I’ve spent the last couple days traveling to and attending a funeral. It was for a World War II veteran. The interment, in a rural cemetery, was an intimate affair, which allowed me to see close-up the honor guard ceremony the military still puts on for its vets. It was intensely moving. Two soldiers took the flag off the coffin and like Japanese Kabuki artists folded it with meticulous care. The way they handled the cloth reminded me of the way in which priests would touch the sacraments in the sacristy before and after mass. With almost painful slowness, the flag was folded into consecutive triangles before being handed to the man’s eldest son. (His youngest is my boyfriend.) Their salutes were almost slow-motion, like a Robert Wilson production. They performed the ceremony with such quiet precision for a man they never personally knew that you got a sudden, instant glimpse of what military service is really about. It’s not just a bond between a person and his or her country. It’s a bond between him and every other soldier who has ever been there – past, present and future. It’s a ritual of transcendence, symbolized by a flag, conjuring a nation. I had understood this before but never felt it. Now I have.
ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM GETS RESULTS! Not long after the American Prospect conceded that it had exaggerated its online traffic by almost 300 percent, the New York Times admits its Tim Egan Alaska story – hyped in editorials and by Bob “Suffer The Children” Herbert – contained a big fib. Here’s the correction printed yesterday:
A front-page article on June 16 about climate change in Alaska misstated the rise in temperatures there in the last 30 years. (The error was repeated in an editorial on Monday and in the Bob Herbert column on the Op-Ed page of June 24.) According to an assessment by the University of Alaska’s Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research, the annual mean temperature has risen 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit over 30 years, not 7 degrees.
Notice how long it took before this front-page fib was corrected – weeks. Notice also no admission that the Alaska Climate Research Center puts the rise as far less than that. I’m traveling and haven’t had time to dig into the Alaska University citation. If anyone out there could subject it to scrutiny, I’d be grateful. Like the American Prospect’s revised numbers, I still don’t buy it, and would like to see the basis of that 5.4 degree claim. But it’s gratifying to see that even the New York Times has to concede a whopper when it’s pointed out in daylight. Score one for the blogosphere. Here in cyber-space, we also correct our errors promptly.
RAINES WATCH: What do you do when a sensible proposal to arm pilots gains traction in the Congress? Do you commission a poll to find out what the public thinks? Nope. You send out a reporter to a state where the headlines have been full of America West pilots arrested for being drunk in the cockpit. Then you find some people who object to the idea and run this opposition as a “news-story.” Even then, the Times couldn’t get anything but a narrow plurality against arming pilots. But that was good enough for the lede and the headline. Doesn’t Howell know we’re wise to this propaganda?
REALITY CHECK: A useful corrective to market gloom from Clintonite Brad Delong. Here’s the money quote:
Out in the real world, moreover, the economy is doing just fine. Inflation-adjusted wages are up 13% over the past seven years–the best jump in three decades and a boon for most Americans. Inflation, outside of food and energy, is only 2.5%, down from 2.9% in 1995. And productivity growth over the past three years is still running at a 3.1% rate–far faster than the 1.5% seen in the first half of the 1990s and the entire 1980s. Indeed, productivity growth has been so strong that it can withstand even expected downward revisions in the economic data. At the end of July, the Commerce Dept. will issue revised estimates for the past couple of years that could reduce 2000’s reported gross domestic product and productivity growth by as much as a percentage point. But even if that happens, the three-year productivity growth rate will still be a very solid 2.7%.
I don’t know about you, but I’m buying.
The Dish 