Reason Magazine - Topics > Television

Are You Experienced?

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:03:00 EDT

Last week on Face The Nation, Wesley Clark said crashing a jet doesn't qualify John McCain to be the next president, and hawkish conservatives everywhere clawed at their breasts and howled "Traitor!"

Mark Hemingway at NRO's The Corner, who is one of the more relaxed members of the McCain cabal, didn't go so far as to defend the record of National Review's barely-breathing second-choice nominee, but he did passively entertain a fantasy of pushing Clark off the national stage and (presumably) on to a tuba player in the orchestra pit.

Clark is a little rough around the edges, but I agree with David Reese at the Huffington Post that standing idly by while McCain lists "crashed an expensive plane" on his resume would have a devastating trickle-down effect on potential appointees:

Riding on a rollercoaster and flying out of your seat but then landing on a waterslide and sliding down to into the water and almost drowning but then being rescued by an Elvis impersonator: QUALIFIES YOU TO BE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR....

Getting really, really drunk at Thanksgiving and crying, "Why was I never good enough for you, Dad?" and then literally eating a banjo, and then saying, "Am I man enough NOW, Dad? Now that I've eaten my banjo-- the one thing I loved, the one thing you could never understand?": QUALIFIES YOU TO BE CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE.

Read the rest of Reese's qualifications here. Peruse reason's McCain archive here.

Hat tip to my associates at The F*ck Squad and Bill Watterson.

The Cunning Linguist

info@reason.com (Marty Beckerman) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Every obituary for George Carlin will cite his "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV" routine in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence. The monologue led to Carlin's arrest and a 1978 Supreme Court obscenity case. (Carlin admitted that he was "perversely...proud of" the federal legal drama that his dirty words caused.)

But Carlin's comedy was not simply about dirty words; it was about the English language, and our collective fear of it. He used more expletives than Howard Stern, but his obsession was linguistics, not lasciviousness. As Carlin told CNN in 2004, "[I]f I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved-to teach it, probably...Language has always fascinated me."

He was especially fascinated with the blunting of language for comfort's sake. Carlin ridiculed our watering-down of sexual descriptions and ethnic categories, not to mention our mourning clichés, all of which he believed were the real-life manifestations of George Orwell's "Newspeak," utilized to obscure reality, numb the mind, and discourage criticism. As much as Carlin loathed theology, war, greed, and hypersensitivity, he was most disgusted when religous puritans, the military, corporations, and P.C. "classroom liberals" mangled the language for the purpose of soothing the masses. When I saw Carlin perform in the ‘90s, the biggest laugh of the night came from his observation that "the unlikely event of a water landing," discussed in every preflight safety lecture, sounds suspiciously like "crashing into the fucking ocean."

In fact, Carlin was disgusted with the mangling of English for any reason. He hated anyone who pronounced forte as "for-tay," insisted that "no comment is a comment," and advised us that "unique needs no modifier; very unique, quite unique, more unique, real unique, fairly unique, and extremely unique are wrong and they mark you as dumb, although certainly not unique." For all of his lifelong ranting against conservatism, Carlin was a diehard traditionalist when it came to grammar and vocabulary.

This mastery of the language allowed Carlin to craft his puns ("Soft rock music isn't rock, and it ain't music...it's just soft," "I thought it would be nice to get a job at a duty-free shop, but it doesn't sound like there's a whole lot to do in a place like that"), but also gave him the ability to see how we pad our existences with pleasant lies. In Carlin's mind, language should not be safe, and neither should life. Children, he argued in his final HBO special, this year's It's Bad for Ya, should play with sticks, not have "play dates" under the ever-watchful eyes of overprotective, micro-managing parents. (He had previously complained, with his trademark growl, "We've taken all the fun out of childhood just in the interest of saving a few lives.")

Near the end of his career, Carlin was more bitter than funny—It's Bad for Ya is a righteous tirade that provokes more nods than laughs—but he never lost his unparalleled ability to play with words. He deconstructed the phrases that we use absentmindedly, exposing our hypocrisies—and our human condition—in the process. He was a comic genius because he was a linguistic master. As Carlin said in his most famous routine: "I thank you for hearing my words... They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have, really."

Marty Beckerman is the author of Dumbocracy, which will be released this September. His website is www.MartyBeckerman.com

A (Not Really) Working-Class Journalist Is Something to Be

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:05:00 EDT

Try to guess the provenance of this sentence:

Weren't nobody happy when Ma got pregnant with me [...], what with her being barely seventeen and all and the father being my old man, who wasn't nobody's idea of a young go getter. Me? I can't complain -- I got borned, didn't I?

Is that some snippet of oral history from a WPA project on Appalachian life? Perhaps a selection from The Autobiography of Chicken George?

Nope! It's from a new nonfiction book by a New York Times staff writer, who grew up in, uh, New Hampshire. As Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who flagged this passage (and liked the book), put it, such demonstrations of "hardscrabble bona fides" sound "contrived and artifical." They also sound a lot like the round-the-clock Tim Russert tributes that have clogged the media's tubes since Friday's news. Who knew that being a fan of a professional sporting team was such a telltale indicator of regular-guy, working class heroism?

In watching bits of MSNBC's ongoing Russert telethon, Beltway elitist after Beltway elitist waxed positively proletarian about the Meet the Press host's authentic Joe Sixpackitude, his instinctive "connection" with the great unwashed lunchbuckets of (late-campaign) Hillary Clinton's Real America. It was kind of like watching Stephen Hawking sing the glories of the Yanomami tribe.

Being the son of sharecroppers myself, I tend to be allergic to the sight of monocle-wearing Kennedy Center regulars expressing wonder that a guy can really make it in this big old world without Ivy League certification. And needless to say, the bizarre ritual of resume de-padding at the top of the heap would strike me as borderline offensive if I wasn't so busy working three jobs and going to night school. But maybe there is a more charitable interpretation.

Why are baseball players the most superstitious athletes in the world? Because 1) the game is a festival of failure, where screwing up 7 times out of 10 is a much-coveted goal; and 2) they get to be bajillionaires as long as they can continue to slightly beat the odds and stay healthy. The joyride can be stopped at any time, without warning. Something similar is at play with hot young actresses − they're rich, they're famous, they're adored, they're despised ... and they can be out of work forever overnight, for reasons often out of their control.

It makes a kind of perfect sense that those lucky few who ascend the rickety throne of network TV news would pay constant, treacly tribute to the masses who make it all possible. If an army of Viagra-popping geriatrics was paying for my baseball season tickets, I too may be tempted to wax poetical about the gritty hometown I long left behind, and the ironclad Wisdom of Big Russ' Greatest American Heartland Generation of Our Fathers. Also, maybe there are worse things than an elite class that feels under constant pressure to demonstrate their jes'-folks street cred.

But still. If, as former reason editor Virgina Postrel suggested in a fascinating recent Atlantic column, rising incomes on the lower end of the economic scale are eroding the need for immigrant and minority communities to overcompensate with conspicuous consumption, maybe it's time for a mirror effect to begin taking shape at the top. It's OK, you Skull & Bones fancy-lads who will always rule the world − you no longer have to pretend to like Pabst Blue Ribbon! Besides, only Dennis Hopper ever drank that shit to begin with.

Tomato Triage

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

I love the farmers' market. A victim of my own post-yuppie childless female demographic, I can't help but cherish a vision of myself in a summer dress, basket tucked in the crook of my elbow, sashaying between stalls of heirloom tomatoes, wildflowers, and artisanal pork products. In this fantasy it is 7:30 on a brilliantly sunny Sunday morning, and all the grizzled farmers and jolly butchers know me by name.

This is, of course, an absurd delusion. What really happens most weeks is that I sleep in, then pick up a shrink-wrapped bundle of green beans and an equally shrink-wrapped Tyson chicken at the Safeway.

While I weep for the lost aesthetic experience, I'm not worried about endangering my own virtue, my health, or the health of the planet if I'm a little hung over from Saturday night's festivities or if it happens to be raining when I wake up. Because there simply isn't anything like conclusive evidence that shopping at the farmers' market will save me (or the environment) from such heartaches.

I'm sure you've heard: Killer tomatoes are attacking America as we speak. The New York Times editorialized that we "should not have to wait until the next food scare before Washington comes to the rescue." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is doggedly eliminating possible culprits state by state. But not all tomatoes are equally terrifying, the FDA has been careful to point out. Cherry or grape tomatoes are fine, as are homegrown tomatoes.

This last bit has the "eat local" crowd crowing. Locavore (word of the year 2007!) logic goes like this: Those big factory farms are awash in God knows what kind of creepy-crawlies. Tomatoes are picked in one place, washed in another, packed elsewhere, and shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles. Of course they're going to get dirty! Far better, say the locavores, to eat food that is grown within a small radius, say 100 miles of your home. Buy at farms and farmers markets. Get to know your local producers and only shop with the ones you trust. Grow your own! An appealing prospect, to be sure. But the gap between homegrown and farmer's market may be larger than the gap between farmer's market and supermarket.

"As a scientist, I cannot say smaller is better. It's just not that simple," Martha Robert, a microbiologist at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and a safety adviser to the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, told Newsweek. "The large packers we have are extremely stringent with sanitizing techniques and measures to prevent cross-contamination, but if someone makes a mistake when they're mixing or dicing large quantities, the problem is going to be larger too," she explains. "But sometimes a small grower has been doing something for years, and [they] don't know they're putting themselves at risk."

Put another way, anyone who has ever been in one of New York's independent corner greengrocers, or an unaffiliated rural grocery store knows that small and local are no guarantee of higher hygiene standards. Some big operations are squeaky clean, others breed disease. Likewise with the little guys. As I write, the feds are fingering a couple of growers and maybe a restaurant chain as the culprits after clearing thousands of tomato producers.

Small can be beautiful, but it's no guarantee of better hygiene or virtue. Accidents happen. Sometimes pigs shit in inconvenient places or someone fails to wash his hands on little farms, too.

Because advocates of local eating conflate health and environmental issues on a regular basis, allow me to briefly do so as well. Much of the warm glow of farmers' market virtue comes from a growing concern about something called "food miles"—when a box of grape tomatoes has to travel hundreds of miles to get to your plate, surely the number of carbon-belching, petroleum-powered vehicles involved becomes unacceptable. So even if you still might end up calling Ralph on the big white phone thanks to some tainted tomatoes, at least you'll be able to tell him you weren't contributing to global warming, right?

Just in time for summer, a new study finds a serious hole in the food miles concept: In terms of total carbon output, what you eat matters a lot more than where it came from. Swapping out chicken for red meat every now and then can eliminate just as much carbon as eating entirely local. Going further still, several studies have come up with variations on this somewhat counterintuitive conclusion: shipping spring lamb on the slow boat from New Zealand may actually produce less carbon than hopping in the minivan for a family trip to pick up some locally-raised lamb shanks from the farmer outside of town, or a drive to the farmers' market.

Because I'm a late sleeper, I often manage to emerge, unshowered and basketless, just as they're shutting down the farmers' market in my neighborhood. The site is no longer a magical, vegetable version of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. It's just a parking lot with a burst glass container of fresh-from-the-cow (potentially unpasteurized) milk, a Port-a-Potty in the corner, and nowhere to wash your hands. The snarl of shoppers' cars and farmers' old diesel trucks that chokes the neighborhood on market days is just clearing up. The farmers' market is marvelous enough without all the trappings—while I'm sad that once again this week I won't befriend a jolly butcher, I remain unconcerned about my gastronomic virtue or the relative threats to my guts.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor.

Tim Russert, RIP

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:11:00 EDT

The nation's Sunday morning advertisement for Lexis-Nexis is dead of a heart attack at the young age of 58. I won't pretend that I was a huge fan of Russert's particular brand of anchorperson nostalgia for the Greatest Generation, but, unlike 99.9% of the rest of us, he did one thing better than anyone else − drag a politician onto network TV and confront him or her with past statements and actions that do not reconcile with the rhetorical BS of the present. The best such example I can recall offhand was Russert's brutal interrogation 13 months ago of a stammering John McCain.

You'd think it wouldn't be rare for a political journalist to read up on his subjects, but Russert was not only a rare exception in that regard, he also used the tactic with admirable efficiency and calm.

Russert-lovers? Haters? Share your memories in the comments.

The Central Committee Is in Session

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding an open meeting today, giving students of public policy a chance to observe an especially egregious arm of the regulatory state. If you want to see what's wrong with Washington, the FCC is as good a place as any to start looking: Since its birth in 1934, it has manifested three fundamental problems.

The commission is corrupt. I don't just mean the sort of corruption where the chairman loosens his tie, puts his feet up on his desk, and doles out favors to the companies that scratched the right backs—though you'll find plenty of that in the commission's history. Even when the body is being relatively transparent and above-board, it is beholden to politically connected lobbies. The FCC controls an important economic resource. Naturally, important economic interests try their best to influence its decisions.

The most flagrant example of this might be the welcome the commission gave to FM radio. The technology was an enormous leap forward: It allowed stations to broadcast without static, and it allowed more signals to coexist on the spectrum. It also worried RCA, which was investing heavily in the development of television; the company fretted that consumers might not pay for both a new FM radio and a new TV set. RCA didn't control the patent on FM, so it pressured the FCC to favor the other technology. The regulators obliged, and a series of roadblocks appeared in FM's path. The most destructive decision came in 1944, when the commissioners suddenly reassigned the FM broadcasters' portion of the ether to television, instantly rendering every FM receiver obsolete.

Sometimes the benefits of FCC corruption were more narrowly focused. The most infamous illustration might be the case of Lady Bird Johnson, whose broadcasting empire relied on the Washington connections of her husband, future president Lyndon Johnson. The Johnsons got rich off their stations, with the FCC smoothing the way whenever they needed an application approved and throwing up regulatory hurdles when someone threatened their monopoly on Austin's TV market.

Does such winner-picking still go on today? Decide for yourself. The commission intends to auction off some wireless spectrum soon. FCC chief Kevin Martin wants to impose some restrictions on how that spectrum can be used—restrictions that happen to dovetail with the business model of one well-connected startup. The business in question, M2Z, wants to build an ad-supported national broadband network, with additional tiers where consumers can pay extra for speedier connections; last year it asked the commission to grant it the spectrum outright. The regulators refused, and the company promptly sued to overturn the decision. But if the auction goes forward as planned, the commission will have effectively bequeathed the spectrum to the corporation anyway.

You needn't be fond of the incumbent wireless industry—not exactly free-market heroes themselves—to appreciate how inappropriate it is for the government to weigh the scales in any single firm's favor. Those incumbents have protested the plan, leading Martin to take his proposal off the agenda for today's meeting. But that doesn't mean the idea is dead: Martin says he hopes to introduce it next month instead.

Despite this unpleasant history, the FCC believes it is qualified to serve as a moral guardian for the rest of us. Which leads us to problem number two.

The commission is sanctimonious. For seven decades, the nation's scolds and censors have used the FCC as a tool to shape the sounds and images allowed on the airwaves. In 1952, for example, then-commissioner Paul Walker announced with satisfaction that his agency had "surveyed the programming of some of the television stations in operation, and found that some of them had reported no time devoted to broadcasts of a religious nature. We felt in view of this fact that regular renewal of their licenses would not be in the public interest." The stations quickly revised their schedules, and the commission agreed to renew their licenses after all.

These days the FCC is less likely to shoehorn something onto a station's schedule, but it's more than willing to slice something off the program. This practice also has a long history. It was the FCC that enforced Spiro Agnew's crusade against "drug lyrics," an especially vague stricture at a time when some fretful listeners managed to detect traces of narcotics in "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Hey Jude" (for the phrase "let her under your skin"). Agnew himself believed the Beatles song "With a Little Help from My Friends" was a coded message in which "the 'friends' were assorted drugs with such nicknames as 'Mary Jane,' 'Speed' and 'Benny.'" Rock stations suddenly faced much more uncertainty about what they were allowed to play, and worried program directors reined in their DJs, hastening the decline of freeform radio.

More recently, the FCC under Michael Powell and then Kevin Martin has waged war on "indecent" material, stepping up enforcement even before Janet Jackson's infamous nipple slip in 2004 and ramping its penalties still higher since then. Now Martin wants to tell a company that intends to offer a free national wireless network that it'll have to filter out the porn if it wants access to the ether.

The company? M2Z, of course—or, to be precise, whoever wins the auction tailored to M2Z's business model. Don't expect any objections: The smut-free proviso was already present in M2Z's plans. The execs there understand what Washington wants.

And then there's problem number three:

The commission is technocratic. The next time someone tells you central planning is dead, remind him that there is an arm of the federal government that decides in advance how different chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum will be used, and that it also reserves the right to determine which entities will be allowed to use it. It's true the commission has adopted several market "mechanisms" in the last few decades: FCC-approved broadcasters now have the right to sell their licenses to other FCC-approved broadcasters, and spectrum is usually distributed by auction rather than pure fiat. But even an auction can be bent to the planners' will.

For evidence, look—again!—at the M2Z situation. If the auction goes forward according to Martin's reported plans, the bidding won't be open to just any telecom company. Applicants will have to use that spectrum for a particular sort of service. They will even be pushed to adopt a particular business model. There are phrases to describe such an arrangement. "Free market" is not one of them.

But that is how the Federal Communications Commission works. In theory, its job is to manage the nation's spectrum in the public interest. In practice, inevitably, that means its job is to pick and choose among the definitions of "the public interest" offered by rival industry lobbies and moralistic pressure groups. Corruption, sanctimony, and the conceit of central planning: That's the FCC—and Martin's pet auction—in a nutshell.

Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).

Friday Fun Slash Vid

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:30:00 EDT

A parting shot before the weekend:

Stewart vs. McClellan

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:44:00 EDT

The bad news is that Jon Stewart isn't all that funny anymore.

The good news is, he may be the best serious interviewer on television.

I don't know of anyone who has been better or more consistent than Stewart when it comes to cutting through the bullshit as these ex-Bush administration officials do the talk show circuit to promote their books.

These days I watch Colbert when I want to laugh. But I'm more apt to watch Stewart interview a guy like McClellan than I am Tim Russert or one of the other Sunday morning talking heads.

Miscellaneous Friday Links

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:33:00 EDT

* John Ford's lost Vietnam propaganda film.

* You want witch hunts? Here's a witch hunt.

* Is Alice Cooper a terrorist?

* Jimmy Carter's hands-on presidency.

You Don't Have to Watch Dynasty to Cop an Attitude

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:02:00 EDT

Last month I mentioned that the conspiracy theorist Carrington Steele, author of Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult, wasn't the first person to worry that a Church of Oprah was rising. But I didn't realize just how unoriginal Steele was. The Christian outfit Lighthouse Trails Research reports:

Upon reading Steele's work ourselves, our editors discovered that the 80-page book was filled with verbatim passages copied from other writers material, which was presented as Steele's own authorship....

While we regret to issue this finding because we do believe that Oprah Winfrey's efforts to convert the public to her New Age beliefs must be exposed, we fear that Steele's book could negatively reflect upon and misrepresent long-standing and reputable ministries. In addition, because the author also plagiarized some secular sources (such as CNN, Fox News, and Rolling Stone magazine), we believe this book may, in addition to being a poor Christian testimony, be legally problematic.

There's a political angle:

Because the chapter on Obama did not contain any documentation that he was involved in the occult or the New Age, Lighthouse Trails asked Steele if there was political motivation involved. What's more, the chapter on Obama did not seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Steele said she was not politically motivated.

Fuel for future conspiracy theories:

When Lighthouse Trails spoke with Carrington Steele, she stated she had done both the writing and the research on the book without help or support from others. However, it was pointed out to her that she often said "we" and "us" in her interviews, and we wondered to whom she was referring. At this point, Steele said she could not answer that question, saying she was not at liberty to say. We found this response to be curious and disturbing.

"Drop Dead Gorgeous—and Military Trained!"

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Via the overheated commentary of Extreme Mortman comes this bizarre slow-news-day CNN Situation Room bit on how Israel (that 60-year-old!) is overhauling its image by having former military gals pose for Maxim magazine. "Israel is hip, sexy, and fun," says CNN:

Not sure if Fox News will counterblast with the girls of the PLO.

Gentle reader, does this news change your views on foreign aid?

Or does it merely convince you further that we're living in the Rapture and we don't even know it?

Just Sue Ellen Stories

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:25:00 EDT

"How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War," the Nick Gillespie/me co-production in this weekend's Washington Post, drew some interesting testimonial responses. A sampling:

In 1987 [...] I visited Bukhara in Uzbekistan. At one point, we were invited into the living area behind a shop, where the owner took out a video cassette and played it for us. It was a grainy episode of "Dallas," dubbed in Finnish. (We learned later that Estonians would record the Finnish version of "Dallas"--and other Western TV shows also--off of Helsinki TV, easily seen Tallinn. These would then circulate throughout the USSR.) Our host grilled us intensely about each of the appliances in Miss Ellie's kitchen. Thus did visions of Southfork reach even unto Central Asia.
*
In the summer of 1983 I was traveling through Europe with my Brother. One of the countries we visited was Romania. I recall meeting [a] 20-30 year old Romanian male. His first question to me was "Who shot JR"? I was surprised to hear such a question. He said he watched the series however [the] episodes they see were a few seasons behind. It was unfortunate for I could not answer his question.
*
I was there when Dallas won the Cold War, with an American tour group, just after Dallas started running. Wherever we went--Moscow, St Petersburg, Odessa, Kiev, everywhere!--the touring day could not begin till after the morning episode was over, since neither the driver nor guide would stir till then. Same thing for the late-afternoon epidsode, the tour had to end before it began. And it was not only our driver and guide--auto and pedestran traffic just disappeared from the streets during those two hours. I think I remember being told it was Boris Yeltsin's party that sponsored the twice-a-day showing ... and ran political messages in the commercial breaks since they knew everyone in the, then, USSR, would be watching.
*
Do you remember a news story following the opening of Albania? Boat people from Albania started coming across to Italy and landing on the beaches in droves, causing a headache for the Italian police. One policeman reported that when he approached a group of Albanian boat people, they said, "Is this Dallas?"

*
In the late 80s, probably 1987, I was in Inverness, Scotland. My then wife and I went out to a pub. We walked in and saw the entire bar looking in our direction and up to a TV that was placed above the door. There was dead silence except for the American accents on the television. As we proceeded into the place and bellied up to the bar, we turned to look and on the screen was Dallas. The entire place was mesmerized.
*
It's probably the most important show ever, as ridiculous as that might sound. Its impact on the rest of the world was even more profound than its impact in the U.S.
I would propose that Baywatch continued the Dallas phenomenon in the late 80s and 90s. To people outside the U.S., and particularly in Germany, Baywatch symbolized the myth of California: A place to live freely and enjoy the abundance of the earth. Must have been very attractive to the East Germans who could get the program and wanted very much to travel, and to the West Germans who were sick of the whole big government, nanny state thing. When the Wall came down in 1989, David Hasselhoff (brilliantly) flew to Berlin right away to give a "Freedom" concert at the Brandenburger Tor.

Over in the comments at my personal blog, one of my favorite film writers, David Ehrenstein, adds:

The impact of Dallas cannot be underestimated. At heart it was little more than a louche retread of Sirk's Written on the Wind and Stevens' Giant but with the unabashed vulgarity of Russ Meyer thrown in for good measure.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was obsessed with the show, assigning two of his most valuable boyfriends (Udo Kier and Raul Gimenez) all-important taping duties. He didn't want to miss a nanosecond. Needless to say Berlin Alexanderplatz is rather different in overall presentation. But its dark heart is much the same.

At Commentary magazine, Abe Greenwald searches for the new diverting Dallas in our modern twilight struggle, and comes up with ... Hillary vs. Obama! Still, my favorite response was probably this:

Good article, I enjoyed it but there is one failing. To wit: Contrary to popular belief, this is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot/killed JFK.

Some related nuggets from the reason vault: The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised, and Charles Paul Freund's classic In Praise of Vulgarity.

Poperah

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:40:00 EDT

A lot of Christians are angry at Oprah about her latest book club selection, Eckhart Tolle's New Age tome A New Earth. Here is one of many YouTube videos attacking her:

That clip is called The Church of Oprah Exposed; it is, among other things, a promo for Carrington Steele's book and DVD Don't Drink the Kool-Aid: Oprah, Obama, and the Occult. (Yes, of course there's an Obama angle. Apparently Jeremiah Wright isn't the only controversial preacher in his life.)

It isn't just fringy Christians who talk about a Church of Oprah. In 2002 the deeply mainstream Christianity Today published a famous article, "The Church of O," that makes a more respectful, less paranoid argument that Oprah is a spiritual leader. The best quote in it comes from a Bible teacher in Chicago: "I like Oprah. I'm a closet groupie, though, because her theology's a little off." Another Chicago Christian -- the infamous Rev. Wright -- has a good line as well: "Somebody who makes $100 a week has no problem tithing. But start making $35 million a year, and you'll want to renegotiate the contract. You don't want to be a part of 'organized religion' at that point."

Over in the ivory tower, Prof. Kathryn Lofton of Indiana University has taken a slightly different approach, arguing that "Oprah does things in a religious manner, but she is not a religion." She goes on:

"She endorses some modes of theological existence, but dislikes many more. For her, religion implies control and oppression and the inability to catalog shop. The only way religion or religious belief works for Oprah is if it is carefully coordinated with capitalist pleasure. Thus, the turn to 'spirituality' -- the non-dogmatic dogma that encourages an ambiguous theism alongside an exuberant consumerism," Lofton said.

In Winfrey's view, Buddhism isn't about meditation and renunciation, it's about beaded bracelets and fragrant incense. "Christianity isn't about Christ's apocalyptic visions or the memorization of creeds, it's about a friendly guy named Jesus and his egalitarian message. As long as you can spend, feel good about yourself and look good, your religious belief will be tolerated on Planet O. The religion of Oprah is the incorporated faith of late-capitalist America," Lofton said.

Sort of a mellower, bourgier version of the spiritual jacuzzi I described in reason in May 2003. That article concluded with a look at Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius, and other "joke religions" -- I wrote it too early to include the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- so I shouldn't end this post without mentioning that Oprahism has manifested itself in that sphere as well. Here's one more YouTube clip:

For extra credit, read the comment thread on that film's YouTube page. The Carrington Steele crowd has discovered the video and seems to be taking it literally. God bless the Internet: bringing mutually incomprehending tribes together since 1969.

Links! We Got Links!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:00:00 EDT

Stuff I've been meaning to blog:

* a leftist critique of the New Deal,

* an online chat with Al Qaeda,

* a psychiatric strange loop,

* and from 1986, the first important piece of Reagan revisionism.

Bonus politics-free, prog-free music link: Candi Staton sings Merle Haggard.

Guantanamo: The DVD

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:53:00 EDT

John Yoo's newly declassified torture memo -- download it here -- surely paved the path for the abuses at Guantanamo. But it wasn't alone. Vanity Fair reports:

Ideas arose from other sources. The first year of Fox TV's dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. "We saw it on cable," [Lt. Col. Diane] Beaver recalled. "People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular." Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. "He gave people lots of ideas."

The rest of the Vanity Fair feature isn't so funny. Read it here.

Blurry Boobs, Butts Bother Bureaucrats

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:15:00 EDT

Fox is refusing to pay a $91,000 indecency fine imposed by the Federal Communications Commission for a 2003 broadcast of the now-defunct reality show Married by America in which the naughty bits of strippers at a bachelor party were blurry but inferrable. The FCC conceded that "the pixelation of the female strippers' naked breasts and buttocks does render the material less explicit and graphic than it would have been in the absence of pixelation" but concluded that "the material is still sufficiently graphic and explicit to support an indecency finding." It initially imposed a fine of $1.2 million—$7,000 for each of 169 Fox stations that aired the show—but later decided to fine just the 13 Fox stations in cities where viewers had complained. Fox nevertheless remains defiant, saying the FCC fine is "arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional."

In my column last week I said the FCC should stop it already with the indecency nonsense. Now I'm having second thoughts. I never saw Married by America, but I feel pretty confident in suggesting that it was less entertaining than the bureaucratic brouhaha it generated.

[via The Freedom Files]

The Upside of Seeing Financial Institutions Face a Crisis

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:00:00 EDT

It's as good an excuse as any to link to the long-lost ending of It's a Wonderful Life.

Rough Trade in Foreign Sausage

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:40:00 EDT

The European Union, friend of free trade:

Swiss pork-and-beef cervelat sausages have traditionally used Brazilian cow-intestine skins, but the European Union has banned imports of the skins, fearing they may contain traces of mad cow disease, or BSE.

Picnickers flock to parks at weekends to barbecue the large, bland sausages which look like giant hot dogs. But skin stocks will run out by the end of the year, forcing butchers to use alternatives which purists say split easily and lack flavour....

The [economics] minister said there would be enough sausages for spectators at the European soccer championship the Swiss and Austrians are hosting later this year, and promised to push for a review of the EU ban.

If that fails, Swiss fans may just have to put up with inferior skins, even if they do not curl the sausage when cooked, she said. "I believe Swiss consumers will have the courage to accept a slightly straighter cervelat."

Oh, well, at least there's unfettered trade in sausages within Europe. Hold on -- what's that?

The generally good relations between Czechs and Slovaks cooled dramatically last year when Slovakia applied to the EU for trademark protection for its 'spekácky' sausage. This speciality has also been produced from time immemorial by Czech manufacturers. A trademark for the Slovak sausage would mean that the Czechs would have to produce their sausage according to the Slovak recipe. The prospect triggered outraged protest in the Czech Republic. The Czech daily reports that the agricultural ministers of the two states have now reached an agreement at a trade fair in Brno. "Czechs and Slovaks are now working together again on the 'spekácky' project. Both countries will jointly apply to the EU for the registration of this regional speciality. ... If the EU grants protection, there will be a 'sausage declaration' that stipulates the recipes to be used, but allows each country to use its own."

They've always provoked passion, those sausages:

Nonsense of Indecency

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In most of the places where this column appears, the four-letter words it contains will not be spelled out. Instead they will be rendered as initial letters followed by dashes.

That custom is an example of self-restraint by newspapers and websites that do not want to offend their readers. It is not the result of government censorship, which would violate the First Amendment.

Yet as a case the Supreme Court recently agreed to hear illustrates, different rules apply to broadcast TV, where the Federal Communications Commission has decreed that anything it deems "indecent" may not be aired between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. One day soon Americans will marvel at the bureaucratic energy expended on censorship in this one arbitrarily chosen segment of the media universe.

The FCC imposed its first fine for broadcast indecency in 1975, provoked by a mid-afternoon airing of a George Carlin monologue on a New York City radio station. In upholding the fine, the Supreme Court emphasized the distinction between Carlin's "verbal shock treatment," involving the deliberately provocative, repeated use of expletives, and "the isolated use of a potentially offensive word."

For the next three decades, taking its cue from the Court, the FCC let stray expletives slide. Then Bono got a little carried away at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards, where he pronounced his award for best original movie song "really, really fucking brilliant."

In response to complaints orchestrated by the Parents Television Council, the FCC's Enforcement Bureau said Bono's expletive was not indecent because it was not really a sexual reference and in any event was "fleeting and isolated." Five months later, the commission reversed this finding, along with its longstanding policy of overlooking isolated vulgarities. The FCC later ruled that expletive-containing comments by Cher at the 2002 Billboard Music Awards and by Nicole Richie at the 2003 Billboard Music Awards were indecent as well.

Last June, in response to a lawsuit by broadcasters, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that the FCC had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to "articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy." That decision, which the Supreme Court now has agreed to review, did not definitively address the broadcasters' constitutional objections, but the court was skeptical that they could be overcome.

The 2nd Circuit suggested that the FCC's indecency rules are unconstitutionally vague, creating "an undue chilling effect on free speech" by drawing seemingly arbitrary distinctions. A single fuck or shit on a live awards show can cost a network millions of dollars, for example, but the same words are OK in a "bona fide news interview," even if the interview is a thinly disguised promotion for one of the network's own entertainment shows.

The accidental airing of Cher's "fuck 'em" is indecent, but the deliberate airing of the very same footage in the context of a news report is not. The "repeated and deliberate use of numerous expletives" is OK in a fictional World War II movie because they are "integral" to the film yet indecent in a documentary about real-life blues musicians.

It's obvious by now that the FCC makes up the rules for acceptable speech as it goes along. In the paradigmatic example of broadcast indecency, Carlin's monologue about "the words you couldn't say on the public airwaves," there's no question that the expletives were "integral" to the routine, which was partly about the very censorship to which it became subject.

The premise underlying the Supreme Court's decision upholding the fine for Carlin's monologue was that TV and radio over the airwaves are "uniquely pervasive" and "uniquely accessible to children." With nine out of 10 U.S. homes receiving cable or satellite TV, with downloads and DVRs making a hash of "time channeling," with ratings and parental controls available across video sources, that premise is no longer tenable. The only question is how much longer the courts will pretend otherwise.

© Copyright 2008 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

'I'd Normally Shake Your Hand, but I Don't Want to Get a Contact High'

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 12:16:00 EDT

In the second installment of his 35,000-part series "Better Know a Lobby," Stephen Colbert sits down with the Drug Policy Alliance's Ethan Nadelmann "in his opium den."

And If You Freeze the Frame at Just the Right Moment, You Can See a White Robe and Pointy Hood Hanging on the Back of the Door

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:56:00 EDT

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has watched Hillary Clinton's "something is happening in the world" ad so many times that he has lost his mind. Spurred by "an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right," he found that "repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease." Eventually Patterson realized what was bothering him:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad's central image—innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger—it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn't help but think of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad—as I see it—is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

Patterson concedes that the Clinton campaign might not have had a racist intent, but he's pretty sure that the candidate benefited from the support of voters spooked by the idea of a black man answering that red phone. And if that was not the plan all along, why on earth would the ad's creators have put a blond child in it? True, "two other sleeping children, presumably in another bed, are not blond, but they are dimly lighted, leaving them ambiguous. Still it is obvious that they are not black—both, in fact, seem vaguely Latino." Just like the children menaced by lurking black men in Birth of a Nation?

I hate Hillary Clinton more than the next guy, and I thought the red phone ad was moronic and demagogic. But Patterson's take on it is even stupider.

To Be Fair, Mondale Was Wearing A Big Gold Medallion and an Earring In the Original

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:23:00 EDT

Camille Paglia has the best take yet on Hillary Clinton's red phone ad:

If it's 3 a.m., why is the male-seeming mother fully dressed as she comes in to check on her sleeping children? Is she a bar crawler or insomniac? An obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, like Joan Crawford in "Mommie Dearest"? And why is Hillary sitting at her desk in full drag and jewelry at that ungodly hour? A president should not be a monomaniac incapable of rest and perched on guard all night like Poe's baleful raven.

At L-o-o-o-n-g Last Sir, Have You No Sense of Humor?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:41:00 EDT

Just last night I was telling someone that I couldn't imagine any scenario on God's green earth that would get me to vote for Hillary Clinton. But that was before I watched this clip of Grade A rageaholic and unfunny sports humorist Keith Olbermann, with anger more than sadness, laying into Hitlery for Geraldine Ferraro's sins. See how long you can last through his hilariously self-serious tirade; I crapped out somewhere on minute five:

Link via Wonkette. Nick Gillespie wrote last year about the many (horrifying) moods of Keith Olbermann. UPDATE: YouTube seems to be having server-squirrel issues; try this link.

The Wire vs. The Sun

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:30:00 EDT

The fifth and final season of The Wire concluded Sunday night. Until this year critics were nearly unanimous in their praise for the Baltimore-based HBO series, but the last 10 episodes provoked furious debates between the program's defenders and detractors. The chief cause of the ferment was the show's critique of the newspaper where Wire creator David Simon began his career: the Baltimore Sun.

I'm not going to join the argument about the season's artistic merit—not here, anyway. I do have a few thoughts about the substance of Simon's criticisms. I might not have a front-row seat at the paper, but I'm not squinting from the back row either: I subscribe to The Sun, my wife is a reporter there, and our circle of friends includes several current and former Sun staffers, some of whom had cameos on The Wire this year. (Disclaimer: What follows are my own opinions. They are not necessarily shared by anyone who happens to be married to me.)

Here is Simon's critique, conveniently summarized in an essay for the March Esquire:

[W]hen the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might—even amid the turmoil of the Internet—still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.

In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.

No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the "impact" that The Sun's coverage has achieved—covering your own coverage—the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.

Note that this is not the familiar liberal narrative of newspaper decline. In the standard story, like Simon's story, short-sighted media companies cut the meat out of powerful papers. But in the usual account, those "impact" stories are the missing meat and the editors who assign them—in The Sun's case, John Carroll and Bill Marimow—are the heroes standing up for journalistic "excellence."

For Simon, by contrast, Carroll and Marimow are a central part of the problem. Their stand-ins on his show are sanctimonious blowhards; their prize-hungry journalism is a substitute for the real thing. Their quest for "impact" brings to mind Ivan Illich's opening to Deschooling Society, with its disdain for the confusion of "process" with "substance," its ire at a world where "Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve those ends." It's the same problem The Wire decries in policework and schooling, where decaying bureaucracies defend their performance by jacking up meaningless statistics.

I don't agree with all of Simon's take. It's hard to believe, for example, that many papers could have kept themselves relevant while hiding their best online material behind a pay wall. And the focus on cutbacks qua cutbacks seems off. The problem with The Sun isn't that it's cutting back; it's that it's so thoughtless about where it cuts. The Wire made a big deal about The Sun's disappearing international bureaus. (Eight years ago, it had outposts in five foreign countries. Now it has none.) But I would be happy to see the paper bring its overseas correspondents home if it would reinvest those resources in covering the city.

Instead, The Sun—which managed to find the money for an expensive redesign hated by virtually every reader in the metro area—no longer maintains a beat for each of the city's major regions. Now it has just one reporter covering urban neighborhoods. It has been closing its suburban offices, eliminating its Carroll County bureau last year and losing its Baltimore County base last month. (The former county is growing rapidly, and half or more of the paper's readers live in the latter.) When the Baltimore County staff moved to the paper's downtown headquarters, a company spokesperson told the local alt-weekly that the reporters are "not in their office most of the time anyway. They can go out to Glen Burnie or Reisterstown from here just as quick as they could from Towson."

For those of you who don't live around here: It is extremely unlikely that a Baltimore County reporter will have to cover anything in Glen Burnie, since Glen Burnie is in Anne Arundel County. To get from the old Baltimore County office in Towson to Glen Burnie, you must first move around or across an obscure little burg called the City of Baltimore. The fact that it is possible to be a spokeswoman for The Sun without knowing this speaks volumes.

This rupture between the paper and the region it covers is at the heart of Simon's critique, and it's here that I agree with him the most. It's striking how much of The Sun's coverage of Baltimore—especially, but not exclusively, the blacker, poorer parts of Baltimore—are written as though the subject is an alien landscape. But it shouldn't be surprising.

There are basically two ways to get hired at The Sun. The standard method is to learn your craft at a series of smaller papers around the country. The other approach is to come directly to the paper from an elite university. The Sun has found a lot of fine journalists through these routes (especially the first one). But there used to be a third road to the paper: from the city itself, getting started as a copy boy or some other low-level position and gradually working your way up the ladder.

It's valuable to have a number of Baltimore-bred correspondents who developed their skills and discovered their city at the same time. They have accumulated a wealth of local knowledge that can't easily be replaced. Not only is this now essentially closed as a path to the paper, but the reporters who entered the building this way, along with other experienced hands, have been leaving as the newspaper hires cheaper but greener outsiders to replace them. There are solid reasons not to staff a newspaper only with native talent, but there are solid reasons as well to make sure they're part of the mix—perhaps even for a special local outreach effort to find the next generation of copy boys made good. But that isn't part of the professional culture of old-media journalism, at The Sun or anywhere else.

This isn't intended as a nostalgic argument for bygone days. In some ways American journalism is better than it has ever been: There are more outlets to choose from, more ways to start an outlet of your own, more eyes monitoring the outlets' output for errors, omissions, and lies. The larger mediasphere has grown more open to outside voices, even if specific channels like The Sun have grown more insular and removed. For many topics, though not nearly enough, this means not just more commentary but more actual reporting.

But that makes it all the more important that a paper respond to that competition by doing the things an urban newspaper is best suited to do. And that means intimate, collaborative coverage of a city by people who know it well. The major problem with The Sun is that it doesn't seem to know what to do with the knowledge it has stored within its walls, and that it doesn't seem to have noticed how much of that knowledge has already slipped out its doors.

Jesse Walker is reason's managing editor.

"Someone Has To Start Wondering What the F Is Going On."

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EST

Ed Burns is co-creator of HBO's critically acclaimed series The Wire, now concluding its fifth and final season. Burns is also the co-producer of Generation Kill, a forthcoming HBO miniseries based on journalist Evan Wright's book about the first stages of the war in Iraq. Burns is also a Vietnam veteran, a 20-year veteran of the Baltimore police force, and a teacher in the city’s public schools. He’s an outspoken critic of the drug war, the growth of prisons, and the structure, incentives, and organization of police departments.

reason Senior Editor Radley Balko recently interviewed Burns via telephone. Responses should be sent to letters@reason.com.

reason: This season of The Wire focuses pretty heavily on the media. What do you think the media does well when it comes to covering criminal justice issues, and what do you think it does poorly?

Ed Burns: I think a lot depends on who’s doing it. In specific cases, you can do extremely well as a reporter. My problem is more with the basic philosophy of how it’s done. It’s like a laser beam. They cover a specific aspect, or a specific trial, or a specific murder in a way that simplifies things, that makes them very stereotypical. It only takes one sentence to name the victim of a crime and the street where the crime took place. So they’re really only reporting something that we know is going to happen—because the conditions are there to make it happen—but they doesn’t go beyond that. There’s no context in crime reporting. That’s the problem.

reason: Slate’s media critic Jack Shafer has said that the media is at its absolute worst when covering the drug war. Do you agree with him, and if so, why do you think that it is?

Burns: Take just the term “war on drugs.” I mean, they’re not warring on drugs. They’re warring on drug addicts and the users and the small-time dealers. They’re warring on neighborhoods. They’re warring on people who can’t stand up to them. They’re not warring on major dealers.

You can follow it in any city, I don’t care how small it is or how big it is. If the paper is pretty avid about covering who’s getting locked up, you’ll notice that they’re not getting the big guys. They’re not getting the big stakeholders.

I think their whole approach is almost as if they were trying to separate us, trying to separate the classes by saying, “Look what’s happened down there. Look at these people down there, these people and what they’re doing.”

When I was teaching, you’d have a kid in, say, his junior year of high school. And you’d give him a list of things he could possibly do when he gets out. He could be a doctor, lawyer, all this kind of stuff. We’d make one of the options “drug addict,” and there are kids who always check it off.

The media reports as if these kids have all of these options, and they consciously make this decision to become a drug addict, and to risk the consequences of going up to the corner and getting themselves killed. That decision was made for him long before that kid got to be in the 11th grade. A lot of guys don’t even get that far.

This idea that there are lots of options for these kids and they choose a life on the corner, that’s too simplistic. But it’s the way these things get covered.

reason: We interviewed your co-producer David Simon just before The Wire’s fourth season. He said that though The Wire may be cynical about institutions, it treats its characters with a lot of affection. But the last two seasons seem to have gotten even more cynical. Many of the characters who show promise seem to either succumb to character flaws, or actually get punished for doing the right thing. Are viewers to take anything away from The Wire other than that our major institutions are failing, and there’s little reason for hope?

Burns: Well, I don’t think there’s much reason for hope if you keep doing the same thing over and over again, even though you know it’ll never work. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that if you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle in the opposite direction really doesn’t help. Basically that’s what we’ve done, we’ve gotten on entirely the wrong train, and we keep sprinting down the aisle in the other direction, trying to pretend that if we run fast enough, we can get it together and turn things around. We’re losing more than we’re winning, and there’s no reason for it.

I mean, if you go into West Baltimore, or East Baltimore, or any of these cities in the ghettos and you pick up a stone and you throw it, you’re probably going to hit a nonprofit. They’re all over the place. They aren’t working, because again we’re all on the same, wrong train. The nonprofits are fragmented. The whole thing is fragmented. It just doesn’t work.

So no. I don’t think we’re being cynical. I think we’re being factual. We’ve been fighting the drug war for 30 years. Thirty years of failure. But there’s some reason that we persist in this. What is it? We never explore why that is. But you just can’t spend this much money and get these few results and continue on like this. Someone has to start wondering what the fuck is going on.

reason: Critics have said the city of Baltimore is really the central character in the The Wire. Recently, we’ve seen some interesting developments in violent crime statistics. Large cities like New York and Los Angeles have continued with improvements that started in the 1990s, but smaller and medium-size cities like Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis seem to be getting bloodier. Do you have any theories as to why that might be?

Burns: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I think New York’s murder rate is under 500 this year in 2007 and that’s out of a population of 8 million people. Baltimore’s murder rate was somewhere around 282 for a population of around 600,000 people. So we’re very close to New York just in raw numbers. The reason is that New York has an economy. There’s a vitality there. There are things happening. People have jobs.

In places like Baltimore, Detroit, and Cincinnati, the jobs that were there are gone. The manufacturing-based jobs are gone, and without that kind of job, it’s very, very difficult to jumpstart the economy. There’s no prospect for Baltimore having jobs in the near future. If you look at Baltimore now, what you’re seeing is a very decayed inner core. The east side of the city is being bought up by Johns Hopkins [the university and hospital]. They’re building a biotech park which is going to employ 6,000 people, but of those 6,000 people, you’ll be lucky to get three people who were originally from those neighborhoods. They just aren't qualified.

reason: You've said that too many narcotics police today have developed a gung-ho, cowboy mentality. You traced this trend back to the 1972 movie The French Connection. Could you elaborate?

Burns: Well, it’s just dumb. The Godfather, or The French Connection, which came out in the early '70s, those movies set the stage for both sides of the drug war. In The French Connection, [Detective] Popeye Doyle had this very cynical, harsh, rough, law-breaking type of drug style that sort of set the tone in how street narcotics guys work. Very flippant. What the movie didn’t pick up, and what you didn’t see, is all the intense surveillance and hard work that would go into a drug bust back then. But they put out the idea of this guy who cracks heads, especially in that scene they went and they shook the bar down. That became iconic. And that is the way the cops were afterward. I mean, you’d see white cops in black neighborhoods looking like Serpico, and they’re not undercover. It was just this mindset that took over of how you’re supposed to dress and act and the way you’re supposed to be.

The Godfather had a similar effect on the other side. It basically taught these emerging heroin gangs how to do business, how you set up your structure, with the code and the organization, the way you should have a boss, under-bosses—you know, capos. It got black, inner-city heroin dealers into the same mindset.

reason: How common do you think that is—drug dealers taking tips from the entertainment world? I’ve actually read that some dealers actually get advice from The Wire, particularly when it comes to communication systems they can use to evade police surveillance.

Burns: Well, if they’re looking at what we’re telling them, they won’t be learning much, because the technology has been out there. The Marlo Stanfields of today—those types of guys who I think of as mid-level drug dealers—there are just so many of them. They’re like the salmon going up the river. There’s really no way for law enforcement to stop all of these guys. There’s just too many of them. So the ones who take a modicum of precautions, the ones who are smart enough to stay low key, they’re completely under the radar screen, because it would just take too much work to even figure out who these guys are, and how to catch them. Only the really, really careless ones get caught.

reason: What effect do you think shows like Cops and Dallas SWAT have on police culture and police attitudes?

Burns: I can’t answer that question. I don’t watch any television.

reason: What’s your feeling on the militarization of domestic police departments, particularly as it relates to the drug war?

Burns: I think this whole thing was driven by the concept of numbers. You can quantify numbers, so if you’re in a war and you’re racking up numbers—numbers being arrests—it sets that military tone. Sort of like the way we’ve historically measured the success of wars in terms of casualties. The police departments that work in these hard neighborhoods are basically armies of occupation. Their job is to keep these people suppressed.

In Baltimore two years ago, they locked up 115,000 people from a population of 600,000. Now, let’s assume that they didn’t lock up anybody under the age of 8 or over the age of 70. They didn’t lock up that many white middle class people. That’s an awful lot of people from one particular group getting put behind bars. And many times, they’re getting locked up for things like sitting on the stoop drinking a beer, pissing in the alley, or just jaywalking in the street.

reason: The old “broken windows” theory, right?

Burns: [Laughs] Yeah. James Q. Wilson's trick. It doesn’t work. In fact, what it does do is alienate the police department from the community. So you’re an army of occupation, and because you’ve alienated the community, and you’re not getting any information. That’s a bad situation.

It’s the same thing they discovered in Iraq, oddly enough. Once they got away from the idea of suppression, they started getting much more information from Iraqis. The soldiers and Marines in Iraq basically use many of the techniques developed by law enforcement. They do the same type of searches. They gather the same type of information. They collate it the same way. They use cell phone data. They’re doing everything that law enforcement normally does. But they’re only successful when they’re connected with the people. In Baltimore, they’re not connected to the people because they’ve alienated everyone in the neighborhood.

So when you need to know something, when you need information, where do you go?

reason: What do you make of the "Stop Snitchin'" movement, the street campaign that discourages people from cooperating with police, which seems to have started in Baltimore?

Burns: Well, again, it’s something that’s incidental. It’s a symptom. If the police were connected, if the police were actively involved with the people in the neighborhood, the amount of information they would be getting would be so great that the whole idea of snitching wouldn’t be important. When I was a cop, having informants was a rare thing. They were looked down upon. I had sometimes as many as 50 guys working for me. I didn’t have to go out on the street. I could sit by the phone and just wait for the information to come. But you got that by being decent to people, working with them, helping them out on their little charges, stuff like that. That’s a lot of work and a lot of money comes out of your pocket to keep them happy and cooperative, but the amount of information you get back is profound.

Cops aren’t taught to do that anymore because today it’s all about numbers. You can get a number by just going up on the corner and grabbing somebody and getting a bag off of him. That’s the easy thing. If taking a guy in for drinking a beer on the street is a “1,” and catching the kingpin is a “1,” well, it takes two minutes to catch the guy with the beer can. It could take you two years to catch the kingpin. If numbers is all the department cares about, then the guy who pursues the kingpin is wasting his time.

And it is all about numbers. It’s how they talk, how they rate themselves. The fact that the murder rate in Baltimore stays constantly above the norm would be seem to be an indication that maybe they should try something different. But they’re bankrupt. They don’t have any idea what they need to do because they’re separated from the people. They’re not of the people. You’re policing as an army of occupation, not as police in the community. And that just doesn’t work.

reason: David Simon once wrote that you are “the living manifestation of lost wars,” since you were a soldier in Vietnam, a cop fighting the drug war, and a teacher in the public school system. Do you agree those three wars were or have been lost? Are there any institutional similarities you’ve observed that contributed to those three failures?

Burns: Well, we definitely lost Vietnam. And we lost Iraq. And we’ll lose any war where we allow an insurgency to exist. As for the war on drugs, I don’t think we’ll ever recover from the mindset we’ve gotten into to fight it. The educational system is an absolute and total disaster. And that of course is fueling the drug war, because there are so many kids who have no alternative but to spend their time on the corners.

The failure is institutional because no one sets out to lose these wars. This is dangerous stuff, self-defeating stuff. Education has no relevance. It doesn’t mean anything to these kids because they can’t connect to it. They spend those eight years or nine years in school because they have to. Of course, they have to learn something. And what they learn is how to sit quietly in a corner and make the school become a kind of training ground for the corners. The administration and the teachers basically become surrogate cops. And the kids play through these fantasies with the stand-in “cops” until they’ve tested their mettle enough to go up on the corners and try it with the real guys.

We’ve had 20, 30 years of this stuff, and 20, 30 years of spending billions of dollars on failed systems. And if you go to one of the private schools and see these kids in action and then go to an inner city public school, you can see the chasm. There’s separation even in the way of being, in the way they think, in how they operate. It’s profound, but it’s nothing new. We’ve been doing this for a long time.

reason: What reforms do you think are necessary? What can policy makers do to make public schools more effective?

Burns: Five years ago I couldn’t have given you an answer to that question. But I’ve learned about a program right now in Harlem. It’s been around for 12 years now. It’s called the Harlem Children’s Zone. The basic philosophy is so logical and so obvious. What works in the middle class is that you have input, the healthy positive input into an infant every day of that child’s life, as an infant and as a young child. Somebody’s always there. That’s how we raise our kids, and the success rate is very, very high. There are some failures in the middle class and the upper middle class, but the success rate is high.

That’s what they do in Harlem in the Children’s Zone—with about 35,000 kids. From birth, someone is with that kid until he gets out of college. They’re normal kids—not geniuses or anything—but they will be able to break the cycle of poverty and of drugs in those neighborhoods because those kids are not focused on drugs and poverty. They’re focused on the positive aspects that come from traditionally raising kids where you expect things from them. You tell them how good they are, you boost their egos, and you light the fires under them. That’s how you do it. That’s how it’s done in most middle class homes. I mean, that’s how simple it is. In Harlem, it cost them $4,500 a child.

And in talking with Geoff Canada, who runs the program up there, they’ve had 2,200 different groups—around 2,200 groups that have come to see their program. People who come to watch are impressed and want to go back to other states, to other countries, with the hope of implementing the program. Yet there isn’t another Children’s Zone that I know of anywhere in the country.

reason: Is that from a lack of funding?

Burns: From what Geoff surmises, it’s more about turf. If I come into your turf and let’s say you’re running a rehab center, or you’re running a day care program or whatever, that’s your little fiefdom, you know what I mean? That’s your little piece of the pie. You’re not going to give that up easily. You’re going to fight anything that tries to change that. You don’t want to be beholden to some bigger process, where you’ll then have to belong to something bigger and show results. No one wants to do that because they’re already not showing the kind of results that these types of processes require.

Maybe you’re showing anecdotal results. You know, “I saved this kid but I lost those 20 others.” These kinds of little empires are all over the place, and unfortunately, they have the ears of the politicians. It’s something where you have to almost come in and cut the Gordian knot and just do it. It makes absolute sense, but of course, we’re not focused on this, so we’re focused basically on surviving and shorter-term goals.

reason: You just finished shooting an HBO miniseries based on Generation Kill, Evan Wright’s book on the early stages of the Iraq War. You said earlier you believe Iraq is going to be a failure just as Vietnam was. Did you draw on your experiences in Vietnam at all in that project? Do you see many parallels between the two wars?

Burns: Just knowing the military was a big asset for me in helping to shape the series. The thing about Iraq is that it is the same scenario as Vietnam. There’s an insurgency that’s taken hold in the population, and once that happens, you might as well leave. There’s nothing you can do. And Iraq is getting ready to explode on us. Actually, it’s already exploded on us, but it’s going to continue to explode on us and we’re going to eventually be forced out. Or we’ll retire to these super bases and just try to drain the country of its oil. But we will never win the hearts and minds of those people. Fundamentally that was what we set out to do, to bring democracy to that country.

The same thing happened in Vietnam. These insurgencies are national movements. These people don’t want us in their country. And once that happens, once that mindset’s there, you know you’re in trouble. What we’re doing now is paying the Sunnis not to kill us. That only lasts for so long.

reason: How would you describe your personal politics?

Burns: Liberal. Liberal to radical. I’m pretty fed up with what’s going on.

reason: Is there any concrete policy you can think of that would lead to the more community oriented style of policing you’ve described?

Burns: You would have to change the nature of the institution. You’d have to stop making it a numbers game. Now, how do you do that with people who've been inculcated with this idea that it’s all about numbers? These guys have got computers, they've got charts, they’ve got all this kind of stuff, and it all revolves around locking people up. Clearly, that’s not the way to go. But it's how they sell themselves to politicians, and how they sell themselves to these community relation groups. This stuff is about locking people up.

The police should be focused on the most serious crimes, and in Baltimore the most serious crimes are murder, rape, and robbery. So you try to diffuse the other stuff, but you have to start putting your resources into those. Because if a person kills someone in the neighborhood, the neighborhood knows who did it. If the police don’t catch that person, and that guy’s walking around having beaten a murder, all the police credibility goes out the window.

It’s the same thing if you go up on the corner and you roust an addict while the guy sitting across from the addict has a gun. Everybody in the neighborhood knows he’s got the gun because he’s the bodyguard. And you don’t grab him. The people are thinking, well, maybe the dude is paying the police off. Why else would they grab the harmless addict but not the guy with the gun? Again, the problem is that the police are operating without information, and playing to the numbers. If I’m locking you up for petty stuff, you’re not going to be telling me shit. If I’m locking you up two and three times a month, you’re especially not going to tell me anything.

So how do you change all of this? You change the numbers game. You require police to reconnect with the people, and you start focusing everybody on the major crimes, the ones that make living very, very difficult—murder, rape, and robbery.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason.