Bringing Mahler to Michael's House

When Queen Elizabeth invoked the phrase "Annus Horribilis" to describe the year 1992 in her speech at Guildhall to mark the 40th anniversary of her Accession, she was speaking from an intensely personal point of view. However, there are so many ways in which the phrase may be applied to 2007 from a global point of view that the last thing I want out of end-of-year journalism is that inevitable flood of retrospective impressions. For this reason the only page I felt was worth reading in the "Datebook" section of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle was the weekly full-page advertisement placed by the San Francisco Symphony to announce the coming events at Davies Symphony Hall. Looking forward to something is the only way to drive off the mean reds that are an inevitable part of this year's retrospection.

January promises to be a truly fascinating month at Davies. Much of the reputation of Michael Tilson Thomas here has been made by his performances of the Mahler canon, so it might almost be an act of chutzpah for any other conductor to bring Mahler into "Michael's house" (as they would say, or used to say, in the National Basketball Association). Nevertheless, this will happen twice during the month of January; and I suspect that I am far from the only "good listener" (as Stravinsky had put it) anxiously anticipating both events. The more ambitious is the second one: Mariss Jansons conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the fifth symphony.

Ironically, the last time I heard the Concertgebouw was also for Mahler. It was about 25 years ago, back when Bernard Haitink was "running the shop." My own story actually began on a business trip to Den Hague, at which my host expressed surprise that I would travel all the way to Holland and not try to visit the Concertgebouw. We consulted the newspaper and saw that Haitink was conducting the Mahler seventh symphony. He then had his assistant arrange a ticket for me with absolutely no success: the demand for Haitink's Mahler performances was far too high. The following season, however, the Concertgebouw Orchestra visited Carnegie Hall to give that same concert, thus fulfilling Edward Albee's proposition that "the American Dream" is all about getting a second chance. This time I ordered a ticket as soon as I could and was awe-struck for the entirety of this work that is notoriously unwieldy in just about every imaginable way. In comparison the fifth symphony is a far more orderly composition, but it deploys its orchestral resources in such abundance that it is another one of those works that will never submit to the limitations of recording technology. Thomas recently demonstrated this with the San Francisco Symphony, and now Jansons is bringing the Concertgebouw Orchestra here is establish another point of view of that same mass of orchestral complexity. My only frustration is that the performance will not take place until January 28!

There is another irony in the concert that Jansons has prepared for the preceding night. He will be conducting Hector Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique a little more than a month after the San Francisco Symphony performance under Thomas. Once again, as I have written, this is a work for which there is no substitute for a live performance. It also demands a radically different approach than any composition by Mahler does, so San Francisco will be getting an excellent opportunity to survey a broad scope of Jansons' capabilities.

Nevertheless, it is one thing to come into Michael's house with your own orchestra and another to conduct his orchestra. This is what Myung-Whun Chung will be doing during the days immediately preceding the Concertgebouw visit. He will be conducting the San Francisco Symphony in his interpretation of the Mahler first; and, just to make the entire program a bit more interesting, he will precede the symphony by Olivier Messiaen's "L'Ascension." For sound alone this should be raising all sorts of challenges for the Symphony, and it will certainly be interesting to hear how Chung leads them through all of those challenges. As a reader of William Blake, I have to wonder whether or not this evening will turn into a marriage of the heaven of Messiaen's mystical pieties and the hell of Mahler's stark worldly realities.

Fortunately, I do not think we need fear that Thomas will be upstaged this coming month. The week before Chung brings out the Messiaen, Thomas will be conducting Iannis Xenakis' "À l'ile de Gorée;" and the preceding week I shall finally get my opportunity to hear Deborah Voigt perform with the Symphony doing the "Four Last Songs" of Richard Strauss. If we add to all these other events the visit that Robert Mann will be paying to the San Francisco Conservatory at the end of January, then this may be an opportunity to enjoy an extensive music education all crammed into the temporal interval of 31 days!

A Silicon Valley Story from Al Jazeera

I do not normally expect to find Silicon Valley news on the Al Jazeera English Web site; and, in all fairness, this is not strictly an Al Jazeera story. The "Agencies" byline seems to be their way of saying that the report has been compiled from their wire sources, without explicitly naming any of those sources. Nevertheless, it is interesting that I had to wait until examining my Al Jazeera feed before encountering this item, which definitely has its "roots" down the Peninsula in Silicon Valley.

The story concerns eBay launching a new subsidiary, MicroPlace, which will basically allow anyone on the Internet to participate in the microfinancing process for which the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mohammed Yunis and his Grameen Bank. Here is the lead:

Online auction giant Ebay has launched a microlending website that enables people to invest in entrepreneurs in poor communities around the world and get a return on their money.

"You are actually investing in the world's working poor," Tracey Turner, Microplace.com's founder, said.

Unlike micro-finance organisations, which make interest-free loans to people in developing countries, Microplace.com offers investors profits in return for funding people across the world who are trying to build better lives, Turner said.

The report is written in a highly positive tone, the only contrarian position being saved for the final paragraphs:

The UN's humanitarian news agency, IRIN, showed that according to research by the a microfinance consortium in 2003, evidence of the effectiveness of microfinance as a tool for development remains slim, partly because of the difficulty in monitoring and measuring impact.

Questions have arisen about whether microfinance can ever be as important a tool for poverty alleviation as its proponents and practitioners suggest.

In the IRIN article, Thomas Dichter of the Cato Institute, a Washington DC-based think-tank, called the potential of microfinance "grossly overestimated".

Dichter also criticised the influx of microfinance institutions, claiming that agencies are "jumping into this field" under the assumption they can alleviate poverty without actually looking at the different causes of poverty in different regions.

I am not suggesting that Al Jazeera should have done a more thorough job of pursuing both sides of this argument. I think it is more important that they bothered to release this story at all, particularly in light of the particular approach to the profit motive that Microplace.com seems to be taking (which I suspect would be of interest to the Cato Foundation). There are plenty of "grass roots" foundations out there through which people can make small contributions that matter. (My wife and I have been partial to the Heifer Foundation, partly through our interest in animals.) However, if this particular project does not succumb to the potential flaws and pitfalls that it faces, it may become a case study of how the Internet may be harnessed for the public good on a global scale in far more substantive ways than those observed thus far in, for example, the One Laptop Per Child program.

I'm Not Alone (But I Don't Like the Company)!

The time stamp on yesterday's post indicates that I completed and filed it at 8:09 AM (Pacific Time). This was after John Bolton's appearance on Hannity & Colmes on Thursday. However, because I think the last time I spent more than 60 seconds with Fox News was several years ago in a Tokyo hotel room when I was trying to find any source of "straight news" in English, I did not know about Bolton's opportunity to reflect on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto until I read yesterday's account of it by Mike Aivaz and Nick Juliano for The Raw Story. If I read this account properly, then it would appear that Bolton and I are in the same camp when it comes to stray conspiracy theories: this was not (as I put it) a "pathology of contempt" but a "pathology of ignorance."

At this point, however, our ways depart, at least somewhat. From my perspective the ignorance resided in ill-considered actions towards the promotion of democracy in Pakistan (which, in the context of our more "visceral" goals of capturing Osama bin Laden and/or bringing down Al Qaeda, may, itself, have been an ill-considered goal). As Aivaz and Juliano reported, Bolton was concerned with a different context:

Bolton said the primary concern of the US needs to be the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. With Bhutto's death plunging the country into chaos, there is now a "very grave danger" the weapons will fall under control of radical Islamist militants within the Pakistani military.

"What we have now is a prescription for chaos," Bolton said.

Another foreign policy expert told RAW STORY Thursday that the death of the opposition leader likely has caused the so-called atomic "Doomsday Clock" to tick closer to midnight.

This distinction reveals what may be an interesting difference in decision-making strategy that may explain not only the ignorance leading up to the Bhutto tragedy but also Bolton's abrasive tenure at the United Nations, not to mention the more fundamental question of whether or not our "War on Terror" has been either legitimate or effective.

It all goes back to the distinction that Gore Vidal stressed in the wake of 9/11: The only way to view those attacks was a criminal acts. Since we are all reared on the "law" and "order" perspectives of crime prevention by our television viewing habits, we should all remember that the prosecution of a criminal act is grounded on three factors: means, motive, and opportunity. Bolton's reflection on Hannity & Colmes seems to indicate that he believes that any "War on Terror" should be based on "battles over means," so to speak. In terms of Republican ideology, this is slightly ironic, since it comes down to the principles behind gun control, but on a much larger scale that includes nuclear weapons. My own belief, which I have tried to write about in the past but never particularly clearly, is that we can only understand terrorism by viewing it through the lenses of motives: If we can undermine or disable the motives, the threat of those motivated to attack us will be reduced. (It is with a bit of trepidation that I suggest that just about every story about an Al Qaeda video I have seen, particularly those issued by bin Laden himself, are focused primarily on "messages of motive.")

Why is this distinction important? The answer resides in another one of my favorite themes, which I usually discuss when I am writing about technology. One can try to address the problem of means in the "objective world;" but problems of motive reside strictly in the "social world," with all the messiness it entails with regard to communicative actions. At the risk of being too reductive, Bolton came across as so disagreeable at the United Nations because his fixation on the objective world blinded him to all that messiness; and, as a result, his communicative actions just made our social relations in the global community messier. This is not to dismiss the value of an objective perspective (or, for that matter, the importance of means of access to nuclear and other dangerous weapons); it is to dismiss the view that the objective perspective is the only perspective, which seems to be a view that Bolton shares with most of the neoconservative community. Unfortunately, the mess we are now in is, more than anything else, a consequence of "a failure to communicate" (thank you, Paul Newman, not to mention Winston Churchill's remark at the White House on June 26, 1954: "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war"); and, if we persist in our dismissive attitude towards the importance of communicative actions, particularly where the social world is concerned, that mess will only get worse.

Conspiracies, Anyone?

I first heard a report of the Associated Press/Yahoo! News poll on NPR this morning, so I was glad to see a more extensive written account by Associated Press Writers Jim Kuhnhenn and Trevor Tompson on the Yahoo! News Web site. Here is the lead:

Voters began to worry more about their pocketbooks over the last month — even more than about the war in Iraq.

More than half the voters in an ongoing survey for The Associated Press and Yahoo! News now say the economy and health care are extremely important to them personally. They fear they will face unexpected medical expenses, their homes will lose value or mortgage and credit card payments will overwhelm them.

Events, however, can quickly change public opinion. Thursday's assassination of Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto could draw more attention to terrorism and national security, an issue that still ranked highly with the public and which 45 percent of those polled considered extremely important.

Most of the article is devoted to the first two paragraphs, the only surprise being the extraordinary strength that the writers must have exercised to avoid hauling out the old Clinton campaign slogan, "It's the economy, stupid!" The reader who persists through this portion of the discussion, however, will be rewarded by the following elaboration of the third paragraph:

The impact of Bhutto's assassination on public opinion depends on whether Americans perceive her death as an added threat to the United States. Terrorism was the only issue polled that Republicans were trusted to handle better than Democrats.

Republican Rudy Giuliani had benefited most from people's fears of terrorism. But over the past month his level of support dropped, even among voters who said terrorism was an important issue. Giuliani is now trying to get some of those voters back, releasing an ad Thursday that uses images of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on New York.

Assassinations have long been a notorious breeding ground for conspiracy theories. I sometimes wonder if the shock of the tragedy leads people to dispense with rationality, perhaps out of the despairing feeling that rationality no longer does any good. Thus, the more hare-brained the conspiracy theory, the more likely it is to proliferate. It is a game anyone can play and is thus best avoided.

Nevertheless, it is hard for me to shake free of the contextual knowledge that the Bush Administration played a major role in persuading Bhutto to return to Pakistan with the promise of her concluding a power-sharing agreement with President Pervez Musharraf. The reasoning probably was based on the premise that a powerful secular authority was more important to American interests than a government that reflected the voice of the people at a time when many of those voices were being drawn to fundamentalist Islam. On the basis of the news reports, we can assume that Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice knew that it would be difficult to cultivate any beneficial dialog between Bhutto and Musharraf, particularly if the only real beneficiary would be the United States; but we can probably also assume that her reasoning was heavily (exclusively?) influenced by ideological commitment. That same ideological commitment, however, probably also allowed her to ignore the extent to which her strategy would be putting Bhutto into harm's way, with the possible consequence of losing all the marbles in this game. However, to push that metaphor a bit further, those would be Pakistani marbles, meaning that the strategy was not only blind to risk but also short-sighted with respect to higher-level goals, such as capturing Osama bin Laden or bringing down Al Qaeda. On the other hand, if all the marbles were lost (and there is now a pretty clear threat of this being the case), then the American fear of terrorism would escalate, either of its own accord or with a bit of encouragement from appropriately placed propaganda.

Does all this add up to a conspiracy theory that Bhutto was sacrificed to turn American opinion back in favor of the Republican administration? Before leaping to such a conclusion, recall the three forms of "service pathology" I recently explored (bearing in mind that any government is basically a service provider whose clients are the citizens of the country): ignorance, negligence, and contempt (usually manifested through malice). Any conspiracy theory would have to be grounded in motivated actions directed towards the third form: a willfully malicious contempt of opinions of the electorate that were finally heard in the 2006 election. My guess is that this is not the case, since so much of the narrative in the preceding paragraph involves decision-making that was impeded by excessive ideology. The narrative is one of signification incapacitated by ideology, a fundamental ignorance of how to "read the signs" and "see things as they are," from which one could then anticipate the consequences of one's actions. It is based on the familiar (and usual incorrect) assumption that theory can trump practice. Unfortunately, practice almost always gets the upper hand and can be very cruel when it does so (as it was in this particular situation).

So I seem to have demonstrated my initial point: Thinking about conspiracies tends to eschew rationality. Rationality tends to come up with better explanations. They are not necessarily pleasing explanations; and, when the situation is a tragic one, they tend not to make us feel better. Nevertheless, I continue to support Stephen Flynn's fundamental proposition in his book, The Edge of Disaster: In trying to deal with terrorism, resiliency is more important than preventative security. As in Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," we can never be absolutely secure from all harm; but we can be strong enough to recover quickly and surely when harm attacks. The riots on the streets of Pakistan are now playing out a narrative of the lack of resiliency. They won't make us feel any better either; but we should take them as an object lesson about our own national priorities, which have been severely jeopardized by excessive ideology. Unless we get out from under that jeopardy, we shall be as lacking in resiliency as the Pakistanis currently are; and we definitely will not feel good any the consequences that ensue from such a position!

Chutzpah for the Sake of Attention

I sometimes worry whether commenting on the "right to bear arms" is riskier than raising questions about either patriotism or extreme religious beliefs; so it is with a certain amount of trepidation that I have decided that the Chutzpah of the Week award should go to the National Rifle Association. However, this is not a case of arguing over what is or is not allowed under the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights but one of what might be called "indelicately exploiting a delicate situation." The basis for the award is a report filed by Associated Press writer Michael Kunzelman. Here is Kunzelman's lead:

The National Rifle Association has hired private investigators to find hundreds of people whose firearms were seized by city police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to court papers filed this week.

The NRA is trying to locate gun owners for a federal lawsuit that the lobbying group filed against Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Warren Riley over the city's seizure of firearms after the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane.

In the lawsuit, the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation claim the city violated gun owners' constitutional right to bear arms and left them "at the mercy of roving gangs, home invaders, and other criminals" after Katrina.

The NRA says the city seized more than 1,000 guns that weren't part of any criminal investigation after the hurricane. Police have said they took only guns that had been stolen or found in abandoned homes.

My argument is that this is a situation that was based in a chaos from which those institutions that make the city of New Orleans what it is are still recovering. Now is not that time to exploit that painful recovery process as part of the lobbying interests of the NRA. The implication of the language of the lawsuit that only gun owners' were vulnerable to "roving gangs, home invaders, and other criminals," because they no longer had their guns, is an insult to a police force that was stretched beyond its limits when the entire population was vulnerable.

Yes, in a time of chaos, bad decisions get made: Some are questionable; others are flat out wrong. We all know this. However, this is not the time to be arguing over one of those decisions, particularly when so much positive recover work is taking place. We do not need distractions like this, particularly if this is more a matter of the NRA flexing is muscles of influence in preparation for the candidate selection process that is about to begin. The chutzpah does not reside in "the principle of the thing" but in the rather inept way in which that principle has been converted into action at the wrong time, if not the wrong place.

Slouching towards HABEAS CORPUS

As I was driving down to Palo Alto early this morning, this was the lead story on the BBC World Service Radio:

Iraq's government has backed a draft law that enables the release of thousands of suspected insurgents held captive by US and Iraqi forces.

The amnesty law is thought to specify offences for which prisoners who have been held without charge can be freed.

Parliament must debate the law on Sunday before it is ratified.

Hearing it read (while paying more attention to freeway traffic), my first impression was that Iraq had "discovered" habeas corpus, because I do not think the news reader ever used the word "amnesty," concentrating, instead, on the proposed release of prisoners being held without charge. The text version throws a different light on the whole matter, and it is not a particularly pleasant one. If these are prisoners currently being held without charge, for what are they being granted amnesty? I found it a grim reminder of the sour note that began the administration of President Gerald Ford, when he issued a blanket pardon for Richard Nixon that effectively covered any crimes he had or might have committed while in office. If my initial reaction from the radio account was that Iraq might teach the United States a thing or two about due process of law, my reaction to the text account is that they are learning from our current practices all too well!

The Civil Tongue

Most of my attention to C-SPAN is occupied by their XM Satellite Radio feed. For the most part I do not feel I am missing anything by ignoring the visuals. However, this morning on Washington Journal, Frank Luntz came prepared with video clips from the debates of the Presidential contenders, along with an assortment of PowerPoint (yes!) slides; so I traded the radio for the television over today's breakfast. C-SPAN is about the only broadcasting source for which I am willing to sit through phone-in questions and comments. One reason is that they request voluntary classification, providing separate numbers for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. Another is that the level of discourse is on such a different plane from commercial talk radio (and, more often than not I fear, public radio) that the callers tend to cleave to that plane.

That turned out not to be the case on this morning of Peace on Earth and Good Will Towards Men. The result was a shift in the focus of the discourse itself. It began with a caller going on a rant that departed from the usual level of discourse. There are a variety of explanations for such behavior, all of which have been better analyzed by Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature; but in this case the result was that both Luntz and the moderator agreed to cut off the caller. This eventually led to another call that challenged Luntz on whether or not he believed in free speech, to which Luntz replied rather nicely that one can exercise free speech without being uncivil about it. Ironically, this was followed by another less-than-civil call, which was again prematurely dismissed. Luntz then noted whimsically that the two cut-off calls had been equally distributed between the Democrat and Republican telephone lines.

I have been interested in Luntz since I read about his book Words that Work in The New York Review. In that review Michael Tomasky (who has been doing one of the better jobs of putting the pre-primary hysteria into perspective) described Luntz as "the Republicans' most famous spin doctor of the past fifteen years," which made it interesting that Luntz openly resisted C-SPAN labeling him as a "Republican Pollster." (His argument, as I recall, had two prongs. First, his current focus is on focus groups, rather than polls. Second, he offers his service without bias to both parties.) Thus, I do not think that Luntz was being hypocritical in criticizing the erosion of civility in political discourse. Indeed, shortly after reading Tomasky's account of Luntz' book, I wrote a critique of a column by Eugene Robinson, which I felt violated two fundamental "laws" that one could take away from reading either the book or its review:

1. You are not going to persuade anyone of your position if the first thing you do is call that person stupid.
2. Furthermore, you are not going to persuade that person if you call anyone that person clearly admires stupid.

I make this observation, because I feel it is important at a time when so much of what gets published may well be obsolete before the end of the first publishing run (or, as I have put it before, has a "knowledge half-life" that can be measured in months, if not weeks, rather than centuries, as would be the case for Plato). Here was an example of a book that had at least a few offerings of enduring value, even if that endurance may not be on the half-life scale of a Plato. Whether or not that value would turn a profit for the author is not particularly relevant, since the author's "day job" seems to be taking care of his "creature comforts" well enough.

In the long run of history, however, I may be biased towards Luntz for tilting at one of my own favorite windmills, knowing full well that his impact will be minimal. Entropy is not restricted to the objective physical world of thermodynamics. There are many other processes that inevitably devolve into chaos; and, whether we like it or not, political discourse may be one of those processes.

Oscar Peterson in Jazz History

After all that writing about Bach, I settled down to watch the 3 PM telecast of the BBC News and learned that Oscar Peterson had died. I was glad to see that the BBC chose this as a "front page" story, even if their coverage left more than a little to be desired. Anyone who has any question as to the importance of reporting the death of such an important jazz pianist would to better to consult Wikipedia over the BBC, since this entry is less concerned with the personality of the man and more with his position in the grand scheme of jazz history.

The difference between the two accounts is most evident in the dog that failed to bark in the BBC account. That dog, of course, was Art Tatum, regarded by many as the strongest influence on Peterson. At the risk of making it all sound too reductive, just about any form of Western music comes down to the art of embellishment, how and where it is applied, how extensive it is, and, as the forms became more developed, how embellishments themselves could be embellished. In the history of classical music, Franz Liszt pushed embellishment to extremes that could be exasperating, if not offensive to some of more disciplined natures. To call Tatum the Liszt of jazz would not constitute offense to either pianist. Indeed, one of the frequent comments made about the vast catalog of Tatum recordings is that a little bit can go a long way.

However, in the spirit of that analogy, if Tatum was the Liszt of jazz, then Peterson was its Busoni, highly virtuosic in his understanding of both how to apply embellishment to the underlying "text" (i.e. song) and how to execute the embellishing without the embellished getting lost in the blur. When the CD was finally released of a session organized by Norman Granz that brought Peterson together with Count Basie, this was the first sentence on the back of the jewel case:

It could be argued that no two pianists could be more unalike than Count Basie, the master of understatement, and Oscar Peterson, the avatar of speed, power, and embellishment.

My own pet name for this CD is "The Minimalist Meets the Maximalist." The "official" name, however, is The Timekeepers, wherein all proper respect resides. Time was of the essence for both of these men, who knew full well that, without an "art of time," there is no "art of music." Thus, time was also the one element that could unite two such disparate performers, each of which understood the other in terms of strategies for how time passes (that last phrase having emerged in the title of an essay by Karlheinz Stockhausen, who may not have been a slouch where jazz was concerned).

Basie died back in 1984. Indeed, too many of the greatest who had performed so well with Peterson are gone as well. Atheist that I am, I still cannot resist the fantasy that they are all up there in heaven waiting for Oscar to join the jam. Meanwhile, there is so much of Oscar in every recording he made that the rest of us can keep learning to be better listeners from those recordings for some time to come.

Collecting Bach

Our household is not particularly big on gifts. Living in a condominium in the San Francisco Civic Center, we had to experience a rather radical downsizing of stuff when we sold the house in Palo Alto, especially when the contents of our garage led to the Mother of All Garage Sales. Consequently, I have a tendency to annoy my wife when, if she is thinking about buying something, I reply "Do we have space for it?" However, every now and then something shows up that deserves the space, even if it means taking space occupied by something else.

Last week, when my wife came home with the Brilliant Classics Bach Edition, which she had received as a gift from someone who knew that she was a serious music-lover, my immediate reaction was to point out that a sizable chunk of the condominium volume was being occupied by the Teldec Bach 2000 collection. However, since I already had the Brilliant collection of the complete works of Mozart, I had the good sense to hold my tongue and do a bit of exploration. After some initial sampling I now feel it important that the puppy can stay.

Those unfamiliar with Brilliant probably do not know that they are the "paperback press" of classical CDs. They are a Dutch outfit basically in the reprinting business, but they have shown a lot of good taste. The Mozart collection is a mixed bag, but how could anything that large be other than mixed? Besides, I got fed up with St. Martin in Neville's Recording Studio decades ago and therefore never had the urge to spring for the Philips Complete Mozart Edition. Furthermore, the packaging is really compact. Each disc is in a rather flimsy paper envelope, and all the liner notes are in PDF files on a CD-ROM. I have not consulted those files very much, particularly since I have so many other sources for Mozart; but I still appreciate the packaging strategy.

My only real beef with Brilliant is that they do not communicate directly with the consumers. As fate would have it, out of the 153 CDs in the Bach 2000 collection, one was missing: The cardboard jacket for the Orgelbüchlein contained a second copy of another disc of chorale partitas and other short organ works. Since I had purchased the collection (at a rather impressive discount) from Collectors' Choice Music, I got in touch with them; but the only thing they could offer was to replace the entire set, which I was hoping to avoid. Fortunately, however, I was able to get in touch with the Hamburg office of Warner Music, where they were only too happy to send me the missing disc (without requiring me to return the duplicated one). On the other hand the Brilliant collection of the complete Haydn symphonies, which I had again ordered from Collectors' Choice, had a similar problem. A duplicate of the final disc (Symphonies 103 and 104) was in the jacket for (among other things) Symphony No. 94 ("Surprise!"). All efforts to reach Brilliant through electronic mail were in vain; but this time the Collectors' Choice invitation to replace the whole set was a bit more palatable, particularly when they made the exchange process so easy (and expense-free). Of course Brilliant must operate on a far smaller scale than Warner, so I was happy enough that the problem could be resolved.

Nevertheless, whatever the virtues of Brilliant may be, if space is such a premium in our condominium, do we really want two distinct sets of the complete works of Bach? Well, it is certainly not conspicuous consumption at the level that Mad Magazine once captured in their Fiddler on the Roof parody:

Headshrinker, headshrinker,
I am his spouse.
Two minks I own;
One's for the house.

The question is more whether my wife and I have world enough and time for two distinct performances of so many compositions. Regular readers probably know my answer already: There is always time to hear a new performance of a piece of music, no matter how familiar it may be; music lives, not through the fixity of marks on a page, but through the diversity of the ways in which those marks can be interpreted. Bach "lives" precisely because living musicians are always coming up with new ways to approach the performance of his work. Having such diversity on so extensive scale does wonders for becoming a better listener!

To be fair, I still have to determine just how diverse that diversity actually is. I am just beginning to listen to the Brilliant discs, and I have not yet tried to do any really serious comparisons. So my initial excitement may be premature, but it is still allowing me to embark on an interesting adventure.

Meanwhile, there are already two areas of difference about which I can comment. One has to do with the contents of the collection and the other with how the collections are organized. The Brilliant collection has 155 CDs, i.e. two more than were in the Bach 2000 collection. I immediately accounted for one of those discs: The Brilliant collection has a Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach disc, with 32 tracks, many of which are from the Schmieder Anhang and others of which are not by Bach but were copied in for his wife's enjoyment (presumably). In the Bach 2000 collection, on the other hand, the Notenbüchlein is represented by only eight tracks at the end of the final disc in the "Motets, Chorales & Songs" box, none of which are from the Anhang. Of course much of the Notenbüchlein is for solo keyboard and would therefore not belong in this collection; so the "editorial decision" seems to be based on whether or not the Anhang should be represented. That being the case, there may be other Anhang entries to account for the other additional disc; but I shall have to do some further digging to find them.

This brings us to the matter of organization. Bach 2000 was packaged as a four-by-three array of cubic boxes. The first four boxes contained the sacred cantatas. The fifth box contained the secular cantatas, the sixth the other large sacred choral works, and the seventh the collection cited in the last paragraph. The eighth box contained all the organ music, followed by the keyboard music in the ninth and tenth boxes. The eleventh box contained the chamber music and the final box the orchestral works. This is roughly the way in which Wolfgang Schmieder organized the music for his (BWV) catalog. It is also the basis for the index printed in the 244-page book that comes with the collection, in which dates are attached to each entry (where known and sometimes modified with a question-mark). This has become a great reference for me for far more than finding my way around the collection.

The Brilliant collection uses a simpler grouping into six "volumes."

1. Orchestra Works/Chamber Music
2. Keyboard Works
3. Cantatas I
4. Cantatas II
5. Vocal Works
6. Organ Works

The index on the cover of the box is more than a little arbitrary (probably due to the constraints of printing area) in choosing between text and BWV numbers. My guess is that I am going to continue to use the index in the book for finding my way around this second collection.

Finally, there is the question of what gets classified where. In the Brilliant collection the entire Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach is included as chamber music, which, for me at least, makes more sense than singling out the vocal material for a general vocal collection. More problematic is the Art of Fugue. Bach 2000 includes this in the chamber music collection, but it is performed by a solo organ. Brilliant classifies it in Volume II, rather than Volume VI; and the performance appears to be by a harpsichord. I need to figure out whether or not this is a pedal harpsichord, because, unless I am mistaken, there are passages that really cannot be handled by two hands (at least without a damper pedal). Of course, it may be that the performer applied the "Glenn Gould" solution of overdubbing, which my ear may not be able to detect. However, I shall have to think some more about this particularly organizational decision.

On the other hand that may be a waste of cycles. For all the interest we take in the performances of the individual movements of Art of Fugue, there is no reason to assume that Bach ever expected them to be performed. This is a treatise about the "art" of composing fugues, written in the only language in which Bach could write well, music notation. There is something slightly naive about the assumption that anything that looks like music should be played like music. (As one of my thesis readers put it, "Who wants to listen to an entire evening in D minor?") That is actually what infuriated me the most about Gödel, Escher, Bach. The book is overloaded with philosophy grounded in the puzzle canons of the Musikalisches Opfer when there is no reason to believe that those "notes" were ever intended as music to be played by instruments. As the name implies, they were puzzles, intellectual amusements that Bach could share with Frederick the Great without worrying about whether or not any performers would get in the way, let alone whether latter-day theorists would dignify them by calling them "music!"

I have no idea whether or not I shall "file any further dispatches" as I work my way through the Brilliant collection. I have yet to hear a disc that has disappointed me, but I am not yet sure what the impact will be on my overall listening to Bach (or anyone else's music, for that matter). At the very least the Brilliant collection has done an excellent job of keeping the place free of Christmas carols!

Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim

I always get suspicious when "everyone" is recommending that I read, see, or listen to something; and my suspicions have a bad tendency to erupt into backlash. (Would I have written a more moderated and less devastating review of Gödel, Escher, Bach had a colleague not forced the book on me, at a gun-point that was powerfully metaphorical, even if it was not literal?) Consequently, I am wondering whether or not my curiosity about Tim Burton's rendering of Sweeny Todd will get the better of me, particularly since I much prefer to spend my entertainment money on "live" performances. That curiosity was dampened when the word got out that the opening chorus of the original musical had been dropped, presumably because it was too much of an artifice of the stage to fit in with Burton's vision. My immediate reaction was that this would be like hearing a performance of Beethoven's fifth symphony from which the first movement had been dropped.

However, upon reading Walter Addiego's interview with Burton in today's Chronicle, it appears that Stephen Sondheim himself did not take it that way. In the course of the interview, Burton dished out a quotation from Sondheim after an early screening:

Listen, this isn't a re-creation of the show. It's a movie based on the show. Don't have any preconceived ideas about it. Just go into it.

Still, it will be hard for me to shake the preconception based on the decision of Houston Opera to include the work in one of their seasons. In my book Sondheim has produced two works that can stand head-to-head with what was "officially" done in the name of opera during the twentieth century. Sweeny Todd is one of them, and Pacific Overtures is the other. Even if Burton has not bought into such an operatic premise, I still tend to be uncomfortable with opera in a movie house and actually prefer it on my own television set.

So, more likely than not, I shall wait until it finds its way to cable, which will probably not take very long, given the competition it will be facing at the box office. Meanwhile, I can dwell on the more interesting question of whether Burton will join the ranks of other directors best known for their films, such as Franco Zeffirelli, Ingmar Bergman, and William Friedkin, and either seek out or accept an opportunity to work on a "real" opera stage? He certainly has the visual chops for the job, along with a keen sense of what it takes to deliver a narrative; but can he work with the neurotic performers of the opera world as well as he can work with the neurotics in the movie business?

A Narrative of Times that Try Men's Souls

Katrina vanden Heuvel used her post to The Notion, the blog site maintained by The Nation (which she happens to edit) to reproduce the following excerpt of a declaration:

We are lawyers in the United States of America. As such, we have all taken an oath obligating us to defend the Constitution and the rule of law…. We believe the Bush administration has committed numerous offenses against the Constitution and may have violated federal laws…. Moreover, the administration has blatantly defied congressional subpoenas, obstructing constitutional oversight …. Thus, we call on House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy to launch hearings into the possibility that crimes have been committed by this administration in violation of the Constitution…. We call for the investigations to go where they must, including into the offices of the President and the Vice President. -- American Lawyers Defending the Constitution

The post itself then went on to report on the rising trend of lawyers enjoining the Congress to take more decisive actions against the abuse of the Constitution by the Executive Branch.

In the context of the narrative of history, this makes for an interesting recapitulation. The first serious threat to Pervez Musharraf's assumption of carte blanche in his dictatorial rule of Pakistan came from the community of lawyers, provoked primarily by his attempts to interfere with the operations of the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the lawyers took to the streets; and things got ugly. Unfortunately, in the longer course of the narrative, Musharraf agreed to shed his uniform and to allow an election with a more serious semblance of opposition participation. The reason I chose the words of that last phrase so delicately, however, is that, for all intents and purposes, we are back to business as usual in Pakistan; and, once again, the rest of the world has other things to look at (thank you, Douglas Adams).

In this country the President does not wear a uniform; and the lawyers are not yet protesting in the streets, perhaps because the impact of the Executive on the Supreme Court has been too indirect to be perceived as interference. Thus, even if this statement and similar measures may set off some ripples of discontented consciousness, the fluid in which those ripples form will be too viscous for them to propagate very far. Even Al Gore has told the world basically to ignore President Bush and think forward to the administration that will be elected in November. Such a point of view would probably oppose my objection to those senators who feel that their time on the campaign trail is more important than time spent doing the "people's business" in Washington. However, that kind of chastisement is not enough to persuade me to change my position. Rather, I take it as evidence that Gore is no longer devoting many of his mental cycles to the problems of government and politics, probably because those cycles are being absorbed by the challenge of persuasion on a global scale.

That little joke by Tom Lehrer about allegiance being ruled by expedience goes beyond jibes at former Nazis. When we pay attention to the words we rattle off out of a sense of habit, we find that our allegiance is pledged to that republic symbolized by our flag. That republic is defined by a constitution grounded in laws: making laws (the Legislative branch), enforcing laws (the Executive branch), and deciding when laws have been violated and how violations should be punished (the Judicial branch). That grounding could not exist without the operational processes of those three branches of government, but we must not forget that those processes are there to serve a rule of law without which our republic would no longer be defined. In other words to appeal to needs for expedient implementation of those processes (as we saw in the logic behind the decision not to pursue impeachment proceedings) is to sacrifice our allegiance to our republic.

Perhaps this gets at why so many of our electorate seem so disenchanted. They may not be able to put it in the sort of words I have been concocting, but they are still smart enough to recognize when the machinery of their government is running roughshod over a pledge they have been making since childhood. They also recognize their own helplessness as they witness their most patriotic values being undermined. Hence my title: These are truly times that try men's souls. They are also times in which those who would oppose those souls realize that it is more expedient to narcotize them than to fight them overtly.

In the past the broken record in me tries to wrap up the argument with a conclusion that this is the world the Internet has made. However, this world was in the making long before the networking of computers was a gleam in anyone's mind. I suspect it would be fairer to say that this is the world that the "modern business school education," with its emphasis on the objective identification of goals and the selection of efficient "operators" to achieve them, has made. It is a mindset that was already beginning to emerge during the Second World War and was so entrenched in our national consciousness by the end of the century that any question of an alternative point of view was dismissed as ridiculous. In the past I have suggested that we have now succumbed to an addictive behavior; so I suppose the question is whether or not there is any "program" (Lord only knows how many steps) we can follow to pull out of that addiction. Perhaps Gore should be devoting some of his cycles to this problem, rather than falling back on a this-too-shall-pass attitude towards the mess in which we are all mired.

Interesting News (if it's News)

Bearing in mind that I still hold to the precept that blogging is not journalism, I have to confess that I was curious about a post on Net News Publisher under the headline, "‘Long Shot’ Kucinich Leads Among Online Independent Voters." Posted by "admin," this jumble of assertions, which probably did not go through any fact-checking process, is a perfect poster child for advertising the value of good editing at a time when we are still be deluged by Web 2.0 evangelism. Nevertheless, the headline fascinated me so much that I could not resist dusting off my editor's visor (metaphorically) and trying to figure out for myself if there was actually signal in all the noise. It turns out that there is signal; but you have to read pretty closely to learn that the post is based on the results from a poll conducted by an organization called IndependentPrimary.com. There is nothing scientific about this poll. If you want to participate, you just sign up on the Web site (using the hyperlink I attached to IndependentPrimary.com); and, as far as I can tell, that is all it takes for your voice to be heard.

The result Web page for this organization provides the evidence behind the headline. Among those who declared themselves as Democrats (80,153), 76.7% (61,477 respondents) "voted" for Kucinich. There was also a Republican poll with only 25,269 participants, a whopping 93% of whom selected Ron Paul. In both parties none of the other would-be candidates could muster a double-digit standing (i.e. 10% or higher), meaning that, while the sample itself may not be statistically representative, the results are statistically significant. (If you think that what you just read is a candy-coated way of saying garbage-in-garbage-out, you probably have a good point!)

The Net News Publisher post cites three other polls, each of which may be flawed in its own way. One was conducted by Democracy for America (DFA), whose slogan is "Social Progress; Fiscal Responsibility; Grassroots Activism." Their account of their poll leaves a bit to be desired:

Last month over 154,000 of you voted in the largest primary poll of 2008. The poll made clear two striking facts: A 78% consensus for the top three progressive candidates of Edwards, Kucinich, and Obama¹. And 95% of DFA members voted for someone other than the media's frontrunner.

Once again, the question of sampling has been totally disregarded; but in this case the question of statistical significance of results is not as decisive. The superscript refers to the Web page with the numbers. Kucinich is still at the top with roughly 11,000 "votes" putting him ahead of Al Gore. The way you get that "78% consensus" if to drop Gore from the options and rebalance the percentages over the reduced sample.

Then there is the group called Progressive Democrats of America (PDA). They have provided the most thorough account of their results in a PDF file. The problem here is that their membership is only 80,685; and only 15,810 of the members voted. So we have lots of tables all with lots of relatively small numbers. With these limitations, their own account of the results is about as acceptable as one could anticipate:

Not surprisingly in a field of eight contenders, no candidate came close to gaining a majority of the total vote in PDA's recently completed presidential straw poll. But two candidates--Dennis Kucinich (41%) and John Edwards (26%)--combined for more than 2/3 of the total vote. Over 15,000 PDA activists voted in the presidential straw poll. Full results here.

After Kucinich and Edwards, only one other candidate-Barak Obama (13%)-made it into double digits. All the rest were in single digits: Hillary Clinton (9%), Bill Richardson (5%), Joe Biden (3%), Chris Dodd (1%), Mike Gravel (less than 1%). In contradiction to media reporting on the primary race, PDA's results parallel those of DFA, Daily KOS, the Texas Democratic Party and others whose polls show very weak support for Clinton among the Democratic base.

Finally, The Nation conducted its own poll, presumably among its readers. I have not yet tried to track down these numbers. I do not recall seeing them on my RSS feed. My guess is that the sample would be somewhere in the same league as that of Progressive Democrats of America. Here is the summary from Net News Publisher:

And, in a poll conducted by the progressive The Nation magazine, he [Kucinich] won with 35% of the vote. Obama came in second with 24%, and Edwards was third with 13%.

Now I personally have enough interest in Kucinich and many of the principles he is trying to promote that nothing would please me more than to find him pulled out of the slough of statistical insignificance. I only object to extricating him with methods that justify ranking statistics as worse than damn lies! What depresses me is that these are results that take place out there on the long tail, which means that one only reads about them on that same long tail. Viewed from the other end of the telescope, this means that these results do not "count as news" at the editorial desks of the mainstream media; and, critical as I am of how the mainstream media tries to shape our thoughts, rather than report on them, the statistical methods behind those polls may be sufficiently weak to justify the editorial decisions.

This brings us back to my original theme. The blogosphere is a great place for the stuff that Abraham Lincoln had in mind when he said, "This is the sort of thing that people who like that sort of think like." Call it an echo chamber or a vanity mirror; just do not pretend that it is journalism. Whatever the media business may be doing to undermine the role of journalism as a public trust, there is still a critical mass of practitioners out there trying to carry the flame. We should not abandon them just because we can find places on the Internet where we can read things that make us feel better.

Strengthening this Week's Chutzpah Case

Today's Los Angeles Times has a follow-up article by Janet Wilson about Stephen Johnson the reinforces yesterday's Chutzpah of the Week award decision and one of the hypotheses behind that decision. Here is the lead:

The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ignored his staff's written findings in denying California's request for a waiver to implement its landmark law to slash greenhouse gases from vehicles, sources inside and outside the agency told The Times on Thursday.

"California met every criteria . . . on the merits. The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers," said an EPA staffer. "We told him that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts."

EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson announced Wednesday that because President Bush had signed an energy bill raising average fuel economy that there was no need or justification for separate state regulation. He also said that California's request did not meet the legal standard set out in the Clean Air Act.

But his staff, which had worked for months on the waiver decision, concluded just the opposite, the sources said Thursday. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the media or because they feared reprisals.

Thus, this award goes solely to Johnson and should not in any way reflect on all the other members of EPA staff who have been trying to do their respective jobs under what appear to be highly adverse conditions.

The hypothesis that justified the award on the basis of terminology that Johnson shared with the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, on the other hand, may require further investigation:

Some staff members believe Johnson made his decision after auto executives met with Vice President Dick Cheney and after a Chrysler executive delivered a letter to the White House outlining why neither California nor the EPA should be allowed to regulate greenhouse gases, among other reasons. The Detroit News reported Wednesday that chief executives of Ford and Chrysler met with Cheney last month.

"Clearly the White House said, 'We're going to get EPA out of the way and get California out of the way. If you give us this energy bill, then we're done, the deal is done,' " said one staffer.

Chrysler spokesman Colin McBean said that records show that Chrysler submitted position papers on the mileage issue with the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget about five weeks ago. Neither McBean nor a Ford spokeswoman would comment on whether company executives met with Cheney.

Jennifer Moore, a spokeswoman on environmental issues for Ford in Dearborn, Mich., said her company had no reason to question the EPA administrator's assertion that his decision was independent of the White House.

Charles Territo, spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers in Washington, said there was "absolutely not" any linkage between his trade group's decision to support the final version of the Senate energy bill and the EPA's decision to deny California's request for a waiver. Territo said the industry has always stressed a national mileage standard and opposed the California petition.

My guess (emphasizing that, with the current evidence, it is nothing more than a guess) is that the word "patchwork," which I cited yesterday, first emerged and the Cheney meeting, from which it "migrated" to both Johnson and David McCurdy, president and chief executive of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, both of whom invoked it in the statements they prepared yesterday. Under this scenario, it is still the case that Johnson was acting as a front to deliver a script; and now we know that this script in no way reflected any of the more seriously regulatory activities of the EPA. Whether he was invoking his authority to shill for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers or the Vice President is a minor matter; either way the chutzpah resided in his brazen abuse of authority in a situation so transparent as to be ludicrous to just about any casual observer.

Which Reviewer Actually SEES the Elephant?

I am now close to a point of saturation with reviews of Charlie Wilson's War. This is not to say that I am not interested in the film or do not see its entertainment value. However, I get the impression that most critics, since they are affiliated with media conglomerates that do not want to get on the wrong side of the Bush Administration, neglect the extent to which the film has crafted a synthesis of entertainment and information without degenerating into what we have come to call "infotainment." Thus, their reviews are a bit like the accounts of blind men groping at the elephant, either because they have been fitted with blinders as part of the job description or because they do not pay much attention to the world that exists outside of those darkened screening rooms.

The result is that those critics who know enough about writing to make sure that they end with a concluding paragraph provide one dripping with almost unadulterated drivel. Consider, for example, the final paragraph of the account in The New York Times by A. O. (or "Tony," as Richard Roeper seems to like to call him) Scott:

But there is nonetheless a bracing, cheering present-day moral to be found in Charlie Wilson’s story, a reminder that high principles are not incompatible with the pleasure principle. The good guys are the ones who know how to have a good time, and who counter the somber certainties of totalitarianism with the conviction that fun is woven into the fabric of freedom.

This is fine if all you expect from a movie is to be reaffirmed that "Everybody's happy nowadays" (in the spirit of my recent critique of editorial cartoons). However, if, like me, you are interested in contexts and consequences, you may want to know that the only review I encountered that shared my interest was the one written for SF Weekly by Robert Wilonsky. Wilonsky's final paragraph takes the bull (pun definitely intended) by the horns and reminds us that, in the broader scheme of history, we need to look at fun "woven into the fabric of freedom" through a more jaundiced eye:

The punch line to Charlie Wilson's War is that after spending $1 billion on helping the Afghans liberate their country from the God-hatin' Russkies, we refused to pony up a lousy $1 million to rebuild their schools. Oh, shit, I can't believe we created the devil. Who needs writers? You can't make this oh-shit up.

In other words, if we choose to take the long view (the way Shakespeare did with some of his history plays and in a way that I suspect did not escape either Aaron Sorkin or Mike Nichols), then this is actually a story about how we ended up with the mess of 9/11 in our own backyard. This should not detract from any entertainment you feel in watching this film, as long as you do not mind your entertainment having a sharp edge to it!

Pronouncing "Chutzpah"

Katty Kaye was holding the anchor for today's 3 PM (Pacific Time) broadcast of the BBC News that I regularly watch courtesy of KQED World. I am not sure whether or not she writes her own copy, but the text she was reading decided to describe Ayman al-Zawahiri's offer to answer questions from individuals, organizations and journalists an act of chutzpah. However, before I get to the question of whether or not this constituted an appropriate use of the word, there was a not-so-small matter of her mangled (to such a degree that I do not think I can reproduce it with phonetic spelling) pronunciation. It certainly would not surprise me to learn that the BBC standard of "received pronunciation" does not extend beyond the boundaries of English, let alone into Yiddish, which is not the national language of any country. Nevertheless, Ms. Kaye is currently stationed in the United States; and she would have had to be living an awfully sheltered life not to have heard the word uttered many times in the popular media over here. It is one thing for our President to mispronounce unfamiliar words, but this may be a case where even he is more familiar with uttering this word than Ms. Kaye is!

As far as usage is concerned, regular readers know that I have done a bit of research to make sure that each week's award is true to the term in both denotation and connotation. In that respect I am not sure I can quibble with invoking the term in its strictest sense; but the strictest sense of Leo Rosten's definition (which I have taken as my standard) does not really capture the extent to which chutzpah constitutes a basis for humor or ridicule. Zawahiri's act was certainly about as brazen (to invoke one of the terms in the Rosten definition) as they come; but I would still liken it more to the hubris of the Greeks, in the spirit, say, of Ulysses taunting the blinded Cyclops. After all, Ulysses' brazen act practically led to the destruction of his ship: The Cyclops was blind, but he could still hurl boulders in the direction from which he heard the taunts. Zawahiri is all but inviting intelligence agencies (not to mention any unaligned hackers who are motivated by nothing more than a good challenge) to turn his invitation into an opportunity to use the Internet to figure out just where he is hiding. Like Ulysses, he is all but inviting his enemies to hurl boulders at him; and that is far more hubris (about which, presumably, any BBC news reader is well educated) than chutzpah!

Needless to say, my vanity would like to believe that Ms. Kaye decided to invoke the term because this was the day I put out the weekly Chutzpah award. However, it is hard for the realist in me to believe that anything I have bothered to write would ever get noticed by the BBC! Nevertheless, I feel it is important to defend words against improper usage; and I would hold to the proposition that Stephen Johnson is still more deserving of this week's award than Zawahiri is!

Regulatory Chutzpah

One thing I have to say about the Executive branch of our Federal Government is that it never seems to be at a loss in coming up with Chutzpah of the Week award candidates. This week's award winner is Stephen L. Johnson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It has not been particularly surprising that, under the Bush Administration, the EPA has kept a pretty low profile, so low that some of us were beginning to wonder if it still existed. However, the EPA is back in the spotlight; but the light is not a particularly friendly one. It all comes down to a story that Richard Simon and Janet Wilson wrote for today's Los Angeles Times with the following lead:

The Bush administration Wednesday denied California's bid to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, dealing a blow to the state's attempts to combat global warming and prompting an immediate vow from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to take the decision to court.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson denied the state's request to implement its own landmark law, noting that an energy bill signed by President Bush earlier in the day would go a long way toward reducing emissions throughout the United States. The bill provides the most significant increase in vehicle fuel economy standards in more than three decades.

Is this nothing more than a pissing contest between presidential and gubernatorial authority? One answer may reside in Johnson's own words:

The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution, not a confusing patchwork of state rules.

One might think that all Johnson was doing was invoking a clever metaphor in support of the need for a national agenda to overrule any individual statewide policies. However, Simon and Wilson seem to have figured out who was actually writing Johnson's script:

David McCurdy, president and chief executive of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said in a prepared statement that a "patchwork quilt of inconsistent and competing fuel economy programs at the state level would only have created confusion, inefficiency and uncertainty for automakers and consumers."

Now we can understand McCurdy's pain. Schwarzenegger's plan would regulate what vehicles can be sold in California. This is in the interest of the vulnerability of much of California geography to emissions pollution, but it means that, as far as American automotive products are concerned, the California market is important enough that the state standards would trump any national standards. Needless to say, if foreign automotive products do meet the standards, then they stand to gain market share from the new California regulations; and that is the real reason why McCurdy is screaming in agony.

This takes us to the question of where the chutzpah resides. From my point of view, McCurdy is doing exactly what he is expected to do as a chief spokesperson for American automobile manufacturers; and that is not chutzpah. Johnson, on the other hand, through his little linguistic slip of the tongue, has put out a rather blatant signal that, with the blessing of the Bush Administration, he is acting as a shill for those automobile manufactures, placing the need to prop up their failing businesses over the need to clean up California's air. By being so overt about what Federal priorities really are, Johnson has earned himself the week's Chutzpah of the Week award!

Viewing the Hajj from the West

I began this week by considering the nature of a Huntington-like "clash" between Western and Islamic civilizations and the ways in which this clash surfaces in the biases that arise when these two civilizations report the news. One of my conclusions was that it is particularly important for those of us on the Western side to monitor Al Jazeera English for the perspective it provides from the Islamic side. An example of the value of this perspective comes the reporting of the annual Hajj in Mecca. The Western press has a track record of focusing on the large crowds, the dangers of the lack of adequate (by Western standards) crowd control, and sometimes the symbolic acts of violence, such as the stoning of the Devil.

This year, however, Al Jazeera English found a more substantive source of news in their reporting on the Hajj:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, joined millions of Muslims on Mount Arafat, east of Mecca, to mark the spiritual high point of the Hajj.

He is the first Iranian leader to take part in the annual Muslim pilgrimage.

Ahmadinejad is attending the Hajj at the invitation of King Abdullah, the Saudi king.

Now, in fairness to Western journalism, I need to state that I was first aware of Ahmadinejad's participation in the Hajj when I watched yesterday's 3 PM (live) broadcast of BBC News on KQED World; but, in equal fairness, I need to observe that I have yet to find a text version of this BBC story on their Web site (having just done a search before writing this sentence). More important is that the BBC found this story newsworthy for the same reason that Al Jazeera English provided in their account:

Relations have been rocky between Shia majority Iran and Sunni majority Saudi Arabia, which also has a substantial Shia community in its oil-rich eastern province.

Relations reached an all-time low in July 1987 when 402 people were killed in clashes between Iranians and Saudi security forces during the Hajj.

However, Ahmadinejad's appearance is seen as a sign of warming relations between the two countries.

Now perhaps it would be a bit extreme on my part to suggest that the West is more inclined to report acts of conflict and violence within the Islamic civilization than they are to report the ways in which Islamic precepts and ceremonies may lead to peaceful resolutions of those conflicts. This may just be the capitalist bias and war sells better than peace, but my own view is that the latter principle is the tip of the former principle's iceberg.

The other thing that struck me about the BBC account was the way in which they used images to show all the Hajj pilgrims wearing white robes that were practically identical. The BBC reported explained that this is because Islam views all pilgrims as equal, regardless of wealth, power, or gender (yes, in this setting, women have the same status as men). For me this was a profound reminder that the very concept of civilization clash is Western in origin and is thus a bias that needs to be recognized as such. Karen Armstrong has done much to try to bring that bias to our attention; but, as is almost always the case, the right image can speak louder than even the most eloquent prose. I just wish that more of the Western press shared the value of this particular image with the BBC.

TIME is Out of Joint

Since I take so much pleasure in irony, there was at least one level in which, after having yesterday read Huffington Post blogger Russell Shaw write about the inevitability of Al Gore being this year's selection for Time magazine's Person of the Year, I could enjoy the Associated Press report that the selection was actually Vladimir Putin. What made the report interesting, of course, was not the selection but the reasoning behind the selection:

The nod went to the Russian leader because of Putin's "extraordinary feat of leadership in taking a country that was in chaos and bringing it stability," said Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor.

This one criterion overlooks many dimensions of Putin, which even Stengel could not ignore:

"He's the new czar of Russia and he's dangerous in the sense that he doesn't care about civil liberties, he doesn't care about free speech," Stengel said.

In other words, as Tom Lehrer put it about Werner von Braun, Putin is "a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience;" and expedience has worked very well in his favor.

So did Time speak for the rest of us? Did it ever? And, even if did, just what was it saying? Perhaps Gore was rejected for precisely the reasons that Shaw found him so inevitable. He has dedicated both his heart and his mind to getting out the word that the planet is in trouble and enjoining as many people in the world as he can to unite in reversing a dire trend. Putin, on the other hand, is perceived as the fixer. Gore warned about a chaos that is descending upon the entire world. Putin took the chaos that had engulfed Russia and returned stability "by any means necessary." I take this to mean that, at least at Time, solving problems is more important than understanding them, even if it means overlooking some of the less savory steps that lead to the solution.

Obesity is Where you Eat It

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may have decided to declare economic war on high-calorie soft drinks; but, according to a Reuters report from Los Angeles, a different kind of economic war has erupted in the burger business:

No. 3 U.S. hamburger chain Wendy's International Inc introduced a 99-cent double cheeseburger on Tuesday, a product the company hopes will help it compete with bigger rivals McDonald's Corp and Burger King Corp Inc

In a statement, Wendy's said the new "Stack Attack" burger would help reel in cash-strapped consumers struggling with rising gas prices and other "financial pressures."

The move comes as Burger King plans to test a $1 double cheeseburger that is larger than McDonald's comparable product in several markets next year. Both Wendy's and Burger King hope to steal market share from McDonald's, whose $1 double cheeseburger is its most popular menu item.

This is just what we need: meeting the challenge of affordable food with an onslaught of double cheeseburgers. Can't anyone figure out a way to produce and market a $1 salad bar?

Not All Market-Based Thinking is Dangerous!

Lest my last post be interpreted as a wholesale (pun sort of intended) attack on market-based thinking, I feel a need to cite a story closer to my own home, also reported by Reuters last night, this time by Adam Tanner. Here is the lead:

San Francisco stores selling high-calorie sodas should pay millions of dollars a year to offset the health-care costs related to obesity, the city's mayor said on Monday.

"This is not just hippy-dippy, left-coast, granola stuff," Gavin Newsom said about his proposal to encourage people to drink less Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other soft drinks. "There is a direct correlation between caloric sweetened beverages and obesity."

"What we are doing is proposing a fee against the supermarkets and hypermarkets."

The details do not appear to have been worked out thoroughly yet. However, here is the basic strategy:

The plan, outlined during an interview at City Hall, seeks to raise to between $1.7 million and $7.1 million a year for anti-obesity programs by having stores pay between hundreds and thousands of dollars a year each.

Needless to say my injunctions about thinking, particularly about premises and consequences, still hold. Nevertheless, I find this an interesting strategy, somewhat along the lines of efforts to wean Americans off of the tobacco habit. It is an interesting way to think about problems and solutions in terms of costs and benefits, and I hope it is given the attention it deserves.

Ideology and Expertise

I have not figured out whether it is good news or bad news that, in the wake of making our country an embarrassment in the global community (as was demonstrated most vividly last week in Bali), President Bush has appeared to shift his attention from international to national affairs. After all, I suspect that, if you were to just walk up to people on the street and ask them with what major national event they would associated our President, most of those folks would probably respond, "Hurricane Katrina." So when I read last night's Reuters report by John Crawley under the headline "Bush wants market solutions for U.S. airline delays," my immediate reaction was, "Can this turn into a mess worse than the impact of Katrina?"

Of course air travel is already a pretty awful mess, and there is nothing like a holiday to aggravate the mess. However, when things are at their worst, is it really the best time to experiment with market-based ideology? I cannot help but remember my history lessons about how both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong tried to apply Communist ideology to agriculture and brought on famines that devastated their respective countries. It is all very well and good to think out of the box, as long as you remember that the operative word is "think!" Even Franklin Roosevelt, who believed that, in confronting the Great Depression, doing anything was better than doing nothing, did not try to attach ideological baggage to the things he tried.

The more fundamental question we need to ask, however, is just what Bush means by "market solutions" and what premises and consequences are associated with that meaning. Fortunately, Crawley has provided us with a few of Bush's own words:

The truth of the matter is, we need a more rational way of allocating gates among airlines.

There are any number of ways to pick apart this assertion. The most important is probably the premise it appears to embody that markets are rational. As far as I can tell, the only settings in which markets are rational are in economics textbooks; and, as more and more economists seem willing to acknowledge that markets are primarily phenomena of the social world, those textbooks are quickly fading out of fashion, if not out of print. Perhaps Bush really meant "efficient," rather than "rational." This is another favorite adjective for economists who prefer the cleanliness of mathematical models to the grubby realities of the social world; and isn't "throughput" the major concern of holiday travelers? Here, however, we have to remember that, particularly from the subjective (and not necessarily rational) perspective of the consumer, "effectiveness" may count for more than efficiency. The last time I raised this distinction, I was discussing the patient's-eye view of health care; but it is just as valid for the traveler's-eye viewpoint of airline operations.

In fairness, however, we should still see what sorts of proposals are on the table, regardless of the weakness of the premises (not to mention their potential consequences):

The Transportation Department has struggled to finalize details of its congestion plan for the New York region -- especially JFK -- after meeting stiff resistance from airlines and some members of Congress to centerpiece initiatives such as the administration-preferred plan that would make airlines pay a premium for flights during the busiest times of the day.

But regulators, according to aviation sources late on Monday, are coalescing around a plan that is to be announced on Wednesday by Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and would, over the longer term, manage capacity and competition by auctioning some takeoff and landing rights.

In the shorter term, the sources said, the government is expected to impose hourly flight caps at JFK for the summer of 2008.

It seems as if, between keyword advertising and eBay, auctioning has become the new hammer (pun intended), wielded by a small boy who sees everything as a nail. This may be due in part to the way in which it has provided mathematicians with new opportunities to experiment with models, even if those models are firmly ensconced in the objective world, safely protected from the messy details of the subjective and social worlds. The problem, of course, is that, when the models are used in a predictive capacity, their predictions are limited to the objective world, which is just not the world of holiday travelers.

I actually had my first taste of auction-based thinking at a talk that John Seely Brown gave in the auditorium of the (then) Xerox PARC Auditorium for an event sponsored by the Wharton School (one of those academic monuments to the objective world). Brown was extolling the virtues of low-level communications in highly distributed networks as an alternative to the hierarchy of a "classical" Weber-style bureaucracy. The example he chose to invoke was air traffic control, which, from the point of view of risk to loss of life and property, is a more critical problem than passenger throughput at airports. Brown suggested that the heavy cognitive load on air traffic controllers could be alleviated if every airplane could carry a software package that would enable individual planes to "bid" for the available landing slots at airports. Cynic that I am, I found the following voice ringing in my ears as I thought about this suggestion:

This is your Captain speaking. We hope you have enjoyed your non-stop flight from Los Angeles. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure a winning bid for a landing slot at Kennedy Airport. However, I am happy to report that we have won a bid for a slot at Logan International Airport outside Boston and will be landing there in about an hour.

While I am clearly serving this up as a joke, it also demonstrates what happens if we fail to think through narrative scenarios when we bury our heads too deep in the mathematics. We remember Hurricane Katrina (and associate it with President Bush) because, after the Gulf Coast was flooded by the elements, the entire nation (if not the world) was flooded with such narrative scenarios; and there was not the slightest thing funny about any of them. As I said in my second paragraph, the operative word behind trying to solve any problem is "think." Depression has become too much of a way of life in this country and the President is perceived as being far too detached from that depression for him to take on another problem and fail to think through those irritating details of premises and consequences.

The Clash of Civilizations Continues with the Immigration Debate!

Having let Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations genie out of the bottle, it is interesting to observe some of the other clashes in which Western civilization is now embroiled. Consider the lead from this story filed by Associated Press Writer Bob Lentz:

A small sign that asked customers to order in English at a famous cheesesteak shop was never meant to be offensive, the shop's owner testified Friday at a hearing to decide whether the policy was discriminatory.

Joe Vento, the owner of Geno's Steaks, defended his policy before the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, which filed the discrimination complaint.

"This country is a melting pot, but what makes it work is the English language," Vento told the commission. "I'm not stupid. I would never put a sign out to hurt my business."

Vento posted two small signs in October 2005 at his shop in a diverse South Philadelphia neighborhood, telling customers, "This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING PLEASE 'SPEAK ENGLISH.'"

He said Friday that he posted the sign because of concerns over the debate on immigration reform and the increasing number of people from the area who could not order in English.

But he said he also wanted to keep the line moving at his busy store.

What makes the story particularly interesting is the role of the debate over immigration policy in establishing Vento's motives. Looking at Huntington's "conflict graph," reproduced by Wikipedia, we see Latin America identified as a civilization distinct from Western; and we have to wonder if Vento had Latinos in mind when he deployed his signs.

The other item that attracted my attention was Vento's argument that the signs were posted in the interest of efficiency. Now, writing as someone who looks for someplace else to eat when he sees a long line, I can understand (if not agree with) this argument. On the other hand I suspect that Vento never had the inclination (let alone the time) to figure out whether (a) his revenues were suffering due to declining efficiency in handling the line of customers (long lines mean more customers meaning more sales) and (b) whether that inefficiency, if genuine, had to do with failure to understand customer orders. My guess is that this is all a matter of jumping to a conclusion in the worst possible direction by choosing an action that not only did not address the real problem but also entailed some really unpleasant consequences. Finally, while my own argument accepts the hypothesis that the best business is an efficiency business, I have questioned that hypothesis in the past and continue to do so. Thus, while T. S. Eliot cautioned us about doing "the right deed for the wrong reason" in his tragedy, Murder in the Cathedral, this may be a more comic instance of doing the wrong deed for the wrong reason!

The Clash of Civilizations Begins with Semantics

While I continue to draw upon the BBC as one of my more reliable sources of news, I do so knowing that, every now and then, I can detect a "culture-centric" streak in their reporting. My detection mechanism started buzzing this morning while listening to their report on the radio of the pardoning of the rape victim by the King of Saudi Arabia. Those who have been following this story know that, after having to deal with the trauma of rape, this woman was then sentenced by the Saudi justice system to 200 lashes and a prison term. Nevertheless, there was something in the BBC choice of language that did not register very well with me. Fortunately, I was able to find it in the lead paragraphs of the story on their Web site:

The Saudi king has pardoned a female rape victim sentenced to jail and 200 lashes for being alone with a man raped in the same attack, reports say.

The "Qatif girl" case caused an international outcry with widespread criticism of the Saudi justice system.

There is was: that phrase "international outcry." While my personal ethic felt the King had made a "right and proper" decision, I could not but wonder just how "international" the outcry was in a world that is so large and diverse and has such a substantial population of devout Muslims. Was the BBC interpreting protests from the Western world as an "international outcry;" and, if so, did this put an undesirable bias on their report?

Fortunately, the BBC Web site is not subject to the temporal constraints of their top-of-the-hour radio news summaries. Thus, I was glad to see from further reading that I was not alone in raising these questions:

The BBC's Heba Saleh says the king's decision to pardon the woman victim is already arousing controversy with some contributors to conservative websites, who say he has breached the rules of religion in order to appease critics in the West.

The US had called the punishment "astonishing", although it refused to condemn the Saudi justice system.

Human rights groups had been calling on King Abdullah, who has a reputation as a pro-Western reformer, to change it.

The justice ministry recently rejected what it saw as "foreign interference" in the case and insisted the ruling was legal and that the woman had confessed to having an affair with her fellow rape victim.

In these brief paragraphs we find a deeper story that reminds us that Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory is still very much with us, even if no longer in the form adopted so rabidly by neoconservative ideologues. This is not to oppose a Western value system, which reacted with such revulsion to a justice system meting out harsh punishment to a rape victim; it is just to observe that when a Western text invokes the adjective "international" in addressing a serious moral question, it usually means "Western world." Huntington's point was that such uses of language can lead to confused communications between civilizations, which, in turn, can lead to more aggressive conflicts. So it is that we now see that the backlash to the King's decision is displaying as much passion as the initial reaction of those (Western) human rights groups.

From a literary point of view, this is a case with which even a Solomon would have struggled; and, alas, King Abdullah does not appear to have such Solomonic wisdom. On the other hand I suspect that he has built up a "core competence" in what Isaiah Berlin called "political judgement;" and I am willing to credit him with bringing the full weight of that competence to bear on the conflictual nature of the relations between the Western and Islamic civilizations (to keep things grounded in Huntington's terminology). Whatever the BBC may say or its listeners may believe, if the King is sincerely trying to act as a change agent, his "political judgement" is sharp enough to recognize that "change" need not necessarily be accepting Western values to such a degree that key Islamic values are sacrificed in the process.

Back when I was active in the debates over knowledge management, trying to tease out fundamental questions of what it should be and how it should be implemented, many of my colleagues liked to talk about the goal of "shared understanding." This usually meant agreement over such matters as how we see the world, how we collect data from the world, and how we interpret those data. However, "understanding" and "agreement" are not necessarily synonymous nouns; and, in my own effort to avoid the confusion of that synonymy, I tried to change my own language. Rather than echoing that phrase "shared understanding," I start to speak of "negotiated understanding." The point I tried to make was that we could still strive to agree about how to act, even if we disagreed passionately over what things mean. In Kantian terms our actions are grounded in "pure reason," "practical reason," and "judgment;" and, particularly when we are in critical decision-making situations, we cannot afford to short-change any of those foundations.

Relations between the Western and Islamic civilizations are in just such a critical situation. We see it in the Western language of our would-be Presidential candidates; and today we saw it in a BBC News "headline" story. One of the reasons why I feel it is important to monitor Al Jazeera English is that it provides at least some opportunity to sample the language from the Islamic side. I just hope that influential figures like King Abdullah appreciate this difference between "shared understanding" and "negotiated understanding" and have both the power and the skill to exercise a "political judgement" that can move us towards a world in which Western and Islamic civilizations no longer feel obliged to clash.

Irony in "The New American Workplace"

I wanted to add, as an afterthought, one point I neglected to mention in yesterday's critique of The New American Workplace. It is a point of irony that arises in the Foreword written by Susan R. Meisinger. I cited this Foreword yesterday to provide the context for the project under which this book was written, but the irony arises in what appears to be a difference of opinion between Meisinger and authors James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III. Towards the end of the Foreword, Meisinger offers her opinion of the major take-away from the text of the book:

Even though American workplaces have evolved in ways unforeseen at the time of the Work in America study, readers of The New American Workplace will draw at least one conclusion that remains unchanged from the earlier study: Satisfying work is a basic human need that establishes individual identity and self-respect and lends order to life.

The irony resides in how this conclusion actually aligns with the results that O'Toole and Lawler present. Yes, the authors observe that many of the jobs that are no longer available in the United States were not very satisfying and were probably alienating (to draw upon the observations of Robert Blauner, whom, as I observed yesterday, was not recognized as a source). It is also true that many of the new "knowledge work" jobs can, indeed, be highly satisfying, particularly when they address intellectual challenges of innovation. What is more important is that has been left unsaid. I see at least two key points here:

1. For whatever virtues they attribute to it, the sort of knowledge work that O'Toole and Lawler have in mind is a relatively elite profession. Those who work in the "trenches of innovation" are the product of a rigorous filtering process that has probably begun before one enters college as an undergraduate and continues all the way through current hiring practices. When I suggested yesterday that O'Toole and Lawler were ignoring people in favor of abstractions, the people I had in mind were the many unemployed who have either lost their jobs and found no replacement or are looking for work after having successfully graduated college. For me, these are the people of the "real world," rather than the "stars of high technology," whom O'Toole and Lawler seem to be celebrating. I suggest that it would not be too far-fetched to claim that the odds of an average twenty-something breaking into such a profession of knowledge work are about the same as those of making a career in professional sports. or show business.
2. Even in those elite circles where the work itself is satisfying, the progressive erosion of both job security and benefits (both of which O'Toole and Lawler acknowledge) lead to a quality of life that detracts significantly from any personal sense of satisfaction. Put another way, knowledge work now takes place in high-risk settings, where the risks may be just as high as they are in sports and show business. Where O'Toole and Lawler try to see this positively as an incentive for working harder and "smarter," I see it as a recipe for burn-out, again very much as we can observe in sports and show business. For a CEO, of course, this creates a "churn" in which "fresh blood" keeps flowing in to replace those who have burned out their "knowledge productivity;" but what happens when such burn-out occurs long before the worker is thinking about retirement?

I really have to wonder if Meisinger actually saw the disconnect between this small bit of text she was using to introduce the book and what the book was actually saying. Perhaps it does not matter very much. After all, she was writing as the sponsor of the project and was therefore obliged to put a positive spin on the results, even if that spin could only be obtained through a gesture of rather shallow lip service. The rest of us can just add "satisfying work" to the list of concepts that have succumbed to that loss of meaning that so occupied the studies of Max Weber.

"The New American Workplace"

I spent Thursday afternoon in the Jury Assembly Room of the Superior Court of California for the County of San Francisco. Twenty years ago in a similar setting in Santa Monica, I was able to use my waiting time to come up to speed on much of the literature for connectionism. This time around the room was equipped with two Wi-Fi services (only one of which was free) and plenty of desk space for laptops. However, in order to minimize the hassle of going through security, I kept my metal to a bare minimum and decided that my waiting time would be better spent making a dent in my reading list.

The book I brought with me was The New American Workplace, by James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III. This book is a report of the results of research supported by a grant from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The work is introduced in a Foreword by Susan R. Meisinger, President and CEO of SHRM. The first two paragraphs set the context for the reader:

In the 1970s, Louis "Studs" Terkel, the Chicago radio broadcaster, oral historian, journalist, and author interviewed more than 130 working American men and women of different ethnicities and ages and captured their voices for his book Working, about the realities of employment in America. Published in 1974, the award-winning work carried the subtitle: "People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do."

While immensely popular, Terkel's book was based on a less comprehensive study than another, more formal, examination of the nation's working conditions, Work in America, which was conducted in 1972–1973 by a task force formed by the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Elliot L. Richardson. The task force's chairman, James O'Toole, was the principal author of the survey report and, not coincidentally, is also the coauthor, with Edward Lawler, of this publication, The New American Workplace. Since the study documented in this book employed the same methodology as the earlier study, the current work can be viewed as a fresh take on that government-sponsored effort.

I must confess that my reaction to Meisinger's thinly-veiled dismissive attitude towards Terkel immediately raised a red flag that was still flying high when I read what O'Toole and Lawler had to say about methodology in the first chapter of their new book. Remembering Eisenhower's warnings about the threat of the military-industrial complex, I realized that, where the social world is concerned, there is an equally menacing threat, which we might call the "academic-government complex." It is the administrative embodiment of the premise that the expertise of academics and government bureaucrats responsible for policy making carries far more influence than the experiences of the general public whose lives will be impacted by those policies. The Web site for The New American Workplace provides a link to a PDF file that has combined the bibliographies of this book and its predecessor. Terkel's book is in that list; but, as if to confirm that its presence was little more than a token gesture, the only other cited author who focused on that general public was Barbara Ehrenreich for her book, Nickel and Dimed. Other authors who did their best work "in the trenches," such as Robert Blauner (one of the pioneers of this approach) and Barbara Garson, are totally absent.

This is not to say that O'Toole and Lawler have failed to recognize how much things have changed in the time between these two book. However, they write from a world populated by abstractions, rather than people; and, as a result, they exhibit an annoying tendency to put a positive spin on conditions that have become so pathological to justify the use of the word "depression" in a clinical sense. To continue a theme that I began earlier this week, O'Toole and Lawler are quick to write about benefits and slow to get to the heart of what the costs for those benefits are, particularly where human factors are involved. As a result the book ends up being little more than another one of many contributions to the propaganda front behind the War Against the Poor.

"A child's view of the $100 laptop"

My title is in quotation marks because it is the title of a story that Rory Cellan-Jones filed on Wednesday on the BBC NEWS Web site. BBC News has been giving a fair amount of attention to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program and the XO laptop around which the effort is based. Cellan-Jones seems to have picked up an XO while on assignment in Nigeria (although he does not give any details behind how he did this); and, upon returning to England's green and pleasant land, he did the obvious thing. He gave it to his nine-year-old son, Rufus, to evaluate.

The result makes for good reading. If we are to believe that dad had no hand in Rufus' activities, then the lad was highly self-motivated; and the XO did a great job in both satisfying and triggering his motivations. The question, however, is how much value resides in Rufus' enthusiastic evaluation. Father Rory caught on to this in his penultimate paragraph:

The One Laptop Per Child project is struggling to convince developing countries providing computers for children is as important as giving them basic facilities like water or electricity.

So what can we learn from a nine-year-old middle-class English white boy, who not only has but also takes for granted not only water and electricity but also a home wireless network and a dad willing to trust him with the security code for connecting to that network? My guess is that Dr. Igwe Aja-Nwachuku, Nigeria's Minister of Education, will not be particularly impressed with anything Rufus had to report. Recall what he said when interviewed by BBC reporter Jonathan Fildes last month:

What is the essence of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?

In the spirit of Dr. Aja-Nwachuku's objection, I would like to introduce the modest proposal that the OLPC take some "break time" to reread (hoping that at least some of them read it back when it was published) The Ugly American. Recall that the title of the book is also the title of one of the chapters, in which we learn that "The Ugly American" is actually the sobriquet of one of the few characters in the book who sets a positive role model. Many of us tend to dismiss his actions in that story as "going native;" but the point of the story was that only by living among those "full-time residents" of a developing country could he even begin to communicate with them effectively about alternative ways of doing things in their day-to-day routine. (Of course this is also a fundamental precept of workplace anthropology in the industrialized world; and to this day I believe that "The Ugly American" had an impact on my research at Schlumberger that addressed bringing information technology into "knowledge work" that they had been doing for many decades before I started to work there.)

My concern is that OLPC was conceived in the rarefied atmosphere of MIT and promoted in the equally rarified atmosphere of government offices, which always seem to enjoy opulence no matter how much in need of development their countries may be. While Dr. Aja-Nwachuku is, himself, a bureaucrat in one of those offices, he has dared to speak for those in the trenches; and my greatest fear is that this makes him a very rare bird in the global promotion of OLPC. Of course if Walter Bender truly spoke for OLPC when he told the BBC that such voices are "unwilling to commit because 'change equals risk'," then it is very unlikely that either those voices or the voices of the children most in need will have any impact on how OLPC progresses.

Service Pathology

Steve Tobak introduced his post this morning on CNET News.com's News Blog under the headline, "Would you pay more for better service?" As one might suspect, this question has prompted a generous number of answers in the form of comments. For my part, however, I would prefer one of the standard rabbinical answers, "It depends;" but I would like to be more specific in doing so. I would like to suggest that "it depends" on three things:

1. The nature of the pathology that makes the service so poor.
2. The question of whether that pathology can be remedied by throwing money at it.
3. If that question can be answered affirmatively, the follow-up question of how much money will be necessary to make a noticeable improvement in the pathological condition(s).

I have been interested in workplace pathology for some time; but I realize that, until now, I have not been particularly rigorous in distinguishing between internal pathologies (involving the operations of the enterprise) and external pathologies, which impact the "customer-facing" side of the business. Tobak's question is basically about a problem of external pathologies and what those of us on the customer side should do about it.

My use of the plural is intended to suggest that there is actually an ontology of customer-facing pathologies, if not that we might better understand the aetiology of those pathologies if we knew their ontological categories. In this post I would like to restrict myself to the ontological question and propose three such categories based on the three "dimensions" and Anthony Giddens' structuration theory:

1. The pathology of ignorance is a malady of what Giddens calls "signification." It is a lack or failure of knowledge concerned with what things mean, how they work, and how one make take remedial action(s). My recent rant against the San Francisco Public Library, after my (highly frustrating) efforts to pay the fine on a book my wife had not returned on time, amounted to a description of an instance of this particular pathology. The Library had installed new technology and imposed new work practice; but few (if any) really knew how the new technology worked, let alone what to do when it got ornery. (This morning I discovered that ranting doesn't do anything about the pathology!) The "knowledge management" movement was supposed to address this pathology; and the fact that it remains in my ontology can be taken as evidence of how successful that movement was!
2. The pathology of negligence is based on Giddens' dimension of "legitimation." It is a pathology in the social world of the normative patterns of interaction between a service provider and a client. It may be a consequence of a service provider suffering depression, which, in turn, may have come about as a reaction to some internal pathology. It is an instance of what Max Weber called the "loss of meaning," where the service provider has become so alienated from the work that (s)he no longer sees any reason to honor the necessary behavioral norms.
3. The pathology of contempt arises from problems along Giddens' dimension of "domination." It is basically a more extreme form of negligence, based on a Nietzschean "will to power," which regards behavioral norms as impediments to be overcome. The primary symptom is the premise that any customer who needs help must have done something wrong.

Instances of each of these categories may arise from a variety of causes. While some of those causes may be external, it is probably the case that internal causes are likely to have more impact. This would be consistent with a report for CNET News.com published today by Natasha Lomas. Here is the story's lead:

Overly authoritarian and bureaucratic IT managers are bad for morale and productivity and are making their staff sick.

According to the Quality of Working Life survey conducted by U.K.-based management-services firm Chartered Management Institute, the most widely experienced management styles in the U.K.'s IT sector are reactive (45 percent), bureaucratic (38 percent), and authoritarian (24 percent)--management styles that can all have a negative impact on workers' morale, productivity, and even health.

These three management styles have also become more common in the IT sector--with reactive and bureaucratic styles increasing by six percent since 2004, and authoritarian leadership rising by 5 percent. A CMI spokeswoman said rates of reactive management in IT are "slightly higher" than in some other industries.

There is nothing particularly new in this story other than some fresh data reinforcing a study that is now over twenty years old. The earlier work can be found in an Academy of Management Review article published in 1986 by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller under the title "Personality, Culture, and Organization." This was a fascinating study of the parallels between organizational pathology and neurotic management behavior (the higher the management level the stronger the parallels). I suspect that the only significant difference between then and now is that management behavior has been steadily drifting from the neurotic to the psychotic, with the unpleasant consequence that what we used to classify as pathological may be similarly drifting into the normative!

Chris Dodd and the Dead Moose on Google's Table

Perhaps the most important reason that Al Gore deserves the Nobel Peace Prize (even though it was not acknowledged at the ceremony) is that he has advanced the language we can use for describing political discourse. He has provided us with a new category: An assertion in political discourse either acknowledges some "inconvenient truth;" or it doesn't. When Declan McCullagh wrote, in his Iconoclast blog post for CNET News.com, "Most presidential hopefuls who show up at the so-called Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., praise their hosts and marvel at the company's search technology," he was describing politicians who kept the level of discourse safely (and "conveniently") in the latter category. That sentence, however, was used to introduce an account of Chris Dodd's recent visit to Google; and Dodd decided that, for this audience at least, he was not going to shy away from inconvenient truths. McCullagh posted the following excerpts from Dodd's speech to make his point:

If you believe that the Googles of the world can serve as a democratizing force and expand freedoms--after what we have seen in the wake of 9/11, with the sheer amount of information you have, we would be fools to not also believe the other side of that equation: that such power can also take those freedoms away...

It is what you have been criticized for doing in your China venture, Google.cn, which was built to expressly censor subjects the Chinese government deemed controversial.

And it is what you are currently being accused of doing, in assisting the Israeli government with identifying a citizen who made allegations against three members of the Shaarei Tikva Council posted on your Blogger service...

And you can start with this: By telling the Chinese government that Google.cn will no longer censor information with Google's consent. And should the Chinese government not find that acceptable, Google.cn will be shut down.

He then offered what may be the only sensible reaction to Dodd's strategy:

Is this good advice? Because there's no really perfect answer, it's hard to say.

As one might expect, McCullagh has already fielded some commenters eager to answer his question more definitively. Personally, I am less interested in whether or not Dodd's advice was good than I am in his taking the trouble to propose it at all, forcing his audience to admit that there is a dead moose on the table. Similarly, while I appreciate those who defend Google's decisions with the ultimately-a-business argument, I am less appreciative of that argument being applied to resolve a question that involves a conflict of moral values between two radically different cultures. Yes, Dodd is running so far behind that he needs to do something to raise his political capital; but just maybe (and I know it's a long shot) he decided to talk about the dead moose on the table because it is such an affront to his personal moral convictions. This gives him the courage to talk about inconvenient truths. That is a courage he shares with Dennis Kucinich (whose numbers also continue to be "down in the noise"); and we should honor both of these men for giving us, as voters, an opportunity to make a real choice that matters.

What Price Growth?

Remember that cliché from the days of the first Reagan Presidential campaign about a rising tide lifting all boats? The underlying implication was that growth was all about benefit; and, if there was any cost to growth, that cost would always be outweighed by the benefits. Jimmy Carter had the courage to suggest that the appealing surface of such a worldview concealed flaws at a deeper level, and he was soundly trashed by the electorate for such convictions. Now the world (if not our President) wants to honor Al Gore for picking up Carter's baton and bringing "inconvenient truths" about economic growth to the public consciousness; and the most inconvenient of those truths will probably come when the bean counters finally open their books are start tallying up the cost figures.

In today's Financial Times Javier Blas and Chris Flood have written a story that reveals one of the things we are likely to find in those books. Consider their lead paragraphs that precede pulling out the actual financial numbers:

The global economy is facing a second wave of food inflation after the US agriculture department on Tuesday warned of significant falls in stocks of corn, wheat and soyabean and heavy demand.

Officials forecast US wheat stocks would shrink to their lowest level in 60 years, dropping from 312m bushels to 280m by the end of the 2007-08 crop year.

The US is the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and importing countries are bidding heavily for its crops as other exporters cut supplies.

Cold weather damaged crops in Argentina and drought affected Australia’s wheat production. Flooding also damaged European crops.

Michael Lewis, of Deutsche Bank in London, said the decline in stocks and rising shortages in large parts of Asia suggested 2008 “could deliver another year of . . . price shocks”.

Corn and soyabean stocks will also be lower than expected as demand from emerging countries rises in spite of record prices.

Greg Wagner of Horizon Ag Strategies in Chicago said supplies of soyabeans and wheat had now tightened to “very uncomfortable levels”.

This is not to imply that climate change is the only reason why the world is facing a food-shortage crisis; but, at a time when it appears that the United States is determined to prevent anything substantive coming out of the current conference in Bali, it is important to recognize the role that climate change is playing. Having considered their lead, consider, now, how Blas and Flood chose to conclude their story:

Agricultural commodities analysts have warned that rising prices for corn, wheat and soyabean will force up feedstock costs for farmers, leading to higher meat, poultry and milk prices for consumers.

Food prices are boosting inflationary pressures just as central banks are trying to cut rates to cushion their economies from the effect of the credit squeeze.

China said on Tuesday that inflation had reached an 11-year high at 6.9 per cent in November, boosted by a 18.2 per cent jump in food prices.

Eurozone inflation recently rose to a six-year high propelled by high oil and food prices.

As previous reports have begun to suggest, we are entering a period in which basic staple products are becoming luxury items; and, from my point of view, this is just another skirmish in the War Against the Poor. It is a return to the days of Germany before the Second World War, in which inflation had all but demolished the concept of "real money;" and the primary victims where those struggling to bring bread and milk to their family table. So it may be that the whimper with which our world will end will come not only from those being killed off by the negligence of our Social Security Administration but also from those starving to death on a far more global scale. When that happens, will those few who can still afford the food they eat still be obsessing about economic growth?

Debilitating the Editorial Cartoon

I suppose the most disconcerting thing about the selection of the "Top 10 Editorial Cartoons" made by Time ("in partnership with CNN," as the banner on the Web page says) is how lame the collection is. In a year when there were so many pain points that ridicule was the only viable alternative to outrage, not one of the Time selections packed the sort of ridicule that would go straight to the jugular of our national consciousness. Consider, for example, that George W. Bush does not appear in any of the cartoons on the Time list, neither in his familiar "Curious George" alter ego or through any other avatar. (Dick Cheney, on the other hand, appears twice, making one wonder if this is yet another maneuver by the White House Press Office to distance the President from the Vice President.) It is not as if ridicule has gone out with T. S. Eliot's whimper. Those of us who read Truthdig have enjoyed a year's worth of cartoons with wit as sharp as the pen needed to draw the finest of their lines, but none of those cartoons made it to the Time list. The lesson is that Time has now become the perfect example of soma-induced journalism whose only task is to convince the rest of us that, as Aldous Huxley put it in Brave New World, "Everybody's happy nowadays." If that does, indeed, reflect the thoughts of most of the mainstream media, then, as my mother used to say, "They have another think coming!"

Igor Stravinsky and the Cardinal Sin of Envy

In my reflection on the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen last week, I accused Igor Stravinsky of being envious of the jazz that was being played when he was living in Paris, because, in spite of his many efforts to do so, he just could never compose music like that. Watching the final performance of The Rake's Progress by the San Francisco Opera yesterday, I realized that there was probably another target of Stravinsky's envy, which was probably just as strong, if not more so. That target was Benjamin Britten, and I believe that this hypothesis cannot be ignored in addressing Stravinsky's only attempt at a "grand" opera.

This is not to say that I dislike Stravinsky. What he composed in his attempts to reproduce rags and tangos has a unique enough sound that the works are interesting through their very infidelity to their sources of inspiration. The same can be said of the rather convoluted ways in which Stravinsky set English text, not just in the Rake but in many shorter efforts. The counterintuitive phrasings must be enough to drive any singer crazy, and they ultimately highlight the extent to which English texts would fit within Britten's music like a hand in a glove. The comparison is most explicit in "The Flood," that "musical play" commissioned by CBS Television in 1960, which I find more worthy of Ivan Hewett's "cringe-making" epithet than just about anything Stockhausen ever produced. While it is possible to imagine that Stravinsky was unaware that Britten had composed a similar work, "Noye's Fludde," in 1957, the fact that Stravinsky drew upon exactly the same Chester Miracle Play texts makes that possibility highly unlikely. Nevertheless, I have seen many performances of the Rake that I have had no trouble enjoying for what they were and I treasure my CDs of the recording that Stravinsky made in London in 1964.

Perhaps some of that joy comes from this being the end of the second major "road" that Stravinsky followed in his musical career: the path of neoclassicism that stands between his more Russian period and his explorations of serialism at the end of this life. The Rake's Progress is classical in just about every way you can imagine, from the harpsichord-accompanied recitativo secco to the wisps of Handel and Mozart that are never quite tangible in the score but always seem to be suggested. If W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman were not able to produce a more salutary text for Stravinsky's musical language, then, as is the case with his experiments in jazz, one can still enjoy the results. Trouble only ensues in a production that does not let Stravinsky be Stravinsky.

Unfortunately, Robert Lepage provided the San Francisco Opera with such a production, reminding me of my having invoked the verb "undermining" when I wrote about Robert Carsen's setting of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride last June. Much of my discontent probably resides in the fact that Stravinsky was very good at falling back on structure when intuition was not serving him as well as he wished. The Rake's Progress is impeccably structured, so I was immediately on my guard when I picked up my Opera program and saw that Lepage had smashed Stravinsky's structure to bits. To be more specific, Stravinsky composed this opera in three acts, each consisting of three scenes; and this was the perfect complement to the Auden-Kallman libretto, which structures the narrative of Tom Rakewell around three wishes he makes and how they are implemented by Nick Shadow. Thus, when my wife complained that she felt the final scene of the opera went on far too long, my reaction was that it felt long because she had been deprived the benefit of an intermission before the "unit" of the third act got under way. With all of his experience in ballet, Stravinsky knew all about audience fatigue; and Lepage's attempt to restructure the opera in two acts was a serious "sin" against Stravinsky. When we then recognize that this revised structure also distracts from the narrative role of the three wishes, we must further conclude that he has "sinned" against Auden and Kallman. Finally, to honor a tripartite structure that may be the best part of the opera, I would suggest that Lepage also "sinned" against Hogarth by rejecting everything about his original conception of how the narrative should be set and conjuring up an image that sings of London but exhibits Hollywood. To be fair Hogarth is honored by both the music and the libretto only in spirit, but Lepage decided to have none of that spirit. Also to be fair most of Lepage's images were pretty impressive, fascinating enough to be a viable audience magnet. The problem was that they were an "alternative universe" to the one that Stravinsky, Auden, and Kallman had conceived. Those two universes were almost violently incompatible, which is why I can argue that the former undermined the latter.

The good news was that the music was still pure Stravinsky at his best. All of the primary voices, William Burden (Tom), Laura Aikin (Anne Truelove), Kevin Langan (Anne's father), James Morris (Shadow), Catherine Cook (Mother Goose), Denyce Graves (Baba the Turk), and Steven Cole (Sellem), had their parts solidly nailed and knew how to work with Donald Runnicles, the orchestra, and the chorus to make this production "work" as well as it could. Graves was particularly effective in her full-out-no-shame conception of Baba; and I suspect it would have been even more fun to see what she would have done with a staging that had been more true to the libretto!

Christian Chutzpah

It is all very well and good to seek out chutzpah in the conduct of government and business; but, at a time when so much of our national discourse seems to be wallowing in Christian values, I have to confess to a certain guilty pleasure in singling out a church for the Chutzpah of the Week award, however early in the week it may be. Anyone who saw the story yesterday morning on Good Morning America knows the church I have in mind. Here is the text summary from the ABC News Web site:

A Florida megachurch has garnered national attention with its annual Christmas pageant. The First Baptist Church of Fort Lauderdale's production is filled with extensive pyrotechnics, live stock and a bevy of actors.

"We're having to compete against many theatrical things around the country, whether it's MTV or the Rockettes or any show you might see on Broadway," said the Rev. Mike Jefferies of the First Baptist Church of Fort Lauderdale. "We have made a conscious decision to pull out all the stops."

The chutzpah resides not such much in the spirit as in the price tag. The ABC News report had no trouble getting right to the heart of the matter:

Some visitors said they truly enjoy the vast production, but others believe the $1.3 million price tag of the pageant would be better spent on charity.

In other words the First Baptist Church of Fort Lauderdale has made a firm commitment to its position on the War Against the Poor, but it is not fighting on the side that the preaching of Jesus had commanded! On the other hand perhaps this church is the best embodiment of our President's faith-based ideology put into practice. Say "Amen" somebody!

A Revival of Upton Sinclair

One sign of just how deplorable social conditions are may be the way in which filmmakers are drawing upon one of the most effective muckrakers of the early twentieth century as a source of stories. When I wrote, at the end of October, about both the book and film versions of Fast Food Nation, I observed that Richard Linklater's narrative strategy basically stood on the shoulders of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle. This weekend the Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced that their choice of the best film in 2007 was There Will be Blood. Most of the rest of us have not yet had a chance to see this film, let alone any buzz surrounding its release; but what is important in this case is that the film is an adaptation of another Sinclair novel, Oil! (the exclamation mark being part of the title). Perhaps the relative media silence has something to do with the fact that muckraking the oil industry is even more sensitive than muckraking the fast food industry. Ironically, Sinclair was one of those muckrakers who eventually made a difference, primarily because Theodore Roosevelt took the time to read his books. Somehow I just do not see any of our current contenders for the White House investing their time that way, particularly the ones who have decided that campaigning is more important than doing the work in Congress that they were elected to do!

Social Insecurity

Lest there be any doubt about the side our government has chosen to take in the ongoing (and escalating) War against the Poor, one need only consult the story Erik Eckholm wrote for today's New York Times about current conditions in the Social Security Administration. Eckholm's lead says it all:

Steadily lengthening delays in the resolution of Social Security disability claims have left hundreds of thousands of people in a kind of purgatory, now waiting as long as three years for a decision.

Two-thirds of those who appeal an initial rejection eventually win their cases.

But in the meantime, more and more people have lost their homes, declared bankruptcy or even died while awaiting an appeals hearing, say lawyers representing claimants and officials of the Social Security Administration, which administers disability benefits for those judged unable to work or who face terminal illness.

The agency’s new plan to hire at least 150 new appeals judges to whittle down the backlog, which has soared to 755,000 from 311,000 in 2000, will require $100 million more than the president requested this year and still more in the future. The plan has been delayed by the standoff between Congress and the White House over domestic appropriations.

These paragraphs are followed by a series of case studies that provide a human element to the "raw data" used to introduce the story.

Will this story be read by those with the power to do something about it (in the Legislative, as well as the Executive, Branch)? We have to assume that, at the very least, every individual with the power to do something about this mess has, at the very least, an aide, who will read it, "clip" it (scare quotes because the "clipping" may be virtual), and recommend that it should be "kept in view," all of which add up to a far cry from taking any form of effective action. If there is anyone left in the District with a sense of history (which, from my own cynical perch, I am inclined to doubt), that person may recognize that Eckholm is writing precisely the kind of horror story that Franklin Roosevelt first invoked by demonstrating just what it was that a Social Security system would prevent. In other words we have circled back to the conditions under which Roosevelt felt it was necessary to propose Social Security in the first place. History is repeating itself, but it would take a terribly hard heart to agree with Marx that this repetition is farcical.

Note, by the way, that the above hyperlink on "Marx" points back to last month's most blatant example of conspicuous consumption for the rich, the $25,000 chocolate sundae. This seems to be more important to some (identified by the size of the assets they hold) than a Social Security Administration that is now pathetically understaffed and is likely to stay that way while our budget continues to be bankrupted by an insane war and our President maintains a state of oblivion, reinforced by his faith-based ideology, over our country's domestic needs. Perhaps it is time for Naomi Wolf to take another trip around the country and write a follow-up to her "American Tears" Huffington Post blog post; but, if her first effort had no effect on the current political discourse (let alone actions) in Washington, why should she expend her time on another one? That, of course, is the reasoning of clinical depression, which, as I tried to argue in my reading of Wolf, is precisely the state of our country's psychology. My own conclusion from that reading was that I had learned how the world could end with a whimper; and my own "American tears" are shed over the fact that no one seems to be left willing, at the very least, to go down fighting the mess, rather than just succumb to it.

SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE++

That title is the entry I placed in my Outlook Calendar for last night's San Francisco Symphony concert at Davies Symphony Hall. The "official" name of the program was Music of Hector Berlioz: Episode in the Life of an Artist. This plays on the fact that, at least in my Heugel study score, the full title of Berlioz' Opus 14 is given as Episode de la Vie d'un Artiste: Symphonie Fantastique. However, there is also an Opus 14b, whose title is Lélio, or The Return to Life, a stage piece in the form of a monodrama for a single actor and a rich collection of musical resources, including one tenor accompanied by a piano and another tenor, a baritone, and a full chorus, all of whom perform with a full orchestra (although from a point of view of pure demographics, not quite as full as the one required for Opus 14). Lélio was performed in this dramatic setting in June of 1997 under the baton of Michael Tilson Thomas with F. Murray Abraham as the actor. By my reading of the Chronicle review of this week's offering, Joshua Kosman is still grousing about that last performance, which he called "an unforgettable embarrassment." Thus, Kosman was able to write about his delight that this time around, Lélio was represented only by the music, which did not constitute an integrated whole the way the movements of Opus 14 do. Writing about the six unconnected works that constitute Opus 14b, Kosman asserted that "the pieces shine with the harmonic vitality and textural imagination of Berlioz's finest work."

I have no quibble with Kosman's opinion of the music; and Thomas certainly knew how to command all of his resources to summon all of that "harmonic vitality and textural imagination." I also do not want to argue over the fact that Opus 14b is actually a sequel to Opus 14, but the Lélio music was performed before the Symphonie Fantastique. By all rights, a proper performance would have begun with the Symphonie, followed by an intermission, after which the full monodrama would be performed. Having heard a full Lélio on the radio, I know that the idée fixe melody, which haunts every movement of the Symphonie, keeps haunting the narration in the sequel but only appeared once in the musical episodes performed at Davies. Nevertheless, last night's concert was a pretty full order; and my idea of "a proper performance" would probably stretch the patience of much of the audience (probably including myself).

Nevertheless, the "full package" provides insights into Berlioz as a problem-solving composer that were absent in the more "digestible package" that Thomas offered. This project presents us with Berlioz seeking out a new relationship between music and dramatic narrative that goes beyond the expectations of audiences used to the opera productions of his time. It is a perspective on Romanticism that has more to do with Isaiah Berlin's view of the movement as an alternative to Enlightenment thinking than with the traditional music history view of a move beyond the constraints of Classicism. In terms of the theory I have been trying to develop in many of my posts, the shift has less to do with the grammar of the composer's language and more to do with its underlying logic. That logic had to do with a departure from a musical approach to narrative that was, with few exceptions, highly artificial; but finding that "new relationship" would require a lot of experimentation. The thing about experiments is that they do not always succeed; but, when properly performed, they can still be very informative. In this context we might do well to examine Berlioz in the light of one of his contemporaries who was also experimenting heavily, Robert Schumann, even though there does not seem to be any evidence that the two interacted directly.

At the time of Berlioz' Opus 14, Schumann was focusing most of his attention on solo piano music, also heavily influenced by narrative themes. As a result he was able to explore new approaches to the grammar of not just the structures of harmony and counterpoint but also the very nature of the melodic line. Unfortunately, he was never particularly good at translating his imaginative conceptions at the keyboard to a full orchestra. I still like the turn of phrase that Percy Scholes invoked when he was responsible for the tenth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music:

The orchestral works are usually held to suffer a little from a thickness and lack of variety in the instrumental colourings.

Berlioz, on the other hand, could hardly be accused of "lack of variety in the instrumental colourings!" Indeed, what I was taught as a student was that Berlioz thought directly in terms of instrumental color and usually wrote directly on orchestral score pages, rather than first developing his ideas on the scale of a piano keyboard. The result however is that his grammar is a far cry from Schumann's. The sound is paramount; and, if the melodic lines and harmonies sometimes wander and the counterpoint sometimes cops out in mid-stream, then these were details subordinate to his primary objectives as a composer. Unfortunately, our own culture seems to prefer to educate us to listen according to Schumann's standards, leaving us to acknowledge Berlioz but label him as some kind of anomaly.

Now there is a problem with listening to Berlioz for his sound, and that problem resides in the way in which the sound itself has changed. Much as I appreciate the value of the "authentic instrument" movement in Baroque and Classical music, I suspect that the acid test for this philosophy can be found in Symphonie Fantastique. I suspect that hearing this work with the two ophicleides in the original scoring would be enough to yield a sound that is a far cry from which we expect from today's orchestras. After all, the lurid narrative of the entire Opus 14 package would have been more than a little shocking to Berlioz' audiences; so it is reasonable to assume that this shock effect would be reinforced by those sounds that he could command with so much of his skill in orchestra writing. Much of that shock probably came from the higher level of unpredictability of many of the wind and brass instruments, the ophicleide being the most blatant (blaring?) example, which is why we do not hear very much of it today. Instruments are now more "predictable;" and our whole approach to performance technique is structured around that predictability.

This is not to criticize the sound that Thomas evoked from the San Francisco Symphony. Rather, it is to observe that the performance was like a finely cut-and-polished diamond, while Berlioz himself had been working "in the rough." Every now and then we get a taste of what that "rough" was like. My personal favorite in this field has always been Modest Mussorgsky; and I really enjoy any opportunity to hear his own orchestral writing before Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov came along to "fix up the weak spots." In Berlioz' case we usually get what he wrote; but I suspect that, for the most part, we do not get what he heard. I suspect most audiences would respond to that observation with, "Thank God for that;" and I recognize that mine is a minority opinion. Still, my idea of a real treat would be a live performance of at least the Symphonie Fantastique, if not the whole dramatic package, which made a serious effort to capture and deliver the sort of sound for which Berlioz was aiming in his original scoring.

Prioritizing Death

The composer Andrew Imbrie died on Wednesday. Six of his compositions received their world premiere by the San Francisco Symphony, and his opera based on Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose was commissioned by the San Francisco Opera. Nevertheless, he never had much of a reputation beyond the Bay Area; and, as a result, I never knew much of him other than his name. Why it took the San Francisco Chronicle until this morning's issue to run an obituary for him is a mystery to me, as much a mystery as my scanning the paper and finding no account at all of the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen, after reading a veritable abundance of Stockhausen articles in the Telegraph alone. Apparently the only thing the Chronicle felt worth offering was the Associated Press report on their SFGate.com Web site.

This is not to belittle Imbrie's memory but to comment on what has happened to arts reporting in San Francisco. We are used to expecting that reviews will not appear the morning after the performance, but it had not occurred to me that the scope of the Chronicle would be quite so provincial in a city where there is such a high level of interest in the performing arts. On the other hand in this age of RSS feeds, the Chronicle is not much of a news source either; so this incident is probably just another datum to consider in addressing the question of what role the physical newspaper now plays. From that point of view, a more relevant question may be what I got from Google News from typing only "Imbrie." The answer is that I got a whopping total of ten hits, only one of which had to do with Andrew Imbrie; and that hit was today's Chronicle obituary! So perhaps the Chronicle really best serves the world at large as a local newspaper for the San Francisco Bay Area, and we can rely on any number of other sources for news about composers with a much greater global reputation.

Jazzy Stockhausen

I suppose I should feel some modicum of satisfaction in having one of my conjectures confirmed by the Telegraph obituary for Karlheinz Stockhausen. The conjecture was that "the lion's share on the music from Licht [Stockhausen's cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week] now available on recordings seems to have been inspired by performances by jazz greats such as Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and Jimmy Knepper." The confirmation comes from this item from his early biography:

Between 1944 and 1947 Stockhausen paid for his education by working as a stretcher-bearer in a military hospital, as a farmhand, assistant to a travelling magician and as a jazz pianist in clubs.

Now this does not say anything about how good a jazz pianist Stockhausen was or even where those clubs were and whether or not they were ever visited by American performers. Nevertheless, it still means that Stockhausen had at least some experience in the practice of jazz. On this one dimension Stockhausen stands a cut above Igor Stravinsky, who kept trying to write "jazzy" dance pieces but could never really "get it." If I have a personal fantasy about Stockhausen having a collection of old Blue Note vinyls, then my fantasy about Stravinsky has him sitting in the Hot Club de France in Paris listening to Stéphane Grappelli, gnashing his teeth in envy because he could never figure out how to write music that sounded that way! I suspect that a lot of that Licht music sounds jazzy because Stockhausen still had a sense for how to play jazz, rather than just listen to it. Furthermore, Stockhausen was playing his jazz at a time when jazz was going through what was (for me at least) its most important revolution, the rise of the likes of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Lennie Tristano. The "jazz greats" I had previously cited would not be as memorable as they are today without standing on the shoulders of those giants from the Forties, that same period when Stockhausen was trying his hand at jazz piano. Did the jazz revolution fuel his own revolutionary spirit? There may never be a definitive answer to that question, but I can still fantasize about it!

From that point of view, I need to take issue with Ivan Hewett's appreciation piece, also in the Telegraph, which argues that most of Stockhausen's greatness lay in compositions from the Fifties and Sixties and that "vast tracts" of Licht are "cringe-making." I have no idea if Hewett experienced any of the Licht operas as theater; but, if he was writing about them as if they were "pure music," continuing Stockhausen's experiments in the grammar of how scores could be developed, then he was laboring under a great misconception. If jazz really is integral to how we should approach Licht, then we need to think of it more as performance (which happens to be staged, perhaps in the same spirit that Sun Ra performances were stages) than as composition. This move from the grammar of composition to the rhetoric of performance may, indeed, have been the act of a musician in his twilight years looking back on his origins; and, at my age at least, that is not cause for cringing!

Actually, I found Hewett's way with words more cringe-making than anything Stockhausen ever produced. What are we to make of Hewett's phrase, "the great Austrian/Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg?" Is he trying to connote that Schoenberg's music could not have been what it was had Schoenberg not been Jewish? If so, then I suspect I would not be the only one to disagree with him vigorously!

In this respect I found the BBC approach to the news of Stockhausen's death (my initial source) to be far more interesting. Newshour approached Brian Eno for comment. Eno began by comparing him to John Cage, which I felt was a great way to start. He emphasized this connection by observing that Stockhausen should be assessed not only by his own work but by the work of those he influenced, stressing that, in Stockhausen's case, much of that influence when into the revolution on the pop music scene (Eno being one of those influenced). I think this is more important than anything Hewett said in his appreciation, which chose, instead, to invoke the cult-like nature of those who followed Stockhausen.

Finally, I am glad to hear that Licht was completed before Stockhausen died. The recordings for two of the operas (for Wednesday and Sunday) have not yet been released, possibly because they have not yet been performed. I have every reason to hope that they will be performed, and I look forward to adding those recordings to my collection.

Has Jimmy Wales Discovered the Value of Editing?

According to a report by Alistair Coleman of BBC Monitoring, Jimmy Wales wants us to believe that Wikipedia has entered a brave new world in which there will no longer be questions about the authority of its content:

Speaking at the Online Information conference at London's Olympia, he dismissed the long-running controversy over the site's authority.

He said he now thinks that students should be able to cite the online encyclopaedia in their work.

Previously, Mr Wales believed that the website, which is edited by users, lacked the authority for academic work.

As long as an article included accurate citations, he said he had "no problem" with it being used as a reference for students, although academics would "probably be better off doing their own research".

"You can ban kids from listening to rock 'n' roll music, but they're going to anyway," he added. "It's the same with information, and it's a bad educator that bans their students from reading Wikipedia."

In 2005, at the height of the controversy over the site's accuracy, Mr Wales told the BBC that students who copied information from Wikipedia "deserved to get an F grade", and that the site should really be used as a "stepping stone" to more authoritative information.

New editing and checking procedures have made Wikipedia more trustworthy, said the Wikipedia founder.

This raises a variety of questions, the most important being, "When did these new procedures go into effect?" More specifically, did they go into effect after last August's efforts by the CIA to tamper with the entry for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Did they go into effect because those CIA efforts were revealed to the public through the news media? Just how effective have the procedures proven to be; and, for that matter, what are the procedures?

Coleman provides us a bit more information addressing that last question:

Since the controversy, in which it emerged that the "free editing" policy had allowed articles containing inaccuracies and bias to appear, the site has introduced a system of real-time peer review, in which volunteers check new and updated articles for accuracy and impartiality.

The way Coleman began that sentence should raise some eyebrows: It gives the impression that Coleman is willing to accept at face value Wales' assertions that the controversy has been laid to rest. Now readers of some of my recent music posts know that I tend to use Wikipedia more than I used to as a supplement to whatever material is provided in the program book of any concert I attend. I have acknowledged this, even to the point of admitting my own surprise in doing so. On the other hand, while the worlds of musicology and music theory are not without controversy (which can sometimes get quite heated), basic bread-and-butter items like the chronology of major works by a major composer tend to be relatively settled. Put another way, I have enough experience with the academic music literature to have a basic intuition that distinguishes between "raw data" and "interpreted data," as it were; and I know enough to steer clear of anything "interpreted" unless I have a good idea of who is doing the interpreting! Thus, while it is possible that one musicologist may "have it in for" another musicologist with that same level of emotional energy that at least one CIA agent had it in for the current government in Iran, I know enough to steer my own course away from such "minefields of content."

This then takes us to the more serious question in Wales' claims: Should students be allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source; and is it a "bad educator" that bans Wikipedia? First of all we should sweep away the inflammatory rhetoric, which is based on a specious premise. My guess is that this was a swipe at the history department of Middlebury College, which, as I reported back in February, had issued the following policy statement:

Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source.

This was clearly not a ban on Wikipedia but a perfectly reasonable statement of academic discipline. I suspect I would accuse anyone who tried to ban investigating any source, even one as blatantly reprehensible as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, of being a "bad educator;" and there are definitely cases in which Wikipedia has addressed such troubled waters with what I found to be an acceptable level of objectivity and balance. On the other hand the Middlebury policy statement was actually a special case of a more general principle of academic discipline: Any assertion you read needs to be substantiated. There are two basic was to substantiate:

1. Cite a source that has made the assertion and, if necessary, affirm the credibility of the source.
2. Provide your own warranted argument on the basis of substantiated evidence that you have already stated in your text.

In other words it does not matter if you read the assertion in a Wikipedia entry or in The New York Times (to invoke a favorite sore-spot example): If you cannot substantiate it, you cannot claim it as evidence in any subsequent argument you wish to make. So much for Wales' rhetorical persiflage.

Should students be allowed to cite Wikipedia as a source? The answer to this question is that the "law of substantiation" still applies. The issue is not flat-out resolved by a voluntary peer-review process, no more than such a process provides the ultimate criterion for academic publication. There is still an editor (perhaps more than one), who sits between the author and the reviewers; and my real beef with Wales is that he has not yet grasped just what the editorial process is or why it is valuable in substantiating the reliability of content. To put this another way by parodying that motto that the National Rifle Association so loves, "Bad writers do not provide unreliable content; bad editors provide unreliable content!" Thus, whatever Wales may be claiming about how things have changed at Wikipedia and whatever rabble-rousing he may invoke with phrases like "bad educator," the Middlebury policy is a sound one. Not only does it not need to be reexamined, but also we would all benefit from generalizing it along the lines I have suggested here.

Alienation and Suicide

It is worth examining this morning's Reuters report, which takes advantage of temporal distance in its effort to account for the context of yesterday's shootings in Omaha. Consider the summary provided by the lead paragraphs:

A 19-year-old school dropout who shot and killed eight people at a shopping mall had lost both his job and girlfriend and believed he was worthless, according to a report published on Thursday.

"I'm a piece of s---," said a suicide note left behind by Robert Hawkins who killed himself after murdering five women and three men in the mall, "but I'm going to be famous now," the Omaha World-Herald reported.

Police said the rampage appeared to be part of a premeditated suicide by Hawkins, who turned his SKK assault rifle on himself after a midday bloodbath at Westroads mall on Wednesday that also left five people wounded.

One way to approach this episode might be in light of Robert Blauner's classic study, Alienation and Freedom. Even accounting for the fact that this was a study of factory workers published in 1964, I believe that his efforts to analyze the nature of alienation are just as relevant today, if not more so, particularly in light of the fact that my last invocation of Blauner came in a response to a case of three suicides at Renault. In that previous analysis I excerpted the following characterization of alienation from Blauner's forward:

Domination, futility, isolation, and discontent are each aspects of experience that have been identified as elements of the general condition of alienation, a leading perspective in modern social thought.

In his "Alienation and Modern Industry" chapter, Blauner then develops these aspects under the following headings:

• Powerlessness
• Meaninglessness
• Social Alienation
• Self-estrangement

Hawkins, of course, was not a factory worker. In the words of the Reuters report, he "was fired from a fast food restaurant for allegedly stealing $17." However, as we know from Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, the fast food workplace is as alienating as any setting Blauner could have encountered in 1964.

Nevertheless, the very concept of alienation appears to be taboo in the news accounts. Not only is it absent from the Reuters report; but a Google News search on the three keywords "Hawkins," "Omaha," and "alienation" yields no hits. One explanation for this may be that editors do not want their reporters to be amateur psychologists; but the usual way of dealing with events like this is to seek out sources of "expert opinion." I find it hard to believe that reporters could not find sources that would view this event through the lens of alienation, which then makes me wonder whether or not this is a matter of editors not wanting to depress their readers, particularly when their advertisers are facing what could turn out to be a truly grizzly Christmas shopping season. This would then reflect back on reporting the news as an approach to communication that exhibits that "loss of meaning" about which Max Weber warned; and being subjected to such a loss of meaning, in turn, leads to that personal feeling of meaninglessness, which is key to Blauner's profile of the alienated individual. In other words we are dealing with an act of an alienated individual by reporting it in a way that would aggravate a feeling of meaninglessness in others who happen to read the report, thus cultivating feelings of alienation among other readers, many of whom are already enduring the other aspects of alienation in their everyday lives. We are caught in a vicious cycle; but we are impeded from recognizing (let alone reflecting) on it, because to do so would be "bad for business." Then reporters, such as those who file stories for Reuters, prepare their accounts, reminding readers of all the precedents that keep accumulating while trying to "inoculate" any "enquiring minds" from looking for any patterns. This is how we now get our information about the world the Internet has made!

Careless with Money, Careless with Language

Consider the following lead for a report from the belly of the beast of our nation's bureaucracy, filed by Associated Press Writers (yes, that is how they are identified on the byline; does that mean they are not reporters?) Frank Bass and Eileen Sullivan:

The Bush administration now acknowledges it is trying to recover nearly $500 million from people who improperly received federal aid money intended to help victims of two deadly hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, along the Gulf Coast two years ago. It said the amount may increase further.

"This is a moving target and not finite," said James McIntyre, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The government's newest estimate of improper aid represents $494 million FEMA paid to 134,000 people who were ineligible for the aid they received. More than half the money went to people who couldn't prove residency, according to FEMA figures. Overpayments and duplicate payments account for most of the remainder.

The amount had exceeded $500 million, but the agency wrote off nearly $27 million because of appeals or hardship waivers. The $500 million figure would represent nearly $1 of every $10 in government aid intended to help storm victims.

The news about the money is bad enough, but that turn of phrase by McIntyre just adds insult to injury. Does he really mean to assert that the amount of money misappropriated by FEMA is infinite? Given that the Federal Reserve does about as good a job as it can of making sure that there are never an infinite number of dollars in our currency system, we can safely assume that even the Katrina fiasco did not run up an infinite tab. No this is just another example of a bureaucrat trying to elevate his persona by elevating his language; and, consistent with just about every other Bush administration bureaucrat (including The Man himself) who opens his mouth to the press, the opposite effect always seems to ensue! It is not (as my Title may imply) that the careless handling of language is a symptom of the careless handling of finances (or, for that matter, vice versa). Rather, it is just that ours is a government that is careless in everything; and, like a muscle ache that only haunts us when it rains, we have become so used to the discomfort that we hardly notice it any more. Unfortunately, tolerating excessive carelessness in others is tantamount to an act of carelessness unto itself, whatever we may believe about loving our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart. If people get the government they deserve and ours is government of carelessness, what does that say about us?

TQM RIP

Once upon a time it was all about quality; and the United States was scrambling to learn lessons about "Total Quality Management" (TQM) from the Japanese. Some of the best lessons seemed to be coming from Toyota; and, while Ford was sloganeering with "Quality is Job 1," General Motors decided to partner with Toyota in a concerted effort to plant TQM on American soil. The result was New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), established in Fremont, California, in 1984 and a "poster child" demonstration that the United States could learn about quality from Japan.

That was then, as they say. 2007, on the other hand, was the first year in which a Toyota vehicle received bad marks from Consumer Reports. What happened to the quality? One answer may lie in a story filed this morning by Chang-Ran Kim, Asia auto correspondent for Reuters. Here is the lead:

When Kenichi Uchino collapsed and died on the factory floor before dawn one February day in 2002, he was into his fourth hour of overtime.

In his final month at the Toyota car plant, he had logged more than 106 hours overtime, most of it unpaid. He died from sudden heart failure at just 30 years old.

A district court ruled last week that Uchino had literally worked himself to death. It was a hard-fought victory for his widow, Hiroko, after almost six years of legal battles while holding down her own job and raising two young children.

But the issue of 'karoshi', a household Japanese term meaning 'death from overwork' is underplayed in Japan, she says. Workers are too often expected to sacrifice their personal lives and happiness for the company's benefit.

The Japanese believed that quality could only emerge if all workers were personally invested in doing their best in every assigned task; but that precept neither said nor intended anything about sacrificing "personal lives and happiness for the company's benefit." However, Kim has probably tapped into why the priorities of quality seem to have been displaced:

Toyota is on its way to overtaking General Motors as the world's biggest automaker. Much of its growth has been due to expanded production in Japan, and the company has repeatedly lamented a shortage of engineers and skilled workers.

In other words, regardless of any past relationships around NUMMI, Toyota is now hell-bent on taking over General Motors' place in the Number 1 slot; and, from an operational point of view, "hell-bent" means "fiercely competitive." This leads to a hypothesis that may eventually graduate to the list of laws that I have been compiling on this blog:

Increased aggression in competition leads to decreased attention to quality.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that such aggression in competition will abate any time soon. One of the unintended consequences of globalization seems to be a culture that recognizes that, if one can now "play for all the marbles," one is obliged to do so, lest all those marbles fall into a competitor's hands. Thus, while we are "amusing ourselves to death" in the arena of political discourse, we are working ourselves to death to keep the economic wolf from the door. This raises the reductio ad absurdum question: What happens to quality when all the workers have died of exhaustion?

What is the Truth about the Economy?

This morning I was listening to a former intelligence analyst on KPFA's Morning Show. He was explaining how the National Intelligence Estimate works and why its results were so valuable. This led to the inevitable question having to do with Bush's comment yesterday that he had only known the results for a week. The analyst invoked a verb I seldom hear on any of the mass media. He said that the President had "prevaricated" in making that statement. Without going into the semantic subtleties of whether there is a difference of either denotation or connotation between "prevaricate" and "lie" or whether the former is effectively a euphemism for the latter, this was a pretty serious charge, particularly, as one reporter tried to point out, in regard to the credibility of the United States in the global community.

Without trying to trivialize this matter, I still hold to the claim I made yesterday: When it comes to the opinion of our general public (which I avidly hope will also be our voting public), making up stories about an impending Third World War in the face of strong evidence to the contrary is still not as important as the desire of every American for a sense of economic well being. Bearing this in mind, we should examine the lead from last night's Reuters report, which covered this aspect of the President's press conference:

U.S. President George W. Bush said on Tuesday the country's economic fundamentals were strong despite "headwinds" from a weaker housing market, and he voiced confidence in a plan to ease the subprime mortgage crisis.

"The basics in the economy are good," Bush told a news conference, citing low inflation, low interest rates, a solid labor market and rising exports as grounds for optimism, although he acknowledged there were also challenges.

In light of the charge of prevarication over the results of intelligence analysis, one has to wonder whether or not the name of the reporter who filed this story, Alister Bull, was actually an effort on Reuters' part to encrypt editorial opinion in the form of a nom de plume. Put more bluntly, if the global community can no longer take our President as a credible source on matters of nuclear proliferation and Iran, can the national community take him as a credible source on the state of our economy? The little unscientific experiment I performed yesterday would seem to indicate that at least some chunk of the San Francisco portion of that national community is more inclined to associate anything the President says about the economy with the last name of that Reuters reporter. There may even be some voters who remember, either from direct experience or from a history lesson, a previous Republican President who tried to tell our country, "Prosperity is just around the corner" (back in the days when political discourse was far too dignified to use phrases like, "It's the economy stupid!").

Are things as bad as they were when Herbert Hoover was hit by the locomotive of the Great Depression? There are too many dimensional factors to this question to give it a simple yes-or-no answer. (This, by the way, is why Ronald Reagan's question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?," made for great rhetoric but was thoroughly specious on logical grounds. The Carter team, unfortunately, made the classic mistake of assuming that they could beat down rhetoric with strong logic.) Even though logic need not be involved, the real question is, "What portion of the American population is seriously concerned about their economic situation?" This is an entirely subjective criterion, but the future of our government may depend on how it is answered and how that answer is confronted.

Consistent Chutzpah

The news, reported on John Nichols blog for The Nation, about senators absent from the vote on the Peru Trade Agreement will not, at least for now, deprive Dennis Kucinich of his second Chutzpah of the Week award; but it will count as "extra credit" on the award given to Joe Biden of Delaware, Hillary Clinton of New York, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Barack Obama of Illinois back on November 9. Recall that these four would-be candidates decided back then that campaigning was more important than voting on the approval of the appointment of Judge Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. Well it turns out that only five senators missed the Peru vote, and four of them were the aforementioned Chutzpah of the Week award holders. (The fifth was Arizona Senator John McCain, which is some indication that Republican priorities are no different.) When I had my rant on November 9, I concluded by saying that my thoughts about supporting Kucinich had been reinforced. When it comes down to who is demonstrably serious about doing the people's business, my support for Kucinich (and for the reason why he is getting another Chutzpah of the Week award) just keeps growing!

An Unscientific Look at Consumer Confidence

The general consensus that one gets from both news and editorial sources is that the American public is much more concerned about their economic well being than they are about our President's opinion of the latest National Intelligence Estimate; and, at this time of year, one of the best ways to assess the individual consumer's sense of economic well being is to observe Christmas shopping behavior. Of course increased activity in the digital world means that we can no longer do this strictly in the physical world, but Nicole Maestri's report from the physical world for Reuters still merits some attention. It is decidedly not the sort of story we would have gotten from the Ghost of Christmas Past:

The holiday tug-of-war is under way. U.S. retailers want to rack up sales now, not later.

Consumers, however, are resisting, playing the waiting game for bigger discounts closer to Christmas.

To win the battle, many retailers are enticing shoppers with so-called limited-time sales, hoping a deadline will convince them to spend money now -- and help stores avoid profit-crunching price cuts later in the season.

To get my own read on this "tug-of-war," I decided that I would walk through Union Square while on my way to the Noontime Concerts™ event at Old St. Mary's Cathedral. Bearing in mind that this is about as far from a "scientific method" as one could get, except for one rather depressed looking Santa (a Salvation Army woman who did not even have a Santa suit) in front of Saks, there was absolutely no feeling of it being Christmas time in what used to be the heart of downtown shopping in San Francisco. This may simply indicate that the "action" has left Union Square in favor of mall settings (one of which is a short walk over on Market Street). Right now, however, there is an intuitive gut-level feeling of economic depression, whatever the experts and their spin doctors may be saying; and I think it is a consequence of that element of consumer resistance that Maestri has described. Indeed, the very fact that we should be speaking in terms of consumer resistance, rather than confidence, may say more about that sense of economic well being than any economic analysis can tell us.

"You shall love your crooked neighbor/With your crooked heart."

As a student I thought that the couplet quoted in my Title line, taken from W. H. Auden, was a really cool condemnation of the hypocrisy of religion. Today, in light of Edward Mendelson's review of Arthur Kirsch's Auden and Christianity in The New York Review, I have an alternative reading that may be singularly appropriate for our faith-based society. The reading is a reminder that loving your neighbor amounts to an acknowledgement that you and your neighbor are equally flawed. This elevates the moral language of religion beyond Carl Gustav Jung's "relation of the individual to his fantasy" by grounding a biblical commandment in a simple reality of everyday life, which is that every individual has a relation to a fantasy world but that those worlds are both flawed and incompatible. The problem with our President's faith-based policy resides less in his simplistic division of the world into good and evil on the basis of the wisdom of his heart and more in his faith blinding him to the fundamental proposition that the wisdom of his heart is flawed, just as it is in his neighbor's heart, whoever his neighbor may be. Auden's ballad is more about love than about the moral imperative of dealing with good and evil, but the lover in his text is thinking just as simplistically as George W. Bush. Both of them need to be cautioned; but in Auden's text the final stanza indicates that the lovers did not really "get the message" of that couple, which had been delivered by the chiming of the clocks:

It was late, late in the evening
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

So, if our President cannot get this message either, we just have to remember that he is no better than the protagonist of Auden's ballad, which is to say that he is just as human as the rest of us.

Kucinich Plays the Chutzpah Card Again!

I confess. I take more delight in pointing out how Dennis Kucinich can invoke the positive connotation of chutzpah than I do building up our President's stockpile of negative connotation awards. Again, it is early in the week; but Kucinich seems to have cottoned on to the proposition that chutzpah is a great way to get attention from more than the long tail of the blogosphere. Having had to endure the usual neglect at the Brown and Black Democratic Forum, he decided to exercise his right ask a candidate of any candidate on the stage by asking himself a question. The topic was universal single-payer not-for-profit health care, which gave him the opportunity to distinguish himself from all the other candidates (since he is the only one supporting such a straightforward approach to quality-health-care-for-all). As anyone can see from the video clip (which I saw on Truthdig), he pulled this off with the sort of panache that made it clear that he knew he was in chutzpah territory. So now he has two Chutzpah of the Week awards; and, if his strategy works (and I certainly hope it does), then he may yet be able to parlay those awards into votes that count.

Misfortune as Entertainment (again)

The Reuters story about Who Wants to Marry a U.S. Citizen? was released last Friday morning; and I have yet to read any follow-up report revealing that this was a hoax. There is certainly an air of legitimacy in their account:

The show's backers at Morusa Media hope to make a sort of love match between reality TV and a national obsession with immigration. But the producers make no promise that a marriage will occur or lead to U.S. citizenship.

Show creator Adrian Martinez said that Morusa Media has not yet found a network to produce or air the show, but he is currently in talks with one cable TV network and already has signed up contestants for six episodes.

Between the consequences of the writers' strike and the continuing popularity of "reality" (scare quotes intended) programming, this may very well be the real deal coming soon to a cable channel near you.

Making entertainment out of the suffering of others goes all the way back to the oral predecessors of Ancient Greek drama. The Greeks could dignify it with the concept of catharsis, but few shreds of dignity were left by the time Imperial Rome was calling the shots. Even the exploitation of political undertones is not especially new, particularly when the politics were highly sensitive, since a "fiction" was always "safer" than logical argument or exposition. So does this project really deserve any special attention?

I suspect my own sore nerve resides in that premise of "a national obsession with immigration." It is not that I disagree about the obsession. Rather, the problem is that this is yet another highly complicated mess in which we are mired with little hope of extricating ourselves. The situation is a complex web of contingencies that impact the very nature of how business is conducted, the health (or sickness) of both the national and global economies, and the roles we play in international relations. If the national public, as a whole, is "obsessed," it is because they feel hopelessly lost in all the complexity, lacking the foggiest idea about whom to believe or, where elections are involved, whom to support.

Then along comes this (proposed) television program. If it really does get produced, there is a good chance that it will create an audience base; and that base will be lulled into thinking that they now "understand" the immigration problem. They will be deceived, of course, since they will come away with nothing more than a gross trivialization of the problem that reduces it to a handful of particularly dramatic case studies. What is more chilling is that the producers of this program will then be able to shape public opinion on the basis of the particular cases they decide to present. Put another way, this kind of programming will set the bar for a whole new level of propagandizing; and, if the producers turn out to be free of any ideological bias, they will quickly discover the virtue of selling out to the highest bidder.

Worse yet, the mere act of proposing such a project, regardless of whether or not it ever hits the airwaves or coaxial cables, has effectively let the genie out of the bottle. Now that what passes for television news has pretty much exhausted its strategies for keeping its viewers entertained (without worrying too much about keeping them informed), the baton of issues-and-events-as-entertainment is being passed to "reality programming." I would guess that at least half a dozen similar projects are now being hashed out in reaction to Friday morning's report; and, in the context of the current writers' strike, that estimate may be pathetically low. Thus, we are entering a new age of attitude towards government and political processes. This new age will no longer need to bother with postmodern resistance, because all it will need for a foundation is self-gratification; and there never seems to be a shortage of that particular commodity!

Challenging Positivism in the Social World

My post about "Asking the Right Questions about Communities" has provided me with my first experience with an extended thread of comments, even if the thread has turned into a conversation with one reader; and this has obliged me to revisit many of the issues that I had tried to examine when I first tried to address the proper role of social theory in the design, implementation, and deployment of IT systems. That examination has drawn heavily upon three primary sources, each of whom has provided me with a valuable perspective:

1. From Jürgen Habermas I acquired my recognition that the social world was qualitatively distinct from the objective world, which positivism had tried to treat as the only world about which we could reason, and the subjective world, which was the alternative foundation posited by psychology. This ontological framework did not originate with Habermas. It can be found in Karl Mannheim's earlier work on the sociology of knowledge in Ideology and Utopia; and I shall not be surprised if I eventually find it in Max Weber (if not an earlier source). Nevertheless, Habermas was the one who made a real case for the proposition that effective action could only arise if all three worlds were taken into account. This was probably motivated by his concern for the "colonization of the lifeworlds" by systems constrained by the limits of positivism, a concern which is as relevant today (if not more so) as it was when he first addressed it.
2. From Anthony Giddens I gradually developed an appreciation for how structuration theory could account for a process of decision making that accounted for Habermas' three worlds and enable us to act effectively in a life-world that has not been "colonized" by positivist systems.
3. Isaiah Berlin provided me with my first serious critique of positivist thinking as it flourished under the Enlightenment and a view of Romanticism as a quest for an alternative Weltanschauung.

In retrospect, though, we can view Romanticism as an experiment that failed, or at least could not yield anything of a substance that would satisfy the likes of serious social theorists like Habermas and Giddens. Nevertheless, if we examine the "critics of the Enlightenment" that so occupied Berlin's writing, we see that they seem to share a mind-set that avoids the prescriptive strategies of positivism in favor of developing better strategies for description. While such a cognitive shift is interesting in its own right, it still leaves with the question of what role better description can play when we have to make decisions and take actions in the life-world.

One way to address this question is to pay less attention to whether or not Romanticism provided us with any lasting "life lessons" and more to what their cognitive shift says about the texts upon which we draw when we are trying to decide how to act. To some extent Berlin would probably have resisted such a strategy, arguing that one of the better "political" decision-makers in history, Otto von Bismarck, tended to eschew any texts when crucial decisions were at stake. However, I would regard such a position as overly extreme. We are all informed by texts, particularly if we take a broad view (assuming, for example, that any symbolic artifact can be considered as a text and "read") of just what constitutes the texts we encounter in the life-world. The question is not whether we are informed by texts but by which types of texts we are informed, where I use the word "types" in the terms of text type theory.

That theory posits four categories of text: argumentation, description, exposition, and narrative. What interests me in this case is that each category takes a different stance towards positivism.

1. To the extent that argumentation is rooted in the objectivity of pure logic, it is the most positivist of the four types.
2. Description, on the other hand, presumes that the text has an author who is doing the describing; and, since there is an unavoidable psychological element in perception, the understanding of a descriptive text must reside in the subjective world as well as the objective. Furthermore, if description is being engaged with some suasive objective in mind, then the reader of the text is as important as the author, which means that the text must also account for the social world.
3. When one views a narrative in terms of its component elements, which include not only events but the agents responsible for those events and the motives behind the acts taken by those agents, we recognize that narrative texts are fundamentally about the social world and thus are very much in that social world, while, at the same time, accounting for the subjective motives of the agents and certain objective properties of the scene in which those agents are situated.
4. Finally, exposition is very much concerned with providing the reader with a context within which one can interpret propositions relating to argumentation, description, or even narrative. Communicating such a context must, of necessity, be rooted in the social world. However, the interpretations that it serves also involve the objective and subjective worlds.

Thus, like Habermas I believe that the "communicative actions" we take must reside equally in the objective, subjective, and social worlds. However, while Habermas tried to develop his own theory of such actions as an extension of Austin's Speech Act Theory, I am more inclined to examine the "communicative texts," rather than the actions that they enable. Ultimately, it is the texts that determine how we manage in the life-world; and, through the study of those texts, we may eventually cultivate a matter understanding of just how we do that. In other words we should pursue the agenda of hermeneutic thinking that has already occupied both Habermas and Giddens.

Charles Ives in the World of "Nice Jewish Boys"

Back in June when I wrote that the Eusebius Duo "made such a bold move in coupling violin sonatas by Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms that it was a pity that they lacked the maturity to do justice to either composition," I accentuated the positive by concentrating on the relationship between Ives and Brahms, rather than picking on the problems with the performance. Suffice it to say that, where the Ives was concerned, much of the problem had to do with an understanding of his source material, which is why I really appreciated Michael Tilson Thomas' decision to have the San Francisco Symphony Chorus perform five instances of that source material in conjunction with his recent performance of Ives' music. This decision was probably based on a similar strategy he engaged for his recording of Ives' fourth symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This has led me to reflect on why Jews in their sixties should know more about the Christian hymns that were so important to Ives than current graduates of the San Francisco Conservatory appear to be!

Since I cannot speak for Thomas, I shall try to deal with my own case through a minor exercise in autobiography, which grew out of my discovering that one of my friends in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, who shares my enthusiasm for Ives, was not familiar with the Essays Before a Sonata, that he had written in conjunction with the composition of his second ("Concord") piano sonata. I realized that I was first introduced to the Essays by Professor David Epstein in the first year that he took over teaching the twentieth-century music course at MIT. I dutifully read the collection and found it inspirational in many ways, but I suspect it is due for another reading in the context of the experiences I have now accumulated. Epstein died recently, and I think there is a lot to be said for the good taste of not speaking ill of the dead. Nevertheless, I had a lot on influences in my study of Ives, including my personal composition teacher; and I have to say that, in retrospect, Epstein never really "got" Ives, however many other things he did "get." One reason may be that Epstein was too obsessed with "the culture of a nice Jewish boy" during those turbulent Sixties when what Thoreau called the "incessant influx of novelty" ran the gamut from the provocative to the offensive. As a result Epstein's personal ethic sought refuge in an "incredible dullness," which Thoreau had attacked as the general reaction to novelty. In this respect I find it interesting that Epstein had studied conducting under George Szell, whose recordings I had devoured as a student; but today I find those recording to be the epitome of Thoreau's "incredible dullness." Ironically, I now have the opportunity to hear the work of another Szell student, George Cleve; but I have never found Cleve inclined to seek out "incredible dullness," particularly in his Midsummer Mozart offerings! (I had occasion to ask Cleve if he ever knew Epstein, but the two did not overlap.) I suspect that much of Epstein's interest in Ives was rooted in a famous note that Arnold Schoenberg had written in which he declared Ives to be the one truly original voice in American music. Whether or not Schoenberg "got" Ives (particularly in light of how little of that music was being performed in his day) is an open question; but, with his Princeton background, Epstein came from a culture that did not question Schoenberg!

Let me now set down that geisha from the famous Zen proverb and shift from an argument with an old professor that I never got to have to my personal experiences in trying to play Ives' music. My first serious experience came from a piano teacher I had in Santa Barbara. The most important thing she ever taught me was not to be afraid of anything, and to make her point she had me look at the fourth movement of Ives' first piano sonata. I still have my copy with all the marks I put in to try to figure out how to manage the polyrhythms, and to this day I continue to believe that she had me look at the music because she was also trying to figure out how to play it! However, she was basically right: Once I got beyond my fear, I was able to strategize; and the strategy was good enough to get me through the entire movement. (It also put enough strain on the used instrument I was playing at the time that my technician told me it was about time for me to exchange it for a "real" piano that would be up to such demands!)

My next experience came when I moved East to work in Connecticut and spend all of my spare time in New York. I decided to get to know "The Alcotts" from the "Concord" sonata. I was probably more afraid of the "Concord" than I was of the first sonata, just because Epstein had put so much time into it, which I had enhanced by reading the Essays; and I had emerged thoroughly intimidated. However, I had now been taught about overcoming fear; and "The Alcotts" was the most manageable movement of the sonata (by virtue of being the least representative of the four). What I had not anticipated as that this exercise would turn out to provide me with a good example of where Epstein had misled his students in his approach to Ives. He had been particularly taken with the appearance of the four-note motif from Beethoven's fifth in "Emerson" and saw "The Alcotts" as an expansion of that motif. On the other hand, if we listen to the "hymn sing" by the Chicago Symphony Chorus included on Thomas' recording of the Ives fourth symphony, we discover that "The Alcotts" actually begins with a direct citation of "Ye Christian heralds," known as the "Missionary Chant" in The New Harp of Columbia; and, if we then go back to "Emerson," we find that the hymn is already emerging there (although I cannot say as I ever thought of Emerson as a "Christian herald" missionary type)!

I suspect the lesson from all of this is that Ives is not the sort of composer who holds up well to "academic" methodologies. Ives was too much of a performer to lose himself in arguments over the logic that holds together the notes on the page, he was too scornful of all those traditions that had informed how we hear music at all, and his whole sense of music was just too intensely personal. When publishing a paper or even getting a conservatory degree is more important than getting inside the head of the composer and turning what you find into a performance, our understanding of Ives will inevitably be short-changed. Fortunately, Thomas does not have to worry about such academic priorities; and that is probably why we in San Francisco are just as lucky to have him for performances of Ives as we are for his performances of Mahler!