A jaundiced look at the world we live in.
A little humor for the weekend (h/t Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars):
From Butch Hancock of the band Flatlanders:
“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”
I was going to post about Obama’s speech this morning, but Tod Gitlin has already said it, and said it best.
He sounded like a winner. Like all great preachers, he started methodically and built to crescendos. The Republican responder, Charles Boustany of Louisiana, sounded like a whiner, crying, Deficit, deficit, and government-run, government-run, and built toward nothing. Obama charged the Republicans with specific lies. He made the obligatory gestures toward bipartisanship, including the unexpected shout-out to John McCain, who had campaigned in favor of mandatory catastrophic insurance–and I don’t want to be cynical about those gestures, even though I think he’s naive about the other party’s intentions–but that’s not where his stresses fell. He was reminding the majority who voted for him why they did that. He was reminding independents that the reason why no progress has been made toward universality, mandates, and affordabiity is Republicans–as with 1935’s Social Security and 1965’s Medicare laws. He was reminding them, as well as the few rational Republicans left, that the insurance companies are not the glories of American value.
He did not sound like a patsy. He offered specific programs but the peroration was clear: he stood for values and national character. If he went too easy on the insurance companies for my taste–his audience could have used the information that Americans pay insurance companies twice as much as they pay doctors–he took a proper jab at Republicans (they know who they are) who make up the party of fear. You can say that he’s still not willing to talk to Americans straight about the need to limit high-tech medicine for the very old and very frail. Presidents won’t do that.
But he bet on the strength of the American character. It was his finest public moment since the Inaugural. I’m betting national decency wins.
Every couple of years, I team up with the Dean of the Journalism school at IUPUI to teach a course in Mass Media and Public Affairs. To suggest that it is challenging to describe the relationship between sound information and public policy would be a definite understatement! It was challenging even before newspapers began failing, and right now, it is anyone’s guess what the media landscape will look like ten years hence.
A recent article in the Atlantic addresses journalism’s profound transition from newspapers and broadcast evening news to…what, exactly? We can’t yet know, but Mark Bowden, the author, describes today’s landscape pretty accurately:
With journalists being laid off in droves, ideologues have stepped forward to provide the “reporting” that feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition . . .
Over at Balkinization, Frank Pasquale has an interesting analysis of the philosophical roots of opposition to healthcare reform.http://balkin.blogspot.com/2009/09/risk-health-care-and-red-america.html It is worth reading in its entirety, but the last paragraph does sum up the situation as it appears right now:
The really appealing goal of reform–a strong public option that would be part of an exchange open to all–appears to be more of a bargaining chip than a firm commitment for the Obama Administration. Strategically, if your goal is to get “something” through Congress, this makes a great deal of sense: Republicans and some waivering Democrats think a public option smacks of socialism. But as a political matter, it is draining support for reform. People can understand a public option, and building support for it might have been as decisive to Democrats’ fortunes as FDR’s reformulation of the American social contract in the 1930s. Sadly, Obama’s technocrats appear more attracted to wonk-talk like “bending the cost curve” than the forceful moral case for collective responsibility for health. Only the President can correct that course. It takes an ideology to beat an ideology.
I had, of course, heard of Alan Turing. I knew he was brilliant, and had cracked Nazi codes during WWII, allowing the allies to access information that was critical to winning the war. But I was unaware of the tragic “back story,” until I read that there was a movement in England to issue a posthumous apology to him.
As Ed Brayton over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/09/an_apology_to_alan_turing.php has reported:
Turing’s story is both remarkable and appalling. His work laid the foundation for the development of computers, a development as significant as the harnessing of fire or the invention of the telephone. But during WW2, he was also the man largely responsible for breaking the Nazi codes and allowing the good guys to win that war and prevent Hitler from taking over.
His reward for that? He was prosecuted for being a homosexual, stripped of his security clearance, and subjected to chemical castration. He killed himself two years later. One of the backers of this campaign said, “With Turing’s death, Britain and the world lost one of its finest intellectual minds. A government apology and posthumous pardon are long overdue.”
How sad. Another example of unreasoning hatred depriving mankind of a great resource. It reminds me of the Arabic-speaking gay soldiers discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” even as the U.S. was desperate for recruits who could speak Arabic.
I will never understand people who hate or fear other people so much–people they don’t even know!–that they are willing to harm themselves in order to hurt “them.”