Month: December 2008

By Patrick Appel
Katharine Mieszkowski chronicles the life of the Hummer. What’s the outlook for the apartment on wheels?:

While pleading with Congress for a bailout, General Motors says it will be "reduc[ing] brands [and] nameplates." It announces it may part with the Hummer line, and with Saab and Saturn. Supposition throughout the media is that "review" of Hummer’s status includes the option of simple elimination as well as sale. But take heart, Hummer fans — sales are still booming in Russia. Perhaps a post-Soviet plutocrat will rescue the brand, and the Hummer will still be available — as an import.

Haslett, Michigan,  8.30 am.

By Patrick Appel

I completely agree with Fallows on the brilliance of Obama tapping Eric Shinseki for Secretary of Veterans Affairs:

Whenever he talks about this selection, Obama (plus his lieutenants) can describe it completely, sufficiently, and strictly in the most bipartisan high-road terms. They have selected a wounded combat veteran; a proven military leader and manager; a model of personal dignity and nonpartisan probity: an unimpeachable choice. Symbolic elements? If people want them, they can work with Shinseki’s status as (to my recollection at the moment) the first Asian-American in a military-related cabinet position, not to mention a Japanese-American honored for lifelong military service on Pearl Harbor Day.

As for the other symbolic element — that Obama is elevating the man who was right, when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al were so catastrophically wrong — that is something that neither Obama nor anyone around him need say out loud, ever. The nomination is like a hyper-precision missile, or what is known in politics as a "dog whistle." The people for whom this is a complete slap in the face don’t need to be told that. They know — and know that others know it too. So do the people for whom it is vindication. And all without Obama descending for one second from his bring-us-together higher plane.

By Patrick Appel
Writing about Mumbai, Suderman tackles our cinematic understanding of terror:

Hollywood exploits these sorts of events for their inherent tension, repackaging them as exciting and thrilling adventures rather than ugly massacres. It usually makes me queasy and unsettled, to some extent, because I’m an unabashed fan of violent entertainment.

I’ll admit: I love onscreen gunfights and shootouts, the more over the top the better. I’ve waxed ecstatic over the bullet-ridden 45 minute finale of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, which includes one of the highest death tolls of any movie in the last few decades (the sequence is set at a hospital, and at one point, the film’s bad guy walks into a room full of hostages and mows them all down with an automatic weapon).  Watching a sequence like that in a movie is exciting and fun; watching a similar scene in real life is deeply disturbing. Part of me thinks this is a problem; action movies train us not to react with horror to these sorts of events. But I also wonder if it isn’t natural, a release of some sort, a way to indulge violent urges without resorting to real violence, or a way for human beings to understand the daily, life-and-death struggle for existence — long before movies, human stories revolved around death and violence, and often involved heroes who slayed all those in their way. For whatever reason, we, as a species, seem to be drawn in by narratives of calamity, destruction, and bloodshed.

By Patrick Appel
Elizabeth Nolan Brown thinks that "the journalistic system has failed today’s young reporters than the other way around":

I got my first reporting job in 2005, at a small daily business paper. With only four reporters and two stories to write daily, we never left the office, doing things entirely via faxed press releases, emails and phone calls. Every now and then we got to leave to go to a press conference at the state capital or courthouse up the street, but this was frowned upon (”Can’t you just call and see if you can get a quote or a summary beforehand?”) because then we probably wouldn’t be back ’til 1 p.m. and completed stories were supposed to be to layout by then.

By Patrick Appel
Rachel Levitt summarizes a Swedish medical student’s thesis on the benefits of state-subsidized in vitro fertilization:

Europe’s dwindling population is currently threatening many state-maintained support programs like Social Security and health care. If the birth rate doesn’t increase soon, children may be increasingly forced to support the aging European population, which by 2050 will have an estimated one in three people over the age of 65. With that responsibility looming, Svensson and others believe that investing government money in IVF programs and technology could help spur future economic growth, as well as improve the morale of thousands of couples who are involuntarily childless.

It would be better for Europe to deal with it’s falling birth rate by allowing greater immigration, though even that probably won’t fix the imbalance entirely. State sponsored IVF, however noble, is hardly going to solve the problem. Megan wrote about birth rates over a year ago:

Almost all European countries have a lot of amenities for new mothers; some of those countries have high birth rates, and some of them low. America, which has many fewer amenities, has higher birth rates than Canada, which has a lot more government support for child-rearing. There’s no very good evidence that a government can do much of anything to increase its birth rate. The main culprit seems to be opportunity cost: women have more fun things to do, these days, than spend time with toddlers. And even parenting with lots of free day care involves spending a lot of time with toddlers.

By Patrick Appel

Massie predicts:

…chicken-blogging will be the sensation of 2009.

Here’s some good fodder.

By Patrick Appel
The Independent interviews Mark Penn:

So why did Penn say in a memo of March 2007 that Obama was unelectable? "Huh. No. It doesn’t say that at all." Yes it does, if the facsimile published by Atlantic Monthly magazine is correct. The great communicator appears thrown. "Those memos, right, that came out, were really … er, were really, I think, show you, you know, just a piece, because … a small part, a piece of how we were looking to, I think, set up or solve the fact that he was a very strong candidate."

Heh.

By Patrick Appel

Photographer Richard Mosse has a series of photographs on disaster-response training airplanes. From an interview with the artist:

My project is an attempt to locate the air disaster in our cultural imagination. When I say that I mean that the air disaster is a potent image and speaks to all of us. It’s not just something that we feel when we board an airplane, or when we’re caught in turbulence. It’s something that pervades our lives these days. The air disaster is an altogether different class of catastrophe to the car crash. It is a mythic symbol of modernity’s failure…

In 2000, having just landed in Paris, I was walking off my plane when fellow passengers began pointing out their windows. Off in the distance, white smoke trailed from a skinny jet. Within a minute, it disappeared. The passengers collected their luggage from the overhead bins. I picked up my checked bags and got on a bus to a hotel. It wasn’t until I reached my room and flipped on the TV that I learned all 109 passengers of the Concorde, and four people on the ground, had perished.

By Patrick Appel
Jay Wexler was amused by FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc, a Supreme Court case about profanity:

The oral argument in the case had many funny moments.  By far the best one was when, in the midst of a back-and-forth with Carter Phillips regarding how the words "fuck" and "shit" may or may not get their special force from being connected to sexual and excretory activity, Justice Scalia said, and I kid you not, "Don’t use golly waddles instead of the F word."

Having never heard "golly waddles" before Wexler asked language expert Steven Pinker about it. Pinker’s reply:

I am pretty sure that Scalia made up ‘golly waddles’ on the spot. He needed a hypothetical term that was not "fuck," and so used that; I don’t think it was an allusion to any commonly used euphemism.

On the other hand he was certainly influenced by the truncated profanities for “God” that are ubiquitous in polite speech, such as golly, gosh, egad, gad, gadzooks, good grief, goodness gracious, Great Caesar’s ghost, and Great Scott. Similar truncations pop up for just about every taboo term, including Jesus (gee, gee whiz, gee willikers, geez, jeepers creepers, Jiminy Cricket, Judas Priest, Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat), shit (shame, sheesh, shivers, shoot, shucks, squat, sugar), and fuck (fiddlesticks, fiddledeedee, foo, fudge, fug, fuzz, flaming, flipping, freaking, frigging, effing). I’m not sure why he felt he needed a second word in his hypothetical euphemism, but it may have been inspired by the prevalence of two-part euphemisms for bullshit, like applesauce, balderdash, blatherskite, claptrap, codswallop, flapdoodle, hogwash, horsefeathers, humbug, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot.

Pinker wrote a superb dispatch about the case a few months ago.