Daily Blague

The Terri Schiavo case may wreck - may already have wrecked - my little sabbatical, announced yesterday. On the front page of this morning's Times, there's a story about how conservative groups nursed the case for two years, sustaining it through a series of judicial "reversals" and eventually bringing it to the US Capitol for what I pray will turn out to have been an unconstitutional extravaganza. Thank you, reporters David D Kirkpatrick and Sheryl Gay Stolberg - but where were you? Where were we all, really.

Instead of complaining about the extremely faulty logic of Michael Schiavo's opponents, instead of formulating elegant rebuttals and researching the hypocrisy of the right, liberals ought to be asking themselves, where were we? The Schiavo case has been in the news ever since Jeb Bush got on board in 2003. That didn't alarm me, because the story appeared to be local. This was willful thinking. Nothing that the President's brother gets excited about is local. But I hadn't really begun the reeducation program that George Bush's victory last fall has forced me into, had I.

My blood pressure's rising, I'm reaching for the potato chips - signs of stress that Peter C Whybrow attributes to American mania. Was I right to resist blogging for two years? According to Dr Whybrow, the Internet is a drug that has dangerously disturbed our human equilibrium, our ability to balance desire and curiosity against love and thoughtfulness. This equilibrium, calibrated over millennia of evolution, can't adapt quickly enough to the radically altered environment in which we find ourselves. The instant gratification provided by Amazon and Visa has confounded our sense of limits. Dr Whybrow believes that Americans have recently passed through the grandiose - I can do anything - phase of mania and are now teetering on the brink of inevitable, depressive collapse. Even though I tell myself that I am not preoccupied by status and possessions, the drives that fuel Dr Whybrow's hypothesis, I believe that I have been touched by this malady, less so perhaps than others but what, in the end, is the difference? Sick is sick.

American Mania: When More Is Not Enough seems at first glance to be a disappointment. The fundamentals are stated on nearly every page, for one thing; for another, television is mentioned exactly once, according to the index. These details suggest to me that while Dr Whybrow is on to a big idea, he has not really worked it out. There is something manic about the book itself, beginning with the tabloid-style dust jacket. Just the same, I'm going to spend some time with it. (I apologize for the bogus language, but I can't commit to reading the book all the way through.) As faithful readers know, I've been working on my own pet theory about why half of the country thinks the way it does, but while I still think that I'm on to something, too, I think that American Mania does a good job of explaining why the whole of the country behaves the way it does. If you have ever lived in the company of mania (and I have), then the stubborn refusal to listen to reason that seems to have infected nearly everybody will strike a dreadfully familiar note.

But, hey, maybe a little mania's good for you! Even though it occasioned a very amusing drawing from Michael Witte, Benedict Carey's "Hypomanic? Absolutely. But Oh So Productive" is a disgrace. The best thing to be said about it is that it belongs in the newpaper's Sunday Styles section, and not in the Science Times, lackluster as that section is. (Come to think of it, a weekly science section looks like evidence of manic grandiosity. Is there that much real science news for a daily paper with a general readership to print?) The article comes under the rubric of "It's okay to be bad" journalism that Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown pioneered. Dr Whybrow's cautionary opinion isn't cited until the end, when the party's over.

The Times did get at least one thing right: it pasted a biggish photograph of Bobby Short on the cover, devoted the top of the first page of the Arts section to an appreciation of his career, and printed a reasonably long obituary as well. Mr Short died yesterday at New York Hospital (as I persist in calling it) of leukemia, aged 80. Kathleen, a fan ever since she first heard him, in her teens, said she wasn't surprised, because he had worked all his life and probably oughtn't to have retired, but perhaps she had it wrong way round: who knew about his leukemia? The last time we saw Bobby Short at the Carlyle was two years ago, when he surprised us with the band that lined up, a little foolishly, along the banquettes along the wall behind his piano, but for the most part the shows were pretty much alike, which was just what everybody wanted (think of Bayreuth). I can remember taking in the show from at least five different tables; on three occasions, we had dinner first, a truly gala experience. Bobby Short transcended "café society" to become part of the definition of this city, and his passing diminishes the place.