Average American ???

Kevin O'Keefe

November 18, 2005
Books of The Times | 'The Average American'
Winnowing the Field of America to One Representative
By WILLIAM GRIMES

All Americans can be average some of the time, but only one American, apparently, can be perfectly average all the time. Kevin O'Keefe, a marketing consultant, set out to find that person five years ago, armed with fresh data from the 2000 national census and a burning desire to pursue and comprehend the very thing he had spent most of his time avoiding: life as lived, defined and loved by the vast majority of his fellow citizens. "The Average American" is the logbook of that quest.

Mr. O'Keefe tries, somewhat feebly, to put a philosophical gloss on his statistical journey. "If I could find the numbers, I could find the person, and if I could find the person, maybe I could find a piece of myself," he writes, but "The Average American," from start to finish, is nothing more (or less) than a clever game. The author starts with a pool of candidates that embraces all 281,421,906 official residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia counted in the 2000 census, and chapter by chapter, using the census and other statistical sources, introduces new categories of averageness that gradually whittle that number down to one. His eventual winner, and the community he lives in, comes the closest of all Americans to matching 140 criteria, from average height and weight to average annual rainfall.

As a piece of statistical analysis, "The Average American" is wobblier than a three-legged table. A multitude of numbers are thrown around, some from official government sources like the Census Bureau and others from opinion polls and marketing surveys. The author does not actually insist that his winning candidate match each and every criterion. In many cases, it's enough that he belongs to the statistical majority. For example, the average American has 12.7 years of education, but Mr. O'Keefe decides that a high school diploma, which the majority of Americans have, would be sufficient.

No one is likely to look too closely at the methodology, just as no one, listening to a joke, wonders why a rabbi and a priest would walk into a bar. "The Average American" is really just an excuse to play with numbers and overturn commonly held notions of what the average American does and thinks. It's also a golden opportunity for the author to hit the road, always traveling in a midsize car, and spend time with people like Myklar the Ordinary, a magician who carefully explains to his audiences that there is no such thing as magic, and Rich Bean, the first politician to run under the banner of the Average American Party. Not to mention an 88-year-old Brooklynite named Harry Average.

It is not surprising to learn that most American families do not consist of a working father, stay-at-home mother and children. It is surprising to learn that such families account for only 7 percent of the population. In 1948, 4 percent of American said they were in favor of marriages between blacks and whites. In 2002 the number was 65 percent, and in 2003, 72 percent. The majority of Americans say they do not want to become famous.

Mr. O'Keefe, ruthlessly swinging his statistical scythe, eliminates vast populations at a single go. Since most Americans live in a one-unit owner-occupied detached dwelling, or private home, more than 50 percent of Los Angeles County and 99.5 percent of Manhattan disappear from contention. The majority of American towns get at least some snowfall. Residents of those that do not fall off the list of contenders. So long, Florida, except for a few thousand residents near the Georgia and Alabama borders, as well as large parts of Texas, and all beachside residents in California from Santa Monica to Mexico. City dwellers and country folk also fall by the wayside, since most Americans live in suburbs.

Gradually, the average American takes form. He (or she) spends 95 percent of the time indoors, thinks abortion is morally wrong but supports the right to have one, owns an electric coffeemaker, has nine friends and at least one pet, and would rather spend a week in jail than become president. He (or she) lives within a 20-minute drive of a Wal-Mart, attends church at least once a month, prefers smooth peanut butter to chunky, lives where the average annual temperature is between 45 and 65 degrees, and believes that Jews make up 18 percent of the population (the actual figure is between 2 and 3 percent).

Mr. O'Keefe, a Manhattanite who married late in life, expresses more than average astonishment that most Americans, even though they do not live in Manhattan or mingle with powerful and famous people, describe themselves as happy and place a higher value on family than on work. He also comes across as a lot more average than he thinks he is. He's a lot less interesting than most of the people he meets, but his project is intriguing, combining as it does the elements of a detective story and the trivia interest of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

With the clock ticking, Mr. O'Keefe narrows his search to 94 houses, and diligently makes contact with one adult resident in each, probing with his list of questions. "This is a joke, right?" one woman asks. Not on your life. One by one, his prospects flunk the test. One has too many cars. Another lacks a pet. And so it goes, down to the wire.

Fittingly, the book's final chapter lies midway between a foregone conclusion and a twist ending. The author winds up in a strangely familiar place, talking to a strangely familiar figure. And average, even when distilled to its quintessence, turns out to be exactly what you'd expect. What's wrong with that?

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Children and Divorce

Dave Calver

November 27, 2005
More Options to Answer 'What About the Kids?'
By MIREYA NAVARRO

IN the new film "The Squid and the Whale," the Berkmans announce their breakup to their 16- and 12-year-old sons and proceed to put them in the middle of their fight. The dad tells the kids that their mother is to blame and confides to the older son that she has cheated. The mother asks the younger boy to keep secrets from the father and soon starts dating the children's tennis instructor.

The scenes draw audible gasps from the audience. In the decades since the divorce boom of the 1960's and 70's, and even since the mid-80's, when the film takes place, many divorcing parents have struggled to avoid such disastrous events; the trend has been toward agreeing to agree early in the divorce for the sake of the children. Increasingly, say lawyers, psychologists, educators and other professionals who deal with divorce, ex-spouses are showing a willingness to try new or little known strategies to lessen the damage to children from a fracturing household.

These strategies include interactive Web sites where parents communicate with each other through message boards and calendar postings instead of arguing; a "collaborative law" movement in which parents and their lawyers commit to come to terms without going to court; and, for the highly contentious who can't even agree by e-mail, "parenting coordinators" available for hire to make decisions for them.

The increased role of fathers in child rearing, divorce lawyers and mediators say, has also led to more creative joint-custody living arrangements. In one example, known as bird-nesting, children stay in the family home and parents take turns living there.

"The one thing you can say is that when parents are communicating and getting along and putting the kids first, the kids are more likely to thrive and do better," said Peter Salem, executive director of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, a group of judges, mediators and others involved in the resolution of family conflict that has grown 50 percent over the last four years, to 2,600 members.

These efforts go on despite a recent, much-publicized challenge to the "good divorce" movement in the form of a book, "Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce." The book, by Elizabeth Marquardt, a scholar with the Institute for American Values, a pro-marriage organization, is based on a national study that found that even in amicable divorces children suffer more isolation and feelings of being torn between two worlds than children from intact families. The pain of divorce is lasting even when efforts are made to minimize it, Ms. Marquardt argues. The study has drawn criticism from those who say it does not address what they argue is a more apt comparison: how the children of divorce would have fared if their parents had stayed in troubled marriages.

But Ms. Marquardt, 35, a child of divorce herself, concludes that parents in "low conflict" marriages - those not involving violence or serious fighting, for example - should stick it out.

"When parents are married," Ms. Marquardt said in an interview, "it is their job to first deal with conflict. When the parents get divorced, it becomes their children's job to make sense of the two worlds."

But what constitutes "low" conflict for some is unbearable for others. Hundreds of thousands of couples continue to divorce annually - with some government surveys showing about a million children experience divorce each year in the United States - and get down to the business of raising their children separately, hoping the way they handle themselves, not the act of separation, will determine how well their children fare.

With four children, KatRyn Howell, 47, a piano teacher, and Roger Bowerman, 48, a community college professor, devised a bird-nesting solution requiring a level of cooperation that belied the tensions of the marriage. Since January, when the couple separated, the kids have lived in the four-bedroom family home in the San Fernando Valley, while the parents each went back to their own parents' homes, the same homes where they grew up about five miles apart.

They now take turns living with the children - she every Monday, Tuesday and Friday; he every Wednesday and Thursday. They alternate Saturdays and Sundays.

It allows the children "to have a fairly normal life," explained Mr. Bowerman. "Their lives haven't changed that much except Mom and Dad are not around at the same time - and we're not fighting."

The shift to more equitable custody arrangements over the last decades, a reflection of the changing role of fathers, has propelled many couples into more contentious divorce proceedings, as they fight over equal time with their children, some divorce lawyers say. Yet the resulting financial and emotional toll of protracted litigation is at the same time creating a powerful incentive for many separating couples to look for ways to agree.

Judges are increasingly mandating that parents play nice, sending them to child-rearing classes and requiring them to draw up plans. This year the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers put out a "model parenting plan" that spells out responsibilities and contingencies at different ages, including whether parents must confer before allowing piercing and tattooing, access to the Internet or viewing R-rated movies.

Divorcing parents seeking to avoid warfare can also find tools that they didn't have before. Erica Laughlin, 35, an outreach program director at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, logs on to OurFamilyWizard.com, a Web site created in 2001 by Paul Volker, an airline mechanic with three children and a stepdaughter.

Ms. Laughlin uses the site to hash out the scheduling and expenses of her two young sons with her ex-husband. The couple, who split custody 50-50, pay $100 a year to use the Web site, which has features that allow them to request trading days with their kids and to keep an expense log.

"The things that are difficult to discuss - who gets the kids when, who owes who money - that's handled electronically," Ms. Laughlin said. "The kids don't have to listen to talk about all that. Our conversations are focused on the kids. They're about the school conference or Christmas."

The site, used by more than 4,000 parents, is growing steadily, adding up to 150 new accounts a month, Mr. Volker said. Like e-mails, the system not only helps by keeping emotions out of communications but also by keeping a record.

Tracking how many divorced parents are exploring such novel strategies to improve their relations is difficult because states and courts vary in what they mandate, divorce experts said. And while some strategies have helped cut down on return visits to court by quarreling couples, mediators and others say, the long-term influence on children is more subjective and harder to gauge.

But the growth of some organizations suggest an increased attitude of cooperation. The International Academy of Collaborative Professionals has trained more than 7,000 lawyers, child specialists and other professionals in the workings of a nonadversarial divorce proceeding, known as collaborative practice, over the last five years, its incoming president, Susan Hansen, said.

And Mr. Salem of the courts association said surveys show that parent education programs for divorcing couples number in the thousands, compared with just a few hundred in the mid-90's.

On a recent Thursday night Jayne A. Major, a parent educator in Los Angeles who gets referrals from family court, gathered half a dozen parents at an Indian restaurant in Brentwood for a session of her "breakthrough parenting" program, which teaches separating or divorced couples how to minimize conflict. The husbands and wives often attend different sessions; the conversation underscored the ugliness that can emerge in marital discord. One man asked how he could protect himself if his ex-wife was not cashing his child support checks so that she could later claim he was not paying it.

One woman, 53, who had been divorced for several years, said the classes were helping her communicate better with her ex-husband.

"Even in my communication by e-mail I turn everything into 'I' statements," she said, singling out one lesson from the workshops. " 'I want this to be done because I believe this is best for the child,' " she explained, "instead of saying, 'You are wrong,' and pointing out the negative. It takes the sting off everything." She asked not to be named because she is in the middle of a custody fight over her 12-year-old son.

For high-conflict cases, some parents are turning to a third party to make decisions for them. Bruce Copeland, a clinical psychologist who serves as a "parent coordinator" in Bethesda, Md., said parents hire him to decide which holidays their kids will spend with which parent, who buys school uniforms and other day-to-day issues.

"You can get involved in absolute minutiae," he said.

Joan Kelly, a psychologist and researcher on children's adjustment to divorce, said that options like parent coordinators are gaining ground as the emphasis in many divorces shift away from the combative route.

"The approach," she said, "has been to use the research that has been developed over the last 25 years to make post-divorce arrangements appropriate for kids, so they don't experience longing and loss."

But Ms. Marquardt, who conducted a survey of 1,500 adults from 18 to 35 whose parents divorced during their childhood, said longing and loss are inevitable.

In publicizing her research, Ms. Marquardt has pointed at her survey and to movies like "The Squid and the Whale" as representing the increasingly vocal opinions of adult children of divorce. In an interview Noah Baumbach, who wrote and directed the movie and was 14 when his parents divorced, insisted that his film is not meant to judge the parents, even when it portrays their joint custody arrangement as hard on the two brothers.

"Some kids are affected much more than others, and it has to do with the dynamics of the family beforehand," he said. "A lot of families never break up, and there's this underlying tension and anxiety. Each situation is so specific."

He seemed reluctant to discuss his own family and the effect divorce had on him. "I almost don't know," he said. "Obviously it was very hard at the time, and you adapt, and it becomes an experience for you."

Many parents say they can plainly see how hard divorce is on children. But of those interviewed for this article, all said they thought their children were better off.

"It's equally unhealthy to not see an open display of love," said Sherwin Bryant, 33, a college professor in Evanston, Ill., who separated six months ago from his wife and now spends half of the week with his two young daughters. "The absence of love is very loud."

In Los Angeles the bird-nesters Ms. Howell and Mr. Bowerman plan to divorce, although they have not filed papers. "We stayed together for many years because of the kids," Ms. Howell said of her 23-year-old marriage. "Finally you ask, Is it better to see happy parents or parents who are always arguing?"

The couple have four children, three girls, ages 17, 15 and 11, and a 9-year-old boy. One of their children, Deanna Bowerman, 15, said she preferred living in her house while her parents came and went to having to move between two separate homes. "It'd be a hassle to move all of us," she said. "They're still both around."

The couple keep most of their belongings and receive mail at their old address. They switch off stays under certain rules: each will leave the house tidy, each is responsible for his or her own groceries, and neither will bring dates. Mr. Bowerman said the arrangement "makes it more difficult" for both parents "because you don't get closure."

But he added, "Right now I see it as the best thing for the kids."

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Dave Chappelle

David Lee

The comedian Dave Chappelle in a bongo mood at Dave Chappelle's Block Party, in September 2004.

Dave Chappelle Is Alive and Well (and Playing Las Vegas)

Macy's Parade 1997

Carlton Roberts, 1997

The balloon accident in this year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was similar to this 1997 incident, in which the Cat in the Hat balloon hit a lamppost at 72nd Street and Central Park West, hitting four people.

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Rescue workers gather around an injured woman in Times Square after a streetlamp hit her. The lamp was knocked down by a passing parade balloon.

Julie Jacobson/Associated Press

A gust of wind sent a giant balloon crashing into a lamppost along the crowded parade route, knocking the lamp onto spectators below.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

One of two injured sisters is taken to an ambulance in Times Square after being hit by a streetlamp

Librado Romero/The New York Times

A streetlight sits on the ground after it hit two spectators at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It was knocked down by a passing parade balloon

Jeff Christensen/Associated Press


The M&M's candy balloon fell onto the street after it hit a lamppost during the parade. A lamp fell from the post and injured two people.

Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times


Handlers worked to keep the Uncle Sam balloon upright in the wind as the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which started in 1924, passed through New York's Columbus Circle.

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Thanksgiving

Brendan Smialowski/AFP – Getty Images

President Bush pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys today. Marshmallow will serve as grand marshall of Disneyland's holiday parade.

November 23, 2005
Two Turkeys Pardoned, With First-Class Tickets
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - With Vice President Dick Cheney at his side, President Bush pardoned two Thanksgiving turkeys, Marshmallow and Yam, on Tuesday and sent them off first class on a United Airlines flight to live out their lives at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif.

In previous years, the pardoned birds were sent to Frying Pan Park in Herndon, Va., where many died within months.

"This year is going to be a little different," Mr. Bush said, moments before a handler wrestled the flapping 37-pound Marshmallow to the stage in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. "Marshmallow and Yam were a little skeptical about going to a place called Frying Pan Park. I don't blame them."

After the bird had settled down, Mr. Bush cautiously stroked its white feathers, patted its head and invited a group of schoolchildren to the stage to do the same. Mr. Cheney, who has never been known as a lively campaigner, hung back in a corner of the stage and approached neither the turkey nor the children.

The other turkey, Yam, the alternate, was not on the premises. "He's in a pickup truck hanging out by the South Lawn," Mr. Bush said.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has been pressuring the White House for years to stop sending the turkeys to Frying Pan Park, claimed credit for the switch to Disneyland. A spokesman for the organization, Bruce Friedrich, said that the birds were kept in a small enclosure at Frying Pan Park and that they looked lonely and neglected when he visited them there several times a year.

"It doesn't make any sense at all that the leader of the free world pardons two birds and then sends them to a life of squalor," Mr. Friedrich said. "It's hard to argue with Disneyland."

Joel Brandenberger, a spokesman and lobbyist for the National Turkey Federation, which handles the pardoned birds, said that the animal rights group had nothing to do with the decision to send the birds to Disneyland, "and if they think they did, they're absolutely delusional."

Mr. Brandenberger said that Frying Pan Park had always treated the pardoned turkeys well, but that Marshmallow and Yam were sent to Disneyland because it had asked for the turkeys this year to help celebrate its 50th anniversary.

On Thursday, the birds will be grand marshals in the Disneyland Thanksgiving Day parade and will then live in an enclosure in Frontierland, near the entrance to Santa's Reindeer Roundup, called Big Thunder Ranch the rest of the year. The birds, in cages, traveled first class to California, Mr. Brandenberger said, because Disney and turkey executives took up an entire United first-class cabin.

Shortly after granting the pardons, Mr. Bush left on Air Force One for a Thanksgiving holiday at his Texas ranch.

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Key West

Mike Hentz for The New York Times

With places the 801 Bourbon Bar, Key West appeals to visitors of almost every stripe.

November 18, 2005
Is Key West Going Straight?
By ROBERT ANDREW POWELL

FOR decades, the remote Florida town of Key West has been a refuge for gay tourists, a kind of Southern bookend to Provincetown, Mass. - a place where drag shows, all-male guest houses (complete with communal hot tubs) and a spirit of unbridled hedonism attracted everyone from closeted Midwest accountants to Tennessee Williams.

But recently, soaring real estate prices and the popularity of events like Fantasy Fest - an annual bacchanal of parades, masquerade balls and celebrity look-alike contests that began as a tourism promotion in 1979 and has since evolved into a drunken open-air party that would be right at home on fraternity row - have begun to attract a more heterogenous crowd, one that can at times make Key West look like any other tourist town getting ready for Spring Break.

You can feel the change at the Lighthouse Court, a popular - some would say notorious - gay-only Whitehead Street guesthouse that recently went "all welcome," the local euphemism for accepting heterosexual guests as well as gays. And it's obvious clear across Old Town at the Heron House Court, formerly known as the Fleur de Key and long one of the premier gay-only guesthouses on the island. It started welcoming straight visitors to its 16 rooms in August.

Meanwhile Duval Street, the main commercial street of Old Town, continues to evolve into a strip of Hard Rock Cafes and Margaritavilles. On a sultry evening in late September, a cover band at Sloppy Joe's plowed through Tommy Tutone's lone hit, "Jenny (867-5309)." At Irish Kevin's, a troubadour was convincing his audience of fraternity brothers to sing along to Bon Jovi.

Could Key West, the place that Readers of OutTraveler magazine named the second best resort town in the world (behind Provincetown), be going straight?

"I'd say Key West is less gay friendly than it was 10 years ago," said Gregory Gearhart, a hairdresser from Fort Lauderdale who visits three times a year. Mr. Gearhart was sitting at the Atlantic Shores pool bar, an iconic gay hangout that plans to close next year. He took a sip from his Skyy and Coke and contemplated the impact of his words. "Actually, I wouldn't say it's gay unfriendly. It's becoming different, though. It's not what it once was."

Of course, Key West retains a gay sensibility. There are gay tourist charters to the Dry Tortugas and gay sunset cruises into the Florida Straits. Rainbow flags flutter across Old Town. It's nothing to see a pair of men or pair of women walking on Duval Street hand in hand. A sign posted on a house on Frances Street states: "That 'love thy neighbor' thing, I meant it. - God."

Key West was the first American city to openly recruit gay tourists, and current ads are specifically aimed at gay travelers. A gay and lesbian trolley tour rolls down gay guesthouse row on Fleming Street, passing the Equator, Coconut Grove, Oasis and the Coral Tree Inn. The Island House on Fleming not only remains gay-only, it also features a clothing-optional gym.

On Duval, the La Te Da cabaret continues to offer drag queen reviews. More drag queens work the sidewalk outside the 801 Bourbon Bar, beckoning passing tourists. At the Bourbon Street Pub, a man in a tight pink tank-top still looks right at home.

But for many longtime gay visitors to this 5.9-square-mile island, located about 150 miles southwest of Miami, there is a growing sense that Key West is no longer the gay destination it once was. Some of it is a generational shift, as younger gay travelers can take their choice of gay-friendly destinations like South Beach, Palm Springs, Puerto Vallarta and even - unlikely as it seems - Orlando.

But the shifts are a reflection of more significant changes in Key West itself. Once a low-cost retreat for those who wanted to get away from it all - both gay and straight - it is now one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country. While transplants once could buy up attractive but dilapidated houses in Old Town, those "Carpenter Gothic" houses have now been restored with pastel paint and shiny tin roofs to a standard that would make Martha Stewart applaud. Today, a tiny bungalow in Old Town can sell for $600,000 or more.

"In 1985 you could go to a party that would include a famous writer, a millionaire and a woman who sold beads on Duval," said Michael Browning, one of the owners of the Atlantic Shores, which is scheduled to close in the spring, to be replaced by a 58-unit condominium complex. "That doesn't happen as much anymore. But people talk about how great it was 20 years ago. I'll bet you anything that 20 years from now, they'll talk about how great it was in 2005."

At the Atlantic Shores pool one sunny day this fall, what caught the eye first were the women, many of whom were topless. And then the men reclining on plastic lounge chairs padded with blue cushions. Several of the men were completely naked, soaking up sun as naturally as iguanas. In the pool, men in fluorescent bikinis stood submerged almost to their nostrils, motionless like Everglades alligators stalking deer.

In a survey of gay tourists conducted by the Key West Business Guild, several respondents specifically mentioned the Atlantic Shores as their favorite thing about Key West. "It was a simple business decision," Mr. Browning said of the condo conversion. "A lot of people love the Atlantic Shores, but they weren't necessarily booking rooms at the hotel."

Mr. Browning is not alone in blaming simple economics for many of the changes. The Lighthouse Court, for example, was bought in January by a group of investors who own four other hotels on the island. "They are all all-welcome, so we just folded it into our operation," said Julie Fondriest, the new managing owner of the Lighthouse Court. "It wasn't a slight against the gay community at all."

At Pearl's Rainbow, a former cigar factory that is the island's only women-only guesthouse, Loraine Quigley remained optimistic about the island's gay-friendly identity. "I wouldn't say there's a trend to eliminate gay guesthouses," she said. "One or two properties have switched owners, but that's about it."

Still, at one of the Atlantic Shores regular Sunday night tea parties earlier this fall, a sense of mourning hung in the humid and salty air. There was worry that condos like the ones to be built on this property will change the character of the city. There was talk of moving to Wilton Manors, a growing gay enclave outside Fort Lauderdale. Or perhaps Costa Rica.

"Key West is not going to be the gay Mecca that it was," Charlie Barry, 42, said. He wore jeans and no shirt. A can of Budweiser perspired in his hand. He is a native New Englander known as Woody; he said he first came to Key West in 1992 and has lived in Old Town for the last three years. "I mean, c'mon, it's just for the filthy rich. It's not going to be a gay Key West."

On the dance deck, a drag queen, Miss Angelica Duval, lip-synced her way through a set of disco hits. She redefined Amazonian, with muscular legs and buttocks showcased by a thong. Remove the makeup, the wig and the glitter and she could be a defensive lineman for the Washington Redskins.

Another drag queen, Gina Maseratti, lamented the closing of the Atlantic Shores. "I've been coming here for many years," she said. She wore stiletto heels, a platinum wig and a full face of makeup. "Eventually the condos will be bought up by people who don't live here year-round. The real heart of Key West will sell and move on."

But, in many ways, Gina Maseratti's situation is as complicated and nuanced as Key West's future. Miss Maseratti's given name is Kerry Torr Cressman. He works in construction. He's involved in a committed relationship with a woman, whose shoulder he caressed while he spoke to a reporter. "I don't think people come to Key West for the typical stuff you get in Miami or Fort Lauderdale," he said. "They come to see people like me, a drag queen in a beautiful relationship with a beautiful woman who is a schoolteacher."

Miss Maseratti was about to step into the spotlight to lip sync a disco version of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" during which she would strip off her khaki skirt to reveal a blue maillot spangled with white stars. As she headed over to the stage, she insisted she was not about to leave the island, even if the Atlantic Shores did.

"I still love Key West," she said. "I love it. I'll be here until they drag me out screaming and kicking."

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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. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Woodward covered in Huffington Blog

Arianna Huffington Bio

11.22.2005

Memo to Woodward: Endlessly Evoking Watergate Won’t Make Us Forget Plamegate

READ MORE: Iraq, Judith Miller, Scooter Libby, Indictments, CIA, Valerie Plame, George W. Bush

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…

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Xtreme Sports

Article30 August 2005 What's so extreme about extreme sports? There is a lot of PR puff behind the idea that new sports challenge our safety-first, shrink-wrapped world. 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.

Iraq War

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). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 17, Page B16 Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education