Toxic

Music Commentary

As Britney Spears re-enters rehab, an EW senior writer reflects on the girl he met five years ago and the troubled woman we see today -- and remembers her imagining her own downfall

By Chris Nashawaty
EW.com

Five years ago, I drove to Lakeland, Fla., to meet Britney Spears. I bring this up because I've been thinking about that trip a lot lately. Specifically, what the hell happened to make the girl I met back then seem so bats--- insane now?

Lakeland wasn't much of a town then, and I suspect it's not much of one now. It was really just an endless archipelago of drive-thru fast-food joints, midway between the first-class kiddie glitz of Orlando's Disney World and the blandness of Tampa. But back then, in the late fall of 2001, Lakeland was the epicenter of a teenage youthquake. It's where boy bands like 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys worked out the kinks of their road shows before kicking off their world tours.

That's exactly what brought me face to face with the world's most famous 19-year-old. Britney had just released her third album and was about to kick off a grueling string of concerts. It was an awkward moment in her life, onstage and off. Up until then, Britney had masterfully finessed the weird dichotomy of being a wholesome teenager claiming she was saving herself for marriage, and a grown-up pop sex kitten. In fact, she'd just released the single ''I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,'' which seemed to sum up that moment in time to a T.

And that's exactly how I found her that day in Florida — a petite clusterbomb of mixed signals. Britney was a girl in pink sweats, wearing a plastic ring on her finger that opened up to reveal a cache of lip balm. And she was also a woman whose blue thong played peekaboo above the waistband of her pants, and who just a few months earlier did a bump-and-grind on TV with an albino python wrapped around her neck.

Now, aside from getting nostalgic for a time when Britney actually bothered to wear a thong (or underwear of any kind), I look back on that day as the innocent ''before'' picture to what's become a tabloid trainwreck. I have to confess, I was as riveted as anyone this past weekend watching the video footage of Britney buzzing off her locks. (Well, maybe not as riveted as Pat O'Brien, who introduced the footage twitching with the giddiness of a kid on Christmas freakin' morning.) But then, I suspect like a lot of you, I was also a bit creeped out. With her eyes still red from crying, Britney shaving her head didn't just seem like a cry for help; it felt like a bloodcurdling scream.

The pictures from the past few weeks of the 24-year-old mother of two caught flashing her south-of-the-border junk for the paparazzi, or entering and exiting rehab as if she were going through a revolving door (for the record, she just checked into an L.A. facility again today), or coming out of clubs at 4 a.m. covered in what looked like her own vomit, were bad enough. The fact she now makes her ex K-Fed look like the less trashy one is mindboggling.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but there's something about the whole hair-cutting episode that scares me and makes me queasy. It felt like I was watching Anna Nicole Smith in the days before her death raiding a fridge full of methadone and Slimfast. How did America's sweetheart turn into such a ticking time bomb?

On that day in Florida five years ago, I sat with Britney in her dressing room. There, on top of a giant TV and surrounded by candles, was a framed photo of her then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake. It was like a puppy-love shrine. Something as innocent as Joanie Loves Chachi. The lights in the dressing room were muted by draped pink scarves. The place smelled like vanilla. That day, Britney Spears was still very much a girl and not yet a woman.

After an hour or so, I asked her to imagine how her charmed life could go wrong. At the time, she had No. 1 records, fame, millions of dollars in the bank, and Justin. What would happen if, 10 years from now, they decided to make a VH1 Behind the Music episode about her? What would the detours and missteps have been? How would she have fallen from grace?

Britney looked at me like I was insane.

''Oh... my... God!''

After thinking it over for a minute, she unspooled the Britney crash-and-burn.

''First, the worst thing that could happen is if my boyfriend would break up with me. I would be totally devastated,'' she said. ''And then, after the depression, maybe I did some dorky movies that were just bombs. Then... I don't know, maybe I did another album that didn't do very well. And then, I went back to working at my granny's deli — back to rolling quarters and boiling crawfish and smelling like fish on my dates.''

Britney exhaled, then broke into a fit of giggles. It was the only unscripted moment of the interview. And when she was done with her worst-case-scenario repsonse, she gave me a look as if to say, ''That was fun!''

Well, it's not so fun anymore. Here we are, not even 10 but five years later. And everything, except for the deli part, has come to pass. And maybe in the long run, that's what it will take for Britney to get back on track: move away from the paparazzi glare of Los Angeles and back to Louisiana, rolling quarters and boiling crawfish, getting her s--- sorted out before it's too late.

Posted Feb 20, 2007

Putin's Moment To Seize

By David Ignatius
Washingtonpost.com, February 14, 2007

MOSCOW -- Vladimir Putin made headlines last weekend when he blasted the Bush administration for its "almost uncontained hyper-use of force" that has created a world where "no one feels safe." If he had been a Democratic presidential candidate, it would have been a standard stump speech. But coming from a Russian president, his remarks had pundits ruminating about a new Cold War.

I was in the audience in Munich when Putin made his speech, and the tone seemed to me more one of resentment than belligerence. He was proud, prickly, defiant -- a leader with all the Russian chips on his shoulder. You could hear his inner voice: We let you dismantle the Berlin Wall. We folded the Warsaw Pact. We dissolved the Soviet Union -- all on your promises that you wouldn't take advantage of our weakness. And what did we get? Nothing! You surrounded us with NATO weapons.

Putin's comments may be jarring to Americans, but they express a bitterness that's widespread here. His generation of Russians grew up in a country that claimed the status of "superpower," and they don't like being taken for granted. Putin, a former KGB officer with a black belt in judo, has been pugnacious in standing up for his country's interests, and Russians seem to like that. In the latest opinion polls, his popularity is well above 70 percent.

I met with one of Putin's top aides yesterday in a building that once housed the headquarters of the Soviet Communist Party. "We want to work together with you," he explained. "But please open your eyes. We will never accept that the sole power in the world will be the U.S."

Russia is back. That's the real lesson I take from Putin's blunt comments. A country that was near collapse after the fall of Soviet communism has regained enough confidence and stability to take a verbal shot at its old rival. "We are emerging from nothing," the Putin aide told me. To explain the Putin phenomenon, the Kremlin's chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, recently compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another president who brought his country back from economic disaster and restored its pride. Like FDR, Putin is using "presidential power to the maximum degree for the sake of overcoming the crisis," Surkov said.

Visiting here for the first time since 1990, I am struck by how everything in Russia is different, and everything is the same. Driving in from the airport, you see the familiar monument marking the farthest German advance in World War II -- a testament to the Red Army's fierce resistance to foreign invasion. And next to it is the Mega Mall with its huge Ikea showroom -- a foreign invasion that, in the end, proved unstoppable.

In Red Square, the somber stones of Lenin's tomb are a reminder of Soviet power. But across the way, in what used to be the drab GUM department store, are glittering displays of the latest fashions from Vuitton and Dior.

What hasn't changed is Russia's neurotic relationship with the West. Russian friends tell me the country feels unloved and unappreciated -- a political doormat that Western powers think they can walk on at will. That's the frustration that surfaced in Putin's speech in Munich.

By Russian standards, this is something of a golden age. Putin recently touted some of the country's achievements: Russian average incomes increased 10 percent in 2006 over the previous year; the economy grew by about 6.7 percent; inflation was in single digits for the first time in many years. Russia's currency reserves rose to $303 billion, the third-largest in the world, and its "stabilization fund" of energy profits was nearly $100 billion. All this in a nation that in 1998, on the eve of Putin's presidency, was essentially bankrupt.

The new Russia has a moment of opportunity. America, far from the "unipolar" superpower Putin describes, is weakened by the Iraq war and is badly in need of allies. If Putin is wise, he can play a pivotal role in resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis -- and thereby restore some of Russia's lost diplomatic clout. Or he can keep complaining that nobody appreciates his country -- and let his old rival struggle a while longer in the Iraq quagmire.

Was Putin's Munich manifesto an "invitation to dialogue," as one of his aides told me? Or was it a warning shot from a newly confident Russia that is rather enjoying America's troubles? If Putin wants to play a role in stabilizing the post-Iraq world, he is pushing on an open door. But does he have the vision and political will to seize the moment?

Jakarta Drifts

Indonesia's president talks reform but is struggling to make good on his promises.
By Joe Cochrane
Newsweek International

Feb. 19, 2007 issue - During his military career, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was known as "the thinking general" for his intellectual approach. One can only wonder what was going through his mind last week, when monsoons caused floods that submerged three quarters of Jakarta, killing 46 people and displacing some 420,000. It was a replay of a similar disaster in the capital five years ago—leading angry citizens to wonder why a single canal hadn't been dug nor dam built since then. Yudhoyono's rivals pounced on the opportunity to take potshots at the increasingly beleaguered leader. "Local [Muslim] preachers asked their congregations to [deal with the floods by] asking for forgiveness from God," said Azyumardi Azra, rector of the State Islamic University in Jakarta. But among the political elites, he continued, the disaster was seen as a sign that even nature has turned against Yudhoyono.

So it goes for Indonesia's president as he approaches the midway point of his five-year term next month. Long gone are the heady days of 2004, when his huge popularity allowed him to win the country's first-ever direct presidential election with a whopping 62 percent. Tall and confident, he promised to provide Indonesians with a firm but gentle hand and to root out its endemic corruption and nepotism. Two-and-a-half years later, however, his reform program seems dead in the water, and last week's floods only symbolized how little he's accomplished. Local commentators now accuse SBY, as the president is known, of pandering to his vice president, Jusuf Kalla, whose ruling Golkar Party gives him political muscle in Parliament. Critics also accuse the president of ignoring his own reform mandate and kowtowing to cabinet members, smaller parties in Parliament, hard-line Islamic groups and even his political rivals. To make matters worse, Jusuf Wanandi, chairman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, says Yudhoyono has developed the flaw of indecisiveness. "He's in angst if he has to decide," Wanandi says. "He talks nice, but it's tough to get him to decide anything."

As SBY waffles, his country is drifting. Last year Yudhoyono proved unable to push through much-needed tax, labor, civil service and other reforms. Indonesia is already paying the price: foreign direct investment, the key component of the president's job-creation strategy (more than 40 million of his constituents are unemployed), plummeted by 32 percent in 2006. The country possesses vast natural resources, but multinational corporations have grown wary of trying to exploit them due to the red tape and discrimination they are likely to face. During the 32-year regime of the dictator Suharto, foreign investors flocked to the country; despite the profound corruption, the rules of business were clear—grease the right palms and anything was possible. SBY's attempts to crack down on such practices have only paralyzed the country's bureaucracy. While he sends one message, meanwhile, other top officials send another.

The president has also failed to extend his writ outside Jakarta, thanks to a de-centralization process started in 1999 by President B.J. Habibie, which has empowered local players with their own agendas. "In Suharto's day, everybody knew the rules about payoffs and kickbacks," said one Western executive in Jakarta. The current situation, he said, "makes for uncertainty, and businesses don't like uncertainty."

Underscoring the problem, next month a court in North Sulawesi is expected to rule on an environmental suit brought against the U.S.-based Newmont Mining Corporation. The company's Indonesian unit is alleged to have dumped toxic substances from a gold mine into Buyat Bay, and its American president, Richard Ness, faces three years in prison. Prosecutors have accused Newmont of pillaging Indonesia's resources and despoiling its environment. Newmont, backed by the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, calls the charges a "hoax" orchestrated by figures in Sulawesi and Jakarta, who it says doctored evidence for political and monetary gain. There's something to this: prosecutors have produced little in the way of hard facts; an independent WHO study found no contamination in Buyat Bay; and at least one key government witness has already retracted her accusations. Yet the trial continues. Now in its second year, it is being viewed by other foreign businesses as a key test of SBY's claims to be investor-friendly. "Anything less than an acquittal is going to be seen as a disincentive" for foreign investment, says one U.S. official in Jakarta.

In Suharto's day, the whole affair might have ended with a quick phone call from the Presidential Palace. But Yudhoyono doesn't want to interfere in provincial matters. Other top officials aren't so squeamish, as shown by the difference between Newmont's harsh treatment and the kid-gloves handling of an Indonesian gas company accused of similar misdeeds. In May 2006, Lapindo Bratas hit an underground volcano while doing exploratory drilling in Sidoarjo, East Java. The result was one of the country's worst environmental disasters: a mud-flow that inundated more than 4.5 square kilometers of land and displaced 25,000 people. The police have named 13 Lapindo officials as suspects, but nine months on, none have been arrested (despite the fact that two American, one Australian and three Indonesian Newmont executives were jailed).

The difference between these two cases? Lapindo is owned by the family of Aburizal Bakrie, a wealthy business tycoon who is now minister of people's welfare and a leader of the Golkar Party. He has insisted that the mudflow was a "natural disaster" triggered by an earthquake, and so far his boss, the president, has kept mum about Bakrie's involvement in the case. Critics in Indonesia speculate that this is mainly because SBY needs Bakrie and his Golkar Party's support if he is to have any hopes of pushing the country toward reform. At Yudhoyono's insistence, Lapindo did agree to pay $420 million in compensation to affected persons and businesses. But it remains to be seen whether any of its officials end up in court. Colonel Rusli Nasution, head of the East Java provincial police's investigation team, told NEWSWEEK that the investigation was concluded last year but state prosecutors returned the case file to police because it was incomplete. "The prosecutors told the police to get more information on the role of each suspect and information from experts," he said.

Back in Jakarta, SBY faces more problems. Local media have jumped on rumors of a planned coup by retired generals. The alleged plotters deny the allegations, and analysts say the idea of toppling of a man who recently won a landslide election is unthinkable. But if Western investors start fleeing the country, new jobs will not materialize, and SBY's grasp on power—and chances of re-election in 2009—could continue to slip.

What makes an astronaut crack?

NASA has too many of them for just a few missions a year, resulting in fierce competition among overachievers to get on a flight.
By Homer Hickam, HOMER HICKAM is the author of "Rocket Boys/October Sky," "The Keeper's Son" and many other books.
LA Times, February 9, 2007

AS A FORMER NASA astronaut training manager responsible for crew training for shuttle missions, I was not entirely surprised by the initial reports of the sad, bizarre case of Lisa Marie Nowak.

This isn't the first case of astronauts having difficulties in their personal lives. Usually, the straying astronaut simply resigns or retires, and everything is hushed up. But being charged with assault, attempted kidnapping and attempted murder is far greater than anything I ever observed or imagined could occur. Perhaps this tragedy will bring some of the agency's long-ignored problems into the open.

First is the tremendous and unnecessary pressures brought to bear on the members of NASA's cloistered astronaut office. This is the division at the Johnson Space Center in Houston where the astronauts work. It is the office that assigns each astronaut his or her job. Since most astronauts are waiting to be put on a mission, these jobs — such as working on the shuttle hydraulic system or sitting in on meetings about a new science payload — are important, but they're usually no more difficult than the ones accomplished routinely by other NASA engineers and scientists. The difference is the astronauts come under constant scrutiny by their management to determine who will fly and who will not. Some never get assigned to a space mission, yet they are called astronauts as long as they work for NASA.

Nowak was hired as an astronaut in 1996. It was a decade before she flew into space. During that time, she was passed over again and again. Somewhere along the line during those disappointing years, I think she became brittle. She finally flew, landed and then was sent to the back of the astronaut line again. My guess is that her personal life started to become unglued from the accumulated strain, and she finally cracked.

But why did Nowak have to endure 10 years of scrutiny and constant competition with her fellow astronauts before she got to fly? The fact is, there are too many astronauts (more than 125) and not enough opportunities to fly. The NASA inspector general said the same thing in a 2003 report. Yet the astronaut office hired 11 more astronauts in 2004. Last year, the shuttle flew three times, carrying just seven astronauts per flight. Its replacement vehicle, which is under design now, will carry at most six astronauts.

Does it make sense to have this many overachievers all walking on eggs, vying for such a limited number of slots? Only in a dysfunctional bureaucracy like NASA's astronaut office, which keeps hiring more astronauts than it needs.

As a training manager, I was aware that many astronauts felt as if they were powerless, stressed-out peons within their own organization. I observed their daily competition with one another to get a seat into space. In many cases, this trial by fire changed enthusiastic young astronauts into bureaucratic combatants with warped personalities and shaken confidence.

For a long time, I also have been aware of the corrosive resentment many NASA engineers and scientists feel toward the astronauts. The astronauts have a sense of entitlement, and what they want, they get, or so it seems. For instance, I was in a meeting once in which an astronaut who only had a few years of NASA experience constantly interrupted and belittled a 20-year space engineering veteran. That's the kind of thing that fuels discontent.

My suggestion to lessen the pressure on the astronauts and also to decrease the resentment others in the agency feel toward them is to reorganize their office, first by shrinking it. There are two types of astronauts — pilots and mission specialists. The latter are more or less like flight engineers who are generalists. They operate robotics, perform experiments and go on spacewalks. They make up the bulk of the astronaut corps, and we just don't need so many. They should be offered other jobs within the agency. There would remain just a small, core group confident that they will fly.

The remaining seats on shuttle flights should then be opened up to the top tier of space scientists and engineers in the country from outside NASA. Right now, the only Americans allowed to fly aboard our spacecraft are the employees of the astronaut office, who live in a closed community with little outside influence. That is just not right, nor is it healthy.

To bring in the best of the best from outside the agency to fly would not only result in better science and engineering, it would also inject a constant stream of fresh air into a program that, as the Nowak tragedy reveals, is very much in need of it.

Under Bush’s Pillow

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Op-Ed Columnist
February 4, 2007


Dick Cheney as Lord Voldemort?

A reader named Melissa S. e-mailed to say that she explains Iraq policy to her 8-year-old son in terms of Harry Potter characters: “Dick Cheney is Lord Voldemort. George W. Bush is Peter Pettigrew.” Don Rumsfeld is Lucius Malfoy, while Cornelius Fudge represents administration supporters who deny that anything is wrong. And, she concludes, “Daily Prophet reporter Rita Skeeter is Fox News.”

That was one of the 400 comments from readers offering literary or historical parallels to the Bush administration and Iraq. One of the most commonly cited was Xenophon’s ancient warning, in “Anabasis,” of how much easier it is to get into a Middle Eastern war than out.

As a reader named John H. summarized “Anabasis”: “Ten thousand Greek mercenaries march from Greece to Iran to effect regime change (unseat one emperor and establish his younger brother). They win the first few battles (cakewalk, mission accomplished) but then the younger brother is killed.”

So the invaders found themselves without an effective prime minister to hand power to, yet they were stuck deep inside enemy territory. Xenophon’s subtext is how the slog of war corrodes soldiers and allows them to do terrible things. Xenophon is particularly pained when recounting a massacre that was the Haditha of its day.

The readers who sent in comments were responding to a column I wrote last month arguing that President Bush is inadvertently a fine education president, because he breathes new life into the classics. Thucydides’ account of the failed “surge” in the Sicilian expedition 2,400 years ago is newly relevant, and “Moby Dick” is interesting reading today as a bracing warning of the dangers of an obsessive adventure that casts aside all rules. (You can submit your own favorite literary or historical parallel at nytimes.com/ontheground.)

Perhaps I’m cherry-picking from the classics to support my own opposition to a “surge” in Iraq. In writing this column, I wondered what classics Mr. Bush’s supporters would cite to argue for his strategy. Shakespeare’s “Henry V”? “Hamlet”?

Yet frankly, it’s difficult to find great literature that encourages rulers to invade foreign lands, to escalate when battles go badly, to scorn critics, to be cocksure of themselves in the face of adversity. The themes of the classics tend to be the opposite.

Literature and history invariably counsel doubt and skepticism — even when you think you see Desdemona’s infidelity with your own eyes, you don’t; even when your advisers are telling you “it’s a slam-dunk,” it’s not. The classics have an overwhelmingly cautionary bias, operating as a check on any impulsive rush to war.

Perhaps that is because, as Foreign Policy argues in its most recent issue, humans have an ingrained psychological tilt to hawkishness. In many ways, the authors note, human decision-making tends to err in ways that magnify conflict and make it difficult to climb down from confrontation.

My hunch is that the classics resonate in part because they are an antidote to that human frailty; literature has generated so many warnings about hubris in part to save us from ourselves.

Eastern classics have that same purpose of trying to tame and restrain us. The central theme of Chinese philosophy is the need for moderation, and Sun Tzu’s famous “Art of War” advises generals on how to win without fighting. (Sun Tzu and Julius Caesar alike also appreciated the diplomatic benefits of treating enemy prisoners well; they would be appalled by Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.)

So Mr. Bush should resolve that for every hour he spends with Mr. Cheney, he will spend another curled up with classical authors like Sophocles. “Antigone,” for example, tells of King Creon, a good man who wants the best for his people — and yet ignores public opinion, refuses to admit error, goes double or nothing with his bets, and is slow to adapt to changing circumstance.

Creon’s son pleads with his father to be less rigid. The trees that bend survive the seasons, he notes, while those that are inflexible are blown over and destroyed.

Americans today yearn for the same kind of wise leadership that the ancient Greeks did: someone with the wisdom to adjust course, to acknowledge error, to listen to critics, to show compassion as well as strength, to discern moral nuance as well as moral clarity. Alexander the Great used to sleep with the “Iliad” under his pillow; maybe Mr. Bush should try “Antigone.”

Oh, and for Mrs. Bush? How about Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata”?