On Choosing Words Carefully

It has been a while since I placed a text under a strong magnifying glass; but, considering how volatile conditions currently are in Iran, I think it is worth examining Barack Obama's most recent statement this way. If he thinks he is pouring oil on troubled waters, then others may see him as setting a match to that oil. Let us consider his first (and most quoted) paragraph (using Robert Dreyfuss' most recent blog post for The Nation as my source):

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

This text starts out immediately on the wrong foot with its use of "must." This is nothing more than that great classic of Bush-speak, "ya gotta understand" (which I once called "the only rhetorical device Bush has mastered"), with less folksy phonology. It presumes that the speaker's point of view is the only valid one, and this shows a flagrant disregard for the message behind the subtitle of (now "banished") Dennis Ross' Statecraft book, which is the need "to restore America's standing in the world." The bottom line is that this one little word reveals that, when push comes to shove, we can fall back on the same might-makes-right reasoning of the Bush Administration that got us into so much trouble.

This injudicious use of the word "must" is followed by the equally suspect adjective "unjust." Like it or not, the Iranian government has a justice system. We may not like the way it works, and we are under no obligation to agree with it or support it. However, using the word "unjust" amounts to invalidating it; and, like it or not, we do not have grounds to do so.

This then takes us to the even more highly-charged adjective "universal." Presumably, this adjective was engaged because it appears in the title of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Unfortunately, subsequent debates and decisions emerging from the United Nations since then have demonstrated that there is far from "universal" agreement when it comes to taking the 30 articles of this Declaration seriously in practice. Thus, Obama would have done better to make his point on the basis of his grounds for support, referring to "rights granted by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights" without shoving the "universality" of those rights in the faces of those currently violating the Preamble (free speech) and Article 20 (assembly) of that Declaration.

As was the case when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was first elected, we would do well to recognize how little this disputed election has to do with the governance of Iran. Power still resides ultimately with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; and the president is little more than an "interface" between the world of this religious leader and the world of other countries, whether their governments are secular or sacred. Khamenei has made it clear that those who protest are indisputably at fault and will thus be subjected to the consequences of their faulty actions. Those are currently the "rules of the game" in Iran. If we are going to even try to exercise statecraft, we cannot begin by denying that those rules exist. This puts most of the Western countries in a great bind. However, this may have been Khamenei's intent. He is testing us to see if (and how) we can negotiate from such a difficult position. This will be Obama's real test as to whether or not meaningful relations with Iran can be restored. Khamenei has created that test, and it is now up to Obama to figure out how to pass it.

The Sound of a Sextet

I sometimes feel at a disadvantage for not being able to play any instrument in the string family. (No, I do not count the washtub bass that I played during my brief engagement with a bluegrass group.) There is something about the rich diversity of sound one can evoke from just one of these instruments that compounds in such remarkable ways as the ensemble grows. One could hear this in the concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music that featured three members of the violin faculty, and one heard it last night in the Chamber Music Masters concert at the Conservatory that featured cellist Joel Krosnick. The first of these concerts progressed from duos to a trio; the second culminated in a sextet.

I have to confess that I am a real sucker for the sound of a string sextet with its equal pairings of violins, violas, and cellos. I think I got "hooked" many years ago, when Jaime Laredo organized a concert at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, which consisted entirely of the two Brahms sextets, each one played on either side of the intermission. I have a similar weakness when Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" is played in its intended sextet form. However, the ultimate in that sextet sound has to be Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." When I wrote about the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 515 string quintet that took place during Robert Mann's visit to the Conservatory, I described listening to it as being "a bit like eavesdropping on a very intimate and highly amicable social conversation." In "Verklärte Nacht" every instrument also has the personality of a unique voice, but the effect is more one of drama than of social conversation. Nevertheless, Schoenberg's approach to drama is rather unique; and this is what makes the listening experience so interesting.

One way to explain this would be through the terminology of Kenneth Burke, which seems appropriate, since the sextet is based on a highly narrative poem (of the same name) by Richard Dehmel. At its highest level of abstraction, the poem is a dialog between two agents: A woman confesses, and a man forgives. (This is not to reductively oversimplify the poem but, from a narratological point of view, to sort out the story from the discourse.) However, Schoenberg was not interested in the traditional approach of program music to illustrate the core story; and, as a result, he shifted his attention to the scene in which the story takes place. This is the "night" of the title, which is the focus of Dehmel's first stanza, briefly appears in the third stanza (which stands between the woman's confession and the man's reply), and serve to wrap up the final line, which characterizes the "transfiguration." In some ways the listener might to better to put aside the poem (which Schoenberg himself had suggested) and turn (which he had not suggested) instead to some of his landscape paintings (which I had the good fortune to see at the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan late in 1984. These canvasses are less interested in objects than in the play of color and light; and Schoenberg's approach to Dehmel's night and the critical role played by the moon (which may or may not anticipate the "moon views" of Pierrot Lunaire). From this point of view, the individuality of the instrumental voices almost constitutes an embodiment of brushwork in auditory form.

Now all this may be a ploy on my part. "Verklärte Nacht" is a rather long piece of uninterrupted music; and, while it may have five large sections corresponding to Dehmel's five stanzas, I still have trouble finding my way around its expanse of time. (This is probably why I leap at any opportunity to hear a concert performance. I can negotiate Gustav Mahler's longest symphony movements, but my ears still need more exposure to "Verklärte Nacht!") In this respect the Conservatory performers (Ian Swenson and student Daniel Jang on violin, Paul Hersh and student Alexa Beattie on viola, and Joel Krosnick and Jennifer Culp on cello) honored the seamlessness of Schoenberg's texture, consistent with his avoidance of sharp object boundaries in his landscape paintings. More importantly, though, they were sensitive to all the gradations of color in the sonorities, which is why I feel that the metaphor of brushwork contributes to the listening experience.

This sextet was sharply contrasted by the worked which preceded it just before the intermission, the Opus 7 duo for violin and cello by Hanns Eisler. Eisler studied with Schoenberg but is probably better known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. This duo (which paired Krosnick with violinist Axel Strauss) had a much sharper sense of "objects," cast in rather traditional forms but rendered with an extremely free chromaticism.

This Eisler-Schoenberg axis was complemented by the opening of the concert, which was the Opus 1, Number 1 piano trio of Ludwig van Beethoven. It is interesting to compare the Opus 1 trios with the Opus 2 sonatas that opened András Schiff's performance of the complete cycle of piano sonatas last October. They both begin with an energetic ascending arpeggio line, they are both rich in wit, and they both involve what, in writing about the Schiff recital, I called "the rhetorical impact of the rest." Thus, once again the case was made that, even in his Opus 1, Beethoven was exploring how to stray from the beaten path, setting examples that would later be followed by Schoenberg and Eisler. For this performance Strauss and Krosnick were accompanied by piano student Kevin Korth; and as a group they knew exactly how to honor both the impact of the silences and the wit that makes the listening such a treat.

All this set me to thinking back to Krosnick's comments on Tuesday evening about not performing the notes too "factually." Each of these three compositions had much to communicate to the listener; but none of them communicated through "factual" means. To go back to the narratological framework, everything was in the discourse; and the "story" was incidental. Once this was accepted, it was easy to let the music speak for itself.

The Civil Tongue

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a Mosque?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Condi Still Fighting the Cold War?

The American press has not been paying very much attention to our plans to build a "missile shield" in Europe, not to mention Vladimir Putin's resistance to those plans; but this is a major story for the European press, given that their own backyard is at stake. Our own "party line" has been nicely summarized in the latest SPIEGEL ONLINE report:

The US claims that the planned missile shield is intended to protect the US and its European allies from a ballistic missile attack from a so-called "rogue" state such as Iran.

Putin, on the other hand, just used his annual speech to the Russian parliament (both houses, just like our own State of the Union address) to state his resistance in no uncertain terms:

The rhetoric heated up Thursday as Putin, in his annual speech to both houses of parliament, said he was suspending Russia's obligations under the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, in response to the US missile shield plans. He said the NATO signatories to the treaty were not respecting it, and criticized US plans to locate elements of the anti-missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, saying they create "real dangers and possibly unpleasant surprises."

Is poor Europe caught in the middle of an attempt to revive the Cold War? Is Putin right to be suspicious of the American "party line?" Certainly, if he watches Bill Maher (does HBO now serve Russia?), he is unlikely to believe anything our government says or, for that matter, anything he reads or hears through American mass media! On the other hand he would probably pay attention to what Condoleeza Rice told reporters prior to her meeting with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a NATO-Russia meeting in Oslo:

The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous and everybody knows it.

Excuse me? Did she really use the adjective "Soviet?" Does she view today's Russia as a "front" for a Soviet Union that is still lurking somewhere in the culture of the Kremlin and is still engaged in a Cold War with the United States? Whatever one may think about Freud, this was a very revealing slip of the tongue and hardly the sort of thing that should come to the attention of a Russian leader who probably still has very strong roots in the Cold War! It is chilling to think that one adjective could turn history back some twenty years, and I sure hope that the State Department realizes that some form of damage control is now in order. (Since the meeting with Lavrov has a two-day agenda, there will certainly be plenty of opportunities for damage control.)

When Reagan made his little joke about bombing the Soviet Union, it was a thoughtless act of mouthing off without knowing that a microphone was live. Condi knew her microphone was live; and, worse yet, she knew she was speaking to reporters. So what was she thinking?

Retaliating with a BON MOT

Unregistered Truthdig commenter Jed Wing deserves a tip of the linguistic hat for his deft handling of potentially inappropriate speech. The context, appropriately enough, was the seemingly never-ending discussion of the Imus affair, this time around James Harris' "Imus Distraction" piece. Mr. Wing had obviously become so exasperated by some of the assertions in the ensuing discussion that he eventually had to erupt in expletive: "N-word, please!" After a brief pause, I had my own eruption … of laughter (probably the first healthy belly laugh I had to break the ice of the excessive seriousness with which this topic has been handled). Those of us who understand both the denotation and the connotation of Mr. Wing's little bit of linguistic legerdemain can appreciate that the challenge of respecting the constraints of "appropriate speech" can be a source of creativity, not to mention fun. The rest will have to seek explanation elsewhere and take comfort in the fact that this was a no-harm-no-foul move in the great language-game of life!

Ahmadinejad's Discourse

First of all I would like to thank Al S. E. for providing a comment with a pointer to quotes from Iran's President Ahmadinejad. I think this is one of the best ways to pursue what, in an earlier post, I called "the way of Berlin" (which might also be called "the way of Appiah"); and, in the interest of following that way I would add to the quotes compiled that far the transcript of the interview that Ahmadinejad gave to Diane Sawyer. This transcript may be valuable, in part, because it is not a collection of excerpts; but, in all fairness, its value depends heavily on the reliability of the translation. Unfortunately, I am in no position to judge that reliability; and, presumably, any Farsi speaker watching the broadcast would not have been able to hear the original text very well (if at all). So, unless another version of the transcript is released by another source, what ABC provided is all we have.

Having said all of that by way of disclaimer, I can now put on my text-analysis hat! There is much to impress the reader here. Since the adjective "articulate" has become off limits, let me appeal to the Medieval Trivium and admire Ahmadinejad's command of both logic and rhetoric. (His grammar can only be evaluated in the original text.) Nevertheless, my initial examination of the texts revived a question I had raised about the "Presidential material" of the would-be candidates for our own forthcoming election. That question can also be attributed to "the way of Berlin," this time with respect to his "Political Judgement" essay. In this context I would argue that, while logic and rhetoric may be as important in today's classroom as they were when the Trivium was constituted, the classroom is not the political arena; and this is particularly important where logic is involved. It is not that we should disregard logic but that, in the worlds of politics and diplomacy, the force of logic inevitably gets pushed into the background, partly by rhetoric but more substantially by action. Thus, while President Ahmadinejad can be very skillful in his post hoc accounts of actions that many members of the world community (not just Americans) have taken as provocative, whether he likes it or not, those accounts take a back seat to the actions themselves. This is why Berlin's essay identifies Bismarck as a paradigm of political judgment while making it clear that there was nothing particular memorable about Bismarck's intellect!

Here again, however, we have to be fair about the limits of our understanding of what Habermas has called the "action situation" in Iran. Actions, after all, result from decisions; and, to draw upon recent White House jargon, we really do not know who the key "deciders" are in Iran. We do know that there are parallel political authorities, one secular and one religious. We also know that, while Ahmadinejad is the secular authority, he is a man of deep religious conviction, not likely to oppose the religious authority. This is not to reduce him to an apologist for actions over which he has little, if any, control but simply to call out our own ignorance of how decisions are made in Iran. At this deeper level of understanding, Ahmadinejad's texts, whether in translation or in the original Farsi, may not tell us as much as we would like!

Why Story Needs Discourse

Strictly speaking, that Burke pentad, to which I referred earlier today, focuses on only have of the domain of narrative analysis: the description of the events being recounted. In the terminology of Seymour Chatman, from whom I acquired my working knowledge of narrative theory, this half is called the story; and its complementary half is called the discourse. If the story is concerned with those elements that need to be accounted for, the discourse is concerned with how those accounts are rendered, such as the rhetorical devices that guide the reader of the text through the accounts. The significance of discourse is illustrated in almost painful clarity in a report of a recent sociological study about racism that is now available, as summarized by the author, at the Nieman Watchdog Web site. Here is the critical text of the summary:

In this experiment, I hired young men to pose as job applicants, assigning them resumes with equal levels of education and experience, and sending them to apply for real entry-level job openings all over Milwaukee. There were two teams, one white and one black. The two members of each team also alternated presenting information about a fictitious criminal record (a drug felony), which they “’fessed up to” on the application form. During six months of fieldwork, the two teams audited 350 employers, applying for a wide range of entry level jobs such as waiters, sales assistants, laborers, warehouse workers, couriers, and customer service representatives. The results of these studies were startling. Among those with no criminal record, white applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback relative to equally qualified black applicants. Even more troubling, whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background. Racial disparities have been documented in many contexts, but here, comparing the two job applicants side by side, we are confronted with a troubling reality: Being black in America today is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job.

This is about as good an illustration as we can hope for of the critical role that discourse can play, regardless of the strength of the "underlying facts" of the story. The greatest virtue of this account is the way in which it presents its key result in a manner that is as vivid as it is meaningful. The implication that the "level of the playing field" for a black with a clean record is the same as that for a white with a felony conviction cannot fail to grab the attention of the reader! It would be nice to believe that the strength of that formulation will be enough to incite action to change this imbalance, but I am not holding my breath!