Month: June 2012

Michael Lind wishes they were more diverse in their interests:

American politics has always been dominated by wealth, but only rarely have wealthy people from a single industry dominated politics as much as those from the financial industry dominate both parties today. I can only think of two examples: the Southern planters before the Civil War and the railroad tycoons in the 1860s and 1870s, before the rise of wealthy manufacturers in the late 19th century.

The recent financialization of politics was made possible by the bubble economy. Over time, even without reform, the inflated financial share of the economy is likely to shrink, with influence shifting partly to economic elites in other sectors, including perhaps the energy sector and a partly-revived manufacturing sector. As a rule, ordinary Americans have been better off when rival economic elites are forced to compete for their votes than when a single industry supplies the donors and much of the personnel of both parties.

In a new book, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson make the case for compromise. They spotlight the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as a model: 

Compromises—even the most successful ones, like the Tax Reform Act—never satisfy pure principles. After the act was passed, its supporters rallied to its defense, hailing it as landmark legislation. It was—if compared to previous or subsequent tax reform. But judged by the moral principles invoked even by its staunchest supporters—whether principles of progressive taxation or those of the free market—the Tax Reform Act fell far short.

Earlier this week, Ezra Klein asked whether this sort of compromise is possible anymore.

The n+1 editors inveigh against the "blogorrheic style" of Internet writing today:

Outside of Twitter, a coercive blogginess, a paradoxically de rigueur relaxation, menaces a whole generation’s prose (no, yeah, ours too). You won’t sound contemporary and for real unless it sounds like you’re writing off the top of your head. Thus: "In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno went bonkers with rage, and took off after Heidegger and the existentialists with a buzz saw, loudly condemning the sloppy word that these dumb existentialists sloppily use to brag about how they know what is real and what isn’t." This appeared on a blog (The Awl), so its blogginess shouldn’t be held too much against it. But all contemporary publications tend toward the condition of blogs, and soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.

In one sense, I get this. As so much of our comunication is now online, the style we most use – and, they're right, there is a conversational style to blogging – will arguably affect the way we write in other contexts. Blogging, as I've written before, is about as close as writing can get to speaking.

On the other hand: chill. Why does everything have to be zero-sum? The whole fricking point of the web is that there is endless space for every form of writing imaginable. No website prevents someone writing a great novel or a long-form reported essay or a lengthy piece of literary criticism. And as long as there are writers with ambitions, these and other forms will endure and proliferate, with ebbs and flows as always. There's just a new screaming baby in the room. And it will mature in time.

(Image via Rebeca Aldama Garcia)

A reader writes:

I just read your post about surviving the plague and thought of your 1996 NY Times magazine cover for “When Plagues End” that starts in a fuzzy font and becomes clear and talks about a plague where survivors had contemplated their own mortality but survived.  (paraphrased).  I wish you would post it on your blog.

I had torn this off and framed it for my office years ago, as it really spoke to me.  I had been a 3rd year med student in 1986 at Roosevelt hospital in NYC where every abnormal chest Xray was PCP, former models were distorted by KS lesions all over their faces, AIDS dementia and continuous diarrhea made others a difficult challenge for partners who loved them still.  I had also been an infectious disease fellow in 1993-5 when suddenly my patients’ Tcells were magically going UP on new combinations of AZT and 3TC and to zero once we had saquinavir.  I’ve trained younger docs more recently who hadn’t ever seen PCP.  A miracle.

I hadn’t looked at that framed cover since a move several years ago. When I unpacked some things from storage recently I was surprised to see it had been written by you!  I started being a regular Dish reader about 4-5 years ago, long after that article was written. Anyway, just wanted to say thanks to you and the graphic artist.  I loved that cover.

Chip Kidd designed it. It’s worth recalling that the piece was arguably the most controversial thing I’d ever written. The response was immediate and extremely hostile from within the gay community. I was wrong, I was irresponsible, etc etc. Alas, the piece didn’t say what many who didn’t read it assumed it said. I was fascinated by the psychology of grappling with the end of plagues – not of diseases. A plague is a widespread virus for which there is no cure and which is close to 100 percent fatal. A disease is something that can be treated. HIV went in America from being one to being the other as suddenly as in La Peste. Another reader:

We are blood brothers. I’m from NYC originally, and before my 30th birthday I had attended 19 funerals of friends who succumbed to AIDS, including my first partner.  I left corporate law practice to spend most of my career managing AIDS service programs, and expected to die there.  Science trumped the virus and here I am, healthy as a horse and impoverished.  Except the strength, passion and friendships I developed in the AIDS community is a wealth of sorts.  If there is a God, and I doubt it, he owes us an apology.

Another:

The line “1996 was a real nail-biter” hit me in the gut. My uncle died an agonizing death in January of that year after a very rapid decline in the preceding months.

When there was nothing else that could be done in the hospital, my grandmother brought him home to die in his childhood bedroom. He had very strange symptoms – almost like a chemical burn from the inside out over his entire body – that may or may not have been related to the alternative treatments he pursued out of desperation. His skin was so thin and fragile it couldn’t hold an IV for the morphine drip. I was a freshman in college. I went back after the winter break and told very few people – not out of shame but because I was burning with so much anger that I feared what would come out if I opened my mouth.

And then, within a year, it was over. People just stopped dying. Former boyfriends of my uncle who had seemed to be on death’s door for longer than he had even been sick started to put on weight and make plans for the future. I saw one of them a few years ago on a visit home. He looked great. It’s hard, even so many years later, not to think about what might have happened if he’d held on just a little more or not gone to that quack or, or, or … But that’s not the way it happened.

Another:

I got to come out in those years of fear of sickness and death. I made many mistakes because of that fear, like rushing into a long-term relationship I was not ready for with a guy I was not quite compatible with, then being promiscuous enough to get Hepatitis B (probably by oral route). I joined ACT UP/Boston for a while, but got annoyed with the group. I felt like they were pushing the drug companies and FDA too fast and beyond good scientific practice. This resulted in some drugs causing harm rather than helping (like ddI and neuropathy due to too high doses).

I was struck by the second image you picked, which was clearly from the same ACT UP protest at Astra Pharmaceuticals in Weston, MA, that I first went to as a photographer for Boston’s BayWindows in 1989. I remember being astounded that the cops were all wearing latex exam gloves, even though by 1989 we knew HIV was not transmissible by touching an infected person’s skin. The protesters chanted to the cops, “Your gloves don’t match your shoes.” One of the writers on staff at the paper was dating the protester raising his arms in the picture, who subsequently died of a Hepatitis B opportunistic infection.

I’m now married to the same fellow I have been living with since 1991 (second boyfriend, hitched since 2007) and turn my cameras more often on peaceful landscapes than on protests.

Another:

I’ve been following your discussion about AIDS with interest. Some of us in the younger generation (I’m 35) were affected by it, too. My husband, who is now 30, lost his favorite uncle Ricky to AIDS in 1994, when he was only 12 years old. Ricky was charismatic and flamboyant (I’m sorry, there’s no other word) and ran an African dance school on the south side of Chicago. His sexuality was never discussed openly, though it must have been understood that he was gay – but his “lifestyle” was shrouded in shame and silence. My now-husband got his first introduction to dance through Ricky’s school, which opened up an entirely new world to him, and eventually led him out of the urban ghetto of Chicago and into a career as a professional ballet dancer. I will forever be grateful to Ricky, who I never had the chance to meet, for opening up this world of opportunity to him.

We met in 2005, when he was 23. In 2009 we were married, legally, in Massachusetts – with both of our families in attendance. Our wedding was a mixture of black and Jewish traditions, and we constructed a chuppah out of garments that had belonged to departed loved ones from each of our families, including a piece of clothing that had belonged to Ricky. As we stood under that chuppah, affirming our love and commitment to one another in front of our friends and family, I couldn’t help but think that we were fulfilling a dream that Ricky hadn’t been able to realize; that he had died – that he had been killed – by the shame and silence that we were seeking to banish; and that his family has gotten a second chance, with us, at redemption – to accept us, affirm us, love us, and not exile us to isolation and shame.

More stories from our readers at our Facebook page. The Dish thread so far is here, here and here.

(Photo by Steven Keirstead)

Tom Smith wonders why partisans are generally overconfident. Ilya Somin has a theory:

[T]his kind of overclaiming isn’t limited to media pundits. Campaign operatives do the exact same thing, including even skilled political strategists who follow the polls closely and probably know very well what their candidates’ true chances are. The real answer to Smith’s question probably has to do with the “bandwagon effect.” A small but significant number of swing voters tend to support whichever side seems to be winning, partly because they want to be identified with a winner and partly because of a sense that whoever seems to be winning might well be the best person for the job for that very reason.

 Will Wilkinson weighs in:

It is illuminating to see journalists and pundits as participants in a subtle, subtextual status game, in which they vie to improve their guy's status relative to his hated opponent. Loudly touting polls that show Barack Obama struggling among working- and middle-class whites is a way of communicating that support for Mr Obama may be an imprudent status move among America's largest demographic group. Counter-stories suggesting that Mr Obama's trouble with whites is a sign of lingering racism can be a way of communicating to America's largest demographic group that, by refusing to support the president, one risks raising suspicions of America's original and, at this point in history, trashiest vice. 

Michael Cohen worries about the consequences of Romney's apocalyptic rhetoric on Iran:

Some might just dismiss this over the top language as the usual sort of alarmist fare of the campaign trail. But, these words have an effect – they convince Americans that the world is a far more dangerous place then it really is. Case in point: this new fascinating survey from Dartmouth University on the foreign policy attitudes of Americans. When asked if they agree of disagree with the notion that the United States faces greater threats now than it did during the Cold War . . . 63% either strongly or somewhat agree. SIXTY-THREE PERCENT! … More Americans die every year from lightning, drowning in bathtubs and furniture falling on top of them than terrorism and yet a strong majority of Americans think we are in greater danger now then when thousands of nuclear weapons were pointed directly at the United States.

Meanwhile, Paul Pillar assesses an argument by Ken Waltz (gated) that an Iranian bomb would actually be a good thing for Middle East stability:

The issue at hand is not whether an Iranian nuclear weapon would be on balance good or bad, any more than the issue is whether Iranian leaders are nasty or nice. The important policy issues instead involve the relative costs, risks and efficacy of different possible postures and actions toward Iran. In this respect Waltz's insightful comments about the costs and risks—or lack of them—from Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon are important to heed even if one does not go as far as Waltz (and like most of the mainstream, I do not go that far) in arguing that an Iranian nuke would be a net positive. Paying attention to Waltz's analysis is all the more important because the topic of what effect an Iranian nuke would have on Iranian behavior and on security and stability in the Middle East is the aspect of this issue that is most often subjected to unquestioned conventional wisdom rather than any analysis at all (a gap I have endeavored to fill).

It's still, in my view, under-rated in this election cycle. Gallup finds a sturdy 17 – 20 percent of Americans who won't vote for a qualified candidate who happens to be a Mormon. That includes 18 percent of Independents. Among those without a high school diploma – a sector Romney has to do well in, especially in the swing states – 23 percent are resistant. There is no real difference between Protestants and Catholics on the issue. More worrying for Romney, a third still don't know he is a Mormon. In the words of Frank Newport:

Americans who know that Romney is a Mormon are the most likely to say they would vote for a Mormon for president. Those who do not know Romney's religion are the most resistant to a Mormon candidate. This suggests the possibility that as Romney's faith becomes better known this summer and fall, it could become more of a negative factor — given that those who resist the idea of a Mormon president will in theory become more likely to realize that Romney is a Mormon as the campaign unfolds. That things will actually work out this way, however, is far from clear.

Pareene tackles Kathryn Jean Lopez. You kinda want to look away.

"There's a saying among some Hispanic Mormons when it comes to Mitt Romney: 'On Sundays he's our brother, but Monday to Saturday he's trying to deport us,'" – McKay Coppins, Buzzfeed.

If you've been immersed in the marriage equality debate, you'll know who David Blankenhorn is. He is perhaps the most clearly decent, intellectually honest, non-homophobic opponent of marriage equality. He has played a huge role in elevating the debate, in getting the right to take it more seriously, and in pioneering civil discussion. Along with Jon Rauch, he really tried to find common ground, rather than polarize or hyperbolize. And I think many involved in this intellectual combat can be proud of themselves for maintaining greater civility than exists in many other emotional, personal debates. In the grass roots it can get brutal, as it can online. But the arguments we've had in person have been usually civil. Jon Corvino's book with Maggie Gallagher is an example of this, as is their dog-and-pony show on the debate circuit.

But I bury my lede. Blankenhorn has switched sides and is now in favor of marriage equality, and explains why on NPR right now. Click here for the audio. He has an essay in the NYT on the subject as well. Money quote:

I had hoped that the gay marriage debate would be mostly about marriage’s relationship to parenthood. But it hasn’t been. Or perhaps it’s fairer to say that I and others have made that argument, and that we have largely failed to persuade. In the mind of today’s public, gay marriage is almost entirely about accepting lesbians and gay men as equal citizens. And to my deep regret, much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying anti-gay animus. To me, a Southerner by birth whose formative moral experience was the civil rights movement, this fact is profoundly disturbing.

David was a good man when he was opposed to marriage equality and he is a good man now. We need more like him.