The Sheltering of Palin

Palin should be laughed right off the ticket (and Hannity should be laughed right off of cable. And radio.) She's had one legitimate interview, one infomercial, and zero press conferences. They wrote the rules of the VP debates so that she won't even have to debate, just prettily recite the talking points.

The election's in less than a month. This is ridiculous.

Chart of the Day: Obama and McCain on Taxes

Via Andrew Sullivan.

The Necessity of Sheltering Orthodox Children

Beyond BT is my favorite blog about the mirror experience of going off the derech.

When the Secular Little Cousins become Teenage Cousins

Fresh from my annual time share vacation with the secular family, I want to write for the Beyond BT readers on a topic that I think needs some further exploration and discussion.

Logic says that the longer we are working things out with our secular family, the easier it gets...

I wasn’t prepared for how DIFFICULT it becomes when the little cousins who once played with each other on the floor, and talked about barney and sesame street, now talk about “hot” boys, my space, and IPODS. When the kids were little, the differences between all of the cousins was not as pronounced, and other than making sure that the kosher kids only ate the kosher food, it wasn’t much of a problem.

Now – my girls aren’t supposed to do mixed swimming anymore, and I caught a conversation between my oldest daughter and her teenage cousin who couldn’t quite believe that my daughter has never had a boyfriend. Now the teenage cousins bring their computers and IPODS and videos to vacation, and none of it is Jewish. Now my 10-year old son’s eyes can easily be diverted by his teenage cousin’s non-tnius dress, or lack of dress.

In the beginning of the week, my kids think their cousins are weird. But after only a few days, they start looking fascinated, and that’s the biggest problem. I don’t think it has ever gotten to the point where they’d want to trade places, but one never knows what can happen when that thought is introduced for even a day or two. And, what really bothers me is that I want my kids to feel really privileged and lucky to be frum Jews. I worry when the “other side” starts looking attractive, and our way of life seems to be making them “miss out.” (Yes, of course we can give the speeches to our children about how the secular kids are really the ones missing out, but hey, kids are normal, and some freedoms in life look very delicious at times to them).

If teenagers know what their options are, they're less likely to choose Orthodox Judaism.

The Ultimate Test of the Media

McCain and Palin are doing something interesting. They've apparently decided that if the media covers only controversy and that the media will not call people on lies, but dutifully report "both sides," then they're going to just lie and see what happens. They get to not only frame the debate, but take ideal positions having nothing to do with reality.

Ezra Klein wrote brilliantly about this:

The McCain campaign's decision to lie about, well, everything, really needs to be understood as more than the outcome of John McCain's consuming ambition. It is a rational and obvious response to the rules laid down by the media. Indeed, McCain's spokesperson Brian Rogers says this directly to The Politico's Jonathan Martin. "We ran a different kind of campaign and nobody cared about us. They didn’t cover John McCain. So now you’ve got to be forward-leaning in everything."

And it's true. Earlier this year McCain made poverty tours and offered policy speeches. No one cared, Obama retained his lead. It was only when he began offering vicious attacks and daily controversies that he began setting the pace of the coverage. The McCain campaign learned something important about the media: It's an institution that covers conflict. If you want to direct its coverage, give it more conflict than your opponent. And so they have.

None of this, of course, absolves McCain of what he has done. He has sacrificed his honor and dignity with astonishing enthusiasm. He has become much worse than "just another politician." He is a politician who was once more than that, and used that reputation to go lower than the rest. But the fact remains that he wouldn't be doing this, that no one would do this, if the media ignored or censured the behavior. If lies were covered as lies and an allergy to substance was treated as evidence of an unfitness to govern, the tenor of campaigns would lift. These are, at the end of the day, rational beasts, and they hunger for good coverage. The McCain campaign has found its best coverage comes from its worst campaigning. And so they are following the incentive structure laid out by the media.

I don't think it's going to work. There's too much time until the election and the evidence is too obvious.

Here's Andrew Sullivan on the Bridge To Nowhere lies:

In her speeches, Sarah Palin routinely and repeatedly uses the phrase: "I told the Congress 'thanks, but no thanks,' for that Bridge to Nowhere." In the McCain-Palin ads, the claim is that she "stopped the Bridge to Nowhere."

These are, again, demonstrable lies. Again I will cite Wikipedia, since it's the fairest summary of the facts of the case, and includes all the links for you to see for yourself:

In 2006, Palin ran for governor on a "build-the-bridge" platform,^[101] attacking "spinmeisters"^[102] for insulting local residents by calling them "nowhere"^[101] and urging speed "while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist."^[103] About two years after the introduction of the bridge proposals, a month after the bridge received sharp criticism from John McCain,^[104] and nine months into Palin's term as governor, Palin canceled the Gravina Bridge, blaming Congress for not providing enough funding.^[105] Alaska will not return any of the $442 million to the federal government^[106] and is spending a portion of the funding, $25 million, on a Gravina Island road to the place where the bridge would have gone, expressly so that none of the money will have to be returned.^[101] Palin continues to support funding Don Young's Way, estimated as more than twice as expensive as the Gravina Bridge would have been.^[107]

Your call.

Probably much more important is this picture:



Unfortunately, I think the "lipstick on a pig" lie and the "Obama voted for comprehensive sex ed for kindergartners" lies won't hurt them. McCain can simply stand by the "Lipstick on a pig" lie, as he did on The View, and it's not something one can really prove to be false. The sex ed one won't hurt him, because the refutation doesn't make a good sound bite. Any day talking about "sex ed" and "kindergartners" is a win for McCain.

If he is brought down by his lies, it'll be the lies about Palin. The bridge, the earmarks, and McCain's and Palin's standing by them long after they'd been revealed as lies. The Obama campaign must frame the issue: "Is John McCain a liar?" The contrast between the honorable soldier he presents himself as and the dishonerable campaign he's leading represent a great opportunity for Obama. Rove took Kerry's greatest strength and turned it into his greater weakness, and Obama has the opportunity to return the favor with the message "John McCain is dishonest and dishonerable."

David Foster Wallace has Died

My favorite author hanged himself on Friday. I don't even have a second-favorite.

I wrote a review of his book Infinite Jest, which is my favorite book, on my other, long-neglected blog. Excerpt from my review:

It's not a beautiful book; there are no lyric descriptions of love and beauty. It's about addiction and depression and the futility and inadequacy of intelligence and success. It takes place primarily in a tennis academy and a rehab clinic. It's also, in part, a retelling of Hamlet.

His writing was informed by his depression. Excerpt from an interview:

The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing.

Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to write a lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knew I wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't. The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was the starkest thing that I could find to talk about that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.

(I wrote about how Alcoholics Anonymous is NOT EFFECTIVE compared to many other forms of treatment here.)

DFW attended church, but his writing has a real atheistic feel to it. It's honest and real and unflinching while at the same time imaginative and playful. My guess is that he wanted to believe, that he saw that as perhaps a way out of depression, but that he couldn't really do it. From later in that same interview:

[Interviewer:] The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic clichés.

[DFW:] It's hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. "One Day at a Time," right? I'm thinking 1977, Norman Lear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed sampler this is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. And it's so awful that the only way to deal with it is to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something as banal and reductive as "One Day at a Time" enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is. That struck me.

I think, and again, I'm guessing here, that DFW saw religion in much the same way -- that there's something real and helpful there and all this intelligence and education and ironical detachment gets in the way of that. I hope he didn't neglect what would most likely have helped -- professional psychological treatment -- for religion.

Religion is somewhat correlated with happiness and longevity, but I suspect that if you're an educated, intelligent depressed non-believer, psychological treatment is more likely to help than attempting to convince yourself to believe.

DFW's essays were perhaps even better than his novels. My favorite is "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie and Human Completeness," collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. (His work sounds pretentious, but when you get to know it, you see that he's using literary playfulness as a tool. He's not just showing off.)

DFW was the editor of The Best American Essays 2007, and his introduction to that book is itself a brilliant essay. I was a little underwhelmed by Host, an essay about right-wing talk radio host John Ziegler, but it's worth a read. He also wrote an essay about John McCain in 2000 for Rolling Stone, which has now become a book. Here's an interview with the Wall Street Journal about the book.

Here is David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose. Skip to 23:15:

Fan site The Howling Fantods has everything you'd ever want to know about DFW.

(Public service announcement: If you are depressed or think you might be, please get yourself a good psychologist. It's not something you have to figure out on your own or trust your religious tradition to help you with. I see a psychologist myself. Feel free to email me.)

Update: According to the NY Times obit, Wallace was receiving medical care:

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst...

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”