Loose Links (Tuesday)
¶ Sometimes the Times shows the most amazing signs of life. Life, that is, after or apart from Bill Keller. As in this account of the late (or not so late) blizzard by Alan Feuer.
According to Steve Fybish, an amateur weather historian with a habit of calling reporters on deadline with interesting weather facts, this winter is the first since the late 19th century that has produced three snowstorms of five inches or more within a nine-day period.
From Feb. 20 to 21, he said, five inches of snow fell; from Feb. 24 to 25, six inches fell. Mr. Fybish said he was hoping that at least five inches would fall this time.
"To get three in this period is, I think, unprecedented," he said. "That's kind of fun."
We are hanging up on you now, Mr Fybish, but please don't take it personally, because we're on deadline.
¶ La petite anglaise reports on an underwear campaign in Paris. It's very sexy stuff for very sexy guys, and you can follow the link to the designer's site from Lpa. I've had enough underwear-in-public, on both sexes, thank you very much, and I would like it to stop now. I would like to choose the moments for relishing images of desire, or for satisfying my curiosity about current trends in underwear advertising, myself. At my pleasure and convenience, nobody else's. The Hom campaign that Lpa talks about is garishly para-pornographic: the highly sculpted, ultra buff men look much naughtier in their skin-tight, peek-a-boo shorts than they would "in the nude," and that is the point of the photographs. Well and good. The point of pasting the photographs onto public billboards is something quite different. It's to shout that some people are so gorgeous that the line between public and private melts in the glare of their fabulousness. And that's what has gotten tedious. No mortal is that fabulous.
¶ More merchandise from CaféPress:
I've been thinking a lot about the Gannon Affair since yesterday, when I agreed with Bob Somerby that the mainstream media coverage has not been derelict. Does this mean that I don't think the story is significant? No. Aside from its hoot value, of which any reader of these pages will have seen me to be an eager appreciator, it adds another brick to the wall of Bush Administration incompetence. But there are so many other bricks! And what's really derelict about mainstream media is the habit of respectfully deferring to the Administration's radical restructuring of everything that it doesn't simply wreck.
Comments
Yes! I completely agree with your point about the media respectfully deferring to the Administration. Why are they worthy of any deference whatsoever? It's not like they even have any executional competence, as some members of Nixon's administration did. They're all clownish hacks of the worst kind.
Posted by: Max | March 1, 2005 12:50 PM
Even the Washington and Lincoln Administrations were unworthy - by nature - of the supine accommodation offered by today's press. But it isn't the Administration alone that demands this. It is also the significant bloc of the American public that regards being nice as a political issue.
Posted by: R J Keefe | March 1, 2005 02:38 PM
You really don't like "nice," do you? I can't blame you; it was one of the things I found extremely unnerving about Minnesota when I lived there. (The vast empty spaces outside of the Twin Cities also induced a near-phobia in me, but that's a different matter.)
Posted by: Max | March 1, 2005 03:00 PM
America's fixation on niceness is the besetting sin that replaced, somewhere along the line, its fear of hellfire, but it is no less anxious. It's important to see that being nice and being polite are utterly inconsistent states. Being polite means attending to specific differences among people and making the best of them. Being nice means ignoring such differences and acting according to a script. Reality-based, in short, versus religion-based.
Posted by: R J Keefe | March 1, 2005 03:06 PM
The stereotypical Minnesota treatment of controversial topics is to say "Oooh, gash, that's [inneresting|different]," and then quickly to change the subject to something more anodyne.
That said, as repulsed as I am by false conviviality, I am also extremely conflict-averse.
Posted by: Max | March 1, 2005 03:22 PM
C'est malheuresement l'heure (les heures) du bon français. Let me just mention, though, my faith that politeness can make conflicts truly manageable. Not by scattering soothing formulas over troubled waters, but through sheer attentiveness. The fact that a polite person is really listening to what you say can make serious disagreement easy to take. Of course, I'm speaking of conflicts among equals; but every boss should strive to be polite to his people.
Posted by: RJ Keefe | March 1, 2005 03:50 PM
Certainly, politeness can make serious disagreement easier to take, but politeness will be effective only if one is conversing with another person who is equally polite. One might learn something from being polite but I doubt anyone ever learns anything by being nice (just as, in my experience, one never learns much by being rude). I often find myself shifting from 'politeness' into 'niceness' (as both terms are defined by RJ) when I am dealing with an interlocutor whose views I discern I have no hope of affecting in even the slightest degree (and at that point, I feel as though my 'niceness' is dishonest, but the dishonesty is more conducive to maintaining a healthy blood-pressure level and avoiding fisticuffs). Perhaps this explains the media's deference to the current administration, i.e., the media is in the business, after all, of selling a product (newspapers, magazines, air-time) which, based on the returns from the recent election, wouldn't be quite so palatable to a great number of Americans if it didn't defer to the current Administration. This is not intended to excuse the media, rather, it is merely a thought as to a possible explanation for the media's deference; personally, I believe that the goal of the media should be to provoke discussion based upon verifiable facts.
Another comment, this time on the Paris underwear campaign: I wasn't able to link to the site referenced in the post, but what RJ wrote reminded me of a comment (which may be completely off the mark in this case) that a friend of mine once made about sexy undergarments: if they are effective, they don't remain on one's person long enough to justify the cost, and if they are worn for any period of time, they weren't worth the cost in the first place.
Posted by: jkm | March 1, 2005 11:29 PM
Big bedtime post! I will definitely make the nice/polite distinction a post of its own, and try to export these comments thereto. And we also have to decide if the media are in the product business or the journalism business. Marketing rules will never apply to the latter.
Leave it to JKM to remind us of truly pithy objections to négligée.
Posted by: RJ Keefe | March 1, 2005 11:50 PM
I look forward to further discourse on product vs. journalism, as it pertains to the media. As to your second remark, you must remember that I am a good old gal from the midwest who wears sensible shoes and, thus, would never fritter away my funds on anything frivolous (well, perhaps, other than gemstones, to which I am addicted but to which my spouse has developed a severe allergy).
Posted by: jkm | March 1, 2005 11:59 PM