Sticking it to Milton Babbitt?

In 1958 the popular magazine High Fidelity published an article by the highly intellectual composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt had entitled the article "The Composer as Specialist;" and it addressed the mindset gulf between many composers following in the footsteps of Arnold Schoenberg and most audiences. (Schoenberg himself had addressed this topic.) Without Babbitt's knowledge or consent, High Fidelity changed the title to "Who Cares if You Listen?;" and Babbitt has been living with the consequences of that decision ever since. However, even if he found the title "offensively vulgar," there remains that connotation of detachment in his "specialist" stance.

I have no idea if Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson intentionally decided to exploit this stance and twit Babbitt at the same time, but they definitely found an amusing and clever way to do so. Here is the BBC News account of their project:

US rock star Lou Reed and his artist wife Laurie Anderson are to stage a "high-frequency concert" for canines in Australia.

Music for Dogs, to be held outside the Sydney Opera House, is billed as "an inter-species social gathering on a scale never seen before in Australia".

The bizarre recital in June will be largely inaudible to the human ear.

The couple said they have experience making music for at least one dog - their rat terrier, Lollabelle.

"She likes things with a lot of smoothness but with beats in them,'' Ms Anderson told the Sydney Morning Herald.

She said the inspiration for the performance at the Vivid Live festival in Sydney came while she was backstage at an event and thought: "Wouldn't it be great, if you were playing a concert and you look out and you see all dogs?"

The show, created by Ms Anderson, will last for 20 minutes as she says "dogs don't have a giant concentration span".

The sounds will be played at high frequency like a dog whistle, setting dogs' ears twitching but barely audible to their owners.

It is billed in the festival programme as "an absolute must for any dog and their two-legged friends".

The link to Babbitt is delightfully obvious: Now we have "Who cares if you can't listen?" However, even if Babbitt was not the intended target, this is clearly aimed at those who tend to get excessively serious about concert attendance, particularly in an opera house. It takes a certain level of chutzpah to break with such a strongly-held social tradition; and I would say that the level is high enough for Reed and Anderson to share the Chutzpah of the Week award!

Government by Comedy

BBC Trending just put up an article discussing the impact of Barack Obama's appearance on Between Two Ferns on visits to Healthcare.gov. The results seem to indicate that, at least in the short term, the impact was definitely a positive one. In is unclear how significant these results are, particularly because that "in the short term" qualifier cannot be overemphasized. However, in the longer term these results may add further data points to support the hypothesis that comedians on television are more trusted sources than just about anyone in the government, possibly (probably?) including the President of the United States. There is a tendency to say that this is just the best way to appeal to youth culture. On the other hand it may be worth considering that, in the political arena, there is nothing particularly new about trusting comedians. We are still more inclined to believe the witticisms of Will Rogers and Mark Twain than any official statement released at a Presidential press briefing. Perhaps we trust comedians to recognize bullshit, because bullshit is often the perfect source for a good joke (somewhat like chutzpah). On the other hand there is often an all-too-human tendency to laugh at a joke without necessarily getting what the joke really is. In other words, while we may accept the comedian as an authority, we are not always clear on his/her authenticity, which means that "policy by stand-up" can be just as flawed as "official story" press releases.

Time for Another Jesse Owens Moment?

I just finished reading an article of BBC News that begin with the opening summarizing sentence:

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said a Russian law banning "homosexual propaganda among minors" does not breach the Olympic charter.

It did not really surprise me. I have never felt that the Olympic games deserved much attention, since it struck me as yet another form of self-aggrandizement for yet another form of elitism. Given what I wrote yesterday about the America's Cup, I am not surprised that my mind should be in this state. However, we have to remember that, in the longer view of the history of the Olympic games, human rights has never been a factor in selecting a venue.

However, rather than gnash our teeth over this state of affairs, we should remember that sometimes the athletes were willing to take up the burden that the organizers had made such a point to ignore. I was more than a little impressed to find that, on the Wikipedia page for the 1968 Summer Olympics, the very first item listed under "Highlights" was the following:

In the medal award ceremony for the men's 200 meter race, African-American athletes Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) took a stand for civil rights by raising their black-gloved fists and wearing black socks in lieu of shoes. The Australian Peter Norman, who had run second, wore an American "civil rights" badge as support to them on the podium. As punishment, the IOC banned Smith and Carlos from the Olympic Games for life, and Norman was left off Australia's Olympic team in 1972.

In 2008 there are an attempt at a parallel effort on the part of Team Darfur. Sadly, it attracted far less attention that seemed to be limited to Riz Kahn on Al Jazeera English and a blog post by Dave Zirin (who wrote a book about Carlos) on the Web site for The Nation. On the other hand, there have also been more passive instances of making an issue by not making an issue, the best example of that being the triumph of Jesse Owens in the face of a stadium full of proponents of the Nazi Master Race ideology, all of whom had expected to hijack the event for no purpose other than to promote their discriminatory propaganda.

In that context it might be appropriate for those affected by the Russian ban and those who wish to challenge that ban openly to train like hell for the Sochi Games and embrace the premise that there is no bully pulpit quite like the one on which an Olympic medal is presented.

Recovering the Progressive Agenda

The article “Where Do We Go from Here?” by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in the current (January 13) issue of The New York Review appears to have been completed on December 16, a good half month before the House gavel was passed and the Tea Party first flexed its muscles by requesting a reading of the Constitution (from which passages not to their liking were omitted).  Nevertheless, since the sabers have begun to rattle over undoing health care reform, the question posed by this article is extremely timely.  My personal feeling is that we need to revive what I have previously called “the Neustadt-May thinking-in-time approach to dealing with crisis situations,” which begins by asking of the particular crisis situation “How did we get into this mess?”  Fortunately, Krugman and Wells use their final paragraph to provide a way to think about this question:

In 2008, progressives fell for the fantasy of hope and change on the cheap; they believed Obama’s promise that the reforms America needed could float through on a tide of bipartisan reconciliation. It was not to be, and clinging to that illusion will only lead to more defeats. If progressives want to rebound, they’ll have to fight.

I am not sure I would agree with that “on the cheap” qualifier;  but I definitely endorse the use of the noun “fantasy.”  On the day after the last Election Day, I was not so polite.  I described those progressives as “the deluded masses who rallied behind Barack Obama blinded by a vision of secular Messianism;”  and I see no reason to soften my tone.  Indeed, that sharper tone is the one that now advocates serious attention to the key recommendation made by Krugman and Wells:

Democrats need to make it clear that if Obama isn’t going to be the leader of the Democratic agenda—and all indications are that he can’t or won’t—they will advance that agenda anyway, with or without his help. They have to be ready to delink their political fate from Obama, and make it clear that they won’t tolerate further undermining of their goals by deluded calls for bipartisanship. Progressive groups—MoveOn, for example—helped put Obama in office by mobilizing their members and followers through a variety of organizational strategies, including use of the Internet. They did so only to be ignored and dismissed once the 2008 election was won, and now they need to be revived.

One way to approach this recommendation is by revisiting my “favorite from Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies,” which is “Go to an extreme, come part way back.”  We need leadership in both the House and Senate smart enough to recognize that you start by trying to go for all the marbles, because only then do you have the best chance of getting the ones you really want.  Fortunately, we have members of both legislative bodies who are not afraid of this bold strategy and can hang tough over just how far they are willing to concede “part way back.”  These members were the heroes of the debate over health care reform;  and, if they did not prevail, they at least held out a more realistic hope of getting something done than Barack Obama ever did.

If we really want to take Krugman and Wells seriously, then we need to make sure that such legislators are not sidelined.  On the Senate side we need to recognize someone like Bernie Sanders, who is never afraid to ask uncomfortable questions about who the beneficiaries really are and why those who deserve to benefit are being ignored.  Over in the House I would suggest that we have a “dynamic duo” in Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich, both of whom I recognized back in my chutzpah awarding days.  I have to confess that I figured I had better check the list on Wikipedia of the current membership of the House to make sure that those I have just recommended still had Congressional seats.  It was nice to see that Kaptur and Kucinich had consecutive entries under Ohio, 9 and 10;  and it was all the more amusing that they follow John Boehner in position 8.  To hijack Obama’s campaign rhetoric, yes, we can make sure that our voices get heard;  but let’s make sure we find the right people in Washington to speak for us!

CHUTZPAH Unregarded

I see I made it through last week without ever saying anything about a Chutzpah of the Week award.  Clearly, this has nothing to do with chutzpah going on a decline.  Rather, it is simply a matter of a shift in my attention.  Now that Examiner.com has changed policy to allow only explicitly local articles to appear on my SF Classical Music Examiner site, my Channel Manager has been generous enough to set up for me a “national” site, where I can write about matters of more general interest, including performances in cyberspace, recordings, and touring schedules of performers of interest.  This has led to a change in how I read my daily news feeds;  and, as a result, between what I now read and why I read it, I have had to retract by “chutzpah feelers.”

Because I shall continue to try to orient my Examiner.com articles around listening experiences, however, I shall continue to engage in active research over the nature of those experiences and how we communicate them, whether in the domain of listening or performing.  In keeping with the more research-oriented posts I have “rehearsed” on this site, I expect still to regard both performing and listening as behaviors that take place in the social world, which means that the domain of my overall research theme may probably best be called “the social world of music.”  If I ever have “world enough and time,” I may even be able to turn that theme into a book, for which my Examiner.com efforts may emerge as a major part of my “field work.”  This would amount to eating the dog food I cooked up when I took Harvey Sachs to task for being too much of a hagiographer and not enough of an anthropologist in his book The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824.  I summarized the primary ingredient of that dog food as follows:

The problem is that this book is top-heavy with adjectives of adulation and far to sparse when it comes to addressing the "work practices" (to appropriate the terminology of those anthropologists cited in the first paragraph) of a man with considerable musical skills, many of which could be attributed to a rich education and the rest to an equally rich body of "workplace experiences." Obviously, one cannot approach Beethoven as a workplace anthropologist, following him around at work day by day, capturing every activity with a handheld video camera and interviewing him to clarify what one observes; but there is an extensive historical record of documents by Beethoven and by those who worked with him. Sachs has been far to negligent of this record, perhaps because he wanted his book to appeal to a more "popular" readership or perhaps because he did not want to reproduce the scholarship of others. Whatever the reason, when it comes to trying to provide a sense of Beethoven as a "man at work," this book falls far short of what it could have been.

In terms of my current “field work,” I would note only that, in my Examiner.com pieces, I try to approach that sense of the “musician at work” in terms that make sense from the audience side.  I am less interested in “dishing the dirt” on what happens in rehearsals and conservatory studies and more interested in how listening can be informed simply by recognizing that there are “work practices” in performance that may help the mind to find order in the sensory signals coming in through the ear.

Needless to say, the connotation in that last sentence of Friedrich Hayek’s speculative investigations into the nature of “sensory order” was deliberate.  Listening to music engages as much of our faculties of consciousness as does reading a book.  It may even engage more of those faculties because the experience is far more time-dependent.  Thus, I anticipate that I shall continue to explore the nature of those faculties in a broader context on this site, just as I anticipate that I shall continue to engage disciplines such as philosophy and social theory in my general reading practices.  Hopefully, this will make for an interesting and informative journey, even if my aspirations for a book to make sense of it all are never fulfilled.

Profiles High and Low

I have been toying with the idea of a Chutzpah of the Week award for Anya Kushchenko (better known as Anna Chapman) ever since she was deported from the United States on grounds of espionage.  We tend to think of spies as keeping the lowest possible profile in the interest of doing their work as effectively as possible.  The only ones with a high profile are like James Bond, whose proper domain is that of entertaining fiction, right?  Actually, Chapman’s high profile as an attractive attention-gathering public figure has at least one intriguing precedent in the United Kingdom.  Guy Burgess was always calling attention to himself, particularly when he was going against the grain of society norms (which he was almost always doing);  and, yes, I am sure there are those who would disagree with describing him with the adjective “attractive!”  The difference is that Burgess was an insider groomed well enough from the inside to know how the system worked in intimate detail (thus being perfectly poised to muck with that system).  Chapman, on the other hand, was an outsider groomed to pass as an insider;  and she was clearly very good at her job.

This was the week, however, that finally tipped my balance in her favor.  Yes, the news gets a bit slow during the holiday season.  If I were a serious animist, I might consider giving the award to “The Weather” for its timing in making so many people so miserable;  but the whole purpose of the Chutzpah of the Week award is to focus on outstanding instances of human  This was the week that Chapman demonstrated that, however much we in the United States may have tried to load down her reputation with lemons, she could still make a whopping pitcher of lemonade.  As the BBC reported on Wednesday, that pitcher was her prestigious appointment to the Public Council, which is basically the governing body of the Molodaya Gvardiya, the youth wing of Russia’s governing party (i.e. the party of Vladimir Putin). behavior.

Chapman is thus doing what she does best, maintaining a high profile in the interest of the State.  She has done this by taking her first step into politics.  However, is espionage really a useful prerequisite for those seeking to ascend the ladder of political power?  One only has to consult Russian history, perhaps starting with Putin himself (if he were willing to take the question)!

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!

China Defines its own Rules

Apparently the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was not content with the support of eighteen countries in boycotting the awarding of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.  Yesterday the government released an official statement to the Associated Press announcing that they would initiate a similar award that would “interpret the viewpoints of peace of [the] Chinese,” presumably with a “majority rule” focus on those living in the PRC itself.  According to a report filed last night for Associated Press by Tini Tran, the new award will be called the Confucius Peace Prize.

Tran’s report also includes the announcement of the first recipient of this prize:

The first honoree is Lien Chan, Taiwan's former vice president and the honorary chairman of its Nationalist Party, for having "built a bridge of peace between the mainland and Taiwan." A staffer in his Taipei office said she could not comment Tuesday because she knew nothing about the prize.

Lien was chosen from among eight nominees — some of whom are regularly mentioned for, or have already won, that other peace prize: including billionaire Bill Gates, former South African President Nelson Mandela, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and the Panchen Lama, the second-highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

While China regularly disparages the Dalai Lama, the religion's spiritual leader, the current Panchen Lama is a 20-year-old who was hand-picked by Beijing. The original boy named by the Dalai Lama has disappeared.

This seems worthy of a Chutzpah of the Week award, although I suppose there can be some debate over whether the connotation of this particular act of chutzpah is negative or positive.  At the very least it is a more constructive approach than the official reaction of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Liu Xiaobo, which Tran summarized as follows:

Since Liu Xiaobo's selection, China has vilified the 54-year-old democracy advocate, called the choice an effort by the West to contain its rise, disparaged his supporters as "clowns," and launched a campaign to persuade countries not to attend Friday's ceremony in Oslo. The government is also preventing Liu — who is serving an 11-year sentence for co-authoring a bold appeal for political reforms in the Communist country — and his family members from attending.

Furthermore, by selecting a candidate on the basis of activities that so clearly reflected the interests of the PRC, the Chinese may have found the right way to express their opinion that national self-interest has always been at the heart of the Nobel awards.  Nevertheless, there is a curious irony put into play here.  The Chinese have put a stake in the ground to assert just how culturally dependent a concept like “peace” can be;  and then they named that stake after a philosopher whose principles are about as absolutist as you can get.  Ultimately, this is act that embodies the old gag line, “Be reasonable;  do it my way.”  This would be little more than an amusing joke were it not for the extent to which our own government follows exactly the same precept.

The bottom line is that it’s the PRC’s nickel (actually 100,000 yuan, which Tran values at $15,000).  They can do what they want with it.  However, because what they have done sends so many messages, many of which really should not be ignored, the PRC deserves a country-wide Chutzpah of the Week award for their innovative approach to “constructive criticism” of the Nobel Committee (and let me know when the first Jew makes the short list)!

WikiLeaks CHUTZPAH

As the quantity of news surrounding the current tribulations of both WikiLeaks and its director Julian Assange continues to increase, I find that I am more inclined to attach the positive connotation of chutzpah to the Chutzpah of the Week award I granted to Assange at the end of November.  At the very least this morning’s Associated Press dispatch by Cassandra Vinograd and Raphael G. Satter makes it clear that Assange recognizes the limitations of his own editorial capacities.  This is why he has been playing out the documents to five major newspapers, “outsourcing” editorial judgments to their respective staffs.  WikiLeaks is thus not the direct conduit from a whistle-blower to the World Wide Web that I originally took it to be.  Rather, the organization recognizes the need for a mediating role and appears to have chosen a perfectly viable way to address that need.

Meanwhile, it is interesting to see how the media have been dealing with public reaction to the current flood of leaks.  For the most part the media have sided with those whose oxen have been gored by the revelations;  and, of course, most of those oxen happen to be American.  Thus, we seem to get no end of reports of inflammatory reactions, many of which have taken this as an opportunity to resume hurling accusations of terrorism at anyone who happens to embrace a “thought that we hate,” to appropriate from the title of Anthony Lewis’ recent book on the First Amendment.  This leads me to wonder about the extent to which the efforts to prosecute Assange in Sweden (and in the United Kingdom for extradition) have been motivated by heavy-handed pressure tactics coming from our own country.  Thus, while I appreciate the potential for damage resulting from some of the WikiLeaks releases, I worry that there will be those who will make political gain through collateral damage to the foundations of our government, particularly where the Bill of Rights is concerned.

What makes me most uneasy is that the “official” reaction of our government to Assange and WikiLeaks comes dangerously close to the conduct of the People’s Republic of China in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiabo.  However, while the situation in China has a lot to do with the stability of a prevailing culture (which, face it, most of us do not understand in the slightest), the WikiLeaks affair may well influence the future of the Internet, particularly where questions of governance are concerned.  As I have observed in the past, most of those who develop, maintain, and evangelize the Internet tend to overlook matters of governance and may even see the Internet as a refuge from such matters.  Then something ugly happens (as was the case with the death threats directed at Kathy Sierra);  and we get a lot of throat-clearing and a paucity of clear thinking.

Once again we are back on the turf of Number 51 of The Federalist:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

WikiLeaks is a dispassionate “external control” that owes allegiance to no institution, governmental or corporate.  In effect it uses the Internet as an “insurance policy” against the fact that none of us are angels.  Unfortunately, this carries the corollary that those in government are not angels either, but they happen to be vested with considerable authority and the powers to exercise that authority.  We now face a “clear and present danger” that the very governance of the Internet, deemed unnecessary by most of those who gave us that technology in the first place, will be brought to heel by those determined to thwart any exercise of “external control.”

Quantitative CHUTZPAH

Patricia Cohen has a piece in today’s New York Times that definitely deserves attention;  but it is the sort of attention that one reserves for a double-edged sword.  The good news is that she gives a good account of both edges of the sword.  The bad news is that she leads with the blue-sky technocentric evangelism that I continue to hold responsible for much of the current mind rot of our national culture and its possible global implications:

Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.

This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.

Before delving into details, there is one important reflection on Cohen’s choice of a lead sentence, which can found in the “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” entry in Wikipedia.  That entry makes it clear that there is no hard evidence of who first applied that phrase but that the most plausible evidence seems to point to the Liberal Victorian politician, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, whose 1996 biography by Roy Harris Jenkins was entitled Dilke:  A Victorian Tragedy.  There may thus be a bit of exaggeration in the use of that adjective “enamored!”  Neither of these two names appears in Cohen’s article, although one of the cheerleaders for this brave new statistical world is Alice Jenkins, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow, who may or may not be related to Dilke’s biographer (just as one of the leading researchers, Dan Cohen at George Mason University may or may not be related to the Times writer).

From a technical point of view, Cohen (the historian, not the Times writer) and his colleagues see the Internet as a vast corpus of text sources that will open up a new generation of methods for lexical analysis.  This is certainly the case.  It is also the case that Peter Norvig, Director of Search at Google, has turned up some interesting results in how one may actually be able to derive results in semantic analysis on the basis of relatively brute-force results in lexical analysis.  Nevertheless, the “bridge” that Norvig has investigated can only be crossed through well-developed methods involving how one chooses the data, how one selects the statistical tools, and how one interprets the results that those tools yield.  In other words increasing the size of the data sample, even by several orders of magnitude, does not turn lexical analysis, in and of itself, into some kind of “miracle drug.”  For Cohen to claim that lexical methods now allow scholars to “finally and truly test” outstanding hypotheses is nothing more than chutzpah fueled by technocentric enthusiasm.

The Times story offers an amusing counterexample based on research by Meredith Martin, Assistant Professor of English at Princeton:

Ms. Martin at Princeton knows firsthand how electronic searches can unearth both obscure texts and dead ends. She has spent the last 10 years compiling a list of books, newspaper and journal articles about the technical aspects of poetry.

She recalled finding a sudden explosion of the words “syntax” and “prosody” in 1832, suggesting a spirited debate about poetic structure. But it turned out that Dr. Syntax and Prosody were the names of two racehorses.

The punch line to this and any number of other equally amusing anecdotes is that one needs to handle the results of context-free examination of words with the same caution one would apply to an unexploded bomb.

(There is a similar incident involving our own Department of Homeland Security scouring a massive collection of documents for names that would appear in close proximity in the text stream to that of Osama bin Laden, the assumption being that these would be the names of likely terrorists.  It turned out, however, that one of the names that appeared very frequently in this analysis was that of George W. Bush!  While this became a source for many jokes about Bush being a terrorist, the real punch line was that lexical analysis could not distinguish “talking with” from “talking about!”)

From the standpoint of chutzpah, this is a clear case of making too much from not very much.  The fairest response would probably be for the two Cohens, the scholar and the reporter, to share the Chutzpah of the Week award.  The first deserves it for over-promotion;  and second deserves it for keeping the “evidence to the contrary” in a “below the fold” position in the article, thus contributing to the inflated promotional value.

The Malice of Ignorance

Whatever we may say about WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange, they certainly have come up with a unique way to raise our consciousness about verb tense.  Their announcement to make public what they call the “Embassy cables” has forced our State Department to enable a phrase which I recently quoted from Alfred Schutz:  “to place ourselves mentally in a future state of affairs which we consider as already realized.”  Suddenly the State Department finds itself deep in the throes of what Schutz called “thinking in the future perfect tense,” perhaps, in the spirit of Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, without having the foggiest idea of what the future perfect tense is.

If Assange were doing this for no other reason than to give a grammar lesson to those in power in order to dissuade them from exercising their power recklessly, it would be easy to recognize his announced intentions (his own “thinking in the future perfect tense”) as positive-connotation chutzpah worthy of a Chutzpah of the Week award.  Unfortunately, we do not know what his intentions really are.  Thus, while there may be no doubt about the degree of chutzpah, there are no criteria for assessing the underlying connotation as positive or negative.

This situation is further complicated by the current Administration having campaigned on the promise that the workings of governance needed to become more transparent.  That is but one of many promises that was not kept;  but, given the chronology of WikiLeaks itself, one wonders whether or not Assange has deliberately managed it as a thorn in the side of the Obama White House, a seriously painful reminder of the failure to make good on this promise.  This might further tilt the balance toward positive connotation were it not for the question of just who would feel the pain.  If that pain were focused on specific reckless acts of specific individuals, Assange’s intended action might, indeed, lead to more members of the State Department acting with a level of discretion that, by all rights, should have been the norm;  but there is no focus at all in Assange’s threat.  If we go by the numbers provided this morning in David Dombey’s report for the Financial Times, we are talking about between 250,000 and 400,000 documents scheduled for release;  and, on the basis of the protestations coming from the State Department, there is a good chance that the State Department knows more about what is in those documents than Assange does, since it is hard to imagine Assange having reviewed them all.

This is where the connotation balance swings to the negative.  It is hard to tell just what Assange takes his job description to be.  The “editor-in-chief” description, which Dombey used in his Financial Times piece, can also be found on Assange’s Wikipedia page;  but the Wikipedia page for WikiLeaks itself names him as “director.”  This may be a fine point;  but it is one way to assess the underlying question of WikiLeaks own “code” of behavior.  (I was pleased to see that “A man gotta have a code” has first place in the Web page of Top 10 Quotes from The Wire.)  If Assange is acting in an editorial capacity, then, according to prevailing normative practices of editing, he is responsible for every piece of text he releases for publication.  Since it is unlikely that he has examined every one of those documents whose numbers run to six figures, the act that he is threatening would be viewed as negligent, at least by any other editor who takes his/her work seriously.  As a “director,” on the other hand, he could either delegate this responsibility to someone with professional editing qualifications (recognizing that the buck would still stop at his own desk) or decide that no such individual was necessary, meaning that WikiLeaks was effectively a conduit, simply moving content from a limited-access site to a public one.  My own feeling is that all of these options place Assange in a very negative light.  The chutzpah still stands, but the connotation is unlikely to be positive.

There remains one other way to read the current state of play, which is that Assange has decided to play a game of chicken with the State Department.  This, too, would be an act of chutzpah;  and, while some might see it as a positive act of one lone individual setting himself up against as monstrous bureaucracy whose interests may be questionable more often than not, there is too much brinksmanship going on in global relations right now to allow for the influence of such a wild player.  In other words Assange’s “code” may be that warped version of an old Sixties motto:

If you are not part of the solution, you can make the problem so bad that someone else will finally get around to fixing it.

Unfortunately, Assange’s strategy for calling attention to the problem runs the gamut from perverse to downright dangerous.  I would thus conclude that Assange has attracted enough attention this week to deserve the Chutzpah of the Week award;  but, at least within the norms of my own worldview, the connotation of his chutzpah is decidedly negative.

Happy CHUTZPAH to EU

Chutzpah is about as normative in Italian culture as it is for the Israelis.  Thus, I have never really considered a Chutzpah of the Week award for Silvio Berlusconi, just because even his most outrageous acts always seem to be little more than business as usual over there.  It seemed more appropriate to give an award to Erik Gandini for taking on Berlusconi in his Videocracy documentary.  On the other hand there are lower echelons of Italian governance that can still rise to levels of chutzpah, and today the BBC reported news of such a level involving trying to stick a fast one to the European Union:

The organisers of an Elton John concert in Italy have been told to pay back the money they used to stage the event.

The 720,000 euros (£613,000) came from the European Union as part of a fund to enhance regional development in the Campania region.

Sir Elton was the headline act at a festival in Naples last year.

The European Commission only recently discovered that some of its funds had been used to stage the gig by one of the biggest names in music.

When we consider all of the different instances of corruption that have come down to us from Naples, one might say that the city has lived its life like a candle in its uncollected garbage.  Still, this came down to trying to bilk the EU out of a pretty healthy piece of change;  and I think that the organizers can be honored with a Chutzpah of the Week award without casting any asparagus at Sir Elton!

India's CHUTZPAH of Economic Growth

I was beginning to wonder if I would get through this week without a good candidate for the Chutzpah of the Week award.  However, as is often the case, the BBC came to my rescue with a story released this morning.  This is one of those cases where the chutzpah is in the context.  Nevertheless, the best place to begin is with the story itself:

India is aiming to achieve double-digit economic growth within two years, as the country's recovery from the global downturn picks up pace.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said he was optimistic the economy should soon return to the 9% growth it achieved before the downturn.

The challenge then is "to cross the double-digit growth barrier in the coming year or two", he added.

The Indian economy grew by 8.8% between April and June this year.

It is the second-fastest-growing economy in the world behind China.

"We are all witness to an emerging new world order," Mr Mukherjee said, which would lead to a "more equitable arrangement for global prosperity."

The context comes from that final phrase about a “more equitable arrangement for global prosperity.”  I see that it is exactly two weeks ago that I put up a post intended to serve as preview reflections on Barack Obama’s visit to India.  The relevant context for today’s news comes from an excerpt from an Associated Press report that I cited in my earlier piece:

There were more than 670 million cell phone connections in India by the end of August, a number that has been growing by close to 20 million a month, according to government figures.

Yet U.N. figures show that only 366 million Indians have access to a private toilet or latrine, leaving 665 million to defecate in the open.

Mukherjee’s statement reflects a semantic interpretation of “prosperity” that appears to have more concern for how many cell phone connections people have than it does for the sanitary conditions of the people having those connections.  They reveal a man who is more interested in being one of the stars of the next meeting of the World Economic Forum than he is in the well-being of all sectors of his own country’s vast population.  It takes no small amount of chutzpah to thumb your nose at so many people with the expectation of being rewarded for your efforts, so Mukherjee clearly deserves the current Chutzpah of the Week award.  From my point of view, this one was worth the wait!

POST MORTEM CHUTZPAH

As far as I can tell, Robert Scheer has never received a Chutzpah of the Week award, although his Truthdig Web site has provided source documentation for several such awards.  However, Scheer has the advantage that his weekly column is released on Wednesday mornings with copies at Truthdig and the Web site for The Nation.  He thus found himself in the company of all of the rest of today’s Monday (actually Wednesday) morning quarterbacks trying to assess what happened at the polls yesterday.

Of all the analyses I have read thus far, Scheer’s has been, by far, the most interesting.  True, it carries more than a faint odor of told-you-so thinking;  but, given that Scheer’s thoughts have always given priority to Main Street over Wall Street, it is hard to fault him for sounding like a broken record (yet again).  More important is his rhetorical style.  Where others seem to tangle themselves in their own rhetorical legerdemain, Scheer has the chutzpah to keep his focus on “the working stiff,” even when that means taking those who claim to be his ideological soul mates to task.

In this case those soul mates are the deluded masses who rallied behind Barack Obama blinded by a vision of secular Messianism.  His lack of patience with those enthusiastic voters is on a par with his lack of patience with Obama himself.  This takes us to his choice of words for this morning:

Barack Obama deserved the rebuke he received at the polls for a failed economic policy that consisted of throwing trillions at Wall Street but getting nothing in return. His amen chorus in the media is quick to blame everyone but the president for his sharp reversal of fortunes. But it is not the fault of tea party Republicans that they responded to the rage out there over lost jobs and homes while the president remained indifferent to the many who are suffering.

At a time when, as a Washington Post poll reported last week, 53 percent of Americans fear they can’t make next month’s mortgage or rent payment, the president chirped inanely to Jon Stewart that his top economics adviser, Lawrence Summers, who was paid $8 million by Wall Street firms while advising candidate Obama, had done a “heckuva job” in helping avoid another Great Depression. What kind of consolation is that for the 50 million Americans who have lost their homes or are struggling to pay off mortgages that are “underwater”? The banks have been made whole by the Fed, providing virtually interest-free money while purchasing trillions of dollars of the banks’ toxic assets. Yet the financial industry response has been what Paul Volcker has called a “liquidity trap”—denying loans for business investment or the refinancing necessary to keep people in their homes.

Instead of meeting that crisis head-on with a temporary moratorium on housing foreclosures, as more than half of those surveyed by the Post wanted, the president summarily turned down that sensible proposal. Instead he attempted to shift the focus to his tepid health care reform and was surprised that many voters didn’t think he did them a favor by locking them into insurance programs not governed by cost controls. Health care reform was viewed by many voters with the same disdain with which they reacted to the underfunded and unfocused stimulus program. Neither seems relevant to turning around an economy that a huge majority feels is getting worse, according to Election Day exit polls.

In other words the electorate has been smart enough to see that any promises that Planet Washington would finally bring Planet Wall Street to account for its abuses have now been reduced to dust.  Instead, Planet Washington has itself been reduced to one of those insignificant moons that orbits around Planet Wall Street, and the folks on Main Street welcomed the opportunity to vent their anger about this.  What they have yet to recognize is that, in throwing out the current crop of scoundrels, they have simply replaced them with another crop within the same gravitational pull of Planet Wall Street.

Scheer’s “inconvenient truth” is that our electorate has become more consistent in voting-against than in voting-for:  Those holding office are ultimately the problem, so let’s vote them out of office.  Then it turns out that the new office-holders are just as much a problem as their predecessors had been;  and the Federal Government maintains its business-as-usual inactivity with a consistency scarier than any Emersonian hobgoblin.  Scheer has the chutzpah to tell us that this is the government we have, and he is willing to challenge us by asking if this is the government we think we deserve.  Those seem like perfectly acceptable grounds for a Chutzpah of the Week award.

Those who Should Know Better Ignore History

This week Mikhail Gorbachev gave an interview, excerpts of which were broadcast on the PBS feed of BBC World Service News, in which he talked about Afghanistan.  Speaking from his own unpleasant experience, Gorbachev, who was in an excellent position to deliver the refrain of history being repeated by those who ignore it, suggested that a “war on terrorism” was no justification for that ignorance.  Indeed, I would not be surprised if the excerpts excluded a suggestion that the war on terrorism has clouded our ability to think clearly as much as the Cold War had done in its time.  Think of our efforts to prop up an Afghani government of questionable value strictly of the interest of keeping the country from falling into “terrorist” (more specifically, Taliban) hands.  Then think of the number of downright brutal dictatorships we supported in countries with no goal other than keeping Communists out of those countries.

This strikes me as the lens through which we should view the following report that appeared on Al Jazeera English this morning:

In a decision critics say has undermined a powerful new law, the United States has decided to turn a blind eye to four countries that use child soldiers in their armed forces.

In a brief and little-noticed announcement on Monday, the White House said Barack Obama, the president, had decided to exempt Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan and Yemen from the Child Soldiers Prevention Act of 2008, which prohibits funding for foreign governments' militaries if they recruit or use child soldiers.

On Thursday, Foreign Policy magazine posted  online a nine-page memo from Obama to Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, that linked the continuation of funding to US counterterrorism efforts in some of those countries.

"Everyone’s gotten a pass, and Obama has really completely undercut the law and its intent," Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times newspaper.

Of the six countries identified by the state department as having used child soldiers in 2009, only Somalia and Myanmar were not granted an exemption. Myanmar receives no military aid from the United States, but the vulnerable Transitional Federal Government of Somalia receives significant assistance. In May 2009, the United States applied for exemption from an United Nations arms embargo in order to provide Somalia with assault rifle, mortar and machine gun ammunition, and rocket-propelled grenades.

This is precisely the sort of madness that we readily associated with the previous Bush Administration.  When we voted for “change we can believe in,” we were voting for getting beyond our involvement is such a horrific amalgam of absurdity and atrocity.  Yet we have both the White House and the State Department maintaining the rules of the Bush playbook, presumably to avoid any criticism of being “soft on terrorism”

The ultimate irony is that the Research Briefing section of the Web site for the Republican National Committee ran their own account of the above story;  and they ran it under the headline “Indefensible.”  This, of course, was precisely the language that Democrats rushed to use when George W. Bush was being the “decider” in such matters.  We now are half a week away from an election at which the Republicans are doing all they can to give Obama a beating that will be impossible to ignore or rationalize.  Was it in any way “defensible” for the Administration to give the Republicans yet another stick to use in the beating?

A Question of Priorities

Those interested in a more wired world will probably welcome the following report that ran on the BBC News Web site this morning:

Mount Everest climbers can now surf the internet and make video calls through a 3G network, Nepalese telecoms firm Ncell says.

The company has installed eight 3G base stations along the route to Everest base camp.

The wireless network could help thousands of tourists who visit Mount Everest every year, Ncell claims.

Climbers and trekkers in the Everest region have so far relied on satellite phones and a voice-only mobile network.

Ncell, which is owned by the Swedish company TeliaSonera, says its highest 3G base station is near Everest base camp at 5,200 metres (17,000 ft).

The coverage would reach the summit of the world's highest mountain, company head Pasi Koistinen, said.

He added that this had not been tested yet.

The 3G network will help climbers and trekkers stay in touch with their families and trip organisers, Mr Koistinen said.

It will also enable them to receive weather reports and safety information while they are climbing.

So I appreciate the value of that last sentence;  but I also appreciate Jon Krakauer’s argument that there are too damned many people trying to be tourists on Everest, most of whom are neither physically nor mentally equipped to be there.  Consequently, I cannot help but wonder if this “new connectivity,” whatever benefits it may provide to that elite few who are serious about what they do, will worsen a situation that is already pretty bad.

However, there is another twist to this story, which is the one that really motivated me to write this morning:

Less than one third of Nepal's population have access to telecommunication services.

TeliaSonera announced that it would invest more than $100m (£63m) in the next year to increase mobile coverage in the country.

The good news is that the Nepalese government cut a deal with TeliaSonera through which a major chunk of their population may get telephone service for the first time.  The bad news is the sense of priorities in the arrangements for that deal:  We’ll let you bring connectivity to Everest if you then bring connectivity to the rest of Nepal.  A government that cared more about its own population than about its tourist trade would have reversed the order:  First help us with a national telecommunications solution, after which you can do your thing on Everest.  It takes more that a little chutzpah to be so overt about such priorities, which is why this week’s Chutzpah of the Week award will go to the entire Nepalese government!

Artistic CHUTZPAH

Yes, I know it is really early in the week;  and thinking about the Chutzpah of the Week award runs the risk of being premature.  However, this one is too good to resist for a variety of reasons.  It concerns a recent decision made by Mike Leigh to decline an invitation to teach at the Sam Spiegel Film & TV School in Jerusalem.  Dave Itzkoff documented Leigh’s justification on his ArtsBeat blog for The New York Times as follows:

Mr. Leigh wrote that he “always had serious misgivings about coming,” adding that he almost canceled after an incident in May in which Israeli commandos raided a Gaza-bound flotilla. The “last straw,” Mr. Leigh wrote, was the proposal of legislation by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, requiring that Israeli citizens pledge a loyalty oath to the “nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Mr. Leigh added that these and other actions by the Israeli government had left him “in an untenable position, which I must confront according to my conscience.”

Under most circumstances this could simply be accepted as an act of conscience;  but what makes this particular episode interesting is the way in which Israeli filmmaker Renen Schorr, director of the Spiegel School, chose to respond to Leigh’s statement:

Mr. Schorr wrote to Mr. Leigh in a letter dated Oct. 15, “I am certain that the decision is sincere and that it reflects your detailed, legitimate political views,” but added, “Boycotts and ostracism are the antithesis of dialogue.”

Mr. Schorr wrote that “the public will interpret your decision as indicating an irrevocable rift between us, a boycott of Israel, and a rebuke of its current and future artists.”

“To me,” he said, “this is a red line. Thus, I cannot justify your decision.”

Schorr basically escalated Leigh’s rather simple statement of conscience into an insult that required riposte, oblivious to the extent to which this intuitive reflex to counterattack would be fraught with irony.  At the simplest level we have the “surface” reading of Schorr’s motive in his final sentence.  If Leigh was following the dictates of his own conscience, Schorr’s “justification” is at least irrelevant and at most intrusive.  However, the strongest irony lurks in that sentence about dialogue.  Schorr is perfectly correct in asserting that ostracism is antithetical to dialogue, but his own ideological blinders prevent him from recognizing the extent to which that same spirit of ostracism by Israelis continues to undermine any substantive dialogue taking place between them and Palestinians.

In other words Schorr’s primary refutation actually serves to reinforce Leigh’s conscience-based motives.  Leigh turned his rejection letter into a judo-like act of disarming his opponent through his opponent’s own weakness.  In the context of the current volatility of the Middle East, such an act may be appreciated as an act of chutzpah, even if it was not initially conceived as such,.  So, while there is always the possibility that a stronger case will arise later in the week, I am going to stick my neck out and name Leigh as the holder of this week’s Chutzpah of the Week award.

Economic Recoverty (for the banks)

There have been a fair number of stories recently to the effect that, as far as the banks (particularly the big ones) are concerned, the economic crisis is now “officially” a thing of the past.  This has led many of the more progressive commentators to wonder just how those banks have managed to return to their status quo while so many of the rest of us remain left in the lurch.  One data point to consider was reported in today’s San Francisco Chronicle by Marisa Lagos of their Sacramento Bureau:

Advocates for the poor say that while [California Governor Arnold] Schwarzenegger has rightly cracked down on such abuses [by welfare recipients using welfare debit cards at casinos, for example], he has failed to curb another source of waste: escalating bank fees that take money from needy families and from the California businesses where that money would otherwise flow.

By the end of this year, they estimate, more than $38 million will have been transferred from poor families to banks in the form of ATM and debit fees over the past three years. For example, in 2008, according to state figures, banks collected $10.1 million in fees from welfare recipients; this year, they are on track to collect more than $15 million. In June 2008, recipients paid out $833,000; banks collected $1.44 million the same month this year.

This amounts to adding insult to injury.  Initially, all American taxpayers were informed that their tax dollars would “stimulate” (an optimistic euphemism for “bail out”) banks that were failing as a result of their own practices that ranged from ill-conceived to downright abusive.  Now that the word is out that the banks are beginning to pay the government back, Lagos’ story provides one sign of the source of funds for those payments.  This is about as clear-cut a story as one might encounter about how the poor are the ones who pay to keep the rich in a state of wealth to which they have become accustomed.  After all, where else would those bankers get the money to payroll all those lobbying efforts to thwart any substantive move towards economic reform?

The CHUTZPAH of Judiciary Activism

First it was Chief U. S. District Judge Vaughan Walker, who earned himself two Chutzpah of the Week awards, one for his handling of the challenge to the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage and the second over abuses of civil liberties in the name of “homeland security.”  Now we have his colleague, also a U. S. District Judge, Virginia Phillips, who has moved forward on grounds of constitutionality to achieve what the Senate, hog-tied by partisanship, could not.  Here is the story as it just appeared on the BBC News Web site:

A US judge has ordered a nationwide halt to enforcement of the country's ban on openly gay military personnel.

US District Judge Virginia Phillips last month ruled the "don't ask, don't tell" policy unconstitutional.

Under the policy, gay people can serve in the military but face expulsion if their sexuality is discovered.

President Barack Obama and some military leaders have called for it to be overturned. A legislative attempt to do so failed in the Senate last month.

The US Department of Justice has 60 days to appeal but may opt not to do so.

Judge Phillips appears to believe that matters of civil liberties should not be held hostage to partisan bickering, which is all the more interesting in light of how the case came to her bench:

The lawsuit was brought by the Log Cabin Republicans, a pro-gay Republican group, on behalf of openly gay military personnel who had been discharged under the policy.

At the very least this is yet another opportunity to appreciate irony;  but, while it may still be early in the week, it seems appropriate for Judge Phillips to join Judge Walker as a Chutzpah of the Week laureate.

Loophole CHUTZPAH

As they say, business is business;  and it is hard to imagine any business being conducted without making sure that every participant has his/her own convenient set of loopholes.  This morning’s Financial Times provided a report from Christian Oliver and Song Jung-a in Seoul that illustrated this point very nicely in the context of our current effort to bring Iran to heel through economic sanctions:

South Korea has appointed two state-run banks to finance trade with Iran and revive lucrative business ties that collapsed because of sanctions announced in September.

The US has pressured Seoul to help cut Iran out of international markets, but South Korea is seeking ways to protect its $10bn annual trade with the Islamic Republic.

It has now been revealed that South Korea reached a financing agreement with the Iranian central bank, which Washington has sought to sanction, just one week after Seoul had won praise from the US for announcing independent sanctions designed to rein in cross-border financing with Iran.

Seoul says that, from this month, Woori bank and the Industrial Bank of Korea can finance legitimate trade with Iran in sectors unaffected by sanctions.

“We are closing the door on Iran, but leaving a window open,” said Ernst Lee, a spokesman for South Korea’s regulators.

Under the scheme, the Iranian central bank will deposit proceeds from oil sales in South Korea at Woori and IBK. The funds will be used to enure payments for South Korean exporters, who had been retreating from Iran since July ahead of the imposition of September’s sanctions.

To the credit of the Woori Bank, they are at least willing to admit that they recognize a loophole when they see one:

“Iran’s central bank is not the target of sanctions, so transactions through the bank are legal,” Kim Jong-woo, an official at Woori bank told the Financial Times. “We do not worry about any possible sanctions by the US against us.”

Nevertheless, this illustrates nicely just how fragile the instruments of economic warfare can be;  and this comes off as little more than a South Korean bank demonstrating that it can play the loophole game as well as any American business.  Still playing that game against an ally on which the country remains so dependent takes more than a little chutzpah, and that is enough for the Woori Bank to win the Chutzpah of the Week award!