In the last few years, the way journalists write about suicide has changed greatly. We now say that people "died by suicide" instead of "committed suicide." Other measures are taken to try to prevent glamorizing suicide, blame the person who died, or to inadvertently encourage copycats.
This is all generally to the good, and well-intentioned. (I don't love all the guidelines, which urge journalists to avoid describing "personal details" about people who have died in favor of keeping the information general, because that renders an individual somewhat faceless, IMHO.) A story in the New York Times demonstrates a complication with the approach: It can obscure clarity.
AMSTERDAM — One hundred and thirty years ago, Vincent van Gogh awoke in his room at an inn in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, and went out, as he usually did, with a canvas to paint. That night, he returned to the inn with a fatal gunshot wound. He died two days later, on July 29, 1890.
Scholars have long speculated about the sequence of events on the day of the shooting, and now Wouter van der Veen, a researcher in France, says he has discovered a large piece of the puzzle: the precise location where van Gogh created his final painting, “Tree Roots.” The finding could help to better understand how the artist spent his final day of work.
Now: If you know anything about art history, you know that van Gogh died by his own hand. The opening paragraphs obscure that fact. You know he was shot. You don't know who!
More than a dozen paragraphs go by before clarity is offered:
There has long been debate about which painting was van Gogh’s last work, because he tended not to date his paintings. Many people believe it was “Wheatfield With Crows,” because Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic “Lust for Life” depicts van Gogh, played by Kirk Douglas, painting that work as he goes mad, just before killing himself.
This is a story in which van Gogh's death is a critical element: Finding out where the painting originated probably isn't a big NYT story if not for the fact of his death. But it feels like that critical element is the object of hide-and-seek in this story. I suspect the recent conventions on how to write about suicide shaped this approach. Perhaps I'm wrong.
I don't mean to be insensitive. I would like to figure out a way forward that is sensitive and yet doesn't create confusion instead of clarity. Any ideas out there?
I think I've said this before, but it is worth repeating in the current context: People who want a better understanding of China -- as the United States moves toward a more confrontational posture toward that country -- could help themselves a lot by watching Chinese movies.
I'm thinking particularly of the IP MAN series, starring Donnie Yen. You can find all four movies on Netflix right now.
The movies are fantastic martial arts flicks, so they're worth watching from that standpoint alone. But they are also loosely biographical, telling the story of a real Wing Chun master -- he was Bruce Lee's mentor -- and taken as a whole, they signify something about China's relationship with the west.
The first movie takes place in Foshan, China, around the time of Japan's 1937 invasion. The Japanese oppress the Chinese, Ip Man defeats a Japanese martial arts hotshot in single combat competition, and his countrymen are given the pride they need to defeat the aggressor.
In the second movie, Ip Man moves to Hong Kong -- ruled by the British, who are snarling, sneering colonialists. Ip Man defeats a gigantic English brute named Twister. The whole affair leads to a corrupt British officer getting his comeuppance.
In the third movie -- well, this one's a little different. Ip is still in Hong Kong and the story basically revolves around him proving the superiority of Wing Chun over other fighting styles. (Also, Mike Tyson is involved. Yes, it's ridiculous.)
But in the fourth movie, Ip Man goes to the United States, is treated as inferior by arrogant, racist Americans. Ip defeats the most arrogant American in single combat competition, and his countrymen in San Francisco find newfound pride.
You get it. It's a story of a proud Chinese man refuting the "weak man of Asia" stereotypes that justified decades upon decades of outsider incursions to demonstrate that Chinese are just as strong, and maybe even a little better, than the outsiders who have misjudged them. Some of this is propaganda -- movies don't get made in China without official sanction -- but it is also rooted in the last 200 years of Chinese history.
It's not just Ip Man. Chinese historical epics -- especially those set since the beginning of the 20th century -- are telling us a story.
• Westerners are big, bad, and haughty. “Ip Man 2” isn’t the only movie to depict white guys as oversized grunting meatheads. Check out this clip from “Fearless,” which is about the real-life martial artist Huo Yuanjia.
• If Westerners are bad, the Japanese are worse. It’s hard to find a Japanese man in these movies who isn’t playing the villain. No wonder: The Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s and 1940s is estimated to have killed at least 10 million Chinese civilians — some estimates range much higher. It’s safe to say that hurt feelings linger still.
So you wouldn’t expect “Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen” — a sequel of sorts to Bruce Lee’s “Fist of Fury” — to seem so triumphant: It ends, after all, with the Japanese invasion of China underway. But the closing moments are defiant, with Yen — him again — defeating a series of Japanese combatants and crushing the testicles of one particularly nasty officer, before disappearing to join the resistance.
• The Chinese are resilient, strong, and nationalistic in the face of such indignities. “Legend of the Fist” opens with Yen and his comrades winning a battle for the French against the Germans in World War I; “Bodyguards and Assassins” depicts fictionalized efforts to protect real-life nationalist Sun Yat-Sen from those who would do him harm.
In these movies, the setbacks for the Chinese against outsiders is always temporary. Nationalistic pride might go under cover, but it never disappears entirely. Even the worst defeats tend to be triumphs of the spirit.
Now: None of this is to say the Chinese government is good and Americans are bad, or anything so simplistic. The Chinese government is authoritarian in its treatment of the Uighurs and crackdown on dissent, and has even been murderous at times.
But it is also simplistic to go "America good, Chinese government bad." Not just because President Trump has his own authoritarian inclinations, but because in a conflict between America and China, the Chinese people are going to be factoring the ugly history of outside domination in their views of the conflict. They might not think that America is merely aiming for their freedom, but that America intends to limit their country's ambitions, and perhaps eventually to subdue them.
I'm not quite sure how understanding this Chinese view of history modifies American policy going forward, but I can't help but sense that it should. There's a real history here. It matters. You don't have to be a scholar to begin to understand that. (It helps, but not everybody has the time or interest.) All you have to do is watch a few movies.
Here's a description of Sunflower State, a "Democratic-linked" PAC, and what it's up to:
The super PAC, Sunflower State, formed on Monday and two days later launched its first TV ad, focused on Kris Kobach and Rep. Roger Marshall, two of the Republicans running in the Aug. 4 primary. National Republicans have expressed concern that Kobach — the former secretary of state who lost the 2018 governor's race to Democrat Laura Kelly — would put the seat in jeopardy if he becomes the nominee, while Marshall has attempted to consolidate support from the establishment in the primary.
The ad is engineered to drive conservative voters toward Kobach. A narrator in the ad calls Kobach "too conservative" because he "won't compromise" on building President Donald Trump's border wall or on taking a harsher stance on relations with China. By contrast, the ad labels Marshall as a "phony politician" who is "soft on Trump."
I think this is bad politics -- see Liam Donovan's tweet above. Being too-smart-by-half, tactically, could end up biting Democrats in the butt.
But it is also bad for democracy. I'd rather see a Democrat win the US Senate seat that Kobach is vying for, but if we're going to get a Republican -- and remember, Kansas hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate in forever -- I'd like it to be the least-bad Republican. I don't love Roger Marshall, the establishment GOP pick for the race, but he's not Kobach, whose ambitions need to be nipped in the bud. It's more difficult to nip them if Democrats egg him on, or put him over the top.
Rather than try to game the system, it's better for us all if we can work to put the best candidates possible in office.
Here is how I deal with the stress of being stuck mostly in a small house with a kid who hasn't seen his friends in four months:
I go to Sonic every day at noon and order a large iced tea.
I sit there for an hour in the family minivan, more or less, but basically until I've finished eating all the ice in the cup.
It gets me out of the house. I can sit in the shade for an hour, socially distanced. I can get away from the people I am around all the time. And it gives structure to the day.
I'm sure there is a better way of getting these benefits than sitting at Sonic every day. But it seems to be what I am capable of right now.
Steve Pearlstein offers up a list of Democratic priorities to rein in the business community if they take control of government -- go read it -- and it sounds really expansive. "To the business lobby, they represent a nightmare scenario," he writes. "But whatever your view, there can be little doubt that in the short and medium run — the time horizon of most investors and corporate executives — these policy changes will reduce the profits of businesses and the incomes of those who own them."
I'm skeptical. While Democrats as a group are as progressive as they've been in awhile -- and Joe Biden is following suit -- it's also true the party has been mostly on-board the train that has produced greater inequality in America over the last generation or two. If Democrats take the Senate, it will probably be Chuck Schumer -- no enemy of high finance -- who shepherds the party's agenda through that chamber. Business interests may not get everything they want from Democratic governance (and if history is any guide, they'll pout and scream about socialism the whole way) but in all likelihood they'll still be doing pretty well.
Juliette Kayyem argues that, in Portland, Homeland Security isn't the problem -- it's Trump:
Seemingly desperate to goad Democrats into a fight over law and order, the White House has deployed federal law-enforcement agents from the Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect statues on federal property from vandals. Agents from Customs and Border Protection and other branches of DHS are wearing military fatigues, snatching demonstrators from the streets, and even attacking protesters who by all accounts are peaceful. The Constitution did not contemplate the mobilization of federal assets to fight a war on graffiti. Never having requested the president’s help, local and state politicians in Portland are outraged. Yesterday afternoon, Trump announced an expansion of the program to a number of other cities to “help drive down violent crime.”
These events offer a reminder of how much discretionary power every American president exercises—and why voters shouldn’t give the job to someone whose instincts are fundamentally authoritarian.
The only thing that needs to be abolished is the Trump administration. When the president is bent on using executive power for purely political ends, the specifics of the executive-branch organizational chart do not matter.
She's right on one point: A president bent on abusing his power is going to abuse his power. Trump couldn't use the military, ultimately, to achieve these ends -- so he turned to DHS instead.
But she's also wrong.
The framers of the Constitution got a lot of things wrong, IMHO -- we don't need the Senate -- but they did embrace an underlying thought process that was smart: One way to prevent a president from abusing his powers is to limit the tools he has for abuse.
With respect to Kayyem's (I'm sure) honorable service, the Department of Homeland Security was always particularly ripe for abuse by an authoritarian-minded president, from its name on down. I pointed out this week how one DHS agency, Customs and Border Patrol, is pretty much rogue to begin with, and offered some possible solutions.
The underlying idea is to limit the agency, both in terms of manpower and authority. "Trump and his cronies would surely look for other ways to crack down on protesters," I wrote. "He will abuse any power he has, and claim powers the Constitution doesn't actually grant him. Congress, however, doesn't need to make it easy for him."
So, yes, abolish Trump. But let's also make it harder for any would-be Trumps -- Tucker Carlson, say, or Tom Cotton -- to follow in his footsteps and do even more damage. Abolish Trump and the DHS.
