The Dark Film Behind Thomson’s “Americana”

At the end of last month, I wrote about how the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) had organized a “watch party” for the Memorial Day Weekend that featured the six-movement suite of music that Virgil Thomson had composed for Pare Lorentz’ film The Plow That Broke the Plains. At that time I observed that this film was anything but an offering of “celebratory Americana;” and I decided to reject the context of the “watch party” and focus entirely on Thomson’s score, which I viewed through the DSO Replay Web site, which provided a performance on February 8, 2019 at which Leonard Slatkin served as conductor. At that time I observed that Thomson’s score tended to be more upbeat than the film, providing the listener with a variety of familiar folk tunes.

Nevertheless, his arrangement for the suite included several suggestions of ironic rhetoric; and I was left curious as to how the music had been deployed in the film itself. Fortunately, the film is available for viewing on YouTube; and, as expected, watching the film was far less upbeat that listening to the suite. Even when the music accompanies the “rolling text” that introduces the film itself, there are any number of suggestions that there will be little to celebrate in the narrative that will follow. Indeed, the film begins by showing the vast herds of cattle that grazed on the grasslands of the Great Plains, never even suggesting that those cattle had displaced indigenous cultures that had learned, over many generations, how to establish a working relationship with a vast expanse of land where water was scarce and the elements were harsh.

The opening image of The Plow That Broke the Plains (before the credits), showing the homesteaders heading for the Great Plains to replace the cattlemen (screen shot from the video being discussed)

Instead, the first part of the film dwells on advertising whose excessive optimism (is there any other kind in advertising?) encouraged a new generation of Americans to occupy the plains and grow large wheat crops. Indeed, the outbreak of World War I had created a major market for wheat; and Lorentz was not shy about observing how the back-breaking work of the homesteaders was converted into an economic boom, which was basically enjoyed only by the financiers on Wall Street. The film then follows the fate of those homesteaders into the postwar period, when demand dropped radically at the same time that the land itself could no longer sustain the productive farming of wheat. The final blow came with the outbreak of dust storms, after which those previously profit-making plains came to be known as the Dust Bowl.

It is worth noting as a sidebar that Lorenz made his film in 1936. I would like to believe that one of the viewers of that film was John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939; and, for my money at least, it remains one of the best what-happened-next narratives to follow the conclusion of The Plow That Broke the Plains. Neither of these narratives puts our country’s history in a particularly comforting light. By all rights they should have called out the need for us to learn from our mistakes. Sadly, most cultures never rise to that challenge; and, for better or worse, ours has never been an exception to that state of affairs.

Bicycle Follies Cross the Pond

For a while, probably as a result of spending most of my time away from home as a pedestrian on the streets of San Francisco, I was writing about what I called the "defiance culture" of cyclists. When the film Premium Rush came out a couple of years later, I realized that this culture at extended far beyond the Bay Area (and probably beyond more large metropolitan areas than New York). On my own turf, the most dangerous absurdity I had encountered personally was a cyclist who decided to negotiate a bus stop by going down the narrow strip between the bus and the sidewalk, thus endangering those getting on and off the bus at the same time. (Was he keeping score in his head?)

Apparently, the culture has now spread to Great Britain. The following story appeared on the BBC News Web site this morning:

Police are considering what action to take against a Cambridge cyclist who dodged a level crossing barrier, coming within seconds of being hit by a train.

British Transport Police (BTP) confirmed they spoke to a 26-year-old woman from the city on Wednesday. She was filmed cycling through the closed barrier at Waterbeach on 12 September.

The woman came forward voluntarily, and BTP said they were deciding what further action to take.

She was filmed passing the closed barrier and ignoring warning signals and lights.

Rail bosses described it as "one of the closest near misses we've seen".

Hundreds of thousands of people have watched footage of the woman cycling up to the tracks before slamming on her brakes, and edging backwards as the train speeds past.

I know several who attribute this behavior to the extreme sense of self-righteousness that comes with the belief that riding bicycles will save the planet for excess carbon emissions. The fact that this is a fallacy only heightens the self-righteousness, making them an even greater danger to those who come near them, as well as to their own selves.

Turning the “Aggressive Audience” into an Art Form?

Over on Examiner.com, I have been giving a lot of attention to the fact that September 5 will be the 100th birthday of John Cage. Today I even went so far as to give a shout-out to the London Proms series for dedicating last Friday night to Cage, as well as to Ivan Hewitt of the London Telegraph for giving such an excellent account of the occasion (not bad, considering the right-wing politics of that newspaper). In the midst of all of the positive vibes about Cage and his work, I found myself thinking back on when the times were not so good.

My favorite example is the Cramps recording of Cage performing the third part of his Empty Words at the Teatro Lirico di Milano on December 2, 1977. Empty Words does not make for a particularly felicitous listening experience. I remember that it was one of the last things I heard performed at Brandeis University after I had completed my doctoral dissertation and was preparing to start my first academic teaching job at the Technion in Israel. (I was pretty sure I would not hear very much Cage over there.) The work resides somewhere between reading and chant of a syllabic breakdown of texts from the notebooks of Henry David Thoreau. It does not require quite the patience of a performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations;” but it sure comes close.

The thing about the Cramps recording is that the Italian audience lacked that patience. The result is less a concert recording of one of Cage’s performances and more a historical document of the audience riot than ensued. (Don’t you wish that we had a document like that for “Le Sacre du Printemps?”) Almost exactly three years ago, I wrote about that recording on this site in a post entitled “The Aggressive Audience.”

What I did not know when I wrote that post was that, back in 2004, Angelin Preljocaj had created choreography for 63 minutes of that full-length concert recording, which had been performed by Ballet Preljocaj at the Biennale nationale de danse du Val-de-Marne. The title of resulting work was (appropriately enough) Empty Moves. Preljocaji’s text on the company’s Web site talks about “the alienation effect,” without distinguishing between how that effect applied to Cage’s treatment of Thoreau and how it applied to the audience’s treatment of Cage. I am not quite sure how I would react to seeing a performance of this choreography. In the context of all the different ways in which Cage is now been honored around the world, I find that the major value of the Cramps recording is to remind us all that audiences were not always very receptive to Cage. For my part I am also reminded of the stoicism he brought to any of these hostile reactions. My guess is that Preljocaj’s choreography contributes little to either of those reminders.

Ironically, Cage was already beginning to receive honors for his work in the United States long before he encountered that hostile Italian audience. Over on my Examiner.com site, I wrote about hearing Cage read an acceptance speech for “some prestigious award whose details I have since forgotten” in the fall of 1973. The speech was one of those rare occasions when he let go of his stoicism, since the basic message was:

Where were you when I needed you?

These days I find myself more worried about audience hostility than I used to feel. Between soccer hooliganism in Europe and “men with guns” in the United States, I no longer take it for granted that a performance audience is a “safe place.” Back in the day, I remember that the only thing Robert Ashley had to say about audience hostility was:

Don’t throw things at us!

These days the ante seems to have been raised where causes for concern are evaluated. Even the London Olympics seems to have added chips to that ante.

Self-Destructive Self-Righteousness?

Chris Matyszczyk decided to use today’s post to his Technically Incorrect blog on CNET News to riff about the girl who “fell flat on her nose” while texting under the eye of a CBC News camera resulting in a YouTube upload whose hit rate will probably have passed 1.5 million by the time you read this.  I came away from reading his post with a clear impression that behavior modification by humiliation is not nearly as effective as many of us wish it would be.  For me these are the operative passages from Matyszczyk’s post:

But texting and walking has surely gained a unique place in culture, for its sheer absurdity. Just a couple of years ago, I found myself tempted into bumping into New York text-walkers, just to see if they had any self-consciousness at all. (They don't.)

Instead, I found if text-walkers bump into you, they actually think it's your fault. They truly believe that it is your responsibility to get out of their way, because, in texting, they are proving they have more important things to do than look out for you.

As I see it, Matyszczyk has captured a fundamental law of human nature, even if he never stated it explicitly:

Self-righteousness trumps all.

The behavior of those who text while walking is no different from that of the many bicyclists who have made city streets hazardous for pedestrians and motorists alike.  (No matter how many testimonials I read claiming that these guys are a minority, the statistics of my personal observations just cannot agree.)  Even when those cyclists run smack into a serious (fatal, in at least one case in San Francisco) accident, whether or not the cyclist is the injured party, (s)he will inevitably insist that, no matter how reckless (and/or oblivious) his/her behavior may have been, (s)he was in the right because the other guy was clearly opposing his/her “green” philosophy.  In other words we can rephrase the law as the following corollary:

Being right means never having to check your behavior against reality.

In other words, for anyone who does believe in reality checking, it’s a dangerous world out there!

Blaming Those who Try to Blame the Victim

One of the greatest problems that victims of sexual assault face is that they, themselves, become objects of blame.  In other words counsel for the defendant(s) engages the time-old strategic principle that the best defense is a good offense.  One wonders whether this strategy will be engaged again when the Department of Defense is the defendant.

We may find the answer to this question soon enough.  According to a story filed by Jesse Ellison for The Daily Beast, Rebecca Havrilla, a former sergeant and explosive-ordnance-disposal technician in the United States Army, and sixteen of her fellow soldiers will be “plaintiffs in a class action suit filed Tuesday against Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, alleging that their failure to act [on accusations of sexual assault] amounted to a violation of the plaintiffs’ Constitutional rights.”  Ellison provides further details as follows:

The suit, brought by Washington, D.C. attorney Susan Burke, and filed in the Eastern Virginia federal court, charges that despite ample evidence of the problem, both Gates and Rumsfeld “ran institutions in which perpetrators were promoted; … in which Plaintiffs and other victims were openly subject to retaliation… and ordered to keep quiet.” The plaintiffs, in turn, have been “directly and seriously injured by Defendants’ actions and omissions.”

Last week, when I was writing about the current argument over the virtues of Mad Men, I suggested “that just about all of the adults in the Mad Men cast amount to infantile minds in aged bodies;  and, when we consider the many scenes of ‘men at play,’ this deduction is not as preposterous as it may first seem.”  We need to consider seriously the possibility that the primary difference between Mad Men and the Department of Defense is that those in the advertising business comprise a relatively elite class, while the charges against our armed forces have nothing to do with elitism.

In other words, when it comes to matters of the defense of our country, we are not talking about some perverse updating of that old (European) practice of droit de seigneur;  we are talking about the normative behavior of those “jes’ plain folks,” who always seemed to be the audience of preference for Former President George W. Bush.  The critical difference is that these particular “jes’ plain folks” have been trained to handle weapons of all shapes and sizes, often including their own bodies.  Thus, the proposition that such bodies are inhabited by infantile minds deserves serious consideration.

My guess is that there are those above the lowest rank who might argue that adult minds are not as good at following orders, but I do not think that washes.  When I was growing up, our military was promoted as the best place to learn about skills such as leadership;  and this entailed the corollary that military service was the last hurdle one would jump before entering adult life.  This has probably always been a fiction of convenience, particularly in wartime;  but, even if it is only an ideal, it probably still deserves to be taken seriously.  This class action suit may be the best way to raise the question of just how seriously that ideal either is or should be taken.  The fact is that the normative conventions of our military forces have gone through some major changes since I was a kid, but it remains to be seen whether or not our Department of Defense is willing to implement an effective policy to deal with those changes with adult minds.

Threatening with CHUTZPAH?

I realize that it is a bit late in the week to announce the Chutzpah of the Week award;  but I have been busy (sufficiently so that I may have to explain more in a later post).  However, even where chutzpah is concerned, good things come to those who wait;  and this seems to be an instance that deserves to be reported on “the Lord’s day.”  It concerns a report just filed on the BBC News Web site about Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan.

As those of us who follow the international news should know by now, Bashir is a man who takes Sharia law very seriously, particularly when it involves brutal punishment for crimes against the precepts of Islam.  As a result the province of South Sudan, where most of the population follow either Christianity or older traditional beliefs (I am so glad that the adjective “pagan” is no longer used recklessly), will be holding of referendum on seceding from Sudan.  Bashir has now announced that, should this province declare independence, he will change the Sudanese constitution to make Islam the official religion (and therefore Sharia the basic legal code) and Arabic the official language.

My reading of this action is that it is a dare to the Christians of South Sudan.  Bashir is basically saying to them, “If you want your religious freedom in the south, your fellow Christians in the rest of Sudan will be penalized for your action.”  In other words he has taken an attempt to solve a major human rights problem through legitimate political means and turned it into what amounts to a hostage situation.  Any effort to influence the outcome of an election tends to involve some degree of chutzpah, but the degree in this case is high enough to warrant receipt of the Chutzpah of the Week award!

An Inconvenient Truth about Cyclists

Last May I decided to write a post about the “defiance culture” of cyclists, particularly in urban settings.  It was a response to an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by Chris Raschka, “Braking Away,” having to do with respecting traffic laws while cycling;  but my own piece also drew upon several comments on the piece addressing both sides of the question behind Raschka’s topic.  I offer this as context for a piece by Gina Kolata in today’s New York Times, which begins with a personal account of a recent bicycle accident (on a country road, rather than in Manhattan).  However, because Kolata is a science writer, she used the incident as a point of departure for a highly informative examination of risk analysis as it pertains to cyclists.

Kolata’s “hook” came from an interview she had previously conducted with exercise physiologist Michael Berry:

With cycling, he said, it’s not if you crash, it’s when.

From this she could proceed to an examination of how individual cyclists perceive the likelihood of an accident, the results of which were remarkably (and perhaps sadly) consistent with the data I drew from Raschka’s piece and its subsequent comments.

Kolata’s primary source for her examination of accident risk in today’s piece is George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in both economics and psychology.  Loewenstein’s primary point is that individual risk assessment depends heavily on that individual’s feeling of being in control.  (This strikes me as highly consistent with a technocentric society, which sees technology as the ultimate means for control in any situation.)  The problem is that the bicycle itself offers little by way of control, whether it involves rocks on a country road or a busy city street congested with motor vehicles and pedestrians.  However, the cyclist who accepts the illusion of control is likely to take any number of risks, even when it involves “threading a needle” through those motor vehicles and pedestrians.

Thus, my own conclusion from Kolata’s report is that the greatest hazard that cyclists present in city traffic is their delusional attitude.  By assuming they have more control than they actually do in a dense social setting, they pose a danger to all those around them, motorists, pedestrians, and probably other cyclists.  Sadly, this is not a problem that can be solved by putting in more bike lanes, since the constraints imposed by those bike lanes do not figure in the cyclist’s personal sense of risk any more than traffic lights do.  The real difficulty is that no large American city has been designed for the “peaceful coexistence” of pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists;  and the result is that the pendulum swings from “acceptance of the other” to defiant rage on all parts.  About a month after my post on Rascha’s piece, San Francisco experienced a particularly extreme manifestation of that rage involving a motorist and four cyclists.  Kolata’s piece tended to concentrate on the personal psychology of the cyclist and what happens when an accident refutes that illusory sense of control.  Perhaps her next study should deal with the social side of this story as it pertains to the coexistence of these different modes of transportation on city streets.

Attitudes toward "The Other"

The stars appear to be in place for discussing different aspects of discriminatory practices directed at alienating "the other." Mad Men took a frank and open look at the subject of attitudes towards the Japanese twenty years after the end of World War Two, particularly the attitudes of Americans who had fought in the Pacific battles. Then, to remind us that this was no mere exercise in fiction, the news media latched on to Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally, taking place at the Lincoln Memorial 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream" speech at the same site. Coverage of this event is already on the CBS News Web site, including the following sentence from Beck's opening remarks:

Something that is beyond man is happening.

I am not sure how meaningful this sentence is in Beck's context; but, in the broader scheme of what is happening these days, I am tempted to say that the "something" that is happening is a new level of irony.

What I mean is that old wounds whose pain has evoked such angry rhetoric are actually beginning to heal, often in unexpected ways. Even the Man Men writers realized that the perfect agent for expressing anti-Japanese sentiments was the guy who is already the most loathsome member of the new partnership. Much closer to home, however, we have the fate of a famous composer who should have stuck to his music rather than penning one of the most notorious anti-Semitic tracts on record. The composer is, of course, Richard Wagner; and, because the San Francisco Opera will be unveiling their new production of his Ring cycle this spring, Wagner will be very much the "composer of the hour" for much of the coming season.

This will involve an abundance of "background" events intended to prepare us all for this ultimate operatic marathon. San Francisco Opera will have a hand in many of these events and will make it a point to publicize the others. Naturally, the Wagner Society of Northern California will have an event of its own at which Associate Professor (Emeritus) William Eddelman, in Stanford University's Department of Drama, will deliver a lecture entitled "Wagner's Ring—Myths and Imagination." This promises to be an interesting event, but the irony kicks in when we turn to matters of date, time, and place. The venue will be the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco; and the lecture will take place at 1 PM on November 6, which happens to be a Saturday (in other words, the Jewish Sabbath). This probably says as much about Wagner's old prejudices as it does about contemporary Jewish attitudes towards Mosaic law. However, if this really is a positive sign that the wounds are healing, I still want to know if, when the event is over, someone will ask Brünnhilde (hopefully politely) if, things being what they are, she would mind being the one to turn out the lights!

Losing Track of History (again?)

Thomas Vinciguerra's piece in the Arts and Leisure section of today's New York Times turned out to trigger all sorts of nostalgic nerves, as well as a general sense of personal, if not social, history. It concerns one of those aspects of freshman orientation at Harvard University that is probably not highly publicized but may well play a fundamental role in how undergraduates develop a sense of personal identity:

Nowhere is “Love Story” more pummeled than at Harvard, the site of Oliver and Jenny’s gooey courtship. Every year the Crimson Key Society, a student organization that conducts campus tours and otherwise promotes college spirit, runs “Love Story” strictly for laughs for first-year students during their orientation. This year’s two screenings take place on Aug. 30.

The meaning of "strictly for laughs" is then elaborated (as if it would need elaboration) as follows:

“We’re looking to entertain the freshmen and help them feel comfortable in this new place,” said Maya Simon, the co-chairwoman of the Crimson Key Alumni Association.

That involves Crimson Key’s nearly 100 members sitting in the rear of the auditorium of the Science Center building and jeering the proceedings in the manner of a midnight viewing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Just before Ms. MacGraw utters the deathless catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Crimson Key members loudly implore her, “Don’t say it!” At the conclusion, when Mr. O’Neal repeats her bathetic utterance, they shout, “Plagiarist!” And so it goes. At one point, Oliver enters Jenny’s dorm, learns from a receptionist that she is in the “downstairs phone booth,” and asks, “Where is that?”

“Downstairs, stupid!”

I found the reference to Rocky Horror at bit curious, particularly after Vinciguerra decided to give that nail another whack with his hammer:

Crimson Key’s hallowed tradition apparently began in the late 1970s, just as “Rocky Horror” was setting the standard for cult-flick audience participation.

Clearly, Vinciguerra is not of my generation! My own freshman orientation at MIT took place in September of 1963. It did not take me long to discover that our Lecture Series Committee ran a series of weekend films at which improvised sarcasms from the audience were almost always a part of the show. I have no reason to doubt that the same sort of high jinks were taking place every weekend on the other end of Massachusetts Avenue up at Harvard. Indeed, I would guess that this was a normal weekend ritual at just about every American college. Undergraduate life always hits you with more pressures than you expect. This was a great way to blow off steam in a relatively innocuous setting in the company of your fellow students.

In all the screenings I attended, I never saw anyone get up on stage, as would later happen at midnight screenings of Rocky Horror; but I also suspect that our own audience participation was never (well, hardly ever) rehearsed, which was probably part of the Rocky Horror ritual and seems to have been appropriated by Crimson Key. Rocky Horror did not set any standards. It just provided one of those opportunities where undergraduates could indulge in a practice previously confined to the campus and where those of us who remember being undergraduates could do the same in good company. In other words college life had institutionalized the practice long before Rocky Horror was released. Midnight movies just provided a way for that practice to establish itself in a new setting (and, in my own experience base, long before Rocky Horror there was the midnight movie experience of Pink Flamingos).

Vinciguerra clearly lacks such an extensive experience base. I feel sorry for him. For most of us, everyday life now presents us with stresses that would make undergraduate life seem innocuous. We clearly need better ways to blow off steam, particularly when we see so many examples of the pathological behavior of those who apparently lack such means. By missing out on this point, Vinciguerra appears to have also missed out on the full signification of the material he was reporting.

"The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery"

I am not quite sure what to make of the video report on the BBC News Web site entitled "India's 'production line' heart hospital." It is sure to provoke some very strong reactions; but, whether those reactions are positive or negative, the basic message of the report deserves attention. That message is that one can significantly reduce the price of quality health care (in this particular case quality heart surgery) by organizing the overall operation as an assembly line. In this report the emphasis is on having each line worker doing the part of the operation at which he (I did not see any "she" examples) is most expert; so I wonder whether or not there may also be a factor of designing the line and assigning workers to it by following some of Frederick Taylor's principles of "scientific management."

The most important question to ask is whether the site visited by the BBC is successful because of its production line organization or whether the success is due to some overlooked factor. (Note that, for now, I am willing to accept the claim that this is a successful facility. That claim is clearly subject to refutation. The health care of coronary patients is about more than giving them successful surgery. The report says nothing about what has happened to any of these patients after surgery and asking whether any crucial elements of the health care process may have been neglected as a result of looking only at making the surgery more efficient.) The reason I am skeptical about attributing any success to the production line is that the production line itself is based on Taylor's assumption that "scientific management" is about the management of unskilled labor. It thus overlooks the extent to which the very nature of the work can be alienating, particularly when workers bring more skills than they are allowed to exercise; and it overlooks the extent to which serious instances of social pathology may arise in workplaces that impose such alienating practices.

Another reason for my being skeptical is that we have been down this road before with another profession that demands highly skilled workers. That is the profession of education; and, as I have previously written, Raymond Callahan wrote a trenchant analysis of the deleterious impact that Taylorism had on the course (I cannot say "progress") of education in the United States during the twentieth century. Borrowing from the title of Callahan's book, his argument may be summarized by the proposition that American education suffered at the hands of policy makers who succumbed to Taylor's "cult of efficiency." There is an important parallel with health care here. Health care practices are, for the most part, determined by similar policy makers who know little (if anything) about what the practitioners actually do, just as most education policy makers have spent an equally minimal amount of time trying to teach in a public school classroom.

With this as context, do we really want to hitch the future of health care to a single datum? Can anyone blame me for asking whether or not the success of this particular example may be due to some factor that has gone unnoticed because all eyes have been dazzled by the surface feature of the assembly line? Before we start drinking the next batch of Kool-Aid in large quantities, we must first ask whether or not this system is as good as it seems; and, if it really is that good, we need to apply a bit more rigor in analyzing why it is good.

I Hate Being Right!

Almost a month ago I wrote the post "Sister Cities," which had its origins in a New York Times Op-Ed piece by Chris Raschka and emerged as a comparison of bicycle cultures in New York and San Francisco (hence the title). The heart of the comparison had to do with the nature of what I called a "defiance culture," which probably had its origins among the cyclists (through rituals such as Critical Mass) but has extended to both pedestrians and motorists (who were ostensibly the primary target of cyclist defiance). There is, of course, little one can say in defense of a defiance culture; and, in many respects, it just provides further support for Ghandi's precept that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."

The resulting blindness in this case is to the fact that conflicts among cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists amounts to little more than what I called "arguing over symptoms." So I concluded my piece by trying to tease out where the real problems resided:

The "disease" is a "pandemic" inability of cities, at least in the United States, to deal with the current levels of crowding. This is not just a problem of cities lacking the resources to pursue solutions. I would guess that, even before the resource question arises, there are deeper problems of lacks of both will and imagination. In just about any utopian vision that has been conceived, every individual has "breathing space." These days we only encounter those individuals in television commercials; and, because we now accept such commercials as fiction, we may have abandoned the idea that we have the resources to recover that "breathing space." Perhaps disregard for the environment is prevalent because so many sectors of the population feel antagonistic towards that environment; but the problem is that, if we are all wrapped up in hostility towards the problem, we are ill-equipped to give serious thoughts to solution. The result is that we shall find ourselves in yet another situation in which we succumb to a helplessness that can only beget rage.

Today it pains me to report that rage has, indeed, emerged in San Francisco. This morning Henry K. Lee, Staff Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, filed the following brief report:

A motorist is being sought by San Francisco police after he rammed four bicyclists in the Mission District and Potrero Hill neighborhood during a five-minute rampage in a crossover sport utility vehicle, authorities said.

The driver of a blue Nissan Rogue hit three male bicyclists before hitting a fourth victim and then crashing into a light pole and a parked Jeep Cherokee at the corner of 17th and Missouri streets. The motorist then fled from the vehicle on foot.

Three of the victims were taken to San Francisco General Hospital, while a fourth was treated at the scene. All suffered non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said.

Witnesses reported the man weaving in and out of traffic and driving on the wrong side of the road to deliberately run down the victims.

"All of the victims were bicyclists, and from witnesses at the scene, they do appear to be targeted," police Lt. Lyn Tomioka told reporters. "We don't know if they were known victims, or if because they were on bicycles or what the issue was yet. Obviously this is very fresh and still unfolding."

The first incident was reported on the 2700 block of Harrison Street at 9:43 p.m. Wednesday. The second crash happened on the 2800 block of Harrison, quickly followed by the third collision at 23rd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

The final crash at 17th and Missouri was reported at 9:49 p.m.

While the "hard data points" behind this incident are still tentative, the operative phrase is likely to be "appear to be targeted." My use of the noun "pandemic" stems from an ongoing series of news reports from around the world all of which involve outbursts of rage often with what appear to be arbitrarily chosen targets. Consider the "headline company" that Lee is keeping today over on the BBC News Web site. Two of the "Other Top Stories" given links on the Front Page involve similar acts of rage:

1. The shooting spree of 52-year-old self-employed taxi driver Derrick Bird, which left 12 people dead and 11 injured in Cumbria.
2. The shooting deaths of a judge and clerk in a Brussels courtroom.

Yesterday, when I was writing about Michael Pollan's latest New York Review contribution, I did not include his exploration hypothesis of the link between fast food and the erosion of social civility. At the time I felt that this hypothesis was still a bit too remote for further consideration. However, Pollan included a quote from Janet Flamming, a leading proponent of this hypothesis:

Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.

If one is "by oneself" out of a desperate need to find that "breathing space" that plays a significant role in my own argument about city life, then there could well be a link between Flamming's hypothesis and the sociopathy I have been trying to address. The question that then remains lies in another of my hypotheses: Are we so consumed by this sociopathy that we now lack "both will and imagination" that could lead to a cure?

Food Made Visible?

The opening section of Michael Pollan's piece in the latest New York Review, "The Food Movement, Rising," is entitled "Food Made Visible." He is writing about political visibility, and his description of the increase of this visibility took me back to my high school days. Actually, the trigger came not from Pollan himself but from one of the books he cited, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, whose basic argument was surprisingly well dramatized in Richard Linklater's 2006 film of the same name, because Schlosser himself cited a source that had a major impact on my high school study of American history, The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair.

I suppose it was through my high school teacher telling us about this book that I first became aware of the concept of political visibility. He was less interested in what the book had to say than he was in the impact it had, more specifically its impact on a single person, President Theodore Roosevelt. As my teacher told the story, when Roosevelt read the book he "hit the ceiling," thus putting the wheels in motion for Federal regulation concerned with the food we eat.

As is the case with many high school narratives, this one was over-simplified. More accurately, Roosevelt had proposed such regulatory legislation before the book appeared but had to contend with a Senate that, as a whole, had little interest in such matters of regulation for the public good. According to Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex, Doubleday actually "cannily timed" the release of The Jungle "to coincide with Senate debate on a pure-food bill." Roosevelt did not "hit the ceiling" out of rage; but he probably reacted enthusiastically to the public support for this bill that was raised through the success of the book. It certainly helped him to enhance his reputation as a proponent of progressive thinking.

I raise this contrast between "high school myth" and reality as an example of just how elusive the concept of political visibility can be. The fact that the chief virtue of Fast Food Nation is the extent to which it retells much of the message of The Jungle may support the hypothesis that there is a "half-life" to progressive ideals, according to which they decay with the passage of time. Indeed, progressivism itself has decayed so much over the century since Roosevelt's presidency that one can barely detect it with a Geiger counter. The very concept is as much anathema to the Democratic Party as it is to the Republicans; and it is interesting to see that, while the current President labored long and hard to push through health care reform, any connection between food consumption and the need for health care seems to have been relegated to the First Lady.

More troubling is that Fast Food Nation, like The Jungle, is not just about the problems with the food we consume. Both books are also about the food production process, not only in matters of contamination but also regarding the alienating nature of the work itself. As the lack of health quality in what we eat that has faded from visibility, so has the deterioration of working conditions and the connection between that deterioration and general eating habits. Pollan summarizes this nicely:

The picture of the food company Schlosser painted resembles an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as "Fordism": instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald's pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food.

The decay of progressivism thus reflects the attrition of attention directed towards a deteriorating life style that benefits the rich and mighty at the expense of everyone else. It is the ultimate triumph of our consciousness industry, aimed at the "learned helplessness" of those not part of that "rich and mighty" of "the American ruling class." As I have previously suggested, such helplessness runs the risk of leading to rage; and that rage can just as easily lean against progressivism as towards it. Is it any wonder that what will probably be Tony Judt's final book carries the title Ill Fares the Land?

The Voice of the Shareholders

One way to consider the current situation of Goldman Sachs is in terms of the old question of where a business places its priorities. As has often been observed, any company has to face three sets of priorities that are not always (ever?) in alignment. There are the priorities of the workers, which tend to vary according to position on the organizational food chain. Then there are the priorities of external business connections. Traditionally these have been the priorities of the customers; but, as supply chains become more complex and more distributed, the priorities of suppliers must also be taken into account. So here, again, there can been considerable variation in those priorities. Finally, there are the priorities of the shareholders; and, because shareholders are rarely interested in anything other than return-on-investment, these are the priorities most likely to be at cross-purposes with the more business-related ones.

In this context it is interesting to observe that, in the context in which the SEC has filed charges of civil fraud against Goldman Sachs, the Department of Justice is investigating those charges, and Goldman Sachs has begun an internal review of its business practices, we now have a report of the "vox populi" of the shareholders. Here is the BBC News summary of that report:

A filing by the bank with the regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said several lawsuits had been brought against it, accusing the firm of a "breach of fiduciary duty, corporate waste, abuse of control, mismanagement and unjust enrichment".

Shareholders accused Goldman of failing to implement proper risk management procedures while designing and selling complex mortgage-backed derivatives that lost investors huge sums of money.

"[The] defendants failed to implement controls with respect to the evaluation, approval and management of the structure, risk, marketing and distribution" of the derivatives, the filing said.

They also alleged there was a conflict of interest in the way in which the derivatives were sold.

"[The] transactions were neither approved or reviewed by independent members of the [Goldman] board, but instead were reviewed and approved by long-term members of management whose compensation was directly linked to the approval and completion of the proposed transactions."

'Damaged reputation'

Shareholders also accused the bank of not fully disclosing facts that should have been made public.

In one action against the firm, shareholders alleged the bank was forewarned it may face charges concerning its role in the sale of the complex derivatives, but failed to disclose this fact.

As a direct result of Goldman's dealings in mortgage derivatives, and the resultant charges of fraud by the regulator, shareholders said the bank "has been significantly and materially damaged, faces billions of dollars of liability and has suffered serious damage to its reputation and image".

In its filing, Goldman said it expected further shareholder actions to be brought against it.

It is important to note that these are civil lawsuits. In other words the shareholders are seeking compensation for corporate mismanagement, rather than punitive measures for criminal acts. As is always the case when shareholders are involved, it's all about the money.

So what do the shareholders hope to achieve, and is this an effective way to achieve it? Put another way, for what do the shareholders expect compensation? The GS shares had their worst quarter in 4Q 2008, and most smoothing functions will show that the price has been on relatively steady recovery since then. That price is still some distance from the highs of October of 2007, but are the shareholders actually trying to use civil litigation to make up for losses on the New York Stock Exchange? If so, what will they do next? Sue Harrah's for paying out according to odds that probabilistically favor the house? Are we not at least on the threshold of a working definition of "frivolous lawsuit?"

What makes these actions even more suspect is that the shareholders already have a voice. If they really think that Goldman Sachs has a serious problem with poor management, then they can vote in a new Board of Directors to press for reorganization of the company on a large scale. Through such voting they can even deny the CEO a seat on the Board. Isn't this the way corporate governance is supposed to work?

From a point of view of "risk management," there is a good chance that this "shareholder activism" is more likely to make things worse than improve them. It would seem that the most likely consequence of this breaking news will be a decline in the GS price. (According to the Yahoo! Finance Real-Time ticker, the price is down but not yet to a point of 1% of the opening value.) This seems more like an example of irrationality in the face of crisis, rather than a case for the virtues of self-regulation through corporate governance!

Beyond Legal Victory

Last week it seemed as if Goldman Sachs' reaction to the civil fraud charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was that, if the matter came to court, Goldman Sachs would have no problem winning the case. However, a lot happened last week; and it now appears that, between the beating it took from both its Senate hearing and the public reaction to that hearing and the decision by the Department of Justice to begin a formal investigation based on the SEC charges, Goldman Sachs is showing signs of rethinking its position (an ironic word choice considering how much of this case hangs on their own particular semantics of the noun "position"). As I argued last Friday, Goldman Sachs sees no grounds for fraud, since they were only engaged in "normative business practices consistent with the constructed reality of Planet Wall Street." It now appears that, while Goldman Sachs still feels that this provides valid grounds for defense, it might actually be in their best interest to rethink their business practices.

This is based on a report that Justin Baer and Francesco Guerrera filed last night for the Financial Times, suggesting that Goldman Sachs is now leaning towards an out-of-court settlement that could be facilitated by this "good faith effort" (my words) towards business practices showing more respect for the interests of clients. I use that noun "respect" in the context of Richard Sennett's 2003 book, Respect in a World of Inequality, even though Sennett was more concerned with the gutter of the disenfranchised than with the elevated games of the financial sector. One of Sennett's points is that we need to call out the concept of the "level playing field" for the myth it really is, recognizing that it no longer is (if it ever was) a "fiction of convenience." (Again, those quotes are my own words.) Of course money, itself, is a "fiction of convenience," as has been observed by Niall Ferguson and many of his predecessors. However, many of the instruments behind the current economic crisis and SEC accusations of fraud are based on mathematical theories which assume that all parties can know the layout of the playing field, even if it is not perfectly flat, and that, provided with such knowledge, any party can make decisions to optimize its own returns. The fact that those theories are also fictions plays a significant role in Benjamin M. Friedman's recent analysis of the economic crisis for The New York Review.

One of Friedman's key points is that reality is messier than any model posed by those mathematical theories, and one might say that Sennett's book suggests that the social capital of respect is more effective in negotiating the messes of reality than any of the fictions of convenience of the financial sector. So will respect figure into the ways in which Goldman Sachs rethinks its normative business practices? The report by Baer and Guerrera makes it clear that they have not yet progressed beyond "leaning." However, they have teased out a few hints of the possible directions of that leaning:

According to one person familiar with Goldman’s plans, it would now tell employees to seek confirmation from clients that they understand the risks associated with any given security, and how their dealings with Goldman might change their total exposure.

Goldman is also studying ways to ensure that complicated securities are marketed only to appropriate clients, the person said. Goldman’s push to “tighten up” standards suggests its willingness to adapt in the face of mounting scrutiny.

At the very least this seems to indicate that more communication will take place before any transaction is settled. The real question will be whether or not that communication is effectively informative. If what is ultimately at stake is a normative acceptance that Goldman Sachs will respect each of its clients, then the real sign of respect is not that Goldman Sachs communicates but that the client understands; and the nature of understanding is one of the messiest aspects of reality, which is why someone like Jürgen Habermas has invested well over a thousand pages of text to come to grips with that concept.

This is not to suggest that trying to achieve better client understanding is a fool's errand. However, it is not necessarily a goal that Goldman Sachs can achieve if left to its own devices. Because it is an instance of reality at its messiest, it is a situation that demands what I previously called "invoking the methods of Ian Mitroff, through which different perspectives of those realities duke it out with well-formed arguments as part of a process of critical inquiry that makes sense" of the mess in all its complexity. Put another way, if Goldman Sachs really wants to take on this problem, then it would do well to invite the SEC to present its own perspective of this messy reality. The confrontation could be as antagonistic as a court case. However, there is a better chance that fewer people will get hurt; and more people might actually benefit!

The CHUTZPAH of Denying Humanity

Reflecting on the post I just completed, I realize that we need to recognize that humanity needs to provide a foundation for not only the elevated world of statecraft but also our day-to-day personal interactions. To deny humanity from either of these worlds is as reprehensible as confusing one with the other. This is the context in which we should regard the recent action of the South African Zionist Foundation towards Richard Goldstone, just reported on Al Jazeera English:

Richard Goldstone, a former South African judge, has been effectively banned from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah which is to be held in Johannesburg next month.

Goldstone, who authored a UN report on the war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, has been barred by the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) from attending the event, South African and Israeli newspapers reported on Thursday.

The very idea that the SAZF can so interfere with one of the most important of Jewish rites is an act of chutzpah with the most negative possible connotation. Having just written about the delicacy of statecraft, this is an action that extends beyond Goldstone's personal affairs to the ongoing difficulties of any constructive conversations taking place over the problems in the Middle East. Given the consequences that may ensue from this act, SAZF clearly has a strong right to claim the Chutzpah of the Week award.

Diplomacy through Disintermediation?

The headline for yesterday evening's Politics and Law article for CNET News by Declan McCullagh was irresistible:

Meet Russian President Medvedev, Internet geek

Once we got past the Freudian slip of using Vladimir Putin's name in place of Dmitry Medvedev's, we got to the substance of the claim behind this headline:

During an appearance at the center-left Brookings Institution, the head of the Russian Federation suggested that he and President Obama should dispense with their legions of aides and chat on iPhones through text messaging instead.

"We don't e-mail each other (but) that would be the fastest possible way to talk to each other," said Medvedev, according to a translation. "In this case, we could just have a couple of iPhones and we could just exchange text messages or e-mails. I am quite familiar with that, as well as President Obama, as far as I understand." (Obama has a BlackBerry.)

Medvedev said he no longer starts his day by reading newspapers or watching television. Instead, he said, "I just go online and I find all of the things there," including "media that are favorable to the Russian president, media that hate the Russian president."

However, it was the following quote from Medvedev that most interested me:

We don't need our aides that much today. We can immerse ourselves into information...The time has changed. Whatever I read or President Obama reads, we always have the possibility to go online and see what is happening in reality. This doesn't mean that Internet is the final source of truth. But this is an alternative source of information.

It has been some time since I heard talk of disintermediation, particularly when that talk is advocating it at a time when we are beginning to wake up to its deleterious impact on the retail business. Still, this little remark provides us with a healthy reminder that "knowledge work" (if we wish to use that phrase in a manner that is not merely gratuitous) is not all about getting "immersed" in information. If we want to know "what is happening in reality," we need to interpret that information, not according to some abstract and absolute semantic analysis but in terms of how that information is embedded in the rich context of that reality we wish to apprehend, which is not objective but rather is socially constructed. This is never an easy matter; and anyone who participates in the highly sensitive conversations of statecraft must, of necessity, draw upon the expertise of aides to prepare for those conversations. Indeed, when statecraft is at stake, it may not be an exaggeration to say that every unit of "information" is subject to multiple interpretations reflecting the different contexts of differently hypothesized realities. One must prepare for a conversation with a sense of which of those realities are sympathetic to one's own needs and goals. This involves invoking the methods of Ian Mitroff, through which different perspectives of those realities duke it out with well-formed arguments as part of a process of critical inquiry that makes sense of all that "immersing" information.

There may be some virtue in the idea that Medvedev and Obama could text each other over casual matters having to do with dinner, the latest download from iTunes, or how the kids are doing in school. A conversation between two individuals, each of whom grants the basic humanity of the other, almost always makes more progress than a confrontation between adversaries. Even diplomacy can take advantage of little reminders of humanity, particularly when tensions need to be defused. However, the premise of mutual humanity only gets the conversation off to a good start and keeps it going. The substance of the conversation has more to do with reconciling differences in socially constructed realities and making decisions with such reconciliations in mind. From this point of view, the parties involved in conversation will always have to depend on aides when preparing strategies and tactics before the conversation begins.

A New Vocabulary of Violence?

Associated Press Writer Nafeesa Syeed drew upon some interesting terminology in reporting a violent shooting incident in the District of Columbia last night:

A gunman sprayed bullets from a moving vehicle into a crowd in southeastern Washington, killing four and wounding at least five others, before leading police on a chase into neighboring Maryland.

Three people were arrested in the drive-by shooting Tuesday. The D.C. councilman who represents the area said a dispute between groups in the neighborhood apparently caused the shooting.

Groups? Was there something about this incident that distinguished it from what usually counts for gang-related violence? It took a page scroll to account for both who the councilman was and how that particular word came to be used:

D.C. Councilman Marion Barry, a former mayor who now represents the area of the city where the shootings occurred, called the attack a vicious crime. Barry, who had been briefed by police, said it appears "crews" — groups of friends who are not necessarily organized as gangs — had some sort of dispute with each other.

So, apparently, the new term of art, at least in reporting crime in the District of Columbia, is "crew;" and Syeed had deliberately used "groups" to avoid using "gangs."

Do we really need a new term of art where drive-by shootings are involved? Who was responsible for introducing it? Who really benefits from the distinction it draws?

All we can deduce from Syeed's text is that Barry used the term after having been "briefed by police." We have no idea whether or not the word was used by the police in their briefing. My knowledge of Barry's past and my innate sense of cynicism both lead me to hypothesize that the term originated with Barry himself, perhaps because he made a campaign promise to rid his district of gang violence, which would have been quite a promise for one of the tougher parts of town. However, I doubt that many of those represented by Barry would see much value in that kind of terminological legerdemain. Any distinction between "crew" and "gang" has little impact on how safe it is to walk the streets. Those who think they can hide behind vocabulary when confronted with an ugly state of affairs should hang their heads in shame (assuming, that is, that prevailing conditions have not purged any sense of shame from their spirits).

America's Tipping Point

I just finished reading Kai Wright's latest post to The Notion, the blog that The Nation maintains for (currently) twenty contributors. The post was yet another attempt to diagnose the almost pathological divisiveness that has consumed our country, motivated this time by en editorial by Frank Rich in Sunday's New York Times entitled, "The Rage Is Not About Health Care." Wright's reading of Rich definitely deserves reflection:

Rich points out the reality that America is undergoing one of the most deep, significant changes in its history. No, it's not health insurance reform. Nor is it our economic collapse, though that's surely part of it. Frankly, it's not even the fact of a black president. The change is far deeper and probably far more consequential: White people will shortly lose their status as normative Americans. Whatever else does or doesn't change, by the time Millennials are adults, no one will equate white skin with the phrase "all-American" – assuming the phrase carries meaning at all.

I think this is a productive analysis to bring to the conversation, particularly since it uncovers a problem deeper than the issue of normative status: It cuts far deeper to the very nature of identity that we all have, regardless of whether we see ourselves as normative.

From this point of view, both Rich and Wright missed the dead moose on the table. Without dismissing their conclusion I would argue that a more critical contribution to a prevailing sense of rage is the deterioration of what we may call "the American world of work." Unemployment is part of this problem, but it is the tip of an iceberg. Beneath that tip is that substantial chunk of our population that is in our educational system, ostensibly being prepared to enter that world of work. However, this is not simply a cri de cœur about how underfunded education is in our country; it is an attempt to raise the question of how we are to prepare our young for the future when we do not have the foggiest idea what that future will be and what roles they can possibly play in it. It is easy enough to prepare cogent arguments for kids about why they should not pin their hopes on being professional athletes or entertainers, but where should they set their hopes?

There is nothing new about this problem. It was only a few years ago that James O'Toole and Edward E. Lawler III came out with their book, The New American Workplace. The Foreword for this book included the following passage by Susan Meisinger:

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

This is where the real identity problem resides, in our natural ability to establish our "identity and self-respect" through satisfying work. We are afraid to confront the extent to which the world the Internet has made has robbed us of that ability; and, having had it taken violently from us, we respond in the only way we can, with the kind of rage that Rich examined. Unless we can figure out a way in which to restore that identity, it is hard to imagine any future other than one in which the rage gets more violent and ultimately more destructive.

Another Dark Side of the Internet

When it comes to using the Internet as an enabler through which resources can be managed remotely, I have to confess that I was directly involved with one of those "bleeding edge" research projects behind such thinking. It certainly seemed like a good idea to those of us exploring it in its earliest days. The project with which I was involved was specifically aimed at small businesses that needed more powerful computer technology to avoid being swamped by larger competitors but that could not afford to take on additional staff to look after the hardware and software. As I began to survey the field of who was out there providing what kind of remote management, it all felt as if we were pioneers on the threshold of a brave new world.

In the decade since I was one of those dreamers, any number of be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios have come into play. As I wrote in December of 2008, I was discovering the hard way that, wherever there is management, there is also mismanagement; and, when one has to deal with a heavily human-oriented service sector, that mismanagement can get pretty painful. These days, it seems as if the pain knows no limits. Put another way, we seem to be experiencing a new axiom: The more technology you deploy to provide services remotely, the more opportunities that technology has to do harm.

Last night Associated Press Writer Jeff Carlson reported an incident in Dallas that reinforces this axiom in a way that probably no system developer had anticipated. The good news is that the perpetrator was caught and is now in the process of facing the consequences of his malice. The bad news is that this is probably another example of a barn whose door has been closed after the horse was stolen (which seems like the right metaphor for a report from Texas). Here is Carlson's basic account of what happened:

A man fired from a Texas auto dealership used an Internet service to remotely disable ignitions and set off car horns of more than 100 vehicles sold at his old workplace, police said Wednesday.

Austin police arrested Omar Ramos-Lopez, 20, on Wednesday, charging him with felony breach of computer security.

Ramos-Lopez used a former colleague's password to deactivate starters and set off car horns, police said. Several car owners said they had to call tow trucks and were left stranded at work or home.

"He caused these customers, now victims, to miss work," Austin police spokeswoman Veneza Aguinaga said. "They didn't get paid. They had to get tow trucks. They didn't know what was going on with their vehicles."

The irony is that the technology that enabled this episode had been deployed to protect the dealership against abusive customer practices:

The Texas Auto Center dealership in Austin installs GPS devices that can prevent cars from starting. The system is used to repossess cars when buyers are overdue on payments, said Jeremy Norton, a controller at the dealership where Ramos-Lopez worked. Car horns can be activated when repo agents go to collect vehicles and believe the owners are hiding them.

Carlson also provided an account of just how technology deployed to be good had gone bad:

Starting in mid-February, dealership employees noticed unusual changes to their business records. Someone was going into the system and changing customers' names, such as having dead rapper Tupac Shakur buying a 2009 vehicle, Norton said.

Soon, customers began calling saying their cars wouldn't start, or that their horns were going off incessantly, forcing them to disengage the battery. Norton said the dealership originally thought the cars had mechanical problems.

Then employees noticed someone had ordered $130,000 in parts and equipment from the company that makes the GPS devices.

Police said they were able to trace the sabotage to Ramos-Lopez's computer, leading to his arrest.

Norton said Ramos-Lopez didn't seem unusually upset about being fired.

"I think he thought what he was doing was a harmless prank," Norton said. "He didn't see the ramifications of it."

Once again I am reminded of one of the oldest adages about information technology: "To err is human; to really screw things up, you need a computer." However, to be fair to the technology, the screw-up came from a human who happened to see a way to use the computer for "a harmless prank." You would think that systems designers have the sort of mentality to imagine the sorts of "harmless pranks" that could be committed; but, given the sort of pressure they are probably under in their workplaces, I suppose that such imagining gets put on a back burner in the face of the ongoing release-something-that-works management philosophy. Whether or not we wish to single out Microsoft as the originator of that philosophy is left as an exercise for the reader!

On-the-Job Learning the Microsoft Way

We now accept as axiomatic that proposition that, whatever your job may be (assuming you have one), you will have to be learning new things about how to do it while working at it. Microsoft has decided to take a proactive approach to this proposition when it comes to learning more about the features of productivity software; and, since this is a Microsoft effort, that means learning how to use Office software more productively. Here is their basic approach as reported by Ina Fried for her Beyond Binary column on the CNET News Web site:

I'm not sure it's exactly the approach I would take, but Redmond has decided to make a game out of what I find to be one of the most significant annoyances in Microsoft's Office--finding the command one is looking for.

Introduced on Tuesday, "Ribbon Hero" is aimed at turning into a game the often frustrating task of finding commands on Office's Ribbon toolbar, which debuted as part of Office 2007.

In a blog post, Office program manager (and self-described casual games enthusiast) Jennifer Michelstein said Microsoft was trying to see if the company could tap into the trend of using games as a means of training.

"We set out to understand whether elements of game play (things like scoring points, competing with friends, and earning achievements) could motivate people to explore more of the app, learn new features, and ultimately become more productive," Michelstein wrote. "Could we do it in a way that fit well into the regular Office workflow, without being too much of a distraction?"

Ultimately, Microsoft decided to put it out there and see.

Users can earn points in Ribbon Hero in one of two ways. The first way is just by using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and using commands. A small number of points are awarded for basic commands, while more complex features earn more points. A second way to earn points is to complete various challenges. It also taps a Facebook connection to let users share their score and see how they stack up against their friends.

Many years ago I floated the hypothesis that there were three ways a "knowledge worker" could learn new things about a software product:

1. Through the "help" facilities of the software itself, possibly augmented with hyperlinks to Web sites providing FAQ information.
2. By getting in touch with a human being at a call center.
3. Through conversations with colleagues about what they were doing.

That last item was a corollary of a discovery made within Xerox that their repair technicians learn a lot of things that were not "in the book" by exchanging war stories about problems they solved over casual conversation (and perhaps some beer) at the end of a long and hard day. The point is that people can be a great resource for learning, and people you know are better than those impersonal call center voices that spend most of the time reading from a prepared script!

Apparently, Microsoft does not see it this way. They figure that the learning process should focus as much as possible on a man-machine relationship. If that relationship can be facilitated by having the user play a game, that just reinforces their position that time spent with the machine will always be more productive than time spent with one's colleagues. My own position is that workplaces are creating enough alienation already. The last thing they need is more software to increase that sense of alienation!