Monday, April 20, 2009 - Posts
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If I were an Adderall popper, I probably wouldn't have veered from my Slate tasks today to read Margaret Talbot's fascinating piece about neuroenhancers in the latest New Yorker. But I'll please my employers by turning an afternoon distraction to good use: a blog post!
Margaret points out that "every era, it seems, has its own defining drug," and astutely assesses what makes stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, the newer Provigil, and a drug called piracetam—touted for dispelling foggy-headedness and promoting productivity—such a good match for our moment. "Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy," she writes. "And they have a synergistic relationship with our multiplying digital technologies: the more gadgets we own, the more distracted we become, and the more we need help in order to focus."
It struck me that the era helps shape the media portrayal of that defining drug, too. The quest for the cognitive edge: Not so many years ago, I could imagine that a piece about a surge in cosmetic neurology might well have had a romanticizing bent—or at any rate might have sent readers scurrying off to score some pills, eager not to miss out on what go-getters were doing. For all I know, there were such pieces. Without demonizing these drugs, Margaret does something that I can't help thinking is a lot more useful and, when you stop and think about it, better suited to these already stressful times of ours. Her account makes the blinkered drive for focus and hyper-efficiency—in the face of what sounds like phenomenally little research on the drugs' long-term effects—sound strikingly narrow-minded. It's not that she romanticizes unadulterated genius, either; her piece is a reminder, in all ways, of the virtues of calm reflection.
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Last week Dahlia linked to a piece by Salon's Rebecca Traister about TV Land's new dating show The Cougar, in which a bunch of young dudes try and woo a 40-year-old woman. Traister hates the show and the whole cougar phenomenon in general because, "Of all the things that men do that women might reasonably wish to do as well isn't this....mimicking the midlife crisis-penis-car-crippling-insecurity version of mature masculinity...one thing we could have just walked away from without regret?" Some behavior isn't empowering, for anyone, and should be left well enough alone.
A story in this weekend's New York Times got me thinking a similar, if inverted, thought. It was a piece about how Hollywood's leading men are getting fat. Seriously. Apparently, the expanding waistlines of Russell Crowe, John Travolta, Denzel Washington, Hugh Grant and Leonardo DiCaprio constitute a trend worthy of examination in the paper of record. The piece's writer, Michael Cieply, describes a scene between Crowe and Jeff Daniels in the just-released State of Play as "Two men. One notebook. Four chins." Ba dum dum ching. To reverse paraphrase Traister, of all the things women do that men might reasonably wish to do as well, obsessing over one's weight—or being publicly shamed about that weight by the media—shouldn't make the list.
New York's Vulture points out that some might say, "[T]his kind of criticism levels the playing field a bit and puts men in the same position that women have faced for years." I would say it just gives everyone body-image issues.
Cieply writes in his piece that "Hollywood's women may [may!!] have weight issues of their own. But it is somehow less noticeable, possibly [possibly!!] because actresses who expand do not often get roles to showcase that growth." In other words, larger women hardly ever appear in movies because they never, ever get cast. Is it noble of the Times to draw attention to this double standard? So that, what? Larger men don't get cast either? Perhaps, in the interest of equality, actors, just by virtue of turning 45, should start losing roles—exactly like their female counterparts! Then we’ll never have anyone who looks even remotely like a normal, middle-aged person in any movies ever again, but, at least, that would be fair. Or, you know, equally unfair.
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As much as I need to carefully read the Bybee and other Justice Department memos to discover whether "dictated but not read" appears anywhere in the lawyerly text documenting the banality of evil, I can't resist one more comment on the Susan Boyle phenomenon, still reverberating in the Scottish village of Blackburn.
I'm afraid, Kerry, that the ham-handed and patronizing season seasoning you despair of, from Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden, who won't let Simon's dentist go near the "unspoiled" singer, is just the beginning of a giant social experiment and successful series akin to the Truman Show. (The twist here is the Jim Carrey role is played by a matronly Scottish lady who accidentally plucked herself from obscurity.) Susan Boyle and her neighbors may enjoy the media invasion of their small village now teeming with TV bookers and satellite trucks chasing 20 million hits on YouTube. Maybe the West Lothian community is comfortable with the lone Simon Cowell-dispatched handler, guarding the new celebrity at her cottage door, while everybody else in town shares tankards and talk, in fantastic accents, with the sophisticated cellphoned entertainment reporters in their midst. I personally tend to agree, however, with Fray commentator ScrewJack2008 who posted "My advice would be to return to anonymity as soon as possible before these people all chew you up and spit you out to serve their own agendas. Just run for your fucking life."
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But Emily, you are so clearly reading the wrong newspapers again! Because on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal today we learn that what was done to Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not only not torture—since it was being “continuously monitored”—but it also saved America from a a "second wave" of al-Qaida attacks, to be carried out by an "east Asian" affiliate, which would have involved the crashing of another airplane into a building in Los Angeles.” So quite obviously that 179th water-boarding of KSM really was as necessary as the very first.
To me the most interesting development in the torture debate this weekend is that the torture defenders deploy about three different playground techniques in an attempt to minimize the obscenity of what we have learned: Either they go the frat-boy route; the “hahahaha bugs-in-a-box-they-so-did-that-to-me-at-prep-school” defense. Or they trot out the sanctimonious claim that anyone who opposes torture must just hate America. Or, as we learn today in the Wall Street Journal, that it can’t have been torture if lawyers authorized it and doctors were monitoring it. Each argument is more circular than the next. But then I suppose if you're defending the legal principle that "it isn't torture unless we say it is," circular arguments are all you need.
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The only way to understand how the Bush administration could have waterboarded two detainees 266
times is to go back to footnote 27 of this
2005 torture memo, which Scott Shane pointed
to in the New York Times. It
discusses the “unnecessary use of enhanced” interrogation techniques—unnecessary
because “although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be
compliant elements within the CIA Headquarters still believed he was
withholding information.”
The memo only admits to one instance of that kind of break
between the agents on the scene and HQ. But since we know that detainee Abu Zubaydah--83 waterboardings in August 2002, right after an earlier torture memo gave permission--gave up his most useful information in the weeks after he was captured, before or possibly immediately after the torture began. And so that "unnecessary" line stands for a much larger disturbing truth: The
people ordering the torture didn’t care about how much pain they inflicted for
how little gain. Efficacy, humanity—all of this became beside the point. The Bush
administration wasn’t really standing on the ground that torture was a terrible
means to the virtuous end of saving lives, as it so often claimed. There simply was no
necessity defense.
That footnote also demonstrates why if we’re going to
investigate or prosecute anyone, it shouldn’t be the agents on the scene. In
the wake of Obama’s carefully crafted statement fending off prosecution for
anyone who relied in good-faith on the DoJ memos, some commentators have called
for looking into whether CIA agents could go down for torturing before the
memos were written in August 2002. This seems wrong to me. If we went that
route, we’d get around version of Abu Ghraib: a few low-level scapegoats
standing in for their far more culpable superiors. Much more interesting is
another possibility Obama left open: going after the lawyers who wrote the
memos and the officials who demanded and approved them—David Addington, Alberto
Gonzales, Jim Haynes. Rahm Emanuel told
George Stephanopoulos on Sunday that Obama believes that “those who devised
policy… should not be prosecuted either." But what about disbarment? And impeachment for Jay Bybee, the
torture memo author who got life tenure on the 9th Circuit? It would
be a start. If you think these memos are good lawyering, then you don’t deserve
to be a lawyer. That’s a lesson the bar should desperately want to impart.
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This week's column from Meghan McCain is my favorite thus far. While her previous installments were solidly naive, this week's manages to be that and hilarious. As it turns out, the senator's daughter is on Twitter, and guess who's following her Twitter feed? Karl Rove. And that gives Meghan the creeps!
"Karl Rove follows me on Twitter," McCain reveals. "That's creepy." Surely, Rove on Twitter is a creepy concept. Does he really have so little to do with his time these days that he feels compelled to send messages like these out into the void? "Joining Bill O'Reilly tonight," he tweets. Not exactly breaking news. But there's more. "Got to the airport with a lot of time to spare." Who says Rove's post-Bush career is not without thrills? My favorite is the one where he discloses he's getting his shoes shined. Fascinating.
So, what's the probs with Karl's tweets, Megs? Apparently, she finds them "disingenuous." Possibly even written by a ghost-twitterer, she ruminates! (I doubt it. Nobody could come across as dull and unself-aware as Rove-on-Rove.) Therefore, she concludes, it's time for folks like herself to "take Twitter back from the creepy people." Employing her usual writing style, in which she expresses some random thought and never really unpacks that random thought, it remains unclear exactly why she finds Rove following her "creepy." In all likelihood, it's another one of her attempts to set conservatives like herself, who find themselves attempting to blindly steer forward a floundering party, apart from the icky old guys like Rove. The problem is that she and Rove have more in common than she comprehends. After all, she's just a Karl Rove creep in sorority girl clothing.
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I think the Susan Boyle Preservation Project has crossed the line into creepy. From Us Magazine:
"I won't let Simon Cowell take her to his dentist and I certainly won't let her near his hairdresser," judge Amanda Holden tells the U.K. Mirror.
The frumpy 48-year-old "needs to stay exactly as she is because that's the reason we love her," Holden insists. "She just looks like anybody who could live on your street."
"The minute we turn her into a glamour-puss is when it's spoiled," she says.
A makeover "can perhaps come later when she has signed the album deal and conquered America," Holden adds. "For now we'll keep her exactly as she is because that's why we've all fallen in love with her. I think it's the underdog thing."
Pretty Amanda Holden won't "let" Susan Boyle near Simon's makeup crew, lest she be "spoiled." In other words, the singer's frumped-up appearance is the most important thing about her; remove it, and we cease to care.
I don't know that turning Ms. Boyle into some kind of statement about physical beauty is any more respectful of her autonomy than forcing her into a makeover. She hasn't volunteered to be a feminist icon or morality personified or anything else we want to force upon her squinty visage. She is a person, not a placard, and her life is changing. Now that her audience consists of more than just Pebbles, she might well want to glam it up a little. There is nothing particularly authentic about preserving her appearance in amber while everything around her transforms dramatically.
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