David Plotz and Hanna Rosin
Hi again,
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StumbleUponFeel better? Is it all out of your system? Because that hardhearted, cynical "sweetie" who wrote me back this afternoon is not the sweetie I know at home (unless of course this is the usual midday office David I am only now encountering for the first time). Besides calling your wife bogus, I feel you were too hard on that poor choirboy. So much in American culture would be lost without that one last revival tour, the most dramatic of all redemption tales. You're right: Who needs Rick Springfield? But what about all those other reunion gems: "Still Crazy," the Spinal Tap of this genre, a movie that gave us so much pleasure not so long ago. And the campy splendor of a Cher concert. Not to mention VH1's Behind the Music, those late-nite maudlin rockumentaries chronicling the rise and fall of, as Liza Mundy famously wrote: "the same five people, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Nicks, Cher, and Stevie Nicks." Kill those things and you kill what is loveliest about America: the opportunity to rise from your own ashes.
I agree with you about the campaign photos, and the one about Al Gore today was certainly a fine example of the art. I think elitists like us have already got our revenge on ham-hocks populism, though, when Gary Bauer, while flipping a pancake, flipped backward off the stage. But this is not a moment to recall the indignities of Gary Bauer. The man has, after all, suffered enough. Here he takes an iconoclastic stand by endorsing McCain and brings on himself nothing but trouble: First all his friends stop talking to him. Then McCain makes him stand on the stage, his smile slowly fading, as his new and now only friend rails against the "agents of intolerance." Now what will he do with himself?
My favorite story of the day, by the way, comes from the same place it always does: The Washington Times, the only organ in Washington always prepared to be shocked anew. This time, it's about what the headline calls an "art" project that shocks San Francisco (as if San Francisco were the Washington Times). Some hapless 24-year-old at the San Francisco Art Institute has decided to publicly demonstrate oral sex and exchange feces with a bound and gagged classmate. (Makes that doorknob licking by your competitors seem tame.) He justified his oeuvre as "an exploration of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and Kant's theories on freedom on thought and action." Now I know why I never went to graduate school.
So, are you going to Bob Jones this week, or not? If yes, feel free to postpone this discussion to a later point. If not, I'm interested in your opinion on the Hendrik Hertzberg "Comment" on Bob Jones in The New Yorker this week. Although I'm a great admirer, it seems to me he is much too sanguine about America. He argues that the absence of any Bob Jones defenders proves that America has come to accept interracial dating. But that seems like wishful thinking. More than almost anything else, interracial dating seems one of those taboos people know they can't complain about but secretly detest. Same is true for his cheery outlook on shifting Protestant attitudes about Catholicism. Publicly, it's true that they've toned down the differences. And if you asked them on a poll they would tell you that. But if you are a red-blooded Protestant, it would follow logically, by the dictates of your theology, that Catholics are going to hell. Bob Jones is just the only place honest enough to admit that.
Am looking forward to reading the rest of The New Yorker. For now, must check the wires.
Jaded,
Hanna
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Highlights from The Fray:
Obviously I'm biased, and in mourning, but Hanna's outburst about Bill Bradley [see Wednesday's entry] still seems to be a bit much...it's pretty hard to exit one of these races with any grace and dignity, and I think my guy's doing a pretty dang good job of it. Regarding "you just lost, nobody liked you" - Bradley picked up a fairly consistent 30% of the vote nationwide, but many more didn't hate Bradley but they simply thought Gore was the better candidate. Could you imagine if Gore hadn't gone through a primary? Six months of getting killed in the press every night by the GOP? And certainly Bradley did raise a number of issues that the veep wouldn't have prioritized--including universal health care, race relations, and, yes, campaign finance reform.
--Sad Bradley Fan
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[And see Thursday's entry where Ms Rosin responds: that Bradley mourner in The Fray made me feel bad.]
The Breakfast Table asked [see Tuesday's entry] why science reporters haven't written articles explaining the reason TRW and other contractors have such a hard time making a workable missile defense. The short answer (I'm a correspondent for Science magazine, which I assume makes me a science reporter) is that they have written such articles, and the reason that the contractors are having such trouble is that the task is extremely difficult. It's like shooting a bullet at a bullet, only much, much harder. Longer explanatory analogy: I once saw Pief Panofsky, the Stanford physicist who helped negotiate the test-ban treaty, talk about this subject in Cambridge. He asked the audience to imagine some nutty guy who liked to drive into his garage by hitting the garage-door opener at precisely the right moment so that the door flew open exactly as he rolled in. If you think about it for a moment, you can see that this is quite like flying into the path of a missile at exactly the right time so that you hit its forward section -- it's a matter of split-second timing. Now imagine that you are doing this at thousands of miles an hour. Now imagine that instead of a regular car, you are driving a jet-powered car, which shudders and shakes and has to be constantly course-corrected just to stay in a straight line, which of course must be factored in to your garage-door opening. Now imagine that the garage is moving, too, and it's jiggling through the air just like you are. Now imagine that you have to make a whole lot of the crucial decisions when you are miles away and can't even get a good look at the garage. Now imagine -- Panofsky went on like this for a good while, and in the end pretty much convinced everyone in the audience that the ABM treaty was a good idea primarily because it would prevent nations from spending billions of dollars to build systems that simply could not work. Or, rather, that it was supposed to do that -- I guess we're doing it anyway.
--Charles C. Mann
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You asked {Tuesday's entry] what TRW stands for.
Two brainy guys formed Ramo-Woolridge in Los Angeles and showed up on the cover of Time in the late 1950s. Soon after, the big successful machine shop, Thompson Products, acquired them. I don't remember if they named their company Thompson-Ramo-Woolridge, but if they did, they soon changed it to their italicized monogram, TRW.
--Thomas Tersigni
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I love this word, "ironists," as in "committed Democrats and ironists all" by Hanna [See Tuesday's entry]. As for me, I try to live without irony, but sometimes my shirts are just too damned wrinkled, especially the cotton ones. And "canicide!" Fabulous.
--Tim K.
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Plotz has a dizziness accumulated only from his great rareness in common folkish observations without realizing that greatness comes from all around him and manifests itself only to those who are not so encumbered as he obviously is in his own importance and cowering adjectives self learned and looking for a target that is worthy of his very dubious talents and one that is not likely to object as he reads much more worthy...stuff.
--bill schwarz
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To hell with Gabriel Snyder--more domesticity please.
--Jim Crowley
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