Monday, July 23, 2012

Penn State: 'Question What It Is You Revere'

Shortly after I posted about Penn State this morning, Daniel Victor—media maven, Penn State alum, and (from what I know of him) all-around good guy—tweeted:

That's a great point.

Here's the underlying truth for me: I advocate harsh punishment for Penn State largely because I don't actually believe that Paterno, Spanier, etc. were all that unusual in their failure to report Jerry Sandusky. I am terrified by how banal evil can be, how easily bureaucratized and accommodated, and the truth is that I don't fully trust myself to be an exception to this rule. I advocate a harsh punishment because I suspect it will provided a much-needed jolt to the consciences of the vast majority of us who usually go along to get along. The pain of accommodation needs to exceed the the reluctance to rock the boat.

As a young reporter in Lawrence, Kansas, I covered a case where two players on the University of Kansas football team were accused of sexually assaulting a female soccer player, who was from Europe. Uncertain of how to navigate the matter, the player went to her coach, who in turn took her to then-KU football coach Terry Allen, who promised to take care of it.

He made the players run bleachers as punishment. For an alleged sex assault.

Eventually the soccer player figured out what had happened, and went to police. But it was months after the assault, and prosecutors never brought charges. The culture all too easily accommodated sex assault, and Coach Allen wasn't even fired over the incident—he later lost his job because the team kept losing.

This isn't restricted to football. We in Philadelphia have seen, close-up, how the culture of the Catholic Church protected dozens of abusive priests. A "culture of reverence" that allows for abuses isn't just a Penn State thing, it's not just a sports thing—or even a winning sports thing. It's a human thing.

It's why I feel very bad for my Penn State friends today, even though I've made some of them very angry at me. A harsh punishment for the Nittany Lion program will demonstrate a committment to one thing we're supposed to revere—the innocence of children, and our duty to protect them from evil.

Why I'm OK if Penn State football gets eviscerated today

I have several friends who are Penn State alumni--good people who not so long ago revered Joe Paterno, good people who have been devastated by the Jerry Sandusky scandal and everything that has followed. I feel bad for my friends today.

On the other hand, I also hope that today's NCAA sanctions cripple the Penn State football program. 

Penn State defenders point out that if the program is hobbled, it will punish students and a new coaching staff and others who didn't do anything wrong, who didn't let Jerry Sandusky molest children. And they're right.

On the other hand, there's this scene from Sunday's removal of Joe Paterno's statue.
Margaret Walsh knelt in prayer before the stumps of metal that remained, tears streaming down her face. An obstetrician/gynecologist and Penn State alumna who once baby-sat Paterno's children, she had driven nearly six hours from Chesterfield, Va., to pay the statue her respects. 
"Everything is being done so fast," she said. "I pray to God that justice be done and that he be vindicated."
Less obscenely, I'm reminded of this:
Janitors who observed Jerry Sandusky performing a sexual act on a young boy in the Lasch Building showers in 2000 kept quiet out of a fear of Joe Paterno and the power he held at Penn State, according to this morning's Freeh Report. 
Individuals cited in the report as "Janitor A" and "Janitor B" both observed disturbing behavior in Fall 2000, and the report points to Joe Paterno's "excessive influence" in creating a chilling effect for lower-level Penn State employees to report football team misdoings. 
"The University would have closed ranks to protect the football program at all costs," states the report as a characterization of the interview conducted with the janitor last week. The incident "would have been like going against the President of the United States [...] I know Paterno has so much power, if he wanted to get rid of someone, I would have been gone."
The Freeh Report concluded that the football-loving "culture" of the university bore some blame for Sandusky's ability to evade arrest and prosecution for 14 years, and Margaret Walsh's bitter tears suggest that that culture resonates yet. And that culture involves far more people than just the few men who are indicted or lost their jobs over this sad, sorry situation.
So destroy it. Tear that culture out of the ground like a diseased tree and set it on fire so that only ashes are left. Punish Penn State so severely that the janitors know the program isn't bigger than their responsibility to save children. Let Margaret Walsh's tears salt the earth outside the football stadium so that nothing can grow in its place. 


If the culture bears responsibility for molested children, then yes, the culture must be punished. It will be painful, and I do feel terrible for my friends who really bought into the Grand Experiment. But the experiment is a farce and a failure, and an example must be made.

UPDATED: A comment from a friend that originally appeared in this post has been removed. 

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Barack Obama may have the better of the tax argument

Raising Taxes on Rich Seen as Good for Economy, Fairness - Pew Research Center: "By two-to-one (44% to 22%), the public says that raising taxes on incomes above $250,000 would help the economy rather than hurt it, while 24% say this would not make a difference. Moreover, an identical percentage (44%) says a tax increase on higher incomes would make the tax system more fair, while just 21% say it would make the system less fair.

Most Democrats say raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 would help the economy (64%) and make the tax system more fair (65%). Republicans are more divided: 41% say this would hurt the economy, while 27% say it would help and 24% it would make no difference. And while 36% of Republicans say raising taxes on incomes over $250,000 would make the tax system less fair, 30% say this would make no difference and 25% say it would make the tax system more fair."

'via Blog this'

Ramesh Ponnuru on Republicans and defense cuts

I've written a couple of times about the hypocrisy of Republicans who worry that defense spending cuts will hurt the economy. That's Krugmanesque Keynesianism under the rubric of "national security," and it deserves to be labeled as such.

Today, conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru does the labeling, though he comes to a slightly different conclusion than I do:
Needless to say, on the theory that the Republicans are advancing, the federal budget can never be cut. The U.S. Conference of Mayors will be able to say that cuts in social spending will devastate the economy of our cities with at least as much justice as defense-heavy areas can complain about cuts to the military. Rural areas can say the same thing about farm subsidies. 
(Snip) 
Yet the purpose of the defense budget shouldn’t be to subsidize particular people or areas. We don’t buy tanks and train soldiers to keep beauty salons in business. The Republicans resisting big defense cuts generally think that they would jeopardize our national security. That’s a debatable proposition. So debate it. What Republicans should not do is make an economic argument for defense spending that is both untrue and inconsistent with everything else they say about spending and the economy.
I'm not sure I agree with "untrue," but otherwise: Yup.



Walter Kirn and the Mormons

If you haven't already, please read Walter Kirn's TNR piece, "Confessions of an Ex-Mormon." It touches only lightly on the subject of Mitt Romney's religious beliefs and the role they play in this election season and instead focuses on biography: How a brief conversion to Mormonism helped Kirn's father stabilize a life that was spinning out of control, and how (a generation later) Kirn's residence in a house full of Mormons helped him find his own foundations.

Kirn's somewhat ambiguous about the state of his own faith in the piece, but I found it a useful reminder: In the public sphere, we treat religion like it's merely a set of beliefs and doctrines. I've written--and still think--it's fair to test how Romney's own adherence to Mormon beliefs and doctrines affects his views of public policy.

But Kirn's piece reminds me that religion is more than a set of fit-slot-A-into-tab-B rules for getting into heaven: Very often it's a source of community and belonging for people who desperately need it. Which is most of us. And one can benefit from those features without necessarily following the party line on the doctrine stuff: It certainly appears that Kirn did.

About a decade ago, shortly after I'd told my pastor that I had lost my faith and was withdrawing from the church, I attempted to go to church again. It wasn't that I'd changed my mind about my lack of belief; it was that I missed the people desperately. Some of the people I'd attended church with in Lawrence, Kansas, had shown me how I could be an adult in terms that I wanted and made sense to me: They'd helped me, in a very real sense, to become a man. (Though that is, frankly, an unending process.) But my return lasted precisely one service: As Huck Finn said, "You can't pray a lie." I couldn't, at least. And remaining part of that community without partaking of its most regular, weekly, ritual, proved untenable.

I wrote last week that I'm able to construct meaning without God in my life. And that's true. Constructing community has been, and remains, trickier without resorting to church. Maybe that's not the case for everybody, but I spent 30 years in the church: It's difficult to shake old ways of doing things.

So Kirn's piece is a welcome reminder of such things, as is its placement in a political magazine. We--I--get so busy with day-to-day jousting in political matters that we--I--forget about the broader human project. Kirn's piece is so good, because it's so humane.

Monday, July 16, 2012

How John Roberts killed the Affordable Care Act, continued

Me, last month:
Now. I doubt Republicans would mount a campaign to get everybody to pay the tax and avoid health insurance in order to undermine the purposes of he Affordable Care Act. But if the mandate is now framed in the popular mind as a "cheap tax I can pay" instead of a "rule that I must follow," it's possible that many young, poorly paid people will opt to pay the tax--and that insurance companies will drown over time as a result.
James Capretta and Yuval Levin, today at National Review:
In the wake of the Roberts decision, participation in Obamacare’s insurance scheme is optional. Rather than a requirement to buy coverage backed with a penalty for violators, the law now offers Americans two equally lawful and legitimate options: buy expensive insurance (which Obamacare will make all the more expensive), or pay a modest (and still largely unenforceable) tax and just buy insurance for the same price later if you need it. Presented as a choice, not a command, this provision will invite a straightforward comparison, and for many Americans the choice it would pose would be a very easy one. 
Obamacare was always going to lead to a disastrous meltdown of America’s health-insurance system, but in the wake of the Court’s decision, many of its former defenders should acknowledge this fact too. If you argued that the mandate was the linchpin of the system, and that it would work despite its low and unenforceable penalty because Americans are a law-abiding people, you should now see that the mandate as you understood it no longer exists.
So prepare yourselves for the next battle--probably about 10 years from now. It'll probably be a choice between scrapping Obamacare entirely, or replacing it with a single-payer system. I don't imagine that battle will be any easier for liberals than past ones have been.

Dear Democrats: Stop bluffing about the fiscal cliff*

No, no, no:

Democrats are making increasingly explicit threats about their willingness to let nearly $600 billion worth of tax hikes and spending cuts take effect in January unless Republicans drop their opposition to higher taxes for the nation’s wealthiest households. 
Emboldened by signs that GOP resistance to new taxes may be weakening, senior Democrats say they are prepared to weather a fiscal event that could plunge the nation back into recession if the new year arrives without an acceptable compromise. 
In a speech Monday, Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the Senate’s No. 4 Democrat and the leader of the caucus’s campaign arm, plans to make the clearest case yet for going over what some have called the “fiscal cliff.”
Ain't gonna happen.

Listen, when Republicans threaten to scuttle the nation's fiscal infrastructure by not raising the debt ceiling, they've got a plausible reason for doing so: Their constituents won't punish them for not raising the debt, and they might punish them for raising the debt.

What, exactly, do Democrats have to gain by plunging the country back into recession? Does Patty Murray think middle-class Americans want to see wealthy Americans taxed at a higher rate more than they want to preserve their own fiscal futures?

Top earners will see their Bush Tax Cuts extended by the end of the year. Count on it.

* Bluff. Cliff. See what I did there? 

Are 10 percent of American students sexually victimized at school?

Today's Philadelphia Daily News has an op-ed from Terri Miller, president of SESAME Inc.--an acronym for "Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation"--about how we need to do more to protect our children from predators like Jerry Sandusky. No problem there: Who disagrees with that?

But one thing she said in the op-ed jumped out at me: "Overall, an estimated 1 in 10 students will be the victim of educator sexual misconduct during their school career, a ratio that equals about 4.5 million current K-12 students."

This appears to be a statistic she uses regularly: She also used it during testimony before Congress in support of the Jeremy Bell Act, which requires schools to report suspected incidents of educator sexual misconduct.

If she's right, then American parents need to press the panic button: 10 percent of all students are being sexually victimized at school? That's a huge problem, one that would--should--be devastating to the very system of public education itself if true.

One problem: It may not be true. Here's a Slate piece from February explaining where that number comes from.
The best available study suggests that about 10 percent of students suffer some form of sexual abuse during their school careers. In the 2000 report, commissioned by the American Association of University Women, surveyors asked students between eighth and 11th grades whether they had ever experienced inappropriate sexual conduct at school. The list of such conduct included lewd comments, exposure to pornography, peeping in the locker room, and sexual touching or grabbing. Around one in 10 students said they had been the victim of one or more such things from a teacher or other school employee, and two-thirds of those reported the incident involved physical contact. If these numbers are representative of the student population nationwide, 4.5 million students currently in grades K-12 have suffered some form of sexual abuse by an educator, and more than 3 million have experienced sexual touching or assault. This number would include both inappropriate romantic relationships between teachers and upperclassmen, and outright pedophilia.

These statistics are uncertain, however, because no one has ever designed a nationwide study for the expressed purpose of measuring the prevalence of sexual abuse by educators. The Departments of Justice, Education, and Health and Human Services can’t agree on whose domain teacher sexual misconduct falls into, and Congress has shown little appetite to spend money on the issue. In the study described above, surveyors asked participants if they had ever experienced sexual improprieties at school, then asked students who reported abuse to identify the perpetrator. Since the study was intended to measure student-to-student sexual misconduct, the original investigators didn’t focus on teacher-offenders. A third-party academic later used the raw data to suss out the prevalence of teacher sex abuse. A few smaller or less methodologically rigorous studies have also addressed the question, with wildly inconsistent results. One looked at college sociology students and estimated that nearly half had experienced sexual harassment by a teacher. Another surveyed 4,000 adults, with 4.1 percent reporting inappropriate sexual contact with a teacher during their high-school years. But the sample included only urbanites, and white respondents were overrepresented. A third study used responses to a questionnaire published in Seventeen magazine and estimated that just 3.7 percent of children suffer sexual abuse from their teachers.
In other words: Miller uses the biggest and most-inflammatory number to make her case--but it's a number that, once examined, seems a bit less of a sure thing. I'm not saying that 10 percent of American students aren't victimized by educators; I'm saying that a 12-year-old study that wasn't intended to measure that particular problem may not be a totally reliable piece of evidence.

We do need to understand the extent of this problem, and root it out where possible. But there's something about Miller's number that smells like the hype and scare-mongering of the 1980s child-molestation terror epidemic. That turned out to be overblown. Jerry Sandusky taught us--again--that we need to take allegations very seriously. That doesn't mean we have to resort to hysteria. 

How the White House censors journalists (And a solution)

Turns out that when you read quotes from White House officials, you're only reading quotes that have been pre-approved for publication by the White House. This is some kind of obnoxious:
It is a double-edged sword for journalists, who are getting the on-the-record quotes they have long asked for, but losing much of the spontaneity and authenticity in their interviews. 
Jim Messina, the Obama campaign manager, can be foul-mouthed. But readers would not know it because he deletes the curse words before approving his quotes. Brevity is not a strong suit of David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser. So he tightens up his sentences before giving them the O.K. 
Stuart Stevens, the senior Romney strategist, is fond of disparaging political opponents by quoting authors like Walt Whitman and referring to historical figures like H. R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff. But such clever lines later rarely make it past Mr. Stevens. 
Many journalists spoke about the editing only if granted anonymity, an irony that did not escape them. No one said the editing altered the meaning of a quote. The changes were almost always small and seemingly unnecessary, they said.
Now, the story makes clear it's a bipartisan practice. Whatever. It's still bull. And it gives the White House direct control over the content of journalism that appears before the public. That's effectively the power of censorship, even if the processes are essentially informal and don't require the use of an FBI agent to enforce. It's still insidious, and it should be unacceptable in a free society.

But journalists acquiesce because if they don't give White House officials the power to censor their quotes, they don't get quotes at all. And yes, that puts them in a tough place, professionally. So what to do?

The Times' story is a good start, but it's not enough. Every time an official refines a quote before giving permission for it to be used in a story--in every single story that it happens--journalists should state that to their audience. Every single time. Something like:  "I think the president is all kinds of awesome," David Axelrod said, in a quote he pre-approved for publication. 


Would this end this odious practice? Probably not. But it would at least make the process of reporting and gathering a story more transparent to the audience--and the knowledge of how government (or wannabe government) officials operate the levers of power over reporters would be useful for the general public to have. As it stands, I trust Washington-based reporting just a little bit less than I used to.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Dennis Prager's case for God

I think, after today, I'm going to try to stop writing about Dennis Prager. I have conservative friends who deeply respect him, and I admit to being somewhat confused by that: To me, his liberals are always straw man liberals (who always seem to be pulling the country toward Stalinism) and his atheists are always straw man atheists. We won't even talk about his straw woman feminists. There's always an audience for such things, of course, but the people who give credence to Prager are usually thoughtful. I'm obviously missing something.

If Prager has or attempts a moral imagination that lets him consider lives and viewpoints other than his own in non-hyperbolic, non-stereotypical fashion, it is not evident in his writing. And while I admit that my conservative friends might say the same thing about me from time to time, the effect of Prager's style is that it is impossible to really constructively disagree. That means he's mostly irritating, and almost never—in my experience—thought provoking.

His style is on display in an NRO column about why the Higgs Boson discovery is meaningless, particularly if there is no religious belief accompanying it.
One must have a great deal of respect for the atheist who recognizes the consequences of atheism: no meaning, no purpose, no good and evil beyond subjective opinion, and no recognition of the limits of what science can explain.
Prager's case for God boils down to this: Without God there is no meaning, therefore God. 


In other words: He starts from a debatable premise, then makes a conclusion that doesn't necessarily proceed from the premise.

I don't want to be an evangelistic agnostic. If Dennis Prager finds his meaning in the existence of God, well, good for him. I suspected he's joined by the vast majority of Americans, the vast majority of people. And again: Good for them.

But it seems that what Prager is ultimately saying is that my life is meaningless, probably even to me, because I don't infuse it with religious belief. And I reject that idea: Yes, my first years out of the church were a little confusing because I'd relied on that framework for such a long time. Since I left the church, I've gotten married and, with my wife, had a son. I endured a couple of tough years, and somehow didn't throw myself off a bridge. These are not acts of nihilism. I take satisfaction and find meaning in them, but I don't attribute a Larger Meaning to them. That's OK.

I also recognize that Prager and folks who think like him might think I protest too much. That's OK, too.

'The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama': A discussion

The following is a chat transcript with my friend Lex Friedman about Tom Junod's Esquire piece examining how President Obama uses drone warfare—and how his actions might be infringing on American civil liberties.

Lex: So I read that long long piece you linked yesterday.
  About the Lethal Presidency.
  I am above making a joke about how the worse crime by far is the overwrought writing style the author brought to the piece.
 me: Heh. Fair enough.
9:24 AM Lex: I understand the author's argument.
  But I do not agree.
 me: How so?
9:25 AM Lex: I see targeted killings as he (negatively-ish) paints the administration as seeing them: an evolved form of war. Instead of killing soldiers with little stake in the battle, or putting our own soldiers with limited stakes at direct daily risk, you go for the people who are actively involved in plotting against you.
9:26 AM If we grant the president the right to send troops to fight wars—and we do!—then we're trusting him with lots of lives on both sides.
  If this approach means that fewer people die overall, which I think it does, I like it.
9:27 AM me: There are two issues, one narrower but perhaps more important.
 Lex: That said, I probably come down on the wrong answer on this question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
9:28 AM me: Three, three issues. American citizenship, Obama's honesty, and blowback.
9:29 AM Lex: I gotta tell you, the American citizenship issue doesn't faze me at all. Plenty of Americans criticize America all day. If anyone, American or not, is inciting or directing violence against Americans, I don't treat those instigators any differently from anyone else inciting same.
9:31 AM me: The first is the biggest: The president has reserved to himself the right to assassinate an American citizen who is not currently engaged in the field of battle. He's furthermore done that without an explanation of the legal standards involved beyond a "trust me" vibe that sets a bad precedent. I don't trust individuals; I trust processes. We don't know what the processs is. And I don't trust Obama's successors, particularly, to have the power that his precedent grants them--at least not without some ability to restrain or review it. There's a saying in the legal profession: "Hard cases make bad law." Well, al-Awlaki's assassination might be making bad law for the rest of us.
9:33 AM 
2. Obama's honesty: The administration has reported that civilians aren't really killed in these attacks. Part of the way it arrives at that conclusion is by deciding that any "military-aged male" in the vicinity of a targeted bad guy is ipso facto a bad guy. Maybe, but maybe not. That underlying assumption reduces my trust in the president.
 Lex: Even that argument doesn't faze me. Whether Obama makes it a policy/precedent or not, the next better or worse guy could have done the same. There was no precedent for preemptive strikes until W made it. My point being, president precedent doesn't mean much to me, because any new president can set it.
9:35 AM me: 3. Blowback: The use of drones is narrower and more targeted than sending armies to conquer foreign lands. But if your family is on the receiving end of a bomb, it's not going to feel narrower. It only takes a few pissed-off individuals to make an attack of some kind, and I fear that the parameters of the drone war have grown so expansive that the benefits of "narrowly" targeting individuals have been somewhat diminished. That's my weakest argument, because there ARE bad guys out there, but it remains a concern.
9:36 AM Regarding precedent: You're right, to an extent, but also not: Precedent does matter: Even the George W. Bush felt compelled to couch his actions by citing instances from World War II and the Civil War.
9:37 AM And here's the thing: I wouldn't have trusted George W. Bush with these powers. I didn't. So I'm hard-pressed for a logical reason (other than my faith in the good-guyness of Obama) to trust this president with them either. In fairness, I don't think I can.
9:38 AM Lex: I didn't trust W sending the forces of which he was commander in chief into battle.
9:39 AM I'm opposed to all state-sponsored killing, really. I oppose the death penalty, I oppose war, I don't like any of it. The idea that we can kill people, as a nation, frightens and disgusts me all the time. But I recognize that in the current world order, it's not going away any time soon / ever.
  And if the options are the Old Way and the New Way, I prefer the New Way.
  Even if the New Way merely puts a dent in the Old Way.
9:42 AM me: Hey: I'm a lapsed Mennonite. My instincts are still toward pacifism, but I also recognize that's not the way the world works. Maybe what Obama is doing is the best we can realistically hope for. And for that matter, I'll even concede that the Bush Administration—while it gleefully grabbed for a chance to strengthen presidential prerogatives—also had a deep fear of inadvertently allowing another 9/11. The incentives are aligned toward security, not civil liberties. But I don't want to surrender the civil liberties without a fight.
9:43 AM Lex: I naively support civil liberties for good people, and not for people who want to kill good people.
  I say "naively" because someone has to decide which are the good people.
  I think it's a guarantee no president will ever order a drone strike against a friend of mine.
 me: Right. We do civil liberties for everybody, in part, so that good people can feel free to exercise their goodness.
9:44 AM And in most cases, there's a defined process for denying the bad guys of their liberties. When it's skipped or fudged, that's when I get nervous.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Latest podcast: Robert Draper

Ben and I chatted with Robert Draper for the latest podcast, on his newest book about the House of Representatives. It's a good read, and a good discussion. Take a listen here.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Netflix Queue: 'Goon'

Not a bad flick. Not a masterpiece, but it's the kind of thing I can see 17-year-old guys gathering in basements to watch for the next couple of decades:



I'm not really a hockey fan, and it's hard to watch this movie without thinking of guys who have sacrificed their health--and maybe even their lives--to this kind of way of living. But 'Goon' does (or almost does) one really interesting thing: It asks us to consider the options available to people who simply aren't that gifted. For Sean William Scott's Doug Glatt, the option is to fight. And that's about it. We're allowed to see him use that option as a kind of triumph for the little guy. But it's hinted to us--through Liev Schreiber's character--that what comes after isn't so pretty. But mostly we're meant to have a good time, so those themes are touched upon lightly. Like I said: Not a great movie. But not the worst, either, if you're prepared to stomach some extreme profanity and a little ultraviolence.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

How books—even cookbooks—make our worlds bigger.

I felt a sense of loss this morning, reading in the New York Times that the western wildfires had destroyed the Flying W Ranch in Colorado.

Why the loss? I'd never personally visited the ranch. As a child, my mom had the "Cow Country Gourmet" cookbook—essentially a compilations of recipes from the Flying W Ranch. It seems to me that she used it regularly, though my memory might be faulty on that front.

But I remember staring at the cover from time to time: What kind of world did it come from, that one could have a sit-down dress-up dinner under the open sky? Next to cattle? In front of a teepee?

 I've never personally opened the cookbook to make a recipe from it. Yet that cover, which got a little bedraggled over the years, burned itself into my mind's eye. It made the Flying W Ranch—or some fantasy version of it, at least—a part of my childhood. I am sad to see it go.

Netflix Queue: 'Wing Chun'

Yes, we've been watching a lot of Chinese movies lately. Here's one of my favorites on Netflix: It's got young Michelle Yeoh, young Donnie Chen—in the only movie that I've seen of his in which I find him halfway charming—and orchestrating it all: Woo-ping Yuen, the man who choreographed the stunts in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," the "Matrix" films, and "Kill Bill." This early-1990s pic doesn't have the production values of those films—listen to the cheesey soundtrack music above—but the fight choreography is inventive. Don't expect anything epic or narratively complex: This is a light comic piece in the tradition of "The Legend of the Drunken Master." It's a trifle, but a fun, well-made trifle.

Friday, July 6, 2012

'Jayhawkers' on Kickstarter




I'm not in the habit of pimping my friends' work, as a rule, but my former Lawrence Journal-World colleague Jon Niccum contacted me to let me know about a movie project he's working on—one that's crowdsourcing its funding from Kickstarter.

The movie is called "Jayhawkers," and yes it's got some University of Kansas stuff going on, but it also sounds pretty cool. It tells the story of how Wilt Chamberlain went to KU—changing not only college basketball, but helping alter race relations in Lawrence, Kan.:
The movie’s emotional climax comes during the triple overtime 1957 National Championship bout between the Jayhawks and their bitter rivals from The University of North Carolina, a game that is decided in the final seconds, and one that has been called the greatest in college history.

Jayhawkers tells the powerful fable of how a small group of unlikely allies modernized college sports and changed a small Midwestern town, serving as a parallel to the Civil Rights movement that would transform an entire American society.
The director is Kevin Wilmott, who is on faculty at KU, but who has also done a fair amount of film work—including the acclaimed movie "CSA: The Confederate States of America" that reimagined American life as if the Confederates had won the Civil War.

The producers are trying to raise $50,000 in production costs. I've pledged a little bit; if you think the movie or its production team sound interesting, they can use the help. The deadline is Aug. 2.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Threading the needle on public unions

In a recent piece for PhillyMag, and more recently here, I've suggested that public unions bear more scrutiny than their liberal allies have generally given them. But I've also said—much, much less prominently, admittedly—that the problems afflicting municipalities these days can't be blamed solely on those unions. In my Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk this week, I flesh out the rest of it a bit with a look at the bankruptcy of Stockton, California.
Public unions aren't perfect. Too often, they act as constituencies to whom favors are owed rather than partners in building the cities they serve. Democrats are often loath to acknowledge such flaws, for a couple of reasons: a) Unions are a critical source of campaign funding; and b) You never really see Republicans biting the corporate hand that feeds them. Why alienate allies and disarm unilaterally? 
Public unions didn't solely create the problems faced by Stockton, or any other city facing financial trouble. They are, however, being asked to bear the brunt of the solution. 
Before the Great Recession started in 2008, many cities -- flush from a growing economy and a housing bubble that inflated their property-tax collections -- didn't bother preparing for the proverbial "rainy day," instead embarking on vanity construction projects and (like many Americans) digging themselves into a pile of debt. Stockton built a sports arena, for example, and paid singer Neil Diamond $1 million to open the city's new concert hall. 
Good times never seemed so good. That kind of hubris, however, really isn't the fault of municipal unions. 
Cities like Stockton also failed to do one other thing: save enough money to pay for the retirement promises they'd made their workers, hoping that economic growth and tax collections would somehow save the day. Mayors and city councils acted foolishly for decades, avoiding preparations for the retirements they knew would come. 
It may be that America's cities can only be saved with an act of pension sacrifice by municipal workers. Note this, however: When Mitt Romney's Bain Capital enjoys big profits but deserts workers in bad times, the firm is castigated. When local governments do the same thing, it's the workers who get blamed. 
Public unions deserve scrutiny, yes. But they shouldn't be scapegoated. Stockton dug its own hole.
Ben's take: "It's wrong to ask taxpayers to sacrifice a larger portion of their incomes and accept fewer services to pay for benefits that the vast majority of people will never have." You'll have to hit the link to read the whole thing.

Netflix Queue: 'Submarine'

Great movie: It's kind of like "Rushmore," only if Max Fischer were Welsh, had a complete set of parents, and was much less able to overwhelm people with the force of his personality. Oliver Tate also has a way of being alienating, but it's more in the mode of the usual dumb antics of a teen boy than in Fischer's attempts at being precocious. Charming movie.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Walter Russell Mead and the lost Christianity of America's elites

I actually found Walter Russell Mead's post--about how American elites have lost their way by losing Christianity--to be somewhat compelling, if not entirely convincing. This was the passage I found challenging and a bit moving.
Serious Christians have to struggle continually against the temptation to view “merit” uncritically. To begin with, any gifts that you have are just that — gifts. Your ability to score 800 on the math section of the SAT is something for which you can personally take no credit whatever. It’s like a pretty face or perfect pitch: it’s very nice to have, but it’s God’s sovereign choice, not your sublime inner nature, that is responsible for this. And of course, he doesn’t give his gifts without a purpose. 
And guess what: the reason God made you smart wasn’t to make you rich and to make you special and to allow you to swank around in the White House or at Davos. He made you smart so that you could serve — and the people he wants you to serve are exactly all those people you feel so arrogantly superior to. At the end of the day, they aren’t going to be judged on how much they deferred to you, respected you, and handed over to you all those rewards you felt you deserved. God isn’t particularly interested in what the Paul Krugmans of this world think though he wants us all to do our best to get things right; he’s interested in how much Paul Krugman and the rest of us loved and sought to serve one another. 
You are going to be judged on how much you did for the “ordinary folks.” Were those Downs’ syndrome kids any better off because of the way you used your mathematical and reasoning gifts? Were the poor better fed and better housed because of the use you made of the talents God trusted to your care? Did you use your power and the freedom that came with it to help others live freer and more dignified lives, or did you parade your superiority around like a pompous and egotistical ass, oppressing and alienating the world when you should have been enlightening it?
Folks, what he's talking about here is humility.

And while I don't begrudge Mead for seeing it Christian terms, I disagree that it's necessarily experienced as the result of a religious outlook. It should be the result of a thinking, contemplative outlook, one that atheists, agnostics (like myself), and religious people of all stripes can share in.

 One doesn't have to be Christian to realize that one's life is shaped by factors beyond our control. Where we're born--what country, what region of a country,the particular wealth and education of our parents, even the genes they pass on to us--none of these things are in our individual control, but all can make a significant difference in our lifetime prospects. When all those factors align favorably, they're the foundation upon which hard work can be used to create a stunning success, or offer a safety net that allows the taking of risks. Sometimes, they're even enough to guarantee a comfortable life without any hard work or risk-taking.

From a non-religious viewpoint, then, all of that stuff is a crapshoot. For those of us who have attained any measure of success, that knowledge can and should be humbling, something that causes one to look around at one's fellow humans and resolve to do better--and yes, maybe even to serve them.

Mead is correct, I think, in that our society currently train people to believe that what what they've attained, they've attained almost solely through their own efforts. He lays this at the feet of non-religious "progressive meritocrats," but that's (at the very least) an incomplete answer. The enduring faddishness of Ayn Rand-style "I Am The Master of My Destiny, And All You Puny Pukes Merely Hold Me Down" thinking hasn't restricted itself to Objectivists and their God-denying ilk; it's spread more broadly into the half of the country that thinks of itself conservative, to a great many self-professed Christians who seem, these days, to think that to give a man a fish and to teach a man to fish are both contemptible acts.

So what we need is a revival of humility, I think; if religiosity is a necessary component for some people to achieve that, good for them, but I don't see that as necessary overall. And we need to find a way to help people think about "public service" in such a way that the term doesn't drip with irony when heard by the great mass of Americans. The basis for all of this is recognizing the fragility of our good fortune, seeing it (at least partly) as a blessing instead of a boast. Even if they might squirm at the term "blessing," there's no reason atheists and agnostics shouldn't help lead that project.

Netflix Queue: 'Let The Bullets Fly'

What a bizarre movie: I'm still scraping my thoughts together about this, but: It's a cross between a gangster film and a Shakespeare mistaken-identity farce, featuring about 13 or so twists and double crosses along the way. It kept doing things that I completely did not expect it to do: For example, Chow Yun-Fat played the villain with queeny ostentation. So I'm going to have to watch it again.