Year: 2013

Over

dustyjustbefore

We spent the morning on the beach, Dusty and I. These last few days, this usually aloof and independent mischief-maker leaned into me. She sat on the sand, her body pressed against my leg, then allowing me to hold her longer than usual in my arms before she’d squirm and wriggle away. Aaron took her to their favorite breakfast take-out spot and ordered the egg-and-bacon burger she had lusted after but never eaten before. Today, it was all hers. But something she would have swallowed in one breath not so long ago, she looked at, nibbled, and let drop. Only strands of bacon tempted her and then, a chocolate chip cookie. No hesitation there.

Our usual vet was on vacation so we took Dusty to another animal hospital, where they were extremely kind. We waited a little outside, which is when Aaron took the above photo. Dusty was shivering a little and panting, but much less agitated than she usually is near a vet. Inside she was given a sedative as I cradled her in my arms. She relaxed as I petted and held her to my face, her tongue suddenly lolling out as the muscles all sagged. There was no reluctance any more. She gave up her fiercely guarded independence to me, in the end, and it touched me so deeply. She was ornery and feisty and selfish usually – only rarely letting her guard down. But now it was fully down; and she let me take care of her one last time.

This was not like waiting for someone to die; it was a positive act to end a life – out of mercy and kindness, to be sure – but nonetheless a positive act to end a life so intensely dear to me for a decade and a half. That’s still sinking in. The power of it. But as we laid her on the table for the final injection, she appeared as serene as she has ever been. I crouched down to look in her cloudy eyes and talk to her, and suddenly, her little head jolted a little, and it was over.

I couldn’t leave her. But equally the sight of her inert and lifeless – for some reason the tongue hanging far out of her mouth disfigured her for me – was too much to bear. I kissed her and stroked her, buried my face in her shoulders, and Aaron wept over her. And then we walked home, hand in hand. As we reached the front door, we could hear Eddy howling inside.

I don’t know how to thank all of you for your emails over the last 24 hours – as well as the thread that helped me understand this whole thing better, as this loomed in the future. Her bed is still there; and the bowl; and the diapers – pointless now. I hung her collar up on the wall and looked out at the bay. The room is strange. She has been in it every day for fifteen and a half years, waiting for me.

Now, I wait, emptied, for her.

Unsung Heroes

Bill Morris assesses the literature of Motown, with special praise for Nelson George’s Where Did Our Love Go?:

Among the book’s many virtues is the way it places Motown in the historical context of American pop music and black enterprise. … Nelson has a keen ear and he recaptures the many elements that contributed to the magic of a Motown recording session, not only the drums, electric guitars and bass, horns and strings, but also the hand claps, foot stomps, cowbells, tambourines, all of it in service to those sublime vocals. Perhaps best of all, the book gives long-overdue praise to the people who were the key to the Motown sound – the house band known as the Funk Brothers, who [Motown founder Berry] Gordy refused to credit on album covers until Marvin Gaye’s smash 1971 concept album, What’s Going On. “Nobody outside Detroit knew all the players by name,” George writes, “but they may have been the best band in America.” The band’s bassist, James Jamerson, was arguably the greatest musician to come out of Motown. (For an expanded treatment of the Funk Brothers’ story, check out the 2002 documentary Standing In the Shadows of Motown, which opens by stating the astonishing fact that this unknown band played on more #1 hits than the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Elvis combined.)

Watch the Funk Brothers perform in the above clip from Standing In the Shadows of Motown.

Prosecuted By Social Media

Ariel Levy reflects on Internet vigilantism in light of the sexual assault of a high school girl in Steubenville, Ohio last year:

In trying to determine what happened in Steubenville, the police and the public began with the same information, gathered from the same online sources: ugly tweets, the Instagram photograph, and a deeply disturbing video. But while the police commandeered phones, interviewed witnesses, and collected physical evidence from the crime scene, readers online relied on collaborative deduction. The story they produced felt archetypally right. The “hacktivists” of Anonymous were modern-day Peter Parkers—computer nerds who put on a costume and were transformed into superhero vigilantes. The girl from West Virginia stood in for every one of the world’s female victims: nameless, faceless, stripped of identity or agency. And there was a satisfying villain. Teen-age boys who play football in Steubenville—among many other places—are aggrandized and often do end up with a sense of thuggish entitlement.

In versions of the story that spread online, the girl was lured to the party and then drugged. While she was delirious, she was transported in the trunk of a car, and then a gang of football players raped her over and over again and urinated on her body while her peers watched, transfixed. The town, desperate to protect its young princes, contrived to cover up the crime. If not for Goddard’s intercession, the police would have happily let everyone go. None of that is true.

“What happened to the girl is atrocious,” Jane Hanlin told me. “But what they’re putting out there about her is worse—and false.” Nobody urinated on the victim. She was not “brutally gang-raped.” At the trial in March, Mays and Richmond were accused of putting their fingers in her vagina while she was too intoxicated to give consent. There is no evidence to support the claim that the entire football team was present when the assault occurred, or that “dozens of teens witnessed the events,” as a recent Glamour article had it. “The narrative that goes through these stories is: there are dozens of onlookers; she’s taken from party to party; she’s raped at multiple locations,” Hanlin said. “Understandably, people are outraged when they read that, because it makes it look as though there is a whole group of kids here who watched and heckled and laughed and participated. That’s not true: there are five that behaved very badly. But five is less than eighty.”

Your Cubicle Is Your Castle

Tom Jacobs parses research showing that privacy and a personalized work space significantly boost productivity:

Research assistants noted whether they worked in a private office (with a door that can be closed) or a cubicle. They also counted the number of items each worker had brought from home to decorate his or her workspace—a list that included photographs, posters, artworks, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs. Not surprisingly, [professor Gregory] Laurence and his colleagues found a connection between the amount of privacy an employee enjoys and his or her rate of burnout. “High privacy conditions tend to serve as strong protectors against unwelcome interferences and distractions,” they note, “contributing to a work environment supporting reduced emotional exhaustion.”

But this link disappeared when those employees had personalized their cubicles. Employees who had turned their workspaces into areas that reflect their interests and personalities reported the same (relatively low) level of emotional exhaustion, regardless of whether they worked in an office or a cubicle. The researchers credit “the calming effect” of having your own stuff around you.

Debates The GOP Would Rather Not Have

Today the GOP threatened to cancel 2016 GOP primary debates on NBC and CNN. According to RNC chairman Reince Priebus, CNN’s upcoming Hillary Clinton documentary and NBC’s forthcoming Clinton mini-series are to blame. Zeke J Miller sees other motivations:

Republican Party officials believe the 20 GOP primary debates during the 2012 cycle hurt their party and Mitt Romney, the eventual nominee. CNN’s John King, in particular, drew attacks when he questioned former Speaker of the House New Gingrich about his prior marital infidelities in a debate before the South Carolina primary, while Republicans have long been weary of working with NBC given the liberal-leanings of its cable network MSNBC. Priebus has previously proposed a more modest 10 to 12 debates, in part to protect better-funded candidates from insurgents who capitalize on their time before the cameras.

Alyssa makes related points:

Given that the Republican Party seems no closer than it was in 2012 to reaching a decisive break between its radical and moderate wings, if I were Priebus, I might want to keep that debate between them as far away from mass audiences as possible. Given how far moderate Republicans like Mitt Romney have had to run to the right during their primary campaigns, one of the things that debates do is generate a vast trove of high-quality clips of things that the eventual nominee will eventually have to try to explain away in a shortened general election season. If I were Priebus, I’d want as few of those debates as possible, and I’d want them to happen further from the public eye so my eventual candidate has less baggage that can eventually be hung around her or his neck.

Will The Generals Give Up Power? Ctd

The Economist worries that, in the interest of gaining leverage, the US has given a pass to Egypt’s junta for killing scores of pro-Morsi demonstrators:

After the killing, Barack Obama kept his counsel. It fell to John Kerry, the American secretary of state, to speak out—and then he merely called on Egypt’s leaders to “step back from the brink”. Likewise in Britain David Cameron, the prime minister, left it to William Hague, the foreign secretary, to rap the generals over the knuckles. America’s protest at the ousting of Mr Morsi had been to delay the supply of some F-16 fighter jets to Egypt. But that modest gesture was more than undone just before the shootings. In an unwise precedent, the administration declined to say Egypt had suffered a coup, because to do so could have triggered an automatic block on aid.

The Muslim Brothers—and other Muslims across the Middle East—will conclude from all this that the West applies one standard when secularists are under attack and another when Islamists are. Democracy, they will gather, is not a universal system of government, but a trick for bringing secularists to power. It is hard to think of a better way for the West to discourage the Brothers from re-entering Egypt’s political process.

David Rohde remembers that the US has “used the same logic in Pakistan,” to no effect:

Washington has given $11 billion in military aid to the Pakistani army in the name of maintaining American “influence” in Islamabad. From new equipment to reimbursements for Pakistani military operations, the money flowed year after year, despite complaints from American officials that the Pakistanis were misusing funds and inflating bills. … One of the lessons from the last decade in Pakistan is that money might buy American officials a seat at the table. But Pakistani generals — or Egyptian generals — will not necessarily listen.

And they will definitely blame their problems on us. For the last decade in Pakistan, military officials have used pro-military media outlets to spread a message that an all-powerful United States is behind the country’s ills. Some of the same patterns are emerging in Egypt. Pro-military Egyptian media blame the United States for the country’s problems.

General al-Sissi is already blaming the US for “turning its back on Egyptians” by not sending him fresh F-16s. He also insists that he and his generals are willing to give up power:

[Lally] Weymouth: Aren’t the Americans warning the interim government against any further civil strife or bloodshed?

Sisi: The U.S. administration has a lot leverage and influence with the Muslim Brotherhood and I’d really like the U.S. administration to use this leverage with them to resolve the conflict.

Whoever will clean these squares or resolve these sit-ins will not be the military. There is a civil police and they are assigned to these duties. On the 26th of [July], more than 30 million people went out onto the streets to give me support. These people are waiting for me to do something.

Weymouth: How can you assure the U.S. that you don’t want the military to rule Egypt—that the army wants to go back to its barracks?

Sisi: Mark my words and take me very seriously: The Egyptian military is different from other militaries around the world.

Weymouth: Do you really want to have civilian rule here?

Sisi: Yes, absolutely.

Recent Dish on the military coup here.

The 404 Kids

Russian teenagers are pushing back against homophobia with the “404–Kids” campaign. Organizer Lena Klimova explains:

On the Internet, sometimes you see the “404 – Page Not Found” error message. Likewise, our society thinks that homosexual teens don’t exist in nature, as if gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders fly in from Mars as adults. Meanwhile, in every twentieth Russian family, an LGBT child is growing up. These 404–Kids are invisible to society. … Stop, people! Hear them! These are your children. Who knows: Maybe you’ll see the letter of your own child here?

Find more on the campaign (in Russian) here and here. More Dish on the state of gay rights in Eastern Europe here, here, and here. Translation of the above tweet by Ksenia Varlyguina:

404–Kids! We stand with you! Love whomever you love!”

What If Republicans Refuse To Buy Health Insurance?

Ramesh Ponnuru downplays the consequences:

[P]eople who “contract leukemia” will be able to buy insurance once they’re sick at the same rate they could have gotten it for when they were well. That’s the part of the Obamacare law that its defenders are usually most keen to emphasize. People who go without insurance while they’re healthy may have to pay a tax — although even at that the Internal Revenue Service will be limited in its methods of collection — and may, if they get sick, find their options for getting insurance limited for a few months.

Adrianna McIntyre differs:

Sure, there’s the penalty; everyone knows about that. But there’s also the limited open enrollment issue. That’s insurer-speak for “you can only sign up for exchange plans during certain months”; despite the rhetoric, people actually can’t just buy insurance whenever they fall ill.

The initial enrollment period is extended, from October 2013 through March 2014. But in subsequent years, enrollment will only last from October to December. There are special exceptions, like losing employer-based coverage during an off month, but I double-checked the regs.“I accidentally burned my Obamacare card” didn’t make the cut.

Sarah Kliff adds:

The idea of waiting until one gets sick only works if you manage to schedule said major illness for sometime in the early spring. Otherwise, opting not to enroll is a decision that sticks with you through the early fall.

Jonathan Cohn asks whether FreedomWorks will pick up the tab:

Keep in mind that just one visit to the emergency room can easily generate bills that reach into five figures. All of which brings us back to the question Kevin Drum asked a week ago: Is FreedomWorks prepared to cover the medical bills for young people who take the group’s advice, turn down insurance, and end up with crippling medical debts?

Earlier thoughts on FreedomWorks’ anti-enrollment campaign here.

Ask Frederic Rich Anything: Post-Obama Christianism

In our latest video from Rich, he considers how the Christian Right bounces back from defeat:

Frederic Rich is an American lawyer, environmentalist and author. His new book, Christian Nation, is a work of speculative fiction imagining what would have happened if McCain had won the 2008 election and subsequently died, making a former half-term governor the president and putting America on the path to theocracy. His previous Ask Anything answers are here. Our full AA archive is here.