Studying an NYT Article

Here's a New York Times profile of Democratic Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, the Congressman who believes that preventing abortions is way more important than health care reform. Jodi Kantor wrote this and it appeared on the front page of yesterday's Times, single column, above the fold. I found this article very interesting because it is an example of how a newspaper of record like the NYT does puff-pieces. Obviously the NYT has to be more discrete than Entertainment Weekly when it is heaping praise on someone, so it promotes Stupak's image by giving us ostensibly neutral declarative sentences about him.

In the article we find that Stupak is a tough man who endures "things others find unbearable" like the knee surgeries he suffered as a hero cop and the death of his son. He comes from a great state with harsh winters and beautiful summers. He enjoys football and beer. He drives his elderly Oldsmobile, a defunct American-made middling-price automobile brand, long distances to commune with his constituents. He stands strong on his principles even though this makes others hate him.

Who could hates such a fine American? The fact that Jodi Kantor doesn't bother to offer even the most cursory details in answer to this inevitable question is what makes it most obvious that this is a puff-piece. Apparently Congresswoman Denise Slaughter is one of the haters. Who is she? Well... she is a Democrat from New York, she is co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, and she refused comment for this article. Also she hates the stoic hero defined in the above paragraph and might have been rude to him once. Apparently that's all we need to know.

Diana DeGette, the other hater who was willing to comment, provides Kantor with the fig-leaf of balance. After spending the front 2/3s of the article--which I believe is all most people read anyway--telling us what a great guy Bart Stupak is, she provides a short passage explaining the alternative viewpoint that he is actually a tool of religious interests and is grossly misrepresenting the extent of his mistreatment by the party mainstream. It's instructive to compare a couple of passages:

his freshman year in Washington, [Stupak] requested but did not receive a seat on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. "I had one or two members tell me I’d never get on because I’m right-to-life," he said.
...
two years after being elected, he joined the Energy and Commerce Committee, and now serves as chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Stupak's claim of committee members blacklisting him for his anti-abortion views is obviously belied by the fact that he got the seat anyway. Is there in fact anything unusual at all about a freshman Representative's request for an appointment to an important committee being denied until his second term? Probably not.

Here's another direct quotation I thought was particularly interesting:

"If he prevails, he will have won an audacious, counterintuitive victory, forcing a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a measure that will be hailed as an anti-abortion triumph. If party members do not accept his terms — and many vow they will not — Mr. Stupak is prepared to block passage of the health care overhaul."

This passage has a really interesting failure of parallelism. The amendment's success is Stupak's success--in fact his "audacious ... victory" and "triumph"--whereas the bill's defeat is a neutral proposition, defined simply as other party members not accepting his terms. Victory is his child, defeat is an orphan.

Now to the question of the blog post.
Why was this published at all? The information it contains about the actual content of this fight is limited to two paragraphs, one containing a generalized summary of what Stupak's amendment does, the other explaining that there are now more conservative Democrats like Stupak in Congress. The NYT has already had any number of articles about the efforts of anti-abortion Congresspeople to use health care reform as a vehicle for promoting their cause.

Given my above analysis the answer to my question is clearly that the NYT chose to publish a transparent puff-piece for Bart Stupak, but why? According to Jodi Kantor's Wikipedia entry she has a history of pursuing low-content personal interest stories, but still, why put this article on the front-page? I don't understand the reasoning, but then again, this is the newspaper that not long ago hired Bill Kristol as an opinion columnist.

Here's two short monologues I wrote for No-Shame Theater this season, with short notes to go with:

An Open Letter and Statement of Principles
by Evan Schenck

[lights up]

Dear United States Congress,

First off it is not just you that I'm addressing here in this letter, congress. I also want you to send copies of this letter to the pope in Rome, to the anti-pope in anti-Rome, to Barack Obama Alleged President of the United States, to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and the Freemasons and Illuminati, to the Mafia, which I believe is also located in Rome but not at the same address as the pope, and to the media. Make sure you get a letter to all of the different media because I don't want anybody to feel left out. I would have sent copies to these people myself but I could not get their addresses so I want you to do it for me. My taxes would pay your salary, if I actually paid any. So you have to do what I say.

Anyway I am getting to my point now which is that you have got to do something about all the problems facing America. Dark forces are gathering. I am seeing you guys on the TV all the time talking about health care and the Panama Canal but you are always missing the point. This debate about public options, illegal immigrants, triggers, and so on, are not realistic and are not addressing the real problems of today. I am writing you to talk about the elephant in the room, the big issue that everybody is always tiptoeing around, which is that the president is assaulting the nature of reality through witchcraft. You all know what I am talking about, especially the pope. The President's idea of health care reform is to take health care from Americans who have it now, and transmute it from a written agreement between those Americans and insurance companies into a physical object. I have it on good authority that the President has already turned our healthcare into a series of delicate glass tubes. Some of these tubes will be smashed, some will be given to illegal aliens, and the rest will be shipped to the President's dual homelands of Kenya and Indonesia . The upshot is that foreigners and illegal immigrants will have healthcare in the form of magical glass tubes, and Americans will not.

This is not the only issue, by far. The President also plans to perform similar occult ceremonies on other abstract concepts including the emotions that average Americans experience on a daily basis. On Tuesday my daughter watched Obama's address to America's schoolchildren. She tells me that during this speech he cast a spell on her, and that when she got home from school and watched her stories she no longer found the Golden Girls funny. I am 110% certain that the president turned her laughter and amusement into a tiny man who now serves him as a butler. I demand that the president produce his true birth certificate showing him to have been born in both Indonesia and Kenya, that he cease his theft of our health care, that he cremate his secret dwarf butler alive on a pyre built from the wood of a sacred oak-tree so that my daughters sense of humor can return to her in the form of vapor, and finally that he resign from the presidency. I do not think these demands are unreasonable. These acts of witchcraft, which give physical form to imaginary goods, cannot go on. How long before the President turns the Pledge of Allegiance into a pair of shoes, or the nation's collective memory of Abraham Lincoln into a rocket-ship? Not long, I fear. Take heed, Congress, and listen to my warning, before all is lost.

Love and Kisses,
Evan Schenck

[lights down]

I don't usually perform political humor or even go near current events because I think it usually sucks, and I worry about that stuff enough without involving an innocent audience, but this piece was performed on September 11. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land was getting crowded and I thought there was potential for actual comedy there, even though the primary emotions I experienced over the death panel kerfluffle were more in the vein of bemusement and sadness. To get past that I resorted to one of my favorite devices, which is asserting a premise that is patently impossible or illogical--the real problem with Barack Obama is that he is turning abstract concepts into tangible objects. I like ideas like that, especially when they involve specific details.

This piece went pretty well on stage, aided in large part by an audience that was large and kind of jazzed up by the other performances. I brought a little more manic energy to it than my usual subdued method and I think it worked.

The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains
or
The Spirit of the 19th Century
by Evan Schenck

[lights up]

Joachim Wheellock Hammersmith was born in 1815. He was Joachim after the saint, Wheellock after the type of pistol, and Hammersmith after his father, who was a minor official of the British East India company based in Calcutta. J.W. Hammersmith made his first fortune growing opium in Bengal for sale in China. In 1845 he moved to the Ottoman Empire and made his second fortune by founding a company which claimed to arrange pilgrimages to Jeruselam or Mecca but which in fact simply robbed and murdered its customers. Hammersmith increased his profit margins and disposed of the corpses by butchering them and selling the meat to the local Arabs, claiming that it was actually lamb. After being chased out of the holy land by an angry mob, he moved to Britain.

Hammersmith was an early pioneer of the company town concept, in which he made his employees live in a town that he owned and forced them into debt so that they were effectively his slaves. A minor scandal occurred in 1852 when the Times of London reported that each family under his authority was forced to draw a pint of their own blood each month, which was collected by carriage and taken to Hammersmith's enormous mansion, which was a replication of Buckingham Palace sitting on top of a replication of Versailles. He refuted accusations that he was a vampire by revealing that he did not actually do anything with the blood but instead just dumped it in the River Tyne.

By 1888 Hammersmith was widely regarded as the wealthiest and most evil man who had ever lived. That year he was strongly suspected by many in London of being Jack the Ripper, to which he famously replied, “What's this fuss about five prostitutes? Think of my work in Africa. I have probably killed a million men and intend to kill several millions more, but the evil things I do aren't against the law.” To illustrate his point, he sent instructions to the American office of Wheellock LLC to cause the extinction of a major species, adding “I don't care which.” The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.

As he grew older, Hammersmith began to worry about death. Specifically, he was convinced that he was going to be condemned to Hell. Initially he funded scientific research into an immortality vaccine, but after a close reading of the Bible he realized that, even if he were immortal, he would still be damned upon the second coming of Jesus. He thus refocused his efforts. In 1900 he moved to the United States and hired Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla to build a machine to kill God, the enmity between the two inventors finally culminating in a fist fight. Edison pushed Tesla to the ground, sat on his chest, and rubbed a handful of pearl necklaces in Tesla's hair, mortifying the deeply obsessive-compulsive Serbian inventor and putting an immediate end to the project.

However, Hammersmith discovered a passage in the bible, Judges 1:19. “And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” On the strength of this passage Hammersmith ordered a vast mobile tomb to be constructed in his Australian holdings, in the form of an enormous steam-driven iron chariot. Edison dutifully designed the vehicle, which was two hundred feet high, four hundred feet wide, and a thousand feet long. On the front of the chariot was a immense excavator and refinery complex, so that as it surged across the outback at forty-five miles an hour, the chariot could constantly strip mine the coal it needed to continue operations.

Hammersmith bought one hundred infants, 50 male and 50 female. He gave strict instructions that they be raised mute, without language, and taught nothing except the task of maintaining the chariot, so that when the time came to begin his journey they could be sealed inside with his body, living as his slaves after his death, bearing and raising generations of children within the black metallic confines of his cyclopean nomad mausoleum as it drove ever onward into eternity, defying the final justice of God himself. When J.W. Hammersmith died in 1916, his instructions were followed to the letter.

To this day, Hammersmith's tomb can still be seen traversing the deserts of Australia, carving the sacred land of the aborigine's into a blasted moonscape, spewing a column of fire and smoke a mile high by day and night, its 30 steam whistles shrieking an unintelligible babble of discordant notes.

[lights down]

This is my favorite piece of the several I've done so far this year and I was really pleased by it in spite of how heavy-handed the metaphors are. Mark Twain made an appearance in the first version but it was quite a bit too long and had to be cut. I found this piece fun to write and fun to read. It's a treat to toss off phrases like "cyclopean nomad mausoleum" or "blasted moonscape," but one so seldom gets the chance.

In performance it came on kind of slow, because it wasn't immediately clear to the audience what kind of story it was, but they eventually got that it was a kind of absurd narrative and they were laughing by the end.

There's another piece I did last Friday, but I think I might sit on that one until later on, in case I do another piece in the coming show.

Evan Schenck
also posted to Katy Baggs Bloggs

The Proposal

Oh, Lordy

I was looking at movie showtimes on the Google jest a few minutes ago and I saw a film entitle "The Proposal" being shown at many local cinema outlets as if it was a major release. Having seen the Australian independent-type film that I rented on DVD from the ICPL (Iowa City Public Library) I near to peed myself. Danny Huston as a psychotic killer? Guy Pearce as a conflicted felon feeling the pressure between two conflitcting senses of family duty? Why would this film be shown in American cinnies years after it was actually released?

Twas only then that I remembered the vagaries of film-making. It is only a movie which has the same title as that which I have described. The film that is now being released stars Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock (both of whom I like) in some bland rom-com about a Canadian who needs American citizenship. In summarizing this plot through a haze of rum and Fat Tire ale I have exhausted all the narrative possibilities of the subject. I will never see it, I will never plumb its filmitive depths.

I feel no sense of loss.

In the other cinematic categories the only interesting promontory is Public Enemies, the Michael Mann feature which coincidentally stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Michael Mann's name would have been enough to entice me. The man has an intuitive sense for how to direct a battlefield scene. In Hollywood the big-feature action movies are doled out to childish hacks like Michael Bay, or to mechanically inclined technicians like Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott. Somebody who has a true grasp of reality like Michael Mann is only given a moment, a minute, a slice of time in which to address the concept of systematized violence, before that moment passes. Hence the shootout scene in "Heat", which is as immaculate a firefight as could be committed to film.

So I think I should see Public Enemies, if only to observe the planning and execution behind Melvin Purviss's greatest sting.

Transformers 2 debuted recently. I have no idea what this entails, and no interest in exploring this concept. In 10 years, if the idea of these movies has held up to the march of time, if they still make sense in the context of the ages, I might see them. But at this time they have the appearance of garbage. I would sooner watch Porky's or Meatball's, or another film peculiar to the time of its production, than the bombastic offerings of Michael Bay.

Yoghurt

I saw an episode of Alton Brown's "Good Eats" on the Food Network which was about yogurt, in which he asserted that even the lactose intolerant could eat and digest it, in spite of the fact that it is pretty much the dairy-est thing since milk itself, as long as it contained active cultures. Being lactose intolerant, I decided to put this to the test.

At the store today I looked through the yogurt section of the dairy case. Some brands of yogurt bear the inscription "made with active cultures" or "with active cultures"; apparently this is a way that they LIE to the consumer by hiding behind semantics. These yogurts would make me incredibly sick because they contained active cultures only in the PAST. The active cultures have to be alive at the time I consume them, so that they can digest the lactose for me, so the plastic cup has to specifically say "contains active cultures".

I am eating a fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt as I write this, not having eaten any yogurt in a couple of years, at least. It's delicious. In about a half hour we'll see if Alton Brown was right, and I can eat this stuff. I hope so.

Torture

So, people got tortured by America. This has been known for some time but recently we got the details in printed form, so in their own feckless way the media are engaging the story. Every time I see this on television, usually on MSNBC because that's what I watch, I get angry and I yell at the screen. This doesn't get much done even to the extent that it's cathartic, because as soon as I express my anger something else is said to make me mad again.

So here are a few specific items about the torture story, or rather about the story of the story, that bother me and elicit my anger at the television screen.

(A) The ticking time-bomb scenario. I would like it if, every time somebody tried to float this one on the news programs, the anchor/moderator/whoever would just stop them and say, "no, you automatically lose because you brought that up, please leave the set and collect your dunce cap."

First, the entire idea, that there could be a situation wherein we capture a terrorist, and we know that there is a deadly attack coming in the near future, but not know where, when, or how, is fiction. It has never happened and it will never happen. To put this in simple terms, if we know absolutely no details of the terrorist plot, how do we know it is going to happen so quickly that there is only enough time to torture this one guy? If we have no details, how do we know that the suspect knows anything about it at all? It isn't plausible.

Second, even if we accept the ticking-time-bomb scenario in a general sense, as a "well this could happen, and in such a case it would be okay to waterboard a guy," it still fails as a justification for any of the tortures that occurred under the Bush administration. After you get past the large plausibility problem with this argument, you run smack into the fact that it applies to precisely none of the detainees who were tortured! Let's relate this to another crime. Most recognize that if someone attacks another with clear intent to commit murder, the victim of this attack would be justified in using all necessary means to defend himself, up to and including lethal force if all other options were exhausted. Now, does this then justify all murders, including those where self-defense is not even claimed? Obviously not.

Third, even if we allow the first two to slide, there is still the issue that torture produces flawed information anyway, so it's doubtful whether it would yield sufficient data fast enough to thwart a ticking-time-bomb attack, especially since the suspect himself knows that he need only stall the interrogators for a short length of time until the attack comes off and his work is accomplished.

(B) Reporting the controversy and the Golden Mean. When there is an argument or a public debate the newspeople love to sit on the fence between the two sides and simply report on the ins and outs of the argument itself, without ever quite figuring out who was right and who was wrong--often, it seems, they're both wrong and the correct answer is somewhere in the middle, right near the Golden Mean. Hence the reportage about whether or not the torture described in the released memoranda is actually torture. It is! It is! It is! Ask the SERE trainers from whom the ideas were cribbed. Ask Amnesty International. Ask professional torturers who worked for Saddam or Pinochet! Ask any expert, but don't ask Pat Buchanan or Newt Gingrich, because they're talking out their asses!

MSNBC does something particularly egregious with respect to reporting the controversy, which is their habit of replacing one expert with two political operatives, one from right and one from left. Like this morning they had somebody representing the liberal blogosphere and somebody representing the conservative blogosphere, and asked them questions about what the lefties and the righties were saying on the internet about the torture memos. Here is what this lefty is saying: get an expert on your show instead of these amateurs! For example, have an expert in international law tell you whether or not we should prosecute the people responsible for Bush administration torturing. Answer: Yes, the US has legally binding treaty obligations to prosecute wrongdoing of this kind.

(C) Please let's talk about what Dick Cheney is saying about torture, without discussing the fact that he was almost certainly deeply involved in the decision to torture and his statements are probably attempts to avoid being prosecuted himself. I mean, the extraneous memos that he is trying to release to demonstrate that torture worked come from his own personal files. Gee, I wonder why he kept those close to hand.

This is a big story with a lot of details, but this is what bubbles up in my mind right now.

Evan

Coraline

KT and I went to see the film "Coraline" today and I really enjoyed it. The best thing about the movie in my estimation was the art direction, which was beautiful. I've seen the previous movie in the stop-motion style from Henry Selick, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and I thought that its visual style, while interesting, was not particularly arresting. Not so for Coraline, perhaps as a result of the more recent film having the benefit of computer assistance to the puppetry. There were some wide-angle exterior shots showing the fog-shrouded, wooded mountains that framed the setting, and I thought that it was not only suggestive of such landscapes in real life but actually better looking to some extent, which is a significant accomplishment. Given the typical small, weak field for animated features this will probably be the significant Oscar contender in next year's Academy Awards, and I liked the art direction enough to believe it would win, even without having seen it's possible competition.

The story was good, which should be little surprise as it was adapted from a Neil Gaiman story. At various points it became one of those animated features to which people should not have brought very young and/or impressionable children, because I could see how one of those would be terrified by a few scenes.

Some things I wrote

Here are a couple of things I wrote for No Shame Theater:

Business Concept: Two Dimensional Food
by Evan Schenck

[lights up]

Evan: I came up with a business plan last night, and I’m going to pitch it to you, the No-Shame audience. I am giving you the right of first refusal, here. Okay, get ready, because I’m about to wow you. Here’s the concept: Two Dimensional Food.

I’m not talking about stuff that merely APPEARS to be two-dimensional, like tortillas or fruit-by-the-foot. I’m talking about food that is literally two-dimensional, having length and breadth but no depth. This would result in a completely planar food without mass or volume. The applications of this are obvious. The food would possess flavor, but because it took up no space and had no mass, you could eat as much of it as you wanted without ever getting full. People like eating ice-cream and cakes, right? But they don’t like getting fat, and you can get filled up on them and not get the right nutrients. But people would come and pay to eat our two-dimensional food, and they’d get a great taste that doesn’t ever fill them up. This is a win-win proposition, because the customers would be able to just keep buying until they had to leave and get actual filling meal somewhere else.

Okay, I can tell that you want to ask me, “Evan, how are you going to produce this two-dimensional food?” I’m not sure yet, which is why I need an initial investment, so I can do some feasibility studies. One idea I have is putting the food in the middle of a hardcover book, shutting that book, and putting something heavy on top. I’ve already tried this out with gummy bears and it works. Assuming that the flatness of the end product scales in linear fashion with the heaviness of the weight, all I need to do is find an infinitely heavy object and we’ll be in business.

Your next question, of course, is, “Evan, if the food is two-dimensional, wouldn’t it then have an infinitely narrow edge, effectively no edge at all, and therefore be infinitely sharp and capable of cutting through virtually anything?” The answer to that question is yes, the food will be unbelievably dangerous. This will require us to post disclaimers on the menu which will absolve us of any legal liability. Problem solved.

I will be selling shares in the company after the show, anybody who is interested should speak to Eli.

[lights down]


Museum Tour Audiotape
by Evan Schenck

[Lights up]

Narrator: Now, walk north through the arch into the Adolf Hitler exhibit, which was constructed and filled with paintings through a generous donation from automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. In 1936 Ford granted the museum ten million dollars in the name of German dictator Adolf Hitler and stipulated that the museum must never rename the exhibit. The museum attempted to escape this clause in 1941, 1944, 1946, 1951, and 1982, but in each case was thwarted by Mr. Ford’s estate. The Adolf Hitler exhibit features paintings and sculpture by artists of undisputedly Aryan extraction on a rotating basis, as per Mr. Ford’s instructions.

The painting before you presently is entitled “Der übernatürlich Alpentraum” and was painted by the German artist Gerd Christian Helmut Florian Hans Wiesler von Turm an der Oder. It was commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1425, and is an attempt by a German artist to improve upon Italian Renaissance painting. Linear perspective, which allowed three-dimensional images to be depicted in two-dimension paintings, had been invented by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1415, and competition among artists to invent the next improvement in painting was fierce. von Turm believed that the next step was to increase the level of perspective in the painting beyond even that attainable by the naked eye.

To this end, he created a painting that depicts not only three dimensional space but the full extent of fourth dimensional space as viewed from a fixed point. The practical effect of this is that, by viewing this painting, one can simultaneously observe all moments in time, past, present and future, showing a view of the location of the Cologne Cathedral of Germany. Look closely at the painting now. Observe feudal serfs digging the foundation of the cathedral in the early 13th century. Observe a microwave laser incinerating the city of Cologne from space in the early 23rd century. Observe small mammals wandering through a prehistoric forest a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Observe the light of the Big Bang shining in the endless void. At the opposite end, observe the heat death of the universe, the entropy at the end of all time.

If by some chance you are going to die in a place visible in the painting, we apologize, as you have also observed your own death. We advise you to take no steps to avert this fate, because any such effort is futile. Any stress resulting from observation of one’s own death is solely the responsibility of the museum patron, as detailed in the waiver that you signed upon entering the museum. To put it in perspective, you have also observed the death of the entire universe. Thank you for visiting the Adolf Hitler exhibit. Please return next week, when we will be exhibiting a series of Dürer woodcuts depicting unusual rabbits.

[lights down]