Dessay in Lucia:How do you Top Daughter?

Natalie Dessay has long since established herself as a first-tier coloratura, but she had a career-defining hit last season with her performance opposite Juan Diego Flórez in Daughter of the Regiment at the Met—about the most cheerful and engaging big-stage performance that ever I’ve seen Still, nothing comes without a price. In San Francisco this month with Lucia di Lammermoor, she found herself in competition with herself.

That is: in Daughter, Dessay does one memorable entrance dragging a rope line of laundry. The scene and, indeed, the performance as a whole, established that Dessay knows how to give good comedy. In Lucia, she seems still to be dragging the rope line of comedy behind her. But Lucia is a much more spookily serious than Daughter—funny weird if anything, and definitely not funny ha ha. Dessay sang it wonderful and acted it well. Still for so much of the stage business, she didn’t seem to know quite what to do except plan it for laughs. This was particularly true in the first act, where she has to establish that she is half over-the-edge already, so we will accept her later percipitious collapse. Some of her caterwauling came perilously close to clowing.

This isn’t a complaint, exactly. Her mad scene, with blood fingerpaint-smears on her face, was leisurely, slow, fully realized, yet never seemed to strain for effect. It’s certainly one I’ll remember, and this is not trivial—comparing notes after the show, we agreed that we’ve seen others that we can’t really remember at all. And in general, you can just take it as evidence of how performers gain texture from their own history.

Dessay’s backup in Lucia was creditable, but a bit disappointing. As Edgardo, Giuseppe Filianoti offered a lovely voice, but he seems to be a soloist, not up to drama. In their first-act encounter, Dessay kept flailing desperately about for some kind of human interaction, while Filianoti continued with his private cabaret turn In he second half where he was truly on his own he was less constrained, but he still brought to mind the old rule (Stanislavski?) that too many actors think about what they can bring to the character, not what the character can bring to them. Gabriele Viviani as Lucia’s brother Raimondo, understood his character and sang well, but his voice didn’t really conquer the space of the War Memorial (throwaway comment: has anyone noticed how the plot here parallels Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure—sister doesn’t want to traffick her virtue but brother, for whatever reason, thinks trafficking would be a pretty good idea--?).

On the whole, then, a fine performance, worth a detour; not up to Daughter, but hey, what is? Taking her bow as the mad Lucia, Dessay pointed her bottom at the ceiling and folded her hands above (it works; you’d have to see it)—a cute piece of playful clowning, utterly unmotivated by anything in the production. What matches Daughter? Evidently Dessay isn’t so sure herself.

Higher Ed

My friend Majnails ran across "a remark supposedly made by someone in the Nineteenth Century to the effect that there was one university in France, two in England, six in Prussia, and 52 in Ohio."

Who said this?--asks Majnails, and answers his own question: "Just guessing here but I'd bet on Mark Twain."

Might be Mark Twain, but if you extend the definition of "university" to include "jerkwater cowtown college," then it is very likely true, not so? In the sense that virtually every county-seat town in Ohio had at least one such, maybe two?

Afterthought: but then there is this one.

From the Sacerdotal File

I assume I'm late on this, but hey--am advised that the Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, TX, with its 140-acre campus, is known by the locals as "Six Flags Over Jesus" (link). And that its pastor has been arrested on multiple charges involving sex and children (link).

Thanks, Larry.

Holiday

We're off to San Francisco for a bit of opera and to catch up with some friends. We planned this months ago but it couldn't be more convenient: here on the flat of the Sacramento Valley floor, we are under an inversion layer of smoke for an unexampled ring of forest fires in the foothills and mountains that surround us on three sides--and we are only at the beginning of the fire season. We've mostly stayed hunkered down inside the air conditioning for the last couple of days. I did venture forth to the super market last night, where I saw a couple of people wearing breather masks. So, a good time to go gaze at the Pacific. Probably no more posting until Monday but meanwhile, you can follow the fires here. Thanks for the pointer to a somewhat ambivalent Yves Smith.

The Fear Factor: What McCain Could Say, But Almost Certainly Won't

McCain Campaign Manager: Terrorist Attack Would Help Campaign

--CNN (link)

Announcer: Ladies and Gentlemen, Senator McCain (applause).

Senator McCain: My fellow Americans, I understand that my Campaign Manager has said that a terrorist attack would be good for my campaign. I have been asked whether I endorse these views. I can answer in two ways. The first answer is purely technical, operational: is it a fact that a terrorist attack would be good for my campaign? The fact is that no one knows. It might be, if it frightened Americans, and if they believed I could better relieve their fright. It might not, if the voters took it as evidence of a failure of Republican leadership in the war on terror.

But let that be. The point is (and this is my second answer)—I don’t want to win the election that way, even if I can. Mine is a campaign of hope, not of fear: a campaign of promise, not of suspicion; a campaign of daring, not of caution. I am in this race to mobilize the energy, the great sense of purpose of the American people—and, yes, their resilience, even in the face of misfortune.

I think there are good reasons to vote for me in November, and I hope you will be persuaded to do so. But fear is not a good reason. If you fear terrorist attack, and if you are driven by fear, vote for somebody else. If you have—as I have—confidence in the American people, and hope for our future, then vote for me.

The devilish part of this speech is that it is so sneaky and deceptive: give this speech and McCain gets all the fear vote anyway—because he reminds then that he is the candidate who will comfort them in their fears. But he would leave Democrats stripped and deprived of their opportunity to mock him for campaigning on the fear platform.,

The Democrats should wake up every morning giving thanks that they have so backward-looking and unimaginative an opponent.

Miami Spice

A thousand kudos to TPM for bringing me up to date on Efraim E. Diveroli (link; cf. link), the 22-year-old Miami merchant of death, by comparison to whom a Carl Hiaasen novel is about as much fun as the back of a Dade County bus transfer. Where else will I find, for example, an arms dealer named Bar Kochba Botach (link)—and if you were in the business of purveying weapons and ammo, wouldn’t want your customers to be, like satisfied with your goods & services? I see from Efraim’s MySpace page that he is in my “extended network”—which I cannot possibly fathom, because he has only one MySpace “friend”, and to the best of my knowledge, so do I (and it ain’t the same one). I do see that Efraim is looking for

a woman that will stand by her man because she knows he would do the same for her no matter the circumstance.

…and I can only hope he found one in time for the arraignment.

Oh, and a word about John L. Withers, II, the US Ambassador to Albania, whose copybook seems to have been blotted in the whole affair. I see by the Embassy web page that the Ambassador is a career appointee, and a second-generation civil servant. Which leads to two thoughts;

• I assume guys like this know what is permissible (=what they can get away with?) in a job like this?

• But I would assume that guys like this are also supposed to be good at covering their tracks?

Dan Wakefield on "The Silent Generation"

Dan Wakefield (b. 1932) is an unlikely candidate for his rôle as chronicler of the cultural elite—middle class kid from Indianapolis, and an Eagle Scout, his style is modest, almost circumspect, with not a hint of rage or rancor, and not much by way of irony. What seems to have transformed him was his time at Columbia University in the golden age where he studied under Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, and became an acolyte of C. Wright Mills. What stamped him was his ten years in Greenwich Village, where he scratched out a living as a writer and exhibited a Boswellian knack for friendship (Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Norman Podhoretz, Murray Kempton--Wakefield drops good names). He’s not as discerning a critic as his model Malcolm Cowley (of Exile’s Return), but he’s got a sharp eye and a concern for getting things right—and in the long run is judgments on, say, Jack Kerouac or Dorothy Day, or Freudian psychoanalysis, appear to hold up pretty well.

No wonder, then, that Wakefield’s New York in the 50s appears to have established itself as the definitive account of the city between, as it were, Fiorello LaGuardia and John V. Lindsay—not quite a forgotten decade, but one whose memory can be swept up in the deluge of what came after. One of its many names is “the silent generation.” Wakefield believes the label is misunderstood:

If my generation was “silent,” it was not in failure to speak out with our work, but in the sense of adopting a style that was not given to splash and spotlights. Max Frankel says, “We set out essentially to be spectators and reflectors in life. A dogged kind of centrism came out of this, and it was later confused with unfeelingness in the sixties, as if we didn’t care enough for issues like the environment.”

We had no desire to shout political slogans or march with banners, because we had seen thee idealism of the radical thirties degenerate into the disillusionment of Stalinism and the backlash reaction of name-calling anticommunism. The naïve hope of salvation by politics seemed to have burned itself out in the thirties, replaced in the fifties too often by an equally naïve belief in salvation through psychoanalysis. … Ours was not the silence of timidity or apathy, but the kind James Joyce meant, in Portrait of the Artist, when he spoke of the young writer’s vow as “silence,exile, and cunning.” The “silence” of Joyce was not surrender; it simply meant not to blab or brag about your work. The “cunning” was finding a way to make a living and then doing it. The “exile” was the place far enough from the censure of home and middle-class convention to feel free enough to create.

Fn: Wakefield is another guy who needs a Wiki.

This Just In: Fascism on the Rise in Italy

Milan--The Fascisti, or extreme Nationalists, which means black-shirted, knife-carrying, club-swinging, quick-stepping, nineteen-year-old potshot patriots, have worn out their welcome in Italy. Banks and large commercial houses, who contributed the funds that launched the Fascist movement as a protective measure against as threatened Communist revolution, have withdrawn their support and the mass of the Italian press have turned solidly against the Fascisti. Meanwhile the Fascisti, solidly organized, are forming themselves into a political party and by a constant series of outrages, keep Italy in a state of class war.

--Ernest Hemingway, The Toronto Star Weekly, June 24, 1922

McCain and Obama on the Battery: Can't Anybody Play This Game?

I know not what others may think (I haven't been checking, really) but I still think that McCain's $300 million battery is the dumbest public policy idea since, oh maybe since this. Or at least the dumbest idea from a Republican. Jimeny Christmas, hasn't this guy ever heard of the Patent Office? What did he think Our Boys have been Fighting For in all these wars? Or restated: if ever there was an enterprise that can safely be left to the market, I should think it would be this one.

But if McCain breaks the tape, I'd say that Obama crosses the line just a little later. Does he use this as an occasion to mock and deride the old codger, to suggest how totally clueless the aspirant Leader of the Free World really is? Hah. No, Obama thinks this is a grand time to drop hints about the need for a massive public program:

...I don’t think a $300 million prize is enough. When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn’t put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win – he put the full resources of the United States government behind the project and called on the ingenuity and innovation of the American people. That’s the kind of effort we need to achieve energy independence in this country ...

Link (emphasis added). Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph. We do not need to put the full resouces of the United States behind this program. We do not need to march forward to 1955.

We do need to do stuff. For example, I take it for granted that the oil companies have done everything they know how to thwart and deflect any entrepreneurial innovation that might have done anything to disturb their comfortable market niche. We do need the resources of government to help level the playing field. And we do need the government to stop being a collaborator-enabler with this kind of retrograde rent-grabbing. But aside from that, the best thing government can do is get out of the way.

All the smart money tells us that Obama is the greatest rhetorician since JFK. This would have been a fine time for him to deploy some of that skill to so the world just how bankrupt and incoherent McCain's portfolio really is. Instead, we get the economic equivalent of My Pet Goat.

Afterthought: I see I'm suffering from an italics imbalance today. But thanks, I'll be okay once I get my meds adjusted.

Factoid: Generals

"There are currently 57 active-duty female generals in the US military..."

Link. Wonder how many male generals?

Update: Haven't yet come up with a full answer on generals, but I do find this (link) suggesting that there are 35 generals authorized in the Marine Corps. Beginning to remind me of the lion who escaped from the Washington Zoo--he stayed loose because he went to the Pentagon and ate a general a day and nobody ever missed them.

Some Stuff I Am Trying to Learn About Central Asia

Trying to get my mind around Central Asia. That would be: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghyzstan, Tajikistan (I suppose I could include Afghanistan, but it is not on my travel agenda).

• Kazakhstan: is the big one, in area. Ninth largest in land mass  in the world, just behind Argentina, ahead of Sudan. Mostly steppe, but a Caspian Sea border, lots of oil.  The word "Kazakh" is apparently related to the more familiar western "Cossack."  The locals like to tell you it means "free spirit."
  

• Turkmenistan: mostly desert, but plenty of natural gas. Only country I know of whose president is a dentist.

• Uzbekistan: biggest in population, and most complicated. Uzbeks, but also Russians, Tajiks (how many?), Koreans (Koreans?—yes, Stalin moved them out here) and others. Double-landlocked: a landlocked country surrounded by landlocked countries. Euphonious ancient names (Samarkand, Bukhara), but also a living monument to the failure of old Soviet environmental management (the Aral Sea, in an air shot, looks like a cancerous kidney).

• Kirgyzstan: the one whose prime minister tried westernizing, wanted  his nation to be the Switzerland of the east, and who wound up a math teacher in Moscow.

• Tajikistan: the one where they speak a variety of Persian. The smallest and poorest, the one with eight 20,000-foot mountains. The one that celebrated its post-Soviet freedom with a five-year civil war. The Afghanistan of the stans.
  
  Source: mostly Martha Brill Olcott, Central Asia’s Second Chance (2005)

Oh, and he "-stan" apparently the same Indo-European root that produces all those Greek "-mi" verbs. So, station, anastasia, instance. And, of course, "stand."

Good Image: Seinfeld on Carlin

Or more prescisely, how Carlin did comedy:

He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.

link.

Charlie Cook is Cranky This Week

From Cook's weekly email:

One of the byproducts of each major party nominating its most self-righteous and sanctimonious candidate is that with some degree of regularity in the campaign, each will be embarrassed by not adhering to an impossibly high, and politically impractical, standard of moral and ethical perfection. . . . Perhaps it is because I am on the wrong side of 50 years of age that I don't understand the concept of "post-partisan," the new buzzword that, as best I can tell, means that your last name is not Bush, Clinton or Dole.

This is, by the way, one of the best politics newsletters you can imagine. If you aren't getting it already, go here.

Misunderestimating and the Bush Legacy

Conservatives--pardon, Bush diehards--seem to be going all giggly over Andrew Roberts' suggestion that we may be misunderestimating George Bush and that his place in history may be somewhat grander than his derisory 23 percent poll rating today. Strictly speaking, Roberts is right: spot and forward markets offer different prices. Nobody was ready to put up as marble temple for Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War. More narrowly also: if, as, and when we "win" the "War" on "Terror," then lots of the incumbent's crimes and follies may be forgotten, if not exactly forgiven. Just remember how Ronald Reagan was saved from looking like a doofus by the utterly unexpected (unexpected at least by Republicans) intervention of Mikhail Gorbachev. Okay,granted, Reagan still looked like a doofus, but a loveable doofus instead of an industrial-strength clusterfuck. Same thing could happen to Bush.

But there are all sorts of possible endings to this story. Take Warren G. Harding: still much loved and admired when he decamped in 1923--only months later did the true awfulness of his incumbency begin to become apparent. Or, Franklin Pierce. He looked bad when he left office; even worse by the end of the Civil War. Someday, those conservatives may look back on 23 percent with nostalgia.

Deuce the Ace

Somebody—I think it might even be Proust—once said that you can get to go to bed with just anybody if you sit up and listen to them until three o’clock in the morning.

My friend Scott has a milder version: if you sit up and listen to somebody until three o’clock, you hear a lot of dull stuff, but once in a while you hear somebody incredibly interesting.

I was thinking of Scott (and Proust) yesterday when I read the long, fascinating New York Times report about (no kidding) Deuce Martinez, ace debriefer and his work as an Al Qaeda interrogator (link). And he made me a remember a lesson I learned (and could have learned better) back in my days doing newspaper journalism.

Of course, we did not have the option of beating the living shit out of our subjects, but we did know: it is absolutely amazing what people will tell you if you just still and listen.

I remember one of the best I ever knew—he went on to a distinguished career but I won’t embarrass him by outing him here—who used to sit back there in the corner with his old fashioned headset on saying “yeh…uh huh…no kidding…yeh…yeh.” And his copy was just spilling over with wonderful stuff.

It isn't quite a snap of the fingers, of course. It takes tact, preparation, a certain skill at manipulation and of course p-a-a-t-ience, which may be the hardest part of all. Maybe it doesn’t work every time, but it sure works often. Lots of lowly hacks know it. How come the Vice-president’s office never got the memo?

Post Editor Leaves, Standards Deteriorate

Bob Woodward, überjournalist at the Washington Post, saluting the departure of editor Leonard Downie, Jr., says "he grew accustomed to Downie's 'notorious pencil marks all over a draft story'" (link).

The story also says that Downie is " The son of a businessman whose career included work as a Cleveland milkman." For valuable prizes, readers are invited to explain who worked as a milkman--father or son?--and who the heck was asleep at the switch when the story was being edited?

It also reports that Downie " has never been accused of fostering a star system." I assume this will come as a surprise to Woodward, and perhaps also to Howie Kurtz, who wrote the story.

McCain Prizes

McCain wants to offer a prize for battery power (link).  I say God bless im but don't stop there.  Here are other projects for which a grateful nation ought to be willing to offer a reward:

• 
  Perpetual motion.


• Gold out of base metals.


• Squaring the circle.
  
  
• An end to world hunger.
  
  
• Peace in our time.
  
  
• And a pony!
  
  

More on "Bad Guys Get the Girls"

Regular readers of Underbelly will not be surprised to learn that chicks go for bad guys. But here are a couple of researchers who offer some thoughts on just which bad guys, and why (link):

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

But being just slightly evil could have an upside: a prolific sex life, says Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. "We have some evidence that the three traits are really the same thing and may represent a successful evolutionary strategy."

Might be profitable to tie this together with a comment over at TigerHawk (link):

The way that I know how out of touch I am is that the two things that turned me around from voting for GWB just because he wasn't the coward snake in the grass Kerry was his "Bring it on," and "Wanted dead or alive." My reaction was finally a man who will be a man. I became an ardent supporter at that point and I haven't wavered.

I don't know where I'll put my strong loyalties after he leaves office. I find Barack Obama, the poster boy for Beta males, beneath contempt. I do not trust John McCain, who seems to be more interested in not having people mad at him than in actually standing up. I'll vote for him because the other guy is so repulsive, but I can't see myself feeling any great loyalty to him.

My guess is that the commentator--she's a she, apparently--speaks for a fairly large market niche. Forget the guys who change didies--this chick wants a guy who will breed strong sons, who can beat the sand out of their adversaries. Beta male, indeed--as in "hah, when I want you, I'll throw you a bone."

Some Stuff I Think I Know about Health Care

Some stuff I know about health care, I think, via David Dranove :

• Most reliable indicator of surgeon skill: number of surgeries performed. But nobody is quite sure why: could be because he gets lots of practice, could be because the good ones get a lot of business.

• Most reliable source of information about the quality of specialists—your primary care doctor, if (big if) your primary care doctor will tell the truth. But whom does s/he want to please more—the network of specialists, or you?

• A generation ago, a lot of uninsured got medical care via compulsory cross-subsidies. Translated: providers who got money to build hospitals under the Hill-Burton Act were required to provide services to the unserved. So paying patients unknowingly paid for the non-paying.

• Using emergency rooms for non-emergency care is not as goofy an idea as it seems. The big item for an emergency room is having the team ready for, well, for emergencies. The marginal cost of using their extra time to treat non-emergencies is near zero. If the patient is willing to wait, might as well let the docs use their extra time that way.

• Our model of medical care is still Dr. Marcus Welby, MD, of the TV show (link). Interesting thing is, though, that the Dr. Welbys of the world weren't all that good at doctoring. They got away with a lot of mistakes because people trusted them. Incidentally: somebody must have explored the proposition that the ultimate model of modern manhood was Robert Young—star of both Marcus Welby and Father Knows Best—and that Young suffered from alcoholism and depression, culminating in a suicide attempt (link).

Who is

Fethullah Gülen?

Ignoto knows (link).

Thanks, Ignoto.

Cross Elasticities

Mark Perry has a useful summary of cross-elasticities of demand, triggered by the spike in gas prices (link). Example: an increase in the sale of locking gasoline caps. Mr. and Mrs. Buce have responded more directly, choosing rather to park their car on its side.

Update: The Mess in Washington

From instuctions on a government form:

Print on Single-Sided Paper Only

I'm thinking, I'm thinking...

Update to update: Kansas bureau points out that there is single sided paper; just hard to get it into a printer (link).

Apreciation: Dranove on Health Care

I could say that David Dranove’s Code Red is the best book I’ve ever read about the economics of health care but it wouldn’t be saying very much because I don’t think I’ve ever read any another book about the economics of health care. So I can’t do a strict comparison, but my guess is that it’s a pretty good book in any event—lots of particulars about what works and doesn’t work in health care and some (perhaps not enough) about what might be made to work in a new presidency.

And clarity: Dranove has a lot of that on offer, but with a catch. The catch—perhaps the central takeaway point of the whole book—is that health care is inherently complicated, a simply massive spaghetti-net of exceptions, qualifications, special cases and GOK what else. And yet even so, he doesn’t do everything: unless I missed it, there is not a word about what might be the most successful public health care program, the Veterans’ Administration (well, maybe an even better one is the one that Congress provides for itself, but it’s a special case).

If you had to get it down to a soundbyte, I suppose that one candidate might be “the rise and inglorious collapse of the HMO”—the “health management organizations” that swept over the landscape in the 90s, leaving almost everyone unhappy, and quickly receding on the advent of the “PPO,” the “preferred provider organization.” The PPO, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is supposed to be a kind of “HMO lite,” without the same level of consumer dissatisfaction, but perhaps also without the potential for economy tht the HMO was supposed to offer.

Dranove doesn’t waste a lot of energy regretting the failure of the HMO: he concedes, at least that they emerged as an administrative nightmare. He does argue, at least in passing, that HMOs were actually pretty good (or at any rate, not obviously bad) at health care, even if they were dreadful at paperwork. He does insist that the problems that HMOs were intended to solve remain with us: lack of meaningful quality control, or cost control.

Dranove does have one drab candidate for a pathway to improvement in both quality or price: more and better electronic data sharing. It’s astounding how often, 30 years into the computer age, doctors still do their paperwork with obsidian chips on sandstone (but I did see my internist with a laptop last month, first time ever for me).

He also suggests (channeling Burton Weisbrod) “that the most impoertang long-run engine of our healthcare system is technological change.” X-rays and antiseptics revolutionized medicine a generation ago; microsurgery and genetic tinkering may do it for the next.

--

David Dranove, Code Red: An Economist Explains How to Revive the Healthcare System Without Destroying It (Princeton UP 2008)

Who are the 406 in "Operation Malicious Mortgage"?

I wonder if anybody has actually seen a list of the much-hyped "406" indicted in "operation malicious mortgage," the FBI's vaunted crackdown on mortgage fraud, or any other fullscale survey of particulars. A Google News search (link) churns up a number of local names in local stories of people who, to all appearances, did in fact phony up mortgage applications to suck money out of lenders. But the initial press release (link) is full of enough grandiosity and short enough on specifics to make one wonder how many of those cases got swept up under the marquee for decorative purposes only.

Life in the New World

I can't decide where to place this on a continuum between self-satisfied solipsism and really kind of interesting--this description of how they work at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall's primo blog, or rather blog network (link):

Explaining how TPM works can be daunting, especially if you're describing it to someone from a traditional journalism background or, say, older relatives for whom something as simple as email is still intimidating.

As most of you know, we have a bricks-and-mortar office in Manhattan. But that's just the anchor for our operation. We have a reporter in DC, another reporter who works most of the week from Connecticut, and I'm in Missouri. So a third of our staff of nine is not based in the NYC office.

For that model to work, we rely some on phones, a lot on email, but primarily on Skype. That means a whole series of Skype chats going on at any one time between and among editors, reporters, and interns. Even most of the internal office interactions are via Skype, so that those of us not in the office proper can be kept in the loop. Picture a staff of mostly 20-somethings squeezed into a 700-some-odd-square-foot newsroom, hunched over their computers, fingers flying across their keyboards as they IM with colleagues who may be sitting right next to them.

As I say, it's a hard arrangement to explain to the uninitiated. Spencer Ackerman, who used to work for us at TPMmuckraker, captured it pretty well in this blog post:

If you want to understand what it's like to work at TPM, spend a couple days with your ten smartest friends and constantly IM with them. Set up IM windows for multi-person conversation, and break out those discussions with individual participants. And make the substance of those conversations deep-in-the-weeds investigative journalism. Make sure you don't often go more than, say, two minutes without contributing to the discussion. And see if you can avoid being overwhelmed.

As odd as all that may sound, one of the most out-of-the-box things about TPM was that until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I've worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor.

It had just worked out that way. Josh and I both have young kids. Travel is expensive. Whatever. A hundred reasons why it hadn't happened yet. ...

Notice

From the NYT:

[I]t would be a bad idea to plan on getting any inheritance from your older relatives. ... [W]ith each passing year, the pressures on the nest eggs of those older people will only grow. The truly rich will be fine, as they usually are. But a lot of other people, even retirees with net worths well into the seven figures, could end up spending every dime before they die.

(Link). Notice to all expectant children, indifferent grandchildren, harebrained nieces and nephews, etc:

• We have not yet dipped into our capital.


• We plan on living for ever.

That is all. Resume lives of carefree self-indulgence.

In the "Bleeding Obvious" Sweepstakes ...

we have a winner!

Bush May End Term With Iran Issue Unsettled

Source: New York Times (link). Thanks, John.

Update: Mrs. Buce offers a non-trivial response--"you mean we will not go to war?"--which, true or not, seems to be more or less what the piece says.

Pension Planning

Ignoto finds that if you live long enough, you must face the issue:

"But after all, life begins at sixty-five."

"It's for different reasons entirely that my life began at sixty-five.
That was when I qualified."

"Qualified for what? Voting?"

"Qualified for the old age pension, son. Ever since then I've been my own
boss. No more getting pushed around, no more licking asses, not for me!
Nobody can't take that pension away from me."

"It's a great thing," I said.

"It's a wonderful thing. It's the most wonderful thing that ever happened
to me in my life."

"Can you imagine what they did to me?" the old man said. "And that was
when I couldn't walk yet after my second stroke. They put me out in the
county poorhouse, with nobody to look after me except my chums out there.
They said all the hospitals were full. I still have some of the bedsores I
got then. And then they weren't going to give me my old-age pension, even
after I qualified."

"Now I got me a little place of my own under the stairs at the warehouse,
and nobody can say boo to me."

--Ross Macdonald, Blue City 8-10   (Alfred A. Knopf ed. 1947).

The Spirit Moves Me...

I seem to have kicked off a bit of email chatter with my reference to the divine afflatus (link, last graf). Hm--well, I admit it is not a household phrase, but it was familiar to me, I assumed from my newspaper days back in Kentucy, where politicians provide a dependable flow of hot air. Sure enough, it turns out that there is an essay of that name by H. L. Mencken, reprinted in his Prejudices: Second Series (link)—Mencken, the presiding deity of journalists of my generation (our Tim Russert? Now, that bears some thought). And apparently there is a straight line back to Cicero.

It seems the phrase gained prominence among the 19^th-Century romantics as tarted-up Sunday dress for “inspiration.” I assume it is also cognate with “flatulence,” and in an age of Victorian propriety, I don’t suppose it was much trick at all for an impudent schoolboy (with even a minimal classical education) to suggest the imputation that nice ladies might, well, em, fart.

In an age where the nicest of ladies has established her connection with main drainage, I suppose the connection is no longer even salacious. Perhaps the pivot point was the limerick conventionally attributed to Woodrow Wilson:

I sat next to the duchess at tea;
It was just as I feard it would be:

Her rumblings abdominal
Were simply phenomenal

And everyone thought it was me.

I’ve seen that one in the teacher’s edition of a songbook for primary schoolchildren. So I’d say the gas is pretty much out of the bag.

Uh, let me rephrase that your honor. Meanwhile, here is a particularly ripe example:

[She] writes like an inspired priestess—not without a most truthful heart, but a heart that is devoted to religion, and whose individuality is cast upward in the divine afflatus, and dissolved and carried off in the recipient breath of angelic ministrants.

--Richard Hengist Horne, A New Spirit of the Age 27- (1944), quoted here.

The Importance of a Classical Education

At least in Britain (link):

A Cambridge University student was handcuffed and marched to a police car after launching an extraordinary attack on a spectator at a jelly-wrestling competition.

Minutes earlier, shamed Classics student Nadia Witkowski had been wallowing around in a paddling pool full of red jelly, wrestling fellow scantily-clad students in an attempt to win a £250 prize.

But after being booed by onlookers who judged the Trinity College student to have lost the match, the 23-year-old lashed out at a spectator, punching her on the nose.

Thanks, Ignoto. And (on Ferdinand Mount's autobiography (link)):

[T]his is the story of a man who flitters from one admittedly nepotistic posting to another: society children’s nanny; journalist on the Daily Sketch (his expensive classical education proving itself perfect training for the writing of pithy 250-word tabloid leaders); political columnist for the Spectator; head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit; before sinking back into what he describes as his easiest job ever, editing the TLS from 1991 to 2002.

Who's He Losing? Oh, Them

If Obama is so popular with so many people, why is his lead so small? Charlie Cook has an answer, and it impressed him, and it impresses me: Obama is losing the baby boomers. Cook explains (link)

Of all people, the generation that brought us the Vietnam War protests and the Summer of Love is proving to be a very tough nut for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to crack. ...

Obama trailed McCain by 9 points among both 18-to-34-year-old white voters and those 65 and older. He lagged by 10 points among 35-to-49-year-old whites. But among those 50 to 64, Obama is losing by a whopping 18 points, 51 percent to 33 percent....

Some of this may be attributable to long-term voting patterns. These are voters who remember the disappointing--some would say failed--presidency of Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, which was followed by the fairly popular--many would say successful--presidency of Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1989. The voters in this bloc were ages 19 to 33 when that 12-year downer period for Democrats began and 31 to 45 with their voting patterns set, most likely for life, when it ended. Obviously, there are exceptions.

It is often said that Reagan drew a whole generation into the Republican Party. And some observers wonder whether George W. Bush may have driven another generation away. If this is true, Barack Obama, meet Ronald Reagan, your real opponent.

But do white Boomers' past voting patterns explain Obama's problems with them? Or, is his difficulty that these are voters in their prime earnings years, when they are most sensitive to the issue of taxes? Do they view national security issues differently and want beefier credentials than Obama offers? ...

Cook says he doesn't know the answer to his own question, but would like to find out. He does recall a first principle of modern politics, well known to political junkies although perhaps not so well among the population as a whole: the last Democrat to carry even a plurality of white voters was Lyndon Johnson in 1974.

The Rawls Factor on Not Fighting the Tape

I met John Rawls once; he seemed like the nicest man you could imagine. But one reason I have never been too crazy about John Rawls the philosopher is that he seemed to good at comforting the comfortable: reassuirng cosseted young Harvard students that their all-you-can eat smorgy of privilege came with a complimentary side dish of entitlement.

You see a lot of that sort of thing in academic writing: results that cast a gratifying warm glow on the inquirer. My friend Ignoto offers up a compelling example in the abstract of a new paper by an economist:

A theory is developed that explains how stocks can crash without fundamental news and why crashes are more common than frenzies. A crash occurs via the interaction of rational and naive investors. Naive traders believe that prices follow a random walk with serially correlated volatility. Their expectations of future volatility are formed adaptively. When the market crashes, naive traders sell stock in response to the apparent increase in volatility. Since rational traders are risk averse as well, a lower price is needed to clear the market: The crash is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think this means: don't blame us smart guys when we lose all your money by following the stupid guys down.

He adds, "frenzies cannot occur in this model," though what that has to do with anything is not obvious from this abstract.

"My Courage and Skill to Him That Can Get It":Mollie Panter-Downes on London in World War II

Here's someone who deserves a Wiki page: Mollie Panter-Downes.

You remember Mollie? Perhaps you do. She was a sometimes novelist and short story writer, and more importantly the London corespondent for The New Yorker magazine, whose "Letter from London" did so much to form our enduring picture of the doughty British as they fended off the Nazis in World War II.

I've been thinking of Mollie lately as I thumb through a collection called The New Yorker Book of War Pieces (Schockdn, 1988), one of those items that resurfaced in the recent housecleaning. There are a lot of names to remember here: Rebecca West, A. J. Liebling, John Lardner and, at last, John Hersey, whose epochal "Hiroshima" ends the collection. There are others perhaps a tad more recherché: E. J. Kahn, Jr., St. Clair McKelway, Brendan Gill. And Mollie Panter-Downes.

I haven't made an exact count, but Mollie may come first through the tape with number of pieces anthologized here (Liebling is a contender), and it is uncanny how familiar they all sound, to anyone who lived through the period, either in life or in books--familiar even if you have never read them at all. Her picture of England in a troubled time is as much a part of our mythology as all those old Mawsterpiece Theatre soapers that still clog the airwaves on Public Broadcasting.

Here is Mollie on September 3, 1939, just after Hitler crossed the border into Poland: "the London crowds are cool--cooler than they were in 1914--in spite of thundery weather that does it best to scare everybody by staging unofficial rehearsals for air raids at the end of breathlessly humid days." And on May 12, 1940, as Chamberlain fell and Churchill came to power: "London itself seemed much the same as usual except that everyone carried a paper and most people for the first time in months carried a gas mask." And on June 22, after the fall of Paris--though stunned (she says) the British people "took refuge in the classic formula for disaster: calmness, and an increasingly dogged determination to hold back for bitter months--or years, if necessary--a juggernaut that everyone now knows is out to annihilate the nation in weeks."

It's that last one that is really striking. Any fool can say after the fact that "we know they could do it all along." But here is Mollie in the heat of (literally) battle saying: buck up, steady on, things will be all right in the end.

Mollie has not quite vanished into history. Amazon still recognizes the name (link): a couple of her books appear still to be in print, thanks to the dedication of one or two small presses. I have my own copy of Good Evening, Mrs. Craven, a short story collection acquired at Palookaville's best second-hand bookshop ("Merry Christmas 1999, Love--Jessica, XOXO"). A jacket blurb describes her as one of her own characters: her father died at Mons in 1914; she lived for more than 60 years with her family in Surrey; "each day Mollie took a basket with her lunch to a writing hut in the woods where, between 1938 and 1984, she wrote 852 pieces for The New Yorker."

I suspect Mollie may pale by comparison to her more flamboyant opposite number in Paris--that would be Janet Flanner, aka Genet, Flanner the flâneur, bisexual, restless, polygynous, and to boot with a sister named Hildegarde. Flanner does have her own Wiki (link), and it is a treasure; Mollie is relegated to some scattered footnotes (link) ("is this a real name?" one commentator inquires). Oddly enough, Flanner is not so heavily represented in this particular collection, although her "Paris, Germany" is justly recognized as a classic. In the end it may be Mollie's very posture of ordinariness that makes her less visible--hiding in plain sight. Too bad, here is a writer who deserves not to be forgotten.

[You ask--why don't you write the Wiki yourself? Answer, I don't do Wiki. They lock me out for some reason--I think it may have to do with the Google Accelerator. And I have never tried to break through the lock, because I figured that if once I started, I might never stop.]

Update: But there is a New York Times obit (link)--oh and an even better one in The Independent (link)--oh and this book passage (link)--but but but apparently she is not the original for Mrs. Miniver (link).

No, Wait, it was the Spin Cycle on the Washing Machine

My friend Larry starts my day off with a story about a woman in Croatia who sat dead in front of her TV set for 42 years (link). I wrote back to say I'd seen a similar story a while back only it was more like one year. Larry responds:

The first year is the hardest. After that it's mostly re-runs.

Mrs. Buce chimes in:

Forty-two years ago, someone in Croatia had a TV set?

"There's No Cause for Alarm, We're Just Stopping to Take on More Ice"

Adjacent headlines in my Google Reader:

Dutch government acknowledges peak gas.

So you want to see a show?

[Near-er my God to thee, Near-er my God tothee...]

More Cool Graphics

US Open on Line via Prime Time TV (Kedrosvsky)

Projected Dutch Gas Production (Oil Drum)

Foreclosed Properties on Offer from Countrywide (Carpe Diem).

Miscellaneous Gloom and Doom from Perot (Financial Armageddon)

Pig-time Operator

My friend Margaret just sent me a picture of a kid kissing a pig. Made me remember one of my first adult jobs: I was a photographer for the daily newspaper in Washington Courthouse, Ohio. One of my duties--it may have been my most important duty--was to take the picture of the prize pig at the County Fair 4-H auction.

The only good angle for the picture was from inside the auction ring. Now, pigs may be ill-informed, but they are not dumb; when the prize pig came into the ring, he knew that something was going to happen that he wasn't going to like. Also, pigs are not Christian, or at any rate, they do not have the spirit of Christian charity. So when they are in a bad mood, they go looking for somebody to hurt.

So there was I, with a 4"x5" speed graphic in hand, trying to change flashbulbs while hopping backwards around a show ring, inches away from an angry porker.

Pretty good training for being a law professor, though.

Oh, and Margaret's picture--cute pig.


Update: Hoo ha! I just checked the website at the paper. Looks like life back there may not have changed all that much (link).

Cool graphics

Say aah.

Crude prices.

Not a Team Player, That Boy

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

(link).

[Note: irony/sarcasm protocol applies.]

Snips and Snails and Puppydog's Tails

Tyler Cowen (and a whole slew of commentators) weigh in on a noteworthy proposition: liberals tend to think that homosexuality is hardwired and gender differences are not, while conservatives think just the other way around (link).

As a generalization, I suspect there is a good deal of merit to this view, but I don’t think either position does very well at describing me. At the very least, my views evolve: when I was young, I took it for granted that gender differences were hard-wired and I didn’t know enough about homosexuality to have an opinion. In the 60s and 70s, I submitted to the prevailing wisdom that gender differences were cultural (I think maybe I always had my fingers crossed but who knows). And once I began paying attention, I pretty quickly came to the view that homosexuality must be hard-wired.

On homosexuality, I still hold that view, but on gender differences, I’ve regressed: I think we were closer to right the first time. I’ll grant that there are a whole slew of differences that are “merely” (ha!) cultural, and it is maddeningly difficult to disentangle nature from culture, but I suspect that there is far more to the essentialist case than the 60s or 70s were willing to admit.

Mrs. B throws in a couple of wrinkles that I hadn’t thought of it. One, re homosexual “deprogramming.” Even if we could do it, she asks (not that she thinks we can), still, why would we want to? IOW, suppose it is a mere cultural choice—so what?

The other is on the matter of sado-masochism which, I admit, I do my very best not to think about. Mrs. B grants that she doesn’t know much about it either, but if there is an avenue for cultural intervention to reduce its prevalence in society, she’d be delighted to give the avenue a try. Granted there seems to be a lot of it going on between consenting partners. One might still want to be a moral absolutist about this sort of thing; consent or not, it’s just not what you want society to be about.

Firefox 0.0.0

You'f think I'd know better than to try to join the mass Firefox 3.0 download. Anyway, it (a) wiped out Firefox 2.0 and (b) disappeared. Repeated rebootings, reloadings, did nothing to help. A visit to the Firefox tech support page brought up a blank screen.

Well, I had been thinking about trying Opera...

Like, Yes and No?

My friend the New York Crank is on a rant (surprise!) about language usage (link). I give him part credit here. I’d agree with him that making every declaration into a question is to be discouraged, not so much as a linguistic nicety as a character flaw: it represents an unwholesome concern for the opinion of the listener—about whose opinion, in many cases, the speaker really should not give a rat’s patootie.

I’m unpersuaded about the asserted inferiority of “gone missing” as against “is missing.” “Gone missing” has a nice active-verb flavor, and I like active verbs. Moreover, “gone missing” conveys an important linguistic distinction. Judge Crater “is missing,” having “gone missing” on the night of August 6, 1930. When my neighbor tells me that his cat has “gone missing,” I infer that it is something that happened so recently that we are still called upon to revise our behavior or change our attitudes—be on the alert for suspicious characters, or perhaps join the hue and cry. Both “gone” and “in” may be tactful euphemisms for “and is presumed dead” (Judge Crater would be 119 this year). It’s indirect, but at least in the case of “gone missing,” perhaps a bit of diplomatic evasion is forgivable (I remember the life insurance salesmen who were trained to say “if, God forbid, something should happen to you…”).

Which brings me to “like.” I mostly agree that we use it, like, way too much? But a few years ago, we had this faculty candidate—it was clear from the moment she got off the plane that she couldn’t imagine she was debasing herself even so much as to interview at so paltry a school. Anyway, midway through her ordeal she was coming out of the campus restaurant when her eye fell on a somewhat amateurish statue, the residuum, I suppose, of a student project. Through clenched teeth, she hissed: “You’ve got a lot of, like, art around here, haven’t you?”

Quite right, I should say, a lot of like art, which is not the same as real art. Standards must be maintained; certainly no place for a lady. The candidate, of course, has, like, gone missing--her divine afflatus now hovers over the exalted purlieus of a much more dignified venue (as does,for all I know, that of Judge Crater). Oh, and Francisco Franco is still dead.

Shafer (and Buce) on St. Tim

I was resisting saying anything about the late NBC Washsington Bureau Chief, but Slate’s Jack Shafer has a piece up on “The Canonization of Tim Russert,” which says most of what I would have wanted to say (and says it better) (link, and thanks, John). And it induces me to throw in three afterthoughts.

One, Shafer could have laid more stress on one important reason for the wall-to-wall coverage: the cable news hole. You have to have something to fill that yawning chasm of dead air. That’s why know so much about a blonde who went missing in Aruba, why every bit of political slippage is a “controversy,” and so forth. Bummer about Russert but as a(nd against my better judgment) viewer, I say thank heaven for the Iowa floods. Otherwise, we would have heard even more about St. R (come to think of it, don’t they have to prove he performed three miracles?).

Two, it’s time to say it: Russert wasn’t that great a journalist. Okay fair enough, nobody was that great a journalist. And Russert was, I grant, hard working and far better informed than the average pretty-faced chin-wagger. But at the end of the day he was a mainstay of the toxic web of journalistic clientism—the you-give-me-inside-dope, I-give-you-face-time symbiosis that has gone so much to degrade and vulgarize mainstream news coverage. It’s deadly for the polity and Russert was one of the principal purveyors of the virus, and in a very particular way: from the standpoint of his corporate masters, perhaps his most important skill was his knack for asking questions that seemed trenchant, penetrating, without ever pressing hard enough that they might have stopped people from returning his phone calls. I’ll grant you that journalism has been a mess from the get-go, but the celebrity of guys like Russert makes me pine for the era of the ink-stained wretch.

Which brings me to the third point about the canonization: it’s casting the ice axe up the canyon wall. Hey, if this guy is so great, then maybe the rest of us aren’t so bad at all. In a torrent of hot air, all egos rise at once.

Documented extra: Shafer’s piece took me back to one I had missed before: his own obituary on a beloved friend (link)—and the most savagely funny skewering of the late Richard Darman that one could possibly iimagine.

Anne Applebaum Meets Vox Populi And Finds It's Not a Pretty Sight

There’s a marvel of chattering-class confusion up at Slate, from Anne Applebaum (link), about the Irish rejection of them Lisbon treaty where she alternately tries (a) to scold those ungrateful bog jockeys for biting the hand that propelled them into the first division of the per capita income sweepstakes; and (b) to pontificate, knowingly, that it is the sort of thing you have to expect from voters, the poor dears, who just cannot be expected to understand what is good for them.

She doesn’t for a moment seem to consider ( c) the deeply undemocratic nature of the European Union process, top to bottom, which takes it for granted that “legitimacy” in Union affairs is an affair not of democracy but of marketing. From day one, the Union has never been about what the voters want—because, as Applebaum has learned, the voters want a lot of irrational, self-contradictory, self-deluded and deeply anti-social things. The Union has been structured the beginning as a mechanism designed (1) to recognize this fact; and (2) to steamroller the voters into taking what is good for them, whether they want it or not.

The extraordinary thing is not the Irish result, which, in the long history of the Union, counts as a huge ho hum. The Eurocrats have an unbroken track record of success at neutering this kind of popular sincerity and they’ll find a way to do it again. Bully for them, too much democracy is a frightening spectacle. But let’s not kid ourselves about what’s really afoot.

Wish I'd Been There: Tito Entertains the British Navy

“Tito”—Josip Broz, the Croat-Slovene peasant child who grew up to be leader of Yugoslavia—spent most of World War II as the leader of anti-Nazi partisans in the wilds of the Balkan Peninsula. In the early months of his campaign, the allied leadership had no idea who he was, or indeed whether he was perhaps just a fiction. Time and circumstance at last put him into contact with more conventional forces and in the summer of 1943, Tito had himself smuggled out of Yugoslavia for an encounter with British. His biographer recounts:

Disliking the status of refugee, Tito remained in Italy no longer than was necessary. After spending a few days in a villa on the outskirts of Bari which had been placed at his disposal by the British authorities, he crossed by night to Vis in H.M.S. Blackmore, a Hunt Class destroyer. On his way over he was entertained at dinner in the wardroom in the best naval style. The atmosphere was hilarious, there was plenty to drink, and Tito’s natural shyness soon wore off. By the end of the evening he was reciting “The Owl and the Pussy Cat" in fluent English to an admiring audience of young naval officers.

--Fitzroy Maclean, The Heretic 221-2 (1957).

Tito was, among other things, a natural learner, who seemed to pick up the language of any group he was among after a matter of days.

Humphrey Lyttleton, RIP

This will only make sense if you’ve lived in Britain or, failing that, if you’re a BBC fan and happen to have discovered Humphrey Lyttleton, sometimes British jazz great and chairman-for-life of that very British institution, the quiz show I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue. Clue, “the antidote to panel games,” aestheticized silliness with items like “One song to the tune of another” and “name that barcode.” The capstone, which developed a life of its own, was “Mornington Crescent,” the very unreal game (no one has ever been found who could claim to know the rules) named for a very real London tube station.

Humph died last week at 86. Flowers are said to be showing up, you guessed it, outside Mornington Crescent. Courtesy, we assume, of the lovely Samantha.

All Bad News is Good News for Somebody

"Hi!"

It was a kid's voice, as I rolled my bike up to the stoplight. He was walking with his mother, and her bike.

"Hi," I replied.

"We're on the way to get my new bike!" he shouted.

And his mother muttered: "Can't afford gas any more."

You know, if we could do something about these !@#$ bike lanes. Like stop letting them end in the middle of nowhere. ...

Still Around and Making a Lot of Sense

Back when bankers were riding high, Martin (is that guy still around) Mayer looked pretty much like an old fuddy duddy. Not that banks are imploding, Martin (is that guy still around?) may be coming back into fashion. Via Yves Smith, here’s a wonderful interview of Mayer from Institutional Risk Analytics, in which he is sober and tactful enough not to say “I told you so”—but to give the reader plenty of leeway to figure it out for himself. Here’s a money quote:

… there are a certain number of tested Wall Street scams that have been forbidden by regulation. If you can find a way to use technology to revive one of these scams, then you are an innovator and you get paid extremely well for the five years these techniques work, and then you go away.

Makes me remember my friend Bernie who said there were two ways to make partner at his hubba hubba Wall Street firm in the old days: one was to invent a new security, and nobody remembered what the other one was.

Water--Maybe You Could Drink It!

Utah Phillips used to do a routine about the great turtle drive from El Paso to Denver. You can back-engineer most of the jokes, but I did enjoy the punch line which was something on the order of: hey, if we can do this for turtles, maybe we can do it for cattle!

Comes now Underbelly’s Kansas bureau with news in the same vein from the that loutish, loonish parade of greed and blunders we call the Ethanol, um, “industry”—apparently somebody has got the bright idea of turning the stuff into food (link). Well enough in its way, I suppose, but I sign on with the Kansas bureau in asking how many operators—in a business that makes no economic sense anyway “will have the capital to put in a new process that costs $200MM per plant.”

WaMu's (And Everybody Else's) Atrocious Service

Felix Salmon has an instructive piece up about WaMu's atrocious mortgage sevicing. Ha, I thought it was just me. I had a little mortgage that got assigned to WaMu a few years back; I paid it off and went looking for the release on the deed of trust. I couldn't get anybody at WaMu to even admit they owned the damn thing--although I concede their denials were probably sincere, if wrong-headed, in that the folks I talked to probably didn't have any idea what they owned.

I finally deployed a tactic long recommended by my friend Ignoto: I wrote a detailed but patient and non-paranoid letter to the CEO, trusting that if only I could get into the system at the power level, my problem might get solved. Sure enough, a few days later comes a call from a local manager I'd never heard of before saying "you're in luck! Your release just reached my desk this morning!"

Yeh, right. I might add that what we see here is not just WaMu, it's a general business model. Think of the number of places--communications, health care, investment management, whatever--where somebody buys a book of business figuring he'll learn what he has bought, oh, I dunno, maybe when hell freezes over. Meanwhile it is left for the poor sods on the customer service lines--and the apopleptic customers like me--to try to sort out what the heck is going on.

Best Cop Movie Since I Don't Know When

…is Le Petit Lieutenant, about life and hard times in a Paris detective squad. Forget that it’s Paris; forget that it’s Nathalie Baye, and that she looks like a cross between Helen Mirren and Barbra Streisand: this is about as plausible a film about what cop life is about as your are going to find. Some of the reviews complain that it’s too languid, but that is part of the point. A lot of cop work is mind-numbingly squalid and routine; that’s precisely why you are at risk of getting wrong-footed when events kick into a higher gear. It’s great to see a policiere that is not just another knockoff of Law & Order. And it’s great to see the French not trying to be international, but just trying to be themselves.

Football is Like...

Time to freshen up the quote (see at left, under the picture). For more of the same, go here.

McCain and Obama on the Deficit:Sure, That's the Ticket!

Instead of making snide remarks about the treatment of tax policy in the Presidential campaign, I could have spent my time at greater profit following the discourse over at Capital Gains and Games, where Pete Davis is weighing in with some helpful and apposite commentary. As a self-described deficict hawk, Davis isn’t going all hubba hubba over either candidate (link):

How much, if anything, would [Obama or McCain] do to lift the terrible $3.9 trillion of additional public debt that President Bush has incurred on behalf of our children?

Senator McCain is the champion of eliminating earmarks and curtailing government spending. However, eliminating earmarks and cutting non-defense discretionary spending, which has already declined from 5.2% of GDP in 1980 to 3.6% now, would have little impact on future deficits. McCain would continue the Iraq War well into the future at a cost of nearly $200 b. a year and would invest heavily in anti-missile defense. His proposal to expand private health insurance would do little to curtail runaway federal and private health care spending because it depends upon the development of a private health insurance market, as if we're pleased with how well health insurance works so far. Extending the Bush tax cuts and repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax would be twice as expensive as continuing the War by FY2012. McCain would lower the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% and expense all equipment investment to better compete around the world. He would also seek Senate and House rule changes to require a 3/5 majority to raise any taxes, which would further limit the ability to "pay for" tax cuts and entitlement increases. The deficit would rise sharply under McCain's policies. With rising interest rates around the corner, interest expense on the public debt would rise sharply as well. That's not a very pretty fiscal picture, but it's not necessarily any better under Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has an expensive tax cut for just about every voting block except for the rich. He has tax cuts for the poor, for middle class workers, and for the elderly with incomes under $50,000. He would extend most of the Bush tax cuts (the 10% bracket, $1,000 per child credit, and marriage penalty relief), as would most other Democrats. He would offset some of those costs by taxing the rich more heavily, raising the top marginal tax rate and repealing the Bush tax cuts for capital gains, dividends, and estates. He would also impose a truly massive Social Security payroll tax increase on those with incomes over $250,000 by lifting the income cap. These tax increases would have some negative effects upon the economy, as would his protectionist trade proposals. Obama would remove U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months. Although that would have significant long-run savings, in the first two years or so, it would actually increase costs as the relocation costs were piled upon war costs that will be slow to decline. Meanwhile, he would increase the Army by 65,000 troops and the Marines by 27,000 troops. Obama's plan for mandatory health insurance for children and expansion for adults may be half as expensive as the war. Obama also proposes spending increases for infrastructure investment, green jobs and other job creation, fighting global disease, and increase veterans' benefits. Obama pledges to adhere to PAYGO, paying for new initiatives, but PAYGO often gets waived for "emergencies" and high priority appropriations for the War and for natural disasters. Here too, I would add additional interest expense on the public debt with higher deficits. The deficit would rise sharply under Obama's policies.

More wonkery in the same vein here. One possible source of solace: politicians, as Davis points out, rarely keep (or even remember) their promises.

The New, New Switzerland

Boy, nothing is too silly to be real. A year ago, I touted Afghanistan as the next Switzerland—landlocked, mountainous, resource-free, ready to serve as an intermediary for those around it (link).

I don’t think I was being more than half flip, but okay, I was being flip. Hah, shows what I know: set aside Afghanistan for a moment, it turns out that the (former) president of neighboring Kyrgyzstan had essentially the same idea—to turn his country into “the Switzerland of Central Asia.” So recounts Martha Brill Olcott in Central Asia’s Second Chance (2005)—“a financial center, a transport hub, and a popular destination for international tourists” (41). Olcott continues:

Cynically, it can be argued that Akayev was probably turning necessity into advantage, as he sought to distinguish his country and its leadership from that of other states in the region. Lacking the wealth of may of its neighbors, Kyrgyzstan had little more than the personality of its president to serve as a magnet for attracting Western investments, loans, or grants in aid. (id.)

Hello, cynically? Sounds like a perfectly good plan to me—you play the hand that’s dealt you. Unfortunately, Akayev got a bit previous with some of the opposition and they chased him out; he is now (oh, the humiliation!) a math teacher in Moscow.

Well, I still think it’s a good idea. On second (or maybe third) thought, there may be an even better candidate for the role. That would be Kashmir—war-torn between India and Pakistan, but with a strong banking/financial infrastructure (and, so they say, one of the prettiest places on the planet, to boot). Now, if only they could get that silly religion business behind them. Of course, the Catholics and Protestants might have said the same thing in their time…

Reading Note: Galula on Counterinsurgency

I see that somebody had the good sense to republish David Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare (link). Last time I looked,* you couoldn't find anything but old originasl copies on offer at more than $100 each. Now there's a reprint, available for $25 and change. Also on the "Bare Bones Essentials" counterinsurgency reading list at Abu Muqawama, a counterinsurgency blog.

--

*Okay, must have been two years ago, but still...

9/11 Changed Everything:

More on cops can do what they want:

Man on his own sofa laughing at TV winds up sprayed by police.

link.

Here I Go Again: McCain the Old Guy Dept

I really ought to quit watching Chris Matthews. Then I wouldn't be tempted to get into a yackfest where nobody much cares about my opinion anyway. But here we go again...

Look, children, it really doesn't matter whether John McCain at 71 is "too old" to be president. It matters whether he says and does stupid things. For example, if John McCain insists on saying x on Monday and y on Tuesday, and denying any inconsistency, this says nothing one way or another about whether he is too old to be president. It's just evidence that he is a deeply unreflective guy who figures that he is the same person he was yesterday, and so there can be no consistency. This has nothing to do with age; my guess is that he was pretty much like this in flight school, back in the McKinley administration.

This is, FWIW, one traiat that is so maddening in the incumbent (who is not 71): white heart and an empty head are the best possible defense against criticism. Heaven save us from electing another Labrador Retriever.

More Stuff I Think I Know About Taxes

Some more things I know about taxes, I think:

• “Flat tax” can mean at least three different things:

--A single rate (18.2 percent?) for all income-tax payers.

--A “flat base,” with all deductions, exceptions, exclusions, etc., boiled out.

--A retail sales tax (or a value-added (“VAT”)) with a single rate for all transactions.

• One thing it (almost) never means is a single lump-sum payment for each and all potential taxpayers—in effect, a poll tax. But if you did have such a tax, it would be about $5,600 per person. That’s what you get when you divide the current income tax bill by the number of adults in the population.

• A “single-rate” flat tax would on almost any plausible scenario reduce the taxes on the rich and increase the taxes on the poor. For example, using 2005 data, for a family of four, a “single rate” tax of 18.2 percent, supplanting a graduated income tax and getting rid of tax credits and alternative minimum tax—would reduce taxes for all those with incomes over $144,000, and increase taxes on all others.

It occurs to me you aren’t likely to hear much about these tax issues in this election year, or at least not in this traditional form. Re the single-rate flat tax, my guess is that most voters have figured out at this point htat it is a scam perpetrated by Steve Forbes to maintain his 151-foot yacht. Re getting rid of exceptions--one of the most desirable targets is the home mortgage interest deduction, and that has absolutely no chance of being eliminated in this rotten market. Re sales taxes or VAT, the biggest argument in their favor is that they increase savings. Personal savings are indeed near zero, but in a world clogged with surplus capital, the idea of promoting more savings just doesn’t seem to have a lot of traction.

Source: Still reading Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija, Taxing Ourselves (4th ed. 2008)

Update: Good stuff om taxes in the current presidential campaign here.

California: The Reddest of Red States

...according to this cool map of gasoline prices (link).

Roth Versus Trilling--and Remembering "When She Was Good"

NYRB Classics showcases a remarkable (unsent) letter in which Philip Roth gives a bit of what-for to Diana Trilling for what she said about Portnoy's Complaint (link, link). Good fun in its own right, but not least remarkable because it calls attention to an early Roth novel, now unjustly forgotten. That would be When She Was Good, which Roth himself obviously holds in esteem. I don't know anybody but me who still remembers it. I confess I haven't read all that much of the later Roth but this early one sticks in my mind more than Portnoy, more than Goodbye, Columbus.

Kinky versus Erotic

Okay, let's get this straight:

• Erotic is – imagine a beautiful woman with soft skin and beautiful smelling perfume and she traces an ostrich feather across your lips—that’s erotic.

• If she uses the whole ostrich, that’s kinky.

H/T: BBC Quote Unquote.

Some Things I Know About Taxes, I Think

Some things I know about taxes, I think:

• In the USA, we paid 27.5 percent of GDP in taxes (including social security as a “tax”) in 2005, of which about two thirds (18 percent of GDP) was federal, the rest state and local. That is lower than any other comparable “first-world” country except Japan. The OECD average was 35.9 percent; Sweden was 50.4 percent. The federal tax number has hovered with remarkable stability around 18 percent of GDP for more than half a century.

• By some non-crazy Office of Management and Budget estimates, social security plus Medicare and Medicaid are due to eat up about 17.8 percent of GDP by 2040 (mostly medical; social security alone is not a huge problem). Interest on federal debt would grab another 12.1 percent. The OMB numbers project total government spending for 2040 at 39.5 percent—still well below Sweden, but enough (at current tax rates) to imply a deficit equal to 21.7 percent of GDP. A train wreck.
  

• As a percentage of cash income, the average taxpayer pays 21.3 percent of cash income in federal taxes—again, including social security. Contrary to widely held belief, the richest actually do pay most—the top one percent of earners pays at a rate of 30.8 percent (but that one percent also got 10.3 percent of all the Bush II tax cuts). The lowest earners actually receive money via the income tax, thanks to the earned income tax credit, but they pay taxes when you add in social security.


• It’s an axiom of economics that people respond to incentives. In fact, the modern history of taxation provides at best weak evidence for this proposition. People do seem to respond to highly publicized, high-saliency changes in the tax laws—quite a bit of money shuffled around as investors tried to avoid the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. But in a great many cases, the incentive effect is non-existent, or so swamped by other effects as to be imperceptible. The supply-side mantra that we can tax-cut our way to wealth—appears on the all the evidence to be a fantasy.
  
  
• On tax evasion: reported net income as a percentage of true net income—for wages 99 percent, pensions 98 percent. Non-farm proprietors, 43 percent, farm proprietors, 28 percent. As a wage-earner and pensioner, I can get pretty steamed about these numbers. On the other hand, I have the police to collect my salary; they have to hustle for theirs.

--Source: Joel Slemrod and John Bakija, Taxing Ourselves (4th ed. 2008)

Fn.: In the same vein, see this but I do my best never to wear socks.

Annals of Niche Marketing

Walkenhorst’s (link) must be (by all appearances) the leading merchandiser of goods to be shipped to inmates in California prisons. Evidently it is a niche market. A FAQ exchange specifies:

Q: How do I know what is allowed in an inmate package so I can avoid sending items that are not approved by the correctional facility?

A: Walkenhorst's is in direct contact with every facility's property officer to determine which items are allowed at each facility. All the items listed on walkenhorsts.com have been pre-approved by each facility's administration; therefore, the possibility of ordering an item from this website that is not approved has been removed.

From the front page of the website, one can infer that there is demand for Oreo cookies, Starkist chunk light tuna, Folger’s instant coffee and beef jerky. A 100-plus page music catalog offers something for every taste, including “Baby Needs Mozart” and Bach’s Christ lag in Todesbande. There is a special catalog for prisoners in the supermax facility at Pelican Bay.

Thanks, Ignoto.

Shock of Recognition: Auerbach on the Politics of Boredom

One measure of the power of an artist is the response he induces in others--the "shock of recognition," as Thoreau (and Edmund Wilson) said. Stendhal--vain, chubby, self-absorbed, probably a stalker, who said he wouldn't be appreciated for 100 years--has an almost unmatched knack for provoking this kind of response, beginning with his peer Balzac, who saluted him Balzac was already famous and Stendhal was still an unkown: "never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this," said Balzac, of Charterhouse of Parma.

In Mimesis, on of the monuments of 20th Century literary criticism, Eric Auerbach offers an appreciation of Stendhal's other great novel, Le Rouge et le Noir. In particular, Auerbach shows how precisely Stendhal captures a specific moment in time--Paris, on the eve of the 1830 Revolution:

Even the boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of [the Hôtel de la Mole] is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates, among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere off pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons the things which interest everyone--the political and religious problems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its literature or that of the very recent past--could not be discussed, or at best could be discussed only in official phrases s mendacious that a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. ... [L]ife is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated. As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in any public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to accept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly-rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition and with their fear for their ill-gotten wealth, completely vitiate the atmosphere of society.

So much for the prevailing boredom.

--Eric Auerbach, Mimesis 455-6 (Princeton Paperback 1968)

"Who Was that Masked Man, I Wanted to Thank Him!"

Sure, you remember:

[A] rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.

Link.

Found in Translation

Amman - Archaeologists in Jordan have discovered what they claimed to be the "first church in world" … lying underneath Saint Gorgeous Church in Rihab [Jordan] (Earth Times--link).

St. Gorgeous? Georgius? Jorge? Gorgonia? Gordian? Or Mawrdew Czgowchwz, as in “My deah, you look gawgeous!” the campiest of all camp opera classics?

Stendhal

We've been spending a bit of time with Stendhal lately. The readaloud book at the Mr. and Mrs. Buce reading club has been Le Rouge et Le Noir (in Penguin English Scarlet and Black). I also got about halfway through Lucien Leuwen (but then, Stendhal didn't finish that one himself). In Arles, I picked up a copy of the enthusiastic essay that Balzac wrote about Charterhouse of Parma, back when Balzac was a big deal and Stendhal was a nobody. And I have a copy (unopened) of Souvenirs of Egotism, unread except for the warm introduction from Doris Lessing. I've got a bunch of thoughts, not necessarily well related or digested:

1. I first read Scarlet and Black 50 years ago. I enjoyed it, although I suppose I was mainly congratulating myself for reading a "big" book. This time, it made me laugh aloud, a lot. It's obvious now that it is a book about a pompous youth. What I thought about it back when I was a pompous youth, I can only guess at.
   
   
2. The charm of Stendhal is that he is at once a near-hopeless romantic and at the same time the most searching and subtle critic of his own romanticism. Once again, it is those pompous young men. It takes one to know one and you can't kid a kidder. Stendhal was so good at seeming through the visions and illusions of romanticism because he was so firmly wedded to it himself.


3. But here is the problem (Caution plot spoiler ahead): In the last few chapters of Scarlet and Black, after Julien has committed his great crime, when Julien is one his way to the guillotine, we see a great romantic set-piece--a masterpiece of Byronic self-dramatization, a fit literary companion to its almost exact contemporary, Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. One is tempted to keep on laughing here--hey, it's a novel, after all, and the excesses are so, well, excessive.


4. But the trouble is, it isn't clear that Stendhal is in on the joke. For all his suave irony in so much of his work, there comes a point where Stendhal seems to slip his critical stun gun back into its holster and to let the posturing role.
   


5. In retrospect now, I can see that one feels the same way about his extraordinary essay, On Love--the one in which he invented the Salzburg Branch. It's a piece almost devastating in its acuity, yet at the same time we keep finding Stendhal as blind to the very torrent of romanticism that he himself sees through. Can he both see and not see? Yes, apparently he can. And in Charterhouse of Parma, still perhaps the best political novel ever written, we have that wonderful passion of the Princess Sanseverina for her almost entirely undeserving nephew. Can it be that Stendhal took it seriously? Yes, perhaps it can.
   


6. Footnote: one of the few fixed points in the Stendhalian firmament is Napoleon: the late, great colossus who bestrode the firmament just a heartbeat before Stendhal's own prime. And yet Stendhal's most direct exposure to Napoleon was on the march back from Moscow--an episode almost unmatched in the annals of misery and squalor. Not Napoleon's fault, Stendhal seems to have believed.
   


7. I'm tempted to say that all these contradictions make Stendhal all the more interesting--is he, or is he not, an acute self-critic? I suppose I could defend that assertion, but it smells a lot of making a virtue of of necessity. If he is interesting--well, strike that, he is interesting--it as much for his human failings as it is for his extraordinary double vision.
   

Psst--R*b*rt R*b*n

Jason Furman is joining Barack Obama’s economic team. The Bloomberg story—tracking the press release?—hypes the fact that he is close to Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton (link).

Steve Clemons is not impressed (link). Clemons sees Furman, (the neo-Rubin?) as emblematic of a kind of neoliberalism that Clemons would like to see shunted aside.

As a card-carrying neoliberal, I'm happy to see Furman on board A while back I might have said that my choice for president would be: anybody who would listen to Robert Rubin.

On the other hand—Rubin was on the board at CitiCorp last year when owned up to a $17 billion-ish loss (he stepped in as chairman last November; before that he was drawing $15 million a year plus use of a jet to serve as chairman of the executive committee—link). Did Rubin miss that meeting? Ws he out getting the coffee? There may be two good reasons for Obama not to showcase Furman’s intellectual ancestry here.

The Best Book About Revolution in 30+ Years

Martin Malia died before he finished what he must have intended to be, if not his summum bonum, then at least his summing-up. It was left to Terrence Emmons, his professional colleague, to put it in shape for presentation to the world.

Bully for Terrence Emmons. Malia’s History’s Locomotives is the best book on revolution I have read since—oh, perhaps since John Dunn’s Modern Revolutions, back in the 70s.

Malia was a lifelong student of the Soviet “Tragedy” (as he called it), but he was a good deal more than that. Perhaps his most original and important work was his Russia Under Western Eyes, in which he tried to see how our vision of Russia was refracted or distorted through our own prejudices and aspirations.

History’s Locomotives can be read as an extension of that approach. Here, Malia tries to understand the entire history of Marxist revolution in the context of the insights and blinders of Western thought. What he has produced is a brisk—sometimes to the point of leaving you breathless—canter through near 600 years of European political upheaval.

Malia is by no means a sympathizer with Marxism. But one of the many virtues of this book is that he approaches his subject without the dripping hostility of, say Richard Pipes, or other students of the revolutionary tradition who sometimes lest their hostility get in the way of real understanding. Malia approaches the matter with something closer to Olympian detachment, suavely exhibiting the errors and misunderstandings without much in the way editorial overload. Indeed ironically, if he spills any venom in this book, it is aimed at his academic colleagues the sociologists who, it seems, are too given theorizing to appreciate the sheer facticity of history.

Shorter Marin Malia: political upheaval is a constant of social life, but “revolution” is a highly specific social construct, peculiar to the European condition. But even “revolution” cannot be reduced to a formula. Malia has the historian’s nominalism (I think this is his beef with the sociologists). He recognizes—insists—that revolutions learn from their predecessors and shape their successors in what comes perilously close to a kind of Hegelian aufhaben.

In particular, Malia demonstrates how the very idea of “revolution” begins (with the English) as a synonym for “restoration”—how the early “revolutionaries” felt they were just coming full circle. It was the Americans who, even as they sought “restoration” found themselves creating something that appeared wholly new. It was the French who undertook to systematize and generalize their example. It was the French and the Americans together who set the stage for 1848—the first “anticipated” revolution, and for whatever it may be worth, the which the reactionaries won.

Locomotives can be tough going it times, not because of the style, which is smooth and professional, but because Malia covers so much with (apparently to him) such ease—I sympathize with the Amazon reviewer who asks plaintively for an occasional definition now and then. I suspect the book might not be quite as finished a product ass Emmons makes it out to be. Still, it is an invaluable retelling of a familiar story, well worth reading and, I suspect, just as much worth rereading.

The Obounce

Dick Morris on Fox yesterday, doing his best to punch the Dem’s balloon, said he was surprised that Obama wasn’t getting a 10-point bounce in the pools.

He’s got a point. For all the hoopla, you would think that Obama ought to be riding high.

Well, except that today’s Rasmussen data gives Obama a 48-40 lead over McCain, 50-43 if you count “leaners” (link)—so at least a seven point bounce, which is something, if not wonderful. Interestingly, Rasmussen Markets, the in-house bookie joint, shows Obama at 61-36 over McCain. Is this insider knowledge or just conventional wisdom?

I’ve lived through half a lifetime of May-September disappointments in the Democratic Party—hey, I can remember when Michael Dukakis looked good. Is Obama different? The best evidence I can see for the argument that he is different would be this chart reprinted in Jack Shafer’s postmortem at Slate earlier this week. The way I read it, Clinton had virtually every vote she was ever going to win last October. But Obama just keeps going up and up and up.

I take it that most voters didn’t know much about Obama last October, and that a good many don’t know him very well today—perhaps particularly among the older, less-educated, lower-income voters who are said to form the base of Clinton’s support. Yet if this is true, then it seems to follow that once they get to know him, they like him. That would make him one of the rarest of political phenomena—a politician whose standing actually grows on exposure.

I admit, my own enthusiasm for Obama has been, and remains, somewhat muted. It still makes my hair stand on end that we are getting ready to trust our fate to someone unseasoned. And at the very least, he’s got his work cut out for him, getting past the wingnut noise machine (Osama! Muslim! Ghetto street thug! Elitist sipper of chardonnay!). But it is amazing how so far, he doesn’t seem to have put a foot wrong. This may turn out to be a show worth watching.

Barbara Everett on "Objective Attentiveness"

I don’t think I had ever heard of Barbara Everett until I ran across her piece on “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet” in the May 8 issue of the London Review of Books. As a sample, here is Shakespeare’s sonnet 57, together with a comment from Barbara Everett. First, the sonnet:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.

Everett observes:

Shakespeare wrote at moments more richly and deeply than this. But Sonnet 57 is the voice of the man, the man who achieved both great comedies and great tragedies. The poem is not actorish, it is quiet and private but—with its formidably intricate rhetoric—it is entirely in the round: it is full of feeling but has a poise and control at once humane and removed. It’s doubtful whether any love poetry of the last four hundred years sees more than Shakespeare’s, or sees it more levelly. When read, 57 will sometimes seem comic, sometimes tragic, it will sometimes sound abject, sometimes angry, sometimes bitter, sometimes ironic, sometimes amused, sometimes tender, sometimes dry. But always it has an extraordinarily objective attentiveness that says “What is this, and what am I?”

That’s Barbara Everett in the LRB. Worth seeking out more of her, perhaps here (although it is sometimes a challenge to know whether you have the right author or not).

Isn't He the One with the Volkswagen Beetle?

Okay, so her husband is a tax lawyer. But:

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter appear to be the court’s wealthiest members. Justice Ginsburg had assets of at least $11 million and as much as $50 million at year’s end, and Justice Souter had between a bit more than $6 million and approximately $30 million. (The value of each holding is presented as a broad estimate, making precise calculation impossible. Home equity is not included.)

Money like that is wasted on him, not so? Link.

Something I Never Heard About Until Yesterday:Ice Road Truckers

That's Ice Road Truckers. My friend Ignoto thinks it is kinda cool. I had never heard of it. After reading the Wiki, I was ready to declare it the male response to "Sex and the City." But a brief survey of my more manly buddies (probably not all that manly, but hey) backs me off: that they know little or nothing about it. UB's Kansas bureau, who does watch the History Channel, probably has it pegged:

I’ve seen the program; it seems like smoking: a socially acceptable form of suicide but quicker. It is sort of reminiscent of the ice road that the soviets used to supply Leningrad during the siege in WWII.

"Sex and the City Part LXVI: The Fab Four meet the Ice Road Truckers." I can hardly wait.

Fn.:Kansas adds:

Instead of ice road truckers, watch the crab fishermen thing on the same channel. Cold, wet, seasick and pulling muscles. Great fun. Not much plot.

The War on Photographers, and the Power of Stories

Bruce Schneier gets right a point that I was struggling to make the other day .

Oh and while we're at it, a cute Scheiner poster (link).

[Meta footnote: I hope I have not misbehaved here--just what does "please do not link directly" mean? Link to the source? Do not link to the source? Link indirectly? Etc.]

Kumbaya

I have to confess I really don't have a clue how exactly the Hillary supporters are going to react to the great disappointment--I'm certainly not plugged in and my instincts are not that great to begin with. But if I were looking for clues, I might want to start with "Anne" who, if I understand things right, is a regular, intelligent and instructive commentator over at DeLong. Brad posted the notorious "How Can We Beat that Bitch?" squib; no particular problem with that, but Anne responded with, I think, eleven separate comments ranging from mildly acerb to downright angry. If this is the future, it ain't pretty (link).

Ecclesiastes 12:12

Packing up to leave my office at last: the library downstairs keeps a “giveaway cart” where people can dump their unwanted books as strays seeking adoption on their last stop before the pound. Lately I’ve been culling my office to see what I keep and what goes to the cart. It’s a draining exercise. Don’t listen to what Mrs. B tells you, I am really not a pack rat—I’m sure in my life time I have thrown away 2-3 times as many books as I now own. But this kind of exercise is like ripping off the husks of former selves.

Some of these show their age. Perhaps the one I've owned longest is an old Bantam Paperback of The Count of Monte Cristo. The inside cover indicates I bought it in Washington Courthouse, Ohio, in 1957. I remember reading it while tending a coal furnace when my kids were babies in the 1960s (I don’t think I realized it was abridged). And here’s an ancient copy of of Bertram D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution, just about the first serious grownup book I ever read I (hey, I was a late starter, okay?) with a printing date of 1959.

Moving forward in time, here’s a paperback of Perry Miller’s collection, The Legal Mind in America (1962). I see that I bought it in February, 1963, which would have been just months before I began law school: I wonder, did I think it would help? From law school itself, I keep my old copy of Casner and Leach on Real Property, the most instructive casebook I ever went to school to. From law school also, here’s the two volume mimeo (sic) of Hart and Sachs, The Legal Process, which circulated in Samizdat for a generation before somebody got around to publishing it. Oh, and here is the three-volume set of Corpus Juris Secundum on Corporations: my first law school prize (we used it as a booster chair to get my daughter up to the dinner table).

And at last, a milestone: a four-volume set of Kent’s Commentaries, (9^th ed., 1858), given me by my Aunt Selma when I passed the bar in 1968 (she was a legal secretary back before smart girls went to law school). I suspect I have never opened it, but it sure does look pretty.

From the beginning of my own teaching career, here’s Kessler & Gilmore Contracts (1970), one of the classics of law-teaching, together with Gilmore’s inimitable teaching notes, which passed hand to hand among professors in the old days like some underground Henry Miller. More recently, here’s a lot of stuff that (aside from its value as compost) is entirely worthless: bankruptcy statutes of 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, etc., previous editions of lawyer desk books, some written (gasp!) by me.

There are other items not so neatly dateable. Here’s a whole run of books that had certain cachet in their time, now mostly forgotten: Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic; Ed Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society; Leon Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails; J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors--but just where should I rank Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques? (together with Lévi-Strauss, I do find a Fontana Modern Masters paperback, purporting to explain just what in hell he was talking about).

And there are any number of books I won’t throw away but I suspect I may never read, starting with Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

There are scattered fragments of various languages I have never learned very well. Ignoring the audio tapes, here’s a student edition of Pinocchio, which helped me idle away a day when I got stuck in a snowstorm in South Carolina (long story)—complete with student questions: “chi viene in aiuto di Pinocchio?” Here’s a nice antique edition of Balzac’s Le Lys Dans La Vallée, given me a thousand years by a student for my presiding over her wedding; the marriage did not last, but the book is still here (indeed, there seems to be a lot of Balzac; I did not realize I was such a fan). And looky looky: an Oxford classical edition of Plato’s Republic, in Greek (but why do they insist on putting the titles in Latin?)—I guess was full of optimism about my retirement agenda.

And there’s more, folks: there seems to be an array of poets I had quite forgotten I still owned (which probably tells you something): Edwin Muir (once a great favorite); Robert Lowell, James Merrill. And here’s a tattered old edition of Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (but I bought it second hand just last year); and here’s Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of School Children, which I discovered many years ago(but this is a new copy, also purchased just last year).

I learn that I must be a sucker for dictionaries. Here is a Dictionary of Espionage. Here is Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words (knibber: a male deer when the antlers first appear). Oh, and here is the three volume set of the Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance which I bought for $100 from a colleague when, I suspect, he needed the money. As a pendant, here is Hawkshop:The Fabulous Story of the “Emperor of Pawnbroking.”

Finance and Pawnbroking come from a more recent phase in my life, when I got interested in learning (and teaching) the basics of finance to law students. Here are some of the MBA textbooks I cribbed from so shamelessly, before writing my own. Here’s Forgotten Calculus and Forgotten Algebra, which saved my bacon more than once. Here’s a (once) pretty good one about accounting fiddles, made obsolete by the exponential growth of financial fraud in the decade of Enron.

There are tough judgment calls in this game. I suppose I do need my two-volume Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, and Dicey on the Constitution, but do I really need volumes of political criticism written by a couple of Yale professors 15 or 20 years ago, perhaps long forgotten already even by the authors? And here is de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution; I have a French edition at home; do I trust my French enough to dispense with the English? And do I keep my edition of the script of Repo Man—for use, of course, in the teaching of commercial law?

And so it goes. I have 15 boxes of the stuff so far, with maybe another ten still to go (but I swear, I am not a pack rat). And this says nothing about the stuff I discarded. Which reminds me,—that library remainder cart: a month ago, I found my old copy of Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America. I remember the day when everybody in the library seemed to have his (sic) own copy. Last month I put mine on the remainder cart. Tonight, it's still there.

Well, It's Not Like They Destroyed a Great Bank

Compared to Nick Leeson and Jerome Kerviel, these guys are pikers:

Amazon Just Lost $1.8 Million in an Hour
E-commerce Site Was Down for 90 Minutes

June 6, 2008

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- E-commerce site Amazon went down this afternoon around 1:30 EDT and stayed down for at least an hour. Attempts to access Amazon.com were met with the following message: "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." It's hard to know exactly how many dollars a minute Amazon loses in sales for every moment its site is down, but simple math pegs it at about $1.8 million an hour, based on Ad Age estimates.

Link. Thanks, Prof. Ignoto, and Ms. Ignoto.

On Reading The Economist Again:Time for Some New Clichés

I've read The Economist off and on since the 60's. I've had an unbroken subscription since 1983. About two years ago, I went paperless. And I found that my actual reading of The Economist fell to almost zero.

This is remarkable. In the old days, I tried to make time to read it cover to cover. I used to joke that I should keep all the back issues so I could finish them in retirement. I used to tell my students that there was nothing I could teach them (that they need to know) that they could not learn by a year's conscientious reading of the Big E.

Earlier this month, what with some long plane flights and some (seemingly) longer airport waiting periods, for the first time in several years I read through two issues in a row. This ought to put me in a position to assess: why don't I (want to) do this all the time? Here are the usual suspects:

1. It's the no-paper thing. You really don't read anything you can't prop up on the breakfast table.


2. It's the competition. I have 50-75 feeds in my Google reader, and I can get what I need (including some predigested Economist stuff) from these.


3. It's the magazine itself. At some point around the beginning of Bush #2 (maybe the time when they started regional editions), it lost its mojo, and so I lost my Jones.

I can't quite rule any of these out, but here is a slightly different spin: I've learned what The Economist has to teach me. I never had any formal economics training (indeed, having majored in projectile vomiting, I never learned much in college, period). So aside from pure information, The Economist gave me a potted worldview: lessons in free-market economics, partisan but non-dogmatic, coupled with political centrism and cultural catholicity.

At the risk of oversimplifying to caricature, I suspect that threesome captures me pretty well, and I think I know where I got it. The trouble is, The Economist isn't teaching me anything new any more. Oh, in detail, sure. But I'm at the point where once I scan the headlines, I can pretty much guess--in the sense of "pretty much write"--the story they are going to tell.

That's too bad. I'm an old dog, but I could still learn a few new tricks--and so could they. As we used to say in the newspaper biz: "the boss says he is tired of the old clichés; go get us some new clichés."

Appreciation: Malcolm Cowley on Paris

“This book is the story to 1930 of what used to be called the lost generation of American writers.” So begins the prologue to Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920’s, by Malcolm Cowley. On the cover of the Penguin Paperback edition, you find a picture of the Pont Marie bridging the Île Saint-Louis to the Marais in Paris.

From this sort of evidence, you might infer that the book is about “the Lost Generation”—about Gertrude and Alice, and Hem and Ezra, and Sylvia Beach and Kay Boyle and all those Americans who fled from their American homes to hang out after World War I in Gay Paree.

You’d be disappointed. Granted that Paris and the losties do play a role in this memoir, still that role is a lot smaller than you might expect. What you have instead is an autobiographical account, necessarily idiosyncratic, of one person’s sojourn from Western Pennsylvania to Paris—and then back again to New York and Connecticut, during which time he read a lot, hung out with some famous and not-so-famous writers, and generally tried to make sense of his life.

What saves the book is Cowley’s extraordinary shrewd capacity as in observer—so remarkable you can only wish he offered more. He’s got about the best two-or-three page summaries showing why Joyce and Pound are important—and why Pound is not—as you’re likely to find. He offers equally wise and often funny insights into his friends and other strugglers trying to figure out a way to make a living while making a life. And he has some instructive thoughts on Paris itself: unlike so many who have written about Paris in the 20s, he seems to have a sense of history, and a capacity to put he 20s in context as an episode in a long tradition. He speaks, for example, of

…the Paris of the international revelers and refugees. … the crazy Paris which, to its own people, seemed the innermost city; in truth it was the outmost and the youngest. It was not the Paris of Villon or Cyrano or Rameau’s famous nephew, who were wastrels too, but in a different fashion. It was a Paris that began to flourish under the Second Empire, when the landlords and suddenly enriched speculators of all Europe came flocking toward a world capital where they could spend their profits and be ostentatious in their vice. From year to year this Paris became more feverish and gilded—but there was a time after Louis Napoleon fell when it suddenly ceased to exist. “Wonderful indeed,” wrote Karl Marx in 1871, “was the change the Commune had wrought!” …

But this was only an interlude. Soon the police and its Conservative friends reoccupied Paris, after executing thirty thousand of its inhabitants. Son the burglaries began again; soon the wealthy exiles reappeared on the boulevards; and for half a century their special city continued to grow.

Its population, however, had changed since the World War. The Russians still formed part of it, but they no longer had any ex-serfs to provide them with incomes—the Irish absentees had disappeared, after losing most of their estates—the British landlords, with heavier taxes to pay, were living at home—the Southern ex-slaveholders were dead and their descendants had joined the middle classes. Their places in the international set had been taken by the sons and daughters of Northern bankers, by Swedish match kings, by Spanish grandees—and also by strange new people, Chinese mandarins and war lords, Egyptian cotton growers, Indian maharanees, even a sprinkling of Negro kings from Senegal Their places were also taken by a few French nobles … [A]ll these people had this in common, that they lived at a great distance from their sources of revenue; that their money came to them, not smelling of blood, sweat and the soil, but in the shape of clean paper readily transformable into champagne and love. They were spending it faster and faster, but also more aimlessly. In everything they did there was now an air of uncertainty and strain. Something, the war, the Russian Revolution, had given them a sense that their order was crumbling and that they belonged to a dying world.

—Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return 262-5 (Penguin ed. 1994)

Sheesh

Donna Brazile is on CNN right now telling us that Hillary has a team to help with the “transition” and that they are “reaching out to Obama.”

Girl! The other guys won! Sheesh!

War: A Big Drag for Everybody

TigerHawk, the war-loving blogger from New Jersey has a curious post up in which he expresses his exultation that there is a pro-war bumper sticker outside Princeton (link).

I’m probably not the right audience for this piece because I’ve never bought the notion that war is never a good idea.

But but but—well for example, start with one of the most “necessary” war in our history: the American Civil War that ended slavery. If ever there was a war with a good result, this was one. But it was also a colossal waste. That is: there is good reason to believe that if we had freed the slaves with full compensation to the slaves and to the slaveowners, it would have been lost costly than the war. This doesn’t make the war any less necessary for Lincoln and the north in 1861. But it was a damn fool blunder on the part of the south, and a failure of statesmanship all around.

Or take another “good” war: World War II. Again, it is hard to imagine how a war could be more “necessary,” at least if you start from the moment Hitler rolled into Poland in 1939.

But as many have noted, you can’t really understand World War Two in isolation. What you have here is the culmination of a long, ugly and destructive process that starts in 1914. And if ever there was a war unnecessary, topside and bottom, it is World War One—unnecessary to start it, unnecessary to keep it going (and, of course, unnecessary to end it as it ended).

We’re veering close to Turtledove country here, but it’s still fair to ask: what if we hadn’t botched the first war in the first place? Isn’t it a reasonable possibility that we wouldn’t have needed the second?

The point is that in each case, the highest priority is wisdom, in the form of statesmanship and good luck. War can’t be off the table. But there isn’t any situation in which war should be recognized as anything other than a failure.

Afterthought: On second look, I see that another problem on the list of those that war "solved" is "Communism." Say wha--? I should think the amazing thing about the collapse of Communism was how little war had to do with it. Even by the conventional conservative narrative, war had really nothing to do with it: Ronald Reagan just huffed and puffed and blew their house down.

Well: I suppose the War Party would say it only worked because we built up the war machine. It's certainly true that Reagan let Cap Weinberger spend money like a drunken sailor (or maybe he never noticed). But once again folks: it is far from clear--how much, if any, role American defense spending had in leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We do know that Mikhael Gorbachev was not impressed: when his generals said he needed to spend money to fend off the Americans, he rebuffed them with the tart assurance that the Americans weren't going to risk a war. And what we know most of all is that when push (the Soviets) came to shove (East Germany), it was Gorbachev that did the absolutely unexpected. Just months after Tiananmen Square, here in the Vortex of the cold war, Gorbachev did nothing and let it all fall apart.

Nobody expected that--certainly not the uber-hawks in the Reagan defense department, who had staked their fortunes on the premise that the Soviet Military Juggernaut was damn near unbeatable. Indeed, one of the more entertaining sideshows after the fall of the Berlin Wall was to watch the hawk revisionism as they tried to show that what they had never anticipated was really what they had planned for all along.

Damn Straight

There are many experienced Democrats who would make suitable running mates, and for the purposes of governing Mr. Obama needs to pick someone he can work with. Above all, he can't appear to bend to ultimatums from the House of Clinton. This is a test of Mr. Obama's political judgment and toughness. If he can't stand up to Hillary and Bill Clinton, forget about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Link, and thanks, David.

Hawks

Idlest thought of the day. Of the NYRB Classics booklist, I find that (at least) four involve hawks. That would be:

• J. A. Baker, The Peregrin


• Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk


• Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk


• T. H. White, The Goshawk
  

Somehow I thought there was a fifth one, but I can't find it at the moment. Is this just accident, or does someone have a plan? Or is it simply the brute fact that hawks are cool and kind of fun.

But wait folks, there's more; Marie Winn, who wrote the intro to T. H. White, is the author of Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male's Story (link), about a hawk at home in New York's toniest neighborhood. And there is always this one (link).

Update: Oh, and this.

The Presidency: A Sense of History

I'm hearing the people who lament that they'll never see a female president in their lifetime and I'm tempted to respond with the soothing deflector that "these things take time."

I bite my tongue. Partly that's so somebody else doesn't bite my head but in fact I agree: "these things take time" is an evasion. "Time" can turn into "forever," and forever is a long time. Also, I have to acknowledge that I never have been that crazy about Hillary. Respect, yes; even vote for her if it came to that. But not with enthusiasm.

Yet there may be some solace in the long view. I'm too lazy to do the homework myself so I will restrict myself to the rhetorical form. How many female senators do we have now? How many female governors? I'm not certain, but I know it is a whole lot more than we had in 1984. And it cannot be more than a few years until they are a majority in office, just as they are in life. The bench just gets stronger every year.

Remarkably, the same cannot be said for blacks. Once, we had Ed Brooks in the senate; now we have Barack Obama.

Still, we do have Barack Obama. I think Obama, too, is an imperfect candidate. but how often have we had a perfect candidate? A free trip to the Paris for the first person to name even one. Okay, George Washington, but you can't name another.

And for perspective, take a second look at 1984. Then we had Jesse Jackson and Geraldine Ferraro. Today we have Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I'd say we've come a long way.

Fn,: And FWIW, I'd say that for the moment at least, Jackson is conducting himself with a good deal more dignity than Ferraro.

Noted, Without (Much) Comment

James Morris:

1. Married Elizabeth Tuckniss.
2. Fathered five children.
   
3. Became Britain's 15th Greatest Modern Writer (maybe).
4. Had a sex change operation, and became Jan Morris.
5. Divorced Elizabeth.

And now:


6. In a civil union, remarried Elizabeth.

The staff and management at Underbelly central declares: bully for them. Everyone needs someone to go home to.

H/T Different Stripe.

Things Younger, or Older, or the Same Age As, You-know-who

I've been hanging out lately at Things Younger than John McCain, but it's not what you think. Thing is, quite aside from issues of partisanship, this page is turning into a cool memorabilia site, like the old "Where are they now?" column in the newspaper. Mama Cass Elliot, check. Woman's Day magazine, no kidding? The Margarita, the Nacho, Don Imus, Larry Flynt: I feel like my whole life is passing before me.

If it wouldn't be too restrictive, I suppose I could always start a Things Older than John McCain site. We could start with me. And God

Going Through the Mail: Heck of a Job, Yalie

I learn (via the May/June issue of Yale Alumni Magazine) that "Heck of a job, Brownie" has been set to music (link). In the same issue of YAM, there's also a superb retrospective on the career of William F. Buckley, Jr., by one of the shrewdest students of modern conservatism (link).

Great Moments in Czech Republic Gemütlichkeit

A few months back we had dinner at a lovely old-style family restaurant in Prague. The proporietress was the model of what a tourist would want to find there: earthy, good-natured and warm-hearted.

And look, folks, here is her picture in the morning paper.

Update: Damn, somebody sat on my joke. The picture used to be, you know, the other lady.

What Is it with DeLong and Greider?

What is it with Brad DeLong and Bill Greider? A couple of years so ago, DeLong let loose with a screed against Greider and David Stockman—recall it was Greider the journalist who outed Stockman the political hack good man in a bad trade who tried to save us from the evils of the Reagan administration. I thought then that the bile against Greider was at least unwarranted and more generally, downright bewildering (link).

Today for no very convincing reason, DeLong hauled out the same fiery hairball and hurled it again (link). I remain unpersuaded, and said so in the DeLong comments, with a link to my earlier piece. A short time later, “Brad” (sic?) popped up with a comment on the two-year-old thread:

Be assured that my dislike for Greider is small potatoes relative to what the people who worked for him when he was Assistant Managing Editor of the *Post* say when they let their hair down...

Hah? What is this all about? And what does Brad (sic) think he is telling us? Reporters didn’t like their editor? Given DeLong’s ceaseless harping about the evils of journalism in general and the Post in particular, how could anyone possibly take seriously the opinion of any Post journalist about his (her) editor? Or must we recognize that this is, in the last analysis, a matter of personal animus—the kind of personal feud which, practically speaking, shouldn’t be of any interest to the rest of us anyway?

And tedious fn: I don’t know who DeLong knew/knows at the Post, but I knew/know a scattering of these guys, and from what I hear, the tweendecks folks had a high opinion of Greider and were sorry to see him go.

Another tedious fn.: In my original post, I snidely cracked that the book was being remaindered at $1.96. As of this morning, at Amazon it was down to a penny.

One more: Aa the risk of extending this interminably, I have to say I have never been that crazy about Greider’s economic analysis—on the whole, I like DeLong’s better. But as an observer/psychologist, I think Greider has no peer. His profile of George McGovern, reprinted (I think) in the Library of America collection of Vietnam-era journalism (to take just one example) is a masterpiece of shrewd observation. So also the Stockman piece. I think it retains whatever value it has (a penny?) more for its description of Stockman than for whatever, in particular, it says about tax-and-spend.

14-Year-Old Romanian Gymnast for Veep?

"You're a lawyer," my dinner companion declared, "I have a constitutional question for you."

Oh yuk, I never did understand con law.

"The president," he said, "has to be native-born and 35, but what about the vice-president?"

I had a vague sense I'd heard the question before, but I didn't have any nifty law response.

"Interesting question," I sidestepped, "and perhaps important. Chances are pretty good that we will all fall in love with some 14-year-old Romanian gymnast at the Beijing Olympics, and John McCain will want to put her on the ticket for age balance. And geographic."

"Nothing," my companion continued, answering his own question "requires that the vice-president by 35 and native born!"

Beep, wrong. My friend Carlton points out that the Twelfth amendment (we've got twelve?) specifically provides that nobody can be vice-president who doesn't meet the requirements for the presidency. So, the 14-year-old Romanian will have to find other work. Been the law since 1804.

The only residual question would be: where would a seemingly intelligent grownup grab on to such a goofy idea? I really don't know, but here's a guess: there's a paranoid theory floating around the internet that President Hillary will find a way to appoint Vice-President Bill as her vice-president, preserving the dynasty. Setting aside practical good sense, I should think that the Twelfth Amendment pretty much puts paid to that one too (Snopes does the usual efficient murdalizing--link). No telling what you might be able to believe if you don't consult the text.

Justice Black used to carry a Constitution in his hip pocket for handy consultation. Maybe I should, too. Who knows, I might find that the (alleged) "Right to Bear Arms" isn't really in there at all.

What I Learned Today: The Pee Revolution

The Wichita Lawrence Bureau is watching the History Channel:

The phosphorous, nitrogen etc in a person’s urine will over a year provide enough fertilizer to grow enough corn and wheat to feed the person.

Dissent on Hayek

Underbelly's Wichita bureau (newly relocated in Lawrence) points to this instructive critique of Friedrich von Hayek (link), including (surprise!) warm words from Keynes and Orwell.

I came to scoff and stayed to pray on Hayek. I had a college teacher who made us read Road to Serfdom, well before it came into fashion. I was outraged; I knew that as a good liberal, I should it somewhere down around the Protocols of the Elders of Zionj or Mein Kampf. Even as I read it, I developed the uneasy sense that I was wrong. Over the years, I've come to recognize that Hayek has a lot to offer--though certainly not, I should add, the kind of near-worship that he garners from ideological free-marketers (many of whom, I suspect, haven't actually read him).

I remember being particularly impressed by the argument that a central planner cannot possibly know enough to do the planning job right--too much decentralized knowledge in too many out-of-the-way places. I'd say that in the Web 2.0 age, this has come to be pretty much an Article of Faith. Indeed these days, we turn the point around. In the Silicon Valley they quote Hewlitt (or is it Packard?) saying that "if Hewlitt Packard knew what its employees know, we'd be 10 times as rich as we are"--translated, the task of management is to recognize the skill and knowledge of its labor force, and to motivate them to share what they know.

I also appreciate the way Hayek insists; that he's not a conservative. Right enough; anybody that committed to dynamic change cannot possibly share common cause with the troglodytes.

Hayek was, of course, smashingly, crashingly wrong in suggesting that Atlee Socialism must inevitably lead to fascism. But I wouldn't hold this against him. The parade of economists who have made absurdly wrong predictions is long and, ironically, honorable: Malthus, Schumpeter, and yes, Marx. Funny how the ideologues always remember Marx's predictive errors, and ignore or forgive them in everybody else. The truth is we can learn from all of them, and the fact that they were crashingly wrong is quite beside the point.

I've always been intrigued by the friendship between Hayek and Michael Oakeshott--two people who, you might think at first blush, had little to offer each other. Oakeshott is, of course, the arch-foe of systematizers (and, not at all incidentally, one of the best polemicists in modern thought). Of course that makes him a foe of Marxism. But I believe he said (though I can't put my finger on it just now) that Hayek went a bit overboard in his fetishizing of the free market, too.

I suspect where Hayek founders is (surprise!) on a favorite theme here at Underbelly central: the idea that a "market" is no more "natural" than Chinese opera--they are both cultural artifacts constructed out of "natural" materials by paths and devices that we can only dimly comprehend. That's why Hayek failed to understand that Atlee's Britain, very far from being a form of proto-Stalinism, was in many ways one of the most benign governments in human history. But move it lock, stock and barrel to Julius Nyerere's Tanzania and you have a recipe for disaster. Who was it who said that no one has yet invented a system of government under which the Germans will not work, or the Poles will? Not Hayek, but don't hold it against him. He's worthy of serious attention, and a sympathetic critique (like the one in Dissent is the highest form of flattery.

How to Lose an Election

Surveying the Clinton csmpaign, Charles Cook (in his email column) attempts to draw some lessons for experience on how to lose an election.

Recent history shows terrific examples of how to handle and how not to handle tough losses.

In the 1994 Maryland governor's race, Democrat Parris Glendening, the county executive for Prince George's County, edged Ellen Sauerbrey, the state House of Delegates Republican leader, by a scant 5,993 votes out of more than 1.4 million cast.

Some Republicans said they smelled foul play, although a subsequent bipartisan investigation found none. Sauerbrey fought and fought, long after it was clear that she would not prevail, earning her the moniker, "Ellen Sourgrapes."

In the 1998 rematch, though Glendening's popularity was on the wane, Sauerbrey's mishandling of the recount likely prevented her from taking advantage of the situation and she lost, 55-45 percent.

In 2006, Republican automobile dealer Vern Buchanan edged out Christine Jennings, a banker and the Democratic nominee in Florida's 13th District, by 369 votes, though the results were clouded by evidence of voting-machine irregularities.

But once again, the candidate on the short end of the stick handled it badly.

This too, might put Jennings at a disadvantage in her rematch effort this fall against Buchanan. A strong Democratic tide might push her over the top, but that's what it would take, as she came across as a sore loser.

The model for how to lose gracefully is South Dakota Sen. John Thune. Then a House member, Thune lost his 2002 challenge to incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson by just 524 votes, with suggestions of voting irregularities on Indian reservations clouding the outcome.

But Thune stepped back, handled the outcome with grace and was able to leverage that into being well positioned to take on Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., just two years later and unseat him.

Instructive stuff. But apparently his reach didn't go back far enough to pick up 1962, when we all learned that we wouldn't have you-know-who to kick around any more:

9/11 Changed Everything

...in the sense that cops can now do any damn thing they want. Cf., from Schnier on Security (link):

London Heathrow security stopped someone from boarding a plane for wearing a Transformers T-shirt showing a cartoon gun.

and from BoingBoing (link, with cool video):

A BB reader says: "A local news crew was interviewing an Amtrak spokesman at D.C.'s union station who told the reporter that photography is allowed in the station. During the interview, a security guard interrupted them to say that photography/video was not allowed.

test

test

So That's What It's About

Lots of talk this weekend about how guys don't like Sex and the City (see, e.g., link) Actually, I kinda liked Sex and the City (the TV show; I haven't seen the movie). It's not that my wife pushed me into it; I'm not sure she has ever seen it. And it is not just about all those hot babes making the boinky boinky. Well, okay it is about that, but there is more. The thing is that for all their dazzle and glamor, the girls were winningly human—vulnerable and bewildered, and unable to avoid making small or big mistakes. That opened up lots of opportunities for interesting, surprising, funny plots.

But I have to admit one thing: until the current hype over the movie, I never realized that it was all about the clothes.

Eagles May Soar, but Weasels Don't Get Caught in Jet Engines

I think we've found one thing all Americans can agree on: Scott McClellan is a lyng little creep. I mean yes, sure, fine, every word he says in the book is true. But in the too-little-late sweepstakes, this guy retires the jersey, And he's still trying to play the statesman about it. And trying to insinuate that he's really kinda like Richard Clarke--man, that's the last straw.

One good sideshow, though: the number of administration loyalists (probably every one of them, considering how few there are left) who called in to C-Span to accuse McClellan of doing it for (gasp) money. Excuse me, but isn't that the Republican platform: go to Washington, deploy a public resource, go home, cash in?

I doubt we've heard the last of him, though. Snakiness like this promises a long and successful career.

Overheard in Palookaville: The Y Word

HE: (loudly) YOU MEAN YOU WANT

... ME TO DO

(in a whisper) yard work?

SHE: Mmmh hmmmh

HE: (in a whisper) ok.

Tourism Note, with an Endorsement

An attentive reader asks: did I do France on my own, or on tour? The answer is yes to both—Paris on our own, and Provence on tour, a point which invites a bit of expansion. The operator is an outfit called Archaeological Tours out of New York—a one-woman organization (well; with a small but devoted staff). We don't carry pickaxes but we do tend to favor assorted ruins. The trips are well-organized and imaginatively planned, but the real draw is the professor/lecturer; AT has a high-quality stable of these, well suited to their particular assignments.

It's a niche market, with a loyal following: some people have taken 20-30 trips with AT; we've taken nine. Part of the fascination is wondering how the heck she stays business: lots of her tours go to places a lot gnarlier than Provence, and she seems to have a political crisis or a natural disaster (or both) on her hands somewhere all the time (most recently, she had a tour set for that part of China where the earthquake hit; they revised the itinerary, and went ahead).

Yes, yes, I know what they say about packaged tours; I have said most of them myself. But there is a great deal to be said for walking the territory in the company of someone who really knows what s/he is talking about. And for a traveler, there are few things sweeter than sticking your bag outside the door in the morning and having it reappear as if by magic in a distant city that night. For the right taste, highly recommended.

U. Utah Phillips RIP

I will not easily forget the first time I heard U. Utah Phillips tell the story about the Moose Turd Pie.

It was around seven in the morning. I'd just come out of the shower. Somebody was playing a Phillips tape on, I guess KPFA (yes). I nearly swallowed my toothbrush.

In truth, I think I must have heard the story before. But I'd certainly not heard this story nor, come to think of it, any story, so well told with such pith and pace, so scabrously funny.

I made it my business to seek out a Phillips live show as soon as I could. In fact, it wasn't hard: in those days, he made regular appearances at the Palms Playhouse, an inimitable venue for counterculture entertainment at Davis, California, where I was living. I suppose I caught him there half a dozen times over the years before I got distracted and he started reducing his schedule.

Phillips is often billed as a “singer,” some sort of anarchic twin to Pete Seeger. The characterization is accurate only up to a point. For one thing, Phillips was no great shakes as a singer. Granted he could carry a tune well enough, and his voice was loud. But his voice (like his politics?) had no nuance, and his choice of material tended to obscure just those things that made him so wonderful.

But he was (or came very near to being) the best racounteur ever. The moose turd pie left me helpless on the bathroom floor. He did as well, I thought, with the famous last ride on the Goodnight-Loving Trail ("Chief, you can kill me if you want ... !"). And the one about the guy who tried to ventilate his bull with a moose call ("Any guy who don't know the difference..."). And any number of others which elude me at the moment, but which I hope I have somewhere on tape or disk.

Phillips' politics were like Seeger's, broadly speaking, in that they were both anti-establishment. But the differences far outweigh the similarities. Seeger, as I've argued elsewhere, has a manipulative streak that translates into an unwholesome phoniness. Phillips' politics were visceral, instinctive, and (hence) sincere—a sort of a left-wing John McCain. He wasn't a subtle man, and he didn't feel like he had to apologize for his lack of subtlety. He just knew that a lot of people were being screwed over, and he didn't like. He liked to call himself a Wobbly, and it's more than just an exercise in branding. From the beginning, the Wobblies have practiced a brand of leftism more driven by antic energy than by subtle casuistics.

All of which speaks to the other, even more attractive, aspect of Phillips' personality: his compassion, evidently sincere and heartfelt, for “the downtrodden." And not just any downtrodden: Phiillips didn't waste a lot of energy speaking out for innocent babes or for virtue outraged. I suspect he felt that others could do that job as well as or better than he. He saved his pity for the ones that are harder to love—the stumblebums, the ones who sleep on park benches, or huddle around bonfires in old oil drums, and who do not bathe, and who throw up on their shirt.

People, a cynic might say, much like Phillips himself, had providence not given him the grace of a subversive outlook and an antic sense of humor. But providence did give him that grace, and Phillips had the grace to enjoy it, and share.

There are two telling charges against the conventional left: one, that it is driven more by envy than by compassion and two, that it doesn't have a sense of humor. Neither charge is entirely fair, of course, but they are both close enough to the truth that they hurt. Lot of the left does lack a sense of humor, and even when left humorists do try to be funny, they too often fall into tendentiousness and rancor. Phillips in his weaker moments could veer towards tendentious himself But his compassion was vivid and sincere and as a story-teller, he had few peers.

U. Utah Phillips died May 23, 2008, at home in Nevada City, CA. I am among the mourners.

Update: Here it is (link)! Thanks, John.

Provence Travel Note: Artists

Art note on the south of France: as extras beyond Roman ruins (infra), Provence offers trace of Van Gogh (at Arles) and Cézanne (at Aix-en-Provence). Not the art itself: I didn't notice any Van Goghs at all in Arles, though you can see any number of sights that look pretty much as they did when Van Gogh painted them (plus one obviously phony “yellow house”). Though how the locals put up with all that blue-and-yellow in the tourist bric-a-brac is beyond me.

Aix, too, does everything it can to squeeze a few dollars out of the local deceased celebrity. And unlike Arles, Aix actually has a bit of the artist' work. They don't brag about it much, and with good reason: a panel says “we don't want you to think this is just the rejected or the forgotten,” but one suspects that that is exactly what it is. There are lots of “Cézanne did x here” sites. There is even a Cézanne studio which you will like or not, depending on your taste—a sort of a glorified junk shop full of stuff that either was or should have been there when the artist was at work. I thought it was pretty cool myself: did a nice job of conveying a bit of flavor of what it might have been like when the painter himself was in occupancy.

Undocumented extra: it's hardly essential, but I must say it added frisson to leave Provence for Paris and the Musée d'Orsay, where you can see all the Cézannes and Van Goghs that you cannot see at Aix or Arles.