Slate

March 19, 2008

How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?

How did I get Iraq wrong?

Well, for one thing, I trusted the Germans. Those who know me will find this statement somewhat ironic, but there it is.

I trusted one German in particular. His name was August Hanning. In the run-up to the war, he was the chief of the BND, the German foreign-intelligence agency. I met him shortly before the war at the new chancellery building opposite the Reichstag in Berlin. He was spectrally thin and exceedingly sober. His briefcase was the size of a microwave oven. I pictured many consequential documents sequestered inside.
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May 15, 2007

The Devil and Jerry Falwell

The Rev. Jerry Falwell died Tuesday at age 73; he was pronounced dead shortly after he was found unresponsive in his office at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Falwell's most enduring legacy is likely to be his role in turning evangelical Christianity into an important part of the political right. But many will also remember him for his curious claim that the Antichrist was a living, male Jew. In 1999, Jeffrey Goldberg--living, male, and Jewish--visited the reverend to ask whether he, Goldberg, might possibly be the Antichrist.
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April 9, 2007

TV Club: Sopranos Final Season

Dear Jeffrey,

It's an honor to be commemorating the final Sopranos season with you (Season 6, Part 2, if you want to get obsessive-compulsive about it). I am neither a psychoanalyst, like the intrepid team of shrinksSlate employed to pick over seasons 3 and granting, in a show of unprecedented generosity, a full 60-minute hour to the dysfunctional Soprano family, as opposed to the 50 minutes they give paying clientsnor a mob expert, like you or Jerry Capeci, who did the honors for Season 5. Nor am I former Slate New York editor Judith Shulevitz, with whom you dished about The Sopranos in Slate's inaugural dialogue way back in 2000, which technically was still the previous centurya lifetime ago for me, and perhaps for you, too.
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June 14, 2002

John Gotti

It is a little-known fact, even among Mafia hobbyists, that John J. Gotti, a man seldom credited with sophistication, raised his children to be avid readers. His daughter Victoria, who is the smartest Gotti (and who, if the world were a different place, would now be the boss of the Gambino crime family), has a living room lined with books, many of which were not written by Sidney Sheldon, and she is a writer herself of halfway-credible mysteries. His son and sad-sack heir, John, who is known as Junior, is an autodidact and a compulsive reader of history, particularly the history of Native America.
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March 25, 2002

Dialogues: Iraq and Al-Qaida

dialogues
Iraq and Al-Qaida
By Warren Bass and Jeffrey Goldberg
Updated Monday, March 25, 2002, at 1:08 PM ET

From: Jeffrey Goldberg
To: Warren Bass
Subject: Reason Enough?
Posted Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 10:24 AM ET

Dear Warren,

I must say, I'm looking forward to this exchange; it's not every day that I get to have a discussion with a genuine, AAA-approved, USDA-certified foreign-policy establishment pooh-bah, which is what you are, yes?

You've been doing great work, even if you've been doing it for the Man.
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February 9, 2001

The Breakfast Table: Jeffrey Goldberg and Jack Shafer

From: Jack Shafer
Subject: Pols, the Press, and the Sad Bastard Story
Posted Monday, Feb. 5, 2001, at 7:46 AM ET

Dearest Goldberg,

During the campaign, the press busted the presidential candidates every time they harvested a mawkish anecdote from some specific sad bastard's life to make one of their policy pitches. (Often the sad bastard was strategically placed in the audience to give the TV citizenry that throat-clogging Oprah moment.) I cringed whether it was George Bush demonstrating his compassionate conservatism in one of the debates by misting up over the Texas convict who asked him who really cared about his jailed ass or Al Gore jawboning against pricey pharmaceuticals by complaining that his mother-in-law was paying three times as much for the same arthritis drug that her dog Shiloh consumed (a claim that turned out not to be true).

Politicians rely on cheap, emotional anecdotes for obvious reasons. Theirs is a cheap and emotional business. But what's to explain our press comrades' overreliance on the same technique? Scanning the morning papers I find two sad bastard ledes without even searching. My friend Rachel Zimmerman begins her Page One Wall Street Journal story about drug patent extensions with the up-close and personal story of "Mary Robinson, a Philadelphia X-ray technologist," who enrolled her 7-month-old baby in a drug-testing program in return for a $50 Toys "R" Us gift certificate. It's a fine story about the politics of patent extension, but the anecdote never pays off. Baby Robinson pops up only one more time, deep, deep in the story, where we find out that the diluted drug she was fed in the drug trial cured her indigestion.
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February 25, 2000

Superhero Showdown

When you're a superhero, no one ever cuts you a break.

The Shopping Avenger knew it was only a matter of time before some sort of Avenger manqué would try to seize the scepter of consumer advocacy for his own pathetic self. After all, given the fabulous success and worldwide renown (and healthy self-regard) of the Shopping Avenger, why wouldn't some cheap hustler follow him on the path of glory he has single-handedly hacked through the jungle of corporate malfeasance and customer dissatisfaction?

So now comes a publication calling itself Consumer Reports, a sad spectacle of faux-Shopping Avengerness. Consumer Reports is published by a group calling itself the "Consumers Union," which claims to have been founded in 1936. The Shopping Avenger laughs at this claim, because the Shopping Avenger knows that he himself is the originator of American consumer advocacy, back in 1999, or possibly 1998.
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December 8, 1999

Wiener Whining at Super 8

It is a well-known fact that the Shopping Avenger keeps a special place in his heart for the downtrodden and the outcast, including, but not limited to, the poor, the indigent, the day traders, and the blind. When the Shopping Avenger sees the forces of rampant capitalism manhandling an unfortunate soul, he will fly to the rescue straightaway, unless he's busy leading anarchists into battle on the streets of Seattle, or napping.

But there is one group whose persecution will instantaneously get the Shopping Avenger into superhero mode, and that is: wiener dogs.
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November 5, 1999

I, Antichrist?

Early one shiny autumn morning, I got in my car and drove to Lynchburg, Va., in order to find out whether or not I am the Antichrist. You know: the Beast, the Worthless Shepherd, the Little Horn, the Abomination, the linchpin of the Diabolical Trinity. That Antichrist.

I had my suspicions. Nowhere on my body could I find the mark of the Beast--666--but I do have a freckle that's shaped like Bermuda. And though I have never been seized by a desire to lead the armies of Satan in a final, bloody confrontation with the forces of God on the plain of Armageddon, I do suffer from aggravated dyspepsia, as well as chronic malaise, conditions that I'm sure afflict the Antichrist.
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October 6, 1999

You Don't Tug on the Avenger's Cape

Greetings, oh frustrated and bone-weary consumer! It is I, the great Shopping Avenger, who has pledged himself to the betterment of all humankind, or at least to that portion of humankind that shops at Circuit City and rents trucks from U-Haul.

The Shopping Avenger has much to discuss today: You will hear the tale of a Hasidic rabbi who suffered greatly at the hands of TWA, but who, due to his mystical and gentle nature, sought not the help of lawyers but instead the help of Shopping Avenger, who is a part-time kabalist and runs special discounts for clergy every Tuesday, and you will also learn the winning answer to the recent contest question "How much Turtle Wax constitutes a year's supply of Turtle Wax?"
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July 22, 1999

It's Time To Keelhaul U-Haul!

Like all superheroes worthy of the title, the Shopping Avenger has an Achilles' heel. In the case of the Shopping Avenger, his Achilles' heel is not animal, vegetable, or mineral but something less tangible.

An explanation: Last week, the magazine you are currently reading forced the Shopping Avenger at gunpoint to read a series of treacle-filled self-help books, and then to dissect them online together with a partner. The Shopping Avenger, who can withstand radiation, extreme heat and cold, hail, bear attacks, and Eyes Wide Shut, almost succumbed to terminal jejuneness after reading these books. Except for one thing: One of the books, The Art of Happiness, which collects and simplifies the Dalai Lama's philosophy, got the Shopping Avenger to thinking. This, in a way, is the Shopping Avenger's Achilles' heel: thinking. Perhaps it is wrong, the Shopping Avenger thought, to complain about the petty insults and inconveniences of life in the materialistic '90s. The Shopping Avenger felt that perhaps he should counsel those who write seeking help to meditate, to accept bad service the way one accepts the change of seasons, and to extend a compassionate hand of forgiveness to those who provide poor customer care.
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July 15, 1999

The Book Club: A Selection of Self-Help Books

From: Emily Yoffe
Subject: Absolute Positivity
Posted Monday, July 12, 1999, at 12:00 PM ET

Dear Jeff,

What struck me immediately about these three bestsellers is what they are not about. They're not about some of the recently popular themes of the self-help genre: making money; enhancing your sex life; vanquishing your rivals; getting rid of toxic parents, spouses, or boyfriends. We must really live in contented times if these are the books people are reading to improve their lives. The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, M.D. (but really by Cutler, who says in an interview he's not sure the Tibetan leader even read the manuscript), is obviously explicitly about Buddhism, even if it is not terribly instructive in the basic tenets of the religion. And both Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... And It's All Small Stuff, and One Day My Soul Just Opened Up make reference to Eastern philosophy of a watered-down sort.
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June 22, 1999

Air Sickness

Ready for vengeance, everyone?

It is I, the Great Shopping Avenger, reporting to you from the Great Hall of Consumer Justice, a k a the Shopping Avenger's poorly air-conditioned attic office.

The Shopping Avenger has had a terribly busy month (Aquaman never had it so busy), and he is pleased to report that demand for his services has grown exponentially. He is also disconcerted, because the sheer number of e-mails in response to last month's installment means that too many evil corporations are treating too many loyal consumers without regard for the basic norms of customer care, such as answering the phone and not calling customers bad names.
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April 10, 1999

Splat! Bam! Pow! @#$%&!

Fear no more, earthlings, the age of frustration and humiliation is over! I am the great Shopping Avenger, who hath descended to Earth from the planet Galleria in a nuclear-fueled Chrysler Town & Country minivan (base price: $27,385, left sliding door standard in most models) to save you from the dark forces of turbo-charged capitalism and shoddy customer service.

OK, enough with the superhero shtick. It's unsustainable over several paragraphs.

Here's the problem: Like most American shoppers, I've been doing my part to fuel the Dow to absurd heights. My own personal consumer confidence is high (up 2.5 percent just this last month!), and my spending is profligate--laptops and children's toys and weed whackers and coffee tables and SUVs. They make it, I buy it. Retail, even.
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March 14, 1999

Demand an Explanation!!!

Greetings, pissed-off consumers. It is I, the great Shopping Avenger, who has toiled without pause this past month (all right, I paused) to right the wrongs inflicted on the buying masses by the dark forces of turbocharged capitalism.

Before writing the first installment of this column last month, the Shopping Avenger had no idea that so many people would have so many complaints about so many different companies. The Shopping Avenger also had no idea so many people read Slate. The complaints, as Alan Simpson would say, have come pouring in over the transom. I received somewhere around 2.7 million e-mails from Slate readers asking for help in the battle against poor customer service. Perhaps it was fewer than 2.7 million, but not by much.
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March 12, 1999

Diary: Jeffrey Goldberg

Posted Monday, March 8, 1999, at 7:00 PM ET

I don't want to create the impression that I'm paranoid, but big black helicopters are circling my house as I write this. This is not an unusual occurrence. I don't mean writing--which, these days, is highly unusual--but the big black helicopters.

When I covered night cops at the Washington Post, my colleagues and I, in the interest of reportorial efficiency, divided the city into two sectors. D.C. residents either lived on quiet, tree-lined streets or on trash-strewn, drug-infested streets. There was no such thing, in the night-cop playbook, as a quiet, drug-infested neighborhood, or a tree-lined, trash-strewn neighborhood.

But when we moved to American University Park (Motto: "A Second-Tier Neighborhood for a Third-Tier University") a couple of years ago, I realized that there is such a thing in D.C. as a national security neighborhood. These neighborhoods are tree-lined and decisively un-trash-strewn, but they are not quiet, on account of the black helicopters.
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January 6, 1999

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

By way of introducing our subject--providing for the material needs of a baby--a caveat: Whatever it is, you don't need it.

In other words, do as I say, not as I've done. It is permissible, I believe, to shop like a mad dog for your first child and, when Daughter No. 1 arrived nearly two years ago, I did. But when my auxiliary daughter appeared on the scene last month, I learned not one lesson from the mistakes of previous rampages.
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November 8, 1998

The Potato Eaters

Because I am a highly trained TV writer and have sources throughout Hollywood, I can now bring you, verbatim, the pitch meeting in which the now-canceled Fox Network sitcom Costello was first proposed--

Fox Executive No. 1: OK, give us the high concept.

Writer: Right, Costello is Good Will Hunting meets, well, Good Will Hunting, but with a chick instead of Matt Damon.

Fox Executive No. 2: All right, but what's the concept, what's the theme?

Writer: Oh, right. The theme is, Irish people are retards.

Fox Executive No. 2: [thoughtfully] Yeah, I can work with that, but there's got to be something more ...

Writer: OK, how about this: Irish people are loud retards.

Fox Executive No. 1: That sounds like a winner to me!

Writer: One more thing: We'll call the father Spud. Get it, like potato?
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September 27, 1998

Unfunny Business

Over the past year, I've learned three new things about Howard Stern: He's possibly the tallest Jew in the world; he carries a gun; and, as a cultural phenomenon, he is very much over. For this last, most pertinent, fact, he has the Office of the Independent Counsel to thank.

Stern's new TV program, The Howard Stern Radio Show, which appears Saturday nights on an ever-shrinking number of CBS-owned and affiliated stations, is a nonstarter. (Two stations--one in Arizona and one in Texas--have dropped the Stern show since it premiered Aug. 26, citing offensiveness. Its ratings hover just above zero.) It is not much different from Stern's daily radio show--Stern belches into his microphone, talks about the modest dimensions of his penis, and molests strippers. The only difference is that on television, we get to see the strippers. The penis remains hidden.
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August 12, 1998

Right Here in River City!

The recent announcement that CBS will bless America's TV watchers this fall with a second 60 Minutes--a lighter, crispier version--sparks the inevitable question: How many weeks will pass before former CNN producer April Oliver is hired to produce a segment on the secret U.S. Army plan to drop leprous dogs on the heads of innocent Sandinistas?

Actually, that is not the real inevitable question. The real inevitable question is this: Now that television is flush with newsmagazines--two or three each night, it seems--where are producers going to find all that news?
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May 13, 1998

The Secret Story of Ally McBeal

In reference to the vast right-wing conspiracy, I am pleased to report that I have discovered its nexus: Ally McBeal.

The television industry is surely controlled by the extreme right. How else to explain two trends in televised entertainment: the raft of police shows that revel in the denial of Miranda rights to minority suspects and the equally impressive number of sitcoms in which the female characters are portrayed as man-starved, clothes-obsessed, dimwit weaklings? The hand of Gary Bauer is apparent.
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April 12, 1998

Jews You Can Use

The following are fields in which Jewish men are believed to excel: gastroenterology, the violin, political consulting, the domination of world financial markets, and particle physics. One field in which it is believed we do poorly, however, is beating people up. We are, the stereotype has it, lousy fighters, and this rankles. Some of us respond to this slander by embracing, in the words of the cultural critic Daniel Boyarin, our "sissy heritage" and taking up, among other things, the study of Yiddish (not for nothing is it known as "mama-loshen," the mother tongue). Others move in the opposite direction and join the Israeli army, where Yiddish, the language of our sissy exile, is most definitely not spoken. Still others take up ice hockey.
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February 5, 1998

My Nanny Problem

In a recent episode of the popular CBS comedy series The Nanny, nanny Fran, played by the nasal yenta Fran Drescher, is asked by her boss, the daft English millionaire Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy), to discourage a budding relationship between his college-age daughter and her philosophy professor.

The nanny, dressed, as ever, in polyurethane, visits the professor, played by Harry Hamlin (which answers the trivia question "Whatever happened to Harry Hamlin?"). Hamlin's philosophy professor falls immediately for the nanny, but the nanny is torn--she is in love with Sheffield, who unfortunately fears commitment. This is one of the show's running jokes.
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November 16, 1997

Valley of the Molls

It is now officially time to say, "Enough." Or, as Vanessa Redgrave, the most absurd TV Sicilian in the long and storied history of television Sicilians, might say, "Basta."

Redgrave mumbles her way through the role of matriarch to a female-dominated Mafia family (it includes Redgrave, Illeana Douglas, Nastassja Kinski, and Jennifer Tilly) in the worst Mafia drama ever made, Bella Mafia, which is brought to us by the increasingly desperate programming executives at CBS, the same people who earlier this year eviscerated Mario Puzo's The Last Don in order to make the second-worst Mafia drama of all time.
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September 24, 1997

The Way of All Perps

About 10 minutes into the premiere episode of Steven Bochco's initially thrilling CBS crime series, Brooklyn South, I found myself wishing deeply unpleasant tortures--specifically, tortures involving the nonbusiness end of a toilet plunger--upon the psychopathic black perpetrator who commits the heinous crimes that open the show. This, of course, is what the reactionaries who work on the Bochco police-drama assembly line want me to feel: Nothing like a vicious black perp to get the fear-juice of white America flowing.
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July 20, 1997

Animal Farm

There is a moral that HBO is trying to impart in its new series, Oz, a prison drama that's less an experiment in penal realism than a work of penal pornography. The moral is: Whitey best not drive drunk. If he does, he'll kill a little white girl, end up in the Oswald Maximum Security Prison (the "Oz" of the title), and become "bitch" either to a well-muscled black thug or, because this is television and scrupulous racial balance must be maintained, to a psychopathic Aryan Brotherhood member.

Such is the fate of the character Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a bespectacled white lawyer who cowers and cringes through the first episode, which raises the question: Didn't he ever see Sean Penn in Bad Boys? Didn't he at least see Scared Straight, the proto-gangsta documentary that introduced a generation of sheltered white boys to the idea that you shouldn't show fear in prison unless you enjoy the depredations of men who in less polite times were referred to as "buck Negroes"? Beecher is the stand-in for the mass of Caucasian viewers who have been conditioned by Hollywood to fear the prospect of being anally raped by black convicts. In the Jim Crow era, white men oppressed black men partially out of fear that the blacks would ravish virginal white women. Today, white men fear ravishment themselves. This is progress.
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June 19, 1997

News You Can't Use

Before we begin delving into the merits and demerits of the approximately 374 new and existing cable TV "news" networks--in particular the old man of the cable box, CNN, and the two upstarts, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel--let me disclose my biases.

The first bias is one that favors the news-gathering approach of the C-SPAN network, which won me over when it broadcast a half-hour holiday special consisting entirely of a guy walking through the Capitol with a camera filming the Christmastime decorations in the offices of various congressmen. It even had a voice-over if I remember correctly--a retiring, understated announcer who said things like, "And here we see Representative Maxine Waters' Hanukkah bush, adorning the anteroom of her Longworth Building office." Or maybe that was just the voice-over in my head.
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May 11, 1997

An Offer He Should Have Refused

Here is the moment I realized that CBS had done something genuinely awful to Mario Puzo's The Last Don. This little stretch of dialogue, which occurs in the third, or fourth, or possibly fifth hour of this swamp of a miniseries, takes place between Claudia De Lena, a Hollywood attorney, who is played by Michelle Rene Thomas, and Athena Aquitane, a movie star, who is played by the drippy Daryl Hannah. Aquitane's husband is stalking her, and she's desperate for help:

De Lena: I'm going to fly to Las Vegas and see my brother. He knows people.
Aquitane: Is he in the Mafia?
De Lena: Of course not.
Aquitane: Don't knock it. At this point, I could use the Mafia.
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