Always Look on the Dark Side . . .
Pound for pound, there may be no more thrilling display of American military pageantry than the show put on several dozen times each year by the Navy's Blue Angels--the team of six F/A-18 Hornets that famously fly in a tight formation, with as little as 18 inches separating their wingtips, among other aerial feats.
Leave it to the New York Times to rain on the parade. Last week the Blue Angels decided to treat Manhattan's tower dwellers to a free show, as they practiced for an upcoming performance nearby. The Times pursed its lips in sour disapproval, running the following caption in local editions, beneath an admittedly dazzling photo: "Too Close for Comfort? The Navy's Blue Angels precision flying team made a close-quarters pass over the Upper East Side yesterday, a preview of their participation in the New York Air Show at Jones Beach on Sunday and Monday as part of Memorial Day observances. The sight of the fighters and their noise startled some residents, who recalled 9/11 in anxious phone calls."
A Scrapbook informant and Blue Angels fan who saw the Upper East Side fly-by begged to differ. He said he'd heard from friends, Columbia students and bankers, who said people lined the windows of their buildings and thought it was "the greatest thing they ever saw."
Dog Bites Man
Fair is fair: Not everything we read in the New York Times curls our hair. Indeed, last Wednesday's edition brought an article displaying originality of thought and--believe it or not--refreshingly devoid of any implication that President Bush and congressional Republicans are doing their best to wreck the United States of America. Of course, you could only find the article in the "Business" section, not the front page. (That would probably be asking too much.) Still, business columnist David Leonhardt's "This Glass Is Half Full, Probably More," contains many distinctly un- Times-like sentiments, such as this:
The fact is that by most broad measures--wages, average life span, crime, education levels, home ownership, and racial and gender equality, to name a few--life in this country has clearly improved over the last generation. And most Americans think about their lives in these terms. In polls, even low-income people generally say they are better off than their parents were, probably because most are.
Even more daring, Leonhardt goes out of his way to attack lefty icon Thomas Frank, whose What's the Matter with Kansas? spent 35 weeks on the Times's bestseller list.
Frank's book makes the case that his fellow Kansans have succumbed to an angry "backlash" in which lower-income voters elect politicians mouthing social conservatism but whose true agenda is all about enriching the upper crust. Suffice it to say, the book's something of a downer. Lucky for us, Leonhardt is around to set the record straight:
Close inspection uncovers a big problem with Mr. Frank's economic analysis. Wages haven't been falling in Kansas. Up and down the economic spectrum, they have been higher in the last few years than they were at any point in the 1980s or 90s, according to inflation-adjusted numbers from the Economic Policy Institute. The median Kansas worker made $13.43 an hour in 2004, 11 percent more than in 1979, which might help explain why many people don't vote on bread-and-butter issues anymore. . . . More to the point, some other improvements have accelerated recently. In just the last 15 years, the murder rate has been cut almost in half. Many big cities are far more vibrant places than they used to be. About 33 percent of young adults get a bachelor's degree these days, up from 25 percent in the early 1990s. The gap between men's and women's pay reached its lowest ever last year. The divorce rate has stopped rising. Many luxuries of earlier generations--owning a three-bedroom house, flying across the country, calling relatives who live overseas--are staples of middle-class life. If all this doesn't add up to a rise in living standards, I'm not sure what the phrase means.
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
Viva Italia!
A few weeks back, Michael Goldfarb wrote about the Fran O'Brien's steakhouse ("Regular Guys," May 1), which had lost its lease. This was a blow not just for Washington, D.C., meat lovers but, more important, for the wounded Iraq war vets at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who had been enjoying all-you-can-eat steak dinners with their families every Friday night at Fran's for the last two years.
Proprietor Marty O'Brien and partners are still searching for a site where they can reopen the restaurant. Meanwhile, the Italian ambassador has stepped into the breach for the veterans. Stars and Stripes reported last week that "Italian Ambassador Gianni Castellaneta and his wife, Lila, heard about Fran O'Brien's dinners through an Italian sponsor and offered to have the wounded servicemembers over to the embassy." According to Shoshana Bryen of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which helps sponsor the dinners, the ambassador and his wife "have turned themselves inside out to be helpful."
On May 19, "the entire Italian diplomatic corps, including a cadre of military attachés, lined up to greet their guests as the buses ferrying the veterans and family members from the hospitals rumbled up" to the embassy. A gallery of photos from the event can be seen at stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=36450&archive=true
A Show, a Show!
Illustrator Thomas Fluharty, who has created a number of unforgettable covers for The Weekly Standard over the years, is exhibiting paintings, including several that first appeared in these pages, at the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, 269 Bleecker Street, New York, N.Y. The show, "Naughty and Nice," runs from May 25 to June 17. The hours are 2-7 p.m., Mondays through Saturdays, and 3-6 p.m. on Sundays.