A Gift that Gives Back?

Yesterday I finally got around to watching the DVR recording I made of Eduardo Galeano being interviewed about his new book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, on Book TV. As expected, the interviewer brought up the recent incident of Hugo Chavez presenting Barack Obama with a copy of an earlier Galeano book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, during Obama's first official visit south of our border, so to speak. (Chavez' gift was of the original Spanish edition of this book, rather than the English translation by the late Cedric Belfrage. Galeano had high praise for Belfrage in the course of his Book TV interview.)

As a writer, Galeano has a long tradition of documenting Herbert Agar's "truth which men prefer not to hear." This means that his career has been as much one of a survivor as of a writer. His Memory of Fire trilogy was written in Spain at a time when his life was in peril in just about any South American country. Since much of his writing has been as a journalist, one has to wonder how he would react to today's news about the practice of journalism in Venezuela as reported by Will Grant for BBC NEWS:

A tough new media law, under which journalists could be imprisoned for publishing "harmful" material, has been proposed in Venezuela.

Journalists could face up to four years in prison for publishing material deemed to harm state stability.

Public prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz, who proposed the changes, said it was necessary to "regulate the freedom of expression" without "harming it".

The move comes at a time of rising tension over private media regulation.

Under the draft law on media offences, information deemed to be "false" and aimed at "creating a public panic" will also be punishable by prison sentences.

The law will be highly controversial if passed in its current form.

It states that anyone - newspaper editor, reporter or artist - could be sentenced to between six months and four years in prison for information which attacks "the peace, security and independence of the nation and the institutions of the state".

What I remember most from the Book TV interview is Galeano's claim that he always tries to take a view of the world that gives equal measure to the dark side and the bright side. In this case this may mean that he can appreciate both the potential danger for Venezuelan journalists and the opportunity for an ironic sense of humor, even if the humor itself has a dark side.

Short Beer?

I am not a big beer drinker, but I like the stuff enough to have cultivated a discriminating tongue for it. I also have a keen sense for beer humor, which is why I enjoy Web sites like Beer Facts. I mention this site because it contains what Jane Austen would have called "a truth universally acknowledged" had she been a beer drinker (which, for all we know, she was):

There is no such thing as a short beer. (As in, "I'm going to stop off at Joe's for a short beer before on the way home.")

This "truth" (complete with its convoluted syntax) was the first thing that occurred to me while reading the wire service account of last night's White House meeting on Al Jazeera English:

Barack Obama, the US president, has hosted a black professor and white police officer in an attempt to defuse a simmering race row that erupted when Henry Louis Gates Jr was arrested by Sergeant James Crowley.

The meeting at the White House - dubbed the "Beer Summit" - lasted just 40 minutes, but all three men agreed that something positive had come out of the incident, which had become a sensation in the US media.

Being white, I cannot say what I really want to say about this (but the second word is "please"); but, really, who the hell spends only 40 minutes over a beer? It takes at least half an hour for the beer to unlock the conversational wheels and get them turning at all! I appreciate our President's efforts to do damage control over his own counterproductive act in this "simmering" situation; but would it have been that much of a strain on his schedule to have a real conversation instead of a staged media event? Perhaps my historical memory has clouded, but I just cannot imagine President Jimmy Carter handling this kind of affair quite so superficially.

Profile in Courageous CHUTZPAH

Politics may be the art of compromise; but, as we saw in the history of the United States leading up to the Civil War, compromise is often a matter of sweeping problems under the rug until the pile of problems is bigger than the rug itself. This could well be the case with the compromises emerging in an attempt to enact health form legislation. As a result, 57 Democrats in the House of Representatives have decided to bare their progressive teeth with a letter sent to their supposed leaders indicating their intention to oppose any compromise that will ultimately undermine the course of reform.

As usual, this is the sort of news that the mainstream media likes to ignore, being more concerned with rationalizing the strategies of the "Blue Dog" Democrats. Fortunately, those of us who recognize the difference between real reform and the facade of a Potemkin village can still turn to The Nation; and last night John Nichols used his The Beat blog to put out the word about the House progressives. Here is his summary:

A deal between House Energy and Commerce Committee chair Henry Waxman and several members of the conservative "Blue Dog" caucus has been portrayed as "progress" toward reform by some top Democrats and much of the media. But without the votes of the 57 progressives who have signed a letter condemning the compromise, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, is unlikely to be able to cobble together enough support to gain approval of the plan in House where Republicans continue to act as the party of "no."

The progressives are not joining the obstructionists.

Rather, they argue, the compromise between Waxman and the Blue Dogs is itself an obstruction to real reform.

The progressives say "the agreement is not a step forward toward a good health care bill, but a large step backwards." That's because it would, according to their savvy analysis, "reduce subsidies to low-and middle-income families, requiring them to pay a larger portion of their income for insurance premiums, and would impose an unfunded mandate on the states to pay for what were to have been Federal costs."

"In short," declares the letter that was circulated by Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Lynn Woolsey, D-California, and Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona, and a number of CPC members and allies, "this agreement will result in the public, both as insurance purchasers and as taxpayers, paying ever higher rates to insurance companies."

Nichols' post includes the full text of the letter and a list of all of its signatories. In the interest of getting our eyes back on the prize of real health care reform, I think it is important to acknowledge the act of all of those signatories with the Chutzpah of the Week award. Here are their names:

Lynn Woolsey

Raúl Grijalva

Carolyn Kilpatrick

Jerry Nadler

Phil Hare

Lucille Roybal-Allard

Keith Ellison

Earl Blumenauer

Mel Watts

Donna Edwards

John Olver

Dennis Kucinich

Laura Richardson

Maxine Waters

John Conyers

Judy Chu

Maurice Hinchey

Hank Johnson

Diane Watson

Jackie Spier

Bill Pascrell

Lloyd Doggett

Marcy Kaptur

Mazie Hirono

Bob Filner

Linda Sanchez

Marcia Fudge

Barbara Lee

Andre Carson

Sheila Jackson Lee

Michael Honda

Jim McDermott

William Lacy Clay

Jim McGovern

Yvette Clarke

Eric Massa

Chellie Pingree

Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Elijah Cummings

Bennie Thompson

Gwen Moore

Donald Payne

Fortney "Pete" Stark

Ed Towns

Corrine Brown

Alcee Hastings

Nydia Valezquez

Luis Gutierrez

Grace Napolitano

Albio Sires

John Tierney

Mike Capuano

Chaka Fattah

Jose Serrano

Sam Farr

Bill Delahunt

Eddie Bernice Johnson

Among those signatories, Dennis Kucinich is no stranger to the Chutzpah of the Week award; and, reviewing his past awards, it is clear that they have always been granted for his consistency in putting "the people's business" ahead of the business of politics. It is good to see that, in this particular case, he has 56 colleagues who feel as strongly about this matter as he does.

Whose Recovery?

A Reuters dispatch this morning from European Investment Correspondent Jeremy Gaunt in London may be an indicator of who thinks what about the current economic crisis:

Leading investors have taken their holdings of stocks back up to levels last seen just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a series of Reuters polls showed on Thursday.

In other words all those guys who "sharply accelerated a global stock retreat" (Gaunt's words) after the Lehman debacle are "back in the game" (my words). One of these "guys" is Michael Dueker of Russell Investments, described by Gaunt as "head economist for North America." His words are:

The stock market is telling us that the worst has passed for the economy and particularly for the business cycle.

Last month I gave David Viniar, Chief Financial Officer of Goldman Sachs, a Chutzpah of the Week award for this kind of declaration; and I really do not want to repeat myself. Nevertheless, I feel that there can never be enough reminders of just how wide the gulf is between the interests of Wall Street and those of Main Street, a gulf that only appears to be taken seriously by China, perhaps because, for all of their economic prosperity, there is still a bit of Marxism in their worldview! The other important economic story this morning came from Reuters reporter Lucia Mutikani in Washington:

The number of Americans collecting long-term unemployment aid fell to the lowest in three months in mid-July, according to government data that implied a slowing pace of layoffs as the economy stabilizes.

Presumably, Wall Street is more interested in the fact that the rate of increase is decreasing, rather than the blunter fact that unemployment is still increasing (regardless of the rate)!

Yet Another Loss

This may well be the most morbid week I have encountered since I started blogging. I just discovered (due to sluggishness on the part of The New York Times in releasing the story) that this past Monday, when I was writing up my reaction to reading Joshua Kosman's obituary for Michael Steinberg on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, was also the day on which George Russell died. Perhaps the delay reflected that fact that Russell was not that familiar to the general public. To this day he may still be best remembered for his collaboration with Dizzy Gillespie on the two-sided "suite" recorded on a single RCA Victor 78, "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop." This was one of Gillespie's earliest ventures into Afro-Cuban jazz. Russell was his arranger; and his most notable contribution was the introduction to "Cubana Be," one of his earliest departures from conventional scales in favor of the modal scales that could be traced back to Ancient Greece.

Ben Ratliff's Times obituary provides a telling anecdote about Russell's sense of self in his practice of jazz:

He later moved to New York to play drums with [Benny] Carter’s band, but he gave up the instrument as soon as Max Roach was called in to replace him. “Max had it all on drums,” he said. “I decided that writing was my field.”

Like Lennie Tristano, he had an intense drive to get at how things ticked; and, again like Tristano, his reputation was far stronger within the "brotherhood" of practitioners than in the "external" world of casual listeners. (That need to understand how things ticked, of course, meant that his approach to jazz was analogous to the one that Merce Cunningham took to dance and Michael Steinberg took to the art of writing about music, which makes this week's sense of loss all the greater.)

Looking over my own collection, I discovered that I have eight Russell CDs (as well as the 2-CD collection of the complete RCA Victor recordings made by Dizzy Gillespie). I honestly cannot remember how I accumulated those eight CDs, but I think the collection began with the Jazz Workshop recording by The George Russell Smalltet. I may have been drawn to this recording because Bill Evans was Russell's pianist. That CD gave me my first taste of Russell's own compositional voice, after which I would go after every opportunity to add another one to my collection. When I started taking my business to True Blue Music, I encountered The African Game, which I think was his only Blue Note session. My wife fell in love with that recording from its very first notes.

Regarding Russell's theoretical interest in modality, I have to confess that I am still trying to get my ears around it, particularly his focus on the Lydian mode. I suspect that this mode appealed to Russell because of the prominent position of the tritone, the notorious diabolus in musica ("the Devil in music") in the history of Western music. The Wikipedia entry for this mode illustrates it with the song "Maria" from West Side Story. Leonard Bernstein, of course, never concealed his enthusiasm for the innovations taking place around him in jazz; and I would be surprised if Bernstein had not been aware of Russell's pursuits. (His interest in Tristano's work has been documented.) "Maria" may well have been a product of Bernstein taking some of Russell's ideas and putting his own twist on them.

Nevertheless, by the middle of the twentieth century, the devil had been exorcised from the tritone as much as the structural functions of harmony had been emancipated from dissonance. By the time "Maria" came along, the tritone was not the big deal it once was. Consequently, whether or not Russell should be remembered for his theories may be little more than an academic question; but his practices played a vital role in how jazz progressed, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century. Thus, the last word on Russell may parallel the epitaph for Christopher Wren:

Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice.

[Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.]

If you seek Russell's monument, listen to just about any jazz recording after 1947 (the year of the "Cubana Be"/"Cubana Bop" session)!

A Visual Metaphor?

Thinking more about my experience of watching videos of Pierre Boulez conducting the music of Edgard Varèse (which I reported on Examiner.com), I realize that Boulez employed a gesture I had not previously encountered. He would raise both arms, curve them forward, and then bring them down with the rest of his body vaguely following that curve, almost as if he were diving into water. I let that pass as idiosyncrasy until, earlier this week while watching videos of Valery Gergiev conducting the music of Johannes Brahms, I saw him execute the same gesture! This led me to reflect back on what Boulez had been doing and whether or not Gergiev had decided to appropriate it as a good idea.

As I have written in the past, I have come to appreciate Boulez as "a conductor who recognizes the importance of knowing where the climaxes are and making sure that they are recognized as such." Those climaxes are not always indicated explicitly in the score, and where they are is often a matter of how a performer decides to read that score. When the score does attempt to indicate such climaxes, it is usually through the use of a "phrasing slur," a notational artifact for which Heinrich Schenker had a particularly venomous regard. (He did not seem to object to the idea that one could use notation to indicate phrase boundaries or even the hierarchical embedding of subphrases within phrases. His attack was against editors whose phrasing slurs made no sense, at least in his own opinion.) The shape of the notation itself led me to wonder whether Boulez was arcing his body over the end of a phrase in imitation of a slur arc. In other words, just as the use of slur notation served as a metaphor for delimiting the extent of a phrase, Boulez was using his body as a visual metaphor for the notation. If this were, indeed, the case, I could see how other conductors, particularly those who have mastered the skill of conducting with the entire body (like Gergiev), could see the value in this particular gesture and appropriate it for their own performances. When we then take these two examples together, we find ourselves with an interesting illustration of a common foundation for performance shared by Brahms and Varèse, however radically different the experiences of listening to these two composers may be!

Undermining Health Care Reform

Like Al Gore, Howard Dean is not afraid to talk about inconvenient truths concerned with potential crises. Also, like Gore, Dean seems to have discovered that it is easier to talk about those truths through the media of entertainment, rather than through the usual channels of government and politics. However, while Gore chose to raise questions about the environment through a multimedia lecture tour that was subsequently documented as both a film and a book, Dean chose to address the health care crisis by filling in for Keith Olbermann as a guest host on Countdown on MSNBC. In the spirit of an old joke about television commercials, Dean did not have to worry about playing a doctor on television, because he is one. His voice within the health care profession is far from the only one, but it is a voice that the media would prefer that we not hear. Indeed, his is a voice that still tries to view health care as a profession, rather than an industry, which is why those on the industry side of the coin seem to be throwing as much money as they can at discrediting the sorts of things he has to say.

As a Presidential candidate Dean was not always able to play the media in his favor. On the basis of the account in Ari Berman's blog post for The Notion, however, I have to wonder if Dean's fumbles had more to do with impediments placed in his path by the Democratic Party than with the quality of his media presence. As a guest host on Countdown, he was more beholden to MSNBC than to the political party he has represented; and he was not afraid to put the party itself on the hot seat. Since the success or failure of health care reform lies primarily in the hands of our representatives in Congress, Dean felt that his hot seat should be reserved for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which has had a very strong hand in who those representatives are and a stronger hand in what they do than many of us would like to assume. Here is Berman's account of Dean in action:

Howard Dean guest hosted Countdown with Keith Olbermann at an opportune time last night, following reports that the Senate Finance Committee--helmed by Montana Democrat Max Baucus--is preparing to exclude a public option from its long-awaited healthcare bill.

"What if the Senate Finance Committee has already done the Republicans' dirty work for them?" Dean asked rhetorically at the beginning of show.

Dean has just authored a book on healthcare reform--detailing why America needs a public option--and knows quite a bit about the subject from his years as a doctor and governor of Vermont. He called Baucus's reported bill the "so-called compromise."

Dean asked Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, why Baucus would "give away something something so fundamental to healthcare reform as a public option?"

"We have to have the public option," Van Hollen responded. "And we hope the Senate Finance Committee will."

Dean noted that 72 percent of Americans, according to a New York Times poll, support a public option. "Is what Americans want already dead in the Senate?" Dean asked.

"No," Van Hollen answered. But it isn't clear what kind of leverage House Democrats have with the likes of Baucus, nor do we know yet whether they'll be able to keep their own Blue Dog conservatives in line.

"President Obama promised change we can believe in," Dean told Van Hollen. "Are you worried about our party in 2010 if we don't get any change at all?"

Van Hollen said that Democrats will be judged on whether they delivered on a promised new direction. What they end up doing on healthcare will go a long way towards answering that question.

Basically, Dean wasted no time going for the jugular: Are the Americans being represented by those they elected to fill that responsibility in the Congress? Dean clearly answered that question in the negative and gave Van Hollen the opportunity to refute that conclusion. Bound by the sorts of political commitments that the media do their best to conceal from us, Van Hollen could only fumble. Dean then made it clear to his audience why Van Hollen was so helpless through his next choice for a guest:

In the next segment, Dean asked Wendell Potter--a former spokesman for Cigna turned whistleblower--"what motive do Republicans and Blue Dogs have to kill the public option?"

"They have a motive to protect the insurance industry," Potter responded.

There you have it: Those who see health care as an industry and are profiting mightily from that industry see their prosperity in jeopardy from those who wish to restore health care as a profession. Furthermore, those "industrialists" have the budget to pay for their interests, rather than those of that 72% segment of the population that Dean cited. Did anyone really expect that the we-are-so-screwed mantra, so popular during the Administration of George W. Bush, would vanish with a new President from a different political party? We are as poorly represented as we have ever been. It is time to recognize that the change we need will require more than hope. It will require greater pressure on those we elected to remind them of why we chose them in the privacy of the election booth.

Internet News?

The latest issue of The New York Review has a piece by Michael Massing entitled "The News About the Internet." In many ways it is a response to the testimony given to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet given last May. More specifically, Massing seems to have been piqued by David Simon's use of the word "leeches" in his testimony before that Subcommittee. He described Simon's language as being "particularly barbed" and proposed an alternative point of view:

Over the past few months alone, a remarkable amount of original, exciting, and creative (if also chaotic and maddening) material has appeared on the Internet. The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there, with a variety of fascinating experiments in the gathering, presentation, and delivery of news. And unless the editors and executives at our top papers begin to take note, they will hasten their own demise.

I have a fair amount of respect for past Massing articles in The New York Review; but nothing provokes in me quite an adrenaline rush of skepticism as does any form of the verb "reinvent." It always seems to carry a promise of good things to come without ever saying very much about what those things are or when they may be expected.

Nevertheless, as a result of reading Massing's article, I have at least one good thing to say about Internet technology. Because his article had a URL, I could direct Firefox to it and quickly scan his text for occurrences of the "edit" stem. I discovered that almost every occurrence (the one exception being debatable) refers to a position on an organization chart rather than the actual work done by the occupant of that position. In other words Massing does not seem to have a problem with the fact that the blogosphere is almost entirely (again with exceptions being debatable) a world without editors. Now I suspect that he would prefer to say that bloggers are self-editors and then propose that one of the metrics of the quality of writing involves the quality of self-editing. For me, however, self-editing reminds me of Abraham Lincoln's joke about the man who acts as his own lawyer having a fool for a client. I might not be so extreme as to say that any editing that is not fully detached from the writing process is not editing at all, but I have certainly flirted with that position!

The process of editing has been a favorite topic for me on this blog. As I write this piece, I see that I have used the label 32 times. As in the past I continue to believe that this process is best understood within the framework of the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. My guess is that I shall not get any argument over editorial checking for grammar, not to mention spelling. Whether or not grammar-checking software will ever be as good as current spell-checkers, however, is not the point. No matter how good those technologies are, good editing must still scale the hurdles of logic and rhetoric.

Where logic is concerned, we have all heard anecdotes about how Internet technology has augmented our powers of fact-checking. However, logic is about more than facts. It is also about inferences made from those facts, more specifically, whether or not those inferences are valid. This brings us back to my own analysis of the Senate Subcommittee hearings, in which I revisited the question posed by Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr did not address logic in his article, but I would propose that those who are too heavily dependent on search engines and the snippets of text they return may, indeed, be losing their ability to recognize when an inference is valid. Indeed, they may be oblivious to whether or not a snippet is actually the product of a logical inference. In other words, in addition of all of its other injuries, Google may not only be robbing us of editing as a profession but may also be eroding our capacity for editing, at least where logic is concerned.

The "state of the art" of editing for rhetoric is probably even worse. We have become so susceptible to rhetorical manipulation that recognizing when we are being manipulated is even more difficult than recognizing an invalid inference. At least in this case we cannot lay the blame on Google. If we need to find a target of blame for why our sensitivity to rhetoric has been so blunted, we need look no further than the advertising industry; and we do not even have to look at advertising on the Internet. It is, of course, still possible to learn the nuts and bolts of rhetorical machinery. The problem is whether or not denizens of the blogosphere feel it is worth taking the time to do so.

Sadly, one can find a failure of the editing process even in Massing's article (which, as a subscriber to The New York Review for more years than I can recall, I found particularly painful). This is most evident in his discussion of the work of Glenn Greenwald. He promotes Greenwald with the following text:

In contrast to the short, punchy posts favored by most bloggers, Greenwald offers a single daily essay of two thousand to three thousand words. In each, he draws on extensive research, amasses a daunting array of facts, and, as [Eric] Boehlert puts it [in his book Bloggers on the Bus], builds his case "much like an attorney does."

Massing's use of the simile is actually deceptive, since Greenwald is an attorney. This makes him an interesting data point, particularly where the editing question is involved. It would probably be fair to say that one cannot be a successful lawyer without a firm command of logic, grammar, and rhetoric; and I would go further and propose that success may depend on how well one can apply those skills to oneself. Thus, it may be that attorneys are more professionally qualified to edit themselves than journalists are, in which case, comparing Greenwald to the other bloggers Massing examines would constitute a clear instance of a category error! This might then explain the major issue that Massing has with Greenwald's essays:

As well-argued and provocative as I found many of Greenwald's postings, they often seem oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.

For my part I would argue (provocatively?) that lawyers do not just seem oblivious to such practical considerations. They are oblivious to them when they might impede the more important process of making one's case. Greenwald is just being a lawyer, and he is damned good at it!

The problem is that Massing has ignored what I have called "the primary rule for reading any text on the Internet," which is caveat lector. There are no end of ways for the Internet reader to get ensnared by traps. Many readers learn how to be wary of the newspapers they read; some even learn how to beware the commercials they "read" on television. Nevertheless, when it comes to reading, the Internet is more dangerous than both of these worlds combined. When Massing praises the content he finds on the Internet, he does so as a reader well enough informed to avoid those traps; but he seems to ignore the question of whether or not he speaks for everyone else reading contributions to the blogosphere.

One point that Massing seems to have recognized is that the world of "Internet speed" has become, as I have put it, "a world without reflection." His response is to praise Slate for requiring each of its writers "to take off six weeks to work on longer projects." I find no fault with Slate making this policy, but it leads me to wonder whether it might cultivate an attitude that reflection can only be done while on vacation! If this is an indicator of the "reinvention" of journalism, then I fear it as much as I fear those who go around evangelizing "life-long learning" but never seem to practice it.

I suppose what scares me most is not the future of newspapers but the future of that practice of journalism that served as the focus of Massing's discussion. From this point of view, Simon's concerns about leeching is secondary. As Paul Ricœur observed, all writing involves some level of appropriation. It could not be otherwise: Texts only make sense when they can be anchored to other texts. The real concern is whether or not our capacity for the effective use of principles of logic, grammar, and rhetoric are being eroded; and, in his efforts to promote the merits of the blogosphere, Massing seems to have convinced me that such erosion has progressed even further than I had previously feared.

Wall Street, Main Street, and China

We seem to have had another one of those curious coincidences in the morning news that is likely to either amuse or depress depending on the economic straits (and possibly location) of the reader. In the context of the global economy, all eyes seem to be directed at the meeting in Washington (dubbed by some the "G2 Summit") between Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan. In an introductory speech before the talks began, Barack Obama talked about how the United States and China will "shape the course of the 21st century;" but, when we take into account the backgrounds of those setting economic policy in the United States, we have to wonder whether or not Geithner is more concerned with the short-term recovery of Wall Street than he is with "the course of the 21st century."

China, on the other hand, seems to be looking at Main Street in planning its economic future; but it is not any Main Street in the United States. This assertion is based on a report I heard this morning on the BBC World Service; but to track it down I had to turn to that most notorious of "capitalist tools," Forbes. The Forbes Web site just released the following news from Great Britain filed by Vidya Ram:

Meet the British homeowner's newest lender: China.

Bank of China, one of the country's four, state-owned banks, is ramping up its lending business in the United Kingdom as British banks remain cautious in their lending.

The bank, which had already been offering loans to the Chinese community in the U.K., will begin offering mortgages for landlords, known in Britain as "buy to let" mortgages, tracking 3.5% above the Bank of England base rate. It is also offering regular residential mortgages at 2.5% above the 0.5% rate, a spokesperson for the bank confirmed in an emailed response to Forbes.

"Our aim is to translate the global strength of our branch into a household name in the U.K.," she added.

British lenders have been criticized for failing to step up their lending to boost the British economy, despite the pressure being exerted on them to do so by the Labor government of Gordon Brown. Gross mortgage lending in June was 48% below last year's figure, according to the Council of Mortgage Lenders' latest data.

"[British] banks aren't stepping up lending but focusing on shoring up their balance sheets," said Jane King, senior mortgage advisor at Ash-Ridge Private Finance in London. She added that the rates being offered by Bank of China were "extremely good" for tracker mortgages.

Thus, while consumer confidence continues to languish in the United States (at the same time that those in the financial sector were celebrating the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising about 9000), China is applying its financial reserves to the needs of ordinary British citizens trying to keep a roof over their heads. This is not to suggest that such practices will win those British citizens over to Chinese ideology; but, for now at least, the Chinese appear to be "taking care of business" on Main Street more sensibly that the interests of Wall Street are doing.

Two Losses in One Day

Having barely gotten over the news of the death of Merce Cunningham, I just read Joshua Kosman's obituary for Michael Steinberg on the San Francisco Chronicle Web site. Steinberg was music critic for the Boston Globe for almost the entirety of my student days at MIT. With his Princeton credentials (both bachelor's and master's degrees), there was little doubt that he was the best informed music critic in the Greater Boston Area; and, to invoke a phrase that only became cliché decades later, he could definitely be counted as "world class." Since my move to the Bay Area, I have always valued his contributions to San Francisco Symphony program books, even when I did not agree with them. For all the theoretical dispositions of his academic background, he wrote as one who appreciated Igor Stravinsky's distinction between listening and hearing, helping those of us who favored the former to the latter in our concert experiences. The best way to honor his memory will be for those of us still "in the game" to honor his approach to writing.

Remembering Merce Cunningham

The summer of 1968 was not the first time I had seen the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. However, it was the first time I did any serious writing about Cunningham's approach to choreography and John Cage's approach to the composition and performance of music. It was a time when, in the words of the first of the 101 Zen stories in Paul Reps' collection Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, I was full of my own opinions and speculations, most of which were firmly entrenched in the structural formalisms of logical positivism. As in the punch line of that story, the cup had to be emptied before the master could begin to pour fresh tea.

Cage was the one who actually emptied the cup. We were all at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I had joined my thesis advisor as an assistant while he taught there on a visiting appointment. One day I saw a poster announcing that Cage would be offering a "Music and Mushrooms" course, explaining where and when to go for the first session. I was one of two guys who responded; the other had a wife taking dance classes with the Cunningham Company. It turned out that the Company was in Boulder to get their lungs in shape before performing at the pre-Olympic Festival in Mexico City later that summer. Cage's idea of a course was to go mushroom hunting and talk about things (which almost always included music). Since there were only three of us, this was not such a bad idea. The first day he explained the use of a taxonomic key (which I never saw again), which was necessary for determining which mushrooms were toxic. It was a dry summer. There were very few mushrooms but plenty of interesting talk.

Prior to those walks in the woods, I had thought about the use of chance procedures more as a game that one could play with notations rather than as a serious approach to composition. However, as he would later demonstrate during his Norton year at Harvard University, Cage spoke about what he did with a sincerity that easily transcended the bonds of logic. I was probably vulnerable to his style. I had committed several years to studying music theory, analysis, and composition; and all the logic of those studies had crippled me to the point that I could not write a note. That metaphorical cup needed to be emptied. I doubt that it was Cage's intention to do so, since he knew almost nothing about my background; but empty it he did with the grace of a Zen master.

Having dispensed with the bonds that constrained how to think about music, I could then watch Cunningham and his dancers in their classes, "events," and concerts with similar transcendence. Dance did not need to be a formal reflection of music, as George Balanchine had conceived it, a higher plane of drama in the spirit of the Royal Ballet, or even Martha Graham's quest for the core of human emotion. It could just be a matter of "time to walk in space," the title that Selma Jeanne Cohen gave to the Summer, 1968 issue of Dance Perspectives. That issue focused entirely on Cunningham, drawing its title from a remark by former student Marianne Preger cited in an essay by Carolyn Brown.

Returning once again to that Zen story, I came to learn that, where both music and dance were concerned, one could not begin to have opinions until one had descriptions upon which those opinions were grounded. Those who had ridiculed the music of Cage and his colleagues were more interested in glib observations that never really described the listening experience, often trying to support the conclusion that there really was no listening experience. Those who took a similar stance towards Cunningham tended to focus on their own restlessness and boredom in the course of looking for things that were not there, rather than trying to account for what was there.

I was working in Singapore when Cage died. I had a personal friend at Singapore Broadcasting who asked to do a telephone interview by way of an obituary, since I was apparently the only person in the country who had known him for an extended period of time. I remember being asked to give a summary statement at the end of the interview. I responded with: "He taught me to question my teachers."

This morning Alastair Macaulay broke the story of Cunningham's death last night on the ArtsBeat blog of The New York Times. The news was no surprise. Last June he had laid out very specific plans for the future of his company and his work after his death. Like Cage he was far more occupied with the present than the future, but unlike Cage he recognized an obligation to worry about the future of a company of dancers. The plan is that the company will make one last international tour over a period of two years and then close. After than, the rest of us will only be able to draw upon archival material. From my own point of view, I feel it is important that I learned the value of description, even if my contribution to that archival material is insignificantly small.

Returning to Gergiev's Mahler

I have a friend who has done much to cultivate my awareness of the work of Valery Gergiev. This is a somewhat belated mission, since I never really appreciated the contributions he made to San Francisco Opera productions, nor was I particularly motivated to go down to Orange County when his production of Richard Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen was first unleashed on the United States. Thus, my first serious listening to one of his performances did not take place until KDFC programmed a rebroadcast of his 2007 Proms appearance at the Royal Albert Hall; and that was more than enough to pique my attention.

Shortly thereafter came the announcement that, in his capacity as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), he would conduct the complete cycle of the symphonies of Gustav Mahler during the 2007–2008 season. On this blog I referred to this project as "The Coming Mahler Wars?," since San Francisco takes considerable pride in the performances of Mahler that Michael Tilson Thomas has brought to Davies Symphony Hall (and perhaps a bit more pride in his leading the San Francisco Symphony in the seventh of these symphonies as part of that same 2007 Proms series). Needless to say, the "carfare" to the Barbican (and St. Paul's for the eighth symphony) was more than I could manage; so I took great interest in the LSO plan to release recordings of all of these performances on their LSO Live CD label (which may have been inspired by the San Francisco Symphony releasing its recordings of the Mahler symphonies on its own label).

The LSO recording project was launched on April 8, 2008 with the release of the sixth symphony. This symphony has particular significance in San Francisco. I would agree with those who classify it as Mahler's darkest composition. The San Francisco Symphony had scheduled it for the beginning of its 2001 season. This turned out to be shortly after September 11, and Thomas made the decision that it would be appropriate to go ahead with the performances as planned. This was a time when we were all occupied with dark reflections. I thought Thomas made the right decision then, and in retrospect I still feel that way. Needless to say, the performances at the Barbican did not take place under similar shadows; but it was clear from that Proms broadcast that Gergiev was no stranger to darkness. He was not the sort that would have to rely on the coincidental context of current events to achieve his interpretive goals.

My friend was quick to share this first CD with me; and I wrote about it on August 9, almost exactly four months after the release. By that time I had read reviews of the concert itself through my RSS feeds of the arts pages of the London press, and several reviews had appeared on the Amazon.com page for the CD. My own initial impression was that the performance was not visceral enough, and after subsequent listenings my thoughts have not changed very much.

I know this symphony well. It was one of the first recordings released of Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and my initial thoughts about the work were shaped by that recording. This was a blood-and-guts reading that seized my attention with the first beats of its opening march and did not let go until the life had been squeezed out of that minor triad that pervaded the entire symphony. After acquiring that recording, I would go after every opportunity to hear the work in concert; so it may be that I was prepared with too much baggage to give the Gergiev recording a fair listening; but, unfortunately, we have little control over the baggage we carry.

This year my friend decided to give me a copy of the LSO Live recording of the seventh symphony as a birthday present. I greatly appreciated the gesture. I realized that it was a bit unfair to judge the entire project on the basis of the very first release, so I was glad to have the opportunity to consider another data point. Unfortunately, this was another symphony that I knew particularly well. In this case my acquaintance began the summer before I entered MIT when a distant relative, who bought a lot of recordings with no prior knowledge, decided to unload his Westminster recordings of Hermann Scherchen conducting the Vienna State Opera Orchestra (Mahler's former turf). Those recordings included the fifth and seventh symphonies, along with the first movement of the tenth. The seventh was, without a doubt, the hardest to get to know; but I persisted until it gradually became a familiar friend.

The challenge posed by the seventh symphony is that the first movement is the most problematic. While the opening gesture of the sixth is as clear as it is intense, the seventh insinuates in presence with vague rhythms and harmonies. The first theme, delivered by tenor tubas, is profoundly haunting; but it also plays out with that same restlessness that so many find frustrating when first hearing the opening prelude to Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. After that first movement, the remaining four are far clearer; and the final rondo has one of those blazes of glory that Mahler could summon so well. (When I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I remember watching a drum and bugle corps competition being broadcast live from Franklin Field. One of the competitors adapted this movement for their entry.)

Once again, I did not consult the Amazon.com reviews until I had completed my first listening of the Gergiev performance. I found myself agreeing with the reviewer who characterized the beginning of the first movement as "rough and slipshod," as if Gergiev was having as much trouble getting to know this symphony as I had experienced with my first exposure to the Scherchen recording. I also agreed with the reviewer that Gergiev had recovered his footing by the final movement. However, I worry that this was a matter of playing the strategy that audience response is always based on the final gesture. Since this was a recording made from a concert performance, such a strategy would have been well motivated; but, particularly where a symphony like this one is concerned, I cannot sympathize with the assumption that audience enthusiasm at the conclusion compensates for perplexity at the beginning. Thomas conducted this work twice at Davies Symphony Hall on two successive seasons and exercised a firm hand in making sense of those opening ambiguous peregrinations. For better or worse, his strategies became part of my contextual baggage; and it is hard for me to forgive getting this particular symphony off to a weak start.

I should conclude with one comment in response to the Amazon.com reviewer who recommended Scherchen or Horenstein for "the historically inclined." That Scherchen recording that had played such an instrumental role in shaping my listening had a major splicing problem in that problematic first movement. This may have had to do with the fact that the long-playing version came from splicing together the sides of 78 RPM masters that were the original sources. I have not yet listened to the CD version of this recording, so I do not know if it has a similar problem. However, that defect is the primary reason why I have not tried to seek out a CD to replace this particular item in my old vinyl collection. I am definitely interested in how the BBC remastered the broadcast performance by Jascha Horenstein with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, having been particularly impressed with their release of the March 20, 1959 broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall of the eighth symphony. Hopefully, all of these sources will serve as useful preparatory material for the San Francisco Symphony Mahler 09 Festival at Davies Symphony Hall that begins on September 16 and continues through October 3.

China's Latest Propaganda Move

Last night BBC News report Michael Bristow filed a fascinating dispatch from Beijing:

China is launching an Arabic-language TV channel to show the Middle East and North Africa the "real" China.

China Central Television's station will broadcast news, entertainment and cultural programmes 24 hours a day.

It is part of the Chinese government's plan to promote its own viewpoints by encouraging state-controlled media organisations to go global.

I call this "fascinating" because it is hard to read this as anything other than a page from the American playbook. Back when I was doing business travel that frequently took me to both Europe and Asia, I was struck by the presence of American television, in one form or another, in just about every hotel room I occupied. Even when my wife and I were living in Singapore, American television (and all the values dragged along in its wake) came to us in abundance through not only three Singapore channels but also three channels we could receive from Malaysia. Furthermore, in terms of the values that were being communicated, it always amused me that it was through a Malaysian feed that everyone in Singapore could experience a weekly viewing of Baywatch.

So it does not surprise me that China should use the same strategy to promote its own values. However, it also struck me that this is a propaganda maneuver that can be directed just as easily at China's own Muslim population, particularly in Xinjiang, as at the Muslim communities of the Middle East and North Africa. Even if the native language of the Uigurs is Turkic, those who are the most devout Muslims are probably fluent in Arabic, possibly even more than they are in Mandarin. I have to believe that the Chinese are as aware as Americans of the powerful role that television can play in shaping the values of its own population, regardless of how it promotes those values in other countries. In other words China is on to our game, and we should watch carefully to see if they learn to play it better than we do!

Early Cronkite

I really have to thank Dave Itzkoff for his post to the New York Times ArtsBeat blog for directing me to an exemplary specimen of writing that also happens to have historical interest. All it took was his first sentence to send me chasing down the hyperlink:

A 1935 profile of Gertrude Stein from The Daily Texan, unearthed by the student newspaper of the University of Texas at Austin and published at its Web site, was written Walter Cronkite, who was an 18-year-old undergraduate at the university when he wrote it.

This is a writing specimen that does double duty. While some may see it as an indication of Cronkite's precocity, I see it more as an affirmation that what one needs to know about good writing can be acquired at an early age. (In my case I acquired the basics in high school as part of preparation for the Writing Sample section of the College Boards.) The hard part is not in learning the rules but in acquiring the discipline to take them seriously and maintaining that discipline through constant practice. Simply by deciding to work for the student newspaper, Cronkite had committed himself to that discipline of maintenance; and we are fortunate that he did, indeed, maintain it throughout his professional life. This sample is thus inspiring to both those who aspire to write and those who have done so for much of their lives.

At the same time it is also valuable for its choice of subject matter. Gertrude Stein is no longer as controversial as she was in 1935. Unfortunately, this may have much to do with the fact that she is largely ignored today. Ironically, today's neglect of her work would probably not disturb her, at least not if she took seriously the words Cronkite reported her saying:

A writer isn’t anything but contemporary. The trouble is that the people are living Twentieth Century and thinking Nineteenth Century.

By presenting the straightforward nature of her conversational speech, Cronkite blunted those who could only deride her for her rose-is-a-rose-is-a-rose efforts to experiment with the nature of speech beyond the meanings of the words. Still, that quote bears reflection, even if we encounter it only out of curiosity about Cronkite's early writing. We now live in the Twenty-First Century; but it is far from clear in which century our thoughts are now based. Indeed, much of the social division we now encounter may be a matter of different thoughts based in different centuries. Reading this profile from 1935 makes me think that it may be time to revisit the books I have that document some of the lectures that Stein gave to audiences such as the one at the University of Texas.

Implicit Anti-Semitism?

When I observed that a Yahoo! News item on the Apollo 11 anniversary described the original event as "infamous," I received a comment that I may have been making too much of "an incorrect word choice by a low-paid headline writer." However, now that Barack Obama's comments on the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. have returned the "race question" to the front burner, I seem to have become sensitized to other instances of discrimination. Sadly, my feelers had to reach no further than the BBC NEWS Web site, where I encountered a story introduced with the following summary:

Two mayors, rabbis and politicians are among some 30 people arrested in a major corruption and money-laundering investigation, say US authorities.

This sentence, taken on its own, is not necessarily discriminatory or surprising. Consider, however, the headline under which this story appeared:

US rabbis arrested in crime probe

Even the addition of the word "politicians" could have blunted (if not dismissed) the anti-Semitic tone of the headline. So is this just the work of a low-paid employee bored with his/her work; or is it some kind of Zeitgeist indicator?

The Moral Question of Lobbying

These days it has become too easy to shove Google's face in their precept that "You can make money without doing evil;" but I think it is still worth trying to apply that precept as a moral compass when considering Google's relationship with the Federal Government. From this point of view, I find it valuable to track Lance Whitney's Politics and Law contributions to the CNET Blog Network. In light of the attempts of the Obama Administration to take a moral stance on the practice of government and then trip over itself where health care is involved, today's post from Whitney makes for interesting reading:

Faced with issues ranging from online ads to copyright laws, Google spent $950,000 lobbying Washington in the second quarter, according to a federal government database.

The amount compares with the $880,000 that Google spent on lobbying in the first quarter--and the $2.84 million it spent for all of 2008.

Among the issues that Google lobbied on: intellectual property, copyright related to the Google Book Search settlement, and privacy and competition surrounding online advertising.

I am sure there are many out there who would debate whether or not lobbying (which we can take to mean gaining influence over government policies and decisions through financial means) is evil. In the case of health care, one may make the case that it is disrupting the course of much-needed reform; but, where Google is concerned, the circumstances may have less to do with reform and more with enacting clearer legislation. Nevertheless, Google's practices seem to constitute an affirmation of the punch line of John Kirby's documentary, based on a text by Lewis Lapham, The American Ruling Class:

Why change City Hall when you can buy it?

By assenting to a system of government-by-financial-influence, Goggle is basically supporting it. We may debate whether or not this is flat-out evil; but I find it hard to call such practices "good!"

Rhetoric that Confounds When it Should Clarify

One can hardly criticize Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet for trying to call out Barack Obama on the race question behind the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. during yesterday's press conference. Unfortunately, that part of Obama's response that accused the Cambridge police officer who made the arrest of having acted "stupidly" has now resonated through so many media channels (even those overseas such as the Financial Times), that it is important to recognize that this is a perfect example of what happens when rhetoric does not align with logic. To be fair, my own recollection is that Obama's initial response to Sweet was that he did not yet have all of the facts; and it is unclear whether or not, one week after the episode took place, all of those facts have come to light. Had Sweet not posed her question as one of race, Obama could have closed the topic with that initial response; but my guess is that, had he done so, he would then have had to contend with at least one pointed follow-up question.

The real problem, however, is that Obama should have been better prepared for the possibility that such a question would have been asked. Apparently, he was so focused on making his case for health care reform that neither he nor his staff recognized that other challenging questions might arise. As a result, Obama managed to trip over the few statements on the table that could be confirmed as facts. Consequently, when the calm and certain rhetoric of his presentation declared that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” Obama managed to distract the issue to where Gates was arrested (the question of whether he had been trying to enter his own house), thus overlooking the actual grounds for arrest, which Tracy Jan reported for the Boston Globe as follows:

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had "no idea who he was messing with,'' the report said.

On the basis of what we now know, there seems to be little question of the nature of Gates' behavior. Whether or not that behavior provided grounds for a disorderly conduct arrest and booking comes down to a judgment call on the part of the police; and the media have now generated so much "data smog" around this story that we may never get an "authentic" account of how that call was made. We are thus left with an object lesson on the risk of relying too heavily on rhetoric, which may turn out to be a significant unintended consequence of yesterday's press conference.

Will Health Care Really be Reformed?

Last night we witnessed once again the power of Barack Obama's rhetoric. After eight years of George W. Bush, it is refreshing to hear once again a firm command of the English language; but a command of the language does not directly imply a command of the issues. The primary objective of Obama's rhetoric was to "sell" the White House Press Corps (and, by extension, those of us who follow the news they report) on the urgent need for his health care reform package to be passed as law. He pulled out all his guns to convince us that he understood the problem and had proposed a solution that would significantly alter the current system, which appears to give more attention to shareholders than it does to either doctors or their patients. Nevertheless, from a strictly logical point of view, one can almost always be highly convincing about even the most patently false propositions. Thus, any examination of rhetoric must also examine the motives behind the rhetoric, whether it involves a lawyer doing his job in defending a client (without necessarily knowing whether that client is really innocent) or a public figure speaking out on a major social issue without our knowing who actually paid for his bully pulpit.

This is the context in which we must read Sharon Theimer's Associated Press report about White House meetings with key representatives of the health care industry. Only by bringing motive into the picture can we realistically speculate over whether Obama's plan will reform health care back into the domain of the public service that every other industrialized nation in the world recognizes it to be or whether it is the sort of lipstick-on-a-pig that will allow those concerned with nothing more than numbers on balance sheets to maintain their status quo while the rest of us get sedated with the illusion that things are finally going to change. An understanding of motive may even help us to get to the bottom of the counter-argument posed to those who voice their suspicions to Obama's proposal: "It's only a first step, but we have to start somewhere." Some reforms cannot be achieved through a series of steps. (Think of Great Britain deciding to drive on the same side of the road that Americans do.) Those of us who voted for Obama for the change he promised now need to recognize whether or not he is delivering change where we need it or just selling us on illusions the way just about every other politician does.

When Did Information Become an Agent?

I have always believed that one good way to measure the extent to which a society is in decline is by the frequency of barbarisms that arise in its use of language. This may actually be tautological in terms of the two definitions of "barbarism" in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the first being the state of "uncultured ignorance" and the second the use of "words and idioms" that depart from the standard conventions of the language. However, since it is too easy to run afoul of cultural relativism when debating the first definition, I tend to focus my attention on the second.

The last time I decided to hold up a barbarism for ridicule was when I encountered a text that asserted that "trees, rocks, and bouncing balls" all "demonstrate intelligence to the extent that they obey the laws of physics." The problem, of course, is that a rock (to choose the most blatant case) cannot obey anything, since it is incapable of taking any motivated action that would be regulated by a sense of obedience. In other words, if you take just a little bit of time to apply basic semantic analysis to what the assertion is really saying, what emerges is little more than a preposterous jumble of words. It is the sort of proposition worthy of Enrico Fermi's most damning insult, "It isn't even wrong," because, while it may be syntactically coherent, the semantics amount to little more than a waste of air (as a former colleague who happened to be a big Dukes of Hazzard fan liked to put it).

Having established both a denotative and a connotative framework for my use of "barbarism," I am now ready to pull out another example that bugs me more and more each time I hear it:

Information wants to be free.

Ironically, the same type of specious reasoning is involved in the second example: Information is no more capable of motivated action than a rock is. It can no more want anything than a rock can exhibit obedience. Nevertheless, this has become an obsessive mantra of Internet evangelists, who claim it is the reason why one should not charge for content accessible through the World Wide Web. In other words those evangelists want to turn another preposterous jumble of words into a moral imperative (which is really saying something, since one can assume that few, if any, of them have ever spent much time wrestling over any other moral question, even one as common as participating in a jury decision).

The good news is that there are still a few people in the world who know how to confront gibberish with straight talk; and, while it pains me to say anything nice about the Disney empire, I have to admit that Disney CEO Bob Iger is one of them. Iger has both the confidence and the experience to talk back to technocentric airheads; and, according to Ina Fried's Beyond Binary column for CNET News, he did just that at a Fortune-sponsored technology conference in Pasadena. The text for his sermon was simple enough:

People are willing to pay for quality. They are willing to pay for choice; they are willing to pay for convenience.

If those assertions were not true, Disney would not be the powerful empire it has become. (The trick to gaining that power, as Iger would probably agree, is a talent for turning mere willingness into strong motivation.) Nevertheless, for all the power he commands, I doubt that any of his straight talk will shake his audience out of their habit of substituting claptrap for sentences that mean something; and that is where we confront the risk of becoming a society of "uncultured ignorance" (who, of course, will then be susceptible to having their motivations manipulated by the likes of Disney)!

The Chutzpah of Linguistic Denial

At last May's Independence Day celebration in Israel, we saw, for the first time, promising signs that, where the question of relations between Israelis and Palestinians are concerned, the voices of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the rest of his Administration did not necessarily represent significant portions of their country's population. As had been reported in Roane Carey's blog post to The Notion, the evidence emerged through a series of phases. It began with the effort of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to ban Palestinian citizens of Israel from commemorating the anniversary of the Nakba. As I observed around the time of the 2008 Independence Day, this word, which is Arabic for "catastrophe" and therefore reflects the losing side of the Israeli War of Independence, was virtually non-existent not only in Israel but in just about all media coverage of the Middle East. The fact that Lieberman had to invoke it, even for the sake of banning it, was a sign that a linguistic camel's nose was now under the tent.

More surprising, however, was how little time it took for the rest of the camel to follow. Nakba rallies proliferated, not only in Palestinian communities but in Israeli cities seeking better inter-cultural relations. This culminated in a two-day workshop organized by Arabs and Jews as the main event of an "Independence Day/Nakba Day" gathering outside of Haifa. This may have been the first time that the Israeli government had drawn such a defiant line in the sand and large sectors of the population were equally defiant in crossing that line. It was almost enough to remind one of Paul Newman's rather contrived speech over the joint funeral of an Arab and an Israeli in the final scene of Exodus.

That film, as well as the novel it depicted, was, in many ways, a celebration of Jewish stubbornness, best captured in the strategy to get the Exodus ship out of its harbor on Cyprus. It should therefore be no surprise that the Netanyahu administration has responded to this grass-roots defiance with their own version of stubbornness. That response was reported in a dispatch released by Reuters this morning:

Israel will remove from school textbooks an Arabic term that describes the 1948 creation of the Jewish state as a "catastrophe," the Education Ministry said on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said when he was opposition leader two years ago the word "nakba" in Israeli Arab schools was tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel.

The term, which is not part of the curriculum in schools in Jewish communities, was introduced into a book for use in Arab schools in 2007 when the Education Ministry was run by Yuli Tamir of the center-left Labor party.

The book was aimed at children, aged 8 and 9.

Arab citizens make up about a fifth of Israel's population of seven million. The term nakba is used by Palestinians to describe the founding of Israel in a war when some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.

"After studying the matter with education experts it was decided that the term nakba should be removed. It is inconceivable that in Israel we would talk about the establishment of the state as a catastrophe," said Yisrael Twito, a spokesman for Education Minister Gideon Saar.

A passage in the textbook, describing the 1948 Middle East war at the time of Israel's creation, said: "The Arabs call the war the nakba -- a war of catastrophe, loss and humiliation -- and the Jews call it the Independence War."

Jafar Farrah, director of Mossawa, an Israeli-Arab advocacy group, said the decision to remove the term only "complicated the conflict." He called it an attempt to distort the truth and seek confrontation with the country's Arab population.

Reading this I was reminded that George Orwell chose his 1984 title by permuting the digits in 1948; and the job of his protagonist was basically one of rewriting history books in government-approved language. If Orwell's spirit is still with us, it is hard to imagine whether he would be laughing or crying at this embodiment of his nightmarish vision.

There are times when stubbornness can be view in a positive light. There are other times when it should be acknowledged as a primary characteristic of chutzpah. I tend to shy away from giving Chutzpah of the Week awards to Israelis, perhaps because chutzpah is so much a regular part of their culture in both its negative and positive connotations. However, because it reflects what may be the most interesting culture clash to have taken place since Israeli was constituted as a country, it is hard to pass up this particular episode. It thus seems appropriate to grant the award to be shared by Netanyahu and Saar, who, respectively, embodied the theory and practice behind this episode.

The Social Dimension of Concert Etiquette

The beginning of the annual Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall in London seems to have prompted Finlo Rohrer to publish a piece for the BBC News Magazine on proper concert behavior; but his authoritarian introductory summary, which concludes that "there's a whole lot of etiquette to be learned," strikes me as a false step from which he never recovers. I sometimes think that the when-to-clap question (Rohrer's primary focus) has invaded just about every classical music blog that I read; and it gets a bit tiresome to navigate so many opinions so abundant in heat and giving off so little light. Nevertheless, in the grander scheme of history, I really cannot complain, since I find these outbursts of opinion preferable to the flood of favorite-Beethoven-symphonies discussions that eventually drove me away from Usenet. For better or worse, these written opinions about concert behavior shape the expectations I bring with me when I enter the audience area of a performing space.

Unfortunately, the reason why Rohrer's exposition turns into one false step after another is that, having begun with authoritarian posturing, he misses out on a fundamental premise behind the concert experience. He makes the fallacious assumption that etiquette is strictly a matter of the proper relationship between the individual in the audience and the music being performed, as if the performer is some non-sentient agent that happens to "deliver" the music with greater fidelity than any available loudspeaker. This not only insults the performer but ignores the performer's commitment to dual communicative actions. We take it for granted that the performer is executing the music, and I would argue that such execution derives from the interpretive nature of communicative exchanges between the performer-as-agent and the score-as-authored-text, serving as an embodiment of its author. Performing a composition is thus very similar in nature to Mortimer Adler's model of how we read a book as an imagined conversation that we hold with that book's author. In both situations the communicative setting is far from perfect, since the capacity for actual exchange is clearly limited; but the model is still useful for allowing us to raise questions of communication when trying to understand the nature of a performance.

However, execution involves only one channel through which the performer communicates. The other is the channel between the performer and the audience. Communication through this channel goes beyond the music and its execution and deals more with the attitude one takes to the experience of the music itself, whether through execution or listening. It does not take much for the audience to be aware of this channel and the signals that pass through it. Most of those signals tend to involve body language; and one of the primary "massages" in the channel involves that "sense of an ending" that was so important to Frank Kermode in his literary studies. The performer who can effectively communicate that sense of an ending is the one who lets the audience known when it is time to clap, provided, of course, that they are paying attention. As Rohrer pointed out in his piece, one cannot take that proviso for granted, as can be seen in one particularly pathological example he offers:

It is a phenomenon that was satirised in the 2005 short film The Clap. An obsessive classical music fan recalls the lengths he used to go to, studying scores and previous performances, to identify the precise millisecond the concert was over, so he could be the first to clap. Like a maniac.

Rohrer continues this reductio ad absurdum argument of score-based behavior with an excerpt from a recent article by Jonathan Lennie, Classical Editor for Time Out. The article was an open letter to the "Loud Clapping Man Who Sits Behind Me At Concerts" and included the following passage:

The last note isn't the end of the music, the silence completes the music. In Beethoven's 9th, a massive choral outpouring, you can't help but clap, but in other works like Mahler 9 these are the final symphonies, the end of the life. They end in silence.

I agree entirely with Lennie's observation, but it does not imply that the sense of an ending resides in the music itself or even in how performers execute the score. It involves this second channel of communication and those body-language signals. In this season alone I have been exposed to more performers than I can enumerate who can command the elements of both posture and gesture to say, "It's not over yet." Since Lennie singled out Gustav Mahler as an example, I would offer as my own example the ways in which Michael Tilson Thomas can "hold the moment" at the conclusion of a Mahler composition that ends in the sort of silence Lennie described.

This is not to say that performers must take the blame for the inept behavior of that "loud clapping man" who provoked Lennie's diatribe. Like the protagonist of "The Clap," that man is there only to send signals and could care less about paying attention to those he is supposed to receive; and that observation may take us to the core of the underlying question of etiquette. In these times when so many social conventions are being questioned and rejected, those who write about etiquette frequently fall back on common sense as the only guiding rule. Where communication is concerned, common sense tends to focus on paying as much attention to receiving as to sending. From that point of view, the real problem of etiquette may be a consequence of the fact that music has become so commoditized that we now have audiences more preoccupied with consuming that commodity than with what Igor Stravinsky had in mind when he wrote about listening to music.

AT&T Editorializes

My AT&T Home page provided what was, at the least, a curious window on this morning's Yahoo! News. Consider this introduction to the Apollo 11 anniversary story:

I have heard the Apollo 11 mission called many things by many different ideological groups; but "infamous" was the last adjective I expected to encounter during today's 40th anniversary celebrations. This alone was enough to send me to check out the AP story itself, where, sure enough, that adjective was absent:

This led me to do a text search, just in case it had slipped by me during my reading. Having failed to find it that way, I then ran the same text search in the View Source window that Firefox provides on request. The adjective was nowhere to be found except on the AT&T Home page. Was this the prank of a bored bit-pusher or a covert editorial statement? Enquiring minds want to know!

Whose K. 1?

Since we are now in the thick of the Midsummer Mozart Festival, I find myself both playing and listening to more Mozart at home; and this has set me to visit some old speculations. About 35 years ago, when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I had a British colleague whose used to talk with delight about a friend of his who had begun a piano recital with the first entry in Ludwig von Köchel's chronological catalog of the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Many years later I bought myself a copy of the Henle edition of Mozart's Klavierstücke, edited by B. A. Wallner and apparently completed in the spring of 1974 (quite possibly around the time that my colleague told me his story). When I turned to the first page of music, I encountered the same anomaly that confronted me with two of the works on the first Midsummer Mozart Festival program this season, the dreaded parenthesis that follows the K number in the listing "KV 1 (1e)."

Now that it is easier to come by resources to deal with such puzzles, I decided it was finally time to address it. Naturally, I began my efforts with the digitized version of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, whose entry for K. 1 basically aligned with my Henle edition with only a minor discrepancy. The entry was published as a minuet with a trio but with the editor's comment that these may have been "two independent minuets." The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe bundles these options together with the listing "Menuett in C KV 1, Trio (KV⁶ 1^f)." (That superscript "6" refers to the sixth edition of the Köchel catalog, completed in 1964, while the absence of a superscript indicates the original catalog of 1862.)

Next, I decided to consult the notes from my Brilliant Classics collection of the complete works of Mozart. For this particular collection of keyboard music, the notes were by Jérôme Lejeune. Since the CD in the Brilliant collection included the four entries from KV⁶ that did not show up in the original catalog, I was hoping that Lejeune would offer some insights; and I was not disappointed. Here is Lejeune's account of the complete set:

These pieces probably have their origin in the Nannerl Notenbuch; Leopold Mozart had given Nannerl [Mozart's sister, with whom he played his later concerto for two pianos] a rectangular music-book in 1759 into which he had carefully written onto the title-page “Pour le clavecin. Ce livre appartient à Mademoiselle Marianne Mozart”, taking care to copy works of increasing difficulty by various fashionable composers into it. When Wolfgang later came to play these pieces at the age of 4, Leopold marked down the date on which he first saw them. Leopold also transcribed the first pieces that young Wolfgang wrote into this same book.

The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe lists 52 entries in this notebook, followed by twelve additional entries, apparently from the "original" (ursprünglich) version of the notebook; and all six K.1 entries are among those twelve additional pieces. There is no immediate indication of which of those entries were initially in Wolfgang's hand; but Lejeune's comment about Leopold's transcription would explain why the notebook has two versions. If I want to pursue further details, I shall probably have to follow up on the footnotes to the editorial comments in the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, which will require more attention to wading through musicological German than I can muster on a Sunday morning!

The Cyberspace Audience

Those who have been following my "more formal gig" on Examiner.com know that I have taken a great interest in opportunities for concert experiences in cyberspace. Last night Laura Battle filed a story for this morning's Financial Times site that has taken my interest to the next level, considering the extent to which cyberspace may be a game-changer for the very nature of the business of classical music performance. As a case study she decided to examine Plushmusic, which she introduced as follows:

Since the mid-1990s the classical music industry has been accused of myopically cultivating a handful of profitable stars – many of them so-called “crossover” as opposed to echt-classical – to the detriment of up-and-coming musicians, who find it increasingly difficult to set up recording contracts. With the advent of broadband internet these performers and composers have been able to bite back by posting high-quality music samples and MP3 files on their personal websites or social networking profiles, and thereby undercutting the traditional dependence on labels. But until recently they have lacked support or a sense of community.

This looks set to change with the development of Plushmusic, a new kind of music website that went live last November and has just received its official launch. In the words of its founder and artistic director Adrian Brendel, cellist and son of the great pianist Alfred Brendel, it was “born out of the idea of giving musicians the opportunity to record things in a different way, and to use new technology for new projects”. The Plushmusic name might sound a bit kitschy (it could almost inspire a new subgenre of “easy listening” – heaven forbid) but its origins are reassuringly wholesome: in 1995 Brendel founded a chamber music festival in the Dorset village of Plush and the website has developed as an extension of its values and activities.

As at Plush, there is a strong emphasis on chamber music but there are also designated areas for opera, jazz and world music. Individual artists are given “channels”, where they can they can post free video excerpts or charge users for a complete streaming or download of a live concert recording. Classical guitarist Zoran Dukic, for example, has posted a number of free audio clips, while Julian Steckel has made available a film of himself performing Kaija Saariaho’s short piece for solo cello Spins and Spells, and pianist Aleksandar Madzar is charging £9.99 for a high definition recording of a concert he performed at last year’s Plush festival.

I have visited this site, and I must say that I came away very impressed. Thus, I believe that the conclusion of her piece deserves serious attention:

When asked if Plushmusic could pose a threat to the traditional record label, Brendel admits the project will prove “very subjective”, and explains that while Hyperion has been keen to engage, believing the project can be mutually beneficial, other labels have been less enthusiastic.

“It’s such a volatile space at the moment because no one really knows what’s going to happen in the short term or long term with the recording industry, but we’re seeing more and more general interest and we’re really encouraged by the reaction of musicians.”

It is, of course, early days, but if Plushmusic gathers pace and power the consequences could be quite provocative. Once sites such as this successfully supplant the role of record labels, it can’t be long before people begin to question the necessity of agents: if musicians can manage and market their own recordings, if they can nurture relationships with opera houses, music venues and festivals around the world, and interact directly with a pre-existing and potential audience, what need is there for middlemen?

Disintermediation has, of course, been one of the primary watchwords of e-commerce; and I suspect that debates will continue to rage over whether it is a virtue or a vice. However, what Battle neglected to examine in her report was the implications of these new cyberspace strategies for audiences, rather than performers or promoters. What will happen to performance practices if physical presence is displaced by virtual presence?

There is no simple answer to this question; and I suspect that, now that the seed has been planted in my mind, I am likely to cultivate it in a variety of ways in future writing (possible on Examiner.com as well as on this blog). The good news is that we are talking about something on a higher level than downloading a file for your iPod: The concert performance of music deserves more attention than it would receive if you are filling your ears with background sounds to block out realities you would do better not to ignore. However, a concert experience in the physical world is a social one, even when it involves little more than awareness of the audience sharing the experience with you. The risk that cyberspace will turn this experience into a purely subjective one, thereby impoverishing it, cannot be ignored. After all, even going to a movie theater to experience an HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera is a social experience that cannot necessarily be maintained through a computer screen. With the convergence (to invoke another watchword) of the Internet with television, some of that social experience may transplant to living rooms, as it tends to do for many sports events; but I would be reluctant to consider a World Series game as a model for concerts (which may be a mistake on my part)!

There are performers, such as Glenn Gould, for whom the audience did not matter. They are currently in a minority, and I hope they stay that way. This is not just because, where concert music is concerned, my only role is as audience. It is also because the social world is as important to the performance of music as I have argued it is to the development of technologies. Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game was ultimately a reductio ad absurdum of what happens when artifacts of creation are abstracted beyond experiences (even as audience) of creation. We must avoid the risk that the Internet will bring us closer to making that risk a reality.

Keeping Good Company

I have a trumpet-playing friend who has not been shy about informing me of his dislike for Miles Davis. This has not impeded our conversations; but it does lead me to reflect, from time to time, over whether or not he has some good points to make. Ironically, the last time we had one of our exchanges, it came about after I had been writing about Gil Evans; and, while I would not call Davis' participation in his sessions with Evans "incidental," there are certain elements of those sessions that depend far more on Evans than they do on Davis. I found myself thinking about this "collaboration factor" this morning, while listening to some of the Columbia recordings from the sixties, such as the live recordings from Lincoln Center and the Plugged Nickel; and I realized that I was beginning to develop an appreciation of what seemed to be bothering my friend. I suppose one way of putting it is that there was a tendency on Davis' part for introspection unto an extreme that began to block out both the music itself and the richness of conversation with the rest of his quintet.

Thinking more about this tendency, I realized that, of all the recordings I had, about the only ones that really stuck with me beyond the Evans collaborations were those with John Coltrane. For all of Davis' complaints about Coltrane's solos being too long, the two tended to bring out the best in each other. Also, these interactions seem to be at their best in works that neither of them composed. I am thinking most specifically of Charlie Parker's "Ah-Leu-Cha," which is the sort of work I would single out for those looking for a first taste of both what Parker could compose and what seasoned performers like Davis and Coltrane could do with it. This is, of course, a judgment based entirely on my own highly subjective listening behavior; and some of that subjectivity may have to do with my being far more interested in where Coltrane went after the two of them broke up than I am with Davis' progress. Another possibility is that, even when Coltrane went into the direction of free jazz, bebop remained part of his worldview, while Davis moved in a direction of shedding his bebop roots, so to speak.

Back at the beginning of this year, I speculated over whether or not Peter Sellars may have had a detrimental influence on John Adams, suggesting that it may have become time for Adams to keep "better company." Davis had the good fortune to keep some really excellent company in his early years. I have to wonder how his music might have developed had he not departed from that company.

The Sorrows of the Unedited Text

This morning's Telegraph Web site offers an interesting essay by Alex Clark reflecting on the recent "dust-up" (his term) between Alain de Botton and Caleb Crain after the latter reviewed the former's book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in The New York Times. I am less interested in the extent to which I agree or disagree with the points that Clark made, however, than I am with one of those dogs that did not bark in the night. I was more than a little surprised at the absence of any word with the "edit" stem in Clark's text; and this set me to wondering whether that absence had any significance.

In the days before the Internet turned such "dust-ups" into sports of audience participation, it would have been natural to assume that both de Botton's book and Crain's review were products of a scrupulous editing process. Having written many reviews in the print medium, I can think of any number of interactions with my editor over whether a particularly sharp attack could actually be justified and whether or not it really deserved the harsh language of my first draft. Similarly, I have on several occasions been asked to examine early drafts of books and have used those occasions to raise similar questions, involving not only whether or not the methods really justified the conclusions but also whether or not the rhetoric behind those conclusions was appropriate. These days it seems valid to question whether or not any such editorial review took place on either side of the coin. Back in May I raised the same question when, in writing for The New York Review, Sue Halpern exposed several instances of specious reasoning in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success. My conclusion at that time was that I could no longer regard The New Yorker (where Gladwell's material first appeared before being published in book form) as a "reliable source;" but there were certain New Yorker authors, such as Seymour Hersh, with self-editing skills that I could usually trust. Basically I feel the same way about The New York Times and probably trust an equally limited number of its regular writers, whether it involves news, analysis, or the arts.

Where Clark is concerned, I do not consider his lack of any mention of editing to be a significant "sin of omission." He was more concerned with what happens after harsh words are "uttered" (regardless of the medium) than with the absence of normative practices through which those words might have been moderated before being uttered. Furthermore, I recognize that, where writing is concerned, one seldom pays attention to editors. Once the work is done, the editor recedes into the background, rather like Julian Marsh at the end of 42nd Street, sitting alone on the steps of a fire escape listening to everyone in the audience walking out of the theater raving about the new star they have discovered. The result is that these days we are barely aware that there may be a problem when we read texts behind which the editorial effort is minimal, if it is there at all.

Beyond Categories

As I have (too?) frequently observed, I have been heavily influenced by Gerald Edelman's proposition that our capacity for forming perceptual categories from our sensory signals constitutes the bedrock of our very consciousness. What I may not have emphasized enough, however, is that the sorts of categories Edelman has in mind are fluid, rather than static; and, indeed, from Edelman's point of view, memory is best regarded as an ongoing recategorization of both categories themselves and their membership criteria, meaning those criteria are necessarily fluid. This would imply the corollary that any individual who insists on rigidly defined and static category boundaries is suffering from serious cognitive impairment.

I suspect there are a fair number of readers who would appreciate my now following a free association path from the concept of cognitive impairment to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, but that is a bit the way I reacted to scanning through the major Emmy Award nominations. While, from the point of view of those concerned with little more than selling soap, my television viewing is too insufficient and idiosyncratic to signify, when I compare what I watch against what has been nominated, I cannot help but conclude that the Academy has been making some really arbitrary decisions based on an ineffective system of categories. I refer specifically to the categories of "drama" and "comedy."

Granted, I may be one of the few people writing on a regular basis who appeals to Aristotle's ontology in which "tragedy" and "comedy" are subcategories of "drama" and are distinguished more by the qualities of the agents than by the nature of their acts (as Kenneth Burke would put it). Remote as it may be from our times, Aristotle's approach has some merit to it. Drama is ultimately about imitation, and we bear witness to drama for the sake of being informed by those imitations. If we are entertained as well as informed, so much the better. (Personally, I believe that if I am just informed without any entertainment, I might as well be spending my time on the pleasures of reading a book.)

Now I can understand why the Academy wants to avoid words like "tragedy." Not only does the word fail to sell soap; but it tends to be the case that, when something tragic does show up on television, all commercials get cancelled out of respect for the tragedy. On the other hand the semantics of "comedy," regardless of how Aristotle chose to characterize it, took quite a beating in the twentieth century. Consider how much critical ink was spilled over the question of whether or not Bonnie and Clyde was a comedy. It certainly satisfied Aristotle's principal criterion as "as imitation of baser men;" but people did not like to call a movie where someone gets shot in the face a comedy. By the time we got to The Sopranos, it was pretty hard to use the old words sensibly any more. As Alexander Pushkin had called his play about Boris Godunov a "comedy of the distress of the Muscovite State," it made perfect sense to me to call The Sopranos a comedy of the distress of organized crime in contemporary times. Needless to say, the Academy did not see it that way. As far as they were concerned, it did not make sense to put Tony Soprano in the company of the Seinfeld guys.

So I have no problem when something that may be "technically" comedy gets classified as drama. Drama is the "umbrella category;" so the distinction begins in a state of muddle and descends from there. This year, however, I found myself reacting to seeing one of the most serious and thought-provoking series I had encountered on television get classified as comedy. I refer specifically to the nomination of Toni Collette for Lead Actress in a Comedy on the basis of her work in United States of Tara. I have only written about this program twice on this blog, but on both occasions I did so to emphasize the significance of its narrative. I referred to that narrative as "the provocative suggestion that there are times when living with the problem my be preferable to living with the consequences of the solution." Such a precept is anathema to the entire institution of advertising, which is based on the premise that any product can be pushed off as a "solution." To make matters worse, in Tara's case the "solution" was a pharmacological one; so the real message was that sometimes it is better to go without your medications and just cope with your condition. I can imagine that every pharmaceutical company saw Tara as a dangerous ideological opponent and was probably relieved that it appealed to a rather limited audience.

None of this is to suggest that either United States of Tara or any member of its production team is unworthy of awards. There is no doubt that this has been Showtime's finest hour in the history of their internally-produced material. Indeed, in the history of televised dramatic narratives, I am not sure that I can compare Tara to anything other than Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" (which I have done) when it comes to significant achievements. However, like "Marty" Tara was a paradigm shift away from the normative practices of television production (just as Thomas Kuhn's original concept of a paradigm shift involved a departure from what was accepted as "normal science"); and the shift was great enough that those determined to keep those normative practices in place have no idea what to do with it. For my part I could not care less what awards it does or does not win. All that matters to me is whether or not the suits at Showtime give it a crack at a second season.

Technology Amok

We have the BBC NEWS Web site to thank this morning for the latest story of technology out on a rampage:

A man in the United States popped out to his local petrol station to buy a pack of cigarettes - only to find his card charged $23,148,855,308,184,500.

That is $23 quadrillion (£14 quadrillion) - many times the US national debt.

"I thought somebody had bought Europe with my credit card," said Josh Muszynski, from New Hampshire.

He says his appeals to his bank first met with little understanding, though it eventually corrected the error.

It also waived the usual $15 overdraft fee.

"It was all back to normal," Mr Muszynski told his local television station, WMUR. "They reversed the negative balance fee, which was nice."

Debt crisis

His nightmare began when he checked his online bank account a few hours after buying the cigarettes.

He thought he would be a couple of hundred dollars in the black. But his overdraft had pushed him into the red - by an amount equivalent to many times the entire US national debt.

"It is a lot of money in the negative," he said. "Something I could never, ever, afford to pay back.

"My children could not afford it, grandchildren, nothing like that."

In panic, Mr Muszynski rushed back to the petrol station, but they were unable to help. He says he then spent two hours on the phone with the Bank of America.

Eventually, it assured him it would be fixed - and the next morning, it had been.

But no-one has yet explained to Mr Muszynski how such a astonishing error could have been made.

It is unclear whether this punch line suggested that there would be a follow-up story; but I, for one, shall not be holding my breath. My guess is that we are not going to be able to find anyone either within Bank of America or contracted to them who can provide that explanation. The real punch line is that we have become a culture that is not only used to working with technologies we do not understand but also highly dependent on them. While I once believed that the semantics of financial practices were "understood by only a very elite few," I now believe that our current crisis came about because no one really understood those practices. Thus, if we now live in ignorance of our day-to-day business operations, should it be a surprise that we are just as ignorant of the technologies supporting those operations? Yet another Burn After Reading lesson has been given; and I doubt that anyone over at Bank of America has the foggiest idea how "not to do it again!"

"I'm All Right Jack!"

It is hard to imagine the Chutzpah of the Week award for this week going to anyone other than David Viniar, Chief Financial Officer of Goldman Sachs. (Yes, I suppose there are some who claim it is Charles Taylor's turn, but I did not see enough panache in his protestations to achieve a level of genuine chutzpah.) The news behind this week's award is definitely the "miracle" recovery of Goldman Sachs over the last two quarters and the investment bank's response to that recovery. It is in that response that the chutzpah resides. According to a BBC NEWS report released this afternoon:

The bank said it had set aside $6.65bn for pay and bonuses in the quarter - an average of $226,000 per employee.

Please note that those figures apply only to the recently-ended quarter. Bonuses are not paid out until the end of the year. We are already seeing some likely estimates:

Analysts had already predicted that the annual payout in 2009 for its staff could be nearly $18bn - or an average of more than $600,000 per person.

As to why I decided to single out Viniar, it all comes down to one sentence out of a public statement he released:

We are helping the economy to recover.

Say what? It is easy enough for me to see how Goldman is helping both its shareholders and its employees (note the listing in order of importance) recover; but what exactly is Goldman doing for the rest of the United States (or, for that matter, the rest of the world)? This is not a rising tide that will lift all boats. This is a flood of capital that will enable a few of the rich and mighty to buy more boats!

One commentator on Morning Edition managed to penetrate the smoke screen. He started connecting the dots between the "Goldman Sachs legacy" in the Obama Administration and the fact that Goldman got bailout money while its chief competitors did not. Does anyone smell any rats in this story?

The Social World of Cyber Crime

No one has a greater interest in the integrity and safety of the Internet than the companies that provide the technologies for its infrastructure. Cisco probably leads the pack among those companies and has probably done so since "Internet" became a part of everyone's working vocabulary. Unfortunately, the safety of the Internet will never be strictly a matter of technology, which is why I have always valued Udi Manber's metaphor for safeguarding against abusive and criminal practices on the Internet as an arms race. Just as Edsger Dijkstra used to say that program debugging techniques only work for the bugs that have been detected, technologies for Internet safety only work for known abuses. Every time such a technology is deployed, malefactors across the network take it as a challenge to come up with circumventions through which they can continue their activities. The Internet itself may be an objective technology artifact, but the aggregation of all of its users constitutes a complex social world that we barely understand. We are reminded of this practically every day with news reports of events such as the recent Facebook "exposure" of the newly appointed head of Britain's MI6 intelligence operations.

In such a setting, which is as complex as it is disquieting, there is little comfort when a company like Cisco makes naive statements about the problem. Unfortunately, this seems to have been the case when BBC Technology Reporter Maggie Shiels decided to file a story from Silicon Valley about the current "state of the art" of cyber crime. It was clearly important that Cisco have a say in this story; I just wish they had sounded a bit more serious about the task in saying it. Here are some opening paragraphs from Shiels' story:

Networking giant Cisco said online criminals were increasingly using proven business practices.

In its mid-year security report, Cisco said this new approach puts the bad guys way ahead.

"When your enemy is financially motivated you have to be on alert," said Cisco fellow Patrick Peterson.

"Capitalism is a powerful force and these criminal types are collaborating with one another and sharing resources, renting out botnets and forming alliances."

He pointed to the popular model known as "software as a service," or SaaS, where a provider licences an application to a customer for use as a service on demand via the web saving costs for the user.

He said cyber-criminals were increasingly acting like virtual MBA (Master of Business Administration) students.

The naïveté begins almost immediately with a vacuous statement about financial motivation. There are, of course, plenty of Internet users not interested in making money; but my guess is that they are in the minority. Furthermore, the history of malfeasance has always been about getting control over some resource or another; and, as Niall Ferguson has pointed out, money is just the most convenient abstraction for controlling those resources. That the "bad guys" on the Internet are "financially motivated" is, as we used to say at MIT, insight into the obvious.

Such obvious observations continue with the "discovery" that those "bad guys" are "forming alliances." There may never have been honor among thieves, but alliances are seldom held together by matters of honor. Even the idea that those alliances are based on "business practices" is hardly anything new. What, after all, was it that made "organized crime" so "organized" in the first place? Indeed, it may have been the premise that criminals could be as good at business practices as "legitimate" businessmen (using the masculine form for the sake of historical accuracy) that threw J. Edgar Hoover into almost apoplectic denial that "organized crime" could exist at all. If Hoover's denial did not encourage the growth of organized crime, it certainly did not impede it. The thought that Cisco is now making the same mistake about cyber crime that Hoover had made is, to say the least, chilling.

The cherry that tops the sundae, however, is that observation that the new criminals of the Internet are "increasingly acting like MBA students." Has it occurred to Peterson that the simile may not have been necessary? Given the current unemployment conditions coupled with the rate at which universities are still cranking out new MBAs, I doubt that it would surprise anyone that some of the most successful cyber criminals are MBAs or hold other equally prestigious advanced degrees that currently offer no advantages in finding "legitimate" work. Furthermore, these are people who have grown up in a Hollywood culture of narratives about smart people who, for one reason or another, are not "making it in the system" and succeed in turning against that system. (Remember, also, that the collection of Ken Auletta's profiles of the first generation of Internet-based entrepreneurs was entitled The Highwaymen.) Willie Sutton robbed banks because that is where the money was. These days most banks seem pretty feeble compared to the money that can be harvested through the Internet; and, as we are reminded almost every day, the line between legitimate and criminal practices is far from well defined.

For better or worse, every one of us who makes any use of the Internet is dependent on Cisco technology. Those of us worried about such things as safety should not be encouraged by Shiels' report. Hopefully, this only reflects that she did not do a particularly good job in preparing it, preferring what she thought were cool sound bytes over navigating more complex explanations about security. If this is not the case, then it may be time for Cisco to restore our trust (which is really all we have) that they really are concerned with protecting us from criminal activities perpetrated over the Internet.

Not Banned in Boston

Andrew Butterfield's review of the current exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, for The New York Review is a reminder of just how banal our tastes in the erotic have become when put in a historical context. This is particularly the case with the Titian "Danaë" from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. The only bad news is that the image of this painting reproduced in The New York Review does poor justice to Butterfield's vivid prose; but the good news is that the Capodimonte Web site has an excellent reproduction (too large to be incorporated here) in which one can see every tantalizing detail discussed by Butterfield. The irony is that late nineteenth-century Boston was so obsessed with loose morals that the phrase "banned in Boston" became common enough to rate its own Wikipedia entry. I was actually living in the Boston area as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when this movement had its last hurrah, banning William Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1965. The Wikipedia entry does not cite any instances of the Museum of Fine Arts being involved with a morals charge; but my guess is that they were pretty good at self-censorship when this obsession with vice was at its peak. From this point of view of state-imposed standards, however, it is interesting to reflect on Butterfield's observation that one of the greatest admirers of this painting was Hermann Göring, who liked it so much that he stole it in 1943. This was about five years after the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich; but that propaganda maneuver was only directed at living artists. Besides, Göring held enough power that he could turn to Titian to feed his baser instincts with impunity!

Butterfield's account makes me wish I could be in Boston before the exhibition closes. This is not just for the opportunity to see a painting that is in the United States only for the second time, particularly when I own up to the fact that my eyes are now beyond any optometric correction beyond getting me through all the reading I do. No, I am more interested in watching people encounter a canvas like this, which elevates eroticism to a level of "high art" in ways that now elude contemporary artists in any medium. Since Titian created this work on a commission from Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who, in a spirit probably not unlike Göring's, just wanted a nude as "stimulating" as the "Venus of Urbino," he probably never thought of the work having a public viewing. Thus, I find it interesting when a work intended for "private consumption" goes on public display; and my interest is further whetted when that work may have been a product of those aforementioned "baser instincts!" Do people today give in to Titian's eroticism and appreciate the power of its effects when compared with more recent efforts; or do they abstract away the visceral in the interest of "art appreciation?" If the latter tends to prevail, I worry that contemporary worldviews may have desensitized our perceptions of the past (as I fear it threatens to do in the ways in which we listen to music), offering yet another instance of how our obsessions with present and future seem to blind us to the lessons and joys of the past.

Consequences of Colonization

If, as I suggested on Thursday, we have lost our grip on the fundamentals of such concepts as governance, the nature of work, and economics in the world the Internet has made, then we must surely be even more befuddled by the concept of colonization, whose understanding sinks cultural roots that are so prior to the Internet that the only fault lies in our general ignorance of history. This is particularly evident in the analytic punditry that has tried to make sense of the unanticipated ethnic violence in Xinjiang. Once again we are on the turf of Burn After Reading, conditioned by mediocre managerial training to ask what we have learned from the episode and too muddled to get beyond I-guess-we-learned-not-to-do-it-again to have even a clue as to what "it" could be. My point is that the practice of colonization may be so deeply embedded in the human condition that we cannot conceive that "it" is something we should "not do again."

Think about it. Think about how much of the Old Testament is a chronicle of colonization in the course of which the Children of Israel experience both sides of the coin several times. Think of the imperial ambitions that provide focal points of the historical studies of both Europe and Asia. Where Xinjiang is concerned, think more specifically of the pejorative used of "imperialist" in Maoist rhetoric while the "people's republic" established authoritarian control over remote regions that were once autonomous. Colonization is an addictive habit that is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to kick. Perhaps the underlying human condition is that, when one has the potential to dominate, then one exercises that potential, lest one fall victim to someone else exercising it.

It would be nice to assume that China has learned to take a broader view of the problems the West has with the relations between Israel and its neighbors. All the elements are there, all the way down to the settlements of outsiders whose descendants have no idea about living anywhere else. Where colonization is concerned, nothing can be undone. At best, one can seek reconciliation for reprehensible actions of the past, which is basically what South Africa has tried to do. The Financial Times quoted a Han Chinese businessman from Urumqi saying, somewhat in the manner of Rodney King, "We need to live together." This is probably true. One cannot achieve separation without displacement, and displacement has a bad history of causing more problems than it resolves. However, one cannot translate that quote into, "We need to live together as we did in the past." That past cannot be recovered. Who in Xinjiang will start the conversation over how they will live together in the future?

The Repertory Countertenor

Among the 2009 artists performing this summer under the auspices of the Merola Opera Program, the most interesting may be countertenor Ryan Belongie. When I attended the event at which each of the artists was subjected to a brief interview by way of an introduction to Merola supporters, Belongie had the advantage that the interviews were based on alphabetical ordering; but, unless I am mistaken, this is the first time a countertenor "made the cut" for admission to the Merola Program. Unfortunately, the interview shied away from the question that interested me the most: The Merola artists basically make up a repertory company, offering two full operas and two programs of excerpts. Just how much can such a group get out of having a countertenor in the company?

Last night's program of staged scenes at Herbst Theatre (which will be repeated tomorrow in a free outdoor presentation at Yerba Buena Gardens) provided an interesting answer. The only countertenor opportunity was provided by the first scene of the final act of Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. This scene is the core of the tragedy, where Orfeo leads Euridice back to the land of the living while she protests that he is ignoring her. When he finally gives in and looks back, the bargain he struck to win her is abrogated; and she is reclaimed by Hades. This was Belongie's one effort to strut his stuff, both vocally and dramatically; and he scored high on both counts. As I had written when the San Francisco Opera performed Iphigénie en Tauride, Gluck had a keen sense of capturing dramatic tension in his music, even during the recitativo sections. This elevates Euridice above the mundane level of a selfish nag (duly elevated in the performance of Susannah Biller) and justifies Orfeo's predicament in making a deal that he cannot disclose. The catastrophic moment is not forced by the music (and Director Roy Rallo's staging recognized this); but it was one of the most effective presentations I have seen in the (regrettably) few productions I have witnessed.

Given the nature of Orfeo's bargain, it is ironic that Belongie's other significant performance last night was as a mute (which is certainly one way to compensate for a lack of other music for him to sing). This was his performance as Toby in the excerpt from the second act of Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium that climaxed with the catastrophic moment of that opera. In this case Belongie had to rely entirely on his dramatic chops, and they definitely served him well. In most professional productions such non-singing roles tend to be given to dancers, but the Merola team had to work with what they had. Belongie was definitely instrumental in making the performance of this scene work as well as it did.

His final appearance could only be justified by tweaking the original stage directions. This was in an excerpt from the second act of Richard Wagner's Der Fliegende Holländer. According to the libretto, this act takes place in a large room in Daland's house, large enough to accommodate a hearth around which a chorus of women sit and spin, cultivating the household talents through which they hope to win husbands. Working with limited resources that could be adapted to all of the excerpts on the evening's program, Rallo converted this to a late nineteenth-century drawing room occupied by a chorus of detached and decadent observers. Since Wagner scored this chorus for sopranos and altos, Belongie could fit in as the only male in the bunch, which actually enhanced both the sense of decadence and Senta's alienation from the "real world" that motivated her obsession with the legend of the Dutchman. From a vocal point of view, Belongie's voice blended excellently with the other female voices; so again he scored both musical and dramatic points (even if, in this case, his dramatic contribution was very much secondary).

The answer to the question, then, is that there can be plenty for a countertenor to do in a repertory opera company provided that a little imagination is show in both choice and staging of the repertoire!

The Divisive Strategy

My primary response to the AT&T Yahoo! "Palin poll" on Wednesday was a fear that the divisiveness of the results would encourage a Republican political strategy concerned with "maintaining (if not aggravating) that division." Within the Republican ranks, it may still be the case that the "Great Divider" is Newt Gingrich, even if he does not currently hold office. As I observed last February in response to a PBS NewsHour broadcast, his divisive tactics during the Clinton Administration have achieved the sort of historical status that becomes the stuff of pundit commentary. There is little about Gingrich that surprises me any more, but I had to raise my eyebrows when I discovered that he was now using Al Jazeera as an instrument for his strategies.

As reported on the Al Jazeera English site, Gingrich decided to use the network as a platform for going head-to-head with the current Administration over diplomatic questions concerned with Iran:

The former speaker of the US House of Representatives has said that the US should "sabotage" Iran's oil and gas infrastructure as part of its efforts to bring down the government.

In an interview with Al Jazeera's Avi Lewis for the Fault Lines programme, Republican Newt Gingrich said targeting Iran's refinery would spark an economic crisis that would destabilise the government in Tehran.

He said the US should "use covert operations … to create a gasoline-led crisis to try and replace the regime".

"I think we have a vested interest, the world has a vested interest, in a responsible Iranian government, just as we have a vested interest in a responsible North Korean government," he said.

Gingrich, of course, has a history of playing with matches near flammable material that predates his attack on the Clinton Administration. His first major move, which I wrote about over a year ago, involved "delivering a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, which, at the time, was 'depopulated' except for the C-SPAN cameras." At that time I was writing about Walter Benjamin's concept of "the cult of the audience" and its relation to "the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses." Benjamin was writing about Adolf Hitler, but my point was that he may as well have been anticipating Gingrich. As I observed on Wednesday, such parallels with the rise of the Third Reich also constitute the foundation of my fears about Sarah Palin. The combination of Gingrich's skill at long-term planning and Palin's inimitable media style make for a "dynamic duo of demagoguery" (an object of alliteration not seen since the days of Spiro Agnew); and any alarmism I expressed on Wednesday has now been fueled by Gingrich's latest move!

Beyond the "Democratic Press Conference"

Last March the "big buzz" from the Obama Administration for technology buffs was the implementation of an Internet-based "democratic press conference," which I examined with the usual skeptical stance that I apply to all technocentric "solutions." I never saw any serious lessons-learned analysis of this endeavor; but, if there was any anticipation of further such efforts to "bring government back to the people" where press conferences are concerned, we have yet to see them. However, according to a BBC NEWS report filed this morning, Barack Obama will be engaging in a similar experiment with all of sub-Saharan Africa in conjunction with his visit to Ghana tomorrow.

As was the case with the "democratic press conference," Team Obama has invited anyone with the necessary technology to submit questions to our President. The BBC story provides the following details:

The White House has set up local SMS short codes for people to send their messages:

• Ghana - 1731

• Nigeria - 32969

• South Africa - 31958

• Kenya - 5683

Elsewhere, the number are: 61418601934 and 45609910343.

It has also set up Twitter feeds and blogs on a special page.

As of the filing of the story (10:38 GMT), Obama had received "thousands of text messages about Africa." This is two orders of magnitude less than the volume of questions that came in for the March press conference, but it is still pretty impressive. Once again, the question of managing the volume of input rears its head.

According to the BBC, the input that will actually be presented to Obama "will be selected by journalists from Senegal, Kenya and South Africa." In others words, if we accept the premise that journalists try to represent the interests of their readers, we are back on the turf of a traditional press conference, the only difference being that the input consists of tweets to Obama rather than letters to the editor. As I wrote in my analysis of the America press conference experiment, this is not necessarily a bad thing and may well be a good one. (It is almost certainly far superior to the American Idol approach to selection taken last March.) However, that will not prevent the White House media team from trying to push this event as something greater (and more "revolutionary") than it is:

The president's media adviser, Macon Phillips, told the BBC's Network Africa programme he wanted the messages to be part of a "continental conversation".

Mr Phillips said people could text whatever they wanted - questions, criticism or just general comment.

"What we can do is look at all these responses and find trends and popular issues and it gives us a better understanding of what people are thinking about," he said.

"There's much greater value than just question and answer - it's yet another way for us to see what's happening on the ground."

Whether you read this as silly or offensive will probably depend on whether or not you are a serious professional journalist. Those in the latter category work under a job description that requires monitoring "what's happening on the ground" on a day-by-day basis. This is a far more complicated affair than looking for trends among thousands of tweets all posted over the course of a few days. That complexity warrants the argument that the representative nature of a press conference probably serves the public good more effectively than a free-for-all arena in which anyone can submit any number of questions about any number of matters.

I suspect that those professional journalists might also turn apoplectic over Phillips' use of that word "conversation." There are a wide variety of communicative actions that take place in the course of political behavior; and, as I observed in my recent comments about diplomacy, conversation is definitely one of them. However, at the ontological bedrock for journalistic practice, a conversation is not the same as an interview (although conversation may be engaged as a strategy for enabling an effective interview); and the exchange of questions and answers has its own category (which, again, may be part of an interview process). Conversation is best viewed as a "social strategy" that determines whether or not Jürgen Habermas' concept of an "ideal speech situation," through which participating parties can arrive at better understanding, will be achieved or undermined; and I am sure that all of us have experienced conversations that led to both of these outcomes.

Once we apply this reality check, we can then fall back on Russell Baker's observation, which I recently cited, that "all successful government must be based on a fiction." In the context of my own writing on such matters, I see this as an instance of what I have called a "fiction of convenience;" and there are definitely times when fictions of convenience can be more effective than stark realities. One way to read Baker's text is that a President can be a more effective executive through the fiction of being "open to conversation" with all constituents, whoever they may be; and that fiction can be just as effective when that same President is representing his constituents in conjunction with visits to other countries. From this point of view, it may make sense to read Phillips' words as metaphorical, rather than literal. This would blunt my accusation that his remarks are foolish; but, even from that figurative point of view, they may still give offence to professional journalists.

Perhaps the real "truth that dare not speak its name" is that we do not yet know how to govern effectively in the world the Internet has made (just as we seem to have lost touch with the nature of work and economic questions such as compensation for that work). We are in that topsy-turvy world of Burn After Reading, where we are deluged with lessons and have no idea what we have learned. Those who evangelize "technology solutions" cannot see beyond what the technology does; but those impacted by the technology live in that "beyond." Their need for good governance today is no different from that of the Athenian Δήμος, but they are embedded in a radically different context. In a time of crisis, those people will need to be sustained by more than fictions of convenience; and I cannot think of a better time for the Obama Administration to make the paradigm shift from the circuses of those fictions to the bread necessary for each of us to make it from one day to the next.

AT&T Yahoo! Polls Palin (again)

The AT&T Yahoo! polling process is at it again, and once again the focus is on Sarah Palin. Bearing in mind the unscientific statements of both context and question, I think that the numbers still have something to say. Here they are:

First of all, in reviewing the record of past polls I have examined, the number of respondents is a considerable distance from those that responded over the final debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. On the other hand the number is about double that of the response to the poll over Palin's Convention speech. Some of this may have to do with a slight shift in my own timing for collecting the data, but I think the increase also reflects the increase in attention that Palin managed to muster during the Presidential campaign. Nevertheless, the most important observation is the bimodality of the result. When it comes to Palin, there is no middle ground; she is as much an instrument of sharp division across the electorate as she has ever been.

My own conclusion is that the American population remains as deeply divided as it was during the election; and it seems as if maintaining (if not aggravating) that division is going to be a major strategy in the Republican playbook. My fear continues to be that, as the division grows, so will the country's susceptibility to demagoguery; and I still believe that Palin has "the right stuff" for emerging as a demagogue who will promise to heal that division. During the election I was up front about the alarmist nature of my position and only a bit more subtle in my efforts to draw parallels with the rise of the Third Reich. Whether or not my alarmism is grounded in paranoia remains to be seen; but I spent my student days with posters that said, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you!"

Defending TOSCA (sort of)

I suspect it should be clear to those who read this blog regularly that I am far from the greatest fan of Giacomo Puccini. I appreciate that opera singers adore him, and I have even heard many good things about him from some of my informants in the orchestra pit. So it is clear that from the performer's perspective, he has some virtues; but, since my own "performer's point of view" is that of a hopeless amateur at a piano keyboard, I have to approach him strictly from my seat in the audience. Within that constraint I might find a concert performance of an aria or duet acceptable, but in such a setting I would probably have little patience for an entire opera or even an extended suite, such as the one James Conlon prepared for Dmitri Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. If I am going to get my Puccini, then the only place to get it is in an opera house, where I can pay as much attention to the staging as to the singing.

From this point of view, I found myself reflecting on what I had written about the recent San Francisco Opera performance of Tosca while reading Scott Fogelsong's thoughts about the 1953 Maria Callas recording of this opera in his latest SF Classical Music Examiner piece. Let me focus on a few of his sentences:

One hears gush about the "utter truth" of Callas's performance as diva Tosca, but let's get real here: how much "truth" can there be in a trashy, shabby, grubby little potboiler? The fans hear "truth"; I hear cheap histrionics. Tosca is full of great tunes and some nifty choral writing, but intellectually it dwells in a realm somewhere between reality TV and The Perils of Pauline.

I sympathize entirely with this text; but I feel that, when one makes that transition from listening to a recording to watching a production on the stage, one can put a more positive spin on it. It was not out of merely trying to be clever that entitled my own post "Dare to be Vulgar." Indeed, vulgarity had been on my mind when I experienced Conlon's Shostakovich suite, as was the precept in Aristotle's "Poetics" that tragedy is concerned with noble men, while comedy "is an imitation of baser men." If there is any nobility to any of the characters in Tosca, we see precious little of it; and I suspect this was the case in Victorien Sardou's version as well. This is why I came to the conclusion that Tosca is a "comedy of distress," appropriating the language that Alexander Pushkin summoned for the full title of his play about Tsar Boris Godunov.

Having said all that, I suspect that Puccini himself would not have been very happy with his opera being called a "comedy of distress;" but I am not sure that, were he still alive to give it, Puccini's opinion would matter very much. My argument is the same as the one I advanced in considering a composition by a composer who is alive and who does not seem to take very kindly to some critics (including myself), Steven Gerber. Here is how I expressed it back in April:

The basic premise is that, once a composition is presented to an audience, it no longer "belongs" to the composer. Each of us has a unique way of listening, and there will never be any guarantee that any listener will hear a composition the way the composer intended it to be heard. That is part of what makes all of us human, the subjective nature of cognitive interpretation of sensory impressions. The composition leaves the objective and subjective worlds of the composer's working environment and enters the social world, where it becomes part of a vast network of listeners and listenings, very much in the spirit of the social networks that Randall Collins postulated and investigated in The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. From such a point of view, it would seem natural for any composer to experience some sort of past-partum depression with such a departure; but, hopefully, at some point the composer can take pleasure in being the parent of a child that has now left the womb, so to speak.

Once Tosca was turned loose on the audience, it was no longer Puccini's affair, regardless of whether or not calling it a "comedy of distress" involved malice or ridicule (which, in my case, it did not). However, my point of view is still provocative to those targeted by Fogelsong's text. If there is any "truth" in a performance of this opera, it is the truth of the baseness of all of the characters and the consequences of their base behaviors. This is why I began "Dare to be Vulgar" with the suggestion that both the play and the opera would have been better titled Scarpia, were it not for the need to publicize that "celebrity" status of actresses and divas!

CHUTZPAH on Behalf of Main Street (sort of)

Once again I seem to find myself with the problem of facing a good Chutzpah of the Week award candidate at the beginning of the week. Admittedly, I may well be under the influence of Saturday's premiere performance of To Big to Fail by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which I described as "a parable about paying more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street;" but a report by James Lamont for this morning's Financial Times surprised me by covering an opposition between Main Street and Wall Street where I had not considered finding one. Here is the basic story:

The newly elected Indian government on Monday launched a big spending national budget that boosted infrastructure spending and protected farmers, but was deeply unpopular with investors, who hammered Indian stocks.

Fearing the budget would further stretch the fiscal deficit, investors pulled out of shares listed on the Sensex which staged a sharp retreat from early gains, falling as much as 6 per cent to 14,017.37 in afternoon trading.

In other words, under the leadership of Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, India plans to go ahead with a recovery plan that pays more attention to the needs of its citizens than to the needs of its financial sector. Standing up to the financial sector in this way requires a strong sense of chutzpah; and given that the market is already pushing back against Mukherjee, I figure he needs all the support he can get. To emphasize the drama of the situation, Lamont even observed that the Sensex dropped 600 points over the period of Mukherjee's address to the Indian Parliament about his plan. Nevertheless, Mukherjee hung in there with one critical sentence:

As we begin this five-year journey, the road ahead will not be easy.

Needless to say, it is not easy to "stay the course" (to revive that old Ronald Regan cliché) of a five-year plan; but, perhaps this is where that matter of patience with the rich and mighty is so important. Recall that the year began with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo receiving a Chutzpah of the Week award (also presented early in the week) for losing patience with the rich and mighty. Mukherjee has chosen a different journey. It took chutzpah to make the choice, and it will take chutzpah to sustain that choice. I give him the Chutzpah of the Week award in the hope that other countries will take note of how he has decided to place the needs of his citizens above those of his country's financiers.

Diplomacy and Espionage

There has been a lot of buzz this morning around the story of the newly appointed head of MI6 having his "cover blown" by his wife's Facebook site. Even CNET News got on the bandwagon (probably because of the Facebook role), although the bandwagon-rider was Chris Matyszczyk, who is only a member of the CNET Blog Network and whose Technically Incorrect blog must often be taken with several grains of salt. Nevertheless, Matyszczyk is usually good at seeding his posts with relevant and useful hyperlinks. Had he not posted with the attention-grabbing headline "Wife exposes chief spy's personal life on Facebook," I probably would not have read beyond my Google Reader summary; but the post itself made it easier for me to address the source material from Mail Online, the Web site for the Daily Mail and Sunday Mail of London. So here is the basic story in the words of Mail reporter Jason Lewis:

The new head of MI6 has been left exposed by a major personal security breach after his wife published intimate photographs and family details on the Facebook website.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all Britain's spying operations abroad.

But his wife's entries on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, who their friends are and where they spend their holidays.

Amazingly, she had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it visible to any of the site's 200million users who chose to be in the open-access 'London' network - regardless of where in the world they actually were.

There are fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder may have compromised the safety of Sir John's family and friends.

Lady Shelley Sawers' extraordinary lapse exposed the couple's friendships with senior diplomats and well-known actors, including Moir Leslie, who plays a leading character in The Archers. And it revealed that the intelligence chief's brother-in-law - who holidayed with him last month - is an associate of the controversial Right-wing historian David Irving.

Immediately after The Mail on Sunday alerted the Foreign Office to the astonishing misjudgment, all trace of the material – which could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists - was removed from the internet.

The move suggests that MI6 or the Foreign Office, which is also responsible for the GCHQ electronic eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, had not vetted what sort of information Sir John and his family were distributing over the internet.

This is the sort of story that hits the road and immediately runs off madly in all directions. However, the direction that tends to interest me the most is the one that goes up the managerial food chain. Apparently, the BBC shared my interest according to the following report on what happened when Foreign Secretary David Miliband was approached for comment:

But Mr Miliband told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme: "Are you leading the news with that?

"The fact that there's a picture that the head of the MI6 goes swimming - wow, that really is exciting.

'No state secret'

"It is not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks, for goodness sake let's grow up.

"He is an outstanding professional who will do a really good job in an outstanding organisation."

However, there is a bit of context that was given relatively little attention, being buried far below the (metaphorical) fold on the Web pages for both the Mail and the BBC. This is the matter of Sawers' current position, accounted for in the Mail by the usual sensational rhetoric:

Sir John Sawers, currently Britain's Ambassador to the United Nations, where he sits on the highly sensitive Security Council, began his working life in MI6 but has spent the past 20 years building a career as a diplomat rather than a spy.

For me this raises two issues of diplomacy, one historical and one pragmatic. The pragmatic one is that a diplomat is a public figure. A little bit of knowledge about the man under the suit (even in Speedo trunks) could (not necessarily always, though) add a "human touch" when trying to communicate with those reluctant to do so. There is something to be said about laying your cards on the table when those cards are not about how many guns you have in your arsenal. This could have value even in the course of those "highly sensitive" conversations that take place in the Security Council (whose meetings are open to the public).

The historical perspective is a darker one, though. It came to me through an acquaintance I made within the intelligence community. This person happened to observe some scanning I had been doing, and we fell into a conversation about favorite reading matter. One of my candidates was a paper from Past and Present by Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton entitled "'Studied for Action': How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy." This had been written in preparation for a more extended study of reading practices during the Renaissance. Harvey was a leading academic of the late sixteenth century with established credentials from both Cambridge and Oxford; and he served members of the Elizabethan court in a capacity that today we would call "consulting." One of his "clients" was Philip Sidney, who served the Queen as a diplomat on several occasions and would turn to Harvey (and his knowledge of Livy) for "useful background" prior to setting off on his diplomatic missions. The important part of the conversation that took place about this paper was my being reminded that anyone dispatched by Queen Elizabeth I on a "diplomatic mission" was also expected to do "intelligence gathering" while "on site." If the Mail had wanted to sensationalize Sawers' career, a better strategy would have been to play up this "history of confluence" between diplomacy and espionage, rather than dwelling on the sensitivity of Security Council deliberations!

Personally, I am enjoying the coincidence of reading this news this morning after having watched Burn After Reading on HBO last night. This may be the ultimate comedy-of-errors narrative about Homeland Security operations, as well as an analysis of just how arbitrary life can be. There is no consistency over whether the smart prevail over the dumb (or the other way around) or whether virtue triumphs over vice (or, again, the other way around). Thus, the real punch line comes when a CIA officer is being debriefed by his boss about all the confusing events that have unfolded. Being a good boss, he tells the subordinate to treat the whole affair as a learning experience. IMDb selected as a "memorable quote" the exchange that ensues:

CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

Thus, we should be asking both the Sawers family and Miliband if they have learned what not to do again. The most obvious lesson is:

Don't put anything on the Internet unless you want the entire world to see it.

I suspect that many reading this will find that "lesson" an "insight into the obvious" (as we used to say at MIT). The problem is that it is not obvious to large swaths of the population; and those swaths include some very highly-placed people, who can impact the fate of the world! Thus, the real value of this affair is that we have now learned a good cautionary tale to throw back at the next Internet evangelist who is trying to promote a more Wiki-based approach to governance!

A Parable of Economic Crisis

The concept of parable has been around and in practice at least since the days of Aesop. It tends to serve two purposes. The first is to shine a new light on a confusing and problematic situation, thus making it more comprehensible. This is usually a matter of explaining things in terms of those listening to the parable, rather than in the terms of the situation itself, which tend to be the source of confusion in the first place. The second is to use the light of understanding to indicate a path towards resolving the problems brought on by the situation. The parable is the stock-in-trade of the agitprop vehicle of didactic drama and its subsequent influence on Bertolt Brecht's approach to epic theatre.

Epic theatre is alive and well in San Francisco, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe is one of his proudest vehicles. It is thus no surprise that this summer's production should use parables to take on the complexities and perplexities of the current economic crisis, delivered with outrageous humor and spectacle (and very little mime). The result, given its first performance (as always) on the Fourth of July, is Too Big to Fail; and it succeeds delightfully where just about all punditry gets bemired in its own rhetoric. In the past there has been a tendency for Mime Troupe productions to follow the Brechtian tradition of going on too long; but Too Big to Fail is one of the tightest of their productions that I have seen (and I have now lost count). Somewhat in the narrative framework of The Odyssey, parables about our economic crisis are delivered through one story of a great journey and another of what is happening back at the hero's home. Seemingly disconnected events, usually in the form of facile jokes, always get woven into the fabric of a bigger picture and never take too long to do so. When it threatens to get too involved in its own complexity, the narrative mocks itself and quickly returns to the direct delivery of parable.

After a repeat performance this afternoon in Dolores Park, the San Francisco Mime Troupe goes on the road, taking Too Big to Fail to a variety of venues around the Bay Area until the end of September. They have posted a Web page with their full schedule. Most of the performances are free, which means that there is a serious effort to "pass the hat" at the end of the show. This is important since, according to their statistics, those post-performance donations account for 22% of their budget. The schedule also identifies those performances that require tickets, along with information for obtaining them.

Too Big to Fail is basically a parable about paying more attention to Main Street than to Wall Street. The message just gets through more effectively that it has done from other sources. Perhaps that it because of the second role that the parables play. We come away with a better sense of what we can actually do to restore the focus of economic behavior to its rightful place. Power to the Mime Troupe!

Self-Hinderance?

While HBO's new Hung series may be doling out a long-overdue dose of satire to self-help hucksters, it would appear that, according to a recent BBC NEWS story, those hucksters may actually be taking a bad situation and making it worse. The report summarizes a Canadian study published in Psychological Science as follows:

The researchers, from the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick, asked people with high and low self-esteem to say "I am a lovable person."

They then measured the participants' moods and their feelings about themselves.

In the low self-esteem group, those who repeated the mantra felt worse afterwards compared with others who did not.

However people with high self-esteem felt better after repeating the positive self-statement - but only slightly.

The psychologists then asked the study participants to list negative and positive thoughts about themselves.

They found that, paradoxically, those with low self-esteem were in a better mood when they were allowed to have negative thoughts than when they were asked to focus exclusively on affirmative thoughts.

Writing in the journal, the researchers suggest that, like overly positive praise, unreasonably positive self-statements, such as "I accept myself completely," can provoke contradictory thoughts in individuals with low self-esteem.

Such negative thoughts can overwhelm the positive thoughts.

If people are instructed to focus exclusively on positive thoughts, negative thoughts might be especially discouraging.

I have always been suspicious of self-help gurus (a suspicion that continues to be aggravated whenever one of them appears on Public Television during Pledge Week); but this study led me to recognize that the whole self-help movement is yet another front on what, in previous writing, I have called the "War against Reality." In the past I have concentrated on strategies for denying reality; but the self-help evangelists are actually a bizarre extension of that Enlightenment scientistic utopia in which the individual can control everything, not just the natural world but the subjective one as well. The fact that the low self-esteem subjects in the Canadian study were actually in a better mood when not trying to block out their negative thoughts may be a sign that accepting reality is preferable to either denying it or enduring the frustration of trying to control it. The study thus can be seen as reinforcing the narrative position of the Showtime series, United States of Tara, whose protagonist has decided that living with multiple-personality disorder is preferable to trying to beat the symptoms into submission through medication. Paddy Chayefsky took a similar approach in "Marty;" in that narrative, it is only after Marty comes to terms with all his negative qualities (passionately unloading them on his despairing mother) that he can finally strike up a conversation with a woman (who is, herself, very much a wallflower) and discover that he can form a relationship.

In a peculiar way it may well be that we deal with the unpleasant realities of our lives in the same way that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross postulated that we deal with the prospect of our respective deaths. As we are assaulted by those unpleasant realities, we go through the same five stages that form the basis for Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' model:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Perhaps one way to interpret the Canadian study is that, by putting up barriers to acceptance, self-help gurus make things worse for those with low esteem whom they claim to be helping. PBS should take note of this. If all those Pledge Week Specials are actually making people feel worse about themselves, they are probably going to feel less inclined to make pledges!

Professors and Politicians in Vilnius

Apparently, it is one thing for a Yale University Professor of History to explore parallels between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and quite another for politicians to acknowledge that professor's work. The professor in question is Timothy Snyder. The work is the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which is not scheduled for publication until October 2010. However, this past May 9 Snyder delivered a lecture in Vilnius on material that will be included in the book; and a text based on that lecture has appeared in the latest issue of The New York Review. I found that lecture sufficiently fascinating that it inspired a post I wrote this morning.

That post concerned using Snyder's material as a new lens for critiquing the evangelism of globalization and economic growth, particularly from evangelists such as Tom Friedman. However, according to a BBC NEWS report, there are Russian diplomats not interested in reflecting on Snyder's position:

Russian delegates have walked out of an OSCE [Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe] session in Vilnius after it voted for a remembrance day for the victims of both Nazism and Stalinism.

The pan-European security and democracy body passed a resolution equating the roles of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in starting World War II.

Moscow's delegation boycotted the vote after failing to have it withdrawn.

I suppose it is possible that neither Snyder's lecture nor the OSCE meeting would have taken place had Vilnius not been named European Capital of Culture of 2009; but it is a prime example of the sort of "bloodland" that Snyder is examining in his book. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Vilnius was seized by the Soviet Union on September 19, 1939, two days after it had invaded Poland from the east. When Hitler abrogated this Pact in June of 1941 and launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union, Vilnius quickly fell to the Nazis. After the Second World War Lithuania became a Soviet Socialist Republic, with Vilnius remaining as its capital. The city thus had the experience of "both German and Soviet armies passing through … twice, in attack and retreat" (as Snyder put it in describing Belarus and Ukraine). As its Wikipedia entry cites, Vilnius also played a major role in the history of Judaism:

A major scholar of Judaism and Kabbalah centered in Vilnius was the famous Rabbi Eliyahu Kremer, also known as the Vilna Gaon. His students have significant influence among Orthodox Jews in Israel and around the globe.

One of Snyder's points, however, is that there were both Christians and Jews in Vilnius who managed to survive the horrors of both Hitler and Stalin; and, perhaps in recognition of its "Capital of Culture" status, the OSCE saw fit to memorialize those who did not survive. Unfortunately, this did not play well with the representatives of a country that has been experiencing recent revivals of Stalin nostalgia as he becomes a more and more distant historical figure. I suspect that the irony of this situation will please the ghost of another controversial historical figure (this one from music history), who (again according to the Wikipedia entry) was honored by Vilnius back in 1995:

In 1995, the world's first bronze cast of Frank Zappa was installed in the Užupis district with the permission of the government.

Globalization and Genocide

There are several dimensions to the "ignored reality" of the Holocaust examined by Timothy Snyder in his essay in the latest issue of The New York Review. Most important is his observation that "many if not more Jews were killed by bullets as by gas," stressing that, for example, the factory-like procedures at camps like Auschwitz were only a part (and a relatively late one) of the tragic narrative of the Holocaust. Equally important is Snyder's effort to examine parallels between the mass killings under the Nazis and those in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, Snyder saves the real punch line of these parallels for the end of the article:

Although the history of mass killing has much to do with economic calculation, memory shuns anything that might seem to make murder appear rational. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union followed a path to economic self-sufficiency, Germany wishing to balance industry with an agrarian backwardness with rapid industrialization and urbanization. Both regimes were aiming for economic autarky in a large empire, in which both sought to control Eastern Europe. Both of them saw the Polish state as a historical aberration; both saw Ukraine and its rich soil as indispensable. They defined different groups as the enemies of their designs, although the German plan to kill every Jew is unmatched by any Soviet policy in the totality of its aims. What is crucial is that the ideology that legitimated mass death was also a vision of economic development. In a world of scarcity, particularly of food supplies, both regimes integrated mass murder with economic planning.

They did so in ways that seem appalling and obscene to us today, but which were sufficiently plausible to motivate large numbers of believers at the time. Food is no longer scarce, at least in the West; but other resources are, or will be soon. In the twenty-first century, we will face shortages of potable water, clean air, and affordable energy. Climate change may bring a renewed threat of hunger.

If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

For all my criticism of Tom Friedman's evangelical approach to globalization, I do not think I would accuse him of fostering "privileged development." On the other hand it is not difficult to read his evangelism in terms of "economic autarky;" and, from that point of view, I suspect that Friedman can be accused of wearing blinders that block out the connection between economic autarky and privileged development. Thus, we need to turn to Europeans to take that connection into account; and one of those Europeans appears to be Angela Merkel.

I make this assertion on the basis of a statement she made yesterday to the German parliament reported this morning on SPIEGEL ONLINE:

With a week to go before the next G-8 meeting in the Italian city of L'Aquila, Merkel told the German parliament in Berlin on Thursday that the forum was no longer sufficient to deal with the challenges ahead. "We are seeing that the world is growing together and that the problems that we face cannot be solved by the industrialized countries alone," she said.

Merkel now favors the G-20, a wider group of nations, including the fast-growing nations like China, Brazil and India. "I think the G-20 should be the format that, like an overarching roof, determines the future," she said.

These are the words of a world leader who recognizes that there will always be a threat of economic autarky and is prepared to counter that threat by avoiding economic planning by elite bodies that lack adequate concern for those countries not already "developed" according to standards set by the industrialized countries. Of course, compared with the membership of the United Nations, the G-20 is also a rather elite body; but she has taken a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, it will be up to leaders whose sense of history is more tragic than that of any American "players" to take further steps to recognize that the economic well-being of the world at large is not necessarily strictly a matter of growth, rapid or otherwise. Well-being also includes security from threats of harm, such as terrorism. Until those with both the potential and the motivation to threaten can engage in meaningful discussion about economic futures, even the G-20 will not be able to address economic well-being from a position that will matter most to the rest of the world.

Preludes, Fugues, Wittgenstein, and Autobiography

My effort to explore my hypothesis about the autobiographical nature of the second volume of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier among members of the San Francisco Symphony Social Network ran into some interesting confusions. I figured that, since this is my "rehearsal studio," I should use it to reconsider what I was trying to say in the hope of saying it more clearly (if not more convincingly). My invocation of Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to have led others down a dark alley concerned with the nature of "family resemblances" among all of the fugues in this collection (and similarly for the preludes); and I realized that talking about "family resemblance" at all may have been a distracting red herring.

More important than classifying these artifacts is the distinction between the artifacts themselves and the practices through which those artifacts are produced. (For example, I find it particularly relevant that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists "fugue" as having a verb form as well as a noun form. The latter denotes the practice of producing an artifact that is an instance of the former.) The "autobiographical" nature of the second volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier has more to do with those preludes and fugues being reflections on past practices that it does with whether or not preludes or fugues constitute legitimate ontological categories. This was the primary message I was trying to get across when I first posed the "Preludes and Fugues as Autobiography" hypothesis. This can now be reflected back on how Wittgenstein used the concept of "game" (which I had cited when I posed my hypothesis) to illustrate what he meant by "family resemblance." What we choose to call a game has little to do with any attributes of the game itself and far more to do with how it figures into our understanding of the practice of "play." From this point of view, every composition has within it the power to inform us about the practices of the composer (which may then inform us about the composer's past experiences, both musical and extra-musical, thus endowing the artifact with a capacity for "autobiographical communication"). The challenge facing us as listeners is to be so informed! It is no easy matter; but, as Igor Stravinsky would have put it, our capacity to rise to that challenge is what distinguishes us from the ducks!

CHUTZPAH with Military Rhetoric

One of the best ways to win a Chutzpah of the Week award is by speaking truth to power, and speaking truth to military power requires a special kind of chutzpah. National Security Advisor James L. Jones seems to have that chutzpah when it comes to military planning in Afghanistan; and, given our history of getting ourselves into inextricable messes, this is definitely chutzpah in the right place at the right time. Not surprisingly, the story behind this chutzpah was filed by Bob Woodward for this morning's Washington Post. Here is his account of the basic act:

National security adviser James L. Jones told U.S. military commanders here last week that the Obama administration wants to hold troop levels here flat for now, and focus instead on carrying out the previously approved strategy of increased economic development, improved governance and participation by the Afghan military and civilians in the conflict.

The message seems designed to cap expectations that more troops might be coming, though the administration has not ruled out additional deployments in the future. Jones was carrying out directions from President Obama, who said recently, "My strong view is that we are not going to succeed simply by piling on more and more troops."

"This will not be won by the military alone," Jones said in an interview during his trip. "We tried that for six years." He also said: "The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development. If that is not done right, there are not enough troops in the world to succeed."

Jones delivered his message after a 30-minute briefing by Marine Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, who commands 9,000 Marines here, nearly half the new deployments Obama has sent to Afghanistan.

However, as we read on in Woodward's account, we discover that this is a case where the chutzpah resided not only in the enough-is-enough cake but also in that cake's rhetorical icing. As could be expected, Nicholson was ready to push back against Jones' message and try to open the door to further troop escalations. However, as Woodward reported, Jones was ready with push-back of his own:

During the briefing, Nicholson had told Jones that he was "a little light," more than hinting that he could use more forces, probably thousands more. "We don't have enough force to go everywhere," Nicholson said.

But Jones recalled how Obama had initially decided to deploy additional forces this year. "At a table much like this," Jones said, referring to the polished wood table in the White House Situation Room, "the president's principals met and agreed to recommend 17,000 more troops for Afghanistan." The principals -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; Gates; Mullen; and the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair -- made this recommendation in February during the first full month of the Obama administration. The president approved the deployments, which included Nicholson's Marines.

Soon after that, Jones said, the principals told the president, "oops," we need an additional 4,000 to help train the Afghan army.

"They then said, 'If you do all that, we think we can turn this around,' " Jones said, reminding the Marines here that the president had quickly approved and publicly announced the additional 4,000.

Now suppose you're the president, Jones told them, and the requests come into the White House for yet more force. How do you think Obama might look at this? Jones asked, casting his eyes around the colonels. How do you think he might feel?

Jones let the question hang in the air-conditioned, fluorescent-lighted room. Nicholson and the colonels said nothing.

Well, Jones went on, after all those additional troops, 17,000 plus 4,000 more, if there were new requests for force now, the president would quite likely have "a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment." Everyone in the room caught the phonetic reference to WTF -- which in the military and elsewhere means "What the [expletive]?"

Nicholson and his colonels -- all or nearly all veterans of Iraq -- seemed to blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all the troops they were going to get.

Jones, speaking with great emphasis to this group of Iraq veterans, said Afghanistan is not Iraq. "We are not going to build that empire again," he said flatly.

Jones knew that he would have to use rhetoric that would get the attention of the brass in the room, and he had the chutzpah to deliver just the right rhetoric to do the trick. Jones has definitely earned his Chutzpah of the Week award; let us now hope that the Administration he represents does not back down from this position!