November 2013 – Page 32

The Best Of The Dish Today

We launched Deep Dish today, our prototype for a monthly magazine of long-form journalism. My post on it is here. We began with an eBook that’s an edited compilation of my real-time response to 9/11 and the Iraq War. It was grueling for me to read again – and a glutton’s feast of dramatic irony – but a small gesture of journalistic accountability in an unaccountable time. I also had a long conversation with a man who fought in the war I championed, and who tells of the horror he encountered and still lives with every day.

The pile-on against Obamacare reached a frenzied media pitch – and one that seems increasingly out of proportion to the fact that the ACA is the law, that repeal is a fantasy, and that making it work better is the sanest option among many bad ones. Then there was the Cheney family feud, about which I had some, you know, opinions. And the gruesome new leader of al Qaeda in Pakistan. And the giant brothel which is now Germany. Pope Francis showed once again how to engage critics when you’re an actual Christian (something I’ve failed to do myself at times); and an inter-generational face that’ll make you do a double take.

The most popular post of the day was The Cheneys and The Republicans. Second up was the front page of Deep Dish. But you have to be a subscriber to get the monthly long-form version of the Dish. So [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe!”] We can’t keep doing this without you.

See you later tonight on AC360 Later and in the morning.

The Misery Of Miscarriage, Ctd

A reader writes:

I appreciate your reader’s insistence that we delineate between miscarriage and stillborn in the case of Ariel Levy’s article. My wife and I lost two beautiful girls at 22 weeks, born alive, lived for a few hours in their new daddy’s arms before dying. We’ve also suffered a traditional miscarriage, so I can attest the two are a different form of misery. But what happened to my girls (and Ariel’s boy) was not a miscarriage nor a stillbirth. Ariel had a baby, no doubt a beautiful little boy, and she will always be a mother even if that was her only pregnancy. She didn’t say in the article, but I imagine she has a birth certificate evidencing the fact, just like we do.

For what it’s worth, we now have an awesome 8-month-old boy roaming around the house. Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if the girls survived – would I have ever met my son? He was an extra frozen embryo, so he likely would’ve been discarded at the embryo stage if the girls lived. We have one more frozen embryo still, and I can’t bring myself to think about discarding it, even though my wife and I don’t care to go through another pregnancy. We pay about $1,000 per year in embryo storage so we don’t have to face the inevitable.

Another reader:

Interesting thread. As mentioned in the Six Feet Under you posted, there is no word for a parent who has lost a child … but parents who lose a child others have met can expect friends and family to gather – at a wake, a funeral, or sitting shiva – to offer sympathy and support. There is no comparable process for those who lose an invisible child to miscarriage or stillbirth.

My husband and I had two miscarriages, one late enough that I was already showing. Just brutal, especially since many of our friends were starting their families at the same time. A very helpful book for anyone facing this tragedy is Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, by Pauline Boss. My husband and I went on to adopt our beautiful daughter, and 19 months later, I gave birth to our son. Both kids are now grown, have found love with wonderful partners, and are launched in gratifying careers. The ultimate happy ending!

More readers tell their emotional stories:

I had no idea how common miscarriages are until my wife had one at 7 weeks.

Of course I was ignorant of this, but the plain truth is that few people discuss that sort of tragedy in normal conversation. When my wife got pregnant, I immediately told almost everyone I knew. A few people told me I was supposed to wait for three months before a general announcement. That seemed impossible at the time, and besides, I thought, I would need this wide group of friends if anything bad happened.

I got a call from my wife as I was preparing our annual Christmas newsletter, announcing her pregnancy to my extend family. We spent the night in the emergency room. The worst part was the disconnection of the clinicians from one another. My wife told the triage nurse that she was 7 weeks pregnant. When they ran tests for her HCG levels (the hormones that a pregnant woman produces, increasing in production as the pregnancy develops), they showed a level that she would have had at 3 weeks. Unfortunately, the doctor came in and announced this to us with a smiling face, and said “Good news! You’re three weeks pregnant!” My wife is a nurse in reproductive health, and she knew immediately that something was wrong. We spent the rest of the night going through futile tests. My wife got to experience the joys of a transvaginal ultrasound that showed nothing. She cried in pain, and I sat and watched the screen, hoping that my untrained eye was missing the fetus.

For the next several days I choked on tears. Finally, after a weekend, I felt like I had to go into my office and tell every one of the 25 people there, including some guys I hardly knew, that my wife had lost the child. I had a few great conversations with people who had similar experiences. But most of it was awkward, stunned silence, with me faking a smile and a “thanks, we’re doing fine.”

Our therapy was an previously planned trip to New York over New Years’ Eve. At the Peoples’ Improv Theatre, they asked the audience to shout out “the worst Christmas present you got this year,” in order to start their skit. My wife and I immediately shouted “miscarriage!” and they were off and running. Watching a 10-minute improv piece with those talented young comics, so close to our tragedy, kept things light and allowed us a brief moment to laugh.

The laughs stopped soon. We had a high deductible insurance plan that ended on the calendar year. The whole ordeal – appointments falling on both sides of the year – ended up costing us nearly $7,000. My wife ended up checking into the hospital on suicide watch the following summer. The grieving process didn’t fully end until May of this year, when our dreams came true. My wife gave birth to a beautiful, healthy little girl who is the light of our lives.

My wife is lucky in many ways. Some women have major complications and are unable to conceive after. We didn’t have to suffer through a stillbirth, or watch our child die in front of us. The stories that we heard afterward, and the support we received, were instrumental in our healing. I don’t know if that means people need to talk about it more, or what. But thanks for giving your readers the opportunity to learn from each other.

Another:

When I was in my early 20s (not very long ago), my mom casually let slip that somewhere in the five-year process it took for my parents to have me (their first child), there was also a painful miscarriage. My mom went on to have a second child, though it took another five-plus years, so I never thought of her issues as anything more than general but prima facie surmountable fertility issues.

When she mentioned the miscarriage, I was so shocked that I never pressed her for more information, and I don’t know how to go about doing it now. Or if I even have any right to bring up an incident so painful that it is never brought up in my family. And we have a large, gregarious extended family, a close-knit ethnic clan that seems to delight in shitting all over waspy proscriptions like “no politics or religion at the dinner table.” We openly discuss and mock people’s drug habits, sexual partners (not in a homophobic way; family members are happy to point out plenty of non-bigoted reasons to dislike others). Name an issue and it has been served up next to the brisket.

But never the miscarriage. Reading your thread brought that moment of discovery back to me, with all the same confusing emotions. You might hear this on a regular basis, but this is one of the few areas of my life that I can say this: I’ve never shared this discovery with anybody. Truthfully, I don’t think I ever digested how I’ve reconsidered my parents as real humans with their own private wells of sadness. Learning something so emotionally shattering so late in life was like walking downstairs one morning in my childhood home to find a new room that had always existed just beyond my peripheral vision, with a shadow pantomime projecting onto the wall a life that had been playing out alongside mine and could be felt by those who knew it was there but would disappear just as quickly with a flick of the light switch.

Yet here I am sharing it with you. This thread, like so many other reader threads, has been clarifying. And to borrow from a much less depressing feature, I’m grateful for the view from other people’s windows in lieu of my own inability to talk about this with my parents. Maybe one day. In the meantime, thank you.

Face Of The Day

Alice at My Modern Met marvels:

Ulric Collette, the Quebec-based photographer behind Genetic Portraits, a series where he splits family members’ faces apart and then photoshops them together, recently created a new portrait that’s close to his heart. Saying, “I’m really proud of this one,” it shows his mother who’s 61 years old on one side, and his daughter, who is 12 years old on the other.

Though a lot of his other portraits look a little on the creepy side (see here and here), this one is almost like we’re looking at a younger and older version of the same person. “My daughter grew to look a lot like my mom, and this portrait really show it,” Ulric states. “On a personal level, this photograph represent the two most important woman in my life. On a more technical level, they look so much alike that it’s incredible. It’s because of results like that I continue to do this series.” As author Gail Lumet Buckley once wrote, “Family faces are magic mirrors looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.”

More of Collette’s work here. Previous Dish on the artist here.

The Party Of Obamacare

Beutler examines the Democrats’ dilemma:

Even if the White House’s mismanagement of the rollout shakes 100 Democrats’ faith in the whole project, they can’t unbrand themselves. Obamacare bears the president’s name, but it’s a Democratic party creation full stop. If Democrats help Republicans obliterate, it will be an enormous admission of governing incompetence. A “don’t elect me or members of my party because we don’t know what we’re doing” vote.

What Weigel hears from Democrats:

Day to day, it’s very easy to write a “collapse of liberalism” story. Talk to Democrats, though, and you learn that to a staggering degree they think a fixed website would end the general crisis. One month of increased signups—that’s all they want. Ask them how they feel in mid-December.

The View From Your Window

Atlanta, Georgia, 1.16 pm

Taking A Step Back

Bernstein argues that the recent spate of anti-Obamacare stories is mostly a media-driven phenomenon:

The last media frenzy about Obama’s collapse (not counting a smaller one over Syria) came in the spring, when Triple Scandals threatened to destroy him. But those scandals fizzled prematurely, leaving the scandal-loving press with a bad case of frustration. Indeed, as Brandon Nyhan was writing before those Triple Scandals, Obama was way overdue for something like that. When it didn’t pan out, the press was presumably still primed for a pile-on, and even though ACA implementation may not have been a promising topic, they worked with what they had.

In other words, it’s like Whitewater because it’s the result of the press primed and ready and waiting for something to blow up around. It’s different because there is a real story here, but that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how the press is behaving. Like Whitewater, or like the Triple Scandals from April, the phony frenzy part of this will blow over soon. But not before there’s plenty of damage – to the reputation of much of the working press, that is. There’s this week’s real fiasco.

He follows-up at his blog:

It’s ugly out there, folks.

The two that set me off in particular today are Josh Kraushaar’s massive overinterpretation of the events of last week, leading him to believe that Democrats are close to abandoning the ACA. And then Todd Purdom on the imminent collapse of “Big Government progressivism” if the ACA doesn’t work well (complete with supporting quotes from William Galston).

There’s just a lot of nonsense right now. Which is pretty much what happens when these press frenzies get started, but it’s very frustrating. … yes, there is a substantive story on health care reform here, but what the press are up to is mostly just fantasy.

Drum chimes in:

This has pretty obviously become a game of one-upsmanship, and it seems to be continuing this week. For a story to get attention, it has to be even more hysterical than anything that’s come before, so that’s what we’re getting. It’s a doom-mongering bubble.

Battlefield 3 In Baghdad

Simon Parkin investigates the proliferation of videogames in the aftermath of the Iraq war:

During Saddam Hussein’s rule, it was difficult to buy them, and only relatively well-off, professional-class families like [top-ranked game player Yousif] Mohammed’s could afford to import titles from Europe. Until the advent of disc-based video games in the mid-nineties, it was too difficult to pirate game cartridges. “The industry is still in its infancy in Iraq,” said Omar M. Alanseri, the owner of the Iraqi Games Center, one of only a small number of dedicated video-game retailers in Baghdad, which opened sixteen months ago. “But each year, more people get involved. I’ve seen the audience vastly increase, especially among teen-agers.” …

Many of these first-person shooters, often created with input from U.S. military advisers—a handful of Navy SEALs was punished for consulting on the 2012 video game Medal of Honor: Warfighter—are set against the backdrop of fictionalized real-world conflicts, often within Middle Eastern countries. Some have entire sections set within Iraq, like the Battlefield series. For [network administrator Mohannad] Abdulla, playing these games in their real-world settings isn’t problematic. “Any video game that’s set within Iraq and involves killing terrorists becomes instantly famous here,” he said. “Everyone wants to play it. We have been through so much because of terror. Shooting terrorists in a game is cathartic. We can have our revenge in some small way.” Alanseri agreed: “Any game that has a level set in Iraq is popular. They always sell more copies than other games because they are related in some way to our lives.” The games have even established a kind of empathy for foreign gaming partners that Alanseri said he would not otherwise have. “I have learned a lot of things, like Western-world values, culture, life style, and even the way that they think through video games.”

(Video: Gameplay footage of Six Days In Fallujah, a game set in the Iraq War that was pulled from development after controversy surrounding its content)

The Cheneys And The Republicans, Ctd

Dick and Lynne Cheney went public today with their support for Liz in her opposition to her sister’s right to a family like hers. As I said, earlier, the political opportunism here is deep and rich. And what does it profit a woman to gain the whole world if she lose her sister’s love? But for 17 percent support in Wyoming?

If The Good Jobs Never Come Back

Reihan faces America’s economic predicament:

If the labor market position of less-skilled workers is going to get even worse in the coming decades, we have to think seriously about finding new ways to make work pay.

For example, we could try to streamline the various benefits federal and state governments have used to raise incomes at the low end to foster a more work-friendly approach to fighting poverty. Oren Cass, domestic policy director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, recently outlined such an approach in National Review. The basic idea is that while the non-working poor will continue to receive in-kind transfers, channeled through state governments, the working poor will receive cash transfers instead. Low-income households will receive support in either case, but they will receive support with fewer strings attached if they find and hold on to gainful employment.

University of Arizona sociologist Lane Kenworthy, author of the forthcoming Social Democratic America, has called for an expanded employment-conditional earnings subsidy that would rise in sync with economic growth. And in Switzerland, a coalition of activists are campaigning for a basic income, an idea that has been championed by left-libertarians, egalitarian socialists, and even a number of pro-market conservatives who see it as a less bureaucratic, more straightforward alternative to the welfare state. This basic income would not be employment-conditional, which raises the danger that it would encourage people to exit the workforce, as Annie Lowrey observes in the New York Times. But some still find the idea compelling.

Trolling Tunes

Walter Shapiro has argued that Double Down wasn’t meant to be read; it’s meant to foster discussion on cable news shows. Robin James wonders if some pop songs – such as Lily Allen’s latest – play a similar role in the blogosphere:

It seems like music videos and/or performances are increasingly common fodder for so-called “thinkpieces.” There’s Allen, Miley’s VMA performance, Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” Lorde’s “Royals” [seen above], Macklemore’s “Same Love,” and on and on and on. But what’s interesting to me is that most of these thinkpieces discuss the social and political implications of these pieces without talking about the actual music–as though the music was somehow separable from the social and political work these songs and videos accomplish. … So, here is a demand for material about which to write thinkpieces. Maybe one function of the contemporary pop star is to supply this material? Music is part of the social media supply chain?

What does it take for a song to make a good thinkpiece? James thinks novelty isn’t enough:

[T]here’s a distinction, I think, between Gaga-style shock and the “trolling” I identified in my previous post. Gaga courts fame by performing excess – weirdness, disgust, avant-garde fashion, etc. But trolling isn’t about excess or vanguardism. In fact, these troll-gaze songs are more ambiguous than avant-garde. To crib a bit from Le Tigre, troll-gaze songs have to straddle the “What’s your take on XYZ? Misogynist? Genius?” line. There have to be at least two irreducible, individually defensible positions or sides. That allows there to be ongoing back-and-forth debate. These songs court that debate.