WHAT SHOULD THE REPUBLICAN PARTY STAND FOR?

GOP leaders don’t just want to be the party of “no” — but they have a hard time articulating what they want to say “yes” to.

Reuters

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Republicans are trying to refashion the party in the wake of their 2012 defeat. But they keep running into a problem: They can’t agree on what the party’s positive agenda ought to be.

Preventing President Obama and Democrats from doing things they don’t like doesn’t constitute a governing platform. Should the GOP take a more moderate position on immigration reform, which is popular with the public as a whole and could help the GOP with Hispanics? How about gun control, where large public majorities disagree with NRA-style Second Amendment absolutism? Are hardline Republican stances on gay marriage and abortion alienating young voters and women? Taxes and spending have been the party’s traditional strength, but Obama had the public on his sidein raising taxes on the wealthy, and he used Paul Ryan’s proposals for trimming entitlements as a bludgeon in the presidential campaign. And when it comes to a foreign policy, Republicans are all over the map.

This is the real crisis facing the GOP: Articulating a set of stances on issues that majorities of voters agree with, in a way that convinces people they’d be able to govern if given the chance.

At the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Charlotte this week, I posed the question, parlor-game-style, to a wide swath of GOP leaders from all over the country: What did they think the party ought to stand for? If they recited the mantra of “smaller government, lower taxes,” I tried to get them to say what significant parts of the government they’d reduce and whose taxes they would cut. Here are some of the answers I got.

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Dana Randall, South Dakota national committeeman: ”In South Dakota, they’re spending money to chase elk out of a national park, when they could be making money off people to hunt them. Our national forests could be handled more responsibly. After 9/11, they built all these fancy fences around the airport in Aberdeen, but the fence is hanging open!”

Jay Shepard, Vermont national committeeman: ”I have a bit of an issue with the idea that we have to stand for something specific on every issue. Why do we have to be the pro-life party, when a huge number of Republicans are pro-choice? Why are we the only party having this discussion? You can get six Republicans talking about immigration reform and you’ll hear eight opinions. We need to let people know we’re not always top-down.”

Mark Willis, Maine national committeeman: ”A noninterventionist foreign policy, the abolition of the TSA, and ending the Federal Reserve.”

Newt Gingrich, former House speaker: “We need to stand for the kind of problem-solving that leads to more economic growth, more jobs and more take-home pay. A health system that enables people to have the longest life at the lowest cost. It’s going to take a decade or more of inventing big, conservative solutions …. House Republicans ought to hold hearings focused on waste and specific scandals. A lot of Republicans, frankly, spent the last two years saying, ‘Oh, gee, we don’t have to do much because after Obama loses we’ll be in charge.’ Well, now that world has ended.”

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Dave Agema, Michigan national committeeman: ”Traditional family values. Fiscal conservatism, yet willing to help those in need. That’s what we really are. We should have a basic safety net, but too often it becomes a hammock. Our values are what make America great — a mom and a dad. Look what we have today with all these broken families. They have a much higher possibility of being poor.”

Saul Anuzis, former Michigan Republican Party chairman: “The opportunity society — the argument Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich used to make. There’s a desire for it. People are just scared right now, so they want a bigger social safety net …. I don’t think we can win being the party of ‘no.’ We’ve got to do something more.’”

Steve Scheffler, Iowa national committeeman: ”We need to stand by our principles and not deviate. Mitt Romney had a mushy message. He didn’t say anything but ‘We need to get rid of Obama.’ We need to talk about restoring fiscal sanity to the budget, but we can’t talk about it in generic terms.”

Curly Haugland, North Dakota national committeeman: ”We need to reaffirm our vision of every individual in America being allowed to keep the fruits of their labor, and refute this socialism or fascism or whatever you want to call it that Obama has instituted. We should be cutting spending on this green energy. It’s a disaster. There are windmills all over Iowa and North Dakota and South Dakota. It’s ideology, not economics. It’s a redistribution of wealth to produce something of almost no value. Wind power is practically worthless.”

Mike Duncan, Kentucky national committeeman, former RNC chairman: ”The trade-offs EPA is making on coal-fired power plants are costing jobs all over the country. Coal mine jobs, utility jobs, and they’re costing people money through higher electric prices. When Nixon started the EPA in 1970, the air was terrible. Now, we’ve reduced 85 percent of the particulates in the air, and the amount being argued about is so small.”

Jim Bopp, Republican National Conservative Caucus, Indiana: ”Smaller government, lower taxes, so we can have more economic vitality. Yes, in this election, voters favored Obama on higher taxes on upper-income people, and he’s now got that. But that’s why we have periodic elections. Did he think when the people spoke in 2010 that that was the be-all and end-all?”

Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary: ”Inclusiveness. We don’t have to agree on every issue. We need to say to people we disagree with on certain issues, ‘We welcome you.’ … There are people who need government, and we should recognize that. We want there to be fewer and fewer people needing government, but we have to recognize that some people do.”

Glenn McCall, South Carolina national committeeman: ”There are things we could cut in the Department of Education, even Defense. I served in the Air Force for 24 years. There’s waste and abuse in every agency. In corporate America, you make cuts because you have to, and people whine and cry, but you get by.”

Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor: ”Education policy. We need to be fighting for real choice, where the dollars follow the child instead of the child following the dollars. We need to be fighting to simplify our tax code, getting rid of all those distortions and loopholes. I’ve proposed getting rid of the income tax in Louisiana.”

Lenny Curry, Florida Republican Party chairman: “There has to be some level of taxation or you get anarchy. It’s up to Congress and the president to make those decisions. We have to fix the debt problem, and that is going to have to include reforming Medicare and Medicaid. We want them to exist in the future, but they have to be reformed. What we don’t need to be is the party that stands in the middle of the road yelling, ‘Stop, this is bad.’”

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THE LONELY EXISTENCE OF MEL FEIT, MEN’S RIGHTS ADVOCATE

For decades, he has tried to expose the ways society discriminates against men. Will feminists ever see him as anything but an enemy?

Mel Feit in the early ’90s, when he was promoting his “consensual sex contract” (Courtesy of Mel Feit)

Last year, on November 7, the inaugural editorial staff of Ms. celebrated the publication’s 40th anniversary in New York City. Co-founding editors Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin took a moment to bask in the success of their revolutionary magazine and the strides women have made since its founding in 1972.

As the bash ensued, somewhere on Port Jefferson, Long Island, the leader of a different—one might say, decidedly oppositional—movement reflected on the far-less-starry successes his movement’s had since its founding 25 years earlier on November 17, 1987.

His name is Mel Feit and he’s the founder of the National Center for Men, a men’s rights group based in Coram, New York.

“Men’s rights,” may sound oxymoronic—and perverse, something akin to “white rights”—but to Mel and his band of brothers it’s no joke. They believe men’s equal rights are challenged by unfair child support obligations, a family law system that privileges mothers in child custody cases, the trivialization of female-on-male domestic violence, the cultural vilification of male sexuality, and social customs that impose an outdated (and crippling) expectation of masculinity on men.

The NCM has advanced its many causes through counseling services, helping men find family law experts, staging protests at women-only establishments, and using the media to trumpet their movement.

While “movement” might overstate the influence these groups have—they comprise only a handful of organizations—the idea of them nonetheless riles some feminists. Amanda Marcotte, author ofIt’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, offered these scorching words, which pretty much sum up feminism’s response to these guys:

MRAs may have a handful of semi-accurate observations, but the fact that they blame feminists for men’s problems and not patriarchy shows that they are not interested in real solutions. ‘Men’s rights,’ a term that resembles ‘white power’ in its belligerence and pseudo-victimization, is a reactionary movement, and the propping up of a few pseudo-liberal leaders doesn’t change that. There is already a movement for people of both genders who want to end stifling gender roles: It’s called feminism.

As sympathetic as I am to Marcotte’s points, my conversations with Mel over the years tell me that the story of men’s rights is a bit more complicated and nuanced than my fellow feminists allow.

I interviewed Mel several times from 2007 through 2010 when I profiled him in a story I wrote for the June 2010 issue of Elle magazine. In it, I contemplated the idea of whether or not men should have a legal means of refusing to support children born from unwanted pregnancies, especially if they’d told their partners that they do not want children. At the time, the NCM had just sponsored a lawsuit, cleverly titled “Roe vs. Wade for Men,” in which they argued that Planned Parenthood’s motto, “Every Child a Wanted Child,” should apply to men too. The plaintiffs did not think that men should have the power to override a woman’s decision to have or not have a baby, but rather that men should not have to live with the financial consequences of a woman’s decision to have a baby. The NCM proposed a “Reproductive Rights Affidavit,” where men could explicitly state their willingness to relinquish all rights and responsibilities in the event of a surprise pregnancy.

The arguments against this solution are manifold, but mostly hinge on the interests of the child—and, of course, biology. When I broach the idea of men’s reproductive rights with Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood and author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, she scoffs: “When men can get pregnant, they will have the right to determine whether or not to become parents.”

As much as I disagree with most of their politics, I believe that some of their views are in the interest of feminism

But I agreed with Mel when he countered at the time that “our different biologies should not define or limit our rights and responsibilities.” I recognized how problematic it is for women to use biology to justify denying men the opportunity to reject parenthood by disavowing involvement in their children’s lives when women have the freedom to abort unwanted pregnancies. My trouble with Feldt’s biology-based argument is that it cements the centrality of motherhood, heaping the bulk of parenting duties on women. So when Mel called to invite me to the 25th anniversary party of the NCM at Friends of A Farmer in New York’s Gramercy Park, I happily accepted.

I arrive at the gathering at 4 p.m. on December 17 to a group of about ten men, casually dressed, imbibing tea and coffee and chatting around a long wooden table. My entrance is met with restrained courtesy—and a perceptible cloud of suspicion. Why, they must wonder, would I, a lesbian feminist, want to break bread at their masculinist table? As cautiously as I tread their terrain and as much as I disagree with most of their politics, I believe that some of their views are in the interest of feminism.

As Mel introduces his troops, who feel their movement has failed, the reason they eye me with self-protective skepticism becomes clear. Some of the men claim they have lost jobs and relationships over their men’s rights activism; hence, a few request that I use a pseudonym when referring to them, like “Charles,” the loquacious intellectual to my right, who believes that men today are paralyzed with confusion as to how to behave toward the opposite sex. “A man is guilty if he opens the door for a woman,” he says, “but he’s also guilty if he doesn’t, so he’s always wrong.” The way Charles sees it “men have all the disadvantages of the old and new systems and women have all the advantages.”

To my left sits Tony Nazarro, a former deputy director of NCM, who produces a cable access show called Mens Net. The arch conservative compares the men’s movement to Vietnam, calling it a “no-win situation.” He calls for “gender sanity,” which he believes means: “As a female, don’t push to change a law that will make you a cop walking a beat in Bedford Stuyvesant. You don’t have the physicality to do that.” He bristles at the New York City Police Department for “lowering its height standard to accommodate women.”

At the other end of the table, a tall, robust man named Roy also reflects back on Vietnam and bemoans all the jobs vets lost to women upon returning to a thankless country. “A lot of us at this table,” the fiery activist insists, “are victims of affirmative action. We suffer in silence. Nobody gives a fuck about us. It’s reverse discrimination gone amok.”

Next to Roy is a tall, handsome father’s rights advocate named Stephen Metzger. Metzger believes that courts are still partial to mothers, usually awarding them primary custody. Progress for him would be “a universal shared parenting law from the federal level—a presumption of joint physical custody.”

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The leader of this weary clan, Mel, who’s miraculously kept the NCM and himself financially afloat the last 25 years as a paid men’s rights pundit and counselor, sits next to me, opposite Roy, at the other end of the table. Unlike most MRAs, Mel’s a liberal democrat who supports a woman’s right to choose and equal rights for LGBT people.

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He came into his masculinist consciousness sometime in 1959 when he was eight years old. “I became aware of the sexism of the draft in conversation with my father,” the long-haired, bespeckled 62-year-old remembers. “The realization that society can draft and kill only men, do anything it wants to men,” he emphasizes, “and not be required to atone for that sex discrimination has remained at the center of my activism all these years.”

What Mel’s reasoning misses is that underlying the laws that require only men to register for the draft (and policies that, until recently, banned women from serving in combat) is the sexist assumption that women are too powerless—too fragile, too victimizable—to occupy the role of protector because of their need of protection. The draft is less a measure of how expendable or undervalued men’s lives are, as Mel would have us believe, than a gender bias that depends upon an understanding of women as feeble to secure men’s power.

That said, I can still sympathize with how crushing the weight of the draft burden might be. During the Vietnam War, his lottery number was 56. He recalls the harrowing images of death and destruction that daily flashed across television screens and the cruel lingering possibility that he and his friends would be forced to fight in a war they didn’t believe in on the mere fact of their sex.

Throughout his coming-of-age, the ways in which society short-shrifts males—the stiff-upper-lip and courage-at-all-costs ethos; the closed-off, constricted, utilitarian banality of men’s clothing; the dating rituals that perpetually put men in a position of aggressor and rejectee—permeated his entire consciousness. Including the night of junior prom, which turned out to be the first and last date he’d ever pay for. “Men and women are absolutely equal,” he asserts, “and my paying for a first date implies that her sexuality is more valuable than mine and that would feel to me like prostitution.”

After high school, he earned his B.S. from Penn State and a master’s in broadcasting from Boston University. His first careers included a stint as an actor and a public communications professional, both of which cultivated his media savvy and flair for the theatrical. By the time he reached his mid-30s, his gender politics culminated in a lecture he put together titled “A Militant View of Men’s Liberation,” a two-hour talk he delivered at various colleges. It delved into his thoughts on the military draft, the skirt he famously wore (a comment on women getting to wear the pants and freely express masculine and feminine qualities without social repercussions), and the dating rituals between the sexes.

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THE REVENGE OF ‘SPEAKERBOXXX’: HOW BIG BOI FLIPPED THE OUTKAST SCRIPT

André 3000′s highbrow ambitions made him the more-acclaimed rapper of the duo, but as often the case in art, it’s the more prolific, genre entertainer who had made the greater long-term impact.

AP / Peter Kramer; Alison Yin

The hip-hop pairing of André 3000 (André Benjamin) and Big Boi (Antwan André Patton) in the duo OutKast, it once seemed, was made of necessity. André, the creative, musically gifted experimentalist, drew OutKast critical accolades while Big Boi provided street cred, a necessary ingredient for the hip-hop mainstream to take the group seriously. The cover of 2000′s Stankoniaillustrates their roles perfectly. Big Boi wears a plain white tee, gold chain announcing his affiliation with the Southern rap collective “Dungeon Family,” hair relaxed, arms at his side. André poses shirt-off like a nouveau Jimi Hendrix, head cocked and hands out in a slightly effete, even effeminate, gesture, especially as he looks to be sucking in his stomach.

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On the song “Return of the ‘G’” from 1998′s Aquemini, André addresses his image, saying that people often ask Big Boi, “What’s up with André? Is he in a cult? Is he on drugs? Is he gay? When y’all gonna break up?” He raps about how the return of gangsta style in hip-hop is a restrictive, limiting thing. Instead of talking about “bitches and switches and hoes and clothes and weed,” he’d rather “talk about time travelin’” and “somethin’ mind unravelin’.” But on the next verse, Big Boi boasts about owning a gun, and how he’ll “rob, steal, and kill” to protect his own. In this song, as in many others, the duo seem on different pages, with André’s voice being the far more interesting, unconventional one. On Jay-Z’s song “A Star is Born,” from The Blueprint 3, he calls André “a male version of Lauryn Hill.” An apt comparison—André outshone his collaborator as Hill did fellow Fugees Wycleaf Jean and Pras.

I had assumed that André, a multi-instrumentalist, piloted OutKast not just lyrically but also in sound, on tracks that married disparate styles (funk, gospel, drum and bass, rock) to dirty beats studded with keyboards. Yet in 2003, when the duo released two solo albums under the OutKast name—Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx and André 3000′s The Love Below—this turned out to not be the case. André’s album ranged far and wide musically, for sure. A chameleon, he changed appearance from song to song, leaving the restraints of hip-hop behind in favor of jazz and funk, crooning far more than he rapped. Though, as the title suggests, André unified The Love Below around lust and romance, his peripatetic approach made for a sprawling, disjointed mess of an album. Aside from the infectious “Hey Ya!” and a handful of other tracks—”Spread,” “Roses”—the songs were forgettable, overly long, and sometimes even corny.

Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx sounded more like an OutKast album, if one a bit heavier on the gospel and soul samples. The first single, “The Way You Move,” was almost as big a hit as “Hey Ya!” though being a hip-hop track, it lacked the ubiquity of Dre’s three-minute masterpiece. Over the years, I’ve often returned to Speakerboxxx, while The Love Below, which on its release captivated many critics with its bold vision of a post-genre pop future, I rarely revisit.

Since OutKast went on hiatus in 2007, after the disappointing jazz-infused album Idelwild, André 3000 has all but disappeared from the hip-hop scene. He drops a great verse here and there, like on last year’s Frank Ocean album, Channel Orange, but he seems more intent on acting and fashion designing. There’s word he’s working on a solo release, but whether he’s too busy with other projects to complete it, or else bogged down in perfecting the album, like Dr. Dre with Detox (an album that’s been in the works for more than 10 years), who knows.

Big Boi, on the other hand, has put out two great albums, most recently last month’s Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors. All the hallmarks of the classic OutKast sound remain: great samples diced with keyboards (“In the A”), distorted vocals mixed into a molasses-thick beat (“Thom Pettie”), a unique hybrid of hip-hop and, in this case, various indie sounds. His musical borrowings are as surprising as anything André might have made—on some songs, Big Boi collaborates with the synth-pop duo Phantogram and the noise-rock, surf influenced bad Wavves.

Lyrically, the political jabs and church wisdom that used to appear sparingly among his more macho boasts have grown in number, and he’s moved his liberal politics further to the fore. On “Shoes for Running,” he raps about the 99 percent getting screwed over, how poor black men complain about but do nothing to change their situation, and how even elections bring “no progressions, just recessions,” though he might be spitting so fast you didn’t notice. (Big Boi excels at rapping in double time to the beat.) These topical concerns never bog him down into a morose mood, and jokes and boasts about his love of fun, sex, family, and Cadillacs abound on the album. He’s a light, jovial presence, the kind of guy you’d like to hang with at a party.

With these albums, Big Boi has come out from André’s shadow, not by doing anything different, but by doing what he does really well. The film critic Manny Farber’s essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” comes to mind, as André and Big Boi seem to epitomize these two styles of art. White Elephant Art is big, made up of grandiose gestures, meant to be taken by others as a masterwork. Think of the self-important Hollywood blockbusters on serious topics (Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Lincoln), or the fat tomes of “literary” novels that deal with heavy issues (Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom)—works that, no matter how well done, become “a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition,” and collapse under their own weight—just like André’s The Love Below.

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The film critic Manny Farber’s essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” comes to mind, as André and Big Boi seem to epitomize these two styles of art: grandiose vs. genre.

Meanwhile, Big Boi has approached his work like a termite, giving no indications that he has anything in mind “other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Think of the filmmaker who makes movies fueled by small moments and dripping with love of the medium (Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive), or the genre author kicking out book after book of griping stories with the goal of doing nothing more than spinning a good yarn (Elmore Leonard): works that love the art, and the craft of the art, and don’t strive to do anything other than entertain.

In recent years, termite artists have garnered greater attention and acclaim. Genre has stopped being a bad word, as we’ve recognized that not only is there nothing wrong with entertainment, but that these works of art can tell us important things about ourselves, our culture, and our world without being self-conscious about doing so. Critically acclaimed filmmakers helm James Bond flicks—most recently Sam Mendes on Skyfall—or take on superhero films, like Chris Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies. In the writing world, the master of horror, Stephen King, received the Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, and now lands short stories in the literary-minded New Yorker. So, too, has Big Boi risen in estimation. He is now recognized as a dexterous, clever rapper who distills a wide array of musical styles into catchy dance tunes and hip-hop anthems. His reputation has caught up with André’s.

This isn’t to brush his former OutKast partner off. It could be that in a month, a year, or 10 years’ time, André 3000 comes out with a magnum opus, some amazing wonder of pop, track after track of “Hey Ya!”‘s. But in that time, expect Big Boi to have churned out album after great album, and to have built a solid legacy of hits that demands equal respect and repeat listens.

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THE DANGER OF MAKING SCIENCE POLITICAL

Many more scientists identify as Democrats than as Republicans, but threats to scientific thinking can come from any quarter. What must be preserved is the pursuit of science, away from irrational dogma.

The Albert Einstein Memorial Statue at the National Academy of Sciences [Hyungwon Kang/Reuters]

Over the past few years, and particularly in the past few months, there seems to be a growing gulf between U.S Republicans and science. Indeed, by some polls only 6 percent of scientists are Republican, and in the recent U.S. Presidential election, 68 science Nobel Prize winners endorsedthe Democratic nominee Barack Obama over the Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

As a scientist myself, this provokes the question: What are the reasons for this apparent tilt?

Some of this unease might be because of the feeling that the Republicans might cut federal science spending. The notion is certainly not helped by news-making rhetoric of some Republicans against evolution in favor of creationism; unsubstantiated claims that immunization aimed at preventing future cervical cancer cause mental retardation in young girls; and unscientific views of how the female body can prevent pregnancies under conditions of rape.

These comments might represent heartfelt beliefs of the leaders in question; however, some might simply be statements designed to placate the anti-science sections of their base, as part of the political calculus.

A recent opinion in the leading science journal Nature, written by Daniel Sarewitz, a co-director of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, suggests that this polarization of scientists away from the Republicans is bad news. Surprisingly — as he tells it — most of the bad news is the potential impact on scientists. Why? Because scientists, he believes — once perceived by Republicans to be a Democratic interest group — will lose bipartisan support for federal science funding. In other words, they will be threatened with funding cuts. Moreover, when they attempt to give their expert knowledge for policy decisions, conservatives will choose to ignore the evidence, claiming a liberal bias.

The comments of Sarewitz might be considered paranoid thinking on the part of a policy wonk, but he backs up his statement by suggesting a precedent: the social sciences, he feels, have already received this treatment at the hands of conservatives in government by making pointed fingers at their funding. Therefore he says that a sufficient number of scientists must be seen to also support Republicans for the sake of being bipartisan. To be fair to Republicans, no politician has actually targeted science funding in this vindictive manner. But this assessment only goes to show how science is quickly becoming a political football.

I would argue that this sort of thinking might well be bad for scientists, but is simply dangerous for the country. As professionals, scientists should not be put into a subservient place by politicians and ideologues. They should never be felt that their advice might well be attached to carrots or sticks.

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Indeed, this is a sure way to taint their counsel with devastating consequences for us all. This subjugation of science to a political agenda is best seen in totalitarian states. In Stalinist USSR, for example, a whole agricultural movement was driven by an ideology that denied scientific genetic theories. Pseudoscientists such as Trofim Lysenko were rewarded with support and influence at the expense of critics who were silenced. Biology in the USSR languished for decades.

We in democracies should make every effort to promote the objectivity of scientists so they can seek and communicate the best approximation of truth in the natural world, using their training and resources. And the approximation, is only because we will never know reality, but we can get amazingly close with scientific evidence and logical thinking.

Political choices can be made after the evidence is presented, but the evidence should stand for what it is. If the evidence itself is rejected by politicians — as is currently going on — then the ignorance of the political class should indeed be exposed, and all threats resisted.

This should be the case regardless of where across the political spectrum the ignorance is coming from. This might seem to be a diatribe against conservatives. But really this criticism is aimed at all unscientific thinking.

Just to be sure, there are a number on the left who have their own dogmatic beliefs; the most notable are unscientific theories with regard to the dangers of vaccinations, genetically modified produce, or nuclear energy.

It is also important to note that there have been exceptional Republican champions of science. In the U.S. Senate, the late Arlen Spector and in Congress, John Porte were trwo who stood out, lauded by scientists as advocates for scientific inquiry.

In other words, threats to scientific thinking can come from any quarter. What must be preserved is the pursuit of science away from irrational dogma. In that sense scientists should be completely nonpartisan. After all, the universe is what it is. The hurricanes, the flu epidemics, indeed all of reality does not really care about our political affiliations, but we distance ourselves from scientific thinking at our own peril.

As citizens, those of us who care about science should encourage policies that promote education to increase the number of scientifically literate people. This includes supporting our currently embattled public research universities, and federal research agencies that fund science education. Slowly this will increase the numbers of a scientifically literate populace. Politicians then will no longer fear the shrinking base of anti-science ideologues; rather they will quake at the backlash of a scientific literate populace.

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WHY I’M STILL WEARING MY LIVESTRONG BRACELET

Lance Armstrong makes more sense to me after his Oprah interview. And my wristband still means the same thing it always did.

AP/Courtesy of Harpo Studios, Inc., George Burns

I was wearing one of those yellow Livestrong wristbands yesterday, pre-Oprah. It’s still on.

It isn’t about Lance Armstrong, I’ve explained to my kids. It’s about me. I survived prostate cancer five years ago, and it changed in useful ways how I think about life—aiming high, not putting things off, that sort of stuff. I rather like the continual reminder. I’ve never cared much for cycling, for myself or on TV, but it’s hard not to admire a man of determination who keeps coming back.

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Watching Lance Armstrong last night, I was prepared to feel betrayed and to dislike the guy who split up with Sheryl Crow when she had cancer. But I found I didn’t. To my surprise, I liked him. I’m not proud of this, or saying I’d ever forgive him if he’d personally wronged me the way he wronged so many. But everything he said—and did—made a certain sense.

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A fact: Lance Armstrong is a driven man. Whether because of genetics, a rough childhood, whatever the reason(s), he’s a man of outsized ambitions whose outsized talents are inextricably mixed with outsized flaws. They come as a package, as they do for many truly accomplished people who struggle to the top. Think of Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich or Steve Jobs. In a crowded and competitive world, that’s often what it takes.

Fact No. 2: In the world of cycling, getting to the top required doping. Riders who ride up the Pyrenees clean ride down the Champs-Elysees near the back of the pack. Armstrong accepted the rules of the game. He could have done the “right” thing and just said no, except for Fact No. 1. Oh, and …

Fact No. 3: The world offers humongous rewards to the people at the tip-top and far, far less to people below. You can tell Armstrong he shouldn’t be greedy, but he’s a person of flesh and blood who saw his chance for success and fame and grabbed it. The guy who finishes 111th doesn’t have a fan club or raise millions of dollars for cancer or for himself.

Armstrong might, as his critics say, have decided differently—and we’d never have heard of the man. This was his choice, and he made it. And I suspect he’d make the same choice again.

In my case, many months after my wife gave me the “tacky” (as The Washington Post‘s Melinda Henneberger called it) yellow wristband did she confess that she’d found it in a parking lot, by the local CVS. So, I’ve never donated a dime to Lance Armstrong. But I’ve profited from him.

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REBRANDING LANCE ARMSTRONG: MARKETING PROS’ 6-STEP RECOVERY PLAN

Through PR, all things are possible. Maybe.

AP / Marcio Jose Sanchez

Lance Armstrong’s career as a public figure, it would seem, is over. After all, he did not one but several of the lowest things you can do in sports (and life, really): He cheated, he lied about cheating, he allegedly harassed and persecuted those who told the truth about his cheating—and worst of all, he became an international hero in the process. Now that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has found Armstrong on the wrong end of “conclusive and undeniable proof” of a decade’s worth of performance-enhancing drugs, and he’s been banned from cycling for life and stripped of his seven cherished Tour de France titles, the public’s regard for Armstrong has tumbled from Superman status down to the depths of disappointment and scorn.

But if disgraced heroes like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Martha Stewart, and Tiger Woods taught us anything, it’s that there’s always a way to crawl back into the public’s good graces—with the help of some powerful image-rehab magic conjured up by a trained professional, that is.

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What, if anything, can be done to help rebuild Armstrong’s image? Lance Armstrong, after all, isn’t just a man. He’s a marketable brand, too. Since it launched in 1997, his foundation Livestrong (formerly known as the Lance Armstrong Foundation) has raised more than $470 million for cancer awareness and research. So I asked four professionals in brand management, public relations, and consulting what advice they would give to Armstrong to help salvage what’s left of Brand Lance: Karl Heiselman, CEO of international brand consultancy Wolff Olins; Erin Patton, a former Nike executive and brand management consultant who represented the Williams sisters and Stephon Marbury in partnership deals; Danielle Robinson, a Madison Avenue brand strategist; and David Simmons, a Los Angeles-based sports consultant who formerly worked with the Dodgers. And while their approaches didn’t always match up, all four agreed on one thing: Even though Armstrong has a more complicated road back to credibility than many other fallen stars before him, he’s nowhere close to a lost cause. From their responses emerged a simple plan outlining what Lance Armstrong (the man) can do to save Lance Armstrong (the franchise).

Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

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Step 1: CONFESS YOUR SINS. TO OPRAH. (Check. His interview with the talk show host airs in two segments on Thursday night and Friday night.)

Danielle Robinson: An apology is necessary, a confession is necessary, and some form of answer to the question of why. Why the doping? Why lie about it? For a brand as strong as his, and for allegations as severe as his, why? Why do that? That brings the element of humanity.

I will say this: He did it right by going to Oprah. Or Oprah did it right by going to him. If I ever do anything wrong, I’m confessing to Oprah.

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Oprah comes with a lot of credibility and trust. The public trusts her to get to the bottom of the story. … It might be a painful interview, because she’s going to ask the tough questions. She’s going to ask why. But hopefully [his PR team] prepped him on how to interview with Oprah. It could work to his advantage if he allows her to get to the truth—because if the truth comes out, I’d say he literally does not have to do another interview if he doesn’t want to. Talk to Oprah, she gets the truth, and his PR team can say, “We’re done.”

Step 2: CONFRONT THE CONTROVERSY HEAD-ON. … OR JUST LAY LOW FOR A WHILE. EITHER WAY.

David Simmons: He needs to go on the PR tour. Take any interview and answer every question.

” I think he’s going to have to go the charitable route. If he maybe opened some Lance Armstrong biking schools in inner cities or something of that nature, that could help.”

Lance got caught after he [competed]—and that makes it much tougher. If you look at the people like Andy Pettitte, Michael Vick, or Roger Clemens, or Barry Bonds, they all got caught while they were playing. They could keep playing, whereas Lance has retired [from his sport]. That changes the game plan, from a PR standpoint, as to what he can and cannot do. He’s not a competitive cyclist anymore—he lost what he’d accomplished, and he can’t get [those accomplishments back] by riding the bike again. Now he’s just a public figure, so what he does with that brand equity he built up is what he can still do. … He’s still a cancer survivor, he’s still a reputable name.

Robinson: Don’t create a story where there isn’t one. Who did that well? Tiger Woods did it well. The scandal broke and he went silent. All things shut down. That’s one of the quickest ways to not create a story. It allows the public to digest it, number one. And it allows some room for forgiveness. We have examples of that in our personal lives—the further you are from a situation, the more able someone is to see something in a fresh light and allow the forgiveness to take place.

Perfect example of someone who has not followed that rule well is Chris Brown. He goes off in the midst of a PR crisis and just continues down a behavior pattern that is ripe for story-making and headlines.

Karl Heiselman: If he steps out of the spotlight and continues to step out of the spotlight, then his brand is sunk.

Step 3: TAKE UP A NEW CHARITY PROJECT.

Simmons: I think he’s going to have to go the charitable route. If he maybe opened some Lance Armstrong biking schools in inner cities or something of that nature, that could help. Because his career is over—but his name could still mean something.

Heiselman: My advice for Lance would be to take on a new cause. Something like anti-doping—and really own it. He’s going to need to essentially refill the Lance Armstrong brand with something new.

He has to mean it, obviously. But if he really grabbed ahold of it in an honest, transparent way and became a spokesman for anti-doping, that seems likely to be the most head-on way of dealing with his credibility issue.

Step 4: DON’T RAT OUT YOUR FELLOW DOPERS TO GET YOUR SENTENCE REDUCED. OR, YOU KNOW, DO.

Heiselman: That’s a tricky one. On one hand, nobody likes a snitch. But if he became a spokesperson for anti-doping and really meant it, perhaps that could help his cause. But my advice would be to do that much, much later, and in a way that has more credibility. If he’s going to rat people out right [away], he could be doing it potentially in order to shift the blame away from himself. That could hurt his credibility.

Erin Patton: I think part of the process for him is to be as truthful as possible. People will be watching, and what they’ll be watching for is, Are there still cover-ups? Is there still a desire to hide from the public?

It’s almost like Tiger Woods being at a gentlemen’s club a few years after [his infidelity scandal]. People will be so quick to pounce on that. If he just happens to be in the company of a mystery female, TMZ takes the picture, it all comes up again. Same thing with Lance: little room for error. People will have the sense that he’s still holding back, not quite coming clean, and it makes it that much more difficult to really put it behind him.

Step 5: MAKE PEACE WITH THE MEDIA.

Simmons: [When Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte admitted to using steroids in 2009], he came out and held a press conference. Andy Pettitte was a leader of the New York Yankees; he was one of the core four Yankees when they won the World Series four times in five years. He was well respected by the media and the fans, and therefore when he apologized nobody cared and he got to come back and keep pitching.

Lance lied to [a lot of] reporters. The Sunday Times in England—that was a huge one. They published stories [about the suspicion of Armstrong's doping] and got sued for libel, when it turned out the reporter was right. This time I don’t think the media will allow him to exit successfully back into the world.

Barry Bonds is another prime example—probably the second-most famous cheater, after Lance. Hehated the media, so the media was out to get him for years. After he cheated, he didn’t have a road back.

Step 6: DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM LIVESTRONG—AND DON’T BE SURPRISED IF YOU’RE NOT MISSED.

Patton: I’m willing to bet a lot of what prompted his admission is the realization that there are a lot of people who are dependent upon the success of that foundation. There are a lot of people who have invested time, talent, and resources into its success, and I believe he recognizes the good it’s done and what it needs in order for it to go on. While he’ll always be inextricably linked to Livestrong, it’s in many ways time to create distance between the message and the messenger.

Livestrong was all about overcoming odds, working hard, pushing the boundaries of what you can accomplish physically. So to find out that all of that was supported with the use of performance-enhancing drugs totally eradicates the core brand DNA. It would almost be similar to if, during Michael Jordan’s basketball career, people had questioned why he could fly so high. From Nike’s perspective, and Michael’s, it was Air Jordan, but [it would have been damaging] if we found out Michael had jet propulsion in his sneakers.

Heiselman: Perhaps Livestrong should use a different spokesperson as the face of the foundation, or perhaps several spokespeople. Maybe everyday heroes. Teachers, firemen, actors—people from all walks of life. The Livestrong brand in the past was so tied up with one personality that that’s kind of a risk. … I think it’s an opportunity for Livestrong to think about how they take their mission forward in an even more powerful way.

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WHY ‘ZERO DARK THIRTY’ IS THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest is a cinematic tour de force, but one open to moral questioning.

Sony

Khobar, Saudi Arabia, May 29, 2004: A terrorist faction affiliated with al-Qaeda attacks two oil installations, killing 19 foreigners and 3 locals.

London, July 7, 2005: Four suicide bombers blow themselves up on public transit during rush hour, killing 52 civilians.

Islamabad, September 20, 2008: A dump truck laden with explosives detonates in front of the Marriott Hotel, killing at least 54.

Khost, Afghanistan, December 30, 2009: A suicide attack against Forward Operating Base Chapman kills 9, including 7 members of the CIA.

For all the political talk of the War on Terror, it’s a war that remains largely an abstraction in post-9/11 America, with long periods of relative silence punctuated by occasional news of a terrorist attack overseas. Zero Dark Thirty, the stunning new film by director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, has been widely, and accurately, described as a “procedural,” an intercontinental detective story about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But it is also an unconventional war movie about an unconventional war, one in which those on the front lines are not principally soldiers and marines, but intelligence analysts and operatives. For them, the war is not a series of loosely connected news events, but a daily, agonizing reality.

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It is already difficult to discuss Zero Dark Thirty without discussing its attendant controversies, and I won’t try. But before wading into these, let me say that, judged purely on cinematic grounds, Zero Dark Thirty is a tour de force, and the best film of the year. Bigelow and Boal’s prior collaboration, The Hurt Locker, was extraordinary in its execution but relatively narrow in its ambitions, a series of snapshots from a life lived at unthinkable extremes. With Zero Dark Thirty, the filmmakers bring the same meticulous eye and sense of harrowing immediacy to a story of vastly greater scope.

At the center of the film is Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA analyst of undisguised talent and obstinacy. We first meet her in 2003, when a veteran interrogator named Dan (Jason Clarke) introduces her to the savage realities of the Agency’s detainee program. “When you lie to me,” he tells Ammar (Reda Kateb), a captive with possible links to al Qaeda, “I hurt you.” It’s a promise fulfilled with the now all-too-familiar litany of brutal techniques: beatings, waterboarding, stress positions, extremes of cold and dark, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, mind games. “It’s gonna take a while,” Dan explains to Maya. “He has to learn how helpless he is.”

Eventually Ammar produces a name, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and the film enters its long second act, its procedural phase, in which leads are followed, lost, and rediscovered. Maya (a character based on a genuine CIA analyst whose identity remains classified) is convinced that Abu Ahmed is a courier with direct ties to bin Laden. But her superiors are unpersuaded, and her consequent insubordinations become progressively more explicit. Years tick by, as the story winds it way through Islamabad and Kuwait City, through Langley, Virginia and a “black site” in Gdansk, Poland.

Zero Dark Thirty unlike so many other offerings of this holiday season, earns every minute of its two-and-a-half-hour-plus running time.

Until May 2, 2011, when Maya’s tenacious conviction is vindicated in a walled compound in Abbottabad. Here, in the movie’s final act, Bigelow dramatizes the bin Laden raid with all the meticulous care of the Seal Team 6 squad that preceded her: muffled Blackhawks thrum across the Khyber Pass; night vision paints the blackness a queasy green; explosives are set, shots fired, and blood spilled.

Zero Dark Thirty is, like the story it chronicles, a sprawling enterprise—one that, unlike so many other offerings of this holiday season, earns every minute of its two-and-a-half-hour-plus running time. The large cast encompasses Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, Harold Perrineau, Edgar Ramirez, James Gandolfini, and too many others to catalog. As Dan, the ambivalent interrogator, the Australian-born Clarke is particularly notable, building on the work he did earlier this year in Lawless.

Chastain’s Maya, though, remains a bit of a cipher. The actress is good, as always, and it is a relief that her character has not been burdened with backstory. Yet something is missing, some telling idiosyncrasy, especially when she makes her most forceful declarations. (Explaining her attendance at an Abbottabad briefing she tells the CIA chief, “I’m the motherfucker who found this place.”) For all Chastain’s gifts, Maya comes across less as an individual than as the expression of an idea: the woman who must be tough enough to survive in a male environment, a topic about which Bigelow knows more than a little.

As for Bigelow herself, her direction is vital, controlled, enthralling. If The Hurt Locker cracked the door on her cinematic gifts, Zero Dark Thirty kicks it wide open. Boal’s script, meanwhile, is a comparable marvel, gripping yet utterly authentic.

But the film is not, of course, authentic in the most literal sense, which brings us to the overlapping controversies it has engendered. The first erupted long before the movie even screened, when news broke that the Obama administration had granted Bigelow and Boal access to classified information, and opponents of the president charged that the movie would amount to pro-White House propaganda. Their concern was misplaced: Obama appears only once, on a TV screen in the background, and his presence is ironic at best.

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But the filmmakers’ extraordinary access raises other, more troubling questions. Bigelow and Boal have presented their filmmaking process as “journalistic,” while at the same time stressing that the resulting movie is a work of fiction, not a documentary. The problem, as Peter Maass and others have noted, is that it is impossible to know where the journalism ends and the fiction begins: in short, where the filmmakers have been privy to secrets shared by the CIA and where they’ve simply made things up.

Compounding such concerns is the sense in many quarters that Zero Dark Thirty is, at least implicitly, pro-torture—that it shows that “waterboarding works.” I confess that my initial response was very nearly the opposite: No one, I thought, who sits through the film’s early, excruciating scenes, will ever again claim (as many advocates of “enhanced interrogation” did) that waterboarding does not constitute torture. Moreover, unless I misremember, it is neither waterboarding nor other physical abuse that results in Ammar’s eventual confession, but rather the kindness and trickery that follow. (Though one can, of course, argue that it is only the abuse that makes the later trickery possible.) Several writers have also cited as evidence of pro-torture bias a scene in which a peripheral CIA agent complains, after the detainee program is shut down, that intelligence will be harder to obtain. But I was equally struck by another moment. The CIA director (Gandolfini) convenes a meeting to assess the likelihood that bin Laden will be found at the Abbottabad compound, and the most skeptical of all those sitting around the table is Dan himself, who places the odds at a “soft 60″ percent. The very person who conducted the initial interrogation, in other words, is the one least convinced by the intelligence it gleaned.

Which is not to say that I necessarily disagree with critics of the portrait painted by the film; rather that I am conflicted, and eager to see it a second time with their complaints in mind. With Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow and Boal have produced a powerful, morally complicated work on an urgent subject. It is a film that deserves—that almost demands—to be seen and argued over.

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