Jeff Spevak, Writer

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I read The Sunday New York Times so you don’t have to: Oct. 14

By

On October 14, 2012

In The New York Times

Today’s coffee is a beautiful Guatemalan. First music of the day: Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd.

1,While Mitt Romney received a boost from his debate performance against Barack Obama – you may read my use of the word “performance” as a euphemism for my preferred phrase, “deception-filled” – the Times reports, “There is little sign, however, that Mr. Romney’s rebound has translated into races for the Senate.  Although Republicans have made modest gains in a few Senate races, the polls have been poor for them on a whole. Some races have already gotten away from them, while others are on the verge of being lost.” One forecast model, which predicted in August that Republicans had a 68 percent chance of winning the Senate, now lists that probability at just 16 percent. Mitch McConnell must be turning over in is grave.

2, Governor, we hardly knew ye: A Times examination of Romney’s schedule during his four-year term as governor of Massachusetts shows that he spent one-fourth of that time out of state. Seventy percent of that time was spent on personal or political trips unrelated to his job as governor, including activities laying the groundwork for a future presidential run. Critics of Romney’s performance in Massachusetts – actually, you’d have to call that non-performance – say this is proof he was more interested in getting the job than in doing it.

3, Bruce Springsteen had said he was staying out of politics this year, after working hard for Obama in 2008. But, borrowing from the familiar Romney campaign strategy known as the “Flip-Flop,” Springsteen is now joining the Obama campaign, with a Thursday appearance in the battleground state of Ohio.

4, Interesting story on juvenile killers on page 1A. Maurice Bailey is serving a life-without-parole sentence for the 1993 murder of his 15-year-old girlfriend, who was pregnant with their child. “I go over it pretty much every night,” says Bailey, now 34. “I don’t want to make excuses. It’s a horrible act I committed. But as you get older, your conscience and insight develop. I’m not the same person.”

5, The school superintendent of El Paso, Texas, has been sentenced to prison for a scheme to artificially inflate the school system’s test scores in order to keep it eligible for Federal funds under the No Child Left Behind Act. In Texas, student success is measured by the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, a test administered when they are sophomores. “Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day,” the Times writes. “For some, credits were deleted from transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshman or juniors.”

6, Texas seems intent on demonstrating why states are often not best left to their own decision-making processes, despite the desires of non-regulatory advocates. Seven more cancer scientists have resigned in protest what they call “politically driven” decisions made by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. The Associated Press story doesn’t say how many scientists had previously left the program, which is the second-biggest cancer-research funding agency in the country. The scientists are critical of the absence of scientific review before dispensing taxpayer money for what they call a “politically driven, commercialization-based mission.”

7, In an unusually long editorial, the Times makes a convincing argument for the U.S. to leave Afghanistan. Not in 2014, as Obama promises, but immediately. “America’s global interests suffer when it is mired in unwinnable wars, in distant regions,” it writes. “Dwight Eisenhower helped the county’s position in the world by leaving Korea; Richard Nixon by leaving Vietnam; President Obama by leaving Iraq.” The corrupt alchemy of government and religion there cannot  be undone. Our largest concern, that al Qaeda would find “safe haven” in an Afghanistan that has no U.S. presence ignores the fact that al Qaeda enjoys safe haven in countries like Yemen. And wasn’t bin Laden living withing the borders of our alleged friend, Pakistan?

8, The founder of the Principality of Sealand has died. A half-century ago, Roy Bates took possession of an abandoned concrete-and-steel British military outpost off the coast of England and declared it a sovereign nation. This was being done by other DJs in the 1960s, with the intention of setting up pirate radio stations beyond the reach of  British broadcasting regulations. Curiously, the British government itself seemed to concur with Bates’ right to do such a thing, and never interfered with the operations of Sealand, which funded itself by renting titles to people and selling stamps.

9, In The Sunday Review, two compelling personal stories shed light on two big election issues. Nicholas D. Kristof introduces us to his former Harvard roommate, Scott Androes, who quite his job as a pension consultant and was working as a seasonal tax employee – the kind of job where insurance isn’t built into your employment. Now at age 52, Androus has stage 4 prostate cancer. “President Obama’s health care reform came just a bit too late to help Scott,” Kristof writes, “but it will protect others like him – unless Mitt Romney repeals it.” Kristof also writes, “In other modern countries, Scott would have been insured.” Referring to the derogatory term chosen by anti-Obamacare critics, Krisftof adds, “Is that a nanny state? No, it is a civilized one.”  And Frank Bruni interviews Helen LaFave, the step sister of Michele Bachmann, and the “member of our family” who the Minnesota Congresswoman sometimes references during her attacks on gay and lesbian people. We also meet LaFave’s partner, Nia, as they discuss with heartbreaking sadness how Bachmann is leading a war against them.

10, If you’re old enough – let’s say mature enough – you’ll remember the sensational trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, the former Army doctor who was convicted in 1979 of the murder of his pregnant wife and two daughters nine years earlier at their home in Fort Bragg, N.C. Books have been written about the crime, and a movie made about it. MacDonald blamed the attack on a seemingly improbable gang of drug-crazed hippies. Now 68 and still in prison, MacDonald is getting yet another hearing. Errol Morris has just published another book on the murders, pointing to the MacDonald prosecution’s suppression of evidence and intimidation of witnesses. Particularly the testimony of a woman who – and DNA evidence apparently confirms this – says she was in the apartment at the time of the crime. She was a drug informant known to the narcotics cops. Her boyfriend at the time also confessed he was there. A witness, a paramedic, places her near the crime scene. Her attorney then testified this week that, yes, Helena Stoeckley had indeed told him at the time that she was at the crime scene. “Now there is a mountain of evidence supporting Mr. MacDonald and debunking the case against him,” Morris writes in an opinion piece. It really was, he claims, drug-crazed hippies.

11, In the Book Review, essayist Jim Arndorfer recalls when John Steinbeck was being recruited in 1958 to write a novel about a presidential candidate who was actually a thinly-veiled  Richard Nixon. Steinbeck declined the offer, reasoning that an attack novel would have little impact on the 1960 election (Steinbeck’s favorite candidate, Adlai Stevenson, lost the Democratic nomination to JKF anyway). A memo from the affair reveals that the literary plotters believed that books carried a weight that newspapers, TV and radio couldn’t duplicate. “It retrospect,” Arndorfer writes, “it’s easy to feel superior to their short-sighted sentiment – but who could have predicted the power of 140-character messages in today’s political environment? And who can predict the media that will make Twitter seem old hat?”

12, Interesting trivia from a review of Sylvie Simmons’ I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen. Just like Johnny Cash and prisons, the singer-songwriter included stops at mental institutions during a 1970 tour of Europe.

13, The magazine’s food issue is like grocery shopping: Don’t go in there if you’re hungry. Mark Bittman offers “Bacon 25 Ways.” With tofu, with popcorn, with sage and beans. My friend Dick left some home-ground sauerkraut at the house, that’s going in bacon today.

The Critical Mass

By

On October 24, 2010

In Books, Life During Wartime, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Sports, Travel

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: Oct. 24

This morning’s coffee is an excellent Mexican. First music of the day, a continued obsession with the jazz saxophonist Ben Webster. Other pertinent noise: The dog sprawled on the couch next to me, snoring heavily. I’m smoking salmon this morning, a whopper caught in Lake Ontario by my friend Doreen. She’s allergic to salmon, and can’t eat it.

1, The first page of The Times is heavy with bad news, including an election nine days away in which the results will be determined not by issues, but by money; a report that Iran is paying, in cash, millions of dollars to a top aid to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai; and an expose revealing the “Wild West chaos” brought to Iraq and Afghanistan by the private security companies hired by the U.S.

2, In that last story, “Iraq Archive: Private Gunmen Fed Turmoil,” The Times writes of “a critical change in the way America wages war.” It is “the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.” These “presumed insurgents” are far too often innocent people, and the details of the abuses by American-hired security thugs are sickening and shameful. To avoid “messy disciplinary action,” The Times writes, after indiscriminately shooting up some civilian vehicles in one incident, one group of contractors “handed out cash to Iraqi civilians, and left.”

4, It’s complicated. The report on contractors gone wild is based on a new leak of 300,000 military documents released by WikiLeaks, the Internet whistleblowing group run by the Australian computer wizard Julian Assange. WikiLeaks was initially hailed for bringing to light many scandals, and Assange still has his admirers, including Daniel Ellsberg, who in the 1970s was both celebrated and reviled after he released The Pentagon Papers, the secret 1,000-page report on the Vietnam War. But The Times presents a portrait of Assange as a man who’s on the run, frequently changing his look, criticized both by governments and now even his former supporters, who accuse him of reveling in his new-found celebrity, evolving into an unfeeling demagogue whose release of secret documents was done without removing the names of informants who could pay with their lives.

5, Cable news’ role in the elections has reached previously unimagined levels, now becoming major players in aiding fund raising. Florida Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio declared his economic policy must be correct because “Rachel Maddow thinks it’s wrong.” Maddow, the liberal MSNBC cable host, laments “For those of us who work at MSNBC, one of the most surreal things about this particular election year has been conservative politicians’ efforts to make us part of the elections.”

6, Is this a reality that I can’t accept? “The best possible result for Obama politically is for the Republicans to gain control of both houses,” says Democratic pollster and strategist Douglas E. Schoen. Why? “The reality of presidential politics is it helps to have an enemy,” Peter Baker writes in the Week in Review section. “With Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, they shoulder responsibility for the country’s troubles. No amount of venting about George W. Bush or the filibuster rule has convinced the public otherwise. But if Republicans capture Congress, Mr. Obama will finally have a foil heading toward his own re-election battle in 2012.”

7, Sports becomes a Week in Review issue. “Is it morally defensible to watch a sport whose level of violence is demonstrably destructive?” writes Michael Sokolove. After watching one of the particularly brutal hits during last weekend’s NFL games, he says, “I immediately thought: This is how a man dies on a football field.”

8, Delaware Republican candidate for the Senate Christine O’Donnell’s utter confusion over the Constitution last week put the pollsters to work. “On the question of church-state separation, at least, a majority of Americans do seem to get the gist,” The Times writes. “The First Amendment Center poll showed that 66 percent of Americans agree with the statement that the First Amendment requires it, wherever the concept may be found. Oddly enough, however, the poll also showed that 53 percent of Americans agree with this statement: the Constitution “establishes a Christian nation.”

9, Our misinformed public is driven by deliberate deception. “Republican candidates and deep-pocketed special interests are spreading so many distortions and outright lies about health care reform that it is little wonder if voters are anxious and confused,” The Times writes in an editorial. “Voters need to know that health care reform will give all Americans real security.”

10, “President Obama, the Rodney Dangerfield of 2010, gets no respect for averting another Great Depression, for saving 3.3 million jobs with stimulus spending, or for salvaging GM and Chrysler from the junk yard,” writes columnist Frank Rich. “For Obama, the ultimate indignity is the Times/CBS poll News poll in September showing that only 8 percent of Americans know that he gave 95 of American taxpayers a tax cut.” For most Americans there has been no Change They Can Believe In. This is because, Rich writes, those who disemboweled this country economically got away with, and they’re about to go to work again.  Should the corporate-fueled Republicans regain some control in the mid-term elections, “an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.”

11, Harvey Phillips, “a Titan of the Tuba” has died. It was largely through the efforts of Phillips, an accomplished musician, that the tuba emerged from its reputation as an “orchestral clown,” as The Times puts it. Phillips commissioned or was the motivator behind more than 200 compositions written for the tuba, and once said, “I’m determined that no great composer is ever going to live out his life without composing a major work for tuba.” He paid one such composer a case of Beefeater gin for his work. Phillips would practice his own tuba playing in the back seat of the car while his wife drove, their children watching the road in order to warn, “Daddy, bump!”

12, In a Travel section story headlined “The Tricks and Trials of Traveling While Fat,” Rob Goldstone (5 feet, 7 inches, 285 pounds) reports that in China, children would run up to him and rub his belly because they thought he was “The Happy Buddha.”

13, In the Book Review, Stephanie Zucharek in general pans My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man’s Journey Deep Into the Heart of Cinematic Failure. I haven’t read the book, but I do agree with the critic’s premise. “There’s been lots of ink and oceans of pixels spilled on the question of whether the Internet has killed film criticism, but the very short answer is that serious (if unpaid) criticism has thrived on the web. The problem is that it’s all too serious.” But I find too many bumper-sticker philosophies disguised as thinking on the Web. Author Nathan Rabin’s words “probably worked beautifully in their original form, as smart on-line bonbons,” Zucharek writes. “But Rabin is better at being funny than he is at cutting to the heart of why bad movies affect us so deeply.”

14, In this political season, the Book Review devotes an astonishing amount of space to a serious overview by the fairly conservative writer Christopher Caldwell of conservative books and the somewhat liberal writer Jonathan Alter of liberal books. My conclusion? These books don’t change anyone’s mind. Whatever your political belief, you can find a book to match it, read it, and go on without having learned something you already didn’t know.

15, I used to be a sportswriter. In a review of Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry’s Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime and Complicity, reviewer Marc Tracy comments, “sports sections run absurd, character-buttressing portraits of antisocial man-children.” Indeed. That’s one reason I gave up the habit.

16, This week’s magazine is “The Women’s Empowerment Issue.” “Telling women they have reached parity,” Lisa Belkin writes of whether they feel they are equal to men in society, “is like telling an unemployed worker the recession is over. It isn’t true until it feels true.”

17, In “The Rocker’s Emasculation Issue,” Keith Richards’ new autobiography, Life, is evidently an exciting read. But one thing I didn’t expect to learn was that Mick Jagger suffers from, in Richards’ opinion, and as The Times re-phrases it, “uncertain sexual identity.”

The Critical Mass

By

On May 16, 2010

In Books, Cuisine, Music, Philosophy, Politics

I read The Sunday New York Times, so you don’t have to: May 16

1, The fascinating lead story of the day, “For Times Sq. Suspect, Long Roots of Discontent,” examines the man accused of leaving a bomb in Times Square. Faisal Shahzad was living a successful life in the United States, yet did not know how to resolve the moral, cultural, ideological and religious divide between Muslims and the West.  George Bush invaded two Muslim countries, and Shahzad, like many Muslims, knows that one of those invasions –  Iraq – was justified by a series of lies by the Bush administration. Shahzad saw the photos of Muslim men at Guantanamo, many of them swept up for no apparent reason, and now in shackles. “He understood the notion that Islam prohibits the killing of innocents,” this important story reports. But in an e-mail to friends, Shahzad wrote, “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?” Nothing will be resolved by viewing the problem through a Western lens. The story is far more complex than the cartoon version of the Muslim world that many news organizations present.

2, Las Vegas, “is trying to recover by building what it does not need,” The Times writes of a new housing boom in areas where the housing crash was loudest. Here, 9,517 new homes sit empty, another 5,800 were repossessed in the first three months of the year. Contractors suggest that homes are now more affordable after the crash, and they’re stepping into that market. Yet, “Simply put, the country already has too many houses,” The Times writes. Is this any way to run an economic recovery?

3, Confusion reins in the nomination of Elena Kagan to replace Justice John Paul Stephens in the Supreme Court. Worries are emerging among the left that she’s not as liberal a pick as they’d like.  In particular, the contentious Citizens United case in January, allowing corporations unlimited ability to contribute to political causes, is free speech; Kagan seems to side with the conservative viewpoint. Or maybe not. In the examples quoted in this story, no position seems definitive. Sometimes her academic words are at odds with her most-recent work as solicitor general. As Loyola Law School election specialist Richard L.Hansen notes, “her statements in court “were on behalf of her client and might not represent her own thinking, which might in any event have changed in the intervening 14 years.” Perhaps only Barack Obama, who we know does his homework, knows what he has here.

4, Health insurance companies are working fervently to undo Obama’s health care initiative. Consumer groups, The Times reports, “worry that their legislative victories could be undone or undercut by the rules being written by the federal government and the states.” The story notes that “One provision bars insurers from carrying out an ‘unreasonable premium increase’ unless they first submit justifications to federal and state officials. Congress did not say what is unreasonable, leaving that task to rule-writers.”

5, Bud Mahurin, U.S. fighter pilot ace, has died at age 91 in Newport Beach, Calif. Mahurin was credited with shooting down 20.75 enemy airplanes in the European and Pacific theaters  during World War II (the three-quarters reflects shared kills with other pilots).He also shot down three MIG-15s during the Korean War before he himself was downed by anti-aircraft fire, was captured and tortured, and releasd at the war’s end. “You seldom think of aerial combat – getting shot at – as fun,” he said in 2003, “but it’s a lot of fun if you’re doing the shooting.”

6, Also in the obits, K. Dun Gifford, a healthy-eating advocate who said “We need to teach people that food is glorious and you don’t need to eat a lot to be satisfied,” and Richard LaMotta, inventor of the Chipwich Ice Cream Sandwich, died within two days of each other.

7, The hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons is a man at peace: a Vegan who meditates, does yoga, rides his bike, drinks green juice and tweets his prayers.

8, The Green Hornet is due to be released in January, starring Seth Rogan. The role of Black Beauty, the Green Hornet’s legendary vehicle, is being played by 29 customized vintage Chrysler Imperials.

9, Sunday Business has gotten ahold of Ben Bernanke’s 1975 high-school yearbook photo. The now-bald future Federal Reserve chairman sports long hair and a mustache. Nor sure what that means for the future of the economy, though….

10, Feel good about that new Arizona anti-immigration law? “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped and frisked by the New York City police in 2009,” The Times writes in Week in Review, “but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.” The most-common reason for stopping people was “furtive movements.”

11, Arts & Leisure features Holland Cotter’s love letter to Emily Dickinson. But perhaps not the Dickinson most of us are casually acquainted.”At her most extreme,” he writes, “she was a terrorist:”

Had I a mighty gun

I think I’d shoot the human race

12, In the magazine, an issue otherwise dedicated to money,  suggests a recipe for Yucatan Shrimp by the Florida crime novelist Randy Wayne White, who owns a restaurant near Sanibel Island. “You will note that the shrimp are unpeeled,
writes Sam Sifton. “The communal act of peeling and eating the cooked shrimp, White says, leads to a sharing of the spirit of Sanibel itself….” Besides, most chefs will tell you that the shell adds to the flavor.

13, The Book Review examines Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. That might be all you need to know about the famous, “Man Who Never Was,” a scheme in which the British planted fake invasion documents on a corpse, leading the Germans to believe an invasion was coming to Greece, rather than Sicily. “The operation succeeded beyond wildest expectations,” writes reviewer Jennet Conant, “fooling the German high command into changing its Mediterranean defense strategy and and allowing Allied forces to conquer Sicily with limited casualties.” It all comes off like a spy novel, perhaps because much of it was concocted by Ian Fleming – who would later go on to write the James Bond novels. Fleming himself discovered the idea in an old detective novel. Regimes rise and fall on familiarity of pop culture.

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