Month: November 2013

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing died last Sunday at the age of 94. Her life, like her work, was varied:

A generous, open minded character, she was, at various stages of her life, a communist, socialist, feminist, atheist, Laingian and finally a Sufi. To each of these beliefs, she brought a tireless enthusiasm that sometimes obscured judgment. She fell for ideas, digested then, outgrew them and then moved on. While she still believed, she wrote novels out of the experience. Her interests were varied but her ability to make fascinating fiction out of life was constant.

If she had written nothing else, The Golden Notebook (1962) would have secured Doris Lessing a place in the hall of fame. With it, she wrote about “new women” in a new kind of novel, one that stretched the boundaries of realist fiction.

Kim Murphy elaborates on The Golden Notebook:

In her work, Lessing raised but didn’t necessarily answer the existential questions of women’s lives in the 1960s and beyond: Is it better to be married or single? How do you raise children and have a professional life? Is a woman denying her intellect if she longs for a man to love her? Why do older women still feel passion, and what is acceptable for them to do about it? If my life is so perfect, why do I feel as though I’m losing my mind? …

“The Golden Notebook” suggested that humanity, male and female, is driven by a common yearning: “Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who would really understand me, who’d be kind to me,” one of the characters said. “That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

The above video from 2007 captures Lessing’s reaction to the news that she won the Nobel Prize. Her first words? “Oh, Christ!” When she was offered the title of “Dame” in 1992, she was similarly dismissive, rejecting the honor by writing, “There is something ruritannical about honours given in the name of a non-existent Empire.” David Ulin praises her as someone who believed “that literature should recognize no boundaries, that the best work moves us by challenging our preconceptions, whether they have to do with content or with form”:

This, in some ways, could be read as Lessing’s legacy: Don’t stand on ceremony, question your beliefs and prejudices and always, always be prepared to change your mind.

Justin Cartwright remembers a woman “truly unique in her views and in her take on life.” Sophia Barnes argues that “[t]he diversity of Lessing’s oeuvre goes hand in hand with the impossibility – and I would argue the futility – of trying to categorise her”:

A recent collection of scholarly essays on her work was titled Border Crossings, in reference to her seemingly endless capacity for moving between spaces, genres, forms and modes of thinking. What is important to emphasise is that in crossing borders Lessing did not leave what she had experienced or thought behind; rather, she constantly moved back and forth across borders, displaying an adaptive historical consciousness which was vital to the whole body of her fiction.. … She was a postmodernist before postmodernism, a post-communist before the fall of the Iron Curtain, and perhaps both more and less of a feminist than she has often been seen to be. She was without doubt a radical, in the truest sense: intellectually uncompromising, absolutely individual, always striving with the boundaries of her form and the intellectual climate of her age.

From her 2007 Nobel lecture:

We are a jaded lot, we in our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.

We have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there, this wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be. We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.

The New Yorker has assembled a collection of her pieces here. The New Statesman has republished her first piece for the magazine, from 1956, on being refused entry into South Africa. Her 1988 interview with the Paris Review is here.

Drezner considers it unwise, to say the least:

Israeli jaw-jawing about a military strike puts it into a corner with no good exit option.  Netanyahu’s definition of a bad nuclear deal seems to include… any nuclear deal.  So say that one is negotiated.  What can Israel do then?  Netanyahu could follow through on his rhetoric and launch a unilateral strike.  Maybe that would set Iran back a few years.  It would also rupture any deal, accelerate Iran’s nuclear ambitions, invite unconventional retaliation from Iran and its proxies, and isolate Israel even further.  If Netanyahu doesn’t follow through on his rhetoric, then every disparaging Israeli quote about Obama’s volte-face on Syria will be thrown back at the Israeli security establishment.  Times a hundred.

Larison piles on:

Attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities would make the Iranian government more interested in acquiring a nuclear weapon, so an Israeli strike couldn’t ever truly “prevent” that outcome in any case. Once a deal is negotiated, I suspect that Netanyahu will accept it as a fait accompli, because there is nothing else he plausibly could do that wouldn’t risk a huge breach between the U.S. and Israel.

Robert Merry chimes in:

Netanyahu believes, based on past experience, that he can set in motion pressures and forces within the American polity that will ensure the demise of Obama’s delicate reach-out to Iran. And he is willing to risk a rupture with this administration in order to do so because he doesn’t think the risk is very great.

In response to Merry, Larison bets that “the administration will press ahead with negotiations despite Israeli and Congressional complaints”:

I suspect that Obama correctly assumes that his handling of Iran has broader international and domestic support than the critics of the negotiations realize. Netanyahu may think that most Americans will sympathize with his position, but if so he is very likely misreading the public mood and potentially inviting a backlash against himself.

Drum joins the conversation:

Netanyahu obviously has good reason to think that Republicans will support him in this unreservedly, but he better be careful. Even Obama-hating tea party types can start to get a little antsy when a foreign leader is so obviously contemptuous of American interests and the American president.

Kalev Leetaru maps it:

[W]hat we are able to see in the crisp mathematical precision of the computerized graphs and maps above is just how vast and intense the negative coverage really is. As a result, we can move beyond anecdotes like “It’s getting a lot of coverage” to precise statements like “More than 80 percent of all television news shows are talking about it.”

We can also gaze through the eyes of the news media and literally map the deep pessimism towards the law as it spreads across the nation. This by itself is a key finding: just how much the media has been covering Obamacare and, in particular, how key the GOP’s tying of Obamacare to the government shutdown was in bringing it to the forefront.

Chait tries to calm the media down:

Lost in the Keep Your Plan imbroglio, it appears that healthcare.gov has already reached a point of functionality. It can currently handle 20–25,000 simultaneous users. That may or may not qualify as a full Hanukkah Miracle fixed website by the end of the month, but it’s probably enough, at the very least, to let the law muddle through.

All sorts of things will happen to Obamacare in the next few months. At least some of those things will be bad, because any large enough enterprise, public or private, has bad things happen. One thing that can be predicted is that more and more people will start signing up for Obamacare between now and the end of March, which means the constituency for the law will steadily grow. There will still be a constituency against the law, and possibly future failures will enlarge it, too.

But at some point, having state exchanges where people buy private insurance, with rules preventing abusive practices, will simply be part of the backdrop of health insurance.

Waldman adds:

I realize that there’s an impulse as a reporter or a pundit to cast everything in the most dramatic terms possible. “Things are neither perfect nor disastrous” is a much less interesting assertion to make than “Everything has changed! Earth-shattering developments are afoot!” But that happens to be the truth.

Earlier Dish on media coverage of Obamacare here.

Nate Cohn parses recent polling:

Several new surveys show that the Democratic advantage on the generic congressional ballot—the one that emerged during the shutdown—has faded or even evaporated. The three live interview surveys conducted more than two weeks after the shutdown show a dead heat, with the Republicans gaining an average of a net-5 points over the previous survey. Fox News, the newest poll, even shows the Republicans ahead by three points among registered voters.

A “dead heat” among registered voters all but ends Democratic hopes of retaking the House, notwithstanding another political earthquake. They might not even gain seats, since Democrats hold more vulnerable districts than Republicans.

He cautions against reading too much into these numbers:

[I]t would be foolish to assume that the environment will remain this bad for Democrats, just as it was wrong to assume that the GOP was doomed by the shutdown. Frustration will probably subside if and when Obamacare gets up and running. Frustration could even turn into a bit of renewed support if the president benefits from lowered expectations. In the end, the public has a short memory. So, apparently, do most commentators, who have forgotten that they were frothing about the end of the Republican Party as recently as three weeks ago.

Waldman made related points late last week:

Over the next year, the rest of the law will be implemented. There may be problems here and there, but overall it will probably go reasonably well. There will be plenty of things Democrats can point to in order to convince people that it was a good idea, like the fact that now nobody can be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, or the fact that millions of people who couldn’t afford coverage or were denied before now have it. There will also be things Republicans will say to try to convince people it was a terrible idea, like the fact that premiums didn’t plummet, and health care is still expensive, and Obamacare didn’t give every little girl a pony.

And what else will happen in the next year? Other things. The economy may get worse, or it may get better. There may be a foreign crisis. Controversies we can’t yet anticipate will emerge, explode, then disappear. A young singer may move her posterior about in a suggestive manner, causing a nation to drop everything and talk about nothing else for a week. We might start talking about immigration reform again. There’s going to be another budget battle. In other words, all sorts of things could affect the next election, and the election after that.

I vented a little – well more than a little – in my Sunday Times column last week. It was about the amazement that many New Yorkers have that anyone could even think of moving back to DC once they’ve gotten a taste of the Big Apple. That a gay man would pick DC over NYC seems to strike a particularly raw and incredulous nerve. But, of course, one of the things I miss is the community I grew up in as an adult, the friendships over the decades, and the particular way of gay life that has evolved in DC more potently than in many cities with much stronger gay reputations.

And now it’s not just me saying it … but even the New York Times. Jeremy Peters’ piece is a little over-stated but its core argument is indisputably true. Washington has always been a very gay city, and still is:

Gary J. Gates, who studies census data for the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports that Washington has 18.1 same-sex couples per 1,000 households. That places it eighth among cities with populations larger than 250,000. Sorry, New York, but you have only 8.75 same-sex couples per 1,000 households. In Manhattan alone, it’s higher, at 16.7, but still not higher than D.C. The top three are San Francisco (30.3 per 1,000), Seattle (23) and Oakland (21). The numbers capture only those who acknowledge being in a same-sex relationship.

What Peters observes – after living in New York for six years – is the gay sophistication of the place. He argues that the stunning success of the civil rights movement, which reached its tipping point under Obama, has eroded the closet to the point of irrelevance, and thereby transformed the place. That’s certainly true, but I knew gay Washington before the Obama era, and it wasn’t ever as uptight as some would have you believe.

There was always a thriving nightlife – from the great old discos, Tracks and Lost and Found to one of the cradles of House music, the Clubhouse. The DC Eagle is as venerable as the New York version. The community’s response to the AIDS crisis was deep and wide. And the military and Congress brought gays from all over the country to the capital – and not simply because they were gay. So there was always a deep bench of gay cultural diversity in DC that was more like the rest of the country than the flypaper destinations like New York or San Francisco or Miami. And if you’ve never two-stepped at a gay country bar, then Remingtons will be a revelation. For me, a little English kid, it was quite simply overwhelmingly wonderful.

In that way, I think DC was ahead of its time as well as behind it. It had the kernel of a really thriving, large, and diverse gay community, but inside a hard shell of fear and the closet. I don’t want to minimize the fear.

When I was openly gay in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was a real novelty. I could almost feel the tension in some gay social circles as I entered: Would I expose them? Why did I think I could get away with being open in a city whose homosexual presence had always been defined by maximal discretion? When I came out as HIV-positive in the mid-90s, the was another collective dropping of jaws. But over the years, as the gay and (to a much lesser extent) HIV closets eroded, something that had always been there began to breathe and grow into something more mature and more integrated than the beachheads of gay visibility and power. So much so, in fact, that New York today seems a little dated in comparison, even a little stereotypical with its huge fashion and theater scenes.

Then the little things: the gay press in DC is vastly superior to NYC. The infrastructure – from booming 14th Street to Columbia Heights as well as Adams Morgan and Tacoma Park – is often newer and fresher and more modern than New York. A gym like Vida can be a little much – but it no longer has any inferiority complex toward New York. Yes, the white men are, to my mind, simply way hotter in NYC than DC. The DC gays are perfectly formed, but also a little too squeaky clean. A little less deoderant and a little more body and facial hair would be a blessing. But then what does New York have that compares with Bear Happy Hour at Town or a gay sports bar legend called “Nellie’s” that has plastered on its exterior: “Are you Nellie enough?” That kind of edge – integrating mainstream with the subculture and finding a new cultural fusion of the two is something really coming into its own in the nation’s capital. New York, in contrast, seems – dare I say it? – a little played out.

(Photo: Craig Hollander, left, and his partner Gary Unger enjoy the Oscars at Shaw’s Tavern, a DC gastropub managed by a largely gay staff which attracts straight and gay patrons alike. Both men enjoy living openly gay in the district. ‘DC is very much gay-friendly,’ says Gary. ‘You don’t have to look over your shoulders anymore’. By Astrid Riecken/Washington Post/Getty.)