Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 243

Waters’ World

John Waters shares some of his cross-country exploits with Craig Ferguson:

Choire Sicha entertainingly dresses down the “stunt-writing industry” – books like 52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning, and a Perfect Crust and Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk – but saves praise for John Waters’ new take on the genre:

John Waters is something of a living stunt, in the best possible way. A hero of both America and Americana, Waters has changed the culture of the country as much as any other living filmmaker—Errol Morris, Wes Anderson, or Paul Verhoeven. Having written a couple of memoirs, he now turns his gaze more strictly on himself in a strange stunt book, Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). After life-stuntist extraordinaire Bill Clegg sold Waters’s idea to FSG head Jonathan Galassi in a bookish velvet-mafia inside job, it took, according to the acknowledgments, two and a half years for Waters “to write and live this adventure.”

The stunt was that Waters, who is now sixty-eight, would hitchhike from his primary home in Baltimore to his San Francisco residence. On May 14, 2012, he set out on that expedition. In the end, he arrived. We learn that he is far too cranky and fussy to be doing such things!

In one way, though, Waters tears a mannequin of the stunt genre apart and spits in its face. The actual hitchhiking takes up less than the second half of the book. The first 192 pages consist of two fictional accounts: first his best-case scenario, followed by his worst-case one. These are unimpeachably lewd and Watersian (and, of course, far more entertaining than the actual dreary hitchhiking odyssey). Womb raiders, escaped convicts with priapism, a stripper who shoots up Viagra in a room of truckers gone wild, an alien abduction, and rape—oh, sure, that’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case presentation involves way more pus and goiters.

I can’t wait to see him again in Provincetown this summer, gamely biking up and down Commercial Street and still throwing one of the funkiest parties in town. He may hitchhike across America, but he always ends up here.

Iran’s Soccer Politics

Suhrith Parthasarathy looks at how association football influenced the modern history of Iran:

Drawing links between sport and the larger cultural and political ethos of a nation can often be tenuous and far-fetched. But, in Iran, when soccer returned to the hub of social life in the late 1990s, it served, as David Goldblatt wrote in his book, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer, as a “rallying point for opponents of the conservative elements in the theocracy.” Tehran’s national soccer stadium, built in 1971 and which can hold more than 100,000 people, is called “Azadi,” meaning “freedom” in Farsi. But ever since the 1979 revolution, which saw the Islamisization of the nation, women were altogether prohibited from watching soccer at Azadi. The boisterous celebrations following the team’s victory in Melbourne, therefore, served as much as a means to help break such shackles as it has to entrench a new form of expressing not only joy but also political protest in the country. Next month, when Iran plays in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, its matches will reverberate in significance well beyond the soccer pitch.

John Duerden fast forwards to today, when the sport remains just as politically significant:

Popular passion for the game is such that no leader can afford to ignore it. One of the first international figures that President Hassan Rouhani met after taking office last August was Sepp Blatter, the controversial chief of the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), football’s international governing body, who backed Iran’s bid to host the 2019 Asian Cup.

If Rouhani hadn’t immediately grasped the power of the game, it was made abundantly clear soon enough. Just one week after his historic election inspired thousands to take to the streets, crowds of roughly equal size turned out to celebrate Iran’s qualification for the 2014 World Cup. By scoring political points in his meeting with Blatter, however, the new Iranian president was just following the example set by his predecessor. According to a diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “has staked a great deal of political capital in Iranian soccer … in an effort to capitalize on soccer’s popularity with constituents.”

Yet Iranians (NYT) don’t seem all that excited about the World Cup this year. That’s no coincidence:

It is more than the daunting competition and the controversies surrounding Team Melli that keep the Iranians from warming to the World Cup. The authorities have been working hard to nix any soccer related excitement.

Tehran’s cinemas have been told by the police that they are not allowed to show World Cup matches to a mixed audience of men and women, “out of respect for Islamic morals.” A plan to show Iran’s games on some of the large electronic billboards across the city was canceled, and on Wednesday, restaurant and coffee shop owners said they had been told by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture to refrain from decorating their establishments with the national flag or the colors of other countries.

“We want to decorate our restaurant with German flags,” said one restaurant owner who asked to be identified only by his first name, Farhad. “But even that is not allowed. Fun, people gathering in large groups, such things make the authorities nervous.”

Are Steady Jobs Obsolete?

Danielle Kurtzleben worries that the growth of on-demand service startups like TaskRabbit and Instacart points to “deeper, unsettling trends going on in the US economy”:

The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo wrote in May that Instacart and services like it could “redefine how we think about the future of labor.” That sounds great in an era when technology replaces cashiers withself-check-out machines and automates assembly-line jobs out of existence. But the growth of TaskRabbit and other similar firms could mostly mean yet more job growth at the lower end of the spectrum. These low-skill jobs have made up the bulk of job growth over the last decade or so, as the Dallas Fed showed in a recent paper.

While jobs fall out of the middle, new jobs are created at the top and bottom. And those jobs at the bottom tend to be “nonroutine manual” jobs: those that require few skills and little problem-solving. Many of these errand jobs fit this bill perfectly, involving deliveries and other rote tasks. These new errand jobs can feature high pay — Instacart, Manjoo noted, can pay $30 an hour. But a major problem is finding steady work — no grocery run takes eight hours.

Iraq Needs A Political Solution

And Barbara Walter believes it’s a real possibility:

The key to preventing a long and bloody war in Iraq is to create disincentives for Sunnis to fight for complete control over the government. This may not be as hard as it sounds. True, the Sunnis’ number one goal is to regain full control over the government — but Sunnis understand that this is risky and costly. Their second best solution would be to gain a significant voice in government such that Sunnis could ensure that they will not be exploited by the demographically larger Shiite population. This will require a negotiated settlement with al-Maliki and his government that offers real power-sharing guarantees to the Sunni population. A negotiated settlement with moderate Sunnis has the added benefit of undercutting their support for more extreme elements. Studies by Walter 1997 and Harzell and Hodie 2003 have found that civil war combatants are significantly more likely to sign and implement peace settlements that include specific power-sharing guarantees.

But how do you convince al-Maliki to share power when he has shown no inclination to do so to date? As Marc Lynch wrote yesterday, al-Maliki has been urged to build a political accord for a half-decade, but has not done so. The key, I believe, is to make any aid or assistance to him contingent on good behavior. Once it is clear to al-Maliki that he and his army cannot defeat the Sunnis, it will also become clear to him that a deal is his best option.

Walter Russell Mead wonders if Maliki will instead turn towards Iran:

A major thrust of [Obama's] speech is a political ultimatum to Maliki and his government: we will only help you if you get serious about an inclusive government and system in Iraq that offers real accommodation for the Sunnis.

This means Maliki has a choice. Iran is willing to bolster his government without any requiring any concessions to the Sunnis, having already dispatched two Revolutionary Guard units to protect Baghdad and the Shia holy cities of Karbala and Najaf. So for Maliki, do the advantages of American help offset the concessions he would have to make? If so, he’ll respond positively to Obama and the U.S. will get more deeply engaged in the contest. If not, he will turn to Iran and Iran’s involvement in Iraq will grow exponentially—and in effect the entire war in Syria and Iraq will turn into a war of Iranian expansion.

Peter Van Buren imagines a possible future:

The Kurds are the easy ones; they will keep on doing what they have been doing. They will fight back effectively and keep their oil flowing. They’ll see Baghdad’s influence only in the rear-view mirror.

The Sunnis will at least retain de facto control of western Iraq, maybe more. They are unlikely to be set up to govern in any formal way, but may create some sort of informal structure to collect taxes, enforce parts of the law and chase away as many Shias as they can. Violence will continue, sometimes hot and nasty, sometimes low-level score settling.

The Shias are the big variable. Maliki’s army seems in disarray, but if he only needs it to punish the Sunnis with violence it may prove up to that. Baghdad will not “fall.” The city is a Shia bastion now, and the militias will not give up their homes. A lot of blood may be spilled, but Baghdad will remain Shia-controlled and Maliki will remain in charge in some sort of limited way.

 

A Well-Oiled Warzone

Plumer takes a look at a slippery dimension of the Iraq conflict:

Some basics: Iraq has the world’s fifth-largest proven oil reserves. But the country has only very recently begun churning out significant amounts of crude oil again (production dropped sharply during the 2003 US invasion and its bloody aftermath). By April 2014, Iraq was producing an estimated 3.3 million barrels per day — equal to about 4 percent of global supply. And the country was expected to keep ramping up production, with plans to produce at least 5 million barrels per day in the years to come.

Or at least that was the idea. The recent takeover of northwestern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) has complicated those plans considerably.

True, as the map above shows, ISIS isn’t close to any of the massive oil fields in the southern regions of Iraq, which produce 75 percent of the country’s oil. And ISIS has yet to enter the Kurdish regions in the north, another major oil-producing area. But the fighting has threatened some of Iraq’s other oil infrastructure, including a pipeline that can deliver 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Kirkuk to the Turkish port city of Ceyhan. (That pipeline had been damaged by a 2013 attack and was offline receiving repairs — that work has now been halted.)

In terms of oil as well as land, Iraq’s Kurds stand to benefit from the crisis:

The Kurds have an estimated 45 billion barrels of oil and have a long planned to be exporting 400,000 barrels a day this year, but until now dividends have been limited. Kurdistan and foreign oil companies have managed to export some of the crude, transported first by truck and then tanker, despite the Baghdad government’s declaration that all their activities are illegal. But, although a big export pipeline is now complete and millions of barrels of oil have been shipped through it to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, none of these volumes has been actually sold.

Tankers containing 2 million barrels of Kurdish oil are at sea awaiting buyers, who are apprehensive while Baghdad threatens to sue anyone who purchases it. The current offensive by an al-Qaeda affiliate may be the tipping point. Disciplined Kurdish forces now control not only Kurdistan but the disputed, oil-rich region of Kirkuk, which lies just to its west. The region has been autonomous since the first Gulf War in 1991, and its army has steeled itself to defend Kurdistan against Baghdad’s forces.

Previous Dish on the economic angle of the conflict here.

Responding To Student Groans, Ctd

A reader adds a personal touch to the blog debate:

What ever happened to working your way through school? I went to college form 1985 through 1994 to get my degree, going to school in the day time and working as a hospital orderly at first, then working for an engineering firm during the day and taking classes at night. I did my first year at a JuCo and the rest at a couple of state schools. Of course, I had to give up the fun campus lifestyle – no time for fraternities and parties (well, I found time for a few). But, when I graduated, I was student-debt free.

I realize that this is not the same as spending four years at at residential college or university, but that’s the breaks. Some people get to eat filet mignon and some of us have to eat hamburger. Bottom line is, maybe it took a bit more time and effort then some have to expend, my education has served me quite well in my career, and I never had the depression that must come from leaving school with the kind of debt that so many now incur.

I understand that tuition has increased, but dammit, everyone isn’t going to get to go to the Ivy League school that dream about. The state school in my town has a non-residential program that costs $8K/year, full time. Anyone should be able to deal with that.

Face Of The Day

A Iraqi girl fleeing from the city of Mosul arrives at a Kuridish checkpoint. By Sebastiano Tomada/Getty Images.

Keeping A Lowe Profile

Reviewing a new memoir by Rob Lowe, Heather Havrilesky finds that the actor has pulled off the near-impossible – a celebrity book with some humility:

[H]e makes up for … egocentric passages with lovable Diary of an Emo Kid interludes in which our hero is overcome by his surging emotions. On a flight to visit his son during his freshman year at college, for example, Lowe is forced to wear sunglasses and hide behind his newspaper to mask his copious tears. “I am amazed that so much water can come out of the eyes of someone who dehydrates himself with so much caffeine,” he writes, wryly deprecating his sentimental foolishness while also indulging a telltale celebrity Angeleno focus on maximal body maintenance.

Throughout Love Life, Lowe seems attracted to his most demeaning stories:

Jewel wipes her mouth with the back of her hand after she’s forced to kiss him while shooting the short-lived drama The Lyon’s Den. He dresses up as Bigfoot to scare his kids while camping, and ends up getting kicked in the balls. He visits Warren Beatty’s house with his girlfriend; Beatty lightly informs him that he’s been sleeping with her.

Mostly, though, Lowe’s books are a great example of the power of confounding expectations. You wouldn’t think a face off the pages of Tiger Beat magazine would revel in his own humiliation as much as Lowe does. When, in Stories I Only Tell My Friends, a young Lowe goes to a screening of The Outsiders and discovers that his central role in the film has been reduced to an afterthought, it’s impossible not to feel sad for this needy teenager, who desperately hopes for some proof that his big dream hasn’t been a waste of time. Instead, he is humbled, truly.

 

A Depressed Economy

A new survey indicates that out-of-work Americans are twice as likely to suffer from depression as their employed peers. And the long-term unemployed appear to be the worst off:

Gallup also finds that the long-term unemployed spend less time with their family and friends, potentially contributing to those higher rates of depression. The survey notes that we cannot identify causality: “These results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place.” That’s true, but these findings are also consistent previous academic evidence.

Rebecca Rosen mulls over the findings:

[Gallup's Steve] Crabtree cites a 2011 study by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University which found that long-term unemployed people were much more likely to report that they had spent two hours or less being social the previous day.

“Again,” Crabtree writes, “these results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place—if, for example, employers are looking for more upbeat workers. It is also possible that those who spend less time with family and friends are therefore less able to draw on their social networks for employment leads.”

Surely there are people out there who are accurately described by one of those possibilities. But it’s all too easy to imagine a scenario in which all of these act together in a vicious cycle that mires a person in unemployment. That same Rutgers study found much higher rates of reporting “feeling ashamed or embarrassed” or “strain in family relations” for those for whom a loss of a job had had devastating financial consequences. As one reader wrote to The Atlantic in 2011, “I look at my peers who are getting married and having children and generally living life and it’s depressing.  They’ve got jobs, health insurance, relationships, homes; I don’t even have a real bed to sleep on.” Would hanging out with friends and family be very appealing under such circumstances? Not to me, at least. From there, it’s a pretty direct line to isolation, depression, the toll those will have on a job search, to more isolation, more depression, and on and on and on.

George Will Loses The Plot, Ctd

A reader goes out on a limb:

Never have I been more grateful for your anonymous reader-contributor policy …

George Will is wrong in many of the ways people are saying, but he does have a point that no one wants to really face: the power to silence other potential participants in a discussion is a privilege and a powerful one. In our post-Civil Rights era culture, grievance is the optimal position to be in while in argument. Victimhood is desirable when it allows you to win the narrative.

I am not saying this privilege is worth being raped for and that people are intentionally getting raped to win their arguments about gender, but given how often people are silenced by the victimhood of their verbal sparring partner (maybe I see it more because I live in liberal California?), I see why Will had this thought.

I’ll go further:

the story he excerpts, at least in excerpt form, doesn’t sound like rape. The guy is being an asshole for not respecting his recent ex’s wishes but she ultimately cooperated. It’s shitty, yes. It should be discouraged, yes. But “rape”? The point Marcotte and many bloggers make is that it doesn’thave to be “forcible” to be rape; even the absence of consent is rape. Well, okay yes but don’t be surprised when people stop taking “rape” as seriously when it is no longer defined as physically forcing yourself on someone.  I think that’s also one of Will’s two or three somewhat valid points amidst his mountain of old-school BS: the self-proclaimed fighters-of-rape-culture want us to conflate these more ambiguous “absence of consent” situations with the more conventional understanding of rape as a forcing of oneself on another. I think that’s probably a legitimate goal but I don’t think Will is out of line for calling folks on it.

The fact that there are men who are falsely accused of rape doesn’t “cancel out” that women are raped but when one considers the intense fear many men have of being falsely accused of rape, one starts to understand the origins of Will’s thinking as more than just enforcing patriarchy.

I have more on this in the form of anecdote, but I think I’ll wait to see where the discussion goes before I share it.

Another voices a very different view:

Hook-up culture IS rape culture.

There is no place on Earth more progressive than Swarthmore. Every far-left piety is accepted without question, much less criticism. (You’d think that students would be challenged with contrary views to help them burnish their intellectual armor so that when they left Swarthmore they’d be equipped to grapple with people who disagree with them, but you’d be mistaken). “White Male Privilege” means that white guys are automatically wrong, “Rape Culture” is Serious You Guys, and sex is only consensual if the woman has no regrets about it. If under these conditions, women are still getting raped – and not by the College Republicans or Future Patriarchs of America, but by members in good standing of the Privileged-Oppressed Alliance – then the fundamental underpinnings of the college model are completed fuçked, and need to be scrapped.

You want to see “Rape Culture”? Take hundreds of 17 to 22 year-olds, remove them from their parents, give them unrestricted and unsupervised access to alcohol and each other’s bodies, tell them that they’re mature enough to handle adult choices, and teach them that there’s no virtue in sexual restraint. Sprinkle some talk about condoms and consent, and send them back to their coed dorms. THAT is “Rape Culture.” Women are going to get raped, because many eighteen-year-old men aren’t mature enough to understand what “no” means or manage their urges, and many 18-year-old women aren’t mature enough to spot red flags. For all practical purposes, Hookup Culture IS Rape Culture.

You want to get serious about preventing rape? Single-sex dorms, no visitors after ten, doors ajar when there are visitors, room checks by RAs, consumption of alcohol banned, sexual contact beyond first base punished by warning, then formal reprimand, then suspension, then explusion. Yeah, college will be less fun. But you’ll learn more, and there’s no chance that progressive, sensitive, feminist men will ever rape you in your dorm room.

Things may change at Swarthmore. I hope rape victims get better support, because it does sound like the administration’s first instinct has been to wish the problem away when confronted with a rape allegation. (That goes for allegations that are fatuous on their faces; it’s not up to some dean to decide). Regardless, my advice to a relative or friend attending Swarthmore would be to walk down the hill to the police station, and not to trust a system designed to adjudicate academic offenses to competently handle criminal offenses.

But they’re not going to adopt my idea. In loco parentis isn’t coming back, because Swarthmore would never dream of telling eighteen-year-olds who were smart enough to be admitted that they don’t know everything (this being a campus where the prevailing belief is that someone who holds the same position on same-sex marriage that Barack Obama did until May of 2012 is too bigoted to be allowed to speak), or that they’re not yet mature enough to manage decisions about what goes into or comes out of their pelvises.