Andrew Sullivan

The Best Of The Dish Today

Just in case you had a sliver of hope that the US would avoid being drawn in to yet another Muslim sectarian bloodbath, we got the following news today:

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that the Sunni militants seizing territory in Iraq had become such a threat that the United States might not wait for Iraqi politicians to form a new government before taking military action. “They do pose a threat,” Mr. Kerry said, referring to the fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “They cannot be given safe haven anywhere.”

“That’s why, again, I reiterate the president will not be hampered if he deems it necessary if the formation is not complete,” he added, referring to the Iraqi efforts to establish a new multisectarian government that bridges the deep divisions among the majority Shiites and minority Sunnis, Kurds and other smaller groups.

So we’ve gone from 300 military advisers and a new government before any military action … to a threat of potential airstrikes regardless in less than a week. When you think how long it took to ramp up the Vietnam disaster, that’s pretty damn quick. And check out what Kerry just said about ISIS: “they cannot be given safe haven anywhere.” That presumably means that their advance must not just be checked but reversed, a massive undertaking which is about as likely as a multi-sectarian democratic government in Baghdad.

From where I’m sitting, I see no way to achieve the ends John Kerry just outlined without a new war. And who will fight it? That shoe is the one that is yet to drop. My view: not a single American soldier, not a single cent, to build an Iraq that never existed and, at this point, never can. If Obama tries to do it, there has to be an insurrection from his supporters and from all sane Americans. If the Saudis and the Sunni states cannot rein in ISIS, then let the Iranians fight them.

As for the alleged danger to the West, let’s just remember one vital achievement in US foreign policy this past year:

The final stockpile of Syria’s chemical weapons has been shipped out of the country, according to the OPCW, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Ahmet Uzumcu, the chief of the international watchdog organization, said the weapons were loaded Monday aboard the Danish ship Ark Futura and departed the Syrian port of Latakia. “A major landmark has been reached today,” Uzumcu said, qualifying that that meant all “declared” weapons were out of the country.

They will not be able to use WMDs, which renders the one percent doctrine moot. As for training Jihadis, that will go on, as it has gone on. Either we weather that threat, keep close tabs on it, maintain our intelligence advantage, and stay out of that hell-hole, or we decide we can’t risk anything and get sucked back into it. If Obama wants to find a middle ground, he’ll be the first Westerner ever to discover it in Iraq.

Today, we noted that Rand Paul is one of the few figures on the national scene able to resist the intervention beloved of liberal internationalists and neocons alike. I’d been concerned by his recent waffling. But he’s giving me a clear reason to vote for him if he keeps his non-interventionist nerve. Not-very-gay gays got to say their piece – and got hammered by readers. I reviewed “The Case Against 8” documentary premiering on HBO tonight. I pondered the endemic sectarianism of Iraq and the post-modern nihilism of the neocons (and their cable news bookers). And we highlighted some killer male Beyoncé wannabes.

The most popular post of the day was Saturday’s Mental Health Break – the Onion’s take on a dating website ad. Next up was an argument that Led Zeppelin is the most influential rock band of all time.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Fans of Andy Murray queue outside before the start of day one of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon on June 23, 2014 in London, England. Notice that it’s the Scottish flag being painted and not the British one. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Bringing Nightmares To Life

That was photographer Arthur Tress’ goal for his “Daymares” series, a collection of his stagings of children’s creepy dreams from the late ’60s and early ’70s. Jen Carlson recently talked to Tress about the project, which grew out of another series that focused on waterfront parks around New York City:

So as I was doing that series, I photographed a lot of children, because that’s where kids played, along the waterfront. And then I got asked to do a workshop with a childhood educator named Richard Lewis, who still has something called the Touchstone Center in Manhattan, and he does workshops on creativity and children. Every year he has a different theme, and one year he did children’s dreams, to get kids to write poems and paintings from their dreams. So he called me in to photograph his class. So I said, you know, that’s a terrific idea, and I’m going to pursue that by asking children and my friends what dreams they remembered from childhood.

You wouldn’t really just find those things by walking around, so they had to be staged and directed, and so I began doing what’s called staged photography—this is around 1970—and that was kind of unusual for the time, people were doing street photography. I was looking for mythological, archetypical, kind of nightmarish images. That kind of became my trademark for the next 20 years, that kind of surreal disturbing photography.

See more of his work here, here, and here.

Where Developmental Dreams Came True

In his memoir Life, Animated, Ron Suskind recounts raising a son, Owen, who was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. In a review of the book, Rachel Adams describes how the family stumbled into a surprising form of therapy:

The only time Owen seems calm and relaxed is while he’s watching Disney videos. One afternoon, there is a breakthrough. The entire family is watching The Little Mermaid when they make an exciting discovery: the seemingly meaningless phrase Owen has been muttering for the past few weeks, which sounds to them like “juicervose,” is actually a stanza from the film’s last song, “just your voice.” Some of Owen’s therapists dismiss his vocalizations as echolalia, an autistic tendency to repeat sounds without understanding. But the Suskinds are convinced that Owen’s words represent a genuine effort at communication. Soon after the “juicervose” episode the family visits Disney World, where Owen is transformed. Surrounded by beloved characters and themes, he is more focused and receptive than he has been since the onset of his symptoms. The Suskinds become convinced that Disney may be the key to recovering their son’s ability to express himself.

Back in April, Hanna Rosin talked to the Suskinds and Dan Griffin, Owen’s therapist, about how the Disney treatment took hold:

Ron: I came up with the idea of having him use the voice of the sidekicks to solve the problem for a boy like Owen. Dan immediately got it. He gets up real close and says, “Let’s say there’s a boy like you. He’s a little different. He’s struggling and going through tough times and he wants to go backwards.” And without skipping a beat, Owen says, “I would prefer Merlin,” and starts doing this whole riff as Merlin about how he turned Arthur into a fish, and remember, the more you swim, the more you’ll learn, and on and on. And Dan looked at me with a “that’s not in the movie” look. And that’s when we realized he could improvise on cue and use the characters to tap into his inner voice and tell us what was really going on. He ended up in this strange middle ground between the movies and his life, and Dan and I could get into that space and shape it and guide it. …

His internal voice became external and we could hear it and shape it. It was like he felt relief, that he had found a way to talk to himself. That was the moment he started to self-heal.

Read an excerpt from Life, Animated here. Earlier Dish on Suskinds’ book here.

Soccer’s Concussion Crisis?

Though the research isn’t there yet, Michael Goodman tallies the anecdotal evidence that soccer may have the same head injury problem as American football:

There’s the first incidence of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) to be found in a former soccer player. While CTE can only be conclusively diagnosed posthumously — and has been in an increasing number of former NFL players — a number of the living have also been diagnosed with signs of the disease. Then there’s former U.S. Women’s National Team goalkeeper Briana Scurry, who underwent surgery to relieve migraines stemming from concussions. Or the recent FIFPro study showing that among retired players “mental illness seems to occur among former professional footballers more often than in current players and more often than in other populations.

Consequently, mental illness among former professional footballers cannot be underestimated and should be a subject of interest for all stakeholders in football.” There’s the case of Eddie Johnson (the British one, not the American one), who is suing the Portland Timbers over allegedly allowing him to practice with concussion-like symptoms. And there’s a study on the disturbingly high number concussions in girls’ youth soccer. The list goes on.

The Dish previously looked at concussions in sports other than football here.

Boomerang Kids Are Here To Stay

Adam Davidson maintains that “the latest recession was only part of the boomerang generation’s problem”:

In reality, it simply amplified a trend that had been growing stealthily for more than 30 years. Since 1980, the U.S. economy has been destabilized by a series of systemic changes — the growth of foreign trade, rapid advances in technology, changes to the tax code, among others — that have affected all workers but particularly those just embarking on their careers. In 1968, for instance, a vast majority of 20-somethings were living independent lives; more than half were married. But over the past 30 years, the onset of sustainable economic independence has been steadily receding. By 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent.

These boomerang kids are not a temporary phenomenon.

They appear to be part of a new and permanent life stage. More than that, they represent a much larger anxiety-provoking but also potentially thrilling economic evolution that is affecting all of us. It’s so new, in fact, that most boomerang kids and their parents are still struggling to make sense of it. Is living with your parents a sign, as it once was, of failure? Or is it a practical, long-term financial move? This was the question that the photographer Damon Casarez, who is 26, asked when he moved in with his parents after graduating from art school. So he started searching for other boomerang kids, using tools like Craigslist. The result is this photo essay. And the answer to whether boomeranging is a good or a bad thing depends, as Kasinecz noted, on how you look at it.

The Literary Piketty

Thomas Piketty’s Capital famously uses the 19th century bourgeois novel – Austen and Balzac especially – to give a sense of what life was like in that previous age of inequality. Stephen Marche finds that he could have done the same for our own day, noting that the processes the economist describes “have already been reflected in American fiction with almost ridiculous specificity.” One example? The novels of Jonathan Franzen:

Future economic historians won’t have to look very far to find fictional descriptions of our current financial realities. The social realist novel of the moment can be identified by the preeminent, almost exclusive, emphasis it places on social expressions of the changing economic reality. Currently, the large-scale realism of Jonathan Franzen, articulated in his famous article for Harper’s in 1996 and achieved most fully in The Corrections and Freedom, stands utterly triumphant. The narrative forms that thrived in the mid-nineties — minimalism, with its descriptions of poor and rural men; magical realism which incorporated non-Western elements into the traditional English novel; the exotic lyricism of John Berger or Michael Ondaatje — have been pushed to the side.

The principal subject of mainstream literary fiction today is the way we live now, meaning the way the upper middle class lives now. The characters’ lives are aimed, with single-minded purpose, toward the achievement of comfortable and socially acceptable financial security, which is threatening always to collapse or is in the process of collapsing. If Raymond Carver was the master of the death of the American dream, Franzen is the chronicler of its ghostly persistence — the combination of economic growth with deepening insecurity. His characters run on the currents of two polarizing forces — a sense of entitlement and a sense that those entitlements might soon be taken away. “The problem was money and the indignities of life without it,” Franzen writes in The Corrections. “Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn’t covetous; he wasn’t envious. But without money he was hardly a man.”

Scott Esposito isn’t as impressed with Piketty’s literary chops:

To be sure, Piketty does invoke Balzac and Austen, as Marche says, but not nearly enough to warrant the claim that “Capital in the Twenty-First Century is perhaps the only major work of economics that could reasonably be mistaken for a work of literary criticism.” If only. Piketty mainly invokes Austen to help support his observations that monetary inflation didn’t exist in the 19th century. Balzac gets a little more play, as Piketty uses him to demonstrate both his inflation claim, and another claim: that the aristocrats of Balzac’s day were so far ahead of the rest of society in the 19th century that there was really no point in ever trying to catch them by hard work—it would be much better to marry into wealth and live off of that money (as many of Balzac’s characters attempt to do). That’s it. As far as they go, Balzac and Austen are fine ways of making Piketty’s points more concrete for a mass audience, but Piketty makes no attempt to demonstrate the existence of something called the patrimonial novel. (And nor should he; he’s writing a work of economics, not literary criticism.)

Read previous Dish on Piketty here, here, here, and here, and read the Dish thread “A Global Tax On The Super Rich?” here.

Face Of The Day

A zookeeper handles a week-old newborn baby Langur at Bali Zoo in Gianyar, Bali, Indonesia. Javan Langurs are found in Java, Bali and Lombok in Indonesia and are listed as a threatened species due to hunting, agricultural expansion and habitat loss. By Putu Sayoga/Getty Images.

Inherit The Windfall

Greg Mankiw argues that inherited wealth is actually a good thing:

When a family saves for future generations, it provides resources to finance capital investments, like the start-up of new businesses and the expansion of old ones. Greater capital, in turn, affects the earnings of both existing capital and workers.

Because capital is subject to diminishing returns, an increase in its supply causes each unit of capital to earn less. And because increased capital raises labor productivity, workers enjoy higher wages. In other words, by saving rather than spending, those who leave an estate to their heirs induce an unintended redistribution of income from other owners of capital toward workers.

The bottom line is that inherited wealth is not an economic threat. Those who have earned extraordinary incomes naturally want to share their good fortune with their descendants. Those of us not lucky enough to be born into one of these families benefit as well, as their accumulation of capital raises our productivity, wages and living standards.

The Same Old Face Of Heroin

Maia Szalavitz rails against the media narrative that heroin use is just now penetrating the white middle class, which paints an inaccurate picture of the “typical” heroin addict as poor and black:

As far back as the 1970s, the heroin-addicted population had a white majority—and in every decade since then, white heroin addicts have outnumbered blacks. Although, because blacks are a minority in the population, they are somewhat over-represented in most of the late 20th century. Nonetheless, from the 1980s onward, the typical heroin addict was not black. And in the most recent group, blacks are actually under-represented. African Americans make up around 12% of the population—but in the 2010s, 90% of heroin addicts are white.

So why is today’s media hyperventilating about heroin breaking free from the ghetto, when that had already happened back in Ronald Reagan’s era? And when is the media going to stop rewriting the same story Newsweek first ran in 1981 about the new “Middle-Class Junkies”? This will only happen if we examine why we’re so keen to see white middle-class addicts as “not typical.”

Paved With Good Intentions

Fallows has a sobering piece by William Polk on the devastating consequences of American meddling in the Middle East:

Starting in the west and moving east: in Libya, having destroyed the Qaddafi regime, we unleashed forces that have virtually torn Libya apart and have spilled over into Central Africa, opening a new area of instability. In Egypt, the “non-coup-coup” of General Sisi has produced no ideas on what to do to help the Egyptian people except to execute large numbers of their religious leaders; he has also made clear his suspicion of and opposition to us. In occupied Palestine, the Israeli state is reducing the population to misery and driving it to rage while, in Washington, its extreme right-wing government is thumbing its nose at its benefactor, America. Our relations have never been worse. In Syria, we are engaged in arming, training and funding essentially the same people whom the new Egyptian regime is about to hang and whom we are considering bombing in Iraq. In Iraq, we are about to become engaged in supporting the regime we installed and which is the close ally of the Syrian and Iranian regimes that we have been trying for years to destroy; yet in Iran, we appear to be on the point of reversing our policy of destroying its government and seeking its help to defeat the insurgents in Iraq. And on and on.

He reminds us of a time when the US was not regarded as a constant menacing meddler in almost every nook and cranny of the planet:

Admittedly, in my day in planning American policy in the Middle East, we never had to find our ways out of such a disarray. My tasks were comparatively easy. So, perhaps, our actions are aspects of a shrewd, nimble and skillful policy that I am simply not clever enough to understand. I certainly hope so.

But, even if they are, what is the “bottom line,” as businessmen like to say, in terms of our objective of being “secure?”

Allow me a personal answer. When I first traveled through the deserts, farm lands, villages and cities of Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, unfailingly, I was welcomed, invited into homes, fed and cared for. Today, I would risk being shot in any of the areas most affected by American policy.

The US is addicted to controlling the planet. And we just hit another bottom. I don’t think a single, small scotch on the rocks will help.