The Best and the Brightest

Sooner or later, the thought passes through the mind of every educated person in the United States:  Why can’t everyone else in America be as smart as me?  Isn’t there some way we could force people to be less stupid before releasing them into the wild?  Shouldn’t things such as the right to vote be subject to a baseline level of knowledge and intelligence?

As it turns out, while the rest of us were merely thinking such insufferable thoughts, others were actually writing them down.  One such person, Jason Richwine, turned them into a Harvard dissertation in 2009.

Richwine’s paper, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” examines the apparent discrepancy in average IQ between immigrants to the United States (particularly Mexicans) and the native population.  Richwine concludes that it would be in the national interest for the United States to grant legal immigrant status based on an individual’s intelligence, withholding it from applicants whose IQ scores are too low.

The text of the dissertation made the rounds in recent days, and you can imagine how delighted everyone was with it.

Some have attacked Richwine’s premise, insisting the concept of “IQ” is a meaningless social construct, while others have condemned his conclusions, equating them to eugenics and the like.  Many have excoriated Harvard for having approved the topic as a dissertation thesis in the first place, with some going so far as to demand it be retroactively withdrawn.

The reason this particular four-year-old college paper has struck such a nerve is because its particular scribbler is also the co-author of a new paper by the Heritage Foundation about why immigration reform, currently under consideration in Congress, is a bad idea.

While the think tank’s paper does not recommend an IQ-based approach to U.S. immigration policy, Richwine was nonetheless compelled to resign his post there, as the foundation insisted the conclusions in Richwine’s paper were not its own.  By this point, it hardly mattered:  The hornets’ nest had been duly shaken.

Research on the science of intelligence, and the notion of an objective measurement thereof, runs deep.  Those who have studied the subject tend to cast a skeptical eye toward the theory that, to the extent that concepts such as IQ or “g” (for “general intelligence”) mean anything at all, they can be made to have any practical application of the sort Richwine proposes.

For the moment, however—for the proverbial sake of argument—let us simply grant Richwine all of his premises and proceed onward.

The central question, it seems to me, is whether it would be morally permissible to follow Richwine’s lead and admit into the United States only those of superior intelligence.  Supposing, again, that everything Richwine asserts is true—that intelligence can be meaningfully measured and that allowing for too many low-IQ immigrants would (and does) have a detrimental impact on the country’s overall well-being—should we act on this information, or ignore it?

Universities certainly have no problem discriminating on the basis of the relative intelligence within their applicant pools.  Sure, admissions officers might define “intelligence” in their own, disparate ways and include other, less tangible factors in determining which students to accept and which to decline.  Nonetheless, a college aspirant considered to be generally intelligent tends to fare better in the application sweepstakes than one considered to be generally unintelligent.

America, like a university, is under no obligation to open its doors to every last individual who wants to get in.  There must be some set of standards; a line has to be drawn somewhere.  Why not base it on smarts?

We might also alert ourselves (in case we forgot) to the requirement that, in order to become a U.S. citizen, one must correctly answer at least six of ten randomly-selected questions regarding American civics.  While by no means equivalent to assessments of intellectual aptitude such as the SAT, the citizenship test nonetheless illustrates our insistence on not being completely ignorant as a prerequisite for assimilating into American society.

In short:  The attempt to engineer a brainy citizenry is not without precedent.

Against this line of thinking is a longstanding national value and tradition, phrased quite succinctly by Secretary of State John Kerry, “In America you have the right to be stupid.”

“American exceptionalism,” that most nebulous of phrases, frequently employed but seldom well-defined, has at different times come to signify our country’s desire to be the best, but also our insistence that this need not be accomplished by the brightest.  High intelligence might be an advantage on the road to success, but it is not a requirement.

A final consideration that might give us pause in our quest to purge our immigrant pool of the dopes, dolts and dimwits:  Imagine what horrors we might unleash were we to follow a path of consistency and apply this standard to ourselves.

Auditing the Auditors

In Washington, D.C., the journalist Michael Kinsley famously said, the true scandal is not what is illegal, but what is legal.

What ought to outrage us the most, the thinking goes, is not when the government does ridiculous things that are plainly against the law, but rather when the government does ridiculous things that are not.  When the shenanigans being undertaken are, in fact, business as usual.

So when the U.S. Senate rejected the Manchin-Toomey gun control bill last month despite it being supported by an overwhelming majority of the American public, the real problem was not that the Senate failed to align with its constituents on a major domestic issue, but rather that the bill actually had more than 50 votes in its favor but, thanks to a provision in Senate rules that no one outside Washington quite understands, the legislation was rendered dead on arrival.

Of course, this emphasis on the Kinsley adage should not blind us to old-fashioned lawbreaking and political and governmental malpractice, which will never go away and must always be guarded against.  But it is nonetheless a useful reminder that many of the most entrenched failures of our federal government are endemic precisely because they are legally (if not morally) permissible.  If we hope ever to genuinely reform and improve the system, we need to begin at its deepest roots.

With that, we arrive at the kerfuffle surrounding the Internal Revenue Service, one of several official Washington scandals in which the Obama administration presently finds itself embroiled.

Ostensibly, what makes the IRS business so alarming is the apparent bald politicization that has infected this supposedly apolitical wing of the Treasury Department.

In case you have heretofore tuned the story out:  The IRS stands accused (with strong supporting evidence) that it was excessively and purposefully slow and circumspect in granting tax-exempt status to politically conservative groups who applied for the designation, and that the IRS did so precisely because such groups were politically conservative.

I hazard to surmise that no serious person would interpret this behavior as fair.  Quite to the contrary, the notion that the efficiency with which one’s tax forms are processed be subject to one’s political views is a rather frightening one.  The IRS should knock it off.

Yet somehow, that is not the real scandal.

As officials at the IRS abuse their agency’s authority by turning it into a practitioner of partisan politics, we should realize their behavior, however unethical, is a byproduct of a far more comprehensive abuse currently festering across the United States, unabated.

I frame this larger problem in the form of a question:  Why are so many groups exempt from paying taxes in the first place?  Why are any?

The theory behind the exemption in question, known as the 501(c)(4), is that it applies to organizations that engage in “social welfare” activities and steer clear of politics.  Somewhere along the line, the injunction for “no political activity” morphed into “not too much political activity” and, thanks to excessively vague language in the tax code as to what constitutes “political activity” in the first place, organizations that seem to engage in nothing but politics are being granted tax exemptions they were never intended to receive.

Politics begat politics.

The logical short-term solution to this conundrum, methodically laid out by the New York Times editorial board, among others, is simply to clarify what the rules are regarding the 501(c)(4), restoring the original proviso about qualifying organizations not being political outfits in disguise.

But why stop there?  Why not take the opportunity to reevaluate the rationale for granting no-tax status to any organization operating on American soil?

When we say, through our tax code, that certain organizations are entitled to conduct business in America for free while the rest must pay the price of admission, we are imparting a moral judgment upon these groups’ comparative worth.  In a society in which everyone is supposed to be treated equally under the law, why should this be?

If it was unfair for the Internal Revenue Service to discriminate against conservative organizations because it viewed their agendas as being of lesser value to the country than liberal organizations’, is it any less unfair for our tax code to make similar value judgments about any other organization, at any other time, for any other reason?  Dare we say that such assessments are beyond the competency of the IRS?

Cool Kids

Mike Jeffries doesn’t like fat girls who wear Abercrombie & Fitch.

In a 2006 interview with Salon that somehow took until this week to make the rounds, Jeffries, CEO of the popular American clothing company, is quoted as defining the Abercrombie “brand” thusly:

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids.  Candidly, we go after the cool kids.  We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends.  A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong.  Are we exclusionary?  Absolutely.”

Indeed, as was duly noted as this excerpt went viral, Abercrombie & Fitch stores do not stock extra-large sizes of women’s clothing—nothing beyond size 10.

Speaking about the Salon interview this week, Jeffries insisted—as such people do—that the quotation above has been taken out of context.

In a way, he is correct.  The “cool kids” comment does not tell the full story, and I would recommend reading the whole article in order to get a complete and proper understanding of what a truly wretched person Jeffries is.

Among other things, Salon’s reporting makes it clear that Abercrombie & Fitch, under Jeffries, is an outfit of profound shallowness, defining individuals entirely on the basis of appearance and conflating one’s worth as a human being with the contents of one’s wardrobe.

(In fairness, one would be hard-pressed to unearth a youth apparel shop that thinks differently.)

Jeffries in particular is characterized as a figure of breathtaking creepiness—a man in his sixties who talks and dresses like a college frat boy and gives the impression of never having spoken to a woman for longer than a minute or two at a time.

While the cultural concerns this Abercrombie uproar raises are legion—the bottomless psychological harm it will inflict upon young women is certainly one of them—let us limit ourselves today simply to taking Jeffries up on his notion of what it means to be “cool.”

Broadly speaking, there seem to be two possible attitudes one can strike toward the concept of coolness.  The first is to reject it outright; the second is to shape it to one’s own ends.

In one corner is Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, one of the greatest of all movies, in which an uber-nerdy teenaged reporter is seduced by a plucky rock ‘n’ roll band into thinking he is one of them, only to discover this is not quite the case.

“They make you feel cool,” a rock critic explains to the reporter over the phone as it appears his story is going up in flames, adding, “I’ve met you.  You are not cool.”  The critic’s consolation for the kid:  “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

This is undoubtedly an alluring disposition for many people, who tether coolness to shallowness and stupidity and thus render it undesirable—even though it does seem to make it easier to gain friends and get girls.

A slight tweak to this approach—less dour and defensive—is to declare oneself uncool and then half-ironically revel in it.

Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show on CBS, has insisted on multiple occasions that once he has become fully aware of the latest youth-based cultural craze—The Jersey Shore, “Gangnam Style,” Justin Bieber and so forth—said craze has therefore lost its edge.  “If I know about something, it’s not hip,” Ferguson says, clarifying, “It’s not hip because I know about it.”

Ferguson’s view points the way to the self-appropriating attitude toward coolness, in which we arrive at the truth of the matter:  Coolness is in the eye of the beholder.

For instance, Ferguson has made plain that, to him, there is nothing more pathetic than an older man who tries to ingratiate himself into a younger generation (like a certain CEO we could name).  Ferguson has forsaken the idea of hipness in favor of, shall we say, growing up and acting his own age.

Well, what could be cooler than that?  I may be obtuse, but my own estimation of the true meaning of “cool” is to possess the self-confidence not to worry about how others might see you.  Not to “set the trends” so much as to disregard them, and live as if your own ideas about life and happiness were not any worse than anyone else’s.

To be cool is to not feel you need to wear Abercrombie & Fitch.

Reaching For the Sky

As the spire was permanently fused to the top of One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan last week, the glistening new replacement for the dear departed Twin Towers became, at 1,776 feet, the tallest building the West.

This distinction falls on the 40-year anniversary of the last time such a feat was achieved, for it was in May 1973 that construction was completed on the Sears Tower in Chicago (now known as the Willis Tower), which stood as the tallest skyscraper in a world for a quarter-century, until the rise of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1998.

The “world’s tallest” title has remained in the Eastern Hemisphere ever since.

Now that the United States is finally back in the news on the tall buildings front, we should take the opportunity to assess the meaning of the skyscraper sweepstakes in the 21^st century world.

As today’s younger generations can be forgiven for not knowing, the practice of erecting towering beacons of economic supremacy used not to be merely a hobby for the United States; it was a veritable American birthright.

Of the ten buildings (or pairs of buildings) that claimed the mantel of being the world’s tallest during the 20^th century, the first nine were situated in the United States.  Of those nine, seven were on the island of Manhattan.

This was hardly a coincidence.  New York in the first third of the 20^th century served as the canvas for a concerted competition of architectural invention and engineering prowess that has never quite been recreated in so small an area in so short a time span.

The Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan, conceived in 1910 and completed in 1913, was commissioned by business tycoon Frank Woolworth with the express purpose of being the world’s tallest.  The structure held the title until 1930, when its height was eclipsed by 40 Wall Street, just a few blocks south, which was itself locked in a heated rivalry with the Chrysler Building, sprouting simultaneously uptown—a competition ultimately won by the Chrysler, thanks to the secret, last-minute addition of its shimmering 125-foot spire.

Following all that excitement, the very next spring saw the completion, eight blocks south and three avenues west, of the Empire State Building, and that, for the more than four decades until the entrance of Chicago into the skyscraping game, was that.

(The Twin Towers provided a two-year bridge between the Empire State Building and the Sears Tower, but somehow they never inspired as much fanfare in life as they did in death.)

Today, this all feels like ancient history.  The rise of One World Trade Center, rather than the latest benchmark in a continuing tale of tallness, exists more as a singular act of rectitude—the fulfillment of a national obligation rather than a mad act of architectural daring and one-upmanship.

Instead, for the last several decades, America has ceded the skyscraper industry, like so many other industries, to plucky up-and-comers out east, who are building ever-higher and more unique structures at a clip every bit as swift and inventive as that of the old titans nearly a century ago.

The symbolism of this is clear enough.  Indeed, it is perhaps the most visually obvious reminder there is of America’s waning creative hegemony on the world stage, coupled with the remarkable success, in relatively little time, of fledgling economic powers such as China and the United Arab Emirates.  (Of the 50 tallest buildings today, China alone boasts 14.)

One question we might ask, in light of this reality, is whether (and how much) we ought to care.

With the Cold War a distant memory—for Millennials, not a memory at all—great international contests in the mold of the Space Race or the Arms Race do not inspire the sort of excitement they once did, back when the world could more properly be viewed in terms of nations rather than conglomerations and tribes.

Is our national need to build higher and go farther something we have outgrown?  Has it lost its purpose, as we now look inward to computers and the wonders of microorganisms to solve our problems and conduct global commerce?  Or have practical limitations in this age of economic austerity simply forced our hand?

It took 40 years for the United States to outdo itself in erecting the nation’s tallest skyscraper.  How many more decades will pass before we do it again?

Voting on Rights

“If the people of Massachusetts do not want that terrorist to be buried on our soil, then it should not be.”

So said Ed Markey, the Massachusetts congressman and current Democratic Senate candidate, on the continuing saga of what to do with the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Tsarnaev, you will recall, was the mastermind of the Boston Marathon bombing who was lucky enough to get himself shot by police and subsequently run over by a Mercedes driven by his brother and co-conspirator, Dzhokhar.

Following an autopsy that confirmed that, yes, Tamerlan was indeed killed by a combination of bullet wounds and getting a trifle too intimate with a set of SUV tire treads, most of us assumed the story of his time on Earth had drawn to a close.

We were incorrect, as Tsarnaev’s rotting corpse spent the next few weeks being carted from one funeral home to another, as protests and other forms of public pressure seemingly made it impossible to bury him in peace.  At long last, a woman from Virginia volunteered to assume responsibility for the body, and it was duly deposited into an unmarked grave.

Even as the kerfuffle has (presumably) ended, the statement above by Congressman Markey has remained lodged in my brain, and demands further exploration.

Markey has introduced a concept that until now had never crossed my mind:  That the American people can vote to have someone not buried in a particular state.  That one’s funeral arrangements can be vetoed by majority rule.

I am slightly suspicious as to how Markey determined that “the people of Massachusetts” had, in fact, decided that Tsarnaev should not be buried there.  I am a resident of the commonwealth, and I do not recall being consulted on the matter.  Perhaps an e-mail was sent and it was mistakenly rerouted to my spam folder?

I wonder, as well, whether this policy is strictly for traditional burials, or if it applies to body disposal of all kinds.  When I expire, I intend to have myself cremated.  Can I rest assured (so to speak) that my choice of locale to spread my ashes will be honored, or will it, too, be put to a vote?

This is no idle concern.  As we have slowly come to realize in recent years, the notion of one’s personal comings and goings being subject to the whims of the majority has become a normalized part of American life.

Especially if you happen to be gay.

When Minnesota’s House and Senate voted in the past week to legalize gay marriage, the Land of 10,000 Lakes brought the total number of states recognizing same-sex unions to twelve.  While in most cases this has come about either through legislation or court rulings, in three states—Maine, Maryland and Washington—gay people were, in fact, granted the right to wed by popular referenda.

The idea is catching on.  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, vetoing a gay marriage bill in February 2012 that had passed in the Garden State’s House and Senate, said he would prefer the matter be decided by voters.

Against this view, pro-gay marriage protesters can often be seen holding signs, directed at heterosexual anti-gay marriage forces, reading, “When can I vote on your marriage?”

At the core of the issue is the question of when it becomes inappropriate, if not outright unconstitutional, for a matter of great consequence to be decided by popular will.

Lest we forget, in the United States there are certain rights and principles that very specifically are not subject to the whims of public opinion.

For example, we could not repeal the freedom of free expression even if every person in America wanted to; our Constitution mandates that each of us has such a right.  Nor could we vote away early-term abortions, which the Supreme Court inferred as a constitutional right in Roe v. Wade.

America has never been a direct democracy.  Indeed, it was not until 1914 that U.S. senators were elected by popular vote and, of course, the president is still elected indirectly, through the Electoral College, to this day.

The matter with which we began—the prospect of one’s final resting place being a matter of public opinion—is so bizarre, such uncharted territory, that the Constitution is likely to be of limited help.

We are left, instead, to argue about the “spirit” thereof—whether the principles the Constitution does explicate are reconcilable with those it does not, but which we suspect it could.

We would like to think that Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s case is sui generis—one of a kind—and therefore not subject to all that much legal scrutiny.

But this ignores the alluring power of precedence, and the way that once something is done once, it will soon be done twice and it becomes only a matter of time before it is an accepted part of American life.

This being the case, we should choose our words, and our most deeply-held principles, with extreme care and consideration.

Political False Dichotomies

When New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, announced recently that he had undergone lap-band stomach surgery earlier this year to help him lose weight, the world of political punditry immediately got on the case.

The decision by the Garden State’s chief executive to slim himself down, many analysts concluded, could mean only one thing:  He is seriously considering a run for president in 2016.

After all, these news sleuths reasoned, what possible explanation could there be for a 50-year-old morbidly obese married man with four young children to embark upon a concerted effort to improve his health, other than to make himself more physically appealing to Iowa Caucus-goers three years hence?

Christie, of course, swiftly batted away any and all suggestions that his earnest new weight loss regimen is calibrated to coincide with the political calendar (apart from presidential prospects, he is up for re-election as governor this November).

“It’s so much more important than [politics],” said Christie.  “I’ve struggled with this issue for 20 years […] this is about turning 50 and looking at my children and wanting to be there for them.”

As the debate about Christie’s true intentions continues to brew and we figure out, once and for all, whether his new diet is a health-based tactic or a politics-based tactic, allow me to pose a revolutionary, utterly counterintuitive hypothesis.

It is both.  Christie genuinely wants to get himself in better physical shape, but he is also aware—how could he not be?—that doing so will almost surely elevate his chances for future political success.

In a sane media environment, this simple observation would be so blindingly obvious that it would hardly be worth making in the first place.  Unfortunately, the media environment we’re actually stuck with operates under a strict code of dichotomy:  If A is true, then B must be false.  Even when A and B are in no way mutually exclusive, as in the Christie case above, the notion that two separate things can be true simultaneously is just too much for our political discourse system to handle.

So when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was called to testify recently about the Obama administration’s actions (or lack thereof) regarding the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya last September, the question on cable news networks was whether the purpose of the hearing was to get to the truth of the matter, or rather to make Clinton look bad in anticipation of her own possible presidential run.

As with Christie, it seemingly did not occur to anyone that the committee’s questions served both purposes at once—that by holding Clinton responsible for a series of deadly mistakes (and possibly a cover-up), Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee can, indeed, render her politically vulnerable.

So long as this is true, and so long as everyone knows this is true (if only subconsciously), it would be nice if the players in these political dramas could meet us halfway and simply admit it.

When Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the Benghazi hearings, goes on Meet the Press and says, “Hillary Clinton’s not a target,” who does he think he is kidding?

The reason Issa thinks he needs to say this—indeed, the reason our false dichotomy system persists—is his fear that an acknowledgment of a political dimension to the hearings would make him look petty and not truly interested in the deeper questions of what went wrong in Libya.

I don’t see why this should be true.  If Clinton’s State Department really was negligent in protecting its people at the consulate in Benghazi, and there was evidence suggesting as much, then Issa’s ulterior motives would be irrelevant.  The facts would speak for themselves.

Further, if the worst speculation about the Benghazi affair were true, Clinton’s public standing would jolly well deserve to take a hit.

In other words, we should not mistake those with political motives as axiomatically acting in bad faith, even as we recognize that such partisanship can often blind one to facts that are directly in front of one’s nose.  (For some, Benghazi may well be such a case.)

While we’re at it, we should further recognize that sometimes a good policy decision is also a good political decision, and that those making them are allowed to notice this without being made to feel shady or corrupt.

And finally, that on some (if not all) occasions when a fat man of advancing years decides to shed a few pounds, a team of analysts is not required in order to ascertain why.

The Real Me and You

In anticipation of Baz Luhrmann’s new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, I, like so many Americans, returned to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel for the first time since high school.  Finding myself generally spellbound by Fitzgerald’s elegant, lean prose, the turn of phrase that most stubbornly stuck in my mind occurs upon the dramatic entrance of the man himself, described by the narrator, Nick Carraway:

“He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly.  It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.  It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.  It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

The power of this passage, I suppose, comes from knowing precisely what Fitzgerald means, yet realizing you had never heard it quite put that way before.

In that way, the effect of this account on the reader mirrors the effect of the very behavior that it describes—sort of like how the backwards narrative in the movie Memento allows the viewer to share its protagonist’s problem with short-term memory loss.

The behavior in this case is nothing less than understanding the nature of empathy between two human beings, and realizing the necessity for it in any meaningful relationship.

We might regard it as ironic that a novel criticized in some quarters as lacking in any real empathy itself would boast a paragraph that seemingly cuts straight to the core of how it feels to be empathized with.

A great friendship, we often say and think, is one in which the two parties know each other so well that they can “finish each other’s sentences.”  Each knows what the other is thinking without it actually being said.  Good friends practice a form of telepathy that the rest of the world cannot quite grasp, and that is what makes the relationship special.  A successful romantic coupling follows essentially this same dynamic, but with more sex.

Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as two Americans in Tokyo who connect through their mutual cultural disorientation, continues to mesmerize your humble servant and many others because of the perceptive way it situates its two leads in a time and place in which they understand each other as no one else does—not even their spouses.

Beyond the power of empathy and mutual human understanding that the Gatsby passage evokes, it explores the slightly separate but equally intriguing notion of the idealized self, phrased by Fitzgerald as “the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

Certainly there is nothing controversial or unique about this desire on its face.  We all wish that everyone could see us at our best at all times.  That there is a definitive image of us, capturing our true essence, that we could beam out to the world to stand for all time.

What makes the concept compelling, lending it real force, is to imagine it actually being so.

Publishing his 1993 collection of essays, For the Sake of Argument, Christopher Hitchens explained the volume’s cover—a photograph of himself at a party, cigarette in hand, seated behind a phalanx of empty glasses—by saying that it “captures what I’m like after about 8 o’clock in the evening,” which, as far as Hitchens was concerned, represented him at his finest.

Here is a rainy day project for any of you to undertake:  Rummage through all the photographs of yourself from recent years, and figure out which of them presents what you would consider, for better or worse, to be the “real” you.  How many such pictures can you find?  A small handful?  Just one?  Perhaps none at all or, conversely, the whole lot?

And who is to say?  Are we really the best judges of our own true natures?  Or does that burden fall upon everyone else?  What good is your own self-rendering if no one else shares it?

Perhaps that is why we need people like Jay Gatsby in the first place—to look upon us as better than we are, in the hope that, in the future, we may try a bit harder to deserve it.

The Cardinals vs. the Eagles

The archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, will not be attending this year’s Boston College commencement.

The cardinal declined his traditional duty of delivering the ceremony’s closing benediction in protest over the Jesuit university’s choice of commencement speaker and recipient of an honorary degree.

The identity of this most objectionable of honored guests?  Enda Kenny, the prime minister of Ireland.

I know what you’re thinking.  How dare a Catholic institution have the gall to invite the leader of a country that is 84 percent Catholic to speak at its graduation ceremony!  Surely this decision was bound to cause trouble.  What was BC thinking?

In point of fact, the reason for the outrage over the presence of Prime Minister Kenny, such as it is, stems from a single piece of legislation currently under consideration in the Irish parliament concerning abortion.

The bill, which Kenny supports, would allow for abortion if the life of the mother hangs in the balance—including, interestingly, if there is a credible risk of suicide on the mother’s part.

Kenny and others have taken pains to point out that this legislation, known as the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Bill 2013, would otherwise maintain the Emerald Isle’s general policy on abortion—namely, the complete prohibition thereof—but this assurance has proved not quite good enough for the bill’s critics.

A group of Irish bishops issued a statement earlier this month that intoned, “It is a tragic moment for Irish society when we regard the deliberate destruction of a completely innocent person as an acceptable response to the threat of the preventable death of another person.”  Cardinal O’Malley, for this part, has characterized the prime minister as “aggressively promoting abortion legislation” by supporting the bill.

The question for us today, in the context of Kenny’s invite to speak at the BC commencement, is whether the university—or any university—is obligated to confer honorary degrees only upon those whose values it shares.  Is it not more honorable, as an institution for higher learning and a beacon for free expression, for such a place to invite dissenting views rather than enforcing a policy of intellectual conformity?

This year’s BC graduation is a highly imperfect test case for this debate.  Kenny was invited to give the commencement address nearly a year ago, long before the controversial abortion bill saw the light of day.  His speech will very probably not mention the radioactive issue, nor any other political hot potatoes, as college commencement addresses tend toward the bland and accommodating in any case.

More to the point:  Prime Minister Kenny hardly represents an affront to the Catholic Church in the context of the modern world.  Yes, his view that abortion is morally justified to save the mother’s life is in direct opposition to Catholic doctrine.  However, it is also the view of more than 80 percent of the American public, with whom American Catholic opinion tends to align on matters of abortion.

Further, Kenny has rightly pointed out that the Protection of Life bill exists only in order to conform to a 1992 Irish Supreme Court ruling establishing the legality of abortion when the mother’s health is in jeopardy—a heretofore legal-constitutional inconsistency that, as prime minster, Kenny is duty-bound to rectify.

Evidently, objectors to Kenny’s participation in commencement exercises would rather the Irish prime minister defy an order by his country’s highest court in order to legislate a view that is not shared by more than 80 percent of Americans and, according to a February 2013 poll, 84 percent of the Irish.

To a degree, O’Malley and company can be forgiven for their disappointment in Boston College’s open mindedness on this front.  After all, it was only a few weeks ago that the university came under fire for attempting to rid itself of a student group that was distributing birth control at various on-campus locations, precisely because doing so was contrary to Catholic teachings.  For the school to suddenly decide that we can agree to disagree on certain issues must be quite irritating to the clergy, indeed.

But Cardinal O’Malley and Boston College’s front office have different agendas, and university administrators ought to be commended for standing behind their invitation to Prime Minister Kenny, thereby honoring their most important commitment—namely, to their students.

To have caved to the pressure of clergymen such as O’Malley would have effectively endorsed the rather alarming notion—frightfully common in the American political realm lately—that one can only tether oneself to those whose views one shares 100 percent of the time.  Such a mentality of purity and political purging is poisonous in a free and open society, and we should be very thankful there are still those in power who resist it.

Gatsby and Us

The first time I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I was 16 and a junior in high school. As far as books we were forced to read in high school went, it wasn’t bad. It was relatively short, with a story that was easy to understand. Even the green light, the book’s most obvious symbol, was stated to be a symbol in the book – a great help on quizzes.

The Great Gatsby first edition cover, 1925.

It wasn’t just me. Most of my classmates liked The Great Gatsby too. While we all had different opinions on Fahrenheit 451 and A Tale of Two Cities and The Lord of the Flies, it was Jay Gatsby who managed to win his way into our hearts with, as Nick puts it, his “extraordinary gift for hope.”

Although I’ve read two other books by Fitzgerald since then, I didn’t revisit East Egg and West Egg again until last summer. I loved Gastby even more the second time through.

The film version of Gatsby that came out yesterday, and stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, was not a bad film. It has taken hits from critics, and that’s easy to understand. There are risks when you bring a beloved story from page to screen, and unless you’re Peter Jackson filming a Lord of the Rings movie, you’re probably not going to be universally acclaimed.

Carey Mulligan as Daisy and Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby.

But the film stayed very true to the novel, the soundtrack and the costumes in the new movie are phenomenal, and DiCaprio continues his streak of incredible performances. His Gatsby shines and his costars, particularly Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan), and Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan) turn in strong performances.

Director Baz Luhrmann and cast members such as Carey Mulligan have stated that this was a good time to bring Gatsby back to the screen as we’ve seen history repeat itself as the economic boom of the 1990s and 2000s came crashing to the ground in 2008 the way the roaring economic good times of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But The Great Gatsby, the great American novel, has been adapted to film six times now, and those adaptations range from fairly decent (2013) to nearly unwatchable (1974). Part of the problem with adapting Gatsby is that much of the story takes place through Nick’s internal narration. This is true, but the biggest criticism of Luhrmann’s Gatsby adaptation seems to be that it’s too big. The roaring twenties are just too roaring in the film. Gatsby’s parties are too enormous. The film is too visually amazing. Yeah, critics can be very strange.

But what is it about The Great Gatsby, the novel, that has earned it a place in the hearts of millions of Americans? Why do we read it over and over?

Most of the characters are unsympathetic. Tom Buchanan is brutal, manipulative, and abusive. Daisy is shallow, spoiled, weak, and cowardly. Jordan’s a liar. George and Myrtle Wilson are both unlikeable in their own ways. The only two characters anyone can really like or root for are Nick and Gatsby.

Deirdre Donohue at USAtoday.com theorizes that The Great Gatsby is open to new interpretations in ways that keep it relevant. Could Gatsby be a black man? Could Nick be in love with Gatsby? Is Daisy trapped in her life?

And the novel is stylistically beautiful. It’s succinct, with no wasted sentences. It captures the excess and apathy and hope of the roaring twenties, juxtaposing the spoiled, shallow, old money of the Buchanans with the new money, hope, and deep(er) love of Gatsby for Daisy.

Finally, there’s the theory that most of us, as Americans, identify with Gatsby. He’s a nobody from nothing and nowhere who makes himself into a success story, doing everything to win the girl he loves. In fact, love is the primary motivation for wealth. He isn’t in it because he’s greedy, he’s in it to win Daisy. And in spite of all Daisy’s terrible qualities, she does love Gatsby too.

But it’s Daisy and Tom who eventually do Gatsby in, and it’s Gatsby who loses everything. As Nick observes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

It does feel timeless, doesn’t it? In 2013 we’re still recovering from the financial crash of 2008, from rich, careless people like Tom and Daisy who drove our economy into the ground and left a lot of our lives in ruins, who retreated to their mansions and money and let the rest of us bail out their banks and clean up their messes.

And so maybe most Americans don’t love The Great Gatsby just because we identify with Gatsby, even though we do identify with him. Maybe most of us read The Great Gatsby over and over because we periodically like to remember Tom and Daisy, and remind ourselves of who, thankfully, we’re not.

No Free Rides

I did not follow the Oscar Pistorius murder case when it first broke, and in reading about the whole messy business in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair, the detail about the famed “blade runner” that struck me with the greatest force had nothing at all to do with the killing of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

“Although Pistorius didn’t meet South Africa’s individual 400-meter qualifying standard to compete in the 2012 Summer Olympics, he was approved, it seems, just because he was Oscar,” writes Mark Seal in his profile of the sprinter with two prosthetic legs.

Come again?

Yes, it’s true:  In the months preceding the 2012 London Games, Pistorius did not complete a key qualifying race in a good enough time (by his own country’s standards) to participate in the individual 400-meter event in London.  However, because he had qualified for the 4×400 relay and would be at the Olympics anyway—and, more to the point, because he was such a feel-good media sensation—South Africa asked the powers that be to allow Pistorius to run the individual race as well, and the request was granted.

For all my disinterest in most Olympic matters, this rather irritates me.

Yes, as a double amputee with seemingly superhuman physical abilities, Pistorius was undoubtedly a supremely inspirational figure and (prior to the murder charge) a peerless ambassador for his home country on the world stage.

Nonetheless, one would presume that if one does not meet the basic qualifications for inclusion in the Olympic Games, one does not get to participate in the Olympic Games.  Call me old-fashioned, but it seems only fair.

I am reminded (weirdly enough) of the SAT scandal from a few years back, in which an apparent computer glitch caused thousands of students’ SAT scores to be misreported—some students had scored better than they were originally told, while others scored worse.  In some cases, the discrepancy was several hundred points wide.

Once the College Board, which distributes the SAT, was made aware of its rather calamitous error, it rectified the problem thusly:  Those whose true scores were higher than originally reported were duly informed, while those who actually fared worse than they thought were allowed to keep the higher, false scores on their records.

This latter component of the College Board’s reparations has long struck me as supremely unjust.  Ostensibly, it was the College Board’s way of ensuring that no student would be punished for its own mistakes, as if to say, “Don’t worry; this one’s on us.”

The problem, however, is that many students were punished—namely, those whose SAT scores fell somewhere between the miscalculated group’s real and false ones, and who may well have been denied admission to their dream schools for that reason.

(For example:  Someone who scored 1700 found himself weighed against someone whose score was actually 1600 but, thanks to the computer glitch, was granted an 1800.  In the hyper-competitive world of college admissions, this can make all the difference in the world.)

If the SAT episode and the Pistorius episode have nothing else in common, what they share is this sense of passive injustice—of allowing certain people to sidestep the usual rules and regulations on their way to fame and fortune, while withholding the same privilege from others who might be equally, if not more, deserving.

This is what folks mean when they say, “The game is rigged.”  The rigging need not be overt or deliberate to warrant our attention or concern—indeed, it is precisely when injustices of this sort happen more or less by accident that we should most loudly and clearly register our disgust.

The danger of the proliferation of this peculiar practice—beyond the basic unfairness of it all—is the nasty sense of entitlement it engenders in its beneficiaries.

Once someone has been pulled through the E-Z Pass lane to success, enjoying the benefits of hard work without having worked hard, what is to stop him from thinking this won’t always be the case?

Murderer or not, Pistorius is most certainly guilty of an acutely unattractive sense of infallibility, reportedly saying upon being arrested, “I’ll survive.  I always win.”

And when someone witnesses such preferential treatment given to someone else—be it a fellow student or an Olympic athlete—what is he to make of this?  After a lifetime of telling our kids, “Hard work pays off,” are we prepared to permanently add the qualifier, “But dumb luck without hard work pays off even more”?

The harm falls on both sides, you see.  An uneven playing field is a comprehensive toxin on society, and we ought to try harder not to perpetuate it.