President Obama to Frustrated Liberals:
'Wake Up! This Is Not Some Academic Exercise!'
At an intimate fundraising dinner for the DNC in the Pyramid Club on the top floor of the BNY Mellon Building in downtown Philadelphia, President Obama gave his standard speech about how the first task of his administration “was to stop the bleeding, to stabilize the economy, and we’ve done that.”
Citing “eight consecutive months of private sector job growth,” the president derided Republicans “saying no to everything we proposed. ... Their model was, ‘No we can’t.’”
The president this evening said he wanted supporters to understand that “we are just in the first quarter here. We’ve gotten a lot of stuff done, but we’ve got a lot more work to do.”
He criticized Democrats who complain that “the health care plan didn’t have a public option,” or say to him, “'You ended the war in Iraq but haven’t completely finished the Afghan war yet.'”
His message to them: “Folks wake up! This is not some academic exercise. As Joe Biden put it, Don’t compare us to the Almighty, compare us to the alternative.”
“It was easy showing up for the inauguration even though it was cold,” the president said, recalling, ”I’m polling at 70 percent, Beyoncé and Bono are singing. But I believe that the reason you got involved at the outset was not because we had cool pollsters, not because it was the trendy thing to do, not just because my predecessor had become unpopular, but because at some level we understood that the American dream had served each of us very well.”
It was not clear whom the president was talking about, specifically, but earlier today, at a town hall meeting broadcast by CNBC, the president was confronted by the angst of some frustrated supporters.
One woman, Velma Hart, described herself as a mother, a wife, a veteran and “one of your middle-class Americans. And, quite frankly, I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I'm one of those people. And I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting.”
Ted Brassfield, 30, said, “Like a lot of people in my generation, I was really inspired by you and by your campaign and the message that you brought, and that inspiration is dying away. It feels like the American dream is not attainable to a lot of us. ... Is the American dream dead for me?”
The president told them “my goal here is not to try to convince you that everything's where it needs to be. It's not. That's why I ran for president. But what I am saying is, is that we're moving in the right direction.”
Monday, September 20, 2010
MEAT EATERS Time Over?
The Meat Eaters
Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous. This hidden carnage provided one ground for the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer, who contended that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.”
Theologians’ labors will not be over even if they are finally able to justify the ways of God to man. For God must answer to animals as well.
The continuous, incalculable suffering of animals is also an important though largely neglected element in the traditional theological “problem of evil” ─ the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent god. The suffering of animals is particularly challenging because it is not amenable to the familiar palliative explanations of human suffering. Animals are assumed not to have free will and thus to be unable either to choose evil or deserve to suffer it. Neither are they assumed to have immortal souls; hence there can be no expectation that they will be compensated for their suffering in a celestial afterlife. Nor do they appear to be conspicuously elevated or ennobled by the final suffering they endure in a predator’s jaws. Theologians have had enough trouble explaining to their human flocks why a loving god permits them to suffer; but their labors will not be over even if they are finally able to justify the ways of God to man. For God must answer to animals as well.
If I had been in a position to design and create a world, I would have tried to arrange for all conscious individuals to be able to survive without tormenting and killing other conscious individuals. I hope most other people would have done the same. Certainly this and related ideas have been entertained since human beings began to reflect on the fearful nature of their world — for example, when the prophet Isaiah, writing in the 8th century B.C.E., sketched a few of the elements of his utopian vision. He began with people’s abandonment of war: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” But human beings would not be the only ones to change; animals would join us in universal veganism: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and the little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” (Isaiah 2: 4 and 11: 6-7)
Isaiah was, of course, looking to the future rather than indulging in whimsical fantasies of doing a better job of Creation, and we should do the same. We should start by withdrawing our own participation in the mass orgy of preying and feeding upon the weak.
Our own form of predation is of course more refined than those of other meat-eaters, who must capture their prey and tear it apart as it struggles to escape. We instead employ professionals to breed our prey in captivity and prepare their bodies for us behind a veil of propriety, so that our sensibilities are spared the recognition that we too are predators, red in tooth if not in claw (though some of us, for reasons I have never understood, do go to the trouble to paint their vestigial claws a sanguinary hue). The reality behind the veil is, however, far worse than that in the natural world. Our factory farms, which supply most of the meat and eggs consumed in developed societies, inflict a lifetime of misery and torment on our prey, in contrast to the relatively brief agonies endured by the victims of predators in the wild. From the moral perspective, there is nothing that can plausibly be said in defense of this practice. To be entitled to regard ourselves as civilized, we must, like Isaiah’s morally reformed lion, eat straw like the ox, or at least the moral equivalent of straw.
If we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones, ought we to do it?
But ought we to go further? Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy. If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?
I concede, of course, that it would be unwise to attempt any such change given the current state of our scientific understanding. Our ignorance of the potential ramifications of our interventions in the natural world remains profound. Efforts to eliminate certain species and create new ones would have many unforeseeable and potentially catastrophic effects.
Perhaps one of the more benign scenarios is that action to reduce predation would create a Malthusian dystopia in the animal world, with higher birth rates among herbivores, overcrowding, and insufficient resources to sustain the larger populations. Instead of being killed quickly by predators, the members of species that once were prey would die slowly, painfully, and in greater numbers from starvation and disease.
Yet our relentless efforts to increase individual wealth and power are already causing massive, precipitate changes in the natural world. Many thousands of animal species either have been or are being driven to extinction as a side effect of our activities. Knowing this, we have thus far been largely unwilling even to moderate our rapacity to mitigate these effects. If, however, we were to become more amenable to exercising restraint, it is conceivable that we could do so in a selective manner, favoring the survival of some species over others. The question might then arise whether to modify our activities in ways that would favor the survival of herbivorous rather than carnivorous species.
At a minimum, we ought to be clear in advance about the values that should guide such choices if they ever arise, or if our scientific knowledge ever advances to a point at which we could seek to eliminate, alter, or replace certain species with a high degree of confidence in our predictions about the short- and long-term effects of our action. Rather than continuing to collide with the natural world with reckless indifference, we should prepare ourselves now to be able to act wisely and deliberately when the range of our choices eventually expands.
There is no reason to suppose that a species has special sanctity simply because it arose in the natural process of evolution.
The suggestion that we consider whether and how we might exercise control over the prospects of different animal species, perhaps eventually selecting some for extinction and others for survival in accordance with our moral values, will undoubtedly strike most people as an instance of potentially tragic hubris, presumptuousness on a cosmic scale. The accusation most likely to be heard is that we would be “playing God,” impiously usurping prerogatives that belong to the deity alone. This has been a familiar refrain in the many instances in which devotees of one religion or another have sought to obstruct attempts to mitigate human suffering by, for example, introducing new medicines or medical practices, permitting and even facilitating suicide, legalizing a constrained practice of euthanasia, and so on. So it would be surprising if this same claim were not brought into service in opposition to the reduction of suffering among animals as well. Yet there are at least two good replies to it.
One is that it singles out deliberate, morally-motivated action for special condemnation, while implicitly sanctioning morally neutral action that foreseeably has the same effects as long as those effects are not intended. One plays God, for example, if one administers a lethal injection to a patient at her own request in order to end her agony, but not if one gives her a largely ineffective analgesic only to mitigate the agony, though knowing that it will kill her as a side effect. But it is hard to believe that any self-respecting deity would be impressed by the distinction. If the first act encroaches on divine prerogatives, the second does as well.
The second response to the accusation of playing God is simple and decisive. It is that there is no deity whose prerogatives we might usurp. To the extent that these matters are up to anyone, they are up to us alone. Since it is too late to prevent human action from affecting the prospects for survival of many animal species, we ought to guide and control the effects of our action to the greatest extent we can in order to bring about the morally best, or least bad, outcomes that remain possible.
Another equally unpersuasive objection to the suggestion that we ought to eliminate carnivorism if we could do so without major ecological disruption is that this would be “against Nature.” This slogan also has a long history of deployment in crusades to ensure that human cultures remain primitive. And like the appeal to the sovereignty of a deity, it too presupposes an indefensible metaphysics. Nature is not a purposive agent, much less a wise one. There is no reason to suppose that a species has special sanctity simply because it arose in the natural process of evolution.
Many people believe that what happens among animals in the wild is not our responsibility, and indeed that what they do among themselves is none of our business. They have their own forms of life, quite different from our own, and we have no right to intrude upon them or to impose our anthropocentric values on them.
Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it.
There is an element of truth in this view, which is that our moral reason to prevent harm for which we would not be responsible is weaker than our reason not to cause harm. Our primary duty with respect to animals is therefore to stop tormenting and killing them as a means of satisfying our desire to taste certain flavors or to decorate our bodies in certain ways. But if suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent.
That is the central issue raised by whether we ought to try to eliminate carnivorism. Because the elimination of carnivorism would require the extinction of carnivorous species, or at least their radical genetic alteration, which might be equivalent or tantamount to extinction, it might well be that the losses in value would outweigh any putative gains. Not only are most or all animal species of some instrumental value, but it is also arguable that all species have intrinsic value. As Ronald Dworkin has observed, “we tend to treat distinct animal species (though not individual animals) as sacred. We think it very important, and worth a considerable economic expense, to protect endangered species from destruction.” When Dworkin says that animal species are sacred, he means that their existence is good in a way that need not be good for anyone; nor is it good in the sense that it would be better if there were more species, so that we would have reason to create new ones if we could. “Few people,” he notes, “believe the world would be worse if there had always been fewer species of birds, and few would think it important to engineer new bird species if that were possible. What we believe important is not that there be any particular number of species but that a species that now exists not be extinguished by us.”
The intrinsic value of individual species is thus quite distinct from the value of species diversity. It also seems to follow from Dworkin’s claims that the loss involved in the extinction of an existing species cannot be compensated for, either fully or perhaps even partially, by the coming-into-existence of a new species.
The basic issue, then, seems to be a conflict between values: prevention of suffering and preservation of animal species. It is relatively uncontroversial that suffering is intrinsically bad for those who experience it, even if occasionally it is also instrumentally good for them, as when it has the purifying, redemptive effects that Dostoyevsky’s characters so often crave. Nor is it controversial that the extinction of an animal species is normally instrumentally bad. It is bad for the individual members who die and bad for other individuals and species that depended on the existence of the species for their own well-being or survival. Yet the extinction of an animal species is not necessarily bad for its individual members. (To indulge in science fiction, suppose that a chemical might be introduced into their food supply that would induce sterility but also extend their longevity.) And the extinction of a carnivorous species could be instrumentally good for all those animals that would otherwise have been its prey. That simple fact is precisely what prompts the question whether it would be good if carnivorous species were to become extinct.
The conflict, therefore, must be between preventing suffering and respecting the alleged sacredness — or, as I would phrase it, the impersonal value — of carnivorous species. Again, the claim that suffering is bad for those who experience it and thus ought in general to be prevented when possible cannot be seriously doubted. Yet the idea that individual animal species have value in themselves is less obvious. What, after all, are species? According to Darwin, they “are merely artificial combinations made for convenience.” They are collections of individuals distinguished by biologists that shade into one another over time and sometimes blur together even among contemporaneous individuals, as in the case of ring species. There are no universally agreed criteria for their individuation. In practice, the most commonly invoked criterion is the capacity for interbreeding, yet this is well known to be imperfect and to entail intransitivities of classification when applied to ring species. Nor has it ever been satisfactorily explained why a special sort of value should inhere in a collection of individuals simply by virtue of their ability to produce fertile offspring. If it is good, as I think it is, that animal life should continue, then it is instrumentally good that some animals can breed with one another. But I can see no reason to suppose that donkeys, as a group, have a special impersonal value that mules lack.
Even if animal species did have impersonal value, it would not follow that they were irreplaceable. Since animals first appeared on earth, an indefinite number of species have become extinct while an indefinite number of new species have arisen. If the appearance of new species cannot make up for the extinction of others, and if the earth could not simultaneously sustain all the species that have ever existed, it seems that it would have been better if the earliest species had never become extinct, with the consequence that the later ones would never have existed. But few of us, with our high regard for our own species, are likely to embrace that implication.
Here, then, is where matters stand thus far. It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation. There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation. The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species. I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.
(Jeff McMahan’s essay is the subject of this week’s forum discussion among the humanists and scientists at On the Human, a project of the National Humanities Center.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff McMahan is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and a visiting research collaborator at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of many works on ethics and political philosophy, including “The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life” and “Killing in War.”
Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous. This hidden carnage provided one ground for the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer, who contended that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured.”
Theologians’ labors will not be over even if they are finally able to justify the ways of God to man. For God must answer to animals as well.
The continuous, incalculable suffering of animals is also an important though largely neglected element in the traditional theological “problem of evil” ─ the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent god. The suffering of animals is particularly challenging because it is not amenable to the familiar palliative explanations of human suffering. Animals are assumed not to have free will and thus to be unable either to choose evil or deserve to suffer it. Neither are they assumed to have immortal souls; hence there can be no expectation that they will be compensated for their suffering in a celestial afterlife. Nor do they appear to be conspicuously elevated or ennobled by the final suffering they endure in a predator’s jaws. Theologians have had enough trouble explaining to their human flocks why a loving god permits them to suffer; but their labors will not be over even if they are finally able to justify the ways of God to man. For God must answer to animals as well.
If I had been in a position to design and create a world, I would have tried to arrange for all conscious individuals to be able to survive without tormenting and killing other conscious individuals. I hope most other people would have done the same. Certainly this and related ideas have been entertained since human beings began to reflect on the fearful nature of their world — for example, when the prophet Isaiah, writing in the 8th century B.C.E., sketched a few of the elements of his utopian vision. He began with people’s abandonment of war: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” But human beings would not be the only ones to change; animals would join us in universal veganism: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and the little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” (Isaiah 2: 4 and 11: 6-7)
Isaiah was, of course, looking to the future rather than indulging in whimsical fantasies of doing a better job of Creation, and we should do the same. We should start by withdrawing our own participation in the mass orgy of preying and feeding upon the weak.
Our own form of predation is of course more refined than those of other meat-eaters, who must capture their prey and tear it apart as it struggles to escape. We instead employ professionals to breed our prey in captivity and prepare their bodies for us behind a veil of propriety, so that our sensibilities are spared the recognition that we too are predators, red in tooth if not in claw (though some of us, for reasons I have never understood, do go to the trouble to paint their vestigial claws a sanguinary hue). The reality behind the veil is, however, far worse than that in the natural world. Our factory farms, which supply most of the meat and eggs consumed in developed societies, inflict a lifetime of misery and torment on our prey, in contrast to the relatively brief agonies endured by the victims of predators in the wild. From the moral perspective, there is nothing that can plausibly be said in defense of this practice. To be entitled to regard ourselves as civilized, we must, like Isaiah’s morally reformed lion, eat straw like the ox, or at least the moral equivalent of straw.
If we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones, ought we to do it?
But ought we to go further? Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into herbivorous ones, thereby fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy. If we could bring about the end of predation by one or the other of these means at little cost to ourselves, ought we to do it?
I concede, of course, that it would be unwise to attempt any such change given the current state of our scientific understanding. Our ignorance of the potential ramifications of our interventions in the natural world remains profound. Efforts to eliminate certain species and create new ones would have many unforeseeable and potentially catastrophic effects.
Perhaps one of the more benign scenarios is that action to reduce predation would create a Malthusian dystopia in the animal world, with higher birth rates among herbivores, overcrowding, and insufficient resources to sustain the larger populations. Instead of being killed quickly by predators, the members of species that once were prey would die slowly, painfully, and in greater numbers from starvation and disease.
Yet our relentless efforts to increase individual wealth and power are already causing massive, precipitate changes in the natural world. Many thousands of animal species either have been or are being driven to extinction as a side effect of our activities. Knowing this, we have thus far been largely unwilling even to moderate our rapacity to mitigate these effects. If, however, we were to become more amenable to exercising restraint, it is conceivable that we could do so in a selective manner, favoring the survival of some species over others. The question might then arise whether to modify our activities in ways that would favor the survival of herbivorous rather than carnivorous species.
At a minimum, we ought to be clear in advance about the values that should guide such choices if they ever arise, or if our scientific knowledge ever advances to a point at which we could seek to eliminate, alter, or replace certain species with a high degree of confidence in our predictions about the short- and long-term effects of our action. Rather than continuing to collide with the natural world with reckless indifference, we should prepare ourselves now to be able to act wisely and deliberately when the range of our choices eventually expands.
There is no reason to suppose that a species has special sanctity simply because it arose in the natural process of evolution.
The suggestion that we consider whether and how we might exercise control over the prospects of different animal species, perhaps eventually selecting some for extinction and others for survival in accordance with our moral values, will undoubtedly strike most people as an instance of potentially tragic hubris, presumptuousness on a cosmic scale. The accusation most likely to be heard is that we would be “playing God,” impiously usurping prerogatives that belong to the deity alone. This has been a familiar refrain in the many instances in which devotees of one religion or another have sought to obstruct attempts to mitigate human suffering by, for example, introducing new medicines or medical practices, permitting and even facilitating suicide, legalizing a constrained practice of euthanasia, and so on. So it would be surprising if this same claim were not brought into service in opposition to the reduction of suffering among animals as well. Yet there are at least two good replies to it.
One is that it singles out deliberate, morally-motivated action for special condemnation, while implicitly sanctioning morally neutral action that foreseeably has the same effects as long as those effects are not intended. One plays God, for example, if one administers a lethal injection to a patient at her own request in order to end her agony, but not if one gives her a largely ineffective analgesic only to mitigate the agony, though knowing that it will kill her as a side effect. But it is hard to believe that any self-respecting deity would be impressed by the distinction. If the first act encroaches on divine prerogatives, the second does as well.
The second response to the accusation of playing God is simple and decisive. It is that there is no deity whose prerogatives we might usurp. To the extent that these matters are up to anyone, they are up to us alone. Since it is too late to prevent human action from affecting the prospects for survival of many animal species, we ought to guide and control the effects of our action to the greatest extent we can in order to bring about the morally best, or least bad, outcomes that remain possible.
Another equally unpersuasive objection to the suggestion that we ought to eliminate carnivorism if we could do so without major ecological disruption is that this would be “against Nature.” This slogan also has a long history of deployment in crusades to ensure that human cultures remain primitive. And like the appeal to the sovereignty of a deity, it too presupposes an indefensible metaphysics. Nature is not a purposive agent, much less a wise one. There is no reason to suppose that a species has special sanctity simply because it arose in the natural process of evolution.
Many people believe that what happens among animals in the wild is not our responsibility, and indeed that what they do among themselves is none of our business. They have their own forms of life, quite different from our own, and we have no right to intrude upon them or to impose our anthropocentric values on them.
Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it.
There is an element of truth in this view, which is that our moral reason to prevent harm for which we would not be responsible is weaker than our reason not to cause harm. Our primary duty with respect to animals is therefore to stop tormenting and killing them as a means of satisfying our desire to taste certain flavors or to decorate our bodies in certain ways. But if suffering is bad for animals when we cause it, it is also bad for them when other animals cause it. That suffering is bad for those who experience it is not a human prejudice; nor is an effort to prevent wild animals from suffering a moralistic attempt to police the behavior of other animals. Even if we are not morally required to prevent suffering among animals in the wild for which we are not responsible, we do have a moral reason to prevent it, just as we have a general moral reason to prevent suffering among human beings that is independent both of the cause of the suffering and of our relation to the victims. The main constraint on the permissibility of acting on our reason to prevent suffering is that our action should not cause bad effects that would be worse than those we could prevent.
That is the central issue raised by whether we ought to try to eliminate carnivorism. Because the elimination of carnivorism would require the extinction of carnivorous species, or at least their radical genetic alteration, which might be equivalent or tantamount to extinction, it might well be that the losses in value would outweigh any putative gains. Not only are most or all animal species of some instrumental value, but it is also arguable that all species have intrinsic value. As Ronald Dworkin has observed, “we tend to treat distinct animal species (though not individual animals) as sacred. We think it very important, and worth a considerable economic expense, to protect endangered species from destruction.” When Dworkin says that animal species are sacred, he means that their existence is good in a way that need not be good for anyone; nor is it good in the sense that it would be better if there were more species, so that we would have reason to create new ones if we could. “Few people,” he notes, “believe the world would be worse if there had always been fewer species of birds, and few would think it important to engineer new bird species if that were possible. What we believe important is not that there be any particular number of species but that a species that now exists not be extinguished by us.”
The intrinsic value of individual species is thus quite distinct from the value of species diversity. It also seems to follow from Dworkin’s claims that the loss involved in the extinction of an existing species cannot be compensated for, either fully or perhaps even partially, by the coming-into-existence of a new species.
The basic issue, then, seems to be a conflict between values: prevention of suffering and preservation of animal species. It is relatively uncontroversial that suffering is intrinsically bad for those who experience it, even if occasionally it is also instrumentally good for them, as when it has the purifying, redemptive effects that Dostoyevsky’s characters so often crave. Nor is it controversial that the extinction of an animal species is normally instrumentally bad. It is bad for the individual members who die and bad for other individuals and species that depended on the existence of the species for their own well-being or survival. Yet the extinction of an animal species is not necessarily bad for its individual members. (To indulge in science fiction, suppose that a chemical might be introduced into their food supply that would induce sterility but also extend their longevity.) And the extinction of a carnivorous species could be instrumentally good for all those animals that would otherwise have been its prey. That simple fact is precisely what prompts the question whether it would be good if carnivorous species were to become extinct.
The conflict, therefore, must be between preventing suffering and respecting the alleged sacredness — or, as I would phrase it, the impersonal value — of carnivorous species. Again, the claim that suffering is bad for those who experience it and thus ought in general to be prevented when possible cannot be seriously doubted. Yet the idea that individual animal species have value in themselves is less obvious. What, after all, are species? According to Darwin, they “are merely artificial combinations made for convenience.” They are collections of individuals distinguished by biologists that shade into one another over time and sometimes blur together even among contemporaneous individuals, as in the case of ring species. There are no universally agreed criteria for their individuation. In practice, the most commonly invoked criterion is the capacity for interbreeding, yet this is well known to be imperfect and to entail intransitivities of classification when applied to ring species. Nor has it ever been satisfactorily explained why a special sort of value should inhere in a collection of individuals simply by virtue of their ability to produce fertile offspring. If it is good, as I think it is, that animal life should continue, then it is instrumentally good that some animals can breed with one another. But I can see no reason to suppose that donkeys, as a group, have a special impersonal value that mules lack.
Even if animal species did have impersonal value, it would not follow that they were irreplaceable. Since animals first appeared on earth, an indefinite number of species have become extinct while an indefinite number of new species have arisen. If the appearance of new species cannot make up for the extinction of others, and if the earth could not simultaneously sustain all the species that have ever existed, it seems that it would have been better if the earliest species had never become extinct, with the consequence that the later ones would never have existed. But few of us, with our high regard for our own species, are likely to embrace that implication.
Here, then, is where matters stand thus far. It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation. There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation. The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species. I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.
(Jeff McMahan’s essay is the subject of this week’s forum discussion among the humanists and scientists at On the Human, a project of the National Humanities Center.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff McMahan is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and a visiting research collaborator at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of many works on ethics and political philosophy, including “The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life” and “Killing in War.”
Sunday, September 19, 2010
POLICE SHOOTINGS The law playing outlaw?
POLICE SHOOTINGS: Inquests trigger questions, more reform talk
Costco shooting renews public clamor for changes
By BRIAN HAYNES LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
In 2007, the Clark County Commission tweaked the coroner's inquest process amid a push to improve the oft-criticized review of fatal police shootings.
At the time, the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada said the changes did not go far enough toward balancing what they called a one-sided process that favored police officers.
Three years later, the inquest remains a flawed process ripe for reform, said Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the ACLU.
"Now we're several years down the road, and obviously the system isn't fixed because we're having the same problems," he said.
In the wake of several recent high-profile police shootings that have piqued public interest in the inquest, the ACLU, community groups and public officials are again calling for a fresh look at the way Clark County reviews deaths caused by police officers.
The ACLU, citing a "growing public sentiment" for change, is planning to ask county commissioners to implement key reforms that were rejected in 2007, after a review by a committee of community groups and government officials, Lichtenstein said.
At least one commissioner supports the move.
"It is time to take another look at it," said Chris Giunchigliani, who believes the current system has fundamental flaws and supported changes rejected three years ago.
The case that has sparked new interest in inquest reform is the July shooting of Erik Scott, a former Army officer shot and killed by three Las Vegas police officers outside a Summerlin Costco store.
Witness accounts vary, but police say Scott, a medical device salesman, pulled one of two guns he legally carried when officers approached him in response to a 911 call from a Costco employee who said a man with a gun was acting erratically in the store.
The Scott inquest begins Wednesday amid an unusual level of interest among the public and policymakers, in part because of the clean-cut image of the dead man, the shooting's location in an upscale community and the Scott family's high-profile criticism of police and of the inquest process.
Commissioner Steve Sisolak, who pushed for broadcast of the Scott inquest by the county's television channel, said he will watch the inquest before deciding whether changes are needed.
"Maybe we do need to revisit it. I don't know," he said, adding that this inquest will be the first he has seen.
Informal discussions already have been taking place among community groups and elected officials about possible changes.
Sheriff Doug Gillespie said he has met with the Metropolitan Police Department's unions, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others to discuss the inquest process. While not promoting any reform proposals, Gillespie said the process is not perfect.
"I'm not happy with it," Gillespie said, adding that he doesn't think anyone else is happy with it either.
Inquests are intended as a fact-finding process -- not a trial -- in which jurors decide whether the actions of police are justified, excusable or criminal. During the nonadversarial hearing, prosecutors from the district attorney's office question witnesses and present evidence.
Representatives of the dead person's family cannot directly question witnesses. Instead, they can submit written questions to the justice of the peace overseeing the hearing, who decides whether to ask them.
The ACLU and others believe a family representative should be allowed to question witnesses directly.
In 2007, Giunchigliani, the ACLU and others supported that change, but it was rejected by the commission amid worries that police officers would effectively cut off information by invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refusing to testify if they have to face cross-examination by a family lawyer.
Giunchigliani said a new review of the inquest probably would look at the 2007 proposals and inquest procedures used in the Seattle area, where King County allows a family representative to question witnesses and review evidence before the hearing. She said she didn't think the county needs to form another citizens committee to make recommendations, as it did three years ago.
Inquests are not as common in other states, where officer-involved deaths are more often reviewed in private by a prosecutor's office or a grand jury. Clark County District Attorney David Roger, whose deputies conduct the inquests, stressed that the public often expects inquests to be more like a criminal or civil trial than a fact-finding look into the circumstances of the shootings. They are not criminal or civil trials, he said.
"The critics of the inquest system want it to be something it's not used for," Roger said.
In cases where police officers kill someone criminally, Roger said they would be charged before an inquest.
He pointed to the cases of a Las Vegas police officer who committed a fatal drive-by shooting and a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper who killed four people when his speeding patrol car slammed into a car on Interstate 15.
Both officers were prosecuted by Roger's office and sent to prison.
Chris Collins, executive director of the Police Protective Association, the union representing 2,500 rank-and-file Las Vegas police officers, said the current inquest is as open and public as any review process anywhere. He doesn't think it needs to change.
If a family lawyer is added to the process, police officers could stop cooperating, Collins said.
"If it becomes so much like a criminal trial where officers refuse to participate, then there's no point in the process."
He blamed a "small, vocal minority" of people pushing for changes.
"Until one of our officers goes to jail for murder, that small minority won't be satisfied," Collins said.
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL THE INQUEST PROCESS AT A GLANCE
• A Clark County coroner’s inquest is held any time someone dies at the hands of police officers. The Clark County Code defines it as a fact-finding process where a jury hears testimony from the officer, the medical examiner, police investigators and witnesses. Witnesses can be subpoenaed to appear, and all testimony is under oath.
• The inquest is held in a courtroom open to the public, which makes it unusual. In most jurisdictions, officer-involved shootings are reviewed only by secret grand juries or within a district attorney’s office, with no public airing of the facts.
• A representative from the Clark County district attorney’s office questions witnesses and a judge presides over the process, but the inquest is not a court proceeding or a trial.
• The family or representatives of the deceased may submit written questions to the judge, who decides whether to ask them to witnesses. Neither family members nor their attorney can directly question the witnesses.
• Seven jurors selected randomly from the county court’s regular jury pool hear the evidence.
• Jurors must select one of three findings: justified, excusable or criminal.
• Unlike a criminal trial, the jury vote need not be unanimous. The determination is based on a majority vote, and has no force of law.
• The Nevada attorney general’s office, through an agreement with the district attorney’s office, determines whether an officer will face charges, regardless of the jury vote.
THE SCOTT INQUEST
• The inquest into the death of Erik Scott, killed July 11 outside a Summerlin Costco store, begins at 10 a.m. Wednesday in courtroom 16D at the Regional Justice Center, 200 Lewis Ave., in downtown Las Vegas. Justice of the Peace Tony Abbatangelo will preside.
• The coroner’s office has scheduled three days for the inquest, but it could last longer.
• Limited seating in the courtroom is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Spectators also can watch live video feeds in overflow courtrooms.
• The inquest will be broadcast live by Clark County’s cable channel 4 and by KSNV-TV’s digital channel 123 (on Cox Communications) and on the station’s over-the-air channel 3.2. The channel will also be streaming it live on its Web site, www.mynews3.com.
By BRIAN HAYNES LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Costco shooting renews public clamor for changes
By BRIAN HAYNES LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
In 2007, the Clark County Commission tweaked the coroner's inquest process amid a push to improve the oft-criticized review of fatal police shootings.
At the time, the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada said the changes did not go far enough toward balancing what they called a one-sided process that favored police officers.
Three years later, the inquest remains a flawed process ripe for reform, said Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the ACLU.
"Now we're several years down the road, and obviously the system isn't fixed because we're having the same problems," he said.
In the wake of several recent high-profile police shootings that have piqued public interest in the inquest, the ACLU, community groups and public officials are again calling for a fresh look at the way Clark County reviews deaths caused by police officers.
The ACLU, citing a "growing public sentiment" for change, is planning to ask county commissioners to implement key reforms that were rejected in 2007, after a review by a committee of community groups and government officials, Lichtenstein said.
At least one commissioner supports the move.
"It is time to take another look at it," said Chris Giunchigliani, who believes the current system has fundamental flaws and supported changes rejected three years ago.
The case that has sparked new interest in inquest reform is the July shooting of Erik Scott, a former Army officer shot and killed by three Las Vegas police officers outside a Summerlin Costco store.
Witness accounts vary, but police say Scott, a medical device salesman, pulled one of two guns he legally carried when officers approached him in response to a 911 call from a Costco employee who said a man with a gun was acting erratically in the store.
The Scott inquest begins Wednesday amid an unusual level of interest among the public and policymakers, in part because of the clean-cut image of the dead man, the shooting's location in an upscale community and the Scott family's high-profile criticism of police and of the inquest process.
Commissioner Steve Sisolak, who pushed for broadcast of the Scott inquest by the county's television channel, said he will watch the inquest before deciding whether changes are needed.
"Maybe we do need to revisit it. I don't know," he said, adding that this inquest will be the first he has seen.
Informal discussions already have been taking place among community groups and elected officials about possible changes.
Sheriff Doug Gillespie said he has met with the Metropolitan Police Department's unions, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others to discuss the inquest process. While not promoting any reform proposals, Gillespie said the process is not perfect.
"I'm not happy with it," Gillespie said, adding that he doesn't think anyone else is happy with it either.
Inquests are intended as a fact-finding process -- not a trial -- in which jurors decide whether the actions of police are justified, excusable or criminal. During the nonadversarial hearing, prosecutors from the district attorney's office question witnesses and present evidence.
Representatives of the dead person's family cannot directly question witnesses. Instead, they can submit written questions to the justice of the peace overseeing the hearing, who decides whether to ask them.
The ACLU and others believe a family representative should be allowed to question witnesses directly.
In 2007, Giunchigliani, the ACLU and others supported that change, but it was rejected by the commission amid worries that police officers would effectively cut off information by invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refusing to testify if they have to face cross-examination by a family lawyer.
Giunchigliani said a new review of the inquest probably would look at the 2007 proposals and inquest procedures used in the Seattle area, where King County allows a family representative to question witnesses and review evidence before the hearing. She said she didn't think the county needs to form another citizens committee to make recommendations, as it did three years ago.
Inquests are not as common in other states, where officer-involved deaths are more often reviewed in private by a prosecutor's office or a grand jury. Clark County District Attorney David Roger, whose deputies conduct the inquests, stressed that the public often expects inquests to be more like a criminal or civil trial than a fact-finding look into the circumstances of the shootings. They are not criminal or civil trials, he said.
"The critics of the inquest system want it to be something it's not used for," Roger said.
In cases where police officers kill someone criminally, Roger said they would be charged before an inquest.
He pointed to the cases of a Las Vegas police officer who committed a fatal drive-by shooting and a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper who killed four people when his speeding patrol car slammed into a car on Interstate 15.
Both officers were prosecuted by Roger's office and sent to prison.
Chris Collins, executive director of the Police Protective Association, the union representing 2,500 rank-and-file Las Vegas police officers, said the current inquest is as open and public as any review process anywhere. He doesn't think it needs to change.
If a family lawyer is added to the process, police officers could stop cooperating, Collins said.
"If it becomes so much like a criminal trial where officers refuse to participate, then there's no point in the process."
He blamed a "small, vocal minority" of people pushing for changes.
"Until one of our officers goes to jail for murder, that small minority won't be satisfied," Collins said.
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL THE INQUEST PROCESS AT A GLANCE
• A Clark County coroner’s inquest is held any time someone dies at the hands of police officers. The Clark County Code defines it as a fact-finding process where a jury hears testimony from the officer, the medical examiner, police investigators and witnesses. Witnesses can be subpoenaed to appear, and all testimony is under oath.
• The inquest is held in a courtroom open to the public, which makes it unusual. In most jurisdictions, officer-involved shootings are reviewed only by secret grand juries or within a district attorney’s office, with no public airing of the facts.
• A representative from the Clark County district attorney’s office questions witnesses and a judge presides over the process, but the inquest is not a court proceeding or a trial.
• The family or representatives of the deceased may submit written questions to the judge, who decides whether to ask them to witnesses. Neither family members nor their attorney can directly question the witnesses.
• Seven jurors selected randomly from the county court’s regular jury pool hear the evidence.
• Jurors must select one of three findings: justified, excusable or criminal.
• Unlike a criminal trial, the jury vote need not be unanimous. The determination is based on a majority vote, and has no force of law.
• The Nevada attorney general’s office, through an agreement with the district attorney’s office, determines whether an officer will face charges, regardless of the jury vote.
THE SCOTT INQUEST
• The inquest into the death of Erik Scott, killed July 11 outside a Summerlin Costco store, begins at 10 a.m. Wednesday in courtroom 16D at the Regional Justice Center, 200 Lewis Ave., in downtown Las Vegas. Justice of the Peace Tony Abbatangelo will preside.
• The coroner’s office has scheduled three days for the inquest, but it could last longer.
• Limited seating in the courtroom is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Spectators also can watch live video feeds in overflow courtrooms.
• The inquest will be broadcast live by Clark County’s cable channel 4 and by KSNV-TV’s digital channel 123 (on Cox Communications) and on the station’s over-the-air channel 3.2. The channel will also be streaming it live on its Web site, www.mynews3.com.
By BRIAN HAYNES LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
U.S. platoon in Afghanistan accused of killing civilians for sport
Members of U.S. platoon in Afghanistan accused of killing civilians for sport
The U.S. soldiers hatched a plan as simple as it was savage: to randomly target and kill an Afghan civilian, and to get away with it.
For weeks, according to Army charging documents, rogue members of a platoon from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, floated the idea. Then, one day last winter, a solitary Afghan man approached them in the village of La Mohammed Kalay. The "kill team" activated the plan.
One soldier created a ruse that they were under attack, tossing a fragmentary grenade on the ground. Then others opened fire.
According to charging documents, the unprovoked, fatal attack on Jan. 15 was the start of a months-long shooting spree against Afghan civilians that resulted in some of the grisliest allegations against American soldiers since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Members of the platoon have been charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones.
The subsequent investigation has raised accusations about whether the military ignored warnings that the out-of-control soldiers were committing atrocities. The father of one soldier said he repeatedly tried to alert the Army after his son told him about the first killing, only to be rebuffed.
Two more slayings would follow. Military documents allege that five members of the unit staged a total of three murders in Kandahar province between January and May. Seven other soldiers have been charged with crimes related to the case, including hashish use, attempts to impede the investigation and a retaliatory gang assault on a private who blew the whistle.
Army officials have not disclosed a motive for the killings and macabre behavior. Nor have they explained how the attacks could have persisted without attracting scrutiny. They declined to comment on the case beyond the charges that have been filed, citing the ongoing investigation.
But a review of military court documents and interviews with people familiar with the investigation suggest the killings were committed essentially for sport by soldiers who had a fondness for hashish and alcohol.
The accused soldiers, through attorneys and family members, deny wrongdoing. But the case has already been marked by a cycle of accusations and counter-accusations among the defendants as they seek to pin the blame on each other, according to documents and interviews.
The Army has scheduled pre-trial hearings in the case this fall at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, home of the Stryker brigade. (The unit was renamed the 2nd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, when it returned from Afghanistan in July.) Military officials say privately that they worry the hearings will draw further attention to the case, with photos and other evidence prompting anger among the Afghan civilians whose support is critical to the fight against the Taliban.
The 'kill team'
According to statements given to investigators, members of the unit - 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment - began talking about forming a "kill team" in December, shortly after the arrival of a new member, Staff Sgt. Calvin R. Gibbs, 25, of Billings, Mont.
Gibbs, whom some defendants have described as the ringleader, confided to his new mates that it had been easy for him to get away with "stuff" when he served in Iraq in 2004, according to the statements. It was his second tour in Afghanistan, having served there from January 2006 until May 2007.
The first opportunity presented itself Jan. 15 in the Maiwand district of Kandahar province. Members of the 3rd Platoon were providing perimeter security for a meeting between Army officers and tribal elders in the village of La Mohammed Kalay.
According to charging documents, an Afghan named Gul Mudin began walking toward the soldiers. As he approached, Cpl. Jeremy N. Morlock, 22, of Wasilla, Alaska, threw the grenade on the ground, records show, to create the illusion that the soldiers were under attack.
Pfc. Andrew H. Holmes, a 19-year-old from Boise, Idaho, saw the grenade and fired his weapon at Mudin, according to charging documents. The grenade exploded, prompting other soldiers to open fire on the villager as well, killing him.
In statements to investigators, the soldiers involved have given conflicting details. In one statement that his attorney has subsequently tried to suppress, Morlock said that Gibbs had given him the grenade and that others were also aware of the ruse beforehand. But Holmes and his attorney said he was in the dark and opened fire only because Morlock ordered him to do so.
"He was unwittingly used as the cover story," said Daniel Conway, a civilian defense attorney for Holmes. "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Morlock, Holmes and Gibbs have each been charged with murder in the shooting. Attorneys for Morlock and Gibbs did not return phone calls seeking comment.
A father's warning
On Feb. 14, Christopher Winfield, a former Marine from Cape Coral, Fla., logged onto his Facebook account to chat with his son, Adam, a 3rd Platoon soldier who was up late in Afghanistan. Spec. Adam C. Winfield confided that he'd had a run-in with Gibbs, his squad leader. He also typed a mysterious note saying that some people get away with murder.
When his father pressed him to explain, Adam replied, "did you not understand what i just told you." He then referred to the slaying of the Afghan villager the month before, adding that other platoon members had threatened him because he did not approve. In addition, he said, they were bragging about how they wanted to find another victim.
"I was just shocked," Christopher Winfield said in a phone interview. "He was scared for his life at that point."
The father told his son that he would contact the Army to intervene and investigate. It was a Sunday, but he didn't wait. He called the Army inspector general's 24-hour hotline and left a voice mail. He called the office of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and left another message. He called a sergeant at Lewis-McChord who told him to call the Army's criminal investigations division. He left another message there.
Finally, he said, he called the Fort Lewis command center and spoke for 12 minutes to a sergeant on duty. He said the sergeant agreed that it sounded as if Adam was in potential danger but that, unless he was willing to report it to his superiors in Afghanistan, there was little the Army could do.
"He just kind of blew it off," Christopher Winfield said. "I was sitting there with my jaw on the ground."
Winfield said he doesn't recall the name of the sergeant he spoke with. Billing records that he kept confirm that he called Army officials; he also kept copies of transcripts of Facebook chats with this son. He said he specifically told the sergeant of his son's warning that more murders were in the works.
Army investigators have since taken a sworn statement from Christopher Winfield, as well as copies of his phone and Internet records.
Other killings
Eight days after Winfield tried to warn the Army, according to charging documents, members of the 3rd Platoon murdered someone else.
On Feb. 22, Marach Agha, an Afghan civilian, was killed by rifle fire near Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar province, where the 3rd Platoon was stationed. The Army has released few details about the slaying but has charged Gibbs, Morlock and Spec. Michael S. Wagnon II of Las Vegas with murder.
Wagnon has also been charged with possessing "a skull taken from an Afghan person's corpse." He allegedly took the head sometime during January or February 2010, but court documents do not specify whether it belonged to the Afghan he is charged with killing.
An attorney for Wagnon, who was on his second tour in Afghanistan and also served in Iraq, did not return a call seeking comment.
More mayhem followed in March, when Gibbs, Wagnon and three other soldiers - Staff Sgt. Robert G. Stevens, Sgt. Darren N. Jones and Pfc. Ashton A. Moore - opened fire on three Afghan men, according to charging documents. The documents do not provide basic details, such as the precise date of the shooting, the identities of the victims or whether they were wounded.
Members of the 3rd Platoon found their next victim on May 2, documents show. Gibbs, Morlock and Adam Winfield - the son of the former Marine who said he tried to alert the Army three months earlier - are accused of tossing a grenade and fatally shooting an Afghan cleric, Mullah Adahdad, near Forward Operating Base Ramrod.
Winfield's attorney, Eric S. Montalvo, said his client was ordered to shoot but fired high and missed. He and Winfield's parents say they can't understand why the Army has charged their son, given that his father tried to warn officials about the platoon.
Military police caught wind of the final killing a few days later, but only by happenstance. Records show they were coincidentally investigating reports of hashish use by members of the 3rd Platoon.
After word leaked that one soldier had spoken to military police, several platoon members retaliated, records show. They confronted the informant and beat him severely - punching, kicking and choking the soldier, then dragging him across the ground. As a last warning, the documents state, Gibbs menacingly waved finger bones he had collected from Afghan corpses.
However, the informant talked to the MPs again and told them what he had heard about the slayings, according to court documents.
Some members of his unit, he said in a statement, "when they are out at a village, wander off and kill someone and every time they say the same thing, about a guy throwing a grenade, but there is never proof."
This time, the Army acted quickly and made arrests.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
The U.S. soldiers hatched a plan as simple as it was savage: to randomly target and kill an Afghan civilian, and to get away with it.
For weeks, according to Army charging documents, rogue members of a platoon from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, floated the idea. Then, one day last winter, a solitary Afghan man approached them in the village of La Mohammed Kalay. The "kill team" activated the plan.
One soldier created a ruse that they were under attack, tossing a fragmentary grenade on the ground. Then others opened fire.
According to charging documents, the unprovoked, fatal attack on Jan. 15 was the start of a months-long shooting spree against Afghan civilians that resulted in some of the grisliest allegations against American soldiers since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Members of the platoon have been charged with dismembering and photographing corpses, as well as hoarding a skull and other human bones.
The subsequent investigation has raised accusations about whether the military ignored warnings that the out-of-control soldiers were committing atrocities. The father of one soldier said he repeatedly tried to alert the Army after his son told him about the first killing, only to be rebuffed.
Two more slayings would follow. Military documents allege that five members of the unit staged a total of three murders in Kandahar province between January and May. Seven other soldiers have been charged with crimes related to the case, including hashish use, attempts to impede the investigation and a retaliatory gang assault on a private who blew the whistle.
Army officials have not disclosed a motive for the killings and macabre behavior. Nor have they explained how the attacks could have persisted without attracting scrutiny. They declined to comment on the case beyond the charges that have been filed, citing the ongoing investigation.
But a review of military court documents and interviews with people familiar with the investigation suggest the killings were committed essentially for sport by soldiers who had a fondness for hashish and alcohol.
The accused soldiers, through attorneys and family members, deny wrongdoing. But the case has already been marked by a cycle of accusations and counter-accusations among the defendants as they seek to pin the blame on each other, according to documents and interviews.
The Army has scheduled pre-trial hearings in the case this fall at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, home of the Stryker brigade. (The unit was renamed the 2nd Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, when it returned from Afghanistan in July.) Military officials say privately that they worry the hearings will draw further attention to the case, with photos and other evidence prompting anger among the Afghan civilians whose support is critical to the fight against the Taliban.
The 'kill team'
According to statements given to investigators, members of the unit - 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment - began talking about forming a "kill team" in December, shortly after the arrival of a new member, Staff Sgt. Calvin R. Gibbs, 25, of Billings, Mont.
Gibbs, whom some defendants have described as the ringleader, confided to his new mates that it had been easy for him to get away with "stuff" when he served in Iraq in 2004, according to the statements. It was his second tour in Afghanistan, having served there from January 2006 until May 2007.
The first opportunity presented itself Jan. 15 in the Maiwand district of Kandahar province. Members of the 3rd Platoon were providing perimeter security for a meeting between Army officers and tribal elders in the village of La Mohammed Kalay.
According to charging documents, an Afghan named Gul Mudin began walking toward the soldiers. As he approached, Cpl. Jeremy N. Morlock, 22, of Wasilla, Alaska, threw the grenade on the ground, records show, to create the illusion that the soldiers were under attack.
Pfc. Andrew H. Holmes, a 19-year-old from Boise, Idaho, saw the grenade and fired his weapon at Mudin, according to charging documents. The grenade exploded, prompting other soldiers to open fire on the villager as well, killing him.
In statements to investigators, the soldiers involved have given conflicting details. In one statement that his attorney has subsequently tried to suppress, Morlock said that Gibbs had given him the grenade and that others were also aware of the ruse beforehand. But Holmes and his attorney said he was in the dark and opened fire only because Morlock ordered him to do so.
"He was unwittingly used as the cover story," said Daniel Conway, a civilian defense attorney for Holmes. "He was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Morlock, Holmes and Gibbs have each been charged with murder in the shooting. Attorneys for Morlock and Gibbs did not return phone calls seeking comment.
A father's warning
On Feb. 14, Christopher Winfield, a former Marine from Cape Coral, Fla., logged onto his Facebook account to chat with his son, Adam, a 3rd Platoon soldier who was up late in Afghanistan. Spec. Adam C. Winfield confided that he'd had a run-in with Gibbs, his squad leader. He also typed a mysterious note saying that some people get away with murder.
When his father pressed him to explain, Adam replied, "did you not understand what i just told you." He then referred to the slaying of the Afghan villager the month before, adding that other platoon members had threatened him because he did not approve. In addition, he said, they were bragging about how they wanted to find another victim.
"I was just shocked," Christopher Winfield said in a phone interview. "He was scared for his life at that point."
The father told his son that he would contact the Army to intervene and investigate. It was a Sunday, but he didn't wait. He called the Army inspector general's 24-hour hotline and left a voice mail. He called the office of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and left another message. He called a sergeant at Lewis-McChord who told him to call the Army's criminal investigations division. He left another message there.
Finally, he said, he called the Fort Lewis command center and spoke for 12 minutes to a sergeant on duty. He said the sergeant agreed that it sounded as if Adam was in potential danger but that, unless he was willing to report it to his superiors in Afghanistan, there was little the Army could do.
"He just kind of blew it off," Christopher Winfield said. "I was sitting there with my jaw on the ground."
Winfield said he doesn't recall the name of the sergeant he spoke with. Billing records that he kept confirm that he called Army officials; he also kept copies of transcripts of Facebook chats with this son. He said he specifically told the sergeant of his son's warning that more murders were in the works.
Army investigators have since taken a sworn statement from Christopher Winfield, as well as copies of his phone and Internet records.
Other killings
Eight days after Winfield tried to warn the Army, according to charging documents, members of the 3rd Platoon murdered someone else.
On Feb. 22, Marach Agha, an Afghan civilian, was killed by rifle fire near Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar province, where the 3rd Platoon was stationed. The Army has released few details about the slaying but has charged Gibbs, Morlock and Spec. Michael S. Wagnon II of Las Vegas with murder.
Wagnon has also been charged with possessing "a skull taken from an Afghan person's corpse." He allegedly took the head sometime during January or February 2010, but court documents do not specify whether it belonged to the Afghan he is charged with killing.
An attorney for Wagnon, who was on his second tour in Afghanistan and also served in Iraq, did not return a call seeking comment.
More mayhem followed in March, when Gibbs, Wagnon and three other soldiers - Staff Sgt. Robert G. Stevens, Sgt. Darren N. Jones and Pfc. Ashton A. Moore - opened fire on three Afghan men, according to charging documents. The documents do not provide basic details, such as the precise date of the shooting, the identities of the victims or whether they were wounded.
Members of the 3rd Platoon found their next victim on May 2, documents show. Gibbs, Morlock and Adam Winfield - the son of the former Marine who said he tried to alert the Army three months earlier - are accused of tossing a grenade and fatally shooting an Afghan cleric, Mullah Adahdad, near Forward Operating Base Ramrod.
Winfield's attorney, Eric S. Montalvo, said his client was ordered to shoot but fired high and missed. He and Winfield's parents say they can't understand why the Army has charged their son, given that his father tried to warn officials about the platoon.
Military police caught wind of the final killing a few days later, but only by happenstance. Records show they were coincidentally investigating reports of hashish use by members of the 3rd Platoon.
After word leaked that one soldier had spoken to military police, several platoon members retaliated, records show. They confronted the informant and beat him severely - punching, kicking and choking the soldier, then dragging him across the ground. As a last warning, the documents state, Gibbs menacingly waved finger bones he had collected from Afghan corpses.
However, the informant talked to the MPs again and told them what he had heard about the slayings, according to court documents.
Some members of his unit, he said in a statement, "when they are out at a village, wander off and kill someone and every time they say the same thing, about a guy throwing a grenade, but there is never proof."
This time, the Army acted quickly and made arrests.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Yiddish
The Yiddish language is a wonderful source of rich expressions, especially terms of endearment (and of course, complaints and insults). This article is a follow up on Ten Yiddish Expressions You Should Know. Jewish scriptwriters introduced many Yiddish words into popular culture, which often changed the original meanings drastically. You might be surprised to learn how much Yiddish you already speak, but also, how many familiar words actually mean something different in real Yiddish.
There is no universally accepted transliteration or spelling; the standard YIVO version is based on the Eastern European Klal Yiddish dialect, while many Yiddish words found in English came from Southern Yiddish dialects. In the 1930s, Yiddish was spoken by more than 10 million people, but by 1945, 75% of them were gone. Today, Yiddish is the language of over 100 newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, and websites.
1.baleboste
A good homemaker, a woman who’s in charge of her home and will make sure you remember it.
2.bissel
Or bisl – a little bit.
3.bubbe
Or bobe. It means Grandmother, and bobeshi is the more affectionate form. Bubele is a similarly affectionate word, though it isn’t in Yiddish dictionaries.
4.bupkes
Not a word for polite company. Bubkes or bobkes may be related to the Polish word for “beans”, but it really means “goat droppings” or “horse droppings.” It’s often used by American Jews for “trivial, worthless, useless, a ridiculously small amount” – less than nothing, so to speak. “After all the work I did, I got bupkes!”
5.chutzpah
Or khutspe. Nerve, extreme arrogance, brazen presumption. In English, chutzpah often connotes courage or confidence, but among Yiddish speakers, it is not a compliment.
6.feh!
An expression of disgust or disapproval, representative of the sound of spitting.
7.glitch
Or glitsh. Literally “slip,” “skate,” or “nosedive,” which was the origin of the common American usage as “a minor problem or error.”
8.gornisht
More polite than bupkes, and also implies a strong sense of nothing; used in phrases such as “gornisht helfn” (beyond help).
9.goy
A non-Jew, a Gentile. As in Hebrew, one Gentile is a goy, many Gentiles are goyim, the non-Jewish world in general is “the goyim.” Goyish is the adjective form. Putting mayonnaise on a pastrami sandwich is goyish. Putting mayonnaise on a pastrami sandwich on white bread is even more goyish.
10.kibbitz
In Yiddish, it’s spelled kibets, and it’s related to the Hebrew “kibbutz” or “collective.” But it can also mean verbal joking, which after all is a collective activity. It didn’t originally mean giving unwanted advice about someone else’s game – that’s an American innovation.
11.klutz
Or better yet, klots. Literally means “a block of wood,” so it’s often used for a dense, clumsy or awkward person. See schlemiel.
12.kosher
Something that’s acceptable to Orthodox Jews, especially food. Other Jews may also “eat kosher” on some level but are not required to. Food that Orthodox Jews don’t eat – pork, shellfish, etc. – is called traif. An observant Jew might add, “Both pork and shellfish are doubtlessly very tasty. I simply am restricted from eating it.” In English, when you hear something that seems suspicious or shady, you might say, “That doesn’t sound kosher.”
13.kvetsh
In popular English, kvetch means “complain, whine or fret,” but in Yiddish, kvetsh literally means “to press or squeeze,” like a wrong-sized shoe. Reminds you of certain chronic complainers, doesn’t it? But it’s also used on Yiddish web pages for “click” (Click Here).
14.maven
Pronounced meyven. An expert, often used sarcastically.
15.Mazel Tov
Or mazltof. Literally “good luck,” (well, literally, “good constellation”) but it’s a congratulation for what just happened, not a hopeful wish for what might happen in the future. When someone gets married or has a child or graduates from college, this is what you say to them. It can also be used sarcastically to mean “it’s about time,” as in “It’s about time you finished school and stopped sponging off your parents.”
16.mentsh
An honorable, decent person, an authentic person, a person who helps you when you need help. Can be a man, woman or child.
17.mishegas
Insanity or craziness. A meshugener is a crazy man. If you want to insult someone, you can ask them, ”Does it hurt to be crazy?”
18.mishpocheh
Or mishpokhe or mishpucha. It means “family,” as in “Relax, you’re mishpocheh. I’ll sell it to you at wholesale.”
19.nosh
Or nash. To nibble; a light snack, but you won’t be light if you don’t stop noshing. Can also describe plagarism, though not always in a bad sense; you know, picking up little pieces for yourself.
20.nu
A general word that calls for a reply. It can mean, “So?” “Huh?” “Well?” “What’s up?” or “Hello?”
21.oy vey
Exclamation of dismay, grief, or exasperation. The phrase “oy vey iz mir” means “Oh, woe is me.” “Oy gevalt!” is like oy vey, but expresses fear, shock or amazement. When you realize you’re about to be hit by a car, this expression would be appropriate.
22.plotz
Or plats. Literally, to explode, as in aggravation. “Well, don’t plotz!” is similar to “Don’t have a stroke!” or “Don’t have a cow!” Also used in expressions such as, “Oy, am I tired; I just ran the four-minute mile. I could just plotz.” That is, collapse.
23.shalom
It means “deep peace,” and isn’t that a more meaningful greeting than “Hi, how are ya?”
24.shlep
To drag, traditionally something you don’t really need; to carry unwillingly. When people “shlep around,” they are dragging themselves, perhaps slouchingly. On vacation, when I’m the one who ends up carrying the heavy suitcase I begged my wife to leave at home, I shlep it.
25.shlemiel
A clumsy, inept person, similar to a klutz (also a Yiddish word). The kind of person who always spills his soup.
26.schlock
Cheap, shoddy, or inferior, as in, “I don’t know why I bought this schlocky souvenir.”
27.shlimazel
Someone with constant bad luck. When the shlemiel spills his soup, he probably spills it on the shlimazel. Fans of the TV sitcom “Laverne and Shirley” remember these two words from the Yiddish-American hopscotch chant that opened each show.
28.shmendrik
A jerk, a stupid person, popularized in The Last Unicorn and Welcome Back Kotter.
29.shmaltzy
Excessively sentimental, gushing, flattering, over-the-top, corny. This word describes some of Hollywood’s most famous films. From shmaltz, which means chicken fat or grease.
30.shmooze
Chat, make small talk, converse about nothing in particular. But at Hollywood parties, guests often schmooze with people they want to impress.
31.schmuck
Often used as an insulting word for a self-made fool, but you shouldn’t use it in polite company at all, since it refers to male anatomy.
32.spiel
A long, involved sales pitch, as in, “I had to listen to his whole spiel before I found out what he really wanted.” From the German word for play.
33.shikse
A non-Jewish woman, all too often used derogatorily. It has the connotation of “young and beautiful,” so referring to a man’s Gentile wife or girlfriend as a shiksa implies that his primary attraction was her good looks. She is possibly blonde. A shagetz or sheygets means a non-Jewish boy, and has the connotation of a someone who is unruly, even violent.
34.shmutz
Or shmuts. Dirt – a little dirt, not serious grime. If a little boy has shmutz on his face, and he likely will, his mother will quickly wipe it off. It can also mean dirty language. It’s not nice to talk shmutz about shmutz. A current derivation, “schmitzig,” means a “thigamabob” or a “doodad,” but has nothing to do with filth.
35.shtick
Something you’re known for doing, an entertainer’s routine, an actor’s bit, stage business; a gimmick often done to draw attention to yourself.
36.tchatchke
Or tshatshke. Knick-knack, little toy, collectible or giftware. It also appears in sentences such as, “My brother divorced his wife for some little tchatchke.” You can figure that one out.
37.tsuris
Or tsores. Serious troubles, not minor annoyances. Plagues of lice, gnats, flies, locusts, hail, death… now, those were tsuris.
38.tuches
Rear end, bottom, backside, buttocks. In proper Yiddish, it’s spelled tuchis or tuches or tokhis, and was the origin of the American slang word tush.
39.yente
Female busybody or gossip. At one time, high-class parents gave this name to their girls (after all, it has the same root as “gentle”), but it gained the Yiddish meaning of “she-devil”. The matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof” was named Yente (and she certainly was a yente though maybe not very high-class), so many people mistakenly think that yente means matchmaker.
40.yiddisher kop
Smart person. Literally means “Jewish head.” I don’t want to know what goyisher kop means.
As in Hebrew, the ch or kh in Yiddish is a “voiceless fricative,” with a pronunciation between h and k. If you don’t know how to make that sound, pronounce it like an h. Pronouncing it like a k is goyish.
There is no universally accepted transliteration or spelling; the standard YIVO version is based on the Eastern European Klal Yiddish dialect, while many Yiddish words found in English came from Southern Yiddish dialects. In the 1930s, Yiddish was spoken by more than 10 million people, but by 1945, 75% of them were gone. Today, Yiddish is the language of over 100 newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, and websites.
1.baleboste
A good homemaker, a woman who’s in charge of her home and will make sure you remember it.
2.bissel
Or bisl – a little bit.
3.bubbe
Or bobe. It means Grandmother, and bobeshi is the more affectionate form. Bubele is a similarly affectionate word, though it isn’t in Yiddish dictionaries.
4.bupkes
Not a word for polite company. Bubkes or bobkes may be related to the Polish word for “beans”, but it really means “goat droppings” or “horse droppings.” It’s often used by American Jews for “trivial, worthless, useless, a ridiculously small amount” – less than nothing, so to speak. “After all the work I did, I got bupkes!”
5.chutzpah
Or khutspe. Nerve, extreme arrogance, brazen presumption. In English, chutzpah often connotes courage or confidence, but among Yiddish speakers, it is not a compliment.
6.feh!
An expression of disgust or disapproval, representative of the sound of spitting.
7.glitch
Or glitsh. Literally “slip,” “skate,” or “nosedive,” which was the origin of the common American usage as “a minor problem or error.”
8.gornisht
More polite than bupkes, and also implies a strong sense of nothing; used in phrases such as “gornisht helfn” (beyond help).
9.goy
A non-Jew, a Gentile. As in Hebrew, one Gentile is a goy, many Gentiles are goyim, the non-Jewish world in general is “the goyim.” Goyish is the adjective form. Putting mayonnaise on a pastrami sandwich is goyish. Putting mayonnaise on a pastrami sandwich on white bread is even more goyish.
10.kibbitz
In Yiddish, it’s spelled kibets, and it’s related to the Hebrew “kibbutz” or “collective.” But it can also mean verbal joking, which after all is a collective activity. It didn’t originally mean giving unwanted advice about someone else’s game – that’s an American innovation.
11.klutz
Or better yet, klots. Literally means “a block of wood,” so it’s often used for a dense, clumsy or awkward person. See schlemiel.
12.kosher
Something that’s acceptable to Orthodox Jews, especially food. Other Jews may also “eat kosher” on some level but are not required to. Food that Orthodox Jews don’t eat – pork, shellfish, etc. – is called traif. An observant Jew might add, “Both pork and shellfish are doubtlessly very tasty. I simply am restricted from eating it.” In English, when you hear something that seems suspicious or shady, you might say, “That doesn’t sound kosher.”
13.kvetsh
In popular English, kvetch means “complain, whine or fret,” but in Yiddish, kvetsh literally means “to press or squeeze,” like a wrong-sized shoe. Reminds you of certain chronic complainers, doesn’t it? But it’s also used on Yiddish web pages for “click” (Click Here).
14.maven
Pronounced meyven. An expert, often used sarcastically.
15.Mazel Tov
Or mazltof. Literally “good luck,” (well, literally, “good constellation”) but it’s a congratulation for what just happened, not a hopeful wish for what might happen in the future. When someone gets married or has a child or graduates from college, this is what you say to them. It can also be used sarcastically to mean “it’s about time,” as in “It’s about time you finished school and stopped sponging off your parents.”
16.mentsh
An honorable, decent person, an authentic person, a person who helps you when you need help. Can be a man, woman or child.
17.mishegas
Insanity or craziness. A meshugener is a crazy man. If you want to insult someone, you can ask them, ”Does it hurt to be crazy?”
18.mishpocheh
Or mishpokhe or mishpucha. It means “family,” as in “Relax, you’re mishpocheh. I’ll sell it to you at wholesale.”
19.nosh
Or nash. To nibble; a light snack, but you won’t be light if you don’t stop noshing. Can also describe plagarism, though not always in a bad sense; you know, picking up little pieces for yourself.
20.nu
A general word that calls for a reply. It can mean, “So?” “Huh?” “Well?” “What’s up?” or “Hello?”
21.oy vey
Exclamation of dismay, grief, or exasperation. The phrase “oy vey iz mir” means “Oh, woe is me.” “Oy gevalt!” is like oy vey, but expresses fear, shock or amazement. When you realize you’re about to be hit by a car, this expression would be appropriate.
22.plotz
Or plats. Literally, to explode, as in aggravation. “Well, don’t plotz!” is similar to “Don’t have a stroke!” or “Don’t have a cow!” Also used in expressions such as, “Oy, am I tired; I just ran the four-minute mile. I could just plotz.” That is, collapse.
23.shalom
It means “deep peace,” and isn’t that a more meaningful greeting than “Hi, how are ya?”
24.shlep
To drag, traditionally something you don’t really need; to carry unwillingly. When people “shlep around,” they are dragging themselves, perhaps slouchingly. On vacation, when I’m the one who ends up carrying the heavy suitcase I begged my wife to leave at home, I shlep it.
25.shlemiel
A clumsy, inept person, similar to a klutz (also a Yiddish word). The kind of person who always spills his soup.
26.schlock
Cheap, shoddy, or inferior, as in, “I don’t know why I bought this schlocky souvenir.”
27.shlimazel
Someone with constant bad luck. When the shlemiel spills his soup, he probably spills it on the shlimazel. Fans of the TV sitcom “Laverne and Shirley” remember these two words from the Yiddish-American hopscotch chant that opened each show.
28.shmendrik
A jerk, a stupid person, popularized in The Last Unicorn and Welcome Back Kotter.
29.shmaltzy
Excessively sentimental, gushing, flattering, over-the-top, corny. This word describes some of Hollywood’s most famous films. From shmaltz, which means chicken fat or grease.
30.shmooze
Chat, make small talk, converse about nothing in particular. But at Hollywood parties, guests often schmooze with people they want to impress.
31.schmuck
Often used as an insulting word for a self-made fool, but you shouldn’t use it in polite company at all, since it refers to male anatomy.
32.spiel
A long, involved sales pitch, as in, “I had to listen to his whole spiel before I found out what he really wanted.” From the German word for play.
33.shikse
A non-Jewish woman, all too often used derogatorily. It has the connotation of “young and beautiful,” so referring to a man’s Gentile wife or girlfriend as a shiksa implies that his primary attraction was her good looks. She is possibly blonde. A shagetz or sheygets means a non-Jewish boy, and has the connotation of a someone who is unruly, even violent.
34.shmutz
Or shmuts. Dirt – a little dirt, not serious grime. If a little boy has shmutz on his face, and he likely will, his mother will quickly wipe it off. It can also mean dirty language. It’s not nice to talk shmutz about shmutz. A current derivation, “schmitzig,” means a “thigamabob” or a “doodad,” but has nothing to do with filth.
35.shtick
Something you’re known for doing, an entertainer’s routine, an actor’s bit, stage business; a gimmick often done to draw attention to yourself.
36.tchatchke
Or tshatshke. Knick-knack, little toy, collectible or giftware. It also appears in sentences such as, “My brother divorced his wife for some little tchatchke.” You can figure that one out.
37.tsuris
Or tsores. Serious troubles, not minor annoyances. Plagues of lice, gnats, flies, locusts, hail, death… now, those were tsuris.
38.tuches
Rear end, bottom, backside, buttocks. In proper Yiddish, it’s spelled tuchis or tuches or tokhis, and was the origin of the American slang word tush.
39.yente
Female busybody or gossip. At one time, high-class parents gave this name to their girls (after all, it has the same root as “gentle”), but it gained the Yiddish meaning of “she-devil”. The matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof” was named Yente (and she certainly was a yente though maybe not very high-class), so many people mistakenly think that yente means matchmaker.
40.yiddisher kop
Smart person. Literally means “Jewish head.” I don’t want to know what goyisher kop means.
As in Hebrew, the ch or kh in Yiddish is a “voiceless fricative,” with a pronunciation between h and k. If you don’t know how to make that sound, pronounce it like an h. Pronouncing it like a k is goyish.
Getting Back to the Phantom Skill
By JAMES MCMULLAN
Line by Line is about rediscovering the lost skill and singular pleasure of drawing.
Drawing, for many people, is that phantom skill they remember having in elementary school, when they drew with great relish and abandon. Crayon and colored pencil drawings of fancy princesses poured out onto the sketchbooks of the girls, while planes and ships, usually aflame, battled it out in the boys’ drawings. Occasionally boys drew princesses and girls drew gunboats, but whatever the subject matter, this robust period of drawing tended to wither in most students’ lives and, by high school, drawing became the specialized province of those one or two art geeks who provided the cartoons for the yearbook and made the posters for the prom.
The first few columns of this series on drawing that I’m initiating this week will offer a primer on the basic elements of line-making, perspective, structure and proportion, which I hope will begin to rekindle the love of drawing for those readers who left it behind in the 4th grade. Achieving some confidence in drawing objects will get you started in the pleasure of this activity, and give you the basis for moving on to drawing figures.
I also hope, in later installments, to provide insight into the vitality and sensuousness of great drawing so that your next visit to the museum will be both more gratifying and a chance to amaze your companions with your new-found aestheticism.
My method for helping you to draw focuses primarily on two aspects of the skill: first, showing you how to see the structural logic of the object or figure you are drawing, and second, through focused practice, strengthening the link between your eyes and hand so that you are better able to make the drawing marks you intend.
For readers who are familiar with other kinds of drawing instruction that emphasize experimenting with materials, making images with different kinds of pencils, pens and paints, my approach may seem, at first, somewhat stripped down. However, if you try the exercises I describe, I think you will find that they give you the basic thinking and hand skills you need to move on to whatever experimenting with mediums you like.
James McMullan
In the historical and contemporary art I use as examples here, I hope there will be many drawing styles and different drawing and painting materials to inspire you. But, for the exercises in the early columns, I suggest you stick to using a 2B or 4B pencil so that the goal of clarifying your thinking and strengthening your hand-eye coordination doesn’t get confused by the difficulties of manipulating pen and ink or any other more complicated drawing tool.
In advising you to begin with these simple materials, pencil and a drawing pad, I am not denying the sensuousness of charcoal or pen-and-ink or paint or any of the myriad implements and colorful fluids with which, like happy children in a mud puddle, we can make images. I’m simply hoping to provide you with a period at the start of your endeavor in which you can focus on learning to see and getting in touch with your drawing hand without the distraction of style or materials.
In every column I will use examples from the history of art to show how certain functions of drawing and approaches to subject matter play out successfully in the work of specific artists. De Chirico’s surreal cityscapes will help to dramatize perspective. Edward Hopper’s paintings will illuminate how light brings out the solidity of objects and people. Picasso shows us how modeling can emphasize the substance of faces and bodies, while Matisse will be exhibit A in how artists move from realism to stylization in considering the human figure.
James McMullan
My overall goal, apart from helping with specific information, is to communicate the enthusiasm I feel for the immediacy of drawing. It is the activity that most engages an artist’s sense of exploration, both visually, as the artist feels out the image, new born, on the drawing surface, and intellectually, as the drawing becomes the bridge between observation or an idea and a graphic fact. In looking at Michelangelo’s studies for the Sistine Chapel, for instance, so searching and in-the-moment is the artist’s attention to his subject that I often feel the years fall away and there I am, looking over his shoulder as he draws.
I confess that much contemporary drawing disappoints me for its lack of risk and immediacy. It often seems like the product of a too premeditated and too lengthy process of refinement. Part of this may be the influence of the computer and the surface perfection that it achieves so easily; geometrically pure shapes, even textures, clear colors.
Another source of this arid quality may be attributable to the use of photography as a drawing shortcut. Photography as a source for subject matter has opened many amazing possibilities in 20th and 21st century art, but when it is used as a tracing or projecting tool in order to circumvent the difficulties of achieving correct proportion, the resulting art is often static and lifeless.
Drawing is a process of engagement for the artist, a period of both time and struggle that pulls the artist deeply and intensely into his subject and his ideas. Projecting a photograph in order to give you a perfect drawing of your subject has robbed you of all the imperfect yet more interesting drawings you might have made. The recent exhibit of the art of William Kentridge at The Museum of Modern Art in New York was the most powerful expression of the vital possibility in drawing that I have seen for some time, and it made so much other contemporary drawing seem dry and intellectualized.
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art. © 2010 William Kentridge. William Kentridge’s drawing from Stereoscope 1998–99
During the 12-week period of this column, I will be working on posters for Lincoln Center Theater as well as on a children’s book, and I will share with you sketches from those processes if they seem to illuminate an aspect of drawing being discussed. I hope that readers will respond to this column and help to shape and expand its content. I will be only too happy to move into the more arcane aspects of art and drawing if comments indicate interest.
Next week: “The Frisbee of Art.”
Line by Line is about rediscovering the lost skill and singular pleasure of drawing.
Drawing, for many people, is that phantom skill they remember having in elementary school, when they drew with great relish and abandon. Crayon and colored pencil drawings of fancy princesses poured out onto the sketchbooks of the girls, while planes and ships, usually aflame, battled it out in the boys’ drawings. Occasionally boys drew princesses and girls drew gunboats, but whatever the subject matter, this robust period of drawing tended to wither in most students’ lives and, by high school, drawing became the specialized province of those one or two art geeks who provided the cartoons for the yearbook and made the posters for the prom.
The first few columns of this series on drawing that I’m initiating this week will offer a primer on the basic elements of line-making, perspective, structure and proportion, which I hope will begin to rekindle the love of drawing for those readers who left it behind in the 4th grade. Achieving some confidence in drawing objects will get you started in the pleasure of this activity, and give you the basis for moving on to drawing figures.
I also hope, in later installments, to provide insight into the vitality and sensuousness of great drawing so that your next visit to the museum will be both more gratifying and a chance to amaze your companions with your new-found aestheticism.
My method for helping you to draw focuses primarily on two aspects of the skill: first, showing you how to see the structural logic of the object or figure you are drawing, and second, through focused practice, strengthening the link between your eyes and hand so that you are better able to make the drawing marks you intend.
For readers who are familiar with other kinds of drawing instruction that emphasize experimenting with materials, making images with different kinds of pencils, pens and paints, my approach may seem, at first, somewhat stripped down. However, if you try the exercises I describe, I think you will find that they give you the basic thinking and hand skills you need to move on to whatever experimenting with mediums you like.
James McMullan
In the historical and contemporary art I use as examples here, I hope there will be many drawing styles and different drawing and painting materials to inspire you. But, for the exercises in the early columns, I suggest you stick to using a 2B or 4B pencil so that the goal of clarifying your thinking and strengthening your hand-eye coordination doesn’t get confused by the difficulties of manipulating pen and ink or any other more complicated drawing tool.
In advising you to begin with these simple materials, pencil and a drawing pad, I am not denying the sensuousness of charcoal or pen-and-ink or paint or any of the myriad implements and colorful fluids with which, like happy children in a mud puddle, we can make images. I’m simply hoping to provide you with a period at the start of your endeavor in which you can focus on learning to see and getting in touch with your drawing hand without the distraction of style or materials.
In every column I will use examples from the history of art to show how certain functions of drawing and approaches to subject matter play out successfully in the work of specific artists. De Chirico’s surreal cityscapes will help to dramatize perspective. Edward Hopper’s paintings will illuminate how light brings out the solidity of objects and people. Picasso shows us how modeling can emphasize the substance of faces and bodies, while Matisse will be exhibit A in how artists move from realism to stylization in considering the human figure.
James McMullan
My overall goal, apart from helping with specific information, is to communicate the enthusiasm I feel for the immediacy of drawing. It is the activity that most engages an artist’s sense of exploration, both visually, as the artist feels out the image, new born, on the drawing surface, and intellectually, as the drawing becomes the bridge between observation or an idea and a graphic fact. In looking at Michelangelo’s studies for the Sistine Chapel, for instance, so searching and in-the-moment is the artist’s attention to his subject that I often feel the years fall away and there I am, looking over his shoulder as he draws.
I confess that much contemporary drawing disappoints me for its lack of risk and immediacy. It often seems like the product of a too premeditated and too lengthy process of refinement. Part of this may be the influence of the computer and the surface perfection that it achieves so easily; geometrically pure shapes, even textures, clear colors.
Another source of this arid quality may be attributable to the use of photography as a drawing shortcut. Photography as a source for subject matter has opened many amazing possibilities in 20th and 21st century art, but when it is used as a tracing or projecting tool in order to circumvent the difficulties of achieving correct proportion, the resulting art is often static and lifeless.
Drawing is a process of engagement for the artist, a period of both time and struggle that pulls the artist deeply and intensely into his subject and his ideas. Projecting a photograph in order to give you a perfect drawing of your subject has robbed you of all the imperfect yet more interesting drawings you might have made. The recent exhibit of the art of William Kentridge at The Museum of Modern Art in New York was the most powerful expression of the vital possibility in drawing that I have seen for some time, and it made so much other contemporary drawing seem dry and intellectualized.
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art. © 2010 William Kentridge. William Kentridge’s drawing from Stereoscope 1998–99
During the 12-week period of this column, I will be working on posters for Lincoln Center Theater as well as on a children’s book, and I will share with you sketches from those processes if they seem to illuminate an aspect of drawing being discussed. I hope that readers will respond to this column and help to shape and expand its content. I will be only too happy to move into the more arcane aspects of art and drawing if comments indicate interest.
Next week: “The Frisbee of Art.”
Friday, September 17, 2010
Media Matters UPDATER
DE-jà vu
In a stunning turn of events, a little-known, hyper-conservative congressional candidate became the darling of the tea party movement, earned the surprise endorsement of former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Twitter), and made a last-minute push in the polls, overtaking the moderate GOP frontrunner who up to that point had been considered a shoo-in to win the seat. After emerging as the preferred GOP pick, the tea party candidate's extreme positions made clear that a race that had once been considered a GOP-lock had turned into a potential win for the Democrats. As such, the conservative media were fractured: some complained that Republicans sacrificed electability in favor of ideology, and were quickly cannibalized by the bloggers and commentators who insisted either that their new extremist could win in a general election, or that it was better to lose with a "real" conservative on the ballot than to win with a "RINO."
I'm talking, of course, about Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and the 2009 special election for New York's 23rd Congressional district. Early polling in the race showed moderate Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava with a comfortable lead over Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens, before the still-nascent tea party machinery lined up behind Hoffman and Palin lent him her imprimatur. As more Republicans defected from their party's candidate to back Hoffman, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich held fast, endorsing Scozzafava and explaining that it was a question of winning: "If your interest is taking power back from the Left, and your interest is winning the necessary elections, then there are times when you have to put together a coalition that has disagreement within it." As a reward for his tent-building efforts, Gingrich was excoriated by right-wing bloggers, who said he had lost all credibility and didn't support true conservatism. (He's since made amends by attacking President Obama's "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.")
In the end, Scozzafava dropped out of the race and the seat that had once been considered hers went instead to Bill Owens, who defeated Hoffman 48-46 percent. After the election, Rush Limbaugh endorsed the view of RedState.com blogger Erick Erickson, saying: "It would have been great if Hoffman won, but the real victory was making sure that a Republican-in-name-only did not win."
Fast forward one year to the Delaware Republican Senate primary and, though the races aren't completely identical, it starts to feel like déjà vu all over again. Republican Christine O'Donnell, who got thumped by Joe Biden in Delaware's 2008 Senate race, decided to give it another shot in 2010 and for a long time languished far behind Rep. Mike Castle in the Republican primary race. That, of course, changed very rapidly when Sarah Palin decided that O'Donnell was one of her "Mama Grizzlies" and the tea party dumped a pile of cash in her lap. Right-wing bloggers quickly aligned with Queen Bee Palin and ripped into Castle, hysterically claiming that he had voted to impeach George W. Bush. The same series of events played out: polling showed O'Donnell overtaking Castle late in the game, and when the dust settled, O'Donnell emerged as the unlikely Republican candidate.
And as nasty as the race between Castle and O'Donnell was, the internecine warfare between conservative bloggers and journalists over the race was incomparably vicious. The Weekly Standard, Powerline, Mark Levin, and other bloggers got into a massive twist regarding the Standard's long-form takedown of O'Donnell. Here's a sampling from the back-and-forth: "I think you're an ass," "a disgrace," "mouthpieces for the Republican establishment," "lazy and unfair," "smear tactics against O'Donnell," "elitist and arrogant attitude," "jackass," "what an idiot."
But no figure better represents the O'Donnell-inspired clash between ideology and electability than Karl Rove, who appeared on Fox News' Hannity the night of O'Donnell's win to attack her "checkered background" adding: "It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, at the end of the day, while they may be conservative in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for." The right-wing reaction was swift and brutal. Michelle Malkin said Rove was "an effete sore loser." Dan Riehl called for Fox News to "suspend and investigate" Rove. Erickson said Rove was "in full meltdown," while Levin accused the former Bush adviser of declaring "war against the Tea Party movement and conservatives." Rove, after initially defending his stance, folded like a lawn chair during a particularly aggrieved Fox News appearance, insisting that he endorsed O'Donnell and was going to help her.
As for the growing consensus that O'Donnell's primary victory has torpedoed the GOP's once-excellent chances of capturing the Senate seat (polls show Democrat Chris Coons trailed Castle by about 10 points, but leads O'Donnell by double-digits), conservatives again fell back to winning-isn't-everything justifications. "If we lose it, fine. It's better to have a genuine Marxist in the US Senate rather than a phony, pretend conservative who's gonna vote often like a Marxist and just confuse everybody and water down the entire identification of what a conservative or what a Republican is," said Rush, whose attitude was enthusiastically cheered by Erickson.
So what can be drawn from these two scenarios? One is led to the unavoidable conclusion that the right-wing media's commitment to ideological purity transcends not just partisan loyalty, but logic and common sense. They want "real" conservatives in power, but when the "real" conservative politicians they support lose to Democrats, they convince themselves not only that this doesn't matter, but that it's a good thing. They want Republicans to control Congress, and they're willing to sacrifice as many Republicans in Congress as is necessary to achieve that goal.
A network of their very own
Christine O'Donnell's rise to electoral prominence has also helped to reveal just how integral Fox News has become in modern Republican politics.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a survey this week detailing Americans' news-gathering habits. Of particular note was their partisan breakdown of cable news audiences over the past decade. In 2000, 18 percent of Republicans and 18 percent of Democrats said they regularly get their news from Fox. In 2010, the percentage of Democratic regular viewers has dipped to 15, while regular Republican viewers skyrocketed to 40 percent. Moreover, 41 percent of Republicans believe "all or most" of what Fox News says. It is the network of and for the GOP. Kevin Drum observed: "As Fox has steadily amped up its conservative branding, conservatives have decided that's all they want to hear. The echo chamber must be getting pretty deafening over there."
But this transcends mere epistemic closure. Fox News' viewers aren't just looking for pro-conservative bromides and limited-government chalkboard diagrams -- they're looking for candidates. And Fox News is also meeting that demand. Christine O'Donnell's rapid rise was due in part to the big assist she got from Fox News -- and not just from Sarah Palin, but from their entire stable of conservative hosts and contributors. But don't take my word for it. O'Donnell made sure to thank her FNC cheering squad in her victory speech, from Palin to the Beck-created 9-12 movement to the Tea Party Express, which benefits hugely from Fox News' generous attention. Like all newly-minted Republican candidates, her first post-primary stop was with the sycophantic crew of Fox & Friends.
And if O'Donnell follows Sarah Palin's advice -- and why wouldn't she? -- Fox will continue to play an integral role in her campaign. "Speak through Fox News," counseled Palin during an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, who explained that her vice-presidential run should serve as a cautionary tale against dealing with the legitimate media, who will occasionally do things like ask non-softball questions and point out when you've said something crazy. Fox News will let O'Donnell get her message out and make an end-run around the media's uncomfortable questions (as well as provide a ready-made venue for some quickie fund-raising).
And when you consider that the network boasts among its contributors people like Karl Rove, who heads a multi-million-dollar "shadow RNC" tasked with electing Republicans, and Dick Morris, who works diligently to elect any Republican willing to pay his exorbitant consulting fees, one can't escape the realization that Fox News has moved beyond simply cheerleading for Republicans. Right now, the network is one of the most important cogs in the national Republican electoral machine.
In a stunning turn of events, a little-known, hyper-conservative congressional candidate became the darling of the tea party movement, earned the surprise endorsement of former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Twitter), and made a last-minute push in the polls, overtaking the moderate GOP frontrunner who up to that point had been considered a shoo-in to win the seat. After emerging as the preferred GOP pick, the tea party candidate's extreme positions made clear that a race that had once been considered a GOP-lock had turned into a potential win for the Democrats. As such, the conservative media were fractured: some complained that Republicans sacrificed electability in favor of ideology, and were quickly cannibalized by the bloggers and commentators who insisted either that their new extremist could win in a general election, or that it was better to lose with a "real" conservative on the ballot than to win with a "RINO."
I'm talking, of course, about Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and the 2009 special election for New York's 23rd Congressional district. Early polling in the race showed moderate Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava with a comfortable lead over Hoffman and Democrat Bill Owens, before the still-nascent tea party machinery lined up behind Hoffman and Palin lent him her imprimatur. As more Republicans defected from their party's candidate to back Hoffman, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich held fast, endorsing Scozzafava and explaining that it was a question of winning: "If your interest is taking power back from the Left, and your interest is winning the necessary elections, then there are times when you have to put together a coalition that has disagreement within it." As a reward for his tent-building efforts, Gingrich was excoriated by right-wing bloggers, who said he had lost all credibility and didn't support true conservatism. (He's since made amends by attacking President Obama's "Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.")
In the end, Scozzafava dropped out of the race and the seat that had once been considered hers went instead to Bill Owens, who defeated Hoffman 48-46 percent. After the election, Rush Limbaugh endorsed the view of RedState.com blogger Erick Erickson, saying: "It would have been great if Hoffman won, but the real victory was making sure that a Republican-in-name-only did not win."
Fast forward one year to the Delaware Republican Senate primary and, though the races aren't completely identical, it starts to feel like déjà vu all over again. Republican Christine O'Donnell, who got thumped by Joe Biden in Delaware's 2008 Senate race, decided to give it another shot in 2010 and for a long time languished far behind Rep. Mike Castle in the Republican primary race. That, of course, changed very rapidly when Sarah Palin decided that O'Donnell was one of her "Mama Grizzlies" and the tea party dumped a pile of cash in her lap. Right-wing bloggers quickly aligned with Queen Bee Palin and ripped into Castle, hysterically claiming that he had voted to impeach George W. Bush. The same series of events played out: polling showed O'Donnell overtaking Castle late in the game, and when the dust settled, O'Donnell emerged as the unlikely Republican candidate.
And as nasty as the race between Castle and O'Donnell was, the internecine warfare between conservative bloggers and journalists over the race was incomparably vicious. The Weekly Standard, Powerline, Mark Levin, and other bloggers got into a massive twist regarding the Standard's long-form takedown of O'Donnell. Here's a sampling from the back-and-forth: "I think you're an ass," "a disgrace," "mouthpieces for the Republican establishment," "lazy and unfair," "smear tactics against O'Donnell," "elitist and arrogant attitude," "jackass," "what an idiot."
But no figure better represents the O'Donnell-inspired clash between ideology and electability than Karl Rove, who appeared on Fox News' Hannity the night of O'Donnell's win to attack her "checkered background" adding: "It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, at the end of the day, while they may be conservative in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for." The right-wing reaction was swift and brutal. Michelle Malkin said Rove was "an effete sore loser." Dan Riehl called for Fox News to "suspend and investigate" Rove. Erickson said Rove was "in full meltdown," while Levin accused the former Bush adviser of declaring "war against the Tea Party movement and conservatives." Rove, after initially defending his stance, folded like a lawn chair during a particularly aggrieved Fox News appearance, insisting that he endorsed O'Donnell and was going to help her.
As for the growing consensus that O'Donnell's primary victory has torpedoed the GOP's once-excellent chances of capturing the Senate seat (polls show Democrat Chris Coons trailed Castle by about 10 points, but leads O'Donnell by double-digits), conservatives again fell back to winning-isn't-everything justifications. "If we lose it, fine. It's better to have a genuine Marxist in the US Senate rather than a phony, pretend conservative who's gonna vote often like a Marxist and just confuse everybody and water down the entire identification of what a conservative or what a Republican is," said Rush, whose attitude was enthusiastically cheered by Erickson.
So what can be drawn from these two scenarios? One is led to the unavoidable conclusion that the right-wing media's commitment to ideological purity transcends not just partisan loyalty, but logic and common sense. They want "real" conservatives in power, but when the "real" conservative politicians they support lose to Democrats, they convince themselves not only that this doesn't matter, but that it's a good thing. They want Republicans to control Congress, and they're willing to sacrifice as many Republicans in Congress as is necessary to achieve that goal.
A network of their very own
Christine O'Donnell's rise to electoral prominence has also helped to reveal just how integral Fox News has become in modern Republican politics.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a survey this week detailing Americans' news-gathering habits. Of particular note was their partisan breakdown of cable news audiences over the past decade. In 2000, 18 percent of Republicans and 18 percent of Democrats said they regularly get their news from Fox. In 2010, the percentage of Democratic regular viewers has dipped to 15, while regular Republican viewers skyrocketed to 40 percent. Moreover, 41 percent of Republicans believe "all or most" of what Fox News says. It is the network of and for the GOP. Kevin Drum observed: "As Fox has steadily amped up its conservative branding, conservatives have decided that's all they want to hear. The echo chamber must be getting pretty deafening over there."
But this transcends mere epistemic closure. Fox News' viewers aren't just looking for pro-conservative bromides and limited-government chalkboard diagrams -- they're looking for candidates. And Fox News is also meeting that demand. Christine O'Donnell's rapid rise was due in part to the big assist she got from Fox News -- and not just from Sarah Palin, but from their entire stable of conservative hosts and contributors. But don't take my word for it. O'Donnell made sure to thank her FNC cheering squad in her victory speech, from Palin to the Beck-created 9-12 movement to the Tea Party Express, which benefits hugely from Fox News' generous attention. Like all newly-minted Republican candidates, her first post-primary stop was with the sycophantic crew of Fox & Friends.
And if O'Donnell follows Sarah Palin's advice -- and why wouldn't she? -- Fox will continue to play an integral role in her campaign. "Speak through Fox News," counseled Palin during an appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, who explained that her vice-presidential run should serve as a cautionary tale against dealing with the legitimate media, who will occasionally do things like ask non-softball questions and point out when you've said something crazy. Fox News will let O'Donnell get her message out and make an end-run around the media's uncomfortable questions (as well as provide a ready-made venue for some quickie fund-raising).
And when you consider that the network boasts among its contributors people like Karl Rove, who heads a multi-million-dollar "shadow RNC" tasked with electing Republicans, and Dick Morris, who works diligently to elect any Republican willing to pay his exorbitant consulting fees, one can't escape the realization that Fox News has moved beyond simply cheerleading for Republicans. Right now, the network is one of the most important cogs in the national Republican electoral machine.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
IT'S ABOUT TIME Another kick in the ash!
Another kick in the ash:
Mayor Bloomberg to ban smoking in Times Square, city beaches
Talk about kicking butts in Times Square.
Smokers will not be able to light up when hanging out along pedestrian walkways across the five boroughs, including in car-free areas of Times Square, as part of a broad expansion of the city’s smoking ban to parks, beaches and boardwalks, officials announced today.
The proposed ban means no smoking if you're sitting on the traffic-free Broadway plaza at the Crossroads of the World and Herald Square, in all parts of Central Park or along the famous Coney Island boardwalk.
“The science is clear: Prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke – whether you’re indoors or out -- hurts your health," Mayor Bloomberg said in announcing the widespread ban. "Today, we’re doing something about it."
City officials said it expects New Yorkers and tourists alike to follow the law. Those who choose to ignore the ban could be hit with a violation summons issued by the Parks Department.
A fine could cost violators $50.
“By supporting this legislation, we welcome the chance to improve the beauty and health of the City’s public outdoor spaces,” said Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe. “Tens of millions of visitors – New Yorkers and tourists alike – enjoy our beaches and parks year round, and we hope this new legislation makes it even safer and more pleasant for children and adults to play sports and for visitors of all interests to enjoy healthier and cleaner parks and beaches.”
The ban, which has the support of Health Commissioner Tom Farley, also extends to the city's 14 miles of public beaches and 29,000 acres of parkland.
Smoking is already banned in some parks facilities, including playgrounds, but not in most open recreational areas.
Several other states and municipalities across the country have similar bans, including Los Angeles, which went into effect in 2007.
The proposal must be approved by the City Council.
“New York is the national leader in creating healthy cities, and promoting a healthy life style,” said Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), who introduced the legislation. "That’s why we’re pushing to get butts off the beaches. And it’s not just a health issue, as any beachgoer knows: Despite the clean-up efforts of the Parks Department, the sand is too often used as an ashtray.”
Mayor Bloomberg to ban smoking in Times Square, city beaches
Talk about kicking butts in Times Square.
Smokers will not be able to light up when hanging out along pedestrian walkways across the five boroughs, including in car-free areas of Times Square, as part of a broad expansion of the city’s smoking ban to parks, beaches and boardwalks, officials announced today.
The proposed ban means no smoking if you're sitting on the traffic-free Broadway plaza at the Crossroads of the World and Herald Square, in all parts of Central Park or along the famous Coney Island boardwalk.
“The science is clear: Prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke – whether you’re indoors or out -- hurts your health," Mayor Bloomberg said in announcing the widespread ban. "Today, we’re doing something about it."
City officials said it expects New Yorkers and tourists alike to follow the law. Those who choose to ignore the ban could be hit with a violation summons issued by the Parks Department.
A fine could cost violators $50.
“By supporting this legislation, we welcome the chance to improve the beauty and health of the City’s public outdoor spaces,” said Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe. “Tens of millions of visitors – New Yorkers and tourists alike – enjoy our beaches and parks year round, and we hope this new legislation makes it even safer and more pleasant for children and adults to play sports and for visitors of all interests to enjoy healthier and cleaner parks and beaches.”
The ban, which has the support of Health Commissioner Tom Farley, also extends to the city's 14 miles of public beaches and 29,000 acres of parkland.
Smoking is already banned in some parks facilities, including playgrounds, but not in most open recreational areas.
Several other states and municipalities across the country have similar bans, including Los Angeles, which went into effect in 2007.
The proposal must be approved by the City Council.
“New York is the national leader in creating healthy cities, and promoting a healthy life style,” said Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), who introduced the legislation. "That’s why we’re pushing to get butts off the beaches. And it’s not just a health issue, as any beachgoer knows: Despite the clean-up efforts of the Parks Department, the sand is too often used as an ashtray.”
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Veterans Agency Made Secret Deal Over Benefits
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs failed to inform 6 million soldiers and their families of an agreement enabling Prudential Financial Inc. to withhold lump-sum payments of life insurance benefits for survivors of fallen service members, according to records made public through a Freedom of Information request.
The amendment to Prudential’s contract is the first document to show how VA officials sanctioned a payment practice that has spurred investigations by lawmakers and regulators. Since 1999, Prudential has used so-called retained-asset accounts, which allow the company to withhold lump-sum payments due to survivors and earn investment income on the money for itself.
The Sept. 1, 2009, amendment to Prudential’s contract with the VA ratified another unpublicized deal that had been struck between the insurer and the government 10 years earlier -- one that was never put into writing, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. This verbal agreement in 1999 provoked concern among top insurance officials of the agency, the documents released in the FOIA request show.
For a decade, until the contract was formally changed, Prudential wasn’t fulfilling its obligations to survivors of fallen service members, says Brendan Bridgeland, an insurance lawyer who runs the non-profit Center for Insurance Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
‘Violated Terms’
“It’s very clear they violated the original terms of the contract,” says Bridgeland, who is retained by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to represent consumers.
“Every veteran I’ve spoken with is appalled at the brazen war profiteering by Prudential,” says Paul Sullivan, who served in the 1991 Gulf War as an Army cavalry scout and is now executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington. “Now vets are upset at the VA’s inability to stop Prudential’s bad behavior.”
That the VA allowed Prudential to issue retained-asset accounts for 10 years while the contract required lump-sum payouts is “more evidence that the VA was asleep at the wheel for a decade,” says Sullivan, who was a project manager and analyst at the VA from 2000 to 2006.
“When grieving families check the box that they want a lump sum, they should get it. We remain disappointed and irate at the VA’s failure to provide advocacy for veterans,” he says.
State and U.S. Probes
Since July 28, when Bloomberg Markets first reported that Prudential sent checkbooks instead of checks to survivors requesting lump-sum payouts, state and federal officials have demanded the retained-asset system be investigated and reformed. The VA itself launched a probe of its life insurance program the day the first story was published.
The next day, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo launched what he called a “major fraud investigation” of Prudential and other life insurers over their use of retained- asset accounts. Since then, Cuomo’s office has issued subpoenas to Prudential and at least 12 more insurance companies.
The insurance departments in Georgia and New York have also opened probes. The U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee plans to hold hearings into Prudential’s use of retained-asset accounts to pay money owed to fallen soldiers’ survivors.
‘News to Me’
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates -- who was in office when the 2009 agreement was signed -- said when the VA started its probe that he had been unaware that survivors were being sent retained-asset accounts.
“Until today I actually believed that the families of our fallen heroes got a check for the full amount of their benefits,” Gates said at the time. “This came as news to me.”
As a result of the VA probe, the agency announced today that it will change its insurance program, allowing survivors to request and receive lump-sum checks.
Under Prudential’s original 1965 contract with the VA and a 2007 revised contract -- both of which were released as part of the FOIA response -- the insurer is required to send lump-sum payouts to survivors requesting them. The contract covers 6 million active service members, their families and veterans.
The checkbooks Prudential sends to survivors are tied to what the insurer calls its Alliance Account. The checkbooks are made up of drafts, or IOUs, and aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Prudential invests the survivors’ money in its general corporate account, where it can earn the insurer as much as eight times as much as it currently pays in interest to beneficiaries.
Bond Income
Prudential held $662 million of survivors’ money in its corporate general account as of June 30, according to information provided by the VA. Prudential’s general account earned 4.2 percent in 2009, mostly from bond investments, according to regulatory filings. The company has paid survivors holding Alliance Accounts 0.5 percent in 2010.
Families that were supposed to receive lump-sum payments under the terms of the contract before it was amended in 2009 may be able to successfully sue Prudential for lost interest, insurance lawyer Bridgeland says.
“Survivors would have a very strong claim for interest earned by Prudential on their money,” he says.
Prudential spokesman Bob DeFillippo says his company is following the terms of its agreement with the VA.
“Prudential is in compliance with its contract with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs,” he says.
DeFillippo declined to comment on whether Prudential was in compliance with its contract between 1999 and September 2009 or to answer any other questions. Prudential chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Strangfeld declined to comment for this story.
Useful Service
In July, DeFillippo said Prudential’s retained-asset account was a useful service for bereaved relatives of soldiers. “For some families, the account is the difference between earning interest on a large amount of money and letting it sit idle,” he said. Survivors can withdraw some or all of their money at any time, he said.
Veterans Affairs Chief of Staff John Gingrich says the agency approved use of the Alliance Account because it wanted to help survivors.
“We needed to give an option to individuals that allowed them more flexibility and time to react to the tragic family situation,” Gingrich says.
Verbal Agreement
VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts declined to say when Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in January 2009, learned of the existence of the 1999 verbal agreement and the 2009 amendment. She also declined to make Shinseki available for comment.
The VA official who verbally agreed in 1999 to allow Prudential to change the terms of the 1965 contract and begin offering retained-asset accounts was Thomas Lastowka, the VA’s director for insurance, according to Dennis Foley, a VA attorney. Prudential began sending Alliance Account kits to soldiers’ beneficiaries in June 1999.
Foley says the VA and Prudential would have been better off if they had put their 1999 agreement in writing.
“Could that have been done better?” Foley asks. “Probably. Best practice would have been to legally memorialize it at the time.”
Foley says the 1999 changes to the 1965 contract were valid, even if they weren’t in writing, because they were made by mutual agreement by people empowered to make such decisions.
“It was changed by somebody who was authorized to change it,” he says.
Contract Terms
The language of both the 1965 contract and the 2009 amendment make clear that Newark, New Jersey-based Prudential was required to adhere to the original terms until 2009, regardless of any handshake agreements in 1999, insurance lawyer Bridgeland says.
The 1965 contract says any alterations must be made in writing.
“No change in the Group Policy shall be valid unless evidenced by an amendment thereto,” it says. “No Agent is authorized to alter or amend the Group Policy.”
The VA and Prudential signed a revised contract in 2007, saying it was “amended in its entirety.” That contract, with the exact same words as the 1965 agreement, required that Prudential pay survivors with lump sums.
The 2007 revision included the same procedures in the 1965 agreement requiring any changes be made in writing. It contained no mention of the retained-asset system, or of the verbal agreement struck in 1999.
2009 Amendment
It wasn’t until Sept. 24, 2009, that the changes agreed to by VA official Lastowka and Prudential in 1999 were put into writing. The 2009 amendment allowing Prudential to hold onto death benefit payouts was made retroactive to Sept. 1, 2009, not back to 1999.
By putting in writing a change that was verbally adopted 10 years earlier, the VA is effectively trying to backdate the amendment, says Jeffrey Stempel, an insurance law professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who wrote ‘Stempel on Insurance Contracts’ (Aspen Publishers, 2009).
“They’re trying to reinvent history,” Stempel says. “You really can’t do that. This is a blatant giveaway by the VA with nothing for the agency or the people in uniform.”
Nine of every 10 survivors ask Prudential for lump-sum payments, the VA says. Prudential sends those families “checkbooks” instead of checks.
‘Disasters Do Happen’
Documents released in the FOIA request show some signs of concern within the VA after Prudential proposed the retained- asset accounts in 1998. Lastowka, the official who allowed Prudential to introduce the Alliance Accounts, said that the insurer’s “checkbook” system wasn’t protected by the FDIC.
“Disasters do happen,” wrote Lastowka, in an e-mail dated June 9, 1999, to Stephen Wurtz, the agency’s deputy assistant director for insurance.
Lastowka said in his e-mail that the lack of FDIC coverage could backfire on survivors.
“Who is responsible if Alliance goes belly up?” Lastowka asked. “I think we have to also be prepared to defend the use of the Alliance Account.”
Lastowka also asked whether Prudential had adequately disclosed to survivors that the Alliance Accounts weren’t covered by FDIC insurance. “Did Pru alert us to the non-FDIC fact?” he wrote to Wurtz. “Or was it in small print as the notice to beneficiaries?”
Documents turned over by the VA didn’t include a response from Wurtz.
‘Aware of Issues’
Lastowka says his e-mail shows the decision to allow Alliance Accounts was carefully considered.
“This e-mail demonstrates simply that the VA’s Insurance program was aware of issues that might be raised as we implemented the payment method and that we should be prepared to respond to inquiries,” Lastowka says. “We were confident that we were making a decision which would benefit survivors.”
The FOIA documents show that on June 10, 1998, Prudential gave a presentation to the VA. It included 10 pages of key points, saying the Alliance Accounts would benefit survivors because they would provide safety, flexibility in how and when to use their money, competitive interest rates and customer service.
In fine print, at the bottom of one of the pages, was this caveat: “Funds in the Alliance Account are direct obligations of The Prudential Insurance Company of America and are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”
Sheila Bair
Twelve years later, the issue of the lack of FDIC protection in retained-asset accounts flared anew.
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said in August that consumers could incorrectly conclude that retained-asset accounts were insured by the FDIC.
“The insurance company must take care to avoid implying in any way that these accounts are in fact FDIC-insured,” she wrote in an Aug. 5 letter to state insurance regulators.
Some families of veterans have taken their complaints to court. Five survivors filed a federal fraud lawsuit in Boston on Aug. 30 against Prudential claiming the insurer has earned as much as $500 million in profits by improperly keeping beneficiaries’ money instead of paying it out in a lump sum.
The suit, Lucey vs. Prudential Insurance Co. of America, says the insurer fraudulently claims to beneficiaries that the Alliance Account is a lump sum.
‘This Ruse’
“Initiation of this ruse does not constitute payment of anything to anyone,” the suit says. “The Alliance Account is merely a bookkeeping device used by Prudential to hold on to beneficiaries’ money.”
Prudential hasn’t yet filed a response in court. Spokesman DeFillippo says he can’t comment on the case.
“It is important to note that several federal judges have rejected claims against accounts like our Alliance Account, concluding that beneficiaries are in virtually the same position they would be in had the insurer sent them a check,” DeFillippo says. He cited the dismissal of a case against MetLife Inc. on Sept. 10.
Insurance contract professor Stempel says that regardless of the outcome of that lawsuit, it’s clear that Prudential and the VA wrongly manipulated a federal contract at the expense of military members and their relatives. “At a minimum, survivors ought to be made whole with their missed interest,” he says. “The VA really seems to have had the best interests of the insurance company at heart, instead of those of the soldiers and their families.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Evans in Los Angeles at davidevans@bloomberg.net.
The amendment to Prudential’s contract is the first document to show how VA officials sanctioned a payment practice that has spurred investigations by lawmakers and regulators. Since 1999, Prudential has used so-called retained-asset accounts, which allow the company to withhold lump-sum payments due to survivors and earn investment income on the money for itself.
The Sept. 1, 2009, amendment to Prudential’s contract with the VA ratified another unpublicized deal that had been struck between the insurer and the government 10 years earlier -- one that was never put into writing, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue. This verbal agreement in 1999 provoked concern among top insurance officials of the agency, the documents released in the FOIA request show.
For a decade, until the contract was formally changed, Prudential wasn’t fulfilling its obligations to survivors of fallen service members, says Brendan Bridgeland, an insurance lawyer who runs the non-profit Center for Insurance Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
‘Violated Terms’
“It’s very clear they violated the original terms of the contract,” says Bridgeland, who is retained by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to represent consumers.
“Every veteran I’ve spoken with is appalled at the brazen war profiteering by Prudential,” says Paul Sullivan, who served in the 1991 Gulf War as an Army cavalry scout and is now executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington. “Now vets are upset at the VA’s inability to stop Prudential’s bad behavior.”
That the VA allowed Prudential to issue retained-asset accounts for 10 years while the contract required lump-sum payouts is “more evidence that the VA was asleep at the wheel for a decade,” says Sullivan, who was a project manager and analyst at the VA from 2000 to 2006.
“When grieving families check the box that they want a lump sum, they should get it. We remain disappointed and irate at the VA’s failure to provide advocacy for veterans,” he says.
State and U.S. Probes
Since July 28, when Bloomberg Markets first reported that Prudential sent checkbooks instead of checks to survivors requesting lump-sum payouts, state and federal officials have demanded the retained-asset system be investigated and reformed. The VA itself launched a probe of its life insurance program the day the first story was published.
The next day, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo launched what he called a “major fraud investigation” of Prudential and other life insurers over their use of retained- asset accounts. Since then, Cuomo’s office has issued subpoenas to Prudential and at least 12 more insurance companies.
The insurance departments in Georgia and New York have also opened probes. The U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee plans to hold hearings into Prudential’s use of retained-asset accounts to pay money owed to fallen soldiers’ survivors.
‘News to Me’
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates -- who was in office when the 2009 agreement was signed -- said when the VA started its probe that he had been unaware that survivors were being sent retained-asset accounts.
“Until today I actually believed that the families of our fallen heroes got a check for the full amount of their benefits,” Gates said at the time. “This came as news to me.”
As a result of the VA probe, the agency announced today that it will change its insurance program, allowing survivors to request and receive lump-sum checks.
Under Prudential’s original 1965 contract with the VA and a 2007 revised contract -- both of which were released as part of the FOIA response -- the insurer is required to send lump-sum payouts to survivors requesting them. The contract covers 6 million active service members, their families and veterans.
The checkbooks Prudential sends to survivors are tied to what the insurer calls its Alliance Account. The checkbooks are made up of drafts, or IOUs, and aren’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Prudential invests the survivors’ money in its general corporate account, where it can earn the insurer as much as eight times as much as it currently pays in interest to beneficiaries.
Bond Income
Prudential held $662 million of survivors’ money in its corporate general account as of June 30, according to information provided by the VA. Prudential’s general account earned 4.2 percent in 2009, mostly from bond investments, according to regulatory filings. The company has paid survivors holding Alliance Accounts 0.5 percent in 2010.
Families that were supposed to receive lump-sum payments under the terms of the contract before it was amended in 2009 may be able to successfully sue Prudential for lost interest, insurance lawyer Bridgeland says.
“Survivors would have a very strong claim for interest earned by Prudential on their money,” he says.
Prudential spokesman Bob DeFillippo says his company is following the terms of its agreement with the VA.
“Prudential is in compliance with its contract with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs,” he says.
DeFillippo declined to comment on whether Prudential was in compliance with its contract between 1999 and September 2009 or to answer any other questions. Prudential chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Strangfeld declined to comment for this story.
Useful Service
In July, DeFillippo said Prudential’s retained-asset account was a useful service for bereaved relatives of soldiers. “For some families, the account is the difference between earning interest on a large amount of money and letting it sit idle,” he said. Survivors can withdraw some or all of their money at any time, he said.
Veterans Affairs Chief of Staff John Gingrich says the agency approved use of the Alliance Account because it wanted to help survivors.
“We needed to give an option to individuals that allowed them more flexibility and time to react to the tragic family situation,” Gingrich says.
Verbal Agreement
VA spokeswoman Katie Roberts declined to say when Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in January 2009, learned of the existence of the 1999 verbal agreement and the 2009 amendment. She also declined to make Shinseki available for comment.
The VA official who verbally agreed in 1999 to allow Prudential to change the terms of the 1965 contract and begin offering retained-asset accounts was Thomas Lastowka, the VA’s director for insurance, according to Dennis Foley, a VA attorney. Prudential began sending Alliance Account kits to soldiers’ beneficiaries in June 1999.
Foley says the VA and Prudential would have been better off if they had put their 1999 agreement in writing.
“Could that have been done better?” Foley asks. “Probably. Best practice would have been to legally memorialize it at the time.”
Foley says the 1999 changes to the 1965 contract were valid, even if they weren’t in writing, because they were made by mutual agreement by people empowered to make such decisions.
“It was changed by somebody who was authorized to change it,” he says.
Contract Terms
The language of both the 1965 contract and the 2009 amendment make clear that Newark, New Jersey-based Prudential was required to adhere to the original terms until 2009, regardless of any handshake agreements in 1999, insurance lawyer Bridgeland says.
The 1965 contract says any alterations must be made in writing.
“No change in the Group Policy shall be valid unless evidenced by an amendment thereto,” it says. “No Agent is authorized to alter or amend the Group Policy.”
The VA and Prudential signed a revised contract in 2007, saying it was “amended in its entirety.” That contract, with the exact same words as the 1965 agreement, required that Prudential pay survivors with lump sums.
The 2007 revision included the same procedures in the 1965 agreement requiring any changes be made in writing. It contained no mention of the retained-asset system, or of the verbal agreement struck in 1999.
2009 Amendment
It wasn’t until Sept. 24, 2009, that the changes agreed to by VA official Lastowka and Prudential in 1999 were put into writing. The 2009 amendment allowing Prudential to hold onto death benefit payouts was made retroactive to Sept. 1, 2009, not back to 1999.
By putting in writing a change that was verbally adopted 10 years earlier, the VA is effectively trying to backdate the amendment, says Jeffrey Stempel, an insurance law professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who wrote ‘Stempel on Insurance Contracts’ (Aspen Publishers, 2009).
“They’re trying to reinvent history,” Stempel says. “You really can’t do that. This is a blatant giveaway by the VA with nothing for the agency or the people in uniform.”
Nine of every 10 survivors ask Prudential for lump-sum payments, the VA says. Prudential sends those families “checkbooks” instead of checks.
‘Disasters Do Happen’
Documents released in the FOIA request show some signs of concern within the VA after Prudential proposed the retained- asset accounts in 1998. Lastowka, the official who allowed Prudential to introduce the Alliance Accounts, said that the insurer’s “checkbook” system wasn’t protected by the FDIC.
“Disasters do happen,” wrote Lastowka, in an e-mail dated June 9, 1999, to Stephen Wurtz, the agency’s deputy assistant director for insurance.
Lastowka said in his e-mail that the lack of FDIC coverage could backfire on survivors.
“Who is responsible if Alliance goes belly up?” Lastowka asked. “I think we have to also be prepared to defend the use of the Alliance Account.”
Lastowka also asked whether Prudential had adequately disclosed to survivors that the Alliance Accounts weren’t covered by FDIC insurance. “Did Pru alert us to the non-FDIC fact?” he wrote to Wurtz. “Or was it in small print as the notice to beneficiaries?”
Documents turned over by the VA didn’t include a response from Wurtz.
‘Aware of Issues’
Lastowka says his e-mail shows the decision to allow Alliance Accounts was carefully considered.
“This e-mail demonstrates simply that the VA’s Insurance program was aware of issues that might be raised as we implemented the payment method and that we should be prepared to respond to inquiries,” Lastowka says. “We were confident that we were making a decision which would benefit survivors.”
The FOIA documents show that on June 10, 1998, Prudential gave a presentation to the VA. It included 10 pages of key points, saying the Alliance Accounts would benefit survivors because they would provide safety, flexibility in how and when to use their money, competitive interest rates and customer service.
In fine print, at the bottom of one of the pages, was this caveat: “Funds in the Alliance Account are direct obligations of The Prudential Insurance Company of America and are not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”
Sheila Bair
Twelve years later, the issue of the lack of FDIC protection in retained-asset accounts flared anew.
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair said in August that consumers could incorrectly conclude that retained-asset accounts were insured by the FDIC.
“The insurance company must take care to avoid implying in any way that these accounts are in fact FDIC-insured,” she wrote in an Aug. 5 letter to state insurance regulators.
Some families of veterans have taken their complaints to court. Five survivors filed a federal fraud lawsuit in Boston on Aug. 30 against Prudential claiming the insurer has earned as much as $500 million in profits by improperly keeping beneficiaries’ money instead of paying it out in a lump sum.
The suit, Lucey vs. Prudential Insurance Co. of America, says the insurer fraudulently claims to beneficiaries that the Alliance Account is a lump sum.
‘This Ruse’
“Initiation of this ruse does not constitute payment of anything to anyone,” the suit says. “The Alliance Account is merely a bookkeeping device used by Prudential to hold on to beneficiaries’ money.”
Prudential hasn’t yet filed a response in court. Spokesman DeFillippo says he can’t comment on the case.
“It is important to note that several federal judges have rejected claims against accounts like our Alliance Account, concluding that beneficiaries are in virtually the same position they would be in had the insurer sent them a check,” DeFillippo says. He cited the dismissal of a case against MetLife Inc. on Sept. 10.
Insurance contract professor Stempel says that regardless of the outcome of that lawsuit, it’s clear that Prudential and the VA wrongly manipulated a federal contract at the expense of military members and their relatives. “At a minimum, survivors ought to be made whole with their missed interest,” he says. “The VA really seems to have had the best interests of the insurance company at heart, instead of those of the soldiers and their families.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Evans in Los Angeles at davidevans@bloomberg.net.
10 Dirtiest Fruits and Veggies
The 10 Dirtiest Fruits and Veggies -- and How to Clean Them.
Recently,one SELF staffer found flies in her celery -- blech!
Another found worms in her corn -- double blech!
Then, we came across a study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) listing the dirtiest fruits and vegetables., based on the fact that they're laced with pesticides and may be more difficult to clean.
Anyone else losing her appetite.?
Here are the 10 dirtiest items in the produce aisle -- and a few cleaning tips from culinary pros:
Especially important to add to your cleaning priority list, according to the EWG: Celery, peaches, strawberries, apples, blueberries, sweet bell pepper, greens (spinach, kale, collards, etc.), grapes, potatoes and cherries.
No worries if your faves are on the list.
Just be sure to give them an extra good cleaning using these expert tips:
* Give them an ice water bath..
Soak veggies such as grapes (spider webs, mold on the branches = yuck!), asparagus (those pesky little leaves trap junk) and potatoes for at least five minutes before scrubbing them down.
Add vegetable wash or baking soda for extra dirty produce.
* Choose carefully.. It's easier for bugs and chemicals to enter produce that's beaten up -- think bruising and breaks in the skin. Be superficial -- pick the best-looking fruits and veggies.
* Wash with baking soda:.
You can buy pricy produce washes, but don't bother: It's cheap and easy to play chemist and brew one up yourself.
Simply fill a bowl (reserve it only for washing produce!) with cool water and add a few tablespoons of baking soda.
Soak fruit or veggies in the water for 5 to 10 minutes, occasionally scrubbing with a vegetable brush.
This is especially important for celery (bye-bye, flies) which has thin grooves and is angled in, making it a pesticide- and dirt-trapping machine..
* Buy organic:
Obviously, when it comes to avoiding pesticides (the EWG found more than 50 different types on some of the veggies they studied), your best bet is to buy organic.
* Clean your produce promptly: .If you wait until you're ready to cook to clean your fruits and veggies, you're less likely to do a thorough job -- because by that point you're starving and just want to eat already!
So, when you get home from the grocery store or, even better, the farmer's market, clean and cut up the goods (if appropriate), then store them in air-tight containers to keep them fresh up to 33 percent longer.(Rubbermaid's Produce Saver Set)
ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS & COMMENTS ON THIS TOPIC BELOW: Thank You
Recently,one SELF staffer found flies in her celery -- blech!
Another found worms in her corn -- double blech!
Then, we came across a study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) listing the dirtiest fruits and vegetables., based on the fact that they're laced with pesticides and may be more difficult to clean.
Anyone else losing her appetite.?
Here are the 10 dirtiest items in the produce aisle -- and a few cleaning tips from culinary pros:
Especially important to add to your cleaning priority list, according to the EWG: Celery, peaches, strawberries, apples, blueberries, sweet bell pepper, greens (spinach, kale, collards, etc.), grapes, potatoes and cherries.
No worries if your faves are on the list.
Just be sure to give them an extra good cleaning using these expert tips:
* Give them an ice water bath..
Soak veggies such as grapes (spider webs, mold on the branches = yuck!), asparagus (those pesky little leaves trap junk) and potatoes for at least five minutes before scrubbing them down.
Add vegetable wash or baking soda for extra dirty produce.
* Choose carefully.. It's easier for bugs and chemicals to enter produce that's beaten up -- think bruising and breaks in the skin. Be superficial -- pick the best-looking fruits and veggies.
* Wash with baking soda:.
You can buy pricy produce washes, but don't bother: It's cheap and easy to play chemist and brew one up yourself.
Simply fill a bowl (reserve it only for washing produce!) with cool water and add a few tablespoons of baking soda.
Soak fruit or veggies in the water for 5 to 10 minutes, occasionally scrubbing with a vegetable brush.
This is especially important for celery (bye-bye, flies) which has thin grooves and is angled in, making it a pesticide- and dirt-trapping machine..
* Buy organic:
Obviously, when it comes to avoiding pesticides (the EWG found more than 50 different types on some of the veggies they studied), your best bet is to buy organic.
* Clean your produce promptly: .If you wait until you're ready to cook to clean your fruits and veggies, you're less likely to do a thorough job -- because by that point you're starving and just want to eat already!
So, when you get home from the grocery store or, even better, the farmer's market, clean and cut up the goods (if appropriate), then store them in air-tight containers to keep them fresh up to 33 percent longer.(Rubbermaid's Produce Saver Set)
ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS & COMMENTS ON THIS TOPIC BELOW: Thank You
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