I have to say there have been moments when I’ve thought Megyn Kelly was a real blast of fresh air in the fetid, morning-breath swamps of cable news: whip-smart, mildly sassy, occasionally rebellious, she is a real star on the propaganda network of the GOP/Tea Party. So I wondered how she would respond to her rather unfortunate assertions this week that both Santa Claus and Jesus Christ were “white”. Here’s the original segment. Here is her response.
I’d say two things. The original segment was clearly not as light-hearted and humorous as Kelly now insists it was. She did not originally refer to the Slate piece as “tongue-in-cheek” and responded to its provocation by being offended, not amused. Since both tapes are out there, make your own mind up. But rather than cop to an obvious error – made off the cuff – she made the decision to hunker down and accuse others of persecuting Fox News because it isn’t liberal. So the classic and silly notion that white Republicans are somehow an oppressed class – and minorities should just stop whining – became her “correction.” But that’s not a correction. It’s a distraction.
More to the point, the much more disturbing assertion that “Jesus was white” – something Kelly injected into the conversation all by herself – is left hanging. She claims in one aside in her response that the question “is not settled.” But it is. Jesus was a first century Jew. He’s not a northern European. He was Semitic, not Caucasian. Now maybe Kelly will unpack why she may believe that Jews are somehow “white” in her racial categorization of humanity, while, say, Hispanics are not. But it seems likely she won’t. That would open a very large box of premises Roger Ailes prefers to keep vacuum-wrapped.
So she screwed up – which we all do. But on the core measure of whether she could fairly cop to her screw-up, correct and apologize for it, she failed. I tend to think that how journalists respond to error is more instructive than how they report and analyze in factually impeccable fashion. On that count, Kelly emerged this week as a flak and a hack. I guess I was foolish for hoping for more.
(Painting: Mother Mary with the Holy Child Jesus Christ, Oil/canvas, 1913. By Adolf Hitler.)
You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Despite the ominous hijacking of a truck filled with radioactive material earlier this month, The Economistreports that the chances of someone detonating a “dirty bomb” are slim and getting slimmer:
By many accounts, the most plausible dangers appear to be declining. For a start, an “overwhelming” number of buyers turn out to be undercover cops, says Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. A sizeable network of informers helps Georgia’s interior ministry to keep a close eye on the four or five cells in the country currently trying to obtain or sell radiological material, says Mr Pavlenishvili. When one of them is lining up a potential deal, it is almost always because his or a foreign unit is preparing a sting operation, he adds. Mr Pavlenishvili’s unit has not got wind of a single profitable sale – Georgia’s underworld makes its money on other crimes such as drug-running.
Considering the growing risk and persistent lack of money to be made, it is amazing that smugglers continue to give it a shot, says Lyudmila Zaitseva, an academic working on a University of Salzburg database on nuclear and radiological trafficking.
Many traffickers no doubt reckon that terror groups will pay dearly for dirty-bomb ingredients. After all, counterterrorism officials citing seized al-Qaeda documents have said as much. Yet although a terrorist-made dirty bomb of mass destruction cannot be excluded, it remains unlikely. For one thing, rooting around to obtain dangerously radioactive material is a great way to attract the attention of the authorities. A bust could doom a painstakingly assembled terror cell.
In any case, most of the stuff being peddled is fraudulent rather than dangerous, says Adrian Baciu, head of the Romanian police’s nuclear and radiological unit until 2004 (he later worked for four years in Interpol’s counter-terrorism directorate). To hype their products, sellers typically describe it as material used in a nuclear bomb, a reactor, the Space Shuttle or the like. “Excuse my language … just bullshit,” says Mr Baciu. In one sting, he arrested four men trying to sell, for several hundred thousand dollars, material from a calibration kit for radiation-detection equipment. It could be safely handled with cotton gloves. Another cell tried to pass off as dangerously radioactive a piece of ordinary iron. Trafficking in Romania, he says, has tapered to almost nothing.
This weekend we’ll be featuring poems from exciting debut collections. The first is “To a Camellia Blossom” from She Has a Name by Kamilah Aisha Moon, just published by Four Way Books:
I saw your pretty head lying
beneath the bush. Without
thinking, I kneeled
and cradled you, petals sighing
into grateful palms. Beauty face down
is an abomination. Why
must you suffer the weight
of early perfection? Your vividness
lifts me, lifts all. I wanted
to hold you. Just like that.
Until. I know this kind
of blooming well, to be
so lush, insides so swollen with life
that what was meant to hold you up
can’t. I wasn’t meant
to hold you, yet here we are
on this stray, brisk day in April
trembling and fulfilled, unlikely
and true. Before I knew what
to call you, I reached and imagined
season after season. Unmoored.
A new report from web security company Incapsula shows that as much as 61% of web traffic is from bots, not real people. Frederic Lardinois unpacks it:
At first glance, this sounds like this means the number of nefarious attacks is up, but Incapsula actually notes that the bulk of growth in this number is due to what it calls “good bots.” Visits from certified agents from search engines and similar tools increased from 20 percent to 31 percent, for example. According to Incapsula, many search engines have lately increased their sampling rates. In addition, the SEO tools that try to help websites rank higher once they are crawled, also now often visit sites more often than ever before.
He adds an important caveat, that “Incapsula gathered this data by looking at stats from its own 20,000 customers” and that “companies that sign up for the kinds of security services the company offers may not be exactly representative of the Internet as a whole.” Still, Alexis Madrigal worries about the bots impact on the digital economy:
The point is: It’s so easy to build bots that do various things that they are overrunning the human traffic on the web. Now, to understand the human web, we have to reckon with the logic of the non-human web. It is, in part, shady traffic that allows ad networks and exchanges to flourish. And these automated ad buying platforms — while they do a lot of good, no doubt about it — also put pressure on other publishers to sell ads more cheaply. When they do that, there’s less money for content, and the content quality suffers. The ease of building bots, in other words, hurts what you read each and every day on the Internet.
Rose Eveleth flags a treasure trove for American history buffs, a curious website by “Doctor Zebra” that allows visitors to “peruse the weird medical history of every single U.S. President”:
President are people, and they struggled with the same illnesses and bad habits as the rest of us. And this one website chronicles them all—the weird bodily ailments of every United States President. The site might not be the prettiest, but it’s got all the information there. From John Adams’s baldness to Herbert Hoover’s problem with performing his handshaking duties. Seriously:
The annual White House reception, in which Hoover had to shake hands with thousands of visitors, was a problem. His hand was at times so swollen that he could not write for days. Once he received a bad cut from a diamond ring that was turned inward; the reception was abruptly halted.
Jack Hamilton gives a rave review of the new Coen brothers movie:
Inside Llewyn Davis is easily the best film ever made about the folk revival, and it’s also one of the very best films ever made about music, period. For a movie about authenticity obsessions that recreates its place and period with exacting detail, its soundtrack isn’t much for slavish verisimilitude: [lead actor] Oscar Isaac’s singing voice is far more indebted to Jeff Buckley (still a twinkle in his folksinging father’s eye in 1961) than [folk legend Dave] Van Ronk or even Bob Dylan. These anachronisms strangely work, making the music feel newly vital while honoring the spirit and conviction of the period. And the film’s performance sequences are luxurious and fully real: they’re not cut short by impatient edits, hitched to montages, or bludgeoned into bold-faced Turning Points.
Tomas Hachard appreciates that the film shows that “some people faced private tragedy and inner turmoil even in the open-minded, happy-go-lucky 1960s, and many came out just as lost as when they entered”:
Inside Llewyn Davis’s main character is not destined to lead an artistic movement, even if he has the views for it: Though he’s secure in his convictions, Llewyn is insecure in life. He wanders from couch to couch in New York like a man in permanent limbo. The characters around him can seem archetypal and cartoonish at first, until you realize that we’re seeing them through Llewyn’s eyes, filtered by his preoccupations and rigid determinations of how the world should work. For example, when Jean (Carey Mulligan), his friend, fellow musician, and sometime lover, shares that she might one day like to settle down in the suburbs with kids and that playing music may just be a way to get there, Llewyn tells her, “It’s a little careerist, it’s a little square, and it’s a little sad.”
Eileen Jones finds that the movie’s “themes of hardship, joblessness, pinched resources, scarce opportunities, and swiftly lowering expectations” still resonate today:
Though the film is set in 1961, it’s not a 1961 we’ve ever seen posited in any other period film that readily comes to mind. Here is no vision of the “Camelot” presidency of JFK, of martini-drinking advertising executives in sleek suits, or even of the comparatively flourishing folk music scene in its Bob Dylan heyday. Here is an alternate vision of America in its great era of prosperity. The Coens have made a movie about failure in an era when, the standard pop-histories tell us, nobody really failed. They continue to look at the struggle of those on the margins, at failure among bungling strivers with grandiose dreams. The directors somehow maintain their faith that we’ll actually be interested enough in our own lived experience to appreciate their black comic vision of it.
In spite of its main character’s hardships, J. Hoberman calls the movie “certainly [the Coen brothers’] warmest film in the 16 years since The Big Lebowski“:
Crashing on couches, mooching meals, and obtusely refusing to “sell out,” poor Llewyn is one more hapless Coen protagonist. The folk singer is alternately sullen and pugnacious; having just put out an album titled Inside Llewyn Davis that no one seems interested in buying, he doggedly pursues an apparently hopeless career in a dead-end scene, amply stocked with colorful grotesques. … The Coens have characterized Inside Llewyn Davis as an exercise in futility, “an odyssey in which the main character doesn’t go anywhere.” The movie is in fact a prolonged flashback to the protagonist’s moment of triumph and the ignominious defeat that inevitably follows.
When it comes to writing about anorexia, the only truly radical move, as far as I can tell, would be to show clearly just how profoundly boring it is—not sad or prurient or overdetermined. The very premise is an unappealing one: we’d like to believe that such unhinged myopia would have psychological roots in trauma or in some sinister personal history, but usually it doesn’t. “If you can starve with some consistency, all you need is two weeks,” Osgood writes. Her point is that anorexia is often little more than a kind of self-inflicted tautology: the act of starving is what allows you to starve. It’s true, but a voluntarily isolated person choosing not to eat until she’s addicted to not eating doesn’t make for a very good story.
I don’t know what a deliberately boring book about anorexia would look like. The closest Osgood gets is when she writes, “I used to sit in trigonometry class and calculate my intake obsessively in the margins of my notebook, each time coming up with the same answer, each time dismissing my mathematics as unreliable.” That is a much more accurate description of the disease than anything involving clavicles or frozen yogurt or sexual abuse or the fear of feeding tubes. If we really wanted to protect our supposedly susceptible youth, we’d paint anorexics as they are: slowly suicidal obsessives who avoid other people and expend ninety-five per cent of their mental energy counting the calories in green vegetables. We wouldn’t see them as worth reading about at all.
S.T. VanAirsdale reports from Stockton, California, where the first mass school shooting of the cable-news era took place a quarter century ago:
Much else has faded about the Cleveland [Elementary School] shooting since it seized the American imagination – since Time grimly proclaimed “ARMED AMERICA” in a cover story three weeks after the massacre and, later in 1989, Esquire painstakingly deconstructed the last days of Patrick Purdy. No less a pop cultural eminence than Michael Jackson invited himself to Stockton on Feb. 7 of that year, where his attempts to cheer up the Cleveland community only meant more emergency vehicles, more police, more helicopters and more campus bedlam that just recalled the panic that Jackson had sought to assuage in the first place.
A reader reflects on last year’s massacre in Connecticut:
Saturday marks one year since 20 first-graders – 20 six- and seven-year-old kids – were slaughtered in their school with six of their teachers and protectors, as well as the mass-murderer’s own mother. Since then, the United States has responded decisively and deafeningly: we’ve done approximately nothing. We’ve heard a stupid comment or two from Congress suggesting we arm our teachers. And The New York Times just published a startling infographic documenting the 109 pieces of state-level gun legislation passed in 2013 -two thirds of it loosening restrictions, not tightening them, and a few in outright defiance of federal law. It seems no serious gun-safety legislation is weak or toothless enough to survive our more extremist impulses.
I’m not sure what we should do about guns. But I’m pretty sure we need serious therapy.
If we as a nation could spend a session on the couch, our analyst might conclude that on some level, we must enjoy this repeated horror. We’re a society that tolerates and even kind of expects the occasional massacre – even when it means the slaughter of six-year-old children. Because we keep letting it happen, and we refuse to make any changes to prevent it from happening again.
A few weeks ago, a friend down the street took me trap shooting – a little like skeet for beginners, maybe: you say “pull” and, if you do it right, you blast the shit out of a soaring clay disk with a shotgun that, because I was holding it wrong, turned my bicep all kinds of bizarre colors for the following two weeks. It was a hell of a lot of fun, even a little zen, in a funny way. It’s not hard for me to see the appeal. But it’s very hard for me to see how better licensing could threaten our Constitution. The only friend I’ve ever talked about guns with in a more personal sense keeps his father’s firearms locked in a cabinet, with the bullets in another locked cabinet on another floor of his house. “But what if you really did need it?” I wondered, and he admitted to me: “Trying to square that circle is something I’m still trying to figure out.”
I have to wonder what our reaction over the past year might have been if the murderer could have been tarnished by a more convenient ethnicity or faith, by something “other.” Just imagine the government and talking-head response if he’d been Muslim. Or suppose the Boston Marathon bombers in April, with their difficult Chechen names, had used firearms on Boylston Street instead of pressure cookers. I don’t think there’s much serious doubt that our representatives and talk-show hosts would have gone completely apeshit. (Actually, I know exactly what the reaction would have been: “Get the Muslims.”) But this was one white kid – one creepy, psychotic white kid – and so this mass-murder of teachers and tiny children was just a terrible aberration, a “tragedy,” and a mental-health issue, not a gun-safety issue. (And when I say “gun safety,” obviously I’m talking mostly about guns that can only be used to kill people.) And we’ve permitted ourselves, again, to put this “tragedy” behind us.
And who decided on that passive word, anyway? Calling this a “tragedy” is an insane perversion of language. English has any number of honest, accurate words to describe what actually happened. “Massacre.” “Slaughter.” “Mass murder of children.” But “tragedy” suggests that what happened was unavoidable. It lets us off the hook. It sets the stage for the next “tragedy.”
Grief and mourning and rage all feel right. So do nausea and sickening familiarity. I also feel chest-tightening parallels to September 11, 2001. Witnessing that massacre from uncomfortably close range has made it impossible for me ever to refer to that day as “9/11”: a term far too neat, too abstract and political, too simplistic and reductive to encapsulate its colossal horror. “9/11” is a term that has allowed our collective memory of that mass-murder to be symbolically debased and abused, easily and endlessly. Same with “Katrina.” When we talk about the many degrees of social, environmental and political failure we witnessed in response to the flooding of New Orleans, we don’t always seem to remember that we’re not talking about a symbol but about an actual cataclysm that erased the most marginalized neighborhoods of an already neglected metropolis—and one that real people actually experienced and lived through, or didn’t. “Katrina” lets us shrug and forget that we’re supposed to have a heart. We’re supposed to be better than this.
So as I’m trying to keep its victims and its survivors in my thoughts, I’m also trying to keep in mind that “Newtown” can never encapsulate an absolutely unthinkable massacre of very young children and teachers that happened to real people in a real place. For the families, the neighbors, the first responders, “Newtown” is not that day in hell, and “Newtown” is not the anniversary. “Newtown” is not gun debate. “Newtown” is not future mass murder. “Newtown” is not the heartless cowardice of our elected officials. Newtown is a real place in terrible anguish. I’m still not sure what we should do about guns, but I’m still angry, and today I’m trying to keep my mind on the pain of real people who might never escape it.
I saw your post on Bernstein, and Gottlieb’s remarks, which could not have been more incongruent with the video. I have a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the #1 ranked conducting program in the nation, so I’m not a layman on this topic. Watch the video again. And notice the camaraderie. The respect. The ease with which he rehearses them. This kind of rapport doesn’t exist anymore, except at off-the-radar orchestras in mid-level locales and certain lucky academic institutions. The top-level orchestras have become sanitized from this kind of warm, collegial, sometimes jocular style of rehearsing, partially because of the extreme reaction to the angry dictator-conductor (think crazy hair, and the yelling white European male). But also because now, the skill level of professional orchestral musicians is so ridiculously high. You’d have to look to Navy SEALs or brain surgeons to find the same level of expertise nowadays. That’s not hyperbole.
Yes, Bernstein was a narcissist, in his own right. But don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Seriously. The cure for our sustained disinterest in anything requiring more than seconds of our time is the depth and richness of classical music, literature, film, and dance. Just spend two minutes watching this upending performance of Bernstein conducting Vienna in Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2, which will never be rivaled.
Another:
I was lucky to do copying and editing work for Bernstein late in his life and spent a good deal of time at his apartment at the Dakota as well as his house in Fairfield.
I have stories, but would prefer not to air dirty laundry. Yes, not surprisingly, he was sometimes childish, inappropriate, and self-centered. But he was also kind and learned, and loved teaching. Unlike some other men who liked to claim how he hit on them, he always treated my like my nice Jewish grandfather. Perhaps he knew I wasn’t interested. Perhaps he wasn’t interested. But I’d also like to point out that as a conductor, specifically when he was doing his later Mahler cycle, he was fucking brilliant. The moments when handlers disappeared and we talked, or simply watching him in rehearsal with the NY Phil are some of my most treasured memories. Getting a bit choked up while telling me which works he wrote at his studio desk in Fairfield is hard to beat at a moment, especially when those works include Chichester Psalms.
For all of his compositional unevenness he was incredibly skilled and sometimes devastatingly hit the mark in his work. That he never received the Pulitzer I believe irked him to no end and probably was due to a combination of his fame and their jealousy, his ability to suck all of the air out of a room, and – worst of all – being looked down upon by the establishment because he also wrote musical theater. He lived through a “Cold War” in composition, the ascendancy of the modernist and serialist composers and a near-total separation between pop and classical music. It was not easy being Bernstein then. He was always told he did too much and wasted his talents, as opposed to how amazing it was that he did so many things brilliantly. When I look at the number of composers who have received the Pulitzer in the last 3 decades since he died I have to wonder. It’s crazy that he did what they are doing now – combined high and populist art, kept the tonal tradition alive – in a far an earlier time, when it was more detrimental to your reputation, and often with far more skill and sophistication they they did. And yet… they have the award, not him. This goes for both concert and theater music. The score to West Side Story not better than Rent? Are you kidding?
I do agree that later in life, after his wife’s death, he did lose his moorings a bit. There weren’t enough people around him to tell him no. That always left me profoundly sad. That he was difficult and narcissistic isn’t a trait unique to him. Ever meet a rock star, a conductor, or – worse – a politician?
