Reason Magazine - Staff

Getting Serious About "Getting Serious"

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

I want to call la migra on my neighbors.

It's not just that I hate the other tenants in my building, or that I want to see some upfront constituent service from noted blackface authority Julie L. Myers, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It's not only that I think I might get better treatment from my prick landlord if several units in the building were forcibly emptied. I'm not even sure how well calling in a raid from ICE would work: I have good reason to believe that the only family in the building I like is out of status.

It's just nice to share the popular feeling of being personally burdened by the invasion across our southern border. My fellow supporters of unrestricted immigration, who spend all their time being chauffeured between undocumented-nanny-cleaned mansions and illegal-janitor-tended Ivory Towers, forget the degree to which immigration-restriction pressure is driven by a feeling of injustice, in particular by suspicions of condescension and neglect from aloof authorities. That people in power refuse to get serious about illegal immigration is the essential premise of all immigration foment. That feeling gels in a sense that even when public officials do get serious about illegal immigration, they're really winking at the audience. And public officials don't do a whole lot to correct that impression.

Here's Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff giving a recent assessment of his efforts to seal the U.S.-Mexico border: "To me, the most important thing we're doing at the border is showing the American people that if we make a judgment that we need to do something and we promise to do it, we'll do it."

If you're passionate about stopping illegal entry into the United States, it's hard not to see that statement as a condescension: Chertoff's stated concern isn't catching illegal immigrants at the border; it's showing the American people that he wants to catch illegal immigrants at the border.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) specializes in the language of convincing voters and understanding their concerns. If, as is statistically likely, you augment your opposition to immigration with opposition to free trade, these clumsy attempts to validate your feelings can seem insultingly false: Who is able to believe Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) really opposes NAFTA when she's swilling down Canadian whiskey?

Sure, you could argue that restrictionists deserve no better. After all, when you go to a doctor for an imaginary malady, you should expect to be treated with a placebo.

But not all the complaints are as petty as my beef with my neighbors. In Los Angeles, the March murder of 17-year-old high school football star Jamiel Shaw has opened an off-topic but revealing controversy over a Los Angeles Police Department rule governing how officers are supposed to deal with illegal immigrants.

Pedro Espinoza, Shaw's accused killer, is an illegal immigrant who was released from county jail shortly before the murder, despite procedures that were supposed to have him referred to federal authorities and (presumably) deported. For various reasons (among them, that Espinoza was arrested by Culver City cops), the case doesn't bear on the LAPD's "Special Order 40," which was promulgated in 1979 by then-chief Daryl Gates and advises cops not to initiate inquiries about immigration status in most cases. But that hasn't stopped a fiery debate on the rule. That debate isn't strictly logic-based, but it expresses a general sense that local authorities don't want to bring any power to bear on crooks who flout their indifference to the laws of the land—and a detailed look at procedures suggests there is some validity in that view.

LAPD Chief William Bratton may be the most politically astute cop on the planet, but with his accurate, dismissive comments about the controversy, he's playing into the hawks' sense that nobody takes their concerns seriously. If you're that way inclined, you can draw a pretty compelling picture of a city where officialdom fiddles while illegals murder Stanford-hopeful athletes, slaughter interesting filmmakers, and ethnically cleanse the local black population. That kind of argument by anecdote is always cheap, but in this case it has a special piquancy. It's in the nature of all immigration to create concentrated costs and distributed benefits, and if you're the person who got beaten up by pandilleros or sent home from an overcrowded emergency room, you enjoy extra credibility on this issue.

Some immigration hawks really are driven by an honest sense of law and order, and fear of crime is particularly susceptible to anecdotal support (except when crime-rate statistics overwhelmingly argue against that fear, which, in L.A., they don't). It's an interesting paradox. Nearly all trends are going the way the restrictionists want. Some researchers say that border crossings peaked back in 2000. In any case, the current economy stinks, dampening the attraction of the U.S. for prospective border jumpers. Tougher enforcement has made the border quieter, while even professional immigration hawks applaud the superior "tone" of a nation with fewer migrants. In L.A., it's likely that Special Order 40 will be modified, possibly in ways that would allow cops to use gang members' illegal immigration status against them.

Yet the rhetoric about immigration remains as passionate and hysterical as ever. And so government officials respond to the hysteria, but since they know in their hearts that the immigration crisis is a solution in search of a problem, they do so with a vain, affected quality that reveals the very condescension restrictionists find so infuriating.

In the end, immigration hawks will never be happy because what they really want is somebody to say "I feel your pain"—and mean it.

Tim Cavanaugh is opinion Web editor at The Los Angeles Times.

Rant: Not Ready for Sub-Prime Players

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 08 May 2007 12:05:00 EDT

Even cave-dwelling, 15-year-fixed-rate-paying troglodytes were close to hysteria this spring, spooked by speculation that the debacle in the sub-prime mortgage industry, which had already sunk industry leaders like Ownit and AmeriQuest, was on the verge of torpedoing the entire American economy. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) proposed a bailout of the multi-billion-dollar industry. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton called for a “foreclosure timeout.” A bill aiming to stop “predatory lending” practices is still moving through the Senate.

Strangely, though, homebuyers in Southern California, the epicenter of the sub-prime quake, don’t seem to have heard the news. Actual closing prices continued to climb throughout the industry crash.

The sub-prime meltdown comes in a context of debt panic—specifically, of other-people’s-debt panic. Liberal economists, values conservatives, and hug-the-middle moderates are in full agreement on this one: Poor people’s access to debt is driving them to fiscal ruination or worse. James D. Scurlock’s celebrated documentary Maxed Out collects horror stories—including youngsters driven to suicide by credit card debt—to prove the thesis that “banks and credit card companies are setting their customers up to fail.” Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt, envisions debt-ridden young professionals as the new serfs. (The hard-luck bio on Kamenetz’ website includes the Dickensian detail that she “graduated from Yale seven months after the 9/11 attacks.”) Ambitious politicians and math-unencumbered reporters are in hot pursuit of the culprits: predatory lenders, indifferent regulators, Madison Avenue captains of consciousness—everybody except people who borrow large sums of money with no intention of paying it back.

The conventional wisdom used to say the poor didn’t have enough access to debt. One of the earliest products of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was the Home Owners Refinancing Act, which provided mortgage money to more than a million borrowers over a three-year period. Harry Truman’s record shows a consistent effort to expand the amount of debt available to willing borrowers.

My favorite artifact of the period’s pro-lending mood is Fredric March’s great “collateral” speech from the 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives. March, playing a rising bank middle manager who has just returned to his job after serving as an Army NCO in the Pacific, reads a rambling riot act to a banquet of porcine small-town bankers who have criticized him for providing loans to bad-credit-risk veterans. If we’d fought like bankers, seeking collateral for every risk and a guarantee on every expenditure, we’d have lost the war, he argues.

We can dispute the wisdom of federally guaranteed loans and mortgage purchasing, but it’s notable that the new economy March wanted helped to create one of the greatest booms in the country’s history: the postwar suburbanization of America, which is now derided by our own bien pensant classes, who claim there’s too much ready credit out there. The difference now is that it’s coming from the market rather than a package of government guarantees, from an industry that expanded to fill a demand and is now contracting as the demand shrinks.

In a sane world, we’d say this is a market behaving as it should, and marvel at an economy where so many people who were once locked into the renters market have gotten a chance at homeownership. Some of them have blown their chance by exhibiting the same kind of behavior that made them bad credit risks in the first place. But most have not. In fact, about nine out of every 10 sub-prime borrowers are still making their payments.

So our grandparents solved the not-enough-credit crisis, and Sens. Clinton and Dodd are well on the way to solving the too-much-credit crisis. What will they think of next? Whatever it is, there will be plenty of deadbeats, politicians, and people who can’t do math to cry that the sky is falling, even if home prices are not.

Tim Cavanaugh is an editor at the Los Angeles Times.

Discuss this article online.

Battle of the Blogosphere: Cavanaugh vs. Gillespie

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:21:00 EDT

Over at the website Jewcy, reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie and former Web Editor Tim Cavanaugh (now with The Los Angeles Times) engage in three days of peace, love, and misunderstanding about political blogs, the passing of Jerry Falwell, the GOP debates, and much, much more.

Read Day One here.

Read Day Two here.

Read Day Three here.

Discuss this article online.

We the Living Dead

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 14:48:00 EST

Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, by Annalee Newitz, Durham: Duke University Press, 183 pages, $21.95

Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, by Jamie Russell, Surrey: FAB Press, 309 pages, $29.95

The Dominion of the Dead, by Robert Pogue Harrison, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 159 pages, $14

The zombiephiles—that odd cohort of nerds, video game addicts, and mullet-headed grindhouse nostalgists who have made the flesh-eating zombie a central figure of modern culture—know all about chewed kidneys, shambling ghouls, moldering flesh, barricaded doors, deserted streets, and the all-important bullet to the brain. But most of all, fans of the rich, vibrant zombie narrative of the late 20th and early 21st centuries know about politics.

Ever since George Romero’s genre-creating Night of the Living Dead in 1968, and especially since Romero’s overtly political 1978 masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, highbrow revolutionary theorizing has stalked this graveyard of lowbrow pleasures. In his 1979 study The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, the esteemed cineaste Robin Wood declared that the zombie’s cannibalism “represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism.” J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1983 study Midnight Movies called Night of the Living Dead “a remarkable vision of the late sixties, offering the most literal possible depiction of America devouring itself.” In a later reappraisal, a Village Voice critic explained that “the zombie carnage seemed a grotesque echo of the conflict then raging in Vietnam.”

The film historian Sumiko Higashi went completely around the bend in a 1990 essay, declaring, “There are no Vietnamese in Night of the Living Dead.…They constitute an absent presence whose significance can be understood if narrative is construed.” As subsequent genre pictures, trailing titles like Zombi 2 and Zombie Flesh Eaters 3, ate their way through America’s VCRs, Wood elaborated his original claims, averring in his 1986 book Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan that the living dead “represent, on a metaphorical level, the whole dead weight of patriarchal consumer capitalism, from whose habits of behavior and desire not even Hare Krishnas and nuns…are exempt.” Take a bite out of that.

Two recent books belong to different strains of this wonderful critical tradition. Annalee Newitz’s Pretend We’re Dead, an unapologetically Marxist survey of horror films as studies in labor theory and racial politics, celebrates not only the poor zombie but also the mad scientist (cruelly alienated from the means of intellectual production) and the identity-stealing alien invader (a commodifier of family-cultural norms). Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead is more of a fan encyclopedia, but it too makes impressive claims about how Dawn of the Dead “offers us a glimpse of a universe in which all spiritual values have been replaced by our awareness of the material realities of the corporeal and consumerism.”

Such readings can be silly and overdetermined, but they’re mostly right. From Night of the Living Dead to Homecoming (in which dead Iraq war veterans return from the grave to vote against the war), the zombie movie has been among the most consistently political forms in American popular culture. The politics tend to lean left, but zombie entertainment approaches a level of discontent more elemental than mere anti-capitalism or shopping mall burlesque. Apocalyptic and piously disdainful of the carnal realities of human life, zombie cinema is a shocking, uproarious meditation on the nature of death—on what, if anything, we owe to the dead.

Russell’s book helpfully explains that the word zombie didn’t appear in the English language until 1889 (in a Harper’s article on voodoo by Lafcadio Hearn) and did not attain currency until the 1920s, propelled by the Haitian-adventure writings of William Seabrook. Hearn and Seabrook made strong efforts to jazz up the vague tales they’d heard in the Caribbean about resurrected dead people working as plantation slaves. Thus, from the start, the reanimated stiff was a modern phenomenon, a figure of Western exoticism as much as an authentic island legend, with tales of blank-eyed field workers, “white zombies,” and witch-doctor mesmerism.

George Romero, a Pittsburgh-based director of TV commercials and occasional segments for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, took the basic concept of the mindless automaton, stripped out the superstitious hoodoo, and injected it with the grotesque visuals and highly programmatic irony he learned from EC Comics. Night of the Living Dead had a budget of $114,000, jarringly violent content (though its intestinal tug-of-war and close-up cannibalism may seem tame to today’s viewers), and a punkish nihilism: It is equally unkind to media, military, and police authorities and to its own heroes—parents trying to protect an injured child, a goodhearted young couple, and a likable hero who survives the night only to be mistaken for a zombie and killed by sheriff’s deputies. The plot is elegantly simple. For reasons never fully explained, recently deceased bodies return to life in order to devour the living, and several strangers barricade themselves in a deserted farmhouse in a doomed attempt to survive the onslaught.

Night of the Living Dead earned a vast sum (estimated at about 250 times its budget) on the midnight movie and TV syndication circuits, and was honored at the Museum of Modern Art and preserved by the Library of Congress. It repays all the critical attention with a maddening thumbs down on humanity. Characters are done in by their zombified siblings and children. The film’s roots in resurrection and cannibalism parody the founding ideas of Catholicism, yet it avoids any hint of spiritual or supernatural meaning. The zombie plague follows a public-health epidemic model, but the movie doesn’t really offer a scientific explanation for the tragedy. (Hints about radiation from a NASA probe are quickly and shrewdly abandoned.) You get the impression that the dead are rising against us because, in some general way, we deserve it.

Romero’s zombie follow-ups featured increasingly direct political content. The epic-scaled 1978 Dawn of the Dead moved the action to a shopping mall for a grisly satire of consumer culture; the most brain-dead viewer couldn’t miss the meaning of those zombies shambling dimly to the elevator music and eating intestines outside the Thom McAn shoe store. The unloved 1985 Day of the Dead dispensed with the satire, making shrieking villains out of military types who were still holding out against the undead. The inevitable fourth film in the trilogy, Land of the Dead (2005), was practically a 527 ad, with full-bore jibes at American foreign policy and the real estate boom, Dennis Hopper playing a profiteer modeled on then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Romero openly siding with the zombies.

Romero’s minimal template turned out to be enormously fertile all over this planet. The supremely dedicated Russell lists more than 300 international zombie titles. The genre encompasses such oddities as Stacy, an allusive Japanese schoolgirl zombie dramedy; the Hong Kong “hopping zombie” series of Sir Run Run Shaw; and Lucio Fulci’s magnificent Zombi 2, which combines a flesh-eating zombie, a man-eating shark, and a bare-breasted woman diver in a bravura underwater battle.

Nearly all these films follow, with one or two modifications, the same basic ground rules. The recently deceased return as slow, weak, dumb, disorganized automata whose only desire is to eat the living. Despite their many deficiencies, they have numbers on their side. A bite from a zombie is always fatal, and death means you too will come back as one of them. The setting is nearly always apocalyptic, with the heroes learning through radio or TV broadcasts that the dead are rising not just in their neck of the woods but all over the country. The only way to put a zombie down is to destroy its brain. A geographical constant puts settlers in an isolated outpost (farmhouse, pub, voodoo church, downtown Pittsburgh), where they bicker, weaken, and are finally overwhelmed—making the genre a sort of anti-western that reverses the process of bringing civilization to a savage land.

In Pretend We’re Dead, Newitz, a tech columnist and philosopher, considers the flesh-eating undead as symbols of racial oppression—a credible reading, given the genre’s Afro-Caribbean roots. Even in considering a film as critically paved over as Night of the Living Dead, Newitz manages a fresh insight: that the late Duane Jones’ doomed hero is not only an African American but clearly marked as a bourgeois achiever of the civil rights era, sporting loafers, a dress shirt, and an admirable work ethic. (He spends much of the film boarding up windows and doors.) Thus his murder at the hands of a mob connects the film with what is, in Newitz’s imaginative reading, the first undead picture—Birth of a Nation, where white men become white-sheeted “ghosts” in order to prey upon upwardly mobile blacks.

It’s vain to argue that zombie politics don’t lean left, but the positioning is not simple. Bob Clark’s 1970 film Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, for example, is something of a reactionary fantasy, with the undead attacking the most irritating band of flower children in movie history—possibly the exact moment America turned decisively against hippies. Romero himself is more of a free-ranging anti-authoritarian than a formal leftist, and his monsters, partly because they’ve been divorced from any kind of ethical or supernatural meaning, are open to various interpretations. The conservative blogger Tim Hulsey sees the undead as a Randian nightmare vision, a mobocracy in which “weak and incompetent corpses band together and achieve a dominance over the living minority that they could not otherwise attain.” For Hulsey, “when the zombies attack, their arms are outstretched toward the victim, as if they were begging for something. Which, in a manner of speaking, they are.…The idea of being overwhelmed by stinking masses, of being forced into a way of life (or death) we would not choose for ourselves, lies at the maggot-infested heart of the original Dead trilogy.”

Something else works against reducing the zombie flick to schematic politics: the film’s physical weight, its fascination with eviscerations, rotting skin, simple fleshy mortality. Russell’s Book of the Dead is the kind of horror movie book you don’t see much anymore, in which high-minded text fleshes out a gallery of incredibly gory color stills from ghastly films. With dripping viscera and mutilated sex kittens on virtually every page, it’s something I hadn’t thought possible in this post-shame age—a book I was actually embarrassed to read in public. In other words, it’s an apt, brilliant look at a medium whose saving grace is that it can never become respectable. Russell, a British film journalist, loves the “splatter” or “gut muncher” genre, the series of extremely bloody Italian films that followed the outlandish violence of Dawn of the Dead, and he entertains the not-improbable theory that there’s an element of Catholic mortification of the flesh in here somewhere.

Discussing the Blind Dead series of the Spanish director Amando de Ossorio (in which cowl-wearing Knights Templar mummies feast on beautiful young women), Russell expands the obvious Death-and-the-Maiden theme. “The flesh,” he writes, “is simply a reminder of our own mortality. The younger and prettier it is, the more poignant the realization of its eventual death, decay, and destruction. As the Templars shuffle blindly and (incredibly) slowly toward their victims, it’s impossible not to see them as the literal embodiment of death’s relentless and completely implacable approach.”

In addition to political and eschatological appeals, there is another characteristic of the zombie genre: the strong desire of fans not merely to observe the zombie apocalypse but to participate in it. Shinji Mikami’s phenomenally popular Resident Evil video game is only the most prominent of more than 70 zombie game titles. (Resident Evil has inspired several films for the Japanese and Hong Kong markets as well as two—so far —Hollywood pictures starring the queen of the B’s, Milla Jovovich.) The humorous conceit of Max Brooks’ 2003 Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead is that the undead are another real-life challenge like personal finance or auto repair, and the book is filled with helpful advice drawn from the many movie tropes that have grown up over the years. (Samples: “Blades don’t need reloading” and “Get up the staircase, then destroy it.”) If you watch a zombie picture with fans, be prepared for intense practical discussions about strategy and the science of the resurrected brain. At their best, the movies support this literalness: The long sequence in Dawn of the Dead wherein the heroes secure and sweep the zombie-infested Monroeville Mall in suburban Pittsburgh is as carefully detailed, as true to the logic of tactics and terrain, as anything ever presented in a heist or war picture.

Can these various critical theories and fan passions be reconciled? I think so. What makes zombie films special isn’t that they feature outrageous gore or invite political readings. Plenty of horror films do that. But they are the only movies that give much thought to the nasty physicality of death. The detail that the zombie can only be dispatched if its brain is destroyed seems like a throwaway plot device, but it connects the genre to something universal and disturbing: the particular quality and nature of corpses. The brain isn’t reasoning, merely lurching the body along in an extended post-death muscle spasm. Gone is the monster that can be dispatched by romantic means like exorcism or proper burial or a stake through the heart. Ironically, the zombie, a creature that negates the finality of death, is a dramatic reminder of the physical permanence of mortality.

The Dominion of the Dead, Robert Pogue Harrison’s poetic study of death and burial rituals, is definitely not a zombie book, but it is relevant here. Harrison, a professor of Italian at Stanford, considers how funerary rituals create human institutions, how the dead and the living coexist. It’s in burying the dead, for example, that we put a cultural stamp on a piece of ground. That makes losses at sea and other forms of no-remains deaths especially unnerving for survivors. Naming the dead—at the Vietnam War Memorial, for example—shapes how a living society thinks of itself; praying to particular saints or ancestors is a way not only of honoring the past but of creating your own identity. In all those examples, though, the dead remain mute, an undifferentiated unit whose meaning is concocted by the living. Studying the celebrated closing paragraphs of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Harrison explains how snow falling evenly is a more apt simile for the end than, say, falling leaves, which retain their original shape. To die is to be subsumed into a mass.

To die is also to be involved in something substantially less pretty than a gentle snowfall. After reading Dominion of the Dead I found myself craving a late-night screening of Zombie Flesh Eaters 7 or 8, something with the decaying dead walking around in their graduation gowns, softball league uniforms, and cheerleader outfits—those markers of healthy and fruitful life now perverted by the humiliating stench of death.

No zombie discussion would be complete without orotund socio-political theory, so here’s mine: By foregrounding the question of how much dignity there can be in death and dying, the era of physician-assisted suicide and Terri Schiavo has spurred the recent revival of the zombie film. The British director Danny Boyle revived his career with the zombie-type plague picture 28 Days Later (2002). Dawn of the Dead was remade in 2004 with a big budget and an A-minus-list cast. That same year, the genre-informed Shaun of the Dead proved it’s possible to combine romantic comedy with zombie holocaust in a completely successful picture. And in 2005 Romero, whose forays outside his genre have yielded mixed results, returned to form with what the posters promised would be his “ultimate zombie masterpiece.”

Land of the Dead, a Metropolis-style parable, takes the elements of class warfare to their insane conclusion. The zombies—“blue-collar monsters,” Romero calls them in interviews—are dressed in hilariously explicit class markers: a butcher’s smock, a gas station attendant’s coveralls, etc. The villains are literally cigar-smoking capitalists, holed up in Fiddler’s Green, a high-security skyscraper in Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle. The movie opened in mid-2005 to mixed reviews and mediocre business; it was savaged by fans who found the politics obvious even by genre standards. Yet within a few months, Hurricane Katrina had made the movie’s vision seem prophetic, with a full complement of venal and indifferent authorities and something few of us would have imagined seeing in our lifetimes: bodies lying unburied for weeks in the streets of a major American city. By the time the activist Randall Robinson claimed (erroneously) that New Orleans residents were resorting to cannibalism, the message was clear: It’s George Romero’s world; we’re just mindlessly shambling through it.

The spectacle of an advanced society laid low by a Third World catastrophe is the zombie film’s stock in trade —the “return of the repressed” in a modern, death-denying culture. That’s why the ultimate zombie picture may be one that features no gore or cannibalism at all. Robin Campillo’s 2004 film Les Revenants (released as They Came Back in the United States) envisions a resurrection of thousands in a provincial French town, who then don’t do much of anything. They can talk, but they have no affect, nor any personality beyond mild pleasantness. Their clothes are neatly pressed and their complexions are good, but they’re sort of distracted, unable to relate to loved ones, unable or unwilling to talk about the afterlife, just somehow not there.

Brilliantly, Campillo refuses to milk this material for either comedy or horror but instead explores, in rapid succession, the metaphoric possibilities: The situation looks at times like France’s immigration and refugee crisis (as helpful government officials, pontificating about the rights of all citizens, provide temporary housing for the resurrected in indoor tent cities), at times like a comment on the full-employment state (all the undead are given back their old jobs, which they’re not really able to do anymore), at times like family drama (as characters find themselves guiltily impatient with the empty spouses and children miraculously returned to them), and finally like a parody of the nanny state (as the government sets up thermal monitors to keep track of the returned people—whose body temperatures are just slightly below normal).

That’s an irresolvable setup, but it gets to the heart of what makes our zombie friends such paradoxical creatures: metaphorically potent because they’re grounded in a mundane reality, spiritually provocative because they dispense completely with spirituality, symbols of class warfare that posit a classless society as the ultimate horror. The zombie embodies the greatest horror of death: the inescapable sameness of it. In the end, the grasping, hungry, rotten legions of the living dead are not so different from W.M. Thackeray’s description of the garden-variety dead: “Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.”

Tim Cavanaugh is Web editor of the Los Angeles Times opinion page.

Contract Killings

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:37:00 EST

With characteristic deadpan delivery, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) shocked and amazed nobody with a September report announcing that “the United States generally has not met its goals for reconstruction activities in Iraq with respect to the oil, electricity, and water sectors.” As of August, oil production remained below prewar levels, and efforts to restore electricity and water treatment capacity have failed to meet stated goals.

Much of the trouble stems from shady contracting arrangements and unrealistic expectations. As the report explains, “When setting requirements for work to be done, [the Department of Defense] made assumptions about funding and time frames that later proved to be unfounded.” The GAO cites numerous cases where hiring of a contractor was completed before the Defense Department, the State Department, or Iraqi authorities had even decided on the work to be done or the budget for the job.

The agency has been tracking the lousy record of contracting in Iraq since soon after the 2003 invasion. It has turned up dozens of cases where guidelines for competitive bidding were circumvented (by, for example, inaccurately describing the scope of work on a given project) or where agencies abused the “interagency contracting” method designed to increase efficiency and timeliness. In many of the single-bid contract cases, the agencies involved have claimed they didn’t have time to put together a multiple-bid process.

On the plus side, some areas of reconstruction (such as water treatment) have brought Iraq to a level higher than what it had prior to the war, though almost all areas have failed to meet the lofty goals of U.S. agencies.

March of the Moles

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 09:41:00 EST

California now has a central anti-terrorism center, and police and sheriff's departments in the state have developed homeland security, anti-terrorism, and intelligence units, with many departments participating in an FBI joint terrorism task force. So what progress have the cops made against the Golden State's homegrown Bin Ladens?

According to "State of Surveillance," a recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union, they've been working overtime to infiltrate and neutralize activist groups. In Sacramento a police "identification specialist" videotaped the crowd at a demonstration because, in her words, "This is a crime scene." Oakland police infiltrated, and helped plan some of the activities for, a demonstration against police brutality. A San Francisco cop (acting without authorization) donned a Che Guevara pin and helped whip up excitement at an anti-war rally. A deputy sheriff in the terrorist hotbed of Fresno posed as an especially active and motivated member of a local peace group a ruse that unraveled when the deputy died and members of the group recognized his picture in an obituary.

These efforts to help agitators agitate recall the work of the FBI's notorious Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which sowed confusion among radicals in myriad ways, from publishing a fake Black Panther Coloring Book filled with violent racial imagery for children to spreading the rumor that the actress-activist Jean Seberg was pregnant with a Panther's child. Compared to those masterstrokes, the recent efforts by local flatfoots seem practically tame.

Casual Sex, Sunni Style

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:35:00 EST

With great trepidation and a roar of religious mumbo jumbo, many Saudis are opting for a matrimonial loophole known as the misyar (or "visit") marriage, a form of clandestine matrimony in which the woman gives up any spousal rights and stays in her own residence, the man visits her for sex, and after a while the union is dissolved by a divorce. Officials tell Arab News that seven of 10 contemporary marriage contracts in Saudi Arabia are misyar arrangements.

The popularity of the arrangement in a country top-heavy with spinsters and divorced women and men unable to afford the expense of maintaining a full-time bride has prompted Saudi religious authorities to observe a time-honored method for dealing with vice: renaming it virtue. This spring, the Institute of Islamic Religious Law sanctioned misyar marriages but stipulated that neither party can enter into the union with a secret intention of getting divorced. Even this caveat is belied by the wording of many misyar contracts. One version makes divorce automatic if the woman gets pregnant; another ends the union if the marriage is made public.

In a society that disguises hatred of women as concern for the well-being of the distaff, it's not surprising that much of the controversy over misyar marriage has centered on exploitation of women or concern for the children of these unions. But the dynamics of the practice create some intriguing questions about power relations and economic clout specifically, whether women may in many cases be driving misyar marriages. Although some of these unions appear to be kept-woman arrangements, a cleric tells the newspaper Al-Madina that the majority of misyar wives are professional women. Some opponents of the practice raise the specter of young gigolos reeling in wealthy old bags and "extorting" them.

But in Saudi Arabia, the most pressing concern is not about women's rights or even Islamic piety but something closer to the heart of the Gulf's Sunni majority: that misyar marriage seems like the kind of thing a Shiite would do. Shia Islam has allowed a similar practice known as mut'a ("pleasure") marriage for centuries except that the Shia version is somewhat less hypocritical, making no secret of the union's nature and allowing the contract to be dissolved without a divorce.

May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung, may you be in Heaven an hour before the Devil knows you're dead, and may gentle be all your steps as you walk beyond this valley...

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 20:05:00 EST

Friday was my last day at Reason, and I've just been finishing up last stuff and getting ready to be fitted with my MSM subcutaneous microchip. So let me say what a privilege it has been working at Reason these past four years. This was a truly fantastic place to work, and I leave with too many regrets to mention. Among other things, it pains me to be taking off just as we finally have our brand-spankin' new CMS, with a more responsive Hit & Run and an all-around better and more manageable site. For this achievement I should publicly thank Mike Alissi, the mysterious Pierce Inverarity figure who quietly makes just about everything happen at Reason. I'm just sorry I only got a week to play on the new site.

The great Radley Balko and "Delaware" Dave Weigel will be expertly serving up the Reason you've come to know and ~~loathe~~ love, and will undoubtedly cause you to forget I was ever here within a matter of hours. I've been honored to work with all the Reason staff and to edit myself into trouble under Nick Gillespie, who is what Rupert Pupkin would call a great artist, a great innovator, and a great great loss. Every former employee hopes to see his old bosses brought to ruin so he can claim that he was the indispensable element, but in my case I hope Reason soars to ever greater orbits of world domination and pan-galactic comity.

Finally, all my love to you, the fabulous little people. A quality publication is about great readers as well as great writers, and it's a too-rare pleasure to write for a readership that is engaged, informed, argumentative, and prone to understanding jokes. To both the regular commenters and the great lurking masses, I say thank you. I very much hope to see you at the L.A. Times, and I fully expect to keep seeing you at Reason.

William Styron, R.I.P.

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:46:00 EST

Belated obsequies for the Virginia-born heavyweight novelist, who I just learned died a few days ago. Styron's lifelong fascination with "the catastrophic propensity on the part of human beings to attempt to dominate one another" made him something of a kindred spirit back in my force-loathing salad days, and he became a hero to literary traditionalists (I'm not one of them) for steadily eschewing nearly every Modern and Post-Modern trick in the book. Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, the two books out of Styron's slender oeuvre on which his reputation rests, would be enough for anybody to hang his hat on, but the controversies over those two books were also crucial to his significance. By weathering the idiotic storms about the right of a white man to write about slavery or a goy to write about the Holocaust—and in both cases to do so in a more oblique manner than traditional thinking about these catastrophes had usually allowed—Styron became a hero on the manner of Madonna: somebody who revealed what a fake concept authenticity really is. He's an icon of freedom in another manner: A lifelong depressive and legendarily functioning drinker, Styron was one of our greatest self-medicators.

Stark, raving mad: Pain in the ass blogger gets Allen thugs madder than ever

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:15:00 EST

Mike Stark, last seen in a Bridget Jones's Diary-style brawl with George Allen's flunkies, continues his Ahab-like pursuit of the true George Allen, and Allen's goons continue to provide him with photo opps. This time, an Allen associate (according to Stark) bumps him and then takes a dive, and cops come in to handcuff and detain the irrascible Stark. Full video coverage here, and the highlight is definitely the Allen goober who taunts Stark as he's being hustled into the squadcar: "Don't you write for the blawg, Mike? The liberal blawg? Answer the question Mike. Don't you write for the liberal blawg?"

Saddam sentence: Death by hanging

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 04:03:00 EST

...or as I always prefer, that he be hanged by the neck until dead.

Mixed bag for co-defendants: Some cleared, some 15-year sentences, at least one life sentence and at least one hanging. Nothing online yet. Saddam's response: "God is great." Ramsey Clark removed from the court.

Give Your Awl for the Right to Concealed Carry, or, First They Came for the Pointy Woodworking Tools

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 03:23:00 EST

Haven't we all been here? You're sprawled out naked on a tree stump in a public place at quarter to eight in the morning, peacably choking your chicken, when along come the jackbooted thugs who force you to give up the sharp instrument you've got discreetly cached up your Hershey Highway. And they call this the land of the free...

And what of Fusilli Jerry?

Because I'm...Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:18:00 EST

I am too childish foolish for this world. When Mark Foley tried the old molested-by-a-priest trick, I figured that had to be straight-up bullshit. Not a day later, it turned out that, while they may not have been unwanted encounters, there really were some hot interludes between the boy-wonder Foley and Fr. Anthony Mercieca (now living, in a detail nobody could make up, "on the Mediterranean island of Gozo off Malta").

Yesterday I hear that Rev. Ted Haggard, the gay-marriage-hatin' (now former) head of the National Association of Evangelicals, was involved with a male prostitute, and it sounded like the whole thing was so obviously a setup that it wasn't even worth a second thought. Today it turns out Haggard really was doing the nasty... Excuse me, he was just buying some drugs from the gay escort in question, but there was no sexual (mis)conduct—which I guess is the Evangelical equivalent of Kevin Spacey innocently lending his cell phone to a Hyde Park hustler.

And I mean, I'm always willing to believe the worst of religious people. But these just seemed too convenient to be true. No more! Twice bitten, thrice shy, I say. From this day forward, I believe everything I hear.

Special Gaydar Update: Commenter crapactionjackson sends along a great clip of Richard Dawkins getting harangued by Haggard. I had never seen Haggard in action before; the man is obviously queer as a French horn. Here I was thinking he was one of God's tough guys, equally at home cutting down trees and sharing his enormous penis with his young son. To reiterate, I should have been, like Haggard's flock, ready to believe.

Does this count as a market failure?

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:20:00 EST

Commenter Happy Jack notes that Kroll Inc. has decided to stop providing security services in Iraq, following the deaths of four employees. AP paraphrases Michael Cherkasky, president and chief executive of Kroll owner Marsh & McLennan Companies, as saying that business in Iraq and Afghanistan "wasn't worth risking the lives of company employees."

Interestingly, the whole private contractor issue continues to boil over stateside. In the close race for Colorado's 5th Congressional District, Republican Doug Lamborn has been waving the bloody shirt at Democrat Jay Fawcett by tying him to Daily Kos' fabled Destroy All Mercenaries comment. Fawcett is trying to put some daylight between himself and the Kossaks, and turn the conversation around to his own service in the USAF. Lamborn, like many a GOP stalwart, knows it's more important to support the troops than to be the troops, which led to an amusing exchange where Fawcett questioned his lukewarm patriotism, and Lamborn responded Frank T.J. Mackey style, by quietly judging him:

During a later break, Fawcett questioned why Lamborn had never served in the military or Peace Corps; Lamborn looked back at him without answering. Fawcett told him that he'd "been stared down by better" and Lamborn replied: "I'm not intending to stare at you."

Fawcett/Lamborn has been a pretty entertaining negative campaign, with lots of "This scum-sucking pig is calling me names" road rage. Read all about it here, here, and here, because attack ads are good for you.

The joke you've all been waiting for

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:52:00 EST

The Wine Commonsewer (or somebody claiming to be TWC—I don't see the trademark Hawaiian shirt) gets the official response from the troops to John Kerry's personal Dien Bien Phu:

I don't vouch for the authenticity of the pic, nor do I claim those aren't eight campaign volunteers posing in their Halloween costumes at President Bush's Crawford estate, but it's still a pretty funny joke. Still, once they stop laughing and fold up the sign they'll still be stuck in Iraq, and that's gotta suck.

Stark Incident! 'Skins scion sics goons on spit-taking gadfly

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:48:00 EST

Dig the footage of "Former Marine and first year law student" Mike Stark getting into a mega-wimpy tussle with some flunkies from the George Allen campaign. Stark got the brawl going with a question we should all be asking ourselves every morning: "Why did you spit on your first wife?"

Opinions? I'm watching it in a public WiFi zone with no sound, so I can't say for sure, but it looks to me like Stark is moving in pretty fast and furious, in a manner that could be interpreted as threatening to overly zealous staffers. (The arty shakycam effects may make Stark look more like a would-be assassin than he did in person.) The slap fight is good stuff though, and I give Stark full props for hanging on to his schoolboy bookbag (worn over one shoulder, koolkid-style) throughout the ordeal. As so many real-world fights do, this one reminds me of my favorite fight in literature, the lumbering brawl between Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty:

We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children... I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us...[E]lderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati... Both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle.

Remember the Stark Incident.

Merry Prankster dropout Kathy Casano, aka Stark Naked.

How would history have been different if Prince Andrew had married Koo Stark before Fergie came into the picture? How would all our lives be different if Koo Stark's cameo as "Camie" hadn't been cut from the original Star Wars: Episode Whatever the Hell It's Being Called Now?

Quote of the Day

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 08:23:00 EST

"I guess Kerry wasn't content blowing 2004, now he wants to blow 2006, too."

That's an unnamed "Democratic congressman" talking to ABC's Jake Tapper about John Kerry's new Edu-gate gaffe, which is now splashed on Drudge, up to 720 stories on Google News, and forcing President Bush to object that the troops are "plenty smart." What's the route of that one-man parade again?

Alan Moore Comes Like a Thief in the Night

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:32:00 EDT

Can't you just taste the excitement with your uvula? Dems within striking distance, maybe, says CQ

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:41:00 EST

Congressional Quarterly says it's all down to 18 "tossups" in the House, and the Democrats have an unlikely chance of gaining control of the Senate:

Democrats are increasingly bullish on their chances to net the gain of at least 15 seats that they need to oust the GOP’s J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois as the Speaker of the House and install Nancy Pelosi of California instead.

As of Oct. 27, CQ’s individual assessments of all 435 House races showed Democrats seriously contesting Republican holds on 72 seats (31 percent of the party’s current total) with seven of those races already leaning toward a Democratic takeover and 18 more considered genuine tossups — the result of a combination of Republican political weaknesses and the Emanuel team’s success at growing the roster of competitive Democratic challengers, many in districts that the party had not contested in years. By contrast, only 21 Democratic seats were in play, and only a handful appeared seriously at risk. The bottom line is that the Republicans are now ahead at least marginally in only 207 races, meaning that even if they hold on to all of those (which won’t happen) they must win 11 of the 18 tossups to retain power. The Democrats are now ahead in 210 races — nine more than the number of seats they have now — so if they hold all those leads they will need to win just eight of the tossups to gain control.

As they have throughout the campaign, the Democrats face their more daunting task in the Senate: They must gain a net of six seats to take control — an all-the-more-unlikely prospect just two years after they lost four seats. But their quest has now put them within striking distance.

With 10 days to go, four GOP incumbents are now underdogs for re-election: Conrad Burns of Montana, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. The Democratic bids in Missouri against Jim Talent and in Tennessee for the seat that Majority Leader Bill Frist is vacating are absolutely too close to call, while the party still has a clear shot at George Allen in Virginia. So if they win two out of three — and if they protect all their own seats, particularly that of New Jersey’s Robert Menendez, who’s also in a tossup — the Democrats should win the Senate.

Whole discussion here, with details on the close Senate races, the eight glorious mysteries of electioneering, and House details North, South, East, and West. Just to prove these guys don't really know anything you don't, there's also ominous talk of an October surprise (only hours left! Happy Halloween!), and a great prim reference to "Mark Foley’s tawdry behavior toward congressional pages." But like most political prognostication, it's a vibrant species of on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-that.

Can the Dems still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? My ancient prophecy that the Republicans would retain both houses was based on the Democrats' proven ability to fuck up the proverbial one-man parade. And if this election is anything, it's a Monday morning walk of shame for President Bush. But I am impressed by how widespread the belief is that the Republicans are headed for a catastrophe. If nothing else, it will be nice to be proven wrong on this.

At least he didn't use the f-word

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:48:00 EST

Reader "Chilli" emails a review. Cavanaugh garbologists are welcome to speculate on what, if anything, he or she is responding to:

F_____ you, you smegma eating far right jerkoff! I hope you're happy that your Republican morons put Hitler in the White House. And yes, I'm a liberal, you fascist---with three honorable discharges and service in the Korean War. Now, why don't you telll me how many DC solons (Republicans) served in the military? There's a sheet going around that tell you. And how about your Bush baby dodging military service in Vioet Nam? You people must come out of the womb screamingh Nazi propaganda! Drop dead---please!

I Wish I Could Piss Like A Man, I'd Join the Navy

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:15:00 EST

The neighborhood of what was all too briefly my Old Dominion home is blanketed with Webb and Allen posters, but was still late getting to the season's dumbest election story: penisinthemouthgate In case you missed it, Sen. George Allen has unleashed a library-clearing broadside against challenger James Webb, the decorated Vietnam veteran and former Navy secretary whose military novels contain such racy passages as a reference to a woman who pees standing up ("Didn't lose a drop, either. Not a drop"), a stripper who can cut a banana "in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina," and this bit that has captured the hearts and minds of all Americans:

"A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy's penis in his mouth."

"Most Virginians and Americans would find passages such as those below shocking," Allen says, raising the question of what most Virginians would find above shocking. Allen's Great Books crusade has already been good for hundreds of breathless news stories and has already generated the inevitable unintended hilarity: Lynne Cheney's battle to suppress her own steaming-hot-lesbo novel Sisters. Even Hit & Run commenter "ex-subscriber" has got his or her panties in a knot about Webb's purple prose. Maybe I'm jaded, but the perverse stuff seems like standard issue sailor talk (wake me up when a stripper can peel and cut a banana with her pussy muscles), and the descriptive parts sound pretty much like the ham-handed "toward dawn, he took her again" passages you usually find in books like this. Maybe Webb's a misogynist, but based on these passages I'd say if anything he shows a healthy respect for the power and versatility of female plumbing.

What to make of it all? Reason's own Radley Balko points the way on his blog, noting that the boy's-penis passage (which even in Allen's invidious out-of-context quote reads like the piece of oddball local color it obviously is) actually draws attention to something Allen should probably be downplaying-that Webb actually served in Vietnam. I am not a James Webb supporter (the only thing I'm hoping for the Democrats to deliver in two weeks is divided government), but he's the closest thing to a renaissance man American politics offers at the moment: a decorated veteran, a high-level government official in various capacities, a highly praised novelist (the only one I've read is Fields of Fire, which I liked a lot), a popular historian with a prominent book about the Scots-Irish to his credit, and so on.

Against this, Allen is arguing, as Jeff Taylor noted a while back, that he should be re-elected because he's a moron. Based on the positive reaction this desperate attack on Webb is getting, it looks like that argument may be good enough. That's more disturbing than anything in James Webb's novels.

Title explanation.

Imagine the Dewlap: Central Casting villain leads central planning boondoggle! With special all-choking featurette

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:19:26 EDT

Shawnee Hoover of the Exxpose Exxon campaign wants us to publicize former ExxonMobile CEO Lee Raymond's involvement in a new Oil and Gas Study sponsored by the Department of Energy. Raymond's ready-for-an-Oliver-Stone-movie petrovillain look, including a massive neck, have made him a favorite cartoon villain for petrorexia sufferers everywhere, who find it all too easy to believe the jolly oil tycoon is actually a 12-foot lizard. Exxpose Exxon is urging resistance to Raymond's heading the National Petroleum Council. Hoover warns:

Though President Bush has alerted Americans to our oil addiction, he is now putting the most successful pusher of that product in charge of determining our energy future. When many of our future solutions hinge on buying and burning less oil, it seems obvious that the last people that should be charting that course is the oil industry itself. Mr. Raymond's repeated criticism of U.S. energy independence, investments in renewable energy, peak oil, and policies to help combat global warming have made it clear exactly where he stands.

Fun stuff, but if I may go completely off-topic, this dustup reminds me that in my previous story about Raymond, his critics, oil panics, and crazy attempts to solve our "gas crisis," I made a passing reference to the Heimlich maneuver. This prompted a fascinating response from an emailer purporting to be Peter Heimlich, the son of the inventor of the legendary anti-choking technique. I've been looking for an excuse to publish that one for a while, so swallow this:

Three years ago my wife and I began researching my father's career. To our astonishment, we turned up a remarkable history of fraud. To make a long story short, he's a charalatan, albeit a singular one. Among other more serious issues, it's clear he didn't invent the Heimlich maneuver, but appropriated the idea from a colleague. Our original research has been the basis of dozens of articles in publications which include the New York Times, LA Times, Reuters, and many others. We were recently profiled in a two-part feature in Radar Magazine. For more information and for links to these articles, you may wish to visit our website.

You should know that my father's frequent claim which you repeated, that backslaps "push lodged objects down the esophagus," is dubious. The only scientific evidence supporting that claim is a 1982 study by the late pediatrician, Richard Day MD. My research uncovered that my father clandestinely paid for the Day study. The study was presented by Day and my father to a national committee of the American Heart Association (AHA) in 1985 which—after an overheated ten-year media campaign conducted by my father against the AHA and the American Red Cross—removed backslaps from choking rescue guidelines. Since then, in this country anyway, it's been the Heimlich maneuver and nothing else when it comes to choking rescue.

It's a different story in Europe and most of the rest of the world which continued to teach backslaps as the first step in choking rescue since backsalps are less invasive than abdominal thrusts (the "Heimlich maneuver") which has been associated with a variety of injuries. And my father's "celebrity doctor" image had little, if any influence outside the US.

Fast forward to December 2005, the AHA recently revised choking guidelines. Both backslaps and chest thrust are again in the guidelines and the phrase "Heimlich maneuver" has been deleted in favor of "abdominal thrusts." For more on chest thrusts as well as further commentary on my father's conduct, you may wish to read this recent letter. The editor's note that follows includes a link to the new AHA guidelines.

What's more, I have an e-mail from Roger White MD, a world-respected emergency medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic, who was chairman of the 1985 AHA committee, the one that eliminated backslaps. Dr. White wrote:

There never was any science here; Heimlich overpowered science all along the way with his slick tactics and intimidation, and everyone, including us at AHA, caved in...We were taken....

Finally, your article included a link to a 1988 article co-authored by my father and Dr. Edward A. Patrick. If you're unfamiliar with Dr. Patrick, he figures prominently in my father's career. Dr. Patrick was the subject of this 2004 Cleveland newsweekly cover story, "Playing Doctor," which raises questions about the legitimacy of his credentials.

So, sorry to say, the actual history doesn't bolster the point you were making in your column. Not that I fault you. For over 30 years my father has been relentlessly repeating the "deadly backslaps" myth and it has entered the popular history as an unexamined trueism.

Now imagine what combination of compression, backslaps, stomach pushes, and solid-fuel rocketry would be required to dislodge half a sandwich from Lee Raymond's throat.

Victory in Iraq: Out. Victory in America: In!

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 11:38:53 EDT

President Bush: "I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq. I'm not satisfied either. And that is why we're taking new steps to help secure Baghdad and constantly adjusting our tactics across the country to meet the changing threat."

Karl Rove:

Rove predicted the Republicans would retain control of Congress, discounting polls that show the Democrats threatening to take over.

"You heard it here first," Rove declared in his interview with Fox News Radio.

Actually, you heard it here first. I can already hear "Mandate!" ringing in my right ear and "Diebold!" ringing in my left.

Times finally admits it was right

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:51:25 EDT

"In the early months of 1935," writes David Leonhardt in today's New York Times, "this newspaper ran a series of editorials warning about a grave threat to the American economy. The Social Security plan being pushed by Franklin D. Roosevelt was 'a bad bill,' the editorials said, that would become an enormous burden on American companies and might be unconstitutional to boot...

Many Congressional Republicans and business executives agreed, predicting that the bill's new payroll taxes would short-circuit the economy's recovery from the Great Depression. With all this criticism, the bill's fate seemed uncertain. On March 21, the editorial page of The New York Times approvingly quoted a news report saying that the bill's prospects were "diminishing daily."

The worries about Social Security may sound silly now, given that it did pass that summer and went on to become one of the most popular government programs in American history. But on the narrow charge that they were making—that Social Security would destroy jobs—the critics at The New York Times and on Capitol Hill were, in fact, correct.

Besides taking money out of the pockets of workers that otherwise might have been spent, the new payroll taxes raised the cost of employing workers, and when the cost of something goes up, demand for it usually goes down. The Social Security Act of 1935, as the historian Edward Berkowitz has noted, laid the groundwork for the "Roosevelt recession" of 1937 and 1938.

Regular readers of the Kan-Do Keynesian's "Economix" column will have guessed already that this stunning admission is just a setup for an argument that "job-killing programs" are good for the economy. Social Security, Medicare, and workplace safety rules, Leonhardt argues, have all elevated standards of living at the cost of only rounding-error-level dips in productivity. So make room for minimum wage hikes, which are on the ballots in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Nevada:

[Arguments against the min-wage hike initiatives] seem to be falling flat with voters. A recent poll in Colorado shows 69 percent supporting the measure there, and only 26 percent opposed. In the other five states, the initiatives have similarly big leads...

I think there are two main reasons for the enormous popularity of the proposals. By now, many people probably understand that the dire predictions about higher minimum wages don't come true. In the 10 years since Congress raised the minimum wage, crime didn't become an epic problem, as [Colorado Sen. Hank] Brown forecast. Instead, it has fallen sharply.

In fact, modest rises in the minimum wage don't even appear to kill many jobs. The recent state increases have created a series of natural experiments for researchers to study, and they have generally found that modest changes have only minor effects on employment levels. Some have found no net effect. Higher wages may end up lifting employee morale and reducing turnover, making business more productive and mitigating some of the higher labor costs...

The second big cause of the proposals' popularity stems in all likelihood from the rise of income inequality. The American economy has done so well at creating jobs in recent decades that almost anybody who wants work can find it. The problem is that too many jobs still don't pay a decent living.

There is another argument against the minimum wage, of course: Nobody's forcing you to offer or take any job at any price. If you and another party agree on a price, why is that the government's business? And what powers of perpetual motion does the law have that it can make "income inequality" disappear by fiat?

That having been said, it's worth giving a think to Leonhardt's main point: that the apocalyptic predictions about minimum wages, Social Security, and a host of other expense-creating government mandates have failed to come true, leaving the human race (disappointingly) still alive. Ominously, you could make the same point about almost any regulation on the books.

Courtesy of reader "M," who calls the column, "Pork: The other Social Security."

New at Reason

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 12:45:21 EDT

David Weigel gives a Red Baron salute as the conservative pundit class crashes to earth.