"Mitt Romney’s son rescued four people from a car crash—then tweeted a photo of himself grinning next to the wreck."

"Bad move if you’re an aspiring politician from a family with a reputation for being out of touch."

“Was first on scene to big accident, see pic of car in the house,” Josh tweeted. “I lifted 4 people out to safety. All ok. Thankful.” Accompanying the tweet was a the moral equivalent of a selfie of Josh standing proudly in front of the wrecked SUV that had just destroyed some homeowner’s kitchen.

Weirdly, he is grinning—the symptom of either a relentlessly sunny personality or else an alarming incapacity to empathize with another person’s horrible luck.

Poor Josh Romney. Even when he's out there saving lives, he must be ever on guard lest he create evidence that can be used to say, one more time, Romney is out of touch.

By the way, Barack Obama is always smiling — including while standing in front of wrecks worse than a car that crashed into a kitchen but didn't injure anyone. Somehow his smile always fits the preferred media framing: Whatever happens, we still love him as a person.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

How is that a selfie? Is his right arm 25 feet long with multiple joints?

CWJ said:

[M]y take was that either Josh reflexively smiled when the camera was pointed at him, or that the amateur photographer might actually have said "cheese" or its equivalent.

I said:

Yeah... I can imagine a lot of jokes that could be made, like "Hey, where's Seamus?!!!"

More seriously, Paddy O said:

I think of news people who always need to be on the scene of a disaster. That's much worse, I think.

For people who grow up in social media, this is a way of sharing what happened, a traumatic event that ended better than it might have. Maybe the smile was out of place, but it's very human.

If a person didn't start by hating the Romneys, this wouldn't even be an issue.

And I said:

Property damage is worth laughing at when you know the people are all safe. If you've ever been in a situation like that, you know we're all safe is everything. Then you look at the wreck and you can laugh.

The people who don't understand that kind of laughing should reflect and then give thanks if what I suspect is true: They never lost a loved one in a car crash.

ADDED: On the "selfie" issue. The article at The Daily Beast does say "the moral equivalent of a selfie," as I've quoted, and the headline at the link is "Josh Romney’s Awkward Car-Crash 'Selfie,'" with "selfie" in quotes. You might argue that "selfie" is in quotes because it's slang, but The Beast can say it's in quotes because it's not actually a selfie, but it's the moral equivalent of a selfie. And the failure to put "selfie" in quotes in the phrase "moral equivalent of a selfie" squarely refutes the quotes-because-it's-slang interpretation.

"We use transgender as an umbrella term that includes people who are transsexual, cross-dressers or otherwise gender non-conforming."

A definition in the sidebar of an article titled "The Heart Wants What It Wants" — supertitled "We Are as We Are" and "Dating Trans?," which is teased on the front page of this new website Ozy under the heading "Tricky Topic: Dating a Transgender Person/Have attitudes about the fluidity of gender migrated much on the T in LGBT?"

For a website with a 3-letter name, that's an awful lot of titles, dragging us this way and that. What caught my eye — among the many things clamoring to catch eyes — was that side-bar definition that I used for the post title. That made me think: Who's not under that umbrella? Only people who are gender-conforming, which in my book — who wants to be a conformist, a gender stereotype? — is an insult.
The erstwhile minority could become the majority by repositioning the line.

But the article doesn't get us any further than telling us about some new Jared Leto-Matthew McConaughey ("Oscar buzz"), the price of some "sex reassignment" surgeries ("creating a penis is difficult and costly"), the fact that the Social Security Administration will now record your change of sex without proof of surgery (why not?), and finally — as we reach the last paragraph, still searching for the multiple teased topics — 3 questions, essentially only repeating the question raised in all those titles/supertitles/teasers.

So that's my first encounter with Ozy. Here's a Business Insider article about it: "Former MSNBC Anchor Launches Ozy, A Fresh News Site With Money From Laurene Powell Jobs."

Watson is the kind of person who is so charismatic, an interview about Ozy required a follow-up phone call. 

What? Is the reporter — Alyson Shontell — saying she was so dazzled by the in-person presence of this man who "wore a gray fitted T-shirt and a bright smile" to their in-person meeting that she needed another interview at some distance from this man's powerful force-field?

[Carlos Watson] is a great schmoozer and I admittedly fell for it during our first meeting. He escaped tough business questions the first time around.

Ha ha. I wonder how Laurene Powell Jobs is doing. Does it matter? She has Steve's billions to throw around however she wants, at whatever cute guys remain amongst the living, now that poor Steve has oh-wowed.

"I think most people would say, 'No, we don't need another news site,'" Watson says. "But if you asked them, 'Has there been a change, such that people are hungrier now to see more, be more and do more than before?' I think they'd tell you there has been. That's why Kickstarter exists. That's why Airbnb has such a robust business. There's a reason why there are things called 500 startups, and a reason startup accelerators are in every city. There's a reason why American Idol is still strong 15 years later. There's a hunger people have for both for themselves and in the world for what's next and what's new."

Are you still hungry? Or does this put you off your feed?

The woman who taught the Motown stars to behave in a manner that read as "class."

It's Maxine Powell, who died on Monday at the age of 98.

“Mrs. Powell was always a lady of grace, elegance and style, and we did our best to emulate her,” Martha Reeves, the former lead singer of Martha and the Vandellas, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “I don’t think I would have been successful at all without her training.... Every asset of my personality has been by her influence... Even to the end, she was making sure that I was standing with posture and exuberant grace.”

She scolded the Supremes about how they were dancing the shake. “You are protruding the buttocks... Whenever you do a naughty step like the shake, add some class to it. Instead of shaking and acting tough, you should roll your buttocks under and keep smiling all the time.” She showed them how to do it and: "They were shocked that I could do it and at how much better it looked my way."

Maybe you're thinking: Why aren't there any Maxine Powells around anymore to class up the pop stars of today? But there must be. They're simply classing them up to suit the taste of our time, which is to say putting them somewhere near the edge of what is acceptable to the big majority. More is acceptable today because of what went on in those earlier years. Dancing the shake at all — rolling the buttocks — was near the edge of acceptability in the 1960s. So that Powells' modification — smile when you roll those buttocks — shaped how people felt about such things and was part of a process that got us where we find ourselves today.

The NYT obituary — at the link — doesn't mention the topic of race (other than to say that Powell founded a finishing and modeling school "which placed the first black models" (was it only for black women?)). But it's hard to ignore that Motown succeeded in making black performers popular with white Americans, who might not have liked them so much if they hadn't been remade in the way Powell taught. What does it say about American racism? It was Powell's idea of what white people wanted and didn't want.

It worked, so who can say what would have happened if some other approach had been used?

Chris Christie smiling.

This post is the first in a series, premised on my observation that the candidate with the best smile wins the presidency. I'm not certain that's true, at least not all the time, but it explains a lot, as long as you start in 1976, when a man won the presidency almost entirely because of a gigantic, toothy smile.

So what I'm doing is a Google image search on a presidential candidate's name along with the word "smiling," then picking the least smiley photograph that comes up. I'm starting with Chris Christie because the results made me laugh, and I had a hard time choosing between the photo above and this one:

"Outside the United States (and certainly outside the South), the tyranny of the smile is considerably weaker."

"In France, even women with the most naturally perky of faces seem to purposely cultivate BRF to enhance their je ne sais quoi."

"Stop telling WOMEN to smile."

"WOMEN do not owe you their time or conversation."

The word "umbrella" appears exactly once in Obama's "Dreams From My Father."

I'm searching the text, because I've been thinking, this morning, about the fascination with Obama's interaction with the Marine and the umbrella, and that set me looking into umbrellas as a famously Freudian symbol, and I was struck by the meaningfulness — in that Freudian context — of Obama's book title "Dreams From My Father."

Now, I'm astounded to see that the umbrella figures importantly in the book — and it is even an umbrella held over him by another man (his younger brother Bernard). This happens at the end of what is the most dramatic scene in the book, on the last page of the final chapter. Obama, in Africa, falls to the ground between the graves of his father and his grandfather and cries.  He's crying about a lack of "a faith that wasn’t new, that wasn’t black or white or Christian or Muslim but that pulsed in the heart of the first African village and the first Kansas homestead—a faith in other people."

And for lack of faith you clung to both too much and too little of your past. Too much of its rigidness, its suspicions, its male cruelties. 

He expresses the idea that their "male cruelties" should have been moderated by more of "the laughter in Granny’s voice, the pleasures of company while herding the goats, the murmur of the market, the stories around the fire... Words of encouragement. An embrace. A strong, true love." That is, the over-masculinity should have been mixed with more feminine things, things that "could make up for a lack of airplanes or rifles." There's a theory of gender here: "you could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving those things behind."

For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept. When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago.... all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.

A light rain began to fall, the drops tapping on the leaves above. I was about to light a cigarette when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to find Bernard squatting beside me, trying to fit the two of us under a bent-up old umbrella. 

“They wanted me to see if you were okay,” he said.

I smiled. “Yeah. I’m okay.” 

So — as he dramatizes it —it is at the moment when he finds out who he really is that another man suddenly appears and is sheltering him with an umbrella. He's been crying, but now it all makes sense, and — with the prompting of the younger man — he sees that he is okay.

Flash forward, and he's President. He is in the Rose Garden. It starts to rain. No man suddenly appears with an umbrella. He is getting wet and he is President — with plenty of airplanes and rifles and all of the world's greatest military at hand — but he is still getting wet. He has to order the Marine to shelter him. It isn't Bernard squatting with a bent-up old umbrella. It's a Marine in full-dress uniform, with a fine unbent umbrella, which is nevertheless not correct under the official — male, rigid — Marine Corps regulations. Where are the words of encouragement, the embraces, the strong, true love? You could never forge yourself into a whole man by leaving those things behind!

Now, here is the whole world gathered around him. Was there ever anything more unlike the time when he was alone between 2 graves? And yet, back then, the moment a light rain began to fall, his brother was there, sent by others who loved to see if he was okay. And here he is, the center of the whole world's attention, and he had to call for the umbrella.  He is not okay.

"Al Gore made $200 million. Good for him!"

Said Meade. Acknowledging that I got the reference, I said, "But he didn't do it alone..."

Meade has his computer screen open to Drudge, the right 2/3 of which looks like this right now:



It's all about smiles, as the dolphin in the lower right corner makes clear. Meade says, "Wow, George P. Bush looks like Nixon," and I say, "And Obama too... strangely." The Gore smile is waxen. For all I know the pic is of a wax depiction of the GoreBot, the ManBearPig we've come to dread.

Meanwhile, there's Leo, our new Gatsby, apparently "vibrantly alive." The word "vibrant" appears only once in "The Great Gatsby":

He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

I think you know what to do with that sentence. And if not, my belief in the harmony of the universe — or the mystical shades and echoes of pink dolphins or the reliability of the Althouse commentariat — tells me that betamax3000 will show you the way.

Pope Francis looks like...

... Ed Wynn!



A lovable face, I think. Something very sweet about it. Ed Wynn's real name was Isaiah Edwin Leopold. He made the middle name — we're told — into his whole name "to save his family the embarrassment of having a lowly comedian as a relative." You may remember him from the "Twilight Zone" episode "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" — about an old man who believed he would die if his clock stopped. Can you remember whether the clock stops and, if so, whether the man dies?

"If he could smile and play and feel then despite his disabilities he deserved to enjoy whatever life he had left, no matter how short."

"Just because his life would be shorter or different, didn’t mean he didn’t deserve to experience it. As long as he was pain free I vowed to let him enjoy his life both while inside me and outside, no matter how long that be."

"Flight attendants at Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific Airways are threatening to withhold food, alcohol and even smiles..."

"... from passengers during the Christmas holidays over a pay dispute, a union official said Thursday."

"I managed to get my head up and scream 'croc' and then this giant dragged me under again."

"I got my head above water again and this time I was swearing and saying get this thing off me. I was just screaming for help. I couldn't feel any pain but I could see his teeth sinking into my leg. I thought I was going to die. I could only see about four centimetres of the top of my leg and the rest was in the croc's gob."

Well, clearly she survived, since we have that quote, but how did she survive? (The saltwater crocodile was 3 meters long.) Her friend on the shore — Al Sartori — went in:

"I jumped into the water and on to its back and stuck my thumbs into its eyes until I felt it start to slacken off.... I picked up the croc and chucked it back into the water and it came back at me. It was pretty heavy."

Great heroism by Satori! A euonym? "Satori is considered a 'first step' or embarkation toward nirvana."

The student's mind must be prepared by rigorous study, with the use of koans, and the practice of meditation to concentrate the mind, under the guidance of a teacher.... Chinese Zen master Wumen Hui-k'ai (無門慧開)... struggled for six years with koan "Zhaozhou’s dog"...

The koan is: "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" Does a crocodile?

Wumen, having understood the koan wrote this poem:

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes;
Everything under heaven bows together;
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

I know a poem about a crocodile:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

"I am such an overprotective parent that if I knew my child might get bitten, I would not have even let my daughter do this."

"But I felt safe. Everyone just imagines dolphins as smiling, non-biting animals with knobby teeth. You forget these are wild animals."

Ugh. Human beings and their attitudes about dolphins. Everyone just imagines dolphins as smiling... No. Some people realize that's just the shape of their mouth. Meanwhile, a little 8-year-old girl is bitten because she impulsively does exactly what the kids are told not to do: moves the paper tray of fish. The dolphins are all just fine taking fish from kids, but when the paper tray is moved, a dolphin immediately jumps up to grab it, biting the child.

Whose fault is this?
	The dolphin's. He needs to learn to control his impulses.
	The child's. She was told not to move the paper tray, and then she did it!
	The parents'. They needed to figure out if their child was capable of following the rules.
	Sea World. It profits from this little show, which is an accident waiting to happen.
	The government, which should have shut down this damnable entertainment long ago.
	There's no fault here at all, just nature and the market taking their course.
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