The Dish – Page 771

Putting Mental Illness In A Black Box

Esther Breger criticizes ABC’s new medical drama “Black Box,” about a neuroscientist with bipolar disorder, for perpetuating the trend of treating TV heroes’ mental illnesses as superpowers:

Catherine, the medical director of a fancy neurological center known as the Cube, is apparently amazing at her job, and “Black Box” doesn’t hesitate to draw a connection between her genius and her illness: “Catherine has an insight into her patients that no one else has, allowing her to communicate with them on a different level,” according to ABC’s press notes. She’s fabulously empathetic and intuitive, somehow able to see what all the other doctors miss (though her cases should be familiar to anyone who reads Oliver Sacks’s essays). That’s because, the show keeps reminding us, mental illness goes along with greatness. …

The show’s particular absurdities are all its own, but “Black Box” is part of a long line of fictions that treat psychological disorders as a professional asset.

On TNT’s “Perception,” which will soon air a third season, Eric McCormack plays a schizophrenic neuroscience professor who moonlights as an FBI consultant, solving murders with the help of witnesses he hallucinates. “Mind Games,” which lasted five episodes this spring before getting the axe, starred Steve Zahn as a bipolar genius who used to teach psychology and now runs a “problem-solving” business. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes coolly calls himself a “high-functioning sociopath,” but Sherlock fans have been offering competing psychological profiles for Arthur Conan Doyle’s character for decades. “Homeland,” at its best, complicated this dynamic, but Claire Danes’s Carrie Mathison was still gifted with a perception that her saner C.I.A. colleagues lacked. She was a superhero, until she was a lovesick lackey.

Because it’s so painfully clumsy and thoughtlessly constructed, “Black Box” distills what’s unsettling in the rest of these shows into something wholly unpleasant.

Alan Sepinwall also pans the show:

Describing the show makes it sound like the sort of thing Jack Donaghy might have scheduled on the “30 Rock” version of NBC: Kelly Reilly plays Catherine Black, a brilliant neurologist who’s known as “the Marco Polo of the brain,” and who has somehow kept secret from all her friends, colleagues, and even her long-term boyfriend Will (David Ajala) that she is bipolar, and subject to abrupt, extreme mood swings from manic to depressive. Her name is Black, she tells us that people in her field call the brain a black box, and she is an expert at curing everyone’s neurological difficulties except her own! And she frequently refuses to take her medication because she fears becoming dull or, worse, “normal,” which leads her to sleep around, perch on hotel balcony railings while drunk and frequently dance to free-form jazz compositions that only she can hear.

In other words, it’s combining what’s become the most annoying aspect of “Homeland” with the most formulaic parts of “House”(*) with that tired old saw that Fienberg has dubbed the Vocational Irony Narrative.

Capital For Conservatives

Gobry argues that conservatives ought to agree with Piketty’s proposal to shift the tax burden from income to wealth:

To be a conservative is to want a vibrant, innovative economy. All else equal, presumably, in order to have such an innovative economy, you want to have risk-taking and risk-bearing capital. The problem with the global economy isn’t, per se, that the rich have a lot of money. It’s that the rich have a lot of money and, instead of investing it in rocket ships to the moon and dotcom ventures, almost all of them are instead investing it in government bonds and ultra-safe corporate bonds. With inflation at zero and no wealth tax, investing at 2% for no risk is very attractive. If there is inflation and/or a wealth tax, suddenly you have to seek it out bigger investments.

Looked at it very broadly, the conservative “diagnosis” would say something like this: for the broad middle class, what we usually think of as the components of “the good life”, i.e. housing, a job, affordable healthcare, higher education, and so on, are growing increasingly expensive–and in large part this is because of bad government regulation. This is also true of access to capital. As Piketty says, all else equal, we want to increase wealth mobility and access to capital.

Noting that Americans see Piketty as more left-wing than he sees himself, Yglesias points out that he actually wants to cut most Americans’ taxes:

Piketty’s big point about the United States is that we actually do engage in substantial wealth taxation in this country. We call it property taxes, and they’re primarily paid to state and local governments.

Total receipts amount to about 3 percent of national income. The burden of the tax falls largely on middle-class families, for whom a home is likely to be far and away the most valuable asset that they own. Rich people, of course, own expensive houses (sometimes two or three of them) but also accumulate considerable wealth in the stock market and elsewhere where, unlike homeowners’ equity, it can evade taxation.

Piketty also observes that the current property tax system is curiously innocent of the significance of debt. A homeowner is taxed on the face-value of his house, whether he owns it outright or owes more to the bank than the house is worth. “If you own a house worth $500,000 but you have a mortgage of $490,000 then your net wealth is $10,000,” he explains. “So in my system you would owe no tax.”

But Scott Sumner thinks we should measure inequality not by income or wealth, but rather by consumption:

[T]here are plenty of billionaires who splurge on things like 500-foot yachts. Now we are getting somewhere! The labor and materials that went into constructing that yacht could have produced 10,000 cars for average people. That sort of inequality is real. That’s what we (should) mean by “economic inequality.” That’s the way all of us economists were taught, but 99% of us seem to have forgotten what we learned about consumption. Consumption is what you should tax. Of course when we tried to do that a bunch of Democratic politicians who have apparently never heard of Bastiat said the luxury tax was a bad idea because it cost jobs in the yacht making industry. (I’m not joking.) Nor are they willing to cut back on intellectual property protections for companies like Disney.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is available here.

Is HRC Hosting Jo Becker Tomorrow?

I ask because of this – now deleted – calendar from Penguin, Becker’s publisher, which we stumbled upon three days ago:

We called the HRC building and press office and, after several attempts, we could not get an answer. They told us that the only event planned this weekend is private and they cannot give us any details about it. Blogger Will Kohler tried to get an answer too and tells the Dish that the HRC spokesman wouldn’t deny or confirm a Becker event. But HRC rents the space out and would presumably get reimbursed for hosting an event. So this is a genuine question for HRC members: is HRC honoring a book that trashes everyone else in the marriage equality movement?

We can’t get an answer from them, which is par for the course. But maybe you can: press@hrc.org. Be nice.

Update: we’re not the only ones getting the run-around. From Metro Weekly’s Justin Snow:

Re @sullydish retweet, HRC asked me to correct my story about the Becker event http://t.co/mRrL1xjRzG, but won’t say if they canceled it

— Justin Snow (@JustinCSnow) April 25, 2014

Update: A reader writes:

What about Becker also being hosted at Gibson Dunn, Ted Olson’s law-firm, for a private event on April 28 (as shown in your screenshot)? Even more inside access.

Indeed. An author who is hosted at book signings and events by the “characters” she fawns over in her book is crossing an ethical line. Another one. And, yes, I think, given the refusal of HRC to confirm or deny that the Becker event is canceled tomorrow, we can assume that it’s a party for Becker, and a thank you for the public relations job she has done for the organization. It’s all win-win-win. Except for the truth.

One last update: Because HRC would not respond to requests for clarification, Chris Johnson asked Becker herself at her DC book-signing at Politics and Prose if HRC was hosting her on Saturday:

I ask Jo Becker if she'll be at HRC tmrw. Her response: No, will be on MSNBC. I ask if there was ever an HRC event. Says she's not aware.

— Chris Johnson (@chrisjohnson82) April 26, 2014

Quote For The Day

“I’m not surprised. I’ve been discriminated against for 70 years, and they might as well discriminate against me in death as well as life,” – Madelynn Taylor, a US Navy veteran who won’t be allowed to have her ashes interred with her dead wife’s ashes because of a provision in the Idaho Constitution.

Will Obamacare Help Democrats?

Sam Stein and Sabrina Siddiqui examined the websites “for 186 House Democrats up for reelection (we didn’t count those who’ve announced retirements), as well as 20 Democrats running for Senate (including three current House members and a few clear frontrunners who don’t currently hold federal office)”:

The results tell the story of a party still skeptical of the law’s political benefits, but overwhelmingly committed to upholding President Barack Obama’s signature piece of legislation. House Democrats are far more excited about Obamacare, with many members overstating the critical role they played in its passage. Senate Democrats seem more inclined to whitewash the entire bill from the public’s memory — the majority of Senate candidates avoid mentioning Obamacare at all. Only three candidates among the 206 whose websites we checked had an overtly anti-Obamacare message — and even those three don’t advocate repealing the law outright.

Josh Green expects Democrats to benefit from Obamacare in the long run:

I think the health-care law will still prove to be a net plus for Democrats in many races—a few this fall, and many more in future elections. The reason why is easier to understand if you flip the issue around and look at it from the Republican side.

Conservative orthodoxy still holds that Obamacare is a socialist abomination, and this requires Republican candidates to continue to advocate its repeal. It’s true that the law’s repeal is a strong motivator for Republican voters, and that does carry electoral advantages. But in practice, repealing Obamacare would entail dissolving popular state plans such as [Kentucky’s health care exchange] Kynect. Voters are bound to notice and make the connection.

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Steve Beshear, on Tuesday declared the law an “indisputable success” and said 413,000 Kentuckians had gained private or Medicaid coverage through Kynect. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes, Beshear has a 56-29 approval rating. But Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican running for reelection, remains wedded to the notion of repeal. Now, Democrats in the state are going after him for wanting to abolish not Obamacare, but Kynect.

Jonathan Bernstein’s view:

If you ask people whether government should “do more” or “do less” on health care, the liberal argument is going to come out on top with everyone except a small group of seriously ideological conservatives.

Making Obamacare the central issue in health care tends to obscure that Democratic advantage. That may be why Republicans would want to continue to keep the debate going. It also appears that Obamacare motivates Republican voters, for now at least. I’ve always believed this is arbitrary. Republican voters will always be motivated by whatever issue that Republican politicians, opinion leaders, and party-aligned media choose to emphasize. If the focus switched to Common Core, for example, Republican voters would follow. It’s difficult to see them moving away from Obamacare anytime soon, however, given their investment.

Cillizza, on the other hand, argues that Obamacare is still a problem for Democrats:

Republicans HATE the law. Democrats like it. That’s why, in Louisiana, almost six in ten registered voters said that they would not vote for a candidate who did not share their views on the law. While some of that number is surely Democrats who wouldn’t vote for a candidate who was against Obamacare, all of the other data out there about the law suggests that the energy on the issue is with the folks adamantly opposed to it.

Given that, the gap between those saying they wouldn’t vote for a candidate who disagreed with them on the Affordable Care Act and those who said they would is another way to gauge intensity around the law. And while the 30-point gap between “wouldn’t vote” and “would” is widest in Louisiana, it’s still quite large in North Carolina (18 points) and Arkansas (17 points). In Kentucky, where the state-run insurance exchange is working as well as any in the country, there appears to be less political heat around the law, with those who wouldn’t vote for a candidate who shared their view on the ACA running only seven points ahead of those who said they could vote for a candidate who disagreed with their view.

The Right’s Blindness To Race

Yes Sean, Bundy just confirmed what we already knew: Hannity Disgusted With Bundy: Race Comments ‘Beyond Repugnant’ http://t.co/GrJISFIUzK

— Donna NoShock (@NoShock) April 24, 2014

‘OUT OF CONTEXT’… http://t.co/RujYlbzHBZ

— DRUDGE REPORT (@DRUDGE_REPORT) April 24, 2014

Beutler was not shocked by Bundy’s racist remarks:

It’s hard to put this delicately, but a tax-protesting, government-rejecting, gun-toting white rancher from the Old West is fairly liable to say and believe some pretty uncouth things, including about race. I didn’t know Bundy was a racist until Thursday, but I was utterly unsurprised by the revelation. I doubt many liberals were terribly shocked either.

His explanation for why “many, many conservatives—even conservatives with presidential ambition—were caught completely flatfooted”:

When certain conservatives object to liberal characterizations of the American right, and when they bristle at suggestions that conservative policies draw some of their political vitality from unreconstructed racists, or resentful white voters, or anything other than ideologically pure freedom fighters, they aren’t playacting. At some point, to those conservatives, willful blindness to the political power of white conservative populism became unwillful. As far as they were concerned, anyone arguing that welfare-state opposition (or tenth-amendment fetishism or any other conservative hobbyhorses) derived any political support from racist whites was trafficking in racial McCarthyism. Perhaps at some point they had assumed a defensive crouch to protect themselves and their tribe from an uncomfortable reality, but eventually they grew comfortable in it.

Relatedly, Barro finds that Bundy’s big-government grievances resonate most strongly among whites:

The rush to stand with Mr. Bundy against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest incarnation of conservative antigovernment messaging. And nonwhites are not interested, because a gut-level aversion to the government is almost exclusively a white phenomenon. A 2011 National Journal poll found that 42 percent of white respondents agreed with the statement, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” Just 17 percent of blacks, 16 percent of Asians and 25 percent of Hispanics agreed.

And Weigel explains why Bundy’s downfall matters:

Bundy had the potential to become a galvanizing figure for a cause that’s hard to get people excited about. For a very long time, conservatives have been campaigning to take back federal lands, give them to the states, and let businesses or farms—or whatever—develop them. Having spent many hours inside the air-conditioned ballrooms of conservative conferences like AFP’s “Defending the American Dream Summit,” I’ve seen presentations about the government’s choke-hold on usable land. Other reporters, who’ve tracked legislation in Western states, have watched Arizona and Utah pass bills demanding the feds turn over tens of millions of acres to the states.

The problem, as Jessica Goad and Tom Kenworthy noted, was that Western voters didn’t care.* By at least a 2–1 margin in a recent Colorado College State of the Rockies survey, they did not think “having too much public land” was a problem. Enter Cliven Bundy. His years-long battle with the feds came to a head last month, and conservatives from Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul to likely next governor of Texas Greg Abbott rallied to him.

Book Club: Did Jesus Know He Was God?

Readers get the conversation started:

I find Ehrman too reductive in his search for what’s true. The same lens of critique that he applies to the literalist – that a certain passage is contradicted, or impossibly out of context – can also be applied to his own conclusions.

For instance: So Jesus is not quoted as explicitly stating that he is God. Does that mean that he himself didn’t believe it? We know that the gospels can’t be trusted as a source of word-for-word quotation – that’s a central part of the author’s set-up. That means finding a lack of such clear self-proclamation doesn’t mean that in Jesus’s own mind, or in his private conversations, he didn’t expressly believe in his own divinity. Perhaps there are rhetorical reasons for why the authors of the gospels withhold such an explicit declaration? Perhaps it’s more powerful and compelling for how it is revealed?

Similarly, we’re left with a problematic assertion if we see Jesus primarily as an apocalyptic preacher: He was wrong, unless you interpret his “prophesy” as being epochal in time span rather than immediate (in the mind of God a generation could last thousands of years, one supposes). But isn’t it equally possible that this clear assertion of his apocalyptic preaching are also examples of rhetorical flourish on the part of the writers – to convince people through fear to change their fundamental belief system?

In the end, what do we know? I think you should consider staying clear of words like “truth,” and instead position the gospels and religion as sources of “meaning.”

These are two sharp points. I’d summarize them this way: The very limits of what these texts can tell us about what actually happened not only leaves the possibility that Jesus had no idea he was God, but for that very reason also leaves the possibility that he did. Both are in the texts. And when you zoom out a little, the very limits of our understanding of this man – filtered through the game of telephone of repeated oral memories – leave a span of possibilities open. The Gospels themselves offer us a variety of contradictory interpretations and factual accounts of many aspects of Jesus’ life and teaching. Maybe instead of trying to make them all make sense, we should let go a little, and accept that we will never fully know and never fully understand. Jesus, to borrow a phrase, is a known unknown and also an unknown unknown. And the very fallibility of the texts make this an unavoidable conclusion.

The Incarnation itself is, of course, utterly baffling. Ehrman shows this by charting an exhaustive survey of how early Christians tried and kept failing to understand it. A human who was exalted to divine status at his death? At his baptism? At his birth? Before his birth? From the beginning of time? You can watch the Christian imagination expand as the years go by when grappling with the ineffable concept of a person both fully human and fully divine. And at every resting point, the idea eludes any rational understanding.

To wit: If Jesus were divine, he would know everything, including his future resurrection, right?

And yet he is clearly racked with fear and agony and doubt throughout the Gospels – sometimes because, we infer, he knows what is about to happen (as in the Garden of Gethsemane), but sometimes also because he appears not to know what is about to happen (did he let Lazarus die by mistake or by design?). How, for that matter, could an omniscient God cry on the cross at his hour of death: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The narrative of Jesus makes no sense if he is merely a divine omniscience inhabiting a human shell. And it makes even less sense if he is a fallible human being completely bewildered by what is happening to him.

So for me, over the years, as I have thought and prayed and simply wondered about this, I’ve come simply to the conclusion that it makes sense only to God, to a consciousness far greater than a human one, and that if we are to believe, we have to believe in this doctrine as essentially a mystery. I know agnostic and atheist readers will find this a cop-out, and it is, rationally speaking. All I can say is that my own experience of Jesus as a living God in my own life forces me to this unsatisfactory position. I cannot rationally reconcile the divine and the human as single concept. But my faith, my personal experience of Jesus, forces me to accept it.

But if I cannot rationally accept it, what do I mean by accept? I mean an embrace of wonderment at what the force behind all things can be beyond any human understanding. And I mean the sacrament of the Mass which, far from attempting to explain Jesus’ divinity in human form, merely claims to demonstrate it in ritual. I mean the sacrament of nature, where what is absolutely subject to rational understanding, from the viewpoint of science, nonetheless escapes those parameters when one simply regards it with awe. I mean an afternoon in early autumn at the end of Cape Cod, where light and water congregate and commune in something I can only call transcendent. We live in a universe both material and wondrous – and neither denies the other. That is how I have come to accept the incarnation as mystery and as necessity – both in Jesus and in the world.

(Please email any responses to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com rather than the main account. Unfiltered thoughts from readers on Facebook here.)

(Photo: The monumental main cross, symbolizing the Christian faith, is silhouetted in a puddle at the Theresienwiese during dusk of day 1 of the 2nd Ecumenical Church Day in Munich, Germany on May 12, 2010. By Johannes Simon/Getty Images. The original post contained the rather English term “Chinese whispers”, which confused many readers, so I’ve change that phrase to “game of telephone” which is the American equivalent. )

The Payoff From Vaccination

It’s massive:

In 1994, the United States, fresh off a measles epidemic, instituted the Vaccines for Children program to ensure that all children, regardless of income, could get vaccinated. … [T]he Centers for Disease Control says that the program, which is funded through Medicare and Medicaid, has had a staggering effect. You can see it in the vaccination rate alone: In the late 1980s, roughly 70 percent of children were vaccinated for common childhood illnesses—after the program was started, that number jumped well over 90 percent. Take a look:

The vaccines will prevent, according to the CDC,

322 million illnesses

21 million hospitalizations

731,700 deaths

Those reductions will save roughly $295 billion in direct hospitalization and other costs associated with disease and will save $1.38 trillion in total society costs, the organization says.

Puff, Puff … Pass

Legalization activists are waiting for 2016:

To be sure, this fall there may end up being only a couple of marijuana initiatives on the ballot. Florida voters will decide on a constitutional amendment providing for medical marijuana, and a full legalization initiative could make it to the ballot in Alaska. Advocates are also trying to put a measure on the ballot in Oregon.

But if you’re a legalization advocate, you actually shouldn’t want to have an initiative on the ballot this year. In state after state, advocates have decided to wait until 2016, when they know more of Democrats and young people will be going to the polls to vote for president, to put the question to the voters. Advocates in California considered mounting a push this year, then put it off until 2016. That presidential year could also see initiatives in Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, and Nevada, and possibly other states as well.

DC could be an exception:

In order to put Initiative 71, the “Legalization of Possession of Marijuana for Personal Use Act of 2014,” on the November ballot, they will need to collect 23,000 signatures by July 7, which shouldn’t be too hard to do in an extremely liberal city of 600,000 people. A Washington Post poll from January found that 63 percent of the city’s residents favor legalization.

Jon Walker believes that Alaska’s initiative could help Democrats keep the Senate:

According to a new analysis by the New York Times, Alaska is the most competitive Senate race this year with Democrats and Republicans having exactly a 50 percent chance of winning. More importantly, it is also currently projected to be the tipping point election which will decide control of the Senate. On November 4th the nation could easily be up late waiting for result from Alaska to tell us if Democrats end up with a 50 senator majority (plus the Vice President who is the tie breaker) or 49 seat minority.

This one recently moved marijuana legalization initiative may just prove to be the small edge Begich, and by extension the entire Democratic party, needs for a close win.

Category: The Dish