You'll Prefer Reading About Ebola Nurses Over Reading Maureen Dowd In The Sunday NY Times

We're still getting used to bringing you this New York Times roundup on Sundays, so bear with us. It's a nice break from "Sundays With the Christianists" (which will be back at some point -- there's no shortage of material), but we're still adjusting to writing about reality, as brought to you mostly by "reporters" instead of the fanciful Goddiddit tropes of our previous Sunday reading. Happily, for the fantasy element, we still have the columnists.

On the news side, the Grey Lady brings us a timeline of the 4 1/2 hours that Michael Brown's body lay in the August heat after he was shot, with reporting from both Ferguson, Missouri, and also from places that have competent police and emergency services. You will not be terribly surprised to find points like this:

Experts in policing said there was no standard for how long a body should remain at a scene, but they expressed surprise at how Mr. Brown’s body had been allowed to remain in public view.

You will also not be surprised, but will slap your forehead nonetheless, at this typical spin from St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, who explained that leaving Brown's body in road for four hours allowed detectives to do the meticulous investigating that Brown, and Justice Itself, deserved: “Michael Brown had one more voice after that shooting, and his voice was the detectives’ being able to do a comprehensive job,” said the guy who made sure that reporters were given a detailed report on a convenience store robbery a full week before the department released a bare-bones copy of the "report" on Brown's shooting. And your non-astonishment will reach new levels at the note that "The St. Louis County police declined to give details about what evidence investigators had been gathering while Mr. Brown’s body was in the street." Even with all that derp on the Ferguson side of things, it's worth a read, especially if you're into the Mary Roach style "how they do stuff" side of police investigations. It's good to know that a lot of police departments actually are competent, as long as you're not in St. Louis County, Missouri.

There's also a piece on the Obama administration's just-announced review of the policy of arming police departments as if they were Seal Team Six, on the off chance that the West Podunk PD may need to deal with IEDs. Here's your "Yeah, maybe that wasn't such a great idea" pull quote:

In Washington, the only debates were whether the George W. Bush administration was providing equipment fast enough, and whether departments were getting their fair shares.

Nevertheless, the article also notes that "any effort to significantly cut police funding would be met with sharp opposition from local and state officials and many in Congress" -- the money and the toys are really, REALLY popular among the departments that love having the chance to crank up "Ride of the Valkyries" as they go out to serve drug warrants and shoot somebody's dog.

If we had a Pick of the Day (hey, should we have a Pick of the Day?), it would be this surprisingly uplifting story about nurses and volunteers fighting Ebola in Africa, focusing mostly on Josephine Finda Sellu, the head nurse in the Ebola ward at a government hospital in Sierra Leone. It's heartbreaking -- she's lost 15 of her nurses to the disease -- but also a genuinely affecting portrait of some seriously brave people who kept doing their jobs even as they struggled in an already inadequate medical system against a disease that was killing their co-workers. So far, at least 129 health workers have died in the epidemic; the good news is that as international aid has started coming in, containment measures have improved and the number of new patients seems, at least to Ms. Sellu, to be declining. Also featured in the story is a group of young men who have come forward -- often working without pay at first, but now getting a whopping $6 a day -- to take on the dangerous job of recovering and burying the dead. The call themselves the "burial boys":

</p> <p>Please remember these health care workers if you ever hear someone lamenting the lack of real heroes in today's fallen age. And if you find it useful in shaming <a href="https: //wonkette.substack.com/p/congressional-candidate-will-protect-arizona-from-ebola-ridden-immigrant-kids-sharknados" target="_blank">paranoid fearmongers</a> who think we should just let 'em all die, that's good, too. </p><p>NYT's reporting partnership with the <em>Texas Tribune</em> brings us a story about the plague of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/us/thousands-in-texas-lose-cars-amid-calls-for-loan-restrictions.html?ref=us" target="_blank">automobile title loans</a> that have resulted in thousands of Texans losing their vehicles in the high-interest schemes that prey on poor people with no other credit or collateral. Did we say "prey upon"? Surely we must have meant "provide a needed service to people who may not have other options," according to the scummy people in the industry who are just there to help. </p><p>On to Lifestyle! We still can't bring ourselves to read about real estate, but we were at least distracted by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/fashion/living-with-parents-is-the-norm-overseas.html?ref=fashion" target="_blank">this essay</a> about how modern and convenient it is to live with your aging parents and an older brother. We guess multigenerational living is the next hip thing, and so very European! Of course, we also get a good dose of angst over the writer's uncertainty about whether she's "warned" dinner guests that her octogenarian parents may stop in, or that her older brother might arrive home from work and "walk through the door any minute with a six-pack." Talk about embarrassing! </p><p/><blockquote>I don’t want my guests to squirm the way they do in old episodes of “The Addams Family,” when Lurch answers the door with Uncle Fester close behind. <p>“We live with my parents and older brother!” I normally blurt out to new visitors before they have even taken off their coats. “I’ll explain over drinks,” I usually say before ushering them in and pouring myself the strongest one of all.</p></blockquote> <p>Calm down there, brave pioneer. You're having a First-World moment. Go read about the Ebola nurses for some perspective. </p><p>Also in Lifestyle, we learn that tech millionaires are busy <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/fashion/at-burning-man-the-tech-elite-one-up-one-another.html?ref=fashion&_r=0" target="_blank">ruining Burning Man</a> too, showing up at Black Rock City with increasingly elaborate accommodations, including prefab air-conditioned yurts and of course their personal chefs. It was probably inevitable for something so trendy: Burning Man has a gentrification problem. </p><p><a href="https://assets.rbl.ms/17683363/origin.jpg"><img id="701ac" data-rm-shortcode-id="c54c8930565326a1deb78d1ea92e566b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" class="rm-shortcode " loading="lazy" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xNzY4MzM2My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTczNzcwMTc5NH0.1uFFNtfzwrX5QvXLO4Xb2OM4sSw64BGVpKStIP58iws/img.jpg?width=980" /></a> </p><p>And now, on to the columnists. This is where you may want to switch from coffee to straight bourbon. Especially because <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/thomas-l-friedman-order-vs-disorder-part-3.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss" target="_blank">Thomas Friedman </a>is back. But what's this? The column is titled "Order vs. Disorder, Part 3" -- which means that since we haven't seen Parts 1 and 2 and our Netflix queue is really backed up, maybe we'll just skip the whole trilogy? We are informed this would not be allowed, so maybe just a peek... </p><p/><blockquote>The United States is swamped by refugee children from collapsing Central American countries; efforts to contain the major Ebola outbreak in West Africa are straining governments there; jihadists have carved out a bloodthirsty caliphate inside Iraq and Syria; after having already eaten Crimea, Russia keeps taking more bites out of Ukraine; and the U.N.’s refugee agency just announced that “the number of refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post-World War II era, exceeded 50 million people.” If it feels as though the world of disorder is expanding against the world of order, it’s not your imagination. There’s an unfortunate logic to it.</blockquote> <p>Oh, shit, and he says that "Three big trends are converging," and that can only bring madness. What are they, Mr. Flatworld? Ah. 1: There are a lot of people who are "un-free" in that they have achieved a certain amount of political or economic security but "don't have the kind of freedom that matters most," -- Christ, and then there's a FURTHER division of the world into "three kinds of spaces..." in terms of how much order or disorder they have, and how many trend-spotters can dance on the head of a pin. The second Big Trend is that the institutions and nations and structures that actually do promote order are really weak just now, and the third trend is that America, the most order-bringing force in the world traditionally, because it sounds good to say so, is in a real fix because our own politics are gridlocked, and where oh where are the alliances that could help us work together and oh dear god Thomas Friedman you are not entirely wrong but your desire to turn the world into a flow chart creates a trend toward gastric distress. We are finished with you. </p><p>Frank Bruni has a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-black-white-and-baseball.html?ref=opinion" target="_blank">perfectly pleasant piece</a> about the awesome Little League pitcher, Mo’ne Davis, who is a rare bit of awesome in a news environment full of ISIS and Ferguson and generally terrible badness. She's terrific, Bruni's column is inoffensive and hopeful, and Mo’ne's coach, Steve Bandura, seems quite nice too -- it's one of those not-just-a-coach-but-also-a-mentor stories that you can take or leave, and we have little doubt that the movie adaptation will have soaring music. </p><p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-isis-in-the-21st-century.html?ref=opinion" target="_blank">Ross Douthat</a> is in one of his "big picture" moods, and even manages an insight or two, in his column rejecting the rhetoric that groups like ISIS are anachronistic throwbacks that will inevitably end up failing because they are out of step with the winds of history. Barack Obama said last week that "One thing we can all agree on" is that the group's oppressive, totalitarian agenda has “no place in the 21st century.” Douthat isn't quite so sure, noting that lots of backward-looking political movements have combined their reactionary ideologies with very modern messages in the hope of defeating liberal democracy --- just look at 20th century fascism, he says, which appealed to "mythic Roman and Teutonic pasts" but also embraced </p><p/><blockquote>a vision of efficiency, technology and development, one that helped persuade many Europeans (and some Americans) that Mussolini and then even Hitler stood at history’s vanguard, that the future was being forged in Rome and Berlin.</blockquote> <p>Douthat makes a pretty good point about the problem with the term "Islamofascism" -- sure to crop up again now that ISIS is big news: it was </p><p/><blockquote>imprecise because it gave groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS too much credit: They may know how to use the Internet to propagandize, but they otherwise lack even a hint of the reactionary futurism, the marriage of romanticism to industrial efficiency, that made the original fascism appealing to so many. </blockquote> <p>And so here's a fine thing -- Ross Douthat, eager as ever to show off his erudition, actually uses his historical precedent management skills to end up not that far away from Barack Obama, who of course oversimplifies about ISIS being out of step with modernity, but not as wrong as he usually is. From Douthat, that's pretty close to adulation. </p><p>And finally, there's the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-the-golf-address.html?ref=opinion" target="_blank">steaming heap of dreck </a>that is Maureen Dowd's HI-LARIOUS mashup of the Gettysburg address, with an imagined monologue by -- get this! -- Barack Obama defending his fondness for golf! Truly, it is the most damning habit that any president ever had, even though Obama will <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/aug/23/who-took-more-vacation-george-w-bush-or-barack-oba/" target="_blank">never ever catch up with Dwight Eisenhower </a>in terms of rounds played in office (Obama 186 as of August 12, Ike 800 rounds in 8 years -- and Woodrow Wilson managed 1200 rounds in his presidency, which included a World War). But Eisenhower was a war hero, so shut up. </p><p>MoDo's piece reads exactly like something a clever collegiate newspaper might print, plopping golf jokes into the framework of the Gettysburg Address (haw haw, and golfers even <em>address</em> the ball, get it?), Here's the first paragraph, and you can pretty much imagine the rest: </p><p/><blockquote>FORE! Score? And seven trillion rounds ago, our forecaddies brought forth on this continent a new playground, conceived by Robert Trent Jones, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal when it comes to spending as much time on the links as possible — even when it seems totally inappropriate, like moments after making a solemn statement condemning the grisly murder of a 40-year-old American journalist beheaded by ISIL.</blockquote> <p>We almost get the sense that at this point, Barry Bamz has just given up trying to avoid "offending" people with the golf stuff -- even if he hadn't golfed after that speech, the golf jokes would be out there, so what the hell, may as well give the assholes something to whine about. And Dowd manages it for 18 excruciating paragraphs, right down to the inevitable closing: </p><p/><blockquote>this nation, under par, shall have a new birth of freedom to play the game that I have become unnaturally obsessed with, and that golf of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. <p>So help me Golf.</p></blockquote> <p>There's not much we can say to top <a href="https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status/503545816494391296" target="_blank">this tweet</a> from Salon writer Simon Maloy, so we'll give him the last word: </p><p><a href="https://assets.rbl.ms/17683364/origin.jpg"><img id="cd759" data-rm-shortcode-id="5b51eb010ecd40f0fb73c21b4a3adc0c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" class="rm-shortcode " loading="lazy" src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xNzY4MzM2NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTcxNTU3NDgyOX0.yMH3OFi09jvktopVrl6MfXblRgWKoIuA_-JBGGOX1tY/img.jpg?width=980" /></a> </p>