 |  Matthew Holst for The New York Times Lisa and Guy Winchell will lose their jobs at the Maytag plant in Newton, Iowa, when it shuts down on Oct. 26. Above, they worked on his bus, converted into a recreational vehicle. Is There (Middle Class) Life After Maytag?NEWTON, Iowa THE last of the Maytag factories that lifted so many people into the middle class here will close on Oct. 26. Guy Winchell and his wife, Lisa, will lose their jobs that day. Their combined income of $43 an hour will disappear and, soon after, so will their health insurance. Most of the pensions they would have received will also be gone. The Winchells are still in their 40s. They can retrain or start a business, choices promoted by city leaders in a campaign to “reinvent” Newton without its biggest employer. But as they ponder their futures, the Winchells are uncertain about how to deal with a lower standard of living. “I’m not wanting to go waitress,” said Mrs. Winchell, who, at 41, drives a forklift and earns $19 an hour, “but I can do what I have to to make money.” Mr. Winchell, 46, having earned $24 an hour as a skilled electrician, seems paralyzed by the disappearance of his employer. He imagines that there is work for electricians in central Iowa but he hasn’t looked. “Lisa is always on me because I’m so angry,” he said. “She says, ‘What would your mom have said?’ My mom would have said, ‘Worrying is not going to help.’” Newton’s last day as a manufacturing mecca comes a century after Fred L. Maytag built his first mechanical washing machine here. Over time he also located his headquarters, research center and most production in Newton, changing it from a rural county seat into a prosperous city of 16,000. Absent Maytag’s high pay, overall hourly earnings last year for other workers in the county would have been $3 an hour less, according to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency. And then the Whirlpool Corporation bought Maytag in the spring of 2006 and began shutting down its operations here, eliminating jobs and depressing wages. Those caught in this process around the country are gradually swelling what Katherine S. Newman, a Princeton sociologist, describes as “The Missing Class,” the title of a soon-to-be-published book (Beacon Press), of which she is co-author. Ms. Newman calculates that 54 million adults and children occupy a “nether region” of family incomes well above the poverty line — but well short of the middle class. Either they fall out of the middle class, as the Winchells are in danger of doing, or they have never earned enough at one job to get a family of four into the middle class. “We are caught in a never-ending cycle of de-industrialization in which the best jobs disappear,” Ms. Newman said. “It is amazing to me how much we have come to accept that there is nothing to be done about this loss of income.” HERE in Newton, Maytag’s fortress-like headquarters building, its beige-colored bulk looming over the downtown, has been emptied of 1,200 white-collar workers. Of nearly 900 unionized blue-collar workers still left last December in the sprawling factory, 400 were laid off and the rest got a reprieve, including the Winchells. But theirs is a dead-end task: keeping retailers supplied until Whirlpool can start production of redesigned Maytag models built on the chassis of Whirlpool machines at the company’s existing factories in Monterrey, Mexico, and Clyde, Ohio. In Clyde, top pay for nearly all of the 3,700 non-union blue-collar workers is $17 an hour, several dollars less than Maytag paid in Newton. But as Bill Townsend, the plant manager, put it, “whenever we advertise for employment, it is not difficult finding folks.” Nor is it difficult to recruit workers in Newton anymore. Absent Maytag, a good wage in central Iowa is $12 or $13 an hour. The trick is to get that much as well as health insurance — and if not the wage, then at least the health insurance, even if that means commuting 40 to 50 miles, as more than a few ex-Maytag workers are now doing. The downshift is reflected in the Labor Department’s national data. Median family income has risen at an average annual rate of only six-tenths of a percent, adjusted for inflation, since the mid-1970s — in sharp contrast to the 2.8 percent growth rate in the preceding 26 years. Hardship, however, is initially postponed in Newton. Local 997 of the United Automobile Workers, representing Maytag’s blue-collar staff, negotiated a severance package with Whirlpool last fall that extends each departing worker’s health insurance for five or six months and pays at least $850 for each year worked, up to 30 years. For the Winchells, who have five children, all but one from previous marriages — their smiling faces on display in oval-shaped photographs grouped together on a living-room wall — the severance packages translate into more than 20 weeks of pay for the couple. The delayed impact helps to explain, as Mr. Winchell put it, why he and his wife won’t be forced until early next spring to face the inevitable distress of shrunken incomes and uncertain health care. “I’ll find work,” he declared, “but I really don’t know what I am going to do. I’ve thought about applying to hospitals because they have health insurance. One of us will have to take a job with health insurance.” Whatever the damage to living standards, from Whirlpool’s point of view, its strategy in acquiring Maytag was impeccable. Make the same number of washing machines in two plants — Clyde and Monterrey — instead of three, achieving economies of scale. Add 1,000 workers in Clyde to accommodate the increased output, but non-union workers earning less, with fewer benefits, than the unionized work force in Newton. The State of Iowa offered numerous incentives to Whirlpool to stay in Newton. Gov. Tom Vilsack suggested publicly that he would build for Whirlpool “the most energy-efficient plant in the world.” As a lure, the city said it would give full college scholarships to children who went through the public schools. “It was part of a retention strategy; here’s the benefit we can provide if you stay,” said Kim Didier, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation. But for Jeff M. Fettig, Whirlpool’s chairman, leaving Newton was, in the end, a no-brainer. Staying, he said in an interview, was “not economically viable.” He explained: “It was two companies doing the same thing that you needed one company doing very well.” Given such realities, Steve Schober, an industrial designer at Maytag for 25 years, with a fistful of patents to his credit, applied to Whirlpool’s research department in Benton Harbor, Mich., and was turned down, partly because he acknowledged in a job interview that he was unhappy about moving his family from Newton. So, at 52, with six months of severance as a cushion, he went out on his own last year, starting Schober Design and working from his home — a large, handsome Tudor-style with a sloping front lawn in an elegant neighborhood, a few blocks from the brick mansion where Fred Maytag once lived. As a freelancer, however, Mr. Schober’s annual income plunged in the first year from the low six figures he had earned at Maytag to $25,000. Half now goes to pay for health insurance for himself and his children, Katie, 18, and Ben, 16. His wife, Sarah, 51, a special education teacher earning $30,000 a year, has coverage for herself from the public school system. Adding the family would cost $800 a month, slightly less than Mr. Schober now pays, so the couple will probably drop his coverage for hers. “Health insurance was one of those invisible benefits of working for a corporation,” he said. “You didn’t have to think about it.” He and his wife invited a reporter to their home on a summer afternoon, offering refreshments and describing their situation matter-of-factly, as if talking of a less fortunate family’s situation, not their own. Their children were present at first, but soon Katie, who will be a college freshman in the fall, partly on scholarship, drifted out of the living room, and then Ben, a strapping high school athlete, abruptly excused himself, departing to meet his friends, his parents explained. “I have three options,” Mr. Schober said. “I could get a job in a different field that doesn’t approach what I made at Maytag, but has a benefits package. I’ve thought about working for the post office. Or I could send out my résumé to design studios. One of the issues in doing this is my age, which works against me. Or I can continue to do what I am doing, building a client base from Newton.” He is embarked on the third option. While the pay is still sparse, the work is interesting, he said, citing as an example a contract with a winery to design small utensils to open wine bottles. But each month to cover expenses, including a $1,000 mortgage payment, the family cuts into its savings. “We never did that before,” Mrs. Schober said. The Schobers think differently now about money. They shop more cautiously. As a family, they organized a garage sale, taking in $580 by selling castoffs that would have accumulated in the basement. And the couple have taken part-time weekend jobs. They work at Newton’s recently opened auto speedway. On race weekends, Mrs. Schober is at an information booth, answering questions, and he shuttles handicapped patrons in a six-passenger golf cart. Each job pays $10 an hour. “It helps the cash flow,” Mrs. Schober said. Tim and Rhonda Saunders, in their mid-40s, have taken a different route. He went back to school, while she took a full-time job. While Mr. Saunders put in 20 years at Maytag, mostly shaping sheet metal into cabinets and doors, she raised their two children and worked part-time as a bookkeeper. His layoff last December forced her into the full-time job, at $12 an hour in the accounts-payable department of a small manufacturer, so the family could have health insurance. She took the new job without giving up the part-time work and the $220 a week it brings in. That work is now done at home on evenings and weekends. “We have to pay more for her health insurance than I did at Maytag: $300 a month versus $50,” Mr. Saunders said. “And the coverage is not quite as good. But without it, I could not have gone back to school.” What pushed him into school was the job market. He found that he could not replace, or even approach, his $23-an-hour Maytag wage, not with only a high school diploma. A cousin steered him toward computer programming as a good source of future income, and he enrolled at the Des Moines Area Community College, attending classes full-time on the Newton campus. He turned out to be an A student. More than 450 other ex-Maytag employees are also enrolled in full-time schooling, their expenses paid by the federal government as part of its Trade Adjustment Assistance program. Maytag first qualified in 2003. The company was faltering then, losing market share to imports and whittling down its blue-collar staff from a high of 2,500 in 2000. The Labor Department ruled that the import competition qualified the laid-off workers for up to $15,000 each in tuition, along with book and transportation subsidies, and unemployment insurance for two years. The extended unemployment pay has been a lure. For a number of ex-Maytag workers, it comes to about $360 a week, or $9 an hour — not much below what many jobs pay in Iowa. In his own initial effort to land work, Mr. Saunders found that the best he could do was $11 an hour. So he went to school, and the family tightened its belt. He listed the economies he and his wife have imposed: no more weekend camping trips, cooking hamburgers instead of steaks on the grill, paying less of the college tuition for their children, who are turning more to student loans. But then he inadvertently mentioned a planned excursion to New York with their daughter, and acknowledged that the $3,000 trip was hardly belt-tightening. “My son always wanted a used racing car,” he explained. “And when he turned 18 a couple of years ago, we gave him one, knowing then that my daughter would want to go to New York when she was 18 and see a couple of shows. So we saved the money and it was put away before this ever happened. It was something I wanted to do for her. She was so easy to raise and she worked so hard in school.” Tootie Samson, a 47-year-old mother of three, and a grandmother, is also going back to school with federal aid, but with a different goal in mind. Having already earned a two-year degree in interior design on her own, she’ll now go for a bachelor’s and maybe open her own shop. Ms. Samson joined Maytag on the assembly line in 1997 after working 20 years as a bookkeeper at less than $10 an hour. She came for the wage, $20 an hour today, and to qualify for a pension, lost now in the buyout. She was laid off in 2003, allowing her time to study interior design. Then, to her surprise, she was called back last March. Whirlpool had underestimated how many workers it would need to keep the plant running through October. “For me, it is fortunate to be back at Maytag as it closes,” she said. “You need that closure. It’s done. It’s over. You always think that maybe you’ll get called back and now you know it is over and you can move on with your life.” With Maytag gone, the Newton Development Corporation scrambled to find buyers for the headquarters building and the factory — the great concern being that once shuttered, these buildings would become giant eyesores. Iowa Telecom finally bought the headquarters building, and the Industrial Realty Group of Los Angeles, the factory, with Whirlpool subsidizing both purchases as a goodwill gesture. BUT Maytag fulfilled one function that can’t be finessed. As the biggest employer paying the best wages, it put upward pressure on the pay of other employers, who sought to prevent their best workers from jumping to Maytag. Now that pressure is gone. The loss is seen in the development corporation’s effort to persuade a fiberglass company to put a plant here employing 700 people at $12 to $13 an hour, and health insurance. Ms. Didier, an ex-Maytag employee earning less herself as the development corporation’s executive director, put the best face on it she could. “With Maytag,” she said, “it was difficult for companies to get good people at a lower wage, and now they can.” |
Month: August 2007
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Is There (Middle Class) Life After Maytag?
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Clams, Lifelist,U.S. Open,
- Nadal Recovers From Slow Start to Advance
Robert Caplin for The New York TimesRafael Nadal dropped the first six points of his match, but went on to win 7-5, 3-6, 6-4, 6-
U.S. OpenNadal Recovers From Slow Start to Advance
Filed at 6:35 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) — Rafael Nadal recovered from a slow start, Venus Williams overcame a few glitches and Justine Henin ran right into the next round Wednesday at a U.S. Open where the favorites kept rolling.
Nadal dropped the first six points of his match against No. 123 Alun Jones and later called out a trainer to check on his shaky knees.
The second-seeded Spaniard eventually hit his stride and, once again relying on his legs, moved into the second round 7-5, 3-6, 6-4, 6-1.
”I have to improve in the knees so much more if I’m going to continue in the tournament,” Nadal said.
Williams had some speed bumps — six double-faults, 20 unforced errors — in beating Ioana Raluca Olaru of Romania 6-4, 6-2.
After launching a Grand Slam-record 129 mph serve in her opening match, Williams reached a top speed of 124 mph and had to be content with only one ace. The two-time Open winner and current Wimbledon champ moved into the third round.
”I want to be the last one standing with a plate over my head,” Williams said. ”I’m not stressed out on a few shots. Feel a little wiser.”
Henin also advanced into the third round, defeating Tsvetana Pironkova of Bulgaria 6-4, 6-0.
The top-seeded Belgian, bidding for her seventh major title, broke Pironkova’s spirit midway through the final set.
Caught close to the net, Henin raced back to the baseline, her legs churning at a full speed for a shot that won her the point. Pironkova flipped her racket in the air, then tried to catch it and missed.
”I know I have to work hard because I know a lot of surprises can happen, even if it looks easy,” Henin said. ”You have to be careful all the time.”
Former Open champion Marat Safin, crowd pleaser Ana Ivanovic, No. 8 Tommy Robredo, No. 10 Marion Bartoli, No. 11 Mikhail Youzhny, No. 14 Elena Dementieva, No. 17 Carlos Moya and No. 19 Sybille Bammer also won in straight sets.
”Hopefully, it’ll continue this way and keep it short,” Safin said after beating Frank Dancevic of Canada 7-5, 7-6 (5), 7-6 (7).
Tim Henman, playing his final Grand Slam event, also advanced. The unseeded Brit beat No. 27 Dmitry Tursunov of Russia 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4.
Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Jelena Jankovic were scheduled later in the day.
Ninth-ranked Daniela Hantuchova was the lone player in the upper echelon to lose during the first three days. In all, it was an early breeze for those at the top.
A night earlier, Maria Sharapova and Andy Roddick overpowered their opponents. Former champions Lleyton Hewitt, Martina Hingis and Svetlana Kuznetsova also won in straight sets.
The fifth-seeded Ivanovic defeated Aravane Rezai of France 6-3, 6-1. Popular on and off the court, her victory came a day after she received an unusual request from a fan.
”I was signing autographs after practice, the guy asked me to sign his forehead. I was like, are you kidding?” she said.
”I didn’t,” she said. ”I felt bad for him walking with a sign. I say, ‘I can sign your ball or shirt, but forehead?”’
Robredo beat Bobby Reynolds 6-3, 7-6 (5), 6-1 and Youzhny defeated Nicolas Devilder of France 6-0, 6-1, 6-2. In the women’s draw, Dementieva beat Petra Cetkovska of the Czech Republic, 6-3, 6-2 and Bammer downed Meghann Shaughnessy 6-4, 6-3.
Other ranked players to lose were No. 28 Ai Sugiyama of Japan, beaten by Ekaterina Makarova of Russia 6-4, 4-6, 6-2, and No. 30 Potito Starace of Italy, defeated by Ernests Gulbis of Latvia 7-5, 7-6 (4).
- Ten Things to Do Before This Article Is Finished
Ten Things to Do Before This Article Is Finished
1) Write a catchy opener.
“Zen has no goals,” according to a traditional koan. “It is always on its way.”
If so, Rachael Hubbard, a preschool teacher in Salem, Ore., will not be accompanying it. Ms. Hubbard has many goals — 78, to be exact. And it is only by dutifully ticking them off, she said, that she has found her path toward enlightenment.
Two years ago Ms. Hubbard compiled what is known as a life list, a contract with herself enumerating dozens of goals she hoped to accomplish before she died (build a house for Habitat for Humanity, read “Pride and Prejudice,” etc.) and posted it online.
“I just felt like I was slowly getting older and was looking around saying, ‘Well, I haven’t really done a whole lot with my life yet,’ ” she recalled.
But once she began the journey prescribed by her list, it quickly became an addiction.
“Earn a master’s degree” (No. 5): check.
“See a dinosaur fossil” (No. 27): check.
As for her latest challenges, “become quadri-lingual” or “swim with dolphins,” well, she is only 24.
“Hey, I am actually accomplishing things with my life,” she said, “even if it’s little by little.”
2) Distill the point of this article in a “nut graph.”
Once the province of bird-watchers, mountain climbers and sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the life list has become widely popular with the harried masses, equal parts motivational self-help and escapist fantasy.
3) Demonstrate the popularity of life lists.
Evidence of the lists’ surging popularity is all around. The travel writer Patricia Schultz currently has two “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” books lodged on The New York Times paperback advice best-seller list, two in an avalanche of recent life-list books, like “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” and “101 Things to Do Before You Turn 40.”
In December, Warner Brothers will release Rob Reiner‘s “Bucket List,” starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as cancer patients who set out on a series of life-list adventures, including a Harley ride on the Great Wall of China.
Multiple life-list oriented social-networking Web sites have cropped up, inviting strangers to share their lists and offer mutual encouragement. Even Madison Avenue has chimed in. Visa is currently running a print campaign built around a checklist called “Things to Do While You’re Alive” (and credit-worthy, presumably).
4) Offer an explanation of the phenomenon.
And no wonder life lists are so ubiquitous. They are, proponents say, the perfect way for anxious time-crunched professionals to embark on spiritual quests in a productivity-obsessed age. The lists are results-oriented, quantifiable and relentlessly upbeat. If Aristotle were alive, he might envy the efficiency of a master list in which the messy search for meaning in life is boiled down to a simple grocery list: “get a tattoo,” “learn to surf.”
5) Consult the experts.
“People are dying to make this list, and most haven’t been given a chance since grade school,” said Josh Petersen, a founder of the Robot Co-op, a Seattle company that runs the Web site 43Things.com, which since 2004 has enrolled 1.2 million members who post customized life lists, find others with similar goals and encourage one another to check them off. Sky diving ranks 24th in popularity; losing weight, unsurprisingly, is first. “Pull a prank involving 100 lawn gnomes” is a goal shared by 65 members.
“In school you’re asked, ‘What do want to be when grow up?’ ” Mr. Petersen said. “Then people stop asking the question.”
Caroline Adams Miller, a life coach and motivational-book author in Bethesda, Md., asks that her clients create their own list of 100 things to accomplish. “What it does is give you a road map for your life,” she said. “To check items off your list gives you a sense of self-efficacy, or mastery.”
Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, agrees that people are happiest when making progress toward clear-cut goals, but said that those who set unreasonable goals (or overly ambitious timelines to meet them) set themselves up for stress. “Evolution vested us with a carrot — happiness — and a stick — anxiety,” he explained. “We feel happy when we make progress toward our goals, anxious when we don’t.”
6) Include the celebrity angle.
There was a time when life lists seemed mostly favored by overachievers who viewed their years on earth as heroic narratives. As recounted in “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” the motivational speaker and self-described adventurer John Goddard wrote a list of 127 life goals when he was 15 — pilot the world’s fastest aircraft, milk a poisonous snake — and now, at age 88, says he has checked off 110 of them. (He has yet to visit the moon.)
The college football coach Lou Holtz jotted down a life list of 107 items that included telling jokes on the “Tonight” show and winning a national championship. By 1988 he had done both.
Last year Ellen DeGeneres asked celebrity guests to share their lists on her talk show. Orlando Bloom vowed to learn to play the bongos. Beyoncé Knowles promised to take ballet lessons.
7) Return to the experiences of everyday people.
Non-celebrities tend to use their lists to overcome more-fundamental hurdles. Stacey Morris, 40, a sales manager at a housewares company in Ventnor, N.J., created a 100-item list after consulting with Ms. Miller, the life coach, because she said she felt unmotivated and “needed more focus.” Several of her items seemed vague (“develop a more positive attitude,” for example), but the goals have forced her to take specific steps toward self-improvement, she said.
To make good on her vow to “develop persistence,” she trained herself to pause at work every 15 minutes to record the activities she had just finished. The point, she said, is to eliminate distractions like inessential phone calls. She says she has doubled her daily productive hours.
“Having a life list,” she said, “changed my life.”
When she turned 40, Jill Smolinski, a single mother and freelance writer in Los Angeles, drew up a life list that unearthed ambitions she hadn’t known she had. “The first thing I wrote was ‘live in a beach house,’ ” said Ms. Smolinski, now 46. “That’s weird. I didn’t even know that was important to me.”
“Within a week, I was going for walk and noticed a beach house for rent,” she said, adding, “and I’m standing in it right now.”
The list also yielded a novel. Her book “The Next Thing on My List,” about a woman who vows to live out a dead friend’s life list, was published in April by Shaye Areheart Books.
8) Explore grand theories about the lists’ popularity.
Ms. Schultz, the travel author, who has sold 2.5 million copies of her first book and has seen it spun off into games, desk calendars and a Travel Channel show, surmised that there were demographic factors behind the sudden interest in this alluring, if gimmicky, pursuit.
“Seventy-nine million of us baby boomers are at a point in our life that this is the moment to stop and take stock,” she said. Ms. Schultz, 54, added that she had visited 80 percent of her 1,000 must-see places. “If ever there was an awareness that this is no dress rehearsal, this is it.”
Those in midlife, wrestling with issues of personal worth, seem to be the target for many of the life-list books, like “Fifty Places to Play Golf Before You Die,” by Chris Santella (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2005).
But Justin Zackham, 36, who wrote the screenplay for “The Bucket List” and was one of its executive producers, argues that the life-list impulse is actually strongest among members of Generation X, like himself: those who have grown up watching boomers stress out over high-paying conventional jobs and have vowed to chart their own course.
“We grew up as a generation questioning all that,” said Mr. Zackham, whose own life list includes sky diving (check) and “get a bunch of movies made” (check). “People do more lists now because they are actually thinking outside the typical progression of what life is supposed to be like.”
9) Postulate that life lists show a universal longing for adventure, fulfillment and grace.
The concept of the life list is as old — and American — as the self-improvement regimen that the young Jay Gatsby scribbled inside his tattered copy of “Hopalong Cassidy,” in which he vowed to “practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.”
Decades later the life lists of average Americans do not seem unlike those of people who strived to be extraordinary, and became so. For a companion book to “The Bucket List,” Mr. Zackham collected life lists from dozens of celebrities and high achievers. Jerry Rice, the football great, said he wished to visit Rome. Mr. Freeman, the actor, said he hoped to attain the perfect golf swing.
“These people pretty much want the same thing you do,” Mr. Zackham said. “So how extraordinary are they — or how un-extraordinary are you?”
10) Find a humorous “kicker.”
Then again, some Americans lead lives too extraordinary to augment with a life list.
For his book, Mr. Zackham visited Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion and asked him what he still hoped to experience.
“Nothing,” was Mr. Hefner’s answer to him. “He said, ‘I honestly can’t think of anything I don’t already have.’ ”
- In a ’64 T-Bird, Chasing a Date With a Clam
Erik Jacobs for The New York TimesNOT SO HUMBLE Fried clams, big bellies bulging, at the Clam Box in Ipswich, Mass.
In a ’64 T-Bird, Chasing a Date With a Clam
RECAPTURING a childhood memory is nearly impossible. Chasing after it in a black 1964 Thunderbird convertible with red interior certainly helps.
The memory: lightly fried clams with big, juicy bellies, like the kind I munched on nearly every summer weekend growing up in Swansea, Mass. The car, owned by my friend Bob Pidkameny: a nod to my godfather, a local celebrity and stock car driver, who would pile my two cousins and me into whatever sleek beauty he was tinkering with and take us to Macray’s in Westport, Mass. There we sat — three lard slicks — digging into red-and-white cardboard boxes, while screams from the riders on the Comet, the wooden roller coaster at a nearby amusement park, floated across the highway.
Fried clams are to New England what barbecue is to the South. Like barbecue, the best clams come from small roadside shacks run in pragmatic mom-and-pop style. Flinty Northerners, like their porcine-loving counterparts, can be fanatically loyal to their favorite spots. To eat at any place but Macray’s was considered familial treason when I was growing up — it was Macray’s or nothing, until it was shuttered and we were set adrift.
This summer, in search of the clams of my youth, Bob and I covered more than 625 miles, visited 16 shacks and unashamedly basked in the attention the Thunderbird commanded from Branford, Conn., to Portland, Me., and back. In between rolls of antacid and scoops of ice cream, the unofficial finish to a fried-clam meal, we found that this summertime classic is even more fleeting than the season of its peak popularity.
Storms, public taste, government warnings about saturated fats, even school vacation schedules conspired to keep the clams of my memory mostly out of reach. But every once in a while, fate jiggered events and passed me a pint or two of the luscious, plump-bellied beauties I remember.
To many New Englanders the humble clam, which stars in chowders, clambakes and clam cakes, reaches its quintessence when coated and fried. And ever since July 3, 1916, when Lawrence Woodman, a k a Chubby, the founder of Woodman’s in Essex, Mass., fried a clam in lard normally reserved for his famous potato chips, cooks have been trying to create the perfect fried clam.
But unlike pit masters who rabidly guard their secret sauce recipes, fry cooks are an open book. All work with the same four elements: soft-shell clams, a dipping liquid, a coating and oil. According to almost all the cooks and owners I met the liquid is usually evaporated milk, and the coating is nothing more than some combination of flours: regular, corn or pastry. Most places use canola or soybean oil, which are high in unsaturated fats. Only Woodman’s and Essex Seafood, in Essex, Mass., still fry clams in pure lard.
So why are the clams I dream of so hit-or-miss?
“I’ve been doing this for 21 years,” said Dave Blaney, owner of the Sea Swirl in Mystic, Conn., “and the hardest part is training the new kids.” He explained that it takes two weeks to train summer help, usually college students, but it requires almost two months of supervision to turn them into bona fide fry cooks. He warned me about visiting shacks too early in the season (when the students are gearing up) or too late (when the exodus occurs, and deep-fryers can be left in the hands of most anyone — the owners’ sons or daughters, say, or the cleaning help).
Improperly cooked clams can range from oil-laden to burned. Indeed, the Clam Shack in Kennebunkport, Me., a favorite place I’ve been recommending to friends for years, presented Bob and me with a pint of puny dark-brown clams that tasted faintly of burned liver. Champlin’s Restaurant in Narragansett, R.I., another well-regarded spot, served clams so overcooked we dumped them after eating only a few. In both places, the kitchen crews looked like a cast from “The Real World” on MTV.
The Sea Swirl’s clams, on the other hand, were golden, with a light crunch, and the bellies, while on the smaller side, were plump and filled with ocean flavor. What caught my attention was that the siphons, or “necks,” were snipped off. That made for a soft chew, without the rubber-eraser bite common to most fried clams — even, I must admit, those from the hallowed boxes I remember at Macray’s.
I asked if this was a customary practice of purveyors. “No, I snip them here,” Mr. Blaney said. “Otherwise I’m at the mercy of the supplier, and I can’t afford that.” Of all the places we visited, only the Sea Swirl offered completely snipped necks; the others sold clams with just the tops nicked off.
This snipping, though, shouldn’t be confused with the iconic, and tasteless, clam strips featured on every Howard Johnson menu in New England. These impostors can be as varied as de-bellied steamers — a rarity — and slices cut from the “tongue” of the larger multipurpose Atlantic surf clam. No strip has the oceanic flavor of a true steamer with its belly firmly attached.
It was later that day, after leaving two small Massachusetts shacks empty-handed, that we understood just how much weather influences what we eat, or rather do not eat. As a result of several days of heavy downpours and runoff earlier in the week, the clam flats, the most highly prized of them off the coast of the state’s North Shore, specifically Ipswich and Essex, were closed.
The water can take several days to normalize after a big storm, according to Curt Fougere, a great-grandson of Chubby Woodman and the manager of Woodman’s. That’s why those smaller spots, which don’t sell as many clams as Woodman’s, had to turn us away. Larger places with purchasing muscle can buy from Cape Cod or even as far away as Maryland and Canada, but none of those clams have the Ipswich richness, a byproduct of the nutrient-filled mud.
“Cape Cod clams tend to be gritty,” Mr. Blaney said, “because they come from sandbars rather than mud flats.” Maryland steamers, while deliciously large, are too soft, he said, and break apart while cooking. Maine clams are considered the closest to Ipswich clams, and are the most common substitute.
In between shouts from classic car enthusiasts along Route 1, Bob and I theorized about the reasons for the dearth of the big-belly clams. We batted around global warming, pollution, disease, but none seemed likely to have knocked out only the pudgy clams. No, the biggest threat, we discovered, was far more menacing: fashion.
“Clams kind of go through cycles,” said Terry Cellucci, an owner of J. T. Farnham’s, one-third of the famous Essex clam shack trifecta that includes Woodman’s and Essex Seafood. For years, she explained, smaller clams have been in vogue. “Right now that’s what our customers like, so that’s what we buy.” The same was true of most every place we visited. The clams at Farnham’s fried up dark golden and pleasantly crunchy but were missing that burst of juicy belly brininess.
Two diners at the next table in Farnham’s, Janice Shohet of Lynnfield, Mass., and her guest, Stacey Malcolm, of Wichita, Kan., were of the plump-clam camp. When asked their favorite of the three popular Essex spots, Ms. Shohet tapped the table. “I like it here — it feels like a real seaside place,” she said, referring to the deep-blue inlet outside. Then she mentioned the most important clue to my past: “But we love the Clam Box, too. They give you a choice of big or small bellies.”
As we pulled up outside the Clam Box, eight miles northwest in Ipswich, Mass., the first thing we noticed — aside from the whimsical roof that looks like (what else?) an opened clam box — was the line snaking out the door. It numbered more than 20 and according to the owner, Marina Aggelakis — known to all as Chickie — had started forming, as always, 30 minutes before opening.
Taking Ms. Shohet’s advice, I searched the huge menu above the order window and found the one line of neat, tight printing I was hoping to see: “Big belly clams available on request.” The Clam Box was the only shack on our trip to offer up this critical piece of information unbidden.
When I ordered a pint of the big bellies, the woman behind the counter winced: “Are you sure? They’re big.”
“I’m positive.”
“You’ll only get about nine,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
She tried once more to dissuade me, but I resisted. When my number was called, a tray was pushed through the pickup window: on it was a mound of golden clams with bellies so big and soft the coating was chipping off. The necks, though not trimmed like those at the Sea Swirl, had none of the elastic bite I had encountered in many pints along the way. And the bellies dripped sweet, briny clam juice down my chin.
To pull this all off, Ms. Aggelakis uses only Ipswich clams unless bad weather or high demand causes her to turn to Maine suppliers. She also double-dips her clams while cooking. Excess coating stays behind in the first deep-fryer, allowing for cleaner cooking in the second. In addition, she closes the restaurant between lunch and dinner — unheard-of — to change the oil, ensuring a clean taste all day long.
It was an offhand comment, though, that gave me the final piece of the puzzle: darker-fried clams, she said, have a nuttier taste, while the lighter version lets the clam flavor predominate. Bingo. “I like to please my customers,” she added. “Some like them big, small, lightly fried, dark — we give them what they want.” Funny, the concept of requesting anything special at a clam shack’s takeout window had eluded me for 40 years.
Putting together the experience from the trip, I decided to try my hand at customizing my meal at Lenny’s Indian Head Inn in Branford, Conn. First, I called ahead because we had had two days of steady rain. The clams were frying. When I ordered, I asked the waitress, a bubbly young woman, if the restaurant had big-bellied clams. She wasn’t sure, so went to ask the cook.
She returned deeply crestfallen. All he had, she said, was medium-size, “but he’ll try to pick out the biggest ones.” Equally crestfallen, I agreed and asked for them to be lightly fried.
What was placed in front of me 10 minutes later was a platter with clams nearly as large as those at the Clam Box. They had a light golden almost tempuralike coating. And the bellies? They were briny, sweet and so juicy a lobster bib wouldn’t have been out of the question.
I could almost hear the screams from the Comet again.
-
Iraq War, God and religion, Topless Pools, Las Vegas, Today’s Papers Mike Silverman, Hollywood
- 87, Square and Ever So There
Jonathan Alcorn for The New York TimesSMALL TALK Mike Silverman, 87, a k a the mascot of Malibu, chats with the actresses Nicole Moore, left, and Vail Bloom
87, Square and Ever So There
MALIBU, Calif.
MIKE SILVERMAN didn’t get up once during the entire party. Celebrities and aspiring starlets kept coming by, some of them leaning down in flimsy tops to kiss his cheek, some just saying “Hi.”
Friends served Mr. Silverman crab legs and oysters. The D.J. turned down the music for him. When bystanders blocked his view of a lovely actress, he asked them to move, and they obliged.
Two young men made their way to the white-haired guy in the orthopedic shoes to ask, you know, how he does it.
“I’m a bad boy,” Mr. Silverman said with a wink. He raised his arm from his walker and pointed to a plastic medallion around his neck that read “Bad Boy.”
“You are bad,” Ryan Purcell, 24, said admiringly. “Every time a girl walks by here, it’s like you’re getting a lap dance or something.”
Mr. Purcell was exaggerating, but there is no doubt that Mr. Silverman — charming, bawdy, 87 years old — is enjoying his perch at Polaroid House, a bungalow on Malibu’s “Billionaires Beach” that a public relations agency rented for a summer of parties, photo opportunities and promotions for corporations, chief among them Polaroid. Here, he has become a mascot of the Malibu party circuit.
“Everybody loves Mike,” said Fritz Gerhardt, a deeply tanned surfer and Polaroid House devotee. “He’s a legend in Malibu. He’s got a good soul.”
And good opening lines. With a vocabulary of bygone phrases (“doll face”) and a few old dirty jokes (“A woman was having sex with her husband, and an earthquake woke her up”), Mr. Silverman has won over the likes of Paris and Nicky Hilton, Matthew McConaughey and a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan, as well as the nearly famous and non-famous who frequent the house.
“I could have the hottest guy in my house and you’ll find half the girls around Mike,” said Jessica Meisels, an owner of Fingerprint Communications, the public relations company that manages Polaroid House. At the start of the summer, Fingerprint extended invitations to the neighbors — a kind of good-will, please-don’t-call-the-cops gesture. Mr. Silverman, who owns the $20 million Cape Cod-style house next door, gleefully accepted.
To some Polaroid House guests, Mr. Silverman seems an incongruous character in a room full of revelers many generations his junior, worthy of the same attention one would give an elderly relative at a family function.
“You’re adorable!” cooed Ali Larter, the coquettish star of the television series “Heroes.” She planted a kiss on Mr. Silverman’s cheek, which he returned in kind before she bounced away.
But to others, he is a welcome presence — a living link to a dignified Hollywood that seems long gone, if it existed at all.
“You’re back!” Romi Maggorno, a 29-year-old music publicist, said when she spotted Mr. Silverman. She celebrated his attendance with a kiss on the cheek and a shake of her rump.
“Mike is a good guy,” Ms. Maggorno said as she introduced a group of friends to him. “He’s very regal. He flirts, but he’s not a dirty old man. It’s an old Hollywood kind of flirting.”
“I’m having just a great time,” Mr. Silverman explained as an old Run-DMC song boomed in the background. “This crowd is colorful, interesting. They all have a lot of spirit — and occasionally, some depth.”
The Virile Elder has become an archetype in Hollywood, where a man on the right side of the line between envy and pity can stay at the dance long after he has stopped recognizing the music.
There’s Hugh Hefner, who at 81 is still followed about by a gaggle of young girlfriends, and the late talent agent Irving (Swifty) Lazar, who in his autumn years was famous for giving the only Oscar parties that mattered. Like them, Mr. Silverman’s history stretches back to Hollywood’s Golden Age.
As a Beverly Hills real estate broker in the 1950s, Mr. Silverman once enjoyed a celebrity of his own and was described everywhere from National Geographic to German fashion magazines as the “Realtor to the stars.”
He hung out poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the pockets of his swim trunks filled with waterproof business cards that he passed out to famous sunbathers.
Newspaper stories of the era tell of Mr. Silverman selling mansions to Zsa Zsa Gabor, Frank Sinatra and Tony Curtis, and buying property from Mae West that he turned into commercial real estate. All the while, he partied with his clients, usually at sit-down dinners. “Because it was in a controlled atmosphere,” Mr. Silverman explained, “it couldn’t get too crazy or too wild.”
Still, Mr. Silverman was able to win a remarkably intimate degree of access to his famous clients. A sampling of photographs from his albums show him on an African safari with William Holden, at a party with Pat Boone and on a picnic in the English countryside with Rex Harrison.
Mr. Silverman said he began his working life as an unsuccessful, socially awkward commercial artist with a debilitating stutter. A chance encounter with a real estate agent at a bar in 1949 changed all that. Over a few beers, the agent told him that selling houses could turn an uneducated man into a millionaire.
And it did. Mr. Silverman reinvented himself as a playboy with a penchant for gimmicks. “Now,” he said, “I have the ability to turn a cold stranger into a friend.”
Indeed, Mr. Silverman didn’t marry until 10 years ago — to a woman more than 20 years his junior who supports his active life.
“This has been absolutely the best summer for him,” said his wife, Davey Davison, 64, a former actress. “I don’t really care for parties, but he gets a kind of energy from them.”
Of course he can’t maintain the same party-hopping pace that he kept up 50 years ago. He was hospitalized with pneumonia for five weeks earlier this summer. When he returned home in July, he found photographers lining his beach and Matthew McConaughey playing in the sand.
When Mr. McConaughey’s Frisbee landed on his deck, Mr. Silverman tossed it back, along with a joke about the “beached paparazzi” on his property.
Ms. Meisels said: “Matt went over to talk with him, and then I brought him some barbecue and ended up talking with him for three hours. Now we’re obsessed with him.”
And so, what was supposed to be a summer of recuperation has turned into a wildly good time.
At the final Polaroid House event last week, Russell Crowe and Heath Ledger were expected, but only Wilmer Valderrama and, of course, Paris Hilton, showed. Mr. Silverman made the scene but decided not to stay.
A pair of tattooed musicians from the rock band Only the Young cleared a path through the crowd as Mr. Silverman bid them adieu. He was almost out the door when a smiling blond chef asked him to pose for a photo.
“I’ve heard about you,” she said.
He smiled for the camera, then shuffled out the door.
“I have another party to go to,” he explained.
- Today’s Papers
More and More
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007, at 6:07 A.M. E.T.The Washington Post leads with word that the Bush administration wants more money for the Iraq war and is planning to ask Congress for up to $50 billion next month. The thinking seems to be that lawmakers won’t be able to say no after Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker ask for more time to build on the progress they have made. The New York Times leads with a look at how even though the United States has pledged to accept more Iraqi refugees whose lives are threatened because of their work for the U.S. government and military, “very few are signing up to go.” Iraqis have to leave the country to apply, which means taking a costly and dangerous trip to neighbors such as Syria and Jordan, where, if allowed in, they could languish for months. The State Department says the security challenge would be too great to process applications inside Iraq.
The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal‘s world-wide newsbox lead with new census figures that show the number of people without health insurance increased by 2.2 million in 2006 to a grand total of 47 million. In terms of the overall population, 15.8 percent of people lacked insurance, which is the highest level since 1998. At a time when President Bush is in a fight with Congress over health insurance for children, the LAT points out the number of uninsured children grew by 600,000. The LAT also mentions, while USAT goes inside with, economic figures in the census that showed there was a slight increase in median household income and a modest drop in poverty rates in 2006, although pretty much no one (except President Bush and some Republicans) saw this as particularly good news.
The extra money for Iraq would be in addition to the approximately $460 billion in the defense budget and it will probably be added to the $147 billion supplemental bill to pay for Afghanistan and Iraq. The Post breaks it down: “the cost of the war in Iraq now exceeds $3 billion a week.” The additional request is a sign the administration sees the “surge” lasting “into the spring of 2008.” Near the end of the story an unnamed officer at the Joint Chiefs of Staff continues the campaign to reduce expectations for the Petraeus-Crocker hearings, saying he doesn’t expect “any surprises.”
Although the State Department wants to give priority to those who worked directly for the U.S. government, the approximately 69,000 Iraqis who work on U.S. contracts for the private sector face many of the same threats. There’s no official count of how many Iraqis working for the war effort have been murdered, but one large company says 280 of its employees have been killed since 2003.
The modest rise in median household income to $48,201 was mainly due to people working longer hours, or more people entering the workforce, and not because they were being paid more. And the household income still remains below the pre-2001 recession peak. In addition, the slight decrease in the poverty rate was not a reflection of a widespread improvement as old people were the ones that saw the largest benefit. The WSJ points out that even though the poverty rate saw its first significant decline in a decade, the figures “showed how meager some of the gains for those in the middle class have been,” which is partly because of the continuing trend of increased income inequality.
Yesterday, the WSJ introduced us to Norman Hsu, a political fund-raiser who got into the game three years ago and has given lots of money to Democratic candidates, a big chunk of it to Sen. Hillary Clinton. The paper raised questions about how a family of apparently modest means with ties to Hsu has donated $200,000 in the last few years. Today, the WSJ looks into how Hsu is one of Clinton’s top fund-raisers but has maintained a “remarkably low-profile.” In a Page One story, the LAT reveals Hsu might have a reason to want to stay (relatively) far from the limelight: “He’s a fugitive,” said the man who handled the case 15 years ago in which Hsu agreed to serve up to three years. Although the paper notes Hsu has been photographed at numerous events, authorities are still technically looking for him since he disappeared after pleading no contest to grand theft.
The Post fronts, and everyone mentions, Senate GOP leaders calling for an ethics investigation of Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho after it was revealed that he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges. The NYT fronts a look at the exasperation currently felt by Republicans who seem to be engulfed in scandal after scandal.
Yesterday, Craig tried to begin the process of saving his career and reputation and denied any wrongdoing. He said it was a mistake to plead guilty after he was arrested by an undercover officer in a Minneapolis airport restroom. Craig contends he was under pressure from a newspaper that was investigating claims he had sexual encounters with men in bathrooms. He has now hired a lawyer, but experts said he faces an uphill battle if he hopes to reopen the case.
The NYT is alone in trying to look into claims that there had been a number of arrests “regarding sexual activity in the public restroom” at the airport. But the airport wouldn’t talk numbers and although it’s clear there had been stepped-up security patrols, it’s less clear whether anyone was caught having sex or whether there were complaints. Most of the major airports say they haven’t experienced problems of this nature. Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t take the extra step of questioning whether this is a real or fabricated problem for places like airports. But it does talk to the owner of a popular Web site that lists places where men can have sexual encounters with other men, and explains that foot tapping is part of the “little unspoken code” of bathroom sex. Although the site’s URL merely consists of the words “cruising” and “sex,” the Times doesn’t name it and prefers to call it simply a “gay sex Web site.”
Daniel Politi writes “Today’s Papers” for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com.- Losing Your Shirt, but Not in the Casino
Isaac Brekken for The New York TimesON THE BEACH Tops are mandatory, not optional, at the pool area Tao Beach at the Venetian.
Losing Your Shirt, but Not in the Casino
UNDER an oppressive desert sun, 1,500 revelers squeeze in and around a complex of pools at the Palms resort, showing off their dance moves and late-summer tans. The hotel’s weekly bacchanal, Ditch Fridays, is in full flare.
The sloshed and the giddy sled on plastic saucers down an artificial hill, created with 25 tons of snow, then drop into chest-high heated water. D.J.’s spin a blend of rock and hip-hop, and cabanas overflow with pretty people in designer swim trunks and bikinis. A glass-bottom pool, which serves as the ceiling of an outdoor bar, echoes swingy decadence, 1970s-style.
“It feels like spring break,” says Heather Fordham, a trainer from Texas visiting here with 20 girlfriends. “The only difference is that we’re all in our 30s and we need more time to recover from our hangovers.”
Along the Las Vegas Strip, new-breed pools have dovetailed with nightclubs to become a magnet for attracting customers to casinos. Growing from simple hotel amenities to small resorts after steroidal makeovers — a $35 million expansion at the Palms — many have their own entrances, bottle service and admission policies enforced by doormen at a velvet rope.
To justify the investments, properties strive to outdo one another by conjuring flashy approximations of Gen X joie de vivre.
Some of the hotels manufacture sex appeal by wooing local strippers with free cabanas. Ordinary guests at elite pools are provided with free goodies like ice-cold towels, frozen fruit kebabs and sunblock.
Mandalay Bay has a full-blown gambling den overlooking its wave pool ($100-minimum blackjack tables afford a view of topless sunbathers in a discreet section called Moorea Beach). Wynn Las Vegas has a poolside menu from the kitchen of one of its restaurants, Tableau.
And at Tao Beach, a spinoff of Tao Nightclub, in the Venetian, employees resolve problems that are easily endured.
“We have guys who walk around with water tanks on their sides,” says a Tao owner, Richard Wolf, “and their job is to spritz guests so nobody gets too hot.”
Mr. Wolf instructs his door staff to maintain a two-to-one ratio of women to men.
“There are girls who clean people’s sunglasses and then there’s our mood director,” Mr. Wolf says. “He makes sure that groups of guys and groups of girls get introduced to each other all day long.”
Happening pool scenes have proved to be a profitable gambit for Las Vegas casinos. Usually managed by the same entities responsible for filling stylish dance floors around town, the pools lure big players and keep customers in-house.
“Casinos are turning swimming pools into clubs and leveraging what had been underutilized assets,” says David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
And the pools’ what-happens-here-stays-here atmosphere also puts players in a casino-friendly frame of mind, says Anthony Curtis, president of lasvegasadvisor.com, which tracks local action.
“Just like the nightclubs, pool parties get guests loose and ready to gamble,” Mr. Curtis says. “It’s midday and they’re already in a full-on, damn-the-torpedoes Vegas mood. It’s what the casinos want, but it’s also what the people want.”
In 1941, the El Rancho, the first Las Vegas hotel passed by tourists driving in from Southern California, placed its pool facing the street. Coming upon it from the desert, Mr. Schwartz says, “The idea was that you’d be drawn by the refreshing pool and would check in at the El Rancho rather than proceeding downtown — in your non-air-conditioned car — to where most of the casinos were.”
Fifty-one years later, the Rio hotel and casino started the city’s first modern pool party. But the enterprise was elevated to its current state by Chad Pallas, who made a name in Las Vegas by overseeing a nightspot called Baby’s at the Hard Rock.
After a while, however, management decided that Baby’s had cooled. Suddenly, Mr. Pallas needed to justify his paycheck. He envisioned Rehab, a Sunday afternoon party at the pool. That was in 2004, and Las Vegas daylife has not been the same.
According to Mr. Pallas, Rehab grosses around $6 million a summer.
“Before Rehab, the pool was generating $15,000 on a Sunday,” he says. “Now we have cabanas going for $2,000 to $5,000 per day, and 40 people were on the waiting list today. Plus there’s the bottle service, a private waitress, a special wristband.”
If that’s not enough, showoffs at Rehab have developed a custom that they call making it rain. “They drop $100 bills from the cabanas up above,” Mr. Pallas says, “and watch the crowd down below go crazy. We have a guy come in every Sunday on his private jet. He stays for the day and makes it rain.”
Rainmaking aside, how expensive can it get for high-end customers seeking a raucous Sunday afternoon? Randy Lund, a C.P.A. who works as a branch manager for mortgage broker Meridias Capital, has been going to Rehab since Day 1. He says he spends more than $100,000 a year on cabanas, food and alcohol for him and his guests. Yet as much as Rehab is about recreation for Mr. Lund, it is also about business.
“I bring Realtors and clients and they love it at Rehab,” says Mr. Lund, trim, shirtless and wearing board shorts. “I met a guy here who was a friend of a friend, I invited him to hang out with us in my cabana, and I bought him a few drinks. He turned out to be a multimillionaire who owns shopping centers and a jet. Now he’s a mentor to me, and we’re in the process of developing our own shopping center here in Vegas.”
But these kinds of free-spending customers are tough to lure. And in Las Vegas’s highly competitive atmosphere, everyone tries to outdo everybody else.
In recent years the Mirage, Wynn Las Vegas, Caesars Palace and Mandalay Bay have introduced what they call European sunbathing. It takes place in sequestered pools, often requires an additional admission, and men always pay more than women (as much as $50 a day, and with day beds or cabanas, costs can easily reach $1,000 for an afternoon). The policy is part capitalism and part crowd control. As one pool manager says, during the busy Cinco de Mayo weekend, “I turned away $15,000 worth of business because we didn’t want too many guys in here.”
At the Mirage, the top-optional pool club is known as Bare. There, one weekend afternoon, the N.B.A. star Devon George hung out with friends in an elevated V.I.P. area with its private, glass-walled pool while, on a nearby lounge, a half-dozen out-of-town girlfriends debate doffing their tops.
One of them casually takes the plunge, and others follow. The lone holdout, Libby Chansky, of Santa Cruz, Calif., who is here on vacation, suddenly finds herself in what resembles a female rugby scrum. She emerges topless. Looking slightly abashed, she says she hasn’t had any work done so told her friends that she didn’t want to remove her top. Pointing to the ringleader, she says, “But my friend whipped it off anyway.”
As potential visitors are endlessly told, being a little naughty is part of Sin City’s allure, and Las Vegas’s pool scene works hard to feed into that.
“Las Vegas is about creating experiences that people cannot have at home,” says Scott Sibella, president of the Mirage and the force behind Bare. “You see the girl next door here and know that she would not go topless at home.”
Toplessness may be the latest tactic in the Las Vegas pool wars, but not for all. Palms and Rehab have never gone that way (“I like having something left to the imagination,” says Mr. Pallas); Tao Beach did it for a while before retreating.
The manager of a rival pool maintains that Tao’s new modesty stems from the fact that it stays open after dark as part of Tao Nightclub and that it was hard to persuade guests to cover up after sunset. “The way it was going, they would have had to change their designation to topless bar,” says the competitor.
Mr. Wolf explains it differently: “We ultimately decided that it would be better, in terms of being a classy, fun, hip beach-club, to not be topless. It was a hard decision but it was a good decision.”
Whatever the case, it apparently has not hurt business. As Sunday evening encroaches, Rehab winds down and the party kicks up at Tao Beach. A drummer from “Stomp” plays on top of a D.J.’s beats, and a trumpeter roams among the Buddhas meant to imbue an exotic air. A bride-to-be in a monokini rubs lotion into a muscle-boy’s biceps, and Mr. Wolf marvels over a man with the Tao logo tattooed on his stomach.
For the people behind this pool-club-cum-disco, it all adds up to profits. But, looking around, even among the fabulousness, a pall sets upon Mr. Wolf’s face. What’s wrong?
“I’m noticing that as it gets later on Sunday, the crowd shifts,” he says. “It seems that we have more guys and fewer girls. And, to be honest, it concerns me.”
Then he bucks up and declares, “But, don’t worry, I’m going to fix it.”
Marco …Polo
Many of the following require guests to be 21 or older.
TAO BEACH (Venetian) Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to sunset; Sunday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Free Sunday to Friday, with a selective door policy; $20 Saturday, but free for local women and hotel guests. (702) 388-8588.
BARE (Mirage) Daily 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. $10 for women, $30 for men Monday to Thursday; $20 for women, $40 for men Friday to Sunday. Selective door policy, including hotel guests. (702) 791-7442.
DITCH FRIDAYS (Palms) Friday, noon to 7 p.m. $20, but local women and hotel guests free. (702) 938-9999.
REHAB (Hard Rock) Sunday, noon to 7 p.m. $20 for women, $30 for men. Free for hotel guests, through express line. Otherwise, the wait can exceed two hours. (702) 693-5555.
VENUS POOL CLUB (Caesars Palace) Daily 9 a.m. to sundown. $20 for women, $30 for men. (702) 650-5944.
- God and Belief
God’s Still Dead
Mark Lilla doesn’t give us enough credit for shaking off the divine.
Posted Monday, Aug. 20, 2007, at 11:06 AM ET
Those of us in the fast-growing atheist community who have long suspected that there is a change in the zeitgeist concerning “faith” can take some encouragement from the decision of the New York Times Magazine to feature professor Mark Lilla on the cover of the Aug. 19 edition. But we also, on reading the extremely lucid extract from his new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, are expected to take some harsh punishment. Briefly stated, the Lilla thesis is as follows:- The notion of a “separation” of church and state comes from a unique historical contingency of desperate and destructive warfare between discrepant Christian sects, which led Thomas Hobbes to propose a historical compromise in the pages of his 17th-century masterpiece, Leviathan. There is no general reason why Hobbes’ proposal will work at all times or in all places.
- Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all, and they are thus (in an excellent term derived by Lilla from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) by nature “theotropic,” or inclined toward religion.
- That instinct being stronger than any discrete historical moment, it is idle to imagine that mere scientific or material progress will abolish the worshipping impulse.
- Liberalism is especially implicated in this problem, because the desire for a better world very often takes a religious form, and thus it is wishful to identify “belief” with the old forces of reaction, because it will also underpin utopian or messianic or other social-engineering fantasies.
Taken separately, all these points are valid in and of themselves. Examined more closely, they do not cohere as well as all that. In the first place, it is not correct to say that modernism relied on a conviction about the steady disappearance of religious belief. Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, to take two very salient examples, looked upon religion as virtually ineradicable—the former precisely because he did identify it with secular yearnings that would be hard to satisfy, and the latter because he thought it originated in our oldest mistake, which was (and is) wishful thinking.
In the second place, it is interesting to find Lilla conceding—though not in so many words—that religion is closely related to the totalitarian. As he phrases it when writing about Orthodox Jewish and Islamic law (and as was no less the case for Christianity in its pre-Hobbesian heyday), divine or revealed teaching is “meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands.” How true. Now, there is one thing one can say with relative certainty about the totalitarian principle, which is that it has been repeatedly tried and has repeatedly failed. Try and run a society out of the teachings of one holy book, and you will end with every kind of ignominy and collapse. There is no reason at all to confine this grim lesson to the Christians who were butchering each other between the Thirty Years’ War and the English Civil War; even the Jews who established the state of Israel and the Muslims who set up Pakistan understood the importance of some considerable secular latitude (as did the Hindus who were the majority in independent India). In other words, while it may be innate in people to be “theotropic,” it is also quite easy for them to understand that religion is a very potent and dangerous toxin. Never mind for now what Islamist fundamentalism might want to do to us; take a look at what it did to the Muslims of Afghanistan.
So, when Lilla says that the American experiment (in confessional pluralism and constitutional secularism) is “utterly exceptional,” he forgets that there had to be many dress rehearsals for this and that only a uniquely favorable opportunity was the really “exceptional” condition. Men like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine had been eagerly studying the secular and agnostic and atheist thinkers of the past and present, from Democritus to Hume, and hoping only for a chance to put their principles into action. There are many minds in today’s Muslim world who have, by equally scrupulous and hazardous inquiry, come to the same conclusion. It is repression as much as circumambient culture that prevents the expression of the idea (as it did for many, many, Christian and Western centuries).
Lilla’s most brilliant point concerns the awful pitfalls of what he does not call “liberation theology.” Leaving this stupid and oxymoronic term to one side, and calling it by its true name of “liberal theology” instead, he reminds us that the eager reformist Jews and Protestants of 19th-century Germany mutated into the cheerleaders of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Reich, which they identified—as had Max Weber—with history incarnate. Lilla might have added, for an ecumenical touch, that Kaiser Wilhelm, in launching the calamitous World War I, was also the ally and patron of the great jihad proclaimed by his Ottoman Turkish subordinates. So, could we hear a little less from the apologists of religion about how “secular” regimes can be just as bad as theocratic ones? Of course they can—if they indulge in acts of faith and see themselves as possessing supernatural authority.
Lilla goes on to cite the many liberal religious figures who became apologists for Nazism and Stalinism, and I think he is again correct to stress the Jewish and Protestant element here, if only because most of the odium has rightly fallen until now on the repulsive role played by the Vatican. So, what is he really saying? That religion is no more than a projection of man’s wish to be a slave and a fool and of his related fear of too much knowledge or too much freedom. Well, we didn’t even need Hobbes (who wanted to replace a divine with a man-made dictator) to tell us that. To regret that we cannot be done with superstition is no more than to regret that we have a common ancestry with apes and plants and fish. But millimetrical progress has been made even so, and it is measurable precisely to the degree that we cease to believe ourselves the objects of a divine (and here’s the totalitarian element again) “plan.” Shaking off the fantastic illusion that we are the objective of the Big Bang or the process of evolution is something that any educated human can now do. This was not quite the case in previous centuries or even decades, and I do not think that Lilla has credited us with such slight advances as we have been able to make.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.- Iraq War Perspective
Iraq War Commentary
Keith Negley
Op-Ed ContributorA War We Just Might Win
Washington
VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.
Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.
Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services — electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation — to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began — though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done.
In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks — all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups — who were now competing to secure his friendship.
In Baghdad’s Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived.
We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark.
But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq).
In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Army’s highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab.
In the past, few Iraqi units could do more than provide a few “jundis” (soldiers) to put a thin Iraqi face on largely American operations. Today, in only a few sectors did we find American commanders complaining that their Iraqi formations were useless — something that was the rule, not the exception, on a previous trip to Iraq in late 2005.
The additional American military formations brought in as part of the surge, General Petraeus’s determination to hold areas until they are truly secure before redeploying units, and the increasing competence of the Iraqis has had another critical effect: no more whack-a-mole, with insurgents popping back up after the Americans leave.
In war, sometimes it’s important to pick the right adversary, and in Iraq we seem to have done so. A major factor in the sudden change in American fortunes has been the outpouring of popular animus against Al Qaeda and other Salafist groups, as well as (to a lesser extent) against Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
These groups have tried to impose Shariah law, brutalized average Iraqis to keep them in line, killed important local leaders and seized young women to marry off to their loyalists. The result has been that in the last six months Iraqis have begun to turn on the extremists and turn to the Americans for security and help. The most important and best-known example of this is in Anbar Province, which in less than six months has gone from the worst part of Iraq to the best (outside the Kurdish areas). Today the Sunni sheiks there are close to crippling Al Qaeda and its Salafist allies. Just a few months ago, American marines were fighting for every yard of Ramadi; last week we strolled down its streets without body armor.
Another surprise was how well the coalition’s new Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams are working. Wherever we found a fully staffed team, we also found local Iraqi leaders and businessmen cooperating with it to revive the local economy and build new political structures. Although much more needs to be done to create jobs, a new emphasis on microloans and small-scale projects was having some success where the previous aid programs often built white elephants.
In some places where we have failed to provide the civilian manpower to fill out the reconstruction teams, the surge has still allowed the military to fashion its own advisory groups from battalion, brigade and division staffs. We talked to dozens of military officers who before the war had known little about governance or business but were now ably immersing themselves in projects to provide the average Iraqi with a decent life.
Outside Baghdad, one of the biggest factors in the progress so far has been the efforts to decentralize power to the provinces and local governments. But more must be done. For example, the Iraqi National Police, which are controlled by the Interior Ministry, remain mostly a disaster. In response, many towns and neighborhoods are standing up local police forces, which generally prove more effective, less corrupt and less sectarian. The coalition has to force the warlords in Baghdad to allow the creation of neutral security forces beyond their control.
In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front. Iraqi politicians of all stripes continue to dawdle and maneuver for position against one another when major steps towards reconciliation — or at least accommodation — are needed. This cannot continue indefinitely. Otherwise, once we begin to downsize, important communities may not feel committed to the status quo, and Iraqi security forces may splinter along ethnic and religious lines.
How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.
Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.
