Category Archives: Current Affairs

The NYT had a hilarious article the other day about recent politicans’ gaffes and their hopeless attempts at damage control. Some good analysis of different kinds of apologies, too. And now, straight from Washington D.C.:

Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said Wednesday that the United States confronts a “faceless enemy” of terrorists who “drive cabs in the daytime and kill at night.” Despite a hail of criticism on Thursday, Mr. Burns has not apologized for this remark as he did after complaining in July that a group of firefighters did not do a “goddamn thing” to stop a wildfire east of Billings.

Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, has been serially apologizing across Virginia since demeaning a man of Indian descent as “Macaca, or whatever his name is” at a campaign rally last month. Mr. Allen has been perhaps the most prodigious apologizer in what has been a spate of groveling across the political spectrum.

The contrite caucus includes Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans (who said he was “very sorry” after calling the site of the World Trade Center a “hole in the ground”); Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, (who asked forgiveness after a C-Span microphone caught him saying “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”); a Florida Republican Congressional candidate, Tramm Hudson (who might have sunk his campaign by saying that blacks were bad swimmers); and Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, (after using the term “tar baby” not long after the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, deployed the same phrase, which some consider to be a racist epithet)….

Mr. Burns, the Montana senator, is both an accomplished apologizer and non-apologizer. He demonstrated as much in June when he joked that “the nice little Guatemalan man” working on his house might be an illegal immigrant. He has not apologized for the quip, as he once did after calling Arabs “ragheads.”

“I can self-destruct in one sentence,” Mr. Burns, a former livestock auctioneer, recently told supporters. “Sometimes in one word.”

From time to time journalists and producers contact me for feedback on stories they’re working on. I’ve worked regularly with my local paper, for example, the San Francisco Chronicle, on a variety of issues they’re thinking about, from unhealthy school diets in cafeterias to the impact of blogs on their business.

Michelle Melendez, a journalist at Newhouse News Service, a wire service whose articles run in several dozen papers in the midwest and south, recently talked to youth about the lasting effect of 9/11 on my generation. In this piece I pop up once and say 9/11 won’t have as lasting effect as "emerging technologies." Indeed.

Pearl Harbor stamped "the Greatest Generation," the Kennedy assassination marked the baby boomers. Were the terrorist attacks five years ago such a moment for Generation Y?

As Sept. 11, 2001, nears another anniversary, America’s rising youth — together with the scholars and marketers who study them — are pondering its impact on attitudes and outlooks….

Ben Casnocha, 18, of San Francisco, said Sept. 11 has had little lasting impact on his generation beyond inconvenience at airports: "On a day-to-day basis, if you didn’t have someone who you knew who got killed on that day, I don’t think it affects us as much as something like emerging technologies or other things."

This made my heart drop, all the more poignant since this girl was the same age as me. What can we do to help Iranian girls throw off their veils?

Andrew Sullivan:

This is another chilling story from Iran. This time, a 16-year-old girl is hanged for "sexual immorality" which, so far as we can tell, was a function of being raped continuously by a man three times her age. Money quote:

Being stopped or arrested by the moral police is a fact of life for many Iranian teenagers. Previously arrested for attending a party and being alone in a car with a boy, Atefah received her first sentence for "crimes against chastity" when she was just 13. Although the exact nature of the crime is unknown, she spent a short time in prison and received 100 lashes… [Subsequently], the moral police said the locals had submitted a petition, describing her as a "source of immorality" and a "terrible influence on local schoolgirls".

So she was arrested again. Then there’s this moment in her "trial":

When Atefah realised her case was hopeless, she shouted back at the judge and threw off her veil in protest.

That earned her the noose. This is the enemy we face. And they do this in God’s name.

Lee Siegel is fast becoming one of my favorite writers. He’s a senior editor at the New Republic and writes the blog On Culture over at TNR

A few weeks ago he wrote an essay in the NYTBR about the late poet and critic Paul Zweig. I don’t know much about Zweig, but I picked up on a few of Siegel’s sentences that are interesting:

Zweig registered, with creative joy, his psychic constrictions just before self-obsession became an all-pervasive cultural style. He wasn’t just one of the pioneers of contemporary memoir. He was one of its ideal practitioners…

The self-enclosure that he analyzed and navigated by — and to which Lasch unfairly sentenced him — has become a part of our lives in countless ways. "Self-love" is no longer a heresy, and narcissism is no longer a subversive position.

Is narcissism "in"? Maybe. Self-improvement/self-help stuff are selling like hotcakes. Some fraction of the 30 million bloggers out there feel like their lives are interesting enough to talk about. I spoke to an entrepreneur friend a few weeks ago who wants to write a novel about a guy who grapples with feeling like "he’s a chosen one" to do something great and special in the world.

The other day I spoke to a woman over 50 who said this is indeed generational: younger people are now told to embrace their individualism, embrace their potential to single-handedly do great things, to "have passions" (she argued that even the word "passion" is narcissistic, because it means you think you have more than a simple "interest"). I’m wary of generational arguments — old people like to pine about the good old days and young people like to think everything is up to their generation — but I appreciate her point.

A more narcissistic society is not a wholly bad thing. While some cultural critics bemoan an age where everyone is so inward looking to the detriment of her neighbors, to her community, and to humanity, I see it differently. A community of blank faces does not constitute a community. Rather, a community is composed of diverse individuals who share something in common (which may very well be their differences). But subjugate individuality to the community — or to a nation, or a corporation — and we lose texture, and the community collapses.

People first need to take care of themselves (economically, spiritually, physically) before they can help others. If this requires a dose of narcissism, then fine. Self-delusion after all is important for happiness and self-confidence (perhaps even a bit more than normal) is important for resilience and success.

Obviously we don’t want too narcissistic a society, but my point here is to complicate a matter that’s  often written off as yet sign of the moral rot of 21st century society…

The Atlantic continues to rock the house…Several of their writers are in Aspen, Colorado for their annual Ideas Festival and are blogging all the sessions. Interesting food for thought and good insight into the personalities of the writers.

I was going to go to the Ideas Festival last year, but the timing with Zurich and its cost (despite their generous $1500 discount to me) didn’t let me. At least this year I can follow the blog.