September 8, 2007
The Blitz Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:55 PM EST The homepage of this website notes that today is the anniversary of the beginning of the Blitz, the Luftwaffe’s sustained bombing campaign against London that began on September 7, 1940. There would be raids on London for the next 57 days, and if you discount one raid-free night where the Luftwaffe was prevented from attacking by miserable weather, there would be 76 days of uninterrupted bombing. Before September 7, the Germans had attacked London’s civilian population only incidentally, or by pure accident. On September 5, however, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to make London the main focus of its attacks, and on the 7th, 300 bombers escorted by 600 fighters attacked by day, with another 180 bombers attacking that night, between them killing 436 Londoners and wounding 1,600 more. One intention was to avenge the Royal Air Force’s attack on Berlin of August 25, itself a reprisal for an unauthorized German raid on London the day before. The other intention was to let the Luftwaffe win the war on its own. When the bombing was done, any invasion was expected to be a walkover. There were two targets, one of them being the remaining aircraft of Fighter Command (the much-anticipated “last 50 Spitfires”), which would be forced to deploy over London and be destroyed. The other target was the civilian population of London. The intention was to produce panic and social division, ideally the threat of civil war, which would force the British government into a compromise peace. It was long a commonplace to say that Hitler lost the war when he directed the Luftwaffe away from its previous military and industrial targets and toward a monomaniacal focus on London, and while that is not so obvious, since there was no clear alternate path to a German victory over Britain in 1940, the attack on British morale famously failed. The long-run result of that famous failure is that strategic bombing—attacks on enemy morale, production, or armed forces, made by aircraft alone—has widely come to be considered an inevitable failure. This sturdy judgment, which has handily survived the crucial role strategic air attacks played in securing the surrender of Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Milosevic’s Serbia, along with the indispensable contribution strategic bombing made to the victory over Nazi Germany, encapsulates one of the false notions asserted with eerie confidence by people who are very confident that they are bravely uttering a profound and heretical truth. When directed at civilian morale, the purveyors of the conventional wisdom “know” that strategic bombardment is both an inexcusable crime and a manifest folly; when directed at economic or military targets, at least a folly (and when civilians are killed in the course of such attacks, an outcome which is almost inevitable, the charge of crime is nowadays pretty common). The apostles of strategic bombing, who generally and often grossly overstated the case for their form of warfare, claiming the power to deliver victory unassisted, admittedly bear some of the responsibility for the now widespread dismissal of their form of war. But current specialist scholarship, which has for decades been revising upward our estimate of the contribution strategic bombing made to victory over the Axis, is almost always ignored by people who pronounce on the subject. With the exception of the popular conception of the British World War I experience on the Western Front (“lions led by donkeys”), my guess is that no mistake about war is held by a larger number of educated people.
September 8, 2007
The Old Order Passeth III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST Fredric Smoler wrote, “According to Mr. Gordon’s account . . . the decline of the share of world population engaged in agriculture means a chance at abundance (rather than subsistence) as the fate of most of the species. If this is true—and I think it is—it is of course not the only possible majority fate. Hordes of unemployable paupers living in urban slums is also a possible fate, but Mr. Gordon surely knows that.” Indeed I do. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England that is exactly what happened. The enclosure movement, where the landlords tossed out the peasants and brought in sheep—which were both more profitable and much less likely to get uppity—turned many of the displaced peasants into roaming hordes of paupers, often pushed from one parish to another. (Parishes were in charge of what today we would call welfare, so they each sought to make it the next parish’s problem.) One result of this, happily for this country, was the migration of the most ambitious and daring of these displaced workers to the new North American colonies, a fact that has enriched this country ever since. Toward the end of the seventeenth century and especially in the eighteenth century, the English trading and, increasingly, industrial economy began to expand quickly and was able to absorb more of these displaced workers. But many ended up in urban slums anyway, although I doubt the unspeakable urban slums of Dickens’s England were much if any worse than the unspeakable rural slums of Fielding’s England had been a century earlier, just vastly larger. The transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one ended up making it possible for a much larger percentage of the English population to live above the poverty level, today essentially everyone. But it was a long process with many dislocations and individuals who were made worse off, sometimes far worse, in the short term. It was a good thing in the long term, but, as Lord Keynes explained, “In the long term we are all dead.” Mr. Smoler writes, “We are eerily sentimental about the rural past. We have a tendency to imagine rural life as virtuous and just, with the city as the zone of corruption and wretchedness. This is perverse sentimentality held with remarkable tenacity, and it affects people who ought to know better.” I entirely agree. If you would like to be disabused forever of this notion of an idyllic rural past, I would recommend Michael Lesy’s remarkable Wisconsin Death Trip. It consists mostly of often grim photographs taken in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, by Charles Van Schaik between 1890 and 1910, along with clippings from the local newspapers about barn burnings, madness, alcoholism, bank failure, murder, armed gangs, you name it. It is not the world depicted by Grandma Moses. This nostalgia for a picket-fence and vine-covered-cottage rural past that had never, in fact, existed, began in the middle third of the nineteenth century, as the pre-industrial age was beginning to vanish from human experience with the introduction of new technologies such as the railroad, steamboats, telegraph, mass media, and running water. People previously had lived in a world in which technological change had been glacial. Someone born in, say, 1800, grew up in a world that would have been familiar to his parents, grandparents, even great grandparents. To be sure, politics changed and fashions (for those who could afford to be fashionable) changed, but the way the world worked did not. The steam engine and the Industrial Revolution changed that, and the early Victorians found themselves living in a new age, one they thought of as “an age of chaos . . . [a] heaving tumbling age.” People began to long for “the good old days” (the phrase was coined in 1844), which they remembered nostalgically, not accurately. Today we are in the midst of a technological revolution, induced by the microprocessor, that is even more profound. But it has not, at least not yet, produced a similar nostalgia for the industrial era. I detect no longing for the good old days of air pollution, labor strife, and operator-assisted long distance. I suspect the reason for that lies with the fact that the Industrial Revolution not only changed the world profoundly in the course of a single lifetime but also greatly accelerated the rate of change. Every generation since that first, early Victorian one has lived to see the world made new. I can remember my grandmother telling me about the first time she ever used a telephone. My grandfather, born in 1881, grew up in a horse-and-buggy world lit by kerosene, and yet he and I watched television together as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon.
September 7, 2007
The Films That Are How We Know Football: An Interview with Steve Sabol (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 04:15 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. Is it fair to say that from the very start you were self-conscious about the mythology of pro football? Absolutely. We thought of ourselves as filmmakers, romantics, and storytellers. We never used video, always film. Video is too immediate, too right now. Film has texture and context. What was the film where it all came together for you? In 1965 we did the league’s first promotional film, They Call It Pro Football. If my dad’s 1962 film of the Packers-Giants was Birth of a Nation, then They Call It Pro Football was Citizen Kane. That was the film where we first used the big background score and had John Facenda as narrator. We premiered it at Toots Shor’s restaurant in New York, and the commissioner, Pete Rozelle, said, “This isn’t a highlight film, it’s a movie. From that time on we had Pete’s full support. He never tried to curtail our creative freedom, even though what we did was sometimes a bit too avant-garde for some of the more conservative owners. The music used by NFL Films has always been distinctive. From the start you never went for the rah-rah college marching band sound. You always use a full orchestral score. Why? For as far back as I can remember, I was always captivated by orchestras. When I was a kid in Philadelphia, my friends would run home and turn on American Bandstand. I’d brag my ginger snap cookies, go to the TV, and turn on Victory at Sea. I was enthralled by Richard Rodgers’s music, and I liked big thundering sort of songs—at summer camp I used to love singing stuff like “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?”—things like that. Marching bands sounded tinny. A lot of the NFL owners wanted John Philip Sousa–type music in the back of their films. I always loved the sound of cellos and timpani, and especially French horns. And until 1983 we had the “voice of God,” John Facenda, doing the narration. [The Philadelphia Phillies’ Harry Callas currently does the NFL Films voiceovers.] Where did you find Facenda? Twenty-four years after his death, people still ask about him. They ask, “Where in the world did you find him?” He was a local Philadelphia news anchor. Most people’s jaws drop when I tell them that he wasn’t a football fan. When I gave him the copy to read, I’d say, “Do you want to see these highlights?” or something. He’d say, “No, No, that’s okay. I don’t need to.” He actually recorded his voiceovers without seeing the images. I think the words Facenda read were as much a part of NFL Films’ style as the images and the music. Whose prose poetry was Facenda reading? I’m afraid that would be mine. As a kid, one of my favorite poets was Kipling, and one of my favorite sportswriters was Grantland Rice—you know, “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the four horsemen rode again . . .” That kind of stuff. One of my favorite NFL Film productions was a profile of Vince Lombardi. Let me read you some of the text: “Lombardi —a certain magic still lingers in the very name. It speaks of duels in the snow, in the cold November mud . . .” And here’s something from your profile of the old Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach: “His passion was football. His obsession was winning. A championship was his destiny.” Are those your words? Yes, in all their splendid pomposity. Of all the games that NFL Films has covered and all the specials you’ve produced and all the Emmys you’ve won over the decades, what would you say you’re proudest of? Of when people come up to me and say, “You know, I didn’t watch the game when John Elway went the length of the field to win the game for Denver” or “I missed that drive in the 1989 Super Bowl when Joe Montana took the ’49ers down the field in the last two minutes, but I saw them happen in your films, and I felt like I was there.”
September 7, 2007
The Old Order Passeth II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s interesting post “The Old Order Passeth” notes that for the first time in 10,000 years agriculture is no longer the primary source of global employment, and its diminishment should not be mourned, because, as Mr. Gordon puts it, “Agriculture made civilization possible, but it made prosperity possible for only the few.” That is harsh, but not unjustly so. Agriculture produced a greater division of labor, storable economic surpluses, cities, and literacy, to list only a few of its achievements. It made people more numerous—a lot more numerous—but in most cases it also made them sicker and shorter and certainly much more unequal, in terms of both wealth and status. Rural life was proverbially dull and weary—a vivid American expression once described it as life spent staring at the wrong end of a horse—but in most times and places it was also remarkably unequal. That inequality was enforced by violence; when the inequality was occasionally challenged, rural life meant looking at the wrong end of a landlord, the one holding the sharp, pointy thing. I only became vividly aware of what bad luck the agricultural revolution meant for most of humanity in 1995, when I read a remarkable book by Robert O’Connell, Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War, which tersely described the order produced by agriculture as “the plant trap.” Not too long ago, more people seemed to remember something of this truth. In school, we were taught that over the gates of German medieval towns a phrase proclaimed Stadt Luft Macht Frei!”—town air makes men free. According to Mr. Gordon’s account, which stresses the fact the it also allows them to become richer, the decline of the share of world population engaged in agriculture means a chance at abundance (rather than subsistence) as the fate of most of the species. If this is true—and I think it is—it is of course not the only possible majority fate. Hordes of unemployable paupers living in urban slums is also a possible fate, but Mr. Gordon surely knows that. What animated his post, I think, was the fact that we are eerily sentimental about the rural past. We have a tendency to imagine rural life as virtuous and just, with the city as the zone of corruption and wretchedness. This is perverse sentimentality held with remarkable tenacity, and it affects people who ought to know better. In the country, I confess that I am unattractively proud when I can identify the crops raised in a field: That is rape seed, I smugly assert. Rationally, I am prouder of my grandfather, who escaped a farm in Appalachia to reach, after various hazards, including rounding Cape Horn as a merchant seaman, the idylls of Brooklyn. That was the progress of civilization, and as Mr. Gordon reports, it is now in reach of the majority of our kind.
September 7, 2007
The Films That Are How We Know Football: An Interview with Steve Sabol (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 12:15 PM EST NFL Films may not be, as the late New York Giants general manager Wellington Mara once put it, “the heart and soul of the NFL,” but it is where the heart and soul of the National Football League reside. Founded in the early 1960s by Ed Sabol, an overcoat salesman from Philadelphia who began his film career with a Bell & Howell camera he was given as a wedding gift, the company has been run by his son Steve since Ed’s retirement in 1974. Two years after Ed Sabol filmed his first NFL game, his company, Blair Productions, officially changed names when the league’s 14 teams each put up $20,000 to finance NFL Films.
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The NFL Films complex in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, cost more than $50 million to build, covers nearly 200,000 square feet, and houses uncounted thousands of miles of film of every NFL game in every season going back more than 40 years. It’s more than just a handsome showcase for over 90 Emmys; the facility features a state-of-the-art theater and motion picture and television production and postproduction studios. The corridors are a virtual history of football in sport and popular culture, replete with such iconography as the program from the first Army-Navy game in 1893 and all 22 New Yorker covers devoted to football. There are posters of football movies both famous (Jim Thorpe—All American, with Burt Lancaster) and obscure (Two Minutes to Play, with Herman Brix), and Steve Sabol’s own multimedia collages juxtapose such unlikely images as Vince Lombardi, the actress Debra Winger, and the sixteenth-century French essayist Montaigne. In addition to recording NFL games, compiling highlight films, and creating specials on legendary coaches, players, and teams, NFL Films handles projects as diverse as the football sequences from films like Rudy and Jerry Maguire and Bruce Springsteen’s MTV concert. Steve Sabol fielded our questions in a brief lull before the flurry of the 2007 season. The interview is appearing in two parts. I’m not the first one to say this, but I think most fans’ memories of the NFL come from NFL Films. I think we don’t so much remember seeing Bart Starr’s quarterback sneak against Dallas in the 1967 Ice Bowl or Dwight Clark’s catch against the Cowboys in the 1982 championship game so much as we remember seeing the replays on an NFL Films program—in slow motion, with John Facenda’s baritone providing the context. Or am I overstating the case? Well, I’d like to think that you aren’t. George Halas, who is usually credited as the founder of the league, once wrote us a letter saying “the history of pro football will forever be preserved on film and not by the written word à la baseball.” I certainly think it’s true that the history of pro football is a visual one. Before ESPN, most baseball fans knew the great moments of their game by reading about them. I think it’s fair to say that football fans have images in their minds of the NFL’s great moments, and those images come from their depiction by NFL Films. You’re coming up on an anniversary, aren’t you? Wasn’t the first game your father ever filmed the December 30, 1962, championship game between the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants? My father bid $3,000 for the rights to film that game. He had six cameras; a couple of them froze. The game was played at Yankee Stadium, and I was there, helping my dad. I have two vivid memories from that game. One, the bitter cold and sweeping winds through Yankee Stadium, and second, the impact when the players hit that frozen, rock hard turf. I remember Jim Taylor, the great Green Bay running back, getting stitches in his lip. I remember Ray Nitschke, the Packers’ all-pro linebacker, sitting on the bench with a hood pulled over his head and blood frozen on his chin. How did that film set the tone for what your father and then the two of you would do later? My father had a genius for beaming right in on the heart of a game. He could see that Jim Taylor and the Giants’ great linebacker, Sam Huff, hated each other and went out of their way to kick and gouge every time they came together. He knew when to zoom in when a player struggled to pull himself up after a vicious hit on that frozen turf. He focused on the contrast between the Packers’ coach, Vince Lombardi, who always seemed to be on the verge of exploding, and Giants’ coach, Allie Sherman, who was much more of a cerebral type. We were lucky to have that for a first game [won by the Packers, 16–7] because there were so many legendary players—Taylor, Huff, Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, Nitschke, Frank Gifford, Y. A. Tittle. I think there were more Hall of Famers playing on the field that day than in any other game in NFL history.
September 7, 2007
The Old Order Passeth Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST The New York Times carried a Reuters dispatch the other day that is simply filled with astonishing statistics. For one thing, it reports global statistics, not just national ones. Global unemployment fell in 2006 to 6.3 percent from 6.4 percent, and productivity is rising nearly everywhere. The United States is the world’s most productive nation, measured in annual output per worker, but then American workers work more hours than those in most other countries. Ireland was second. When measured in output per hour, Norway was first. But Norway is a very large oil producer with a very small population, which distorts the statistics. The United States was second by that measure. East Asia shows the greatest increase in productivity, but from a much lower level than Europe or North America. Altogether, “In 2006, the productivity rise was 3.3 percent at the global level, 2.1 percent for the industrialized world and 8.5 percent in East Asia.” The number of working poor is falling sharply everywhere but in sub-Saharan Africa, down by 50 percent in East Asia between 1996 and 2006. But for me, the most astonishing statistic of all was buried in the very last paragraph of the story. For the first time in 10,000 years, agriculture is no longer the primary source of global employment. According to the report, in 2006 industry employed 21.9 percent of the world’s workers, services 42 percent, and agriculture 36.1 percent. Ten years ago, agriculture was at 42 percent and services at 37 percent. That is a very rapid change indeed. It also indicates that much of the developing world seems to be bypassing the industrial stage of development and moving directly to services, perhaps because the enormous growth of global trade in the last 50 years has made it both unprofitable and unnecessary to establish local industries. Agriculture made civilization possible, but it made prosperity possible for only the few. And for millennia civilized societies were islands surrounded by barbarians. For 200 years industrialized societies were islands of ever-increasing and ever-more-widespread prosperity surrounded by those who still lived at a subsistence level except for the few. That is now changing rapidly. Assuming politics or nature doesn’t produce a global disaster, the world might be a much better place in a few decades, with abundance, not subsistence, the fate of most of humankind. If that should come to pass, the old order will indeed have passed.
September 6, 2007
George Romney’s Interview II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST Thanks to Alexander Burns for pulling up a link to the video clip of George Romney’s famous “brainwashing” remark. I agree entirely with Mr. Burns, who writes that “it seems pretty obvious that [Romney] wasn’t using the word ‘brainwashing’ in any literal sense [but] that didn’t stop the press and the public from pulling the man’s campaign apart at the seams.” I’m sure Romney had a miserable time watching Richard Nixon, his onetime rival for the GOP presidential nomination, obfuscate his way around the Vietnam issue altogether throughout the better part of 1968. Though he had told a New Hampshire audience, “Yes, I have a plan to end the war,” and though he promised that he would “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific,” Nixon stubbornly refused to reveal even the scantest details of his “plan,” which, to his chagrin, reporters took to calling a “secret plan.” “I don’t want to pull the rug out from under our negotiations in Paris” by giving away too much detail, he explained. Unlike the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Nixon could afford to be vague. He was not a member of the current government, and he stood for change ipso facto. Perhaps George Romney might have done well to follow Nixon’s lead and take no position at all. Or, like a certain actor-turned-politician (no, not the one you’re probably thinking of), he could simply have delayed his entry into the race for several months, ducked debates, and confined his appearances to late-night variety shows. Then, he wouldn’t have had to talk about Iraq—sorry, I meant to say, Vietnam—at all.
September 5, 2007
“Let Your Motto Be Resistance” Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:40 PM EST Since its inception, American Heritage has been headquartered in New York City, but since the magazine and website are dedicated first and foremost to all things American, we try not to overemphasize the local roots of the outfit. With this caveat in mind, I hope that readers outside the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut metropolitan region will indulge the following recommendation: Last weekend I went into Manhattan to visit the International Center of Photography’s temporary exhibit “Let Your Motto Be Resistance”—a collection of still photographs of African-American leaders from the political, cultural, and athletic arenas. It’s a remarkable exhibit, but it closes on September 9. I highly recommend a visit—soon. The exhibit includes familiar portraits of familiar faces, like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unfamiliar portraits of familiar faces, like some rare shots of Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. Though the cast of characters includes many predictables—from Harry Belafonte and Louis Armstrong to Malcolm X and Jack Johnson—the portraits are tremendously effective when seen together. What’s more, even scholars of African-American history will find more than a few photos of once-famous black artists and cultural figures who have slipped from the canon. By far the most difficult feature of the exhibit is a photograph of three of Martin Luther King’s children—Yolanda (age 12), Martin III (age 11), and Bernice (age 5). (Missing in the frame is King’s son Dexter, who was 7 at the time.) The three Kings are standing next to their father’s open coffin, where the slain civil rights leader rests before his final burial. Yolanda’s and Martin’s eyes betray absolute grief; their sister, Bernice, who, according to the placard accompanying the photo, had just viewed her father’s body for the first time, is in shock: Her mouth is hung open, her eyes are wide, she seems more in a state of disbelief than anything else, for she is only five, and the totality of the week’s events must have been difficult for her to comprehend. It’s a moving photo—difficult to view, and equally difficult to leave behind. The International Center of Photography is located on Sixth Avenue at 43rd Street in New York City.
September 4, 2007
George Romney’s Interview Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:35 PM EST Readers who enjoyed Joshua Zeitz’s feature today on George Romney’s ill-fated presidential campaign might be interested to see a video of the interview in which Romney blundered into his comment about “brainwashing.” It’s available here , where it was posted by the Boston Globe in connection with a serial profile of George Romney’s son, Mitt. One installment of that series focused on the relationship between the governors Romney and contains both a sympathetic portrait of the father and a studied analysis of the son. The video of Romney’s interview works better on some Internet browsers than on others, but for those who can watch it, it’s startling to see just how benign Romney’s remark was. It seems pretty obvious that he wasn’t using the word “brainwashing” in any literal sense. As Mr. Zeitz’s article indicates, that didn’t stop the press and the public from pulling the man’s campaign apart at the seams.
September 2, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents V Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:10 PM EST At the risk of dwelling too long on soon-to-be-former Senator Craig’s misfortunes, there are a couple of points in John Steele Gordon’s latest post that I think deserve a little extra scrutiny. The first is Mr. Gordon’s conjecture that “the persistence of ‘tearoom trade,’ as the op-ed calls it, has a lot more to do with the erotic potential of the danger involved—the thrill of getting away with something so fraught with potential consequences—than with people who engage in such behavior simply being in denial.” There may be some truth to this assertion, but in Larry Craig’s case, as in Walter Jenkins’s, and in many others as well, there’s a more persuasive explanation. For men like Craig and Jenkins, even if they admit to themselves that they are not heterosexual, surreptitious, anonymous locations like public restrooms may be the only places they can find sexual partners without endangering their careers. As men who want to succeed in professions where being homosexual or bisexual is a great liability, they cannot meet prospective partners in bars or at parties where they could be noticed. According to this New York Times editorial, which describes Laud Humphreys’s research about the “tearoom trade,” men who “troll for sex in public places” were mostly “married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.” In other words, they were men, like Craig and Jenkins, with a great deal to lose if their less conventional sexual preferences became public knowledge. They’re not thrill-seekers heading for the men’s room to risk getting exposed by the police, or by their neighbors, or on CNN. They’re people who, through some tragic set of decisions, ended up living double lives. Mr. Gordon also writes that “in fairness to” Senator Coleman and Governor Romney, who described Larry Craig’s behavior as “disgusting,” “what they found disgusting was not Larry Craig or his homosexuality per se but his behavior in a public restroom.” This is, at best, a distinction without a difference. What Larry Craig did in that men’s room was tap his right foot and end up in the middle of a police sting. The same Times article cited above describes how signals like Craig’s foot-tapping only lead to explicit sexual advances when they are answered by similar signals. If the police officer next to Craig hadn’t decided to goad him on, the senator’s behavior would have been limited to that tapping of his foot. I don’t really know why his congressional colleagues would find that action repellent. But of course, it’s not what Craig did in a restroom that McCain and Coleman find objectionable. It’s what he wanted to do, which was liaise with a man—perhaps in the restroom, but perhaps elsewhere. It is hard to see why this behavior should merit the adjective “disgusting,” especially when no such term was thrown at Sen. David Vitter after he admitted to hiring prostitutes, or when, in 2004, the D.C. police department had to visit then-Congressman Don Sherwood’s apartment to stop him from beating and throttling his mistress. Now, lest I give the wrong impression, my sympathy for Senator Craig, while substantial, is limited. If the man was guilty of anything, though, it wasn’t gross public indecency but rather gross public hypocrisy. Laura Mac Donald’s article today draws exactly the right lesson from this whole affair: “Let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.” If something good were to come of Senator Craig’s humiliation, it would be a greater sense of humility on the part of public figures who are all too ready to invade and judge Americans’ personal lives, and a greater degree of reluctance on the part of voters who are all too ready to help them. A final note, following up on my first post about this subject several days ago. Also in today’s New York Times is an op-ed by the documentarian Seth Randal and the Boise State University archivist Alan Virta about the 1955 gay sex scandal in Boise, Idaho. It’s a useful contribution to the ongoing discussion of Senator Craig’s rapid downfall, and a nuanced meditation on exactly what kind of progress has been made in the last 50 years.
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