Month: April 2013

Ask Dreher Anything: Hometown Outsiders

With a follow-up about people who didn’t have a hometown to begin with:

Yesterday Rod discussed how we should follow the example of his late sister, the subject of his new book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life:

[The book] follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie’s death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie’s funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations – Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting.

Some praise for Rod’s book:

“If you are not prepared to cry, to learn, and to have your heart cracked open even a little bit by a true story of love, surrender, sacrifice, and family, then please do not read this book. Otherwise, do your soul a favor, and listen carefully to the unforgettable lessons of Ruthie Leming.“ – Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is Steel Magnolias for a new generation.” –Sela Ward, Emmy Award-winning actress and author of Homesick

Ask Anything archive here.

An Abortion Horror Story, Ctd

A reader writes:

I think you should post something about how the media is not deliberately covering up the Dr. Gosnell case. In fact, several media outlets have been covering it since 2011, as detailed by Irin Carmon.

Another writes:

Regarding the Gosnell case, I’m in the Philadelphia region, so I was a little baffled by the claims of a lack of coverage. The detailed descriptions have been in the local news for some time, so all of this is old news. But I also read a lot of blogs/journals from the left, where it’s been discussed a lot. Heck, Patrick had a good post back in 2011 for the Dish, citing several other posts talking about it.

The distinction is that while there may be a lack of coverage by national mainstream media outlets at this time (I’ve seen posts from 2011 from NYT, CNN and others), the interesting part is that the idea that the MSM is part of a vast left-wing conspiracy. The left has been all over this story since the beginning. But for many, there is no distinction between the left and the so-called “liberal media”, so when they turn on CNN and don’t see any mention of the story on this particular day, it’s clear to them the liberals are burying this story.

Also, Ross Douthat made some interesting points about how people on the various sides of the issue are treating it in a general sense. I normally roll my eyes at his analysis, but I may have to rethink how I read him going forward given how thoughtful his approach is at the moment.

Another focuses on what the Gosnell story means for the abortion debate:

As someone who favors womens’ access to safe, affordable, and legal abortion, but who also favors added restrictions the closer the pregnancy has come to term, I wonder about another angle to this story.  As more and more state governments seek ways around Roe v. Wade to shut down their last abortion providers, and those that remain are subject to constant extra-legal intimidation, I’m afraid that more and more women will be exposed to the Kermit Gosnells of the world when they can no longer access facilities run by Planned Parenthood or similar well-regulated providers.

Another is more direct:

When abortion is legal, it’s one of the safest medical procedures out there. When it’s made illegal and pushed underground, Gosnell is what happens. Women become desperate and will do anything, include risk their lives with an unlicensed provider, to be not pregnant. This is what pro-choice activists are fighting AGAINST. We are just as horrified as so-called “pro-life” supporters about what Gosnell did. However, OUR policies will prevent it from happening again. Anti-abortion policies encourage it.

Another comes from a very different direction:

In reference to your “It’s So Personal” series on the matter, I think it is important to point something out: The difference between what Gosnell did to the babies, and what George Tiller did, was merely a matter of inches.  Where Gosnell fully extracted the child before severing the spine, Tiller only did partial extractions before the “snip” – so as not to be accused of murder.  Like you, I am opposed to abortion but I can live in a world where it’s legal in early term.  But in the barbarity of what needs to be done to terminate a 3rd trimester pregnancy, I see no difference between Tiller and Gosnell.  Just because Tiller had a clean clinic and treated the mothers with dignity and care does not excuse what boils down to simple infanticide.  Both men are monsters.

Update from a reader:

Your reader who insisted that the difference between Tiller and Gosnell is “a matter of inches” ignores that Tiller took patients with third trimester pregnancies who met legal standards for abortion, i.e., who carried fetuses with severe or fatal birth defects or who faced a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” as result of the pregnancy certified independently by two other doctors, while Gosnell, on the evidence, seems to have taken desperate, often poor patients with late pregnancies but apparently no medical need, and failed to treat them by any proper medical standard. The anti-abortion movement wants desperately to make this about the possibly viable baby, but the legality depends upon whether the pregnant woman is receiving appropriate medical care.

The saddest part for me is that so many of Gosnell’s patients were women who had to save money for an abortion and missed the cut-off for standard medical abortion. I used to think of abortion as a moral issue, but the more time I spend working in poor neighborhoods, the more I realize that birth control and abortion is primarily an economic issue for poor women, who can’t afford to miss work, to take time off from jobs, to pay for a larger family. The stories from Gosnell’s clinic are heartbreaking, but the right ought to see this outrageous moral failure as the consequence of a series of smaller failures.

Is It “Too Soon To Tell” On Iraq? Nope.

People Pay Their Respects To The Country's War Dead At Arlington National Cemetery's Section 60

Paul Wolfowitz isn’t ready to declare the Iraq War a failure:

It may be a long time before we really know the outcome of the Iraq war. To put that in perspective, consider that the Korean armistice was signed 60 years ago, but South Korea struggled for decades after that. Even after 30 years, only an extreme optimist would have predicted that South Korea today would not only have one of the world’s most successful economies but also a democratic political system that has successfully conducted six free and fair presidential elections over the last 25 years.

So too, it may be many years before we have a clear picture of the future of Iraq, but we already do know two important things. An evil dictator is gone, along with his two equally brutal sons, giving the Iraqi people a chance to build a representative government that treats its people as citizens and not as subjects. And we also know that Americans did not come to Iraq to take away its oil or to subjugate the country. To the contrary, having come to remove a threat to the United States, Americans stayed on at great sacrifice and fought alongside Iraqis in a bloody struggle against the dark forces that sought to return the country to a brutal tyranny. Iraqis rarely get enough credit for their own heroism in that struggle, but roughly 10,000 members of the Iraqi security forces are estimated to have died in that fight (twice the American total) in addition to tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

It’s a testament to the power of ideology and pride that Wolfowitz is actually still using the South Korea example. South Korea. How many sectarian divisions are there? Was not the war there in order to prevent Communist take-over of the entire peninsula? What possibly equivalent threat existed in sanctioned, impoverished Iraq? There is not a single sentence of personal accountability in the entire piece, not even a flicker of conscience about what his utopianism wrought. His only mention of Abu Ghraib, where torture policies authorized by his own president were exposed, destroying the entire moral case for the war, is about Abu Ghraib under Saddam. No apology for the death of a hundred thousand Iraqis because of a bungled operation. No apology for torture. No apology for sending thousands of Americans to die so that the new Shiite prime minister could actually cancel the coming elections in two critical Sunni areas: Anbar and Nineveh, as the sectarianism Wolfowitz insisted was over by 2003 still somehow consumes a country he never understood. No:

What did require a U.S. apology—which the ambassador to Iraq, Jim Jeffrey, offered in the Fall of 2011—was the failure to assist the Shia uprising in 1991, in the aftermath of Saddam’s defeat in Kuwait.

At this point, you realize you’re dealing with someone psychologically ill-equipped to reflect with even the slightest sense of responsibility on the carnage and chaos his self-righteousness wrought. He’s back to the exhausted tropes of 2002, when he last had even the faintest credibility, repeating them as if, by some magic, they will make his catastrophic error of judgment less obvious. One wonders: when exactly did Wolfowitz have his sense of shame surgically removed? Did Allan Bloom help him out? James Joyner disagrees with Wolfowitz’s view of the US’ motives:

[R]oughly 4712 Americans were killed fighting in Iraq—which is to say, 98 percent of all Americans killed fighting in Iraq—after Saddam’s regime was out of power. 94 percent of the total American KIA died after his sons were killed. 88 percent were lost after Saddam was captured, no threat to return to power, and no longer a plausible cause for the fabled “regime holdouts” to rally around. Even after Saddam was hanged, another 1548 Americans died.

From this, I would conclude that American war aims were something other than merely toppling Saddam’s regime, making sure his “equally brutal sons” did not replace him, or even assuring that Saddam was brought to justice. Because, otherwise, we could have gotten out with only 92 dead American troopers.

Larison draws a key distinction:

Wolfowitz claims that it “may be a long time before we really know the outcome of the Iraq war,” but that’s a very silly thing to say. It may be a long time before we can assess the full historical significance of the Iraq war. That’s true of any major event that happens in one’s own lifetime, to say nothing of a war. Andrew Bacevich addressed that question here, and suggested that the Iraq war might prove to be no more significant over the long term than the War of 1812 was for the later history of the United States. The Iraq war was unnecessary, appallingly destructive, and extremely stupid, but perhaps the most damning thing that will be said about it one day in the future is that it ultimately didn’t matter very much. The outcome of the Iraq war is much more straightforward: it was a costly, wasteful failure. It advanced no concrete American interests, and instead did real harm to U.S. security. Then again, that was clear to some of us over eight years ago.

And yet Wolfowitz is incapable of intellectual evolution, let alone moral responsibility. In fact he’s still blaming Shinseki for speaking the obvious: that we needed 300,000 troops to invade and retain order. Yes: all these years later and Wolfowitz is still dreaming that if only he had controlled everything … then the very fantasies he concocted would have come true. And his main point now? That the US should be more involved in the internal sectarian clusterfuck of Syria. Here’s Wolfowitz’s version of atonement:

“I realise these are consequential decisions. It’s just that they’re consequential both ways.”

The word weasel springs to mind.

(Photo: A sun-bleached flower sticker is adhered to U.S. Army Captain Russell B. Rippetoe’s headstone in Arlington Cemetery’s Section 60 on the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq March 19, 2013 in Arlington, Virginia. Rippetoe was killed in a suicide bombing at a checkpoint near the Hadithah Dam northwest of Baghdad, Iraq. He was the first soldier killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Sound Of The Big Bang

University of Washington’s John G. Cramer simulates what the Big Bang would have sounded like, using “pockets of radiation know as cosmic microwave background (CMB) that still speckle the universe”:


Rebecca Rosen reacts to the audio:

This is not to say this is what you would have heard had you been present in the years following the initial explosion (if through some weird wormhole magic that were even possible *and* you managed to live for the entire 760,000 years). Cramer calls the early universe a “bass instrument,” because its expansion stretched out the sound wavelengths, making their frequencies lower and lower — far too low for a human to hear. In order to make the simulation audible, he had to scale up the sound frequencies by an enormous factor: 1026. As you listen, you can hear a distinct rise and fall of the CMB emissions’ intensity, peaking at 379,000 years.

The simulation is part science, part art — the conversion of data into something you can experience and explore.

The Advantages Of Uh

Research suggests that “filler” words may be more necessary than we realize:

One study had people sit in front of an array of objects, then grab and manipulate a specific sequence of objects, as directed by a computer voice. Sometimes the computer voice said things like, “Move the box.” Other times it added a filler word, saying, “Move the, uh, box.” The task wasn’t complex, and people had no trouble following the directions. Still, they were quicker to follow directions that involved objects they hadn’t yet manipulated when their instructions included an “uh.” To listeners, “uh” indicates that something new, which requires more mental processing on the part of the speaker, is about to be introduced. This helped the study participants put themselves in the right mindset of choosing from the as-yet unfamiliar objects.

So even a word that’s no more than a grunt is helpful. Which is good, because all languages have verbal filler. American Sigh Language has a sign for “um,” and most languages have some monosyllable that has no meaning but indicates a pause.

Eating In Space

Not so great:

[A]n unfortunate circumstance of space life: Microgravity affects humans’ taste buds, making it hard for astronauts to taste flavors in their food even when those flavors are technically present and technically delicious. Without gravity to pull blood toward the feet, especially during the first few days in space, “your head sort of inflates like someone is squeezing the bottom of a balloon,” explains current astronaut Chris Hadfield. The results are clogged sinuses and the hindered flavor reception that comes with them. “It’s kind of like having a cold; you’re kind of stuffy,” Charles Bourland, formerly NASA’s manager for space station food, puts it.

Are Electric Cars Worth It?

Bjørn Lomborg distrusts the “lavish” subsidies for electric cars, which can mean “amounts up to $7,500 in the US, $8,500 in Canada, €9,000 ($11,700) in Belgium, and €6,000 even in cash-strapped Spain”:

If the car is driven less than 50,000 kilometers on European electricity, it will have emitted more CO2 overall than a conventional car. Even if driven much farther, 150,000 kilometers, an electric car’s CO2 emissions will be only 28% less than those of a gasoline-powered car. During the car’s lifetime, this will prevent 11 tons of CO2 emissions, or about €44 of climate damage.

Given the size of the subsidies on offer, this is extremely poor value. Denmark’s subsidies, for example, pay almost €6,000 to avoid one ton of CO2 emissions. Purchasing a similar amount in the European Emissions Trading System would cost about €5. For the same money, Denmark could have reduced CO2 emissions more than a thousand-fold.

The Weekend Wrap

jesuspeter

This weekend on the Dish, we provided our usual eclectic mix of religious, books, and cultural coverage. In matters of faith, doubt, and philosophy, Marilynne Robinson remembered Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Francis Spufford thought about Jesus and self-righteousness, and Rachel Held Evans pondered the perils of sharing your faith. Eve Tushnet reflected on the religious imagery of pre-Raphaelite paintings, Karen Armstrong offered a meditation on science and religion, and Susan Jacoby explained how and why people convert to atheism. Ashley Makar reflected on what her cancer diagnosis taught her about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Erich Fromm taught us how to love, and Barry Lenser found life’s mysteries at the heart of Rod Dreher’s new book. Costica Bradatan reminded us of why failure matters, Jonathan Haidt examined the morals of business students, Priscella Long recoiled at a neuropsychologist’s experiment on human decision-making, and Leanne Ogasawara answered a timeless cocktail party question.

In literary and arts coverage, Robert Silvers divulged the muddled phrases that drive him crazy, David Yezzi provided a searing critique of contemporary poetry, and Ian Crouch wondered if the writer can truly retire. Jeff Sharlet considered the phrase “reads like a novel,” Tom Jokinen recalled Graham Greene’s dream diary, and a transgender woman appeared in the pages of DC Comics’ Batgirl. Stephen Akey praised the French poet Baudelaire for confronting our failures, Lydia Kiesling searched for the great tech novel in San Francisco, and Ann Napolitano toured Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in Georgia. Maureen O’Connor proclaimed the death of the celebrity sex tape and a new documentary explored Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Read Saturday’s poem here and Sunday’s here.

In assorted news and views, DVD technology held promise for cheaper HIV testing, Evan Hughes looked back at the first stirrings of discomfort about New York’s gentrification, Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops dismissed the need for college athletes to get paid, Jessica Freeman-Slade reviewed Rosie Schaap’s memoir, Drinking with Men, and the conversation continued about Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s trip to Cuba. MHBs here and here, FOTDs here and here, VFYWs here and here, and the latest window contest here.

– M.S.

(Image: Ford Madox Brown’s Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet, 1876, via WikiPaintings)

Will Invisibility Cloaks Ever Be Real?

Lawrence Krauss isn’t optimistic:

In the first place, even if you could be invisible, it wouldn’t be all it is cracked up to be. It is a simple law of physics that interactions are two-way streets, so if you are invisible because nothing interacts with you, then alas, you wouldn’t be able to see—your retina would not intercept light. So there goes all the fun.

But all may not be lost:

Incidentally, as one who has always been a fan of low tech, my favorite form of invisibility cloak is simply one with a big screen in front and a camera behind. The screen projects the image of what is behind the object. This idea has not only been used to hide houses but is also being explored for camouflaging troops in battle. It is called active, or optical, camouflage , and while it doesn’t exploit any new physics, it may do the job.

Similar technology is featured in the 2009 news report from Japan seen above.

Does Your Backyard Smell Like Semen?

If so, hopefully it’s just the Callery Pear, “a deciduous tree that’s common throughout North America” which “blossoms in early spring and produces beautiful, five-petaled white flowers—that smell like semen”:

I said that Callerys are “common”: A preposterous understatement.

In Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, which is for horticulturists what the DSM is for psychotherapists, Michael Dirr says that the Bradford Pear—a Callery cultivar—inhabits “almost every city and town to some degree or another” and warns that “the tree has reached epidemic proportions.” There’s one between my apartment and my favorite coffee shop in Brooklyn, and there’s probably one between your apartment and your favorite coffee shop. The last time New York’s Parks Department conducted a tree census, from 2005 to 2006, there were 63,600 Callery Pears, making it the third-most popular species in the city, after the London Planetree and the Norway Maple. …

The way I see it, there’s weirdly little attention paid to the fact that, for a few weeks each year, there’s a good chance your street smells like semen. We just carry on as if that were normal.

Update from a reader:

My high school in the southeastern US was covered in bradford pear trees. The rumor was that the school administration had wanted to plant dogwoods all over the campus but found the price too steep, so they bought the pears instead (which do indeed look similar to a certain kind of dogwood.) In different versions of the story, the administrators either didn’t know what the trees smelled like when they bloomed, or did know and couldn’t care less. Either way, the smell was definitely not lost on us, though depending on the tree or time of year (I was never sure which) the smell kind of runs the gamut between semen and old fish. Regardless, it’s an unpleasant biological odor.

We of course did what any industrious high school students would do, gathering up grocery bags full of the fallen blossoms and then dumping them unexpectedly into idling buses at the end of the day, or shoving them through the slats of someone’s locker.

Another:

Thank you for clearing up what has been a two-decades-long puzzle for me, ever since my early teen years when I gained a reference point for the strange smell of those trees ;)  My high school, or perhaps the neighborhood around it, must have been filled with Callery Pears, because every spring the whole campus would start smelling funny and yet nobody ever seemed to notice, or would pretend to have no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned that the air smelled like cum.

That was the weirdest thing to me – that everyone just ignored it even though I know they noticed it, and they pretended to have no idea what I was talking about.  Right, as if a bunch of teenage boys don’t know what semen smells like.  It all made me feel like I was in some kind of X-rated Twilight Zone episode …  that, or I was crazy and/or perverted, which was the unfortunate reaction I got when I mentioned the phenomenon to a girl I liked.  And trust me, she knew what I was talking about.

Anyways, I’ve been baffled by this annually for as long as I’ve been ejaculating, and I had chalked it up to either a strange hormone-induced brain trick or male gingko trees (which, I think, are the ones that smell like vomit).  Thanks for finally putting my mind at ease.

(Photo by Flickr user slgckgc)