Venerable, vibrant and thoughtful veteran weblog returns with a new design. Welcome home, Lyn!

Thanks to acm for pointing me toward this This Modern World piece setting Michelle Malkin’s words against themselves, one self-contradiction after another. Malkin is right up there with Coulter on my list of blithering idiots we love to hate.

Portrait of Spanish animation artist Carlos Grangel, the hand behind the brush on Tim Burton’s upcoming Corpse Bride, which my family and I are awaiting enthusiastically. (New York Times )

Portrait of Spanish animation artist Carlos Grangel, the hand behind the brush on Tim Burton’s upcoming Corpse Bride, which my family and I are awaiting enthusiastically. (New York Times )

Firing ranges can have more wildlife than national parks. (Nature) More mind-bending arguments along the lines of the rest of today’s posts — that everything bad is good for you and vice versa.

This incredible (in the literal sense of the word, as in “unbelievable”) argument by Andrew Sullivan posits that “American society has rescued itself from what seemed to be terminal decline caused by family breakdown.” He goes on at length about how the cause was the cultural degeneracy of the ’60’s and ’70’s. Between my reaction to this and the smears on the anti-war movement I discuss below, why do I feel I am the sole defender of the legacy of the counterculture?

I have a hard time with both sides of his argument — his notion of the causes of societal breakdown and his sense that things are better — and his use of the term ‘pessimist’ as an epithet to dismiss most thoughtful social criticism that doesn’t proclaim the ‘good news’ as fervently as he would like. Funny, I’m a traditionalist too in some senses, and I think that social anomie and cultural distress relate to loss of community structures, family values and meaningful interpersonal relatedness, that modernity is a disease humans did not evolve to live with from either a mental or a physical standpoint. But it is a question of which conditions of modernity are the destructive ones. It is just that it turns things entirely on their head to say that neoconservative social policy is part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Sullivan may be right to argue that an open society can self-correct more rapidly because of the free flow of information. It is just an incredible illusion to think that that’s what we have here in American society despite the stories we tell ourselves. It is increasingly tiresome to hear people continue to cite the drop in crime, when sociologists have no consensus that it is even a real or enduring trend. Sullivan even cites the claim that cancer rates are down and cure rates are up, while most perspicacious medial observers who know what they are talking about have no such faith for cancer overall, although there have been modest gains with isolated specific tumors.

What planet is he living on when he asserts that he is talking about “a society that its biggest health problem is obesity and its biggest environmental problems are cars that are big enough for our grandparents to have lived in”? Every tired old saw is trotted out, uncritically, from Reagan’s ‘achievement’ in “defining government as part of the problem” to Clinton’s in “abolishing welfare-on-demand.” It is, at least, nice to hear him concede that it is not that the U.S. doesn’t have any social problems left; they are just in “isolated pockets” and he is sure we will eradicate them soon. Sullivan is writing in the Times of London for a British reading public that is several decades behind the US in adoption of neocon ignorant authoritarianism. Woe to those who listen to this pap.

Here’s a loose association, but has anyone seen Crash? This brutal (and somewhat over-the-top) film about a variety of pathologies in human interaction starts with a memorable voiceover monologue by Don Cheadle during the opening credits about how the problem with LA is that everyone is enveloped in steel and glass and isolated from the normal experience of interpersonal contact as they travel through the urban world.

Yes, but don’t stray too far from identifying the central factor — the erosion in bedside manner on the part of physicians, which is a result of productivity pressures but also deficiencies in curriculum design in medical schools and, indeed, in the criteria used to select medical students in the first place. These failings, in turn, reflect the depreciation of compassion as a societal value and the impact of that change on shaping aspirations to and expectations of a medical career.