I have to say that I was surprised at the almost universally positive reaction to my posting last week about reporters first-naming Pfc. Jessica Lynch. A sampling of the reader mail:
From John Holton:
I think that the media have yet to realize that the enlisted people in the military are not conscripts, but there of their own free will, and that as such they're entitled to the same respect shown to the officers. I find it interesting that the retired officers that now act as commentators on Fox News and CNN are called "General So-and-so", whereas the same news organizations find it perfectly acceptable to refer to PFC Lynch as "Jessica". Maybe it's a carryover from Vietnam, where the enlisted forces were generally conscripts and not military professionals. One of the best things I've seen on early morning TV was on the "Today" show, when Matt Lauer was on board an aircraft carrier during the Afghanistan conflict. He was interviewing the woman who was in charge of the galleys, a Master Chief Petty Officer, and asked her if he could call her by her first name (I think it was Betty, but I'm not sure). She very pleasantly told him, "No. Please call me Master Chief." The look on his face was priceless.
From Scott Shields:
I just found your running commentary on the "Private Lynch" vs. "Jessica" thing via Howard Kurtz and the Washington Post. I'm so glad someone is bringing this up! The Diego Rincon case is interesting juxtaposition in terms of media fairness, but there's another side to it all. I was so annoyed when I read this in the Washington Post a few days ago:
"Talk about spunk!" said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), whom military officials had briefed on the rescue.
At first, I couldn't really figure out why this bothered me. It seemed maybe that the comment didn't really fit the weight of the situation. And then I realized that it was the use of the word "spunk". That's a word you use to describe a high school cheerleader who stands up for the school nerd - not a rescued Prisoner of War.
Would you say that John McCain had "spunk"? How about "moxie"? I prefer words like "dedication", "bravery", or even "guts".
From Rod McFadden, Captain, USNR (for i.d. purposes only):
Thank you for making the "Jessica" point. Our Soldier, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Coast Guardsmen who happen to be women deserve the same public courtesy everyone else does.
It's a bit of a myth to call any baby-faced 19-year-old "Pfc.," regardless of sex. And it's an all-American trait to call people by their first names. (Everyone calls me Virginia, and I don't think that's only because nobody knows how to pronounce Postrel.) But the military is a guardian institution to whose members we owe the courtesy of acknowledging their status and their rank. (In addition to my Reason editorial on Jane Jacobs's ideas of guardian-vs.-commercial ethics, another related piece is here.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 08, 2003 • Comments
D Magazine has announced its list of the 10 most beautiful people in Dallas. Is it just me, or do they all have soap opera names--especially the men? (They also look scarily homogeneous.)
You probably want me to comment on the war instead of this fluff. I'm glad it's going well. They're going to need a bunch of M.P.s (and local deputies ASAP) to restore order in Basra, Baghdad, and elsewhere. Read Command Post. I have deadlines.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 08, 2003 • Comments
This time it sounds like Saddam may really be dead.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2003 • Comments
Once again, it's time to prepare for the fearsome Dallas summers and, once again, I find myself in The Gap, saying something I never thought I'd hear myself say, "The 4 is too big. Could I try the 2?" At size 2, the skirt fits, and I buy it. Given the generous proportions and the hip-friendly A-line style, I probably could have squeezed into a size 0.
I am not a thin woman, and I haven't lost any weight. In a normal-sized world (say, 20 years ago, when I was smaller), I'd be a size 10. In most stores today, I'm a size 6. The Gap is once again proving itself America's most generous and creative store when it comes to sizing. I pity the poor customers who really are size 2.
Why do I keep repeating this seemingly trivial message? To counter all the allegedly feminist propaganda denouncing the tyranny of apparel manufacturers who expect women to fit into size 0. What the zaftig propagandists never tell you is that as recently as 20 years ago, size 0 was called size 6. Check out my August 2001 posting; it even has a link to a Michael Kelly column.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2003 • Comments
On Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling ably critiques the latest attack on the basic economics assumption that people pursue happiness (a.k.a. utility) and that higher incomes and technological progress aid that pursuit. An excerpt:
Recently, the Co-Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics Richard Layard spelled out a fundamental challenge to mainstream economics. He argues that higher incomes do not lead to greater happiness. This in turn threatens much of the conventional wisdom among economists concerning policy issues.
To an economist, it is literally axiomatic that if people pursue higher incomes, then higher incomes make them happier. We do not believe that people do things that are contrary to their interests.
Layard argues instead that people pursue higher incomes even though collectively it is not in their interest to do so. He says that people are deluded into pursuing higher incomes by distortions in perception.
"First, I compare what I have with what I have become used to (through a process of habituation). As I ratchet up my standards, this reduces the enjoyment I get from any given standard of living. Second, I compare what I have with what other people have (through a process of rivalry). If others get better off, I need more in order to feel as good as before. So, we have two mechanisms which help to explain why all our efforts to become richer are so largely self-defeating in terms of the overall happiness of society."
According to Layard, we are on a happiness treadmill. Once we get used to air conditioning, having air conditioning no longer makes us happy. Once we get used to surfing the Internet, surfing the Internet no longer makes us happy. Once we get used to living longer because of modern medicine, our greater lifespan no longer makes us happy....
Going from the fact that brain activity changes when people say that they are happy to the conclusion that surveys can correctly identify the causes of happiness is not a valid logical leap.
More important, the fact that subjective happiness and measurable brain activity are correlated does not imply that we can make a meaningful comparison between the happiness reported by one person and the happiness reported by another person. In particular, if I do a survey and find that two people with incomes of $20,000 and $40,000 report happiness of X and Y, I cannot draw any conclusion based on the relative values of X and Y. Even if we are talking about one person, and X and Y represent their reports at two different points in their lives, it is not clear that we can make a meaningful comparison between X and Y. Thus, it is unlikely that survey research can shed light on the effect on happiness of a change in income from $20,000 to $40,000.
Read the whole thing, which includes relevant links.
Arnold's passing comment about the same person's assessment of his or her happiness at two different points in life is worth elaboration. As I learned long ago from reading Thomas Sowell, in assessing economic data, always correct for age. Younger people are generally poorer than older ones. But are younger people less happy?
Probably not, for reasons irrelevant to the dispute at hand. Youth has its own resources: all those options one's choices have not yet foreclosed, all those imagined futures that might come to pass. In middle age, most of us have more money, and hence more material choices, but simply living our lives has eliminated some of the possibilities we felt in our youth. Hence we may not be as happy as we once were. But we're still happier than we'd be without air conditioning--especially if we live in Texas.
On this subject, Richard Rodriguez's books, Hunger of Memory, a youthful work, and Days of Obligation, a middle-aged work (also influenced by the AIDS epidemic), offer an eloquent contrast. (My WSJ review of Days of Obligation is here.) I haven't yet read his new book, Brown; I bought it earlier today. Based on an excerpt and his speech at our second Dynamic Visions Conference, I expect it to be as good as, if not better, than the earlier ones.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2003 • Comments
This blog is at a new URL. Please change your bookmarks and blogrolls to /content/blog/. Thanks.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 07, 2003 • Comments
Some of the most interesting parts of NYT war coverage are buried at the ends of stories. From Craig Smith's story today, datelined Zubayr
At the local hospital, a dark-skinned man with deep-set eyes grimaced in pain in a hallway, an arm wrapped in layers of gauze. He said his brother had been decapitated by a British tank round as the two men were trying to drive out of town to escape the fighting at the start of the war. Though the hospital has been without electricity or water for more than a week, uneasy doctors and nurses evade reporters' questions, repeating that they are doing fine and are in need of nothing.
Later, a young intern named Mustafa caught up with a reporter outside the hospital to say that the hospital was running out of medicine and critical supplies but that the people there dare not tell the truth.
"The director of the hospital has orders from Basra not to accept any help from the allied forces or aid agencies and to tell anyone who asks that we have everything we need," he said.
He said that the director was following the orders out of fear that if he did not, the Baath Party would send someone to kill him.
The water engineer, in his home, offered a guest a frosty tumbler of ice water and explained that the town was still without electricity because the workers at the nearby power plant were afraid to turn it on for fear of Baathist retribution. He said that before the invasion, Baath Party officials warned everyone not to cooperate with the American and British armies in areas that fell under allied control.
The engineer said he was part of a team of about 20 from the local water bureau who have returned to work, using generators to run the water station that feeds the town. The generators allow them to supply about three-quarters of the town with water on alternating days, he said.
He said that he was doing it because without water "the number of people who will die from typhoid and cholera will be more than from any bombs," but that he lives without protection and worries that his work will cost him his life.
"I'm afraid they will knock on the door and kill me," he said. "No matter what we say, you have no idea how scared we are."
He pleaded with a reporter visiting his home to leave quickly and not to ask more questions. "When Basra falls," he said, "your newspaper will not be fat enough to hold all of the stories we have to tell."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 06, 2003 • Comments
This week's New Yorker brings a John Cassidy profile of crusading NY attorney general Eliot Spitzer. (The piece isn't online). I didn't like Eliot Spitzer when he was using his eating club connections to get good coverage in The Daily Princetonian, and I don't like him now. It's the first of these facts that is relevant to a shocking (to me) misstatement of history in Cassidy's profile:
"Princeton at the start of the nineteen-eighties was hardly a hotbed of political activism. Candidates for office included a 'Jihad Party,' made up of hard-partying frat boys who wore towels and face masks. 'It wasn't an office that I recall many people fighting for,' one of Spitzer's fellow-students said. 'Even without Jihad, the slate would have been pretty thin."
The general point is correct: Only resume-polishing student-council weenies like Eliot Spitzer thought being president of the student body was a big deal. (Unlike many schools, Princeton had low student fees, so the student government didn't control a huge money pot.)
The descriptive facts are absurdly off--especially that self-serving line about "hard-partying frat boys." The Antarctica Liberation Front, whose then-dadaist slogan was Jihad (it's not so funny today), was a satirical party of--I say this in the most flattering and self-identifying way--nerds: brilliant, quirky, funny, intellectual guys who make Eliot Spitzer look like a frat boy.
Google turns up a brief reminscience in our class notes:
"WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAMPUS REVOLUTIONARIES? (PRINCETON STYLE, SORT OF)": On campus, he was a leader of the ever powerful Antarctica Liberation Front, the group that 18 years ago pulled off one of the most stunning upsets in USG election history by taking most of the top spots and, in one of the group's first official acts, declared war on The Hun School (reports were unsubstantiated that the ALF demanded a recount upon winning the election).
Another ALF platform plank was to annex all the spaces between the yellow lines on highways. After a year of Eliot Spitzer running student government, the ALF swept to electoral victory, dealing a humiliating rebuke to self-important would-be pols. No wonder Spitzer and his friends want to revise history.
The person mentioned above--the ALF's "spiritual leader," a.k.a. The Divine Bruce Yam--is my friend Keating Holland, now director of polling for CNN, who worked more than full-time as managing editor of The Daily Princetonian and still managed to graduate Phi Beta Kappa. Not a frat boy, and not what people picture when they hear the phrase. A former ALF candidate's current job description starts this way: "I am primarily interested in theories of strongly correlated quantum systems, particularly in low dimensions where quantum fluctuations can lead to interesting and exotic new states of matter." (Dan Arovas has "tenure in paradise," as Keating puts it, as a physics prof at UC-San Diego.)
Sorry, Eliot. I'm sure the New Yorker audience thinks it's just terrible the way the big, bad frat boys mocked your noble sense of public service. The truth--that a bunch of hyperintellectuals with a sense of humor incited a student revolt against Spitzer-style self-importance--is a lot more embarrassing.
How about that famous New Yorker fact checking!
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 04, 2003 • Comments
I'm terribly sad to read that Michael Kelly has been killed in Iraq.
I only met him once, when we were guests on C-SPAN's morning show, but I admired his work greatly. He was one of the best magazine editors, possibly the very best, of our generation, and a gifted and passionate writer. His book on the first Gulf War, which I read as dispatches in The New Republic, provided a gritty, sometimes wrenching, eyewitness account of that often-sanitized conflict. He will be missed.
Update: Here's what The Atlantic said. (Via InstaPundit.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 04, 2003 • Comments
Chuck Watson notes that satellite photos show a lot of contrails on the Iraq/Iran border. He has a photo of one that crosses the border and looks way too straight and intact to have merely drifted.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on April 04, 2003 • Comments