But Could They Field-Dress a Moose?

Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz write on the growing tension on the Left between black folks and gays in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8 in California. The debate continues: is gay marriage the new civil-rights frontier? Or is the comparison intrinsically offensive to black suffering?

As the son of a black man, it saddens me to see the casuistry with which many black folks try to draw distinctions here. Just call a spade a spade, so to speak: much black resistance to gay marriage is not philosophically principled; it is indefensible homophobia.

But actually the reason I'm singling this Op-Ed out has little to do with the issue at hand, and everything to do with the authors' introduction of an especially useful term of art, in discussing those who must fit under the Democrats' big tent. Angry White Men, Soccer Moms, Hockey Moms, etc.: Move aside. Has there ever been a more felicitous phrase in political demography than 'minivan moms of Minnetonka'?

Lyndon W. Hoover

A while back, I was resisting the growing sentiment that W. has been our worst president ever; as we flail about in the midst of the current financial crisis, however, resistance becomes harder to mount (who would have ever thought it possible to combine Depression- and Vietnam-era flashbacks in one administration?). But how much of this disaster can we put on George W. Bush, really? Surely a crisis of this magnitude had many fathers.

It all depends on what our understanding of the nature and causes of the current predicament are. If a large part of the problem has to do with financial deregulation and a lack of proper oversight, then the problem can be traced back to the 'Rubinomics' of the Clinton Administration. So the question is, what exactly can we blame Bush for?

As I understand it, the shit really hit the fan when Henry Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse. And according to Floyd Norris, Bush might have avoided the current bust, or lessened its impact, if he'd been more flexible on tax policy: after cutting taxes in order to start a boom (people like Paul Krugman, of course, question whether the cuts caused the boom, or raise doubts as to how much of a boom there was in the first place), W. should have then raised taxes in order to deal with the enormous ensuing budget deficits, and in order to 'apply the brakes' to runaway growth.

Is that enough to justify talk of 'George W. Hoover'?

Obamanomics

Saw a great talk at Davidson recently by the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, whose book Predictably Irrational seems to be getting a lot of attention (he gives good interview, too). Hell, behavioral economics in general seems to be getting a lot of attention, e.g., David Brooks' recent column.

Noam Scheiber reported a while back in The New Republic that Austan Goolsbee, Barack Obama's top economic adviser, seemed to have some kind of fan-boy thing for Brooks; Goolsbee consults regularly with his University of Chicago colleague, the behavioral economist Richard Thaler; is that the connection?

Fearless Predictions, I: Bill and Barack

42 and 44 will become unlikely friends, with Bill an infrequent but notable guest in Obamalot. Bill wants influence, can't help but dispense political advice; Barry has little to gain, but ... that old Clinton charm? Hey, who would've ever predicted 41 + 42? Perhaps, too, there'll be the Rahm Emanuel connection, as well as the Rubinomists at Treasury. How many Clinton staffers surface in the new Administration? How much choice does Obama have, really? I should think that Carter Administration vets would be quite long in the tooth by now--but then again, 43 reached all the way back to the Ford Administration...

H.N.I.C.

!!!
Who would have ever thought that a tall, dark, and handsome graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law might one day be elected President? Is this a great country or what?

Deep Play

Is it me, or has there been a really interesting convergence of soccer and art in the last few years? I'm heartbroken I missed this particular installation, which one critic describes as a parable concerning the way contemporary technology guarantees omnipresence but not omniscience.

What Made the Depression 'Great'?

With the early 1930s currently being invoked on an hourly basis, I've been meaning to refresh my memory as to the nature of that particular crisis. Unfortunately, I'm absolutely dismal when it comes to this particular science--I almost failed econ in high school, and the semester I spent auditing a macroeconomics seminar in graduate school didn't provide any evidence of improvement. The only stuff I can understand comes from Robert Heilbroner. Fortunately, this piece in yesterday's NYT spells out some of the similarities--and dissimilarities--in bite-sized chunks.

Expensive Lipstick

An article on the front page of the Times today (you see, kids, the NYT also comes in this hard-copy format called a 'newspaper'...) documents a change in tactics among conservatives keen to expand their influence on the nation's campuses. Instead of aggressively polemical attacks on the usual betes noires (postmodernism, multiculturalism, ethnic studies, feminism, etc.), right-wing financiers and foundations now tout their pet projects as nonpartisan efforts to 'embrace a broader range of thought'. In practice, however, it amounts to funding initiatives by conservative academics that adopt a more positive stance to 'Western culture' and offer a 'triumphal interpretation of American history'.

There's no need to see in this some kind of insidious plot: it's perfectly legitimate to be concerned about the way American history is being interpreted and transmitted to the next generation. But--to quote Edmund Burke out of context--'in order for us to love our country, our country must be lovely'. There may be much we can learn from conservative political thought: those who disagree with Burke's ultimate assessment of the French Revolution may still have much to learn from his ideas concerning the value of the past or the most prudent pace of change; those who recoil from Carl Schmitt's politics may yet benefit from a tussle with his political theory. But that is a different kind of education than what these determined triumphalists and soft-sell culture warriors seem to be proposing.

WWABS?

The results of a recent poll, we are told, augur a fundamental shift in the American public's moral philosophy: three years ago, a majority of Americans believed in absolute, acontextual standards of right and wrong; today, that majority, by a slim margin, inclines toward casuistry. What would Allan Bloom say? He was decrying creeping, postmodern moral relativism back in the eighties, when we were apparently still moral absolutists...

Ethnovideography, Etc.

I've just discovered the work of a British social anthropologist named Alan Macfarlane: he's got hundreds of videos up on YouTube, and apparently he's cuckoo for the uses of video for teaching and disseminating anthropological ideas. He posts ethnographic videos of any number of social rituals (he's done fieldwork in Japan, Nepal, China, and other parts of Asia); interviews with thinkers of interest for anthropology and related disciplines (I just spent an hour raptly watching a conversation with George Steiner, was less enthralled by a recording of a seminar with Ernest Gellner); and most helpfully for teachers of social theory, extremely lucid, well-organized introductions to various social theorists and fields of inquiry (Macfarlane's rather low-key, tweedy presentations gradually seduce).

Right now I'm in the middle of a fascinating presentation by the anthropologist Piers Vitebski, recorded by Macfarlane, on love, death, and forgetting.



In part Vitebski recounts, orally and via his own videorecordings, the shamanistic practices of the Sora of India, who rely on holy men (but mostly holy women) to channel the spirits of their dead loved ones in order to talk to them. As I was reflecting on the dilemmas of the ethnographer regarding, say, the suspensions of judgment and disbelief necessary to do this kind of fieldwork (I'm guessing these are pretty naive reflections for anybody more familiar with ethnographic methodology), I was suddenly reminded of our own practices of mourning and remembrance: is not the most salient characteristic of all our recent most successful memorials the fact that they allow the bereaved the chance to speak to the dead?

Signs of the Apocalypse, Pt. II

The crisis continues because nobody knows what anything is worth. You simply cannot have a functioning market under such circumstances--from an assessment of the Bush Administration's latest attempt to stop the bleeding.

Eep.

Signs of the Apocalypse, Pt. I

When you dig deeper at what college is set up to be, college is supposed to make you a money-making machine. ... [players who graduate from Princeton] are still going to make N.F.L. money or have N.F.L.-type success--Roger Hughes, Princeton football coach.

Wow. This from a story about that rare kid who puts his education before big-time college football and opts to play football at Princeton instead of Florida.

Hey kid, life's not about making millions from an NFL career. It's just about making millions.

Pop Quiz

Quick--what's the Bush doctrine? By now, everybody knows that Sarah Palin couldn't answer that question; clearly, there cannot be too many heartbeats between this hastily tutored hockey mom and the Presidency.

Or so people have said (by 'people', I seem to mean simply 'New York Times Op-Ed columnists'). But why should her performance on this particular question be the dealbreaker? Charlie Gibson quizzed Palin as if he were asking her to define the Monroe Doctrine, or to identify the people responsible for the 9/11 attacks--you know, stuff any well-educated person should know about. But why should we expect her to be able to identify the one policy associated with a term that, so far as I can see, has in fact been associated with a number of differing policies?

I'm not sure George W. Bush would be able to define the Bush doctrine. And that's not because I think he's dumb; I don't. (I think he's unwise.)

So the issue isn't whether Palin can pin the right label on the right policy, but what she thinks of the policy itself. And that's where people should be worried: as Maureen Dowd puts it,

The really scary part of the Palin interview was how much she seemed like W. in 2000, and not just the way she pronounced nu-cue-lar. She had the same flimsy but tenacious adeptness at saying nothing, the same generalities and platitudes, the same restrained resentment at being pressed to be specific, as though specific is the province of silly eggheads, not people who clear brush at the ranch or shoot moose on the tundra.

Same Old Song?

Frank Rich is one of my favorite bloviators, but his account this last Sunday of how Obama outwitted the other bloviators over the course of the Democratic Convention struck me as containing more wishful thinking than he ought to indulge in. ( I'm not gonna go into details at this time; I'll just assert this without argument and move on.) Meanwhile, David Kirkpatrick reports that the Right--especially the Religious Right--seem to be doing some bloviator-beatdowns of their own, as McCain lurches so far to starboard (with the selection of Palin, the surrender of the party platform to Phyllis Schafly [!], etc.) that now even James Dobson is along for the voyage.

Seems like just yesterday that some observers, while refraining from obituaries, were writing decline narratives for the 'conservative movement' (somehow, this was a movement in which Jerry Falwell and Paul Wolfowitz were practically rubbing shoulders, philosophy-wise).

Come to think of it, some observers really did write obits. As Rich saw it a little more than a year ago, Rudy Giuliani's short-lived 'Big Mo' showed that the conservative base was singing a refrain that no one would want to hear come election time ('The Karl Rove theory that Republicans cannot survive without pandering to religious-right pooh-bahs is yet another piece of Bush dogma lying in ruins').

Well, there's no accounting for taste, they say.

Home Adjustment

So I just moved into my new digs for the next nine months. After sharing a 900-square-foot loft with two roommates, this is a big adjustment. The new crib has been blasted clean of every speck of dirt, and proffers gobs of space--a family could live here, and yet it's just lil' old me. I figure this is a good chance to finally get my shit organized--I mean, I have a guest room, but who the hell's gonna visit me so far off the beaten track? It'll spend most of its time as a 'projects' room--as well as to try to see how far I can diverge from the ways we commonly use living space.

A few years ago, a team of cultural sociologists talked their way into a number of middle-class living rooms in order to see what kinds of patterns obtained in the way people from similar backgrounds arrange and decorate their spaces. I was struck by how tightly folks tend to follow scripts without at all realizing there's any kind of script, and I have asked myself ever since how possible it is to improvise on them. Most middle-class people do their formal entertaining in the living room, right? Then there's the formal dining room; the family might have a den in which they do their actual living, as well as much of their eating (in front of the TV). Home office in the study, etc.

My place, too, is set up for Standard American Domestic Design. It's got a living room, dining room, wood-paneled study, kitchen, enclosed porches back and front, two bedrooms upstairs. Every room pretty much suggests what to do with it and how--the devil is in the details of where you put the couch. But since I don't have a couch--I drove down w/a bed, a dresser, and a bookcase--I figure I'm already a step ahead when it comes to trying to re-imagine this place.

Since I barely have any furniture, and since I'm ranging over the entire house, I figure the key is be (1) minimalist and (2) mobile. As big a pack rat as I am, I simply don't have enough stuff to fill the space, so I can let one object dominate and define each room. And because I've got a lot of room to cover, things should be on wheels whenever possible.  

And entertaining, too, in a James Bond-y, Swiss-Army-knife kind of way.  Can't forget entertaining.

I'm not exactly winding up to a punchline here--just thinking aloud about my process here. But I think it could issue in a couple of interesting pics in the next few weeks.

KenDo

I'm late to the John Edwards pile-on, but maybe that's because I don't much feel like piling on. I just hate the way we deal with political sex scandals in this country. Even humorists suddenly get serious: Maureen Dowd, for example, adds a little more bite to her snark than usual, dismissing even what might seem like positive aspects of Edwards' mea culpa. 'Even in confessing to preening, Edwards was preening. His diagnosis of narcissism was weirdly narcissistic, or was it self-narcissistic?' she yawns. Now, talk of 'self-narcissism' is taking it to a level of meta that's beyond my ken--but however vague this term is in ordinary language, aren't narcissists quintessentially incapable of precisely the kind of self-awareness that Edwards displayed?

Both MoDo and Gail Collins (GalCo? Nah, I guess we have to save that one for Gal Costa) also take Edwards to task for stressing that his wife's cancer was in remission at the time of, er, transmission: for Collins, this 'may be a new high in the annals of weaseldom'; MoDo sneers at the claim that the tryst was 'oncologically correct', and dubs it 'the creepiest part of his creepy confession'. I guess I need to go to the videotape here, but given that cheating on a wife diagnosed with cancer is gonna be the most unsavory part of the whole scandal for most people, it makes sense to me that Edwards would address the topic directly.

The problem is that Dowd and Collins don't seem interested in a more sachlich take on this sad affair. They'd rather recycle every Ken Doll/Breck Girl cliche they can find.

Subway Seinfeld I

Fellow Gothamites: Why is it that the subway-candy-vendor meme typically goes something like this? 'Good morning/afternoon/evening, ladies and gentlemen; sorry to disturb you. I have candy for sale. No, I'm not selling for no basketball team, I'm selling this candy to stay out of trouble...'

In the first place, has anybody else been inundated by basketball-playing candy-pushers, such that it's a relief to be approached by someone else for a change? Secondly, am I the only one who finds the second qualifier slightly ominous? It's just a hair short of Robocop: 'Buy my candy or there will be ... trouble'.

Batty, Man

Finally saw The Dark Knight last night. My instant assessment? A dumb Hollywood action movie with lots of eye candy; improbable/implausible plot twists; labored political-philosophical musings; inadequate editing; and a beautiful, stirring final scene. Feel free to disagree--I mean, I loved The Matrix Reloaded when I first saw it.

The movie strains for relevance, but offers very little help to us in dealing with our current predicaments. The Joker (Heath Ledger, nuff respect) delights in spreading fear, killing innocents, and sowing destruction--and this all for the sport of it. He's a terrorist, get it? There's just no rhyme or reason to his appetite for destruction!

I don't see how this helps us in dealing with our current crop of bad guys, who--and maybe I'm getting stuck on labels here, but here goes--are fanatics and fundamentalists, sure, but hardly nihilists (there are certainly people who have deep and thoughtful things to say about the psychological connections or lack thereof between nihilism and terrorism, so there's a future post...). The Joker only poses interesting lessons for counterterrorism if you're one of those people who thinks it's sacrilegious even to suggest that some of the current hell Americans are catching has nothing to do with, say, the last five decades of American foreign policy.

The Dark Knight is equally sloppy--or worse, utterly cavalier--about current hot topics such as extreme rendition, torture, or random surveillance. There's a fair amount of interrogation-room-beatdown-porn (interlaced with an oddly prim aversion to slaying the main baddie), for example. At some point, the movie confronts the debate over the Bush Administration's domestic spying in the most misleading, melodramatic way: what would you do, if you were the Batman? Would you peek in on millions of Gothamites' cellphone transmissions, if doing so would help you to locate a criminal mastermind intent on sowing murder and mayhem in the next 24 hours?

Well, yeah, of course I would: how much privacy are you invading if you're simply trying to get a fix on an imminent mass murderer? ('Course, in a Hollywood movie, it's always a bad sign if you're on the other side of a moral debate with Morgan Freeman.) But that's a poor analogy to what the Bush Administration was dealing with, and how they went about doing it.

I'm boycotting Hollywood action movies for the foreseeable future. At least, that is, until I hear more about the Green Lantern's position on nuclear energy.

The Urban Village Idiots

One “room” is a cramped cubby that measures, in all, perhaps 25 square feet, just enough for a full-size mattress and whatever can be stashed beneath. The first-floor rooms, in the basement, are musty and windowless, like caves. The second-floor rooms have plywood walls but no doors, only cut-out windows that overlook a kitchen cluttered with day-old dishes, a chore wheel and the odd paintbrush.

One of the residents likens her home to a “giant treehouse.” Another says it is like “living in a public bathroom.”

“Where the stalls are just superficial sight lines that block the other person, but you can hear everything they do,” said Robyn Frank, a 23-year-old artist. She had just moved in to the McKibbin lofts in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and sometimes they literally become bathrooms. They are known for their giant, raucous parties; revelers occasionally urinate in the halls.

This is life in what some refer to as the McKibbin “dorms,” a landing pad for hundreds of postcollegiate creative types yearning to make it as artists, and live like them too, in today’s New York.--Cara Buckley, 'Young Artists Find a Private Space, Only Without the Privacy', New York Times (7 May 2008).

I'm leaving New York for nine months to teach at a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. Not too many people up here seem to have heard of it; but I've always had a really favorable impression of its academics, and I feel really lucky to have a chance to work there.

Thing is, it's not in New York, so naturally I'm spending a lot of time right now thinking about what I'm leaving behind. Among the things I'll miss most are (1) the living room of my loft in the abovementioned art/hipster 'dorms', (2) my neighbors, and (3) 'the McKibbin' in general (I've lived here over a year and never heard it called that except in The Times).

Our living room (I live with two others) is a really serene place. Southern exposure; overlooks the garden of a neighboring church, with its gurgling fountain and chiming bells; a tree spreads out right in front of our giant windows, providing privacy, oxygen, and the occasional visiting squirrel. I've loved the space from the minute craigslist brought me to it, and it's the first one that's really engaged my nestbuilding drive. It's pictured below the 'cage' shot that ran on the front page of the Times with Buckley's story.

Now, maybe our space is a little bit Ikea'd out for some people's tastes (that's a topic for another day). Maybe it wouldn't make the cover of Dwell or Paper or whatever else people read for images of hip, designer-infused living. Me, I think it's a pretty good place to come home to, and it's a sharp contrast to what Buckley would have you think was the norm.

I'm not saying that me and many of my neighbors don't live with paper-thin partitions: I can hear my roommates sneeze through the walls, and they can hear my 'Bless you!' in response. I'm not saying that there aren't raucous parties with plenty of stupid reveler-behavior: I once clambered up the stairs to check out a loud rooftop party, heard what sounded like Niagara Falls, and discovered a girl peeing at the top of the stairwell (yes, I called her a girl, but she started it by calling me 'sir' when I asked her what the hell she was doing). I'm not even denying that some of the residents and their friends are trustafarian/hipster interlopers with little self-consciousness regarding their own class and race privilege: the asshole quoted as saying 'I don't really speak to the locals' is a dear friend of mine. I'm just saying that's not the whole story. And unfortunately, even though I spoke to Cara on several occasions, introduced her to a number of local characters, and offered to show her my own loft and some much doper ones, she ended up with the story she ended up with.

Ah--maybe I'm just sore I didn't make it into her story (she told me right before it came out that I didn't fit the demographic she was tasked to cover). I've been reading the Paper of Record since I was twelve, and I guess I'll just never feel like a somebody till It records me. In any event, I did try to defend her when the shit hit the stands and all my neighbors were baying for her blood. Buckley's portrayal is a sore subject around these parts: during a recent discussion in the cafe downstairs, I tried to convince some tablemates that Cara, however one may disagree with her, was not in fact some sneering Manhattanite (FWIW, she lives in Park Slope) determined a priori to heap disdain on all things bohemian and Brooklyn; my immediate opposite simply turned her head and diverted her attention to a neighboring conversation while I was in midsentence.

Gosh, maybe the kids aren't alright.

Anyhoo, the more interesting questions have to do with the current state of the Bohemian Dream--if such still exists. But that goes beyond the limits of a simple 'That reporter nailed it!'/'That reporter doesn't know what she's talking about!' diatribe...

Dating After Damascus

Steve Jobs riding his 1966 BMW.

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”--from a New York Times article on literary taste as a dating dealbreaker.

It's news to me that there could be anything tedious about life-changing-experiences-talk--on the other hand, I suppose there's a lot of earnest bloviation ('My mom's my best friend!') that seems like, but is not, appropriate date-convo. The other thing is that it's not always easy to itemize just how your life changed: I've never read Pirsig's book (I bought it after another student mentioned it in my advisor's social theory grad seminar, but never recovered the motivation to read it after bumping into the Big Guy at the cash register and being airily informed that his 13-year old daughter had found it a bit facile), but I'm sure I'd run into the same minefield with Ms. Heiblum if I tried to wax lyrical on my personal road-to-Damascus moment.

The Pros and Cons of Bush-Bashing

Last summer, I found myself the lone dissenter, at a small dinner party stocked mostly with Columbia law professors, to the contention that W. has presided over the worst administration in American history. I'm no fan of the Great Decider; I was simply worried about our presentist bias. But with the news of the Bush Administration's upcoming record-setting deficit, I think it makes sense to try to put everything in perspective. It seems fair to me to say that this is a failed presidency, but let's at least try to consider the Bushies' main talking points.

PROS

• Increased AIDS funding for Africa
• No Child Left Behind (YMMV)
• Persuaded Libya to give up its weapons programs
  
• Created the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands (June 2006)

CONS

• Eight years of deficit spending
• Ill-advised invasion of a sovereign nation (Iraq)
• Poor execution of same invasion
• Deterioration of situation in Afghanistan due to abovementioned invasion
• Denial of, then long-delayed and inadequate response to global climate issues
• Politicization of patronage system to an unprecedented degree
  
• Politicization of federal science initiatives
• An alternately weak or underperforming economy (though there's plenty of blame to go around here)
• Hurricane Katrina
• 'willfully looked the other way as Mr. Putin ... throttled a free press, jailed political rivals and used Russia’s oil and gas riches to blackmail neighbors', while also needlessly antagonizing the Kremlin with plans for a missile defense system in central Europe and expansion of NATO to Russia's borders
• Failed to pursue further nuclear arms control agreements with Russia
  
• ...
  

Even if the Cons have it, could W. really be worse than, say, Richard Nixon? Herbert Hoover? Warren G. Harding? Consider this an assessment in progress...

F*** 'Em If They Can't Take a Joke

So now it's 'Islam-a-phobic' to satirize Islamophobia?

I know I'm a little late on this one, but that's because I was in denial: for a few days, I just didn't want to believe that, along with the abovementioned meta-confusion, the discussion of race in this country has become so impoverished that a reference to racism counts as racism. NY Governor David Paterson claims that the cover was 'one of the most malignant and vicious' he's ever (ahem) seen. Malignant and vicious to whom? Could anyone with even a passing familiarity with The New Yorker believe that the editors were trying to stoke anti-Obama rumor-mongering?

I'd better stop here before my ACLU trick knee starts jerking and kicks over that other tempest-in-a-teapot: flag lapel pins.

Life's Work

Maybe my first post should've been more along the lines of a throat-clearing, existence-justifying effort. Here, then, I make amends:

I hadn't really thought about blogging--despite the fact that gazillions of my friends and peers seem to be doing it--until I read this post by the sociologist Kieran Healy. Healy pokes a little fun at the pretensions of his peers who disdain blogging as a tenure track-derailing frivolity, then makes a forceful case for the importance of blogging for academics by reproducing an essay on journaling by C. Wright Mills and replacing every occurrence of the word 'journal' with 'blogs'. In doing so, he convincingly updates Mills' dictum to the scholar to unify 'life' and work. 'You must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it', Mills exhorts us. As an urbanist and political theorist (self-described), that's what I aim to do here, and that's why blogging is an imperative--whether the audience turns out to be one (i.e., lil' ol' me) or a thousand (although I could get closer to the latter by requiring my students to read and post--hmmm....).


So there you go: existence justified?

Sense and Sinsemilla

All this time I thought American drug policy was singularly fucked up. Having just read about the plight of sprinter John Capel, however, I am sad to say that we're not alone. This poor guy went from winning the 200m at the 2003 World Championships to taking a $30,000 job at a paving stone company in 2006; he'd twice tested positive for marijuana and subsequently received a two-year suspension from competition. For pot!!! The article doesn't mention whether it was the national or the international governing body that meted out the suspension, so maybe it's still just our benighted American attitude towards drugs. I'd love to know the history here--e.g., is this indicative of an international mentality that equates pot-smoking with the general 'doping' problem? Or is this an international policy that reflects American influence (or pressure)?

Also amusing is the uncritical acceptance of such policies on the part of the Times reporter, Lynn Zinser; she blithely reports the harsh consequences of Capel's marijuana 'habit', and emphasizes the hopeful arc of a repentant sinner on the comeback trail. But what possible good does it really do to punish a sprinter's penchant for weed? What possible competitive advantage could pot confer?

It would be worth digging into the rationale behind such policies (me, I've got other projects in the works). But I doubt that it's a sensible one.