Glenn Loury and I discuss that question, as well as health care and public school kids as captive audiences, on Bloggingheads.tv.
I wrote about Barack Obama's glamour here (not my headline) during the campaign and here (briefly) after the election.I discussed drug rationing in this Atlantic column and this response to readers' letters.
For pointers to interesting links, follow my Twitter feeds at twitter.com/vpostrel and twitter.com/deepglamour.
Cross-posted from DeepGlamour.net
The Baader-Meinhof Complex, now playing in U.S. theaters, tells the story of the West German domestic terrorists who called themselves the Red Army Faction. Over about a decade, beginning in the late 1960s, they committed increasingly brutal acts, from bank robberies to kidnappings and murder, in the name of global revolution.
Christopher Hitchens, writing in Vanity Fair, called the movie "the year's best-made and most counter-romantic action thriller." Others have been less approving. The LAT's Kenneth Turan deemed it "an exploitation film on a socially conscious subject, the equivalent of Steven Soderbergh's 'Che' having a love child with 'The Fast and the Furious.'" When it was released in Germany last fall, some felt it was "a little too sexy for comfort" and trafficked in "terrorist-chic."
"The film portrays one murder after another without any sense of meaning, any explanation," Ulrike Meinhof's daughter Bettina Röhl, who was abandoned to a Palestinian orphanage by her terrorist mother, complained in an interview with the Associated Press. She said that "in nonverbal but very suggestive ways, the film insinuates that their motivations for terrorism are understandable."
These contradictory reactions reflect an uncomfortable fact about terrorism and political extremism: To the right audience, they can be very glamorous. They promise purity and meaning, attention and fame and a sense of belonging. Evil does not always appear ugly and unappealing. It can even be sexy.
"Terror is glamour," said Salman Rushdie in a 2006 interview with an incredulous Der Spiegel reporter. It was an astute observation. "The suicide bomber's imagination," he noted, "leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives." What The Baader-Meinhof Complex reminds us is that the glamour of terrorism extends not only to those who actively engage in such violent acts but to the broader public that admires or justifies those actions.
Intentionally or not, this movie about violent leftists illuminates the mass psychology of fascism. (Or maybe seeing crowds of Germans chanting and raising their fists just makes me think of Hitler.) Hitchens writes:
Consumerism is equated with Fascism so that the firebombing of department stores can be justified. Ecstatic violence and "action" become ends in themselves. One can perhaps picture Ulrike Meinhof as a "Red" resister of Nazism in the 1930s, but if the analogy to that decade is allowed, then it is very much easier to envisage her brutally handsome pal Andreas Baader as an enthusiastic member of the Brownshirts.
In its descent from glamour to ever-greater brutality and degradation, however, The Baader-Meinhof Complex most resembles a movie with no political agenda: Casino
But, of course, glamour depends on the audience and so, then, does its deconstruction. German journalist Claudia Fromme, writing in the Times of London, recounted one disconcerting reaction:
As the credits rolled and the lights went up at a screening I attended in Munich, one member of the audience raised his fist in a gesture of sympathy.
He was barely 20 years old, munching popcorn and wearing a hooded jumper. The assiduously factual debunking of the "Baader-Meinhof myth" obviously did not work for everyone in the audience.
"Ted was the Kennedy who lived. He was, as a result, the Kennedy who wasn't glamorous."
Read the rest of my column at Forbes.com. During the campaign, I wrote this piece about Obama's glamour.
[Photo by Flickr user ragesoss under Creative Commons license.]
Ever hungry for status (and business, but mostly status), designers are hoping for a national design policy. A "design czar" would do the trick, but they'd settle for legislation that declares, "Professional design standards shall be used in executing any reform efforts between government and citizens." What are "professional design standards"? Who gets to exclude the upstarts? And--to ask a question designers never consider--what are the limits of design? A process that works wonderfully in a competitive, decentralized marketplace, where new ideas have a chance to enter, would look very different as a single federal policy.
I suspect, of course, that this is not a serious policy proposal but, rather, the latest bid for the recognition designers are always desperate for. But it does suggest another industrial policy.
Since editors are suffering so terribly from the restructuring of the media business, perhaps we should campaign for a "national editorial policy" to employ professional writing standards in all government documents. We could turn Joel Achenbach loose on that health care bill...
Mark Kleiman and I talk about kidneys, crime, and the intersection thereof on Bloggingheads. And you can see my post-chemo wavy hair--the world's most expensive Marcel wave.
Joel Achenbach has a good piece--with a good photo--on the mind-numbing detail of putting together the health care bill. The lead:
The bill, a work in progress called H.R. 3200, is already phone-book thick. The latest amendments this week swamped Room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building, home turf of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Some 250 amendments had appeared by Wednesday night, and the number jumped to 350 by Thursday afternoon. The amendments filled 39 file boxes on chairs, under desks and in the aisles.
An excerpt:
To really understand what a bill says, you'd need to have the existing laws memorized.
Here's a fairly typical passage from H.R. 3200:
Section 1834(a)(7)(A)(iii) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395m(a)(7)(A)(iii)) is amended
(1) in the heading, by inserting 'CERTAIN COMPLEX REHABILITATIVE' after 'OPTION FOR'; and
(2) by striking 'power-driven wheelchair' and inserting 'complex rehabilitative power-driven wheelchair recognized by the Secretary as classified within group 3 or higher.'
And that goes on for a thousand pages.
This is exactly the kind of detail that shouldn't be prescribed in legislation. Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty
(Cross posted from DeepGlamour.net)
Architectural photographer Julius Shulman, who created many of the most iconic images of modern architectures, has died at 98.
This image, while not one of his most famous, is one of my favorites of his works. The convertibles, the gloves, the Pegasus, the pristine gas station, the orange trees in the background (soon to become Disneyland) — it exemplifies the exuberant glamour of mid-century Southern California auto culture. (Click the photo for a larger version.)
I interviewed Shulman about it in 2006, when I was researching this Atlantic column. Here's the transcript of our conversation.
"An architect friend Whitney Smith and his partner Wayne Williams were commissioned by Mobil Gas to do a mockup for a new type of design for the Mobil Gas image, including the flying horse. In the background what do you see?"
A Shulman interview always felt like an oral exam. Bushes, I said, people.
"Those aren't bushes. Those are trees. They're orange trees. There's a story....The architect's wife was there. She was driving an Alfa Romeo convertible, with white gloves. I had her pull her car up just far enough that the bumper would not come inside that shadow line. And then her arms would show. She's just coming in to get gas, to that station. It's a story-telling picture."
Was that her real car? I asked. Or was she posing in someone else's?
"Yes, that's her car. My sedan, my blue Ford sedan, which I used for my work, was elsewhere, in another picture. But I got another convertible here. I asked the man to stay there for a minute while I took a photograph. I'm sure he was happy to do it. He pulled in. The moment he pulled in — I had placed her already — I ran over there and said, 'Would you mind? I have a young lady with a car waiting for me, with a convertible.' He loved the car. He came over to look at it. I said, 'Would you stay in your car while I photograph it? I'll have the attendant talking to you, How many gallons do you want?' Everyone cooperates. It never fails. So we took this photograph in black and white and color, a series of them. Especially in color, it's wonderful."
Information on the new Shulman documentary film Visual Acoustics, currently touring Australia and New Zealand, is here.
[Mobil Gas Station, Anaheim, California, 1956, Smith & Williams Architects, courtesy of Getty Center, in conjunction with the Modernity & the Metropolis exhibition Julius Shulman in his office, 2006, by Virginia Postrel.]
---Buy Shulman's books here--In Sunday's NYTBR, I review Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Fifteen years ago — before Google or Wikipedia or blogging or Craigslist or podcasts or YouTube — the technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson wrote an article analyzing the business of "creative content" in a future where the Internet made distribution essentially free. "Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid," she predicted. Enforcing copyrights won't be enough, because creators "will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content."
That future is today, and it is the subject of Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Despite its subtitle, the book is less about the future than the present and recent past, which Anderson surveys in a cheerful, can-do voice. "People are making lots of money charging nothing," he writes. "Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00."
Driving the trend are the steeply declining prices of three essential technologies: computing power, digital storage and transmission capacity. Reproducing and delivering digital content — words, music, software, pictures, video — has now fulfilled the prophecy once made about electricity. It has become too cheap to meter. "Whatever it costs YouTube to stream a video today will cost half as much in a year," Anderson writes. "The trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero. No wonder the prices online all go the same way."
More precisely, the marginal cost of digital products, or the cost of delivering one additional copy, is approaching zero. The fixed cost of producing the first copy, however, may be as high as ever. All those servers and transmission lines, as cheap as they may be per gigabyte, require large initial investments. The articles still have to be written, the songs recorded, the movies made. The crucial business question, then, is how you cover those fixed costs. As many an airline bankruptcy demonstrates, it can be extremely hard to survive in a business with high fixed costs, low marginal costs and relatively easy entry. As long as serving one new customer costs next to nothing, the competition to attract as many customers as possible will drive prices toward zero. And zero doesn't pay the bills.
Read the whole thing. Unlike the typical journalist's review, this one isn't just a tantrum.
More than 80,000 patients are now on the national waiting list for kidney transplants, a number that has increased by about 20,000 since I first started tracking this issue in 2006. The list does not have to exist. It is an outcome of bad policy and complacent institutions. My magnum opus on ending the list is now up at TheAtlantic.com. Please read it and spread the word.