It’s a relief to find that, thanks to DiFi, John Brennan will not promote someone who destroyed the tapes of the CIA’s torture sessions of waterboarding. But it’s not a surprise that this old CIA hand is “defiant” when it comes to allowing the American people to read the full report on the war crimes in the previous administration. But the power to release the report resides with the president.
If Obama refuses to release it, he will be breaking core election pledges on transparency and torture. This is a bipartisan Senate report on a profound issue of American values and the rule of law. There is no reason on earth why the people of this country should not read and weigh its findings.
When faced with the beginnings of empty-nest syndrome, Halpern [decided] to invest time in others as a way to fill her day. She and her dog, Pransky, became a certified human–dog therapy team, working at the local nursing home. She expected to meet and “learn something about old people, and about the therapeutic value of animals in a medical setting, and about myself in that setting, which was alien and not a little scary.” With Pransky at her side acting as an icebreaker, Halpern experienced the seven virtues of life: “love, hope, faith, prudence, justice, fortitude [and] restraint.” Witty and compassionate, the author introduces readers to the lives of many of the residents, providing insight into the last stages of a person’s life.
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Caleb Crain explains how difficult it is to avoid:
Suppose you want to write a brand-new popular tune. A piano has only eighty-eight keys, and the span of the human voice is even narrower. Only a few rhythms and chord progressions reliably please the palate of the masses, and myriad tunes have already been written under these constraints and are protected by copyright. Is it possible to write a new one that doesn’t echo an old one?
Is plagiarism inevitable in pop music? Thanks to combinatorics, the answer is certainly no for a song at full length. And the answer is probably still no if one focuses on just the heart of a song—whatever, legally speaking, that is. But even a genius would probably be unable to write a new pop song that doesn’t resemble some old one for at least a bar or two. When music plagiarism cases go to trial, lawyers and judges must somehow distinguish inevitable echoes from willful theft. “If a song writer is ethical,” A.J. Liebling once quipped, in a book he ghost-wrote for an unscrupulous music publisher, “he will not cop a tune within three years of its publication.” The law aspires to something a bit longer-lasting and maybe even less cynical. But to formulate a rule for distinguishing accidental from larcenous parallels is a fiendish challenge, and in attempting to rise to it, a mind could easily lose its way.
In a follow-up post, Crain features early 20th-century composer Ira B. Arnstein, who “not only ruined his musical career through the chronic litigation of music plagiarism cases; he literally went mad”:
Details are still emerging about the escape of three young women, including Amanda Berry, kidnapped a decade ago and trapped in a house in Cleveland. Amy Davidson is following the story:
According to a police conference on Tuesday morning, her chance came when she forced a hole in a screen covering the lower part of the door which was big enough for her to push her arm through. Then she started to make noise. (One recalls the way that Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian girl held for eight years, kept looking for a moment to run, and finally found one.) [Neighbor Charles Ramsey, seen in the above interview] came when Berry screamed; and yet she took a risk by trying to get the attention of a stranger. What if he had just told his neighbor, with whom, he told reporters, he’d hung out at local barbecues—“ribs and what not”—that someone in his house was being loud? …
“Yeah hey bro,” it begins, “you check this out.” His intensity, the McDonald’s shout-out, his undoubtedly loose paraphrase of Berry’s account (“This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter”), and also his competence (he does a better job with the essentials like the address than the 911 operator) make him one of those instantly compelling figures who, in the middle of an American tragedy, just start talking—and then we can’t stop listening. (See Ruslan Tsarni, Ashley Smith.) But one phrase in particular, from the interview, is worth dwelling on: “I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” In many times and places, a line like that has been offered as an excuse for walking away, not for helping a woman break down your neighbor’s door. How many women have died as a result? They didn’t yesterday.
The Dish is seeking an editorial intern to help with ransacking the web for smart nuggets, working on larger projects, and guest-blogging when yours truly takes a vacation. The paid internship will be full time, includes benefits and is for a six-month duration. The position is based in New York City. Since the Dish doesn’t have an office, most of the work will be done from home, but the staff meets regularly for lunch and coffee meetings. We’ve decided to cut down to one intern – to keep our budget firmly under control. Which means the one individual really does have to be special.
We are hoping to hire within the next month or so. Start dates are semi-flexible. We’re looking for extremely hardworking self-starters, web-obsessives and Dishheads, who already understand what we do here. We also prefer individuals who can challenge me and my assumptions, find stuff online that we might have missed, and shape the Dish with his or her own personal passions. I want to emphasize that this is an intense job for the intensely motivated. It’s also a pretty unbeatable opportunity to learn what online journalism can be. And a sense of humor is an asset.
To apply, please e-mail a (max 500-word) cover letter explaining why you are a good fit for the Dish and a resumé to apply@andrewsullivan.com. Put “Dishtern” in the subject line. The cut off for applications is Monday, May 20.
I know how I’m supposed to feel about Gatsby: In the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “that it is the American masterwork.” Malcolm Cowley admired its “moral permanence.” T. S. Eliot called it “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Lionel Trilling thought Fitzgerald had achieved in it “the ideal voice of the novelist.” That’s the received Gatsby: a linguistically elegant, intellectually bold, morally acute parable of our nation.
I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them—but not this book.
Her biggest criticism? The lack of love:
Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. … Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, [Fitzgerald] admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”
Lisa Hix takes issue with the book’s portrayal of flappers:
Narrated by a man, the cautionary tale seems to warn against the wiles of The New Woman—the feminist ideal of an educated and sexually liberated woman that emerged in the 1900s.
So instead of intelligent, independent women telling their own stories of rebelling and rejecting their mother’s values, you have male war buddies sharing how vapid, spoiled socialites carelessly wrecked their lives. In “A Feminist Reading of the Great Gatsby,” Soheila Pirhadi Tavandashti points out the pattern:
“The novel abounds in minor female characters whose dress and activities identify them as incarnations of the New Woman, and they are portrayed as clones of a single, negative character type: shallow, exhibitionist, revolting, and deceitful. For example, at Gatsby’s parties we see insincere, ‘enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names,’ as well as numerous narcissistic attention-seekers in various stages of drunken hysteria.[“]
Hix emphasizes that what may be remembered as merely a fashion trend was in fact a complicated, “full-blown, grassroots feminist revolution” that we are still feeling the effects of today:
[The flapper] rejected the notion that women should be submissive and keep to their “separate sphere” of the home. She proved that women could work and live independent from men—and party just as hard.
Meanwhile, Zachary M. Seward sighs at how high school teachers commonly interpret the classic:
[They] use the book to teach their students how to strive, filling in the blank, “My green light is _____.” In the novel, Gatsby’s infatuation with social class is represented by the green light on the dock of the Buchanan estate across the bay from his house. And if there’s one line that neatly, almost overbearingly, conveys the novel’s jaundiced view of the American dream, it’s this one: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”
At Boston Latin School, however, the green light is just good old American ambition. “My green light is Harvard,” a 14-year-old Chinese-American immigrant told a reporter visiting her English class. On the wall of the classroom, students had written their own “green lights” (pdf) on a large piece of green construction paper in the shape of a lightbulb: Pediatric neurosurgeon … Earn a black belt … Make it to junior year… Become incredibly rich.
Previous Dish on Fitzgerald and his novel here, here and here.
The Gasland filmmaker discusses how fracking collides with private property rights:
A reader writes:
Your dissents to Fox’s seemingly biased presentation of the facts around fracking raise a larger issue that I’d be interested in seeing the Dish cover. Specifically, while the preponderance of scientific evidence for global warming tends to be embraced by liberals, issues such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), nuclear power, environmental issues related to the Keystone Pipeline, and fracking are areas where liberals seem more willing to ignore scientific evidence or embrace questionable science in their opposition. Why is that?
The fear of “Frankencorn” is a somewhat legitimate concern, but does that slight fear outweigh the far more realistic danger from excessive pesticide, land or water usage, all of which are areas that GMOs offer tremendous environmental benefits? Similarly, given the danger of global warming and the safety record of the nuclear industry (not to mention that recent studies may show nuclear power has actually saved lives), why are so many liberals hell-bent on opposing nuclear power? In both cases, the opposition seems to be based on a remotely-plausible worst-case scenario, while the scientific evidence seems to strongly support for the opposite position that supposedly pro-science liberals advocate. I have very good, very well-educated liberal friends who are adamant in their support for reducing global warming, but equally adamant in their opposition to nuclear power or fracking, and I honestly don’t understand this seeming dichotomy.
I don’t either. If your concern is climate change, and you believe that slowing or preventing it is your fundamental priority, then nuclear power should be high up on the list for energy-production. On GMOs, I side with my reader, depending on the specific case. I’m always amused by liberal stoners who oppose genetically modified plants. What on earth do they think they’re smoking? As for fracking, I think it’s worth airing Josh’s case, but I remain unconvinced. If it provides energy while lowering carbon emissions, I’m for it, without some overwhelming argument against. I’ve yet to hear one.
Gasland Part II will air on HBO this summer. Fox’s other Ask Anything answers are here. Full AA archive here.
According to George Chauncey’s comprehensive history of modern gay culture, Gay New York, the closet metaphor was not used by gay people until the 1960s. Before then, it doesn’t appear anywhere “in the records of the gay movement or in the novels, diaries, or letters of gay men and lesbians.”
“Coming out,” however, has long been used in the gay community, but it first meant something different than it does now. “A gay man’s coming out originally referred to his being formally presented to the largest collective manifestation of prewar gay society, the enormous drag balls that were patterned on the debutante and masquerade balls of the dominant culture and were regularly held in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Baltimore, and other cities.” The phrase “coming out” did not refer to coming out of hiding, but to joining into a society of peers. The phrase was borrowed from the world of debutante balls, where young women “came out” in being officially introduced to society.
The clip above is from a wonderful documentary, The Sons of Tennessee Williams, about the drag balls organized by gay men in New Orleans, when homosexuality was a criminal offense, but dressing like a woman for a pageant wasn’t. And so these balls included the “coming out” of debutantes. It’s a classic case of how the First Amendment protected besieged gay lives for a very long time in America, which is why, in my view, gays should remain in the forefront of its protection – for our opponents as well as ourselves.
While recognizing that Burke’s persona, like Walt Whitman’s, contains multitudes, Norman boldly summarizes Burke’s thought for our time. Any such effort, however, is fundamentally un-Burkean. There is no catching Leviathan with a hook. Burke’s writing and speaking—style and substance—are all of a piece, coming together organically. His 1790 masterpiece Reflections on the Revolution in France is clear, but stubbornly resistant to summation. There are no chapters or subheadings, no table of contents, no index.
When the luminous intellectual historian Frank Turner edited a new edition of Burke in 2003, he was determined to produce an index. It was, Turner told me, “the damndest fool’s errand I ever set myself.” When he had finally completed it, he found that the first item he looked up in the index had not been included. To grasp the full force of Burke’s ideas, one must read through his entire oeuvre, without assistance.
About those multitudes:
For Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century Irish statesman who served in the British House of Commons, the hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the present and the future to the past.
We live our lives in the present, with time always progressing forward in a linear direction, so Burke’s respect for the past makes him conservative. Given the modern world’s appetite for change, Burke’s emphasis on continuity and permanence makes him seem like a strange outsider. Furthermore, Burke’s conservatism is expressed in a fierce and fiery, almost reactionary, style.
This puzzled his detractors, who were constantly suspecting Burke of some ulterior motive, of exerting some nefarious influence in the cause of some hidden agenda. The Duke of Newcastle said, “Burke’s real name is O’Bourke, a wild Irishman, a Jacobite, a papist, a concealed Jesuit.” At best, but equally threatening to the state, Burke was an eighteenth-century Socrates, a dangerous gadfly, challenging the settled assumptions of Britain.
The portrayal of Burke in Boswell’s Life of Johnson avoids quoting the statesman directly, and sometimes disguises the identity of the “Burkean” speaker, as if to conceal Burke from the authorities. If this was a conservative, it was a strange conservative indeed. Moreover, Burke took contrarian positions on world issues, positions his critics found difficult to reconcile: religious liberty for Ireland, independence for America, justice and respect for India’s traditions, and to hell with the French Revolution.
Of course, all these positions are entirely easy to reconcile, once you abandon rigid categories of agitprop and actually think. The founder of Anglo-American conservatism was, in reality, a Whig. These nuances would not fare well on, say, the Mark Levin show. But any true appreciation of conservatism as a political disposition would be thoroughly engaged.
The Dish 