Judging from my email, there are many, many people (especially Texans) out there who endorse the Certsian Philosophy of the documents controversy: the memos are forgeries AND George Bush got preferential treatment in getting into the Air National Guard. Reader Mark Stephens writes:
I read your blog regarding the TXANG memos. I agree with you. I believe the memos are fakes, but I'm also certain GWB got special treatment.
I have lived in Texas all my life. I became eligible for the draft in 1968. No way, no how could I have gotten into *any* National Guard unit back then. We all knew the Guard was for special guys, and everyone could else was hosed.
I also remember there was no way ordinary guys could sign up in Reserve Units (Naval, or otherwise). Has anyone asked Kerry how he managed to get into a Naval Reserve unit???? Who pulled strings for him? I haven't read anything about that.
Actually, I don't care about any of this one way or the other. I'm voting for Bush because I think he believes *something*, which is more than I can say about Kerry.
On Lone Star Reality, Scott Harris, a self-described "die-hard Republican," posts a hypothetical script for how Bush might have gotten into the Guard. It doesn't even contradict the White House's statements.
Reader James Ingram writes:
The dirty little secret here that no-one is discussing is that in 1968 nobody got in the National Guard without "special treatment." The connections necessary were not necessarily the high-powered kind that GWB could bring to bear. The Guard was an organization with a small town feel, kind of like the volunteer fire company, in many communities. Often the connection needed was, say, a father in the Guard, an uncle who ran a corner drug store and also served as first sergeant of the local Guard company or a teacher who was friends with someone in the Guard. But nobody who was of draft age during this period believes you could go down to your local recruiting office and join the Guard. Its a LOL idea.
Of course, Bush's Guard duty wasn't risk-free, as Lawrence Rhodes notes:
Peripheral to your recent blog entry, I haven't read any discussion of this point: while joining the National Guard might have kept Bush out of Vietnam (not a foregone conclusion at the time), training as a fighter pilot is one of the riskier things you can do. If you recall the first couple of chapters from "The Right Stuff," washing out often means a closed casket funeral. This risk is not significantly smaller than serving in Vietnam, though it does sound like a lot more fun. So you can't really infer a relative lack of physical courage on Bush's part, unless, I suppose, you contend he wasn't smart enough to realize the risk...
True enough on the risks, but the fun matters a lot too. There wasn't much fun in Vietnam, even if you had relatively safe Al Gore-style duty. And young GWB had a classic fighter pilot personality.
I think the reason this story can't get any traction as a scandal is that nobody thinks George Bush came from obscure poverty. And everyone old enough to care about the Vietnam-era draft knows that most young men were eager to find alternatives not only to Vietnam but, if possible, to the disruption of their life plans by conscription. The draft is a really bad idea, incompatible with both a free society and an effective, professional military.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 13, 2004 • Comments
Strengthen the Good has chosen a new micro-charity to support--and I'm especially happy to say that it's one I suggested, based on a recent feature in the Dallas Morning News. It's the Brent Woodall Foundation for Exceptional Children, founded by Brent's wife Tracy after he was killed on 9/11.
The foundation helps families with autistic children, a cause I've come to understand better since the young daughter of my friend (and former Reason correspondent) Michael Lynch was diagnosed with autism. Even under the best of circumstances, raising a child with autism is difficult and expensive. From the foundation's website:
The Foundation focuses on using Tracy's expertise in Autism and visibility with the media to raise awareness of Autism and further to provide education, training and financial support to families with autistic children to better equip them to be more self sufficient and effective as parents. By taking a targeted approach through the Foundation's Pilot Outreach Program, the Foundation can help those families where the impact can be the greatest so donations are most efficiently utilized, and also add much needed research on the effectiveness of cutting edge therapies including the platform Tracy has developed in her work at the New School.
For more links and information on how to give, see the Strengthen the Good website.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 12, 2004 • Comments
A note from friend who works for a Democratic state legislator (and therefore shall remain anonymous), with my replies inserted in bold:
Thanks for weighing in on the CBS memos and pointing out (aside from the controversy) how much our expectations about aesthetics have changed. The Substance of Style continues to show you were writing about something genuinely profound. I still think about it all the time. You know you've hit a real subject when it shows up in so many different and completely unrelated contexts.
Yep. I read a lot about typefaces when I was researching TSOS. I wrote a bunch, too, but left 90% on the cutting room floor.
As to the memos, I honestly have no idea who to believe. But there certainly is a sound case against them. I looked at the .pdf of the memo, itself, and something I haven't seen mentioned came to mind. It's got a lot of little dots on it, as if it had been copied many times over, or something. This is fairly typical copy-degrading, I think.
But wasn't this supposed to have been "newly discovered" because it had been in Killian's personal files all these years and has only just now come to light? Doesn't that suggest the memos would have been originals, or have been touched infrequently, if at all? Maybe it is a carbon copy, and that would explain the dots. But I could certainly see someone thinking they were making it look older by copying copies of copies of it.
Another friend mentioned this as well. You're both smart and not big Bush promoters, so maybe I should actually make the point.
I think the memos are big fakes. I also think that Bush got special treatment, probably without anyone having to ask for it. Given his family's connections and the way Texas operates like a small town, people would have looked out for him.
My Democratic friend's reply to my response makes an important point that, judging from some of my email, is getting lost in the partisanship of this discussion:
I think you're right on - the memos are Big Fakes AND Bush is a Child of Privilege. We have such a hard time accepting the Certsian Philosophy. Yes, it's a breath mint, and yes, it's a candy mint. It's two, two, two mints in one. Much of life is Certsian, but we so love our fights that we'll gin them up if we have to. It's a candy mint, damnit!
The reason this story doesn't resonate with me is that it doesn't do anything more than reiterate the obvious. Of COURSE Bush got political help in getting into the reserves and -- most likely -- took advantage of his privilege to avoid some of his duties. I don't even think Bush's biggest supporters actually believe otherwise. They generally just focus on micro-points, like whether he was honorably discharged (check) or actually put in flying time (check) or such. His spokespeople have done a brilliant job in the Ben Barnes debate by asserting time and time and time again that Bush's father NEVER EVER asked Barnes to get his son into the reserves. Which Barnes, himself never says; instead, Barnes tells what I think is probably the truth (which is, itself, never refuted by the White House) that a family friend was the one who did the asking. And the White House responds with its own micro-truth -- George HW Bush NEVER asked Ben Barnes for such a thing. And the media just completely ignore the fact that what Barnes is saying and what the White House is denying are not contradictory.
So much of these peripheral debates now are about micro-points like this: Where, exactly, was Kerry on Christmas Eve (latitude and longitude, if possible)? Was he throwing medals or ribbons? Proportional spacing is one thing, but what about the kerning? This, if you'll remember, is how OJ won his criminal trial, too -- by atomizing the relevant arguments into obscurity. We'll lay out dots of truth for you to follow. Ignore that big picture over there, please. It's misdirection taken to a level that a magician would envy.
And what it all comes down to is a Seinfeldean nothing. I so hope the Kerry campaign isn't behind all of this. It would be such a waste.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 12, 2004 • Comments
Blog detractors like to point out that bloggers don't have editors and, hence, there are no checks on what we post. True enough. Editors are valuable, and they're often most valuable when they're most annoying. (Not always--sometimes they're just stupid.) Good editors make sure you check the scoop that's "too good to check" and keep you from making stupid mistakes. A good editor needs to know something about everything, and to have a first-class nose for things that just don't smell right.
But even a great editorial team has only a few people assigned to any given story, and those few people necessarily have limited knowledge. What CBS has learned over the past few days is that its editors aren't good enough. Nowadays when stories go public, they get checked by after-the-fact editors with expertise in every field imaginable, and that checking gets published to the entire world via the blogosphere. Bloggers may not have editors, but they serve as editors themselves.
What's so devastating for CBS is that it didn't make an esoteric mistake, requiring rare expertise. It made a boneheaded mistake on a big story. It's my professional opinion that any decent journalist over 30 years old would have immediately suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1972. In fact, any decent journalist over 30 would have suspected a forgery when looking at typeset memos supposedly produced for private files in 1982. (That year, I paid The Daily Princetonian $20 to cover the film cost of a resume that looked like what you can dash off on Microsoft Word; it was produced on an expensive compositing system by a graphics professional.) That those memos managed to get on national television without a caveat about their reliability suggests a complete breakdown of both journalistic instincts and journalistic process.
You shouldn't need bloggers to catch errors like this. But it helps.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 12, 2004 • Comments
I'm not particularly interested in ancient history about Vietnam service or lack of same, but this CNS report (via Drudge) hits my one of my other buttons: how quickly we forget how much the everyday world has changed. The report alleges that CBS got snookered by fake documents supposedly from the "personal office file" of George Bush's now-deceased Air National Guard squadron commander. The evidence, which I find convincing, is that the documents, which supposedly date to 1972, don't look typed:
But the experts interviewed by CNSNews.com honed in on several aspects of a May 4, 1972, memo, which was part of the "60 Minutes" segment and was posted on the CBS News website Thursday.
"It was highly out of the ordinary for an organization, even the Air Force, to have proportional-spaced fonts for someone to work with," said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Agfa Monotype in Wilmington, Mass. "I'm suspect in that I did work for the U.S. Army as late as the late 1980s and early 1990s and the Army was still using [fixed-pitch typeface] Courier."
The typography experts couldn't pinpoint the exact font used in the documents. They also couldn't definitively conclude that the documents were either forged using a current computer program or were the work of a high-end typewriter or word processor in the early 1970s.
But the use of the superscript "th" in one document - "111th F.I.S" - gave each expert pause. They said that is an automatic feature found in current versions of Microsoft Word, and it's not something that was even possible more than 30 years ago.
"That would not be possible on a typewriter or even a word processor at that time," said John Collins, vice president and chief technology officer at Bitstream Inc., the parent of MyFonts.com.
"It is a very surprising thing to see a letter with that date [May 4, 1972] on it," and featuring such typography, Collins added. "There's no question that that is surprising. Does that force you to conclude that it's a fake? No. But it certainly raises the eyebrows."
Which is more likely--that bleeding-edge technology was used to produce routine documents, or that someone who doesn't remember what documents looked like in 1972 hacked together a forgery? Download the memo from the CBS site and judge for yourself. It certainly looks like Microsoft Word to me. And do read the entire CNS piece, which rounds up some well-qualified typography experts to comment. (By way of background, here's today's NYT report on the "newfound documents.")
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 09, 2004 • Comments
Here's an interesting paradox at (as Grant McCracken would say) the intersection of economics and anthropology: All right-thinking humanistic people agree that it's better to spend your time and money on having good, meaningful experiences rather than acquiring material possessions. For consumers, then, intangibles are better --more culturally prestigious--than stuff. For producers, on the other hand, the hierarchy is reversed. It's better to make stuff than to provide services. "Good jobs" are in manufacturing. "Bad jobs" are in hotels. This cultural prejudice goes beyond wages; in fact, people will insist without checking that a service job like, say, giving facials, must pay badly, even when it doesn't.
With this paradox in mind, latest NYT column looks at the shift from buying things to buying experiences:
LISTEN to the jobs debate carefully, and you might get the idea that the problem with the economy is that Americans just are not materialistic enough.
We spend too much of our income on restaurant meals, entertainment, travel and health care and not enough on refrigerators, ball bearings, blue jeans and cars.
Manufacturing employment is sluggish because of rising productivity - making more with fewer people - and foreign competition. But that's not the whole story, especially over the long term. Production is changing, but so is consumption.
As incomes go up, Americans spend a greater proportion on intangibles and relatively less on goods. One result is more new jobs in hotels, health clubs and hospitals, and fewer in factories.
In 1959, Americans spent about 40 percent of their incomes on services, compared with 58 percent in 2000. That figure understates the trend, because in many cases goods and services come bundled together.
Read the rest here, and related articles here and especially here.
And for an experience embodied in a good, buy (and read) the new paperback edition of The Substance of Style.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 09, 2004 • Comments
No, this isn't a spa. It's a design for a outpatient oncology center, created by Wirt Design as a contest entry at Neocon West (an interior design trade show, not a gathering of policy wonks). I saw it there and, like many other attendees, voted it a winner.
After all, why shouldn't an outpatient oncology center look like a spa? Chemotherapy is unpleasant enough already without requiring patients to be treated in depressing, ugly surroundings. "The space responds to basic human needs for patients by providing comfort, convenience and safety," says the Wirt Design website. The space also provides beauty, a bit of pleasure in unpleasant circumstances. (For a better look at the space, see the Wirt Design page.)
Of course, that's just a theoretical design, cooked up for a contest. This NYT feature reports on the trend toward incorporating aesthetics into health care environments:
If there is one universal truth about hospitals, it is that they are drab, dismal places, not at all designed to soothe and heal.
The furniture is industrial-grade, cookie-cutter. Lights are fluorescent and harsh. Noise, according to one recent study, can reach jackhammer proportions. Windows open onto concrete jumbles. And then there is the smell of antiseptic infused with cafeteria grub that inspires in visitors a kind of anti-madeleine moment.
But a sprinkling of architects and designers around the world are working to greatly change hospitals by humanizing their design, a concept that is slowly gaining influence in Europe and the United States.
The idea is obvious: Build inviting, soothing hospitals, graced with soft lighting, inspiring views, single rooms, curved corridors, relaxing gardens and lots of art, and patients will heal quicker, nurses will remain loyal to their employers and doctors will perform better.
"The environment of a hospital contributes to the therapy of the patients," said Tony Monk, a British architect who specializes in health care design and recently published a glossy book called "Hospital Builders" (Academy Press).
"People are happy to be there, to help themselves to get better," he said. "People are mentally vulnerable when they come in, and if they are beaten down by an awful, dreadful, concrete, uninteresting, poor building with poor colors, it makes them even worse."
You have to be pretty obtuse to define hospital "function" without paying any attention to how the environment makes patients feel--but that's exactly how hospitals have historically viewed the problem. Aside from the sheer ugliness of most health care environments, lots of them are also extremely confusing to navigate, adding that extra dollop of stress that patients and their loved ones so need and want.
This may be yet another case in which the disconnect between consumers (patients) and payers (insurance companies and the government) distorts health care provision.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 08, 2004 • Comments
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 08, 2004 • Comments
After the school massacre, Russia's top general promises to "carry out all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world." (Reuters report here.) Pre-emptive strikes seem to be a necessary component of fighting Jihadists, but I wouldn't expect the Russians to be as surgical as the U.S.
Belmont Club's analysis is astute, as are many of the comments that follow it:
Little public analysis has been devoted to options realistically available to Vladimir Putin in response to the massacre of schoolchildren in Ossetia. The fact is that the world has been spoiled by looking at the world through the prism of the American media. When President Bush stopped to consider his response to September 11, he had a range of options available only to a nation as unimaginably powerful as the United States of America. Japanese newspapers reported that President Bush was offered the nuclear option immediately after the attack, probably as an extreme in a range that included filing a diplomatic protest on the opposite end of the spectrum, which he rejected, choosing instead to do what no other country could do: take down the state sponsors of terrorism and pursue the terrorists to the four corners of the earth. America's unmatched power allowed President Bush to select the most humane course of war available. No European power, nor all of them put together, could have embarked on such a precise campaign for lack of means. It was a rich man's strategy, a guerre de luxe.
But no one who has seen the rags and hodgepodge of equipment issued to the Russian Special Forces can entertain any illusion that Vladimir Putin can go around launching raids with hi-tech helicopters, or follow around perps with robotic drones before firing, or use satellite-guided bombs to wipe out enemy safe houses that have been seeded with RFID chips. Nor will those detained by Russia gain weight the way detainees have done at the "inhuman" Gitmo prison. That's an American way of war which even Europeans can only regard with envy. The poor must respond with less. When the Nepalese saw the video of their 12 compatriots executed by terrorists in Iraq, they did what you could do with a box of matches: they burned the mosque in Kathmandu. To paraphrase Crosby, Stills and Nash, 'if you can't hit the one you should then hit the one you're with'.
While Russia can do better than a box of matches, the reality is that its poverty and low-tech force structure will make any response that Putin may choose a brutal and largely indiscriminate affair unless it is subsumed into the larger American-led Global War on Terror. The real price of the European vacation from history is its abandonment of the first principle of civilization. Unless there is common justice, there will be vigilante justice.
Expect Putin to use the escalating terror war as a reason for more authoritarian domestic measures, some possibly justified, many not.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 08, 2004 • Comments
The final season is now on DVD.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 08, 2004 • Comments