Hillary Clinton’s become persona non grata to Democratic leaders and the pundits sympathetic to them, who’d like nothing better than for her to go away and make nice to the new nominee, Obama. Why oh why won’t she just fall into line like a good girl? (Here’s a typical rant on the “sad spectacle” of her tenacity; and here’s Gerard Vanderleun’s deep sociological analysis of the situation).

My own offering is a poetic one, a riff on the Dylan Thomas villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” The Democratic bigwigs and the pundits who’ve come to hate the Energizer Hillary can recite it to her in their attempt to get her to stop ticking now that she’s proven she can take a licking:

Oh please go gentle into that good night.
You shouldn’t burn and rave at close of day
Or rage against the dying of the light.

So Hillary, alone on the sad height,
We curse you if you will not go away.
Shut up, go gentle into that good night.
Don’t rage against the dying of the light.

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-four years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

Folks are not happy about this.

Martin Luther King is about to earn his place on Washington DC’s Mall with a 28-foot high memorial statue that is likely to dwarf those of nearby Lincoln and Jefferson. But that’s not the source of the controversy: the sculptor’s citizenship and the statue’s character is.

Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin was chosen for the honor, immediately raising protests from those who thought the artist for the King memorial should be African-American, or at the very least American. Diversity was not considered a good thing in this particular case.

And now it’s hardly surprising that the model Lei Yixin has unveiled exhibits a certain martial flair, of the Sino-Soviet variety. People who’ve seen it compare it to a “genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.”

There are small precedents—after all, a statue of Lenin was rescued from destruction and has found a home in Seattle. But that’s Seattle; this is the Mall.

The King I remember was indeed a “monumental” figure—one of the words used to criticize the sculpture. He had a certain bulk, presence, and gravitas. And so I initially thought that perhaps the protesters were overdoing it. But then I did a search and got a look at a model for the proposed sculpture.

Even in the tiny version it looks formidable—and, well, Leninesque:

Here’s a closeup:

Representational art is a tricky proposition these days; it seems somewhat archaic. It used to be that it was easier to express the heroic, but in this more ironic age it hardly does the trick.

But even in earlier times our public sculptures were no strangers to controversy. I recall learning in art class about a sculpture of Washington so widely criticized that it had to be replaced due to public outcry. Commissioned in 1840, it harked back to classical precedents—specifically, a famous statue of Zeus—and portrayed the father of our country as a Roman.

The hints of empire or epiphany weren’t the problems. It was the fact that Washington was half-naked:

Many other statues of King seem to suffer from the same problem as the currently proposed and reviled one. Efforts to make King kindler and gentler fall prey to sculpture’s monumental qualities—after all, it’s large blocks of stone we’re talking about here, and a small plastic clay figure wouldn’t really do, would it? If you Google “sculpture Martin Luther King” under “images” you get this group, and I think you’ll agree that many have a certain Soviet quality.

And so it might just be the nature of the standing stone statue; that’s probably why Lincoln and FDR are portrayed as seated—it humanizes them:

Alas, however, the FDR statue was not without its own controversy. You may recall that advocates for the disabled wanted him to be depicted not only seated but in a wheelchair, despite his own heroic attempts during life to hide all photographic evidence of the fact that he really couldn’t walk. Although they did not succeed, the anti-smokers did: they managed to remove his trademark cigarette (and animal rights advocates did the same for a fox fur that was to originally have been part of a statue of wife Eleanor).

King’s sculptors have no such problems—or do they? Turns out that King was a smoker, too, although according to his driver he was always trying to quit. Perhaps it would soften the image if Lei Yixin were to depict him with cigarette in hand—no, on second thought, best to leave well enough alone.

After perusing the many existent scultures of King, I think the most successful is the one at the University of Texas in Austin. It’s monumental, standing, and dignified, and yet it retains a lively and friendly perspective:

The sculptors? The husband-wife team (aha, diversity of gender!) Jeffrey Varilla and Anna Koh-Varilla, from the exceedingly American city of Chicago. However, it turns out Ms. Koh-Varilla was originally—Korean!

Well, at least she’s from South Korea.

[NOTE: And Ann Althouse has a thing or two to say.]

Have you ever noticed that there are fashions in voices? In the past five years or so I’ve noticed the extreme proliferation of a high-pitched little-girl cutesy voice in women in their late teens and early twenties. Since it spread too quickly to be a mutation, I can only imagine that it represents a choice.

You’ve heard it, I’m sure, either in your own daughter or her friends, or the waitress at the restaurant or the salesgirl in the store. Its pitch is very high, and its voice quality is both light and metallic, with a rising inflection in each sentence that suggests a meant-to-be-charming mix of indecision and uncertainty.

I’m not sure how the Voice of the Cohort is decided on. Is there a single originator, and then it catches on and spreads? Or is it a simultaneous development across many geographic points, representing the ethos of the age?

I leave that determination to others. I observe, however, that the present trend had its origins in the early 80s. Although the Big Hair of that time has come and gone (much to my consternation; I have naturally Big Hair and getting it to be at all Little requires some doing), the current girly voice is a direct descendant of a phenomenon first noted and popularized by the Moon Unit Zappa (and by the way, if you want to know where she is now, the answer can by found here):

On listening to the song again after all these years, not only did I laugh (”gag me with a spoon”; “grody” toenails), but I realized the Val pitch is lower than I remembered. The intonation doesn’t really match the voice of today, either, although the whole thing is definitely related.

And the following isn’t quite the new voice, either. It’s too high, for one thing. But the young male intern gets the rising inflection right:

A Canadian study reports that brain changes involving ribosomal DNA have been detected on autopsy in victims of childhood abuse who ended up committing suicide. This finding somewhat complements animal studies showing that early neglect changes the dendrites of rats.

Of course, the Canadian study is not without its flaws. It suffers from a common problem with human research, low sample size. The comparison was between 18 men in the study group and 12 controls who had not been neglected and who died from causes other than suicide. Therefore one huge possible flaw is that the brain changes might be from some aspect of the suicidal tendencies of the subjects rather than the abuse itself. It’s even possible that the brain changes might represent congenital differences rather than reactive changes.

But there’s probably something to the idea that the brain anomalies are not innate. For example, with the advent of improved brain imaging, there’s been a rash of studies that suggest that psychotherapy itself can cause brain changes similar to those achieved by medication. Here, for example, is research indicating that treatment for OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) can induce such changes, and the same seems true for depression.

People are often surprised at any findings that there can be brain changes related to thought, feelings, and personal history. But it stands to reason that the entire system is a feedback loop in which influences go both ways.

The brain is one of the most amazing and mysterious parts of the human body—or perhaps of the universe. It is made of matter, and although it is far more than “mere” matter, every thought must still have a chemical/physical mediator. The brain is where the material world intersects with the world of abstraction, and shows us that, though they might seem to be separate domains, there is no true separation between the two.

And so what may have seemed to Descartes to be a “ghost in the machine” is revealed by modern machines to be no specter at all.

[NOTE: I was thinking as I wrote this post that if brain imaging had been invented at the time of Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments, I bet they would have documented vast changes in those monkeys’ brains. I was going to link to an earlier post I’d done on the subject of Harlow, but when I went back and looked at it I decided instead to repost it.]

While researching my recent series on questioning authority, I got the idea to write a post about the seminal Milgram experiments on obedience to authority.

When I was a psych major back in college, part of our learning experience involved—as you might expect—studying psychology experiments. Many were of the so-called “rat psych” variety, and some were of a more clinical nature. Then much later, while getting my clinical Master’s in the early 90s, I had to read many more. In between, I actually worked as a social science researcher in a place with a sterling reputation. So I’ve done my time—and more—in the field of psychological research, including being a subject back in college (I remember interminable sessions with what was known as a “memory drum.” Bloody boring.).

But I must admit (or is it confess?) that too much social science research is “garbage in, garbage out.” Not all of course, but quite a bit. Some of this is the fault of sloppy methodology. But most of the problem may be inherent in the nature of the beast of social science research itself: too many variables to control for, too many unknowns.

But even social science has some experiments so very wonderfully done, and with such fascinating results, that they not only impressed me when I first encountered them, but they stayed with me and inform me still.

One was the famous “learned helplessness” research, in which dogs who received painful electric shocks without the possibility of escape learned that their efforts to avoid the pain were futile. Later, when they received shocks in a situation in which they were able to escape, they didn’t even try. Another was the perhaps even more famous case of the Harlow monkeys. Still another, of course, was Milgram’s research on obedience to authority.

The first two involved cruelty to animals in those pre-PETA days. The third involved feigned physical cruelty (and, some would argue, actual psychological cruelty) to humans. I’m no PETA member, but I’ve seen the visuals on Harlow’s monkeys and the shocked dogs–both the films and the still photos–and they are disturbing to watch.

Harlow’s research wasn’t limited to the esoteric halls of academe; his surrogate-mother monkeys became well-known through a feature in Life magazine in the 50s, where I first encountered them as a young child.

There was something haunting about those photos. I could hardly take my eyes away from the mournful expressions of the baby monkeys Harlow had taken away from their mothers and raised with two “surrogate mothers”–a wire one with a bottle attached, where the baby could get its nourishment, and a cloth one the baby could cling to for comfort (see photo that begins this essay).

And cling they did:

Before Harlow, many psychologists thought that the mother/infant bond was based on the nourishment provided. Harlow theorized that touch and comfort were even more crucial–if not in keeping the infant alive, then in keeping it emotionally healthy. This may seem self-evident today, but at the time it was revolutionary.

Harlow’s experiments exemplify the paradoxical nature of research that subjects animals to some sort of cruelty and yet yields results that can benefit humans.

Here’s a description of what actually happened to Harlow’s monkeys:

When the experimental subjects were frightened by strange, loud objects, such as teddy bears beating drums, monkeys raised by terry cloth surrogates made bodily contact with their mothers, rubbed against them, and eventually calmed down. Harlow theorized that they used their mothers as a “psychological base of operations,” allowing them to remain playful and inquisitive after the initial fright had subsided. In contrast, monkeys raised by wire mesh surrogates did not retreat to their mothers when scared. Instead, they threw themselves on the floor, clutched themselves, rocked back and forth, and screamed in terror…

In subsequent experiments, Harlow’s monkeys proved that “better late than never” was not a slogan applicable to attachment. When Harlow placed his subjects in total isolation for the first eights months of life, denying them contact with other infants or with either type of surrogate mother, they were permanently damaged. Harlow and his colleagues repeated these experiments, subjecting infant monkeys to varied periods of motherlessness. They concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could be reversed in monkeys only if it had lasted less than 90 days, and estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys’ abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred. When emotional bonds were first established was the key to whether they could be established at all.

But the story is actually worse than that. It turns out that even the contact comfort of a cloth surrogate mother was not enough to raise a healthy monkey. All of Harlow’s monkeys had severe disruptions when they grew up–for example, they could not mate.

You might ask: what’s the point? Isn’t this stuff obvious? Who needed an experiment to prove it? But that’s 20/20 hindsight; at the time, Harlow’s results sent shockwaves through the psychology community:

What may seem obvious to us now…was as counter to the conventional wisdom in psychology in those days as Galileo’s ideas were to the astronomy in his day…The field was dominated by the behaviorist theories of psychologists like B. F. Skinner and child development theories exemplified by John Watson, who used his presidency of the American Psychological Association to conduct a personal crusade against cuddling children.

Harlow’s carefully executed and presented research sent shockwaves through the psychology community, eventually discrediting behaviorism and many other -isms under the extraordinary force of the information he collected. His voluminous hard data replaced what previously had been anecdotal evidence in fledgling schools of thought, providing a much-needed scientific basis for theories like attachment theory, humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow was his first graduate student), and patient-centered therapy.

And what of Harlow himself? According to this Boston Globe profile, he was a troubled and contentious man. His life included two broken marriages, alcoholism, and depression (did he, perhaps, have only a cloth mother, too?)

Harlow didn’t even like monkeys—or animals—at all, which undoubtedly made it easier for him to conduct his research:

Harlow felt no kinship with his test subjects. “The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish,” he said. “I don’t have any love for them. I never have. I don’t really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you love monkeys?”

Harlow fired off some excellent bon mots, including this one:

[Harlow] was at a conference one day, and every time he used the word “love” another scientist would interrupt and say, “You must mean proximity, don’t you?” until at last Harlow, a brash man who could also be strangely shy, said, “It may be that proximity is all you know of love—I thank God I have not been so deprived.”

But one wonders. If the original experiments were dark, later ones (after his divorces and electroshock treatments for depression) grew far darker, and entered the realm of sadism. I’m not using this word lightly; see whether you agree with me:

[Harlow] built a black isolation chamber in which an animal was hung upside down for up to two years, unable to move or see the world, fed through a grid at the bottom of the V-shaped device. This Harlow called “the well of despair.” Indeed, it was successful in creating a primate model of mental illness. The animals, once removed, after months or years, were shattered and psychotic. Nothing Harlow did could bring them back. There appeared to be no cure. No way to contact, to comfort.

Harlow’s earlier research was somewhat cruel, but it had a clear purpose and results that could be used to the benefit of humans. This later research (performed during the 60s) almost undoubtedly would not have been allowed today, whatever his previous reputation. It amounted to the torture of highly intelligent and sensitive animals, to no real purpose.

To me, it’s a case of balance. Harlow’s early experiments had elements of cruelty, but even before the experiments were performed it was clear that they could have some beneficial results for child-rearing (which have ultimately come to include advances in the treatment of premature and institutionalized infants, and the resurgence of breastfeeding). Furthermore, with those early experiments, the extent of the resultant disturbances to the monkeys’ psyches was unforeseen and unexpected.

Harlow’s latter experiments, however, seemed to have no redeeming social importance. The horrific results on the monkeys’ psyches seem not only predictable, but inevitable, and it’s virtually impossible to see how even the feisty Harlow could have argued, prospectively, of any real benefit to our knowledge of human nature likely to result from them.

In certain cases it may indeed be necessary to be cruel to animals in order to be kinder to humans. But Harlow’s trajectory is a cautionary tale of the necessity to calibrate the two.

We may mock PETA for its excesses—I certainly do. But there are times—especially in the relatively unfettered past—that research on animals can go too far. The trick is to make a considered and reasonable judgment about when that may be so, balancing the possible good with the probable harm likely to result. In that equation, people count more than animals, but animals still count for something.

It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals. And that’s been true for thirty-five years, so it has nothing to do with what administration may or may not be in power at the moment.

This may explain why Michelle Obama seems so very unhappy despite her great blessings, and why she speaks to a certain constituency when she voices that bitterness—and it ain’t the “bitter clingers” of Pennsylvania she’s addressing.

According to Arthur Brooks, who wrote a book entitled Gross National Happiness, there are reasons for the greater happiness of conservatives. They are more likely to be married, religious, and parents—all three of which are characteristics that seem to lead to greater happiness, although this wouldn’t explain Ms. Obama. But here’s the bottom line:

Mr Brooks proposes that whatever their respective merits, the conservative world view is more conducive to happiness than the liberal one (in the American sense of both words). American conservatives tend to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed. This makes them more optimistic than liberals, more likely to feel in control of their lives and therefore happier. American liberals, at their most pessimistic, stress the injustice of the economic system, the crushing impersonal forces that keep the little guy down and what David Mamet, a playwright, recently summed up as the belief that “everything is always wrong”.

Bingo.

….including the Fifth:

Jello has long been a highly advertised food, although I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because it has no intrinsic food value whatsoever.

One possibility is that whatever is lacks in nutrition it makes up for in “beauty and sculptural variety.” And early on it gained symbolic significance in our national life:

Immigrants at Ellis Island were ritually served bowls of Jell-O under signs that read “Welcome To America.”

Hillary is like a burr on the body politic of the Democrats and the MSM—they can’t shake her off, try though they may.

Yesterday’s primary results—an expectedly large margin of victory for Obama in North Carolina and a surprisingly small one for Hillary in Indiana—really changes nothing essential about the race. But today there’s another flurry of attempts to say “buh-bye” to Hillary.

For example, here are the top five stories right now at Real Clear Politics:

An End in Sight, at Last—Gerard Baker, Times of London
Has Obama Finally Clinched It?—John Dickerson, Slate
Clinton Hangs On—Barely—Vaughn Ververs, CBS News
Hillary the Cat Runs Out of Lives—John Kass, Chicago Tribune
Ugly Truth Why Clinton Won’t Quit—Thomas DeFrank, NY Daily News

As Gerard Baker points out, Hillary certainly could have used a bigger win in Indiana. And although the math (which always favored Obama) is now favoring him even more, Obama still has not solved the problem of appealing to non-latte-drinking (i.e. less affluent, less educated) white voters. And these still are the people he will have to win over to become President.

North Carolina, where Obama racked up a 14-point lead, is a state with an odd Democratic demography. About a third of its Democrats are African American, and nearly all of these voted for Obama. But the whites in that state went 60% for Hillary, and the same was true of Indiana. Returns from the heavily black areas of Indiana that border on Chicago made the vote close.

Some interpret white support of Hillary to white racism. That was the subtext of Michelle Obama’s recent speeches that suggest anyone who doesn’t vote for Obama the Magnificent is being discriminatory. And this Thomas M Defrank piece appearing in today’s Daily News, entitled, “The Ugly Truth Why Hillary Won’t Quit,” seconds the motion, but offers no proof of it except quotes from two people who think Obama’s a Muslim.

Hillary and the press have never had anything resembling a love affair. That status has been reserved for Obama, and I don’t think the Wright flap has changed the situation very much. Now that Hillary has lost North Carolina by a large margin and failed to win Indiana in a convincing-enough manner, the press would like nothing better than to see her and her pantsuits and her schoolmarmy ways simply disappear, leaving their preferred candidate—Obama—unsullied by any more attacks, and their Party able to unite behind him in order to win in November.

The dilemma remains for the superdelegates: how to ensure the best candidate to win this fall? Even if they think it’s Hillary in the general, they cannot afford to alienate one of their most important bases, African-American voters, by choosing Hillary over Obama. They can hope, however, that the backlash against Republicans this year is strong enough to propel either possible Democratic nominee into the White House.

[ADDENDUM: Dr. Sanity has a few choice comments about the Defrank piece and its assertions of white racism.]

Michelle Obama has been doing quite a bit of campaigning herself, and it’s clear from her speeches that she shares one thing with Hillary Clinton: the belief that a vast right-wing conspiracy is sabotaging her husband.

Ms. Obama doesn’t utter that now-famous phrase. But she seems to feel that her husband is entitled (remember when that word was used for Hillary’s sense that she was owed the Presidency?) to be elected. If that doesn’t happen, it can only mean that nameless, faceless forces are unfairly arrayed against him:

The bar, we are told, is always being raised just as her husband is about to reach it. They said he couldn’t win because he didn’t have an organization. Then he built an organization, so they said he couldn’t win because he didn’t have money. He raised money, so they said he couldn’t win because he couldn’t win caucuses. He won caucuses, so they said he couldn’t win because he couldn’t win primaries. In the tone and substance of the story is the implication that the fact that this race isn’t over is evidence of a profound injustice done to her husband….“The bar is constantly changing for this man,” she tells us.

Ms. Obama seems to be tone-deaf to the implications of what she’s saying, much as when she slipped in the idea that Barack was “one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.” But despite the fact that these non-elitist folks have stooped so low as to get their hands dirty with the hoi polloi in the political fray, Americans have not yet realized how lucky they are. Otherwise, it would have been over long ago, with Barack the heir apparent.

This is scary and paranoid stuff. We’ve all heard of a sore loser; is there any word for a sore winner?

[NOTE: Here’s the speech.]

There’s a fascinating reminiscence by a series of aging boomers (are there any other kind?) in the Spring 2008 City Journal. It’s entitled “May 1968: Forty Years After,” and all of the writers appear to be to members of that group that so interests me today, the Left-to-Right political changers.

One of the best of the essays (all are recommended reading) is “From the Danube to Chicago” by Sol Stern, an editor at City Journal who’s been campaigning for years to waken the country to the dangers of the educational “reforms” of radical Leftist Bill Ayers (see this article, for example, written in the summer of 2006, before Ayers was on the radar screen of most people).

Back in 1968, Ayers was riding high as an SDS member at the University of Michigan. Along with wife-to-be Bernadine Dorhn, he was on the cusp of founding the more violent Weathermen and engaging in a series of bombings for which he has yet to pay any price and does not regret.

In 1968 Stern himself was a Ramparts editor and active in the “peace” movement to end the Vietnam War.

Why do I put the word peace in scare quotes? I have no doubt that many in the antiwar movement actually were interested in peace; in my own very minor role (a few meetings and a few demonstrations), I certainly was. But the picture Stern paints of the active collaboration of leaders such as Tom Hayden and other radicals with the North Vietnamese makes it clear that peace was not really their agenda, it merely was the hook:

Protesting against America’s wars has an honorable tradition, running from Thoreau to Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. But starting with Hayden and continuing in the turbulent outbursts of 1968, that tradition of legitimate democratic opposition morphed into outright collaboration with the enemy. It wasn’t just that Hayden was rooting for the other side—abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had done the same during the Mexican War—but that he was proposing to sabotage the American war effort by all means necessary. Soon enough, as members of the once-idealistic New Left and SDS crossed the line from dissent to treason, it became clear that those means included deadly violence. Within 18 months, some of Hayden’s followers were bombing military installations and public buildings in solidarity with their Vietnamese allies….

The latter group of course included Ayers and Dohrn, current Obamaphiles. Unlike Stern, they have not repented of their ways; au contraire.

The provocateurs at the 1968 Democratic Convention were not just incidently beaten up by the Chicago police while “the whole world [was] watching”—they went there for that express purpose:

(Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis) spent four months planning a massive confrontation with the “war machine,” otherwise known as the Chicago Police Department. At Ramparts, we all knew what was coming, and we were determined to be there for the combat.

Stern is not alone in his indictment of Hayden et al. Even Time, in its contemporaneous recount of the goings-on at the 1968 Democratic Convention, agreed with what Stern now reports.

One of the themes of several entries in the City Journal article is the idea that many of the reporters who covered the events of 1968 were journalists with an agenda and participants in the events they were covering, and that they utterly resisted the idea that this conflict of interest tainted their reporting—or, rather, they felt they were above such mundane concerns and exempt from such rules. Their agenda itself was the point, the very reason they had become journalists in the first place.

Forty years sometimes seems a long time ago. But sometimes it doesn’t seem so very long at all.

The primary season was constructed so that Super Tuesday, which occurred this year aeons ago back on February 5, was supposed to be decisive in indicating a winner. This would make it easier to consolidate the party behind the nominee and get a head start on the general election.

It went that way for John McCain, who emerged as the surprising leader in the originally crowded Republican field. But for the Democrats, a funny thing happened on the way to the convention. It became clear some time ago that there will be no decisive winner, only a marginal frontrunner and a party battle that’s shaping up to be remarkably divisive in a year that was supposed to be (pardon the phrase) a cakewalk.

So today voters go to the polls in Indiana and North Carolina to cast ballots in primaries that are often just afterthoughts but this year have the potential for extreme importance. If either candidate wins both, the tide of superdelegates who hold the keys to the convention may turn more strongly his/her way. If the states split, which seems most likely, the bloodletting will almost undoubtedly continue.

Polls show Indiana as too close to call, and indicate a commanding lead for Obama in North Carolina: 51% to Hillary’s 37%. But hidden in these statistics is the fact that 12% of voters in both states either favor another candidate or were still undecided at the time of questioning. That means that, if previous late-breaking trends toward Hillary hold up, she could end up winning decisively in Indiana and closing the gap considerably in North Carolina.

If this happens, it might sweeten her attempt to woo the superdelegates away from Obama. And of course if that happens, the party stands to alienate one of its most loyal and trusted constituencies, African-Americans, a group the Democrats can hardly afford to lose.

It’s enough to make me happy I’m no longer a Democrat.

[ADDENDUM: Glenn Reynolds points out that the last time the Indiana primary mattered was in 1968. Hmmm.]

It’s that time again: the Sanity Squad will be on Blog Talk Radio tonight. Click here to listen live at 7:30 PM Eastern time, or to hear a tape if you can’t make it then. Siggy, Shrink, Dr. Sanity, and I will be discussing the Great Democrat Cultural and Social Divide—or, “it’s not really about politics for them.” The second topic will be the results of the British elections and the meaning and significance to America of the British voters’ rejection of the Labour Party.

In my continuing quest to bring you the best and worst of the jello molds, here’s an effort that’s an example of the former—an esthetic vision of some loveliness, and a demonstration of the surprising strength of properly reinforced jello:

My cell phone charger died last night. That means I have to race out today and get a new one before my cell phone battery gives out. Or drive around in the car in order to charge it there, much like a reverse version of when I used to take my wailing infant son and place him in the carseat until the movement of the car lulled him to sleep.

So this is my question for all you techies out there: why do cell phone chargers die so early? And do they have to be so expensive to replace? This one has only lasted a few months, as have all my others.

It’s not as though I abuse them. On the contrary, I treat them quite respectfully. I have never stomped on one, thrown it against a brick wall, wrenched it powerfully from its moorings in the outlet, or otherwise mauled it.

And yet they continue to repay my solicitous care with unreliability, dying with no warning whatsoever. They don’t go gentle into that good night, they go precipitously and with apparent malice aforethought.

And so I ask that mother of all questions: why? I know that somewhere out there, among you readers, lies the answer. Or perhaps several answers. I await your wisdom.

[UPDATE: Mystery solved. Thanks to all who replied with so many creative and knowledgeable suggestions.

My previous phone had a charger that attached with a sort of tooth/prong arrangement. It was inherently very fragile. Each charger lasted only a little while before it broke, and I was continually having to replace them. They actually stopped making that kind of phone, fortunately, because it was so problematic.

However, this new phone had a much simpler problem, I’m embarrassed to say. It just needed the old “open it up and take out the battery and put it back in again” treatment. Now, even I am aware of this all-purpose remedy, but the fact that the phone worked perfectly in every other way led me to think the charger was the problem.

I never said I was good at this stuff.]

Well, this is certainly no surprise.

I’ve never been especially interested in horses, and I almost never watch horse races.

One exception was the 1975 match race between the unbeaten filly Ruffian and that year’s Derby winner Foolish Pleasure. As we watched, Ruffian broke down towards the end of the race, and she ended up being euthanized. Ruffian is buried at Belmont Park facing the finish line.

I didn’t watch yesterday’s Kentucky Derby, but I heard about it and have seen photos. The remarkable filly Eight Belles suffered an unprecedented injury, breaking the condylar bones in both ankles after the race as she circled the track for the cooldown lap. She was euthenized then and there, the only time in the Derby’s long history that a horse has ever died in the race.

There is something almost unbearably poignant and even horrific about this sort of event, even to someone like me who’s ordinarily indifferent to horses. The trajectory from sharpest triumph (Eight Belles came in second in the Derby, making her a rare filly indeed) to deep sorrow, all in the flash of a moment and without any foreshadowing or understandable reason (except for the fact that racehorses have fragile leg bones relative to their huge weight, and the bones of fillies are even more delicate than those of colts) is a reminder of the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of life itself.

Is it just my perception, or are such breakdowns getting more common among horses? The colt Barbaro, winner of the Derby in 2006, broke down at the beginning of the Preakness and was ultimately euthanized after a lengthy and heroic effort to save him involving about two dozen surgeries and other procedures (read the sad and harrowing details here).

Racehorses need to stand up to live, and the nature of Eight Belles’s injuries would have made that impossible. Sometimes, as in Barbaro’s case, the recovery process from the breaking of one leg leads to injuries in the others, and the horse becomes unable to stand and is put down for that reason. But Eight Belles would not have been able to stand even at the outset (scroll down here and see especially the comment from Bryan D., an equine veterinarian, who writes “there is no way to splint two fractures like this to even get her in the ambulance and to surgery”).

What’s more, at least one and perhaps both of Eight Belles’s fractures was apparently compound, which is often an unsurvivable type of injury even if the break only involves a single leg. Such fractures, especially if they occur on the race track, tend to be
highly septic (see this for everything you ever wanted to know, or didn’t want to know, about treating fractures in horses).

Racehorses are bred to run, and the champions among them have a fighting spirit that won’t quit. They hate to be behind, and will do almost anything to stay in the lead. This is their glory and, if injured, their nemesis, even if the injury is technically survivable.

When Ruffian died I couldn’t understand why, with all the advances in veterinary science, she could not be saved. But this account of her injury and the aftermath of her surgery makes it very clear. She simply could not stop running:

The first quarter-mile [of Ruffian’s 1975 match race against Foolish Pleasure] was run in a blazing 22 1/5 seconds, with Ruffian ahead by a nose. Little more than a 1 furlong later, Ruffian was in front by half a length when both sesamoid bones in her right foreleg snapped. [Her jockey] Vasquez tried to pull her up, but the filly wouldn’t stop. She kept on running, pulverizing her sesamoids, ripping the skin of her fetlock as the bones burst through, driving the open wound into the stinging sand of the Belmont track, tearing her ligaments, until her hoof was flopping uselessly, bent up like the tip of a ski. She was known for her incredible love of running and unwillingness to lose. She had never before been behind in a race.

She was immediately attended to by a team of four veterinarians and an orthopedic surgeon, and underwent an emergency operation lasting 3 hours. Tragically, when the anesthesia wore off after the surgery, she thrashed about wildly on the floor of a padded recovery stall as if still running in the race. Despite the efforts of numerous attendants, she began spinning in circles on the floor. As she flailed about with her legs, she repeatedly knocked the heavy plaster cast against her own elbow until the elbow, too, was smashed to bits. The cast slipped, and as it became dislodged it ripped open her foreleg all over again, undoing what good, if any, the surgery had done. The medical team, knowing that she would probably not survive more extensive surgery for the repair of her leg and elbow, euthanized her shortly afterwards.

I cannot read those words even today without tears springing to my eyes. RIP the valiant three: Ruffian, Barbaro, and Eight Belles.

In a Newsweek interview with George Will and Sean Wilentz that’s mainly about the Left re-evaluating Reagan, there was this food for thought from Will:

What happened in ‘72 was the aggressive, conscious, tough, skillful disenfranchising of organized labor and of the big city machines, by George McGovern. McGovern was thought of as a soft prairie farmer. He was one tough cookie, a man who took a nonexistent Democratic Party in South Dakota and produced a senator—that was himself—not many years later. What happened in ‘72—that formalized, aggressive takeover of the Democratic Party by one faction at the expense of another—is what we’re seeing playing out right now. It is no accident, comrade, that in ‘76 Reagan makes a strong run and in ‘80 he makes it into the White House over the remains of the badly divided Democratic Party.

It appears that Hillary’s argument may be correct. Post-Wright, she now seems more electable than Obama.

For all the good it will do her. Will the superdelegates listen?

[ADDENDUM: Great Noemie Emery article in the Weekly Standard on how Hillary is channeling her Inner Republican, to the fury of many Democrats.]

In my continuing quest to bring you the best of the jello molds, here’s a 50s twofer to help you while away those leisure hours spent without the cocktail parties and get-togethers of yesteryear:

It combines two crazes whose decline we mourn: the jello mold and the paint-by-numbers kit.

Although paint-by-numbers had a hoary and distinguished ancestry (including use of the technique by none other than Leonardo da Vinci, to help his assistants fill in some of the backgrounds to his works), the technique came on the scene in a huge way in the early- to mid-1950s. The kits were criticized for lack of creativity, emphasis on rote learning, and sheer ugliness, but today they are collectibles and the Smithsonian mounted an exhibition about them a only a few years ago.

I attempted to complete a paint-by-numbers kit as a very young child—the head of a German shepherd, if memory serves. Neither my patience nor my manual dexterity at that point were up to the task, and I abandoned it half finished. But I still remember the excitement of opening the thing—the heady smell of the paints and the wonder of watching it shape up (or half shape up).

This jello mold paint-by-numbers kit now being marketed is not a true artifact of the 50s. It’s an ironic commentary on that era, which was marked by a singular lack of irony.

You can’t go home again, it seems. But you can reflect on vanished innocence from the distance of the cynical decades that have followed.

I know, I know, I should leave the NY Times alone to its dwindling readership and coffers. I should take the pledge to never type in its sorry URL again.

But I’m weak. Every now and then some link catches my eye at another site and the temptation to click is irresistible. And so today at Real Clear Politics I happened on this editorial, stunning in its shamelessness even for the Times.

Here’s the lede:

President Bush will never live down “Mission Accomplished”—and should not. When the White House’s spinners spun that claim five years ago (remember the aircraft carrier?), it seemed cocky and premature. As Mr. Bush continues his $526 billion war-without-end in Iraq, it seems stunningly deceitful.

The piece is titled “Spinning the Spin.” The lofty editors mean to refer to the Bush administration as the spinners, but it’s the Times that is getting awfully dizzy here.

Earth to Times (and anyone else who’s been on planet Xenon for the past few years):

(1) That banner referred to the mission of the crew of the ship USS Abraham Lincoln, on which Bush spoke that day. The ship was about to return home after combat operations in the Gulf, its mission accomplished.

(2) On that occasion, Bush declared “major combat operations” over (that is, the official war against Sadaam’s forces) and added [emphasis mine]:

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We are bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous…Our mission continues…

(3) Bush’s showboating (literally) that day, making a grand entrance in a jet that landed on the carrier, and appearing in a flight suit in front of the banner, was a macho display of strutting that we probably all could have done without.

That’s just the first paragraph of the editorial. The rest is devoted to stating the obvious—things still aren’t perfect in Iraq—and driving home the non-obvious,that this state of affairs requires our exit, pronto.

In the last paragraph the Times makes it clear that all of this must be done before the next President takes office. The Times no doubt is betting that this person will be a Democrat.

So it’s far better that the Iraqis be abandoned now, whatever the consequences, than that we stay long enough to make as certain as possible that all the blood and treasure expended there was not for naught. Far better to have the resultant blood and “mess” be on Bush’s hands, rather than having it sully those of a new Democratic administration.

[ADDENDUM: About those casualty figures for April that the Times cites.]

And nothing disgusting in this one (although, where’s Trigger? Hmmm.)

This excellent Slate article can be summarized as follows: if you look down on people, it’s unlikely that they’ll start looking up to you.

Yesterday was Mayday. But, moving right along, tomorrow is Shutdown Day, the holiday during which we’re advised to take a holiday from our computers, televisions, and other electronic communication gadgetry.

Don’t know if I will. I was about to say “Don’t know if I can“—but of course I can. Most definitely I can. Any time I want, I can turn this sucker off. I just choose not to.
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Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Fête (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents.
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