SPEAKING OF CELEBRITY INTELLECTUALS
Here's an essay to remind us that Camille Paglia isn't just a media provocateur. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
Dynamist Blog
JONATHAN RAUCH
Jonathan Rauch's new book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, is out and I highly recommend it. Even if you aren't especially interested in the issue, it's always a delight to see Jonathan's fair and careful mind at work. (If you really, really aren't interested in marriage and want to sample his work, try Kindly Inquisitors.)
While most reviews of the book will peg him as a gay writer, Jonathan actually comes to the issue as someone who has been thinking and writing seriously about heterosexual marriage for years and who cares deeply about the health of that institution. His book tour schedule is here. A mutual friend and I would like to get him to Dallas. Anyone with leads on a speaking venue, please email me.
For those concerned about the quality of contemporary public intellectuals, this book provides a nice test case: Can a graceful, careful, and honest writer on a serious yet hot-button issue grab attention if he doesn't have bluster and self-promotional personality of a media-age celebrity?
"JUST DANG CREEPY"
Look what Lileks found in an unironic 1940s Parenting magazine. The full-size version is here. In other mid-century Flotsam, he's also got ads from a 1953 tourists' guide to Baghdad.
DISSENT ON BANK CHARGES
A number of readers have written to disagree with the particulars of my post on California's bill to ban paycheck-cashing fees at banks. (Nobody seems to disagree that California is regulation crazy.) In the interest of equal time, here's reader David Lonborg's note:
It's hard to argue with your general point that California is a rough place to do business, but I don't think the paycheck legislation is an example. If I'm reading the story correctly, the legislation is directed only to checks cashed at the banks on which they're drawn. The idea of a check is that it's a _negotiable_ instrument: instead of paying what I owe you in currency, I give you a piece of paper that orders my bank to pay you that amount. If I owe you $100, and I give you a check drawn on Wells Fargo for $100, you have a legitimate gripe if Wells Fargo only pays you $95 when you present the check.
I'm inclined to think that the bill is directed at the wrong target. It looks to me like the current law quoted in the article would give employees a good claim against their employers, and that should give the employers ample reason to do whatever's necessary to clarify the banks' understanding of "negotiable." But your post is off-base. There's no cost-shifting issue, because the relevant customer is the one who's issuing the check (an order to the bank to pay money), not the one who's presenting it. The bank is already well-positioned to put those costs where they belong.
I agree that if there's a problem, it's between the employee and the employer, not the employee and the bank. But I can imagine the shrieks of protest that would emerge from the tax authorities of California if employers started paying in cash. In 2004, money is something that goes through banks, for a minor charge. You can, of course, always get a bank account yourself, and have cash available 24 hours a day for free--contrary to the bad old days when I was a poor college student and used to pay 50 cents to cash a $25 check.
TOMATOES AND PROGRESS
If progress is so obvious, why do tomatoes taste so bad? For as long as I can remember, the contrast between delicious tomatoes out of the garden and the rubbery, tasteless variety in supermarkets was Exhibit A in the case against large-scale agriculture. In the early '90s, a biotech company tried to genetically engineer a good tomato. They attracted a lot of hostility from the likes of Jeremy Rifkin but ultimately failed in their quest.
Over the last couple of years, however, delicious tomatoes have hit the supermarkets--in miniature form. Where did these grape tomatoes come from? And could anything that tastes so good actually be low in calories? As I was wolfing some down like candy last night, I wondered about these questions and, using Google, found the story behind them, a long feature by Carole Sugarman of the WaPost. I suspect no one read it at the time (it's dated 9/12/2001) but it's well worth a read now. The story has all the elements of a contemporary business yarn--globalization, intellectual property disputes, secretive business deals--but no new-fangled biotech. It's all old-fashioned grafting, upsetting to Marvell's mower but no bit deal to today's bio-Luddites. Here are some excerpts:
In a few weeks, when most of the locally grown tomatoes disappear, there will still be hope for the brisk-weather salad. A juicy beefsteak may be hard to come by, a pint of farmers' market cherry tomatoes may be scarce, but commercially grown grape tomatoes -- the bite-size sugary fruit that has gone from novelty to commodity -- will be in abundance.
"Meteoric," is how Tom Mueller, director of sales and marketing for Six L's Packing Co., Inc., an Immokalee, Fla., grower, describes their rise in popularity.
After years of producing flavorless, armor-thick impostors, commercial tomato growers now have a big hit. Grape tomatoes are sold widely, from Wal-Mart to Sutton Place Gourmet. Aside from Florida, they're being grown in Mexico and up and down the East and West coasts, making them available all year long. Six L's, for example, farms grape tomatoes in Virginia in the summer, working its way down the coast to Florida by the end of October.
And their ubiquitousness has changed the landscape of the supermarket produce aisle.
Grapes "have killed the cherry tomato business," says Charles Lester, produce buyer for Giant Food, who added that the chain "very seldom" carries cherry tomatoes anymore. They're "quickly becoming the tomato of choice," says Craig Muckle, spokesman for Safeway, which sells 10 times more grape than cherry tomatoes....
Their success, however, is more than just a triumph of taste. The forces of the global marketplace have growers constantly scrambling to come up with the next great idea. New varieties of produce are being imported "from Holland, Costa Rica, all over the world," says Gene McAvoy, an extension agent with the University of Florida. "If growers don't stay ahead of the pack, they're in trouble. People don't just want a pepper anymore."
They also don't just want a tomato, which is why grape tomatoes hit such a competitive nerve among growers. It also explains how the efforts of a small Florida farmer developed into a legal battle, a seed crisis and eventually an oversupply of the tomatoes.
Andrew Chu, a vegetable grower in Wimauma, Fla., first heard about a grape-shaped variety of cherry tomato in 1996. A Taiwanese friend and specialty produce wholesaler in New York asked Chu to try them, thinking they might appeal to Asian shoppers; they were already being grown in mainland China.
So Chu sent away for the hybrid seeds from Known-You Seed Co., Ltd., in Taiwan. He planted his first crop in the fall of 1996. Asians bought the grape-shaped tomatoes, but the market was limited, says Chu.
"I started thinking about taking them mainstream," he says. So in 1997, Chu Farms packed them up in pint-size plastic clamshells, and shipped them through its regular distributors to the East Coast.
Word travels fast among the farmers, seed salespeople and truck drivers in tomato country. Before long commercial growers such as Six L's and Procacci Bros. got a taste of the fruit and realized Chu was on to something. "I've been in business 53 years and I recognized their potential," says Joe Procacci, chief executive officer of Procacci Bros., who first saw the sweet tomatoes at Chu's initial three-acre plot. He and other growers imported the seeds -- a variety called Santa -- and started planting.
As far as I can tell from online sources, grape tomatoes do in fact have few calories, about 33 in a half cup.
LYNCH MOBS
Mark Bowden's article in yesterday's WSJ is a must read. (The link should work for a week.)
The picture is haunting. The bodies of the dead dangle overhead, twisted and grotesque, while the living frolic beneath them, posing for the camera. The joy and laughter on the faces of the celebrants is unmistakably genuine. These are people exulting in hate, glorying in their own cruelty.
It was taken on Aug. 7, 1930, and it shows the bodies of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two black men falsely accused of rape who were beaten, tortured, mutilated and then strung up by a mob in Marion, Indiana. The picture is remarkably similar to the ones we saw last week from Fallujah, or those we saw nearly 11 years ago from Mogadishu. Mobs reduce human nature to its lowest common denominator, whether American, Iraqi or Somali. They are savage and ugly, but they are not irrational....
Lynching is deliberate. It is opportunistic rather than purely spontaneous, and it has a clear intent: to insult, to challenge and to frighten the enemy, and to excite and enlist allies. The mutilation and public display of bodies follows a distinct pattern. The victims are members of a despised Other, who are held in such contempt that they are considered less than human. Respectful treatment of the dead is the norm in all societies, and a tenet of all religions. Publicly flouting such basic dignities is a communal expression of hatred designed to insult and frighten. Display of the mutilated remains must be as public as possible. In Fallujah they were strung high from a bridge. In Mogadishu, where there were no central squares or bridges, the bodies were dragged through the streets for hours. The crowd, no matter how enraged, welcomes the camera -- Paul Watson, a white Canadian journalist, moved unharmed with his through the angry mobs in Mogadishu on Oct. 4, 1993. The idea is to spread the image. Cameras guarantee the insult will be heard, seen and felt. The insult and fear are spread across continents.
The other message at a lynching isn't as obvious. It is also an appeal. It is a demonstration of potency designed to sway and embolden those who are sympathetic but fearful. It says, Look what we can get away with! Look what we can do! The sheer horror asserts the determination of the rebel faction, and underlines the seriousness of the choice it demands from its own community. It draws a line in the sand; it is a particularly graphic way of saying, You are either for us or against us. With the potential for further such atrocities afoot, critics of the rebels are frightened into silence and acquiescence.
It is a mistake to conclude that those committing such acts represent a majority of the community. Just the opposite is true. Lynching is most often an effort to frighten and sway a more sensible, decent mainstream. In Marion it was the Ku Klux Klan, in Mogadishu it was Aidid loyalists, in Fallujah it is either diehard Saddamites or Islamo-fascists.
The worst answer the U.S. can make to such a message -- which is precisely what we did in Mogadishu -- is back down. By most indications, Aidid's supporters were decimated and demoralized the day after the Battle of Mogadishu. Some, appalled by the indecency of their countrymen, were certain the U.S. would violently respond to such an insult and challenge. They contacted U.N. authorities offering to negotiate, or simply packed their things and fled. These are the ones who miscalculated. Instead the U.S. did nothing, effectively abandoning the field to Aidid and his henchmen. Somalia today remains a nation struggling in anarchy, and the America-haters around the world learned what they thought was a essential truth about the United States: Kill a few Americans and the most powerful nation on Earth will run away. This, in a nutshell, is the strategy of Osama bin Laden.
One thing about posing for the cameras is that you leave a record of who you are. L.A. authorities used those photos, with mixed success, to prosecute cases after the 1992 riots. U.S. authorities should use them in Iraq (not that I'm suggesting that Fallujah is the place for anything as civilized as an American-style trial), and they seem to be.
Bowden concludes: "The photographic evidence should be used to help round up those who committed these atrocities, and those who tacitly or overtly encouraged it. A suitable punishment might be some weeks of unearthing the victims of Saddam Hussein's mass graves."
THANK YOU FOR C-SPAN
In the better-late-than-never department of delayed blogging, let me recommend Jonah Goldberg's excellent appreciation of C-SPAN, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. If you haven't read it, Reason's 1996 interview with Brian Lamb is one of the best he's given.
MINNEAPOLIS MODERNISM
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where I'll be speaking in June, has a great site (reflecting a great collection) on the many, often contradictory, movements called "modern" design. Check it out if you're interested in design history, or if you just want to see what a raygun-shaped crushed-ice shooter looks like.
GOOGLE AD SECRETS
One little mention of a site selling a term paper on my NYC talk and now my Google ads are mostly for fraudulent term papers. I trust that no readers of this fine site are in the market--though if you click on the ads and don't buy a term paper, perhaps that will teach these people not to advertise, at least on honest websites.
I'm told by a high-level Google exec that the way to get more action from Google ads is to write a lot about term life insurance. That's because people shopping online for term life insurance really are interested in the subject--they want to shop right now, and they tend to buy insurance when they do. It's what Steve calls the mattress store principle. Most of the time a mattress store has no customers, but nearly every customer who comes in buys a mattress. The same is generally true of term life insurance and probably of fraudulent term papers.
Now that I'm not going to Saudi Arabia and therefore can actually get term life insurance (insurers don't like those Saudi risk factors), I do indeed need to buy some term life insurance. Does anyone have a good recommendation for a source of term life insurance? How about you folks at Google ads? Will this post get action?
BTW, readers will no doubt notice that I'm now carrying Blogads, which pay much better than Google.
WHY CALIFORNIA IS TROUBLE
If you've got a problem, however minor, the California legislature has a new regulation to address it and a credulous press to report on the bill. The latest crisis demanding government intervention? Banks that charge non-customers fees for cashing their paychecks. Here's the Fresno Bee's account, which reads like a press release from the bill's sponsors:
Workers who don't have bank accounts often sacrifice about an hour's wage to cash their paychecks.
State Sen. Dean Florez and Controller Steve Westly on Tuesday announced new legislation that would allow such employees to cash their checks for free.
Senate Bill 1917 would clarify state law to prohibit banks from charging cashing fees on paychecks issued by the bank's clients. SB 1916 would allow state employees without accounts or direct deposit to cash their paychecks without charge at any bank that has a payroll contract with the state.
The predictable result of this legislation would be to hide the cost of cashing non-customers' checks in the fees paid by customers, including payroll account holders. The bill is nothing more than a cumbersome transfer of money from one group of Californians to another. Both the problem and the "solution" are relatively trivial, but the constant accretion of such regulations in California isn't. It's just not a good place to do business. Someone--the Governator, perhaps--needs to stop this nonsense.