Subtitles.

Ben Yagoda has a nice essay (in tomorrow's NYT Book Review) about the overuse of subtitles in book titling:

I miss the time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a book to go out into the world with only a strong title followed by a few hundred pages of outstanding writing. That was certainly the tack taken by most mid-20th-century nonfiction classics: ''Hiroshima,'' ''All the President's Men,'' ''The American Way of Death,'' ''The White Album,'' ''Elvis,'' ''Dispatches,'' ''Joe Gould's Secret,'' ''The Executioner's Song,'' Lillian Ross's ''Picture,'' ''The Right Stuff,'' ''The Soul of a New Machine,'' ''The Kingdom and the Power,'' just about everything ever written by John McPhee, and a book that, were it published today, would tote a subtitle like ''The True Story of How the Ivy League Elite Developed Strange Ideas About the World, Got America Into Vietnam, and Messed Up Foreign Policy for a Long Time.'' Back in 1972, David Halberstam called it ''The Best and the Brightest'' and then shut up.

The problem with respect to books is nothing compared to law review articles. One rarely sees a title without a subtitle. But the truth is, those subtitles really are helpful when you look for articles through LEXIS and get a long list of titles. A snappy title is nice, but it's almost never nice enough to make me curious enough to take the time to click on the link to see what you've written. You've got to have that colon followed by something that makes it plain what you're writing about.

A sidenote: I always use LEXIS to find law review articles when I'm doing legal scholarship. Nevertheless, I receive many reprints of law review articles in the mail. Reprint-sending is such a wasteful and now totally unnecessary practice. Could we all please just stop? Think of the trees! Think of the mail truck exhaust! Lawprofs: if there were a national "do not send reprints" list, would you not put your name on it?

"The religion of health," part 2.

Yesterday, I wrote about what Vatican officials called "the religion of health." And not too long ago, I criticized Arkansas Governor Huckabee for participating in a covenant marriage rally. Some of my readers thought I was being too hard on Huckabee, and perhaps now you will suspect me of having an unfair focus on the man from Hope, but Huckabee keeps walking right into the net of Althouse blog-topics. This is from yesterday's Daily Citizen:

Striving towards fitness is part of a person's covenant with God, said Gov. Mike Huckabee to Harding University students Thursday morning during Harding's daily chapel.

First, thanks for reminding us that "covenant" is a word with deep religious connotations. It helps shed some light on the problems with those state-sanctioned "covenant marriages" you just rallied about. Either keep the religion out of marriage or keep government out of marriage. Just choose, and be consistent.

Huckabee has lost about 110 pounds since he was diagnosed two years ago with type two diabetes. He had been told then that the next decade of his life would be his last if he did not change his eating habits and begin exercising, recounted Huckabee, who was hosted by Harding's wellness committee.

"If my body belonged to the Lord, I was not following the design of the Designer," said the governor.

It is a matter of the divine ownership of the body, said Huckabee.

Whatever helps you lose weight is fine with me, and tying God into every aspect of your life that you can think of, if that's what you want to do, is fine with me. But do you really mean to say everyone who's fat is sinning?

"I was living in a way that made my body unfit as a temple where He might live. It was not only unhealthy. It was sinful," said Huckabee.

I guess he hasn't heard that making a religion out of health might be a sin. But quite aside from whether dieting is the stuff of religion, is it the concern of government? Huckabee surely thinks so:

Huckabee has used his governorship to enourage state-wide weight-loss. Huckabee's legislative package last year included a law now in effect requiring public schools to weigh their students, and send home each child's body-mass-index, said Huckabee spokesman Jim Harris.

Public radio needs classical music?

Andrew Ferguson, writing in the Weekly Standard, doesn't like that his local NPR station is going from classical music to all news and talk. And he's arguing that this format change is a reason why public radio ought to be privatized. I would argue the opposite: public radio is most justifiable in the news and talk format.

I listen to WERN here in Madison, but only if it has a news or talk show on. If I turn on the radio and hear classical music, I turn it right off and am, in fact, irritated that they are using the public station for that purpose. I don't hate classical music -- Ferguson calls it "beautiful and intelligent music." But it is only listened to by a small segment of the population, no doubt the more affluent folks who are perfectly capable of purchasing all the easily available classical music they want on CD or as digital files. Yet Ferguson's argument is studded with points about a dysfunctional marketplace:

Public radio in the United States is remaking itself according to a wholly new sense of its mission. Originally conceived as a service for preserving and encouraging minority tastes ignored by the market -- particularly in the arts, not only in classical music but also in jazz, bluegrass, cabaret, folk -- public radio is being transformed into the nation's first government-funded news service....

"We're in the business of trying to create a larger audience," [WETA's president] told the Washington Post, explaining the [format change]. Her line of reasoning is shared by the new generation of station managers who have gained control over public radio in the last 15 years. According to their conventional wisdom -- though whether it's wisdom or merely convention has yet to be determined -- news and chat inevitably bring in more listeners, and more affluent listeners, than classical music or jazz. And affluent listeners draw higher-class advertisers (called "underwriters" in the painstaking lexicon of public broadcasting) and respond more generously during pledge drives.

... [But] the point of subsidized radio has never been to maximize its audience, and certainly not to maximize its income. It has always been sustained instead on an odd, but sturdy, rationale: Public broadcasting needed to exist because its programming wasn't terribly popular....

If poor, minority, or marginalized persons were big fans of classical music, I might think about this differently. But the audience for classical music does not deserve special favors. They got what they wanted in the past precisely because they were the affluent people who would respond to fund drives. Now that the baby boomers have filled up the affluent demographic, the same dynamic is pushing out classical music, because not many baby boomers care about classical music. Quit whining about the advantage you're losing and ask yourself whether you ever deserved that advantage in the first place. It's not enough to say that classical music is "beautiful and intelligent." Nearly everyone thinks the music they like is the best.

I do realize that there has always been an argument about cultivating a new audience for classical music, and that telling people who already like it to buy their own CDs is not enough because we need new people to encounter it on the radio, where they can learn to like it. But why should the government care which genre of music people decide to like? Why isn't the marketplace enough? Just because it doesn't favor the music you like? There is some problem with radio stations being too much alike, but playing a lot of classical music is an inadequate solution to that problem. Why should only one minority taste get government support?

Is podcasting good?

The NYT has a frontpage article promoting podcasting, which is supposedly the big new thing now that blogs are so last year. I decided to check out Adam Curry's "Daily Source Code," and clicked on this one. It was just unedited, uninteresting blather. He rambled on about NYC. He seemed to think it was worth stating that he hadn't been there since 9/11, even though he had nothing else to say about 9/11 and just continued into some lightweight talk about how he had a lot of friends to visit. And there was no amusing detail of any sort about the friends. Just: he has a lot of friends in NY. Who cares? Then, he got to the topic of "The Gates," which he had nothing interesting to say about. "The Gates" made it hard for him to find a hotel. He said, "The hotels are all booked to the hilt," then immediately started talking about the Hilton. Well, it seems to me that if you have any way with words at all, if you say "to the hilt" and then "the Hilton," you've got to riff on that. If you don't have a way with words and you can't riff verbally and your ideas and observations don't flow out with some detail or distinctive edge, why are you recording yourself?

So I've got the lav on, so I can walk around a bit, look out the window. Let's see. What was I going to do?

One thing about written blogs is you can glance over them quickly and decide how much you want to read. These podcast recordings impose their time frame on you. A slow talker forces you to listen longer. A slow writer doesn't cause you to read slowly.

I'm not completely knocking podcasting. I might like to do it myself. Curry deserves credit for developing the medium, but I don't see him as much of a content provider. That's my snap judgment after listening to him for about two minutes and not wanting to put up with any more slow-moving banalities. I can see the special value to people who are walking around with iPods and want to listen to something radio-like. Sitting with my computer, I find it annoying to listen to a rambling chat. But audio might be a nice addition to a blog, like photography. But like photography and writing, spoken word needs to be done well. It can't be just: hey, look, I'm podcasting.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that at some point Curry plays music. That's when I turned it off, actually. Conceivably, a DJ can chatter inanely and still be acceptable to people who want to hear music. I pretty much only listen to music in my car. You might wonder why I don't have an iPod. I quite simply don't want one. I don't like to listen to music while I'm out walking around.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Legal Underground thinks I'm rejecting podcasting and Adam Curry unfairly and claims that there are a lot of great podcasts out there. First, link to some that you consider great so I can see for myself. I picked Curry's site because he seemed to be an important podcaster. And I did get his "soundseeing" concept, but found it lacking in content. (I also hate when NPR pads out its stories with footsteps in the crunching leaves as we approach ... whatever.) And I do understand the notion of downloading the material into an iPod, but I'm not going to sign on to the idea that the material therefore doesn't really need to be that good. If I listen through my computer and find it boring and pointless, I'm going to stand by that opinion. I've listened to "This American Life" and old episodes of Jean Shepard's great show on the computer. It's the same as listening to the radio.

YET MORE: There is also just "audioblogging," which looks really easy to do on Blogger. One advantage is that you can phone in your posts, which means you can blog without a computer. A pitfall, judging from the examples at that link, is talking as you would in an ordinary phonecall. It is quite tedious to listen to a stranger talk in a way that would be normal and acceptable in a personal phone call. I think people naturally hold themselves to a higher standard when writing. But audioblogging might be great for a small blog that is read by friends and family -- basically, the people who would enjoy chatting on the phone with you. It would take a real effort, I think, to use a telephone to make an audio clip that a large number of strangers would want to hear out. Even getting good content would be hard, but add to that the problems most of us have speaking fluently and distinctly and in a nice-sounding tone of voice.

AND YET MORE: Jonathan Gewitz agrees with me about the problem of audio imposing its time frame on you and adds that videoblogging has the same drawback. I note that I'm essentially making an argument for why reading is the best way to receive communication (unless you're having a personal relationship). I've developed almost an aversion to going to the movies in the last couple years, and I know it's mostly about feeling stuck in the theater. You commit yourself to being there for the two hours or so and then you have to wait while the material is reeled out at the pace somebody else decided was a good idea for the audience in general. At least with TiVo or a DVD you can pause when you want, but isn't reading superior? You're not limited to pausing. You can vary the pace constantly depending on your interest, the difficulty of the material, and how much room you need to make for thoughts of your own.

I realize that this point is related to what I wrote yesterdayabout the Summers speech heard live and the speech read as a transcript. ("I think if I had been there and heard the 'daddy truck/baby truck' part, I would have missed the whole next section because I would have become wrapped up in my own thoughts. This is one reason why I'd prefer to read a speech than listen to one. Who can sit through a long, overcomplicated speech with a passive mind?") Of course, as a teacher, I impose live speech on an audience all the time, so I must also believe that there is something that happens in that setting that is better than reading or an important addition to reading. But I certainly know one needs to make a very great effort to do it right. You've got to feel that you owe your audience a lot, since you are presuming to trap them in a room for an hour.

The lingering furor and the deepening rift.

I've been following the NYT stories about Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers. Yesterday, it was "Furor Lingers as Harvard Chief Gives Details of Talk on Women," and today, it's "Rift Deepens as Professors at Harvard See Remarks." It's essentially the same headline, but I think it's funny how a "furor" becomes a "rift" and I like to contemplate the possible difference between a problem "lingering" and "deepening." I think there's more trouble in "deepening," but maybe it's just the metaphorically consistent word choice when you're going with "rift." Of course, a rift could also "widen." And I actually don't like "lingering" with "furor." A "furor" seems too turbulent and furious to just "linger."

See, this is why it takes me forever to read the newspaper. I really am interested in the substance of the article, but I think I am more interested in the words themselves. Oh, perhaps, it's that verbal thing women are born with....

Anyway. Let's actually read today's article:

A mood of uncertainty settled over Harvard University on Friday in the aftermath of President Lawrence H. Summers's release of the transcript of his contentious remarks last month about the shortage of women in the sciences and engineering.

Many people were parsing and debating the often dense and rambling 7,000-word transcript, a long-awaited document that quickly became a must-read on campus....

Ah, yes, I tried to read that transcript yesterday. It was dense or I was dense because I just couldn't get through it. Well, this is Harvard's problem. Now there are two groups of professors gathering signatures, one for a letter supporting Summers and one for a letter against him.

I get distracted by words again. Is it right to call his remarks "contentious"? Isn't it the faculty that's contentious? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, "contentious" can mean controversial, and is not limited to meaning quarrelsome. My digression leads me to this entry in the "Dictionary of Phrase & Fable" for John Lilburne:

If no one else were alive, John would quarrel with Lilburne. John Lilburne was a contentious Leveller in the Commonwealth; so rancorous against rank that he could never satisfy himself that any two persons were exactly on the same level....

“Is John departed? and is Lilburne gone?

Farewell to both -- to Lilburne and to John.

Yet, being gone, take this advice from me:

Let them not both in one grave buried be.

Here lay ye John, lay Lilburne thereabout;

For if they both should meet, they would fall out.”

I love the old "Dictionary of Phrase & Fable" (written by E. Cobham Brewer and published in 1898). Let's look up something else: "Furor"! I love that word, and I wanted to check and make sure it really was related to "fury" (it is). Here's the entry in the "Phrase & Fable" book:

Furor.

Son of Occasion, an old hag, who was quite bald behind. Sir Guyon bound him “with a hundred iron chains and a hundred knots.” (Spenser: Faërie Queene, book ii.)

Having explored "furor," why not "rift"? I found this story about Virgil, which might perhaps give the Harvard professors some idea of what to do about Summers:

Virgil was wise, and as craft was considered a part of wisdom, especially over-reaching the spirits of evil, so he is represented by mediæval writers as out witting the demon. On one occasion, it is said, he saw an imp in a hole of a mountain, and the imp promised to teach the poet the black art if he released him. Virgil did so, and after learning all the imp could teach him, expressed amazement that one of such imposing stature could be squeezed into so small a rift. The imp said, “Oh, that is not wonderful,” and crept into the hole to show Virgil how it was done, whereupon Virgil closed up the hole and kept the imp there. (Een Schone Historie Van Virgilius, 1552.)

There, now, wasn't that perfectly innately feminine of me?

Movie star.

There's a movie being made chez Althouse tonight. The star came over in a pouch:



A sugar glider!

The closer you get...

Ambivablog thinks "The Gates" look nice from a distance, like Buddhist monks' robes:

But when I walked through and under them, the fabric looked heavy and inert, more like drapes than filmy wind-yielding robes. (There wasn't any wind, was part of the problem.) And there was something claustrophobic and oppressive about the way they hung straight across, like Christiane Amanpour's bangs...

The brains behind the dummy.

Here's the obit for the inventor of the crash-test dummy, Samuel W. Alderson. What would we do without crash-test dummies?

In the 1930's, with traffic fatalities becoming a growing public health concern, manufacturers began to explore the design of safer cars. But the new science of crash testing raised a seemingly intractable problem: to study the effect of a crash on the human body, researchers would have to equip the test car with a live human being. Volunteers were few.

As a result, the first crash-test dummies were cadavers. While useful in collecting basic data, they lacked the durability required for repeated trials.

And because no two cadavers were exactly the same size and shape, no two tests were strictly comparable.

Actually, cadavers are still used in some crash tests today, as I learned from chapter 4 of Mary Roach's incredibly enjoyable book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers."

Blogger is driving me crazy.

Blogger has its good days and bad. I have no idea why. But the last few days have been awful, as it slowly grinds away and you gradually go from wondering when it will ever finish a task to worrying whether it will destroy your post altogether. And if you go back and edit while it's in the middle of one of its endless publishing hang-ups, you can expect to see your post published in duplicate or triplicate. Right now, I'm wasting time trying to see if my last post is double-posted -- all because I couldn't resist breaking in to correct the spelling of "labyrinthine."

Summers releases the transcript.

Finally, we get to see the transcript of Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers making his much-criticized remarks about women and science. I had an excerpt here, which I'd edited down, but on preview, it was still far too long. The speech is labyrinthine. Let me try again:

[T]here is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization. ... I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize. There are two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis for two reasons. First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true. The second empirical problem is that girls are persisting longer and longer. When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are twenty, or when people are twenty-five, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again, to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address.

I think one reason this transcript wasn't released earlier is that it is so wordily inarticulate. There are some obvious garbles -- "The second empirical problem is that girls are persisting longer and longer" -- and that makes you wonder how much he was in control of what he was saying. I'm not surprised people came away from the session with a lot of different ideas about what he was saying, because he either unwilling or unable to speak clearly and directly.

When you speak on a sensitive topic, listeners are going to pick out certain phrases and then magnify and distort your meaning as they swirl the part they heard around in their heads with their own fears about what they think you might be saying.

I think if I had been there and heard the "daddy truck/baby truck" part, I would have missed the whole next section because I would have become wrapped up in my own thoughts. This is one reason why I'd prefer to read a speech than listen to one. Who can sit through a long, overcomplicated speech with a passive mind? Assuming you can resist thinking about something else altogether -- what's for dinner? -- you hear bits of the speech and think about it, criticize it, relate it to something in your own experience.

Whether the release of the transcript will help Summers now is a different matter. The NYT reports:

While Harvard professors plan to convene Tuesday to discuss the transcript and Dr. Summers's leadership, and some have spoken of a vote of no confidence, it is the Harvard Corporation that has decisive influence over Dr. Summers's fortunes. It stood behind him on Thursday.

Several female scientists who were at the National Bureau of Economic Research forum and who expressed outrage at Dr. Summers's remarks there said they felt vindicated. Critics had accused them of misinterpreting him and overreacting out of political correctness.

"I'm glad his words are finally out there," said Shirley Malcom, who grew up in segregated Alabama and is now the director of education for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. "Because so many of us have been accused of implying that he said things he did not, and now people can actually judge for themselves."

Good luck sifting through the verbiage.

"The religion of health."

Vatican officials criticize the rich countries of the world for luxuriating in excessive health care. We expect far too much, we overconsume, as the rest of the world goes hungry for the most basic health care:

"While millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires," said the Rev. Maurizio Faggioni, a theologian and morality expert on the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life.

"The medicine of desires, egged on by the health care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services, soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness," Faggioni said.

This is a good point. Perhaps as an ethical matter, anyone contemplating something like cosmetic surgery, ought to think again and contribute the money he or she would have spent on the surgery to a charity that provides basic health care to the poor.

But the Vatican officials take the criticism a step further: the rich countries have embraced a "religion of health."

Vatican officials ... held out Pope John Paul II's stoic suffering with Parkinson's disease as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine must cure all, calling this a "religion of health" that is taking hold in affluent countries.

Now the problem is framed not merely as selfishly consuming more than your share, but believing in the wrong values.

There is some truth in this. I remember a TV commercial from a few years back with an ordinary woman, standing on her porch, blandly asserting, "Nothing is more important than my family's health." Taken literally, that's quite an inappropriate thing to believe. People often say, without any sense that they are saying something offensive (and idiotic): "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." To make health one's central value is exceedingly shallow.

Is health becoming a religion? Some people make it the central value around which they order their lives. Health is worshipped. And, Lord knows, there are many rituals.

UPDATE: Reader Jim Havey writes:

I've long thought that the Catholic church offers people who are brilliant in every field except economics. Our pursuit of better drugs and procedures benefits people all over the world. Particularly in the development of pharmaceuticals: millions are spent in development of new drugs and we in the United States pay most of the cost. Once developed, those drugs are relatively inexpensive to manufacture and people in less affluent countries often get them at prices they can afford. When there are problems getting drugs to where they are needed, it isn't because we are consuming more than our share.

The maladies of impoverished countries--beyond poor healthcare -- are the result of bad government or cultures with poor priorities. Whenever I hear a representative of the Catholic Church speak about third-world poverty, it's from a zero-sum view of wealth -- we in the West can only have more at the expense of someone else.

I'm no economic expert--I'm an appellate prosecutor. But that's pretty basic.

[Is health] becoming our religion? Maybe. If my life is representative there is sin -- eating junk food and carousing -- and there is penitence -- miles run and time at the gym.

Yes, this religion of health has sinners, doesn't it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader, Reginald White, writes (and I use his name with permission):

I read with some interest your comment on the cliché, "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." While I agree (with what I think is your premise) that "[t]o make health one's central value is exceedingly shallow," I also believe that this cliché contains more truth than most.

Almost seven years ago (May 2, 1998--not that I'm counting), I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In five years, what started as a numb spot about the size of quarter in my left thigh has effectively ended my career and has left me physically disabled. (This was not an easy adjustment; I graduated at the top of my class from Tulane Law School, expected a lot from myself, and was on the fast track until I physically couldn't pull the hours anymore. I also went to college to play baseball, so the physical limitations, such as the inability to walk more than a block or so, have been particularly difficult to accept).

So, the Vatican's pronouncement about health as well-being disturbs me. (As a former Catholic, such statements still carry particular weight with me). But for modern medicine and its expensive treatments (which have stabilized my health by slowing the rate of disease progression), I would be in a wheel chair or worse. The resources expended on me could have been used to provide basic health care for more than a few persons.

In Britain, the National Health Service effectively rations the immunomodulating drugs that have done so much for me. Is the Vatican providing a theological basis for rationing health care for people with chronic diseases like mine?

The entire health care debate seems to have skipped over the question of what to do about people like me. Unlike people who have acute incidents (i.e., health incidents from which people either will die or will overcome), most people with chronic diseases consume much more in health care resources and produce less economically. From a strict cost-benefit analysis, this money spent on people like me could be expended with better result elsewhere. (The Nazi realized this quickly and implemented their vile T4 program, the precursor for the Final Solution).

What is more ethical? Helping me preserve what remains of my health (and dignity for that matter)? Or spending the same money on health care for more people with less serious and more treatable ailments, conditions, etc.?

I don't know. Obviously, the way out of this dilemma is to advance the science and cure this (and other chronic diseases). I fully expect a cure sooner than later, but probably I have unrealistic expectations about the possibilities of medicine. But until then, what? Or what if it's incurable? What should society do with people like me?

First, I'm constantly impressed by the email I receive, and I'm chastened to be reminded of the things I forget to think about. Clearly, I don't mean for anything I've written to mean that White should not receive his treatment simply because the money spent on him could be distributed to provide health care for, say, several children with various, simply cured diseases. There is no reason to draw the line at health care: why don't we all only consume the bare minimum and give all the rest to charity? Isn't that what Jesus told the rich man to do? How can I buy a fancy new car, or even any car? Why don't I walk, eat only what is necessary to survive, and live in a one-room apartment, and contribute everything else to the poor? I should do that before White should give up his treatment, of course, and I don't.

Then Jesus said to His disciples, "Assuredly, I say to you that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. And again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." When His disciples heard it, they were greatly astonished, saying, "Who then can be saved?" But Jesus looked at them and said to them, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."

YET MORE: The Anchoress has an excellent post.

Is Governor Huckabee running for President?

I certainly thought so as I lambasted him for his recent covenant marriage stunt. And today I see that Brian Lamb -- who, despite his name, never lambastes anyone -- asked him straight out the other day whether he was running for President:

"Gov. Mike Huckabee, Republican of Arkansas, what will it take to get you to run for president in 2008?" Lamb asked.

"Oh! That's a big question," Huckabee responded. "Probably a vision from above." He said he has a lot of other responsibilities, including being governor of Arkansas ...

The governor followed with the standard but sincere line that he is "flattered" to be talked about as a potential candidate, but added that such speculation is "premature" and that he was still celebrating the re-election of his friend George W. Bush....

"I'm not going to try to push you to say, 'I'm running or not running,' but what I was getting at is that you're a Hope, Ark., native," [Lamb] said. To which the governor responded with a solid "Yes."

But [Lamb] still wasn't finished. "You're a Republican governor eight-and-a-half years in the office. A lot of people mention all kinds of folks during this period, and I just wonder if you're - I know you want to avoid saying yes or no on all this, but what kind of questions do you ask yourself in a period like this, when people start saying, 'Mike Huckabee should run for president?'" Lamb asked.

This time the governor must have realized that his polite interviewer wasn't going to let go of this bone, so Huckabee engaged him:

"I think the things that anyone has to ask. What do I bring to it? Do I bring ideas? Do I bring a world view, or something that maybe would be useful to the country? Is there some perspective that is, that's helpful? I think if it's just this, 'Gee, I'd like to do that,' that's not an adequate beginning for me. There has to be something. Maybe it's a focus on domestic policy, a focus on how we can improve our nation, but there's got to be something deep inside."

We need a serious President capable of handling foreign policy and national security, not some "values" charlatan.

When I see a guy like this moving forward, and, among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton moving to the center and burnishing her national security credentials, I feel like dusting off my Democratic Party registration.

Are "The Gates" Art? Who cares! They saved puppies!

Aw.

Enough of Christo's "Gates."

Time for the Somerville Gates!

"You're a law professor?"

Let's say you're a businessman of some sort, encountering a prospective client for the first time. It's your big chance to make a good first impression, to establish a relationship of trust. You ask her what she does for a living. She says she's a law professor. How do you respond? I'm not so sure I really want to help you, but let me just say "You're a law professor?" is not a good response. (And neither is "Good for you!")

Marriage: “sculpt[ing] the raw rock of male aggression and sexuality.”

The day after Valentine's Day, I criticized Arkansas Governor Huckabee's big covenant marriage spectacle. That post was linked by Instapundit yesterday, and I've been getting a lot of traffic -- as you might imagine -- along with a fair amount of email. So I'm going to to go over the more recent news stories on the subject and share a little of the email. But for now, I just want to talk about this article, by David Koon, in the Arkansas Times.

An estimated 6,500 faithful started showing up at 5:30 p.m. for the 7 p.m. showcase of Arkansas’s 2001 Covenant Marriage law. (The Huckabees have been too busy before now to make use of the law.) The audience drove in or rode church buses from all over Arkansas to sit in hard folding chairs and listen to the governor preach the merits of the law, which he said puts “speed bumps” in the road to divorce. Thanks to the law, the millions who might divorce every year over hangnails, custody of the remote, who left the toilet seat up and other inconsequential differences of opinion, will come to their senses.

Well put. Of course, staging a spectacle to celebrate traditional marriage creates a forum for those who would like to reform the institution. The article continues:

A group of about 80 gays, lesbians and their supporters got there early as well, waving signs protesting last year’s vote that banned them from getting even the freeze-dried version of what was being sold at Extra Strength inside. A woman handed out pebbles with John 8:7 inked onto them — the one about stones and who should cast them. Another waved a giant cardboard wedding cake. Sheena Alford, 19, of Conway, stood beside her friend, Brandon, holding a sign. What would she say to the governor if she could? “Just support us,” she said. “Our love is just as valuable as theirs is. We’re not any less because we may love someone of the same sex.

I like the pebbles with that scriptural reference. The form of expression is small and subtle, and it calls attention to an aspect of Christianity that is far, far more important that opposition to homosexuality. (I'm not assuming opposition to homosexuality is even a part of the Christian religion, but some people think it is.)

The article quotes one of the speakers at the Huckabee event, Rabbi Daniel Lapin , of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, as saying that marriage is need to “sculpt the raw rock of male aggression and sexuality” into marriage. Yikes! I wonder if much of the opposition to homosexuality is the fear of masculinity: What would happen to this world if the ways of the male are not diluted and modified by the female ingredient?

And, Rabbi, nice castration imagery! Bring on the sculptress to chisel away at the "raw rock."

To what extent is the opposition to homosexuality really -- if the opponents would be brutally honest with themselves -- opposition to male homosexuality? And is your opposition to female homosexuality more like your concern about solitary women: Why are they not performing the necessary work of mellowing and modifying some dangerous man?

The Huckabees recited wedding vows that proclaimed [God] had chosen them for each other. Mike promised to “protect” Janet, and Janet promised to “submit” to him.

No! Why must she submit? He should submit. We need Janet to sculpt the raw rock of Mike's aggression and sexuality!

Later, at a press conference, the governor said “the fact that we have been married 31 years is in my mind her forgiveness and God’s grace. It’s not that we’re an exceptional couple.”

Wait, I thought this whole covenant marriage idea was to get government authority to hold couples together. So is it government or God that will save us from decline? If you really think it's God, why are you moving government into God's realm? Or is God, like your big marriage spectacle, just another device for leveraging your way into political power?

UPDATE: A reader from Arkansas writes:

I have to say (type?) that our governor is not usually into spectacles. He's generally a pretty low-key guy. I think that this current circus is going on because he truly believes that "covenant marriage" will help curb divorce in the state. Among the very religious people (read: Evangelicals) in our state, including our governor, lowering the rate of divorce has become a huge issue. ...

Do I think covenant marriage will curb divorce in Arkansas? No. I don't even know why people would want the covenant marriages in the first place since it's just a marriage that's harder to get. But I just wanted to let you know that our governor is generally likeable and not usually like this. I think he's just particularly impassioned right now.

There are many nice and likeable people who shouldn't be trusted with political power -- especially people who think good intentions are enough. In fact, some of the nicest people are full of good intentions. And maybe they're so nice because the have a sunny attitude that things will work out well because they mean well. So I'm looking out for nice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I'm getting a fair amount of email informing me that men really are quite beastly. This is being presented as a conservative concept -- an acknowledgement of the Hobbesian state of nature. (I'm also familar the the concept from the feminist anti-pornography movement.) I did not write this post to dispute the observation that men as a group, compared to women, have more violent, dangerous urges. I'm objecting to the idea that women exist to control and civilize men. Women are individuals, not instruments for solving problems you might think men have. Let the men develop self-control and good character. It's not our job to fix them. (Pun intended!)