BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Saturday, June 28, 2003
Lydon on Raines. Burrowing
more deeply into Christopher Lydon's weblog, I just read
his
June 6 post on the
resignation of New York Times executive editor Howell
Raines.
Obligatory triple back-scratch: I'd
seen it yesterday but didn't have time to read it. Al
Giordano credits me with
leading him to Lydon's blog -- and now he's leading me back to
Lydon's Times post.
Anyway, if you can only force
yourself to read one more thing on the downfall of Raines, read
Lydon. He writes:
If Howell Raines is to be
held responsible for serious lapses, let it be for the Times'
pusillanamity around the unnecessary war that the Bush team
slipped past the Congress and the sleeping watchmen in the serious
press.
And that's not all. Not even close.
posted at 9:36 PM |
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Friday, June 27, 2003
Sodomites 6, theo-fascists
3. US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gets it exactly right.
Commenting on the Court's six-to-three decision throwing out the
Texas sodomy law and, in effect, virtually legalizing same-sex
relations, a
bitter and angry Scalia
accuses his colleagues of having "taken sides in the culture war" and
having "largely signed on to the so-called homosexual
agenda."
Damn straight! This week has really
been a wondrous one for progressives, who've gone from looking at the
Court as a virtual extension of the Bush presidency -- whose very
existence it had hurried into being -- to, surprisingly, a last
bastion of justice.
Earlier this week, of course, the
Court
upheld affirmative action
in college admissions, although rigid quota systems will not be
allowed. Unfortunately, the court made a bad call in upholding a law
ordering public libraries that receive federal funding to filter out
Internet
porn. But the republic will
survive that a whole lot better than it would have survived bad
decisions in the sodomy and affirmative-action cases.
These stunningly good decisions are
accompanied by recent buzz that, contrary to longstanding rumor, none
of the justices is seriously contemplating retirement.
Media Log's theory: buyer's
remorse. When five justices rushed to hand the presidency to George
W. Bush two and a half years ago, they may have seen him as a
garden-variety conservative cut from the same mold as his
father.
Now that they -- or at least Sandra
Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, the most moderate of the five
conservatives -- have gotten a look at how radical Bush really is,
they've decided to stay put for as long as they can.
Long live the Supreme
Court!
posted at 8:38 AM |
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Christopher Lydon, natural-born
blogger. While the Supreme Court is kicking up its heels, we
continue to be hampered by a quiescent and complacent
press.
I've been negligent in not giving a
plug to a newish blog by veteran journalist Christopher
Lydon, although I have no
doubt that his many fans have discovered it anyway.
But here
it is -- and the most
recent entry is a link to a terrific column by Newsday's Jimmy
Breslin, who is appalled at the way his younger colleagues accept the
secrecy with which the government is fighting the war against terror.
Says Breslin: "You believe the FBI, you belong back in public
school."
Lydon also offers some intriguing
thoughts on Ralph Waldo Emerson, "A God for Bloggers" ("He is a man
for bloggers to embrace most especially, not for Emerson's glory but
for our own understanding of a transformative moment we are living
through"), and on the internecine warfare at the New York
Times.
posted at 8:37 AM |
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Reading and drinking. I'll
be reading tonight between 7 and 9 p.m. as part of the
Writers
with Drinks series at the
Lizard Lounge, at 1667 Mass Ave, in Cambridge. I'll definitely be
doing something from the political-media axis, but I may have a
surprise as well. So drop in if you get a chance.
posted at 8:36 AM |
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Thursday, June 26, 2003
Scatology and the law.
Denver Post editor Greg Moore -- the former managing editor of
the Boston Globe -- is reportedly being sued over a barnyard
metaphor he offered in the Post newsroom to explain why he'd
fired a veteran editor.
According to Westword's
Michael
Roberts (scroll down to
"Back to the barnyard"), Moore helpfully explained to his staff that
he'd gotten rid of assistant city editor Arnie Rosenberg because "the
way to clean up a place is not to move manure around the barnyard."
Holy shit! (Via Romenesko.)
posted at 8:29 AM |
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New in this week's
Phoenix. Making sense of the media frenzy over UMass
president Bill Bulger's memory-impaired
congressional testimony.
Also, "News
Dissector" Danny Schechter
writes an insta-book on the war in Iraq -- complete with a soundtrack
starring a rapping George W. Bush.
posted at 8:28 AM |
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Wednesday, June 25, 2003
We live in a political
world. And whether we are about to be done in by human-caused
global warming depends very much on your political
perspective.
David
Appell has a good piece in
Scientific American over a new study by two scientists at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that purports to show
that there's nothing to worry about. It seems that the consensus view
among their colleagues, though, is that global warming is real and
the study is deeply flawed.
The best quote: "You'd be
challenged, I'd bet, to find someone who supports the Kyoto Protocol
and also thinks that this paper is good science, or someone who
thinks that the paper is bad science and is opposed to Kyoto."
posted at 9:35 AM |
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Tuesday, June 24, 2003
More on the WMD deception.
Can the Bush administration's deceptions about Iraq's
weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities blossom into a real issue?
(I don't mean just for the Democrats, but for anyone who cares about
our ability to obtain enough honest information to be able to govern
ourselves.) Two newish pieces suggest that the Great WMD Deceit isn't
going away.
First, this week's New
Republic -- perhaps the most significant liberal organ to support
the war in Iraq -- has a long cover essay this week by John Judis and
Spencer Ackerman documenting in convincing detail how the White House
continually cooked intelligence reports to make it look like Iraq had
both extensive WMD capabilities (including nukes) and ties to Al
Qaeda.
Judis and Ackerman revisit the
matters of the aluminum tubes and the forged uranium documents from
Niger. More important, though, they show an overarching strategy to
pressure intelligence officials -- right up to and including CIA
director George Tenet -- to make assertions that weren't true in
order to stoke war fever.
Unlike most TNR content,
this article is freely
available online. Read it.
And ask yourself why Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Dick
Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- at a minimum -- haven't been
subpoenaed to testify before Congress about their public
prevarications. Can you say "Gulf of Tonkin"?
The second piece is Sunday's column
by the Washington Post's George
Will, reprinted in Monday's
Boston Globe. Will doesn't say anything startling except for
the fact that it is he -- the staunch old Republican warhorse and
adviser to Ronald Reagan -- who's saying it. Writes Will:
Some say the war was
justified even if WMD are not found nor their destruction
explained, because the world is "better off" without Saddam
Hussein. Of course it is better off. But unless one is prepared to
postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily
dismantle any tyranny -- on to Burma? -- it is unacceptable to
argue that Hussein's mass graves and torture chambers suffice as
retrospective justifications for preemptive war. Americans seem
sanguine about the failure -- so far -- to validate the war's
premise about the threat posed by Hussein's WMD, but a long-term
failure would unravel much of this president's policy and
rhetoric.
Good Reaganite that he is, Will
holds out the possibility that Saddam's WMDs were removed before the
US invasion, and/or that they will eventually be found. But there's
no mistaking Will's general thrust: his bowtie is spinning in
consternation.
In light of the daily updates from
Iraq -- continued
fighting, and the possible
emergence of a radical
Shiite theocracy -- you'd
have to be Ari Fleischer to pretend to be pleased with the way this
is playing out.
posted at 9:07 AM |
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The Penguin and the Apple.
Even as Apple
Computer rolls out a new
line of sexy products, Slate's Paul Boutin writes that the
Macintosh operating system will soon slip
into third place, behind
Linux, in the number of personal computers on which it is
installed.
Boutin references a
Business Week article,
but offers additional analysis suggesting that third place is,
essentially, where they put intensive-care patients who aren't likely
to recover.
More bad news for us Mac
users.
posted at 9:07 AM |
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Monday, June 23, 2003
Some thoughts about the "M"
word. In a piece for yesterday's "Week in Review" section in the
New York Times, Natalie
Angier considers the
possibility that some short adolescent males will be given human
growth hormone (hGH) in order to add a few inches.
She is talking about boys whose
height is not the result of any medical or genetic condition, and is
merely on the low side of normal. By contrast, she notes, hGH has
long been given to children -- boys and girls -- who have a type of
dwarfism known as growth-hormone deficiency. She writes that "without
the treatment, they would be true midgets, perhaps under four feet
tall as adults; with the shots, they are brought up to low-normal
heights."
Her use of the word midget
is interesting. Angier probably doesn't know this, but the M-word has
long been considered offensive within the dwarf community, in much
the same way as the N-word is considered unacceptable to
African-Americans. That is, a few dwarfs might toss the M-word at
each other as kind of an inside joke, but virtually no one wants to
hear outsiders use it.
Yet Angier's use of the phrase
true midget suggests something else -- that there is an
actual, clinical definition of the word. And in fact, the M-word has
long been restricted to those whose profound short stature is the
result of growth-hormone deficiency or some other endocrinological
cause. These people's proportions -- their arms, legs, head, and
torso -- are the same as those of "average-size people," the
politically correct term for the vast majority of us who are
unaffected by any kind of dwarfism.
By contrast, dwarf has
traditionally been reserved for people who have one or another type
of skeletal dysplasia -- that is, genetic and/or medical conditions
affecting bone development. These people, who constitute the vast
majority of the profoundly short statured, tend to have average-size
torsos, slightly larger-than-average heads, and exceedingly short
arms and legs.
So is there a good reason to
distinguish between midgets and dwarfs? Not really. The
origins of dwarf are ancient. By contrast, midget is a
made-up word whose lineage can only be traced to 1865 or
so.
The American
Heritage Dictionary
gives this as the first definition of the word: "Offensive An
extremely small person who is otherwise normally proportioned." So
even though the AHD embraces Angier's meaning, it also notes
that its use is discouraged.
The Oxford English
Dictionary (not freely available online) gets closer to the heart
of the matter:
"An extremely small person;
spec. such a person publicly exhibited as a curiosity." No
mention of proportionality, by the way. Thus, according to the
OED, the M-word is closely tied to the idea of public
performance -- of the side show, the freak show, with such latter-day
offshoots as midget wrestling and midget porn. No wonder it came to
be considered offensive.
Midget is sometimes thought
to have been coined by P.T. Barnum, but such is not the case. Barnum,
of course, was the employer of Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren --
two proportionate dwarfs who were better known as General and Mrs.
Tom Thumb. If the M-word could accurately describe anyone, it was
surely they. Yet in Barnum's 1855 autobiography, he describes both
Strattons as dwarfs. The reason is simple enough: the M-word
had not yet been invented.
These things tend to come full
circle. Next week, hundreds of dwarfs will arrived in Greater Boston
for the annual conference of Little
People of America. Among
the more politically aware members, there continues to be a simmering
debate over terminology. Some would like to reclaim midget as
their own; others do not want to hear the word at all, thank you very
much.
Obviously the most important thing
to keep in mind is that LPA's members are all individuals.
Dwarf is a lot better than midget, but the person's
name is best of all. This is the first national LPA conference to be
held in the Boston area since 1983. Boston is not renowned for making
visitors feel welcome, but maybe this time we can make an
exception.
posted at 8:13 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
