The Enthusiasms of Newsweek

THE SCRAPBOOK was a little surprised by last week's cover of Newsweek--no heroic portrait of Barack Obama?--and so, slowly and a little hesitantly, dove in.

Sure enough, on Page One, there was a scowling double portrait of the McCains, standing awkwardly on an airport tarmac. And this was followed, on Page Four, by a shot of a thoughtful Barack Obama, gazing into the future. Underneath Obama these words were inscribed--"John McCain's years on Capitol Hill make him more qualified for the White House than Barack Obama, who spent most of his time in office in the Illinois Legislature, right? Think again .  .  . "--at which point THE SCRAPBOOK quickly skipped to the popular "Conventional Wisdom Watch" feature, where an arrow pointed upward for--yes, Michelle Obama. Nor did the "Perspectives" page disappoint: There was one cute snapshot of young Barack Obama and his grandfather, one tart quotation from Michelle Obama .  .  . and then an eight-page, faintly hostile, profile of Mrs. John McCain--"In Search of Cindy McCain"--which THE SCRAPBOOK bypassed to confront a stunning photograph of Barack Obama striding purposefully up the Capitol steps.

To which THE SCRAPBOOK responded by throwing our issue of Newsweek skyward, and finding it opened, when it fell back to earth, to a full-page portrait of the late R. Buckminster Fuller, and a three-page tribute entitled "Bucky's Very Large Dome."

To be honest, we had thought that the ghost of Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) had been thankfully dormant for the past quarter-century, but how wrong we were. Not only is Manhattan's trendy Whitney Museum putting on a retrospective in his honor, but Newsweek resurrects, for a few minutes' duration, the reputation of one of the arch cranks of the sixties.

Fuller, who was inordinately proud of his New England Transcendentalist family background, was a college dropout and failed engineer, inventor, and architect, but successful futurist. He is best known for his design of the geodesic dome--last seen at the U.S. pavilion at Montreal's Expo '67--but lesser known is his legacy of leaking buildings, collapsed houses, unbuildable structures, and THE SCRAPBOOK's favorite, the 1933 Dymaxion car, which has no rear window. "Buckminster Fuller's inventions didn't always work," Newsweek helpfully explains, "but his ideas still inspire."

Well, while not quite comprehending what it's done, Newsweek does put its finger on the key to Fuller's renown: "[He] spent decades developing his theories and inventions, but he hit it big in the 1960s .  .  . as a kind of guru for the Woodstock generation." Translation: You had to be either a drug-crazed hippie or a philosophical adherent of Flower Power to take Bucky seriously.

Newsweek continues: "There's the timeliness of Fuller's holistic approach. He called himself a 'comprehensivist': he was an interdisciplinary thinker who blurred the boundaries between art and science, and liked to use the then new term 'synergy.' .  .  . A catalog of his inventions doesn't do justice, though, to the free-ranging ideas that scratched around inside Fuller's own dome. .  .  . [H]e dreamed up fantastical structures that floated in the sky, which he called 'Cloud Nine'; he proposed a clear dome over Manhattan; a tetrahedron suburb in San Francisco Bay, and he patented a scheme for an underwater city."

Did we mention that "Al Gore likes to quote him and his words are in the Kyoto Protocol .  .  . [and] his outlook was global, not national, and he believed that technology, if properly harnessed, could solve the problems of what he referred to as 'Spaceship Earth'"?

What Fuller did best had nothing to do with bridges across the Mediterranean Sea, or stilts for traversing the Everglades, or colonies of fine old New England families on Mars. R. Buckminster Fuller was a 20th-century specimen of a very ancient breed: the intellectual as confidence man, beginning with visions of sprucing up the Earth and ending with regiments of cultists and disciples, and publishing memoirs called I Seem to Be a Verb.

Of course, THE SCRAPBOOK believes that Newsweek's enthusiasm for Sen. Barack (Change We Can Believe In) Obama bears no resemblance to its faith in Bucky Fuller.

Kennedy's Footnote

Buried in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in Kennedy v. Louisiana is a remarkable citation. Making the inarguable point that "a State that punishes child rape by death may remove a strong incentive for the rapist not to kill the victim," Kennedy mysteriously feels the need to point curious readers to a St. John's Law Review article by Corey Rayburn Yung, a former clerk on the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. You can get the gist of the article from the state-of-the art academic wordplay in its title: "Better Dead Than R(ap)ed?: The Patriarchal Rhetoric Driving Capital Rape Statutes."

Proponents of applying the death penalty to child rapists, per Yung, are driven by "a new, but very old, rhetoric." Yung doesn't explain how something can be both "new" and "very old," but he does argue that "as long as populations and politicians can make the appeal that rape is an evil worse than death, they can push these laws with a load of Victorian, patriarchal baggage attached." Writes Yung,

When womyn's lives are leveraged into a utilitarian calculus that values chastity over survival, the Victorian shackles that feminism has sought to break reassert themselves in insidious fashion. Womyn's choices to live or die are then judged by cultural norms derived from patriarchy.

This is academic mumbo-jumbo. Also, as you can see in the above passage, it's riddled with spelling errors. Yung writes in one of his many footnotes, "I choose to adopt the gender-neutral term 'womyn' to refer to the people more commonly called 'women.' " Whatever you say, Corey.

From now on, THE SCRAPBOOK chooses to adopt the term "idiotz" to refer to the people more commonly called "former law clerks drunk on pomo feminist legal theory."