Things are Never Black and White

I just corrected a typo on last Thursday's "The Technician Versus the Venture Capitalist" post. I meant to say that the argument in that post was not an attempt to reduce the debate between Vinod Khosla and Hermann Scheer "to a four-legs-good-two-legs-bad situation, pitting 'two-legged' business decisions against 'four-legged' public policy." Last night, Guy Dinmore, of the Financial Times, filed a story in which the interests of the shareholders seemed to be aligning themselves with public sentiment over a particularly ugly policy decision. Here is Dinmore's lead:

Warren Buffett is known for hanging on to profitable stocks long term. This week, however, at the annual general meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway company, the “sage of Omaha” will hear an unusual case from shareholders who want him to sell his huge holdings in a well-performing Chinese oil company – to help stop the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region.

I am particularly struck by the timing of this story, since my Saturday post had included the following quotation from French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal:

I'm today holding out my hand ... to all those who think that human values must always prevail over financial and market values.

Those of us who cannot afford to become Berkshire Hathaway investors, can enjoy a certainly level of irony in this little narrative of opposition between human values and financial values. After all, people invest in Berkshire Hathaway because they attach high value to Buffett's judgment and skill for making them a lot of money; but, in this particular case they seem to have acquired a distaste for what may be "blood money." This all harkens back to that little "prose poem" about self-execution from my youth.

Fortunately, I do not have to take sides on this matter. If Buffett chooses to exercise judgment that places financial values over human values, then that is his business, in the strictest definition of that word. Shareholders who do not like that priority can always "vote" by selling their shares. I am not convinced that a shareholders' meeting is the right place for a debate over moral questions. On the other hand, the world being what there is, I am not sure that there is a right place for such a debate; and , after all, a shareholders' meeting is supposed to allot some time for the "voice" of the shareholders. So I suppose I am glad that, at least in this particular case, this particular "voice" will be heard, if not because it will sway Buffett's own strategies then because it is an opinion that will be reported to fund managers around the world, each of whom can then make of that news what they will. It will also be reported to investors around the world, and they, too, can make their own decisions about their own investments.

Google Fails to Learn (again?)

It is not yet a month since the story broke over Google's use of pre-Katrina images in Google Maps and Google Earth. One would have thought that this incident had raised enough flack to teach Google a good lesson in the consequences that come from being too casual about their responsibility as an information provider. However, a Reuters story this morning seems to indicate that this is not the case and the Google's negligence has now scaled up from domestic embarrassment to an international controversy. (At least Google maintains its reputation for thinking big!)

The Reuters lead says it all:

The Chilean government wants Google to fix its Earth geographical search program that places a village named after Chilean independence hero Bernardo O'Higgins in Argentina.

The satellite image shows Villa O'Higgins, a tiny hamlet 1,000 miles south of the Chilean capital, Santiago, on the Argentine side of the border.

I had not realized the potential consequences of this error until, in a later paragraph, I learned something I had not previously known:

The two countries nearly went to war in the late 1970s over ownership of remote islands in the south. The dispute was resolved with the intervention of the Pope.

My guess is that no one at Google knew how sensitive this border issue was either, which makes me feel a little bit better! Once again, however, Google was out there with an official spokesperson, this time Megan Quinn. Unfortunately, her message was not that different from the Katrina patch-up:

We have received the request and are working with our partners to get more precise data for the region.

The operative word in that sentence is "partners." Google is quite happy to build the reputation of being the provider of all the world's knowledge, but it does not seem to have decided where the buck of responsibility for quality control should stop. Sadly, the current state of their revenue flow is unlikely to make them very conducive to learning. Would it help if, after his planned visit to the United Nations, the Pope extended his itinerary to include a stop in Mountain View?

The Third Candidate at the Runoff

Even though I shall not be voting in it, I must confess that I am thoroughly fascinated by what is happening in the French presidential election. I think a lot of my interest has to do with the far broader spectrum of choice that was available during the first round, even if I could not resist the urge to poke fun at some of the choices on the left. However, now that the field has been cleared to only two candidates, what particularly impresses me is that the centrist François Bayrou is still in the spotlight, even though his first-round numbers were substantially behind those of the leading candidates. Election watchers with far more expertise than my own were giving serious consideration to the prospect that Bayrou could eliminate either Royal or Sarkozy, just as Le Pen had eliminated Jospin in the last election. Personally, I am just as glad that this did not happen, since, by all rights, the distinguishing features between the two candidates are much clearer. However, both candidates now seem to be pinning their strategies on going after those who voted for Bayrou, while Bayrou is doing his best not to exert his own influence over those voters.

It is hard to tell what the deciding factors will be when the runoff election takes place; but it is beginning to appear that many voters will be swayed by which candidate is less annoying, if not downright alienating. Before the election was announced, Sarkozy was already building up a track record of provocation, often by disparaging sectors of the electorate by questioning whether or not they were "really French" (my words, not his, in the interest of full disclosure). Since, whether I like it or not, I carry with me a "cultural memory" of Jews who were subjection to questioning over whether they were "really German" (or "really Austrian" or "really Polish"), this kind of tactic gets to me at a gut level. Sarkozy must have realized that enough voters who really mattered would have similar gut reactions; so much of his "performance" (What else can we call it?) leading up to the runoff involved a "presentation of self" that was more moderate. This left me wondering whether any particular turn of events might knock down this facade and remind the electorate of the more provocative Sarkozy; and, of course, there was the question that, if such events would come to pass, would they have been activated by Royal, or, for that matter, Bayrou?

Reading the latest wire reports, it looks like such events have occurred; and they may have been due to both Royal and Bayrou? Royal seems to have decided that, if her objective is to win over Bayrou's voters, then the best way in which she could present herself to them in a persuasive manner would be in a debate with Bayrou, rather than Sarkozy. Such a debate was planned and scheduled for broadcast tonight on CanalPlus (a cable network that is becoming almost as much a household word as HBO or Turner Broadcasting). However, CanalPlus cancelled their plan on Thursday, claiming that it would violate their equal-time policy; and the debate will be covered by a smaller satellite channel.

As we can read in the Al Jazeera English account, this is where things began to get interesting:

Bayrou said the conservative leader from the UMP party [Sarkozy] had used his media contacts to try to stop him from holding a televised debate with the socialist hopeful.

Sarkozy called the accusations insulting and his campaign director, Claude Gueant said Bayrou was using "Stalinist" tactics.

"It's slander, a slanderous insinuation," he said.

This summary then received further elaboration, which also makes for good reading:

Bayrou has campaigned against Sarkozy's links to big business and media groups, notably the TF1 station owned by Martin Bouygues, a close friend of Sarkozy, who runs the media, construction and telecommunications conglomerate Bouygues.

Royal said: "I think all the pressure that has taken place, notably within a media-financial system to which Nicolas Sarkozy is very linked, have no reason to exist in a democratic country where freedom of speech and debate is very important."

"I'm today holding out my hand ... to all those who think that human values must always prevail over financial and market values," she told supporters at a rally in Lyon.

Sarkozy vehemently denied any involvement in CanalPlus deciding not to air the debate and accused Royal and Bayrou of trying to stage the "Moscow trials", in reference to the show trials of Stalin's political opponents in the 1930s.

"No one is under control, no one is putting pressure," Sarkozy said during a campaign swing in the central French town of Puy Guillaume.

"If renewing politics means staging Moscow trials like this one, this is not renewal," said Sarkozy, the 52-year-old candidate of the governing party.

So it would seem that both Bayrou and Royal may have had a hand in releasing that kraken that lurks within Sarkozy, leading the French voters to question his intimations of moderate conduct, if not his policies. If this was a "cunning plan," then it was well executed, although we shall not know how effective it was until the runoff takes place. One thing I know, however, is that, even though I cannot vote, Royal has finally won my sympathies, given how much of my own writing is about the need for human values to "prevail over financial and market values!"

Leveraging What Works

The thing that most impressed me about General David Petraeus was that, on his first tour of duty, he seemed to have a very good sense of what did and did not work coupled with an action plan for using the things that did work to his advantage. When he received his new appointment, I wondered whether or not he would continue to exercise this skill. Reporting for Reuters, Yara Bayoumy has identified at least one situation, in the Anbar province, where Petraeus is doing just that:

At a news conference in Washington on Thursday, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, hailed Abu Risha and other Sunni tribal leaders.

He said the Sunni Arab tribes were "helping transform Anbar province and other areas from being assessed as lost as little as six months ago to being relatively heartening".

So what is it that Petraeus found at the Sunni tribal level that "worked" will enough to be incorporated into his own strategy? Here is Bayoumy's lead:

A year ago, Iraq's Anbar was the most dangerous province for U.S. troops. Al Qaeda had dug in across the vast desert region. Iraqis were afraid to leave their homes in the local capital Ramadi, where insurgents held sway.

Then last summer Sunni tribal leader Sheikh Abdulsattar Abu Risha gathered his fellow tribal chiefs together and created a police force to try to restore security.

Under the umbrella of the Anbar Salvation Council, Abu Risha says his initiative is showing early signs of success, with recruitment putting some 20,000 police on the streets of the Sunni-dominated province.

"The situation (in Anbar) was unbearable before, people were tortured, shot dead, bodies littered the streets. We couldn't even leave our homes to bury the dead," Abu Risha told Reuters from Ramadi by a crackly satellite phone.

Abu Risha's initiative -- partly in response to Sunni Islamist al Qaeda's indiscriminate killing of civilians in Anbar -- has revived 15 large police stations that now come under the control of the provincial police chief.

Now, while car bombings still plague Anbar, and especially Ramadi, their number has fallen, U.S. military officials said.

And for the first time in three years, U.S. military deaths in the insurgent stronghold stretching across western Iraq number fewer than in Baghdad, where a new security crackdown began in February with additional troops.

This is definitely a "good news" story; but, more importantly, it is a story about a solution that was conceived and implemented at a tribal level. Not only that, the story is about a Sunni tribe that refused to have anything to do with the practices of another Sunni-based organization, al Qaeda. We are so obsessed with the primacy of the concept of "nation," whether in our own world-view of government or the world-view at the core of the United Nations, that we find it hard to conceive of any governance structure grounded on any other concept. T. E. Lawrence was probably able to conceive of such governance but had no skill in trying to convince his own country, which was both nation-bound and empire-bound. This is not to promote Petraeus as a latter-day Lawrence or as a "wise man" of political theory. Petraeus just believes in leveraging anything that works. If his superiors allow him to continue with this strategy, he may be our best hope for getting out of the mess we have made for ourselves.

On the Logic of the "System"

I have never expected to make any money off of blogging. Presented with the prospect of signing up with AdSense, I basically applied chicken-soup-logic: I could not see any reason why it could hurt. I have had a bit of exposure to processes like keyword auctions, so I was kind of curious as to what the system would do with me. These days I am trying to engage my text analysis skills to figure out why the ad I keep seeing on my home page is a link to TheGayQuiz.com/gay! My working hypothesis is that this is driven by my tag list, which happens to have entries like "discrimination" and "intolerance." I like this. I feel it is important to bring acts of discrimination and intolerance to light, lest we delude ourselves into thinking that they are things of the past; and, as a result, I am likely to be sympathetic to any organization that has decided to bid on either of those keywords!

Another Award for Neoconservative Chutzpah

Condi already has her Chutzpah of the Week award, so the timing seems right for Paul Wolfowitz to get his. Think of all they have in common, from their prestigious academic credentials to a preternatural disposition for aggression in the face of adversity. In this case the context can be found in Steven Weisman's current "review of the bidding" in Wolfowitz' conflict with the World Bank over whether he should keep his job. Weisman's lead paragraphs illustrate the delicacy and tact that the Bank, as an institution, has tried to bring to bear on what must be such an unpleasant situation:

Paul D. Wolfowitz’s struggle to hold on to his job as World Bank president suffered a major setback on Thursday when more than 40 members of the organization’s anticorruption team, formed to promote transparent government and closely identified with Mr. Wolfowitz, declared that the controversy over his conduct was undermining their work.

Without directly calling for his resignation or removal, the team said that Mr. Wolfowitz and the bank’s board needed to take “clear and decisive actions to resolve this crisis,” which it said was undermining the bank’s “credibility and authority to engage” on the corruption issue.

“The credibility of our front-line staff is eroding in the face of legitimate questions from our clients about the bank’s ability to practice what it preaches on governance,” the statement said. “In these circumstances, we cannot credibly implement the GAC strategy,” using the acronym for governance and anticorruption.

So how has Wolfowitz reacted? We learn this by progressing further into Weisman's article:

Mr. Wolfowitz, who has steadily lost support in recent weeks at the bank and in finance ministries around the world, had asked Wednesday to appear before the board next week. He conveyed that request in a letter charging that the board had treated him “shabbily and unfairly” by not giving him enough time to make his case.

Having read several other accounts of this affair, I am willing to stick my neck out and say that Weisman did a pretty good job of keeping bias out of his lead paragraphs, leading us to wonder just how it is that the Bank board has been unfair, let alone shabby, to Wolfowitz. Having enough time seems like a pretty shallow argument, given how long this pot has been boiling. Perhaps Wolfowitz needs the time because he assumed that the controversy would just run out of steam; but to now accuse his accusers of unfair and shabby treatment in the wake of his own failure to recognize the need to prepare a defense makes for a good working definition of chutzpah!

We are Known by the Company we Keep

Amnesty International has released its annual report on global death penalty statistics. This got brief coverage on BBC World Service Radio, but the best place to see the numbers is at Al Jazeera English. Here are the most important statistics:

Amnesty International reported 1,591 executions last year.

It said 91 per cent of all known executions took place in six countries.

- China: More than 1,000 executions reported but actual figures could be as high as 8,000.
- Iran: 177 people at least, doubling the number in 2005.
- Pakistan: 82
- Iraq: 65, including at least two women - death penalty reinstated in 2004 to combat violence.
- Sudan: 65, chief among six African countries that carried out executions in 2006.
- United States: 53 people in 12 states, the only country in the Americas to have carried out any executions since 2003.

I find this particularly interesting in light of our efforts to be seen as the exporter of democracy to the rest of the world. Sadly, our value system is determined less by what we say than by what we do and, apparently, by the company we keep in doing it.

Jack Valenti's Last Take

Rostropovich was not the only subject of a BBC obituary this morning. There was also the report of Jack Valenti's death last night. Those of us who saw the documentary This Film is not yet Rated or have investigated the business side of Hollywood through other lenses are most likely to associate Valenti with the introduction of the rating system employed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). This has turned out to be the closest any American procedure has come to the workings of the old Star Chamber system; so, if we are to remember Rostropovich for championing the principle of freedom of expression beyond the bounds of music, Valenti may best be remembered as an anti-Rostropovich. This provides a light under which we can examine the final paragraphs his BBC obituary:

Valenti once said that the 1966 film A Man For All Seasons was his favourite movie.

"I'm the luckiest guy in the world, because I spent my entire public working career in two of life's classic fascinations, politics and Hollywood," he said.

"You can't beat that."

While "classic" is the sort of hyperbole we have come to associate with the entertainment industry, Valenti's sentence cleverly overlooks the fact that the common fascination behind politics and Hollywood is the extent to which all of their operations revolve around resolving questions of who gets to manipulate whom. As I recall, Dante had a particular beef with those occupied with manipulation (Machiavelli was, after all, his contemporary); and, since much of the Divine Comedy was his personal exercise in retribution, one can imagine Dante assigning Valenti to some circle in which he will be subject to the kinds of manipulations he dished out for all eternity! Thomas More was, of course, another skilled manipulator while his head was on his shoulders. I do not know if he invented the literary form of biography-as-propaganda; but he is certainly responsible for one of the best examples. His portrayal of Richard III as one of England's darkest villains, basically as a way to legitimize Tudor rule, has been so immortalized by Shakespeare that no one cares very much any more about any of its inaccuracies! More was just the sort of person Valenti would want on his staff!

Remembering Rostropovich

I first heard the news of Rostropovich's death on my XM BBC feed, so I made it a point to check out the story on the Web site. My one opportunity to hear Rostropovich in concert was at a recital he gave in Singapore. I was particularly delighted that he included the cello version of Schnittke's "Suite in the Old Style." On the surface this appears as sentimental nostalgia, and I suspect that it is still heard that way by most audiences everywhere. However, Schnittke had a sarcastic streak in his nostalgia that Rostropovich handled with politic delicacy, making it clear only to those who knew how to hear it. Programming an anti-authoritarian like Schnittke in Singapore involved a certain amount of risk, but the risk was a subtle one that Rostropovich handled with aplomb.

The BBC announcer tried to portray Rostropovich as an artist who preferred to avoid politics but could not always do so. Find this hard to believe on the basis of his own reflection of the letter he wrote to Pravda in support of Solzhenitsyn back in 1970:

The best step was not found in music, but in one page of this letter. Since that moment my conscience was clean and clear.

I think it would be fairer to say that Rostropovich was strongly political without being blatant about it. That was the spirit in which he introduced Singapore to Schnittke.

Bill O'Reilly Takes on Semantics

I try my best to avoid Bill O'Reilly. I figure that if the blogosphere can let me do my thing, then Fox Network can let him do his. Nevertheless, I was intrigued that Rolling Stone's National Affairs Daily blog should post a YouTube clip under the headline, "Bill v. Bill: See O'Reilly's Attempt to Smear a Real Reporter." Now, for all my appreciation of much of what Rolling Stone reports (a far stronger feeling than my desire to avoid O'Reilly), I have to confess to blog editor Tim Dickinson that the language of a barker for a carnival side show leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Then I confess that I was still curious enough to watch the video!

I think it is fair to say that every accusation that O'Reilly made did not hold up under scrutiny. I say this on the basis of the fact that O'Reilly was explicit about his evidence, playing what he felt were the relevant excerpts from an interview that Moyers gave to Rolling Stone. Moyers was very careful with his language, deliberately speaking in terms of categories to avoid being attacked on instances. Thus, it would be fair to say that all grounds for O'Reilly's attacks were products of O'Reilly's own reading of the text; and he would probably be hard pressed to find others to validate his particular reading.

Nevertheless, O'Reilly chose to do just that, bringing Marvin Kalb on to comment on the whole affair, entirely on the basis of what had just been aired. Kalb, of course, is no stranger to the skills of critical reading; and, like Moyers, he is very careful in the language he uses. So, Kalb did not explicitly call O'Reilly out on the holes in his reading but proceeded, instead, to start to tease out some of the subtleties in the language being used. This was too much for O'Reilly, who cut Kalb off with the sentence, "I'm not going to argue semantics; you came here for journalism."

As they say, give a man enough rope and he will hang himself, perhaps even before your very eyes. O'Reilly's single sentence at the very least carried the connotation that semantics has no place in the business of journalism, leaving those of us old-fashioned enough to view journalism as a form of communication (with all the contingent implications about both semantics and rhetoric) to wonder if O'Reilly might have been citing a Fox policy statement. Now, having done more than a little international travel, I know that, like CNN, Fox now provides news and comment to an international, rather than just domestic, audience. If this is a statement of what Fox thinks about semantics, then I should not be so surprised that we are now living in that world without reflection!

More about Rhetoric in Music

The idea that we should be able to take a rhetorical stance in responding to a musical performance continues to fascinate me. My initial position was that rhetoric is all about suasion, so the role of rhetoric in music is one of convincing the audience to pay attention. However, if we wish to draw analogies between musical performances and spoken utterances, then it may be necessary to draw distinctions between (at least) two separate categories in the domain of utterances:

1. Utterances of oratory
2. Utterances of conversation

The first category is the one I had in mind when I proposed my argument based on suasion; and, indeed, this is the context in which most principles of rhetoric have been framed. However, I believe there are many settings in which it may make better more sense to think of those of us sitting in the audience of a musical performance as eavesdropping on a conversation. Much of what we experience at the opera falls in this category; and, in that respect, there is a lot to be gained in examining how the best composers of opera, such as Mozart, have managed to anticipate the insights of far more recent analytical work in conversation theory by social theorists such as Erving Goffman. However, in the world of music we do not need singers (or, for that matter, speakers) to have a conversation. When I wrote about the Artemis Quartet, I wrote about the "dramatic crutch" I used to engage when trying to "make sense" of Schoenberg's first string quartet and the way in which the Artemis relieved me of the need for that crutch. The fact is, however, that much is to be gained by listening to the voices of any contrapuntal composition as if they were voices of a conversation, even if the conversation does not necessarily have a well-defined "topic." (The validity of such a stance can be seen in the work of playwrights, such as Samuel Beckett, who have turned the proposition on its head, assigning texts to their characters that are driven more by musical than by dramatic motives.) Furthermore, such conversations are not restricted to the scale of chamber music. Once again, we can turn (as I recently did) to Mozart and the extent to which the conceptions of his concertos, particularly those for piano, are so conversational in nature. Of course not all music is, by nature, contrapuntal; and, in the case of Bach's sacred music, which for voice or strictly instrumental, contrapuntal techniques may be engaged for oratorical purposes. Nevertheless, there is probably value in accepting the fact that we, as audiences, are frequently eavesdroppers and that our understanding of this role may help us to be better listeners.

Is Condi Still Fighting the Cold War?

The American press has not been paying very much attention to our plans to build a "missile shield" in Europe, not to mention Vladimir Putin's resistance to those plans; but this is a major story for the European press, given that their own backyard is at stake. Our own "party line" has been nicely summarized in the latest SPIEGEL ONLINE report:

The US claims that the planned missile shield is intended to protect the US and its European allies from a ballistic missile attack from a so-called "rogue" state such as Iran.

Putin, on the other hand, just used his annual speech to the Russian parliament (both houses, just like our own State of the Union address) to state his resistance in no uncertain terms:

The rhetoric heated up Thursday as Putin, in his annual speech to both houses of parliament, said he was suspending Russia's obligations under the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, in response to the US missile shield plans. He said the NATO signatories to the treaty were not respecting it, and criticized US plans to locate elements of the anti-missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, saying they create "real dangers and possibly unpleasant surprises."

Is poor Europe caught in the middle of an attempt to revive the Cold War? Is Putin right to be suspicious of the American "party line?" Certainly, if he watches Bill Maher (does HBO now serve Russia?), he is unlikely to believe anything our government says or, for that matter, anything he reads or hears through American mass media! On the other hand he would probably pay attention to what Condoleeza Rice told reporters prior to her meeting with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a NATO-Russia meeting in Oslo:

The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous and everybody knows it.

Excuse me? Did she really use the adjective "Soviet?" Does she view today's Russia as a "front" for a Soviet Union that is still lurking somewhere in the culture of the Kremlin and is still engaged in a Cold War with the United States? Whatever one may think about Freud, this was a very revealing slip of the tongue and hardly the sort of thing that should come to the attention of a Russian leader who probably still has very strong roots in the Cold War! It is chilling to think that one adjective could turn history back some twenty years, and I sure hope that the State Department realizes that some form of damage control is now in order. (Since the meeting with Lavrov has a two-day agenda, there will certainly be plenty of opportunities for damage control.)

When Reagan made his little joke about bombing the Soviet Union, it was a thoughtless act of mouthing off without knowing that a microphone was live. Condi knew her microphone was live; and, worse yet, she knew she was speaking to reporters. So what was she thinking?

The Technician Versus the Venture Capitalist

I continue to worry about the blinders that cultures wear that inhibit just about any chance of their communicating with other cultures, even in the face of the persuasive arguments set forth by the likes of Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Appiah, and Jürgen Habermas. These blinders inhibit conversation on just about any topic, even those of critical global importance. One of the most important topics right now is the climate crisis. Yet, whatever Habermas may tell us about the need for enlightened understanding, it would appear that heated disputation occupies most of the spotlight.

The "heat," of course, comes from what I have called "'points of friction' across social boundaries;" and those points of friction constitute a fact of life in the social world. In fact, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argued, in her appropriately-titled book, Friction, they can be a source of innovation as readily as a source of conflict. What will result from the friction can rarely be predicted, but often it helps to have a better understanding of those points that are actually bumping into each other.

On February 15 Pacific Gas and Electric, along with the MIT Club of Northern California, organized a forum on the topic of solar technology. This forum turned into a prime example of heated disputation; and, unfortunately, when we start to tease out the "story behind the story," we discover that this particular source of friction is unlikely to turn into a source of innovation. The specific points of friction that bumped into each other were Vinod Khosla, who can probably be described fairly as one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and Hermann Scheer, whose early resume presents a background of qualifications for dealing with both technical and social issues:

Born in 1944, Hermann Scheer graduated from highschool in 1964. He attended the Officers School of the German Federal Army from 1964 to 1966, serving as lieutenant during 1966-67. Hermann studied economics, sociology, political science and public law between 1967 and 1972 at the University of Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin. He received his PhD in Economic and Social Science in 1972. Dr Scheer was appointed Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart in the Faculty of Economics, 1972-76. He worked as system analysts at the German Nuclear Research Center from 1976-1980.

To understand the origins of the friction, we should first recognize that any event sponsored by Pacific Gas and Electric will have, as its first priority, the business of energy. To warp my recently-cited Mencken adage, no one ever rose through the ranks of an energy company by obsessing over the consequences of a clearly sound business decision. (When the energy companies put out those advertisements that try to convince you otherwise by showing really cool nature footage, it helps to remember another adage: Whenever anyone says, "It's not about the money;" you know it's about the money!) So, when we read about what happened at this forum, we should put aside anything Al Gore may be trying to tell us about the future of the planet and recognize that this was a discussion about making good business decisions.

In that context Khosla, with his reputation for making some of the best business decisions in the history of Silicon Valley, was perfect for the forum. The fly in the ointment was Scheer, whose combination of technical and social expertise has earned him a seat in the German parliament, where he now feels more beholden to the German public than to any business institution. Thus, the heated dispute that ensued was not so much about energy policy as it was about the classic question of whether an enterprise is more accountable to its customers than it is to its shareholders, with Scheer serving as advocate for the customer and Khosla assuming the role of "shareholder par excellence."

The good news is that the debate has spilled over from verbal exchanges to text; and CNET News.com has provided a "venue" for the resulting texts. Khosla provided his position statement last week. His rhetorical strategy was to frame the argument as one between environmentalists and pragmatists. Personally, I think this put him in a weak position, since everything else he said then begged the question, "Pragmatic for whom?" After all, this would not have been the first time in history where what was pragmatic for the shareholders was not at all pragmatic (and perhaps even damaging) to the customers! This forced Scheer into the position of defending his own pragmatism from the customers' point of view, and that is basically what he did in responding to Khosla this morning.

Since, in this particular situation, I feel I am more of a customer (of Pacific Gas and Electric, mind you) than a shareholder (since I have no direct investment in any energy company but I know that the energy sector is covered in many of the funds whose shares I hold), my sympathies tend towards Scheer's arguments. Nevertheless, I fear that Scheer has not really grasped that the playing field for this argument is not one of "technology facts." Scheer can throw as many of those facts as he likes a Khosla, and he can even back many of them up with sound economic figures. However, he never really recognizes that these are not necessarily the criteria for making those good business decisions; so I doubt that he will score any significant points against Khosla. The real problem, however, is, as I observed above, that, while their differing contextual assumptions could complement each other in innovative ways, both parties are so intensely invested in their own contexts that this is unlikely to happen.

I would like to conclude by not trying to reduce this to a four-legs-good-two-legs-bad situation, pitting "two-legged" business decisions against "four-legged" public policy. I am a firm believer that sensible business decisions played a strong role in breaking the oppressions of apartheid in South Africa at the end of the Eighties. I am more concerned with that metaphor of cultural blinders that I invoked at the start of this post. Yes, the interests of the general public are in opposition to the interests of the shareholders; but, if that opposition is now cutting off any possibility of conversation, then we are in really deep yogurt. Furthermore, if the climate continues to change the way many of the models are predicting, a large number of us, shareholders included, may soon find ourselves in very deep water!

Beyond the Brotherhood of Mourning

In his latest blog post for The Nation, Tom Engelhardt has tried to put the mass killings at Virginia Tech in the perspective of two attacks of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad that took place this past January and February. Here is the way he summarizes his comparison:

In terms of body count, those two mass slaughters added up to more than three Virginia Techs; and, on each of those days, countless other Iraqis died including, on the January date, at least thirteen in a blast involving a motorcycle-bomb and then a suicide car-bomber at a used motorcycle market in the Iraqi capital. Needless to say, these stories passed in a flash on our TV news and, in our newspapers, were generally simply incorporated into run-of-bad-news-and-destruction summary pieces from Iraq the following day. No rites, no ceremonies, no special presidential statements, no Mustansiriya T-shirts. No attempt to psychoanalyze the probably young Sunni jihadis who carried out these mad acts, mainly against young Shiite students. No healing ceremonies, no offers to fly in psychological counselors for the traumatized students of Mustansiriya University or the daily traumatized inhabitants of Baghdad -- those who haven't died or fled.

He then proceeded to an analysis of the hypothesis that, rather than cultivating a "brotherhood of mourning" (one of the themes I explored), Virginia Tech had been turned into a distraction from what has been going on in Iraq (without trying to play any sort of numbers game as to which was worse). While he made some good points and cited some good sources, I have two alternative reactions.

One I have already explored. It is that, while Engelhardt may be correct, his vision is too narrow. The Bush administration is concerned not only with Iraq but with that broader vision of foreign policy that got us into Iraq in the first place. This was most blatant in Bush's speech during his visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he tried to turn the memory of the Holocaust into an opportunity to float his vision for dealing with Sudan. The underlying narrative is a familiar one: A major crisis shakes up the general public at an intensely visceral level. The general reaction is that something needs to be done, without necessarily reflecting on the question, "Done about what?" This reaction reveals a public at its most vulnerable; and vulnerability means receptivity to new ideas, whether or not those ideas really pertain to the crisis at hand. When you think about it, it was really quite a cunning plan (more cunning than anything Baldrick ever devised)! It was a useful reminder that, while the Democrats landed some good punches in the last election, the neoconservatives still have a lot of fight left in them.

My other reaction is more sensitive. If Giuliani decided to advance his own political purposes by trying to compare Blacksburg to both Oklahoma City and 9/11, I have to reflect back on Columbine, not so much on the mass killings themselves but on the immediate public reaction. The footage of the Columbine adults shot soon after the shootings there is now a distant memory, but I shall never forget how much of what I heard had to do with turning the incident into an injunction to return to those Christian values that were supposedly the heart of the community there. Reflecting on that language, I realized that those "Christian values" may have been a factor in the alienation of the two shooters aggravated to a point where their reaction was as extreme as it was. Community, after all, is the expression of "self" across a group; and you cannot have "self" without "other." If you choose to identify "self" by demonizing "other," then you should not be surprised when "other" resorts to demonic actions. I think there is a lot to be said for the hypothesis that Cho Seung-Hui had the making of such an "other" demonized by some combination of inability and refusal to identify with the "self" of the community around him. On the basis of the communications he left, I am not sure that Cho's alienation was over "Christian values;" but, even if the values were not anchored on a particular approach to faith, I wonder how similar they were to the values of the adult population of Columbine. In this respect Engelhardt is right in arguing against Blacksburg as a distraction from Iraq, but he missed out on a deeper message. The real danger is the way in which we are using foreign policy as a distraction from domestic social conditions that are seriously pathological (which is why I invoked the term "identity pathology" in my own writing about Cho); and the more our administration tries to use foreign policy to distract from domestic negligence, the worse that pathology is likely to get.

"I want me pap!"

Bartlett's only attributes the quotation to H. L. Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence [or taste] of the American people." It is certainly consistent with other Mencken barbs, although, for me, it will always take second place behind his observation about the folly of simple solutions to complex problems. Nevertheless, this morning I found myself free associating it with my "headline" quotation, one of Nagg's lines from Samuel Beckett's Endgame. The puns are running fast and loose, between Nagg's name and the implication that he is likely the father of one of the other characters; but Beckett could not have anticipated in 1957 that a later generation of New York theatergoers would form their own punning link to Joseph Papp.

Back when I was a student, Walter Slezak gave a talk at the MIT Lecture Series entitled "Show Business is No Business." It was from him I learned that going into the theatre was one of the best ways to go very broke very quickly. The fact that Joe Papp could keep his Public Theatre afloat for so many years made him a shining example of Mencken's law. Joe became the grand master of pap, giving theatergoers flashy packages of predigested pabulum guaranteed not to depress anyone with the slightest intimations of cognitive reflection. Some playwrights, like Sam Shepard, preferred sacrificing the promise of mass audiences to putting up with Papp's obsessions with watering down and slicking up; but Papp made the Public not only an institution but also a harbinger. If today's Broadway deserves the "vast wasteland" epithet that Newton Minnow laid on television in the Fifties, a lot of the blame can be attributed to the Papp legacy.

However, that legacy has expanded its scope far beyond what passes for theater today. Papp can also be seen as the harbinger of the way just about any content is now presented to the American people, particularly when that content is supposed to be "informing." This is probably most evident in the way news is now packaged and delivered; and every four years we see the news fed by a similar process in the great race to the White House. Mencken, himself, was a journalist. We may never know if he intended his remark to anticipate the undoing of his own profession; but, were he alive today, he would probably be among the ranks of those going broke through misjudgments of both their organizational superiors and the clients of those organizations.

Linguistic Scrutiny

One of the reasons I like to read Niemann Watchdog is for the essays that unpack certain phrases that everyone (particularly in the press) seems to be using and drill down to what those phrases are actually saying. This morning Dan Froomkin took on two of these exercises of usage: the phrase "War on Terror" and the question of how to describe what we are doing in Iraq. Froomkin does not really resolve the second exercise, so that set me to thinking about how I have been approaching that problem.

I discovered that the last time I needed this kind of descriptive language in one of my own posts, I just used the noun "mess" (enclosed in scare quotes). This emerged from the context of that post, in which I was referring (yet again) to the Neustadt-May thinking-in-time approach to dealing with crisis situations. As a quick review, what they prescribe is that any crisis situation should be addressed by asking two fundamental questions, which are (in my words, not theirs):

1. How did we get into this mess?
2. If we take this particular action, what will the consequences be.

They wrote up a collection of case studies, all concerning Presidential decision-making, in their book Thinking in Time. My guess is that it would be hard to find a copy in any of the current executive-level offices!

In his first exercise Froomkin focuses on the extent to which the use of the phrase "War on Terror" has created a culture of fear. This is an important point, even if Froomkin is far from the first to have made it; but the point should be pursued further to recognize that it is not the only fear-inducing phrase. "Homeland Security" has strong connotations of fear even before we get to their color-coding system (which, of course, is coding levels of fear). I still support Gore Vidal's assertion that the acts of 9/11 were criminal, rather than military. The proper response is better law enforcement; but that kind of language lacks the marketing power of "war on terror." Sure, it would be easier to use clearer language to describe what we should be doing; but using such language will make it easier to see how badly we have been doing it!

However, if it is clarity we seek, we would probably do better to look to the European Union, rather than our own government, at least on the basis of the following news just reported by Reuters:

The European Union agreed on Monday to inform groups and people why they are put on its list of terrorist organisations, a move aimed at avoiding decisions being overturned in court.

This seems to be based on the premise that being better informed is far more advantageous than being kept in fear. It will be interesting to follow the impact of this decision on EU efforts to control terrorist acts.

From the Notes to the Sounds

When Marino Formenti first started giving interviews about the three "San Francisco Piano Trips" he gave over the course of this past week, he would invoke the progression that many of us learned from our study of mythology (through Edith Hamilton probably) from gods to heroes to men. These were originally to be the themes of his three concerts, but, shortly before the series began, he decided to begin the series of "Kurtág's Ghosts," a fascinating exercise in free association that juxtaposed a broad collection of miniatures by György Kurtág with an equally broad collection of selections from the history of music (ranging from Guillaume de Machaut to Karlheinz Stockhausen) that could be interpreted as influences on Kurtág's own work. In the Hamilton framework one could say that Formenti began with the Titans in his first concert, proceeded to the Olympians and heroes in the second, and ended, as originally planned, with the "men" (generic semantics, since one of the composers was female) of today.

What was not stated explicitly was that there was another progression supporting this one, which made the whole series an important lesson to music theorists. One may say that the Titans forged the traditions of musical composition that have shaped the way music theory as taught and, for the most part, practiced—a focus on structural analysis that is basically confined to notes on a printed page that essentially constitute "instructions" for performance. When we look back on Formenti's "Olympians" (Ives, Bartόk, Webern, Stravinsky), we discover that the all "overthrew the Titans" with new approaches to writing their compositions; but the focus was still on the notes on the page. The "heroes" (Stockhausen, Messiaen, Nono) pushed the expressiveness even further (sometimes, as with Stockhausen's notation of rhythms, to the point of absurdity); but, as we gain more appreciation for their work, we realize (as did Formenti), that they were less interested in new ways to combine "the old notes" than we ways to elicit new sonorities. Thus, when we came to the age of men, Formenti presented a series of compositions in which "it was all about the sounds." Appropriately enough, the final concert was entitled "Nothing is Real" (deliberately acknowledging the Beatles, who, in turn, had been acknowledged by one of the composers of the evening, Alvin Lucier), relaying the subtext that, while printed music may, with suitable care and preservation efforts, last forever, the sound of music vanishes into memory as soon as it is heard.

So it was that each of the "men" in Formenti's framework (Pintscher, Lucier, Lachenmann, Haas, Ustwolskaya, Sciarrino, Cage) presented different strategies for what I have previously called "going for the sound." This was the riskiest of the three evenings, because the works of the age of men have not yet been subjected to the tests of time. In this particular collection Cage was someone like the old pioneer, since his "Music Walk" was conceived during Formenti's "age of heroes;" but, like the more recent works on this final program, it is still fresh enough to challenge us to rethink how we listen at concerts. More importantly, because this was an experimental setting, one could not expect all the experiments to "work." (As I recall, it was Cage's artistic collaborator, Merce Cunningham, who lived by the motto, "Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.") However, such inconsistency does not invalidate the lessons of new ways of listening but only broadens their scope.

The Google Paradigm and its Discontents

A recent confused of calcutta discussion about search, in which phrases like "search fatigue" and "Google rage" emerged, made me realize that, by virtue (?) of an interface that is so deceptively simple and brutally efficient, we have become hopelessly locked into a "Google paradigm" for thinking about search. This was driven home to me by a comment that Lou Paglia contributed to the discussion. Here is his key paragraph:

The fundamental question for search to answer is to either through interface or algorithmically solve the user’s problem or task. It sounds simple but obviously not. And the solution sounds obvious but clearly not simple. There is the concept of “role-based search” that is emerging as well where by the engine itself ‘knowing’ the role of the user, it can can have a baseline of the type of data and information is important, and the types of questions/answers such a user in that role asks.

I would like to consider this point from my own perspective:

I think that what I (actually Habermas) call an “action situation” is a useful generalization of “the user’s problem or task.” The reason that simplicity eludes us is that this is such a broad category that we have to unpack it ontologically (and probably epistemologically, as well). I took a first crack at the ontology last month during the confused of calcutta discussion of the opensourcing of processes. However, the concept of “role-based search” taps into an epistemological issue that derives from this ontology and needs a lot of further consideration. As I suggested in the opensourcing discussion, we cannot talk about processes in any productive way unless we are as “epistemologically comfortable” with verbs and verb phrases as we are with nouns and noun phrases. Database technology has cultivated a mind-set that is so restricted to nouns and noun phrases (the foundations of all schemata and query languages) that we have pretty much deluded ourselves into believing that verbs and verb phrases are unnecessary. However, if we are going to talk about processes, we have to shatter that delusion, because processes are epistemologically verb-based; and, when Lou introduced the concept of role, he emphasized that search is fundamentally a process! Now there is obviously a lot more to the epistemology of processes than roles. Much of my own research in this area has focused on Kenneth Burke, who developed a terminological framework for motivated action; but I believe that framework can be generalized to any verb-based epistemology, such as an epistemology of processes.

I also think that the comment by Washington DC SEO on the virtue of librarians taps into an important distinction that is often overlooked. A librarian is a service professional, whose “role” is neither defined nor evaluated according to the criteria of a production economy. While search engines are definitely products and need to be evaluated as such, the support of search is, strictly speaking, a service. It is more likely that such a service will be rendered by people with particularly skills for using particular tools, rather than by making those tools available to anyone who needs the service. This latter alternative is basically the crux of the "Google paradigm." Like all paradigms it has confined us to a box, and it is about time that we start thinking outside that box!

Will Advertising Trump Ridicule?

One of my recurring themes has been the thesis that ridicule is a far more effective weapon than indignation when it comes to shining a strong light on messes made by world leadership, whether in the public or the private sector. However, there may be an alternative if you happen to have a lot of money at your disposal; and that is television advertising. Consider the following item, written by Andrew Wallenstein for the Hollywood Reporter and subsequently related by Reuters:

Filmmaker Oliver Stone will direct a TV commercial questioning the Bush administration's military strategy in Iraq.

The Oscar-winning Vietnam veteran was hired by activist groups MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org to shoot a 30-second spot derived from video of U.S. soldiers and their family members speaking out against the war. Members of MoveOn will select one of 20 video interviews on its site, as well as on YouTube, for Stone to turn into a commercial.

"We have leaders in Washington who say they're 'supporting our troops' -- but the people who suffer most from their policies are the troops themselves," Stone said. "I decided to participate in this project because, as a veteran, I know that America needs to listen to our servicemen and women."

This appeals to me for a couple a reasons. The most important is that, for all the changes that the Internet may be bringing to advertising, the television spot is still a powerful way to get the word out to a mass audience. Of course, making the spot is only part of the strategy. The real trick will be placing it in slots where it will have the greatest impact, which is not always an easy matter. I am also intrigued by the prospect of Oliver Stone directing the spot, since we tend to associate him with the sprawl of epic proportions. I suspect that working within the limitations of 30 seconds will be a real challenge, but I am counting on him to rise to it.

Early Chutzpah

There has been a lot of discussion of chutzpah this week (not without good reason); and I have already had at least one encounter with the risk of making the weekly award too early. However, every now and then there is a story that just jumps out at you; and in this case there was so much energy in the leap that I viewed it as a serious and justified challenge to the outstanding nomination for George W. Bush. My intention is to assign this week's award to Jean-Marie Le Pen. Now Le Pen is probably already a leading contender for a "Lifetime Achievement Award," should I ever decide that it is time to issue one of them; but this week's award involves a very specific story that Al Jazeera pulled from their wire services.

Actually, it is really a "multiple-chutzpah" story; so I have to sort out and attempt to prioritize the details. The bottom line (which would have been enough to make Le Pen a viable competitor against Bush) is simple enough: Running in fourth place in the polls for the French presidential election, Le Pen has decided to court the Jewish vote. Those who are unfamiliar with Le Pen's reputation among Jews may recall that in 1987 he gave a public speech in which he described the Nazi death camps as a "detail of history!" Well, as they say, the devil is in the details; and in this case the devil is the long cultural memory of the French Jewish population, many of whom either survived or lost relatives (or both) in those death camps.

So Le Pen does things in a big way. (Did anyone hear him singing La Marseillaise on the news?) In this case it is not just that he is courting the Jewish vote but how he has decided to do it:

Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front, made the appeal in comments printed in the Hebrew-language Maariv newspaper on Thursday, ahead of his fifth presidential run.

Now, if this is the Maariv I think it is, then it is an Israeli paper; and, at least when I was living in Israel, it was one of the more reputable ones. I have no idea what its circulation in France is like, but I have to wonder if he opted for this strategy under the assumption that French Jewish voters understand Hebrew better than they understand French. If this is the case (and, given the history of Le Pen's judgments, that is not a far-fetched assumption), then we have him on at least two counts of chutzpah!

Nevertheless, it continues to get better (or worse, depending on your perspective). In spite of my comments about a "long cultural memory," Le Pen decided to revisit 1987. Here is what he told Maariv:

I did not deny the Holocaust. I only said simply that the gas chambers did not constitute but a detail in the history of World War II. It is not something that should provoke anger.

You have to wonder whether he has been taking lessons from Bush. He seems to have that same talent for getting in a hole and then digging deeper in his efforts to get out of it!

I would like to have faith in the French. Beyond the long memory to 1987 there is the more recent experience of Le Pen making to the runoff for the last presidential election. My guess is that most of the French population does not want to see that happen again, but Le Pen has done a great service in reminding them why they do not want to see it again!

A Brotherhood of Mourning?

Yesterday I accused the President of using his visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for political purposes and reflected on whether this could be considered chutzpah, since we have to assume that politicians do everything "for political purposes." Today, to invoke the terminology of Kenneth Burke, the act is the same but the agent and scene have changed. This time the agent is Rudy Giuliani, and the scene is the gathering in Oklahoma City on the occasion of the 12th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. I was struck by one particular sentence quoted by Associated Press Writer Tim Talley:

We mourn and hurt and will never forget, but we don't live under fear.

Because it is hard for me to view Giuliani as anything but a politician (and one trying to become the Republican candidate for the next presidential election at that), his use of the first person plural just stuck in my craw. It was as if he wanted to gather the Oklahoma City bombing under the same tent as 9/11 in the formation of a "brotherhood" of mourning and personal pain, then alluding to Virginia Tech for adding new members to this brotherhood. I am really chilled by this kind of political maneuver, possibly because I fear that it may actually work. Sartre had conceived of such a "brotherhood of mourning" in The Flies. This was his version of Aeschylus' Oresteia; and the brotherhood concept was invented by Aegisthus in memory of Agamemnon, who had been murdered by his wife Clytemnestra with the assistance of, you guessed it, Aegisthus. Sartre saw this as manipulation of the worst kind; and, for better or worse, my own world-view was informed by seeing a performance of this play back in my student days. The San Francisco Chronicle recently observed that, in time of war, it is very easy to find theatre companies mounting productions of Lysistrata. Perhaps some of those companies should also think about reviving The Flies to remind us of how the political mind can actually work.

Deceptive Headlines

Matt Apuzzo's analysis is now available through the Associate Press Web site. The bad news is that it is available under the headline "Va. Tech Awarding Degrees to Victims." This seems to be a reflection of the fact that the following paragraph was added to his report (probably while I was working on my own reflections):

University officials also announced that Cho's 32 victims would be awarded degrees posthumously, and that other students terrorized by the shootings might be allowed to end the semester immediately without consequences.

I am not sure how I feel about the first clause in that sentence, but it is not for me to say. The only reactions that matter are those of the family and friends of the victims. On the other hand I was very glad to read the second clause. Notwithstanding the "Life must go on" injunction of Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Lament" (do Virginia Tech English students read that poem?) it is hard to imagine any university being able to sustain "business as usual" for the remainder of the semester.

Identity Pathology

Associated Press Writer Matt Apuzzo has written one of the better extended analyses of the Virginia Tech shootings in the wake of the packet of information that Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC. Unfortunately, you cannot find it on the Associate Press Web site. It is currently on Yahoo! News, but my experiences in recovering Yahoo! News articles more than a few days after they appeared have been pretty frustrating. So the story is probably worth reading there sooner rather than later.

I suppose what I liked about Apuzzo was the way in which he helped me reflect on a theme I have been examining from a variety of angles recently, which, at least for purposes of this post, I want to call "identity pathology." My most recent venture into this area was a post about "culture death," along with a somewhat related post about Clive James' book Cultural Amnesia. However, these were both basically "pre-Internet" topics; and I have been concerned with more urgent questions of identity pathology since the flood of discussion over the death threats against Kathy Sierra. In that regard I would like to interpolate (with some editing) one of my confused of calcutta comments, responding to JP Rangaswamy's effort to enumerate different perspectives on the nature of identity. With his usual literary panache JP identified several of these perspectives with familiar quotations. This is the one I wanted to examine:

My name is Bond, James Bond: A licence to do something. Granted by someone else. Usually not transferable. Usually not permanent either.

I thought about this while doing one of my “major San Francisco walks,” from my place in the Civic Center to the celebration of the newly-dedicated Jack Kerouac Alley and back (with a stop in Chinatown for congee). I decided that Midnight Cowboy provided a better perspective on identity than the Bond movies; and the particularly characteristic phrase I had in mind was “I’m walkin’ here!” For me this phrase embodied what we might call it the looking-out-for-number-one syndrome; and I wanted to explore it further.

I have spent large portions of my life in large cities where hiding in my car was more trouble than either walking or using public transportation. However, whether you walk or drive, such cities bombard you with more examples of stupid behavior than you can shake a stick at. I used to joke about this being the result of our government putting something in the water. Then I had my insight: It isn’t the water; it’s the population density! While I find something very satisfying about being able to manage a major metropolis on foot, there are a lot of people out there who experience (not necessarily consciously) a strongly dehumanizing effect from the crowds. The result is a growing feeling of insignificance, countered by a need to act out in ways that will assert the self against all those “others” out there. (In this respect I am a Spinozist: there cannot be a sense of self except as a negation of the sense of other.)

Let us now extrapolate “from the city to the Internet” (what a great title for a book). If the sense of self is besieged by walking up Van Ness Avenue, what happens to it in the cosmos of cyberspace or, for that matter, in specific “solar systems,” such as Second Life or the blogosphere? I find myself particularly interested in the way some bloggers start getting obsessed with ranking. It is not to hard to imagine folks out there desperate to be something other than an insignificant (or nonexistent) blip on the Technorati rankings. If they get really obsessed over such things, who knows how they might lash out in an attempt to assert self? They might even start sending death threats to those who have elevated themselves beyond “blip status.” In that respect, then, my conclusion probably aligns very much with the key point that JP kept trying to make I and kept contesting: Where the “social health” of cyberspace is concerned, it really is all about Identity! It just happens to be about a particularly social aspect of identity that slipped through the cracks of JP's particular analysis!

To return to Apuzzo's report, the Virginia Tech campus is significantly smaller than the city of San Francisco; but an attack on the sense of self does not require a large scale. Indeed, it can happen within the scale of a single classroom (or, in a more adult setting, a single committee or panel). The only thing that really matters is how robust the sense of self is under feelings of threat, small or large. Apuzzo accounts for a lot of questions being raised about Cho's sense of self at levels that included the student body, the faculty, the campus administration, and even the more clinical medical perspective. One comes away from reading Apuzzo with the feeling that "everyone knew there was a problem."

Let me now shift to some orthogonal questions: Why do we read reports like this with so much fascination? Why was that package such a scoop for NBC? Why has even the BBC sent reporters to Blacksburg? I think the answer is that we, as audience, are less interested in the underlying problem than we are in the way in which Cho lashed out "in an attempt to assert self;" and the reason for that latter focus is that we seem to have an inbred cultural need to affix blame when the lashing out assumes catastrophic proportions. We refuse to accept that a mess this big can be "nobody's fault" (as I tried to argue was the case with the "racially offensive Canadian couch").

Suppose we take the questioning to a higher level: Why do we act the way we do? There are a variety of answers that hold in different settings. I want to consider three of them:

1. The act is the "effect" of a "cause" (in which case we tend to call it a "reflex").
2. We act on the basis of decisions we make that are grounded in Kantian principles of "pure" and "practical" reason.
3. We act in a particular way because our environmental context disposes us to do so (sometimes called "situated action").

We are all familiar with the first but feel strongly enough about "free will" to reject the premise that everything can be reduced to reflex. We appreciate the second but probably see it more as an idealist theory than anything that would hold up in the "trenches of practice." The third, however, is probably pretty alien to most of us and more than a little disquieting. It has a vague connotation of reflex at a scale too large to comprehend, along with an associated connotation of fatalism. However, it is also disquieting because it denies that an action can be attributed to some single isolated factor, which means that it undermines the concept of an object of blame (human or otherwise).

I realize that it might sound glib to suggest that the horrific events of Monday can be described as a tragedy of situated action, but I think that this is my way of going back to yesterday's reflections on morality. Reducing the discourse to good and evil is just another way of focusing on seeking out that object of blame; but this is simplistic thinking in opposition to the "moral clarity" that President Bush attributed to Elie Wiesel. Unfortunately, our "world without reflection" has a hard time with that particular brand of moral clarity; so is it any wonder that we are left at such a loss when the context of that world provides the disposition for catastrophic action?

Playing the Holocaust Card

It would appear that President Bush wanted to turn his visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum into a rather broad variety of agenda items. Therefore, it pays to give the remarks he made after his tour of the site a close reading, rather than just another sound byte on the evening news. Fortunately, these remarks have been made available through the good graces of PRNewswire. I shall not examine them exhaustively, under the assumption that, if I have committed any serious sin of omission, some reader will be quick to inform me!

These affairs always begin by naming all the right names; but, even here, we can see Bush pursuing his own agenda:

I thank very much Elie Wiesel for joining us. He is a -- he's a big figure in the life of the world, as he should be. He speaks with moral clarity. And I can't thank you enough for being a leader of talking about what is right. And I'm honored to be in your presence.

This passage attracted my attention because of the way in which Bush made such a smooth transition from "moral clarity" to "talking about what is right." Morality involves far more than simply being able to classify everything as either "right" or "wrong" and then deciding upon one's actions according to what has been classified as "right." Wiesel does speak (and write) with moral clarity; but he applies that clarity to plummet the depths beneath superficial right-versus-wrong judgments. His is a keenly reflective mind that has elected to reflect on one of the most agonizing periods in the history of human behavior. Today he apparently had to endure the agony of having that mind trivialized, but he could probably endure it in his understanding of all the greater agonies he had previously confronted. As for the rest of the audience, I suspect that at least some of them could read the subtext: "Today there are far more important issues than the Holocaust that I need to discuss."

The first of these issues was the Virginia Tech tragedy. Bush was able to maintain his role of "chief mourner" due to the fact that one of the victims on Monday was a Holocaust survivor:

We meet at a time of sorrow for our nation. Our flags fly at half-mast in memory of 32 souls whose lives were taken at Virginia Tech on Monday morning. That day we saw horror, but we also saw acts of quiet courage. We saw this courage in a teacher named Liviu Librescu. With the gunman set to enter his class, this brave professor blocked the door with his body while his students fled to safety. On the Day of Remembrance, this Holocaust survivor gave his own life so that others might live. And this morning we honor his memory, and we take strength from his example.

My friend and reader David Berkowitz brought this to my attention as a nomination for this week's chutzpah award. My own reaction, though, is that Bush was grandstanding, letting us know that he has been following the news as it is played out to the rest of us and is sincere in his mourning rather than playing a role in an ex officio capacity. I suspect that there are a fair amount of folks out there who saw this a the latest effort to improve the approval ratings, and my guess is that most of them did not buy it.

After this gesture, though, we hear comparatively little about the Holocaust itself. Instead, the rest of the speech took on the broader concept of genocide, beginning with a minor linguistic exercise:

Today we call what happened "genocide." But when the Holocaust started, this word did not yet exist. In a 1941 radio address, Churchill spoke of the horrors the Nazis were visiting on innocent civilians in Russia. He said, "We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

This led me to make a brief visit to the OED, where I discovered that the word first appeared in the first volume of the four-volume supplement, a project that originated in 1957. I do not know whether or not OED policy has been to document the first known occurrence of a new word; but the earliest example they provide is dated 1944 (Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe). My guess is that Lemkin was aware of Churchill's 1944 address.

The reason for the shift is that Bush wanted the opportunity to speak about genocide today, rather than genocide sixty years ago. In other words this was the forum for him to speak out about Sudan and the Darfur refugees. Now, in all fairness, this is part of the Museum's agenda, given special attention by virtue of their exhibit based on Google Earth images of Darfur (which, we have been informed, are more up-to-date than those of New Orleans). Once again one could hear the sound of sabers starting to rattle behind his voice:

If Sudan's obstruction continues despite these measures, we will also consider other options. Last week, I sent Deputy Secretary of State Negroponte to the region. He informed Sudan's government and rebel groups that our patience is limited, that we care deeply about the human condition in Darfur, that it matters to the United States that people are suffering. I have spoken in the past about the need to end Sudan's use of military aircraft to attack innocent civilians. We're also are looking at what steps the international community could take to deny Sudan's government the ability to fly its military aircraft over Darfur. And if we do not begin to see signs of good faith and commitments, we will hear calls for even sterner measures.
The situation doesn't have to come to that. I urge the United Nations Security Council and the African Union and all members of the international community to stand behind the Addis Ababa framework and reject efforts to obstruct its implementation. The world needs to act. If President Bashir does not meet his obligations to the United States of America, we'll act.

So everything looped back to Bush's opening misreading Elie Wiesel's "moral clarity." The ending message was the same as the beginning message: It is all about right and wrong. Somewhere along the line Bush seems to have lost track of the fact that the Holocaust was the product of some very strong minds with equally strong convictions of right and wrong and an even stronger authority to override any disagreement the rest of the world may have had about those convictions. I may be old-fashioned; but I always thought that we go to museums to learn. Did our President learn anything during his visit today? Perhaps David gave me the right idea for the wrong reason: To visit a museum devoted to one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century and then use that setting to back up a dangerously simplistic morality as an excuse for yet another threat of aggression probably can be classified as chutzpah!

Is Innovation the New Kool-Aid?

It is hard to find any arguments that would dispute that our educational system is a mess. There may be debates over the extent of the mess and even more debates over the how-did-we-get-in-this-mess question; but the mess itself is no longer the dead moose on the table that everyone is trying to ignore. Now we have to start looking for that moose on the tables of those proposing how we should deal with the mess.

As a case in point, I would like to consider Janet Napolitano, governor of Arizona, who came to Cupertino yesterday to sit on a panel of experts to discuss the mess. (By the way I am beginning to believe that dealing with any mess convening a panel of experts may be the ultimate dead moose. These panels very rarely descend to the nuts and bolts of action items; and, even when they do, the recommended actions never progress any further than getting documented.) Ms. Napolitano is the current chair of the National Governors Association; and one of her actions (as opposed to "action items") has been to establish the "Innovation America" initiative. My concern is that, if this initiative is not a dead moose, it is at least a road paved with good intentions (along with what that particular figure of speech entails).

Ms. Napolitano came to Cupertino with precisely the rhetoric that Silicon Valley likes to hear:

In technology and engineering we're really doing nothing. In math and science we're basically teaching the same things we taught when I was in school and we're teaching it the same way.

Right on, sister, for saying what needs to be said; but what comes next? Apparently, all the talk is about science, mathematics, technology, and engineering, supplemented by "incentives for entrepreneurship." This is all very well and good, but what about the bread and butter that always seem to be ignored by Silicon Valley. More specifically, what about the basic skills of reading and writing?

This brings up another case in point. News of this panel was reported at CNET News.com by Joris Evers, and the writing was almost as dismal as the opinions voiced by the panel itself. The most glaring error was the omission of any context for the report other than the vague reference to "an event here that's part of a National Governors Association initiative." At least good readers know that you figure out what "here" means by checking the byline! My point is that, in the absence of context, the report is little more than a transcription of the ego-fest that reflects the true nature of these panel discussions, making sure that we know who was there by name and sound-byte. Probably without any intended malice, this report became a case study of the extent to which ours has become that "world without reflection," concerned more with making Silicon Valley feel and look good in the eyes of "concerned citizens" without really investigating what Andy Grove liked to call "intellectual ergs."

Of course it is not just reading and writing that are missing. There is also the question of reading matter that fails to reflect the scope of a liberal education, the sort of education that John Dewey believed was so necessary for the effective functioning of democracy. This is not to deny that the United States is losing its ability to compete in the world. However, the priorities of Innovation America run the risk of endowing the country with an army of "techno-morons;" and such an army is unlikely to enhance our ability to compete in a world whose population is so diverse and must deal with so many different priorities.

"Hey, Kids, What Time is It?"

Caroline McCarthy's coverage of the BlackBerry e-mail outage for CNET News.com provided an interesting demonstration of how globalization is changing the ways we think about time. This is the paragraph that caught my attention:

This is likely due to a backlog of e-mails stemming from the service outage, which was first reported on the New York metro news site WNBC.com. The outage is believed to have originated around 5 p.m. PDT on Tuesday. WNBC then reported that service was resumed around 4 a.m. Wednesday but that problems with a backlog of data were likely.

I initially reacted to the account of activities in New York being given in Pacific Time, but this led me to wonder further about where the story was actually taking place. Presumably the mail servers are managed by Research in Motion, meaning that they are probably in Waterloo, Ontario; and, unless my memory is failing me (again), Waterloo is in the same time zone as New York! The reason, of course, that Ms. McCarthy was using Pacific Time as her "frame of reference" is that the CNET offices are in San Francisco (a healthy walk from where I happen to be writing this); so her "preferred clock" is probably the one in her office (or cubicle or whatever).

This poses an interesting problem of ethnocentrism. CNET probably knows full well that it has readers around the world. The BBC certainly knows this. The strategy they seem to employ at their Web site is to give the local time at the site of the story followed by the GMT time in parentheses. I personally find this a good way to deal with a global context. When I lived in Singapore, I cultivated an instinct for converting to GMT (along with an instinct for converting to Pacific Time, since that was "home"). Sadly, most of the settings I have encountered in the United States have been blissfully unaware of GMT; and I see that as one of the lesser factors that is now putting us so much at odds with the rest of the world. This one is clearly minor compared to so many of the others; but it is one in which tackling ethnocentrism could begin at home, if we really wanted to do something about it!

Retaliating with a BON MOT

Unregistered Truthdig commenter Jed Wing deserves a tip of the linguistic hat for his deft handling of potentially inappropriate speech. The context, appropriately enough, was the seemingly never-ending discussion of the Imus affair, this time around James Harris' "Imus Distraction" piece. Mr. Wing had obviously become so exasperated by some of the assertions in the ensuing discussion that he eventually had to erupt in expletive: "N-word, please!" After a brief pause, I had my own eruption … of laughter (probably the first healthy belly laugh I had to break the ice of the excessive seriousness with which this topic has been handled). Those of us who understand both the denotation and the connotation of Mr. Wing's little bit of linguistic legerdemain can appreciate that the challenge of respecting the constraints of "appropriate speech" can be a source of creativity, not to mention fun. The rest will have to seek explanation elsewhere and take comfort in the fact that this was a no-harm-no-foul move in the great language-game of life!

Chutzpah Delayed is NOT Chutzpah Denied!

It was not until I was hanging out at the pizza-and-beer "Blogger Dinner," which my friend, David Berkowitz, organized in conjunction with the Web. 2.0 Expo, that I suddenly realized that I had not bestowed last week's Chutzpah of the Week award! I suppose this had something to do with my own way of being caught up in the Imus affair and the extent to which the whole week was one of chutzpah overload. However, I definitely had a strong preference for the most deserving candidate by the end of the week. As a hint, I just affixed the "chutzpah" tag to my "Restitution is Necessary for an Injury" post. That's right, chutzpah fans, the recipient of the award for last week is none other than the Reverend DeForest Soaries, for how else can we describe the way he imposed himself on a situation that demanded the utmost delicacy in all matters and turned it into the bargaining situation that provoked my rant last Friday?

"Yesterday THIS Day's Madness did Prepare"

In this morning's New York Times Scott Shane has written a preview of Robert Dallek's new book (due out next week with excerpts currently available for reading in Vanity Fair), Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. There are so many ways in which this history can be read in the light of our present situation (not to mention my favorite how-did-we-get-into-this-mess question) that the book may best be reviewed as an extend (700-page) reflection on the 74th quatrain of Fitzgerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (whose first line is quoted above). Given my own reluctance to ever use the word "dignity" in a sentence about Nixon, I feel it is best to begin with the "Imus connection." We already know the abundance of expletive in Nixon's spoken utterances (making him perhaps a mentor for the current Vice President), just as we already know his use of the epithet "my Jew boy" in his reference to Kissinger; but Dallek appears to have elevated the latter into "a sadistic pleasure in flaunting his casual anti-Semitism before his Jewish national security adviser" (Shane's text). There are any number of ways in which Imus' recent behavior can be described; but I would not include "sadistic" among them (nor to I recall encountering that particular adjective in any of the many media accounts). (Need it be mentioned that, back in those days, the only connotation of "Ho" was of the formidable opponent we had encountered in North Vietnam.) Kissinger, of course, could give as good as he got. While he may not have done this to Nixon's face, Shane reports on discovering in Dallek's text incidents of "Mr. Kissinger describing his boss to aides and reporters as 'that madman,' 'our drunken friend' and 'the meatball mind.'"

Far more serious is the way in which Shane reads Dallek as commentary on our current "mess" in Iraq:

One pattern in particular seems relevant, he said: the reassurances that Nixon and Mr. Kissinger continually offered each other between 1969 and 1973 about the likely success of each of their moves in Vietnam, from the incursion into Cambodia to the prospects for “Vietnamization,” the gradual shift of the burden of combat from American to South Vietnamese troops.

With them, as with other presidents he has studied, “there’s a degree of autointoxication,” Mr. Dallek said.

“They convince themselves of what they want to believe,” he continued. He said he sensed the same phenomenon in the Bush administration and what he called the plan for “Iraqization” to reduce American involvement in the current war.

I particularly like that term "autointoxication," perhaps because it reflects on the recent HBO series on addiction. Now that the media has gotten beyond acting as cheerleaders for both the White House and the war it created for us, we can find no end to the examples of decision making by an inner circle extremely adept at convincing themselves of what they wanted to believe; and the metaphor of intoxication seems particularly appropriate when the "decider" for that inner circle had to wrestle with his own demons of alcoholism. Meanwhile, we continue to be haunted by the ghost of Marx, not for his Communist Manifesto but for his assertion that, when history repeats itself, what first is tragedy returns as farce. We may have finally encountered the ultimate counterexample to this proposition, since this time tragedy seems to have returned as an even greater tragedy.

Another Virtue of Anonymity

The efforts of the Associated Press to provide "up-to-the-minute" coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting have revealed another virtue of "well-maintained anonymity." The phrase "condition of anonymity" appears three times, in conjunction with three separate interviews, in the story Adam Geller filed at 10:09 AM EDT. What this means is that the content of these three interviews had not yet been vetted for "official announcement." Thus, Associated Press is saying (through Geller), "We know you want to have the most recent information available, but not all of that most recent information has been properly validated. However, rather than withhold it from you, we shall 'flag' it, letting you know when a particular source may be questionable." This seems like a good way for Associated Press to offer itself as an information source that tries to be as timely as the blogosphere but imposes a stronger editorial standard of validity testing. Since one of the Morning Edition reporters commented on the heavy use of the blogosphere for information regarding this particular tragedy, I, for one, endorse the Associated Press policy in the strongest of terms. There is going to be a lot of "noise interfering with the signal" surrounding this story; and we all need at least one source we can rely on to "filter out the noise."

Reflecting on my recent attacks on how Reuters seems to be reporting the news these days, I would like to add that Geller was assisted in preparing his report by "Associated Press Writers Justin Pope in Blacksburg and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington." (Yes, that is quoted from the bottom of the story.) I do not know if the Blacksburg byline indicates that Geller is also "on the ground;" but it does seem that Associated Press is not trying to cover this story using the Reuters outsourcing model, which is another count in their favor!

Earth to Reuters: What Took you so Long?

Reuters Special Correspondent Bernd Debusmann seems to think he had a hot new breaking story; and, apparently, the Reuters editors agreed with this. He certainly wrote a good lead:

The billionaire investor George Soros has added his voice to a heated but little-noticed debate over the role of Israel's powerful lobby in shaping Washington policy in a way critics say hurts U.S. national interests and stifles debate.

However, it is the second paragraph that is problematic:

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros takes issue with "the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)" in Washington and says the Bush administration's close ties with Israel are obstacles to a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The problem is that this article is not in the current issue. While it is true that the issue with the article is dated April 12, the current issue is dated April 26! The Soros article has been on the New York Review Web site for (probably) about half a month; and the Web site usually precedes the print issue by a matter of days.

So just how to these "Special Correspondents" do their job; and, what may be more relevant, where do they do it. If Mr. Debusmann is filing copy for United States news from Bangalore, like his colleague Sweta Singh, then it may very well be that he only saw the Soros article in print over this past weekend. Why he was unaware that the content had been on the Web for some time is between him and his managers at Reuters. It is all very well and good to assume that the Internet makes it possible to track United States news from any location in the world, but I would think that Reuters is still obliged to maintain their reputation for tracking it in a timely manner!

Cultural Blindness

Yesterday I described us as a culture "in which we willing assume tighter and tighter blinders, not so much of our own invention but through acceptance of what the world is dishing out to us." In all fairness I suspect that one cannot have any culture without some commitment to such blinders. There is just too much content out there for us to perceive it all; and, since that content keeps getting generated, the blinders have to be supplemented with a faulty memory, as Clive James pointed out of Book TV yesterday in his "conversation" about his book Cultural Amnesia at the New York Public Library. However, just as the "knowledge movement" used to argue that it is important for businesses to "know what they do not know," we should at least admit that we have these blinders and faulty memory and recognize them for what they are.

This morning's entry at confused of calcutta began with a product of either blinders or faulty memory (if not both):

One of the more unusual things I’ve noticed about the blogosphere is the way that discrimination disappears.

This proposition seems to deny the possibility that the death threat against Kathy Sierra was an act of discriminatory rage, yet such a hypothesis may be one of the most consistent with the prevailing discussion of the lack (or denial) of a moral compass and the need for a civil code of conduct. What has been missing from the discussion, however, has been the underlying question of our own humanity (which occupied much of James' rambling remarks) or, in Nietzschean terminology, our "all-too-humanity." Like it or not, the Internet has provided a host of new opportunities for that all-too-humanity to surface, not only in the virtual world but also, as we recently saw in Canada, in the physical.

This leads me to reflect on the question of anonymity and the confused of calcutta proposal to do away with it "in the main." My strongest reaction has been to wonder, in the spirit of Clive James, to what extent the “cultural amnesia” of cyberspace has lost touch with the concept of samizdat. The good news is that it has a Wikipedia entry. However, even if this provides a useful account of the theory, in the world of practice, it is too easy for us to forget that there are people out there with important things to say who can only say them under the assurance of a well-maintained anonymity. I would not want to throw out those babies along with the bathwater of those who use their anonymity for brutally childish pursuits.

We would all like cyberspace to be a safer place. Hopefully, enough of us object to fascism being the price for that safety. We need a discussion that balances the blindness of optimism against the hopelessness of despair. Both are all-too-human traits that will never be eliminated. However, if we put off that discussion (just as most countries have put off discussion of global warming), cyberspace could easily spin into either an authoritarianism more oppressive than Stalin’s or a global village of street fighting bloodier than Deadwood! Who will rise to the need for reasoned discourse?

Culture Death

Charles Taylor has a fascinating article in the latest issue of The New York Review. The book under review is Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, by Jonathan Lear. The topic of the book is what happened to the Crow tribe after they were confined to a reservation under the terms of a treated with the United States government. Taylor takes, as his point of departure, a quotation from Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation, reflecting on the transition to reservation life:

When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.

Taylor argues that the phrase "nothing happened" should be taken literally, rather than as a symbolic representation of, for example, the depression felt by the Crow upon losing their life style. He fixes a label to that literal meaning; he calls it "culture death." He elaborates his position with the following quote from Lear's book:

The issue is that the Crow have lost the concepts with which they would construct a narrative. This is a real loss, not just one that is described from a certain point of view. It is the real loss of a point of view.

Taylor also examines the current state of our own culture in terms of its understanding of the concept of culture death:

We have encouraged an identity, a self-definition, of which the core is the ability to "reinvent" ourselves. Someone who can change his or her situation is free, self-reliant, creative, imaginative, resourceful. In the current talk about "globalization," this identity and its associated virtues are seen as the highest stage of human development. To such people rightly belong the benefits of economic growth, prosperity, increased mobility, ever-new experiences. In the end, we often come to believe that we're doing the victims of culture death a favor in breaking them out of the stagnant structures of their lives, and opening for them paths of freedom, equality, opportunity.

While Taylor does not explicitly cite Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, he seems to be saying that we are promoting our own narcissistic impulses as a way to fight off or deny the possibility of culture death. Writing at the beginning of the Nineties, Lasch was more concerned with, as his subtitle put it, "American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations." He could not anticipate the impact that globalization, the Internet, the technology of virtual worlds, and, of course, the blogosphere would have on those narcissistic impulses.

The original myth discloses the irony of our situation. We talk the talk of freedom, self-reliance, creativity, imagination, and so forth; but, after the gods punished Narcissus, his fate was the his vision became fixed on only one thing, his own image. The vocabulary of reinvention conceals the way in which we willing assume tighter and tighter blinders, not so much of our own invention but through acceptance of what the world is dishing out to us. It will not be long before ours becomes the world where "nothing happens;" but, unlike Chief Plenty Coups, we probably shall not be aware of it!

"Restitution is Necessary for an Injury"

Don Imus has now had his meeting with the Rutgers women's basketball team. The meeting was hosted at the governor's mansion in New Jersey. In an ongoing story that seems unable to run out of twists and turns, Geoff Mulvihill reported for Associated Press on why the governor was not present at the meeting:

New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine was in critical condition Friday but expected to recover after his SUV crashed into a guard rail while heading to a meeting between Don Imus and the Rutgers women's basketball team.

The crash on the Garden State Parkway broke the governor's leg, six ribs, his sternum and fracturing a vertebrae. Authorities were still searching for a pickup truck driver whose actions were blamed for causing it.

Corzine, 60, won't be able to resume his duties as governor for several days, if not weeks, and he won't walk normally for months, Dr. Robert Ostrum said performing surgery on the governor Thursday night at Cooper University Hospital.

Nevertheless, the meeting went ahead as planned. Associated Press Television Writer David Bauder provided the following summary:

C. Vivian Stringer, the Rutgers team's coach, spoke briefly Thursday night after meeting with Imus and his wife at the governor's mansion.

"We had a very productive meeting," she said. "Hopefully, we can put all of this behind us."

While team members respected Imus' willingness to apologize, they wanted him to understand how they were hurt, said Rev. DeForest Soaries, Stringer's pastor, who joined the meeting. Imus tried to explain what he meant, "but there was really no explanation that they could understand," Soaries said on NBC's "Today" show.

"An apology is appropriate for an insult," he said. "But restitution is necessary for an injury."

I am particularly interested in the contrast of language between Ms. Stringer and Reverend Soaries. The latter reminded me of the discourse that emerged from those who phoned in to C-SPAN last Tuesday. At that time I mentioned the small trend of callers who wanted to talk about the hypocrisy of the media business, but there was another small trend who wanted to address another form of hypocrisy. They wanted to know why none of the ordained ministers who had voiced opinion about Imus had said anything about forgiveness! This question has now surfaced again: While Ms. Stringer was willing to use the language of forgiveness (albeit tentatively), the Reverend Soaries seemed more occupied with the language of bargaining.

This triggered a far more distant memory, of when I first saw Amadeus on the stage and heard a much younger Ian McKellan deliver Antonio Salieri's recollection of his own youth:

Every Sunday I saw Him in church, painted on the flaking wall. I don't mean Christ. The Christs of Lombardy are simpering sillies, with lambkins on their sleeves. No: I mean an old candle-smoked God in a mulberry robe, staring at the world with dealer's eyes. Tradesmen had put him up there. Those eyes made bargains, real and irreversible. "You give me so—I'll give you so! No more. No less!"

My lot is with Ms. Stringer. The discourse should be about forgiveness and, if deemed appropriate, acts of atonement. This is not an occasion for Salieri's or Reverend Soaries' "God of Bargains." If Ms. Stringer and Mr. Imus are sincere in their hope to "put all of this behind us," then I would like to hope that they succeed in their endeavor!

By way of a postscript, I see that commenter "DSmith" over at Truthdig made an interesting contribution to the discourse of forgiveness and atonement:

Imus vowed on Sharpton’s radio show, if allowed to stay and as part of his penance, he would raise untold millions of dollars for Sickle Cell Anemina, a disease that strikes thousands of blacks each year. With the influence Imus had with politicians and his fund raising prowess he could have tripled the amount of money raised for SCA. But to Sharpton and Jackson it was more important to humiliate Imus by making him bear his cross in the public square and I watched as these “Reverends” took great joy in placing a crown of thorns on Imus’s head. Remind you of anyone you heard about during Easter?

One of the Good Apples at CBS

Having vented aggressively over the plagiarism committed by the ghost writer of the "personal reflections" in "Katie Couric's Notebook" (and the CBS management ultimately responsible for such behavior), I feel a somewhat personal obligation to point out that not all of the CBS News apples are bad ones. I just watched the After Words broadcast on Book TV concerning Jeremy Scahill's book about Blackwater. Mr. Scahill was interviewed by David Martin, whose credentials were given as the National Security Correspondent for CBS News. Since one could read Scahill's book as a story about outsourcing, I found it a bit ironic that After Words does not appear to involve anyone from Book TV; none of the interviewers I have seen on this series have any connection with Book TV operations. So this was a "side job" for Mr. Martin; and I would say that he was one of the best interviewers I have seen in the many After Words programs I have watched.

I feel this is important because Mr. Martin had a formidable task. The problem with writing a book about Blackwater is that it covers so much ground illuminated by so many highly vivid examples, that, left to his own devices, Scahill would probably be in great risk of trying to run off madly in all directions. Mr. Martin had obviously but enough effort into both reading the book and internalizing the necessary background that he was able to steer skillfully a one-hour conversation and make sure that all of the most important points were taken into account. For his part Mr. Scahill was as comfortable with oral presentation as he has demonstrated himself to be with his writing; so the "conversation" was actually a matter of Mr. Martin dropping a cue and Mr. Scahill elaborating on it. The good thing about that technique was that Mr. Scahill knew how to bring each elaboration to closure, after which Mr. Martin could provide the next cue.

Yes, this was a one-hour conversation. There is no place for this sort of thing in the CBS Evening News; it is even beyond the scope of 60 Minutes! One advantage that the time provided, though, was that Mr. Martin could provide Mr. Scahill with opportunities to reflect on the contents of his book (particularly in light of events that happened after the book went to press); and Mr. Martin could also prompt Mr. Scahill with reflections of his own experiences in reporting for CBS. It goes without saying that none of this was interrupted by advertising!

Truth in Advertising

On at least one count the BBC has it right: They refer to the anchor-person for their newscasts on both radio and television as a "news reader." This removes any connotation of (or responsibility for) reporting or editing from the anchor desk. This does not make the BBC an inferior news source. It just recognizes how labor is divided in their operations.

On the other hand when CBS decides that their "Evening News" program is going to have a segment entitled "Katie Couric's Notebook," then there is a very strong connotation that Ms. Couric is going to share a personal reflection with her audience in her own words. That, at any rate, is what theory tells us; but in the world of television (and probably lots of other worlds) practice is quite a different matter. This is why a recent installment of "Katie Couric's Notebook" turned out to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal; and this particular genie came out of the bottle. As Steve Gorman reported for Reuters, it fell to spokeswoman Sandy Genelius to announce that the "producer responsible for Couric's piece was fired." In plainer language Ms. Couric does not write the words in "Katie Couric's Notebook;" and CBS has now sacked the author of those particular plagiarized words, which Ms. Couric may not have even seen prior to air time.

So what happened to "personal reflection?" Here is the tail end of Gorman's story:

Genelius said Couric met with a group of producers weekly to discuss upcoming topics for her "Notebook" video essays, and "she does write some of them herself."

"Sometimes the text is written by the producer," she added. "That's the way television generally works. It's a very collaborative medium."

I suppose that calling this segment "Katie Couric's Notebook" was also the result of a collaborative effort. Not only does this leave me wondering how many "collaborators" were involved; but it also reminds me that Europeans are very reluctant to use any variation of the noun "collaboration" because of the connotation with some of the more distasteful activities that took place during the Second World War!

Blunt Talk with a Point

Writing for The Blotter, Luis Martinez described Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, head of the National Guard, as "always blunt-talking." This is a fair description, but it also provides the oxymoronic reminder that blunt speech is often the best way to make a point. For example, this is the way in which Blum reminded the Senate Appropriations Committee that providing resources is always a matter of setting priorities:

It bothers me that the Army, Marines are sending forces to fight, and at home the nation is watching "American Idol."

I have to appreciate this: Getting the attention of Congress is rather like getting the attention of that proverbial mule by whacking him on the head with a two-by-four. However much I may intellectualize about the dangers of a world without reflection, Blum knows how to cut to the chase in terms of immediate consequences. Facing an appropriations committee is always a matter of holding out your hat; but Martinez provided a simple summary of what needs to go into that hat:

Lt. Gen. Blum, the head of the Pentagon's National Guard Bureau, said 88 percent of the Army National Guard in the United States is not ready due to lack of equipment and training, and that $40 billion was urgently needed to provide guard troops at home with "meat and potatoes stuff," such as radios, trucks, humvees, night vision gears and medical supplies.

Unfortunately, he has had to testify at a time when the country may still be under the influence of all that rhetoric about a leaner, meaner military organization. One assumes that there will be plenty of members of congress (in both houses, no doubt) who will enjoin their aides to seek out every opportunity to trim that $40 billion estimate. The good news is that Blum has already summoned some of his rhetoric towards a preemptive strike against such behavior:

You can't show up to put out a fire with only half the equipment because the house will burn down.

This metaphor (which actually has an interesting parallel in Talmud) provides yet another example of how being blunt may be the best way to make the point.

Fired!

I watched Fired!, which may best be described as Annabelle Gurwitch's therapeutic exercise for coping with having gotten fired by Woody Allen, yesterday over lunch. I really wish it had been better, although the fact the IMDB decided to classify the genre of this film as both Documentary and Comedy should have been a warning. As the old joke goes, the man (or woman in this case) who walks down the middle of the road gets hit by trucks coming in both directions; and that may be a good way to summarize the experience of watching this film.

There is certainly a lot of good comedy. The reenactment of her encounter with Allen, framed in a very Allen-like cinematic style by directors Chris Bradley and Kyle LaBrache, worked very nicely, setting you up for seeing the opening credits using that same no-frills font that starts every Allen film. Similarly, the filmed excerpts from the off-Broadway show that Gurwitch produced, in which she recruited her friends (most of whom, at least in the excerpts, seemed to have a talent for comedy) to tell their own stories about being fired made for great comedy in both the content and the timing. I probably would have been happier to have seen this show and left things there.

Unfortunately, Gurwitch wanted to dig deeper into the nature of work, the impact of getting fired, and questions of coping and recovery. It is hard to tell whether or not she knew she was venturing into turf that had been so well mapped out by Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch), since Ehrenreich never shows up in the script as either subject or object of citation. Towards the end of the film, she does sit down with both Robert Reich and Ben Stein (who definitely knows more about economics than his television personality would lead you to believe). While Reich may have had more impressive credentials, Stein turned out to be the one more willing to recognize Gurwitch's topic as a symptom of a more profound disease; but the material excerpted for the film do little more than provide him with a platform to express is strong indignation at a national policy that continues to ignore that disease. Of course it may be that Stein's interview came off best because it was the one setting in which Gurwitch did not try to put in a comic twist. Where comedy would have been more appropriate would have been in her visit to Right Management, one of those "transition management" firms that usually get contracted by the business doing the firing and do little more than keep the victims of the firing off the streets (at least for the duration of the contract). The extent to which such businesses offer little more than shallow illusions is a perfect target for ridicule, but Gurwitch did not seem to appreciate this well enough to exploit what could have been the best opportunity to invoke comedy in the service of documentary.

Gurwitch might have done better to read, if nothing more, the final sentence on the dust jacket of Bait and Switch:

Alternately hilarious and tragic, Bait and Switch, like the now-classic Nickel and Dimed, is a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

Only Stein seemed willing to recognize that cruelty for what it is and try to put it in its place. The way in which he has managed to make himself into a television personality (even making fun of the fact that he really does know a lot of important things) makes me wish that he had been the one writing the script for this film!

Bad Behavior about Bad Behavior

If I am to believe Reuters, then Tim O'Reilly's "code of conduct" draft has provided an incentive for a growing amount of bad posting behavior in the blogosphere. The rest of the report basically records O'Reilly's disappointment, as well as that of Jimmy Wales. Since I tend to believe that reasoned criticism should not be taken for bad behavior, I would like to think that I am not part of this particular trend. However, lest I be accused of either contributing to or fomenting bad behavior, I probably ought to come clean and reproduce what I feel was my most emotional outburst, submitted as a comment to Truthdig:

The real problem behind this story is that cyberspace, particularly the blogosphere, is a socio-technical phenomenon. There is no faulting folks like O’Reilly and Wales in matters of technical competence; but, when it comes to social matters, it seems as if their grasp of the situation runs the gamut from the woefully incompetent to the hopelessly naive.

Yes, this may have been extreme language; but it is also a reflection on the role that these two particular individuals have had in shaping the world that the Internet has made. Actually, my guess is that O'Reilly are in the same boat. Neither his "code of conduct" nor my own call for a discussion of governance is cyberspace is likely to get anywhere; but I have lived through enough disappointments to know better than to beat my breast over this one!

Of Babies and Bathwater

Ellen Wulfhorst's recent dispatch for Reuters demonstrates just how far we have departed from the reasoned and deliberated discourse that Alessandra Stanley tried to apply this morning in her analysis piece about Don Imus. Here is Ms. Wulfhorst's lead:

Calls for Don Imus' head sounded loudly on Wednesday, as the ranks of advertisers dropping their support and activists vowing not to rest until he is off the air grew.

The apology by the syndicated U.S. radio host, his suspension, the canceled advertising and media uproar are not enough, say many who want Imus fired. His comments show just how sensitive and unresolved issues of race and racism remain in America, they say.

One cannot tell from Ms. Wulfhorst's text the magnitude of that "many;" but what one can gathers from the quotations she cites is that this is no longer a story about bad behavior or an offensive "language-game" foul. Indeed, it probably isn't even a story about Imus any more. Instead, it seems to have metamorphosed into an opportunity to expose (but not necessarily debate) "how sensitive and unresolved issues of race and racism remain in America." Well, not only is this not news; but, at the risk of being accused of insensitivity, I would like to point out that there are far better examples of the race problem than the blunderings of a shock jock. Consider some of the examples that have been examined just on this blog:

• The racist aspect of subprime lending
• The racist aspect of the aftermath of Katrina
• The (probably inadvertent) racist language of Ellen Senter, Strom Thurmond's niece, upon learning of her family connection to Al Sharpton
• The linguistic tempest over the adjective "articulate"
• The correlation between race and salary
• The correlation between race and getting a job (before worrying about that salary)

These are just stories I examined on this blog, but the oldest came out last January! Where was the indignation then? Why is this the story that has erupted in a demand for all manner of repercussions?

The simple explanation is that Imus is just to easy a target. Everyone is ganging up on him because:

1. They can
2. They look good in doing so
3. It conveys the appearance of acting on a more important issue

That last time is the most important, because, in this postmodern world, appearance always trumps substance. However, this postmodern condition may actually provide a deeper explanation, which has also reared its head in the debate over a "code of conduct" for cyberspace: We have lost the ability to differentiate the baby from the bathwater. It is not just that appearance trumps substance but that, in our obsessions with appearance, we have actually lost touch with what the substance is. This then reflects back on another one of my favorite themes: the deterioration of our capacity for reflection, which is so necessary to any serious deliberation of a matter of substance.

I wish I could end this rant on a note of hope, some indication, for example, that John Dewey's vision of the symbiotic relationship between democracy and education will be restored and cultivated. Unfortunately, this just does not seem particularly viable in today's business climate, let alone the social climate being shaped by the Internet. I may just have to resign myself to harvesting what I can from my memories and using this blog to tell stories about "the good old days!"

The Dangerous Mix of Globalization and Software

Dana Hughes has filed a story on the Blotter blog maintained by ABC News that demonstrates (even more than Imus) just how bad things can get when it comes to conduct in the world the Internet has made. Here is the core of the story:

ABC News spoke to Doris and Douglas Moore of Toronto about what happened when they purchased a set of dark brown couches for $1300 and were told the couches were high-quality imports from Italy. But when they arrived, her 7-year-old daughter made a startling discovery. On the shipping label, next to "color," it read: Ni**er-Brown.

This obviously raises two questions that are far harder to answer than they were in the Imus affair:

1. How did this happen?
2. Who is actually responsible?

This seems to be a case in which efforts to address these questions were best satisfied through the local media business:

So far, no one has wanted to take responsibility for the slur. Moore immediately called the furniture store, Vanaik, from where she and her husband purchased the couches, but received no response. So she contacted a local television station, Toronto's City News, who tracked down the store manager. He told a reporter from the station he was sorry for the label but blamed the supplier, Paul Kumar of Toronto-based Cosmos Furniture, who also ships furniture to the United States. In media reports, Kumar said that the label was placed by the manufacturer, located in China, not Italy.

Kumar told ABC News that he spoke to the manufacturer and that the mistake was made "out of innocence." The slur was a translation problem with the labeling software, he said, but he declined to name the software used. He also said he didn't know how many other pieces of furniture his company may have sold with the racial epithet on the label.

I can think of no better case study of the extent to which the distorted philosophies of globalization (such as those of Thomas Friedman), when coupled with software designed with no awareness of the social world, can make a mess of disastrous proportions. The answer to the first question is: This is the sort of thing that happens when software is developed and used in what I previously called "a world without reflection." There was clearly no attention to social consequences during the software development process; and, if the software was being used in China, it is reasonable to assume that the user was not equipped to reflect on the English texts being generated by that software.

Unfortunately, the second question is far more problematic than the first. The Ontario Human Rights Commission, however, has decided to answer it by filing suit against both the store and the distributor; but we have to wonder whether or not the imposition of a fine is going to restore the process of reflection to a system that has been designed to eliminate it. The reality of the situation is that globalization has created a world in which, to draw upon the phrase from Dickens' Little Dorrit that become the title of the two-part film adaptation, this kind of mess is "nobody's fault." A world without reflection is also a world without accountability; and that is the world that seems to work best for making and selling stuff in a highly distributed but cost-effective mode of operation.

One might say that the fault ultimately lies with those advice-givers whose "wisdom" has given us the world the Internet has made. Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton once wrote about one of those advice-givers in Elizabethan England. His name was Henry Cuffe. He had been a professor of Greek at Oxford but became secretary to the earl of Essex. As we all know, Essex was executed for treasonous acts. Jardine and Grafton, however, have done us all a great service by pointing out that Cuffe was also hanged for his part in the Essex rebellion, thus becoming one of the best case studies for the precept that giving advice can have serious consequences! Now I doubt that such a fate is in store for Friedman or any of the other purveyors of globalization or, for that matter, Web 2.0. For that matter I doubt whether its lesson will do anything to make the world a more reflective place. However, if only a few of the readers of this blog bother to reflect on it, we may be making our first steps in the right direction!

A Television Critic Examines Don Imus

Alessandra Stanley, television critic for The New York Times, weighed in with her own opinions on Don Imus and provided a useful perspective to one of those controversies that inevitably yields more heat than light. She used, as her point of departure, yesterday morning's Today show, on which Matt Lauer interviewed both Imus and Al Sharpton. The occasion allowed Ms. Stanley to preface her thoughts about Imus with a reflection on this particular forum:

There are no laws to adjudicate racial harmony; morning television is the forum in which grievances are aired and sympathies are marshaled. Politicians weighed in (Rudolph W. Giuliani supports Mr. Imus; Senator Barack Obama does not), but television, or more specifically advertising, is the arbiter. The hosts of “Today” in particular serve as America’s test family, one that reflects many of the veiled tensions about race that exist throughout American society.

I gave up on Today many years ago. I never watched it at home, only in hotel rooms when I was on the road. As the news business grew more competitive, the fluff content grew more tiresome; and there were too many better places to get "straight" news. Nevertheless, I think that Ms. Stanley is on to something important here, even if her following paragraphs push that "test family" metaphor to the point of aggravation. More importantly, she is not afraid to talk about the dead moose on the table, which is that everything comes down to who gets how much advertising revenue.

Furthermore, her first phrase may offer the only viable link, which C-SPAN was looking for yesterday, between the Imus affair and the problem of conduct in cyberspace. Ms. Stanley is not quite right, to the extent that one can prosecute hate crimes in our courts of law; but she is right in that the court can only deal with obeying the letter of the law, rather than its spirit, which is ultimately where racial harmony resides. This is a point that, as far as I can tell, has received no attention on all the exchanges over the draft of a "Blogger Code of Conduct," the idea that any reading of such a text must account for its letter and spirit. More specifically, one cannot adopt such a code without addressing the Tweed question (“What’re ya’ gonna do about it?”) when the code is violated; and if one is going to address that question, one needs to get straight when one is talking about violations of the letter and when the violations are of the spirit. Ms. Stanley is right to point out that courts of law are no place to address questions of violations of the spirit; but, if there is going to be any letter at all, then one has to decide what to do when the letter is violated. This is where I feel it is important to ask about the role of governance in cyberspace.

Going back to Imus and his practices, I think that Ms. Stanley has provided a perceptive summary of what the situation is and how we got into it (the how-did-we-get-into-this-mess question):

In this polite but sometimes strained community [Today as "test family'], Mr. Imus is the cranky, aging neighbor who can be relied upon to shovel snow off the sidewalk but occasionally blurts out words so offensive and insensitive that it makes everyone regret inviting him to the block party.

He tried to explain his remark as a momentary slip, describing himself as a “good person who said a bad thing.” But there is a deeper dichotomy behind his disgrace: Mr. Imus wants to be both a shock jock and Charlie Rose, and the two roles inevitably collide. He is a radio star whose early popularity rested on sophomoric and outrageous humor. But Mr. Imus also staked his claim to gravitas, inviting journalists and politicians on his show and discussing —with considerable skill — news and political affairs.

He told Mr. Lauer that his racist remark about the Rutgers players came out in a comic context. “I’m not a newsman,” he said rather testily from his radio talk-show desk. “This is not ‘Meet the Press.’ ” Actually, it is: “Imus in the Morning” is the place where fans who don’t watch Tim Russert’s talk show get a chance to hobnob with writers for The New York Times, NBC correspondents and Newsweek columnists.

For Ms. Stanley, then, it all comes down to role-playing, which is not an unreasonable perspective for a television critic. However, the role we play is very heavily defined by the language-games we play, which is why I felt it was important to drag Wittgenstein into the conversation. Indeed, Bill Maher's defense of Imus, made when he called in to Imus' radio program (and then rebroadcast on C-SPAN), is that the guy just committed an offensive foul in his language-game; and yesterday I tried to reinforce that position by observing that, where language-games are concerned, the rules (not to mention the referees) are always changing.

One final note on the topic of news sources: The New York Times fell from the top of my list as a result of all the messes they made in reporting on the Bush administration and its "war on terror." Nevertheless, I decided to leave my "Arts" RSS feed intact. Writers like Ms. Stanley do a good job of reminding me why I made this decision!

"O brave new world, That has such people in it!"

This afternoon Reuters filed the latest story on another recall of pet food from Menu Foods. I found this through my Reuters: US News feed (as I expected I would). I read these stories because of the concern of my cat's welfare (whatever my cat may have to say about the matter). None of this constitutes anything out of the ordinary; but at the bottom of this particular (brief) filing was the statement that it was reported "by Sweta Singh in Bangalore!" The Internet does indeed change everything. It would appear that I get at least some (if not most) of my news of the United States from Bangalore.

This reminds me of one of my first experiences with an outsourced help desk. It involved the DSL service I was getting in my house back in Palo Alto, which was provided by (what was then) SBC. Back in those early days we early adopters discovered a correlation between rain and a reduction in quality of service. One day I was experiencing such a reduction while looking out the window at a clear sky, so I figured I had better notify SBC. After going through the usual routine questions that did not help the operator, I asked, "Is in raining anywhere in the vicinity?" The reply was, "I don't know; where are you?" The operator knew my area code but had no idea what it meant or what I meant by "vicinity?" This was the first time I had come to grips with having to deal with a "help service" that was half-way around the world; and I was not happy about it! If local weather was a factor in quality of service, how could I get help from someone who had no idea what the local weather was?

Now I understand that news services, like newspapers and radio stations, monitor the wire services and select the items they feel are most important; but it had not occurred to me to question the source of the wire reports. I had just taken for granted that a story about Ontario would come from Ontario, but I guess that is not the case. Presumably, Menu Foods used the Internet to send a press release to Reuters; and that press release was picked up by Sweta Singh. Whether or not Sweta Singh then did any follow-up activities is anybody's guess. It seems unlikely that someone in Bangalore would pick up the phone and call Ontario to check up on the source, but perhaps that is what happened. Who knows?

Strange Bedfellows

This morning's Washington Journal, which I listen to on C-SPAN Radio through my XM subscription, made a slightly odd judgment call. They decided to devote an entire call-in segment to the question of civility in the media, lumping together the stories of the suspension of Don Imus and the reporting of Tim O'Reilly's proposed "code of conduct" for the blogosphere. I call this odd because my own feeling is that these two issues are about as alike as apples and oranges. As I and others have tried to argue in our own contributions to the blogosphere, concepts like civility are not easy to grasp; and trying to discuss them in terms of two such disparate events can only complicate the matter. The good news is that most C-SPAN callers did not want to talk about the blogosphere, so they kept the issue focused on the Imus affair.

C-SPAN callers, as a rule, make for a mixed bag. There is so much diversity (much of which is shot from the hip) that even the slightest hint of a trend may say something. This morning I was reminded of a sign I used to have on the door to my office at the University of Pennsylvania with the following lines of text:

You built the scaffold

You tied the rope

You put your head in the noose

And now you're complaining that the trapdoor opened

I was pleasantly surprised that there were so many callers who wanted to talk about the hypocrisy of the media business, and the way in which they have turned "shock radio" into a major cash cow, rather than about the "bad behavior" of one of the best known "shock jocks." The dead moose on the table is the underlying premise that Imus was doing exactly what he was paid to do, because that is what gets people to listen to his program, which means it is what gets people to listen to the advertising spots on his program. When both broadcasting management and the advertisers make a show of recoiling in horror at one particular move in Imus' particular brand of language-game (Wittgenstein and Imus in a single sentence … who woulda thunk it?), they are doing nothing more than putting up a front to prop up their own professed standards of "civility," which they feel are important for their public image. Well, I do not know about the kind of people who phone in to Imus (or, for that matter, Al Sharpton); but there seem to be a fair number of C-SPAN listeners who see that front for what it is. (Maybe they have gotten so good at detecting it in the government that they are now beginning to recognize it in the private sector!) If it took Imus going over a line that was never particularly well-defined in the first place (let alone fixed) to get people talking about where the real problem lies, then I, for one, am willing to accept his apology for what I personally felt was offensive speech.

Let me now repeat: None of this has anything to do with what is going on in the blogosphere, and attempts to examine it that way can only confuse a situation that is confused enough already. The fact is that there are a variety of ways in which radio broadcasting is subject to governance, and that governance has generally been effective enough to engender an implicit code of conduct. Yes, there are flaws in the governance structure in both the public and private sectors; but, when you compare radio broadcasting with all the other areas that provide the American public with goods and services and their governance structures, that sector does not look so bad. This is enough to make me wonder whether the underlying problem of safety in cyberspace would benefit from examining practices in radio broadcasting as a way to complement the theoretical insights of the fundamental documents of the United States government. I suspect that we would make a lot more progress than we would through a "wiki-based review" of a draft document prepared by someone who is much better at preparing high-quality no-nonsense desktop reference books (with really cool cover pictures).

On the "Blogger Code of Conduct"

I see that Tim O'Reilly has decided to follow through on his proposition that the safety of the Internet can best be achieved through a code of conduct. He now has a first draft that he has posted for the solicitation of comments. True to his principles, he hopes to arrive at a final draft "through a wiki-based review process." Since I have already accused O'Reilly of completely missing the point with his proposition, I do not plan to participate in this review process. Indeed, he probably captures my own feeling towards this whole approach in his quotation of an old saying: "Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it."

As an alternative I would like to examine the draft from my own position of text analysis and cut to that part of the text around which everything else is basically embellishment:

We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:

• is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
• is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
• infringes upon a copyright or trademark
• violates an obligation of confidentiality
• violates the privacy of others

We defined and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]

There is no questioning the good intentions behind this text, but it does nothing but remind me of my own rants regarding the ignorance of basic principles of governance surrounding the whole question of safety on the Internet. It is a truly disappointing specimen when compared with the language of the Constitution of the United States or the passage from the Declaration of Independence that I picked out for analysis in the early stages of this discussion. Sadly, the difference may have to do with the fact that these two documents were products of intense (not to mention heated) face-to-face deliberation, which will always be a far cry from the abstractions of "wiki-based review."

Without deep-ending into philosophy, I need to point out that the blogosphere is best viewed as an enormous Wittgensteinian language-game. The important lesson from Wittgenstein is that words and concepts are so context-dependent that defining them will always be a futile exercise. They can only be understood in terms of how they are used; and the term "language-game" was introduced to hang a label of this general principle of use. The problem is that, as Márquez put it in One Hundred Years of Solitude, this is a game where the players to not have any prior agreement over what the rules are; but, as Wittgenstein keeps reminding us, we can still play the game and (for the most part) play it very well.

In my own case I am most worried about the distinction between declarative and literary use when we play the game. Put another way, I think that O'Reilly's text can be seen as an attempt to undermine such literary devices as satire. Now I realize that satirical text is an extremely delicate matter, and it is sometimes hard to tell whether or not a ox is actually being gored. However, I object in the strongest way in any "solution" to the Internet safety problem that cannot tell the difference between the baby and the bathwater; and I see that as the flaw in O'Reilly's effort. (I originally wrote "tragic flaw;" but my knowledge of Aristotle reminded me that this is not a situation about the acts of noble people!)

There are other ways I could pick apart the text, but I think it is important to focus on the core rather than the embellishments. However, I want to close by taking comfort in the first comment that appeared at O'Reilly Radar, posted by someone named Shelley:

You created badges.

You actually created badges.

I just can't believe you created badges.

As Babylon 5 fans are sure to recognize, the Night Watch is upon us again!

The Consequences of Scholarly Research, Indian Style

One does not usually associate the Oxford University Press with controversy. My guess is that their senior management has pretty low expectations for most of the books they publish, feeling happy when some of those books get any reviews at all, positive or negative. However, according to a report on Reuters this morning, one of their books received considerable attention from the Indian Supreme Court:

India's Supreme Court has ordered a state government to stop prosecuting on charges of racial hatred a U.S. scholar whose book was banned after claims that it insulted a revered 17th-century Hindu king.

The 2004 publication of Professor James W. Laine's book "Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India" [published by Oxford University Press] infuriated hardline Hindu groups in the western state of Maharashtra, who claimed Laine was questioning Shivaji's parentage.

In the absence of the author and the publisher, the offended parties decided that their fury would best be vented on the institution with the author conducted his research:

The book was banned in the state after dozens of protesters forced their way into the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, where the professor did his research. The mob destroyed rare Tibetan and Sanskrit manuscripts and smashed windows and doors.

While the Reuters dispatch is not specific about this, it appears that the ban was accompanied by legal charges of racial hatred brought against both Laine and the Oxford University Press. Presumably Oxford had the resources to appeal litigation to the level of the Supreme Court, leading to the decision reported today:

The court, whose ruling was released on Monday, ordered that the state drop all charges brought by hardliner groups against both the professor and his publisher, saying neither had intentionally tried to cause tensions between communities.

"One cannot rely on strongly worded and isolated passages for proving the charge," the court said in a statement.

This makes for an interesting story of cultural perspective. At the local level the state had to respond to the attack on the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, and this raises an interesting analogy. Scholars want to believe that they can conduct their research in safety at this place, just as those of us in the blogosphere currently want to believe that it is a safe place for us to conduct our conversations. Nevertheless, the state level of government is accountable to its constituency; and, if that constituency was responsible for the violence, the state decided that the best way to restore such safety would be to ban the book and press charges against its author and publisher. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, represents a much larger and far more diverse constituency and, in a sense, castigated the state government for caving in to the base and violent actions of their local constituency.

From our vantage point we would like to see this as a victory for liberal thinking and an endorsement of the openness of academic scholarship, but I doubt that the state's constituents will see it that way. Perhaps the problem here is that cause and effect needed to be examined as two separate cases. The effect of destructive vandalism seems not to have been addressed at the legal level; yet it would seem that those responsible for the destruction should now be responsible for reparations, regardless of whether or not a particular book (obscure to most of the world) was the underlying cause. However, if that underlying cause is one of cultural offense, then it may be a mistake to rule on the offense itself, just as I would not want any branch of my government to tell me that I should be offended by, to raise a recent example, a crucifixion statue made of chocolate that make no attempt to hide the genitalia.

As a teenager, I learned an interesting lesson about banned books in the United States. Philadelphia had decided to make a big issue out of banning Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer from both its bookstores and public library branches. However, since it was easy enough for me to hop a train to New York, this was no big deal. The bad piqued my curiosity; and I had no trouble buying a copy in Manhattan and reading the book, never making a big deal about having my own copy. The book is still in my library (although I much preferred Tropic of Capricorn).

On the other hand, as an adult involved in global business transactions, I realized the delicacy of the nature of offense. I once found myself in Singapore have finished the book I had brought to read over the course of an extended trip. I was down the street from Tower Records (which dates the story) and decided to check out their book section. To my great delight (not to mention surprise), I found a copy of Interzone, a collection of early writing by William S. Burroughs including much of the preliminary material that would later mature into Naked Lunch. Not bothering to ask how this had slipped past Singaporean censors, I snatched up the copy and devoured it with relish. However, by the time I got to Kuala Lumpur, I realized that there was a lot of text in this book that could give a lot of offense to the people around me. I may have been overly cautious, but I locked the book in the safe in my hotel room. I was not going to carry it around with me to my business meeting, and I definitely did not want to leave it out where the cleaning lady might glance at it. The safe may have been extreme, but it was the easiest solution.

Taken together, these two anecdotes have a shared lesson: One can always find a way by coupling common sense to your better judgment. As we saw at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, this lesson is not always gladly received or readily learned. However, no one of us should try to assume the job of educating the rest of the world. We should simply negotiate our way through that world in a way that works best for us, and I think I have managed to find that way where controversial reading matter is involved!

Identity on the Coast of Utopia

The great language-game over the nature of identity continues at confused at calcutta with some interesting further moves. Gordon Cook threw out a sentence that I cannot resist reproducing:

I view 19th century Russian history as tragic outcome of the search for identity carried out by the russian nobility beginning with the conclusion of the napoleonic campaigns.

I know that Gordon knows a lot about Russian history (far more than I can ever hope to know). However, in my own amateur way fueled by my dramatistic interests, I had to note that he was raising the same theme that Stoppard addressed in his Coast of Utopia trilogy. The titles of the three plays say something about the author’s point of view: “Voyage,” “Shipwreck,” “Salvage.” I was also struck by the fact that, while several of us were sharing Isaiah Berlin stories on a back channel, the opening of "Voyage"at Lincoln Center, led to a mad dash to buy up copies of Berlin’s Russian Thinkers!

My free associating led me to consider the analogy between Stoppard’s conception of a search for Utopia and Gordon's perspective of the search for identity. Berlin fans know that he took a very dim view of Utopian thinking, not just from the Russians. This is best captured in “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” which is the lead essay in The Crooked Timber of Humanity. His basic idea resonates very nicely with the sort of language we are inclined to use. The “tragic flaw” (if I may wax Aristotelian) of a Utopia is that it is a state, which means that it can never accommodate any “real world” context, since that context will always be in flux.

I think we can reflect this back on questions of identity. Trying to deal with identity as some kind of state will result in an equally tragic flaw. While it is true that, at an abstract level, we can always “freeze time” and “capture” at least some of the attributes and relations that would count for a “state description,” I would argue that where “the crooked timber of humanity” is concerned, our understanding of identity resides in the transitions, rather than any artificial “states” we construct, often just because they are more compatible with our databases!

The kicker, however, is that we really have not yet gotten our minds around the alternative. We know how to describe state; but our skills for describing transitions are impoverished, often reduced to saying little more than “what happens between these two states.” The last time I harped on this was in a discussion over the opensourcing of process. In another comment I suggested that the best way to confront the problem would be through a better understanding of the rich diversity in the grammar of verbs. This, in turn, reflects back on much of the life-work of Kenneth Burke and his efforts to develop a theory of “dramatistic” (as opposed to “scientistic”) thinking. Of course, regular readers know that it does not take much to get me to invoke Burke! I suppose this all demonstrates just how tightly coupled the nature of identity is to so many other equally complex concepts!

Another Approach to Identity

As I recently observed, in at least one corner of the blogosphere, the reaction to the "Kathy Sierra incident" has led to the challenge of "Getting Identity right." This has set me to fretting about the all-too-human condition of going out to romp in concepts that one does not really understand. My own reaction to Kathy Sierra's situation was to try to bring some clarity to the concept of governance, quite a challenge in the face of national and corporate organizations trying to keep it as muddy as possible! I have tried to do the same with the concept of morality, with the result of sparking some interesting conversational insights over at confused of calcutta.

As intimidating as these two concepts may be, dealing with them feels like a walk in the park when compared with identity. The good thing about the conversations at confused of calcutta, though, is that they always seem to come back to question of what we do, rather than what we know; and that may be useful guidance in this case. Indeed, J. P. Rangaswami, who runs that blog, is very big on conversations; so what happens if we try to think about questions of identity in terms of the conversations we conduct?

As I see it, the problem that we face, particularly in cyberspace, is that we must all cope with the challenge of communicating in a social world that is about as far from a Habermas-style ideal speech situation as you can dare to get! We need to start taking lessons from those who have such communication skills: anthropologists whose bread-and-butter come from communicating with “alien” societies, psychiatrists who cannot “heal” the psychotic without first communicating with them, and actors who have mastered the art of communicating through an “other” persona. Perhaps if we addressed the question of principles of conduct (a key element in Kant's conception of morality) in terms of such communication skills, the “question of identity” will take care of itself as a corollary!

Domestic Pots and Kettles

We have Truthdig; Dick Cheney has Rush Limbaugh. Susan Cornwell filed a Reuters story on how the Vice President used an appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio program to issue the administration's public response to Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria. As is often the case, the choice of words is the best part of the story:

I think it is, in fact bad behavior on her part. I wish she hadn't done it. Fortunately I think the various parties involved recognize she doesn't speak for the Untied [I assume that this was Ms. Cornwell's typo, rather than Cheney's Freudian slip, although the latter possibility is far more entertaining] States in those circumstances, she doesn't represent the administration.

You would think that, given the number of administrations he has served, that the Vice President would have a better understanding of the concept of separation of powers. Given the current attitudes of both her colleagues in the Congress and her party in general, I would have been surprised if it had ever entered her mind that she might be representing the administration! The fact is that the Congress used its budget to plan and execute a fact-finding mission to the Middle East; and, if the Constitution does not have any explicit language about Congressional fact-finding missions, there is at least a strong body of precedents. Part of the plan was to try to acknowledge that there were more sides to the story than were in the administration's version. In other words this mission was, among other things, a way to deliberately question the credibility of the administration; and, on the basis of both election results and opinion polls, I would say that such questioning speaks for a significant segment of the population of the United States (but perhaps not the Vice President's Untied States)!

This, however, raises a question that you would have thought would have provided a great opportunity for Cheney and Limbaugh. (Doesn't that sound like a great deli offering? I am tempted to run a contest on what should be in it but reluctant to want to judge the entries!) It is all very well and good for the Congress to let its constituency know that it is questioning Executive credibility, but should it be sending that message to other world leaders? Does the Congress have the right to air dirty laundry before the global public? That question is not covered by the Constitution either. Once upon a time we might have been idealistic enough to invoke the normative principles of civil behavior, but any student of the history of American government knows that such an ideal was never more than a myth. (We seem to have enough civility to eschew the kinds of fist fights they have in Taiwan, so perhaps we should just count our blessings!) My own opinion is that, on the global stage, Ms. Pelosi and her colleagues were doing their best to avoid the message of dirty laundry, concentrating instead on the message of separation of powers. In other words Ms. Pelosi was doing exactly what Cheney accused her of doing: She was not speaking for the administration and demonstrating that the Congress had a right to do just that, even when speaking to representatives of other governments.

This brings us to another question of representation in Ms. Cornwell's story:

While in Damascus on Wednesday, Pelosi announced she had told Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that Israel was prepared to negotiate with Syria. That prompted Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office to underline the Jewish state's preconditions for such talks -- including that Syria abandon its "support for terrorist groups."

Cheney, pointing to the Israeli reaction, said it was obvious Olmert had not authorized the message Pelosi delivered.

The good news is that, when Cheney shot this one from his hip, Ms. Pelosi was ready with a response:

Pelosi's spokesman, Brendan Daly, asked to respond to Cheney's criticism, said the speaker accurately relayed the message from Olmert to Assad.

"The tough and serious message the speaker relayed was that, in order for Israel to engage in talks with Syria, the Syrian government must eliminate its links with extremist elements, including Hamas and Hezbollah," Daly said, referring to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, and Lebanon's Hezbollah, which Israel fought in a war last year.

The final question is whether or not the interests of the American public have been served. My guess is that the delegation returned from their trip better informed, just because they took the initiative of bringing more voices into the conversation. The Middle East is still an extremely delicate situation, so it is hard to assess whether or not their effort to further conversation among Middle Eastern parties will have a positive result. However, my own feeling is that they did not do any damage to anything other than Ms. Pelosi's standing with AIPAC (which is clearly not her highest priority)!

Blog Time Strikes Again

This morning's CNET News.com Blogma blog provided another example of the dangers of what yesterday Ellen Goodman called "blog time." The item is short enough to be reproduced in its entirety (without reactions):

A fake ad placed on Craigslist led to the complete trashing of a Tacoma, Wash., home, according to news reports.

The ad invited people to "take everything," and vandals did just that--stripping the rental home of furniture, appliances, light fixtures, even the kitchen sink and hot water heater.

The owner said she hadn't placed the ad, and had recently evicted the tenant. The ad was only online for about an hour and half before it was flagged as fraudulent, and removed, but that was apparently enough time to attract attention.

While many might take this as an opportunity to bash Craigslist, I think it is important to recognize that, at least in this case, Craigslist is only a symptom of the disease that Ms. Goodman analyzed yesterday (making it all the more appropriate that one of her examples concerned medical diagnosis). In some circles detecting such a fraud within 90 minutes might be regarded as a good thing, but not when Internet speed is involved. The only way to deal with this problem is to make scrupulous editing part of the process (as I have argued Wikipedia should do), even if that means that it will take long for a post to appear before all the eyeballs in cyberspace.

Climate Chutzpah

I had really thought of giving this week's chutzpah award to the Iranian government for giving gift bags to the British hostages before releasing them, but I decided that the handling of the United Nations climate report deserved more attention. After all, how often do we see China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States joined together in opposition to the most comprehensive scientific analysis of global warming yet prepared? I realize this may be righteous indignation on my part, but there just seemed to be something particularly egregious about China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia objecting to a conclusion in the executive summary that the poor will suffer the most from global warming. On the other side of the coin, the BBC has been providing some excellent footage on television to support this particular plight of the poor. (United States objections were less of a surprise, since they were entirely consistent with White House policy.) This sort of attitude towards the poor demonstrates the extent to which the United States has global sympathy, if not support, for the sort of callousness it demonstrated in the wake of Katrina (or, more recently, the arrest of Eric Montanez by the Orlando police for serving, in the words of his arrest warrant "30 unidentified persons food from a large pot utilizing a ladle"). The bottom line seems to be that those who are now feasting most from the economic pie also care the least about those who are lucky to pick up the few crumbs that fall from the table. Calling this cruelty may, in the abstractions of philosophy and social theory, may reflect a cultural bias; but, if ridicule is still one of our best weapons, the least we can do is affix the chutzpah label! These four countries can then argue amongst themselves about how to divide up the label, since they appear to have nothing better to do with their time and policy-making.

A World without Reflection

I really appreciate the fact that Truthdig carries Ellen Goodman's columns; but I was particularly impressed with today's piece, "The Benefits of Slow Journalism." Usually I can count on Ms. Goodman to bring my attention to a matter I had not previously considered, but this time she took on a topic that has occupied me for the last several years, the state of the world that the Internet has made (a topic whose significance is now being recognized by other columnists, such as Libby Purves). As always seems to be the case, she did it with a keen sense of perception; and she did it from a pulpit that commands so much more authority than my own meager blogging efforts.

As is often the case on Truthdig, I responded with a comment expressing my own take on these matters. What follows is a somewhat enhanced transcription of what I submitted to Truthdig. The focus of the comment was what I call the how-did-we-get-into-this-mess question, which Neustadt and May analyzed so well in their book, Thinking in Time, about decision-making in times of crisis.

Ms. Goodman's point of departure concerned the problem of inaccuracies in "news" reported through the blogosphere due to the problem of blog time trumping checking time. What made her column most interesting, however, was her recognition of these inaccuracies as a symptom of a much greater problem:

You don’t die from a journalistic mistake. The worst thing you can kill is a reputation. I might not have even noted these errors of speed-blogging (is that redundant?) if I hadn’t been reading Jerome Groopman’s disturbing and thoughtful book of essays on “How Doctors Think.”

It turns out that most mistakes in medicine are not a matter of operating on the wrong leg or leaving a sponge in the stomach. “The majority of errors are due to flaws in physician thinking, not technical mistakes,” writes Groopman. As many as 15 percent of all diagnoses are wrong.

These mistakes in thinking, says Groopman, are mostly due to cognitive shortcuts, what are called “heuristics.” In real life, for example, doctors are likely to judge the case before them by others that come readily to their minds. They are then likely to latch onto a diagnosis, anchor it, and cherry-pick the symptoms that confirm their belief rather than revisiting or expanding the list of possibilities.

Such heuristic thinking is very much a product of the progress artificial intelligence (AI) made in moving from the research laboratory to the "real world." It is an interesting note of history that one of the first "successful" steps in that direction was in the area of medical diagnosis. Now it is important to remember that the AI technology would not have emerged had the researchers not been able to recognize the heuristic element in medical diagnosis and see how that element could then be rendered in software, but the result was the formation of a culture that believed that heuristics were all that you needed. One of the worst parts of that result was the extent to which it reflected back on the practices of the medical community itself. There were, of course, plenty of researchers demonstrating that, in just about any discipline, expertise was not a simple matter of heuristics; but they did not stem the growth of a cottage industry based on translating heuristics into software.

There was another factor that encouraged that growth, though, which was a long-standing preference in the business world for efficiency over effectiveness. The reason was simple: You can always measure efficiency. Evaluating effectiveness requires much more human judgment and often entails considerable disagreement. Software can do wonders for efficiency, but effectiveness will always be a matter of the mind sitting behind the computer terminal. Nevertheless, the world of work has been gulped down and masticated to a pulp by the obsession with efficiency. Health care is now an industry where doctors have to "process" their patients, rather than care for them. Public education has a long history of obsession with efficiency that goes all the way back to the early days of Taylor-style efficiency experts with their stopwatches. Now, thanks to the blogosphere, journalists are as much under the efficiency gun as is the kid who takes your order at McDonald's.

I was once at a trade show at which I heard one of the "knowledge management" gurus talking about the need to "process more knowledge more efficiently." All I could think of was how little this guy knew about knowledge. Ms. Goodman interpreted Groopman's findings with proposition that "the enemy of thinking is speed;" but I would like to refine that conclusion. The point that this guru was missing was that you cannot have knowledge without reflection. RSS can now pour all sorts of sources (even credible and reliable ones) onto your screen at a prodigious rate; but, if you do not reflect on what those sources are asserting, you are no wiser that you would have been had you never seen all that stuff. So, the bottom line is that "the world the Internet has made" is a world in which doctors can no longer reflect on their patients' conditions, teachers can no longer reflect on their students' progress, and journalists can no longer reflect on what they read. Good luck, world!

Knut Shoulda Been a Contender

Stefan Simons' profile of Ségolène Royal in today's SPIEGEL ONLINE lives up to the high quality of extended analysis that I have come to expect from this source. There was, however, one sad problem, which was the sort of thing that could only happen in the medium of the World Wide Web. The reader serious enough to scroll down below the introductory material quickly discovered that the "Photo Gallery" prepared for Ségolène found itself situated to the left (where else?) of an "other stories" link (with photograph) to the extensive coverage (in text, photographs, and video) of Knut, the polar bear cub at the Berlin Zoo. Knut has received a lot of attention, not just from Spiegel, where he has become a symbol of national pride, but also on Reuters and the BBC. I am not sure the American press is paying much attention to him, but I have my own circle of friends here in the Bay Area who want to be notified every time Spiegel comes out with a new Knut dispatch.

My point is that Ségolène is no match for Knut. Check it out. Follow the hyperlink at the top of this post, start going through Simons' piece, and see what happens when you get to the Photo Gallery. What happens to your attention? Do you stick with the text? Do you check out the Ségolène photographs, most (if not all) of which have been staged by political consultants; or do you become so fixated on that one image of "Cute Knut" (as the caption calls him) that you cannot resist clicking through for more? Come to think of it, given that "TSS principle" (which can stand for either tout sauf Ségolène or tout sauf Sarkozy) that Simons discussed in an earlier Spiegel article, Ségolène should probably count herself lucky that Knut is not on the ballot!

Australia Plays the Tweed Card

In all fairness I suppose that current Administration policy is not entirely about “fear, superstition, and pettiness.” If these are like the "weird sisters" in Shakespeare's Macbeth, then the pot they are stirring is a heady brew of arrogance. To be sure, the shift of power in the Legislative branch has attenuated some of that arrogance; but it is far from muted. Indeed, if there were a monument to that arrogance, its theme would probably be the management of Guantanamo, a practice that has now been questioned on just about every conceivable front. Nevertheless, the official position continues to reflect the arrogance of Boss Tweed and his "What're ya gonna do about it?" response when confronted with hard evidence of his corrupt practices.

This morning we learned from Al Jazeera's wire services that two can play that game:

Australia will not stop Guantanamo detainee David Hicks from talking to the media despite a gag order that is part of the plea deal that secured his release, the attorney-general has said.

Philip Ruddock said the government would not enforce the US-imposed gag on Hicks because if he did speak out he would not be breaking Australian law.

Hick's was convicted last week by a US military tribunal last week of providing material support for terrorism.

His US military lawyer, Major Michael Mori, had said his client could be sent back to Guantanamo if he talked to reporters.

But Ruddock said the Australian government would not legally be able to extradite Hicks back to the US if he spoke to the media.

"In Australia, we have a position about freedom of speech," Ruddock told ABC television late on Tuesday.

"I'll leave it to your imagination as to a way in which somebody seeking extradition in relation to a party for breaching a so-called gag order would be able to be delivered up through the judicial processes in Australia."

It is about time that our own Executive branch learns about the receiving end of the sort of language that has been dished out to the rest of the world!

Presence of Malice

Yesterday I responded to an analysis of Ehud Olmert's reaction to the Saudi peacemaking summit by suggesting that it was an act of deliberate malice, rather than the recklessness that is often attributed to him. This morning I read Paul Cummins' Truthdig essay on the sorry state of education in the United States; and, again, I could not help but wonder if this was another instance of deliberate malice. There used to be a Web page (which I can no longer find) of an address that sociology professor Neil Ramsey gave to the Senior Banquet where he taught, Virginia Wesleyan College. What I remember most about this address was the hypothesis he raised that a liberal education can free the mind of “fear, superstition, and pettiness.” Now, at the risk of being pegged for a conspiracy theorist, I would dare to suggest that such an act of freeing the mind is precisely the opposite of what the current Administration wants. Consider each of those items:

• 9/11 has elevated fear to the primary currency in what now passes for discourse.
• "Faith-based reasoning" is nothing more than a postmodern euphemism for "superstition."
• Now that the tables are turning, we are finding more and more pettiness in the language invoked by the White House in the face of questions of accountability and (in the case of the current congressional fact-finding mission to Syria) the examination of policy.

One of the recurring themes in Dilbert is that of the project that, from its inception, has been designed to fail. Has our government decided that education reform is such a project; and, if so, was that decision made out of clumsy recklessness (as we tend to assume) or deliberate malice?

The Loose Cannon that Hits the Desired Target

Christoph Schult has written an interesting opinion piece about Ehud Olmert on today's SPIEGEL ONLINE Web site. He begins with a description of what Mark Lilla would have called "reckless mind syndrome," were Olmert more of an intellectual:

Whenever Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert holds a press conference, his advisors hold their breath. They never know what surprises he has in store for them. Experience has taught them that Olmert likes to make the headlines, even if that means acting brashly. Afterwards, his spokespeople often have difficulties explaining just what got ahold of him.

He then uses this description to provide the context for examining Olmert's reaction to the latest attempt at peacemaking at the summit in Saudi Arabia:

On Sunday, it was time for another surprising announcement. With German Chancellor Angela Merkel by his side, Olmert proposed a "meeting of all Arab states" and Israel. News of his words spread around the world in no time. The impression was that a peace summit as revolutionary as that of 1977 was imminent. Back then, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem and paved the way for the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.

This proposal is the focus of Schult's analysis, and the conclusion is that Olmert's proposal may do more harm than good towards the goal of a general peace in the Middle East:

Olmert's recurrent compliments to the Saudis also threaten to discredit the Arab kingdom as mediator in the Arab world. King Abdullah is already having a tough time selling his peace initiative to radical Arab regimes. Meanwhile, Iran's President Ahamdinejad is taking on the role of Saudi Arabia's regional counterpower. Olmert would be well advised to hold back with his comments about Saudi Arabia's mediating role. Too much praise from Jerusalem could amount to a kiss of death for the patient called "peace process," who has only just awoken from his coma and remains weak.

Schult's logic is fine as far as it goes; but, from a dramatistic perspective, I wish he had given as much attention to the question of motives behind Olmert's actions (and the extent to which those actions may reflect White House motives) as he gave to Ahmadinejad's motives in the geopolitical arena of the Middle East. Once we progress beyond the find points of logic, we have to at least entertain the hypothesis that Olmert wanted to bestow that "kiss of death" on those recent Saudi efforts. At the very least we need to recognize that Olmert represents constituents who assign a far higher priority to Israeli security than they do to that "general peace in the Middle East." I do not know if there is a Hebrew version of "crazy like a fox;" but it is worth considering whether Olmert's recklessness is nothing more than a surface performance intended to conceal deeper and more disconcerting motives.

Well Said and in Fewer Words!

David Fanning's review for the Telegraph of violinist Henning Kraggerud's performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto managed to distill what I have been trying to say about Emanuel Ax' Mozart performance in far fewer words:

Kraggerud plays with a freedom that seems immune to what any teacher, critic or peer musician might think of him. But he has an instinctive good taste that protects him from the dangers of mere egotism and wilfulness.

Another Advocate for Ridicule

The byline said April 1, but I am inclined to believe that Greg Sandoval's "Newsmakers" interview with former pornography star Ron Jeremy (for CNET News.com) was the real thing (even with its headline "Ron Jeremy sticks it to tech sector"). If there has been any virtue in "reality television," it is the way in which it has made us more aware of the nature of reality: enduring over long stretches of time, repetitive, sustained boredom punctuated by occasional flashes of interest. That pretty much captures Jeremy's "voice" in the interview; if, if this was an April Fool's joke, it was a very good parody.

On the other hand, if it was real, then I am glad to report that one of those occasional flashes of interest provided a favorable reflection of one of my currently favorite attitudes, what I have called the virtue of "ridicule as an alternative to indignation." Much of Jeremy's interview involved repetitive bursts of indignation over our prevailing obsessions with technology, particularly Internet technology. However, if Jeremy did not appreciate how ineffective those repetitive bursts were, he may have found a better way with his new gig for Heavy.com. There he will be performing satirical comedy skits, and his primary target will be the technology sector. In introducing the interview, Sandoval wrote, "Some of his funniest material comes when the 54-year-old tweaks the attention-starved crowd at YouTube." Well, it's about time! The more one learns about Jeremy, the more one appreciates how shameless he can be; and perhaps we need someone really shameless to give our technology obsession the ridicule it deserves!

The Inner Twenty-Year-Old

It was all very well and good for Chronicle Music Critic Joshua Kosman to devote almost the entirety of his column to the San Francisco Symphony's performance of Finnish music (coupling the United States premiere of Kalevi Aho's Louhi with the Sibelius first symphony) under a Finnish conductor (Osmo Vänskä); but what are we to make to the final paragraph of the review?

Between the Finns came Mozart, as pianist Emanuel Ax provided a nimble, unfailingly good-natured account of the Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-Flat, K. 482. Ax's playing is precise, beautiful and unobtrusive; it provides unfailing pleasure but defies critical analysis. Better, perhaps, to marvel at its delights and leave it at that.

I suppose this is better than saying, "I've run out of column space, so I really do not have anything to say about Ax or Mozart;" and I cannot fault any of the adjectives that Kosman invoked. (Even "unobtrusive" gets at the fact that all of the Mozart piano concertos are very much dialogs between soloist and orchestra; and Ax was very good about not dominating the dialog.) However, there a few things to add that would do more justice to the performance.

One aspect of any "critical analysis" has to do with the fact that this is a relatively mature work. Mozart was pushing thirty when he wrote it, so his Wunderkind days had long passed. Nevertheless, this piece brought out the show-off kid in him that so aggravated at least the fictitious account of Salieri in Amadeus. I am not talking about the foul-mouthed brat that so fascinated the Amadeus audiences. I am talking about a performer who, from childhood, found the piano keyboard an absolute romp and never tired of the games he could play on it. It was not just that Ax was "nimble" or even "good-natured." It was more that he has now achieved a reputation high enough that he can reflect back on performing that has more to do with fun and less to do with winning competitions or pleasing critics. In other words he could turn the performance over to his inner-twenty-year-old; and he seems to have done this to the pleasure of everyone else in the hall, both in the audience and on the stage.

That level of "critical analysis" would slight the conductor, however; and I think it would be an injustice to portray Vänskä as an expert in Finnish music while disregarding his other skills. One of those skills had to do with the general sound quality of the Symphony. It may have been a consequence of how he prepared the performance of the Sibelius, but he did something that made the Symphony sound like a different orchestra. There was a dry and crisp quality to the timbre that sharply contrasted with the usual lushness of their "big sounds" under Thomas and most of the guest conductors. This served the Sibelius very well by bringing out details that might get buried under all that lushness, but it also worked for the Mozart. Under Vänskä's baton the concerto was not just a conversation but almost (since one cannot ignore the trumpets and timpani) an intimate chat. From that point of departure, Vänskä provided the opportunity for every "voice" in that "chat" to go for its own sound, so to speak. If the effect did not always quite work, that was probably a learning-curve problem. This was not Vänskä's first performance with the Symphony; but he has always been only a guest, which means his preparation time is limited. I am more than a little disappointed that he will not be a guest next season, because he has piqued my curiosity as to where that learning curve could lead.

Beyond the Chutzpah Award

My understanding of the situation in Zimbabwe has come primarily from the half hour of television news I get from the BBC by virtue of an agreement they have with PBS. This has not been an easy job for the BBC, since Mugabe's government has prohibited them from entering the country. So all dispatches are filed from Johannesburg with minimal comment about sources (most likely in the interest of the safety of those sources). The American media have not given this story that much attention. As almost always seems to be the case with news from Africa, it just keeps getting bumped down the priority list by other stories. However, the seriousness of the story was brought home to me when my Chutzpah of the Week Award managed to garner the most interesting comment I have received since starting this blog (not that I have received very many).

The comment came from the Reverend Mufaro Stig Hove, who seems to be making a committed effort to bring the Zimbabwe affair into the blogosphere, however, the media may choose to handle it. He found my own post through a Google Alert (which, hopefully, will not imply that I am going to start "going soft" on Google!). Under the "handle" of The Radical Mindset!, I found fourteen blogs on the subject; and the URL for one of them, "THE ZIM FINAL PUSH" is included in his comment. Like the BBC, he appears to be working out of South Africa (Cape Town in his case). I have no way to estimate the level of risk that the BBC is taking in their activities, but I have a gut feeling that the risks for Reverend Hove are much greater. So far I have only examined the "FINAL PUSH" blog. It is one monster of a Web page; and, with all the security checks that Firefox now performs, it takes forever to load. "Labor of love" is probably not the right turn of phrase; it would be better to say that this is a serious "labor of commitment" (however much that word may have become devalued by "the America way of romance"). When I compare what I am doing with what Reverend Hove is doing, I can only think of Marx' final "Feuerbach Thesis" (number XI):

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.

Yes, my own focus (in both the blogosphere and the "real world") has always been on interpreting; and I shall be the first to admit that this is the safer road to travel. Reverend Hove is more concerned with the road of change because, in his context, that is the necessary choice; and I have to admire him for making it.

For my part I have already tried to explain why I like to issue my Chutzpah of the Week awards. That "safer road" is a crowded place. That means that it can often make for a might chorus of indignation, but one of the factors that makes evil so banal is its capacity for oblivion to shame. In other words it does not matter how loud the chorus is if the ears are deaf. So in my own campaign I have tried to invoke ridicule as an alternative to indignation, and there is no better target for ridicule than brazen acts of chutzpah. Mugabe's he-asked-for-it justification of his beating of Tsvangirai immediately reminded me of one of my favorite "working definitions" of chutzpah: The man who kills both of his parents in cold blood, enters a plea of guilty, and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the ground that he is an orphan. When my own modest acts of ridicule are of any use to Revered Hove's more serious efforts is strictly for Reverend Hove to decide, but at least I can take a bit of comfort in knowing that there are some ways to interpret the world that have a sharp edge to them!

Meanwhile, if we are to go by today's news from Al Jazeera English (another one of the better sources for these matters), Reverend Hove still has a way to go on his road. However, there is at least one judge who (to paraphrase that pornography ruling again) knows brutality when he sees it:

Nine opposition activists due to be charged with attempted murder and illegal weapons possession in Harare all required medical attention for injuries sustained in custody, according to doctors.

One activist collapsed in the courthouse and the judge agreed to adjourn Saturday's hearing and allow them to get medical treatment, officials said.

The detainees were taken to private medical facilities under police guard.

One probably still has to inquire about the nature of both the "private medical facilities" and the police guard; but it least it was good to see a judge who was willing to take the verb "stand" literally in the phrase "stand trial!"