How the Other Half Vacations

What happens when you take 500 paleo-conservatives and put them on a cruise ship bound for Mexico? Hilarity ensues! Case in point, Norman Podhoretz:

"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."

I'd sign up next year just for laughts if I weren't absolutely convinced I'd be jumping over the rail an hour out of port.

Justice Is Served

Everyone should be relieved to know that you can't successfully sue your dry cleaner for $54 million over a pair of lost pants. At least not yet.

Moral Confusion

Bush, not unexpectedly, vetoed the stem cell bill Wednesday. His explanation: "The Congress has sent me legislation that would compel American taxpayers, for the first time in our history, to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos."

You might also remember that Bush spent the summer of 2001 in a long, anguished quest for moral clarity before imposing the limits on research that this bill tried to overturn. Clearly, Bush wants people to think that he is truly committed to the moral principles that have driven his actions on this issue.

But just as clearly, he isn't. The stem cell bill would merely have permitted stem cell research using the excess embryos resulting from certain fertility treatments, embryos that are destined to be destroyed anyway. By vetoing the bill, not a single embryo will be saved. And when it comes to lobbying for those policies that would prevent embryos from being destroyed, the President and most of the right wing are silent. There are no calls to ban these fertility treatments that produce these excess embryos. Indeed, the "Human Embryo Destruction Ban" promoted by the FRC explicitly excludes fertility treatments from its scope.

And then we are faced with the fact that 50% of conceptions end in spontaneous abortion. You might expect insistent calls from those who believe that life begins at conception to devote substantial resources to save these millions who die each year. But instead, nothing.

If you want to believe that life begins at conception, that's fine with me. If that belief compels you take certain moral stands, all good. But if you want your convictions to be taken seriously, you have to be consistent, even when compelled to adopt positions that might be exceedingly unpopular, such as banning certain fertility treatments.

And Bush is neither consistent nor serious. While playing Solomon, he actually did split the stem cell baby in two back in 2001, and he's been doing contortions ever since to justify that awful bit of ethical and scientific policy. That most of the right does no better speaks volumes about their willingness to look the other way when their "culture of life" proves inconvenient.

Friday Cat Blogging

Javascript makes me sleepy.

"Lord Knows"

I guess it really depends on what you mean by "honor":

Local black leaders are decrying a recent performance by three white men at a church who wore blackface while pantomiming traditional black hymns.

The performance at Pilgrim Baptist Church was meant to honor gospel music history and was not meant to offend anyone, said the Rev. Thomas Holbrooks Jr., pastor at the church.

"It was in no way making fun," Holbrooks said. "Lord knows we love the old spirituals they sing. That's why they did it."

Welcome to Gastonia, NC, where it's still 1927!

Of course, to prevent people from getting the wrong idea, one of the three explained to the paper, "I have some real good black friends." Uh, yeah, probably not anymore.

But the most amazing bit of willful cluelessness comes from the pastor's wife: "A little tiny blond woman sang Randy Travis. So I guess Randy Travis should be offended. My husband pantomimed playing the piano. So I guess the piano should be offended." Maybe she should learn to sing that old Sesame Street ditty One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.

Company

I just finished Company, a novel by Max Barry, and I'm still trying to figure out what I think about it. It's not that I didn't enjoy the experience. It's a briskly-told story about a young college graduate named Jones who's just been hired by Zephyr Holdings, which is an obvious stand-in for everything that is wrong in corporate America. I've never worked for a large company, but my wife does, and Barry nails many of the absurdities — the constant reorganizations, the cut-throat politics, and the brutal/comical ways in which employees are treated. At this humorous surface level, Company is a success.

On other levels, though, I'm left with more questions than answers. The story's primary conflict is between Eve, a completely amoral business consultant whose only interest is in maximizing efficiency regardless of the human toll, and Jones, who feels that somehow the employees "deserve better." Via Eve, we are given the standard arguments why corporations should not care about their workers as people, but rather manage them as resources. Bottom line: if companies aren't as efficient as possible (read: wring every last possible erg of work from their employees), they fail, and then everyone is out of a job. Corporate America is the worst of all possible systems, then, except for all the others. So get over it.

Of course, Zephyr itself is meant to serve as the counter-argument. In its endless quest to cut costs and increase productivity, it's become a completely dysfunctional. And I'm with Barry as far as that goes. But I'm still left wondering where he thinks the middle ground is. Is there a conflict between employee satisfaction and productivity? Is there a point where employees just have to suck it in order for the company to be successful? We never really get any good answers.

Complicating matters is the very odd relationship between Jones and Eve. The chemistry behind their "merger" is never made entirely clear, and both characters come off as machines at times, able to turn their emotions on and off at will. Which is fine for Eve, whose not supposed to be fully human, but in Jones' case it just doesn't quite fit.

I'll think about these questions some more in the coming days, and that in itself is the best reason to read any book.