Author: Andrew Sullivan

Reviewing the new documentary, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, David Schmader finds that the late writer’s literary achievements are “perhaps given short shrift” – but the politics are plenty:

Born into high privilege to a father who “dreamed of being the Henry Ford of aviation” and taught his son to pilot a plane by age 10, Vidal followed most naturally in the footsteps of his grandfather, a US senator who overcame his blindness by having his young grandson read him all necessary documents. Vidal came away with a lifelong fascination for the workings of the American political system, which he explored from the inside during two unsuccessful runs for office and investigated from the outside through a lifetime of ferocious writing and commentary.

As the subtitle suggests, [director Nicholas] Wrathall’s film focuses on the decades Vidal spent denouncing the American political machine, from a jarring critique of the presidency of his beloved friend JFK (whose photo Vidal kept framed in his office as a reminder to never again fall for a politician’s charm) to endlessly articulate screeds against the “American Empire” and beyond. (Forget 9/11—Vidal believed Pearl Harbor was an inside job.)

Hence the sad, twisted embitterment of an American scion. I’d like to admire Vidal – and his early novels are breathtakingly good. But the precious posturing, the all-too-defensive lambasting, and the cheap sneers always force me to keep my distance. As for Pearl Harbor, well, sheesh. And we’re supposed to admire someone for this conspiratorial nonsense? (My own review of his novel on the American mid-century, The Golden Age, is here.) Meanwhile, Ted Scheiman marvels at Vidal’s precocious early writing about homosexuality:

At 19, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, while convalescing in the North Pacific, where he served for three years during World War II. Writing in the Times in 1946, Orville Prescott gave a triumphalist review, and Vidal had arrived, terribly young, in the world of letters. The glittering accomplishments of Vidal’s youth are more impressive, even moving, when we consider that Vidal published The City and the Pillar just two years later, in 1948—an explicitly gay novel that the Times refused to review….

In his earliest television appearances, culled here with sensitivity by Wrathall, the young Vidal is remarkably composed and confident as he declares the difference between gay and straight to be “about the difference between somebody who has brown eyes and somebody who has blue eyes.” He was an outspoken pioneer on dangerous territory despite being—to believe Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor and the documentary’s M.C.—“really quite shy” at the time.

Except, of course, that he subsequently insisted that there was really no “gay” and no “straight.” My own direct experience of him on the matter was his steadfast opposition to marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s. Even the director of this fawning film, Nicholas Wrathall, notes Vidal’s crankiness on the subject in the years after The City and the Pillar‘s publication:

I think he felt that was a fight he fought at a different point in his life. He had written The City and the Pillar, and he had been outspoken at the time. He’d never been in the closet. He had a lifelong relationship with Howard [Auster], which was a sort of marriage in its own way. He has been criticized for not being at the forefront in the fight against AIDS and now, more recently, in the marriage equality situation. But I think he had let go of it a little bit and didn’t want to be pigeonholed—although it was a big part of his life—but I think marriage was something he didn’t have a lot of fondness for. His parents’ marriage had been a disaster. I asked him about marriage equality and he said: “Why shouldn’t everyone share in the misery of marriage.”

Zooming out, Tricia Olszewski wasn’t impressed as some with the documentary, calling it “hagiography”:

Archival footage of Vidal’s television appearances, photos of his mingling with 20th-century glitterati, and interviews with the man are punctuated—a little too often—with his Oscar Wildean bons mots. Every element showcases Vidal’s quick wit, eloquence, and astoundingly insightful, often prescient editorials on whatever hot topics the zeitgeist offered. There are also documentary-requisite comments from fans and colleagues (including Tim Robbins, literary executor Jay Parini, and, naturally, Hitchens) that tend toward drooling (except, naturally, Hitchens).

The cumulative effect is worship overload. Vidal was undoubtedly an impressively well-rounded and accomplished human being—though it should be noted that he was born into privilege—and he all but says so in the film. It would be surprising if he ever admitted he was wrong. And while such confidence may have drawn people—a lot of people—in, it’s nearly unpalatable here. Vidal spoke regally (a missile was a “miss-aisle”) and expected to be regarded that way, too.

Read our coverage of Vidal’s death, in 2012, here, here, and here.

Zoë Heller reviews Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood. As a Brit, she challenges what she sees as Senior’s American approach to the question:

Parenthood curtails the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure, she observes, but it also puts those pleasures in perspective, by revealing the deeper, more meaningful satisfactions of connection, attachment and service to others:

Indeed, one could argue that the whole experience of parenthood exposes the superficiality of our preoccupation with happiness, which usually takes the form of pursuing pleasure or finding our bliss. Raising children makes us reassess this obsession and perhaps redefine (or at least broaden) our fundamental ideas about what happiness is. The very things Americans are told almost daily to aspire to may in fact be misguided.

This is a troubling paragraph. It seems reasonable enough for Senior to want to correct some of her fellow Americans’ more callow, entitled attitudes. And she is not to be faulted for pointing out that fun is more usefully regarded as an occasional by-product of experience than as an end in itself. (British readers, who tend to have more modest expectations of life’s fun quotient, may be forgiven for finding her progress towards this revelation a little ponderous.) But there’s something grim about asking parents to resign themselves to the end of paltry bliss-seeking in order to concentrate their energies on the higher satisfactions of duty, service and sacrifice. Let’s by all means concede that parenthood isn’t a trip to the funfair, but does it have to put the funfair off-limits? And can it only be appreciated if the funfair is dismissed as having been a rather childish and squalid diversion?

According to the WaPo, the Gates Foundation spent more than $200 million winning political support for Common Core:

The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

Common Core foe Diane Ravitch is distressed:

The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A congressional investigation is warranted. The close involvement of Education Secretary Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the federal government overstepped its legal role in public education.

Freddie deBoer detects “a palpable sense of worry among a lot of education researchers and people in the education nonprofit world, around the Gates Foundation”:

They’re just so dominant in funding and, through funding, influence. That manifests itself in a fear of publicly criticizing the foundation and its policy preferences. That may be a small fear, it may represent itself subtly, but if you multiply it across the broad world of education research and policy, it can have a major impact on what gets studied, how results are reported, and what is considered realistic policy. It’s easy to make this sound like some kind of explicit corruption, but it’s not that simple or that easy to judge. It isn’t so much a matter of people saying “I want that sweet Gates cash, I better get in line on charter schools.” It’s a matter of identifying what kind of research gets funded, of worrying about funding in the future, of recognizing that plummeting state and federal research dollars can make private foundations like Gates the only game in town. It’s not sinister, on either side of the equation, but it can have pernicious effects.

Andrew J. Rotherham has a very different perspective:

1) There is money on all sides of this. Pro-and con.  The opposition did start out pretty diffuse and unorganized but that’s not the case now. I doubt there is parity between the pro-and anti-Common Core factions but this isn’t David and Goliath either.

2) In education there is very little change absent an infusion of marginal dollars and outside pressure. It’s not for nothing that we call them “Carnegie” units. That’s not a pro-Gates point or an anti-Gates point, it’s merely context about change in education. Related, Gates has spent a great deal on Common Core, but some context on all the other philanthropic dollars flowing into education would be useful, too.  The lion’s share, mostly from much smaller and localized foundations mostly buttresses the status quo. Philanthropic dollars aimed at leveraging broader changes have increased over the past decade but are still not the dominant force in overall education philanthropy.

Reihan responds to Dylan Matthews on the merits of unconditional cash assistance to the poor, arguing that the findings that Matthews cites don’t carry over from international development to domestic welfare programs:

The trouble is that there is a big difference between the conditions that give rise to poverty in a domestic context, where brute survival is not generally at stake, and in a global context, where it is. My argument rested in large part on the legitimacy of the welfare state. Work requirements for the able-bodied poor help ensure that the beneficiaries of public assistance are perceived as deserving. This matters in societies in which a broad base of employed middle-income taxpayers help finance transfers. It matters less in societies in which transfers are largely funded by outsiders, via government-to-government transfers from affluent countries, or through the exploitation of point-source natural resources, like oil and gas. …

In weak states that aren’t funded by local tax revenues, the “legitimacy” question doesn’t arise in the same way, particularly when it comes to the disbursement of public assistance. The communities that benefit from direct assistance aren’t divided between those who fund direct assistance, and who work, and those who benefit from it, and who might or might not work. Rather, it is more common that the funds are coming from outside of the community, and virtually everyone “works,” albeit in the informal sector. That said, norms around “conditional reciprocity” do indeed obtain in many poor societies — but these norms operate through the kin-based social networks that the dominant mode of social organization in traditional societies. Modern societies, in contrast, are dominated by non-kin-based social networks, and the most successful states, or rather the states that do the best job of cultivating solidarity among citizens, appear to be, and this is my subjective judgment, those that build in norms of conditional reciprocity into their institutions.

#Pakistan update 2: Death toll is 38 in Sunday’s attack on Karachi Airport by Taliban. http://t.co/9tihLcEXgH pic.twitter.com/Qd03yK0Exc

— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) June 10, 2014

Its Pakistan-based militants have launched two attacks on Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport since Sunday night:

On Tuesday, a number of gunmen on motorbikes opened fire on a training academy run by the Airports Security Force and located about a half mile from the airport. “We accept responsibility for another successful attack against the government,” Taliban spokesperson Shahidullah Shahid told Reuters, adding, “We are successfully achieving all our targets and we will go on carrying on many more such attacks.” …

The death toll from Sunday’s attack, meanwhile, has jumped. The BBC has updated its count to 38 dead, Reuters to 34, and the Associated Press to 36.

Saba Imtiaz highlights the security deficit that allows the Taliban to attack such high-value targets:

The attacks in Karachi underscore not just the intensity of the militants’ renewed campaign, but also Pakistan’s inability to effectively counter such threats in advance. Analysts and security experts have long bemoaned Pakistan’s inability to get its intelligence and security services to share intelligence.

Pakistan has a number of intelligence agencies, including the Inter-Services Intelligence agency and Military Intelligence, the civilian-run Intelligence Bureau, and the police’s Special Branch. A counter-terrorism strategy developed by the interior ministry this year envisages better coordination between intelligence and security agencies, but has yet to spur much change.

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told parliament that his ministry had warned the provincial government in March that the gate used by militants to attack the airport was not properly secured. Similar claims have surfaced after previous militants attacks in Pakistan.

Ishaan Tharoor analyzes the strength of the Pakistani Taliban:

What began as a low-level militancy in Pakistan’s tribal belt along the porous border with Afghanistan has now metastasized into a sprawling insurgency that has tapped into nationwide networks of criminal syndicates and other terrorist organizations. The Pakistani Taliban’s profile in Karachi has grown in recent years, highlighted by a spate of brazen attacks, including the 17-hour siege of a Pakistani naval base near the airport in 2011.

Despite its effectiveness, the Pakistani Taliban operates in a fashion that is “not as hierarchical as one terrorist group may be,” says Hassan Abbas, author of the new book “The Taliban Revival: Violence and Extremism on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier.” Pakistan’s government, Abbas says, has struggled to adjust to the threat posed by the militants, who have claimed thousands of lives. “The Pakistani Taliban are as dangerous as al-Qaeda once was,” he says. “People think they’re just Pashtun tribals. But it has become a much more complicated crisis.”