Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 264
May 24, 2014
The View From Your Window
Moon Township, Pennsylvania, 8.50 am
Translating World To Word
Kathryn Schulz raves about Geoff Dyer’s writing prowess, calling him “one of our greatest living critics” and “one of our most original writers—always out there beyond literary Mach 1, breaking the how-things-usually-sound barrier“:
[T]he essential fact about Dyer’s nonfiction is that it works beautifully when it shouldn’t work at all. Some of that work gets done at the level of the sentence, where Dyer excels. Listen to him on a hot day in Algiers: “Even the ants out on the balcony drag a little sidecar of shadow.” On Roman ruins in Libya: “All around were the vestiges of nouns—columns, stones, trees. No verbs remained.” On a saxophone solo by John Coltrane: “It’s pretty and then dangerous as he reaches so high the sky blues into the darkness of space before reentering, everything burning up around him.”
What’s going on in these sentences is the fundamental business of nonfiction: the translation, at once exact and surprising, of world to word. Writers weight that ratio of exactitude and surprise differently; you can stay close or reach further, out toward the risky and weird. Dyer reaches. You can see it in those precise but strange sidecars, in that startling grammar of ruin, and finally in the sax solo, where, like Coltrane, he pushes so hard on his medium that it threatens to break. Note the word blues, pulling three times its weight—noun, adjective, verb, so much pivoting around it that all the referents go briefly haywire and it seems like the solo is still rising and what’s falling is the sky. And note, too, how the sentence itself is pretty and then dangerous: dangerous because it starts out too pretty (“pretty” is a pretty word; “so high the sky” is Hallmark stuff); beautiful because it ends in so much danger.
Schulz goes on to praise Another Day at Sea, Dyer’s new travelogue of two weeks aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. John McAlley reviews the book (somewhat spoiling its ending in the last paragraph):
Dyer’s tour of the boat (that’s right: boat, not ship) is as closely monitored as an F-18 sortie, even though it’s a relatively stress-free time on the Bush: October 2011, more than a year after President Obama announced the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq. Once Dyer inures himself to the ’round-the-clock “crash and thunder” of the in-transit jets and the “aftertaste of the big meats” served in the mess, he’s at ease to report on the daily encounters prearranged for him. Each brief chapter gives us a peek into another nook and cranny of the carrier’s teeming underworld, or the above-deck “island,” “the bridge and assorted flight-ops rooms rising in a stack from one side of the deck: an island on the island of the carrier.” …
For all the snap and snark in his prose, Dyer can’t tamp down his generosity of spirit forever. This unbeliever — in faith, in wayward military action, in bad food and the snorting of bath salts, even in mourning the death of his parents — ends the breezy Another Great Day at Sea with stunning economy and emotional force, and in the most unexpected way. He says a prayer for the men and women of the USS George H.W. Bush — and for all of us at sea.
Subscribers to The New Yorker can read an excerpt of the book here.
May 22, 2014
A “Meep Meep” Moment In The Gulf?
News that Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has been invited to Saudi Arabia is music to Paul Pillar’s ears. He attributes the emerging thaw between the two regional giants in large part to American leadership, though the usual suspects will deny it:
Rapprochement between Iran and its Arab neighbors is good for the neighbors as well as for Iranians, good for stability in the Persian
Gulf, and good for U.S. interests in the region.
Secretary of State Kerry’s comments welcoming the Saudi move are doubly appropriate, given that the United States can claim some of the credit because of its role in currently negotiating an agreement with Iran to keep its nuclear program peaceful. The Saudis’ invitation is very likely being made partly in anticipation of successful completion of those negotiations and the prospect of Iran and the United States taking a step toward a more normal relationship. This is the sequence that should be expected: the superpower leads, and lesser allies follow. It is the sequence that should have been obvious to anyone who hasn’t been trying to spin Arab reactions to the negotiations to cast doubts on where the negotiations are going.
To Juan Cole, this overture indicates that the Saudis are copping to the ugly reality in Syria:
Bashar al-Assad has for about a year been winning the Syria war, and the rebels may not seem a very attractive investment any more.
Moreover, the most effective fighting forces have declared themselves a branch of al-Qaeda. Saudi Arabia is deathly afraid of the latter. Riyadh recently discovered a terrorist plot in which the major group fighting in Syria (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) became a threat to their own Saudi backers. That episode may soured Riyadh on the most hawkish strategy in Syria. Indeed, you could imagine a Saudi-Iran alliance against al-Qaeda affiliates, now holding territory in northern Iraq and northern Syria.
But Lina Khatib expects Iran to throw Assad under the bus for the sake of better relations with Riyadh:
The dominant wisdom has been that Iran has thrown its full weight behind Assad and that it would not abandon this ally because Assad guarantees Iran’s strategic interests in the Levant. But Assad himself is less valuable to Iran than the much-coveted nuclear arms deal. Talks between the United States and Iran appear to be heading towards a settlement, while Saudi Arabia’s softened stance towards Iran means that Iran must give Saudi Arabia something in return for cordial relations, because Saudi Arabia remains the stronger regional player in the Gulf. Assad is likely to be the least costly compromise for Iran on both fronts.
Maybe if both countries give up on their unsavory clients, it will force a settlement of the conflict that allows the sane middle to come to the fore. I’m not too sanguine that any good immediate outcome is possible for Syria (or Lebanon) after three years of perpetual disaster, but getting these major regional players to talk about cleaning up the mess in their neighborhood is crucial to end the violence, which in turn is a necessary first step toward rebuilding the shattered Levant. And it would prove that a patient, as opposed to reactive, American foreign policy pays dividends. Obama won’t get much credit—least of all from the neocons, as Pillar rightly points out—because his hand in this isn’t visible enough, but that’s sort of the point, isn’t it?
The Intercourse Is For Fun, Ctd
Readers keep the thread going:
The problem I have as a parent of three (two boys, one girl) in telling them the truth – that intercourse is fun – is that I’m not sure how to balance that with the message that they’re better off waiting. “It’s one of the most enjoyable things a person can do! But don’t do it until you’re older!” And we say “because”: because you can get pregnant or get someone pregnant, because it can be emotionally complex, etc. But not getting too deep into this rabbit hole is the same reason I don’t tell my kids that I smoked pot and really enjoyed it – because smoking pot, too, is fun. That’s why people do it in the first place.
I do think you need to tell kids the truth. But, knowing kids, I worry that they’ll blow right past that “because” and focus on the fun. If it’s so fun – why wait?
But another looks to reverse psychology:
I can’t think of a better way to get kids to abstain from sex for longer: Let them know the details, and that mom and dad think it’s fun and cool. Kids never want to like what their parents like.
Another reader:
The latest series on sex being fun and yet inexplicable to children reminded me of when we told our kids “the facts.”
My wife worked from home as a lawyer for families seeking a surrogate. Sometimes the family needed eggs, sometimes sperm, and often a uterus. She concluded that she could not keep telling stork stories to the kids while working in the kitchen and talking on the phone with clients about sperm count, viability and the other issues that naturally needed to be addressed.
So when my two girls were 9 and 11 my wife decided it was time to have the talk. At that time we still had our Sunday dinners as a family, so my wife picked a Sunday and just started talking. My wife thought it was important that we provide more than the usual detail. She remembered when her mother, in the early 70s, explained the matter to her and left out the erection bit, and that her reaction had been, “That can’t work. I’m a babysitter and I’ve seen those floppy things. That can’t go inside me.”
So the kids got the whole shebang. Even the warning that “boys like it a lot and will try to talk you into it.” My oldest, always more analytic and scientific, simply nodded and took in the info. The youngest was horrified. “Does Joel know about this?” is what she wanted to know, Joel being a close family friend who my daughter obviously respected more than us after telling her the weird things we do. “Joel has three kids of his own,” was an explanation that did not quite solve the question, but time has passed.
Another story about talking to kids honestly about sex:
When I was in middle school in Marin County in 1977, two of our teachers gathered the sixth-through-eighth graders together for “Sexuality Day.” They told us we were free to write down any questions we might have. “Anonymity promotes honesty,” they said, so innocent to the fact that they were sitting in front of a room of leering preteens. So we wrote down questions and the first one pulled from the hat by a stern Mrs. Meyers was “Can you get pregnant by butt fucking?” Her answer: “I prefer the term anal intercourse. And the answer is no.” The next question was “Do you fuck? Do you like to fuck?” The matronly Mrs. Floyd took this one and answered honestly, bless her heart. “I also prefer the term ‘intercourse.’ And many of you know my daughter Kristen so I guess the answer is obvious. And yes, I’m not ashamed to say I enjoy relations with Mr. Floyd!”
Hats off to these brave teachers of yore. You probably couldn’t get away with that kind of nerdy honesty today.
Update from a reader:
One of your readers mentioned Our Whole Lives (OWL), the progressive sexuality education program created by the Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ. Both our daughters went through the middle school OWL program – and then they volunteered to take the more involved high school OWL program as well.
OWL works by answering every question, and providing more information than you could ever want. As some of your readers suggested, knowing all the facts is generally the opposite of an aphrodisiac. My daughters have been part of informative discussions about pleasure and abortion and LGBTQ issues and masturbation and date rape. They’ve been shown illustrations that include different positions and even disabled people having sex. One of them even won a classroom race to get the condom on the banana first.
The result is that while they have a positive attitude toward sex and toward their bodies, their eyes are open. They’ve made it clear that, at ages 18 and 15, they’re in absolutely no rush to go all the way. Meanwhile, adults in our congregation are wondering when they can sign up to take the OWL classes for people over 35 (there are curricula for six different age levels in all), so that they can explore issues such as, say, how to enjoy sex after a mastectomy.
In fact OWL’s success is so strong that one can’t help but wonder if part of the popularity of abstinence-only programs is an unspoken knowledge that they keep kids ignorant and therefore more sexually malleable – that they keep young women more likely to end up barefoot and pregnant per a certain 1950s ideal.
Face Of The Day
Kiev’s mayoral candidate for the Internet Party, “Darth Vader”, arrives to speak to the media on Volodymyrska Hill in Kiev, Ukraine on May 22, 2014. Amongst his pledges Mr Vader promises “fish for everyone” and “anti gravity tripods for journalists”. Ukraine’s Presidential elections are to be held on Sunday May 25, 2014. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.
What’s Race’s Impact On Biology?
While trashing Nicholas Wade’s book on race and genetics, Jonathan Marks points out that Wade ignores epigenetics:
It is hard to find a book on evolution today that fails to mention epigenetics—the ways in which DNA can be modified in direct response to the environment, and those DNA modifications can be stably transmitted—but this is one such book. Flexibility and reactivity are not in Wade’s evolutionary arsenal. To acknowledge the plasticity and adaptability of the human organism—which has framed most scientific work in human biology over the last century—would be to undermine Wade’s theme of the independent, unforgiving external world exacting its selective toll on the human gene pool.
Relatedly, Anne Fausto-Sterling reviews Richard C. Francis’s Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes, Ann Morning’s The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference, and Dorothy Roberts’s Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century. Here’s a quote from Roberts that explains her thesis:
Race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health. Understanding race as a political category does not erase its impact on biology; instead, it redirects attention from genetic explanations to social ones.
Fausto-Sterling takes this argument and runs with it:
Morning and Roberts argue convincingly that race is a socially produced set of categories that has profound and often terrible biological consequences. Without putting words into Francis’s mouth, since he doesn’t discuss race per se, he would, I think, agree that epigenetics provides a well-understood tool that ought to be used more frequently in studies of biological correlates of racial inequality in health. If our goal is not just to understand race, but to improve health, then we don’t need research to find genes that cause essential hypertension as much as we need to address the sources of chronic stress. … Understanding race as a producer of health outcomes, but not a result of genetic programming, doesn’t suggest that we abandon biomedical research as it relates to race, but it does suggest that looking for race-oriented genetic precursors of disease is a fruitless labor. We need a different kind of investigation.
It’s true that epigenetics “ought to be used more frequently in studies of biological correlates of racial inequality in health.” But that doesn’t preclude looking for genes that influence health. And some of those genes may well be concentrated in populations with genetic simularies. Just because those populations are not races doesn’t mean that we should focus entirely on epigenetics.
Previous Dish on Wade here.
The View From Your Window
Sakudaira, Japan, 6.05 pm
Mixing Commerce With Consecration, Ctd
Matthew Hutson offers a theory as to why people are so offended that the 9/11 museum has a gift shop:
What people see in the 9/11 gift shop is a taboo trade-off. On one side of the exchange is cash, and on the other is not just a mug or a hoodie but something much larger. These items stand in for all the suffering they commemorate. The equation is quite simple: “They’re making money off my dead son,” one man told the Washington Post. Some people have a problem not with the merch per se — 9/11 T-shirts were not invented over the weekend — but with the location of their sale. I suspect they see a leveraging of museum visitors’ mourning into commercial gain.
We find taboo trade-offs offensive because secular goods are fungible and sacred ones are not. A hundred dollar bill or a new stereo or bike can be reduced to a single dollar figure, and can be traded for each other based on these values. But we consider certain qualities of life too rich and unique to undergo such valuation without significant loss. How do you put a price on your child’s life? Even to suggest such a thing—that perhaps your son’s bundle of charms and qualms and loves and drives could be squashed into one dollar figure — outrages us. By putting something on sale, “money becomes the most frightful leveler,” the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1903. “It hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability.”
Hutson doesn’t mention the unidentified remains of 9/11 victims housed at the site, which lend it a grim solemnity that many believe make it an inappropriate venue for selling kitschy souvenirs or holding boozy donor galas. Jessica Goldstein points out, however, that even among museums that exist to document tragedies, it would be unprecedented if the 9/11 museum didn’t have a gift shop. She compares it to the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, whose gift shop drew little controversy when it opened in 2001:
Kari Watkins, executive director of the Oklahoma City Museum, said the gift shops serve two important purposes. They help visitors commemorate the event, and they make a museum fiscally possible. “People come from around the world. They want to remember. They want a token to take back with them,” she said. In the case of her museum, “The store is 25% of our museum revenue.”
There’s been a gift shop at the Oklahoma City Museum since it opened, she said. “We had people who didn’t like it,” she added, even though everything that’s sold there has to be “very mission-related. We’re heavy on the books, postcards, apparel, some things that kids can relate to.” Today, the store at the Oklahoma City Museum offers the same type of merchandise as the 9/11 store: stuffed puppies in rescue dog vests, “Survivor Tree” Christmas ornaments, mugs, charms, apparel.
I grew up in New York and lived through 9/11, and though I was fortunate enough not to lose any friends or relatives on that day, I know people who did – I think most New Yorkers are only a degree or two removed from a 9/11 victim. I haven’t visited the museum, so I’m hesitant to form too strong an opinion, but my gut reaction is to see the museum’s commercial side as a profanation of a place that continues to hold deeply painful and traumatic personal associations for tens or even hundreds of thousands of people.
On the other hand, the museum will need to sustain itself, and people who travel to New York to see it will want to take home mementos of their visit. And this isn’t exactly new, either: I remember taking some friends from Virginia downtown in October 2001 to bear witness to the tragedy, and I could hardly count how many souvenir stands had already popped up on the sidewalk, mere blocks from the rubble. At the time, we were all too shocked to be offended, and grateful, for that matter, that people were coming to New York and spending money here.
But when all is said and done, I think what is really driving the outrage here is that this museum exists in such close proximity to the unidentified remains of a thousand dead human beings whose families are still grieving and will probably never experience the closure that comes with burying their loved ones. Even though the repository is separate from the museum and not open to the public, I can see why victims’ family members would find it troublesome that NYPD t-shirts and commemorative bookmarks are being sold a stone’s throw away.
Ukraine Stumbles Toward The Polls, Ctd
There is a regional divide in favorability for Ukraine's presidential front-runner, Poroshenko pewrsr.ch/1qXkwkN http://t.co/WATM0e2Q36—
Pew Research Global (@pewglobal) May 22, 2014
Steven Pifer surveys the political landscape in the lead-up to Sunday’s presidential elections in Ukraine:
In the final week before the vote, oligarch Petro Poroshenko appears to hold a commanding lead, polling over 30 percent. His nearest competitors, former Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and former banker Serhiy Tyhypko, each poll in single digits. If anything, Poroshenko’s lead has grown over the past two months, and it appears almost insurmountable. Some analysts project that Poroshenko will win outright on Sunday. That would require that he win virtually all of the undecided vote in the opinion polls. If he does win outright on Sunday, it would be a first for a Ukrainian presidential election; every previous election has gone to a run-off.
Whether or not the election is decided in one round or two, a democratic election process and clear winner will be a big plus for Ukraine. It will remove the cloud of illegitimacy that hangs over the government as seen in the eastern part of the country. It could give a boost to the OSCE-initiated roundtable process that seeks to promote a peaceful settlement of the country’s internal differences.
What would a Poroshenko presidency look like? Annabelle Chapman ponders the question:
Poroshenko has also vowed that one of his first moves will be to dismantle Ukraine’s oligarchic system.
He has pledged to get rid of the “uncompetitive, corrupt benefits” the old authorities created for “families” of businessmen and has promised “zero tolerance for corruption.” This is also a message to voters. In one recent poll, 51 percent of respondents put “untainted by corruption” at the top of the list of criteria they’d like to see in the country’s future president.
Needless to say, this is just what Ukraine needs — but these are strange words, coming from someone who made his career, and his fortune, in just the environment he now condemns. Eight years ago, when Poroshenko took a senior political position in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution, analyst Andreas Umland considered the ironies entailed by replacing old oligarchs with new ones. Fast-forward to 2014, and another revolution in Kiev, and that assessment remains current.
Daniel Berman analyzes Putin’s approach to the elections:
Putin’s changing behavior towards the elections reflects frustration over their outcome. At the time of the agreement with Yanukovych, Putin had reason to believe that a runoff between a Party of Regions-backed candidate and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was plausible. Such a runoff would have ensured that no matter who won, Putin would have a friendly face in Kiev. …
If either Tymoshenko or a Party of Regions candidate were to have a chance of victory, they would need the votes of the very Eastern Ukrainian regions were Pro-Russian separatists are threatening to disrupt voting, and where turnout will almost certainly be sporadic and low. Hence Putin’s decision to “release the hounds” in Donetsk and Luhansk indicates that has by and large given up any hope of a victory by either of them, and decided to proceed with other plans even if they would hurt the chances of his own proxies within the Ukraine.
Rajan Menon, on the other hand, expects Russia to be OK with a Poroshenko victory:
Petro Poroshenko will likely win the presidential poll. Yulia Tymoshenko will make a strong showing and continue playing an important part in politics. Neither has ever been aligned with Ukraine’s far right, the Kremlin’s bête noire. Both have a long history of dealing with Russia and are familiar figures to Moscow. Poroshenko, the “Chocolate King,” is a tycoon with substantial business interests in Russia and understands that Ukraine will be ill served by getting caught in a conflict spiral with Russia. And Putin knows that the next president won’t come from the Party of Regions, whose electoral base is in the Donbass, and that Poroshenko is a man with whom he can work.
The election will also help calm easterners’ fears about the right-wing nationalist parties and movements, particularly Right Sector and Svoboda, rooted in western Ukraine. It would be a big mistake for Kyiv and the West to dismiss these apprehensions as nothing more than the product of a Kremlin-run misinformation campaign (not that there hasn’t been one). A sensible policy toward the Donbass requires that they be taken seriously.
Must Animal Shelters Kill?
Brian Palmer defends shelters that euthanize hard-to-adopt animals:
No-kill is an appealing idea. But before condemning U.S. shelter managers as barbarians, look at a country like India, which prohibits the killing of unwanted dogs. The country’s 25 million stray dogs live in deplorable conditions—emaciated, diseased, surviving on trash, and in constant conflict with humans. The country suffers 20,000 human deaths from rabies annually, which represents more than 35 percent of the global total. Contrast this with the situation in the United States. Stray dogs are incredibly rare, and one or two Americans die annually from rabies, invariably transmitted by a wild animal.
The debate between no-kill advocates and traditionalists comes down to this question: What kind of life can we give animals that are surrendered to shelters? And would that life be better than a quick death?
When that life isn’t so great:
The conditions in some no-kill shelters are awful. “If you don’t euthanize animals due to over crowding, they get into fights,” says [PETA's Daphna] Nachminovitch. “They injure each other. They kill each other. They spin around and throw themselves against the cage. They stop eating. They get sick, and they eventually die. This is the reality.”
PETA’s support of animal euthanasia has come under fire in the past.
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