Marty Kaplan2013-06-19T16:38:20-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=marty-kaplanCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Marty KaplanGood old fashioned elbow grease.Ask Your NSAtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.34121222013-06-10T10:57:41-04:002013-06-10T10:57:55-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/Dear NSA,
It turns out that our handyman has been looking at gay porn on my laptop. Is there a way to correct your records?
Name Withheld, Washington, D.C.
Dear Senator,
We really have no idea what websites you're been visiting. If we'd wanted to know whether you've been cruising men4men, we'd have gotten a warrant from the Fisa court.
Your NSA
Dear NSA,
First off, I'm not saying you did anything illegal. In fact, what you've doing is completely legal, and you're keeping America safe. But on that men4men thingie, I don't think you understand. I wasn't the one doing it -- it was our handyman. We never should have given him the key.
Name Withheld, Washington, D.C. P.S. Why did you call me Senator?
Dear Senator,
It was totally a guess. Really, we have no idea who writes to us. And hey -- thanks for the props. It means a lot when someone like you stands up for us. It's the leakers who hate America.
Your NSA
Dear NSA,
Some really crazy mistakes keep showing up on my Verizon bill. I never watch video on my smartphone. Can you help me fix that?
Name Withheld, Arlington, VA
Dear Senator,
Did you really think driving to Arlington would confuse us?
Your NSA
Dear NSA,
I think most Americans know that we live in a dangerous world, and sometimes you have to give up something on the privacy side to get something on the security side. These people whining about their civil-liberties-this and their Constitution-that should just wake up and smell the jihad. Is there anything else you want me to be saying? I really could use your help.
Pseudonym, Washington, D.C.
Dear Senator,
These reporters revealing classified documents are breaking the law, they're putting our people in harm's way and they should be prosecuted. The same goes for their publishers, and for the so-called whistleblowers who've been leaking to them. And another thing: When our guys testify in front of you, and those Bill of Rightsers on the committee ask us if we're spying on Americans, what do they expect us to say? "Yes"? "Trust us"? "I don't recall"? Anyone who's ever clicked on Agree without reading a terms of service agreement, anyone who's ever used Facebook, anyone who has a cellphone in their pocket -- any nine-year-old will tell you there's no such thing as privacy any more, and frankly, who cares? If you're not breaking the law, Senator, you've got nothing to worry about.
Your NSA
Dear NSA,
I know it's not against the law. It's just, well, awkward. As for the rest of that stuff, those are exactly the points I've been making. Which you should have known in the first place, if you're so darn good at data mining, Mr. SnoopyPants (ha ha).
Anonymous, Washington, D.C.
Dear Senator,
We do know. We're just messin' with ya. We gotcha covered. Ix-nay on the men4men.
Your NSA
PS Don't forget to delete those cookies on your browser.
Dear NSA,
Were you able to get rid of the Grindr on my iPhone, too?
Me Again, Washington, D.C.
Dear Senator,
What's Grindr?
Your NSA
Dear NSA,
You're good.
Thanks A. Bunch, Washington, D.C.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>Diagnosis: Informed Citizen Disordertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33401852013-05-27T15:42:02-04:002013-05-27T15:42:08-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/New York Times -- is also bad for my health.
After all, lamb chops are luscious, but it turns out that red meat, not to mention a perfect side of salty fries, can kill you. Just because you enjoy something doesn't mean that it's good for you.
But being informed about what's going on in the world is supposed to be a virtue, the civic equivalent of exercise. You have to find the time for it, and it's not exactly fun to work your muscles to failure and your heart to 80 percent of 220 minus your age. Still, you're glad you did it, and it actually makes you feel better.
Keeping up with the news should be like that. An informed citizen ought to get a nice buzz from following what's happening. It's part of patriotism. Loving your country requires knowing your country, and knowing about the world it's part of.
But boy can it be depressing. Infuriating, too. Here are some of my Times spit-takes from just the last couple of weeks:
Nearly six million Americans below the poverty line in 25 states won't get the health insurance that the Affordable Care Act gives them because their Republican governors or state legislators are refusing to accept federal money to expand Medicaid.
Bank lobbyists -- big contributors to both Republicans and Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee -- basically wrote the bill the committee passed exempting Wall Street from what's left of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul.
Apple avoided paying taxes on $74 billion between 2009 and 2012 by creating a subsidiary in Ireland with no physical presence and no employees -- "It is not a shell company," Apple said -- that hasn't filed a tax return in Ireland, the United States or anywhere else.
More active duty American troops committed suicide over the past 12 years than were killed in Afghanistan.
In Sunday's Times, Nathaniel Rich said that the X-rays emitted by full body scanners used in airports by the Transportation Security Administration were so hazardous that he took to calling them cancer machines. His piece is part a series called "Anxiety," which the Times has been running since the start of last year. I don't know why they confine that label there; they might as well put the whole paper under that masthead.
I got hooked on the Times habit when Mr. Drew, my English and social studies teacher at Burnet Junior High School, told us we could subscribe for something like a nickel a day, and yes, its content would be on our current events quizzes. We were required to know stuff like what cabinet positions Anthony Celebrezze and Willard Wirtz held, and the Times was a good way to keep track of that.
Today, of course, the best journalism in the world, from plenty of sources, is available online, often for no cents a day, and we can access it in video and audio as well, and from anywhere at any time. I realize how much dangerous propaganda and addictive infojunk is also out there; I recognize the risks of confirmation bias, living in the bubble, inhabiting an echo chamber; I know that prestige outlets can sometimes be inaccurate, elitist, partisan, obtuse and hamstrung by archaic professional practices. But informed citizens aren't puppets; they're critical thinkers. Civic literacy is not inherently impossible.
But it can cause such outrage, panic, helplessness, bewilderment -- there really should be a consumer warning on the news.
What a downer for democracy. You do your best to keep up, and what you get in return for your effort is something that the American Psychiatric Association ought to have put in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Informed Citizen Disorder: the damage you do to your mood and your blood pressure by watching Bill Moyers or Jon Stewart, listening to Kevin Phillips or Bruce Bartlett and reading the Guardian or the New York Times.
Every so often, I detox from the news. I find that a week of media-free hiking in the high desert provides a pretty decent cleanse. But that doesn't help with the rest of the year. Even if my work didn't require me to drink from the information firehose, I can't quit. Ever since Mr. Drew, it's been drilled into my conscience that it's my responsibility as an American -- as a voter -- to know what's going on.
Of course no one has to pass a current events quiz in order to qualify for a ballot. If I suffered from Dumb Voter Disability instead of Informed Citizen Disorder, I'd still get to pick the president. Which, come to think of it, is just one more reason to panic.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>The Day the Earth Stood Stupidtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32636912013-05-13T12:53:56-04:002013-05-14T15:23:06-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
That message -- plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve -- was announced to the people of the world last week.
When this happens in science fiction -- 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still is the classic -- the planet pays attention. The flying saucer lands; an alien, in this case played by Michael Rennie, emerges; a final warning is issued: Stop it. If you don't, you're doomed.
Back then, the "it" was violence -- the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear midnight. Last week, it was climate change -- greenhouse gases, and the promise of ecological extinction.
"Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears," ran the headline on the front page lead story in Saturday's New York Times, with this sub-head: "CO2 at Level Not Seen in Millions of Years, Portending Major Climate Changes."
A headline like that -- millions of years? really? -- normally turns up in comic books and superhero movies, not in the paper of record. In fiction, what usually comes next is a montage. At breakfast tables and on street corners, in souks and igloos, in the Oval Office and at the U.N., the shocking news galvanizes humanity into action.
In the real world, it was pretty much a one-day story.
What does it take to grab us by the eyeballs? Chris Christie's waistline is guaranteed wall-to-wall coverage. The next Jodi Arias is waiting in CNN's wings. The Benghazi circus will be in town at least through 2016. Sure, disaster porn is always good for ratings, but though a Superstorm Sandy may momentarily raise the specter of climate change, daily bulletins on the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere apparently aren't Nielsen enough.
It's not that people who know our planet's hair is on fire aren't trying to get our attention. The animated graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Science Research Lab showing how atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed over the last 800,000 years should be as horrifying as any computer-generated imagery Hollywood has to offer. Along with the news that we had hit the 400 ppm mark on the CO2 curve for the first time since the Pliocene epoch came scary quotes from scientist after scientist calling this our last chance before the point of no return. Unless we act, children born today will see temperatures rise irreversibly and sea levels rise catastrophically. Weather patterns will be disrupted, deserts and drought will spread and -- in the words of Lord Stern, head of the U.K.'s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment -- "hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died.... [W]hen they try to migrate into new lands... [they will be brought] into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth."
If graphs and quotes aren't sexy enough to warrant a permanent place in the news, there are other ways to hang on to the spotlight. The Climate Reality Project's website features 18 disturbing but entertaining videos about the price of carbon and our addiction to fossil fuels. "Do the Math," the film that journalist Bill McKibben is using to spark his 350.orgmovement, has a dramatic narrative that's compelling but not preachy. The Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime's climate change documentary series now being shot, has producers who know a little something about how to capture audiences: James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Those efforts use media to engage an informed, activist public. Could such a citizenry make change? There's plenty we can do in our personal lives to reduce our carbon footprint. Local and state policies in conservation, transportation, building design and urban planning can also curb greenhouse gas emissions. But without federal leadership like killing the Keystone XL pipeline and putting a tax on carbon, and without global commitments with teeth to enforce them, it's hard to imagine a path back from the brink.
In the U.S., the same dysfunctions preventing anything else useful from happening -- the Senate filibuster, the gerrymandered House, the corrupt campaign finance system -- also hold climate change mitigation hostage. So does denial. And though some denial can be attributed to hoax propaganda funded by the fossil fuel industry, some comes from an infantile strain in the American psyche that should not be mistaken for religious freedom.
Last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D -- R.I.) gave a floor speech urging his colleagues to
"awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, to our storms. And I wonder, 'Why is it that we are so comfortable asleep, when the warnings are so many and so real?' What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty? I was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, 'God won't allow us to ruin our planet.'... [That] statement... is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking."
I admit that my fantasy that last week's CO2 headlines might rally our planet like an alien invasion may make me as guilty of magical thinking as Senator God-Won't-Allow-Us. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a big fan of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and as president he often referred to it. When he first met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, he speculated that the threat of an alien invasion might get the Americans and the Soviets to cooperate. If Michael Rennie's "Klaatu barada nikto" line is the father of "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," maybe blowing past the 400 ppm barrier can be the progenitor of "Mr. Obama, cancel that pipeline."
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>Can't We All Just Not Get Along?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31754782013-04-29T13:39:37-04:002013-04-29T23:09:24-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
Old hands lament the passing of the era when, by day, partisans went after one another red in tooth and claw, but when the sun hit the treetops, the enmity took a breather. Thanks to the bourbon dispensed in Capitol hideaways and Georgetown salons, the gears of democracy were lubricated and America's bidness could get done. But today, this elegy goes, legislators race home to their districts instead of chillin' with the villains. The sealed ideological bubbles that politicians now inhabit prevent rivals from finding common ground after hours.
Conversely, democracy is also said to benefit from an adversarial free press. Its mission -- speaking truth to power, without fear or favor -- is the reason the Constitution protects the fourth estate. The Washington press corps is the watchdog of liberty. Being relentlessly skeptical may not make journalists popular, but it's a necessary tension.
Armistices in this 24/7 tribal warfare, Washington ethnographers tell us, are those occasional evenings devoted to bipartisan mingling and self-deprecating humor, like the Gridiron Club dinner, the Alfalfa Club dinner and above all the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, whose 2013 confab happened Saturday night. On those nights, hostility takes a holiday. Reporters break bread with the people they cover, Republicans and Democrats take a break from demonizing each other and comedy is a universal solvent for animus.
There are two problems with this account.
One is that the theoretically productive antagonism between the power and the press was long ago replaced by access journalism -- the cultivation of official sources at the expense of telling uncomfortable truths about them. The tone of mainstream Washington journalism is set by prestige correspondents and anchors who are often better paid and more famous than those they cover and interview. They sup with sources year round. Their common membership in the nation's power elite affects their work more than any hypothetical tension between their domains.
There are of course exceptions. A Jeremy Scahill or a Matt Taibbi could care less about whom they offend. But when politicians feel the press's lash, it is usually a function of the press taking sides the way politicians take sides. Fox News is indifferent to the risk of alienating Democratic sources, and MSNBC pulls no punches for Republicans. (And no, I'm not making a moral equivalence argument. Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes give plenty of Democrats grief, and they go out of their way to book conservative guests and be gracious to them - something rather rare on right-wing cable news.) But the rule is chumminess. You don't need a White House Correspondents' Dinner to see Bill O'Reilly dine with Antonin Scalia; that happens in effect every night on The Factor, just without the rubber chicken.
The other problem with the conventional narrative -- oh, for the good old days when Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill got tipsy together at Katharine Graham's table! -- is that it diverts us from the real story of insider Washington, which is its common culture of nihilism.
Money makes Washington's wheels go round. The revolving door between officeholders and lobbyists, between regulators and the industries they regulate, between hacks and flacks, between politicians dialing for dollars and talking heads on the media payroll, is a bipartisan pathology. The big media moguls who bought tables on Saturday night, and who brought their big advertisers along to ogle the Hollywood stars that the evening turns out, are accustomed to buying friends on both sides of the aisle. The room, laughing at its own expense, is superficially sending the message that it doesn't take itself too seriously, but it's a disingenuous, wink-wink, postmodern self-critique. A press that's worthy of the journalism scholarships that tickets to the Correspondents' Dinner support would, for example, be all over the climate change story all the time, as if mitigating global warming were the only thing standing between us and the end of the world, instead of letting the fossil fuel industry and the fear of depressing or boring away the audience set the boundaries of adequate coverage.
That's why the establishment pushback to Stephen Colbert's 2006 routine at the Correspondents' Dinner was so vehement: he crossed a line. It was one thing for George W. Bush to show a video of himself at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association dinner (one more of these affairs) searching beneath Oval Office furniture and saying, Nope, no weapons of mass destruction under here, as he did in 2004. But it was quite another for Colbert, on Washington's prom night, to tell stenography journalism's top practitioners that they're the problem:
"Over the last five years you people were so good, over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The President makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home."
I thought that President Obama and Conan O'Brien were both really funny at this year's White House Correspondents' Dinner. But whatever barbs they tossed were easily accommodated by the soothing meta-fiction machine that the whole incestuous enterprise amounts to. Commingle, self-deprecate, after-party with the owners. Just put 'em through a humility simulator and go home.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>An Apple for the Appletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30339702013-04-10T15:18:33-04:002013-06-10T05:12:01-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
For one thing, essay-grading software can't tell the difference between the intentional errors I just made and the kind of mistakes that would torpedo a college or job application. For another, who needs a machine to tell me I'm a hack when people are standing in line to do that already?
If big brands like Harvard, M.I.T. and Stanford weren't lending their haloes to computer programs that grade written answers to essay questions, there probably wouldn't have been a recent front-page New York Times story about it, let alone a petition by a group called Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment, which that story says had collected the signatures of nearly 2,000 educators.
There are good reasons to be skeptical of machines grading essays. Their algorithms can't distinguish between arguments supported by factual evidence and cases built on canards. They're reliable enough to dock points for clichés, but they're not subtle enough to reward subtlety. They're fans of the kind of five-paragraph structure (intro, three examples, conclusion) that can be taught, but that can also be a vehicle for nonsense. Michele Bachmann's policy statements may hew to the traditional essay template, but the "thinking" that goes into them deserves those scare quotes. As that petition by Professionals Against Machine Scoring says, computers can't "measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy, reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance, convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity, among others."
But it'd be a mistake to brush off this development as a naïve attempt to automate what can't ever be automated. Artificial intelligence is not like jetpacks; this stuff really is heading our way. When people give computers feedback about what they're doing wrong, computers can learn from their mistakes. Maybe machines will never be able to give a David Foster Wallace essay an appropriate grade, as one of the commenters on the Times story said, but this software is already helping tens of thousands of students taking free online courses to write better. By instantly boosting students' scores when they improve their essays, by getting their competitive juices flowing the way that games do, these programs may be teaching the most important lesson about composition that there is: writing is rewriting.
The objection to automated essay grading, like the objection to the proliferation of MOOCs -- massive open online courses, many of them free, and many offered by some of the top universities in the country -- seems a tad aristocratic to me. There's some elitism lurking in the criticism that students who take these courses and have their essays graded by machine are missing out on a real education. It's as though a monopoly on the sorting and credentialing apparatus were being busted. Who's going to pay a gazillion dollars for college tuition, if you can learn to write (or special relativity, macroeconomics, digital sound design or "The Ancient Greek Hero") for free? There's no denying the thrill of learning, in person, from a great teacher; and the value of learning from peers; and the lifelong importance of the friends you make and the networks you develop in college. But the reality is that this experience is only available to a tiny fraction of the people who could benefit from it. Even if cost weren't an obstacle, we're nowhere near having enough places in high-end higher education to meet the demand. Automated grading and massive online learning may not deliver all that elite institutions provide, but that shouldn't stop us from using computers to improve what most learners can access.
Sure, it's unsettling to think that machines can accomplish things that once seemed impossible to automate. Computers are writing articles that do a decent job of delivering news. They recommend books, movies and music with the reliability of longtime pals. They drive cars, data-mine Shakespeare, recognize faces, read emotions, fix us up on dates. If a computer can grade an essay, why can't it conduct a job interview, evaluate the testimony in a trial, reply to your parents' texts, teach your puppy tricks?
When I was a student at Cambridge University, I sometimes heard faculty bemoan the change from the one-on-one student-teacher setup back in the day, to the two- or three-to-one ratio we had to endure. That's right: the old Oxbridge normal, just you and your tutor reviewing your weekly essay over tea, had given way, under economic and social pressure, to -- the horror! -- mass education, meaning three or even four people around the fire. Somehow we survived.
Slurping ramen at a laptop is a world of difference from having your own mentor to reduce your argument to rubble. So it's a small miracle that technology promises to make at least some online learning as intellectually nourishing as it is, finally, widely available.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>Daddy's Been Arrestedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29893672013-03-31T15:03:50-04:002013-05-31T05:12:01-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
At 6 a.m. last Friday, the FBI arrested Michael S. Steinberg, a 41-year-old stock trader for New York hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, at his $8 million Manhattan co-op.
This brings to nine the number of SAC employees indicted in the investigation of its founder, Steven A. Cohen, whose net worth is around $10 billion. Four of them have pleaded guilty. Apparently the FBI is trying to reel in and flip Cohen's conspirators in an alleged insider trading scheme, and Steinberg -- Cohen's golden boy -- is their latest catch.
The New York Times has been all over the SAC investigation, running front-page stories about how Cohen, even as the F.B.I. is now tightening its lasso on him, has gone on a shopping spree, buying a $60 million oceanfront home in East Hampton and paying $155 million to casino magnate Steve Wynn for "Le Rêve," the Picasso that Wynn had accidentally put his elbow through in 2006. (Since Wynn reportedly had paid less than half of that to acquire the painting in 2001, Cohen seems to have gotten no discount for wear and tear.)
Saturday's Times story includes a thumbnail photo of Steinberg on A1. You can imagine the admiration and envy his charmed life must have aroused. He's young, smart, good-looking and -- until now, anyway -- way successful. He has a wife and two kids, and with three other hedge fund managers he also started Natan, which "inspires young philanthropists to become actively engaged in Jewish giving by funding innovative projects that are shaping the Jewish future."
But to the FBI, Michael Steinberg was a high-level player in an insider-trading ring that illegally profited from secret financial data about technology stocks Dell and Nvidia.
Steinberg knew they were closing in on him. Here's the kicker to the Times story:
Since his name surfaced in the investigation, Mr. Steinberg has occasionally spent evenings in New York hotels to avoid being handcuffed at home in front of his two children. Federal agents refused to let Mr. Steinberg surrender of his own volition at F.B.I. headquarters downtown, expressing the view that white-collar defendants should not be given special treatment.
Last week, Steinberg and his wife and kids had been visiting relatives and taken a trip to Disney World. On Thursday, he returned to his Upper East Side place without them. At dawn on Friday, the feds came for him with the cuffs.
I can't get those kids out of my mind. They did nothing wrong, and they were spared what could have been a traumatizing moment. But I can't help thinking about what it was like to learn the news from their mother on Friday. It's almost unbearably poignant to imagine their family life last week, during the final days of what they will inevitably think of as Before: the kids having innocent fun on the rides, oblivious of what's to come, as their parents struggle to join the laughter and savor the last moments before After starts shadowing them forevermore.
Deterrence is one of our criminal justice system's goals. If Michael Steinberg pleads guilty or is convicted, his future punishment will also punish his family. And yes, he should have thought about that ahead of time, while rising at SAC and accumulating the rich life's rewards. A front page Los Angeles Times story calls Preet Bahara, Manhattan's top U.S. prosecutor, "the new sheriff of Wall Street" because of the 71 insider trading convictions he's racked up since he took office three years ago. During these last three years, those convictions had to have been on Michael Steinberg's radar, along with the domestic carnage they must have caused. But -- if Steinberg turns out to have done what he's been indicted for -- his belief that he wouldn't get caught must have kept any heart wrenching images of his kids' uncomprehending faces from stopping him.
Of course, I don't know that. As Michael Steinberg became Steven A. Cohen's most fortunate protégé, I don't know whether the true north of his moral compass pointed to Everybody Does It, or to You'll Be Sorry. Or maybe, as Cyndi Lauper sang, Money Changes Everything, and the fantastic wealth pumping up these privileged lives, mixed with the musk of the trading floor, turns people who ordinarily know the difference between right and wrong into barracudas who only know Kill or Be Killed -- a kind of temporary ethical insanity that somehow permits these predators also to be loving parents and generous citizens.
The day after Michael Steinberg was arrested, I was talking about his efforts not to be handcuffed in front of his kids with a friend of mine whose own father had gone to jail when he was a kid. My friend's childhood days are a long time ago, but what happened to his father may still be the most important contributor to who he is as a man. He still wrestles with the demons that his father's imprisonment unleashed. It's possible that his own considerable empathy and generosity were also conceived in that darkness. It's always a crapshoot how horrendous things like this will ultimately play out in kids' lives. But you'd think a father would think twice before rolling those dice.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>The Bartender Who Rescued Americatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28974362013-03-18T13:55:16-04:002013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
That's journalism jargon for not recognizing the most newsworthy part of a story -- for delaying the real attention-grabber for later. (Calling a story's first words the "lede" instead of the "lead" is a beloved fossil from the days when typesetters used lead -- the metal -- to put space between lines. No wonder newspapers' bottom lines are hurting.)
Prouty, we learned last week, is the 38-year old bartender who videotaped the $50,000-a-plate Boca Raton fundraiser where Mitt Romney wrote off 47 percent of the country as victims.
It's plausible that footage cost Romney the presidency. It validated his biggest perceived weakness -- his image as a cartoon plutocrat, Mr. Moneybags, the Bain guy who fired workers and saddled companies with debt, the country club Republican who called sports "sport" and didn't have a clue about how ordinary Americans were hurting. Romney tried to counter that image: he wore jeans, reminisced about shooting varmints and had country western stars in his corner. He wanted swing voters to believe that his sucking up to his party's resentful right was just an obligatory primary-season performance, and that as president he'd govern from the middle.
Scott Prouty's tape revealed that the regular-guy stuff was the real performance -- play-acting for the rubes. There he was in a roomful of millionaires, caught in the act, dissing half the country as dependents on the public teat. The contempt for working stiffs wasn't caricature; it was character.
Prouty didn't shoot the video because he wanted the goods on Romney. He was just making a souvenir, like his pictures of Bill Clinton shaking hands with the staff at another event. It was only when Romney talked about going to China to buy a factory "back in my private equity days" that he knew he had something explosive on his hands.
Romney told the room that the factory employed 20,000 young women in their teens and twenties, living 12 to a room in triple bunk beds, 10 rooms sharing one little bathroom, working long hours for a "pittance." The factory was surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. "And we said gosh, I can't believe that you, you know, keep these girls in. And they said, no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to work in this factory that we have to keep them out."
What galled Prouty was that Romney bought the lie. He told the story not to condemn slave labor, but to say how lucky American are to be born in a land of so much opportunity that we don't have to stop people from scaling walls to get work.
Looking around the room, Prouty saw that none of the guests were appalled. He thought it wrong that only people with $50k to shell out could see the real Romney. Afterward, searching online, he learned that the factory was Global-Tech in Donguan, and that Charles Kernaghan, an international labor rights activist, had exposed Bain's interest in ventures built on outsourced American jobs and exploited workers. Two weeks later, when Prouty decided he'd be a coward if he kept what he'd seen to himself, it was this story alone that motivated him to go public. China, not the 47 percent, was his lede.
He posted the China clip on YouTube, under a pseudonym, and began using social media sites to link to it. His goal, as he later explained, was to have the China clip pop up whenever someone typed "Mitt Romney" into Google. He also contacted Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who'd written about Bain's forays into China. Enterprising reporters from BuzzFeed and Huffington Post managed to track Prouty down. But it was only at the end of August, when Prouty posted the clip of Romney saying that 47 percent of Americans were freeloaders, that the video began to catch fire. Corn was the first to get the full 68-minute tape from Prouty, and when he ran with excerpts on September 17, "47 percent," like the Occupy movement's "1 percent," became an indelible part of the American political lexicon, and arguably changed the course of the race.
By remaining anonymous until he went on MSNBC's Ed Show last week, Prouty ensured that the story would be about Romney, not about the motives of the man who made the tape. What was striking about his media appearances was how important it was for him to keep talking about China and Kernaghan's work for the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. Prouty now faces right-wing derision, and he's worried about the legal defense costs he may incur. But his courage caught the attention of United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, who offered Prouty a job. His goal is to go to law school and fight on behalf of ordinary Americans like himself.
But it turns out that the Scott Prouty tending bar at that Boca fundraiser was not an ordinary American. Yes, he was struggling to make ends meet, and he had no health insurance and no car. But going public with the video was not, he said on the Ed Show, the only "incredibly brave or incredibly stupid thing I did"; there was also the time in 2005 -- "one of the proudest moments of my life" -- when he saved a woman's life. She had driven off Florida's I-75 into an alligator-invested canal. Prouty, who was working in a nearby Honda dealership, ran to help. He dove into the water, and with a co-worker he called to bring a knife, he cut her seat belt and carried her to shore.
That moment, he recalled last week, was something that said, 'You know what? If you can jump in, jump in.' And I had a chance to jump in with this again, with the video, and so I said, 'You know what? I'm going to jump in one more time.'"
It's one -- amazing -- thing to try to rescue a woman drowning right in front your eyes. But to have empathy for enslaved workers on the other side of the world, and to try to rescue a country from a candidate who had no such empathy, is even more amazing. Even if he buried the lede.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>Supermarkets Say: Please Don't Buy the Crap We Selltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28029392013-03-04T15:05:50-05:002013-05-04T05:12:01-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly's, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price-per-unit, which I'm used to, but little blue and white linked hexagons marked on a scale of 1 to 100 -- a "NuVal" score.
NuVal scores don't tip you off to a bargain. They tell you how good or bad a food is for your health.
Yeah, right. The idea that a food store would admit -- would explicitly declare, on the spot, as your hand is reaching for it -- that a product it's selling is nutritionally crappy: that violates every principle of Marketing 101, not to mention Ayn Rand 101.
This is different from the labels that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has required since 1990. Those are well-intentioned marvels of confusion, containing so much information (are you getting your minimum daily requirement of magnesium?), so much disinformation (calculating calories per serving, when a serving is half the amount a runway waif would eat), so much incomprehensible information (I forget -- is tripotassium phosphate good or bad for you?) that you can get an anxiety attack trying to figure out which granola will nourish you and which will kill you.
But NuVal scores make that simple, and sometimes shocking.
Cocoa Puffs, for example, gets a NuVal score of 26, but so does Life ("you don't have to be a grown-up to benefit from the whole grain inside"), and Kashi Strawberry Fields Cereal ("plenty of whole grain goodness") gets a 10, same as Cap'n Crunch.
An apple gets a 96, which you might expect. But unsweetened applesauce gets a 29, apple juice gets a 15 and Mott's Original Applesauce ("a great tasting snack that's actually good for you") gets a 4.
Nabisco Nilla Wafers ("simple goodness") get a 6, and Keebler Townhouse Bistro Multi-Grain Crackers (multi-grain! surely good for you, no?) get a 3 (no).
You'd expect fresh broccoli to get 100, as does Birds Eye Cooked Winter Squash. Grapefruits are 99, and sweet potatoes are 96. But Vlasic Old Fashioned Sauerkraut gets a 4.
Skim milk comes in at 91, 1 percent milk at 91 and 2 percent at 55. Capri Sun gets a 1. So does Odwalla Pomegranate Limeade with 20 percent juice. Who would buy products like these if they actually knew what poison -- I mean, um, empty calories -- they amount to, and if they had manifestly better alternatives an arm's reach away?
The NuVal numbers are the brainchild of David L. Katz, M.D., MPH, an adjunct associate professor at the Yale School of Medicine. A dozen doctors and nutritionists, funded by the nonprofit Griffin Hospital in Derby, Conn., developed the scoring system, based on 30 factors including vitamins, fiber, salt, sugar, fat quality, protein quality, glycemic load, energy density and calories. From the public health evidence about those factors, they constructed an algorithm that processes the data into a single number. As new food science research is published, and as products are reformulated by their manufacturers, the algorithm and the individual scores are updated. (If that's happened to any of the products I've mentioned, I'll be glad to revise the numbers online.)
It's a miracle that some 30 retail food chains are adopting the scores. You won't find them at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, and from the locations page of the NuVal website it looks like the only chain in my neck of the woods -- Kroger, which in Los Angeles owns Ralphs and Food4Less -- is running a "pilot program in select areas" (Kentucky, apparently). But Lunds and Byerley's, which use NuVal, are venerable markets in Minnesota, as is King Cullen on Long Island, N.Y.; grocers in the NuVal fold aren't just a bunch of crunchy hippies.
As you might imagine, there's been pushback. Ocean Spray, whose Light Cranberry Juice Cocktail gets a 2, says NuVal doesn't reflect their product's urinary tract health benefits. Sara Lee, whose Ball Park hotdogs get a 7, says other Ball Park products score higher. General Mills complains that details of the algorithm aren't public, as does the National Consumers League, which turns out to be an astroturf front for the likes of Monsanto, Bristol Myers Squibb, the Chemical Specialties Manufacturers Association and the National Meat Association. And according to Dr. David Katz, the NuVal founder, the algorithm "has been described in detail in peer-reviewed publications accessible to all. It has been made available in its entirety to research groups throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.; to federal agencies in the U.S.; to the Institute of Medicine; and to private entities that have requested such access."
I'm no food puritan. My culinary patrimony consists of shmaltz, gribines and kishka. (Don't ask.) I believe that the joylessness caused by renouncing "bad" foods -- and the guilt that's caused by consuming them -- conceivably undoes the good that's done by substituting celery for Oreos. I know that adding eye-popping 1-to-100 scores to grocery price tags won't cut down on gargantuan portion sizes; or make meals more mindful occasions; or alert us to our complicity with corporate farming; or prevent the processed food industry from addicting us to salt, sugar and fat; or get our butts off the couch and start moving. But giving consumers a no-brainer tool while they're standing in the supermarket aisle is surely a more promising way to stop the slow-motion suicide we call the American way of eating than declaring March to be National Nutrition Month.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>How to Avoid Meteorstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27123252013-02-18T20:43:22-05:002013-04-20T05:12:01-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/say that meteor explosions like the one last week injuring 1,200 people in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, are 100-year events. The last time a big meteor crashed into our planet, incinerating 80 million trees in the Tunguska region of Siberia, was in 1908. So if you're feeling a bit panicky after Chelyabinsk, relax. Odds are it'll be a century before something like that happens again -- though it's understandable if you decide to cross the Trans-Siberian railroad off your bucket list.
On the other hand, the same cosmos that visits us with 10,000-ton space rocks also sends earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes and lightning our way. Every second, the division of trillions of cells in our bodies risks minuscule, morbid mistakes in our DNA. Every time we get in a car, we take our lives in our hands.
It's the randomness that's galling, the notion that we're not in charge. Even within the city of Chelyabinsk, flying glass in one building sliced through tendons, while next door the windows were unshattered. The damage was "without a discernible pattern," said a spokesman for the governor of the region. That's how shock waves work, said an MIT planetary scientist. No wonder they're called shock waves. It's shocking how little control we have, how contingent these catastrophes can be.
God's plan, God's strange and mysterious ways, God's promise of a less capricious afterlife: these get some people through the arbitrary night. Through the millennia, theodicy -- the attempt to square divine justice with the bad things that happen to good people -- has come up with explanations: the free will that God gave to man; the evil of Satan; the inevitability of suffering; the tsimtsum, the Kabbalistic concept of a God who contracted from the world in order to create it; the distinction between a benevolent God of morality named Adonai and a tragic God of nature named Elohim.
The Enlightenment advantaged scientific explanations of the universe, and historic events from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake to the 20th-century Shoah have tipped the scales toward the secular for many a former believer. Each 9/11, each Newtown, reopens the wound of God's perverse omnipotence. The governor of Chelyabinsk told reporters why there had been no fatalities: "God directed danger away." How grateful would he have been to that God if Chelyabinsk had looked more like Tunguska?
But secularism sucks. It is hard to tell children that the universe is indifferent to them. It is unacceptable that chance changes everything all the time. It is difficult to tell ourselves the running story of our lives -- to find meaning in our personal narratives -- when the plot points come not from character or merit, but from rolls of the dice, bolts from the blue, madmen, freaks of nature, lousy luck.
There are of course rational ways to deal with this dilemma. We buckle up and drive defensively. We buy insurance and earthquake kits. We exercise, wear sunscreen and eat kale.
There are spiritual ways, too -- ones that don't require twisting ourselves into theological pretzels. Knowing we may die tomorrow, we seize today, smell the roses, hug our children close. We count our blessings without positing a Blesser, thank our lucky stars without believing in fortune, fate or destiny.
Living well is the best revenge. I have friends whose toddler died suddenly of an undetected heart defect. "What do you do with that?" I asked the boy's grieving father as, horrified, I fought thinking the unthinkable. "How do you go on? What do you learn? What do you do?" "Drink better wine," he said.
There's a poem by Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
We are sleepwalkers, amnesiacs, oblivious of everyday miracles, comically reliant on benign biopsies and Siberian meteors to remind us to be mindful.
We're about to learn whether Hurricane Sandy decisively awakened us to our planet's manmade mortality. "Climate Change a Bigger Extinction Threat than Asteroids" was the headline in a newsletter last week. Sixty-five million years ago, when an asteroid hit the sea off the Yucatan Peninsula, 70 percent of all living species disappeared in the climate change that followed. Today, as Michael D. Lemonick's Climate Central piece explained, "many scientists believe another mass extinction is under way -- this one entirely of our own making."
No one can avoid living where a chunk of space rock explodes with the force of 20 Hiroshima bombs. But the causes of climate change, unlike the contingencies of the interstellar cosmos, are within our control. There remains to us a small window of time when we can still bend the curve of global warming. It will be a manmade miracle if we don't go back to sleep.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>CNN Snags First Papal Primary Debatetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26620472013-02-11T10:53:15-05:002013-04-13T05:12:01-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/papabili will first square off on March 1 in a debate moderated by CNN anchor Candy Crowley.
"The tough thing was deciding who's eligible," said Zucker, explaining why former CNN contributor Pat Buchanan did not make the cut. "We thought a ten percent threshold in the College of Cardinals was the right place to draw the line."
Said CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger, "Scola, Ouellet and Sandri are the clear frontrunners," naming cardinals from Milan, Canada and Argentina. "It's really theirs to lose."
It is not known whether the lame duck pontiff will live-Tweet the debate, but Vaticanisti note that Twitter handle @justratzinger was recently claimed.
The Sistine Chapel beat out St. Anselm's College in Manchester, New Hampshire as the site of the event. Co-sponsoring with CNN will be L'Osservatore Romano's YouTube channel, which will livestream the event.
Ground rules include a CNN pledge that Crowley will toe the line on infallibility and not ask follow-ups quoting encyclicals, fiats or bulls.
Fox News chief Roger Ailes could not be reached for comment, but a Fox spokesperson denied that a fracas between Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly to anchor is the reason CNN got the first nod from the Holy See.
NOTE: This piece is satirical. All quotations are fabrications for the purpose of satire.]]>Being American Is Bad for Your Healthtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26132222013-02-04T16:34:54-05:002013-04-06T05:12:01-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
That stark sentence appears in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it comes from the authors of a landmark report -- "Shorter Lives, Poorer Health" -- on differences among high-income countries.
You probably already know that America spends more on health care than any other country. That was one of the few facts to survive the political food fight pretending to be a serious national debate about the Affordable Care Act.
But the airwaves also thrummed with so many sound bites from so many jingoistic know-nothings claiming that America has the best health care system in the world that today, most people don't realize how shockingly damaging it is to your wellness and longevity to be born in the U.S.A.
This is made achingly clear in the study of the "U.S. health disadvantage" recently issued by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine, which was conducted over 18 months by experts in medicine and public health, demography, social science, political science, economics, behavioral science and epidemiology.
Compare the health of the American people with our peer nations -- with Britain, Canada and Australia; with Japan; with the Scandinavian countries; with France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Side by side with the world's wealthy democracies, America comes in last, and over the past several decades, it's only gotten worse.
With few exceptions -- like death rates from breast cancer -- we suck. Our newborns are less likely to reach their first birthday, or their fifth birthday. Our adolescents die at higher rates from car crashes and homicides, and they have the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections. Americans have the highest incidence of AIDS, the highest obesity rates, the highest diabetes rates among adults 20 and older, the highest rates of chronic lung disease and heart disease and drug-related deaths.
There is one bright spot. Americans who live past their 75th birthday have the longest life expectancy. But for everyone else -- from babies to baby boomers and beyond -- your chances of living a long life are the butt-ugly worst among all the 17 rich nations in our peer group.
In case you're tempted to blow off these bleak statistics about American longevity by deciding that they don't apply to someone like you -- before you attribute them to, how shall we put it, the special burdens that our racially and economically diverse and culturally heterogeneous nation has nobly chosen to bear -- chew on this: "Even non-Hispanic white adults or those with health insurance, a college education, high incomes, or healthy behaviors appear to be in worse health (e.g., higher infant mortality, higher rates of chronic diseases, lower life expectancy) in the United States than in other high-income countries." And by the way, "the nation's large population of recent immigrants is generally in better health than native-born Americans."
Why are we trailing so badly? Some of the causes catalogued by the report:
The U.S. public health and medical care systems: Our employer -- and private insurance-- based health care system has long set us apart from our peer nations, who provide universal access. The right loves to rail against "socialized medicine," but on health outcomes, the other guys win.
Individual behavior: Tobacco, diet, physical inactivity, alcohol and other drug use and sexual practices play a part, but there's not a whole lot of evidence that uniquely nails Americans' behavior. The big exception is injurious behavior. We loves us our firearms, and we don't much like wearing seat belts or motorcycle helmets.
Social factors: Stark income inequality and poverty separate us from other wealthy nations, who also have more generous safety nets and demonstrate greater social mobility than we do. In America, the best predictor of good or bad health is the income level of your zip code.
Physical and social environmental factors: Toxins harm us, but our pollution isn't notably worse than in other rich nations. The culprit may be our "built environment": less public transportation, walking and cycling; more cars and car accidents; less access to fresh produce; more marketing and bigger portions of bad food.
Policies and social values: To me, this is the richest, and riskiest, ground broken by the report, which asks whether there's a common denominator -- upstream, root causes -- that help explain why the United States has been losing ground in so many health domains since the 1970s:
Certain character attributes of the quintessential American (e.g. dynamism, rugged individualism) are often invoked to explain the nation's great achievements and perseverance. Might these same characteristics also be associated with risk-taking and potentially unhealthy behaviors? Are there health implications to Americans' dislike of outside (e.g., government) interference in personal lives and in business and marketing practices?
My answer is yes, but I'd plant the problem in recent history and politics, not in timeless quintessentials. Since the 1980s, in the sunny name of "free enterprise," there's been a ferocious, ideologically driven effort to demonize government, roll back regulations, privatize the safety net, stigmatize public assistance, gut public investment, weaken consumer protection, consolidate corporate power, delegitimize science, condemn anti-poverty efforts as "class warfare" and entrust public health to the tender mercies of the marketplace.
The epidemic of gun violence has been fueled by anti-government paranoia stoked by the gun manufacturers' lobby, the NRA. The spike in consumption of high-fructose corn syrup has been driven by the food industry's business decisions and its political (i.e., financial) clout. In the name of fiscal conservatism, plutocrats push for cuts in discretionary expenditures on maternal health, early childhood education, social services and public transportation. The same tactic that once prolonged tobacco's death grip -- the confection of a phony scientific "controversy" -- now undermines efforts to combat climate change, which is as big a danger to public health as any disease.
More accidents may be shortening our lifespans. But we're not getting sicker by accident.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>The Post-Kumbaya Presidenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25234252013-01-22T08:46:10-05:002013-03-24T05:12:02-04:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
Four years ago, while Democrats danced at inaugural balls, Reps. Cantor and Ryan dined at The Caucus Room, a Capitol Hill steakhouse, along with other top Republicans, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, and Sens. Jim DeMint, John Kyl and Tom Coburn.
Barack Obama's presidency was by then all of eight hours old. At midday, the man who rocketed to prominence in 2004 by declaring America to be not red states or blue states, but the United States, had told the nation, "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics." With those words, and the applause of 1.8 million Americans on the National Mall still ringing in their ears, some 15 GOP leaders discreetly gathered in the restaurant's private room to decide what to do with the olive branch the president had extended.
As we know from a new Frontline documentary based in part on Robert Draper's book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, the Caucus Room caucus decided, in Draper's words, "to fight Obama on everything -- this meant unyielding opposition to every one of the Obama administration's legislative initiatives."
No matter what was on Obama's agenda, even if it was identical to Republican proposals, they planned to attack it. No matter how many times Obama met with them, sought common ground or negotiated with himself, their strategy was to keep the number of Republican votes he got for anything whatsoever as close to zero as possible.
This happened before there was a Tea Party, before there were 87 far-right GOP freshmen, before the birthers had migrated from the lunatic fringe to the party's mainstream. The economy was in crisis; a second Great Depression was conceivable. Also conceivable was actually working together on behalf of the country. But from night one of day one, the Republicans decided to torpedo Obama, a sentiment echoed the next year when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said publicly that denying President Obama a second term was his top priority.
Now that second term has begun. The president has had plenty of experience with Republican intransigence. He has learned the hard way that you can't sing Kumbaya as a solo. But even so, in his second inaugural he said that the oath he swore, "like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction." Though he surely has the Republicans' number by now, he said, nevertheless, that "we cannot mistake absolutism for principle," that we cannot "treat name-calling as reasoned debate." Was any of that more than wishful thinking?
Seven times he said "together"; five times he said "we, the people." Does he really think his opponents are capable of collaborating, or is he just laying down a marker to collect when they behave badly?
A lot is riding on the answer. "We will respond to the threat of climate change," he promised at heartening length; "we will preserve our planet." But scores of Republican science-deniers hold very safe seats in gerrymandered House districts; they will face no electoral penalty for sticking it to the president every chance they get. Immigration reform, tax reform, school reform, gun control: It's hard to imagine Luntz, Gingrich & Co. working up a different playbook for dealing with the 2012 Obama agenda in a back room at steakhouse 2.0 than they did four years ago.
Though the president didn't put a fix for Citizens United in his inaugural address -- isn't fighting political corruption as important as the long shot legislation that made it into the speech? -- he did use the word "citizen" eight times. He said it at the top ("fellow citizens," instead of the traditional "fellow Americans"), and he said it repeatedly in the peroration.
I connect that word "citizen" with something else he said. Between going after absolutism and rejecting name-calling, he said that we cannot "substitute spectacle for politics." In an age when the public holds politicians in such low esteem, it's so striking that he chose to use "politics" as a positive term.
Politics is what citizens do -- that's what I took him to mean. Spectacles need spectators; democracies need citizens. Spectacles treat citizens as consumers, markets, eyeballs to sell to advertisers. Politics treat citizens as stakeholders, constituents -- people to listen to, not just persuade. Spectacles are circuses to distract us; citizens know the risk we run of amusing ourselves to death.
The most important political event of the past week may turn out to be neither the inaugural, nor the sirloin-fueled cabal it may have prompted, but rather the morphing of Obama for America into Organizing for Action. Obama for America was an attempt to convert his 2008 ground game into a grassroots group at the Democratic National Committee, but it barely played a part in his first term's legislative battles. Organizing for Action will try not to make that mistake again. His 2012 top command is determined to make the 2012 vote the beginning, not the end, of political action. His first term was about negotiations between party elites; his second term will be about mobilizing citizen power.
That thrilling phrase in his second inaugural -- "Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall" -- is about citizens, not spectators, about activists, not audiences. If Washington actually ends up, despite steakhouse obstructionism, doing something important about climate change or guns or anything else on the president's shortlist, it will not be because we saw his inauguration on television, but because we took his fate, and ours, in our own hands.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>Fear of Funtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23853352012-12-31T07:52:56-05:002013-03-02T05:12:02-05:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
You can predict what that entertainment might be like just by extrapolating from technology that already exists.
Start by imagining CGI on steroids, a future version of the computer-generated imaging that today enables battalions of post-production wizards working for movie-makers like James Cameron and Peter Jackson to put up on the screen real-seeming 3D renderings of anything that anyone can dream up.
Add to that the successor to the virtual reality technology now used in Google goggles, which relocates those digital fantasies from the screen into the real space all around us, but swap the goggles for contact lenses or neural implants.
Combine that with the power to convincingly simulate the feel of touching objects that don't exist, which haptic gloves can currently approximate, and extend that capacity to your whole body, whose entire anatomy will become an exquisitely sensitive, interactive input device, the nth gen of game controllers like Wii and Kinect.
Throw in superb 360-degree sound, plus a way to trigger micro-spurts of the molecules that cause the sensations of smell and taste.
Miniaturize everything down to the atomic scale, which is where computing is already going, so that the gizmos that do all this are featherweight and forgettable.
Store the content -- the entertaining stories and experiences that this technology delivers -- in the cloud, which is where more and more software is heading now, so that it's ubiquitous, available (for a price) to anyone in any place at any time.
And just as advances in processing power have turned laptops into animation and recording studios, imagine that this new entertainment content will be produced not only by the Comcasts and NewsCorps and Activisions, but also by scrappy startups, and kids in dorm rooms.
Think of the porn that will make possible.
And the first-person shooters.
And the trips to the rain forest, the Sistine Chapel, the moon, the gates of heaven and of hell.
It's not a question of whether the technology to confect and convey this digital dream, or nightmare, will one day exist; it's only a matter of when.
In 1975, as molecular biologists were recognizing the potential dangers of the recombinant DNA technology then becoming widespread, Paul Berg, a future Nobel Prize-winner, organized a conference at Asilomar State Beach in California, where some 140 researchers, doctors and lawyers drew up voluntary principles of self-regulation, in order to prevent labs -- both at academic institutions and in industry -- from unleashing untold horrors on humanity. Today, it's next to impossible to conceive of a comparable convening of itself by the entertainment industry and the innovation labs that supply them with new wonders.
It's easy to brush off the National Rifle Association's response to the Newtown massacre: Violent video games have created a culture of violence that has spawned deranged killers. It's easy because, for starters, there's no scientific evidence connecting the dots between exposure to video game violence and actual violent behavior.
But there's plenty of research supporting what we all intuit: Entertainment really does influence us. It affects what we know, how we feel and how we behave. If it didn't, there wouldn't be an advertising industry, or propaganda films or Sesame Street, and DJs wouldn't be pied pipers, Putin wouldn't have prosecuted Pussy Riot, Plato wouldn't have banned poets, Romans wouldn't have run circuses, Uncle Tom's Cabin would have just been a best-seller and Sheherazade couldn't have saved her life by withholding the endings of the stories she told.
There's a debateraging now about whether the movie Zero Dark Thirtydepicts torture as an effective way to get intelligence. Critics are passionate because the stakes seem so high -- for politics, history, public opinion and public policy. We've been here before. In one of the best-known storylines on the series 24, Jack Bauer used torture to get useful information from terrorists. The scenes were so powerful that, as Jane Mayer reported, the dean of West Point flew to Hollywood to meet with 24's writers and producers to explain that real U.S. soldiers -- instead of paying attention to their teachers and their textbooks; instead of learning that torture is wrong, counterproductive, inefficient and produces false intelligence -- were instead trusting the instruction about interrogation methods that they were tacitly getting from a fictional, made up TV show.
The NRA is obscenely wrong about the relation between gun regulation and gun violence. But before we dismiss its case about popular culture out of hand, we might want to take seriously the way that entertainment thrills, enthralls, enrages, instructs and inspires us, all of us, no matter how sophisticated and media-savvy we may think we are. One fine day, awesome technology will enable the pleasure industry to pretty much erase the line between simulation and reality. I wonder whether we'll arrive at that point without first having wrestled with the consequences that might follow from that fun.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>Sandy Hook, Sandy and the Politics of Learned Helplessnesstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23118172012-12-16T18:16:03-05:002013-02-15T05:12:01-05:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
It was my friend Judith, a wise woman, a mother and grandmother, on the phone from across the country, the evening of the day of the Newtown massacre, trying to figure out how to enlist the first lady in a campaign against gun violence.
From the email Judith wrote her: "Unless from the top with unyielding outrage we rein in and destroy the gun lobby -- unless we stigmatize the NRA as we stigmatized the Ku Klux Klan -- we will be robbed of any claim we have to our children's and grandchildren's respect."
She was calling to get my help to get Michelle Obama's attention. I was appalled by how effortlessly cynical was the response that came out of my mouth.
This one is different, I said. That's what everyone is saying, and it's true. Mowing down first-graders with a Bushmaster ("for us, building rifles and carbines is more than a job -- it's a passion") turns a new page in hell.
But even if Michelle Obama does take this on; even if her husband, freed from the calculus of re-election, summons us in a soaring second inaugural to curb the culture of gun violence; even if in his State of the Union address to Congress he demands a ban on assault weapons, on high-count magazines and on armor-piercing bullets, and he calls for an end to firearms sales at gun shows, and requests funds for mental health screening and violence prevention -- no matter what the first lady or the president or millions of mothers marching on Washington or the rest of us may say or do, neither the House nor the Senate will pass such a law. The NRA is simply too powerful. There are too many cowards in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, who will protect their seats before they protect their fellow citizens.
By the end of the weekend, I realized that "cynical" isn't the right word to describe my reaction to Judith's idea to recruit Michelle Obama. Nor is Realpolitik. Here's what it is: learned helplessness -- a 21st century disease of the American soul, born of the dysfunction of our political system. It's the sinking admission that we are powerless to be the change we've been waiting for. It's the painful evidence that the Washington deck is stacked against the kind of gun regulation that even cops and most of the NRA's own members favor. It's the gut-punching recognition that no horror, however unspeakable, will turn that around. This wail is a civic sickness, and I got it bad, and that ain't good.
And it's not just about guns.
The devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy was widely characterized as a wake-up call on climate change. It dragged the global environmental crisis into the U.S. presidential campaign at the eleventh hour, after its disgraceful absence from national debate. It was hailed as a shot of courage for timid lawmakers to consider a carbon tax, and to abjure the myth of "clean coal," and to confront the real risks of exploiting oil shale and tar sands. It was an opportunity to alert the public to the fraudulent claim that scientists differ on climate change, a hoax financed by the fossil fuel industry and modeled on the phony controversy over cigarettes causing cancer that was manufactured by Big Tobacco. At the end of August, in Tampa, Mitt Romney got laughs for saying, "President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet"; only two months later, when Sandy brought misery and death to the eastern seabord, it became clear that the joke was on us.
Public opinion polls bear that up. The same day as the Sandy Hook slayings, an Associated Press-Gfk poll was released; it found that 4 out of 5 Americans say global warming will be a serious U.S. problem unless action is taken to reduce it. "Belief and worry about climate change," said the AP,
"are inching up among Americans in general, but concern is growing faster among people who don't often trust scientists on the environment. In follow-up interviews, some of those doubters said they believe their own eyes as they've watched thermometers rise, New York City subway tunnels flood, polar ice melt and Midwestern farm fields dry up."
Reporting this poll, The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, told its congressional readers that "57 percent of adults believe the U.S. government should do a 'great deal' about global warming." Will it? I can imagine inspiring words about climate change from the president in January. I can believe that grass-roots efforts like Bill McKibben's 350.org will continue to gain traction on college campuses. I have no doubt that the more stories about climate change that Americans hear and see, the more they will demand action from their representatives.
But as things stand, it is virtually inconceivable to me that our lawmakers will rise to the challenge. The petroleum industry swings as big a bat in Washington as the gun lobby. Even if the president has the second-term courage to propose it, our corrupt campaign finance system won't make an enlightened exception for a cap-and-trade bill. The fear of losing a race exceeds the fear of losing a planet.
Are special interests invincible? No, and each counter-example is a ray of hope, something we could all use this season. Last August, in the heat of the campaign, President Obama courageously doubled fuel efficiency standards by 2025, which will cut greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks in half. When the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 was passed in 1994, it was called "a blow to the credibility and power of the nation's gun lobby," proof that the "NRA is no longer bullet proof." Still, I can't help noting that the CAFE standards were raised by executive action, and didn't require the assent of the Tea Party Congress. Or that the 1994 assault weapons ban was able to pass the House (by a razor-thin margin of 216 votes) because the NRA suffered 38 Republican defections, led by GOP leader Bob Michel of Illinois, who arguably was able to reverse his previous opposition to the ban because he -- like several NRA-friendly Democrats who also voted for it -- was about to retire from Congress. That fall, when Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took over the House, the narrative was born, and persists to this day, that bucking the NRA is political suicide.
This time around, I'd love my pessimism to be proven wrong. I'd be thrilled if Michelle Obama were the answer. I'd be grateful to rekindle my confidence in democracy. Learned helplessness is the status quo's most pernicious enabler, and I welcome any ladder out of this pit. But whether it's guns or climate change, poverty or plutocracy, war or water: whatever problem most troubles any of us, I'm convinced that the way forward requires a transformational solution to the power of money and fear to determine our national fate.
This is my column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. You can read more of my columns here, and email me there if you'd like.]]>Two, Three, Many Grover Norquiststag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22048782012-11-28T15:20:00-05:002013-01-28T05:12:01-05:00Marty Kaplanhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/
Norquist, in case you don't watch too much cable news, is the Washington lobbyist who for years has threatened hundreds of conservative candidates with defeat unless they signed a pledge to never, ever vote to raise taxes. Until now, it worked. The massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent of Americans is arguably a consequence of his purity test, as is the size of the deficit and the gridlock on the Hill. But since the election, a panicky Norquist has watched one member of Congress after another take off his purity ring. And you know what? No brimstone has hailed down on them. Far from being omnipotent, Grover Norquist turns out to have electile dysfunction.
In fact, many of Washington's mighty now fear not being feared. They're right to tremble, because the jig is up.
The truth is that Mitch McConnell is bluffing. John Boehner is a paper tiger. And Lindsey Graham is wearing no clothes. (Ewww.)
For years, Senate minority leader McConnell's explicit goal has been ensuring President Obama's failure. He's prevented hundreds of bills from coming to a vote -- from even being debated at all -- by perverting the filibuster's use. It once was a rarity: Lyndon Johnson faced just one filibuster in his six years as majority leader. But in Harry Reid's six years in the same job, he's faced 386.
Now that Democrats are talking about some incremental changes in the filibuster rule -- like permitting bills at least to be debated, and requiring filibusters to actually take the floor and talk -- McConnell is predicting that "the fighting, the bitterness and the gridlock will only get worse." It "would poison party relations even more," he warns, and "would prevent the very possibility of compromise and threaten to make the disputes of the past few years look like pillow fights." Translation: If Democrats take away my guns, I'm going to get a nuclear bomb. Reality: If Democrats call McConnell's bluff, the country will easily see through his attempt to weasel out of accountability for his own obstructionism.
On the other side of the Hill, House Speaker John Boehner is playing both good cop and bad cop in the budget negotiations. As nice guy, he says he's all about doing what's best for the country. As tough guy, he represents a hundred or so members who say they're willing to see the United States get its credit rating downgraded again, and even default on its debt, rather than compromise on a balance of revenue increases and spending cuts. President Obama nails this for what it is: taking our economy hostage. But Speaker Boehner says that raising the debt ceiling is his "leverage," that it has to be part of a quid pro quo: "There is a price for everything."
Two years ago, when the president had a showdown with the hostage-takers, he blinked. If he stands his ground this time, reckless House members will again try to force Boehner to refuse a deal that includes raising taxes on the wealthy. But it's not inevitable that the country will blame both sides equally for intransigence. The president has a bully pulpit. It's not beyond his wit to explain who the real obstructionists are. And as the election demonstrated, it's not beyond the capacity of the American people to see through the propaganda that the right's billionaires -- I mean, jobs creators -- will no doubt unleash. If Obama thinks that the only way to strike a budget bargain is to capitulate to the economic terrorists who pull Boehner's strings, then unfairness is already baked into the deal. But 2012 is not 2010. Boehner can see that the Norquist era is ending. He fears the national opprobrium that his suicidal caucus will bring down on themselves and on him. It's that paper tiger -- and not some mad beast who must be mollified at all costs -- whom I hope the president knows he's negotiating with.
And then there's South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who -- together with two other GOP Senators, Arizona's John McCain and New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte -- has vowed to put a hold on Susan Rice's nomination to be Secretary of State, if President Obama should nominate her. Now, there's a game of truth-or-dare I hope the president plays.
In the pack mind of Sunday talk show bookers, those senators have stature. But I suspect that in the public's mind, McCain and Graham are increasingly seen as partisan hacks smearing a talented public servant. McCain is a cranky grudge-keeper getting even with Ambassador Rice for being an effective Obama surrogate in 2008; Graham is McCain's mini-me; Ayotte's involvement is a transparent attempt to prevent this from looking like some old white men ganging up on a woman of color. They want to force Obama to abandon Rice, nominate Senator John Kerry instead, and pave the way for a Massachusetts special election that could replace him with Scott Brown, the Republican senator whom Elizabeth Warren just beat. These are not three giants. They're three Grovers. The president should welcome the chance to let them tar themselves with their own brush.
Karl Rove has a glass jaw, too. So do the Koch brothers, and Sheldon Adelson. Did you see how miserably ineffectual their big money was in the election? There are plenty of Grovers out there. If the Democrats have the spine to do it, this is a ripe moment to reveal the impotence of the bullies in the political playground.