Mad Men, Catholic NYC, Ezra Klein, Social Security, Jon Stewart, Jared Diamond

1. Mad Men. Bruce Handy has an excellent piece in Vanity Fair describing the creative process and background of Matthew Weiner’s period piece, Mad Men:

Mad Men is too clear-eyed about its period to be called nostalgic—Weiner loves writing anti-Semitic wisecracks for his admen and showing pregnant women with cigarettes dangling from their lips—but at the same time there can be a yearning tug, even an ache, in the intensity of the show’s backward gaze. Maybe it’s a kind of wised-up, at times even loathing nostalgia—precisely the kind of contradiction that drives the show creatively.

2. Catholic in Manhattan. Carlene Bauer writes in Salon about how she came to convert to Catholicism while living in New York City. A moving piece for me. This is her description of the Rite of Election:

On a damp, cloudy morning back in New York City, on the first Sunday of Lent, our church’s group of converts met at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to attend the Rite of Election, a ceremony in which all the catechumens in the city’s diocese declared their intentions before God and Cardinal Egan. Once our names were called and we stood before the altar receiving a blessing, there was apparently no turning back. There were hundreds of people there, faces of many colors. But then the priests before us: corpulent, white, reminding me of all the stories I’d heard about the princely class that lived like kept women in their rectories. Fat white men lording it over the faithful. Here was the other Catholic Church, the church that, in all my excitement, I’d been suppressing my knowledge of. It was the church that came to mind for most people when they thought of the Catholic Church, the one that turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of its children, that would not let women become priests or let their priests marry, that castigated its liberation theologians. The moneyed, secretive, inflexible machine.

How many people would I have to climb over to run down the aisle and out onto Fifth Avenue? This really was intellectually irresponsible. The pope, Mary, Padre Pio, Pope Pius, Opus Dei, the sexual abuse, the forbidding of birth control, the official stance on homosexuality. I wouldn’t marry someone if I had to ignore this much sin and dysfunction. Or would I? But think: Why had I come all this way? And who had led me here? Dorothy Day had submitted. And if it was the church of Dorothy Day, it was the church of Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor. A church of dissenters and mystics.

3. Ezra Klein on Health Care. By far the best blog to read to understand the policy and politics of health care reform is Ezra Klein’s at the Washington Post. A recent point:

In part, that’s why the debate has had to move toward fear-mongering and lies: There just aren’t that many scary elements in the bills, because the legislation is oriented toward preserving the existing system and avoiding points of controversy.

4. Social Security Sucked When It Was Passed. Paul Begala – who advised Bill Clinton that it was better to have no bill than a flawed bill in 1994 – is now making the alternate case. He makes it by invoking history – specifically Social Security:

The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I’ve never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn’t generous enough; I’ve never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn’t included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.

5. Consevatives Love Jon Stewart. Jacob Gershman explains why in New York magazine:

Conservatives like Stewart because he’s providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks.

6. Jared Diamond. David Pilling profiles one of the top intellectuals of our time for the Financial Times. This little clip seems to capture both Pilling’s writing style and the serendipity of Jared Diamond’s world:

Thus did the pomegranate boom begin, and the fruit make its way to the refrigerators of 21st-century America. The story somehow captures Diamond. We have the awe of ancient civilisations, the physical explanation of the fertile soil of ancient Mesopotamia and modern California, and the accident of his friend’s financial resources and ingenuity. In this way, all things, big and small, come to pass.