Waldman asserts that the semantic argument over Benghazi has been ignoring one basic fact:
[H]ere’s what nobody seems to get: Benghazi was not a terrorist act. Or an act of terror. Or an act of terrorism.
As it happens, there’s a nice succinct definition of terrorism in U.S. law, section 2656f(d) of Title 22 of the United States Code, which reads, “the term ‘terrorism’ means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.” So why wasn’t Benghazi terrorism? Because the people targeted weren’t civilians. As TheWall Street Journal has reported, “The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation, according to officials briefed on the intelligence. Of the more than 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the deadly assault, only seven worked for the State Department. Nearly all the rest worked for the CIA, under diplomatic cover, which was a principal purpose of the consulate, these officials said.” CIA officials are not civilians.
That doesn’t make their deaths any less tragic or painful for their families, but it’s the truth. Nor is a CIA outpost a civilian target.
Charles Mills makes the case dispassionately (and if you have the time, it’s well worth a full listen):
Since I really want to get to the bottom of this, it’s also worth quoting TNC’s latest post on the subject at length:
When the liberal says “race is a social construct,” he is not being a soft-headed dolt; he is speaking an historical truth. We do not go around testing the “Irish race” for intelligence or the “Southern race” for “hot-headedness.” These reasons are social. It is no more legitimate to ask “Is the black race dumber than then white race?” than it is to ask “Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?”
The strongest argument for “race” is that people who trace their ancestry back to Europe, and people who trace most of their ancestry back to sub-Saharan Africa, and people who trace most of their ancestry back to Asia, and people who trace their ancestry back to the early Americas, lived isolated from each other for long periods and have evolved different physical traits (curly hair, lighter skin, etc.)
But this theoretical definition (already fuzzy) wilts under human agency, in a real world where Kevin Garnett, Harold Ford, and Halle Berry all check “black” on the census. (Same deal for “Hispanic.”) The reasons for that take us right back to fact of race as a social construct. And an American-centered social construct. Are the Ainu of Japan a race? Should we delineate darker South Asians from lighter South Asians on the basis of race? Did the Japanese who invaded China consider the Chinese the same “race?”
Andrew writes that liberals should stop saying “truly stupid things like race has no biological element.” I agree. Race clearly has a biological element — because we have awarded it one. Race is no more dependent on skin color today than it was on “Frankishness” in Emerson’s day. Over history of race has taken geography, language, and vague impressions as its basis.
“Race,” writes the great historian Nell Irvin Painter, “is an idea, not a fact.” Indeed. Race does not need biology.
TNC’s commenters push back in exactly the same way I would. “UDDanB” writes:
– When my wife was pregnant, we saw an OB. She gave us a pamphlet about cystic fibrosis testing. I don’t recall the exact numbers, but the pamphlet said that roughly 1 in 30 Caucasians carry the recessive gene. She didn’t recommend testing because she said the chance that my wife (who is Japanese) has the recessive gene as well is almost incalculably low.
– I know a Jewish couple who just got tested for Tay-Sachs prior to marriage. They said their doctor recommended that they do so (citing the much increased chance of this disorder among Jewish couples).
This is exactly what Andrew Sullivan is talking about. To convince ourselves that all alleged differences among humanity are entirely ginned up in a social context is plainly nonsense to anyone who has ever talked to a doctor about anything similar to the above. The word “race” is a pedantic distraction here – TNC is, of course, correctly that the colloquial use of that term has evolved over time (and is usually flat out inaccurate). Maybe what I describe above is best formulated as “subgroups with genetic differences”- ok, fine. Lets have the primary debate using that term.
I think that reclassification is very helpful, although I’d call it “subgroups with genetic similarities“, i.e. subgroups with specific genetic ancestries that make them different from others. This makes sense from a Darwinian perspective, as TNC notes. Before humankind entered its hyper-mobile modern era, members of the same subgroups in particular places and environments obviously developed more genes in common with each other than with outsiders (skin color is just a superficial one). So we get this sentence in the NYT piece about Angeline Jolie’s genetic marker for breast cancer:
Any woman with ovarian cancer should consider being tested, as should Ashkenazi Jewish women with breast or ovarian cancer.
Is that sentence racist? Of course not. It merely recognizes biological traits that are common in one genetic ancestry rather than others. (Interestingly, the first version of the article simply state “Jewish women” and then added “Ashkenazi.” That’s almost a perfect example of how race can obscure reality, which is that Jews come from two distinct ancestries, Ashkenazi and Sephardim.) But the social racial category – Ashkenazi Jew – does actually correlate with a specific, biological genetic marker. Or take the gene CCR5, which provides immunity from HIV infection. It is not found in Africa – because it was a genetic variation that became more dominant in European populations during the Black Death. In that case, “race” in its crudest sense can be a shorthand for predicting the likelihood of certain genetic variations. But it won’t tell you in any specific case. Most “white” Europeans do not carry CCR5.
If we are discussing “subgroups with genetic differences,” we avoid the pitfalls of race as an overly-broad category. But we do not deny biological genetic differences in these subgroups, which can correlate with various degrees of accuracy with our crude racial terminology.
It’s really futile and I would argue self-defeating for liberals to deny this reality. These days, you can actually find out the exact subgroups with genetic differences that your DNA most closely resembles. You do that by spitting into a beaker and then sending off your DNA sample to Ancestry.com. Here’s what happens:
Once your results have been processed … you can log into your account and see an approximate composition of your ancestral DNA, which dates back around 500 years. For example, if your grandparents were half Polish and half Irish, your DNA results wouldn’t necessarily reflect that closely, but they would show you roughly where your family came from 10 generations ago.
Here’s how the science works:
Basically, your DNA is tested using several hundred “markers,” and compared using the “signal” those markers share strongly in common with geographic populations worldwide. Some markers have a very strong association with a specific location, making the results much more reliable, while others — such as those associated within central Europe, France, and Germany — are much less so, making that fine of a distinction often difficult to assume with a high level of accuracy.
These “subgroups with genetic differences” are real. Homo sapiens would be a bizarre exception to natural selection if they weren’t. And these genetic variations have changed within the last 500 years. Imagine how much they might have changed over hundreds of millennia, with subgroups largely separated from each other and adapting to very different challenges, diseases and climates. Commenter “kochevnik” addresses this point here:
Both the cases [UDDanB] mentioned do point to higher likelihoods of congenital disorders among certain ancestries (although if I’m not mistaken, Tay-Sachs is more an issue among Ashkenazi Jews, not Jews as a whole).
But in both cases a particular ancestry leads to a recommendation test for a particular gene. You don’t get cystic fibrosis because you are white. There is a higher likelihood that that condition will occur if you are white, which triggers to a test to find the actual gene that causes the disorder.
In the case of race and IQ, it’s comparing test scores to self-reported categories, the labels of which have been influenced by US history. No one has (as far as I can see) just made the case that x gene leads to y IQ score.
Not yet, but they are hard at work in China trying to figure it out. A lab partly funded by the government is examining the genome of 2,200 individuals with stratospheric IQs of over 160. They intend to compare those genomes with people of average IQ and see where the genetic differences are. This is not quack research – although it is a daunting scientific challenge with something as genetically complex as intelligence. Scientists have discovered a series of genes that regulate height, for example. But intelligence will require an enormous number of DNA studies before we get a clue. But the idea that genetics has nothing to with subgroups in human history or intelligence is bizarre. TNC responds:
The example I am more familiar with is sickle cell which is more prevalent among African-Americans than it is among “Caucasians.” But what do we mean by Caucasian? It’s obvious from this map that sickle-cell affects a lot more people than just “blacks”–including some who in America would be called “Caucasian.”
I appreciate your point. (No sarcasm at all.) I am not saying that there is no point in asking a patient about their ancestry. I am saying that the minute you say “Caucasian” you have entered the realm of race and social constructs, because “Caucasian”–like black–is a term defined by actual people, with actual agendas.
On this we can agree. “Race” as a term is very nebulous. But human subgroups with similar ancestries can have group differences in DNA – and intelligence is highly unlikely to have no genetic basis at all (although most now believe its impact is greatly qualified by cultural and developmental differences).
But what I really want TNC to address is the data. Yes, “race” is a social construct when we define it as “white”, “black,” “Asian” or, even more ludicrously, “Hispanic.” But why then does the overwhelming data show IQ as varying in statistically significant amounts between these completely arbitrary racially constructed populations? Is the testing rigged? If the categories are arbitrary, then the IQs should be randomly distributed. But they aren’t, even controlling for education, income, etc.
That’s the core problem with debunking the Richwine thesis. The policy inferences are repellent to me. But the data are real. And they correspond to our socially constructed racial categories. There’s no correlation between intelligence and height, for example, or between intelligence and gender (except arguably at the extreme extremes). So why would our constructed and arbitrary racial categories yield such dramatic IQ differentials? Remember this holds true even when controlling for class, money and education. The answer is: we can only guess. Once they find a specific genetic pattern for intelligence, as they are looking for in China, we may find out.
Poor Steve Miller, the now former acting IRS director:
He’s just a fall guy. He wasn’t director for most of the period in question (though he was serving in the agency). And both he and his predecessor acted properly and swiftly to shut down the inappropriate criteria when it was brought to their attention.
But someone had to be fired. Otherwise President Obama wouldn’t seem like he was taking action. And Obama actually didn’t have many choices for whom to fire. It’s hard for the president to axe ordinary employees at the IRS at will. The agency is insulated from the executive branch — in part due to fears that a president will fire employees if they don’t discriminate against groups or individuals who’re fighting his agenda. In this case, that insulation is actually protecting employees who might have discriminated against conservative groups from being fired by the White House. Now there’s an unintended consequence for you.
Update from a reader:
Miller wasn’t as uninvolved as it may seem at first glance.
He was the head of the exempt org division where the trouble started for several years, and then was promoted to the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement – the exempt org boss’s boss. So though he wasn’t running it directly when all this happened, it bore his imprint. Lois Lerner, who ineffectually addressed the issue in 2011, was his protegee and subordinate. And he has a reputation for getting into the details at work – something he uncharacteristically failed to do in this case.
The biggest deal of all is that Miller may well have obstructed the work of Congress, a criminal violation, by not revealing what he knew about the targeting in letters and hearing testimony after he learned of it.
Yes, it did stop cold once he became aware of the issue. But it was an issue for two-and-a-half years before he became aware of it. The people who kept him in the dark never seem to have paid a price. And then he apparently kept Congress in the dark in turn. Not sure what that makes him, but it’s not quite an innocent victim.
Another:
I thought I would point out that Steve Miller’s title was acting commissioner, not acting director. A minor point, but there is a distinction.
What would normally be seen as good news for the president is now being spun into bad news. Given our current state of knowledge, it does not appear that the president had any direct role in the inter-agency tussle over how to describe chaotic events in Benghazi. Equally, there doesn’t seem to be – so far – any indication that the IRS Cincinnati office shenanigans reach to the Treasury, let alone the president. On the broad subpoenas for the AP in a leak investigation, the DOJ was being egged on by Congressional Republicans, although it is perfectly fair to say that the Obama administration has been far more focused on pursuing espionage charges than any recent administration.
The Watergate analogy, deployed rather cavalierly by George Will today, is the reverse of what we are seeing. The president was not directing any of this. The attorney general recused himself from the AP investigation. The IRS outrage came after repeated calls from Congressional Democrats for the IRS to give 501(c)4s extra scrutiny because they were – pretty obviously – campaign appendages. A flavor of one letter:
We strongly urge you to fully enforce the law and related court rulings that clearly reserve 501(c)(4) tax status for legitimate nonprofit organizations. And we urge you to investigate and stop any abuse of the tax code by groups whose true mission is to influence the outcome of federal elections.
On Benghazi, it seems to me we have a classic inter-agency tussle over how to present the facts – but also a reasonable process to hammer out a consensus. The Benghazi emails released yesterday do not seem that scandalous to me.
So the critique now is that the president is not sufficiently in charge, that he is a bystander to his own administration. I have to say this has some appeal as a general critique, but it isn’t borne out by these scandals. The IRS is rigorously independent of the White House – and the Cincinnati office was picked as a place to investigate the 501(c)4s because it was far away from Washington and therefore seen as more neutral. The reason to look closely at those new groups was perfectly legitimate, even if the partisan implementation is abhorrent. On the AP subpoenas, the decision was rightly made by the DOJ, independently of the president.
If we are to blame the president, are we really saying that we want a president involved in or directly monitoring these procedures?
Should he make a call on subpoenaing AP phone records? Nope. Should he be in the middle of an inter-agency fight over whom to blame for the Benghazi attack? Nope. Should he have known about and stopped partisan bias at the IRS? On that last question, arguably yes. It was in the news; there were vocal complaints about disparate treatment; there were calls to investigate. It’s not unreasonable to think that a president concerned about this should have instructed the acting head of the IRS to make sure no politics was involved.
But even that last one is a stretch. And if Obama had been that involved in the minutiae of all this, here is what the GOP would now be saying: 1. He’s another micro-managing Jimmy Carter; and 2. He’s a control freak out to persecute us. Hovering above all this, as David Ignatius notes, is the context of a Washington where everyone is so terrified of scandal, they ensure they do not have direct knowledge of what’s going on below them. Holder recused himself; Obama must now be relieved his fingerprints are nowhere near the IRS; on Benghazi, Clinton was hassled because of what a civil servant, Victoria Nuland, said in defending her turf and agency.
And hovering above it still is the media lull after Obama’s re-election. Ratings are down. This is the first blood in the water since Obama took office four and a half years ago – a record you might think would be relevant to our current discussion. So we have the frenzy; and the hyperboles; and then the slow discovery of the actual detail. All of this is part of our system. And it’s better than any alternative. But it’s a distortive lens to view politics through, when we have a still-critical long-term fiscal crisis, a climate emergency, implementation of healthcare reform, and immigration reform to focus on.
Obama has made the right call in firing the interim IRS head, releasing all the Benghazi emails, and pledging a full investigation in the IRS matter. The rest is Washington’s need for conflict and partisan advantage. But this too, I suspect, will pass, unless there really is something in there that we do not yet know.
(Photo: US President Barack Obama uses an umbrella as he walks under rain to board Marine One after visiting wounded service members at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on March 2, 2012. By Jewel Samad/Getty.)
By reminding its citizenry that government tyranny is not an abstract concept, the IRS has done America a considerable favor. “Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then,” wrote Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly. Indeed. Next time an authoritarian explains how, say, a national gun registry will be just swell — and labels its naysayers as neurotic — his opponents will have a new and useful shorthand: “IRS scandal.”
Why, you might ask, do I use “paranoia,” instead of the more palatable “skepticism”? Paranoia, after all, is an involuntary reaction — less of a tendency to “wait and see” than a recipe for constant fear. I will tell you why: because reflexive suspicion of government power is a magnificent and virtuous tendency, and one that should be the starting point of all political conversation in a free republic.
Jonah Goldberg agrees that the “fear of tyranny, healthy and unhealthy, are American traits, not right-wing ones”, but is less gung-ho about embracing the word “paranoia”:
If you know in your gut something is wrong, but you lack the ability to distinguish your emotions and instincts from facts and reason, it is all the more likely you’ll succumb to paranoia — and that’s a bad thing.
The word “skepticism” isn’t quite strong enough for me because one can be convinced from a position of skepticism, “Look, we’re not doing anything bad. How about it?” As a general rule, I want people far more afraid of the government than that would allow. I want people saying, “I don’t care how safe you say it is, I’m just not doing it. Ever.” There is never going to be a government or a society in which “tyranny is not just around the corner,” to borrow a phrase from the president. Never, ever. And there are never going to be people who can be trusted to rule.
“Some of the beauty of writing for network is that there are so many things you can’t do, but that sort of pushes you to do things you didn’t even think you could do to get around that,” says Meriwether. “I do miss going there, I really do, and I hope—I want—in the future to write something that gets a little bit dirtier and goes there a little more. But it has been a really good exercise for me in learning not to rely on that, in learning, like: OK, so we can’t show boobs, we can’t say the word ‘dick,’ we can’t just say the most shocking thing. We have to come up with a way around it.”
One way around the obstacles was to anchor the show in a character who is a bit of a prude. Jess’s girlishness was something critics initially found off-putting about the show, but Meriwether wasn’t creating a symbol, after all. She was looking for things she found funny, then finding means for getting them across. And so there was a whole episode in the first season during which Jess is afraid to say “penis.” As Meriwether delights in recounting, in that context, standards and practices allowed five instances of the word. This year, she and her writers tried to get seven penises into an episode; that was too much.
During a debate over network TV, Willa Paskin compares “New Girl” to “Girls”:
Why is “New Girl” downgraded so drastically because you’ve seen something like it before? I get that originality counts, but I think this is part of the strain of Book Report-ism that has crept into TV-watching (in the corner of the universe that writes about “Girls” on the internet a ton, where I live). We watch TV for pleasure! There is no shame in that! If “New Girl” makes one laugh and smile a ton, if it is super-super enjoyable and pleasant, that is awesome, period. If its version of self-asphyxiation sex did not launch a million blog posts and New York Times op-eds, that’s fine. It has a different set of intentions than “Girls,” among them trying to make millions of people laugh. Which is crazy hard to do! Originality is important, but I think the fixation on it obscures the way that even the very best, most original things riff on what came before—the way that “The Wire” functioned as a genre cop show, where the gang got back together at the start of each season; the way that “Mad Men” works as a melodrama; the way that “30 Rock”’s workplace is structured almost exactly like “Mary Tyler Moore”—and backseats pleasure like it’s something lesser than, instead of being the whole point. TV is not homework, and that is one of the very best things about it.
Michael Paterniti profiles Sodeto, a Spanish village of 250 which won “El Gordo,” Spain’s enormous Christmas lottery. Some of the consequences:
Paco buys Marisol, his hairdresser wife, a new wedding ring. Marisol goes to New York with her sisters and stands in Times Square, an unimaginable dream, which is when it occurs to her that she’s really won. At home, Paco and Marisol buy a bigger tank “for pig pee and excrement,” to make fertilizer. “When you have 2,500 pigs and you go from 600- to 800-liter tanks, it saves a lot of time,” says Paco. “And your quality of life gets a little better.”
Meanwhile, others buy new cars, Audis and BMWs. Carmen buys a couple of Harley-Davidsons. Someone vacations in Venice, another in Mexico. They return from their trips exhausted. After eating every day of their lives at 1 p.m. at the kitchen table in their house, they’re overwhelmed by the outside world, by all the choices, hundreds and thousands of possible restaurants serving food at all hours. “That was fourteen days of panic,” they say when they return. “It’s loco out there.”
Why would anyone want to leave this place called Luck?
Everyone seems to have their kitchen redone, replacing the old with the modern—appliances, cabinets, and counters—bordering on the garish. One farmer, Pedro Luis, guts his abode across the road and in its place builds—in village terms—a mansion. He installs a window in the kitchen, to look out into his garage. That way he can make dinner while keeping a close eye on his new tractor.
It’s hard to remember now, but at one time, MTV really was watched just like commercial radio was listened to: you would turn it on and see what came around, and if you particularly liked a video, you’d wait a while and hope you heard it. That’s what half the slumber parties of my adolescence were about: waiting for Michael Jackson or Duran Duran.
We don’t wait very much anymore. It’s not just that this model of MTV largely went away, or that getting most of your music listening through the radio faded. It’s that the entire idea of ephemeral availability — that you would have to sit and wait for something to be played for you, and that at other times you had to do without it — is simply not how people expect to digest much of anything anymore.
She notes the influence of MTV Unplugged:
MTV Unplugged played a critical role in the development of authenticity policing. The idea that pop stars — entertainers — had to prove themselves in stripped-down formats went hand in hand with the suspicion that they were inauthentic in the first place, an idea that music videos didn’t invent but certainly advanced. (Milli Vanilli released Girl You Know It’s True in 1989, the same year MTV debuted Unplugged.) …
In the end, MTV pushed spectacle in music, but simultaneously created a market for an authenticity proving ground, which it then filled. Just as “Money For Nothing” could be both of MTV and suspicious of MTV, artists could combat their MTV images … on MTV. That was the way in which the channel was revolutionary: for a brief cultural moment, it was both the disease and the cure – both supply and demand.
Florence Williams asks why a company should be allowed to patent the genes that prompted Jolie’s double mastectomy:
Although they reside in our bodies, the BRCA genes are effectively owned by a bio-tech giant, Myriad Genetics, which patented the genes in the mid-1990s. Should a single corporation control access to DNA that exists in every human cell? Numerous scientific organizations and consumer health groups have decried the patents, saying they restrict critical research and prevent many women from having access to the tests. The patents also mean women can’t seek second opinions from other labs and they mean that the BRCA genes must be excluded from other more comprehensive test panels, which are offered elsewhere for much less money. The company argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last month that the patents are appropriate because of its technology used to isolate and analyze the genes, and that without patent protection it would not be able to recoup its research development costs.
SCOTUS Blog held a symposium on the Myriad case back in February. Here’s part of Andrew Torrance’s contribution to the debate:
With Myriad, the Court stands on the verge of endorsing a venerable principle in biotechnology patent law: human beings are improper subject matter for patenting. Under U.S. law, humans may not be property. Even human body parts, such asorgans, may usually not be owned and sold as property, whether from the living or the dead. The evidence from attempts to maintain patent rights covering hESCs, IVC products, human thought, and human genes are in accord: intellectual property may not confer ownership over human beings or human-related inventions. Add to this the force of AIA Section 33, banning patent claims “directed to or encompassing a human organism,” and it is likely the Supreme Court will answer its question on appeal in the negative: human genes are not patentable. Such a result will roil the biotechnology industry, while delighting the many critics of patents claiming human genes. However, the full effect on biotechnology may be modest because synthetic genes are quite likely to remain patentable.
The Court’s doctrine invites it to add up the pluses and minuses of the patent: does it do more good than harm? The context here would seem to make that an easy calculation. On the minus side: documented higher prices and less help for women who fear breast or ovarian cancer; less research; and fewer scientific advances – effects that would be felt widely as other genes are patented. On the plus side: not much. A Court that began its most recent patent decision by worrying about patents that “would risk disproportionately tying up the use of the underlying natural laws” is unlikely to find this a difficult decision.
The question is not so much whether the isolated gene is, in its essence, a new thing; it is instead whether it takes significant human intervention to go from the chromosome in its native state to a purified and isolated gene. I think it does; and that the gene as claimed ought therefore be deemed a new (patentable) thing. The fact of significant human intervention, and the importance of purified genes “commercially and therapeutically,” leads me to conclude that we should call them non-naturally occurring inventions.
Any number of biologic drugs have been developed that, according to a recent Federal Trade Commission report, “have improved medical treatments, reduced suffering, and saved the lives of many Americans.” These drugs were developed by companies that isolated the genes – including, but not limited to, erythropoietin, human growth hormone, interferon, blood clotting Factors VIII and XI, human insulin, tissue plasminogen activator – encoding them, because only by doing so could these therapeutically important proteins be produced in useful quantities. The patent incentive was instrumental in supporting investment in these companies, and in developing a biotechnology industry in the U.S. that has been a world leader for twenty-five years. As anyone following the debate on follow-on biologics will recognize, the need for patent protection to attract investment in what remains a fundamentally risky industry has not diminished.
Recap of oral arguments here. SCOTUS is expected to rule on the case before the end of this term.
In 1902, the poet and critic Sadakichi Hartmann attempted a performance described as a “melody in odors”:
In 1906, a movie theater in Pennsylvania hoped to increase interest in its newsreel of the Rose Parade by fanning the room with rose oil, to the complaints of everyone in attendance. A 1960 movie called Scent of Mystery was the only film ever to use a failed invention called “Smell-O-Vision,” a patented system of odors cued to the actions on-screen. At Disneyland’s California Adventure theme park, opened nearly a hundred years after Sadakichi’s performance, a gentle smell of citrus is spritzed on visitors during a ride where they seemingly soar over a grove of orange trees.
The invention of the perfume concert was a singular achievement; the execution of it was something else entirely.
Sadakichi insisted that his concert would represent an advance in technology, that the event had previously never been fully realized “due largely to the lack of an apparatus capable of driving odors forcibly into an audience and of producing precise impressions even at great distances… Such an apparatus has been invented lately.” The “apparatus,” an electric fan, was now blowing over the audience a sickly strong perfume of roses, which spread quickly across the orchestra, rising into the balcony seats. One man shouted that he “did not like the smell of the scuppers and there were too many aboard who were seasick.” Sadakichi responded that they were now arriving in England and were smelling the native wild rose. Another voice shouted that the creeping odor reminded him of the time the gas meter leaked. The audience had begun to turn.
“Now we reach Germany,” Sadakichi continued. The girls slid in a second square of linen, and after another long minute the distinct odor of violets was blown from the stage into the balconies. “Who does not remember plucking violets on a fair morning along the banks of the Rhine?” Sadakichi asked. “The violet is Germany’s flower.” But no one in the theater remembered plucking violets. Violets were soaps and cheap toilet water, saltwater taffy and last night’s whore. Roses were women in fox fur and fake hair, or husbands begging for forgiveness.
The perfumes that Sadakichi assumed would carve out the landscapes of provincial Europe had little or no effect on his audience. The nostalgia was his and his alone.
The Dish 