A Scrapbook correspondent in the state of Washington mails us the June 24 front page of the Seattle Times, reporting the arrest of two men who were plotting a suicide attack on a U.S. military office in Seattle. On July 7, a federal grand jury indicted the two, Walli Mujahidh and Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, on nine felony counts, including, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, “conspiracy to murder officers and agents of the United States, and conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.”
What caught our correspondent’s eye was the surreal juxtaposition of the Seattle Times’s headline description—“looked like everyday guy”—and the adjacent photo of Abdul-Latif (born Joseph Anthony Davis), the “guy” in question, an admirer of Osama bin Laden who we would say looks rather fearsome in his full-Wahhabi beard. We’re guessing Abdul-Latif didn’t have a “Visualize World Peace” bumper sticker on his 17-year-old Honda.
As connoisseurs of the genre will recognize, this sort of hilariously inapt headline is actually par for the course for newspapers dealing with out-of-the-ordinary crime suspects. A few years ago, under the headline “What’s Wrong with the Neighbors,” Slate compiled these examples:
“I thought he was pretty nice. . . . But then again, I knew that his beliefs were way out of line. They were good neighbors, but, well, I got blue eyes, so I guess that helps” (Meda VanDyke on her neighbor, neo-Nazi murderer Buford Furrow).
“We figured they would have questioned him and let him go and eventually we forgot about it” (Eric Anderson, neighbor of Atlanta mass murderer Mark Barton, on the murder of Barton’s first wife and mother-in-law several years earlier).
“He was shy, a little withdrawn. But not real bizarre,” and “he never bothered anyone” (mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer’s neighbors).
And in the case of Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, the headline description also came from next door, as it were. According to the Times report: “ ‘He looked like an everyday guy,’ said one of his neighbors, Abdi Mohamud.”
Remind Us What This Item Is About
The Scrapbook has long maintained that a certain amount of social science research is really just the quantification of common sense. You know, the revelation that men are more attracted to attractive women than to unattractive women, or the discovery that incidents of crime tend to decrease in proportion to an increase in the prison population. Consider, as another example, the recent findings of Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and her colleagues, as reported in the pages of the Washington Post.
Search engines may be changing the way our brains remember information. . . . [P]eople are more likely to remember things they do not think they can find online and will have a harder time remembering things they think they’ll be able to find online.
In other words, if people have learned that they can retrieve certain information from the Internet—“Google Effects on Memory” is the title of Professor Sparrow’s paper—they are less likely to commit such information to memory, and vice versa. That is to say, it is easy and convenient to consult Google when you need to remember the capital of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg), but it wouldn’t be smart to rely on Google to remind you of the date of your wedding anniversary.
Lest The Scrapbook be accused of philistinism, we hasten to add that there’s nothing especially wrong with the quantification of the obvious, especially when people of all races, creeds, and points of view can agree on certain basic propositions. We also suspect that Professor Sparrow’s revelation may be applied retrospectively. The invention of writing, or printing, probably did some damage to the oral tradition of storytelling, which brought us Homer’s Iliad and any number of venerable folk tales and sagas. Similarly, just as the introduction of the automobile radically reduced public knowledge about the care and training of horses, The Scrapbook is bold to suggest that the invention of television probably cut the number of weekly moviegoers in America. You could look it up.
It is possible—indeed, likely—that the swift availability of information on the Internet will affect patterns of cognition, perhaps even brain function. But The Scrapbook detects a hint of displeasure, even foreboding, about this in the coverage of the study. “Why remember something if I know I can look it up again?” asks a psychologist at Washington University in the Post story. “In some sense, with Google and other search engines, we can offload some of our memory demands onto machines.”
Which, in The Scrapbook’s considered judgment, is not a bad thing. Yes, it’s nice to commit poetry or biblical passages or the birth date of the Duke of Wellington to memory; but how much nicer that we have such things as books to serve as permanent repositories of knowledge, or new technologies like search engines that retrieve such information instantaneously, and collate and classify it as well. The Scrapbook suspects that the amazing speed and convenience of such handy tools as Google will leave us with even more leisure time to fill. Perhaps we will finally have time to memorize more poetry.
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Insuring Obama’s Mom
Look who’s finally fact-checking President Obama! The New York Times filed this report on July 14:
Book Challenges Obama on Mother’s Deathbed Fight: The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book that suggests that President Obama, in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother’s deathbed dispute with her insurance company. During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage. In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses. But in A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument. Indeed, as Byron York pointed out in a July 11 column for the Washington Examiner, Ann Dunham had no worries at all when it came to her health insurance, and her employer was more than generous: At the time she took the job [working in Jakarta for an American company under contract with the Indonesian State Ministry for the Role of Women] Dunham was increasingly worried about her health; she was suffering from intense abdominal pains. In November 1994, Dunham went to an Indonesian doctor who diagnosed appendicitis. As Dunham debated whether to leave the country for surgery, she called her boss at Development Alternatives. “You’ve got health insurance, that’s taken care of,” the boss told her. “We can cover the airfare.”
Good for the New York Times for noticing that their superhero’s cape has a couple of wrinkles in it. Our expectations for them are low, but in this case they exceeded them.
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
‘Kids with substantive allowances could purchase actual records, but the rest of us, trapped in prudent homes, had only Memorex tapes to save our favorite jams from the yawning void beyond the memory of play-lists. Who knew how long it would be before we again beheld the splendor of ‘Cold Gettin’ Dumb’? Even the artists were ethereal. There was no Vibe or XXL to confirm the death of the Human Beat Box or Scott La Rock, or explain why UTFO faded away. Overrun by mystery, you had only divination and hours upon hours of deciphering . . . ” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, New York Times, July 10).