David Plotz and Hanna Rosin
Decadent Art
By David Plotz
Posted Thursday, March 9, 2000, at 10:40 AM ETGood morning, Hanna.
As always, we must thank God for the artists of New York. They are so kind to journalists. Today's New York Times front page brings us the story of one Hans Haacke, whose show "Sanitation" is part of the forthcoming (and eternally notorious) Whitney Biennial. Haacke intends "Sanitation" to be a commentary on last year's Brooklyn Museum "Sensation" show, and on government suppression of art in general. And how exactly is brave Hans expressing that? you ask: He is putting a bunch of garbage cans in a room and covering the walls with quotes from Rudy Giuliani, Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan. Oh, and he is rendering the quotes in Nazi-style "Fraktur" script. Get it? What a light touch this fellow has.
Here's my theory about Haacke: Rudy himself secretly hired the artist to make "Sanitation." (Can't you imagine Giuliani telling him: "No, No Hans. Not just the Nazi script. Use garbage cans too. It'll be great.") The best thing about this show for Giuliani is that the Whitney receives very little city funding: The mayor gets to be martyr to the idiocies of the culture vultures, and he can't do anything stupid like shutting the museum.
The Times front page also carries a disturbing story about how the INS has essentially stopped raiding workplaces in search of illegal employees. The implication is that the United States is so desperate for low-wage workers that it is ignoring illegal workers in order to keep wage inflation low. (Weird detail: One reason employers don't bother to weed out illegals is that an employer can be sued for discrimination if she questions an authentic-looking Social Security card. In other words, the law encourages employers to look away.) The policy seems backward. We are creating a huge cohort of second-class Americans, illegals who will be tolerated as long as they work for cheap, but will never be afforded the real benefits of living here. It is economically efficient, but un-American. Instead of limiting immigration and letting illegals stay, we should vastly increase legal immigration and boot illegals out. The new legal immigrants will fill the same jobs the illegals have now, but they will also gain the opportunity to become citizens.
Another Times story caught my eye--what is it with me and the Times today?--the account of a San Antonio high-school basketball player who just got sent to jail for viciously elbowing an opponent in the head during a game. The kid was already on probation, so the assault may put him in prison for five years. This follows yesterday's announcement that Canadian authorities are going to charge NHL player Marty McSorley for slashing another player in the head with his stick. Sports fans and NHL officials seem indignant about cops' getting involved in their games: It's our sport, let us police it. I think the player indictments are great news. If a sport's violence stays within its rules, the law should leave players alone. But if players are causing mayhem and the refs can't stop it, the law should intervene. When a hockey player swings his stick into an opponent's head, he is no longer playing hockey: He is committing assault.
Best observation of the morning comes from Michael Kelly in his Washington Post
column. Musing on the stupidity of George W. Bush--"Pinhead," Kelly calls him--he writes, "Contemplate, if you are pitiless, the Gore-Bush debates."
Yours contemplatively,
D
Decadent Art
By David Plotz
Posted Thursday, March 9, 2000, at 10:40 AM ETHanna Rosin covers religion for the Washington Post. David Plotz is her husband and Slate's Washington bureau chief.
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
(To reply, click
here.)
[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
(To reply, click
here.)
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
(To reply, click
here.)
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.
(To reply, click
here.)
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
(To reply, click
here.)
To hell with Gabriel Snyder--more domesticity please.
--Jim Crowley
(To reply, click
here.)
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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
(To reply, click here.)
[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
(To reply, click here.)
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
(To reply, click here.)
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.
(To reply, click here.)
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
(To reply, click here.)
To hell with Gabriel Snyder--more domesticity please.
--Jim Crowley
(To reply, click here.)