Wednesday, July 29, 2009 - Posts
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President Obama will meet with Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the White House on Thursday for what's being called the "Suds Summit." The three men plan to gather ‘round a picnic table, share a few beers, and, in this relaxed atmosphere, work out their differences. No one can say whether Obama's gambit will work, but to celebrate the great tradition of bonding over brewskies, Slate presents the top five beer-sharing moments from movie history.
5) In The Sure Thing, a classic '80s romantic comedy, John Cusack decides to drink his holiday blues away at a bar. After chatting up two strangers, he buys one a spritzer, the other a beer, and the three break into a drunken, but sweet, rendition of "The Christmas Song," commonly known as "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire."
4) In the 2007 bromance Superbad, two bumbling cops (played expertly by Seth Rogen and Bill Hader) invite a nerdy but charming teenager who calls himself "McLovin" (real name: Fogel) to knock back a couple at a bar. Before McLovin can take a sip, he first has to capture a bum that the cops couldn't quite catch—of course, he's rewarded with a couple extra brewskis for his efforts.
3) A group of British ambulance workers separated from their unit must trek across Africa in Ice Cold in Alex. Their leader, Captain Anson (John Mills), keeps up morale by describing the cold lagers they'll be able to drink when they reach Alexandria. In the climactic scene, a bartender lovingly pours bottles of Carlsberg into chilled glasses for the parched travelers. Rumor has it they used real lager and that Mills was pretty tipsy by the end of the shoot.
2) National Lampoon's Vacation takes the prize for the most disturbing-yet-adorable beer-sharing scene. Chevy Chase, through broken glasses and tears, tells his son, metal-mouthed 'tween Anthony Michael Hall, how much he loved sitting down for a beer with his dad when he was younger. Then he pulls a can out from his pocket and initiates young Hall to the secrets of lager drinking: "Don't let Mom smell it on your breath."
1) In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins barters tax advice for beer. He gets three for himself, and three for each of his buddies. "A man," he says, "working in the outdoors, feels more like a man if he can have a bottle of suds." Morgan Freeman's narration chimes in once they're perched on a roof, swilling away: After drinking that "Bohemia-style" brew, they all "felt like free men."
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The latest revelation about the conflict between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley is that the two men may be very, very distantly related. Late yesterday, ABC News reported that the professor and his arresting officer shared an ancestor in Niall of the Nine Hostages, a fourth-century Irish king whose blood, we are told, runs through up to one in 12 present-day Irishmen. Associated Content goes so far as to claim that the men are "actually cousins."
As this morning's "Google Trends" post noted, the DNA connection has since then become a public fixation. Why do we care? In Slate three years ago, Steve Olson explained that most people alive today, regardless of their races, have ancestors scattered throughout the world. Genetic tests can only measure lineage in a direct male line—father to father to father, all the way back. When you account for connections through women, though, "virtually everyone with any European ancestry" would be able count Niall of the Nine Hostages as an ancestor. In fact, Olson's research suggested that if any two people traced their lineage back to about 1,000 B.C., their ancestors would be identical.
Gates and Crowley's common DNA is not particularly unusual. What's stranger is today's obsession with these way-back family ties. Again: Why do we care? Are the thorny social and judicial questions framing Gates-gate softened by the fact the two men share genetics?
Behind today's interest in the "surprising" DNA connection, it seems to me, is a deeply unsettling public assumption about race as a biological measure of otherness. We know it isn't so: It's still unclear whether race can even be reliably determined from a given DNA sample. Yet a looming belief in biological difference (or, at least, surprise that black and white men should share genes) seems to linger. Had it been two pale-faced people found to have common origins—say, Vladimir Putin and Mikheil Saakashvili—would that news have likewise climbed the Google charts? It's hard to think so. A cultural idea of race as difference has caused enough problems. Seeing that idea show up in biological assumptions, too, is frightening.
Photograph of Henry Louis Gates Jr. by PETER KRAMER/Getty Images
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In recent days, the health care debate has shifted back to an idea that's been kicking around since Barack Obama first started talking about universal coverage on the campaign trail: Let's stick fatties with the tab. The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke out (again) this week in favor of a national tax on sugary drinks to fight the obesity epidemic and raise federal revenue. The Los Angeles Times spelled things out: "Tough love for fat people: Tax their food to pay for healthcare."
The recent push comes in the wake of a report published Monday in Health Affairs that purports to compute the annual medical spending attributable to obesity. According to author Eric A. Finkelstein, "obesity is the single biggest reason for the increase in health care costs" in the United States, contributing $147 billion to our national tab in 2008. A similar study from a few weeks ago pinned California's budget problems on the $41 billion cost of "obesity and inactivity.") Predictably, media outlets have jumped on the story.
This isn't the first time we've been led to believe that we can pay for universal health care by taxing fat people or making them lose weight. During the presidential campaign, both Obama and Hillary Clinton were asserting that preventing obesity could save the Medicare system a trillion dollars. But the idea that a national diet could solve all our problems is purest fantasy. (Or should I say pie-in-the-sky?) If we were really dedicated to cutting healthcare costs—if pinching pennies were a more important goal than making people well—then we wouldn't tax soda and cheeseburgers. We'd subsidize them.
The fact is, fat people aren't breaking the bank at all—they're saving us money. While it's true that someone who's grossly overweight might rack up bills for obesity-related ailments like diabetes and hypertension, those added costs would be more than offset by his shorter lifespan. The rest of us tend to suck more resources over the duration of our slim and fruitful lives on account of all the expensive degenerative diseases we develop in our
bonus years. That's not to say we shouldn't try to prevent obesity. But let's stop pretending it's a reasonable way to pay for health care reform.
(For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see my piece on the fat tax from February of last year.)
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 7: "Rorschach Wikipedia." Weirdly-shaped blobs throw Wikipedia into chaos! Last month, an emergency-room physician posted all 10 plates of the famous Rorschach Inkblot tests to Wikipedia, which some psychologists claim will make them ineffective, nulling years of valuable research. Wikipedians are waving the banner of free speech: "The APA it seems want to keep what they do a secret. Allowing them to carry this out on Wikipedia amounts to allowing them to censor Wikipedia content," wrote Heilman on the page's massive discussion section. (As of this writing, all 10 plates remain on the page.)
No. 15: "Niall of the Nine Hostages." Medieval Irish king, only son of Eochaid Muighmedon, fearless warrior ... progenitor of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the cop who arrested him? According to ABC News, both Gates—who is part Irish—and his arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, trace their lineage back to the 4th century king Niall of the Nine Hostages. (Researchers have found that one in 12 Irish men share genes with the king.) Only time will tell if these sons of Niall shall settle their differences at the bar stool with Obama.
No. 31: "Chester Himes." Chester Himes, the crime novelist and author of If He Hollers Let Him Go would have turned 100 today. Himes began writing while a prisoner in the 1930s and went on to become one of the more accomplished black writers of the 20th century. Set in a gritty 1960s New York, the nine books in his Harlem Detective series follow hardboiled NYPD sleuths Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. "I put the slang, the daily routine, and complex human relationships of Harlem into my detective novels," Himes said, according to NPR.