Knowledge Management and Social Software: The Clash of the Over-Inflated Midgets

The discussion over Facebook and the enterprise over at confused of calcutta not only continues but has now moved into the domain of knowledge management. This could be a good thing to the extent that it would provide an opportunity to find something solid for anchoring down the concept of the sociology of knowledge. Unfortunately, I have already argued that, from the enterprise point of view, Facebook is hardly a good place to drop anchor. However, JP Rangaswamy has proposed "three simple examples" of Facebook attributes that purport to serve the objectives of knowledge management:

One, relationships. Facebook has a rich array of relationships, from Friend to Group Member to Network Member and even Cause Supporter, all the way to Event Participant. And they’re all non-hierarchical and nonexclusive. This is very powerful, since it mimics real-life relationships far better than organisation charts and hierarchies. Furthermore, it allows you to “subscribe” to your interests with reasonable precision.

Two, conversations. Facebook allows a wide range of conversation types, from Poke to Send Message to Write On Wall to Chuck Book to Hug to Give a Gift to Dedicate a Song. It also features a number of conversation styles, from text to video (and surely audio cannot be far behind) and a whole plethora of ways to attach stuff and comment on stuff, both bilaterally as well as multilaterally. Again, this mimics organisational real life far more than the straitjackets of email-only deprivation zones.

Three, transactions. Every event in Facebook is a transaction, and every transaction you do in Facebook can be an event. A news feed is nothing more than a transaction ticker. You get status updates on a number of things as well. And notifications. The entire alert process is promising and more flexible than traditional enterprise approaches.

For my part I see this is an opportunity to do what I do best, which is to unpack the text and see whether the stable actually contains a pony or is just filled with the pony's calling cards! This is basically did with the three words in "Customer Relationship Management," revealing that, in the reality of enterprise operations, all three were linguistically impoverished. This provides a useful context, since the first of the above three examples is, again, "relationships."

1. My point is that there is just as much linguistic poverty in the Facebook approach to relationships as there is in CRM. A rich array of labels does not make for a rich array of relationships! Indeed, when you start to tease apart the nature of "real-life relationships" the way, for example, Erving Goffman has done, you quickly discover an amorphous mass that does not yield readily to perceptual categorization. This is not to say that "organization charts and hierarchies" are any closer to "real-life relationships." Rather it is to say that, when the social subtleties of human relationship are at stake, there is little to be gained from arguing over the lesser of two evils!
2. The same goes for conversations, which is another one of Goffman's prime areas of study. As a matter of fact, one collection of his essays is entitled Forms of Talk. This is, by no means, an "easy read;" but I cannot imagine having anything intelligent to say about "knowledge sharing" without first having taken a whack at the first essay in the collection, "Replies and Responses." If nothing else, it is sure to change your thoughts about Google! Once again, it is not a matter of labeling things with type or attaching stuff. It is about multilateral exchanges, but the reader quickly sees that Goffman's take on multilateralism goes way beyond that of Facebook.
3. The reason I can state that last sentence so definitively is that the whole point of "Replies and Responses" is that the events of such talk are not transactions. Goffman weaves a rather elaborate argumentative web to make this point; and I am not going to reproduce it (because I still do not understand it well enough to synopsize it). However, where the argument leads is that Goffman analyzes a conversation in terms of moves (in the metaphor of a chess game, which is basically the operative metaphor behind Wittgenstein's language-game concept); and moves are far more elaborate than the simpler give-and-take foundation of a transaction.

Needless to say, this analysis goes far beyond the limitations of Facebook. Rather, it is a wart-revealing lens that can be applied to examine just about anything out there that claims to be "social software." The moral of the story is that, once again, we should be looking at "real life," rather than at software. Every enterprise is rich with relationships and conversations. Rather than trying to impoverish it with a consumer toy like Facebook, we should be looking for software that recognizes the wealth that is already there, facilitates it, and ultimately enhances it.

IT: Infantile Tenacity?

Yesterday, in a comment on confused of calcutta, I revisited that old joke that IT is one of only two professions that refers to its customers as "users." This morning, while reading Claire Messud's New York Review piece on Andrew O'Hagan's novel, Be Near Me, I remembered another "professional metaphor," which seems to now attract less attention than it did when it was first introduced. I do not know if Robert Townsend invented the metaphor for his book, Up the Organization; but that is where I first encountered it. It is where refers to IT professionals as high priests.

My memory was tweaked because the protagonist of Be Near Me is a Catholic priest. This gave O'Hagan an opportunity to reflect on the life of such a priest in a passage that fascinated me:

One never buys a house or pays school fees. One sleeps in a single bed. One lives like an orphan in a beautiful paternalistic dream. As a priest one may never grow up. In a sense, one lives as an infant before the practical trials of reality.

I have to wonder whether O'Hagan and I share the same reading of that preposition "before." If one reads this in the context of preparation for the priesthood, then "prior to" would probably be the appropriate reading. However, if this is a description of an ordained priest, then "in the face of" would be more suitable; and this is the reading I prefer, because I can then also read it in terms of those "ordained" in the practices of information technology.

What sort of infantilism do I have in mind (if this text is to be more than a screaming rant)? I think the answer can be found at the lower levels of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. These are the levels that have to do with the self-satisfaction of deficiencies, the implication being that, even when the deficiencies are social, satisfaction is very much a self-centered matter that essentially ignores the roles and motives of others in its achievements. Townsend was basically arguing that so many of the critical elements of the real world workplace were being blocked out by the dogmatic objectivity of information technology that the professionals of that technology would ultimately do more harm than good. Much of what he had to say was not only true but subsequently reinforced by the later stages (fads?) of IT development, culminating in the mess that has been made by the combination of today's enterprise systems and their connectivity to the Internet. Meanwhile, as the technologies have extended from life at work to life at home, the infantilism behind those technologies has similarly extended, leading to such phenomena as the self-satisfying "cult of the amateur" and Time's declaration of that infantile "you" as Person of the Year.

There is a further reading of that last sentence quoted from O'Hagan, which, in my argument, shifts attention from the "IT priesthood" to the "flock." To live as an infant in the face of the practical trials of reality is to believe, as an act of faith, if necessary, that someone (the father figure in that "beautiful paternalistic dream") will always be there to take care of those trials. Put another way, the infant lives without any sense of responsibility under the conviction that there will always be a deus ex machina to set things right. This is why so much of the current Presidential campaign seems to be based on appealing to what I have called the "Secular Messianism" of the electorate. Going beyond governance to everyday life, this form of infantilism was also embodied in the Eloi of H. G. Wells' Time Machine.

This leads us to two ways in which we can view today's IT profession. On the one hand they are the priests, the purveyors of that "beautiful paternalistic dream," who promise that all will be satisfied if we simply offer up our obedience without question or resistance. On the other hand they are the Morlocks, the only ones left capable of pulling those strings that satisfy our infantile needs. Then again, if we apply a dialectical synthesis, it may be that the IT professional is a Janus wearing both of these faces, since both priests and Morlocks seem to ask nothing more than that the rest of us wallow in our own infantilism.

Lessons from Bogus Journalism

The latest report from Reuters concerning the authenticity of a news report about steamed buns sold by street vendors in China that were actually made from cardboard may provide some useful insights into the underlying nature of the world of work in China today. Consider the lead for the article:

Chinese state television has begun sacking contract staff after a bogus news report about toxic dumplings that drew international alarm and angered propaganda chiefs, newspapers reported on Monday.

Next, let us move to that this actually means in substance:

Propaganda officials are now seeking tighter control on the mammoth, multi-channel national broadcaster by sacking masses of contract and informal staff, according to Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong paper under mainland control.

A staff member told the paper that after the scandal, the ruling Communist Party's propaganda department and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television had demanded that media "carry out resolute self-examination and self-correction".

"CCTV [China Central Television, which ran the bun story] is following the demand and has begun dismissing employees," the employee said. "Those with ability can stay, those that aren't qualified must all be dismissed."

Reflecting its status as an arm of state, CCTV has a limited number of formal staff positions authorized by the government. But as channels and the chase for ratings and advertising revenue have expanded, the broadcaster has taken on many hundreds of contract and informal staff.

"These irregular staff are huge in number -- about as many as there are formal staff," commented the Yangcheng Evening News, a state-run paper in Guangdong province, which also reported the dismissals.

Let us begin with what appears to be official language about "resolute self-examination and self-correction." This strikes me as a significant reminder that, whatever moves China may be making towards the accumulation of wealth and the exploitation of global opportunities, the language of Communist ideology still provides the bedrock of the culture. However, because words can never be more the signifiers, there remains the question of how sound that bedrock is. On the one hand this language could be a reminder of the sort of punitive measures exacted in the days of Mao, which would make it a not-particularly-veiled threat that those measures still prevail and can be invoked again. On the other hand, to continue the geological metaphor, that threat may be as hollow as bedrock that has had all the fluid (water or oil) sucked out of its pore spaces, sitting there just waiting to collapse into a sinkhole. My point is that, while Mao could be absolutely ruthless in making sure that there was no gulf between word and deed, the contemporary pragmatism of today's Chinese leaders no longer appears to exercise such ruthlessness. Even the imposition of capital punishment as a sentence for negligent oversight may have been more a symbol of threat, rather than a warning that such measures would be the norm for future acts.

Then there is the matter of just how "self-correction" is being administered, getting rid of the contract workers. Like just about every business in the industrialized world, CCTV now depends heavily on contract labor. However, while free market businesses engaged contractors as a cost-cutting measure, CCTV does it in response to that government authority that makes an ad hoc determination of the number and types of full-time staff positions that the business can sustain. Putting this another way, while the Los Angeles Times may have to rely on contract reporters because their owners keep requiring them to cut their staff numbers (presumably to satisfy the needs of shareholders), CCTV has traded the problem of satisfying shareholders for the problem of satisfying government bureaucrats who may or may not care about the quality of their "product."

In other words the "story behind the story" is actually about a growing emergence of a major confrontation between Communist ideology and the Chinese media business, which, on the one hand, is supposed to be a vital propaganda arm for the ideology but, on the other hand, is also trying to think of itself as a business. What are the consequences likely to be? The Reuters story closes with one perspective:

But staff were also skeptical about how deep and lasting the cuts would be. One CCTV worker said many dismissed staff were likely to be re-employed because many programs could not be made without them.

This is that question of the soundness of the bedrock. The world the Internet has made is one that does not support hollow gestures very well because it is so good at exposing them for how hollow they really are. If, indeed, the ideological bedrock is no longer strong, then the Chinese leaders will have to find new ways to exercise authority. In the absence of authority recognized as valid, all of China could turn into another Deadwood; and that will bring consequences that none of us will want to face.

Can Anyone do Anything about the Pathology of Today's Workplace?

In "They're Micromanaging Your Every Move," in the latest issue of The New York Review, Simon Head reviews three books, none of which are particularly new:

1. The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
2. Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, by Barbara Ehrenreich
3. The Culture of the New Capitalism, by Richard Sennett

It is only at the end of his article that Head looks to the future, rather than reminding us of just how pathological the present is and how it was that the past brought us into this mess. Nevertheless, Sennett's book, based on lectures he gave at Yale in 2004, is probably still valuable for its analysis of the implications and consequences of the mess; and he may also have contributed some fresh weapons for taking on some of the more recent claptrap being promoted by IT evangelists. By invoking the concept of "culture," Sennett is justifying an argument that has to do with a major shift in worldviews and values. Head recognizes this by capturing that shift in a single sentence:

The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

While Sennett does not invoke the adjective "Agile" (capitalized by its evangelists to reflect a development methodology, a business strategy, and, consistent with Sennett's "culture" concept, a mindset), he describes contemporary workplaces as scenes in which Agility trumps all else:

As we have seen, in the workplace [changes based on Agility] produce social deficits of loyalty and informal trust, they erode the value of accumulated experience. To which we should now add the hollowing out of ability.

Indeed, it is that erosion of the value of accumulated experience that lies at the horror story of Ehrenreich's book, a truly disconcerting chronicle of the inability of a successful journalist to land a job in public relations, even with the assistance of "career coaches."

Head's concluding assessment of the future is framed in terms of what a Democratic candidate for President might do to get us out of this mess:

Compared with Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards are already concentrating more heavily on the growing inequality of American society, the squeeze on middle- and lower-income Americans, and how to reverse these trends. But all three are having a hard time facing up to how the unfairness and inequality they all claim to deplore has been caused by the relentless growth of corporate power.

This is worth saying; but, once again, it is nothing new. The message was delivered far more dramatistically in John Kirby's documentary, based on a text by Lewis Lapham, The American Ruling Class. The punch line of this film is a motto that says it all: "Why change City Hall when you can buy it?" It is hard to imagine any candidate for President (even one not affiliated with either of the major political parties) achieving the office without ultimately selling out to that corporate power that lies at the heart of our own "ruling class." Furthermore, since the power to rule now depends to such a great extent on the very IT that the evangelists keep promoting, the bottom line is that the world the Internet has made is one in which we have painted ourselves into a corner and the paint is now closing in on us through its own devices!

When (and Where) did Music Move from Background to Foreground?

Yesterday I described Mozart's "Haffner" serenade as "occasional music." This is a slightly more dignified phrase than "background music;" but the two phrases have roughly the same connotation. This particular composition was written for a wedding; and in eighteenth-century Austria one did not go to weddings to listen to music. Presumably, then, as now, the primary function at a wedding was social talk situated in a context of food (probably, but hardly definitely, better in a posh wedding in 1776 Salzburg that it would be today), fashion, and some form of music tasteful enough to fill any embarrassing silences but not so intrusive as to interrupt conversation. Tafelmusik (which carries both the denotation and connotation of "dinner music") served a similar function. The fact that Mozart would put out a "product" (which is basically how it would be viewed by its "consumers," Sigmund Haffner being very much such a consumer) that deserved attentive listening was irrelevant, if not disruptive to the social occasion.

The above reflection is a product of my just having read Darryl Pinckney's review of Gabriel Banat's new biography of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. I suspect that many of my contemporaries, like myself, discovered Saint-Georges through the good graces of the Musical Heritage Society (MHS), which used to sell "reprints" of European recordings from publishers such as Erato. MHS had a series called "Of Castles and Cathedrals," each record of which hypothesized a concert that would be performed at a particular castle or cathedral. The first of the series was an imagined concert for Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon; and the first side coupled one of Saint-Georges symphonies concertantes with a duo by his teacher, François Gossec. It was from the liner notes that I learned that Saint-Georges was a mulatto from Guadeloupe, a fact that could first be summoned to raise eyebrows at a concert and later receive more serious attention in the study of Black History. Pinckney's review, however, addressed an attribute of that concert (real or imagined) that I had not previously considered:

In the early 1770s, a new type of concert emerged in large court societies. The chatter of the salon quieted down and people began to listen more attentively, or seem to, a reflection of a fashion for seriousness and marking a display of one's elevated sensibility.

Pinckney does not discuss whether this "new type of concert emerged" locally in France or began to crop up in court societies across Europe. He only writes about France because that was the site of most of Saint-Georges' musical activities. However, given the impressions we get about the Archbishop of Salzburg from accounts of Mozart's life, it is not hard to imagine that the trend had not yet "taken" in the Salzburg of 1776; so Mozart most likely only encountered it when he moved to Vienna and the court of Marie Antoinette's relatives!

"Bon Voyage" to the San Francisco Symphony!

One of the advantages of being invited to "Bloggers' Night" at the San Francisco Symphony was the opportunity to learn about the European tour that the Symphony will be making beginning at the end of August. I was particularly interested in the performances at the Edinburgh Festival and the BBC Proms, because I can now anticipate reading reviews of them through my RSS feed for the Telegraph (and perhaps hearing at least one of the Proms concerts on the BBC World Service). Today's San Francisco Chronicle further tweaked my interest with an advertisement for a "Bon Voyage" concert at Davies on August 23. Here is the program with some extra information about the soloist (omitted in the ad but culled from the Symphony press release) and which works will be performed that the two venues that interest me the most:

John Adams Short Ride on a Fast Machine (Edinburgh, August 29)

Charles Ives Symphony No. 3 (Proms, September 1)

Richard Strauss Final Scene from Salome (Deborah Voigt, soprano; Edinburgh, August 30; Proms, September 1)

Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 (Proms, September 1)

So basically the San Francisco audience gets to hear the September 1 Proms concert with the Adams thrown in for good measure. I was also pleased to note that the Symphony will be performing a second Proms concert, consisting entirely of the Mahler seventh symphony. This was of particular interest, not only because Michael Tilson Thomas has done so much to build an audience for Mahler here but also because he seems to be doing the same in London with his performances with the London Symphony Orchestra. My guess is that the Telegraph will have a lot to write about, and I look forward to reading all of it!

You Can't Deny the Social World!

I continue to be amazed at the ramparts erected by denizens of the objective world in their efforts to deny the existence of the social world! Most recently I have been following the confused of calcutta discussion on whether or not companies should ban their employees from visiting Facebook, at least at work. A comment from alexis expressed amazement that "a mutual friend at a Tier1 Bank told me it was banned on the basis of being a ‘Dating Site’." Of course Facebook is a dating site; and, as those of us who have studied the phenomena know, dating in virtual worlds can get just as hot and heavy as it does in the physical world! (Is there any difference between "getting it on" in the world of plain text electronic mail and engaging in phone sex?) However, over in that physical world, bars are dating sites also. Is there anyone out there in the world of enterprise workers who has not conducted business in a bar at one time or another? The problem with virtual worlds is that we get so wrapped up in all the evangelical jargon about them that we forget about some of the simple realities of the physical world!

It gets better. Stick with the fact that a particular virtual environment is primarily a dating site. Can any enterprise worker claim to have worked for an organization that never had even the slightest brush with sexual harassment? Like it or not, the office is a dating site, too; and, until we finally invent a realistic approximation to Huxley's soma to regulate the libido, it is going to stay that way!

This brings me to that oft-repeated positivist dream of enriching "data with real semantics," that old Philosophers' Stone that will solve all the problems of knowledge management. Inveterate Wittgensteinian that I am, I believe that the only "real semantics" reside in how we use those data, whether they are texts, records in a database, or cells in a spreadsheet. The corollary is, as we all know, that, as our situation changes, we use those texts, records, and spreadsheets in different ways. That applies to workplace talk as well as everything else; and anyone with an ounce of literary sensibility can recognize when seemingly objective "work talk" is also sending out "mating dance" signals! (In other words the multiple uses of text and be simultaneous!)

Those who react to these plain truths in horror remind me of those who want to achieve zero-level probability of a terrorist attack in their community. This is an unrealistic goal. The less hysterical policymakers in "homeland security" have long argued that one should strive for a robust environment, capable of quick recovery from catastrophe (whether caused by terrorists or forces of nature). This is still a tall order, but it is at least within the realm of possibility! The conduct of business, whether in physical or virtual worlds, should be similarly robust.

Personally, I just try to avoid talking too much in either virtual worlds or bars. This is not because of any puritan streak. I just bear in mind that wherever I am talking, my texts can have consequences. So I prefer to generate texts in settings where I can review them (as I plan to do with this comment after I complete it)!

Mozart at Twenty

For all of my remarks last week about the virtues of revisiting music I had heard earlier this season at Davies, the high point for me at the second Midsummer Mozart Festival was not a second hearing of the "Coronation" mass but a first "live" hearing of the K. 250 "Haffner" serenade. This was probably due, at least in part, with my fascination with the "inner-twenty-year-old" on much of Mozart's music, because it turns out that Mozart was a twenty-year-old when he wrote this particular serenade! While this was "occasional music" for the wedding of the daughter of a wealthy banker, merchant and burgomaster (Sigmund Haffner, whose name also surfaces in the K. 385 symphony), ostensibly a solemn affair with all its trappings of wealth and power, the eight movements of this work all present Mozart the "show-off kid" in the best possible light. There are any number of unpredictable twists and turns of composition that are more often associated with Haydn's ingenuity and wit; and they are matched by utterly splendid use of orchestral resources, made all the more evident by the reduced size of the Midsummer Mozart ensemble.

Then there is the violin. By way of context, we should consider a passage from Dyneley Hussey's Lives of the Great Composers (included in Louis Biancolli's Mozart Handbook) about this period in Mozart's life:

On his return to Salzburg [in 1775], Leopold [his father] set him to work harder than ever at violin-playing. His father (no mean judge) was of the opinion that, if he would do himself justice, he would be 'the first violinist in Europe.' The results of his application are embodied in the five violin concertos, all written at this time. But although he worked at the instrument to please his father, Wolfgang had no great love for it, and turned his attention to the newly invented pianoforte as soon as he cut his apron-strings.

If Mozart, indeed, "had no great love for" the violin, one can hardly tell it from the attention to gives to the solo violin voice in the "Haffner" serenade. As was the case for Laura Griffiths in last week's performance of the K. 251 divertimento, concertmaster Robin Hansen had all the right skills for the double-duty of responsibilities to both the ensemble and her own solo voice. Indeed, given that the concert was dedicated to the memory of Beverly Sills, Hansen's performance of the second movement andante elicited a foretaste of some of Mozart's best writing for the soprano voice.

That foretaste was satisfied after the intermission when Elspeth Franks sang three of those composition, all of which are seldom performed. Two of them were written for the soprano Louise Villeneuve, who wanted them inserted into a performance she gave of Il burbero di buon core, by Martín y Soler; and they both demonstrate how Mozart could bring the sublime to bear in the midst of even the most ridiculous dramatic situation. Franks' voice brought just the right subtlety to this sublimity and fit will in the relatively intimate setting of Herbst Theatre. Then, as an encore, Franks and conductor George Cleve included a performance of "Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben" from the first act of the Singspiel Zaide (an aria Cleve had conducted for Sills at a performance in San Jose). This was less interesting musically, but the emotional context was what mattered.

Finally, that "intimate setting" through a new light on the "revisited" offering, the "Coronation Mass." Even though Metzmacher had reduced his resources in the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus, he was still faced with the problem of providing a sound for the space of Davies. Cleve could achieve a better "fit" with the resources of the Cantabile Chorale and soloists Ruthann Lovetang, Sanford Dole, and David Miller joining Franks. Yes, there is certainly a "grand" sound to this work; but grandeur need not imply massive volume. Also, since most of the solo voices are singing together, there is little attention to "grand arias" here. The result was just the right match of resources to music, bringing this year's Midsummer Mozart Festival to a conclusion that honored the composer's work in the best possible ways.

A YouTube Advantage

It appears that I may have been took quick to criticize the CNN "YouTube Debate" as being little more than a desperate attempt from CNN to draw eyeballs back to their channel. Now that CNN is planning a second such debate for Republican candidates, scheduled for September 17 in the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg, we are discovering, from sources such as the Pensito Review blog, that Republican candidates are running scared from the prospect of an event similar to the one in which the Democrats participated. It may be that, in their overall value system, the Republicans are discovering that fear of the general public may be more important than the fear of God. Pensito Review framed the situation as follows:

After pulling a party-line no-show at the recent National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) convention, aka, THE event for Latino movers and shakers, they are now discovering a rash of scheduling conflicts at the prospect of facing the chilling YouTube questioners in debate.

According to Stephanie Garry, Staff Writer for the St. Petersburg Times, Rudy Giuliani is already claiming that "scheduling issues" may prevent his participating. More interesting is the Pensito Review account of Mitt Romney:

Mitt Romney — who recently faced derision and questions about his common sense for strapping his dog in its carrier to the top of his car during a 12-hour drive, causing the animal to defecate over his windshield — came right out and said the format is beneath his dignity.

“I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman,” Romney told the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader this week.

Before making any further comments about his dignity, Romney would do well to read that passage about "the knight who swore on his honor" in Shakespeare's As You Like It! Apparently only two Republicans have confirmed that they will participate, John McCain (whose campaign is in such deep yogurt that he is willing to try anything but who also may have learned from the "battle experience" of his "Google interview") and Ron Paul (who presumably saw the way in the which Democratic debate provided good opportunities for Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel, none of whom have particularly good numbers).

Distortions of Retold Stories

Having invested a lot of my personal research time in trying to understand the nature of organizational memory and the proper role that technology can play in maintaining such memories, I have become very occupied with the extent to which stories provide a better model of memories than, for example, data repositories do. Recall my previous citation of Jerome Bruner, who, in his Acts of Meaning book, credits Jean Mandler with the observation "that what does not get structured narratively suffers loss in memory." However, when we shift focus from the individual (psychological) level to the social level of organizations, we encounter the corollary that memory is maintained not only through narrative structure but through the capacity of members of the organization to retell stories in social settings, whether they involve work or leisure. One of the best demonstrations of this corollary in an organizational setting is probably the Eureka system that supports the entire global network of repair technicians. The underlying idea for this system grew out of observations from anthropological field work concerning how these technicians exchanged "war stories" at the end of the working day. Technology provided a means by which stories that previously had only been shared by technicians working in (for example) Denver could now be shared with technicians around the world.

Nevertheless, there were two consequences to this approach that were probably not anticipated:

1. Once a story has been "told" into a database, the communicative action of retelling in has been subverted by the "hard record" now in the database.

2. The retold version of a story is seldom the same as the story as the "re-teller" heard it.

Neither of these consequences has really been assessed since Eureka was fully launched as part of service operations. Each has is own impact and deserves attention.

The significance of the first has as much to do with general "Internet culture" as with the organizational memory of Xerox repair technicians, because it involves the question of whether or not our general relation to the Internet is gradually changing us from storytellers to story readers, thus reflecting back on the proposition analyzed by Walter Benjamin as to whether or not man had lost his capacity to tell stories. There is, of course, the Wikipedia philosophy that this capacity can only flourish in a setting in which everyone can comment on what everyone else is writing; but I continue to argue that a disregard of the social context in which Wikipedia is embedded and a staunch rejection of the role that governance can play in regulating that context have done the capacity to tell stories more harm than good, simply because even the most astute reader will have trouble distinguishing the informative narrative from the "disinformative tall tale." My guess is that our elevation to the status of Time's "Person of the Year" has encouraged our willingness to be participating storytellers; but the Web 2.0 setting that Time celebrated has taken away our active and involved audience, which may, in the long run, erode both the quality of our stories than the interest that anyone (probably including ourselves) may have in them. In other words, to invoke Andrew Keen's language, the capacity to tell stories may get washed away in the flood brought on by the "cult of the amateur."

This then moves to the question of what happens to the "signal" when a story is retold. I can illustrate this with an example. Yesterday I was writing about the filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer. I am pretty sure that my first exposure to his work was his Passion of Joan of Arc. This was back in my student days, and there was a lot of excitement about Dreyer having cast Antonin Artaud in this film. However, there was also a story circulating about Maria Falconetti, the actress Dreyer had cast as Joan. The story was that, prior to shooting the final scene in which Joan is burned at the stake, Dreyer found a remote location, tied Falconetti to a stake he had driven into the ground, and left her there (alone) overnight. This was supposedly the factor behind her anguished look when the cameras started rolling.

This all sounded a little bit absurd. However, there were other stories about Dreyer's eccentricity; and, if nothing else, this was a good story. It was only when I saw a documentary about Dreyer that I learned the origin of this story. It turned out that a more logical version of this tale had nothing at all to do with The Passion of Joan of Arc. Rather, it was a story about Day of Wrath, which begins with a witch-burning scene. In this scene the woman being executed was not tied to a stake but to a flat wooden frame. After the fire was burning, the frame was propped up, perpendicular to the ground, and tipped over; so the victim would fall directly into the flames. The day this scene was shot, much of the morning went into tying the actress playing this woman to the frame that had been built. Once she was in place, someone shouted, "Lunch break!" Everyone went off to eat (including Dreyer); and she was left lying on the ground, tied down to her frame. The teller of this story suggested that Dreyer had done this intentionally to make sure that the actress would be suitably hysterical during the filming. Anyone who has seen the film knows that this effect was achieved; and, since it is a somewhat more "controlled" approach to "method," it is at least a bit more believable than the Falconetti story. However, since more people seem to have seen the Joan of Arc film, the story "crossed over" to "satisfy a larger audience."

A similar case of story-distortion came up in the early years of my music education. I had encountered a story that Brahms had appropriated Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" theme in the final movement of his own first symphony; and, when someone walked up to him on the street and confronted Brahms about this, Brahms reply was that any fool could recognize the appropriation. Well, here I was, owning copies of scores for both symphonies, and I could not, for the life of me, figure out where this appropriation was supposed to be. Eventually, I was able to straighten things out by reading Arnold Schoenberg's "Brahms the Progressive" essay. The story was not about Brahms' first symphony but about his first piano sonata, and the music appropriated from Beethoven was not from the ninth symphony but from the "Hammerklavier" piano sonata. The two sonatas definitely share the same opening gesture, just justifying Brahms' rejoinder, "Das bemerkt ja schon jeder Esel."

This now strikes me as a variation of a classic Ernie Kovacs gag: The Great Wall of China is not great, it is not a wall, and it is not even in China; it is in New York, where it is called the Triborough Bridge!

When we confront distortions like this, we have to ask what really matters in the story. The Dreyer story was more about the man's personality, which is ultimately more important that specific details about films and actresses. (On the other hand IMDB confirms that Falconetti never made another film after Joan of Arc, and the Dreyer documentary suggests that the experience of working with Dreyer had something to do with this.) On the other hand we count on editorial skills to make sure that the distorted version of the story does not show up in a textbook on film history (and Wikipedia assumes that the "wisdom of the crowd" will keep it out of any of their related entries). Thus, while I am not quite as pessimistic as Benjamin, I believe that a story only becomes a good story when it can survive "performance before a critical audience," which is precisely what we seem to be losing with the rise of "Web 2.0 culture;" so, if we lose our capacity for telling good stories, we may also gradually lose the communal memory through which we make sense of the world around us. In other words we may accumulate a critical symptom of culture death.

Moving a Corporate Scam to the Public Sector

This week's act of chutzpah falls under the category of making an outrageous decision in opposition to strong contrary evidence. In this case the evidence concerns trading in carbon emissions, also know as carbon credits and carbon offsets. The evidence that this was more of a scheme to protect polluting industries than a serious step towards cleaning up a polluted atmosphere has been accumulating for some time, but the hardest data were reported by the BBC last month with only the weakest of refutations. In the face of this evidence, the outrageous decision has come from our Forest Service, according to Claudia Lauer, Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times:

For years, companies have been allowed to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing "carbon offsets" — vouchers for investment in alternative energy sources, tree-planting and other projects that can mitigate global warming.

Now the idea is spreading to individuals, with the Forest Service's announcement Wednesday that it will be the first federal agency to offer personal carbon offsets through an initiative called the Carbon Capital Fund.

"We came up with the idea because everyone is looking at what they can do in terms of climate change," said Bill Possiel, president of the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit partner of the Forest Service. "The money goes to a restricted fund for projects on national forests."

Trees and forests are "carbon sinks," Possiel said, because they draw carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming — out of the atmosphere and store it for long periods of time.

The Forest Service, an agency within the Agriculture Department, estimates that the 155 forests it oversees absorb 10% to 15% of the nation's carbon emissions and that planting through the new initiative will increase that amount.

Under the program, individuals can use a "carbon calculator" at http://www.carboncapitalfund.org to figure out the size of their carbon footprint. Then, they can buy offsets at $6 per metric ton of carbon dioxide. An average family of four is responsible for 19 to 30 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, so the offsets would cost $114 to $180.

"People have an opportunity to contribute to the health, diversity and productivity of the nation's forests not only by countering climate change, but also by replanting forests for the benefit of future generations," Forest Service chief Gail Kimbell said in announcing the initiative.

As to any contrary evidence, Possiel claims it is refuted by the "ground truth" of the computer models they are using. Furthermore, verifications based on those models will be managed by an unnamed third party. All in all the operative noun for all this still appears to be "scheme;" so the Chutzpah of the Week award goes to the Forest Service for sending out a dog that could never hunt in the first place.

Information Content in Grieg

John Cage once said that, in his youth he had decided he would dedicate his life to learning and performing the piano music of Edvard Grieg; and we also get suggestions that he made this decision because he found the music of Beethoven too challenging. My own experiences with Grieg were heavily influenced by the (probably familiar) high school experience when any piano student with an ounce of either talent or ambition would take a crack at the first movement of the piano concerto. This saturated me with so many mediocre performances that I quickly became sick of the damned thing (except in the treatment given by the Hoffnung Festival Orchestra); and that feeling percolated into the rest of the Grieg repertoire.

Nevertheless, when I was living in Santa Barbara a little less than thirty years ago, I had this absolutely wonderful piano teacher, who believed that, since I was not out to be a professional pianist, I should take the time to explore just about anything the repertoire had to offer, ranging from the downright impossible (such as the fourth movement of Ives' first piano sonata) to the (deceptively?) simplistic (such as Mompou's "Charmes").

Actually, I think she gave me the Ives to see how I would approach it, since she was trying to prepare it herself at the same time. Looking back on my copy, I see that I meticulously marked out all the "1 & 2 &" beats on the first two pages, making particular note when these fell between the beats of the triplets, quintuplets, and septuplets in the notation. I seem to have done this only on the first two pages. I think this is because my first "assignment" was limited to those pages. However, after concentrating on those pages, I began to develop a feel for the rhythms and did not have to mark those "training wheels" on the remaining pages.

It was with this attitude of exploration that I found sheet music for the first three sets of Grieg Lyric Pieces at a friend's used book store and decided to buy them (in spite of the somewhat disparaging look on my friend's face). (This was the same friend who had taken the late Steven De Groote to task for including the Liszt "Dante" sonata on the program for a recital he gave in Santa Barbara, as if Liszt was just too vulgar to receive serious attention.) Like much of the music I purchased at that time, it then just sat in a pile, waiting for the "right time" when I would give it some attention.

I cannot remember when I decided to look at the first set (Opus 12 from 1867). I remember that it was more challenging than Mompou, but it also had a tendency to be tediously repetitious. Nevertheless, I was amused that the "Watchman's Song" had been inspired by Macbeth, particularly since the mood was so much more sober than the character it was supposed to invoke. This was my first clue that there was probably more to this music than what I was reading on the surface.

Ten years later I was living in Los Angeles, taking piano lessons from a promising young composer, who decided to put me on the "Berceuse" movement at the beginning of the second set (Opus 38, 1884). The two of us never communicated very well (which is probably why, to this day, I do not think very much of his work, which puts me at odds with much of the listening public for "serious" music); so I did not make very much further progress with Grieg. I do not think I returned to that second set until I had also returned from Singapore (now about ten years ago) and was no longer taking lessons, just using my time on my own as best as I could. By this time I think I had acquired the full CD set of Grieg's piano music, released by BIS with pianist Eva Knardahl. I was not sure what to make of Knardahl, beyond her achieving the ambition that Cage had set for himself and never fulfilled; but, if nothing else, she made me aware that the Lyric Pieces were embedded in a cultural context that I did not understand very well. I was thus willing to admit that I had not really "gotten" either of the first two sets and that I was not sure what it would take to "get" them.

What probably turned the trick for me was the decision of the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel to run a "focus series" on the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer, which included a documentary about the man made by Torben Skjødt Jensen in 1995. I had known about both his Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath from my student days but had never given very much thought to his Danish nationality and the impact it had on his talents as both writer and director. Nevertheless, I consumed the entire TCM series voraciously, thinking little about it until I decided to return to Grieg a couple of months ago and take on the last of the Lyric Pieces sets I had in sheet music.

This time I was more interested in getting beyond the simple repetitions; but what really turned me around was the "Erotic Piece," which is the fifth composition in that third set (Opus 43, 1886). My immediate impression was that this was not particularly erotic; but then, with an impact not that different from that of Proust's madeleine, my memory flashed back to Dreyer's Gertrud and I realized that this was an eroticism that had more to do with sexual frustration than with consummation. This, in turn, led me to approach the other pieces in the set as growing from a soil rich with sadness, however upbeat the surface structure may have been. From this vantage point I could listen to Knardahl with "fresh ears," more aware of the ways in which those seemingly tedious repetitious were actually fraught with emotional intensity.

This throws a new light on my recent attempt to home in on the "right" way to invoke information theory in the study of music. If we just look at the notes in the Lyric Pieces compositions, we find a relatively low level of information content, by virtue of all the repetition. However, as I have tried to argue for some time, information content resides only partially in the notes; one must also take the performance of those notes into account. Because Knardahl was so good at finding the right ways to play the repeated passages without having them sound "repetitious," she was intuitively raising the information content of the listening experience to a very high level, obliging us to (almost literally) hang on every note summoned from her keyboard. From a point of view of historical irony, it is interesting to note that Cage eventually moved to an aesthetic in which notation could be almost incidental to the acts of performance.

Now my challenge is on the other foot, so to speak. My guess is that my technique will never be up to conveying the subtleties through which Grieg really "works;" but I have finally come to a point where I am no longer dismissive of the man's compositions. At that point I have also decided to trade in my sheet music for the Dover publication of all of the sets of Lyric Pieces, because I expect them to occupy me for several years to come!

The Naked Violin

Having written about two members of the wind section of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra (Rufus Olivier and Laura Griffiths) being featured in the first Midsummer Mozart Festival concert, I feel a need to give similar attention of Kay Stern, Concertmaster of the Opera Orchestra. This afternoon Ms. Stern gave the "Musical Lunch Break" concert at Saint Patrick's Church, accompanied by pianist Joan Nagano. The program consisted entirely of Beethoven's "Kreutzer" sonata (Opus 47, Number 9, in A major for the more musicologically inclined). Ms. Stern introduced the performance with the observation that Kreutzer was best known for his exercises for violinists and found the Beethoven sonata too hard to play. She then launched into a delightful demonstration of how much the skill of violinists has changed for the better over time.

I have had many influences in my life that stress the importance of first impressions, whether it is the very first sentence of a text (literary or otherwise), the opening gesture of a musical composition (of any genre), or the first gesture of a soloist in an accompanied work. By the time we are in the age of the classical concerto, the last two are seldom the same; but the sonata tradition usually has both soloist and accompanist participating in the opening gesture, as was the case in most baroque sonatas. The unaccompanied soloist, however, was another matter. That is exactly how the "Kreutzer" begins, with a soloist honoring the semantics of that label by being truly alone. (Beethoven would invoke the same technique, with equally dramatic effect, at the beginning of his fourth piano concerto.) The result is a sonata that demands not only technical skill and a confident sense of performance rhetoric but a full measure of intestinal fortitude. The listener is about to embark on a voyage of about forty minutes, the heart of which reveals Beethoven in one of his best elements, weaving elaborate variations around a relatively simple theme; and the first step in that voyage is the critical one. I am therefore happy to report that Ms. Stern had it all: solid technique, persuasive rhetoric, and, most importantly, opening with a stance of self-conviction that qualified her as our guide for the entire voyage.

This is not to say that the opening gesture is all that mattered in this performance. This sonata is a syntactic wonder, as Beethoven explores not only new ways of approaching what is basically a call-and-response relationship between soloist and accompanist but also the weaving together of two lines of counterpoint, invoking more of a sense of a duet for sopranos than an instrumental sonata. There are also the dynamic levels that shift abruptly, never keeping the metaphor of the ground beneath your feet particularly steady as you are guided forward. This sonata may be the closest one comes to a drama without the benefits of either text or the imagined plot line of a tone poem (which may make it one of Schoenberg's inspirations when he was exploring similar dramatic qualities in his first string quartet). Both Ms. Stern and Ms. Nagano seemed to have the right intuitions for how to bring dramatic "voices" to their instruments that did justice to such a point of view.

If we are inclined to talk about what we have heard at the end of a concert (as I hope most of us are), the conversation inevitably comes to the what-did-you-think or how-did-you-like-it question. If the music in question is totally new (which is often in the case of my own tastes), I have come to the realization that the best thing I can say in response is, "I don't know, but I would really like to hear it again." We do not have to say this about works we think we know; but, for such works, the best performances are the ones that remind us that we do not know as much as we thought. Today's "Kreutzer" performance left me hungry to hear it performed again; and I think that may be the highest praise when one is talking about such a familiar composition.

Blogging at the Symphony

Last week I neglected to mention that San Francisco Symphony conductor James Gaffigan's "intermission chat with a community of local bloggers who had assembled at Davies" was made possible by the Communications Department of the Symphony, which had declared that concert to be "Bloggers' Night." Twenty pairs of prime orchestra seats were set aside for those "local bloggers," who were also given access to the Press Room (now endowed with WiFi connectivity). I thus have this kind of forward-looking thinking from the Symphony to thank for giving me the opportunity to write my two recent posts about Rachmaninoff and Richard Strauss. For those interested in the general impact of the event on those local bloggers, Louisa Spier, the Public Relations Associate who coordinated the whole affair, has set up a del.icio.us page (actually three pages), on which she has compiled all the resulting posts. As might be expected, the content ran the gamut from the sort of stuff that, a few months ago, prompted Andrew Keen's "Blogs are boring" rant to some keen perceptions from serious instrumentalists, one of whom was well experienced with the oboe part for the Strauss "Don Juan." Having now visited all of the links on Ms. Spier's pages, I have to say that the impression that pleased me most was the discovery that listening to a performance in Davies is a significantly different matter from listening to a CD or DVD, no matter how good the system may be. At its best, the recording process can only capture a single event, which can never provide a fair representation of the music being performed; and, because recording technology is still far from capturing everything in that event, collecting several recordings of the same composition does not improve the representation very much. There is also, as I mentioned in my Rachmaninoff post, the problem that most of those recordings are the result of "manufactured production" in a controlled studio setting, which really has nothing to do with the true nature of musical performance. So the bottom line is that Ms. Spier has done a great service to the San Francisco Symphony (for cultivating awareness); and some of the local bloggers were quite good about letting their awareness be cultivated!

The "YouTube Debate"

I'm surprised that no one has yet asked the most important question about last night's debate on CNN: Did CNN ratings improve as a result of their incorporating "grass roots" questions submitted through YouTube? I know that is a cynical assessment; but, on the basis of yesterday's post, I strongly suspect that this is the only question that matters to the CNN bean counters. Meanwhile, for those who are interested in whether or not anything of substance occurred, I found John Nichols' blog post for The Notion to be one of the better summaries this morning. He did a good job of writing about voices that might not otherwise have been heard and the absence of other voices (such as Wolf Blitzer) who tended to provide more noise than signal. Nichols used the title of his post to identify those voices that he felt most deserved recognition: Bill Richardson (for the only intelligent comments about Darfur), Dennis Kucinich (for departing from everyone else by speaking in favor of gay marriage), and Mike Gravel (for trying to cut through much of the bull left on the stage by the other participants). Nevertheless, Nichols himself seems to agree with Gravel that any significant change is unlikely, no matter how much the surface trappings of political discourse may change to accommodate the Internet age.

Semiotic Ignorance

Once again I see that JP Rangaswami, over at confused of calcutta, is waxing poetic over the Cluetrain motto that "markets are conversations. This time has argument is motivated by the Bengal Renaissance, which brought about a veritable explosion in creative writing. ("Between 1818 and 1867 there were some 220 different periodicals published in Calcutta, mainly in Bengali, freely discussing politics, culture and spirituality.") This has led to an interesting exchange of comments over whether or not the virtual conversations enabled by the Internet are raising or lowering "the social intelligence of our species." I have to react to this with an overwhelming need to vent, because, while I approve of debates that take place through the comments submitted to a blog post, I feel strongly that exchanges impeded by tunnel vision hardly count as debates.

Let me try to provide some context for my aggravation. On March 1, 2006 I was invited to give a seminar talk at the IBM Almaden Research Laboratory. This was at a time when the IBM effort in "services science" was charging forward with great vigor; so I saw this as an opportunity to exercise some sound argumentation on the basis of a contentious position. That position was that interpretation was a critical skill in providing effective service. There was nothing new about this, since Karl Weick had been saying the same thing for several decades; but I then argued that the capacity of a service provider for interpretation was impeded by a lack of understanding in five fundamental disciplines. Those disciplines (which will not be found in the department names of any university catalog) were phenomenology, semiotics, hermeneutics, narratology, and emotive valuation. This is my lengthy (Wagnerian?) prelude to the assertion that the confused of calcutta discussion about "the social intelligence of our species" is being impeded by a failure to grasp one of the most fundamental principles of semiotics.

That principle is the idea that any sign has a dual nature, whose two aspects are the signifier and the signified. Everything that was said about conversations in the confused of calcutta discussion, whether it involved printed matter in Bengal or an enumeration of the many things we see on our computer screens, was about signifiers. Those signifiers are the artifacts without which conversation would be impossible, but the conversation itself resides entirely under the aspect of the signified. Each of us relies on our capacities for interpretation to make sure that we are conversing about signifieds, rather than quibbling over signifiers.

This is why it is pointless to argue about whether or not the signifiers of virtual engagement (not just conversations) raise or lower "the social intelligence of our species." Such an approach is a distraction from "where the action really is." One has to take a broader view of the acts of interpretation (yes, I'm talking about verb-based thinking again) in order to grapple with a concept like social intelligence. (Indeed, one also needs that point of view to address the question of whether the crowd is wiser or madder than any individual member.) This is no easy matter; but, if we do not confront it, we are no better than the drunk looking for his keys where the light is better, regardless of where he dropped them.

To provide an example, let me try an exercise in examining the context in which interpretative actions take place. JP's description of Calcutta in the middle of the nineteenth century invokes memories of similar descriptions of coffee-house Vienna at the end of that same century (both heavily seasoned with caffeine and nicotine). This was not just a scene of conversations; it was also (in Chomskian language) the "surface structure" of a "deep structure" of cultural ferment. The "fermentation" would eventually burst out of the vessel that contained it, Europe would be consumed by a "war to end all wars," and the conversations of the coffee houses would be forever silenced. I am not interested in what is happening on the "surface" of the Internet, because I am too worried about what kind of brew is now fermenting!

CNN's Grass Roots Mythology

Yesterday I tried to take a pragmatic look at Cindy Sheehan's "challenge from the grass roots" against Nancy Pelosi's seat in the House of Representatives. My theme, as stated in my lead paragraph, had to do with "thinking beyond the passion of the moment to the consequences" of taking action. Today's News Blog post by Josh Wolf provides another take on that "passion of the moment" and how, as was the case with Ms. Sheehan, mass media can convert the best of political intentions into marketing opportunities. Now, just to be fair, that last sentence does not capture any assertion that Mr. Wolf made in his post; so I shall try to explain why I have chosen to read his report that way.

Let me begin with what Mr. Wolf did report:

When I first heard that CNN had partnered with You Tube for two upcoming presedential debates I was intrigued. For the first time in history, on July 23 at 7:00PM (ET), the general public will have a chance to ask a question to the man (or woman) who might become the next president of the United States.

But what does this approach really mean to the future of U.S. politics? As a recent article on CNN points out, while the questions may come from the public, the news agency is still making the choice which questions will actually be asked. Does this approach really democratize the debates or is it simply a chance for a few lucky individuals to have a chance to be on national television. According to Joshua Levy at techpresident.com, "There are two parts to opening up a platform like these debates to the community: 1) Let individuals participate in unprecedented ways, [and] 2) Give up control of the voting to the community."

In other words Mr. Wolf wanted to raise the question of whether or not CNN had hit on an innovative approach to democratizing the debating of issues, which, hopefully, would lead to the selection of candidates for the Presidency of the United States. My own reading was that this was not a story about political processes, democratic or otherwise, but just another brick in the wall constructed from the unhealthy relationship between the service of informing the public and the business interests without which (apparently) such services cannot be rendered.

I still believe that the cardinal rule of investigation is "follow the money." Following the money in this case leads to asking about CNN's motive for running this debate; and my guess is that the motive has nothing to do with politics (unprecedented or otherwise) and everything to do with bringing lost eyeballs back to the CNN channel (which leads to charging more for advertising slots, which, in turn, means, of course, more money). Now that both CNN and Headline News have their veins full of the Kool-Aid of entertainment fluff being passed off as news, they have discovered that the gain in viewers who want that kind of "news lite" has been overwhelmed by the loss of viewers who want "all news all the time" (if anyone still remembers that motto). Of course, many of the viewers they have lost have not gone to another channel; they have gone to the Internet, where you can now get "hard news" from just about any source you desire and editorial opinions of every conceivable stripe. CNN has become the drowning man coming up for air one more (last?) time; and grabbing the YouTube life preserver for a new take on a so-called "open forum" will likely result in as feeble an effort as their recent previous "forum" programming.

From the Grass Roots to the House of Representatives

When Cindy Sheehan "came out of retirement" to announce that she would run against Nancy Pelosi as an independent if the Speaker did not move to impeach George Bush by July 23, I was not sure how to react. Since I live in California's Eighth Congressional District, this would affect me personally. However, this also means I know a thing or two about the cost of declaring residency in the District; and I wondered whether or not Ms. Sheehan had factored that into her plans (and that would be before worrying about financing an actual campaign). In other words I reacted as someone who appreciates passion, particularly when it involves my own strong beliefs, but also recognizes that passion has to be balanced against pragmatics. Now I actually had several reasons for not voting for Ms. Pelosi last November, but one of them was that I knew that the polls were giving her a pretty safe majority. Thus I could use my own ballot to register discontent without jeopardizing Pelosi's chances, and I still believe that this was a good thing to do. So the pragmatist in me could not help but wonder to what extent Ms. Sheehan was thinking beyond the passion of the moment to the consequences of her action.

Today, the day before the "deadline" she declared, she published an opinion piece in the "Insight" section of the San Francisco Chronicle; and it provides at least some indication of the extent of such thoughts since the made the announcement a couple of weeks ago. She began by raising the question of whether or not her announcement had prompted support:

The feedback I have been receiving since I announced that I would challenge U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, for her House seat -- unless she gives impeachment the go-ahead -- has been running about 3-to-1 positive.

Some people have offered to quit their jobs to move to California's Eighth Congressional District to help my possible campaign. People are lining up to donate and help, and I am again very grateful and touched beyond belief by the generosity and energy of my fellow Americans.

My guess is that her numbers are pretty informal. We do not even know if that 3-to-1 ratio is based on a statistically valid sample space; and while I am sure that people are "lining up to donate and help," we have no good way of assessing the extent of either their checkbooks or the amount of personal time they are willing to commit. Then, of course, there is my initial question of moving into the District in time to change the base of the electorate already there. At least Ms. Sheehan confirmed that she had given this factor of the equation some thought!

However, there is also a question of the mentality that Ms. Sheehan would be bringing behind her challenge. This is where I found a paragraph that made me a bit nervous:

I was a lifelong Democrat only because the choices were limited. The Democrats are the party of slavery and were the party that started every war in the 20th century, except the other Bush debacle. The Federal Reserve, permanent federal income taxes, not one but two World Wars, Japanese concentration camps, and not one but two atom bombs dropped on the innocent citizens of Japan -- all brought to us via the Democrats.

This is where I worry that the balance between passion and pragmatics has been knocked way out of kilter (or, as they probably still say in the military, "fouled up [or words to that effect] beyond all recognition"). What particularly concerns me is the way she lumped the Federal Reserve, perhaps the most important effort in regulation to stave off a repetition of the Great Depression, in with the two World Wars (the second of which had been supported by some of the most extreme opponents to the first due to the nature of the enemy) and the Japanese internment camps created out of the same irrational passions that now drive our "homeland security" policy. Pragmatism is, among other things, a matter of finding an appropriate perspective from which to assess every situation. Perspective is one of those traits that is sorely lacking in our current Executive Branch. It is more present in the Legislative Branch because, if nothing else, the new leadership has enabled more exchange of perspectives than the previous set of puppets to gave the Executive everything without question.

This brings me to my strongest fear, which is that Ms. Sheehan is no better than President Bush when it comes to making decisions. Both of them are ruled by their passions, and the fact that Ms. Sheehan's passions are closer to my own is not a determining issue. For all the unpleasant qualities that a "political animal" must have, just by the nature of the work, I would rather be represented by such an animal than by a candidate who speaks from the heart, however much I may sympathize with what her heart tells her.

The Many Approaches to Mozart

I do not know if this was an intentional act of design by Music Director George Cleve, but this month's Midsummer Mozart Festival is revisiting two of the works that I felt were high points during this past season of the San Francisco Symphony. Next week Cleve will be conducting the K. 317 "Coronation" mass with the Cantabile Chorale, which Ingo Metzmacher had conducted in Davies; and last night featured the K. 482 E-flat major piano concerto, which Emanuel Ax had performed under the baton of Osmo Vänskä. While I did not write about Metzmacher (even though I have yet to hear one of his performances with the San Francisco Symphony that displeased me and am already looking to the program he has prepared for next February), Ax' approach to Mozart prompted me to write about the way "he could turn the performance over to his inner-twenty-year-old," referring to that "show-off kid" side of Mozart that was so central to his characterization in Amadeus. (Given how strongly this impression has stuck with me, I should, out of a proper sense of full disclaimer, credit it to a conversation I had with a former professional colleague, who had joined me for this particular concert, during the intermission following Ax' performance.) While Janina Fialkowska may share some of Ax' Eastern European roots, her reading was definitely not one of a show-off kid. Like Cleve she had a great sense of all the nuances that Mozart brought to bear in the grammar of his structure; but, also like Cleve, she knew how to let those nuances speak for themselves, rather than marking them all with a metaphorical highlight pen. In other words this was an another example of how conductor and soloist were very much "on the same page" where the rhetoric of performance was involved. This is not to say that Fialkowska was so refined that she was bloodless: She knew how to summon the climax of the first movement cadenza in a way that brought me to edge of my seat, while her sense of touch in the Andante summoned that same sense of poignancy that we hear in The Marriage of Figaro (which Mozart was working on at the time he composed this concerto). The result was yet another reminder of why it is so important to live in a world of live performance, rather than one of a massive library of recordings that, through the wonders of technology, we can take with us wherever we go. As I observed about a week ago, this is not to dismiss the value of those recordings but to emphasize the value of our listening skills and the memories of how those skills can serve us.

This concert was also an interesting exercise in the variety of personal approaches that a soloist can bring to performance. The other concerto on the program was the K. 191 bassoon concerto, played by Rufus Olivier, a familiar face, since my seat at San Francisco Opera affords a great view of the action in the orchestra pit. I do not have a lot of background knowledge of the work (other than having heard several performances, all, unfortunately, recorded); but I do know that this was Mozart's first effort at a concerto for wind instrument and orchestra (just as I know that the clarinet concerto was his last). I also know that Mozart scribbled jokes into the soloist part for his horn concertos, but those came about ten years after the bassoon concerto. Nevertheless, the bassoon is an instrument of extremes; and the kid in Mozart seems to have had a lot of fun running those extremes into each other. Therefore, the important thing about this performance is that both Olivier and Cleve were in on those gags; and Cleve gave Olivier the berth to pull them off, occasionally with some supporting body language. The result was something much more akin to the inner-twenty-year-old approach to performance (although Mozart was actually only eighteen when he wrote this concerto), making for an approach to concerto performance that pleasantly complemented Fialkowska's sense of refinement.

The other featured soloist of the evening was Laura Griffiths, playing the sole oboe part in the K. 251 divertimento. This is a part that has to do double-duty, both shaping the overall sound of the ensemble and coming forward as a full-fledged solo voice. Here, again, Cleve and Griffiths shared a common agreement about when she was playing which role. Also, again, there is a question of whether or not Mozart is playing a prank with that double-duty in the rondo movement, where the oboe has some sustained notes that tend to stick out like a sore thumb and seem to be there more as a sound effect. Since the movement is a rondo, the effect keeps returning; and the result is definitely comical, which I believe to be intentionally so. If it was meant to be a joke, Cleve and Griffiths knew how to avoid belaboring it, making it come of as a throw-away gag of the sort that W. C. Fields had mastered so well. Another possible joke in this work is that, while the rondo has a definite feel of being a finale, it is not the final movement. Rather, it is followed by a "Marcia alla francese," which would almost provide an opportunity for the performers to march off the stage, were they not primarily a string ensemble. Most likely Mozart was taking this as an opportunity to tweak the expectations of the Archbishop of Salzburg, making it just another example of coping with strained relationships in the workplace!

Since I have covered all the other pieces, I should mention that this program, which was already quite generous in length, concluded with the K. 338 symphony (number 34 in C Major). In the context of the divertimento, this is the last symphony Mozart wrote in Salzburg. It has only three movements but, in its own way, is a rather massive piece of work. It required the largest of orchestral resources of the works on this particular program, bringing a final burst of energy as a conclusion to the evening. Indeed, the final Allegro vivace movement was delivered at as breakneck pace (without any loss of accuracy), which I feel is really the way it should be rendered. This may make it a bit of an athletic stunt; but, actually, its just the show-off kid at it again! Indeed, since so much ground had been covered in the concert, this was the perfect way to leave us walking out of Herbst Theatre in an upbeat mood!

Adding Injury to Insult

Just when we think we have heard enough of the ways in which the Federal Government has denied the humanity of the survivors of Katrina, preferring to treat them as objects manipulated by the machinery of their bureaucratic operations, we discover that there are still more gnurrs waiting to "come from the voodverk out" (if only they could wreak the destructive power endowed upon them by author Reginald Brentnor on those bureaucrats)! The latest report comes from Associated Press writer Charles Babington:

Lawyers for the government's disaster relief agency discouraged officials from pursuing reports that trailers housing hurricane victims had dangerous levels of formaldehyde, according to documents released Thursday.

Lawmakers said they were infuriated. At a House hearing, they listened to three trailer occupants whose families suspect formaldehyde is to blame for their various illnesses.

Democrats and Republicans criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its limited inspections or tests of trailers whose occupants reported various respiratory problems.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoenaed records showing that agency lawyers warned officials of potential liability problems if tests suggested government negligence.

"It's sickening and the exact opposite of what government should be," said the committee chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. "It is impossible to read the FEMA documents and not be infuriated."

This is beyond chutzpah (which is just as well, since this week's award already has a deserving recipient). This is far closer to the reduce-the-surplus-population philosophy of Ebenezer Scrooge. Perhaps it is about time that we move beyond the formalities of oversight to the nitty-gritty of criminal investigations!

Whose "Don Juan?"

Having written yesterday at greater length than I anticipated about the San Francisco Symphony performance of the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto, I wanted to devote a second post to the performance of Richard Strauss' "Don Juan" on the first half of that same program. From many points of view, this piece may be the most challenging of Strauss' tone poems, beginning with the fact that the opening measures provide one of the major hoops through which any string player must jump when auditioning for a symphony orchestra chair. In spite of the fact that this is may be the shortest tone poem, I have had the misfortune to hear two major conductors (whom I would prefer to leave unnamed, along with the orchestras they were leading) bungle things somewhere along the course of the score. I suspect that the problem has less to do with the feet-first burst of energy that launches the work as with the high density of abrupt energy shifts that take place over the work's brief duration. The problem, then, is that neither performer nor listener is ever on "solid ground" for very long. The music never lingers in the moment (more applicable to Faust's contract with Mephisto, at least according to Goethe) but, instead, is always charging ahead to the next "conquest." This is a vision of the Don that occupied many of the authors of the Romantic movement, with its rebellion against Enlightenment thinking. The theme shows up in a variety of languages, including English (Byron), German (Hoffmann), and Danish (Kierkegaard). This obsession to drive forward incessantly is not halted by the fires of Hell, as conceived by Mozart and da Ponte, but by the sheer exhaustion of "all passion spent," without even the comfort of past reflection that Casanova enjoyed by writing his memoirs.

Thus, while we can all appreciate Gabriela Martinez' observation that the primary challenge in "taming" "Rocky 3" is endurance, this is just as true for "Don Juan." In the spirit of the Don's activities, endurance is not just a matter of length but with everything that happens "over the duration." Consequently, the same skill that James Gaffigan had in working with Martinez to establish a good "energy budget" for the extended scale of the Rachmaninoff concerto was applied equally effectively over the brevity of the Strauss tone poem. The result was that the Strauss performance was as impressively memorable as the Rachmaninoff; and, while the two works were radically different in so many ways, that level of quality performance was achieved in these two settings for basically the same reasons.

I also want to submit the disclaimer that the "vision of the Don" I presented above is primarily my own fabrication; and it is not easy to determine whether or not this was the "story" behind the Strauss tone poem. Strauss' source was an incomplete poem by Nicolaus Lenau, who is not known, at least in the United States, anywhere near as well as the three authors I cited. As a matter of fact, when I did a Google search on the phrase "Don Juan" and the name "Lenau," all of the first ten hits were from program notes for the Strauss tone poem. (We have Robert Schumann to thank for knowing that Lenau also did a version of Faust.) Wikipedia does have an entry for Lenau, but says little about Don Juan except for its fragmentary status. (Was Lenau thinking on the same scale as Byron?) Unfortunately, the Wikipedia entry for Don Juan is a good example of what Andrew Keen calls "the cult of the amateur" at its worst. Not only is the Lenau fragment misrepresented as a play; but the accounts of both Hoffmann and Kierkegaard, however brief, leave much to be desired. We have to wonder if Strauss was drawn to Lenau through the motive of getting away from the shadow that Mozart had cast over the legend. If Strauss wanted to seek out "something completely different," he certainly succeeded, but in a way that is likely to drive performers crazy for many years to come!

Philosophy: The First Refuge for Chutzpah?

Michael Moore already has his Chutzpah Award for health care "services rendered;" and, if it involved more bias than we anticipated, that is no reason to take it away from him. However, given the high profile of health care in the news, it is probably time for President George W. Bush to join Condi Rice as a two-time Award winner. The justification has been provided by Washington Post Staff Writer Christopher Lee:

President Bush yesterday rejected entreaties by his Republican allies that he compromise with Democrats on legislation to renew a popular program that provides health coverage to poor children, saying that expanding the program would enlarge the role of the federal government at the expense of private insurance.

The president said he objects on philosophical grounds to a bipartisan Senate proposal to boost the State Children's Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over five years. Bush has proposed $5 billion in increased funding and has threatened to veto the Senate compromise and a more costly expansion being contemplated in the House.

"I support the initial intent of the program," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post after a factory tour and a discussion on health care with small-business owners in Landover. "My concern is that when you expand eligibility . . . you're really beginning to open up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to the government."

Given the man's track record, the idea of using "philosophical grounds" to undermine health coverage for poor children, one of the few things the government does with enthusiastic bipartisan support, really sets the bar for what counts as chutzpah! Nevertheless, when our President starts to dig himself into a hole, he always seems to find a way to make the hole deeper:

"I'm not going to surrender a good and important idea before the debate really gets started," Bush said. "And I think it's going to be very important for our allies on Capitol Hill to hear a strong, clear message from me that expansion of government in lieu of making the necessary changes to encourage a consumer-based system is not acceptable."

In other words he is perfectly willing to hold those kids hostage until his idea of proper deliberation gets to run its course. Even then, however, Bush did not seem to know when to stop:

In the 15-minute interview, Bush also rejected the charges by former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona that the administration's political appointees routinely rewrote his speeches, blocked public health reports for political reasons and screened his travel.

"I can't speak to some of the complaints the surgeon general made," Bush said. ". . . He worked energetically in his job. And, obviously, at some point in time, he became very disgruntled and spoke out about it. But ours is an administration that attracts very smart, capable people. I'm very interested in their points of view, and I expect people to speak out. I also have my own points of view and feel very strongly about a lot of issues."

Bush said he is opposed to a bipartisan legislation that would allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the manufacturing, marketing and sale of tobacco products, which could lead to stronger warning labels and limits on nicotine and other ingredients.

"We've always said that nicotine is not a drug to be regulated under FDA," Bush said.

I would say that a performance of this caliber deserves an extra shiny award at the presentation ceremony!

The Cuban Side of the Health Care Story

Since I began the day dealing with the authenticity of the cardboard steamed bun story from China, it is only fair to point out that there is now a question of authenticity regarding Michael Moore's trip to Cuba in search of quality health care. It turns out that Jocelyn Noveck's report for Associated Press on the quality health care that 9/11 workers received in Cuba (as documented in Moore's film SiCKO) may have been a bit more susceptible to Moore's bias than her readers would have anticipated. Writing for Reuters, Anthony Boadle has now pulled together a version from the point of view of the physicians who attended to those workers. This version does not question the quality of the medical care provided. However, it also introduces a new point of view:

Communist Cuba's universal free health system has achieved low child mortality and high longevity rates on a par with rich nations since Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution.

But the hospital where SiCKO's patients were treated is an exception in Cuba, where patients of many other hospitals complain they have to take their own sheets and food.

There is something about that last sentence that resonates with Communist ideology, leaving me to wonder whether it is possible to have health care without either of the ghosts of the capitalist profit motive or the everyone-pulls-their-own of Communism. For all my skepticism about hospitals, I would hate to think that I would have to be responsible for my own sheet laundry while I am being treated; and, while we all have our favorite jokes about hospital food, during my last surgery I certainly did not want to question the judgment of an on-staff dietician in matters of what I would consume during my first 48 hours out from under the knife. My guess is that, as I previously suggested, Cuba saw an advantageous opportunity in playing Moore's rhetorical game; but, at the end of the day, scoring points in rhetoric is not going to fix a broken health care system.

Taming Rachmaninoff's Monster

As "professor" Robert Wuhl delights in reminding us in his Assume the Position lectures (on "the stories that made up America... and the stories that America simply made up") on HBO, movie-makers have no problem with distorting the historical record (along with other facts that create the context for that record) in the interest of "making it" at the box office. It is not that we are unaware of this precept. Rather, we are willing to disregard it where the entertainment industry is concerned if the product is more … well … entertaining. If "the record" loses out in the interest of entertainment, then that is just how "the system" works.

One of the more unfortunate losers in this process has been the third piano concerto of Sergei Rachmaninoff. By virtue of the success of the movie Shine, this composition now has the reputation (due in large part to the delivery that John Gielgud brought to his role) of a Grendel-like monster that devours any pianist who dares cross its path. In this respect, last night's performance at Davies Symphony Hall was memorable for two reasons: First, it reminded us that the concerto really is a piece of music that should be appreciated as music, rather than as the moral equivalent of trying to scale Everest or score a perfect ten in an Olympic gymnastic competition. Second, after the concert it provided the performers with an opportunity to reflect on the practices behind the music, putting the whole thing in a far more human perspective than the Shine experience afforded. Both of these reasons made for a far more satisfying experience than the terrors induced by the Shine story.

This is not to say that the concerto is just another piano concerto. As conductor James Gaffigan point out in his intermission chat with a community of local bloggers who had assembled at Davies, the raw note count of the work sets it apart from anything in the standard repertoire. However, as soloists Gabriela Martinez told those in the audience who remained for a question-and-answer session, this just means that the primary challenge in performing the concerto is endurance; and that challenge is hardly insurmountable. Georg Solti discussed this matter in the liner notes for Wagner's Das Rheingold. He explained that, while this was the shortest of the four Ring operas, it was the most difficult to conduct, because it was two and a half hours without intermission. Now there is a lot of high-intensity action throughout those two and a half hours; but it all leads up to the climax when Thor strikes his hammer to form the bridge that the Gods then cross to enter Valhalla. This is not just a dramatic climax, it is an energy climax. This is where every instrument in the orchestra has to be putting out with full strength; and, if that strength has been dissipated my expending too much energy on all the preceding abductions, thefts, and murders, then that final climax is weakened (and the audience leaves disappointed). So a conductor has to keep the overall energy under control from the very beginning to make sure that the strength is there to make the ending "work." Without making it sound too political in light of current conditions, there needs to be an "energy budget."

In a Wagner opera a conductor (certainly one like Solti) can take charge of that "budget;" but a concerto is a responsibility shared by soloist and conductor. What made the Rachmaninoff work so well as music was that Gaffigan and Martinez seemed to have a shared sense of what that "energy budget" should be. Since Gaffigan was not shy about discussing how little rehearsal time he had, I have no idea how "calculated" that budget was; but, even when the balance was not always the best, the two of them exhibited a sense (possibly intuitive) of what it would take to get from beginning to end without succumbing to exhaustion.

Much of this may have to do with the way in which Martinez seems to have internalized her share of the burden. During the question-and-answer session she was asked how much time it took to prepare this concerto; and her reply was that she spent two months to prepare for the performance. You could sense the jaw-dropping effect this had on everyone who knew the concerto only through Shine; so I figured it would be worth digging a bit into whether or not this was truly a superhuman effort in her part. I came to two conclusions.

First, while she may have spent two months from the first time she sat down with the music to the point at which she felt ready to perform it, that figure basically disregards all the ways in which her general music education prepared her for this task. Much of that education went into building up technique, but I suspect that there was also a generous amount of time put into learning other works of Rachmaninoff. In other words, to reflect back on one of my favorite themes, whether or not she was doing it consciously, she was building up an understanding of this music on those three levels of logic, grammar, and rhetoric:

1. Logic: What is the rationale that accounts for why Rachmaninoff wrote the notes that he did?
2. Grammar: What are the structural features through which one sorts out all those embellishing features (responsible for that massive number of notes) from the "core" features that are embellished?
3. Rhetoric: How do logic and grammar then inform the execution of the notes, particular in the context of the need to maintain that "energy budget?"

This now moves on to the second conclusion, which is that, at the level of logic and grammar, Rachmaninoff is actually rather predictable. The more you listen to Rachmaninoff, the more you begin to realize that his expressive palette is just not that extensive; so, as a performer, you probably begin to pick up on when, even if you are taking on a new work, you are actually on familiar ground.

By way of a more theoretical digression, this involves a principle of mathematics that obsessed many music theorists about fifty years ago. Leonard Meyer (who was, alas, far too much of a snob to ever put much time into Rachmaninoff's music) put a lot of effort into applying Claude Shannon's "information theory" to musical analysis. Shannon was interested in general problems of communication and recognized that the problem of distinguishing "signal" from "noise" (interference) was easier if the signal was more predictable; and he was able to quantify "how easy it was" in terms of a measurement he called "information:" the higher the information level, the more unpredictable the signal. In this language we can say that, for all that massive abundance of notes, Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto has a lower information content than (to pull an example from roughly the same time period) either of the piano sonatas by Charles Ives. The principle, then, is that, the lower the information level, the easier it is to internalize the composition. (Invoking the fiction of film once again, remember when Mozart reproduces the march Salieri composed in his honor in Amadeus. He plays about sixteen bars from memory and then says, "It's all the same after that, isn't ?" Mozart recognized predictability when he heard it!)

This is not to imply that predictability is a bad thing. The point, rather, is that predictability on the levels of logic and grammar demand more creativity on the level of rhetoric. This is the question of "putting your own stamp" on a performance that also came up in the question-and-answer session. Both Martinez and Gaffigan figured out to do this, even with limited rehearsal time.

What does this all mean? I see this as a vivid object lesson in why music is really all about what happens in a performance space, rather than what comes our of some recording. As I recently wrote, even if the recording some from a "live" performance, the latter is still a manufactured product. That product can invoke memories of performances we have enjoyed or, as I recently suggested was the case for Prince, prepare us for a performance we plan to attend; but it will never substitute for the performance. Another point that Martinez raised was the degree of public enthusiasm among the young in her native Venezuela for making music. Before recording technology "took over," adults also shared that enthusiasm: It was a familiar way to socialize. Without sounding too reactionary, I would like to hope that we wean ourselves away from all those recordings and recover that enthusiasm for the performances themselves, both doing them at whatever skill level we may have and enjoying others who do them.

The Proof of the Bun

Al Jazeera English has an interesting follow-up to the story they compiled from their wire sources last week about steamed buns sold on the streets in China that were "made from up to 60 per cent waste paper and cardboard." Here is the latest version of the story:

A China journalist has been arrested for fabricating a report about street vendors who used chemical-soaked cardboard to fill meat buns, state media says.

The Beijing municipal government said investigations had found that the Beijing Television freelance reporter had fabricated the story for higher audience ratings, the China Daily reported.

The report by the journalist, surnamed Zi, had come amid a spate of real food scares and added to local and international concerns about made-in-China products.

The story, allegedly shot with a hidden camera, was broadcast on Beijing Television and relayed nationwide by China Central Television last week and created a buzz on the internet, with netizens flooding chatrooms with comments expressing shock and disgust.

Zi's footage appeared to show a makeshift kitchen where people made bao zi, or traditional steamed buns, stuffed with 60 per cent cardboard that had been softened by a bath of caustic soda and topped up with fatty pork and flavouring.

"It's all cheating," the municipal government said, adding that after the report, officials inspected bun sellers across the city, but found no such problem.

The Beijing Youth Daily said that in mid-June, Zi brought meat, flour, cardboard and other ingredients to a downtown Beijing neighbourhood and had four people make the buns for him while he filmed the process.

This is one of those cases where both sides of the story are feasible. Many people of my generation remember when the BBC broadcast a documentary of the "spaghetti tree harvest," supposedly shot in northern Italy. Then, about ten years ago, there was the Spanish Gaudi "documentary," purporting to show footage of the man himself, which was so convincing that another documentary producer incorporated it as source material. These days you can fake anything, and the process does not require a heavy investment in support technology.

On the other hand, as I tried to explain in my reaction to the original report, even if this particular account was fictitious, it still revealed a layer of truth about how little we think about what we consume and the consequences of such negligence. This is the light in which we should review the Chinese government reaction to the hoax (if it was a hoax). Perhaps a case history more appropriate than spaghetti trees and Gaudi impersonation would be the mass panic brought on by the way in which Orson Welles presented a radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds. Whether or not, as some version have it, there were listeners who preferred suicide to confronting evil Martians, we should remember that no legal action was taken against Welles or CBS. The primary reason is probably that the broadcast was actually explicit (early and often) about being fiction and therefore could not be held accountable for listeners who got so caught up in the drama that they ignored the disclaimers. The Chinese report, on the other hand, was not so explicit; but it would appear that the general reaction was one of "intensified buzz," rather than the sort of mass panic associated with the Welles broadcast.

This is going to be a hard case for the Chinese judiciary system to tackle. They have already imposed capital punishment as a penalty for negligent oversight. Meanwhile, China is now in the world spotlight for those oversight problems:

Yohei Kono, the speaker of Japan's lower house of parliament, who was in Beijing for trade talks, told [Chinese Premier] Wen he hoped China "ensure food safety as soon as possible so that we feel safe about buying Chinese products", according to Kazuo Koga, Kono's secretary.

The United States, of course, has its own way of reacting to China without saying that it is reacting to China:

Meanwhile, the US president ordered top aides on Wednesday to review the safety of imports into the US amid public concerns over goods from China.

"The American people expect their government to work tirelessly to make sure consumer products are safe," George Bush said after signing an order creating a task force to assess US safeguards and report back in 60 days.

Bush appointed Michael Leavitt, the health secretary, to lead the panel, which will work to "review the procedures in place … to make sure that our food supply remains the safest in the world".

Bush did not name any countries of concern and Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said: "This is not a slap at China."

US and Chinese officials are to hold talks in Beijing starting on July 31 to improve food safety mechanisms.

However, all of this dances evasively around the hypotheses I tried to explore, which is that any problems with oversight of production (of anything) may be only a symptom of negligent oversight of the whole globalization process. This is due, at least in part, to the failure to have a framework that defines the responsibility for oversight. However, that failure arises from a laissez-faire philosophy, which basically argues that, if you are getting rich, you can damn the consequences. Well, what happens when the consequences end up damning both the suppliers and the customers?

Republicans (according to the Associated Press)

The Associated Press is providing an interesting place to learn about the contenders for the Republican candidacy for the next Presidential election. Yesterday, Liz Sidoti filed a story with the following lead:

And the leading Republican presidential candidate is ... none of the above.

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly a quarter of Republicans are unwilling to back top-tier hopefuls Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mitt Romney, and no one candidate has emerged as the clear front-runner among Christian evangelicals. Such dissatisfaction underscores the volatility of the 2008 GOP nomination fight.

It used to be the Democrats that would agonize over what was wrong with "middle America." Now its the Republicans who ought to be nervous about what will happen at the Iowa primary:

Among the legions of undecided Republicans is Barbara Skogman, 72, a retired legal assistant from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She isn't at all excited about any of the prospects. At one point, she favored McCain. At another, she was open to Giuliani. Now, she's leaning slightly toward Romney but says she's far from sold on him.

"I'm looking for a strong, honest person. Do you know of any?" she joked. She had an easy time detailing why she was queasy about each of the most serious contenders. "Isn't that sad?" Then she reached a conclusion: "I just don't know."

Perhaps the Republicans are discovering that appealing to "fundamental Christian values" is a double-edged sword. Now that we have a President who wants to reduce everything to good and evil, his party has to confront with solid like-minded citizens who may not give a lot of thought to the subtleties of diplomacy but sure-as-hell know sin when they see it. Guess what? They need look no further than any number of sites in Washington (replete with Republicans) to see it these days! It will be a supreme irony if the Republican party can not come up with a candidate whom these solid citizens feel is a better Christian than Hillary Clinton (who can wear her faith on her sleeve along with the best of them)!

In the interest of "equal time," by the way, I should point out that Jews are just as good at mustering the common sense to recognize sin when they see it. My favorite expression of this was a line from the film Hester Street delivered by one no-nonsense bubeleh in the cast. At one point she erupts at a young slicker trying very hard to put one over her with the line, "You can't piss up my back and tell me it's rain!" My guess is that just about every culture has a variation on this.

Meanwhile, a few of us will probably read all of Sidoti's story and as, "What about Ron Paul?" These days it seems that, if you want to read about him, you have to Google him; but at least his top-of-the-list hit is an Associated Press story. This one was filed by Jim Kuhnhenn on Monday and explains why he never showed up in the Sidoti report:

Ron Paul, the Lake Jackson congressman running a long shot campaign, reported raising nearly $2.4 million from April through June and ended the quarter with a similar amount in the bank.

The total is a remarkable showing for Paul, putting him in a better financial position — with less cash on hand but no debt — than Arizona Sen. John McCain. Paul still barely registers in public opinion polls and raised far less than McCain or the other leading Republicans. But his libertarian views and opposition to the war in Iraq have ignited a fire among nontraditional contributors, particularly on the Internet.

That's it: the guy still "barely registers." His presence is still not strong enough to stand above all those other candidates who told Sidoti that they do not like any of the Republican contenders. Personally, I am not sure I subscribe the extremity of his libertarian position; but I have to wonder how all those Republicans canvassed by Associated Press and Ipsos would react to Paul if they were aware of him!

Turning 89, Mandela GIVES a Birthday Present

After ranting yesterday about the dangerous consequences of shallow political thinking, I was comforted to read Rebecca Harrison's Reuters report from Johannesburg this morning. Nelson Mandela has used the occasion of his 89th birthday to offer a present to the world at large:

Nelson Mandela marked his 89th birthday on Wednesday by launching an international group of elder statesmen, including fellow Nobel peace laureates Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter, to tackle the world's problems.

As birthday tributes poured in, Mandela said the group of "elders" would use almost 1,000 years of collective experience to dream up solutions for seemingly insurmountable problems like climate change, HIV/AIDS and poverty.

The leaders, who include former Irish President Mary Robinson and former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, would also use their political independence to help resolve some of the world's most intractable conflicts.

"Using their collective experience, their moral courage and their ability to rise above nation, race and creed, they can make our planet a more peaceful and equitable place to live," said Mandela, wearing his trademark silk African-style shirt.

Mandela is, of course, no stranger to problems that are too complex to be addressed by quick fixes or for which, following the warning of H. L. Mencken, the quick fix may do more harm than good. However, there are several interesting auxiliary points that make the "story behind the story" just as interesting as the story itself. Most interesting of these points is that the idea actually did not originate with Mandela himself:

British entrepreneur Richard Branson and singer Peter Gabriel -- who performed an a capella version of his anti-apartheid protest song 'Biko' at the launch -- came up with idea of launching a braintrust of world leaders seven years ago.

They asked Mandela, who has officially retired from public life and will not play a major role, to launch the group and select its members.

Note, also, that the idea took seven years to progress from wouldn't-it-be-nice-if to a concrete inception. This, in itself, constitutes a resistance to the quick fix. What would now be nice would be some sort of chronological sketch of what happened over those seven years, as there may be some lessons to be learned about the need for "gestation" when dealing with complex problems.

Finally, it is worth mentioning some impressions from Carter that were included in Harrison's report:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said governments had frequently failed to tackle the world's big issues and conflicts because they were beholden to voters, inhibited by their own political agenda and beset with domestic problems.

"We will be able to risk failure ... and we will not need to claim credit for any success," he said.

To some extent I felt I could read this as a vindication of yesterday's rant: For all the virtues of representative democracy (and I doubt that I could live under any other form of government), there will always be a tension between the complex thinking demanded by complex problems and the need for political expediency. An independent body that does not have to deal with that tension is likely to be less inhibited in exploring the complexity in the depth that is demanded. Also, Carter has the courage to acknowledge the risk of failure, because this is a group that can absorb that risk without fear of jeopardizing any of the personal stakes the members have.

We should all thank Mandela for the present he has given us. It has great potential to serve us in this current time of crisis. I just hope that we can collectively value it to the extent that we can use it wisely.

Silence and Sensibility

I believe it was from Spinoza (delivered to me by way of Kenneth Burke's Grammar of Motives) that I first picked up the idea that some concepts are best understood through negation ("all determination is negation"): a concept is determined by that which remains after the "negative" of the concept has been eliminated (a strategy that Conan Doyle later attributed to master detective Sherlock Holmes). From this point of view, Paul Eckert, Asia Correspondent for Reuters, has provided a very interesting think piece on the current presidential campaign in the United States in terms of an issue important to every voter that is being almost totally neglected by every would-be candidate. Here is his lead:

Food safety fears and broad economic concerns keep China in U.S. headlines, but the epochal rise of America's greatest potential rival has barely rated a blip so far in the 2008 presidential campaign.

The reasons for silence on the political trail range from the pressing fact that U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan to the elusive nature of a competitive China that threads through issues such as the environment, energy, economics and security, analysts say.

However, just as important as the way in which Eckert began this report was the way in which he chose to end it:

Former U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman, who interpreted for Richard Nixon when he opened ties with China 35 years ago, says dealing with Beijing will be a defining issue for the next president. But for now, the less said, the better, he added.

"I'm happy that the presidential campaign is relatively silent on China because campaigns do not bring out the greatest wisdom in our politicians," Freeman said.

This is probably best read as a reflection on H. L. Mencken. Presidential campaigns are not about deliberating over complex issues before making decisions about what to do (and there can be no doubt that China is one of the most complex issues now confronting us). Rather, campaigns are about promoting easily-remembered slogans in the hope that the right slogan will trigger the right memories when the voter actually casts a ballot. (Actually, given the current state of voter turnout, these slogans are also necessary to get the electorate to both register and actually show up at the polls.) Unfortunately, as Mencken warned us, clear and simple solutions to complex issues are invariably wrong; and the strength of any slogan is its clarity and simplicity. Thus, whether or not Barack Obama has tried to address this complexity on its own terms through an essay in Foreign Affairs is not going to count for very much unless someone on his campaign staff can milk just the right "magic slogan" out of that essay. Such a "magic slogan" would most likely be a sin of either omission (leaving out critical parts of the argument in the essay) or commission (constituting a flat-out misreading); but it would still what the voters "take away" as an "understanding" of Obama's "position on China."

Thus, in spite of my continuing aversion to the reckless use of the noun "wisdom," I think Freeman has got it right, because he it reflecting my own reasoning about the need to think in paragraphs, rather than simple slogans. Indeed, the admiration I expressed yesterday for Dennis Ross cuts right to the heart of the complexity that must be faced. Any engagement with China is going to have to involve "statecraft" of the highest order of skill; but that statecraft must be exercised over that broad spectrum of issues that Eckert raised in his lead: "the environment, energy, economics and security." Personally, I think the problem is not just that "campaigns do not bring out the greatest wisdom in our politicians." Ultimately, that "greatest wisdom" may reside not in the President of the United States but in how that President provides himself with skilled advisors and knows how to draw upon the advice they provide. We have now had far too much experience with what happens when such an approach to "wisdom" is compelled to take a back seat to faith; but, as voters, we are unlikely ever to be informed of which of all those many would-be candidates can assemble and work with powerful teams when confronted with harsh complexities. I am not saying that past voters were any better informed of such matters; but, as the complexities become greater and entail more dire consequences, the need for such an informed stance will become far more important.

Speaking in Coherent Paragraphs (again)

My recent observation about Andrew Keen's "ability to speak in coherent paragraphs" has made me more aware of the communicative skills of others when facing an ostensibly intelligent audience. My own words revived in my consciousness yesterday while I was watching a recording I had made (again from Book TV) of Dennis Ross talking about his book Statecraft. From the very beginning of his talk, Ross made it clear that the very concept of "statecraft" was far to subtle to be neatly wrapped up in a few "take-away" clichés. Consequently, the entirety of his talk, prior to taking questions from the audience, was designed to familiarize the audience with the concept without either reducing it to triviality or drowning it in complexity. Ross is one of those rare speakers who seems to have no urge to "perform" (in the showy sense of the word); he believe that the center of attention should be his topic material, rather than himself. I do not think I can say this about many lecturers. Even Keen seems to know how to deliver the right amount of performance when administering his logic; and, for all my admiration of the man's ideas, I doubt that anyone would accuse Harold Bloom of scrimping on the performance factor!

The other thing that struck me about Ross was his (possibly intuitive) command of text type theory. Ross approaches his subject through the text type of description. This means, at least for me, that he sets up a representational framework for the concept and then proceeds to develop each of the components of that framework. Each such development is basically expository, which, for me, is a matter of situating the component in a suitable context. That context, in turn, can be established through the remaining two text types. Argumentation is invoked when the context is a matter of examining evidence and justifying conclusions drawn from that process of examination. However, since Ross' qualification to speak on the concept of statecraft in the first place is grounded on his personal experiences in practices of diplomacy, he can also establish context through narrative accounts of those experiences.

The result was a truly compelling lecture that "spoke for itself" without any "cheap tricks" of rhetorical performance. Of course the structure was sufficiently elaborate that I strongly doubt that it was delivered extemporaneously. Most likely Ross had prepared a text in advance; so there was an element of performance. I suppose, then, that what I am really trying to say is that the performance element was sufficiently subdued that the prepared text was neither tedious nor overwhelming. At the conclusion of this portion of the event, I was ready to go out an read Ross' book, which, I suppose, was the primary motive behind his preparing this talk in the first place!

Returning to Ornette Coleman

I do not seem to write very much about jazz these days; and, when I do, it seems to have more to do with my hypothesizing that Karlheinz Stockhausen (possibly along with his son, Markus) seems to have a better feel for jazz as an act of performance than most of what is currently being offered in the name of jazz. I used the italics in that last sentence, because I feel that, given the overwhelming demand for music that we now download and carry around with us on some portable device, there is an increasing tendency to view music, whatever its genre may be, as a manufactured studio product. In other words we have become so obsessed with using recordings to relegate music to the background as a "soundtrack for life" that we have lost touch with the foreground "roots" of music: performance in front of a "live" audience.

This has a further consequence, which is that, when such a performance does take place, audiences are probably less aware of the "real-time" virtues of that performance than they used to be. In this respect I think that Prince may have hit on any interesting solution. I learned about this from reading confused of calcutta (but later saw it covered on the BBC):

So it was with some amusement that I read this story, where he is described as having done a deal with the Mail On Sunday to give his latest album away free before it hits the shops.

As the BBC has now reported, today was the day of this grand experiment. The reaction from the manufactured-product camp has been downright testy:

But the giveaway has angered retailers, who called it "an insult" to high street record stores.

It also dealt a blow to Prince's record label, Sony BMG, which has shelved plans to release the album in the UK.

However, this report has also tapped into Prince's motive, which I feel is the heart of the story:

"Prince has done this because he makes most of his money these days as a performing artist," the Mail on Sunday's editor, Peter Wright, told BBC Five Live.

"He's got a fantastic series of concerts coming up at the O2 Dome and this is a way of telling people what he's doing."

Carrying this logic one step further, it is that Prince has decided not just to promote his upcoming concerts but to actively cultivate the audience for those concerts. By giving them the opportunity to hear the recorded versions of his new material ("telling people what he's doing"), his audience will be better prepared to appreciate those elements that live performance add to what it means to "experience music."

Thus, those retailers may be right to feel insulted by his strategy. He is basically telling his fan base (and quite likely others made curious by the promotional strategy) that anything they buy from a record store, physical or virtual, will never be anything more than a secondary by-product of what he does. His live performances are the most important part of his life as a musician, and an audience that is prepped with free recordings of the new compositions is more likely to get this message.

This takes me back to jazz. My problem seems to be that it is just not fun any more; and it is not fun because, even when a performance is live, it feels as if it is still little more than a "playback" of things that have been concocted through recording studio work. I recently tried to communicate this message in a survey conducted by SFJAZZ, ostensibly conducted to find out what jazz lovers really want them to offer in their programs. Ironically, my sour opinion was rewarded with two complimentary tickets to hear Ornette Coleman in October!

This should make for an interesting test of my current thinking. I came to know Coleman through a live performance that he gave during my student days at MIT. I did not start listening to his recordings until CDs replaced vinyls, but those CDs became an important part of my collection during my years in Singapore when there were almost no opportunities to hear quality performances of jazz. My first impressions of Coleman were shock-of-the-new astonishment. I could do little more than "bathe" in all those new sounds that could not be processed by my mind as anything more than joyful chaos. Through my recordings, however, I have begun to make sense of that chaos; so I shall be able to go to that October performance as a far more informed audience than I was at my first exposure. I'm not sure about the rest of the audience, though. One certainly does not hear much of Coleman on the radio from either KCSM, the one serious place to learn about jazz on the public airwaves of the Bay Area, or the "Real Jazz" channel provided by XM Satellite Radio. There is no doubting that the guy is an acquired taste; but it seems as if all of those parties offended by Prince's new approach to releasing new music are also the parties that make it so difficult, if not impossible, to "acquire" a new taste in the first place.

This all reflects back on the sorts of arguments that Andrew Keen was trying to make about "culture death" in that "debate" broadcast by Book TV yesterday. Jeff Howell (the not particularly "moderate" moderator from Wired) wanted to wax eloquent over the "long tail effect;" but Keen was smart enough to see the flaw in the propaganda. The issue is not whether there is a "place" for experiences of limited appeal, such as cultivating an appreciation of what Ornette Coleman brought to the jazz scene. I am sure there is plenty of his stuff out there on the long tail, just as I am sure that I can find it, because I know how to do just the right kinds of narrowly-focused searches. The bigger challenge is whether or not Coleman can cultivate an audience for adventurous listeners who want more from jazz than they are going to get from the mass productions of Wynton Marsalis and others like him closer to the center of commercial attention. Can Coleman be "discovered" out there on the long tail by such listeners? Keen is skeptical about this proposition, and I share his skepticism.

So, putting the Internet aside, will either SFJAZZ or KCSM do anything, not just to encourage buying tickets, but also to prepare the ticket buyers, for an evening with Ornette Coleman in October? Once again, I am skeptical. In this case, though, I would really like my opinion to be proven wrong!

Studying Political Theory through Fiction

I am progressing slower than I would like through the excerpt of J. M. Coetzee's new novel Diary of a Bad Year in The New York Review. I can give the usual excuses about all the things that have been occupying my time; but, having discovered that this "novel" may be a framework for some rather radical thoughts about the current political situation, I find myself reading every paragraph very closely. I think it is still the case that I have not yet figured out how to approach the excerpt in its entirety (let alone how to prepare for the book in its entirety); but, given the currently relations between the executive and legislative branches of my own government, one paragraph jumped out at me as a piece of text that I really wanted to see. So, in the interest of "sharing with the group," here it is:

If you take issue with democracy in times when everyone claims to be heart and soul a democrat, you run the risk of losing touch with reality. To regain touch, you must at every moment remind yourself of what it is like to come face to face with the state—the democratic state or any other—in the person of the state official. Then ask yourself: Who serves whom? Who is the servant, who the master?

Enthusiastic readers should be quick to see the resonance with the "Humpty Dumpty question" about the meaning of words in Through the Looking Glass; but this passage also needs to be read in the context of the previous excerpt I cited, which basically asserts that a "state" is an institutionalization of slavery. Needless to say, our own situation in the United States all but cries out for our asking whether we are being not only represented in the workings of our government but also served by those workings. I doubt that very many of us are satisfied with the prevailing answer!

From School of Medicine to School of Health

Maggie Fox, Health and Science and Editor for Reuters, has just reported a new voice in the debate over health care reform:

Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stepped into the debate over health care reform with a call for changing the way doctors, nurses, veterinarians, pharmacists and dentists are educated.

Not only are more schools needed, Gerberding said, but these professionals need to start their education all together, to foster cooperation and a sense of common mission.

"I believe that what we really need in this country are schools of health," Gerberding told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

"If we are seriously thinking about building a health system, then we need to be training professionals in a collegial and collaborative manner."

My immediate reaction to this new call to arms is whether it involves anything other than changing a name. Fox provides only one example of what Gerberding seems to have in mind:

Gerberding said the system is focused on treating disease and on end-of-life care, with little attention paid to preventing disease and helping people lead healthier lives.

Perhaps Gerberding might think twice about playing the name game if she realized that there already is a label for this alternative perspective: When the words are taken literally, it is called "health maintenance." Had this phrase not been so contaminated by health-maintenance-as-industry, she might have recognized the semantic interpretation it deserves.

However, this little word game gets to a problem Gerberding never bothers to recognize. Whether your call it "medical care" or "health maintenance," the process is about far more than learning how the body works and learning the proper practices of diagnosis and treatment. The real world of health care is now a world of an "industrial complex," chock full of all the negative connotations that Dwight Eisenhower assigned to the "military-industrial complex." The real problem with health care is the dominating mindset of profit-based business thinking; and, unless we can all come up with the right way of casting health care in terms of the sort of customer service problem that those businesses understand, new approaches to training health care professionals will probably not have much impact. Unfortunately, the way most of the business world deals with customer service these days, we should applaud any health care operation with the good sense to avoid that paradigm! However, the real moral of this story, to paraphrase Talleyrand-Périgord once again, is that health care is far too serious a matter to be left to those with the credentials of a Doctor of Medicine!

Who is Andrew Keen?

I believe it was through confused of calcutta that I discovered Andrew Keen's Great Seduction blog, and I continue to believe it was a good find. If there are times when I feel like accusing JP Rangaswami of "irrational exuberance" over Web 2.0 and related trends in thinking about cyberspace, I can almost always count on Andrew to find ways to level the balance. My only regret is that I have not built a bridge between the ideas behind Andrew's book, The Cult of the Amateur, and his presence as a performer in front of a live audience. (Some would argue that the blogosphere provides a middle ground between these two extremes; but, since Andrew used Great Seduction to develop the proposition that blogs are boring, I suspect he would not think much of that middle ground!)

This morning Book TV came to my rescue, broadcasting a video recording they made of an event at the Strand Bookstore in New York on June 6. The organizers of the event called it a "debate;" but, if much of what Andrew argues has to do with how, in the words of his book's subtitle, "the Internet is killing our culture," then this event demonstrated that the concept of debate itself is just one of the many corpses piled up on the battlefield of an ongoing culture war. This is not to say that the event was lacking in content but that just about all of that content was familiar to those of us who have tried to think out the consequences of current activities in cyberspace.

So, without replaying the issues one more time, I just want to write about how sorry I feel for Andrew. Not only does he understand the nature of debate, but his writing skills are matched by an ability to speak in coherent paragraphs when challenged on one of his issues. The problem is that those skills just do not hold up very well when confronted by opponents who can rarely string their words together into a coherent sentence and never seem to miss an opportunity to invoke a clever cliché (that great bête noir for Harold Bloom), whether or not it has anything to the point being discussed. This was exactly the situation Andrew confronted with (if I may be so bold as to name names, since this is all now part of the video record) moderator Jeff Howell, of Wired, and "opponent" Lev Grossman, Book Review editor for Time and, more relevant to the event, responsible for the issue of Time that selected "you" as Person of the Year. I must say that Andrew exerted some noble efforts towards serious discourse on many of my favorite topics (consequences being at the top of my personal list); but, to invoke his own phraseology, the seduction of performance was just too great.

While I am venting, I should also note that, having spent many of my best years on the East Coast, I have fond memories of the Strand Bookstore; and I believe that, given the attrition of independent bookstores, sponsoring events like these is a good way to remind the general public how important these places are. Now I keep myself on the mailing list for events at City Lights. My schedule is such that I have to be very selective in what I attend, but I have never attended an event at City Lights that was introduced by someone delivering a thoroughly inept reading of a prepared text. Book TV had the good taste to conceal this person's identity, but it was sad to see such sloppiness at an institution I used to admire.

What is a Mosque?

It would appear that synchronicity has struck again. No sooner have I celebrated Larry Flynt as a "dogged free-speech advocate and professional provocateur" than I find myself reading a report of a truly radical, but apparently sincere, effort to push the envelope of free speech in SPIEGEL ONLINE. Here are the lead paragraphs:

Günter Wallraff doesn't think of himself as a provocateur, he justs wants to get a dialogue going and to put the integration of Muslims in German society to the test. His method is somewhat radical. The well known German writer has said he wants to read aloud from "The Satanic Verses" in a Cologne mosque.

Wallraff denies that his proposal to read from a book regarded by many Muslims as blasphemous is a provocation. Rather, he says, he just wanted the Rushdie book to finally be discussed within the Muslim community.

The mosque in Cologne is being built by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) and Wallraff says he wants to take the organization at its word when it says the new mosque is to be a place for transparency and dialogue. Some local residents have opposed plans (more...) to build the mosque, including the atheist novelist of Jewish heritage Ralph Giordano, who has said Muslims should learn secular values and integrate into Germany.

My initial reaction was to wonder how the priests of the cathedral in Cologne would react to anyone proposing to read from The Last Temptation of Christ there; but, if we are to take DITIB at its word, this would be a false analogy. As I understand the practice of Catholicism, the church is a place for ritual, nothing more, nothing less. It is not that Catholics are averse to either transparency or dialogue; they just do not wish to associate those activities with a physical place of worship. My guess is that many Jews are more inclined to see the synagogue as a place of learning and might therefore, to choose about as radical an example as I can imagine, condone the reading of Mein Kampf for the sake of a dialogue that would lead to subsequent enlightenment. On the other hand I really know nothing about mosques, except for the way in which the media like to report sermons that seem to be delivering political, rather than religious, lessons. However, if DITIB really intends their mosque "to be a place for transparency and dialogue," then I have to admire Wallraff for responding to their seriousness of their intentions. In the elaboration that SPIEGEL ONLINE provided, his intentions appear to be honorable:

Wallraff said he envisaged a "discussion event and not a classic reading." He wants the passages that have been criticized in the Rushdie book to play a central role in any reading and for them to be translated into Turkish.

Nevertheless, many of us are probably familiar enough with efforts to discussion sensitive issues (such as, for example, the Middle East) that, in spite of their good intentions, degenerate into shouting matches, generating, in the words of that old cliché, more heat than light. I suspect the real challenge for the sort of event Wallraff has proposed will reside in how it is moderated. If that moderation can be satisfactorily framed, then this could be a valuable opportunity for the Muslim community, in Cologne if not at large.

HUSTLER Chutzpah

It would be too easy to give a Chutzpah of the Week award to George W. Bush for his press conference "performance." (Actually, one could even narrow things down to his answer to the first question, posed by Helen Thomas, not to mention restoring to Ms. Thomas the honor of asking the first question.) However, as was the case with Michael Moore in May, there is a certain amount of sociological hygiene in recognizing positive acts of chutzpah; and, in that respect, Moore would be a viable contender this week for the way in which he turned an interview with Wolf Blitzer that was supposed to be about his movie into an attack on the biased practices of CNN. However, in the interest of diversity, I would like to assign this week's award to Larry Flynt on the basis of his press conference in Beverly Hills on Wednesday, which was reported by Kasia Anderson for Truthdig, even if no one else bothered to cover it.

Here is the basic story:

Flynt held a press conference Wednesday at his Hustler headquarters in Beverly Hills to field questions about the Vitter case and to drop tantalizing hints to the assembled reporters about other promising leads generated by his June 3 advertisement in the Washington Post offering $1 million to any reliable source who could provide “documented evidence of illicit sexual or intimate relations with a Congressperson, Senator or other prominent officeholder.” Currently, he has “twenty-some investigations going that all look good,” almost all resulting from sources who responded to the Washington Post ad, and many of them about “high-ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Senate and the House.” In fact, Flynt said, his team has received more responses from the Post ad than it had from earlier, similar initiatives, including his effort against critics of President Clinton during the 1998 impeachment hullabaloo. “I don’t know if there’s something in the air, or if it has to do with election year,” he mused.

Note that I have included the Truthdig hyperlinks, because they give some indication of which sources have regarded Flynt's recent activities as newsworthy. This is not to imply that this week's award is honoring something that happened a little over a month ago. Rather, it is an award for both the "progress report" and Flynt's general demeanor in facing the press. What probably tipped the balance for me was the final paragraph of Ms. Anderson's report:

When asked whether his anti-hypocrisy crusade leans heavier to one side of the partisan divide, Flynt admitted that “Republicans are more fun, because they get caught so easy and live a repressed life.” Another reporter wondered if he wasn’t on a “moral rampage” himself, which drew a characteristically colorful response from the dogged free-speech advocate and professional provocateur: “The government, for a total of about 15 years, did everything they could to put me in prison [for publishing Hustler]. You’ve got people who don’t have an ounce of the character that I have that are running our government. And I’m saying, this is payback time ... and payback’s a bitch!”

If George W. Bush has tainted our government with every negative connotation of the noun "crusade," then the chutzpah of Flynt's style provides a few weights on the positive side of the balance pan. More power to him!

"The Misue of Science" and Holsinger's Weak Defense

Most of us would probably associate the phrase "faith-based medicine" with Christian Science and the writings of Mary Baker Eddy. It is thus interesting to see the extent to which the White House has changed the connotation of this phrase through its handling of the management of the Office of the Surgeon General. Will Dunham has been covering the Senate confirmations hearings for Dr. James Holsinger, Bush's nominee to succeed Dr. Richard Carmona. Dunham felt that it was important to include, as context for his latest report for Reuters, the fact that "Carmona has accused the Bush administration of preventing him from speaking out on stem cell research and other controversial issues." Carmona felt that the authority of his own professional experience should not be subjugated to the authority of anyone who lacked comparable experience, even his boss. This strength of professional conviction above political expediency casts an interesting light on the current examination of Dr. Holsinger.

The issue at stake was described by Dunham as follows:

Gay rights groups also have opposed Holsinger's nomination to be the nation's top doctor, faulting a document he wrote in 1991 titled "Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality."

Written to a United Methodist Church panel studying homosexuality, Holsinger offered exhaustive anatomical details to describe anal sex as unnatural.

Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the committee's chairman, said Holsinger's paper was "ideological and decidedly not an accurate analysis of the science then available on homosexuality."

"The misuse of science gravely concerns me," Kennedy said.

"I did not attempt to write a definitive scientific paper," Holsinger responded, admitting the paper is now outdated.

One does not have to be a seasoned expert in rhetoric to see how Dr. Holsinger evaded Senator Kennedy's concerns about the "misuse of science." Whatever his intent may have been, Dr. Holsinger wrote this 1991 document in the voice of the authority of his profession. One has to assume that the United Methodist Church invited him to write the document specifically for that voice of authority. If that voice was used to "utter" ideology and inaccuracy, then my own opinion is that Dr. Holsinger has committed an act of the "misuse of science." He might offer, as a defense, that, because the paper had not been reviewed by his medical peers, it should not be taken as a scientific document; but I see this as a deliberate attempt to confound the distinction of the role of the writer with the role of the reader. If the United Methodist Church presented Dr. Holsinger as an authority to its community, then that community will not care very much whether or not what Dr. Holsinger wrote had been properly vetted by peer review. If it is good enough for those representatives of the Church that invited Dr. Holsinger to write the paper, then it should be good enough for the entire Methodist Community.

This is perhaps an overly extended way to saying that Senator Kennedy should be concerned about the "misuse of science" and that Dr. Holsinger did not say anything to allay those concerns. It is not an attempt to argue that "scientific truth" should always trump "faith-based truth," however. Rather, it is a conviction that the highest government official responsible for the oversight of medical practice in this country should have sufficient respect for that "scientific truth" that we, as citizens, can view him as an "honest broker" in the decisions he makes and his capacity for oversight.

Hypotheses about the "China Free" Movement

This morning over breakfast (appropriately enough) I heard an interesting item on NPR's Morning Edition, summarized on their Web site as follows:

Food for Health International, a supplements maker, started labeling its "9 a Day-Plus" capsules as China Free. The company says most vitamins and supplements come from China. But it wants to set itself apart.

This story then set the context for the following report, which Al Jazeera English compiled from their wire sources:

Fake steamed buns made from up to 60 per cent waste paper and cardboard have become the latest food to join a growing list of health scares in China.

The bogus buns were exposed in a report carried on China's state-run television network CCTV.

The CCTV reporters found vendors chopped up waste cardboard and mixed it with fatty meat to produce the buns, known as "bao zi", in a Beijing backstreet factory.

It would seem that the chickens of that formula of prosperity-through-globalization are coming home to roost; and suddenly the world is taking a harsh look at both the chickens and how they are being processed. The Chinese are discovering that this is a problem too big to be resolved through exercising capital punishment. So, once again, we are confronted with the how-did-we-get-into-this-mess question; and I would like to explore two hypotheses, both of which are based in consequences of globalization.

The more direct hypothesis is that globalization has created an expansion of market volume, very much in the manner that evangelists such as Tom Friedman said it would. Unfortunately, even with its vast population, China is not keeping up with that expanded volume. The result is desperate measures being taken to deal with a widening gulf between demand and supply. The situation is further complicated by the coupling of the escalation of price with the escalation of demand; and the escalation of price then "trickles down" to all the elements of the supply chain. Thus, even a humble bun bakery is confronted with the problem of putting out more buns while cutting costs of production. If this means replacing expensive flour with cheap cardboard, then that is just how the game of contemporary economics is played, even when the product, itself, is not going into a global market.

There is another hypothesis however that has more to do with the globalization worldview than with market behaviors. This is the hypothesis that all these stories about suspect ingredients going into a production chain may not be particularly new. Anyone who has been a world traveler knows all the don't-drink-the-water jokes; and those who are more experienced know how to check out whether it is a joke or whether it is a serious warning. When I visited Cambodia about fifteen years ago, I remember being advised to drink only from sealed cans. Anything bottled was suspect, because the bottles could be refilled and recapped. The fact is that we really do not know very much (if anything) about normative practices in the production of edible products (or, for that matter, tires) in China. For all I know, there is an entry about cardboard-based buns in Lonely Planet. Thus, the hypothesis is that, through globalization, normative domestic practices have now come to global attention. If this is the case, then changing the norms is unlikely to be solved by executing a bureaucrat responsible for the oversight of food and drug production. To invoke the adjective that Condi Rice (shudder!) used when she had to testify about Abu Ghraib, the problem is "systemic."

Actually, both of these hypotheses involve systemic problems with the very systems that have emerged from the visions of globalization. Once again, a narrative of prosperity has turned into a narrative of fatal consequences faster than you can say "that's the way it is." Where will this new narrative lead? It can only lead to further consequences (of course), raising the question of whether are not there are any policy-makers or decision-makers with enough strength of will to think about those consequences, however unpleasant they may be.

Balanchine does Mozart

It is very hard for me to listen to Mozart's K. 287 divertimento without regretting that I had only one opportunity to see Balanchine's choreography of this music performed. Fortunately, it was at a time when there were still two dancers who had been in the original 1956 performance, Melissa Hayden and Nicholas Magallanes; and I should be thankful that this one occasion was one more than the number of chances I had to see Balanchine's choreography of the K. 364 "Sinfonia Concertante!" Back in 1956 Balanchine was shaping the minds, as well as the bodies, of his dancers, making this a time when one could often see better performances of Mozart than what one was hearing in the concert halls. Hayden and Magallanes were joined by Tanaquil LeClercq (this was the last ballet she performed before succumbing to polio), Diana Adams, Patricia Wilde, Allegra Kent, Herbert Bliss, and Roy Tobias. I just wish I could find the record of who danced what, because, however much one may write about Balanchine's work as abstraction, there is so much character in the music that one assumes that those character traits were revealed in the choreography. I have been able to determine that each of the musical variations in the second movement was a solo dance variation, and I have to believe that the adagio movement was set as a pas de deux. (How else could it be set?) Beyond that my memories are too spare to fill in the blanks. At least this afternoon I got to hear the music conducted by George Cleve, one of the few conductors with an understanding of the working of both the choreography and the music itself.

The TBD of Crowds

Every now and then I get back on a hobby-horse to try to take Jimmy Wales to task for his naiveté about the social context in which his Wikipedia effort is embedded. What I had not realized until yesterday is that there is actually a very useful source in the social theory literature that directly confronts this issue. It turns out that whether or not a “great experiment” like Wikipedia succeeds or fails is a long-standing problem in social theory. A good introduction to the problem may be found in the paper “Social Theory, Social Research, and a Theory of Action,” by James S. Coleman, where it is called the “micro-to-macro problem.” As irony would have it, Coleman has an entry in Wikipedia. Indeed, this paper is included in the list of his “Selected Works;” but there is no mention of his contribution to the study of the micro-to-macro problem in the entry itself.

Simply put, the “macro” is about the sorts of relations that occur between social groups. The example Coleman cites is the classic thesis about the “Protestant work ethic” formulated by Max Weber, the causal relationship between Protestant religious doctrine and a capitalist economy system. The “micro” on the other hand is about individual behavior and thus occupies the “turf” of psychology. So, to continue with the Weber example, we have models for the relationship between Protestant doctrine and individual values; and we have models for the impact of individual values on the economic choices that those individuals make. What we lack, however, is a model that explains the relationship between those individual economic choices and the emergence of a capitalist social system. (Coleman also cites, as another example, the micro-to-macro problem with classical Marxism.)

Another way of looking at this is in terms of the two extreme models of crowd behavior. These are generally known as “the madness of crowds” and “the wisdom of crowds.” The fact is that neither model holds all the time, and which model prevails depends on a whole lot of contextual details that tend to be ignored. In this respect the problem of the “micro-to-macro problem” is our inclination to avoid those details (just as Wikipedia avoided saying anything about them in its piece of James Coleman)!

"Just a Piece of Goo"

Having recently cited Harold Bloom for (among other things) his attack on the Harry Potter craze, I was quickly drawn to the headline of Motoko Rich's piece in today's New York Times: "Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits." By way of introduction, the headline for this post is actually a quote from Bloom, taken from his NewsHour interview with Ray Suarez on August 29, 2000. Here is its context:

I read the first "Harry Potter" book in order to write that piece [for the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal]. I was appalled that every sentence was a string of clichés, that there was no characterization, that every character in it spoke with the voice of every other character, that it was finally just a piece of goo.

Addressing the same issue discussed in today's Times, Suarez that asked whether reading a Harry Potter book was better than reading nothing at all. Bloom's contentious reply was that reading such a book was not really reading:

Their eyes are passing over a page. They are turning the page. Their minds are being numbed by cliché. No demands are being made upon them. Nothing.… Nothing is happening to them. They're being schools in what you might call unreality or the avoidance of reality. They are going in every direction expect inward into the self.

Rich does not deep-end in matters of literature (which is probably just as well) and concentrates on the "raw data" that our government collects for such issues:

Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

Apparently, plus ça change is becoming a leitmotiv on this blog!

Rich assess the problem by examining the "competition" for reading as a leisure activity:

Young people are less inclined to read for pleasure as they move into their teenage years for a variety of reasons, educators say. Some of these are trends of long standing (older children inevitably become more socially active, spend more time on reading-for-school or simply find other sources of entertainment other than books), and some are of more recent vintage (the multiplying menagerie of high-tech gizmos that compete for their attention, from iPods to Wii consoles).

My guess is that Bloom would view those gizmos as a continuation of that schooling in "the avoidance of reality;" and he would definitely have my sympathy on that count. However, what surprised me about Rich's analysis was that there was no mention of the extent to which increased social activity entails increased peer pressure. In other words the Harry Potter story is not so much about literature or reading as it is about marketing. After all, just because a marketing campaign wraps itself in a cloak of educational virtue (however mythic that virtue may be), that does not make the effort any less one of marketing. The greatest flaw in the Rich analysis is that the attention was fixed strictly on the consumer, assuming tacitly that the producer did not have a part in the impact of the product.

Beyond this weakness the Times piece also included one of the most annoying paragraphs I have read this year:

Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.

Regular readers of this blog should immediately recognize that people need "zero narrative" for their occupation, whatever that occupation may be, is the sort of ludicrous assertion that can come from someone with as much problems with "avoidance of reality" and Harry Potter readers! If Professor Kamil thinks that learning "to read for information" will bring education into a better alignment of the realities of life, then he ought to get off the Stanford campus and become better acquainted with those realities, whether they involve the highest levels of deliberation that take place in Washington, the relationship between a doctor and a critically ill patient, or even what the repair technician does to a broken copy machine. Professor Kamil has demonstrated that the very act of teaching "education" may have more damage on the future of our children than all of those "avoidance of reality" gizmos cited in Rich's article. To paraphrase Talleyrand-Périgord, education is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to academic departments of education!

It's not about the Data (again)!

Last night Julie Steenhuysen filed a report for Reuters about a study just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine on the impact of the move to electronic health records. Her lead paragraphs say it all:

Electronic health records -- touted by policymakers as a way to improve the quality of health care -- failed to boost care delivered in routine doctor visits, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Of 17 measures of quality assessed, electronic health records made no difference in 14 measures, according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The study by researchers at Stanford and Harvard Universities was based on a survey of 1.8 billion physician visits in 2003 and 2004. Electronic health records were used in 18 percent of them.

In two areas, better quality was associated with electronic records, while worse quality was found in one area, they said.

This story was particularly important to me, as a Lipitor user, since that "one area" of "worse quality" was the prescription of statins for high cholesterol; but it is not just my own ox that is being gored. Indeed, my own interpretation of these results is that, when the quality of health care is left in the hands of "policymakers," rather that practicing health care providers, that quality is bound to suffer.

Fortunately, Ms. Steenhuysen gave some indication of what may have influenced those policymakers:

Electronic health records promise to eliminate errors due to bad handwriting and make it easier for doctors to follow a patient's care over time.

Some systems can also flag dangerous drug combinations, or offer advice about tests or drugs the doctor might prescribe.

However, the question of the extent to which factors such as these impact the overall quality of health care practice were left unaddressed, at least by Ms. Steenhuysen if not the Archives of Internal Medicine. Those who seek a better understanding of the issues behind that question need to consult books like Atul Gawande's Better and Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think, or at least the comprehensive review of Groopman's book that Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, published in The New York Review. I already wrote about Ellen Goodman's review of Groopman's book when it appeared on Truthdig, but Horton has now given us more of an insider's point of view.

To try to put the Archives study in perspective, I would like to cite a paragraph from Horton's review concerned with what he calls a "deeper fault line within medical practice:"

On average, about 15 percent of a doctor's diagnoses are inaccurate. Groopman directs a well-aimed arrow at a system of medical training that more often than not fails to investigate why these diagnoses are misses. Doctors are rarely taught to ask how an error could have taken place, let alone how it could be avoided in the future. Most are unaware of their mistakes. Even if patients remain unwell, no systematic effort is made to find out where doctors may have gone wrong. Doctors are uncertain about their own uncertainties. (Although for some doctors, such as radiologists, Groopman cites alarming research that shows the worse their performance, the more certain they seem to be that they are right!)

In this context one has to ask whether, even if practicing physicians were more conscientious about error analysis, having electronic records would make a difference. Anyone who took an undergraduate course in databases (if not the more general area of information systems) would know the answer immediately: It depends on what has been recorded electronically! If the decision about record content was left to policymakers more concerned about the risk of applying the data to support a malpractice suit, then it is unlikely that those records would be of much help when error analysis is required. In other words, at a time when public opinion (now under the influence of Michael Moore) about health care just keeps getting lower, technology is there, once again, with a solution to the wrong problem. This leaves the policymakers scratching their head over what went wrong, as oblivious to the possibility that they, themselves, were what went wrong as are those radiologists that Groopman studied!

From the Blogosphere to the Newspaper

This is an anecdote (as opposed to a scientific study) of the flow of information through the Internet. The story began for me this morning with my usual perusal of headlines from my RSS feeds. Since I use Google Reader, I tend to follow the alphabetical ordering of those feeds. The headline that caught my attention was from the Financial Times feed (one of my favorite sources for general, as well as financial, news): "YouTube video embarrasses Google." Since I can never resist an opportunity to criticize Google, I figured that this was a story I had to read!

The first thing I noticed was that this story was not filed from Silicon Valley or from any other source in proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area. Instead it was filed from Paris (as in France, rather than Texas) by Emmanuel Paquette. Since I had previously gotten on Reuters' case, when they were reporting from Bangalore about the risk of my cat (in the United States) eating tainted food, I was curious about why a Silicon Valley story was being filed from Paris. Fortunately, Mr. Paquette was the sort of journalist (one of the last remaining?) who know how to clarify this matter in his lead paragraph:

A 21-year-old American has posted a video on YouTube explaining how to use Google’s search engine to download music and video games for free, Les Echos, sister paper of the Financial Times, has found.

In other words this was not a Financial Times story but one that FT had picked up from their "sister paper" in Paris.

This then led to my next question. By reading my sources in alphabetical order, I almost always read CNET before getting to the Financial Times. If this was news, why had it not been covered by CNET. I decided to I had better try feeding the name of the subject of Mr. Paquette's article, Jimmy Ruska (actually I just used the last name), to the CNET search engine. I discovered that most of the substance of Ms. Paquette's story had been filed on the CNET News Blog by Matt Rosoff on June 27! Rosoff, in turn, cited the "Wednesday Business Links" post from the coolfer blog (for "music and the industry"); and the relevant link was to a Slyck News post by Thomas Mennecke dated June 25.

At this point we could turn this into a story about what Mr. Paquette knew and when he knew it, but I think it is more important to cite that he did bring new material to his report. Most important is that he seems to be the one who actually tried to get a response from Google (and succeeded):

Matt Cutts, the engineer in charge of the quality of search results at Google, played down the effectiveness of the system. “The formula shown on YouTube is an attempt to find web pages containing a list of files including the word MP3,” he said.

“Nothing guarantees that such a search will find music files, for many web pages can contain the word MP3 without giving access to [music] content.”

More importantly, however, Mr. Paquette and his colleagues decided to see for themselves whether or not to take Mr. Cutts seriously:

Searches by Les Echos located many web pages containing music files that could be downloaded very quickly. It was also possible to access recordings of television programmes, films and video games.

Finally, the story provides a European perspective on this situation:

The London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry identified this use of search engines to make illegal file downloads early last year.

“We systematically send many warning letters and we do not hesitate to take legal action when necessary,” the Federation said. “But we do not comment in advance on action that we will or will not take.”

Last week a Belgian court made Europe’s first ruling that an internet service provider must block illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing by its subscribers when copyright is breached, according to the IFPI. Other European countries are expected to pass laws that will make ISPs responsible for stamping out exchanges of copyright material.

It is also important to note that the story does not provide specific information about the YouTube video at the heart of the story, probably because that might be construed as contributing to improper exchange of copyright material. Slyck News, on the other hand, has the link to the video itself. Finally, it what may simply have been a gesture of Gallic wit, Mr. Paquette wrapped up her report with a one-sentence paragraph:

Google’s share price rose 5.09 per cent to $544.49 by midday on Monday.

My guess is that this was just his was of saying plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

Remembering John Sirica

For those of us who lived through Watergate, today is a good day to remember John Sirica, former Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. That is because of the lead for the story Laurie Kellman just filed for Associated Press:

President Bush invoked executive privilege Monday to deny requests by Congress for testimony from two former aides about the firings of federal prosecutors.

This was the Nixon gambit back in the day of Watergate (probably under the advice of Fred Fielding, who is now advising Bush). Sirica's response was one of the memorable quotations from the whole Watergate saga: "Executive privilege is executive poppycock!" Of course Watergate was also a time when the Judiciary had a bit more balance to it and the reason for investigation did not involve upsetting that balance!

When a Child Star Grows Up

The question would not be if it would happen but when it would happen. Last May the word was out that Knut was no longer the cute cub that had drawn so many visitors to the Berlin Zoo. It is now official: "Cute Knut" has given his final appearance. Here is how it was reported at SPIEGEL ONLINE (one of the best sites for Knut photographs):

Sunday marked the last installment of the "Knut show," in which Knut and his keeper Thomas Dörflein paraded before visitors in an emptied bear enclosure at the Berlin Zoo. Ever since Knut went on public display in March, the celebrity cub would wrestle with Thomas and play with his famous green blankie twice a day in front of admiring crowds. No more.

This decision has most to do with the fact that Knut has grown. Any adult that deals with him has bruises (mostly a product of Knut's idea of "play") to prove it. However, in preparing this "final" story, SPIEGEL also got a useful perspective from André Schüle, Knut's vet:

Another reason for the decision to cancel the shows, Schüle said, is that the demand to see Knut has shrunk. The zoo no longer needs to let Knut roam the large, empty brown bear enclosure -- which used to be necessary to cope with the crowds of fans. "The number of visitors has dropped in the last few weeks as Knut has started looking less like a baby and more like an adult, which makes him less attractive to those people who like cute young animals," Schüle said.

In other words, as anyone familiar with the media business would put it, Knut's ratings have fallen! It turns out that Knut was just another child star. Jerry Mathers was able to succeed in his "second life;" will Knut?

Workers of China, Unite!

Apparently in today's China the Communist Manifesto gets about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield, at least according to a recent dispatch from Reuters:

Chinese migrant construction laborers are overworked, feel isolated from urban society and mostly lack basic insurance, state media reported on Monday, citing a survey.

The report comes after China's rubber-stamp parliament passed a labor law giving greater protection to workers' rights. It also follows a brick kiln slave labor scandal which prompted nationwide outrage.

Some 53 percent of migrant workers lacked an official contract and only 17 percent of workers with contracts understood their content, the China Daily said, citing a poll of 5,000 workers in several major cities by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank, and Beijing's Tsinghua University.

Only 31 percent of polled workers regularly received their full salary on time, while nearly two-thirds lacked disability insurance, the paper said.

China's breakneck industrialization has resulted in a rash of maimings, poisonings and deaths among workers who are often poorly trained and overworked.

Of China's 120 million migrant workers flooding the country's booming eastern cities, one in three worked in construction, the paper said, citing China's labour watchdog, the All China Federation of Trade Unions.

Labour rights groups regularly accuse China of not doing enough to protect workers -- most from impoverished rural areas who have moved to China's booming eastern cities to find work -- from unscrupulous employers who flout work safety rules and withhold salaries.

Parliament last month passed a new labour law giving greater protection to workers' rights in the wake of the national furor over the use of kidnapped children and slave labour in brickworks in the northern province of Shanxi.

One has to look back on those old rants by Nikita Khrushchev and wonder just who ended up burying whom!

Live Earth without Rose-Colored Glasses

At the risk of developing a reputation for goring oxen, I think it is important to view this last weekend's Live Earth events through those same dark lenses I used to examine Bill Moyers. By way of a bit more explanatory context this time, I should explain that one of the strongest intellectual roots of my student years has to be Tom Paxton’s “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” He found just the right balance of cynicism and wit to deliver the message; he just never had enough people pay attention!

Well, whether the issue is Public Broadcasting or the "global celebration" of Live Earth, folks are still not paying attention to Paxton's message; and I fear that, as a result, my capacity for cynicism has overwhelmed my capacity for wit! Thus I saw Live Earth as just another feel-good event that created little more than an illusion of social conscience (which, according to Tony Azios of The Christian Science Monitor, did not even extend to the environment-consciousness of picking up the trash). I would rather see the media celebrate people who do things that make a difference, preferably at a grass-roots level, than cover all those glitterati trying to show the world how much they “care.” One recent case in point has been coverage of institutions (including restaurants and even the San Francisco city government) that no longer have anything to do with bottled water, because tap water is just as good (and cheaper).

When is it Fiction?

Yesterday I made the rather audacious claim that I tend to focus my attention on non-fiction to avoid having to compete with the likes of Harold Bloom on the "turf" of critical reading. It is definitely true that non-fiction almost always bumps fiction off of my priority list of books I want to read; but this is usually because the books that receive highest priority are those likely to inform writing projects I have set for myself. Thus, when Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past actually made it to the top of the priority list (and managed to stay there through the whole cycle of novels), the reason had a lot to do with my being in the midst of writing about the problem of "organizational memory" and deep-ending on the broader question of memory itself.

All this presumes an ontology that supports a clean delineation between fiction and non-fiction, which is, if you will forgive the play on words, presumptuous to the point of absurdity. Even public libraries continue to have trouble with the distinction; and this is not a problem of our modern (or postmodern) condition. The blurring of fiction and non-fiction can be traced all the way back to the days on Aesop and Hesiod in our "Western civilization;" and I suspect that things are not that different in other world cultures. Indeed, the distinction has absolutely no relevance in the context of the very opening passage in the Preface of Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why:

There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?

As I wrote not too long ago, the "knowledge movement" has left a bad taste in my mouth where the word "wisdom" is concerned; but, since I know that Bloom is not trying to "sell a knowledge management solution," it is not hard for me to show a bit more respect when he introduces the noun. In that sense I can read this passage as an extension of one of my initial premises: If I choose the books I read on the basis of how they will inform specific writing projects, Bloom's "prime reason" has to do with the more general capacity for reading to inform the more general "project" of being-in-the-world (having no idea what, if any, opinions Bloom has about Heidegger). In that respect fiction has as much of a capacity (if not more so) to inform our being-in-the-world as non-fiction does, perhaps even to the extent that, even if there is "no single way to read well," we need not invoke different strategies for the respective reading of fiction and non-fiction.

In my previous blog I tried to address this question of reading strategy in the matter of an "essay" by Heinrich von Kleist. I invoked scare quotes because I doubt that any reader will ever know with certainty whether or not Kleist took seriously the propositions he set forth in this particular text or whether he was just pushing the envelope for what one could do with the expository text type. From this point of view, Kleist was playing the same game with expository prose that Raymond Queneau would later do with the texts of pure mathematics in his "The Foundations of Literature (after David Hilbert)" (Number 3 in the Bibliothèque Oulipienne collection). It is with this mindset that I realized I would have to approach the excerpt from J. M. Coetzee's new novel, Diary of a Bad Year, which appears in the current issue of The New York Review.

On the surface this is an interweaving of two texts, a first-person narrative account of a personal experience (that could be based on Coetzee's personal experience but could just as easily be entirely fictitious) and an expository analysis of "central problems in social theory" (if I may be allowed to appropriate the title of one of Anthony Giddens' books, whether or not Coetzee knows about Giddens' writings). In approaching this text, I suspect that it is important to note that, just as it does not matter whether the narrative account has anything to do with Coetzee's past experiences, it also does not matter whether or not the expository analysis reflects Coetzee's personal thoughts and values in the domain of social theory. The first of these "central problems" is "the origins of the state;" and the text takes Thomas Hobbes as its point of departure, including an extended (and footnoted) quotation from On the Citizen. However, Hobbes is rather quickly "interrupted" by an excursus on The Seven Samurai, which makes it immediately clear that the author sees this film as much more than an homage to John Ford. Rather, it is, in that author's words, "no less than the Kurosawan theory of the origin of the state" (perhaps in the same way that the first season of Deadwood elevated the genre of the Western to an exploration of issues also concerned with "the origins of the state").

The author now proceeds to summarize the plot in terms of the village plundered by bandits once a year. This is where things get interesting, because the premise for the plot also becomes a premise of social theory:

The bandits have not yet begun to live among their subjects, having their wants taken care of day by day—that is to say, they have not yet turned the villagers into a slave population. Kurosawa is thus laying out for our consideration a very early stage in the growth of the state.

This is the point at which the reader can only stare at the text and think, as I had previously described in the case of Kleist, "I can't believe I'm reading this!" The author has introduced the proposition that the "state" is fundamentally an institutionalization of slavery (in a manner not that different from Max Weber's definition of politics as the institutionalization of the exercise of authority). This is the point at which the reader has to take a stand on whether or not "context matters" in reading this text. Yesterday I cited the argument of the relevance of context in reading literature but felt strongly that one could not ignore context in reading non-fiction. Does context matter in reading this text that Coetzee is calling a "novel?" I find it hard to believe that Coetzee wishes us to ignore his own South African nationality, let alone the many years during which South African governance had been built on a foundation of institutionalized slavery.

I am not sure I should take this argument much further for now. After all, the only text I have is an excerpt from a larger work. What I have just written is not so much a document about that larger work as an attempt to document the formation of "first impressions" upon reading this excerpt. Of course first impressions are important for any text. They contribute to the frame of mind that the reader brings to the remainder of the text and may often determine whether the subsequent text is read at all. Suffice it to say here that Coetzee has introduced an intriguing strategy for "hooking" his reader. That strategy seems to have worked with me; and, for all I know, I shall still be "hooked" when the book is finally published in January of 2008!

The Way we Read Today

Today's title may have been appropriated from the title of a lecture that Harold Bloom gave at Stanford several years ago. I am not sure of this, but I am more certain that both of us appropriated the idea from the same source, Anthony Trollope's novel, The Way We Live Now. Bloom's Stanford lecture was delivered not too long before the appearance of his book, How to Read and Why; and my only disappointment with this book is that he did not include any pieces of non-fiction among the wealth of case studies that he did provide. Perhaps that is why I have directed my own attention to non-fiction, knowing full well that I could never compete with Bloom on his own turf!

Where popular fiction is involved, Bloom revels in being a merciless iconoclast. His attack on the Harry Potter books attracted enough attention to land him a spot on NewsHour; and it was probably in that spirit of deliberately going against the grain that I voiced my own discontent with Bill Moyers' current approach to righteous indignation, which I accused of being both hollow and vain. I wrote this in response to a video clip from Bill Moyers' Journal that had been posted on Truthdig; and I took a lot of flack for having the temerity (and vanity) to make the accusations I did. Here is one of the more coherent attacks I received:

The issue is Moyer’s uncanny ability to cut through the propaganda to provide in depth, and always factual, analysis that speaks truth to power. If you cannot appreciate the brilliance of a Bill Moyers then you either lack the intellectual capacity to comprehend or you are simply jealous that your communications skills will never, in your life time, rise to the level of an intellectual giant like Bill Moyers.

I found this an interesting example of what happens to our general capacity for discourse when a "sacred cow" gets attacked, if not gored. Because Moyers is not afraid to speak "truth to power," he has been elevated to a pedestal to facilitate his adoration, if not worship, by all those to cleave to the fundamental principles of sound (and liberal) Enlightenment thinking. The extent of Moyers' analyses cannot, by virtue of their delivery as television "editorials," entail very much depth. If you want depth, you need to read (and probably re-read) more extensive content, the kind that cannot be readily grasped as it flows to you from a loudspeaker. Furthermore, any analysis that Moyers delivers is, by its very nature, an interpretation of his observations of the world in which he is situated. Following that strategy of Karl Weick that I discussed yesterday, Moyers assumes the "truth" of his worldview (which has the status of a theory) and applies that truth to teasing out the "meaning" of his observations. This is elusive stuff. The issue is not whether I (or anyone else) has "the intellectual capacity to comprehend" it but that there is an audience out there blinded by the impoverished "channel capacity" of television that thinks they can comprehend it through this particular medium. Again, the proper domain is that of written texts that can be read and re-read; and even then, for all the "intellectual capacity" that can be mustered, the "stuff" of it all will still be elusive!

Am I jealous of Moyers? To some extent I suppose I am. We all write for an audience (even when rehearsing); so I suppose I have some jealousy that Moyers can attract a larger audience than I can (by virtue of which he also receives more compensation for his efforts than I do). However, when I tried to defend my position on Truthdig, my prevailing emotion was frustration; and the frustration was mostly for Moyers' attracting so much attention for doing little more than rehashing a set of observations about the news media without adding anything of substance to what had been accumulated over the last decade. In literature there is a long-standing argument (in which Bloom has participated vigorously) over whether any text should be read in the context of other texts (not all of which need be other texts of literature, such as biographical information about the author); but in non-fiction I feel strongly that we ignore context at great peril. Unfortunately, television news is far too shallow a medium to give context its due; so I guess my real frustration is that, by virtue (vice?) of the extent to which we now rely on television as a source of "news and information," we have lost most, if not all, of that ability to read in context. The perils that we face do not need to be repeated, whether they involve the quality of our government or the quality of the planet to sustain our very future.

Meta-Chutzpah?

As I suspected might be the case, Al Gore III's claim to the Chutzpah of the Week award has been superseded by a much more deserving candidate, Tony Snow. For those who would accuse the panel (i.e. myself) of a bias against the right wing, I have to point out that Snow has taken chutzpah to a new level, yet to be achieved by any other member of the White House circle. He has managed to achieve chutzpah with regard to the use of the word "chutzpah;" in other words, through his linguistic dexterity, he has achieved meta-chutzpah!

This all revolves around a story that Terence Hunt recently reported for Associated Press. Here are the lead paragraphs:

The White House on Thursday made fun of former President Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for criticizing President Bush's decision to erase the prison sentence of former aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

"I don't know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it," presidential spokesman Tony Snow said.

So, how do we count the ways? First we have Snow himself invoking the word, most likely in the absence of any Yiddish culture to inform him of its true semantics and perhaps even in ignorance of the nationality of the word. This was then followed up by the presumption that the word could be translated into "Arkansan," which is sort of a double whammy of presumptions. On the one hand it presumes that there are no Jews in Arkansas (which probably runs the gamut from the dubious to the offensive); and, at the same time, it presumes that they do not speak English in Arkansas, a minor fact that did not escape the Truthdig editors, who were quick to point out that, where the Clinton's are concerned, the use of English (as in "unmitigated gall" or "brazenness") would be more appropriate than the invocation of Yiddish. As to the act of Clinton-bashing itself, that is so much a matter of common practice among the Republicans that the use of the word "chutzpah" can only be taken as an assumption that anyone with an understanding of Yiddish could only be a Democrat (or Michael Bloomberg).

Masada Redux?

It is very hard to read the Reuters dispatches about the siege of the Red Mosque, such as the one just filed from Islamabad by Faisal Aziz, without thinking about the final chapter of Josephus' Jewish War. This is the chapter about, among other things, the last stand at Masada, where those who held out preferred martyrdom to arrest, a spirit now reflected by the cleric Abdul Rashid Ghazi, leader of those who have chosen to remain in the mosque. Actually Josephus did not attach very much significance to the engagement at Masada, which is given only a few paragraphs in a chapter whose title was translated by G. A. Williamson as "Cleaning-up Operations" and whose content deals with events following the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman forces. Masada was held by the Sicarii, described by Josephus as "brigands who took their name from a dagger carried in their bosoms." However, contemporary Israelis do not think very much of Josephus and prefer to see Masada as the last stand of faithful zealots. The Israeli attitude is thus a paraphrase of an old slogan by Barry Goldwater: Extremism in defiance of the Roman Empire is no vice.

Ghazi's extremism is described as "Taliban-style" in Aziz' dispatch; so many Israelis (and probably quite a few others) are likely to chafe at this analogy, particularly in light of what the Taliban did in Afghanistan. The point of the analogy, however, is that the long-term consequences of a mass martyrdom at the Red Mosque may be just as dire as those of the withdrawal of Pakistani government forces. No matter which point of view you choose, Islamabad is now in a mess of staggering proportions, only exasperated by an attempt to assassinate Pervez Musharraf (also part of Aziz' report). By now all the involved parties are too much in the thick of things to apply that old strategy of asking how they got into that mess. Besides, it is hard to ask that question without tripping over proposed answers that have a lot to do with the presence of the United States (Empire?) in that part of the world!

Theorizing about Theorizing

Efforts "to try to stay one step ahead of the next paradigm shift" should take into account the nature of not only the paradigms themselves but also the theories that emerge from those paradigms. In my ongoing effort to assign as much honor to worthy texts from the past as to the latest insights from the present, I find myself frequently returning to the work of Karl E. Weick. Given my proclivity for complementing our preoccupations with "noun-based thinking" with equal attention to "verb-based thinking," I have to respect anyone who shows enough sensitivity to wording to title a book The Social Psychology of Organizing; but I have even more respect when that author issues a second edition of this book that so barely resembles the first edition that only the final chapter has a title that resembles its initial counterpart. So, when I discover that Weick has written about the process of theorizing, even if that text is in a 1987 Handbook of Organizational Communication, I know I will not be disappointed if I give his text a serious reading.

One sign of the paradigm shift from physics-based to biology-based thinking is a move away from Cartesianism, which has probably been discussed most eloquently by Antonio Damasio. However, while Damasio's Descartes' Error was not published until 1994 and the kind of thinking behind the approaches taken by Damasio and Edelman only began to surface in Israel Rosenfield's 1988 The Invention of Memory, Weick was already in their camp with his anti-Cartesian view of theory formation, best summarized in a single sentence:

Evocative ideas need to be cultivated by theorists from the beginning because belief, not skepticism, precedes observation.

In other words, as appealing as Descartes' invocation of doubt may have sounded, the very act of perception cannot take place without a foundation of belief, a proposition that Edelman and his colleagues would later demonstrate in their computer simulations of "wet brain" behavior. Weick then explores the implications of his fundamental proposition:

If believing affects seeing, and if theories are significant beliefs that affect what we see, then theories should be adopted more to maximize what we will see than to summarize what we have already seen. Usually, what we have already seen merely confirms what we expected to see. To theorize better, theorists need to expect more in whatever they will observe.

The consequence of this approach stands as a fascinating inversion to our traditional view of scientific method. Rather than starting with a theory that explains the meaning of what we observe and then testing the "truth" of that theory against the data we collect, we start by assuming the "truth" of the theory and apply it to teasing out the "meaning" of the data.

Biology provides us with a wealth of opportunities to explore this strategy. To invoke Rosenfield's point of departure, however sophisticated we may be in observing our behaviors, we always seem to fall back on the "truth" of the phenomenon of memory, however vague we may be about what it actually is. (Indeed, we are probably better at demonstration that biological memory is not like computer memory than we are at coming up with a model of what biological memory is like.) The problems we face have to do with how we reconcile the data we collect, neurological, psychological, and social, with that "truth" of our understanding of memory. Our progress in addressing such problems has been slow and has involved many false starts (as we see from how much of the twentieth century was occupied with finding the engram); but the progress is there nonetheless.

My point is that both Descartes and the history of physics have impacted not only the way in which we observe the world but also the role of theory in our observing behavior. Previous paradigm shifts have not demanded that we elevate ourselves to the meta-level of theorizing about theorizing. This time around, however, the rules for "normal science" seem to be radically different; and the behavior of those who cling to the paradigm of physics with an almost desperate passion will be quite understandable when viewed through the lenses of psychology and sociology.

Green Chutzpah

You would think that Fourth of July celebrations would provide a mother lode of candidates for this week's chutzpah award; but the morning news seemed pretty mild, at least on the home front. This may be due, at least in part, to the fact that even the usual tub-thumpers have figured out which way the winds of public opinion are blowing and are discovering the exercising caution can have its virtues. For my part the San Francisco Mime Troupe provided the perfect way to celebrate the day with the first performance of their production for this summer, Making a Killing. Both Cheney and Rice are characters in this show, and the actor portraying Cheney could almost serve as a stand-in for the guy. (The Rice actress was a bit too tall for the "genuine article" but made up for her shortcoming (pun intended) with Rice's wonderful technique of clothing her arrogance in sass.) This being "opening night" (actually at 2 PM in Dolores Park), the show was preceded by three of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence leading a responsive reading of about a dozen of the great linguistic gems from the mouth of our President. All this was great ridicule played full-out (as it should have been) but no real source of chutzpah (since, for all of the performers, both "Sisters" and "Mimers," it was just business as usual).

On the other hand the Reuters office down in Los Angeles filed a story that seems to involve an "inconvenient truth" with some amusing "green" coloration:

The 24-year-old son of former Vice President Al Gore was arrested for drug possession on Wednesday after he was stopped for speeding in his hybrid Toyota Prius, a sheriff's official said.

Al Gore III -- whose father is a leading advocate of policies to fight global warming -- was driving his environmentally friendly car at about 100 miles per hour on a freeway south of Los Angeles when he was pulled over by an Orange County sheriff's deputy at about 2:15 a.m.

The deputy smelled marijuana and searched the car, said sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino. The search turned up a small amount of marijuana, along with prescription drugs including Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, Adderall and Soma. There were no prescriptions found, he said.

Gore was arrested on suspicion of drug possession and booked into the Inmate Reception Center in Santa Ana, about 34 miles south of Los Angeles, on $20,000 bail. Although he quickly identified himself as the son of the former vice president, Amormino said Gore received no special privileges.

Gore made bail and was released at 2 p.m., Amormino said. He will receive notice of a court date within 30 days.

Since the week is not over, this is probably a pretty low bar for chutzpah standards, compared with previous weeks; so young Gore may still get bumped out of the running. Nevertheless, there is something about the excess of it all that at least elevates him to candidate status. However, a far more interesting instance of chutzpah could emerge if we find a memo to Toyota dealers citing this example for when customers ask how fast a Prius can really go!

Living in the "Century of Biology"

I just got done reading the Freeman Dyson piece in the latest New York Review, based on lectures he gave in 2004. The opening sentence is: "It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology." The rest of the article explores scenarios that would support this proposition. However, while most of Dyson's scenarios involve eventual roles for biotechnology as the new paradigm for solving the world's problems (poverty being highest on his list), I think he missed out on the real paradigm shift that is likely to be at stake.

The key to that paradigm shift lies in the work of Carl Woese, whom he cites at the beginning of his article. The most important take-away from Woese's work is that the shift away from physics entails a shift away from the reductionist thinking of physics. This is all about trying to explain the complex in terms of combinations of simple constructs, whether it is the detonation of a massively deadly bomb in terms of the behavior of subatomic particles or the sort of strategic planning for an enterprise that tries to abstract the consequences of specific actions into costs and benefits. When Woese speculates on a "new biology," he is thinking about (in Dyson's words) "the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years" (which is to say under the paradigm of physics as "normal science"). It remains to be seen just how the paradigm can (or will) shift; but, when we view agricultural practices through the lenses that Dyson offers, the shift may be in the direction of the sort of "living systems" theory that resulted in a 1000-page book by James Grier Miller back in 1978. This is a paradigm for dealing with an entire ecology with lots of tight couplings (and lots of loose ones, too). Miller (not cited by Dyson) tries to develop a paradigm that can scale from the level of the cell to the level of what he called "the supranational system" (thus anticipating globalization); and two levels below that top level is where he situates the "organization" (where strategic decisions are made on the basis of the cold figures of cost-benefit analyses).

To try to invoke the complexity of living systems to get away from the positivist paradigm of physics-based reductionism may be little more than invoking a new wave of romanticism to counter Enlightenment thinking; but one of my own "rehearsal" objectives is to try to stay one step ahead of the next paradigm shift. Miller, Woese, and Dyson all seem to be thinking about the world at large, rather than the world of the laboratory bench; and it is comforting to see Dyson give so much attention to the problem of poverty, even if I do not agree with everything he says. Personally, I am more impressed by Joel Salatin, whose Polyface Farm experiment was documented in Michael Pollan's recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. This is a farm whose operations are based on "a deep understanding of ecology" (in the words of Tim Flannery's review of Pollan's book in The New York Review). Those of us in the more mundane world of enterprise information systems might do well to take a cue or two from such ecological thinking, even if it means going back to Miller's 1000 pages in search of lessons to help us in these times of great and troubling complexity!

Giving the Government Back to the People

If the Executive Branch of our government is, as I have suggested, truly an institution guided by no motive other than the ability to exercise power then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is likely to make some of our "executives" very nervous. According to a report from Reuters, Brown has decided that since Parliament consists of the elected representatives of the British public, major decisions of national import should be determined by the entire Parliament, rather than the elites of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. Here is the Reuters text reproduced in its entirety to emphasize the implications of Brown's decision:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proposed on Tuesday giving parliament the final word on going to war, saying he planned to relinquish a raft of powers traditionally held by the head of the government.

The measures are designed to bolster public trust in a Labour government and in British politics, shattered by his predecessor Tony Blair's decision to back the U.S.-led war on Iraq and by allegations of sleaze.

Brown said he wanted parliament to hold United States-style hearings on key appointments and assume the power, currently held by the prime minister, to ratify international treaties.

"The changes we propose today and the national debate we now begin are founded upon the conviction that the best answer to disengagement from our democracy is to strengthen our democracy," Brown said in his first statement to parliament since he succeeded Blair on Wednesday last week.

Brown proposed relinquishing or limiting powers held by the head of government for centuries in 12 areas.

They included the power to declare war, to dissolve or recall parliament and to appoint judges and bishops.

He proposed that new members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, including the governor of the central bank, be subject to greater parliamentary scrutiny through hearings.

Brown also said he would consult on a bill of rights for Britain and on lowering the voting age.

The country which we fought to establish our own independence now seems to have a better appreciation of the ideals of our Founding Fathers than our current government does. We need to watch the progress of Brown's vision very carefully, because we may learn some useful lessons from it.

The Language Game of Clemency

Tim Dickinson, who writes the National Affairs Daily blog for Rolling Stone, is right: Language is important, not just "in moments like this," as Dickenson put it in his piece on the commutation of Scooter Libby's jail sentence, but in the who scene set by the context of our times. In their televised report the BBC emphasized the noun "commutation," making it clear that this was not a pardon, although on the Web page for this story, there is no mention of either commutation or pardon. However, Dickenson pointed out that the title of the formal proclamation by George W. Bush that commutes Libby's sentence is "Grant of Executive Clemency;" and Dickinson uses the semantics of "clemency" as the basis for his own reaction:

Clemency is an emotive word. It appeals to our sense of mercy. Clemency is something we should give to the Georgia teenager whose girlfriend gave him head at a party and now is in prison for aggravated child molestation. It’s reserved for those instances where following the letter of the law creates a greater injustice than the crime.

Scooter covered up illicit actions at the highest levels of our government. Libby lied. Intentionally. To the F-B-fucking-I.

If you or I did that we’d be flirting with Gitmo.

The clemency a rogue sheriff tried to give Paris Hilton provoked nationwide outrage. Clemency for a Bush crony should rile us no less.

Now in at least some fairness to the President, the BBC report had Bush describing Libby's 30-month prison sentence as "excessive;" so, in Bush's opinion at least, this was a case where following the letter of the law did create a greater injustice than the crime. On the other hand, as one reads further into the BBC account, one encounters considerable disagreement with Bush's opinion. Unfortunately, these are not times in which we can hold reasoned argumentation over differences of opinion. They are not even times in which Harry Reid's rhetoric on the harsh judgment of history will carry much weight. They may not even be times in which decisions are based on the convictions of faith, rather than the disciplines of reason championed by Enlightenment thinking. These may just be times in which power is all that matters, whether in government, business, or even leisure time. In such times power may be exercised for no reason other than the plain fact that it can be exercised, and no amount of rationality can put a crack in the soundness of that harsh proposition.

No Jail for Scooter

If my fulminations, both here and on Truthdig, about the futility of righteous indignation need any reinforcement, we have only to shift our attention from Rupert Murdoch to George W. Bush. Less than an hour ago, the following appeared on the BBC NEWS Web site:

US President George W Bush has intervened to prevent Lewis Libby, a convicted former vice-presidential aide, from serving a prison term.

President Bush described as "excessive" the 30-month prison sentence Libby was facing for having obstructed an inquiry into the leaking of a CIA agent's name.

Though no longer required to go to jail, Libby is still due to serve a period of probation and pay a fine.

An appeals court had earlier told Libby he could no longer delay going to jail.

Among those who would make Boss Tweed their role model, Murdoch has been reduced to a side show by Bush, who is probably second only to Cheney in this particular capacity. Bush has taken yet another opportunity to demonstrate his wanton disregard for the very concept of due process of law, perhaps for no reason better than his conviction that he can do so. No amount of righteous indignation will change either this act or the motives behind it.

The Hollow (and Vain) Voice of Indignation

I have grown weary of Bill Moyers. I suppose I became first aware of this when I encountered his fumbling attempt to play with irony in a forum that was supposed to be making the complexities of the Net Neutrality issue more palatable. Then there was the interview he gave to Rolling Stone that became the basis for the usual kind of rhetoric-without-logic attack from Bill O'Reilly. However, while every foolish word from O'Reilly's mouth seemed to make Moyers look better and better, the real hero from that episode was Marvin Kalb, who tried to hold his own position for serious examination of text in O'Reilly's presence until O'Reilly cut him off, probably for making too much sense. Moyers was in absentia for that episode, present only through his words in Rolling Stone, while Kalb had to confront O'Reilly in the flesh.

Still, Moyers may have learned a lesson from O'Reilly about the value of rhetoric. If people watch O'Reilly because his rhetoric of hatred is so flamboyantly spectacular, then it may be that Moyer's greatest appeal is his rhetoric of cool and disciplined reason rather than the underlying logic itself. Moyers, after all, has a preacher's background and knows full well that the power of the pulpit does not derive from the text of Scripture but from the rhetoric through which the preacher delivers that text to the congregation. This is not to attack the value of rhetoric; but, back before the Reagan administration gutted its budget, Public Television could satisfy the appetite for ideas to a degree that viewers would be eager to talk about what they had "consumed." Now, as the old joke goes, you come away hungry five minutes after the meal is finished.

I found myself thinking about all this because Truthdig decided to post the video clip of the tail end of the last Bill Moyers' Journal, which amounts to a barrage over the bow aimed at Rupert Murdoch lasting a little under four minutes. Perhaps this was just Moyers doing to Murdoch in absentia what Murdoch's employee had done to Moyers in absentia, this time motivated not by Rolling Stone but by Murdoch's intentions towards The Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine Murdoch paying much attention to Moyers with any response other than the immortal words of Boss Tweed (“What’re ya’ gonna do about it?”). The ultimate truth resided not in Moyers' rhetoric but in an observation volunteered by Truthdig reader "THOMAS BILLIS" in a comment on the Truthdig page:

The ultimate responsibility for Murdoch is the public that buys his crap newspapers and watch his crappier news programs.If people would watch Shakespeare on television it would be on 5 nites a week.Television is an exact mirror of the populace because those whores will show whatever will make a dollar.

This comment then invoked the memory of Ed Murrow, who for so many years was the voice of a commercial radio and television network, to support this demand-side analysis.

This left me wondering if Moyers was doing little more than preening his own vanity, along with, perhaps, the vanity of those who watch him. My thoughts were already in this channel as a result of an open letter that appeared in The New York Review in protest of the detention of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari by the Iranian government. The partial list of signatures is filled with names that will resonate with any New York Review letter: Ian Buruma, Noam Chomsky, Mark Danner, Natalie Zemon Davis, Ronald Dworkin, Jürgen Habermas, Stanley Hoffman, Tony Judt … you get the idea. Are any of these names likely to have an impact on the Iranian government? Does this gesture do anything more than encourage some of us who are less "elevated" to add our names to the petition? Will more names add to the impact? Have all the names on petitions for the release of Alan Johnston had an impact? For that matter, were O'Reilly apply his style of rhetoric against either the Iranian government or the Army of Islam, would he have any more effect than these more high-minded efforts?

I have become tired of the silver-tongued rhetoric of cool reason. It is just as hollow as any other stock-in-trade rhetoric these days and does little more than cultivate another sense of vanity. As I have argued before, if we really wish to see actions taken against egregious offenses, we need to sharpen our weapons of ridicule and use them more effectively!

The Passion of Farfur According to Hamas

In many ways Farfur was a symbol of Hamas' defiance of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that culminated in a separation of Hamas-led Gaza from West Bank territories governed by the PA. Through the very name of their television program, Tomorrow's Pioneers, the Hamas-affiliated al-Aqsa channel set the tone with Saraa, their little girl host, serving as interlocutor for an obvious Mickey Mouse clone (complete with high-pitched voice) spouting propaganda while taking telephone calls from viewers. When the Palestinian Authority tried to pull the program off the air, Farfur demonstrated where the real authority lay in Gaza long before the case was finalized by the recent militant bloodshed. So perhaps Farfur was the avant garde agent provocateur in the Hamas effort to separate Gaza from the Palestinian Authority.

If this was the case, then it was time for Farfur to exit the stage. According to the BBC, al-Aqsa achieved this through one last tirade of hate-filled rhetoric:

The Hamas-affiliated al-Aqsa channel aired the last episode on Friday, showing the character, Farfur, being beaten to death by an "Israeli agent".

"Farfur was martyred defending his land," said the show's presenter Saraa.

At least his ending was more consistent that the efforts to spell his name in the Latin alphabet, where "Farfour" is an equally valid spelling! Indeed, at least one story filed by Nidal al-Mughrabi included both spellings! However, the spelling of the signifier hardly matters when what is signified is such vicious discrimination and hatred. One can only wonder what al-Aqsa next plans to show to its viewers.