Brave New Whirl

Most of the obituaries of fractious former Secretary of State Alexander Haig focused on his white-knuckled appearance at the White Hose podium on March 30, 1981, when in the uncertain, fearful hours immediately after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, he tried to reassure a shaken public  that  “I am in control here, in the White House.”  Anyone old enough to recall the events of that bizarre day will tell you that Haig’s jittery appearance was about as convincing and reassuring as Tiger Wood’s recent mediacentric mea culpa over his Olympic-class priapism.

Haig (right) with former National Security Advisor Richard Allen, March 30, 1981

Rarely has public ambition been so naked or unappealing. Tim Weiner’s treatment of Haig’s life and career in The New York Times is worth reading, however, for its wonderful dissection of Haig’s bumptious, short-lived tenure as “the vicar of foreign policy” in Reagan’s first term, as well as his crucial service as Richard Nixon’s last White House chief of staff as the Watergate scandal finally, irrevocably unwound, leading to Nixon’s 1974 resignation.  As Nixon, besieged by reality, retreated into the comfort of the bottle, Haig emerged as the de facto president during the last, awesome, crisis-ridden year of that criminally inclined administration.

What tickled me, however, was Weiner’s description of Haig’s uniquely tenuous grip on English.  Long before Bush-speak, there was Haig-speak, which carried on an equally long-distance relationship with the mother tongue:

He had a unique way with words. In a 1981 “On Language” column, William Safire of The New York Times, a veteran of the Nixon White House, called it “haigravation.”

Nouns became verbs or adverbs: “I’ll have to caveat my response, Senator.” (Caveat is Latin for “let him beware.” In English, it means “warning.” In Mr. Haig’s lexicon, it meant to say something with a warning that it might or might not be so.)

Haigspeak could be subtle: “There are nuance-al differences between Henry Kissinger and me on that.” It could be dramatic: “Some sinister force” had erased one of Mr. Nixon’s subpoenaed Watergate tapes, creating an 18 1/2- minute gap. Sometimes it was an emblem of the never-ending battle between politics and the English language: “careful caution,” “epistemologically-wise,” “saddle myself with a statistical fence.”

Now it’s my turn to caveat something: When politicians start sounding like Prof. Irwin Corey on a bad day, it is usually intentional, because they are trying to cover their tracks and/or backsides. Weiner concludes:

But [Haig] could also speak with clarity and conviction about the presidents he served, and about his own role in government. Mr. Nixon would always be remembered for Watergate, he said, “because the event had such major historic consequences for the country: a fundamental discrediting of respect for the office; a new skepticism about politics in general, which every American feels….

He was brutally candid about his own run for office and his subsequent distaste for political life. “Not being a politician, I think I can say this: The life of a politician in America is sleaze,” he told the authors of “Nixon: An Oral History.”

“I didn’t realize it until I started to run for office,” he said. “But there is hardly a straight guy in the business. As Nixon always said to me — and he took great pride in it — ‘Al, I never took a dollar. I had somebody else do it.’

As Haig might have said, there’s absolutely nothing nuance-ly about that.

One of my goals for the coming year is to pay way less attention to what gets posted on Gawker.com. It’s as addictive as all those salty snacks—Doritos, Pringles, Cheetos  (D’oh, Cheetos!)—that nutritionist warn us against ingesting, but we do anyway.  It’s a guilty, unhealthy pleasure.  But every now and then I’ll read something there that’s eye opening, based on actual reporting.

Such is the case today. Check out Ryan Tate’s post The Culture of Fear Inflames the Financial Wires, which follows up his earlier account of the new performance metrics introduced into the Bloomberg newsroom.  The news service’s editorial employees are now being professionally evaluated—and financially rewarded—on how many Breaking News Points™ they to accumulate for each of the scoops and exclusives they break. Basically, the news service is handing out gold stars to reporters based upon a dubious, inhouse-developed metric.

Not surprisingly, many Bloomberg employees have learned to game the system and make themselves shine on paper. As Tate noted in his post Wednesday,  after the new metrics were introduced “reporters magically produced nearly three times as many scoops in one quarter of 2009 as they had in all of 2008.”

Today, Tate writes that Reuters has its own counterpart to Bloomberg’s  scoop-o-meter.  Known as Beats and Exclusives, it is being used this year for the first time  to evaluate journalists’ productivity.  And the impact internally has been about the same:

The abuse we’re told is rampant under the Reuters “Beats and Exclusives” system should only get worse now that money is involved. Our source:

The people who actually file [“Beats and Exclusives” notes] tend to shamelessly game the system by trying to get credit for non-news that no other outlet had or cared about or for “exclusive” executive interviews that broke zero ground. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen now, when jobs and pay are on the line. (Emphasis added).

This is what happens when you import inappropriate performance metrics from Wall Street or the factory floor into a newsroom. A few months ago, a member of Sam Zell’s team, which has deftly managed the Tribune Company into Chapter 11, even suggested judging individual newspaper reporter’s productivity based upon the sheer number of words they pounded out over the course of a quarter or year. So much for striving to write tight and bright copy.

Quality journalism requires the investment of substantial time and is labor intensive. Real scoops are usually the result of arduous leg work, developing new sources and painstakingly winning their trust, and confirming and corroborating what they say with independent authorities. And sometimes promising leads don’t pan out.  As the legendary, late newspaper editor Jim Bellows used to say, commentary is cheap, reporting is expensive.

On the other hand, performance-boosting schemes like those at Bloomberg and Reuters don’t produce more news, but rather more news flavor. Similarly, my favorite Cheetos (D’oh, Cheetos!) may contain no real cheese, but still manage to pack plenty of lip-smacking cheese flavor.

In either case, the end result is the same: empty calories, no fiber, and a slightly queasy feeling.

We will be living with the painful, malodorous, and inescapable consequences of the real estate crash for years to come, I  fear.  Still, there’s a modicum of justice left in the world, as this article published in The Wall Street Journal proves.  As the late, brilliant Anna Russell was wont to say in the course of explaining to audiences about the plot of The Ring Cycle, “I’m not making this up, you know.”

For the second time in a decade, The New York Times is on a tear to uncover the hidden dangers of WMDs.

No, this time the subject is not Saddam’s non-existent nukes, but the dire threat posed by the widgets of mass distraction (WMD) that permeate every nook and cranny of our life: text-enabled cell phones and smart phones.

Since last July, The Times has published at least 21 articles on the hazards and potentially deadly consequences of drivers talking and texting while behind the wheel as part of its series “Driven to Distraction.” For an institution challenged to maintain its reputation as the paper of record in face of unremitting downsizing and layoffs, the series is exhaustive and exhausting in its thoroughness as it apportions culpability all around.

It blames the cell phone industry for irresponsibly promoting its devices as way to turn idle drive-time into productive work-time despite knowledge of the risks; attention-deficited, multi-tasking drivers who focus their attention everywhere but on the road in front of them; and lackadaisical state lawmakers who have refused to take the problem seriously. (The Times cites one federal study that found that 11 percent of all drivers were yakking on their cell phone at any particular time. Only 11 percent? Based upon my extensive driving experience in New York, where nearly every-other driver seems to have a phone surgically stapled to their ear, that’s the most egregious undercount since Bush vs. Gore.)

I initially felt that that The Times was intentionally over blowing the issue to some degree. (An acquaintance, a former Times-person for three decades, recently told me that the editors were pinning some of their 2009 Pulitzer aspirations upon the series.) One of my old colleagues from Newsweek speculated that one of the top editors at The Times must have been rear-ended by a distracted, teenaged texter recently and decided to do something about it.

But the more I mull it over, I’m increasingly convinced they’re underestimating the dimensions of the problem.  And it’s not just the multitudes preoccupied by their iPhone while driving.

Truth is, the epidemic of mass distraction is more prevalent—and perilous—than the H1N1 virus. We’ve become a society of gadget-fixated obsessives, glamoured by the latest the shiny personal electronic device of the moment. Whenever I’ve ventured into Manhattan recently I’ve been astounded by the high proportion of multi-tasking pedestrians ambling down the sidewalks with their eyes glued to their phones, fingers flailing furiously over their tiny keyboards as they urgently tap, tap, tap away. Or they’ll walk with the head bent over a cramped, two-inch screen attempting to read something, utterly oblivious to the bustle about them as they clutch their smartphones like talismans: Yea, thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will see no evil, for my iPhone and Blackberry they comfort me.

Tales of ridiculous, avoidable accidents that have befallen distracted cell-yakkers and -texters have spawned a new category of urban cautionary tales, such as the Staten Island girl who was so engrossed texting a friend that she walked into an open manhole in her path. While she escaped with only a few bruises (and the uncomfortable knowledge that she came close to winning a Darwin Award), not every preoccupied pedestrian is quite so lucky.

One company sees an opportunity for a technological solution—an app called Type n Walk that harnesses the built-in camera to display a live image of the street directly ahead to your phone screen as you text.

Excuse me, but what’s wrong with this picture?!

The paradox inherent in modern communications technology is that while it connects us to almost anyone in the world in real time, it also tends to isolate us from our actual physical environment and leave us suspended in a virtual electronic bubble of our own making and oblivious to the larger world around us.

Caveat textor.

The raucous free-for-alls playing across the country at various town hall meetings focusing on health care reform reminds me of one of my favorite movies, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

No, this is not because Arlen Specter somehow reminds me of Paul Newman.

In the film, you might recall, Butch and Sundance make their fateful decision to go to Bolivia after they are pursued across much of the scenic Southwest by the unrelenting and implacable super posse dispatched by E.H. Harriman to stop their train-robbing ways.  The pair ride and ride, desperately trying to lose their dogged pursuers, but every time they look over their shoulders their unshakeable foes are still there, relentlessly hounding them.

 “Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance repeatedly ask each other, with a mounting mixture of frustration and wonderment.

 That’s what I keep asking myself about the foaming, splenetic protesters who have turned out at various congressional events to vent their screeching, splenetic  opposition to Obama’s proposed health care reforms.  “Who are those guys?”

I mean, who in their right mind is satisfied with our current undeniably broken and unsatisfactory health care system, which leaves millions of Americans unprotected, and those of us who are lucky enough to have health insurance paying ever-escalating premiums for ever-diminishing coverage?  (Other than the insurance companies, of course, and those who carry water for them.) 

Granted, we’ve learned that these shout-fests, far from being spontaneous groundswells, are well-organized and orchestrated by various factions opposed to all aspects of Obama’s political agenda, such as the self-styled Tea-Party Patriots anti-government-spending zealots.  And some of the putative “just a mom from a few blocks away” have been revealed to be Republican operatives and party hacks. (Paul Krugman, as usual, has written one of his typically smart columns today, pointing out that even “moderate” Republicans like Chuck Grassley have embraced their party’s latest ridiculous lie, that Obama’s health-care proposals would establish “death panels” and advocate euthanasia of the elderly.)

Okay, if we’ve learned anything from the past eight years, it’s to expect a little—okay, make that a lot—of dissembling from the foes of social progress.  But what really concerns me is the ranting, raving, and rebuking rank-and-file.  Where did all of these desperate and angry and (let’s be honest) pale white people come from?

Are they so buffeted, depressed, or displaced by all of the soul-shaking events of the past decade—two recessions; terrorist attacks; two simultaneous, hard-to-comprehend wars in far-off, little-understood countries; an unprecedented financial crisis, all set off against a backdrop of growing economic inequality and uncertainty—that they have independently and collectively decided they are (in the memorable phrase uttered by Howard Beale in “Network”) “mad as hell and not going to take it any more.”  Even if the proposed reforms would probably make their own lives less stressful, more secure, and healthier?  (The irony, of course, is that for all their verbalized fears that Obama is a secret Socialist, in a truly social democratic society most of these people would find themselves with fewer economic insecurities.)  

Are they that fearful of change that they’re willing to fight—even threaten violence—to retain our current sick health care system?

Who are those guys?