Ms. Collins, in “The Amtrak Connection,” says that the importance of Arlen Specter’s defection, with his unparalleled instinct for self-preservation, is that he became a Democrat because Pennsylvania likes the Democratic agenda better. Mr. Cohen, in “Of Loos and Language,” says it’s strange that President Obama, who is far more eloquent than his predecessor, can communicate so well in a world whose lingua franca has become bad English. Mr. Kristof asks “Is Rape Serious?” He says the refusal to test the DNA evidence taken from a woman’s body after sexual abuse seems to be because there is an underlying skepticism about rape as a traumatic crime. Here’s Ms. Collins:
Imagine those Amtrak conversations between Joe Biden and Arlen Specter.
The vice president’s devotion to taking the train home to Wilmington, Del., is legend. It turns out that besides reinforcing his commitment to mass transit, Biden’s commute also gave him hours and hours of uninterrupted quality time with the senator from Pennsylvania.
Which he used to urge Specter to ditch the Republicans.
“We have talked over every problem under the sun and under the moon,” said Specter, at a welcome-to-the-Democratic-Party press conference with Biden and President Obama.
Biden, Washington’s most compulsive talker, and Specter, one of the Senate’s most self-absorbed egos, rode the rails, sharing their every thought. Probably not in the quiet car. You’d think that by the time one of them paused to take a breath they’d be in Montreal.
On Wednesday, Biden was bounding around with excitement at his coup, and who could blame him? Heaven knows Obama deserved some good fortune. Other than Specter’s defection, the best news the president got on his 100th day in office was probably word that the Department of Homeland Security had eliminated the threat of swine flu by changing its name to the H1N1 flu.
The Republicans were irate. “Look, you can tweak my nose, and you can step on my toes and you can pull my hair. At some point, enough is going to be enough,” Michael Steele, the party’s chairman, told CNN.
Steele is turning out to be irrepressible, which is the worst thing you could possibly want in a party spokesman. You really do better with a guy who can repress at the drop of a hat.
The chief G.O.P. talking point was that Specter had only switched parties because he wanted to get re-elected. “To me, this was not a question of, ‘oh, gee, all of a sudden I found principles as a Democrat.’ This is about political survival,” said Steele.
It was a superdepressing message to Steele’s fellow party members north of the Mason-Dixon line: Good for you in saddling yourself with a toxic political affiliation out of principle.
And besides, nobody ever suggested that Specter was acting out of anything but self-interest, including Specter himself.
In his coming-out press conference, the newest Democrat — who had been giving interviews for months stressing his determination to stay a Republican and protect the two-party system — said that the precipitation for the jump came on Friday when he got poll results showing how bleak his prospects were for winning the Republican primary in his re-election fight next year.
Then, he managed to drop the fact that he has more seniority than the current chairman of the Labor-Health Appropriations Subcommittee.
Sorry about that, Tom Harkin.
Nobody has ever tried to paint Arlen Specter as a profile in courage. As the Judiciary Committee chairman, he demonstrated his moderateness by consistently expressing sympathy for the Democrats’ objections to proposals like depriving prisoners of the right of habeas corpus or appointing Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Then, of course, he went right ahead and voted with the Bush administration. But he wanted it on the record that his heart was in the right place.
Nevertheless, the Democrats were very, very happy to welcome him into the fold. “I have known Senator Specter for more than a quarter-century. He has always been a man of honor and integrity, and a fine public servant,” said the majority leader, Harry Reid, who wrote in his 2008 autobiography that Specter “is always with us when we don’t need him.”
The fabled 60th vote! Finally, the Democrats can override filibuster threats and pass the Obama agenda! Except that even as Specter was arriving, his new fellow party members were reminding their leaders that they reserved the right to gum up the works at a moment’s notice. “They might have a 60-member majority. That doesn’t mean they have 60 votes,” warned Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, who is busy trying to block the Obama student loan reform bill.
The real import of this story isn’t the 60 votes. It’s that Arlen Specter, with his unparalleled instinct for self-preservation, became a Democrat because the people of Pennsylvania like the Democratic agenda better. And the Republicans were too fanatical or deluded to allow him to straddle the line.
“Well, if spending the hard-earned dollars of the American people and redistributing their wealth and moving towards a collectivist socialist approach to government, if that helps you realize you’re a Democrat, then, you know, good riddance,” Steele said.
The Republican Party has officially moved into nutcase territory. The Republican moderate caucus in the Senate is down to the two women from Maine. And we would all certainly like to listen in on their conversations on the plane ride home.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
A poet friend, Vincent Katz, was over for dinner the other night and asked me with a twinkle in his eye if I was “knackered.” Katz came to poetry via rock ’n roll, and to Oxford via the University of Chicago, and along the way he picked up some English vernacular.
“Knackered?”
The word — meaning more than tired, beat — transported me to the England of my youth, a place of hissing gas fires, metered hot water, contempt for “the Continent,” schoolboys in corduroy shorts, crows over the rubbish dumps, skinheads on the tube, Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, soggy leaves and solid fog.
Aging is like that. The memories pile up. More things are done for the last time than the first. It doesn’t take much to be transported.
Yes, I was knackered — and suddenly nostalgic for the churning clouds of London, the damp mustiness of pre-prosperous England, and the mist hovering in an Oxford dawn.
I dug out a diary I kept at university in the early ’70s and found this: “Sunday morning: the allotments dotted with stooping figures. Steaming water poured over gleaming cars. The papers. This England.”
And this:
Loose summer dresses catching in the crotch
The leather boys stick together
With coffee on the benches.
Tulips dying gape open-mouthed
At the fruit rotting after lunch.That England’s gone, of course, it’s had its glossy makeover like everywhere else. Gastropubs shun bangers and lumpy mash and even Leeds is trendy.
But language is another story. Katz told me how uncomfortable he felt saying “loo” for the first time. The unthinkable alternative was to ask some bloke for the “bathroom.”
What for, mate?
Katz read classics at St. John’s College (viewed as a too-beautiful refuge of sporty underachievers by my own Balliol) and he summed up the experience this way: “I began to realize (what I should have known all along) that I was living in a completely different culture. It was just as alien to me as France would have been, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany. There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don’t.”
Yes, the illusion is there. The United States freed itself from Britain in a revolution but had to opt for subtler forms of sedition when it came to the language.
I remember getting in a row with an editor and friend, Richard Berry, after writing “car park.” No such thing in American, Berry said. Come on! It’s where you put your car, Richard. Nope, he insisted, parking lot.
I was miffed. I was gutted. (Look that up, Richard.)
“Well done, love,” I told my 14-year-old son the other day. “Well done, love!” he parroted in that scorn-dripping tone teenagers reserve for their Paleolithic parents, weaving an English patter into his Brooklynese. “You mean: Good job!”
Quite.
Jobs, the work ethic — no escape from them in the United States, where finishing a meal in a restaurant prompts the death-penalty-meriting: “Are you still working on that?” When I took an English test to become a U.S. citizen a few years back, one of the three sentences in my dictation was: “I plan to work very hard every day.”
Quite.
America works, every day, its youthful ambition still boundless. England, having seen everything go pear-shaped, relieved of the burden of running a ropey world, boozes and says it’s sorry and prefers a lie-in.
“Oxford was the only place I’ve heard someone use ‘mayn’t’ completely casually,” Katz wrote. “I began to long for those usages — grammatically unimpeachable and stylistically extravagant — and be on the lookout for them. I had a friend who used ‘Crumbs!’ as an exclamation, something I’d only ever read in books or seen in movies.”
Crumbs! It’s been yonks since I heard that or peered through the windscreen over the bonnet at lorries on the motorway. I thought I’d left England behind — its rucksacks and trousers and chemists and fortnights — you know, the full Anglo monty — until I got too knackered to resist.
Katz continued: “After a year or so of tuning into the subtleties of the English language, something quite remarkable occurred — I began to perceive many different layers of expression in ways the British communicate. Where they are often criticized by Americans for being cold, I began to see endless expressions of warmth. Where they might be considered narrow-minded, I found instead some of the most open-minded, progressive minds I have encountered.”
English tolerance can be as uplifting as American idealism, that many-faceted and quizzical “quite” seeing U.S. “hope.”
Since my student walks to the Isis past the wet autumn leaves smoking rather than burning, English has gone global. In fact, the world’s lingua franca is now bad English. It’s strange then that a U.S. president who speaks good English, far better than his predecessor, seems able to communicate with that world. This may even be Barack Obama’s biggest achievement in his first 100 days.
Brilliant!
And now here’s Mr. Kristof:
When a woman reports a rape, her body is a crime scene. She is typically asked to undress over a large sheet of white paper to collect hairs or fibers, and then her body is examined with an ultraviolet light, photographed and thoroughly swabbed for the rapist’s DNA.
It’s a grueling and invasive process that can last four to six hours and produces a “rape kit” — which, it turns out, often sits around for months or years, unopened and untested.
Stunningly often, the rape kit isn’t tested at all because it’s not deemed a priority. If it is tested, this happens at such a lackadaisical pace that it may be a year or more before there are results (if expedited, results are technically possible in a week).
So while we have breakthrough DNA technologies to find culprits and exculpate innocent suspects, we aren’t using them properly — and those who work in this field believe the reason is an underlying doubt about the seriousness of some rape cases. In short, this isn’t justice; it’s indifference.
Solomon Moore, a colleague of mine at The Times, last year wrote about a 43-year-old legal secretary who was raped repeatedly in her home in Los Angeles as her son slept in another room. The attacker forced the woman to clean herself in an attempt to destroy the evidence.
Tim Marcia, the detective on the case, thought this meant that the perpetrator was a habitual offender who would strike again. Mr. Marcia rushed the rape kit to the crime lab but was told to expect a delay of more than one year.
So Mr. Marcia personally drove the kit 350 miles to deliver it to the state lab in Sacramento. Even there, the backlog resulted in a four-month delay — but then it produced a “cold hit,” a match in a database of the DNA of previous offenders.
Yet in the months while the rape kit sat on a shelf, the suspect had allegedly struck twice more. Police said he broke into the homes of a pregnant woman and a 17-year-old girl, sexually assaulting each of them.
“The criminal justice system is still ill equipped to deal with rape and not that good at moving rape cases forward,” notes Sarah Tofte, who just wrote a devastating report for Human Rights Watch about the rape-kit backlog. The report found that in Los Angeles County, there were at last count 12,669 rape kits sitting in police storage facilities. More than 450 of these kits had sat around for more than 10 years, and in many cases, the statute of limitations had expired.
There are no good national figures, and one measure of the indifference is that no one even bothers to count the number of rape kits sitting around untested.
Why don’t police departments treat rape kits with urgency? One reason is probably expense — each kit can cost up to $1,500 to test — but there also seems to be a broad distaste for rape cases as murky, ambiguous and difficult to prosecute, particularly when they involve (as they often do) alcohol or acquaintance rape.
“They talk about the victims’ credibility in a way that they don’t talk about the credibility of victims of other crimes,” Ms. Tofte said.
Charlie Beck, a deputy police chief of Los Angeles, said that there was no excuse for the failure to test rape kits, but he noted that integrating a new technology into police work is complex and involves a learning curve. Since Human Rights Watch began its investigation, he said, the department had resolved to test rape kits routinely — and as a result, cold hits have doubled.
While the backlog and desultory handling of rape kits are nationwide problems, there is one shining exception: New York City has made a concerted effort over the last decade to test every kit that comes in. The result has been at least 2,000 cold hits in rape cases, and the arrest rate for reported cases of rape in New York City rose from 40 percent to 70 percent, according to Human Rights Watch.
Some Americans used to argue that it was impossible to rape an unwilling woman. Few people say that today, or say publicly that a woman “asked for it” if she wore a short skirt. But the refusal to test rape kits seems a throwback to the same antediluvian skepticism about rape as a traumatic crime.
“If you’ve got stacks of physical evidence of a crime, and you’re not doing everything you can with the evidence, then you must be making a decision that this isn’t a very serious crime,” notes Polly Poskin, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault.
It’s what we might expect in Afghanistan, not in the United States.
