POLITICAL B00KNOTES
Metcalf, Eliot Sloan, Margaret P. Battin, Jens Ludwig, Stephen
Political Booknotes Truth in Rumors by Eliot Sloan N THE MID-19307S, RUMORS spread around America like a forest fire, whispering that Franklin Roosevelt was mentally deranged. Some claimed...
...Their reanalysis was published this January in the same journal that carried Lott’s original article, and provided more support for my fears about the Lott study: A well-known statistical test revealed that Lott’s methods produce misleading estimates...
...but many of the insights he provides suggest that it is...
...Of course, Callahan admits that responsibility for one’s own health is “Wearisome...
...As it turns out, there was...
...But we may also suspect the task is at once subtler and more awesome than Grisham allows...
...In the face of the carnage she so vividly conjures, Bok’s solutions are surprisingly tepid and familiar: We must trust in conscience and private-sphere solutions, such as more self-scrutiny and restraint on the part of journalists and producers, more responsibility and fortitude from parents, and the V-chip...
...Some claimed to have heard shrieks and laughter emanating from the windows of the White House, and others solemnly explained that the bars on the president’s windows were there to keep him from throwing himself out onto the lawn in a maniacal fit...
...Gossiping about his health was a way to release pent-up concerns about the president, under the umbrella of dramatized, embellished entertainment...
...Political Booknotes Truth in Rumors by Eliot Sloan N THE MID-19307S, RUMORS spread around America like a forest fire, whispering that Franklin Roosevelt was mentally deranged...
...it’s an indicator of how much societal effort we decide to devote to a given purpose...
...This isn’t new advice from the author...
...it is more a huge conglomerate of increasingly commercial interests, creating new markets for its own procedures and products...
...My job was to determine whether Lott’s article had solved the relevant statistical problems that plague this type of inquiry...
...For example, the implied effects of right-to-carry laws on homicide are 8 percent in Table 3 and 67 percent in Table 11...
...in the U.S...
...And while we’re not so naive as to suppose that we’ll all be guaranteed it all the time, we still take perfect health as medicine’s ultimate goal...
...If there are now well-documented problems with Lott’s research, what can account for the attention that journalists, politicians, and others continue to devote to this work...
...Bok‘s may not be the last word on American violence and the industries of distraction, but she inspires us to ask how we can treat children as something more than the “radio fodder and television fodder” they seem to have become...
...Much of what he has to say is indeed the right medicine for what ails our health care system...
...THAT’S WELLknown bioethicist Dan Callahan’s new advice on what to do about expensive, extensive health care, and how to control the out-ofcontrol costs of medicine...
...Guns and Numbers by Jens Ludwig T IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO separate the problem of crime in America from questions about how guns should be regulated...
...Truly effective gossip - the kind that results in huge headlines and around-the-clock coverage - has to strike larger cultural chords in order to take root...
...The first attempt at a national study of the effects of right-to-carry laws is found in a new book by John Lott Jr., whose conclusions are hinted at in the book‘s title: More Guns, Less Crime...
...How did they think he looked...
...instead Bok urges us to settle for “probabilistic causation,” or the intelligent suspicion that the nightly carnage piped into living rooms everywhere has a meaningful impact on viewers...
...Televiolence by Stephen Metcalf N 1996 TWO TEENAGERS, AFTER repeated viewings of Oliver Stone’s movie “Natural Born Killers,” committed a brutal murder...
...Berkeley...
...Be vigilant at the dinner table...
...This is certainly true, but what about the bloody films of Samuel Fuller and Sam Peckinpah...
...The presumably intractable nature of such questions has limited debate on the subject, but has not deterred Sissela Bok, an accomplished public philosopher and the author of widely acclaimed books on lying and on secrets...
...The book is a dizzying collection of 27 graphs, 27 figures, five appendices, 30 pages of footnotes, and even a few qualifications about the research...
...Society, furthermore, has the duty to nourish that development...
...The analogy between “sustainable’’ medicine and “sustainable” ecological practices is engaging, but in the end unpersuasive...
...In this way, we create medicine’s agenda and then buy into it, so that we come to believe that this is what medicine can (and should) do for us...
...But health care is different...
...Inadequate controls for these factors will cause Lott’s analysis to reveal that California has a different crime rate from Idaho even when this difference is unrelated to right-to-carry legislation...
...Yet it’s also possible that some criminals will respond to an increase in gun carrying among the citizenry by using a gun more frequently themselves, which may increase the number of shootings that result from street crimes...
...Another view would be that a thousand versions of a demonstrably invalid analytical approach produce boxes full of invalid results...
...What we need instead, argues Callahan, is a “sustainable,” “steadystate” medicine, a health care system (preferably, a single-payer one) that would guarantee us a decent basic level of care and, in return, expect increased personal responsibility for health...
...It is this second assertion, of course, that will give civil libertarians pause...
...We can supply all the care we want, if we’re willing to spend the time doing it...
...Callahan thinks our priorities for medicine ought to be lower...
...one of the really admirable things about Callahan’s view is its global scope...
...Drink moderately or not at all...
...Such a system would emphasize public...
...Most of us would be inclined to support right-to-carry or other changes to our gun laws if they would save lives...
...Okay from here...
...All of which adds up: A television character, by some estimates, is a thousand times more likely to be raped, tortured, maimed, or killed than an average person...
...When a journalist finally got up the nerve to inquire directly about the president’s mental status, FDR, holding his cigarette holder and leaning back in his chair, began to laugh a loud, healthy laugh...
...and the other fancy industrialized nations, in contrast, it’s far too good and far too expensive...
...This means providing a health-favoring environment, keeping dangerous elements out of the food supplies, having children immunized - and, especially, calling attention to the risks of poor health behavior: Don’t smoke...
...Because we cannot actually observe what would have happened had this law not passed, we are forced to compare Idaho with other states without such laws, such as California...
...Doesn’t this counsel us to err on the side of permissiveness...
...We don’t need perfect health for this...
...But forget living on into “ancient” old age, the repair of every injury, purely cosmetic surgery, extensive infertility treatment, or trying to save tiny newborns with desperate prognoses...
...and public funds should not be used to clean up the mess...
...She identifies the sources for our inertia perceptively: First, we have placed the bar of empirical proof for the causal relationship between the consumption of violent images and deleterious effects way too high...
...The challenge is to statistically control for all of the relevant factors that will cause crime to be different between places like California and Idaho...
...While More Guns, Less Crime cannot answer this question, the discussion surrounding the book may nonetheless be helpful by highlighting how much more we still need to know about the role of gun laws in addressing our nation’s crime problem...
...instead she leads us through a thumbnail history of Church Fathers, Thomas Bowdler and French theatre, then canvasses pundit-academics, from the prudish Robert Bork to the libertarian Nadine Strossen, only to assure us in the end that the distinction between violence and gratuitous violence can be perspicuous...
...Callahan’s vision of a sustainable, steady-state, basic medicine isn’t confined to the US...
...It is like an enormous cancer that will swallow all our resources and dash all our hopes...
...Community interests ought not override the needs of the individuals who make up that community, if it is possible to provide for both...
...What are these hopes - appropriate hopes, not the false ones Callahan attacks in his title...
...A jury will finally say enough is enough, that the demons placed in [the killer’s] mind were not solely of her own making...
...It doesn’t have our interests in mind as much as its own...
...Proponents of these laws hope that increased gun carrying will increase the “costs” of crime and thereby deter some criminals...
...TV programs are little more than bait, sleekly crafted delivery systems for commercials...
...For adults as well as children, TV creates a vast no-place where it is difficult to find the moral purchase to organize and protest...
...and violent programming, Bok surmises, is designed to put us in a state of semiarousal for the ads, which act as little oases in between homicides...
...John Lott first called me in August 1996, as I was enjoying a cup of coffee in my windowless office at Georgetown University, to invite me to discuss his paper at a forum sponsored by the Cato Institute...
...How good does this basic level of health care need to be...
...These rumors about the president, New York Times editorial writer Gail Collins tells us in her lively new book, flourished so successfully because they contained a thread of truth: a genuine public fear about the president’s health...
...Give it up, or at least give up a lot of it...
...It means not trying to save people with rare, expensive-to-treat diseases...
...A normal lifespan, relief from chronic physical suffering, treatment for trauma and disability where reasonable function can be achieved...
...Bok insists that no particular crime need ensue for this to be socially toxic: Heavy viewers, for example, begin to suffer from the so-called “mean-world” syndrome, with its baleful feedback effect of keeping people indoors, where they watch more TV, becoming even more convinced of the risk of leaving their home...
...to give up on the dying because they are dying is inhumane...
...Health care is primarily a service, not a nonrenewable resource like minerals or fuels, and while it certainly uses resources to manufacture its CAT-scanners and surgical bandages and tongue depressors, the heaps of used hypodermics left over as medicine does its work aren’t the limiting feature we are worrying about...
...The moral center of Bok’s book, however, is unmistakeable: Children have the right to flourish as autonomous beings, capable of rational self-direction and choice...
...The central idea all along has been a piece of basic, how-to-live-and-end-your-life advice to Americans: don’t fight it (death) don’t ask for it (expensive life-prolonging treatment) don’t expect society to provide it for you (elaborate, unusual treatment) don’t expect to get it (perfect health) unless you’re willing to be responsible for it yourself...
...The closest he gets to addressing this point is to acknowledge “the more serious possibility that some other factor may have caused both the reduction in crime rates and the passage of the law to occur at the same time,” but then goes on to say that he has “presented over a thousand [statistical model] specifications” that reveal “an extremely consistent pattern” that right-to-carry laws reduce crime...
...Clinton’s public ratings are still high, Collins claims, because he has done nothing inconsistent with the image the American public formed of him back in 1992...
...That’s Callahan’s picture...
...Political figures, she makes clear, can be hurt by gossip only when it is out of sync with our view of their character...
...Heck argues in his recent book that it is “more likely [that] the declines in crime coinciding with relaxation of carry laws were largely attributable to other factors not controlled in the Lott and Mustard analysis...
...The ink blots of political figures cannot be judged objectively without our timely concerns right there in the front row, cheering us on...
...The real essence of the book, however, lies not in the titillating tales about what happened to whom in what room, but in Collins’ discussion of the social context that allows rumors to run wild...
...There seemed to be enough of these troublesome points to decide that his conclusions about the benefits of such laws were premature at best...
...Tongues began wagging faster as the gossip caught on: His polio had spread to his brain, he was discovered cutting out paper dolls instead of working, he had been seen breaking into fits of uncontrollable laughter during press conferences, and how he was babbling all sorts of entertaining nonsense during meetings...
...good enough” will do...
...As in a Rorschach test, the American public brings all of its anxieties, neuroses, and projected fears to the gossip arena...
...This distraction has apparently caused some observers to discount the growing body of evidence on the central limitations of Lott’s analysis...
...She offers the unassailable example of “Schindler’s List,” a “film about gratuitous violence, without in any sense exploiting it or representing an instance of it...
...It’s a science, after all...
...Exercise, even if it is a cold dark night after a tiring day of work...
...When Black and Nagin address this probcm using Lott’s own data, they find no evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce crime...
...Here’s our mistake: We think of medicine as progressive and perfectionist...
...We trust that, given enough research time and money, medical science will continue to conquer our diseases and improve our health...
...Of course, into TV’s no-place come Commissions and laments and 10 minutes of pseudointrospection, all substitutes for real change, before the inevitable cut back to Jerry Springer...
...It will take only one large verdict against the likes of Oliver Stone, and his production company, and perhaps the screenwriter, and the studio itself, and the party will be over...
...While Bok acknowledges the persistent difficulty of borderline cases, she has a habit of gazing on popular culture as if from quite a distance, leaving the issue conveniently blurred...
...The verdict will come from the heartland, far away from Southern California, in some small courtroom with no cameras...
...The concern that his statistical ‘‘fnes” might not fully correct for these problems received some support from his results: Several findings don’t line up with previous research in criminology or common sense, and some of his findings were grossly inconsistent with each other...
...But “good enough” isn’t really good enough, when it means giving up on patients just as their needs become great...
...Most readers are unlikely to appreciate the importance of these qualifications, and will walk away with just the message of the concluding sentences: “Will allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns save lives...
...Rather than watch the disparities between medically poor and medically rich nations increase, we should improve the dismal care now offered in many woefully underfunded systems in the Third World but rein in the excesses of engorged systems in the fat nations, so all citizens of the world can enjoy approximately the same hopes...
...With humor and insight, Collins offers every view of the truth, the almosttrue, and the too-juicy-to-be-true...
...Since FDR made special efforts to conceal his disability, and since reporters rarely depicted the president in his wheelchair, much of the public remained in the dark as to his real condition...
...How can this be reconciled with TV’s relentless marketing juggernaut...
...For the vast majority who will need only basic care throughout their lives to write off a minority who need more help is indecent...
...it means letting people with terminal illnesses die earlier than might now be the case...
...It means cutting back on useful technology that improves health and saves lives...
...It doesn’t always mean giving up, but it often means not trying very hard...
...The answer is yes, it will...
...But those who don’t do it should be blamed (yes, blamed...
...Right Diagnosis, Wrong RX by Margaret P. Battin IVE IT UP...
...Appropriately tamed health care would limit, not expand, patient choice: no fancy rescue medicine where it makes little sense, increased pressure to live right...
...Now, Callahan’s advice has broadened from exhortations to patients into a full-scale critique of the medical establishment...
...Other reanalyses have also cast doubt on Lott’s findings, including my own study, currently in press at U.C...
...The real question is about priorities, not usage...
...Ideally, we would measure the effects of right-to-carry laws by comparing the crime rate that a state like Idaho experienced after enacting a right-to-carry law in 1990 with the crime rate that Idaho would have experienced had that state not enacted a right-to-carry law in 1990...
...This is not a trivial exercise, since reliable measures for many of these factors are simply not available...
...Several aspects of Lott’s statistical approach struck me as troublesome...
...But we trick ourselves: Medicine is, in actuality, “expansionary” and “progress-obsessed...
...One of the victim’s friends later wrote a letter of protest...
...Second, our national fetish for the First Amendment now has the perverse effect of stifling free thought, stopping any discussion about how obscenity laws might cover violent as well as sexual images dead in its tracks...
...Bok tells us in its day Moliere’s great play “Tartuffe” was a “symbol of depravity to some, evidence of [theatre’s] glory to others...
...Bok’s position on the suppression of violent images by law is not exactly announced outright...
...But now he adds to it a trenchant account of how our assumptions about the nature of medicine invite medicine to take control of us, to make us greedy for more...
...MARGAREPT...
...There is typically some uncertainty about how a change to our gun laws will impact crime, since guns in principle have both helpful and harmful aspects...
...We’re fortunate to have had plenty of advice over the years from Callahan, one of the most articulate and thoughtful bioethicists working anywhere in the world...
...STEPHEN METCALiFsa fieehnce writerliving in New York City...
...The tobacco lobby put off cigarette legislation Ior decades with similar arguments...
...She gives us all the sordid details and all the delicious rumors from the safe seat of the talker instead of the talked-about...
...While most Americans at the time knew that FDR suffered from polio, very few had actually seen him, and many could not bear to imagine their president, a paragon of strength and leadership, as an invalid...
...The other potential drawback of these laws is that the daily annoyances of modern life, such as rude driving or Yankees fans, can lead to fights that would be more lethal if one or both of the parties is armed...
...BATTIN is a bioethicist at the University of Utah and author i4The Least Worst Death and The Death Debate...
...Though similar rumors about presidents occurred in the past, technology has given our era a whole new power to catch the ball running...
...For example, he cannot adequately control for the fact that states with right-to-carry laws and those without are different with respect to poverty, gangs, drugs, and police practices...
...ELIOT SLOAN is an editorial i n t m at Harper’s magazine...
...I think they ought to be higher, though for medicine trimmed of waste and refocused in many of the ways Callahan suggests...
...In the end, Callahan’s prescription is wrong - or if it’s right, it’s only half strength...
...The answer can be found in part in some of the responses to his original article, which, regrettably, included attacks on his integrity as an academic researcher...
...Required reading, important, indeed imperative to think about...
...Is it a coincidence that the author of this letter was John Grisham, creator of such bestselling literary products as The Finn and The Pelican Briej...
...Collins attributes gossip’s ability to spread so quickly and so out of control to the speed of our hightechnology era, in which a rumor zooms from people’s mouths directly into e-mail gossip loops, before it even hits MSNBC...
...To hope for anything more, at least at public expense, is to buy into the false hopes that medicine fosters...
...Callahan assumes that it isn’t possible...
...But she does end with a question about what will happen to gossip if public standards of behavior - and of privacy - continue to erode...
...While he includes a chapter that contains replies to his critics, unfortunately he doesn’t directly respond to the key Black and Nagin finding that formal statistical tests reject his methods...
...Boring...
...But I think we shouldn’t swallow the medicine even after we’ve seen the prescription...
...America’s quest for perfect health is a recipe for failure, a prescription for disaster...
...High-tech health care wouldn’t be wasted on people over 65 or on babies with terrible defects or on routine screening for low-risk conditions or other “black-hole” problems that endlessly consume public resources...
...It’s impossible, after all, for people to speculate about who is breaking the rules behind closed doors when there are no rules left that matter...
...This doesn’t mean just cutting out waste, and Callahan is honest about this...
...Today, with easy access to TV and computers, the media would find it almost impossible to shield us from FDR's illness, Rumors about Honest Abe would also be dead on arrival because the question of whether the president has some interracial ancestry is no longer at the top of our concern list...
...Collins argues that gossip “really does need some kind of context to give it meaning...
...It’s money...
...health medicine - measures designed to improve the health of a population, not of specific individuals...
...To dispel the notion that Lott is simply being victimized by the “PC crowd,” it may be helpful to mention the reaction of Gary Heck, a Florida State criminologist known for his generally “pro-gun’’ views, who has launched a nasty attack on the public health community for what he perceives to be its “anti-gun’’ stance...
...Shortly thereafter, Lott’s data were reanalyzed by Professors Dan Black of the University of Kentucky and Daniel Nagin of Carnegie-Mellon...
...Lott has thus been able to paint himself as the victim of those who are out to enforce the “politically correct, antigun orthodoxy...
...Bok describes this well, but unfortunately backs away from anything too radical, allowing Cass Sunstein and a handful of law professors to make the argument for governmental regulation for her...
...Take, for example, the current allegations of presidential philandering...
...Health care in much of the developing world isn’t anywhere near as good as it should be...
...He’s always told us that, as patients, we shouldn’t be greedy for more - more medical treatment, more health care expenditures, more life...
...This is unfortunate, since Lott’s analysis ultimately cannot support his conclusion...
...Callahan gives a communitarian answer: The basic level of care should be whatever is sufficient “to ensure civic functioning” - to allow children to function in schools, workers to function at their jobs, parents to function in child-rearing, citizens to exercise their roles in a political society...
...Bok is in no hurry for Grisham’s version of heartland justice, but is fed up nonetheless with the interminable hand-wringing that postpones any serious discussion about violent images in TV and the movies...
...and in this respect “sustainable” health care isn’t like “sustainable’’ energy policy or any other ecological issue...
...It would still allow those willing to pay for more elabirateke‘alth care to do so, but the basic, socially supported care provided to all would be just that - basic...
...With her new book, Bok seeks to initiate a “probing society-wide discussion on violence in society and its links with cultural life, including all forms of entertainment...
...But money isn’t an exhaustible resource...
...JENS LUDWIGis a visiting scholar at the Northwestern Uniuersity/Uniuersity of Chicago yoint Poueny Center...
...How can we distinguish art from schlock when labeling a movie a mere “product...
...Only if the rumor is relevant to our era, explains Collins, will it take off...
...Many of us may share Grisham’s outrage, and might even be happy to sit on such a jury...
...Sustainable ecology has to do with not using up nonrenewable environmental resources...
...Stone’s film, he argued, should not be allowed the excuse of artistic freedom...
...Collins remains agnostic on the question of Clinton’s alleged misbehavior...
...Newmeek reported: “Back to the roomful of correspondents he tossed the question...
...Callahan is right that medicine, like any expansionist commercial conglomerate, is capable of engendering desires that are not really genuine, and he is also right that medicine is guilty of unconscionable waste, but it is a mistake to confuse trumped-up wishes for pointless treatment with real, human desires for meaningful care...
...If something goes wrong with the product, he concluded, “either by design or defect, and injury ensues, then its makers are held responsible...
...Given this uncertainty, it is noteworthy that more than 30 states have now passed “right-to-carry” laws that allow private citizens to carry concealed guns...
...I had never heard of Lott and barely knew where the institute was, but he asked nicely and I thought there might be a free lunch involved...
...The results from Lott’s original article form the heart of this book...
...Gary Hart portrayed himself as an upstanding husband, which is why, when the media caught him frolicking with Donna Rice, the public exploded...
...Dispiriting...
...it means not trying to restore perfect function if some physiological system has failed...
...All of which isn’t to say Bok‘s work doesn’t have a serious moral center: It does, and it’s the well-being of children...
...How do we begin to pinpoint causality when considering an act of violence...
...Gossip, Collins argues, “provides an insight into what’s bothering Americans - maybe not as precisely as a random cross-sample poll of the voting public, but with a little more flavorl‘ From Civil War rumors that President Lincoln had “Negro blood” and was nicknamed ‘Abraham Africanus the First,” to stories of Prohibitionist Americans angrily pointing fingers at Teddy Roosevelt’s drinking habits, Collins’ book traces the history of American gossip through the eyes of the public...
...Instead, the film should be treated as a product, “something created and brought to market, not too dissimilar from breast implants...
Vol. 30 • June 1998 • No. 6
