A botanical jihad?

Afghan Poppycock
Hamid Karzai’s halfhearted jihad.
By David Bosco
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005, at 4:16 AM PT

There’s all sorts of good news coming out of the Afghan drug war. Hamid Karzai recently announced that opium cultivation might be down as much as 30 percent this year. In April, the United States nabbed alleged Afghan drug lord Haji Bashir Noorzai. U.S. and European money are helping Karzai’s government build special drug courts and train paramilitary interdiction teams. One might almost be convinced that Afghanistan—site of an ongoing political renaissance—has pulled off another miracle.

Don’t believe it. The truth is that the war against opium in Afghanistan is stumbling badly. A bureaucratic struggle on counternarcotics strategy inside the U.S. government produced an unhappy compromise. For its part, the fragile Afghan government is too timid to do serious crop eradication. There may be a drop in opium production this year, but it will be due primarily to recent flooding and to the huge stockpiles from last year’s bumper crop.

The campaign is certainly not foundering for lack of passionate rhetoric. A few days after his election victory was assured last December, Karzai delivered a table-thumping speech to a collection of Afghan tribal elders. Afghanistan’s booming opium trade, he said, was an affront to Islam. “Just as our people fought a holy war against the Soviets, so we will wage jihad against poppies.”

The poppies may turn out to be the more stubborn foe. Afghanistan now produces more than 80 percent of the world’s opium. In 2004, poppy cultivation reached an all-time high, and the drug economy now accounts for between a third and half of the country’s economic output. A World Bank study estimates that opium cultivation can generate at least 12 times as much income as wheat, the main alternative crop. Because drug money flows to regional warlords and other malcontents, it threatens to derail an otherwise remarkably successful nation-building effort. (Last month, several more Taliban big fish accepted the government’s amnesty offer and another batch of refugees returned from Pakistan, cheered on by Angelina Jolie.)

Karzai faces a torturous choice in trying to kick his country’s habit. If he attacks the trade too aggressively, he could cripple the country’s economy and generate a nasty political backlash. Aerial spraying is particularly touchy, since many Afghans still remember napalm runs by Soviet aircraft as they tried to crush the mujahideen. Rumors—unfounded, it appears—that spraying was under way forced Karzai to issue a flurry of denials and call in foreign diplomats for stern conversations. The United States is sensitive to Karzai’s political limits, and outgoing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad helped deflect pressure for a massive eradication campaign. Karzai, the administration realizes, would be a terrible thing to waste.

But if Karzai moves too slowly, the drug trade may infect his country’s fragile institutions and fill the coffers of violent opponents including, possibly, al-Qaida (the intelligence on where drug money ends up is spotty at best). According to former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Bobby Charles, “One of the fastest ways you could design to cripple a young democracy is to allow the influx of substantial drug money.”

In Washington, the opium dilemma has become a tussle between the State Department and the Defense Department. Curiously, the hawks on this issue are at State. Charles and his colleagues argued for large-scale aerial eradication and the involvement of U.S. and coalition military forces in interdiction. “The success we’ve had in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia,” he says, “has always involved the military.”

The prospect of a militarized drug war makes the brass nervous. The Defense Department is keen to keep its footprint light and is wary of a drug war that could set the population against U.S. troops (last week’s Newsweek-inspired anti-American riots will only deepen that fear). The Afghans, after all, have a history of kicking out technologically superior foreign soldiers. So the military has kept drugs on the back burner. Instead of getting its troops directly into the interdiction business, Washington is sending a few teams of DEA agents who will fly around the country in leased helicopters.

The generals aren’t alone in resisting a full-on drug war. The idea is anathema to many regional experts, who believe that attacking Afghanistan’s economic base without first establishing an alternative is political suicide. Barnett Rubin, an irascible NYU Afghan expert, has no patience for the drug warriors. “There’s absolutely nothing to lead one to believe that you can abolish 40 percent of the economy without major implications.” He argues for a slow, sequenced approach that begins by creating alternatives for Afghan farmers. Crop eradication, in his view, comes at the end—not the beginning.

That argument has had an effect, and U.S. policy has downshifted. Afghan officials, aided by U.S. contractors, are manually destroying some poppy fields, although it won’t be many. Funds earmarked for massive eradication are being directed instead to supporting alternative livelihoods. (Rubin calls these funds a “a drop in the bucket.”) For now, the Afghan drug war is a patchwork of sporadic manual eradication efforts, occasional clashes with traffickers, and a trickle of money to Afghan farmers for alternative crops.

It’s a dangerous game for Karzai. Having called for jihad, his credibility is on the line. In deference to the president’s exhortations, some Afghan farmers may have decided not to plant poppies this year. They’ll be expecting assistance in return. If they don’t get it, they may take out their frustration in this fall’s parliamentary elections—or less constructively. Meanwhile, Karzai and his new security forces are poking at the country’s nest of traffickers and drug labs without knocking them out. For the time being, Karzai and his Western backers have no choice but to hope they can continue cultivating a new democracy in a bed of poppies.

David Bosco is senior editor at Foreign Policy. He filed dispatches from Afghanistan last summer

May 26, 1891 Edith Wharton   (1862 – 1937) Edith Wharton and “Mrs. Manstey” by Steve King

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On this day in 1891, Edith Wharton’s first published story, “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” was accepted by Scribner’s Magazine. Wharton was twenty-nine years old, brought up in wealth and high society, and recently married to a prominent banker; she was as opposite to her destitute heroine as she was to being a struggling young writer, and her first story throws the write-about-what-you-know rule out the window.

A view from the back window of her New York rooming-house is all that Mrs. Manstey has. It does not offer much, but she has grown to treasure it:

Mrs. Manstey, in the long hours which she spent at her window, was not idle. She read a little, and knitted numberless stockings; but the view surrounded and shaped her life as the sea does a lonely island. When her rare callers came it was difficult for her to detach herself from the contemplation of the opposite window-washing, or the scrutiny of certain green points in a neighboring flower-bed which might, or might not, turn into hyacinths, while she feigned an interest in her visitor’s anecdotes about some unknown grandchild. Mrs. Manstey’s real friends were the denizens of the yards, the hyacinths, the magnolia, the green parrot, the maid who fed the cats, the doctor who studied late behind his mustard-colored curtains; and the confidant of her tenderer musings was the church-spire floating in the sunset.

When a neighbor plans to build an addition and ruin Mrs. Manstey’s view, she attempts to dissuade them, first through a polite appeal and then through arson.

“We cannot often use a sketch as slight as that which you have kindly sent us…,” wrote the cautioning editor of Scribner’s, but these would become the familiar Wharton topics – money and society, home and garden –- in The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and three-dozen other books over a half-century career. Within a decade she would begin planning “The Mount,” her spectacular home in Lenox, Massachusetts. Henry James described it during his first visit in 1904 as “a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” Probably not a place where Mrs. Manstey could feel comfortable, though she would agree with Wharton’s imperative for the “inner house”: “Make one’s centre of life inside oneself, not selfishly or excludingly but with a kind of unassailable serenity –- to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same in the hours when one is inevitably alone.”

Wharton would eventually leave husband and home to live alone in a real French chateau, with a better view of the Paris that she loved: “the tranquil majesty of the architectural lines, the wonderful blurred winter lights, the long lines of lamps garlanding the quays–je l’ai dans mon sang [it is in my blood!].”

The estate and gardens of “The Mount” have recently been restored, and are open to the public. The bookshop there sells a birdhouse which has a roof made to look as if the cover of The House of Mirth, the sides made of pages of text, the front perch a fountain pen. Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses, was done with architect Ogden Codman and is regarded as a classic in the field. Codman did only limited work on “The Mount” and in his view it was in many ways a failure: “The Whartons know just enough to be very unhappy but not enough to get anything done right, they have always supposed they knew all they knew and all I knew too. Now they realize they don’t.”

- SK

Robert Grossman

May 22, 2005
The Legacy Project
By JEFF SHESOL

Just about one year ago, as millions of television viewers watched the sun set in Simi Valley, Calif. — the terminus of Ronald Reagan’s cross-country funeral procession — the late president’s advance men called an end to Operation Serenade, their code name for this national farewell. In a manner that recalled Reagan’s time in the White House, every move had been carefully choreographed. This was no ordinary funeral. ”This,” as one former advance man said, ”is a legacy-building event.”

That work goes on, with Reagan’s acolytes still building and burnishing. The Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by the conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist, seeks to name something — a stadium, a stretch of turnpike, anything — after Reagan in every state in the union.

The chain bookstores, for their part, now feature a virtual Reagan wing, their shelves stuffed full of character studies, coffee-table confections, speech anthologies, hagiographies and mash notes. Beyond a basic hunger for heroes, this great cascade of Reagan lit reflects a mounting effort to retool the Reagan narrative.

What could be wrong with the old story line? Few modern presidents could boast a better one: Reagan, it is said, was a great communicator, made America proud again, ended the cold war. ”All in all, not bad,” as Reagan said in his farewell address. ”Not bad at all.”

No, not bad. But for some, still not good enough. ”Great communicator” sticks in their throats. They detect condescension in the term, a backhandedness, as when one politician calls another a ”great politician.”

A communicator, however great he may be, is not necessarily a thinker. And so a growing number of conservatives are at work on a correction. They do not deny Reagan’s persuasiveness, but argue that it was indicative of, and secondary to, a powerful intellect.

The revised story line runs something like this:

Leftish elites, the news media and disgruntled former aides dismissed Reagan as an ”amiable dunce” (in a well-known epithet of the 1980′s). But recently released documents show the clarity, originality and depth of his thinking. Reagan, by this telling, was not simply his party’s pitchman, he was its idea man: the Jefferson of modern conservatism, writing its founding documents by hand.

Reagan’s intellectual stock has indeed been climbing since the publication, in 2001, of ”Reagan, in His Own Hand,” a collection of handwritten radio scripts from the mid-to-late 1970′s, when Reagan, mostly unaided by speechwriters, tested his arguments on a national audience.

The impressive assortment of subjects in these audio essays (from Namibia to the United States Postal Service to Lee Harvey Oswald), along with their detail, wit and remarkable concision, has, in the view of the biographer Lou Cannon, made ”mincemeat of the idea that Reagan was a dunce, amiable or otherwise.”

”In His Own Hand” was just an opening salvo. Its editors have issued two follow-up books: first, a compendium of letters (”Reagan: A Life in Letters”), and second, another batch of radio scripts (”Reagan’s Path to Victory”).

The basic contention of these volumes — that Ronald Reagan was brighter than most believed — is being amplified by a new group of revisionist historians. In ”Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons,” Paul Lettow deems it ”demonstrably incorrect to argue that Reagan did not, or could not, think for himself, or that he was a mere cipher through which his advisers enacted their own agendas.” Lettow portrays the president as a shrewd, hands-on manager, a principal architect of key policies like the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Another recent book, ”Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All,” by Craig Shirley, takes a similar view. Shirley, a Republican political consultant, recounts Reagan’s effort to unseat President Gerald Ford in 1976 — a failed attempt, but a smart and spirited one. An appearance at the National Press Club finds Reagan in top form, a candidate who ”deftly fielded one question after another and bested the Washington media at their own game.” Taken together, these books make a powerful argument that Reagan’s brain looked nothing like the ”bleak, ravaged landscape” that Garry Trudeau envisaged in ”Doonesbury” in the 1980′s.

Still, Reagan’s intellectual rehabilitation can go only so far. It’s true that he displays none of the ostentatious anti-intellectualism so prevalent in his party, from Spiro Agnew to George W. Bush. Yet he shows no great passion for ideas, either, beyond their utility. There is no sense of struggle in his writings, no careful weighing of views, no perceptible self-doubt — none of the typical markers of a searching mind. Reagan does not ruminate so much as proselytize. In a letter from 1977, replying to a woman who has accused him of having a ”closed mind,” Reagan offers charm, statistics and a predictable swipe at ”projects by bureaucrats which will further erode our freedom.”

His brilliance — as Garry Wills observed nearly two decades ago in ”Reagan’s America” — was in his presentation of evidence and his near-perfect pitch. He understood America’s hopes and fears — and played to both. Which makes him less a great intellect than, well, a great communicator.

In any event, was Reagan’s wattage ever really the issue? His critics — and many of his closest advisers — were less concerned about Reagan’s intellectual capacity than about his lack of intellectual engagement in the Oval Office. Shirley is right: Reagan snapped and crackled in the 1970′s. His radio addresses of that period show a sharpness of tongue and focus that seemed to abandon him in the White House, where — as numerous accounts have suggested — he seemed to go a bit fuzzy, tuning out and even falling asleep in meetings. This is the Reagan whose pose at press conferences — head cocked, eyes unfocused, lips pursed in puzzlement — launched a thousand parodies. This is the Reagan whose inattention engendered budget chicanery, vicious staff squalls and Iran-contra. Showing him to be smarter than we thought does not explain this away.

Still, with the impending publication of Reagan’s White House diaries, the legacy-building is likely to intensify — if only because his followers are banking everything on him. In the pantheon of modern presidents, the Democrats claim Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. The Republicans have only Reagan. Neither Ford nor Nixon commands his party’s devotion, and Eisenhower, who resisted McCarthyism, has little to offer the cultural and religious conservatives who dominate the party today.

Reagan has become the Great Touchstone. Yet to be truly useful to his present-day heirs, his record has to be retouched. As president, he cut deals with Democrats; boosted taxes, public spending and the size of government; sought arms reductions with the Soviet Union; and did less than promised to regulate private behavior. Within the Reagan administration, the true believers, more often than not, lost badly at the hands of moderates.

Badly, and bitterly. When the ideologues lashed back at Reagan — which they did frequently — they went not for his jugular but for his frontal lobe. Reagan’s arms control initiatives led Howard Phillips, the chairman of the Conservative Caucus, to call the president ”a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda” and ”little more than the speech reader in chief.” Reagan’s departures from economic orthodoxy prompted accusations of weakness, laziness and outright ignorance. The right, now ascendant, has absolved Reagan of these sins. His legacy, too, is being corrected. His pragmatism is being written out of the picture, replaced by ideological purity. His detachment is shrugged off as a left-wing myth.

Nonbelievers may be tempted to dismiss all this as hero worship, but the legacy-building project is more than that. It is a strenuous act of self-promotion. Reagan’s heirs attribute to him what they wish to see in themselves, or wish others to see in them. His redemption is their redemption. He is, as he must be, everything now — at once the Great Oz and the man behind the curtain.

Jeff Shesol is the author of ”Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade,” and was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.

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Note: Maureen Dowd is on book leave. Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the author of “The 2 Percent Solution,” will be a guest columnist for the next four weeks. He can be reached at mattmiller@nytimes.com.

May 25, 2005
Listen to My Wife
By MATT MILLER

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” wrote George Bernard Shaw. “The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Or maybe on the unreasonable woman. Take my wife.

Jody – and I mean this in a sweet and not a clinical way – has been in a state of perpetual schizophrenia since our daughter was born. She used to run a company, but she loves being a mom. So she’s settled on a string of part-time roles that (in my view, at least) call on a fraction of the skills corporate America spent two decades helping her develop.

Maybe you know a woman (or a few million) like her. It’s hardly news that the issue vexing talented people is the struggle to balance their professional lives with time for fulfilling lives outside of work. The shock is that after decades of wrestling with these tradeoffs, the obvious answer is the one everyone has been too skeptical or afraid to explore: changing the way top jobs are structured.

In a world where most people are struggling, the search for “balance” in high-powered jobs has to be counted a luxury. Still, there is something telling (if not downright dysfunctional) when a society’s most talented people feel they have to sacrifice the meaningful relationships every human craves as the price of exercising their talent.

Nowhere is there a greater gulf between the frustration people feel over a dilemma central to their lives and their equally powerful sense that there’s nothing to be done. As a result, talented people throw up their hands. Women are “opting out” after deciding that professional success isn’t worth the price. Ambitious folks of both sexes “do what they have to,” sure there is no other way. That’s just life.

My unreasonable wife rejects this choice. If the most interesting and powerful jobs are too consuming, Jody says, then why don’t we re-engineer these jobs – and the firms and the culture that sustain them – to make possible the blend of love and work that everyone knows is the true gauge of “success”? As scholars have asked, why should we be the only elites in human history that don’t set things up to get what we want?

When your wife declaims like this daily for a decade, the effect can be surprising. For years I listened politely but inadequately, to judge from Jody’s grumbling. Now, thanks to her persistence and my exhaustion, I’ve discovered I’m a feminist (“humanist,” Jody corrects). They say spouses come to look like each other; maybe their convictions do, too. In any event, now that I’ve internalized this, I can help other men avoid my agonizing learning curve.

Here’s the deal: this isn’t a “women’s” problem; it’s a human problem. Yet for 30 years women have tried to crack this largely on their own, and one thing is clear: if the fight isn’t joined by men (like me) who want a life, too, any solutions become “women’s” solutions. A broader drive to redesign work will take a union-style consciousness that makes it safe for men who secretly want balance to say so.

Today talented people live in fear of sounding anything less than 24/7. Tell your boss you have to deal with a drinking problem and you’ll be fine; say you want more time with your family and you’re on the endangered species list. As a result, my wife says, we’re being led by a class of people who made choices (because there was no alternative) that are alien to what most of us want.

Some call this “whining.” Others like working 24/7. Still others assert that you can never change the nature of work near the top. But our corporate experience persuades us that change is inevitable. In a globalizing world, many senior jobs are already impossibly big. If they need to be restructured anyway (we’re working on how), why not do so in ways that give folks the option to have a life? Skeptics should recall that everyone once “knew” that a weekend or a minimum wage would spell economic ruin, too.

The first step in any tough transformation is what A.A. famously teaches: admit that we’re powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable. It’s time workaholic males took up this cause, because top jobs will never change unless we do. Jody even has an incentive plan.

In Aristophanes’ play “Lysistrata,” the women withhold their charms until the men agree to stop making war. Jody thinks that’s a promising model. Talk about unreasonable.

E-mail: mattmiller@nytimes.com; Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Maureen Dowd is on book leave.

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Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

President Bush made his opposition to the stem cell bill known yesterday at the White House, showing off month-old Trey Jones, who was born as a result of one couple’s donation of frozen embryos to another.

May 25, 2005
House Approves a Stem Cell Research Bill Opposed by Bush
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, May 24 – The House passed a bill on Tuesday to expand federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, defying a veto threat from President Bush, who appeared at the White House with babies and toddlers born of test-tube embryos and warned the measure “would take us across a critical ethical line.”

The vote, 238 to 194 with 50 Republicans in favor, fell far short of the two-thirds majority required to overturn a presidential veto, setting up a possible showdown between Congress and Mr. Bush, who has never exercised his veto power. An identical bill has broad bipartisan support in the Senate; moments after the House vote, the Senate sponsors wrote to the Republican leader, Bill Frist, urging him to put it on the agenda.

The House action is the first vote on embryonic stem cell research since August 2001, when Mr. Bush opened the door to taxpayer financing for the studies, but only with strict limits. The new bill permits the government to pay for studies involving human embryos that are in frozen storage at fertility clinics, so long as couples conceiving the embryos certified that they had made a decision to discard them.

“The White House cannot ignore this vote,” said the bill’s chief Republican backer, Representative Michael N. Castle of Delaware, adding, “I’m elated.”

But opponents also said they were elated. Representative Joseph R. Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, said: “I hate to lose, but I feel pretty good about this vote. We beat a veto-proof margin by 50 votes.”

The big question now is what will happen in the Senate. Dr. Frist, a heart surgeon from Tennessee who supports the existing policy, is already facing intense pressure from conservatives over the issue of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees and does not seem eager to schedule a vote on stem cell research. He said last week that he wanted to check with his colleagues before doing so.

The House vote followed an impassioned lobbying campaign by advocates for patients, including Nancy Reagan. Mrs. Reagan, who became a strong backer of stem cell research as her husband struggled with Alzheimer’s disease, telephoned fellow Republicans this week urging a yes vote, Mr. Castle said.

But Mr. Bush countered with a powerful one-two punch, throwing the full weight of the White House behind the opposition. On Friday, he issued a rare threat to veto the Castle bill. On Tuesday, just hours before the vote, he appeared in the East Room of the White House with families created by a rare but growing practice in which one couple donates its frozen embryos to another.

“The children here today remind us that there is no such thing as a spare embryo,” Mr. Bush said, amid the squeals and coos of babies cradled in their mothers’ arms. “Every embryo is unique and genetically complete, like every other human being. And each of us started out our life this way. These lives are not raw material to be exploited, but gifts.”

The parents, who worked through a Christian adoption agency, applauded enthusiastically. When Mr. Bush said that “every human life is a precious gift of matchless love,” a mother behind him on stage mouthed the word “Amen.”

The White House event, on what conservative Christians and the president call an important “culture of life” issue, demonstrated just how far Mr. Bush is willing to assert himself on policy that goes to what he considers the moral heart of his presidency. In another sign of how important the issue is to conservatives, the House Republican leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, managed the opposition to the bill, also casting it in stark moral terms.

“An embryo is a person, a distinct internally directed, self-integrating human organism,” Mr. DeLay said, adding, “We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth.”

He went on: “The choice to protect a human embryo from federally funded destruction is not, ultimately, about the human embryo. It is about us, and our rejection of the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others.”

Human embryonic stem cells, isolated from human embryos for the first time in 1998, have the potential to grow into any cell or tissue in the body, and so hold great promise for treatment of disease. But the embryos are destroyed when the cells are extracted. So Mr. Bush, intending to discourage further embryo destruction, insisted in 2001 that federal financing be limited to studies of those stem cell colonies, or lines, that had already been created.

Instead, Mr. Bush is promoting research on adult stem cells, which are drawn from bone marrow and blood, including umbilical cord blood, and have narrower implications for medicine than embryonic stem cells. On Tuesday, the House voted 431 to 1 to approve a measure that would create umbilical cord blood banks to advance adult stem cell research.

But it was the embryonic stem cell debate that inflamed the passions of the House, sounding at various times like a lesson in cell biology, a theological discourse and a personal confessional. Lawmaker after lawmaker came to the House well to recount struggles with conscience and searing personal experiences with death and disease.

Representative Jim Langevin, Democrat of Rhode Island, rolled to the microphone in his motorized wheelchair to speak of his spinal cord injury, which he said could be helped by the research. Representative Jo Ann Emerson, Republican of Missouri, told of a young man named Cody, who had been paralyzed in a car accident at age 16 and asked her to rethink her opposition to embryonic stem cell studies.

“I later wrote a note to Cody’s family telling them that even after hearing his story, I couldn’t do as he asked,” Ms. Emerson said, “and I have regretted writing that letter ever since.”

But for every supporter with a compelling personal tale, there was an opponent like Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, whose brother has Parkinson’s disease. “I’ve learned a lot of things from my brother,” Mr. Lungren said, “But one of the things I learned most is that there is a difference between right and wrong.”

The backers of the Senate measure, Senators Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, have scheduled a news conference for Wednesday to demand quick action. “I don’t understand why Mr. Bush is doing this,” Mr. Harkin said, adding, “I wish he would refrain from drawing lines in the sand.”

Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting for this article.

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Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
Francine du Plessix Gray’s glamorous, forgetful parents.
By Katie Roiphe
Posted Monday, May 23, 2005, at 1:29 PM PT

If there is anything we are fonder of than stories of obscure figures climbing to great heights of glamour, it is stories of the unhappiness behind that glamour. This is precisely the story Francine du Plessix Gray sets out to tell in her absorbing new memoir, Them. Gray’s mother, Tatiana, was a statuesque blonde who arrived in Paris in the ’20s and immediately conquered the thriving community of White Russian émigrés. She began an affair with the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and then married a minor French aristocrat, Bertrand du Plessix, who died in the resistance during the Second World War. Tatiana then fled with her paramour, Alexander Lieberman, to New York, where she became the legendary hat designer, “Tatiana of Saks,” and he became the art director, and eventually editorial director, of Condé Nast, pioneering the new aesthetic of Vogue, discovering promising young photographers like Irving Penn, and earning a reputation as an artist in his own right. Within a few years, the Liebermans were moving in rarefied circles, socializing with Salvador Dalí, Clement Greenberg, Christian Dior, and Marlene Dietrich. In their brownstone on the Upper East Side, they brought together highbrow artists and fashion people, creating a brand new nexus of style through sheer, European charisma, a definite idea of taste that ranged from paintings to hats.

Not everyone, however, found the Liebermans glamorous. Philip Roth commented that the couple’s sleek white modern living room, which was splashed across the cover of House & Garden, reminded him “of an operating room in Mt. Sinai Hospital.” With this, he captured something impersonal and uninviting about glamour itself. Glamour is all about the shining, immaculate surface: It repels insight. And Gray’s book is fundamentally unsatisfying because it cannot get beneath her parents’ impressive surface.

The grown-up children of famously glamorous parents become both fervent witnesses and fervent admirers—both the most intimate victims of their parents’ mythology and its most tortured critics. If the world is so impressed with one’s parents, how can a child not be? Them has the dazed quality of someone who has woken up from a dream, a quality it shares with other memoirs by children of famous, artistic people, like Angelica Bell’s account of growing up in Bloomsbury, Deceived With Kindness. Gray cannot seem to decide: Were her parents thrilling or narcissistic? Did she have an unusually charmed childhood or a sad one?

The underside of the Leibermans’ glamour was their extreme selfishness. When they arrived in New York in 1941, after fleeing Vichy France via Lisbon, they sent the 11-year-old Francine away to live on various friends’ and relatives’ couches. The young Francine felt so insecure in her new life that she cultivated a “twinkling surface gaiety” and learned how to make charming dinner conversation. When the family finally moved into an apartment in the East Seventies, they forgot to feed Francine breakfast or supervise her dinner until she fainted several times at her Upper East Side school, Spence, from malnutrition.

But Gray nonetheless remains enraptured of her parents’ glamour. Her mother is fragrant. Their house is exquisite. Their parties legendary. Their presence unspeakably charismatic. She writes that Alex had “exceptionally well groomed hair,” and was “suave, urbane,” and she writes about the “the majesty” of Tatiana’s presence, and how she looked “like a page out of Vogue.” But surely if you live with someone, that glamour is complicated and dulled. Glamour involves illusion: It is the made-up face, the carefully photographed interior. It is not life as it is lived.

Most memoirs are fueled by intimacy, by the writer’s uncomfortable proximity to her subject matter, but Them is more a product of elegant reserve. One feels at times that Gray is writing about fascinating acquaintances. She seems to know very little about them, and it is not hard to see why: This was a family in which any form of direct communication was reviled. When Alex wants to suggest to Tatiana that they have another child, he has to get a friend to approach her on his behalf. Tatiana eventually enlists two of her own friends to tell the 11-year-old Francine that her real father was killed in the French resistance a year earlier. Gray reports that whenever Alex tried to talk to Tatiana about anything remotely personal, she would say, “So you want to have another of your Jewish conversations?”

Gray explains that she wants to be a “proper biographer.” And in some way the saddest thing about this book is the remoteness the biographer feels from her subjects: the bewilderment, the diligent, almost academic piecing together of her own past. She interviews innumerable friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. She visits archives and analyzes letters. She is trying, through the biographer’s craft, to accumulate some understanding of people she should already have known: still very much the child of a family that is not an “us” but a “them.”

Toward the end of the Liebermans’ lives the glamour recedes into seediness. When Tatiana leaves “Tatiana of Saks” and becomes addicted to Demerol, Alex is unable to intervene. Later, after Tatiana dies, when Alex is slowly pushed out of Condé Nast, he marries Tatiana’s nurse and begins, according to Anna Wintour, to see mostly “garage mechanics.” In adulthood, Gray goes on to build a more grounded, reclusive life; she moves to the country with a solid painter and forges more fulsome relationships with her sons, and yet her acknowledgements page reads like the guest list from one of her parents’ fabled Christmas parties: Richard Avedon, Tina Brown, Diane von Furstenberg. And this raises the central question of the book: Does the Liebermans’ daughter who runs off with a “country gentleman,” want to think critically about their glamour, or does she want to celebrate and reproduce it?

Memoirs of extreme wealth or glamour can be interesting in their foreignness: Take Katherine Graham’s admission that when she got to college she didn’t know that one had to wash one’s clothes because it had always been done for her. Likewise, Gray’s explanation that Marlene Dietrich had to explain menstruation to her is piquant in its exoticism. And yet some of what we come to expect in the memoir, the heat, the sharpness, the felt experience, is missing in Gray’s monumental tome. The best memoirs are made vivid with revenge or anger or pain. The sheer narcissism of the investigation, the insistent demand for attention, gives urgency to ordinary memories. In Them Gray does achieve the biographer’s balance she was striving for, but her admirable fairness is somehow a detriment to the book’s interest. One wishes, in the end, for less understanding and more insight, more distilled emotion. One wishes, after 544 pages, for less Tatiana and Alexander, and more Francine.

Katie Roiphe is the author of Still She Haunts Me.

Marvi Lacar for The New York Times

Rich Cohen, 36, out with Scout and an audio book

May 26, 2005
Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading!
By AMY HARMON

JIM HARRIS, a lifelong bookworm, cracked the covers of only four books last year. But he listened to 54, all unabridged. He listened to Harry Potter and “Moby-Dick,” Don DeLillo and Stephen King. He listened in the car, eating lunch, doing the dishes, sitting in doctors’ offices and climbing the stairs at work.

“I haven’t read this much since I was in college,” said Mr. Harris, 53, a computer programmer in Memphis. And yes, he does consider it “reading.” “I dislike it when I meet people who feel listening is inferior,” he said.

Fortunately for Mr. Harris, the ranks of the reading purists are dwindling. Fewer Americans are reading books than a decade ago, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, but almost a third more are listening to them on tapes, CD’s and iPods.

For a growing group of devoted listeners, the popularity of audio books is redefining the notion of reading, which for centuries has been centered on the written word. Traditionally, it is also an activity that has required one’s full attention.

But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else. Digital audio that can be zapped onto an MP3 player is also luring converts. The smallest iPod, the Shuffle, holds roughly four books; the newest ones include a setting that speeds up the narration without raising the pitch.

“I wish I had had this feature while listening to ‘Crime and Punishment,’ ” said Lee Kyle, 41, a math teacher in Austin, Tex., who now listens in bed instead of reading. It’s more relaxing, he said, and he doesn’t have to bother his wife with the light.

Audio books, which still represent only about 3 percent of all books sold, do not exactly herald a return to the Homeric tradition. But their growing popularity has sparked debate among readers, writers and cultural critics about the best way to consume literature.

“I think every writer would rather have people read books, committed as we are to the word,” said Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, “Angela’s Ashes.” “But I’d rather have them listen to it than not at all.”

To make the audio version of his books more tolerable, Mr. McCourt said, he insists on narrating them himself. “Actors are always doing this phony breathing,” Mr. McCourt said.

Among the questions facing audio book connoisseurs are: Which is better suited to the format, fiction or nonfiction? Can a bad narrator ruin a great book? If you’ve listened to a book, have you really “read” it?

Rich Cohen, the author of “Tough Jews,” has found short stories are best while walking his dog on the Upper West Side, because of the likelihood of distraction, and the difficulty in rewinding.

“Sometimes your dog will attack another dog, and you’re pulled completely out of the book,” explained Mr. Cohen, who has experimented with various genres since discovering he could purchase audio books from Apple’s online music store.

A book about string theory by the physicist Brian Greene proved entirely unable to hold Mr. Cohen’s auditory attention, as did “Hamlet.” With “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” however, he had the multitasking satisfaction of digesting a book he had always been curious about but did not want to devote the time to actually reading.

David Lipsky, another New York writer and frequent dog walker, said he often “shuffles” music on his iPod, and has similarly come to enjoy jumping among chapters of, say, James Joyce, Martin Amis and Al Franken as he circles the block.

Charlton Heston reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” proved a dud, even if it was sandwiched between Jeremy Irons reading “Lolita” and Robert Frost reading his own poems. “You keep waiting for him to announce that Kilimanjaro’s been taken over by damned dirty talking apes,” Mr. Lipsky said. “Now it’s hard to read ‘Kilimanjaro’ without hearing Heston’s voice.”

The novelist Sue Miller said she prefers Henry James on tape because the narrator has untangled the complex sentences for her. But she found D. H. Lawrence unbearable. His notoriously repetitive prose “doesn’t lend itself to an auditory experience,” she said.

Some critics are dismayed at the migration to audio books. The virtue of reading, they say, lies in the communion between writer and reader, the ability to pause, to reread a sentence, and yes, read it out loud – to yourself. Listeners are opting for convenience, they say, at the expense of engaging the mind and imagination as only real reading can.

“Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.”

The comedian Jon Stewart, an author of the mock history textbook “America (The Book),” opens the audio version by lampooning the format. “Welcome, nonreader,” he intones. Listeners are advised that the listening experience “should not be considered a replacement for watching television.”

Audio book aficionados face disdain from some book lovers, who tend to rhapsodize about the smell and feel of a book in their hands and the pleasure of being immersed in a story without having to worry about the car in the next lane.

Gloria Reiss, 51, of St. Louis, said her officemates correct her when she mentions having read a book.

“They’ll say, ‘You didn’t read it, you just listened to it,’ ” said Ms. Reiss, who switched to audio when her two jobs and three poodles made it hard to find time to curl up on the couch. Recently a colleague refused her urging to take a Stephanie Plum mystery along on a long drive.

“She goes, ‘I like to read my books,’ ” Ms. Reiss said, “like that makes her better than me.”

Most audio book lovers argue that one is not better than the other. Some say it was not until they started listening to books that they realized how much of the language they were skimming over in the books they read on paper. And then there is the sheer pleasure of being read to.

Ms. Reiss’s husband, Ken, says he remembers more of books that he hears, perhaps because he’s simply wired that way. Levi Wallach, 36, of Vienna, Va., says he’s a slow reader, “so it’s much more efficient for me to listen while I do other things.”

Libraries say the growth in circulation of audio books is outpacing overall circulation. Book clubs are increasingly made up of hybrid listener-readers, and the market for children’s audio books is booming. Sales at Audible, the leading provider of digital audio books, surged from $5 million in 2001 to $34 million last year. Half of its subscribers are new to audio books.

Still, a certain stigma lingers. Dan Barber, a chef, said he felt compelled to ask Louis Menand’s permission to listen to his book, “The Metaphysical Club,” on CD when Mr. Menand dined at his Greenwich Village restaurant, Blue Hill, last month.

Mr. Menand assented, but his dining companion, Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, looked put off, Mr. Barber said. Or maybe Mr. Barber was projecting his own ambivalence about audio, as evidenced by his consumption of Mr. Gopnik’s anthology, “Paris to the Moon.”

“I read parts of it on tape,” Mr. Barber said. “But I also read the whole book – what do you call it? Traditional-style?”

John Hamburg, 34, notes that audio books can be shared in a way that printed ones cannot. Mr. Hamburg and Mr. Barber, high school friends, were both sobbing while listening to “Tuesdays With Morrie” during a drive, Mr. Hamburg said.

Listening to authors read their own memoirs introduces an intimacy that cannot be achieved without the audio, Mr. Hamburg said. He found Bill Clinton’s thick autobiography a bit daunting, for instance, but said listening to it “was kind of like being with an old friend.”

Mr. Hamburg, a screenwriter, says he limits his audio habit to biography, eschewing fiction out of respect for authors whom he imagines did not intend for their creative work to be read “when you’re doing 30 minutes on your elliptical trainer.”

But when he came across the audio version of “The Kite Runner” online, it was hard to resist downloading it. The hardcover version of the novel, a coming-of-age story set in Afghanistan, has been sitting unopened on Mr. Hamburg’s night table for weeks. It’s still there.

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Everett Collection

Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen in “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Associated Press

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes in Rome last month

May 22, 2005
I Love You With All My Hype
By MIREYA NAVARRO
LOS ANGELES

THEY smooch and hug as cameras snap. Friends enthusiastically report: “It’s true! They’re smitten!” Their publicists confirm it is the real deal. But when celebrity magazines asked the public to weigh in on the latest high-octane Hollywood pairing – Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, the former star of “Dawson’s Creek” – the cynics crushed the dewy-eyed. “Publicity stunt,” said 62 percent of respondents to a People magazine’s poll. “P.R.,” echoed 65 of 100 people questioned at random by Us Weekly at Rockefeller Center.

Mr. Cruise and Ms. Holmes may very well be head over heels, but they should not be surprised that even the most star-struck fan seems to be having trouble embracing their romance, say chroniclers of Hollywood and others who cover or work in the entertainment industry. Through all the changes that have swept Hollywood over the years, one thing still endures: strategic love.

The coupling of stars to create ballyhoo for a movie, burnish an actor’s image, create a name or distract attention from other relationships may not be as common as when the movie studios tightly controlled stars’ careers through the 1950′s, some publicists and film industry experts assert. But it is still the easiest way to grab flattering publicity.

And when it comes to celebrity news, it hardly gets any bigger than a love connection involving a superstar like Mr. Cruise. After appearing together in public for the first time late last month, cuddling and smooching at a film awards ceremony in Italy, the instant couple – they had met only weeks earlier – made the covers of the Big Three: Us Weekly, Star and People. The articles mentioned that each had a film coming out shortly: “The War of the Worlds” for Mr. Cruise and “Batman Begins” for Ms. Holmes.

That coincidence, along with the flood of details about the liaison that emerged in the celebrity magazines – Mr. Cruise, 42, had phoned Ms. Holmes, 26, out of the blue; on their first date he served her sushi in his private jet cruising over Los Angeles – has fanned the skepticism of an audience schooled to expect secretiveness from trysting stars, not to mention celebrities who stage reality television shows to hype themselves.

“Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise is sudden and strange,” said Janice Min, the editor in chief of US Weekly. “But I do think it is real, and I’ve had people in the office laugh at me.”

Even if today’s savvier fan may smell a rat, the temptation of being in the know is hard to resist. In the cases of outright romantic convenience, said Stephen M. Silverman, a biographer of film directors who is the news editor of People.com, the Web site of People magazine, “the basis for doing it remains the same, to get publicity. But today you have the extra added attraction that the public is celebrity crazy, whether it’s with cynicism or adoration.”

Romance, Mr. Silverman said, usually trumps almost any other private endeavor as news. “Angelina Jolie is doing serious humanitarian work.” he said, “but the Brad Pitt connection gets more coverage. I go to dinner parties with very sophisticated people and they say, ‘So, what’s going on with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt?’ “

Chris Doherty, the president of INF, a photo agency in New York that handles paparazzi and celebrity event photographers, said that with the high number of outlets vying for images, stars seeking publicity no longer need to appear at official events; a couple can just walk down a street holding hands. “If they want it to happen,” he said, “it’s not that difficult.”

Whether the coupling is real or fake, Mr. Doherty said, is difficult to judge. Publications often ask “the circumstances under which the pictures were taken,” he said. “Did it look like they were acting? They’ll ask us if they saw the photographer. If they didn’t see the photographer, you can pretty much read into that that the pictures were candid.”

But, he said, in the case of hot couples like Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie, any questioning is almost irrelevant. “Everybody wanted a picture after his breakup with Jennifer Aniston,” Mr. Doherty said.

Phony pairings, film historians say, used to be concocted by studios to promote a movie. In the days of the studio system for example. the publicity machine often helped convince fans that stars appearing on screen together were an item. The movie “Singin’ in the Rain” spoofed this, by having the actress believe the publicity even though her ardent on screen partner loathed her. In other cases, phony pairings were arranged to mask a secret, perhaps adulterous, affair, and, in cases like that of Rock Hudson, to hide homosexuality. Tab Hunter, a heartthrob in the 1950′s, said he was a frequent companion of Natalie Wood at the request of Warner Brothers, which had both stars under contract. They would attend parties to promote films like “The Burning Hills” even though he was gay – not publicly at the time – and she was still in her teens, he said.

“Once the machine got rolling, it was quite powerful, and the press carries it one step beyond,” he said in an interview last week. “They reported it every way: ‘Natalie is in love,’ ‘Natalie has lots of boyfriends, and Tab is No. 1.’ All that nonsense. She really loved R. J. Wagner.”

Mr. Hunter, who at 73 plans to release an autobiography this fall, “Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star,” in which he talks about his homosexuality and romance with Anthony Perkins, said he went along with the stunts because he considered it part of his job.

Today celebrities are responsible for marketing themselves and some go further than others in using their personal life as headline fodder.

“You have a lot of people,” said one Hollywood publicist, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the privacy of his clients, “who think it’s a good thing to be on the cover of these magazines, and the healthiest way to do that is romance. You don’t want to be on the cover for a criminal act or a divorce.”

But other publicists insisted they would never seek to draw attention to a client’s personal life. Once you open that door, one publicist said, “you can’t get that privacy back.”

Exposure does not come without risks. With more news media competition, there is less control over coverage or ability to protect the stars as the studios once did, some film experts say.

Take Ms. Holmes. Three weeks ago pictures showed her radiant and beautifully styled with Mr. Cruise in Rome. Last week the tabloids and glossies showed her in unflattering close-ups with a skin rash around her mouth. (“Katie’s Lip Malfunction,” read the US Weekly headline.)

Celebrities these days also risk reaching a point of saturation with the public just as fast as the romance. “There are very few secrets anymore,” said A. Scott Berg, who has written books about Katharine Hepburn and the studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

In the old days “the audience never got tired of the star,” he said. Or at least it took a lot longer. “Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn’t so much information about him,” said Mr. Berg, who has won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. “Today you’re on television all the time.”

Movie studios are not crazy about overexposed, off-screen couplings, said Peter Sealey, a former president for marketing and distribution for Columbia Pictures, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He said love relationships do not significantly affect ticket sales and can interfere with the suspension of disbelief that is still the goal for most movies.

“If you co-mingle external reality and fantasy, fantasy loses,” he said, citing the relentless stories about Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck preceding the release of their movie “Gigli,” which flopped.

Mr. Sealey said that while stars may personally benefit from the higher profile a new love may bring – staged or otherwise – movies live or die on word of mouth, and “you want the focus on the movie.”

“You got to see it,” he said, should be the response of the audiences, and not, “‘They seem to be happy together.’”

A lot of stars do fall in love on the set, making for such legendary pairings as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. “You have beautiful people who have libidos and are off on location for months at a time,” Mr. Sealey said. “What do you think is going to happen?”

And some improbable relationships – Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore – seem to pan out as well. But Mr. Cruise and Ms. Holmes seem to have raised a number of red flags. In addition to their age difference and seeming to have little in common – one report noted she had first been smitten when she saw “Risky Business” as a child – they seem to be chasing the paparazzi, instead of seeking privacy.

“Isn’t romance a kind of exclusive focus on one person to the exclusion of the outside world?” asked Leo Braudy, the author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History” and a professor of film history at the University of Southern California. “If you are carrying out your romance in public, there’ll be some cynicism about your motives.”

Publicists for the couple did not return calls, but in an interview with “Access Hollywood” scheduled to be broadcast tomorrow (with excerpts available on the show’s Web site) Mr. Cruise, the former husband of Nicole Kidman, explained why he has been less inhibited than usual. “I’m not going to hide it,” he said. “I am so happy, and I am not going to pretend or hide it or be shy. This woman is magnificent.”

People may snicker, some noted, but they will still watch. “It doesn’t mean that they don’t want to see the pictures of them kissing,” said Mr. Doherty, the photo agency executive. “It’s all part of the show.”

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It’s just a movie!

The Mr. Smith Fallacy
Was screening Frank Capra’s classic the true nuclear option?
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 2:10 PM PT

In the absence of any other logical explanation, I conclude that what nudged the Senate back from the brink of a “nuclear option”—the majority-driven rule change disallowing the use of filibusters against judicial nominees—was the prospect that both Democrats and Republicans would screen Frank Capra’s 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, last night in the Capitol.

As I’ve explained before, I believe that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist should have taken his “nuclear option” one step further and eliminated the filibuster not only for judicial nominees but for legislation, too. This isn’t because I favor the appointment of judges hostile to a woman’s right to choose abortion; I don’t. Rather, it’s because I believe the filibuster is an inherently reactionary tool that, over the long term, has impeded and will continue to impede activist liberal government by imposing a 60-vote supermajority requirement on virtually every bill that comes before Congress. People would have an easier time grasping this if it weren’t for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

In Mr. Smith, the idealistic Sen. Jefferson Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, uses the filibuster to block legislation to build the Willet Creek Dam, the true purpose of which, we are told, is to line the pockets of political bosses. That sounds like a plausibly liberal goal today, when environmentalists routinely argue that dams destroy delicate ecosystems. And it seemed so during the last week of October 1972, when I, age 14, attended a screening of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at Pomona College with my older brother Peter. Capra was there to answer questions from the audience afterward, and Peter’s hand was the first one up. “Mr. Capra,” asked my brother, “can I assume, based on what we just saw, that this Tuesday you’ll cast your vote for George McGovern?” Capra looked balefully at his shaggy-haired, bearded interlocutor, whose political views, he knew, were shared by nearly everyone else in the audience. Then he mumbled, “Uh … no.”

Capra idealized the common man, but he was nobody’s idea of a liberal. And back when Mr. Smith was released—a mere six years after the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority—liberals were not the dam-haters they are today. New Dealers considered the building of federally funded dams vital to maintaining struggling family farms and to bringing electricity to the homes of the rural poor. Seen in its historic context, then, the fictional bill that the fictional Mr. Smith blocks is what today would be called “progressive legislation.” It therefore fits right in with the sort of bills that filibusters have nearly always been deployed against in real life. Thanks to the filibuster, President Roosevelt was never able to pass anti-lynching legislation. More recently, the filibuster kept the Clinton administration from overhauling a century-old mining law that makes it impossible for taxpayers to block environmentally harmful giveaways to companies mining federal land. Today, the filibuster guarantees that the United States won’t pass legislation extending health insurance to all its citizens. And saving it is a great liberal cause?

Another fallacy inherent in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the notion that the modern-era filibuster has anything to do with what Sen. Robert Byrd (citing Mr. Smith in a March 1 floor speech) grandly calls “the deliberative process.” As Byrd well knows, contemporary practice eliminates the speechifying part of the filibuster altogether; these days, whenever a filibuster is threatened, the Senate majority will typically calculate whether it has the 60 votes necessary to cut off debate, and if it doesn’t, it won’t bother to bring the legislation in question to a floor vote at all. (Byrd, I should note, filibustered—the old-fashioned way—14 hours against passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That’s the law that banned discrimination in public facilities! So forgive me if his views on the subject don’t command my full attention.)

It’s ironic that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has become an argument-stopping sacred cow in Washington, because when the film premiered in 1939 at Washington’s DAR Constitution Hall, it got an overwhelmingly hostile reception. Here’s how Capra remembered it in his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title:

By the time Mr. Smith sputtered to the end music, about one-third of Washington’s finest had left. Of those who remained, some applauded, some laughed, but most pressed grimly for the doors. … [At the reception afterward,] I took the worst shellacking of my professional life. Shifts of hopping-mad Washington press correspondents belittled, berated, scorned, vilified, and ripped me open from stem to stern as a villainous Hollywood traducer.

In an interview with Richard L. Strout of the Christian Science Monitor, Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat (he would later be Harry Truman’s vice president), changed the subject from the debate over entering the war in Europe to Capra’s film. Barkley called Mr. Smith

as grotesque as anything I have ever seen. … At one point, the picture shows the senators walking out on Mr. Smith as a body when he is attacked by a corrupt member. The very idea of the Senate walking out at the behest of that old crook! It was so grotesque it was funny. It showed the Senate made up of crooks, led by crooks, listening to a crook. … It was so vicious an idea that it was a source of disgust and hilarity to every member of Congress who saw it. … I did not hear a single senator praise it. I speak for the whole body.

A fascinating index of how our politics have changed since 1939 is that back when Mr. Smith came out, it didn’t occur to members of the Senate—or even the press!—to identify with the film’s authority-defying protagonist. Today, it would never occur to a senator—even a member of the Senate leadership—to identify with anyone else. Maybe that explains why the filibuster is proving so hard to kill.

Timothy Noah writes “Chatterbox” for Slate

So Long, Garage Jammers. Nowadays Laptops Rock.

By DAVID CARR

Sitting in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan last week, Michael Cobden could hardly be blamed for tapping his toe. It was a glorious spring day, and he was playing hooky from his job as a restaurant manager on the Upper West Side. Like a lot of people in the park, Mr. Cobden was enjoying a bit of alfresco media, with a Mac G4 laptop and a set of headphones.

Except Mr. Cobden, 28, was not checking e-mail messages while listening to music, he was creating a pop song called “Bryant Park.” In doing so, Mr. Cobden joined millions of people – trained musicians and amateurs alike – who are using powerful laptop tools to produce music that in an earlier age might have wailed out of a garage. “An artist is an artist, even if he is using things he found or stole and arranging them in an artful fashion,” he said. “There are many composers who never played an oboe, but they write the music and give it to an orchestra to play.” For himself, Mr. Cobden tapped the Mac in front of him lovingly. “I have a computer,” he said. (Hear the song he created here.)

“Computers are the new garage,” said James Rotondi, the editor of Future Music, a new magazine packaged with enough free software to get any would-be Moby started. “A lot of people who are making music right now have never recorded to tape. The concept is completely foreign to them.”

Music recording, an arduous, analog process that has long been the province of musician gearheads and studio savants, is being downsized and democratized by a virtual array of digital sound loops, simulated instruments and the notebook-size means to record them. The growing power of laptop computers and new software means consumers have gone from listening to music at the push of button to creating it with similar ease.

GarageBand, a user-friendly band-in-a-box made by Apple, came preinstalled on 4.5 million Macs sold in the last 18 months. And Mr. Rotondi estimated that hundreds of thousands of copies of Reason, a sound-creation application produced by Propellerhead Software in Stockholm, have been sold, along with many more pirated copies.

Laptop songs are being listened to as well: iCompositions, a Web site for homemade music that is just over a year old, is adding about 36 songs a day to a total of over 11,000 that have been listened to 1.5 million times. It is enough home-brewed music to fill 43,000 iPods to the brim. (MacJams, another online music site, has over 7,500 songs available for the listening.) And several laptop jammers have been signed to major labels on the strength of their digitized output. The line between the music consumer and creator is shrinking to the point where the kid bopping his head on the bus may well be listening to a song he came up with in his bedroom.

“We are in the midst of a true consumer push to create music,” said Tim Bajarin, a technology industry analyst with Creative Strategies. “They now have the ability to storyboard a song by dragging and dropping.”

The phenomenon appalls many longtime musicians and many of the songs are lame efforts that should remain in the laptop, but there are gorgeous and surprising exceptions. Most of the work seems to fall somewhere in the middle.

Mr. Cobden, who works at Mike’s Bistro on West 72nd Street, has created songs with a friend who is a comedy writer and another who is a photographer.

“We get together, we drink and smoke a lot, and then we make music,” he said, taking his headphones off to chat. “Everybody sings and contributes, and we end up with a song. It’s sort of like an audio photograph of the party.”

Although Mr. Cobden is an experienced musician – he plays guitar and was making music long before a studio could be emulated on a laptop – he was more than happy to trade a clutter of equipment for the intimacy and ease of his virtual studio.

“Instead of one band, I can have 10,” he said. “Instead of lugging a bunch of equipment to the rehearsal space, I can stay home and make music.”

The revolution is still in its nascent stage and has its limits. It is, for instance, much easier to make a synth-based dance track than an off-the-hook rock song, perhaps because there is still no great digital substitute for the bent string of a Fender Stratocaster. But there are people who see value in music that comes out of laptop. “We live in a world of simulation, so no one should be surprised by what is going on,” Mr. Rotondi said. “Before, everybody wanted to be a guitar hero. Now they want to be a D.J. or a producer.”

A duo from Bellingham, Wash., using mostly free software they found on the Web, produced a record a called “Strange We Should Meet Here.” Last year their “band,” Idiot Pilot, was signed to Reprise Records. And at the beginning of the month, Trent Reznor, who records as the band Nine Inch Nails, offered a free download of the hit single “The Hand That Feeds” that was broken into multiple tracks, allowing laptop aficionados to mix and mash up their own version of the song.

Mr. Cobden, who has been playing in bands since he was 13, does not see major-label gold when he peers into the Reason 3.0 interface on his desktop, just a way of making music without going through a lot of hoops.

“When musicians get together, there are always a lot of chemistry issues,” he said. Using software, if he doesn’t like the sound of the bass player, “I just delete him,” he added.

Mr. Cobden raced to get a song up and going before he had to go punch in at the restaurant. Though even there, he said, his virtual life as a rock god does not have to end.

“My mom hates my music, but the other night one of the hostesses in the restaurant came in and was rocking out on her iPod and it was one of my songs, which was a big thrill,” he said. “Now if I could just get her to throw her panties at me.”

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