We love Yale sluts! “No” means “yes,” and “yes” means “anal”—that’s the beastly braying cry at Yale these days. The frat boys from Delta Kappa Epsilon (G. W. Bush’s club) have been accused of taunting female undergraduates in this fashion. Yale requested that the fraternity be shut down for five years.
O, how the mighty have fallen! How can such noisome behavior, base and vile, reek from this once-great flower of American academia? Indeed, lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
In the glory days, no man ever went to Yale to learn anything. God gave us Columbia and Harvard for that. OK, there’s Harold Bloom, but otherwise, Yale was intended for unadulterated gentlemanly pleasure and sport. As Wilde said, “If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough.” Is there anyone around who remembers when Yale was the most splendid, elegant, and gentlemanly of Ivy League colleges; when Andover and St. Paul’s sent their best and brightest to New Haven; when, as Fitzgerald wrote, “Taft and Hotchkiss…prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale”?
Where are the Yale men who had their soft tweed jackets and their Oxford-gray flannel trousers made at J. Press and Arthur M. Rosenberg; who trod the Memorial Quadrangle shod in the Raywood-model, full brogue, slip-on Peal shoe and the Oxford-cloth, rolling, button-down-collar Brooks Brothers shirt?
And what’s happened to the tables down at Mory’s, which the 21 Club wished it looked like? And whither the Fence Club, the swellest undergraduate sodality, where Huggins, the club permittee, the white-jacketed Negro gentleman’s gentleman, brooded over his boys with warm breast and, ah, bright wings? Ralph Lauren would have made a mess of himself had he seen such authentic WASP class and décor: stuffed leather chairs, polished mahogany tables, Turkish carpets, and framed pictures of Y-sweatered Eli captains sitting on the Yale Fence.
O, where is the Yale of Skull and Bones, when it was the world’s most prestigious college underground secret society? Admittedly, it always had a meritocratic, hence slightly middle-class, tinge. The fifteen senior “knights” might include such campus big shots as a team captain and the editor of the Yale Daily News, but its graduate patriarchs became presidents, ambassadors, and, most important of all, partners in Brown Brothers Harriman. And where are the modern equivalents of Donald Ogden Stewart, Gerald Murphy, and Brendan Gill, who represented the lefty, artistic wing of the brotherhood—yet gentlemen all?
O, where is the Yale of Bones’ chief rival, Scroll and Key, whose brothers deferentially referred to themselves publicly as second in fame to Bones, knowing full well privately that they were, in fact, the snottiest of senior societies? Like the Order of the Garter, which Lord Melbourne coveted “because there was no damn merit in it,” Scroll and Key preferred aristocratic and moneyed birth over brash achievement. O, where are the likes of Jock Whitney and Paul Mellon, both cringingly shy, and Scroll and Key visions of the beau ideal? And who remembers when Scroll and Key’s idea of an arty-farty brother was the composer of “Eli Yale! Bulldog! Bulldog!” the über-sophisticate, Cole Porter?
Even as a septuagenarian, Philip Roth can’t seem to stop offending the kind of people who make it their business to be offended all the damn time. The latest case in point: the very public and ill-tempered resignation of feminist writer Carmen Callil from the Man Booker Prize committee in protest against the award going to Roth. Huffing like Margaret Dumont in an old Marx Brothers movie, Ms. Callil declared that “I don’t rate him as a writer at all” and questioned whether anyone would still read his novels in twenty years’ time. She opined that reading his novels can make a reader feel as though Roth were “sitting on your face and you can’t breathe,” causing earnest literary critics across the world to giggle uncontrollably.
Roth has long been derided and disliked by the feminist literary community for his unreconstructed phallocentrism, if that’s even a real word. Ms. Callil quickly went into damage-control mode after her initial comments were seen as being needlessly ungracious by claiming that the real issue was not Roth’s alleged misogyny, but his American citizenship. Writing in Britain’s Guardian, she clarified that she felt the prize should have gone to a non-North American contender. She argued that Roth’s reputation as a walking penis did not inform her decision, but instead her concern that a more culturally diverse set of writers be acknowledged.
Roth has been an amazingly enduring figure of contempt for public morality’s righteous defenders for over half a century now. His ability to piss people off remains admirably constant, from the Eisenhower era’s uptight, bow-tied arbiters of good taste to today’s politically correct apparatchiks. When his volume of short stories detailing lower-to-middle-class Jewish American life in the 1950s (Goodbye, Columbus) was released, he was denounced from synagogue pulpits (or whatever they call pulpits in synagogues) and spat at by rabbis on the streets because he had dared to portray Jews as flawed, ordinary humans rather than icons of righteous humility. Apparently unfazed by the hostility and outrage that such a comparatively mild book of social observation aroused, he unleashed Portnoy’s Complaint, which ups the ante on community-offense matters considerably:
…weep for your own pathetic selves, why don’t you, sucking and sucking on that sour grape of a religion! Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favor, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass….
If this passage—part of the teenaged Portnoy’s frustrated rant against his oppressively close-knit family—was Roth’s idea of offering an olive branch to aggrieved community members, one can understand why he never pursued a career as a diplomat. Feminists didn’t much care for the book or its sex-crazed protagonist either, and there was plenty to offend mainstream Catholics and Protestants as well as Jews. But perhaps the ultimate offense was simply to serious literary and intellectual types who couldn’t believe that Roth would turn his back on his early novels’ earnest, Jamesian drama and choose instead to write a book about overbearing Jewish mothers, teenage masturbation, and threesomes while seeming to use the words “cock” and “cunt” 20 times per page.
“We need to be honest with the president, with the Congress, with the American people” about the consequences of cutting the defense budget, said Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his valedictory policy address to the American Enterprise Institute.
“(A) smaller military, no matter how superb, will be able to go fewer places and do fewer things.”
Gates seeks to ignite a debate the country seems reluctant to have. With a federal budget running out of balance by 10 percent of gross domestic product, what are we Americans willing to sacrifice? What are we willing to forego? What are we willing to cut?
The biggest budget items are Social Security, Medicare and defense. To Democrats, the first two are untouchables. To most Republicans, defense is off the table. Indeed, the likelihood is that any budget deal to which both parties agree will contain escape clauses to enable Congress to avoid the painful decisions and kick the can up the road.
Consider the situation the U.S. military faces.
The useful life of the planes, ships, missiles, guns and armor that date to the Ronald Reagan buildup of the 1980s is coming to an end, and the cost of replacement weapons is far greater. A fleet of 2,440 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, for example, will cost over $1 trillion.
Military health care costs have risen 150 percent in 10 years to $50 billion a year. The pay and benefits of today’s forces, which are one-tenth the size of those we deployed in World War II, have seen comparable increases. These costs are eating deeply into the dollars for new weapons systems.
And while we no longer face a Soviet Union with nuclear and conventional forces equal to our own, U.S. commitments have not been reduced but augmented since the end of the Cold War. Six Warsaw Pact nations were brought into NATO, along with three republics of the old Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, the disarmament of Europe continues in the wake of the debt crisis. Of special concern are cuts by the Tory government of Great Britain, our most reliable ally for 70 years.
While the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have been shuttled in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, China has fought no wars—but grown its defense budget by double-digits annually for two decades.
She now possesses submarines, missiles and aircraft sufficient to challenge the United States in the Western Pacific and is clearly intent on forcing a U.S. strategic retreat from the region.
The other night at the Hotel George V, the American Library in Paris held a fundraising dinner of the city’s American grandees. Dotted among the plutocrats were various publishers, journalists, and writers such as Lily Tuck, Diane Johnson, Alan Riding, Dinaw Mengestu, Jack Lamar, and Elaine Sciolino. Scott Turow delivered the after-dinner speech. His theme was, “Will there be books in the future?” I should have gone straight to the bar before he started.
Turow is both a lawyer and a best-selling novelist of crime thrillers such as Presumed Innocent. He’s also the president of the Authors Guild. At the George V, although his Chicago accent was weary from the transatlantic flight, the feisty barrister packed some hard punches. “Any honest assessment of the future must recognize that writing books for a living may well disappear as a profession,” he said, “and with it, for many of the same reasons, libraries as we know them now.” Writers and libraries, and by implication bookshops and publishers, were “endangered species.” This was not the uplifting message we wanted after our gazpacho, braised duck, and Burgundian wines.
Literature, as music did when Napster came along, is waging a life-or-death war with online piracy. Turow admitted that e-books save publishers money on printing, storing, and shipping printed texts. E-books, however, are vulnerable to theft that robs authors and publishers. “The average eighteen-year-old computer geek,” Turow said, “can buy one copy of a book from Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, or Google and remove the encryption and get it posted online. Of course, the pirate sites are far more sophisticated. Under the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, there is a device for shutting down these pirate sites, though it’s really just a game of Whac-A-Mole because they spring up under a different name.” Turow said that New York’s Macmillan publishing house sends 4,000 takedown notices to brigand sites every month. (Another publisher, John Wiley & Sons, pays three full-time staff to ferret out the pirates and bring them to book. In 2009, Wiley was demanding that 5,000 illegal e-versions of its titles be removed from the Internet per month.)
For the benefit of those suffering, as I do, from economic dyscalculia, Turow explained how Amazon is putting scribblers and publishers on the breadline. Amazon, which introduced the first effective e-reader, paid publishers fifty percent of a book’s cover price to sell it in an e-edition. Using a hypothetical cover price of $30, Turow continued:
So they were paying publishers, let’s say, $15. They then turned around and sold the readers the e-book version for $10. So they lost $5 on every sale. And nobody believed Amazon was engaged in an effort to subsidize publishers. It was of course an effort to drive out any competing e-reader.…And they were well on their way to monopolizing the market. And once that happened, publishers were not going to be getting $15 for what Amazon was going to be selling for $10.
College kids go through a strange phase where they decide it would be prudent to hang out with a hobo. Sometimes the kid is at the cheapest bar in town and he’s hammered enough to chat it up with a group of vagrants toward whom he wouldn’t normally have the balls to say “Hi.” Sometimes he’s wandering home and he strikes up a conversation with the guy under the bridge who just asked him for a quarter. The homeless guy usually starts out with interesting tidbits like, “When we ask you for change, don’t bullshit us. Just say, ‘No.’” However, things get real dark real fast, and soon you’re hearing about how this bum knows an old gay man who lets the bum use his shower if the bum lets the gay dude use his bum. That’s usually the end of a young man’s quest to “bro down” with the dispossessed.
When we see a vagabond, our first instinct is to give them a quick loan because that’s what we’d need if we were down on our luck. This is the most common mistake in the field of thinking about people: the assumption that their brain is our brain. It’s comforting to assume losers lost because they were cheated, but up to 80% of lottery winners file for bankruptcy within five years. Sorry, but most beggars are street people because they’re vagrants.
“Staying out of their way and letting them slowly kill themselves is probably the only solution.”
Staying out of their way and letting them slowly kill themselves is probably the only solution. But this goes against all our instincts and leaves us vulnerable to huckster politicians. Back in my hometown of Ottawa, helping the homeless has become an industry where the Guilt Tax helps pay for civil servants to go to lavish retreats and discuss the problem for days on end. In his book on government failure, Canadian radio host Lowell Green estimates the cost in Ottawa is upward of $35K per year per pauper.
America spends less on the poor per capita, but the problems are the same. In 2009 the federal government blew three billion on useless programs for the homeless. If they spent that money on houses, they could have built 145,000 of them. San Francisco spends about $17k per homeless person per year to no avail. It’s half the average American’s salary, for crying out loud.
Hopelessly entangled with drug and alcohol addiction is mental illness. Schizophrenia can be medicated, but have you ever heard these people talk about antipsychotics? They describe a world of catatonic lifelessness where their legs are made of anvils and their brain contains no thoughts. Personally, I’d rather be a nut than a zombie.
As May draws to a close, we’d like to set a good example by making public examples of parents who’ve made bad examples of themselves this past month.
All right, let’s clarify that and say they allegedly made bad examples of themselves this past month. Many of these cases have yet to be settled in court, so we’ll toss in a “reportedly” or an “according to” as required by law. That (reputedly) allows us some leeway to (purportedly) ridicule everyone.
Amid a month where millions of parents undoubtedly did billions of bad things and made trillions of bad decisions, we’ve chosen ten prime examples of far-from-exemplary behavior. Many cases didn’t make the final cut because they were either too grisly or too typical. The main criterion for selecting our ten “winners” was novelty rather than brutality. We consider these the ten most interesting cases of bad parenting in May 2011.
Counting down from 10 to 1, with #1 being the most “interesting” merely because it’s so fascinatingly annoying:
10. MOM AND DAUGHTER ACCUSED OF CANCER SCAM
In small-town South Carolina, a mannish woman named Angela Chapman and her 15-year-old daughter have been charged with bilking local citizens’ generosity by soliciting donations for the daughter’s cancer, chemo, and radiation treatments although the girl was perfectly healthy—at least physically. Mom and daughter allegedly drove 1,200 miles roundtrip so the girl could pose for pictures wearing pajamas in front of St. Jude’s Children Hospital in Memphis as if she’d been a patient there. They raised an estimated $1,200 in contributions before being nabbed.
9. “BOTOX MOM” CONFESSES TO HOAX
California mother Sheena Upton gained international press coverage and made appearances on Inside Edition and Good Morning America by claiming her name was Kerry Campbell and that she’d given Botox treatments to her eight-year-old daughter Britney. She went so far as to inject a needle in Britney’s face while a reporter for British tabloid The Sun watched. This led to international scorn and revulsion, which only intensified after Upton revealed she’d made up the entire story for cash and was only using her daughter as a theatrical prop in an elaborate media prank.
8. CENSUS STATS REVEAL INDIA’S FEMALE INFANTICIDE EPIDEMIC
India’s recently released 2011 census data shows only 914 girls under age six for every 1,000 boys. In the rural district of Morena, the figure dipped to only 825 girls per 1,000 boys. Due to cultural traditions that deem sons more valuable than daughters, many parents opt for illegal abortions after finding out their fetus is female. Countless baby girls are also systematically starved and neglected, often to death. “Women cry when they have girls,” observed a female nurse. “Everyone wants a boy,” said a woman described as “unhappy” because her daughter-in-law has borne six daughters and no sons.
7. MOTHER ALLEGEDLY USES SON TO HELP BREAK INTO EX-BOYFRIEND’S HOUSE
Dayanne Costa, 22, of Newport, RI, was arrested for breaking and entering into her ex-boyfriend’s house in the early morning hours of May 25th. She had reportedly hoisted her tiny son into the house through a front window and told him to open the front door for her. An honorable mention goes to a West Virginia couple arrested for reportedly leaving their three children at home while they attempted breaking into a car.
On the off chance that you lead a remotely fulfilling life and were busy working, studying, or having sex—even alone—on Wednesday, you may have missed the “First Annual Global Planking Day” and been none the worse for it.
You might even be one of the rare souls lucky enough never to have heard of “planking.” I sincerely regret being the messenger who delivers the bad news to you, because even learning about it will render you permanently less intelligent.
Here’s the simplest definition I’ve found:
Planking is the practice of lying down flat as if to mimic a wooden plank.
A more complicated explication that still fails to make it sound any smarter:
A fast-spreading global fad, planking involves people being photographed while lying face-down in a public place and posting the images on the Internet.
Helpful instructions for the would-be planker:
Lie face down, straight as a board, pointed toes, arms to the side with straight pointed fingers. The planker’s face must remain expressionless, head held straight, not turned. Pretend as if rigor mortis has set in.
If on some lonely afternoon I were to find myself in such a position, I would wish for rigor mortis to set in. Another plankophile described the practice as “pretty much active lying down.” Yeah, pretty much. “It’s the most fun you can have while being still,” enthused an Australian plankster on Facebook. If that’s the case, I imagine being stillborn must feel like attending the Mardi Gras.
Still, on Wednesday, people across this vast blue orb who display flashes of intelligence in other areas—mainly computer programming and social media—celebrated First Annual Global Planking Day by doing stupid things such as lying flat on basketball hoops, balcony railings, and kitchen counters, having someone photograph it, and uploading the results online.
One could strain with all their might and still be unable to conceive of things more meaninglessly self-abasing than lying face-down to get some thumbs-up, but we live in desperately meaningless times. And it’s not as if there weren’t stupid teen crazes of yore. Train-surfing wasn’t the brightest of ideas, yet at least it carried a subtext of poverty, bravery, and danger. It also required a modicum of athletic skill. Pole-sitting was a goofy American fad in the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression came along and replaced it with a goofier fad of stockbrokers jumping from skyscraper ledges. But even pole-sitting derived from a long historical tradition of column-sitting that went all the way back to fifth-century ascetic St. Simeon Stylites, who was reputed to have sat on a small platform atop a pillar in Turkey for 37 years. As superficially idiotic as that sounds—which is “very”—such feats involved tremendous physical endurance and, however feverishly misguided, some huge scoops of spiritual dedication. They definitely required more chutzpah and effort than lying still on a park bench for five seconds while your best friend captures it on his iPhone.
“Right now, socially, we are disintegrating.”
So says Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and potential candidate for president of Egypt.
Indeed, post-revolutionary Egypt appears to be coming apart.
Since the heady days of Tahrir Square, Salafis have been killing Christians. Churches have been destroyed. Gangs have conducted mass prison breaks. The Muslim Brotherhood brims with confidence.
And demands are rising for the prosecution and execution of former president Hosni Mubarak.
“People do not feel secure,” says ElBaradei, “They are buying guns.” And as Anthony Shadid and David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times write, it is not only Egypt’s future that is in doubt.
“(I)n the past weeks, the specter of divisions—religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya—has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era.”
Can the Arab revolts cope with “the cacophony of diversity … the Arab world’s variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?”
Or will we witness the disintegration of nations like Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, as we did Ethiopia and the Sudan—and of African, Latin American, Asian and European nations, as well?
With the end of the Cold War in 1991, it seemed the world was moving toward unity. The post-Cold War era saw the expansion of the European Union, NAFTA and GATT, the creation of a World Trade Organization, the Rome Treaty for the prosecution of war crimes, the Kyoto Protocol, and the G-7 expand to the G-8 and then to the G-20.
Nations seemed to be coming together to solve global problems.
Today, nations seem everywhere to be coming apart.
Is the future more likely to bring deepening global integration, or continued disintegration, as we saw with the collapse and breakup of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia into 24 nations, separated along the lines of ethnicity, culture and faith?
What America has on offer to the world is democratic pluralism.
Unlike the Founding Fathers and every generation before 1960, all of which sought to keep us European and Christian, we declare to the world that diversity—religious, racial, ethnic, cultural, the more the better—is now the American ideal.
In 1960, 97 percent of all Americans spoke English. Today, we take pride in the fact that Americans speak hundreds of languages.
The Beast‘s arrival in Europe brought comparisons to the Hindus” Juggernaut, the giant sacred conveyance that carried the idol of Jagannath, transcendental cause of the Avatars. Mandeville wrote in his Travels about how in the pilgrimage procession worshipers would throw themselves under its crushing wheels to prove their devotion.
From the beginning of President Obama’s European tour, The Beast has occasioned nearly as much comment as its occupant. As under his predecessor, a visit from Obama to a foreign country requires a polite-but-firm American military occupation of the host country. But even with the fleets of helicopters and battalions of Secret Servicemen in place and all the sewer lids welded shut, the president can”t feel safe without shipping over what they call “the most technologically advanced protection vehicle in the world.”
At about eight tons, it is also the heaviest. With a Cadillac badge on the grille and a GMC truck chassis underneath, The Beast pretends to be made in Detroit, though it is really much more a product of the military-industrial complex. Its security and communications systems are Top Secret, although we know the body has five inches of composite armor. (US troops driving around Kandahar in M2 Bradleys have to make do with slightly over an inch.)
The Beast possesses shotguns and tear-gas cannons for the president to practice impromptu riot control. It has bottles of his blood for emergency transfusions. Even the windows are several inches thick. They do not open, but the car is capable of creating its own atmosphere in case of chemical attack. In keeping with the administration’s guidelines on environmental dissimulation, the mileage is estimated at 8MPG, though the laws of physics suggest it must be more like 8GPM.
The Beast’s first stop was Ireland, where it was secretly filled up by the Secret Service at a BP station. Its only job would be to take the Obamas from the US Embassy to Moneygall in County Offaly. Sadly, it was not up to the task.
The Beast’s arrival in Europe brought comparisons to the Hindus’ Juggernaut, the giant sacred conveyance that carried the idol of Jagannath, transcendental cause of the Avatars. Mandeville wrote in his Travels about how in the pilgrimage procession worshipers would throw themselves under its crushing wheels to prove their devotion.
From the beginning of President Obama’s European tour, The Beast has occasioned nearly as much comment as its occupant. As under his predecessor, a visit from Obama to a foreign country requires a polite-but-firm American military occupation of the host country. But even with the fleets of helicopters and battalions of Secret Servicemen in place and all the sewer lids welded shut, the president can’t feel safe without shipping over what they call “the most technologically advanced protection vehicle in the world.”
At about eight tons, it is also the heaviest. With a Cadillac badge on the grille and a GMC truck chassis underneath, The Beast pretends to be made in Detroit, though it is really much more a product of the military-industrial complex. Its security and communications systems are Top Secret, although we know the body has five inches of composite armor. (US troops driving around Kandahar in M2 Bradleys have to make do with slightly over an inch.)
The Beast possesses shotguns and tear-gas cannons for the president to practice impromptu riot control. It has bottles of his blood for emergency transfusions. Even the windows are several inches thick. They do not open, but the car is capable of creating its own atmosphere in case of chemical attack. In keeping with the administration’s guidelines on environmental dissimulation, the mileage is estimated at 8MPG, though the laws of physics suggest it must be more like 8GPM.
The Beast’s first stop was Ireland, where it was secretly filled up by the Secret Service at a BP station. Its only job would be to take the Obamas from the US Embassy to Moneygall in County Offaly. Sadly, it was not up to the task.
