Content & Context

This Week:

Timeline: August 2003
Places & Culture
Weekly Digest

TIMELINE: AUGUST 2003

Beneath the streets of Manhattan, subway cars stopped in their tracks, went pitch black, and started to swelter when the power went out on a Thursday afternoon last month. In one of the broadest power failures ever, darkness enveloped swaths of seven states and swept into Canada, closing airports and office buildings, disrupting hospitals and homes. At the feet of blackened skyscrapers in New York, people spread newspapers and slept on the sidewalk. They boiled their drinking water in Detroit, kept candlelit shops open in Toronto, were told not to drive in Ohio (where the problem may have started). Who would have thought the loss of power could leave us feeling so … powerless? “You realize just how dependent we are on electricity,” said New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, and soon a caveman in a New Yorker cartoon, sitting on a stone and roasting fish over a fire, said to another, “And then one day the grid went down and never came back up.” It brought back memories of the last time New York City was devastated, as did released transcripts of telephone calls and radio transmissions on the morning of September 11, 2001. Earlier, a forensic scientist said as many as 1,000 victims of that day may never be identified.

We felt just as powerless about events elsewhere in the world in August. In Iraq, where the postwar death toll of U.S. soldiers exceeded the casualty count from the war itself, bombings ravaged Baghdad, including U.N. headquarters and a Shiite shrine. Bombay, Jakarta, and Jerusalem were also shattered by blasts. But elsewhere, the loss of power was empowering. Charles Taylor vacated the presidency of Liberia, coaxing flickers of hope for peace there. Hambali, an al Qaeda leader who planned last year’s bombing of Bali, was caught in Thailand. Not all shifts in power seemed so promising; action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger became the most talked-about candidate to replace California’s governor. California television stations refrained from airing Schwarzenegger’s movies, lest opponents demand equal time under campaign advertising laws. “All That’s Missing Is the Popcorn,” said Time magazine of the Schwarzenegger story. So much for the dog days of August, which, we presume, are meant to be idling carelessly on a hammock listening to a ball game. Which is, more or less, what cost one sportswriter his job; he was fired for filing a report on a game he watched on TV but did not attend.

People used to feel powerless about racial injustice in America, before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, the 40th anniversary of which was marked last month. The timeless and deeply religious speech evoked principles of justice and righteousness as fundamental to the Bible as the Ten Commandments, which were removed from the Alabama Supreme Court in a controversial ruling. Thou shall not steal, they say, but last month, a 91-year-old bank robber did anyway. Thou shall not kill, as a Congressman from South Dakota allegedly did after running a stop sign. The gift of life, meanwhile, was celebrated by participants in the first known three-way kidney transplant.

Father Walter Ong, a Jesuit linguist and student of Marshall McLuhan, who studied the effect of media on oral traditions, died in August at age 90. John Burgess was the first African American bishop of an Episcopal diocese in the United States. Colonel John Landsdale Jr. raided the Nazis’ atomic weapons labs in 1945, before the Soviets could get to them. Gregory Hines, one of the fleetest tap dancers of his time, died of cancer at age 57. Herb Brooks, who coached the “Miracle on Ice” U.S. hockey team at the 1980 Olympics, died in a car accident. With his record-setting son Barry, Bobby Bonds formed one of the greatest father-son duos in baseball history. Claude Passeau pitched Game 3 of the 1945 World Series for the Chicago Cubs, the day before a fan put the Billy Goat hex on the team. Connie Reeves, considered America’s oldest cowgirl, died at 101 after being thrown from her horse. Roxie Laybourne was an ornithologist who studied the death of birds in jet engines for airplane manufacturers. In a place where people feel powerless, Miss Hen, as she was known to everyone she considered family in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, was a light in the darkness.

• Cancel August, says David Plotz in Slate.

• Timeline: July 2003

• Timeline: June 2003

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

TOKYO — The deaths of … three men marked only one incident in an extraordinary string of Internet suicides to hit Japan. Over the past six months, police investigators say at least 32 people—mostly in their teens and twenties— have killed themselves nationwide after meeting strangers online. Many more young Japanese have entered into online suicide pacts, but either failed in their attempts or backed out at the last minute. Psychiatrists and suicide experts are linking the phenomenon to a profound national identity crisis during Japan’s 13-year economic funk. Indeed, the Internet deaths come at a time when Japan is undergoing an alarming surge in its overall suicide rate—with financial problems cited as the fastest growing reason for despair. … Though Western, religion-based stigmas of suicide do not exist here, the Internet deaths have nevertheless dismayed this island nation, becoming a dominant topic in chat rooms and the subject of a new play. Full story

LAS VEGAS — The worst year in the life of Alex Arreguin III ends where it began, in the Greyhound bus station on Main Street. This time Arreguin, 43, isn’t arriving, he’s leaving. It isn’t midnight, but the afternoon, and instead of walking out of the bus station, he is sitting on the dirty floor while his companion, Diane Garcia, 39, is out front, wrestling down her doubts with a cigarette. … In search of a better life, the two came here from recession-hit Texas last summer. With Las Vegas’s distinction as the fastest-growing area of the United States, there seemed no better place for two people to find good jobs. But 54 weeks have taught them a hard-earned truth: that in a fragile economy, if one thing goes wrong, a person on the margins can very quickly skid into what they have become—broke, jobless and without a home. Silly with promise when they arrived, they are now creatures of charity, from the donated clothes they are wearing, to the dismal places they have been sleeping, to the bus tickets back to Houston that they were presented with just an hour before by a local social services organization. … Since last month, dozens of people who came here to work have been sent back to home towns from Florida to Alaska. Full story

DIGEST

For links with an * you can log in with member name and password of “bcread”

• As of last month’s fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, one of the finest champions of that dream isn’t a black civil rights leader, but a white conservative Republican, writes Peter Beinart in the New Republic. Alabama governor Bob Riley “is that rarest of creatures: a genuinely inspiring politician,” Beinart says. The formerly anti-tax Riley looked at Alabama’s tax system, under which the poor pay more than twice as high of a percentage of their income in taxes than the wealthy do, and declared it to be unfair. Not just unfair, but biblically wrong, given God’s call to tend to the “least among us,” Riley said. His plan to reform the system, which goes to a vote tomorrow, is expected to fail, due in part to the conspicuous failure of civil rights leaders to rally support in the state, Beinart says. “Riley’s plan would arguably do more for black and poor Alabamians than anything since the civil rights era,” he writes. “And yet, as far as I can tell, it received not a single mention at last week’s anniversary March on Washington.” Beinart declines to speculate why civil rights leaders are AWOL in Alabama—are they too northern and coastal in focus, too prone to pick symbolic fights (such as the number of African Americans on network sitcoms) over more practical ones, or, in this case, both? Full story*

• Earlier, this weblog linked to Thomas Friedman’s report from Iraq, which he said was in disarray due to saboteurs and a weak U.S. commitment to rebuilding the nation. Since that column, two influential advocates of Iraq involvement have also questioned the direction of postwar policy. “Considering what might have gone wrong—and which so many critics predicted would go wrong—the results [in Iraq] have been in many ways admirable,” write William Kristol and Robert Kagan in the Weekly Standard. But they find it “baffling that, up until now, the Bush administration has failed to commit resources to the rebuilding of Iraq commensurate with … the magnitude of the task.” We need more troops, more money, and more State Department personnel to help rebuild Iraq, they argue, but the Bush administration appears to be committing less and less. While the writers do not address whether a new or better rebuilding plan should be articulated before the U.S. increases its resources, their concerns are pressing for their fellow conservatives. Full story

Related:

Point-counterpoint on what’s next in Iraq from The New Republic

Where we stand in Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, and beyond, from yesterday’s New York Times Magazine*

The problem with President Bush’s with-us-or-against-us diplomacy, from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright in Foreign Affairs.

Recent Friedman column: ‘American Idol’ and the future of democracy in the Middle East

• Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As long as we’re talking about America’s vision, it’s worth remembering this credo in our Constitution. But “the pursuit of happiness,” says one psychologist in New York Times Magazine, is a more misguided exercise than we would like to think. We don’t realize how bad we are at predicting how future events or possessions will make us happy or unhappy. In a consumer culture, we live with the anxiety of not being able to get what we want, but the greater fear should be that “you can’t always know what you want,” the psychologist says. Full story* The article is a serviceable reminder of the lies of commercialism on which our society runs, but it would have been a lot better had it talked about the difference between happiness and joy or peace, and the importance of fulfilling relationships—as opposed to more rational “prediction and decision making”—in pursuit of them.

• In the meantime, we go on buying things. And where would buyers be without the bar code, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next year? The milestone, though, may mark the decline of the bar code in favor of radio-frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., similar to the E-Z Pass at highway toll booths, writes James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. Instead of bar codes, products may soon start wearing computer chips that send signals about their presence in stock and on shelves, their expiration, and their popularity with customers. Wal-Mart will start to phase in R.F.I.D. technology in 2005. Its purpose is to make the stocking of supplies more efficient; with better tracking of what’s on shelves and what’s selling, stores can more evenly match supply to demand. Full story

• The 1970 census questionnaire added a new box to check: “Hispanic.” But should that have read “Latino”? Should it now? What should the U.S.’ new largest ethnic minority be called? The debate was intensifying even before Mexican American poet Sandra Cisneros refused to appear on the cover of Hispanic magazine because of its title. “I’m a Latina,” she tells the Washington Post, which explains, “Hispanics derive from the mostly white Iberian peninsula that includes Spain and Portugal, while Latinos are descended from the brown indigenous Indians of the Americas south of the United States and in the Caribbean, conquered by Spain centuries ago.” Says the Panamanian president of the Hispanic National Bar Association: “If we use the word Latino, it excludes the Iberian peninsula and the Spaniards. The Iberian peninsula is where we came from. We all have that little thread that’s from Spain.” Would “Latino-Hispanic” be better? Full story

• If all goes as planned, the Galileo orbiter will crash into Jupiter on September 21. The grand finale of the satellite’s space journey will be to rocket itself into the stormy atmosphere of the solar system’s largest planet, transmitting what it sees. Then it will glow with heat and burst into bits, its debris consumed in Jupiter’s incinerating atmosphere. It will be a good time to recall what Galileo saw during its travels, says the New Yorker, including the questions it raised about the possibility of life in the oceans of one of Jupiter’s moons. Full story

• Miscellaneous:Africans found to follow AIDS medication better than Americans – Suburban lifestyle linked to obesity—Scientists search for history’s first clothes—Indian actress addresses social issues through film—Puzzling chill in Atlantic surf—Academics concerned about the commercialization of colleges