Areas of Unrest

5 October 2000 - Opinions On Everything

QOTD: "Sometimes I think war is G-d's way of teaching us geography." -Paul Rodriguez

Reading: Bill Fitzhugh, Cross Dressing

Listening to: Nomad, Songman

I have a burning desire to talk about a few controversial subjects, but I don't really feel like arguing with my friends. So where better to do it than here? But, first, a couple of news items.

My brother sent me email the other day asking me questions about Los Angeles. It seems a recruiter had contacted him about a possible position at U.S.C. (for non-locals, that's the University of Southern California, popularly known around my circles as either the University of Spoiled Children or the University of Second Choice, though their academic reputation is actually improving quite a bit and they are well-respected in some fields). He was asking about things like how bad the neighborhood is and what the cost of living in L.A. is like. To the former, I could simply point out that it's a very high crime area but the campus is heavily patrolled. In the case of the latter, he said he'd like a 2000 square foot house, with 4 to 5 bedrooms, for under $200K. Once I pulled myself off the floor after my fit of laughter, I directed him to listings of real estate prices. It seems the recruiter had a very nebulous idea of geography and had mentioned places to him that are a good two hour drive away during commute hours. In the end, Elliot concluded his life style here would be no better than in San Jose. So it seems like the Nadel Exclusion Zone won't be violated. (The Nadel Exclusion Zone is the concept that bad things happen if any two members of my family live within about 100 miles of one another. Its origin is the distance that would inhibit Mom from dropping in on short notice and was originally intended to protect me from her realization of how bad my housekeeping is. We have expanded on the concept over the years and now believe that violating it can cause floods, fires, earthquakes, swarms of locusts, etc.. So the upshot is that I won't have to move to Colorado.)

My other news item is that I got another nice "attagirl" today. Not just a simple bonus check, but an actual out-of-cycle raise! My more cynical side interprets this as my having been underpaid all along, but I'm still happy.

As for controversy, let's start with RU-486. There's something I think has been missed in all the reporting I've heard. Namely, abortion is legal in the United States. The function of the Food and Drug Administration is to determine if drugs are safe and effective, not to enact legislation. So, as I see it, they didn't have a choice in the approval process. If you oppose abortion, work to change the law. I'll disagree with you there, but I'll respect your free speech. But don't try to politicize the medical decisions.

By the way, I'm also skeptical of the argument that the legalization of RU-486 will cause some women to be careless about contraception. "Morning-after" pills have been available for a long time without any evidence that they're used much by anyone other than scared adolescents who hadn't planned ahead but have a modicum of common sense, rape victims, and women who've had condoms break. Does it help anyone to think of RU-486 as, essentially, a better "morning-after" pill?

Moving from sex to politics, I'll ignore the contents of the debates themselves and stick to the subject of who should be invited to participate in them. I'm going to take a hugely unpopular stance here and say that I think the two party system is one of the great strengths of American politics. We get a lot more accomplished by forcing compromise between two entities with significant power than we would by having to pander to every weird little faction with more than a handful of vocal supporters. Having said that, I fully recognize that the two parties we have right now are not the same two parties we started with and that a third party can rise to enough significance to supplant one of the established ones. I think it's generally better for that to start at the local level, though. Instead, we have a few parties that are significant in one state and have made no attempts to spread to other states (e.g. the Liberal and Conservative parties in New York, which have both been powerful enough at one time or another to have won Senate seats, although they more often endorse Democrats and Republicans in the big races than run their own candidates). And everybody wants to be president.

Where I'm going with this is that I think it's perfectly reasonable for there to be some minimum expectations on candidates before siccing them on the public in the debates. I also think the debates have become too important in the public eye. They're overemphasized as a way to find out what candidate's positions are. I prefer to look at their recent records - how they voted on major issues, what policies they've supported in their current positions, etc.. I'm also concerned that the debates have tended to center on things that the president has little control over. No matter what candidates say, local school boards have more to do with the quality of local education than the president does. No matter what candidates say, the crime rate in your city has more to do with whether your local authorities have provided adequate policing than what the president does. The most important issues determining who you should vote for in this election are foreign policy and the composition of the Supreme Court. Those are things where the president is directly involved. (And, I'd add that, in general, the quality of a president's appointees are one of the main ways of judging how good a job a president has done. Part of the reason for my admiration of Woodrow Wilson, for example, is his selection of Robert Lansing as Secretary of State.)

I will also add, just to stir the pot further, that despite my preference for the two party system, I have voted for a third party candidate. (It was John Anderson in 1980. And he's also the reason I was once a Republican for a day, which has to do with the way primaries worked in Massachusetts.) But foreign policy is a reason why I will never vote for Ralph Nader. His claims that NAFTA has cost jobs, for example, are simply wrong. The unemployment rates are lower now than pre-NAFTA. Nader's economic isolationism would cripple business and sink the entire world, not just the U.S. into depression. His past record also suggests that he would try to completely cripple scientific research in this country. (Or even more than he's already tried, with assorted particularly ridiculous liability lawsuits.)

Let's see, I've tackled sex and politics, so that must leave religion. I am not about to discuss the Mideast in depth and I will admit that it's a subject that I'm biased about. (My opinion, in brief, is that there is already a Palestinian state and it's called Jordan. There's a reason that the 1948 act which created Israel was called the Partition Act.) But I am very concerned about the media coverage of the latest crisis in Israel. How many people saw the AP picture that was captioned as being a Palestinian victim at the Temple Mount but later turned out to really be an American student who was pulled from a taxi and stabbed in a completely different part of Jerusalem? (The story broke because the guy's mother recognized him in the picture and was outraged.) How many times have you heard reporters say that Sharon's visit to the site triggered the violence when the rock throwing started a day later? (I think it was provocative but it's like the question of what started World War I. Nobody would have cared that a Serbian nobleman was assassinated if the Germans hadn't been looking for an excuse to start a war to start with.) I've kept a mental count on NPR and their ratio of Palestinians interviewed versus Israelis interviewed is roughly ten to one so far. (I don't pretend this is scientific, though, as I only listen to NPR for about an hour a day.) And exactly why does anybody believe that rocks being thrown at people, particularly from above, are not weapons that it's valid to defend against?

But I didn't really get to the religion part yet. There are at least three things that I haven't heard mentioned in any of the coverage yet. The first is that Israeli law actually prohibits Jews from going to most of the Temple Mount. The reason is that nobody knows exactly where the Holy of Holies (a part of the Temple) was, and the religious parties pushed through this law to keep Jews from inadvertently desecrating the site. The second is that until 1967 and the recapture of Jerusalem, Jews were denied access to the Kotel (the Western Wall), which is the holiest remaining site in Judaism. Finally, the Dome of the Rock (and Jerusalem, in general) holds nowhere near the same status in Islam as the Kotel holds in Judaism. One would think that there's a drug given to all journalism students which blots out anything they might ever have heard of Mecca and Medina.

Just in case there is anybody out there who isn't already fuming at me, I'll mention Napster. This is an issue on which I've actually reversed my position this week. I'm usually an ardent defender of copyright (and I'll admit that's out of enlightened self-interest). But I heard the argument that the defense is using. That argument relies on the American Home Recording Act, which explicitly allows people to share home recordings as long as no money changes hands. The music industry is arguing that the act was never intended to apply to anything of the scale that Napster makes possible. Which may well be true, but the act doesn't say that and you can't nullify a law (judicially speaking - you can, of course, write new lews to change the existing one) because the people who wrote it couldn't imagine its application.

Special Offer:

Ever wonder about the music I say I'm listening to? Can't hear Snakefarm or Old Blind Dogs or Pierre Bensusan on your local radio station? Well, here's your chance. In the spirit of musical evangelism I've made a mix tape of music I referred to in my margin notes over the past year. I also happen to have another mix tape handy, mostly of World Beat stuff, that I'd made for another purpose. All you have to do is send me email with your address, telling me if you want the AOU41 tape or the Worlds of Unrest tape (or both) before the end of October 2000. (The links are to playlists.) Nothing is required in return, beyond your willingness to listen. If I decide this was a successful experiment, I'll make it an annual event.