Tom Friedman's furrowed middlebrow

This column is a few months old, but it's a particularly good example of something illustrated by any number of Thomas Friedman columns, or indeed any amount of free-wheeling high-profile punditry. Various aspects of the argument strike me as absurd (the idea that the only really big problem the world had when Friedman was a kid was the fact that the Soviet Union was a nuclear state) to at best dubious and strained (the analogy between increasing U.S. government debt and increasing carbon emissions). But what struck me about it at the time, and why I remembered it this week, was something else: the breezy style in which Friedman issues pronouncements on three immensely complex subjects -- nuclear proliferation, the world's financial system, and climate change -- as if these are straightforward matters that he, Thomas Friedman, has sufficient expertise to comment on in a useful way because he slept in a Holiday Inn Express last night or something.

I was reminded about that this week because I've spent a lot of time doing media stuff on the childhood obesity panic (I'll be on CNN tomorrow at 7:45 PM eastern Update: link to video here), and I was struck, if I might indulge in a bit of liberal condescension, by how much I know on this subject, at least in comparison to almost everybody who is commenting on it.

Now this isn't because I'm some sort of genius, but simply because I've spent literally thousands of hours studying the subject of the relation between weight and health. I get a bemused smile when somebody in a comment thread starts pontificating about the "fact" that very thin people have high mortality rates because people lose lots of weight right before they die. As anyone in my position would be, I'm intimately familiar with the methodological debates about what to do to control for occult wasting in observational studies. Indeed I'm hip to all the tricks researchers use when trying to squeeze certain conclusions out of the data. That's why people like, to name names as they used to say back in the 1950s, Walter Willett and JoAnn Manson of the Harvard School of Public Health hate me with a visceral passion -- and I welcome their hatred.

Normally, people like Willett and Manson can shut dissenters up, or at least make them extremely cautious and mealy-mouthed, through the raw exercise of institutional power. They review articles for publication, consult on grant proposals, invite people to conferences, write tenure letters and letters of recommendation, place former students in key positions, and even hold press conferences to denounce researchers who publish inconvenient truths, to name just a few of the many tools at their disposal.

But hey I'm not a doctor, as I'm so often reminded. No kidding -- which means, among other things, that I'm off the grid. They can't do anything to me and it drives them nuts. It's hardly a coincidence that the most trenchant criticisms of the obesity orthodoxy are coming from academics who are mostly outside the public health establishment: from political scientists and sociologists and historians and physiologists and yes even a law professor or two. These are people who don't have to curry favor with the obesity powers that be to get hired and funded and tenured and promoted.

[Update: A few comments in this thread and in the torture/body stigmatization thread take the rather inexplicable view that I'm claiming "academia" is out to get obesity dissidents. To the contrary, academia enables obesity dissidence, as the links in the post indicate. The parallels between obesity dissidence and global warming denialism are interesting, but also highly problematic for all sorts of reasons. That's a subject for another post].

Anyway, back to Tom Friedman. One advantage of actually knowing a lot about something is that (unless you're an egomaniac) you have a keen sense of how little you know about almost everything. Here's what my opinion is worth, on the margin, to debates about nuclear proliferation in an age of terrorism, and managing the U.S. debt in the context of the world financial system, and dealing with the problem of anthropogenic climate change: Nothing. If I studied one of those things intensely for say five years I might have something to add. But I haven't and I don't. So I try to draw a distinction (at times unsuccessfully no doubt) between opining on subjects on which I actually know something (there are about two others besides fat), and everything else. I doubt, however, that someone like Friedman could do what he perceives to be his job if he drew a similar distinction.

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The politics of cowardice

I think it's a positive sign that the WSJ published this.

On a related note, in the last two days fighter jets have been scrambled twice to "accompany" flights on which passengers became fractious in some unspecified but ultimately non-terroristic way.

Does it really make everybody feel better that the USAF is apparently primed to shoot down commercial airliners at the drop of a hat?

Also, how much does that sort of nonsense cost?

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Terrorball

I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

How else can one explain the extreme and ongoing over-reaction to last week’s botched attempt to blow up Northwest flight 253? Commentators from Glenn Greenwald to David Brooks have pointed out that demands that the government keep us completely safe from the risk of terror attacks are both absurdly infantile, and very helpful to terrorists, since such demands place the bar for what counts as successful terrorism practically on the ground.

Meanwhile, in the week that began with a terrorist incident in which no one other than the pathetically incompetent aspiring terrorist was hurt, approximately 47,000 Americans died. Around 13,000 of these people never reached old age, including nearly one thousand children.

Indeed over the past seven days approximately 350 Americans were murdered. About twenty of these murder victims were women killed by their husbands and boyfriends, while something like 35 were children who died as a result of abuse. Several hundred Americans committed suicide between Christmas and New Year’s Day and several hundred others died as a direct consequence of not having any medical insurance.

All of this is considered completely natural and normal and therefore not in the slightest bit newsworthy. At the same time, President Obama is being criticized for not rushing back to Washington from his holiday vacation because a wannabe terrorist managed to set his own underwear on fire.

On one level, Terrorball can be understood as a product of straightforward cynicism: Both politicians and media moguls know that fear can be exploited for power and profit. But the rules of the game have another source as well.

In the more than eight years since the 9/11 terror attacks, I’ve often been struck by inability or unwillingness of Al Qaeda to carry out occasional small-scale terror attacks within the United States. Given the climate of hysterical nationalism and rampant paranoia that continues to grip much of America in the wake of 9/11, setting off a car bomb once or twice a year on some big city street would probably whip up enough panic to satisfy the ambitions of any terrorist organization.

So why do Islamic terrorists continue to try to blow up commercial jetliners, rather than focusing their efforts on more vulnerable targets? Besides the most obvious reason – that there are very few such terrorists, and their destructive abilities are in fact extremely limited – it appears these terrorists understand the psychology of our political and media elites quite well.

That psychology dictates a third rule of Terrorball: destroying a commercial jet is the most terrifying form of terrorism, and if (when) terrorists once again manage this feat, in the face of all the elaborate steps taken to stop them, then they will have truly “won.”

Now why should this be? Part of the reason is that the normal conditions of airline travel, which create feelings of claustrophobia, helplessness, and a general loss of control, are ripe for exploitation by those who want to use fear as a political weapon, i.e., terrorists and those eager to enhance and manipulate the fear of terrorism.

Another reason has to do the imaginative capacities of our elites. The typical Congressional subcommittee chairman or cable news anchor or syndicated columnist can’t really imagine not being able to afford to take his child to a doctor, or being wrongly convicted of a crime, but he is quite capable of imagining being on a Paris to New York flight that’s blown out of the sky. And while it’s true the risk he faces of suffering this fate are very close to zero, they are not, as they are for a poor person, literally zero.

Terrorball, then, is an elaborate political game that seems irrational on its face – after all, it’s certain that more than 2.4 million Americans will die this year, and fairly likely that not even one of those deaths will be caused by terrorism -- but which features its own peculiar logic. That logic reflects the anxieties of those who have created its rules, and serves the interests of both terrorists and those who profit from exploiting the fear of terrorism.

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