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Times Watch for 03/12/03
Toying With Anti-Ashcroft Paranoia
Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath wrote about the annual Toy Fair for the Times Sunday magazine. Surveying this year's hot toy hopefuls, McGrath happened upon a doll called Rude Tunes Taz that makes, well, rude noises with its armpit. Also on display: wireless teddy bears, ultra-diva Barbie dolls and spy gear for kids. That last item caused McGrath to take his toy story on a detour into the crowded liberal playground of John Ashcroft-bashing.
McGrath reported one company was hawking "a gizmo that looks like a portable CD player with earphones but is actually a listening device that can pick up conversations from the other end of the lunchroom."
What most kids, and people who were once kids, were thinking: Cool! (The company is called Wild Planet, by the way.)
What Charles McGrath was thinking: Latent McCarthyism!
"It's tempting to blame John Ashcroft, who apparently has no trouble with the idea of domestic surveillance, for our new interest in local and familial snooping," McGarth wrote. "But in truth it predates him."
"Tempting" for liberal paranoids, perhaps.
McGrath continued: "Had it been available, the [spy] stuff would have sold like crazy during the McCarthy era. You could argue, in fact, that the toys, and the habit of suspicion, came first. A country where parents and children want to play at investigating one another is a country that was bound, sooner or later, to wind up with a John Ashcroft."
Rightist's Inauguration Leads To Czech Suicide
Reporter Peter Green wrote on the suicide of high school student Zdenek Adamec, who set himself on fire on a Prague street. Green quoted large swathes of Adamec's confused suicide note that were critical of economic and social conditions in the Czech Republic. (Adamec was also being investigated by the police for ties to computer hackers who were disrupting power lines and blacking out neighborhoods.)
In a bizarre side note, Green wrote: "Coincidentally or not, Mr. Adamec killed himself the day before the inauguration of the country's new president, Vaclav Klaus, a rightist former prime minister whom many Czechs see as the embodiment of the triumph of money and consumerism over the humanist idealism of his predecessor, Vaclav Havel." See what happens when you vote those right-wingers into office?
Why would the Times bring President Klaus into this? Adamec's online suicide note didn't even mention the president. Here's one clue: Klaus is, as the Cato Institute's Marian Tupy noted, "an unabashed free-marketer" and an admirer of Milton Friedman. It appears that the Times simply used the suicide as a pretext to bash the new Czech president, who, "coincidentally or not," is conservative.