David Plotz and Hanna Rosin
They're Comin' to America!
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Thursday, March 9, 2000, at 10:56 AM ETHi again,
That Haacke story is priceless (what a name!). I especially love the detail of the curator pondering over the exact wording of the predictably pretentious labels for the exhibit (the "wall spiel," as Woody Allen called it in The New Yorker) --"to probe the foibles and perceived hypocrisies of blah blah." In this case, wouldn't it be better to go with something more minimalist, say, "Mean People Suck."
I'm not against political art per se, but the metaphors have to be more sophisticated than a high school senior's. Nancy Chunn, the New York artist who charmingly annotated the New York Times for a year in Crayola, knew how to handle Giuliani; with jokey Red Hots devil horns and a wink. Over the years, some of these Biennial types have come up with great sly digs. But for the most part they are tedious, especially on the subjects of modern politics and God. Tom Shales reviews in the Washington Post today the new cartoon God, the Devil and Bob. As you can imagine, the prospect of Hollywood inventing God for the children has the people I cover quivering with anger. But predictably, God turns out to be a toothless cliché, a geezer hippie who downs a few brewskies and frequents the strip joints. How original. (All the people who liked the movie Dogma: You are no longer my friends.)
As for that immigrant story, I'm afraid you're displaying a bit of that Haacke naiveté. This is the way immigrants have always made it to America, back to the Chinese railroad workers. They come when we need them, then hide when we don't. I say let them come, no matter how they get here. The more the merrier. My problem with this new policy is it puts INS agents in the role of God, judging souls: Weed out the bad ones, let the good ones stay. As we already know, their crude judgments have already produced some tragedies, petty teen-age thieves who have grown up in America and get shipped back to countries they've never been to, where in many cases they don't even speak the language.
On that hapless high-school basketball player, I'm afraid I have to disagree again. (Not even 9 a.m. and it's already our second fight of the day!) I feel your normally sweet-tempered self is too hard on these guys. The coaches tell these kids to "draw some blood," as this kid did, and when they are a bit too literal they get slammed. Especially in hockey. Slam your opponents head against the wall and they cheer. But wave the hockey stick in their face, well, that's just going too far. Plus you are catching me on the morning after a Knicks game, when a friend I was with reminded me of the New York press's smug and borderline-racist judgment that Latrell Sprewell was an irredeemable thug.
Did you notice that the Washington Post, in preparation for political mourning, is full of ghosts today: a Fred Thompson lie, a Dan Burton subpoena, and that sad eugenics story of that poor Michigan man who'd been sterilized?
I've run out of time, but I just want to point out two wonderful foreign stories, as we've discussed none: Barry Bearak's story about the new girl's school in Afghanistan, and the Israeli court's decision that Jews can't keep Arabs out of their shiny new housing developments. Viva la Revolucion!
Sleepily,
H
They're Comin' to America!
By Hanna Rosin
Posted Thursday, March 9, 2000, at 10:56 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.)