Dear Joel,
Thanks for putting so economically what it was that bothered me about the vigilante cybermom. The only thing in today’s paper that is nearly so creepy is political consultant Ralph Reed. The New York Times fronts a story about how Microsoft is paying Reed to lobby his top client–George W. Bush. It’s usually hard to tell when the Influence Economy has taken another step down the path to perdition, but this case seems pretty clear: I’m not aware of any other instance in which a consultant signed up to lobby a current political candidate. Reed is orchestrating a letter-writing campaign in which major Bush backers are being solicited to write to the candidate, saying they oppose the government’s antitrust suit against Microsoft. Now, this is just the sort of organized pressure that makes running for or holding high office so hard, and one might expect one’s friends (or at least one’s paid professionals) to refrain from adding to the load. But in the upside-down world of political life, someone like Reed is seen as so crucial to a candidate’s success (in the years before this year’s Republican field took shape, Reed’s deliberations about which candidate he would work for were watched so closely that politicos referred with straight faces to the “Ralph Reed primary”) that he can do anything. Shades of Dick Morris, who used to sidle into the Oval Office to bother the leader of the free world with complaints about his cut of the ad buy.
There’s my dudgeon for the day. On a lighter note, I want to hear what you thought of big story in the “Science Times” on the NASA mission now underway to study the asteroid Eros. This is probably old news to you, but I–who never write and rarely think about science–loved this piece: Who knew that we even had spacecraft that could orbit an asteroid a four-year journey away from Earth? (I thought we sent them all to Mars and drove them into craters.) My only disappointment was that that the story told me nothing about who named the asteroid Eros, and whether they knew, at the time they named it, that it looks like a giant baked potato.
I do think (I’m back to answering you now) that there’s something arrogant about all this “new philanthropy.” It’s great that these zillionaires are giving away a lot of money. And it’s even good, up to a point, that they’re trying to find new ways to do it: The world of “old” philanthropy can be fairly sclerotic. I’d rather see someone start a new endeavor, even a self-aggrandizing one, than give to Harvard, which already has more money than God. But Saylor does symbolize the annoying side of it: He wants to be Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller right now, at the very same time he’s making his fortune. No problem, if you share his Panglossian belief that you can help the whole world in a way that also creates new markets for yourself and also helps you develop a skilled workforce and also gets you more press, so that it will all make you richer and a better person and more famous than before, which are all goals that now seamlessly support each other. Somehow our new technology will just abolish all the old sufferings.
But giving money effectively requires a tragic imagination. Part of what was most admirable about the old robber barons’ philanthropies was that these men bothered to open their eyes to the particular forms that wretchedness takes. The Saylors of the world think their new magic is so powerful that they can skip all that.
Indignantly,
Marjorie
