Mac Attacked

National Review Online, July 7, 2003

Chicago, October 1989  © Andrew Stuttaford

The realization came as I chowed down on a good breakfast of egg, sliced Canadian style bacon (water added!), sweeteners (one or more of sugar, dextrose or corn syrup solids), the salts of the earth and laboratory (specifically sodiums phosphate, pyrophosphate, aluminum phosphate, erythorbate, nitrite, citrate, stearoyl-2-lactylate and good old salt), enriched (a cocktail of thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, iron and folic acid), bleached wheat flour (confusingly, wheat flour may contain malted barley flour), vital wheat gluten, trivial wheat gluten, yeast, (and, self-sufficiently, yeast nutrients — ammonium sulfate, calcium sulfate, calcium carbonate, ammonium chloride, non-calcium phosphate), partially hydrogenated (more water!) soybean oil (except when it's cottonseed), vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, corn meal, soy flour, soy lecithin, lecithin without soy, dough conditioners (an intriguing blend of calcium peroxide, mono-and diglycerides), numerous acids (fumaric, acetic, citric, sorbic and ascorbic), calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, corn starch, beta carotene, eye of newt (all right, I made that one up), cultured milk, cheese culture, unsophisticated cream, enzymes, sinister-sounding "fungal" enzymes and, a touch weirdly under the circumstances, colors and flavors just known as "artificial," all washed down with carbonated water, caramel color, more acid (phosphoric and citric this time), more sodium (saccharin — "cause[s] cancer in laboratory animals!"), "natural" flavors (and, helping nature out, potassium benzoate "to protect taste"), caffeine, potassium citrate, aspartame, and, finally, that proofreader's nightmare, dimethylpolysiloxane. McDonald's really, really wanted me to know the contents of an Egg McMuffin and a Diet Coke and, yes, there is, indeed, such a thing as too much information.

I was in a Mickey D's on a main street somewhere in northern Massachusetts. It was a bleak, blue collar, pink slip of a town, the sort of town that is more Dunkin' Donuts than Starbucks, the sort of town where someone ought to be able to find a scrap of fat and a bad for you bun without running the risk of a lecture. No such luck.

There, amid the dispirited detritus of a tarnished Golden Arches, amongst the straws, the stains, the rumpled napkins and those sad, sad sachets of tomato ketchup were some new, perky strangers, politically correct pamphlets (printed, naturally, on "acid-free recycled paper, 30% post-consumer waste") in NPR beige and Sierra Club green. McDonald's is, I learned, a "socially responsible" neighbor, busily promoting "environmentally sustainable practices" and the work of Dr. Temple Grandin, "one of the world's foremost authorities on animal behavior" (until that ugly moment at the abattoir, future happy meals need to be kept, well, happy).

And, yes, there's more. "Nutrition," the reader is told, "is a long-standing priority at McDonald's." So I should hope. The place is a restaurant after all.

Unfortunately, that is not what Mickey D's means. Nutrition is not food. Food is super-sized, fatty, and fun. It's burgers (add cheese!), fries (add salt!), hot dogs (add mustard!), and it's a barbecue in July (add beer!). Nutrition, by contrast is glum, not fun. It's subtract, not add. It's greens, not fries. Food is a chocolate shake. Nutrition is no-fat milk. Food is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Nutrition is a doctor checking your cholesterol, a bureaucrat vetting your dinner plate and a fast-food chain beginning to sweat. Most of the leaflets on display were designed to demonstrate McDonald's commitment to "balanced eating" and to help its clients with their "nutrition goals": The truly obsessed could find out more on the company's website or by dialing a special number.

Well, my nutrition goal that day was an Egg McMuffin, a choice that a disturbing number of people would find upsetting, reprehensible, and, quite probably, suicidal. For, "obesity," it is increasingly obvious, is set to be the new tobacco. The Savonarolas of self-denial have found another pleasure to wreck, and a scold of "advocates," cranks, and worrywarts has, so to speak, weighed in with relish. To take just two examples, the American Obesity Association (yes, really) is referring to obesity as an "epidemic" that is shaping up to become "the leading public health issue of the 21st Century" — and, no, they are not bragging. Meanwhile, the never knowingly under-alarmist Center for Science in the Public Interest is gleefully quoting HHS statistics showing that gluttony and sloth "contribute to" (whatever that might mean) between 310,000 to 580,000 deaths in America each year, a hungry man holocaust that's "13 times" greater than the death toll from that more familiar liberal bogeyman — the firearm.

Needless to say, attorneys too are preparing to feed at this tempting new trough. The first lawsuits have been filed, each for a Quarter Pounder (or more) of flesh. These have faced difficulties, but all the ingredients for a successful rerun of the great tobacco shakedown are clearly falling into place — the defendants (the fast-food chains) have enticingly deep pockets and their wares can be linked to health problems that come, supposedly, with a high cost to this country (around $117 billion annually according to the junk statisticians at the Centers for Disease Control) and which are, ominously, coming under scrutiny from within the (ever expanding) beltway as well as the trial bar. Naturally, none of this is blamed on the tubby "victims" themselves. Much like those unfortunate geese conscripted into the cause of  pâté de foie gras, they are said to have had little choice in what was slid down their gullets.

So, as we saw in the cigarette wars, notions of personal responsibility are either watered down — "dealing with overweight and obesity…is also a community responsibility," explained (now former) Surgeon General Satcher — or denied altogether. It's now claimed that Big Mac mavens may, like smokers, have been tricked into their unhealthy habit — all those munching and, we can be sure, litigious morons had absolutely no idea that mountains of burgers, fries, nuggets and shakes might lead them to put on a pound or two. Better still, fast food may even be, wait for it, "addictive." John Banzhaf, the "public interest" law professor who pioneered tobacco litigation, has argued that "fast foods can produce addictive effects — like nicotine — in many users; and that the chains deliberately manipulate the foods to make them far more dangerous and habit-forming than they would otherwise be."

When this sort of nonsense appears on the agenda, "the children" are never far behind. Sure enough, fast food's foes are busy pointing to the fact that the nation's tots are not so tiny any more. Across the fruited plain, tubby tykes (most of them, presumably, orphans: in this discussion we never seem to hear very much about parental responsibility for their kids' diet) are waddling their way through an "obesity epidemic" all their own. The need to save them from this peril will inevitably be used to justify both litigation and, almost certainly, intrusive and patronizing legislation — the not so thin end of a very bulky wedge. It's only a matter of time before Ronald McDonald is Joe Cameled by the calorie cops.

With pockets that aren't just deep, but super-sized, McDonald's is right to be worried. Ironically, its very success will count against it. Those golden arches are ubiquitous (millions and millions of potential litigants) and, worse, they have become a symbol of all that infuriates the anti-corporate crowd about big-business America. Anticipating the struggles to come, McDonald's France has already started to wave the white napkin, suggesting (in a paid magazine "advertorial") that customers should not visit its restaurants more than once a week. No word yet on whether Vichy water will be added to the menu.

Sterner souls on this side of the Atlantic have since disavowed this attempt at surrender, but, even in the U.S., the company's tactics look dangerously like appeasement. As the cigarette companies discovered, appeasement is unlikely to work. The leaflets displayed in that Massachusetts McDonald's are a pointless gesture — little more than drivel sprinkled on grease — and they will not do any good. The information they contain may be technically complete, if mildly insulting (most customers are quite capable of working out for themselves the purpose of different serving sizes without additional explanation), but it falls far short of the health warnings (basically, "you're doomed if you eat any of this") and other "disclosures" sought by the restaurant chain's critics, critics who will be aided by lawyers as insatiable as the pudgy plaintiffs they purport to represent.

What's more, by this and other moves (it has, for instance, recently announced the creation of an "advisory council on healthy lifestyles") the company may well be conceding, if only by implication, the core of its assailants' case — that fast-food joints have some sort of duty to guide their clients towards (to borrow McDonald's tortured language) more "healthful eating." That's a mistake, legally, politically, and intellectually. It takes the debate into territory where a burger behemoth will find it difficult to prevail: far better, instead, to render leaflets and advisory council into post-consumer waste. If diners choose to eat none too wisely, but all too well, the consequences should be their responsibility and theirs alone — and Mickey D's should say so.

McDonald's has no need to apologize for what it does best — delivering cheap, sinful, and surprisingly succulent slop to those who don't have the time, inclination, or talent to make other arrangements. And, if, despite what the sad saga of the McLean Deluxe might suggest, there really is a demand for "healthier" food under the golden arches, the logic of the marketplace will lead McDonald's to salad bar, tofu and side orders of carrots. For now, the company is stressing the healthiness of its salads, Fruit 'n Yogurt parfaits (280 calories without granola!) and Chicken McGrill (300 calories without the mayo!), but, don't worry, it has not abandoned those who prefer a fattier feast. The new bacon, egg, and cheese McGriddles (450 calories! 80 percent of your daily cholesterol, ahem, "value"!) show obvious promise and, in another exciting development, McDonald's is looking at adding more sugar to its buns (to make them toast more easily).

Now that's what I call heartening.

Area 51 Revisited

National Review Online, May 23, 2003

The White Letterbox, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

The famous "black mailbox" is, these days, white. It is battered, chipped, and covered with graffiti, but white, definitely white, not black at all — a suitable symbol for Area 51, a place where legend and reality never quite seem to match. To find it, drive north from Las Vegas into the Nevada desert, bleak and broiling at the time of my visit, blistering in the late August sun, an empty, strangely lovely place of dust devils, triple-digit temperatures, and massively overheated imaginations. Highway 93 will take you most of the way. Just past the supermarket at Ash Springs, turn left at the intersection onto that stretch of Highway 375 now officially (thank you, Governor Miller!) known as the Extraterrestrial Highway. No little green men, but a large green sign — decorated, naturally, with a couple of flying saucers — tells the visitor that this is no ordinary scenic route. This is a drive where it is wise to watch the skies as well as the road.

The mailbox itself is another 20 miles farther along. It stands, a solitary sentinel in the desert, just to the left of the highway. A dirt track heads southwest, to the mountains in the distance and, much nearer, to a far more formidable obstacle, the boundary of a vast forbidden zone: Area 51, the secret installation that some call Dreamland.

Area 51! The name follows the numbering pattern established for mapping the old nuclear-testing site that it, alarmingly, adjoins. The notoriety dates from that moment, sometime in the early 1990s, when America's interest in UFOs, never a field reserved solely for the sane, tipped over into outright mania — a mania exploited by the entertainment industry to create a series of movies and TV shows that simultaneously fed off, and fed, the narratives and obsessions of those who believed E.T. had come for real. The result was to create an echo chamber of the ludicrous, where fiction, fantasy, and (very rarely) fact bounced off one another to create ever-amplifying myth, paranoia, and pre-millennial speculation. For some, the story centered on the sweaty, delusional sexual psychodrama of all those probing, prying, prurient abductions; for others it was a blend of gearhead fantasy and conspiracy theory centered on a mysterious, lonely base baking in the Nevada sun.

Extraterrestrial Highway, August 2002  © Andrew Stuttaford

Area 51! It was a video game, a book (many, many books, actually, including Area 51, Area 51: The Reply, Area 51: The Truth, Area 51: Excalibur, Area 51: The Mission, Area 51: The Sphinx, and Area 51: The Grail), and a rap CD by the Body Snatchaz. It was the subject of sci-fi drama, numerous documentaries, frequent articles, and wild, wild rumors, all fed by tall tales and repeated sightings of lights in the sky — enigmatic, hovering, darting, pulsating, unexplained, all colors, all shapes, and, for the credulous, all meanings. It was, inevitably, a place where Mulder and Scully came calling and it was, only slightly less predictably, the base from which Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum saved the world in Independence Day.

Area 51! Depending on who you chose to believe, it was a top-secret testing ground for the U.S. Air Force, a treasure house of extraterrestrial technology, a morgue for little green (well, gray actually) corpses, or, more cheerfully, a facility (ever since a treaty signed with Eisenhower in 1954) for aliens who were still alive. More lurid still, there was talk of genetic experimentation, of ghastly unnatural cocktails of human and alien DNA, and of subterranean vats filled with body parts and other unknown horrors.

Subterranean vats filled with body parts? If that's not enough to put off uninvited visitors to Area 51, a locally produced pamphlet warns what the U.S. government will do to those who stray too close:

When you approach the boundary… there are signs on both sides of the road — Do Not Pass The Signs or you will be arrested on a charge of trespassing on the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range. The fine for a first offense is $600… You will see two tripod mounted surveillance cameras. You may also see guards in white jeep Cherokees or champagne colored Ford pick-ups watching you from nearby locations. As long as you do not violate the boundary, they have no authority to interfere with your activities. If you hike near the border — do not pass any of the orange posts that mark the boundary!

Well, that sounded like way too much trouble, the sort of challenge more suited to a fearless investigative reporter than to me. Craven and cautious, I rejoined Highway 375 and headed further west, to Rachel, Nev., home of the Little A'Le'Inn.

Little A'Le'Inn, Rachel, NV, August 2002  ©  Andrew Stuttaford

Rachel is a slight, scrappy settlement with a population of under 100 — an encampment more than a town, little more than a few trailers and a Baptist church dumped in the middle of the high desert plain. Except for the alien invasion just across the horizon, not a lot is going on in this burg. For entertainment, there's checking the readings on the radiation-monitoring station (a reminder of all those nuclear tests), hanging out at the Quik Pik convenience store, and, of course, the Little'A'Le'Inn (formerly the Oasis, Club 111, the Stage Stop, the Watering Hole, and the Rachel Bar and Grill), the Silver State's best-known intergalactic diner/motel, home of the "World Famous Alien Burger" ("served with lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, and our Special Secret Alien Sauce") and notorious epicenter of Area 51 intrigue.

The diner ("earthlings," a sign says, are "welcome" — phew!) itself is impossible to miss. Alien figures peep out through its windows, and a tow truck is parked outside — a small flying saucer hanging forlornly from its hoist. To enter, go through the door invitingly marked "Notice — Cancer & Leukemia cases… Possible Compensation Available!" (another souvenir of those pesky nuclear tests) and you will find yourself in a large, low-ceilinged dining room with a pool table, a bar, and the biggest collection of alien ephemera outside the flea markets on Jupiter.

There are rubber aliens, plastic aliens, glow-in-the-dark aliens, inflatable aliens, gray, green, purple, and orange aliens, aliens in T-shirts, an alien in a dress, and mom, pop, and junior alien all sharing a comfortable chair. The walls are lined with more — alien yo-yos, alien cigarette lighters, alien ashtrays, alien sippy cups, alien guitar frets, alien playing cards, alien beer coolers, alien beer mugs, alien sunglasses, alien jewelry, alien key rings, alien refrigerator magnets, alien postcards, alien Christmas decorations, alien baseball caps — and the T-shirts, as countless, it seems, as the stars in the sky: "Area 51 — it doesn't exist and I wasn't there."

For more dedicated enthusiasts, there are books, magazines, pamphlets, videos (yes, that old autopsy film — again), and, lining the walls, those inevitable blurred, ambiguous pictures of lights in the sky that are always a feature of places such as these. And then there are the bumper stickers praising Newt Gingrich and attacking that hopeless man from Hope.

Gingrich? Clinton? There is a sense that this is a place that time may be passing by, that the Little A'Le'Inn may be becoming the Little A'Le'Out. Back in the 1990s, Rachel was a hotbed of alien activity (or, at least, the search for alien activity), complete with a research center/trailer (close to the Quik Pik) run by one Glenn Campbell (not to be confused with Glen Campbell — one "n," Rhinestone Cowboy). The town played host to UFO seminars, UFO Friendship Campouts, UFO technicians (supposed ex-Area 51 employee Bob Lazar — worked on alien technology, saw mysterious alien writing), Ufologists, UFO tourists, and, of course, Larry King. Yes, Larry King — UFO Cover-Up? Live From Area 51. You missed it?

Rachel, Nevada, August 2002  ©  Andrew Stuttaford

But that was then. The saucers will return, doubtless, to soar again over our popular culture, but UFOs, for now, appear to be going the way of the hula hoop, and it's going to take more than Spielberg's revealingly lackluster Taken (complete with Area 51 references) to bring them back. That's not to say that Rachel's visitors have been reduced solely to the ranks of the extraterrestrial. Some humans — true believers or just the curious — are still coming to scrutinize the skies, to peer at the base, and to dodge the fearsome "cammo dudes" who guard its perimeter. Others show up just to giggle, cheerfully buying the tchotchkes that celebrate a phenomenon in which they do not really believe.

The small group of diners at the Inn was mainly European, strangers in a stranger land, laughing as they chowed down on alien burgers and surveyed the alien kitsch. They had found their alien Graceland, a desert theme park of the absurd, another piece of exuberant Americana to treasure and to mock, a spectacle impossible to imagine in their own constrained, more sober continent. Gamely, a member of the Inn's staff told her story. She had, naturally, seen those "lights in the sky." That's not so peculiar in the vicinity of an air base where new planes and other hardware are tested, but no one seemed to mind.

It's telling that Glenn Campbell has moved on. They remember him with a smile at the Quik Pik, but the self-dubbed "Psychospy" has abandoned Rachel for cyberspace. According to his website, Area 51 is now a "has-been." The Research Center "has moved on to broader issues." And so has the U.S. The saucer frenzy of the 1990s was self-indulgence for safer times, play-acted paranoia suitable for an era when the country believed it had no real enemies. Now the adversary is visible, his strength, ironically, the product not of some highly advanced technological civilization, but of something almost more alien — a primitive, theocratic fanaticism that should have been buried centuries ago. Under these circumstances, talk of an extraterrestrial menace seems embarrassingly frivolous. Besides, nowadays most people rather like the idea of secret bases.

So long as they are on our side.

Prize Specimen

National Review Online, May 7, 2003

We will never know how many Ukrainians died in Stalin's famines of the early 1930s. As Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, "No one was keeping count." Writing back in the mid- 1980s, historian Robert Conquest came up with a death toll of around six million, a calculation not so inconsistent with later research (the writers of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimated a total of four million for 1933 alone). Four million, six million, seven million, when the numbers are this grotesque does the exact figure matter? Just remember this instead:

The first family to die was the Rafalyks — father, mother and a child. Later on the Fediy family of five also perished of starvation. Then followed the families of Prokhar Lytvyn (four persons), Fedir Hontowy (three persons), Samson Fediy (three persons). The second child of the latter family was beaten to death on somebody's onion patch. Mykola and Larion Fediy died, followed by Andrew Fediy and his wife; Stefan Fediy; Anton Fediy, his wife and four children (his two other little girls survived); Boris Fediy, his wife and three children: Olanviy Fediy and his wife; Taras Fediy and his wife; Theodore Fesenko; Constantine Fesenko; Melania Fediy; Lawrenty Fediy; Peter Fediy; Eulysis Fediy and his brother Fred; Isidore Fediy, his wife and two children; Ivan Hontowy, his wife and two children; Vasyl Perch, his wife and child; Makar Fediy; Prokip Fesenko: Abraham Fediy; Ivan Skaska, his wife and eight children.Some of these people were buried in a cemetery plot; others were left lying wherever they died. For instance, Elizabeth Lukashenko died on the meadow; her remains were eaten by ravens. Others were simply dumped into any handy excavation. The remains of Lawrenty Fediy lay on the hearth of his dwelling until devoured by rats.*

And that's just one village — Fediivka, in the Poltava Province.

We will never know whether Walter Duranty, the principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R., ever visited Fediivka. Almost certainly not. What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.

As the years passed, and the extent of the famine and the other, innumerable, brutalities of Stalin's long tyranny became increasingly difficult to deny, Duranty's reputation collapsed (I wrote about this on NRO a couple of years ago), but his Pulitzer Prize has endured.

Ah, that Pulitzer Prize. In his will old Joseph Pulitzer described what the prize was designed to achieve: " The encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In 1932 the Pulitzer Board awarded Walter Duranty its prize. It's an achievement that the New York Times still celebrates. The gray lady is pleased to publish its storied Pulitzer roster in a full-page advertisement each year, and, clearly, it finds the name of Duranty as one that is still fit to print. His name is near the top of the list, an accident of chronology, but there it is, Duranty, Times man, denier of the Ukrainian genocide — proudly paraded for all to see. Interestingly, the list of prizewinners posted on the New York Times Company's website is more forthcoming: Against Duranty's name, it is noted that "other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."

Understandably enough, Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall. In a new initiative, Ukrainian groups have launched a fresh campaign designed to persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award to Duranty. The Pulitzer's nabobs do not appear to be impressed. A message dated April 29, 2003 from the board's administrator to one of the organizers of the Ukrainian campaign includes the following words:

The current Board is aware that complaints about the Duranty award have surfaced again. [The campaign's] submission…will be placed on file with others we have received. However, to date, the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.

A "different era," "different circumstances" — would that have been said, I wonder, about someone who had covered up Nazi savagery? But then, more relevantly, the Pulitzer's representative notes that Duranty's prize was awarded "for a specific set of stories in 1931," in other words, before the famine struck with its full, horrific, force. And there he has a point. The prize is designed to reward a specific piece of journalism — not a body of work. To strip Duranty of the prize on the grounds of his subsequent conduct, however disgusting it may have been, would be a retrospective change of the rules, behavior more typical of the old U.S.S.R. than today's U.S.A.

But what was that "specific set of stories?" Duranty won his prize "for [his] dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." They were, said the Pulitzer Board "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity…."

Really? As summarized by S. J. Taylor in her excellent — and appropriately titled — biography of Duranty, Stalin's Apologist, the statement with which Duranty accepted his prize gives some hint of the "sound judgment" contained in his dispatches.

"Despite present imperfections," he explained, he had come to realize there was something very good about the Soviets' "planned system of economy." And there was something more: Duranty had learned, he said, "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, who [had grown] into a really great statesman."

In truth, of course, this was simply nonsense, a distortion that, in some ways bore even less resemblance to reality than "Jimmy's World," the tale of an eight-year-old junkie that, briefly, won a Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of the Washington Post. Tragic "Jimmy" turned out not to exist. He was a concoction, a fiction, nothing more. The Post did he right thing — Cooke's prize was rapidly returned.

After 70 years the New York Times has yet to do the right thing. There is, naturally, always room for disagreement over how events are interpreted, particularly in an era of revolutionary change, but Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception, a cynical sugarcoating of the squalor of a system in which he almost certainly didn't believe. His motivation seems to have been purely opportunistic, access to the Moscow "story" for the Times and the well-paid lifestyle and the fame ("the Great Duranty" was, some said, the best-known journalist in the world) that this brought. Too much criticism of Stalin's rule and this privileged existence would end. Duranty's "Stalin" was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.

And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board to reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to the New York Times to insist that it does so.

*From an account quoted in Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow. ** On another occasion (a dinner party, ironically) that autumn Duranty talked about seven million deaths.

Turn Off, Tune Out & Drop Out: Do you know what week it is?

National Review  Online, April 23, 2003

If there’s one fashion disaster that has endured throughout the ages it is the hair shirt. There is something perverse about our species, a self-indulgent sense of guilt that makes us take rather too much delight in self-denial. Ever since the awful moment when the first caveman was hectored by the first Neanderthal nag, the killjoy has been a malign presence at our side, a preaching, prattling parasite condemning and chastising, perennially telling humanity what to do — always for our own good, naturally. The excuse for such interference used to be the Hereafter, the preservation of the immortal soul, the pitch to avoid the sulfur, fire, and brimstone. But we live in more secular times these days — and with the afterlife increasingly an afterthought, do-gooders are busily turning their attention to this life too. Health is the new holiness. Narcotics are a no-no, sex is “high risk,” boozers are losers, tobacco is a taboo, the Big Mac is a lawsuit, and, now, seemingly in a final insult, one of the last remaining pleasures, television — that flickering, fascinating window into countless different worlds, that most kindly of household appliances — is coming under savage attack.

Yes, April 21-27 is TV-Turnoff Week! Just days after televised images of toppled statues and desert heroics transfixed this nation, an organization calling itself the TV-Turnoff Network is advising us to switch off the tube for what could be a long, long week. In a press release issued, fittingly enough, on that annual hair-shirt holiday, April 15, the Network predicted that “more than seven million people will participate in over 17,000 organized Turnoffs in every state in the U.S., as well as numerous other countries.”

I don’t know about you, but there’s something about the idea of an “organized Turnoff” that sounds deeply depressing to me. A quick check of a list of the Turnoff’s supporters is enough to confirm that, despite some benign participants, its core is indeed a killjoy cabal. Signatories of a letter supporting the Turnoff Week include the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association, miscellaneous “advocacy” groups including “The Alliance for Childhood” (opposed to “test-stress” but, readers will be relieved to know, in favor of a “new national commitment to peace education”) and, inevitably, Hillary’s old chums at the Children’s Defense Fund, as well as an organization with a name — Shape up America! — that led to some unaccustomed exertion on my part: a shudder of fear as, slumped on the sofa, I hastily put down my drink and reached for the remote, desperate to find something, anything, that would push the thought of “shaping up” far from my mind.

Superficially, at least one of the points made by those who have signed that letter might seem to have some appeal: “Research demonstrates conclusively that turning off the TV boosts school performance. Federal studies show that at all grade levels, students who watch an hour or less of TV per day consistently have better reading skills than other students — and this disparity increases at higher grade levels.” Well, maybe, but after a moment of thought, it’s not hard to see that this argument muddles cause with effect. Brighter kids — or children with more actively involved parents — are far more likely than their dimmer brethren to look for intellectual excitement beyond the boob tube. The contrary notion, the idea that Jackass addicts will, once their sets have been switched off, turn to Dickens, Melville, and Hemingway for their thrills is, quite simply, absurd.

There is, of course, potential for serious discussion about how much television Americans, and particularly younger Americans, choose to watch; but that’s not what the Turnoff Taliban is really about. Look a little closer at what their supporters have to say, and it’s easy to see that their destination is Rodham County: “Watching less television also means less exposure to a wide array of antisocial behaviors, including violence, over-consumption and racial and gender stereotyping.” It’s not difficult to suspect that the Turnoff Network’s greatest objection is not to the medium, but to what they see as its message.

These folks choke over their lattes at what they call “commercialism.” In other words, they disdain the cheery excesses of American capitalism, the ceaseless, chattering parade of vulgar hucksters, relentless hustlers, and insistent ad men who play so important a part in the consumer capitalism that the Turnoff crowd so affects to despise. They look down on the greedy, grabby, gabby, glittering, energetic mess of a culture that has brought this country so much prosperity, and its people so much opportunity.

That’s an old — and familiar — form of snobbery. But these days, of course, the hair shirt comes mainly in green, and so it’s no surprise to discover that amid the alternative forms of entertainment proposed for TV-Turnoff Week is a celebration of the most dismal of all the killjoy carnivals — Earth Day (April 22). “Turn off the tube and go for a hike, help in a stream clean-up, or write a letter to a legislator about an environmental issue that’s important to you.” Help in a stream clean up?

Further suggestions carry less ideological freight and don’t, at least, involve waterproof clothing. They can, however, be just plain goofy — “Shakespeare’s birthday is traditionally observed on April 22 or April 23 (depending on your source). Take an evening and read some of his sonnets as a family, or act out a scene from a play.” Well, if it’s dad who has decided to deprive his wretched offspring of the joys of television, King Lear might be a selection to avoid. Other choices included in the Network’s list of “101 screen-free activities” include (and I’m not making this up) watching the clouds, looking at stars, and learning about native trees and flowers. And if watching the clouds, looking at stars, and studying native flora is not excitement enough, why not “make paper bag costumes and have a parade?”

As with most liberal campaigns, not only do “the children” play a prominent part in the Turnoff Network’s message, but so does a health threat — in this case, smoking’s most likely successor as national scapegoat: the pudgy menace of “obesity” currently waddling across the fruited plain and dooming us all to early, if substantial, graves.

Fear of fat already seems set to tarnish the allure of those infamous Golden Arches and may now, it seems, be used to cast a shadow over the simple pleasures of a night with Seinfeld. “More than one in four American adults is obese,” we are warned, and tiny tots, it appears, are no longer so tiny — “more than one in ten children is obese.” All is not lost, however. “Turning off the TV reduces sedentary behavior — because no other waking activity is as sedentary as watching TV — and can affect nutritional choices, as it means seeing fewer advertisements for high-fat, high sugar foods” — advertisements which we poor peons are, presumably, powerless to resist on our own.

Of course, the Turnoff is not intended to stop at a week. Those seven days are just a first step. Worse is to come. Parents are urged to “try and restrict viewing to a half-hour per day or one hour every other evening.” That’s an unnecessarily rigid approach which will not only succeed in isolating their children from much of contemporary culture — good as well as bad — but which also makes very little intellectual sense. When it comes to deciding what children should watch on TV, quality should surely be a more important measure than quantity, a notion clearly lost on an organization that, for bad measure, also recommends canceling your cable — thus banishing from the home even relatively educational programming, such as A&E and the History Channel.

And the TV-Turnoff Network even has plans for those of us who, despite all the dangers, persist with the tube. In its opinion, viewers need to be subjected to a little improving propaganda every now and then. In a recent filing with the FCC, the Network called on the Commission to “adopt a regulation that requires all TV broadcast stations to run periodic announcements throughout the broadcast week and in all dayparts [sic] reminding viewers that excessive television-viewing has negative health, academic and other consequences for children and that parents and guardians retain and should exercise their First Amendment right and ability to turn off their television sets and limit their children’s viewing time.”

That’s a pretty strange way to look at the First Amendment, but unfortunately I don’t have time to discuss it.

Buffy is on in a couple of minutes.

Spirits in the Sky

National Review Online, January 17, 2003

Their cloning techniques may (or, more likely, may not) be cutting edge, but there's nothing particularly novel about the Raelians. That's true both literally (they have been around since the 1970s) and, ahem, spiritually — the wilder realms of UFO lore have long been filled with numerous cults, creeds, and true believers in salvation from the skies.

Distinguishing between all the varieties of alien enlightenment can be confusing. To use a possibly unfortunate word, "space" does not permit a detailed survey of what is on offer, so here's a quick guide to some of the players, with a handy comparison of certain key issues to help you choose the group best suited to your needs. NRO's dedicated team of in-house sensitivity counselors insist that the word "cult," with its pejorative connotations, be avoided, so let's just say that all these people have managed, at one time or another, to attract an enthusiastic following. All claims of alien contact have been taken at face value.

Before making your choice, here are some questions you might want to ask:

Should I go for an established brand?

Undoubtedly. We have selected four for your consideration.

The grandfather of galactic goodwill was George Adamski. Highly qualified in both bunkum (he founded the "Royal Order of Tibet" — in, naturally, California), and burgers (he ran a fast-food stand), Adamski's rendezvous with destiny was in 1952, the year he first met up with the likeable Venusian, Orthon. Subsequent highlights included a trip to Saturn and a number of best-selling books. Less successful than some in his field, Adamski failed to transform his saucer sorties into a more-lasting creed, despite claims of a mysterious meeting with Pope John XXIII. Adamski died in 1965, leaving behind a rich legacy of blurry photographs, wild tales, and entertaining conspiracy theories. His memory lives on at the Adamski Foundation.

A year or so after Adamski and Orthon first exchanged small talk (via hand signals and telepathy) Englishman "Sir" George King heard a voice telling him that he was to become the "voice of the Interplanetary Parliament." King was, apparently, "shocked by the implications of this statement" but rapidly came to terms with his new role, which included contact with a "Cosmic Master" known as Aetherius, also based in Venus, but not, strangely, an acquaintance of Orthon. Not long afterwards, "Sir" George founded the Aetherius Society, probably the first UFO-based religion. It's still in existence today after almost half a century, an impressive feat — the original Star Trek only lasted three seasons.

Nearly two decades later, it was Claude Vorilhon's turn. Following an encounter with a pint-sized alien exuding "harmony and humor," Claude, a French journalist, became the prophet Rael. His disciples, the Raelians, are now said to number 55,000 — not counting clones.

Aliens have even been seen in Switzerland, a sensible country generally better known for its banks than its cranks. Despite this, at least one of its citizens, Eduard "Billy" Meier, has been chatting to extraterrestrials for years. Matters really took off, so to speak, in the mid-1970s when Semjase, a sexy siren from the Pleiades, started allowing Billy to photograph her "beamships." It wasn't long before fame and Shirley MacLaine came knocking at Meier's door. The actress went away "amazed" and she wasn't alone. Meier admirers soon formed themselves into an acronym known as FIGU, an ambitious institution dedicated to the "worldwide dissemination of the truth" — under the circumstances a possibly self-defeating enterprise.

Will my new friends ask me to commit suicide?

Probably not, but the Heaven's Gate fiasco offers some useful hints for those wishing to avoid such unwelcome requests. References to human bodies as temporary "vehicles" are a bad sign. An unhealthy interest in plastic bags, sleeping pills, and vodka is even worse. Do not accept any offers of Kool-Aid.

Morks or dorks? How cool are their aliens?

The aliens featured in this survey all predate the Model E. T. standardized in the popular imagination by Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As a result they look more like inhabitants of this planet than Spielberg has taught us to expect. Billy Meier's Semjase, tall, slender, blonde, and blue-eyed, a space chick with more than a hint of Stockholm about her, is undoubtedly the coolest in this cosmic collection, but that's not saying much. Look at the competition. Orthon (one-piece brown leisure suit, red shoes) had no style and Rael's alien (four-feet tall) had no stature. It's difficult to draw any conclusions about the elusive "Cosmic Masters" favored by the Aetherius Society. They appear to believe that they should be heard, but not seen, and clearly prefer to communicate through human intermediaries.

Did the group's founder change or otherwise enhance his name?

This seems to be essential. Claude turned into "Rael," and Eduard became "Billy," a homespun, if not particularly Swiss choice, somewhat eclipsed by the names of Billy's kids — Gilgamesha, Atlantis-Sokrates, and Methusalem. Adamski was a "professor" and "Sir" George King discovered that a knighthood was not enough. He ended his career as both a "prince" and an "archbishop."

Should I worry if the group's founder looks a little weird?

No. Would-be recruits for these groups have much more-important things to worry about. Still, it's an understandable question when confronted with pictures of Billy Meier's beard (a Jehovah/ZZ Top mix) and Rael's topknot, which functions, reportedly, as an excellent antenna for extraterrestrial communication.

They may be nuts, but are they liberal nuts?

An important question for any regular reader of NRO and the answer, regrettably, is yes. Our alien friends often come across as Left-wing Democrats, particularly in their loopy environmentalism (insert Al Gore joke of choice here), welfare largesse, pacifist leanings, and hopelessly utopian worldview. Is it only coincidence that Jimmy Carter once claimed to have seen a flying saucer?

The current tensions in the Middle East are, naturally, a focus of concern. Rael, who has had an interest in the region for many years (there were long-standing plans to build an embassy for incoming aliens near Jerusalem) is opposed to an invasion of Iraq, and, if recent commentary published by Billy Meier's FIGU is any guide, so is Semjase. The "war-waging howling American, G. W. Bush" clearly has a major P.R. problem in the Pleiades, but Dubya's support elsewhere in our solar system remains unclear. Orthon hasn't been heard from for years, but a patchy Cold War record suggests that Adamski's spaceman would not be chummy with Rummy. That's no surprise. Orthon came from Venus, not Mars.

What will be expected of me?

This can vary, but it may be more than just cash. For example, members of the Aetherius Society are often busy charging "Spiritual Energy Batteries" (don't ask) and climbing the mountains first charged with spiritual power back in the heady days of Operation Starlight.

Raelians seem to prefer mounting to mountains. Their "sensual education" ("sensual education allows us to learn to take pleasure with our organs") may be as strenuous as an Aetherian hike, but it sounds like more fun. (For more on this topic, see Any chance of a date?, below).

Will I be cloned?

It's only the Raelians who are concerned with cloning. All life on earth is, apparently, the product of genetic engineering by an alien race known as the Elohim. The Raelians want to repeat the trick, but their cloning technology is optimistic, not mandatory.

I'm interested in one of these groups, but has it ever suffered any embarrassments?

You're considering signing up with one of these groups and you are concerned about embarrassment? That's like being worried about the beard and the topknot. The answer to this question ought, of course, to be yes. These beliefs are the superstitions of a technological age. They are often attached to highly specific "scientific" claims, which have a nasty habit of being subsequently refuted. The Raelians might be about to run into this difficulty very shortly. However, such moments tend to turn out to be less of an embarrassment than might be thought. To take one analogy, many religious sects have a long tradition of forecasting the end of the world on a specific date — only to see that day pass by without apocalyptic incident. They then continue on as if nothing had happened, which indeed it hadn't.

In similar vein George Adamski was unperturbed when shown the first photographs (taken by the Soviet lunar orbiter — Luna 3) of a bleak and lifeless dark side of the moon (a place where this most curious George had earlier claimed to have seen trees, cities and snow-capped mountains). Adamski simply denounced the pictures as fakes, a subject on which he was something of an authority, and stuck to his stories of those handsome folk from Saturn, Venus and Mars. In this field, ordinary notions of embarrassment do not seem to exist.

Despite this, the Aetherius Society has been more cautious:  "People on Venus, Mars and the other planets in this solar system are living on higher vibratory planes and even if we go there we will not see anybody unless they decide to make themselves visible to us." 

Disprove that.

Any chance of a date?

That's hard to say. When it comes to sex, no sects are the same. Nineteenth Century Christianity included the Shakers (celibate) and the Oneida Community (not at all celibate). The same is certainly true in the UFO sphere. The best bet for space-age swingers? Probably the Raelians. They seem to be up for pretty much anything. This has led, naturally, to stern criticism in NRO but it may explain why the Raelians were always more successful in attracting recruits than the determinedly asexual (some devotees even chose to be castrated) Heaven's Gate.

Conclusion

Are you now bewildered, lost, and completely confused? Has your mind now been filled with useless "knowledge"? Excellent. You are now ready to make your choice.

The truth is out there.

Sex in the City

National Review Online, December 3, 2002

There's a gift shop at the entrance to New York's new Museum of Sex with "edible body chocolate," "Kama Sutra" oils, nudie pens, and books such as New York Girls, Fetish Girls, Forbidden Erotica, Strip Flips, Peek — Photographs from the Kinsey Institute, The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, and Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist — but none of this was enough for one downtown Jezebel, grumpy in Winona black as she gazed idly at pictures of Bob Flanagan's tortured form. "You'd think," she grumbled, "that there would be more here than this. There ought to be, like, you know, toys." After all the foreplay — the carding (no one under 18 allowed), the $17 admission ticket (now there's an obscenity), the bawdy, giggling anticipation, the titillating costume (all visitors are issued with a self-adhesive scarlet "X"), and the come-hither enticement (the museum's advertising features boots, spurs, and a very, very short skirt), was this a first hint that the actual Museum of Sex experience might, well, fall a little flat?

The museum, which opened in October, is located, appropriately enough, near a street corner. It's on 27th and 5th, just to the east of the old "Satan's circus," Manhattan's former Tenderloin district, in a slightly shabby building that may once have known some very shabby times: There's fevered talk that it was used as a brothel. The interior — whitewashed walls, bare floors, and (cathouse chic?) bead curtains — is almost as drab. Perhaps the austerity is designed to emphasize the seriousness of the museum's "mission": "breaking new ground in an area of human life that…museums…have previously treated at best with benign neglect. This… includes the consideration of both high and low sexual culture (in all their endlessly fascinating manifestations)…" High culture? Who cares about that? I was there for the low (in all its endlessly fascinating manifestations). The academic flummery is best seen as a disguise, camouflage for the peepshow, a scholar's gown for those too prim to be seen in a dirty gray raincoat.

But back to that "mission" — according to the museum's publicity materials, its inaugural exhibition, NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America is devoted to an investigation of "the sexual subcultures of the city's past and present, and…the means by which they have influenced the development of modern attitudes about sex and sexuality." It's an appropriately narcissistic theme for a perennially self-absorbed city (or, more accurately, borough — the references to queens in this exhibition have nothing to do with Archie Bunker's old stamping ground). It comes with a flattering subtext: Out there in the sticks, the rubes, the birds and the bees were stuck doing it the same old way until those enlightened and sophisticated Manhattan folk started spreading the news.

That said, the first part of the exhibition is dedicated to prostitution, a business that even New Yorkers cannot claim to have invented. On this topic, the museum's main emphasis is on the 19th century: its most beguiling feature an interactive display highlighting extracts from Zagat-style guides to Manhattan's whorehouses, clearly a necessity for anyone wishing to avoid the perils of locales such as 14 Mercer Street, an unsavory joint where "gentlemen are never known to call a second time."

There's more to see than hooker handbooks, of course, not least a mummified penis, a chorus girl's costume, and a skull rotted by syphilis, but the real delight lies not in curios but in absorbing the details of this lost city of sin, a Gomorrah on the Hudson that had, in its downtown "fairy resorts," a suggestion of Sodom too. To be frank, though, this evidence of Victorian vice mainly comes across as a little bland. The passing of time and large amounts of soft sepia coloring mask both its erotic force and the brutality and squalor that must have lain not so far below it. All that remains is surface strangeness, best seen in a 1890s illustration of the Bowery by night, teeming, exotic, and menacing with more than a hint of a Blade Runner streetscape about it.

When the museum's visitors arrive in those sections of the exhibition that deal with the 20th century, improved photographic techniques literally bring the picture, and the reality behind it, into far clearer focus. This is just as well if the show is to hold our attention. Age can lend fascination to the most banal of knick-knacks, but once we reach the modern era there is not much in the way of alluring artifacts for the museum to display. An old tin of Ramses may be vaguely "Egyptian," but it's not exactly the treasure of Tutankhamen. Brave attempts are made: Exhibits include some nasty-looking bondage gear, a poster for the Village People and a 1971 handbook used to instruct the police on how to identify "toilet snipes," but a showcase featuring a forlorn pile of vintage peepshow tokens is a reminder why photography has to be an essential resource for this exhibition.

But, in a museum looking to chronicle behavior at its most intimate, this becomes, paradoxically, a problem. It's simply not that often that couples bring a camera into the bedroom and, unless they are a Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, it's even more unusual for the rest of us to see the results. Every type of picture can tell a story, but when it comes to recording this area of human conduct, the paintbrush can be more effective than the lens. It's surprising how little art is included in this show. The heavy reliance on photography inevitably shifts the exhibition's balance away from the private sphere to public — or quasi-public — displays of sexuality, primarily pin-ups, pornography, and an orgy or two; interesting enough, but something of a caricature. We are shown more, but, somehow, it feels like less. It is an impression only heightened by a selection of photographs more weighted towards, shall we say, the mechanics of this show's subject matter than its broader social context. This is not history, just a vision of the past reflected in a funhouse mirror.

This doesn't always matter. That part of the exhibition concerned with New York's contribution to 1970s pornography succeeds on its own terms. As porn is never meant to be anything more than dirty pix there is no intimacy to lose. Spectacle is simply replayed as spectacle, and becomes the source of the museum's most entertaining sight — small groups of visitors earnestly clustered around monitors showing continuous loops of disco era smut. As the crowd gawped at the gropers, portable audio guides related the (forgive the phrase) blow-by-blow reminiscences of a star from that time, Vanessa del Rio — the "Latin from Manhattan," reduced, these days, to Brooklyn.

To see how a display lined with photographs can fail as a record of the history of sex, check out the installation devoted to S&M. It is redeemed only by the revelation that the ranks of the spanked received a significant boost from the arrival of refugees from Nazi Germany, a place where sadism was no fantasy. For the most part, however, this segment of the show is, ahem, dominated by pin-ups of the pinioned, the pummeled, and the trussed, posed by professionals and packaged by profiteers. These pictures tell a picaresque tale (the saga of Irving Klaw, bondage entrepreneur, cries out for a Tim Burton movie), but they are far from enlightening. They record not authenticity, but performance. On the other hand, having also glanced at the museum's small, but painful (holy urethra!), sample of the undeniably authentic Mapplethorpe oeuvre, I'm not inclined to complain too much.

When the museum turns its attention to homosexuality, the results are somewhat better. Whether it's in the bleak camera work of Thomas Painter, the Brassai of Manhattan's mid-century gay demimonde, or in plain brown envelope beefcake photos (including one of a naked Yul Brynner — the real shock is his full head of hair) from the 1940s and 1950s, pseudo-exotic, claustrophobic, and vaguely ill at ease, the impact of that era's repression is obvious. Later came the Stonewall riot (visitors can study the Village Voice's remarkable report of that "fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen") and then the Dionysian 1970s (exhibits include a board game, "Gay Weekend," featuring Scott, Billy, Mark, Glen, Terry, Ritchie, a beach, a bar, and a truck stop). Inevitably, there's also an installation designed to describe the horror of the plague years that followed.

What we are never really shown is the gradual acceptance of gays into "respectable" society, an omission typical of an exhibition that consistently confuses the extreme with the cutting edge, and also tends to neglect the mainstream by much more than the show's stated purpose would suggest. That's a distortion of the historical record even for supposedly go-ahead Gotham, and it has another disadvantage. The exaggerated emphasis on the far out, and the touch of Coney Island that it brings to this exhibition, reinforces the sense of alienation and emotional distance already implicit in viewing images of other people's sex lives. For all the low culture thrills, I left the museum lost in mild, but oddly persistent melancholy.

Post-coital depression by proxy? I doubt it. Intriguing, prurient and more than a little kitsch, the Museum of Sex is certainly worth trying but you won't need a cigarette afterwards.

Goodnight, John Boy

National Review Online, October 11, 2002

The Pax TV network promises "quality, family-friendly entertainment, free of senseless violence, explicit sex and foul language." That's one good reason for me to avoid it. Just Cause, a new show that premiered a couple of weeks ago, is another. Described by the self-proclaimed "feel good" network as a "compelling legal drama" this dreary offering is, in fact, no more than populist pabulum for the age of Enron. Promoted with the slogan "Cleaning up America…one crooked CEO at a time," Just Cause is a gimcrack morality play tailored for dunces. More ominously, it is almost certainly an early example of how the recent corporate scandals have, once again, turned bashing business into showbiz fare. The show's premiere opens in a women's prison, that familiar location for overheated fantasy, which on this occasion involves not sex (well, this is Pax), but racial harmony, pizza deliveries, benignly butch wardresses and a rendering of "I Will Survive." The occasion is the release of Alex DeMonaco (played by the marvelously named Lisa Lackey), paroled towards the end of a five-year sentence for insurance fraud. Naturally, like many of her fellow inmates, she is a "bona fide member" of the "been done wrong by a man club", a victim, not a criminal. In her case, she has taken the fall for her crooked lawyer of a husband, who has, the brute, disappeared with the loot, taking the couple's young daughter with him. In a final confirmation of this monster's wickedness, we learn that he used to wear a $3,000 suit, while poor Alex had to make do with "pantyhose with holes in them."

Alex, however, did not entirely waste her time in prison. Not only did she find true friendship amongst the salt of the cellblock, but she also managed to complete a law degree. On leaving prison, Alex works as a cleaning woman, but not for long. This very briefest of stints amongst the working poor was probably included only to establish her street credibility — her coworkers are impressed that she's a "home girl" from East L.A., who can speak Spanish. She then manages to talk herself into the offices of Hamilton Whitney III, a tony (we know that because of his name, his number, and the fact that he is the last man in America to wear a three-piece suit) San Francisco lawyer, whose firm's caseload will, after the arrival of Alex, move decidedly downscale.

As Jacqueline Zambrano ("a surfer and a Buddhist," according to a press release), the show's producer and co-creator, has explained, "We kind of feel like we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore… Our stories are going to be about corporate greed, drug companies that don't give us disclosure, the Army [not paying] for Agent Orange veterans, fast-food companies that give us breakouts of [bacteria]," a predictably shrill agenda so narrow-minded that to describe it as one-sided would be a compliment.

None of this seems to worry Hamilton Whitney III. His pleasantly profitable commercial practice (described in Pax's promotional materials as "helping rich people keep their money") will probably be wrecked by the militantly anti-business DeMonaco, but, by the end of the first episode, Alex's crusading zeal has fired up Whitney's old enthusiasm for the legal profession (apparently the practice of corporate law doesn't really count as a truly satisfactory calling) and the ex-con has become a member of his team. Perhaps casting is to blame. Whitney is played by Richard Thomas, an actor who became infamous as "John Boy" Walton, that simpering scion of a sanctimonious clan which, for all its supposedly conservative appeal, always seemed more Roosevelt than Coolidge.

Revealed as a man with a painfully clichéd social conscience, and thus, in all likelihood, a bore, the character of Whitney runs the risk, despite the best efforts of the amiable Mr. Thomas, of being too dull to watch. To spice him up a little, the show's scriptwriters have given this antiseptic attorney a racy past that is more Fox than Pax. Whitney III has three ex-wives! The problem is that, as a Casanova, the erstwhile sage of Walton's Mountain simply does not convince, and nor, for that matter, does Rebecca, the only one of his former spouses to make an appearance so far. Presumably one of the show's promised "comedic undercurrents," she's a curvy FBI agent in a Sue-Ellen Ewing power suit sashaying through her scenes in a way that reminds us yet again that the departure of a far more likeable G-woman, the restrained and classy Dana Scully, was a tragedy for the discerning viewer.

As for the series' storylines, they operate as little more than a showcase for the scriptwriters' ideological posturing. The premiere was, opportunistically but understandably enough, dedicated to financial and other shenanigans in an Enron-like corporation, Coltar, "a Bay-area energy giant." While aspects of the drama (the way in which the document shredder has become the getaway car of early twenty-first century robbery) were bang up to date, many of its characterizations were archaic caricatures, not much fresher than that old cliché of the capitalist bogeyman in his top hat and frock-coat, albeit adapted to the movie of the week sensibilities of contemporary TV.

Thus, while Enron's real-life chieftains seemed to have succeeded in maintaining at least a veneer of sophistication, the Coltar entourage includes a posse of Texan Neanderthals, complete with bolo ties, hee-haw accents, talk of executive jets, and a deplorably sexist attitude towards poor, pawed Alex, who is referred to as "Honey" and, in the ultimate display of crassness, asked to stick her "pretty finger" into the coffee "in order to sweeten it up." It's not only the bad manners that are exaggerated — Coltar's crimes are also far worse than anything now alleged about the home of that infamous crooked E.

Given Enron's current difficulties, it's difficult to become too upset when that company is parodied, even if unfairly. Suspicions, however, that the evil Coltar was being used as a device to make broader comments about the wickedness of corporate America were confirmed in the second episode of Just Cause. This saw the scriptwriters turn their attention to a far-less-deserving target: the pharmaceutical industry, a familiar punching bag for the unthinking Left. The story revolved around a rogue drug company testing its possibly dangerous products on an appropriately helpless community (the patients of a free clinic in an impoverished part of town). That's not an outlandish plot for a TV drama these days, but what marked out this episode was a series of observations by Alex that seemed to suggest that our heroine wants to see the U.S. adopt a Soviet-style medical system or, failing that, revert to the era of the apothecary and the leech.

On asking the clinic's doctor (long-haired, sincere, sympathetic) why a pharmaceutical company should want to manufacture a drug almost identical to one that is already available, Alex is told that the answer is "greed." If a company sees a competitor's product doing well, it will want to "whip up a me-too product and get a little of the action." Alex shakes her head at this disgraceful example of free market competition, mutters angrily about "capitalism at work" and looks sadly across at, you guessed it, some children. Needless to say the principal victim in this episode is also, Rodham-style, a child — of Russian immigrants, no less. Within minutes of his mother telling him about the joys of being brought up in the United States, the land of equality and democracy, the unfortunate tyke has (like, I suspect, most of the Just Cause audience) fallen into a coma. In poor Yuri's case, the grasping capitalists of the American pharmaceutical industry are to blame. Subtle, this show is not.

Other contributions by Ms. DeMonaco to the healthcare debate include misleading statistics hurled into the conversation in a way rather reminiscent of The West Wing and, in a comment on the drug companies' efforts to develop their business, the remark that "pushers aren't just on the street." There are, quite clearly, few depths to which this tawdry piece of agitprop will not sink.

So, Ms. Zambrano says that she is as mad as hell. I don't know about that, but she certainly ought to be embarrassed.

Party On

Imagine, for a moment, that some crime had taken place, an act of wrongdoing so outrageous that it gripped the attention of the nation. And suppose that the perpetrator of this crime had been the member of an ethnic minority, do you think, even for a second, that the New York Times would have set up a meeting with some genial racist to find out his reaction? Would the reporter from the New York Times have sat there, quietly nodding as he took his notes, preparing to write an article that (with, of course, the appropriate amount of ironic distance) hinted that the recent outrage might show, just perhaps, that there was something to the crackpot's theories? Well, hopefully not, but on Friday the "paper of record" published an article that, in a number of ways, was not really so different from doing just that. "Letting the Capitalists Eat Crow" by Clyde Haberman, takes the form of a chat about the recent Wall Street scandals with Jarvis Tyner, the executive vice chairman of the Communist Party USA. Tyner is a veteran activist with a lifetime of Communist politicking behind him, including a stint as the running mate to party leader Gus Hall in the 1972 U.S. presidential election (it's worth remembering that Hall, an unrepentant Stalinist, had effectively endorsed the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia only four years before) and again in 1976. I'm not sure where Comrade Tyner stands now on the Soviet rap sheet, but offered a platform for his views on capitalist criminality, he unsurprisingly jumped at the chance.

Why anyone should care about Tyner's opinions on this topic is quite beyond me. The American Communist Party is a grubby group with a shabby history. Its numbers are miniscule these days and its significance is even less. If its leadership has anything interesting at all to say, it would be to shed some light on a murky Moscow-subsidized past that includes espionage, Stalin worship, tacit support for Hitler (during that embarrassing Nazi-Soviet pact) and acquiescence in mass murder. Sadly, Mr. Haberman did not choose to raise any of this. The only reference to earlier times came from Tyner himself with his wistful references to the "radicals" of the 1960s, and, inevitably, the 1930s. Ah yes, the radicals of the 1930s, that generation of leftists who will forever be associated with the CPUSA, the Gulag groupies who added further disgrace to an already ghastly decade, creepy enthusiasts for collectivism, coercion, and revolutionary violence, the old comrades who Tyner apparently still mourns.

Worth mentioning, Clyde? But, no, Mr. Haberman would prefer to discuss the country's current economic troubles with the beaming Bolshevik. Fair enough, you might think. Having presided over the impoverishment of much of the planet, Communists know a thing or two about mismanagement. Unfortunately, the incompetence that Mr. Haberman wants to discuss is not theirs, but ours.

"Is there any greater joy," writes Haberman,

for a heart that pounds to the beat of a hammer attached to a sickle than the sight of capitalists resorting to a form of corporate hara-kiri…Thanks to the shenanigans of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the rest, the Dow Jones industrial average has fallen further in the last three months than it did in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Think about it. The boardroom brethren have walloped the stock market harder than Osama Bin Laden did.

That's the sort of simplistic analysis that could only appeal to someone with absolutely no grasp of economics, to someone like, well, a Communist. And it does. The "smiling" Jarvis Tyner's response to the crisis is "we told you so". Blithely ignoring the fact that Marxists have been "telling us so" every year since about, oh, 1848, Tyner tells us again.

The growing corruption of big business is a sign of its inability to generate profits honestly any more…People were left out in the cold. But capitalism always functioned that way. It's just gotten worse. We've got a society that's run on greed. And they've got their guys in the White House now.

Hmm, greed. There are those who hint that Tyner's old running mate Gus Hall might have had some explaining to do on that account. Rather less ascetic than his creed might suggest, greedy Gus was said to have lived in some style, even, one old comrade has claimed, going so far as keeping a stable of Arabian racehorses, a gift, it was alleged, from Mr. Brezhnev himself. Can this be true? Racehorses? Brezhnev? Now, that's what I call a story.

Alas, these tales of socialist sybaritism never come up. Readers are, instead, presented with Tyner's tired sloganeering. He believes the president's proposed crackdown on corporate crime is meaningless: Bush is "playing softball with the big guys…He's running with the big dogs and he's not going to hurt them." Yada, yada, yada. As even Haberman notes, "what else would you expect from a Communist?"

Quite, but then the journalist goes on to write, "But isn't it funny that Democrats, and more than a few Republicans, have been saying pretty much the same thing?" And so there you have it; that sly half-suggestion that maybe this repulsive old ideology is not quite so demented as it once seemed.

It is a nauseating conclusion to a distasteful piece, and it overlooks a simple, and rather obvious point: Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Sob Sisters

National Review Online, June 26, 2002

Even the trailers were a sign that I was in a strange place. Instead of the usual fare, tantalizing glimpses of fast cars, brutal murders, sinister aliens, and seething high-school passion, the movies previewed included a "mature love story" (apparently dedicated to the astonishing idea that romance is possible among the over-50s) and a multigenerational family drama (we were urged to "go ahead and cry") starring Susan Sarandon. But the sobs would not have to wait for Socialist Sue. For this was chick-flick night, a chance to discover the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a movie that is, warned the Los Angeles Times, "rich in emotional life." And moviegoers know what that means — tears, rows, mothers fighting daughters, daughters fighting mothers, hissy fits, shouting matches, and hugs, all culminating in a definitive reconciliation somewhere towards the conclusion of the final reel, often at about the time one of the key characters perishes of a terminal, but not unsightly, disease.

If that is what you are looking for, the Ya-Yas don't disappoint, except that the only person to die is the hapless (but handsome) Jack Whitman, who comes to the requisite tragic end, but relatively early in the movie. Jack is unlucky in love, and unluckier in war. He joins the air force not long after Pearl Harbor (seemingly more to impress his father than to depress Hitler) and, poor fellow, is killed before he has had much chance to enjoy his budding affair with the lovely Vivi, drama queen and lead Ya-Ya. Like Jack, Vivi (played excellently as a younger woman by Ashley Judd, and, in her old age, by a less-convincing Ellen Burstyn) never appears to get over this setback. Being dead, Jack has an excuse. Vivi does not. No matter. In this movie, self-indulgent is usually just an adjective, only a criticism when applied to those perennial symbols of boomer disdain for the older generation: drink, cigs and Feelgood-era pharmaceuticals.

Of course, a touch of the exotic always helps pull in the ladies: Just ask Fabio. In Divine Secrets this is provided by a gorgeous Louisiana setting, the perfect excuse for good music, bad behavior, ridiculous names (Siddalee!), cookery porn (crayfish!), and wild overacting (ham!). Naturally, this being the south, the past, as Faulkner once put it, is never dead; it is not even past. No one is prepared to follow the advice of another, less distinguished, southerner and simply "move on." Instead, most of the movie is dedicated, mainly through a series of flashbacks, to showing how the damaged Vivi proceeds to damage everybody else for the next six decades. Propped up only by the support of the Ya-Yas (a sorority she formed with her three closest childhood friends), pills, booze, and tobacco, Vivi is a poor wife and unsatisfactory mother. We only meet her husband, Shep, in his later years, but his weary expression is more than enough to tell the tale of a marriage that has been more for worse than for better. Old Shep has become a withdrawn, stoic figure (portrayed with dignified melancholy by James Garner) still fond of his high-maintenance Ya-Ya, but careful always to lock the door to his (separate) bedroom at night.

Vivi's dealings with her children are shown in rather more detail. The high maintenance wife was, it turns out, an even higher-maintenance mother, capable of acts of love, of cruelty, and of something that was a bit of both. As a result, her relationship with her offspring is, to say the least, tricky. Remarks by her eldest daughter, Sidda (a rather muted Sandra Bullock), in a magazine interview trigger a crisis between mother and daughter, which only the Ya-Yas can resolve. They do so by kidnapping Sidda and gradually revealing her mother's deepest, darkest, and far from divine, secret: Vivi once had a breakdown so total that she was taken away from her kids and institutionalized. Relief all round! Mom wasn't nasty after all, just nuts. A blissful Sidda reconciles with Vivi, Shep unlocks his door and Sidda decides to marry her Shep-in-waiting, Connor (a soft-spoken Irish hunk played with quiet charm by Angus MacFadyen), a man who has clearly not been studying his future in-laws' family history.

Does any of this make any sense? Not exactly. An even vaguely believable story is one of the casualties of the film's complex heritage. Divine Secrets is a bowdlerized version of Rebecca Wells's novel of the same name, which is itself a prettied-up companion to her 1992 debut, Little Altars Everywhere, and quite a lot has got lost in the process. Typical products of an era when most Americans seem to have believed that they had been molested by a close relative during childhood, these books fill in the gaps left in the movie's narrative by a creative team unwilling, presumably, to frighten off potential ticket buyers.

The books reveal that Vivi was not only badly abused by her mother (something that is hinted at in the film) but, quite probably, her father too. This complies with a basic rule of boomer fiction (fatally flawed families) and makes much more sense as a source of Vivi's later instability than the more romantic alternative put forward in the movie: that the Ya-Ya was pining for her pilot. Vivi may have been crazy about Jack, but I doubt if his death would have been enough to drive her mad. Equally, the remarkably tortured relationship between Vivi and her grown children becomes more understandable after reading that the abuse she inflicted on them was far worse than anything depicted on screen.

Not that this matters. The audience for this film is expecting two hours of lush Louisiana gush, the moviegoers' equivalent of aromatherapy, massage, and a nice long soak, and that is what they get, much of it in front of the most empathetic stretch of water since that famous Golden Pond. Those few who worry about plot details will probably have read the books, and, as we have discussed, if they haven't they will need to. As for the other characters in the movie, no one has to think too hard about them; their characters are caricatures, crudely drawn bayou nobility with the mannerisms of a clutch of drag queens. They are talking props, a Greek chorus with nothing (but too much) to say and if everyone (except calm Shep and doomed Connor) and everything in this movie seem a little overwrought, well, that's just chick-flick high-jinks. Besides, a quick look at some of Ms. Wells's original prose would suggest that understatement was never on the cards:

"If Sidda Walker had been able to witness Vivi and the Ya-Yas in the light of that summer moon in 1942, their young bodies touching, their nipples luminous in the light, she would have known she came from goddess stock. She would have known that a primal, sweet strength flowed in her mother like an underground stream, and that the same stream flowed in her. Whatever scars Vivi had inflicted with her unhinged swings between creation and devouring, she had also passed on a mighty capacity for rapture."

Oh, is there a little of that loopy feminist-pagan thing swinging around unhinged in there? You bet, but, reduced to a subtext, it is one of the few aspects of the film that is underplayed, except, that is, for a moment of total absurdity near the end: Vivi, standing in the center of a circle of flaring, blazing sparklers is shown offering up a prayer to a Virgin Mary, who, one can only hope, is kindly enough not to burst out into amazed, startled laughter. As for me, a man from Mars watching a film from Venus, it was just another reminder that rationality, logic, and a sense of proportion had long since fled this unapologetically manipulative piece of hokum. If chicks could dig a flick like this, I was ready to proclaim to the world the superior reasoning powers of my own sex. Then I remembered something:

The movies of Jerry Bruckheimer.

The Ex-Files

National Review Online, May 17, 2002 

It has been a rough couple of months for fans of 1990s television. Waifish Ally is waving goodbye, ER's noble Mark Greene has already passed beyond the help of the most dedicated trauma surgeon, and even simpering Steve from Blue's Clues has abandoned his cerulean canine in favor of a beard and a band. Sunday, though, will truly see the end of an era. With the airing of its final episode, the X-Files will x-pire. Like Samantha, Fox Mulder's abducted sister, the series will be sorely missed. Its tales of alien mayhem and spooky intrigue are a dark, twisted delight, an unreality show that took paranoia to prime time and made suspicion a star. Brilliantly written and beautifully shot, the X-Files is film noir for color TV. Chiaroscuro interiors echo themes of a world lost in the shadows of conspiracy and moral ambiguity, while the series' pale landscapes are vistas of a not-quite-normal America, a place where everything is bleached out, other than the bizarre.

And, half-lit in the gloom, or, sometimes, seen as no more than a blur, there emerges a cast of characters to savor (occasionally, given the writers' rather unhealthy interest in cannibalism, quite literally so): monsters, mutants, maniacs, murderers, mechanical cockroaches, prehistoric mites and, most frightening of all, white men in suits. But there's no need to worry too much. If they can actually manage to avoid death, disease, demons, alien bounty hunters, abduction and walking off the show, Mulder and Scully will be around to protect us.

Strangely romantic heroes in an unromantic age, this oddly matched duo search for truth in a maze of lies. The eccentric interplay between them only adds to the show's offbeat appeal. Working with the exasperating Mulder, poor Scully finds herself in an often-thankless role. Sancho Panza and Doctor Watson would feel her pain. Played by Gillian Anderson, a strikingly attractive redhead (Doctor Watson would have approved), Dana Scully is the scientist, balanced, skeptical, and altogether quite sane. None of these adjectives apply to David Duchovny's Fox Mulder, a man with the soul of Don Quixote, the beliefs of Shirley Maclaine, and the mind of Sherlock Holmes. He is clever, cranky, obsessive, and inspired. Crumpled and faintly saturnine, there is also something of Sam Spade about him, but without the booze or, usually, the broads (despite getting lucky with a trainee vampire, Mulder's love life — and death (but that's another story) — is generally confined to pornography).

The X-Files has been a critical and popular triumph. At its peak four or five years ago, the show was regularly drawing audiences of around 20 million in the U.S. and it has been broadcast in well over a hundred countries (although what they make of it in Yemen is anyone's guess). With success came spin-offs (the X-Files movie, the Lone Gunmen TV series, various X-Files novels, video games), paraphernalia (t-shirts, action figures, trading cards, an "X-Files Ken and Barbie," comic books, posters, CDs, calendars, and no fewer than six "official guides") and, of course, learned tomes (Conspiracy Culture from Kennedy to the X-Files, Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files, and a lengthy (and invaluable) section in Paul Cantor's Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization).

Launched in 1993, the series was also one of the first cyber-sensations. Its conspiratorial themes and otherworldly subject matter were at one with the weirdness of the amazing, expanding web. The brave new show and the brazen new medium echoed each other, and as the thoughts and the ideas bounced between them, rapidly amplifying and becoming ever more absurd as they did so, they helped create an intellectual climate in which the X-Files could thrive.

This new means of communication was also used to create some old-fashioned buzz. As science fiction with more than its fair share of gore, the X-Files attracted its first viewers among exactly the same 18-34 (largely male) demographic that was the source of the Internet's most enthusiastic early adopters. Word of mouth recommendation was said to be the most effective advertising. Word of web turned out to be even better. It is impossible to quantify the contribution made by the Internet to the build-up in the X-Files' audience (from an average of around seven million in the first season to the high teens of millions two years later), but the show's creators were always careful not to neglect the geeks' dank ghetto, a recognition that reached its height when they listened to cyber-feedback and made heroes out of the Lone Gunmen, three nerds whose idea of fun was "hopping on the Internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2."

However, it is not necessary to be Clyde Bruckman (the insurance salesman with the ability to predict the manner of someone's death) to realize that the X-Files would eventually have to close. The truth may still have been out there, but fewer and fewer have seemed to care. The number of viewers has fallen to around 8-9 million, and Agent Mulder hasn't been seen for weeks. Scully seems distracted and disengaged, a woman with more than autopsies on her mind, played by an actress who has now been in a period film (House of Mirth! Edith Wharton! Costumes!) and may be a tad too grand these days for little green men. And, yes, before anyone writes in, I know that aliens are gray. The more recent recruits, Agents Doggett and Reyes, are New Coke to Fox and Dana's Classic, perfectly acceptable, but not really worth the effort.

As even the makers of M*A*S*H eventually realized, no series can last forever. What was once original goes stale, innovation turns into a formula that even alien DNA cannot keep alive. While the X-Files has never been shy about repeating itself (we have seen a mutant that munches on human livers, a mutant that feasts on human fat, a mutant that is hungry for human hormones, and a mutant that browses on human brains) there comes a moment when there really is nothing else to say.

More than that, the X-Files is a product of a time that has passed. It is a relic of the Clinton years as dated as a dot-com share certificate, a stained blue dress or Kato Kaelin's reminiscences.

It's the attitude, stupid. Typical of that era, the X-Files combines credulity (too many episodes show alarming signs of a New Age "spirituality") with cynicism, irony, and a notable sense of detachment. This is a show where, for all the drama, no one seems genuinely involved — even with each other. There has clearly been an attraction between Mulder and Scully almost right from the start, but for many years they could not be bothered to do very much about it (Scully now appears to have had a child by Mulder, but that's a more complicated matter than it may first seem). Meanwhile, the underlying plot has twisted and turned, sometimes into deliberate self-mockery, sometimes into incomprehensibility, sometimes into real suspense. There are episodes that teeter between horror and comedy, while there are others (some of the most effective, interestingly enough) that are just played for laughs. This is Po-Mo Sci-Fi, a wild, self-referential, but essentially meaningless jaunt into the unknown. It is Seinfeld with flying saucers, another show, ultimately, about nothing. Nothing serious, anyway.

Nothing serious? Apart, that is, from the existence of a vast conspiracy involved, somehow (more details on Sunday?), with covering up, and perhaps assisting, the planned alien colonization of this planet. But aliens were the pet rocks of the mid-90s, and it's too soon for nostalgia. The X-Files' continuing obsession with our gray-skinned tormentors is, well, so over. The same is true of its conspiratorial premise and all those suggestions of an irrevocably untrustworthy and malevolent government. While Chris Carter, the series' creator, seems to see himself as a left-libertarian (it is not necessary to be an Earth 2 nitpicker to detect in the X-Files a worldview a little closer to that of Oliver Stone than the Cato Institute), it is not surprising that the show found a mass audience in that now bygone era, the epoch of Reno amok and the Gingrich revolution.

Of course, there's no real mystery as to why Chris Carter had to turn to aliens, the feds, and sinister "syndicates" for his dark side. As he once put it, "With the Berlin Wall down, with the global nuclear threat gone…there is growing paranoia because…there are no easy villains anymore." At the time, viewers seemed to agree, but we have since been taught that such an assumption was hopelessly, tragically wrong. With Duchovny largely absent (he'd had enough: E.T. was not really to blame), the X-Files would have been set for decline even without 9/11, but you would have to be Norm Mineta to avoid noticing that ratings fell almost 25 percent between the May 2001 season finale, and the ninth season's premiere last November. The X-Files was a show for self-indulgent, more complacent times, an entertainment for before. That is something that makes one aspect of the series' 1993 debut seem, now, eerily appropriate.

Its date — September 10.