Month: March 2005


  • Type A’s boast of rising before dawn. But who really gets the worm?


    March 27, 2005

    The Crow of the Early Bird


    By WARREN ST. JOHN and ALEX WILLIAMS





    Mr. Iger, who is married to the television journalist Willow Bay, with whom he has four children, is up at 4:30 in the morning, works out and arrives in the office by 6:30.


    The New York Times, March 14, profile of Robert A. Iger, the new president of the Walt Disney Company


    Most days before work, Ward, 53, wakes up at 4:30 a.m. at her South Anchorage condo, grabs her mandatory morning coffee and heads to the gym. Part of her success rides on the fact that she exudes energy and sleeps only six hours a night.


    The Anchorage Daily News, Jan. 3, profile of Robin Ward, a real estate deal maker


    After Singer’s call, Wirtschafter couldn’t get back to sleep. He usually drops off for only about three hours a night, anyway, rising at around 1 a.m. to read scripts and scribble diagrams in a blue notebook, plotting the decision tree of the following day’s phone calls.


    The New Yorker, March 21, profile of Dave Wirtschafter, the president of the William Morris Agency


    THERE was a time when to project an image of industriousness and responsibility, all a person had to do was wake at the crack of dawn. But in a culture obsessed with status—in which every conceivable personal detail stands as a marker of one’s ambition or lack thereof—waking at dawn means simply running with the pack. To really get ahead in the world, to obtain the sacred stuff of C.E.O.’s and overachievers, one must get up before the other guy, when the roosters themselves are still deep in REM sleep. And of course since so few people are awake at such an ungodly hour, the early risers of the world take special pains to let everyone else know of their impressive circadian discipline.


    “I’m an early riser, I’m achievement driven, and oh, my, has it served me well in the business world,” said Otto Kroeger, a motivational speaker and business consultant in Fairfax, Va. Mr. Kroeger, who says he routinely rises at 4 a.m., preaches about the advantage of getting up before dawn to audiences and clients. “For 13 years,” Mr. Kroeger said, “I never allowed myself more than 4 hours in any 24-hour period. It was all ego driven. My psyche was saying, ‘I can do it, I can outlast.’ It’s a version of the old Broadway song from ‘Annie Get Your Gun’: ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.’ “


    For late risers, the crack of dawn was a formidable enough benchmark. In today’s age of competitive waking, they’re made to feel even worse. The writer Cynthia Ozick, who goes to bed after 3 a.m. and wakes up sometime after noon, said she lives with constant disapproval. “I’m a creature of bad habits in the eyes of the world,” she said. When Ms. Ozick answers the telephone in the early afternoon, she said, “you’re approached in the most accusing voice—’Did I wake you?’ “


    At least since Benjamin Franklin included the proverb “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” in his Poor Richard’s Almanac, Americans have looked at sleeping habits as a measure of a person’s character. Perhaps because in the agrarian past people had to wake at dawn to get in a full day’s work outside, late sleepers have been viewed as a drag on the collective good.


    Even today, said Edward J. Stepanski, the director of the Sleep Disorders Service and Research Center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, “it’s a uniformly negative characteristic to be asleep while everyone else is going about their business.”


    But before slinking back under the covers in shame, slugabeds of the world should consider: Sleep researchers are casting doubt on the presumed virtue and benefits of waking early, with research showing that the time one wakes up has little bearing on income or success, and that people’s sleep cycles are not entirely under their control. Buoyed by the reassessment of their bedtime habits, a few outspoken and well-rested night owls are speaking out against the creep of sleepism.


    “There are night owls who have just had their fill of people making them feel guilty and of other people who rag on them,” said Carolyn Schur, a late sleeper from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, who advocates for night owls in speeches and in her book “Birds of a Different Feather.” “A lot of people are just saying, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’ “


    Whatever the negative associations with sleeping late, scientists say there’s good reason to doubt the boasts of the early risers. Dr. Daniel F. Kripke, a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Diego, said that in one study he attached motion sensors to subjects’ wrists to determine when they were up and about. While 5 percent of the subjects claimed they were awake before 4 a.m., Dr. Kripke said, the motion sensors suggested none of them were. And while 10 percent reported they were up and at ‘em by 5 a.m., only 5 percent were out of bed.


    Dr. Stepanski said the same is true of people who boast they need little sleep. In a study in which subjects claimed they could get by on just five hours’ sleep, he said, researchers found the subjects were sneaking in long naps and sleeping in on weekends to make up for lost z’s.


    “There’s a tendency to generalize and to do it in a self-serving way,” Dr. Stepanski said. “If your view is that you can get by on less sleep than the average person, then you’re going to play that up.”


    Scientists call early risers larks, and late sleepers owls, and speak of morningness and eveningness to describe their differing circadian rhythms. Researchers believe that about 10 percent of the population are extreme larks, 10 percent are extreme owls and the remaining 80 percent are somewhere in between. And they say the most important factor in determining to which group a person belongs is not ambition, but DNA.


    “Timing of sleep is genetically determined, whether you’re an owl or lark,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, the medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center. While most people are a little bit owl or a little bit lark, for others, Dr. Mahowald said, altering sleep habits is “like changing your height or eye color.”


    Dr. Christopher R. Jones, the medical director of the Sleep-Wake Center at the University of Utah, said that just as there are morning people, scientists have found morning flies and morning mice. Variations in sleep patterns among the population, he added, may have benefited the species.


    “The whole tribe is better off if someone is up all the night, listening for a lion walking through the grass,” he said.


    The rhythms of modern times are determined not by fanged predators, of course, but by the 9-to-5 schedule of the workaday world. While those hours would seem to benefit larks, there is little evidence that night owls are any less successful than early risers. Dr. Kripke said that a 2001 study of adults in San Diego showed no correlation between waking time and income. There’s even anecdotal evidence of parity on the world stage; President Bush is said to wake each day at 5 a.m., to be at his desk by 7 and to go to sleep at 10 p.m., while no less an achiever than Russian President Vladimir V. Putin reportedly wakes at 11 a.m. and works until 2 a.m.


    Night owls thrive, it seems, by strategizing around the expectations of the early crowd. Bella M. DePaulo, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who goes to sleep around 3 a.m. and wakes about 11 a.m., said that before she answers the phone in the late morning, she practices saying “Hello” out loud until she sounds awake. Ms. DePaulo said she has been a night person since childhood, and that she gravitated toward academia in part of because of her sleep habits.


    “Academia is a good place to be if you’re out of the mainstream,” she said. “If you’re doing 80 hours of work a week, what does it matter what 80 hours you work?”


    Dr. Meir H. Kryger, a professor of medicine and a sleep researcher at the University of Manitoba, said that many people choose professions in line with their circadian rhythms.


    “There are whole professions that tend to be larks,” he said, like bankers and surgeons. “Very often people self-select themselves into that kind of career.” Owls, he said, tend toward the entertainment or hospitality industries and the arts. But not everyone manages to find a perfect fit.


    Drue Miller, a design and marketing consultant in San Francisco and the creator of a satirical late sleepers’ bill of rights online bulletin board, said that when she worked as a Web designer, she was able to indulge her night owl tendencies by coming in late in the morning and working into the evening. That changed when she became the boss and found herself adjusting her schedule to fit the perception that people who run things are at their desks early. “I felt like I was being a ‘bad boss’ by showing up so much later,” she said.


    Perhaps the biggest boon to night owls in keeping up with the larks has been the Internet. Ms. Schur, the night owl advocate, said she spends the wee hours shopping, paying her bills and doing her banking online.


    “It’s a vehicle for maintaining a night owl lifestyle,” she said of the Web. Ms. Schur added that if she is expected to get some bit of work to clients or colleagues by the early morning, she typically does it late at night.


    “People will call me and say, ‘Hey, your e-mail said 2 or 3 in the morning—did you really send it at that time?’” Ms. Schur said. “I say, ‘Yes.’ “


    For people desperate to change their circadian rhythms, doctors say, there are some options. Dr. Kripke said that light therapy, melatonin and large doses of vitamin B12 can be used to adjust the body’s natural clock. (Dr. Kripke outlines these treatments in a free e-book on his Web site www.BrightenYourLife.info.) But because sleep rhythms are so ingrained, the treatments must be practiced continually and so for many are impractical.


    “People come to my clinic and want to change,” said Dr. Jones of the University of Utah, “and I tell them I can’t, I don’t have a genetic screwdriver to get in there and tweak the gene.”


    Of course for hardened members of the early-to-rise crowd, any talk of being a slave to a notion as wispy as circadian rhythms is a sure sign of weakness. Their message to the drowsy is more or less: Get an alarm clock.


    “If you work two extra hours a day,” said Brian Tracy, the motivational guru, “you will outstrip everyone else in your field. The question is, where do you get those two hours? Early morning time is the most productive. It does no good to do work later in the day, because by then your batteries are burned out. Most successful people try to get up by 5 or 5:30 in the morning.”


    He added: “Getting up late, having fun at work, these are all for losers.”



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  • Working Stiffs
    By David Wallace-Wells
    Posted Friday, March 25, 2005, at 2:28 PM PT


    Today, bloggers critique the premiere of NBC’s The Office, discuss a Newsweek column on Paul Wolfowitz, and analyze the ultimate meaning of the Terri Schiavo case.


    Working stiffs: The Office, the transplanted American version of the celebrated British comedy-verité, premiered last night on NBC. The debut episode had American actors performing a reworked version of a British script, and bloggers don’t know quite what to make of the half-new, half-old hybrid. (Read Slate‘s Dana Stevens on the show.)


    “Wow, I didn’t think a show on U.S network TV could be made without a laugh track,” writes Canadian poet and writer Adrian Speyer, who thinks “kudo’s should be given to NBC for green lighting a show a decade ago would never have seen the light of day on network TV.” Though his expectations were “low … Real low,” Joe Rivera, of Stereo Joe, was nevertheless disappointed, writing, “They dumbed down the script … they got the characters wrong, the nuances are completely off.” Bloggers who don’t mention the U.K. original, like those at Oh yeah this is life… and Zach Is Here, have generally positive things to say about the American update.


    Law student Iyaz Akhtar thinks “the NBC version is kind of like watching a re-enactment, a bad one.” The American version, he writes, “edited out a lot of the awkward silences that were present in the BBC version. The pacing is a little off – it’s like NBC is trying to hit the viewer with jokes in rapid succession. The BBC version just didn’t bother – they let the jokes happen when they happened.” At Various and Sundry, Augie De Blieck Jr. also notes the absence of awkward lulls but approves. “The show moves a lot faster,” he says, “It’s what they had to do to make it appeal to an American audience.”


    Other bloggers have doubts about the show’s mix of deference and impudence. Television “is littered with the corpses of failed attempts to duplicate British shows in the US (and vice-versa). Basically, network executives don’t seem to get why these shows are funny in their original format,” writes Cincinnati-based crime writer James R. Winter. “Here’s a novel idea: Why not import the original? Save money on hiring new actors, writers, etc., and the show’s still funny.” At Bowl of Ramen, New Jersey student Chang sees a silver lining: He expects the show to fail, but guesses “there is a bright side to all this, by reminding me how inimitable the original series was.”


    Read more about The Office.


    Cornering Fareed: A variety of writers at conservative clubhouse The Corner are attacking a Newsweek column by Fareed Zakaria that suggests the appointment of Paul Wolfowitz to the presidency of the World Bank might liberate conservative thinking about global poverty from the “stale catechism of clichés based on virtually no research or experience” which Zakaria believes has characterized it for years.


    “Talk about old orthodoxies,” says John J. Miller. “This is another example of how the media portrays the Right as racist, without a shred of evidence.” Miller and John Derbyshire both object to Zakaria’s offhand suggestion that conservatives believe foreign aid is ineffective because “Africans don’t want to work.” Ramesh Ponnuru argues that “Hernando de Soto’s ideas about helping the Third World poor through property rights have been more popular on the American Right than on the Left.” Jonah Goldberg agrees, writing that “if the issue is ‘new ideas’ I don’t think Zakaria’s swipe holds much water,” since the “left, it seems to me, has been mostly interested in the same old remedies — debt relief, direct aid, increasing budgets for NGOs etc.” In an e-mail, Nick Schulz of Tech Central Station writes, “I’m not surprised at the gratuitous swipes at conservatives from Fareed, but he might want to get his facts right in the future. Most Africans would put more ‘work’ into op/ed columns than he did.” S. Abbas Raza, at 3quarksdaily, suggests that Zakaria’s column isn’t so much an attack on Wolfowitz or his policies as it is part of a wider trend of writers celebrating him as the most idealistic of the neoconservatives. (Raza links to Christopher Hitchens’ Slate column on Wolfowitz.)


    Read more about the column, the World Bank, and Paul Wolfowitz.


    Last licks on Schiavo: A federal district judge today denied an appeal by the parents of severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo that sought to reinsert the feeding tube that was removed from their daughter one week ago. Acquiescing somewhat, bloggers on every side of the issue have begun to hypothesize about the legacy of the political and legal battle that has dominated the media for the past week.


    The lesson of the affair, for conflicted conservative Andrew Sullivan, “is that religious zealotry cannot be incorporated into conservatism. It is the nemesis of conservatism. And it has to be purged in order for conservatism to be revived.” At InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds argues that it isn’t religious fanaticism that threatens the conservative movement, but the liberal habit of imposing the government on citizens’ lives, and “[t]rampling the Constitution” in the process. At the liberal Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum basically agrees: Conservative principles are in conflict over Terri Schiavo, not liberal ones. “Sometimes it’s better,” he adds, “to let the other side make fools of themselves without interfering.”


    Read more about Terri Schiavo here.


    Have a question, comment, or suggestion for Today’s Blogs? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.

    David Wallace-Wells is a Slate intern.

    Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2115317/


  • Dragon?
    The Economist says various problems will hold China back.
    By Bidisha Banerjee, Jesse Stanchak, and David Wallace-Wells
    Updated Friday, March 25, 2005, at 2:51 PM PT




    Economist, March 26
    The cover package argues that competition from Japan and the United States, combined with internal corruption, poverty, and political scheming, will prevent China from controlling East Asia in the near future. At the same time, the region’s stability is very much dependent on China’s response to Taiwan and North Korea. … Another piece criticizes the Tory response to gypsies in Britain. Because a 1994 law curtailed the number of places where they could park their caravans, gypsies have resorted to illegal camping. In response, the Tories have praised Ireland, where trespassing is a crime; they’ve also threatened to repeal the Human Rights Act, claiming that it helps gypsies challenge the government. Calling the Tories’ proposals “slightly less useful than a sprig of lucky heather,” the article points out that Ireland has substantially increased the number of legal camping sites. Also, when gypsies appeal to courts about this issue, their rare victories aren’t because of the Human Rights Act.—B.B.





    Harper’s, April 2005
    An article about the effects of strip mining in Appalachia focuses on Lost Mountain in Kentucky “before, during, and after its transformation into a western desert.” The piece condemns the destruction of natural resources that we don’t have immediate use for, and reflects on the sexual practices of liverwort. (A male liverwort “extends a tiny, umbrella-shaped antenna”; when rain strikes it, “sperm explodes inside that raindrop and bounces a couple of feet,” in order to hit a female receptive to the “sperm-laden droplets.”) It also laments the loss of the “oldest and most diverse” North American forests and bemoans the impact of modern mining practices (in which “entire mountaintops are blasted off”) upon the people who live near the mountain. … Another piece examines how Cubans have been forced to develop “what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture.” In response to massive food shortages caused by the fall of the Soviet Union and the stringency of the U.S. embargo, Cubans have created predominantly organic urban gardens.—B.B.





    Legal Affairs, March-April 2005
    Two former applicants for clerkships with William Rehnquist—one who was hired, one who wasn’t—debate the legacy of the chief justice. Despite conventional wisdom that Rehnquist has significantly advanced the cause of federalism during his tenure, the lawyer passed over writes that Rehnquist’s juridical inconsistency has favored no ideology, only the absolute supremacy of the court. The lawyer hired by the chief justice argues that Rehnquist’s votes for federal restraint demonstrate consistent and “profound humility,” rather than activism from the bench. (An accompanying piece charts the rates of agreement among the nine justices of the Rehnquist Court). … An investigative study examines the degenerate incentive system that animates the Department of Veterans Affairs, where quota systems, rushed judgments, outmoded bookkeeping, and limited oversight have meant many legitimate claims for disability payments have been unfairly denied for decades. According to the piece, a review board overturned more than 60 percent of denials appealed between 2000 and 2003.—D.W.





    American Prospect, April 2005
    The cover story argues that the pro-life movement has gained ground since Roe v. Wade by casting its arguments in emotional instead of legal terms and says its time for pro-choice advocates to adopt the same tactics to build sympathy for would-be mothers faced with a difficult choice. “The challenge for pro-choicers is to balance America’s growing sympathy for fetuses with an equal—or greater—concern for women,” writes Jodi Edna. “They must counter the image of a humanized fetus with that of a human, caring, and sometimes suffering woman—with a woman who has needs and feelings and morals.” … A movement to oust Sen. Joe Lieberman is under way in Connecticut, as detailed in a piece outlining both the gripes that many Democrats hold against the senator and hurdles confronting the “Dump Joe” movement in trying to unseat the incumbent.—J.S.





    Scientific American, April 2005
    Business practices might be a product of evolution, suggests a piece that explores how animal behaviors mirror economics. Through a variety of studies on chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, and cleaner fish, Frans B.M. de Waal shows how concepts of supply and demand, reciprocity, and even valuing good customer service might have been handed down by our animal ancestors. “This evolutionary explanation of how for why we interact as we do,” writes de Wall, “is gaining influence with the advent of a new school, known as behavioral economics, that focuses on actual human behavior, rather than abstract principles.” … A new painkiller has its origins on the ocean bottom, reports a piece on Prialt, a synthetic version of cone-snail venom that will be injected directly into patients’ spines to treat certain types of chronic pain resistant to opiates and aspirin.—J.S.





    New York, March 28
    Ben Stiller is profiled as he prepares to open a new drama off Broadway. The 39-year-old actor is found wrestling with the age-old comedian’s dilemma of how to be taken seriously as an actor and land the dramatic roles that have eluded him for years. “Apparently, once you’ve zippered your scrotum, dangled sperm off your ear, been Tasered, faked explosive diarrhea, and filmed yourself in an orgy involving a donkey and a Maori tribesman,” writes Logan Hill, “some studios just won’t trust you with serious material.” … Cablevision CEO James Dolan grants a rare interview in a piece delving into his public feud with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his private battles with his father, Chairman Chuck Dolan, at family-run Cablevision, “the North Korea of the cable business.”—J.S.





    New York Times Magazine, March 27
    The cover story looks at the exurban megachurch as a supplier of the social infrastructure otherwise lacking in the developing communities of the rural West. The complex maintained by the Radiant Church in Surprise, Ariz., functions as a Christian clubhouse for the boomtown: It offers a flat-screen TV lounge, video games for kids, an upscale coffee shop, bookstore, aerobics classes, and positive self-help sermons on such nontraditional subjects as sex and the stock market. “We want the church to look like a mall,” says Pastor Lee McFarland, who believes casual churchgoers will eventually gravitate toward the church’s evangelical core. “We want you to come in here and say, ‘Dude, where’s the cinema?’ ” … A photo essay covers how field hospitals treat soldiers injured in the Iraq war. … A profile of Benjamin Biolay relentlessly compares the singer to French icon Serge Gainsbourg and finds the younger chanteur a reluctant hero to a new generation of French pop.—D.W.





    The New Yorker, March 28
    In a piece that asks, “Do ads still work?” Ken Auletta focuses on advertising guru Linda Kaplan Thaler, who firmly believes that all publicity is good publicity. (Thaler thought up the enormously successful quacking duck commercials for Aflac, an insurance company.) Noting that the declining importance of network television has put an end to traditional advertising approaches, the article looks at the rise of product placement and Internet advertising. … In a profile of Antonin Scalia, Margaret Talbot suggests that the conservative Supreme Court justice provides “the jurisprudential equivalent of smashing a guitar onstage.” Claiming that Scalia appears to be “campaigning” for the position of chief justice, Talbot explores his disdain for the concept of a “living Constitution,” and writes, “[I]t’s hard to identify a Scalia Doctrine that speaks for the Court, as opposed to a Scalia Doctrine that speaks for Scalia.”—B.B.





    Weekly Standard, March 28
    A piece excoriates former baseball player Jose Canseco, whose allegations that his former teammates used steroids led to last week’s congressional hearings into steroid use: “Jose Canseco is against smoking and stress. He’s for the environment. He’s a liar. He’s a criminal. He’s a tattletale. He changes his story from audience to audience. Why isn’t this guy in Congress?” … Another piece defends President Bush’s nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as the new president of the World Bank. Citing Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden’s support for Wolfowitz, the article calls the Europeans’ “caricature” of him “tripe,” and argues, “They say he is a warmonger (he is not) and a unilateralist (he is not) and a tool of the Likud party in Israel (he is often quite skeptical of Ariel Sharon and advocated giving the Palestinians a state when that view was considered radical).” (Slate‘s Fred Kaplan wrote about Wolfowitz here, and Christopher Hitchens did so here.)—B.B.





    Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, March 28
    Condoleezza Rice: In an extremely upbeat appraisal of Condoleezza Rice’s performance as secretary of state, Time claims that Rice is already internationally “bigger and more popular” than Bush. Arguing that Paul Wolfowitz’s recent nomination to run the World Bank means that “Rice and her realist deputies have gained the upper hand over their neoconservative rivals at the Defense Department,” the piece evaluates Rice’s relationship with rivals like John Bolton (whose departure for the United Nations is another victory for Rice) and allies like Karen Hughes. “[F]or now, the nonstop dissonance of the first term has subsided, replaced by something new: a single voice who speaks confidently for the boss,” concludes the article. … An online-only piece in Newsweek argues that Rice’s “mildly pro-choice,” position makes her an unlikely presidential candidate in 2008.



    Women international: Newsweek profiles Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman whose village council ordered her gang-raped three years ago because her teenage brother was accused of having an affair with an older woman. Since then, Mai has garnered international support and significantly improved life for women in her village. Time reports on the visit to the United States by the sisters and fiancé of Robert McCartney, whose murder has turned public sentiment in Ireland against the Irish Republican Army. They met with several senators and were guests of President Bush at a St. Patrick’s Day reception: “Everywhere the women were seen … Americans applauded their stand against the IRA.” … And, in light of the high-profile divorce of Joan Stonecipher from her husband Harry, the recently deposed CEO of Boeing, U.S. News revisits Lorna Wendt, whose 1995 divorce from a leading General Electric executive “touched off a national dialogue about stay-at-home corporate spouses and what they’re entitled to in divorce.” (Wendt won close to half of her husband’s assets.)


    Odds and ends: Time‘s cover grapples with the prevalence of indecency on television. One year after Janet Jackson’s infamous “Nipplegate,” there’s a new FCC head, and Congress is attempting to increase the agency’s power to regulate decency—maybe even on cable. Arguing that indecency is a matter of context, the piece insists that people “don’t want absolute rules. They want boundaries: they just want to know where the cultural deep end and the kiddie pool are.” … U.S. News‘ cover examines FBI Director Robert Mueller’s struggle to transform his organization: “Today, the premium is not so much on busting bad guys after they commit a crime but on spotting terrorists and stopping them before they attack.” … And Newsweek‘s cover looks at the early days of Christianity and asks why the religion was so successful even though Jesus’ second coming, which early disciples expected to witness, never happened.—B.B.


    Bidisha Banerjee is a Slate editorial assistant.
    Jesse Stanchak is a Slate intern.
    David Wallace-Wells is a Slate intern.

    Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2115142/



  • Demi Moore
    The mother of all actresses.
    By Bryan Curtis
    Posted Wednesday, March 23, 2005, at 3:50 PM PT




    When was the last time Demi Moore was in a picture? Not a motion picture—mercifully, those seem to have stopped—but a magazine cover? Demiologists date the artist’s last major work to the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair, in which she posed nude and pregnant, though a vocal minority argues for the August 1992 issue, in which she posed nude and lathered with body paint. To those two masterworks, let us add a third: this week’s cover of the Star, which announces, “DEMI PREGNANT AT 42!” The magazine reports that Moore and her boyfriend, Ashton Kutcher, 27, are expecting a baby in October. This is big news. When not carrying a child, Moore comes off as an unsmiling, wooden actress that America tends to root against. Pregnant Demi, on the other hand, ignites our greatest sympathies and passions. This is the actress who spans genres, even decades—the Demi we deserve.



    Of course, she might not be pregnant. But while Moore’s handlers issue hazy denials—”She cannot at this time say she is pregnant”—the Star‘s breathless article dishes out the specifics. Moore learned the news on March 4, the magazine reports, then phoned Ashton and yelped, “Honey, I’m pregnant!” Already, the tabloid has begun to portray Demi in a more sensitive and respectable light. It reports that she has forsaken her regular diet of Red Bull and cigarettes. Moore’s three daughters—Rumer, Scout, and Tallulah Belle—are said to be overjoyed at the news. Why, there’s even talk of a wedding, to ensure the Kutcher baby enters the world as part of an honest union.


    Has an actress ever leveraged pregnancy more effectively than Demi Moore? The recent births by Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts reminded us of everything we love about them. Moore, by comparison, uses pregnancy to make us forget what we detest about her. Moore’s most celebrated pregnancy was her second, at 28, when she posed for Annie Leibovitz’s infamous Vanity Fair cover shot. The movie Moore was ostensibly promoting (The Butcher’s Wife) was wretched and seen by no one. But the photos were so incendiary that Moore was elevated to the role of feminist saint. The withering attacks from talk-show hosts and American Enterprise Institute fellows only made her more so. “People can’t bear the idea that I could be sexual and provocative, and still be a nice person with a nice family and a nice husband,” she said later.


    Pregnancy has the further effect of burnishing Demi’s biography: It makes her hardscrabble childhood seem more poignant. She was born Demetria Guynes in Roswell, N.M., in 1962. Her mother, Virginia, named her after a beauty product. Her father disappeared before she was born; her stepfather, Danny Guynes, divorced her mom and killed himself when Demi was still in high school. Demi says her family moved 48 times during her youth. Years later, her mother descended into alcoholism, rebuffed Moore’s attempts at intervention, and wound up replicating her daughter’s nude poses for a low-end magazine.


    Motherhood does more than animate Demi’s public persona. She says it invests her movies with previously unnoticed depth. This will come as a surprise to some viewers, who thought Moore’s movies were primarily vehicles for her to cry and remove her clothes. Moore has said, “When I start to reflect on films I’ve done, starting with Disclosure to The Scarlet Letter, then The Juror, Now and Then, and Striptease, even though they’re very different, they have elements that have a general theme … a very maternal theme.” Moore says she idolized Hester Prynne for years before acting in The Scarlet Letter; never mind the scene in which Moore lovingly inspects her body in the bathtub. Striptease was the inspiring story of a single mother that only incidentally contained nude dancing. Some matriarchs are harder to figure—was Disclosure‘s Meredith Johnson the mother of high tech?—but one admires her efforts, nonetheless.


    Pregnancy also gives Moore what Hollywood starlets really want: creative control. “Gimme Moore,” as one studio executive dubbed her, spent her career terrorizing directors into caving to her demands. But never did she wield more influence than at the birth of her oldest daughter, Rumer, in 1988. Moore traveled with then-husband Bruce Willis to Paducah, Ky., where he was shooting In Country. She commandeered a local hospital, placing three video cameras and a director named Randy in the delivery room. When her labor started, the cameras rolled, with Willis looking brave if a bit bewildered, as in Die Hard, and Moore panting and moaning, as in Indecent Proposal. When the baby’s head finally emerged, Moore was said to turn to the director and grunt, “Did you get that?” Though largely unseen, it remains a canonical performance, just behind her work in G.I. Jane and Blame It on Rio.


    Moore appeared last weekend on Saturday Night Live alongside Kutcher, in a gray wig and a floral-print dress. The obvious gag was that Moore was 15 years older than her paramour, but if she is indeed pregnant, the skit carried a deeper meaning: Moore was angling to become Hollywood’s oldest expectant mother. And Moore may not stop with one more. Pregnant or not, her spokesman says the actress wants more “children”—plural—which could guarantee regular Demi births deep into the new century. “Pregnancy agrees with me,” Demi once said. So much more than acting.


    Bryan Curtis is a Slate staff writer. You can e-mail him at curtisb@slate.com.

    Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2115220/

  • Overdue Process
    By Keelin McDonell
    Posted Sunday, March 27, 2005, at 3:27 AM PT


    The New York Times leads with word that the Pentagon may be planning a major revamp of the military tribunals set up to try foreign terror suspects in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to a 232-page “draft manual” that’s been making the rounds among Defense Department lawyers, proposed changes include granting detainees greater access to prosecutorial evidence, increasing the number of officers who sit on the tribunal, and barring all testimony obtained through torture. Experts say these tweaks are aimed at modeling the terror tribunals on traditional military courts-martial.


    The Los Angeles Times’ top non-local story reports that the CIA closed out a spy ring in 2002 that it had assigned to monitor Iranian militants in South America. The agency was having some success intercepting information related to Tehran and Hezbollah, but top brass decided that the resources would be better spent on al-Qaida and Iraq. “We’re going to be starting from near zero,” one CIA official complained of future intelligence gathering on Iran. The Washington Post leads with an in-depth look at how large corporations have already scored big during the second Bush term. Companies like MBNA, Wal-Mart, and Exxon Mobile—all generous contributors to GOP candidates—have seen their investment pay off as Republicans have pushed through key legislation on bankruptcy, class-action lawsuit protection, and oil drilling in Alaska.


    While many Pentagon officials are optimistic about the possibility of retooled tribunals, there appear to be a couple major hurdles. For one, the Bush administration, led by Vice President Cheney, has been digging in its heels. (That may also explain the Times‘ one paltry on-the-record comment.) Officials also worry that the reforms fail to address last November’s federal court ruling that the tribunals’ structure is not up to snuff with American and international legal standards.


    In related news out of Gitmo, the WP fronts a solid investigative piece on a German national whom a military tribunal identified as an enemy combatant despite sparse evidence of terrorist ties. Recently declassified documents and court rulings reveal just how badly the tribunal bungled in its determination. The Post hails this as “the first known case in which a panel appeared to disregard the recommendations of U.S. intelligence agencies and information supplied by allies.”


    The LAT‘s David Zucchino files a vivid account of the lives of American soldiers on forward operating bases (or “fobs”) spread throughout Iraq. Offering all the amenities of home (junk food, gyms, cable TV), these areas of “ersatz America” can be a jarring contrast to violent conditions elsewhere in the country. Zucchino seems to get the mood just right, too: “Like any war, the one in Iraq is defined by long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by intervals of sheer terror.”


    A similarly excellent Page One dispatch in the NYT examines the problem of smuggling over the Iraq-Iran border. Shiite pilgrims flooding into Iraq for the Ashura holiday have made it all the more difficult to crack down on goods leaving the country.


    The papers all stuff yesterday’s massive demonstration in Taiwan, where hundreds of thousands turned out to protest China’s recent anti-secession law that allows Beijing to employ “nonpeaceful means” to keep Taipei from declaring its independence. The discontent is nothing new, but the LAT points out that this is a particularly bad time for it to be on display for the world: China is currently waiting to find out if Europe will lift its 15-year arms sales embargo.


    The Post goes inside with an absorbing rundown on the recent revolution in Kyrgyzstan. What apparently began as an organized protest in the capital of Bishkek escalated quickly into a spontaneous (and, it would seem, virtually unopposed) government take-over. Acting leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev has already promised new presidential elections on June 26.


    Everyone offers up another round of Terri Schiavo-related ruminations. Easter prompts the Post to check in on the Catholic Church’s stance on feeding tubes. Schiavo’s parents have long argued that their daughter’s Catholic faith forbids her from declining sustenance, and recent comments from high-ranking cardinals seem to support this claim. Some Catholic thinkers are even heralding this as the Vatican’s first definitive indication that members of the church cannot turn down life support. The NYT fronts a piece on the ethical conflicts that arise between families who insist on prolonged life support for a patient and doctors who recommend pulling the plug. And, truly leaving no angle (or analogy) uncovered, the LAT goes below the fold with Rep. Tom DeLay and family’s decision nearly 20 years ago to withhold machine support from his severely brain-damaged father.


    Being an Army recruiter is among the most high-stress, anxiety-ridden jobs in the military, the NYT reports above the fold. Young people don’t want to join up in the midst of a war; at the same time, meeting recruitment quotas is more important than ever. One recruiter even told the Times that his current occupation was “more strenuous than the time he was shot at while deployed in Africa.”

    Keelin McDonell is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.

    Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2115854/

  • Pope delivers Easter sunday blessing

    - – - – - – - – - – - -
    By Nicole Winfield


    printe-mail


    March 27, 2005  |  VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope John Paul II delivered an Easter Sunday blessing to tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square, but the ailing pontiff was unable to speak and managed only to greet the saddened crowd with a sign of the cross, bringing tears to many.


    Aides had readied a microphone, and the pope tried to utter a few words from his studio window overlooking the square. But after making a few sounds, he just blessed the crowd with his hand and the microphone was taken away.


    Vatican watchers had been anxiously awaiting John Paul’s appearance for signs of how the 84-year-old pontiff was faring after Feb. 24 surgery to insert a tube in his throat to help him breathe. After the dramatic appearance, many in the crowd cried or applauded in sad appreciation for John Paul’s pained efforts to greet them on the holiest day of the church calendar.


    John Paul last spoke to the public March 13, shortly before he was discharged from the hospital.


    “Look, it’s Easter and everybody is so sad, and so many have tears in their eyes,” said Hubert Wichert, from the German town of Essen, who was in the square.


    A physician from Nice, France, Milou Drici, said he and others were saddened by what they saw — but also heartened.


    “As a doctor, I felt for him. It is an ordeal for him and you could see his frustration,” he said. But he added: “You have to admire his strength and fortitude. The faith of the people, as you saw today, helps him overcome his difficulties.”


    For the first time since John Paul’s papacy began in 1978, Easter Sunday Mass at the Vatican was celebrated without him as he continued his convalescence following two recent hospitalizations for breathing crises. John Paul also suffers from Parkinson’s disease, which makes it difficult for him to speak, and knee and hip ailments.


    As a result of his infirmities, the pope missed participating in all major Holy Week events and designated top cardinals to stand in for him.


    On Sunday, it fell to the Vatican’s No. 2 official, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, to celebrate Easter Mass in the flower-decked square jammed with more than 50,000 people. Millions more watched in TV hookups in 74 countries.


    John Paul appeared at his window after the service ended, drawing applause from the crowd. He coughed at first, but remained at the window for 12 minutes, looking stronger than he has in recent appearances.


    He had papers on his lectern and turned the pages himself, following along as Sodano read his Easter message in the square below.


    At the end of the message, a microphone was put in front of him and John Paul touched it as if readying to impart the papal blessing. After trying to utter the words, the pope rested his hands on the lectern in apparent resignation that he could not speak and the microphone was taken away. Soon after, John Paul withdrew from the window.


    The Vatican had said the pope would appear to the faithful Sunday, but officials never confirmed he would speak and many in the crowd said they were not necessarily expecting it.


    “It would have been better with the pope,” said Sheri Zimpelman.


    But her husband, Thomas Zimpelman, a U.S. serviceman stationed in Aviano, northern Italy, said: “If he’s sick, he should do what’s best for him. His presence is enough.”


    The Turin daily newspaper La Stampa quoted one of the pope’s doctors Sunday as saying that the pope does indeed speak regularly in private, but public discourse is much more difficult for him.


    “You must consider that the physical and psychological effort of a public speech, even a brief one, is radically different and something that requires much more effort for a recovering patient,” the doctor was quoted as saying.


    The doctor, who spoke to the paper on condition of anonymity, stressed that the pope was recovering well but should continue to curtail his duties for “some weeks.” Vatican officials previously have acknowledged that the pope may be recovering more slowly than hoped.


    In his Easter message read by Sodano, John Paul said people around the world were hungering for “truth, freedom, justice and peace.”


    John Paul also asked God to “give also to us the strength to show generous solidarity toward the multitudes who are even today suffering and dying from poverty and hunger, decimated by fatal epidemics or devastated by immense natural disasters.”


    A prayer was said during the Mass asking “life and new energies” for the ailing pontiff and the entire Catholic Church.


    In John Paul’s native Poland, Catholics prayed for him and watched broadcasts from the Vatican for signs of how he was faring. Poland’s Roman Catholic primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, said Poles feel even closer to the pope than they did before his latest health crisis.


    “What the pope has shown the world during the last few days is very powerful and touching,” Glemp told The Associated Press. “He does not hide his suffering and pain but through it teaches us and speaks to us.”


    Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, said Sunday that John Paul must see his own ailments and inability “as joining the sufferings of the Lord in a very special way.” But in an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” he did not count out a full recovery for the pope.


    “I think you know how many times we’ve crossed the Holy Father off, how many times we’ve counted him out and he’s come back. He’s come back strong, he’s come back powerfully,” he said


  • Speed demon
    Steroids aren’t the only drug that help you on the job. As a 28-year-old freelancer, I had a special friend that helped me crank out stories: Meth.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -
    By James Maier


    printe-mail


    March 21, 2005  |  Ten in the morning. Sunlight, filtered by a philodendron’s leaves, played across my desk. The computer hummed, a loud noise in a room where the only other sound was the squeaking of a razor blade as it chopped chunks of speed into a line on the back of a CD. I remember, clear as crystal, the way the sight of the drug made my heart beat faster and the tips of my fingers go dry.


    I remember lowering my rolled-up twenty and hoovering the drug up into my right nostril — the good nostril (for reasons unclear, the left one never worked well). I remember the sinus burn.


    And I remember my headache lifting, my brain shifting gears, energy levels soaring. Why did I love speed? Because it made me productive! Pot sent me to the couch to ooh and ahh at stupid TV. Psychedelics taunted me with glimpses of faux profundity. Alcohol just made everything sloppy. But speed made things happen.


    I remember bouncing out of my chair, hiding the blade and the little baggie and the CD with its tell-tale pattern of cross-hatched razor cuts.


    And then I remember waking up. Lying in bed, my wife sleeping beside me, heart racing, palms sweaty, mind confused. What had just happened?


    I must have been dreaming, I realized, dreaming of speed. I hadn’t done a line in six months. I had quit, sworn off the demon drug, cut myself free from the people who could get it for me. But though I had pushed it away, the drug wasn’t ready to let go. My subconscious knew exactly how to simulate the feeling of pumped-up dopamine levels. The craving endured. I was both frightened and sad as the memory of speed-driven glee began to fade. Frightened because I was trying to kick this drug, which was screwing with my marriage and my health. But sad because I could recall from the dream how clearly I’d been looking forward to that buzz, that boost, that charge of energy, that icy clarity.


    Dawn was beginning to break. I shook off the nostalgia like a dog trying to get dry, got up and started making coffee.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Crystal meth, plain old meth, crank, ice, glass, chalk: This particular white powder has gone by a lot of different names, but to me, the drug is always “speed,” because that’s what it does.


    I first got turned on to it by a precision machinist, a guy who custom-made parts for antique automobiles. A working-class white guy, the classic profile for a speed user, back in the day (though less so today, now that upscale Bay Area fathers are writing about their addicted sons in the New York Times Magazine). For my friend, the drug wasn’t just a jolt of social energy like, say, a toot of coke. It was part of his toolbox. Snort some speed, crank up the metal lathe, work all night.


    I didn’t see the point of that, at first. Drugs were for fun, not for work, and my efforts, on a couple of occasions, to do some writing while under the influence of cocaine, or even more laughably, psychedelic mushrooms, had been pathetic. But I was happy to do some lines and watch my friend explain to me the purposes of his vast armory of metal-working tools. That was cool.


    There were other, obvious things to like. Speed was cheap and it lasted a lot longer than coke. For a 28-year-old freelance writer struggling to pay the rent, that made a difference. Sure, it burned like a motherfucker when you snorted it, but you got used to that. I scored some from the machinist and shared it with my friends and girlfriend, using it, late at night, washed down by many a beer, to break on through to the other side of socializing, that place in the wee hours where the down and dirty stories of your life get shared and acquaintances become recognized as soul mates.


    And so it went for a few months. Then, one morning, I sat in front of my computer monitor, utterly uninspired. I had an assignment to write a 1,200-word piece on a suite of software applications known as Microsoft BackOffice. It was borderline P.R. for a trade magazine — a critique of Bill Gates as evil monopolist wasn’t what the editor was ordering. And I didn’t want to do it.


    I considered the fact that some speed remained from a blowout the night before. That there was any left at all was unusual; typically, the night ends when the last trace of powder has been licked clean from inside the baggie. I decided to do a test — in the interests of science. Hadn’t I watched my friend the machinist operate tools on speed that required total concentration and delicate control? And it wasn’t as if I was trying to create lasting prose that would awe the poets of the land.


    I did a couple of lines.


    Two hours later, my story was done, the dishes in the kitchen sink were clean, the laundry was folded, and the house plants were watered. I had started a grocery list and a to-do list and was trying to decide what was next: reorganizing the icons on my desktop, alphabetizing my CD collection, or spending the rest of the afternoon organizing a master plan for getting healthy, wealthy and wise. Speed, without alcohol as a buffer, or friends to interact with, was something completely new to me. On speed, I could get shit done.


    Right away I knew I’d never met a drug more dangerous.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Speed, like any other stimulant, is fun going up and miserable coming down. And once you’ve done too much, the focus and precision go out the window. Think about the feeling you get when you’ve drunk one cup of coffee too many. You’re a little jittery, a little headachy. Multiply that by 100 and you’ve got an inkling of what it’s like when you’re maxed out on speed. You’re grinding your teeth, your mouth is feeling dry, your sweat starts to feel toxic and metallic. You take a shower, to try to get clean, but it only works for a few minutes. You start drinking water and find that you can’t get enough, but it seems to go through your system without even stopping for a chat with your inner organs.


    The crash is horrific. Massive headache, depression, dehydration. Speed is not good for you, and your body tells you that in every possible way. But your mind… your mind is more amenable. Your mind is always saying, just a little boost would be OK.


    From the get-go, I was aware that I was dancing with the dark side. Even as I continued doing it socially, now that I was using it for work, I wasn’t putting it all on the table, so to speak. I was setting some aside, secreting away baggies inside obscure audiotape cassette boxes. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was doing lines in the middle of the day by myself. I also didn’t want to share, even with my girlfriend. Getting high with her was a blast, but meeting my deadlines was a necessity.


    But it was good for my work. Making a career as a freelance writer in the teeth of a recession is a challenge, and I needed all the help I could get. I was working seven days a week, for anyone who would pay me, always under deadline pressure.


    And the stuff I wrote wasn’t bad! At least, not judging by what my editors and readers told me. It was quality shit. I was my own best editor and critic on speed, scornful of lazy writing. Transitions had to be perfect, arguments airtight.


    I once finished a massive, hundred-page project in a four-day-long speed-fueled frenzy, doing huge fat lines every couple of hours, from early in the morning until past midnight, sleeping uneasily for three or four hours at a time. Midway through the home stretch, it occurred to me that there was an underlying tension in the piece that, if drawn out and made explicit, would tie everything together in one brilliant stroke. Only problem was that it would require rewriting the entire thing from top to bottom. My speed-intensified brain couldn’t back away. I did a couple more lines, and rammed my way through, like a hopped-up fullback knocking tacklers hither and thither as he rushes for the end zone. Nothing could stop me.


    Yeah, there was that one moment on the fourth day, when, moments after a line, I sat at my desk feeling my heart beat like a tribal drum and I thought to myself — I am in complete control. I could stop my heart from beating with a single thought right now. But I soon dismissed that fleeting epiphany as paranoia and returned to my current task of removing every single passive construction in some 40,000 words of writing. And making sure the margins were just right. And the footnotes. Don’t get me started on the footnotes.


    Some months later, I went to a bar where I had arranged to meet a guy — let’s call him “Al.” Al was a little shifty. He had a nice grin but a hard time keeping a job as a landscaper. His shoulder-length hair was a little scraggly. I didn’t know him all that well — he had worked for another friend of mine who was also a landscaper.


    Al was supposed to know a guy who could sell me some speed. My machinist friend was getting a little flaky and wasn’t returning phone messages. There was another guy I knew, a biker dude whose claim to fame had been playing bass for the third incarnation of a second-rate Southern rock band, but he was in jail, and there was no telling when he’d be out. So I was down to Al.


    Al had me drive to a part of town I hadn’t been to before, where the buildings were mostly warehouses with boarded-up windows and the street gutters were littered with ripped-open condom packages. It was broad daylight, around 4 in the afternoon, but the stark light made the scene more uncomfortable and freaky than pitch darkness. After pulling up to one warehouse, reputedly the shared residence of a once-famous punk band that had fallen on hard times, Al told me to stay in the car while he went inside with a couple hundred of my dollars.


    “These guys are a little paranoid,” he said. And then disappeared.


    I sat in the car, imagining what I would say if a cop passed by — and this was the kind of neighborhood where cops did roll by, often — and ask me what I was doing. What was my cover story? What would I say?


    A few minutes later, a car did pass, going about 10 miles an hour, and both the driver and the passenger gave me a long hard look. I just leaned back in my seat, avoiding eye contact, feeling the sweat break out on the back of my neck. Where was Al? Why was I doing this? Was this the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my life, or what?


    The answer, obviously, was yes. But the adrenaline of scoring overrode whatever tiny reservoir of common sense was still lurking inside me. I was addicted — to that sense of control, that sense of total focus — and if that meant going completely out of control to get there, so be it.


    Al finally returned. Was he gone an hour or just ten minutes? I have no idea. All I know is that he made the deal. I gave him a cut and got back home.


    And it was all good.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Except I knew it wasn’t. I knew, all along, that I would have to quit. I could see other people around me getting fucked up by the drug, displaying the same patterns of selfishness and paranoia that I was developing — the hoarding and the secrecy. And when I saw some old friend clumsily sneaking a line when she thought no one was paying attention, or getting agitated at the thought that she wasn’t getting her fair share, it alarmed me more than when I saw that same behavior in myself. Is that what I looked like? I wondered.


    Somehow, I never let the physical impact of the drug get too out of control. I’m not sure why, but it’s possible that the same obsession with work that drove to me to speed kept me from submerging completely into its embrace. There was a limit to how much I could do and still keep it together. My body required time to recuperate if I was still going to meet my work obligations — and I never failed to toe that line.


    But even as I avoided becoming a tweaked-out wreck, alarm bells were ringing. My girlfriend — now my fiancée — and I were both having a little too much fun. She and I discussed what was going on — I shared all my furtive secrets of the past year in an all-night, speed-fueled heart-to-heart. We agreed to a pact a few weeks later — in the middle of our honeymoon.


    We were going to clean up. Quit. Put that shit behind us, together.


    As far as I know, she didn’t do another line of speed from that moment onward.


    But less than a month later, I was back to it. I was on to a huge story that needed to be done on an absurdly short deadline. A friend of mine was helping me out. He laid out some lines. I didn’t even think twice.


    In the months that followed, I can remember coming to bed before I was sleepy, because I knew that if I stayed up any later working she would start to wonder if I was back on the drug. And of course she would be right, because I was. And I would lie there, wide awake under the blankets, concentrating on regulating my breathing so as to seem asleep. It is not really a productive use of one’s time to fake being asleep. But it seemed to make sense at that moment.


    Of course she found out. And was angrier than I’d ever seen her — I think it was the first time I’d ever really disappointed her. If I could go back in time and change anything in my life, I think I might go back to that first pact-breaking line and slap myself around a few times. You know what they say: The first cut is the deepest — there’s really no coming back from that initial breach of faith. Not all the way, anyway. That kind of damage may not be the kind that can ever be fully repaired. Over the course of the next year, I did finally fight my way clear of the hold that speed had over my waking, and sleeping, hours. How did I get free? I’m not sure — I’m not even sure that now, some 15 years later, I am free. I just stopped myself from scoring. I drank a lot of coffee.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Speed is much in the news these days. The tweaker who blows himself up in his jerry-built meth lab has become a kind of cultural cliché, like the burned-out stoner, the coke-addled yuppie, or the blissed-out E raver. But in the 21st century, speed has come a long way from where it was when I fell under its spell. Meth: It’s not just for white trash any more. The intelligentsia are starting to pay attention. It’s a gay man’s party drug, for crying out loud!


    I haven’t touched the stuff in more than a decade, but I don’t doubt that speed abuse is spreading. What I don’t see is a whole lot of appreciation for why. Understanding why people do speed is more complicated than just noting that, as with any recreational drug, speed is fun, and when fun is combined with the likelihood of physical addiction, you have a problem. But speed isn’t just about fun, and addiction isn’t something that happens just because you try something once, and boom, the shackles are in place.


    For some of us, speed answers deeper needs. I think one reason why it used to be situated mainly in blue-collar circles was because speed is a workingman’s drug. Gotta pull another eight-hour shift at the factory? Speed can help with that. Gotta drive another thousand miles in your big rig? Speed is great for that.


    Speed, for me, was that workingman’s drug, updated for the hypertechnological age. It’s a busy time, these days, busier than it’s ever been, and it is hard to keep up. In a 24x7x365 digitally networked wireless world there’s always another e-mail, another voice mail, another item on the to-do list.


    The more powerful our computers and information-management programs, the more we try to do — and the more we are asked to do, because of course, there is a huge economic incentive to have fewer people do more. That’s called productivity — and everybody likes productivity. You can go all the way back to good old Max Weber and “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” — we get closer to God when we get lots of stuff done. Speed, man, it’s holy.


    We’re a nation that’s hooked on speed for very good reasons. It is no coincidence, I think, that speed abuse is burgeoning at exactly the same time that the pressure on each and every one of us is ratcheting up.


    After all, you’d better be productive if you want to flourish in the outsourced, downsized, globalized and completely deregulated 21st century economy. Just the thought of competing against a couple billion Chinese and Indians makes me want to reach for the razor blade, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Take out that second mortgage, work that second job, learn that extra skill — got to add value if you want to survive, but where are you going to find the time?


    I suppose there could be another way. A good Zen Buddhist might encourage us to assume the lotus position, eliminate our desires, and purge ourselves of need. Speed isn’t going to solve anything, anyway, even if you can achieve the unlikely feat of controlling your habit so you don’t kill yourself. There’s always going to be more to do, more competition, more distraction, more pressure. Just don’t do it, the sage would tell us. And while you’re at it, ease up on the caffeine, why don’t you?


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    If someone laid a line out in front of me right now, I’d be hard put to say no. And there are times, when the deadlines shower down and the hours start slipping away, that a little voice in the back of my head says, “If only I had some speed…” There’s always that delusion of drug grandeur — I can stay on top of this. I can control it.


    But when you wake up in the middle of the night sweating because your body is riding a drug high that never really happened, you should listen to the whispers of the demon. I’m lucky I did, but I still miss it.



    - – - – - – - – - – - -







    About the writer
    James Maier is a pseudonym.

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  • Ask the pilot
    The pilot has problems with Gwen Stefani but learns the fate of Men Without Hats. Also: Exactly how much fuel does a plane need to get from point A to point B?


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    By Patrick Smith


    printe-mail


    March 25, 2005  |  When, a few weeks ago, I rhetorically asked what had become of the band Men Without Hats, the one-hit-wonder from those formative days of MTV, I did not expect, or particularly want, an answer. To my amazement, the following came in from reader Bill Owen:


    “I don’t know where the rest of them fetched up, but the keyboardist went on to become my dentist here in Ottawa. At least he used to be my dentist; about a year ago he packed up and moved to the States. Before leaving, he did the soundtrack for a locally produced film called ‘Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter,’ which was even worse than it sounds.”


    I’d wondered which country, or perhaps which planet, Men Without Hats called home. Had I known Canada, I’d have pegged the keyboardist for a career in Cirque de Soleil, maybe. Definitely not dentistry.


    Thinking back to 1983, I’m able to picture the “Safety Dance” video with an almost painful vividness. My apologies if the past 22 years have mixed up certain details, but I seem to recall band members prancing ridiculously through what looked to be the rolling moors of the British countryside (maybe it was rural Ontario). Behind them frolicked a strangely outfitted ensemble of fairies, dwarves, or druids of some kind, while Canada’s weirdest dentist-to-be plinked away at his synthesizer, urging us to “dance if you wanna.” It was all too much, even then.


    What got this thread going, maybe you remember, was my grieving over the general atrociousness of in-seat entertainment, particularly the music options. On-demand video is becoming more and more commonplace, but a staple of the U.S. domestic flight still consists of bulkhead screen reruns of “Frasier” and an abysmal selection of audio channels. For those of us who don’t yet tote along digital music players, the only thing more disappointing than a stale packet of snack mix is in the usual armrest anesthesia of nonthreatening pop songs, quasi-jazz and world music mishmash. Give the airlines credit, I suppose, for upgrading their gadgetry, but truth be told, Sting’s greatest hits aren’t any more palatable through ear buds (or, in some premium cabins, noise-reduction units from Bose), than they were through those old-style stethoscopic head vices.


    En route to Argentina I was amazed to catch one of my favorite early ’80s songs — the Jam’s “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” on the channel 10 playlist. Hoping against hope, I wondered if maybe the airlines were on to something. Alas, my more recent trip to Chile took care of that suspicion. Not that there’s anything wrong with people willing to stomach Destiny’s Child, Gwen Stefani, and LL Cool J all in the same loop. Or maybe there is, but either way I don’t presume there are many of them. Surely I hope not.


    And that’s the thing: by attempting to satisfy everyone, the in-flight mix-masters please nobody. In fact they really tick some of us off. Who wants to endure the tedium of having to wait in 45-minute cycles just to hear one bloody song? And why are there so few channels to begin with? If I can get 16,000 cuts into a single iPod, there’s no reason a quarter-billion-dollar 777 can’t offer me Hüsker Dü, the Jazz Butcher, the Wedding Present and the Mountain Goats at my choosing.


    At the same time, you might be amazed — some would say disheartened — to learn how seriously some airlines take this stuff. In one of the most daring examples of airline merchandising you’ll ever encounter, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) compiles its onboard music program — mostly instrumental folk tunes and the occasional Pakistani pop song — for sale on CD at stores around the country. (I’m left struggling to imagine a similar endeavor here in America. Where to go with this? Now at all Tower Records locations: “The Best of Delta, Unplugged.”)


    Ask the Pilot’s man in Pakistan is Ameel Zia Khan, who lives in Islamabad. I sent Ameel on a mission to find me a disc of PIA’s greatest hits, so I could sell the idea to JetBlue.


    “I went to several shops,” he reports back. “But they were mostly sold out. The compilations are actually quite popular. Only one store had copies, and those were pirated.”


    Partway through an America West flight from Las Vegas to New York-Kennedy, the pilot announced that we’d experienced stronger-than-expected headwinds and would need to land in Columbus, Ohio, to take on extra fuel. How often does this happen and why? Did America West roll the dice before we took off, hoping we’d have enough gas?


    Determining the required fuel is a serious and somewhat scientific undertaking. Crews do not ballpark the load with a cursory glance at a gauge, as you might in a car before a long road trip. The regulations get knotty, particularly on international routes, but a good place to start is the standard U.S. domestic rule: You cannot depart without enough fuel to reach your intended destination, then to proceed to the most distant of any requisite alternate airports (designated in accordance with forecast ceiling and visibility minima), and to maintain a 45-minute cushion on top of that.


    The numbers are wrangled backstage, so to speak, by an airline’s dispatch/flight planning staff. Intended routing and cruise altitude(s) are balanced against wind and weather conditions to formulate a minimum legal carriage. Air traffic considerations may further increase the total. The ascertained sum is presented to the captain, who has final word, as part of the preflight paperwork package. If in the captain’s judgment the situation so warrants, he or she can request extra.


    Once aloft, quantity on longer flights is kept track of progressively over a series of waypoints. Hitting a certain fix, the crew compares the actual remaining fuel with a predicted value shown in the fuel-synopsis portion of the flight plan. Flash back for a minute to that old freighter I once flew to Europe. Approaching a waypoint over the North Atlantic, we’d run a fuel score. I’d total up what remained in the jet’s eight tanks and compare that amount to what was anticipated on the sheet. If, for example, at 40 degrees west longitude, roughly midway across the pond, the paperwork called for 75,400 pounds, and I counted 76,200 pounds, I’d tell the captain we were “ahead 800″ (or 120 gallons if you prefer).


    That’s pretty old-fashioned, but a good illustration. On modern aircraft there’s no need to have a hack like me staring at eight dials, with a calculator, but the basic procedure is no different.


    Usually, the estimated numbers are accurate and reliable. With sophisticated software and thousands of daily flights, carriers have cutting-edge prognosticating tools and an immense bank of empirical data to work with. Still, every so often, whether due to shifting upper-level winds or a surprise air traffic control re-route, you drop below target values. Back on our freighter, it wasn’t unusual for the captain to hear, “We’re down 1,500.” Even so, it’s seldom a big deal unless you begin to fall substantially behind. (Keep in mind that even over the ocean planes stay within prescribed distances to diversion airports.)


    When loads are heavy or other factors make takeoff weight an issue, a flight might set out with exactly the minimum legal fuel. Though all mandated buffers are accounted for, there isn’t much wiggle room for unforeseen problems. Should the cards include drastically changed winds or holding patterns, a diversion may be in order. This rarely happens, but as the e-mailer can attest, it’s not unheard of. You aren’t making a pit stop because you’re “running out of fuel,” exactly (reference the British Airways stories from a few weeks ago). More specifically, you’re unable to maintain those regulatory safety margins.


    Critical to all of this is the fine print of how and when to designate a so-called alternate airport. Take the e-mailer’s example of Las Vegas to JFK. If the weather in New York is forecast below certain parameters, a diversion point, or “alternate” must be filed as well. Think of it as a backup destination, and here too the weather is obliged to meet specific ceiling and visibility criteria. In some cases two alternates need to be filed, with fuel enough to reach both. Occasionally, such as when an entire region is blanketed by heavy fog, hunting down a permissible alternate can take you hundreds of miles away. The closest option to New York might be Pittsburgh (that’s fairly extreme, but not unprecedented). Now, not only do you need enough in the tanks to go LAS-JFK, but enough to then backtrack to PIT. Add still more for the 45-minute rule, and yet more for any anticipated holds or delays — what an airline calls provisionary or contingency fuel. Down at the gate in Vegas, you might hear chatter of the B-word (bump) if the flight is already heavily laden with passengers and cargo.


    One way of working the system is to request a change of alternates while en route, if possible. Should Hartford turn bright and sunny, that can free up several thousand pounds on reserve for the much longer ride to Pittsburgh — useful if ATC springs an hour-long holding pattern.


    With all of these safeguards, you’d figure it a virtual impossibility for a plane to succumb to fuel depletion. If by virtual impossibility you mean four times, that’s an accurate assessment. The most notorious and widely known incidents in which otherwise operable jetliners became hundred-ton gliders are those of a United Airlines DC-8 near Portland, Ore., in 1978; an Air Canada 767 five years later; the tragedy of Avianca flight 52 near JFK airport in 1990, and the strange story of Air Transat flight 236 in 2001. Air Canada and Air Transat landed safely. United and Avianca did not.


    Dissecting the how and why of those events would involve many pages. Suffice to say the circumstances were complicated and, in at least two of the examples, involved some hideously unusual decision making. I choose to think the rarity of such occurrences — a mere four flights out of many millions — is the most noteworthy thing about them.


    On a flight from San Diego to Dallas, a medical emergency required a diversion to Phoenix. We were immediately cleared for landing, but once on the ground we waited almost an hour. The pilot announced that refueling would be necessary, and there was paperwork to fill out. Why the delay, and why the need to refuel when Phoenix sits directly along the route between San Diego and Dallas? (The emergency involved an infant that had difficulty breathing. Later, there was no mention of the event in the Phoenix papers. Was this so routine as to be un-newsworthy?)


    The hour-long wait doesn’t surprise me. You’d have needed a new flight plan; a new ATC clearance; a revised weight and balance manifest; and so forth. Additionally, it’s possible that all of the fuel parameters had changed. Having enough gas for San Diego-Dallas does not guarantee you still have enough, per the guidelines covered above, just because Phoenix rests partway between. Takeoff and climb to cruising altitude consume a considerable percentage of the total, and now you’re looking at two takeoffs.


    This type of thing does not happen very frequently, but I fail to see why it would, necessarily, warrant mention in the paper. The news was not the detour itself, which was nothing more serious than a plane landing at city B instead of city A; but rather the baby with breathing trouble. And babies with breathing trouble usually don’t make the news. Unless, maybe, you’re watching local Fox TV, in which case each of the leading five stories must, per network decree, in some way involve small children.


    Jet fuel is essentially kerosene and sells for about $1.40 gallon at present. But why does it cost more than three times that amount down at the local hardware store? Are the airlines are buying in bulk?


    Jet fuel is slightly different from campground-grade kerosene, and obviously there’s an established infrastructure for its production and delivery. And yes, the airlines do buy in bulk. Lots of bulk, often hedging their purchases by buying millions of gallons, months or even years ahead of time. Of course, a carrier needs cash on hand to do this, which is partly why Southwest — who else? — is the industry leader. With oil prices creeping toward $60 a barrel, the airline was able to hedge more than 80 percent of its anticipated fuel needs for 2005 at a ridiculous $25 a barrel. For 2006 it has already bought ahead at $31 per barrel, and at $30 for 2007.

    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.



    - – - – - – - – - – - -







    About the writer
    Patrick Smith is an airline pilot. His column is archived here and his previous articles for Salon can be found here.

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  •  


    Speed demon
    Steroids aren’t the only drug that help you on the job. As a 28-year-old freelancer, I had a special friend that helped me crank out stories: Meth.






     



    Mwt



    Speed demon
    Steroids aren’t the only drug that help you on the job. As a 28-year-old freelancer, I had a special friend that helped me crank out stories: Meth.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -
    By James Maier


    printe-mail


    March 21, 2005  |  Ten in the morning. Sunlight, filtered by a philodendron’s leaves, played across my desk. The computer hummed, a loud noise in a room where the only other sound was the squeaking of a razor blade as it chopped chunks of speed into a line on the back of a CD. I remember, clear as crystal, the way the sight of the drug made my heart beat faster and the tips of my fingers go dry.


    I remember lowering my rolled-up twenty and hoovering the drug up into my right nostril — the good nostril (for reasons unclear, the left one never worked well). I remember the sinus burn.


    And I remember my headache lifting, my brain shifting gears, energy levels soaring. Why did I love speed? Because it made me productive! Pot sent me to the couch to ooh and ahh at stupid TV. Psychedelics taunted me with glimpses of faux profundity. Alcohol just made everything sloppy. But speed made things happen.


    I remember bouncing out of my chair, hiding the blade and the little baggie and the CD with its tell-tale pattern of cross-hatched razor cuts.


    And then I remember waking up. Lying in bed, my wife sleeping beside me, heart racing, palms sweaty, mind confused. What had just happened?


    I must have been dreaming, I realized, dreaming of speed. I hadn’t done a line in six months. I had quit, sworn off the demon drug, cut myself free from the people who could get it for me. But though I had pushed it away, the drug wasn’t ready to let go. My subconscious knew exactly how to simulate the feeling of pumped-up dopamine levels. The craving endured. I was both frightened and sad as the memory of speed-driven glee began to fade. Frightened because I was trying to kick this drug, which was screwing with my marriage and my health. But sad because I could recall from the dream how clearly I’d been looking forward to that buzz, that boost, that charge of energy, that icy clarity.


    Dawn was beginning to break. I shook off the nostalgia like a dog trying to get dry, got up and started making coffee.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Crystal meth, plain old meth, crank, ice, glass, chalk: This particular white powder has gone by a lot of different names, but to me, the drug is always “speed,” because that’s what it does.


    I first got turned on to it by a precision machinist, a guy who custom-made parts for antique automobiles. A working-class white guy, the classic profile for a speed user, back in the day (though less so today, now that upscale Bay Area fathers are writing about their addicted sons in the New York Times Magazine). For my friend, the drug wasn’t just a jolt of social energy like, say, a toot of coke. It was part of his toolbox. Snort some speed, crank up the metal lathe, work all night.


    I didn’t see the point of that, at first. Drugs were for fun, not for work, and my efforts, on a couple of occasions, to do some writing while under the influence of cocaine, or even more laughably, psychedelic mushrooms, had been pathetic. But I was happy to do some lines and watch my friend explain to me the purposes of his vast armory of metal-working tools. That was cool.


    There were other, obvious things to like. Speed was cheap and it lasted a lot longer than coke. For a 28-year-old freelance writer struggling to pay the rent, that made a difference. Sure, it burned like a motherfucker when you snorted it, but you got used to that. I scored some from the machinist and shared it with my friends and girlfriend, using it, late at night, washed down by many a beer, to break on through to the other side of socializing, that place in the wee hours where the down and dirty stories of your life get shared and acquaintances become recognized as soul mates.


    And so it went for a few months. Then, one morning, I sat in front of my computer monitor, utterly uninspired. I had an assignment to write a 1,200-word piece on a suite of software applications known as Microsoft BackOffice. It was borderline P.R. for a trade magazine — a critique of Bill Gates as evil monopolist wasn’t what the editor was ordering. And I didn’t want to do it.


    I considered the fact that some speed remained from a blowout the night before. That there was any left at all was unusual; typically, the night ends when the last trace of powder has been licked clean from inside the baggie. I decided to do a test — in the interests of science. Hadn’t I watched my friend the machinist operate tools on speed that required total concentration and delicate control? And it wasn’t as if I was trying to create lasting prose that would awe the poets of the land.


    I did a couple of lines.


    Two hours later, my story was done, the dishes in the kitchen sink were clean, the laundry was folded, and the house plants were watered. I had started a grocery list and a to-do list and was trying to decide what was next: reorganizing the icons on my desktop, alphabetizing my CD collection, or spending the rest of the afternoon organizing a master plan for getting healthy, wealthy and wise. Speed, without alcohol as a buffer, or friends to interact with, was something completely new to me. On speed, I could get shit done.


    Right away I knew I’d never met a drug more dangerous.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Speed, like any other stimulant, is fun going up and miserable coming down. And once you’ve done too much, the focus and precision go out the window. Think about the feeling you get when you’ve drunk one cup of coffee too many. You’re a little jittery, a little headachy. Multiply that by 100 and you’ve got an inkling of what it’s like when you’re maxed out on speed. You’re grinding your teeth, your mouth is feeling dry, your sweat starts to feel toxic and metallic. You take a shower, to try to get clean, but it only works for a few minutes. You start drinking water and find that you can’t get enough, but it seems to go through your system without even stopping for a chat with your inner organs.


    The crash is horrific. Massive headache, depression, dehydration. Speed is not good for you, and your body tells you that in every possible way. But your mind… your mind is more amenable. Your mind is always saying, just a little boost would be OK.


    From the get-go, I was aware that I was dancing with the dark side. Even as I continued doing it socially, now that I was using it for work, I wasn’t putting it all on the table, so to speak. I was setting some aside, secreting away baggies inside obscure audiotape cassette boxes. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was doing lines in the middle of the day by myself. I also didn’t want to share, even with my girlfriend. Getting high with her was a blast, but meeting my deadlines was a necessity.


    But it was good for my work. Making a career as a freelance writer in the teeth of a recession is a challenge, and I needed all the help I could get. I was working seven days a week, for anyone who would pay me, always under deadline pressure.


    And the stuff I wrote wasn’t bad! At least, not judging by what my editors and readers told me. It was quality shit. I was my own best editor and critic on speed, scornful of lazy writing. Transitions had to be perfect, arguments airtight.


    I once finished a massive, hundred-page project in a four-day-long speed-fueled frenzy, doing huge fat lines every couple of hours, from early in the morning until past midnight, sleeping uneasily for three or four hours at a time. Midway through the home stretch, it occurred to me that there was an underlying tension in the piece that, if drawn out and made explicit, would tie everything together in one brilliant stroke. Only problem was that it would require rewriting the entire thing from top to bottom. My speed-intensified brain couldn’t back away. I did a couple more lines, and rammed my way through, like a hopped-up fullback knocking tacklers hither and thither as he rushes for the end zone. Nothing could stop me.


    Yeah, there was that one moment on the fourth day, when, moments after a line, I sat at my desk feeling my heart beat like a tribal drum and I thought to myself — I am in complete control. I could stop my heart from beating with a single thought right now. But I soon dismissed that fleeting epiphany as paranoia and returned to my current task of removing every single passive construction in some 40,000 words of writing. And making sure the margins were just right. And the footnotes. Don’t get me started on the footnotes.


    Some months later, I went to a bar where I had arranged to meet a guy — let’s call him “Al.” Al was a little shifty. He had a nice grin but a hard time keeping a job as a landscaper. His shoulder-length hair was a little scraggly. I didn’t know him all that well — he had worked for another friend of mine who was also a landscaper.


    Al was supposed to know a guy who could sell me some speed. My machinist friend was getting a little flaky and wasn’t returning phone messages. There was another guy I knew, a biker dude whose claim to fame had been playing bass for the third incarnation of a second-rate Southern rock band, but he was in jail, and there was no telling when he’d be out. So I was down to Al.


    Al had me drive to a part of town I hadn’t been to before, where the buildings were mostly warehouses with boarded-up windows and the street gutters were littered with ripped-open condom packages. It was broad daylight, around 4 in the afternoon, but the stark light made the scene more uncomfortable and freaky than pitch darkness. After pulling up to one warehouse, reputedly the shared residence of a once-famous punk band that had fallen on hard times, Al told me to stay in the car while he went inside with a couple hundred of my dollars.


    “These guys are a little paranoid,” he said. And then disappeared.


    I sat in the car, imagining what I would say if a cop passed by — and this was the kind of neighborhood where cops did roll by, often — and ask me what I was doing. What was my cover story? What would I say?


    A few minutes later, a car did pass, going about 10 miles an hour, and both the driver and the passenger gave me a long hard look. I just leaned back in my seat, avoiding eye contact, feeling the sweat break out on the back of my neck. Where was Al? Why was I doing this? Was this the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my life, or what?


    The answer, obviously, was yes. But the adrenaline of scoring overrode whatever tiny reservoir of common sense was still lurking inside me. I was addicted — to that sense of control, that sense of total focus — and if that meant going completely out of control to get there, so be it.


    Al finally returned. Was he gone an hour or just ten minutes? I have no idea. All I know is that he made the deal. I gave him a cut and got back home.


    And it was all good.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Except I knew it wasn’t. I knew, all along, that I would have to quit. I could see other people around me getting fucked up by the drug, displaying the same patterns of selfishness and paranoia that I was developing — the hoarding and the secrecy. And when I saw some old friend clumsily sneaking a line when she thought no one was paying attention, or getting agitated at the thought that she wasn’t getting her fair share, it alarmed me more than when I saw that same behavior in myself. Is that what I looked like? I wondered.


    Somehow, I never let the physical impact of the drug get too out of control. I’m not sure why, but it’s possible that the same obsession with work that drove to me to speed kept me from submerging completely into its embrace. There was a limit to how much I could do and still keep it together. My body required time to recuperate if I was still going to meet my work obligations — and I never failed to toe that line.


    But even as I avoided becoming a tweaked-out wreck, alarm bells were ringing. My girlfriend — now my fiancée — and I were both having a little too much fun. She and I discussed what was going on — I shared all my furtive secrets of the past year in an all-night, speed-fueled heart-to-heart. We agreed to a pact a few weeks later — in the middle of our honeymoon.


    We were going to clean up. Quit. Put that shit behind us, together.


    As far as I know, she didn’t do another line of speed from that moment onward.


    But less than a month later, I was back to it. I was on to a huge story that needed to be done on an absurdly short deadline. A friend of mine was helping me out. He laid out some lines. I didn’t even think twice.


    In the months that followed, I can remember coming to bed before I was sleepy, because I knew that if I stayed up any later working she would start to wonder if I was back on the drug. And of course she would be right, because I was. And I would lie there, wide awake under the blankets, concentrating on regulating my breathing so as to seem asleep. It is not really a productive use of one’s time to fake being asleep. But it seemed to make sense at that moment.


    Of course she found out. And was angrier than I’d ever seen her — I think it was the first time I’d ever really disappointed her. If I could go back in time and change anything in my life, I think I might go back to that first pact-breaking line and slap myself around a few times. You know what they say: The first cut is the deepest — there’s really no coming back from that initial breach of faith. Not all the way, anyway. That kind of damage may not be the kind that can ever be fully repaired. Over the course of the next year, I did finally fight my way clear of the hold that speed had over my waking, and sleeping, hours. How did I get free? I’m not sure — I’m not even sure that now, some 15 years later, I am free. I just stopped myself from scoring. I drank a lot of coffee.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    Speed is much in the news these days. The tweaker who blows himself up in his jerry-built meth lab has become a kind of cultural cliché, like the burned-out stoner, the coke-addled yuppie, or the blissed-out E raver. But in the 21st century, speed has come a long way from where it was when I fell under its spell. Meth: It’s not just for white trash any more. The intelligentsia are starting to pay attention. It’s a gay man’s party drug, for crying out loud!


    I haven’t touched the stuff in more than a decade, but I don’t doubt that speed abuse is spreading. What I don’t see is a whole lot of appreciation for why. Understanding why people do speed is more complicated than just noting that, as with any recreational drug, speed is fun, and when fun is combined with the likelihood of physical addiction, you have a problem. But speed isn’t just about fun, and addiction isn’t something that happens just because you try something once, and boom, the shackles are in place.


    For some of us, speed answers deeper needs. I think one reason why it used to be situated mainly in blue-collar circles was because speed is a workingman’s drug. Gotta pull another eight-hour shift at the factory? Speed can help with that. Gotta drive another thousand miles in your big rig? Speed is great for that.


    Speed, for me, was that workingman’s drug, updated for the hypertechnological age. It’s a busy time, these days, busier than it’s ever been, and it is hard to keep up. In a 24x7x365 digitally networked wireless world there’s always another e-mail, another voice mail, another item on the to-do list.


    The more powerful our computers and information-management programs, the more we try to do — and the more we are asked to do, because of course, there is a huge economic incentive to have fewer people do more. That’s called productivity — and everybody likes productivity. You can go all the way back to good old Max Weber and “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” — we get closer to God when we get lots of stuff done. Speed, man, it’s holy.


    We’re a nation that’s hooked on speed for very good reasons. It is no coincidence, I think, that speed abuse is burgeoning at exactly the same time that the pressure on each and every one of us is ratcheting up.


    After all, you’d better be productive if you want to flourish in the outsourced, downsized, globalized and completely deregulated 21st century economy. Just the thought of competing against a couple billion Chinese and Indians makes me want to reach for the razor blade, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Take out that second mortgage, work that second job, learn that extra skill — got to add value if you want to survive, but where are you going to find the time?


    I suppose there could be another way. A good Zen Buddhist might encourage us to assume the lotus position, eliminate our desires, and purge ourselves of need. Speed isn’t going to solve anything, anyway, even if you can achieve the unlikely feat of controlling your habit so you don’t kill yourself. There’s always going to be more to do, more competition, more distraction, more pressure. Just don’t do it, the sage would tell us. And while you’re at it, ease up on the caffeine, why don’t you?


    - – - – - – - – - – - -



    If someone laid a line out in front of me right now, I’d be hard put to say no. And there are times, when the deadlines shower down and the hours start slipping away, that a little voice in the back of my head says, “If only I had some speed…” There’s always that delusion of drug grandeur — I can stay on top of this. I can control it.


    But when you wake up in the middle of the night sweating because your body is riding a drug high that never really happened, you should listen to the whispers of the demon. I’m lucky I did, but I still miss it.



    - – - – - – - – - – - -







    About the writer
    James Maier is a pseudonym.

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    An overextended, overmedicated insomniac turns to Provigil, the skyrocketingly popular pill that’s been a godsend for the narcoleptic, the jet-lagged and the just plain dog-tired.
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    You’re in a love puddle. You’re smiling. You’re high on Ecstasy. You touch your friend’s hair. Wow. You can’t stop touching it. Her hair is incredibly soft. You keep smiling. Now it’s a few years later. You take E again. You grind your teeth, the hangover lasts a week. It’s no fun. What happened?
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    Salon.com >> Life
     


  • Michael Jackson gestures to fans as he arrives Thursday at the Santa Barbara County, Calif., courthouse


    The man in America’s mirror
    Believe it or not, the Michael Jackson trial is more than a freak show. Yes, it’s a celebrity-sex wallow — but it’s also a crucible for our unresolved questions about crime, fame, race and punishment.


    - – - – - – - – - – - -
    By Farhad Manjoo


    printe-mail


    March 26, 2005  |  To most people, taking the Michael Jackson case seriously is a contradiction in terms. As much as Jackson is known for having once been a great performer, he is now known for being a freak. With his chimp, hyperbaric chamber, mysterious illnesses, dangling baby and, most of all, ever changing face, Jackson has become a regular player in the Bat Boy brigade of tabloid media. His trial is one of those media spectacles that stand as yet another reason to be ashamed of America, and arguing that it is some sort of social, cultural or legal landmark seems as silly as arguing that “The Wiz” marked a compelling turn in American cinema. Really, it’s understandable why you’d want to look away.


    But I’m here to tell you that Jackson’s trial on charges of child molestation is more important than you think it is. The case presents us with a rich seam of American obsessions, a combustible cocktail of celebrity, sex, race, mass media and the administration of law and order in our society. It gives us an opportunity to understand the method to Jackson’s apparent madness, to examine the ways in which he has, throughout his career, mined freakishness for its utility to him as a star. Here’s a musician who hasn’t recorded a great album in more than a decade and nevertheless remains, for better or worse, a cultural obsession, a national figure to be mocked or cried over, lamented or prized.


    To begin with, Jackson can’t be dismissed simply as a freak. Seth Clark Silberman, a professor of gay and lesbian studies at Yale University, who is a fan and a scholar of Jackson, reminds us that the performer has long engineered his own career and image. As long as Jackson’s been popular, he’s been weird. A better way to put it is that he’s popular because he’s weird, because he knows that oddness is intriguing, and that it’s better that the public thinks of him as being a strange man than not think of him at all.


    In a lecture that Silberman gave at a conference focused on Jackson at Yale last fall, the professor pointed to an assessment that Steven Spielberg once made of Jackson: “He’s in full control,” the director said. “Sometimes he appears to other people to be sort of wavering on the fringes of twilight, but there is great conscious forethought behind everything he does. He’s very smart about his career and the choices he makes.”


    Silberman argues that even in the infamous 2003 documentary, “Living With Michael Jackson,” by the British journalist Martin Bashir, Jackson played up his oddities in a (rather brilliant) attempt to keep us interested. The whole world thinks of Jackson as odd; if he’d disappointed Bashir by acting normal, nobody would have watched. So, instead, he decided to act stranger than any of us might have ever imagined. Afterward, we couldn’t get him out of our heads.


    In the documentary, though, Jackson’s circus act backfired on him. Silberman says that while watching the scene in which Jackson is holding hands with a 12-year-old boy and proudly declares that there isn’t anything wrong with sharing his bed with children, “I had to pause the TiVo and say to the TV, ‘Michael, what are you doing? Why would you do this now?’” It was this scene, prosecutors say, that set in motion the current child molestation case.


    The trial has been carrying on for about four weeks; we’re now at the halfway point, with the prosecution just about done presenting its case for Jackson’s guilt. At the center of this case are two boys, Gavin, the former cancer patient shown in the documentary, and Star, Gavin’s younger brother. Gavin claims to have been molested by Jackson, and Star says he witnessed acts of molestation.


    These acts are alleged to have occurred after the Bashir video was made, but both boys also testified that Jackson acted inappropriately with them before that. For instance, Jackson gave Gavin a computer on the first night that he met the boys at his Neverland Ranch in the summer of 2000, and, presumably in an effort show them that the computer was in working order, he introduced them to pornographic Web sites. “Got milk?” Jackson is said to have remarked when showing the boys a well-endowed woman who struck his fancy — proof if ever you needed it that those commercials are evil.


    Gavin, Star and their older sister, Davellin, who have all testified, say that they spent some time at Jackson’s ranch in late 2000 and 2001 — but that Jackson suddenly cut off all communication with them and they didn’t talk to him for more than a year. Then, one day in 2002, Jackson called Gavin more or less out of the blue and invited him to Neverland Ranch to participate in a film — the Bashir film.


    This series of events is important; it suggests that Jackson had forgotten about these children for some time and decided to call them only when he thought they could be useful to him in a documentary. As Silberman suggests, there was some calculation to Jackson’s behavior in the film. He may have been using the kids specifically to show the world that he was not going to shy away from past indiscretions and in fact that he was going to embrace, in an aggressive manner, the world’s suspicions about him.


    Instead of making the public think that Jackson was merely kooky, the Bashir video was deemed beyond the pale. In 1993, Jackson barely avoided a trial when another child accused him of molestation; he paid that accuser $20 million to keep the charges out of court. With the Bashir video, the public had finally had enough with Jackson’s winking at molestation. The film ruined Jackson, the prosecution says, prompting him to attack the children who were featured in the video.


    It was only in the weeks after the Bashir video aired, the prosecution argues, that Jackson molested Gavin. Gavin testified that he and Jackson were together in Jackson’s bed when Jackson brought up the subject of masturbation. He said that Jackson told him that masturbation is natural, and that men who didn’t masturbate would become “kind of unstable” — they would try to rape women or have sex with dogs. “And so I was under his covers, and then that’s when he put his hand in my pants and then he started masturbating me,” Gavin testified. He said that a similar incident occurred a few days later, and that he thinks, but can’t be sure, that there were more incidents as well. “In my memory, it was only twice, but I feel it was more than twice,” Gavin said. “But I only remember it twice.”


    Star testified that on two occasions, he went up to Michael’s open bedroom door and saw the pop star masturbating while fondling his brother, who was asleep or passed out on the bed beside Michael. Jackson “had his hand in his pants, and he was stroking up and down,” Star said. His brother was snoring. Jackson “had his eyes closed.”


    Life with Jackson appears to have been an awful cross between Romper Room and the Playboy Mansion, where every gag was at once juvenile and perverse. Jackson hosted odd swearing contests in which he encouraged the kids to string together all kinds of bad words. He made crank calls to strangers, asking women how big their “p-u-s-s-y” was, Star said in court. Once, while Star and Gavin were watching a movie, Jackson walked into the room completely naked with a “hard-on,” Star testified, and the brothers were “grossed out.” Star also described an incident in which Jackson pretended to have sex with a mannequin he keeps in his room. “He was — one time — he was jerking around and he grabbed the mannequin, and he was pretending like he was having intercourse with it,” Star said. “He was fully clothed. He was acting like he was humping.”


    The lurid details make the case easy to dismiss as tabloid fodder. But Thomas Lyon, an expert on child-abuse law at the University of Southern California Law School, believes otherwise. He argues that the high-profile trial is important precisely because it resembles many other molestation cases. “It could have a profound effect on how people see cases involving children,” he says. Depending on the outcome, it may dictate “what kinds of legal actions we take against them.”


    Currently, there are about 90,000 cases of sexual abuse against child victims confirmed in the United States each year, and there are likely a great many more instances of abuse that go unreported to authorities. Most of these children are molested by adults they’re acquainted with, many by adults who’ve cultivated relationships with the kids for the specific purpose of molestation. Prosecuting perpetrators in these cases is difficult: Children make bad witnesses, and children who are abused tend to be the sort of kids juries don’t believe — kids with problems in school, for example.


    Lyon points out that Jackson’s fame doesn’t eliminate the similarities between his case and other child molestation trials. For all its apparent freakishness, he says, the Jackson trial is proceeding in just the way most child-abuse trials do. “This case can teach the public about the M.O. of the typical molester,” Lyon says.


    Most people believe that a typical child molester is a “violent offender who picks up kids he doesn’t know” and abuses them. But that’s not at all how most cases occur, Lyon says. “If these charges are true, Jackson is the classic molester in terms of how he approached his victims.


    “First step is, Jackson introduces him to alcohol. Then he introduces him to pornography. Then he talks to him about how it’s natural to masturbate. Then, fourth step is, he does something to the child. And then he tries to get the child to do something to him. This is classic. The molester befriends the child, he corrupts the child, and then he moves toward the sex act.”


    Not only did the alleged molestation in Jackson’s case parallel most molestation cases, so too has the courtroom proceeding run according to a similar pattern, especially when it comes to the children’s testimony.


    On the stand, Gavin, Star, and their older sister Davellin have sketched a rather clear broad picture of what happened during their interactions with Jackson. But they have also been inconsistent, and sometimes unbelievable, in their details. Reading through the transcripts of the case, especially during the times that each of them was cross-examined by Tom Mesereau, Jackson’s pitch-perfect defense attorney, is a frustrating exercise. You’re constantly trying to believe the kids — what they say is too terrible to dismiss — but at the same time you’re wondering if they’ve fooled the D.A. and half the country into believing awful things about Jackson.


    Why can’t they remember dates? Why can’t they explain why they said one thing before and are saying another thing now? What should you make of their admissions that they’ve lied to juries during a previous case? Are they trying to scam Jackson?


    Lyon explains that inconsistencies are standard in child abuse cases. “The media is acting surprised at how terrible the children are doing on the stand but the kids are performing exactly as predicted,” he says. “They’re showing inconsistencies that any witness would show, and because they’re children, they’re explaining their inconsistencies more poorly, which is normal.” Watching this case might give the public “a better appreciation for how hard it is for prosecutors to go after these guys,” Lyon says. “It raises public awareness for how difficult it is to prove child molestation.”


    He notes that if the defense is successful in convincing the public and the jury that the kids are lying, there’s a danger that people may become more skeptical of child accusers in general. That’s especially because most incidents of child abuse are more difficult to prove than the ones alleged in this case, Lyon says. “It’s true that in most cases you don’t have the money motive,” he says, referring to Jackson’s defense team’s theory that the family accusing the entertainer only wants money from him. “Yet in most normal child abuse cases you don’t have this much evidence. You don’t have an eyewitness. You don’t have possible previous victims. You don’t have the alleged molester acknowledging on tape that he sleeps with boys in his bed.” If people don’t believe the accusers in this case, they may not believe the accusers in most other cases, either.


    Because Jackson is a wealthy superstar, there are certainly some major differences between this case and most child molestation cases. The prosecution alleges that Jackson used his stardom and wealth to lure Gavin into his trap; the defense, meanwhile, says that Jackson is being set up by Gavin’s family specifically because he is wealthy. As such, says Robert Weisberg, a criminal law professor at Stanford, the Jackson case may be seen as “not just a trial of one of the most famous people on earth,” but it “may truly be a trial about the phenomenon of celebrity.”


    In a sense, each side is asking the jury to weigh the power of Jackson’s stardom, and to decide which side — Jackson’s side, or the boy’s family’s side — was more willing to trade on that celebrity for gain. Because molestation cases are difficult to prove, Jackson may not be convicted of actually touching Gavin inappropriately, Weisberg says. But Jackson may be found guilty with lesser crimes having to do with his inappropriate behavior, such as giving the boys alcohol or porn. In such a scenario, Jackson’s crime would fall into a kind of gray area, and he would really be convicted for “perverting or exploiting his celebrity,” Weisberg says. “It wouldn’t be that he raped children. The crimes would be somewhat more inchoate and amorphous. It would have to do with the fact that he wields extraordinary power over people, and he would be found guilty of abusing that power.”


    While there may be a great deal at stake in this case, it’s not clear the version we are watching on TV is conveying what’s important. Indeed, when you look at how the Jackson case plays on TV, it’s not unusual to think back on the time of O.J. Simpson with no small bit of nostalgia.


    It’s true that you may have considered it inconsequential at the time, but that case, on reflection, can be called significant. The O.J. Simpson trial laid bare the deep racial divisions in our society. Through it, we learned of the pervasiveness of police misconduct, about jury nullification, the limitations of DNA evidence, deficiencies in domestic violence law, and the perils of televising court cases. The case inspired some positive changes in the law, but it also shook our faith in the courts.


    “It was a disaster for the American perception of criminal justice,” says Weisberg. “It fed into all the Archie Bunker myths of how the criminal justice system works — that money enables you to win false acquittals, that everybody lies, and that people get away literally with murder.”


    Still, coverage of the Simpson case largely stuck to the facts in the courtroom. Today, the coverage of cases like Jackson’s offer opinion over fact, constant shouting, as the New Republic’s Jason Zengerle recently pointed out in a fine dissection of the disaster that is TV coverage of courtroom news.


    These days, “viewers can watch legal pundits yell at one another as they debate guilt and innocence, life and death, on any number of programs,” Zengerle writes. Mark Geragos, who defended Scott Peterson and initially represented Jackson as well, tells Zengerle that “Court TV has taken what’s happened in the political arena with Fox News and extended that to the legal arena … It’s the Fox-ification of the legal arena. And it’s a significant problem.”


    With the Jackson case, coverage has slipped even more, making it now nearly impossible to determine anything important about the case from a nightly cable show.


    During the Simpson case, “you could have analysts like myself sit up and talk and discourse on race, on domestic abuse, the issues of interracial marriage,” says Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a cultural commentator who wrote a book on the trial and often appeared on CNN during that case. “It was almost an educational forum.”


    Hutchinson still frequently goes on TV to discuss legal cases — I spoke to him just after he’d done Bill O’Reilly — but he says that the whole experience is dumbed down these days, especially when it comes to Jackson. “Do you hear any of the very similar issues routinely raised in the media? Are there child-abuse experts, criminal justice experts on these talk shows? They can easily do the same thing they did with O.J. But the decision was made to treat this as a celebrity peep show. It’s titillation driven, not information driven.”


    In addition to talking about child molestation, Hutchinson says that he would like to discuss the differences in the racial dynamics between this case and O.J. Simpson’s. However, given Jackson’s odd racial status, observers on race and law have to admit they’re perplexed.


    Christopher Bracey, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who is an expert on how racial questions affect the law, remembers that Simpson had an ambiguous racial status at the time of his trial; he’d married outside his race and was considered at the very least not quite concerned about African-Americans. But blacks embraced him during his case. Now, “with Jackson, it’s like O.J. multiplied by 10,” Bracey says. “He’s in racial and cultural exile.”


    Still, Bracey says he found it interesting that “when the initial allegations were raised, the Nation of Islam came to his side. It’s very interesting how people make a move to their perceived power base, and how Jackson’s perceived power base was African-Americans.”


    Early in March, before many of the most important witnesses had taken the stand, the Gallup Organization ran a survey of Americans’ attitudes toward Jackson. It found that 75 percent of whites believe the charges against Jackson are true, compared with only 51 percent of blacks.


    But both Bracey and Hutchinson suggest that such disparities won’t persist after the verdict is handed down. If Jackson is found guilty, blacks aren’t going to rally around him, as they did around O.J. Simpson. That’s simply because many African-Americans sensed that what they believed happened to Simpson — that he was framed by corrupt cops — could realistically happen to any one of them. What’s happening to Jackson doesn’t carry the same sense of victimization.


    “There’s been a decade of suspicions about him,” Hutchinson says. “We know about the settlement. We know he’s had these young boys in his bed — the suspicions are so deep, the feeling is this guy is tainted. And so blacks will say, ‘Why would we want to rally around a child molester?’”


    Significantly, the judge in the case has run a tight ship, treating Jackson as fairly as any other defendant. Here’s Michael Jackson, one of the most famous, most wealthy people in the world, getting a fair trial and being treated like everyone else, a lesson at odds with what happened to Simpson. “Ever since O.J. Simpson, when rich people go on trial, I think the public wonders if the same standard will be applied to them,” says Jim Hammer, a former San Francisco prosecutor and frequent legal analyst for Fox News. “I think so far, here, the same standard has been applied — and that sends an important message. In that courtroom you’re like any other American.”


    And really, Hammer says, “I think the fact that there is a trial at all is a victory for the system. In 1993, he subverted justice. It’s outrageous that you can buy off a victim with $20 million. Working folks can’t do that. It’s crazy that in a serious crime like child molestation, all that kept you out of jail was $20 million. So who knows — maybe these are false allegations, maybe they’re true. I don’t know. But there is some victory in forcing the rich guy to stand trial like everyone else.”


    Any day now, Jackson’s lawyers will rise to his defense.



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    About the writer
    Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer.

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