This week’s roundup of quality journalism for your enjoyment:

• As it’s already got the chattering class talking, you should check out the lengthy profile of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the forthcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine.
• Speaking of profiles of political figures, New York has a long piece on the political fortunes of Liz Cheney.
• Is Fox News a part of the GOP or has it just mastered the medium of cable news? Terry McDermott argues the latter in the latest Columbia Journalism Review.
• Did Tim Geithner get it right with the bank bailout? Maybe, says John Cassidy in The New Yorker.
• Can one pill cure alcoholism? Nate Penn tries to find out in GQ.
• I dare you to read this Oxford American piece on southern food invading Los Angeles while hungry. You’ll be out the door in search of some mac and cheese in no time.

As a new add-on to this feature, here’s the Song of the Week. NYC is getting its first taste of spring, so here’s a sunny tune from California band, Dawes. Enjoy “Love is All I Am”:

Today’s Los Angeles Times has a big piece about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s expansion into political organizing:

The new grass-roots program, the brainchild of chamber political director Bill Miller, is concentrating on 22 states. Among them are Colorado, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is vulnerable; Arkansas, where Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln faces an uphill reelection battle; and Ohio, where the chamber sees opportunities in numerous House races and an open Senate seat.

The network, called Friends of the U.S. Chamber, has been used to generate more than a million letters and e-mails to members of Congress, 700,000 of them in opposition to the Democratic healthcare plan. That is an increase from 40,000 congressional contacts generated in 2008.

What makes the initiative possible is a swelling tide of money. The chamber spent more than $144 million on lobbying and grass-roots organizing last year, a 60% increase over 2008, and well beyond the spending of individual labor unions or the Democratic or Republican national committees.

The chamber is expected to substantially exceed that spending level in 2010.

I understand the First Amendment arguments that previous rulings restricted the ability of corporations to exercise their right to free speech, but I’m not convinced. From a post Kevin Drum wrote shortly after the decision:

I’m just enough of a First Amendment fundamentalist to believe that there are plausible arguments for allowing corporations to make political contributions; just enough of a realist to think that it might not make as much difference as a lot of people think; and just enough of a cynic to think that corporations might not be as eager to spend huge pots of political money in plain view of their customers as you might suppose. On the other hand, I’m not credulous enough to think that modern multinational corporations are mere voluntary assemblies of concerned citizens who deserve to be treated the same way as the local PTA. The world is what it is, and in a practical sense corporations have such enormous power that it would be foolhardy in the extreme to think that we can just blindly provide them with the same rights as individuals and then let the chips fall where they may.

Kevin should have been more cynical because if the Times article is correct, those corporations won’t be spending in plain view of, well, anyone:

Using trade associations such as the chamber as the vehicle for spending corporate money on politics has an extra appeal: These groups can take large contributions from companies and wealthy individuals in ways that will probably avoid public disclosure requirements.

The chamber has developed that into something of a specialty: Under a system pioneered by Donohue, corporations have contributed money to the chamber, which then produced issue ads targeting individual candidates without revealing the names of the businesses underwriting the ads.

So now we have a situation under which virtually unlimited amounts of cash can pour into the Chamber – whose political action committee spent 86% of its advertising budget during the 2008 election to support Republican candidates – from corporations with minimal disclosure guidelines. And this is good for open democracy how?

When I was in graduate school, several of my classmates believed that, in order to be a good writer, you had to “kill your darlings.” In the parlance of journalists, this means being willing to part with that exquisite turn of phrase or perfectly chosen word in the service of making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The concept of killing your darlings apparently morphed out of a passage from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1916 work, On the Art of Writing:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

I found myself thinking about that idea when I serendipitously came upon one of my favorite pieces by the gone, but not soon to be forgotten David Foster Wallace, on the site of protean blogger Andrew Sullivan last night. In the post, entitled “A Different Kind of Freedom,” Sullivan provides an excerpt of the graduation address Wallace delivered to the students at Kenyon College in 2005. It’s a wonderful piece of oratory that got me thinking about killing my darlings in a entirely different light. Like most people, I can live with – after a time – cutting words from a page. But I’m talking about the personal darlings: the things we want to desperately believe about ourselves, the things we want to be true, even when we know they’re not. I wonder how we live with ourselves when we have to kill those darlings.

I’m a social person and wonder why I want to be a writer. It’s among the most isolating professions, if not the most isolating. Certainly, a journalist has to engage with the world, observe it, and participate in it, but much of a writer’s work lies not in putting the metaphorical or literal pen to paper; rather, it comes through the thought process that leads to what one hopes is a cogent and convincing arrangement of words and ideas that may express some point of view in a visceral way or illuminate a great truth, previously undiscovered. But thinking is, largely, a solitary endeavor.

So, as I said, I often find myself thinking about why I want to write and inside those thoughts lay my darlings, snarling like a pack of rabid dogs. They gnaw and claw at me constantly.

Sometimes I think want to be rich, but what I really want is to live a comfortable life. I’m not sure what that means, but I know its one of my darlings. I think I had a comfortable life once, or at least an approximation of it. Prior to moving to New York, I had a respectable job working in non-profit management at a major, private university. The hours were agreeable. The pay was adequate. I could take a nice vacation here and there, buy a round or two at the bar, or indulge my music fetish with unnecessary downloads from the iTunes store. I liked it but don’t know if I loved it. It was safe. What I’m doing now is not. Wallace:

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

It is hard to keep that truth in your face in city that sells aspiration like a commodity. In the main, aspiration is admirable. Humans are, by nature, aspirational creatures. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to move up from your starting station in life. That notion is, in fact, what we call the American Dream (TM). It’s why our parents scrimp and save and defer their own happiness so that we, as their children, may know a life that’s just a little better than the one they’ve know. My parents did that for me and I’m sure the same could be said of many of you who will read this. I am grateful for their sacrifice, though I don’t always show it or even seem to accept it. Being out of work in one of the richest cities on the planet can do awful things to your self worth if you let it. I see myself falling prey to a well-known trap – tying my value to the amount of money in a bank account – and I don’t know how to stop it. I know I don’t want to live with the persistent fear of bouncing a check or being unable to save for my retirement because I didn’t have enough good ideas to pitch in a given month. Does wanting to make a lot of money make me a bad person or merely a person who might not be doing the thing he’s best suited for? I don’t know. Wallace again:

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Do you consider yourself to be a good person? I know that I’d like to think that I am. However, I also know I’ve done things I’m not proud of, things that make me cringe when I even start to consider them. For example, try remembering the first time you convinced yourself that it was ok to be less than truthful to a person you cared about. If you’ve never done that, consider yourself a saint. For the rest of us, though, how did it make you feel? Were you taken aback by the ease of your mendacity…or were you seduced by the feeling and thrill of it? Do you even know why did you did it? Was it for expediency’s sake? Perhaps it was borne out of a momentary fit of pique? Maybe fear was the motivator? Whatever the reason, if you consider yourself a good person, you weren’t when you committed that act (or any similar subsequent acts). You let yourself down and in the end, that’s all you have.

Failing to be your best self inevitably leads to regret, which, sad to say, is a darling of mine. It seems an odd thing to hold on to for regret is perhaps the most crushing feeling there is because it comes with a sense of ownership. At some juncture, you were at least partially in control of the circumstances that led to the regrettable state. Regret sticks with us because it also creates a false sense of powerlessness. We reconstruct memories in ways that make us less culpable for our actions. We allow ourselves to think we’re at the mercy of others or circumstances rather than realize the active role we play in making our lives what we want them to be. I do this constantly and then wonder why things don’t look the way I want them to. In the wake of those delusional waves, we ask for forgiveness and absolution. Our deities grant these things by way of simple prayer or act of penance; people, however, are less charitable. You may not deserve to be forgiven or absovled (or if you are deserving, it may not happen when you want it to). Whispers heard by God are often shouts of desperation that fall on deaf ears in the realm of men.

The key for killing my darling of regret, then, is to focus on those things that Foster mentions: attention, awareness, discipline and caring and sacrificing for others. All of these things can be accomplished by getting out of your own way, which is probably one of the most important things you can ever learn. You can’t always pick yourself up, but you can pick up someone else. You can’t always make amends, but you can resolve to never make the same mistakes again (or at least learn from previous mistakes). Every day offers an opportunity to kill a darling. It’s painful. It makes you realize how far you have to go to be better than what you currently are. But it’s the only way you’ll get to where you need to be.

Former Air Force chief of staff Merrill McPeak has a long op-ed in today’s New York Times arguing for the continuation of the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. In the piece, McPeak advances three arguments for why DADT should be left in place:

First, they say, many otherwise proficient servicemen and women are tossed out only because of an inability or unwillingness to stay closeted. As the services keep track of what it costs to train somebody in a specific skill, the price tag, we are told, can be calculated simply by multiplying the number of service members ejected by the cost of training a replacement.

But this is the wrong way to reckon cost. Each service maintains a multibillion-dollar training system: bases, classrooms, instructors and so forth. This is necessary because of the substantial turnover as service members return to civilian life. The size and cost of the training system is influenced over time by economic factors like pay and benefits or employment opportunities in the civilian sector. In recent years the services have been able to make sizable cuts in training infrastructure because of better retention in an all-volunteer, more professional force.

Nonetheless, these large-scale factors swamp the question of marginal training cost. In the early 1990s, as we thought through the implications of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” I worked out the numbers for the Air Force. During the previous decade, we’d put about 800,000 people through basic and advanced training programs, at a cost of about $30 billion. The money we expended on training 3,000 people who were eventually removed on account of homosexuality was minuscule by comparison. (During the same decade, we forced out 15 times as many people for failure to meet Air Force weight standards, with no one objecting to the cost.)

I find this to be totally unconvincing because it seems focused on the bottom line cost as opposed to value added after the fact. The military would seem to come out ahead if it retains an Arabic translator – who just happens to be gay – when its fighting a war in an Arabic country than it would have by cutting that same solider loose based on his sexual orientation. I’d call that money well spent as opposed to a “minuscule” expense in the training budget. I also find the comparison about the military expelling overweight soldiers specious; being in top physical condition is something we expect of troops in theater as it directly relates to their fighting ability. However, being gay doesn’t make one a less effective translator.

Moving on:

The second major argument for allowing openly gay service is that it’s a matter of civil rights, akin to racial integration. This view must rest on the notion that serving in the armed forces is a job like any other, and therefore civilian anti-discrimination laws should apply. While it may seem hopelessly idealistic, my view is that serving in uniform amounts to a calling, different in many ways from other jobs. (One of the ways is that your employer can order you to risk your life.)

But let’s limit ourselves to practical considerations. The services exclude, without challenge, many categories of prospective entrants. People cannot serve in uniform if they are too old or too young, too fat or too thin, too tall or too short, disabled, not sufficiently educated and so on. This, too, might be illegal in the civil sector. So why should exclusion of gay people rise to the status of a civil-rights issue, when denying entry to, say, unmarried individuals with sole custody of dependents under 18, does not?

Besides resting on another lazy set of comparisons (does McPeak not understand why we as a society might want a single parent to stay at home with their children?), he goes on to say that the main reason he opposes the civil rights argument is because it requires the leadership of the various service branches to embrace the changes so they can lead in a more effective way. We can wait forever for the brass to get over their uncomfortable feelings about the policy, but there’s a chain of command and the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all embrace the idea of repealing DADT. If McPeak is a believer in the importance of the chain of command, the other heads need to fall in line, regardless of how uncomfortable it might make them.

The final argument also happens to be the most risible:

Last, and most frequently heard, is the seemingly businesslike argument that what’s important is an individual’s performance. Hundreds of service members are mustered out annually for failing to stay closeted, regardless of job performance. Indeed, we seem to have here an odd exception to the American idea that people should be judged by their actions rather than their makeup.

But it would be a serious mistake to imagine that personal performance is what matters in combat. Combat is not a contest between individuals, like poker or tennis; it is a team event whose success depends on group cooperation and morale. So the behavior that concerns us is not individual achievement but the social dynamics of relationships and groups. The issue is whether and how the presence of openly declared homosexuals in the ranks affects the solidarity of the unit.

In study after study and in country after country, there’s been virtually no evidence that unit cohesion has been affected by letting gays serve openly with their fellow brothers and sister in arms. It’s a lazy argument unsupported by even the most basic set of empirical data.

I wonder what possessed the Times to run this piece. I can only hope they let McPeak air his views to prove that opponents of keeping Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in place really have no leg to stand on.

Here, a reintroduction to a feature that had fallen by the wayside a bit:

• It’s a few weeks old at this point, but I doubt you’ll read a better profile this year than this Chris Jones piece in Esquire on Roger Ebert. By turns heart-wrenching and uplifting, it’s the kind of article that makes you appreciate the magic that can happen when a gifted writer encounters a compelling subject. Also recommended is Will Leitch’s Deadspin post about how he gained Ebert’s friendship…and then almost lost it.
• This piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about a black preacher representing an overwhelmingly white county in Alabama recalls Faulkner’s famous quote: “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.”
• New York chronicles the next moves to be made in the Big Apple’s media wars by News Corp mogul Rupert Murdoch.
• Speaking of media warfare, Michael Wolff has a piece in Vanity Fair about who’s going to win the coming Internet information showdown.
• In last month’s issue of The Believer, Roger Cohen has a long essay on why and how writing styles change with age.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates on getting past your past (and finding success in spite of it).
• And two pieces from GQ: Chuck Klosterman on the return of Pavement and Terry Ellis on the love lives of educated black men in the Age of Obama.