The story of my political formation

The fact that I came of age during the Clinton years had an important effect on my political outlook. The first presidential election I paid any attention to was 1992, when I was 15, and although I naturally rooted for Clinton because my liberal parents did, my observations were mostly superficial. I actually don't remember the 1994 Republican takeover. It just wasn't on my radar at the time. But a year later, as I was beginning college, the government shutdown had an immediate impact on my family. My father was a federal employee, as was our next-door neighbor, a single black woman with a teenage son. It didn't help things that one of my brothers had recently passed away.

For the first time, I got a very direct glimpse of the effect that politics could have on everyday lives. It was no longer just a funny game I saw on TV, featuring colorful personalities in fancy suits. I also began to have my first informed judgment on a political figure, in this case a Congressional leader by the name of Newt Gingrich, who provided me with my first taste of what it was like to deeply loathe a politician.

I also was beginning to discover the phenomenon of Rush Limbaugh, as well as Christian Coalition figures such as Falwell, Robertson, and Reed. I personally encountered people who insisted with a straight face that the president was a rapist, a murderer, and a drug addict. These people, who included a few of my parents' friends, typically spoke of liberals as if describing a distinct species of insect. Arguing with them was usually an exercise in futility, for they had a barrage of "facts" they had picked up from talk radio, which they listened to far more often than I had time to listen to anything.

These experiences left a powerful impression on me, because I couldn't help noticing that the contemporary American right was apparently run by complete lunatics and charlatans. The maligned liberals, on the other hand, were mostly represented for me by thoughtful milquetoasts like Michael Kinsley. Maybe it wasn't fair that I got such a terrible first impression of conservatives, who I know include many reasonable individuals. I was well aware that the left had its share of clowns, such as Al Sharpton, but they didn't seem to matter a whole lot. There was a notable imbalance in the political spectrum that belied the cliche evenhandedness so many pundits found seductive.

I sometimes got the sense that even the conservative intelligentsia were simply playing the good cop to Limbaugh's bad cop, saying the same stuff in gentler language. A 1995 article I read by William F. Buckley took Clinton to task for his attacks on Limbaugh. Buckley conceded that Limbaugh "induces hatred" and that "if I were a liberal, I would hate him," but he went on to suggest that FDR and Truman did the same sort of thing to the other side. Not a word about Limbaugh's lies or conspiracy theories. This from the 20th century's greatest conservative intellectual.

I made these observations long before I gave any serious thought to budgets, taxes, health care, trade, and so on. While certain causes like environmentalism and gay rights were no-brainers to me from the start, I was initially tempted in a more rightward direction on such issues as abortion, affirmative action, and school vouchers. But the disintegration of any sane right-wing establishment was formative for me, and I would watch the problem grow ever worse as the years passed.

Everything that's happening now looks to me like the logical end result of what was happening in the '90s. A very moderate Democratic president presiding over an economic boom is clobbered by conservatives as some kind of left-wing hippie and nearly hounded from office for sexual lapses of no consequence to anyone but his own family. A Republican enters the White House under highly questionable circumstances and in the course of eight years leaves the country in two hapless wars one of which he started for no good reason, unprecedented debt, and the worst recession since the Great Depression. The disaster of the Bush years is so breathtaking I almost distrust my own judgment on the matter. Maybe I'm falling prey to the same kind of partisan hatred that characterized Clinton's adversaries. But no matter how I look at it, I can't escape the conclusion that Bush truly is one of the worst presidents in history. And it's amazing to watch the conservative establishment today attempt to make us all forget that just a few short years ago they practically worshiped the man.

When it comes to the right, the most visible difference between the 1990s and today is the rise of Fox News. Yes, it did begin in 1996, but it didn't become a force to be reckoned with until the Bush years. The first sign came with the election itself, when a reporter who just happened to be Bush's first cousin called the election for Bush, and all the other news networks--the legitimate ones, that is--followed suit. This set the tone for the Florida post-election fiasco that would follow.

Fox has grown steadily worse. Before, it was a right-leaning network that pretended to be fair and balanced. Now it's just a TV version of talk radio, a calculated, large-scale attempt to brainwash its viewers through the use of misleading propaganda, outright lies, and conspiracy-mongering, nonstop 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week. It is nothing more than the right's Pravda. And it still has an astonishing influence on the mainstream networks, the ones we're supposed to believe are "liberal-biased."

So it was all set when the godfather of this mode of politics, Rush Limbaugh, said he hopes Obama fails, and not a single Republican in power had the strength to distance himself from Limbaugh, not without quickly reversing himself and groveling at Limbaugh's feet for forgiveness. This is what's truly new about the right wing: there is now no separation at all between the propagandists of right-wing media and the Republicans holding public office.

And somehow, the things said against Obama and other Democrats are worse than during the Clinton years. Back then, the attacks were merely nasty. Now, it is absolutely no exaggeration to say that Republican politicians and commentators are stoking insurrection. The tone of conservative hatred today isn't just hysterical, but contains not-very-subtle appeals to violence: talks of Second Amendment remedies, drawing crosshairs on Congressional maps with the slogan "Don't retreat--reload," explicitly defending violent overthrow of the government. The rhetoric is increasingly apocalyptic, and the very name of the opposition movement--"Tea Party"--deliberately alludes to the events leading up to the American Revolution. What's scariest about all this is that the Clinton years gave us Timothy McVeigh; who knows what's coming up now. And something will, make no mistake, because the tea-partiers will invariably be disappointed when the officials they have elected fail to stop Obama's agenda. And they don't strike me as the sorts of people to take disappointment by packing their bags and walking home.

That's why there's a lot more to the current political situation than rooting for teams. I don't mean to suggest that the past was one long Golden Age–I know my parents' generation alone went through Vietnam and Watergate–but I feel in my bones that there's something uniquely disturbing about what's happening now, even under the first president in my life I've had any enthusiasm for.

This post is based on a comment I wrote on Emily Hauser's blog last week. She suggested that I post it to my blog. I expanded on a few sections and edited the wording here and there, but it's more or less the same.

Cross-posted to Daily Kos.

With friends like these

cross-posted at DovBear's blog

It appears that John Boehner is planning to campaign for Rich Iott, the Nazi-impersonating congressional candidate.

It's important to understand how offensive this is: the problem is not that Iott participated in historical reenactments, which are perfectly legitimate, or even that he dressed as a bad guy. The problem is that the whole reenactment is invested with significant historical revisionism that views these SS officers admiringly and makes only the vaguest references to the crimes they committed. The website contains a disclaimer disavowing support for either neo-Nazis or the original Nazis and condemning "the atrocities which made them infamous." What it does not do is make any mention of the Holocaust, Jews, or even genocide.

This approach to the war is Holocaust minimization, a soft form of denial that doesn't engage in any outright conspiracy-mongering about a Holocaust "hoax," but nonetheless describes World War II in a way that greatly downplays the crimes of the Nazis in an effort to make the two sides seem somehow equivalent. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Iott argued that we shouldn't judge these officers because they were doing what they thought was right, that the SS unit he was reenacting had never been charged with war crimes (in fact, one member was recently charged with the murder of 58 Jews), and that "Horrible things...happened on both sides." If you think Iott makes a single mention of the Holocaust during this interview (other than a bare statement that he doesn't deny it), I've got a tea-bag to sell you.

After the refreshing disavowal of Iott by Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, I find Boehner's decision to stick by this guy pretty sickening. It brings to mind another story recently about the Emergency Committee for Israel, a lobbying organization that is supposedly devoted to getting pro-Israel candidates elected ("pro-Israel" in the most hawkish, right-wing sense) but in practice seems more interested simply in getting Republicans elected:

If ECI genuinely cared about electing pro-Israel members of Congress, it would launch big money campaigns against Tea Party candidates, such as Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), the source said.

Toomey, for instance, has twice voted against foreign aid packages, which are widely viewed as principal pro-Israel litmus tests, as they include large amounts of financial assistance for the Jewish state. (According to the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent, Toomey said that he "feels Israel no longer needs economic aid, and should simply receive military assistance.")

Pollak, however, defended Toomey, noting that he voted against foreign aid not out of hostility toward Israel, but "as a matter of larger fiscal principles. He has never shown a particular animosity toward Israel -- far from it."

In short, vote Republican because the Republicans are better for Israel, but vote Republican even when they aren't better for Israel. If that confuses you, don't worry about it, just vote Republican.

What we need to understand is that a lot of the Israel talk by Republicans is not done for the sake of Jews. It is for the consumption of Christian Zionists who vastly outnumber their Jewish counterparts and who aren't necessarily even "pro-Jewish," as can be seen from Pat Robertson's bizarre views.

Or, to paraphrase James Baker, we don't vote for Republicans anyway, so we might as well go be fruitful and multiply.

A compendium of politically incorrect views

People talk about political correctness so often you'd think there'd be a simple, consistent definition of the concept. All we know for certain is that it's bad for something to be PC, and that individuals who violate PC standards are being unjustly persecuted. Or at least that's what everyone who invokes this phrase seems to think. But what does the phrase mean?

That's what I've set out to determine. I'm not looking in any dictionaries or on Wikipedia. Instead, I've collected a sampling of quotes from various sources that use this expression, and from them I've attempted to discern its larger meaning.

Let's start with Regnery's Politically Incorrect Guide series. Among the many PI truths you will learn from these books is that the Civil War was not about slavery, that the robber barons benefited the U.S. more than any government program ever did, that the medieval Islamic world didn't contribute greatly to science, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and that hunters are "America's real environmentalists."

Having been written by different people, the guides do not always jibe with one another. In a rare moment of factual correctness, Clint Johnson's Politically Incorrect Guide to the South lists rock 'n' roll as one of the great products of that region. But Jonathan Leaf's Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties (whose author seems to have drifted into the PC debate a few decades too late) describes rock music as an artistic void with little talent.

In the view of some conservatives, PC is the cause of all our problems. According to Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams, "Political correctness is going to kill us. Political correctness led to 9/11, political correctness led to Barack Hussein Obama. Political correctness is a societal HIV." No one is immune to infection, not even, apparently, his own supporters. He wrote, in reply to one of several commenters at his site who criticized his controversial Lincoln letter, "you are crippled--mentally and emotionally--by political correctness."

Still, I suspect even Williams would be surprised at how the phrase has been used outside the United States. "It would be sad," wrote British journalist Peter Millar on the doomed libel suit of Holocaust "revisionist" David Irving, "if we allowed political correctness to condemn Irving for thinking (or even saying) the unsayable."

So now Holocaust denial is merely "not PC." It therefore shouldn't surprise us that other unsavory views have found their way into this category. Consider a notorious moment from Robert Novak's 1995 interview with Sen. Jesse Helms:

CALLER: Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I just think that you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you've done to help keep down the niggers.

NOVAK: Oh, dear.

HELMS: Whoops. [looks at camera] Well, thank you, I think.

[both laugh nervously]

NOVAK: That was the bad word. That was politically incorrect. Can you--we really don't condone that kind of language, do we?

HELMS: No, no, no.

NOVAK: Absolutely.

HELMS: No. My father didn't condone it. When I was a little boy, one of the worst spankings I ever got is when I used that word, and I don't think I've used it ever since.

NOVAK: And you had--

HELMS: Mark Twain used it.

NOVAK: And you had--you had--you had African Americans on your staff a long time ago, didn't you? As I remember.

HELMS: Oh yes. I hired several.

Notice that neither Novak nor Helms addressed the caller's stated views. Only his language seemed to put them on edge, his use of a "politically incorrect" word. Somehow I get the sense that young Helms would not have been spanked for wishing to "keep down the blacks."

But it isn't just conservatives who talk about PC. In his unflattering review of the live-action version of Mr. Magoo, Roger Ebert wrote:

There is one laugh in the movie. It comes after the action is over, in the form of a foolish, politically correct disclaimer stating that the film "is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight."

Though I haven't seen the movie, I agree that trying to avoid offending the nearsighted in a Mr. Magoo film is indeed an example of PC run amok. But I wasn't sure I followed Ebert's reasoning in another instance of his use of the phrase:

The beat goes on with Ron Howard's The Missing, a clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

This is interesting. In an age of revisionist Westerns like Dances with Wolves that paint a sympathetic portrait of Indians, Ebert thinks one in which they boil white men alive and sell white girls into slavery is PC because they don't behave quite as savagely as we might expect. Got it.

Then there is the 1991 New York Times review of the Dictionary of Cautionary Words and Phrases, a handbook which the reviewer attributes to "the disease of political correctness." While some of the book's advice is arguably a little excessive--it instructs journalists to say homemaker instead of housewife, to avoid the noun Jew in favor of Jewish person, and never to describe a black person as "articulate"--it also includes things we take for granted now, such as the term Asian to replace Oriental. I even once saw a documentary in which a young skinhead was bashing a race he called Asians. When you have neo-Nazis nonchalantly saying Asian, I think it's safe to say it has advanced from PC terminology to common speech.

That's actually the case with a lot of the terms that were once derided as PC. Few people today blink at Native American, Latino, diversity, homophobia, substance abuse, and vegan--all of which appear as entries in 1992's tongue-in-cheek Official Politically Correct Dictionary alongside such items as sobriety-deprived for "drunk" and terminally inconvenienced for "dead."

The most striking use of the phrase "PC" I can remember came in a blog discussion I was reading some years ago. A commenter referred to a particular author as an idiot. The blogger said he agreed with the commenter's criticism but added that there was no need to engage in ad hominem attacks. The commenter retorted, "Oh, don't be so PC." The discussion had nothing to do with politics. To the commenter, "PC" simply meant being polite to avoid offending someone.

Based on all these examples, I am forced to draw the following conclusions about the phrase "PC":

1. It is absolutely meaningless.

The amount of things the "PC" label has been mockingly applied to is truly diverse. It can mean the often amusing excesses of the academic left, in particular the weird coinages. Or it can mean perfectly mainstream ideas such as the notion that the Civil War had something to do with slavery or that the Holocaust did in fact occur. It can mean trying to avoid offending the nearsighted, or it can mean neglecting to call someone you disagree with an idiot. Since there's no set standard for when sensitivity goes too far, the phrase is a free-for-all that usually says more about the person using it than it does about whatever the person is talking about.

2. It fosters the idea that sensitivity is a sin.

In practice, the phrase has become an excuse for boorish, inconsiderate behavior. People invoke it as a lazy way of trying to imply that no one has a right to be offended, without having to justify their position. It fosters the idea that words don't matter, that they can't harm anyone, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a joyless schoolmarm out to control everyone's speech.

3. It blurs the line between taboo language and taboo opinions.

Being un-PC sometimes refers to a questionable choice of words, even when no one objects to the point of view being expressed. At other times it refers to just the reverse--a controversial viewpoint expressed without any objectionable language. As a consequence of this ambiguity, the phrase distracts attention from the content of people's speech and makes all offending statements sound like mere violations of decorum. You can see that clearly in Helms and Novak's inadequate response to the racist caller.

4. Anyone who uses the phrase is, by definition, a hypocrite.

When people label a statement PC, they are effectively trying to shut down debate and eject the statement from the conversation by making it sound unworthy of serious discussion. Thus, the term does exactly what it is allegedly fighting against. This becomes particularly noticeable when those who claim to be battling PC propaganda are in fact promoting right-wing propaganda, but it is inherent in the phrase itself.

5. It is sometimes hard to resist using.

I've used it myself on occasion, and I no doubt will use it again. Let's face it, we live in a culture where lots of people take umbrage at things they shouldn't. The pushback against racism, sexism, and all the other isms has had a stifling effect on our discourse, down to the jokes we tell. But I realize that's a biased statement, and I can offer no precise standard for when it is or isn't justified to be offended. I just know it when I see it, whether or not that's okay with any of you cerebrally challenged hunks of processed animal carcasses.

Take me to your leader

If there is one scientific topic that provokes strong opinions in the absence of any direct knowledge whatsoever, it is life on other planets. Some scientists feel certain Earth is the only place in the universe where life resides; others insist the question is not whether life exists in other places, but where. You will find sane, rational people with full command of the facts coming out on either side of this debate.

I lean toward the second possibility. The notion that in the entire universe, the only planet with living things just happens to be the only one we've ever seen up close, seems a stretch to me. But I admit I have no proof. It's just a hunch.

"Just a hunch" is the best we can do when it comes to these arguments, which never stand up to logical scrutiny. Some scientists point to evidence that life arose on Earth quite soon after the planet's initial formation (say, only several hundred million years), and if it can happen that quickly, it must have happened in other parts of the universe. The problem with this argument (aside from a rather fluid definition of "quickly") is that we still don't know how life arose here, or even whether it did--one theory holds that it came from Mars via meteorite. If we don't know what happened to cause life to exist, then we have no way of knowing whether it could have happened elsewhere.

Other scientists believe the origin of life on Earth was a rare, freakish occurrence in the universe's history, because it depended on a huge number of factors in combination, including Earth's exact composition, temperature, rotation, orbit, and so on. If any one of these factors had been slightly different, so the argument goes, life on Earth either would not have started or would have perished long before it had a chance to evolve into more complex creatures like ourselves.

The answer to this objection is twofold. First, extraterrestrial life could differ from Earth life in ways we have trouble imagining. Second, the universe is just really big. What scientists call the observable universe, or the portion we have the capacity to detect because the light has had enough time to reach us since the beginning, is estimated to have over one hundred billion galaxies. Our own galaxy alone, which remains virtually unexplored, contains hundreds of billions of stars. However unlikely the conditions necessary for life may seem, there is a great deal of space out there for those conditions to be repeated.

In the movie Contact, a scientist played by Jodie Foster argues that there must be life beyond Earth, for otherwise there would be "an awful waste of space." You could interpret this statement different ways. For religious believers, the question is why God would have created all those countless galaxies when only one planet of one star would be inhabited. Perhaps it is so that people in the future will have places to go after Earth is used up or on the brink of destruction. Still, that's an awful lot of space....

A more secular version of the same argument might go something like this: In the vastness of outer space, our solar system is a mere speck in a sea of galaxies that all look more or less like ours. Given the relative uniformity of everything from afar, our default assumption should be that the basic conditions of our vicinity are not unique. This reasoning might not convince those of us who suspect the origin of life was miraculous, but it ought to be good enough for those of a more secular mindset.

One comparison is instructive. Most people have long assumed that there are planets beyond our solar system. Yet until the 1990s, with the discovery of a star that wobbled (suggesting it was being orbited by a large object), there was no concrete evidence that any of these so-called extrasolar planets existed. For all scientists knew, our sun could have been the only star in the entire universe that harbored planets. That possibility runs contrary to intuition for much the same reason the idea that we are alone does. It proved to be incorrect, and I suspect the second idea will also.

Some people will say, "Okay, maybe there's life in other places. Perhaps things on the level of bacteria or even plants have sprouted elsewhere in the universe. But intelligent life? Advanced civilizations? How likely is that?" Skeptical scientists point to some discouraging facts. Although bacteria appear fairly early in the Earth's fossil record, there was nothing but bacteria for the next three billion years--complex, multicellular life doesn't appear until the last billion. Furthermore, current scientific consensus holds that an asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and if not for that fortuitous event, brainy mammals would never have come to dominate the planet.

Science fiction movies always assume that alien life must look more or less similar to us. In the real world there are creatures as weird as sea anemones living right here on Earth, but movie aliens invariably have a more standard appearance. Take the recent Avatar. In that film, a crew of Earthlings is investigating the exotic life forms that we're supposed to believe evolved independently in an entirely different solar system. And just how exotic are these creatures? Other than their possessing tails, blue skin, a ten-foot stature, and a few other odd features, they basically look human, sound human, and act human, right down to the mating rituals. The movie's plot is sort of an amped-up Dances with Wolves, only instead of a white man becoming part of a tribe of Lakota Sioux Indians, it has a white man becoming part of a tribe of giant alien smurfs.

I shouldn't make fun. The director, James Cameron, has said he intended the film as "science fantasy" rather than science fiction, and that they'd first designed the aliens as less human-looking before worrying it would turn off audiences. At least the film is a touch more plausible than a lot of older sci-fi like Star Trek, where aliens are shown as humans with pointy ears or ridged skin. But it's striking that more recent flicks like Independence Day and Signs continue to fall back on the most worn cliches about extraterrestrials, depicting them all as green and warty and malevolent.

The most versatile aliens depicted on screen are still probably those in Star Wars. I never fully appreciated that fact until I read Jeanne Cavelos's The Science of Star Wars (1999). Herself an astrophysicist (who also wrote The Science of The X-Files), Cavelos makes a noble effort to find scientific basis for all the major components of the series, including the ships, the weapons, the planets, the aliens, the droids, and even the Force. She doesn't always succeed--but she does explore much of the current research on subjects ranging from A.I. to quantum mechanics. (For a broader discussion about how far along we are toward inventing the technologies of science fiction, I highly recommend the 2008 book Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku, one of my favorite science writers, and one of the scientists Cavelos interviews.) Her chapter on aliens begins with the following observation about the films: "Almost anywhere you go in 'a galaxy far, far away,' alien life is there. You'll either land in it, step on it, or get eaten by it.... Even in environments as inhospitable as Tatooine, Hoth, or an asteroid, life finds a way to survive."

Of course Star Wars has always been one of the more unabashedly unscientific sci-fi franchises. There are serious difficulties in explaining certain things such as how all the creatures breathe comfortably no matter what planet they're on, which seems unlikely unless they're using some sort of technological aid we never see. Cavelos points out that planetary atmospheres may be unique like fingerprints, which would mean that no life form from one planet can breathe naturally on another. Avatar gets this detail right, having the human explorers only able to breathe with gas masks or in air-tight buildings or inside their Avatar bodies.

Still, the sheer diversity of the aliens in Star Wars is impressive, especially compared to earlier films. As Dr. Kaku explains, "the aliens don't look like us anymore. They tried to have aliens with different architectures. In that sense, Star Wars is more realistic than some of the stuff I've seen." And yet many of these aliens are simply analogues of Earth animals: dogs (Wookiees), slugs (Hutts), pigs (Gamorreans), bats (mynocks), and buffalo (banthas). Some of the organisms even look identical to what's on Earth, as in Endor's redwoods or Dagobah's snakes. Most of the invented creatures are humanoid, and those that aren't, like Jabba, are still anthropomorphic. How likely is it that aliens would look that similar to what we see around us?

The book quotes one scientist who argues that most of the visible features that humans possess, such as five-digit hands, are intrinsically efficient characteristics that evolution would tend to produce even on other planets, similar to the way aquatic mammals like dolphins acquired a fish form. Most scientists disagree. As Dr. Jack Cohen puts it, "Finding another planet with our kind of dinosaurs or people is more unlikely than finding a remote Pacific island on which the natives speak perfect German."

Science fiction literature has had the opportunity to envision alien life more broadly than the movies do. Strange life forms appear in hard sci-fi novels such as Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg, which speculates about what the intelligent inhabitants of a neutron star would look like. Part of the reason why movies aren't as daring is budgetary constraints. Commercial films have the most resources for showing aliens. The problem, as James Cameron tells us, is that mass audiences aren't interested in seeing anything truly weird.

Life as we understand it can mean different things, from simple bacteria to advanced civilizations. But since our only frame of reference is what we see around us, we have trouble visualizing aliens without comparing them to familiar creatures. If aliens exist, they might be more bizarre than anything we've ever thought of, much less seen. We can't possibly be certain what lies beyond our immediate knowledge.

Scheming, grasping liberals

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

It isn't news when Rush Limbaugh says something offensive, but it is intriguing when he shows an ironic lack of self-reflection.

He wondered, in the wake of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, if Jews were having second thoughts about their support for Obama. "To some people, 'banker' is a code word for Jewish," Limbaugh said, "and guess who Obama is assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there."

In other words, Limbaugh thinks Jews are automatically inclined to perceive an ethnic insult in criticisms of an institution or profession that anti-Semites identify as "Jewish."

Curious, then, that he doesn't apply the same logic to conservative assaults on Hollywood, which often sound quite similar to attacks by neo-Nazis and their ilk. To test the parallels, I collected a series of quotes from Limbaugh and from Stormfront, the Internet's leading white-supremacist website. Any occurrences of the word "Jew" in the latter, I either removed or replaced with the word "liberal." I then shuffled up the five quotes. Try to see if you can determine which are the Limbaugh ones and which the Stormfront ones. I myself would have been unable to do so.

1. "White people, too, are debasing their own culture with some of the rotgut that shows up on TV, some of the rotgut that shows up in Hollywood movies and so forth. Who's running all this? It's liberals! Liberals run Hollywood."

2. "McCarthyism is actually correctly accusing someone of communism, identifying a communist, right? That's what it was. People that hated McCarthy were the commies that were identified."

3. "Ted Turner marries Hanoi Jane Fonda, tries to go Hollywood, push Hollywood-type liberal politics and it just doesn't work."

4. "You recall, and there have been countless movies about this and books, all the liberals in Hollywood spent decades trying to convince the American public and countless congressional hearings, committees, that they weren't in bed with the communists.... now they're embracing communists as a badge of honor."

5. "Imus made the comment about a group, not an individual, just like NRA members are called gun nuts, paranoid whack jobs and other highly insulting terms by the liberal-controlled media."

(Here are the answers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

You get the point. If you have ever perused Stormfront (a lovely experience, I can tell you), you will find that a great deal of what is said there sounds remarkably, eerily similar to things said by Limbaugh, by other conservative talk-radio commentators, and by their millions of listeners. Both crowds attack liberals, socialists, and communists, usually treating the three categories as interchangeable. Both think Hollywood and the media are "run" by left-wing subversives. Both assail welfare, affirmative action, feminism, multiculturalism, gun control, global warming science, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Both consider themselves at war with "elites." Both embrace conspiracy theories, and both see President Obama as an anti-white radical.

Of course, there are also substantial differences between the dittoheads and the Goebbelheads. Limbaugh is strongly pro-Israel and supports the Iraq War, neither exactly a popular stance among white nationalists (who hate Bush almost as much as they hate Obama). He has never explicitly embraced biological racism; he rationalizes his attacks on blacks and other minorities by saying he is only against the way liberal institutions coddle them. I don't believe he is an anti-Semite, and I disagree with the ADL that his remarks about Obama and the banks were "borderline anti-Semitic." His argument was that Jews might perceive attacks on bankers as veiled bigotry because anti-Semites talk that way, not that the banking industry is actually "Jew-controlled."

I just find it fascinating that he would make such an inference, apparently blind to the fact that his very own career is built on a style of demagoguery closely resembling that of some intensely anti-Semitic groups. He spends day upon day vilifying and demonizing many of the same institutions and organizations as the white-power folks do--Hollywood, the media, the government, the ACLU, the Ivy Leaguers--only he doesn't go around describing his targets as Jewish or Zionist, even though many of them do in fact include a disproportionate number of Jews. But as soon as someone utters a word of complaint about the ways of Wall Street, in swoops Mr. Limbaugh to protect us Yids against the slander. It's nice to know someone cares.

Why ethnic labels matter

One time as I was waiting in the hall for a class, I began a conversation with a woman sitting nearby, and when she asked me what I was taking, I said, "Hebrew." She then inquired, without a hint of irony, "Why do you need to take Hebrew if you are a Hebrew?"

I was struck dumb. It wasn't just her ignorance of the fact that most American Jews are less than fluent in the Hebrew language, it was her referring to me as a "Hebrew." I hadn't encountered that nomenclature before, and if I'd ever expected to, it would have been from a small-town dweller in Alabama or some such place, not from a fellow student at U. of Maryland!

Was I offended? Not really. While I'm suspicious about the sorts of ideas that might accompany her terminological illiteracy, this use of the word "Hebrew" was once considered perfectly respectable--like, oh, back in the nineteenth century. As British historian Paul Johnson notes:

From about the second century BC, when it was so used by Ben Sira, 'Hebrew' was applied to the language of the Bible, and to all subsequent works written in this language. As such it gradually lost its pejorative overtone, so that both to Jews themselves and to sympathetic gentiles, it sometimes seemed preferable to 'Jew' as a racial term. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was much used by the Reform movement in the United States, so that we get such institutions as the Hebrew Union College and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

A quick search on Google News, which has a mammoth historical archive of newspaper articles, turns up numerous instances of this usage between 1875 and 1915. For example, one 1913 article from The New York Times reports, "More than 500 Hebrews crowded Clinton Hall last night and took part in an enthusiastic meeting...in honor of Nahum Sokelew, the Zionist, and editor of the best-known Jewish newspaper in Russia." To this day there are statutes on the book that refer to things like "Orthodox Hebrew religious requirements." But in the common language this sort of phraseology sounds ignorant, if not anti-Semitic, to most people. That it once was standard usage has been all but forgotten.

If you keep up with current events, you may already have suspected where this post was leading. Two apparently coincidental news items recently have sparked a debate in the media and blogosphere about the use of outdated racial/ethnic terminology. In one, the census forms for 2010 included "Negro" as an option for racial identification, because some older blacks still prefer the term. In another, a 2008 quote by Sen. Harry Reid was uncovered in which he had stated that the country was ready for a black president, especially one who was "light-skinned" and spoke "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

If Reid had said "black" instead of "Negro," would his statement still be objectionable? Depends who you ask. (I personally think no.) But most commentators agree that there's something exceedingly strange about hearing the word "Negro" used in earnest, and not in a historical context, by the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate.

Unlike "Hebrew," which few if any individuals alive today remember as an accepted term for a Jewish person, "Negro" fell out of fashion only about 40 years ago. Martin Luther King used the word several times in his "I Have a Dream" speech, and Bobby Kennedy used it when he suggested--with considerable foresight, as it turns out--that the U.S. would elect a black president in the next 40 years. People of Reid's generation (b. 1939) had to expunge the word from their vocabulary when they were well into adulthood. Can younger people like me (b. 1977) understand what that's like? Why, yes we can. That's exactly what happened with the word "Oriental" when I was growing up.

Anyone should be able to understand why terms like these persist in the margins of society for decades after having been purged from mainstream discourse. Apart from the fact that old speech habits die hard, the changes usually seem a little arbitrary on the surface. Why is "Hebrew" more demeaning than "Jew"? Why is the Spanish word for "black" worse than the English word? Partly it may be their closeness to a slur ("Hebe," "nigger," etc.), but the real reason is probably that it is just a way of marking a shift in public attitude. Therefore, any person who continues using a linguistic casualty of this type gives the impression of not having fully absorbed the social developments that left it behind.

I molt therefore I am

"They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation."

-- Nicolas Fontaine, 1650

I once visited an oceanarium hoping I'd get the chance to hold a live lobster in my hands. It turned out the place wouldn't let us--something about contaminating them, I think. I did get to hold a horseshoe crab, a starfish, and a sea cucumber, all alive. The lobsters, however, we could only observe in their enclosures, snapping their claws, waving their antennae.

Our guide was eager to debunk the popular notion that lobsters scream when they are cooked alive. That is impossible, he told us, first because lobsters have no vocal cords, and second because they have no brains.

That didn't sound right to me. First of all, of course lobsters don't have vocal cords, but then neither do birds, and birds certainly emit a shrill noise when in extreme distress. I suppose he meant lobsters don't vocalize, period. Fair enough. Then what is the high-pitched sound heard when a lobster is placed in a boiling pot? He didn't say, but later I found out that many sources explain it as steam escaping from the animal's carapace.

A much bigger stretch was his second claim. I knew that not all animals have brains. We even got to see a confrontation between two such creatures. Someone placed a starfish into a tank with a mussel, an animal that looked sort of like a three-dimensional Pac-Man. As soon as the starfish hit the water, the previously sedentary mussel rocketed toward the other end of the tank, its shell bobbing open and closed with each stroke. We were told it was trying to escape because the starfish is a natural predator. It wasn't "afraid" of the starfish. As a type of clam, a mussel has no brain and therefore can have no emotion. But it did nonetheless possess survival reflexes.

The problem was that everything I knew about lobsters, insects, and other arthropods suggested they did have some sort of brain. I had done several reports in college on honeybees, who have the most complex system of communication in the animal world, involving a "dance" that conveys the location of nectar to other members of the hive. They know the dance instinctively, but it seems unlikely that any brainless creature could process that level of information.

It wasn't until a while later that I found the decisive refutation for what our guide had said. I was in my university's library when I wandered into the biology section and decided, on a whim, to check a book on crustacean anatomy. The book unhesitatingly described these animals as possessing a brain. In fact, the brain of arthropods is fairly advanced for invertebrates, surpassed only by that of cephalopod mollusks--squids and octopuses, the only invertebrates that appear to possess intelligence.

As noted zoologist Donald Griffin stated, "Experimenters have demonstrated that the central nervous systems of crustaceans, insects, and cephalopods organize and modulate information in ways that are quite comparable in complexity and precision to those of vertebrate brains" (qtd. in George Page's Inside the Animal Mind, p. 167).

Okay, so they have brains. Or at least something we can call a brain. But that leaves open a more crucial question: Do they have any consciousness? When injured, do they experience pain? Remarkably, many scientists insist the answer is no. A 2005 study funded by the Norwegian government received wide publicity, which claimed it merely bolstered an existing scientific consensus that these animals feel no pain:

[A]nimals with simple nervous systems, like lobsters, snails and worms, do not have the ability to process emotional information and therefore do not experience suffering, say most researchers.... "When you drop a lobster in boiling water, or put a fishhook through a worm, those stimuli cause those muscles to contract," Stevens said. "We describe that as pain because of the motor response, which is nothing more than neurons that have been stimulated."

Or, in the words of the Terminator, "The data could be called pain."

I guess that settles it, huh? Not quite. A more recent investigation paints a rather different picture:

[Robert] Elwood, along with Stuart Barr and Lynsey Patterson, outline seven reasons, with supportive findings, they believe crustaceans suffer.

For one thing, they argue, crustaceans possess "a suitable central nervous system and receptors." They learn to avoid a negative stimulus after a potentially painful experience. They also engage in protective reactions, such as limping and rubbing, after being hurt.

Other scientists remain unconvinced. As one puts it, "You could argue the shrimp is simply trying to clean the antenna rather than showing a pain response."

Well, of course you could argue. An alien scientist studying humans could argue that humans do not experience pain. They cry, scream, and sweat when they're injured simply because those are adaptive behaviors for getting help or scaring away predators (or whatever). If you're intent on denying an organism's inner experience, you can explain away any behavior you see. Much of what drives this skepticism, however, is scientists' unwillingness to expand their idea of what an invertebrate nervous system can do.

Proving that lobsters suffer when boiled would probably have legal consequences. They would be subject to laws prohibiting cruelty to animals (they already are in some places), and chefs might be required to kill them or stun them before boiling them. (There is even now an electrocution device for that purpose called CrustaStun.) Since there's a big worldwide seafood industry and many people consider lobsters incredibly tasty, it's no wonder discussions of this nature tend to provoke angry, knee-jerk reactions.

What do religious Jews, who don't eat lobster, think about this issue? Most don't get involved at all. We already have our own problems dealing with groups that seek to ban kosher slaughter. But the teachings of our religion do shed light on this topic. While allowing the killing of animals for food and other human-related purposes, Judaism places great value on their proper treatment. There are a range of laws about taking good care of one's livestock or pets, including feeding them on time and not overburdening them. Many rabbis prohibit hunting for sport, and none encourage it. The ritual slaughter of mammals and birds attempts to make their death quick and painless.

These rules have given Judaism a better record on animal welfare than Christianity, but they have important limitations. They allow a Jew to harm an animal for a legitimate human purpose (for example, ridding a rat infestation), and some Jews have interpreted this stipulation broadly enough to justify some pretty brutal practices. The ugliest example in recent memory concerned the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant (later shut down after the fallout from another controversy, involving mistreatment of employees). Undercover videos released by PETA showed cows apparently walking around for several minutes after their necks had been cut. Defenders insisted the animals were like chickens with their head cut off, acting on reflex but feeling no pain.

Kosher supervisors finally agreed to change the plant's practices, and later it received a positive review from an inspection by leading animal-welfare expert Dr. Temple Grandin. But one of their controversial practices that remained in effect was turning animals upside-down before killing them, which is authorized by Israeli rabbis but not practiced by any other kosher slaughterhouses in America.

Judaism teaches that non-Jews should observe the Noachide commandments, which include an injunction not to eat an animal while it is still alive, usually interpreted as a general statement against cruelty to animals. But the obligation is narrower than it is for Jews, and might not apply to a marine invertebrate anyway.

The important point in all this, however, is that Judaism always intended the principle of compassion for animals to go beyond the letter of the law. As Rabbi Natan Slifkin explains in his book Man and Beast:

Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi was once approached by a calf fleeing in terror from the butcher. But Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi did not take pity on it. He said, "Go; for this is what you were made for!" As a result of this he suffered pain for many years. His atonement came when his maid discovered a rat's nest in the house and was about to sweep it away; Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi told her to leave it alone.

Now it is undeniably true that the calf's purpose in life was indeed to be eaten. That was what it was bred for. This is neither wrong nor cruel; on the contrary, it assures the success of the species (cows will never become extinct) and the elevation of this animal. Yet nevertheless it was this event that brought punishment to Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi. For treatment of animals is not meant to be determined on a purely legal level. The purpose of the mitzvah of kindness to animals is to inculcate one in the trait of compassion. That cows are destined to be eaten is irrelevant. When faced with a dewy-eyed, bleating, tender calf, one's mercies should be aroused. Likewise, although there is every reason to dispose of rats, it is admirable if one feels sympathy for the poor little things and cannot bring oneself to do so.

There are other limitations in one's actions toward animals. Although a human need justifies causing pain to animals, it only justifies it insofar as it is required. Where different options are available, one should choose the less painful option. (pp. 194-5)

The prime consideration in Judaism is not what the animal is experiencing but what type of person you become in the way you treat it. People who are unaffected by seeing an animal suffer are likely to lack empathy in general. So even if the lobster's nervous system is too simple for the creature to experience pain, just the appearance that it does ought to give us pause. Whether the practice of boiling lobsters alive continues or not, there's something seriously wrong when people have desensitized themselves to the point they consider the process as casual as chopping fruit.

All wired up

Sarah Palin has taken no shortage of abuse for her inarticulate remarks last year when she first rose to national prominence as McCain's running mate. Everyone who followed the campaign remembers the notorious moments from the Couric interviews, particularly when she tried to explain why being governor of Alaska enhanced her foreign policy credentials:

Well, it certainly does because our -- our next door neighbors are foreign countries. They're in the state that I am the executive of. And there in Russia ... We have trade missions back and forth. We-- we do-- it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where-- where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is-- from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to-- to our state.

Contrary to popular belief, Palin never said "I can see Russia from my house." That was SNL's parody of a remark she made during an interview with Charlie Gibson for ABC News, when she said, "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska." The whole argument about her state's proximity to Russia giving her foreign policy experience started as a bit of campaign bluster by McCain, and she unwisely stuck with it through several interviews.

I believe that ultimately candidates should be judged by the smartest things they have said, not the dumbest things. Our political culture obsesses on these gotcha moments, which can happen to anyone. I know I've made stupid remarks in my life, and been in situations where I've done nothing but sputter. I was just lucky never to be in front of a news camera when it happened.

That's why I decided to ask around the Internet for Palin fans to show me smart, eloquent things she has said on public policy. As it turns out, several users were kind enough to provide me with a series of quotes they believe reveal her penetrating insight. Here is one example, from a November interview with Greta Van Susteren:

Fundamentally, America's economy was built on free market enterprise. It was built on these principles that allowed the private sector to grow and to thrive and prosper and for our families to keep more of what we earn. Where we are right now in America in about the last 11 months is seeing this reversal of those principles that were applied to build up our economy.

All of a sudden, we're thinking it's OK to grow debt in our country. It's OK to borrow money from countries that we will soon be so beholden to. It's OK to print money out of thin air and think, again, that everything's just going to magically work out.

Fundamentally, everybody is equal in America. Everyone has equal opportunity to earn and produce and build. And the fundamentals of a strong economy have got to be applied again, as they were, like I just said, back in the '80s, when Reagan faced a worse recession than what we're facing today. Let's learn from that piece of American history and apply the same solutions.

Okay, where do I begin? Her premise--that the U.S. was a bastion of fiscal restraint until the day Obama took office--is quite sensible to anyone with the political literacy of a third-grade hall monitor, but to few else. Reagan added more money to the national debt than any other president in history, until Dubya shattered the record. (See here for the details.) Furthermore, economists of all political stripes agree that the government should spend during a recession.

As for the claim that everyone in America has equal opportunities for success--well, let's just say if I took the time to refute that assertion with data, it would put me in mind of the proverbial machine gun for killing a fly. Instead, I'll go back to the words of Mr. Reagan himself, in a 1985 address on tax reform:

My goal is an America bursting with opportunity, an America that celebrates freedom every day by giving every citizen an equal chance, an America that is once again the youngest nation on Earth--her spirit unleashed and breaking free.

Notice that he identifies equal opportunity as a goal, not a reality. And he argues that limiting government and stimulating business will help us move toward that goal. That's conservatism in a nutshell. Palin, in contrast, is saying everyone already has equal opportunity. If that's the case, why bother changing anything? Her rhetoric may aim for Ronald Reagan, but it ends up at Stephen Colbert.

But let's put all that aside for the moment and consider her verbal abilities. At least she's worlds more coherent than she was during the Couric interview. Whether she's more eloquent, more facile, more persuasive than the average college term paper is another matter. If I had to grade her, I'd give her a C on style and a D on content. And this is supposedly one of her better moments.

On a similar note, consider the following gem:

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for being part of this quest in working with us to restore the American dream. The commonsense Republican proposals are the first step in restoring the American dream because Republicans care about America. But there is no greater dream than the dreams parents have for their children to be happy and to share God's blessings.

That last sentence, I must admit, rings nice on the ears. Unfortunately, I was being a little tricky in leading you to think this was a Sarah Palin quote. It's a real quote, but it wasn't uttered by Sarah Palin. It wasn't even uttered by a human being.

Rather, it came from a computer program that produces automatic summaries of text. In 1996, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg punched in the combined texts of the speeches from the first two nights of the Republican Convention, and the quote above is part of what the program returned. He then tried the same thing with the Democratic Convention. "In this case, though," he reports, "the summarizer software returned pure word salad--maybe because Democrats have more trouble staying on message than Republicans do, maybe because they just go on longer." (This anecdote comes from Nunberg's book The Way We Talk Now and is recounted later in his Talking Right.)

Palin is that summarizer software. At her worst, she speaks "word salad." At her best, she speaks at about the level of that last quote, a comfortable summation of stump-speech rhetoric. If this is the model of a rising political star in our age, we seriously ought to rethink our notions of what it takes to reach that position. All you need is the face of Tina Fey and the syntax of a Pentium, and you're good to go. Bill Gates's influence reaches yet new heights.

Arguing with fear

Sometimes movies that don't work are more interesting than those that do. One example that comes to mind is Just Cause (1995), which seemed to draw upon public feelings generated by the contemporaneous O.J. trial, as well as by the earlier Rodney King controversy. The movie is a mess, with a ludicrous ending that leaves the impression that the film supports, or at least condones, police brutality. And yet, the movie got me thinking about this issue in a way that has stayed with me far longer than many better films.

(Warning: What follows will contain plot spoilers.)

In the opening scenes, police detain a black man (Blair Underwood) in an interrogation room. There, they beat him until he confesses to the rape and murder of a little girl in the Everglades. The arresting officer is white, but the sheriff (Laurence Fishburne) is black.

In the next scene, several years have passed, and a Harvard law professor (Sean Connery) is railing against the death penalty at a public debate. He is called in to defend Underwood, who faces execution. His conversations with the charming, intelligent prisoner lead him to talk to another death row convict (Ed Harris, trying a little too hard to channel Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs) who, after some wrangling, takes responsibility for the murder and correctly reveals the location of the murder weapon, which Connery finds in the swamp. A new trial is granted, and Underwood is freed.

Connery discovers, too late, that Underwood really did commit the murder. He persuaded the already condemned Harris to make a false confession. In return, he offered to kill Harris's parents--which Harris wanted--once he was released.

It is at this point that the movie takes its leaping nosedive down the rabbit hole. What Underwood does next is what any newly acquitted killer would do: go after the family of the man who got him acquitted. We learn that Connery's wife was the prosecutor in an earlier trial when Underwood got castrated in jail, and he has plotted his revenge ever since. (Uh, huh.) He kidnaps Connery's young daughter and takes her to the Everglades. Connery and Fishburne confront him, where he is finally devoured by an alligator.

Oh, how I wish I were making this up. Oh, how I wish.

The movie seems to suggest that the police were right to beat a confession out of Underwood, since otherwise a horrible killer would have been let loose. As Fishburne explains earlier in the film, sometime before it jumps the alligator, "This is a case that hangs together by the thinnest of threads.... You come down here, you start pickin' at them threads now, it's liable to fall apart." Because Connery sticks his liberal nose into the cops' business, he ends up freeing a monster who then comes after him--poetic justice. The message is straight from the annals of Willie Horton: If you dare to fight for such radical notions as civil liberties and due process, a black man will come and rape your daughter.

As it stands, Just Cause falls into a long tradition of Hollywood movies stretching back to Dirty Harry and beyond, which show no respect for the legal and constitutional protections on criminal suspects. The attitude of these films is that you do what you gotta do to keep dangerous criminals off the street, even if it means breaking the law yourself. Never do these films stop to consider that these protections do far more to prevent the U.S. from becoming a draconian police state than they do to instigate the contrived, paranoid scenarios these films cook up.

I am not naive about crime in America. I grew up and still live in Baltimore, which has the second-highest homicide rate in the country. I've been a civilian patrol volunteer for the last ten years. I know firsthand how weak and ineffectual the police force and justice system around here usually are. But I have seen nothing to convince me that beating up suspects will make the world safer.

You can't have it both ways. If cops get to railroad a case whenever they're convinced a suspect is guilty, it will greatly increase the chances that innocent people will be framed--and abused. Is that worth the cost of making sure guilty people always get brought to justice?

The way people answer that question often falls on racial lines, because it's a matter of what people fear the most. Both whites and blacks are scared of street crime. But blacks also carry a fear of police brutality and discrimination that many whites fail to understand, because it is not something whites normally experience.

That's why most whites are perplexed by black people's unwillingness to acknowledge O.J. Simpson's obvious guilt. Because frame-ups have been a reality to blacks for so long, many of them simply do not trust our justice system. Once they hear that an investigator to the case once used the term "nigger," that is enough to throw the entire investigation into doubt.

This reaction is not logical. But neither is the perspective of whites who take comfort at the thought of police violating a suspect's civil rights. They aren't afraid they'll ever be that suspect; they're afraid of what the suspect will do to them if he gets set free--an outcome that, in fact, may directly result from such violations. In other words, both sides to this debate are capable of being irrational, and for the same reason: because they cannot argue with fear.

An inconceivable analysis

One of my favorite scenes in any movie is the Battle of Wits from The Princess Bride, in which Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) must decide which of two goblets Westley (Cary Elwes) has poisoned. Almost everyone finds the scene amusing and clever, but it has subtleties that are easy to miss. They concern the following questions: What in the name of mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwiches is Vizzini doing in this scene? How did he arrive at the choice he finally makes? And how come he's so confident in that choice when it's so spectacularly wrong?

Consider his opening argument, which makes more sense than anything else he says: a clever man would be tempted to put the poison in his own goblet, except that Westley would have anticipated Vizzini would think so, and therefore he'd put it in Vizzini's goblet instead. (Game theory deals with reasoning such as this, where you try to anticipate not only what your opponent will think, but how much he will anticipate your anticipations. Many games have this dynamic, where it's a race to determine who will do the most determining. Various webpages and books have examined the role of game theory in this scene.)

He eventually sticks with his initial conclusion (that the poison is in his own cup), but not before rambling for an entire minute about Australia and giants and Spaniards, going back and forth on which glass he thinks was poisoned. What he's trying to do, I suspect, is gauge Westley's reactions. Since Westley already knows the poison's location, he will (Vizzini assumes) fear for his life if he thinks Vizzini is guessing correctly. (That's why Vizzini secretly switches the goblets--he figures Westley will forfeit the game rather than voluntarily commit suicide if he realizes Vizzini has won.) Vizzini's strategy, therefore, is to keep changing his answer until Westley's body language betrays the correct one. As Westley observes, "You're trying to trick me into giving away something." In light of Vizzini's sureness when he finally makes his choice, we presume he does manage to detect something in Westley's behavior at crucial moments--nervousness maybe.

Westley indeed is nervous, but for a different reason than Vizzini assumes. He's worried Vizzini will stumble upon his actual secret, that he has poisoned both goblets. Vizzini almost seems to be approaching the truth as he rambles about how he "clearly" can't choose this glass and "clearly" can't choose the other one either. He even says at one point, "You could have put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you." His own rhetoric contains the solution to the puzzle, yet somehow he never notices. He's just bluffing (a recurring theme in The Princess Bride).

He possesses the classic fatal flaw of overconfidence, or hubris. He may in fact be smart enough to figure out what Westley is up to. Immunity-building was a practice known to the Ancient Greeks, whom Vizzini references earlier in the scene when he declares that Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates were "morons." The problem isn't so much that Vizzini is less smart than he imagines as that he discounts other people's intelligence. Truly wise people accept the wisdom of others. Thinking everyone in the world but oneself to be an idiot is folly, not wisdom.

Essential to any game is sizing up one's opponent, and Vizzini seriously underestimates Westley every time the word "Inconceivable!" escapes his lips. He never learns his lesson even as Westley continues to do everything he thought wasn't possible, including defeating a master swordsman and a giant. He reasons that a man who can defeat those "morons" still cannot hold a candle to his perfect mind. As he explains to Westley, "I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains." It doesn't seem to occur to him that Westley used brains, not brawn, to defeat Inigo and Fezzik. Since he maintains such a low opinion of Westley in spite of all available evidence, he fails to consider there might be a trick up the man's sleeve.

Ironically, his lack of appreciation for other people's minds deprives him of a powerful tool he could use against his enemies. What makes Westley so formidable an opponent is not just that he's versatile and quick-thinking, but that he uses people's natures against them. That's how he handles all his adversaries throughout the movie: he takes immediate advantage of Inigo's fairness, of Fezzik's sportsmanship, of Vizzini's pride, of the palace guards' credulity, and of Prince Humperdinck's cowardice. In contrast, Vizzini is all tactic and no psychology.

You might think I'm reading more into the film than is there, but in the novel it's pretty obvious that the author, William Goldman (who also wrote the screenplay), put considerable thought into the themes, the traditions, and the history this mock fairy tale draws upon. There are many interludes in which he speaks directly to the reader about various plot elements and their significance. Whether in movie or book form, The Princess Bride is not just clever and entertaining, but also well-conceived. It should not be underestimated.

Harry Potter, the jock

I'm sure I'm not the first to have noticed, but quidditch, the imaginary sport from the Harry Potter books, probably wouldn't work very well in the real world even if you had all the technology needed to make the game physically possible--including flying broomsticks, and a ball with a mind of its own.

In this game, each team has a group of players called Chasers who try to get a ball through the other team's goalpost. Of course every team has a goalie. This would all sound like soccer on broomsticks were it not for a couple of really exotic elements. First, there's a heavy, enchanted object called a bludger which tries to knock players off their broomsticks. To protect the players, each team has special players called Beaters, armed with a club for batting away bludgers.

The trouble is, nothing the Chasers, the Beaters, or the goalies do has any effect in moving the game toward its conclusion. A team could go on scoring goals forever, and the game wouldn't end even if the score was 440-0. A team's ultimate fate rests entirely with one player, the Seeker, whose task is to catch a tiny enchanted object called the Golden Snitch which only appears on occasion and tries to elude the Seeker's grasp. Once the Seeker catches the Snitch, his or her team earns 150 extra points and the game ends. Usually his or her team then wins the game. Only if that team is more than 150 points behind at the moment the Snitch is caught does the team lose. One of the later Harry Potter books (I can't remember which) depicts such a game.

Quidditch therefore has one fundamental flaw: the Chasers, who make up the majority of the players and whose actions dominate most of what happens, have a very weak incentive for scoring goals. As long as they manage to remain within 150 points of the other team, they are in little danger of losing. The score could be 140-0, and the team that hasn't scored could still easily win. Most likely, a typical quidditch team would hardly score at all, focusing its energy simply on preventing the other team from scoring.

To compensate for this all-too-obvious flaw, teams get ranked according to points scored rather than number of games won. But that makes it heavily dependent on record-keeping between games. You'd have to commit yourself in advance to playing many games for it to have any impact. It's not the type of sport that lends itself to casual play in the backyard.

In our world, most team sports revolve around one very simple formula: one team tries to relocate a small object (a ball, a puck, etc.), and the other team tries to stop it. That's it. Right there you have the basic description of soccer, hockey, baseball, football, basketball, volleyball, and lacrosse. Soccer and hockey are almost moronically simple games. Baseball and American football have intricate rules of progression, and baseball (along with its cousins such as cricket) is slightly unconventional in that a team's ultimate objective involves the movement of players rather than the movement of the ball. None of these games, however, allow more than one ball on the field at a time, much less more than one type of ball. And a game where regular scoring doesn't count for anything more than a team's record is hard to imagine. In sports, complexity is not necessarily a virtue.

The Potter books, nonetheless, make quidditch out to be the most dazzlingly exciting sport in the history of mankind, far surpassing any of the familiar earth-bound ballgames. No other wizard sport ever gets mentioned, suggesting the wizarding world is quite satisfied with this one. Most readers consider it one of the charms of the series, an example of J.K. Rowling's enduring creativity. Somehow it's fun to read about, even if the rules are probably too unwieldy for it to work in the real world.

Whether it's fun to watch is less clear. Only the first two movies show the game in detail, and the fourth and fifth movie don't show the game at all. The novelty of seeing the magical sport on screen makes it interesting at first. After that, there's little suspense to be generated, apart from hoping Harry doesn't get hit by a bludger. As a Seeker, most of what he does during any game is sit around waiting for the Snitch to appear. As for the other players, since they do not determine the game's ultimate fate, what's the point in watching them play? (It's no wonder the films so often show cheating and other disturbances; they aren't confident the game will be interesting on its own terms.)

Had Rowling eliminated the business with the Seeker and the Snitch, quidditch would be more believable. It would be like soccer in three dimensions rather than two, similar to what Orson Scott Card envisioned in his novel Ender's Game, in which child soldiers conduct simulated space battles in a null-G environment. But the Golden Snitch is just enough to put quidditch over the top as something truly otherworldly. If all the game consisted of was players trying to score goals, it would quickly begin to sound mundane once the novelty of their flying on broomsticks wore off. The bludgers add a level of danger you don't associate with high school athletics, and the Snitch makes the game unlike anything you've heard of.

Quidditch is really part of the whole mystique of the Harry Potter series. In a world where magic dominates and where broken limbs can be mended within seconds, physical prowess is a lot less valued than in our "muggle" world. That's why a kid who looks to us like a class-A dork can get to be the star of his school's sports team. That's why girls can play along with the boys, without anyone turning their head. That's why even the school bully is a pint-sized kid. But considering that the magic in these books is a lot like advanced technology, one must ask: isn't this where our own society is headed?

The twin straw men

Jimmy Carter has helped highlight some intriguing parallels between Israel-bashing and Obama-bashing. He stated recently that "an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity" toward President Obama is fueled by racism. Israel supporters have long made a similar argument about anti-Semitism in the type of Israel-bashing that, ironically, Carter has engaged in. For their part, Israel-bashers and Obama-bashers both like to invoke the straw-man argument that the bigotry charge is being used against all criticism of the subject in question.

Israel-bashing

Soon after the release of his book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, Carter asserted, "There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel." Of course that statement is demonstrably false, as a glance at the editorial page of any standard newspaper will reveal. Indeed, Carter's own critical pieces on Israel have been carried by major papers both before and after the publication of his controversial book.

That's where the straw man comes in: following some inflammatory, over-the-top attack on Israel, the bashers insist they're being vilified simply because they had the temerity to "criticize" the Israeli government, as if calling Israel an apartheid state falls in the same category as complaining about its bus routes.

It would be one thing if these commentators argued simply that there isn't enough debate about Israel, and that certain criticisms are unfairly labeled as anti-Semitic. Instead, they make the extraordinary claim that all criticism of Israel is treated this way. This claim has been repeated so many times it has become a sort of mantra in anti-Israel circles, despite the fact that it crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

What's striking is that virtually no one fits this description. Every U.S. president in the last four decades has attacked the building of Israeli settlements in the territories--the mainstream position in American discourse. Even the most fervent right-wing Zionists criticize Israel all the time, as their bitter reaction to the 2005 pullout from Gaza amply demonstrated. While there is basis for saying that many on the right are too quick to apply the "anti-Semite" label to people who deviate from the Likud party line, the mainstream in this country doesn't act that way, and even the rightists aren't vilifying all "criticism" of the Jewish state.

Most Israel supporters agree that there are certain types of assertions that cross the line from legitimate criticism to veiled anti-Semitism. Where that line falls exactly is a matter of debate. Irwin Cotler, commenting on the 2001 Durban conference, gives several examples of such assertions. These include calling for the destruction of Israel, attacking the legitimacy of the Jewish state, depicting Israel as the prime source of the world's evils, comparing the Israeli government with the Nazis, and singling out Israel for condemnation while ignoring or downplaying comparable or worse happenings in other countries. As Cotler observes,

For example - and apart from Durban - in December 2001, the contracting parties of the Geneva Convention convened for the first time to criticize Israel. This was the only time in 52 years that any nation was indicted. Similarly the UN Commission on Human Rights has singled out Israel for discriminatory indictment while granting the real human rights violators exculpatory immunity.

None of this is intended to suggest that Israel is above the law or is not accountable for any violations of international human rights and humanitarian law like any other state. Quite the contrary. But the problem is not that anyone should seek that Israel be above the law, but that Israel is being systematically denied equality before the law.

Convincing the average American that these sorts of criticisms are not merely unfair, but indicative of anti-Semitism, is tricky. It requires some knowledge of history and an understanding that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis has often been framed in a way that encourages Israel's perceived shortcomings to receive attention far out of proportion to their importance in world affairs. Adding to the problem is that Israel, since its inception, has been surrounded by enemy countries whose leaders have often expressed explicitly genocidal wishes against the Jews. The destruction of Israel isn't just a political goal, but a call to mass murder.

What's notable about Israel-bashing is that, unlike ordinary criticisms of a country's sins, it is usually directed, subtly or overtly, at Israel's legitimacy as a country. And since Israel was created as the world's only Jewish state, it is hard not to notice traditional anti-Jewish themes cropping up under the guise of "criticizing" Israel. Carter himself unwittingly proved this point when he claimed that "most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American organizations." Which organizations he had in mind, he did not say. As Deborah Lipstadt noted, most of the strongest public condemnations of his book came from Michael Kinsley, Ethan Bronner, Jeffrey Goldberg, Alan Dershowitz, Dennis Ross, and 14 members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors who resigned in protest. All are Jewish, but none represent a Jewish organization.

Obama-bashing

Bill O'Reilly recently lambasted two columns, one by Eugene Robinson and the other by Maureen Dowd, who believe, according to O'Reilly, that "if you criticize somebody [they like] and it's a person of color, then immediately you're a racist." In fact, neither column suggested anything of the kind.

They were both reactions to Joe Wilson (R-SC), who shouted "You lie!" during the President's health care address. Robinson's column discussed at length the open disrespect shown toward the President by Wilson and other Republican Congressmen at the speech before adding, "I suspect that Obama's race leads some of his critics to feel they have permission to deny him the legitimacy, stature and common courtesy that are any president's due. I can't prove this, however." Dowd argued that Wilson's former membership in a neo-Confederate group, his campaign to keep the Confederate Flag flying above the state Capitol, and his dismissing as a "smear" a black woman's truthful claim to be Strom Thurmond's illegitimate daughter, formed an ominous pattern that cast suspicion on his unprecedented departure from accepted standards of decorum in front of the nation's first black president.

That's where the straw man comes in: following some inflammatory, over-the-top attack on Obama, the bashers insist they're being vilified simply because they had the temerity to "criticize" the President, as if shouting him down as a liar while he's speaking falls in the same category as complaining about his tariff policy.

It would be one thing if these right-wingers argued simply that there isn't enough criticism of the President, and that certain criticisms are unfairly labeled as racist. Instead, they make the extraordinary claim that all criticism of Obama is treated this way. This claim has been repeated so many times it has become a sort of mantra in anti-Obama circles, despite the fact that it crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

What's striking is that virtually no one fits this description. Robinson, Dowd, and even Carter have all criticized Obama before. But you wouldn't know that from reading most of the right-wing sites, which, like O'Reilly, claim that these commentators apply the "racist" label to all who dare say anything negative about The One. A more recent Robinson column explains clearly when he feels attacks on Obama cross the line from legitimate criticism to veiled racism:

Of course it's possible to reject Obama's policies and philosophy without being racist. But there's a particularly nasty edge to the most vitriolic attacks -- a rejection not of Obama's programs but of his legitimacy as president. This denial of legitimacy is more pernicious than the abuse heaped upon George W. Bush by his critics (including me), and I can't find any explanation for it other than race.

I'm not talking about the majority of the citizens who went to town hall meetings to criticize Obama's plans for health-care reform or the majority of the "tea bag" demonstrators who complain that Obama is ushering in an era of big government. Those are, of course, legitimate points of view. Protest is part of our system. It's as American as apple pie.

I'm talking about the crazy "birthers." I'm talking about the nitwits who arrive at protest rallies bearing racially offensive caricatures -- Obama as a witch doctor, for example. I'm talking about the idiots who toss around words like "socialism" to make Obama seem alien and even dangerous -- who deny the fact that he, too, is as American as apple pie.

Of course one may legitimately disagree with Robinson. Obama is hardly the first president to be the subject of vitriolic attacks and kooky conspiracy theories. Robinson's point of contrast is with Bush, but I was thinking about Clinton, whose detractors called him a murderer, a rapist, and a drug addict and likened him to both Hitler and Stalin. On the other hand, no one threatened secession, or said he had a "deep-seated hatred of white people," or accused him of having been born outside the United States. Some of the attacks on Obama seem clearly to have racial (or xenophobic) overtones, but there are those on the left who see a racial motivation in less obvious examples such as Joe Wilson's outburst, which didn't happen when Clinton was in office but conceivably might have. Irrational hostility toward Obama may be rooted in racism, but it also may be rooted in the way Republicans tend to behave while out of power.

Conclusion: the parallels

Israel supporters and Obama supporters both believe that a significant amount of the hostility they receive is motivated by bigotry. Israel-bashers and Obama-bashers react by claiming that supporters are using the bigotry charge to silence all criticisms. This claim has become a sort of mantra among the bashers even though it falls apart under the least bit of scrutiny. In reality, even the staunchest Israel supporters criticize Israel, and even the staunchest Obama supporters criticize Obama. There is, however, basis for arguing that Israel supporters and Obama supporters sometimes try to suppress some criticisms by unfairly branding them as bigoted.

Nevertheless, what Israel supporters and Obama supporters are mainly reacting to are the more extreme, inflammatory attacks, particularly those that seek to undermine the legitimacy of Israel as a country, or the legitimacy of Obama as a president. Whether those sorts of attacks are in fact evidence of bigotry can be debated, and depends to some extent on one's understanding of the history of racism in the U.S. or of anti-Semitism in the world at large. But those who do see bigotry in these attacks should at least have their views described accurately rather than caricatured to make them easier to knock down.

^{(Hat tip to Rabbi Harry Maryles for the cartoon.)}

The sushi myth

Often when I mention sushi to someone who has never eaten it, I get a response like, "Well, raw fish ain't my cup of tea." It seems that every American who hasn't directly encountered sushi believes it is just another word for raw fish. They hold this belief firmly, like it's a simple fact.

I don't know where this misconception got started, but it's widespread. I myself held it at one time. Snopes even has an entry debunking it. But it takes on an added irony when it comes from people (and Jews in particular) who don't realize they have been eating a type of uncooked fish for years, called lox.

"What?!" they exclaim. "How can lox be raw? Everybody knows it's smoked salmon. Even the dictionary says so."

Okay, now wait a second: do you know what smoking means in this context? It refers to cold smoking, a preservation process that does not expose the fish to heat. Furthermore, not all lox is smoked; it is mainly preserved through curing--soaking in brine (hence the salty flavor).

Like sushi, it is an acquired taste. It's a little weird, actually: eaten by itself, it's borderline unpalatable. Add cream cheese, and it becomes delicious. The raw fish that is found in some sushi has a similar quality.

In the last ten years or so, kosher markets have begun selling sushi. To remain kosher, it must forgo traditional ingredients such as crab. The first sushi I ever ate, I made myself. I was guided through its creation while sitting in a Sukkah, in a program hosted by my college's Hillel during the holiday.

If sushi isn't raw fish, what is it? Usually it consists of rice wrapped in seaweed, with a middle that can contain just about anything--fish generally, but there is also vegetable sushi and fruit sushi. I even once tried chicken sushi, though I didn't think the combination worked.

Snopes defines it as "vinegared rice that can (but need not) be paired with raw seafood." That's also the definition offered by Wikipedia, which then links to the Snopes page. But does it really need to have rice? I once ordered something from a sushi menu, and was given simply a slab of raw tuna on a plate. I say "tuna" because that's what the menu called it, but it didn't look or taste anything like the sort of food you find in a Chicken of the Sea can. It was dark red, with a jello-like consistency, and was about as appetizing as baking soda toothpaste.

But if it doesn't need to have rice, and doesn't need to have fish, what makes sushi sushi? I tried asking this once to a sushi chef, but he didn't know enough English to explain it to me, or even to understand my question.

I made some a few weeks ago using a kit, the first time I've done it without supervision. The kit provided the seaweed and rice, and I added lox, carrots, cucumbers, and celery. The people I served it to liked it, but it was far from perfect. I put in too much rice, making it hard for me to keep the pieces together. I've asked for tips on Internet forums, and watched what the chefs at local restaurants do. The latest technique I learned is to wet the knife before cutting the rolls.

Let's face it. Sushi is just more fun to make--or to watch being made--than it is to eat. The chefs always remind me of artists, their products more visually dazzling than gustatorily appealing. But you should try it some time, just to say you've had it.

A nerdy examination of nerdiness

What, exactly, is a nerd? Roger Ebert once attempted to answer that question, in his review of one of the Revenge of the Nerds flicks:

These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with [this film].... A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.

I must confess that I find Ebert's definition rather strange, especially his contention that the protagonists of this film couldn't be nerds because they were "a bunch of interesting guys." I've always thought nerds were the interesting guys. It was the popular kids who were the bores, who went on to boring, regular jobs, while their nerdy classmates went on to become the inventors, the rocket scientists, the CEOs, the movie stars. (If you don't believe me about that last one, go read an interview with Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck about their high school days.) I presume Ebert doesn't include in his definition a tubby, bespectacled guy who analyzes movies for a living. He doesn't because he seems to define nerds as dysfunctional human beings rather than the people you learn to respect when you grow up.

Ebert is afflicted with a condition I like to call lexicitis, which is the desire to provide precise definitions for words that defy any. The word nerd is little more than a loose collection of stereotypes, rooted in the superficial world of teen cliques and in-crowds, but applied to adults without any consistent, universally accepted meaning.

I wouldn't even call it a character type, for it can encompass many character types. Rick Moranis's mad scientist in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is nerdier than Christopher Lloyd's mad scientist in Back to the Future, but then Moranis made a career out of putting a nerdy spin on characters who might not seem nerdy if played by other actors. In Parenthood he played a perfectionistic snob, but a nerdy perfectionistic snob.

Like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, you know 'em when you see 'em. I think of nerds as social oddballs, but not all social oddballs are nerds. Nerds are often thought to be intellectuals, but not all intellectuals are nerds, and not all nerds are intellectual.

Above all, the word evokes particular images: a guy who wears glasses with a piece of tape in the middle, a guy with pens in his shirt pockets, a guy who reads comic books and plays video games and likes science fiction movies and memorizes UNIX manuals.

Nerds are traditionally pictured as male. Girls and women have been described as nerds, but nobody's sure what that means. Women nerds defy a sexual stereotype almost as much as women football players do.

Nerds are, also, usually pictured as Caucasian. Of course blacks can be nerds too (think Urkel), and in black youth culture, nerdiness blends with the idea of "acting white." As for Asians, according to Hollywood in recent years, all Asian guys are nerds (this has apparently replaced the older stereotype that they all know martial arts). And all Jewish men are nerds, except for Israelis.

The commonest explanation for the word's origin is that it came from the name of a creature in a 1950 book by Dr. Seuss. How it acquired its current sense is unknown, but by the 1960s it was being used by teenagers to describe those they considered uncool.

The twin word geek has a different history, originally referring to a performer at a carnival sideshow who bit the head off a chicken. It later evolved into a synonym for nerd, a fact that hasn't stopped people from coming up with a distinction between the two. The filmmaker John Hughes once explained it in the following way: "A geek is a guy who has everything going for him, but he's just too young. By contrast, a nerd will be a nerd all his life."

Personally, I've never heard anyone else use that definition. But I agree that the two words are not always identical. It's one of those pairs like morality and ethics that seem interchangeable but upon closer inspection turn out to have a subtle difference in connotation. Geekiness usually suggests an element of the grotesque, whereas nerdiness is something you can find endearing. The heroes of most teenage comedies are nerds, not geeks, despite what John Hughes may think.

Still, it seems like both words don't mean quite what they used to. Early in the 2000s, Comedy Central had a game show called Beat the Geeks, in which contestants would try to match their knowledge against Star Wars geeks, horror geeks, James Bond geeks, Simpsons geeks, Playboy geeks, hip-hop geeks, wrestling geeks, and so on. What was striking was how many of these so-called geeks were immersed in pop culture, something you would not associate with the geeks of old.

Nerds were once thought to make up the computer-literate population, but now that we've entered an age of iPhones, Blackberrys, webcams, Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, you're considered uncool if you aren't caught up on the latest computer or Internet development. It's not surprising that I haven't heard the phrase "computer nerd" in a long time.

This is what happens when you take a term invented by adolescent boys and try to apply it to adults, most of whom have long lost their sense of what's cool and what's nerdy. The word may shed light on some of the qualities of today's culture, but let's not take it too seriously, lest we become a living example of the word in its negative sense.