Yes. Seriously. A competition for parking valets.
I’ve long been in awe of the skill of parking attendants in city lots, although I don’t have much experience with other forms of valet parking. I can parallel park well enough (after all, I grew up in NY), but let’s just say that I’d never make it as a parking valet.
Of course, to call it an “anti-Trump effort” is to both understate and simplify the matter. Since the evening it became clear that Donald Trump would become president of the United States, and millions upon millions of totally shocked Americans (including me) tried to digest the startling news, some huge proportion of them (not including me) have been trying to discredit everything he does and everything he says.
The goal seems to be impeachment. But impeachment alone, although a disgrace, is practically meaningless in terms of actually removing a president. It’s conviction that does that, and though conviction is always a possibility, the bar is set so high (67 votes) that it’s highly unlikely unless something else, and something big, happens.
Democrats are hoping for that “something big” to happen. And if it doesn’t happen, they’ll uncover it because it’s already happened. And if they can’t uncover it, some of them are determined to manufacture it, because it’s just that unconscionable that Trump is president and just that necessary to remove him for the good of the nation.
I certainly was no Trump fan during the primaries—au contraire. I thought he might be a dangerous and tyrannical president. But since he took office, I’ve seen very little evidence of that sort of behavior—and (as I’ve written many times) for the most part I’ve been pleased what what he’s actually done.
So in terms of the Wolff book’s allegations, which are such huge news right now, I’m not planning a point-by-point analysis. I’ll leave that to others, and pick up the story if and when it appears that these claims end up being something more than the latest salvo in the long-continuing fight against Trump. After all, Wolff’s truth-teller credentials aren’t exactly impeccable.
Trump is uncouth, often ruthless against enemies, and more than capable of lying and/or exaggerating. He was elected with the American public knowing all of that, because he demonstrated those characteristics over and over during the primaries. But since taking office, not only has his behavior has been better than expected rather than worse, every serious post-election allegation against him (and there’ve been plenty of them) so far has come to naught despite multiple investigations by people who would dearly love to charge him with something.
The left is salivating over Wolff’s book, though. For now, anyway. The goal is not just to impeach or somehow remove Trump. The larger—and probably more realistic—goal is to discredit the entire Republican Party. That was always the danger in electing Trump—that the combination of an MSM allied against him and his own episodic outrageousness could ultimately end up tarnishing the right in a way that would result in liberal control of the reins of government. That’s the real goal of this entire crusade against Trump: the regaining of power by a left that believes it should be inevitable and permanent, and that will not and cannot rest until it has that power once again.
[NOTE: How did Wolff manage to get his interviews? Here’s the description:
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Wolff says, he was able to take up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” ”” an idea encouraged by the president himself. Because no one was in a position to either officially approve or formally deny such access, Wolff became “more a constant interloper than an invited guest.” There were no ground rules placed on his access, and he was required to make no promises about how he would report on what he witnessed.
Since then, he conducted more than 200 interviews. In true Trumpian fashion, the administration’s lack of experience and disdain for political norms made for a hodgepodge of journalistic challenges. Information would be provided off-the-record or on deep background, then casually put on the record. Sources would fail to set any parameters on the use of a conversation, or would provide accounts in confidence, only to subsequently share their views widely. And the president’s own views, private as well as public, were constantly shared by others. The adaptation presented here offers a front-row view of Trump’s presidency, from his improvised transition to his first months in the Oval Office.
If that’s true, it’s pretty shocking that someone like Wolff was allowed that sort of access. Trump and company should have known it was the perfect set-up for a hit piece. Surely it’s not usual for some random member of the press to be plunked down in the middle of a transitional White House, with full access to anyone wishing to speak with him? Here’s Wolff’s Wiki entry; he’s mostly been a reporter on the media and his reliability has been questioned many times.
The White House has certainly focused on that aspect of Wolff:
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that a forthcoming book containing scathing criticism of the president and his administration from team members and allies was filled with “mistake after mistake after mistake.”
Sanders told reporters at Thursday’s press briefing that Americans “probably could care less about a book full of lying and would really like to hear about” issues on which the administration has claimed victories, including combating terrorism and the economy.
“I don’t think they really care about some trash that an author that no one had ever heard of until today or a fired employee wants to peddle,” she said.
Oh, I know plenty of people who really really care. Most of them hate Trump already, though, so I’m not sure that Wolff’s book and the coverage of it will change many minds.
Others, including former deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, have denied making statements attributed to them in the book, and Sanders on Thursday characterized the book as “complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip.”
Asked to offer examples of falsehoods in the book, Sanders pointed to one excerpt listing White House communications director Hope Hicks’s age as 26 ”” she is 29 ”” and another in which Wolff wrote that Trump responded “who?” when former Fox News chief Roger Ailes suggested John Boehner for the job of White House chief of staff.
“I’ll give you one, just because it’s really easy: The fact that there was a claim that the president didn’t know who John Boehner was is pretty ridiculous, considering the majority of you have seen photos,” Sanders said. “Frankly, several of you have even tweeted out that the president not only knows him but has played golf with him, tweeted about him. I mean, that’s pretty simple and pretty basic.”…
Sanders also disputed a portion of the book that outlines expectations from the top of Trump’s campaign, including campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Trump himself, that he would not win the 2016 election. The press secretary called it “one of the most ridiculous things” from the book.
“The president, the first lady, his family, they wouldn’t have put themselves through that process if, one, they didn’t believe they could win, and two, they didn’t want to win,” Sanders said. “It is absolutely laughable to think that somebody like this president would run for office with the purpose of losing.
Sanders also said one thing that might answer the question of how Wolff got access to his interviewees:
…that 95 percent of the interviews for Wolff’s book were conducted at the request of Bannon…
Bannon was fired last August. And I would guess he realized things were going badly between him and Trump long before that. When did Wolff interview most of his subjects?]
Well, we don’t have much choice, do we?
It’s snowing, the wind is blowing (but not, I think, at blizzard level), and I have no reason to go out today.
As for great blizzards of the past, I well remember this one. Fortunately, I was not among those stranded motorists on Route 128, some of whom died because their exhausts got covered and the carbon monoxide backed into their cars. I was safe at home hunkered down with my husband and a fireplace.
Unfortunately, however, I was stranded on a Greyhound bus with a seat near front row and center for this 1967 Midwest biggee. My bus and I were somewhere in Indiana; I’d been on my way to a family wedding where I was scheduled to be a bridesmaid. In those days, forecasting the weather was a great deal more primitive than now, and nobody foresaw the scope of this storm at the time I joined a ragtag group of people who stepped onto that bus and filled every single seat, because the airport was already closed.
I did have the foresight, however, to wear multiple layers of clothing, and so I was very warm. I must have been hungry, too, but I don’t remember that. I chiefly recall an interminable night of sitting with my Intro to Botany text open on my lap, reading the same paragraphs about xylem and phloem over and over and trying vainly to absorb the information, while somebody’s pesky two-year-old roamed the aisles unsupervised, his copiously running nose unattended and dripping with the cold.
How long did the bus sit there without moving? I don’t know, but memory tells me it was at least 24 hours. Did I make the wedding? Yes, barely.
[NOTE: Half of this post has been recycled from a previous one.]
Iran is unpredictable. I have no idea what will happen there.
But I do know that tyrannies stay in power through a number of mechanisms. One is complete mind control, but only North Korea seems to be able to do that in this day and age. But another, and perhaps the most common one, is that the tyrannical regime—which, after all, consists of a small number of people in power compared to the large number of a country’s inhabitants—must have an enforcing agent. The leaders are always outnumbered, after all.
The enforcer can be the military. It can be the police. It can be the secret police or the elite military. It can be (and often is) several or all of the above.
And that group of enforcers must be willing to do the regime’s bidding. Time after time, tyrannies have fallen because the enforcers refuse to enforce the will of the country’s leaders.
Then there is the will of those in charge—in other words, how ruthless they are willing to be. In Soviet Russia, for example, the earliest leaders were plenty ruthless. Think Lenin and Stalin. Later on, though, some of that fervor went out of those in charge. Maybe because they got used to the high life, or because they became somewhat Westernized over time, or maybe they realized how rotten their police state was and they just couldn’t defend it with the same vigor. They didn’t want to lose power, but they just weren’t willing to kill as many people to keep it.
Which brings us to Iran. I don’t even begin to read the minds of the mullahs, but I do believe that religious fervor is more inclined to continue undiminished, because they believe that the kingdom they built in Iran isn’t just one of earth, it’s one of heaven on earth—no matter how many people they have to kill to sustain it.
So I think that it all depends on what the enforcers will do. If enough enforcers turn on the mullahs, that will be the real turning point.
Why? Because he said something they want to hear: that the meeting between Kushner et. al. and some Russians was “treasonous.”
Bannon, of course, has reason (or thinks he has reason) to hate Kushner. You may or may not recall this sort of thing:
Steve Bannon”˜s White House exit was partially orchestrated by First Daughter and Presidential Advisor Ivanka Trump and her husband, Senior Advisor to the President Jared Kushner, a source with knowledge of the situation tells PEOPLE.
“Jared and Ivanka helped push him out,” the source tells PEOPLE, adding, “Bannon being removed changes everything.”
On Friday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that Bannon would no longer serve as chief strategist in a statement, saying, “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”
That was back in August. Bannon is a “don’t get mad, get even” sort of guy. Or maybe he’s a “get mad and get even” sort of guy.
And so we have Bannon’s scorched-Kushner policy:
Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.
Completely unsurprising. Bannon’s one of those people for whom the answer is “neither” when you’re asked the question would you rather have him inside the tent pissing out, or outside the tent pissing in?
[ADDENDUM: I was wondering what Trump might say. After all, Kushner is his son-in-law, and Trump isn’t a guy who tends to retreat from a fight, or to disregard an insult or a threat. Well, the White House has issued a statement, and it’s a lulu:
Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans.
Steve doesn’t represent my base””he’s only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.
Now it’s Steve’s turn.]
CNN seems to have it down: “Winter ‘bomb cyclone’ threatens East Coast, bringing temps colder than Mars.”
In the following excerpt, I’ve highlighted the most fear-mongering words:
A massive “bombogenesis” — an area of rapidly declining low pressure — will wreak havoc on the Northeast this week, threatening hurricane-force winter wind gusts in a region already crippled by deadly cold.
The bombogenesis will result in what’s known as a “bomb cyclone.” And the bomb cyclone, expected to strike Thursday, will likely dump 6 to 12 inches of snow in New England and hurl 40- to 60-mph gusts.
By the end of this week, parts of the Northeast will be colder than Mars.
At Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire, the temperature will plunge to -35 degrees Friday night into Saturday, weather observer Taylor Regan said. At last check, the high temperature on Mars was -2 degrees Fahrenheit.
I believe that’s what we used to call a “blizzard.”
And 6 to 12 inches is not nothing, but it’s fairly typical of a snowstorm.
Has the cold been “crippling” and “deadly”? Yes, if you’re out in it long enough, dressed inappropriately enough. I try not to do that, and so do most people around here. It’s been cabin-fever inducing, but I’ve gone out nearly every day for at least a little while, suited up in a knee-length down coat, enormously warm mittens, a scarf, and earmuffs. If I know I’m going to be out for long, I get out the big guns: something on the order of this, only a bit more formidable, and colored blue.
I don’t go out in blizzards if I can help it; I sit around hoping the power doesn’t fail. Power outages are what I fear.
Oh, and that Mt. Washington/Mars thing? No fair comparing the low on the mountain to the high on Mars! But Mt. Washington is famous for having the most extreme weather on earth. Yes, you heard that right—on earth:
Hurricane force winds occur an average of 110 days per year. Mount Washington holds the Northern Hemisphere and Western Hemisphere records for directly measured surface wind speed ”” 231 mph, which was recorded on April 12, 1934…
On January 16, 2004, the summit weather observation registered a temperature of −43.6 °F and sustained winds of 87.5 mph, resulting in a wind chill value of −102.59 °F on the mountain. During a 71-hour stretch from around 3 p.m. on January 13 to around 2 p.m. on January 16, 2004, the wind chill on the summit never went above −50 °F.
I don’t plan to be on Mt. Washington tomorrow, when the storm is expected to begin.
I don’t plan to be here, either, but I thought I’d sneak this in because I like it:
[NOTE: I did a search to find out what happens to the homeless when there’s a cold snap like this or a blizzard. Obviously, being outside for long would be extremely hazardous and even deadly if a person is living on the streets. I couldn’t find too much about it with a New England twist, but ordinarily shelters are filled to capacity and over capacity when the weather turns very cold, and there are outreach teams who try to encourage street people to use them. For example:
As a prolonged, bitter cold front descends across the state, homeless shelters in Portland and Bangor are making an extra effort to get people off the streets so they don’t freeze to death.
City officials and shelter staff in the two cities are trying different ways to keep people indoors, now that there’s greater risk that people will die of exposure. In Bangor, shelters have hauled out extra beds, and Portland shelters have beefed up staffing levels.
Police in Bangor said they are ready to shuttle people from the streets to city shelters ”” or just a friend’s house ”” if it means getting people out of the cold.
“The general gist is, when the weather turns cold, or dangerous, we work even more closely with our local shelters,” said Bangor police Sgt. Wade Betters.
In Bangor, the city’s two primary first-come, first-served shelters are nearly always full, but both are adding extra beds this week to accommodate as many people as they can.
…Those who are still sleeping outside in winter have often been barred from shelters, usually for repeatedly endangering other guests. If they have nowhere to go, Bangor officers have allowed people to warm up in the police station lobby.
“We would not turn them away,” Betters said.]
This story may not mean much to you, but it does to me: in the midst of allegations of abuse, Peter Martins has retired from the directorship of the New York City Ballet, although he denies any wrongdoing.
Here’s more information on some of the allegations, which mostly seem to involve physical rather than sexual abuse.
In 1993, Jeffrey Edwards was a soloist with New York City Ballet when he did something radical, at least for the company: He accused Peter Martins, the powerful ballet master in chief, of verbal and physical abuse, and reported him.
“I brought a complaint to the general manager, company manager and the dancers’ union, describing Peter’s conduct in detail,” Mr. Edwards said in a recent statement to The New York Times.
The union, the American Guild of Musical Artists, confirmed that it had received the complaint. But to all appearances, nothing much happened. Mr. Martins continued in his role as leader of City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, and Mr. Edwards left the company shortly thereafter.
The next year, Victor Ostrovsky, a 12-year-old student at the ballet school, had his own run-in with Mr. Martins. During a dress rehearsal, Mr. Ostrovsky said he was horsing around onstage with other children when Mr. Martins became enraged and grabbed him by the back of the neck in what Mr. Ostrovsky called “a death lock.”
“He’s yanking me around to the left and to the right, he’s digging his left thumb and his middle finger ”” I felt like he was piercing my muscle,” Mr. Ostrovsky said in a telephone interview. “I started crying and sobbing profusely.”
I doubt any of this would have come out if Martins wasn’t already quite disliked by a lot of people.
I’ve already written about Martins and his flaws and strengths, as well as sexual harassment and other forms of abuse in the dance world, here. I’ll just add that although Martins—about whom the scuttlebutt in the dance world has been bad for at least forty years, when I first heard some of it—is not a widely-beloved figure (to say the least), his alleged behavior isn’t really so very unusual. Milder types of abuse are rampant in the dance world. A significant amount of dance training involves (or used to involve, when I was coming up) verbal abuse, although there also were many teachers who didn’t engage in it. But commenting on the body and its flaws (and in particular on overweight) was and perhaps still is so common as to be standard, and engaging in name-calling and insults certainly used to be a daily occurrence with a great many teachers.
Dancing also involves physical abuse, although most of it is self-inflicted with encouragement by some teachers and company directors and choreographers—forcing a turnout or extension, dancing on pointe till you bleed. Also, touching dancers and jerking them around harshly, sometimes enough to cause pain, is not unusual. It’s even happened to me, although fortunately not to the point of being injured. Have I ever seen anyone hit? I can’t recall, but I certainly saw treatment I’d call abusive.
Sex between directors and dancers most definitely exists, too, usually consensual although often influenced and encouraged by ambition on the part of the underling. I wrote about that before, too:
Ballet differs from other arts (and certainly from politics or broadcasting or even acting) in that the body is completely the instrument, the mechanism by which that art is expressed. There is nothing else, not even talk (as in acting). Not only that, but the way the body looks is nearly as important as the way it moves, or at least inextricably connected with it. It’s no exaggeration to say that virtually every dancer in the professional dance world is a physically beautiful person with an extraordinarily beautiful body. And even the older directors (such as, for example, Martins) have an aging version of the same, and often a personal magnetism and power that cannot be denied. It was part of the reason they were stars, although not all directors were once performers or stars…
What’s more, there’s often a lot of interaction and touching in the choreography and in the studio, even during class. Teachers touch their students all the time””that’s how they convey what’s needed””adjusting a hand, helping the dancer bend in the right direction by giving a little push, turning the head just so. Partners touch their partners all the time, and the communion between partners can be extraordinarily intimate. It can also lead to an actual romance (and of course sex) in real life””what little the dancers have of real life, that is, after the rigors of taking class and rehearsals and performances and shoe preparation and all the rest.
Company directors (the heterosexual ones, that is; I know less about the habits of the gay directors, but I’m assuming the story is not too different) often sleep with their dancers. They even sometimes marry them; Balanchine, for example, was famous for this, having married (and divorced) a whole series of them.
So the idea in ballet is not to eliminate the sex or the touching””I think that would be impossible””but to eliminate the harassment. How would “harassment” be defined in a world like that? Unwanted touching? Touching that goes beyond what’s required for the class or the choreography or the correction? Whether there is a quid pro quo for the sex: “sleep with me and I’ll make you a star”?
Some directors and some dance teachers are kind and gentle. But it’s not the least bit unusual for them not to be kind and gentle at all. And then there’s the strangeness (and intensity) of many dancers. I remember, for example, taking class in my early twenties at a large and famous dance studio (affiliated with a dance company) in Manhattan. The class was so large that we were squished together and had to turn diagonally away from the barre in order to be able to kick our legs upward. This is not an unusual practice, but it meant that at certain times—because the barres were portable, and they were pulled away from the walls so that dancers could hold onto them from both sides—I was practically nose-to-nose with perfect strangers sweating up a storm.
I recall in one particular class that the young woman opposite me started crying after getting a correction from the teacher, and didn’t stop crying for the entire barre. It was disconcerting. She wasn’t sobbing, but her tears were flowing all through the exercises (which last close to a half hour). I tried to whisper to her—although I didn’t know her—“Don’t let it bother you; it’s not worth it” or some such platitude. But other dancers near me, who knew her better than I did, shrugged and told me not to bother. “She does this practically all the time” they said.
And by the way, in the ballet world abusive behavior by directors and teachers is not limited to men. Ballet is in certain ways an equal opportunity endeavor.
[NOTE: Here’s a former New York City ballet dancer saying Martins was perfectly fine with her. I have little doubt that it’s true.
This woman also has written about George Balanchine. Her article has a glaring omission, however, and IMHO it’s one that makes the article unfair to Balanchine. She neglects to mention that at the time she visited Balanchine in the hospital and the events she relates took place, he was suffering from the disease that killed him not too long afterward, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a brain disease that leads to (among other things) senility and personality changes. That said, before he got sick Balanchine certainly had a well-known history of sleeping with his dancers—he married quite a few of them, too.]
NY Times publisher Arthur Ochs (“Pinch”) Sulzberger Jr. (66) has retired, to be replaced by his son A.G. Sulzberger (37) as of January first. The change was announced last month. A.G. represents the fifth generation of the family to run the Times since patriarch Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896.
Donald Trump welcomed the new Times head this way:
The Failing New York Times has a new publisher, A.G. Sulzberger. Congratulations! Here is a last chance for the Times to fulfill the vision of its Founder, Adolph Ochs, “to give the news impartially, without fear or FAVOR, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” Get…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
….impartial journalists of a much higher standard, lose all of your phony and non-existent “sources,” and treat the President of the United States FAIRLY, so that the next time I (and the people) win, you won’t have to write an apology to your readers for a job poorly done! GL
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2018
Can’t say I disagree with him.
It also happens that I drafted a post a week or two ago on the subject of the history of the Times. So here it is, with a few additions.
We often talk about how opinion and fact journalism have increasingly merged in the last half-century. That’s a change, one I wrote about at length in my two-part series on Walter Cronkite.
But it’s also important to note that opinion journalism itself has changed, too. For example, not that long ago William Safire used to write for the NY Times, not as its resident token “conservative” who is not really conservative (a la Ross Douthat or Bret Stephens), but as a highly respected long-time (and by “long-time” I mean looooong time; Safire started his column in 1973 and left in 2005) mainstream columnist. He was pretty middle-of-the-road moderate Republican for the most part. In addition, I can’t think of any opinion columnist in the Times of that day who exhibited anything like the left-leaning extremes of Paul Krugman or Frank Rich, for example (Walter Duranty was somewhat of an anomaly at the time, and anyway he wasn’t a columnist).
The Times actually started out as a Republican paper but turned Democratic during the last quarter of the 19th Century. In the partisan atmosphere of papers of the time, Adolph Ochs (whom Trump references in his tweet, and who acquired the Times in 1896) decided that a good and rather unique niche to carve out would be that of objectivity. And for the most part, with some exceptions, the paper was fairly objective (at least, compared to today), although always strongly and consistently liberal Democratic.
Prior to Pinch’s coming to power there was his father (“Punch”), who published the paper from 1963 to 1990, when Pinch took over. Under Punch, Abe Rosenthal was executive editor from 1977-1988. Glenn Reynolds wrote about Rosenthal (and about the Times’ history in general) in an excellent 2011 book review, and when you read the following quote from Reynold’s piece you’ll see how far the Times has strayed from Rosenthal’s days:
As [Gray Lady Down author] McGowan makes clear, maintaining this [objective] position took constant effort. Abe Rosenthal, who ran the paper from 1977 through 1986 (and whom McGowan regards as the Times’ best editor), warned that because of the staff’s overwhelmingly liberal political leanings, “you have to keep your hand on the tiller and steer to the right, or it’ll drift off to the left.” Rosenthal was also particularly concerned about keeping political opinions out of the culture sections and news reports ”” under his supervision, there were to be no “editorial needles.”
That’s exactly and precisely what’s missing today. Oh, I have little doubt that today’s fact and opinion journalists at the Time are aware that they are overwhelming liberal—how could they not be? But the idea of steering to the right would be anathema, and why would they want to avoid drifting to the left? They are there to speak truth to power, to question authority, to stop people like Donald Trump and to march in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein.
Rosenthal certainly made some decisions that most people on the right would consider partisan in the sense of leaning left. But, still, it was better than it later became, paticularly in terms of those “needles.” Here’s another Rosenthal quote:
He once told a reporter who demanded to exercise his rights by marching in a street demonstration he was assigned to cover: “OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can’t cover the circus.” We call that “the Rosenthal rule.”
(I’m going to assume that “[make love to]” stands in for the F-word there.)
When Punch was replaced by Pinch in 1992, that’s when a bigger change in the paper’s editorial stance occurred:
Unlike his father, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger Sr., Pinch was less concerned with balancing either the coverage or the books, and instead began to run the Times as a sort of upscale Village Voice: not a great news organization that tried to tell the truth as accurately as possible, but a snarky in-group publication that told its increasingly homogeneous audience things it wanted to hear. The difference between generations is summed up neatly in this anecdote:
“Walking across Boston Common one day discussing the war, Punch asked Arthur Jr. which he would like to see get shot if an American soldier came across a North Vietnamese soldier in battle. Arthur Jr. defiantly answered that he would like the American to get shot because it was the other guy’s country. For Punch, the remark bordered on treason, and the two began shouting. Sulzberger Jr. later said that his father’s inquiry was the dumbest question he had ever heard in his life.”
That probably gives you all the information you need to know about Pinch, but I’ll add a bit more:
Fast-forward a few years and Pinch, now firmly ensconced ”” despite resistance from the board of directors ”” as publisher, cancels [Abe] Rosenthal’s op-ed column, leaving Rosenthal feeling “betrayed and heartbroken.” Pinch wanted something new at the Times, and he got it, something that avoided the dumb questions of his father’s generation.
Pinch wanted edge, something with a New Leftish angle, and, above all, diversity. He told critics that if the Times was alienating older white-male readers, then “we’re doing something right.” He hired Howell Raines as editorial-page editor, a man suffering, McGowan writes, from “a lifelong sense of Southern guilt” and “a simplistic, perhaps even Manichean political vision.”
Raines wasn’t interested in nuance, and under his direction, the Times editorial pages became a vehicle for preaching more than for converting. Meanwhile, Pinch was allowing politics to seep into first culture, and then news coverage, all while pushing ever-greater efforts at “diversity” hiring onto the paper’s news divisions.
Now almost all the Times reporters and opinion writers are f-ing elephants and covering the circus, and it’s considered great.
I wanted to know something about A.G., and so I took a look at this recent interview with him in the Times-friendly New Yorker. One statement I found to be of special interest was this:
I’ve always had a theory that decent journalists are contrarians by nature, because they have to ask tough questions of people…And, like any decent journalist, I have a contrarian streak, and I actually spent most of my life not thinking I would go into journalism.
That strikes me as almost humorously youthful, because A.G. then goes on to say that he decided to go into journalism shortly after college (Brown). Since’s he’s now 37 and has been in journalism his entire adult life, that means that when he says “most of my life” he’s talking about childhood and his teen years.
Another interesting statement by A.G.—one that’s less personal—is the following:
One thing I’d say about the subscription model that we didn’t expect, which was an unintended benefit of this strategic shift we made, is that everyone in the New York Times today wakes up thinking how can we serve our readers. That’s aligned our journalistic mission and all of our business incentives in a really clean and consistent way.
Earlier in the interview A.G. had said that, with falling advertising revenue in the media, the paper now relies for 2/3 of its money on reader subscriptions. It used to be that their revenues were 80% from advertising. That’s a big big change, and the way I read the above quote is that the Times has to feed its liberal/left readers more and more red meat.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? If the paper pulled more to the middle, those revenue-generating subscribers would drop the Times like a hot potato.
A.G. doesn’t think the paper is liberal. As a frequent reader—and analyzer—of Times coverage (as well as a long-time critic of A.G.’s interviewer, New Yorker editor David Remnick), I’d probably have found the following exchange between Remnick and A.G. amusing if I didn’t see it as dangerous:
D.R.: For many in the general public, the New York Times is seen as a liberal newspaper. True or false?
A.G.S.: False. And I can send you all the hate mail that I’ve gotten from our aggressive coverage of the Clinton campaign.
D.R.: O.K., but do you really think that it’s possible to argue that the New York Times, by and large, isn’t both populated by people who are left of center, and that the tone of the newspaper isn’t left of center?
A.G.S.: We’re committed to a really old-fashioned notion. It’s a notion that isn’t too popular these days, which is reporting the news “without fear or favor.” Those are words that my great-great-grandfather, Adolph Ochs, wrote in our initial mission statement. What that means to me is reporting on the world aggressively, searching for the truth wherever it leads, and not putting our thumb on the scale. I really deeply admire my colleagues’ commitment to that. We strive to understand every side of the story, and to convey it fairly.
D.R.: Do you believe in the notion of objectivity?
A.G.S.: I do believe in the notion of objectivity. I think it’s something you have to work at; I think it’s something that we don’t always get right.
D.R.: I have a hard time with the notion of objectivity. Objectivity, to me, sounds to me like what you do in a science lab. Fairness is another matter. I struggle with that””the notion of objectivity. You think it’s possible to accommodate it?
A.G.S.: You know, I think fairness is a word that comes pretty close to me, too, if you want to call it fairness. The point is the discipline of trying to strip away your own biases””whether they come from a worldview or lived experience””and to try to tell a story in a way that’s fair to all the participants in it.
Why did I call that exchange “dangerous”? Both men hold a lot of power through their publications. You may scoff at both the Times and the New Yorker, but they are both still highly influential with a huge number of people whose minds and viewpoints are both shaped by them and reinforced by them. Either A.G. and Remnick actually believe they are objective/fair, or they are lying about it. Fools or knaves, or fools/knaves. As usual, take your pick.
And if the Times actually does become fair and/or objective under A.G., I’ll be happy to say I was wrong.
First of all, Happy New Year once again!
You may have noticed I don’t tend to make a whole lot of predictions. Every now and then, though, I offer one up. For example (and of course, here I’m remembering the ones that came true), I predicted right after Obama’s election in 2012 that Hillary Clinton would run in 2016, and that she’d have an excellent chance of winning. Well, she came awfully close, didn’t she?
And then there was the time in 2010 when I made this prediction about an Obama second term. I thought that, if he did get re-elected, his second term would look like this:
And then, and then””voila! Four more years! Four years in which he won’t have to answer to the electorate at all. He will be unleashed to do whatever it is he really wants. And does anyone think that would look moderate at all?
In my mind I never really thought that Trump would win the 2016 election (although I always thought there was a possibility). But quite early on I believed that he had an excellent chance of winning the nomination. Here’s my post from August of 2015:
From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.
If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.
I’m sure I made other predictions that didn’t turn out to be so prescient. But fortunately, I don’t remember what they were.
As a member of the Legal Insurrection group, this year I was asked to make three predictions for 2018 and to offer one resolution for the New Year. Here’s the post where you can read the responses of the entire LI crew. Most of the writers were much wordier than I; I was uncharacteristically brief—maybe due to my general reluctance to make predictions. Here’s my offering, though:
1. At the Oscars, most of Hollywood will manage to be self-congratulatory about its own sins.
2. There will be several articles a day in the MSM about how Donald Trump is about to have a breakdown and that everyone on the White House staff is worried. But Donald Trump will not have a breakdown.
3. We will never hear from a single one of Roy Moore’s accusers again.My New Year’s resolution is not to make any more predictions for 2018. I may even stick to it for a few weeks.
And you?
It’s Sunday. I usually take the day off on Sundays, although if there’s something big going on—or if the spirit happens to move me—I post anyway.
Today the spirit moves me to comment on New Year’s Eve, one of my least favorite holidays even when I was young. In part it’s because I’m not a drinker (have I told you that I’m not a drinker?). In part it’s because I’ve always been hyper-conscious of the passage of time. And as I’ve gotten older, and time has curiously accelerated, that consciousness has only increased.
2018??? Excuse me, but how on earth did we get that far into the 2000s? I’ve only recently gotten it into my head that the 1900s were a long time ago (almost 20 years), but it still doesn’t feel that way to me. I still have to do the math to remind myself.
One thing I must say is that the past year has been exceedingly interesting. I have a hunch that 2018 will be, as well. Right after the 2016 election, I wrote:
Before the polls closed yesterday, I was having dinner with a friend who’s a liberal Democrat. She worked for Hillary and voted for Hillary, but she wasn’t a fervent Hillary admirer. None of the returns had come in yet, but we were talking about the election and the possibility of a Trump victory. I didn’t think it likely but I was definite that it was a possibility, and not a distant one, either. She and I agreed that a Clinton presidency would probably be more predictable in terms of her behavior as president, and that a Trump presidency would be more unpredictable.
And then she surprised me by musing, “But I’m almost hoping he wins, because I’m very curious what it would be like. It would be exciting.”
And I agree. Of course, “exciting” is a double-edged sword. And I don’t think most Hillary supporters would agree with her sense of adventure.
Well, it has turned out to be “exciting.” And no, most Hillary supporters didn’t (and don’t) agree with her, to say the least.
Tonight I’m going to a friend’s house. She’s having a low-key party. I’ll stay up till midnight because I always stay up till midnight. And I’ll hope the year 2018 turns out to be exciting in a good way.
And to all of you: Happy New Year!!
[NOTE: I meant to put this up right before Christmas, but it slipped my mind.]
A while back I spent several smiling hours on YouTube watching the reactions of people receiving a puppy or kitten as a gift. The thing that struck me is that their reactions are so very similar—as you can see. You’ll need a tolerance for high-pitched squealing, though—and I’m not talking about the sound the puppies are making:
I think a puppy or kitten is a risky gift. But my guess is that most of these people were already on record as wanting a pet.
And this video, featuring children as the recipients, might be even better:
You may have heard there’s been a lot of internet buzz about a recent New Yorker short story called “Cat Person,” especially among young people. It’s about a 20-year-old college student who meets an “older man” (he turns out to be 34, but the reader doesn’t learn that for quite some time), gets into a back-and-forth texting relationship with him, then goes on a date and sleeps with him that night despite deciding somewhere in the middle of the encounter that she isn’t really all that into him.
That brief summary doesn’t quite to give you the flavor of the story; if you’re interested, take a look. This particular story reminds me of the sort of thing that used to come out of one of my writing group (I had a writing group with some very proficient members). It’s sexually graphic but not unusually so for this day and age, and its main strength is telling the reader a lot about the hesitations and assumptions going on the mind of the female protagonist as she negotiates the “courtship” (if it can be called that), the “date” (if it can be called that), and the sex (it definitely can’t be called “lovemaking”) with this man.
The story has what I consider a cheap ending, a bit of an O.Henry twist (just a tiny bit) and then an abrupt stop that indicates to me that the author didn’t really know what to do with her characters at the end. What interests me more than the story, though, is the enormous amount of internet discussion about it, which you can easily read by Googling and which is taking place at many many venues.
I’ve read quite a bit of the discussion, and no one whose comments I’ve read seems to agree with me on the story. Maybe that’s because I may be twice as old (or three times as old) as most of the people participating in that discussion. But I saw “Cat Person” as a description of today’s hookup culture, in which people who don’t know each other end up in bed together, where women are sometimes the initial sexual aggressors (that was true in the story) and yet don’t know their own minds (also true in the story), and leave themselves open to being very vulnerable in situations they might even perceive as dangerous (and might even be dangerous), if only because they are alone with someone they really don’t know at all.
I increasingly find the world of the young to be a distant country, one that doesn’t seem as though it would be an especially pleasant one in which to reside.
[ADDENDUM: By the way, no cats appear in the story, unlike in this post.]