Month: April 2006

Eating dinner at a bar the other night, I sat next to a sales rep for a company that produces portable home dialysis units. He was drinking pretty hard, celebrating a deal that he’d just closed and telling me how soaring diabetes rates were going to create ever greater demand for his revolutionary product. I thought he was going to propose a toast to kidney failure.

But what bothered me most about our conversation was the streamlined plastic phone device implanted in his right ear and connected via Bluetooth to the Palm Treo lying on the bar in front of him. Every minute or two the earjack would light up, suddenly pulsing white and blue, and I’d forget whatever I was saying to him or whatever he was saying to me. Finally, I asked him what the light was. “That just means the thing’s turned on,” he said. As he said this, he was looking at his Treo screen, which he did about every thirty or forty seconds. His face changed — had some important message arrived? Still speaking to me, but without much focus now, he tapped out a line or two of text with his amazingly prehensile thumbs. He’d left the scene, I sensed; he was somewhere else. At headquarters, perhaps. And I’d been placed on hold.

I didn’t like it. I never like it. And it happens constantly. I’ll be in the middle of what I take to be a sincere human interaction with somebody and they’ll start cutting in and out — checking the Blackberry, texting on the cell phone, stylus-ing the electronic calendar. No apologies, either. No ‘excuse mes.’ As though a mixture of physical proximity and electronic separation is the accepted new mode of social togetherness. I swear I’ve seen couples out on dates who speak to each other only when the menu comes, to negotiate their appetizers, and then drift off into conversations with others until the check arrives.

And yet they call it “communications technology.”

When the dialysis salesman returned to earth, I committed a faux pas by asking him what he’d just been writing about. I thought I was entitled to ask this question because he’d been conducting his business in front of me. I found out otherwise. He glared at me. What kind of spying busybody was I? The warmth between us never returned and we ate our salads in different universes, staring at the TV behind the bar. The light in his earjack pulsed. I paid my tab. When I left, I mumbled a goodbye, but the salesman didn’t acknowledge it. He was tapping on his keys.

–Walter

I see in today’s New York Times that a state judge ruled yesterday that two lawsuits disputing the constitutionality of California’s fledgling stem cell research agency, the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, have no merit. Brought by attorneys with ties to anti-abortion groups, the suits claimed that because Prop 71, the 2004 ballot initiative funding the agency, authorized money for both stem cell and other types of medical research, it violated a state law prohibiting a ballot measure from proposing more than one issue. Judge Bonnie Lewman Sabraw of the Alameda County Superior Court basically dismissed these claims as the bologna that they reek of.

Good. I’m not denying that there are delicate ethical concerns that need to be addressed in regards to stem cell research. And I keep hoping the federal government will get fully into the game in order to help keep an eye on just such issues. But on the whole, the potential benefits of this field appear to outweigh the costs. And while I understand social conservatives’ moral objections to stem cell research, I’m disinclined to take them seriously until I see pro-life picketers also take on the IVF industry, which is busy creating scads of excess embryos that will never, ever see the inside of a warm womb and will ultimately be tossed out with the trash.

Sadly, the Institute for Regenerative Medicine has to wait until the appeals process has been exhausted until it can start selling securities to raise grant money. (Until then, it’s using loans from philanthropic groups.) Here’s hoping the higher courts’ jurists have noses as well-refined as Judge Sabraw’s.

—Michelle

Page A3 of today’s Washington Post has a large photo of a sobbing woman standing beside another sad-looking younger woman. The headline above: "Family Grieves Over Death of 10-Year-Old." The caption below: "Jennifer Fox, right, mother of Jamie Rose Bolin, stands with her daugher, Lori Dawn Headrick, during a funeral service yesterday for 10-year-old Jamie at Purcell High School in Purcell, Okla. She was found slain last week."

That’s it. No accompanying article. No instructions to turn to another page. No nothing. The extent of this "news" tidbit is a photo of a grieving mom and her surviving child. At first, I could not fathom why the Post would be running such a pic without any related story. An unaccompanied photo of Bush and Hu jogging, or even of Donald Rumsfeld sunbathing, I could understand. But despite the impact of shark-attack-and-child-snatching-obsessed cable news on journalism at large, surely not every youngster’s death calls for having the faces of sobbing family members splashed across the pages of a major daily several hundred miles away. 

A quick nexis search reveals that the details of poor Jamie’s murder were indeed gruesome, involving (as briefly as possible) a mentally unstable neighbor, a cutting board, suffocation, sexual assault, and some disturbing blog entries about cannibalism. But only people already following this case–which has, unsurprisingly, been all the rage on CNN–would understand the point of today’s Post pic. Clearly the paper is trying to have it both ways: It wants to signal to readers that it is still keeping an eye on this sensational story, yet it doesn’t want to stoop to rehashing any of the grisly details and open itself to accusations that it has adopted cable’s tabloid mentality. So it runs an exploitative, seemingly pointless photo without any explanation.

Pompous, tawdry, and confusing. Quite a journalistic achievement. 

—Michelle

At least the high-school students in Kansas who decided to shoot up their school but were stopped before they could because they first wrote about their plot on MySpace.Com already have an insanity defense.

Can a craving for attention drive people crazy? It seems to have in this case. The motivation for the crime was also, here, the motivation for discussing the crime online, and that has proved fortunate. But it makes me wonder if these sort of massacres-as-spectacle aren’t the defining offenses of our time. Even politically-motivated terrorism seems to be an effort to garner publicity.

There’s something about the world these days that brings out the worst in the lonely and the obscure and feeds their grudges until they grow enormous. And I don’t think it’s violent video games and movies. I don’t think it’s access to firearms. I think it’s the simple message that you’re not anyone until you’ve done something worthy of media coverage, whatever that thing may be. The star-system has become a kind of moral code with only one commandment: Thou Shalt Not Go Unnoticed. When the concept of fame broke free from its old grounding in the concept of public virtue — when it was supplanted by the lesser idea of Warhol-ish celebrity — the lid was off the jar.

Luckily (I think), the Web has come along, where anyone can make his presence felt — or have the illusion of making his presence felt — without having to perpetrate a sensational crime. The Kansas kids were eager to do both, of course, and they foiled themselves. Perhaps the Web’s promise of liberating people from anonymity will aggravate their mania, but here’s hoping it will bleed it off some.

–Walter

Today’s New York Times has a front-pager that could have been run dozens of times over the past few years: "Democrats Eager to Exploit Anger Over Gas Price." In fact, during the last presidential race, I wrote a column outlining why the Dems’ attempts to use high gas prices as an election year rallying cry were completely understandable–as well as shameless, dishonest, and ultimately doomed to failure.

With the public growing ever more hostile toward the party in power, it’s entirely possible that pump prices will prove a more successful weapon for Dems this time around. But that doesn’t make their exploitation of the issue any more honest or less shameless. I mean, does anyone really believe Dems would have done a better job of tackling our long-term energy crisis–much less short-term gas prices–than the Bushies have? And I say this in the context of the Bushies having tackled bupkiss. I like to kick around the administration as much as anyone, but on the issue of energy, neither party seems able to free itself from some ugly combination of knee-jerk ideology and special-interest money long enough to get serious about hashing out a workable compromise.

Take the excruciatingly annoying issue of ANWR: Some days it seems that any piece of legislation having anything to do with energy or the environment comes to a screeching halt at the feet of almighty ANWR. Enough already. The Dems should stop fetishizing this remote piece of wilderness, and the Republicans should stop pretending that drilling there will make any real dent in our dependence on foreign oil. At this point, Dems should use the oversized ANWR bargaining chip to extract some massive compromise from Republicans on an issue that would have an even bigger environmental impact, such as raising fuel-economy standards or (gasp!) establishing a federal gas tax–an idea that even conservatives like Charles Krauthammer have touted. Alas, since ANWR is what drives environmental activists to distraction, we can expect Dems to keep babbling about the caribou until we all choke to death on a cloud of SUV exhaust.

Admittedly, I’m slow to get worked up about most environmental crusades. It’s not that I’m unsympathetic or consider them unimportant; I just tend to obsess about other issues. But one of those issues is our national security–which is increasingly tied to our energy needs. For a primer on how the parties let the politics of energy trump both environmental and security concerns, check out this 2002 piece by Gregg Easterbrook. What may be most disturbing about the piece is how little has changed in the four years since it ran.   

—Michelle

One Georgetown University wit had this response to my polygamy item:

"What you’ve described sounds suspiciously like the role of an unpaid intern. Which, come to think of it, is actually a good idea; we have internships to allow kids to learn the ropes of all sorts of jobs before they actually dive in these days.  Why not create a few more that get some work done around the house?  As a still-deathly-scared-of-commitment 20 year old, I hereby sign myself up to be your martini mixer and slipper fetcher so I can see what all the big fuss is about."

Alas, I suspect my husband won’t be that enthusiastic about this kind offer–unless, come to think of it, this 20-year-old of undisclosed gender looks a lot like Salma Hayek.

—Michelle

The general consensus is that, title change notwithstanding, Rove will retain his big-dog status at the White House. Even so, having been asked to relinquish part of his official portfolio in a move that some folks might perceive as a demotion is unlikely to sit well with Bush’s Brain. If I were a Democratic strategist, I’d be awfully uneasy at the thought of a brassed off Rove with extra time on his hands and a driving need to salvage his rep and cement his legacy with a big win in November. If you thought his winged monkeys played rough in past elections, just wait.

—Michelle 

So I’m watching an "encore presentation" of HBO’s new polygamy-themed hit, "Big Love," last night, when it occurs to me: What a huge number of modern married couples need is an extra wife. No, not for procreative purposes or even to share the burden of household chores (though I don’t know anyone who’d turn down an extra set of laundry-folding hands). But if all the articles, books, and polling about stressed-out women struggling to have-it-all are any indication, many marriages clearly could use someone to fulfill the traditional (perhaps partly apocryphal?) role of the patient, attentive, supportive emotional rock of the family–you know, the kind of wife who greets you at the door each evening with your slippers and a martini, assures you that everything on the homefront is running smoothly, and insists that you tell her all about your hard day at the office.

As it is, in many two-career households in particular, although both spouses strive to be supportive and attentive, often they’re both a little too preoccupied with their own attempts to juggle work and home life to provide adequate comfort. An additional wife–or husband (since limiting this discussion to polygyny would, after all, be inexcusably sexist)–could go a long way toward smoothing out some of those whose-turn-is-it-to-take-the-dog-to-the-vet bumps along the road to domestic bliss. Provided, of course, that the new spouse understood his or her role as domestic cheerleader-in-chief.

Save your disgruntled emails. Obviously I’m not serious about this. But you can’t blame a gal for fantasizing. I do so love a good martini.

—Michelle

Every time I fill in on this blog (well, both times) the price of gas has risen to a new peak and I, as well as hundreds of other journalists, have tried to make something interesting of the fact. Will America finally get serious about conserving? Will Detroit go full-tilt producing hybrids? Will commuters stay home and work over the Web? It’s pretty boring and tiring, actually — almost as much so as the speculation about whether the high prices are manipulated by the oil companies, dictated by speculators, or reflective of actual dwindling reserves. The debate seems easy to settle but it never is, nor is the question of whether the big run-up will prove transitory or semi-permanent.

And just when these articles have all been written, in all their variations, the price slides down again and people go back to doing as they did and driving whatever they drove before as far and as often as they ever drove it, while listening to pretty music .

Perhaps that’s why this time I wouldn’t be disappointed if fate just split the difference in the whole cycle and gas prices stayed where they are now. Then I might be able to adapt to them. Then I might finally relinquish my fantasy of buying a 300 hp sports coupe that only uses premium. My best trick so far is to set a dollar limit every time I open my gas cap. The concept is to always spend the same amount — say fifty bucks– and drive as far as I can on what it buys me but not a mile more. It works for a week or two but then it doesn’t work due to the same sort of sloppy, self-serving accounting that causes me about once or twice a year to ditch my HBO while, with the other hand, I buy more cell-phone minutes.

A soon as prices drop, I stop playing my mental gas games and do as alcoholics do when they pick up the bottle again after a period of sobriety: guzzle to beat hell. It might be my last opportunity, I reason, before gas goes to fifteen bucks a liter. Boy, do I make hay. It’s the opposite of conservation. It’s the opposite of learning one’s lesson. It’s desperate and slightly euphoric and, I’m convinced now, it makes not a dimple in the vast reserves that economists always point out are still around no matter what the prices on the pump read.

And as yo-yo dieters know, binging and starving corrupts one’s whole metabolism. That’s where I am now with gasoline. Nothing anyone tells me seems believable, no disciplined program of consumption seems rational and nothing I read on the subject seems relevant. For all I know, when oil truly runs short the price of gas will plunge and plunge until there are only twenty gallons left which no one will want, so they’ll pour them on the ground.

Tomorrow I have a trip planned. Eight hundred miles of interstate. It might be cheaper to fly but I might never get this chance again.

–Walter

Poor Scott McClellan. Even after all this administration has put him through, the departing press secretary got all choked up yesterday as Bush was announcing his early retirement. I know much of the media corps (specifically, those who had to deal with him regularly) had their issues with McClellan, but I always felt sorry for the guy. Clearly his tenure was more contentious than that of predecessor Ari Fleischer, in part because McClellan occupied the podium during more troubled times than Ari. But I also think McClellan had a harder time in the job because, deep down, he was more uncomfortable being dishonest. McClellan always looked strained and slightly gassy when dishing out whatever bologna the administration had fed him. By contrast, Ari, as my colleague Jon Chait detailed long ago, has always had a somewhat more relaxed attitude toward truth-telling.   

—Michelle