April 2013 – Page 52

The Deconstructed Pop Star

Adam Ash toasts David Bowie:

Before him, public figures worked at creating an enduring single persona. Even actors did it — John Wayne as avuncular cowboy; Clara Bow as vamp; Cary Grant as the ideal gentleman date; Humphrey Bogart’s cynical tough guy covering up a morally upright soft heart (when he started off as an upperclass white-tie fop on Broadway). But Bowie said, nope, I’ll create a new self every now and then. In his public personas, Bowie exemplifies the psychological theory which says we consist of various self-states, who need to make peace with one another. Except his self-states are so various, there’s no way they could be integrated.

And the singer is still taking England by storm:

His first album in 10 years is top of the charts, and a V & A museum exhibition, “David Bowie Is,” devoted to all things Bowie and drawn from his personal archive, is the greatest thing that this august establishment museum has ever put on: double the ticket sales of any previous exhibit in its 160-year-long history. Selfridges has pop-up stores where you can buy Bowie T-shirts and stuff, and there’s a makeup kit for you to Bowie-make-over your quotidian visage. His album is tipped to win the Mercury prize. Not a day goes past that there is not a Bowie pic or article in the popular press. There’s even been an April Fool’s joke about Bowie opening a pet shop called Spiders from Mars, which would sell some of his favorite spiders as pets.

Did Obama’s Race Hurt Him? Ctd

Nate Cohn recently argued that “the long term decline in Democratic fortunes in the South and Appalachia” largely explains why Obama did worse in the more racist parts of the country. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz pushes back:

First, if this were true, any Democrat, not just Obama, should have underperformed in such areas. In early 2008, SurveyUSA polled hypothetical match-ups between each of Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards and various potential Republican nominees. Obama consistently underperformed among whites in areas with higher racist search rates. Clinton did not. Edwards did not.

Second, if areas with higher racist search rates were punishing all Democrats in 2008, relative to 2004, a similar relationship should be seen in House voting patterns. House Democrats should have also underperformed in these areas in 2008, relative to 2004. They did not.

Dysfunctional Daycare

Jonathan Cohn’s new TNR cover-story tackles America’s daycare system:

A 2007 survey by the National Institute of Child Health Development deemed the majority of operations to be “fair” or “poor”—only 10 percent provided high-quality care. Experts recommend a ratio of one caregiver for every three infants between six and 18 months, but just one-third of children are in settings that meet that standard. Depending on the state, some providers may need only minimal or no training in safety, health, or child development. And because child care is so poorly paid, it doesn’t attract the highly skilled. In 2011, the median annual salary for a child care worker was $19,430, less than a parking lot attendant or a janitor. Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California–Berkeley, told me, “We’ve got decades of research, and it suggests most child care and early childhood education in this country is mediocre at best.”

At the same time, day care is a bruising financial burden for many families—more expensive than rent in 22 states. In the priciest, Massachusetts, it costs an average family $15,000 a year to place an infant full-time in a licensed center. In California, the cost is equivalent to 40 percent of the median income for a single mother.

Ask Steve Brill Anything

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Some background on Brill:

He is the founder of CourtTV and American Lawyer magazine. His most recent venture is Journalism Online, which he sold to RR Donnelley in 2011 for a reported $45 million and now has more than 400 publications using its Press+ service to charge for digital content. He also founded Verified Identity Pass, Inc., a New York-based company that operated the Clear airport security fast-pass, a pre-cursor to the current Federal Trusted Traveler program. In addition to writing a column for Newsweek, he has written magazine articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Harpers and Time.

His most recent success is that 36-page Time cover-story, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us”, which the Dish covered here and here. Money quote from Brill:

When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?

What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million- or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?

Brill’s piece is what journalism should now be doing – the long, deep-dive, debate-shifting essay that addresses our reality in an accessible, clear but compelling way. To submit a question for Steve, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. Thanks for participating.

Sifting Through The Evidence

In response to the Boston Police Department’s request that the public submit video of the finish line to be parsed for clues, Alexis Madrigal offers a suggestion:

If Federal or local police do need help [with video analysis], they could reach out to Digital Media Evidence Processing Lab at the University of Indianapolis, which is run by the Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association. …

After the Vancouver riots, police in that city brought the video they received from citizens to the lab. “Working around-the-clock shifts, analysts and technicians examined more than 5,000 hours of video while tagging more than 15,000 criminal events and individuals,” trade journal Evidence Magazine wrote in 2012. “The approach proved quite powerful. Whereas investigators required four months to process just 100 hours of video after the riots in 1994, the thousands of hours of video recorded in 2011 were processed and initially tagged in just two weeks.”

This will become the sad new ritual of mourning a tragedy: sending and processing the horrific memories of an event in hopes of finding evidence to bring criminals to justice.

Chronicling The Carnage

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture has the most stirring images from yesterday. A reader responds to what was probably the most gruesome photo to surface:

Please, please, I hope to find that the man in the wheelchair with the bilateral leg trauma (and amputations) has survived. He will be in every prayer I have the ability to pray. If you hear of him, please let us know.

He appears to be alive and stable. A little background on the young man here. By the way, the guy in the cowboy hat seen helping in the photo is also featured in this stirring Youtube, in which he recalls the carnage while shaking uncontrollably. He also appears to be the same guy holding up the American flag in the middle of the bomb site. His name is Carlos Arredondo and his remarkable backstory is here.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, we rounded up coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, from reax on Twitter to commentary and context in the blogosphere, while holding out further analysis until more information emerges. Patton Oswalt had the last word on the tragedy for today.

In other coverage, Andrew took apart Paul Wolfowitz’s retrospective of the Iraq War and pondered whether Pope Francis will drag the Church into the light of modern day. He also questioned our modern fixation on life-extending medicine despite the pain it can bring and wondered how soon news orgs will face the music of a new era. Elsewhere, Andrew responded to TNC’s thoughts on Rand Paul trip to Howard University, and shook his head at the ongoing merger of Christianity and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism in certain quarters of the GOP.

In more political news and views, Andrew Solomon expressed mixed feelings on North Dakota’s new law restricting abortion as we studied the frequency of cross-confessional marriage and cut subsidies for electric cars down to size. Readers filled in the media’s gaps on the horrific story of Kermit Gosnell as we gathered increasing commentary on the case. We met the rare souls who enjoy filling out tax forms while Heritage illustrated where your tax dollars ended up this past year. Finally, Marc Lynch rationalized the Muslim Brotherhood’s irrational track record while a reader took on Susan Jacoby’s reasons to leave religion.

In miscellanea, readers asked Rod Dreher about hometown blues, Willie Nelson spoke for the moment, in the moment, we found a reason for our ‘ums’ and ‘uhs,’ and remembered the first VFYW, in Los Angeles. Michael Wolf awed with his photographs of Hong Kong high rises as we ate breakfast overlooking the Earth and listened closely to the sound of the universe being born. Later we put away our dreams for an invisibility cloak, shopped for germs and browsed some risqué botany. Lastly, we spent a moment in Rome for the VFYW and witnessed the shock following the Boston bombing in the Face of the Day.

–B.J.

(Photo: A man comforts a victim on the sidewalk at the scene of the first explosion near the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon. By John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Quote For The Day

“I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths. But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. … This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago,” – Patton Oswalt.

Converting To Atheism, Ctd

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A minister criticizes Susan Jacoby for cherry-picking religious arguments:

Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.”

That is not the religious answer. That is a religious answer. It happens to be a bad answer. It is bad theology. Atheism is a rational rejection of bad theology – and more power to them. But there is also good theology out there – good religious answers which do justice both to our reason and to our spirits.

Why does God allow polio and disease and other bad things to happen to good people? Because God is not an omnipotent manipulator of the world. Because God works through the system, not over-powering it. Because we have free will that allows us to create justice and love, and also evil. God’s power is not coercive (“you must not do that horrible thing and I will stay your hand”) but patiently persuasive (“there’s a better way, make a better choice”). God’s “plan” was not to create polio, or human beings, but to set the conditions and watch what we do, and to use that “still, small voice” to gently urge all creation toward divine ideals of deep rich experience, consciousness, love, marvelous beauty, and thoughtful theology.

As any teenage theologian can see, the idea of a simultaneously all-powerful and all-loving God is impossible based on the evidence of the tragedies that befall us everyday. But there is better theology available. The churches should be better teachers. And atheists shouldn’t give up so soon.

Another reader views her youthful conversion to atheism as simply a step in her lifelong spiritual development:

During those early years it is not just typical but imperative for intellectual development to question all received wisdom. Everything that once made sense no longer does. Faith in God is a great example of that because it is taught to children when ultimately, to be authentic, it must be felt.

But the years after do something to us. We have hard times and unexpected joys and we begin to see nuance and complexity where everything had previously been so black and white. We’re humbled by this, by the sense that what we accepted may have been wrong, that we are and always will be a work in progress. For many people, that means discovering faith in a more mature and meaningful sense than what we were given as children.

I certainly followed that trajectory. As a teen and young adult, God just didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t understand how anyone could believe that irrational nonsense. But at some point in middle age, as I negotiated the rough contours of my life, I began a kind of inner dialogue – sometimes accusatory and angry and sometimes grateful – with, I thought, myself. Eventually I realized I was engaging in a personal relationship with God. And once I understood that, fully grasped it, atheism just didn’t make sense to me anymore. Once again, everything that had made sense to me no longer did. I have a faith that I never thought I would have.

One reader takes issue with Jacoby’s tone:

My beef is actually with Susan Jacoby and the flippant way that she deals with the conversion of Paul. The problem with atheists has always been that they pride themselves on having discovered ‘the truth’ and hence also accord themselves the licence to belittle people of faith. In Susan’s words, ‘A voice appears out of the sky, you fall off your horse, you hit yourself on the head, and when you wake up you know Jesus is the lord.’ To deal with the conversion of Saul in such a disparaging way is why people of faith have no patience with the logic put forth by atheists. Saul didn’t fall down from his horse and hit his head and wake up a loony. I can take any text from any book and put forth the same derisiveness. All it requires is a little sarcasm and cynicism.

According to the Bible, you don’t need to worship stones and trees or have Gods with exotic names like Baal and Astaroth. When atheists are unwilling to entertain an opposing thought and are dogged about their determination to have converts, then it’s just another religion.

Another reader focuses on Saul’s conversion, and describes his similarly sudden conversion to atheism while visiting Mecca:

There I was in the middle of the teeming masses, observing an essentially pagan pilgrimage co-opted by Islam to gain the support of Mecca’s merchant class whose livelihoods had depended on it, a fact conveniently ignored/forgotten by most Muslims. And it hit me right there and then! None of this made any sense! NONE! Why are we going around this big black cube? Why do we have to pray five times a day? If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, surely he doesn’t need us to reaffirm our faith in him five times a day.

I left Mecca with the firm conviction that I was better off not worrying. I was already 40 years old, and I had a strong sense of right and wrong, and how to live the best life I could possibly live and how to be the best human being I could possibly be; a work in progress admittedly. I guess I had a Damascene conversion in Mecca!

Another points to Ricky Gervais (in the above video) as a similar “Damascene convert.”

As The Smoke Clears

Charles Pierce reports from Boston:

Once I got to Copley Square, I sat down and talked to an EMT. He had been one of the first on the scene. The problem the EMTs had was that the bomb went off inside the security barricades. The barricades meant to protect the spectators briefly prevented the EMTs from reaching the injured. This was not the last of the day’s cruel ironies. The EMT told me that the first person he saw was a 5- or 6-year-old with blood on his face. He did not seem to be in any way injured. One of his parents lay on the ground next to him. The parent wasn’t moving.

Marc Herman points out that “today’s attack at the finish line appears to have coincided with the moment when, statistically, the largest number of runners — and presumably their friends and family — would be nearby.” Nicholas Thompson zooms out:

There’s something particularly devastating about an attack on a marathon. It’s an epic event in which men and women appear almost superhuman. The winning men run for hours at a pace even normal fit people can only hold in a sprint. But it’s also so ordinary. It’s not held in a stadium or on a track. It’s held in the same streets everyone drives on and walks down. An attack on a marathon is, in some ways, more devastating than an attack on a stadium; you’re hitting something special but also something very quotidian.

Ezra Klein focuses on the response to the tragedy:

If you are losing faith in human nature today, watch what happens in the aftermath of an attack on the Boston Marathon. The flood of donations crashed the Red Cross’s Web site. The organization tweeted that its blood supplies are already full. People are lining up outside of Tufts Medical Center to try and help. Runners are already vowing to be at marathons in the coming weeks and months. This won’t be the last time the squeakers run Boston. This won’t be the last time we gather at the finish line to marvel how much more we can take than anyone ever thought possible.

(Photo: Beacon Street near Kenmore Square remains empty for the use of emergency vehicles after two explosive devices detonated at the finish line of the 117th Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts. Two people are confirmed dead and at least 23 injured after two explosions went off near the finish line to the marathon. By Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)