Being a superstar intellectual himself—we hear he reads Niebuhr and Burke!—it was natural that President Obama would assemble a group of superstar scientists to figure out a way to clean up British Petroleum’s giant oil mess in the Gulf of Mexico. The Department of Energy selected five scientists who, we can only assume, are something like the Top Guns, the best of the best, of the oil-spill remediation community. Two weeks ago these big brains assembled in Houston to get cracking on the disaster.
But last week, one member of the team ran into a problem. It was discovered that Washington University physicist Jonathan Katz has a website on which he has published a number of non-physics essays, among them “In Defense of Homophobia” and “Diversity Is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel.” Here’s an excerpt from the latter:
When someone talks about “diversity” he is changing the subject from his proper responsibility—doing his job better. At a university that is improving the quality of teaching and research. At a government agency it is serving the public. In a foundation it is carrying out the donor’s wishes. And in a profit-making corporation it is making money for the shareholders. The next time you hear or read “diversity,” substitute “Americanism,” another right-sounding (but now unfashionable) slogan. Both of these are excuses for not doing one’s proper job. Diversity has another attraction. It offers the pygmy Napoleons of administration a chance to interfere in every decision made—procurement, hiring and (at universities) student admissions. It keeps them busy and justifies their existence. It is a protection racket—give them a percentage or they will prevent you from hiring or admitting the people you need, or awarding contracts to the lowest or best bidders. It provides administrators plenty of opportunities to do favors for their friends, a natural human desire which, in other circumstances, remains under an ethical cloud. It often amounts to breach of fiduciary responsibility, violation of a public trust, or theft. It is the fashionable form of patronage.
So Katz is a physics genius with a streak of the iconoclastic blogger in him. Which, of course, is unacceptable to the pygmy Napoleons. Nearly as soon as his extracurricular essays were outed, Katz was booted from the blue-ribbon oil spill committee.
It’s of course within any administration’s prerogative to steer clear of people who have ideas they find embarrassing or with which they disagree, even if those ideas have nothing to do with the expert’s day job or the expertise being sought. But there’s a word for this reflex: politics. And do recall that it was Barack Obama who pledged to take “politics out of science” and “restore science to its rightful place.”
Two years from now when Obama tries to tar his Republican opponent as someone who doesn’t respect science, it will be well worth recalling that the president wouldn’t allow a presumably quite expert physicist to help with the oil spill because that man didn’t toe the ideological line on affirmative action and gay marriage. ♦
Woody Would, Wouldn’t He?
In olden times the Cannes Film Festival could be relied upon for stories (or more likely, photographs) of topless starlets showing up on the beach, with a gaggle of what we now call paparazzi. But nowadays a topless actress-in-waiting on the beach at Cannes would be about as newsworthy as a major speech on childhood obesity by the first lady, or Lindsay Lohan reentering rehab. In fact, by happy coincidence, the latest Lindsay Lohan catastrophe was the big story out of Cannes this year—she couldn’t leave France to make a court date in Los Angeles because someone had “stolen” her passport—until Woody Allen decided it was time for him, again, to speak out on the Roman Polanski rape/fugitive case.
As such things go, this was much more in keeping with the modern Cannes festival, which has grown considerably more political over the years and has tended to feature standing ovations for the likes of Michael Moore and press conferences with frenzied actors and directors denouncing global warming or George W. Bush, or both. Allen was interviewed last week by a French radio station, and said the following: “[Polanski] is an artist, he’s a nice person, he did something wrong and he paid for it. [The critics] are not happy unless he pays the rest of his life. They would be happy if they could execute him in a firing squad.” And then, with that exquisite sense of satire for which he is famous, he added this observation: “They should take the money they spent on the Polanski case and go after drug dealers and rapists.”
At first glance, The Scrapbook thought that perhaps the interview had been conducted in French and Woody’s language skills were to blame, or that the translation was botched. But the interview had been conducted in English, and he seems to have meant precisely what he said.
Where to begin? First, since Roman Polanski stands accused of raping a drugged 13-year-old girl when he was aged 43, you would think that a 74-year-old man (that’s Woody) married to his 39-year-old stepdaughter would hesitate to speak out on the subject. Or that the same 74-year-old would realize that, in pursuing the Polanski case, the authorities are, literally, “going after” a rapist. What’s more, Allen seems deliberately to ignore in his extraordinary statement that, while his friend and fellow artist Roman Polanski “did something wrong,” the whole convoluted case is based on the fact that he has not paid for it: Polanski fled the United States before sentencing and is currently under house arrest in Switzerland pending extradition.
Or put another way, even by the rarefied standards of the Cannes Film Festival, it is hard for The Scrapbook to conceive of anyone less entitled to high moral dudgeon about rape, statutory or otherwise, than Soon-Yi Previn’s husband, Woody Allen. Even a topless starlet on the beach would know that. ♦
All a-Twitter
The Internet continues to remake our world: Last week Hugo Chávez took to the worldwide web to encourage Venezuelans to use Twitter to inform on their fellow citizens. Venezuela, you see, is having financial difficulties, the most pressing of which is rapid inflation, which is devaluing the bolivar. Chávez blames “speculators.” So, during his weekly radio and TV address he urged his fellow citizens to identify these “thieves.” “My Twitter account is open for you to denounce them,” he said. He promised that once the denunciations started twittering in, “We’re going to launch several raids. We’ve already launched some raids, thanks to the complaints from the people.”
Techno-skeptics will recall that nearly a year ago the world was treated to an endless parade of congratulation about how Twitter was going to bring down the autocratic government of Iran. We won’t recapitulate all of “The Revolution Will Be Twittered” stories here—suffice it to say, the mullahs endured. Amazingly enough, they were able to defeat social networking with mere soldiers and guns. Who’d a thunk it?
But it is worth noting that the people who got so worked up over the civilization-altering possibilities of social networking weren’t just wrong in that they overestimated the Internet’s power. They were also wrong in their belief that technology is necessarily an ally of the just. There’s no reason Twitter can’t be a tool for both Iranian dissidents and a Venezuelan dictator.
At the end of the day, though, it turns out that Twitter isn’t a particularly powerful political tool at all. The mullahs are still in power. The bolivar is still cratering. And despite thousands and thousands of glowing press reports, Twitter itself has yet to see a dime of profit. ♦
Decline and Fall . . .
[img nocaption float="left" width="280" height="220" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1760[/img]The Discobolus of Myron (left)—the most famous depiction of the Olympic athlete of antiquity. “Wenlock” and “Mandeville” (right)—official mascots of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, unveiled last week.