November 22, 2005
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‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores’
Caleb Bach/Knopf
Gabriel García Márquez
http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/
November 22, 2005
Books of The Times | ‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores’
He Wants to Die Alone, but First . . .
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
“Memories of My Melancholy Whores” is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years.
It turns out not to have been worth the wait.
After the author’s magical portrait of his own youth and apprenticeship in a classic memoir (“Living to Tell the Tale,” 2003), this very slight novella – a longish short story, really – plays like a halfhearted exercise in storytelling, published simply to mark time. Like the entries in his 1993 collection “Strange Pilgrims,” this tale demonstrates that the shorter form of the story does not lend itself to Mr. García Márquez’s talents: his penchant for huge, looping, elliptical narratives that move back and forth in time is cramped in this format, as is his desire to map the panoramic vistas of an individual’s entire life. The fertile inventiveness that animated his masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is decidedly muted in these pages, and the reverence for the mundane realities of ordinary life, showcased in more recent works, seems attenuated as well. As a result, “Memories of My Melancholy Whores” feels like a brittle little fable composed on automatic pilot.
For some time now Mr. García Márquez has been interested in writing from the vantage point of old age, and this story takes that impulse to an extreme. Its narrator, a former scholar known by his students as Prof. Gloomy Hills, is turning 90 and decides to celebrate his birthday by having sex with a young virgin. He places a call to the madam of his favorite brothel and makes arrangements to spend the night with a 14-year-old girl. In the course of recounting the relationship he develops with this girl, whom he calls Delgadina, the old man also ruminates about “the miseries” of his “misguided life.”
Prof. Gloomy Hills, we learn, lives in his parents’ house, proposing “to die alone, in the same bed in which I was born and on a day that I hope will be distant and painless.” In addition to having taught Spanish and Latin grammar, he served for 40 years as the cable editor at El Diario de La Paz, a job that involved “reconstructing and completing in indigenous prose the news of the world that we caught as it flew through sidereal space on shortwaves or in Morse code.” He now scrapes by on his pension “from that extinct profession,” combined with the even more meager sums he earns writing a weekly column.
In his nine decades of life, the narrator has never had any close friends or intimate relationships. “I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn’t pay,” he says, “and the few who weren’t in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was 20 I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so many and I could keep track of them without paper.”
Such passages read like a sad parody of Mr. García Márquez’s radiant 1988 novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” which chronicled love (not just sex) in all its myriad varieties. Worse, we receive no insight into why the narrator has led such a libertine but lonely existence, no insight into why he has never examined his inner life.
All this changes, we are asked to believe, when Prof. Gloomy Hills meets Delgadina and, for the first time in his life, falls in love. He does not touch her that first night, nor the next night, nor the one after. Instead, he simply watches as she sleeps next to him on the bed – exhausted from her day job at a factory, and overcome by the valerian potion the madam has given her to calm her nerves.
As the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with this innocent young woman – who, truth be told, does little ever but doze in his presence – fantasy and dreamlike hallucinations begin to take over. After one imagined exchange with her, he says: “From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood: a novice in love at 20, a parlor whore at 40, the queen of Babylon at 70, a saint at 100.”
The narrator imagines that Delgadina has been to his house and prepared him breakfast. Later he flies into a jealous rage, convinced – with hardly any evidence – that she has been sleeping with other men. He assiduously courts her with flowers and presents, and reads books like “The Little Prince” to her as she sleeps. “We continued,” he says, “with Perrault’s Tales, Sacred History, the Arabian Nights in a version sanitized for children, and because of the differences among them I realized that her sleep had various levels of profundity depending on her interest in the readings.”
The relationship between the narrator and his virgin is really a relationship that exists inside the narrator’s head, and since Mr. García Márquez makes little effort to make this man remotely interesting – as either an individual or a representative figure – it’s hard for the reader to care really about what happens. Moreover, the trajectory of this narrative turns out to be highly predictable, leading to a banal ending to a banal story that’s quite unworthy of the great Gabriel García Márquez’s prodigious talents.
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Woodward covered in Huffington Blog
Arianna Huffington Bio
11.22.2005
Memo to Woodward: Endlessly Evoking Watergate Won’t Make Us Forget Plamegate
Bob Woodward’s patronizing haughtiness was everywhere last night on Larry King. I haven’t been talked down to that much since I was introduced to Shaquille O’Neal. I get it now: we all just don’t get it. The heroic Woodward wasn’t trying to hide anything or maintain his access, he was just too busy doing “incredibly aggressive reporting” on “immense questions” about Iraq to be distracted by “a casual, off-hand remark” that, even on the eve of the Libby indictment, as Plamegate threatened to paralyze the White House, didn’t strike the legendary reporter as even “a firecracker” of a story.
Woodward’s performance was, to borrow a phrase, “laughable” — particularly the way he kept tossing in references to Watergate, strapping on those glory days like a protective armor. Over the course of “the full hour”, he mentioned Watergate four times, Ben Bradlee three times, Deep Throat twice, Carl Bernstein twice, and Richard Nixon and Katharine Graham once each. Memo to Bob: we get this, too. Your reporting once brought down a president. But that only makes your “journalistic sins” on Plamegate all the more appalling and disappointing.
It was pathetic watching the real life Robert Redford reduced to holding up old headlines to fight off charges that he’s just carrying water for the powerful. Color me convinced. At least until I reread Plan of Attack.
I also found it really interesting that King’s interview with Woodward, like his recent interview with Judy Miller, was pre-taped — making it impossible for either of them to have to interact directly with the public and deal with viewer calls and questions. Could it really be a coincidence that these two star reporters both took no viewer calls on a show famous for them?
Since King has a rule about always trying to do his show live — it’s not called Larry King on Tape, after all — we sent an email to the show asking why the Woodward interview had been taped. Scheduling conflicts we were told.
Which raised the question: who had the scheduling conflict, Woodward or King? I doubted it was Larry’s since I had been at the party at the Mondrian Hotel’s Skybar to celebrate the release of his wife Shawn’s new CD. The party was called for 7:00 p.m. and the Mondrian is located at 8440 Sunset Blvd. CNN’s Los Angeles studios are just down the road at 6430 Sunset, so King could easily have done the show live and been at the party before the first drink had been poured (I arrived at the party late, by which time Larry had already left to fly to New York for tonight’s interview with Jerry Seinfeld).
So I called Larry this morning. “I spoke to Woodward,” he told me, “and I told him we could either tape the interview or we could do it live and I’d be a little late for Shawn’s party. He said, ‘Let’s tape it’. But I don’t think he was ducking anything.”
I beg to differ. On the show, Woodward talked about a reporter’s “obligation to get information out to the public”. It sounded very noble. But when given the choice between doing the show live with calls for the aforesaid public or taping the show without viewer calls, he chose the latter. Maybe he just really, really didn’t want Larry to miss a second of Shawn’s big bash (incidentally, I’ve had the first track of Shawn’s new CD on repeat all morning).
As for Miller, King told me her interview had been taped because “she had to go to a dinner”. It was actually — as I was told by people who were there — a small dinner party thrown by Mitch Rosenthal of Phoenix House in New York. Hmm, let’s weigh those options: attend a small dinner party or allow the public you theoretically serve the chance to ask questions? No contest — if you want to avoid all those tedious questions bloggers representing the public have been raising for weeks.
Thanks for the openness, guys.
It’s too bad. Maybe someone would have called in and asked Woodward why, despite all his “incredibly aggressive reporting” and all that has come out about Plamegate, he still claims he hasn’t yet “seen evidence” of an “organized effort” to “slime” Joe Wilson and his wife.
So we’re supposed to believe that a gaggle of Bush administration officials just happened to decide on their own volition, at about the same time, to mention that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA to Bob Woodward, Judy Miller, Matt Cooper, Robert Novak, Walter Pincus, and lord who knows who else. Sure, Bob, whatever you say.
A quick review:
Matt Cooper was leaked to, realized that Wilson was being slimed, and promptly told his readers about it in an article called “A War on Wilson?”.
Bob Novak was leaked to, realized that Wilson was being slimed, and promptly did the leakers’ bidding by outing Valerie Plame.
Judy Miller was leaked to, realized that Wilson was being slimed, and promptly chose not to pursue the story, sticking “Valerie Flame’s” name into a forgotten drawer.
And Bob Woodward, Watergate hero and journalistic superstar, was leaked to but, apparently unable to understand what was really going on, promptly did nothing for close to two-and-a-half years… and still doesn’t get it.
Don’t worry, Bob. We’ll always have Watergate, Watergate, Watergate, Watergate, Watergate…
Xtreme Sports
Article 
30 August 2005
What’s so extreme about extreme sports?
by Josie Appleton
According to the ads, extreme sports are an antidote to our safety-first, shrink-wrapped world. They offer the opportunity to carve your own path and find out where your limits lie.
There is a new extreme sport born almost every week, each seemingly more bizarre and dangerous than the last. BASE-jumping involves parachuting off buildings and cliffs; extreme ironing (inexplicably) involves ironing mid-skydive, up a mountain or under water. Hang-gliding and skydiving have spawned heli-bungee and sky-flying; skateboarding has spawned street luge, or lying on a skateboard and going fast downhill. Buildering is free climbing up skyscrapers, popularised by the Frenchman Alain ‘Spiderman’ Robert; free running treats the city as one big gymnastics circuit. Then there are events such as the Verbier Extreme, which challenges snowboarders to find the most daring way of descending a mountain.
Extreme sports – also known as lifestyle sports – have roots in 1960s countercultural movements, and have been growing since the late 1980s. Research by American Sports Data found that new-style sports such as snowboarding and paintballing have increased at the expense of traditional sports. Snowboarding was up by 30 per cent between 1998 and 2004 (7.1million people tried it at least once in 2004), while paintballing increased by 63 per cent in the same period (to 9.6million participants), and artificial wall climbing was up by 63 per cent (to 7.7million). By contrast, the number of baseball players fell by 28 per cent between 1987 and 2000, declining to 10.9million players (though most of these would be regular players, whereas most paintballers would be one-offs). Softball and volleyball fell by 37 per cent and 36 per cent in the same period (1).
Given the high-adrenaline image, it’s unsurprising that male 15- to 24-year-olds are the prime market. In the UK, Mintel found that 22.7 per cent of 11- to 19-year-olds participated in BMX/mountain biking and 27. 5 per cent did skateboarding (2). But these sports attract a wide variety of participants. BASE jumpers include thirty- and fortysomething solicitors and accountants; and the new free running training academy in east London attracts 80 people a session, including everybody from kids to the middle aged.
The myth of ‘extreme’ sports
But it isn’t really the danger factor that marks out extreme sports. According to Nicholas Heyworth from Sports England, many are less dangerous than traditional sports: ‘Statistically, the most dangerous sport is horse riding.’ One ‘aggressive skating’ website warns you to ‘Skate safe, because pain and death suck!’, and another cliff jumping website is packed with disclaimers and warnings, such as ‘don’t drink and jump’, ‘never jump alone’ and ‘know your limits’. Heyworth notes that ‘many extreme sports guys have got safety equipment up to their eyeballs, and a complete safety team. You would be lucky to get a cold sponge and a bucket of water at a Sunday league rugby match’. A helicopter packed with medical equipment tracks participants in the Verbier Extreme.
Improvements in equipment allow the reduction in risk and pain. In the 1960s, skydiving was done by penniless daredevils using surplus US airforce chutes. One veteran recalls: ‘It hurt like hell and you drifted mercilessly at the will of the wind until you crashed to the ground and it hurt like hell again.’ (3) Now, he says, there are ‘high-income jumpers who not only make eight jumps a day, but pay someone to pack their parachutes’. Even the most extreme of extreme sport pales into comparison beside the exploits of the early climbers and explorers, for whom the risks were great and the outcomes unknown. The advert for Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-17 Trans-Antarctic expedition read: ‘Men wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.’
Much of the hype about extreme sports comes not from the participants, but from the industry that surrounds it. Extreme sport goods – including TV programmes, graffiti art, design, drinks, and clothing – are a bigger business than the sports themselves. The Extreme Sports Channel has an estimated audience of 20million across Europe, most of whom wouldn’t go anywhere near a half-pipe – it’s popular among Portuguese women, for example.
The Extreme Media Group sells a range of clothing and drinks. The ‘Extreme energy’ drink is formulated to ‘deliver an intense physical and mental energy boost’, using Asian fermented tea, Siberian ginseng and guarana (a natural form of caffeine). There is even ‘Extreme water’ (‘the pure artesian mineral water from the Rockhead source in Buxton, will rehydrate you fast’), and Extreme Chillout (‘new gen soft drink created to aid relaxation, recovery and all round chilling’) (4). Meanwhile, there is an X-Games brand of mobile phone: ‘Carry the excitement and attitude of X Games with you everyday. The tweaked out phone allows devoted fans to capture the signature style and personality of the X Games in a wireless phone.’ (5)
But it’s not all image. Beneath the hype, lifestyle sports are a new kind of sport for a new age. While traditional sports elevated the values of commitment and fair play, these new sports offer individuals a more personal kind of challenge.
Sport: from team to individual
Most traditional sports were institutionalised in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, sport had been more informal, with the different teams in a rugby match deciding on the rules at the start of the game. Indeed, many sports were just a more or less organised form of fighting: early ‘football’ involved neighbouring villages scrapping over a pig’s bladder.
As the historian Eric Hobsbawm outlines in The Invention of Tradition, institutionalised sport provided a gel for an industrialising society. Factory owners set up football teams for their workers (Arsenal was the team of London gun-makers), to tie them into the firm and provide an outlet for aggression. Meanwhile, the ruling class formalised its own sports – tennis, golf, and rugby union – which Hobsbawm describes as a ‘conscious…effort to form a ruling elite’. Business was done on the tennis court and golf course, and the values of sportsmanship and fair play became the signature tunes of the British elite.
Now that class and community identity is on the wane, traditional sporting associations have suffered. A boys’ football team, for example, requires parents as volunteer helpers, and for each member of the team to play by the rules and turn up for practice. Professor Neil Ravenscroft, a research fellow at the University of Brighton, tells me that ‘Volunteers to run sport outside of school are declining. And young people have less commitment to the idea that you adhere to sets of rules that are not yours, and turn up to training regularly’.
Lifestyle sports provide more individualised ways of pushing yourself. There is no winning and losing as such, and little organisation into teams or leagues. Each individual is really competing against himself: the founder of free running, Sebastien Foucan, said that the sport was about a ‘desire to overtake yourself’. How a free runner tackles the urban landscape is up to him. There are some established moves – a cat jump, speed vault, a palm spin, and so on – but you are always free to invent your own. This contrasts with sports such as gymnastics, when athletes have a certain time to perform, a set piece of equipment and a limited series of moves.
Extreme sports claim to be confronting authority. Rather than work within leagues and sporting bodies, participants say that they are doing it for themselves. Bandit canoeing goes down forbidden waterways, and off-piste snowboarding and skateboarding crash off set tracks. Free runners claim to challenge the official architecture of the city. Ez, who runs the east London free running academy, says: ‘I like the freedom aspect, the fact that every individual has their own way of overcoming. The average person will be guided by pavements, but with parkour you interact with obstacles, you won’t be guided by them.’
The only rules are those tacitly agreed by participants. A street basketball site or skateboarding half pipe will have a set of agreements about what’s allowed. At Brighton skateboarding park, for example, there are different times of the day for different abilities.
For some, lifestyle sports can be character developing. Once boys were sent out to freezing football and rugby fields to make men of them; now they might assault a half-pipe instead. They go at a jump again and again, falling off and picking themselves up until they can finally do it. In this way, you bear the consequences of your actions. One climber explained the attraction: ‘there must be something which can be won and something which can be lost. The winning can be the unutterable joy as your questing fingers latch a crucial edge. The losing can be life itself. Either way we choose.’ (6)
Extreme sports can also enable you to confront fears. Some free runners are scared of heights, yet will perform complicated leaps between high buildings. They still their minds before the jump, overcome the part of them that wants to balk. This isn’t about taking risks for the sake of it: instead, it’s the calculated judgement of the sportsman. Ez argues that free running ‘requires discipline to do it properly, which is transferred to other aspects of life’. Some claim that the thrill of the jump can cast the grind of everyday life into perspective. One young BASE-jumper says: ‘It’s the way to refresh things, to keep the mind awake. You have plenty of time to think about yourself, the mountain you stand on, your life, people you meet, things you’re doing.’
Of course, some people look to these new sports for easy thrills. They want the appearance of doing something ‘craaa-zy’ like skydiving or bungee jumping, while relying on the instructor to ensure that nothing goes wrong. But some participants want to put themselves to the test. This comes at a time when institutionalised sports are being tied up in regulation, with risk analysis required before every rugby game and players suing the referee if they get injured. In schools, kids are encouraged to go for non-cooperative games that reinforce everybody’s self-esteem. Lifestyle sports might provide an opportunity for some individuals to develop themselves.
The limits of extreme sports
Because lifestyle sports are so individualised, however, they are liable to go off in bizarre directions. Without social sanction and discipline, these sports can look like the more ridiculous parts of the Guinness Book of Records, with people riding bikes up trees or ironing up mountains. This is casting around, looking for something – anything – to test yourself.
These sports can also revel in individuals’ isolation, the fact that they don’t have to rely on anybody else. This is a limited form of subjectivity: in reality, we develop ourselves by working with and against others. Traditional sports provided a way for individuals to push themselves through the challenge of competition, or by working together as a team. A hundred-metre runner, for example, is trying to beat the other runners rather than just his PB – and this challenge takes him to new heights. Lifestyle sports can encourage a narcissistic focus on individual performance, rather than pushing the limits of human achievement.
There is something childish, too, about the desire to traverse official boundaries. Canoeing where you aren’t supposed to be canoeing, jumping where you’re not supposed to jump…this involves the guilty freedom of a child breaking the rules. Paradoxically, an obsession with breaking rules actually leaves you beholden to them.
Hype and reality
So there is both potential and limits to extreme sports. In order to understand the pros and cons, though, we have to cut through the hype that surrounds them. This hype owes less to the participants than to the extreme sports industry.
This industry makes the idea of ‘living on the edge’ into a consumer product. Deep down, we all feel that we should be pushing ourselves a bit more; the extreme sports industry sells the image of aspiration. Wear a ‘Just do it’ cap; drink a can of ‘Live life to the max’ Pepsi; talk on an X-Games mobile phone. This is about the appearance of living on the edge, posing at taking risks while actually doing nothing at all. In the passive act of buying a consumer good, you are offered thrills and spills. It’s not the real act of grappling with a challenge, but the image of ‘pushing it to the MAX’. This is why extreme sports are so hyped up: the adrenaline factor is sold in concentrated form.
Some of these new sports are little more than PR products. There are actually a tiny number of dedicated free-runners, and many of will only perform for the camera. The sport became a media phenomenon before it built up a decent base of participants; now it can be more for show than self-development. Extreme sports often have a short shelf life: they will be the in thing for a few months, but soon get overtaken by the next fad. XFL, an ‘extreme’ version of American football that was a mix of NFL and WWF wrestling, was set up in 2000, but folded after just one season (7).
So let’s put aside the extreme hype, and look at these sports as just another kind of sport. They offer some potential for individual development – although often only by leaping in odd directions.
(1) American Sports Data website
(2) Quoted in ‘Lifestyle sports and national sports policy: an agenda for research’
(3) You can buy a thrill: chasing the ultimate rush, American Demographics, June 1997 Vol 19, issue 6
(4) Extreme drinks
(5) X-Games mobile
(6) Quoted in ‘Lifestyle sports and national sports policy: an agenda for research’
(7) XFL – the history
Today’s Papers
Still Pulling Your Cheney
By Eric Umansky
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 3:43 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post lead with GM’s announcement that it will shutter at least nine North American plants and cut an additional 5,000 jobs on top of the 25,000 planned cuts it announced over the summer. USA Today also leads with GM, but the paper highlights a point the others cruise past: Unless GM wins concessions from unions, the company’s savings will be limited for a good while because union contracts require the company “to continue paying workers most of their salaries even when plants close.” The New York Times leads with Iraq’s major political parties getting together at an Arab League confab and asking for “a withdrawal of foreign troops on a specified timetable, dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces.” Similar calls have been made before, and as with this time, none have included an actual time frame.
Again, GM just added 5,000 job cuts to the 25,000 it already announced months ago, a concept the WP seems to have had trouble digesting: “GM TO SLICE 30,000 JOBS, SHUT OR CUT 12 PLANTS.”
The NYT not only properly parses the job numbers, it also points out that Wall Street analysts did as well and were unimpressed: “Analysts immediately questioned whether the plan was enough, saying it lacked the speed and breadth that had helped rivals make comebacks.”
The NYT‘s lead emphasizes that this is the “the first time” Iraq’s political parties have “collectively” called for withdrawal. Which is probably true and not particularly relevant: The big parties might not have made such a call collectively before, but they have individually, and that includes the governing Shiite parties. (The Times‘ editors might want to take a peek at item No. 2 in the Shiite coalition’s platform for the last election: “A timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq.”)
It’s not that the NYT‘s lead story is so wrong—the piece mentions that the call for a time line isn’t new—the problem is where editors put the story. After all, if the calls for withdrawal are symbolic and aren’t new, then what exactly is the Page One-worthy news here?
The WP and NYT front Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as expected dropping out of the conservative Likud party, which he helped found, to start a centrist party aimed at creating peace with Palestinians by … well, it’s not clear yet. “Likud in its present form is unable to lead Israel toward its national goals,” said Sharon. Israel’s parliament is on its way to dissolving, and elections will soon be scheduled.
The WP emphasizes Sharon’s at least rhetorical nod toward the U.S.-supported road map, which, among other things, calls for a settlement freeze. Top Israeli paper Ha’aretz, meanwhile, suggests that Sharon is considering a unilateral pullout and making large settlements near Jerusalem and the border part of Israel.
As the LAT, NYT, and WP all front, Vice President Cheney cooed about the importance of an “energetic debate” on the war, and then in the grand spirit of such debate Cheney explained that those who question the administration’s use of prewar intelligence were “dishonest and reprehensible” as well as “corrupt and shameless.”
Selective Cheney coverage scorecard: The NYT‘s Elisabeth Bumiller’s piece is thin and padded with pingpong back-and-forth quotes. (Revealed in the story: Sens. Kerry, Kennedy, and Reid all object to Cheney’s characterizations and, bonus scoop, they explain why.) The Post‘s Dana Milbank has the sharpest take. But the LAT comes in first, achieving near-poetry, “USING OLIVE BRANCH, CHENEY LASHES FOES.”
The WP off-leads and others go inside with a former partner of shamed super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff singing to the feds and pleading guilty to conspiring to bribe lawmakers. Which means an unknown number of people in Washington are now sweating. The WP says among those being investigated are a “half a dozen members of Congress, current and former senior Hill aides, [and] former deputy secretary of the interior.” One congressman pointed to in the plea agreement: Rep. Robert Ney.
The WP fronts the administration loosening some standards on the No Child Left Behind Act. Last week the government announced it will allow, as the WP describes it, “as many of 10 states” (?) to judge schools by improvements on tests rather than whether they’re meeting mandated test scores.
A front-page USAT piece announces, “6,644 ARE STILL MISSING AFTER KATRINA; Numbers Suggest Toll Could Rise Significantly.” … Or not. We quickly learn that most of the missing are “probably alive and well” and “are listed as missing because government record-keeping efforts haven’t caught up with them in their new locations.” There’s probably a story in there somewhere, but hyperventilating about the potential for large numbers of deceased MIA isn’t it.
Well, at least that foreign-policy campaign was successful … The Wall Street Journal and NYT cover President Bush’s pleasant but brief stop in Mongolia, where, despite the lack of war protesters or locked doors, there was stress. When SecDef Rumsfeld visited a few months ago, he was given a horse. The president did not want a similar party favor. The WSJ:
White House aides say Mr. Bush was worried about the obligations of ownership. Would taxpayers be on the hook for upkeep? Was there any way to guarantee the horse’s well-being down the road? The question occupied not one but several meetings at the National Security Council in the days leading up to Mr. Bush’s trip, one participant said.
The president did not receive a horse.
Eric Umansky (www.ericumansky.com) writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
Iraq War
Where should we go, Mr. Murtha?
Nowhere To Go
Stop the taunting, and let’s have a real debate about the Iraq war.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, at 1:45 PM ET
So, Bill Clinton got it wrong as usual, by making a smarmy plea for a truce of civility from his Little Rock library redoubt. The Iraq debate does not need to become less rude or less intense. It needs to become much more bitter and much more polarized. As I never tire of saying, heat is not the antithesis of light but rather the source of it.
No, the problem with the Iraq confrontation, as fought “at home,” is not its level of anger but its level of argument. After almost three years of combat, the standard of debate ought to have risen and to have become more serious and acute. Instead, it has slipped into a state of puerility. Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, squeals about cowardice and suggests that those who differ are stabbing our boys in the back—and then tries to revise her remarks in the Congressional Record. This is to sink to exactly the same level as those who jeer that sympathizers of the intervention should “send”—as if they could—their own children, if they should happen to have any handy. Or even to the level of those who claim that anti-war criticism demoralizes “our men and women in uniform.” I can’t be absolutely sure of this, but the “men and women in uniform” whom I have met, and who have patrolled edgy slums and nasty borders, are unlikely to burst into tears when they hear that someone even in their home state doesn’t think they can stand it. Let’s try not to be silly.
For a while, it seemed possible that the sheer reality of battle in Iraq—a keystone state in which we would try the issue of democracy and federalism vs. fascism and jihadism—would simply winnow out the unserious arguments. Those who had jeered at the president for “trying to vindicate his daddy” would blush to recall what they had said, and those who spoke of imminent mushroom clouds would calm down a bit. Those who had fetishized the United Nations would have the grace to see that it had been corrupted and shamed, and those who pointed out that it had been corrupted and shamed would demand that it be reformed rather than overridden. Those who had wanted to lift the punitive sanctions on Iraq because they were so damaging to Iraqis could have allowed that the departure of Saddam was the price they would have to pay for the sanctions to be removed. Those in power who had once supported and armed Saddam might have had the decency to admit it. Those who said that it was impossible, by definition, to have an alliance between Saddamists and fundamentalists might care to notice what they had utterly failed to foresee.
Instead, we have mere taunting. “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” “Terrorist sympathizer.” It’s certainly appalling that Michael Moore should be saying that the Iraqi “insurgents” are the moral equivalent of the minutemen, but my tax dollars don’t go to support Moore. My tax dollars do go to pay the salary of Scott McLellan, who ought to be looking for other work after he accused the honorable but simple-minded Rep. Murtha of being a Michael Moore type.
I am not myself trying to split this difference. For reasons that I have explained at length elsewhere, I think that the continuation of the Saddam Hussein regime would have been even more dangerous than the Bush administration has ever claimed. I also think that that regime should have been removed many years before it actually was, which is why the Bush administration is right to remind people of exactly what Democrats used to say when they had the power to do that and did not use it. No, there are two absolutely crucial things that made me a supporter of regime change before Bush, and that will keep me that way whether he fights a competent war or not.
The first of these is the face, and the voice, of Iraqi and Kurdish democrats and secularists. Not only are these people looking at death every day, from the hysterical campaign of murder and sabotage that Baathists and Bin Ladenists mount every day, but they also have to fight a war within the war, against clerical factions and eager foreign-based forces from Turkey or Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia. On this, it is not possible to be morally or politically neutral. And, on this, much of the time at least, American force is exerted on the right side. It is the only force in the region, indeed, that places its bet on the victory and the values of the Iraqis who stand in line to vote. How appalling it would be, at just the moment when “the Arab street” (another dispelled figment that its amen corner should disown) has begun to turn against al-Qaida and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, if those voters should detect an American impulse to fold or “withdraw.” A sense of history is more important than an eye to opinion polls or approval ratings. Consult the bankrupt Syrian Baathists if you doubt me.
But all right, let’s stay with withdrawal. Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between “over here” and “over there.” There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his “exit strategy” from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just “over the horizon” in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?
The atom bomb, observed Albert Einstein, “altered everything except the way we think.” A globe-spanning war, declared and prosecuted against all Americans, all apostates, all Christians, all secularists, all Jews, all Hindus, and most Shiites, is not to be fought by first ceding Iraq and then seeing what happens “over the horizon.” But to name the powerful enemies of jihad I have just mentioned is also to spell out some of the reasons why the barbarians will—and must—be defeated. If you prefer, of course, you can be bound in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space and reduce this to the historic struggle between Lewis Libby and—was it Valerie Plame? The word “isolationist” at least used to describe something real, even “realistic.” The current exit babble is illusory and comprehends neither of the above.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
Ted Koppel
ABC News/Associated Press
Ted Koppel, above in 1980, ends his run tonight as the anchor of ABC’s “Nightline.”
November 22, 2005
The TV Watch
With Little Fanfare, an Anchor Says Goodbye
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Leave it to Ted Koppel to quit “Nightline” in the same wry, superior way he began it 25 years ago. His choice for a valedictory broadcast is not a video scrapbook crammed with slow-motion clips and misty testimonials from world leaders. Nor is it a foreboding look forward at what network news will be like without him.
Instead, Mr. Koppel cunningly devotes his last half-hour on ABC News to someone else’s last act. Eschewing the kind of self-referential pomposity that most anchors thrive on, “A Tuesday With Morrie” allows Mr. Koppel to take another look at a once-unknown man, Morrie Schwartz, a Brandeis University professor who in 1995 allowed “Nightline” to document the last year of his life as he battled A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
The show is a tribute to Mr. Schwartz’s indomitable spirit, but the broadcast also serves as a veiled showcase for Mr. Koppel’s proud, contrarian personality. He built his career on being different – professorial, not telegenic; cerebral, not entertaining; coolly amusing, not genial or avuncular. “A Tuesday With Morrie” tonight is Koppel’s last chance on ABC to épater les bourgeois.
Those three interviews with Mr. Schwartz were among the most requested “Nightline” shows, rebroadcast several times and still available on DVD and VHS. Mr. Koppel intersperses clips of those shows with a more recent interview with Mitch Albom, a sportswriter and former student of Mr. Schwartz who was inspired by the “Nightline” show to write a book, “Tuesdays With Morrie,” that became a best seller and later a television movie. (Mr. Albom went on to write another best seller, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.”)
Throughout his conversations with Mr. Schwartz, who died in November 1995, Mr. Koppel maintained his customary cool. Mr. Koppel asks Mr. Schwartz about death, dying and the daily indignities of his disease dispassionately, without condescension, pity or camera-pleasing pathos. And Mr. Schwartz was an ideal subject: lucid, good-humored and intellectually engaging to the end. The two men had a tender-tough rapport. Close to death, Mr. Schwartz asks softly, jokingly, if having led a good life entitles him to be an angel. Mr. Koppel replies, Bogart-style, “Yeah, you’d be – you’d be cute with a pair of wings, Morrie.”
There were times when “Nightline” seemed tired and obsolete, but Mr. Koppel managed to stay on his game when it counted. He was at his personal best in the early days of the Iraq invasion as an embedded reporter. Traveling with the Third Infantry Division, Mr. Koppel wore a helmet too big for his head, and managed to deliver incisive, well-structured live reports, staying level-headed and dispassionate when many of his younger colleagues grew strained and emotionally involved with the troops they accompanied. He never lost his dry, deflating sense of humor. He once described enemy resistance during the invasion as “more annoying than devastating.”
Mr. Koppel began as anchor of “Nightline” in March 1980, after first proving his mettle as host of a late-night program, “The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage.” Those were primordial days in television news, before CNN, easy live-by-satellite access, and the Internet. He stood out immediately, interviewing guests about the story of the day with crisp authority and a brisk, no-nonsense style. He was sometimes confrontational, but almost always in an impersonal, somewhat lofty manner.
Mr. Koppel leaves at a time when younger anchors are making a name for themselves by flaunting their personal feelings on the air. During the Hurricane Katrina debacle, NBC’s Brian Williams was widely applauded for venting his anger and frustration over the government’s failure to act quickly to help the victims. So was Anderson Cooper, who recently replaced Aaron Brown as CNN’s late night anchor and famously gave Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana an on-air tongue-lashing.
Mr. Koppel also covered the scandal of Katrina, and was often quite scathing, asking the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown, “Don’t you guys watch television? Don’t you guys listen to the radio?” But Mr. Koppel never lost his aplomb, or his aversion to the first-person pronoun.
And his reticence and reserve will be missed. ABC decided to replace him with three anchors, Terry Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir, a former BBC and ITV reporter best known for sensationalist interviews with celebrities like Diana, Princess of Wales, and Michael Jackson. CBS News and ABC News have not yet announced their choices to take over their evening news broadcasts, but it is unlikely that either network will find an anchor with the same cool, impersonal manner and inquisitive style.
Mr. Koppel recently was a guest on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°,” a nighttime news program that is the un-”Nightline”: Mr. Cooper jumps from topic to topic at top speed, everything from grisly true-crime stories to interviews with the likes of Nicole Richie. (Mr. Cooper has kept Hurricane Katrina on the air as a personal badge of honor with a nightly feature, “Keeping Them Honest,” which highlights the latest disgrace in the recovery effort.)
Mr. Koppel was gracious, and kept his critique of television news light, noting dryly that he was disheartened by the cable news “obsession with being first with the obvious.”
And he declined the opportunity to sound sentimental or nostalgic. When Mr. Cooper asked Mr. Koppel why he was leaving ABC News, Mr. Koppel gave a dry smile and replied, “Why not?”
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Smart Or Not ?
From the issue dated December 17, 2004
POINT OF VIEW
Here’s the Problem With Being So ‘Smart’
By JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS
How often have you heard about someone’s work, “You have to read it – it’s really smart.“? Or “I didn’t agree with anything he argued in that book, but it was smart.”? At a conference you might hear, “I want to go to that panel; she’s quite smart.” You’ve probably also heard the reverse: “How did he get that job? He’s not very smart.” Imagine how damning it would be to say “not especially smart, but competent” in a tenure evaluation. In my observation, “smart” is the highest form of praise one can now receive. While it has colloquial currency, smart carries a special status and value in contemporary academic culture.
But why this preponderance of smart? What exactly does it mean? Why not, instead, competent? Or knowledgeable? Or conscientious? We might value those qualities as well, but they seem pedestrian, lacking the particular distinction of being smart.
Historically, smart has taken on its approbative sense relatively recently. Derived from the Germanic smerten, to strike, smart suggested the sharp pain from a blow. In the 18th century it began to indicate a quality of mind. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary notes Frances Burney’s 1778 use in Evelina: “You’re so smart, there’s no speaking to you.” (We still retain this sense in the _expression “smartass.”) Smart indicated a facility and manner as well as mental ability. Its sense of immediacy also eventually bled over to fashion, in the way that one might wear a smart suit.
The dominance of smart in the academic world has not always been the case. In literary studies – I take examples from the history of criticism, although I expect that there are parallels in other disciplines – scholars during the early part of the 20th century strove for “sound” scholarship that patiently added to its established roots rather than offering a smart new way of thinking. Literary scholars of the time were seeking to establish a new discipline to join classics, rhetoric, and oratory, and their dominant method was philology (for example, they might have ferreted out the French root of a word in one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). They sought historical accuracy, the soundness of which purported a kind of scientific legitimacy for their nascent discipline.
During midcentury the dominant value shifted to “intelligent,” indicating mental ability as well as discerning judgment. Lionel Trilling observed in a 1964 lecture that John Erskine, a legendary Columbia professor, had provided “a kind of slogan” with the title he had given to an essay, “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.” Trilling went on to say that he was “seduced into bucking to be intelligent by the assumption … that intelligence was connected to literature, that it was advanced by literature.” Literary scholars of this era strove to decipher that essential element of literature, and their predominant method was interpretive, in both the New Critics (of particular poems) and the New York intellectuals (of broader cultural currents).
The stress on intelligence coincided with the imperatives of the post-World War II university. Rather than a rarefied institution of the privileged, the university became a mass institution fully integrated with the welfare state, in both how it was financed and the influx of students it welcomed. As Louis Menand recounts in “The Marketplace of Ideas,” the leaders of the postwar university, such as James B. Conant of Harvard, strategically transformed the student body to meet the challenge of the cold war as well as the industrial and technological burgeoning of the United States. These leaders inducted the best and brightest of all classes – as long as they demonstrated their potential for intelligence. Conant was instrumental in founding the Educational Testing Service, which put in place exams like the SAT, to do so.
In the latter part of the century, during the heyday of literary theory (roughly 1970-90), the chief value shifted to “rigor,” designating the logical consistency and force of investigation. Literary study claimed to be not a humanity but a “human science,” and critics sought to use the rigor of theoretical description seen in rising social sciences like linguistics. The distinctive quality of Paul de Man, the most influential critic of the era, was widely held to be his rigor. In his 1979 classic, Allegories of Reading, de Man himself pronounced that literature advanced not intelligence but rigor: “Literature as well as criticism is … the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself.”
Since the late 1980s rigor seems to have fallen out of currency. Now critics, to paraphrase Trilling, are bucking to be smart. This development dovetails with several changes in the discipline and the university. Through the 1980s and ’90s literary studies mushroomed, assimilating a plethora of texts, dividing into myriad subfields, and spinning off a wide array of methods. In the era of theory, critics embraced specialization, promulgating a set of theoretical schools or paradigms (structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and so on). But while the paradigms were multiple, one could attribute a standard of methodological consistency to them.
Today there is no corresponding standard. Individual specializations have narrowed to microfields, and the overall field has expanded to encompass low as well as high literary texts, world literatures as well as British texts, and “cultural texts” like 18th-century gardens and punk fashion. At the same time, method has loosened from the moorings of grand theories; now eclectic variations are loosely gathered under the rubric of cultural studies. Without overarching criteria that scholars can agree upon, the value has shifted to the strikingness of a particular critical effort. We aim to make smart surmises among a plurality of studies of culture.
Another factor in the rise of “smart” has to do with the evolution of higher education since the 1980s, when universities were forced to operate more as self-sustaining entities than as subsidized public ones. As is probably familiar to any reader of The Chronicle, this change has taken a number of paths, including greater pressure for business partnerships, patents, and other sources of direct financing; steep increases in tuition; and the widespread use of adjuncts and temporary faculty members. Without the fiscal cushion of the state, the university has more fully modeled itself on the free market, selling goods, serving consumers, and downsizing labor. It has also internalized the chief protocol of the market: competition. Grafting a sense of fashionable innovation onto intellectual work, smart is perhaps a fitting term for the ethos of the new academic market. It emphasizes the sharpness of the individual practitioner as an autonomous entrepreneur in the market, rather than the consistency of the practice as a brick in the edifice of disciplinary knowledge.
One reason for the multiplicity of our pursuits is not simply our fecundity or our fickleness but the scarcity of jobs, starting in the 1970s and reaching crisis proportions in the 1990s. The competition for jobs has prompted an explosion of publications; it is no longer uncommon for entry-level job candidates to have a book published. (It is an axiom that they have published more than their senior, tenured colleagues.) At the same time, academic publishing has changed. In the past, publishing was heavily subsidized, but in the post-welfare-state university the mandate is to be self-sufficient, and most university presses now depend entirely on sales. Consequently the criterion for publication is not solely sound disciplinary knowledge but market viability. To be competitive, one needs to produce a smart book, rather like an item of fashion.
Smart still retains its association with novelty, in keeping with its sense of immediacy, such that a smart scholarly project does something new and different to attract our interest among a glut of publications. In fact, “interesting” is a complementary value to smart. One might praise a reading of the cultural history of gardens in the 18th-century novel not as “sound” or “rigorous” but as “interesting” and “smart,” because it makes a new and sharp connection. Rigor takes the frame of scientific proof; smart the frame of the market, which mandates interest amid a crowd of competitors. Deeming something smart, to use Kant’s framework, is a judgment of taste rather than a judgment of reason. Like most judgments of taste, it is finally a measure of the people who hold it or lack it.
The promise of smart is that it purports to be a way to talk about quality in a sea of quantity. But the problem is that it internalizes the competitive ethos of the university, aiming not for the cultivation of intelligence but for individual success in the academic market. It functions something like the old shibboleth “quality of mind,” which claimed to be a pure standard but frequently became a shorthand for membership in the old boys’ network. It was the self-confirming taste of those who talked and thought in similar ways. The danger of smart is that it confirms the moves and mannerisms of a new and perhaps equally closed network.
“Smart,” as a designation of mental ability, seems a natural term to distinguish the cerebral pursuits of higher education, but perhaps there are better words. I would prefer the criticism I read to be useful and relevant, my colleagues responsible and judicious, and my institution egalitarian and fair. Those words no doubt have their own trails of associations, as any savvy critic would point out, but they suggest cooperative values that are not always inculcated or rewarded in a field that extols being smart.
Jeffrey J. Williams is a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University and editor of the minnesota review. His most recent book is the collection Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003 (New York University Press, 2004).
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 17, Page B16
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
