Shots In The Dark

It's The Aristocrats, of course. An entire movie dedicated to one really nasty, vulgar, disgusting, scatological joke. Which begins with some rough approximation of the line, "So this guy walks into a talent agent's office," and ends with the line, "The Aristocrats!", and inbetween is filled with every perverse and probably illegal act that you can think of. One thing's for sure: comedians will never run out of terms for bodily fluids and orifices.

It is hilarious. And in a strange way, it is heartwarming. There is more genuine laughter in this movie—the people in it, not just the audience—than you'll see in a lifetime of sitcoms. Much of the film is really about the tribe that is comedians...how they all know each other, they respect each other, and they all know this one joke, passed down through the ages. No matter how slick they get, how much money they make, they remember where they came from, and the beauty and art in the telling of one, simple but not so simple, joke. It's fitting that the best telling of the joke is done by squeaky-clean Bob Saget, whom middle-America knows from the old sitcom "Full House" and, I think, "America's Funniest Home Videos." His telling of the joke is genius—there's really no other word for it. He interrupts the telling to go out and "entertain people"—it looks like he's got a stand-up gig to do—and you somehow feel that you've been privy to something much funnier than whatever he's about to do for that other audience.

Then there's Gilbert Gotfried, telling the joke to make people laugh and raise money weeks after 9/11....Kevin Pollack imitating Christopher Walken doing the joke...Drew Carey describing his little flourish at the end in a way that can only be described as sweet...Andy Richter telling the joke with his infant...and when the infant doesn't laugh at the punchline, he pushes it a little farther, as if to say, "Oh, yeah? That didn't get you laughing? All right, try this!"

The Aristocrats is about a joke, but it's really a movie about a group of people who are very, very good at making the rest of us laugh, and the joy we all get when they say the things that we dare not.

Conrad Harper's resignation gets play in the Boston Globe and New York Times. The Globe story is better, the Times story more important.

The Globe story is better because it adds new material to what the Crimson reported yesterday. Reporter Marcella Bombardieri finds a source who is "close to Harvard's leadership" and "familiar with the discussions over Harper's resignation" who provides these insights:

"...Harper was displeased with Summers' criticism of celebrity professor Cornel West, which prompted West to leave Harvard. Harper was also upset, according to the source, both about Summers' comments on women in January and his remarks about Native American history at a conference this past fall. In that speech, Summers contended that many more Native Americans were killed by disease than by Europeans, and spoke of the 'vast majority of suffering' as a 'concidence that was a consequence' of assimilation and 'nobody's plan.'"

The Times story is more important because it's in the Times, which people all around the country read. When the Times says that a story's important, then Harvard alums take it seriously.

Some thoughts of my own.

You'll notice that Harper says "it's up to Harvard" to release his resignation letter. That's different than saying that it shouldn't be made public. Harper clearly wants his grievances to come out. Fascinating; he must really be pissed. This move puts some pressure on Summers, et al, to release the letter—just as happened with the transcript of his remarks at the women-in-science conference.

The question of the Corporation and its composition now becomes so urgent for Harvard, it has risen to the level of a crisis. In four years, Larry Summers will have appointed five of the six Corporation members other than himself. The last holdout is Jamie Houghton, who is not young, and surely can't enjoy having to stick up for Summers every time some new controversy arises.

(And yet, Houghton, the Harvard loyalist, does it. Notice his quote about Harper's resignation: "I regret that he has chosen, in reflecting on recent matters at the university, to bring his service to a close." This we can classify as spin. That clause—"in reflecting on recent matters at the university"—is a subtle dig, an attempt to suggest that this is the last fall-out from the women-in-science fiasco, and nothing more...when in fact Harper's dissatisfaction with Summers dates back at least to the Cornel West matter in the fall of 2001. Houghton is playing damage control here...and in the process, he is damaging his own reputation and credibility. Sad for an old man nearing the end of his career to compromise himself for a younger man who probably doesn't deserve it.)

(It is possible that if Houghton were really the Harvard loyalist, he would organize Larry Summer's ouster...but then, he's outnumbered, isn't he?)

The question becomes, what if everyone wanted to fire Larry Summers...except the people who have the power to do it? Because Larry Summers appointed them....

The number of black people employed by Harvard continues to shrink.

Wait. Stop. That was sensational. True, but sensational. Let me start over.

Conrad Harper, the only African-American member of the Harvard Corporation in its 355-year history, has just resigned from that body, telling the Harvard Crimson that he "could no longer support President Summers."

The Corporation, you will recall, is Harvard's seven-member (including President Summers) governing body. It meets about once a month, in secret, and is notoriously tight-lipped. It happens to be the body which chose Larry Summers to be president—although Harper was rumored to have preferred Lee Bollinger, then the president of the University of Michigan and now the president of Columbia.

Since Summers was chosen, four members of the Corporation have retired from it, and Summers has handpicked replacements who are, in background and interest and perspective, rather like him.

Harper has apparently never been a fan of Summers. He was said to be furious about Cornel West's departure for Princeton, and very concerned that Skip Gates would also leave. This spring, after the faculty vote of no-confidence in Summers, Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton released a letter saying that the Corporation supported Summers. Some eyebrows were raised over the fact that Houghton was the only signatory; it was whispered that Harper had refused to sign.

The quote that he gave—he "could no longer support President Summers"—adds some circumstantial evidence to that theory.

While this event may seem like inside baseball to some, to the Harvard community, it's a very big deal. I'm not aware of any precedent—not, at least, in Harvard's modern history. (Larry Summers is creating all sorts of unfortunate precedents at Harvard: first president given a vote of no-confidence, first president to become a national object of controversy, etc.)

Conrad Harper is a smart, highly respected man, a member of the New York legal establishment, a member of the United States establishment. He's no fire-breathing radical, and he wouldn't take this step lightly. He clearly wants it to have some impact.

This should be interesting.....

Anyone else watch the premiere of Steven Bochco's new FX show, "Over There," about the war in Iraq? It's been controversial, as the idea of putting on a dramatized tv series about a war that's still in progress makes some people (myself included) uneasy.

My uneasiness is not completely quelled by watching last night's episode, in which a group of rookie soldiers tries not to get killed during its first week in Iraq. There are some awkwardly Hollywood moments in the episode, such as when the African-American recruit named Angel composes a song that just happens to be the show's theme song. (And not a particularly good one, either—it sounds like a beer ad.)

But still, there were moments when we saw a side of the war that we don't see on the nightly news. At one point, a female soldier is nearly shot when she's trying to take a nighttime crap in the desert. Not pretty, but I'm sure that this is how many of the deaths in Iraq come—in the middle of the most mundane acts, the combination of the banal and the horrific.

At episode's end, a US truck drives over a roadside bomb, and a soldier has his leg nearly blown off; another soldier tries to hold it together as the wounded man is lifted onto a stretcher. The agonized cries of the wounded man are truly haunting.

Who knows? In a culture where so many prefer reality tv to reality, and where the Bush administration won't allow photographers to take pictures of coffins coming home from Iraq, maybe it will take a fictional TV series for people to start realizing just how terrible war is—especially when it's based on lies.

Arianna Huffington presents a creepily plausible scenario about Judith Miller's role in "Plamegate," as the Huffington Post likes to call it.

Short version: Miller was so pro-war that she's the one who told Scooter Libby and Karl Rove of Valerie Plame's CIA identity, in order to discredit ambassador Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, who was writing anti-war editorials in the pages of Miller's own newspaper.....

Which, if true, would make me recant all the nice things I've previously said about Judith Miller's principled stand on sourcing. More important, it would just be appalling—terrible for journalism, terrible for the Times.

Is it possible? I think so. I once saw Judith Miller speak about the war in Iraq, and was impressed by her passionate hatred of Saddam Hussein's regime—this was a subject about which she clearly had no objectivity. Of course, you can understand why. But her cold fury did seem to have affected her ability to report on the war without sounding boosterish. At one point, describing her status as an embedded correspondent with a group of soldiers, she described American soldiers in Iraq using the first person plural....

Now Senate Democrats are wondering whether John Bolton lied when he vowed that he was not interviewed by the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame matter.

Let's consider the group of people now of interest in the CIA agent's outing: John Bolton, Ari Fleischer, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby...and let's not forget Bob Novak, the journalist who started it all.

Strikes me that, as you might expect from a nasty piece of work, this is a nasty group of people. It says something about President Bush that, although he can come across as genial and likeable, he surrounds himself with a bunch of hitmen, and their court scribe, Bob Novak....

Like clockwork, every winter I get laid out with a nasty cold, and like clockwork, all my earthy, Brooklyn-based friends inform me that, although I should have taken echinacea the second I felt a twinge of illness coming on, it's not too late. I know they mean well, but it's kind of annoying. So imagine my delight—immature, I know, but still delight—to discover that I haven't missed a thing, and echinacea is nothing more than snake oil....

When Eric Alterman needed a new assistant, he sent around the following e-mail:

"Seconds ago, I received two weeks’ notice from my senior research assistant [RB: Does this mean that Alterman also has a junior research assistant? Or is he just being pretentious?] who works somewhere between half and full time for me, doing mostly historical research for my books, but also a bit of clerical work and helps me a bit with planning my teaching, writing and speaking schedules. I’d really like to have someone in place by the time he’s gone. If you are interested, please apply ASAP to [xxx@AOL.com], but do not send me your resume as an attachment. I won’t open it. Sorry I can only reply to those emails I want to pursue. If you don’t hear from me, it’s a “no.” Please apply only if:

a) You have at least a master’s degree in American history or a closely related field like American studies, or, you have at least two years experience as historical researcher or editor or as a particularly impressive intellectually-oriented journalist on say, a Matt Yglesias or SARAH WILDMAN level (which means I should already be acquainted with your work).

b) You already live, or will be living, in or around New York City two weeks from today.

c) You can make a commitment to work 20-40 hours a week at least until Labor Day

d) You are independent, efficient, grown-up, well-organized, and discrete [sic]."

What a great job! So good, you don't even have to mention pay. Hard to believe the other guy quit....

Red Sox pitcher Matt Clement got hit in the head by a line drive last night. He was hit so hard, the ball bounced off his head all the way into left field, where it was played by left fielder Manny Ramirez.

The picture alone of this incident is disturbing.....

I don't want Clement, one of the Sox's pleasant surprises this season, to win any more games, but not for this reason. Here's hoping that he's okay.

Two teenage boys, one 18 and one younger, have been executed in Iran because they allegedly had sex with each other. It's big news all around the world...except here. Would it be too much for the White House to voice its displeasure?

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Center for Science in the Public Interest is calling for a ban on beer advertising at NCAA events.

"The NCAA is the beer industry’s pied piper among children," said George A. Hacker, director of the alcohol-policies project at CSPI.

Uh-huh. And college students would never drink beer if they didn't see it advertised during basketball games.

CSPI is generally a good watchdog group, but they do tend to the puritanical. Wouldn't it be nice if they, and the rest of the country, suggested instead that young people learn that there's nothing wrong with a beer or two, as long as they drink responsibly? A beer or a glass of wine at dinner isn't going to kill an 18-year-old. (No, leave that to insurgents in Iraq. I still don't get the whole, you're allowed to join the army and kill people, but you can't drink a beer afterward, thing...)

Of course, three or four beers, followed by a quick drive down the road, might kill you, and some other people too. (Especially if you're driving an SUV.) But one beer does not invariably lead to three.

At the moment, this country says to young people, don't touch a drop of alcohol till you're 21, and then, boom, go crazy. Wouldn't a more gradual, common-sensical approach work better?

Back in the early '80s, John Roberts, as an assistant to attorney general William French Smith, was an advocate of a restrained federal government. In one August 1982 memo, he endorsed a limited view of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal aid. According to the Times, Roberts wrote, "Under Title IX, federal investigators cannot rummage willy-nilly through institutions but can only go as far as the federal funds go."

Well, times have changed, and now the Republican Party has become the party of big government, in everything from spending to domestic security to education. One specific area is the Solomon Amendment, which would allow the government to sever federal aid to educational institutions that ban military recruiting—not just the part of the institution that bans the recruiting (say, a law school), and not just the aid related to the military. The Clinton administration didn't enforce this law; the Bush administration is enforcing it.

Given Roberts' past position on Title IX, I'd like to hear a Judiciary Committee senator ask him whether he now thinks that the Solomon Amendment allows the government "to rummage willy-nilly through institutions," or whether the government's reach "can only go as far as the federal funds go." It seems only fair.

Have you seen the new "Chrysler Group" ads in which Lee Iacocca (or some diminutive relative of his) intones, "If you can find a better car, buy it"?

What a load of crap.

I remember back in the '80s, when Iacocca, now 80, first used that line in commercials. At the time, he was hawking Chrysler's infamous line of K-cars, perhaps the biggest pieces of junk ever to set wheel to the road. (If you don't remember them, does this help? Chrysler LeBaron, Dodge Aries, and Plymouth Reliant.)

Perhaps out of sheer chutzpah, those ads actually worked at the time; people went out and bought Chryslers. Will they again? It's hard to imagine. Chryslers' cars have improved since that time, but still...if I could find a better car than a Chrysler? To do that, all I'd have to do is look at any car made by Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Subaru, and so on.

I was thinking of this as I read an article in today's Times about how Sony has been caught in a payola scandal. Apparently Sony was giving away computers, trips, sneakers and other stuff to disc jockeys in exchange for playing songs by Sony artists. Now you know why Good Charlotte and Celine Dion have careers.

What's the connection? In both instances, I think, capitalism isn't working. Chrysler is using ads that are literally incredible; Sony is trying to shove bad musicians down people's throats. (Well, ears, really.) The result is that consumers, who are more sophisticated than they were back during Iacocca's first time around, may actually shun Chrysler cars more than they do now; and music fans, bored of formulaic radio, start stealing music off the Internet, listening to webcasts and Podcasts, and just generally rejecting all the crap that the music biz shovels out to the public.

Here's a particular irony about the Sony story: Apparently it's totally fine for Sony to break the law to get you to hear their music...but it's totally, totally wrong for consumers to break the law to try to hear/download music that they actually like....

You have to love any newspaper article beginning thusly: "It's time for Harvard University President Larry Summers to pick a fight."

Writing in the Boston Herald, Virginia Buckingham argues that Summers has dropped the ball by failing to push for the reinstitution of ROTC on the Harvard campus. (At the moment, Harvard students who enroll in ROTC travel to MIT for their training.)

Faced with recruiting shortfalls, the military needs officers, Buckingham says. And Harvard students lose out on a life-changing patriotic experience by not supporting the military.

Buckingham's article is both right and wrong. It's wrong in the sense that Summers has in the past pushed for the restoration of ROTC at Harvard, particularly in the weeks after 9/11. She's right in that Summers, after getting lots of credit for his rhetoric from American conservatives never actually did anything to bring ROTC back. Doing so would require a vote of the faculty, and Summers has never chosen to expend his political capital on such a vote. Accurately or not, that decision has created the appearance that Summers wants to get credit for talking up military service without raising a sweat on its behalf.

I'm of two minds about this. The reason Harvard doesn't have its own ROTC program is because of the military's anti-gay discrimination; Harvard bans recruitment on its campus by any employer that discriminates. I think that's a principled stand, and I support it.

At the same time, I do think that there's real value in military service, and that the exclusion of the military does separate Harvard from the national mainstream in some unfortunate ways. It also exposes Harvard to charges of being unpatriotic, which, in my opinion, it is not.

There is, of course, an easy solution. The military has a severe recruiting shortage; the military bans gays from service. Hmmm.

But since the military doesn't seem likely to change its policy, what to do? I honestly don't have an answer for that. Do you?

Ever notice how, every time you read about a dramatic car crash, there's an SUV involved? I have. And once you start to notice, the pattern is remarkable. People can't stop them, can't turn them, can't slow them down in time, can't brake without skidding or flipping. And when someone does lose control in an SUV—or drive drunk into someone else—the damage is all the more devastating because of SUVs' enormous size and weight.

The irony here, of course, is that people buy SUVs because they feel safer in them. A double irony, really. They're not safer, because they're more likely to lose control and crash. And the people they crash into are invariably more likely to be wounded or killed than if they were hit by, say, a Honda Accord or Volkswagen Jetta.

So I think I'll start pointing out some of these incidents here on the blog.

Like this one: Infant Clings to Life after Crash by Repeat Offender. It's upsetting on many levels. A guy driving an SUV hit a pregnant woman in an SUV. The guy had repeat convictions for driving while on drugs, and had had his license suspended. His girlfriend admitted that she allowed him to use her car even though she knew that his license had been revoked....

Massachusetts is considering a law which would mandate jail time for repeat driving-under-the-influence offenders, to which one can only say, Of course. You drive drunk more than once, and you should go to jail.....

An acquaintance of Jean Charles de Menezes remembers him.

The more I learn about this episode, the more upsetting it gets.

As if the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an unarmed Brazilian man in the subway, isn't bad enough, now the British authorities are making it worse by insisting that they did nothing wrong in killing him. Instead, they are defending their new "shoot in the head" policy to stop suspected terrorists.


I still haven't read a good explanation of why this man was shot in the first place. That's because there is no good explanation.

Here, from Sarah Lyall's report in the New York Times, is the reason Menezes was shot and killed:

"Having found the address in a backpack left behind by one of the bombers in the failed attacks on Thursday, the police were watching the building where Mr. Menezes lived. But they failed to realize, apparently, that there was more than one apartment there. So when Mr. Menezes left the building to go to a job on Friday, they followed him. They trailed him onto the No. 2 bus, bound for the Stockwell subway stop, a little more than 10 minutes away."

Let's just emphasize that: the police didn't know that there was more than one apartment in the building. And yet they are considered competent enough to make a split second decision about shooting someone in the head.

According to the police, Menezes was wearing a "bulky jacket," which made them think he might be hiding something. Plainclothes policeman allegedly identified themselves, Menezes—who had been attacked by a gang a few weeks before—panicked and ran. He actually ran headfirst into a train and fell on his stomach. The police then shot him, from behind, five times in the head.

I'm going to emphasize the word "allegedly" here, because that's what cops always say after shooting someone in the back of the head—that they properly identified themselves first.

So let us consider two things about this incident. Jean Charles de Menezes would never have been shot if he didn't have dark skin. And if he didn't have dark skin—if he were, say, a white Oxford student—the British authorities would be apologizing, and the British public would be demanding it. But Menezes is Brazilian, and so he is dead.

Perhaps you noticed that the Re-Ethicist was missing last week. Mea culpa. I was stuck in my bedroom, mired in a weekend of passionate...um...house-painting. (A combination of Brazilian blue and Swiss blue, if you must know. Individually they're very nice; together, even better!) And once in the middle of house-painting, you really have to finish. It's kind of addictive that way.

However, I'm happy to announce that the Re-Ethicist is back!

This week, Randy Cohen, a.k.a. the Ethicist, responds to a letter from Jo Sanders of Seattle. Along with her husband, Jo went to see her son participate in an improv comedy competition, the winner to be determined by audience vote. She thought that her son's team was not the best, so she voted for another team. Her husband agreed with her estimation, but voted for his son's team out of loyalty. "Who was right?"

Randy Cohen, a.k.a. the Ethicist, replies, "I'm with your husband."

Wrong!

" Your husband could more convincingly argue that by soliciting votes from an audience with obvious personal ties to participants, the venue surrendered any hope of a dispassionate verdict," Cohen writes.

This strikes me as a fancy way of saying that two wrongs make a right. They're biased, so you can be too.

But let us consider this event from its impact on the boy. There is no satisfaction in a hollow victory. Chances are that Ms. Sanders' son knows his group wasn't the best. (And if he doesn't, he might want to consider another hobby.) Knowing his secondary status and yet winning would only teach the youth that the best way to get ahead is not on merit, not on ability, but by stacking the deck.

Let me close by pondering the premise of Ms. Sanders' question: "Who was right?"

In this situation, two people took two different actions, each for what they considered moral reasons. Must one be right and the other wrong? Can not two people be right at the same time? And correspondingly, are they not both wrong at the same time?

Discuss.

In this situation, there is no such thing as Truth. There is just one truism: Randy Cohen, a.k.a. the Ethicist, is wrong!