Marcus' World

Larry Craig

My gut tells me that Idaho's senior senator Larry Craig really is gay, no matter what he says.  I felt sorry for him today as his old friends on the GOP side of the Senate aisle deserted him in droves. But  nobody wants to be associated with a gay man with the Republican primaries just months away.

Yes--Craig's story now doesn't wash, and he should have owned up to what happened in that airport restroom much earlier. But his desperation to cover this up is very telling, and quite sad.

When New Jersey's former governor Jim McGreevey came out three years ago, he had the advantage of doing so in a state with liberal views of homosexuality.  Craig has no such safe haven, in either his state or his party.  Part of the GOP success strategy in 2004 was to demonize gays,  by  stoking fears of  gay marriages taking place at a City Hall near you.  To survive as a mountain-state conservative in such a climate, Craig had to suppress much of himself.

That's my sense of it, anyway.  But let's say Craig is telling the truth, and that he pled guilty to disorderly conduct in order to avoid a journalistic witch-hunt. The fact that the mere possibility of his homosexuality caused such contortions proves the larger point. Family values have sharp edges.

Rove and Gonzales Depart

Now that the "architect" Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have resigned, the President's merry band of hand-picked toadies is dwindling. Hopefully their replacements will bring a measure of maturity and perspective to the administration in its final months.  I'm not betting on it, but anything is possible.

As Scott notes, it is deeply strange that Gonzales lied to his own spokesman about his impending resignation less than 24 hours before it happened.  Or, at least, it would be strange for most administrations, Republican or Democratic.  For the Bush Administration, petty and pointless lies are an essential part of standard operating procedure. This administration is not conservative in a meaningful sense, because it has no interest in conserving the best of American tradition. 

When the historians look back on the Bush II years, they will have to ask, "Why? How could the American people re-elect such an obviously incompetent person?" For help with this question, they would profit by reading John B. Judis's examination of how President Bush masterfully exploited our collective post-September 11 fears [log-in required].  Judis details the field of "political psychology," which has demonstrated the how impending fear of death [i.e., from another terrorist attack] causes people to choose differently than they would under normal circumstances.

Bush utilized this insight to great advantage in 2002 and 2004, relentlessly talking up the "war on terror" and scandalously conflating Osama bin Laden with Saddam Hussein.  Rove mapped out every step of this strategy, and Gonzales offered a facade of legal credibility to naked power grabs by the executive branch.  By 2006 there was finally enough distance from September 11 for the American electorate to realize they'd been manipulated and lied to.

Too little too late? Perhaps.  But, ever the optimist, I say, "better late than never."

Two-Way Streets: Helen's New Blog

Helen started a new blog focused on marketing, called Two-Way Streets. It's a new link under "Places to See," in the left column of this page.

Marketing will be her focus at the Haas School of Business for the next two years; even though classes  don't start until tomorrow, there are already several posts.  Learn more  about her goals for the blog in the About page, and keep up with it in your favorite RSS reader.  Most of  all, enjoy!

News and Notes--Orientation, Work, and the Big Lebowski

Helen's business school orientation week is drawing to a close, and classes begin Monday. Hard to believe that we've already been in Berkeley 3.5 weeks. 

Last night Helen partied with her colleagues in San Francisco, while I stayed behind and watched "The Big Lebowski" on the big screen.  It was a packed house, and most people--unlike me--had seen this cult classic many times. Eerie fact: Early in the film Jeff Bridges ("The Dude") writes a check for 69 cents on September 11, 1991.

Today was the first day in my new position at UCSF, and it went very well.  My only complaint is the commute, but I suppose we all need something to complain about. I'm looking forward to this next chapter.

Scrabulous--It's Fabulous

Bill just beat me in our three day old Facebook Scrabulous game. At first I would take hours between moves, as life intervened.  But as the game wore on I kept waiting for Bill to make his next move, so that I could respond with stunning dispatch.

I was behind badly at the beginning, before making up ground with two triple word scores.  But then--horrifyingly--I left another triple word option open. Bill entered that breach, and I was toast.

By the end it became small potatoes, as the consonants dwindled and the vowels remained. We've all been there; some things don't change in cyberspace.

Even though I lost, and was sucked in with disturbing ease, I still say: play Scrabulous--it's fabulous!

The Viet Nam Analogy for Iraq--Why It Fits

Yesterday President Bush argued that, if we pull out of Iraq too precipitously, we will leave behind a calamity reminiscent of the Cambodian genocide and Vietnamese refugee crisis that occurred after the end of the Viet Nam War. (I split "Viet Nam"  in two because this is a more accurate spelling.)

Leaving aside the fact that the President's rhetoric has moved from glorious liberation to tales of great gloom if we leave Iraq, he does have a point.  There will indeed be bedlam in Iraq whenever we leave, of a different order than we've caused by being there in the first place.

The President's implication, of course, is that if we had stayed in Viet Nam--if we had won the war, that is, in Rambo style--perfect peace would have descended upon Southeast Asia. By further implication, we're supposed to believe that this will happen in Iraq and the broader Middle East.

In both cases, the President's analysis elides a crucial point: The horrible consequences of withdrawal are precisely because of our initial actions. Unless we are prepared to remain in Iraq forever (which might be the point, according to some commentators), we will leave eventually.  Bedlam and horror will follow, sooner or later.

Flashback: The Nixon administration precipitated the Camdodian genocide, through a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia after we couldn't throw down enough bombs over the border in North Viet Nam. That cleared the way for a murderous despot named Pol Pot to rally together a ragtag band of terrorists to fight the American aggressors. He seized Phnom Penh in 1975 as we were leaving the region, and killed 20% of his population in the next few years.   [William Shawcross's Sideshow is essential reading for this topic.]

If we had stayed in Viet Nam, would we have staved off Pol Pot? Would we have even cared? Nobody can say; all we know for sure is that our actions led to his rule.

Likewise, we've stirred up an always simmering sectarian hornet's nest in Iraq. Car bombings and other atrocities are now the stuff of daily life; we've replaced the horror of Saddam Hussein with the horror of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Maybe the President is right that we can't leave right away, but he's wrong to paint us as saviors.  The Viet Nam analogy fits, but not for the reason he claims.

Robert Reich Sighting in Berkeley

Maybe Berkeley is more like Washington DC than New York City. Or maybe I'm just a political nerd.

This afternoon I took in a matinee performance of Becoming Jane; it was decent, until succumbing to the Hollywood need to tie everything in a bow at the end.

But you can find the reviews yourself. Of note is what happened afterward. I left the theater to observe Robert Reich--Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, co-founder of The American Prospect magazine, and Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley--speaking with his wife in the lobby.  He's very short, something I did not realize when I heard him speak at Politics and Prose in Washington DC several years ago. 

I felt like exclaiming, "I like your books and NPR commentaries! Once I heard you read at Politics and Prose!!" But that seemed rude, since he was headed to the men's room.

So I quietly went on my way, basking in the glow of my first Berkeley celebrity sighting.

Gumball Capital

On Saturday I attended the 4th Annual Craig's List Foundation Non-profit Boot Camp, on the campus of UC Berkeley. The best outcome of the day was discovering Gumball Capital, a microfinance social equity firm founded by students at Stanford earlier this year.

Microfinance involves giving modest loans to budding entrepreneurs in developing countries, who use the funds to grow their businesses.  97% of people who receive such a loan--who are not eligible for more traditional loans, due to lack of a credit history--repay it, after putting it to good use. Microfinance received a huge boost in cultural awareness last year, when Muhammad Yunus, the godfather of the movement, won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Stanford students formed Gumball Capital to raise awareness and funds for microfinance on campus, and ended up winning Stanford's Entrepreneurship Week Challenge in March 2007.  To date, Gumball Capital has made loans to small businesspeople in 21 countries. They also support the work of established microfinance organizations.

With these achievements under their belts, Gumball is now sponsoring a well-organized nationwide challenge to enable college students across the country to fight global poverty.

Perhaps it is true that microfinance is a "flavor of the moment" in poverty reduction.  The loans certainly help the entrepreneurs who receive them, but do not fully address the underlying causes of widespread poverty.  Then again, every little bit helps--as long as we're careful not to oversell the benefits of microfinance, we should acknowledge its beneficial effects. 

On that note, bravo to the students of Gumball Capital for making such a positive difference.

Slowly Inching My Way Toward Web 2.0

Bill has made a big splash on Facebook this weekend; he's a late entrant, so he's making up for lost time.

One thing Bill discovered is the ability to import blog posts to your Facebook profile, as a note. So just now I imported the last 10 posts.  Some people read this blog faithfully (thank you!), while others are friends on Facebook but don't read the blog.

So I'm trying for a harmonic convergence between two worlds. Or something like that. At any rate, it should go more smoothly than an awkward dinner party where different worlds collide.

The Gutenberg Elegies

A few days ago I finished reading The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts's paean to the lost art of reading deeply in a world that is increasingly online. He published it in 1994, before e-mail, instant and text messaging had become commonplace, before many Americans had heard of the Internet, and several years before Google took the Web by storm.  Reading it in 2007, the book often has the feel of prophecy.

His subtitle--"the fate of reading in  an electronic age"--reveals the high stakes Birkerts places on this topic. It's not a light read, and he sometimes veers off course into unconnected autobiographical digressions about his own reading life. But on the whole, it is certainly worth reading...without any distractions, after you've allowed yourself to stop working on a computer or any other electronic device.

Distractions are the problem today--with so many buzzing gadgets, so many blogs to read (!) and web pages to visit, we usually read quickly rather than deeply.  I often find it difficult to sink fully into a good book, because I want to see the latest news from the Times or to check my email.

I'm not advocating putting the genie back in the bottle, which would be a futile quest in any case. The level of worldwide connectivity that the Web provides (at least for those who can access it) is amazing. For example, over the last two weeks I've worked on an editorial with two other people exclusively by email--I only know one of the authors, who knows both of us and brought us all together. This type of work was much harder in 1994.

So let's make good use of all of our communications and collaborations tools--no looking back.  But we should also find time to shut down, turn off, and curl up with a good book. Offline pleasures still have their virtues.