David Paul Kuhn - Politico
Despite the first black major party candidate for president, the discussion of race during this election has been remarkably muted — but Saturday’s Associated Press-Yahoo study estimating that 2.5 percent of Democratic voters will not support Democrat Barack Obama because of his race may thrust issues of color and identity back into the campaign spotlight.
A look back at the many polls and surveys on race relations conducted during this election cycle shows a more complicated picture in which race appears to have cut into Obama's support with some voters even as it has increased support with others — and he continues to have overwhelming support among black voters.
An ABC News analysis of public polling and racial attitudes in June found that three in 10 whites expressed feelings of prejudice or racial insensitivity and that those who did favored Republican John McCain by a 26-point margin. The same study, though, also found that among the two in 10 whites “at the high end of racial sensitivity,” Obama led by 19 points.
“In our own work we have found that yes, there is a group of whites ill-disposed to a black candidate and ill-disposed to vote for him,” said Gary Langer, who heads the ABC News polling unit. “We also found there is a group of whites well-disposed to a black candidate and more likely to support him. And in the end, we did not see any net effect.”
The AP-Yahoo study came to different conclusions, describing white Democratic racism as having the potential to significantly undermine Obama’s political prospects. Of the one-third of the white Democrats it surveyed who referenced a negative adjective such as “violent” or “boastful” when describing blacks, just 58 percent said that they planned to back Obama.
Excluding Obama’s fleeting downturn after the Republican convention, though, the Gallup poll’s authoritative weekly survey summaries have generally measured the Democrat with the backing of about 34 to 38 percent of white men, about the standard level of support for a Democratic candidate since 1980. Among white women, his support has ranged from being split with McCain to being slightly behind — also fairly normative for a Democratic candidate.
“If Obama’s support among whites is essentially the same as Al Gore’s support among whites, and better than Walter Mondale’s and Michael Dukakis’ success among whites, then it's hard to ascribe his deficit among whites to his race,” Langer said.
For Obama, more public attention on the subject of race may not be a welcome turn of events.
The Democrat has seen his campaign rebound this past week as Wall Street has imploded, with the Gallup tracking poll showing him ahead of McCain 50 to 44 percent — matching the height of his support this year. Up until the convention, polls had consistently shown voters preferring Obama on the question of which candidate would be better suited to improve the economy, and most observers continue to see the economy as favorable turf for the Democrat.
The widely respected annual Pew Religion and Public Life Survey reported in August, for example, that 57 percent of voters believe McCain has “conservative” or “very conservative” values, while 48 percent believe Obama has “liberal” or “very liberal” moral values.
On Pew’s moral or cultural values scale, Obama was not as far to the political left as Bill Clinton, and McCain was not as far to the political right as George W. Bush. But Pew noted that voters remain more socially conservative than liberal, positioning the public's “moral values” nearer to McCain than Obama.
The Obama campaign has generally attempted to avoid cultural debates on wedge issues, including race. In his book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama notes how the framework of those debates in national elections has long favored Republicans.
A July New York Times/CBS News poll found that despite Obama’s historic campaign, almost six in 10 blacks said race relations were generally bad, while 34 percent of whites said the same.
During the Democratic primaries, Obama’s own call for a conversation on race was delivered in a speech only after the emergence of racially charged remarks from his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Since the widely applauded remarks, the Democrat’s campaign has been mostly silent on the subject.
One seasoned Democratic strategist noted, on the condition that his name be withheld, that Obama’s campaign may have concluded that discussing race can only further limit his wider public appeal. Throughout the Democratic primaries, the Obama campaign has been keen on the candidate avoiding the label of “the black candidate.”
Although Saturday’s AP-Yahoo study indicates racism remains a substantial factor shaping the outcome of the presidential race, it will likely face scrutiny in the coming days.
The Democrats surveyed were about 10 percentage points less supportive of Obama than is normally found among Democrats in other polls. The poll also did not ask about widely agreed-on non-racial weaknesses for Obama, from his inexperience to the fact that no northern Democrat has been elected president since 1960.
And although the much buzzed-about AP dispatch was almost entirely focused on race, the study itself found that “race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama,” reporting that “doubts about his competency loom even larger.”
Measuring how the latent beliefs on culture, race and gender affect voters has challenged pollsters for decades, because many voters are unwilling to frankly express their views on these subjects — and the AP poll will surely be cited by those who see racism as damaging to Obama’s prospects.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
We're Teaching Books That Don't Stack Up
By Nancy Schnog – Washington Post
Sunday, August 24, 2008; B01
Browsing in Barnes & Noble one recent afternoon, I found myself drawn to the "Summer Reading" table, where neatly stacked piles of books by Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston sat waiting for the teenagers who were supposed to read them by the first day of school. Gazing at the gleaming covers, I had to wonder how many students were in fact turning the pages with any real desire to get to the next one.
It's the time of year when I'm reminded of my twisted fate as a high-school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in America. "The percentage of 17-year olds," it reports, "who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled" in the past 20 years. I teach juniors and seniors -- yes, 17-year-olds.
If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today's high-school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It's our job to take digital natives -- teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube -- and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism.
But as school starts up again, it's time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn't the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We've shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it's English teachers like me -- as able and well-intentioned as we may be -- who close down teen interest in reading.
"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded). I'll never forget what one parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after she took AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."
As someone who teaches in private schools, I find this especially painful to acknowledge. I haven't been constrained in my teaching methods by Standards of Learning or No Child Left Behind testing. But even where teachers are free to design their own "best practices," I've been amazed at the chasm between their sense of purpose in their curricular choices and teens' sense that what they choose for them is irrelevant. Ironically, kids' turn-off to books can originate in teachers' hopes of turning them on.
How do I know? Because kids tell me. Every June, when I asked my students at a previous school to write about a favorite book of the year, they mostly gushed over two: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." For years, "Catcher" served as a successful icebreaker for my juniors, exciting debate while eliding the gender divide. Whether they admired Holden Caulfield's quirkiness or disparaged him as a jerk, both my male and female students were eager to argue about him.
So imagine my dismay when "Catcher" was demoted to the eighth or ninth grade. Apparently it wasn't sophisticated enough for 11th-graders, its language too facile, the plot insufficiently complex. That many 17-year-olds identify powerfully with Salinger's 17-year-old protagonist was a fact cast by the wayside.
But here's what a former student wrote in an essay about this book that knocked her socks off: "To my twelve-year-old self, the book didn't seem to move anywhere. I didn't understand why Holden couldn't just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the difficulties of teenage romance, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me." In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.
It's hard to forget my son's summer-reading assignment the year before he entered ninth grade: Julia Alvarez's "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents." Try as he did, he never got beyond the first of 15 vignettes about four culturally displaced sisters who search for identity through therapists and mental illness, men and sex, drugs and alcohol. I could hardly blame him. We ask 14-year-old boys to read novels about the travails of anguished women and want them to develop a love of reading?
Far too often, teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels. "Why do we assume that every 15-year-old who passes through sophomore English is an English major in the making?" asks a teacher friend. "It's simply not the case. And the kids go elsewhere, just as fast as they can -- anywhere but another book."
I watched this play out last year when the junior reading list at my school, consisting mainly of major American authors, was fortified with readings in Shakespeare, Ibsen and the British Romantic poets. When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear that they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?" asked one agitated boy, obviously yearning for afternoon lacrosse to begin.
One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."
Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."
So there you have it: A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high-school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer him. "The reason I did not participate in class," he admitted, "was that I found the reading a chore."
Parents of high-school students are probably familiar with the product of this classroom: the alienated writer who turns up sulking at the dinner table. When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both the student (think "all-nighter") and the teacher, who'll spend precious weekend hours reading papers devoid of content. The upshot of this empty drill: teens increasingly resistant to great books.
If I were a student today, surfing the gazillions of Web libraries or model-essay banks for insight into an assigned school classic, I'm sure I'd be asking myself, "What on Earth could there be left to say?" Last year, when I thought that I was stepping out of the mainstream by requiring my students to write a review of "Dead Poets Society," I was shocked to find, with just one click, that the 1989 Robin Williams movie had already been analyzed by hundreds of online literary pundits. Asking our students for yet another written commentary has a certain absurd ring to it, no?
The lesson couldn't be clearer. Until we do a better job of introducing contemporary culture into our reading lists, matching books to readers and getting our students to buy in to the whole process, literature teachers will continue to fuel the reading crisis.
I'm not suggesting that every 11th-grade English teacher adopt "Catcher," drop Shakespeare or ride the multicultural bandwagon. But if we really want to recruit teen readers, we're going to have to be strenuous advocates for fresh and innovative reading incentives. If that means an end to business as usual -- abolishing dry-bones literature tests, cutting back on fact-based quizzes, adding works of science fiction or popular nonfiction to the reading list -- so be it. We can continue to alienate teen readers, or we can hear them, acknowledge their tastes, engage directly with their resistance to serious reading and move gradually, with sensitivity to what's age-appropriate, toward the realm of great literature.
So if your kids haven't yet started their summer reading, or are having trouble getting through it, perhaps now you know why. It may be what they've learned at school.
Sunday, August 24, 2008; B01
Browsing in Barnes & Noble one recent afternoon, I found myself drawn to the "Summer Reading" table, where neatly stacked piles of books by Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck and Zora Neale Hurston sat waiting for the teenagers who were supposed to read them by the first day of school. Gazing at the gleaming covers, I had to wonder how many students were in fact turning the pages with any real desire to get to the next one.
It's the time of year when I'm reminded of my twisted fate as a high-school English teacher. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, more teens and young adults are dropping literary reading than any other age group in America. "The percentage of 17-year olds," it reports, "who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled" in the past 20 years. I teach juniors and seniors -- yes, 17-year-olds.
If ever there were a teaching conundrum, today's high-school English teachers are smack in the middle of it. It's our job to take digital natives -- teens saturated with images in video games and on YouTube -- and get them to strike up a relationship with pictureless chains of black print and focus on the decidedly internal rewards of classical literature. More and more, this mission feels like blind idealism.
But as school starts up again, it's time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn't the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We've shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it's English teachers like me -- as able and well-intentioned as we may be -- who close down teen interest in reading.
"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded). I'll never forget what one parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after she took AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."
As someone who teaches in private schools, I find this especially painful to acknowledge. I haven't been constrained in my teaching methods by Standards of Learning or No Child Left Behind testing. But even where teachers are free to design their own "best practices," I've been amazed at the chasm between their sense of purpose in their curricular choices and teens' sense that what they choose for them is irrelevant. Ironically, kids' turn-off to books can originate in teachers' hopes of turning them on.
How do I know? Because kids tell me. Every June, when I asked my students at a previous school to write about a favorite book of the year, they mostly gushed over two: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." For years, "Catcher" served as a successful icebreaker for my juniors, exciting debate while eliding the gender divide. Whether they admired Holden Caulfield's quirkiness or disparaged him as a jerk, both my male and female students were eager to argue about him.
So imagine my dismay when "Catcher" was demoted to the eighth or ninth grade. Apparently it wasn't sophisticated enough for 11th-graders, its language too facile, the plot insufficiently complex. That many 17-year-olds identify powerfully with Salinger's 17-year-old protagonist was a fact cast by the wayside.
But here's what a former student wrote in an essay about this book that knocked her socks off: "To my twelve-year-old self, the book didn't seem to move anywhere. I didn't understand why Holden couldn't just try a little harder at school. By tenth grade, I had been drunk for the first time. I knew rebellion against my parents, the difficulties of teenage romance, the fakeness of social interaction. As a reader in the eleventh grade, I grew close to Holden; he was a friend who understood me." In adults' determination to create sophisticated teen readers, we sever them from potential fictional soulmates.
It's hard to forget my son's summer-reading assignment the year before he entered ninth grade: Julia Alvarez's "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents." Try as he did, he never got beyond the first of 15 vignettes about four culturally displaced sisters who search for identity through therapists and mental illness, men and sex, drugs and alcohol. I could hardly blame him. We ask 14-year-old boys to read novels about the travails of anguished women and want them to develop a love of reading?
Far too often, teachers' canonical choices split from teenagers' tastes, intellectual needs and maturity levels. "Why do we assume that every 15-year-old who passes through sophomore English is an English major in the making?" asks a teacher friend. "It's simply not the case. And the kids go elsewhere, just as fast as they can -- anywhere but another book."
I watched this play out last year when the junior reading list at my school, consisting mainly of major American authors, was fortified with readings in Shakespeare, Ibsen and the British Romantic poets. When I handed my students two weeks of readings by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge after a month-long study of American transcendentalists, it became clear that they had overdosed on verse packed with nature description and emotional reflection. "When will we read something with a plot?" asked one agitated boy, obviously yearning for afternoon lacrosse to begin.
One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. "The reason for studying fiction escapes me," he wrote. "Why waste time thinking about fabricated situations when there are plenty of real situations that need solutions? Cloning, ozone depletion, and alternate fuels are a few of the countless problems that need to be addressed by the next generation, my generation."
Okay, you may think, this is a kid geared to excel in history and science, not literature. But read his closing words: "Granted fiction has a place in this world, but it is not in the classroom. It is beside the night lamp next to your bed, the car ride to the beach, the soft glow of a fireplace. Fiction is about spending beautiful days indoors because you can't wait to get to the next page. Because I like science fiction, my Shakespeare, my Fitzgerald, my Dickinson are Haldeman, Asimov, Herbert. They dare me to think and question my beliefs."
So there you have it: A smart teen and motivated reader goes to high-school English class and discovers that the classics have nothing to offer him. "The reason I did not participate in class," he admitted, "was that I found the reading a chore."
Parents of high-school students are probably familiar with the product of this classroom: the alienated writer who turns up sulking at the dinner table. When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both the student (think "all-nighter") and the teacher, who'll spend precious weekend hours reading papers devoid of content. The upshot of this empty drill: teens increasingly resistant to great books.
If I were a student today, surfing the gazillions of Web libraries or model-essay banks for insight into an assigned school classic, I'm sure I'd be asking myself, "What on Earth could there be left to say?" Last year, when I thought that I was stepping out of the mainstream by requiring my students to write a review of "Dead Poets Society," I was shocked to find, with just one click, that the 1989 Robin Williams movie had already been analyzed by hundreds of online literary pundits. Asking our students for yet another written commentary has a certain absurd ring to it, no?
The lesson couldn't be clearer. Until we do a better job of introducing contemporary culture into our reading lists, matching books to readers and getting our students to buy in to the whole process, literature teachers will continue to fuel the reading crisis.
I'm not suggesting that every 11th-grade English teacher adopt "Catcher," drop Shakespeare or ride the multicultural bandwagon. But if we really want to recruit teen readers, we're going to have to be strenuous advocates for fresh and innovative reading incentives. If that means an end to business as usual -- abolishing dry-bones literature tests, cutting back on fact-based quizzes, adding works of science fiction or popular nonfiction to the reading list -- so be it. We can continue to alienate teen readers, or we can hear them, acknowledge their tastes, engage directly with their resistance to serious reading and move gradually, with sensitivity to what's age-appropriate, toward the realm of great literature.
So if your kids haven't yet started their summer reading, or are having trouble getting through it, perhaps now you know why. It may be what they've learned at school.
Public Display - The Picture-Perfect American Family? It Doesn't Exist.
By Andrew J. Cherlin – Washington Post
Sunday, September 7, 2008; B01
With the debut of the Palins before a nationwide audience, a presidential campaign that was supposed to be about the economy, Iraq or even race has unexpectedly become -- for a little while, at least -- a conversation about family. But even before the surprising news of 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the Obamas, Bidens and McCains had spent an inordinate amount of precious convention time introducing us to their loved ones: videos, scripted shout-outs, smiling tableaus as the confetti came down. Both parties clearly thought that it was crucial for the candidates to show how deeply they value their family lives.
But if the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore -- at least not in terms of who lives in the household and how they are related. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noted as much on Wednesday. While introducing her clan to a cheering crowd of the Republican faithful, the GOP vice presidential nominee said: "From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That's how it is with us."
In fact, the diversity of American households was the unspoken lesson of both conventions, as four strikingly different kinds of families came into view. First, the Obamas. The Democratic nominee's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, spoke to the Denver crowd, highlighting his biracial family background, dominated by an often single mother and a largely absent father. Obama's wife Michelle also took a powerful turn at the podium, focusing on her husband's biography but also playing up her own high-powered career and modest roots. The Bidens were introduced to a national audience that week as well, a stepfamily formed after the tragic death of the senator's first wife. With the McCains, we see another stepfamily, formed this time after the senator's divorce. Their family also includes Bridget, a daughter adopted from Bangladesh. And the Palins bring to the stage two working parents with five children, including a pregnant teenager and an infant with Down syndrome.
Divorce itself is not new to the presidential politics -- Ronald Reagan and John F. Kerry both campaigned with second wives by their sides -- but never has such an extraordinary range of family histories been center stage.
A half-century ago, when the two-parent, breadwinner-homemaker, first-marriage family was at its peak, all of the candidates would have conformed to the same mold. In the 1950s, iconic TV shows -- the ones that you can still find while channel-surfing -- celebrated the Cleavers and their ilk. Ward went to work and earned enough so that his single paycheck could keep June, Wally and the Beaver happily provided for at home. Sentiment against divorce in public life was so strong that New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's presidential aspirations were stymied in 1964 because he had recently divorced and remarried.
But the Cleavers are only available in reruns now, and the prominence of the breadwinner-homemaker family rapidly declined in the last third of the 20th century. Married women moved into the workforce, divorce rates rose, and more children were born outside of marriage.
That traditional family unit has been replaced by a wide variety of living arrangements. Today, only 58 percent of children live with two married, biological parents. Many others live with stepparents or with single parents. Even having a pregnant teen in the home is not that unusual: About one out of six 15-year-old girls will give birth before reaching age 20, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The candidates seemed to realize that none of their families is typical in the old sense. None of them tried to look like the '50s family. Instead, they focused on being "typical" in a different, 21st-century sense: They worked hard to show us how emotionally close they are.
Over the past few decades, the emotional rewards of family life have become more important to Americans, as compared to the rewards of bringing home a paycheck or raising children. In a 2001 national survey conducted by the National Marriage Project, more than 80 percent of women in their 20s agreed with the statement that it's more important "to have a husband who can communicate about his deepest feelings than to have a husband who makes a good living."
Personal satisfaction, the feeling that your family is helping you grow and develop as a person, communication, openness: These are the kinds of criteria people use in evaluating their family lives. Practical concerns still matter, but if that's all that holds your family together these days, people may view it askance. Given the demographic diversity of American families, emotional closeness, not who the Census takers find in your home, has become the new gold standard.
And so all four aspiring first and second families, despite their differences, appealed to the voters in much the same way. Each wanted to show how much support and warmth they provide to one other. What matters here is not whether your current wife is your first or second but whether you draw emotional strength from her. So Obama refers to his wife as "my rock" and McCain says of his wife, Cindy, "she's more my inspiration than I am hers." What matters is not whether your teenage daughter is pregnant but whether you provide loving support to her. So Palin and her husband issued a statement assuring the nation, "As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support." What matters is being a loving, devoted father, even after the tragedy of losing one's spouse. So Biden's son Beau introduced his father to the Democrats in Denver as "my friend, my father, my hero."
This is not to say that the modern family is a free-for-all, choose-your-own-Thanksgiving-guest-list adventure for everyone. Social conservatives, for instance, still hold the family to stricter moral standards. In 1998, sociologist Penny Edgell asked all of the pastors in four upstate New York communities whether they agreed with the statement, "There have been all kinds of families throughout history, and God approves of many different kinds of families." Eighty-eight percent of pastors from the more liberal Protestant denominations agreed; none of the pastors from conservative denominations did. Social conservatives tend to disapprove of divorce except in cases of infidelity or desertion. They teach their children to abstain from sex until after marriage. But the religious right's reaction to the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy shows they are willing to embrace a family that deviates from their ideals if the parents are willing to support each other and their children through difficult times. As former Baptist preacher, Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said last week, "People of faith aren't people of perfection."
What is important today, in other words, is not who you live with -- and how you're legally bound to them -- but rather how you feel about them.
This is a barrier-breaking election in so many ways. But apart from the race and gender hurdles being trampled, the 2008 campaign has also shown that Americans, whether from red or blue states, have embraced a broad definition of what constitutes a family. Some traditionalists may lament the decline of the first-marriage, single-earner households. But diversity, in this case, has clear virtues. Would we really want to go back to an era when a divorce disqualified a person from running for president? Come November, it is unlikely to bother many voters that McCain is on his second marriage or that Michelle Obama had a demanding career or that Palin's daughter is facing what used to be called a shotgun wedding.
Of course, Americans' tolerance for family diversity still has limits; many voters, for instance, find it difficult to accept gay and lesbian unions. In 2004, Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney, sat in the audience with her partner as her father delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. But the couple did not join the rest of the Cheney family on stage afterward and did not sit with the vice president when President Bush delivered his speech the following evening.
If the trend toward embracing greater diversity continues, however, convention stages a generation from now could easily look quite different from this year's. We could all be watching as a gay or lesbian candidate shouts out to his or her "rock" or "inspiration": a same-sex partner, smiling from the VIP box.
Andrew J. Cherlin is a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University
Sunday, September 7, 2008; B01
With the debut of the Palins before a nationwide audience, a presidential campaign that was supposed to be about the economy, Iraq or even race has unexpectedly become -- for a little while, at least -- a conversation about family. But even before the surprising news of 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the Obamas, Bidens and McCains had spent an inordinate amount of precious convention time introducing us to their loved ones: videos, scripted shout-outs, smiling tableaus as the confetti came down. Both parties clearly thought that it was crucial for the candidates to show how deeply they value their family lives.
But if the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore -- at least not in terms of who lives in the household and how they are related. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noted as much on Wednesday. While introducing her clan to a cheering crowd of the Republican faithful, the GOP vice presidential nominee said: "From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That's how it is with us."
In fact, the diversity of American households was the unspoken lesson of both conventions, as four strikingly different kinds of families came into view. First, the Obamas. The Democratic nominee's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, spoke to the Denver crowd, highlighting his biracial family background, dominated by an often single mother and a largely absent father. Obama's wife Michelle also took a powerful turn at the podium, focusing on her husband's biography but also playing up her own high-powered career and modest roots. The Bidens were introduced to a national audience that week as well, a stepfamily formed after the tragic death of the senator's first wife. With the McCains, we see another stepfamily, formed this time after the senator's divorce. Their family also includes Bridget, a daughter adopted from Bangladesh. And the Palins bring to the stage two working parents with five children, including a pregnant teenager and an infant with Down syndrome.
Divorce itself is not new to the presidential politics -- Ronald Reagan and John F. Kerry both campaigned with second wives by their sides -- but never has such an extraordinary range of family histories been center stage.
A half-century ago, when the two-parent, breadwinner-homemaker, first-marriage family was at its peak, all of the candidates would have conformed to the same mold. In the 1950s, iconic TV shows -- the ones that you can still find while channel-surfing -- celebrated the Cleavers and their ilk. Ward went to work and earned enough so that his single paycheck could keep June, Wally and the Beaver happily provided for at home. Sentiment against divorce in public life was so strong that New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's presidential aspirations were stymied in 1964 because he had recently divorced and remarried.
But the Cleavers are only available in reruns now, and the prominence of the breadwinner-homemaker family rapidly declined in the last third of the 20th century. Married women moved into the workforce, divorce rates rose, and more children were born outside of marriage.
That traditional family unit has been replaced by a wide variety of living arrangements. Today, only 58 percent of children live with two married, biological parents. Many others live with stepparents or with single parents. Even having a pregnant teen in the home is not that unusual: About one out of six 15-year-old girls will give birth before reaching age 20, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The candidates seemed to realize that none of their families is typical in the old sense. None of them tried to look like the '50s family. Instead, they focused on being "typical" in a different, 21st-century sense: They worked hard to show us how emotionally close they are.
Over the past few decades, the emotional rewards of family life have become more important to Americans, as compared to the rewards of bringing home a paycheck or raising children. In a 2001 national survey conducted by the National Marriage Project, more than 80 percent of women in their 20s agreed with the statement that it's more important "to have a husband who can communicate about his deepest feelings than to have a husband who makes a good living."
Personal satisfaction, the feeling that your family is helping you grow and develop as a person, communication, openness: These are the kinds of criteria people use in evaluating their family lives. Practical concerns still matter, but if that's all that holds your family together these days, people may view it askance. Given the demographic diversity of American families, emotional closeness, not who the Census takers find in your home, has become the new gold standard.
And so all four aspiring first and second families, despite their differences, appealed to the voters in much the same way. Each wanted to show how much support and warmth they provide to one other. What matters here is not whether your current wife is your first or second but whether you draw emotional strength from her. So Obama refers to his wife as "my rock" and McCain says of his wife, Cindy, "she's more my inspiration than I am hers." What matters is not whether your teenage daughter is pregnant but whether you provide loving support to her. So Palin and her husband issued a statement assuring the nation, "As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support." What matters is being a loving, devoted father, even after the tragedy of losing one's spouse. So Biden's son Beau introduced his father to the Democrats in Denver as "my friend, my father, my hero."
This is not to say that the modern family is a free-for-all, choose-your-own-Thanksgiving-guest-list adventure for everyone. Social conservatives, for instance, still hold the family to stricter moral standards. In 1998, sociologist Penny Edgell asked all of the pastors in four upstate New York communities whether they agreed with the statement, "There have been all kinds of families throughout history, and God approves of many different kinds of families." Eighty-eight percent of pastors from the more liberal Protestant denominations agreed; none of the pastors from conservative denominations did. Social conservatives tend to disapprove of divorce except in cases of infidelity or desertion. They teach their children to abstain from sex until after marriage. But the religious right's reaction to the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy shows they are willing to embrace a family that deviates from their ideals if the parents are willing to support each other and their children through difficult times. As former Baptist preacher, Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said last week, "People of faith aren't people of perfection."
What is important today, in other words, is not who you live with -- and how you're legally bound to them -- but rather how you feel about them.
This is a barrier-breaking election in so many ways. But apart from the race and gender hurdles being trampled, the 2008 campaign has also shown that Americans, whether from red or blue states, have embraced a broad definition of what constitutes a family. Some traditionalists may lament the decline of the first-marriage, single-earner households. But diversity, in this case, has clear virtues. Would we really want to go back to an era when a divorce disqualified a person from running for president? Come November, it is unlikely to bother many voters that McCain is on his second marriage or that Michelle Obama had a demanding career or that Palin's daughter is facing what used to be called a shotgun wedding.
Of course, Americans' tolerance for family diversity still has limits; many voters, for instance, find it difficult to accept gay and lesbian unions. In 2004, Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Cheney, sat in the audience with her partner as her father delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. But the couple did not join the rest of the Cheney family on stage afterward and did not sit with the vice president when President Bush delivered his speech the following evening.
If the trend toward embracing greater diversity continues, however, convention stages a generation from now could easily look quite different from this year's. We could all be watching as a gay or lesbian candidate shouts out to his or her "rock" or "inspiration": a same-sex partner, smiling from the VIP box.
Andrew J. Cherlin is a professor of sociology and public policy at Johns Hopkins University
Recommended Books and Movies - Sept 21
Recommended Books
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State
God, Race and American Politics
Why We Hate Us
The End of Food
Recommended Movies
Religulious – October 3
Changeling – October 31
Quantum of Solace (James Bond) – Nov 14
The Day the Earth Stood Still – Nov 12
Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State
God, Race and American Politics
Why We Hate Us
The End of Food
Recommended Movies
Religulious – October 3
Changeling – October 31
Quantum of Solace (James Bond) – Nov 14
The Day the Earth Stood Still – Nov 12
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Collection from Spring 2008
A Day In New York: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/travel/features/2008/newyork/index.html
----------------------------------------------------------
Why Are We Out to Destroy Our Diversity?
Sunday, May 11, 2008; B08
On the streets of Manassas, two residents told a Post reporter that they prefer empty homes to the immigrant neighbors who lived there before ["A New View of Vacant Houses," Metro, April 21]. Now Frederick County, Md., is considering actions similar to those in Prince William County, which may lead to more vacant homes [front page, May 6]. While I shudder at the picture that these Manassas residents painted of drunken men fighting and urinating on the lawn, it is hard for me to believe that such behavior took place at the majority of the homes now left empty. It simply doesn't ring true with what I've seen over the past 20 years.
Their comments make clear the sad fact that an entire group, Hispanic immigrants, is being painted with the broad strokes of the undesirable behavior of a few. That's called stereotyping, and when it is combined with scapegoating -- placing problems from noise to overcrowding to gangs at the feet of Hispanic immigrants -- it is truly frightening.
Let's look at some of the problems often cited regarding illegal immigrants:
· Noise. My husband, a middle-aged white guy, cranks up the oldies station pretty loud outside when he's gardening. A teenage band practices in a garage nearby, quiet loud, quite often. But all that seems to be acceptable. Is it the loud music or the type of loud music that is unacceptable?
· Too many cars. Have you ever been in a middle-class neighborhood when all the kids are home from college with their cars, parked next to the cars that every high-schooler seems to require, parked next to the individual car of every adult driver? No one seems to complain about the number of cars in front of these houses. Perhaps it's the trucks or older cars that many immigrants drive, rather than the number of cars.
· Hanging around outside. There is a garden apartment complex a few miles from my home in Springfield that is largely Latino. The balconies, which face the road, are often full of adults and children loudly enjoying the outdoors (even when most of us deem it too hot). Is that a lifestyle we should condemn -- or one we should envy nostalgically, thinking back to the days when neighbors knew each other and enjoyed each other's company on a regular basis?
· Gangs. Yes, unfortunately, some immigrant children are lured into gangs, perhaps by the sense of community that they are not finding around them. And if we continue to build a hostile environment around immigrant students and their families, we push them into these waiting arms.
I have seen firsthand how our communities are enriched by immigrant families. In my work with immigrant parents of high schoolers, I am overwhelmed by their commitment to their families. We American-born parents could learn much from the immigrant parents who insist that families spend weekends together and who still get hugs from their teenage sons. Their children are part of the mosaic that creates a rich, diverse learning environment in our schools, which research shows helps all students learn to think more deeply, be better problem-solvers and work more effectively in collaborative groups -- essential 21st-century skills.
If we recognize that immigrants do enrich our community, we stop blaming and look for solutions, such as much-maligned day-laborer centers. Where are the sincere outcries for affordable housing?
I worry that the steps advocated by those who wish to return to a neighborhood, a community, that resides in their memories are actually destroying the richly dynamic neighborhoods of today. It's time for all of us who recognize that diversity is not just to be celebrated but to be championed to speak up loudly to drown out the ugliness. Let's get back to viewing our neighbors as individuals and our communities as opportunities to grow beyond our own experiences.
----------------------------------------------------------
What's in Your Genes? You Don't Want to Know -- Yet.
By H. Gilbert Welch and Wylie Burke
Sunday, May 11, 2008; B02
The company 23andMe promises to "unlock the secrets of your own DNA." Navigenics wants you to be tested to "do everything you can to stay healthy." And deCODEme hopes that genetic testing will "prompt people to do the right thing."
It all sounds so good. If you have a couple of thousand dollars to part with (along with some saliva), why not have one of these companies scan your genome?
The primary caution about genetic testing has usually been that you will learn that you are destined to develop some dreadful disease (such as Huntington's disease, a degenerative neurological disorder) for which there is no known therapy. A positive test only allows you to start worrying about your demise earlier. Do you really want to know?
Then again, your genome includes lots of other information, which the scans are beginning to tap. So the more relevant question is: What is the point of knowing?
Some of what you can learn is how well your genotype (your DNA code) relates to your phenotype (your personal attributes). The testing companies tout their ability to see whether your DNA says that you like Brussels sprouts, can tolerate dairy or are plagued by ear wax.
This may be a novel hook for some, but it's really pretty frivolous stuff. Geneticists point out that "phenotype trumps genotype." In other words, the fact that you don't like Brussels sprouts trumps any associated DNA code that says you should.
You can also learn something far more serious from the tests -- information about your risk of developing a number of diseases: heart disease, diabetes and multiple sclerosis, as well as breast and prostate cancer. But the information is not as good as you might think.
It would be simpler if all genetic information were definitive: If you have the gene, you will get the disease; if you don't, you won't (as is the case with Huntington's disease). Most gene variants, however, only marginally increase or decrease the chance of getting cancer or other diseases. And because so many non-genetic factors contribute to illnesses, having a rough estimate of a small genetic effect doesn't help us predict future health with any certainty. And even if the information were perfect, it wouldn't tell you what to do.
Imagine you are a 40 year-old woman receiving the results of your genome scan. Your profile shows that you have four times the average risk for developing ovarian cancer but below-average risk for lung cancer. Your risk for breast cancer could be almost 50 percent increased, but it also might not; the research is divided. Your chances of developing heart disease turn out to be 25 percent higher than normal. (Not surprising, you think, because your mother had a heart attack a couple of years ago.) One factor that raises your risk of heart disease also lowers your risk for macular degeneration -- but you also have a second genetic variant that raises the risk of that disease.
Now what? Oops, the test doesn't answer that question. Some might argue that the first step would be to deal with the ovarian-cancer risk and remove your ovaries. Others might point out that heart disease is a greater concern and that taking out the ovaries, removing estrogen, would only increase your risk. Another doctor might suggest removing your ovaries and starting estrogen replacement. Someone else will point out that that will increase your risk for breast cancer. (These uncertainties, combined with the absence of increased lung-cancer risk, may tempt you to keep smoking.)
What's the right thing to do? With the exception of quitting smoking, the truth is: No one knows. Our ability to read the genome is well ahead of our ability to know whether medical intervention based on such a reading does more good than harm. But we can be sure that haphazard genetic testing will needlessly make well people worry about becoming sick.
We need more research, not pricey genomic scans. Until then, save your money, and spare your health.
----------------------------------------------------------
They're Global Citizens. They're Hugely Rich. And They Pull the Strings.
By David Rothkopf
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B01
We didn't elect them. We can't throw them out. And they're getting more powerful every day.
Call them the superclass.
At the moment, Americans are fixated on the political campaign. In the meantime, many are missing a reality of the global era that may matter much more than their presidential choice: On an ever-growing list of issues, the big decisions are being made or profoundly influenced by a little-understood international network of business, financial, government, cultural and military leaders who are beyond the reach of American voters.
In addition to top officials, these people include corporate executives, leading investors, top bankers, media moguls, heads of state, generals, religious leaders, heads of terrorist and criminal organizations and a handful of important cultural and scientific figures. Each of these roughly 6,000 individuals is set apart by their power and ability to regularly influence millions of lives across international borders. The group is not monolithic, but none is more globalized or has more influence over the direction in which the global era is heading.
Doubt it? Just look at the current financial crisis. As government regulators have sought to head off further market losses, they've found that perhaps the most effective tool at their disposal is what the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank described to me as their "convening power" -- their ability to get the big boys of Wall Street and world financial capitals into a room or on a conference call to collaborate on solving a problem. This has, in fact, become a central part of crisis management, both because national governments have limited regulatory authority over global markets and because financial flows have become so large that the real power lies with the biggest players -- such as the top 50 financial institutions that control almost $50 trillion in assets, by one measure nearly a third of all assets worldwide.
Most major companies are both bigger and more global today, which effectively makes them able to pick and choose among various governments' regulatory regimes or investment incentive programs. They play officials in country X against those in country Y, gaining leverage that makes the old rules of trade obsolete. The world's biggest corporations, such as Exxon or Wal-Mart, have annual sales (and thus financial resources) that rival the gross domestic product of all but the 20 or so wealthiest nations. The top 250 companies in the world have sales equal to about a third of global GDP (these are very different measures, but they give a rough sense of relative size).
Major media organizations such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which is effectively controlled by a single individual, touch far more people each day than any national government can. Just a few weeks ago, Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi once again used his extraordinary resources to win election as prime minister, which will give him a seat at G-8 summits and other global conclaves. Even global terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda or Hezbollah have both the ability, through their international networks, and the will to project force more effectively on an international level than all but a handful of governments.
The people who run these big international organizations can have much more power over key aspects of your daily life and over global trends than most officials in Washington are likely to have, except in the most extreme circumstances. They can affect investments and job creation, shape culture and influence lawmakers. The Federal Reserve Bank has played a critical role in the financial crisis, but it couldn't have intervened successfully without a financial leader like Jamie Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, which stepped in to purchase the failing investment bank Bear Stearns.
The rise of the global superclass signals the latest evolution in the age-old tale of the few who corner the market on power. There have always been elites. But this contemporary group is very different from those that preceded it. Study these 6,000 or so individuals, and you'll find that unlike past aristocrats who inherited their wealth, many -- Bill Gates, for instance, or Warren Buffett -- have built their fortunes over their lifetimes. Many more come from the worlds of business, finance and media than in the past.
What's more, many acknowledge that they increasingly have more in common with fellow members of the global elite than they do with the people of their own nations. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, for instance, may be governor of a Siberian province, but he also manages to live large in London, where he owns a famous English soccer club. Even though he has donated millions to help his province, he spends considerably more time with global business partners or his posh neighbors in Britain than he does with his constituents back home.
At the same time, political and military elites are fading in relative influence -- the former bound by geography, the latter by the extraordinarily high cost of modern warfare. The regional composition of the group is changing as well, as transatlantic elites who today make up about 60 percent of the class gradually give way to a rising cadre of Asian leaders, such as the 100 Chinese billionaires estimated to have emerged in the last couple of years.
In a world with only two kinds of international institutions -- weak and dysfunctional -- the members of this superclass are filling a power vacuum when it comes to influencing decisions about transnational issues such as financial-market regulation or climate change. (Many countries voted for the Kyoto accords on global warming, but it took just Exxon and a handful of other oil companies to successfully lobby the White House to opt out and undercut the entire initiative.) In so doing, they raise real questions about the future of global governance. Will the global era be more democratic or less so? Will inequality continue to grow, as it has for the past three decades of this group's rise, or recede? Will the few dominate because the government mechanisms that traditionally represent the views of the many are so underdeveloped on a global scale?
Once again, the meltdown in global financial markets brings this aspect of the story into focus. For years, financial elites have argued that markets should self-regulate even as instruments grew more complex and risks more opaque. Then, when a crisis came, they used their influence to get top government officials to come in and help cauterize their self-inflicted wounds, warning of a "systemic failure." But critics are already correctly charging that new regulations to rein in global markets are largely protecting the interests of the richest.
One distinguishing characteristic of the superclass is the concentration of extreme wealth in the hands of so few. Inequality has always existed in the world, but the international trend toward leave-it-to-the-market policies of the past 25 years has resulted both in great growth worldwide (what superclass member Martha Stewart might call "a good thing") and in growing inequality (not so much, as superclass member Jon Stewart might say). Today, the world's more than 1,100 billionaires have a net worth that's roughly double that of the bottom 2.5 billion people on the planet. The richest 10 percent of adults worldwide own 85 percent of global wealth, while the poorest half only barely one percent. The world's almost 10 million millionaires have seen their wealth double to nearly $37 trillion over the past 10 years.
Growth is taking place, but it is disproportionately benefiting the few. And there's a sense that the issue of class conflict, confined not too long ago to the ash heap by our (premature) celebration of the "end of history" after communism's fall, remains with us.
A backlash is inevitable. Are these elites especially talented? Hard-working? Lucky? Some are all of these things. But conspiracy theories don't hold water in a group whose members are so diverse and self-interested. Still, when their self-interests align to cause them to act together, they can be hard to resist. They often get their way -- and thus often get much more than the rest of us. And that leads to angry reaction. "When a CEO is making more in 10 minutes than an ordinary worker's making in an entire year . . . something is wrong, something has to change," Sen. Barack Obama declares on the stump. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton chimes in that "it is wrong that somebody who makes $50 million a year on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 a year."
The next U.S. president will still be the most powerful person in the world because of his or her control of the nation's unparalleled military might and influence over our economic and political resources. But that influence is on the wane, for a number of reasons: the relative decline in the power of national governments; the relative rise in the power of others in the world's fastest-growing places; U.S. trade and fiscal deficits; and a third, geopolitical deficit arising from both damaged national prestige and what might be characterized either as Iraq fatigue or as having learned from the mistakes of the past several years.
None of this makes the decision that U.S. voters will make in November less important. Government still offers the average citizen the best means of counterbalancing the superclass or redressing growing inequality. And governments will have to play a key role in shaping the new regulatory frameworks and governance mechanisms that will be essential to a more balanced distribution of power in the global era. But what it does mean is that "change" isn't just a slogan in this year's campaign. It's a reality that will redefine the landscape of power worldwide for U.S. presidents of the future.
----------------------------------------------------------
5 Myths About the Best (College) Years of Your Life
By Peter Feaver and Anne Crossman
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B03
Congratulations! You've spent thousands of dollars on test-prep books and enrichment camps and sunk hundreds of hours into applications, to say nothing of enduring countless sleepless nights -- and it all paid off. You got at least one fat, flattering acceptance package, it's just a couple of weeks till graduation, and before long you'll be headed to college. It's a walk in the park from here, right? Aside from coughing up the tuition, how hard could it be to get your money's worth out of your university years?
Harder than you think. Teaching, advising and actually being college students hasgiven us front row seats to undergraduate life. We've seen some students get a lousy education at renowned schools and others get a great education at uncelebrated ones. What they don't tell you in SAT prep courses is that, though where you go to college matters, what you do there is much more important.
So how can you make the most of college without giving yourself a panic attack? The first step is rethinking some common myths.
1.Your major determines your career success.
The unemployed graduate with a bachelor's degree in philosophy is a popular cliché, and we won't kid you: An electrical engineer who graduates with a second major in accounting has, at least at first, more lucrative options than, say, a history major vying for a coveted (and unpaid) internship on Capitol Hill. But many excellent opportunities are still available for graduates with seemingly "useless" degrees, as long as you can show potential employers that you know how to learn and will continue to do so as your field evolves. Many companies don't care whether you majored in medieval literature or international business; they want to know that you're passionate about succeeding and are probably hoping that you'll apply the keen eye you used on "The Canterbury Tales" to their long-standing clients' portfolios. That said, if all your courses have "Canterbury Tales" in their titles, it's best to hedge your bets by tossing in a few accounting or economics courses to demonstrate your readiness for the marketplace.
2.You should check off graduation requirements as quickly as possible.
What a waste of tuition, especially when you consider that most college lectures cost about as much as a ticket to "Monty Python's Spamalot" (but are not, we are sorry to say, nearly so entertaining). Every semester, students rush through general-education requirements as if college were a game of beat-the-clock bingo. Far better to treat those requirements as invitations to explore subjects outside your comfort zone, such as Legal Linguistics, History of Strata or Ancient Egyptian Mythology.
You should pick courses based on the professor's reputation, the course's reputation, your interest in the topic, graduation requirements and convenience -- in that order. A great professor can make an obscure area of study come alive, and a lousy one can make even the most titillating topic tedious. And should you be lucky enough to land a class that feels like Monty Python's views on statistics, who cares if it meets at 8 a.m. on Fridays?
3. The more extracurriculars, the better.
Only if you want to be a fifth-year senior. If everyone around you is smiling, giving you freebies and telling you how swell you are, you're either at your bar mitzvah or your college's annual activity fair. If you aren't careful, by the end of the hour you'll have signed up to sing in an a cappella choir, read to the blind, coach soccer for inner-city youth and write for the campus newspaper. Oh, and try your hand at intramural wrestling.
Resist! You can't do it all, and you're asking for a nervous breakdown if you try to juggle as many activities in college as you did in high school. When it comes to extracurriculars, less is more; you already have dozens of papers and lab reports and hundreds of pages of reading to keep you busy. Picking several diverse activities and engaging in them deeply is better than being a superficial (and overstressed) participant in lots.
4. You should study all the time.
You won't, and you shouldn't. But perhaps you are wary of Myth 3 and have forsaken all earthly pleasures (including extracurriculars) to focus on academics. You may have spent 40 hours a week locked in classrooms back in high school, but you'll be in the university lecture hall more like 15. You'll find that it's tough to fill that vacuum with studying alone, especially when deep, imponderable questions are crying out to you: If I watch another edition of SportsCenter, will it have new scores to report? (Answer: Yes.) If I party on Tuesday like it's Saturday, what does that make Wednesday? (Answer: Painful.) Is it possible to play "Guitar Hero III" for 24 hours straight without getting carpal tunnel syndrome? (Answer: We were too scared to try.) The discipline that a well-chosen mix of courses and extracurriculars imposes is better than a routine devoid of fun.
5 If your roommate is a dud, your social life will be too.
You will be thrilled to know that this is also a no. We consistently find that students tend to underemphasize what they should take seriously -- such as selecting the best professors and classes -- and overemphasize what they should take as it comes -- such as roommates. We have known roomies who forged lifelong friendships (and billion-dollar partnerships) and others who were undone by the polka music blaring from one side of the room or the dirty boxers piling up on the other. (Our favorite was the smoker who requested a nonsmoking roommate because "two smokers in one room would be too much.") Your safest bet is to lower your expectations about roomie-bonding and seek out other avenues for fun. The two of you may not agree on bunk beds, matching bedspreads or the use of snooze buttons, but it will all be over in a year.
----------------------------------------------------------
Here's How America Looks to the World
By Josef Joffe
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B03
HAMBURG Some years ago, I received a terror threat. If I did not apologize publicly and profusely for a column that blasted the Iranian regime, I would be killed by Friday, Sept. 13 -- what an auspicious date! So I sent for the security experts, and this is what they told me: Your front and back doors are worthless; get armored ones. Order bulletproof windows. Build a safe room. Install panic buttons. Get rid of that silly chicken-wire fence and put in a steel and concrete one. Don't use the driveway; try to vary your access routes (which, I think, meant sneaking home through the neighbors' gardens). Pretty soon, we were talking six-figure costs and contemplating emigration to Iceland.
The appointed day of my demise came and went. (Real terrorists don't write letters; they just kill you.) But the moral of this story will remain etched in my mind: When security is at stake, there is no limit to fear or fortification.
Fear, in other words, is a tax, and al-Qaeda and its ilk have done better at extracting it from Americans than the Internal Revenue Service. Think about the extra half-hour millions of airline passengers waste standing in security lines; the annual cost in lost work hours runs into the billions. Add to that the freight delays at borders, ports and airports, the cost of checking money transfers as well as goods in transit, the wages for beefed-up security forces around the world. And that doesn't even attempt to put a price tag on the compression of civil liberties or the loss of human dignity from being groped in full public view by Transportation Security Administration personnel at the airport or from having to walk barefoot through the metal detector, holding up your beltless pants. This global transaction tax represents the most significant victory of Terror International to date.
The new fear tax falls most heavily on the United States. Last November, the Commerce Department reported a 17 percent decline in overseas travel to the United States between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2006. (There are no firm figures for 2007 yet, but there seems to have been an uptick.) That slump has cost the country $94 billion in lost tourist spending, nearly 200,000 jobs and $16 billion in forgone tax revenue -- and all while the dollar has kept dropping.
Why? The journal Tourism Economics gives the predictable answer: "The perception that U.S. visa and entry policies do not welcome international visitors is the largest factor in the decline of overseas travelers." Two-thirds of survey respondents worried about being detained for hours because of a misstatement to immigration officials. And here is the ultimate irony: "More respondents were worried about U.S. immigration officials (70 percent) than about crime or terrorism (54 percent) when considering a trip to the country."
The falloff has not been as uniform when it comes to international scholars. Chinese, Koreans and Indians keep coming, reports the International Institute of Education (IIE); for the 2006-07 academic year, growth rates were between 3 and 6 percent. But the number of Western scholars coming to the United States is falling. Japan, Germany, Canada, Great Britain, Israel, Australia and Holland show declines of between 1 and 13 percent -- presumably because the richer a country, the less willing its scientists are to brave the indignities they face before entering the United States. Those hailing from poorer countries, with more limited opportunities -- such as the Chinese and the Indians -- remain undaunted.
The pattern for international students resembles that of the scholars. For 2006-07, the IIE reports the "first significant increase in total international student enrollment since 2001/2002." Again, the rise is led by the Indians, the Chinese and the Koreans. The number of students from Japan is down; ditto for Germany. Hence the IIE's veiled warning: "America needs to continue its proactive steps to insure that our academic doors remain wide open, and that students around the world understand that they will be warmly welcomed." To which all Americans should say amen, as these foreign students contribute about $14.5 billion annually to the U.S. economy, according to the IIE. Higher education, after all, is the fifth-largest service-sector export of the United States. And foreign talent that's willing to stick around is one of the country's critical natural resources.
Some U.S. officials know all this, of course. But while the State Department protests, the Department of Homeland Security makes the rules -- and will invent new verbotens by the day. Nor is there any end in sight. The demand for security, as my death threat taught me, is like an obsession, spreading relentlessly, for which there is no rational counterargument. DHS always asks, "What if?" -- which always trumps "Why more?" A more fruitful dialogue with the homeland security apparat would be trying to answer: "What is the national interest?"
After all, which face does the United States want to show to the world? One distorted by fear and suspicion, or the face that it used to present: that of a boisterous, easy-going and welcoming society? America's face used to be George Bailey's genial grin in "It's a Wonderful Life," filled with the optimism and trust that can banish greed and evil; now, it's the grim visage of Jack Bauer in "24."
This is not woolly-headed idealism but sober realism. Just imagine how the U.S. Army would have fared in liberating my home continent, Europe, if the blinkered commissars of DHS had been calling the shots in 1944. The way the last superpower chooses to bestride the world brings with it hard consequences. Does the United States open its arms or ball up its fists? Growling rarely elicits smiles, and distrust never reaps its opposite. To present a friendly face to the world is not a matter of saccharine niceness but of well-considered interests, especially for a fearsome giant like the United States. For trust breeds authority, and authority breeds influence.
What is happening to the American character? True, the country has gone through crises of confidence before, some of them cresting in sheer hysteria -- from the Alien and Sedition Acts to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's search for a commie under every State Department desk. But the worst acts from 1798 were repealed or allowed to lapse within three years, and the senator from Wisconsin was censured a few years into his red-baiting career. Alas, the USA Patriot Act and DHS have already endured longer than either earlier excess, and neither is fading.
Will the 9/11 terrorist attacks change the American character in ways that John Adams's laws and McCarthy's mendacity could not? The answer is still "no" if you go to the heartland, where trusting librarians let this perfect stranger shove his memory stick into a public computer; they seemed to think that a virus scan referred to the common cold. The heartland is still Jefferson country. But when you travel through John F. Kennedy International Airport or Dulles International Airport, you notice nervousness bordering on angst, which is hardly a classic American trait. No, your neighbor will not let you leave your bag on the seat while you amble over to Starbucks.
Have the "free and brave" lost it? If so, you are not alone. Look at France, where the controls at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport are just as invasive as those at Reagan National Airport. Like the United States, the European Union now wants to fingerprint all foreigners who enter or leave its boundaries. So there is a larger moral to this tale: Security is an obsession that defies natural limits. And we submit because we like it.
Al-Qaeda likes it, too. Never before have so few terrorized so many with so little.
----------------------------------------------------------
When Parents Crush Teachers
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B08
The other day, I was walking back to my classroom to gather my stuff and go home. It was 4 p.m., and school had ended at 2:05.
I decided to stop and talk to a well-respected colleague, an excellent teacher who goes above and beyond the call of duty and is popular with her students. We talked for a few minutes, and then she dropped a bombshell.
She told me she was thinking of leaving teaching. I pretended to be happy that she might have found something that she liked better, and I asked her why she wanted to change jobs. She answered: "Parents."
I know what many of you are thinking -- parents just are not involved enough in their children's educations. But that is not the case in the D.C. area's metropolitan suburbs. The parents about whom I am talking are the overinvolved parents. They are "contact you every day," "argue every problem marked wrong" and "my child is perfect" parents. These parents are so aggressive that they are driving many of my best colleagues out of the profession.
Let me be clear: The vast majority of parents with whom we deal are wonderful and supportive. However, a rapidly growing minority is having a real, negative impact on schools, and the teaching profession, by being too involved in their children's lives. Today, I spoke with a retired teacher who began her career in the early 1970s. She told me that, for the first 25 years of teaching, she never heard from parents whether her students were earning A's or F's. This was not because parents didn't care, but because they knew that the grades their children received were an accurate reflection of the time and effort they put in. However, she said, by the mid-'90s, there had been a shift. Parents began to micromanage not only their children's lives but those of their teachers as well.
The sad reality is that this is taking a toll on the teaching profession. Teachers should not spend more time talking to parents than to students. Another colleague, one of the best teachers I know, had a student last year who did little work during a quarter. She decided to give the child a chance to make up the unfinished assignments, but she told both the parent and the student that she would not do so again. So when the same thing happened the following quarter, my colleague put her foot down.
The result? The parent promptly went to the principal and demanded that the child be allowed to make up the work to get a better grade. After much back and forth, the principal agreed.
For my colleague, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. She was willing to work long hours to develop dynamic lessons, to tutor students and to give second chances. But continually to allow students to make the same mistake? At this point, she knew, a school isn't helping its students; it's hurting them. What happened to high standards? My colleague began to consider another career.
Most educators I have talked to entered the field for noble reasons. They wanted to work with children and to make a difference in their lives. They didn't go into teaching to spend all day working with a few pushy parents. This year, I taught a student whose mother wanted to meet with all seven of her child's teachers on what seemed like a weekly basis. Each week, she accused us of not reaching out to her son, saying things like, "You don't like my child." She made unreasonable demands. "My child refuses to do work in class. Just make him do the work." She told us that her son would not do his homework at home and that we should stay after school to see that he did it. It seems as if we have created an "excuse bank" for children, so that teachers are to blame if they fail and not the students themselves.
Can our schools sustain this kind of attrition? Can we compound all of the burdens that are placed upon educators by adding overly meddlesome parents to the list and expect to attract top people to our profession? Personally, I don't think so. How do you do that when we are already losing our best and brightest?
Meanwhile, I have to figure out how to convince my two parent-weary colleagues that they picked the right profession.
----------------------------------------------------------
The Prize Clinton Isn't Owed
By George F. Will
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B07
Women, we are told by some people who say they know them, are not amused. Women, or at least those whose consciousnesses have been properly raised, supposedly think that the impatience being expressed about the protracted futility of Hillary Clinton's campaign is disrespectful. They say that if the roles were reversed -- if Barack Obama's delegate arithmetic were as hopeless as hers -- people would not be so insensitive as to try to hurry a man off the stage.
But they would. And some people, claiming to speak for African Americans, would be explaining that African Americans find it all disrespectful. In identity politics, ritualized indignation about imagined affronts is highly choreographed and hence predictable.
In America, however, nothing ages as fast as novelty, and efforts to encourage Clinton to pack it in are heartening evidence that the novelty has worn off: The female candidate is like all other candidates. This is what equality looks like -- life as an equal-opportunity dispenser of disappointments.
When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball's first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one's job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him.
Some of Clinton's supporters seem to be cultivating, for a purpose, a permutation of the entitlement mentality that many voters thought they discerned in her candidacy and found off-putting. She seemed to feel entitled to the Democrats' nomination, and having been denied it she may feel really entitled to be Obama's running mate. But for him, choosing her would be even more dangerous than Bosnian sniper fire. She would solve none of his problems and would create others.
Because Democrats are desperate to win in November, they will support Obama, so his most pressing priority should be to compete with John McCain for independent voters, or for people lightly attached to the Republican Party. Almost all the people who like Clinton are Democrats, and a recent poll revealed that only 39 percent of Americans regard her as "honest and trustworthy," down from 52 percent in May 2006. Furthermore, if Obama cannot win New York without her, he is going to lose almost everywhere else.
On several occasions presidential nominees have felt the need to choose as their running mates the persons who were their strongest competitors for the nomination. But two successful occasions were quite unlike Obama's situation.
On the eve of the Democrats' 1960 convention in Los Angeles, the campaign of Lyndon Johnson, who was decisively behind John Kennedy in the delegate count, intimated -- correctly, we now know -- that Kennedy's health was much more precarious than was then understood. Ten days later, Kennedy asked Johnson to be his running mate. The "solid South" was no longer solidly Democratic -- in 1952 Dwight Eisenhower carried Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida, and in 1956 he added Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia -- so Kennedy needed Johnson.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, who was cool toward George H.W. Bush, chose him partly to assuage the disappointment of the Detroit convention that had become giddy with enthusiasm for the silly idea of recruiting former president Gerald Ford as Reagan's running mate. Reagan did not select Bush to attract November votes that Reagan thought he could not win.
Clinton has been carrying categories of voters that Obama has had trouble attracting. But it is implausible that she is the only Democrat who would enhance Obama's appeal to white, blue-collar Democrats.
Finally, Clinton is not entitled to a consolation prize. Robert Frost provided a warning for those who become too accustomed to the limelight:
----------------------------------------------------------
A Test for Obama's Promises
By David Ignatius
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B07
One of the most appealing but untested promises of Barack Obama's presidential campaign is that he would break down the partisan divisions in America and govern across party lines. He has a chance to make this gauzy idea of consensus politics concrete in his choice of running mate.
By reaching outside the Democratic Party for his vice presidential nominee -- tapping Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, say, or independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg from New York -- Obama would in an instant demonstrate that he truly means to change the divisive, lose-lose politics of Washington. It would offer a unity government for a country that seems to want one.
There are all sorts of practical arguments against such an unconventional choice -- not least that it would upset many of Obama's liberal Democratic supporters. But it would make a powerful statement that Obama really does want to govern in a different way. It would make "change we can believe in" more than a slogan.
By choosing a veteran politician outside his own party, Obama would solve three problems at once: He would undercut the bipartisan appeal of his maverick GOP rival, Sen. John McCain; he would ease voters' fears about his own youth and inexperience; and he would find a compelling alternative to Hillary Clinton, who for all her virtues as a vice president would come with heavy baggage -- not least the role of her husband, who is even harder to imagine as Second Laddie than as First.
Moreover, Obama needs to counter the charge that he talks a better game about bipartisanship and change than he has actually delivered. His voting record in Illinois and Washington mostly has been that of a conventional liberal, and there are precious few examples of him taking political risks to work across party lines.
McCain, by contrast, has actually fought the kind of bipartisan battles that Obama talks about -- from campaign finance to climate change to rules against torture -- and he has the political scars to prove it. That's why the Republican base is still so uneasy about him, because they know that McCain's natural allies in recent years have been centrist Democrats. By picking a GOP running mate, Obama would outdo McCain -- and in the process make some enemies in his own party. That would make him a more appealing candidate, I suspect.
Hagel would be an especially interesting choice for Obama. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, he would add some national security heft to the ticket. And he was also an early and courageous GOP critic of the Iraq war, which would reinforce one of the most powerful themes of Obama's campaign. At the same time, although Hagel agrees with Obama on the need for withdrawal from Iraq, his military credentials would reassure U.S. allies that it would not be a pell-mell retreat.
A final advantage is that Hagel and Obama seem to like each other. Hagel is said to view Obama as a politician with a special gift who might actually be able to bring the country together. Whether Democrats could accept Hagel's pro-life views and other aspects of his Republican identity is a complicated question, but here again, bipartisanship is about bridging hard issues.
Bloomberg would provide a different sort of boost for Obama. He could run as the bipartisan manager and problem-solver, the nation's chief operating officer, if you will. That would free Obama, who has never managed much of anything, for the larger role of leadership -- the visionary politics at which he's so good.
The New York mayor would also make a good running mate for McCain -- who badly needs someone with economic credentials to offset his own lack of experience and interest in this area. But it would be difficult for the GOP to embrace a double dose of bipartisanship, when many in the party already view McCain as a quasi-Democrat.
If Obama were to run on a unity ticket, it would be a sign that he thinks the nation is in such serious trouble, at home and abroad, that the normal political rules don't apply. Obama could choose among many fine Democrats for his running mate, but none of them would send such a powerful message to America and the world that he means what he says about turning a page.
----------------------------------------------------------
Not the Party Faithful Anymore
By Mark Stricherz
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B04
Irmo Antonacci used to vote for Democratic presidential candidates. A son of Italian immigrants, the 80-year-old retiree lives in Jeannette, Pa., a down-at-the-heels smokestack city southeast of Pittsburgh. After dropping out of college in 1950, he got a job installing telephones with Bell Penn and joined a union. He registered as a Democrat and became a John F. Kennedy fan. A decade ago, he was the Democratic committeeman from the town's 5th ward.
But Antonacci no longer automatically pulls the lever for the candidate with (D) beside his or her name. "I'd seen the time from where the party used to be and where the party is now accepting abortion and gay rights," he says. "And I didn't go for that."
On the lawn in front of Antonacci's one-story brick house stands a foot-high statue of St. Francis and another of the Virgin Mary, symbols of a transformation that could spell trouble for the Democrats in November. It's the transformation of a group of voters we might call Casey Democrats, after the late Robert P. Casey Sr., governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995.
Like Casey, these voters -- blue-collar and religious, often Catholic -- are liberal on economic issues but conservative on cultural ones. Where they once looked to union leaders and their fellow union members for political guidance, they now look to their religious leaders and fellow churchgoers. And in the last decade, to the dismay of Democratic strategists, they've been voting for Republican presidential candidates. According to Democratic pollster and strategist Stan Greenberg, they made up the 10 percent of white Catholics who identify with the Democrats but didn't vote for Sen. John F. Kerry for president in 2004. And if Sen. Barack Obama can't do better with the Casey Democrats, his presidential bid may fare no better than Kerry's.
Antonacci's story is fairly common in his native Westmoreland County. Except for 1972, Westmoreland went for the Democratic nominee in every presidential election between 1936 and 1996. At the congressional level, the county remains Democratic; both local House members are Democrats, and registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans nearly 2 to 1. Yet in the last two presidential elections, the county has gone Republican.
A similar pattern has emerged in a handful of Rust Belt and border states. With the exception of 1972 and 1984, West Virginia also voted for the Democratic presidential nominee from 1932 to 1996, and it hasn't elected a GOP senator for generations. Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio all went for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and for Bill Clinton twice. All but Ohio have been dominated by Democrats at the congressional and gubernatorial levels for decades. But all five went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
The reason: Casey Democrats. "Democrats' difficulties with this group surely have a great deal to do with these voters' sense of cultural alienation from the national Democratic Party and its relatively cosmopolitan values around religion, family, guns and other social institutions/practices," blogged Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira after the 2004 election. Just two years earlier, in their book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," Teixeira and John Judis had predicted that the party's economic liberalism would bear the Democratic nominee to victory in such states.
Why have Casey Democrats defected?
Consider the story of Antonacci's hometown of Jeannette. The hilly city once boasted more than a half-dozen manufacturing plants: Pennsylvania Rubber Co., Jeannette Glass, Victor Brewing Co. and others. Due to AFL and CIO organizing efforts during the Depression, the jobs in these factories were stable and well paid. After World War II, Jeannette's population soared to 20,000.
Then came globalization. By the mid-to-late 1980s, most of the factories had closed. The population dropped by half, and many businesses left. Now the downtown is pockmarked with storefronts for sale or lease.
The old industrial order in Westmoreland County is declining. It's not that the economy has withered; its structure has simply changed. Instead of mines and smokestacks, the county now has malls and industrial parks. For every town in economic decline such as Jeannette, there are one or two on the economic upswing.
The area's politics have also changed. In 1972, more than a third of the state's workforce was still unionized. Today the figure is 18 percent. The largest union left in Westmoreland is the Service Employees International Union, with only 800 to 900 members. "Their influence," says County Commissioner Tom Balya, a Democrat, "has diminished over time."
If local unions had remained robust, county voters might have stuck with the national Democratic Party. Union members gave 59 percent of their votes to Clinton in 1996 and the same percentage to Al Gore in 2000. But the unions' disintegration has loosened Casey Democrats' ties to the national party.
Moving into the unions' place is the church. Take a drive through downtown Greensburg, the county seat. When I arrived one Saturday afternoon in late 2006, the sound of an announcer calling a football game at Seton Hill University, a small Catholic liberal arts school in town, blared from several streets away. A few blocks from the football field is the headquarters of the Westmoreland County archdiocese. Half a mile away, at the top of North Main Street, stands a Knights of Columbus hall. Not far away is the Aquinas Academy, an elementary school run by the Sisters of Charity. Next door is Blessed Sacrament Cathedral; at the packed Sunday Mass I attended, seniors stood elbow to elbow with young married couples, most with small children.
In August 2004, only months after being installed, Greensburg Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt declared that pro-abortion rights Catholic politicians should refrain from receiving Holy Communion -- a not-so-subtle reference to presidential candidate Kerry. Because the church plays such a major role in local life, it's highly likely that some Catholic voters were influenced by Brandt. With the Catholic Church in alliance with the GOP and the National Rifle Association, "it's a powerful combination" against Democrats, says county Democratic chairwoman Rosemary Trump.
In dealing with Casey Democrats, the national party faces two temptations. One is to ignore them. The party had planned to target voters in more libertarian Mountain West states this fall. But with Arizona Sen. John McCain the presumptive GOP nominee, Democrats are less likely to flip states such as Nevada and Colorado. The second temptation is to assume that Casey Democrats will support the Democratic ticket because Obama has been endorsed by figures such as Sen. Bob Casey Jr., the late Pennsylvania governor's son. But Casey's endorsement failed to prevent Obama's nine-point loss to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary last month.
The bottom line is clear: The party must woo Casey Democrats in Rust Belt and border states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky. To win them over, it won't be enough for Democrats to hammer the GOP over the economy and the war in Iraq, as Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, did in 2004, or merely to use inclusive language and support partial-birth abortion, as Obama and Clinton have done. Instead, Democrats must address voters' real concerns about protecting families and human life, as Gov. Casey did. "Catholic voters have emerged more pro-life," pollster Greenberg wrote in a 2005 memo, "but they are very responsive to a broad initiative to reduce unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions."
As the front-runner for his party's nomination, Obama can start to win over Casey Democrats by endorsing the Pregnant Women Support Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Casey. This legislation would, among other things, provide adoption information to pregnant women, give lower-income women free sonograms and require abortion clinics to obtain informed consent from women seeking to end a pregnancy.
Endorsing it is sure to alienate many cultural liberals. But supporting it could help win over many Casey Democrats -- and possibly a few key swing states this fall.
----------------------------------------------------------
Coming Soon, Scorsese of Arabia
By Abdullah Al-Eyaf
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B02
Just over a decade ago, when I was 20, I found the love of my life: movies. I used to rent four videos at a time and then live with the characters, in their worlds, for days. Once, I watched eight films in a single sitting.
As a contributor to Cinemac.net, a Web site for movie buffs here in Saudi Arabia, I typed away about masterpieces such as "Citizen Kane," "Raging Bull" and "Amadeus" and shone the Saudi spotlight on directors including Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Akira Kurosawa. I even participated in silly arguments about the best actor of all time: Is it Marlon Brando? Al Pacino? Robert De Niro? Jack Nicholson? Or even Tom Hanks, one of my favorites? Several years later, a local newspaper hired me as a film critic. Getting paid to write about movies? "Pinch me," I wanted to tell my editor. "I must be dreaming."
You might be surprised to learn, then, that I didn't set foot in a movie theater until I was 25 years old. That's because Saudi Arabia has banned the public screening of films since the early 1980s. But ordinary Saudis, still bewitched by the silver screen, are quietly directing a scene change.
I'm lucky because I live in eastern Saudi Arabia, not far from Bahrain, where movie-lovers live in relative freedom. Of course, with traffic, the 15-mile drive across the King Fahd Causeway sometimes takes as long as three hours -- but my delight once the screen lights up is always worth the trouble.
My friend Tariq, who lives in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, isn't so fortunate. He has to travel more than 300 miles, or 500 kilometers, to reach the nearest border. Two years ago, in my debut film, "Cinema 500 km," I followed 21-year-old Tariq on his first trip outside the country for a day at the pictures. His savings plan included borrowing a friend's car for the trip and staying with another friend instead of renting a motel room. In all, the trip cost Tariq about $80. I know richer Saudis who fly to Bahrain and sleep at five-star hotels to spend a weekend at the movies -- making theirs surely the most expensive tickets in history.
Saudis may not have movie theaters, but we do know a thing or two about the silver screen. The country is a prime market for pay TV and has booming DVD and VHS sales. I know one video store in Riyadh that has more than 16,000 regular clients, most of them teenagers and young adults. In "Cinema 500 km," I interviewed the manager of the largest theater chain in Bahrain, who told me that in the summer and on holidays, as many as 90 percent of his customers are Saudis. So don't believe the fundamentalists who maintain that only a handful of young people have a craving for movies.
Life without movie houses or filmmaking schools has its benefits for wannabe filmmakers like me. The technical aspects of our films may not be very good, but we don't have to worry -- at least for now. Saudis have very few homegrown films to choose from, so they take what they can get. Nice, huh? And how many young American or European guys with only a couple of extremely low-budget short films to their credit have you seen writing in the pages of newspapers such as The Washington Post?
My second film, a 19-minute fictional drama called "Etaar" ("A Frame"), won a Special Jury Prize in the 2007 Emirates Film Competition and was nominated for a prize at the Dubai International Film Festival. Like many other Saudi productions, my movies are screened in countries such as the United States, France, Spain, Holland, India, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. But some of my own friends still haven't seen them. When people started asking why a few years ago, Saudi officials were finally forced to allow limited movie screenings.
The official phobia surrounding the cinema is still so great that literary clubs (government-supported groups that organize artistic events for the public) started pre-screening certain movies and advertising them in newspapers as "educational films" -- just to prevent an uproar among anti-cinema groups. In 2006, when a local film screening was announced in Jiddah, where people live more freely than in Riyadh, the organizers had to bill the event as the "Jiddah Visual Shows Festival." Call them "Visual Shows," and you're in business. But use the words "cinema" or "film," and the government is guaranteed to prevent your screen from ever lighting up.
Happily, we'll be getting that scene change this week. The first annual Saudi Film Competition, which I helped organize, opens on Tuesday. Did you notice the word "film" in the title? The event is sponsored by the Saudi Society of Arts and Culture and the Dammam Literary Club, and is the first official film festival in Saudi history. Thirty-four short films, including three of mine, will compete for prizes. Eleven scripts have been entered for a separate award, and many other films will be screened outside the competition. The audiences will of course be segregated by sex, but Saudis will be able to watch, for free, movies that they once could only read about in newspapers.
My third and most recent film is called "Matar" ("Rain"). In Islamic and Arab cultures, rain is a good omen, and like my characters in "Matar," young Saudi filmmakers are expecting good days to come. The world has celebrated a century of cinema, and it has finally come to our country. Of course, we didn't wait and began making our little amateur films years ago, but I'm convinced that our audience is growing.
I believe that the world wants to learn more about my country, especially after the horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, and their consequences, and we will show the world how Saudis live. I'm sure you'll love our stories. We'll keep trying to make better pictures, even without film schools or high-powered production companies. And who knows? One day we might even win an Oscar! Good movies are made with true passion -- and believe me, in Saudi Arabia, we moviemakers have plenty of that
----------------------------------------------------------
It's an Emergency. We're Not Prepared.
By John D. Solomon
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B01
Disaster is bearing down on all sides of late. A ravaging cyclone in Burma. A killer earthquake in China. Even the United States hasn't escaped unscathed, with tornadoes ripping across the heartland and Southeast and floods rising in the mid-Atlantic.
Still, most Americans have been watching the devastation in Asia from relative safety and, if I had to guess, with a certain sense of complacency, a feeling that disaster on that scale isn't likely to happen to them. But it could. And if it did, our country might face the same sort of crisis as our Asian cousins. A major reason: The American public isn't prepared.
Even after Sept. 11, 2001, even after Hurricane Katrina, a Red Cross survey last year found that 93 percent of Americans aren't prepared for a major calamity -- a natural disaster, a pandemic or a terrorist attack. This is troubling, because the more prepared a population is, the more effective the response to and recovery from a catastrophe will be.
In the weeks after 9/11, my worried wife asked me, "What should we be doing?" We lived directly across the street from the Manhattan hospital where a woman had just died from anthrax exposure; I worked only a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center.
Initially, I thought that the answer to her question would be pretty straightforward. But 6 1/2 years later, I'm still trying to pin it down.
Readying the public for the likely emergencies of the 21st century may be one of the most complex social-education challenges the nation has faced. Americans have to prepare for a range of threats, many of which the government can neither describe nor predict. Says George Foresman, former undersecretary for preparedness with the Department of Homeland Security, "There's no playbook for any of us to go by."
In my search for a playbook, I've consulted government Web sites, including DHS's Ready.gov, read all the books I could find and spoken to first responders, policymakers and other experts. I've signed up for emergency e-mail lists and text alerts from all over the country -- my BlackBerry now pings whenever there's a major storm heading toward New York, a tremor near San Francisco, a Metro train derailment in Washington or a new terror alert from the FBI.
To get a more ground-level view, I completed the 11-week, 33-hour training for New York City's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), the civilian auxiliary force that helps the authorities during emergencies. So far, as part of my neighborhood unit, I've responded to the plane crash that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle near the East River, directed traffic during a power failure, played the role of "Rude Evacuee No. 1" in a city hurricane drill, passed out preparedness guides in 11 languages at subway stations and mixed the hot chocolate at a Red Cross evacuation center.
My immersion has been so deep that last November I was selected "Ready New Yorker of the Month" by the city's Office of Emergency Management.
As I've continued to educate myself, people have asked me whether I feel better or worse. The answer is, both. I feel more prepared and more empowered. I see how much an individual can do and am more confident in people's inherent resilience in emergency situations. But I've also learned that my family's safety and the ability of my community and my nation to respond to major disasters might depend on my fellow citizens' preparedness. It may sound a little dramatic, but if even 93 Americans -- let alone 93 percent of us -- aren't informed and engaged, then none of us fully are.
"It keeps me awake at night," says John R. Gibb, New York state's emergency management director and one of several top officials who acknowledged concern over the current level of public readiness.
Public engagement is important not only in responding to emergencies, but also in helping prevent them in the first place. "The weakest part of our homeland security is the citizen," 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas H. Kean told me. "Addressing that is very, very, very important. Ultimately, it's as likely that a terrorist attack here will be stopped by the CIA or FBI as by someone who sees something suspicious and, instead of just going home for dinner, decides to tell his or her local police."
Based on my research and experiences so far, here are 10 suggestions for achieving a more prepared public:
1. Make public preparedness a priority, or it won't happen. Last year, Foresman asked a ballroom full of state first responders how many of them had made a family emergency plan. Of 300 people, nine raised their hands. If many of the folks promoting civilian preparedness aren't following their own advice, it's no wonder that the rest of us aren't, either. "It needs to be a national imperative," says Joseph F. Bruno, New York City's emergency management commissioner.
2. Make preparedness part of 21st-century citizenship. Being prepared may be the most significant contribution many citizens can make to their nation's security. Not only are civilians likely to be the first first responders at any disaster scene, but the nation's response will also be only as strong as that of the weakest link. And a new commitment to public preparedness would give the country a nonpartisan, substantive way of re-tapping the reservoir of post-9/11 goodwill. "We don't ask enough of people," says one city emergency manager. "Everyone asks me, 'How are you going to take care of us in a disaster?' You have a big role in taking care of you."
3. Don't laugh at "duck and cover." The nation's Cold War civil defense campaign is often parodied, but it offers helpful lessons for the present. "We threw the baby out with the bathwater," says R. David Paulison, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "We need to get back the preparedness ethic from our past." In the 1950s, U.S. air defense had more than 100,000 civilian volunteers and thousands of observation posts (including my grandmother, Jeannette, an observer in the Bronx). We don't need that many people looking up at the skies, but we could use that type of citizen interest and engagement.
4. Knowledge is power. Just about every emergency official I've interviewed says that public education could help mitigate the impact of a catastrophic disaster. The idea isn't to overwhelm the citizenry with too much information but to tell people what they really need to know -- so that, for example, they'll understand the difference between a "dirty bomb" and a nuclear bomb with even a fraction of their ability to differentiate between Britney and Paris. In fact, experts believe that a "dirty bomb," a traditional explosive laced with radiation, is a likely terrorist weapon in part because it could have a psychological impact far beyond its actual physical damage -- particularly if people haven't been briefed in advance.
5. We should tell the children. Like fire safety and seat belts, emergency preparedness may ultimately take a generation to take hold. So we need to include young people in the effort. We could make preparedness education part of the school curriculum by piggybacking on the successful fire or earthquake programs already in place. Going through kids makes it more likely that adults will follow. When my 5-year-old came home from school asking whether we were going to save the environment by getting new compact fluorescent bulbs, it sent me to the hardware store faster than any public service announcement.
6. Try the carrot and the stick. The government uses the bottom line when it wants to influence behavior. During hurricane season, the state of Louisiana provides a "tax holiday" for residents to purchase emergency supplies. Virginia will hold its first such holiday May 25-31. This could be replicated nationwide. Every year, I have to sign a form certifying that I have guards on my apartment windows. Could there be a similar form for having a family emergency plan? There are laws and insurance benefits for installing burglar and fire alarms; we could expand that to preparedness.
7. Bring in business to help make the sale. Marketing isn't the public sector's forte, and preparedness needs to be marketed as a consumer brand. A number of major corporations distinguished themselves in response to Katrina. It's time to engage the private sector in advancing civilian preparation.
8. Use 21st-century technology to prepare for 21st-century emergencies. The use of camera phones, Twitter and Google map mash-ups after the Chinese earthquake and during last year's Southern California wildfires are just the most recent examples of personal technology's growing role in public emergency preparation and response. We need to make Americans more aware of the capabilities of the technology at their fingertips and integrate it better into disaster planning. Social networking sites, for instance, could help in finding family members in an emergency, but only if everyone in the family is networked and knows how to use them. Though I'm a 40-something who didn't know "BFF" from "LOL," I'm beginning to learn (with the help of my 8-year-old). My wife and I now know how to send text messages, which can sometimes get through when voice calls can't (e.g., after the 2005 London subway bombings).
9. Everyone should learn the drill. The CERT hurricane drill in which I played a victim helped me think about what I'd do in an emergency. Drilling would help all Americans focus on and work through the questions everyone should ask in advance. (How will you get information and communicate with your family? Do you know the emergency plan of your children's school?)
10. Create a National Preparedness Day. September was made National Preparedness Month in 2004, but sometimes more can be accomplished in 24 focused hours than in 30 diffuse days. Let's have a day when we focus on this need -- briefing citizens, conducting drills, filling emergency kits. A helpful model is Japan's Disaster Prevention Day, held on the anniversary of the catastrophic 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Sept. 11 could be the official U.S. Preparedness Day: It would honor the memories of those who died by making sure that the United States is never so unprepared again.
History has shown that individuals will rise to the occasion in an emergency. But offering them the information, training, technology, support and encouragement to prepare in advance means that they'll be in the best position to help themselves, their families and their community if -- but probably when -- that emergency arrives.
----------------------------------------------------------
Where We Got By Walking in Their Manolos
By Ashley Sayeau
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B01
LONDON After five hours of craning for a good view, the impossible finally happened: I cursed my vow to never buy stilettos. I'm short, you see, so even though I was only inches from the red carpet, I couldn't see a thing when the crowd started chanting, "Carrie! Carrie! Carrie!"
I'd heard rumors of a green hat, so I raised my camera and shot randomly into the air. And there in my photos it was: about a foot high, looking like Kermit the Frog eating broccoli in the English countryside. But it was all the proof I needed: My heroine was here. Only Carrie (a.k.a. Sarah Jessica Parker) could carry off wearing something that ridiculous.
After a four-year hiatus, the women of "Sex and the City" -- Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha -- are back. Through a fluke of international movie marketing, the film of the long-running HBO series, which opens in the United States May 30, premiered first not in New York, the show's beloved backdrop, but here in London, where I now live. I was ecstatic at my luck, as were the screaming women who packed Leicester Square last Monday as the show's stars made their way into the Odeon theater, ducking under an enormous banner encouraging visitors to "Get Carried Away."
But why? What was it about that self-indulgent, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too show that could turn perfectly serious, accomplished adult women into swooning fans, trying to catch a glimpse of the women they had worshiped on the small-screen since the show debuted a decade ago?
As someone who has studied Carrie Bradshaw's place in the pantheon of popular culture's depiction of single girls, I thought I knew my own answer. Her outsized life is a fantasy, but an empowering one. We couldn't afford Carrie's shoes, let alone ever really hope to walk in them, but in her outlandishly expensive Manolos, she teetered squarely in the footsteps of TV's independent heroines, projecting an infectious kind of confidence.
My new friends in the crowd at the premiere had their own answers, of course, mostly focused less on how Carrie fits in with the depiction of feminine dependence in, say, 19th-century fiction than on good television. I spent the afternoon dishing about "Sex" with them, and we kept circling back to the question that has always plagued the show. I call it the question of reality. Nearly every critic has posed it, many with a furrowed brow. It goes like this: Why do so many women love this show that bears no resemblance to their real lives, that presents nothing but a fantasy world of shoes, sex and staying out late?
"It's inspirational. It's a dream world," said Sam Ramage, 19, echoing what many said. "You want to live in New York. You want to have all the designer clothes, but it's not just the clothes -- it's the way they dress. Their confidence."
I was impressed. These women managed to be both giddy and poised, while I, on the other hand, was growing increasingly wacky. Wanting a proper picture, I had scrambled onto a nearby fence. All afternoon, I had contained myself, been the removed reporter. "What must they think of me now?" I thought, my backside in the air. But the truth was, I didn't care. I hadn't felt so alive in ages.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. My relationship with the series has always been more cerebral than emotional. I first came across it seven years ago while researching my master's thesis on single women. I was looking for a contemporary example of a single-woman archetype, and I found four of them, staring me in the face. I was immediately hooked. I wrote 75 pages describing the show's predecessors, from Theodore Dreiser to Helen Gurley Brown, analyzing Carrie's engagement ring and ultimately arguing that the series represented a profound step forward for women in its portrayal of sex, friendships and single life.
But there was nothing sentimental about it. Like many academics who write on popular culture, I insisted that I related to the show on only an intellectual level. Fans were to be studied, not emulated. And yet here I was, perched on that rickety fence, watching Carrie and Co., my heart fluttering.
For a cultural critic, this is as metaphysical as it gets. On the one hand, I knew that the hoopla surrounding the $60 million film spoke to the fact that "Sex and the City" is above all a brand, one that has only grown since the series ended in 2004. TBS spent a reported $750,000 an episode for the syndication rights, and DVD sales have done nothing but soar at home and internationally. The series is good at a lot of things -- especially marketing.
On the other hand, none of this diminished the excitement that I, or the other women, felt at the premiere. I'd been secretly pleased by the women's dismissive attitude toward those who disdained the show as just fantasy. I've always felt that the question of reality was a ruse, and that what really upset reviewers was not that the series lacked verisimilitude (it's a television show, after all, not real life), but that so many women flocked to this alternate world, this fantasy of four women let loose in the city.
From the beginning, critics feared that television would bring subversion to the suburbs, disillusioning women about family life, as well as distracting them from their domestic duties. "Whatever happened to men?" wondered TV Guide in 1953. "Once upon a time (before TV) a girl thought of her boyfriend or husband as her prince charming. Now having watched the antics of Ozzie Nelson and Chester A. Riley, she thinks of her man as a prime idiot." The critics were right to be worried. In the decades that followed, the tube was a key site of women's rebellion. It's where Lucy avoided housework, Mary took the pill, Maude got an abortion and Murphy got on a vice president's nerves.
"Sex and the City" continued this courageous -- if madcap -- tradition. With conservatives pushing abstinence and pro-marriage programs, it was an adroit form of protest to have a show where women questioned marriage, made more money than their boyfriends did, and declared (more eloquently than I can here) that they only give oral sex if they get it. So what if it was over the top -- if we're going to fantasize, why not fantasize about women staying out late and making tons of money? After all, nobody's particularly bothered when Tony Soprano does it. (Though he may have other hobbies that moralists would quibble with.)
Of course, even the best kind of fantasy has its flaws. I learned this the hard way -- on a "Sex and the City"-themed bus tour of Manhattan, back in 2002, where two dozen women paid about $30 for three hours on a chartered coach that hit pockets of the city made famous by the show. As we drove from one expensive shop to another, I sat appalled as my fellow passengers propositioned random men from the bus windows and compared their own tokens of male affection, or their "rocks," as they called them. Shortly after, I chronicled my horror in Salon, where I shamefacedly acknowledged that not all fans equate Jimmy Choo with empowerment or see Carrie in Charlotte Brontë's "Villette." I felt that the series had let me down. As breakups go, it was a toughie.
And yet seeing the characters again years later, atop that fence at the premiere, I couldn't help but forgive them. I'd always insisted that I loved them for their minds, not their bodies. But now I realized that it wasn't true. Seeing them again was like seeing an old friend -- a refrain I heard throughout the day.
I realize this is sappy, but I'm not alone. At the premiere, I noted none of the hostility emitted years ago by those older tour-bus riders, who had seemed bitter that their lives could never really match those of the stars. There were older women in this crowd, too, but mostly it was younger women, women who had grown up watching the show with their moms or on DVD. They were fun-loving but sensible -- nicely dressed, but nothing outrageous. In fact, I counted not one stiletto. They weren't afraid to admit that they were inspired by the show. They weren't befuddled by the idea of fantasy. Instead they took it for what it was worth. I finally acknowledged that what I had always loved most about the series, but was too afraid or too shy to admit, was that it made me feel as though I could do anything I wanted.
This sentiment was echoed by the women I talked to. When I asked them how they related to the series, most said they looked to the women for guidance in their careers, often as future journalists, fashion designers or PR people.
"Carrie writes about her life, and for me, wanting to go into journalism, wanting to go into theater, [I see] that you have to do what you love -- not just job-wise, but relationship-wise too," said Megan Wheeler, a 21-year-old from Washington studying abroad in London. "It's part fantasy, but it makes me feel like it can happen, that it can be done."
The fans also reminded me that although there's fantasy in "Sex and the City," there is, especially in the later seasons, an equal dose of real life. I recalled my favorite scene, certainly more meaningful since my daughter was born two years ago, in which Carrie visits Miranda shortly after the latter has had her son. The top-notch lawyer is trying but failing miserably to listen to her friend. She hasn't slept in three weeks and her boobs -- on full display -- look like whoopee cushions. Suddenly she says, "This is so frustrating. I can't follow your thoughts. It's all about nursing and nipples. I am not gonna become one of those mothers who cannot carry on an adult conversation. I am not."
Thinking about that scene, I realize that "Sex and the City" has on several occasions made me feel less alone, more thoughtful and more bold. I have never spent more than $50 on jeans. I have never invited the UPS guy inside -- and I probably never will. But you know what I have done? Sometimes when I'm writing, I look out my window and scrunch up my face just like Carrie. Sometimes I even pretend to smoke a cigarette. I'm 30 now, the same age she was when the series began. I'm not sure that the next decade will bring me everything it brought her -- a trip down a runway, a great bob.
Yet I feel, in some vague way, as though I'm here, at this computer, because of her. I too come from a nameless suburb and spent my youth daydreaming about being a writer in the big city. It's hard to believe that I'm actually doing it, because back then -- and for much of my 20s, too -- I thought it was just some silly fantasy.
----------------------------------------------------------
Obama Has the Upper Hand. But McCain Can Still Take Him.
By Dick Morris
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B01
John McCain is America's favorite kind of candidate. With his record of extraordinary patriotism and his distinctive Senate tenure, McCain is a nominee whom voters from both parties -- and independents, too -- could easily support.
But he has been dealt a terrible hand: a tanking economy, an unpopular war, a Republican incumbent whose approval ratings are at their all-time low and a gloomy national mood, with 82 percent of Americans saying in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week that the country is on the wrong track. Political scientists add all that up and predict that the Democrats are destined to win the White House. But I don't do political science; I do politics, and I'm convinced that McCain can still win -- if he's willing to follow the road map below.
McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he's not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive? Simple: The GOP electorate, along with the rest of the country, has moved somewhat to the left. (In Florida, for example, exit polls showed that only 27 percent of Republican primary voters described themselves as "very conservative," while 28 percent said they were "moderate" and 2 percent said they were "very liberal.")
Meanwhile, McCain's likely rival, Barack Obama, has raised such doubts among voters that their concerns momentarily energized even Hillary Rodham Clinton's sagging campaign. With the help of the incendiary comments of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Obama's negatives have been rising even as he nears the finish line.
Still, voters are tending heavily toward the Democratic Party. Normally, party preferences are about even, but recent national polls give Democrats a decided edge. In last week's Post-ABC poll, 53 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats or leaned toward the party, compared with 39 percent who were Republicans or tilted to the GOP.
To sum it up: A candidate who cannot get elected is being nominated by a party that cannot be defeated, while a candidate who is eminently electable is running as the nominee of a party doomed to defeat.
In this environment, McCain can win by running to the center.
His base will be there for him; indeed, it will turn out in massive numbers. Wright has become the honorary chairman of McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts. It would be nice to think that race isn't a factor in American politics anymore, but it is. The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.
So McCain doesn't have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.
If the GOP nominee were Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, independents and Democrats might not vote Republican even if they became convinced that Obama is some kind of sleeper agent sent to charm and conquer our democracy. Even Rudy Giuliani, with his penchant for confrontation, might have elicited sufficient doubts among Democrats to hold them in line for Obama. But McCain doesn't threaten anyone. Everyone can appreciate the ordeal that tested his courage in Vietnam, and independents and Democrats can celebrate much of his legislative record. Voting for McCain is an easy sell.
Except, of course, for Iraq. This is his biggest problem -- the one issue that impales the Arizona senator and hampers his ability to induce liberals to cross the line.
Earlier in the race, Iraq might have been a deal-breaker. But a kinder, gentler war has emerged. U.S. combat deaths are way down, and the de facto U.S. alliance with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province against al-Qaeda in Iraq seems to have dramatically improved the security situation. Still, most Americans don't like the war, and McCain must deal with their opposition if he wants to win.
The solution is to draw Obama out -- to ask the untested senator what he would do if al-Qaeda in Iraq took over the country . . . or if Iran did . . . or if the Iraqis who backed the U.S. mission were being slaughtered by the thousands . . . or if Islamist terrorists seized control of the country's oil wealth.
Obama, not wanting to appear weak, would no doubt rise to the bait and agree that he might need to send troops back in under certain conditions. He would assure us that sufficient forces would be available at nearby bases to get the job done. To avoid coming across as indecisive and timid, he would put on a sufficiently hawkish face to reassure the voters. And in doing so, he would blur the war issue vis-a-vis McCain. It will make little difference to most Americans whether our troops are in Iraq (as McCain wants) or in Kuwait (as Obama can be pushed to suggest), so long as U.S. casualties are dropping. And with the economy in tough shape, Iraq will fade as the election's be-all and end-all issue.
Which brings us to George W. Bush, the least popular president of modern times. Unlikely as it sounds, the soon-to-be former president needs to get out of the White House, reenter the political arena (much as it will pain him) and go around the country telling us two things: First, we are winning in Iraq; second, the economy is not as bad as most people think. With the Dow at around 12,800 and unemployment at 5 percent, Bush can make a good case that things aren't really headed for the rocks. And he'll have to. Republicans cannot win with an incumbent president with rock-bottom ratings.
Bush can help McCain, but that doesn't mean that McCain should support Bush. As Bush makes the case for himself, McCain must put distance between them. A lot of distance. Once, McCain ran against Bush. But since then, he has basked in the glow of Bush's warm welcome back to the mainstream of the party. Now McCain needs to free himself of Bush's spell, go out again into the cold and show the country the difference between his agenda and Bush's.
Meanwhile, McCain should highlight his credentials as a reformer and a maverick to attract Democrats and independents who worry about Obama. Forget about the base. It will be there. Obama's liberalism, his pro-tax agenda and his proposed weakening of the USA Patriot Act -- as well as fears that he would appoint to office people such as Rev. Wright and William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground -- will all assure the full mobilization of the right. Immigration reform and McCain's other acts of apostasy will be forgiven for the sake of beating Obama. So McCain needs to go after the swing voters:
Lash out at the corporate greed that landed us in the subprime mortgage crisis. Attack the golden-parachute pensions, the ill-gotten commissions and the maddening lending fees.
Go after credit card companies' interest rates, late fees and consumer gouging.
Demand action on global warming (as McCain began doing last week, including hawking "eco-friendly" campaign T-shirts).
Call for a ban on all congressional earmarks, with their inevitable waste and pork, and insist that Congress appoint a permanent ethics special prosecutor to police itself.
Attack big tobacco, and blast the movie industry for helping sell its poison.
Pledge to make hedge-fund managers pay full earned-income taxes on their incomes, rather than the undeserved capital-gains treatment they currently get.
But not all of McCain's moves should be aimed at pleasing the left. He should also:
Attack Obama for favoring federally subsidized health insurance for illegal immigrants.
Criticize Obama for slavish devotion to the teachers' unions and willingness to compromise educational standards.
Go after the Democrats for their proposals to lower sentences for crack cocaine to make them equal to those for powder cocaine. (Instead, McCain should urge raising penalties for regular cocaine.)
McCain need not depart from long-held principles to wage any of these battles. He has always embraced these causes as a senator, and he needs to do so ever more forcefully as a candidate for president. The danger for McCain is that he will forget that he has already won the Republican nomination and retreat to safe GOP positions, which will alienate precisely the Democrats and independents whom he is uniquely positioned to attract.
Meanwhile, the right wing will carry the attack against Obama. McCain is not a mudslinging politician by nature, but he doesn't need to be. The collected quotes of Rev. Wright will be a bestseller this summer. Obama once had to prove to us that he was not a Muslim; now he must convince us that he never really went to church much. Just as Sen. John F. Kerry was buffeted by veterans who had less than heroic memories of their service with him in Vietnam, so Obama will have to weather the recollections of his fellow parishioners. Count on several to surface and claim that they sat next to him during some particularly incendiary sermon.
The American public will not ultimately doubt Obama's patriotism; that is a bridge too far. But we will come to think less of his credibility and strength as he fumbles his way through awkward denials. Obama's ex-pastor may have faded in the primary fight with Clinton, but Wright will loom larger in the general election. McCain is in an excellent position to exploit the openings that Obama will offer -- if, and only if, he moves to the center.
----------------------------------------------------------
Dalaro And the Deep Blue Sea
By Erica Johnston
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2008; P01
Nearly 20 years ago, during a long bicycle trip through Europe, a friend and I happened upon a small coastal town that was too alluring not to stop in. We were about 25 miles southeast of Stockholm, pedaling north from Copenhagen to meet up with a friend.
There wasn't much to the town, really; I remember a cobalt blue bay with several small islands dotting the horizon, a ragged shoreline and a few of the simple yet stately cottages that line the back roads of Sweden.
As we looked for a place to pull over for a rest, we saw an inconspicuous sign featuring a drawing of a house and a single word beneath it: "Vandrarhem." We had unwittingly ridden to the door of a waterfront youth hostel. The decision, it seemed, had been made for us: Our friend in the capital would have to wait a couple of days.
We had stumbled upon Dalaro, gateway to the Stockholm archipelago, historical defender of the Crown from seafaring Russians and, for more than 100 years, a summer retreat for fortunate Stockholmers. I can't recall what we did there, but I've remembered it ever since as one of my favorite spots in a country I came to know quite well.
So when my brother and sister-in-law asked if I could join them for a vacation in Sweden, how could I say no? For several summers they had rented a house near Stockholm, in a quiet town on the Baltic Sea.
You can guess the rest. My brother, Chip, had found Dalaro by chance, as I had. Unlike me, he had the good sense to keep going back.
The More Things Change . . .
A few weeks later, not long after Midsummer's Day, I was back in the land of cloudberries and cardamom buns, lolling on the deck of the rental house, watching as the near-midnight sun performed a slow-motion light show across the darkening bay. A clan of ducks commuted along the shallows in V-formation. Come mornings, we came to see, they evidently were permitted a free-swim period, with each doing its own thing before falling into line once again.
Some vacationers did pretty much the same thing. A middle-aged couple strode to the water's edge in the mornings, stripped out of their robes and dived in. The nudists next door? Not really. In Sweden, it's just an invigorating, sensible way to start a summer day.
You could spend a lot of time -- all of it highly useful, of course -- pondering these phenomena. But we had pressing business to tend to. In my long absence, my sister-in-law said, Dalaro had changed. I had to check out the main street.
Sure enough, there it was, in the center of town: a newish bakery, complete with warm cinnamon rolls, blond wood tables, fancy sandwiches and even something called Dalaro bread, a seemingly good-for-you affair. To my brother and me, this was a major development, like a skyscraper might be to others. And so it came to be that we felt morally obligated to walk there every morning for some serious carbo-loading. You know, to support small business.
The modern conveniences and contrivances had arrived, if only in a typically understated Swedish sense. There were boutiques and at least one art gallery, though it never seemed to be open. Things change. After all, it had been nearly 20 years.
I knew that the youth hostel must be gone. Location, location, location: Some laws of real estate are immutable, even in famously left-leaning Sweden. It surely didn't make sense that a $15-a-night refuge for the young and restless would command such prime property. Okay, fine. After all, I didn't need it any longer.
What really mattered, I figured, was the enduring calm of the town, the saturated golds and iron reds of the houses, and the magnificent archipelago (the Swedes call it skargard, or a garden of rocks). Sure, there were a few modestly showy houses in Dalaro now, and I noticed more Crocs-clad feet than traditional Swedish clogs. But the big things, the stuff that counted -- none of that had changed, as far as I could tell.
Island Adventure
One morning, we board a ferry for Orno, a 20-minute hop from Dalaro. (Boats are like buses around the archipelago; they also leave from Stockholm and other towns.)
Layer upon layer of isles, islets and barren outcroppings instantly begin to reveal themselves. There are more than 24,000 in all, stretching across a 50-mile arc that extends nearly into Finnish waters. The vast majority are uninhabited.
In the summertime, the islands -- lush in the shadow of the mainland before becoming sparser and more severe farther out to sea -- offer Swedes a treasured playground. The enjoyment of nature is a fundamental principle in Sweden, and broad public access to the land, even when privately owned, has been equated with Americans' constitutional freedoms of speech and religion. (The right of public access is called allemansratten, or all people's rights.)
My brother and sister-in-law, Judy, roll off the boat on their bicycles, ready to cross the verdant island on a road too narrow for a stripe down the middle. We stop at a nearby farm so I can rent a bike, which turns out to be a three-speed (at least in theory; only one works) better suited for a teenage girl. No doubt the farmer's daughter, circa 1980. The seat is banana-shaped and way too low; the bell has been rendered silent by rust and time. None of this matters in the slightest. It is, in fact, the perfect island transportation.
The farmer surprises us all: Arriving in his truck, chatting on his cellphone, we soon realize that he doesn't speak English. That's rare in Sweden, even on a rural island, even for a farmer, even one who looks about 60. In fact, there's a good chance that anyone you happen to run into under the age of 65 or so will speak English nearly as well as you do.
Which is almost a shame, because the Swedish language is so melodic and sometimes so wonderfully confounding. Sure, it often seems easy, especially in writing: "bageri" for bakery, "parkering" for parking. Then there are the words that look like you should know them, such as "snart" (soon) or "snabbacash" (the "speedy cash" offered at the ATM).
But similarities can be deceiving. Our u's often become y's in Swedish, hence a restaurant's meny. Kornbiff isn't corned beef; it's a type of meat substitute. And the nearby island of Kymmendo, the onetime home of playwright August Strindberg, is pronounced "sher-men-DURH."
We glide past sheep, horses and wildflowers bursting with blues, yellows and purples. Ads posted at the harborside cafe where we stop for an alfresco smoked-salmon lunch tout faster broadband Internet connections. This jumble of scenes and signals might appear contradictory, but they actually seem quite happy together.
On the way back to the ferry, I prop my bike against the farmhouse as cars board the boat at the bottom of a long hill. My brother motions for me to climb onto the rack at the back of his bicycle to quicken the trip. A minute later, we're pulling away on the ferry.
Back in Dalaro, we return to form, succeeding spectacularly in doing pretty much nothing at all. A comprehensive tour with Judy proves that there is more to the town than I had thought -- though not that much more.
One day, mysteriously finding ourselves back at the bakery, we buy a newspaper and are gratified to learn, using our beginner Swedish, that Lettland had just sworn in a new president. The sad fact that we have no idea where -- or what -- Lettland is barely dents our enthusiasm. (It's Latvia, by the way, so be happy for them.)
Walking home along the harbor, Judy points to another newish landmark, the vaflestuga. It's a shack, or cottage (stuga), more than 100 years old, all wide planks of weathered wood, maybe 14 feet square. What's new is the vafle part: freshly made Belgian-style waffles, with deep bowls of whipped cream and fresh-fruit preserves set out on the counter.
As we stroll out, a little fatter and a little happier, we walk into a light, slightly chilly rain. On one side of the street is a docked shipping boat, a workhorse hauler. Having just spent several nights watching videos of Henning Mankell crime novels, we amuse ourselves by imagining the boat's dastardly cargo: illegal immigrants, surely, or maybe a cache of drugs from the former Eastern Bloc countries across the Baltic.
I'm so preoccupied that I almost miss the small sign along the walkway, one door down from the waffle shack. It shows a house with one word beneath it: "Vandrarhem."
The hostel lives. About a quarter-mile from where we're staying and right where it always was. No huge deal, really. But still.
For a country of 9 million people and a California-size place that many Americans seem to believe is a frozen nation of brooding blonds, Sweden has managed both to prosper and stick to its principles. So while the continued existence of an international youth hostel on a choice chunk of waterfront probably has nothing to do with the long arm of the government, it seems to speak to the country's egalitarian, allemansratten ethos.
And Swedes take their icy reputation in stride, even managing to shrug when Americans mistake their nation for Switzerland. (Snowy? Check. Mountains? Check. Starts with "Sw"? Yep. Spooky.) When one of your homeland's biggest cultural exports is Abba, it helps to have a healthy sense of humor and perspective.
Friends in Watery Places
The next night, friends of my brother and sister-in-law pull up to the dock in a motorboat, along with their two young daughters. As we step a few feet away into the rental house, with its glass doors allowing full view of the waterside deck, Flisan, the 4-year-old big sister, plays quietly outside. After spending the summers on an island a few miles north, she understands the rules: No going in the water.
But just in case, her life jacket remains tightly fastened. Along its back is a luggage-like plastic handle, so she can be plucked from the water as easily as a milk jug. Yet more evidence of the Swedes' affinity for design and style (Swedish crystal, Ikea and H&M also come to mind) that seems to flow from a wellspring of common sense and a taste for elegant simplicity.
Hours later, the parents bundle their sleeping children into the boat, along with summer supplies and maritime maps, and whisk them back home through a slalom course of miles of isles. This is summer in (or near) the city for thousands of Stockholmers.
In the morning, I boost the economic prospects of the bakery one last time. The waffle shack will have to wait. You know, the one next to the hostel .
----------------------------------------------------------
Keeping Your Profile Clean
By Elizabeth Ody
Kiplinger's Personal Finance
Sunday, May 18, 2008; F03
A careless comment in your blog (or in someone else's). An embarrassing incident recounted in your local newspaper. A racy photo on MySpace. Any of these can sully your online reputation.
A recent survey by ExecuNet, a networking organization for business leaders, found that 83 percent of executives and corporate recruiters research job candidates online, and 43 percent have eliminated a candidate based on search results. Even if you're not in the market for a new job, it's a good idea to clean the skeletons out of your digital closet.
Do it yourself. First, search for yourself on Google to pinpoint any negative hits you'd like to remove. You may not be able to destroy them, but you can at least bump them down the list. Check other search engines.
Your goal is to highlight the positives about yourself. Set up accounts at networking Web sites, such as MySpace and LinkedIn, or create a blog in which you write about something uplifting. On each site you create, include links to the others. That will push them higher on Google's results list. "To Google, links are like votes," said Ben Padnos of Done SEO, which helps clients optimize for search engines. "It's a popularity contest."
Still stuck in the virtual muck? To dig yourself out, you may have to get a pro to create new Web pages that accentuate your positives. Figure that it will cost at least $1,000 to bump all the negative hits off your first three search-results pages. But prices vary according to the number of hits and how difficult they are to move, so shop aggressively. Start your search at DefendMyName.com and Internet-Reputation-Manage- ment.com.
Keep tabs on your reputation by setting up a Google alert for your name. You'll receive an e-mail with a link whenever your name pops up on a new page.
For a more powerful search, Reputation Defender offers a $10-per-month service that captures pages on sites that don't get picked up by Google, such as Facebook or tiny, low-traffic sites. Founder Michael Fertik said the service is a hit. "People consider it their new credit report."
----------------------------------------------------------
The Buyout Boys Reload
Their New Killer Deals: Leveraged Purchases Of Their Own Debt
By Allan Sloan and Katie Benner
Sunday, May 18, 2008; F01
On a spring day at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Key Biscayne, Fla., Michael Klein, Citigroup's chairman for institutional clients, took the stage at the bank's ninth annual private equity conference. In front of pension fund investors, hedge fund managers and private equity dealmakers, Klein flashed a series of newspaper headlines on the giant screens.
One slide read, "The collapse of a major investment house," evoking groans -- Bear Stearns had collapsed two weeks earlier. "End of the 'leveraged' era," read another. "Middle East investor buys major stake in a U.S. bank." The audience nodded along, thinking about how the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority had poured capital into Citi. But before the conference could turn into a wake, Klein revealed that the stories were not from this past year but from 1990 and '91. The bank in question was Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was a casualty of the junk-bond collapse. Citi's Middle Eastern investor was Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud.
Plus ça change, plus la même chose, as they say in the fancy French restaurants the buyout boys frequent. The industry, as the more grizzled audience members recalled, had survived that implosion and grown into a $2 trillion colossus. Paraphrasing Charles Dickens, Klein went on to explain how 2007 was a tale of two halves. The first was ebullient: nine of the 10 biggest leveraged buyouts ever ("leveraged" means using borrowed money) and Blackstone Group becoming a publicly traded company. The second was one in which LBOs fell from almost 40 percent of the dollar value of all deals through July to a single-digit market share.
While the days of the brainless megabuyout are over (at least for now), private equity has not gone away. It's merely retreated. Veteran dealsters say they welcome the current separation of the men from the boys, of the serious players from those who merely surfed on waves of cheap debt but have now wiped out. These periodic shakeouts are "what keeps the industry healthy," said Blackstone President Tony James, who has been in buyouts for almost three decades. "It squeezes out a large number of marginal players." TPG (formerly Texas Pacific Group) co-founder Jim Coulter describes the change this way: "There aren't 100 bankers showing up with companies they want you to buy, but the ones they're offering are much more interesting."
What's different in private equity now from its last meltdown, in the late 1980s? Answer: It has become part of the landscape in a way that it wasn't 20 years ago. If you buy a teddy bear at Toys R Us, stay at a Hilton or drive a Chrysler, private equity is part of your life. If your pension fund has money invested in buyouts, these guys' performance will have a say on whether your golden years are spent eating caviar or cat food. Many public-employee pension funds have a piece of buyout action (or soon will), and if they don't make their projected returns, governments will turn to taxpayers to make up the shortfall.
So what do smart people like the buyout boys do when they're confronted with violent change in the markets? They're engaging in what we call "double cropping," a classic example of the way the largest private-equity firms can adapt. Okay, you can't buy companies anymore, but you can make a second profit from the buyouts you've already done. How? By offering capital to the institutions with the greatest need -- the banks that financed your original deals.
The banks, nowhere near as clever as their clients, figured they would sell most or all of their takeover loans to institutions throughout the world, ending up with some nice fee income while having little or none of their capital at risk. But when the credit crunch began last summer, the music stopped and the banks lost their would-be dance partners.
Enter the buyout firms, which have tons of new money flowing into their funds. What to do with it? Rummage for value in banks' used-loan inventory. "The flavor of the day is buying your own debt at below face value," said David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group. "I'm buying bank debt in my deal with leverage from the bank that made me that deal."
You have to love it. First, banks provided lavish financing for the takeovers, making it possible for LBO firms to show double-digit returns to investors even if the properties themselves produced gains in single digits. (Example: Borrow $5 billion at 6 percent to buy a $6 billion company that's growing at 9 percent, and you make 24 percent on your $1 billion investment.) Now the banks are lending their borrowers money to cart off the loans at a discount, giving them another bite at the buyout apple.
Consider, if you will, the biggest double-cropping transaction to surface thus far: a deal in which Citi sort of unloaded $12 billion of buyout loans onto Apollo, TPG and Blackstone. The firms stand to make double-digit returns because they get to borrow so much money from Citi -- and they've even managed to limit their risk.
We're saying "sort of unloaded" because Citi didn't sell the paper to the buyout groups, contrary to what's been reported. Rather, Citi and the firms did "total-return swaps." The firms forked over $3 billion of cash and agreed to pay Citi interest (at a low 1 percent over the London Interbank Offered Rate) on $7.8 billion. In return Citi will pay the firms the interest and principal repayments generated by the $12 billion portfolio.
We don't have details on every loan, but we do know that Apollo and TPG, which took Harrah's Entertainment private for $28 billion, got some of Citi's Harrah's debt. We also know that TPG, which partnered with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in the $45 billion purchase of the Texas utility TXU, got some of Citi's TXU paper. (None of the firms involved would discuss specifics.)
Doing a swap rather than a sale avoids various complex financial and legal problems. It also means that the buyout firms are on the hook for only the cash they've put up, unless they choose to put up more. So if the loans prove to be truly disastrous, they will be Citi's problem all over again.
This kind of transaction isn't as sexy (or lucrative) as lining up the first $100 billion buyout. But hey, it helps cover the overhead. Double-cropping leveraged loans isn't likely to produce the 25 percent or so (before fees) returns to which buyout-fund investors have become accustomed (or would like to become accustomed). But it beats a sharp stick in the eye. Firms can realize returns in the high teens or low 20s (before fees) from buying this paper, which is a far less risky investment than putting up the equity in an LBO.
One reason banks are so eager to do these deals is that the takeover loans made late in the cycle tend to be really messed up. That's because banks were competing so hard for buyout business that they took leave of their senses. At a gathering of business journalists last month, Carlyle's Rubenstein riffed on the way banks were competing to finance buyouts on increasingly ridiculous (for the lenders) terms. After playing the banks off against one another, Rubenstein said -- a big smile on his face as he milked laughs from the crowd -- the firm ended up with a deal that worked like this: "I don't have to pay the debt on time, I don't have to write covenants, I don't have to worry about nuclear bombs, I don't have to have any equity. I'll do that deal."
In a more serious vein, consider a study of post-2003 buyout debt by Marty Fridson's Distressed Debt Investor. Fridson, who has been around high-yield debt since back when it was known as junk, said that before the lending excesses started in 2004, buyout debt followed a familiar pattern: The longer the debt had been outstanding, the more likely it was to be distressed (which he defines as yielding 10 percentage points or more above equivalent Treasury securities). The reason: The longer a buyout has been around, the more chance it has had to run into economic problems.
But the trend has reversed -- the more recently a loan was made, the more likely it is to be distressed. As of early May, 42 percent (62 of 146) of post-2003 LBOs were distressed, more than double the rate in the rest of the high-yield universe. This includes three of the four issues from this year, 49 percent (18 of 37) from 2007, and 34 percent (14 of 41) from 2004. The good news is that now is better than in mid-March, when Fridson found a full 50 percent of these issues to be distressed.
None of this means that huge private-equity deals -- formerly management buyouts, formerly leveraged buyouts, formerly bootstraps, soon perhaps to be "transformational equity" (a term that you hear bandied about on the buyout circuit) -- are dead. They're just in hibernation.
Buyout firms, which are always in full sales mode, are telling potential investors that this is a great time to commit money to their funds, because investments made in meltdown years and the two following years tend to do exceptionally well. History backs up the idea that investing in a burst-bubble climate is a great way to make money. A Cambridge Associates study shows that investors in funds formed in the years when bubbles popped and the two subsequent years have made returns far superior to those from funds in other years. For example, funds raised in 2001, 2002 and 2003 (after the stock market bubble burst) returned 33 percent, 29 percent and 31 percent, respectively, after fees, the best three years in the 20-year survey.
However, just because post-bubble buyouts have been good in the past doesn't mean they'll be good in the future -- history, after all, isn't destiny. The fact that firms are double-cropping in the debt markets is a departure from the historical pattern. In the past, they kept their powder dry in post-meltdown years and waited for things to improve.
It's going to take a while -- possibly a long while -- to see how all this plays out. For now, you've got to work on the companies you have, do smallish deals and find really creative ways to keep the Gulfstream in fuel until the market turns.
The folks at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a low-profile buyout shop that's been around for 30 years, waxed philosophical about this in their year-end letter to investors. "If the wind will not serve," they said, citing an ancient proverb, "take to the oars." In short, get ready for some calluses, buyout boys.
----------------------------------------------------------
Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.
By James Howard Kunstler – Washington Post
Sunday, May 25, 2008; B03
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:
The way we produce food
The way we conduct commerce and trade
The way we travel
The way we occupy the land
The way we acquire and spend capital
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.
As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.
And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years -- inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.
Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.
The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.
These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.
We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.
James Howard Kunstler is the author, most recently, of "World Made by Hand," a novel about America's post-oil future.
----------------------------------------------------------
Why Are We Out to Destroy Our Diversity?
Sunday, May 11, 2008; B08
On the streets of Manassas, two residents told a Post reporter that they prefer empty homes to the immigrant neighbors who lived there before ["A New View of Vacant Houses," Metro, April 21]. Now Frederick County, Md., is considering actions similar to those in Prince William County, which may lead to more vacant homes [front page, May 6]. While I shudder at the picture that these Manassas residents painted of drunken men fighting and urinating on the lawn, it is hard for me to believe that such behavior took place at the majority of the homes now left empty. It simply doesn't ring true with what I've seen over the past 20 years.
Their comments make clear the sad fact that an entire group, Hispanic immigrants, is being painted with the broad strokes of the undesirable behavior of a few. That's called stereotyping, and when it is combined with scapegoating -- placing problems from noise to overcrowding to gangs at the feet of Hispanic immigrants -- it is truly frightening.
Let's look at some of the problems often cited regarding illegal immigrants:
· Noise. My husband, a middle-aged white guy, cranks up the oldies station pretty loud outside when he's gardening. A teenage band practices in a garage nearby, quiet loud, quite often. But all that seems to be acceptable. Is it the loud music or the type of loud music that is unacceptable?
· Too many cars. Have you ever been in a middle-class neighborhood when all the kids are home from college with their cars, parked next to the cars that every high-schooler seems to require, parked next to the individual car of every adult driver? No one seems to complain about the number of cars in front of these houses. Perhaps it's the trucks or older cars that many immigrants drive, rather than the number of cars.
· Hanging around outside. There is a garden apartment complex a few miles from my home in Springfield that is largely Latino. The balconies, which face the road, are often full of adults and children loudly enjoying the outdoors (even when most of us deem it too hot). Is that a lifestyle we should condemn -- or one we should envy nostalgically, thinking back to the days when neighbors knew each other and enjoyed each other's company on a regular basis?
· Gangs. Yes, unfortunately, some immigrant children are lured into gangs, perhaps by the sense of community that they are not finding around them. And if we continue to build a hostile environment around immigrant students and their families, we push them into these waiting arms.
I have seen firsthand how our communities are enriched by immigrant families. In my work with immigrant parents of high schoolers, I am overwhelmed by their commitment to their families. We American-born parents could learn much from the immigrant parents who insist that families spend weekends together and who still get hugs from their teenage sons. Their children are part of the mosaic that creates a rich, diverse learning environment in our schools, which research shows helps all students learn to think more deeply, be better problem-solvers and work more effectively in collaborative groups -- essential 21st-century skills.
If we recognize that immigrants do enrich our community, we stop blaming and look for solutions, such as much-maligned day-laborer centers. Where are the sincere outcries for affordable housing?
I worry that the steps advocated by those who wish to return to a neighborhood, a community, that resides in their memories are actually destroying the richly dynamic neighborhoods of today. It's time for all of us who recognize that diversity is not just to be celebrated but to be championed to speak up loudly to drown out the ugliness. Let's get back to viewing our neighbors as individuals and our communities as opportunities to grow beyond our own experiences.
----------------------------------------------------------
What's in Your Genes? You Don't Want to Know -- Yet.
By H. Gilbert Welch and Wylie Burke
Sunday, May 11, 2008; B02
The company 23andMe promises to "unlock the secrets of your own DNA." Navigenics wants you to be tested to "do everything you can to stay healthy." And deCODEme hopes that genetic testing will "prompt people to do the right thing."
It all sounds so good. If you have a couple of thousand dollars to part with (along with some saliva), why not have one of these companies scan your genome?
The primary caution about genetic testing has usually been that you will learn that you are destined to develop some dreadful disease (such as Huntington's disease, a degenerative neurological disorder) for which there is no known therapy. A positive test only allows you to start worrying about your demise earlier. Do you really want to know?
Then again, your genome includes lots of other information, which the scans are beginning to tap. So the more relevant question is: What is the point of knowing?
Some of what you can learn is how well your genotype (your DNA code) relates to your phenotype (your personal attributes). The testing companies tout their ability to see whether your DNA says that you like Brussels sprouts, can tolerate dairy or are plagued by ear wax.
This may be a novel hook for some, but it's really pretty frivolous stuff. Geneticists point out that "phenotype trumps genotype." In other words, the fact that you don't like Brussels sprouts trumps any associated DNA code that says you should.
You can also learn something far more serious from the tests -- information about your risk of developing a number of diseases: heart disease, diabetes and multiple sclerosis, as well as breast and prostate cancer. But the information is not as good as you might think.
It would be simpler if all genetic information were definitive: If you have the gene, you will get the disease; if you don't, you won't (as is the case with Huntington's disease). Most gene variants, however, only marginally increase or decrease the chance of getting cancer or other diseases. And because so many non-genetic factors contribute to illnesses, having a rough estimate of a small genetic effect doesn't help us predict future health with any certainty. And even if the information were perfect, it wouldn't tell you what to do.
Imagine you are a 40 year-old woman receiving the results of your genome scan. Your profile shows that you have four times the average risk for developing ovarian cancer but below-average risk for lung cancer. Your risk for breast cancer could be almost 50 percent increased, but it also might not; the research is divided. Your chances of developing heart disease turn out to be 25 percent higher than normal. (Not surprising, you think, because your mother had a heart attack a couple of years ago.) One factor that raises your risk of heart disease also lowers your risk for macular degeneration -- but you also have a second genetic variant that raises the risk of that disease.
Now what? Oops, the test doesn't answer that question. Some might argue that the first step would be to deal with the ovarian-cancer risk and remove your ovaries. Others might point out that heart disease is a greater concern and that taking out the ovaries, removing estrogen, would only increase your risk. Another doctor might suggest removing your ovaries and starting estrogen replacement. Someone else will point out that that will increase your risk for breast cancer. (These uncertainties, combined with the absence of increased lung-cancer risk, may tempt you to keep smoking.)
What's the right thing to do? With the exception of quitting smoking, the truth is: No one knows. Our ability to read the genome is well ahead of our ability to know whether medical intervention based on such a reading does more good than harm. But we can be sure that haphazard genetic testing will needlessly make well people worry about becoming sick.
We need more research, not pricey genomic scans. Until then, save your money, and spare your health.
----------------------------------------------------------
They're Global Citizens. They're Hugely Rich. And They Pull the Strings.
By David Rothkopf
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B01
We didn't elect them. We can't throw them out. And they're getting more powerful every day.
Call them the superclass.
At the moment, Americans are fixated on the political campaign. In the meantime, many are missing a reality of the global era that may matter much more than their presidential choice: On an ever-growing list of issues, the big decisions are being made or profoundly influenced by a little-understood international network of business, financial, government, cultural and military leaders who are beyond the reach of American voters.
In addition to top officials, these people include corporate executives, leading investors, top bankers, media moguls, heads of state, generals, religious leaders, heads of terrorist and criminal organizations and a handful of important cultural and scientific figures. Each of these roughly 6,000 individuals is set apart by their power and ability to regularly influence millions of lives across international borders. The group is not monolithic, but none is more globalized or has more influence over the direction in which the global era is heading.
Doubt it? Just look at the current financial crisis. As government regulators have sought to head off further market losses, they've found that perhaps the most effective tool at their disposal is what the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank described to me as their "convening power" -- their ability to get the big boys of Wall Street and world financial capitals into a room or on a conference call to collaborate on solving a problem. This has, in fact, become a central part of crisis management, both because national governments have limited regulatory authority over global markets and because financial flows have become so large that the real power lies with the biggest players -- such as the top 50 financial institutions that control almost $50 trillion in assets, by one measure nearly a third of all assets worldwide.
Most major companies are both bigger and more global today, which effectively makes them able to pick and choose among various governments' regulatory regimes or investment incentive programs. They play officials in country X against those in country Y, gaining leverage that makes the old rules of trade obsolete. The world's biggest corporations, such as Exxon or Wal-Mart, have annual sales (and thus financial resources) that rival the gross domestic product of all but the 20 or so wealthiest nations. The top 250 companies in the world have sales equal to about a third of global GDP (these are very different measures, but they give a rough sense of relative size).
Major media organizations such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which is effectively controlled by a single individual, touch far more people each day than any national government can. Just a few weeks ago, Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi once again used his extraordinary resources to win election as prime minister, which will give him a seat at G-8 summits and other global conclaves. Even global terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda or Hezbollah have both the ability, through their international networks, and the will to project force more effectively on an international level than all but a handful of governments.
The people who run these big international organizations can have much more power over key aspects of your daily life and over global trends than most officials in Washington are likely to have, except in the most extreme circumstances. They can affect investments and job creation, shape culture and influence lawmakers. The Federal Reserve Bank has played a critical role in the financial crisis, but it couldn't have intervened successfully without a financial leader like Jamie Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, which stepped in to purchase the failing investment bank Bear Stearns.
The rise of the global superclass signals the latest evolution in the age-old tale of the few who corner the market on power. There have always been elites. But this contemporary group is very different from those that preceded it. Study these 6,000 or so individuals, and you'll find that unlike past aristocrats who inherited their wealth, many -- Bill Gates, for instance, or Warren Buffett -- have built their fortunes over their lifetimes. Many more come from the worlds of business, finance and media than in the past.
What's more, many acknowledge that they increasingly have more in common with fellow members of the global elite than they do with the people of their own nations. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, for instance, may be governor of a Siberian province, but he also manages to live large in London, where he owns a famous English soccer club. Even though he has donated millions to help his province, he spends considerably more time with global business partners or his posh neighbors in Britain than he does with his constituents back home.
At the same time, political and military elites are fading in relative influence -- the former bound by geography, the latter by the extraordinarily high cost of modern warfare. The regional composition of the group is changing as well, as transatlantic elites who today make up about 60 percent of the class gradually give way to a rising cadre of Asian leaders, such as the 100 Chinese billionaires estimated to have emerged in the last couple of years.
In a world with only two kinds of international institutions -- weak and dysfunctional -- the members of this superclass are filling a power vacuum when it comes to influencing decisions about transnational issues such as financial-market regulation or climate change. (Many countries voted for the Kyoto accords on global warming, but it took just Exxon and a handful of other oil companies to successfully lobby the White House to opt out and undercut the entire initiative.) In so doing, they raise real questions about the future of global governance. Will the global era be more democratic or less so? Will inequality continue to grow, as it has for the past three decades of this group's rise, or recede? Will the few dominate because the government mechanisms that traditionally represent the views of the many are so underdeveloped on a global scale?
Once again, the meltdown in global financial markets brings this aspect of the story into focus. For years, financial elites have argued that markets should self-regulate even as instruments grew more complex and risks more opaque. Then, when a crisis came, they used their influence to get top government officials to come in and help cauterize their self-inflicted wounds, warning of a "systemic failure." But critics are already correctly charging that new regulations to rein in global markets are largely protecting the interests of the richest.
One distinguishing characteristic of the superclass is the concentration of extreme wealth in the hands of so few. Inequality has always existed in the world, but the international trend toward leave-it-to-the-market policies of the past 25 years has resulted both in great growth worldwide (what superclass member Martha Stewart might call "a good thing") and in growing inequality (not so much, as superclass member Jon Stewart might say). Today, the world's more than 1,100 billionaires have a net worth that's roughly double that of the bottom 2.5 billion people on the planet. The richest 10 percent of adults worldwide own 85 percent of global wealth, while the poorest half only barely one percent. The world's almost 10 million millionaires have seen their wealth double to nearly $37 trillion over the past 10 years.
Growth is taking place, but it is disproportionately benefiting the few. And there's a sense that the issue of class conflict, confined not too long ago to the ash heap by our (premature) celebration of the "end of history" after communism's fall, remains with us.
A backlash is inevitable. Are these elites especially talented? Hard-working? Lucky? Some are all of these things. But conspiracy theories don't hold water in a group whose members are so diverse and self-interested. Still, when their self-interests align to cause them to act together, they can be hard to resist. They often get their way -- and thus often get much more than the rest of us. And that leads to angry reaction. "When a CEO is making more in 10 minutes than an ordinary worker's making in an entire year . . . something is wrong, something has to change," Sen. Barack Obama declares on the stump. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton chimes in that "it is wrong that somebody who makes $50 million a year on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than somebody who makes $50,000 a year."
The next U.S. president will still be the most powerful person in the world because of his or her control of the nation's unparalleled military might and influence over our economic and political resources. But that influence is on the wane, for a number of reasons: the relative decline in the power of national governments; the relative rise in the power of others in the world's fastest-growing places; U.S. trade and fiscal deficits; and a third, geopolitical deficit arising from both damaged national prestige and what might be characterized either as Iraq fatigue or as having learned from the mistakes of the past several years.
None of this makes the decision that U.S. voters will make in November less important. Government still offers the average citizen the best means of counterbalancing the superclass or redressing growing inequality. And governments will have to play a key role in shaping the new regulatory frameworks and governance mechanisms that will be essential to a more balanced distribution of power in the global era. But what it does mean is that "change" isn't just a slogan in this year's campaign. It's a reality that will redefine the landscape of power worldwide for U.S. presidents of the future.
----------------------------------------------------------
5 Myths About the Best (College) Years of Your Life
By Peter Feaver and Anne Crossman
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B03
Congratulations! You've spent thousands of dollars on test-prep books and enrichment camps and sunk hundreds of hours into applications, to say nothing of enduring countless sleepless nights -- and it all paid off. You got at least one fat, flattering acceptance package, it's just a couple of weeks till graduation, and before long you'll be headed to college. It's a walk in the park from here, right? Aside from coughing up the tuition, how hard could it be to get your money's worth out of your university years?
Harder than you think. Teaching, advising and actually being college students hasgiven us front row seats to undergraduate life. We've seen some students get a lousy education at renowned schools and others get a great education at uncelebrated ones. What they don't tell you in SAT prep courses is that, though where you go to college matters, what you do there is much more important.
So how can you make the most of college without giving yourself a panic attack? The first step is rethinking some common myths.
1.Your major determines your career success.
The unemployed graduate with a bachelor's degree in philosophy is a popular cliché, and we won't kid you: An electrical engineer who graduates with a second major in accounting has, at least at first, more lucrative options than, say, a history major vying for a coveted (and unpaid) internship on Capitol Hill. But many excellent opportunities are still available for graduates with seemingly "useless" degrees, as long as you can show potential employers that you know how to learn and will continue to do so as your field evolves. Many companies don't care whether you majored in medieval literature or international business; they want to know that you're passionate about succeeding and are probably hoping that you'll apply the keen eye you used on "The Canterbury Tales" to their long-standing clients' portfolios. That said, if all your courses have "Canterbury Tales" in their titles, it's best to hedge your bets by tossing in a few accounting or economics courses to demonstrate your readiness for the marketplace.
2.You should check off graduation requirements as quickly as possible.
What a waste of tuition, especially when you consider that most college lectures cost about as much as a ticket to "Monty Python's Spamalot" (but are not, we are sorry to say, nearly so entertaining). Every semester, students rush through general-education requirements as if college were a game of beat-the-clock bingo. Far better to treat those requirements as invitations to explore subjects outside your comfort zone, such as Legal Linguistics, History of Strata or Ancient Egyptian Mythology.
You should pick courses based on the professor's reputation, the course's reputation, your interest in the topic, graduation requirements and convenience -- in that order. A great professor can make an obscure area of study come alive, and a lousy one can make even the most titillating topic tedious. And should you be lucky enough to land a class that feels like Monty Python's views on statistics, who cares if it meets at 8 a.m. on Fridays?
3. The more extracurriculars, the better.
Only if you want to be a fifth-year senior. If everyone around you is smiling, giving you freebies and telling you how swell you are, you're either at your bar mitzvah or your college's annual activity fair. If you aren't careful, by the end of the hour you'll have signed up to sing in an a cappella choir, read to the blind, coach soccer for inner-city youth and write for the campus newspaper. Oh, and try your hand at intramural wrestling.
Resist! You can't do it all, and you're asking for a nervous breakdown if you try to juggle as many activities in college as you did in high school. When it comes to extracurriculars, less is more; you already have dozens of papers and lab reports and hundreds of pages of reading to keep you busy. Picking several diverse activities and engaging in them deeply is better than being a superficial (and overstressed) participant in lots.
4. You should study all the time.
You won't, and you shouldn't. But perhaps you are wary of Myth 3 and have forsaken all earthly pleasures (including extracurriculars) to focus on academics. You may have spent 40 hours a week locked in classrooms back in high school, but you'll be in the university lecture hall more like 15. You'll find that it's tough to fill that vacuum with studying alone, especially when deep, imponderable questions are crying out to you: If I watch another edition of SportsCenter, will it have new scores to report? (Answer: Yes.) If I party on Tuesday like it's Saturday, what does that make Wednesday? (Answer: Painful.) Is it possible to play "Guitar Hero III" for 24 hours straight without getting carpal tunnel syndrome? (Answer: We were too scared to try.) The discipline that a well-chosen mix of courses and extracurriculars imposes is better than a routine devoid of fun.
5 If your roommate is a dud, your social life will be too.
You will be thrilled to know that this is also a no. We consistently find that students tend to underemphasize what they should take seriously -- such as selecting the best professors and classes -- and overemphasize what they should take as it comes -- such as roommates. We have known roomies who forged lifelong friendships (and billion-dollar partnerships) and others who were undone by the polka music blaring from one side of the room or the dirty boxers piling up on the other. (Our favorite was the smoker who requested a nonsmoking roommate because "two smokers in one room would be too much.") Your safest bet is to lower your expectations about roomie-bonding and seek out other avenues for fun. The two of you may not agree on bunk beds, matching bedspreads or the use of snooze buttons, but it will all be over in a year.
----------------------------------------------------------
Here's How America Looks to the World
By Josef Joffe
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B03
HAMBURG Some years ago, I received a terror threat. If I did not apologize publicly and profusely for a column that blasted the Iranian regime, I would be killed by Friday, Sept. 13 -- what an auspicious date! So I sent for the security experts, and this is what they told me: Your front and back doors are worthless; get armored ones. Order bulletproof windows. Build a safe room. Install panic buttons. Get rid of that silly chicken-wire fence and put in a steel and concrete one. Don't use the driveway; try to vary your access routes (which, I think, meant sneaking home through the neighbors' gardens). Pretty soon, we were talking six-figure costs and contemplating emigration to Iceland.
The appointed day of my demise came and went. (Real terrorists don't write letters; they just kill you.) But the moral of this story will remain etched in my mind: When security is at stake, there is no limit to fear or fortification.
Fear, in other words, is a tax, and al-Qaeda and its ilk have done better at extracting it from Americans than the Internal Revenue Service. Think about the extra half-hour millions of airline passengers waste standing in security lines; the annual cost in lost work hours runs into the billions. Add to that the freight delays at borders, ports and airports, the cost of checking money transfers as well as goods in transit, the wages for beefed-up security forces around the world. And that doesn't even attempt to put a price tag on the compression of civil liberties or the loss of human dignity from being groped in full public view by Transportation Security Administration personnel at the airport or from having to walk barefoot through the metal detector, holding up your beltless pants. This global transaction tax represents the most significant victory of Terror International to date.
The new fear tax falls most heavily on the United States. Last November, the Commerce Department reported a 17 percent decline in overseas travel to the United States between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2006. (There are no firm figures for 2007 yet, but there seems to have been an uptick.) That slump has cost the country $94 billion in lost tourist spending, nearly 200,000 jobs and $16 billion in forgone tax revenue -- and all while the dollar has kept dropping.
Why? The journal Tourism Economics gives the predictable answer: "The perception that U.S. visa and entry policies do not welcome international visitors is the largest factor in the decline of overseas travelers." Two-thirds of survey respondents worried about being detained for hours because of a misstatement to immigration officials. And here is the ultimate irony: "More respondents were worried about U.S. immigration officials (70 percent) than about crime or terrorism (54 percent) when considering a trip to the country."
The falloff has not been as uniform when it comes to international scholars. Chinese, Koreans and Indians keep coming, reports the International Institute of Education (IIE); for the 2006-07 academic year, growth rates were between 3 and 6 percent. But the number of Western scholars coming to the United States is falling. Japan, Germany, Canada, Great Britain, Israel, Australia and Holland show declines of between 1 and 13 percent -- presumably because the richer a country, the less willing its scientists are to brave the indignities they face before entering the United States. Those hailing from poorer countries, with more limited opportunities -- such as the Chinese and the Indians -- remain undaunted.
The pattern for international students resembles that of the scholars. For 2006-07, the IIE reports the "first significant increase in total international student enrollment since 2001/2002." Again, the rise is led by the Indians, the Chinese and the Koreans. The number of students from Japan is down; ditto for Germany. Hence the IIE's veiled warning: "America needs to continue its proactive steps to insure that our academic doors remain wide open, and that students around the world understand that they will be warmly welcomed." To which all Americans should say amen, as these foreign students contribute about $14.5 billion annually to the U.S. economy, according to the IIE. Higher education, after all, is the fifth-largest service-sector export of the United States. And foreign talent that's willing to stick around is one of the country's critical natural resources.
Some U.S. officials know all this, of course. But while the State Department protests, the Department of Homeland Security makes the rules -- and will invent new verbotens by the day. Nor is there any end in sight. The demand for security, as my death threat taught me, is like an obsession, spreading relentlessly, for which there is no rational counterargument. DHS always asks, "What if?" -- which always trumps "Why more?" A more fruitful dialogue with the homeland security apparat would be trying to answer: "What is the national interest?"
After all, which face does the United States want to show to the world? One distorted by fear and suspicion, or the face that it used to present: that of a boisterous, easy-going and welcoming society? America's face used to be George Bailey's genial grin in "It's a Wonderful Life," filled with the optimism and trust that can banish greed and evil; now, it's the grim visage of Jack Bauer in "24."
This is not woolly-headed idealism but sober realism. Just imagine how the U.S. Army would have fared in liberating my home continent, Europe, if the blinkered commissars of DHS had been calling the shots in 1944. The way the last superpower chooses to bestride the world brings with it hard consequences. Does the United States open its arms or ball up its fists? Growling rarely elicits smiles, and distrust never reaps its opposite. To present a friendly face to the world is not a matter of saccharine niceness but of well-considered interests, especially for a fearsome giant like the United States. For trust breeds authority, and authority breeds influence.
What is happening to the American character? True, the country has gone through crises of confidence before, some of them cresting in sheer hysteria -- from the Alien and Sedition Acts to Sen. Joseph McCarthy's search for a commie under every State Department desk. But the worst acts from 1798 were repealed or allowed to lapse within three years, and the senator from Wisconsin was censured a few years into his red-baiting career. Alas, the USA Patriot Act and DHS have already endured longer than either earlier excess, and neither is fading.
Will the 9/11 terrorist attacks change the American character in ways that John Adams's laws and McCarthy's mendacity could not? The answer is still "no" if you go to the heartland, where trusting librarians let this perfect stranger shove his memory stick into a public computer; they seemed to think that a virus scan referred to the common cold. The heartland is still Jefferson country. But when you travel through John F. Kennedy International Airport or Dulles International Airport, you notice nervousness bordering on angst, which is hardly a classic American trait. No, your neighbor will not let you leave your bag on the seat while you amble over to Starbucks.
Have the "free and brave" lost it? If so, you are not alone. Look at France, where the controls at Paris's Charles de Gaulle Airport are just as invasive as those at Reagan National Airport. Like the United States, the European Union now wants to fingerprint all foreigners who enter or leave its boundaries. So there is a larger moral to this tale: Security is an obsession that defies natural limits. And we submit because we like it.
Al-Qaeda likes it, too. Never before have so few terrorized so many with so little.
----------------------------------------------------------
When Parents Crush Teachers
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B08
The other day, I was walking back to my classroom to gather my stuff and go home. It was 4 p.m., and school had ended at 2:05.
I decided to stop and talk to a well-respected colleague, an excellent teacher who goes above and beyond the call of duty and is popular with her students. We talked for a few minutes, and then she dropped a bombshell.
She told me she was thinking of leaving teaching. I pretended to be happy that she might have found something that she liked better, and I asked her why she wanted to change jobs. She answered: "Parents."
I know what many of you are thinking -- parents just are not involved enough in their children's educations. But that is not the case in the D.C. area's metropolitan suburbs. The parents about whom I am talking are the overinvolved parents. They are "contact you every day," "argue every problem marked wrong" and "my child is perfect" parents. These parents are so aggressive that they are driving many of my best colleagues out of the profession.
Let me be clear: The vast majority of parents with whom we deal are wonderful and supportive. However, a rapidly growing minority is having a real, negative impact on schools, and the teaching profession, by being too involved in their children's lives. Today, I spoke with a retired teacher who began her career in the early 1970s. She told me that, for the first 25 years of teaching, she never heard from parents whether her students were earning A's or F's. This was not because parents didn't care, but because they knew that the grades their children received were an accurate reflection of the time and effort they put in. However, she said, by the mid-'90s, there had been a shift. Parents began to micromanage not only their children's lives but those of their teachers as well.
The sad reality is that this is taking a toll on the teaching profession. Teachers should not spend more time talking to parents than to students. Another colleague, one of the best teachers I know, had a student last year who did little work during a quarter. She decided to give the child a chance to make up the unfinished assignments, but she told both the parent and the student that she would not do so again. So when the same thing happened the following quarter, my colleague put her foot down.
The result? The parent promptly went to the principal and demanded that the child be allowed to make up the work to get a better grade. After much back and forth, the principal agreed.
For my colleague, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. She was willing to work long hours to develop dynamic lessons, to tutor students and to give second chances. But continually to allow students to make the same mistake? At this point, she knew, a school isn't helping its students; it's hurting them. What happened to high standards? My colleague began to consider another career.
Most educators I have talked to entered the field for noble reasons. They wanted to work with children and to make a difference in their lives. They didn't go into teaching to spend all day working with a few pushy parents. This year, I taught a student whose mother wanted to meet with all seven of her child's teachers on what seemed like a weekly basis. Each week, she accused us of not reaching out to her son, saying things like, "You don't like my child." She made unreasonable demands. "My child refuses to do work in class. Just make him do the work." She told us that her son would not do his homework at home and that we should stay after school to see that he did it. It seems as if we have created an "excuse bank" for children, so that teachers are to blame if they fail and not the students themselves.
Can our schools sustain this kind of attrition? Can we compound all of the burdens that are placed upon educators by adding overly meddlesome parents to the list and expect to attract top people to our profession? Personally, I don't think so. How do you do that when we are already losing our best and brightest?
Meanwhile, I have to figure out how to convince my two parent-weary colleagues that they picked the right profession.
----------------------------------------------------------
The Prize Clinton Isn't Owed
By George F. Will
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B07
Women, we are told by some people who say they know them, are not amused. Women, or at least those whose consciousnesses have been properly raised, supposedly think that the impatience being expressed about the protracted futility of Hillary Clinton's campaign is disrespectful. They say that if the roles were reversed -- if Barack Obama's delegate arithmetic were as hopeless as hers -- people would not be so insensitive as to try to hurry a man off the stage.
But they would. And some people, claiming to speak for African Americans, would be explaining that African Americans find it all disrespectful. In identity politics, ritualized indignation about imagined affronts is highly choreographed and hence predictable.
In America, however, nothing ages as fast as novelty, and efforts to encourage Clinton to pack it in are heartening evidence that the novelty has worn off: The female candidate is like all other candidates. This is what equality looks like -- life as an equal-opportunity dispenser of disappointments.
When, in 1975, Frank Robinson became major league baseball's first African American manager, with the Cleveland Indians, that was an important milestone. But an even more important one came two years later, when the Indians fired him. That was real equality: Losing one's job is part of the job description of major league managers, because sacking the manager is one of the few changes a floundering team can make immediately. So, in a sense, Robinson had not really arrived until he was told to leave. Then he was just like hundreds of managers before him.
Some of Clinton's supporters seem to be cultivating, for a purpose, a permutation of the entitlement mentality that many voters thought they discerned in her candidacy and found off-putting. She seemed to feel entitled to the Democrats' nomination, and having been denied it she may feel really entitled to be Obama's running mate. But for him, choosing her would be even more dangerous than Bosnian sniper fire. She would solve none of his problems and would create others.
Because Democrats are desperate to win in November, they will support Obama, so his most pressing priority should be to compete with John McCain for independent voters, or for people lightly attached to the Republican Party. Almost all the people who like Clinton are Democrats, and a recent poll revealed that only 39 percent of Americans regard her as "honest and trustworthy," down from 52 percent in May 2006. Furthermore, if Obama cannot win New York without her, he is going to lose almost everywhere else.
On several occasions presidential nominees have felt the need to choose as their running mates the persons who were their strongest competitors for the nomination. But two successful occasions were quite unlike Obama's situation.
On the eve of the Democrats' 1960 convention in Los Angeles, the campaign of Lyndon Johnson, who was decisively behind John Kennedy in the delegate count, intimated -- correctly, we now know -- that Kennedy's health was much more precarious than was then understood. Ten days later, Kennedy asked Johnson to be his running mate. The "solid South" was no longer solidly Democratic -- in 1952 Dwight Eisenhower carried Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida, and in 1956 he added Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia -- so Kennedy needed Johnson.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, who was cool toward George H.W. Bush, chose him partly to assuage the disappointment of the Detroit convention that had become giddy with enthusiasm for the silly idea of recruiting former president Gerald Ford as Reagan's running mate. Reagan did not select Bush to attract November votes that Reagan thought he could not win.
Clinton has been carrying categories of voters that Obama has had trouble attracting. But it is implausible that she is the only Democrat who would enhance Obama's appeal to white, blue-collar Democrats.
Finally, Clinton is not entitled to a consolation prize. Robert Frost provided a warning for those who become too accustomed to the limelight:
----------------------------------------------------------
A Test for Obama's Promises
By David Ignatius
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B07
One of the most appealing but untested promises of Barack Obama's presidential campaign is that he would break down the partisan divisions in America and govern across party lines. He has a chance to make this gauzy idea of consensus politics concrete in his choice of running mate.
By reaching outside the Democratic Party for his vice presidential nominee -- tapping Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, say, or independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg from New York -- Obama would in an instant demonstrate that he truly means to change the divisive, lose-lose politics of Washington. It would offer a unity government for a country that seems to want one.
There are all sorts of practical arguments against such an unconventional choice -- not least that it would upset many of Obama's liberal Democratic supporters. But it would make a powerful statement that Obama really does want to govern in a different way. It would make "change we can believe in" more than a slogan.
By choosing a veteran politician outside his own party, Obama would solve three problems at once: He would undercut the bipartisan appeal of his maverick GOP rival, Sen. John McCain; he would ease voters' fears about his own youth and inexperience; and he would find a compelling alternative to Hillary Clinton, who for all her virtues as a vice president would come with heavy baggage -- not least the role of her husband, who is even harder to imagine as Second Laddie than as First.
Moreover, Obama needs to counter the charge that he talks a better game about bipartisanship and change than he has actually delivered. His voting record in Illinois and Washington mostly has been that of a conventional liberal, and there are precious few examples of him taking political risks to work across party lines.
McCain, by contrast, has actually fought the kind of bipartisan battles that Obama talks about -- from campaign finance to climate change to rules against torture -- and he has the political scars to prove it. That's why the Republican base is still so uneasy about him, because they know that McCain's natural allies in recent years have been centrist Democrats. By picking a GOP running mate, Obama would outdo McCain -- and in the process make some enemies in his own party. That would make him a more appealing candidate, I suspect.
Hagel would be an especially interesting choice for Obama. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, he would add some national security heft to the ticket. And he was also an early and courageous GOP critic of the Iraq war, which would reinforce one of the most powerful themes of Obama's campaign. At the same time, although Hagel agrees with Obama on the need for withdrawal from Iraq, his military credentials would reassure U.S. allies that it would not be a pell-mell retreat.
A final advantage is that Hagel and Obama seem to like each other. Hagel is said to view Obama as a politician with a special gift who might actually be able to bring the country together. Whether Democrats could accept Hagel's pro-life views and other aspects of his Republican identity is a complicated question, but here again, bipartisanship is about bridging hard issues.
Bloomberg would provide a different sort of boost for Obama. He could run as the bipartisan manager and problem-solver, the nation's chief operating officer, if you will. That would free Obama, who has never managed much of anything, for the larger role of leadership -- the visionary politics at which he's so good.
The New York mayor would also make a good running mate for McCain -- who badly needs someone with economic credentials to offset his own lack of experience and interest in this area. But it would be difficult for the GOP to embrace a double dose of bipartisanship, when many in the party already view McCain as a quasi-Democrat.
If Obama were to run on a unity ticket, it would be a sign that he thinks the nation is in such serious trouble, at home and abroad, that the normal political rules don't apply. Obama could choose among many fine Democrats for his running mate, but none of them would send such a powerful message to America and the world that he means what he says about turning a page.
----------------------------------------------------------
Not the Party Faithful Anymore
By Mark Stricherz
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B04
Irmo Antonacci used to vote for Democratic presidential candidates. A son of Italian immigrants, the 80-year-old retiree lives in Jeannette, Pa., a down-at-the-heels smokestack city southeast of Pittsburgh. After dropping out of college in 1950, he got a job installing telephones with Bell Penn and joined a union. He registered as a Democrat and became a John F. Kennedy fan. A decade ago, he was the Democratic committeeman from the town's 5th ward.
But Antonacci no longer automatically pulls the lever for the candidate with (D) beside his or her name. "I'd seen the time from where the party used to be and where the party is now accepting abortion and gay rights," he says. "And I didn't go for that."
On the lawn in front of Antonacci's one-story brick house stands a foot-high statue of St. Francis and another of the Virgin Mary, symbols of a transformation that could spell trouble for the Democrats in November. It's the transformation of a group of voters we might call Casey Democrats, after the late Robert P. Casey Sr., governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1995.
Like Casey, these voters -- blue-collar and religious, often Catholic -- are liberal on economic issues but conservative on cultural ones. Where they once looked to union leaders and their fellow union members for political guidance, they now look to their religious leaders and fellow churchgoers. And in the last decade, to the dismay of Democratic strategists, they've been voting for Republican presidential candidates. According to Democratic pollster and strategist Stan Greenberg, they made up the 10 percent of white Catholics who identify with the Democrats but didn't vote for Sen. John F. Kerry for president in 2004. And if Sen. Barack Obama can't do better with the Casey Democrats, his presidential bid may fare no better than Kerry's.
Antonacci's story is fairly common in his native Westmoreland County. Except for 1972, Westmoreland went for the Democratic nominee in every presidential election between 1936 and 1996. At the congressional level, the county remains Democratic; both local House members are Democrats, and registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans nearly 2 to 1. Yet in the last two presidential elections, the county has gone Republican.
A similar pattern has emerged in a handful of Rust Belt and border states. With the exception of 1972 and 1984, West Virginia also voted for the Democratic presidential nominee from 1932 to 1996, and it hasn't elected a GOP senator for generations. Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio all went for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and for Bill Clinton twice. All but Ohio have been dominated by Democrats at the congressional and gubernatorial levels for decades. But all five went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.
The reason: Casey Democrats. "Democrats' difficulties with this group surely have a great deal to do with these voters' sense of cultural alienation from the national Democratic Party and its relatively cosmopolitan values around religion, family, guns and other social institutions/practices," blogged Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira after the 2004 election. Just two years earlier, in their book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," Teixeira and John Judis had predicted that the party's economic liberalism would bear the Democratic nominee to victory in such states.
Why have Casey Democrats defected?
Consider the story of Antonacci's hometown of Jeannette. The hilly city once boasted more than a half-dozen manufacturing plants: Pennsylvania Rubber Co., Jeannette Glass, Victor Brewing Co. and others. Due to AFL and CIO organizing efforts during the Depression, the jobs in these factories were stable and well paid. After World War II, Jeannette's population soared to 20,000.
Then came globalization. By the mid-to-late 1980s, most of the factories had closed. The population dropped by half, and many businesses left. Now the downtown is pockmarked with storefronts for sale or lease.
The old industrial order in Westmoreland County is declining. It's not that the economy has withered; its structure has simply changed. Instead of mines and smokestacks, the county now has malls and industrial parks. For every town in economic decline such as Jeannette, there are one or two on the economic upswing.
The area's politics have also changed. In 1972, more than a third of the state's workforce was still unionized. Today the figure is 18 percent. The largest union left in Westmoreland is the Service Employees International Union, with only 800 to 900 members. "Their influence," says County Commissioner Tom Balya, a Democrat, "has diminished over time."
If local unions had remained robust, county voters might have stuck with the national Democratic Party. Union members gave 59 percent of their votes to Clinton in 1996 and the same percentage to Al Gore in 2000. But the unions' disintegration has loosened Casey Democrats' ties to the national party.
Moving into the unions' place is the church. Take a drive through downtown Greensburg, the county seat. When I arrived one Saturday afternoon in late 2006, the sound of an announcer calling a football game at Seton Hill University, a small Catholic liberal arts school in town, blared from several streets away. A few blocks from the football field is the headquarters of the Westmoreland County archdiocese. Half a mile away, at the top of North Main Street, stands a Knights of Columbus hall. Not far away is the Aquinas Academy, an elementary school run by the Sisters of Charity. Next door is Blessed Sacrament Cathedral; at the packed Sunday Mass I attended, seniors stood elbow to elbow with young married couples, most with small children.
In August 2004, only months after being installed, Greensburg Bishop Lawrence E. Brandt declared that pro-abortion rights Catholic politicians should refrain from receiving Holy Communion -- a not-so-subtle reference to presidential candidate Kerry. Because the church plays such a major role in local life, it's highly likely that some Catholic voters were influenced by Brandt. With the Catholic Church in alliance with the GOP and the National Rifle Association, "it's a powerful combination" against Democrats, says county Democratic chairwoman Rosemary Trump.
In dealing with Casey Democrats, the national party faces two temptations. One is to ignore them. The party had planned to target voters in more libertarian Mountain West states this fall. But with Arizona Sen. John McCain the presumptive GOP nominee, Democrats are less likely to flip states such as Nevada and Colorado. The second temptation is to assume that Casey Democrats will support the Democratic ticket because Obama has been endorsed by figures such as Sen. Bob Casey Jr., the late Pennsylvania governor's son. But Casey's endorsement failed to prevent Obama's nine-point loss to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary last month.
The bottom line is clear: The party must woo Casey Democrats in Rust Belt and border states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky. To win them over, it won't be enough for Democrats to hammer the GOP over the economy and the war in Iraq, as Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards, did in 2004, or merely to use inclusive language and support partial-birth abortion, as Obama and Clinton have done. Instead, Democrats must address voters' real concerns about protecting families and human life, as Gov. Casey did. "Catholic voters have emerged more pro-life," pollster Greenberg wrote in a 2005 memo, "but they are very responsive to a broad initiative to reduce unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions."
As the front-runner for his party's nomination, Obama can start to win over Casey Democrats by endorsing the Pregnant Women Support Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Casey. This legislation would, among other things, provide adoption information to pregnant women, give lower-income women free sonograms and require abortion clinics to obtain informed consent from women seeking to end a pregnancy.
Endorsing it is sure to alienate many cultural liberals. But supporting it could help win over many Casey Democrats -- and possibly a few key swing states this fall.
----------------------------------------------------------
Coming Soon, Scorsese of Arabia
By Abdullah Al-Eyaf
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B02
Just over a decade ago, when I was 20, I found the love of my life: movies. I used to rent four videos at a time and then live with the characters, in their worlds, for days. Once, I watched eight films in a single sitting.
As a contributor to Cinemac.net, a Web site for movie buffs here in Saudi Arabia, I typed away about masterpieces such as "Citizen Kane," "Raging Bull" and "Amadeus" and shone the Saudi spotlight on directors including Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog and Akira Kurosawa. I even participated in silly arguments about the best actor of all time: Is it Marlon Brando? Al Pacino? Robert De Niro? Jack Nicholson? Or even Tom Hanks, one of my favorites? Several years later, a local newspaper hired me as a film critic. Getting paid to write about movies? "Pinch me," I wanted to tell my editor. "I must be dreaming."
You might be surprised to learn, then, that I didn't set foot in a movie theater until I was 25 years old. That's because Saudi Arabia has banned the public screening of films since the early 1980s. But ordinary Saudis, still bewitched by the silver screen, are quietly directing a scene change.
I'm lucky because I live in eastern Saudi Arabia, not far from Bahrain, where movie-lovers live in relative freedom. Of course, with traffic, the 15-mile drive across the King Fahd Causeway sometimes takes as long as three hours -- but my delight once the screen lights up is always worth the trouble.
My friend Tariq, who lives in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, isn't so fortunate. He has to travel more than 300 miles, or 500 kilometers, to reach the nearest border. Two years ago, in my debut film, "Cinema 500 km," I followed 21-year-old Tariq on his first trip outside the country for a day at the pictures. His savings plan included borrowing a friend's car for the trip and staying with another friend instead of renting a motel room. In all, the trip cost Tariq about $80. I know richer Saudis who fly to Bahrain and sleep at five-star hotels to spend a weekend at the movies -- making theirs surely the most expensive tickets in history.
Saudis may not have movie theaters, but we do know a thing or two about the silver screen. The country is a prime market for pay TV and has booming DVD and VHS sales. I know one video store in Riyadh that has more than 16,000 regular clients, most of them teenagers and young adults. In "Cinema 500 km," I interviewed the manager of the largest theater chain in Bahrain, who told me that in the summer and on holidays, as many as 90 percent of his customers are Saudis. So don't believe the fundamentalists who maintain that only a handful of young people have a craving for movies.
Life without movie houses or filmmaking schools has its benefits for wannabe filmmakers like me. The technical aspects of our films may not be very good, but we don't have to worry -- at least for now. Saudis have very few homegrown films to choose from, so they take what they can get. Nice, huh? And how many young American or European guys with only a couple of extremely low-budget short films to their credit have you seen writing in the pages of newspapers such as The Washington Post?
My second film, a 19-minute fictional drama called "Etaar" ("A Frame"), won a Special Jury Prize in the 2007 Emirates Film Competition and was nominated for a prize at the Dubai International Film Festival. Like many other Saudi productions, my movies are screened in countries such as the United States, France, Spain, Holland, India, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. But some of my own friends still haven't seen them. When people started asking why a few years ago, Saudi officials were finally forced to allow limited movie screenings.
The official phobia surrounding the cinema is still so great that literary clubs (government-supported groups that organize artistic events for the public) started pre-screening certain movies and advertising them in newspapers as "educational films" -- just to prevent an uproar among anti-cinema groups. In 2006, when a local film screening was announced in Jiddah, where people live more freely than in Riyadh, the organizers had to bill the event as the "Jiddah Visual Shows Festival." Call them "Visual Shows," and you're in business. But use the words "cinema" or "film," and the government is guaranteed to prevent your screen from ever lighting up.
Happily, we'll be getting that scene change this week. The first annual Saudi Film Competition, which I helped organize, opens on Tuesday. Did you notice the word "film" in the title? The event is sponsored by the Saudi Society of Arts and Culture and the Dammam Literary Club, and is the first official film festival in Saudi history. Thirty-four short films, including three of mine, will compete for prizes. Eleven scripts have been entered for a separate award, and many other films will be screened outside the competition. The audiences will of course be segregated by sex, but Saudis will be able to watch, for free, movies that they once could only read about in newspapers.
My third and most recent film is called "Matar" ("Rain"). In Islamic and Arab cultures, rain is a good omen, and like my characters in "Matar," young Saudi filmmakers are expecting good days to come. The world has celebrated a century of cinema, and it has finally come to our country. Of course, we didn't wait and began making our little amateur films years ago, but I'm convinced that our audience is growing.
I believe that the world wants to learn more about my country, especially after the horrible events of Sept. 11, 2001, and their consequences, and we will show the world how Saudis live. I'm sure you'll love our stories. We'll keep trying to make better pictures, even without film schools or high-powered production companies. And who knows? One day we might even win an Oscar! Good movies are made with true passion -- and believe me, in Saudi Arabia, we moviemakers have plenty of that
----------------------------------------------------------
It's an Emergency. We're Not Prepared.
By John D. Solomon
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B01
Disaster is bearing down on all sides of late. A ravaging cyclone in Burma. A killer earthquake in China. Even the United States hasn't escaped unscathed, with tornadoes ripping across the heartland and Southeast and floods rising in the mid-Atlantic.
Still, most Americans have been watching the devastation in Asia from relative safety and, if I had to guess, with a certain sense of complacency, a feeling that disaster on that scale isn't likely to happen to them. But it could. And if it did, our country might face the same sort of crisis as our Asian cousins. A major reason: The American public isn't prepared.
Even after Sept. 11, 2001, even after Hurricane Katrina, a Red Cross survey last year found that 93 percent of Americans aren't prepared for a major calamity -- a natural disaster, a pandemic or a terrorist attack. This is troubling, because the more prepared a population is, the more effective the response to and recovery from a catastrophe will be.
In the weeks after 9/11, my worried wife asked me, "What should we be doing?" We lived directly across the street from the Manhattan hospital where a woman had just died from anthrax exposure; I worked only a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center.
Initially, I thought that the answer to her question would be pretty straightforward. But 6 1/2 years later, I'm still trying to pin it down.
Readying the public for the likely emergencies of the 21st century may be one of the most complex social-education challenges the nation has faced. Americans have to prepare for a range of threats, many of which the government can neither describe nor predict. Says George Foresman, former undersecretary for preparedness with the Department of Homeland Security, "There's no playbook for any of us to go by."
In my search for a playbook, I've consulted government Web sites, including DHS's Ready.gov, read all the books I could find and spoken to first responders, policymakers and other experts. I've signed up for emergency e-mail lists and text alerts from all over the country -- my BlackBerry now pings whenever there's a major storm heading toward New York, a tremor near San Francisco, a Metro train derailment in Washington or a new terror alert from the FBI.
To get a more ground-level view, I completed the 11-week, 33-hour training for New York City's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), the civilian auxiliary force that helps the authorities during emergencies. So far, as part of my neighborhood unit, I've responded to the plane crash that killed New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle near the East River, directed traffic during a power failure, played the role of "Rude Evacuee No. 1" in a city hurricane drill, passed out preparedness guides in 11 languages at subway stations and mixed the hot chocolate at a Red Cross evacuation center.
My immersion has been so deep that last November I was selected "Ready New Yorker of the Month" by the city's Office of Emergency Management.
As I've continued to educate myself, people have asked me whether I feel better or worse. The answer is, both. I feel more prepared and more empowered. I see how much an individual can do and am more confident in people's inherent resilience in emergency situations. But I've also learned that my family's safety and the ability of my community and my nation to respond to major disasters might depend on my fellow citizens' preparedness. It may sound a little dramatic, but if even 93 Americans -- let alone 93 percent of us -- aren't informed and engaged, then none of us fully are.
"It keeps me awake at night," says John R. Gibb, New York state's emergency management director and one of several top officials who acknowledged concern over the current level of public readiness.
Public engagement is important not only in responding to emergencies, but also in helping prevent them in the first place. "The weakest part of our homeland security is the citizen," 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas H. Kean told me. "Addressing that is very, very, very important. Ultimately, it's as likely that a terrorist attack here will be stopped by the CIA or FBI as by someone who sees something suspicious and, instead of just going home for dinner, decides to tell his or her local police."
Based on my research and experiences so far, here are 10 suggestions for achieving a more prepared public:
1. Make public preparedness a priority, or it won't happen. Last year, Foresman asked a ballroom full of state first responders how many of them had made a family emergency plan. Of 300 people, nine raised their hands. If many of the folks promoting civilian preparedness aren't following their own advice, it's no wonder that the rest of us aren't, either. "It needs to be a national imperative," says Joseph F. Bruno, New York City's emergency management commissioner.
2. Make preparedness part of 21st-century citizenship. Being prepared may be the most significant contribution many citizens can make to their nation's security. Not only are civilians likely to be the first first responders at any disaster scene, but the nation's response will also be only as strong as that of the weakest link. And a new commitment to public preparedness would give the country a nonpartisan, substantive way of re-tapping the reservoir of post-9/11 goodwill. "We don't ask enough of people," says one city emergency manager. "Everyone asks me, 'How are you going to take care of us in a disaster?' You have a big role in taking care of you."
3. Don't laugh at "duck and cover." The nation's Cold War civil defense campaign is often parodied, but it offers helpful lessons for the present. "We threw the baby out with the bathwater," says R. David Paulison, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "We need to get back the preparedness ethic from our past." In the 1950s, U.S. air defense had more than 100,000 civilian volunteers and thousands of observation posts (including my grandmother, Jeannette, an observer in the Bronx). We don't need that many people looking up at the skies, but we could use that type of citizen interest and engagement.
4. Knowledge is power. Just about every emergency official I've interviewed says that public education could help mitigate the impact of a catastrophic disaster. The idea isn't to overwhelm the citizenry with too much information but to tell people what they really need to know -- so that, for example, they'll understand the difference between a "dirty bomb" and a nuclear bomb with even a fraction of their ability to differentiate between Britney and Paris. In fact, experts believe that a "dirty bomb," a traditional explosive laced with radiation, is a likely terrorist weapon in part because it could have a psychological impact far beyond its actual physical damage -- particularly if people haven't been briefed in advance.
5. We should tell the children. Like fire safety and seat belts, emergency preparedness may ultimately take a generation to take hold. So we need to include young people in the effort. We could make preparedness education part of the school curriculum by piggybacking on the successful fire or earthquake programs already in place. Going through kids makes it more likely that adults will follow. When my 5-year-old came home from school asking whether we were going to save the environment by getting new compact fluorescent bulbs, it sent me to the hardware store faster than any public service announcement.
6. Try the carrot and the stick. The government uses the bottom line when it wants to influence behavior. During hurricane season, the state of Louisiana provides a "tax holiday" for residents to purchase emergency supplies. Virginia will hold its first such holiday May 25-31. This could be replicated nationwide. Every year, I have to sign a form certifying that I have guards on my apartment windows. Could there be a similar form for having a family emergency plan? There are laws and insurance benefits for installing burglar and fire alarms; we could expand that to preparedness.
7. Bring in business to help make the sale. Marketing isn't the public sector's forte, and preparedness needs to be marketed as a consumer brand. A number of major corporations distinguished themselves in response to Katrina. It's time to engage the private sector in advancing civilian preparation.
8. Use 21st-century technology to prepare for 21st-century emergencies. The use of camera phones, Twitter and Google map mash-ups after the Chinese earthquake and during last year's Southern California wildfires are just the most recent examples of personal technology's growing role in public emergency preparation and response. We need to make Americans more aware of the capabilities of the technology at their fingertips and integrate it better into disaster planning. Social networking sites, for instance, could help in finding family members in an emergency, but only if everyone in the family is networked and knows how to use them. Though I'm a 40-something who didn't know "BFF" from "LOL," I'm beginning to learn (with the help of my 8-year-old). My wife and I now know how to send text messages, which can sometimes get through when voice calls can't (e.g., after the 2005 London subway bombings).
9. Everyone should learn the drill. The CERT hurricane drill in which I played a victim helped me think about what I'd do in an emergency. Drilling would help all Americans focus on and work through the questions everyone should ask in advance. (How will you get information and communicate with your family? Do you know the emergency plan of your children's school?)
10. Create a National Preparedness Day. September was made National Preparedness Month in 2004, but sometimes more can be accomplished in 24 focused hours than in 30 diffuse days. Let's have a day when we focus on this need -- briefing citizens, conducting drills, filling emergency kits. A helpful model is Japan's Disaster Prevention Day, held on the anniversary of the catastrophic 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Sept. 11 could be the official U.S. Preparedness Day: It would honor the memories of those who died by making sure that the United States is never so unprepared again.
History has shown that individuals will rise to the occasion in an emergency. But offering them the information, training, technology, support and encouragement to prepare in advance means that they'll be in the best position to help themselves, their families and their community if -- but probably when -- that emergency arrives.
----------------------------------------------------------
Where We Got By Walking in Their Manolos
By Ashley Sayeau
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B01
LONDON After five hours of craning for a good view, the impossible finally happened: I cursed my vow to never buy stilettos. I'm short, you see, so even though I was only inches from the red carpet, I couldn't see a thing when the crowd started chanting, "Carrie! Carrie! Carrie!"
I'd heard rumors of a green hat, so I raised my camera and shot randomly into the air. And there in my photos it was: about a foot high, looking like Kermit the Frog eating broccoli in the English countryside. But it was all the proof I needed: My heroine was here. Only Carrie (a.k.a. Sarah Jessica Parker) could carry off wearing something that ridiculous.
After a four-year hiatus, the women of "Sex and the City" -- Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha -- are back. Through a fluke of international movie marketing, the film of the long-running HBO series, which opens in the United States May 30, premiered first not in New York, the show's beloved backdrop, but here in London, where I now live. I was ecstatic at my luck, as were the screaming women who packed Leicester Square last Monday as the show's stars made their way into the Odeon theater, ducking under an enormous banner encouraging visitors to "Get Carried Away."
But why? What was it about that self-indulgent, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too show that could turn perfectly serious, accomplished adult women into swooning fans, trying to catch a glimpse of the women they had worshiped on the small-screen since the show debuted a decade ago?
As someone who has studied Carrie Bradshaw's place in the pantheon of popular culture's depiction of single girls, I thought I knew my own answer. Her outsized life is a fantasy, but an empowering one. We couldn't afford Carrie's shoes, let alone ever really hope to walk in them, but in her outlandishly expensive Manolos, she teetered squarely in the footsteps of TV's independent heroines, projecting an infectious kind of confidence.
My new friends in the crowd at the premiere had their own answers, of course, mostly focused less on how Carrie fits in with the depiction of feminine dependence in, say, 19th-century fiction than on good television. I spent the afternoon dishing about "Sex" with them, and we kept circling back to the question that has always plagued the show. I call it the question of reality. Nearly every critic has posed it, many with a furrowed brow. It goes like this: Why do so many women love this show that bears no resemblance to their real lives, that presents nothing but a fantasy world of shoes, sex and staying out late?
"It's inspirational. It's a dream world," said Sam Ramage, 19, echoing what many said. "You want to live in New York. You want to have all the designer clothes, but it's not just the clothes -- it's the way they dress. Their confidence."
I was impressed. These women managed to be both giddy and poised, while I, on the other hand, was growing increasingly wacky. Wanting a proper picture, I had scrambled onto a nearby fence. All afternoon, I had contained myself, been the removed reporter. "What must they think of me now?" I thought, my backside in the air. But the truth was, I didn't care. I hadn't felt so alive in ages.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. My relationship with the series has always been more cerebral than emotional. I first came across it seven years ago while researching my master's thesis on single women. I was looking for a contemporary example of a single-woman archetype, and I found four of them, staring me in the face. I was immediately hooked. I wrote 75 pages describing the show's predecessors, from Theodore Dreiser to Helen Gurley Brown, analyzing Carrie's engagement ring and ultimately arguing that the series represented a profound step forward for women in its portrayal of sex, friendships and single life.
But there was nothing sentimental about it. Like many academics who write on popular culture, I insisted that I related to the show on only an intellectual level. Fans were to be studied, not emulated. And yet here I was, perched on that rickety fence, watching Carrie and Co., my heart fluttering.
For a cultural critic, this is as metaphysical as it gets. On the one hand, I knew that the hoopla surrounding the $60 million film spoke to the fact that "Sex and the City" is above all a brand, one that has only grown since the series ended in 2004. TBS spent a reported $750,000 an episode for the syndication rights, and DVD sales have done nothing but soar at home and internationally. The series is good at a lot of things -- especially marketing.
On the other hand, none of this diminished the excitement that I, or the other women, felt at the premiere. I'd been secretly pleased by the women's dismissive attitude toward those who disdained the show as just fantasy. I've always felt that the question of reality was a ruse, and that what really upset reviewers was not that the series lacked verisimilitude (it's a television show, after all, not real life), but that so many women flocked to this alternate world, this fantasy of four women let loose in the city.
From the beginning, critics feared that television would bring subversion to the suburbs, disillusioning women about family life, as well as distracting them from their domestic duties. "Whatever happened to men?" wondered TV Guide in 1953. "Once upon a time (before TV) a girl thought of her boyfriend or husband as her prince charming. Now having watched the antics of Ozzie Nelson and Chester A. Riley, she thinks of her man as a prime idiot." The critics were right to be worried. In the decades that followed, the tube was a key site of women's rebellion. It's where Lucy avoided housework, Mary took the pill, Maude got an abortion and Murphy got on a vice president's nerves.
"Sex and the City" continued this courageous -- if madcap -- tradition. With conservatives pushing abstinence and pro-marriage programs, it was an adroit form of protest to have a show where women questioned marriage, made more money than their boyfriends did, and declared (more eloquently than I can here) that they only give oral sex if they get it. So what if it was over the top -- if we're going to fantasize, why not fantasize about women staying out late and making tons of money? After all, nobody's particularly bothered when Tony Soprano does it. (Though he may have other hobbies that moralists would quibble with.)
Of course, even the best kind of fantasy has its flaws. I learned this the hard way -- on a "Sex and the City"-themed bus tour of Manhattan, back in 2002, where two dozen women paid about $30 for three hours on a chartered coach that hit pockets of the city made famous by the show. As we drove from one expensive shop to another, I sat appalled as my fellow passengers propositioned random men from the bus windows and compared their own tokens of male affection, or their "rocks," as they called them. Shortly after, I chronicled my horror in Salon, where I shamefacedly acknowledged that not all fans equate Jimmy Choo with empowerment or see Carrie in Charlotte Brontë's "Villette." I felt that the series had let me down. As breakups go, it was a toughie.
And yet seeing the characters again years later, atop that fence at the premiere, I couldn't help but forgive them. I'd always insisted that I loved them for their minds, not their bodies. But now I realized that it wasn't true. Seeing them again was like seeing an old friend -- a refrain I heard throughout the day.
I realize this is sappy, but I'm not alone. At the premiere, I noted none of the hostility emitted years ago by those older tour-bus riders, who had seemed bitter that their lives could never really match those of the stars. There were older women in this crowd, too, but mostly it was younger women, women who had grown up watching the show with their moms or on DVD. They were fun-loving but sensible -- nicely dressed, but nothing outrageous. In fact, I counted not one stiletto. They weren't afraid to admit that they were inspired by the show. They weren't befuddled by the idea of fantasy. Instead they took it for what it was worth. I finally acknowledged that what I had always loved most about the series, but was too afraid or too shy to admit, was that it made me feel as though I could do anything I wanted.
This sentiment was echoed by the women I talked to. When I asked them how they related to the series, most said they looked to the women for guidance in their careers, often as future journalists, fashion designers or PR people.
"Carrie writes about her life, and for me, wanting to go into journalism, wanting to go into theater, [I see] that you have to do what you love -- not just job-wise, but relationship-wise too," said Megan Wheeler, a 21-year-old from Washington studying abroad in London. "It's part fantasy, but it makes me feel like it can happen, that it can be done."
The fans also reminded me that although there's fantasy in "Sex and the City," there is, especially in the later seasons, an equal dose of real life. I recalled my favorite scene, certainly more meaningful since my daughter was born two years ago, in which Carrie visits Miranda shortly after the latter has had her son. The top-notch lawyer is trying but failing miserably to listen to her friend. She hasn't slept in three weeks and her boobs -- on full display -- look like whoopee cushions. Suddenly she says, "This is so frustrating. I can't follow your thoughts. It's all about nursing and nipples. I am not gonna become one of those mothers who cannot carry on an adult conversation. I am not."
Thinking about that scene, I realize that "Sex and the City" has on several occasions made me feel less alone, more thoughtful and more bold. I have never spent more than $50 on jeans. I have never invited the UPS guy inside -- and I probably never will. But you know what I have done? Sometimes when I'm writing, I look out my window and scrunch up my face just like Carrie. Sometimes I even pretend to smoke a cigarette. I'm 30 now, the same age she was when the series began. I'm not sure that the next decade will bring me everything it brought her -- a trip down a runway, a great bob.
Yet I feel, in some vague way, as though I'm here, at this computer, because of her. I too come from a nameless suburb and spent my youth daydreaming about being a writer in the big city. It's hard to believe that I'm actually doing it, because back then -- and for much of my 20s, too -- I thought it was just some silly fantasy.
----------------------------------------------------------
Obama Has the Upper Hand. But McCain Can Still Take Him.
By Dick Morris
Sunday, May 18, 2008; B01
John McCain is America's favorite kind of candidate. With his record of extraordinary patriotism and his distinctive Senate tenure, McCain is a nominee whom voters from both parties -- and independents, too -- could easily support.
But he has been dealt a terrible hand: a tanking economy, an unpopular war, a Republican incumbent whose approval ratings are at their all-time low and a gloomy national mood, with 82 percent of Americans saying in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week that the country is on the wrong track. Political scientists add all that up and predict that the Democrats are destined to win the White House. But I don't do political science; I do politics, and I'm convinced that McCain can still win -- if he's willing to follow the road map below.
McCain needs to not run as a traditional Republican, which is easy, since he's not one. After all, how did an anti-torture, anti-tobacco, pro-campaign finance reform, anti-pork, pro-alternative-energy Republican ever emerge from the primaries alive? Simple: The GOP electorate, along with the rest of the country, has moved somewhat to the left. (In Florida, for example, exit polls showed that only 27 percent of Republican primary voters described themselves as "very conservative," while 28 percent said they were "moderate" and 2 percent said they were "very liberal.")
Meanwhile, McCain's likely rival, Barack Obama, has raised such doubts among voters that their concerns momentarily energized even Hillary Rodham Clinton's sagging campaign. With the help of the incendiary comments of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Obama's negatives have been rising even as he nears the finish line.
Still, voters are tending heavily toward the Democratic Party. Normally, party preferences are about even, but recent national polls give Democrats a decided edge. In last week's Post-ABC poll, 53 percent of Americans identified themselves as Democrats or leaned toward the party, compared with 39 percent who were Republicans or tilted to the GOP.
To sum it up: A candidate who cannot get elected is being nominated by a party that cannot be defeated, while a candidate who is eminently electable is running as the nominee of a party doomed to defeat.
In this environment, McCain can win by running to the center.
His base will be there for him; indeed, it will turn out in massive numbers. Wright has become the honorary chairman of McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts. It would be nice to think that race isn't a factor in American politics anymore, but it is. The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.
So McCain doesn't have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.
If the GOP nominee were Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee, independents and Democrats might not vote Republican even if they became convinced that Obama is some kind of sleeper agent sent to charm and conquer our democracy. Even Rudy Giuliani, with his penchant for confrontation, might have elicited sufficient doubts among Democrats to hold them in line for Obama. But McCain doesn't threaten anyone. Everyone can appreciate the ordeal that tested his courage in Vietnam, and independents and Democrats can celebrate much of his legislative record. Voting for McCain is an easy sell.
Except, of course, for Iraq. This is his biggest problem -- the one issue that impales the Arizona senator and hampers his ability to induce liberals to cross the line.
Earlier in the race, Iraq might have been a deal-breaker. But a kinder, gentler war has emerged. U.S. combat deaths are way down, and the de facto U.S. alliance with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province against al-Qaeda in Iraq seems to have dramatically improved the security situation. Still, most Americans don't like the war, and McCain must deal with their opposition if he wants to win.
The solution is to draw Obama out -- to ask the untested senator what he would do if al-Qaeda in Iraq took over the country . . . or if Iran did . . . or if the Iraqis who backed the U.S. mission were being slaughtered by the thousands . . . or if Islamist terrorists seized control of the country's oil wealth.
Obama, not wanting to appear weak, would no doubt rise to the bait and agree that he might need to send troops back in under certain conditions. He would assure us that sufficient forces would be available at nearby bases to get the job done. To avoid coming across as indecisive and timid, he would put on a sufficiently hawkish face to reassure the voters. And in doing so, he would blur the war issue vis-a-vis McCain. It will make little difference to most Americans whether our troops are in Iraq (as McCain wants) or in Kuwait (as Obama can be pushed to suggest), so long as U.S. casualties are dropping. And with the economy in tough shape, Iraq will fade as the election's be-all and end-all issue.
Which brings us to George W. Bush, the least popular president of modern times. Unlikely as it sounds, the soon-to-be former president needs to get out of the White House, reenter the political arena (much as it will pain him) and go around the country telling us two things: First, we are winning in Iraq; second, the economy is not as bad as most people think. With the Dow at around 12,800 and unemployment at 5 percent, Bush can make a good case that things aren't really headed for the rocks. And he'll have to. Republicans cannot win with an incumbent president with rock-bottom ratings.
Bush can help McCain, but that doesn't mean that McCain should support Bush. As Bush makes the case for himself, McCain must put distance between them. A lot of distance. Once, McCain ran against Bush. But since then, he has basked in the glow of Bush's warm welcome back to the mainstream of the party. Now McCain needs to free himself of Bush's spell, go out again into the cold and show the country the difference between his agenda and Bush's.
Meanwhile, McCain should highlight his credentials as a reformer and a maverick to attract Democrats and independents who worry about Obama. Forget about the base. It will be there. Obama's liberalism, his pro-tax agenda and his proposed weakening of the USA Patriot Act -- as well as fears that he would appoint to office people such as Rev. Wright and William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground -- will all assure the full mobilization of the right. Immigration reform and McCain's other acts of apostasy will be forgiven for the sake of beating Obama. So McCain needs to go after the swing voters:
Lash out at the corporate greed that landed us in the subprime mortgage crisis. Attack the golden-parachute pensions, the ill-gotten commissions and the maddening lending fees.
Go after credit card companies' interest rates, late fees and consumer gouging.
Demand action on global warming (as McCain began doing last week, including hawking "eco-friendly" campaign T-shirts).
Call for a ban on all congressional earmarks, with their inevitable waste and pork, and insist that Congress appoint a permanent ethics special prosecutor to police itself.
Attack big tobacco, and blast the movie industry for helping sell its poison.
Pledge to make hedge-fund managers pay full earned-income taxes on their incomes, rather than the undeserved capital-gains treatment they currently get.
But not all of McCain's moves should be aimed at pleasing the left. He should also:
Attack Obama for favoring federally subsidized health insurance for illegal immigrants.
Criticize Obama for slavish devotion to the teachers' unions and willingness to compromise educational standards.
Go after the Democrats for their proposals to lower sentences for crack cocaine to make them equal to those for powder cocaine. (Instead, McCain should urge raising penalties for regular cocaine.)
McCain need not depart from long-held principles to wage any of these battles. He has always embraced these causes as a senator, and he needs to do so ever more forcefully as a candidate for president. The danger for McCain is that he will forget that he has already won the Republican nomination and retreat to safe GOP positions, which will alienate precisely the Democrats and independents whom he is uniquely positioned to attract.
Meanwhile, the right wing will carry the attack against Obama. McCain is not a mudslinging politician by nature, but he doesn't need to be. The collected quotes of Rev. Wright will be a bestseller this summer. Obama once had to prove to us that he was not a Muslim; now he must convince us that he never really went to church much. Just as Sen. John F. Kerry was buffeted by veterans who had less than heroic memories of their service with him in Vietnam, so Obama will have to weather the recollections of his fellow parishioners. Count on several to surface and claim that they sat next to him during some particularly incendiary sermon.
The American public will not ultimately doubt Obama's patriotism; that is a bridge too far. But we will come to think less of his credibility and strength as he fumbles his way through awkward denials. Obama's ex-pastor may have faded in the primary fight with Clinton, but Wright will loom larger in the general election. McCain is in an excellent position to exploit the openings that Obama will offer -- if, and only if, he moves to the center.
----------------------------------------------------------
Dalaro And the Deep Blue Sea
By Erica Johnston
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2008; P01
Nearly 20 years ago, during a long bicycle trip through Europe, a friend and I happened upon a small coastal town that was too alluring not to stop in. We were about 25 miles southeast of Stockholm, pedaling north from Copenhagen to meet up with a friend.
There wasn't much to the town, really; I remember a cobalt blue bay with several small islands dotting the horizon, a ragged shoreline and a few of the simple yet stately cottages that line the back roads of Sweden.
As we looked for a place to pull over for a rest, we saw an inconspicuous sign featuring a drawing of a house and a single word beneath it: "Vandrarhem." We had unwittingly ridden to the door of a waterfront youth hostel. The decision, it seemed, had been made for us: Our friend in the capital would have to wait a couple of days.
We had stumbled upon Dalaro, gateway to the Stockholm archipelago, historical defender of the Crown from seafaring Russians and, for more than 100 years, a summer retreat for fortunate Stockholmers. I can't recall what we did there, but I've remembered it ever since as one of my favorite spots in a country I came to know quite well.
So when my brother and sister-in-law asked if I could join them for a vacation in Sweden, how could I say no? For several summers they had rented a house near Stockholm, in a quiet town on the Baltic Sea.
You can guess the rest. My brother, Chip, had found Dalaro by chance, as I had. Unlike me, he had the good sense to keep going back.
The More Things Change . . .
A few weeks later, not long after Midsummer's Day, I was back in the land of cloudberries and cardamom buns, lolling on the deck of the rental house, watching as the near-midnight sun performed a slow-motion light show across the darkening bay. A clan of ducks commuted along the shallows in V-formation. Come mornings, we came to see, they evidently were permitted a free-swim period, with each doing its own thing before falling into line once again.
Some vacationers did pretty much the same thing. A middle-aged couple strode to the water's edge in the mornings, stripped out of their robes and dived in. The nudists next door? Not really. In Sweden, it's just an invigorating, sensible way to start a summer day.
You could spend a lot of time -- all of it highly useful, of course -- pondering these phenomena. But we had pressing business to tend to. In my long absence, my sister-in-law said, Dalaro had changed. I had to check out the main street.
Sure enough, there it was, in the center of town: a newish bakery, complete with warm cinnamon rolls, blond wood tables, fancy sandwiches and even something called Dalaro bread, a seemingly good-for-you affair. To my brother and me, this was a major development, like a skyscraper might be to others. And so it came to be that we felt morally obligated to walk there every morning for some serious carbo-loading. You know, to support small business.
The modern conveniences and contrivances had arrived, if only in a typically understated Swedish sense. There were boutiques and at least one art gallery, though it never seemed to be open. Things change. After all, it had been nearly 20 years.
I knew that the youth hostel must be gone. Location, location, location: Some laws of real estate are immutable, even in famously left-leaning Sweden. It surely didn't make sense that a $15-a-night refuge for the young and restless would command such prime property. Okay, fine. After all, I didn't need it any longer.
What really mattered, I figured, was the enduring calm of the town, the saturated golds and iron reds of the houses, and the magnificent archipelago (the Swedes call it skargard, or a garden of rocks). Sure, there were a few modestly showy houses in Dalaro now, and I noticed more Crocs-clad feet than traditional Swedish clogs. But the big things, the stuff that counted -- none of that had changed, as far as I could tell.
Island Adventure
One morning, we board a ferry for Orno, a 20-minute hop from Dalaro. (Boats are like buses around the archipelago; they also leave from Stockholm and other towns.)
Layer upon layer of isles, islets and barren outcroppings instantly begin to reveal themselves. There are more than 24,000 in all, stretching across a 50-mile arc that extends nearly into Finnish waters. The vast majority are uninhabited.
In the summertime, the islands -- lush in the shadow of the mainland before becoming sparser and more severe farther out to sea -- offer Swedes a treasured playground. The enjoyment of nature is a fundamental principle in Sweden, and broad public access to the land, even when privately owned, has been equated with Americans' constitutional freedoms of speech and religion. (The right of public access is called allemansratten, or all people's rights.)
My brother and sister-in-law, Judy, roll off the boat on their bicycles, ready to cross the verdant island on a road too narrow for a stripe down the middle. We stop at a nearby farm so I can rent a bike, which turns out to be a three-speed (at least in theory; only one works) better suited for a teenage girl. No doubt the farmer's daughter, circa 1980. The seat is banana-shaped and way too low; the bell has been rendered silent by rust and time. None of this matters in the slightest. It is, in fact, the perfect island transportation.
The farmer surprises us all: Arriving in his truck, chatting on his cellphone, we soon realize that he doesn't speak English. That's rare in Sweden, even on a rural island, even for a farmer, even one who looks about 60. In fact, there's a good chance that anyone you happen to run into under the age of 65 or so will speak English nearly as well as you do.
Which is almost a shame, because the Swedish language is so melodic and sometimes so wonderfully confounding. Sure, it often seems easy, especially in writing: "bageri" for bakery, "parkering" for parking. Then there are the words that look like you should know them, such as "snart" (soon) or "snabbacash" (the "speedy cash" offered at the ATM).
But similarities can be deceiving. Our u's often become y's in Swedish, hence a restaurant's meny. Kornbiff isn't corned beef; it's a type of meat substitute. And the nearby island of Kymmendo, the onetime home of playwright August Strindberg, is pronounced "sher-men-DURH."
We glide past sheep, horses and wildflowers bursting with blues, yellows and purples. Ads posted at the harborside cafe where we stop for an alfresco smoked-salmon lunch tout faster broadband Internet connections. This jumble of scenes and signals might appear contradictory, but they actually seem quite happy together.
On the way back to the ferry, I prop my bike against the farmhouse as cars board the boat at the bottom of a long hill. My brother motions for me to climb onto the rack at the back of his bicycle to quicken the trip. A minute later, we're pulling away on the ferry.
Back in Dalaro, we return to form, succeeding spectacularly in doing pretty much nothing at all. A comprehensive tour with Judy proves that there is more to the town than I had thought -- though not that much more.
One day, mysteriously finding ourselves back at the bakery, we buy a newspaper and are gratified to learn, using our beginner Swedish, that Lettland had just sworn in a new president. The sad fact that we have no idea where -- or what -- Lettland is barely dents our enthusiasm. (It's Latvia, by the way, so be happy for them.)
Walking home along the harbor, Judy points to another newish landmark, the vaflestuga. It's a shack, or cottage (stuga), more than 100 years old, all wide planks of weathered wood, maybe 14 feet square. What's new is the vafle part: freshly made Belgian-style waffles, with deep bowls of whipped cream and fresh-fruit preserves set out on the counter.
As we stroll out, a little fatter and a little happier, we walk into a light, slightly chilly rain. On one side of the street is a docked shipping boat, a workhorse hauler. Having just spent several nights watching videos of Henning Mankell crime novels, we amuse ourselves by imagining the boat's dastardly cargo: illegal immigrants, surely, or maybe a cache of drugs from the former Eastern Bloc countries across the Baltic.
I'm so preoccupied that I almost miss the small sign along the walkway, one door down from the waffle shack. It shows a house with one word beneath it: "Vandrarhem."
The hostel lives. About a quarter-mile from where we're staying and right where it always was. No huge deal, really. But still.
For a country of 9 million people and a California-size place that many Americans seem to believe is a frozen nation of brooding blonds, Sweden has managed both to prosper and stick to its principles. So while the continued existence of an international youth hostel on a choice chunk of waterfront probably has nothing to do with the long arm of the government, it seems to speak to the country's egalitarian, allemansratten ethos.
And Swedes take their icy reputation in stride, even managing to shrug when Americans mistake their nation for Switzerland. (Snowy? Check. Mountains? Check. Starts with "Sw"? Yep. Spooky.) When one of your homeland's biggest cultural exports is Abba, it helps to have a healthy sense of humor and perspective.
Friends in Watery Places
The next night, friends of my brother and sister-in-law pull up to the dock in a motorboat, along with their two young daughters. As we step a few feet away into the rental house, with its glass doors allowing full view of the waterside deck, Flisan, the 4-year-old big sister, plays quietly outside. After spending the summers on an island a few miles north, she understands the rules: No going in the water.
But just in case, her life jacket remains tightly fastened. Along its back is a luggage-like plastic handle, so she can be plucked from the water as easily as a milk jug. Yet more evidence of the Swedes' affinity for design and style (Swedish crystal, Ikea and H&M also come to mind) that seems to flow from a wellspring of common sense and a taste for elegant simplicity.
Hours later, the parents bundle their sleeping children into the boat, along with summer supplies and maritime maps, and whisk them back home through a slalom course of miles of isles. This is summer in (or near) the city for thousands of Stockholmers.
In the morning, I boost the economic prospects of the bakery one last time. The waffle shack will have to wait. You know, the one next to the hostel .
----------------------------------------------------------
Keeping Your Profile Clean
By Elizabeth Ody
Kiplinger's Personal Finance
Sunday, May 18, 2008; F03
A careless comment in your blog (or in someone else's). An embarrassing incident recounted in your local newspaper. A racy photo on MySpace. Any of these can sully your online reputation.
A recent survey by ExecuNet, a networking organization for business leaders, found that 83 percent of executives and corporate recruiters research job candidates online, and 43 percent have eliminated a candidate based on search results. Even if you're not in the market for a new job, it's a good idea to clean the skeletons out of your digital closet.
Do it yourself. First, search for yourself on Google to pinpoint any negative hits you'd like to remove. You may not be able to destroy them, but you can at least bump them down the list. Check other search engines.
Your goal is to highlight the positives about yourself. Set up accounts at networking Web sites, such as MySpace and LinkedIn, or create a blog in which you write about something uplifting. On each site you create, include links to the others. That will push them higher on Google's results list. "To Google, links are like votes," said Ben Padnos of Done SEO, which helps clients optimize for search engines. "It's a popularity contest."
Still stuck in the virtual muck? To dig yourself out, you may have to get a pro to create new Web pages that accentuate your positives. Figure that it will cost at least $1,000 to bump all the negative hits off your first three search-results pages. But prices vary according to the number of hits and how difficult they are to move, so shop aggressively. Start your search at DefendMyName.com and Internet-Reputation-Manage- ment.com.
Keep tabs on your reputation by setting up a Google alert for your name. You'll receive an e-mail with a link whenever your name pops up on a new page.
For a more powerful search, Reputation Defender offers a $10-per-month service that captures pages on sites that don't get picked up by Google, such as Facebook or tiny, low-traffic sites. Founder Michael Fertik said the service is a hit. "People consider it their new credit report."
----------------------------------------------------------
The Buyout Boys Reload
Their New Killer Deals: Leveraged Purchases Of Their Own Debt
By Allan Sloan and Katie Benner
Sunday, May 18, 2008; F01
On a spring day at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Key Biscayne, Fla., Michael Klein, Citigroup's chairman for institutional clients, took the stage at the bank's ninth annual private equity conference. In front of pension fund investors, hedge fund managers and private equity dealmakers, Klein flashed a series of newspaper headlines on the giant screens.
One slide read, "The collapse of a major investment house," evoking groans -- Bear Stearns had collapsed two weeks earlier. "End of the 'leveraged' era," read another. "Middle East investor buys major stake in a U.S. bank." The audience nodded along, thinking about how the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority had poured capital into Citi. But before the conference could turn into a wake, Klein revealed that the stories were not from this past year but from 1990 and '91. The bank in question was Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was a casualty of the junk-bond collapse. Citi's Middle Eastern investor was Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud.
Plus ça change, plus la même chose, as they say in the fancy French restaurants the buyout boys frequent. The industry, as the more grizzled audience members recalled, had survived that implosion and grown into a $2 trillion colossus. Paraphrasing Charles Dickens, Klein went on to explain how 2007 was a tale of two halves. The first was ebullient: nine of the 10 biggest leveraged buyouts ever ("leveraged" means using borrowed money) and Blackstone Group becoming a publicly traded company. The second was one in which LBOs fell from almost 40 percent of the dollar value of all deals through July to a single-digit market share.
While the days of the brainless megabuyout are over (at least for now), private equity has not gone away. It's merely retreated. Veteran dealsters say they welcome the current separation of the men from the boys, of the serious players from those who merely surfed on waves of cheap debt but have now wiped out. These periodic shakeouts are "what keeps the industry healthy," said Blackstone President Tony James, who has been in buyouts for almost three decades. "It squeezes out a large number of marginal players." TPG (formerly Texas Pacific Group) co-founder Jim Coulter describes the change this way: "There aren't 100 bankers showing up with companies they want you to buy, but the ones they're offering are much more interesting."
What's different in private equity now from its last meltdown, in the late 1980s? Answer: It has become part of the landscape in a way that it wasn't 20 years ago. If you buy a teddy bear at Toys R Us, stay at a Hilton or drive a Chrysler, private equity is part of your life. If your pension fund has money invested in buyouts, these guys' performance will have a say on whether your golden years are spent eating caviar or cat food. Many public-employee pension funds have a piece of buyout action (or soon will), and if they don't make their projected returns, governments will turn to taxpayers to make up the shortfall.
So what do smart people like the buyout boys do when they're confronted with violent change in the markets? They're engaging in what we call "double cropping," a classic example of the way the largest private-equity firms can adapt. Okay, you can't buy companies anymore, but you can make a second profit from the buyouts you've already done. How? By offering capital to the institutions with the greatest need -- the banks that financed your original deals.
The banks, nowhere near as clever as their clients, figured they would sell most or all of their takeover loans to institutions throughout the world, ending up with some nice fee income while having little or none of their capital at risk. But when the credit crunch began last summer, the music stopped and the banks lost their would-be dance partners.
Enter the buyout firms, which have tons of new money flowing into their funds. What to do with it? Rummage for value in banks' used-loan inventory. "The flavor of the day is buying your own debt at below face value," said David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group. "I'm buying bank debt in my deal with leverage from the bank that made me that deal."
You have to love it. First, banks provided lavish financing for the takeovers, making it possible for LBO firms to show double-digit returns to investors even if the properties themselves produced gains in single digits. (Example: Borrow $5 billion at 6 percent to buy a $6 billion company that's growing at 9 percent, and you make 24 percent on your $1 billion investment.) Now the banks are lending their borrowers money to cart off the loans at a discount, giving them another bite at the buyout apple.
Consider, if you will, the biggest double-cropping transaction to surface thus far: a deal in which Citi sort of unloaded $12 billion of buyout loans onto Apollo, TPG and Blackstone. The firms stand to make double-digit returns because they get to borrow so much money from Citi -- and they've even managed to limit their risk.
We're saying "sort of unloaded" because Citi didn't sell the paper to the buyout groups, contrary to what's been reported. Rather, Citi and the firms did "total-return swaps." The firms forked over $3 billion of cash and agreed to pay Citi interest (at a low 1 percent over the London Interbank Offered Rate) on $7.8 billion. In return Citi will pay the firms the interest and principal repayments generated by the $12 billion portfolio.
We don't have details on every loan, but we do know that Apollo and TPG, which took Harrah's Entertainment private for $28 billion, got some of Citi's Harrah's debt. We also know that TPG, which partnered with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in the $45 billion purchase of the Texas utility TXU, got some of Citi's TXU paper. (None of the firms involved would discuss specifics.)
Doing a swap rather than a sale avoids various complex financial and legal problems. It also means that the buyout firms are on the hook for only the cash they've put up, unless they choose to put up more. So if the loans prove to be truly disastrous, they will be Citi's problem all over again.
This kind of transaction isn't as sexy (or lucrative) as lining up the first $100 billion buyout. But hey, it helps cover the overhead. Double-cropping leveraged loans isn't likely to produce the 25 percent or so (before fees) returns to which buyout-fund investors have become accustomed (or would like to become accustomed). But it beats a sharp stick in the eye. Firms can realize returns in the high teens or low 20s (before fees) from buying this paper, which is a far less risky investment than putting up the equity in an LBO.
One reason banks are so eager to do these deals is that the takeover loans made late in the cycle tend to be really messed up. That's because banks were competing so hard for buyout business that they took leave of their senses. At a gathering of business journalists last month, Carlyle's Rubenstein riffed on the way banks were competing to finance buyouts on increasingly ridiculous (for the lenders) terms. After playing the banks off against one another, Rubenstein said -- a big smile on his face as he milked laughs from the crowd -- the firm ended up with a deal that worked like this: "I don't have to pay the debt on time, I don't have to write covenants, I don't have to worry about nuclear bombs, I don't have to have any equity. I'll do that deal."
In a more serious vein, consider a study of post-2003 buyout debt by Marty Fridson's Distressed Debt Investor. Fridson, who has been around high-yield debt since back when it was known as junk, said that before the lending excesses started in 2004, buyout debt followed a familiar pattern: The longer the debt had been outstanding, the more likely it was to be distressed (which he defines as yielding 10 percentage points or more above equivalent Treasury securities). The reason: The longer a buyout has been around, the more chance it has had to run into economic problems.
But the trend has reversed -- the more recently a loan was made, the more likely it is to be distressed. As of early May, 42 percent (62 of 146) of post-2003 LBOs were distressed, more than double the rate in the rest of the high-yield universe. This includes three of the four issues from this year, 49 percent (18 of 37) from 2007, and 34 percent (14 of 41) from 2004. The good news is that now is better than in mid-March, when Fridson found a full 50 percent of these issues to be distressed.
None of this means that huge private-equity deals -- formerly management buyouts, formerly leveraged buyouts, formerly bootstraps, soon perhaps to be "transformational equity" (a term that you hear bandied about on the buyout circuit) -- are dead. They're just in hibernation.
Buyout firms, which are always in full sales mode, are telling potential investors that this is a great time to commit money to their funds, because investments made in meltdown years and the two following years tend to do exceptionally well. History backs up the idea that investing in a burst-bubble climate is a great way to make money. A Cambridge Associates study shows that investors in funds formed in the years when bubbles popped and the two subsequent years have made returns far superior to those from funds in other years. For example, funds raised in 2001, 2002 and 2003 (after the stock market bubble burst) returned 33 percent, 29 percent and 31 percent, respectively, after fees, the best three years in the 20-year survey.
However, just because post-bubble buyouts have been good in the past doesn't mean they'll be good in the future -- history, after all, isn't destiny. The fact that firms are double-cropping in the debt markets is a departure from the historical pattern. In the past, they kept their powder dry in post-meltdown years and waited for things to improve.
It's going to take a while -- possibly a long while -- to see how all this plays out. For now, you've got to work on the companies you have, do smallish deals and find really creative ways to keep the Gulfstream in fuel until the market turns.
The folks at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a low-profile buyout shop that's been around for 30 years, waxed philosophical about this in their year-end letter to investors. "If the wind will not serve," they said, citing an ancient proverb, "take to the oars." In short, get ready for some calluses, buyout boys.
----------------------------------------------------------
Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.
By James Howard Kunstler – Washington Post
Sunday, May 25, 2008; B03
Everywhere I go these days, talking about the global energy predicament on the college lecture circuit or at environmental conferences, I hear an increasingly shrill cry for "solutions." This is just another symptom of the delusional thinking that now grips the nation, especially among the educated and well-intentioned.
I say this because I detect in this strident plea the desperate wish to keep our "Happy Motoring" utopia running by means other than oil and its byproducts. But the truth is that no combination of solar, wind and nuclear power, ethanol, biodiesel, tar sands and used French-fry oil will allow us to power Wal-Mart, Disney World and the interstate highway system -- or even a fraction of these things -- in the future. We have to make other arrangements.
The public, and especially the mainstream media, misunderstands the "peak oil" story. It's not about running out of oil. It's about the instabilities that will shake the complex systems of daily life as soon as the global demand for oil exceeds the global supply. These systems can be listed concisely:
The way we produce food
The way we conduct commerce and trade
The way we travel
The way we occupy the land
The way we acquire and spend capital
And there are others: governance, health care, education and more.
As the world passes the all-time oil production high and watches as the price of a barrel of oil busts another record, as it did last week, these systems will run into trouble. Instability in one sector will bleed into another. Shocks to the oil markets will hurt trucking, which will slow commerce and food distribution, manufacturing and the tourist industry in a chain of cascading effects. Problems in finance will squeeze any enterprise that requires capital, including oil exploration and production, as well as government spending. These systems are all interrelated. They all face a crisis. What's more, the stress induced by the failure of these systems will only increase the wishful thinking across our nation.
And that's the worst part of our quandary: the American public's narrow focus on keeping all our cars running at any cost. Even the environmental community is hung up on this. The Rocky Mountain Institute has been pushing for the development of a "Hypercar" for years -- inadvertently promoting the idea that we really don't need to change.
Years ago, U.S. negotiators at a U.N. environmental conference told their interlocutors that the American lifestyle is "not up for negotiation." This stance is, unfortunately, related to two pernicious beliefs that have become common in the United States in recent decades. The first is the idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. (Oprah Winfrey advanced this notion last year with her promotion of a pop book called "The Secret," which said, in effect, that if you wish hard enough for something, it will come to you.) One of the basic differences between a child and an adult is the ability to know the difference between wishing for things and actually making them happen through earnest effort.
The companion belief to "wishing upon a star" is the idea that one can get something for nothing. This derives from America's new favorite religion: not evangelical Christianity but the worship of unearned riches. (The holy shrine to this tragic belief is Las Vegas.) When you combine these two beliefs, the result is the notion that when you wish upon a star, you'll get something for nothing. This is what underlies our current fantasy, as well as our inability to respond intelligently to the energy crisis.
These beliefs also explain why the presidential campaign is devoid of meaningful discussion about our energy predicament and its implications. The idea that we can become "energy independent" and maintain our current lifestyle is absurd. So is the gas-tax holiday. (Which politician wants to tell voters on Labor Day that the holiday is over?) The pie-in-the-sky plan to turn grain into fuel came to grief, too, when we saw its disruptive effect on global grain prices and the food shortages around the world, even in the United States. In recent weeks, the rice and cooking-oil shelves in my upstate New York supermarket have been stripped clean.
So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.
We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.
Fixing the U.S. passenger railroad system is probably the one project we could undertake right away that would have the greatest impact on the country's oil consumption. The fact that we're not talking about it -- especially in the presidential campaign -- shows how confused we are. The airline industry is disintegrating under the enormous pressure of fuel costs. Airlines cannot fire any more employees and have already offloaded their pension obligations and outsourced their repairs. At least five small airlines have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past two months. If we don't get the passenger trains running again, Americans will be going nowhere five years from now.
We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.
James Howard Kunstler is the author, most recently, of "World Made by Hand," a novel about America's post-oil future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)