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A day in the life of a public defender

Advocating for the indigent in rural Minnesota.


Editor’s Note: Names and details have been changed to maintain client confidentiality.


The sun was rising over the trees when I arrived at my office. I glanced at the five names that I had written on a yellow notepad, and then shoveled the files, calendar, and notepad into my briefcase. I grabbed a stack of business cards and a couple of pens, then walked two blocks to the courthouse, where I would spend the rest of the day.

The names on my notepad were all people I had been appointed to represent. Each of the five was poor, and each was, in one way or another, in trouble with the law. It was my job to help navigate them through the criminal justice system, to insure that their constitutional rights were vindicated, and to advocate on their behalf against what often seems like the limitless power and resources of the state.

I am a public defender. I primarily practice in a rural northern Minnesota county, which spans the eastern edge of Leech Lake Reservation to the southwestern portion of the Iron Range. In the two and a half years I have practiced here, I have been berated by clients who feel that I am incompetent or who feel cheated by a system that can be both unfair and unjust. Moreover, while most people seem to like the idea of public defenders, in practice their reaction can be much different. As an advocate for the same clients, I’ve been verbally attacked by judges and prosecutors alike. I’ve been called sneaky and underhanded by probation officers. I’ve been accused of lying, and I’ve had police officers ask me how I sleep at night.

Hurt feelings aside, I have also collaborated with many of the same people to achieve some very beneficial results for my clients. While familiarity can breed contempt, it is vital to the practice of efficient and effective public defense. Just as important as my legal training, my knowledge of local standards and the relationships I’ve forged with judges, prosecutors, probation officers, treatment providers, and law enforcement, though at times contentious, allow me to maintain a heavy caseload, zealously represent my clients, and focus my time and energy on those cases that need it the most.

When I arrived at the courthouse, I made my way to a conference room, where I was joined by the four other public defenders who would be handling the day’s cases. We discussed each item on the calendar and divided the previously unassigned cases. I wrote down the names of my new clients, and then went to the jail.

At the jail I met with George, and we discussed his options, which included trial, regular probation, or drug court. George lived in a town of about 800 people in the northwest corner of the county. Just days after his 18th birthday, George was sitting shotgun in his friend Bill’s SUV while Bill filled his tank at the local BP station. Resting under the seat was eight ounces of marijuana. When Bill saw the town’s chief of police walking toward him, he panicked, taking off in his truck without paying for the gas. Eight blocks down the road, the chief pulled Bill over. The chief was grilling Bill on the evils of gasoline theft when he caught a whiff of pot smoke from inside the vehicle. He searched Bill’s truck, found the marijuana, and arrested both Bill and George. George was released from jail the next day, with specific instructions not to use drugs. However, George found his freedom fleeting, especially when conditioned on chemical abstinence. Having tested positive for cocaine (George attributed this to his massive consumption of energy drinks), George was returned to jail seven days after his initial release. He would remain in jail as long as the case was pending, unable to afford the $5,000 bail.

George refused to point the finger at Bill, or anyone else for that matter, and he didn’t want to be subjected to the daily check-ins and frequent testing that came with drug court. More than anything, George wanted to get out of jail. Given his limited defenses, I told George that I would talk to the prosecutor about having him released from jail today if he agreed to plead guilty.

The next person I met with was Gabe. At 19, Gabe had been caught breaking into a gas station storage locker in order to huff propane. Although his affect resembled a Nebraska prairie, I liked Gabe. I had previously represented Gabe, both of Gabe’s parents, and Gabe’s younger brother. They never committed any serious crimes and, although they seemed to enjoy living on the fringes of the law, they were generally good-natured. Gabe’s most recent adventure with law enforcement involved using apple juice to fake a urine sample, and it had landed him in jail for 45 days.

Over the weekend, Gabe got into a fight with his cellmate. While I didn’t have any paperwork, Gabe informed me that there weren’t any defenses and that he just wanted to resolve the case as quickly and quietly as possible. I told Gabe I would try to negotiate a sentence that did not involve probation or any additional jail time. While Gabe never told me what precipitated the fight, I found out later that the fight started when his cellmate complained that Gabe wasn’t cleaning up after himself when he was done masturbating in the shower. When I heard this, all I could think about was that I wasn’t going to shake Gabe’s hand the next time I saw him.

The last person I needed to visit at the jail was Florence. Florence’s problems stemmed not only from her horrible addiction to pain medication, but from the myriad of mental health problems she had experienced throughout her lifetime.

Reading Florence’s psychological evaluation was like reading a how-to manual on the application of the DSM-IV. Still, the court-appointed psychological evaluator said that Florence was competent, and she had subsequently pled guilty to a low-level felony drug crime for changing the number on her Vicodin prescription from six to 60. Florence struggled mightily with probation, and she had just gotten kicked out of inpatient treatment. Her probation officer wanted Florence to go to prison and, while her mental health case manager opposed prison, neither she nor I had been able to secure funding for a treatment program that could meet all of Florence’s needs.

When Florence walked into the meeting room, she was surprisingly lucid, and she expressed how weary she was with treatment and probation. She had no interest in doing treatment, and seemed excited about the prospect of getting released from probation, even if it meant sitting more than six months in jail. Florence feared prison, telling me that she wanted to sit the remainder of her sentence in the county jail. I told her that we would continue her case until she had less than six months remaining on the sentence. (Under Minnesota law, people with less than six months remaining on their sentences are considered “short-term offenders.” When a short-term sentence is executed, the person serves the remainder of his or her sentence in the county jail as opposed to prison. Disclaimer: To anyone reading this article, this is not legal advice.)

After I finished meeting with Florence, a jailer buzzed me through the sally port, and I made my way to the county attorney’s office. Sitting in the office, I could tell that the prosecutor was preoccupied by other cases. I brought up Marylyn’s case. Not all public defender clients are created equal, and Marylyn is poorer than most. She shared a trailer several miles south of town with a mongrel Shih-Tzu/Pomeranian named Smokey, her most prized possession. Marylyn had no family aside from her sister Judy, and she felt betrayed by Judy. Three years ago, Marylyn and Judy had gotten caught lifting money from the cash registers at Wal-Mart, where they both had worked. Both had pled guilty, and both were on felony probation. Since that time, Marylyn had cleaned herself up, while Judy was still fighting a demon called methamphetamine. Now Marylyn was back in front of the court, charged, along with Judy, with presenting a forged fifty-dollar check at the local grocery store. Because of Marylyn’s record, the prosecutor charged her with a felony.

Marylyn maintained that both her innocence and the marginal evidence the state had against her provided hope that she would be acquitted at trial. Also, Judy expressed her willingness to testify at trial that she had led Marylyn to believe that the owner of the check, which was already signed, had given the check to Judy, and that Marylyn had no way of knowing the check was stolen or forged. Still, Marylyn feared jail as a fate worse than death, and the stress resulting from having to put her faith in the hands of 12 jurors was starting to take its toll.

I suggested to the prosecutor that he reduce Marylyn’s charge from a felony to a misdemeanor. He refused, and the best deal I could get him to agree to was a stay of adjudication, meaning Marylyn would not have a felony on her record if she successfully completed probation. He also offered to suspend all jail time, as long as Marylyn’s probation officer was agreeable. I also asked about George, the young man in jail on drug charges. The prosecutor agreed to suspend all future jail time if George agreed to plead guilty, meaning that if George pled guilty, he would be released from jail today and he would not be required to serve any additional jail time unless he violated the terms of his probation.

When I left the county attorney’s office, I found Marylyn sitting among the people lining the hallway outside of the courtroom. We found a meeting room and I told her about the new offer. Marylyn seemed willing to accept the offer as long as she didn’t have to do any jail time. I racked my brain to think of viable sanctions besides jail. Marylyn couldn’t afford the fee of $5 to $15 per day for the ankle bracelet, and she didn’t have consistent transportation to get to and from community service. Nonetheless, I made these suggestions to her probation officer as alternatives to jail. I also stressed the weaknesses in the state’s case and Marylyn’s success on probation up until now. The probation officer agreed that there were some mitigating circumstances, but she told me that she would not be agreeable to any less than 15 days in jail.

When I told Marylyn about the probation officer’s request, she began to weep. I reminded her that we could still go to trial if that’s what she wanted, but she didn’t know what to do. She told me that she wants to go to trial but she doesn’t want to risk a longer jail sentence should she lose. Also, because Judy was in a treatment program, Marylyn had no one to feed Smokey, and she couldn’t afford to board him. I tried twice more, in vain, to convince Marylyn’s probation officer to allow community service, monitoring, or some combination of the two, and to reduce or eliminate the jail time.

By the time I finished speaking with Marylyn, the jailers had escorted my clients up to the courtroom. I quickly read the one-page police reports that had been filed in each of my new cases, and then talked to the prosecutors that were handling the cases. We were able to resolve Gabe’s case quickly, when the prosecutor agreed with my proposal to sentence Gabe to an executed 10-day jail sentence. I then negotiated with the prosecutor to have one of my driving while intoxicated (DWI) clients sentenced immediately so that he would be eligible for the jail’s work release program. Another new DWI client would be released from jail today with a number of conditions, including the condition that he not drink or enter establishments selling and serving alcohol.

Walking into a conference room adjoining the courtroom, I saw several of my clients, dressed in orange and handcuffed to one another. I told George that if he pled guilty, he would be released from jail and that unless he violated his probation, he would not have to do any more jail time. I told Gabe that if he pled guilty he would have to sit 10 days in jail that would run concurrent (at the same time) to the sentence he was already serving. I then explained the concept of release conditions, as well as the consequences of a guilty plea, to my two new DWI clients.

It was now my turn to go in front of the judge. I called Marylyn’s case. I told the judge that we had not resolved the case, and that the court should set the matter for trial. A trial date was set. Next, I called George, who pled guilty and admitted to the judge that the marijuana belonged to him. The judge agreed to release him from jail until sentencing. Gabe also pled guilty. Florence’s hearing was continued two weeks. Court dates were set for several of my new clients.

Back at the office, I processed paperwork from the day’s court hearings, returned phone calls, and started to prepare for a contested hearing that I had set for Wednesday. The contested issue in Wednesday’s hearing was the prosecutor’s attempts to send Charlie to prison. When Charlie was 17, he and three of his friends — Joe, Adam, and Nate — assaulted Nate’s sister’s boyfriend with a golf club. Though the assault was serious, Charlie’s role was more that of a bystander than actual participant. Nonetheless, Charlie pled guilty to the assault and was sentenced to a hybrid juvenile-adult sentence. As such, although Charlie was only 17, he had a 60-month prison sentence hanging over his head.

As part of his original sentence, the judge had sent Charlie to a long-term treatment program. Charlie excelled in the program and when he was done, he returned to live with his aunt and uncle, who had raised him. During the next eight months, Charlie became a true success story. He found work, he graduated from high school, he earned a scholarship for college, and his probation officer raved about his accomplishments. When he wasn’t in school or at work, Charlie was at home, helping his aunt and uncle with their bough-picking business.

In January of 2007, Charlie’s aunt and uncle were killed when their car hit a patch of ice and slid into an oncoming grain truck. Having already lost both of his parents — his mother had committed suicide when Charlie was 11 and his father overdosed just last year — Charlie was devastated. He started drinking heavily, and stopped going to see his probation officer. Fifteen months later, Charlie was arrested for domestic assault after he got into a fight with his younger brother. The fight took place in another county; Charlie pled guilty and was sentenced in the other county without knowing what his consequences would be in my county.

Now, despite all of the tragedy Charlie had experienced over the past two years, the prosecutor wanted to send Charlie to prison. The prosecutor wanted Charlie to go to prison even though Charlie’s probation officer said that prison was not appropriate, even though we had gotten him into a six-month alcohol treatment program, and even though Charlie’s fiancée said that she needed him with her to help care for their eight-month-old child. I thought the prosecutor’s position was ridiculous, but I was nervous because the judge had just sent Charlie’s friend Adam to prison under very similar circumstances. I wanted to make sure that all of my arguments and questioning were prepared prior to the hearing.

Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals once wrote, “[a] bare-bones system for the defense of indigent criminal defendants may be optimal.” How pleased he would have been watching me practice on that day. I didn’t make any special demands on the prosecutor or the judge, I didn’t contest anything, and, with the exception of Charlie, I didn’t spend more than a half hour on any given client. Still, I had worked a full day, and when I left the office just before 8:00 p.m., I was spent.

Like many other public defenders, my goal is to provide my clients with representation that is as good as, if not better than, the representation they would receive if they could afford a private attorney. While I owe this duty to each one of my clients, a heavy caseload and lack of funding makes it impossible to dedicate significant time and resources to each case. Instead, effective public defense requires a triage approach: quickly identifying which cases have legal or factual issues, and which cases are more likely to go to trial, then focusing time and resources on those cases. The tricky part of this approach is making sure that those clients whose cases do not receive a significant amount of time and attention still have their constitutional rights vindicated and receive a disposition that is acceptable to them.

When I tell people about my job, I often hear “How can you defend those people?” We are “those people.” Every time a legislator utters, “there ought to be a law against …,” the line between what is criminal and what is not is blurred. Moreover, “those people,” just like us, have constitutional rights, not the least of which is the right to counsel. More than a formality, the right to counsel provides the most effective means through which all other rights are enforced. As a public defender, I hold this right dear to the protection of liberty, not only for “those people,” but for all of us. Though I know it not to be the case, I can only hope that Marylyn, George, Florence, Gabe, Charlie, and anyone else who is unfortunate enough to be poor and charged with a crime, feel the same way.

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Reviews

Brother One Cell

A look at life behind the bars of a South Korean prison.


 

Every expatriate in Asia has known this guy. He is the one that cultivates a patch of marijuana in the hills near Lake Biwa. He smuggles condom-wrapped ecstasy tablets up his ass from Ko Samui. He buys magic mushrooms in a Cambodian bar for resale in Singapore, or horse-trades cheap methamphetamine in a Seoul nightclub. And now and then you hear of these guys getting busted, and later you wonder what ever happened to them.

While teaching English in Seoul in 1994, Cullen Thomas made a plan to visit a remote mountain village in Luzon, buy bricks of hash on the cheap, mail them to himself in Seoul, and to sell them to the expat crowd. The first brick arrived safely, and he was a 23-year-old cosmopolitan outlaw: “Like many of the other foreigners, I fooled myself into thinking that I could operate alongside Korean society and yet not have to answer to it.”  He signed for the second brick poste restante, and was quickly surrounded by drug agents. 

Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons (Viking) is his memoir of prison life and his journey from youth into manhood. The early chapters are a cautionary tale for any foreigner sucked into the South Korean criminal justice system. In a Kafkaesque scenario, he deals with a con artist Korean lawyer, bratty and bungling translators, and a prosecutor that uses him to practice his English.

South Korean police work often depends on forced confessions rather than investigative work to make a case. He recalls a “short, fat man who still has the grease of lunch on his face and the smell of liquor on his breath” approaching him with a cattle prod-like device:  “All I can think is What the hell? before he casually presses it against my upper right thigh and triggers it again with a smile. A painful blast of electric current shoots through me, shoots me right out of my chair into the middle of the room.”

Thomas was sentenced for three and a half years with no appeal. During that period he served his time in three different prisons, and his compatriots were Pakistani killers, Peruvian thieves, an American child murderer, smugglers, and Korean draft dodgers. Inside his cell and inside his head, he rages at his shame and predicament, he worries for a girl he left behind, and he gains wisdom into his own nature and human nature.

He adapts with a monk-like acceptance and finds work in the prison’s shoe factory to pass the time. In the prison yard, he becomes a basketball hero and earns some respect in no-rules dirt court games organized by gangsters. Back in his cell, he bides his time by keeping a surreptitious diary with a stolen pen. He learns of friends that are denied visits and of confiscated care packages from family members. He is not allowed to write about the prison, so he learns to write letters in a roundabout narrative to avoid the censors.

Some of his observations of Korean society are so accurate they could be equally applied to life in Korea outside the prison walls: He describes an unappetizing diet that is not much different than what most Korean day laborers eat everyday. The drab, cold cement walls in unheated buildings could be any rural Korean elementary school. The petty prison bureaucrats are equally contemptible as those at city hall, and throughout his story, Thomas describes the inane pissing contests of Confucian hierarchies.

It is important to note that Thomas harbors no animosity for Korea from his hardening prison experience. Back home in New York, he eats bibimbap and is asked by Korean acquaintances if he will ever return. He writes, “I had a lot of love and appreciation left in me for Korea. She had taken me to the edge and let me look over, but she never let me go and didn’t leave me there too long. She didn’t feel the same about me. I don’t know if I can ever go back.”

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Commentary

On the shoulders of giants

Tramping in New Zealand.


There are moments, like long stretches of New Zealand’s Whanganui River, when time flattens out and one need do nothing but simply exist, floating along the surface and enjoying the fine day. My wife and I spent three such days on the Whanganui River Journey, one of New Zealand’s famous Great Walks. To dip your paddle into the river is to dip into a perfect reflection of the deep, wild valleys and the clear blue sky. At times the river is so peaceful that these moments can stretch into infinity, and time, a construct for lesser beings, vanishes.

 

 

There are other moments, both in life and on the river, that demand action. A canoe can be an unforgiving method of travel on rapids, all too apt to turn sideways and capsize, dumping its occupants into the roiling current. When the front of your canoe enters a rapid, the water beneath it begins to move faster, until the boat and the river are moving at the same speed. It is critical at this point to maintain the boat’s momentum, and so you paddle as hard as you can, reaching and pulling at the churning water while wrenching at the river with your paddle, maneuvering your canoe around rocks and keeping yourself upright and inside the boat. It is a rush, a blur of action independent from conscious thought, and it is even fun when you spill into the river. If you do find yourself in the river, you just wring yourself out, collect your belongings, and continue on your way. The sun is warm and the water soon calms.

And if your way should include your rental car grazing a guardrail, you should laugh and try to forget about it, and remember that Kiwis are nice people. I learned this at a panel beater in the small town of Renwick, in the heart of the Marlborough Valley, New Zealand’s wine country. The owner of the local shop looked at the scratch, squinted, and said, "I think we can get that out." While he worked on the car, we told him our story. In a few minutes, the scratch was gone and we were on our way. "Just tell everyone that Kiwis are nice people," he said, refusing our money. Consider yourself told.

 

 

 

There are more than 20 vineyards within a few miles of Renwick. The spectacular countryside and density of the vineyards makes the bicycle an ideal mode of transportation for a wine tour. The wineries in the region offer free or low-cost tastings and sell their wines in their "cellar door" shops. The regional specialty is Sauvignon Blanc, but slight climactic variations means that each vineyard grows slightly different grapes, producing distinct wines. You learn quickly that the bartender is the gatekeeper to each winery’s finest vintages, and it is in your interest to make friends with this person, since he or she decides if you are good enough for the good stuff. It pays to speak the language: You may refer to a Sauvignon Blanc as reminiscent of an unoaked California Chardonnay, or comment on how the Pinot Noir of the region is spicier and less dusky than French or Italian varieties. We tasted many inferior vintages, but we were finally rewarded with a taste of a fine, single cask Pinot Noir at the Nautilus Vineyard, where an ex-pat American cracked open the vineyard’s Special Reserve for us. It was brisk and unique, inviting and beguiling, much like the rest of New Zealand.

Queenstown is the adventure capital of New Zealand, a country famous for its adventurers. We were ready for an adventure; it is what we came to New Zealand for. Some people like bungee jumping. Some enjoy parasailing. Others are more into skiing, snowboarding, mountain-climbing, hang gliding, or jet-boating, all of which is available in or around Queenstown. Not us. We prefer trekking up a steep hill and back down the other side, preferably across streams and other difficult terrain. We settled on the Rees-Dart track, a four-day jaunt into the Southern Alps.

 

 

 

It was great. We slept in DOC huts and walked through open alpine tundra, above the tree line, rocks and hardy plants clinging to the hills around us. When a heavy fog rolled in and enveloped us in its thick, misty embrace, it felt as if we were walking across the surface of Venus. The atmosphere was ghostly; people drifted in and out of view, and the moisture in the air absorbed sound like a wet sponge, enforcing an eerie silence that hung over the trail.

But when the sun finally broke through, peeling the gloomy mist away, it felt glorious. The warm rays slanted down, carving thick slices through the mist and awakening us from our slumber. The wet landscape glistened in the bright light, and the mountains’ snow-topped peaks winked and sparkled at us. I smiled as we clambered over boulders and across small streams, tramping through the New Zealand countryside in a local tradition as old as human settlement in the region.

 

 

 

After our hike, we continued north from Queenstown, and climbed Avalanche Peak, near Albert’s Pass, our final exploration of New Zealand’s astounding natural beauty. The peak overlooks a valley in the middle of the South Island. A highway and a railroad snake past the small town at the pass. As I stood there at the crest, a frozen instant in time, I felt as if I were on the shoulders of giants, with snowy peaks soaring to the sky all around me. I was born in the flat, featureless Midwest, but my grandfather is from Colorado. It is from him that I get my love of the mountains. They are breathtaking in their sheer size, and the blue-white snow that clings to the tops looks so majestic — a powerful reminder of my relative size and place in the world. I do my best to remember this and stay respectful. It is all any of us can do.

 

 

I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.

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Photo Essays

A boy grows in Brooklyn

After years of wanting a baby and undertaking 11 rounds of artificial insemination, Lynn finally became pregnant.


Nine months later, she and her partner, Lori, welcomed Jack into their Brooklyn home. Photographer and neighbor Claire Houston documents the couple’s first months of motherhood.

 

[ Click here to view the visual essay ]

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Reviews

From the page to the stage

The universality of David Sedaris — a review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames.


 

After selling millions of books worldwide, penning an Obie Award–winning play with his equally well-noted younger sister Amy, and cultivating the kind of sweater-vested, lefty politico audience that must keep the suits at National Pubic Radio (NPR) waist-deep in spicy tuna rolls, how exactly does David Sedaris manage to keep himself fresh and culturally relevant? At the top of his game, Sedaris has always been the thinking man’s humorist — the kind of literary lothario that even your grandmother has heard of (and adores, naturally). Now, with his sixth collection of witty, observational-styled essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris has reached a crossroads in his epic career: either grow with your core base, or fade into pop cultural obscurity.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, along with its accompanying global book tour, can best be viewed as an ongoing case study in misfit dysfunction — a natural continuation to Sedaris’ trademark genre of wry, autobiographical narration. Whereas his previous collections have revolved primarily around the outrageous hijinks of his thoroughly unpredictable Greek family, the stories presented in Flames display a heightened sense of maturity and confident self-awareness, the sort of which that courses breathlessly through every page and every chapter. If Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris’ 2000 release about moving to France with his partner and his struggle to cope with learning a foreign language while thriving in a foreign land, stood as his literary adolescent years, then Flames represents full-fledged adulthood: a coming-out party for a now-seasoned world traveler; an awkward pupil of culture now especially skilled at the unusual art of adaptation.

As its inflammatory title suggests, Flames spends more than 300 pages highlighting emotions of fear and discomfort and the many perils of frequent travel, and no one recreates the outsider experience quite as vividly as Sedaris (in classic, peak form) does. There’s a reason why he is able to affix the title “noted humorist” to his business cards, and in Flames, the humor is no less sharp or wryly observant than in prior works. The difference here is that Sedaris is writing from an interloper’s perspective more frequently than he has in the past, and his descriptions of third party discomfort play as well as the book’s more personal elements do.

An early chapter entitled “Keeping Up” finds Sedaris watching vacationing American couples arguing loudly outside of his apartment window, taking desperate stabs at figuring their way around Sedaris’ adopted home of Paris, while concurrently mangling the French language as though it were a garbage-bound piece of paper. (One woman even mistakenly believes that her meager Spanish skills will suffice for the trip.) Still another story brings Sedaris to the doorstep of his father’s neighbors in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he makes acquaintances with a flamboyant 15-year-old, whose own Southern-fried parents proudly proclaim to be a homosexual. Odd, Sedaris sniffs in his biting narrative. In his own Southern childhood, identifying oneself as gay would have been nothing short of a death sentence; you’d have to find yourself a girlfriend “who was willing to settle for the sensitive type.”

The best story in Flames, however, is the memoir’s last: a multipart epic about the author’s two-decade-long love affair with smoking cigarettes and subsequent decision to give them up for good. It’s an arduous undertaking that has Sedaris and his partner, Hugh, relocating to Japan for a three-month excursion, steeped in the fundamental principles of cultural misfit-hood. Broken up into three distinct sections — “Before,” “Japan,” and “After,” respectively — the story offers an inside man’s perspective into Sedaris at his very best and most introspective, and indeed, the entire account reads as though the passages were copied directly from the pages of his diary. “The Smoking Section” is equal parts poignant and melodramatic, altruistic and self-serving, all at once. It is here that Sedaris demonstrates his remarkable ability to spin seemingly mundane scenes into funny and interesting lifestyle pieces, with no shortage of heart. By its conclusion, one can’t help but wonder why moving to Tokyo wouldn’t be just as, if not more, effective a method for kicking butts as attaching an endless parade of nicotine patches to one’s forearm would be.

As a performer, Sedaris’ star shines equally as bright, but in a radically different manner than his comedic persona radiates when regulated to the page. Currently underway on a multicity North American book reading tour, Sedaris has taken to reading out loud from works by other authors, a few of his as-yet unpublished essays, and even a smattering of excerpts from his personal journal, offering a rare glimpse of the author when he is unfiltered by the bounds of the editing process.

It’s fun to watch Sedaris relay his unique brand of offbeat, awkward humor to the audience in person, and listening to the introductory origins of each story provides the kind of elated enhancement that is more often applied to the most cherished of fantasy fiction, but rarely to the kind of observational memoir writing of which Sedaris has repeatedly proven himself a master. Robbed of the protection of editors and literary distance, many equally capable writers would more than likely find themselves foundering onstage. In his public readings though, Sedaris demonstrates that, on paper or off, he’s able to use his biting and keen sense of humor to make pathways into his audience’s hearts; put quite simply, he’s just a funny guy.

Converting humor from the page to the stage is no easy feat, and many fine nuances are often sacrificed in translation. The fact that Sedaris has been able to consistently maintain a long-lasting relationship with his avid readers stands as an overwhelming testament to his genius and talent as both a writer and a performer. The trick to remaining relevant is to grow and mature with one’s audience — a difficulty that has seen many gifted artists forfeited in its wake. Sedaris, conversely, continues to regenerate the kind of radiant humor and spark in both his writing and his performing that has simultaneously drawn in younger readers while keeping his core base unwaveringly interested. Upon reaching the summit of Flames, one gets the sense that this isn’t Sedaris’ zenith; rather, it’s something of a new beginning.

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News

Suicide in paradise

Why do Sri Lankans kill themselves in such large numbers?


Many descriptions of Sri Lanka today are of the “paradise lost” variety: What was once a stunningly beautiful island with sparkling beaches and lush jungle is now a war torn country mired in a protracted ethnic conflict. The 25-year war between the government of Sri Lanka and the rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has killed 80,000 people by some estimates and displaced hundreds of thousands, continues to grind on and hinders the tropical island from ever reaching its potential splendor.

There’s little truth to these descriptions, commonly found in tourist’s guides and the odd magazine piece. Death did not suddenly arrive on the doorstep of the paradise island 25 years ago. On the contrary, before Sri Lankans were killing each other in war, they were killing themselves.

 

 

In the early 1940s, Sri Lanka’s suicide rate was fairly average, but over the next decades it started to creep upward, gradually rising from roughly six people per 100,000 to nearly 10 people per 100,000 by 1961. Shortly thereafter, the number of suicides took a shocking leap, doubling between 1961 and 1971, and doubling again between 1971 and 1983, the year the civil war began. By 1995, 47 out of 100,000 people were killing themselves each year — one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

To get a sense of what these statistics really mean, consider that in the period between 1990 and 1995, it’s estimated that approximately 38,500 Sri Lankans took their own lives. That’s nearly half as many as have died in the entire war in a single five-year period. Some people argue that the killing of ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka should be called “genocide.” But is there a word in existence that captures the tragedy of tens of thousands of people killing themselves? “Epidemic” doesn’t begin to accurately relay the horror of it.

Judging by the suicide rate, Sri Lanka is not a country of particularly happy people. But the reasons for this can’t be blamed on the civil war, the most publicized aspect of Sri Lanka’s recent history and the easiest culprit. The burgeoning suicide rate throughout the 1950s and 60s doesn’t support a direct correlation. Other theories, such as a high number of failed love affairs in the country or a widespread inability to deal with negative emotions, seem to fall short of being able to explain the magnitude of the problem.

 

 

Further complicating the matter is the fact that indicators used to measure a country’s general happiness, like gross national happiness (GNH) or subjective well-being (SWB), show that Sri Lanka scores are average. According to these scales, which take into consideration levels of poverty, health, conflict, and education, Sri Lankans are less happy than people near the top — Americans and northern Europeans — but more happy than Indians, Russians, and most of Africa.

Measurements of happiness such as these should be treated with suspicion; they aim to capture through statistical analysis what is essentially intangible, a state of being within the human heart and mind. But with very broad strokes they can give a view of how people see themselves. Are they satisfied with their lives? With their work, relationships, and health? Overall, Sri Lankans score the same SWB rating as the Portuguese, and yet their suicide rate is much, much higher.

One of the more disturbing yet compelling explanations for the high number of suicide deaths is the use of severely toxic pesticides in Sri Lankan agriculture. In 2007, a team of doctors presented a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology which claimed that the increase in suicides coincided with the rising importation of deadly pesticides, such as methamidophos, monocrotophos, and endosulfan. When ingested, these chemicals act similarly to nerve gases developed during World War II and are extremely fatal. During the years of Sri Lanka’s soaring suicide rate, pesticide poisoning accounted for two-thirds of these deaths.

 

 

In 1995 and 1998, the Sri Lankan government enacted bans on importing highly and moderately toxic pesticides into the country, and within a few years the number of suicide fatalities decreased significantly. It’s unclear whether the number of attempted suicides decreased at all, but today the suicide rate hovers at around 22 per 100,000 people — nearly double that of the United States, but half of what it was during Sri Lanka’s peak. The researchers behind the epidemiological paper attempted to isolate factors other than these import bans to explain the decrease in suicides, but couldn’t find any. “We found no evidence that the trends were specifically associated with beneficial changes in levels of employment, alcohol sales, divorce or with periods of civil war,” they wrote. 

In myriad ways, the implications of these findings are troubling. If the mere presence of deadly pesticides was responsible for the start of the suicide epidemic in Sri Lanka, it could be inferred that the suicidal impulse had been there much earlier but the methods weren’t nearly as effective. It could also be inferred that the ban on pesticides and subsequent decrease in suicide deaths has merely stanched an ongoing tragedy. From what limited current data exists, Sri Lankans still seem to attempt suicide in relatively large numbers, but the fatality rate is lower.

 

 

The sources of this epidemic remain unexamined in part because psychological research in Sri Lanka is a relatively new and undeveloped field. There have been few if any widespread studies by experts from within or outside the country that attempt to document and analyze the underlying causes of Sri Lanka’s suicide rate.

“We have many who are interested in the field, but have little systematically collected knowledge of ‘Sri Lankan’ psychology,” said Dr. Shamala Kumar, a university professor of psychology, in an interview with a Sri Lankan newspaper in November.

In a sense, experts have so far only managed to explain how Sri Lankans killed themselves in such great numbers in past decades. But the emotional, psychological, and philosophical heart of the problem remains a mystery.

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Commentary

Dispatch from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness

Learning from Bhutan.


When U.S. President-elect Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination, he explained that “we Democrats have a very different measure of what constitutes progress in this country.” And that is what the Bhutanese have been working on since the 1970s, when their last king realized that the country’s gross national happiness was more important than its gross national product.

It’s my first time in Bhutan, but after two days here, I am captivated by the country’s beauty and the civility of the people. And as I open a second bottle of Red Panda beer and gaze over the lights of Thimphu, I feel very privileged to be here. Just a few years ago, it would have been pretty unlikely for someone like me from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to have even thought of attending a conference like this. But over the past few years, the idea of developing alternative measures of progress has become close to the OECD’s heart. It is work that has been the focus of the OECD-hosted Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies for the past three years.

 

 

For 60 years, gross domestic product (GDP) has been the dominant way in which the world has measured and understood progress. This approach has failed to explain several factors that have the most significant impact on people’s lives. During the last decade, a large amount of work has been carried out to understand and measure the world’s progress. The Global Project is the first systematic global effort to “go beyond GDP” by enabling and promoting new ways to measure societal progress, one high-profile example of which is French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress. The commission comprises some of the world’s great thinkers and includes five Nobel laureates.

The Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies aims to foster the development of sets of key economic, social, and environmental indicators to provide a comprehensive picture of how the well-being of a society is evolving, and seeks to encourage each society to consider in an informed way the crucial question: Is life getting better?

The Global Project is an international network of organizations from all sectors of society. The main partners in the Global Project are the OECD, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, and the European Commission. Research institutes, development banks, nongovernmental organizations, and statistical offices from both developing and developed countries are also working with us.

The project has three main goals:

  • What to measure? In order to measure progress, we must know what it looks like, and so we are encouraging debate about what progress means in different societies. The project is developing methods and guidelines to carry out these debates effectively.
  • How to measure progress? The project is developing best practices in how to measure progress and its component parts, some of which are not yet measured well using existing statistical indicators.
  •  Ensuring that those measures are used. New information and communication technology (ICT) tools offer huge potential to turn information into knowledge among a much broader swathe of citizens than those who currently access such information. The project is developing new tools for public use.

At the heart of the Global Project is the development of Wiki-Progress, a global collaborative online platform that will serve as a hub and focal point of the many existing and nascent initiatives to measure societal progress at national and local levels.

The OECD is among those that believe that grassroots conversations around measuring progress — and the outcomes a society wants to achieve — can change the political debate: They can shift discussion from arguments over the political means to agreement on the societal ends. This also echoes U.S. President-elect Obama’s Democratic nomination acceptance speech: “We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. … Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This, too, is part of America’s promise, the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.”

There is mounting evidence that discussions on indicators of progress can foster a sense of what the U.S. president-elect described as “our sense of common purpose, our sense of higher purpose.” The OECD is working to promote this approach. And there is much we can learn from the Bhutanese.

Jon Hall is project coordinator of the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. He presented the paper “A global movement for a global challenge” at the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in November in Thimphu, Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Measuring the Progress of Societies
A global movement for a global challenge
Papers from the 4th International Conference on Gross National Happiness in Bhutan
A teacher’s view on the Gross National Happiness conference

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Commentary

Happiness in Bhutan

A national ideal.


My romance with Bhutan began in February 2000, when I flew for the first time from Bangkok to Paro, the only airport town in Bhutan. The airport had no radar detection device. Planes could only land and take off in broad daylight, in good visibility. At the time, “planes” meant the two aircraft owned by Bhutan’s national airline, Druk Air. As we neared Bhutan, the arid landscape gradually gave way to layers of mountains looming grey and purple in the distance, becoming luxuriant with vibrant shades of green as the plane glided over them. Mountains and valleys interlocked with one another like fingers of hands clasped in prayer. I had the inkling I was about to experience something quite different from what the biggest cities and fanciest resorts of the first world could offer.  

 

 

The day my husband Mike told me about his potential assignment to consult in Bhutan, I looked up the country on the Internet. Cradled in the foothills of the Himalayas, about the size of Switzerland, was the Kingdom of Bhutan, with India to the south, east, and west, and Tibet to the north. Further research told me the country had no constitution or political parties, no freedom of assembly, press, or religion. No church to attend, only Buddhist temples. No electricity in most parts of the country, and limited TV broadcasting even in places with electricity. No traffic lights anywhere, not even in its capital, Thimphu. No fast food restaurants. And little medicine except the indigenous kind.

There was a dress code: National dress was required to be worn in public. My findings were depressing enough to make Bhutan a curious — even fascinating — place to see. 

As tourists in the first two weeks before Mike started work, we had a guide who took us from Paro to Thimphu and across the mountain pass Dochu La to Punakha, the winter home of the Central Monastic Body. We also journeyed eastward to the Bumthang district in central Bhutan. We even braved the narrow, nerve-racking, mountain-hugging roads south all the way to Phuentsholing, on the border of India. The fortress-like dzongs, or monasteries, intimidated and awed me. Houses decorated with auspicious, painted symbols of dragons, flowers, and wheels caught my fancy, while wooden phalluses — hung from roofs to ward against evil — initially rendered me speechless. Buddhist relic-filled chortens, prayer wheels big and small, and forests of prayer flags fluttering in the wind were spiritually uplifting.

But what really filled me with wonder was that every man, woman, and child looked happy.

Happiness radiated from weather-beaten faces, with their windburned cheeks and smiles that showed teeth stained red from betel nut addiction. It was quite obvious that happiness in Bhutan was not born of material wealth and comfort, for those were lacking everywhere I looked. The Bhutanese people as a whole might be poor by Western standards, but they are not destitute. Begging and unwelcomed soliciting are not in the Bhutanese vocabulary. While tourists to many countries would have to pay to get a picture taken with a local outfitted in his or her national dress, I got all my pictures taken with Bhutanese men in ghos and women in kiras for free, for my payment often came in the form of letting adults pore over my Lonely Planet Bhutan or showing children the magic of my binoculars. What a breath of fresh air. The children might look shabby, with snotty faces and dirt-encrusted fingernails, but they all had school and parents who provided for them.

And they all looked happy.

A highlight of that first trip was a night in a farmhouse in a small hamlet during our Bumthang Cultural Trek. That evening, we shared a meal with the family, comprising a couple and their two sons. We sat on the floor around the bukhari, or wood-burning stove, in a kitchen surrounded by soot-blackened walls. The room was dimly lit with a low-wattage bulb, which our host proudly told us was fed by electricity generated by a solar panel on the roof. We dined on buckwheat pancakes, yak stew and curries, and lots of chilies, which Mike and I politely declined. Arra, a strong wheat- or rice-distilled drink, was poured, warming the body and the spirit.

In spite of the dark and drab surroundings of the interior, it did not take much to feel the contagious effect of happiness. That night, Mike and I were given the best room in the house in which to sleep: the altar room, reserved for the deities and VIP guests. In the darkness of the room, lit only by a flickering butter lamp on the altar, surrounded by statuettes of Buddhist saints and thangkas depicting deities, I was not afraid. Mike fell asleep as soon as his head hit the mattressed floor, but I stayed awake for a long while, thankful for the opportunity to be sharing in the happiness of an extraordinary nation.     

On my second visit to Bhutan, in 2002, I went to the public library in Thimphu and picked up a copy of Kuensel, the national weekly. “Chorten vandal sentenced to life,” the headline read. Also on the same page: “Eight HIV cases detected in Bhutan.”

Little international news made it into the paper. Neither did anything critical of government policies. Surely there must be some souls unhappy with contentious issues even in the most fairytale paradise on earth?    

“They are careful of what they print, aren’t they?” I remarked to a man reading nearby.

He gave me a curious look, and said, “Yes, it’s a pretty good paper.”

Up until 2008, the country had no constitution. But for 100 years, the Bhutanese people had placed their faith in the king and his benevolent, if absolute, governance. Peace and harmony reigned in this kingdom which, to the developed world, might seem deprived of the fundamental rights of democracy and freedom. On my visits to Bhutan, I have observed that the Bhutanese are intrinsically happy, if happiness could be summed up to trust in their beloved king and his government, contentment with their way of life, faith in their religious beliefs, harmony with their environment, peace with all sentient beings, and the highest regard for the cultural and spiritual traditions of their country. 

With a new king and Bhutan’s first constitution, the kingdom has entered a new era, one of democratic beginnings. The Internet has become accessible, more programs are broadcast on television, and new hotels are being erected.

It’s progress by Western standards.

But what about happiness?

 

 

Elsie Sze is the author of the novel Hui Gui: A Chinese Story, which spans from the war torn China years of the 1930s to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong. Her forthcoming novel, Heart of the Buddha, is about Bhutan.

Additional reading:

Books offer clues to finding happiness in tough economy
Substantiating GNH
Lessons in Gross National Happiness

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Interviews

Riding (uphill) to prosperity

A town thrives because of biking, but not everyone is happy.


The only noise you hear is the water rippling over rocks, as the Lehigh River cuts through a steep valley near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Bikers ride along a paved path that gently slopes at a 2 percent downward grade. The lush carpet of trees on the mountains eventually gives way to a small picturesque town that looks like a place you’d see in the Swiss Alps.

This little town of 4,800 supports two bike stores that shuttle riders to the beginning of the Lehigh Gorge Trail, as well as quaint stores, B&Bs, and several restaurants. The weekends buzz with activity.

 

 

Jim Thorpe has come a long way from its days as a depressed mining town to the biking center it is today.

The first time we came through Jim Thorpe, it was to raft. But since then we’ve been back three times to mountain bike, stay in hotels, eat at restaurants, and shop on Main Street.

We spent plenty of money there, so I was surprised to hear about the anti-bike sentiment. Bike tourism seems to have lifted this town from its depression. Why would a town bite the hand that feeds it?

“It’s animosity between the locals and the visitors,” said Tom Loughery, corresponding secretary of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “Existing residents had no idea that the town had something special to offer. They complain that it now takes 10 minutes to get across town, and the restaurants are crowded.”

They don’t seem to link the visitors to the newly-renovated homes and buildings and the full tax coffers.

No irony was lost when this town changed its name from Mauch Chunk to Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was a versatile athlete of American Indian descent who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics, but these were rescinded when it was learned he’d earned a minimal amount of money during college playing basketball. Although he played professional football and baseball, his later life was marked by poverty and alcoholism.

Mauch Chunk had been a thriving coal and railroad town. In an attempt to replace those dying industries with tourism, town leaders agreed to let the widow of the disgraced athlete bury his body there in 1953 and changed the name in his honor. The tourists never came, until the 1990s. But it wasn’t to see Thorpe’s grave. It was to go biking.

Copious studies support the idea that biking can boost an economy. Mountain biking has been the fourth most popular adventure activity among U.S. adventure travelers, according to a 1997 study by the Travel Industry Association of America. Sixty million adult Americans bicycle each year. Bicyclists spend money on this recreation, which creates jobs and brings revenue to communities. The Outdoor Industry Foundation reports that bicycling contributes $133 billion to the U.S. economy each year.

Declining towns can capitalize on their natural gifts. Not every mountain biking center needs spectacular rolling rock trails like Moab, Utah, or the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains that Durango, Colorado, offers. Woodlands and flatlands can be developed into biking arenas. Plus, the trails can be cleared with volunteer efforts and a few inexpensive tools. In Jim Thorpe, timber roads and coal mining roads had already been cut through the woods.

Looking for new sources of income, West Virginia aggressively pursued bike dollars in the early 1980s. It sponsored races and reaped the benefits by establishing itself as a biking mecca. The Hatfield-McCoy trails that were opened in 2000 have proven very successful. After a decade of work to build community support and of agreements with 20 different landowners, the shared-use trails have added $51 million to the economy, drawn 303,000 visitors, and created 1,572 new jobs.

Yet some still oppose biking there.

“The Nature Nazis think they are saving the world from mountain bikes,” complained Matt Marcus, owner of Blackwater Bikes and the president of the West Virginia Mountain Bike Association, describing his experience with officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“Anti-bike groups claim that bikes cause erosion and trail widening,” said Drew Vankat, policy adviser for the International Mountain Biking Association, “when in fact research has shown bikes cause no more impact than horses.”

Vankat has been at the forefront of a battle with the U.S. Forest Service in Colorado. The Forest Service director in Denver proposed eliminating bikes on the Monarch Crest Trail — based on research done before mountain bikes were even invented.

“They don’t want to lose pristine nature and feel if you allow bikes, it will open up the floodgates,” Vankat said.

The town of Jim Thorpe felt the backlash too.

“The state of Pennsylvania outlawed biking on state game lands, and while only four trails were affected, the perception was that there was no more biking in Pennsylvania. That was in 2004, and it really hurt the economy,” said Loughery of the Jim Thorpe Area Council. “We’re working hard to gain them back.”

To be fair, not every cyclist is courteous. Some refuse to ride single-file or around a puddle while off road, widening the trail. But the benefits far outweigh a few examples of bad behavior.

The Forest Service argues that allowing bikes into the woods would open the door to allowing in four-wheeled all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). So the agency takes the position of “no wheels at all.” That’s easier: The Forest Service is under siege from powerful companies like Kawasaki Motors. Bike manufacturers lack the deep pockets to fight for inclusion. Although ATVs are noisy and pollute with their fossil-fueled engines, equating pedal-powered bikes with ATVs makes no sense.

Depressed regions have an opportunity to recreate their image and character. While not as powerful as coal or steel barons, bike riders can help towns overcome flagging economic fortunes, if they can overcome the naysayers.

Additional Reading:

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania
Lehigh Gorge Trail

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Photo Essays

101 billionaires

The other side of Russian capitalism.


Under Vladimir Putin’s rule, Russia has reclaimed its position among the superpowers of the world. In the past eight years, the economic recession of the tumultuous 90s is seemingly all but forgotten. Thanks to the country’s abundance of raw materials, such as oil and natural gas, the Russian economy is flourishing as never before. After a mere 18 years of capitalism, the January 2008 issue of Finans Magazine reported that there are currently 101 billionaires in Russia.

It is difficult to detect much prosperity in the book 101 Billionaires, which portrays an entirely different segment of the Russian population.  In this excerpt, Hornstra depicts the impoverished Russians: victims of the ”tough-as-nails” capitalism with which Russia made its name immediately after the fall of communism."  Hornstra’s new book, 101 Billionaires, is available through his website, www.borotov.com.

[ Click here to view the visual essay ]

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Commentary

A moose-flogging, cheerleading dominatrix?

Or is it just open season on another woman candidate?


 

Since Alaska governor Sarah Palin became Sen. John McCain’s running mate, the barrage of misogynist media criticism has been relentless. Does any of this anti-woman talk sound familiar? Just when I thought we had left the chatter about Hillary Clinton’s pearls, cleavage, and cackle in the dust, the media got me again.

We all understand that McCain chose Palin for political reasons. She has the highest gubernatorial approval rating in the country: 80 percent. Her accomplishments, lauded by conservatives, have included cutting taxes, balancing the budget, and putting the kibosh on the Bridge to Nowhere.

With so many would-be Clinton voters left behind after Barack Obama chose Joe Biden instead of a successful and seasoned woman who says she received more of the popular vote during the primary than Obama himself, McCain obviously chose Palin to try to snare some of those voters. In picking Biden, Obama was using the same strategy. He was aiming to shore up his own national security shortcomings and to grab the blue-collar, Catholic voters who supported Clinton — the same voters he’d denounced a few months before as people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

The media tore immediately and salaciously into Palin, branding her as unqualified to be vice, let alone president. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has repeatedly called Palin an “empty vessel” told what to say and do. The Daily Kos, without evidence, claimed that Palin’s 15-year-old daughter was the real mother of Palin’s newborn son. A Salon article featured Palin in a dominatrix outfit, flogging a moose. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times has compared her to a cheerleader and a Lancôme salesperson. A reporter from Denver’s local Channel 7 news was even caught on camera, moments after Palin’s nomination, saying she had a “nice ass,” and suggesting the running mates were sleeping together. And in perhaps the most egregious, anti-woman comment to date, CNN’s John Roberts questioned Palin’s ability to be a mother and vice president at the same time.

We haven’t heard reporters question Barack Obama about whether he could be a father to his two children and president at the same time. Nor have we heard them comment on Obama’s butt cheeks, or seen him placed in sadomasochistic sexual attire.

Even more to the point, why haven’t the media focused on Obama’s inexperience? Fact: Obama has the least amount of political experience, measured in years, of any candidates on a national ticket in the past 100 years. In perhaps the most telling line of the primary season, Hillary Clinton noted: “Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the White House. I will bring a lifetime of experience. And Senator Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002.” Ouch.

Instead of focusing on her pregnant teenaged daughter or her husband’s 20-year-old DUI charge, reporters should focus on Palin’s record. She has taken strong positions on abortion, gay rights, and the environment, and has drafted key, if not controversial, legislation for her state.

We’ve seen the clips of Palin’s sportscaster days and have heard more than we want to know about the teenaged father of her daughter’s baby. Let’s talk about the issues that matter to Americans — and leave Palin’s family life and X chromosome out of it.

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Interviews

Disaster for sale

Our media’s favorite brand is fear.


 

Even in an economy broadsided by the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history, not everyone is losing money. Advertising Age reported in September that Campbell Soup’s sales rose 13 percent in the second quarter.

Maybe cash-strapped consumers are embracing condensed soup as a meal alternative both inexpensive and nourishing. Kudos to the integrated marketing communications media for pulling off a cunning ploy based on the information processing model of advertising effectiveness, a theory developed by William McGuire in Behavioral and Management Science in Marketing.

What do we see besides violence and fear in the news media? Armed with modern technology, savvy corporate professionals shower their audiences with an array of terrifying images and narratives. Every bomb blast is “BREAKING NEWS!” and every weather disturbance the “STORM OF THE DECADE!” This constant propagation of danger has addicted our culture to panic and destruction.

Since the advent of advertising agencies, conglomerates have been seeking their help to promote their brands. For news media, that brand is fear. Based on McGuire’s model, the news media first catch our attention by inundating us with coverage of economic woes. This sparks panic and a shift in consumer behavior, which translates into money redirected and profits collected. In this way, shrewd corporate media planning is the lifeblood of the 24-hour news cycle.

But according to statistics on worldwide deaths caused by organized violence, the world is getting less dangerous. Harvard’s polymath professor Steven Pinker even states that we are probably living “in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence.” So why does it not feel that way?

Fareed Zakaria, in a May 2008 Newsweek article called “The Rise of the Rest,” explains, “We are told that we live in dark, dangerous times. Terrorism, rogue states, nuclear proliferation, financial panics, recession, outsourcing, and illegal immigrants all loom large in the national discourse. Al Qaeda, Iran, North Korea, China, Russia are all threats in some way or another.”

Coverage of worldwide danger is what’s truly increasing. “The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most importantly, images from around the world all the time,” says Zakaria. That’s most visible in technology. Video games and movies bring our enemies closer: into our living rooms.

What we see on television determines what we know. The news program is a mechanical presentation of events, and carefully scripted and sequenced. It is not the media’s fault that these events have occurred. However, selection, length of time allotted, and intensity of coverage are very much corporate decisions.

There always has been, and always will be, something to fear. Remember the Y2K crisis of 2000? In the months leading up to the New Year, it was impossible to avoid news coverage of this apparently inevitable disaster. Would every computer crash because of clock overload? An article in the December 30, 1999 edition of USA Today stated: “Here at the predicted end of cybertime, the future looks bright but a little brittle.”

As a student at one of the nation’s preeminent media studies departments, New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, my “innocence” in this media society is now more than three years past. Still, I am suddenly panicking, inundated with coverage of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the $700 billion dollar “bailout.” By tuning into mainstream media, we have all been conditioned to fear and uncertainty, and desensitized to violence. We have consequently relinquished our own ability to understand what is real, as our reality is spoon-fed to us.

Campbell Soup knows this. Why else would a canned foods company dedicate so much money to media planning to effectively deliver the advertisers’ message to the market? In 2006, Campbell Soup consolidated its $300 million international media planning account with Mediaedge:cia, a media planning agency with around $17.9 billion in billings. These professionals know canned foods are inexpensive products that decrease in demand when consumer income rises.

Does the crisis reporting have some link with the weakening dollar? President Grover Cleveland (the face on the $1,000 banknote) is probably rolling in his grave at this fiscal atrocity. But you can still see many attractive foreign women leaving Bergdorf Goodman with bags full of full-priced luxury “bargains.”

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