Shots in the Dark

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Center for Science in the Public Interest is calling for a ban on beer advertising at NCAA events.

“The NCAA is the beer industry’s pied piper among children,” said George A. Hacker, director of the alcohol-policies project at CSPI.

Uh-huh. And college students would never drink beer if they didn’t see it advertised during basketball games.

CSPI is generally a good watchdog group, but they do tend to the puritanical. Wouldn’t it be nice if they, and the rest of the country, suggested instead that young people learn that there’s nothing wrong with a beer or two, as long as they drink responsibly? A beer or a glass of wine at dinner isn’t going to kill an 18-year-old. (No, leave that to insurgents in Iraq. I still don’t get the whole, you’re allowed to join the army and kill people, but you can’t drink a beer afterward, thing…)

Of course, three or four beers, followed by a quick drive down the road, might kill you, and some other people too. (Especially if you’re driving an SUV.) But one beer does not invariably lead to three.

At the moment, this country says to young people, don’t touch a drop of alcohol till you’re 21, and then, boom, go crazy. Wouldn’t a more gradual, common-sensical approach work better?

Back in the early ’80s, John Roberts, as an assistant to attorney general William French Smith, was an advocate of a restrained federal government. In one August 1982 memo, he endorsed a limited view of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal aid. According to the Times, Roberts wrote, “Under Title IX, federal investigators cannot rummage willy-nilly through institutions but can only go as far as the federal funds go.”

Well, times have changed, and now the Republican Party has become the party of big government, in everything from spending to domestic security to education. One specific area is the Solomon Amendment, which would allow the government to sever federal aid to educational institutions that ban military recruiting—not just the part of the institution that bans the recruiting (say, a law school), and not just the aid related to the military. The Clinton administration didn’t enforce this law; the Bush administration is enforcing it.

Given Roberts’ past position on Title IX, I’d like to hear a Judiciary Committee senator ask him whether he now thinks that the Solomon Amendment allows the government “to rummage willy-nilly through institutions,” or whether the government’s reach “can only go as far as the federal funds go.” It seems only fair.

Have you seen the new “Chrysler Group” ads in which Lee Iacocca (or some diminutive relative of his) intones, “If you can find a better car, buy it”?

What a load of crap.

I remember back in the ’80s, when Iacocca, now 80, first used that line in commercials. At the time, he was hawking Chrysler’s infamous line of K-cars, perhaps the biggest pieces of junk ever to set wheel to the road. (If you don’t remember them, does this help? Chrysler LeBaron, Dodge Aries, and Plymouth Reliant.)

Perhaps out of sheer chutzpah, those ads actually worked at the time; people went out and bought Chryslers. Will they again? It’s hard to imagine. Chryslers’ cars have improved since that time, but still…if I could find a better car than a Chrysler? To do that, all I’d have to do is look at any car made by Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Subaru, and so on.

I was thinking of this as I read an article in today’s Times about how Sony has been caught in a payola scandal. Apparently Sony was giving away computers, trips, sneakers and other stuff to disc jockeys in exchange for playing songs by Sony artists. Now you know why Good Charlotte and Celine Dion have careers.

What’s the connection? In both instances, I think, capitalism isn’t working. Chrysler is using ads that are literally incredible; Sony is trying to shove bad musicians down people’s throats. (Well, ears, really.) The result is that consumers, who are more sophisticated than they were back during Iacocca’s first time around, may actually shun Chrysler cars more than they do now; and music fans, bored of formulaic radio, start stealing music off the Internet, listening to webcasts and Podcasts, and just generally rejecting all the crap that the music biz shovels out to the public.

Here’s a particular irony about the Sony story: Apparently it’s totally fine for Sony to break the law to get you to hear their music…but it’s totally, totally wrong for consumers to break the law to try to hear/download music that they actually like….

You have to love any newspaper article beginning thusly: “It’s time for Harvard University President Larry Summers to pick a fight.”

Writing in the Boston Herald, Virginia Buckingham argues that Summers has dropped the ball by failing to push for the reinstitution of ROTC on the Harvard campus. (At the moment, Harvard students who enroll in ROTC travel to MIT for their training.)

Faced with recruiting shortfalls, the military needs officers, Buckingham says. And Harvard students lose out on a life-changing patriotic experience by not supporting the military.

Buckingham’s article is both right and wrong. It’s wrong in the sense that Summers has in the past pushed for the restoration of ROTC at Harvard, particularly in the weeks after 9/11. She’s right in that Summers, after getting lots of credit for his rhetoric from American conservatives never actually did anything to bring ROTC back. Doing so would require a vote of the faculty, and Summers has never chosen to expend his political capital on such a vote. Accurately or not, that decision has created the appearance that Summers wants to get credit for talking up military service without raising a sweat on its behalf.

I’m of two minds about this. The reason Harvard doesn’t have its own ROTC program is because of the military’s anti-gay discrimination; Harvard bans recruitment on its campus by any employer that discriminates. I think that’s a principled stand, and I support it.

At the same time, I do think that there’s real value in military service, and that the exclusion of the military does separate Harvard from the national mainstream in some unfortunate ways. It also exposes Harvard to charges of being unpatriotic, which, in my opinion, it is not.

There is, of course, an easy solution. The military has a severe recruiting shortage; the military bans gays from service. Hmmm.

But since the military doesn’t seem likely to change its policy, what to do? I honestly don’t have an answer for that. Do you?

Ever notice how, every time you read about a dramatic car crash, there’s an SUV involved? I have. And once you start to notice, the pattern is remarkable. People can’t stop them, can’t turn them, can’t slow them down in time, can’t brake without skidding or flipping. And when someone does lose control in an SUV—or drive drunk into someone else—the damage is all the more devastating because of SUVs’ enormous size and weight.

The irony here, of course, is that people buy SUVs because they feel safer in them. A double irony, really. They’re not safer, because they’re more likely to lose control and crash. And the people they crash into are invariably more likely to be wounded or killed than if they were hit by, say, a Honda Accord or Volkswagen Jetta.

So I think I’ll start pointing out some of these incidents here on the blog.

Like this one: Infant Clings to Life after Crash by Repeat Offender. It’s upsetting on many levels. A guy driving an SUV hit a pregnant woman in an SUV. The guy had repeat convictions for driving while on drugs, and had had his license suspended. His girlfriend admitted that she allowed him to use her car even though she knew that his license had been revoked….

Massachusetts is considering a law which would mandate jail time for repeat driving-under-the-influence offenders, to which one can only say, Of course. You drive drunk more than once, and you should go to jail…..

An acquaintance of Jean Charles de Menezes remembers him.

The more I learn about this episode, the more upsetting it gets.

As if the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, an unarmed Brazilian man in the subway, isn’t bad enough, now the British authorities are making it worse by insisting that they did nothing wrong in killing him. Instead, they are defending their new “shoot in the head” policy to stop suspected terrorists.

I still haven’t read a good explanation of why this man was shot in the first place. That’s because there is no good explanation.

Here, from Sarah Lyall’s report in the New York Times, is the reason Menezes was shot and killed:

“Having found the address in a backpack left behind by one of the bombers in the failed attacks on Thursday, the police were watching the building where Mr. Menezes lived. But they failed to realize, apparently, that there was more than one apartment there. So when Mr. Menezes left the building to go to a job on Friday, they followed him. They trailed him onto the No. 2 bus, bound for the Stockwell subway stop, a little more than 10 minutes away.”

Let’s just emphasize that: the police didn’t know that there was more than one apartment in the building. And yet they are considered competent enough to make a split second decision about shooting someone in the head.

According to the police, Menezes was wearing a “bulky jacket,” which made them think he might be hiding something. Plainclothes policeman allegedly identified themselves, Menezes—who had been attacked by a gang a few weeks before—panicked and ran. He actually ran headfirst into a train and fell on his stomach. The police then shot him, from behind, five times in the head.

I’m going to emphasize the word “allegedly” here, because that’s what cops always say after shooting someone in the back of the head—that they properly identified themselves first.

So let us consider two things about this incident. Jean Charles de Menezes would never have been shot if he didn’t have dark skin. And if he didn’t have dark skin—if he were, say, a white Oxford student—the British authorities would be apologizing, and the British public would be demanding it. But Menezes is Brazilian, and so he is dead.

Perhaps you noticed that the Re-Ethicist was missing last week. Mea culpa. I was stuck in my bedroom, mired in a weekend of passionate…um…house-painting. (A combination of Brazilian blue and Swiss blue, if you must know. Individually they’re very nice; together, even better!) And once in the middle of house-painting, you really have to finish. It’s kind of addictive that way.

However, I’m happy to announce that the Re-Ethicist is back!

This week, Randy Cohen, a.k.a. the Ethicist, responds to a letter from Jo Sanders of Seattle. Along with her husband, Jo went to see her son participate in an improv comedy competition, the winner to be determined by audience vote. She thought that her son’s team was not the best, so she voted for another team. Her husband agreed with her estimation, but voted for his son’s team out of loyalty. “Who was right?”

Randy Cohen, a.k.a. the Ethicist, replies, “I’m with your husband.”

Wrong!

” Your husband could more convincingly argue that by soliciting votes from an audience with obvious personal ties to participants, the venue surrendered any hope of a dispassionate verdict,” Cohen writes.

This strikes me as a fancy way of saying that two wrongs make a right. They’re biased, so you can be too.

But let us consider this event from its impact on the boy. There is no satisfaction in a hollow victory. Chances are that Ms. Sanders’ son knows his group wasn’t the best. (And if he doesn’t, he might want to consider another hobby.) Knowing his secondary status and yet winning would only teach the youth that the best way to get ahead is not on merit, not on ability, but by stacking the deck.

Let me close by pondering the premise of Ms. Sanders’ question: “Who was right?”

In this situation, two people took two different actions, each for what they considered moral reasons. Must one be right and the other wrong? Can not two people be right at the same time? And correspondingly, are they not both wrong at the same time?

Discuss.

In this situation, there is no such thing as Truth. There is just one truism: Randy Cohen, a.k.a. the Ethicist, is wrong!

So New Yorkers will now have to submit to random bag searches on the subways. In our fight against terrorism, we are losing one more bit of freedom.

I say that with sadness, but not opposition. It’s impossible not to ride the subways these days and not think how vulnerable they are to terrorist attack; it’s a small miracle that nothing has happened so far. We not only allow, we encourage bag searches on airplanes. Why not subways?

The only problem, of course, is that random bag searches often aren’t random at all; if you’re a backpack-toting tourist from Pakistan, odds are you’re going to spend some time with your friendly New York policeman.

I know I should be upset about that, too, but I can’t say that I am. Given who’s committing acts of terrorism these days, and the sheer impossibility of inspecting everyone’s bag, it only makes sense to do some profiling of potential searchees. Let’s just hope that the search process is carried out with some sensitivity, so that we don’t wind up needlessly humiliating people who’ve done absolutely nothing wrong.

But let there be some logic to this process, as well. I remember how, after 9/11, the Yankees banned the carrying of bags into the Stadium. In reality, men were forced to check their bags, no matter how small, at a bar across the street. Women could carry in purses of virtually any size….

Here’s what Liddy Dole—Senator Liddy Dole—had to say about Democratic Senate candidate Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, whose father was governor of that state:

“”I don’t know that he has addressed any issues. They are kind of locking him away, letting him run on his father’s name.”

Huh.

Um….Mrs. Dole…wasn’t your husband a senator for, oh, about 30 years? And weren’t you the one who ran one of the most notoriously issue-free campaigns in modern political history?

Oh, and if your name-piggybacking weren’t enough…I’m sorry, but who’s president, again? And governor of Florida?

Honestly, these people….