Brad Warthen's Blog

The tax on stupidity

I liked this analogy offered in a book review in The Wall Street Journal Thursday about why we so often call lotteries a "tax on stupidity:"

    'Imagine a standard NFL football field. Somewhere in the field, a student has placed a single, small, common variety of ant that she has marked with a spot of yellow paint. You walk onto the field, blindfolded, and push a pin into the ground. If your pin pierces the marked ant, you win. Otherwise you lose. Want to give it a go?"
    Thus did one mathematician describe the odds of winning a Powerball lottery. Is it any wonder that economists deride state-run lotteries as a tax on stupidity? Bad enough that the government is encouraging gambling; all the worse that it is encouraging such a bad bet.

You betcha.

Never mind maneuvers...

Just watched the end of a movie in which Lawrence Olivier was strutting about in Napoleonic-era admiral's uniform with one empty right sleeve, which could only mean he was portraying Lord Nelson. And there was Vivien Leigh talking about Lord Keith and St. Vincent and the rest, so I was hooked to the end of it. Saw a highly melodramatic rendering of Nelson's death at Trafalgar.

As you know, I'm a huge fan of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, and Lord Nelson was Jack Aubrey's hero. In the books, Jack is the one to whom Nelson said, "Never mind maneuvers, always go straight at 'em." In reality, he said that to Lord Cochrane, upon whom Aubrey is largely based.

Here's the kicker: After the movie, the guy who introduces the features on TCM said the movie was so chock-full of homilies about the importance of standing up to dictators that the director was summoned to Congress -- still gripped by isolationism -- where our lawmakers were investigating pro-war propaganda by Hollywood. He was scheduled to appear on Dec. 12, 1941, so he lucked out there. By his appearance date, isolationism was no longer quite the thing, you know.

Imagine that -- Hollywood being investigated for pro-war propaganda.

I'd better go to bed now.

This is worse than Facebook

You know how I've complained about how I just don't get Facebook -- that I find it disorienting, and just generally a lousy way to communicate information?

Well, I've found a worse way -- Twitter.

Have you seen this new site that S.C. Rep. Dan Hamilton and self-described GOP "political operative" Wesley Donehue have started, SCTweets? Basically, its point is:

...to find a creative way to showcase SC’s tech-savvy elected officials. Specifically, we expect the Statehouse crew to be twittering a lot from the floor and we thought it would be cool to see what they were saying. That goal somehow expanded and we decided to showcase all South Carolina politicos with our directory. We then gave them a way to interact through #sctweets.

Look, I don't mean to criticize Messrs. Hamilton and Donehue at all. I appreciate the effort. Go for it. But when I try to obtain any sort of information of value from a series of incomplete, typo-ridden sentence fragments from a bunch of people ranging from Anton Gunn to David Thomas to Bob Inglis to Nathan Ballentine to Thad Viers, with a lot of Blogosphere usual suspects such as Mattheus Mei thrown in, I feel like I've trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack with cotton candy and Pop Rocks on top, stirred with a Slim Jim. Just a jumble of junk.

The "authors" aren't to blame. It's the medium. I'm still waiting to find any value in this Twitter thing. I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.

What do I consider to be GOOD way to communicate information? Well, here's a coincidence: I actually looked at my Facebook page this morning, and as usual got little out of it. But I noticed where a friend I worked with a quarter-century ago posted something that seemed a deliberate illustration of the incoherence of Facebook. He exhorted readers to:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

So I followed his instructions (except for the posting part). The book nearest to my laptop was the literally dog-eared (chewed by a dog that died three decades ago) paperback Byline: Ernest Hemingway. Here's the fifth sentence on page 56 (if you count the incomplete, continued sentence at the top of the page as the first):

"He smiled like a school girl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame."

And you know what? I got more out of that than I got out of that Twitter page. At least I formed a clear, coherent picture of something.

It occurs to me that Twitter is the bright new world that that Colorado congressman who claims credit for killing The Rocky Mountain News extols. And then it occurs to me that to the extent he is right, to the extent that this is the future of political communication, we are in a lot of trouble int his country...

The unspeakable horror

This was a terrible day for news about children.

The awful thing is that the front-page story about the boy shot and killed by his brother while they were idle on a "snow" day was not the worst, most appallingly horrific such news in the paper.

It was awful enough. In my long career in this business, I am often shocked at how unbelievably trivial the incidents leading to domestic homicides (the most common kind) can be. Although I can't remember whether this happened in Tennessee or Kansas or South Carolina (the three places I've worked), the archetype in my mind was a case in which two grown men who were related to each other (I want to say an uncle and his nephew) were drinking heavily, and one shot the other after the quarreled over what to watch on TV.

This case exceeds that one in sheer awfulness, and not only because it was children involved. These boys were arguing over who would sit where while they watched TV. The mind reels, this is so terribly sad and unnecessary.

And those words -- "terribly sad and unnecessary" -- are so pathetically inadequate. You have to be a better writer than I am to describe it adequately, and I mean a MUCH better writer. Conrad got at it with Kurtz' raw whisper, "The horror! The horror!" Obviously, you don't have to travel to deepest Africa to find the Heart of Darkness.

Then there's Dostoevsky, of whom I was reminded in reading the second, and even worse, item in today's paper. Ivan Karamazov, world-class cynic, told his idealistic brother, "You see, I am fond of collecting certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books, and I've already got a fine collection." They tended to be of horrific incidents of unspeakably terrible things being done to children, and they confirmed him in his dim view of humanity.

This second story would have fit perfectly in his collection. Before I share it let me warn you that this is by far the most horrible, shocking, painful-to-read thing I have ever posted on this blog.

That said, here it is:

SUMTER, S.C. -- The parents of five South Carolina children have been charged after their 1-year-old boy starved to death in a Sumter home crawling with rats and roaches, authorities said Tuesday.
    The toddler, who has not been named, was found unresponsive Monday at a home that Sumter County Coroner Harvin Bullock described as filthy and unsuitable for living.
    The child was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Sumter Police Chief Patty Patterson said.
    A police report listed the toddler's weight as 4 pounds.
    The boy's parents have been arrested and charged with homicide by child abuse and unlawful conduct. Kevin Dewayne Isaac, 25, and Marketta Sharnise McCray, 23, were in jail Tuesday awaiting a bond hearing, and it was not immediately clear if they had attorneys, police said.
    If convicted on the homicide by child abuse charge, Isaac and McCray could face life in prison, and Patterson said more charges could be forthcoming.
    The boy's twin sister, whose weight was listed as 9 pounds, has been hospitalized for malnutrition, and three other children in the home have been placed in state custody.
    Those children - ages 4, 6, and 9 - are being checked out by physicians, Patterson said.

As I read that in the paper this morning, it struck me as so massively tragic that the pages of a newspaper seemed far too frail and insubstantial to support it. The item -- which is about a child who was a twin, and almost exactly the same age as my precious twin grandchildren -- should have dropped through the page, through my breakfast table, and plunged straight into the netherworld before I could see it. Yet there it was.

Ironically, today was the same day that The New York Times editorialized, again, to this effect:

We were horrified to be reminded that the nation still has not plumbed the depths of the Bush administration’s abuses....

Remember when I wrote about that several months ago, about how easy it was to inspire "horror" in the eyes of the NYT editorial board? I even wrote a follow-up to provide a little perspective on things we should truly "watch with horror." I even included some pictures that were very painful to look at.

But you know what? This news about this poor child starved to death is harder to take than what I cited before. You see something like this, and you want to be distracted from it. You say, by all means let's talk instead about how filled with horror we are at that awful George W. Bush and the unspeakable things he did. Let's indict him. After all, the NYT accuses him of "mangling the Constitution." Let's have show trials, 24/7 on television. I promise to shout and wave a pitchfork. Anything to avoid thinking about that little item I read in the paper this morning.

Because I don't want to think about that any more.

Remembering 'Breaking the News'

Back in the first comment on this post, Lee mentioned James Fallows' excellent book, Breaking the News: The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy -- which, as it happens, I actually reviewed for this newspaper when it came out.

Here's what I wrote, back in 1996:

THE STATE
MEDIA EXAMINES ITSELF<
Published on: 02/25/1996
Section: TEMPO
Edition: FINAL
Page: F6
Reviewed by Brad Warthen
Memo: Brad Warthen is an associate editor of The State's editorial page.


BREAKING THE NEWS: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

By James Fallows
Pantheon, 296 pages, $23

    So you think the news media are dragging the country down with their negativity and their failure to put things in perspective?
    So join the club. A lot of us on the inside of this alleged profession agree. James Fallows, Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, is one. Fallows' saving grace is that he's written this book explaining exactly what is wrong and why it matters.
    The problem has to do with perverse cognitive habits that journalists embrace as normal, but which cause them to portray public life in ways that make it hard for readers and viewers to engage it constructively.
    For instance: ``Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another.'' Among journalists, casting a jaded eye upon anything a politician does is seen as being ``professional.'' We tend to think of it as healthy skepticism. But there is nothing healthy about it.
    In fact, ``By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the news media helps bring about that very result.''
    That's exactly what has happened. As a groundbreaking poll discovered last year, the public is now far more cynical about politics and government than are journalists, who are more likely to believe that our political system is sound, and that citizens can make a difference. In other words, the people believe the system is just as bad as we've painted it, and we know better.
    There are excellent examples in this book illustrating the profound disconnect between journalists and sensible people.
    One of the best-documented is the journalists' penchant for reducing everything -- every issue, every speech, every policy initiative, every human gesture by a politician -- to what it means in terms of the next election. If a politician tries to do something about starving children, we immediately wonder aloud what this means in terms of the way he's trying to position himself in New Hampshire.
    If Fallows didn't do anything else in this book, I would praise him to the skies for drawing so clearly the connection between the way we cover politics and the way we cover sports -- which is to say, in virtually the same manner. Journalists tend to see everything as a contest, which one side must win and the other must lose. This, of course, leaves no room for the kind of consensus-building that solves problems in the real world.
    Politics and government matter, but modern journalism has done much to cause the public to despair of it ever meaning anything good.
    The sins that Fallows details in this book are examined in a manner that shows clearly ``how they affect the future prospects of every American by distorting the processes by which we choose our leaders and resolve our public problems.''
    Unlike most modern journalism, this book does not merely wallow in unrelieved despair. The author writes encouragingly of such things as the ``public journalism'' movement, through which a number of far-sighted, community-oriented journalists (you'll note that few of them are in Washington or New York) have started accepting responsibility for fixing the problem, starting with themselves.
    Fallows draws an interesting connection between the way the U.S. military examined and healed itself after Vietnam, and the way journalists can become their own best physicians. It won't be easy, but it can be done -- we just have to unlearn about half of the nonsense that got crammed into our heads in journalism school.
    Fallows has correctly diagnosed what's wrong with American journalism. If you want to know why you ought to be mad at the media, read this book. If everybody would read it (journalists should read it twice), we might find ourselves on the way to a cure.

The awful irony is that this was just when things were starting to get much worse, what with 24/7 shouting heads on cable TV and the blogosphere yet to come. The pointless, yammering, conflict for its own sake is SO much worse now -- and it's one of the things I struggle with constantly here on the blog, along with those of you who still hope for a civil town square in which to discuss issues -- that when I look back on when that review was written, it's almost like a lost age of innocence....

Sunday preview: Ivy Day in the Committee Room (5 Points version)

    Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. When the dome was thinly covered his face lapsed into darkness but, as he set himself to fan the fire again, his crouching shadow ascended the opposite wall and his face slowly re-emerged into light....

        -- from "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," by James Joyce

In the middle of a brilliant, unusually warm February afternoon (Thursday), I was holed up in an Irish-themed pub talking local politics. Jack Van Loan was holding court at his "office" in a booth at Delaney's pub in Five Points. And when I say office, I mean "office," with his files and organizers on the table before him next to his coffee, and his briefcase opened on a bench close at hand. From such locations Jack makes and takes his multiple calls getting ready for the big St. Paddy's Day event (March 14) and talks Five Points politics.

Last year, he was pushing Belinda Gergel for the 3rd district council contest that she eventually won. Today, he was conveying his blessing upon another (potential) candidate -- this one for mayor.

The candidate, or potential candidate, sat in the dark with the bright light coming in the window behind him so that I was talking to a silhouette -- a little like the effect when you talk to Joe Riley in his office down there at the Four Corners of the Law, with that huge cathedral-like array of windows behind him, and the fluid light of the Holy City radiating all about him. This was a little more prosaic than that, but then this wasn't the mayor yet, just a potential candidate.

Who was the candidate? Well, that's him in the very bad phone picture above, with Jack at his right. Shouldn't be hard to figure out. The thing about this candidate was, I needed no introduction. We've endorsed him for statewide office in the past. But my friend Jack wanted to introduce him as his candidate for mayor in next April's election, and I wanted to hear what Jack -- a force in the influential Five Points Association since 1991 -- had to say about him. It wasn't exactly Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" and we didn't talk about Parnell, but by Columbia standards it would do.

Anyway, the rest of the story will be in my Sunday column, so tune in.

Capt. Smith sits this one out

Ran into James Smith this morning at breakfast, and expressed my surprise that Vincent Sheheen was running for governor and he was not.

He said he just couldn't afford the time away from his family. As you'll recall, he was separated from the wife and four kids for about a year and a half, most of it fighting those folks President Obama calls the Tolly-bon. He said his wife was supportive, but he couldn't stand to miss the time with his kids. He said a Soapbox Derby event over the weekend (or was in Pinewood Derby? I get those mixed up) underlined that for him; if he were to run for gov, he'd miss such events.

On other matters, I mentioned I had thought of him and the other guys of Team Swamp Fox last night, because I've been watching (via Netflix) the HBO series "Generation Kill," based on the book by the same name by a Rolling Stone correspondent embedded with Force Recon Marines on the tip of the spear in the Iraq invasion in '03. The Marines, who were veterans of Afghanistan, talk about that experience a lot, and are sometimes nostalgic because the way they had fought on that front made more sense to them.

Anyway, I need to get together with Rep. Smith sometime and talk at greater length; I haven't had a chance to do that since he got back.

If you love books, dig my tie

Recently some of you had disparaging things to say about traditional men's neckwear. Well, this should turn you around -- at least, it should win over those of you who have enjoyed our discussion of good books back on this post.

Both p.m. and I put pretty much anything Mark Twain wrote on our favorites list, and I doubt that we're alone.

Anyway, I acquired this cravat a couple of years ago -- it was a Father's Day present that I sort of picked out myself. I had seen it in the gift shop of a museum/performance hall in Harrisburg, Pa. I don't know where you would find it closer than that. The label says "Museum Artifacts," which led me to find one on this Web site. Just don't wear it to any event I'm likely to attend, 'cause I found it first!

There's a tantalizing detail on this tie: One of the book covers at the bottom is of a book called Innocents at Home, which I had never seen or heard of, much less read. And I find few references to in on the Web, although Amazon does seem to have a line on A copy.

Something to add to my "to read" list, for sure -- if I can get my hands on one. I loved Innocents Abroad.

Moby Dick is a squitchy good read (Surprise!)

Doug Ross mentioning The Canterbury Tales back on this post -- which I never read (somehow, I escaped its being required of me in school) -- reminds me of something I'm reading at the moment and sort of enjoying, much to my surprise:

Moby Dick.

For years -- for decades in fact; almost four of them -- I refused to read Moby Dick on principle. You see, we spent like six weeks on it in my honors English class in the 11th grade at Robinson High School in Tampa, and I never did read it, at least not past "Call me Ishmael." And yet I got an A-plus on the six weeks test on the book. How? First, because it was an essay test -- which always gave me a leg up in school. Multiple choice can be such a brutally effective means of telling whether you actually know the material. With an essay, you can be careful to stick to what you know you know, and steer clear of your blank spots. And some, but not all, teachers are dazzled by a nicely worded essay. Although not all teachers -- I had one prof in college who wrote on one of my better B.S. efforts something like, "Nicely written; I enjoyed it. But obviously you are not familiar with the material." Enough teachers were snowed for me to get by, though. And I confess this played a not inconsiderable part in my decision to write for a living.

Also -- and this is the bigger point -- how on Earth could I possibly not be familiar with all the themes, characters and plot after six weeks of listening to people talk and talk and talk about it in class, even if I was only half-listening, which was probably the case?

Anyway, I took such perverse pride in that grade -- one of my most dramatic coups of skating without having done the work in my educational career -- that I avoided reading the book subsequently because I didn't want to spoil the perfection of my slacker record. I had read -- and enjoyed -- other books years after I was supposed to have read them in school. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance. But I kept myself pure on Melville.

But I picked up a copy recently, tempted by the fact that I'm such a huge fan of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring tales and thinking I might actually enjoy this one, although not having high expectations.

And you know what? While I doubt it will ever be my favorite novel, I've been really surprised by how accessible it is. I mean, I always had the impression (based on the way the people who actually read it in school groaned about the experience) that it was just something that no one in our era could possibly relate to, that it was way too 19th century for that (and not in a fun way, like Mark Twain). But on the contrary, I'm struck by how modern its tone and style is in parts. Also, it's very bite-sized -- the chapters are no longer than a typical newspaper column, and each one a well-crafted nugget all by its lonesome. So you can read a chapter, think "That wasn't so bad," then read another, and really feel like you're making progress without a lot of time invested all at once. (Try that with Dostoevsky, someone I actually did read and enjoy when I was supposed to in college, but not a guy you'd describe as "accessible" in the sense that I mean here.)

Far from being some boring old guy telling us stuff in boring old language, Ishmael as a narrator is actually sort of hiply ironic. He has a detachment and amusement toward his heavy subject material that is very late-20th century. And sometimes, the language itself goes along with the tone. For instance, in this passage very early in the book, describing a painting he puzzled over at The Spouter Inn:

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.--It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

Who'd have thought Melville could have written such a line as "A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted?" That is a very New Journalism use of language; one could imagine Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson being responsible for it. Or, to speak in fiction terms, it can be almost as modern-feeling as Nick Hornby or Roddy Doyle. It strikes me that way, anyway. Way more modern-seeming than much-later writers such as James Joyce or Fitzgerald or even Hemingway (who sounded WAY modern in the 20s, I suppose, but not so much later on).

As I read on, Ishmael is not what I'd call a likable character -- he's too much of a wise guy for that, tossing out ironic comments about everyone and everything. But he's certainly accessible.

And that surprised me.

Stepping forward into the past: My cool new Moleskine notebook

As you may have gathered, I'm a bit of a gadget guy. One of the reasons I blog is for the opportunities it gives me to mess around with cameras and PDAs and laptops and the various ways you can use them to produce text, sound, video, etc. This very night, in fact, I'll be trekking out to the Verizon store to get a Blackberry to replace the Treo I use for work. That Blackberry will be, as my Treo is now, a place for working with e-mail, my calendar, my contacts, as well as providing another browsing platform and a backup camera. Oh, yeah, and a phone (although I use the current one least for that).

But at the moment I am most enchanted with a piece of low-tech, retro equipment that my youngest daughter was so thoughtful as to give me for Christmas, ignoring my hint for a new insulated coffee travel mug. She gave me a Moleskine notebook -- specifically, a Moleskine Reporter Ruled Notebook. You may have seen them in bookstores. They're advertised as the notebook of Hemingway and Picasso. In years past, I had thought of buying one (I was a great admirer of Hemingway in my youth, and he had something to do with my choice of career). But I couldn't justify the expense. After all, I get all the reporter's notebooks I need for free at work, right?

But I misunderestimated, to use a bit of Bushspeak, the magic of a really nice, classic, classy notebook in one's pocket. I just started carrying it yesterday, and it's already affecting how I work -- for the better, I think. Since the notebook itself is special, it makes me think a little more carefully about what I choose to jot down. And it also makes me WANT to come up with stuff that's worthy to write in it. It's a motivator in the way a blank screen on a laptop or a PDA is not. It's like, I don't know, working on a painting or something -- the sense that what I write here stays here, is permanent, has a life, and if this notebook is dug out of an old box in an attic by one of my great-grandchildren, they will read what I am writing today.

I find myself thinking I need to get a better pen to write in it with.

The book itself is esthetically appealing -- you can see why Hemingway might have wanted to carry one around the Montparnasse or to the bullring or the front or whatever. It's a perfect size for the hand and the suitcoat pocket. It's black. The paper is of high quality. It has that cool, built-in elastic band to secure it with, giving a feeling of completeness and accomplishment when you finish a note and get ready to put it back in your pocket. Using it is just an appealing tactile, visual and interactive experience all around.

And it's making me more efficient, of all things. Y'all know how I tend to start my day with breakfast downtown, where I pore over The State and The Wall Street Journal and whatever I else I have time to look at over my coffee. Well, I get a lot of ideas while doing that, but too often, by the time I get back to the office, and have my morning meeting, and then start dealing with the e-mail that has to be read and the copy that has to be moved and talking with Robert about a cartoon and so forth and so on, next thing you know it's past lunch and my ideas of the morning are long forgotten.

This morning, I had a column idea for Sunday of the classic ephemeral sort that would be likely to evaporate long before I had time to start on it -- bits and pieces from different stories I was reading in the paper. Wanting to hang onto the thread, I thought of sending myself some notes by e-mail on the Treo. But that is cumbersome at best, typing on that little thumb keyboard, and it lends itself only to the shortest of reminders. But then I remembered the notebook. So I sent myself an e-mail that simply said:

Hope springs, even in South Carolina politics

See Moleskin notebook

Then I opened my notebook and filled two pages with an outline for the column, an outline that would be just waiting for me to flesh out at my first opportunity (which, as it happens, did not arrive until mid-afternoon). Since I all too often don't write the first word of my Sunday column until midday Friday, this put me more than a day ahead on one of my must-do tasks of the week. Consequently, I might have a chance to write an extra column to run Tuesday (a page that has to be done this week because of the MLK holiday), one that occurred to me as I was doing the final editing on the Tuesday editorial (about the Obama inaugural).

A classic, simple black notebook. What an ingenious device for enhancing personal productivity. What will they think of next?