…your day:
This just might be…
…the most depressing article I’ve read in a very long time.
HCR’s vulnerability
David Brooks speaks of the “striking” vulnerability of HCR to challenges, “some of them scarcely discussed before passage.”
Scarcely discussed? I guess the supposedly-conservative Brooks didn’t have the time to check out blogs or periodicals on the right, because he would have read a great many discussions of just these points long before the bill’s passage. Perhaps he means that the people who matter—the Democrats in the previous Congress, his fellow colleagues in the MSM, and those who attend their cocktail parties or wear pants with tellingly wonderful creases—never discussed or anticipated them.
But here they are: court challenges, false projections for human behavior, employee dumping, health care service provider mergings, and (most surprising of all; how can it be?) public hostility.
The Constitution and that 3/5 compromise
When Republicans offered their controversial reading of the Constitution at the opening session of this Congress, they and the Democrats who participated decided (wisely or unwisely; you be the judge) to hold back from reading every single word, and instead left out parts that have been superseded by amendments. One of the omissions was the 3/5 compromise, which counted slaves as 3/5 of a free person for enumeration (taxation and apportionment) purposes.
Understandably; it sounds awful to modern ears. Three-fifths of a person is a terrible concept. Like prohibition—also omitted from the reading yesterday—it’s no longer operative, although it’s certainly part of our history.
History, ah history! How many people know what how the 3/5 compromise came to be, or what it represented? It was the result of a fight that was ongoing, even at the very beginning of the nation, between the North and South, free states and slave. Those who ignore that history ignore the fact that, far from being casually accepted, slavery was acknowledged to be a problem for the country from the start:
The Three-Fifths compromise was a compromise between Southern and Northern states reached during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787…
Delegates opposed to slavery generally wished to count only the free inhabitants of each state. Delegates supportive of slavery, on the other hand, generally wanted to count slaves in their actual numbers. Since slaves could not vote, slaveholders would thus have the benefit of increased representation in the House and the Electoral College. The final compromise of counting “all other persons” as only three-fifths of their actual numbers reduced the power of the slave states relative to the original southern proposals, but increased it over the northern position.
So in an odd irony, it was the anti-slavery forces who wanted to leave slaves out of the count, in order to decrease the power of the slave states, and it was the pro-slavery forces who wanted to count them as full people. How many people today—even if you include those who know there was a 3/5 rule about slaves in the Constitution—are aware of these facts behind it?
And how many are aware that, if compromises such as this had not occurred, the United States would not have been a viable entity in the first place? By such agreements, the Founders merely postponed the day of reckoning that they knew might come in blood, but that they hoped might come in peace.
The truth of history is far more fascinating, and far more complex, than the simple morality tale that various factions like to make of it.
The fall of the house of Pahlavi
The sad news of the suicide in Boston of Alireza Pahlavi, the youngest son of the late and last Shah of Iran, is the most recent chapter in the sorrowful saga of the family.
Here they are in happier days. He’s the one being held in his mother’s arms:
His father died in exile of lymphoma at the age of 60, when Alireza was a boy of thirteen. And the little girl in the above photo, younger sister Leila, what of her? Dead at the age of 31 in London of a drug overdose.
The family appears to carry a tendency to depression; Leila had a serious case, and Alireza reportedly also suffered from it after her death. Two other children of the Shah by their mother, former Empress Farah, remain alive, as does Farah herself, who must be overwhelmed with grief.
I hadn’t heard of Farah Pahlavi in decades, but suddenly a distinct memory from my childhood came back—of the Shah’s fiance, movie-star beautiful and featured on the cover of Life, bearing the memorable and euphonious maiden name of Farah Diba. A veritable fairy tale.
But fairy tales always have their dark sides, and I was aware even back then that this one was built on a sad situation.
Did I say Farah looked like a movie star? Indeed:
But Farah’s predecessor Soraya (another lovely name, and another Life favorite, as I recall) also looked like a movie star, and a specific one at that—Ava Gardner. Take a look:
Oh, take two:
Why did the Shah divorce the beauteous Soraya? I remembered that, too, because even as a child I thought it exceptionally sad: she could not have children. And being a shah, he needed a male heir. So Soraya was divorced after she refused to let him take a second simultaneous wife.
Soraya never had children, but she went on to become an actual actress, at least for a little while. She died at 69 under mysterious circumstances in 2001, just a few months after Leila’s death. To compound the sorrow, Soraya’s younger brother died suddenly only a week after her, in a strange foreshadowing of the deaths of Farah’s daughter and son so many years later.
[NOTE: Please see this series of mine about the Iranian Revolution.]
The vaccine/autism connection was a fraud
Not an error: a deliberate fraud.
Let that sink in a minute.
It’s not been an inconsequential fraud, either; I completely agree with the contention, voiced in the British medical journal BMJ, that Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s original study purporting to make the connection between autism and vaccinations “has done long-lasting damage to public health” (see this and this).
But it couldn’t have been done without a willing and for the most part scientifically ignorant public, clamoring for easy answers to medical mysteries. In an editorial in BMJ, editor Fiona Godlee writes that the furor against vaccines continues to be:
…fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession…
Andersen Cooper is helpfully giving Dr. Wakefield a forum in which to defend himself; the good doctor will be appearing on “Anderson Cooper 360” tonight. Wakefield will be saying that it’s his work that’s being distorted, by ruthless people determined “to crush any attempt to investigate valid vaccine safety concerns.”
Wakefield is accused of falsifying case histories in his study, whose findings have never been replicated since, either by himself or others. The lack of replication alone should have been enough to discredit it. But once the public thinks it has an explanation for something—and a “scientific” one at that—it is hard to change minds that have become set in stone.
[NOTE: Related case in point: remember Erin Brockovitch and PG&E? Well, it turns out Brockovitch was almost certainly wrong, and that the town of Hinckley has had no more cancer cases than would have been expected by chance.
Hey, but we saw the movie! How many people will get the corrected news?]
[ADDENDUM: More thoughts.]
Feel-good story of the day: the golden voice
I challenge anyone not to be touched by this story, and especially by the character of the guy’s fabulous mom (remember—ninety, not ninety-two):
The wheels of justice: Dupree freed
The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine:
A Texas man declared innocent Tuesday after 30 years in prison had at least two chances to make parole and be set free ”” if only he would admit he was a sex offender. But Cornelius Dupree Jr. refused to do so, doggedly maintaining his innocence in a 1979 rape and robbery, in the process serving more time for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.
“Whatever your truth is, you have to stick with it,” Dupree, 51, said Tuesday, minutes after a Dallas judge overturned his conviction.
Dupree might have gotten out in 2004 if he had just agreed to submit to a re-education program for sex offenders that required the “4 R’s:” recognition, remorse, restitution and resolution. He couldn’t do it; couldn’t recognize or show remorse for a crime he did not commit. Now the DNA evidence has exonerated him.
Like so many others who have been wrongly convicted, Dupree’s verdict rested almost entirely on eyewitness testimony. Eyewitnesses sound good and are often quite sincere, but unfortunately their testimony is not anywhere near as reliable as people tend to think it is. In Dupree’s case, only one eyewitness fingered him; the other did not. And yet he served thirty years.
It is always upsetting to hear something like that. But it is always good to know that an innocent person has finally been freed. And it helps that the state of Texas will be paying Dupree over two million dollars, tax-free, for his pain, although it will never be able to give him those thirty years back.
If Michele Bachmann runs…
…for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, will she split some of the Palin-hatred and deflect it onto herself? Or will she magnify it?
I’ve noticed that, although Bachmann has a smaller public profile than Palin, she taps into some of the same virulence as Palin, for somewhat similar (although also somewhat different) reasons. Like Palin, she’s not afraid to speak her mind, and is very conservative. Like Palin, she’s a Tea Party favorite. Like Palin, she’s got five children.
And like Palin, she’s a very attractive woman, a brunette with long hair, a style that used to be a no-no for politicians but is now not uncommon. But unlike Palin, she has a law degree, which makes her more immune–although hardly completely resistant—to the charges of “dummy.”
We won’t have Robert Gibbs to kick around any more
Except that we will; Gibbs is leaving the White House press secretary post only to become a political adviser to the president and his re-election campaign.
It will still be very pleasant not to have Gibbs as Obama’s public face and mouthpiece. It is no surprise that he will stay on as a trusted adviser, because he’s had that role in addition to the press role for quite some time. The only meaningful change in Obama’s Gang of Four so far appears to have been the departure of Rahm Emanuel, who was the member least close to Obama to begin with (Axelrod, like Gibbs, changed venues but remains as a trusted confidant and helper).
Gibbs’ departure is probably part of Obama’s shift to a kinder, gentler facade of compromise and moderation. It will be interesting to see his replacement, but my guess is that it will be someone less offensive and less combative. Of course, that’s pretty easy to accomplish; it would be hard to find someone more offensive and more combative. But make no mistake about it; Gibbs will remain very influential behind the scenes.
Bedbugs and the Buckeye State
Ohio may be losing jobs and losing people. But there’s a counterbalance: the state is gaining bedbugs, and nobody knows why.
The bleak, baroque, berserk “Black Swan”
“Black Swan” was one of those movies I just had to see. After all, it’s described as a psychological thriller about ballet. So, what’s not to like?
Well, just about everything. I didn’t merely dislike this film, I loathed it.
“Black Swan” is suspenseful, all right. But the non-stop suspense involves one thing and one thing only: exactly when will the next flesh-rending Grand Guignol moment occur? It’s difficult to make viewers feel simultaneously horrified, exhausted, and bored, but the film’s relentless one-note assault manages to accomplish that mean feat.
The characters consist of cliché after cliché after cliché: the sexually predatory ballet company director; the shy, bulimic, repressed underling dancer who finally gets her Big Chance; the pretend friend and rival who just might be an enemy in disguise; the jealous older dancer who’s all washed up; the enmeshed and controlling ballet mother who sacrificed her career to…well, you get the idea.
And the sex—let’s not forget the sex. The movie certainly doesn’t. Every sexual encounter between two people (although the movie’s specialty is actually sex for one) is decidedly unpleasant. The obligatory lesbian sex scene is probably the only one of its kind in which viewers are justifiably afraid that one of the actresses is literally going to eat the other—as in “sink teeth into, draw blood, and devour.”
If that doesn’t strike your fancy, there’s the dancing. After all, this is a dance movie, right? All dance films must face the question of whether to cast dancers in the leading roles and sacrifice the acting, or cast actors in the leading roles and sacrifice the dancing. “The Red Shoes” and “The Turning Point (see this for a personal note) resolved the dilemma in favor of dancers who could act somewhat. In “Black Swan,” it’s actresses who can dance somewhat.
Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis do a pretty good job—good but not great, since it’s an impossible task to fake artistry and/or professional technique. The camera obsessively follows the movements of Portman’s slender, flexible upper body in claustrophobic closeups which make her seem convincing as a dancer, although a relatively uninteresting one. She can rise on her toes and perform simple movements respectably, as well. But when bravura technique is required, it’s a long shot and a body double to the rescue.
But in fact, none of the dancing in the film is of interest as dance per se, and there really isn’t that much of it anyway. But dance is not what this movie is about—it’s “Rosemary’s Baby” crossed with “Repulsion,” sur les pointes. If that seems like a mixed metaphor—well, it is.
[NOTE: In the life-imitates-art department, star Portman is now pregnant and engaged to the NYC Ballet dancer who plays the brief role of the Prince in the film, handsome Benjamin Millepied. Until the filming began, Millepied had a live-in girlfriend, American Ballet Theatre dancer Isabella Boylston. This would make Portman the Other Woman, just like Odile, the Black Swan is in “Swan Lake.” Does that make Boylston Odette, the White Swan?]