Category: The Dish

[Ross] Jack Shafer defends the media coverage of Virginia Tech, presumably against attacks like this one. Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias defends the attempts to exploit the tragedy for crass political purposes.

[Ross] During the early confusion, a lone American reporter misidentified the Virginia Tech killer as a Chinese student who picked up his visa in Shanghai. James Fallows, our man in China, explains what happened next.

[Ross] The strange thing about that Jane Kramer piece that Reihan brings up was that nearly all the reporting she did was extremely favorable to Benedict XVI’s approach to Islam – yet she still felt the need to bracket the whole thing with the usual throat-clearing about the Pope’s supposed reactionary tendencies on unrelated issues, including not only the passage Reihan mentioned, but this loaded one-liner: "He wants to purify the Church, to make it more definitively Christian, more observant, obedient, and disciplined—you could say more like the way he sees Islam." It’s almost as if there’s some copy-editing program at every major media outlet that’s designed to automatically insert the words "birth control" into any piece about Catholicism, no matter what the actual subject of the story happens to be.

[Andrew] This I can’t embed. This I don’t even know what to say about. This certainly is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. But this woman can tell something called the truth about women, men and sex (and jack-rabbit sex toys). Especially, perhaps, black women, black men and sex. Think of it like XXX Oprah told by a preacher. Think of it as YouTube’s gift to those of us who aren’t watching public access TV in Atlanta in the early hours of the morning. Another warning: DO NOT CLICK if you are the slightest bit squeamish or sensitive about matters sexual. But I am in awe.

[Reihan] Several weeks ago, during SXSW, I saw one of the most joyful, raucous performances of my life.  The band was called Aqueduct, and they’ve fast become one of my all-time favorites.  Silly, brassy, loud and deeply strange, Aqueduct makes music for fist-pumping sing-alongs and quiet reflection alike.  The A.V. Club‘s Noel Murray placed Aqueduct, accurately, at the intersection of Pavement and The Beastie Boys: this will either make you cover your ears and head for the hills, or it just might be up your alley.  Thanks to the miracle that is Hype Machine, you can sample some of their tracks for yourself.  I recommend "Living A Lie" for starters.  I saw Aqueduct again this past Friday, and I danced like a lunatic.  At one point it occurred to me that I was fast becoming an embarrassment to the human race, not to mention my lovely companion, and yet the music was just too good.  Superego failing.  Id taking over.  Can’t … fight … urge to dance.      

[Reihan] Ross wants you to read The Lords of Breakfast, and I respect that. Many years ago I went by the name “Hash Brown,” fully intending to start a brunch-oriented rap supergroup with members named FlapJaxx and Hardboiled and songs titled “Sippin’ on Maple Sizzurp,” “Only Built for Sausage Linx,” “Tata, Frittata,” and, my personal favorite, “Brown Ops.” It occurs to me that “The Lords of Breakfast” would have been a wonderful name for my non-existent ensemble. Alas, my lyrical skills, as evidenced by this ancient post, were never quite up to snuff.

That said, I have another candidate for comic of the year, namely the slightly smutty (I am a prude) anti-war agitprop graphic novel Shooting War. I can’t imagine I agree with the creators on much of anything (well, maybe some things), but they’ve created a vivid and disturbingly plausible portrait of Iraq’s near future. Then there are the delightful cameos.

[Reihan] Speaking of Jane Kramer, I was a little disappointed by her take on Pope Benedict XVI from a few weeks ago.  Mainly I was disappointed because of this brief aside.

It is well known that Benedict wants to transform the Church of Rome, which is not to say that he wants to make it more responsive to the realities of modern life as it is lived by Catholic women in the West, or by Catholic homosexuals, or even by the millions of desperately poor Catholic families in the Third World who are still waiting for some merciful dispensation on the use of contraception.

I actually think — and I’m no expert on the Catholic Church, so do take my words with a grain of salt — that this is almost the opposite of the truth. Recently, Civitas, a British think tank, released On Fraternity, an extraordinary pamphlet by Danny Kruger, a close advisor to British Conservative leader David Cameron. I really wish I could link to the complete text, but I’m afraid I’ll have to settle for this much-abridged version that appeared in Prospect late last year. Kruger opens his pamphlet with a brief discussion of Benedict XVI, and the kind of conservatism he represents.

John Paul’s main political concern in the 1980s, the time of his vigour, was with the wall which passed through Berlin and divided the free west of Europe from the communist east. His wish was to dismantle the dominating structures of communism, liberating individuals and nations from state oppression. His object was freedom. Twenty years on, Benedict sees a different problem: not a wall, but a desert. His concern is with the arid emptiness in Western culture, an emptiness which extends from private loneliness all the way to environmental desolation. ‘The external deserts are growing’, he said in his first papal pronouncement, ‘because the internal deserts have become so vast. His object is fraternity.

Kruger goes on to offer a brilliant and incisive interpretation of the twin failures of Conservatism and Socialism to reckon with and reverse the “social desertification” of British life, and he offers a tentative way forward. It’s the kind of argument that would drive a lot of American conservatives up the wall, I’m afraid, and it is very, very smart. Anyway, by taking on this social desertification, it seems to me (I like to think of myself as a Humanistic Muslim, though I suspect the mullahs would disapprove) that Benedict is indeed making the Catholic Church "more responsive to the realities of modern life, even if it’s not in quite the ways Kramer would like.

[Reihan] You know what else is striking about Jane Kramer’s insightful article on the French presidential election? Well, there are two things. The first is her conviction that France’s most obvious challenge is economic.

The country has stalled. Its growth is minimal.  Its protectionist policies are disastrously out of touch with global reality, let alone with the realities of the European Union, which it helped to found and enlarge (and then to undermine, in 2005, when it voted against an E.U. constitution).  Its business, beyond the realm of luxury labels and designer clothes that the rich will always pay for, is not competitive.

Now, this is a fairly conventional neoliberal reading of the French predicament, easy to imagine in the pages of The Economist or Forbes. It has the added virtue of being, in my view at least, mostly sound. (As Perry Anderson reminds us in a still-fresh essay from 2004, France actually has gone through a pretty wrenching period of economic reform. That’s not to say there isn’t room for more, but try telling that to hard-pressed workers.) But then, just a few sentences later in that same paragraph, she has this to say about the plight of France’s Muslim underclass.

(Part of the problem is education; the rest is simply French xenophobia and racism.)

There you have it, a sharp assessment in a neat parenthetical. What is it that these quick takes have in common? On the surface, not very much: one is commonly associated with the right (France needs a healthy dose of market economics), the other with the left (education is the solution). But both quick takes reject narratives embraced by the French working class, who voted overwhelmingly against an E.U. constitution that at least seemed to threaten a new wave of neoliberal reform and who’ve turned in ever larger numbers to anti-immigration rejectionist parties of the far right and left.  Right or wrong, I doubt struggling French families who feel besieged by gang violence are likely to buy Kramer’s characterization of France’s cultural dilemma. Sarkozy, the alleged Thatcherite, has made a play for Le Pen’s voters by talking about "national identity." (Keep in mind, of course, that Sarkozy has also been willing to experiment with positive discrimination and other policies designed to advance the interests of the neo-French.) And Royal has embraced the "left-nationalist" Jean-Pierre Chevènement. France is only the latest example of Europe’s left-right spectrum decomposing from below, as the lower-middle (heirs to the Poujadists and the Trotskyists) revolts against the orthodoxies of the upper-middle.  The mostly shallow fusionism of Ségo and Sarko marks a clumsy attempt to reconcile with the new political reality.  European politicians, at least, "Are All Pim Fortuyns Now." I think it’s only a matter of time before a similar political landscape emerges here in the United States. We have the considerable advantage of a large and growing economy, and yet we also have a sky-high rate of incarceration that might soon become for us what tension over assimilation and immigration has been for Europe — and then some.

[Megan]  Radley Balko on Jon Corzine’s car accident:

As you might guess, I’m not going to criticize New Jersey Gov. John Corzine for choosing to not wear a seatbelt. And I find the suggestion from one of his aides that he be issued a citation for not buckling up back when Corzine was fighting for his life mind boggling.  Who thinks like that?

I do wish Corzine the best, and I hope he recovers in full.

But there is a legitimate public safety issue, here.  And it’s this:

he SUV carrying Gov. Jon S. Corzine was traveling about 91 mph moments before it crashed, Superintendent of State Police Col. Rick Fuentes said Tuesday.

The governor was critically injured when the vehicle crashed into a guardrail on the Garden State Parkway just north of Atlantic City last week. He apparently was not wearing his seat belt as he rode in the front passenger’s seat.

The speed limit along that stretch of the parkway is 65 mph.

The state trooper-driven sport utility vehicle was in the left lane with its emergency lights flashing when a pickup tried to get out of its way. Instead, it set off a chain reaction that resulted in the crash.Corzine was late for a meeting (between–guess who!?!–Don Imus and the Rugters women’s basketball team). So his driver rushed him through traffic. At ridiculously high speeds. And caused a serious accident.

When you live in the D.C. area, this kind of thing happens all the time (not the accident, the VIPs taking over the road), and just from personal observation, I’d say it’s happening more frequently. There seems to be an increasing feeling among many politicians that their meetings, their business, and their appointments are somehow more important than everyone else’s. Therefore, they can fly down highways, ignore red lights, and purge everyone else to the side of the roadway. If they can get their own police escort or caravan, even better.

I get caught in a caravan in D.C. about once every two weeks. When it’s the president or vice president, it’s merely annoying. They shut down all the streets on the route a good 3-4 minutes before the caravan arrives. And I’ll concede that there are probably good security reasons for the president and vice president to travel like this, though they do tend to abuse it (Bush has shut down cities in the past during rush hour in order to attend political fundraisers). 

When it’s not Bush or Cheney, it can be downright scary. You glance in your review mirror to see a limo or three or four barreling up at you, flashing their lights. When you’re already in freeway traffic moving at freeway speeds, everyone scrambling to get out of the way, it’s not difficult to see how this can be pretty dangerous.

Increasingly, lesser-ranking public officials seem to think they shouldn’t have to obey traffic laws, either. Why was Gov. Corzine’s meeting that day more important than the meetings of everyone else on the road? Why was it so important that he had to endanger everyone else on the road?  Because he’s an elected official?  Posh.

He’s absolutely right.  Still, you really should wear your seatbelt:

Did you ever notice how often the words “unrestrained passenger” turn up in Trauma: Life in the ER just before something Really Messy rolls in the door? In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That’s the second collision. That body’s internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments—and that’s where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when the bowling ball you left on the rear deck hits you in the back of the head, because that continued at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.

There are two major routes that unrestrained persons take in a front-end MVA (Motor Vehicle Accident). Up-and-over or down-and-under (AKA “submarining”). With up-and-over, the upper body launches forward and up. The head strikes the windshield. (This produces the classic “windshield star”) Your injuries here include concussion, scalp laceration, and various brain bleeds. You can suspect fractured cervical vertebrae (and if you have a fracture with compromise to the spinal cord at C-4 or higher, you’ve lost the nerves that control chest expansion and the diaphragm. “C-4, breathe no more,” as the saying goes).

Go a little farther through the windshield, and it isn’t unexpected to leave some or all of your face behind stuck in the broken glass. You’d be surprised by how easily faces come off the facial bones. You can also expect fractured wrists, arms, and shoulders, from folks trying to brace themselves. A little farther through the windshield, all the way out of the vehicle (a situation we call “pre-extracted for your convenience”), and in addition to whatever damage you took on the way through, you get the damage from hitting the ground, trees, and metal poles at however-many-miles-an-hour.

Sure, you hear people talking about wanting to be “thrown clear” in the event of an accident. If you want to simulate being “thrown clear,” go to the fifth floor of a building and jump out the window. Let’s talk briefly about being thrown clear, because it happens more often than you’d think. Unrestrained driver: side impact. Vehicle spins. Driver goes out the window. In one case I recall, the driver was half-way out his window when the vehicle rolled over on top of him. That was the second-most grotesque scene I’ve ever been to. Another scene, the driver went out the window when it spun. The vehicle went into a snow bank and was drivable from the scene. The driver went into a river and drowned. Any time you go to an accident and the windows aren’t rolled all the way up and unbroken, look 200 feet in all directions for the other patients. It’s pure heck finding them three days later when someone wonders why all those birds are over there, or when someone at the hospital wakes up enough to ask “Where’s Joey?”

Okay, let’s look at down-and-under. In this one the patient goes forward and down, under the dashboard. Here’s where you’re going to find fractured femurs, broken knees, and compression fractures to the lower spine. If you’re asking “Is it possible for a human femur to be pushed through the floor of the pelvis?” the answer is “Yes.” If you ask me how I know that, the answer is: “Seen it done.” Unrestrained driver, 40 MPH impact. As the legs collapse accordion-style, the patient’s chest hits the dashboard. This can give you rib fractures, a fractured sternum, cardiac bruising, or that ruptured aorta that we all love so well. The nice thing about going submarining is that there usually isn’t any brain damage (unless you got clonked on the knob by that bowling ball, and seatbelts won’t help with that). On the other hand, femur fractures can be, and frequently are, fatal.

I think I’ll leave Traumatic Asphyxia, Hemo/Pneumothorax, and Flail Chest for the Trauma and You post that I’m going to do one of these days. Let’s just say that they’re associated with having your chest hit the dashboard or steering wheel, and they Really Suck (and not in a good way).

                   

[Megan] Ezra Klein had a very good comment on the rush to push policy prescriptions:

The desire to segue instantly into an argument over gun control reflects, I think, the human ache to establish control — however illusory — over a tragic and senseless event. In the same way we’re vaguely comforted by knowing that a horrific car accident was the result of an unbuckled seat belt and a lung cancer came from a lifetime of chain smoking, we want to be able to say that if we only change this law, tweak that policy, we can prevent this awful killing from ever being repeated. Sadly, I’m largely with Atrios on this: " if people want to kill people and don’t care if they get killed or caught they’re going to kill people." Thankfully, most humans are decent and very few are murderous, and so despite the countless firearms and cars and gasoline cans laying around this nation, mass killings remain blissfully rare.