Steve Reads

The first thing to realize about this novel is that the narrator’s name is, in fact, “Not Sidney Poitier”. That is, his mother was Mrs. Poitier, and she named him “Not Sidney.”

The second fact about the book, which sets the tone, is that Not Sidney goes to live with Ted Turner. Not a metaphorical Ted Turner — the real Ted Turner, the guy who founded CNN. Mrs. Poitier, it turns out, bought tens of thousands of shares of Turner Broadcasting System stock back when the company was just starting out, and hitched a ride with TBS on the way up. Ted Turner thinks this poor black woman has pluck and ingenuity, and becomes close friends with her. When she dies, Turner takes Not Sidney into his home — actually, gives Not Sidney his own home somewhere within the Turner compound — and lets him roam free. He has enough money that he will never have to worry about paying for anything, ever.

The third fact is that Not Sidney comes to look more and more like Sidney Poitier — the famous actor, that is.

Fourth: Not Sidney ends up with a teacher at Morehouse College named Percival Everett, who either speaks nonsense because he’s trying to teach a lesson, or because he’s just a nonsensical human.

In sum, then: in a book by Percival Everett, who portrays himself as a peddler of erudite nonsense, we meet a wealthy Sidney Poitier lookalike named Not Sidney Poitier, living with the Turner family and fantasizing about seeing Jane Fonda’s (Turner’s wife’s) breasts.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Not Sidney has mind-control powers? Yeah, well he does. By staring at someone long enough, he can usually get them to do his bidding. Out on the Turner-Fonda yacht, Not Sidney uses these powers to convince Jane to toss her bikini top overboard. Breasts aren’t always involved in his mind control. It also doesn’t always work, for that matter; when it doesn’t, people tend to get miffed that he’s staring so intently at them. They kick his butt for this sin every now and again.

While we’re floating free of the constraints of reality or of ordinary plots, why not have a few random women perform oral sex on our narrator? This happens more often than not in mildly grounded fantasy novels written by men, and it certainly happens in I Am Not Sidney Poitier. (I hypothesize that Philip Roth made this sort of thing respectable.)

Our hero wanders from place to place. He ends up the Deep South with toothless, incestuous parodies of rednecks. He goes off to college, not because he needs it to get ahead — remember, he’s wealthy beyond belief — but because … well, it’s not clear why he does. He just does. He starts dating a fellow-student, who eventually brings him back to her anti-affirmative action, pro-business black family because Not Sidney is really black, and she wants to shock her parents. His trip to the girlfriend’s parents’ house is filled with a few notes of fantasy, in the sense that the world bends itself to make life easy for Not Sidney.

The book is a bit of fun candy. It’s possible it’s trying to make a bigger point, maybe something about conservative self-hating blacks, but I think that’s just in there to poke some fun. And having read a second Everett book, I’m starting to suspect that the caricatured Clarence Thomas-type character is an Everett hobbyhorse.

It’s definitely worth the read, especially given the two or three hours it will take. I guess this would count as “beach reading,” in a way that Sunk Costs and Market Structure: Price Competition, Advertising, and the Evolution of Concentration might not.

(Attention conservation notice: 3,000 words on how to install the Request Tracker software for Linux. Unless you intend to install RT — something which I expect less than 1/10 of 1% of my readership to do — there’s no reason to read this. I only include it here because the process was such an enormous pain in the ass that I had to document it. If I save someone an hour of configuration, I will have done my job.) (more…)

The GOP is going over the top in its anti-universal-health-care jihad, with Sarah Palin asserting that

my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.

Everyone can see that this is nonsense. Everyone can see, moreover, the rank hypocrisy of asserting that the GOP stands up for “the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.” They have opposed every means of defending those children and those seniors for nearly half a century. They opposed Medicare under LBJ, and they opposed S-CHIP at the end of Bush’s tenure. They have opposed every practical measure for helping these “precious” people. It’s time for them to give up the charade.

But back to Palin’s insanity. I could be crazy, but I can’t see us losing to this kind of “argument.” I just can’t see the history books in 30 years telling us that we lost the health-care battle under Obama because the public was scared into believing that the president would send them to a “death panel.” We’re past the era when the spectre of “Communism” could scare the American people. I think better of my fellow-citizens than that.

When the history books write about this era, it might turn out that we lost for other reasons. Or maybe we didn’t lose outright, but we lost because the Senate is a decrepit institution that gives undue weight to small, conservative states; that institution may produce a health bill that tries to placate conservatives and ends up helping too few Americans. I just can’t see, though, that we’d lose to outright GOP paranoia. For all its flaws, my country has moved past that.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, we may have feared for a time that we’d lose because Barack Obama is black. Lots of people talked about the “Bradley effect” — that people say they’ll vote for a black man, then don’t do so when they’re face to face with a ballot. It didn’t amount to anything; the right man won. I can’t say that I’m always so sure about my fellow-Americans, of course: I’m sure all of us — on either side of the political spectrum — think periodically that everyone we know is smart, but that everyone else is a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather. But I have faith that the country as a whole is generally moving in the right direction. The direction we’re moving in just won’t allow Palin’s brand of hate speech to get any traction.

They’re desperate, and they know they’ve lost the debate. If they thought they could win the debate, they’d be arguing honestly. They’d be telling us that while they really do wish every American were insured, they don’t believe that government is the way to guarantee universal coverage. Instead they need to scrape the bottom of the barrel and scare old people into thinking that we’ll euthanize them. This is a party that’s throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.

What we’re seeing is the end of the 2008 campaign all over again. Back then it was the GOP stirring up rage and hatred among its base, to the point that McCain had to reassure one of his supporters that Obama is not an Arab.

It’s natural to fear now that we’ll lose to the fanatics, because they’re passionate and we’re not mobilizing hard enough against them, just as it was natural to fear then that the racists would tip the presidential campaign. When you’re caught up in the heat of the moment, it’s hard to see the big picture; it’s hard for me, right now, to pull myself up out of 24-hour coverage of the debate. But ask yourself: do you really think this is a country where barbarians like Palin could swing the debate? I don’t. If it is such a country, may god have mercy on us.

Steven Pearlstein put it really well the other day:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society — whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone’s Waterloo, let it be theirs.

This may well get me branded a fascist, but what the hell.

An Ezra Klein piece from a while back really turned my head. On a very simple multiple-choice test, only 24% of Americans could correctly specify that cap and trade had something to do with the environment rather than Wall Street or with health-care reform. 30% said they have “no idea,” which strikes me as a better perspective than that of the 46% who think they know but actually don’t. Insert the standard caveats in here, of course, about the difference between what people say in a poll and what they’d actually do. Of those either 76% who are ignorant or even ignorant about their ignorance, what fraction would bother to storm their Congressmen’s office and demand an end to “cap and tax”? Maybe the cap-and-taxers are the 24%, and they just hate it.

Even if all those who scream against “cap and tax” are among the relatively well-educated, that still means that all the people making a big stink about it constitute a minority. Likewise, we’ve been hearing a lot of stories in recent days about people telling their Congressmen to “keep the government out of my Medicare.” You have written yourself out of the discussion if you say things like that. I would be interested to see what fraction of those opposing universal health care can answer the most basic questions about their health-insurance arrangements: “If you lose your job, do you get to keep your health insurance?” “Is a larger fraction of Americans insured today than was insured 30 years ago, or a smaller fraction?” “Who runs Medicare? Is it a) the Federal government, b) private insurance companies, or c) nonprofit charities?” The questions would have to be even simpler than that, on the order of “Is cap-and-trade about Wall Street regulation?”

If you can’t answer these questions properly, and if you’re demanding that the government keep its hands off your Medicare, I submit that the government just has no reason to listen to you.

Let me be clear that I would never for a moment advocate disfranchising these folks. The way I envision my government working is like so:

1. I run for office. I say I’m going to do some things.
2. You elect me, or don’t, on the basis of what I’ve said I want to do.
3. If elected, I do in office what I promised to do, subject to the vagaries of political life.
4. I run for re-election. You judge me on the basis of how I’ve lived up to my promises, what I promise to do if re-elected, and how likely I am to live up to those promises.

There should be feedback throughout the representative’s tenure, of course. We always want the people involved. But I just don’t see why elected representatives are under any obligation to listen to the least informed of the electorate.

It’s easy to demagogue, because there are far more ways to be wrong than to be right. Demagoguery can slip into the process at any of those four steps. When I’m running, you unfairly label my program “cap and tax”; while I’m in office, you loudly proclaim creeping socialism and hire thugs to shout me down as I speak. You get a double-digit percentage of the American public to think they know what cap and trade is, and to think that they hate it, when in fact they haven’t a clue what it is. Leadership seems, quite often, to be the successful swatting-down of demagoguery.

Speaking of leadership, the media’s obsession on polls seems to be premised on a false conception of how public opinion works. We say something like “52% of Americans support President Obama,” as though there were a thing sitting out there in the world which we are reading with our instruments; we conceive of public opinion as something which will stay fixed tomorrow, and which politicians ignore at their peril. Public opinion, to the contrary, is created by the leaders, just as much as it shapes how the leaders act. If we expected our leaders to do what polls wanted at all times, why would we even bother with representative democracy? Why wouldn’t we just hook a Nielsen box up to the breakfast table and have Americans vote while they eat their their cereal? As LBJ put it, and as I never tire of quoting:

The Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them. I want to pull out the cannon. The President is the cannon. You let him be on all the TV networks just speaking from his conscience … I know the risks are great and it might cost us the South, but those sorts of states may be lost anyway. The difference is if your President just enforces court decrees the South will feel it’s yielded to force. He ought to make it almost make a bigot out of nearly anybody that’s against him, a high lofty appeal, treat these people as Americans.

We expect the president to deploy the cannon and act from his conscience. We hire leaders specifically so that they’ll do what they think is best, even when it contradicts the public will. We don’t hire them so that they’ll be unadulterated mirrors of the public’s mind. If they don’t do what we want, we’ll vote against them in a few years. In other variants of representative democracy, we can channel our momentary anger into a no-confidence vote that leads to a near-instant election where we can vote the bums out.

So to the extent that the public is now revolting against universal health care, I would advise the Democratic Congress to grow a spine and vote its conscience. I would advise them to listen to their knowledgeable constituents, educate those who can be educated, and pay no attention to those who try to shout them down; those folks are not part of the conversation. To the extent that the shouters influence public opinion: too bad for them, and for the discourse. We can’t let ill-informed demagoguery win. Do you really want to continue working as a Congressman if you voted against what you believed?

There’s another, uglier possibility: if Congressmen end up voting against universal health care or cap and trade, it will have nothing to do with the demagoguery, at least not directly. It will have to do with well-financed lobbies having their way with Congress, which makes a good show of caring what the public thinks but really only cares about elites. In which case the demagoguery and the lobbying come from the same source: all the money in the world, arrayed against what’s good for the country.

I wish I could tune out of blogs for a few weeks while the debate rages on. It’s almost too heart-wrenching to bear.

Whoa.

I read that only a moment after reading a WBUR piece, about how Grabauskas had survived what sounds like a no-confidence vote.

All the talk has been about Grabauskas’s failure in the face of safety problems at the T. Those are serious, for sure. But the safety problems seemed to me of a piece with the T’s general mismanagement. It’s sort of like their continuous “signal problems”: one signal problem is a signal problem; one a day is a management problem.

I have no idea whether Grabauskas will be replaced with someone better. I hope so. The T is vital to Boston. It’s not always clear to me that the city realizes that.

By the way: WBUR is pretty great. I’ve only recently discovered all their podcasts, by way of my man Adam Rosi-Kessel. They have a lot of great podcasts, most particularly (among those I’ve found so far) Radio Boston. Even more particularly: I listened to a great podcast today, from a few weeks back, about dismantling Storrow Drive. (Non-Boston people: if you come visit me, I will explain to you what this means. The explanation will involve walking along one of Boston’s most beautiful stretches. You will not object to this, I swear.) Highly recommended.

Bostonians got a nice bit of news last week: the MBTA (Boston’s subway, bus, commuter rail and inner-harbor ferry provider) finally hooked their route information into Google Maps. This was a long time coming. I read a link a while back, which I can’t seem to find now, explaining just how simple the format Google required from public-transit providers was; so I find the delay mysterious, but welcome.

The link above notes that “unlike the T’s website, Google Transit cannot provide real-time updates about service changes and delays.” Interestingly, unlike the T’s website, the T’s website cannot provide real-time updates about service changes and delays.

What makes this much, much cooler than the MBTA website is that Google contains mass-transit maps for lots of other cities. If it’s not possible now, it surely will soon be possible to get from one side of the country to the other on Google Maps using only mass transit.

If Google isn’t already thinking of ways to sell Greyhound or Amtrak tickets through Maps, they’re much more foolish than I expect. First buses and trains, then airlines. I want to get from my house in Cambridge to where I used to live in D.C.: Google tells me that I should walk to the T stop near my apartment, take the red line to South Station, hop on the silver line to Logan, take an AirTran flight to BWI, take a WMATA shuttle to the Greenbelt stop, hop on the green line, take it to the U St stop, and walk 4/10 of a mile to my old apartment.

Only Google Maps is in a position to offer this sort of end-to-end, multimodal mapping. And they’re the only service that has any incentive to, for instance, offer you routes on either Amtrak or Greyhound or any of the airlines; Orbitz and Kayak can’t do that, and certainly no individual transport company has any reason to do it.

Once that’s in place, you can start talking about other clever bits: “Do you anticipate that you’ll be making this trip more than four times per month? Then you might want to buy an Amtrak pass and a CharlieCard; the total cost of doing so would be $N, whereas it would be $M to buy each ticket individually.”

Then hook it up with the various SpeedPass/EZPass-type systems that get you through toll plazas on highways in the northeast. Hook it up with on-time statistics for the various flights, trains, buses, and automobile commutes. The number of directions in which this could be extended is limitless, and Google is sitting right at the nexus, collecting a little fee for the convenience of buying all your passes in one place. Imagine instead a single card, the GooglePass, that replaces your train pass, your commuter-rail punch card, your EZPass, your airline boarding pass … You can sign into your Google account if you lose it, if you want to re-up, etc.

This may all sound pie in the sky, but I would be shocked if Google weren’t already at least thinking this way.

This is an unenjoyable book that wants to be a captivating pamphlet.

If you see the title and think that this book meshes with what you already believe — namely that

• bottled water is an egregious slam against the environment, particularly the endless plastic bottles left to rot in gutters and wash out to sea
• tap water tastes almost as good as bottled water (and would taste just as good as bottled water if you stirred it a bit or let it sit in a pitcher overnight)
• consuming tap water makes you more likely to pay attention to the devastation that farming, industry, and lawn-care runoff are wreaking on the environment

– then you are probably right. You haven’t paid to nod your head vigorously for four hours, though. Books like Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Politics, or What To Eat will all appeal to a certain brand of enlightened American, but they’re not just rehashing what we already believe. What To Eat, in particular, is a cornucopia of practical advice on what to buy when you’re in the grocery store; it’s meant to be propped open in the basket at the back end of your grocery cart. Omnivore's Dilemma offers something different: a wider-perspective look at how food moves from ground to corn to cow to plate.

Bottlemania, I think, wants to combine some elements of both these approaches. It is, at points, an absolutely gripping zoomed-out view of how water travels from the clouds to lakes to groundwater to your home. For a moment I thought I had misjudged it as a rather boring, not-really-very-informative tirade against the bottled-water industry. A minute later I was back to the main thrust of the book, which is I think supposed to be something about democratic control of water supplies. We spend endless (endless, endless) hours in Fryeburg, Maine, where Poland Spring, a division of Nestlé, keeps fighting — per its corporate mission — to obtain more and more water from the town. At one point — for a few pages — we see democracy in action, as the good citizens of Fryeburg assemble for their annual town meeting and vote down a provision that would have given even more favorable terms to Poland Spring. The rest of our time in Fryeburg is spent looking at pipes in the ground, following the flow of the Saco River as it nourishes Maine, and generally understanding the contours of the water industry. All well and good, but it could have been condensed to 20 pages at most.

Contrary to her goals, Royte actually proves too much. She wants to argue that democratic control of water, rather than corporate control which remains opaque to the citizens it affects, is for the best, and she’ll find no argument from me there. But what she ends up showing is that we humans are just terrible at managing our resources. It’s not clear, by the end of Bottlemania, that we know how to keep our streams clean and our groundwater uncontaminated. The entire United States becomes, in the reader’s head, a pulsating mass of toxic chemicals leaching into the groundwater; public water officials can only control a small subset of them. They do their very best, and I certainly ended Bottlemania with a lot of respect for what they do. But it’s an uphill battle. And even after they’ve drawn away everything nasty that they could find, one still wonders where the extracted nastiness goes. The answer seems to be that it becomes part of the sewage, which goes back into rivers to be cleaned by municipal water departments further downstream. This is not a pleasant story. And it’s not clear that municipal water officials would do all that much better than Nestlé at stopping the onslaught. As for corporate rapacity, Royte doesn’t give any examples of Nestlé malfeasance to exceed New York’s drowning Westchester County towns to create a reservoir, Boston’s doing the same to create the Quabbin, or Chicago’s reversing the flow of the Chicago River to send the gift of sewage to St. Louis.

If you suspect that this book, while stomach-turning, is ethically nourishing, you’re right. It’s just that it needs to be drastically slimmed down and issued as a pamphlet from the Natural Resources Defense Council, thick with horrifying statistics and minus the pointless, droning series of interviews with Fryeburg’s notables.

My advice? Pick it up, skip to page 100 or so, read it until it repeats something you already read, and return it to the library.