Rethinking the necessary war

“Afghanistan: Barack Obama’s Iraq.” It’s a dire, downbeat geopolitical linkage that’s been offered for months as speculation by the media and Pentagon analysts. It’s a turn of phrase couldn’t be more ominously apt, more frighteningly possible than it is right now.

The recent and self-explanatory evidence of growing U.S. fatalities; the views of military experts here and abroad; and a frank assessment made recently by the senior American military man on the ground in Afghanistan suggest that if Iraq was George Bush’s Vietnam, Afghanistan has the potential to be President Obama’s Iraq: an exhausting, unpopular, ruinously expensive barbed-wire albatross draped — and tightened — around the neck of a young and confident president with myriad other things to do.

The Wall Street Journal, for all its potential to brandish that customary Murdochian edge, that tinge of snark that runs through News Corporation properties like some renegade DNA, may have done a masterful job of headline distillation today. The Journal shouted “Taliban Now Winning” on a story about the difficult U.S. effort in prosecuting what’s been sold to this generation as World War II was portrayed more accurately for an earlier one: “the good war,” the necessary conflict, the one that we had to fight and to win.

“The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency's spiritual home,” the Journal’s Yochi J. Dreazen and Peter Spiegel reported Monday.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal would no doubt beg to differ with the Journal’s downbeat characterizations. It’s a reflex of American military leaders: accentuate the positive. But McChrystal, apparently unsolicited, gave The Journal his own time line for progress.

“Gen. McChrystal said his new strategy had to show clear results within roughly 12 months to prevent public support for the war from evaporating in both the U.S. and Afghanistan,” WSJ reported.

“This is a period where people are really looking to see which way this is going to go,” he said. “It's the critical and decisive moment."

◊ ◊ ◊

Don’t kid yourself. That deadline is more for domestic consumption than anything else. The American public isn’t likely to have the appetite for continuing a war that’s already gone on twice as long as our involvement in World War II. That national impatience reflects a fear that the conflict is more about American interests than the world’s interests.

“There are fears that this could become a U.S. war rather than a NATO one,” Christopher Langton, senior fellow for conflict at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, told The Independent on Jan. 25. “With other NATO members already planning to scale back, the U.S. could find itself isolated. Rather than being an international operation, it would become another 'coalition of the willing,' as in Iraq – though with the crucial difference that the Afghan mission has had a United Nations mandate throughout."

To go from the casualty count, Americans’ fears are well placed. According to the reliable iCasualties Web site, 14 Americans were killed in Afghanistan in July 2007. Twenty Americans died in Afghanistan in July 2008, a 40 percent increase. In July 2009, 45 Americans were killed in Afghanistan, a 120 percent increase over the year before.

And 12 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan so far in August already.

Robert Shrum, a longtime Democratic party op, had a clear-eyed perspective when he spoke to The Week in December:

“Afghanistan has the potential to become what Iraq was for so long for Bush — a quagmire without exit.

“No President could give up the fight to capture Osama bin Laden and close down the terrorist redoubts. But a pragmatic President may be forced to conclude that we can’t remake Afghanistan in our own image—that it’s time to negotiate a ‘very limited’ deal that advances our security while freeing us from a rocky quagmire half a world away.
 
Before too long, that may be the only option we have left.”

◊ ◊ ◊

The reflexive American military reaction — put more boots on the grounds and Predators in the sky overhead — isn’t necessarily a solution. Increasingly, it’s not even an option. One senior military official, referencing the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, said it plainly for The Journal: “How many people do you bring in before the Afghans say, ‘You're acting like the Russians’? That’s the big debate going on in the headquarters right now.”

What Gen. McChrystal called “the critical and decisive moment” could be characterized another way. Malcolm Gladwell called it “the tipping point”: in popular culture, a point of no return, the moment at which an oddity becomes an obsession. In the context of the war in Afghanistan, the critical and decisive moment there will yield another one, in Washington.

President Obama’s strategies for the Afghan war are under fire, and not just from the Afghan-based insurgents. What’s happening is as much a critical and decisive moment for a young administration as it is a decisive moment for American military might under siege in a part of the world that we truly do not understand.

◊ ◊ ◊

Colin Powell, in a moment of distilling frankness that the Bush administration he served didn’t have the good sense to see, characterized the American invasion of Iraq and the ensuing unpredictables as like what he thought would befall the hapless fumble-fingered customer at a Pottery Barn store:

According to a 2004 book by Bob Woodward, Powell told President Bush before the March 2003 invasion that, if he sent U.S. troops to Iraq, “You know you're going to be owning this place.”

In a phrase: “You break it, you bought it.”

The good folks at Pottery Barn, owned by Williams-Sonoma, Inc., dutifully objected to Powell’s metaphor, stating that on those infrequent occasions when a customer breaks something, it’s written off as a loss.

The current conflict in Afghanistan might be, to borrow the obvious if inaccurate phrase “Pottery Barn II.” It differs a little from the Powell calculus, but, ironically, the outcome could well be the same. We didn’t break Afghanistan; our role there is more surgical, less massive than it was in Iraq. Our entrance in Afghanistan didn’t damage the country outright; indeed, a national election is set for next week, despite the power of warlords and tribalism in Afghan society.

◊ ◊ ◊


But the U.S. mission of ridding the Afghans of the Taliban and its monstrous repressions of women and intellectuals, and of minimizing inter-tribal conflicts could keep the United States there for years.

Michael Moore, the filmmaker and Obama supporter, knows what’s at stake for the new president. Interviewed in the Aug. 20 Rolling Stone, Moore revealed a sense of nuance and distinction we can only hope Team Obama shares, a recognition of just how far an outsider, any outsider can go to create change in Afghanistan, and who’s ultimately responsible for change in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban are not an invading force — they are citizens of Afghanistan and it is up to the Afghan people to decide whether they want to be oppressed by a group of religious fanatics. It’s not the business of our country to be in Afghanistan right now. I feel so bad that Obama had to inherit this, and he clearly hasn’t been given the right advice. Because it will, a year from now, become his war, just as Vietnam became Nixon’s war.”
-----
Image credits: Obama: Still from White House video. U.S. Afghanistan casualties chart: WSJ Market Data Group. Powell: Still from NBC News' "Meet the Press," October 2008. Choppers inbound: Spc. Mary L. Gonzalez, CJTF-101 Public Affairs.

Checkout lines: A celebrity exit update

Billy Mays

Maybe now we know why he talked so fast, so loud, so nonstop: Florida authorities on Friday released the official autopsy report regarding the death of Billy Mays, once the ubiquitous, over-the-top king of infomercials. In a press release, The Hillsborough County medical examiner's office "concluded that cocaine use caused or contributed to the development of his heart disease, and thereby contributed to his death.”

Mays died June 28 in his sleep at his Tampa condo.

Toxicology tests also found the presence of painkillers oxycodone, hydrocodone and tramadol, and the anti-anxiety meds alprazolam and diazepam — all apparently within limits of use consistent with someone who’d been legitimately prescribed these medications.

Understandably, the Mays family takes issue with the findings. “We were totally unaware of any non-prescription drug usage and are actively considering an independent evaluation of the autopsy results,” the family said in a statement.

The family cited the report for “speculative conclusions that are frankly unnecessary and tend to obscure the conclusion that Billy suffered from chronic, untreated hypertension, which only demonstrates how important it is to regularly monitor one's health.”

Meanwhile, ads with Mays’ boisterous presence have been on TV as recently as last week. And more are still to come: Hawking products from the Jupiter Jack, a wireless speakerphone, to Mighty Putty adhesive, Mays will soon be seen in commercials shot just before he died, and in repeat ads: commercials that will return him to the airwaves to hawk the products that made him famous in the first place.

Death, where is thy sting?

The Taco Bell Chihuahua

So much was happening about two weeks ago: the escalation of the health-care battle on Capitol Hill; the fallout from Mark Sanford’s escapades down Argentina way; the teachable/learnable moment of the Henry Louis Gates incident. It was possible to lose sight of the really important stuff:

The world of entertainment was stunned on July 22 to learn that the Taco Bell Chihuahua had died, of a stroke, at the age of 15 (approximately 105 human years, give or take).

The dog, whose real name was Gidget, became the spokesdog for the Taco Bell fast-food franchise in 1997, and quickly staked a claim to being the top canine of all media, with merchandising deals, frequent TV appearances, and residuals that kept Gidget in dog biscuits all her life. She lived quietly after her brush with fame, in a retirement home in Beverly Hills.



Gidget was a trailblazer for the canine community, opening the door for other conversationally-gifted quadripeds in commercials that are now fixtures in popular culture. Vaya con Dios y una chalupa, la Chihuahua.
-----
Image credit: Billy Mays: icanbenefit.com.

Ben Stein's Sundays off

Avid readers of the Sunday New York Times will find their favorite dead-tree doorstop lighter by one columnist this Sunday. The services of Ben Stein, actor, pitchman and conservative economic gadfly, will no longer be required by the Gray Lady.

Gawker, quoting from a statement by The Times, reported on Friday that Stein was losing his “Everybody’s Business” column because of his role as a pitchman for FreeScore.com, a financial services company that peddles credit reports to consumers for exorbitant fees.

“Ben didn't understand when he signed on with FreeScore that this might pose a potential conflict for him as a contributing columnist for the Times, because he hadn't written about credit scores or this company,” Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said in the statement. “But, we decided that being a commercial spokesman for FreeScore while writing his column wouldn't be appropriate.

“We are sorry to lose him as a columnist, and appreciate his work for the Times over the years.”



FreeScore.com employs a kind of bait-and-switch strategy, one that dovetails with these desperate financial times. Consumers using FreeScore services get access to a credit score, but are charged $30 a month for access to the credit report that gives that credit score — one of three from the major credit watch agencies — any value or meaning in evaluating overall creditworthiness.

It’s pretty much the same business model as freecreditreport.com, whose ads with down-at-the-heels musicians are a lot more entertaining than watching Stein sit on a park bench with an animated squirrel holding a sign.

◊ ◊ ◊

Stein has been on the public radar about this for awhile now. Felix Salmon, blogging for Reuters, took issue with Stein in a blog on July 16:

“Stein … has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a “free” credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all. Naturally, the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it.

“The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason — as if the case for the prosecution weren't damning enough already — for the NYT to cancel Stein's contract forthwith. It's simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its ‘Everybody's Business’ columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy.”

Apparently, The Times agrees.

◊ ◊ ◊



But shed no tears for Ben Stein. He’ll be taking Sundays off, but he’ll no doubt continue to earn a handsome living from his still-strong presence in the culture as a kind of nebbish-in-chief. The occasional actor (remember him in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” [“Bueller? … Bueller? … Bueller?”]?) and game-show host (“Win Ben Stein’s Money”) still has three network gigs hustling punditry (one of them, Fox News, should always be a safe haven for Stein, a former Nixon and Ford speechwriter and current Republican), a column on Yahoo! Finance, and a free-ranging column at American Spectator, a conservative magazine.

More recently he’s been shilling for Comcast cable TV services in ads pairing Stein with Shaquille O’Neal. And Stein’s probably still getting carfare-sized residual checks for cameo roles on “Seinfeld” and for his role selling Clear Eyes, an eye redness remover.

It’s a very safe bet that Ben Stein won’t need to avail himself of the services of the credit report company he works for. Payment for the overpriced services FreeScore offers to cash-strapped Americans will find their way, one way or another, into his pockets …

It’s the trickle-down economy at work! God bless America.
-----
Image credits: Ben Stein: Still from FreeScore.com ad.

Media boardrooms II: Dances with ethics

Today, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post expands on the emerging fiascette over whether, and how, MSNBC and Fox News entered into an agreement ending hostilities between “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann and “O’Reilly Factor” host Bill O’Reilly — only to see said agreement fall apart.

The bigger issue, of course, is the fact that the chairmen of the parent companies of those networks made this editorial decision, instead of the editors and executives of the news organizations themselves.

That little willful smudging of the line between journalistic interests and business interests is exactly the problem, and those two networks aren’t alone.

CNN has made a decision that points again to how the agendas of major news organizations, and the bigger companies that own them, are more responsive to the bottom line than the public’s right to know.

Greg Sargent, writing the Plum Line blog at the Washington Post Company’s Who Runs Gov Web site, reported Tuesday that CNN decided not to run an advertisement critical of the health-care industry and those working to block reform:

CNN’s reason: The ad “unnecessarily” singles out a top insurance industry executive by name for criticism.

The labor-backed Americans United for Change, a top White House ally in the health care wars, tried to book time on CNN and MSNBC for the ad, which hits the insurance industry for wanting to preserve the status quo and levels harsh criticism at insurance giant Cigna’s CEO, Ed Hanway.

“Why do insurance companies and Republicans want to kill health insurance reform? Because they like things the way they are now,” the ad says, and then slams Hanway’s annual salary of over $12 million and golden parachute retirement package of over $70 million.

Jeremy Funk, spokesman for Americans United for Change, told Sargent that CNN refused to run the ad nationally, and e-mailed the reason for rejection: “This ad does not comply with our clearance guidelines because it unnecessarily singles out an individual company and person.”

Sargent reported that MSNBC has decided to run the ad. Check it out below:



Sargent, with quotes from Funk, seems to suggest that at the very least, CNN is engaging in a double standard about the threshhold of acceptability of ads that name particular individuals. You have to wonder: if CNN really objected to potentially controversial ads that “single out an individual company and person,” as a consequence of robust public debate about an important issue, how’d they make any money during last year’s presidential election season, when the TV air was thick with bipartisan attacks, ad hominem, ad nauseam?

◊ ◊ ◊

CNN’s is merely the latest of journalists’ dances with ethics. Richard Wolffe, political biographer and former MSNBC political analyst, came under fire from Salon’s Glenn Greenwald the other day for not revealing his ties to a Washington lobbying organization while he was offering analysis for MSNBC.

Wolffe offered some idea of his thinking about conflicts of interest some time ago. “The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on,” Wolffe said to Politico’s Ben Smith in June. “You tell me where the line is between business and journalism.”

Wolffe’s statement seems to suggest he thinks that line doesn’t exist just because he has a hard time finding it.

The response to that challenge would seem to be self-evident to a true champion of independent media. Any bright inescapable “line” between the interests of journalism and the interests of business is nothing less than an ethical boundary — one that properly begins with the ethics of the reporter himself. It means having a hearty skepticism about the ties that bind journalism and business. If the source of the ethics reflecting the editorial independence necessary for sound, reliable journalism isn’t the individual reporter, where is it?

For journalists, corporate relationships with news organizations (and the potential for editorial interference created by those relationships) are problematically cozy liaisons; they’re something to tolerate — a necessary evil in a world in which media and business are more entangled than ever — but not to fatalistically celebrate as the way things are. We know the way things are. That's what journalists are trying to make things better … one principled stand at a time.
-----
Image credit: CNN logo: © 2009 Cable News Network.

Media boardrooms: The places for politics

MSNBC’s longtime slogan — “The Place for Politics,” with a silly vocal inflection on the word “the” — is more revelatory than the marketing mavens who devised the moniker may have realized. A stunningly categorical two-part broadside by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com reveals just how much corporate boardrooms of media organizations are the places for a brand of politics that profoundly affects the American electronic newsgathering process — and what we get as news.

Greenwald began on Saturday with a synthesis of an Aug. 1 story in The New York Times, in which reporter Brian Stelter recounts a May meeting at which PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose brought together Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and CEO of General Electric, parent company of MSNBC (my former employer), and Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, parent of Fox News. Charlie Rose (in the role of George Mitchell) attempted to broker a truce between the two companies — or more specifically, between MSNBC's acerbic, progressive “Countdown” host Keith Olbermann and Fox's provocative, conservative Bill O'Reilly.

Greenwald writes:

According to the NYT, both CEOs agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other's news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn't engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O'Reilly's show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O'Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp. …

The deal, as it was, went into effect on June 1. Greenwald notes how the once-incessant criticism of O’Reilly by Olbermann — most notably in the “Worst Persons in the World” segment of “Countdown” — more or less ended almost immediately.

Greenwald:

[A] review of all of Olbermann's post-June 1 shows does reveal that he has not ever criticized (or even mentioned) Bill O'Reilly since then and barely ever mentions Fox News any longer. And on June 1 -- the last time Olbermann mentioned O'Reilly — Olbermann claimed at the end of his broadcast that he would cease referring to O'Reilly in the future because ignoring him (and "quarantining" Fox) would supposedly help get O'Reilly off the air ("So as of this show‘s end, I will retire the name, the photograph, and the caricature").

◊ ◊ ◊

Curiously, Greenwald doesn’t mention Olbermann’s ostensible reason for this network quarantine: June 1 was the day after Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was shot to death at his church by Scott Roeder, a disturbed anti-abortion activist. That evening, in a state of high dudgeon, Olbermann all but laid Tiller’s murder at O’Reilly’s feet, claiming that Tiller’s murder was a direct result of relentlessly inflammatory language O’Reilly — “a facilitator for domestic terrorism” — had used against Tiller on the air for months.



Olbermann cited O’Reilly for creating the social climate that made Tiller’s murder possible. By attempting to excommunicate O’Reilly from the church of the national media conversation, Olbermann seemed to be stepping out on principle.

Greenwald may think otherwise. He didn’t think enough of Olbermann’s explanation to include it in either story. The breadth of the scholarship of his two Salon pieces points to at least the possibility that, rather than making a decision based purely on journalistic principle, Olbermann may have been seeking legitimate journalistic cover for a corporate decision that had, effectively, been made for him.

What’s significant, of course, has more to do with the meeting in May than the public cessation of hostilities in June: It’s the fact that the chairmen of the parent companies of the news organizations were central to an editorial decision, rather than the brass at the news organizations themselves.

That distinction should be of serious concern to supporters of a free and independent American media.

◊ ◊ ◊

Greenwald goes on to examine the ways in which MSNBC/GE’s corporate muzzling of its journalists has occurred before. Past victims included Ashleigh Banfield, once a star at the network in its early days, but fired for comments about the media, Fox in particular, in coverage of the early days of the Iraq war; and Phil Donahue, the veteran talk-show host who was cashiered for liberal views that didn’t dovetail with the pro-war sentiment loose in America in early 2003.

What seems to have happened to Olbermann has a parallel with the boardroom scene in the film “Network,” in which CCA chairman Arthur Jensen reads the riot act to the mercurial news anchor Howard Beale:

“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Olbermann … and you … will … atone!”

Greenwald also explores the ways news orgs cross ethical and political lines that should have been a red flag for any presumably independent news organization.

Richard Wolffe, a former Newsweek reporter and for many months now one of MSNBC’s better political analysts, apparently left Newsweek to join Public Strategies, Inc., a corporate communications advisory firm directed by Dan Bartlett, former Bush White House communications director.

Wolffe, author of the Obama biography “Renegade,” joined Public Strategies on April 13. He’s filled in periodically as a host on “Countdown” since then.

“Having Richard Wolffe host an MSNBC program — or serving as an almost daily ‘political analyst’ — is exactly tantamount to MSNBC's just turning over an hour every night to a corporate lobbyist,” Greenwald observes.

“ … This is a conflict so severe that it’s incurable by disclosure: who wouldn't realize that you can't present paid corporate hacks as objective political commentators? But the fact that they don't even bother to disclose that just serves to illustrate how non-existent is the line between corporate interests and ‘news reporting’ in the United States.”

On Monday, Olbermann wrote to Daily Kos, saying that for the time being, Wolffe’s services will no longer be required.

◊ ◊ ◊

In the previous graph by Greenwald is a well-written nutshell of the central problem with the giantism, the connections and the cozy lobbying that infect much of American media today. In its negotiations with Fox News, MSNBC locked itself into a network-specific agreement to engage in hands-off journalism, when the problem — a willing ignorance of the facts to boost ratings and stoke partisan sentiment — is hardly particular to O’Reilly or to Fox.

Any complicity by Olbermann in any MSNBC/Fox negotiation would seem to be unlikely; Olbermann came back from vacation on Monday and promptly resumed his "Worst Persons" segment. Two of the winners? Rupert Murdoch and ... Bill O'Reilly. MSNBC's managers should have known better thinking they could control Olbermann. In recent weeks, he's taken up the cudgel against Fox nitwit agitators Glenn Beck and Brian Kilmeade … as well as CNN’s nativist blowhard flamethrower Lou Dobbs. Would a hands-off deal with CNN be next on MSNBC’s agenda?

The trouble with media organizations making deals with the devil is, it’s hard to know when to stop. The trouble with the parent companies of those media organizations making such deals is making them in the first place.
-----
Image credits: MSNBC logo: © 2009 MSNBC. Fox News logo: © 2009 Fox News Channel. Still from "Network": © 1976 MGM. Wolffe: Still from MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann." Olbermann: Still from "Countdown."

Naomi Sims: Some kind of symbol

Long before the parade of people of color that now inhabit the fashion universe — some parts of it anyway — being a black female model was a groundbreaking thing indeed. Years before Tyra Banks or Naomi Campbell or Iman held sway over the attention, the notion of black as beautiful on the runway was rarer than the still rare thing it is today.

Back in the day of the ‘60’s, when an Afro was more a political statement than a hairstyle, back when the world of high fashion and haute couture was Off Limits to blacks and browns, back when black people needed some kind of symbol, Naomi Sims emerged and became what African Americans needed during those previously trying times: a straight-up Superstar.

Sims died on Saturday in Newark, N.J., after battling breast cancer. Prepare to curse again the painfully early exit; this supermodel who personified blackness, diversified as a businesswoman, and made the template for others hoping to crash the hallowed precincts of the fashion industry was only 61 years old.

◊ ◊ ◊

In 1968, it was tough to be somebody if you were somebody black in America. By November of that year, Martin Luther King Jr. was gone and with him went much of black America’s collective sense of itself. Cities like Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C. went up in flames; and black American men kept dying in the meat-grinder of a war in Vietnam, engaging in the noble patriotism that would see black soldiers die in numbers that comprised 13 percent of all U.S. forces by the end of the war, five years on.

Naomi Sims turned up on the cover of Ladies Home Journal that month, a crowning touch on a career that was, even then, turning heads much the way she did when she walked down the runways of the world. Gracing the cover of the Journal at the age of 20, the first African American model to do it, almost immediately won her the title of supermodel (that phrase that’s been thrown around almost irresponsibly in the decades since).

But back then, Naomi Sims was special for other reasons. When she showed up on magazine covers from Cosmopolitan to Ebony, Life to The New York Times, it validated something to black mothers and grandmothers who’d endured generations of being told their touch of class wasn’t classy enough. It was all right to be who they were: people moving through life, oblivious to the haters, with heads held high on the runways of life.

◊ ◊ ◊

And this was about more than showboating on the catwalk, more than wearing clothes that other sisters could only dream about dreaming about. Naomi Sims represented in other ways. In 1972 she was offered the title role in Warner Bros.’ urban ass-kicking blaxploitation staple “Cleopatra Jones,” by that point the latest in a line of such films that defined the era of the early 70’s. But Sims said hell naw, rejecting the script reportedly offended by its black characters’ clowning and caricature.

She did even more. Following on her experiences as a model forced to work on her own hair and makeup — a sensible result after working with photographers and studio assistants who didn’t have a clue how to light and photograph dark skin — Sims planted the seeds for a business.

“She noticed that most commercially available wigs were designed for Caucasian hair,” The New York Times reported Monday in its Sims obituary, “so she began experimenting with her own designs, baking synthetic hairs in her oven at home to create the right texture to look like straightened black hair.”

In 1973, scratching that entrepreneurial itch, she started her own business. Inside of five years later, her wig designs were generating annual sales of about $5 million. She went on to write books on beauty, success and self-image, maintaining a perspective that accentuated the positive for African American women.

◊ ◊ ◊

In her own regal, high-powered but accessible fashion, Naomi Sims paved the way for any number of black and minority fashion models; Ann Fudge (former CEO of Young & Rubicam); and even Oprah Winfrey, whose exploits as an independent black businesswoman were inspired by the supermodel from Mississippi who was raised in a foster home half a century ago.

Naomi Sims helped create possibilities for black women in a field that, to this day, is still underrepresented by people of color. As today’s fashion models sashay down the runway, some of them — the few black models you’re likely to see in Milan, New York or Paris — can thank Naomi Sims for opening the door of perception just a crack wider for black people.

They, and we, can thank her for helping black people build that door for themselves.
-----
Image credit: Cosmopolitan cover: Hearst Magazines. Sims on the runway: Bill Cunningham for The New York Times.