The Dish

Suicide Leaves Behind Nothing

“Suicide, seen as among the most selfish of acts, pushes a button in us that even murder doesn’t,” according to Clancy Martin:

When I was in treatment for depression, I found that meeting and talking to other people about suicide was profoundly helpful; I saw what a loss it would have been had those people succeeded. A friend once said to me, “Suicide leaves behind nothing but miserable people blaming themselves.”

My psychiatrist, a wise eighty-seven-year-old woman who has been practicing six days a week for more than forty years, told me, “Think of the example it sets. For your children.” That remains the most compelling argument I’ve heard against suicide: it sets an example — for one’s children, of course, but for others too. It isn’t that we want people to “tough it out.” It isn’t that we think the suicide has acted out of moral weakness. It’s that, when we look at the people we knew who committed suicide, they were often the very people we most appreciated having around. We need more of those people, not fewer.

Recent Dish on suicide here and here.

Spellchecking Your Blindspots

Michael Keller ran a bunch of misspelled words through an iPhone simulator to see which topics Apple doesn’t autocorrect:

Our analysis found over 14,000 words that are recognized as words when spelled accurately, but that won’t be corrected even when they are only slightly misspelled. However, the vast majorityof these words are technical or very rarely used words: “nephrotoxin,” “sempstress,” “sheepshank,” or “Aesopian,” to name a few.

But among this list as well are more frequently used (and sensitive) words such as “abortion,” “abort,” “rape,” “bullet,” “ammo,” “drunken,” “drunkard,” “abduct,” “arouse,” “Aryan,” “murder,” and “virginity.”

We often look to technology to make our lives easier—to suggest restaurants, say, or to improve things as simple as our typing. But as more and more of our speech passes through mobile devices, how often is software coming between us and the words we want to use? Or rather, when does our software quietly choose not to help us? And who draws the line?

A commenter makes an obvious counterpoint:

I’m not the engineer in charge of this, but if I *WERE*, I’d probably have been told that my boss didn’t want to see users complain about spellchecks turning innocent typos into offensive words. The best way to do that would be to mark the word as something that the dictionary wouldn’t complain about, but that would never feature in those “Damn You, Spellcheck!” websites or tweets.

If that’s the case in reality (and it certainly seems likely enough), it’s not censorship and it’s not squeamishness. It’s Apple helping the majority of users from having little mistakes escalate into major embarrassments.

Dustjacket Dating

Elyse Moody imagines a literary alternative to Craiglist’s Missed Connections, pairing a title with the type of man she hopes to attract:

I’ve been asking myself some basic questions: What do I like? Reading. What am I looking for in a date? Someone who enjoys books and talking about them, and who can strike up good conversations with strangers. An idea started to gel. Maybe if I’m choosy about what I read on my longish interborough commute, the right guy—one with superlative taste who’s curious enough to make a move—will be drawn to me by the tractor beam the open book in my hands emits.

I ran this idea by my therapist, and she started nodding excitedly. “Books are such a great crutch,” she said. “I think of them like props.”

Exactly.

So this strategy’s been clinically endorsed. I’ve reviewed my journals, made a list of the most attractive qualities of potential soul mates past (setting aside their less desirable traits—e.g., substance addiction, monomaniacal narcissism, commitment phobia), and distilled it into archetypes of the charming men I hope to meet, if fate wills it, somewhere in the New York City public transit system.

Arrests Can’t Win The Drug War

Mexico has captured Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, the ruthless leader of the infamous Los Zetas drug cartel. Juan Carlos Hidalgo expects little to change:

Sylvia Longmire and Alejandro Hope have good analyses [in Spanish] on what the capture of Treviño will mean in the near and medium term to the Zetas and to the configuration of organized crime in Mexico. Overall, we should expect a spike in violence as the Zetas might splinter into several violent “cartelitos” which will fight one another for control of territory. Also, we might see a renewed effort from the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán to challenge the Zeta’s control of the lucrative Nuevo Laredo transit route.

But isn’t the ultimate goal of the war on cartels to stop the flow of drugs into the United States? Should we expect a decline in the smuggling of narcotics after the arrest of Treviño?

No, according to reports from the U.S. government itself. The Office of Intelligence and Operations Coordination of the Custom and Border Protection agency looked at drug seizure data from January 2009 to January 2010 and matched it with the arrests or deaths of drug operatives (11 capos in total). It found that “there is no perceptible pattern that correlates either a decrease or increase in drug seizures due to the removal of key DTO [drug trafficking organization] personnel.”

Peter Watt agrees that little will change:

Treviño’s arrest will surely be a temporary blow to the organisational structure of Los Zetas. But so long as the conditions that allow organised crime to prosper in Mexico – paradoxically as a result of the so-called drug war – and so long as investors, banks, politicians and drug cartels share an interest in militarisation and conflict enveloping different parts of the country, we would be naïve to think that this latest capture of a capo represents much more than a job opening at the top of a very profitable enterprise.

James Gibney’s bottom line:

While it’s good that Mexican Marines have arrested a guy who liked to stuff his enemies in 55-gallon drums and set them on fire, in the short run his capture may lead to more, rather than less, violence.

The Best Of The Dish Today

Floating houses; bathing corgis; depressed gang-bangers; washed up hacks; and nutty jurors. A glimpse into the rabid violence of sectarian religion; and the preservation of scents.

My first Trayvon piece remained the most popular, followed by the tricks of Fox News. The Faces Of The Day won’t leave my mind. The Window View above was located here.

See you in the morning.

Racism And Richard Cohen’s Reality

Richard Cohen is cutting edge for 1988. In fact, a huge amount of the op-ed crap published by Fred Hiatt appears to be frozen from the time liberals decided it was time to move to the center-right. I think they were as right to do so in the late 1980s as they are wrong to cling to that position as if it is embalmed in aspic today.

So Cohen describes what he calls a “uniform” that young black men wear that legitimately causes fear among whites (and presumably blacks too). For twenty years, as I wrote earlier, I lived on a crime-charged corner in DC, where the 17th and Euclid gang still operates (and I hope to return). For the first ten years, it was sometimes hard to get people to visit me (not that I did much entertaining). And they weren’t crazy. It was a crime-ridden hood. I lived through several murders on my block, a dead body found in my alley way, and a bullet that came through my upstairs neighbor’s window.

But I honestly never felt any real fear simply being around young black men in the hood. And I still don’t. Yes, if I saw drug deals from my window, I took pictures in case the police needed help. Yes, I could see that most of the miscreants were black men – but that could have been said of my neighbors who played basketball, or hung out on the local stoops. I lived by minding my own business, something Zimmerman could have done as well.

I think it may be the fact that I wasn’t born or raised in America; or obliviousness; or a simple, growing awareness of how many young black men are in no way related to that kind of violence – because I lived among them; or aware that I was a familiar face and so in no way a threat. But I never felt fear. Hoodies were not a “uniform”, either, unless there’s been a fashion craze since I left for New York. What Richard Cohen is describing in his attempt at political incorrectness is a vision in his own head that equates all young black men he may come across with the potential to kill. I can’t think of a word to describe lumping everyone of a certain race, gender and clothing into a category of potential murderers other than, yes, racist. Can you?

There’s no question that young urban black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes, compared, say, with young white men.

If you look at homicide, you’ll see, however, that a white person is far, far more likely to be killed by another white person than by a black one. 83 percent of white murders were committed by whites. In 2011, only 448 black men killed a white person in America. In a country of 300 million, that means that Richard Cohen’s fear of the young black men is as unjustified as Zimmerman’s description of Martin as a punk. The percentage odds of Richard Cohen being killed by a young black man is 0.00015 percent. And yet he’s scared. I guess it’s clarifying to have this fact of human nature expressed in a column. But it doesn’t make it any less repugnant.

Elspeth Reeve covers the rest. This is for me her best point:

“Urban crime” is shorthand for young black people committing crimes in big cities on the verge of collapse. But Martin wasn’t killed in Cabrini-Green. He was killed in Sanford, Florida (population 53,570), inside a gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which has about 260 townhouses. The alleged crime was a suburban crime. And, just for the record, it was not the black kid who was just acquitted of it.

(Photo-image by from the Tumblr “While Seated” by Michael David Murphy.)

Literary Clockwork

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video collage “The Clock” consists of film clips in which people consult timepieces at each of a day’s 1,440 minutes:

Taking a page from Marclay’s playbook, The Guardian has invited readers to create a literary version of “The Clock”, which is set to debut at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this August. Some examples:

00:00:00 It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping. Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can’t sleep. — Molloy, Samuel Beckett

4:50:00 Even the hands of his watch and the hands of all the thirteen clocks were frozen. They had all frozen at the same time, on a snowy night, seven years before, and after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle. — The 13 Clocks, James Thurber

11:45:00 “I will tell you the time,” said Septimus, very slowly, very drowsily, smiling mysteriously. As he sat smiling at the dead man in the grey suit the quarter struck, the quarter to twelve. — Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

13:00:00 It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — 1984, George Orwell

19:00:00 It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupé with him and started for Long Island. […] So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. — The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Previous Dish on Marclay’s clock here.

Salt Of The Earth

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Eight miles south of Krakow and a considerable distance below it, the Wieliczka and Bochnia Royal Salt Mines contain a religious complex chiseled entirely out of halite, or rock salt:

The mine’s attractions include dozens of statues, three chapels and an entire cathedral that has been carved out of the rock salt by the miners. The mine, built in the 13th century, produced table salt continuously until 2007, as one of the world’s oldest salt mines still in operation.

Unesco recently expanded its World Heritage Site designation for the complex, which also features salt chandeliers and a salt John Paul II. More photos here.

(Photo: Detail from Bochnia Salt Mine, Małopolski Instytut Kultury)

What Would Actual Conservative Foreign Policy Look Like?

Jennifer Rubin says it should strike “a middle ground between unbridled intervention and neo-isolationism”:

Finding a conservative middle ground that incorporates the lessons of the past decade should be the work of elected Republicans, former officials and think-tank gurus. They must present a foreign policy that maintains (or restores, when Obama leaves) American supremacy in the world and is also politically sustainable.

Larison pounces:

Since neo-isolationism doesn’t really exist and even Rubin wouldn’t claim to favor “unbridled intervention,” we can be confident that the “middle ground” Rubin refers to here is not a compromise between her hard-line, aggressive foreign policy and a foreign policy characterized by restraint and respect for the limits of American power. By setting up two extremes that virtually no one favors, Rubin is resorting to the time-honored tactic of presenting her own position as the “middle ground” that will satisfy most conservatives and Republicans.

He describes the conservative foreign policy he’d like to see:

A conservative alternative to Obama’s foreign policy wouldn’t automatically support all or even most U.S. overseas commitments, but would reduce those commitments when regional allies and rising powers have the resources to assume responsibilities for security in their own parts of the world. It wouldn’t treat “American supremacy” as an end in itself, and it would recognize that America’s post-WWII and post-Cold War roles were exceptional ones that needn’t and shouldn’t be emulated forever. Unless a treaty ally is attacked, a conservative foreign policy wouldn’t allow the U.S. to be pulled into conflicts where the country’s security wasn’t at stake for the sake of preserving “credibility” or supposed allied solidarity. It also would oppose waging wars of choice.

Our Life Stories Are Missing Pages

Sarah Polley’s documentary about her mother Diane, Stories We Tell, is driven by a conundrum: “How is it we talk and talk without conveying somehow what we’re really like?” Charlotte Hornsby riffs on it:

As people trail off about what her mother hid, what her mother thought and craved and feared, Sarah reflects that we can’t resurrect someone through our stories of them. In saying “she was like this” we risk turning her into a fiction, and feed the lie that Diane or any of us are a recipe of traits that if mixed in the proper order will rise and cool into a consistent personality. Given the gaps between stories, the discrepancies between the Diane her sister knew and the Diane her DNA-dad knew, Sarah wonders if any of us are truly knowable.

This is the loneliest question. I know I’ve asked it before and I’ve certainly seen it echoed by some of my favorite writers. In his play “The Cocktail Party”, T.S. Eliot’s Celia confides to her doctor, “It isn’t that I want to be alone, but that everyone’s alone—or so it seems to me. They make noises and think they are talking to each other; they make faces and think they understand each other. And I’m sure that they don’t. Is that a delusion?” “Being close,” Nicole Krauss writes, “as close as you can get to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.”