By Steve Rhodes
A weekly look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ that has really gotten away from me so let’s just try to get updated from newest to oldest also considering that due to financial constraints I barely get any magazines at all anymore.
Beaten
“He was a star in the Republican Party,” the New York Times Sunday Magazine says. “Now, like dozens of his GOP colleagues, he’s quitting Congress, fed up with his party, his president and the process. Tom Davis gives up.”
This is a fascinating profile that really gives you an idea of what it’s like to be a United States congressman – and particularly a United States congressman with good intentions who wants to work across the aisle and get things done. It also illustrates how corrosive – and corrupting – zealous partisanship is.
“Davis asked for a list of all 20 bills on the floor that day – naming post offices, recognizing the anniversary of Bulgaria’s independence, honoring an old American war sloop. Davis wanted me to have it. ‘Tell them about the important work we’re doing while Rome burns.'”
Perhaps what this article does best is explain how scoring political points in order to maintain power supercedes solving problems. And it applies to both parties.
“When you get the majority, the leadership team sits around the table, and the first question the winners ask, sitting in this ornate room, is How do we stay in the majority?’ he said. ‘And the minority, by the way, sits in a little less ornate room, a little smaller room in the Capitol, and they say, How do we get it back? And so for every issue it’s Do we cooperate or do we try to embarrass them? Very few times they cooperate.”
Being Brokaw
“I have a theory that life is junior high,” Tom Brokaw said recently, according to the New Yorker. “Everybody’s trying to get to the right tables, hang out with the right crowd, say the right things, and emerge saying they’re part of the ‘in’ group.”
Maybe, but some of us have grown up.
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Besides, I’m sure that Brokaw’s version of “the right crowd” is vastly different than, say, mine.
Plus, he’s only the billionth person to have a “theory” like this.
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Plus, it’s part of his standard commencement speech.
Beer & Diapers
“It’s the stuff of legend, the famous discovery by Wal-Mart that placing beer and diapers near one another in their store increased sales of both items,” Bob Garfield writes in Advertising Age. “Why? Because men on their way home from work, instructed by their wives to pick up a bundle of Pampers or whatever, also grabbed a six-pack. It is the quintessentially unexpected correlation, almost universally invoked to exemplify the rewards of data mining. Isn’t it, after all, a superficially counterintuitive connection that makes absolutely perfect sense?
“Of course it is. And here’s something else it is: not true.”
Playing Footsie
“The foot is at such a high risk for injury largely because it has so many small, frangible parts – 25 bones, 33 joints and more than 100 tendons, ligaments and muscles, any of which can fail,” Play reports.
The Daley Show
“It seems almost laughable now,” David Bernstein writes in a Chicago magazine, “but when Daley II rode into office in 1989, he vowed to end corruption in city hall.”
Almost?
Limning Lapham
“Something of an aristocrat himself, Lapham would seem an unlikely liberal,” Vice reports. “His great-grandfather founded Texaco, his grandfather was mayor of San Francisco, and his father was a shipping tycoon.”
I did not know that. But I do know that when he was editor of Harper’s and raging against the moneyed class he did not pay his interns. So, you know, only kids from the aristocracy could afford to do them.
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Elsewhere in Vice, Howard Zinn speaks that which most doust not speak: that America’s Revolutionary War may not have been just.
“You might say Vietnam is easy to criticize,” Zinn says. “So are Iraq and the Mexican War. But the American Revolution, in terms of casualties, was the bloodiest of wars. A lot of people don’t realize that. There were only 3 million people in the colonies at that time . . . the same question in all of these consecrated wars is: Could the same objective have been accomplished – independence from England, ending slavery, defeating fascism – at less than the bloody toll that was taken and without corrupting the moral values of the victors in the war – and with better outcomes?”
Liberal Elitism
“The argument of The Liberal Imagination is that literature teaches that life is not so simple – for unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy happen to be literature’s particular subject,” Louis Menand writes in the New Yorker.
Posted on October 9, 2008