A Daughter’s View of Orson Welles

By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

November 5th, 2009

In My Father’s Shadow is a memoir by Orson Welles’ eldest daughter, Christopher Welles. Yes, his daughter, Christopher, with his first wife, Virginia Nicholoson. As a little girl, when Chris demanded an explanation for her father naming her Christopher, Orson replied, “I liked the sound of it—Christopher Welles, don’t you think?” He told her that it was unique, even though she was too young to understand what “unique” meant, and said that someday she’d be grateful for that name. He claimed that when she was born, he sent out a telegram to everyone he knew, proudly announcing “CHRISTOPHER SHE IS HERE.” The telegram turned out to be fiction. Orson Welles was a much better storyteller than a father.

驴友队长的email:

This was our trip:

The weather could not be any better than we had yesterday.

This was the first trip that women were outnumbered (6:10).  We needed the help and the teamwork from these new members: Bob, John, Ricky, Simon, especially for a hike like we had yesterday.

LaVerne, We salute you to your accomplishment for successfully finishing the hike. You said that was your lifetime experience.  We admired you.  We may not be able to do that when we are at your age.

Welcome to join us.  We are honored to know you. Thanks to Sophia for recommending a wonderful new member.  But we like to see you joining the hike too.  

By SAM TANENHAUS

Published: November 20, 2009

Even those not convinced that Andre Agassi was the best tennis player of his time will readily admit he outdid all others in attracting attention, beginning in the 1980s, when he was a teenage phenom from Las Vegas who blazed onto the pro tour in flamboyant, Nike-­sponsored plumage — stone-washed denim, skintight “Hot Lava” compression shorts, midnight-at-the-roulette-wheel shades — that blinded many to the granite consistency of his game: the compact, bludgeoning ground strokes, the lethal service return, the lightning reflexes.

Now, three years into his retirement, Agassi’s sterling accomplishments are again being obscured, this time by pre-publication revelations from his autobiography, “Open,” especially his admission that during one low period he found solace in crystal methamphetamine, supplied by his “assistant,” and later lied about it to tennis officials, thus avoiding a three-month suspension.

Given the current scandals involving steroids and human growth hormone, Agassi’s infraction seems minor, even quaint, characterized as it was by late-night binges that more likely retarded rather than “enhanced” his match-day performances.

The more arresting news is that “Open” is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete — bracingly devoid of triumphalist homily and star-spangled gratitude. Agassi’s announced theme is that the game he mastered was a prison he spent some 30 years trying to escape. His first cell was the backyard court his immigrant father, Mike, built behind the family’s ramshackle house in the parched outskirts of Las Vegas. Armenian, raised poor in Iran and employed as a “captain,” or usher, at a casino on the Strip, Mike Agassi was determined to groom a champion and subjected all four of his children to abusive training, yanking them out of school for extra practice time. The three eldest all crumbled under the pressure. The jackpot came with the fourth, who was blessed with preternatural hand-eye coordination, honed in daily sessions in which he swatted as many as 2,500 balls belched forth by a machine at speeds of up to 110 miles per hour, at angles so acute the 7-year-old Andre had to swing the instant the ball landed, lest it bounce over his head — the trick of hitting “on the rise” that eventually would freeze opponents, helpless as even their most blistering shots came screaming back.

All this was nurturing, at least compared with his next incarceration, at the Florida tennis academy, or “glorified prison camp,” operated by Nick Bollettieri, a sun-baked entrepreneur paid thousands of dollars by parents who shipped their children off for months, even years, of incessant drilling, lectures on motivational psychology and nights spent in barracks-like dorms. “The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision — it slowly turns us into animals,” Agassi writes. This happened at a time when tennis promoters were eager to feed the public’s infatuation with under-age champions like Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert, not to mention half-forgotten casualties like Jimmy Arias and Andrea Jaeger — a phenomenon that recalls the unhealthy national “love affair” almost a century ago with screen virgin-goddesses like Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters. Agassi rebelled by drinking, brawling, body piercing and sporting “one pinky nail that’s two inches long and painted fire-engine red.”

Locked into a career dictated by talent and upbringing, he found escape off-court, surrounded by the entourage, or surrogate family, he assembled and in most instances paid for, in particular the company of two father figures — his physical trainer, Gil Reyes, and his coach, Brad Gilbert. Together they reconstructed Agassi’s body and his game, and made possible his extraordinary, late-career resurgence, when, at last finding joy in tennis, he briefly eclipsed his archrival, Pete Sampras, and staked his claim to being the era’s dominant player. The numerology of pelt accumulation favors Sampras, who won 14 Grand Slam titles, seven of them at Wimbledon, and held a 20-14 advantage in head-to-head matches. But in his prime Agassi possessed the more complete game, suited to every surface (clay, grass, hardcourt). He is one of only three men in the open era, and the only American man, to capture each of the four Grand Slam titles, compiling in one stretch (1999-2000) a record of 27-1 in successive majors — a ho-hum burst of excellence in the brave new world of Roger Federer, though it was the best streak in 30 years, dating back to Rod Laver’s full cycle of Grand Slam victories in 1969.

In the twilight of his 21-year career, upon being told he had just played his 1,000th match, Agassi discovered, somewhat to his dismay, that he could recall them all. At times in “Open” he seems bent on reprising the full catalog — wins and losses in Houston, Toronto and other tournament stops not even die-hard fans will care to visit.

There is no sexual boasting in “Open,” but there are full accounts of Agassi’s two marriages. His first, to Brooke Shields, rich tabloid nutriment at the time, lasted just two years, the classic bad pairing of jock and starlet, a kind of inverse Joe DiMaggio-­Marilyn Monroe, since Shields was his elder by five years, her career stalled, while Agassi was nearing his zenith on the pro tour and raking in surplus millions from his Nike contract. The wedding, scripted by Shields, is rendered in “Open” as bleak farce, from the ceremony in the ritzy coastal town of Carmel, Calif. — “with four helicopters full of paparazzi circling overhead” and the squat groom wearing elevator shoes, so as not to be dwarfed by his towering bride — through the day-after family barbecue, with the couple making their entrance astride horses and outfitted in cowboy wear.

Apart from having been pushed onto the stage as children, the glamorous couple had nothing in common. A Prince­ton graduate with a degree in French literature, Shields disliked tennis and also her husband’s pals. Agassi, for his part, was forever a beat behind the banter Shields enjoyed with her showbiz crowd; once, in a jealous fit, he stormed off the set of “Friends” when she was taping a segment, her big break. They failed to reconnect on vacations, planned by Shields, often on exotic islands meant to re­capture the ever-­receding memory of “The Blue Lagoon.”

Soon after his divorce in 1999, Agassi began wooing Steffi Graf, another former tennis prodigy, who, Agassi says, loathed the game as much as he did but surpassed him in disciplined, competitive fury. The two agreed not to build a court behind their home in Las Vegas, to spare their children. Instead, Agassi spent and raised millions to erect a youth center that grew into a charter “education complex” in the city’s most ravaged district, a superb act of philanthropy that gave underprivileged children, most of them African-Americans, the one advantage he himself had been denied.

Equally hard-won self-knowledge irradiates almost every page of “Open,” thanks in great part to Agassi’s inspired choice of collaborator, J. R. Moehringer, author of the memoir “The Tender Bar,” with its melody of remembered voices. Agassi says he read it in 2006, at his last U.S. Open, and then recruited Moehrin­ger to help him write his own book. The result is not just a first-rate sports memoir but a genuine bildungsroman, darkly funny yet also anguished and soulful. It confirms what Agassi’s admirers sensed from the outset, that this showboat, with his garish costumes and presumed fatuity, was not clamoring for attention but rather conducting a struggle to wrest some semblance of selfhood from the sport that threatened to devour him.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review and the author, most recently, of “The Death of Conservatism.”

Four-time World Champion Hoop Dancer, Derrick Suwaima Davis (Hopi/Choctaw), and singer, Ryon Polequaptewa (Hopi), presents a 30-minute family program of Native American dance, music and storytelling.

November 18 at 10 a.m.

Clark County Library, 1401 E. Flamingo Rd.

According to the local newspaper this morning, Las Vegas Events and Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority have announced that the famous Grucci company from New York will be in charge of staging a huge fireworks show for the New Year on top of 7 local hotels: MGM Grand, Planet Hollywood, Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, Venetian, Stratosphere, and the new Aria scheduled to open in December.

Land of the setting sun

Nov 12th 2009 | TOKYO
From The Economist print edition

Japan’s economy was on course to surpass America’s. What happened?

Soon to be number three

IT LEFT American executives quaking in their loafers and cheered a generation of Japanese salarymen. “The extent of Japanese superiority over the United States in industrial competitiveness is underpublicised,” trumpeted Ezra Vogel of Harvard University 30 years ago in “Japan as Number One” (see article), which became one of the most-discussed business books of its time.

The world’s second-largest economy had surpassed America in gross national product per person according to some measures, and looked on course to overtake it. “Vogel’s book helps explain why Japan is the most dynamic of all modern industrial nations,” gushed Foreign Affairs. America was mired in stagflation, with an unemployment rate nearing double digits. Japan seemed to be the better bet.

Yet things didn’t quite work out the way Professor Vogel expected. Japanese industrial production rose by 50% in the decade after 1980—a remarkable trajectory for a country crammed into an area the size of Montana. But growth was driven by financial leverage and overinvestment. Property and share prices bubbled, rising as much as sixfold.

The bubble’s collapse, beginning 20 years ago this December, led to almost two decades of economic doldrums. It took 15 years for industrial production to surpass the 1991 peak. In the current crisis it collapsed to levels last seen in the 1980s. In time America’s fearful “Japan bashing” gave way to sniggering, then indifference. Last month a poll of market professionals by Bloomberg, a news provider, put Tokyo last among several big cities as a financial capital. In the 1980s all of the world’s top ten banks measured by deposits were Japanese.

Why didn’t Japanese business regain momentum? Companies, accustomed to being protected, were too slow to change, says Karel Van Wolferen, author of “The Enigma of Japanese Power”, published 20 years ago this year. Steven Vogel of the University of California in Berkeley (and Professor Vogel’s son), blames regulators for failing to clean up the banking system until long after the crash.

His father had argued in 1979 that Japan set many examples to America: good labour relations, low crime, excellent schools and elite bureaucrats with long time horizons. “And the US did learn,” particularly in manufacturing, he says today from retirement in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet change is needed in Japan, he admits. A system geared for high growth has been unable to adapt.

Though it is still the second-largest economy, Japan may well lose that title to China in 2010. Many are now cooing about China’s growth. But the lesson of Japan is that nothing is inevitable.

Holy shit!

Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

A new way of finding out how diet affects gut microbes

AS THE world’s fatties clock up the kilos, their excuses for being that way have piled up, too. Big bones, junk foods, genes or poor parenting—there are plenty of directions in which to point a chubby finger. In the past few years, a new potential culprit has emerged: gut bacteria. Human guts are full of bugs that help digestion and also stop their disease-causing counterparts from invading. In this age-old symbiosis, some bacteria are better than others at providing food to their human hosts—and also seem, by mechanisms yet unknown, to encourage those hosts’ bodies to store that energy as fat and to keep the fat on.

In the past, when food was in limited supply, these bacteria would have been valuable allies. In an era of plenty, though, they are problematic. In particular, work on mice suggests obesity is associated with having a high proportion of bacteria called Firmicutes, whereas the lean favour another group, the Bacteroidetes. Such work has also raised the suggestion that transplanting “lean mouse” microbes to fat mice can make them thinner—for a while.

They did it by taking ten-week-old mice that had been bred to be free of germs and colonising their guts by feeding them with human faeces. (Note to the squeamish: the article adds that mice are coprophagic.) After this, the mice could be tested on various kinds of diets to see how the bacteria responded. These studies show similar sorts of outcomes to those previously seen with native mouse bacteria, including the increased obesity associated with Firmicutes.

The point of it all is to allow more precise investigation of how human gut bacteria work. Such studies will also, no doubt, give rise to an industry testing new classes of “probiotics” that can be added to food in order to ameliorate its obesity-inducing effects. In other words, to sell special drinks that may make fat people less likely to pile on the pounds after eating a hamburger and fries.

An emotive issue

Nov 12th 2009 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

A good-humoured war over food

Illustration by Peter Schrank

MIDDLE EASTERNERS have had a habit of making war but they suffer a stronger addiction to hummus, the chickpea dip that is a staple of Levantine cuisine. So what could be more explosive than a mix of both passions, war and peas? Just such a conflict is raging between those old foes, Israel and Lebanon.

Last year, a team of Israeli chefs concocted what they claimed was the world’s biggest-ever batch of hummus, rolling out a vat weighing 400kg (882lb) in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market. It took a year to muster an Arab counter-strike, but on October 24th a squadron of Lebanese chefs cooked up a bunker-busting bowlful that weighed in at over 2,000kg. For good measure they also unveiled a terrifying 3,500kg batch of tabbouleh, the cracked wheat and parsley salad for which Lebanon is justly famed. Gastronomic gigantism may be a fad in Lebanon, where chefs recently baked a tray of kibbeh, a pie of minced meat and cracked wheat, at 20 square metres (215 square feet) a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records.

But for nationalists there is more at stake than fashion. Foods such as hummus originated in Lebanon, they say, and this should be recognised, as much as Greece’s exclusive claim to feta cheese or Parma’s to parmesan. Alarmed by Israeli firms’ success in marketing Middle Eastern foods in the West, where they are sometimes labelled as traditional Israeli fare, they see the food fight as an extension of Arab “resistance” against the usurping of their patrimony.

It is true that two Israeli companies, one allied to Pepsi and the other to Nestlé, control most of the American hummus market, worth $250m a year. And it is true that Israelis are devoted to hummus. Some claim it is mentioned in the Bible, while humourists have pictured Israelis brushing their teeth with it, and stirring it into their coffee.

Yet most Israelis would willingly grant that hummus is an Arab dish. The most popular hummus cookeries in Israel are Palestinian-run. For years, the two rival Abu Shukri restaurants in the Palestinian village of Abu Ghosh, outside Jerusalem, battled for hummus dominance, before the cousins who owned them were publicly reconciled on Israeli television.

In fact, it is a matter of record that hummus can promote peace. A decade ago, Israeli and Syrian officials faced off in tense (and ultimately unsuccessful) negotiations at Shepherdstown, West Virginia. But there came one moment of heartfelt agreement. All exclaimed that the hummus, served by their American hosts in an attempt to make everyone feel at home, was horrid.

Nov 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist, died on October 30th, aged 100

Getty Images

BEFORE Claude Lévi-Strauss revolutionised the discipline, anthropology in France, and generally elsewhere, was a matter of ill-attended lectures in small, cold halls, and the collection of feathers and fish-hooks as evidence of the quaint divergences of the “primitive” tribes of mankind. He made it as fashionable as philosophy and poetry, both of which he wove through his ethnographical studies as perhaps only French intellectuals can. The proper study of mankind was indeed man: not in his politicking, warring or banking, but naked, painting his body, hunting bears, snaring birds. Here lay the universal truths about how the human mind worked and what man was.

Obedient to Rousseau, who always “set him aflame”, Mr Lévi-Strauss observed men from afar. He never got too near or stayed too long in his rare stints of field-work, mostly in Brazil in the 1930s; he grasped only a few words of the languages, and avoided the “hateful” distractions of individual characters. In the bitter phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he sparred for years, he preferred to view men like ants. He focused not on their differences but on the deep-lying patterns and systems in everything they did, until he could proclaim that all tribal myths were reducible to one formula, and that all human thought, “savage” or not, was built up from binary opposites such as hot and cold, night and day, raw and cooked, good and bad. Round these concepts whole societies, as well as stories, were organised.

Mr Lévi-Strauss, throwing down the gauntlet in “La Pensée Sauvage” in 1962, saw nothing primitive about the tribes he studied. Totemism, for example, was a system as complex as the Linnaean classification. In tribal myths, apparently diverse and arbitrary elements—eruptions by lizards and woodpeckers, the significance of black arrows or the artemisia plant—were suddenly revealed to have a universal unity at their heart, a quest for objective knowledge and origins as acute as any in the West. The minds behind them were not savage, just “untamed”. The salient difference was that his tribesmen stayed within their limits, simply putting the materials they had together in new ways, like handymen or bricoleurs. “Civilised” man, on the other hand, tried to defy his constraints and change the world with new inventions, like an engineer.

The world needed both these types, said Mr Lévi-Strauss. And he embodied both. He too hopped from subject to subject like a bricoleur, discarding philosophy for its arid moralising, giving up law out of sheer boredom, vaunting socialism until it tired him, turning to anthropology as if he was still a fascinated boy in a curio shop. He abandoned theories like scorched earth in the forest. But the far-sighted engineer in him set up a “laboratory” at the Collège de France, where he held the brand-new chair of social anthropology from 1959 to 1982, and produced the four huge volumes of “Mythologiques” (1964-71), in which he tracked 813 myths the length of the American continent. He happily called himself both “neolithic” and a man of science.

The underlying order

Generations of students considered him the father of structuralism—the theory of underlying order in everything. This annoyed him. He invoked the word in the 1950s mostly in homage to linguists like Roman Jakobson, who had posited binary opposites (voiced and voiceless elements) as the building blocks of language. Thereafter structuralism had become a “vogue”, he thought, “besmirched” by being wrongly applied, and weirdly linking him with thinkers—Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault—with whom he had nothing in common.

But there was really no avoiding structure in his life. He loved Rameau’s music, Poussin’s paintings. His own career appeared to contain a fair element of chance: the second world war, with exile in New York, that led him to Jakobson, or his meetings with Max Ernst and André Breton, who taught him to look at objects with a surrealist’s eye. And yet possibly all this too, as he wrote in “Tristes Tropiques” in 1955, exemplified how, over time, “events without any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places…suddenly crystallise into a sort of edifice conceived by an architect…”

Ever diffident and retiring, he wished to be remembered only for his “moment in anthropological thought”: an effort at systematising cultures as profound, he hoped, as what Marx had done for ideologies, or Freud for dreams. Proselytising was left to his difficult, often beautiful, books and the pages of his journal L’Homme. The existentialists, and all who thought that man should be studied as an individual rather than en bloc, noisily attacked him. He dismissed their “shop-girl metaphysics”.

Before his immense age turned him into a national treasure for thinkers of all stripes and none, greens claimed him, and he was happy to be claimed. The consumer filth and monoculture of the “civilised” world had depressed him ever since the writing of “Tristes Tropiques”. As he faded, he mourned the vanishing of the tribes. “Primitive” man was not nobler or purer than he was, but they were, in the deepest sense, connected: for universal laws linked his thinking, in all its book-lined complexity, to that of the Indian clad only in tree-bark, trailing a deer along a forest path.

Celebrate Native American Heritage Month

Finding our voice: a community conversation with Native American actor Evan Adams

November 12 at 7 p.m. Clark County Library 1401 E. Flamingo Rd.

Join us for a conversation with actor, playwright and physician Evan Adams (Sliammon First Nation). He is best known internationally for his roles in the films of Sherman Alexie, as Thomas Builds-the Fire in the 1998 film Smoke Signals and Seymour Polatkin in the 2002 film The Business of Fancydancing.

Evan majored in microbiology at McGill before moving on to learn medicine and become a physician. Once he was called on to help deliver a baby in an emergency case for a Native American woman, who was surprised in her agony of labor to find a movie actor acting as her doctor. Now he is busy doing many things, including working as a Canadian government official in charge of health affairs for Native Americans. After the event tonight, he gave me his autograph and upon learning my daughter is completing her master’s program in biotech at McGill expressed his wish that she would go on to do her PhD.

Thank you, Dr. Katy Barin, for taking very good care of my teeth and pulling out those two nasty wisdom teeth that have been giving me so much pain and trouble over the years.

Dr. Barin graduated from McGill in Montreal and so is my daughter’s alumnus. She has two sons who are learning Chinese. One of them just lost one of his teeth the other day and asked his mom for 20 dollars in consolation. Dr. Barin gave him only one.

Every time I visit Dr. Barin’s dental office, she always offers me a little gift: a toothbrush, toothpaste, floss, peppermint, etc. This time, she gave me a packet of gauze to stop bleeding and a sheet of post surgery instructions:

1.       Care of your mouth: keep pressure on gauze placed in your mouth for 2 to 3 hours, changing every 20 to 30 minutes. The day after surgery, the mouth may be refreshed with warm salt water. However, rinse gently, no spitting.

2.       Discomfort: some discomfort may occur when the local anesthesia (numbness) wears off. Some pain medication can affect your reaction. Therefore do not drive or operate potentially dangerous equipment.

3.       Swelling: after 24 hours, if swelling or jaw stiffness occurs place an ice pack on area for 15 minutes then off for 15 minutes continuing until swelling either stops or starts to go down. Swelling may be present for 3 to 4 days.

4.       Oozing: eat only cold, soft or liquid foods for the first 24 hours after surgery. After the first day stay on a soft but balanced diet. DO NOT eat hard, spicy or chewy foods (including breads and pastries) for 5 to 7 days. Do not skip meals!!

5.       Dressing: pieces of surgical dressing may be loose and break off. DO NOT be concerned unless it causes bleeding or pain.

6.       Antibiotics: if antibiotics are prescribed, take them as directed until they are all gone.

7.       Smoking & Drinking: please do not smoke or drink alcohol following surgery. Tobacco smoke may cause dry socket. Stay away from smoking for the first 48 hours, then exercise caution while smoking.

8.       Other: go about your normal routine, but limit heavy exercise and excessive activity. Nausea is rare, but if occurs drink 1 ounce of carbonated drink, such as 7up r ginger ale every hour for 5 to 6 days. Avoid taking pain pills on an empty stomach as this sometimes causes nausea.

Bush, Clinton, and the Generals

By David Halberstam

In this long-awaited successor to his #1 national bestseller The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam describes in fascinating human detail how the shadow of the Cold War still hangs over American foreign policy and how domestic politics have determined our role as a world power.

More than twenty-five years ago Halberstam told the riveting story of the men who conceived and executed the Vietnam War. Today the Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written another unforgettable chronicle of Washington politics, this time exploring the complex dynamics of foreign policy in post-Cold War America.

Halberstam brilliantly evokes the internecine conflicts, the untrammeled egos, and the struggles for dominance among the key figures in the White House, the State Department, and the military. He shows how the decisions of men who served in the Vietnam War—such as General Colin Powell and presidential advisers Richard Holbrooke and Anthony Lake—and those who did not have shaped American politics and policy makers (perhaps most notably, President Clinton’s placing, for the first time in fifty years, domestic issues over foreign policy).

With his uncanny ability to find the real story behind the headlines, Halberstam shows how current events in the Balkans, Somalia, and Haiti reflect American politics and foreign policy. He discusses the repercussions in Washington on policy makers from two different administrations; the wariness of the American military to become caught again in an inconclusive ground war; the frustrations of civilian advisers, most of whom have never served in the military; and the effects these conflicting forces have on the American commanders in Kosovo, General Wes Clark.

Sweeping in its scope and impressive in its depth, War in a Time of Peace provides fascinating portraits of Clinton, bush, Reagan, Kissinger, James Baker, Dick Cheney, Madeleine Albright, and others, to reveal a stunning view of modern political America.

Alas, the Dewey-beats-Truman reveries died shortly after midnight, when even Fox had to concede that the Democrat, Bill Owens, had triumphed in what had been Republican country since before Edison introduced the light bulb. For the far right, the thriller in Watertown was over except for the ludicrous morning-after spin that Hoffman’s loss was really a victory. For the Democrats, the excitement was just beginning. New York’s 23rd could be celebrated as a rare bright spot on a night when the party’s gubernatorial candidates lost in Virginia and New Jersey.

The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans. Tuesday’s results may be useless as a predictor of 2010, but they are not without value as cautionary tales. And the most worrisome for Democrats were not in Virginia and New Jersey, but, paradoxically, in the New York contests where they performed relatively well. That includes the idiosyncratic New York City mayor’s race that few viewed as a bellwether of anything. It should be the most troubling of them all for President Obama’s cohort — even though neither Obama nor the national political parties were significant players in it.

But first let’s make a farewell accounting of the farce upstate. The reason why the Democratic victory in New York’s 23rd is a mixed blessing is simple: it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.

This race was a damaging setback for the hard right. Hoffman had the energetic support of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox as well as big bucks from their political auxiliaries. Furthermore, Hoffman was running not only in a district that Rove himself described as “very Republican” but one that fits the demographics of the incredibly shrinking G.O.P. The 23rd is far whiter than America as a whole — 93 percent versus 74 — with tiny sprinklings of blacks, Hispanics and Asians. It has few immigrants. It’s rural. Its income and education levels are below the norm. Only if the district were situated in Dixie — or Utah — could it be a more perfect fit for the narrow American demographic where the McCain-Palin ticket had its sole romps last year.

If the tea party right can’t win there, imagine how it might fare in the nation where most Americans live. Some G.O.P. leaders have started to notice. Mitt Romney didn’t endorse Hoffman despite right-wing badgering to do so. On Wednesday, Michael Steele dismissed the right’s mantra that somehow Hoffman’s loss could be called a victory and instead talked up the newly elected Republican governors who won by appealing to independents and moderates. Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell are plenty conservative, but both had rejected Palin’s offers to campaign for them. They also avoided the tea party zanies, the fear-mongering National Organization for Marriage and the anti-abortion-rights zealots Hoffman embraced. They positioned themselves as respectful Obama critics, not haters likening him to Hitler.

In the aftermath of this clear-cut demonstration of how Republicans can win, the revolutionaries are still pledging to purge the party’s moderates by rallying behind more Hoffmans in G.O.P. primaries from Florida to California. And they may get some scalps. But Tuesday’s loss revealed that they’re better at luring freak-show gawkers into Fox’s tent than voters into the G.O.P.’s. As if to prove the point, protesters hoisted a sign likening health care reform to Dachau at the raucous tea party rally convened by Michele Bachmann on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Should the G.O.P. avoid self-destruction by containing this fringe, then the president and his party will have to confront their real problem: their identification with the titans who greased the skids for the economic meltdown from which Wall Street has recovered and the country has not. If there’s one general lesson to be gleaned from Christie’s victory over Jon Corzine in New Jersey, it’s surely that in today’s zeitgeist it’s less of a stigma to be fat than a former Goldman Sachs fat cat, even in a blue state.

Michael Bloomberg’s shocking underperformance in New York was an even more dramatic illustration of this animus. Tuesday’s exit polls found that he had a whopping 70 percent approval rating, as befits a mayor who, whatever his quirks and missteps, is widely regarded as a highly competent, nonideological executive who has run the city well. Yet only 72 percent of those who gave him a thumb’s up voted for him. Though the mayor wildly outspent and out-campaigned his bland opponent, Bill Thompson, he received only 50.6 percent of the vote.

This shortfall has been correctly attributed to Bloomberg’s self-serving, highhanded undoing of the term limits law he had once endorsed. The ferocity of the public reaction to this power grab surprised him, pollsters and the press alike. That it became a bigger deal than anyone anticipated — arguably bigger than it merited — is an indicator of how much antipathy there is toward the masters of the universe in the financial capital. Americans don’t hate rich people, but they do despise those who behave as if the rules don’t apply to them. “Michael Bloomberg is About to Buy Himself a Third Term” was the cover line on New York magazine in October. However unfairly, some voters conflated his air of entitlement with the swaggering Wall Street C.E.O.’s who cashed out before the crash and stuck the rest of us with the bill.

The Obama administration does not seem to understand that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It has pushed aside the entreaties of many — including Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House’s own Economic Recovery Advisory Board — to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by the government’s bailouts, low-interest loans and guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on “Meet the Press” dodging questions about the banks in general and Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides. “We’re not going to let the system go back to the way it was,” he said.

Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington, publicly questioned Geithner’s fitness for his job, given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations of the derivatives that enabled last year’s collapse. On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White House’s consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, told me on Friday it was “surreal” that Democrats were now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing “the golden chalice” of reform. If investors cannot have transparency, Levitt said, “the whole system is worthless.”

The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action.

The tea party Republicans vanquished on Tuesday have no jobs plan. They just want to eliminate all Washington spending — a prescription that didn’t go down too well in New York’s 23rd, where the federal government has the largest payroll. The G.O.P. establishment’s one-size-fits-all panacea is tax cuts — thin gruel for those with little or no taxable income. The administration’s answer is the stimulus, whose iffy results so far, it argues, can’t be judged this early on.

Fair enough. But a year from now the public will register its verdict in any event. Meanwhile, both parties have their own delusions, not the least of which is the Republicans’ conviction that Tuesday was a referendum on what Obama has done so far. If anything, it was a judgment on just how much he has not.

Just listened to NPR’s one-hour program hosting Andre Agassi in its studio here. So excited. Tried to call in and talk to him but I knew it was a mission impossible. The line was busy, I was told and had expected. Andre is scheduled to appear at Encore and Wynn at 7:00pm tonight. To bad I can’t be there as I have to work then. Maybe I can find the time to go to his book signing or other events here soon.

So much gained, so much to lose

Nov 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Over the past 20 years economic freedom has outpaced political liberty. Neither should be taken for granted

“OF ALL places it was in divided Berlin in divided Germany in divided Europe that the cold war erupted into an east-west street party,” this newspaper observed 20 years ago. Even to those who had been confident of the eventual triumph of the West, the fall of the Berlin Wall was surprisingly accidental. When 200,000 East Germans took advantage of Hungary’s decision to open its borders and fled to the West, their communist government decided to modify the travel restrictions that imprisoned them. Asked about the timing, the unbriefed propaganda minister mumbled: “As far as I know, effective immediately.” When that was reported on television, the Berliners were off. Baffled border guards who would have shot their “comrades” a week earlier let the crowd through—and a barrier that had divided the world was soon being gleefully dismantled. West Germany’s chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was so unready for history that he was out of the country.

The destruction of the Iron Curtain on November 9th 1989 is still the most remarkable political event of most people’s lifetimes: it set free millions of individuals and it brought to an end a global conflict that threatened nuclear annihilation. For liberals in the West, it still stands as a reminder both of what has been won since and what is still worth fighting for.

Remember the Stasi, but don’t forget the fridges

Yet the past two decades have seen economic freedom advance further than political freedom. Talk 20 years ago of a peaceful new world order has disappeared. New divisions have emerged out of nationalism, religion or just “fear of the other”. Rather than making the case for democracy unassailable, plenty of countries, including, alas, a few of the old Warsaw Pact members, most of the Arab world and China, have been able to run shamelessly repressive authoritarian regimes. When Western leaders visit Moscow, Riyadh or Beijing, they merely mumble about human rights. The presumption has become that such regimes will endure.

By contrast, “globalisation”, that awkward term that covers the freer movement of goods, capital, people and ideas around the globe, has become the governing principle of commerce. That does not mean it is universally accepted: witness the travails of the Doha round of trade talks. But few places openly oppose it. In the economic sphere, illiberalism usually has to disguise itself through governments trying to adapt it, stressing “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “fair trade” and so on. Even after the crunch, the commercial classes assume that the world will become more integrated: who can resist economic logic and technology?

It is not hard to see why such a presumption should exist. Consider two successes of economic liberalism, both somewhat under-appreciated at the moment. The first is its role 20 years ago (see article). The East Berliners rushing to the West were not just fleeing the Stasi; they also came in search of fridges, jeans and Coca-Cola from supermarkets. By then communism, for all its tanks and missiles, was plainly a less efficient economic machine. Mikhail Gorbachev deserves credit for allowing so many serfs to escape so peacefully; but the Soviet Union crumbled because it could not produce the goods.

And even if the current round of globalisation technically began before the wall fell, it was spurred on by it. (The word seldom appeared in The Economist before 1986 and began to be common only in the 1990s.) Globalisation would have meant much less if half of Europe had been bricked in; many instinctively statist giants of the emerging world, such as Brazil, India or even China, would have been far slower to open up their economies if a semi-credible alternative had still existed.

That points to the second under-appreciated success. At present capitalism is too often judged by the excesses of a few bankers. But when historians come to write about the past quarter-century, Lehman Brothers and Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin will account for fewer pages than the 500m people dragged out of absolute poverty into something resembling the middle class. Their success is not just a wonderful thing in itself—the greatest leap forward in economic history. It has also helped spur on other chaotic freedoms: look at the way ideas, good, bad and mad, are texted around the world.

For in the end, no matter what China’s leaders tell Mr Obama when he visits Beijing later this month, economic and political liberty are linked—not as tightly as people hoped 20 years ago, but still linked. Look forward, and China’s internet-obsessed emerging middle class will surely have an appetite for liberty beyond the purely economic. Change could happen as unexpectedly as it did in 1989. Even the most fearsome fortresses of repression can eventually be breached. Then it was Honecker and Ceausescu; tomorrow it might be Castro, Ahmadinejad or Mugabe; one day Chávez or even Hu.

Marx to market

Put another way, the presumption that political freedom will never catch up with economic freedom could turn out to be joyously wrong. The problem is that this gap could also be closed another way. Economic freedom could be slowed down, perhaps even reversed, by politics.

For Western liberals, even ones who believe in open markets as unreservedly as this paper, that means facing up to some hard facts about the popularity of their creed. Western capitalism’s victory over its rotten communist rival does not ensure it an enduring franchise from voters. As Karl Marx pointed out during globalisation’s last great surge forward in the 19th century, the magic of comparative advantage can be wearing—and cruel. It leaves behind losers in concentrated clumps (a closed tyre factory, for instance), whereas the more numerous winners (everybody driving cheaper cars) are disparate. It makes the wealthy very wealthy: in a global market, you will hit a bigger jackpot than in a local one. And capitalism has always been prone to spectacular booms and busts.

Above all politics remains stubbornly local. All that economic integration has not been matched politically. And to the extent that there is a global guarantor of the current system, it is America, a country which as globalisation works will continue to lose relative power. Thanks to its generosity in exporting the secrets of success, it now has China closer to its shoulder and other emerging giants are catching up. Public support for protectionism has surged in the United States.

In the affairs of man, wounded pride and xenophobia often trump economic reason. Why else would Russia terrorise its gas customers? Or Britons demonise the EU? In a rational world China would not stir up Japanophobia and rich Saudis would not help Islamic extremists abroad. Many businesspeople, too busy on their BlackBerrys to worry about nationalism or fundamentalism, might ponder Keynes’s description of a prosperous Londoner before August 1914: sipping his morning tea in bed, ordering goods from around the world over the telephone, regarding that age of globalisation as “normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement” and dismissing “the politics of militarism” and “racial and cultural rivalries” as mere “amusements in his daily newspaper”.

Be prepared, be very prepared

Recognising the political shortcomings of globalisation should redouble Western liberals’ determination to defend it: to close the gap in the right way. That involves a myriad of things, from promoting human rights to designing better jobs policies (see article). But it also requires defending the enormous benefits that capitalism has brought the world since 1989 more forcefully than the West’s leaders have done thus far. And above all perhaps, taking nothing for granted.