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I previously posted some clips of irascible 1960s talk show host Joe Pyne. Here are three more, each from 1966, just four years before the chain-smoking shock jock died from cancer.
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Yippie leader Jerry Rubin storms off:
Georgia Governor Lester Maddox storms off:
Future Nixon enemy, journalist Jack Anderson, stays put:
Tags: Jack Anderson, Jerry Rubin, Joe Pyne, Lester Maddox
Paglia, when she burst into the mainstream, with an unlikely interlocutor.
Tags: Bob Costas, Camille Paglia
Yes, they discuss nukes.
Tags: Hugh Hefner, William F. Buckley
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans to build a world-class science and engineering campus in Manhattan is the impetus for a debate in the New York Times about whether the Big Apple can ever overtake Silicon Valley as America’s center of tech. I think it’ll be a long haul at best. Tech-centric culture has been gradually and relentlessly built and nurtured in the Valley ever since Shockley and Hewlett and Packard set up shop there. It’s kind of like asking why Los Angeles can’t do better than Broadway or why a country that has never known democracy has trouble installing one. Minds have to be changed before reality can. An excerpt from the Times piece, which was written by Flipboard‘s Craig Mod:
“To be in Silicon Valley is to be completely immersed in technology. The building, the pushing, the hacking, the designing, the iterating, the testing, the acquisitions, the funding — it is everywhere and wholly inescapable. Here is a culture and place that emerged seemingly from nothing, and yet over the last 50 years it has developed a mythology deep and inspiring and all its own.
Anyone can take part in this great valley mythology. For a place so overflowing with money, there is shockingly little pretension. With sufficient curiosity and gumption you are in. This is what captures the minds of entrepreneurs around the world. That the great founders aren’t in Ivory Towers — they are standing in front of you, eating yogurt. That the great companies aren’t just of the past — they are being replaced by even greater companies. And those greater companies are hiring like mad.”
Tags: Craig Mod, Michael Bloomberg
A predictive 2000 Nightline doc about overpopulation, which was far too dire.
Tags: Ted Koppel
KFC in Lagos, Nigeria. (Image by Qasamaan.)
From “Megacity,” an excellent 2006 New Yorker article by George Packer which deflated the recent romantic reconsideration of large-scale slums by Western intellectuals:
“When I first went to Lagos, in 1983, it already had a fearsome reputation among Westerners and Africans alike. Many potential visitors were kept away simply by the prospect of getting through the airport, with its official shakedowns and swarming touts. Once you made it into the city, a gantlet of armed robbers, con men, corrupt policemen, and homicidal bus drivers awaited you.
Recently, Lagos has begun to acquire a new image. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Third World’s megacities have become the focus of intense scholarly interest, in books such as Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, and Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities. Neuwirth, having lived for two years in slum neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, and other cities, came to see the world’s urban squatters as pioneers and patriots, creating solid communities without official approval from the state or the market. ‘Today, the world’s squatters are demonstrating a new way forward in the fight to create a more equitable globe,’ he wrote. What squatters need most of all, he argued, is the right to stay where they are: ‘Without any laws to support them, they are making their improper, illegal communities grow and prosper.’
Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Marin County, California, goes even further. ‘Squatter cities are vibrant,’ he writes in a recent article on megacities. ‘Each narrow street is one long bustling market.’ He sees in the explosive growth of ‘aspirational shantytowns’ a cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit-making opportunity. ‘How does all this relate to businesspeople in the developed world?’ Brand asks. ‘One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.’
In the dirty gray light of Lagos, however, Neuwirth’s portrait of heroic builders of the cities of tomorrow seems a bit romantic, and Brand’s vision of a global city of interconnected entrepreneurs seems perverse. The vibrancy of the squatters in Lagos is the furious activity of people who live in a globalized economy and have no safety net and virtually no hope of moving upward.” (Thanks TETW.)
Tags: George Packer
Tags: Abraham Lincoln
Alternet has a report about the development of a slew of so-called “non-lethal weapons systems” that can be used to control crowds. One example:
“The Invisible Pain Ray
It sounds like a weapon out of Star Wars. The Active Denial System, or ADS, works like an open-air microwave oven, projecting a focused beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to 130 degrees. This creates an intolerable burning sensation forcing those in its path to instinctively flee (a response the Air Force dubs the ‘goodbye effect’).
The Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP) says, ‘This capability will add to the ability to stop, deter and turn back an advancing adversary, providing an alternative to lethal force.’ Although ADS is described as non-lethal, a 2008 report by physicist and less-lethal weapons expert Dr. Jürgen Altmann suggests otherwise:
‘… the ADS provides the technical possibility to produce burns of second and third degree. Because the beam of diameter 2 m and above is wider than human size, such burns would occur over considerable parts of the body, up to 50% of its surface. Second- and third-degree burns covering more than 20% of the body surface are potentially life-threatening – due to toxic tissue-decay products and increased sensitivity to infection – and require intensive care in a specialized unit. Without a technical device that reliably prevents re-triggering on the same target subject, the ADS has a potential to produce permanent injury or death. ‘”
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Active Denial System demo:
Look at that punk kid go. (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
Tags: Milton Friedman
Early in his career, Peter Watkins made documentary-style narrative films that were so politically charged as to be almost unreleasable. Two of these were particularly great. The War Game, from 1965, shows the horrors that would befall Britain if the nation engaged in a nuclear war. It was so convincing that it was banned from broadcast in its native country and won a Best Documentary Oscar despite not being a documentary. Punishment Park, from 1971, takes things a step further. Set in America in the wake of Kent State, Watkins exaggerates the truly tumultuous divide between conservatives and radicals, creating a landscape so brutal and bitter that nuclear devastation might seem the lesser evil.
In America, young, anti-establishment activists who oppose the Vietnam War or support Black Power are arrested, interrogated and tried before a jury of peerless right-wingers. The convicted can either do decades in prison, or they can try their luck in Punishment Park. A punitive expanse of cracked earth in the California desert, Punishment Park is an obstacle course of sorts in which prisoners must complete a 53-mile trek with armed officers in pursuit. If they successfully finish the course in sweltering temperatures and reach an American flag at journey’s end, they will supposedly be released. But the sweet release of death seems more likely with the numerous threats to their well-being.
There’s a scene in which a young officer opens fire on a group of the political prisoners, and is almost immediately interviewed by the faux documentary crew, as he cries and pleads in confusion. The passage comes as close to recreating the visceral pain of the tragedy at Kent State as is imaginable. During an era when the news was the scariest show on TV and the pseudo-documentary was the perfect approach, Watkins presented a searing vision intended to jolt those who were sleepwalking through the nightmare.•
Recent Film Posts:
Tags: Peter Watkins
September 2, 1963. President Kennedy would be dead by November.
Tags: John F. Kennedy, Walter Cronkite
Ray Bradbury voices his frustrations about space travel and politics in his 1996 Playboy interview:
“Playboy: When you talk about the future, you tend to talk about space travel. Do you really think it’s in our future?
Ray Bradbury: It must be. First of all, it’s a religious endeavor to be immortal. If the earth dies, we must be able to continue. Space travel will give us other planets to live on so we can continue to have children. It’s that simple, that great and that exciting.
Playboy: Will we really be forced to escape earth? Will we be able to in time?
Ray Bradbury: We are already on our way. We should back on the moon right now. And we should be going off to Mars immediately.
Playboy: Yet there doesn’t seem to be a rush into space anymore. NASA’s budget is being whittled away as we speak.
Ray Bradbury: How come we’re looking at our shoes instead of at the great nebula in Orion? Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads. JFK, for a brief moment in his last year, challenged us to go to the moon. But even he wasn’t motivated by astronomical love. He cried, “Watch my dust!” to the Russians, and we were off. But once we reached the moon, the romance started to fade. Without that, dreams don’t last. That’s no surprise – material rewards do last, so the history of exploration on earth is about harvesting rich lodes. If NASA’s budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss. We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don’t mean Tupperware.
Playboy: Tupperware?
Ray Bradbury: NASA feels it has to justify everything it does in practical terms.
And Tupperware was one of the many practical products that came out of space travel. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. That’s b.s. We don’t need that. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that’s life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.”
Tags: Ray Bradbury
Pearl Bailey supports Gerald Ford for President in 1976.
More celebrity political endorsements:
Tags: Gerald Ford, Pearl Bailey
Theodore Roosevelt stumps for votes, 1912.
This classic 1912 picture of Theodore Roosevelt on the stump originally appeared in the New York Times, though the photographer is unknown. Roosevelt was trying to regain the White House, as he split from the Republicans and formed the Bull-Moose Party. His efforts, of course, failed.
With the upturned hat on the table, Roosevelt gives the impression of a magician. Some critics, however, wanted the politician and his domineering personality to disappear. Mark Twain was one such detractor, and he wrote the following text in 1908 when Roosevelt was exiting the White House:
“Astronomers assure us that the attraction of gravitation on the surface of the sun is twenty-eight times as powerful as is the force at the earth’s surface, and that the object which weights 217 pounds elsewhere would weight 6,000 pounds there.
For seven years this country has lain smothering under a burden like that, the incubus representing, in the person of President Roosevelt, the difference between 217 pounds and 6,000. Thanks be we got rid of this disastrous burden day before yesterday, at last. Forever? Probably not. Probably for only a brief breathing spell, wherein, under Mr. Taft, we may hope to get back some of our health – four years. We may expect to have Mr. Roosevelt sitting on us again, with his twenty-eight times the weight of any other Presidential burden that a hostile Providence could impose upon us for our sins.
Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.”
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Silent clip of Roosevelt with some fellow Rough Riders:
Tags: Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt
Hunter S. Thompson’s campus tour during the Gipper administration.
More Hunter S. Thompson posts:
Tags: Hunter S. Thompson, Ronald Reagan
"Hunter insisted on meeting an imprisoned Hearst, the granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst."
On Grantland, Jonathan Abrams profiles current NBA players’ union executive director Billy Hunter, who enjoyed a fascinating legal career even before being at loggerheads with league commisioner David Stern:
“President Jimmy Carter appointed Hunter as the U.S. Attorney for Northern California in 1977. He was one of the youngest lawyers to ever hold the position and became entangled in several historic moments. He brought the first major federal cases against the Hells Angels and Black Panther Party.
Hunter also prosecuted the surviving members who aided Jim Jones’ cult after the mass suicide of more than 900 people in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. Hunter visited Jonestown following the assassination of U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan.
‘We got there just on the eve of the Guyanese Army evacuating all the bodies,’ Hunter said. ‘The bodies had blown up because of the heat and all the bodies up there. It’s hot as hell there.’
Hunter also recommended Patty Hearst’s sentence be commuted and visited Hearst while she was imprisoned. At first, Hunter perceived that his bosses simply wanted him to sign off on the decision. Hunter insisted on meeting an imprisoned Hearst, the granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who was first kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and later sympathized with the militant group.
They talked about life, and Hunter noted the irony of how he, a poor kid from New Jersey, was holding the key to the freedom of one of the country’s most wealthy heiresses. At the end of the three-hour conversation, Hearst plainly asked Hunter of his intentions. ‘I told her that I would recommend getting her out of here.'”
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The SLA has a gunfight with the LAPD the year before Hearst’s arrest:
Tags: Billy Hunter, Patty Hearst
"Upon the first fire Cochrane was shot in the forehead--the ball ripping up a portion of his skull, and scattering a teaspoon full of the brain."
The most famous duel in American history was the Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton tragedy that played out in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1804. But plenty of other gun-and-sword battles occurred in this country in the 19th century. The following are several stories about duels that appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
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“Duel Near Washington” (February 19, 1844) “A duel was fought near Washington on Friday last, between a couple of young men named Julian May, a lawyer and student of medicine, and Joseph Cochrane, brother to John F. Cochrane, Esq., of the War Department. They fought with rifles, at fifty paces, and upon the first fire Cochrane was shot in the forehead–the ball ripping up a portion of his skull, and scattering a teaspoon full of the brain. The wound is considered mortal. The quarrel originated in a billiard room, between friends of the parties, and ultimately led to a discussion touching their bravery. Until dueling shall be branded and punished as murder, we must expect to hear of such brutalities.”
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"One received a sword thrust through the breast."
“Fought A Duel With Swords” (December 17, 1886): “Chicago–A duel with swords was fought early yesterday morning in Humboldt Park. A little before 7 o’clock closed carriages entered the park, each carriage contained a principal, with his second and a surgeon. They drove to the western end, where they alighted and concealed themselves behind a clump of trees. The arrangements being completed, the principals each drew a saber and the contest began. Soon both were wounded. One received a sword thrust through the breast and his opponent was cut across the face.
With the drawing of blood the duelists seemed satisfied, for they were quickly put in their carriages, and rapidly driven to Frerksen’s drug store, at the corner of North and California Avenues. There the wounds were dressed. Then the men were carried to their carriages and rapidly driven away. So quickly was the duel fought that the park policeman who saw the carriages go out of the park was not aware of what had occurred, nor were several people who saw them drive up to the drug store and away again. The only witnesses of the duel besides those immediately interested were some boys who were skating in the park. The boys say one of the men was large and fully bearded, with a military bearing. The other was younger. Mr. Frerksen, the druggist, was very reticent about the matter, though he admitted that a duel had been fought and that the participants were the editor of a pharmaceutical journal and a young medical man. It is said the affair was over the hand and favor of a young lady.”
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“Duel Between Father And Son” (December 11, 1890): “Gainesville, Tex.–A fatal duel took place last night in Paine’s Valley between Senator Samuel Paul, of the Chicasaw legislature, and his son, Joe Paul, in which Joe received a bullet wound to the back and one in the breast, and the father received a dangerous wound in the thigh, made by a pistol ball fired by the son. Reports from Paine’s Valley state that the young man died of his wounds this evening, but that the father will recover. It is said that the difficulty grew out of a quarrel over a woman of bad repute. Deputy Marshal Thomas left Gainesville this evening to place the senator under arrest and take him before a United States commissioner for preliminary trial.”
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Ikeelas Dodge
Cover of November 1968 "Esquire": "Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Terry Southern, John Sack--Chicago."
Late literary journalism legend John Sack filed a report for Esquire in 2001 about a California convention of Holocaust deniers, which he was invited to despite being Jewish and having a far firmer grasp on history than his hosts. An excerpt from “Daniel in the Deniers Den“:
“I’m sure many antisemites say the Holocaust didn’t happen (even as they take delight that it really did) but I met none that weekend. The only debatably antisemitic comment that I heard was on Friday night, when I dined in the downstairs restaurant with a prominent denier in a NO HOLES? NO HOLOCAUST! shirt, an Alabama man whose name is Dr. Robert Countess. A gangling scholar of Classical Greek and Classical Hebrew, he had taught history at the University of Alabama and had retired to a farm outside of Huntsville, where he played major-league ping-pong and he collected old Peugeots—he had twenty-two, some dating back to the Crash. While scarcely cranky, he had a cranky-sounding voice, and in the open-aired restaurant he was practically grinding gears as he discoursed on the Septuagint and as I, not Countess, brought up the Jewish sacred scrolls the Talmud. ‘What’s called the Talmud,’ Countess lectured, ‘Talmud being the participle form of lamad, in Hebrew learn, developed in Babylonia as rabbis reflected on certain passages in the Torah. Some of these rabbis engaged in a syncretism, a bringing together, of Babylonian paganism with the religion of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So if you read much of the Talmud, and Elda will tell you her favorite story—’
‘No,’ said Elda, Countess’s wife, who was dining with us.
‘It’s unbelievable, but it’s in the Talmud,’ said Countess.
‘No no. I don’t want to tell it,’ said Elda, embarrassed.
‘Go ahead and tell it,’ Countess entreated.
‘Well,’ said Elda, blushing, ‘iit’s in the Talmud that if a Jewish man’s repairing the roof, and if his sister-in-law is down below, and if he falls onto her and she becomes pregnant—’
‘He falls off the roof in such a way—’ Countess laughed.
‘Can you picture it? Then the child won’t be a bastard,’ said Elda. The tale would be antisemitic rubbish if it weren’t indeed in the Talmud (in Yebamoth, and again in Baba Kama) and if the Countesses were just amused and not also appalled. ‘You and I laugh about this,’ said Countess, ‘but I sit in stark amazement saying, Jews aren’t stupid people! How can they go along with this?’
‘The answer is, We don’t,’ I explained. By bedtime on Friday, my impression of the Countesses was like my impression of UFO devotees. Everyone in America believes in one or another ridiculous thing. Me, I belong to the International Society for Cryptozoology and I firmly believe that in Lake Tele, in the heart of the Congo, there is a living, breathing dinosaur. Fifteen years ago, I even went there to photograph it—I didn’t, I didn’t even see it, but I still believe in it. Other people believe other things, and the Countesses and the other deniers believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Like me in the Congo, they’re wrong, wrong, wrong, but to say that emphatically isn’t to say (as some people do) that they’re odious, contemptible, despicable. To say that they’re rats (as does the author of Denying the Holocaust) is no more correct than to say it of people who, in their ignorance, believe the less pernicious fallacy that Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy. Oh, did I hit a sore spot there?'”
Tags: Dr. Robert Countess, John Sack
The Prime Minister of Norway refuses to overreact to shocking politicized violence. From the New York Times:
“‘It’s absolutely possible to have an open, democratic, inclusive society, and at the same time have security measures and not be naive,’ Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Oslo. ‘I think what we have seen is that there is going to be one Norway before and one Norway after July 22,’ he said. ‘But I hope and also believe that the Norway we will see after will be more open, a more tolerant society than what we had before.’”
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David Foster Wallace, completely unburdened by political office, took things a step further in response to 9/11. From the Atlantic in 2007:
“Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, ‘sacrifices on the altar of freedom’? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?
In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?”
Even before his steep fall from grace, John Edwards always seemed a mealymouthed charlatan who had all the slickness of Bill Clinton without any of the prodigious political talent. But even the best and brightest can sometimes look at a situation and completely misread it. I was looking up some articles by Barbara Ehrenreich and was reminded of this:
“For my money, John Edwards is the best candidate out there. Clinton has Iraqi and American blood on her hands; Obama has yet to lay out clear economic alternatives; and, although they might once have been Republican moderates, McCain and Giuliani are shamelessly snuggling up to the Christianist Right. I like Edwards because he’s taken up the banner of the little guy and gal in America’s grossly one-sided class war. He’s laid out a plan for universal health insurance; he wants to repeal Bush’s tax cuts for the rich; he shows up at workers’ picket lines.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Not Modesto, but possessing a stunning likeness. (Image by Hans Hillewaert.)
Ciudad Juarez in Mexico has been a hyperviolent hotbed of crime and murder for so long that locals have been forced to remain inside as much as possible, which, of course, makes those who do venture out even more unsafe. Could an increasing number of people visiting a park to see a giraffe be a sign that things are changing? From Damien Cave’s well-written article about the significance of Modesto the Giraffe in the New York Times:
” Oblivious to crime, nearly 20 feet tall and tough enough to withstand wild temperature swings, Modesto the giraffe has become more than just another oddity in this bizarre borderopolis of malls and murders. He has become a magnet for people trying to escape fear and the cooped-up life caused by violence.
‘We need places that are peaceful,’ said Eduardo Ponce, 44, an elementary school teacher whose 2-year-old son was entranced by Modesto on a recent afternoon. ‘I try to think positive.’
That seems to be a little more common these days. Several parks here in Ciudad Juárez have been attracting crowds again, residents say, because of a desire that often emerges after several years of war or widespread crime — a desire to get out, to stop hunkering down, to believe that things are better, or will be.
It is far from clear that this hope is yet realized. Murders in Ciudad Juárez appear to be down compared with last year, but the past few weeks have been especially bloody, with 21 people killed in a single day this month. No one here seems to think the struggle against the city’s rampant drug violence is over. Many are just tired of letting it rule their lives.”
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Modesto la jirafa:
Tags: Damien Cave, Eduardo Ponce, Modesto
From 1967.
Tags: Groucho Marx, William F. Buckley
Frank Sinatra, that erstwhile Liberal Democrat, supporting his Hollywood buddy Ronald Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention. Chris Wallace and Lynn Sherr do the honors. Lousy audio, but still worth it.
Another post about a celebrity political endorsement:
Tags: Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan
In Philip K. Dick’s too-bleak 1972 essay, “The Android and the Human,” there is, unsurprisingly, some truth:
“I would like then to ask this: what is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect behavior, or reflex behavior? And I would include, in this, the kind of pseudo-human behavior exhibited by what were once living men — creatures who have, in ways I wish to discuss next, become instruments, means, rather than ends, and hence to me analogs of machines in the bad sense, in the sense that although biological life continues, metabolism goes on, the soul — for lack of a better term — is no longer there or at least no longer active. And such does exist in our world — it always did, but the production of such inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and such-like agencies, now. The reduction of humans to mere use — men made into machines, serving a purpose which although ‘good’ in an abstract sense has, for its accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal — however puny — destiny. As if, so to speak, history has made him into its instrument. History, and men skilled in — and trained in — the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically oriented, themselves, in such as way that the use of these devices strikes them as a necessary or at least desirable method of bringing about some ultimately desired goal.
I think, at this point, of Tom Paine’s comment about or another party of the Europe of his time: ‘They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird.’ And it is the ‘dying bird’ that I am concerned with. The dying — and yet, I think, beginning once again to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity — the dying bird of authentic humanness.”
Tags: Philip K. Dick
It’s always curious to me that negotiators, whether politicians or the opposing sides of sports leagues, so often delay working on an agreement in earnest until they place themselves under severe time constraints, which would seem to be the worst time for those in disagreement to reach a compromise. The reliably lucid James Surowiecki explains why negotiations go bonkers under time pressure, in his article on the debt-ceiling debacle in the New Yorker.
“You might think that there are benefits to putting negotiators under the gun. But, as the Dutch psychologist Carsten de Dreu has shown, time pressure tends to close minds, not open them. Under time pressure, negotiators tend to rely more on stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. They don’t consider as wide a range of alternatives, and are more likely to jump to conclusions based on scanty evidence. Time pressure also reduces the chances that an agreement will be what psychologists call ‘integrative’—taking everyone’s interests and values into account.
In fact, by turning dealmaking into a game of chicken, the debt ceiling favors fanaticism. As the economist Thomas Schelling showed many years ago, ‘It does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, coolheaded, and in control of oneself’ when it comes to brinksmanship.”
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A dramatic interpretation of the American economy, with Slim Pickens in the role of John Boehner:
Tags: Carsten de Dreu, James Surowiecki