Another Voice of Reason: Libby Purves

Libby Purves probably does not read this blog. My guess is that she is unaware of confused of calcutta and may not have heard of Kathy Sierra. Nevertheless, her TimesOnline column for March 27 demonstrated that she is willing to invest many of her cognitive cycles in the state of the world the Internet has made:

Kevin Whitrick is dead. He killed himself. That is real. His last companions were the “insult” chat room frequenters on Paltalk, some of whom goaded him on, apparently shouting abuse over microphones or the screen, saying “F****** do it, get it round your neck, for f***’s sake do it properly”. In a similar case in Arizona, Brandon Vedas took poison to jeers of “Eat more!”.

Most of the online mob were not monsters; most people are not monsters. But they felt safe in their anonymity and distance, and expressed shock when they realised that the suicides were genuine, typing anxiously: “Oh my God, this is serious . . . Is this real?” Personally, I hope that the detectives now searching for the Paltalk members manage to track them down, question them and if appropriate caution or charge them with incitement to suicide. That’ll answer their question: yes, mate, it was real.

In one of my confused of calcutta comments, I observed that a major consequence of the Kathy Sierra incident was the number of knee-jerk responses it invoked, particularly over the question of governance (both for and against the proposition). Ms. Purves is not one to jerk her knees. Rather, she is in the camp that tries to unravel complicated issues and has the luxury of using as much column space as the task demands. Here is the crux of her current thinking:

Even without such horrors, it is high time that we emerged from our internet infancy. The IT revolution has brought information and education, convenience and joy and fellowship, even wisdom. It is worth noting that if you Google “suicide” you first get pages of kindly websites pointing you towards help. The internet is not evil. We who use it daily — for everything from news and banking to cinema listings and tracing quotations from forgotten poets — quickly learn how to navigate around the piles of rubbish, the lurking fraudsters, the lies and malice and vapidity and perversion. It is a vast teeming city, and you can choose whether to frequent cathedrals, theatres and Parliament or just the brothels and public hangings.

But we should accept the same rules of morality and decorum that govern solid, daily life. If shouting “Go on, kill yourself” to a stranger is not acceptable in the street, it is not acceptable in a chat room. Similarly, we do not allow the pushing of unsolicited obscenities through letterboxes, and so should not tolerate the clogging-up of private, often heartfelt e-mail traffic with repeated shrieks of “Ejaculate like a porn star!”. If it is illegal to print malicious lies, equal sanctions should face those who put them online; if it is stupid to leave your credit cards in a café with the PIN on them, it is equally stupid to ignore computer security. Face it: the internet is real. It is not a holiday from normal human behaviour, just a useful extension of it.

We have not quite grasped this yet. Not only has the novelty of apparent anonymity made people behave cruelly in chat rooms, but the homeliness of the PC screen makes many of us almost criminally irresponsible about fraud. Fascinating figures from Get Safe Online and the BBC showed yesterday that fewer than half of us feel responsible for keeping our details safe, while a third consider it the bank’s or service provider’s job. One in five responds to spam messages — which explains why the rest of us still suffer them — one in six doesn’t even have a basic “firewall”. The Serious and Organised Crime Agency is tearing its hair out over our insouciant negligence.

This seems to be leading her to a middle path between my quest for a foundation of governance independent of any "official government structures" and J. P. Rangaswamy's "Getting Identity right" approach:

That sense of unreality has led to a lag in enforcement and — equally importantly, because the law cannot do everything — to a failure of conscience. The only area in which real concern is evident is child abuse. Elsewhere, both self-protection and self-control are lacking. The legal threats against the Mumsnet website by Gina Ford are particularly interesting. It is unfortunate, because Gina Ford is rich and irritating, and Mumsnet is a good site helping new mothers and should not be driven out of business. I hope they settle amicably. However, the chat room that caused her such offence is a classic example of people feeling they can say anything because “it’s only online”. Even though it was a joke (about her strapping babies to rockets and firing them at Lebanon) it was the culmination of tasteless, rude, unjustified statements about a woman whose only crime is to write humourless advice on letting babies cry. Mumsnet should have known better. It does now. I hope the lesson will not be the end of it.

I have not read any of Ms. Purves' other columns, so I do not know how much she has written about this particular issue. I hope she writes more. If enough of us take this conversation seriously, we may eventually find our way to a solution.

Google Discovers Consequences (yet again)

Google seems to be getting a lesson in why a responsible information provider cannot make decisions on the basis of what's cool; and the lesson seems to be coming from a relatively great height: the House Committee on Science and Technology. As Cain Burdeau reported for Associated Press, the lesson concerns the satellite images of New Orleans being used for Google Maps and Google Earth:

Google's replacement of post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery on its map portal with images of the region before the storm does a "great injustice" to the storm's victims, a congressional subcommittee said.

The House Committee on Science and Technology's subcommittee on investigations and oversight on Friday asked Google Inc. Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt to explain why his company is using the outdated imagery.

The subcommittee cited an Associated Press report on the images.

"Google's use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history," subcommittee chairman Brad Miller, D-N.C., wrote in a letter to Schmidt.

Swapping the post-Katrina images and the ruin they revealed for others showing an idyllic city dumbfounded many locals and even sparked suspicions that the company and civic leaders were conspiring to portray the area's recovery progressing better than it is.

The only explanation appears to come from the director responsible for these images:

John Hanke, Google's director for maps and satellite imagery, said "a combination of factors including imagery date, resolution, and clarity" go into deciding what imagery to provide.

"The latest update from one of our information providers substantially improved the imagery detail of the New Orleans area," Hanke said in a news release about the switch.

Kovacs [an "official" Google spokesperson] said efforts are under way to use more current imagery.

I suppose the best way to interpret this is that someone in Hanke's division decided that resolution and clarity trump imagery date, which, in this case, seems to imply that really cool high-quality images win out over more accurate ones.

Kovacs also acknowledged having received Miller's letter with the reply that Schmidt had no immediate response. This is probably a good thing. Schmidt seems to be building up a track record for shooting off his mouth with provocations that almost always seem to be aimed at some aspect of the District of Columbia. Then, of course, there is the current administration's track record on all things related to Katrina, which seems to be the primary reason why Miller wants to know more about what is actually happening:

Miller asked Google to brief his staff by April 6 on who made the decision to replace the imagery with pre-Katrina images, and to disclose if Google was contacted by the city, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey or any other government entity about changing the imagery.

"To use older, pre-Katrina imagery when more recent images are available without some explanation as to why appears to be fundamentally dishonest," Miller said.

On the basis of Hanke's remarks, I am not sure where the fault lies. It looks as if the images come from a third-party "information provider;" and, for all we know, they were the ones "persuaded" by the government to provide less "embarrassing" images of New Orleans. Nevertheless, Miller is right to put Schmidt on the hot seat. At the very least there seems to have been a failure to review that third-party content and assess that content on anything other than image quality. As Elizabeth Hollerman, Miller's staff counsel, put it, people tend to take what they get from Google as "the official word;" and Google should respond to such a "public trust" with greater editorial responsibility. It may have been Hanke's blunder; but, in the tradition of Harry Truman, the buck from such responsibility stops at Schmidt's desk. If Miller decides to turn this into a trip to the woodshed, the outcome may be better for all of us.

A Road Paved with Good Intentions?

Once again irony rules. On the same day that Reuters reported the controversy over "My Sweet Lord," they filed a story from Vienna with the following lead:

The United Nations top human rights body condemned "defamation" of religion on Friday and, in an apparent reference to the storm over the Prophet cartoons, said press freedom had its limits.

With the support of China, Russia and Cuba, Moslem and Arab states comfortably won a vote on the 47-state Human Rights Council to express concern at "negative stereotyping" of religions and "attempts to identify Islam with terrorism".

"The resolution is tabled in the expectation that it will compel the international community to acknowledge and address the disturbing phenomena of the defamation of religions, especially Islam," said Pakistan, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

The implications of these three paragraphs are far from clear. Much clearer is that the final vote reflected a major divide between "Western civilization" and the rest of the world:

The resolution was opposed by Western states which said it focused too much on Islam. The job of the Council was to deal with the rights of individuals not religions, they said.

The result was a narrow margin. 24 countries voted in favor; 23 did not (divided between 14 against and 9 abstentions).

I am not sure why Reuters put those quote marks around "defamation;" but they should be taken as a warning. If ever there were a word whose semantics varied from culture to culture, this would be it. The American legal system has had enough problems ruling on defamatory speech within its own culture. What international legal system could do justice to the question when so much cross-cultural variation is concerned? There is, of course, the classic ruling on pornography: "I know it when I see it." That, however, was an individual judgment; and I doubt that the United Nations would trust such a judgment to a single jurist.

Recently I wrote about two films made from Lion Feuchtwanger's novel, Jew Suss. I wrote that one of these films was made in 1934 and, for its time, made a very bold statement against anti-Semitism. However, in 1940 a second film was released under Nazi auspices that served their anti-Semitic propaganda very well. Would this reflect back on the novel and put it in a defamatory light? I would hope not, but I can certainly imagine that quite a few people saw the second film with absolutely no awareness of the first. They would probably assume that the novel was just as anti-Semitic.

Let's consider another example, which probably gets closer to the cultural interests of at least some of the countries that voted in favor of the UN resolution. In my last blog I once described The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a book "maliciously designed to shape the reader's opinion." Let me assume, for the sake of argument, that the use of the adverb "maliciously" could used to make a case for the defamatory nature of this book. Now, however, consider the case of Robert Spencer. Wikipedia tries very hard to provide an objective and balanced description of this man and his works. This includes a list of his six books:

• The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion, Regnery Publishing 2006 (NYT bestseller list [[13]])
• The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims (editor), Prometheus Books, 2005. ISBN 1-59102-249-5
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), Regnery Publishing, 2005. ISBN 0-89526-013-1 (NYT bestseller list[14])
• Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, Regnery Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-89526-100-6
• Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics (with Daniel Ali), Ascension Press, 2003. ISBN 0-9659228-5-5
• Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Foreword by David Pryce-Jones), Encounter Books, 2002. ISBN 1-893554-58-9

It also includes the following paragraph (all hyperlinks included):

Khaleel Mohammed, Louay M. Safi and Carl Ernst assert that Spencer's scholarship and interpretations of Islam are fundamentally flawed - that he supports preconceived notions through selection bias - that he lacks genuine understanding and; that 'he has no academic training in Islamic studies whatsoever; his M.A. degree was in the field of early Christianity'.^{[9] [10] [5]} For example, critics have objected to what they see as Spencer's method of taking some Muslim interpretations and then using them to characterize all Muslims or what he implies is the real Islam; cf. for example Mark LeVine ^[11]. They object to what they describe as Spencer's method of taking a position they deem to be radical (on apostasy, women, etc) and then attibute that position to all of Islam, rather than situating it within ongoing discussions.^[5] Khaleel Mohammed and Spencer have had detailed discussions on Front Page Magazine.^{[12][10] [13][14]} Carl Ernst and William Kenan have called him an Islamophobe.^[15]. They also allege that Spencer's publications are not scholarly because they are not blind peer reviewed and not published by any university press.^[15]

That paragraph is then followed by a section with the heading "Spencer's responses to critics."

This time, for the sake of argument, let us take this article as an authoritative source (putting aside my many peeves with Wikipedia). Are any of Spencer's books defamatory? The Pakistani government seems to think so; they have banned The Truth About Muhammad. Pakistan is a Muslim state, however; so, should a judgment they make for their own country apply to the rest of the world. When I wrote about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (when it was my ox that was being gored), I still fell back on the concept of "malicious design;" and, at my current level of understanding, I do not know if I would attribute malice to Spencer's work. If one's reasoning is flawed, then one may eventually negotiate with one's critics over those flaws; and, in the best of all possible worlds (or, as Habermas would put it, an "ideal speech situation"), mutual understanding would ensue. However, if the flaws have arisen through malice, negotiation is unlikely to resolve anything.

My conclusion, then, is that Pakistan has every right to ban Spencer's book, even if I, personally, object to any book being banned. They also have the right to offer themselves as an example to other Muslim states, whose respective legal systems could invoke a similar ban. I just do not want to see decisions made at the national level elevated to global policy, even if the United Nations is brought into the process. I objected to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in response to the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and I would object to any attempt to declare any of Spencer's books defamatory on an international scale. Meanwhile, I probably ought to do some more reading to form my own opinion about Spencer, knowing full well that much of my thinking about Islam has already been (positively) influenced by Karen Armstrong!

"I don't care if it rains or freezes ..."

Once again an artist is in the spotlight for offending a religion. I still remember my days on Usenet when I set myself the exercise of writing about "Piss Christ" strictly on its merits as a photograph (waxing lyrically over a free association with Debussy's "Cathédrale engloutie"). I was not in a position to write about Giuliani's attack on the Brooklyn Museum, when he was offended by a Virgin Mary that they exhibited; but now Daniel Trotta has reported for Reuters on a real goodie, in the literal sense of the word. This time the artist is Cosimo Cavallaro; and the controversy is over his piece, "My Sweet Lord," a life-sized sculpture of the crucified Jesus made out of chocolate. (A photograph is currently on Cavallaro's home page, but I have no idea how long it will remain there.) The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has responded with attacks on at least two fronts: the Roger Smith Lab Gallery, for planning to exhibit it in a street-level window for two hours of each day of Holy Week, and the Roger Smith Hotel, for their association with the gallery. As is usually the case with scattershot anger, it is hard to tell what is most offensive to the League: the medium of chocolate or the depiction of genitalia. My guess is that it is the depiction of genitalia in an edible medium, which may be all right for certain X-rated specialty shops but goes over the line when you know whose genitalia they are. As far as any questions of aesthetics are concerned, I find it hard to say very much on the basis of the one photograph available. With my limited knowledge of art history, I find that it has a bit of a Gothic feel to it, perhaps because that is a style of religious depiction I happen to like. Given the pun in the title, I have no idea how sincere Cavallaro was about his own religious convictions; but, whatever the feelings of the sculptor may have been, I see nothing wrong with taking this work seriously.

Post script: Four hours after I posted the above reflection, Trotta filed a follow-up story for Reuters. The exhibition of "My Sweet Lord" has been cancelled. The decision was made by James Knowles, president of the Roger Smith Hotel, where the Roger Smith Lab Gallery was a tenant. The artistic director of the gallery did not agree with his landlord's decision:

Matthew Semler, artistic director of the gallery, said he sent the gallery his letter of resignation to protest the cancellation and that "the ball's in their court" as to whether he might be convinced to stay.

He does not consider the piece irreverent and said he would look for another venue to display it.

"I saw it as meditation on all those issues: the fact that it's chocolate, the fact that it's nude, that the chocolate is black," Semler said.

While Mayor Giuliani went ballistic over the Brooklyn Museum, Mayor Bloomberg has been much more of a pragmatist:

"If you want to give the guy some publicity, talk more about it, make a big fuss," Bloomberg told WABC radio. "If you want to really hurt him, don't pay attention."

I agree entirely. Since, as I stated above, I rather liked the sculpture (on the basis of its photograph), I hope that Cavallaro derives some benefit from this tempest in a pot of "hot chocolate!"

Getting Away with Grievous Bodily Harm

With all due respect to Thabo Mbeki, who seems to have been the one elected by the Dar es Salaam summit to hold the bag full of Mugabe's garbage, it almost seems has if that whole convention of southern African leaders had been designed with the Chutzpah of the Week Award in mind. The lead paragraphs from today's First Post say it all:

The images of a grinning Robert Mugabe at yesterday's Dar es Salaam summit said it all: the other southern African leaders did not deliver the expected rebuke. All they came up with was that Thabo Mbeke of South Africa should try to mediate some sort of peace between Mugabe and his opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). It's a tall order.

In the 48 hours before Mugabe left for Tanzania, the crackdown on the MDC intensified. The police picked up dozens of party members, including leader Morgan Tszangirai, taken at gunpoint from his HQ.

Another senior MDC member, Last Maengahama, was abducted by gunmen - assumed to be contracted by Mugabe's secret police, the COI - and dumped on farmland outside Harare after being severely beaten.

However, real chutzpah tends to involve more than waffling in the face of a need for substantive action. So this week's Award really ought to go to Mugabe himself, not so much for that grin as for the spin he managed to put on the whole episode after he returned to Zimbabwe. Here is the lead from the account Al Jazeera English prepared from their wire sources:

Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean president, has said that he acknowledged to his fellow African leaders that Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, had been assaulted, but added he deserved it.

Mugabe also made a rare acknowledgement of divisions within his governing ZANU-PF party on Friday, warning critics to keep their disagreements in-house.

Mugabe told supporters the day after returning from a regional summit in Tanzania: "Yes, I told them he was beaten but he asked for it.

"We got full backing, not even one criticised our actions," the president said.

"There is no country in SADC (the Southern African Development Community) that can stand up and say Zimbabwe has faulted. SADC does not do that, it is not a court but an organisation of 14 countries that co-operates with each other and supports each other."

This is not making lemonade from lemons. This is making Jonestown-style Kool-Aid and then claiming it was made from real fruit! The only greater act of chutzpah would be compelling Mbeki to drink that Kool-Aid!

By way of a post script, I should note that, while I was writing the above text, MacDonald Dzirutwe was filing a report from Harare for Reuters. There were a couple of items in this report that reinforced the decision behind this week's award. Most important is that Mugabe used the occasion of his return from Tanzania to start rallying support for running for another term of office in 2008. The other was another Mugabe quote in the spirit of the one reported by Al Jazeera English:

Of course he was bashed. But he and his MDC must stop their terrorist activists. We are saying to him. "Stop it now or you will regret it."

The Rise of the Vernacular

I just started reading Hayden Pelliccia's review of the two new translations of Virgil's Aeneid in the latest issue of The New York Review. (The timing seemed appropriate, following up on the conclusion of the second season of Rome!) Pelliccia teaches Classics at Cornell. I had not previously heard of him, but he takes an interesting point of departure. He points out that, in the absence of anything even faintly resembling a historical record, Homer's epics can never be anything other than fiction:

What the classical Greeks knew of that world they knew from Homer, which means that Homer's version of people and events enjoyed, as it still does, the definitiveness of fiction or myth: the legitimacy of the Iliad's representation of King Agamemnon as an arrogantly boorish fool is not subject to revision in light of new evidence about any real historical Agamemnon, who might to our surprise turn out to have been, say, a wise and lovable commander, and husband, too.

Indeed, Homer himself may have been a "fiction of convenience," a means to hang a label of authorship on a long-standing artifact of oral tradition.

Virgil, on the other hand, was flesh and blood. He lived through the events that were dramatized in the two seasons of Rome; and, back in the days when Masterpiece Theatre ruled Sunday evenings, one may recall that he was present, "performing" his Aeneid, in the very first scene that Claudius "documented" in I, Claudius. Since this epic celebrates the foundation of Rome, one could imagine that such "performances" were in frequent demand by the then emperor Augustus.

Pelliccia then introduces another interesting contrast: He views the Homeric epics as a reflection of Hesiod's "sour view that things have gone downhill precipitously since the heroic age." Virgil, on the other hand, weaves a narrative that begins with the total annihilation of Troy and ends with the foundation of (to borrow the phrase from the Lombardo translation) "everlasting Rome," which Roman audiences would surely read as an improvement. What interests me the most, however, is how Pelliccia wraps up his argument:

But whether they've gone up or down, the significant point is that the "things since then" are there at all: the Iliad and the Odyssey do not fast-forward into the present in any remotely comparable way; what happens in the Iliad stays in the Iliad.

I have to wonder whether or not that last little jab of wit originated in a classroom lecture, ringing a change on an old and familiar cliché about Las Vegas as a ploy to make sure that students are still awake and paying attention. They may not have remembered the details of the argument leading up to the punch line, but they might remember the punch line and then scramble to recover the rest of the joke.

This kind of anachronism has been a mainstay of humor, whether it involved Anna Russell referring to Wagner's Rhine Maidens as "aquatic Andrews Sisters" or Jack O'Brien rewriting all the geographical references in Comedy of Errors to shift the setting from the Mediterranean to the California coast (knowing full well that any reference to Pismo will get a laugh, particularly in San Diego). Nevertheless, we tend not to expect it in scholarly texts. While I am sure that Pelliccia is not the only one who uses this technique to engage students in the classroom, I rather like his effort to shift the technique onto the printed page. After all, it has the same effect, which is to make sure that we get the point of the argument that we have just traversed; and, if we get that point, it may stick with us long after we have finished the text and put it aside. In other words it reminds us that scholarly reading can be a pleasure, rather than the chore that an unpleasant undergraduate life may have taken it to be!

Reactions to the Kathy Sierra Story

BBC NEWS has fielded an interesting set of comments to follow up on yesterday's report of the death threats against Kathy Sierra. Ironically, Greg Sandoval's Blogma post at CNET News.com on this same topic seems to have fielded only six comments, which may say more about prevailing attitudes across the blogosphere than any "expert" tapped by the BBC. Before reviewing these more elevated comments, however, I would like to reproduce one sentence from my own contribution to the Blogma TalkBack:

I think it is amazing (and depressing) how many people embrace a single clause from a single amendment to the Constitution while remaining woefully ignorant of the whole framework to which that amendment applies.

My reaction in reading the BBC NEWS account this morning was a bit more refined but still on the same theme: Those who would dismiss the value of governance are often those who understand the concept the least.

My primary target in this regard is probably Tim O'Reilly; but, in all fairness, his remarks seem to have come from a live interview on BBC Radio Five. None of us are at our best in a live interview. The format affords little (if any) opportunity for reflection, which is probably the best politicians control such interviews through the fine art of saying nothing at all of any substance. Here is how the BBC translated the interview onto their Web page:

He told BBC Radio Five Live that it could be time to formalise blogging behaviour.

"I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable behaviour, I would hope that it doesn't come through any kind of [legal/government] regulation it would come through self-regulation."

While condemning the bloggers who issued the threats, Mr O'Reilly was keen that the whole blogosphere should not be tarred with the same brush.

"The fact that there's all these really messed-up people on the internet is not a statement about the internet. It is a statement about those people and what they do and we need to basically say that you guys are doing something unacceptable and not generalise it into a comment about this is what's happening to the blogosphere."

That last paragraph carries a faint whiff of the standard mantra hauled out in opposition to gun control: Guns don't kill people; people kill people. Contrary to Mr. O'Reilly's assertion, the presence of "really messed-up people on the internet [sic BBC]" does make a statement about the Internet; it makes the statement that the Internet is not the safe place that its cheerleaders wish it would be. Furthermore, safety is not achieved through the declaration of a code of conduct. In fact, to draw upon yesterday's line of reasoning, that last sentence may be read as an analogy to the proposition that an independent country is not achieve through a "declaration of independence;" one needs only a cursory review of the history of our Constitutional Convention to appreciate how complicated the process turned out to be (hence my harping on woeful ignorance). Like it or not, self-regulation is still regulation; and, if that regulation is not propped up with an adequate architecture of governance, it is a harmfully deceptive fiction.

Kathy Sierra's own reaction, on the other hand, reinforces one of the key points I tried to make yesterday:

She believes it is time the technology blogging community sat up and took notice.

"I think there is a culture of looking the other way. When other prominent people look the other way it is creating an environment that allows this type of behaviour," she said.

This is basically what I had in mind yesterday when, after invoking Voltaire, I wrote:

I would therefore question the wisdom of suspending blogging "in a show of support" when more substantive support can come from confronting the nature of the situation and discussing how it can be addressed.

Any AIDS support advocate knows the motto, "Silence is death;" and we have to recognize that this may be just as true in the blogosphere as it is for AIDS.

One of the reasons why Internet advocates may be circling the wagons in opposition to governance it that they tacitly assume that governance must involve some level of government in this country. Since Denise Howell is a lawyer, I am reluctant to lay my "woeful ignorance" charge on her; but she, too, waved the self-regulation flag in her BBC interview. Nevertheless, I would accuse her of well-intentioned naïveté:

The Kathy Sierra situation is, she said, "forcing bloggers to examine their moral compasses on a number of fronts".

I would put up the low level of response on Blogma as a counter-argument here and would even be so cynical as to wonder just how many bloggers out there have moral compasses, let alone take the time to examine them!

Finally, Sam Sethi revealed himself as the only one ready to rough out a plan that would lead to (self-)regulation supported with a viable level of substance. The BBC quoted him as follows::

It is up to the community to agree the rules and then it would simply be a line at the top of the blog to say only show me sites that adhere to this conduct.

Aside from the fact that, once one has to confront the devil in the details, things are not going to be that simple, I think that Mr. Sethi is on the right track; and, if he is in a position to turn his theory into practice, I wish him all the best.

From the Bay of Pigs to the Persian Gulf

Continuing on the theme of the hazards of ignoring history, I just came across a fascinating analysis of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. This was a failed exercise in "exporting democracy" that is now over 45 years old. In some ways the exercise may have been more beneficial, because it failed almost immediately, rather than first putting up an illusion of success. This analysis appeared a couple of years after the failure in The American Political Science Review in the context of a study of the role of power in decision-making. The authors were Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz. The actual analysis constitutes half of a footnote, since it illustrates a point they were trying to make about the nature of power. Here is what they wrote:

The abortive invasion of Cuba in April 1961 is perhaps another example of the inherent dangers in projecting our values onto a populace holding a different collection of interests. Looking at the great body of Cuban nationals who were apparently bereft both of individual freedom and personal dignity, we concluded that we need only provide the opportunity, the spark, which would ignite nationwide uprisings against the Castro regime. But hindsight has indicated how badly we misread popular feeling in Cuba.

It seems particularly appropriate to cite this text on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. I would further argue that the beneficial impact of the Bay of Pigs invasion is not only that it failed sooner rather than later but also that President Kennedy learned from his mistake. The failure of the Bay of Pigs probably had a lot to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis taking place, but the ability of Kennedy and his advisors to understand the nature of that prior failure probably had a lot to do with their taking actions to make sure that the Cuban Missile Crisis did not result in an even more disastrous failure.

Needless to say, we have not heard the neoconservatives say very much about the Kennedy administration, either when they had the catbird seat at the White House or in their great mea culpa for Vanity Fair. This should be an indication of the extent to which their ideology detached them from reality. After all, when Hegel wrote about "the end of history," he did not equate it with ignoring the historical record!

Does the Unthinkable Come after Farce?

At the beginning of this year, I titled one of the final posts to my previous blog "Ignoring History: What comes after Farce?" I drew that title from the opening sentences of his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which probably deserve to be reproduced:

Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forget to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

These days we seem to have no end of opportunities to consider this lesson, and the Middle East should probably be given pride of place in the priority ordering. This particularly blog post, however, was not about military adventurism but about adventurism in cyberspace, specifically a debate over the legal rights of a Second Life avatar. I tried to argue that the history that could not afford to be ignored concerned "the emergence of governance in different gatherings of individuals, whether they are the Children of Israel wandering around in the desert after being released from their bondage in Egypt, the Founding Fathers of the United States, the enlightenment philosophers behind the French Revolution, the early settlers of Deadwood, or even the 'wizards' of LambdaMOO."

That last example is particularly appropriate to a story reported at the BBC NEWS site this morning. The story is about Kathy Sierra, author of the blog Creating Passionate Users, who began receiving death threats four weeks ago. Ms. Sierra has taken these threats seriously enough to cancel her appearance at ETech in San Diego yesterday, where she was a keynote speaker and suspend her blog. The BBC further reported:

Some supporters have temporarily suspended their blogs in a show of support while others are discussing the need for a bloggers' code of conduct.

Personally, I am not a reader of Creating Passionate Users; and I have little sympathy for the ways in which cults of celebrity status seem to be emerging throughout the blogosphere. As I explained when I created this particular blog, my primary interest in having a place to "rehearse" material that I am considering writing in more "serious" settings. Having readers is nice, as if having constructive feedback; but my primary interest is in expressing and then cleaning up "unkempt thoughts."

However, whether or not I have any feelings about the content of Creating Passionate Users or its author, I do feel strongly about a letter that Voltaire supposedly wrote to the Abbé le Riche on February 6, 1770:

Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

I would therefore question the wisdom of suspending blogging "in a show of support" when more substantive support can come from confronting the nature of the situation and discussing how it can be addressed.

So it is that I wish to return to the question of governance, and the best point of departure is the text of our own Declaration of Independence (hopefully without arguing over the masculine bias of the text):

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their CREATOR, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

If we grant the "right to blog" as "unalienable" (which I am willing to accept as a principle under the condition of arguing specific cases when necessary), then the Declaration stipulates that it is necessary to "secure" that right. It asserts that such security resides in the institution of government, subject to a set of constraints that we tend to take for granted in the "real world."

The question at stake, then, is whether such thinking can and/or should be translated from the "real world" to the "virtual world" of cyberspace and its many instantiations, such as the blogosphere and Second Life. This is where, in my own opinion, we should not ignore history, because, as my earlier blog tried to argue, even the short history of cyberspace has lessons to teach us. The particular lesson I invoked in that earlier post was the case of cyber-rape in LambdaMOO and the extent to which the administrative "wizards" of the LambdaMOO software "instituted" a level of government to "secure" the "unalienable Rights" of the LambdaMOO population.

Learning from this lesson, however, will not be an easy matter. LambdaMOO was a far more "closed society" than the blogosphere is; and the prospect of governing the entire blogosphere is probably about as feasible (let alone desirable) as that prospect of "governing" the entire Internet (whatever that may mean). Rather, we need to think in terms of whether or not more "closed" environments may be created within which governments may be instituted in a viable manner. Entering such an environment would then entail a "social contract" to accept its governing authority; and violation of the contract would be dealt with according to that governments rules, just as the LambdaMOO wizards could deal with the presence of a rapist in their community.

This involves much more than the sort of code of conduct cited in the BBC report. Indeed, it probably involves considerable time and commitment in an environment that has prided itself on the minimum of commitment required to make "the system" work. The lesson of history, however, is that minimal commitment will not longer cut it for the social consequences that are beginning to emerge; so it is time to "review the bidding." A good first step would be for one of the major blog managers, such as Google's Blogger, to review their current "ground rules" and start thinking in terms of a move towards a more institutionalized government, whose organization could be "inspired" by the principles of our own Declaration of Independence. The decision to use Blogger would then also be a "commitment of citizenship" and acceptance of the consequences entailed by that commitment. This is a pretty tall order for a concept that has long prided itself on its anarchic spirit, but the most important lesson from the experience of Kathy Sierra is that anarchy may have finally had its day. If governance is not to emerge, better that its emergence receive due consideration.

Giving up the Ghost of Print Journalism

According to Dawn Kawamoto's Blogma post this morning at CNET News.com, beginning in April InfoWorld will no longer have a print edition. Dawn's own take on this is in her final paragraph:

The print world, which includes newspapers, increasingly is finding its readers don't want to be couch potatoes. They want to participate via blogs, video posting or posted messages. That's a difficult thing to deliver when the printed word arrives carved in stone, via doorstep or mailbox.

Personally, I do not think that participation is the primary factor in sounding the death knell for print journalism; nor do I think it has to do with a sudden passion for the journalism business to save the trees or, as one of the comments to Dawn's post claimed, the temporary nature of journalistic content. Mostly it has to do with the struggle of the journalism business to break even, let alone turn a profit. Like any business in such a situation, the primary strategy is one of cutting waste.

In this particular case the real waste lies in the mass production of a large quantity of pages, most of which receive little more than a passing glance by most readers (probably even those who do their glancing during "bodily functions"). This is not to say that casual browsing is a bad thing; but, for most of my periodical reading, Google Reader seems to satisfy my skimming needs better than most printed pages do. There is, however, one disadvantage on the commercial side: When you browse with Google Reader, you do not see advertising on adjacent pages. Advertisers used to count on this, and some were particularly good with their placement strategies. However, the advertising business seems to be waking up to the need to explore other ways to grab eyeballs.

This, of course, is not the end of printing. Rather, it is the transfer of responsibility for printing from the publisher to the reader. Anything that requires serious reading (which, for my own habits, has yet to be the case for InfoWorld) is something that I usually decide to print; and it then follows me around to the many places where I do that serious reading. Electronic paper is not yet good enough to change this habit, nor are most portable devices. So paper is not yet dead, but publishers are beginning to recognize that they can make major cuts in the amount of money they spend on it. As a result, we are just likely to be using less of it; and that is good for the trees! (I just hope InfoWorld does not reveal that this is their idea of an April Fools joke!)

Debating Health Care

Having reached an age where the health care problem is likely to be one of the highest-priority deciding issues by the time I have to cast a vote next year, I was glad to hear that seven Democratic contenders met to debate the issue at UNLV yesterday. I was less pleased to discover that the only way I could hear about it was from the blog that Marc Cooper writes for The Nation. Apparently the United States desk at Reuters had better things to do. I was also disappointed that Cooper joined all seven contenders in ignoring the dead moose on the table, which was the colossal failure to reform health care during Bill Clinton's administration. I am one of those who believes strongly that we learn more from failure than from success; and, since Hillary was right there on the line of fire for this particular effort, I would have thought that this would have been an excellent opportunity for a serious "lessons learned" discussion.

Of course I should have known better. This was not an opportunity to wrestle with all the hard problems that stand between the present mess and a viable and equitable health care system. This was a media event; and the contenders were primarily distinguished by how they "played" the media (even if immediate media coverage was not as substantial as any of them would have wanted). Edwards did the most homework on details. He could get away with it without boring the media with a well-worded reminder that those details mattered in the context of his personal life. Hillary seems to have been there with the stirring rhetoric (again); but she ignored the question that she should have been best equipped to ask: "How do we get it right this time?" Obama also had little concrete to say, which did not serve his stature very well. Of the remaining candidates Kucinich was the most confrontational; but he, too, was ignoring the past. In his case, however, the past was more distant. He failed to see that raw confrontation with the role of corporate greed in managed health care is not that different from the efforts of the New York press to confront Boss Tweed and the corruption at Tammany Hall. Tweed had the same answer for any reporter who framed a confrontational question: "What are ya gonna do about it?" If Kucinich really wants to go after corporate greed, he better have a good answer to that question!

The Rest of the Country

The Reuters report of the National Technology Scan broke yesterday, but I had to chew on it a bit before deciding how many of my own commenting cycles to invest in it. Reuters released it with the headline: "Many Americans see little point to Web: survey." Close reading revealed that this was a somewhat distorted summary. Fortunately, the lead paragraph was a bit more sound:

A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a survey released on Friday.

At least one of the details struck me as particularly interesting:

The response "I do all my e-commerce shopping and YouTube-watching at work" was cited by 14 percent of Internet-access refuseniks.

This one says as much about general current workplace attitudes as it says about the Internet playing a role at home, as well as at work. It probably requires a study of its own that is at least as comprehensive as the National Technology Scan; but that study is unlikely to get funded, since it may reveal too many "inconvenient truths." Then there is the 44 percent segment of "refuseniks" who just are not interested in what the Internet has to offer. Are these people living happy and fulfilled lives without the Internet; or are they avoiding it because it is so stress-inducing at work?

The best results are always those that point the way to the next round of questions to ask. However, it would appear that those responsible for the National Technology Scan do not see things quite that way:

"The industry continues to chip away at the core of nonsubscribers, but has a ways to go," said John Barrett, director of research at Parks Associates [which conducted the survey].

"Entertainment applications will be the key. If anything will pull in the holdouts, it's going to be applications that make the Internet more akin to pay TV," he predicted.

In other words the question is not one of happiness and how it is being pursued, so to speak, but of why there should be "holdouts." Even if they constitute less then one-third of the population, they are still holdouts, which is just a statistical euphemism for "unexploited market potential." This survey is not about life in the world the Internet has made but about how to draw in those who are not already "hooked" (chosen deliberately for its connotation) on the Internet.

Weapons of Mass Ridicule

Assimilated Press has done it again; and I am beginning to appreciate the extent to which their satire goes beyond what I have previously called the representation of "reality with far more accuracy than conventional prose could ever do." This time the target is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, christened (isn't that an appropriate verb?) "KSM" by the mass media almost immediately after the story of his mass confessions had broken; but did the story really "break?" This was one of those classic cases where mass enthusiasm drowned out the few voices that tried to raise question. This was particularly disconcerting, because one of those voices was Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl. Since KSM had claimed to have personally executed Daniel Pearl, one would have thought that the reaction of his father would deserve some attention; but the mass media seems to have thought otherwise.

At this point I should offer up a disclaimer about my own opinion. Back when I worked in Los Angeles, I knew Judea, who was teaching at UCLA. I would often sit next to him at cognitive science seminars, because he was good about letting me grumble aloud at some of the proclamations we would hear. Judea has a keen mind for logic; but he always was patient with my more-to-life-than-logic rants. My point is that, if he could detect logical inconsistencies in the KSM confession and how it was reported, then he had the professional credentials to do so; even if it involved subtleties of reasoning that the mass media not be able to follow very easily. If he had misgivings about the text, that was, at the very least, incentive to ask more questions.

The obvious question to ask had to do with the fact that these confessions really were not "news." At least some of the media were willing to acknowledge that they had been "on the books" for some time. The only thing new about the story was its connection to the closed tribunal being held and the decision of which parts of the proceedings would be disclosed to the media. What was new that week was that the heat was finally turning up on Alberto Gonzalez and the "President's bidding" to overhaul the practice of "due process" in unprecedented ways. Something needed to be done to turn down that heat; and, as I have said on many occasions, there is no better way to undermine a narrative than with another narrative. In other words KSM was a "narrative weapon of mass destruction," whose main purpose was to distract attention from what was turning out to be (with apologies to Al Gore) "an inconvenient truth" for the White House.

However, there is another rule of thumb, which is just as important as the one for undermining narrative. That is the one I first invoked on Thursday: "all a blogger can do today is ridicule." I formulated this rule as a way to deal with the ways in which intolerance and discrimination were worming their way into becoming normative practice. However, it is just as applicable when media distortions come into play, and that is where Assimilated Press enters the picture. They have decided that absurdity counts for more than fact (KSM confessed to at least one activity that took place while he was under our custody). Today's post exhibits such absurdity at its finest:

Today, after after another round of waterboarding, K.S. Mohammed added to his catalog of crimes by confessing to complicity in the new Medicare Prescription Drug Law, inflated housing prices in San Francisco, the introduction of hemorrhoids to America, and most shocking of all, the killing of Bambi's mother.

So, if the logical voice of Judea Pearl is not enough to make us realize just how suspect the whole KSM media blitz has been, we can thank Assimilated Press for explaining it to us in language that, hopefully, we can all understand!

Fear and Loathing at the Gasoline Pump

Chris Baltimore has prepared a Reuters article about the http://www.terrorfreeoil.org/ Web site. Anyone interested in content analysis should fine this site an interesting visit. Consider their declared objective:

Terror-Free Oil Initiative is dedicated to encouraging Americans to buy gasoline that originated from countries that do not export or finance terrorism.

We educate the public by promoting those companies that acquire their crude oil supply from nations outside the Middle East and by exposing those companies that do not.

We are also looking into creating a healthy debate concerning alternate methods of fuel production and consumption.

Consider then what their home page says about this objective. Begin with their logo, which could not have been a better design to cultivate fear and loathing of Islam:

Then let your eyes wander over to the video you can watch on this page and make note of its title: "Terror-Free Oil: Saudi Arabia is NOT Our Friend!" (complete with rhetorical flourishes in the setting of the text). The name of the game is fear and the use of fear to instigate intolerance and discrimination, all cloaked by the pretense of "healthy debate" over our new quest for energy independence. Fortunately, Baltimore explores the whole goal of energy independence with an eye to whether or not it may be a "fiction of convenience" that serves no purpose other than political advantage, taking his cue from one of the energy think tanks:

"If we mean it literally, we're almost certainly headed for great disappointment," Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, told a congressional hearing, though he admitted the idea has "deep political resonance."

There is no doubt that "a healthy debate concerning alternate methods of fuel production and consumption" is valuable; but there is no value in starting that debate with inflammatory rhetoric!

New Semantics for "Lean and Mean"

Writing for The Nation under support from the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute, Joshua Kors has uncovered another example of the kind of management pathology that emerges from a military run my bean-counting efficiency experts. His article needs to be read in its entirety to appreciate just how bad the "reformed" military has become; but here is the basic message:

A six-month investigation has uncovered multiple cases in which soldiers wounded in Iraq are suspiciously diagnosed as having a personality disorder, then prevented from collecting benefits. The conditions of their discharge have infuriated many in the military community, including the injured soldiers and their families, veterans' rights groups, even military officials required to process these dismissals.

They say the military is purposely misdiagnosing soldiers like [Jon] Town [whose case was used to introduce the article] and that it's doing so for one reason: to cheat them out of a lifetime of disability and medical benefits, thereby saving billions in expenses.

I suppose this is yet another example of how our government has chosen to set it priorities and yet another opportunity for Congressional oversight to look into just what consequences are coming out of Executive decision-making (made by "the decider," of course).

Succeeding at the Box Office

300 has now endured everything the American movie critics chose to throw at it and could then throw its box office numbers back in their critical faces. Nevertheless, I found it worth reading Sukhdev Sandhu's British perspective at Telegraph.co.uk this morning. I suppose what interested me most was a quote from director Zach Snyder, which I had not previously seen, to the effect that filmmakers "need to get in touch with their inner 15-year-old boy." Since I remember a review of The Phantom Menace in The New York Review beginning with the assertions that Titanic was a film for twelve-year-old girls and Star Wars was for thirteen-year-old-boys, Snyder's remark may indicate a step, however small, along the path to maturity.

I wouldn't count on it, though. While Sandhu did describe the plot as "the kind of clash of civilisations that Samuel Huntington and neo-cons have been talking up these past few years," the other particularly interesting thing about the review is that it says absolutely nothing about how the Persians are portrayed. This is the back-story behind the whole project to produce and release 300 that has attracted the attention of many American critics, particularly those writing for the alternative press. From their point of view, this was a major propaganda effort to encourage further intolerance in public opinion about Middle East cultures, especially the one that currently occupies what used to be Persian soil. Any critic with a sense of history would probably have reflected back on Jud Süß, the notorious Nazi film produced in 1940 to cultivate anti-Semitic attitudes (not to be confused with the version starring Conrad Veidt and more faithful to the Feuchtwanger novel, which, since it was made in 1934, was a rather bold voice against German anti-Semitism). If, as I argued yesterday, intolerance "rules the roost," then what better way to promote it than through fifteen-year-old-boys, who are just about at the age when they can start thinking about a career in the military? Why invest resources (which are already overstretched) in some latter-day version of the Hitler youth when you can count on the movies to provide exactly the attitude you need for your next generation of armed forces?

That Word (again)

A recurring theme on this blog seems to be the extent to which the understanding of a text may hang on the interpretation of a single word, an interpretation that is likely to involve rhetorical strategy in addition to bread-and-butter semantics. Today's word is "apartheid" and its usage in referring to Israel. To some extent Jimmy Carter has had a hand in bringing this association to public consciousness with the publication of his book with the (unpunctuated) title, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid; but, as Joseph Lelyveld pointed out in reviewing this book for The New York Review, the association can be traced back (at least) to the World Conference Against Racism, which the United Nations convened in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. Today the association was raised by John Dugard, special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, who happens to be a lawyer from South Africa. In reviewing Carter's book, Lelyveld felt it was important to address the question of whether or not the association is a valid one on semantic grounds. He argued that there are two interpretations of the term and then demonstrated that the interpretation behind the Durban usage (meant to invoke associations with pre-Mandela South Africa) "is relatively easy to dismiss as propaganda." The second interpretation, he argued, amounts to a side-effect of the actions of an occupying military force and is more problematic to assess:

The settlements, roads, barriers and military presence have effectively divided the West Bank into security zones or enclaves, severely limiting Palestinian passage from one zone to the next. The crushing impact on Palestinian lives and families is clear enough. The debate on whether it amounts to "apartheid" turns on whether it's to be seen as a legitimate and reversible response to the threat of terrorism across the border in Israel, or whether it's meant to be as permanent as it looks.

It is important to note that Lelyveld has invoked some pretty strong rhetoric in his descriptive language but still makes a case that the use of the word "apartheid" is debatable.

On the basis of the Reuters report by Richard Waddington, it would appear that Mr. Dugard is not interested in the semantic subtleties that Lelyveld explored, although, as a South African, his use of the phrase "deja vu" would indicate that he is leaning towards the Durban usage. However, there is a reason behind his intentions, even if they are propagandistic, and that is to use his United Nations position of authority to cast the situation in a more global context. Here is how Waddington describe it:

South African lawyer John Dugard warned Western states they would never rally support among developing nations for effective action against perceived abuses in Sudan's Darfur, Zimbabwe and Myanmar unless they tackled the plight of Palestinians.

"This places in danger the whole international human rights enterprise," he told the Council, a Geneva-based watchdog.

In a way this is "deja vu;" but it is a recollection of the rhetoric to elevate the climate crisis to global proportions. This makes for good rhetoric; but it can also inhibit local solutions with the dismissive argument that we-obviously-can't-do-anything-about-a-problem-that-big. Yes, Mr. Dugard is probably just trying to get the mule's attention; but he should take care that, when he whacks away with his two-by-four, he does not knock the poor beast unconscious!

"Justice Delayed and Justice Denied"

Like the rest of us who are not "part of the system," all Amnesty International can do is try to direct public attention. "Justice Delayed and Justice Denied" is the title of the sharply critical report the organization has just released on the subject of the trying of Guantanamo prisoners before military tribunals. It is not that this report has revealed anything that has not already been reported in the news. It is just that its authors have decided to account for the situation in one expository package. Unlike most reports it is light on "action items," except for a call to other governments "not to provide any information to assist the prosecution in military commission trials, even in cases where the death penalty is not sought." Given the way this situation has progressed, it is unlikely that this recommendation will be converted to action where any of the current Guantanamo prisoners are involved.

Recovering from the Triangle: Whose Problem?

Continuing the theme of "creeping racism," Reuters just released two stories on the subprime lending crisis (whose racist angle I recently explored) dealing, respectively, with the Congressional and the Executive perspectives. What may be most important about these reports is what the reveal about the priorities of both of these perspectives. The primary focus appears to be on the institutions that provided the loans and on the impact of their problems on the domestic (if not global) economy. Turning the telescope around, this means that comparatively little attention is being paid to the borrowers. As was the case with Katrina, the processes of the governmental system have once again demonstrated an inability to recognize who the victims are and to give serious consideration to how they should be treated as subjects (rather than objects in the databases of the lending institutions). In the remarks he prepared for a Senate hearing, Joseph Smith, the North Carolina Commissioner of Banks, described the situation of such borrowers as "unsustainable" but did not appear to have much to say about getting out of that situation through any path other than foreclosure. Nevertheless, that rather gratuitous verbal gesture was still better than the official statements from the White House, which simply chose to ignore saying anything about the borrowers in its assessment of the problem. It would be nice if these victims were spared the indignities suffered by the Katrina victims, but this is unlikely to happen if they lack a voice that can be heard by either the Congress or the White House.

Japanese Chutzpah

I was all set to award this week's chutzpah prize to the Bush Administration for accusing Congress of "political spectacle" by using its subpoena power to investigate possible unconstitutional activities such as the violation of due process; but that would have been too predictable. Instead, I decided that, once again, the Japanese have outdone the Americans, at least when it comes to comparing their Foreign Minister Aso with our President Bush. Those who follow the news from Japan know that Aso has a track record for this sort of thing. However, now that he has decided to use his bully pulpit to discuss the Middle East, his attitude deserves a bit more attention. Here is the Reuters lead on his latest move:

Blond, blue-eyed Westerners probably can't be as successful at Middle East diplomacy as Japanese with their "yellow faces", Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso was quoted by media as saying on Wednesday.

"Japan is doing what Americans can't do," the Nikkei business daily quoted the gaffe-prone Aso as saying in a speech.

"Japanese are trusted. If (you have) blue eyes and blond hair, it's probably no good," he said.

"Luckily, we Japanese have yellow faces."

This is, indeed, a quantum leap beyond anything that could be dished out against Bush, even by his harshest critics.

I also think it is important to acknowledge this episode as further evidence that, for all the injunctions from Isaiah Berlin and Anthony Appiah that would guide us towards better cross-cultural understanding (I see that the last time I introduced this topic, I also invoked Jürgen Habermas), intolerance still rules the roost just about anywhere you would care to look. (In the roughly two months since I started this blog, I have tagged seven of my posts with "intolerance." I just reviewed them and had not realized how diverse their scope had been.) There is no doubt that Aso is an easy target; but, if Wilfred Owen said about the First World War that "all a poet can do today is warn," then, where reckless language the reeks of intolerance is concerned, we may do better to take our lead from V for Vendetta and change Owen's text to say, "all a blogger can do is ridicule!"

Everything I Learned about Life Came from the Sports Page

My most valuable writing experiences came from my graduate school days, when I was writing dance reviews for an arts weekly in Boston while working on my thesis. This meant that I was reading about dance as voraciously as I was reading background material for my thesis research. One of my most valuable lessons (on the dance front) came, I believe, from Agnes de Mille's To a Young Dancer, which actually had a thing or two to say to would-be writers like myself. The message was that, if you wanted to learn how to write about dance, read the sports pages. In her day that was a valuable insight, very much in the same school of thought as my editor's advice to read Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. All three of these involved writing about processes, rather than objects. They all came in settings that discouraged note-taking, since paying attention to your own writing was a distraction from the processes you were supposed to be observing. All you could do was discipline your attention to take in as much as you could; and, once it was all over, get to a typewriter as fast as you could. Sports writers often had the luxury of typewriters at the site of the game. Those of us who wrote about dance had no such luck.

Things change. I am too consumed for nostalgia for that "Golden Age" of dance about forty years ago to feel much sympathy for any performances I see today, let alone want to write about them; and, having just read Robert Lipsyte's "Descent into March Madness" on the Web site for The Nation, I realize that the sports pages are not the lessons in writing they used to be, at least where writing about processes is concerned. Lipsyte's piece is blatantly curmudgeonly, but is also about much more than college basketball, or, for that matter, sports reporting. His lead paragraph makes it clear what kind of subject matter he is going to explore:

This is the mud season of the sports calendar. While we await blessed baseball and its promise of renewal, here comes the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men's Division I Basketball Championship--the Big Dance for sportswriters, the Bracket Racket for gamblers, a frat-rat party, a racist entertainment, and a subversion of higher education, perhaps democracy as well.

This is basically the abstract of the article, where he gives us the ladder he will ascend (descend?) that proceeds from press coverage to the more critical questions of the nature of college education and (in the spirit of John Dewey) the role that education plays in a democratic society. I shall not retrace Lipsyte's steps, primarily because it is just too much fun to read his own words. I just want to focus on those final rungs.

If sports writing used to have a close affinity with writing about the performing arts, that affinity has now shifted over to that I have previously called "freak show" arenas, by which I mean the domain of politics. The affinity is now so close that is poses a chicken-and-egg question: Are political writers (perhaps like that unabashed baseball fan, George Will) adopting the style of sports writers contaminated by commercialization on just about any front imaginable; or do the sports writers realize that they are in the middle of a "freak show" of their own and had better draw upon the methods of the political writers? In a way the answer does not matter. Both domains have regressed to a new norm where the marketing of the content takes precedence over the content itself, whether that content has to do with winning a basketball tournament or getting elected to the presidency. I would even go so far as to speculate that the precedence of the marketing is so strong that the content is virtually irrelevant.

I remember once seeing a play in New York entitled Geniuses, whose author I can no longer recall. They play was "inspired" by the making of Apocalypse Now. It was a satire whose primary (but far from only) target was Francis Ford Coppola. The line that said it came when the Coppola surrogate declared that anyone could make a movie, but the real work that turned him on was making the deals. This is the sort of thing I mean when I want to argue that marketing now trumps content. Lipsyte has shown us how such thinking has dragged sports into the mud, taking higher education in its wake. If democracy is also being dragged down, it is not entirely the fault of what has happened in the sports world; but it does have to do with the fact that writing about the democratic process is suffering from the same malady as writing about sports. The writing that matters most is steadily being bludgeoned to death by those who live or die by the success of marketing copy; and, since democracy is not a "marketable commodity," we shall all be the worse if such writing ultimately succumbs to its beating.

Catastrophe in Theory and Practice

The old joke goes, "To err is human; to really screw things up, you need a computer." The Alaska Department of Revenue is probably not laughing at this any more. A routine reformatting of a disk drive managed to wipe out a $38 billion account, and the backup drive was reformatted with the same effect. They then discovered that their backup tapes were unreadable. Thus, there was only one source for backup: the original pieces of paper, 300 cardboard boxes worth of the stuff. So much for the paperless office, and thanks to Yahoo! News for feeding this from Associated Press!

TSS on the Left

Yesterday I wrote about the TSS principle in French politics, which, on the left side of the political spectrum, stands for tout sauf Ségolène (anyone but Ségolène Royal). Today Martin Arnold reported for the Financial Times that left-leaning voters actually have six ways to choose an "anyone." They make for an interesting assortment:

1. Olivier Besancenot – Trotskyite LCR party – a postman who likes to run for president
2. José Bové – anti-globalisation campaigner – standing in his first election
3. Marie-George Buffet – communist party – struggling to revive a flagging party
4. Arlette Laguiller – Trotskyite Lutte Ouvrière party – standing up for all workers
5. Gérard Schivardi – Trotskyite parti des travailleurs – representing far-left mayors
6. Dominique Voynet – greens – has struggled to harness public interest in green issues

That's quite a field, and it is probably not surprising the there should be three opposing Trotskyite parties! The total number of parties, by the way, is twelve; but, since Bayrou is a centrist, that does not really make for an even divide between right and left. Also, I have to wonder whether or not at least one of those parties was invented by Monty Python:

Frédéric Nihous – the CPNT hunting and fishing party – appealing for the rural vote

The basic message, though, is that Royal has a lot of work cut out for her if she is to avoid the fate of Lionel Jospin (knocked out of the runoff by Jean-Marie Le Pen) in the last presidential election.

Still Trying to Break the Silence

Yehuda Shaul is the primary agent (in Burke's terminology) in a recent report for Reuters filed by Bernd Debusmann. Here is one reason why we ought to know about him:

Burly, bearded and from an ultra-orthodox background, the 24-year-old Shaul was one of the founders of Breaking the Silence, a group of former soldiers who shocked Israel in 2004 with an exhibition of photographs and video testimony on harassment and abuse of Palestinians.

The exhibition, which ran for weeks in Tel Aviv and was briefly on display at the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) spawned the tours of Hebron, where many of the soldiers in the group served during the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising.

I actually saw these photographs in San Francisco, and I hope they were on display in other cities outside of Israel. Debusmann filed his report because Breaking the Silence now has a new project:

Disenchanted Israeli army veterans have turned into guides to one of the bleakest places on the West Bank, the Israeli-held part of Hebron, to highlight what they say is the ugly face of occupation most Israelis never see.

Over the past 20 months, former soldiers have led some 2,500 people, in small groups of around a dozen, mostly Israelis, on grim show-and-tell excursions meant to explain the brutalizing effect of daily routine in an occupied city.

Shaul explained the project to Debusmann as follows:

"The tours have two goals," said Shaul. "Show the effect the occupation has on the occupied AND on the occupiers, the way it disrupts Palestinian life and the way it erodes the moral values of Israeli soldiers.

"The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) blames excesses, when they come to light, on 'rotten apples'. But few soldiers end their West Bank tours with entirely clean hands. Israeli society prefers to keep silent about this."

This puts the Breaking the Silence group in the same camp as Yosef Lapid, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, who also happens to be a Holocaust survivor and who has chosen to focus on just how bad things are in Hebron. (I still find it ironic that I had to learn about Lapid from Al Jazeera and have yet to read about him in any other source.) What Debusmann fails to discuss, unfortunately, is the extent of the impact that Breaking the Silence has had on Israeli public opinion, perhaps because it is so rare that there is consensus about anything in Israeli public opinion!

McDonald's Declares War on a Dictionary

The Financial Times is not known for writing the sort of texts that send you to the dictionary, particularly since most of its readers probably do not have a dictionary close at hand when they are reading it. Nevertheless, after reading yesterday's piece by Stefan Stern and Jenny Wiggins under the headline "McDonald's seeks to redefine 'McJob," I could not resist pulling out my Fifth Edition Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, there it was, between "McIntosh" (the preferred British spelling for the apple variety) and "McKenzie" (whose definition had nothing to do with Bob and Doug). I rather like their definition, perhaps because the final phrase of the text is likely to raise eyebrows for all the right reasons:

An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one creating by the expansion of the service sector.

Of equal interest is the etymological analysis:

from Mc- (in the name of the McDonald's chain of fast-food restaurants, popularly regarded as a source of such employment) + job noun

This brings us to the crux of the Stern-Wiggins report:

The UK arm of the fast food chain is starting a campaign to get British dictionary publishers to revise their definitions of the word “McJob”, a term the Oxford English Dictionary describes as “an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector”.

The word first emerged in the US in the 1980s to describe low-skilled jobs in the fast food industry but was popularised by the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, in his 1991 novel Generation X. It appeared in the online version of the OED in March 2001. McDonald’s plans a “high-profile public petition” this year to get it changed.

“We believe that it is out of date, out of touch with reality and most importantly it is insulting to those talented, committed, hard-working people who serve the public every day,” wrote David Fairhurst, chief people officer in northern Europe for McDonald’s, in a letter seen by the Financial Times seeking support for the petition. “It’s time the dictionary definition of “McJob” changed to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime.”

This story can be pursued in a variety of directions. First, I would make it clear that I, personally, have never used the noun "McJob," nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I encountered it elsewhere. From this readers can conclude that I have never read Generation X (although I have read plenty of other source material about the Generation X phenomenon). On the other hand I have (with great relish) Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future Into the Factory of the Past, which first appeared in 1988 and whose basic arguments are no less valid today than they were when the book first appeared. Indeed, I suspect it would be very hard for Garson to refrain from reacting to what I have called "The Big Lie of Customer Relationship Management" by saying, "I told you so!" Garson's basic narrative is best summarize by the titles of the three major sections of her book:

1. Automating the Clerks
2. Turning Professionals into Clerks
3. Automating the Boss

In other words, if you want to understand the office of the future, start by looking at the clerks of today. (Did Kevin Smith ever read this book?) She does this in two chapters, the first of which is devoted to (you guessed it) McDonald's.

The next point I would like to make is that David Fairhurst, who seems to be spokesperson for McDonald's indignation (is that part of the job description for "chief people officer?") does not appear to be particularly familiar with the OED. At least he seems to be aware of the first page, which bears the original published title:

A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis

Those last two words bear all the weight. This is a reference source that is, above all else, a historical document. Every definition is based on documentation of usage that carries enough weight to justify its entry. If that documentation did not extend south of our border with Canada, it may still have pervaded the Commonwealth, which would be sufficient to justify its inclusion in what is probably the Commonwealth's primary dictionary reference. (I bought my first Shorter Oxford English Dictionary when I was living in Singapore.) The point is that Fairhurst has it all backwards. People do not take the OED definition for "McJob" as the meaning of the word because the OED has sanctioned it; the OED published the definition because that is consistent with how people are using the word. If McDonald's wants that definition changed, they should be paying closer attention to what the English-speaking public thinks about them (which sounds like a good thing for a "chief people officer" to be doing), rather than picking a fight with Oxford University Press (not to mention threatening legal action).

Does the definition need to be changed? To the extent that McDonald's has tried to contest it with a substantive argument, they seem to have concentrated on the "prospects" aspect:

McDonald’s says it has an excellent record of promoting female workers and entry level staff to senior executive positions. In the UK, half the executive team started on the shop floor and 25 per cent are women.

Personally, I find this a pretty lame effort at refutation (and I can only imagine what the female population things of it). On the other hand McDonald's seems to have recognized that argumentation is not always the best strategy. Instead, one can invoke Emery Roe's principle that the only way to undermine a narrative is with a counternarrative:

A McDonald’s recruitment campaign in the UK last year featured slogans such as “McProspects – over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob.”

This then transfers the onus to the reader, who has decided which narrative to believe. Personally, I embrace the OED strategy of keeping the definitions consistent with the life-world. I rarely go into McDonald's, and there is one right across the street from where I live. However, my last venture came on my way back to San Francisco after having delivered a seminar talk at the University of California at Santa Cruz; and I wanted to grab a quick bite before getting back on the road. Nothing had changed since Garson wrote her chapter. If anything thing, the clerks were even more bewildered by the technology, which now had to support more customer options than when Garson made her study. If things are different in the Commonwealth, I would be happy to hear about it!

The Mismanagement of Managed Health Care

Today's Reuters release concerning the Commonwealth Fund report on health insurance makes for a useful supplement to the HBO Addiction Project. One of the most painful parts of the Addiction documentary was the way in which it addressed addiction treatment in theory and practice. The theory was good news, dealing with the ways in which addiction can now be treated through both pharmacological and human interventions. The reason the practice was bad news was because the primary message was that such interventions are inadequately covered (if covered at all) by just about all managed health care systems, meaning that the people most likely to benefit from the theoretical results are least likely to have the practical means to do so. Dickens knew how to write about this kind of phenomenon. This is a case, however, where one cannot invoke the "nobody's fault" gambit from Little Dorrit when the more suitable characterization would probably be Ebenezer Scrooge's reduce-the-surplus-population argument.

This is the context in which Reuters released today's report on managed health care:

At least two of the health care proposals being presented to Congress would cover all or nearly all of the Americans who lack health insurance, and many would lower spending, too, according to an independent report released on Monday.

Many of the plans would do more to cover uninsured Americans and lower costs than President George W. Bush's proposals, said the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which studies health care issues.

Is this a matter of economic ignorance or just pure callousness? One possibility is that it involves an ignorance more social than economic that happens to be part of the family context. One has to recall Barbara Bush at the Superdome, captured for posterity in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, suggesting that conditions there (which had deteriorated pretty far by the time the elder Bushes put in their appearance) might be better than those of the evacuees' homes that had been destroyed by Katrina. What makes the rich different is not that they have more money (as the old Hemingway-Fitzgerald joke goes) but that their money impedes their perception of any world-view other than that of their own class. This comes precious close to old Scrooge where addiction is concerned: Better to "reduce the surplus population" of addicts than to support a health care system that would see to their recovery. Fortunately, there are now Democrats in both the House (Pete Stark) and Senate (Ron Wyden) more interested in seeing such unfortunates treated as human beings and still doing it in a cost-effective manner. They deserve our support.

French Politics

Reading today's report on the coming presidential election in France, prepared by Stefan Simons for Der Spiegel, reminds me of Peter Ustinov's 1958 recording project, The Grand Prix of Gibraltar, now available on CD. At the risk of spoiling the punch line for those who have not heard it, one by one, each of the drivers' attempts to achieve speed and/or overtake the competitors, hurtles over a cliff; and the prize (the "Prix du Rock") goes to the one driver who opts for caution (British, of course) and therefore makes it to the finish line intact. This is just too good a metaphor for the current race for the French presidency. Indeed, one has to wonder whether or not both Sarkozy and Royal have already driven their campaigns over a cliff, since the focus of Simons' analysis is on the rising popularity of François Bayrou, the chairman of the small, pro-European Union for French Democracy (UDF). Bayrou's growing presence in pre-election polls seems to have less to do with his positive attitude towards the European Union (which, according to at least some analysts, may also be driving off a cliff) as with the growth of what seems to be known as the "TSS principle." "TSS," conveniently enough, stands for both tout sauf Sarkozy and tout sauf Ségolène (anyone but Sarkozy/Ségolène). The last time this sort of frustration surfaced, Jean-Marie Le Pen was the one who cashed in with the second seat in the runoff election. No one wants to see that happen again; so Bayrou's centrism looks very attractive, even if it regards the EU more favorably than much of the electorate.

Of course that "anyone but" mentality almost always ends up in play in the American political process. The problem is that Americans often end up expressing it by staying away from the polls. The French seem to take their elections more seriously, which is a good thing. Just as good is that they take the whole process more seriously, thus avoiding the most important problem in the United States, which is the drowning of the electorate in two years of coverage of candidates, primaries, conventions, and, of course, the never ending opinions of Calvin Trillin's "Sabbath-Day gas-bags." There is something to be said for replacing this process with something like the shorter-duration French process, which, over the course of only a few months, has one election to narrow a field, followed by a runoff to make a final decision. Unfortunately, such reform would involve changes at the Constitutional level; so we had better brace ourselves for more of the business-as-usual (in which case we should not be surprised if it all ends up with the usual consequences)!

Reading for the Structure

Thinking more about the problem of reading philosophy, which I raised yesterday, I realize that there is a parallel with the issues of grammar that I raised when I was trying to develop my argument about "accountability to the music itself." In that post I talked about the need for structural explanation in both performing and listening to music; but this reinforces a position that I have taken for many years that music is a text in the same sense as the "garden variety" one we apply to the books we read. In yesterday's post I talked about structural explanation in terms of sorting out the embellishing from the embellished; but, where many difficult texts are concerned, it may also be an issue of segmentation. Let me try to say a bit about each of these perspectives.

The philosopher who probably had the best appreciation for the distinction between the embellishing and the embellished did so in only one text, which is basically the only completed text he ever wrote. The philosopher, of course, was Ludwig Wittgenstein; and the text was his Tractatus. Any other "book" with his name as author is basically a collection of notes, either his own or those of others; and, while they are excellent examples of Kleist's concept of "the gradual fabrications of thoughts" that I cited yesterday, none of them are in a form that Wittgenstein would have felt was suitable for publication. The Tractatus, on the other hand, uses an explicit hierarchical numbering system to establish the embellishment relationship across the individual passages. Given my interest in such structural hierarchies, I am a bit embarrassed to confess that it took Ray Monk's book about reading Wittgenstein to point out to me that the best way to read the Tractatus is in a top-down (breadth-first) "tour" of the paragraphs. In other words, if you begin by reading the "single-digit" passages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) in order, by-passing everything that comes between them, you get a text that would pass for the abstract of an extended technical monograph. However, every one of those passages requires further elaboration. Passages 1.1 and 1.2 provide that elaboration for Passage 1. After reading them, you can decide to see where Passage 2 is going or how Passage 1.1 is elaborated. You, as reader, can make this choice on the basis of where you want to focus your attention. Whatever tour you decide to take, however, this strategy is likely to serve you far better than beginning at the beginning, going on until you reach the end, and then stopping (with apologies to Lewis Carroll).

There may not be any other philosophers who reveal the organizational structure of their text quite so explicitly, but some put enough effort into the Table of Contents to allow it to serve a similar purpose. Kant seemed to be rather good at using his Tables of Contents as "road-maps" to the actual text; and it seems as if he would approach a subject by first "mapping it out" and then providing the text for all the "regions on the map." As anyone who has read one of the Critiques knows, however, Kant made up for the simplicity of his road-map with the complexity of his sentences! This is particularly evident when a translator feels it is important to be true to Kant's linguistic style, which seems to boil down to the fundamental strategy of cramming as much as he can into each sentence. (Yes, I know I can be accused to the same stylistic problem.) This is where real grammar (as opposed to my attempt to talk about music at a grammatical level) enters the picture. The best way to deal with those sentences is to diagram them: Start with the basic relationship between subject and predicate and then sort out all the parenthetic remarks and adjectival and adverbial modifications. A typical sentence of Kant demands several passes to do this; but a "tour" of one of those sentences is not that different from the "tour" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. One you get hold of the "primary message," you can then set your own agenda for dealing with the rest of the text.

This kind of mapping also addresses the problem of segmentation: the segment boundaries are equivalent to the "region boundaries" on the map. Not all texts are this accommodating, however. By assuming the style of the prolonged conversation, in the course of which the lessons reveal themselves, Plato saw no need to provide his reader with any explicit segment boundaries. However, most of these texts are too long for a single sitting; and sometimes you need to take a break just to reflect on what you have been reading. Fortunately, there are no end of scholars out there who can provide segmentations of Plato's texts; but you can also view the search for those boundaries as part of the reading experience. I tend to prefer the casual summaries I can get from someone like Edith Hamilton, which serve me in rather the same way as the single-digit passages in Wittgenstein's Tractatus; and, knowing no more than that "bird's eye view," venturing into the text looking for those transitions that take me from one stage of the argument to the next. This is particularly nice because some of Plato's dialogs are actually quite dramatic, framing the argument itself between a prologue and an epilogue, which sometimes turn out to be rather tragic reflections (as on the death of Socrates).

Let me close with two remarks, both of which I may explore in greater depth in later posts:

1. While I chose to focus on philosophy, I suspect that most good texts out there benefit from a similar structural approach to reading. Indeed, that kind of structural comprehension seems to lie at the heart of what is called "explanation" in the hermeneutics literature. I would even go so far as to suggest that the strategy works on fiction as well as it does on non-fiction.
2. On the other hand, there are plenty of texts out there that resist such an approach to reading. Many government reports (the longer the better) are good examples. I might even want to skate out onto thin ice and call these non-texts. My argument would be that these texts were not meant to be written but only for the sake of creating an archival record, just like the transcripts of congressional and judicial proceedings. Texts like these will not benefit very much from good reading strategies and may not benefit from much other than good search engines!

The Problem of Dealing with Difficult Texts

This is a problem I have had to deal with throughout my life (and I hope to be able to continue to deal with it for the remainder of that life). I remember that when I was very young (elementary school age), Omnibus devoted one of its programs to a dramatization of Homer's Iliad. My parents told me I would find it too difficult. They later gave me the Classics Comics version. from which I progressed to prose renderings of the text, picking up Hamilton's Mythology along the way. To this day I have no idea whether or not that Omnibus project actually used Homer's verse, but I have been fascinated with Christopher Logue's project to provide his own verse "accounts" of the books of the Iliad for BBC radio broadcasts. I suppose that, where anything as massive as the Iliad is concerned, it is good to go in with a relatively straightforward sense of the story (for which Classics Comics did not do a bad job) in order to be receptive to the devices of discourse.

When I was in junior high school, my father again invoked the "difficulty argument" against Bullfinch; but I checked it out of the library anyway. By this time Hamilton had given me the basic roadmap for the Greek myths; and, to this day, I never figured out why my father thought Bullfinch was difficult. It probably had something to do with the excursions he tacked on at the end of each story. At the time these did not register very much with me. When I returned to them in college, I did not think that much of them; and today, while I feel that Hamilton is still a valuable part of my library, I do not think there is a copy of Bullfinch in the house (whose shelf space has become rather limited).

By the time I was in high school I was getting hooked on mathematics and was fascinated when I discovered that there was such a thing as game theory. My father again hauled out the too-difficult argument. However, rather than telling me to do something else, he presented me with his copy of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by von Neumann and Morgenstern. As I recall he said something to the effect that if I could get through any ten pages in the book, then I could think about learning more about game theory. I quickly discovered that there was a trick to doing this. The first 45 pages, presumably by Morgenstern, were all about economic theory and were thoroughly alien to me. After that, von Neumann took over and worked his way up to a set-theoretical definition of a game. Since I was part of the "new math" crowd and had no trouble with either the vocabulary or concepts of set theory, this was easy stuff.

I think that, to some extent, this strategy of going for the easy stuff ended up damaging my ability to dig into really heavy reading, even if it was also a survival tactic for dealing with the heavy loads of both undergraduate and graduate studies. As a result, I have to confess that it has only been over the last ten years that I have begun to give serious reflective reading the attention it deserves; and I can probably thank the "knowledge movement" for channeling that attention in so many directions, broadening from technology to philosophy, economics, social theory, cognitive theory, and literary theory (not that this list is inclusive). What has emerged is a whole new set of reading habits that I now seem to be able to engage regardless of the text involved.

I was a product of that how-to-study school of thought that encouraged marking up what I read. Since highlighting pens were not part of my culture, that meant underlining text and using the margins for notes. I still do that, but it now serves an additional purpose. What I had not appreciated for many years was the value of transcribing the products of my note-taking. Ironically, it took technology to bring me to this insight. Back in high school I was trained to take all my notes on 3 x 5 cards, and one day I realized that a PowerPoint slide could be treated as a 3 x 5 card on steroids. (I suppose that was the original HyperCard vision. However, I was never particularly seduced by HyperCard and did not give the technology much thought until Microsoft had swallowed all of its features into PowerPoint.)

This has had an interesting impact on both my reading and my note-taking. I still do a lot of underlining, but now I copy those underlined passages into PowerPoint files. I have a lot more respect for copying than I used to, in spite of many anecdotes I had encountered when I was younger. (A counterpoint teacher at Curtis used to have his students copy out Palestrina. Even Stravinsky once said that he never liked to employ copyists, because copying out the final score and parts was the time when his work really began to make sense to him.) I also continue to take notes in the margin and copy them out in conjunction with the passages they are annotating. If there is not enough room in the margin (often the case), I write my annotations on a separate sheet of paper (or, if they are really extended, write them into a Word file) and attach the paper to the reading matter; so I remember to include that stuff when preparing my PowerPoint file.

Since PowerPoint supports hyperlinks, I also now pay a lot more attention to connections. This attention was reinforced, in part, by Patrick Olivelle's introduction to the edition of the Upanishads that I picked up while on one of my business trips:

In the preceding survey we noted three areas of concern for the vedic thinkers: the ritual, the cosmic realities, and the human body/person. The ritual sphere includes formulas, prayers, and songs, as well as ritual actions and ceremonies. As we have seen, the vedic thinkers did not make a strict distinction between the gods and cosmic realities; so the cosmic sphere includes both. The central concern of all vedic thinkers, including the authors of the Upanishads, is to discover the connections that bind elements of these three spheres to each other.

I felt it was important to include what I felt were useful associative connections in my notes, and PowerPoint let me record those connections as hyperlinks. This, in turn, led to my often reading particularly difficult material with the computer close at hand, searching my existing notes for related material, using my own hyperlinks and the various search tools Microsoft provided. These days I have extended my searching to the Web (and, sometimes, with the assistance of A9, to other reading matter). As a result, the marginal notes I make on paper now include references to specific PowerPoint slides (now my working 3 x 5 cards) and serve as reminders of hyperlinks I need to install during the transcription process.

One other element has become a major part of my reading practice, particularly where those extended marginal notes are involved. This has its origin in an essay by Heinrich von Kleist entitled "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking." I summarized this essay in my previous blog:

The basic thesis is that the thoughts we have "in our head" are, for the most part, vague and ill-formed; and it is only when we try to express them in words that they become concrete enough to be called ideas.

Most, if not all, of my reading serves to sort out all those "vague and ill-formed" thoughts in my head; and it is through the writing practices that accompany my reading that expression takes place. This happens as much when I am reading Logue or Proust as when I am reading Morgenstern (whom I now feel better equipped to read), Giddens, or Plato. It is happening even as I write this, which is why I call these writings my "Rehearsal Studio;" and I hope that these practices will continue to keep me fit as I continue to find my way through the world of ideas!

Pelosi Confronts AIPAC

I looks as if I was premature in characterizing Nancy Pelosi's participation in this year's AIPAC conference as business as usual. If AIPAC had prepared a script for her, she managed to lose it on her way to the podium. In so doing she may have made history as the first prominent politician to confront AIPAC with language they did not particularly want to hear. Here is how Ari Berman reported it on his "Notion" blog for The Nation:

House Minority Leader John Boehner got a standing ovation when he voiced his continued support for the war in Iraq at AIPAC's annual conference today. When his counterpart, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, dared to criticize the war, she heard boos.
"Any US military engagement must be judged on three counts--whether it makes our country safer, our military stronger, or the region more stable," Pelosi told 5-6,000 AIPAC supporters. "The war in Iraq fails on all three scores." First came light applause, followed by catcalls and boos, The Hill reported.

Berman is still unhappy that Pelosi showed up at all:

By speaking to AIPAC, Pelosi is giving the organization legitimacy that it doesn't deserve.

I appreciate what he is saying (as my previous post indicated); but I no longer agree. Legitimacy is not the issue. AIPAC exists (and has a right to exist under our current system) whether we like it or not; and the last thing we need to do is fall back on the kind of formulaic reasoning that yields positions like not recognizing Red China (remember that one?) or not speaking with terrorists and the countries that support them. Pelosi had the opportunity to turn her invitation into a bully pulpit. She stuck to a position that had been so important in restoring Democratic control in Congress, and she did not cave in to a hostile audience. More power to her!

The New Triangle: Racism to Greed to Subprime Lending

Ever since the motto of the Triangle Trade ("molasses to rum to slaves") found its way into one of the songs in 1776, it has been part of our public consciousness (although at least some of us did not need a musical to inform us). Well, if we are to believe a report from the Woodcock Institute, discussed by Rebecca Knight in a piece for the Financial Times, then, in the words of that ghostly giant from Twin Peaks, "It is happening again." The new triangle basically picks up where the old one left off and casually glides into the new millennium; it runs from racism to greed to subprime lending. Having already reviewed the discouraging evidence of the race factor in the job market, it should be no surprise that a similar skeleton should have come out of the mortgage market closet. You have to wonder, though, how long it might have stayed in the closet had the financial institutions not been thrown into crisis this week by an unanticipated high number of defaults of such loans.

This crisis reminded us that the financial sector still lives by Gordon Gecko's greed-is-good philosophy. Apparently, the number crunchers came up with a good argument for the tail end of the triangle: properly managed, subprime loans tied to an adjustable interest rate could make for a very tempting cash cow. The dirty secret that the Woodcock Institute uncovered was how the front end of the triangle covered the customer base for those loans:

A study conducted by the Woodcock Institute, a Chicago-based organisation that promotes community development, and four other groups found that home loans are more expensive for minorities in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City and Rochester, New York.

In these six cities, blacks were 3.8 times more likely to receive a higher-cost home loan than were white ­borrowers, while Latinos were 3.6 times more likely than white borrowers to receive a higher-cost loan. Subprime loans – mortgages tailored to homebuyers with poor credit ratings – typically have interest rates at least 3 percentage points above regular mortgages.

Knight reinforced these findings with a report of another study:

A separate study on the subject showed that the trend is particularly pronounced in Boston. Jim Campen, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Boston, found that high-income minorities were six to seven times more likely to have an expensive mortgage than high-income whites. Around 70 per cent of black and Latino borrowers in Greater Boston with incomes between $92,000 (£48,000, €70,000) and $152,000 took out mortgages with high interest rates in 2005, according to the study.

At this point, however, my attention shifted from the new racist triangle to the choice of words in talking about it:

“This is just one manifestation of the great inequality of American society,” said Prof Campen, a long time analyst of mortgage lending to minorities. “This is news because it’s not just black people losing their homes; it’s white investors on Wall Street losing their money.”

It's the second clause of that second sentence that really gets you in the gut. Campen is probably as well-intentioned as any other scholar (at least in economics); but he seems to have stumbled over the connotation that the triangle is only important because the crisis in an unanticipated level of defaults caused the stock markets to take a big dive. He may not have meant to say it, but what came out was the claim that this was only important because "white investors on Wall Street" were losing money.

Back in January when I reported on the second of the job market studies, I concluded by asking how many more of these studies we would be encountering. I guess my question has now been answered. My guess, however, is that still more studies will emerge. I just hope that the American media pays as much attention to them as the Financial Times is currently doing.

Chutzpah from Europe

Sometimes it just feels as if there is something about the end of the week that encourages the chutzpah to come "from the voodverk out" (as the great Reginald Brentnor's Papa Schimmelhorn put it). This week the "voodverk" seems to be in Europe, which would have been more of a surprise had it not been for yesterday's Reuters report about the growing pains of the European Union. The real surprise was that I got this news from CNET News.com, rather than any of my European feeds (or, for that matter, Al Jazeera). This is one of those good-news-bad-news stories, where, as might be expected, the chutzpah resides in the bad news.

The good news is that the BBC decided to commit $289 million to develop a Web site, called BBC Jam, providing free educational content to children between the ages of five and sixteen. That is about as ambitious as it is admirable, but it is also part of the charter of the BBC Trust. It is operated by a staff of 200 and has 170,000 registered users.

This is the sort of endeavor that you want to hold up by the ears and show off to American media as an example of doing things right, were it not for the bad news side of the story. The bad news is that the European Commission has approached the BBC with "a number of complaints alleging that the publicly funded BBC Jam … damages the interests of the commercial sector." Toto, I guess we're in Kansas after all; and there's the European Commission taking over our farm! A time when there is so much concern about getting quality education anywhere and by any means is not a time for "the commercial sector" to step in and dictate how things should be done. We have enough trouble with this sort of problem in the United States for the European Commission to allow it to muck up serious efforts to provide educational content. So, if Paul Taylor was right yesterday when he wrote that "the European Union still isn't sure what it wants to be when it grows up," does this mean that they are now turning to the United States as a role model?

Unions: From the Soviet to the European

I just finished watching the VTR recording I made of George Will interviewing John Patrick Diggins about the latter's new book, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History. At one point Diggins made an interesting remark to the effect that Reagan knew the Soviet Union would fail because of all the alcoholism he saw on the street. This provided an interesting context for reading the "EU at 50" article that Paul Taylor wrote for Reuters. Here are the lead paragraphs with the key message:

Even though it turns 50 this month, the European Union still isn't sure what it wants to be when it grows up.

The six-nation European Economic Community created by the Treaty of Rome signed on March 25, 1957, has grown without an architect's plan into a sprawling 27-nation union that is the world's biggest trading bloc and covers most of the continent.

A perpetual work in progress, the EU is as torn as ever between wider enlargement and deeper integration, between political unification and economic union, and between being more open to the world and protecting its manufacturers and farmers.

"European construction is not ready and will never be fully ready," European Commission Vice-President Margot Wallstrom said this week, comparing the EU to a "jigsaw puzzle" put together piece by piece without a master plan.

Opinion polls suggest this sense of hurtling toward an unknown destination is one reason why the EU's popularity has fallen in many member states, along with perceptions that it is too remote, bureaucratic, cosmopolitan and business-friendly.

On one level this can be read as a narrative of a "grand theory" that just could not be carried over into practice, a narrative that would probably apply just as well to the history of the Soviet Union. As such it provides a potential afterword to my observations about addiction. The most direct analogy is between alcoholism on the streets of Russia with the rise of binge drinking across large portions (if not the entirety) of the European Union. If Reagan were alive today touring (perhaps with Margaret Thatcher) Ireland, Finland, Britain, and Denmark (the countries at the top of the list in the SPIEGEL article), would he be forecasting the failure of the European Union?

However, why should we stop with alcoholism? If there is any soundness to my argument that addiction is a global malady, have we come to a point where, for any city whose streets we choose to walk, it is all too easy to encounter evidence of addition? Coming at a time when the global attitude towards major crises, such as the climate and the proliferation of arms, seems to vacillate between denial and dithering, does that mean that we are stuck in a system that has basically run its course? If Diggins is correct, he would probably say that Reagan was always too much of an optimist to come to such a conclusion. Diggins would probably also argue that, confronted with present conditions, Reagan would take is own initiatives towards negotiating a way out of this mess.

Interesting as such speculations may be, they can be dangerous. This is a point that Jeremy Waldron made in his article for The New York Review about Hannah Arendt's philosophy as a product of the dark times in which she lived. The title of Waldron's article is "What Would Hannah Say?;" and Waldron's key point is the inanity of such a question:

The worst thing about the question "What would Hannah do?" is the likelihood that it—or the cult that generates it—becomes a substitute for thinking for ourselves. The nature of thinking is one of the most important concerns of Arendt's social and political theory. Thinking is the "habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention," an inner dialogue, in sort of conversation with oneself, where every mental reaction is subject to criticism and in which the inner critic is also held to answer back and forth.

Arendt speculated that, in many circumstances, moral conduct seems to depend on this "intercourse of man with himself." A person contemplates murder, for example, but says to himself or herself: "I can't do this. If I did, I would have to live with a murderer for the rest of my life." But thinking is also one of the most fragile features of human consciousness. Part of what Arendt meant by the banality of evil is the possibility of wrongdoing that opens up when this inner dialogue is no longer an important feature of people's lives, so that the prospect of who I would have to live with in myself is no longer a concern.

Thinking is possible, she says, among people who know how to talk back and forth with one another—that's how one learns to think. But thinking will atrophy in an environment that lacks the stillness that allows us to concentrate in inner dialogue or, more ominously, in a social environment where distrust among people makes first outer conversation, then inner conversation impossible. We know that in totalitarian societies, distrust is fostered deliberately to this end. It is a question for us whether something less malign but equally consequential may be happening in the noise and superficiality of modern consumer society.

Much of this is consistent with the thinking and behavior of the Ronald Reagan presented in Diggins' book, due, in part, to the former president's passionate belief in that model of self-reliance espoused by Emerson. Such thinking can definitely aid our efforts to get out of the mess we are currently in. Perhaps that mindset is the trait we should be looking for, above all others, in anyone with aspirations for being our next president!

Going for the Sound

I wanted to raise one afterthought to yesterday's speculations about the rhetoric of musical performance. I realized that, in raising the issue of "speaking in a unique voice," I did not pursue that metaphor with respect to the sound of that voice. It may be a bit old-fashioned, particularly in the academic community of music theorists; but I have to keep reminding myself that music really is "all about the sound." I suppose the recording industry has a lot to do with forgetting this fundamental precept, not just because the sound of a recording can never measure up to the "live" experience but also because the sounds of those recordings are always, to some extent or another, manufactured (making "faithful reproduction" yet another of the great oxymorons of our language).

Fortunately, I have a neighbor who plays second violin in the San Francisco Opera Orchestra who does a lot to get my musical thinking back on track in our occasional conversations. Needless to say, her observations are highly personal, as when she tried to argue that the first Bruch violin concerto is really all about how the soloist pulls off that first sustained note. I am not yet sure where I come down on this argument, but I know that recovering from a fumbled first gesture is a formidable problem.

Applying this to yesterday's analysis, I would again begin by turning to the Artemis Quartet, since their entire evening was a matter of speaking in a revolutionary voice. However, with this as background what was important was that the "revolutionary sound" of Beethoven was not the "revolutionary sound" of Webern (which, in this case, was very much influenced by the sonorities of Verklärte Nacht) or even the "revolutionary sound" of the Schoenberg first quartet (whose "domain" marked a radical shift from that of Verklärte Nacht). Finding and delivering the right sound for each of these three, highly distinct, pieces demonstrates precisely what I was trying to get at in trying to make a case for "accountability to the music itself." In Biss' case I felt that his approach to the entire evening was actually built on going for a sound that embraced the entire program, and this was one of the reasons why his opening approach to Mozart only began to make sense in the context of his approach to Schumann.

This takes me back to my more recent impressions of Ingrid Fliter. Yesterday I charged her with the following accusation:

Fliter, however, played as if she had nothing rhetorical to say to the audience, which probably reflects that mind-set that is more directed at talking to competition judges, so to speak (but also reflects that she did not have very much, if anything, to say about either rationale or structural explanation).

To elaborate on this, I would say that she definitely had a sense of what it meant to go for the sound; but she was going for localized effects, rather than something for a specific composition or the entire program. She definitely had interesting approaches to touch and shading that displayed a command of playing the piano as a contrapuntal instrument. In other words she had the technique to make different voices speak in different ways, even (particularly?) when they were speaking at the same time. However, since it felt as if this technique was being applied to "special effects," my own impression was that those effects were intended more to impress competition judges than to reflect a rhetorical stance towards the music being played.

What Germany may Teach Subway

I have had what can best be described as an up-and-down relationship with the Subway chain of sandwich shops. I was certainly very impressed with their efforts to promote a greater variety of healthy offerings than could be found at McDonald's; and, if the numbers that now have Subway replacing McDonald's as the number one fast food chain in the United States are correct, then I would like to believe that this emphasis on healthy food had something to do with it. On the other hand I am always trying to track "customer experience," even where fast food is concerned; and, while Subway may have the infrastructure for accommodating a greater variety of customer needs, I have not been particularly happy with how those demands are being met at the most local level (meaning the shop closest to where I live). I have tended to spot-check this particular site before the lunch demand hits its peak, which gives me a somewhat more leisurely setting in which to observe. What I have seen is a shop with two people behind the counter. One is a manager who engages only with the other person. That person is the only one making sandwiches; but, even after several weeks on the job, she is still not familiar with the basic model of options. This means she has to think about every order of an case-by-case basis. She has not been doing this very well, and her manager has not been doing anything to provide assistance. As a result, I can no longer call this a "fast food" outlet; and what gets delivered is nothing like it used to be.

I was willing to view this as a local problem, best solved by not going to the Subway shop any more, until I read Klaus-Peter Kerbusk's account at SPIEGEL ONLINE about the hard time that Subway has been having expanding into the German market. The bottom line is that, while the initial venture into Germany got off to a good start, the current numbers indicate that the franchises are now having a very hard time at being profitable; and some of them are just plain failing. More specifically, Bernd Fassbender, president of the Franchisee Association Germany, told Kerbusk, "A conservative estimate would be that 30 percent of the Subway franchisees in Germany are just scraping by at the subsistence level."

So what's the problem? Kerbusk decided that the best way to address the question would be to look at the franchisees, since they were the ones losing money and therefore hurting the most from the problem. Here is what he observed:

The franchisees' objections begin with the English-language franchise contract, which makes a New York City court responsible for arbitration in cases of litigation. On a day-to-day level, the lack of territorial protection for franchisees is more annoying. The DAs [development agents, responsible for opening new outlets] are not paid a salary. Instead, they profit from the sale of licenses and receive a percentage of the monthly franchise fees -- regardless of whether the franchisee makes a profit or a loss. The system puts the DAs under strong pressure to constantly open new outlets -- and they apparently do so without any strategic rhyme or reason. "It's pure cannibalism," one franchisee complains.

The selection procedure for new franchisees is also controversial. Unlike McDonalds, where new franchisees go through a one-and-a-half-year training program, the DAs hand out licenses after a two-week course. They are happy to give them "to anyone who can read and write," complains Romberg, who is also the chairman of the National Franchisee Board Germany (NFBG), an association founded by German Subway franchisees to represent their interests.

In other words the problem is a systemic one concerned with how, at the top level, Subway has decided to run its business; and that problem may trace back to the fact that the business is still run by the founder, who started with a single sandwich stand in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1965. Furthermore, if the problem is systemic, then one is as likely to encounter it in the United States as in Germany. I am certainly willing to believe that my own local dissatisfaction can be accounted for by the Subway approach to training; and, since, according to Kerbusk, Subway's founder continues to expect operations to be financed by the franchises, rather than through a higher-level budget for "strategic advances," that approach is unlikely to change. (As an aside, however, I need to emphasize that this should not be taken as an endorsement of McDonald's. If they still have a one-and-a-half-year training program, the staff I recently encountered at an outlet in Santa Cruz did not appear to have benefited at all from it!)

As I said at the beginning, I have a lot of admiration for a fast food operation that appreciates the value of healthy offerings. Such a position is actually rather impressive for a business that got its start in 1965. Unfortunately, the founder still appears to be locked into the mindset of that single stand in 1965 business conditions. He is now beginning to feel the pinch of the ways in which the world has changed, and it remains to be seen how he will respond.

Confronting Addiction

HBO's Addiction Project, produced in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), goes on the air tonight. Having demonstrated their ability to deliver compelling social messages through both dramatic series (The Wire still being the best of the lot) and documentaries that demonstrate what you can do when you replace the financial table scraps of Public Television with a real budget (When the Levees Broke and, more recently, Bastards of the Party), HBO has now mounted a major project around a ninety-minute documentary supplemented by thirteen shorts. That's a lot of material, and HBO is engaging many of their resources to manage it. This includes four of the cable channels they now manage and their On Demand service. (I also thought I saw something about streaming video, but the only video I have found on their Web site thus far has been preview material.) Finally, the DVD (a four-disc set) goes on sale on March 20.

Entertainers love to recycle the motto that timing is everything. Since much of my own writing has tried to address the "addictive stance" we seem to be taking towards our abundance of technology toys, my own opinion is that the timing of this project could not have been better. However, while HBO describes this as a project targeted at Americans, I can only hope that at least some of the material they have produced can contribute to a global conversation on this problem. Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE ran a story about binge drinking in Europe that throws a new light on how we should be thinking about the social consequences of the European Union. Furthermore, while Germany may be taking innovative approaches to dealing with the elderly, the survey reported in SPIEGEL ONLINE indicates that this approach to alcohol is an addiction of the young:

Europeans from Cyprus to Ireland indulge in a rather intoxicating continental pastime: drinking. The champions of excessive or binge drinking are the Irish, Brits, Finns and Danes, according to a European Union survey on alcohol consumption released on Wednesday.

The study -- which polled 28,584 people between last October and November -- found that for young people in particular, the odd drink is not enough to satisfy their thirst: almost one in five between the ages of 15 and 24 consumes five or more beverages in one session, defined as the benchmark for binge drinking.

Binge champions are the Irish with 34 percent, followed by the Finnish, British and Danish with 27, 24 and 23 percent respectively. Italians and Greeks, on the other hand, tend to stay relatively sober: only 2 percent of those asked reported excessive alcohol consumption.

Since Germany is at neither the top nor the bottom of the list, SPIEGEL included one paragraph specific to Germany in their report:

Germany is currently discussing the dangers of binge drinking and ways to prevent out-of-control alcohol consumption following the much-publicized case of a 16-year-old student in Berlin who drank himself into coma by consuming 52 shots of tequila in one sitting.

I do not know if I, personally, have been too reductive in trying to gather these stories, and any others concerned with addiction, under my reality-is-too-much-with-us motto. I shall certainly be watching the HBO material with that project in mind, not so much to continue on my rants about our proclivities to deny reality as to try to throw more light on what it now means to "be in the world," a world that has now been made by our barreling ahead with major technological advances, most of them grounded in information technology and many of them based on the affordances of the Internet. My first blog tried to approach this as a problem of an educational system that attached more value to short-term training in the latest technologies and short-changed the longer-term perspective of the liberal arts. However, in taking that strategy, I may have been too focused on a symptom of a more general disease that is still very poorly understood; so I want to see if HBO will end up helping me with my understanding.

A New Meaning for "Senior Discount"

Somehow the idea of flashing an AARP card to get "senior rates" seems a little pale when compared to conditions in Germany, at least on the basis of the lead to one of today's SPIEGEL ONLINE stories:

If you have to get old, Germany isn't a bad place to do so. As well as generous state pensions, German senior citizens enjoy a host of benefits during their twilight years. Now, in addition to discounted rail travel, cut-price cinema tickets and cheap museum entry, Germany's old folk have a new perk to take advantage of: a 50- percent discount at Germany's largest brothel.

The brothel "Pascha" in Cologne is now offering senior citizens a 50 percent discount on sex services -- but only between the hours of 12 and 5 p.m., and only upon proof of age. The offer, which many would argue beats free coffee at McDonalds, is valid for clients aged 66 and over.

The reporter neglected to mention that this offer may also be healthier!

There are a variety of ways in which this is just a matter of good economic sense. If you have a population that is not only getting older but staying healthier in its old age, then there is something to be said for rethinking what constitutes the welfare of that population. Besides, while I am no expert on this business in any part of the world, I would think that the discount is valid during a relatively slow portion of the working day. (Unless I am mistaken, back in the days of its thriving existence, Theater in America ran a play based on this particular "work shift.")

The reporter also noted that this particular practice had a precedent that had taken a slightly different approach:

A brothel in Dresden in economically hard-hit eastern Germany made headlines in 2005 when it introduced a 20-percent discount for the long-term unemployed.

So it would appear that there is more to SPIEGEL than those well-considered analyses that I usually cite!

Pay Attention to Reality: It's the Law!

As I have written before, there seem to be an abundance of both motorists and pedestrians out there hell-bent (what an appropriate turn of phrase) on denying reality while in transit, shielding themselves with technologies like iPods and even (in one case in California) a laptop. Accounting for pedestrians may be the harder of the problems; but, according to Marguerite Reardon's Cellular Blog at CNET News.com, the problem with motorists may provoke changes in some states' motor vehicle codes:

The Wall Street Journal published a story Wednesday about state legislators writing laws to define a new driving offense, DWT or "Driving While Texting." It appears that lawmakers have been spurred into action by the increasing number of accidents that have occurred where electronic and wireless devices were being used by drivers.

I like the DWT epithet, since it implies that an active texting device can be as dangerous in the hands of a driver as an open bottle of booze. Ms. Reardon's sentiments are more libertarian, however, believing that common sense is a more reasonable approach than legislation; so a few words about common sense are probably in order.

There is an old joke about a mule that can do any kind of work on the farm, provided that first you whack him on the head several times with a two-by-four "in order to get his attention." Yes, this is a problem about attention; and anyone who spends a lot of time in a car, particularly in traffic and especially on highway patrol, knows that the average motorist has no more inclination to attention than that mule does! Technology has provided us with so many toys for escaping reality, that we now need to wake up to the fact that sometimes we really do have to attend to that reality. I do not know if legislation will wake up most of us, but I would bet that it will do a better job than relying on common sense! (I see Thomas Hobbes off in the distance quietly nodding in agreement.)

The Competition versus the Music

Last night's San Francisco recital debut by pianist Ingrid Fliter reminded me of why I always seem to attach a pejorative connotation to the phrase "competition winner." In this year of her 34th birthday, she seems to have racked up a healthy number of prizes and medals, the most recent being the 2006 Gilmore Artist Award, described in the program notes as follows:

She is only the fifth pianist to have been honored with the award, which is given to an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, possesses broad and profound musicianship and charisma, and who desires and can sustain a career as a major international concert artist.

Does that mean anything? Back when I used to rant about what was happening to the workplace on my previous blog, I would often fall back on the question of how one accounts for doing one's job. This would inevitably lead to the question of whether an enterprise is more accountable to its customers than it is to its shareholders (and sometimes it would also lead to the digression that accountability to employees never seemed to be part of the equation). It seems appropriate to raise this question of accountability to any performer who desires to "sustain a career as a major international concert artist."

Ms. Fliter is definitely not without talent, but I would like to propose that hers is a talent that is primarily calculated to win the approval of competition judges. If one listens with the right set of ears, one can practically hear every individual note being placed exactly where it belongs. If this is the "auditory view" from the recital hall, one can imagine what it must be like from the chair of the judge who is probably following the score during the performance! No, there is no question that we are talking about an awesome talent here; but it is a talent that raises a question analogous to my question about work, except that we are now dealing with a more abstract concept. Is there such a thing as accountability to the music itself; and, if so, can that accountability find itself in conflict with accountability to competition judges? I would argue that this is, indeed, the case, although it probably has little impact on the opinions of "paying customers" in today's "market" for classical music (which, unfortunately, is what ultimately determines the ability to sustain that career).

To try to demonstrate that there is such a thing as "accountability to the music itself," allow me to review two of my previous posts about musical performances, those of Jonathan Biss and the Artemis Quartet. I would like to examine these concerts (both of which left me feeling very enthusiastic about the state of musical performance) through a rather unorthodox set of lenses, those of medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. By viewing these performances from this particular point of view, I hope to demonstrate why Ms. Fliter left me with feelings of annoyance and boredom, rather than enthusiasm.

Let me begin by considering logic and immediately back-pedal a bit. My days as a published scholar entitling me to be a card-carrying member of the Society of Music Theory are long passed; but the scars of my battles with logical positivism remain. In retrospect it is rather depressing how much ink managed to get spilled by music theorists who looked for truth in the sentential forms of some logical calculus. Back in those days music theory had little regard for ethnography. If that discipline had any place at all, it was over in that remote realm of the ethnomusicologists, who already had a reputation for being a pretty odd lot. The consequence of these blinders was the tendency to equate rationality with logic, not realizing, as certain pioneers like Thomas Kuhn pointed out, that both texts and actions that, on the surface, appeared absurd, might actually have a rationale behind them if one could just situate them in a suitable context.

This is how I believe we should approach the role of "logic" when talking about music. We being by assuming that every composition has a rationale behind it, and then we have to go after the context in which that rationale reveals itself. What that rationale is will almost be a matter for debate; or, to put it another way, every performer has the inalienable right to make his or her own case for what that rationale is, rather than trying to home in on some Rashomon-like "truth" based on the composer's intentions (although if any of those intentions are available through the historical record, they ought not to be ignored). In other words at least one of the reasons for performing music is that it is the means by which the performer reveals that rationale and shares it with others.

In this respect both Biss and the Artemis made a very bold move: They tried to structure a program of works oriented around a common rationale that played itself out over a particular period of the history of music. In the Artemis program the rationale was the "revolutionary" one of "thinking out of the box" defined by the "regular social practices" (to invoke the language of Anthony Giddens) of the prevailing musical community. Biss also addressed the rationale behind "thinking out of the box" but added the moral reflection that venturing too far from the box may lead to madness. In Fliter's case, if there was any rationale at all, it had nothing to do with the music. Her program was a collection of works with challenges that would impress competition judges: Beethoven's "Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme," the Schubert A Major sonata written in the final year of his life (one of three extraordinary piano sonatas that left a wake of confusion for many decades after Schubert's death), and a Chopin assortment of familiar pieces, each with its own technical demands. From the point of view of the music, all of these works were, in fact, embedded in fascinating contexts which, if recognized, could have made for the sorts of edge-of-the-seat performances that Biss and the Artemis had delivered; but it seemed as if Fliter did not either know or care about such contexts. So there was so satisfaction through the lens of logic/rationale.

When we move from logic to grammar, we move from questions about ideas to questions about how those ideas are structured. In the language of hermeneutics, we move into the domain of how understanding may be expressed through structural explanation (and how resulting representations of structure may enhance and/or revise that understanding). In just about any domain there is usually considerable argument over just what constitutes an appropriate structural representation. My own musical background is one that honors the spirit (if not always the letter) of Heinrich Schenker: A structural explanation is one that sorts out the embellishing from the embellished. This is a tradition that goes all the way back to (at least) C. P. E. Bach's systematic study of ornamentation; and Schenker's greatest insight was that ornaments could, themselves, be ornamented (which also happens to be the fundamental precept behind bebop). In Schenker's language the greatest obligation that a performer has to a listener is to make it clear where the background is and what sets the foreground off from the background.

The works on both the Artemis and Biss programs raised many interesting questions around the ability of the ear to navigate this space of foregrounds and backgrounds. Indeed, one of the things that made Biss' reading of Mozart so interesting was his (apparently) deliberate effort to propose and then justify a structural explanation that was decidedly at odds with the sort of explanation one would assume for a Mozart piano sonata; and, as I tried to argue in my review, that justification really only "worked" in the context of his entire program (which was one of the things that made his recital so interesting). In the Fliter program one cannot ignore that any work presented as variations on a theme is basically declaring itself as an essay in structural explanation, while Chopin is, if nothing else, one of the greatest masters of embellishment (as anyone who tries to play any of his work knows full well). This is what made Fliter's get-each-note-right-to-satisfy-the-judges performance so disconcerting. Ultimately, she had nothing to say about structural explanation but was simply delivering what she felt was the most suitable "received truth." I was reminded of what Bernard Taper said about every dancer in the New York City Ballet back when Balanchine was in charge: Every dancer was like an angel, delivering a divine message with absolutely no comprehension of what the message was saying. (This also seems to be what Mike Nichols and Emma Thompson were going for in her portrayal of "The Angel of America.") When performing Chopin, this may win prizes, but at the price of detaching the listener from the very experience of music that should justify performance in the first place.

This bring us to the final element of the trivium: rhetoric. This is the one that is all about performance. Having confronted the challenges of rationale and sorted out the structural explanation, it is through the performance itself that one can offer something to the listener that makes sense of it all. Also, in a context in which we are now flooded with a variety of recordings of just about every work of music, it is the most difficult, because, like it or not, the performer is confronted with the problem of "speaking in a unique voice." If rhetoric is ultimately about suasion, then the task of the performer is basically a matter of convincing the audience to sit there and listen, rather than exploring some God-awful frescoes on the walls of the recital hall, playing Jotto with one's spouse (yes, I once had a couple sitting next to me doing that), or filling the program with items concerned with the next day's work (guilty as charged). Sometimes the very novelty of the rationale or the structural explanation may be enough to do the trick. More often the novelty is provocative; and the performer has to figure out how to say, "Look, I know this is not what you expected; but, if you bear with me, I am sure you will find this a real treat." Now, in all fairness, I am not sure that the Artemis Quartet was really trying to say that to their audience. In their case the "message" was probably more like, "We really like getting together to do this; and we hope you will like it, too." On the other hand, by opening with an unorthodox approach to Mozart and then delivering it with technical precision, Biss could pull of the not-what-you-expected rhetorical strategy and carry it through Webern, Beethoven, and Schumann (where finally it all made sense). Fliter, however, played as if she had nothing rhetorical to say to the audience, which probably reflects that mind-set that is more directed at talking to competition judges, so to speak (but also reflects that she did not have very much, if anything, to say about either rationale or structural explanation).

Having now developed an argument around the relevance of the medieval trivium to the appreciation of musical performance, I should conclude by observing that most of Fliter's audience seemed to love her. Since this was the Annual Subscriber Gift Concert for San Francisco Performance, the general atmosphere was highly supportive (not to mention appreciative on the part of the subscribers). I am not even sure that a review of this concert will appear in the Chronicle. Also, I want to go on record that the idea behind this Annual Subscriber Gift Concert is a good one; and I have really enjoyed most of the concerts I have seen in this setting. However, this particular evening restored my attention to an itch I have had about musical competitions for many years; and it was hard for me to avoid scratching it!

A Diary in Music

As a student I was heavily obsessed with Mahler (as were many of my contemporaries, probably due to the efforts of Leonard Bernstein to promote Mahler's work). The only real problem was that his obsession was fed almost entirely by recordings and occasional broadcasts of live performances on the radio. (Unless I am mistaken, there was a Public Television broadcast of Bernstein conducting Mahler's 8th symphony; but it was on when I was still having a lot of trouble getting my mind around that work. The first movement of the 8th was also part of the inaugural program for Lincoln Center in what, at the time, was called Philharmonic Hall; and that concert was telecast.)

Now I live in San Francisco, and Michael Tilson Thomas has made this one of the best cities in the world for hearing live performances of Mahler. (I also recently discovered, thanks to my RSS feed from the London Telegraph, that Thomas is doing the same thing in London with the London Symphony Orchestra, where he is a "permanent guest conductor.") What I have learned from these experiences is that there is always more in a Mahler score than can be captured by any recording process, no matter how good the technology is; but, because there is so much complexity for the ear to navigate, the recordings can provide a sort of "outline," without which many of the subtleties of a live performance might be missed. They also allow one to hear any single work of Mahler's with some sense of his entire corpus (or at least a healthy portion of that corpus); and this, too, can be informative.

For example, consider the fact that Thomas just conducted the Mahler 4th in London. Lots of people who write about music, particularly for the general public, like to claim that this is his most "accessible" symphony, particularly since it comes on the heels of the 3rd symphony, which is one of the most challenging for any conductor, not to mention the audience. (The first movement of the 3rd is longer than most symphonies. I remember hearing a radio broadcast of Mehta leading the New York Philharmonic. In spite of the fact that, by that time, clapping between movements was one of the great cardinal sins of the concert hall, there was a solid, not to mention well-deserved, round of applause after he had steered the Philharmonic through that first movement.)

The "accessibility" of the 4th may have to do with the fact that it can be heard as a reaction to the 3rd. Indeed, the final movement of the 4th, a setting of the Wunderhorn song, "Das himmlische Leben," was originally intended as the final movement of the 3rd, with the programmatic title "What the Child Tells Me." (As a matter of clarifying my sources, most of my understanding of Mahler comes from the de La Grange biography.) I think Mahler himself recognized that the scale of the 3rd was already getting out of hand (even if much of his reputation at that time was for conducting Wagner); so he dropped the "Child" song.

When he then picked it up again for his 4th, things started to get interesting; since one of the inner motifs of this song setting became the seed for the plan of the first movement of the 4th. Then, in the orchestral eruption at the climax of the third movement, we hear the first suggestion of the principal motif of the song setting. Whether or not this tightly-knit structure makes the whole symphony more "accessible" is debatable; but it encourages us to hear the symphony as an integrated whole in its own right, rather than material left over from the 3rd.

Once we start playing this game, however, we discover that the arrow of time points to the future, as well as the past. If we go back to the first movement of the 4th, I believe we shall find that the trumpet fanfare at the moment of its climax, just before we settle comfortably into the recapitulation, is pretty much a note-for-note forecast of the fanfare that introduces the funeral march at the start of the 5th! Once we start doing this sort of thing, we discover that it is actually pretty easy to play the game of finding threads that link the symphonies, particularly if you include Das Lied von der Erde, whose final ("ewig") motif moves over to the harp motif that introduces the 9th. Then, of course, you have the Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen preparing material for the 1st and Wunderhorn Lieder motifs showing up in the 3rd.

Am I suggesting that, from a logical point of view, Mahler wrote only one composition, which occupied most of the years of his practicing as a mature musician? If that is the case, then it might be better to view the Mahler corpus as a kind of diary. We know from all sorts of evidence (the comments scrawled over the pages of the 10th being the most blatant) that Mahler endowed his work with a lot of personal involvement; so this diary hypothesis is not particularly far-fetched. Music history provides us with plenty of examples of composers reflecting on personal incidents, such as the departure of Bach's brother or Beethoven's rage over his lost penny. Wagner certainly let a lot hang out, particularly when he was willing to surface his reflections on an illicit affair in his Wesendonk songs, which, in turn, served in part as a sketchbook for Tristan und Isolde. We now know that a similar theme served as the "secret program" for Berg's "Lyric Suite." However, these are all examples of episodes. Mahler seems to have been driven by his whole life-experience in a far more consistent manner, which is why I believe that, whenever we listen to Mahler, it is valuable to be informed by the whole corpus of his work, even if we can only get at that corpus through the limitations of recording technology.

California Newspeak?

Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE has an interview that Marc Hujer and Gerhard Spörl conducted with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Putting aside any gratuitous jokes about who had how much command of English in this interview, there were some interesting twists and turns in the language. For example Hujer and Spörl decided to lead off by confronting Schwarzenegger on the contrast between his professions of environmentalism and his personal taste in cars:

SPIEGEL: So you still own your Hummers? Is that really the right car for someone who wants to protect the environment?

Schwarzenegger: These are no ordinary Hummers. I had General Motors customize one of them into a hydrogen Hummer. It's the only Hummer in the world with that motor. I had another converted from diesel to biofuel. But now that I am governor, I am no longer able to drive these cars because I am chauffeured by the California Highway Patrol. My Hummers are usually in the garage.

SPIEGEL: Is it not an odd compromise to transform an energy-wasting Hummer into an environmentally friendly car? Wouldn't it be easier for you to just go out and buy a smaller car?

Schwarzenegger: Not at all. The message I am trying to get across is exactly this: Protecting the environment does not require us to be against large SUVs or trucks. Instead we should develop technology to cut down greenhouse gas emissions because that is where the action is -- it's not about what the size of the car is. We just have to redo the vehicles.

SPIEGEL: So is it the new California Dream to do good without having to eschew luxury? Is it possible to be wasteful and conservationist at the same time?

Schwarzenegger: Yes, it's fantastic. A short while ago, our office became the first in the country to receive the first BMW luxury 7 series hydrogen car. BMW made 100 of them and they gave them to 100 opinion-makers, stars and people with high visibility. When those people drive around it again sells the idea that it is cool to drive a hydrogen car. But that doesn't mean that you should take this big car and make it smaller. Instead we should be saying: "Keep the luxury car!"

The idea of being "wasteful and conservationist at the same time" could have come right out of the examples of newspeak in George Orwell's 1984; but Schwarzenegger did not have any trouble embracing it. Of course now that "fantastic" has been appropriated as Hollywood-speak, we have a tendency to forget its more standard definition. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary currently offers the following "primary" definition of the word:

Existing only in the imagination; fabulous, unreal. Now spec. perversely or irrationally imagined.

It looks like the OED may understand Arnold better than the rest of us!

Later in the interview Hujer and Spörl revisited one of Schwarzenegger's more notorious ways with words:

SPIEGEL: Do you think the country is fed up with partisanship?

Schwarzenegger: Unbelievably fed up.

SPIEGEL: That comes from someone who, two years ago, wanted to pass radical reforms in California over the objections of Democrats. You called people who wanted compromise "girly men." Did you change your mind?

Schwarzenegger: I changed my mind, yes. But I did not call anyone "girly men" because they wanted to compromise. I called them "girly men" because they didn't want to make the decisions that were right for California.

This time I do not think we need any help from the OED staff! Apparently, the epithet was invoked to characterize those who "didn't want to make the decisions that were right for California." Does this mean that Nancy Pelosi (or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton) is guilty by connotation of the same problem? Arnold dug a hole for himself when he coined this phrase in the early days of his administration, and it was more than a little disconcerting to see how easy it was for the Spiegel to get him to keep digging the hole!

Al Jazeera Enters the AIPAC Debate

It was clear from Rob Reynolds' report for Al Jazeera yesterday that this year's policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was likely to attract more attention and controversy than it has in the past. Al Jazeera, itself, responded to the controversy with its Inside Story program, on which it interviewed three guests for their opinions about AIPAC. Programs like this still tend to lack the depth of the sort of report compiled by Stephen Mearsheimer and John Walt or Michael Massing's extended analysis of this report for The New York Review, but it is always nice to compare such informal data points with the more scholarly ones. Summaries of the three comments have now been posted at Al Jazeera English and should not be denied attention.

The first comment comes from a leader of Peace Now, an organization that was just beginning to form back when I worked in Israel in the early seventies:

Gavri Bargil, one of the leaders of Peace Now, an Israeli peace organisation, said: "I think the work Aipac does is crucial and I support them. Our fear is sometimes they are too successful.

"They do not always represent the line of the Israeli public, nor the Jewish community in the US, who believe in two peoples, two states.

"Many times what Aipac reports to the [Capitol} Hill or to the US administration is much out of line."

The second is a view from Washington:

Steve Clemons, of the New American Foundation, a Washington think-tank, said: "I am impressed with the organisation and there's a lot of jealousy of its success.

"It has successfully managed to narrow debate in Washington on the Palestinian issue.

"We have a cartel of institutes and political think-tanks that dominate this area and I think it would be healthier if there were more players.

"... it would be a nice idea to invite Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of congress into a conversation at the conference.

"That kind of activity would go a long way to demystifying Aipac and what it's about, because there is a bit of mystery about what it is, and isn't, about."

Finally (and it is important that this was part of the debate), there was a voice from AIPAC itself:

Steve Clemons, of the New American Foundation, a Washington think-tank, said: "I am impressed with the organisation and there's a lot of jealousy of its success.

"It has successfully managed to narrow debate in Washington on the Palestinian issue.

"We have a cartel of institutes and political think-tanks that dominate this area and I think it would be healthier if there were more players.

"... it would be a nice idea to invite Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of congress into a conversation at the conference.

"That kind of activity would go a long way to demystifying Aipac and what it's about, because there is a bit of mystery about what it is, and isn't, about."

The one thing we can conclude from this is that Al Jazeera remains up there with the best of the mass media news sources when it comes to presenting the "story behind the story." Their choice of medium does not lend itself to extended analysis and reflection, but they should be praised for the way they have handled the limitations they have set for themselves. Since I tend to see things in terms of "The Memorable Sentence," I, for one, was most interested in Steve Clemons' suggestion about bringing Keith Ellison into the conversation. Indeed, had I read a report that Nancy Pelosi would be attending the AIPAC conference along with Ellison, I would probably not have reacted as negatively as I did to reading that she would be attending along with Cheney!

The First Step is Admitting the Problem

I suppose there is a certain irony that it was through Yahoo! News that I first found the Reuters report on China's effort to deal with Internet addiction. What is most interesting, however, is the extent to which this problem has become institutionalized in the form of an Internet Treatment Addiction Center, described as follows:

The Internet Addiction Treatment Center (IATC) in Daxing county uses a blend of therapy and military drills to treat the children of China's nouveau riche addicted to online games, Internet pornography, cybersex and chats.

There are sure to be questions about how this facility operates, just as there have been questions concerning approaches to just about any other form of addiction:

The government-funded Daxing center, run by an army colonel under the Beijing Military Hospital, is one of a handful of clinics treating patients with Internet addictions in China.

Patients, overwhelmingly male and aged 14 to 19, wake up in common dormitories at 6.15 a.m. to do morning calisthenics and march on the cracked concrete grounds wearing khaki fatigues.

Drill sergeants bark orders at them when they are not attending group and one-on-one counseling sessions. Therapy includes patients simulating war games with laser guns.

The IATC's tough love approach to breaking Internet addiction is unique to China, but necessary in a country with over two million teenage Internet addicts, according to facility staff.

"Many of the Internet addicts here have rarely considered other peoples' feelings. The military training allows them to feel what it's like to be a part of a team," said Xu Leiting, a psychologist at the hospital. "It also helps their bodies recover and makes them stronger."

The IATC has treated 1,500 patients in this way since opening in 2004, and boasts a 70 percent success rate at breaking addictions.

The fees cost about 10,000 yuan ($1,290) a month, nearly a year's average disposable income in China. But the center takes on pro bono cases for poor families, said Tao Ran, its director.

The article goes on to comment that there is still debate in the Western world over whether or not "Internet addiction" is a legitimate concept. One is reminded of J. Edgar Hoover's doubts over whether or not the Mafia existed, the efforts to ignore or deny medical evidence in the fifties concerning the correlation between cancer and cigarettes, or, for that matter (having just watched An Inconvenient Truth on Showtime), the reaction to scientific evidence of global warming. At least two of these analogies are not that far-fetched. There is nothing in the Constitution (or any other part of the legal record) that refers to "freedom of lifestyle;" but, when we look at general public behavior in open societies (not just the United States), there seems to be a general consensus that this is an "inalienable right," possibly covered in our own documents by "the pursuit of happiness." The Chinese government, on the other hand, was built on an ideology that places the well-being of the society ahead of the well-being of the individual; and every economic analysis we read about the growth of a market economy in China reminds us that this ideology is still officially in place. Indeed, when you think of it, confronting Internet addiction as a question of the public good is no different from challenging the presence of Starbucks in the imperial palace as an insult to Chinese culture.

When I unabashedly appropriated the title of Marco Bellocchio's film (China is Near) for one of my posts last month, it was not my intention to suggest that China was coming closer to the West in "attitude space." Rather, it was that China was catching up with the West by doing things their way, rather than conforming to Western normative practices. Whether or not the consequences of ignoring such norms when Internet addiction is at stake are positive remains to be seen (along with the consequences of this first skirmish of a "culture war" against Starbucks). However, history teaches us that normative practices are, in their own way, also addictive; so it may very well be the case that, as global economic trends work their course, we may be the ones who will need to think seriously about going into rehab!

AIPAC Time (again)

Rob Reynolds has filed a report with Al Jazeera about the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which started today. He described it as "one of the most powerful pressure groups in Washington and one of the main reasons for America's support of Israel," which is certainly consistent with the report by Mearsheimer and Walt, a report that, as I previously mentioned, had to turn to the London Review of Books to find a forum for publication. Reynolds mentioned this report in his final paragraph:

When a pair of university professors, John Walt and Stephen Mearsheimer, published a paper last year suggesting the pro-Israel lobby’s power distorted American foreign policy, they were attacked and labelled anti-Semites.

With that as context, it almost seems like a waste of time to ask whether the Mearsheimer-Walt paper has had any impact on participation in this year's conference. Reynolds' report would indicate that business is going on as usual:

Among the speakers at the conference which opens on Sunday will be Dick Cheney, the US vice president, Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker and Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister.

At this point it is probably worth noting as an aside another news report, which can be found at BBC NEWS, that Halliburton is planning to move its headquarters from Texas to Dubai; one assumes that the Vice President was aware of this!

As I have previously reported, all is not well in the Israeli garden; and it has reached a point where prominent and respected Israelis, such as Yosef Lapid, are willing to speak out about it. Once again, however, the Godzilla rule applies: size matters! Put in language made famous by Lyndon Johnson, AIPAC has too many peckers in their pocket (even from some who do not have said peckers, if I may be forgiven a minor lapse of taste) for the "voices of the righteous" to be heard in the wilderness they have made of the global political landscape. In such a context one can appreciate those who are so fiercely intransigent about even recognizing Israel, even when history teaches us how counterproductive such intransigence can be. After all, David was intransigent about facing Goliath; so why should we be surprised by the same behavior when the Goliath is now on the other side?

The Weapon of Mediocrity

I normally do not pay much attention to the "Insight" section in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, just because there are usually much better sources of analysis available. Today, however, I have to give the Chronicle credit for the pride of place they allotted to an adaptation of material by David Wallis from the book he edited entitled Killed Cartoons: Casualties From the War on Free Expression; my only regret is that the priority the article received in print was "buried" much more deeply on this morning's SF Gate home page. Well, you can't have everything.

The effective use of satire has always been one of my favorite subjects, particularly when effectiveness is a matter to getting "too close to the comfort of reality," as I recently observed about a post to Assimilated Press. What is particularly valuable about Wallis' project, however, goes beyond his decision to compile an anthology of spiked material by giving voice to the cartoonists themselves. It is through these comments that the reader can once again experience the power of what I recently called "The Memorable Sentence." In my opinion the most memorable of the comments came from Milt Prigee, who recalled the advice from an editor at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington:

If you want to survive at this paper, you've got to stay under management's radar. Don't do anything good. Don't do anything bad.

This says it all: Nothing kills critical thinking like mediocrity. The sharp point of the sword of the effective cartoon may be its ridicule, but the keen edge of the blade resides in the power of that cartoon to provoke reflection. Drawing upon the historical examples that Wallis provided, one can conclude that both Adolf Hitler and J. Edgar Hoover agreed on one thing, that the true "enemy of the state" is the reflective reader. Limited to text, rather than images, Kurt Vonnegut may have done the best job of characterizing the extent to which mediocrity can be a "weapon of mass destruction" in his story, "Harrison Bergeron" (which I first read in Welcome to the Monkey House and was eventually made into a not-particularly-good film). Vonnegut wrote this story in 1961; and, as far as I am concerned, we need to be reminded of its words every year.

How Concrete?

According to Steve Negus, Iraq Correspondent for the Financial Times, Iraq went into today's meeting in Baghdad with expectations that it would be concrete, rather than ceremonial:

Iraq says it will propose concrete measures to help stabilise the country at Saturday’s conference in Baghdad, which brings regional powers to the table alongside the US and Britain.

Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, said on Friday the conference would produce “actions...not [just] statements of solidarity or support”, adding: “We have developed some ideas how to hold” neighbouring countries to such commitments.

Reading the account at Al Jazeera English, one has to wonder how satisfied the Iraqis were with how the day proceeded:

"What the conference achieved was exploration and preparation, explorations of the different positions of people attending this conference and preparation for the upcoming conference in Istanbul," Jasim Azawi, the presenter of Al Jazeera's Inside Iraq programme, said.

Somehow, having a conference to prepare for another conference does not sound particularly concrete. Nevertheless, one has to give Nuri al-Maliki point for trying to put substance on the table:

Al-Maliki said that Iraq needed the support of its neighbours and the world in stopping the sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims, which he said could spill over to other countries in the region.

"We call on all to take moral responsibility by adopting a strong and clear stance against terrorism in Iraq and co-operate in stamping out forces of terror," al-Maliki said.

He demanded that "regional or international states refrain from interfering or influencing Iraq's state of affairs through supporting a certain sect, ethnic group or party".

"Confronting terrorism means halting any form of financial support and media or religious backing, as well as logistical support and the flow of arms and men who transform themselves into bombs that kill our children, women and elders, and destroy our mosques and churches."

This is certainly more concrete than focusing on preparing for the next meeting, but did anyone respond after al-Maliki was so explicit? An agreement to honor his demands would have been "concrete" (as, for that matter, would have been any country at the conference saying, "We cannot accept these demands because …").

Those who know their ballet history know about the men in masks on either side of the green table that dance the prologue and epilogue to Kurt Joos' "dance of death," conceived in the years between the First and Second World Wars (and called "The Green Table" as a way of saying the diplomacy frames atrocity). We seem to be watching another performance of "The Green Table," just without the music and the choreography. Al-Maliki could not have spoken in plainer language; but that did not seem to be enough to get the men in masks to offer any more than the ceremonial applause that was part of Joos' choreographic vision.

The Next Generation of 9/11 Stories

The context may have been good old-fashioned political mudslinging, but the effect may be one of opening Pandora's Box. Just as generations of politicians have learned (usually the hard way) about the "untouchability" of the Social Security system, there has been a tacit assumption in the media that the reaction to the 9/11 attack is a "story of heroism" that should not be tainted by any hints of a "dark side." (In this respect Katrina may have provided the media with a sort of safety value, an opportunity to tell as story as if it were entirely "dark side," which, of course, is as much a distortion as trying to portray 9/11 as "pure heroism.") Well, Washington has been more than flirting with "touching" Social Security again; and now the media are beginning to acknowledge that "dark side" of the 9/11 story, all because the International Association of Fire Fighters decided to bring its long feud with Rudy Giuliani out into the public forum. The story broke early this morning through Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press, and her story was then released through Yahoo! News and reported on Truthdig.

The basic story is that the Fire Fighters union has accused Giuliani of what may be called "warped" priorities during the post-9/11 cleanup:

The 280,000-member union accused him of carelessly expediting the cleanup process with a "scoop-and-dump" operation after the recovery of millions of dollars in gold, silver and other assets from the Bank of Nova Scotia that had been buried.

This accusation is part of a letter that now appears on the union's Web site using language that we have never before encountered in accounts of the 9/11 aftermath:

"Mayor Giuliani's actions meant that firefighters and citizens who perished would either remain buried at Ground Zero forever, with no closure for families, or be removed like so much garbage and deposited at the Fresh Kills landfill," the letter said, adding: "Hundreds remained entombed in Ground Zero when Giuliani gave up on them."

"What Giuliani showed is a disgraceful lack of respect for the fallen and those brothers still searching for them," it added.

The union said the purpose of the letter was "to make all our members aware of the egregious acts Mayor Giuliani committed against our members, our fallen on 9/11 and our New York City union officers following that horrific day."

What provoked such an eruption of ill feeling, which we have every reason to believe was sincerely expressed? The answer, of course, is politics. Max Weber characterized politics as a social construct that legitimizes the exercise of authoritarian power, but he forgot to add the corollary that it also legitimizes the elimination of civil discourse. This whole affair came about because the union wanted to organize a presidential forum (basically because, however early in the game it may have been, it gave them a legitimate opportunity to exercise their power). The letter grew out of a debate over whether or not Giuliani should be invited to the forum and got leaked to several Web sites, resulting in the union providing an "authorized version of the text" on their own Web site.

In the midst of the hullabaloo, an invitation did go out to Giuliani, which he declined (as did Mitt Romney, for what that is worth). Sidoti's final paragraph accounts (not very completely) for the current status of the forum:

At least 10 Republican and Democratic candidates plan to attend Wednesday's forum, including Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and former Sen. John Edwards. On the Republican side, the only top tier candidate who has committed is GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, declined an invitation.

My point, however, is that this is not a story about the forum, the union, or even the friction between the union and Giuliani. It is a story about speaking ill of how the aftermath of 9/11 was handled. I invoked the metaphor of Pandora's Box because every story like this has demons that are just waiting to come out in the due course of time. Look at the way the stories we tell about the Second World War have changed over the last decade. In that case it took about half a century for the demons to come to light; but time flows a lot faster in "the world the Internet has made." I would not be surprised to see more ugly stories like this, particularly when we consider how many potential targets for such stories there are. The media is already having a field day tainting candidates for their actions before we went into Iraq; so it should be no surprise that they will now start to do the same with respect to their post-9/11 actions.

If You Reduce it All to a Single Number, that Number is Almost Certainly Wrong!

There has been so much grief over the Bush Administration's obsession with standardized tests and scores as a "remedy" for the current educational practice that there is a certain comfort (albeit cold) in finding other countries that also fail to "get it." A case in point is a report from the United Kingdom by Jon Boone and Simon Briscoe for the Financial Times. I had not realized that all secondary schools in Britain are ranked according to a single number, computed on the basis of students' examination scores. The punch line of the Boone-Briscoe report is that this computation does not take into account the subjects of those examinations. Thus a high score in mathematics carries the same weight as one in "leisure studies" (and, yes, that is a specific example given by Boone and Briscoe). This is particularly important because British parents have some ability to choose where their kids get their secondary education; and, if they have the power of decision, then they are entitled to the power to make an informed decision. The "bottom line" (literally the final paragraph) of the Boone-Briscoe report concludes that British parents are being denied this power:

The government figures make it particularly hard for parents to differentiate between a reasonably good comprehensive school that still primarily teaches traditional academic subjects, and a comprehensive that bulks out its results with softer subjects.

This is the sort of situation that begs for a Neustadt-May analysis that begins by asking, "How did we get into this mess?" Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Studies, claims it is a problem of a system that forces the comparison of apples and oranges. That's a nice metaphor, since I have yet to meet anyone who goes into a supermarket and tries to compare apples and oranges. Speaking for myself, I might want to know which of the two fruit options is cheaper, which looks fresher, or which may have been the story of a pesticide scandal; but I never think in terms of whether the apple itself is better than the orange or vice versa.

Raymond Callahan has argued that, in the United States, such attempts to "score" educational institutions is a product of the "cult of efficiency," which, in turn, had been fostered by Frederick Taylor's theory and practice of "scientific management. Put another way, this is a matter of trying to view education as a production industry rather than a service profession. As I have tried to argue in the past, this just illustrates how hard it is for us to get our brains around what service professions are and how we value them, even both the world's oldest profession and education (which I have called the second-oldest profession) are based on providing services. However, I am not sure that the British ranking system is a symptom of this American cult of efficiency. Sadly, it may just be a matter of laziness, based on that assumption that British parents do not want to be confronted with the problem of comparing apples and oranges; but I have to believe that, since most British parents know how to deal with a grocery store or supermarket, they know better than that. They have at least a vague idea of the sort of education they think would be right for their kids; and, having decided whether that is an "apple education" or an "orange education," they are then ready to talk about comparison. So perhaps it all comes down to whether or not British parents will let their government know that they are mad as hell about having their intelligence insulted and are not going to take it any more (to steal a turn of phrase uttered by a British actor)!

Oops!

Last night the BBC also ran a report about Operation Vigilant Sentry, which they described as "a huge exercise in Florida in preparation for a possible mass exodus from Cuba in the event of the death of Fidel Castro." As we now know, thanks to just about every source (including Jane Sutton at Reuters), the exodus already seems to have begun (or continued) and took place during the exercise:

Boaters dropped off 21 Cuban migrants at a popular nudist beach and left 19 others on another beach a few hours later, the Border Patrol said. Both vessels escaped.

Border Patrol spokesman Steve McDonald got stuck with "spin" duty:

"We're not embarrassed at all," McDonald said. "It's not uncommon for them (Cubans) to have landings."

So, will there be a "lessons learned" session at the end of the exercise; and will the press be invited?

Guantanamo Chutzpah

I suppose I could have climaxed my "billionaires club" post by assigning the Chutzpah of the Week award to Steve Forbes and all who sail under him; but last night's BBC news kept me busier than usual. These days I am more interested in the way we are now engaging in "dueling narratives" with China over the question of human rights; and, with that as context, I feel that last night's BBC report from Guantanamo probably deserves pride of place in the chutzpah "bake-off." I base this on the rather shabby way in which the United States is trying to turn due process into a Potemkin village (i.e., nothing more than facade). The facade in this case concerns the hearings that have been scheduled for fourteen Guantanamo detainees. The purpose of the hearing will be to decide whether each detainee is an "enemy combatant," subject to prosecution by a military trial. The good news is that that government is finally deciding to do something with these fourteen detainees other than "disappearing" them into the Guantanamo detention system. The chutzpah, however, comes from one of the ground rules behind the hearing:

The hearings are being held with no defence lawyers present, and human rights groups say the panels of three military officials could consider evidence obtained by force.

In other words, having invented the construct of "enemy combatant" to legitimize the denial of due process to a suspect, the hearing that will decide whether or not the suspect is an "enemy combatant" will, itself, turn a blind eye to such due process. Some might argue that this is just "business as usual" in Guantanamo; but this week it seems appropriate to use the Chutzpah Award to remind us than any progress we may have made with the electoral process last November is still not being felt where we have committed what may be one of our greatest affronts to justice in the history of the United States.

On Being a Bastard at Steve's Forbes' Party

I first heard the results of the latest Forbes "billionaire club" survey last night on the BBC. Since then I have been struck by how much media attention it has been receiving. For example, on the basis of my own informal sampling of RSS feeds, it seems to be taking priority over this morning's Washington Post story of the latest abusive practices of the FBI in the alleged "interests of national security." Some of this probably has to do with both the statistical implications of the Forbes report and some of the specific instances behind the statistics. The basic statistical result was the lead paragraph on the BBC NEWS Web site:

A record 946 billionaires - worth a total of $3.5 trillion (£1.82 trillion) - now exist, up from 793 last year.

This was followed by a broad-brush attempt at analysis giving voice to editor-in-chief Steve Forbes:

Forbes put the increase in wealth down to surging commodity prices, real estate and strong equity markets.

"In the last five years... despite all the turmoil in the world, all the conflict in the world, the global economy in real terms expanded over 25%," said Steve Forbes, the magazine's editor-in-chief.

"Never in history has there been such an advance."

Another interesting statistic, reported on the broadcast but not on the Web page, is that the average age of these billionaire is decreasing: billionaires are getting younger. They are also cropping up in unexpected places:

Forbes Billionaire list now features 53 nations, including its first billionaires from Serbia and Romania.

Once again, the BBC turned to Steve Forbes for comment:

"This growth in the billionaires list is a mere reflection of a dynamic global economy. More people are better off on this Earth than ever before," Mr Forbes said.

"This boom goes beyond commodities. One of the things that has facilitated this global boom, bringing hundreds of millions of people into the global economy is of course technology," he added.

"This is the richest year in human history."

It has been a while since I actually picked up a physical copy of Forbes; and they are not my Web site of choice for financial reporting. So all this prompts me to reflect on the past (back when Malcolm was in charge) and ask if Forbes still promotes itself as a "capitalist tool." As I tried to argue in my post about the currency situation in Somalia, assertions about wealth or, for that matter, being "better off," rarely rest on anything more solid than the stories that are told by way of support. It is axiomatic that a magazine that calls itself a "capitalist tool" is going to tell different stories than, for example, one that runs an analysis under the title "Does Communism Work After All?" Since I continue to believe that the only way to undermine a narrative is with a better narrative, this kind of "dueling storytellers" is inevitable where highly subjective and culture-dependent concepts of wealth are concerned.

Where I live it is not hard to find counternarratives. I suppose most real estate agents would use the adjective "luxury" in listing my condominium; and, as far as I am concerned, there are enough amenities (which I shall not enumerate) to justify that use. However, living within sight of the San Francisco City Hall dome (and directly across the street from a state government building) means that a short walk to the east takes you right into the heart of the Tenderloin; so, if I say that I live on the boundary between wealth and poverty, I am being more literal than metaphorical. When I take such a walk, I have a hard time swallowing phrases like "the richest year in human history" or Christian platitudes about the poor always being with us.

Instead, I continue to reflect on Baudrillard, who followed up on his trenchant observations about objects by then turning to our obsessions with simulacra (which, in turn, led to the harsh language of America, based on analyses of Las Vegas and Disneyland as purveyors of simulacra). From this point of view, "asset portfolios," whether they involve bank account, equity shares, or what-have-you, are the ultimate collections that Baudrillard is attacking in Le Système des Objets; and, in light of his later thinking, they are collections of simulacra, more virtual than those salt shakers I discussed in yesterday's post. In that respect I would argue that everyone on the Forbes list is, drawing upon the language of my interpreted of Baudrillard, "obsessed" with an "asset portfolio collection." Whether or not I then follow Baudrillard's analysis to the conclusion that such people are "impoverished and inhuman," I still reserve the right to question whether or not they are really making this "the richest year in human history." Instead, I think of Cle Sloan's assertion in Bastards of the Party that we now use prisons as a place to store people who cannot contribute to the economy. I worry that those who hold the most wealth are also the ones who determine what it means to "contribute to the economy;" and I believe that such thinking can only widen that gulf between wealth and poverty that is already far wider than it ought to be.

Growing Up Infantile

Katy's comment to my memoir of Jean Baudrillard left me with the comfort that, even from the grave, he still has the ability to provoke. That provocation seems to have a lot to do with his invocation of the concept of "infantile." Of course this is as concept that occupied American (intellectual?) minds long before most of us were aware of Jean Baudrillard. Paul Goodman took it in in Growing up Absurd, beginning with the premise that, back in the good old days, being adult had to do with the ability to provide food, clothing, and shelter and that, by those standards, very few middle-class Americans in the middle of the twentieth century could be classified as adult. See, it is one thing to purposefully amass (a term that Baudrillard used in contrast to "collect") large quantities of salt because you happen to have evidence that there may be a salt shortage (in the style of the dream of the seven fat years and the seven lean years) and quite another to collect a large quantity of salt shakers. The former is an instance (perhaps overly stereotyped) of the Heidegger concept of being-in-the-world, i.e. being aware of the situation and taking action to deal with it; while the latter is "ultimately discourse with one's self," which, as far as Baudrillard is concerned, is infantile. He chose that language to raise hackles, and it looks like it still works!

Yes, we all need our comforts. We even all need moments of self-indulgence from time to time. On the other hand, in the immortal words of Don Marquis, there is such as thing as "too tourjours gai!" Baudrillard looked around and feared that self-indulgence in comfort was become the focal point of everyday life. He reasoned that such focus detached us from many of the harsher realities of the world. Were he still alive, he would probably be fulminating in the same way over Second Life and the cocoons we weave for ourselves with our iPods. In other words his strident warnings are as important today as they were when he first wrote Le Système des Objets!

The Pot Confronts the Kettle

According to the Al Jazeera wire sources, China has decided to reject its usual silence and speak out in reaction to the latest rant over human rights from the United States. This year China issued a response directly accusing the United States of hypocrisy:

As in previous years, the [US] State Department pointed the finger at human rights conditions in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but avoided touching on the human rights situation in the United States.

As Al Jazeera reported, the Chinese decided to react by looking at the record:

The report took aim at a variety of issues, including civilian deaths in Iraq, child poverty, racism, mistreatment of prisoners and the place of US women in the workplace.

It said naming and shaming other countries in an annual report on human rights practices was "typical of Cold War mentality".

Cases of abuses were sourced to Western media reports, US government statistics and even groups such as Amnesty International that often find themselves taken to task by the Chinese government for their criticism of Beijing's human rights record.

This exchange simply reminds us that neither China nor the United States can speak from a position of moral authority in matters of human rights. Indeed, if we adopt those principles of regionalism that I advocated on Tuesday, there is probably not a position of moral authority by virtue of the extensive diversity of world-views across the regions. On the other hand, some level of reporting is probably necessary, just so a denizen of one region knows what to expect when going into another region. The biggest mistake that a tourist (of any nationality visiting any country) can make is to assume that, wherever one happens to be visiting, things are "just like home." So as long as these reports have explicit value, particularly where matters such as commerce are concerned, they will be produced; but, as long as they are produced, nations will use them to beat the heads of other nations while feeling better about their own moral righteousness, however illusory that righteousness may be.

"God forgives -- Skabrnja doesn't."

If there were any lingering doubts about the relevance of Adam Lebor's piece for The Nation on genocide, which I reviewed on Sunday, then Marion Kraske's report on ethnic hatred in Croatia at SPIEGEL ONLINE should reinforce Lebor's argument. Kraske's lead says it all:

The nights scare Sofia Skoric most. The 71-year-old Serb woman sits in her sparsely furnished sitting room, her wrinkled skin bronzed by decades of sunshine. It's getting dark outside and she no longer feels safe. It's night again, and she and her husband Svetozar feel they may again fall victim to the rage of their neighbors.

Just like one night last summer. It was shortly after half past one when people started hurling bricks through the windows of their house. The police later counted 34 bricks in the house. Other Serbs in the small village of Biljane Donje were also targeted. Within a few hours, police had found the culprits: four young Croats from the neighboring village of Skabrnja.

Turning the other cheek may sound good enough in church, but it does not hold up very well against a collective memory that has been contaminated by the experience of genocide. This is the message behind the graffiti left by the Croatian vandals and quoted in the title of this post. The word from the more moderate voices is no more encouraging:

"There's no one here who didn't lose a member of their family in the massacre," says the mayor of Skabrnja, Nediljko Bubnjar, wearing black sunglasses, his mobile phone attached to his belt. Bubnjar, regarded as a moderate here, says he condemns the attacks on Serbs in Biljane Donje. "But," he says emphatically, "one must not forget what happened here either."

In Ulysses James Joyce had his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, describe history as a nightmare from which he is trying to awaken. The nightmare continues, ironically enough, in a corner of Europe where Joyce did some of this best writing.

Remembering Jean Baudrillard

I just read the wire service report of the death of Jean Baudrillard at Al Jazeera English. I hope that it will not be long before I see more extended obituaries; but I may as well set down my own thoughts on the basis of the "raw data." Basically, my reaction was not that different to how I received the news of the death of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: I went into my files to see what sorts of notes I had taken of what I had read.

I was first drawn to Baudrillard in the summer of 1989, when the English translation of America sent Robert Hughes into a apoplectic frenzy. I had always felt that Hughes was one of those blowhards whose opinion of himself was vastly overrated (and therefore should have been right at home at Time magazine); so I figured that anyone who annoyed him that much had to be worth reading. However, unless I am mistaken, I did not actually knuckle down at buy any Baudrillard until over five years later, when I found French editions of both Amérique and Le Système des Objets in a bookstore in Basle. Then, I have to confess, it took more than another five years before I finally took the time to give him a serious read, concentrating on Le Système des Objets.

The Al Jazeera report describes Baudrillard as "the French sociologist and philosopher and critic of globalisation and consumerism;" and Le Système des Objets is definitely a good place to get his take on consumerism. However, it seemed to me at the time that he was not so much going after the obsessive need to buy and the role of the media, particularly advertising, in cultivating that obsession as he was trying to get at why so much of life had become an (obsessive?) matter of collecting things (i.e. objects). Here is a bullet list of points I made after reading his chapter about collection in Le Système des Objets:

• Collecting is ultimately discourse with one’s self.
• As such it is fundamentally infantile.
• This distinguishes it from science (the collection of facts) and memory (the collection of knowledge).
• Anyone obsessed with collection is impoverished and inhuman.

Writing as one who collects music (CDs, sheet music, and orchestral scores for study) and books, I found this pretty stern stuff. On the other hand it may also have gotten under my skin enough to be useful. If nothing else, it probably eased the trauma of my having to get rid of all my vinyl recordings when I had to adjust to a radical reduction of space in moving from a house in Palo Alto to a condominium in San Francisco. Ironically, given how much critical ink Baudrillard spilled over our obsessions with the virtual, that trauma was also eased by a belief that any object I gave up would eventually be at my disposal through the resources of some digital library. In any event I reproduce that summary here because I feel it is as valid today as it was when Le Système des Objets first appeared in1968.

In my Schlesinger post I made it a point to honor the man with his own words. I would like to do that with another passage from Le Système des Objets. Since I never bothered to look into whether the book was translated into English, this passage is my own translation; so I have to apologize in advance if my effort comes off as too amateurish. However, I wanted to reproduce the content here, because the topic is automation:

Therefore, to render a machine automatic, it is indeed necessary to sacrifice possibilities of operation. To render a practical object automatic, it is necessary to stereotype its functionality and weaken it. Far from having its own technical signification, automation always carries a risk of technological arrest: to the extent that an object is not automated, it is susceptible to reconfiguration, to advancement as a larger functional set. If it becomes automated, its function is achieved, but is also finished: it becomes exclusive. Automation is thus like a closure, a functional redundancy, expelling man into the irresponsibility of a spectator. It is the dream of a subjugated world, of a technology formally accomplished in the service of an inert and dreaming humanity.

I suppose that it was writing like this that ultimately drove me to start writing my first blog on the theme of "Reflections Beyond Technology." The extent to which technocentric thinking is still "expelling man into the irresponsibility of a spectator" continues to haunt me, whether it has to do with the ways in which "CRM thinking" have eroded our humanity or with the consequences of that erosion on our response to natural disasters such as Katrina.

In his later years Baudrillard shifted his attacks from consumerism to globalization; but, at the end of the day, he was still writing about a world that was a product of excessive technocentrism. As far as I am concerned, one cannot write too much about this topic. Given the current state of that world, he should be missed, even if those most in need of his insights are least aware of him.

You Can't Eat or Drink Lifestyle

CRM Buyer has reproduced a story by Donna Goodison for the Boston Herald on a recent customer loyalty poll in the chain coffee shop business. This is an annual poll conducted by Brand Keys based on a few straightforward criteria:

The New York market research firm's survey measures how well a company meets loyal customers' expectations based on location and value, in-store experience and service, quality and taste, and variety and range of offerings.

Here is Goodison's summary of methods and results:

Brand Keys, which has conducted the customer loyalty surveys for a decade and partnered with Brandweek to bestow awards to winners since 2004, added the coffee and doughnuts category five years ago. It conducted telephone surveys of 20,000 U.S. adults, equally split between men and women ages 18 to 60, from nine census regions. Those who buy coffee three or more times a week were asked where they make their purchases and were classified as either Dunkin', Starbucks or Krispy Kreme customers.

Dunkin's scores rose in all four measures judged. It scored higher than Starbucks in both in-store service and experience, and quality and taste.

Robert Passikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys, see this as a clear statement that customers care more about product than about "lifestyle experience," which has been the emphasis is recent Starbucks branding:

When you think of Dunkin', you think of doughnuts and coffee. You don't think of CDs, you don't think of sandwiches, you don't think of newspapers.

I found it interesting that Brand Keys did not consider price a factor in customer loyalty, particularly in economic times when many people are more careful about how much they want to pay to have someone else prepare their coffee. However, if we are to believe the March 2007 issue of Consumer Reports, a Starbucks cup, at $1.55, came in a dime cheaper than the Dunkin' Donuts cup ($1.65). (That Consumer Reports piece, by the way, gave best price ($1.35) and best taste to McDonald's; but I, personally, have never been that confident in the assessment of either taste or nutrition!)

So if price is not the determining factor, could there be an issue of cultural rebellion? Is America losing its taste for the "Seattle trendy" cachet, if not for the beans and brewing? Could it be a matter of perceiving Starbucks as an "evil empire," from the same mould as that other mega-corporation in Washington state? Probably it is not worth too much speculation. Consumer behavior has always been highly volatile; so, while Brand Keys may conduct this survey once a year, the half-life of the results is far shorter!

More on the Urstromtaler (and its 21 cousins)

Yesterday I discussed an analysis of an attempt to solve the problem of currency management in Somalia and described it as a complement to Tristana Moore's BBC report last month on the Urstromtaler. Today SPIEGEL ONLINE features a more extensive analysis by Nils Klawitter of the pros and cons behind the theory and practice of regional currencies, now that 22 regions in Germany have introduced their own variations on this solution. Unfortunately, Klawitter brings only two voices to the debate. The advocate is Margrit Kennedy, who has written several books on alternative currencies and is basically represented by a single quotation:

Regional money is like a homeopathic cure for the chaos and suffering international financial markets cause in the world.

I think it is a bit regrettable that readers with even the most objective intentions might be biased by the "granola connotations" of this language; and, since I have not read Kennedy's Interest and Inflation Free Money, it is hard for me to tell whether or not this quotation is representative of her rhetoric. (For that matter I am not sure how representative this particular book is, since it was written in 1995; but it is the one English-language title I found in the Library of Congress catalog!)

Klawitter devotes far more attention to the opposing point of view. Here is the lead paragraph for that portion of his analysis:

Gerhard Rösl, a political economist at Regensburg Technical College, is not convinced. "Social romanticism on the part of people who don't think in a structured way" is how he characterizes this way of thinking. Rösl has carried out a study on regional currencies for Germany's central bank. The basic thrust of his study is that regional money may be an entertaining gimmick for tourists, but it's largely nonsense from an economic point of view.

So it may be that Klawitter has "primed the pump" with a quote from Kennedy that prepares the reader for Rösl's accusation of "social romanticism." Klawitter then devotes the rest of his article to examples that Rösl invokes to demonstrate that the system does not really work as it was intended and ends up costing more than it is worth.

When the bias is this strong, you have to wonder whether or not "you have to be there" to draw your own conclusions. Certainly, if regions in Germany are anything like regions in the United States, then it is hard to imagine that they are so uniform in their local administration and politics that they would all run with this particular idea the same way and all enjoy the same benefits from their actions. The most important lesson from Somalia is that, in the words of that old cliché of narrative theory, "context is everything," meaning that the we should be very skeptical on the attempts of both Kennedy and Rösl to generalize on their observations.

For what it is worth, my own bias is in favor of regionalism. I think that one of the key lessons of those harrowing analyses of genocide that I recently discussed is that, whatever Hobbes may have argued about the necessity of government, we all tend to be basically tribal by nature (and, while tribal life may be longer that it used to be, it is still pretty nasty and brutish). Friedman's "flat world" is nothing more than a myth to make the super-rich feel better about exploiting the rest of the world's population; but it does nothing for the majority of that population whose biggest problem often comes down to having a loaf of bread and maybe some milk for the night. There is no reason for people in that sector to expect that their problems will be taken seriously, let alone solved, on any level other than a regional one. Whether or not those regions then decide to open up cross-regional channels of communication is another matter (and which time we would do well to listen to the voices of Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Appiah, and Jürgen Habermas); but my current conviction is that there would be fewer problems on a global scale if regions were more empowered to work out their own problems on their own scale.

Money on the Boundary between the Real and the Virtual

Mohammed Adow has written an excellent analysis for Al Jazeera English on the subject of currency management in Somalia. I am not sure he homed in on the right punch line, but he makes a lot of good points. In many ways his report makes for a useful complement to Tristana Moore's BBC report last month on the Urstromtaler. However, while Moore reported on a system that was both highly localized and highly regulated, Adow's account is basically a study in an informal approach to regulation in the absence of any governmental authority:

The collapse of the Somali state in 1991 and the subsequent and the crash of the domestic currency, the shilling, meant the crippled economy was starved of liquidity to facilitate an economic recovery and of any means to replace ageing banknotes.

Without a viable central bank or any other financial authority able to provide such an essential service many people decided to take it upon themselves to do so.

Consequently it is in the Bakaara market, Somalia's biggest, where the value of the Somali shilling is now regulated, largely by a network of guesswork and rumour.

Every morning money exchangers from all over the country call the market to enquire the rate of the Somali shilling against dollars.

In short they have taken on the role of the central bank.

On the surface this seems like a good thing, the sort of story that wisdom-of-crowds advocates love to tell, particularly if they are also free-market ideologues. The basic message is that currency matters most in the market, so the market becomes the vehicle of currency regulation. However, the picture is not as rosy as those evangelists would like it to be:

Mohammed Dhoore is among the people who have come to exchange dollars at the market. A huge pile of notes is his return for a thousand dollars.

"These traders are unscrupulous," Dhoore says. "During the end of the month when there are dollars in the market they reduce the price of the dollar and then a week later they increase it. They are just selfish."

However the traders deny this.

Abdikarim Fodere, a money exchanger, says it is all a matter of supply and demand and the price they put on the dollar depends on its availability in the market and nothing else.

There are no surprises here. There will always be disagreements over questions of regulation. By all rights we should be happy that these disagreements get aired. Unfortunately, disagreements are not resolved by Habermas-style communicative actions that ultimately result in mutual understanding. Rather, they seem to be provoking actions that put the entire system in jeopardy:

Today Somali shillings can be easily printed from Indonesia and inserted into the markets at will.

The government and businessmen have been the biggest culprits in the money printing spree.

There are also reports that some of the money in the markets is printed by underground cartels in the country.

"Our money has been reduced to a commodity like rice and sugar which anyone can just print and bring into the market," Abdikarim Fodere says. "The fake money has eaten into our economy."

The profiteering from fake Somali currency has indeed created more destitution in the country.

It has affected the poorest of Somalia's poor especially those whose wages are paid in the practically useless currency.

In other words the Bakaara market really is not regulating the currency because there are too many easy opportunities to undermine what authority is has (which is based on little more than an agreement about normative social practices).

This analysis is fine as far as it goes (along with an interesting sidebar on the limitations of a single denomination); but I feel it missed out on one of my favorite topics in economics. This is the principle that the value of currency is, and has always been, a "fiction of convenience." In recent time John Kenneth Galbraith was probably one of the most vivid exponents of this position; but, among those with a reputation for wordsmith-craft, Goethe may have been the first out of the gate when he introduced the concept in the second part of his Faust. However, whether your source is Goethe or Galbraith, the principle is the same: currency is only as good as the stories that are told about it and the authority that users of the currency attribute to those stories.

In the context of a secure and centralized government, there is not question about who gets to tell the stories. Those stories may not always be as consistent as we would like, but there is a general agreement over the role of the authorized storyteller. That role is assumed by a "central bank," such as our Federal Reserve. In the absence that "secure and centralized government" in Somalia, the Bakaara market is being recognized as an authorized storyteller. However, as I have previously observed, the best way to undermine a narrative is with another narrative; and that is basically what the counterfeiters are doing. What is particularly sad about this state of affairs is that the merchants in the Bakaara market are in no position to recognize counterfeit currency, so their authority is easily undermined. However, as the old joke about the gambler in Las Vegas goes, "The roulette wheel may be crooked, but it is the only game in town." The market is the only place where Somalis can get the food and other resources necessary to make it through another day; and, as Adow has demonstrated so poignantly, they are the ones who lose the most in this "battle of storytellers." What we are left with is a lesson of the value of centralized governance that should serve as a harsh message to those more academic champions of "self-organizing systems."

Iraqi Chutzpah

Once again I seem to have been late with the Chutzpah of the Week award, but this time it was definitely worth the wait. This week's award goes to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Now I realize that this guy is uncomfortable with his position and has good reason to be so. Nevertheless, we really have to think about the most recent torture news from Iraq that just appeared on Truthdig, courtesy of the BBC. Here is their summary (including a link to the BBC source):

British and Iraqi forces raided a National Iraqi Intelligence detention center on Sunday and discovered 30 prisoners, including two children, “many of whom showed signs of torture and abuse.” Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki condemned the raid as an “illegal and irresponsible act” and has ordered an investigation.

If it is not immediately evident from the summary, the investigation is into the conduct of the raid, rather than the evidence discovered as a result of the raid. Whether or not al-Maliki has been learning about governance from his many meetings with White House representatives is open to question; but he may be getting chutzpah lessons from Condi!

The Battle of Selma

By all rights the celebration of the 42nd anniversary of the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama should have been just that: a recognition of how much has changed since those dark confrontations during the Civil Rights struggle. Unfortunately, with both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton in town for the event, the theme of the anniversary was reduced to a side-show. A lot of innocent blood was shed 42 years ago in what was supposed to have been a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery. This time the press was there in full force expecting a different kind of bloodshed.

I watched the video coverage from both the BBC and ABC. It goes without saying that I have no idea how extensively that material was edited, so I have to begin with the observation that the rest of this analysis is based on what was probably a too-limited point of view. Nevertheless, I feel it important to comment that my primary impression was of how uncomfortable both candidates appeared to be. Perhaps each was uncomfortable because of the presence of the other, but I think that is just the surface manifestation of a deeper problem.

In one church we had Obama, sitting in a sort of detached isolation from the celebratory congregation and looking for all the world as if he wanted to be somewhere else. Then he ascended to the altar to address the congregation; and it was as if, once again, he was struggling to establish his credentials. His delivery was neither stirring nor audacious; and "hope" did not appear to be in his working vocabulary.

Down the street in another church, Hillary had all of her rhetorical guns out in full force. Indeed, I might have marked it down as the best performance I have seen from her had she not belabored her use of the first-person plural; and after a while all I could think of was the final punch line to that great Mad Magazine parody of The Lone Ranger. Those unfamiliar with the joke can follow the hyperlink I have provided. In this age of Political Correctness, many have accused it of being a racist slur. It is nothing of the sort. It is the deft use of humor to reveal a truth that many would prefer to leave unspoken and a celebration of just how good Mad Magazine could be when they were at the top of their game.

Then there was John Lewis, tapped for a sound byte by ABC News (with good reason, since he was one of the Selma marchers who got beaten up by the police). He was uncomfortable with the prospect of having to make a choice between these two would-be candidates; and he gets points from me for being open about his discomfort. He still speaks from a position of authority; but, unlike many with similar status, he appreciates (perhaps painfully) the responsibility of that position. If he declares a preference, one can imagine that he will have many followers; and I sympathize with his being in a position that makes it almost impossible to make a reasoned decision.

Come to think of it, in all the footage I saw, the most comfortable person there was Bill Clinton. He was back in the element he has loved so much and for so long, chatting away with that enthusiasm that brought us to him as a candidate. It made me regret, once again, just how much of his second term was wasted over hyper-partisan bickering and downright stupid errors of judgment.

Madness through Music

Robert Schumann died in a mental asylum in 1856. Since the nineteenth-century understanding of the mind, particularly its pathologies, was not particularly extensive, we have little hard evidence about the nature of his malady other than his attempted suicide. Students of Schumann's life and work like to point to his personal construction of self through the two fictitious voices of Florestan and Eusebius, who appear not only in his texts but also in "Carnaval," and argue that he was bipolar. I even once heard a paper delivered by a musicologist who combined text records with her interpretation of "Carnaval" to conclude that he was a transvestite (or at least fantasized about it). Whatever the facts may be, there is a general consensus that Schumann did not always fit very well with the "real world;" and this would lead to erratic behavior.

This consensus also sees "Kreisleriana" as Schumann's identification with E. T. A. Hoffmann's fictional character, the Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler. I first encountered Kreisler in my college days. A mathematics professor I knew had pointed me in the direction of Hoffmann's Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst Fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler. This purported to be an autobiography of a cat (Murr), who was kept by Kreisler. Unable to find blank sheets of paper, Murr decided to write this autobiography on the opposite side of pages that Kreisler had used to document his own life. The resulting text is an oscillation of disconnected fragments as the "editor" (Hoffmann) reproduces both sides of each sheet of paper in the order in which he found them. Those fragments were enough to convince me that Kreisler was one scary character, so it did not surprise me that one of Hoffmann's working titles for his Kreisler material was Lucid Intervals of an Insane Musician.

Turning now to Schumann, we see that "Kreisleriana" was composed in 1838. He was madly in love with Clara Wieck, and Clara's father was doing all he could to prevent her from marrying Robert. This was a very prolific time for Schumann. One might even get away with saying that he was composing like one possessed, and much of his composition work was pushing the envelopes of both structural expectations and technical demands. The result is an embodiment of madness in music that is as scary as Hoffmann's text-based efforts. They not only challenge the pianist to come to terms with the notes that need to be executed but also challenge the listener to "make sense" of what ensues. In other words the work resides on the brink between the order of musical structure and the chaos of total mental breakdown.

A pianist has to have both confidence and guts to pull off a performance that immediately situates us on that brink and never provides a breath of security through the duration of the eight fantasies that serve as the "movements" of "Kreisleriana." After last night I am happy to report that Jonathan Biss has both the confidence and the guts. I went to his recital with high hopes, having enjoyed his interpretation of Beethoven's fourth piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony; and I was not disappointed. It was not just the manic energy that drove forward all of the allegro passages or even the retrospective mood swings that would interrupt these bursts of energy. There was also this uneasy sense that every pause for reflection was settling on German idioms that would begin as practically banal and then gradually deteriorate as more and more notes were shoveled into the musical texture. Even many of the boldest pianists tend to focus on getting the technique right and letting the results speak for themselves. Biss, on the other hand, found the "subtext" that supported all that technique and would neither hide it nor smooth it over with an elegantly polished reading. It is hard to write about this in the context of music as it is generally performed. One gets a better sense of what this all felt like by thinking over Shakespeare at his most horrific in Lear and then turning up the volume a couple of notches.

"Kreisleriana" was the only piece Biss played after his intermission. In retrospect one realizes that he used the first half of his recital to prepare our ears, so to speak. Just before the intermission, his reading of Beethoven's "Pastoral" sonata honored the fragmented nature of that text. His reading was fitful but not an any exaggerated way, just enough to make sure we were all aware of the "gaps" that impeded the sort of "garden variety" continuity we tend to expect from our classical music. His opening the recital with Mozart took a similar tack. In this case the work was fragmented: the synthesis of the allegro and andante sonata movements of K. 533 with the rondo of K. 494. However, the sense of separation of the two parts was almost violent. The K. 533 movements almost sounded like Schumann, and only the final movement left us with some sense of the comfort that we usually associate with listening to Mozart piano sonatas. When I first heard this performance, I had no idea what to think about it; but it makes a lot more sense in the context of the entire evening.

Between the Mozart and the Beethoven Biss played the Webern "Variations for Piano." This is the sort of piece from which we tend to expect fragmentation. Fortunately, the latter half of the twentieth century saw the successful migration of Webern out of the hands of the (most amateur) mathematicians and into the hands of those who could find the music in the notes. While no one could accuse this of being a standard theme-and-variations composition, Biss had a clear sense of how Webern has segmented the work in such a way that the resulting gestures feel like a series of variations. It may be that this particular approach to reading was the same one that he brought to the K. 533 movements, but this was not apparent until we heard its application to the Webern.

At the beginning of last month, I wrote about how the Artemis Quartet had taken an integrated approach to the program for their recital. It would appear that Biss has done the same with his recital. I hope this is a trend that will continue. It can make us all better listeners.

Nietzsche Redux

The Nietzschean choice of title ("Human, All Too Human") for Adam Lebor's review of four major books about genocide (the last actually being the first two volumes of a four-volume series) in The Nation makes the review all the more haunting and depressing. If Isaiah Berlin staked his philosophical reputation on the conviction that there is no single "one size fits all" world view or set of values for the vast diversity of world cultures and that the celebration of this diversity should hone every individual's sense of tolerance, then the combined perspectives of these historical analyses challenge that conviction with the proposition that the "human condition" response to diversity is to eliminate it. This is not philosophizing about the nature of evil but a bald recognition of behavior that has been going on practically as long as humans have organized themselves into groups (thus elevating the self-other distinction from the subjective world to the social world). Ultimately, Nietzsche's own persona could not tolerate that this might be the fundamental principle of humanity; and he went mad. When Lebor writes about the weakness of judicial rulings in the face of even the harshest evidence of genocide, he may actually be writing about an "induced insensitivity," without which we may all follow Nietzsche's path into madness. Such may be the ultimate price of "being human."

Bernanke at Stanford

Ben Bernanke was at Stanford yesterday, and Jim Christie was there to cover his speech for Reuters. In contrast to the Financial Times report by Krishna Guha that I examined on Wednesday, Christie has made it clear when he is giving us Bernanke's words, even if that still leaves us with the problem of trying to figure out what message is actually being sent. The message appears to be primarily to drum up confidence in the Federal Reserve, since the basic theme involved the regulation of economic health through regulatory control. The reason for sending this message goes back to one of the questions I raised in my Wednesday post over who, in this brave new world of globalization, is calling the rules for the Great Economic Game. Thus, Bernanke wanted to assure us all that globalization in not wreaking havoc with our own playbook:

When the offsetting effects of globalization on the prices of manufactured imports and on energy and commodity prices are considered together, there seems to be little basis for concluding that globalization overall has significantly reduced inflation in the United States in recent years; indeed the opposite may be true.

This led to the major punch line as Christie reported it:

Bernanke said that globalization has not "materially affected the ability" of the Fed to influence U.S. financial conditions, "nor has it led to significant changes in the process which determines the U.S. inflation rate."

So, is this another dog that did not bark in the night; or is there are growing storm of opposition opinion claiming that the Federal Reserve no longer has the regulatory power on which we have relied for so long? Put in a more fear-mongering way, if, as many such as Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner have argued, China is now calling the rules for the Great Economic Game, does that mean that they are now controlling the economic destiny of the United States? If the question is framed in that kind of language, one can understand why Bernanke needs to maintain, if not enhance, confidence in the Federal Reserve. However, if we are really interested in worst-case scenarios, the framing of that question is actually a distraction from the harder truth concerning the magnitude of American debt that China now owns. The unpleasant truth is that our economic destiny depends less on globalization and more on how China decides to manage that debt. Given the track record of our inability to grasp the world view of any culture other than our own, one can imagine any number of ways in which the United States might blunder into an unpleasant situation that could provoke China into being less accommodating towards that debt we have amassed!

Remembering Schlesinger

I think that the best way to honor the memory of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died Wednesday from a heart attack at the age of 89, is to read what he wrote. Since this can keep us busy for quite some time, in this post I would like to focus on an article that appeared in the September/October 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs with the provocative title "Has Democracy a Future?" (The essay was later included as Chapter 6 of War and the American Presidency.) What has particularly stuck with me about this essay is that, even in 1997, Schlesinger was cultivating a highly perceptive sense of the world that the Internet was making; and he felt obliged to write about this.

Let me begin with a passage that picks up on my comments yesterday about the concept of "contributing to the economy:"

The computerized world poses problems for democracy. Where the Industrial Revolution created more jobs than it destroyed, the Computer Revolution threatens to destroy more jobs than it creates. It also threatens to erect new and rigid class barriers, especially between the well-educated and the ill-educated. Economy inequality has already grown in the United States to the point where disparities are greater in egalitarian America than in the class-ridden societies of Europe. Felix Rohatyn [I tried to track down the source for the quotation and found that it may have been by Richard Sennett], the investment banker and rescuer of a bankrupt New York City, speaks of the "huge transfers of wealth from lower-skilled middle-class workers to the owners of capital assets and to a new technological aristocracy."

Then there is a passage that reflects my own skepticism about the ability of the Internet to cultivate the "wisdom of crowds:"

Interactivity encourages instant responses, discourages second thoughts, and offers outlets for demagoguery, egomania, insult, and hate. Listen to talk radio! In too interactive a polity, a "common passion," as Madison thought, could sweep through a people and lead to emotional and ill-judged actions. Remembering the explosion of popular indignation when President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, one is grateful that the electronic town hall was not running the country in 1951. The Internet has done little thus far to foster the reasoned exchanges that in Madison’s words [The Federalist, Number 10] "refine and enlarge the public views."

Finally, let me include a passage that reflects on the key question of the essay, whether or not the concept of democracy has a future, in light of the world that the Internet has been making:

The Computer Revolution offers wondrous new possibilities for creative destruction [my hyperlink]. One goal of capitalist creativity is the globalized economy. One—unplanned—candidate for capitalist destruction is the nation-state, the traditional site of democracy. The computer turns the untrammeled market into a global juggernaut crashing across frontiers, enfeebling national powers of taxation and regulation, undercutting national management of interest rates and exchange rates, widening disparities of wealth both within and between nations, dragging down labor standards, degrading the environment, denying nations the shaping of their own economic destiny, accountable to no one, creating a world economy without a world polity. Cyberspace is beyond national control. No authorities exist to provide international control. Where is democracy now?

There is a school of thought that reflects on the current administration and asks whether the United States is on the cusp of a transition from republic to empire. This proposition certainly merits reflection, but the causality may not reside in the White House. The prevailing Internet culture may be a far more significant factor than any element of any country's current approach to governance.

The Memorable Sentence

Last night I finally got around to watching Bastards of the Party on HBO. This is, without a doubt, the most memorable documentary I have seen on HBO since When the Levees Broke (and since that was not too long ago, my expectations for future projects are beginning to rise). Much of my enthusiasm may have to do with the fact that the film demonstrates the first step of the "thinking in time" methodology developed by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May in their study of episodes of presidential decision making in times of crisis. In vernacular language that step says that, when confronted with a crisis situation, begin by asking the question, "How did we get into this mess?" This is precisely the question that motivates director Cle "Bone" Sloan in his study of black gang violence in Los Angeles; and, while Sloan would probably not call himself a historian, the way in which he takes on the question demonstrates that he is as capable of historical thinking as the best of the "accredited" historians.

However, I find that the documentaries that work best for me are those that master the art of distilling the complexity of the expository subject matter into the more "portable take-away;" and sometimes this can just be a single sentence that sticks with you long after the rest of the documentary is a blur in your memory. In When the Levees Broke that sentence exploded like a grenade during the coverage of the evacuation of the Superdome when a woman could no longer contain herself and accused FEMA of treating the evacuees like slaves. In Bastards of the Party in emerges through Sloan's condemnation of a state strategy that seems based on little more than building more prisons. His point is that all these prisons are not being used particularly punitively, nor are they providing much by way of rehabilitation. All they provide is a place to store people who cannot contribute to the economy. This "storage function" then carries a connotation that avoids the question of whether or not any of these prisoners are capable, or even motivated, to "contribute to the economy," because the penal system is grounded on the assumption that the state does not want these people to "contribute to the economy."

Now this is familiar ground to students of history. The ideology of the Third Reich identified certain sectors of the population as being unfit to "contribute to the economy;" and they implemented a similar "solution" of storing the members of those sectors in various isolated locations. Of course that was only the first step of the "solution;" and all but the most rabid Holocaust deniers know where the subsequent steps led. From that point of view, Amiri Baraka's language in talking about post-Katrina or prisons (being well acquainted with the latter) in terms of "ethnic cleansing" should be viewed as neither extreme nor surprising.

In the midst of the folly of the First World War, Wilfred Owen declared that "all a poet can do today is warn." His warning did not get very far, and Owen ended up as one of the many casualties of that War. Spike Lee and Cle Sloan are using their documentary skills to, once again, try to warn us; but, as is too often the case, they are warning us about truths we really do not wish to hear. The risk of avoiding such warnings, of course, is that, like Owen, we shall all end up as casualties.