Week of August 27, 2001
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

DALLAS GETS MILK: The Dallas city council has escaped the Tequila Dilemma, rescued by the forces of milk. Today's Dallas Morning News brings word that the city has cut a deal to sell a local dairy naming rights to the performance hall at the proposed Latino Cultural Center. So instead of Jose Cuervo, it will be called Oak Farms.

"Hopefully it will roll off the tongue better than Jose Cuervo," Deputy Mayor Pro Tem John Loza told the News. "We're going from tequila to milk, and with Oak Farms, there's not any degree of controversy." Or, as council member Laura Miller put it, "Milk is good."

Wait until the protests from PETA start. For a preview, check out the Milksucks.com site. [Posted 8/30.]

NAME CALLING: Which is worse, naming a Latino Cultural Center after a tequila or a library after a controversial Supreme Court justice? In both cases, cities have a chance to fund major cultural institutions with private dollars—and in both, at least a loud minority of citizens don't like the association.

The Savannah library board did vote to accept $175,000 to refurbish the Carnegie library branch Clarence Thomas used as a child, when it was a segregated library. The money was an anonymous gift, with the condition that Thomas' name go on the building along with Andrew Carnegie's. "I would walk into that place and in the Carnegie Library I would see the pictures of Booker T. and pictures of Frederick Douglass and I would read. I would go into the Savannah Public Library in the stacks and see all of the newspapers from all over the country. Did I dream that I would be on the Supreme Court ? No. But I dreamt that there was a world out there that was worth pursuing," Thomas said on a May tour of another branch. The historically black Carnegie branch has been closed since 1997, pending renovations and the funding to pay for them.

In Dallas, the city council is desperately trying to find a way to accept $1 million from Jose Cuervo's distiller without actually naming the proposed Latino Cultural Center for the locals' beverage of choice. The council has postponed a decision until September 12. People are suddenly worried that someone might get the idea that Dallasites drink tequila! This in a town where every waiter offers you a margarita—and the Music Center is named Smirnoff. Mayor Ron Kirk tells critics to put their money where their gripes are. "You've got time now to pick up the phone and say, 'Here's $1 million,' " he said after the city council's most recent meeting, adding, "This is the time to put up or shut up."

Since any name will always draw complaints, the alternative is to name no public building after a person (the policy adopted by my old school district). As for corporate sponsorship, every company has enemies, and not all of them are anti-capitalists. (See my comments below about American Airlines, for whom the local arena is named.) Somehow it seems more public spirited to take the money and run. If the funded institution is successful, most people will forget the name's origins and come to associate it with the building instead. Not what the funders had in mind, to be sure, but that's the way it works. [Posted 8/30.]

NOT ME: Contrary to what the Megapath technician said after I sat on hold for an hour (fortunately I have a speaker phone, so I got plenty of work done during the wait), the problem I had uploading files to this site was not on my end. It had nothing to do with all the software problems I've been having. As a more-helpful technician finally replied to my email of two days ago, "We did make changes on the web server that could cause problems if the firewall settings on your FTP client are set in a certain way. I don't have a firm fix but if the Fetch program [which I use to upload files] has any firewall or proxy settings try changing those around and see if it helps." I fiddled. It worked. Now you can read new stuff. That's life in do-it-yourself publishing. [Posted 8/29.]

THE SIZE 0 MYTH: I recently went shopping for a denim skirt. The last such skirt I owned was an A-line number that fit quite tightly at the waist. That was 20 years ago, when I was 15 pounds lighter and my waist was at least a half-inch smaller. That skirt was a size 8. On my recent shopping trip, I tried on three denim skirts at the Gap—all size 6, all at least three inches too big in the waist, and none particularly tight in the hips. The only one that didn't look like a small tent was constructed so it would be difficult to alter. I went home skirtless.

Why, you may ask, am I telling this? Because there is a myth out there in feminist popcultureland, the myth of "size 0." The claim is that fashion magazines, evil corporations, and Calista Flockhart are foisting an unreasonably skinny ideal on American women. This ideal is supposed to be historically unprecedented. Exhibit A is the spread of size 0 clothes. Exhibit B is Marilyn Monroe.

"In the l950's and 60's the archetypal femme fatale was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn wore a size l2. She had a tummy, thighs, soft neck and arms. She was a far cry from the emaciated high fashion waif look created by designer Calvin Klein in the form of his favorite model Kate Moss who wore a size 0," opine psychologists Candace De Puy and Dana Dovitch on the Feminista.com site. "What happened to create this shift in female beauty? Why have women gone from accepting a curvaceous form to the familiar dieting, exercising, lipo-suctioning and obsessing over every wrinkle and gray hair?"

The Marilyn Monroe story is complete nonsense, though it's a staple of feel-good feminism. Marilyn's size 12 bore no resemblance to the size 12 you'll find in today's stores. According to the invaluable Urban Legends website (and other sources), Monroe's waist ranged from 22 to 23 inches and her hips were 35 to 36 inches. She was 5', 5 ½" tall. No, Marilyn wasn't as willowy as Kate Moss, nor was she as muscular as today's gym-toned ideal. She was shaped like a thin, wasp-waisted woman with breast implants. The only thing large about Monroe was her bustline. Nor was Marilyn alone. Peruse copies of Vogue from the 1950s, and you'll find models with slim hips and tiny waists worthy of Scarlett O'Hara. (Judging from my mother's wedding gown, rib cages were impossibly small in those days too.)

The myth of size 0 will probably endure, because it makes America's increasingly plump women feel better. "No matter who's buying this stuff, the mere presence of size zero and beyond plays havoc with the weight-conscious woman's psyche," writes Janet Colwell in an unusually rational discussion of the subject, published in the San Francisco Business Times. "There's just something about knowing that the slender size-eighter is four to five rungs up the size ladder and, in Bebe's and Gap's cases, above the mean. However, it's reassuring to find some explanation—other than an explosion of very thin people—for the influx of small sizes."

Her reporting says the reason is an expansion of choice in both directions. Mine says that size 0 is what used to be known as size 4 (or maybe size 6). On average, American women are getting fatter, and profit-maximizing companies know better than to confront their customers with the facts. Having put on a bit of weight since my college days, when I was not exactly svelte, I should be up to a 12 by now. Instead I'm buying size 6 clothes, and having a tailor take them in. But some women still need a "real" size 6 or a real size 2. Hence, the rise of size 0. Coming soon: negative numbers.

For an amusing look at zaftig America, check out Michael Kelly's column here. Mike Fumento's authoritative, if sometimes mean, book on the subject is Fat of the Land. My New York Times column here looked at an economic explanation for our increasing girth. [Posted 8/29.]

WHO IS "WE"? Glenn Reynolds' excellent new me-zine Instapundit, featured a nice bit of commentary on bioethicist George Annas' instant op-ed fretting over the apparent success of Robert Tools' artificial heart. Apparently not content with the FDA's already-elaborate process for approving medical-device safety, Annas wants some kind of wiseman committee to determine, in the name of "public decision and public accountability," whether such artificial hearts are worthy of use. Patients' individual wishes don't count for much in his calculus. Writes Glenn:

Annas concludes: "The limits of what doctors can do to human beings in the name of science are a matter for public decision and public accountability. It is too early now to declare the AbioCor either a success or a failure. But before this device is implanted in anyone else, we need full disclosure, objective observers and a realistic assessment of the way it has worked for Mr. Tools."

Why exactly is this a matter for "public discussion and accountability"? Perhaps (call me a cynic) because if the matter is left to patients and their doctors there would be no role for professional ethics-mongers like Annas? Remember: ethicists have conflicts of interest too, one of which is a natural tendency to frame questions in ways that require the services of an ethicist in reaching an answer.

And what's this about doing to human beings? From what I've read, it seems to me—and to Tools, which is more important—that the doctors have done something for Tools. Thanks, George, for demonstrating the intellectually lame, question-begging nature of most professional bioethical discussion today.

That's a bit harsh, but it gets at an essential truth: The bioethicists who pontificate in public—as opposed to the ones who advise families and individuals in hospitals—tend to advocate collectivizing the most personal sorts of decisions. That's what's wrong with the president's bioethics council: It perpetuates the myth that, with enough wise advisers, "we" can come to a consensus on the right way to deal with the challenges of new biotechnologies. When my radio pal Hugh Hewitt imagines an ideal commission holding a free-wheeling, televised debate on the meaning of conception, I'm afraid he may be falling into this trap. Such debates can help individuals think deeply about their own beliefs, but they cannot bring a diverse nation to a single conclusion. (Consider, for example, the running exchange on stem cells, between Reason's Ron Bailey and natural law advocates Patrick Lee and Robert P. George—a thoughtful discussion but one in which the parties wind up as divided as they began.)

All bioethics can do is help individuals think about how to apply their pre-existing principles to unusual situations. That's why Will Saletan's wise-ass Slate column is off-base when it attacks biomedical companies for consulting bioethicists and then bragging about how the companies' actions have been ethical. There is no doubt a lot of p.r. to such consultations. But nobody is going to be fooled simply because you wave the word "bioethicist" around. What such consultations can do is help managers sort out the ethical issues they think are important—for example, the importance of obtaining fully informed consent from egg and sperm donors before creating embryos for research purposes. And they can tell the people who might use such research products what ethical principles were followed, so those people can evaluate the process according to their own consciences.

Saletan considers that not good enough. "The only question addressed is whether the donors properly consented," he writes of the creation of research embryos by the Jones Institute. "The propriety of what they consented to is ignored." But not everyone questions that propriety—obviously the folks at the Jones Institute and the egg and sperm donors involved don't—and the issues involved are pretty well understood. (Ever hear of the abortion debate?) The sensible conclusion of Saletan's article—"Résumés, commissions, and regulations can't settle these disputes. Nor can ethicists. It's not their job. It's yours."—contradicts the article's accusatory contents. In fact, what Saletan seems to be arguing is, "Résumés, commissions, and regulations can't settle these disputes. Nor can ethicists. It's not their job. It's mine." [Posted 8/29.]

FLIGHT END: The biggest recent news for my life was this tiny item in The Dallas Morning News announcing the end of American Airlines' flights from Love Field to LAX. Those flights were great. Every seat was business class, and it took just 25 minutes to get from my door to the gate, including parking the car ($5/day at Thrifty) and checking in. Plus I don't think I ever paid more than $300 for a round-trip ticket. It was too good to last.

American Airlines hates Love Field, which threatens its stranglehold on DFW. Fort Worth also hates Love Field, which could allow Dallas flyers to get to the airport without schlepping halfway to FW. Until upstart Legend Airlines found a loophole, the federal Wright Amendment blocked all flights from Love except those going to contiguous states. That's why you can't take Southwest, which flies out of Love, to Las Vegas or L.A. Legend finagled an exception—for flights with 56 or fewer passengers. But American managed to tie up Legend in court, and then to match its service, and eventually killed the competition. (Glenna Whitley of D Magazine tells the sordid story here, but her article ends before Legend's demise.)

You might think the trustbusters would go after American. But you'd be wrong. To the contrary, federal law props up American's monopoly power. And by limiting the reach of Southwest, it keeps fares in Dallas high. (A good, though old, piece on the cost of the Wright Amendment is here.) Worst of all, the Wright Amendment forces me to spend an extra 20 minutes each way—$90 in taxi fares—to fly to L.A., making me feel even farther from home. (The mere existence of those easy Love Field flights did wonders for my mental state.) The persistence of this protectionist law strongly suggests that the Texas delegation cares more about American than about any of the state's other businesses, not to mention its flying citizens or those free-market principles Phil Gramm and Dick Armey love to invoke. The only friend of the traveling Texas public seems to be Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby.

Interestingly, American has yet to inform me that my next flight out has been canceled. I wonder how long they'll wait. [Posted 8/29.]

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES: My apologies for the long delay between postings. Much of my time last week was consumed with repairing the spillover effects of my newly installed Iomega Peerless drive. It's a capacious backup disk (20 gigabytes—five times the size of my hard drive), but installing it wreaked havoc on my system, locking up function after function. After several days of effort and many software upgrades, I've got everything more or less back to normal. (The computer does crash about three times as often as it used to.) And I don't have to use the Peerless for a nightlight instead of a peripheral, as one unhappy user complained on the Iomega website. Call me crazy, but I think one reason for the slump in computer sales may be that upgrading your system not only costs a fortune but consumes enormous amounts of time.

Once I got the computer working, the server wouldn't allow me to upload files to this site. The two problems are probably related. Or maybe not. My ISP couldn't find any problems with the site on their end. At any rate, you should have been reading some of this stuff days ago. [Posted 8/29.]

Buy Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies in hardback or paperback.