The Dish

“There’s not much money in the me-zine so far. In February, Amazon.com began a voluntary payment system that allows readers to put their money where their mouse is. By early April, Sullivan had taken in nearly $9,000 through the Amazon system and direct contributions. Kaus had just over $1,000 through Amazon; Postrel netted $630 through Amazon and $100 through PayPal, another payment system she uses; Marshall, the last of the group to add the pay feature, had less than $1,000. “Right now we’re a joke from a business standpoint,” says Sullivan. Two days after saying that, though, he met with his partner in New York to discuss “the next phase.” An archive of Sullivan’s book reviews is in the works, and perhaps an interactive book club. His site got 120,000 unique visitors in March. Soon, Sullivan says, he will try to tempt a sponsor,” – Brent Cunningham, Columbia Journalism Review, January 2002.

In the end, we got 30,000 of you.

If you click on the link, it will take you to a PDF file of all the early press on the Dish in the very first year or two. Robert Cameron, who helped me set this up at the turn of the century, found it in his files. It’s a time-capsule in many ways. Here’s a flavor:

Mr Sullivan is a “blogger” (short for web logger): one of the tens of thousands of individuals and small groups who publish such online diaries. The vast majority of web logs are little more than regularly updated letters to friends with rambling accounts of day-to-day life. Many see them as the latest incarnation of the personal website with family photos and holiday greetings that was briefly popular in the late 1990s. But a few dozen bloggers with broader interests, Mr Sullivan among them, have begun to attract much wider audiences.

Another:

Maybe in six months these me-zines will be dead. But maybe not. Maybe big media will scoop up the best ones. Maybe a group of writers will contribute to a single site, theoretically making it easier to sell ads and find sponsors. Maybe some will get popular enough on their own to have sponsors. “It’s a terrific forum,” says [Joanne] Jacobs. “The question is, Can it be sustained?”

I guess some things never change, do they?

(Photos of Dish readers used with their permission)

I asked @dinamartina if she’d had a chance to watch the #Seahawks and she responded, “Oh was their an aviary show? So sad I missed that.”

— stevenblum (@stevenblum) February 2, 2015

If someone had told me when I started this blog after a decade of campaigning for marriage equality in the 1990s, that the above ad would be playing in Alabama in 2015, I would have thought them nuts. And yet here we are.

The long-running thread gets another story:

I just read the psychotherapist’s take on the selfishness of suicide and would like to chime in with my own experience. My daughter was 16, and we had been going through several years of wildly uncontrolled behavior on her part. I came home one evening to find she had taken an overdose of my pain medication (the stuff was too strong for me, so it was left in my medicine chest). I dragged her to the car and was racing to the hospital yelling at her to stay awake.

At first I was soooo angry at her.

I thought this was another wild stupid stunt and how thoughtless she was. She started crying in the car and kept telling me how sorry she was. She didn’t want to hurt me – she just wanted her pain to stop.

At that moment, I realized I wasn’t angry any more – just desperately afraid. I sat with her all night holding her and loving her while she puked up pills. She clung to me like the baby she was.

The hospital staff kept asking her why she wanted to kill herself, and she kept telling them she really didn’t. She just couldn’t continue doing “this.” She was ultimately diagnosed as a rather severe bi-polar and spent three weeks in a mental hospital followed by three months of daily therapy. I also resolved that I would talk about her mental illness as if she had cancer or diabetes. I would not flinch when I related that she had been committed and I would not be ashamed that she was taking five medications to get through her day.

It was very difficult at first, but got easier. My husband and I thought if we “normalized” her condition instead of being ashamed and perpetuating the stigma, then our daughter would be happier in her skin too.

She’s now 20 years old and we have the best relationship ever. We have that shared night in the hospital and all those years of therapy afterward. I’m just so grateful that my daughter survived her “disease” and will continue to count every day with her a blessing.

Another reader, on the other hand, fears the worst:

I have a loved one who contemplates suicide on a daily basis and has been battling depression for years. If he killed himself it would devastate everyone in his family, including me, along with many other people. The last thing I want to do is take away ANY of the arguments that are keeping him alive, and if the idea that suicide is a selfish act is one of them then, right or wrong, the last thing I want anyone to do is to undermine that idea.

I have noticed that, in the time since Robin Williams killed himself, there have been many articles and discussions that portray suicide as the natural, inevitable, and sometimes even appropriate outcome in people who have struggled for many years with severe depression. This may be very helpful thinking regarding those who have lost the fight, but it is incredibly damaging to those of us who are trying to keep our loved ones and ourselves alive.

Depression traps people in the belief that things will never get better. To say that this is in fact a truth that only suicide can end is very harmful. Even if that supposedly only applies to a specific person, many depressed people (like my loved one) feel that surely it applies to them as well. And in those times, the last grasp on survival is often the feeling that suicide is selfish and would harm those left behind.

Walker, Paul, and Huckabee sit atop a very early Iowa poll:

Andrew Prokop calls Romney’s exit “great news for Scott Walker.” But Tomasky is unimpressed by the Wisconsin governor:

I finally sat myself down and watched that Scott Walker speech from last week that everyone is raving about. If this was the standout speech, I sure made the right decision in not subjecting myself to the rest of them. It was little more than a series of red-meat appetizers and entrees: Wisconsin defunded Planned Parenthood, said no to Obamacare, passed some kind of law against “frivolous” lawsuits, and moved to crack down on voter “fraud””—all of that besides, of course, his big move, busting the public-employee unions. There wasn’t a single concrete idea about addressing any of the major problems the country faces. …

He’s gained [in Iowa] because those items— kicking Planned Parenthood, denying your own citizens subsidized health-care coverage, pretending that voter fraud is a thing—are what pass for ideas in today’s GOP. Walker is even more vacuous on foreign policy, as Martha Raddatz revealed yesterday, twisting him around like a pretzel with a couple of mildly tough questions on Syria. The Democratic Party has its problems, but at least Democrats are talking about middle-class wage stagnation, which is the country’s core economic quandary.

Matt Latimer expects Christie to benefit:

In fact, right after his tweak of Jeb, Mitt Romney headed to a dinner with the “fresh face” he apparently had in mind: the New Jersey governor. Many would-be Romney donors are reportedly following his lead. Should he enter the race, the Christie campaign strategy is not a mystery: To let everyone take whacks at Bush while Christie clings to the most valuable quality in all of presidential politics: being underestimated. The New Jersey governor shares many of Jeb Bush’s strengths: experience running a complicated, politically diverse state; an appeal to moderates; and with his proximity to New York, ready access to big-dollar donors. But he also has a few traits that seem to be notably absent from the third would-be President Bush: a crackling speaking style and a reputation for ruthlessness.

Jennifer Rubin downplays Christie’s chances:

Sources in the donor community say that large numbers of freed up former Romney donors, especially outside the Northeast, are steering away from the camp of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. (Christie took another hit when, not long after an earnest appeal in the Freedom Summit, he clocked in at 6 percent in the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg’s Iowa poll – with a 54 percent unfavorable rating.)

Paul Mirengoff looks at the big picture:

[T]he main effect of Romney’s non-entry may be to move the race more quickly to where it probably would have been after the early going — a field dominated by an “establishment” candidate (now probably Bush), a Tea Party favorite or two (probably Cruz and/or Paul), a “bridge candidate or two (say Walker and/or Rubio), and maybe Mike Huckabee if he retains his popularity among evangelicals.

Nate Cohn argues along the same lines:

There is one crucial respect in which the race has not changed. The main challenge to Mr. Bush will be from his right, from a candidate with appeal to the party’s conservative grass roots yet with enough appeal to the establishment to secure the resources necessary to win the nomination.

Mitt Romney was hoping to be that candidate. The position remains open.

“Democracies don’t need agreement. They do need tolerance of disagreement. The politically engaged — progressives and conservatives alike — mock the disenchanted majority for asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?” In one way, they’re right: Politics divides, and it should. In another way, they’re wrong. Getting along doesn’t require milquetoast moderation, flaccid centrism or “moving beyond left and right.” However, it does require some willingness to compromise, some curiosity about what might be valuable in the other side’s point of view, and some minimal attention to the civic virtues of tolerance and restraint,” – Clive Crook.

Dish literary editor Matthew Sitman writes:

This fall I had the pleasure of sitting down with the poet and priest Spencer Reece to record a long interview about his work teaching English, by way of poetry, to the girls who live at the Our Little Roses orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras – a place also known as the murder capital of the world. You can read the entire interview in Deep Dish, which now is out from behind our paywall, and which includes my brief introduction to Spencer’s own poetry and the projects – a selection of the girls’ verse published in Poetry last month and a forthcoming documentary about Our Little Roses especially – that emerged from his time there. For those interested in Spencer’s background you can read a short biographical sketch about him here. The Dish featured his poetry last year here, here, and here. The interview itself tells the story of how Spencer found himself in Honduras and what he experienced there.

Below is an excerpt from “A Memorable Form of Love: An Interview with Spencer Reece,” in which he explains why it was while living in Honduras that he truly became a priest:

I don’t think I understood what it meant. I don’t think I understood what it meant to be a Christian. I don’t think I understood what the Eucharist meant. I don’t think I really understood any of it. I could repeat it intellectually, or write something on an exam. I had studied all of it. But it was all book knowledge, it wasn’t heart knowledge. I knew I was moving in the right direction, but I really didn’t know what it meant. But when I was with them, as time went on it, I began to understand all of it.

The Eucharist is a moment of intimacy, eating together, looking at each other. Like on the Road to Emmaus. And when I put the wafers in the mouths of all those girls lined up, I think I began to understand it.

Also, they have nobody, so they belong to God. There’s just no other way to explain it.

So then that began to make sense. I as a priest – as a shepherd, as a father, all those words that are used for priests – I literally became a father-like figure, which I’d never been, because I didn’t have children. I never thought I’d be in that position. That was happening to me. I believe what George Herbert wrote, that for him, he craved simplicity. And one of the things that he liked simple was his religion and his understanding of God, and that all God was, was love. As a priest, to communicate that message is what we’re supposed to try to do. We can’t do it perfectly, but that began to come through me. You know a priest really has to be there and not be there – the ego has to die in the spiritual life, so you have to kind of use yourself and not be there at the same time, so that God’s message can come through you. It’s not “Spencer’s” message. Of course it’s going to be some of my message, because it’s me, but you hope that there’ll be little sparks that are God’s that are coming through you. That seemed really important there with those girls.

Read the entire interview in Deep Dish – again, now without a paywall – here.