12.19.07
Warning signs: cultural loss division
From the New Yorker. I recall when I was working with my predecessor as director of admissions, he would ask an applicant, “Do you read books?”, usually getting a positive answer. He would ask the applicant to tell us about books recently read, and then get the applicant to talk about it. The reason for the phrasing of the question, he told me, was because if you asked, “Do you read much?”, you’d always get a yes and then have to probe to find whether books were being read or the reading was only of newspapers and magazines. A book presents a lengthy narrative/argument that requires attention, memory, and the ability to build a mental structure that supports the weight of the argument.
It looks as though the ability to read a book is becoming rare.
In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.
You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
This decline is not news to those who depend on print for a living. In 1970, according to Editor & Publisher International Year Book, there were 62.1 million weekday newspapers in circulation—about 0.3 papers per person. Since 1990, circulation has declined steadily, and in 2006 there were just 52.3 million weekday papers—about 0.17 per person. In January 1994, forty-nine per cent of respondents told the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that they had read a newspaper the day before. In 2006, only forty-three per cent said so, including those who read online. Book sales, meanwhile, have stagnated. The Book Industry Study Group estimates that sales fell from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. According to the Department of Labor, American households spent an average of a hundred and sixty-three dollars on reading in 1995 and a hundred and twenty-six dollars in 2005. In “To Read or Not to Read,” the N.E.A. reports that American households’ spending on books, adjusted for inflation, is “near its twenty-year low,” even as the average price of a new book has increased.
More alarming are indications that Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability.
Today’s mundanities
I got the standing rib roast (two ribs) at Grove Market—the quonset in Pacific Grove. Whole Foods was charge $10/lb, Nob Hill $9/lb, and Grove Market $8/lb—and Grove Market’s butcher shop has excellent quality meat.
Found the fresh horseradish root at Nob Hill though—only place I saw that carried it. Got the crème fraîche at Grove Market, so we’re set for the sauce.
Cleared out the refrigerator mostly: I’m going to dry-age the roast starting on Saturday. In the meantime, I identified a need: couple of rectangular wire-mesh baskets, not very high, to hold the little stuff (small jars, small bags (three jalapeños, say, or five sienna peppers, or a little bunch of fresh rosemary or thyme), and the like). I can then slide the basket out to find what I’m looking for and things are less likely to get lost in a shelf pile.
So things proceed apace.
KBR, the DoJ, and other bottom-dwellers
Last week, Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) said on CNN that he did not believe that gang rape in Iraq of former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones was “an isolated case of assault.” Poe then encouraged “other victims” to notify his office.
In his prepared testimony for the House Judiciary Committee today, Poe said that his office had been contacted by three women other than Ms. Jones about sexual assaults they sustained while working for KBR in Iraq:
Since Jamie has gone public with her experience, my office has heard from 3 other women. Of course, my office will furnish the names of these women to the Judiciary Committee if needed.
Poe named one of the women, Tracy Barker, “who says that she was sexually assaulted in Iraq by a State Department employee who still works at the State Department today.” ABC News identified the State Department employee as Ali Mokhtare, who the Justice Department “declined to prosecute,” despite “a recommendation from the State Department that he be charged.
Regarding the other two women, Poe said that “they both report sexual assaults and sexual harrassment by their coworkers.” He also said that one of the women asserted that KBR not only protected an accused rapist, but also punished her for contacting Army MPs about the situation:
The 2 other women are also former KBR employees. They both report sexual assaults and sexual harassment by their coworkers in Iraq and neither woman has seen any federal law enforcement action. One of the women informed my office that she was molested several times and raped once by her KBR coworkers. When she reported the crime to her immediate supervisor, she was told that they would take care of it. She returned to work two days later and found her rapist working alongside of her. She panicked and called Army MPs, who escorted the rapist off of the base. However, she was subsequently fired. It seems that, unfortunately, Jamie’s case is not unique.
In her testimony today, Jones said that her job had also been threatened. KBR supervisors told her there was “no guarantee of a job,” either in Iraq or back in Houston, if she didn’t “stay and get over it.”
The Gavel has some video clips from the hearing here.
The anti-establishment candidates
The media tries hard to ignore them, and if that doesn’t work, it belittles them. Mr. Greenwald:
Digby writes that the media is not merely obsessed with dreary “horse-race” coverage, but that their coverage even in that regard is profoundly flawed. In particular, she notes that two of the most significant “horse-race” political phenomena of the year — the extraordinary fundraising by the Ron Paul campaign and the massive popularity of Mike Huckabee’s candidacy among Republican voters — are receiving scant attention, at least scant analytical attention, from our political press.
There is no question that the media has paid far less attention to Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee than the respective successes of their campaigns merit. To that list, though, I would add a third candidacy that has received far less media attention than it merits by all objective metrics (polls, stature and money): the John Edwards campaign. In 2004, Edwards was the party’s Vice Presidential nominee, came closer than anyone else to beating Kerry, and has continuously been very near the top of Iowa’s polls. Yet the media has all but ignored him — it’s Clinton v. Obama in their World — except to mock him on the pettiest of grounds, from his hair to his house.
Edwards, Paul and Huckabee are obviously disparate in significant ways — ideologically, temperamentally, and otherwise. But there is a vital attribute common to those three campaigns that explains the media’s scorn: they are all, in their own ways, anti-establishment candidates, meaning they are outside and critical of the system of which national journalists are a critical part, the system which employs and rewards our journalists and forms the base of their identity and outlook. Any candidate who criticizes and opposes that system — not in piecemeal ways but fundamentally — will be, first, ignored and, then, treated as losers by the press.
It is very striking how little Edwards’ substantive critique of our political system has penetrated into the national discourse. That’s because the centerpiece of his campaign is a critique that is a full frontal assault on our political establishment. His argument is not merely that the political system needs reform, but that it is corrupt at its core — “rigged” in favor of large corporate interests and their lobbyists, who literally write our laws and control the Congress. Anyone paying even casual attention to the extraordinary bipartisan effort on behalf of telecom immunity, and so many other issues driven almost exclusively by lobbyists, cannot reasonably dispute this critique.
Yet because that argument indicts the same Beltway culture of which our political journalists are an integral part, and further attacks the system’s power brokers who are the friends, sources, and peers of those journalists, they instinctively react with confusion, scorn and hostility towards Edwards’ campaign. They condescendingly dismiss it as manipulative populist swill, or cynically assume that it’s just a ploy to distinguish himself by “moving left.” In the eyes of our Beltawy press, the idea that our political system is “rigged” or corrupt must be anything other than true or sincerely held.
As Digby notes, Ron Paul is going to raise more money than any Republican candidate this quarter; he just topped the record for most money raised in a single day; and has now exceeded Howard Dean’s 2004 quarter total when Dean was at the peak of his online fundraising prowess. Huckabee is now tied for the lead in national polls and is leading in several of the key early states. Yet our establishment media stars continue to sneer at these anti-establishment candidates as though they are aberrational jokes, and there is virtually no serious effort to understand the meaning of their success.
Worse, whenever these candidates are discussed, it almost never entails any discussion of the critiques they are making. Is Edwards right that corporations and lobbyists dictate legislation in Washington and that this state of affairs is profoundly anti-democratic and corrupt? Are Paul’s criticisms of our bipartisan imperial policies and his warnings of resulting financial unsustainability (and increasing anti-Americanism) accurate? Is Huckabee’s claim true that the GOP has obliterated the economic prospects of its own middle- and lower-middle-class followers? Who knows. Who cares. One searches any media discussions in vain for mention of such matters. As Eric Boehlert writes:
The Army in meltdown
Good and informative article in the Washington Monthly, which begins:
Matt Kapinos was born into the military, at a U.S. Army hospital outside Frankfurt, Germany. It was 1979, and his father was an Army officer, one of thousands of soldiers stationed along the plains of central Europe. Kapinos moved around a lot growing up—thirteen places in all, including upstate New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Kansas, and Korea. From his perspective, these locations all appeared pretty much the same. No matter where he lived, at 5 p.m. everyone paused as the American flag was lowered to the sound of a bugle. He attended schools run by the Defense Department, where many of the teachers were married to soldiers, and where military police chaperoned the school bus at times of heightened security. It wasn’t until he was a high school junior that his family first lived “off post.” His father, then a colonel, got a job at the Pentagon, and so the family moved to Springfield, Virginia. Unsurprisingly, by then Kapinos could imagine only one career for himself: he wanted to be an officer in the Army.
One spring afternoon in his senior year, Kapinos came home from track practice to find a FedEx envelope on the doorstep. It contained his acceptance to the military academy at West Point, the alma mater of great American generals going back to Ulysses S. Grant. Kapinos’s father, who had also attended West Point, “tried to let me know what I was getting into, that you lose a little bit of control over your life and that the Army is not always fun and games,” Kapinos recalled. “[But] my dad always pushed us to, you know, do something to contribute. I guess I wanted to do something that seeks glory, to do great things.”
A different take on Santa Claus
A personification of the bear god. Article by Robert Anton Wilson.
Those mysterious traffic jams: explained
It’s the fault of drivers who brake too sharply:
Mathematicians from the University of Exeter have solved the mystery of traffic jams by developing a model to show how major delays occur on our roads, with no apparent cause. Many traffic jams leave drivers baffled as they finally reach the end of a tail-back to find no visible cause for their delay. Now, a team of mathematicians from the Universities of Exeter, Bristol and Budapest, have found the answer and published their findings in leading academic journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.
The team developed a mathematical model to show the impact of unexpected events such as a lorry pulling out of its lane on a dual carriageway. Their model revealed that slowing down below a critical speed when reacting to such an event, a driver would force the car behind to slow down further and the next car back to reduce its speed further still. The result of this is that several miles back, cars would finally grind to a halt, with drivers oblivious to the reason for their delay. The model predicts that this is a very typical scenario on a busy highway (above 15 vehicles per km). The jam moves backwards through the traffic creating a so-called ‘backward travelling wave’, which drivers may encounter many miles upstream, several minutes after it was triggered.
Obama’s approach: the drawbacks
Krugman spells out the difficulties of trying to take a middle path in the current political context:
I’ve been alerted to an interesting Boston Globe article about Barack Obama’s role, when he was in the Illinois legislature, in the attempt to get the state committed to universal health care. It turns out that the story very much prefigures the debates we’re having right now.
Obama later watered down the bill after hearing from insurers and after a legal precedent surfaced during the debate indicating that it would be unconstitutional for one legislative assembly to pass a law requiring a future legislative assembly to craft a healthcare plan.
During debate on the bill on May 19, 2004, Obama portrayed himself as a conciliatory figure. He acknowledged that he had “worked diligently with the insurance industry,” as well as Republicans, to limit the legislation’s reach and noted that the bill had undergone a “complete restructuring” after industry representatives “legitimately” raised fears that it would result in a single-payer system.
“The original presentation of the bill was the House version that we radically changed – we radically changed – and we changed in response to concerns that were raised by the insurance industry,” Obama said, according to the session transcript.
To be fair, the piece also says this:
During debate over the Health Care Justice Act, Obama also attacked the insurers, accusing the industry of “fear-mongering” by claiming, even after he made changes they wanted, that the bill would lead to a government takeover.
This story gives a lot of context to the debate over health reform now. Obama clearly sees himself playing the same role as president that he did as a state legislator — as a broker among groups, including the insurance industry, as someone who can find a compromise solution that’s acceptable to a wide range of opinion.
My thoughts: being president isn’t at all like being a state legislator, Illinois Republicans aren’t like the national Republican party, 2009 won’t be 2003, and the insurance industry’s opposition to national health reform — which must, if it is to mean anything, strike deep at the industry’s fundamental business — will be much harsher than its opposition to a basically quite mild state-level reform effort.
The point is that if national health reform is going to happen, it will be as the result of a no-holds-barred fight of an entirely different order from what Obama saw in Illinois. The president’s role will have to be far more confrontational, involve far more twisting of arms and rallying of the public against the special interests, than Obama’s role as a state legislator in the Illinois case. And it will take place against a backdrop of fierce attacks not just from the industry but from Republicans who fear, rightly, that any kind of reform will move the country in a more liberal direction.
My worries about Obama are that he doesn’t seem to understand this — that he thinks that in 2009, as president, he can broker a national health care reform the same way that as a state legislator, in 2003, he brokered a deal that mollified the insurance industry. That’s a recipe for getting nowhere.
I have to agree: getting a good national health insurance plan is going to be a fight every step of the way, and Big Pharma and the insurance companies are not going to give an inch. The only way it will happen is with a strong and combative president and a solid Democratic majority in Congress.
Five best Christmas TV commercials
Christmas sometimes seems consumerism writ large, but some of these are very nice.
T&H Grafton
Another Truefitt & Hill shaving cream today: Grafton, applied with Rooney Style 3 Size 1 Super. Extremely nice lather—and the thin layer of cream required a couple of additions of water to the brush to fully lather. Then the English Aristocrat with a Wilkinson Economie blade (scroll down). Not sure how many times the blade has been used—I did get a couple of tiny weepers on one side of my upper lip, but My Nik Is Sealed stopped them in their tracks.
Aftershave was the Stetson, which I find I like. Coffee is at hand…
