Brooks, Cohen and Bruni

Oh, gawd, Bobo thinks he can understand neuroscience.  In “Beyond the Brain” he gurgles that advances in neuroscience promise many things, but they will never explain everything.  (I doubt that anyone ever claimed that they would, Bobo.  Not even the citation-less “some people” you always refer to.)  Mr. Cohen considers “Obama’s German Storm” and says where Kennedy spoke of freedom, Obama must speak of the end of the security-skewed post-9/11 era.  In “Lesser Lights, Big City,” Mr. Bruni says Anthony Weiner preens. Christine Quinn calibrates. And New Yorkers wonder: who’s got the stuff to be our next mayor?  All I can say is that I’m profoundly glad I don’t live there any more…  Here’s Bobo:

It’s a pattern as old as time. Somebody makes an important scientific breakthrough, which explains a piece of the world. But then people get caught up in the excitement of this breakthrough and try to use it to explain everything.

This is what’s happening right now with neuroscience. The field is obviously incredibly important and exciting. From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by it and sometimes go off to extremes, as if understanding the brain is the solution to understanding all thought and behavior.

This is happening at two levels. At the lowbrow level, there are the conference circuit neuro-mappers. These are people who take pretty brain-scan images and claim they can use them to predict what product somebody will buy, what party they will vote for, whether they are lying or not or whether a criminal should be held responsible for his crime.

At the highbrow end, there are scholars and theorists that some have called the “nothing buttists.” Human beings are nothing but neurons, they assert. Once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to understand behavior. We will see the chain of physical causations that determine actions. We will see that many behaviors like addiction are nothing more than brain diseases. We will see that people don’t really possess free will; their actions are caused by material processes emerging directly out of nature. Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.

These two forms of extremism are refuted by the same reality. The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

The first basic problem is that regions of the brain handle a wide variety of different tasks. As Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld explained in their compelling and highly readable book, “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” you put somebody in an fMRI machine and see that the amygdala or the insula lights up during certain activities. But the amygdala lights up during fear, happiness, novelty, anger or sexual arousal (at least in women). The insula plays a role in processing trust, insight, empathy, aversion and disbelief. So what are you really looking at?

Then there is the problem that one activity is usually distributed over many different places in the brain. In his book, “Brain Imaging,” the Yale biophysicist Robert Shulman notes that we have this useful concept, “working memory,” but the activity described by this concept is widely distributed across at least 30 regions of the brain. Furthermore, there appears to be no dispersed pattern of activation that we can look at and say, “That person is experiencing hatred.”

Then there is the problem that one action can arise out of many different brain states and the same event can trigger many different brain reactions. As the eminent psychologist Jerome Kagan has argued, you may order the same salad, but your brain activity will look different, depending on whether you are drunk or sober, alert or tired.

Then, as Kagan also notes, there is the problem of meaning. A glass of water may be more meaningful to you when you are dying of thirst than when you are not. Your lover means more than your friend. It’s as hard to study neurons and understand the flavors of meaning as it is to study Shakespeare’s spelling and understand the passions aroused by Macbeth.

Finally, there is the problem of agency, the problem that bedevils all methods that mimic physics to predict human behavior. People are smokers one day but quit the next. People can change their brains in unique and unpredictable ways by shifting the patterns of their attention.

What Satel and Lilienfeld call “neurocentrism” is an effort to take the indeterminacy of life and reduce it to measurable, scientific categories.

Right now we are compelled to rely on different disciplines to try to understand behavior on multiple levels, with inherent tensions between them. Some people want to reduce that ambiguity by making one discipline all-explaining. They want to eliminate the confusing ambiguity of human freedom by reducing everything to material determinism.

But that is the form of intellectual utopianism that always leads to error. An important task these days is to harvest the exciting gains made by science and data while understanding the limits of science and data. The next time somebody tells you what a brain scan says, be a little skeptical. The brain is not the mind.

Next up we have Mr. Cohen:

Germany is normally a welcoming place for American leaders. But President Barack Obama will walk into a German storm Tuesday provoked by revelations about the Prism and Boundless Informant (who comes up with these names?) surveillance programs of the U.S. National Security Agency.

No nation, after the Nazis and the Stasi, has such intense feelings about personal privacy as Germany. The very word “Datenschutz,” or data protection, is a revered one. The notion that the United States has been able to access the e-mails or Facebook accounts or Skype conversations of German citizens has been described as “monstrous” by Peter Schaar, the official responsible for enforcing Germany’s strict privacy rules. When the German bureaucracy starts talking about monstrous American behavior, take note.

What was scripted as a celebration of U.S.-German bonds on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech has turned into a charged presidential visit underlining how two nations that once had the same views about a shared enemy — the Soviet Union — now think differently about global threats and how to balance security and freedom in confronting them.

It would not be a surprise if Obama faced a banner or two at the Brandenburg Gate equating the United States with the Stasi; or, in an allusion to the chilling movie about the former East German spy service, one with this rebuke: “America, Respect the Lives of Others.”

A half-century ago, Kennedy said, “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” History plays devilish tricks even on the best-intentioned: Obama needs to find language of equal directness now to allay German fury about perceived American intrusion into their essential freedoms.

Saying U.S. actions were legal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which they apparently were, will not cut it. This is a crisis of American credibility. Hillary Clinton made an open and secure Internet supporting freedom around the world a cornerstone of her tenure as secretary of state. She called it the “21st century statecraft” agenda. It was an important program. Little survives of it, however, if its primary supporter — the United States — turns out to be the main proponent of mass global surveillance. No wonder the Chinese and Russians are reveling: You see, we told you so!

Last month, Obama made an important speech about security and freedom at the National Defense University. It was about lost American balance. He acknowledged that in the open-ended, post-9/11 war on terror, the president had been granted “unbound powers” and the United States had “compromised our basic values.” He vowed to end that unwinnable war (“This war, like all wars, must end”), and curtail the drone program. It amounted to a commitment to revoke what has, in some respects, been an undeclared State of Emergency.

There is a parallel between the drones and the surveillance program. Overshoot is inevitable when essential checks and balances erode. One flying robot becomes an army of them dropping bombs. A request to monitor one e-mail account becomes a technology-driven lurch toward capturing all the Internet traffic coming into the United States. And Germans start having nightmares about the digital footprints of their lives stored in a vast facility in Utah.

Obama needs to reprise some of his speech about American rebalancing and the end of the post-9/11 disorientation. He needs to spell out how and why requests are made to the FISA court for approval to monitor foreigners’ online activities (last year there were 1,856 FISA applications, of which 100 percent were approved.) He needs to demonstrate that what has been done is proportional to the threat. Europeans — and Americans — have a right to know more about the standards applied in this secret court. Google and other companies want to publish the terms of FISA requests: This would be helpful. Nobody knows if a single FISA request may involve one e-mail account or thousands. As with drones, Obama must commit to curtailment through greater oversight and accountability.

If the president is serious about winding down the American war that began a dozen years ago, Berlin is a good place to advance that cause. It is the post-Cold-War city par excellence, a vibrant demonstration of how American power in the service of its values can advance freedom.

Angela Merkel, who grew up on the other side of the Wall, will press Obama on surveillance. Given national anger it is a political necessity for her. But indignation is not enough for Europe. It needs to step up and help America defend Internet freedom.

Ben Scott, who was the policy adviser for innovation in Clinton’s State Department and is now based in Berlin, told me: “To be credible on the global stage, it now has to be more than the U.S. pushing the Internet freedom agenda — and the European Union could be particularly important.”

That agenda matters; indeed I cannot think of a more important one for the 21st century. Just look at Turkey.

Last but not least is Mr. Bruni:

Anthony Weiner’s quixotic mayoral candidacy is clearly a bid for redemption, and just as clearly a way to sate his epic, boundless need to be noticed.

But it wasn’t until I went to the Bronx for a candidates’ forum last week that I realized another function the campaign serves for him. It’s his cardio.

While the nine other contenders at a long conference table did what you’d expect and remained seated as they answered questions, Weiner alone shot to his feet whenever it was his turn to speak, an overeager suitor, an overbearing narcissist.

He’d sink back into his chair when his allotted 60 seconds ran out, then rise anew when it was once again Weiner Time. Up, down, up, down: he was part jack-in-the-box, part aerobics instructor and all about Anthony.

When it wasn’t Weiner Time, he made no pretense of caring about or even listening to what his rivals had to say. He’d bury his nose in the papers before him. He’d riffle through them. This despite several news items that had slammed him for similar behavior at a previous forum. For Weiner, rudeness isn’t an oversight. It’s a coat of arms.

He’s a sad spectacle, but that may also make him the perfect mascot for the unfolding mayoral race, which so far doesn’t reflect the greatness of the city whose stewardship is up for grabs. This contest feels crass. It feels small.

And it feels all the smaller because of the constant reminders of just how large a figure the departing mayor, Michael Bloomberg, both is and insists on being. He’s just brought us bikes. He’s determined to bring us composting. He means to vanquish smoking, he means to vanquish obesity and he’s intent on protecting us from the ever stormier seas, after which he means to vanquish global warming itself.

Say what you will about him, he’s a leader of formidable resolve and considerable boldness. And New York of all places needs that kind of swagger, those shades of grandiosity. Can any of his would-be successors provide them? Among many city denizens I know, I sense a justifiable worry, and sometimes an outright angst.

When they look at Christine Quinn, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination and the mayoralty itself, they see someone trying to thread so many needles she gets tangled in her own string.

She can’t run as an extension of Bloomberg, not in a Democratic primary. But she can’t run against his record, having played a key role in securing him a rule-busting third term.

As a woman, she often felt the need to emphasize her toughness. Then came Michael M. Grynbaum and David W. Chen’s remarkable story in The Times about her vicious temper and her frequent outbursts, so loud that her City Hall office had to be soundproofed. So she tacked in a softer, more vulnerable direction, drawing attention to the revelations of bulimia and alcoholism in a just-published memoir whose “sentimentality and self-deprecating girlishness might leaven her image as a brash virago,” Michelle Goldberg observed in The Daily Beast.

On Monday, however, the sentimentality and girlishness were gone as she gave a sharp-edged speech casting herself as a pol of proven dynamism in a field of pandering lightweights. It underscored yet another of the tricky calibrations in her Goldilocks campaign: what’s too liberal, what’s too moderate and what’s just right (and also credible coming from her, a longtime Bloomberg ally).

To some extent, the race for the Democratic nomination — which pits Quinn and Weiner against Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, and Bill Thompson, the 2009 nominee, among others — has been an anachronistic sequence of genuflections before the teachers’ union, African-American voters, Orthodox Jews, animal-rights advocates.

“It seems to me that this is a pre-1992, pre-Bill Clinton version of the Democratic Party, where the candidates dutifully troop before one narrow special-interest group after another and pledge fealty to whatever demands are in front of them,” Howard Wolfson, a longtime Democratic strategist who is now a deputy mayor, told me on Monday. Wolfson credited Quinn more than others for straying on occasion from that timid and tedious script.

The field’s lack of luster prompted Bloomberg last year to try to get Hillary Clinton to throw her pantsuit in the ring. And it has given rise to a belief among some political insiders and a few restless plutocrats that 2017 could be a ripe mayoral-election year for a political outsider interested in emulating Bloomberg’s ascent into office. By then, the theory goes, the winner of 2013 will have failed.

That’s a tad too cynical, though there’s no overstating the current excitement deficit, which is of course another reason Weiner joined this sorry circus. He detected an underwhelmed audience whose attention could be riveted, even if he had to play the clown.

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo has decided to discuss religion…  In “Religion and Inequality” he babbles that the naked dominance of today’s success ethic has contributed to a loss of cultural dynamism, maybe even social stagnancy.  In the comments to this thing “Michael” from Los Angeles said:  “David Brooks, you have outdone yourself!   PS: This is not a compliment.”  ‘Nuf said.   Prof. Krugman, in “Sympathy for the Luddites,” asks a question:  What happens when good jobs disappear? It’s a question that’s been asked for centuries.  Here’s Bobo:

About a century ago, Walter Judd was a 17-year-old boy hoping to go to college at the University of Nebraska. His father pulled him aside and told him that, though the family had happily paid for Judd’s two sisters to go to college, Judd himself would get no money for tuition or room and board.

His father explained that he thought his son might one day go on to become a fine doctor, but he had also seen loose tendencies. Some hard manual labor during college would straighten him out.

Judd took the train to the university, arrived at the station at 10:30 and by 12:15 had found a job washing dishes at the cafeteria of the Y.M.C.A. He did that job every day of his first year, rising at 6 each morning, not having his first college date until the last week of the school year.

Judd went on to become a doctor, a daring medical missionary and a prominent member of Congress between 1943 and 1963. The anecdote is small, but it illustrates a few things. First, that, in those days, it was possible to work your way through college doing dishes. More important, that people then were more likely to assume that jobs at the bottom of the status ladder were ennobling and that jobs at the top were morally perilous. That is to say, the moral status system was likely to be the inverse of the worldly status system. The working classes were self-controlled, while the rich and the professionals could get away with things.

These mores, among other things, had biblical roots. In the Torah, God didn’t pick out the most powerful or notable or populous nation to be his chosen people. He chose a small, lowly band. The Torah is filled with characters who are exiles or from the lower reaches of society who are, nonetheless, chosen for pivotal moments: Moses, Joseph, Saul, David and Esther.

In the New Testament, Jesus blesses the poor, “for yours is the kingdom of God.” But “woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.”

In Corinthians, Jesus tells the crowds, “Not many of you were wise by worldly standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

Under this rubric, your place is not determined by worldly accomplishments, but simply through an acceptance of God’s grace. As Paul Tillich put it in a passage recently quoted on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, “Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.”

This inverse hierarchy took secular form. Proletarian novels and movies made the working class the moral bedrock of the nation. In Frank Capra movies like “Meet John Doe,” the common man is the salt of the earth, while the rich are suspect. It wasn’t as if Americans renounced worldly success (this is America!), but there were rival status hierarchies: the biblical hierarchy, the working man’s hierarchy, the artist’s hierarchy, the intellectual’s hierarchy, all of which questioned success and denounced those who climbed and sold out.

Over the years, religion has played a less dominant role in public culture. Meanwhile, the rival status hierarchies have fallen away. The meritocratic hierarchy of professional success is pretty much the only one left standing.

As a result, people are less ambivalent about commerce. We use economic categories, like “human capital” and “opportunity costs,” in a wide range of spheres. People are less worried about what William James called the “moral flabbiness” of the “bitch-goddess success,” and are more likely to use professional standing as a measure of life performance.

Words like character, which once suggested traits like renunciation that held back success, now denote traits like self-discipline, which enhance it.

Many rich people once felt compelled to try to square their happiness at being successful with their embarrassment about it. They adopted what Charles Murray calls a code of seemliness (no fancy clothes or cars). Not long ago, many people covered their affluence with a bohemian patina, but that patina has grown increasingly thin.

Now most of us engage in more matter-of-fact boasting: the car stickers that describe the driver’s summers on Martha’s Vineyard, the college window stickers, the mass embrace of luxury brands, even the currency of “likes” on Facebook and Reddit as people unabashedly seek popularity.

The culture was probably more dynamic when there were competing status hierarchies. When there is one hegemonic hierarchy, as there is today, the successful are less haunted by their own status and the less successful have nowhere to hide.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

In 1786, the cloth workers of Leeds, a wool-industry center in northern England, issued a protest against the growing use of “scribbling” machines, which were taking over a task formerly performed by skilled labor. “How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?” asked the petitioners. “And what are they to put their children apprentice to?”

Those weren’t foolish questions. Mechanization eventually — that is, after a couple of generations — led to a broad rise in British living standards. But it’s far from clear whether typical workers reaped any benefits during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution; many workers were clearly hurt. And often the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those skills suddenly devalued.

So are we living in another such era? And, if we are, what are we going to do about it?

Until recently, the conventional wisdom about the effects of technology on workers was, in a way, comforting. Clearly, many workers weren’t sharing fully — or, in many cases, at all — in the benefits of rising productivity; instead, the bulk of the gains were going to a minority of the work force. But this, the story went, was because modern technology was raising the demand for highly educated workers while reducing the demand for less educated workers. And the solution was more education.

Now, there were always problems with this story. Notably, while it could account for a rising gap in wages between those with college degrees and those without, it couldn’t explain why a small group — the famous “one percent” — was experiencing much bigger gains than highly educated workers in general. Still, there may have been something to this story a decade ago.

Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.

I’ve noted before that the nature of rising inequality in America changed around 2000. Until then, it was all about worker versus worker; the distribution of income between labor and capital — between wages and profits, if you like — had been stable for decades. Since then, however, labor’s share of the pie has fallen sharply. As it turns out, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon. A new report from the International Labor Organization points out that the same thing has been happening in many other countries, which is what you’d expect to see if global technological trends were turning against workers.

And some of those turns may well be sudden. The McKinsey Global Institute recently released a report on a dozen major new technologies that it considers likely to be “disruptive,” upsetting existing market and social arrangements. Even a quick scan of the report’s list suggests that some of the victims of disruption will be workers who are currently considered highly skilled, and who invested a lot of time and money in acquiring those skills. For example, the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of “automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical professionals.

So should workers simply be prepared to acquire new skills? The woolworkers of 18th-century Leeds addressed this issue back in 1786: “Who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task” of learning a new trade? Also, they asked, what will happen if the new trade, in turn, gets devalued by further technological advance?

And the modern counterparts of those woolworkers might well ask further, what will happen to us if, like so many students, we go deep into debt to acquire the skills we’re told we need, only to learn that the economy no longer wants those skills?

Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income.

I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?

Are there no workhouses?  Are there no prisons?

Brooks and Bruni

In “The Solitary Leaker” Bobo says Edward Snowden faced quite a dilemma in exposing secrets of the N.S.A. , but he also executed a devastating betrayal that it seems he hasn’t recognized.  “Jeo” in New York, who left a comment on this thing, has said it better than I could have dreamed of:  “Every now and then David Brooks’ polite, seemingly moderate veneer peels away and we see the astonishingly vicious, authoritarian true Republican emerge in all its hideous glory. This is something right out of Nixon’s secret tapes ranting about that Daniel Ellsberg fellow.”  Mr. Bruni is pondering “Sexism’s Puzzling Stamina.”  He says despite decades of hand-wringing, soul searching and teachable moments, men still have and relish the upper hand.  Here, FSM help us, is Bobo:

From what we know so far, Edward Snowden appears to be the ultimate unmediated man. Though obviously terrifically bright, he could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.

According to The Washington Post, he has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years. When a neighbor in Hawaii tried to introduce himself, Snowden cut him off and made it clear he wanted no neighborly relationships. He went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton and the C.I.A., but he has separated himself from them, too.

Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. You’re more likely to donate to the Ron Paul for president campaign, as Snowden did.

It’s logical, given this background and mind-set, that Snowden would sacrifice his career to expose data mining procedures of the National Security Agency. Even if he has not been able to point to any specific abuses, he was bound to be horrified by the confidentiality endemic to military and intelligence activities. And, of course, he’s right that the procedures he’s unveiled could lend themselves to abuse in the future.

But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

This is not a danger Snowden is addressing. In fact, he is making everything worse.

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.

He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. He made explicit and implicit oaths to respect the secrecy of the information with which he was entrusted. He betrayed his oaths.

He betrayed his friends. Anybody who worked with him will be suspect. Young people in positions like that will no longer be trusted with responsibility for fear that they will turn into another Snowden.

He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.

He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.

He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

Snowden faced a moral dilemma. On the one hand, he had information about a program he thought was truly menacing. On the other hand, he had made certain commitments as a public servant, as a member of an organization, and a nation. Sometimes leakers have to leak. The information they possess is so grave that it demands they violate their oaths.

But before they do, you hope they will interrogate themselves closely and force themselves to confront various barriers of resistance. Is the information so grave that it’s worth betraying an oath, circumventing the established decision-making procedures, unilaterally exposing secrets that can never be reclassified?

Judging by his comments reported in the news media so far, Snowden was obsessed with the danger of data mining but completely oblivious to his betrayals and toward the damage he has done to social arrangements and the invisible bonds that hold them together.

I’ll add one more comment from “Miskatonic” in Minneapolis:  “No matter what you think of the right or wrongness of Snowden’s actions, Brook’s article is nothing more than a shallow and poorly thought through character assassination that reveals more about the author’s authoritarian tendencies than about the very real issues raised by this leak.”  Now on to Mr. Bruni:

This month the Supreme Court will issue raptly awaited decisions about affirmative action and gay marriage. But what’s been foremost in my thoughts isn’t race, sexual orientation or our country’s deeply flawed handling of both.

It’s gender — and all the recent reminders of how often women are still victimized, how potently they’re still resented and how tenaciously a musty male chauvinism endures. On this front even more than the others, I somehow thought we’d be further along by now.

I can’t get past that widely noted image from a week ago, of the Senate hearing into the epidemic of sexual assault in the military. It showed an initial panel of witnesses: 11 men, one woman. It also showed the backs of some of the senators listening to them: five men and one woman, from a Senate committee encompassing 19 men and seven women in all. Under discussion was the violation of women and how to stop it. And men, once again, were getting more say.

I keep flashing back more than two decades, to 1991. That was the year of the Tailhook incident, in which some 100 Navy and Marine aviators were accused of sexually assaulting scores of women. It was the year of Susan Faludi’s runaway best seller, “Backlash,” on the “war against American women,” as the subtitle said. It was when the issue of sexual harassment took center stage in Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.

All in all it was a festival of teachable moments, raising our consciousness into the stratosphere. So where are we, fully 22 years later?

We’re listening to Saxby Chambliss, a senator from Georgia, attribute sexual abuse in the military to the ineluctable “hormone level” of virile young men in proximity to nubile young women.

We’re congratulating ourselves on the historic high of 20 women in the Senate, even though there are still four men to every one of them and, among governors, nine men to every woman.

I’ll leave aside boardrooms; they’ve been amply covered in Sheryl Sandberg’s book tour.

But what about movies? It was all the way back in 1986 that Sigourney Weaver trounced “Aliens” and landed on the cover of Time, supposedly presaging an era of action heroines. But there haven’t been so many: Angelina Jolie in the “Tomb Raider” adventures, “Salt” and a few other hectic flicks; Jennifer Lawrence in the unfolding “Hunger Games” serial. Last summer Kristen Stewart’s “Snow White” needed a “Huntsman” at her side, and this summer? I see an “Iron Man,” a “Man of Steel” and Will Smith, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Channing Tatum all shouldering the weight of civilization’s future. I see no comparable crew of warrior goddesses.

Heroines fare better on TV, but even there I’m struck by the persistent stereotype of a woman whose career devotion is both seed and flower of a tortured private life. Claire Danes in “Homeland,” Mireille Enos in “The Killing,” Dana Delany in “Body of Proof” and even Mariska Hargitay in “Law & Order: SVU” all fit this bill.

The idea that professional and domestic concerns can’t be balanced isn’t confined to the tube. A recent Pew Research Center report showing that women had become the primary providers in 40 percent of American households with at least one child under 18 prompted the conservative commentators Lou Dobbs and Erick Erickson to fret, respectively, over the dissolution of society and the endangerment of children. When Megyn Kelly challenged them on Fox News, they responded in a patronizing manner that they’d never use with a male news anchor.

Title IX, enacted in 1972, hasn’t led to an impressive advancement of women in pro sports. The country is now on its third attempt at a commercially viable women’s soccer league. The Women’s National Basketball Association lags far behind the men’s N.B.A. in visibility and revenue.

Even in the putatively high-minded realm of literature, there’s a gender gap, with male authors accorded the lion’s share of prominent reviews, as the annual VIDA survey documents. Reflecting on that in Salon last week, the critic Laura Miller acutely noted: “There’s a grandiose self-presentation, a swagger, that goes along with advancing your book as a Great American Novel that many women find impossible or silly.”

I congratulate them for that. They let less hot air into their heads.

But about the larger picture, I’m mystified. Our racial bigotry has often been tied to the ignorance abetted by unfamiliarity, our homophobia to a failure to realize how many gay people we know and respect.

Well, women are in the next cubicle, across the dinner table, on the other side of the bed. Almost every man has a mother he has known and probably cared about; most also have a wife, daughter, sister, aunt or niece as well. Our stubborn sexisms harms and holds back them, not strangers. Still it survives.

Brooks and Krugman

In “The Power Inversion” Bobo says that as Washington coughs along in perpetual sclerosis, state and city governments take the stage.  He seems mystified about why Obama isn’t “filling the public space with a transformational second-term agenda.”  Wotta jackass…  Prof. Krugman addresses some home truths.  In “The Spite Club” he says when you look closer at why some Republican-led states are choosing to opt out of a piece of ObamaCare, it seems the only explanation for it is sheer spite.  Well, there’s also the FYIGM mentality, and the fear that some poor or brown might “take” something…  Here’s Bobo:

There’s a weird calm around Washington these days. The Obama administration only has a year before the lame-duck status sets in. Yet you don’t get a sense of urgency. White House officials seem busy running the government, but they are not filling the public space with a transformational second-term agenda.

Republican leaders aren’t offering bold plans either. They seem more worried about offending pieces of the current coalition than in attracting new ones.

The heart of the problem is that nobody wants to champion proposals that have no chance of passing. Washington is immobilized by interest groups, polarization and a lack of federal dollars.

In their new book, “The Metropolitan Revolution,” Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institution argue that Washington paralysis is already leading to a power inversion. As the federal government becomes less energetic, city governments become more so.

Katz and Bradley describe a country that is segmenting slightly into divergent city-states. Demographically, society is clustering. In an era when the nuclear two-parent family was the key demographic unit, it made sense to think of America as a suburban economy with common needs. But now two-parent nuclear families account for only a fifth of all households. The young, the old and the single make up a huge slice of the population, and they flock to density. According to Robert Puentes of Brookings, the share of young people with driver’s licenses is plummeting. Public transit ridership rose by 32.3 percent between 1995 and 2011.

Economic changes also reinforce regional concentration. For decades, companies sought to protect their intellectual property by isolating their research-and-development functions in suburban research parks. But now scientific breakthroughs are less likely to come from discrete teams. They tend to come from large, loose networks of researchers brought together in physical proximity. It makes sense to locate research facilities in urban districts, often around urban universities, where researchers will make wider and more flexible contacts.

Gerry Carlino of the Philadelphia Fed has found that the number of patents per capita increases by roughly 20 percent to 30 percent for every doubling of employment density. Research by Stuart Rosenthal of Syracuse University and William Strange of the University of Toronto suggests that the intellectual spillovers that often drive innovation drop off as companies move more than a mile apart from each other.

Given this underlying structure, there are a number of reasons city governments are likely to be more dynamic than the federal government. In the first place, regional identity trumps partisan identity. In Washington, your primary affiliation is to your party. But, in Denver, your primary affiliation is to the health of the Denver area. That common consciousness makes it easier for politicians in different parties to cooperate.

Metro governments deal with issues in their particularity, not as abstractions. Leaders in northeastern Ohio can focus on their region’s historic strengths, including a history of expertise with polymers. That leads to certain concrete opportunities — the chance to get into flexible electronics, which are very thin electronic components attached to flexible materials. They can design specific policies around concrete circumstances.

Because issues on the regional level are so tangible, it is possible to debate new proposals without getting immobilized by the big government-versus-small government frame. Republican mayors tend to be more activist than their Congressional counterparts, and Democratic mayors tend to be more business friendly. Katz and Bradley highlight New York City’s fantastically successful effort to lure the Technion-Cornell engineering school. That was an exercise in using government to set the table for long-term growth by luring human capital, not in trying to micromanage the future with shiny office buildings, a downtown stadium or a mall.

Finally, city governments actually have power over the basics, which are the key to promoting growth. American growth lags not because of higher order problems, but because of the bad elemental things, like lousy schools and bad infrastructure. Cities can change this. A study by the Economist Intelligence Unit predicted that Chicago will be the ninth most competitive city in the world by 2025. Its rise in the rankings is fueled by the fact that the city is taking care of fundamentals: $7.3 billion in infrastructure spending over the next two years, a community college program that links education to employment.

Since the New Deal, we have become accustomed to seeing American politics as an ever-concentrated national enterprise. But the sclerosis of the federal system will inevitably produce a reversal, as regions fill the void.

The happiest people these days are those who leave Washington and get elected mayor or governor. The most frustrated people are people who were mayor and governor and get elected to the Senate. They end each day knowing they were busy. They’re just not sure they accomplished anything.

He gets worse and worse…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

House Republicans have voted 37 times to repeal ObamaRomneyCare — the Affordable Care Act, which creates a national health insurance system similar to the one Massachusetts has had since 2006. Nonetheless, almost all of the act will go fully into effect at the beginning of next year.

There is, however, one form of obstruction still available to the G.O.P. Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding the law’s constitutionality also gave states the right to opt out of one piece of the plan, a federally financed expansion of Medicaid. Sure enough, a number of Republican-dominated states seem set to reject Medicaid expansion, at least at first.

And why would they do this? They won’t save money. On the contrary, they will hurt their own budgets and damage their own economies. Nor will Medicaid rejectionism serve any clear political purpose. As I’ll explain later, it will probably hurt Republicans for years to come.

No, the only way to understand the refusal to expand Medicaid is as an act of sheer spite. And the cost of that spite won’t just come in the form of lost dollars; it will also come in the form of gratuitous hardship for some of our most vulnerable citizens.

Some background: Obamacare rests on three pillars. First, insurers must offer the same coverage to everyone regardless of medical history. Second, everyone must purchase coverage — the famous “mandate” — so that the young and healthy don’t opt out until they get older and/or sicker. Third, premiums will be subsidized, so as to make insurance affordable for everyone. And this system is going into effect next year, whether Republicans like it or not.

Under this system, by the way, a few people — basically young, healthy individuals who don’t already get insurance from their employers, and whose incomes are high enough that they won’t benefit from subsidies — will end up paying more for insurance than they do now. Right-wingers are hyping this observation as if it were some kind of shocking surprise, when it was, in fact, well-known to everyone from the beginning of the debate. And, as far as anyone can tell, we’re talking about a small number of people who are, by definition, relatively well off.

Back to the Medicaid expansion. Obamacare, as I’ve just explained, relies on subsidies to make insurance affordable for lower-income Americans. But we already have a program, Medicaid, providing health coverage to very-low-income Americans, at a cost private insurers can’t match. So the Affordable Care Act, sensibly, relies on an expansion of Medicaid rather than the mandate-plus-subsidy arrangement to guarantee care to the poor and near-poor.

But Medicaid is a joint federal-state program, and the Supreme Court made it possible for states to opt out of the expansion. And it appears that a number of states will take advantage of that “opportunity.” What will that mean?

A new study from the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan research institution, examines the consequences if 14 states whose governors have declared their opposition to Medicaid expansion do, in fact, reject the expansion. The result, the study concluded, would be a huge financial hit: the rejectionist states would lose more than $8 billion a year in federal aid, and would also find themselves on the hook for roughly $1 billion more to cover the losses hospitals incur when treating the uninsured.

Meanwhile, Medicaid rejectionism will deny health coverage to roughly 3.6 million Americans, with essentially all of the victims living near or below the poverty line. And since past experience shows that Medicaid expansion is associated with significant declines in mortality, this would mean a lot of avoidable deaths: about 19,000 a year, the study estimated.

Just think about this for a minute. It’s one thing when politicians refuse to spend money helping the poor and vulnerable; that’s just business as usual. But here we have a case in which politicians are, in effect, spending large sums, in the form of rejected aid, not to help the poor but to hurt them.

And as I said, it doesn’t even make sense as cynical politics. If Obamacare works (which it will), millions of middle-income voters — the kind of people who might support either party in future elections — will see major benefits, even in rejectionist states. So rejectionism won’t discredit health reform. What it might do, however, is drive home to lower-income voters — many of them nonwhite — just how little the G.O.P. cares about their well-being, and reinforce the already strong Democratic advantage among Latinos, in particular.

Rationally, in other words, Republicans should accept defeat on health care, at least for now, and move on. Instead, however, their spitefulness appears to override all other considerations. And millions of Americans will pay the price.

As if Republicans are even capable of being rational today…

Brooks and Bruni

In “The Way to Produce a Person” Bobo says when it comes to moral concerns and vocational choice, proceed with caution in thinking in purely utilitarian terms.  Mr. Bruni takes a look at “The Meanest Season.”  He says buggy, muggy and way too long, summer has arrived, and he’s ready for it to go.  Me too, Frank, me too…  Here’s Bobo:

Dylan Matthews had a fascinating piece about a young man named Jason Trigg in The Washington Post on Sunday. Trigg is a 25-year-old computer science graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has hit upon what he thinks is the way he can do maximum good for the world. He goes to work each day at a high-frequency trading hedge fund. But, instead of spending his ample salary, he lives the life of a graduate student and gives a large chunk of his money away.

Trigg has seized upon the statistic that a $2,500 donation can prevent one death from malaria, and he figures that, over the course of a lucrative Wall Street career, he can save many lives. He was motivated to think this way by the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer.

From the article, Trigg seems like an earnest, morally serious man, who, if he lives out his plan, could indeed help save many lives. But if you are thinking of following his example, I would really urge caution.

First, you might start down this course seeing finance as a convenient means to realize your deepest commitment: fighting malaria. But the brain is a malleable organ. Every time you do an activity, or have a thought, you are changing a piece of yourself into something slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you.

Gradually, you become a different person. If there is a large gap between your daily conduct and your core commitment, you will become more like your daily activities and less attached to your original commitment. You will become more hedge fund, less malaria. There’s nothing wrong with working at a hedge fund, but it’s not the priority you started out with.

Second, I would be wary of inverting the natural order of affections. If you see the world on a strictly intellectual level, then a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child. But not many people actually think this way. Not many people value abstract life perceived as a statistic as much as the actual child being fed, hugged, nurtured and played with.

If you choose a profession that doesn’t arouse your everyday passion for the sake of serving instead some abstract faraway good, you might end up as a person who values the far over the near. You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around. You might end up enlarging the faculties we use to perceive the far — rationality — and eclipsing the faculties we use to interact with those closest around — affection, the capacity for vulnerability and dependence. Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god.

Third, and most important, I would worry about turning yourself into a means rather than an end. If you go to Wall Street mostly to make money for charity, you may turn yourself into a machine for the redistribution of wealth. You may turn yourself into a fiscal policy.

But a human life is not just a means to produce outcomes, it is an end in itself. When we evaluate our friends, we don’t just measure the consequences of their lives. We measure who they intrinsically are. We don’t merely want to know if they have done good. We want to know if they are good.

That’s why when most people pick a vocation, they don’t only want one that will be externally useful. They want one that they will enjoy, and that will make them a better person. They want to find that place, as the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

If you are smart, hard-working, careful and lucky you might even be able to find a job that is both productive and internally ennobling. Taking a job just to make money, on the other hand, is probably going to be corrosive, even if you use the money for charity rather than sports cars.

We live in a relentlessly commercial culture, so it’s natural that many people would organize their lives in utilitarian and consequentialist terms. But it’s possible to get carried away with this kind of thinking — to have logic but no wisdom, to become a specialist without spirit.

Making yourself is different than producing a product or an external outcome, requiring different logic and different means. I’d think you would be more likely to cultivate a deep soul if you put yourself in the middle of the things that engaged you most seriously. If your profoundest interest is dying children in Africa or Bangladesh, it’s probably best to go to Africa or Bangladesh, not to Wall Street.

I wonder how much Bobo gives to charity…  The world would be a much better place with fewer Bobos and more Jason Triggs.  Here’s Mr. Bruni:

If my body is a buffet, summer is the server who rips the metal covers off the roast beef and the scalloped potatoes so that the hordes can start feeding. And feed they do, mosquitoes and ants and for all I know spiders. (I’m never sure which tiny glutton has made off with the most of me.)

A bite on my ankle recently grew so large and Vesuvian that I had to go to the dermatologist to make sure it wasn’t deadly.

“What’s this?” she gasped, and the scariest part was that she was looking at something else, on my back. There she discovered a sizable carcinoma, for which summer — not the current one, but all the punishingly sunny ones past — can also be thanked.

The calendar says that the season doesn’t officially begin for another two and a half weeks, but it functionally started on Memorial Day weekend. Not long after, the temperature in New York City hit 90 degrees on two afternoons in a row. If that’s a mere prologue to summer, please speed me to the index. The sweat-stained pages in between promise to be unbearable.

Then again they usually are, all the more so because of the forced cheer. With fireworks and Ferris wheels, watermelon and water parks, we’re constantly being exhorted to wring summer for all it’s worth. No other season matches it for meteorological bullying.

“Are you ready for summer?” “Any special plans for the summer?” Unlike fall or spring, summer is always getting italics like that. I want to meet its publicist.

Because I have questions. Why, year after year, do magazines yammer on and on about what the song of the summer will be, as if it’s a coronation with actual consequence? Winter doesn’t have a song. If it did, it sure wouldn’t be sung by the preternaturally peppy likes of Katy Perry.

Does summer have to be so grammatically piggy, a vain noun with adjectival delusions? Summer vacation. Summer rental. Summer stage. Summer stock. Summer lover. Summer fling. Summer nights. Summer breeze.

And summer movies, God help us, which are a dopey and clangorous breed apart. If they’re not sequels, they’re sequels to sequels or reboots of franchises I thought we’d booted to the curb long ago. In May alone we had our third “Hangover” and our third “Iron Man,” and we were “Fast & Furious” for a sixth time. The “Man of Steel” is en route, with “The Lone Ranger” and “The Wolverine” fast on his airborne heels. Summer is rush hour for superheroes.

Speaking of which, did you know that traffic fatalities go up markedly in summer? The murder rate rises, too. It’s a mean season, even leaving the sun to the side. People drown, are struck by lightning and wear seersucker. I realize that the last item doesn’t really fit with the previous two, but it’s another potent argument against summer, and I had to put it in somewhere.

Perhaps my summer sourness is a function of aging, by which I mean my own, not the earth’s. Summer works best for the young. When you’re on the far side of 45, you and almost everyone you know looks appreciably better in a parka than in a tank top, and the sentence “I’d like to see more of you” concerns frequency, not swimsuits and open-toed shoes.

Or maybe I’m reacting to climate change and to the chilling prospect, or rather the blistering one, that an intolerable season could become a quasi-permanent one.

In a sonnet that assessed summer, Shakespeare acknowledged, “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.” That was more than 400 years ago, so I’ll update the line in accordance with global warming and modern commerce: “Always doth I feel like a French fry under a McDonald’s heat lamp.”

That sentiment holds true already from late May through early September. What if the period grows longer, to five or six or even seven months of the year? I don’t have that many sandals, and I can’t imagine that many bug bites.

My dermatologist biopsied the Vesuvian one, only to determine that it would eventually shrink if I stopped scratching it, for which she gave me an ointment that has proved completely useless.

For the carcinoma, I’ll get surgery and a bevy of stitches. And then, I’m told, all will be well, except that one carcinoma often presages others, especially for those of us whose pale skin and delicate natures aren’t suited to a brutal season of excessive heat and extravagant light. My body isn’t just a buffet. It’s a skin-cancer farm, and summer its fertilizer.

I asked her what I should do about that.

“Wear hats,” she said. “Cover up. Stay out of the sun.”

In winter, that would be a cinch. In summer, it’s no breeze.

I can sympathize.  Summer in New York is no picnic.  But at least it’s over sooner than down here…

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo has found something new to be an authority about.  Marketing.  In “The Romantic Advantage” he burbles that China may be the world’s second-largest economy, but when it comes to branding, the United States still wins.  Don’t ask me why he’s wasting his time (and ours) with this crap, but I’m sure he’s extremely well paid for it.  In “From the Mouths of Babes” Prof. Krugman says the ugly and destructive war on food stamps, which do good for both families and the economy, doesn’t make sense.  Here’s Bobo:

In the race to be the world’s dominant economy, Americans have at least one clear advantage over the Chinese. We’re much better at branding. American companies have these eccentric failed novelists and personally difficult visionary founders who are fantastic at creating brands that consumers around the world flock to and will pay extra for. Chinese companies are terrible at this. Every few years, Chinese officials say they’re going to start an initiative to create compelling brands and the results are always disappointing.

According to a recent survey by HD Trade services, 94 percent of Americans cannot name even a single brand from the world’s second-largest economy. Whatever else they excel at, Chinese haven’t been able to produce a style of capitalism that is culturally important, globally attractive and spiritually magnetic.

Why?

Brand managers who’ve worked in China say their executives tend to see business deals in transactional, not in relationship terms. As you’d expect in a country that has recently emerged from poverty, where competition is fierce, where margins are thin, where corruption is prevalent and trust is low, the executives there are more likely to take a short-term view of their exchanges.

But if China is ever going to compete with developed economies, it’ll have to go through a series of phase shifts. Creating effective brands is not just thinking like a low-end capitalist, only more so. It is an entirely different mode of thought.

Think of Ralph Lifshitz longing to emulate WASP elegance and creating the Ralph Lauren brand. Think of the young Stephen Gordon pining for the graciousness of the Adirondack lodges and creating Restoration Hardware. Think of Nike’s mythos around the ideal of athletic perseverance.

People who create great brands are usually seeking to fulfill some inner longing of their own, some dream of living on a higher plane or with a cooler circle of friends.

Many of the greatest brand makers are in semirevolt against commerce itself. The person who probably has had the most influence on the feel of contemporary American capitalism, for example, is the aptly named Stewart Brand. He was the hippie, you will recall, who created the Whole Earth Catalog.

That compendium of countercultural advice appeared to tilt against corporate America. But it was embraced by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and many other high-tech pioneers. Brand himself created the term personal computer. As early as 1972, he understood that computers, which were just geeky pieces of metal and plastic, could be seen in cool, countercultural and revolutionary terms. We take the ethos of Silicon Valley and Apple for granted, but people like Brand gave it the aura, inspiring thousands of engineers and designers and hundreds of millions of consumers.

Seth Siegel, the co-founder of Beanstalk, a brand management firm, says that branding “decommoditizes a commodity.” It coats meaning around a product. It demands a quality of experience with the consumer that has to be reinforced at every touch point, at the store entrance, in the rest rooms, on the shopping bags. The process of branding itself is essentially about the expression and manipulation of daydreams. It owes as much to romanticism as to business school.

In this way, successful branding can be radically unexpected. The most anti-establishment renegades can be the best anticipators of market trends. The people who do this tend to embrace commerce even while they have a moral problem with it — former hippies in the Bay Area, luxury artistes in Italy and France or communitarian semi-socialists in Scandinavia. These people sell things while imbuing them with more attractive spiritual associations.

The biggest threat to the creativity of American retail may be that we may have run out of countercultures to co-opt. We may have run out of anti-capitalist ethoses to give products a patina of cool. We may be raising a generation with few qualms about commerce, and this could make them less commercially creative.

But China has bigger problems. It is very hard for a culture that doesn’t celebrate dissent to thrive in this game. It’s very hard for a culture that encourages a natural deference to authority to do so. It’s very hard for a country where the powerful don’t instinctively seek a dialogue with the less powerful to keep up. It seems likely that the Chinese will require a few more cultural revolutions before it can brand effectively and compete at the top of the economic food chain.

At some point, if you are going to be the world’s leading economy, you have to establish relationships with consumers. You have to put aside the things that undermine trust, like intellectual property theft and cyberterrorism, and create the sorts of brands that inspire affection and fantasy. Until it can do this, China may statistically possess the world’s largest economy, but it will not be a particularly consequential one.

I guess Bobo hasn’t considered the fact that probably 75% of what we buy has “made in China” on it somewhere.  They don’t have to worry about branding.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

Like many observers, I usually read reports about political goings-on with a sort of weary cynicism. Every once in a while, however, politicians do something so wrong, substantively and morally, that cynicism just won’t cut it; it’s time to get really angry instead. So it is with the ugly, destructive war against food stamps.

The food stamp program — which these days actually uses debit cards, and is officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — tries to provide modest but crucial aid to families in need. And the evidence is crystal clear both that the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients really need the help, and that the program is highly successful at reducing “food insecurity,” in which families go hungry at least some of the time.

Food stamps have played an especially useful — indeed, almost heroic — role in recent years. In fact, they have done triple duty.

First, as millions of workers lost their jobs through no fault of their own, many families turned to food stamps to help them get by — and while food aid is no substitute for a good job, it did significantly mitigate their misery. Food stamps were especially helpful to children who would otherwise be living in extreme poverty, defined as an income less than half the official poverty line.

But there’s more. Why is our economy depressed? Because many players in the economy slashed spending at the same time, while relatively few players were willing to spend more. And because the economy is not like an individual household — your spending is my income, my spending is your income — the result was a general fall in incomes and plunge in employment. We desperately needed (and still need) public policies to promote higher spending on a temporary basis — and the expansion of food stamps, which helps families living on the edge and let them spend more on other necessities, is just such a policy.

Indeed, estimates from the consulting firm Moody’s Analytics suggest that each dollar spent on food stamps in a depressed economy raises G.D.P. by about $1.70 — which means, by the way, that much of the money laid out to help families in need actually comes right back to the government in the form of higher revenue.

Wait, we’re not done yet. Food stamps greatly reduce food insecurity among low-income children, which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults. So food stamps are in a very real sense an investment in the nation’s future — an investment that in the long run almost surely reduces the budget deficit, because tomorrow’s adults will also be tomorrow’s taxpayers.

So what do Republicans want to do with this paragon of programs? First, shrink it; then, effectively kill it.

The shrinking part comes from the latest farm bill released by the House Agriculture Committee (for historical reasons, the food stamp program is administered by the Agriculture Department). That bill would push about two million people off the program. You should bear in mind, by the way, that one effect of the sequester has been to pose a serious threat to a different but related program that provides nutritional aid to millions of pregnant mothers, infants, and children. Ensuring that the next generation grows up nutritionally deprived — now that’s what I call forward thinking.

And why must food stamps be cut? We can’t afford it, say politicians like Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican of Tennessee, who backed his position with biblical quotations — and who also, it turns out, has personally received millions in farm subsidies over the years.

These cuts are, however, just the beginning of the assault on food stamps. Remember, Representative Paul Ryan’s budget is still the official G.O.P. position on fiscal policy, and that budget calls for converting food stamps into a block grant program with sharply reduced spending. If this proposal had been in effect when the Great Recession struck, the food stamp program could not have expanded the way it did, which would have meant vastly more hardship, including a lot of outright hunger, for millions of Americans, and for children in particular.

Look, I understand the supposed rationale: We’re becoming a nation of takers, and doing stuff like feeding poor children and giving them adequate health care are just creating a culture of dependency — and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.

But I wonder whether even Republicans really believe that story — or at least are confident enough in their diagnosis to justify policies that more or less literally take food from the mouths of hungry children. As I said, there are times when cynicism just doesn’t cut it; this is a time to get really, really angry.

Solo Brooks

I guess Mr. Nocera and Mr. Bruni are taking an extended long weekend.  This gives Bobo a chance to have the stage all to himself today.  Now he’s an authority on psychiatry.  In “Heroes of Uncertainty” he informs us that psychiatry is more of a semi-science, in which professionals have to use improvisation, knowledge and artistry to improve people’s lives.  God help us, somebody gave him a copy of the new DSM-V…  Here he is:

We’re living in an empirical age. The most impressive intellectual feats have been achieved by physicists and biologists, and these fields have established a distinctive model of credibility.

To be an authoritative figure, you want to be coolly scientific. You want to possess an arcane body of technical expertise. You want your mind to be a neutral instrument capable of processing complex quantifiable data.

The people in the human sciences have tried to piggyback on this authority model. For example, the American Psychiatric Association has just released the fifth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders. It is the basic handbook of the field. It defines the known mental diseases. It creates stable standards, so that insurance companies can recognize various diagnoses and be comfortable with the medications prescribed to treat them.

The recent editions of this manual exude an impressive aura of scientific authority. They treat mental diseases like diseases of the heart and liver. They leave the impression that you should go to your psychiatrist because she has a vast body of technical knowledge that will allow her to solve your problems. With their austere neutrality, they leave a distinct impression: Psychiatrists are methodically treating symptoms, not people.

The problem is that the behavorial sciences like psychiatry are not really sciences; they are semi-sciences. The underlying reality they describe is just not as regularized as the underlying reality of, say, a solar system.

As the handbook’s many critics have noted, psychiatrists use terms like “mental disorder” and “normal behavior,” but there is no agreement on what these concepts mean. When you look at the definitions psychiatrists habitually use to define various ailments, you see that they contain vague words that wouldn’t pass muster in any actual scientific analysis: “excessive,” “binge,” “anxious.”

Mental diseases are not really understood the way, say, liver diseases are understood, as a pathology of the body and its tissues and cells. Researchers understand the underlying structure of very few mental ailments. What psychiatrists call a disease is usually just a label for a group of symptoms. As the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances writes in his book, “Saving Normal,” a word like schizophrenia is a useful construct, not a disease: “It is a description of a particular set of psychiatric problems, not an explanation of their cause.”

Furthermore, psychiatric phenomena are notoriously protean in nature. Medicines seem to work but then stop. Because the mind is an irregular cosmos, psychiatry hasn’t been able to make the rapid progress that has become normal in physics and biology. As Martin Seligman, a past president of the American Psychological Association, put it in The Washington Post early this year, “I have found that drugs and therapy offer disappointingly little additional help for the mentally ill than they did 25 years ago — despite billions of dollars in funding.”

All of this is not to damn people in the mental health fields. On the contrary, they are heroes who alleviate the most elusive of all suffering, even though they are overmatched by the complexity and variability of the problems that confront them. I just wish they would portray themselves as they really are. Psychiatrists are not heroes of science. They are heroes of uncertainty, using improvisation, knowledge and artistry to improve people’s lives.

The field of psychiatry is better in practice than it is in theory. The best psychiatrists are not austerely technical, like the official handbook’s approach; they combine technical expertise with personal knowledge. They are daring adapters, perpetually adjusting in ways more imaginative than scientific rigor.

The best psychiatrists are not coming up with abstract rules that homogenize treatments. They are combining an awareness of common patterns with an acute attention to the specific circumstances of a unique human being. They certainly are not inventing new diseases in order to medicalize the moderate ailments of the worried well.

If the authors of the psychiatry manual want to invent a new disease, they should put Physics Envy in their handbook. The desire to be more like the hard sciences has distorted economics, education, political science, psychiatry and other behavioral fields. It’s led practitioners to claim more knowledge than they can possibly have. It’s devalued a certain sort of hybrid mentality that is better suited to these realms, the mentality that has one foot in the world of science and one in the liberal arts, that involves bringing multiple vantage points to human behavior.

Hippocrates once observed, “It’s more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.” That’s certainly true in the behavioral sciences and in policy making generally, though these days it is often a neglected truth.

Sweet Jesus, let’s all pray that he never gets his hands on the upcoming ICD-10 codes.  We’ll never hear the end of it…

Brooks and Bruni

Bobo has so many hats!  Today he’s wearing his linguist hat.  In “What Our Words Tell Us” he informs us that gradual shifts in language use over the centuries reflect tectonic shifts in culture.  It’s amazing what you can glean from Google, and of course there’s no link to the “study” he mentions…  In “One School’s Catholic Teaching” Mr. Bruni says with just the briefest acknowledgement of her life partner, Carla Hale lost the job she’d loved for more than 18 years.  Here’s Bobo:

About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The database doesn’t tell you how the words were used; it just tells you how frequently they were used. Still, results can reveal interesting cultural shifts. For example, somebody typed the word “cocaine” into the search engine and found that the word was surprisingly common in the Victorian era. Then it gradually declined during the 20th century until around 1970, when usage skyrocketed.

I’d like to tell a story about the last half-century, based on studies done with this search engine. The first element in this story is rising individualism. A study by Jean M. Twenge, W. Keith Campbell and Brittany Gentile found that between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.

That is to say, over those 48 years, words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.

The second element of the story is demoralization. A study by Pelin Kesebir and Selin Kesebir found that general moral terms like “virtue,” “decency” and “conscience” were used less frequently over the course of the 20th century. Words associated with moral excellence, like “honesty,” “patience” and “compassion” were used much less frequently.

The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent.

Usage of humility words like “modesty” and “humbleness” dropped by 52 percent. Usage of compassion words like “kindness” and “helpfulness” dropped by 56 percent. Meanwhile, usage of words associated with the ability to deliver, like “discipline” and “dependability” rose over the century, as did the usage of words associated with fairness. The Kesebirs point out that these sorts of virtues are most relevant to economic production and exchange.

Daniel Klein of George Mason University has conducted one of the broadest studies with the Google search engine. He found further evidence of the two elements I’ve mentioned. On the subject of individualization, he found that the word “preferences” was barely used until about 1930, but usage has surged since. On the general subject of demoralization, he finds a long decline of usage in terms like “faith,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “evil” and “prudence,” and a sharp rise in what you might call social science terms like “subjectivity,” “normative,” “psychology” and “information.”

Klein adds the third element to our story, which he calls “governmentalization.” Words having to do with experts have shown a steady rise. So have phrases like “run the country,” “economic justice,” “nationalism,” “priorities,” “right-wing” and “left-wing.” The implication is that politics and government have become more prevalent.

So the story I’d like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.

This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.

Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic, and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here. But these gradual shifts in language reflect tectonic shifts in culture. We write less about community bonds and obligations because they’re less central to our lives.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni, datelined Columbus, Ohio:

No one at the Catholic high school that fired Carla Hale in March claimed that she was anything less than a terrific physical education teacher and coach, devoted to the kids and adored by many of them.

No one accused her of bringing her personal life into the gym or onto the fields. By nature she’s private. And she loved her job too much to risk it that way.

But she lost it nonetheless, and the how is as flabbergasting as the why is infuriating.

Rather suddenly, her mother died, and an hour afterward, she and her brother numbly went through the paces of a standard obituary, listing survivors. Her brother included his wife. So Carla included her partner, Julie, whom her mother had known well and loved. Leaving Julie out would have been unthinkable, though Carla didn’t really think it through at the time. Her grief was still raw.

A parent of one of the school’s students spotted the obituary, and wrote an anonymous letter to the school and to the Diocese of Columbus, saying that they couldn’t allow a woman like Carla to educate Catholic children.

So they don’t, not anymore. In a termination notice, the principal explained that Carla’s “spousal relationship violates the moral laws of the Catholic Church.” That was the sum of the stated grievance against her, and after more than 18 years at Bishop Watterson High School, Carla, 57, was done.

“The way it all came about was just so unfathomable,” she told me on Sunday. “An obituary?”

I met her and Julie, 48, in their house outside Columbus, where the front lawn was neatly tended, the refrigerator was plastered with photos of relatives, the chocolate lab dozed in his reserved spot on the sectional and Carla kept a box of tissues handy. Whenever she’s asked what her work meant to her, she cries.

“Every morning,” she said, “from the time you walked into the building, kids would be yelling down the hall, ‘Hey, Miss Hale, what are we going to do today?’ ‘Hey, Miss Hale, I remembered those shoes.’ It felt so comforting.” She had a sense of belonging. Of purpose.

Even now, after nearly two months of exile from the school, she’s still on what she calls “bell time.” If the clock on her kitchen wall says 10:45 a.m., the voice in her head says, “Fourth period.”

There’s so much in the media, and in this column, about the progress of gay rights, especially on the marriage front. But in the republic of Georgia just days ago, Orthodox priests led thousands of people in an antigay attack. In Greenwich Village, a young gay man was fatally shot in what’s been deemed a hate crime.

And at a kitchen table here in central Ohio, a typically cheerful woman dabbed her eyes and wondered aloud what she’d done wrong.

The answer is in one sense simple: she made a life with another woman. While the Catholic Church doesn’t condemn homosexuality per se, it considers any physical expression of it sinful. And Carla’s “public declaration of an extramarital relationship,” meaning the obituary, indicated that she was flouting Catholic tenets and thus breaching her contract, according to a statement the diocese e-mailed me.

But things get complicated when you consider the selectiveness of the church’s outrage, the capriciousness of its mercy.

Until public exposure shamed them, many church leaders protected priests whose sexual transgressions involved minors and were criminal.

Church leaders tolerate teachers at Catholic schools who are married with no kids or with few. Some are surely using artificial birth control, which the church officially opposes.

Besides which, Carla was guiding students through sit-ups, not psalms. The school hired her though she’s Methodist, not Catholic.

She was then married to a man, but they split and, more than a decade ago, she became involved with Julie.

Perhaps six colleagues met Julie over the years, though they probably weren’t the only ones aware of Carla’s sexual orientation. “I’m sure it was surmised: gym teacher, divorced, short hair, didn’t have a bow in it,” Carla said. “Come on.”

There was no discussion or upset, not until the anonymous letter.

Neither the federal government nor Ohio outlaws employment discrimination based on sexual orientation. Columbus does, though whether it can be applied to religious groups is uncertain. Carla’s lawyer, Thomas Tootle, has filed a complaint with the city anyway.

It’s been a big story here, with thousands of people publicly expressing support for her. She’s moved but mortified. She didn’t seek and doesn’t enjoy the media attention.

“A lot of people want me to be bitter and go after the Catholic Church,” she said, adding that others want to cast her as a lesbian heroine. She just wants her job back, a recognition, she said, “that I’m a moral individual who happens to be gay.”

Brooks, solo

Prof. Krugman is off today, so Bobo is flying solo.  In “When Governments Go Bad” he says the I.R.S. and Justice Department scandals disrobe a culture festering in unrestraint and overreach.  Not in the least surprisingly, the word “Republican” appears only in comments.  Bobo saw no reason whatsoever to include it in his piece…  Here he is:

Government, Clinton Rossiter once wrote, is something like fire: “Under control, it is the most useful of servants; out of control, it is a ravaging tyrant.”

So you want government workers to be acutely aware of the ambiguous and perilous nature of their position. You want them to have a heart full of affection for the people they serve. They should regard the people as a mentor, respecting their wisdom, grateful for their trust and longing to serve them with deference and respect.

As they love and respect the voters, you also want government workers to fear themselves. You want officials who are aware that they probably went into government in part because they have a desire to shape and help other people, and that this desire comes with its own form of immoderation.

You want government workers who are alert to their own tendency toward bossiness; who ladle out their power carefully, gram by gram; who are aware that they are not really as benevolent and disinterested as they seem to themselves. Most of all, you want people with a strong sense of self-restraint.

As a surgeon abhors sloppiness, the best government workers instinctively abhor any hint of domination. Knowing how power is liable to corrupt them, they tend to shrink back at any hint of their own overreach and desire for control.

But we don’t exactly see this attitude in the big stories about government today, do we? Most government workers are amazingly dedicated and talented, and they put in a level of commitment that is far out of proportion to their salaries. But we’re also seeing government workers, who, far from checking their own desire for control, have taken it out for a romp.

The I.R.S. scandal and Justice Department’s invasion of The Associated Press are just the most recent examples of overreach. They rest on top of the daily intrusions of the post-9/11 security apparatus and much else.

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem. If that’s the case, then the members of the I.R.S. leadership are suffering from a tunnel vision that turns outside reality into abstractions. When government workers lose touch with the normal human context of their job, that’s when the real horror show commences.

Everyone is treating the I.R.S. issue as a bigger deal, but the Justice Department scandal is worse. This was a sweeping intrusion that makes it hard for the press to do its job. Who is going to call a journalist to report wrongdoing knowing that at some future date, the government might feel perfectly free to track the phone records and hunt you down?

I would have thought a dozen Justice Department officials would have risen up and splashily resigned when they learned of the scope of this invasion. Aren’t there some lawyers in the Justice Department, and, if so, did they go to law schools where the Constitution is left unassigned?

This scandal arises from a larger cultural virus: leakaphobia. Every administration centralizes power more tightly than the one before and is more paranoid about leaks than the one before. Every administration successively narrows the circle of debate, forsaking wide deliberation for the sake of reducing leaks (except the politically useful ones). Why do they do this? Because people who go into government not only have a tendency to want to control other people but also to control information.

We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust.

The rest of us just have to be more wary. For example, I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier. I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies. But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them. They’d take a nudge and expand it into a shove.

And what are we to make of financial regulatory reform and the new health care law? In a culture of unrestraint, will federal regulators use these rule-writing opportunities to expand their reach beyond anything now imagined?

People can only have faith in a government that self-restrains, and there’s little evidence of that now.

Bobo had no problem at all with the previous administration…

Brooks and Bruni

Mr. Nocera is off today.  Bobo, in “The Next Scapegoat,” says political one-upmanship has just hit a new low with the recent charges leveled against Victoria Nuland, the spokeswoman for the State Department.  Well, well, well…  Bobo’s knickers are in a knot because he knows Ms. Nuland, not for any other reason.  Mr. Bruni, in “Our Ceaseless Circus,” says from Benghazi to gun control, we pivot too quickly from the substance to the sideshow of who’s winning and losing.  Here’s Bobo:

Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.

Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.

The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.

It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.

Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.

The next day, Nuland held a background press briefing, a transcript of which is available on the State Department’s Web site. She had two main points. There’s a lot we don’t know. The attack was conducted by Libyan extremists. She made no claim that it was set off by an anti-Muslim video or arose spontaneously from demonstrations.

On Friday, Sept. 14, David Petraeus, then the director of the C.I.A., gave a classified briefing to lawmakers in Congress. The lawmakers asked him to provide talking points so they could discuss the event in the news media.

C.I.A. analysts began work on the talking points. Early drafts, available on Jonathan Karl’s ABC News Web site, reflect the confused and fragmented state of knowledge. The first draft, like every subsequent one, said the Benghazi attacks were spontaneously inspired by protests in Cairo. It also said that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda participated.

The C.I.A. analysts quickly scrubbed references to Al Qaeda from the key part of the draft, investigators on Capitol Hill now tell me.

On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why the C.I.A. was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. She also noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.

Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.

Nuland didn’t seek to rewrite the talking points. In fact, if you look at the drafts that were written while she was sending e-mails, the drafts don’t change much from one to the next. She was just kicking the process up to the policy-maker level.

At this point, Nuland’s participation in the whole affair ends.

On Saturday morning, what’s called a deputies committee meeting was held at the White House. I’m told the talking points barely came up at that meeting. Instead, the C.I.A. representative said he would take proactive measures to streamline them. That day, the agency reduced the talking points to the bare nub Susan Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was given before going on the Sunday talk shows.

Several things were apparently happening. Each of the different players had their hands on a different piece of the elephant. If there was any piece of the talking points that everybody couldn’t agree upon, it got cut. Second, the administration proceeded with extreme caution about drawing conclusions, possibly overlearning the lessons from the Bush years. Third, as the memos moved up the C.I.A. management chain, the higher officials made them more tepid (this is apparently typical). Finally, in the absence of a clear narrative, the talking points gravitated toward the least politically problematic story, blaming the anti-Muslim video and the Cairo demonstrations.

Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence. She was caught in a brutal interagency turf war, and she defended her department. The accusations against her are bogus.

Gee.  Maybe we should encourage Bobo to make a few more friends…  Here’s Mr. Bruni:

Four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya: people with unrealized hopes, unfinished plans, relatives who loved them and friends who will miss them.

But let’s focus on what really matters about the attack and its aftermath. Did Hillary Clinton’s presumed 2016 presidential campaign take a hit?

We live in a country lousy with guns and bloody with gun-related violence, manifest two weeks ago in a Kentucky 5-year-old’s fatal shooting of his 2-year-old sister, evident over the weekend in a hail of bullets at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans.

But let’s cut to the chase. Did Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire senator, safeguard or endanger her political future by casting one of the votes that doomed gun-control legislation in the Senate? An d does the law’s failure mean that it’s time to write the obituary for Barack Obama’s presidency, which has more than 1,300 days to go, or can we wait — I don’t know — a week or maybe even two to do that?

Now we have a scandal at the Internal Revenue Service to factor in. And a scandal it is, in urgent need of a thorough investigation, which President Obama pledged at his news conference on Monday and which we’re very much owed.

But before we get a full account, let’s by all means pivot to the possible political fallout, politics being all that seems to matter these days. Will Republicans ever trust and be able to work with the administration again? (This is being asked as if there were all that much trust and cooperation in the first place.) Have they finally been handed the cudgel that can whack Obama and his crew into oblivion? Assess, discuss and please don’t forget to make predictions about the 2014 midterms.

It never gets better and may in fact be getting worse: the translation of all of the news and of all of Washington’s responses into a ledger of electoral pluses and minuses, a graph of rising and falling political fortunes, a narrative of competition between not just the parties but the would-be potentates within a party. On issue after issue, the sideshow swallows the substance, as politicians and the seemingly infinite ranks of political handlers join us journalists in gaming everything out, ad infinitum.

To follow the debate over immigration reform is to lose sight at times of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in limbo and the challenge of finding the most economically fruitful and morally sound way to deal with them and their successors. No, the real stakes are United States Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential aspirations. Will he pay a high price with the Republican base for pushing a path to citizenship? Or will he earn necessary centrist credentials?

And where does it leave him vis-à-vis Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who are fellow Republican senators itching for prominence and are also hypothetical primary rivals? The next presidential election is three and a half years away — an eternity, really — but instead of putting a damper on speculation, that time span has encouraged it, letting a thousand theories and nearly as many contenders bloom.

We can wonder: if Clinton decided not to run, would a door open for another woman, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of the New York? Just how well has Gillibrand positioned herself for such a turn? That story is already out there, and in it her record is framed largely in terms of her prospects for national office, as if one exists in the service of the other, as if the point of a Congressional seat is leveraging it into an even better, more regal throne.

What about the actual business of governing? Between all the preening, partisan cross-fire and of course fund-raising that consumes members of Congress, is there any space and energy for that?

Not much, to judge from either the sclerosis that now defines the institution or the obsessions of those of us in the media. Our quickness to publicize skirmishes and divine political jockeying abet both. Actors tend to do whatever keeps the audience rapt.

At Obama’s news conference, he breezed past the I.R.S. debacle too quickly, and I’m not sure why he’d stayed mum until then. He flashed too much self-righteous anger about the scrutiny of the Benghazi talking points, which strike to important matters of accountability and credibility.

But however self-servingly, Obama got one thing about Benghazi exactly right: what’s most vital, and what’s being obscured, is how we improve diplomatic security.

After all, the fates altered most profoundly by the attack weren’t his or Clinton’s or any other pol’s, but rather those of the four lost Americans: Christopher Stevens, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith.

“We dishonor them,” Obama said, “when we turn things like this into a political circus.” Indeed. But it’s what we turn almost everything into.