This Kills Me

Sad to see that Lara Logan’s horrible ordeal has sparked such a tired debate among today’s commentators.

So far, pundits are rightfully reminding blame-the-victim types that sexual assault is a serious crime. Well no kidding—now how about we turn our energy to prosecuting the people who did it.

After all, a group of women and about 20 soldiers rescued Logan, so they saw the perpetrators. And Egypt’s officials can be pressured to investigate, if they’re embarrassed that a journalist was openly molested at the peak of a great national uprising. They may also be embarrassed when the world hears facts like these:

• 86% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women said they were harassed regularly, according to a 2008 study. Nearly two in three men admitted to harassing them.
• The Cairo subway system reserves the two front cars of every train for women only, so they can avoid harassment.
• Egyptian women’s groups say groping is a national “cancer.”

Some Egyptians have even tried to drag their rape laws into modern times. In 1999, President Mubarak decreed that rape offenders could no longer go free by marrying their victims. And only two years ago, one Egyptian MP, inspired by human rights groups, tried and failed to generate interest in a law that would allow abortions for rape victims.

Today, progressives in Egypt are expressing their outrage in an online petition and a Facebook page. But one demonstrator posted a note to Logan saying:

“Nothing we can do or say can make up for what happened. I guess for now I can just say ‘Sorry’…”

That does sound like it comes from the heart. But it doesn’t extend human rights to women. So how about shaming your fellow Egyptians into rounding up the criminals and dumping them on the courthouse steps?

Enjoyed David Carr’s piece on down-but-not-out Harvey Weinstein at Sundance—found myself glad to see the guy fighting his way back from near-death of his six-year-old company, aided by the Oscar prospects of his surprise hit The King’s Speech. Carr writes well about Harvey—a large, difficult, outrageous personality, to say the least. But I found myself leaping to Harvey’s defense when I read this:

Mr. Weinstein, an opportunistic bottom feeder with a knack for resuscitating troubled projects, has become one himself.

Harvey is, or has been, many things—a blowhard, a bully, even a thug—but he’s never been a bottom feeder. He may be rumpled and crass, but he has taste, in projects and people. He doesn’t take no, or understand no, or recognize limits on how far it’s okay to go to make something happen. He plays hardball without rules. But he buys and makes interesting stuff.

He once told me he’d ruin me if I ran a story in New York magazine that made him look bad–if it took “every last penny” he had, or words to that effect. He once threatened to investigate my sex life in college as revenge for something we published. (Wait, that was Bob. And if I recall correctly, I told him to go for it.) But I can’t resist rooting for him.

Maybe that’s because I was a magazine editor—not an actor or director—so his rage couldn’t really hurt me. Maybe it’s because after the outsize threats he calls up to say no hard feelings. Maybe it’s because he once got Johnny Depp to take a picture with my daughter at a premiere. Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t lie to me or threaten me the next day, if he felt he needed to.

But there’s no way the indie film business is better off without Harvey. Bottom feeders are driven to make money. Harvey is driven to make movies. As Carr puts it:

If you have a risky movie and you’re looking for a buccaneer to team up with, there are not a lot of pirates around.

Turns out the Chinese Mom From Hell whose book excerpt in the Wall Street Journal a week ago posited superiority over her Western counterparts (sending shock waves through the ranks of parent bloggers, who, in case you aren’t paying attention, are more numerous and more passionate than political bloggers) was something of a creation of the  Journal. By dint of editing, the paper turned what Amy Chua says she wrote as a cautionary tale into a triumphalist screed. Or at least that’s what Chua, aka the Tiger Mom, tells  Jeff Yang of the San Francisco Chronicle.  She exaggerated, she says—of course the girls did go on playdates—and she didn’t intend people to take her storytelling quite so seriously or her advice literally. “I’m an unreliable narrator!”  she protests, noting that her kids warned her that she’d be misunderstood.

The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it. But the worst thing was, they didn’t even hint that the book is about a journey, and that the person at beginning of the book is different from the person at the end—that I get my comeuppance and retreat from this very strict Chinese parenting model.

It’s pretty telling when the writer of a comic book about parenting has to shout, “Hello! I’m an unreliable narrator!”  Over-the-top  and ridiculously extreme are becoming so normal that we just assume she, Glenn Beck-like, is preaching her own personal, passionate, outrageous gospel. Jeff Yang, author of a Chronicle blog called Asian Pop, who noted that the piece “blazed a particularly fiery path across the extended network of digital Asian America,” interviewed a number of other survivors of what he calls “the Crazy Asian Mom phenomenon,” before actually reading the book himself.

Which,  it turns out, is nothing like the excerpt. “Far from being strident, the book’s tone is slightly rueful, frequently self-deprecating and entirely aware of its author’s enormities,” he writes, and the subtitle says it all: “This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.”

All of which led him to call Chua. Which is good. Because who, as a parent, Asian or otherwise, can’t remember  how fleeting the moments of  glory are, and how frequent the humblings by 13-year-olds. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been humbled by a five-year-old.

909 Third Avenue, 9:25am, Jan. 5, 2011

Sure looks like someone’s trying to tell us something.

There it was yesterday morning, apparently one of those weird effects of the sun bouncing off glass in Midtown high-rises—in this case onto the brutalist pile at 909 Third Ave., between 54th and 55th. At least the reflections aren’t blinding anyone or overheating anyone’s office this time—not likely given the absence of windows on this giant brick box. It’s like someone set up a supersized projector to add a little playfulness to a dreary facade—and maybe see if anyone scurrying to work would look up long enough to notice.

Which made me wonder about 909 Third. It seems the building went up in 1968, designed by the exceedingly prolific firm of Emery Roth & Sons. In this case it’s definitely the work of the “& Sons,” because Emery Roth, who designed the likes of the Beresford, the San Remo and the El Dorado, among many beloved New York landmarks, died in 1948. While Roth pere, a Hungarian Jew, did mostly residential buildings in Beaux-Arts and Art Deco styles, the sons, just as busy if not as beloved, shifted to modernist office buildings.

The younger Roths’ contributions include  the Met Life Building, the GM Building, Citigroup Center, and 7 World Trade Center—among  more than 100 others.  Their footprint is astonishing. Columbia, which has their archives, describes their success in discretely commercial terms: “Over the years the firm consistently provided marketable designs that maximized the net rentable area, a feature highly prized by real estate developers.” And the buildings look it. They went out of business in the mid-nineties.

Man, John McCain just keeps hitting new lows. He may be a legendary tough guy, but he’s nursing his wounds from 2008 in the most shameful way: pitting himself doggedly against gay Americans who want to serve their country in order to deny Obama a campaign promise, and vindictively opposing the DREAM Act, which he originally sponsored, because Latinos showed too much enthusiasm for the other guy. An old McCain buddy tells Shushannah Walshe in the Daily Beast:

Woods said “it hurts” McCain to vote against legislation like the DREAM Act after years of working on reform but said the senator felt betrayed when Latinos overwhelmingly supported Obama overwhelmingly in 2008. “When you carry that fight at great sacrifice year after year and then you are abandoned during the biggest fight of your life, it has to have some sort of effect on you,” he said.

This is stunning:  McCain’s warrior world view is now in service to his own wounded pride. The hero was denied the ultimate medal, and he’s gonna spread the pain around to everybody he believes screwed him. Painful to watch, if you used to like the guy.

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Classic New York Times story today about Wall Streeters grousing over losing their bonuses—even though their salaries were jacked up to compensate for it. They’re dubbed Zeros—mid-level types taken out of the bonus pool to stop encouraging the kind of risk-taking that caused millions of Americans to lose their life savings—and they’re feeling sorry for themselves because they’re not in the game any more. This is reported with a perfectly straight face:

Even though employees will receive roughly the same amount of money, the psychological blow of not getting a bonus is substantial, especially in a Wall Street culture that has long equated success and prestige with bonus size.

The fact that the Times would take this seriously shows you what an insane bubble the financial industries exist in—the bubble is called New York, and the rest of us coexist in what is more and more their town, with a mixture of outrage and envy. As we read, we are reassured that the higher-ups are slated to have lavish paydays come January. They’re heading for one of their best years ever, if not quite as fabulous as last year, which was “was pumped up by federal bailout money and the rebound from the financial crisis.” All is well; Porsche dealers can relax.

The utter absence of accountability for the crash is increasingly galling. And to me it’s the most perplexing thing about the Republican triumph at the polls last month. Why did Americans vote for the party that stands for less accountability? Frank Rich tried to make the argument yesterday that financial reform, if not justice, is what the country wants.

The country will not rest easy until there are brave leaders in both parties willing to reform the system that let perpetrators of the Great Recession escape while the rest of us got stuck with the wreckage.

That’s wishful thinking: Not only that there might actually be brave leaders in either party, let alone both, but that reining in self-dealing bankers is what mad-as-hell Americans are clamoring for. Seems to me they’re more worried, thanks to the GOP message machine, that extending health insurance to millions more people will make their own rates go up.

David Carr has a nice piece today about what we should have learned from the meltdown. As the veil has been pulled from the financial system, it’s more and more obvious that the financial geniuses we celebrated before the fall as creators of wealth for all were brilliant mostly at enriching themselves. Writes Carr:

“Each day it becomes more clear that the guy at the bar who mutters into his whisky glass about the game being rigged is probably right.”

Jon Stewart owes a shout-out to Robert Gates, who gave a stunningly sane (not to speak of funny) assessment of the actual impact of the Wikileaks release of secret diplomatic cables yesterday. You know, the leaks that have prompted Sarah Palin and the extended Fox crew to call for a team of assassins to take out Julian Assange. This from the Times:

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.

The secretary of defense is no Wikileaks fan, but he admirably resists the urge to catastrophize each event in foreign policy, as way too many journalists, not to speak of people anywhere along the hawk spectrum, are wont to do. The bottom line:

Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

It’s particularly refreshing in the context of all the hyperventilating over what a “disaster” Obama’s Asian trip in the wake of the November election was said to be. What every defeat, large or small, the president suffers is said to be.

And it came on the same day that Gates took the air out of the hysterical opposition to ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Again from the Times.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said repeal “would not be the wrenching, traumatic change that many have feared and predicted.” He said it was a “matter of urgency” that the lame-duck Senate vote in the next weeks to repeal the law.

Gates separates strong feeling from major consequences—something psychiatrists who treat anxiety call “decatastrophizing,” and something journalists could try to do a lot more often.

This just in: The Pope’s change of heart about condoms doesn’t just apply to sex between men.

The Vatican said today that the Pope didn’t mean to single out male prostitutes when he gave the example of a case in which use of a condom might be “justified” to stop the transmission of HIV/AIDS.

His point was, the Vatican clarified, that “using a condom is a lesser evil than transmitting HIV to a sexual partner—even if that means averting a possible pregnancy,” as  the AP’s Nicole Winfield puts it.

So putting someone’s life at risk by exposing them to AIDS is a bigger evil than using a condom to prevent  a pregnancy.

It seems that the male angle, which was interpreted to mean that Benedict was talking only about gay sex (no potential pregnancies here), may have been accidental. While the original German text of the interview with the Pope used the masculine word for prostitute, the  Italian translation of the book used the feminine. Says the Vatican spokesman:

I personally asked the pope if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of the masculine over the feminine. He told me no. The problem is this … It’s the first step of taking responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk of the life of another with whom you have a relationship.

It’s tempting to laugh at this parsing of the sex of the prostitute in the often abstruse Benedict’s example. And it’s tempting to laugh about the breathtaking  announcement that killing someone is worse than having sex without procreating. But given this Pope’s dogged insistence, as recently as last year, that abstinence is the only ethical way to prevent the spread of AIDS, it’s a real breakthrough. Actually is kind of breathtaking.

It’s so hard to imagine what planet the Pope is on.

He just decided to—extremely grudgingly—acknowledge that the use of condoms might not be, in all cases, evil.

I learned this yesterday through an AP news alert on my phone: “Breaking News:  The Pope: Condoms are justified in some cases.” Stop the presses.

For those of us who aren’t religious, the hardest thing to understand about those who are is how they deal with doctrines that seem patently out of step with the realities of life in the last several centuries. I don’t mean irrelevant, I mean pernicious. Doctrines that destroy lives, like the Catholic Church’s campaign against the use of condoms to contain HIV/AIDS, let alone for birth control. Like the evangelical Christian campaign against homosexuality. Like Muslim fatwas against cartoonists who draw pictures of Muhammad. Or Sharia laws that stone women to death for adultery.

Millions of Catholics cheerfully (or guiltily) ignore church teaching against things that are to them obviously ethical—and birth control is one of those things that are obviously ethical. That is, except to the denizens of the Vatican and some of the priesthood—ostensibly celibate men who regard sex as a destructive force that must at great cost be channeled not only into the confines of marriage, but into childbearing.

There are also many millions of Christians who know that homosexuality is not evil—because they’re gay, because they have many gay friends who are obviously not evil, because how could Ellen DeGeneres be evil? But they tolerate church doctrine that homosexuality is ethically “repulsive.”

In this vein, it’s worth watching the video of the long, pained confession of Bishop Jim Swilley, pastor of an Atlanta megachurch who came out to his congregation earlier this month. It’s notable because (1) for a change, Swilley seems to have been motivated to come clean not by a breaking scandal but by the recent suicides of gay teenagers,  (2) he actually tries to use his confession as a teaching moment, to persuade his flock that it simply isn’t true that being gay is a choice, and (3) while he said he had never preached against homosexuality, he finally decided it wasn’t enough to be silent. Gotta like the guy for that.

Nice Washington Post piece on checkbook journalism, another fault line that seems to be shifting in a lot of news organizations, some cheerfully embracing it (Gawker Media, Deadspin) and some shelling out big bucks but pretending they’re not (ABC and NBC, that would be you).

Paying for access has always been considered declassé, disreputable if not dishonorable, on the grounds that the source becomes suspect if he or she is paid for the information. That’s why the news networks are dissembling, claiming they’re not buying access or “exclusives,” à la the National Enquirer, they’re spending the $10,000 (or $200,000) on the dog-eared family photos or video clip that goes with the interview.  It’s okay to buy images but not words, it seems. The theory is that photos don’t lie, but paid sources do.

A guy named Hagit Limor, the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, whatever that is, has this to say:

“People will say anything in pursuit of money. The public should assume you’re reporting something because it’s true, not because someone received money to say it.”

I’ve got news for you, Hagit. People lie to reporters for many reasons, whether or not they’re getting paid: to undermine the competition, enhance a deal, screw up a deal, get revenge on an ex, make themselves look better, make a better story, get a shot at their 15 minutes—or just for fun. If the “pursuit of money” is the enemy of truth, we shouldn’t pay reporters, either, since they might be motivated to make stuff up—come to think of it, that occasionally happens.

The point is that a competent news organization has to weigh the credibility of the source and the information, whether or not money changes hands. There’s no substitute for judgment and due diligence.

Of course it would be a huge problem if news sources all over the place started demanding payment. People already see the information they possess as a commodity—making journalism more and more like a transaction. Access is exchanged for placement, polite treatment, promotion of a new book or movie, whatever. That stuff is easier for journalists to come up with than cash. But it’s bullshit to pretend it isn’t going on.

In the Post piece, Nick Denton gleefully skewers traditional media pretensions over the firewall against paying sources, noting how lucky it is for him that more news organizations aren’t out there bidding against him. “So I’m a big supporter of that journalistic commandment,” he adds, “as it applies to other organizations.”