 | Graduation 2007 The Graduates- On your first sleepover, your best friend’s mother asks if you would like a tuna-fish-salad sandwich. Your own mother gives you tuna-fish-salad sandwiches all the time, so you say, “Sure.” When you bite into the sandwich, though, you realize, too late, that your best friend’s mother’s tuna-fish salad tastes nothing like the tuna-fish salad your mother makes. You never dreamed that it was possible for there to be more than one way to prepare tuna-fish salad. And what’s with the bread? It’s brown, and appears to have tiny seeds in it. What is more unnerving is the fact that your best friend obviously considers his mother’s tuna-fish salad to be perfectly normal and has been eating it with enjoyment all his life. Later on, you discover that the pillows in your best friend’s house are filled with some kind of foam-rubber stuff instead of feathers. The toilet paper is pink. What kind of human beings are these? At two o’clock in the morning, you throw up, and your mother comes and takes you home.
College, from which some 1.5 million people will graduate this year, is, basically, a sleepover with grades. In college, it is not so cool to throw up or for your mother to come and take you home. But plenty of students do throw up, and undergo other forms of mental and bodily distress, and plenty take time off from school or drop out. Almost half the people who go to college never graduate. Except in the case of a few highfliers and a somewhat larger number of inveterate slackers, college is a stressful experience. American colleges notoriously inflate grades, but they can never inflate them enough, because education in the United States has become hypercompetitive and every little difference matters. In 1960, Harvard College had around five thousand applicants and accepted roughly thirty per cent; this year, it had almost twenty-three thousand applicants and accepted nine per cent. And the narrower the funnel, the finer applicants grind themselves in order to squeeze through it. Perversely, though, the competitiveness is a sign that the system is doing what Americans want it to be doing. Americans want education to be two things, universal and meritocratic. They want everyone to have a slot who wants one, and they want the slots to be awarded according to merit. The system is not perfect: children from higher-income families enjoy an advantage in competing for the top slots. But there are lots of slots. There are more than four thousand institutions of higher education in the United States, enrolling more than seventeen million students. Can you name fifty colleges? Even if you could name a thousand, there would be three thousand you hadn’t heard of. Most of these schools accept virtually all qualified applicants. What makes for the stress is meritocracy. Meritocratic systems are democratic (since, in theory, everyone gets a place at the starting line) and efficient (since resources are not wasted on the unqualified), but they are huge engines of anxiety. The more purely meritocratic the system—the more open, the more efficient, the fairer—the more anxiety it produces, because there is no haven from competition. Your mother can’t come over and help you out—that would be cheating! You’re on your own. Everything you do in a meritocratic society is some kind of test, and there is never a final exam. There is only another test. People seem to pick up on this earlier and earlier in their lives, and at some point it starts to get in the way of their becoming educated. You can’t learn when you’re afraid of being wrong.
The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States today is business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Eight per cent are awarded in education, five per cent in the health professions. By contrast, fewer than four per cent of college graduates major in English, and only two per cent major in history. There are more bachelor’s degrees awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which classifies institutions of higher education, no longer uses the concept “liberal arts” in making its distinctions. This makes the obsession of some critics of American higher education with things like whether Shakespeare is being required of English majors beside the point. The question isn’t what the English majors aren’t taking; the question is what everyone else isn’t taking. More than fifty per cent of Americans spend some time in college, and American higher education is the most expensive in the world. The average annual tuition at a four-year private college is more than twenty-two thousand dollars. What do we want from college, though? It is hard to imagine that there could be one answer that was right for each of the 1.5 million or so people graduating this year, one part of the college experience they all must have had. Any prescription that had to spread itself across that many institutions would not be very deep. One thing that might be hoped for, though, is that, somewhere along the way, every student had a moment of vertigo (without unpleasant side effects). In commencement speeches and the like, people say that education is all about opportunity and expanding your horizons. But some part of it is about shrinking people, about teaching them that they are not the measure of everything. College should give them the intellectual equivalent of their childhood sleepover experience. We want to give graduates confidence to face the world, but we also want to protect the world a little from their confidence. Humility is good. There is not enough of it these days. ? Illustration: Tom BachtellCopyright © 2007 CondéNet. All rights reserved.
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| Religion Books Atheists with AttitudeWhy do they hate Him?.. - Great portents and disasters turn some minds to God and others away from him. When an unusually bright and long-tailed comet was tracked through the sky in the last two months of 1680, posters and sermons called on Christians to repent. A hen in Rome seemed to confirm that the Day of Judgment was near. On December 2nd, it made an extraordinarily loud cackle and produced an exceptionally large egg, on which could be seen a likeness of the comet, or so it was said. This added to the religious panic. But the comet also sparked a small triumph for rationalism. In the next few years, as Armageddon somehow failed to arrive, a stream of pamphlets across Europe and America argued that heavenly displays were purely natural phenomena. The skeptics won the day. From the eighteenth century onward, no respectable intellectual saw comets as direct messages from God—though there were still some fears that one might eventually hit the earth.
The felling of the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, brought its share of religion. Two populist preachers, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, called it divine punishment (though both quickly withdrew their remarks), and not only the bereaved prayed for help. But September 11th and its aftershocks in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere are more notable for causing an outbreak of militant atheism, at least on bookshelves. The terrorist attacks were carried out in the name of Islam, and they have been taken, by a string of best-selling books, to illustrate the fatal dangers of all religious faith. The first of these books was “The End of Faith,” by Sam Harris, which was published in 2004 and was on the Times paperback best-seller list for thirty-three weeks. Then came “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” by Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts University, who has written popular books on the science of consciousness and on Darwin. Next was “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and Britain’s preëminent science writer. Harris joined battle again last year with “Letter to a Christian Nation,” which renewed his attack on Christianity in particular. And now there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (Twelve; $24.99), by Christopher Hitchens, which is both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot. Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.” Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.” It’s possible to wonder, indeed, where plain speaking ends and misanthropy begins: Hitchens says that the earth sometimes seems to him to be “a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.” He certainly likes to adopt the tone of a bemused Martian envoy hammering out a report for headquarters. (We hear of “a showbiz woman bizarrely known as Madonna.”) In a curious rhetorical tic, Hitchens regularly refers to people whom he wishes to ridicule by their zoological class. Thus the followers of Muhammad are “mammals,” as is the prophet himself, and so are the seventeenth-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi and St. Francis of Assisi; Japan’s wartime Emperor Hirohito is a “ridiculously overrated mammal,” and Kim Il Sung, the father of North Korea’s current dictator, is a “ludicrous mammal.” Hitchens is trying to say that these people are mere fallible mortals; but his way of saying it makes him come across as rather an odd fish. He is also a fallible one. After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa, which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS. Hitchens is on firmer ground as he traipses around the world on a tour of sectarian conflicts. He recounts how, a week before September 11th, a hypothetical question was put to him by Dennis Prager, an American talk-show host. Hitchens was asked to imagine himself in a foreign city at dusk, with a large group of men coming toward him. Would he feel safer, or less safe, if he were to learn that they were coming from a prayer meeting? With justified relish, the widely travelled Hitchens responds that he has had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad, and that, in each case, the answer would be a resounding “less safe.” He relates what he has seen or knows of warring factions of Protestants and Catholics in Ulster; Christians and Muslims in Beirut and in Bethlehem; Hindus and Muslims in Bombay; Roman Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Serbians, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; and Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians in Baghdad. In these cases and others, he argues, religion has exacerbated ethnic conflicts. As he puts it, “religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.” That’s more plausible than what Sam Harris has to say on the subject. He maintains that religious belief not only aggravates such conflicts but is “the explicit cause” of them. He believes this even of Northern Ireland, where the Troubles between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Republicans began around 1610, when Britain confiscated Irish land and settled English and Scottish planters on it. As far as Harris is concerned, Islam brought down the Twin Towers, thanks in no small part to the incendiary language of the Koran; Middle East politics, history, and economics are irrelevant sideshows. This thesis suffers from a problem of timing: if he is right, why did Al Qaeda not arise, say, three hundred years ago, when the Koran said exactly what it says now? One practical problem for antireligious writers is the diversity of religious views. However carefully a skeptic frames his attacks, he will be told that what people in fact believe is something different. For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches. So how is a would-be iconoclast supposed to tell exactly what the faithful believe? Interpreting the nature and prevalence of religious opinions is tricky, particularly if you depend on polls. Respondents can be lacking in seriousness, unsure what they believe, and evasive. Spiritual values and practices are what pollsters call “motherhood” issues: everybody knows that he is supposed to be in favor of them. Thus sociologists estimate that maybe only half of the Americans who say that they regularly attend church actually do so. The World Values Survey Association, an international network of social scientists, conducts research in eighty countries, and not long ago asked a large sample of the earth’s population to say which of four alternatives came closest to their own beliefs: a personal God (forty-two per cent chose this), a spirit or life force (thirty-four per cent), neither of these (ten per cent), don’t know (fourteen per cent). Depending on what the respondents understood by a “spirit or life force,” belief in God may be far less widespread than simple yes/no polls suggest. In some religious research, it is not necessarily the respondents who are credulous. Harris has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps. He also worries about a poll that said that nearly three-quarters of Americans believe in angels—by which, to judge from blogs and online forums on the subject, some of them may have meant streaks of luck, or their own delightful infants. The Bible is a motherhood issue, too. Harris takes at face value a Gallup poll suggesting that eighty-three per cent of Americans regard it as the Word of God, and he, like Dawkins and Hitchens, uses up plenty of ink establishing the wickedness of many tales in the Old Testament. Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. The tangled diversity of faith is, in the event, no obstacle for Hitchens. He knows exactly which varieties of religion need attacking; namely, the whole lot. And if he has left anyone out he would probably like to hear about it so that he can rectify the omission. From the perspective of the new atheists, religion is all one entity; those who would apologize for any of its forms—Harris and Dawkins, in particular, insist on this point—are helping to sustain the whole. But, though the vague belief in a “life force” may be misguided, it’s hard to make the case that it’s dangerous. And there’s a dreamy incoherence in their conviction that moderate forms of religion somehow enable fundamentalist zeal and violence to survive. Are we really going to tame the fervor of an extremist imam’s mosque in Waziristan by weakening the plush-toy creed of a nondenominational church in Chappaqua? If there were no religion, it’s true, neither house of worship would exist. So perhaps we are just being asked to sway along with John Lennon’s “Imagine.” (“Imagine there’s no countries /It isn’t hard to do /Nothing to kill or die for /And no religion too.”) When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions. In “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” Jonathan Glover, who is the director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London, documents such opposition, and writes, “It is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have . . . come from principled religious commitment.” The loss of such commitment, Glover suggests, should be of concern even to nonbelievers. Still, Hitchens succeeds in compiling a list of evils that the faithful, too, should find sobering. Now that so much charitable work is carried out by secular bodies, religious ones have to work harder to keep the moral high ground. For the Catholic Church in particular—with its opposition to contraception, including the distribution of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, and the covering up of child abuse by priests—the ledger is not looking good. Bertrand Russell, who had a prodigious knowledge of history and a crisp wit, claimed in 1930 that he could think of only two useful contributions that religion had made to civilization. It had helped fix the calendar, and it had made Egyptian priests observe eclipses carefully enough to predict them. He could at least have added Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and more than a few paintings; but perhaps the legacy of religion is too large a conundrum to be argued either way. The history of the West has been so closely interwoven with the history of religious institutions and ideas that it is hard to be confident about what life would have been like without them. One of Kingsley Amis’s lesser-known novels, “The Alteration,” tried to envisage an alternative course for modern history in which the Reformation never happened, science is a dirty word, and in 1976 most of the planet is ruled by a Machiavellian Pope from Yorkshire. In this world, Jean-Paul Sartre is a Jesuit and the central mosaic in Britain’s main cathedral is by David Hockney. That piece of fancy is dizzying enough on its own. But imagine attempting such a thought experiment in the contrary fashion, and rolling it back several thousand years to reveal a world with no churches, mosques, or temples. The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief. In the early days of the Christian era, nobody was fantasizing about a world with no religion, but there were certainly those who liked to imagine a world with no Christians. The first surviving example of anti-Christian polemic is strikingly similar in tone to that of some of today’s militant atheists. In the second century, it was Christians who were called “atheists,” because they failed to worship the accepted gods. “On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians” was written in 178 A.D. by Celsus, an eclectic follower of Plato. The Christian deity, Celsus proclaimed, is a contradictory invention. He “keeps his purposes to himself for ages, and watches with indifference as wickedness triumphs over good,” and only after a long time decides to intervene and send his son: “Did he not care before?” Moses is said to be “stupid”; his books, and those of the prophets, are “garbage.” Christians have “concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishment.” Their injunction to turn the other cheek was put much better by Socrates. And their talk of a Last Judgment is “complete nonsense.” There’s not much more where that came from, because within a couple of hundred years Christians became the ones to decide who counted as an atheist and was to be punished accordingly. Pagan anti-Christian writings were destroyed wherever possible. In truth, from the start of the Christian era until the eighteenth century, there were probably very few people in the West who thought that there was no God of any sort. Those thinkers who had serious doubts about the traditional conception of God—of whom there were many in the seventeenth century—substituted another sort of deity, usually a more distant or less personalized one. Even Voltaire, one of the fiercest critics of superstition, Christianity, and the Church’s abuse of power, was a man of deep religious feeling. His God, though, was beyond human understanding and had no concern for man. (Voltaire’s satirical tale “Candide,” which attacks the idea that all is for the best in a world closely watched over by a benevolent God, was partly inspired by a huge earthquake in Lisbon, which struck while the faithful were at Mass on All Saints’ Day in 1755 and killed perhaps thirty thousand people.) Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists. In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable. Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once. In Paris, meanwhile, a number of thinkers began to profess atheism openly. They were the first influential group to do so, and included Denis Diderot, the co-editor of the Enlightenment’s great Encyclopédie, and Baron D’Holbach, who hosted a salon of freethinkers. Hume visited them, and made several friends there; they presented him with a large gold medal. But the philosophes were too dogmatic for Hume’s taste. To Hume’s like-minded friend the historian Edward Gibbon, they suffered from “intolerant zeal.” Still, they represented a historical vanguard: explicit attacks on religion as a whole poured forth within the next hundred years. Since all the arguments against belief have been widely publicized for a long time, today’s militant atheists must sometimes wonder why religion persists. Hitchens says that it is born of fear and probably ineradicable. Harris holds that there are genuine spiritual experiences; having kicked sand in the faces of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he dives headlong into the surf of Eastern spirituality, encouraging readers to try Buddhist techniques of meditation instead of dangerous creeds. Dawkins devotes a chapter, and Dennett most of his book, to evolutionary accounts of how religion may have arisen and how its ideas spread. It’s thin stuff, and Dennett stresses that these are early days for a biological account of religion. It may, however, be too late for one. If a propensity toward religious belief is “hard-wired” in the brain, as it is sometimes said to be, the wiring has evidently become frayed. This is especially true in rich countries, nearly all of which—Ireland and America are exceptions—have relatively high rates of unbelief. After making allowances for countries that have, or recently have had, an officially imposed atheist ideology, in which there might be some social pressure to deny belief in God, one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s—let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be. ? Art: JONATHAN BOROFSKY, “FOUR GODS” (1994)Copyright © 2007 CondéNet. All rights reserved New Yorker Magazine |
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| Jerry Falwell Dies at 73 .. May 16, 2007 Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority Founder, Dies at 73 The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist preacher who founded the Moral Majority and brought the language and passions of religious conservatives into the hurly-burly of American politics, died yesterday in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73. His death was announced by Liberty University, in Lynchburg, where Mr. Falwell, its founder, was chancellor. The university said the cause had not been determined, adding that he died in a hospital after being found unconscious yesterday morning in his university office. Mr. Falwell went from a Baptist preacher in Lynchburg to a powerful force in electoral politics, at home in both the millennial world of fundamentalist Christianity and the earthly blood sport of the political arena. As much as anyone, he helped create the religious right as a political force, defined the issues that would energize it for decades and cemented its ties to the Republican Party. He came to prominence first as a religious broadcaster through his “Old-Time Gospel Hour” and then, in 1979, as the leader of the Moral Majority, an organization whose very name drew a vivid line in the sand of American politics. After the organization disbanded a decade later, he remained a familiar and powerful figure, supporting Republicans like George W. Bush, mobilizing conservatives and finding his way into a thicket of controversies. And he built institutions and groomed leaders — including his two sons, who will succeed him in two important positions. Mr. Falwell grew up in a household that he described as a battleground between the forces of God and the powers of Satan. In his public life he often had to walk a line between the certitudes of fundamentalist religion, in which the word of God was absolute and inviolate, and the ambiguities of mainstream politics, in which a message warmly received at his Thomas Road Baptist Church might not play as well on “NBC Nightly News.” As a result, he was a lightning rod for controversy and caricature. After the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, he apologized for calling Muhammad a terrorist and for suggesting that the attacks had reflected God’s judgment on a nation spiritually weakened by the American Civil Liberties Union, providers of abortion and supporters of gay rights. He was ridiculed for an article in his National Liberty Journal suggesting that Tinky Winky, a character in the “Teletubbies” children’s show, could be a hidden homosexual signal because the character was purple, had a triangle on his head and carried a handbag. Behind the controversies was a shrewd, savvy operator with an original vision for effecting political and moral change. He rallied religious conservatives to the political arena at a time when most fundamentalists and other conservative religious leaders were inclined to stay away. And he helped pulled off what had once seemed an impossible task: uniting religious conservatives from many faiths and doctrines by emphasizing what they had in common. He had many failures as well as successes and always remained a divisive figure, demonized on the left in much the way Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, or Jane Fonda were on the right. Even so, political experts agree he was enormously influential. “Behind the idea of the Moral Majority was this notion that there could be a coalition of these different religious groups that all agree on abortion and homosexuality and other issues even if they never agreed on how to read the Bible or the nature of God,” said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and an expert on religious conservatives. “That was a real innovation,” Mr. Green continued, “And even if that’s an idea that did not completely originate with Falwell, it’s certainly an idea he developed and championed independently of others. It was a very important insight, and it’s had a huge influence on American politics.” Seeds of Faith Jerry Falwell was born Aug. 11, 1933, in Lynchburg. His ancestors there dated back to 1669, and his more immediate ones lived as if characters in the pageant of sin and redemption that formed his world view. His paternal grandfather, Charles W. Falwell, embittered by the death of his wife and a favorite nephew, was a vocal and decisive atheist who refused to go to church and ridiculed those who did. His father, Carey H. Falwell, was a flamboyant entrepreneur who opened his first grocery store when he was 22. He was soon operating 17 service stations, many with little restaurants and stores attached. He built oil storage tanks and owned an oil company and in 1927 began American Bus Lines, supplying old battery-operated movie projectors to show Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy movies to riders. Later, he turned to bootlegging liquor, among other enterprises. His best-known business was the Merry Garden Dance Hall and Dining Room, high on a Virginia hilltop, which became the center of Virginia’s swing society. Carey Falwell, too, had no use for religion. He was left shaken forever by an episode in which he shot his brother to death. He became a heavy drinker and died of liver disease at the age of 55. On the other hand, Mr. Falwell’s mother, the former Helen Beasley, was deeply religious. Every Sunday when he awoke, Mr. Falwell recalled, Charles Fuller’s “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” was ringing out from the radio. “It was my mother who planted the seeds of faith in me from the moment I was born,” Mr. Falwell said in his autobiography, “Strength for the Journey.” What he saw in his own family, he said, was the battle between God and the Enemy, the malignant force just as real and just as determined to produce evil as God is to create good. It was the Enemy who destroyed his father and grandfather, he said, and God whose grace ennobled his mother. In his telling, Mr. Falwell chose God on Jan. 20, 1952, when he was 18. It was an experience, he said, not of blinding lights and heavenly voices. “God came quietly into Mom’s kitchen” and answered her prayers, he said. He declared his acceptance of Christ that night at the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, on an evening in which he also first saw the woman who would become his wife, the church pianist, Macel Pate. The next day he bought a Bible, a Bible dictionary and James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Two months later, he decided he wanted to become a minister and spread the word. He transferred from Lynchburg College, where he had hoped to study mechanical engineering, to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo. Returning home, he decided to start his own church, an experience that melded his mother’s faith with his father’s entrepreneurial instincts. He started the Thomas Road Baptist Church with $1,000 and an initial congregation of 35 adults and their families in an abandoned building that had housed the Donald Duck Bottling Company. Mr. Falwell began building his church in 1956 much as he would build a political movement. Carrying a yellow legal pad and a Bible, he set out to visit 100 homes a day, knocking on doors to seek members. Soon after the church opened, he began a half-hour daily radio broadcast. Six months later, he broadcast his first televised version of the “Old-Time Gospel Hour.” He was struck by how effective the radio and television broadcasts were in drawing new members. “Television made me a kind of instant celebrity,” he wrote. “People were fascinated that they could see and hear me preach that same night in person.” On the church’s first anniversary, in 1957, 864 people showed up to worship, and he felt he was on his way. The church grew. Anticipating the megachurches to come, it morphed into a social service dynamo, with a home for alcoholics, a burgeoning Christian Academy, summer camps and worldwide missions. In 1971, Mr. Falwell established Liberty University, originally Liberty Baptist College, with the intent of making it a national university for fundamentalist Christians. The same year, when the “Old-Time Gospel Hour” began broadcasting nationally from his church’s sanctuary, he gained a national audience at a time when televised evangelism was exploding. Political Action There were reversals as well. A lawsuit in July 1973 by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission accused the church of “fraud and deceit” and “gross insolvency” in the selling of $6.6 million worth of bonds for church expansion and services. The charges were dropped a month later after a United States District Court found that there had been no intentional wrongdoing. As the cultural passions and transformations of the 1960s and ’70s swept the nation, Mr. Falwell, like many religious leaders, struggled with what role to play. He saw ministers joining the civil rights movement and was unimpressed. “Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners,” he said in a sermon titled “Ministers and Marchers” in March 1964. “If as much effort could be put into winning people to Jesus across the land as is being exerted in the present civil rights movement, America would be turned upside down for God.” His position reflected his opposition at the time to the civil rights movement and his loyalty to a long fundamentalist tradition in which the faithful believed their role was to cater to the soul, not to the transitory tides of politics. But Mr. Falwell said the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, produced an enormous change in him. Soon he began preaching against the ruling and calling for Christians to become involved in political action. In 1977, he supported the singer Anita Bryant’s efforts to repeal an ordinance granting equal rights to gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla. The next year, he played a similar role in California. He urged churches to register voters and for religious conservatives to campaign for candidates who supported their positions. He organized “I Love America” rallies, blending patriotism and conservative values; students at Liberty University produced their own upbeat presentations around the country. As he told it, at a meeting of conservatives in his office in 1979, Paul M. Weyrich, the commentator and activist, said to him: “Jerry, there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues. But they aren’t organized.” To Mr. Falwell, that suggested a movement encompassing more than just evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. He envisioned one that would also include other Protestants, Catholics, Jews, even atheists, all with a similar agenda on abortion, gay rights, patriotism and moral values. “I was convinced,” he wrote, “that there was a ‘moral majority’ out there among these more than 200 million Americans sufficient in number to turn back the flood tide of moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism.” The movement, he said, would be pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral and pro-American — precisely the kind of broad agenda that could unite conservatives of different faiths and backgrounds. His agenda also included fervent support for Israel, even if his relations with Jews were often rocky; in 1999, for example, he apologized for saying that the Antichrist was probably alive and if so would be in the form of a male Jew. The Moral Majority, he said, had a basic goal in building its membership: “Get them saved, baptized and registered.” He held up a Bible at political rallies, telling followers: “If a man stands by this book, vote for him. If he doesn’t, don’t.” Within three years of the Moral Majority’s founding, he boasted of a $10 million budget, 100,000 trained clergymen and several million volunteers. In 1980, the Moral Majority was credited with playing a role in the election of Ronald Reagan and in dozens of Congressional races. The election gave resounding evidence of the potential of religious conservatives in politics. They themselves were electrified by their influence, but many others were alarmed, fearing an intolerant movement of lockstep zealots voting en masse for the preachers’ designated candidates. A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale University in 1981, accused the Moral Majority and other conservative groups of a “radical assault” on the nation’s political values. “A self-proclaimed Moral Majority and its satellite of client groups, cunning in the use of a native blend of old intimidation and new technology, threaten the values” of the nation, Mr. Giamatti told Yale’s entering freshman class of 1985. He called the organization “angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality.” But many of those who defend mixing religion and politics, not all of them conservatives, say it is a form of bigotry to seek to deny religious conservatives their voice in the political process. Mr. Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989, saying “our mission is accomplished.” But he remained a lightning rod. While running for the Republican presidential nomination against George W. Bush in 2000, Senator John McCain of Arizona characterized Mr. Falwell and the evangelist Pat Robertson as “forces of evil” and called them “agents of intolerance.” He soon apologized, but the remarks, believed to have alienated the party’s base, were seen as enormously damaging to his candidacy. The two men later reconciled. Last year, Mr. McCain delivered the commencement address at Liberty University. For all the controversy, Mr. Falwell was often an unconvincing villain. His manner was patient and affable. His sermons had little of the white-hot menace of those of his contemporaries like Jimmy Swaggart. He shared podiums with Senator Kennedy, appeared at hostile college campuses and in 1984 spent an evening before a crowd full of hecklers at Town Hall in New York, probably not changing many minds but nevertheless expressing good will. He seemed “about as menacing as the corner grocer,” the conservative writer Joseph Sobran wrote in National Review in 1980. Many experts say his role as a direct participant in politics may have peaked with the Moral Majority. Others, like Ralph Reed and Karl Rove, were even more successful in taking Mr. Falwell’s ideas and translating them into lasting political power and influence. But he never left the public eye, whether trying to rescue the foundering PTL ministry in the late 1980s, seeing his libel suit against Larry Flynt go to the Supreme Court or describing President Bill Clinton as an “ungodly liar.” Culture vs. Politics It could be argued that he affected electoral politics more than mainstream culture. The Moral Majority, for instance, began a campaign to “clean up” television programs in the 1980s, but no one viewed the initiative as a great success. After President Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial, Mr. Weyrich wrote his supporters to say that maybe there was not a “moral majority” after all. For all Mr. Falwell’s influence on the world stage, home always remained Lynchburg and his church. Last year the church moved to grand and vast new quarters in Lynchburg, with a membership of about 22,000. Besides his wife, Macel, whom he married in 1958, Mr. Falwell is survived by two sons, Jerry Jr., of Goode, Va., who will succeed his father as Liberty University’s chancellor, and the Rev. Jonathan Falwell, of Lynchburg, who will become senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church; a daughter, Jeannie Savas, a surgeon, of Richmond; a fraternal twin brother, Gene, of Rustburg, Va.; and eight grandchildren. To the end of his life, Mr. Falwell remained active at Liberty University, expanding the campus by buying surrounding land and erecting buildings. And he continued to participate in the political discourse, meeting with prospective Republican candidates for president in the 2008 campaign and inviting them to speak at Liberty. He preached every Sunday and remained openly political in his sermons, declaring, for example, that the election of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to the presidency would represent a grave threat to the country. He surprised some critics, who felt his views on some social issues, like gay rights, had moderated over time. But, at his core, he remained through his career what he was at the beginning: a preacher and moralist, a believer in the Bible’s literal truth, with convictions about religious and social issues rooted in his reading of Scripture. So there was no distinction at all between his view of the political and the spiritual. “We are born into a war zone where the forces of God do battle with the forces of evil,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Sometimes we get trapped, pinned down in the crossfire. And in the heat of that noisy, distracting battle, two voices call out for us to follow. Satan wants to lead us into death. God wants to lead us into life eternal.” Margalit Fox contributed reporting.
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| Ivy League Crunch 
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times Jonathan Miller, a senior at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., decided not to apply to Ivy League universities. May 16, 2007 Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Lehigh University has never been as sought after as Stanford, Yale or Harvard. But this year, awash in applications, it churned out rejection letters and may break more hearts when it comes to its waiting list. Call them second-tier colleges (a phrase some administrators despise) or call them the new Ivies (this, they can live with). Twenty-five to 40 universities like Lehigh, traditionally perceived as being a notch below the most elite, have seen their cachet climb because of the astonishing competitive crush at the top. “It’s harder to get into Bowdoin now than it was to get into Princeton when I worked there,” said William M. Shain, who worked at Princeton in the 1970s and is now dean of admissions and financial aid at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me. Bowdoin is one of those benefiting from the spillover as the country’s most prestigious colleges turn away nearly 9 out of 10 applicants. At Lehigh, known for its strength in engineering and business, about 12,000 students applied this year. That is a whopping 50 percent increase in applications over seven years ago and more than 10 times the seats available in a freshman class of 1,150. The median SAT score of admitted students has climbed about 10 points a year in recent years, officials said. Students have generally been quicker to adapt to the new realities than parents have been, many guidance counselors said. “My sense is that parents are a lot more concerned with how the name is going to look to neighbors and family members, and there is a real sense among parents that it’s almost embarrassing if your child has to settle for a lower-level school,” said Carolyn Lawrence, a private college counselor and the author of a blog, AdmissionsAdvice.com. Some students who might have readily won admission to Lehigh, Middlebury College, Colgate University, Pomona College, Emory University or New York University just a few years ago are now relegated to waiting lists, left to confront the long odds that an offer of admission might materialize over the next month. John Dunham, a senior at the private Delbarton School in Morristown, N.J., had trained his sights on Bucknell University and Lafayette College. He was rejected by Bucknell and put on the waiting list at Lafayette. His college counselor pushed him toward Kenyon College in Ohio, or as the counselor put it “the Williams of the Midwest.” But Mr. Dunham, a solid student who played football and baseball in high school, decided to play baseball on an athletic scholarship at Central Connecticut State. “People are definitely broadening their horizons, because it’s gotten so competitive,” Mr. Dunham said. The logjam is the result of supply and demand. The number of students graduating from high school has been increasing, and the preoccupation with the top universities, once primarily a Northeastern phenomenon, has become a more national obsession. High-achieving students are also applying to more colleges than they used to, primarily because of uncertainty over where they will be admitted. Supply, however, has remained constant. Most of the sought-after universities have not expanded their freshman classes. The result, said Jonathan Miller, a senior at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., is that many classmates perceive institutions like Tufts University, Bowdoin, the University of Rochester and Lehigh in a new light. “I would say that high school students are looking more and more at these schools,” he said, “the way they used to look at the Ivies.” An A student with good SAT scores, Mr. Miller said that he considered applying to Brown University, among others, but that his guidance counselor discouraged him, emphasizing the tough odds. Mr. Miller decided instead to apply early admission to Tufts, and by December, had been accepted. He said he was delighted. Some students who have accepted offers from these colleges were rejected by the most prestigious universities. Others, keenly aware of the extreme competition at the top, decided at the outset to focus on colleges more likely to admit them. “I’m sure part of what we’re seeing is people are saying, ‘Well, if the Ivies and Duke are inaccessible, where do I go to get a similar academic experience?’ ” said Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at Rochester. There are other reasons, too, why these colleges and universities find their stock climbing. To position themselves in the fiercely competitive market, they have hired stronger faculty; built new libraries, science complexes, dining halls, fitness centers and dormitories; and created international programs and interdisciplinary majors. Many have also sought to transform themselves from regional institutions to national ones, recruiting across the country. At Middlebury, applications have increased by 1,000 in each of the last two years; nearly 7,200 students applied this year, compared with 5,200 in 2005. At Kenyon, about 4,600 students applied this year, while 2,000 did six years ago. Colgate received 8,752 applications this year, compared with 5,852 a decade ago. And at the University of Vermont, a state institution, nearly 19,000 applications poured in this year, compared with 7,400 seven years ago. Many of the most prestigious public universities like Michigan and Virginia have also become much more selective, especially for out-of-state applicants. The academic profile of students enrolling at these colleges is improving, based on average SAT scores and other data. “We’re getting a remarkably gifted group of students,” said Gerard P. Lennon, associate dean in the college of engineering and applied sciences at Lehigh, who has taught at the university for 27 years. The median SAT score in the combined verbal and math parts of the test is now 1,320 out of 1,600. (That is not counting the writing section of the test.) But the spillover at the second level has also created its own spillover; some students who not long ago would have won admission to these colleges no longer are. The admission rate at Pomona, in Claremont, Calif., was about 15 percent this spring; it was 38 percent 20 years ago. Bowdoin’s rate was 18.5 percent this year and 32 percent eight years ago. At Lehigh, 31 percent were accepted this spring, compared with 47 percent in 2001. High school guidance counselors have become the reality instructors, encouraging students and parents to think more broadly about colleges. “Now a kid who is applying to Harvard, Yale, Princeton is also applying to the Lehighs and Lafayettes,” said Brett Levine, director of guidance at Madison High School in New Jersey. “It’s the same tier, basically.”
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| Roger Clemens might be worth every penny 
Roger Clemens Dismal Rocket Science
Crunch the numbers: Roger Clemens might be worth every penny.
By Jordan Ellenberg
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 12:37 A.M. E.T.
..After Date–>Roger Clemens, the winningest pitcher alive and still an ace at an age when most ballplayers are selling cars, recently stood up in George Steinbrenner’s box at Yankee Stadium, like Mussolini at the balcony, and told a cheering crowd that he was coming back to the Yankees. New York sports being New York sports, the muttering started a half-second after the cheering. Did the Yankees just buy another pennant? Or another Kevin Brown? Is Clemens really worth $18 million?
The question has been chewed over in the sports media since the announcement. But what’s been missing from the debate is the quantitative question at its base. Four months of Clemens is worth a certain amount to the Yankees. How much? Let’s break it down. First of all, how much money is a playoff berth worth to the Yankees? According to the late baseball statistics guru Doug Pappas, the Yankees’ postseason revenues in 2001, a year they made it to the seventh game of the World Series, were $16 million. So, even if we assume that a Rocket-fueled Yankees team will go all the way, Clemens still might not pay back the Yankees’ investment. Of course, fielding a contending team puts more rear ends in the seats during the regular season, too: If the Yankees finish fourth this year, don’t expect sellouts for next year’s weekday homestand against Kansas City. Revenues coming directly from playoff games don’t tell the whole story—there’s a value to just being in the hunt, even if Yankee fans of the “nothing but a ring will do” variety won’t admit it. Luckily, Nate Silver has come up with a computation of the cash value of adding wins to your regular-season record. That value depends on which wins you’re adding: Going from 56 wins to 62 is worth much less than going from 90 (wild-card contender) to 96 (probable division winner). So, where are the Yankees starting from? That is, how many games would they win without Clemens? My go-to source for real-time predictions of this kind is Clay Davenport’s postseason odds page. His projection uses a so-called Monte Carlo system, which means it operates by running simulations of the baseball season again and again to see, on average, what happens. Every day, starting from that day’s standings, his computer runs through 1 million fake seasons, making a best estimate of the odds of each team winning each game. As of this writing, he has the Yankees winning an average of 86.6 games and making the playoffs 36.6 percent of the time. (At the outset of the season, before the Bombers’ current struggles, those numbers were 90.8 games and 52.6 percent.) Starting at 86 or 87 wins is just when extra victories become really valuable: According to Silver’s computation, it would take just four extra wins in the Yankee ledger to make the $18 million payout to Clemens a black-ink transaction. Surely the Rocket’s going to win four games, right? But that’s not the question. He needs to win games the Yankees otherwise wouldn’t have won. Pitchers win games by preventing runs. To determine whether Clemens will help the Yankees win games they would have lost without him, we need to know how many runs Roger Clemens will deny the Yankees’ opponents. If he suits up at the beginning of June, Clemens is likely to make about 23 starts. At his current age, he’s averaging just under six innings a start. So, let’s say he’ll throw 130 innings. Clemens’ ERA last year in Houston was a sterling 2.30, best in the National League. His numbers won’t be that gaudy in the offense-rich AL East (in his last three years in New York, he posted ERAs of 3.51, 4.35, and 3.91), but there’s every reason to expect him to be effective. The most popular baseball prediction systems project Clemens to have an ERA between 3.00 and 3.50 as a Yankee. That means he’d allow between 40 and 50 runs over the course of those 23 starts. But what we really need to know is how many runs Clemens won’t give up—in other words, how many runs would Yankee opponents score in those 130 innings if the Bombers keep sending out the pitchers they’re currently using? And now we come to the crux of the matter. The Yankees pitching, already thin, has been brutalized by injury, and the resulting parade of last-minute replacements to last-minute replacements was certainly a factor in Steinbrenner’s willingness to open his wallet for a season-saving ace. Then again, Chien-Ming Wang and Mike Mussina are already off the disabled list, and by the time Clemens is ready to pitch, only one, not all, of the replacements—Kei Igawa, Matt DeSalvo, Philip Hughes, Chase Wright, and Jeff Karstens—will be starting regularly for the Yankees. Some of these pitchers have shown great promise and one (Igawa) has a long record of success, at least in Japan. It’s hard to imagine there won’t be one of them who’s maintaining, at worst, an ERA of 6.00. If that’s the case, that pitcher would give up 87 runs in the same 130 innings we’re expecting from Clemens. Assume Clemens saves the Yankees 40 runs over the course of the season. How much does this boost the Yankees in the standings? For this, we need to use a remarkable tool developed by Bill James in the early days of sabermetrics, the Pythagorean formula. Though it has the same name as one, it isn’t a mathematical theorem, but it’s about as close as you get in baseball statistics—and it allows you to predict the effect a change in runs scored or runs allowed will have on winning percentage. James’ formula reads PCT = RS2 / (RS2 + RA2)
where PCT is the team’s winning percentage, RS is runs scored, and RA is runs against. This season, the Yankees are on pace to lead the league in runs scored with 900. If we take this 900-runs-scored figure as fixed, then for the Yankees to end up winning 86.6 games, they’d be expected to allow about 840 runs. Take away the 40 runs saved by Clemens and you would get a record of 90-72. In other words, Clemens would get the Yankees those four wins. Thus, in our admittedly rough approximation, Clemens would help the Yankees to the tune of just about what they’re paying him. Of course, whenever you carry out probabilistic computations like this, you’re dealing with what Don Rumsfeld would call “known unknowns.” If any one of the Yankee spare parts (or a new one picked up cheaply along the way) steps forward and pitches adequately, the benefit of having Clemens could be cut in half. (Though any serious injury to oldsters like Mike Mussina or Andy Pettitte could make adding Clemens seem genius.) If you think Davenport’s simulation places too much weight on the Yankees’ bad start and expect New York would have won 90 games without Clemens, that brings the break-even point down closer to three extra wins. And if you’re certain, as some are, that Clemens would be pitching for division-rival Boston if he weren’t in New York, you need to take that into account, too. All of these factors are hard to get a quantitative grasp on. And then there’s the fact that the dollar value of Clemens might not be what’s ultimately in question. If Steinbrenner is willing to spend however much it takes to increase the Yankees’ chances of winning the AL East, even by a fraction, he may simply not care all that much about the expected cash benefit of signing Clemens. Indeed, the Yankees, for all their on-field success and huge fan base, lost money last year. Adding one of the best pitchers in baseball certainly makes the Yankees better; whether it will make them richer remains to be seen.
sidebarReturn to article Update, May 16, 2007: Several correspondents have pointed out that thanks to Major League Baseball’s luxury tax, the Clemens signing will cost the Yankees closer to $26 million than $18 million, the latter figure representing his prorated 2007 salary. Strictly by the ledger-book, $26 million is too much to pay for the four wins you’d expect Clemens to add. On the other hand, the same forces that subject the Yankees to the luxury tax mean they may have more to gain from a championship season than Nate Silver’s generic formula suggests. Jordan Ellenberg is an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. His first novel is The Grasshopper King.
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| Amputee Sprinter 
Craig Owen “I don’t see myself as disabled,” said Oscar Pistorius, a former rugby and water polo player. “There’s nothing I can’t do that able-bodied athletes can do.” May 15, 2007 An Amputee Sprinter: Is He Disabled or Too-Abled? By JERÉ LONGMAN Correction Appended MANCHESTER, England, May 14 — As Oscar Pistorius of South Africa crouched in the starting blocks for the 200 meters on Sunday, the small crowd turned its attention to the sprinter who calls himself the fastest man on no legs. Pistorius wants to be the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics. But despite his ascendance, he is facing resistance from track and field’s world governing body, which is seeking to bar him on the grounds that the technology of his prosthetics may give him an unfair advantage over sprinters using their natural legs. His first strides were choppy Sunday, a necessary accommodation to sprinting on a pair of j-shaped blades made of carbon fiber and known as Cheetahs. Pistorius was born without the fibula in his lower legs and with other defects in his feet. He had both legs amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old. At 20, his coach says, he is like a five-speed engine with no second gear. Yet Pistorius is also a searing talent who has begun erasing the lines between abled and disabled, raising philosophical questions: What should an athlete look like? Where should limits be placed on technology to balance fair play with the right to compete? Would the nature of sport be altered if athletes using artificial limbs could run faster or jump higher than the best athletes using their natural limbs? Once at full speed Sunday, Pistorius handily won the 100 and 200 meters here at the Paralympic World Cup, an international competition for disabled athletes. A cold, rainy afternoon tempered his performances, but his victories came decisively and kept him aimed toward his goal of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, even though international track officials seek to block his entrance. Since March, Pistorius has delivered startling record performances for disabled athletes at 100 meters (10.91 seconds), 200 meters (21.58 seconds) and 400 meters (46.34 seconds). Those times do not meet Olympic qualifying standards for men, but the Beijing Games are still 15 months away. Already, Pistorius is fast enough that his marks would have won gold medals in equivalent women’s races at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Pistorius’s time of 46.56 in the 400 earned him a second-place finish in March against able-bodied runners at the South African national championships. This seemingly makes him a candidate for the Olympic 4×400-meter relay should South Africa qualify as one of the world’s 16 fastest teams. “I don’t see myself as disabled,” said the blond, spiky-haired Pistorius, a former rugby and water polo player who declines to park in spaces reserved for the disabled. “There’s nothing I can’t do that able-bodied athletes can do.” An Equalizer or an Edge? Still, the question persists: Do prosthetic legs simply level the playing field for Pistorius, compensating for his disability, or do they give him an inequitable edge via what some call techno-doping? Experts say there have been limited scientific studies on the biomechanics of amputee runners, especially those missing both legs. And because Pistorius lost his legs as an infant, his speed on carbon-fiber legs cannot be compared with his speed on natural legs. Track and field’s world governing body, based in Monaco and known by the initials I.A.A.F., has recently prohibited the use of technological aids like springs and wheels, disqualifying Pistorius from events that it sanctions. A final ruling is expected in August. The International Olympic Committee allows governing bodies to make their own eligibility rules, though it can intervene. Since 2004, for example, transgender athletes have been allowed to compete in the Olympics. “With all due respect, we cannot accept something that provides advantages,” said Elio Locatelli of Italy, the director of development for the I.A.A.F., urging Pistorius to concentrate on the Paralympics that will follow the Olympics in Beijing. “It affects the purity of sport. Next will be another device where people can fly with something on their back.” Others have questioned the governing body’s motivation. “I pose a question” for the I.A.A.F., said Robert Gailey, an associate professor of physical therapy at the University of Miami Medical School, who has studied amputee runners. “Are they looking at not having an unfair advantage? Or are they discriminating because of the purity of the Olympics, because they don’t want to see a disabled man line up against an able-bodied man for fear that if the person who doesn’t have the perfect body wins, what does that say about the image of man?” According to Gailey, a prosthetic leg returns only about 80 percent of the energy absorbed in each stride, while a natural leg returns up to 240 percent, providing much more spring. “There is no science that he has an advantage, only that he is competing at a disadvantage,” Gailey, who has served as an official in disabled sports, said of Pistorius. Foremost among the I.A.A.F.’s concerns is that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs may make him taller than he would have been on natural legs and may unfairly lengthen his stride, allowing him to lower his best times by several seconds in the past three years, while most elite sprinters improve by hundredths of a second. “The rule book says a foot has to be in contact with the starting block,” Leon Fleiser, a general manager of the South African Olympic Committee, said. “What is the definition of a foot? Is a prosthetic device a foot, or is it an actual foot?” I.A.A.F. officials have also expressed concern that Pistorius could topple over, obstructing others or injuring himself and fellow competitors. Some also fear that, without limits on technological aids, able-bodied runners could begin wearing carbon-fiber plates or other unsuitably springy devices in their shoes. Among ethicists, Pistorius’s success has spurred talk of “transhumans” and “cyborgs.” Some note that athletes already modify themselves in a number of ways, including baseball sluggers who undergo laser eye surgery to enhance their vision and pitchers who have elbow reconstruction using sturdier ligaments from elsewhere in the body. At least three disabled athletes have competed in the Summer Olympics: George Eyser, an American, won a gold medal in gymnastics while competing on a wooden leg at the 1904 Games in St. Louis; Neroli Fairhall, a paraplegic from New Zealand, competed in archery in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles; and Marla Runyan, a legally blind runner from the United States, competed in the 1,500 meters at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. But Pistorius would be the first amputee to compete in a track event, international officials said. A sobering question was posed recently on the Web site of the Connecticut-based Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. “Given the arms race nature of competition,” will technological advantages cause “athletes to do something as seemingly radical as having their healthy natural limbs replaced by artificial ones?” wrote George Dvorsky, a member of the institute’s board of directors. “Is it self-mutilation when you’re getting a better limb?” Limits and Accommodations Historically, the I.A.A.F. has placed limits on devices that assist athletes. It prohibits an array of performance-enhancing drugs. And it does not allow wheelchair athletes into the Olympic marathon, given that wheels provide a clear advantage in speed. But the governing body has also embraced technological advances. For instance, it permits athletes to sleep in tent-like devices designed to simulate high altitude and increase oxygen-carrying capacity. As disabled athletes improve their performances, the I.A.A.F. is certain to be faced with more decisions about accommodating them. Last February, Jeff Skiba, who has one leg amputated below the knee, competed in the high jump at the United States indoor track and field championships. Some I.A.A.F. officials say Pistorius’s application should not be treated dismissively. Although he would not be considered a medal candidate, his appearance at the Beijing Games could provide an inspiring story. “There is no real grounds to say he should not be allowed to compete” in the Olympics, said Juan Manuel Alonso of Spain, who heads the I.A.A.F.’s medical and antidoping commission. “We’d like to have more information and biomechanical studies.” His own fear, Pistorius said, is that the governing body, which has not contacted him, will ban him on supposition, not science. “I think they’re afraid to do the research,” Pistorius, a business student at the University of Pretoria, said. “They’re afraid of what they’re going to find, that I don’t have an advantage and they’ll have to let me compete.” Pistorius, whose stated height is 6 feet 1 ¼ inches while wearing his sprinting prosthetics, says that the devices are within an allowed range determined by the length of his thighs. The peak length of his stride, he said, is 9 feet, not 13 feet as some I.A.A.F. officials suggest. There are many disadvantages to sprinting on carbon-fiber legs, Pistorius and his coach said. After a cumbersome start, he needs about 30 meters to gain his rhythm. His knees do not flex as readily, limiting his power output. His grip can be unsure in the rain. And when he runs into a headwind or grows fatigued, he must fight rotational forces that turn his prosthetic devices sideways, said Ampie Louw, who coaches Pistorius. “The I.A.A.F. has got no clue about disabled sport,” said Louw, who has coached Pistorius since 2003. Insufficient credit is given to Pistorius’s resolve in the weight room and on the track, Louw said, describing one intense workout that requires him to run 350 meters in 42 seconds; 300 meters in 34.6 seconds; 200 meters in 22 seconds and 150 meters in 15.4 seconds. “The kid is a born champion,” Louw said. “He doesn’t settle for second best.” Having worn prosthetics since infancy, Pistorius did not have to adjust to artificial legs after he began competing, as many disabled athletes do. He won a gold medal in the 200 at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens. “These have always been my legs,” he said. “I train harder than other guys, eat better, sleep better and wake up thinking about athletics. I think that’s probably why I’m a bit of an exception.” One who is attempting to broaden the definition of an Olympic athlete. “You have two competing issues — fair competition and basic human rights to compete,” said Angela Schneider, a sports ethicist at the University of Western Ontario and a 1984 Olympic silver medalist in rowing. The I.A.A.F. must objectively define when prosthetic devices “go from therapy to enhancement,” Schneider said. The danger of acting hastily, she said, is “you deny a guy’s struggle against all odds — one of the fundamental principles of the Olympics.” Correction: May 16, 2007 A sports graphic yesterday with the continuation of a front-page article about Oscar Pistorius, a South African athlete who wants to be the first amputee runner to compete in the Olympics, carried incorrect renderings in some copies of the “take-off” phase of running. A corrected version can be found online.
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| New Jersey Wildfire May 16, 2007 Strong Winds May Spread New Jersey Wildfire A wildfire sparked by a flare that an F-16 jet dropped over southern New Jersey on Tuesday afternoon continued to burn through thousands of acres of brush and pine forest today, fueled by strong gusts of wind that fire officials worried might pick up throughout the day. The fire ignited more than 20 square miles of brush along the border between Ocean and Burlington Counties, forcing authorities to shut down parts of major highways and evacuate about 2,500 homes. There were no reports of injuries, but several mobile homes were damaged by fire, and heavy smoke permeated the air. Firefighters erected containment lines around the fire and said that as of this afternoon about 30 percent of the blaze had been contained. Forecasts called for rain and thunderstorms this afternoon, but there was also concern that strong winds — reaching as high as 20 miles per hour — might cause the flames to spread. “We certainly hope for rain but we believe at a minimum that we’re going to get additional winds,” Lisa Jackson, the commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said at a news conference this afternoon. “The longer the winds are relatively mild, the longer those burns will set in.” Maris Gabliks, the state’s forest fire service chief, said firefighters had been working through the night using a technique called backfiring — which involves setting controlled fires — to try to squelch the flames. He said about 1,000 emergency workers from five counties were on the ground helping in the effort. “We’re using fire to fight fire,” he said. “We’re trying to starve the fire of the fuel that it needs to burn.” In California, Georgia, Florida and other parts of the country experiencing wildfires, National Guard troops have been delivering water and providing logistics and communication support to fire officials. Smoke from fires that burned more than a quarter-million acres in southern Georgia this week created fog and haze over Atlanta and prompted authorities to warn people with asthma and other lung conditions to stay indoors today. In northern Florida, where 120,000 acres of forest have caught fire, more than 700 homes have been evacuated. Fire officials said the flames had jumped containment lines several times but that it appeared as though the blaze was finally under control. “We do believe we have the resources in place to control the fire,” a spokesman for the United States Forest Service, Jim Caldwell, told The Associated Press. In New Jersey, investigators said the wildfire started on Tuesday just after 2 p.m. when an F-16 flying on a routine training mission from a base in Atlantic City dropped a flare at the Warren Grove Gunnery Range in Ocean County. The plane was attached to the 177th Fighter Wing, based at the Atlantic City airport, and was practicing the use of a self-defense system in which flares are fired as decoys to mislead heat-seeking missiles, said Lt. Col. James Garcia, a spokesman for the New Jersey Air National Guard. The flames spread quickly from the range to the surrounding pinelands, forcing evacuations in Barnegat, Stafford, Woodland and Little Egg Harbor Townships. About 500 people were asked to spend Tuesday night in shelters set up at Southern Regional High School in Manahawkin and at a middle school in Barnegat, officials said. Firefighters worked through the night setting small fires intended to destroy flammable materials in the path of the flames. “This is one of the larger fires we’ve had for quite a few years,” said Mr. Gabliks, the chief of the forest fire service. Chief Gabliks said that warm temperatures, low humidity and high winds fueled the blaze. Brenda Schoeneberg, 46, of Warren Grove, said the authorities arrived at her house about 3 p.m. on Tuesday and told her she had 10 minutes to flee. She stuffed some photos, her medications and insurance papers in the car and drove away. By nightfall, she had returned. “I panicked,” she said. Late Tuesday night, Angela Kyme, 43, of Warren Grove, was still at home, where she stood staring at the tree line. She said she heard the fire alarms in town go off about 3 p.m. “Then I went outside and looked up and saw the dark clouds,” she said. “It was pretty scary.” New Jersey State Police officials said that Routes 72 and 539 were closed and that Exits 63, 67 and 69 on the Garden State Parkway were also shut down to help with the evacuation. Some of the roads remained closed through this morning’s rush, they said. Three years ago, another F-16 accidentally fired eight rounds from a high-powered 20-millimeter cannon through the roof of Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School, just three miles south of the range. The incident took place at night, and no one was hurt; the damage to the school was minor. In 2002, errant practice bombs at the range sparked a small fire that burned about 11,000 acres. Another fire that started at the range destroyed 1,600 acres of the pinelands in 1999. Richard G. Jones and Jill P. Capuzzo contributed reporting.
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Tuesday, May 15, 2007 | Deaths of Skier’s Cousin and Officer Divide a Town 
Jim Cole/Associated Press At the police and fire station in Franconia, N.H., signs of mourning after a police officer was killed while on duty Friday night. May 14, 2007 Deaths of Skier’s Cousin and Officer Divide a Town By NATHANIEL VINTON FRANCONIA, N.H., May 13 — The skier Bode Miller is a proud member of the Kenney clan, which has populated this rugged mountain valley for three generations. The family is famous in the region for questioning authority, and Miller’s rise to the top of his sport extended the family’s outlaw mystique. But the story took a dark turn Friday night, when Miller’s cousin Liko Kenney shot and killed a 48-year-old police officer, Bruce McKay, and was then killed by an area man who arrived on the scene and grabbed McKay’s gun. It was the bloody culmination of a bitter and long-running feud that seemingly everyone in this small town knew about but no one was able to stop. The spasm of violence happened near the Kenney family compound in Easton, where Miller spent his rough-and-tumble childhood. “We’ve got our reputation, our history as outlaws or whatever,” said Bill Kenney, a brother of Liko Kenney’s father and Bode Miller’s mother. “Bode channeled his anger into ski racing very nicely. Liko didn’t have that. He couldn’t handle his anger.” While the confrontation left the two original antagonists dead, it has revealed deep divisions in a community where the Kenneys have often feuded with law enforcement officers. John Lynch, the governor of New Hampshire, visited the Franconia Village Store on Saturday to speak with residents. Of the shooting of an officer, the second in the state in the past seven months, he told The Associated Press, “It really tears at the fabric of the community and the fabric of the state.” As the town prepares for two funerals, law enforcement officials and Miller’s family have closed ranks. Miller did not return telephone calls requesting comment on Sunday, when his family was expecting him to return home from Park City, Utah. On Saturday, he announced he was leaving the United States ski team to race independently, a decision he appears to have made before the shootings. While Liko Kenney, who was 24, is not seen here as a saint, many residents say that McKay and Kenney had feuded for years, and that their history — in and out of court — presented a conflict that made justice impossible. Kenney was convicted in 2003 of assaulting McKay and spent time in jail. Kenney claimed that McKay had attacked him and kicked him in the head, Bill Kenney said. Upon release, Kenney was forced to wear an ankle bracelet that identified his whereabouts to the police. According to several residents of Franconia, the town’s police had agreed after that incident that if McKay ever stopped Kenney in Franconia, Kenney could ask for another officer to be brought to the scene. On Friday evening, Kenney was driving his battered Toyota Celica with his friend Caleb Macaulay when McKay pulled him over. New Hampshire’s attorney general, Kelly Ayotte, told reporters at a news conference in Concord that Kenney asked for another officer, then drove away, with McKay in pursuit for a mile and a half. McKay pulled in front of Kenney’s car, forced it off the road and used pepper spray on Kenney and his passenger, Ayotte told reporters. Kenney drew a handgun and shot McKay four times, then ran over him, Ayotte said, citing video from McKay’s cruiser. At that point, another area man, Gregory Floyd, arrived on the scene with his son in their own truck. After watching the shooting, Ayotte said, he was able to pick up McKay’s gun. He then shot Kenney when, he told the authorities, Kenney refused to put down his gun. Floyd will not be charged, the authorities said. The incident, and the decision not to charge Floyd, inflamed tensions in the area. “If he didn’t have a grudge, he wouldn’t have pulled him over,” said Jeff Bushway, 42, an electrician from nearby Bethlehem. “If it was any other guy, would he have pulled him over and maced him for a traffic violation?” John Moodie, 42, questioned Floyd’s actions. “What gives that guy a right to shoot the kid?” he said. “To me, he’s just as bad as the kid who shot the cop. There’s no reason.” But Ayotte defended McKay’s actions. “This is a situation where he obviously disobeyed a police officer,” she said. Not far away from the fatal scene is the family compound where Miller grew up, in the shadow of Cannon Mountain. Deer hunting is popular, but most local residents say that it is rare for people to carry handguns. Easton is not known as a violent place, according to John Moodie, a resident of Littleton, a town up the interstate. “It was all hippies,” Moodie said. Several members of Miller’s family have been charged with possession of marijuana, including his brother Chelone, a talented snowboarder who sustained a near-fatal head injury in a motorcycle accident just before the 2005-6 season. People who grow up around Franconia tend to be adventurous, even if they do not end up on the wrong side of the law. Miller had his own run-in with McKay. McKay gave him a $250 speeding ticket in 2005 that Miller, already making millions of dollars, contested in court in part to “antagonize McKay,” Miller told Sports Illustrated’s Web site at the time. One person who is outraged about the killings is Jean McLean, who works at Dutch Treat, a bar and grill that is one of the town’s primary social crossroads and has Bode Miller memorabilia on the walls. “We didn’t have any disrespect for the cops growing up,” said McLean, who says she clashed repeatedly with McKay. “They treated us with respect, and in turn we treated them with respect.” She added: “If you got in trouble, they’d say, let’s go see your parents about this, and that put the fear of God into you. There’s such a lack of communication now. Maybe it’s because we all work.” McLean said there had been complaints about McKay. “There’s a lot of people in this town that really disliked him,” she said. McKay, who was unmarried and is survived by a 10-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old stepdaughter, had been working on the town’s police force for more than a decade. “What I knew of Bruce was that he was a very nice guy, and great with kids,” said Lynne Adams, a receptionist at the White Mountain Resort. Adams said that McKay had been the first to attend to her young son when he had a severe asthma attack. The Kenney family arrived in the Easton valley in the middle of the last century, when Bode Miller’s grandfather Jack Kenney started the Tamarack tennis camp, and had five children — Jo, Bill, Davey, Bubba and Mike — all known for being adventurous and headstrong. Bubba Kenney was a talented athlete, on the ski team at Middlebury College, before he drowned in a kayaking accident. Mike Kenney raced professionally as a skier before he started a business building and repairing tennis courts. He has worked at times as a coach with the United States ski team. Liko Kenney was the son of Davey and Michelle Kenney. They lived part of the year in Hawaii at a coffee plantation, where Liko spent part of his childhood. On Sunday, Davey Kenney’s brother Bill struggled to find solace in his nephew’s death. “Liko was not the kind of guy who can rot in jail,” he said. “He loved his freedom.”
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| Soldiers feared captured by al-Qaida 
..> ..> | | BAGHDAD (AP) – U.S. aircraft dropped leaflets seeking information about three U.S. soldiers feared captured by al-Qaida, as troops intensified the search Tuesday despite a warning from the terror group that the hunt will endanger the captives’ lives. The U.S. command said the searchers were trying to isolate areas where they suspect the captives may have been taken after the pre-dawn ambush Saturday in which four American troops and an Iraq soldier were killed. “The captors don’t have freedom of movement,” said Maj. Kenny Mintz of San Diego. “If they have the soldiers, they can’t move them from where they are. We’re doing a deliberate search of the areas.” On Monday, an al-Qaida front group—the Islamic State of Iraq—warned the Americans in a Web statement to call off the hunt “if you want their safety.” The warning could indicate that the presence of about 4,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops in the thinly populated farming area 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad is making it difficult for the captors to move the Americans to a secure location. In a statement Tuesday, the U.S. command said American soldiers have questioned more than 450 people and detained at least 11 since the search began last weekend. A later statement said aircraft had dropped leaflets asking for help in locating the soldiers. Trucks with loudspeakers were roaming the area urging people to come forward with any information. No details of the leaflets or their precise message were released. On Tuesday, the military said the soldiers they were assigned to Company D, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, which is part of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y. At the time of the attack, the soldiers were in two vehicles “at a stationary observation post trying to interdict terrorists who place roadside bombs,” a U.S. spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said. “There were other observation posts that were trying to do this in the area. They were not moving in a convoy. The entire unit was out operating in this same area,” Garver added. Al-Qaida and other insurgent groups have been active for years in the string of towns and villages south of the capital. The area is known as the “triangle of death” because of frequent attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces as well as Shiite civilians traveling to shrine cities in the south. Last June, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the deaths of two U.S. soldiers whose mutilated bodies were later found in the same area. The soldiers attacked last Saturday were assigned to a small patrol base set up as part of the new U.S. strategy to move troops from large, heavily defended garrisons to live and work among the people. Critics of the strategy had warned that such small outposts are more vulnerable to attack. Last month, nine American soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden vehicle near a small patrol base northeast of Baghdad. Last week, an embedded reporter for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, who visited the patrol base south of Baghdad, said the soldiers were housed in a rural home with protective razor wire “not far from the front door.” “Soon after the base was established, insurgents began testing their new neighbors,” the Stars and Stripes said. “In the first months, one convoy came across seven roadside bombs piled outside the front gates. More recently, U.S. officials had gotten reports that a force of more than two dozen insurgents planned to storm the walls” although the attack never materialized. The Pentagon confirmed the dead as Sgt. 1st Class James D. Connell Jr., 40, of Lake City, Tenn.; Pfc. Daniel W. Courneya, 19, of Nashville, Mich.; and Pfc. Christopher E. Murphy, 21, of Lynchburg, Va. The four other soldiers are Sgt. Anthony J. Schober, 23, of Reno, Nev.; Spc. Alex R. Jimenez, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.; Pfc. Joseph J. Anzack Jr., 20, of Torrance, Calif.; and Pvt. Byron W. Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich. The Pentagon said one of those four was among the dead, but it could not confirm which one. “I’m proud of my dad, because he didn’t really fight for himself, he fought for the country,” Connell’s teenage daughter, Courtney, told Knoxville’s WATE-TV. In Michigan, students at Maple Valley High School created a memorial for Courneya, who graduated in 2005 and was well-known in the small community southwest of Lansing. He was a member of the school’s track and soccer teams and played clarinet in the band. “It’s a tribute of photos, posters, plaques and a picture of him in his uniform,” school official Kelly Zank told The Associated Press on Tuesday. Courneya’s mother, Wendy Thompson, said her husband, Army Spc. David Thompson, was in Iraq and returning home after learning of his stepson’s death. Also Tuesday, at least 51 people were killed or found dead across the country. They included seven killed in a pair of bombings in Baghdad’s Tayaran Square shopping area and four who died when mortar shells struck the Shiite area of Sadr City. Under a new government policy limiting media coverage of such tragedies, Iraqi police prevented news photographers and cameramen from filming the scene. The government said the order, announced over the weekend, is aimed at preventing journalists from inadvertently tampering with evidence, protecting the privacy of the wounded and keeping insurgents and militias from keeping track of their success rate. The ban also prevents pictures which call into question U.S. and Iraqi claims of success in quelling violence in Baghdad. Elsewhere, five civilians were killed and 41 wounded when dozens of gunmen attacked a village north of the capital, Iraqi authorities said. A mortar or rocket slammed into the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, wounding five American Embassy contractors, a spokesman said. U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said there were no deaths and property damage was minimal. He said the contractors’ nationalities had “not yet been confirmed.” Fintor said the embassy was “open and functioning normally.”
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |  | ..>..> |
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| Imus Affair Revisited
04.16.2007 READ MORE:I’m really glad I wasn’t planning to blog this week, or I might have made the mistake of writing something about Imus. Way too much has been written about Imus, and I’m exhausted from reading all of it, every last word. And the truth is, I have nothing to say. Not that that would have stopped me from writing — after all, it doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone else. I was never a guest on Imus’ show — so I couldn’t have written that what Imus said was inexcusable but on some level I enabled it. Of course I could have written the opposite sort of thing — a blog in which I confessed that although I knew Imus was nuts, I nonetheless would have been happy to have been a guest on his show because (who are we kidding?) I too had a book to sell; and then I could have gone into some sort of stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence about the bully on the playground and how everyone wants to be friends with the bully on the playground because it’s like bearding the lion, until it all turns into Lord of the Flies…. You can see it was a good thing I didn’t write about Imus. And then there’s Al Sharpton. I would pretty much have had to deal with Al Sharpton. Who needs it? And gangsta rap. Don’t get me started. And it’s a good thing I didn’t get started, because what do I know about gansta rap? To my knowledge, I have never heard gangsta rap in my life. The word “hypocrisy” would have cropped up somewhere in this self-important piece of twaddle I’m not writing, for sure. And the words “nappy-headed hos” — which would, of course, have been a way of compounding whatever injury existed in the first place. And I deeply hope I would not have used the expression “Does the punishment fit the crime?” but who knows? I might have. Another reason I didn’t write about Imus, incidentally, is that by mid-week, the entry level into the Imus-commentary sweepstakes changed, and since I do not have two daughters, much less two beautiful black daughters, I was ineligible to comment on how Imus’ remarks would deeply affect them (if they were old enough to read) or had already affected them so much that they would probably never recover. I might even have made the mistake of talking about Imus’ “victims,” when actually the victims were the only true winners of the week, and by the way, how bad can it be for the victims that they were insulted by a lunatic but then got to be on Oprah? Incidentally, late in the week I developed a theory about how Imus could have avoided the whole mess, but since I wasn’t going to write about Imus I instead told it to my friend Arianna Huffington and she stole it for her blog. How could I possibly have worked it into anything now that she’d run off with it? Although I suppose I could have put it into parentheses: (My theory: Imus should have walked into the studio Monday morning, apologized, suspended himself, walked out, checked into rehab, and shut up. But of course he can’t shut up. Because he’s a talk show host. And he can’t stop talking.) (This theory might have led me straight into a sentence about the perils of being the kind of narcissist who loves uproar.) (Which might have led me to ruminate about Imus’ mother.) (Which would have been a mistake, because it’s not her fault.) (It’s never the mother’s fault.) So you can see for yourself — it’s just as well I didn’t write about Imus. |
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| Today’s Blogs -
Deputy Dogged
By Christopher Beam
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 5:27 P.M. E.T. Bloggers ponder the resignation of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. They also tweak the military for banning YouTube and debate a BBC journalist’s outburst over Scientology. Deputy dogged: Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty resigned Monday, the latest casualty of the U.S. attorneys scandal. McNulty says he’s leaving because of the “financial realities of college-age children and two decades of public service.” But Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday that McNulty had “signed off on the names” of the fired U.S. attorneys. Bloggers wonder what the resignation means for the department. Liberal Irregular Times isn’t particularly enthused: “Sorry, I left my pom-poms home today. McNulty’s resignation might be good news for Democratic Party P.R. purposes, but it doesn’t give us any new information, and it doesn’t change what the Bush administration has already done to invert the meaning of justice in America.” Josh Marshall at liberal Talking Points Memo wonders whether McNulty might spill more now that he’s gone: “If I were Gonzales and the White House, I’d see McNulty’s departure as a very unwelcome development. Behind the scenes, supporters of McNulty and Gonzales have been increasingly at odds as the scandal has progressed. … [I]t’s hard to figure where McNulty gets less forthcoming once he’s no longer part of the administration.” Even worse for Bush, now he has to appoint someone to replace him, and that means confirmation hearings. Liberal Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah figures Bush can’t dither: “While Bush might postpone nominating a replacement, DOJ is fairly well gutted at this point, with Gonzales sidelined, Monica gone, Sampson’s replacement USA O’Connor not yet approved. They’re going to need to appoint someone–or else DOJ’s efforts to much up the Foggo Wilkes case (and others) may just grind to a halt.” Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report looks askance at Gonzales’ point that McNulty “signed off on the names”: “That’s true, but so did Gonzales. Obviously, the Bush gang (which certainly includes Gonzales) wants nothing more than to find a high-ranking scapegoat, but McNulty isn’t it.” With McNulty out of the way, Alex Pareene at Wonkette imagines Gonzales “sit[ting] in his office all day cackling and lighting cigars with letters of resignation.” Things can only get worse: “McNulty is one of the guys who actually feels sort of bad about this US attorneys scandal, so expect the DoJ to become even more corrupt in his absence.” Faiz at ThinkProgress posts the video in which Gonzales, in their words, “throws McNulty under the bus.” The Left Coaster‘s Steve Soto hopes that Gonzales’ “pansy-assed comments today and the sniping from the White House will lead McNulty to say some interesting things in response when he goes before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees later this year.” Read more about McNulty’s resignation. Read his resignation letter here. I want YouTube: A month after cracking down on blogs written by soldiers, the Department of Defense blocked highly trafficked sites like YouTube and MySpace on official computers. Military officials cite the risk of high traffic overwhelming the military’s private network and concerns about sensitive information being disclosed. The military will continue to post videos on its own YouTube site. Kevin Drum at liberal Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal dubs the bandwidth argument “obviously bogus. There are fairly straightforward ways of allocating bandwidth. … They just want to restrict images of war flowing in both directions.” British socialist Anthony Karl Page at Neither Labour Nor Tory agrees: “Considering the sheer amount of money spent bombing Iraq and Afghanistan, I am incredulous that the military can’t afford a few more gigabytes of bandwidth for their own soldiers.” Preston, commenting on military blog BLACKFIVE, calls the crackdown “a ham-handed solution. I would have liked to see a ‘share the pain’ strategy. They could have restricted the bandwidth hogs to a few machines in a morale tent. I’m sorry if that means the Exec’s 100th PowerPoint presentation takes an extra second to send. He can wait.” Akinoluna, a Marine sergeant stationed overseas, doubts the ban will do much to prevent the disclosure of sensitive material: “[E]very single servicemember who has access to a military network can simply switch over to using an unblocked website or use their military email accounts instead. And don’t get me started on the proxy server links the resident computer geeks will soon share with all their buddies.” Stress test: BBC reporter John Sweeney exploded at a Scientology official while researching a documentary on the Church of Scientology that aired Monday. (See above.) After a video of his outburst leaked to YouTube, Sweeney admitted he made a mistake: “”I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it makes me cringe.” In his report, Sweeney claims the church sent people to follow him and eavesdrop on his conversations. At the blog of the British Telegraph, Ceri Radford admits she feels “a shade of sympathy for the ‘exploding tomato.’ I mean, if you had been followed about for seven days solid by some implacable drone in a naff suit and reflective sunglasses, wouldn’t you be feeling a little tetchy?” Author Andrew Collins at Where Did It All Go Right? claims he has no quarrel with Scientologists’ beliefs: “But to see the media wing of Scientology trying to shut down a BBC investigation, threatening legal action, reporting it to Ofcom over what they see as 150 guidline breaches, and then to use intimidating tactics such as we saw in the film, does them no credit whatsoever. It’ll take a personal appearance by Tom and Katie to paper over this one.” Nick at Beyond Hollywood expected better from Sweeney: “Wait, aren’t BBC reporters supposed to be better than us? As in, they don’t go around screaming into people’s faces like a red-faced maniac? … I just love it when British guys act like us Ugly Americans.” Mark Maenell at Qaerentia considers Sweeney’s reaction “to a large extent righteous and appropriate. …Scientology’s techniques by themselves are sufficient to indicate seriously sinister intent. … Sweeney was quite right to be angry – and it just reminded me that we should get more angry about these sorts of things.” Read more about Sweeney’s blowup. Christopher Beam is a Slate editorial assistant
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| Sopranos, The Final Season -
From: Timothy Noah
To: Jeffrey Goldberg and Brian Williams
Subject: Week 5: Bush-Soprano Mix ‘n’ Match!
Updated Monday, May 14, 2007, at 3:30 PM ETDear Jeff and Brian, First, a hearty benvenuto to Brian. Now that you’ve established you aren’t the troubled visionary behind Pet Sounds, I can let go of my resentment against your charging $75 for the 40th anniversary limited edition action figure. (And that’s the unsigned edition!) I am mightily impressed that you’ve eaten at Pizzaland, but I wonder exactly what you mean when you say you’ve been to the Bing. It’s my understanding that the Bada Bing! strip club is a fictional locale invented by David Chase. Please explain. I note with mild embarrassment that I’m the only guy in this dialogue who has never reported on the M—-. (After seeing what Chris-tuh-fuh did to his writer friend J.T. in Episode 82, there’s no way I’m going to spell out that word.) I bet you guys have both eaten at Rao’s on 114th Street, too. Me, I buy the sauce at Whole Foods. I do know somebody named Patsy, but it’s short for Patricia, not Pasquale. She’s my sister, not a mobster. She never complains about anything I write about her, as Jeff’s Patsy Conte does, and her sons are too well brought up to pour sulfuric acid on the feet of deadbeats, as the son of The Sopranos‘ Patsy Parisi does. Not that I know about, anyway. Chase’s strategy for this final season should be clear by now. He is fixing things so that Tony’s downfall could come from anybody, anywhere, at any time. Potential assassins, prosecution witnesses, and miscellaneous catalysts in his ruin now include Phil Leotardo, Paulie Walnuts, Hesh Rabkin, Tony’s sister Janice (a favorite theory of Jeff’s), Tony’s pathetic and resentful son, A.J. (a favorite theory of mine), and now Chris-tuh-fuh. (Brian, you mentioned how Tony insulted Christopher’s manhood by criticizing his grilling technique. You might also have mentioned the jealous look Christopher shot in the direction of Tony and Bobby Bacala as the two huddled in a corner of his yard. There was a time Tony’s handpicked successor was sure to be Christopher, but now it’s looking more like Tony’s brother-in-law Bobby will get the job, even though he lacks much experience at icing people.) These days it seems the only friend Tony can really count on is Silvio Dante, whom we haven’t seen much of lately. Will Silvio start to turn against Tony in next week’s episode? Will he bring in Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons to help finish Tony off? (I still don’t know who Southside Johnny played in that earlier episode, but he’s lurking out there somewhere, and maybe he’ll call in the Asbury Jukes.) Then there are the Arabs. One theory I’m starting to toy with is that the Arabs really are undercover cops, and that agents Harris and Goddard are asking Christopher and Tony to pass information about them—lest Meadow or Carmela perish under the Hudson as terrorists blow up the Lincoln Tunnel—purely to divert any suspicion about their sting. Didn’t Christopher sell the Arabs guns once already? Maybe the game isn’t to prosecute Tony as the mobster he is but rather to frame him as a terrorist. That would be a way to end the show realistically (mob bosses never last long) without the Hays Office-style moralizing that Chase has said he deplores. I’m halfway serious about this. Brian, you have inside knowledge. Am I warm? But now I’m completely contradicting my stern lecture from last week about the evils of trying to guess how The Sopranos will end. Brian, you mentioned that Carmela was reading Fred Barnes. Specifically, it was a paperback of Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush. I haven’t read the book, but apparently it’s a paean to Bush’s leadership skills that Barnes had the misfortune to publish in January 2006, just as the Iraq war was sending Bush’s approval ratings into the Dumpster. Its inclusion in the episode strikes me as a fairly broad joke; though Carm probably votes Republican, I seriously doubt she’d be interested enough in politics to read Barnes’ book, or any nonfiction book about public affairs. What’s the joke? That Carmela could use a few tips, because the Tony Soprano administration is in an advance state of collapse, just like you-know-who’s. This leads me to propose that we play a little game: Bush-Soprano Mix ‘n’ Match! Name a past or present member of the Bush administration or family and find the corresponding figure from The Sopranos‘ cast of characters. None of what follows, of course, is meant to suggest that anyone connected with the Bush administration or family engages in criminal activities, or associates with anyone who does, except for Ken Lay. If you need to refresh your memory on Sopranos characters, click here. If you need to refresh your memory on Bush White House players, click here. (Both lists, sadly, are a little out of date, but they’re better than nothing.) I think we can all agree that Barbara Bush is Livia Soprano. (“People think she’s a sweet, grandmotherly Aunt Bea type,” Laura Bush quipped at the 2005 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “She’s actually more like, mmm, Don Corleone.” Reader, if you think she was kidding, read my late wife Marjorie Williams’ chapter about the former first lady in The Woman at the Washington Zoo.) The president is, of course, Tony Soprano, but I don’t think it would be accurate or fair to say that Laura is Carmela. Condoleezza Rice is Carmela. Just as Carmela decided that a spec house was worth reuniting with her unfaithful mobster husband, Condi decided that the State Department was worth never saying “you’re wrong” to her tragically misguided work husband and commander in chief. Or maybe Condi is Dr. Melfi. Like Melfi, Rice is both confidante and enabler. Brent Scowcroft is Uncle Junior, minus the dementia. He may not be a blood relative, but he’s the president’s father’s best friend (not to mention former national security adviser), he’s short on hair, and he thinks the don is way too big for his britches. Vice President Dick Cheney is Ralphie Cifaretto, i.e., the administration’s least-controllable hothead. Doug Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, is Richie Aprile, i.e., its second-least-controllable hothead. George Tenet, memoirist and former Central Intelligence Agency chief, is Paulie Walnuts, a company man with a chip on his shoulder. Like Paulie, Tenet is wary of or outright hostile to rivals for the boss’s affection, and like Paulie, he doesn’t dare challenge the boss head-on. He’s a little too excitable, slow to accept responsibility, and nowhere near slick enough to hide his many liabilities. John Dilulio, director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives during Bush’s first term, is “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero. He ratted out the White House for not taking policy seriously and got whacked (which in this context translates to “was silenced quickly”). Alberto Gonzales? Just to make things difficult, the president nicknamed the attorney general “Fredo,” an unconscious allusion to the weakest and least-intelligent Corleone family member in The Godfather. (In the Bush administration, the price of loyalty is humiliation.) Gonzales is perhaps Bobby Bacala—unstintingly loyal and none too bright. Though catch me tomorrow and I may say that Andrew Card, the president’s former chief of staff, is Bobby. OK, guys, help me out. I’d love to find a Johnny Sack somewhere in the Bush administration, but it isn’t coming to me. No one has Johnny’s moral grandeur. Too bad Bob Dole is retired. Inside the Beltway-ly,
Tim
From: Timothy Noah
To: Jeffrey Goldberg
Subject: Week 6: Comfortably NumbPosted Monday, May 14, 2007, at 3:30 PM ETDear Jeff, Pretty shocking development last night, eh? We’ll get to that soon enough. (Reader, if you didn’t watch, I advise that you not continue past my fifth paragraph.) First, let’s discuss a Pink Floyd song. I mentioned previously that I watch The Sopranos with my 14-year-old son, Will. A couple of episodes back, Will pointed out that Tony, while shambling downstairs in his bathrobe, was singing to himself “Comfortably Numb,” from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Never having been a Pink Floyd fan, I didn’t know the song (Will is rapidly becoming more knowledgeable than I even about music of my own era), and I shrugged off the reference. But “Comfortably Numb” reappeared in last night’s episode, sung this time by Van Morrison with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and the Band (minus Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel). It’s a gorgeous version recorded live in Berlin in June 1990 as part of an all-star restaging of The Wall to commemorate the fall of that other wall seven months earlier. The stage was erected on Potsdamer Platz, which for 44 years prior to November 1989 had stood unoccupied as disputed territory. An account of the staging on Roger Waters’ Web site relates that the West German military had to be brought in to clear the site of unexploded ordnance from World War II and that in the course of that search, the soldiers unearthed a previously undiscovered section of der Führerbunker. Martin Scorsese, who (like David Chase) has a genius for incorporating music into his narratives, used the Berlin version of “Comfortably Numb” in The Departed, in the scene where Billy (the undercover cop played by Leonardo DiCaprio) makes love to Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), his psychiatrist and, unbeknownst to him, the girlfriend of Colin (Matt Damon), the mole planted by the Irish mob in the state police. Even before we look at the lyrics, then, this is a piece of music that’s fairly bursting with associations. The numbness (not all that comfortable) of life in East Germany, where before the Communist regime’s collapse the Stasi had neighbor routinely betraying neighbor (a surveillance nightmare vividly depicted in the German film The Lives of Others). A similar sense of demise and mutual betrayal pervades this season of The Sopranos. The explosive nature of buried and long-ignored debris echoes in Tony’s relationships with just about everyone, most especially Carmela. Hitler’s bunker represents evil in its purest form, and last night’s development demonstrated that Tony is himself becoming more evil and more spookily convinced that his destiny is to triumph. The love scene from The Departed conjures Tony’s sexual attraction to Dr. Melfi and, less literally, his unrequited (and completely undeserved) desire to be comforted and accepted without having to hide his darkest self. The song itself is about the easing of pain, both in the positive sense of relief (“There is no pain you are receding”) and in the negative sense of drifting away from reality (“This is not how I am/ I have become comfortably numb”). Literally, it is about taking a drug (“Just a little pinprick”). As it happens, drug-induced reality bookends this latest episode of The Sopranos (“Kennedy and Heidi“). Chris-tu-fuh is driving Tony back from a meeting with Phil Leotardo, the New York boss, who wants 25 percent of what Tony’s getting to dump asbestos in the marshes of New Jersey. (I’m a little fuzzy about the basis of Phil’s claim; is the asbestos from sites across the Hudson?) Christopher, having fallen off the wagon in last week’s episode, is high as a kite, which Tony notices as the car weaves along the nighttime highway. Christopher pops into the CD player the soundtrack for The Departed, which, being both mobster and cinéaste, he would plausibly cherish, and cranks “Comfortably Numb.” The car swerves left toward an oncoming car, then right, drives off the road, flips several times, and comes to a standstill. Tony is bruised. Christopher is more seriously injured, and he’s desperate to avoid being detected because “I’ll never pass a drug test.” Tony eases himself out of the car, walks to the driver’s side, breaks the window, and observes that Christopher is barely conscious and bleeding from the mouth. He makes an executive decision. He grabs Christopher by the nose and suffocates him. Part of the genius of this episode, I think, is that it isn’t entirely clear at first why Tony has done this. Was it an act of compassion, based on Tony’s calculation that Christopher wouldn’t survive his wounds and needed to be put out of his misery? No, we gradually discover. Christopher’s wounds were survivable, and Tony can’t stop talking about the relief he feels at being rid of his troublesome nephew. He hasn’t forgotten the insult of being portrayed as a thug in Christopher’s slasher movie, he still feels hurt by Christopher’s growing alienation from mob life, and he still feels contempt for Christopher’s addiction to drugs and alcohol. One curious omission, I think, is that we never learn whether Tony knew that Christopher shot and killed his scriptwriter friend J.T. That would cause Tony even more agita, because even though Christopher carefully wiped his prints off the doorknob, the cops would immediately identify him as the likely killer. Not a good idea to whack a civilian who is known to have one and only one friend in the Mafia. Tony being Tony, it isn’t enough that he’s murdered a beloved relative; he wants to be thanked for it, too. He dreams about telling Melfi. He tries to get Carmela to say that she’s relieved that Christopher is gone, which Carmela rejects with apparent sincerity. He tells anyone who’ll listen that the baby car seat was destroyed in the accident, a testament to Christopher’s irresponsibility, but no one shares his outrage. Even Paulie feels bad about the way he used to treat the kid (though he starts to change his tune when Christopher’s wake competes with one for his own mother—or rather, the woman who raised him as his mother but was really, he discovered last season, his aunt). Tony, who spends his life being comfortably numb about the reality of what he does for a living, can’t in this instance abide the hypocrisy of pretending that Christopher died in the accident and that he’s sorry Christopher is gone. He escapes to Las Vegas and looks up Sonya, an old girlfriend of Christopher’s who’s working her way through college as a stripper. (I assume Sonya figured in the show a few seasons back, but I don’t remember her. Do you?) They have sex, and then Sonya introduces Tony to peyote. At first it makes him puke, but later they wander, high, into a casino, and Tony soon finds himself winning at the roulette wheel. His streak of bad luck is over, he realizes; killing Christopher ended it. Remember how Tony told Carmela a few episodes back that he was fated to survive Uncle Junior’s shooting? The peyote deepens that delusion. The episode ends with Tony and Sonya in the desert, Tony shouting, “I get it.” Mario Puzo meets Carlos Castenada. Tony is good and comfortable with his numbness now. Drugs made Christopher weak, but they make Tony strong. Christopher was a loser, Tony is a winner. This goombah is headed for some kind of serious fall, don’t you think? Uncomfortably,
Tim
From: Jeffrey Goldberg
To: Timothy Noah
Subject: Week 6: Tony’s Going to HellPosted Monday, May 14, 2007, at 7:26 PM ETTim, If Hitchens is wrong and there is a hell, Tony’s going. I’m not sure I understand how Hitler’s bunker worked its way into your post (I think you might be channeling Ron Rosenbaum here), but Tony’s capacity for evil, the way he slips so quickly and naturally into opportunistic murderousness, is something to behold. But before we talk about that, let me first say this: Remember what I said about the possibility of a climactic, End Days clash between Tony and Christopher, or Christopher and Paulie? I think we can safely say that I’ve been overcome by events. You were right—it’s a mug’s game, trying to predict the end of this show. For all I know, Meadow is going to end up as capo di tutti capi. And not a bad capo di tutti capi she would be, Brian Williams would say, if he were here. I’ll tell you what I found so interesting about last night’s episode, and it wasn’t only the death-by-sinus-congestion scene, to which, as a recreational user of Flonase, I could relate. What I found so horrible is Tony’s apparent guiltlessness. I don’t think, as you do, that he’s comfortable with his numbness; I think he’s comfortable with his evil. This is why I tend to agree that he’s done for. By celebrating the death of Christopher, he’s very plainly inviting the attention of the evil eye. The absence of guilt is a bad omen, in other words. You, as a rationalist, might not understand what I mean, but, as a more atavistic sort—the sort who believes that Hitchens, whom I love, by the way, is inviting God’s wrath with that book title of his (and his Tower of Babel-high Amazon ranking is only inviting more divine retribution, I’m afraid)—I tend to think that a person who feels good about getting away with an evil deed will find himself called to account by either the One True God or Phil Leotardo, or Phil Leotardo acting as His agent. Speaking of Amazon, by the way, I knew that the show’s rather ostentatious plug for The Departed soundtrack would move its number, but I didn’t guess quite how much—at 10 p.m. last night, it stood at 1,183; this morning, it was at 33; at 5:46 p.m. ET, it had risen to No. 18. Which prompts the question: Why can’t Carmela read my book, and not Fred Barnes’? It would certainly fit in with A.J.’s new course of study—the “dicked-up” Middle East. He’s smarter than I thought, that A.J. He’s also going to die, I think. That, or kill someone. Do you agree? Best,
Jeff
From: Timothy Noah
To: Jeffrey Goldberg
Subject: Week 6: A.J.’s Rodney King MomentUpdated Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 11:30 AM ETDear Jeff, Comfortable with his numbness, comfortable with his evil. It amounts to the same thing. Tony’s capacity for evil has expanded. He is no longer that nice mobster who, back in Season 1, used to fret about the ducks paddling in his swimming pool. If Chris “God Is Not Great” Hitchens were here, I think he’d agree with me that you don’t have to believe in God to believe in evil. And even in a godless universe (where I happen to believe we dwell), the utilitarian logic of cooperation (aka “morality”), which Tony clearly violated when he nose-pinched his beloved nephew to death, generally prevails. What goes around comes around. As you note, Phil Leotardo may be the guy who supplies Tony’s comeuppance. (I gather you don’t know any better than I what entitles Phil to claim a piece of Tony’s no-questions-asked asbestos-removal business.) Who needs God when you’ve got Phil Leotardo? Not to mention Paulie Walnuts, Hesh Rabkin, Janice Soprano, A.J. Soprano, and—who knows?—a tanned, rested, and ready Uncle Junior. Plus those Arabs, who were very quiet this week. A little too quiet, if you ask me. We’ve discussed in the past how A.J., one of the few characters on The Sopranos who is not a murderer, is nonetheless the least sympathetic character in the series. He’s spoiled, he’s stupid, he’s narcissistic, he’s a whiner, and he’s mean. But maybe not as mean as we thought. He seems genuinely horrified when Jason Gervase and his thug pals beat up a black bicyclist who crashes into Jason’s car door. (Needless to say, the Italians call the bicyclist something a good deal less civil than black.) The violence and hatred that A.J. is witnessing with this new crowd is escalating, and he can’t take it. “Why can’t we all just get along?” A.J. tells his shrink, echoing Rodney King. Is series creator David Chase rendering A.J. more sympathetic so that we’ll miss him when he gets killed, the outcome you suggest? Perhaps. But I prefer your alternative notion that, instead of dying, A.J. may kill someone. Or, being A.J., that he will witness a murder. Here’s how I see it going. The cops nab A.J., and he immediately confesses to being an accessory. The district attorney prepares to lock the kid up for years. But there is one way A.J. could get his sentence shortened. Tony could confess to two or three of the many murders the cops suspect him of ordering or committing. “Look, Tony, we know your kid isn’t a criminal. He isn’t the one who should do hard time. You are.” Carmela and Tony fight bitterly over this proposed deal. Tony says A.J. can beat this rap. Carmela is horrified that Tony is willing to sacrifice his son to save his own skin. “You are a murderer, Tony, and if you won’t tell them, I will!” The words are too much for Tony to bear. He pummels Carmela with his fists, really beats her up, for the first time in his life. (Unlike a certain recently departed HBO chief I could name, Tony has never assaulted a female.) Bruised and bleeding, Carmela calls the cops. They arrive, and Tony realizes he has no home left to defend. He confesses to three murders to save A.J. to whatever extent he can. The price turns out to be not only Tony’s confession, but also Tony ratting out the whole gang—Silvio, Paulie, Bobby, Hesh, Janice, maybe even Uncle Junior. The only Soprano left unscathed is Meadow, who heads off to medical school in a daze, leaving Carmela, black and blue, alone in the house. Carmela’s cherished delusion of sustainable mob-funded affluence is dashed. She will lose her house, she has already lost her husband and son, and Meadow may never again want to admit she even has a family. Goodbye, Bloomies; hello, Filene’s Basement. Fade to black. That isn’t a prediction. It’s just a way I can see the series ending. I doubt that it’s Chase’s way. With respect to “Comfortably Numb,” I see that I cast the pearl of my exquisite literary and historical analysis before swine. Your punishment for failing to groove on it is that I will not pretend to agree that Carmela Soprano would ever read your book. It’s a great book, but it’s not Carmela’s kind of book. Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, maybe (not that Ephron needs the sales). But Carmela wouldn’t really appreciate it because she has no sense of humor. Surely your wicked passion for Carmela hasn’t blinded you to the lady’s humorlessness? That has always limited my sympathy for her. Before I sign off for the week, I want to alert you that my son, Will, e-mailed me yesterday afternoon from the basement (I was three floors up in my home office) to complain that while I gave lengthy consideration to the meaning of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” I gave unacceptably short shrift to the meaning of the album whence it came, The Wall, and to how “Comfortably Numb” fits into that larger work. For enlightenment, Will referred me to this Web site. The Wall is all about self-imposed isolation, Will explained, and there are many parallels between The Wall‘s protagonist, “Pink Floyd,” and Tony Soprano: The easiest one to see is that they both have traumatizing mothers. Tony has also been involved with drugs. Now, by killing Christopher, Tony is isolating himself from everyone because he obviously sees the situation differently. … Or, if you wanted a slightly simpler reason why the song was used, you could just note that one of the voices in
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| Venice’s Muscle Beach Famed weightlifter is muscled outBill Howard, a longtime promoter at Venice’s Muscle Beach, has been banned from this season’s contests. His ouster has roiled the bodybuilding community. By Bob Pool
Times Staff Writer
May 15, 2007
Bill Howard says he’s no 98-pound weakling sitting on the beach, waiting for a he-man to kick sand in his face.
Joe Wheatley says he’s no biceps-bulging bully trying to muscle in on someone else’s place in the sun.
That’s the short version of the ego flexing taking place between a veteran weightlifting champion and a younger promoter as this year’s bodybuilding season approaches at Venice’s Muscle Beach.
After more than four decades of staging summertime muscleman contests at the famed tourist attraction, the 73-year-old Howard has been banned from the weightlifting platform that stands beneath Muscle Beach’s symbolic oversized concrete barbells.
Los Angeles parks officials advised Howard that the city “has decided to change direction with regard to future bodybuilding events” at the Venice Beach boardwalk.
“You will no longer be asked to narrate the History of Muscle Beach at the show. The Bill Howard Award will no longer be given at the shows. The Medallion Ceremony will be completed by a representative from Recreation and Parks” and not by Howard, parks authorities advised him in writing in mid-March.
Howard was told he could attend the show “as a member of the public” but would no longer be allowed backstage or in participants’ or VIP areas.
His sudden ouster has roiled Muscle Beach, where Howard began pumping iron in the 1950s. He is credited with helping revive the beachside bodybuilding scene after lifters were kicked off Santa Monica’s original Muscle Beach.
“I’ve given my entire life to Muscle Beach Venice, and they’re kicking me out the door,” said Howard, a Costa Mesa resident who still works as a personal trainer. He vows he is not about to go down without a fight.
“I’m in competition shape,” he said. “I’m going to be 74 and I’m damned proud of how I look. I live the Muscle Beach philosophy. The sanctions against me are vindictiveness.”
Starting in 1963, Howard — without pay — organized and emceed shows at Muscle Beach each Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day.
He saw the beach through its toughest time in the early 1980s, as facilities crumbled and interest faded. Howard recalled that one year, there wasn’t any money for trophies, so he asked Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbo to go home and “get some of their own trophies to donate. They did, and we had a show.”
He led a campaign to get Los Angeles officials to designate the weightlifting area “Muscle Beach Venice” and in 1991 helped secure $500,000 in funding to construct a training area and stage.
Howard stepped aside as the shows’ promoter and master of ceremonies in 2003 while recovering from throat cancer. That’s when Wheatley, 20 years his junior, took over promotional duties.
Since then, Wheatley’s backers say, he has expanded the shows’ scope, drawing more sponsors and participants. Wheatley created an award in Howard’s name to give to the shows’ top male and female competitors and oversaw Howard’s induction into the Muscle Beach Hall of Fame in 2005.
Wheatley, 52, of Glendale, said that as Venice’s Muscle Beach grew, Howard simply wouldn’t change with the times.
“I’ve said over and over that without Bill Howard, we wouldn’t be here today,” Wheatley said. “But it comes a time for everyone to step aside. The program is bigger than Bill. It’s evolved.”
But Wheatley also blamed “ego and narcissism” on Howard’s part. “We couldn’t get the microphone out of his hands,” he said. “The last thing he said to the audience was, ‘I’m not in this for the money; I’m in this for the sport.’ That was a personal attack on me. I do this for a living. Joe Wheatley Productions. I do bring in money.”
City officials have sided with Wheatley.
Lydia Ritzman, the city’s principal recreation supervisor, who ordered Howard’s removal, said there was a personality clash between Howard and Wheatley.
“It got to the point [where] Bill would come in at the 11th hour and undo things Joe had done. These events don’t need that kind of drama,” Ritzman said.
“Joe asked for some cooperation from Bill. For some reason Bill couldn’t do that.”
Devotees of Muscle Beach and bodybuilding said they are caught in the middle.
“Without his enthusiasm, it would have died out. Bill did an excellent job,” said Gene Mozee, a Culver City powerlifter who has written about the sport and edited bodybuilding magazines.
But Mozee also had praise for Wheatley. “He’s really revved up the participation and enthusiasm. True, Joe makes a living at this. But he pays the city a fee and pays his own people to do work.”
Schwarzenegger, who in his early days pumped iron in Venice, issued a statement in 2004 from the governor’s office praising Howard for his dedication to the bodybuilding community as he was battling cancer. “There is no obstacle you can’t overcome,” the governor wrote. On Monday, his spokesman said Schwarzenegger was busy in meetings and unavailable to comment on Howard’s ouster.
Meanwhile, the Muscle Beach battle is heating up.
Wheatley said Howard threatened to picket the approaching Memorial Day holiday show. The Muscle Beach International Classic is scheduled for May 27-28. Officials want to eventually build a Wall of Fame saluting the greats of Muscle Beach, with Howard likely to be among the first honorees.
But “if he causes a big ruckus on May 28, then that plaque is going to go,” Wheatley warned. “He should tread very lightly.”
As for Howard, he says he has spent a lifetime of heavy lifting for a sport that has had more than its share of ups and downs. In his view, only dumbbells would bar him now from Muscle Beach.
“It’s like telling Babe Ruth he can’t go to Yankee Stadium.”
bob.pool@latimes.com |
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| Today’s Papers Enriched Knowledge
By Daniel Politi
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 6:08 A.M. E.T. The New York Times leads with inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency reporting that Iran has figured out how to enrich larger quantities of uranium. Inspectors discovered Sunday that Iran’s main nuclear facility had 1,300 centrifuges producing uranium that could be used for nuclear reactors, when only recently it seemed the Iranians didn’t know how to get them to work properly. The Washington Post leads with news that Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty became the fourth senior Justice Department official to resign since the scandal over the fired U.S. attorneys blew up earlier this year. Of course, he doesn’t mention the scandal in his resignation letter and says he’s leaving because of “the financial realities of college-age children and two decades of public service.” The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with Iraqi insurgents warning the U.S. military to stop searching for the three missing American soldiers, calling it “a venture in vain.” The group that claimed responsibility for capturing the soldiers said their “safety” would suffer if the search continued. USA Today leads with a look at how an ongoing investigation in Texas into the possible use of abusive tactics by guards at state juvenile-detention facilities comes at a time of growing concern about the way teenage inmates are treated across the country. In Texas, four system superintendents were suspended, and in the past few months eight staff members have been arrested. The Los Angeles Times leads with news that gunmen in Mexico City shot and killed the recently appointed head of a drug intelligence unit. Although drug-related killings have become common in Mexico, it’s rare for these types of brazen assassinations to take place in the capital. So far, one of the main goals in European and American efforts to get Iran to suspend its enrichment programs has been to prevent the country from gaining the enriching know-how. Now, the IAEA’s latest finding suggests that point has already been reached. Although the purity of the uranium currently being produced is nowhere near what is necessary for a nuclear weapon, if Tehran wanted to, the purity could probably be increased to the necessary levels in a couple of months. It’s unclear whether the production can be maintained, and, as the NYT points out, “major setbacks are common in uranium enrichment,” but this new information is likely to put pressure on European and American negotiators to rethink their strategy for dealing with Iran. The NYT says McNulty’s testimony before Congress in February, “provided a spark that turned a smoldering issue over the firings of federal prosecutors into a raging inferno.” Besides raising more questions than he answered about the White House’s involvement in the dismissals, McNulty also said the U.S. attorneys were fired for “performance-related” reasons, which led to several of the prosecutors speaking out to defend their reputations. On a separate note, the WP is the only paper that says the controversy has to do with the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The rest of the papers continue to go with eight (the NYT doesn’t mention a number), even though last week the former U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., said he was asked to resign in early 2006. The LAT off-leads, the NYT fronts, and everyone else mentions the World Bank committee has concluded that Paul Wolfowitz broke ethics and governance rules when he arranged a promotion and raise package for his companion, Shaha Ali Riza. The report, which was publicly released last night, also says Wolfowitz tried to hide the package from bank officials and ultimately “saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply.” Wolfowitz is set to defend himself to the bank’s board today. In his response to the findings, Wolfowitz says the ethics committee was afraid to confront the “extremely angry and upset” Riza and forced him to deal with the issue. Wolfowitz added that Riza demanded financial compensation for the disruption to her career and threatened to sue. Meanwhile, the Bush administration continued to speak up for Wolfowitz as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made calls to finance ministers to emphasize the findings don’t warrant a dismissal. Slate contributor Christopher Hitchens says that Riza is a victim of “the nastiest and dirtiest and cheapest campaign of character assassination I have ever seen.” The WP fronts, and the WSJ goes high with, the Pentagon announcing yesterday that its computers will no longer be able to access popular sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Photobucket, and 10 others. Those blocked include some of the most popular sites for social networking, photo, and video, which are widely used among soldiers and their families. The Pentagon insists these sites have slowed down the department’s network, although some believe the ban has more to do with trying to control the flow of information out of war zones. Service members can still access the sites, as long as it’s not from a military computer. Yesterday, the military announced the deaths of six more U.S. troops in Iraq, and a Danish soldier was killed. The LAT fronts a look at the Internet-based reality series Hometown Baghdad, which the paper says is “part documentary, part The Real World–Baghdad.” The show is shot by Iraqis and follows the lives of three upper-middle-class young men. U.S. networks weren’t interested in the show, and now the short episodes have become a hit on sites such as YouTube, although most in Iraq probably haven’t seen it since Internet connections are frustratingly slow. “I hope the show gets a lot more attention,” Adel, who is characterized as the “breakout star” of the show, said. “But not here. In Iraq you can get killed for the stupidest of reasons.” Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.
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Monday, May 14, 2007 | Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy 
Suzanne Plunkett/Associated Press Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at ground zero three days after the World Trade Center collapsed May 14, 2007 Ground Zero Illnesses Clouding Giuliani’s Legacy By ANTHONY DePALMA Anyone who watched Rudolph W. Giuliani preside over ground zero in the days after 9/11 glimpsed elements of his strength: decisiveness, determination, self-confidence. Those qualities were also on display over the months he directed the cleanup of the collapsed World Trade Center. But today, with evidence that thousands of people who worked at ground zero have become sick, many regard Mr. Giuliani’s triumph of leadership as having come with a human cost. An examination of Mr. Giuliani’s handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center’s ruins, Mr. Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack. Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Mr. Giuliani’s administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear respirators. At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. And according to public hearing transcripts and unpublished administration records, officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers. “The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns,” said David Newman, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a labor group. City officials and a range of medical experts are now convinced that the dust and toxic materials in the air around the site were a menace. More than 2,000 New York City firefighters have been treated for serious respiratory problems. Seventy percent of nearly 10,000 recovery workers screened at Mount Sinai Medical Center have trouble breathing. City officials estimate that health care costs related to the air at ground zero have already run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and no one knows whether other illnesses, like cancers, will emerge. The question of who, if anyone, is to blame for not adequately protecting the workers could finally be decided in United States District Court in Manhattan, where thousands of firefighters, police officers and other recovery workers are suing the city for negligence. City officials have always maintained that they acted in good faith to protect everyone at the site but that many workers chose not to wear available safety equipment, for a variety of reasons. Mr. Giuliani has said very little publicly about how his leadership might have influenced the behavior of the men and women who worked at ground zero. Mr. Giuliani, whose image as a 9/11 hero has been a focus of his run for president, declined to be interviewed for this article. His representatives did not respond to specific questions about the pace of the cleanup, the hazards at the site and Mr. Giuliani’s reticence about the workers’ illnesses. Moreover, many of the people who ran agencies for Mr. Giuliani or who handled responsibility for the health issues after he left office would not comment, citing the pending litigation. In the past, Mr. Giuliani has said that quickly reopening the financial district was essential for healing New York and the nation. The cost of Wall Street’s going dark was enormous, and Mr. Giuliani has said he was forced to balance competing interests as he confronted a never-imagined emergency, and he acknowledged that he and others made mistakes. A Mayor in Control From the beginning, there was no doubt that Mr. Giuliani and his team ruled the hellish disaster site. Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, all with extensive disaster response experience, arrived almost immediately, only to be placed on the sideline. One Army Corps official said Mr. Giuliani acted like a “benevolent dictator.” Despite the presence of those federal experts, Mr. Giuliani assigned the ground zero cleanup to a largely unknown city agency, the Department of Design and Construction. Kenneth Holden, the department’s commissioner until January 2004, said in a deposition in the federal lawsuit against the city that he initially expected FEMA or the Army Corps to try to take over the cleanup operation. Mr. Giuliani never let them. In this environment, the mayor’s take-charge attitude produced two clear results, according to records and interviews. One, work moved quickly. Although the cleanup was expected to last 30 months, the pit was cleared by June 2002, nine months after the attack. And second, the city ultimately became responsible for thousands of workers and volunteers while, critics say, its health and safety standards went lacking. “I would describe it as a conspiracy of purpose,” said Suzanne Mattei, director of the New York office of the Sierra Club, which has been critical of how the cleanup was handled. “It wasn’t people running around saying, ‘Don’t do this safely.’ But there was a unified attempt to do everything as fast as possible, to get everything up and running as fast as possible. Anything in the way of that just tended to be ignored.” Records show that the city was aware of the danger in the ground zero dust from the start. In a federal court deposition, Kelly R. McKinney, associate commissioner at the city’s health department in 2001, said the agency issued an advisory on the night of Sept. 11 stating that asbestos in the air made the site hazardous and that everyone should wear masks. Many workers refused. No one wanted to be slowed down while there was still a chance of rescuing people. Later on, workers said that the available respirators were cumbersome and made it difficult for them to talk. Violations of federal safety rules abounded, and no one strictly enforced them. OSHA did not play an active role during the rescue phase, which is usually the case in emergency operations. But the agency remained in a strictly advisory position long after there was any hope of finding any survivors and at the point when, in other circumstances, it would have enforced safety requirements. Agency officials said that enforcing rules and issuing fines would have delayed the cleanup, and contractors could have passed along the cost of the fines to the city. With the city in charge, municipal employees were given video cameras to record recovery workers who were not wearing respirators. Violations were reported at daily safety meetings. An official who was then with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who asked not to be quoted by name because he was not authorized to speak for the agency, said the focus in safety discussions was always on preventing accidents, not protecting workers from the toxic dust. Remarkably, not one fatal accident occurred on the pile. But the city’s inspectors found that by late October, only 29 percent of ground zero workers were wearing the sophisticated respirators that were required by OSHA. Even Mr. Giuliani sometimes showed up without one. The city’s handling of safety issues has been criticized by doctors, unions and occupational safety experts. Mr. Giuliani’s oversight of the operation was condemned in a 2006 book, “Grand Illusion,” by Wayne Barrett, a longtime critic of the former mayor, and Dan Collins. Mr. Barrett said in an interview that when it came to safety, Mr. Giuliani “said all the right things, but did all the wrong things.” In their defense against the negligence lawsuit, city officials have maintained that they cooperated with federal officials to develop an effective safety plan. On Nov. 20, well into the cleanup, contractors and city agencies agreed to follow safety rules, and OSHA agreed not to fine them if violations occurred. The agency ended up distributing more than 130,000 respirators. Workers’ unions tried to get members to wear them, but usage remained spotty without strict enforcement of the rules. “What they were doing on paper wasn’t what they were doing in practice,” said Paul J. Napoli, one of the lawyers representing the more than 8,000 workers who have sued the city for negligence. He said that the construction companies were billing the city for their time and materials, and “safety slows things down.” The four large construction companies that had been hired to clear debris worked around the clock. But that was not fast enough for the city, especially after the rescue operation formally ended on Sept. 29. One reason for the push may have been concern that unnecessary delays would have added to the cost of the cleanup. Two days after the rescue efforts ended and the full-scale recovery and cleanup began, Michael Burton, executive deputy commissioner of the Design and Construction Department, warned one of the companies in a letter that the city would fire individual workers or companies “if the highest level of efficiency is not maintained.” Danger in the Air Much has been said and written about Christie Whitman, then the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and her statement a week after the towers fell that the air in New York was safe. But even then, the air above the debris pile was known to be more dangerous than the air in the rest of Lower Manhattan. In those first days after 9/11, Mr. Giuliani made it clear that workers needed to wear masks at ground zero because it was more contaminated than elsewhere. But as time went on, and workers failed to heed the warnings, the record indicates that his administration sometimes said otherwise. Even after the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health found that workers were “unnecessarily exposed” to health hazards, officials played down the danger. Robert Adams, director of environmental health and safety services at the Design and Construction Department, told the City Council’s environmental committee in early November that even unprotected ground zero workers would not experience long-term health risks. In an interview last week, Mr. Adams, now working for a consulting firm in Princeton, N.J., said that he still believed that based on the information available at the time, the right decisions were made. Whatever they were saying publicly about the safety of the air, Mr. Giuliani and his staff were privately worried. A memo to Deputy Mayor Robert M. Harding from his assistant in early October said that the city faced as many as 10,000 liability claims connected to 9/11, “including toxic tort cases that might arise in the next few decades.” The warning did not lead to a crackdown on workers without respirators. Rather, a month later, Mr. Giuliani wrote to members of the city’s Congressional delegation urging passage of a bill that capped the city’s liability at $350 million. And two years after Mr. Giuliani left office, FEMA appropriated $1 billion for a special insurance company to defend the city against 9/11 lawsuits. Some experts and critics have suggested that the only way the respirator rules could have been enforced after rescue operations ended would have been to temporarily shut down the site and lay down the law: No respirator, no work. And they say the only person who could have done so was Mr. Giuliani. “They should have backed off on the night shift, when a very limited amount of work could be done,” said Charles Blaich, who was in charge of safety for the Fire Department at the time of the attack. Mr. Blaich, who is now retired, said he considers Mr. Giuliani’s unwillingness to enforce respirator rules a failure of judgment, not a mistake, because no one had ever faced such a crisis. ” ‘Mistake’ indicates there was a known procedure that wasn’t followed,” he said. “There just was not that much logistics in place to support another course of action.” Help for the Sick Millions of Americans saw television news reports of Mr. Giuliani attending firefighters’ funerals. They heard him call those who died heroes. But they have not heard him say much about the medical problems of ground zero workers. Although he pushed Congress to protect the city from lawsuits, he has generally stood on the sidelines as New York’s delegation tried to get the federal government to pay for the treatment that sick workers need. “I don’t think I ever saw the mayor at a 9/11 hearing on health,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Mr. Nadler, who was one of the first to criticize the city’s handling of ground zero, said it never occurred to him or to other Democrats in Congress to ask for Mr. Giuliani’s help to influence the Republican White House. John T. Odermatt, who was Mr. Giuliani’s deputy at the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said that Mr. Giuliani had to make many decisions every day during the crisis, but the priority always was “clearly more about people than getting the site open.” Mr. Odermatt, now speaking on behalf of Mr. Giuliani’s presidential campaign, said he did not know whether the former mayor had ever lobbied Congress on behalf of sick workers, and the campaign did not provide any information about Mr. Giuliani’s working to secure federal funds for treatment of ground zero responders. Many of those people are now sick, and they are angry. Lee Clarke, director of health and safety for District Council 37, the city’s largest public employees’ union, said Mr. Giuliani used “very, very poor judgment” in rushing to reopen the financial district without watching out for the workers who cheered him at ground zero. Ms. Clarke said that if those workers found themselves in a meeting with Mr. Giuliani today, “a number of them would be standing up, wanting a piece of Rudy.”
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