Year: 2013

Many readers are upset with this post:

Wow, Andrew. I’ve been with you since 2007, and I can’t recall reading a more blatantly ridiculous statement from you than this one: “And when will they grasp that a religion that does not entirely eschew violence (like the Gospels or Buddhism) will likely produce violence when its extremist loners seek meaning in a bewildering multicultural modern world?”

You know it’s bullshit too. Because otherwise you would’ve said “Christianity” instead of “the Gospels,” keeping it consistent with your blanket characterizations of Buddhism and Islam. But you knew you couldn’t, because of Christianity’s and the Old Testament’s indisputable record of violence, which refutes your narrative that doctrine was the primary cause.

And otherwise you wouldn’t have qualified it with that long modifier of producing violence “when its extremist loners seek meaning in a bewildering multicultural modern world.” How many contingencies do you have to stuff into the interpretation and practice of a religion before you realize those contingencies matter a hell of a lot more than the words in the document everyone’s reading into in whatever way suits their condition? What a logically, linguistically, and sociologically inept attempt to baldly enforce your double standards of religious causation upon your readers.

I do not write things I know are “bullshit.” They may be, but I write in good faith. Perhaps I should have put it this way: All religion, including Christianity, is susceptible to the violence associated with tribalism and fundamentalism. Christianity’s murderousness through the ages is a matter of historical fact, from the Crusades to the Inquisition and beyond.

What distinguishes Islam is that its founder practiced violence, whereas Jesus quite obviously favored the exact opposite – nonviolence to the point of accepting one’s own death. Unlike Christianity, but like Judaism, Islam also claims sacred land, and, along with extremist forms of Judaism, the divine right to repel intruders from it. Religion is dangerous enough. A religion founded by a violent figure, with territorial claims, and whose values are at direct odds with modernity is extra-dangerous. Which other major world religion believes that apostates should be killed? Or regards negative depictions of the Prophet as worthy of a death sentence? As I wrote more than a decade ago now:

The terrorists’ strain of Islam is clearly not shared by most Muslims and is deeply unrepresentative of Islam’s glorious, civilized and peaceful past. But it surely represents a part of Islam — a radical, fundamentalist part — that simply cannot be ignored or denied.

Another reader:

What is “Jihad”? It’s only a religious war in the minds of those who believe that it is. Do we need to broadcast this to people who may be susceptible? Can’t we fight this war without feeding the enemy’s propaganda machine? My worry is that using Jihad/religious war is going to do two things:

1. Help radicalize more people

2. Rev up the right wing into the frenzy we saw post 9-11, which makes us lose our heads and do dumb things, and also reinforcing point No. 1 – it’s a self fulfilling prophecy: “See, the West is after us. Fight the infidels, etc.”

I think this older brother absorbed these radical ideas through osmosis – speaking to a radicalized (but not a member of a radical group) person, all the messaging in the media/Internet, etc., visiting Russia and seeing/experiencing it. But there does not seem to be a direct link to a radical group, where he was directly trained, was meeting with a group, etc. Maybe we just haven’t learned that yet, but until then, we should not jump to conclusions. It seems to me, media outlets calling this a religious war/Jihad are only going to make these people more susceptible to this stuff and give them  greater justification for their feelings and actions.

If I were writing to maximize public safety, I would minimize the religious aspects of this terror attack. But I am writing in order to tell the truth as best I can. Another reader:

It’s terrifying to me that you can write sentences like: “Legally, the case for the presumption of innocence is absolutely right. But come on.”

“But come on” was the animating logic of the drumbeat for war in Iraq. It was the ideological territory of Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Co. It was why Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib happened. “But come on” says, to me: “I know I can’t justify this with reason so I’m going to appeal to a general sense of hysteria.”

But that is precisely why we have these laws and safeguards in the first place. Mirandizing a suspect, presuming innocence and so on were not primarily intended for the low-key cases that take place in America every day. No, they were in large part designed specifically for moments such as this, to prevent a nation in the throes of a huge emotional overreaction (more on that in a moment) from stepping out of bounds. “But come on” represents precisely the arbitrary, emotional desire for overreach that our Constitution and legal system was specifically supposed to neutralize.

If I had simply said the words “come on” and not followed them with a superfluity of evidence, my reader might have a point. But I didn’t.

Tracy Clark-Flory examines the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis:

This theory holds that closeted young men in bigoted environments often respond by overachieving in certain areas, like sports or academics — the idea being that it’s an adaptive means of finding a sense of self-worth where they can. It can also serve to distract from their sexuality: As Andrew Tobias wrote in his 1976 memoir, “The Best Little Boy in the World,” a key “line of defense” was his endless list of activities. “No one could expect me to be out dating … when I had a list of 17 urgent projects to complete,” he wrote.

Despite the prevalence of this idea in gay coming-of-age narratives, it’s never been tested empirically, until now.

In a study recently published in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology, researchers interviewed 195 male colleges students who identified as either heterosexual or a “sexual minority.” They found that the sexual minority men based their sense of self-worth on “academics,” “appearance” and “competition” more so than the straight guys. Interestingly, the amount of time the gay men had spent hiding their sexual identity positively predicted their investment in these areas. The researchers also developed a way to objectively measure the amount of stigma each participant faced in their particular environment by evaluating their home state’s general stance toward sexual minorities. That measure of stigma also positively “predicted the degree to which young sexual minority men sought self-worth through competition.”

For what it’s worth, I fit the model pretty perfectly – and my high school helped. Each class would be graded in every subject every month and then a list would be posted ranking everyone in the class. The first time this happened, after my first month at the school, I was stunned to find out that I was in the top position. Stunned and suddenly proud. Staying there became my over-arching goal for the rest of my high school life. I buried my way into books to prove my self-worth … and to distract attention from my sexual orientation. It worked: I was labeled a nerd rather than a fag – or, in the original English, a “swot” rather than a “poof.”

And those patterns have not truly changed – I’m just more aware of them. Why am I still trying to push the envelope in new media – and risking my own money – when I could have found a more comfortable perch writing somewhere? Why do I still need to prove something every day? Part is obviously an attempt to gain self-worth after homophobia had done its silent, brutal work on my seven-year-old soul. “Does God know everything about you – everything?” I once asked my mum, according to her (I don’t recall the exchange). She said: “Yes, of course. Everything.” I replied, “Then there’s no hope for me, mum.”

But it’s also a positive desire not to allow such prejudice affect you, to break through certain barriers, to push yourself to be a living impediment to homophobic prejudice. One extremely insightful book has been written about this: The Velvet Rage. I really recommend it. It shows how many gay men, propelled by these dynamics for years, sometimes find themselves in middle age at the top of their field and yet deeply depressed or overworked. They realize that rage – even constructive, efficient, effective rage – is no substitute for love.

My fundamental hope in helping to make marriage equality a possibility is that young gay boys and girls, as I once was, can now see a future filled with love rather than rage, intimacy rather than “achievement”.

In his first video, Steve explains why US healthcare is so expensive, including a follow-up on what he found most surprising in the course of researching his excellent Time cover-story, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us”:

Previous Dish on “Bitter Pill” here and here. Relatedly, Trudy Lieberman recently wondered why we don’t try to reduce costs by requiring “drug makers [to] negotiate prices with the government for the drugs used by Medicare beneficiaries” – something other countries do to keep costs down:

Brill estimated that that if drug makers were paid what other countries pay them, Medicare could save some $250 billion over 10 years and, depending on whether that amount is compared with GOP and Democratic deficit reduction proposals, “that’s a third or a half of the Medicare cuts now being talked about.” Liberal economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, crunched numbers from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and came up with similar savings. He found that if seniors paid the same prices as people in Canada, the federal government would save nearly $230 billion over the next decade. States would save about $31 billion and Medicare beneficiaries $48 billion. If the federal government paid the same prices as are paid in Denmark, its savings would be more than $500 billion.

But such numbers are apparently not persuasive when they’re up against the lobbying might of the drug manufacturers. According to Open Secrets.org, drug makers spent $152 million on lobbying in 2012, an amount that has steadily increased since 2002-2003, the time when Congress was debating Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, which handed drug makers the gift of no negotiations over the prices they charge.

Thomas Bollyky highlights another growing issue in international drug prices – patents in developing countries:

Why does Gleevec, a leukemia drug that costs $70,000 per year in the United States, cost just $2,500 in India? It’s seemingly simple. Gleevec is under patent in the U.S., but not in India. Accordingly, Novartis, its Swiss-based manufacturer, may prevent competitors from making and selling lower-cost versions of the drug in the U.S., but not in India.

Last week, India’s highest court rejected an application to patent Gleevec. While the legal issue in the case is important — the patentability of modifications to existing drugs under Indian law — the impact of the decision will likely be broader than just that issue, escalating a long-simmering fight over patented cancer medications in emerging markets.

Indonesia, China and the Phillipines are taking similar measures to amend pharmaceutical patent laws:

The measures that India and other countries have taken — compulsory licensing and adopting strict standards on patentability — are consistent with its international trade commitments, but will be corrosive to the way that pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) is funded internationally. More countries are likely to follow India’s lead. Cancer is not the only NCD on the rise in developing countries, with rates of diabetes, cardiovascular, and chronic respiratory illnesses likewise increasing. U.S. patients will not indefinitely pay a 20-fold increase on the price of medicines that Indian consumers pay.

Michael Cohen echoes me on the difference between America’s reactions to events like the marathon bombing and gun violence:

Londoners, who endured IRA terror for years, might be forgiven for thinking that America over-reacted just a tad to the goings-on in Boston. They’re right – and then some. What we saw was a collective freak-out like few that we’ve seen previously in the United States. It was yet another depressing reminder that more than 11 years after 9/11 Americans still allow themselves to be easily and willingly cowed by the “threat” of terrorism. …

If only Americans reacted the same way to the actual threats that exist in their country.

Which is to say that the terrorists succeeded in almost every way possible. The day after the IRA bombing of the hotel in which she was staying, injuring 31 and killing five, Margaret Thatcher gave a speech, on schedule, to her party conference. The IRA suspects were still at large and threatening to kill again:

Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.

Norman Geras thinks these arguments miss the point:

The supposed ‘overreaction’ to terrorist attacks isn’t primarily about the extent of risk relative to accidental death, or about fear for one’s own safety. It’s about people taking quite proper exception when, finding it morally outrageous indeed that, individuals moved by some grievance or other and/or the tenets of a murderous ideology, freely choose to put the innocent in peril by random acts of violence.

I wrote about this for my Sunday column. I am second to none in finding these acts morally outrageous, which is why we need to exercise more control in not giving them more power over our psyches than we need to. I think, in many ways, we’re still living with 9/11 collective PTSD:

Last week shows how terrorism works. It terrorizes – and the trauma of that terror lies often buried in the psyche for years, and untreated and un-addressed, it can suddenly return, without perspective or rationality. In some ways, this is understandable. Before 9/11, Americans outside Pearl Harbor, had lived for centuries feeling relatively invulnerable to the terrorism that I grew up with in Britain in the 1970s, or that occurs routinely as a consequence of the US invasion of Iraq (on the day of the Boston marathon, 65 Iraqis were murdered by terrorist bombs). 9/11 was so traumatic, in fact, that it led the US to adopt the torture techniques of totalitarian regimes and to invade and occupy two countries. Americans lost it. And I cannot say I was immune. It changed Americans because we allowed it to traumatize us.

Before 9/11, terrorism didn’t have this kind of power. The first bombing of the World Trade Center did not “change everything”. Last week, the historian Rick Perlstein noted that in Christmastime, 1975, an explosion at a La Guardia baggage claim killed 24 civilians, with severed limbs and heads flying all over the place. No one was ever found responsible – and the city of New York was not under lockdown. It’s different now.

Which means bin Laden succeeded as well – in simply terrorizing Americans. Take this statistic: the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism found that the number of terror attacks in the US in the decade before 9/11 was 41 a year. Since 9/11, it has been 19 a year. And yet our terror panic endures – and even grows. It seems we cannot yet simply live with and through occasional terror. We demand its complete absence, in the black-and-white way Americans often do:

We think in absolutes, in terms of avoiding all harms and dismissing potential benefits instead of debating the relative contributions of both. … “Never eat red meat”. “Never let kids watch TV or play video games”. “Never eat soft cheese while pregnant”. “Never fail to screen for disease”. And so on.

Is this a United States thing? Or am I just wired differently? I’m just not sure that the way we react to potential harms is the best approach. This includes, by the way, our response to terrorism.

Previous Dish on Americans’ response to terrorism here.

(Photo: At around 11:45 a.m., April 19, this was the view on Congress Street looking towards Post Office Square as a lockdown-in-place was in effect in Boston during the during the ongoing manhunt for a suspect in the terrorist bombing of the 117th Boston Marathon earlier this week. By Jim Davis/The Boston Globe via Getty Images.)