Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 327
March 21, 2014
It’s OK To Bareback … On The Toilet, Ctd
A reader presumes wrong:
I highly doubt this post will become a thread, as so many other weighty topics have done. But I am willing to admit that I have never - in my 60 years of life - ever successfully deployed a paper toilet-seat cover! Either I’m in way too much of a hurry to bother, or the stupid thing tears coming out of the dispenser or while I’m trying to gently unfold it and ease out the center “hole” section. Or I do get it properly placed and then, just as I lower myself down, half of it slips into the toilet. I long ago gave up f-ing with the covers at all. Glad to know I’m not really taking my life in my hands!
Another sees an opening:
I greatly enjoy your blog, but this is the first time I’ve been inspired to write. This thread reminds me of one of my family’s favorite stories.
First, some background: my grandmother was a long-time public advocate for comprehensive sex education and reproductive health, partly during her work for the California’s women’s correctional programs. She was also not known for blunting her speech when a direct approach would do. One day, following a speech on sex education, a nun in the audience stood up to ask if someone could “catch an STD from a toilet seat?”
“Only if you fuck it while it’s still warm, Sister.”
Another conveys the ick factor felt by many readers:
I don’t use toilet-seat covers because I fear STIs; it’s because of icky, dirty seats. Unisex bathrooms where guys with bad aim don’t put the seat up beforehand. Little kids sliding off the seat after a poop. That well-soaked tampon whacking the seat during removal. And don’t even get me started on the vomit. Eew.
Another raises a much bigger issue:
It should be noted that the notion of contracting an STI from public toilets was developed as a means to explain venereal diseases in children before medical professionals and others were willing to entertain the idea that the children were being sexually assaulted by family members or other adults. It’s important to remember that these things happen, are happening and that our historical impulse has been to refuse to listen to the victims and survivors.
March 20, 2014
The Bigot Everyone Loved To Hate
Matt Sigl calls Fred Phelps “a great friend to the gay rights movement”:
In his outrageous lunacy, his relentless desire for media attention, and the purity of his hatefulness, Phelps did something that the gay rights movement couldn’t accomplish on its own: expose the utter depravity and heartlessness of homophobia. … Phelps probably secretly troubled the pious and faithful more than he ever got underneath any homosexual’s skin, for in him the conservative Christian had to confront just what God really thought of homosexuals after all. The subject is not a pleasant one for many leading religious leaders; just watch the milquetoast Joel Osteen wince when forced to comment on it. Or Cardinal Dolan for that matter.
Alyssa Rosenberg is on the same page:
[A]s the gay rights movement has worked to define lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans as people who want the same things as their heterosexual counterparts, including marriage and family stability, Fred Phelps and his followers gave organizers a perfect image to organize in opposition to. If Americans had to choose between getting comfortable with the idea of homosexuality or being seen as extreme, hateful, and rude, in increasing numbers, they seem to be choosing the former. Fred Phelps has caused many people enormous amounts of agony. But in doing so, he played a critical role in defining the choice between hatred and acceptance, and in accidentally expanding the tolerance of the very people he feared so much.
Jay Michaelson adds:
As symbol, Phelps was the reductio ad absurdum of many conservative beliefs. Tea Partiers think Obama is a socialist, Birthers think he’s a Kenyan, and Phelps said he was the antichrist. Tea Partiers think America has lost its way, Glenn Beck thinks it’s time for revolution, and Phelps said America will be destroyed by God for losing its moral grounding.
Erica Cook is against cheering Phelps’s death:
This is the chance to show the world how we are better people. We aren’t people who make the death of a man the reason to celebrate, no matter who that man is. We are the better people. And no matter who he is to us, he was someone’s father, grandfather, brother, and uncle. We may still be fighting against them, but today they need the respect they didn’t have the capacity to give when it was us. If we act in any way other than respectful we become no better than them. In stooping to that we relinquish the right to call what they do wrong.
Russell Saunders is declares to ”hell with all that”:
Fred Phelps was a blight. He was a receptacle for the absolute worst, most despicable kind of hatred humanity is capable of producing. The god of his imagining was a demon of bile, and his appearance before the public eye was a festering sore.
I do not regret the happiness I feel knowing I no longer share an oxygen supply with him. I do not believe in the existence of a hell, even for the likes of people like him. If there is a judgment that awaits him, let his loved ones hope it is before a judge more merciful than the one he worshiped.
Richard Kim unpacks Phelps’s worldview:
Especially in recent years, he possessed almost no followers, no influence, no allies. What distinguishes him from any other raving street-corner prophet is the simple-mindedness of his message. In the place of the modern religious emphasis on God’s love, Phelps ranted on about God’s hate—for fags, for America, for Muslims, for Catholics, gun massacre victims and US troops. If American exceptionalism is in some way an attempt to sacralize the profane (America is blessed, its soliders and citizens blessed), Phelps merely reversed polarities, swapping in eternal damnation. It was a juvenile substitution. And to discuss Phelps as if he were a morally vexing and profound evil is to dignify him with a complexity he lacked. His hatred was banal.
Tom Junod met the Westboro Baptist Church clan once:
I don’t remember anything they said. What I do remember was how their children looked, and the keen and nearly overwhelming sense of loss the appearance of their children elicited. There were so many of them, for one thing; the Westboro congregation turned out to be a young one, and even some of the lank-haired women holding signs and spitting epithets turned out be, on closer inspection, teenagers. And they were all so poor. I’m not speaking simply of their clothes, and their teeth, and their grammar, or any of the other markers of class in America. I’m speaking of their poverty of spirit. Whether they were sixteen or six, they looked to be already exhausted, already depleted, with greasy hair, dirty faces, and circles under their eyes that had already hardened into purplish dents. They looked as if they were far from home, and didn’t know where they were going next. They looked, in truth, not just poorly taken care of, but abused, if not physically then by a belief inimical to childhood—the belief that to be alive is to hate and be hated.
Dave Weigel notes the relationship Phelps had with the media:
We can agree on this: He was hilariously stupid, and stupid people provide good copy. For a generation, ever since his flamboyant “God Hates Fags” signs went viral (before there was even a modern Internet for things to go viral on), journalists would explore Phelps’ sad little world and bait him.
David Von Drehle wishes Westboro hadn’t gotten so much coverage:
As a reporter and editor in some big newsrooms over the past 30 years, I watched as one journalist after another took Phelps’s bait, then tried to spit out the hook once the dishonesty and shabbiness of the man’s enterprise grew clear. You could fill a gymnasium with the scribes who swore off coverage of Westboro over the years. The only problem was, new and naïve reporters were being minted all the time, ready to believe that Phelps represented some larger darkness beyond the pit of his own person.
Donald McCarthy joins the conversation:
When even Rush Limbaugh rejects the group, you know it’s a rather pathetic target to take on. At this point, saying you hate the Westboro Baptist Church is about as easy as saying you hate the Ku Klux Klan; not exactly a profound statement worthy of approval. A blasting of the WBC is the equivalent of a late night talk show host joking about Kim Kardashian.
The WBC is a target that makes everyone feel good and allows them to ignore mainstream religions’ homophobic tendencies that are more subtle than the signs the WBC members hold. It’s great that the church has provided such a horrible face for homophobia that people now balk from homophobia much more than they used to, but at some point the group’s exposure helps them infinitely more than it helps society.
Scott Shackford hopes the media will finally stop paying attention to the Phelps family:
[T]he death of Fred Phelps probably won’t result in any changes from the family, but it’s a good excuse for the rest of us to move on. I’m sure that right now some dreadful editorial cartoonist is sketching Phelps being met at the pearly gates by all the soldiers his family picketed. It’s true that the solution for bad speech is more speech. But the solution to crazy obsession is not becoming obsessed right back at them. Stop picking at this scab.
(Photo: Fred Phelps, former leader of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, KS. By Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Were The Vikings Really That Bad?
The first Viking exhibition in three decades at the British Museum in London seeks to set the record straight on these seafaring warriors:
Nico Hines explores how the Vikings got such a bad reputation:
It seems this was a rare era in which history was not written by the victors; mostly because the victors couldn’t write. It was left to monks and Christian churchmen to craft the only contemporary accounts of many of the Vikings’ raids, and Vikings did attack churches, which held no sacred mystique for them. They were simply seen as easy, wealthy targets, confounding local conventions of the time.
“These accounts are dressed up in the language of religious polemic,” [British Museum curator Gareth] Williams said. “Many [of the stories] were borrowed from earlier accounts—from classical antiquity. The violent reputation and particularly the reputation for atrocities was created then, but the Vikings were probably no worse than anyone else.”
Mark Hudson is captivated by the Viking ship in the final room of the exhibit:
Only about a quarter of the original dark timbers are present, fitted into a modern metal frame, but the sheer scale of the craft and the dynamic sweep of its curving bows are immensely impressive. For the Vikings, we are reminded, the sea was a route rather than a barrier. Theirs was a culture that resided in waterborne movement rather than in the monuments that come with settled culture. If that’s a difficult idea to get across in an exhibition, which will inevitably be all about objects, the thought of this magnificent ship slicing through the freezing northern Atlantic waves – seen in a looping film at the end of the room – gives a shiver-inducing sense of what Viking travel must have been like.
But Jonathan Jones found the exhibit dry:
Why not weave their tales and the histories written by their enemies into the mix of archaeological stuff to give it warmth and context? The refusal to do so cannot be an oversight. It looks like an archaeological dogma: only material objects painstakingly excavated are to be relied upon as evidence. The rest is romantic twaddle, apparently.
For instance, where are the gods? The picture stone showing a ship arriving at Valhalla is one of just a handful of images of mythology in this exhibition. There’s more about bowls and bracelets than about Thor.
Jones might like the following promotional video more than the substantive one seen above:
A Poem For Thursday
The opening lines from Aracelis Girmay’s “Cooley High“:
I guess it’s a funny thing, really,
how I can’t hear Boyz II Men,
even the 90s bedroom countdown
and the colour blue of Michael McCrary’s
‘Injection, fellas’ without wanting
to cry.
Girmay explains that the poem is based on her experience of moving to boarding school in the 1990s, an attempt to capture “the psychological and emotional consequences of leaving home and being thrown into isolated orbit, neither here nor there (quite)”:
I wanted the poem to deal with loss, and to be built on a trapdoor – to conjure a sense of bottomlessness, and the swift fall beneath the poem. I wanted the opening sentence to serve the poem as noise (the radio!) and structure. The chatty, discursive tone of those first six lines slowly gives way to a different lyrical and geographical landscape (children, prickly pears and hills). I wanted that first sentence to be a kind of bookshelf you look at, plainly, then happen to lean against … the pressure of memory, that weight, pushing you into another hidden room. The house’s true and secret interior. The first sentence thinks it is merely and safely recalling grief, but then, in fact, ends up carrying the speaker deeper into her grief again.
March 19, 2014
Face Of The Day
Fourteen-week-old twin polar bear cubs play during their first presentation to the media in Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich, Germany on March 19, 2014. The male and female twins were born in the zoo on December 9, 2013. By Alexandra Beier/Getty Images.
Legalizing The Scientific Method
Researchers have finally scored some weed to test it as a treatment for PTSD:
As more states move to legalize all or some marijuana use, reform has remained stalled not just by outright federal prohibition, but also by federal policies that have suppressed research on cannabis. On Friday, the federal government took a potentially momentous step back from this position, granting researchers who have for years borne the brunt of this policy access to a legal supply of marijuana. The decision means a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in treating veterans may for the first time be able to perform a triple-blind study on marijuana and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Rick Doblin speculates about FDA recognition:
We’d need $15 or $20 million to make marijuana into a prescription medicine, approved by the FDA. That will probably take five to seven years. What does that $15 to $20 million go toward? This is just a Phase II pilot study, an exploratory study. We’re figuring out what the doses are, whether CBD helps, whether THC is effective on its own, what are the side effects. The money would go then to what is called the Phase III study, and those are the ones that are used to prove safety and efficacy. With that we’ll probably have to treat 400-500 people or more.
This study will give us results and we’ll see how clear the signals that we get are. Is there marijuana helpful a lot or a little? If it’s helpful a lot, then you need fewer people for the bigger study.
Where Does Time Come From?
Dr. Demetrios Matsakis, the Chief Scientist for Time Services at the US Naval Observatory, addresses the question in a terrific short documentary:
(Hat tip: FlowingData)
Putting Justices Out To Pasture
Erwin Chemerinsky begs Justice Ginsburg to retire this year:
So long as the Democrats control the Senate, President Obama can have virtually anyone he wants confirmed for the Supreme Court. There has been only one filibuster against a Supreme Court nominee, and that was to block Justice Abe Fortas’ elevation to chief justice, not to block his initial appointment. There were 48 votes against Thomas and 42 against Alito, but Democrats filibustered neither. Besides, if Democrats have control of the Senate, they could change the rules to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, just as they did for lower federal court judges and presidential appointments to executive positions.
In the end, the only way to ensure that President Obama can pick someone who will carry on in Justice Ginsburg’s tradition is for the vacancy to occur this summer. Indeed, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who will turn 76 this summer, should also carefully consider the possibility of stepping down this year.
Bernstein agrees. Garrett Epps suspects that Supreme Court Justices “just don’t see the issue the way the rest of us do, as a straightforward matter of presidential elections and judicial votes”:
Since the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010, she has been the senior justice on the liberal side of the Court. This is an important job—when the Court’s conservatives vote together as a five-member bloc, the senior liberal justice assigns the task of preparing the liberal dissent. The purpose of such a dissent is to discredit the majority’s reasoning and offer future courts grounds to distinguish or overrule the case. Ginsburg often assigns that duty to herself; her major dissents are masterpieces of the genre.
If she were to retire at the end of this term, that leadership role would, for the next few years, fall to Justice Stephen Breyer, 75. (Chemerinsky also suggests that Breyer “consider” stepping down.) Though Ginsburg and Breyer are both “liberals” on this Court’s spectrum, they are a study in contrasts. Where Ginsburg fights, Breyer dithers; where her ideas are clear, his are mercurial; where she draws lines, he wanders across them; where her dissents are straightforward, his tend to be—well—incomprehensible. In the showdown over the Affordable Care Act, Breyer, along with Justice Elena Kagan, crossed the aisle to support Chief Justice John Roberts in limiting Congress’s Spending Power; Ginsburg’s s opinion dripped contempt for this newly minted limit on a crucial federal power. I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought that her departure would leave the liberal wing without real leadership.
Steven Mazie :
Whatever Justice Ginsburg’s reasoning for resisting the chorus—maybe she expects Hillary to win the White House in 2016, and would like to have her replacement appointed by a President Clinton, just as she was—Emily Bazelon is right that she “has made it more than clear that she isn’t going to retire because columnists and law professors think she should.” There is something strange and unseemly about public calls for a vigorous justice to retire. Does anyone really think the justice has yet to think through her decision? Isn’t the doomsday scenario of a 6- or 7-justice conservative bloc screamingly obvious to her? Should any of us really counsel Justice Ginsburg on her major life decisions?
It’s OK To Bareback … On The Toilet
Mona Chalabi presents the evidence against toilet seat covers:
Public health professionals are continually emphasizing that it is virtually impossible to catch an STI from a toilet seat.
It would require the perfect storm of bacteria (i.e. you would have to sit down on the exact place where the virus was deposited, immediately after it was deposited, and it would have to be a super virus that could survive outside the body).
That improbability is highlighted by a blog post on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, which suggests that “if someone has an open, draining wound (MRSA [Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] positive) and sits on the toilet seat and does not wipe it, someone else can sit on the toilet seat and if they have an open wound contract MRSA, also.” The number of people with open wounds on the part of their bums that hits the seat is likely to be low. And of those people, the number with MRSA-positive wounds will be even lower.
Despite that, demand is high. One U.S. company that sells automatically dispensing toilet seat covers has 2,000 accounts in the Americas and takes in $5 million a year.
All The War’s A Stage
Mark Harris is out with a new book, Five Came Back, which chronicles the wartime service of the great American directors Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, and George Stevens. Tom Carson suspects that “movie buffs will never think of any of these filmmakers in quite the same way again”:
[T]he mind boggles at imagining Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino all donning uniform for the duration to make films championing the Iraq war’s righteousness. That their very approximate 1940s equivalents did just that—generally for a fraction of their peacetime pay—is a trenchant reminder that World War II was different. …
Despite the constant tension between their essential function as propagandists and their new responsibilities as documentarians, all five directors certainly managed to keep busy and even do good work. Peppy as ever, Capra oversaw the Why We Fight series and rode herd on those of his fellow filmmakers who were also attached to the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. Ford, the lone exception, joined the Navy and got a shrapnel wound while filming the battle of Midway. His waywardness undimmed by working for the Pentagon, Huston shot three documentaries—Report From The Aleutians, San Pietro and Let There Be Light—uncompromising enough to horrify the brass, the reason the last of them, about the rehabilitation of shellshocked GIs, was suppressed for decades.
David Denby focuses on San Pietro (scene embedded above, full version here):
In early 1944, John Huston made a film about an infantry unit’s tortuous struggle to clear the Germans out of San Pietro, a small town northwest of Naples, and the surrounding countryside. When “The Battle of San Pietro” came out, in 1945, it was hailed for the power and the grit of its combat scenes and for its portrait of civilian misery, and Huston was praised for his courage. The film has been honored in those terms many times since.
Yet, as Harris reports, the scenes in “The Battle of San Pietro” were largely re-created after the town had been taken from the Germans.
Huston had access to official accounts of the struggle, culled from interviews with soldiers who had fought in it, and he used maps and a pointer to keep the American tactics and the chronology straight. But the bloody progress of the G.I.s across fields and along a stony ridge outside the town was staged; Huston’s actors were soldiers whom the Army assigned to the project. The men certainly look the part, their faces fatigued and worried. Huston asked them to stare into the camera now and then, as people do in newsreel footage. At times, the camera jerks wildly, as Ford’s camera had in Midway. Huston turned the signatures of authenticity into artifact.
But Denby doesn’t seem to mind much:
Huston not only presents the physical hardships of battle; he creates the war as a cultural and moral catastrophe. The sense of desolation is broken only at the end of the movie, by a scene of children playing in the street, their innocent faces making a minimal claim against despair. Even if the images are mostly contrived, “San Pietro” is aesthetically of a piece—and magnificent.
Philip French touches upon the post-war side of Five Came Back:
Hollywood was in transition when they returned, the major studios being broken up by order of the supreme court. None, however, made a real success as an independent producer, and this excellent book is ultimately a tale of disappointment and disillusionment. But there is a heartening moment in 1950 at the height of the McCarthy era, as vindictive rightwing investigators descended on Hollywood. The deeply conservative Cecil B DeMille and his reactionary cronies from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals attempted to depose the liberal Joseph L Mankiewicz as president of the Screen Writers Guild and impose a loyalty oath on all members. Wyler, Ford, Huston, Stevens and Capra came together in a grand reunion to oppose the move and they carried the day.
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