People who support the war in Iraq argue that the invasion (what George Bush euphemistically called "preemption") was necessary because Saddam might have become a terrorist threat; i.e., he might have acquired and used Weapons of Mass Destruction. Similarly, people who support a ban on assault rifles argue that the…
According to ABC News, the White House and the Secret Service "quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public." The agreement is in the form of a five-page…
Friday evening, I did something I rarely do: I watched one of those pseudo-news shows, the kind that generally focus on soft news that everybody but me seems to be interested in. Generally it is some kind of pop culture junk like Brittany’s latest antic (WHO is Brittany anyway and why does everyone but me know her by first name?). But a Friday night spent under a cozy quilt, nursing a slight malaise left from New Year’s, left me sprawled in a recliner with a TV remote and nothing worth watching. I happened to catch Primetime, an ABC show that left me deeply disturbed.
The show was about the Milgram experiment conducted in the early 60s and a 2006 similar replication of the experiment. In 1961, just a few months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann began, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment to test to what degree people would obey authority even when it was in direct conflict with their personal beliefs.
The subjects of the experiment were people like you and me. They were asked to participate in experiment about whether pain assisted the learning process. The second individual, complicit in the experiment, was set up in another room as the “student.” The “teacher”, the actual subject of the experiment, was placed in front of a panel of switches labeled with increasing voltage. Whenever the “student” missed a question, the teacher was directed to flip the next highest voltage switch, giving the student an apparent electric …
I have a confession.
If the general consensus is that I should never do this again, I will seriously consider stopping (not that I had ever done this before–see below). I know that the story I am about to relate will disgust and confound some readers. Beware that I am thin-skinned, but don’t hold back.
Here’s the short version. While in Chicago, my family and I (my wife and I have two daughters, aged six and eight) went to a trendy chocolatier (a store that sells high-priced chocolate). While at said store, I ate some of the high-priced chocolate left by a customer who had left the store just as we were sitting down.
As I relate this, I am haunted by the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza is caught rummaging through the trash can in the kitchen of a house eating a pastry that someone had thrown away. My adventure also brings to mind an idea put forth by “Tim,” a friend of mine, who has long argued that all morality starts with what one puts into one’s mouth.
Here’s what happened. We went to a chocolatier, where my wife ordered a high-priced cup of hot chocolate. The chocolatier was located on the first floor of an upscale mall that sells lots and lots of things that nobody really needs. It just so happened that the Lego store was on the second floor of that mall. That was our true destination when we were distracted by chocolatier’s prominent location.…
Lewis Lapham served as editor of Harper's Magazine from 1976 until his retirement in from those duties in 2006. But he has continued on in his writing. In the January 2007 "Notebook" he bristles at the suggestions of Nancy Pelosi and others that impeachment hearings are "off the table." Lapham…