Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 234

The Same Old Face Of Heroin

Maia Szalavitz rails against the media narrative that heroin use is just now penetrating the white middle class, which paints an inaccurate picture of the “typical” heroin addict as poor and black:

As far back as the 1970s, the heroin-addicted population had a white majority—and in every decade since then, white heroin addicts have outnumbered blacks. Although, because blacks are a minority in the population, they are somewhat over-represented in most of the late 20th century. Nonetheless, from the 1980s onward, the typical heroin addict was not black. And in the most recent group, blacks are actually under-represented. African Americans make up around 12% of the population—but in the 2010s, 90% of heroin addicts are white.

So why is today’s media hyperventilating about heroin breaking free from the ghetto, when that had already happened back in Ronald Reagan’s era? And when is the media going to stop rewriting the same story Newsweek first ran in 1981 about the new “Middle-Class Junkies”? This will only happen if we examine why we’re so keen to see white middle-class addicts as “not typical.”

Paved With Good Intentions

Fallows has a sobering piece by William Polk on the devastating consequences of American meddling in the Middle East:

Starting in the west and moving east: in Libya, having destroyed the Qaddafi regime, we unleashed forces that have virtually torn Libya apart and have spilled over into Central Africa, opening a new area of instability. In Egypt, the “non-coup-coup” of General Sisi has produced no ideas on what to do to help the Egyptian people except to execute large numbers of their religious leaders; he has also made clear his suspicion of and opposition to us. In occupied Palestine, the Israeli state is reducing the population to misery and driving it to rage while, in Washington, its extreme right-wing government is thumbing its nose at its benefactor, America. Our relations have never been worse. In Syria, we are engaged in arming, training and funding essentially the same people whom the new Egyptian regime is about to hang and whom we are considering bombing in Iraq. In Iraq, we are about to become engaged in supporting the regime we installed and which is the close ally of the Syrian and Iranian regimes that we have been trying for years to destroy; yet in Iran, we appear to be on the point of reversing our policy of destroying its government and seeking its help to defeat the insurgents in Iraq. And on and on.

He reminds us of a time when the US was not regarded as a constant menacing meddler in almost every nook and cranny of the planet:

Admittedly, in my day in planning American policy in the Middle East, we never had to find our ways out of such a disarray. My tasks were comparatively easy. So, perhaps, our actions are aspects of a shrewd, nimble and skillful policy that I am simply not clever enough to understand. I certainly hope so.

But, even if they are, what is the “bottom line,” as businessmen like to say, in terms of our objective of being “secure?”

Allow me a personal answer. When I first traveled through the deserts, farm lands, villages and cities of Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, unfailingly, I was welcomed, invited into homes, fed and cared for. Today, I would risk being shot in any of the areas most affected by American policy.

The US is addicted to controlling the planet. And we just hit another bottom. I don’t think a single, small scotch on the rocks will help.

Mental Health Break

Guys in heels absolutely killing it to Beyoncé:

Another Bag-And-Forth

Katherine Mangu-Ward restarts the debate about plastic-bag bans:

You know what’s gross? Reusable grocery bags. Think about it: You put a leaky package of chicken in your cloth or plastic tote. Then you empty the bag, crumple it up, and toss in the trunk of your car to fester. A week later, you go shopping again and throw some veggies you’re planning to eat raw into the same bag. Ew.

And that’s just the yuck factor. There’s also an ongoing debate about the environmental and economic impact of these increasingly popular bans and taxes. Luckily, Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine, issued a new report today that looks at the issue from just about every angle. The report addresses my pet peeve, the health impact of reusable bags, quoting one survey in Arizona and California which found coliform bacteria in half of the bags tested.

Writing from the other side of the Atlantic, Pamela Yeow is disappointed that the UK government just exempted businesses with fewer than 250 employees from a planned plastic-bag surcharge:

Research has substantially demonstrated that plastic bags are harmful to the environment. Lightweight bags are carried by winds to litter roadsides, trees, and streets throughout urban and rural landscapes. The thin plastic breaks down in the environment into tiny pieces that lead to the deaths of birds and marine life. And it has also been shown without doubt that the billions of single-use plastic bags used each year – eight billion in 2012 in England alone – are produced at great cost. It is estimated that the amount of energy needed to make 12 single-use bags could power a car for a mile.

Previous Dish on plastic-bag bans here and here

The Case Against The Case Against 8

I watched the HBO documentary on the Prop 8 case over the weekend – and also had a drink in Ptown and then a lively breakfast discussion with the directors, Ryan White and Ben Cotner, who were as intelligent and as sincere as you could hope for in two young documentarians. And the first thing to say about the doc is that it is not as egregious or as misleading as the Becker book or the Olson-Boies exercize in self-love and credit-grabbing. Instead, its main impact on most viewers will be a net-positive in its portrayal of the moral and legal arguments for marriage equality. And the focus is mercifully on the human story of the plaintiffs, the best angle for a documentary that won’t bore you. I found its most affecting scenes to be toward the end, as the two plaintiff couples finally get their chance for a civil marriage that cannot and will not be taken away. You have to have a heart of stone not to be moved. And there are internal trial preparations that really spell out why civil marriage is non-negotiable if equal protection means anything in a civilized society. It was indeed great to hear arguments many of us honed in earlier, lonelier times come back in the words of the trial.

Maybe it’s because I’m used to these arguments at this point, but the film dragged a bit for my taste. It lost what would have been a key opportunity as it was being filmed  – because the trial was supposed to be televised and then wasn’t. Without those scenes, the film focuses, understandably, on the plaintiffs. The trouble with this strategy is that, in a highly-visible lawsuit, they’ve been selected precisely because they are picture-perfect, squeaky-clean representatives of the gay community. There are no quirks in their background that could be exploited by the other side in the legal drama (or appeal to viewers); their families are all supportive; their blond, attractive children are behind them; their only conflicts, so far as we can tell, are which ornament to place where on the Christmas tree (a scene that is included in the soft-lens political-ad style of the movie). Similarly, there are no flaws whatsoever in any of the “good guys” and all the opponents are hateful, irrational bigots. No one among the good guys has a fight in the movie; no one even as so much as a disagreement. Ted Olson and David Boies get a treatment like subjects in an old Catholic “Lives of the Saints” primer. Griffin is portrayed as in the trailer above: a lone bucker of the trend who single-handedly brought gay equality to America. The number of hugs per frame is beyond counting.

It all feels like a really slick p.r. campaign – or a propaganda movie they’d show at some endless gay fundraiser – rather than an objective or inquisitive documentary. That was Hank Stuever’s view as well. It’s a movie not about a civil rights moment, he argues, but about “the values of show business and mass marketing.” And when you’re marketing something, you show no wrinkles or flaws. You carefully stage every single thing to advance the product.

So there are no interviews with any marriage equality opponents to make their case. There are no interviews with anyone who worried about the lawsuit’s possibly unintended consequences (they are dismissed by Chad Griffin in the film as in-fighting cowards). There is no mention of Olson’s unique demand in the history of marriage equality litigation to be paid $6.4 million rather than work pro bono. There is no interview with Charles Cooper, their chief legal opponent. No facts or ideas of arguments are allowed to get in the way of the triumph of Chad Griffin’s will. And that includes the actual denouement of the case, which was, as Mark Joseph Stern notes today, a clear and demonstrable failure.

Everyone knew from the get-go that this case could well turn on the rather mundane legal issue of “standing,” rather than on any deeper constitutional issues regarding the civil rights of gay citizens. That was one reason I was fine with the suit – because I thought it could play a role in the public education necessary to overturn Prop 8 at some point, and would probably not do any real harm on a federal level because it would likely be dismissed on technical grounds. But that’s emphatically not how the film portrays it.

This was always, from the film’s perspective, and in the words of Griffin’s PR partner, Kristina Schake, in the movie “one of the most important civil rights cases ever before the Supreme Court.” That’s demonstrably untrue – but remains, like all the statements from Schake and Griffin, unquestioned in the film. (There is no narrator, so the subjects of the documentary who gave the film-makers exclusive video access, essentially dictate the message of the entire film – which, since they are the p.r. maven behind all of this, is only fitting.) The case had the great and wonderful effect of ending Prop 8, but outside California, it only upheld Supreme Court federal precedents on the matter of “standing.” And the entire rationale of filing the suit was to change the federal situation, not the state one. So, on its own terms, the lawsuit failed. And yet the film does all it can to hide that fact, introducing the “standing” issue only when they had no choice at the very end (and never before), and breezing right past it to conflate the Windsor case and the Perry case as if they were both landmark victories.

So the re-writing of history is done by omission, elision and sleight of hand, rather than by egregious slander. And so the Perry decision is counter-posed just before a series of breakthroughs in marriage equality, as if it were cause and effect. You’d have no idea that marriage equality was already nationally at 46 percent support – up from 27 percent in 1996 – before Prop 8 came along at all. Or that we already had marriage equality for four years in America, with momentum building fast.

We are also told, by Chad Griffin, that before Ted Olson, marriage equality wasn’t even a Democratic issue, let alone a Republican one – “it was only the left of the left” that supported it. Getting Olson “changed everything” in making the national debate bipartisan. But this again is untrue. The marriage equality movement was born as much on the right as the left, and has had gay conservatives and Republicans on its side since the late 1980s. As for Republican figures, Dick Cheney, the Republican vice-president of the United States for eight years was for it; Alan Simpson, Republican folk hero, was for it; Bill Weld, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, where marriage equality first became a reality, was for it in the 1990s; and you’d think the Californians would also be aware that the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, supported it as well as around 30 percent of Republican voters. Absolutely getting Ted Olson to argue the case was a major coup, as was his adoption of most of the arguments conservatives had been making on this subject for years. But the idea that he alone changed the partisan debate on this is surreal.

Then there are distortions about those who opposed this lawsuit. We are told – again with no balancing counter-view – that the Perry federal suit was “years before this was supposed to be happening.” Really? Then how did the Windsor case arrive at the same time – and with much broader impact? Does anyone think that Prop 8 would have survived the Windsor decision anyway? Several other state bans have fallen by the wayside since, because of the Windsor – not the Perry – case. And that, of course, tells you something about the irrelevance of this case to the broader marriage movement. It was, in the end, unnecessary; it failed to move the federal needle a jot; and it needlessly divided and embittered a usually united, if fractious, coalition.

None of this will be apparent to the vast majority of people who watch this film. The emotional human power of the plaintiff’s stories will obliterate any skepticism an audience might have about the historical accuracy of the film, and liberal supporters of marriage equality will simply stand and cheer (as well they might on the core question). Anyone opposing marriage equality will be turned off by this movie’s crude assumption that only raw hatred can explain their views. As for the rest of us who have lived through a history this movie ignores or dismisses in its massive over-selling of this single case, well, we’ll just have to wait for a documentary or a history that does justice to the whole sweep of it. And that may be a long time coming. The opportunists and self-promoters have to have their say first.

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Correction Of The Day

“In stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not church teaching.

In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926,” – the AP.

Soldiers In Disguise

A female member of the Basij paramilitary militia aims her rifle. http://t.co/gXrTvkTHmM—
Ebrahim Noroozi (@EbrahimNoroozi1) January 16, 2014

Moisés Naím examines how authoritarian regimes are using ostensibly independent “civil society organizations” to give themselves a gloss of popular support:

We’ve seen the same thing in Tehran, Havana, and Caracas, where people who take to the streets to protest their leaders are often confronted by violent groups of civilians posing as common citizens who support the regime. In Iran, they’re called the Basij, or the Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed. In Cuba, they’re known as the Rapid Response Brigades, and they routinely dole out severe beatings to critics who dare to publicly express their opposition to the Castros’ dictatorship. This “political technology” has been successfully exported to Venezuela, where the well-trained and armed “civilians” battling opposition groups are called colectivos. Orwell himself couldn’t have imagined names that better obscure the true nature of these associations.

The reality is that these groups, “movements,” and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are appendices of their governments and draw their “activists” from the armed forces, security services, and government militias. They carry out their repressive deeds disguised as “civil society,” in an attempt to mask the behavior of governments that want to avoid being recognized by the international community for what they really are: autocracies that violate global norms, trample human rights, and brutalize their critics. They have even earned their own acronym—GONGOs—for “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations.” Their rise is forcing us to rethink our benign definitions of NGOs and civil society to accommodate armed groups of civilians and even, most provocatively, terrorists.

How To Read A Death Sentence

D.G. Myers, who has entered the last stages of prostate cancer, reflects:

Cancer may be a death sentence, but there are many ways to read the sen­tence. Resignation is only one of them, and a particularly arrogant one at that, because it pre­sumes to know, as it cannot, the outcome in every detail. But if you are ignorant of the suffering that awaits you when you are first diag­nosed, you are equally ignorant of the changes that cancer will work in your thinking and emotional life, some of which may even be improve­ments in old habits of thought and feeling.

You may, for instance, become more conscious of time. What once might have seemed like wastes of time—a solitaire game, a television show you would never have admitted to watching, the idle poking around for useless information—may become unex­pected sources of joy, the low-key celebrations of being alive. The difference is that when you are conscious of choosing how to spend your time, and when you discover that you enjoy your choices, they take on a meaning they could never have had before. You no longer waste or mark time. You fill it, because now you can see the brim from where you are lying.

“In a sense,” Flannery O’Connor wrote to a friend about the lupus that would kill her at thirty-nine,

sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.

Previous Dish on Myers’ thoughts on death here.

Shakespeare, Philosopher?

Nonsense, argues Simon Critchley in an interview about his recent book, The Hamlet Doctrine:

Q: To what extent was Shakespeare a philosopher?

Critchley: He wasn’t, I think in just about every important sense. If a philosopher is someone who is trying, through the use of reason, to find a kind of intelligibility which grounds our experience of that which there is, that very general sense of philosophy as a project that is trying to uncover the true nature of reality, a metaphysical project, then Shakespeare isn’t a philosopher. Shakespeare is someone who leaves us in the dark as to what that reality might be. What we get instead is an experience of ambiguity and opacity. We look at these plays and we are left – not confused – but having been presented with a conflict between different positions where we are not told what to think.

Whereas with philosophy, we’re generally told what to think. Any commentators too, they tell you what to think, the dead philosophers as well. Drama or theatre – in many ways this is the virtue of theatre – doesn’t do that. It presents us with a situation, which is complex. Reason is on display, arguments are happening back and forth, but it’s not clear what you should think at the end of the play – I think at the end of any of Shakespeare’s plays. And that’s what audiences find intolerable about Shakespeare, about theatre in general, that’s why they won’t comment on it. They want to be told what it means.

(Hat tip: Robin Varghese. Photo of statue of Shakespeare at the center of Leicester Square Gardens, London, by Elliott Brown)

Working On Salvation

Reviewing Randall Balmer’s new faith-focused biography of our 39th president, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, John G. Turner places Carter’s work ethic at the center of his distinctive approach to life and politics:

Balmer ends his book with the “impression that Carter was driven—almost obsessed—by a kind of works righteousness.” He observes quite rightly that too many Christians seek “to prove by their good works that they are among the elect.” From his days on his family farm to his years in the Navy to his many years on the campaign trail, Carter was an incessant worker.

Most of the time, his hard work paid off, but Carter’s work ethic could not solve the Iranian hostage crisis, his nation’s economic malaise, or the electoral threat of Ronald Reagan. Balmer observes, however, that after his defeat to Reagan “Carter reaffirmed his commitment to works righteousness as a way to redeem his loss,” and his ceaseless activism and philanthropy bolstered his reputation in the United States and abroad. … He went door to door trying to “share Christ” with strangers. He devoted one week each year to Habitat for Humanity projects. Through the Carter Center, he attempted to eradicate disease, poverty, and dictatorship around the world.

Although he could not redeem his nation from the sins he believed had imprisoned it, Carter was always an ambassador for his Savior in a way that made nearly everyone around him uncomfortable, whether his unmarried staff members when he encouraged them to stop “living in sin” and get married, feminists who bristled at his staunch personal opposition to abortion, or politically conservative evangelicals who just could not believe that a follower of Jesus Christ would affiliate with donkeys instead of elephants. As Balmer laments, by the time of his presidency, Carter was already a rare breed.

Jonathan Yardley, also reviewing Balmer’s book, finds Carter’s approach to religion and politics a cautionary tale:

Religion is a tricky business, never more so than when it gets mixed up with government. Although Balmer pays due respect to the argument that “religion functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power,” that “once a religious group panders after political influence, it loses its prophetic voice,” he does not convince me that Carter, either as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s or as president in the second half of that decade, really “understood that the Christian faith had flourished in the United States precisely because the government had stayed out of the religion business.”

To the contrary, Carter brought religion (religiosity, too) into the national government more directly and intensely than any president before him in the 20th century. He campaigned as a religious man, speaking repeatedly, openly and almost boastfully about his religious convictions, about the centrality of prayer to his daily life, about the joy he took in being “born again.” Balmer sees this as a redemptive response to the cynicism and venality of the Nixon years, and unquestionably there is some truth to that. But Carter made religion a campaign weapon as well as a private belief, which was not appreciably less calculating than Nixon’s disregard for the Constitution and the common decencies.

(Photo: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter works on the 1,000th home to be built by Habitat for Humanity on the Gulf Coast May 21, 2007 in Violet, Louisiana. Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)