Wednesday, January 26, 2011

SOTU

It was apparent immediately that the constitutional small print had morphed into high drama--more than usual. The politicians in their usual finery, hair coiffed, whitened smiles--but this year with politically integrated seating, implying that political principles distinguish the parties and that they were willing to put them aside to sit with each other, like self conscious school kids, while the press ooh'd and ah'd about the pairings. It was felt this would be of more import than most. The country feels it is under some pressure and is looking for solutions. Obama, the best speaker since Reagan, would surely rise to the occasion. Everyone knows the budget has to be cut. Everyone knows that taxes have to go up. Everyone knows that the result will be a decline in living standards--"temporary inconvenience, permanent improvement". The Americans can do this. The question is: How will this be done? What is right? What is fair? What will do the least damage? And, with the singularly American preoccupation, how will this be done consistent with our political principles? (This strange nation seems to have more principles in its population than in its politicians.)

The worry, anxiety and labor of the last year gave birth to a mouse. Obama was strangely subdued. He was fluid but facile; nothing was challenging, nothing hard won. We were encouraged but not led, inspired but to no end. He was like a sparring partner: Technically perfect. Like General McClellan, he knew everything about combat but commitment.

Some coaches are all fire; they rely on their assistants for technique and tactics. Some are all tactics. At a moment last night that demanded energy and vision, Obama walked into the spotlight, won the coin flip and deferred the choice.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Phantoms and Operas

Interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heaster Shue. Her death in 1897 was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband Edward. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition’s account. Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.--Marker in a cemetery. A ghost's testimony was actually admitted as part of the court record


The Marcellus Shale Formation is a petroleum rich area that runs from western New York through western Pennsylvania into western West Virginia. The formation is deep, between six to eight thousand feet and recently has become approachable through modern drilling and extraction techniques. Part of the technology-fracing--involves sending pressurized liquid, water, into the shale layers to break them and make the petroleum recoverable. This technique has evolved over the last years in several similar sites throughout the North America, most recently in the Bakken area in Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. The site is rich with potential and southwestern Pennsylvania is at the center of it. The area has suffered terribly in the last generation or so with the decline of the steel industry and current estimates are that the Marcellus Shale project will bring up to 200,000 jobs to the area, productive and high paying jobs. But rather than celebrating this potential, the area has begun a strange symbolic and ritualized dance between the businesses that want to develop the area and a poorly identified group that fears terrible consequences of local industrialization. The industry presents its plans, advantages, downsides and quality control methods, the opposition presents its anxieties over the industry, mainly their fear that the pressurized fluid used in the process will contaminate the drinking water generally and the local aquifer specifically.

This debate has been loud and intense in the area despite the fact that several sources show that there has never, ever, been a single episode of fracing resulting in groundwater contamination. There are episodes of organic contamination--plants and animals--but never a fracing contamination.

What is interesting about this is that evidence does not lead to conclusion. There is no endpoint to discussion. Debate goes on as long as people show up--sometimes to meeting places that have no involvement in drilling at all. Nor do facts or accuracy seem to play a part.

This quality of ongoing debate about prima facie questions have become a characteristic of our politics and our journalism. In "JFK" the storyline presented with real historical persons had only coincidental relationship with history. Michael Moore's films are scripted fiction woven in and around factual geography. Positions have become the structure around which the facts are molded; when that is impossible the facts are simply ignored. Every event comes with narrative camp followers who see and analyze through their own specific prism and present their conclusions with operatic drama.

Cormac McCarthy has a recurring theme in his fiction that history and fiction are intermingled by their very nature; it is a necessary--and productive--creative and subjective error. To apply such a distortion to the present and the future is either insincere opportunism, nihilism or madness.

Friday, January 21, 2011

Arresting a Culture

The recent effort to Bowdlerize Huck Finn should be a warning to all that nothing is safe from overprotective sanitation. However, the recent release of Conrad's Nigger of the Narcissus as N-Word of the Narcissus--http://www.amazon.com/N-word-Narcissus-Joseph-Conrad/dp/9076660115#_--is a true milestone; the culture has surely been taken into protective custody. Even the sanctimonious substitution of BCE for the offensive B.C. casts a shadow when placed beside this decision. Imagine the initial, insightful analysis of white guilt in the West having its title changed because of white guilt. It is as if The Onion had a publishing arm.

One wonders who the arresting officers are. Imagine the vastness of the task: Sanitizing a culture. Many people can't get their children to distinguish between the nominative and objective case. Some businesses suffer over dress codes. And here is a movement, seemingly unspoken yet uniform, that is going to make the culture right. There is a bit of the fist shaking Temperance Union about this but no one is laughing. No one dares.

A quality of recent times is the appearance of organizations with huge agendas, huge aspirations. Organizations plan to help us conserve water by controlling the water in toilets. (Half the water, twice the flushes.) Some want to cut down on butter use so they mandate unsaturated fats. Transfats. DDT is banned because it is felt that it might harm bird eggs and malaria comes off the endangered species list. The overriding character of these efforts is hubris; despite failure and disaster, there is no shortage of confidence. These censors are undeterred by failure. The bluenose cannot be embarrassed. They do not learn.

Years ago a movie was made about a struggle between students bent on liberalizing a country and a junta resisting them. The leader of the rebellious kids is eventually killed but he continues as a source of inspiration and the code word for him is "Z", the sound of the letter meaning "He Lives!" The junta eventually bans the letter "Z".

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a Short Review

"Men Who Hate Women" is the original name--kept in the Swedish version--of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Such a title might warn you the author may be so preoccupied as to undermine his story, as Pullman's wearying anti-Catholicism blunts his clever daemons concept in The Golden Compass. The first page does nothing to reassure us; the introductory quote is " 18% of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man." Such focus may be distracting--for example, when the second part of the book starts with the quote "46% of women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man" the math just doesn't seem to work. But the author is not kidding; he feels that violence against women is a savage fact of life inherent in Sweden. Moreover he feels that the state support system which should protect these victims is not simply incompetent; it is a malignant accomplice. These surprising positions form the undercurrents of this popular mystery and they must be dealt with by the reader. These concepts are awkward, isolated and, early, dis-integrated; they float undigested for a while as the story meanders through its early development.

Strangely the opening of the book mirrors this poor integration. Several plot lines and characters bob through the scenes, some going nowhere, some destined to be central. But after the momentum mounts, this is a very exciting story. The main character is interesting and interestingly developed. When the confluence of real story line and characters converge, the speed, tension and violence of the story carry along well.

There are countless problems with the story. There is an element of the wild eyed pamphleteer in the writing. And the outsider is not immediately convinced of the virtues of the author's outrage. Are men really this terrible in Sweden? Are the rest of us naive or sheltered? Do they act this way because they are Vikings? Is the Nazi threat really current? My impression of the Swedish bureaucracy was rather positive; when a governmental official says "This society is responsible for you" the irony is fierce but surprising.

The male lead is inexplicable. He is passive, boring and the women he attracts can not explain him either.

Although the plot is annoyingly complex it is a bit predictable. But it is interesting, exciting and fun. The writer is inexperienced--this is his first book--but it is a very successful first effort. (So successful that some professionals are suspicious, others think that this may not be so difficult after all.) And Salander is a very successful character, first or not, and better than many experienced mystery writers can boast.

Exciting or not, as a first mystery novel this is not of the caliber of Sansom's Dissolution or even the creepy and flawed The Ghosts of Belfast. But it is an undeniable page turner with a very good main character, a rather surprising social and political view and rewarding lessons: Appearance belies potential and vengeance is its own reward.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Conceptual Inkblot 2

"Because of the nail, the shoe was lost, because of the shoe the horse was lost, because of the horse the rider was lost ,because of the rider the dispatch was lost, because of the dispatch the skirmish was lost, because of the skirmish the battle was lost, because of the battle the war was lost, because of the war the king was lost, because of the king the kingdom was lost--and all because of a nail."

There is a chess-like reality to this children's chant; the loss of a pawn can doom a position or a game. In history it is a bit more dangerous an assumption, not because alternative histories can be imagined with one change--what if Albert Sydney Johnson had not died at Shiloh--but there are so many such possibilities, even within each supposition: What if the blockade runners had been stopped, what if the Enfields had never been delivered to the Confederates, what if Johnson had never fought the duel that impaired his leg's sensation....on and on and on. Some fantasy writers have begun to substitute alternative histories for alternative cultures and civilizations--instant creativity.

Nonetheless, in the absence of a response to my "Conceptual Inkblot", I bravely offer my own crucial moment in history (stimulated by "The History of Us") in the last 400 years: Tim Murphy's shooting of General Simon Frazier.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Government as Detective

“We must examine all the facts behind this tragedy. We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.” Obama at the Arizona memorial 1/12/11



This is a telling statement. No experienced medical person tries to understand madness. Indeed, it is an affliction that can be defined by its isolation; one cannot be empathetic, one cannot understand. So what can this mean? We certainly are not declaring war on madness.

How about violence? This country is at arms all over the globe; we cannot be so naive.

So what can this mean? Does it mean that with the right environment, the correct controls, the appropriate laws, that violence can be eliminated or profoundly lessened? And how does self defense or defense against tyranny come in to all this?

Who is it that is examining these "facts"? And do we have confidence in their analytic ability?

One translation that fits is a jaundiced view of free will, a view that sees individuals as part of a historical strip tease where history is gradually revealed to some predestined endpoint. This view does not just deny free will, it denies evil. Individual deviation is a bump in the road that causes an accident. (Pelosi actually called the Arizona shooting an "accident".) And the state, with its clear view of the future, is merely nosing around the accident scene, looking for clues.

Thus the state is an appropriate preemptive agent to be used in anticipation of individual deviation.

For a banal speaker, that is a profound idea.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Assassination Two

According to the media, savage and violent behavior towards seemingly peripheral individuals can be stimulated by nasty and erroneous public opinions. So an isolated idiot or a completely disconnected maniac can be focused into action by the written or spoken word. This is in contradistinction to our opinion on education which shuns any kind of moral or civics teaching. So people can be stimulated to do negative things but not to do positive things. And we apparently know what these dangerous stimuli are. This comes as good news to those who remember the interview with the attempted assassin of George Wallace who revealed that he experienced great anger and hostility while watching The Donna Reed Show, certainly a vipers' nest of chaos and social disruption.

Of course we need to identify these high risk dangerous information areas and stop them. The problem seems to be what is causing what. It appears that violent rap music does not cause violence in inner city youth. Mark Twain, however, can cause prejudice. Muslim terrorists point to the Koran as their inspiration but apparently they are wrong. Does Homer and books about whale hunting cause aggressive behavior in the West? And what censorship could have saved Senor Carlos Castro from his unfortunate recent demise?

There is no reason to denigrate these insightful people who know the causes of these terrible things. But it would be more reassuring if they had something that looked like evidence to bolster their belief. Otherwise the merely plausible might become law. Perhaps it is a simple matter of reading further in the book. The notion is the hypothesis; it is only a starting point. Once the hypothesis is made, long and difficult evaluations have to be made as the hypothesis is stressed. Only after good challenge does the hypothesis get any credibility and, even then, may fail.

But the first day of any study is always exciting and fun. And easy.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Assassination

Murder, in crime, according to The Turk in The Godfather is just business; it is nothing personal. Assassination in politics is almost never business. But it is rarely personal either. Politicians are never killed for any of the Deadly Sins. Of all the assassinations and attempted assassinations in the United States only Booth and possibly Oswald had a political basis. Among the rest, there is no real thread among the assassins except two: Mental illness and Anarchism--in fact the two are so prominent that one could think that one might be diagnostic of the other.
Lincoln: Booth. Certainly political.
McKinley: Leon Czolosz. An Anarchist and follower of Emma Goldberg.
Theodore Roosevelt: John Schrank. A psychotic New York saloon keeper who stalked Roosevelt all over the country because of a dream.
Franklin Roosevelt: Guiseppi Zangora. "Since my stomach hurt I want to make even a capitalist."
George Wallace: Arthur Bremmer. A fame seeker who also stalked Nixon.
Robert Kennedy: Sirhan Sirhan. A Christian Palestinian whose self avowed reason was anti-Zionism. But a stretch to be political as Kennedy had little responsibility there.
Jack Kennedy: Lee Oswald. A Marxist and member of Free Trade Cuba. Perhaps political.
Gerald Ford: Squeaky Fromme. Addled dingbat.
Ronald Reagan: Hinckley. A fame seeker who wanted to impress actress Jodi Foster.

The most recent assassination attempt, that of Congresswoman Gabrelle Giffords presumably by Jared Laughner, has yet to be elucidated. It is likely that a lot of pronouncements and declarations will be made and probably distant causes offered. If the history of assassinations holds true, however, it is unlike that the simple connections that work in common murders--drugs, revenge, jealousy, lust, business--will be applicable in this event either. And any attempt to do so should be seen as disingenuous and, more importantly, distracting. But the amorphous fringe is a poor target at best. It may be easier to hold responsible some innocent group that is closer at hand.

Assassins act symbolically. So will the outraged culture.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Conceptual Inkblot

A discussion has developed as to the most important moment--moment--in the last four hundred years. Of course the responses will be separated through various prisms--all colored as well by an individual's belief in the dominant concepts of history. A Marxist might think Lenin's taking power as communism's first great step, a transnational might suggest the creation of the European Union or the Euro or the collapse of the Soviet State, a Catholic might say the election of Pope John Paul, a Jew the Balfour Amendment or the American recognition of Israel, a Muslim might say the loss of Battle of Vienna in 1682--indeed a Christian might say the same. What would a Jewish Marxist think?

Of course there is no correct answer but it is an interesting exercise because it reveals much of the thinking of those in the debate. Groups, individuals, religions, states--all the answers as plausible as they might be--are revealing as to the makeup of the individual presenting the answer, what in college we often called a person's "conceptual framework."

It is a sort of intellectual Rorschach Test. Takers?

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The Caution of Humility

"Ending Bullying an Inexact Science."
This is not from The Onion; it is a headline from the HuffingtonPost. It implies a body of work investigating bullying and thoughtful self-criticism that attends it. Moreover it implies the value of such inquiry, that bullying is both a reasonable subject of research and that successful management is mere time and effort away. The headline itself is a wonderful bit of modern nonsense: Ending bullying is a hope or desire, not a science. Indeed, science has no aspiration or wish. But it is doubtful that there is not a Bullying Institute somewhere. And if there is one, the employees are certain to wear white coats.

This calls to mind Shimon Peres' lovely observation (a la Niebuhr): "If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact - not to be solved, but to be coped with over time." This is an enlightening thought. How many of the difficulties facing us are problems and how many are facts of life? And how are we to distinguish between them? What screams for change and what for accommodation?

We are a restless and impatient people; we want to improve things. We want to clear the land, bridge the gap, raise the barn. Problems are challenges. But are they really?

Where in our cowboy restlessness and our charming Yankee penchant for tinkering does ambition--or simple foolishness--start to cloud our minds? Is everything to be overcome? Or do we work away at some targeted condition of life like Frankenstein, creating some monster imitation of a solution.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Our Enlightened Caste

Dean Roscoe Pound (Harvard Law Dean from 1916 to 1936): "(law should be) ....in the hands of a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public."


It is hard to imagine what time in history a Harvard Law Dean could say this without some controversy, without some comment. It certainly doesn't sound like an American opinion on government or leadership. (John Adams' lapses excepted.) Especially the "caste" reference. One of the things that so shocked de Tocqueville was that no citizen in America called another "master." There was no such distinction among Americans. The Americans might revere someone or some group but they felt no one above them, recognized no superior "caste". The problem is that the "special caste" is usually self appointed, as others may recognize themselves as Napoleon, Jesus or the Queen of the Sun and Moon. And in a world of uneven distribution of wealth and talent, there is always the chance that those who have less will see it as deserved, just as a six foot three inch blond Plantagenet probably should be a war leader--then king.

But if a culture allows people to feel inferior, they will. Then they will start deferring their decisions, and eventually their lives, to those seemingly more competent. The genius of the American creation is its insistence that everyone is equal before the law, that there are no special citizens. Every man is given responsibility for his own life. It is the American starting point.

The average men who fought and died at Valley Forge did not think like Madison or Jefferson. The brilliance of the American creators is that Madison and Jefferson were capable of thinking like them, the average man, and with admiration not condescension. The Founders of the country felt these farmers, tradesmen, merchants and trappers were capable of any achievement. And why not? They had seen it. They had seen a small peripheral society take arms over points of law and defeat the most powerful nation on earth on the battlefield.

Perhaps that astonishing military victory still hangs on the memory of our "enlightened caste". An element of fear, even paranoia, has crept into modern commentary of late. The recurring theme is "inequality", inequality of income, wealth and position. As if the citizen's accomplishment was not the fulfilling of one's potential as a free man but rather in the collections of goods. The wealth of the nation is unsurpassed in the history of the world but inequality threatens the stability of the nation!

This is new. In the minds of the Founders, the threat to the country was never the grasping average man, it was always the grasping leader.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Palin-tology and Prophesy

This seems to be a time of prophesy from Nostradamus to the Mayans. The Middle East has dueling prophesies with the Apocalypse from the old testament and the various writings loved by Achmedinijaad.

Here is Palin's prophesy from the OED:

palingenesis \pal-in-JEN-uh-sis\, noun:

1. Rebirth; regeneration.
2. In biology, embryonic development that reproduces the ancestral features of the species.
3. Baptism in the Christian faith.
4. The doctrine of transmigration of souls.

We're more interested in rebirth, regeneration--particularly economic rather than the transmigration of souls. Not to say we are opposed to the transmigration of souls......