The Ben and Joel Podcast: Steve Hayward

This week's podcast: "Steven F. Hayward, F.K. Weyerhauser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, historian and author of The Age of Reagan, co-author of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, and cookbook aficionado, joins Ben and Joel for a freewheeling conversation about the coming election, the environment, and U.S. foreign policy." Click on the link to download or listen.

The Guardian's Cool iPhone App

My review of The Guardian's iPhone app: "If there’s a success story to be found among “old media” institutions adapting to the Internet Era, The Guardian must be it. The venerable British newspaper has evolved nicely, expanding its audience—and its coverage—to serve U.S. readers who went online seeking alternative news sources. Now The Guardian has moved into the mobile arena, with a $4 self-titled app that ranks among the best in the news business."

More About the Tea Party and Racism

Kevin Drum points out another finding from the Washington Post study of the Tea Party: 11 percent of members contacted admitted that Obama's race, er, colored their outlook on him. Drum observes: "The taboos against admitting that race makes a difference are pretty strong, and if 11% of the tea party groups were willing to admit this in writing, it suggests that probably at least a quarter of them have similarly overt views. Maybe more. That's a helluva lot." Indeed. Wonder if this will change Jason Riley's mind about anything.

Tom Ricks is Wrong About Wikileaks

Tom Ricks has provided some of the most valuable reportage there is about the Iraq War, but this attitude confuses me: "Maybe I'm going soft, but the Wikileaks dump kind of makes me ill. The whole situation strikes me as a bit sordid. I worry that great newspapers are getting played. If the leaks brought great revelations, I might think differently, but so far I don't think I have been surprised by a single thing I've read."

I'm always confused when a reporter seems to be arguing against making more of the record available -- particularly when the argument is, essentially, "so what?" Even if the openness doesn't redraw the broad outlines of a story, the details represented in the Wikileaks dump still offer nuance and texture to what's known. And though I consider myself relatively well-informed about the state of the war, I was still surprised -- and disgusted -- by the level of human-rights abuses committed by the new Iraqi government. I already knew that it wasn't really all that "free" in our usual understandings of the term, but did I know that Iraqi soldiers were cutting off the fingers of adversaries? No, I didn't know that. I'm glad Wikileaks let me know.

Does the Tea Party Even Exist?

The Washington Post tried to contact every single Tea Party group in the nation: "Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general."

All I'll note is that every time I critique positions that seem to fly under the "Tea Party" banner, I'm told the movement is too diffuse or too young or too something to criticize in conventional terms. Now I wonder if the movement is anything more than barely focused inchoate rage.

The Strikes in France

I usually think the United States could use a little more social democracy. On the other hand, I find it difficult to sympathize with union members in France who are striking to avoid raising the retirement age to 62. I mean: Retiring at 60 sounds nice. I'm not sure it's a fundamental human right.

Why NPR Matters

Jim Fallows: "To hear the Fox/DeMint attack machine over the past week, NPR is simply a liberal counterpart to Fox -- a politically minded and opinion-driven organization that is only secondarily interested in gathering news. I believe that the mischaracterization is deliberate, and I know it is destructive and wrong."

The Great Bailout Backlash - NYTimes.com

Shorter Ross Douthat: We must punish our politicians for doing the right thing.

The Glorious Invasion of Grenada!

Today is the 27th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada, which is apparently a holy day for those who worship at the Shrine of Reagan. I'm not sure if the Grenada triumphalism has always been part of the conservative victory parade, or if that's a relatively recent development, but it's embarrassing either way. The story of Grenada is this: Our big military defeated Grenada's tiny military to control an island of no strategic importance on a flimsy pretext. It wasn't difficult, it wasn't necessary, and it didn't deserve the Clint Eastwood treatment. It was a way for Ronald Reagan to look tough without the dangers of quagmire. Pride in that "victory" is a bully's pride, hollow and a little bit shameful.

Queer Eye for the G.I.?

It's a measure of how far the gay rights movement has come that many (if not most) in the opposition feel the need to cloak that opposition in sober, relatively unbigoted language. Fred Phelps and his "God Hates Fags" signs are shocking to the conscience, in part, because lots of people who broadly share that idea refuse to share that language.

Luckily, there's the Washington Times and today's "Queer eye for the GI" editorial to give us a peek into the anti-gay id. Here's a small selection:

The destructive force unleashed by the Pentagon's collaboration with the leftist agenda is apparent from the circus created when homosexual activists like Dan Choi sashayed over to the Times Square recruiting center to make a political point in the short period in which the Phillips order was effective.

"Sashayed"? Sure, if you mean "strode purposefully into the recruiting station." It's a little different from mincing over in a feather boa, which is what the Times conveys.I suppose we should be grateful the Times decided not to use the slurs normally found on Fred Phelps' signs.

Aside from the transparent gay baiting (as Adam Serwer rightly called it), there's also this issue:

Pentagon officials have been pretending that they have not already made up their minds on this issue. Generals have issued blanket denials that the conclusions for the forthcoming working group report on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" have already been decided. It appears that as the White House rams its radical homosexual agenda through the military, too many generals and admirals are willing to sell their brothers in arms down the river if it means they can keep a shiny set of stars on their epaulets.

I'm not sure how this is substantively different from the "General Betray Us" ad that outraged conservative activists a couple of years ago. The Times is accusing the military's uniformed leadership of treason, basically, because they're not acting in accordance with the Times' agenda. It's ugly, ugly stuff.

Wall Street Journal: Black People Should Pay Attention to Black People Things Instead of Worrying Their Silly Little Heads About the Tea Party

SOURCE: Jason Riley: The NAACP's Unhealthy Tea Party Obsession - WSJ.com

There are few things more patronizing than telling black people what they really should be worried about, and the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley demonstrates this with uncommon clarity today:

The nation's unemployment rate is 9.6%, but it is 16.1% for blacks and an unconscionable 41% for black teens. Politicians continue to promote minimum-wage hikes that harm the job prospects of younger and less-skilled individuals, a disproportionate number of whom are black. Wal-Mart's attempts to open a store that would bring jobs and low-price goods to a depressed neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been thwarted repeatedly by labor unions. And the NAACP is issuing studies on the tea party movement?

I'd buy Riley's argument a bit more if he simply argued or even presented evidence that the NAACP is wrong to be concerned, as it is, that the movement gives a "platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots." Instead Riley dismisses the NAACP's report on the movement as a "smear" and moves to telling the organization what it should really be concerned about.

I know: Jason Riley is black, so of course this whole line of argument can't be patronizing, right? Maybe. But Riley's real purposes seem to be given away in his final paragraph.

It's hard to understand how an organization that says it's devoted to "end[ing] racial disparities" finds the time to rail against tea-party populism until you grasp that the NAACP is, first and foremost, a Democratic Party organ. The NAACP is pretending that the tea party threatens the interests of blacks because the tea party in fact threatens the interests of the Democratic left.

Remember, though, this critique is coming on the Wall Street Journal editorial page -- which is, first and foremost, a Republican Party organ. Kind of like the Tea Party movement itself. Which maybe is why it doesn't try to refute the NAACP's concerns about Tea Party racism and devotes its pages, instead, to what African-American organization should really be concerned about.

Gabriel Schoenfeld and Wikileaks

Gabe Schoenfeld's gangster motto.

Back in July, I critiqued a National Affairs essay by Gabriel Schoenfeld in which he suggested that big leaks of Defense Department documents -- he was, at the time, writing primarily about the Pentagon Papers from the Vietnam War -- amounted to an attack on democracy itself. Schoenfeld wrote critically of Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker in that case:

For better or worse, the American people in the Vietnam years had elected Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon; they had acted at the ballot box to make their leadership and policy preferences clear. Yet here was a mid-level bureaucrat, elected by no one and representing no one, entrusted with secrets he had pledged to the American people to protect, abusing that trust to force his own policy preferences upon a government chosen by the people.

My response then:

It's silly to argue that Ellsberg was "forcing" a policy outcome through his leaks: As Schoenfeld notes, Ellsburg wasn't an elected official -- he had no power at all to change American policy. But Ellsberg did give Americans insight into how the policy had been made, and how what they'd been told by their leaders differed from the reality of the war in Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, then, enabled real democratic self-governance -- he didn't short-circuit it.

Wikileaks' latest release of nearly 400,000 documents related to the Iraq War has brought forth fresh, but familiar, commentary from Schoenfeld. He writes at The Weekly Standard:

The real question is whether, in exchange for a bit of “insight, texture, and context” into the war, the breach has placed lives at risk. On this score the Pentagon statement is very grim. The leak, it says, exposes

secret information that could make our troops even more vulnerable to attack in the future. Just as with the leaked Afghan documents, we know our enemies will mine this information, looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment. This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. 

If this is true, much like Philip Agee, the renegade CIA officer who in the 1970s went around exposing the identities of undercover CIA agents, WikiLeaks is acting as an enemy of our democracy. Even if our laws cannot reach it, it should be treated accordingly.

This is exceedingly credulous on Schoenfeld's part. The Pentagon made similar noises back when Wikileaks released its trove of Afghanistan documents -- the problem being that there's no evidence that anybody was actually harmed by those leaks, which were (frankly) released with much less concern for the safety of parties in Afghanistan.

Schoenfeld continually invokes "democracy" in his criticism of leaks, but as Inigo Montoya once said: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Genuine democracy requires that the citizenry have the maximum-possible information to make informed decisions about the direction of government. The 400,000 Iraq documents show Americans, in rather more detail, what we've gained from our seven years in Iraq: An Iraqi government that cuts off the fingers of its own people and an empowered Iran. Schoenfeld doesn't tell us why American citizens shouldn't have access to this information; he accepts Pentagon assertions that the leaks could lead to some lost lives as sufficient proof of badness. Blindly believing the government, as Schoenfeld urges us to do, is corrosive to democracy.

There are surely bits of information that the public is best served by not knowing. The number of those bits is far fewer than the government keeps from our eyes. Schoenfeld responds to leaks by waving the flag furiously, ignoring that "democracy" is sometimes best served by those who break the rules to help us see our government more clearly.

Netflix Queue: "The Quick and the Dead"

Three thoughts about "The Quick and the Dead":

* Sam Raimi's 1995 film is clearly a riff on the old Clint Eastwood "Man With No Name" spaghetti westerns with Sergio Leone -- encompassing everything from the credited name of Sharon Stone's character ("Lady") to the Ennio Morricone-light soundtrack. And I'm really fine with that: Hollywood westerns are basically American mythmaking, anyway, so revisiting and tweaking those myths to put (say) a woman at the center of the action is fine by me. No, it's not history. But it can be fun -- as this flick mostly is. Still, Clint Eastwood never cried in his westerns; I wish Sharon Stone hadn't cried in hers.

* Then again, Sharon Stone -- though she was a producer on the film -- may not have been quite up to the acting level of her compatriots in this film: Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo Dicaprio, Gary Sinise, Keith David and a bunch of other character actors whose faces you'll certainly recognize. It's a powerhouse cast, and that unfortunately makes Stone's line readings a bit more noticeably thin.

* Then again, while it's a really entertaining film -- and I'm kind of shocked nobody turned it into a "Street Fighter" video game -- there are some real howlers in the script-writing department. TQATD's final line is this: "The law has come back to town." Delivered, I believe, without any awareness of irony. But it is, unfortunately, hilarious. But Raimi directed, and he knows a thing or two about hilarity in extreme situations, so maybe I should give the benefit of the doubt. It is, however Sharon Stone, so maybe I shouldn't.

* BONUS THOUGHT: Her persona has long since overwhelmed our notions of Sharon Stone, but I sometimes forget: She really was an extraordinarily beautiful woman back in the day.

Peggy Noonan, the Tea Party and the Establishment

I suspect that Peggy Noonan is being over-optimistic in her praise of the Tea Party in today's Wall Street Journal:

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!" They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

Sounds nice -- the Tea Party has helped the GOP see the error of its ways! -- but who will the Tea Party actually push to power in Congress next month? In all likelihood, um, John Boehner. He voted, of course, for the Bush Administration's unfunded Medicare drug plan -- probably the best example of the GOP's shamelessness about deficit spending -- and he shows every sign of being a servant of big business and other special interests that Tea Partiers supposedly disdain. And he's using that power to co-opt the supposedly pure Tea Party candidates before they even face election:

One tea-party-backed candidate to get Boehner's help is Steve Stivers, a former state legislator and lobbyist for Ohio's Bank One who has accused his Democratic opponent of supporting "taxpayer-funded bonuses given to failed Wall Street executives." Stivers's spokesman, John Damschroder, said he thinks the $14,000 was given - mostly before the state primary election - because "speaker-to-be Boehner knows how critical Ohio is to control of the House."

Boehner also has given $14,000 to Ohio candidate James Renacci, a former mayor, car dealer and nursing home operator who has attacked his Democratic opponent for having "lobbyist friends" and for attracting support from "special interests." Renacci spokesman James Slepian called the money "a vote of confidence" and a reflection of the importance that Boehner attaches to the race as a step toward Republican control of the House.

So it's difficult to buy the Tea Party of a vanguard of ideologically-cleansing purity within the GOP. It's returning to power the exact same people who ran Congress during the 1990s and most of the last decade. This revolution feels awfully stale.

Time To Slash Defense Spending?

As politicians promise to start cutting spending in Washington after this fall's elections, there's growing talk -- even among some Republicans -- that it's perhaps time to cut defense spending. That has, predictably, generated a backlash within the GOP. Ben and I tackle the topic in our column for Scripps Howard this week. Here's my take:

Yes, America can and should significantly cut its military budget.

Our military isn't built just to defend America and its interests, but to bestride the world like a colossus: There are significant deployments of U.S. troops and personnel in Europe and Asia, and commands charged with readiness to project American military power on the remaining inhabited continents. This has had benefits -- we've helped keep the peace in Europe, by and large, for more than 60 years, which is an extraordinary accomplishment.

But American taxpayers continue to pay dearly for the privilege of maintaining the most awesome military in world history: the base defense budget for 2010 is $533.8 billion -- and that's before costs for "overseas contingency operations" in Iraq and Afghanistan are added to the bottom line.

The result? The United States on its own spends about half the world's total defense budget -- 46.5 percent of the planetary total. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent. We're overdoing it.

This moment of history -- a "unipolar" moment with a single dominant military power in the world -- is an aberration. It is already passing, with the rise of China. We cannot afford to sustain it, which is what defense hawks would have us do.

And it hasn't necessarily made us safer: Osama bin Laden went to war against the United States in part because of U.S. troop deployments to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Sometimes being the biggest just makes you the biggest target.

Even Republicans -- some of them, anyway -- are starting to recognize the dangers. We should not bankrupt this and future generations in pursuit of unsustainable world dominance. If it is time to start cutting government spending, the Pentagon's budget should be on the chopping block along with everybody else's.

Bag O' Books: Paul Auster's "City of Glass"

Three thoughts about Paul Auster's "City of Glass":

* This is the first novel - a novella, really - in the so-called "New York Trilogy," and that name is apt. It's a cliche to say that "the city is a character" in the book; it's also, perhaps, imprecise. Instead, it's fair to say this book cannot exist apart from the city. Specific streets and neighborhoods and even Mookie Wilson's early reign with the Mets are all integral to the story.

* Though ostensibly a detective story, "City of Glass" is a meditation on language itself. And Auster brings a nice sense of play to the proceedings -- not just in the meta sense of placing a writer named "Paul Auster" near the center of the action, but in his use of names ("Max Work," "Peter Stillman") and in considering the many ways that individual words can take on multiple meanings. This sounds like heavy, sloglike reading but it's not: It is a pleasure.

* That makes it sound too hoity-toity. What is lovely, also, about Auster's writing is its rootedness in the physical world: Not just New York, but in the smaller crevices of life -- the reality of notebooks and pens and apartments and tables and plastic phones and more. You can almost hold Auster's world in your hands; you can certainly hold it in your mind. And that's a pretty fair accomplishment.

Finally: You should never judge a book by its cover, but the Art Spiegelman cover to my paperback copy of the book -- bound together with the other volumes in the trilogy -- is astounding, and conveys the art and play to be found within.

Football is Dying. Maybe It Deserves To.

The NFL has spent this week being shocked -- shocked! -- that the violent game it promotes is, well, violent. The league has spent this week levying fines against particularly egregious hits from last weekend's games, but as Pittsburgh Steeler lineback James Harrison and Miami Dolphins linebacker Channing Crowder have pointed out, in their various ways, football is game of hitting, and hitting hard: You're supposed to hit the ball-carrier as hard as you can to bring him down; the carrier tries to hit you as hard as he can so that he can stay on his feet and keep going. It's rough business, and there's growing evidence that it destroys the bodies and minds of the people who play the game.

I don't really watch games anymore -- it makes me a bit queasy to cheer on people in the process of hurting themselves and each other -- though I still check in from time to time on the progress of the Kansas City Chiefs: a lifetime of fandom is hard to put away. But today -- October 21 -- feels like it might be a quiet watershed day in the demise of football.

Today's New York Times:

Helmets both new and used are not — and have never been — formally tested against the forces believed to cause concussions. The industry, which receives no governmental or other independent oversight, requires helmets for players of all ages to withstand only the extremely high-level force that would otherwise fracture skulls.

Moreover, used helmets worn by the vast majority of young players encountered stark lapses in the industry’s few safety procedures. Some of the businesses that recondition helmets ignored testing rules, performed the tests incorrectly or returned helmets that were still in poor condition. More than 100,000 children are wearing helmets too old to provide adequate protection — and perhaps half a million more are wearing potentially unsafe helmets that require critical examination, according to interviews with experts and industry data.

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

The risk of playing football at all levels was driven home over the weekend when a Rutgers University player was paralyzed from the neck down in a game Saturday. It's become clear the way the game is played and officiated must be altered. The unacceptable alternative is to be resigned to more and more players joining the casualty lists.

A recent Harris Interactive poll shows most Americans don't enjoy seeing football players get hurt. They want changes to helmets and other equipment to be made, and they believe players who cause head injuries should be hit with penalties, up to and including suspension.

Blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Samori (his son) didn't play football this year. He wants to go back. We can't, in any good conscience, send him back.

It is, simply, becoming less reputable to cheer on the sport that's literally killing and crippling players before their time. And parents like Coates are taking their kids out of the game. We've already determined that our son will never get our permission to play tackle football. Support for the game is slowly beginning to dry up, because it will never be possible to make the game safe enough without fundamentally altering its character.

That's not to say it will ever completely die. People love sports, and many people love violent sports. But it seems possible to me that the NFL and college football will begin to recede in popularity, something equivalent to the moneymaking-but-still-backwater provinces of pay-per-view (like boxing and ultimate fighting) or minor cable channels (like hockey). And that's fine by me.

The Top Baseball Moments of My Life

I'm not a die-hard baseball fan. But as I sit here tonight wondering if Joe Blanton has what it takes to help the Phillies get back to the World Series (meh) I realize that I actually have a number of fond baseball memories. The best...

* THE ROYALS WIN THE 1985 WORLD SERIES: I don't want to hear your nonsense about Don Denkinger, ok? George Brett, Bret Saberhagen, Steve Balboni, Fred* Frank White: Those were my guys. It was the first time in my youth that I discovered a team with "Kansas" in the name could win something big. I thought we lost everything.

*Fred was a Royals broadcaster. My mistake.

* GEORGE BRETT HITS A HOME RUN IN GAME THREE OF THE 1980 WORLD SERIES: I was 7 years old. I remember nothing else about this game -- the Royals won, but lost the Series -- except that Brett hit a home run and I was sent to bed. And my dad, who got off work at a meat-packing plant at midnight, came home, woke me up and took me to an all-night cafe so I could tell him about it.

* THE 1991 WORLD SERIES: I loved that two "worst to first" teams -- the Atlanta Braves and Minnesota Twins -- played in it. But my fondest memory of it is that Game 6 was played while my family was at Lake Tenkiller in Oklahoma, celebrating my grandparents 40th anniversary. We sat around a fire and listened to the game on the radio; my grandfather was a Braves fan from constant Superstation exposure. It remains the reason I prefer baseball on the radio to baseball on television.

* PHILLIES WIN THE 2008 WORLD SERIES: I'd only moved to town a few months earlier. But the victory celebration on Broad Street was something to behold. Even if I did end up getting shoved by a riot cop.

* BOSTON RED SOX COME FROM 3-1 TO WIN THE 2004 ALCS: It was the previous year, when Red Sox and the Cubs both appeared to be on the verge of reversing their curses in the playoffs, that brought me back to baseball after a sustained absence. But this series was thrilling. I sat with friends at the Red Lion bar in Lawrence, KS to watch the final games. I'm a sucker for the underdog, even if the underdog has a higher payroll than every team but the Yankees -- because, well, I hate the Yankees.

* VISITING OLD YANKEE STADIUM, 2004: I may hate the Yankees, but I appreciate baseball history. So on a vacation trip to New York I spent $100 for a ticket about 15 rows above the third base line. Walking into the park felt like a cinematic experience. I even rooted for the Yankees that night. Bernie Williams won the game -- and the AL East -- with a walkoff homerun against the Twins. And as the crowd exited to the sounds of Sinatra singing "New York, New York," a chant went up: "Boston Sucks! Boston Sucks!" It was everything I could've hoped for.

* MY FIRST BASEBALL GAME AFTER SEPTEMBER 11. It was a Friday night home game for the Royals, sometime in the next few weeks. Friday night games always concluded with a fireworks exhibition: This one was set to Elvis singing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" with George W. Bush quotes interspersed into the audio. The combination of Elvis, Bush and explosions in the sky -- and the way it whipped the crowd into a frenzy -- made me think that maybe the War on Terror was going to bring out some very weird sides to the American character.

* THE DIAMONDBACKS WIN THE 2001 WORLD SERIES: Also related to September 11. I was walking the streets of New York, near Ground Zero, right after the Yankees had lost the Series. I'd spent the day immersed in the odors of the still-burning towers -- the flames went on for weeks -- and felt, well, sick of what humanity could do to itself. Then I heard a horn honk. A limo driver rolled down his window to show his Diamondbacks cap to a couple of cops. They cursed at him; he smiled and drove away. And that's when I realized that New York would survive and thrive.

* BILL BUCKNER'S BLOWN GROUND BALL: I rooted for the Mets that year. I'm a sucker for the underdog.

Stacy Lipson, Michael Smerconish and the Problem of Bullying

An old high school friend of mine sent me a Facebook message recently. Following her recent 20th reunion, she told me, a small group of people had gone into Wichita to have a few drinks together; that group included T, a man who had made my junior high years miserable with an unending procession of physical bullying. Even reading his name years later filled me with anger and a kind of dread.

Simply put: I still hate that guy. Even though a generation has passed.

My friend understood. She told me the topic of T's bullying had come up over drinks: I wasn't, it turned out, his only victim. And it turned out that T, a little older and wiser, had some regrets. "He said he hadn't thought of himself as a bully but now, looking back..." my friend wrote. "Anyway he seems like a decent guy now, really."

That is, I guess, a relatively happy epilogue to my childhood angst. But we're in a media moment that is focused on bullying because, well, not everybody makes it to the epilogue. It's a moment that caused Stacy Lipson, a great Philadelphia writer and one of my Tweeps, to reflect on her own childhood experience of victimization:

You may think you understand. But you don’t. You can’t understand unless you’ve experienced it. And if you have experienced it, you know how it feels. The anxiety, fear, and sadness that seem to be a part of your daily experience. The wish that some day, not too far off, the abuse would stop. The wish to be someone else.

I don’t like to talk about what happened to me as a child. I never thought I would need to. But I think it’s important for parents to realize that bullying is an epidemic. It’s not going to go away anytime soon, and once one child starts, the rest can join in. It’s time to do something. Children need to realize the power behind their words and actions, and parents need to make sure that their children are listening. Hard.

Of course, everybody knows that bullying is wrong. Which is why I've been stewing over Michael Smerconish's Sunday commentary in the Inky which strikes what I'd (probably unfairly) call an "objectively pro-bullying" tone. It's not that Smerconish favors beating up weak kids; he just wants to know what the big deal is.

My hunch is that the underlying behavior hasn't gotten any more vicious. Nor has the prevalence of bullying itself increased. Rather, the attention paid to it has.

I went to school with plenty of bad kids who picked on classmates. Today, kids like that have cell phones and Facebook at their disposal. Meanwhile, an increase in absentee parents means the bullies encounter less discipline at home.

And yes, an overeager media has oversaturated many a news cycle with coverage of the latest bullying case with tragic consequences. The result is both a hyperawareness of behavior that has always existed, and an ever-expanding list of what is classified as "bullying."

Yes, coverage of the subject is intense now and, yes, it will go away soon enough. But rather than treat this as a "teachable moment" -- say, how do we get kids and parents to clamp down on vicious and unacceptable behavior -- Smerconish would rather gripe about the spotlight. Maybe he thinks he's being contrarian. But in this case, he's sending the wrong message.

My own childhood experience colors much of my adulthood. My politics derive, in large part, from a hatred of bullies. (Let's just say that George W. Bush and his frathouse personality provoked something visceral in me.) I sometimes fear taking my toddler to the playground because of worries he might be bullied -- or, worse, that he'll end up a bully. And though I'm an exceptionally peaceful guy, I can lose my cool in a major way if I sense that somebody is running roughshod over another. I can see 40 from where I'm at, and yet my feeling is still very intense: I fucking hate bullies.

Stacy, bless her, has done a fine job of reminding us the pain bullies can cause, the lasting damage they do. Michael Smerconish just wants the story to go away.

Mark Boyle's World Without Money

There's something initally Waldenesque and seductive about Mark Boyle's vision of a world without money, but I'm not sure that it stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Boyle decided to test himself by living for a year without cash, and decided to keep on keepin' on after the year came and went.

What makes the whole endeavour seem a bit of a swindle, frankly, is that while he didn't himself use cash, his existence is made very possible by piggybacking off a world that does, in fact, use money as a way to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.

Boyle lives in rural England in a trailer he spotted on Freecycle.org. He feeds himself by growing everything from barley to potatoes, foraging wild edibles like berries and nettles, and occasionally dumpster-diving for luxuries like margarine and bread. He cooks with a wood stove fashioned from large restaurant olive cans; brushes his teeth with his own mixture of cuttlefish bones and fennel seed; and makes paper and ink from mushrooms. He barters labor for rent, Internet service, and whatever else he can't find, grow, or make.

I don't begrudge anybody who wants to escape the rat race, and more power to Boyle for making it happen for himself. But let him try his experiment in some part of the world where the people and the land are poor -- something actually closer to the moneyless society he favors. Guess I'm dubious that such an experiment would be successful; it's cash-based commerce that made Boyle's survival possible.

And it seems plain that, even allowing for the piggybacking on the existing cash economy, Boyle is still very much engaged in acts of commerce. I don't think he'd deny that; he apparently was an economics student at one point. But money is just a way of making the whole business of commerce more efficient. What's wrong with that?

Maybe this:

We couldn't move from what we are today to—even in 10 years' time—living completely moneyless. It's about moving away from complete dependency on money, which is a very insecure position to be in, anyway. You can't have all your eggs in one basket. As more and more people move away from one economic model to another economic model, then the market reacts to that in certain ways and people produce less. It's more about slow evolutionary process than a revolutionary process. And that's quite key to the whole thing. Our whole agricultural system is based on fossil fuels. Each gallon of fossil fuel is the same as 40 man-hours per week. That's a lot of extra man hours. And so if we're going to get back to a way of agriculture that doesn't involve oil, then people are going to have to transition away from some of the jobs that aren't necessary.

The problem, if I'm reading correctly, is that money is efficient. It makes it possible (in a roundabout way) accomplish a whole workweek's worth of tasks in the span of minutes. Sounds good, but as Boyle points out, that has some ripple effects that maybe aren't good for the environment.

Understood. And I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon. Boyle, however, is unlikely to convince many people that they should return to the Age of Bartering, where existence becomes more difficult and work more arduous. Who wants to live that way? Ascetics like Mark Boyle, I suppose. But environmentalists are never going to win the big fights if the rest of us think that Mark Boyle's vision is the one the rest of us should live by. There's a lot about the modern world to like. We just need to make it work better.