Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 239

America’s Trust Deficit

Dan Hopkins blames Obamacare’s low polling on it:

During a period of high trust like the early 1960s, Americans were confident that the government could accomplish what it set out to accomplish — and were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. A War on Poverty? Sign us up, even if we were also trying to put the first person on the moon. And fighting a major war in southeast Asia. In 1966, Chief Justice Earl Warren said that President Lyndon Johnson had been “working hard on Vietnam and has been for a long time. … He will find some way out.” At the time trust was high, and much of the country agreed.

During a period of low trust, however, we might endorse a policy in theory but oppose it in practice because we doubt the government’s ability to make it happen.

He also argues that low trust can “become a self-fulfilling prophecy”:

In a low-trust environment, politicians who want to expand the government’s role face a conundrum. Even when the public is supportive of their policy goals, Americans might well doubt the government’s capacity to deliver on those goals. And that in turn might encourage the architects of public policy to hide the government’s role, leading to public policies that are at once highly complex and obscured from view. That’s not a great recipe for rebuilding trust in government. But it’s an apt description of Obamacare.

An Anthology Of Other People’s Mail, Ctd

Recently we featured the blog-turned-book, Letters of Note, an eclectic archive of correspondence from both the famous and unknown. Andrea Denhoed recently talked to Shaun Usher, the project’s mastermind, offering a glimpse of how it all works:

The success of “Letters of Note” is certainly a tribute to the charm of written correspondence, but it’s also evidence of the value of a supportive spouse—Usher’s wife, who was working as a manager for a cosmetics company, supported the family alone for most of two years before his work became profitable—and the indispensability of tireless trench work. These days, Usher receives a steady flow of submissions and has connections with a number of archivists. Starting out, however, there was much more digging involved. He says, “In those days … I’d get a list of famous people and I’d type into Google, I don’t know, ‘Stan Laurel letter’ and I’d literally just search about Google to see what I could find. And it worked to an extent.” His first letter to go viral was found this way, several pages into the search results. It’s an unusually kind and lengthy letter to a young fan from John Kricfalusi, the creator of the cartoon “Ren and Stimpy.” It included sketches, encouragement (“Alright Bastard, let’s get to work. Draw!”) and practical cartooning advice (“Learn how to draw hands.”)

The project’s popularity, however, has brought its own frustrations:

Usher estimates that he reads at least twenty unusable letters for each one that he ends up including. He says, “I’ve bought hundreds of books purely to find one letter I just had a hunch might be in there.” With his success, a new problem has cropped up: he also receives a huge number of unusable submissions. He’s been sent a few, he says, that are too scandalous to post. “It’s so frustrating,” he says. But “I’d get sued pretty quickly.” Far more often, he gets “very personal letters—from their grandma, or their grandpa … and it’s this very lovely letter. But I receive so many of them, and I’ve seen them so many times that they’re not …” He trails off, like he can’t quite bring himself to say that these precious family heirlooms can be boring. “I have to write some very tactful rejection letters.”

The idea behind the Letters of Note project—that correspondence holds a rare communicative and aesthetic power—also happens to be well calibrated for the Internet. It hits on a juncture of Pinterest-style object nostalgia, an appetite for emotive but bite-size reading, and a mild voyeurism. Usher points out the irony that “the very service that’s going to kill off letter writing” is responsible for bringing these missives before so many eyes.

(Image: Page from John Kricfalusi’s letter via Letters of Note)

Reading Above The Din

Although Tim Parks grants that today’s readers are willing to put in time for lengthy novels like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s multi-volume My Struggle or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, he finds that “the texture of these books seems radically different from the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. There is a battering ram quality to the contemporary novel, an insistence and repetition that perhaps permits the reader to hang in despite the frequent interruptions to which most ordinary readers leave themselves open.” So what does this mean for fiction?

“In a good novel—it hardly needs to be said—every word matters.” Thus Jay Caspian Kang giving us the lit-crit, text-is-sacred orthodoxy in a recent New Yorker blog post. Honestly, I wonder whether this was ever really true; authors have often published then republished their work with all kinds of alterations but arguably without greatly changing a reader’s experience (one thinks of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence, Faulkner), while many readers (myself included), in the long process of reading a substantial novel, will simply not register this or that word, or again will reread certain sections when they’ve lost their thread after a forced break, altering the balance of one part to another, so that we all come away from a book with rather different ideas of what exactly it was we experienced during perhaps a hundred hours of reading.

But today Kang’s claim seems less and less likely to be true. I will go out on a limb with a prediction: the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable. No doubt there will be precious exceptions. Look out for them.

In response to Parks, Corey Robin confesses to taking long subway rides to no place in particular in order to find time to read:

I take nothing with me but my book and a pen. I take notes on the front and back pages of the book. If I run out of pages, I carry a little notebook with me. I never get off the train (except, occasionally, to meet my wife for lunch in Manhattan.) I have an ancient phone, so there’s no internet or desire to text, and I’m mostly underground, so there are no phone calls.

When I get back, I sometimes post about my little rides and what I’m reading on Facebook: Schumpeter in Queens, The Theory of Moral Sentiments in the Bronx, Hayek in Brooklyn. The more incongruous, the better, though sometimes I find some funny or interesting parallels between what I’m reading and where I’m riding and what I’m seeing.

But the joking on Facebook covers up my dirty little secret: I ride the rails to read because if I’m at home, and not writing, I’m on the internet. “It is not simply that one is interrupted,” as Park writes; “it is that one is actually inclined to interruption.”

Freddie recommends turning off “the part of your mind that cares about getting finished quickly”:

A project book is one that you want to take a long time with, often one that necessitates taking a long time with. And though so many of your instincts are going to militate against it, you should stretch out into that time. Get comfortable. Think of your project book as a long-term sublease, a place that you know you won’t live in forever but one that you also know has to come to feel like home. You want to take months, reading little chunks at a time. It might offend your bookworm nature, but I find it’s useful to make a regular appointment– for this hour, twice a week, I will read this book and ancillary materials about it. Think of it like appointment television, if that suits you. Learn to enjoy the feeling of not being in complete control over what you mentally consume all the time, a feeling that has become rarer and rarer.

Face Of The Day

A Indonesian commercial female sex worker holds a broken pan during protest against the closing of the “Dolly” red-light district in Surabaya, Indonesia on June 18, 2014. Sex workers and others, such as taxi drivers and street vendors working in the district, oppose the plan out of concern for lost income. By Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)

Responding To Student Groans, Ctd

A reader writes:

I think that one aspect that is getting lost in all of this discussion of mounting student debt is that federal money is an enabler of growing college tuition.  When the government gives students extra money to spend on college, they will tend to compete the price of tuition up.  (Just how much the price increases depends on the relative elasticity of supply and demand.)  If, instead, the government paid universities a certain amount per student admitted, the universities would tend to compete the price of tuition down.

It’s counterintuitive that subsidizing the customer doesn’t ultimately help the customer. But then a lot of economics is counterintuitive.  Ironically, the best way the federal government could aid students would be to eliminate Pell Grants, tax write-offs and credits altogether and use that money to incentivize lower tuition rates on the supply side.

Why Doesn’t Turkey Fear ISIS?

Turkey is less alarmed than its neighbors by Syria’s extremist groups:

Mustafa Akyol largely credits conspiracy theories for Turkey’s relative calm:

Many Turkish opinion leaders, especially those in the pro-government media, cannot accept ISIS, or its ilk, as extremist Islamist actors with genuinely held beliefs and self-defined goals. Rather they take it for granted that these terror groups are merely the pawns of a great game designed by none other than the Western powers.

For example, Abdulkadir Selvi, a senior journalist who has been quite vocal in the press and on television generally espousing a pro-government stance, wrote a piece last week titled “Who is ISIS working for?” This was his answer: “Al-Qaeda was a useful instrument for the US. To put it in an analogy, ISIS was born from al-Qaeda’s relationship with [the] CIA. The West gave its manners to al-Qaeda and now it designs our region through the hands of ISIS.” In short, al-Qaeda and its offshoot ISIS are both creations of the US Central Intelligence Agency and serve American interests.

Recent Dish on Turkey’s unsuccessful Syria policy here.

Quote For The Day

“Let me first address the first part of your remark about, ‘well, [Saddam] may have been unpleasant, but …’ This is a man who is guilty of the deaths of no less than one million Iraqis over a period of 35 years. So there is no ‘he may have been a brutal tyrant’ … there is no ‘but’ after that, there’s no comma after that phrase. It’s a period. Having said that, I can say that none of my aspirations for Iraq have come true. My worst fears, my greatest nightmares, have all been exceeded,” – Feisal Istrabadi, Indiana University Law School, who helped draft the post-Saddam constitution, and was Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations from 2004-2007.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The events in Iraq have unveiled the core reality of that country’s sectarian vortex, but they’ve also revealed something just as disturbing at home. Far from feeling any remorse, or expressing the slightest regret, or analyzing their own catastrophic misjudgments, the architects of the Iraq disaster are actually proud of the devastation they caused for no reason. To read Tony Blair is to witness a mind unsullied by fact or history or responsibility. There is not a scintilla of the self-awareness – let alone the shame – that one might expect from anyn responsible adult. I have to say Boris Johnson gets it exactly right:

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad. He wrote an essay published last week  that struck me as unhinged in its refusal to face facts. In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.

If Blair needs help, what can we say of Paul Bremer – yes, Paul Bremer, the man who disbanded the Iraqi military – actually having the gall to go on CNN and blame Obama for his own responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths? We have Bill Kristol – with a straight face – actually going on cable news and arguing that not only does the US have to intervene, but that we have to fight both Iran and ISIS and Maliki simultaneously. He actually then has the gall to ask that we do not re-litigate his own record in fomenting this bloodbath! Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby are teaching a course on wartime leadership! James Fallows is far too kind.

And now the country’s resident and proud war criminal, with his failed politician daughter, are in on the act. As you might expect, theirs is a poisonous little tract, asserting ludicrously that Iraq was a victory, denying any responsibility for introducing extreme Islamism into Iraq, parlaying their own cronies in the Middle East as representative of anything but their own bubble, and blaming everything, as usual, on the man who has steadfastly managed to de-leverage the US from the Bush-Cheney catastrophe.

The Cheneys have indeed been slamming the Kristol meth. And they do so, as usual, by insinuating the president is on the side of our enemies. Take this disgusting sentence:

Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch.

This from the man who left office with a cratering economy, two lost wars, a bankrupted Treasury, and a record of torture and military incompetence unknown in modern American history.

What we’re seeing now is the inability of the neocon mind to adjust even a smidgen in the face of empirical reality, to absorb just a soupcon of history, to accept even a minimum of responsibility. Mercifully, the American public is not drinking the same poisonous Kool-Aid twice:

According to a Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday, 54 percent of voters say they agree more with the president on Iraq, compared with 28 percent who said they agree more with McCain.

Today, Hillary Clinton have another mealy-mouthed answer about her past record – and neocon fanatic Bob Kagan declared he hoped to have her ear in the White House.

We covered the fascinating set of questions posed by the latest outbreak of sectarian mass-murder in Iraq: Could the US and Iran cooperate in Iraq? How organized is ISIS? How different from al Qaeda? Are the Kurds part of the answer? Are air-strikes? How does the Iraq bloodbath affect the Syrian civil war? And why is Paul Wolfowitz on television?

Also: why Schick razors are desperate enough to put small animals on men’s faces; and fellating bears (not in Ptown).

The most popular post of the day was Clinton’s Latest Drivel; followed by Kristol Meth.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  And you can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 14 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here - and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: A visitor walks next to the artwork ‘Continuel Mobile – Sphere rouge’ by Michelangelo Pistoletto in the Unlimited section of Art Basel on June 17, 2014 in Basel, Switzerland. By Harold Cunningham/Getty Images.)

Quote For The Day

“I feel comfortable with [Hillary Clinton] on foreign policy. If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else,” – Robert Kagan, unrepentant architect of the catastrophe in Iraq, and unreconstructed neocon, on the potential to revive neoconservative global aggression under president Hillary Clinton.

American Fútbol, Ctd

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry sticks up for the American preference for calling it “soccer” rather than “football”:

I’m writing this post as a public service to point out the actual fact, which is that the word “soccer” is basically as old as the sport itself, and has impeccable English bona fides. Here’s the real story, as Wikipedia : soccer came into existence at around the same time as other forms of football, in particular rugby football. The sport therefore became referred to as “association football”, to differentiate it from rugby football. With their talent for abbreviation and metonymy, “association football” quickly became “soccer”, from the word “association”.

Call soccer whatever you like. But now you know that the word soccer has impeccable historical and European bona fides, and is not some navel-gazing American invention. It is absolutely proper to call soccer soccer. If anything, calling it “football” is the navel-gazing form, since it ignores other forms of football, whether NFL football or rugby football.

Uri Friedman digs deeper into the history of the term:

If the word “soccer” originated in England, why did it fall into disuse there and become dominant in the States?

To answer that question, [sports economist Stefan] Szymanski counted the frequency with which the words “football” and soccer” appeared in American and British news outlets as far back as 1900. What he found is fascinating: “Soccer” was a recognized term in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t widely used until after World War II, when it was in vogue (and interchangeable with “football” and other phrases like “soccer football”) for a couple decades, perhaps because of the influence of American troops stationed in Britain during the war and the allure of American culture in its aftermath. In the 1980s, however, Brits began rejecting the term, as soccer became a more popular sport in the United States.

In recent decades, “The penetration of the game into American culture, measured by the use of the name ‘soccer,’ has led to backlash against the use of the word in Britain, where it was once considered an innocuous alternative to the word ‘football,’” Szymanski explains.