Oh, looky folks, here's a paperback ($2.25) copy of The Bankers, by Martin Mayer, copyright 1974 (mine is a 1977 reprint, with a 1977 introduction). This is a book that I without irony as thee gold standard of its time for a popular-audience discussion of banking issues (he did a reprise in 1997 which I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've never read).
I can't say I've reread every word of the earlier version earlier, but a skim of the index is enough to give you a hint of how much banking has changed. There is, of course, no entry for Alan Greenspan, Jamie Dimond, Robert Rubin. There's no entry for "proprietary trading (did the phrase even exist them?)--more surprising, none for "investment banking."
I don't mean any disrespect to Mayer here, but these insights do just begin to suggest how much banking has changed over the past generation. Mayer opens the book with a chapter called "The revolution," but its main purpose appears to be to suggest just how dull banking was, and perhaps was supposed to be: Mayer retells the anecdote of the old banker asked to name the most important change he had seen in half a century of bankruptcy--he answered "air conditioning") (shades of Paul Volcker's crack that the greatest financial innovation of the modern age was the ATM machine). Perhaps the only hint in this intro of what is to come is Mayer's description of the Walter Wriston (then head of National City Bank) as "a man who radiates nervous energy."
There are a few harbingers of what is to come. There are excellent discussions of the Penn Central debacle, including a mention of the highly ahem equivocal role played by Goldman Sachs. It's one of only two mentions of Goldman in the book (the other has to do with securities trading in the 20s; in both, Goldman comes off with egg on its face, as amply documented more recently in William Cohan's admirable history of the firm). There's an intelligent discussion of Franklin National, the largest bank failure in the 20th Century up to its time (1974).
Perhaps more familiar to the modern ear will be the discussion of Saloman Brothers (remember): how they borrow(ed) every last clacker of government money they could lay their hands on, and repurpose it unconstrained by such niceties of reserve requirements. This was. of course, before Lew Ranieri at Salomon more or less invented securitization--and long before Paul Mozer nearly brought the whole temple down on his head. Tantalizing for its promise, but not fully developed, is his discussion of "bought money"--what Mayer himself later popularized as the shift from "asset management" to "liabilities management." Here perhaps we have a glimmer of the dynamic vortex that it appears we must all live in today.
Mayer isn't perfect. He tends to wander and to ride his own hobbyhorses at the expense of a more measured presentation. And perhaps needless to say, if anyone were to assign this to you next semester as a textbook on modern banking, you'd want to find yourself another instructor. But as perspective, as context on where we are today, it is an unbeatable recofrd of where we have come from.
Per Wiki, I surmise that Mayer is 83, and still active: he's up at the website of the Brookings Institution; here is his most recent Brookings post.. Here's a fairly recent interview.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Where are All the Men?
Fabrizio, bewildered and unattached on the battlefield at Waterloo, stumbles into the company of three other stragglers and an otherwise unnamed corporal:
=====
Accept it as a universal: unattached, underemployed young men are a misfortune and in sufficient numbers can be a calamity. I've argued before that we (they) will probably breed young men out after another couple of generations, but in the meantime here is another home truth, perhaps more contentious but I think no less true. That is: the only force that society has ever devised sufficient to control anarchic young men is older men: men old enough to have banked the fires of testosterone poisoning, to have acquired mortgages and steady gigs they don't want to lose--but who retain enough energy and personal magnetism to slap the young ones into line.
I'm not talking superman here, not vainglorious displays of macho bravado. Precisely the contrary--that is young man stuff. I'm talking the humbler and more demanding task of Keeping the Wheels on the Bus. Women will say that is women's work and in large measure they are right. But the preponderance of the evidence tilts towards a melancholy truth: they can't do it on their own. Say what you like about what "a mother knows," the fact is they are too often bullied or--what is worse--suckered by the young hot-bloods to maintain stability and good order on their own.
What men, exactly? One's first thought may be "pastors"--priests, rabbis, but I'm not so sure. I'm inclined to vote with Ann Douglas and recognize that pastors are mostly about women. For men, I'm thinking rather of a humbler category: petty officers, top sergeants, shift commanders, shop foremen and the like. And I'm specifically not talking about heroism here. I'm just saying that a decent society can't run without them.
[Aside: in passing, I'd say that this insight helps to explain the enduring popularity of a particular kind of TV show--my old favorite Hill Street Blues, for example, or Coach, or the immortal (interminable?) Law and Order.]
All of which makes me wonder: where are the men in London, specifically Tottenham and Wood Green? The short answer is that I haven't a clue: I've spent a lot of time in London but I don't think I ever set foot in either place. All I know is that it's pretty clear that some sort of social glue is missing. In America, some people would say this sort of thing is an artifact of excessive incarcertion: lock the men away for a generation and you've got nobody to mind the home front. In some places, you might find that it's a function of immigration patterns: young folks come to the city while old folks stay home (think New York in the 1880s-90s). It some places, it may be that the older men have never got plugged in themselves--that they remain without jobs and mortgages and the other indicia of stability that work to put them on an even keel. Ironically, one thing underlying this model is the very philosophy of policing, as invented in modern England by Sir Robert (Bobbie!) Peel."
I stress I don't want to pretend that I know enough to push any one of these particular theories: I'm posing a question, not giving an answer. All I'm saying is that a society with a surplus of underemployed young men is sitting on a bonfire. And a society without a network of plugged-in older men is very likely to find itself stuck with the former.
“That’s good news! We’re all in the same boat,” said the corporal; “but do what I tell you and you’ll get through all right.” His eye fell on five or six trees marking the line of a little ditch in the middle of an immense cornfield. “Make for the trees!” he told his men; “lie down,” he added when they had reached the trees, “and not a sound, remember. But before you go to sleep, who’s got any bread?”
“I have,” said one of the men.
“Give it here,” said the corporal in a tone of authority. He divided the bread into five pieces and took the smallest himself.
--Stendahl, Charterhouse of Parma 60 (Signet ed. 1962)
=====
Accept it as a universal: unattached, underemployed young men are a misfortune and in sufficient numbers can be a calamity. I've argued before that we (they) will probably breed young men out after another couple of generations, but in the meantime here is another home truth, perhaps more contentious but I think no less true. That is: the only force that society has ever devised sufficient to control anarchic young men is older men: men old enough to have banked the fires of testosterone poisoning, to have acquired mortgages and steady gigs they don't want to lose--but who retain enough energy and personal magnetism to slap the young ones into line.
I'm not talking superman here, not vainglorious displays of macho bravado. Precisely the contrary--that is young man stuff. I'm talking the humbler and more demanding task of Keeping the Wheels on the Bus. Women will say that is women's work and in large measure they are right. But the preponderance of the evidence tilts towards a melancholy truth: they can't do it on their own. Say what you like about what "a mother knows," the fact is they are too often bullied or--what is worse--suckered by the young hot-bloods to maintain stability and good order on their own.
What men, exactly? One's first thought may be "pastors"--priests, rabbis, but I'm not so sure. I'm inclined to vote with Ann Douglas and recognize that pastors are mostly about women. For men, I'm thinking rather of a humbler category: petty officers, top sergeants, shift commanders, shop foremen and the like. And I'm specifically not talking about heroism here. I'm just saying that a decent society can't run without them.
[Aside: in passing, I'd say that this insight helps to explain the enduring popularity of a particular kind of TV show--my old favorite Hill Street Blues, for example, or Coach, or the immortal (interminable?) Law and Order.]
All of which makes me wonder: where are the men in London, specifically Tottenham and Wood Green? The short answer is that I haven't a clue: I've spent a lot of time in London but I don't think I ever set foot in either place. All I know is that it's pretty clear that some sort of social glue is missing. In America, some people would say this sort of thing is an artifact of excessive incarcertion: lock the men away for a generation and you've got nobody to mind the home front. In some places, you might find that it's a function of immigration patterns: young folks come to the city while old folks stay home (think New York in the 1880s-90s). It some places, it may be that the older men have never got plugged in themselves--that they remain without jobs and mortgages and the other indicia of stability that work to put them on an even keel. Ironically, one thing underlying this model is the very philosophy of policing, as invented in modern England by Sir Robert (Bobbie!) Peel."
I stress I don't want to pretend that I know enough to push any one of these particular theories: I'm posing a question, not giving an answer. All I'm saying is that a society with a surplus of underemployed young men is sitting on a bonfire. And a society without a network of plugged-in older men is very likely to find itself stuck with the former.
Anything Worth Not Doing is Worth Not Doing Well
Moby-Dick demonstrates the pleasures and profundities of digression, and is an excellent example of how a novelist can excel at what he perhaps should not have tried in the first place.
--Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel 371 (2006)
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Ashland Shakespeare Note: Henry IV Part 2
I guess a lot of people say that Henry IV part II is among the weaker of Shakespearean histories, and I can see their point.. It's pretty clearly a sequel, with a lot of the same characters, reprising some of the same devices. There's little by way of dramatic conflict; just a series of something very close to tableaux.
And yet I've liked it from the very first time I saw it some 40 years ago (at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticuct), perhaps the moreso as time goes on. There be more than coincidence at work here: turns out on closer scrutiny that the play has a theme, and the theme is old age, decay, disease (I think I heard somewhere that "disease" is a word first used in this play). Falstaff is a busted flush. The King is on his death bed. Northumberland may have brought about the death of his son. Shallow and Silence present themselves as perhaps the most remarkable old-guy buddy team in literature short of Statler and Waldorf.
It also includes (and I suspect this is most important) three of the most hauntingly wonderful and uniquely Shakespearean prose packages in the canon. One would be that bit where Mistress Quickly tries to berate Falstaff into marriage . ("sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun-week")The second is the item where Doll Tearsheet suavely beguiles the same Falstaff into blackguarding his great friends while they stand at his elbow (" a' plays at quoits well, and eats conger and fennel, and drinks off candles' ends for flap-dragons). And the third would be that absolutely inimitable "exchange" where Justice Shallow tells old Silence what a carouser he was in his youth (all lies?)("How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?").
Every time I hear/read Shakespeare do stuff like this, I remember all those people who insist that Shakespeare couldn't possibly have been Shakespeare because he wasn't a college boy. What we have here, of course, are samples of Shakespeare channeling "common speech"--precisely the sort of thing you would not have learned in an Oxbridge common room--and channeling it with a pith and urgency that I think are unmatched anywhere else in literature (no, not Dickens; Dickens stuff is diverting in its way, but it's a cartoon). But wait, no--Shakespeare is not merely "channeling:" he's taking common speech and adding his own particular bite and drive such as to make it all into poetry.
He does it elsewhere, I suppose, depending on your definition. There's a stellar example--perhaps the best--in Act II, scene 1 of Henry IV part 1, the inn-yard at Rochester ("What, ostler! come away and be hanged!"). I suppose you could count the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream. although this falls over into more explicit comedy ("The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen..."). I'd count the boost for nationalist solidarity you get from Fluellen in Henry V ("it is out of my prains"). For all this, I don't think any play quite matches Henry IV part 2 in capturing this distinctive mode of expression; all reason enough to keep it among the first rank.
Afterthought: Oh, the play, right, I forgot. I'd say the Ashland troupe did a fine job with it--mostly straightforward and uncluttered. The Doll Tearsheet scenes do seem to get raunchier with the passing years, but I'd say it is all there in the text (guy behind me was loud in his disapproval, though). James Edmondson and Michael J. Hume, whose experience at Ashland extends almost back to the War of Roses, played Shallow and Silence a bit like a pair of vaudeville hoofers (and I say that in a nice way). I thought last year that John Tufts didn't have quite the ambiguity--the combination of charm and menace--that you might want in Prince Hal. I'd say the same now although ironically, he has less to do in this part 2 so you notice it less. Richard Howard, whom I first saw when he strode buck naked across the stage (near 30 years ago, come lammas-eve)--and later, dying in the (literal, Ashland) rain as Richard II--Howard was just about perfectly cast as the ailing and disappointed old king.
And yet I've liked it from the very first time I saw it some 40 years ago (at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticuct), perhaps the moreso as time goes on. There be more than coincidence at work here: turns out on closer scrutiny that the play has a theme, and the theme is old age, decay, disease (I think I heard somewhere that "disease" is a word first used in this play). Falstaff is a busted flush. The King is on his death bed. Northumberland may have brought about the death of his son. Shallow and Silence present themselves as perhaps the most remarkable old-guy buddy team in literature short of Statler and Waldorf.
It also includes (and I suspect this is most important) three of the most hauntingly wonderful and uniquely Shakespearean prose packages in the canon. One would be that bit where Mistress Quickly tries to berate Falstaff into marriage . ("sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun-week")The second is the item where Doll Tearsheet suavely beguiles the same Falstaff into blackguarding his great friends while they stand at his elbow (" a' plays at quoits well, and eats conger and fennel, and drinks off candles' ends for flap-dragons). And the third would be that absolutely inimitable "exchange" where Justice Shallow tells old Silence what a carouser he was in his youth (all lies?)("How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?").
Every time I hear/read Shakespeare do stuff like this, I remember all those people who insist that Shakespeare couldn't possibly have been Shakespeare because he wasn't a college boy. What we have here, of course, are samples of Shakespeare channeling "common speech"--precisely the sort of thing you would not have learned in an Oxbridge common room--and channeling it with a pith and urgency that I think are unmatched anywhere else in literature (no, not Dickens; Dickens stuff is diverting in its way, but it's a cartoon). But wait, no--Shakespeare is not merely "channeling:" he's taking common speech and adding his own particular bite and drive such as to make it all into poetry.
He does it elsewhere, I suppose, depending on your definition. There's a stellar example--perhaps the best--in Act II, scene 1 of Henry IV part 1, the inn-yard at Rochester ("What, ostler! come away and be hanged!"). I suppose you could count the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream. although this falls over into more explicit comedy ("The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen..."). I'd count the boost for nationalist solidarity you get from Fluellen in Henry V ("it is out of my prains"). For all this, I don't think any play quite matches Henry IV part 2 in capturing this distinctive mode of expression; all reason enough to keep it among the first rank.
Afterthought: Oh, the play, right, I forgot. I'd say the Ashland troupe did a fine job with it--mostly straightforward and uncluttered. The Doll Tearsheet scenes do seem to get raunchier with the passing years, but I'd say it is all there in the text (guy behind me was loud in his disapproval, though). James Edmondson and Michael J. Hume, whose experience at Ashland extends almost back to the War of Roses, played Shallow and Silence a bit like a pair of vaudeville hoofers (and I say that in a nice way). I thought last year that John Tufts didn't have quite the ambiguity--the combination of charm and menace--that you might want in Prince Hal. I'd say the same now although ironically, he has less to do in this part 2 so you notice it less. Richard Howard, whom I first saw when he strode buck naked across the stage (near 30 years ago, come lammas-eve)--and later, dying in the (literal, Ashland) rain as Richard II--Howard was just about perfectly cast as the ailing and disappointed old king.
Apple Reminds Me that Its Motto is not "Don't be Evil"
Here's Apple again with another one of those annoyances that really doesn't gain them much of anything but certainly annoys people like me. Here's the deal: a couple of months back, just after I got my Iphone, I downloaded the Kindle reader app, idly and not expecting much. To my stunned surprise, I fell in love with it. I do most of my Kindle reading now on the Iphone--so much so that I've basically ceded the real Kindle over to Mrs. B. I also found that Amazon could just suck money out of me because I could order and take delivery right from the Kindle app screen.
A few days that "order" function just disappeared, zap. Or if anybody told me, I sure missed it. I figured it might be a software glitch so I did the standard computer evasion of killing it out and reinstalling. No change, nada, zip. Idly again, I fired off an email to Amazon to tell them I missed the ordering app and, not incidentally, that it would probably cost them money.
They must have been waiting for me to call. In less time than it takes to tell, Amazon fired back an answer saying sorry, the app is no longer available "In order to comply with recent policy changes by Apple." So, apparently Jeff wants me to understand that he's not taking for Steve's grabiness. But then in the same email, Amazon tells me how to configure the same feature via Safari--with the facility, of course, to put a link on my home page.
Long story short, in a few more minutes, I have essentially the link installed on my home screen and by george they are right, it does just what the original Kindle app used to do. I cannot possibly imagine what advantage Apple gains by insisting on this workaround (and then not telling me about it)--unless their business plan shows them gaining utils by annoying the customer.
A few days that "order" function just disappeared, zap. Or if anybody told me, I sure missed it. I figured it might be a software glitch so I did the standard computer evasion of killing it out and reinstalling. No change, nada, zip. Idly again, I fired off an email to Amazon to tell them I missed the ordering app and, not incidentally, that it would probably cost them money.
They must have been waiting for me to call. In less time than it takes to tell, Amazon fired back an answer saying sorry, the app is no longer available "In order to comply with recent policy changes by Apple." So, apparently Jeff wants me to understand that he's not taking for Steve's grabiness. But then in the same email, Amazon tells me how to configure the same feature via Safari--with the facility, of course, to put a link on my home page.
Long story short, in a few more minutes, I have essentially the link installed on my home screen and by george they are right, it does just what the original Kindle app used to do. I cannot possibly imagine what advantage Apple gains by insisting on this workaround (and then not telling me about it)--unless their business plan shows them gaining utils by annoying the customer.
Blenheim
On this day (N.S.) in 1704: the Battle of Blenheim, where 52,000 allied troops (Britain, Austrian Empire) faced down 56,000 French etc. Winston Churchill called it the beginning of British hegemony in Europe. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat but it wasn't nearly the end of the war, which lasted until 1714. Robert Southey branded it (with leaden irony) "A Famous Victory."
The Duke returned from the wars today and did pleasure me in his top-boots.
--Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of
John, Duke of Marlborough,
commander of the allied forces.
Friday, August 12, 2011
What Does it Mean to Say that "Corporations Are People"?
Some lefties hoot at Mitt Romney for saying that "corporations are people." Others say it's cheap shot. I lean towards the cheap shot faction. Taken in context, he wasn't saying much that was very controversial, or even interesting--i.e., he was saying that in the end, the tax on the corporation ultimately comes out of the pocket of some human being. His mistake was that he said it in the kind of MBA jargon which usually protects him via its implacable dullness-, but this time transmogrified him a moment of harmless merriment. The charge sticks to him (if it sticks at all) not because it is true or even important, but because it crystallizes something we already believe and already dislike about him--like Al Gore and the internet, or Michael Dukakis and the tank. In Romney's case, the insight bears the suggestion that people are not people, which is precisely what his critics think he may in fact believe.
But what I'd really like to know his just what, in detail, Mitt Romney really believes about the people-ness of corporations? Nobody (I think) believes that "corporations" are "people" in every way. E.g., illegal to murder them? to abort them after they become viable?--etc. I think I know the correct answer to those questions; meanwhile I have been telling my bankruptcy students for years that the buzz the hear in Palookaville on a hot August night is not, in fact, a cicada infestation; rather it is the souls of undead corporations that have been abandoned but never terminated, seeking their final home. I sometimes get a laugh for this one.
Some people--unfortunately, some people with robes, believe that corporations are people to the extent of enjoying First-Amendment rights. Me, I'm one of those who thinks the whole thing is a wild hare. I think Citizens United, the free speech case, was a terrible decision--it is people and not corporations who have a just claim on First-Amendment rights. The corporation is a convention, and a distraction.
But for the same reason, I'd get rid of the corporate income tax--shifting the burden over to the individual investors. I concede there is a whole thicket of sub-issues there as to just what gets shifted and how. But I think that shifting the tax to the investor at least clarifies the point that it is the investor and not the corporation who is a "person."
Would Mitt Romney agree? Of course not. When he (or any other GOP Presidential candidate) talkes about getting rid of the the corporate income tax, he doesn't have the slightest intention of trying to replace it with anything comparable but more coherent. He's just saluting the GOP gonfalon of never paying for anything, ever. When he says "corporations or people," the unspoken corollary is "and people shouldn't have to pay taxes."
So if Romney really wants to treat corporations as "people," I'd say he's still got some work to do. But he's a bright guy, and he can afford good staff; any day now he may be telling us how the souls of corporations are eligible for retroactive baptism. But get your money in front, guys; remember that it is Republicans we are dealing with here.
But what I'd really like to know his just what, in detail, Mitt Romney really believes about the people-ness of corporations? Nobody (I think) believes that "corporations" are "people" in every way. E.g., illegal to murder them? to abort them after they become viable?--etc. I think I know the correct answer to those questions; meanwhile I have been telling my bankruptcy students for years that the buzz the hear in Palookaville on a hot August night is not, in fact, a cicada infestation; rather it is the souls of undead corporations that have been abandoned but never terminated, seeking their final home. I sometimes get a laugh for this one.
Some people--unfortunately, some people with robes, believe that corporations are people to the extent of enjoying First-Amendment rights. Me, I'm one of those who thinks the whole thing is a wild hare. I think Citizens United, the free speech case, was a terrible decision--it is people and not corporations who have a just claim on First-Amendment rights. The corporation is a convention, and a distraction.
But for the same reason, I'd get rid of the corporate income tax--shifting the burden over to the individual investors. I concede there is a whole thicket of sub-issues there as to just what gets shifted and how. But I think that shifting the tax to the investor at least clarifies the point that it is the investor and not the corporation who is a "person."
Would Mitt Romney agree? Of course not. When he (or any other GOP Presidential candidate) talkes about getting rid of the the corporate income tax, he doesn't have the slightest intention of trying to replace it with anything comparable but more coherent. He's just saluting the GOP gonfalon of never paying for anything, ever. When he says "corporations or people," the unspoken corollary is "and people shouldn't have to pay taxes."
So if Romney really wants to treat corporations as "people," I'd say he's still got some work to do. But he's a bright guy, and he can afford good staff; any day now he may be telling us how the souls of corporations are eligible for retroactive baptism. But get your money in front, guys; remember that it is Republicans we are dealing with here.
On the Face of things, Absurd...
A society in Germany which advises on etiquette and social behaviour has called for kissing to be banned in the workplace.
The Knigge Society says the practice of greeting colleagues and business partners with a kiss on the cheek is uncomfortable for many Germans.
The society's chairman, Hans-Michael Klein, says he has received concerned emails from workers on the issue.
He advises people in the workplace to stick to the traditional handshake. ...
He said there is, in Europe, a "social distance zone" of 60cm (23in) which should be observed.
The Knigge Society, named after a German guide to good manners, is based in a castle 80km (50 miles) from Dortmund in western Germany.
It has reportedly previously ruled on the correct way to end a relationship via text message, and how to deal with a runny nose in public.
Link. Bruce is skeptical as to the story's authenticity. "A real German," he says, "would compute the correct social distance to millimeters." On implications for European integration, go here. For more on German social norms, John points us to Mozart:
If You Didn't Want to Go to Providence, Why Did you Get on the Train?
Bondholders Get Themselves Paid Twice in Rhode Island
Honestly, am I the only person (outside of the Rhode Island public employees) outraged at the insolence and arrogance of the bondholders who have decided they won't be getting enough on their contracts in prospective Rhode Island municipal bankruptcies? Faced with the prospect of a shortfall the bondholders have just shoved through a piece of legislation that bumps them to the head of the queue. As Reuters explains:
I suppose I could be wrong if we find a document in the file that says "and besides, boss, if there ever arises a real risk of default, we just get ourlapdogs friends in the legislature to change the law." Then again, I guess if they really did plan it that way, then they weren't getting double paid after all.
The law adopted last month gives municipal bondholders a lien on taxes and general revenues collected by the cities and towns whose bonds they buy.I've got a better idea. Let's pass a law giving first priority to all bloggers whose screen names begin with "B." It would make about as much sense as prioritizing precisely those people most likely to have the motive, the opportunity and the wherewithal to estimate this risk and (this is important) to price it into their original loan? Assuming (as I should think we are permitted to assume) that they have already charged for this bankruptcy haircut, if we now let them stick it to the general fund, aren't we just paying them twice?
This means the bondholders would be repaid before other creditors such as workers, suppliers and pension fund beneficiaries if the municipalities went bankrupt.
I suppose I could be wrong if we find a document in the file that says "and besides, boss, if there ever arises a real risk of default, we just get our
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Mead on Just About Everything:
Waiting for a New Edition
I'm still noodling away God and Gold. Walter Russell Mead's everything-I-know-about everything summation of issues in Anglo-American foreign relations. I put it it on my Kindle, oh, I can't remember how long ago, and I never seem to give up on, always expecting that the end must around the corner. Which is to say it is a vastly self-indulgent book, would have been much better a hundred or so pages shorter. Still, Mead is a shrewd and mostly balanced observer, wonderful at individual aperçu, and diverting at clever formulations of complex issues (I do think the Walrus and the Carpenter gets done to death though). It also excites a sense of giddy hilarity to read a foreign-policy commentator who is so unapologetic an apologist in the tradition of grand whiggery, someone still willing to base his analysis on such rocks as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Thomas Babington Macaulay. If we had to locate Mead anywhere in time, I'd nominate August 1, 1740, the occasion of a grand celebration of the accession of George II to the throne of Great Britain--itself the venue for the first performance of Rule, Britannia! (cf. infra).
To be fair, Mead understands what he is up against here, and he strives to identify and respond to (the many?) important objections to an analysis rooted so deeply commitment to the Anglo-American tradition. He is at once self-confident and forthright; you can see him struggling not to be dismissed as "breezy." But there is a gorilla at this garden party. Specifically, Mead published on October 9, 2007, when we were still able to ignore the storm clouds of the gathering financial storm, just about a year away from the collapse of Lehman and the Week that Changed Everything. Breezy he may not be, but jaunty is out there on the verge. It is hard to imagine anyone writing with the same kind of easy self-confidence today.
BTW if Mead is too given to the short-compass insight, it may be that his natural forum is the Blog. Check him out here.
To be fair, Mead understands what he is up against here, and he strives to identify and respond to (the many?) important objections to an analysis rooted so deeply commitment to the Anglo-American tradition. He is at once self-confident and forthright; you can see him struggling not to be dismissed as "breezy." But there is a gorilla at this garden party. Specifically, Mead published on October 9, 2007, when we were still able to ignore the storm clouds of the gathering financial storm, just about a year away from the collapse of Lehman and the Week that Changed Everything. Breezy he may not be, but jaunty is out there on the verge. It is hard to imagine anyone writing with the same kind of easy self-confidence today.
BTW if Mead is too given to the short-compass insight, it may be that his natural forum is the Blog. Check him out here.
Ashland Theater Note: Love's Labor's Lost
I don't suppose many people would count Love's Labor's Lost as their favorite Shakespeare play (though Harold Bloom seems more or less besotted with it, and Harley Granville-Barker thought he saw possibilities in it). The plot is thin enough that you can read a newspaper through it. And the text exhibits a riot of wordplay, the sort of thing that never was Shakespeare's most attractive aspect, and in any event a feature that gains nothing from the passage of time. Yet Shakespeare at his worst is better than almost anybody else at his best, and just about everything he wrote is at least interesting, even if not completely satisfying.
I'm old enough to remember a time when respectable people could say that LLL was so bad that it must be Shakespeare's first play. I don't think many people hold to that view any more. We've got good reason to think that perhaps seven or eight other plays might have been earlier which evidence, if true, means that we are now nearly a quarter of the way into Shakespeare's career. So he is still learning (interesting that Verdi was another sort of late starter--I don't think show people get that kind of leeway very often any more). And even if still learning (but Shakespeare was always still learning), here he is pretty much on the cusp--just beginning to figure what he's got and how he can use it. Bloom again (I repeat from memory)--this is the play where Shakespeare discovers that he can do just about anything with words.*
Apparently we're not sure of an exact date, but the best guesses appear to put it somewhere between 1593 and 1595--so, perhaps coterminous with the sonnets (themselves like LLL, sometimes fussy and over written). Also thus perhaps a bit before Richard II and Romeo and Juliet, both miraculous in the sense tht they are plays in which Shakespeare at once indulges his weakness for overwrought verse, yet at the same time criticizes and ironizes it. Consider: Romeo is a young man who gets some of the best lines, yet fails to grasp that words are not life, and dies for his trouble. So also Richard, a glorious poet but a disastrous king--or rather, a disastrous king because he is a glorious poet.
I'd put LLL in the same bin with those other two, and in the same perspective: the very success of these young people (these young men)with verse betrays a certain schizoid inadequacy at the task of real emotional connection. It's this kind of insight, best appreciated when you think of the play in the context of the larger oeuvre, that makes you realize that Shakespeare even now is always thinking, thinking, and usually one or more steps ahead of you, even when you are enjoying him in your slow-paced way.
A couple more points about context. I always marvel at Shakespeare's capacity for self-correction, his ability never to make the same mistake twice, together with his knack for doing the same thing in a same-only-different way. Both traits are in evidence here: one this is the only play (save Tempest, his valediction) in which Shakespeare did not pillage his plot from elsewhere. You can almost surveying his handiwork and saying, "right, plot is not my strength, better go back to the model of plagiarism-plus-improvement that has served me well before." And two, the play-within-a-play: Shakespeare does one here but it comes across as gratuitous and unkind. He does it again just a little later in Midsummer Night's Dream, where it is tightly integrated and one of the funniesst, most charming bits he ever produced.< All this is by way of background for understanding this season's Ashland venture at LLL. In short, I'd say Ashland's is about as successful as we have any right to expect. The cast doesn't completely conquer the script, but nobody conquers the script, and they do pretty well with it. Meanwhile, the text is malleable enough to allow for the kind of extras that Ashland does well--costumes, music, miscellaneous horseplay. Indeed oddly, there is perhaps a bit less of extraneous trim here (where the play can take it) than there was in, say, Midsummer Night's Dream (where it was often a distraction).
---
*Afterthought on dating: I have "my own" theory on dating the play--"my own," in the sense that I thought it up on my own, though I doubt it is original with me. Specifically: we know the theaters were closed through the 1593 season, thanks to plague. We know that this is the time when Shakespeare wrote a good many of the sonnets. We know he emerged in his first glorious flowering about 1595. Some people also speculate--and it sounds right to me--that LLL was written for private performance, not for the public stage. So far so good--but what if he wrote it for private performance during 1593--i.e., at the same time as the sonnets, but unconstrained by the ban on theaters, and unconstrained also by the demands of a public audience. Pure speculation of course, but that is one reason why the study of Shakespeare is so much fun.
I'm old enough to remember a time when respectable people could say that LLL was so bad that it must be Shakespeare's first play. I don't think many people hold to that view any more. We've got good reason to think that perhaps seven or eight other plays might have been earlier which evidence, if true, means that we are now nearly a quarter of the way into Shakespeare's career. So he is still learning (interesting that Verdi was another sort of late starter--I don't think show people get that kind of leeway very often any more). And even if still learning (but Shakespeare was always still learning), here he is pretty much on the cusp--just beginning to figure what he's got and how he can use it. Bloom again (I repeat from memory)--this is the play where Shakespeare discovers that he can do just about anything with words.*
Apparently we're not sure of an exact date, but the best guesses appear to put it somewhere between 1593 and 1595--so, perhaps coterminous with the sonnets (themselves like LLL, sometimes fussy and over written). Also thus perhaps a bit before Richard II and Romeo and Juliet, both miraculous in the sense tht they are plays in which Shakespeare at once indulges his weakness for overwrought verse, yet at the same time criticizes and ironizes it. Consider: Romeo is a young man who gets some of the best lines, yet fails to grasp that words are not life, and dies for his trouble. So also Richard, a glorious poet but a disastrous king--or rather, a disastrous king because he is a glorious poet.
I'd put LLL in the same bin with those other two, and in the same perspective: the very success of these young people (these young men)with verse betrays a certain schizoid inadequacy at the task of real emotional connection. It's this kind of insight, best appreciated when you think of the play in the context of the larger oeuvre, that makes you realize that Shakespeare even now is always thinking, thinking, and usually one or more steps ahead of you, even when you are enjoying him in your slow-paced way.
A couple more points about context. I always marvel at Shakespeare's capacity for self-correction, his ability never to make the same mistake twice, together with his knack for doing the same thing in a same-only-different way. Both traits are in evidence here: one this is the only play (save Tempest, his valediction) in which Shakespeare did not pillage his plot from elsewhere. You can almost surveying his handiwork and saying, "right, plot is not my strength, better go back to the model of plagiarism-plus-improvement that has served me well before." And two, the play-within-a-play: Shakespeare does one here but it comes across as gratuitous and unkind. He does it again just a little later in Midsummer Night's Dream, where it is tightly integrated and one of the funniesst, most charming bits he ever produced.< All this is by way of background for understanding this season's Ashland venture at LLL. In short, I'd say Ashland's is about as successful as we have any right to expect. The cast doesn't completely conquer the script, but nobody conquers the script, and they do pretty well with it. Meanwhile, the text is malleable enough to allow for the kind of extras that Ashland does well--costumes, music, miscellaneous horseplay. Indeed oddly, there is perhaps a bit less of extraneous trim here (where the play can take it) than there was in, say, Midsummer Night's Dream (where it was often a distraction).
---
*Afterthought on dating: I have "my own" theory on dating the play--"my own," in the sense that I thought it up on my own, though I doubt it is original with me. Specifically: we know the theaters were closed through the 1593 season, thanks to plague. We know that this is the time when Shakespeare wrote a good many of the sonnets. We know he emerged in his first glorious flowering about 1595. Some people also speculate--and it sounds right to me--that LLL was written for private performance, not for the public stage. So far so good--but what if he wrote it for private performance during 1593--i.e., at the same time as the sonnets, but unconstrained by the ban on theaters, and unconstrained also by the demands of a public audience. Pure speculation of course, but that is one reason why the study of Shakespeare is so much fun.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Ashland Theater Note: Pirates of Penzance
I've written before about the morphing of the Shakespeare Festival at Ashland: how it has transformed itself from an earnest and perhaps sometimes reverential exercise into a son et lumière extravaganza where sometimes you can't see the bells for the whistles. These new-style productions happen often enough that I infer it's a board mandate, not just a director's jeu d'esprit. I assume the point is to try to reach out to a younger audience. This will work if (a) you actually do reach out to a younger audience and (b) you don't lose your older audience in the process. As I guess I've said, I think that sometimes Ashland brings it off, more or less, sometimes not.
Last night we caught this season's Pirates of Penzance, Ashland's first-ever venture into Gilbert & Sullivan and very much a venture into the new age. On a morphing scale I'd say it worked pretty well, and both the successes and the failures can teach us something about the possibilities of the genre.
First, some stuff that didn't work. They staged it in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. If you've seen it, you know that this is a purpose-built performance space, admirably suited in size and acoustics to allow good actors to convey a challenging script. But Pirates was not that: one it was miked up to the eyeballs, or I suppose I should say eardrums (Mrs. Buce said she liked it better after she stuffed in some cotton). Two, there was an orchestra--not huge, but big enough to make a big noise. Three, there were an awful lot of people on the stage, flailing and jumping and generally making a racket whose particular purpose was not always obvious to the casual viewer. On the miking, I suppose I date myself: I think that most theater is way louder than it needs to be these days, and that it thereby loses valuable nuance. But I suppose the train has left the station on that one: apparently the bankers want mikes, and evidently the management at Ashland thinks the kiddies want miking too.
Now some good stuff: I wouldn't have guessed it, but it appears that Pirates is one old warhorse that actually gains from being hoked up and reconfigured. Okay: not reconfigured a lot--there was still a lot more of G&S in this remake than there is of Shakespeare in some of the Shakespeare remakes they've done. What they've added are some non-G&S music samplings of--well, of almost everything, including, I suppose, a fair number of things that went right by me (I sometimes felt like I do when I watch The Simpsons, knowing that there are plenty of topical references that I'm just not going. But anyway: Mozart, Gershwin, Harry Belafonte, I assume Lady Gaga and heaven knows who else. Thing is, you come away feeling that this kind of merry irreverence is just what G&S deserve.
And more than just the music: the director imbued the whole performance with a kind of cheerful raunchiness, an easygoing vulgarity. It was fun enough in its own right, but more important, the presentation succeeded in detoxing G&S from just the sort of thing that makes you most uncomfortable about them. I mean the simpering, the prissiness, the victorian pretense. Nothing prissy about this Pirates, and as news, this is nothing but good.
Will we be seeing more G&S? I bet, and why not? If the audience buys it, might as well sell. Yet I'm not sure they will have the same luck a second time. Pirates has always seemed a bit second-rate to me: a little tired, a sequel, an attempt to repeat all the jokes that went over so well in Pinafore. Of course, that may be precisely why it works so well as a remake: recall Buce's theory that a second rate novel (e.g., Gone with the Wind)is likely to make a better movie than a first-rate, e.g., Portrait of a Lady. I'm not at all sure I can see the Pirates treatment working with, say The Mikado. So, might as well enjoy it while we can. But bring cotton for your ears.
Last night we caught this season's Pirates of Penzance, Ashland's first-ever venture into Gilbert & Sullivan and very much a venture into the new age. On a morphing scale I'd say it worked pretty well, and both the successes and the failures can teach us something about the possibilities of the genre.
First, some stuff that didn't work. They staged it in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. If you've seen it, you know that this is a purpose-built performance space, admirably suited in size and acoustics to allow good actors to convey a challenging script. But Pirates was not that: one it was miked up to the eyeballs, or I suppose I should say eardrums (Mrs. Buce said she liked it better after she stuffed in some cotton). Two, there was an orchestra--not huge, but big enough to make a big noise. Three, there were an awful lot of people on the stage, flailing and jumping and generally making a racket whose particular purpose was not always obvious to the casual viewer. On the miking, I suppose I date myself: I think that most theater is way louder than it needs to be these days, and that it thereby loses valuable nuance. But I suppose the train has left the station on that one: apparently the bankers want mikes, and evidently the management at Ashland thinks the kiddies want miking too.
Now some good stuff: I wouldn't have guessed it, but it appears that Pirates is one old warhorse that actually gains from being hoked up and reconfigured. Okay: not reconfigured a lot--there was still a lot more of G&S in this remake than there is of Shakespeare in some of the Shakespeare remakes they've done. What they've added are some non-G&S music samplings of--well, of almost everything, including, I suppose, a fair number of things that went right by me (I sometimes felt like I do when I watch The Simpsons, knowing that there are plenty of topical references that I'm just not going. But anyway: Mozart, Gershwin, Harry Belafonte, I assume Lady Gaga and heaven knows who else. Thing is, you come away feeling that this kind of merry irreverence is just what G&S deserve.
And more than just the music: the director imbued the whole performance with a kind of cheerful raunchiness, an easygoing vulgarity. It was fun enough in its own right, but more important, the presentation succeeded in detoxing G&S from just the sort of thing that makes you most uncomfortable about them. I mean the simpering, the prissiness, the victorian pretense. Nothing prissy about this Pirates, and as news, this is nothing but good.
Will we be seeing more G&S? I bet, and why not? If the audience buys it, might as well sell. Yet I'm not sure they will have the same luck a second time. Pirates has always seemed a bit second-rate to me: a little tired, a sequel, an attempt to repeat all the jokes that went over so well in Pinafore. Of course, that may be precisely why it works so well as a remake: recall Buce's theory that a second rate novel (e.g., Gone with the Wind)is likely to make a better movie than a first-rate, e.g., Portrait of a Lady. I'm not at all sure I can see the Pirates treatment working with, say The Mikado. So, might as well enjoy it while we can. But bring cotton for your ears.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Factoid: The Death of Children
I'm running around doing a bunch of other stuff today but here's a factoid on child death, from Aaron Carroll:
I do think that support for gun freedom is vastly overrated. It's another one of those issues where a small cabal of insiders have learned how to make themselves rich by scaring the hell out of everybody else. Sadly, perhaps for related reasons, I suspect that a vast expansion of gun safety laws would not accomplish much of what proponents hope.
My cousin Peter, deceased, was an anti-gun guy who used to teach gun safety classes on the theory that if you're going to do it, at least do it right. Wish I knew what he could have added to this story.
And I do wonder what the intent of the Founding Fathers was with respect to proton packs.
...in 2005, guns were were in involved in almost 85% of homicides and more than 45% of suicides in children aged 5-19 years, not to mention many accidents.I should add that gun safety is another one of those issues on which I am squishy wet. I know there are countries (e.g., Switzerland) with high gun availability and low gun crime, and places with (e.g., Mexico) with stiff gun laws and plenty of gun crime.
I do think that support for gun freedom is vastly overrated. It's another one of those issues where a small cabal of insiders have learned how to make themselves rich by scaring the hell out of everybody else. Sadly, perhaps for related reasons, I suspect that a vast expansion of gun safety laws would not accomplish much of what proponents hope.
My cousin Peter, deceased, was an anti-gun guy who used to teach gun safety classes on the theory that if you're going to do it, at least do it right. Wish I knew what he could have added to this story.
And I do wonder what the intent of the Founding Fathers was with respect to proton packs.
Monday, August 08, 2011
Michele and Laura
I was flipping through Ryan Lizza's superb* New Yorker profile of Michele Bachmann. I was reading this:
Perhaps better "libertarian ideologue," and the distinction may be important. It's not always easy to sort out the repressive and Bible-thumping "conservatives" from the let-it-all-hang-out dope-smoking libertarians, but it may be important that the number two Google hit on Lane just now (right behind Wiki) is a fanpage from the Cato Institute where she shares billing with the celebrated athiest Ayn Rand and with Rand's sometimes-acolyte, Isabel Paterson
So, what would it be: the brutalizing weather? The charmless landscape, the loneliness, the repeated vulnerability crashing disappointment: what is it about the great midsection that generates a mythology so compelling and with which it is so difficult to come to terms?
==
*Matt Taibbi, take that to heart as well as to mind.
In the speech, Bachmann said that her family arrived in the state in the eighteen-fifties and experienced a series of misfortunes: “the worst winter in fifty years,” “the worst flooding in forty-two years,” “the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded,” and then a plague of “locusts.” But they persevered, and even started the first Lutheran church in the area. The family came to Iowa, she said, after reading the Muskego Manifesto, a letter sent from Norwegian settlers in the town of Muskego to their families back home. Bachmann quoted the manifesto, which describes an America where people “have civil and religious liberty, and here we can choose whatever profession we want, and no one tells us what profession we go in.” Her ancestors, she said, read those words and “sold everything and took their five children and bought boat tickets to come to Iowa.”...and I thought: Laura Ingalls Wilder. Surely you remember Wilder whose Little House books are not, even on the face of things, quite as anodyne as we remember them (winter in the Dakota Territory is pretty hairy by any standard). But more than that, the Laura behind the legend and more particularly, the shaper of that legend, Laura's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who, after a number of false starts, finally found her dual vocation as, one, the keeper of her mother's legend, and two, as a raving conservative ideologue.
In fact, Muskego is a town in Wisconsin, the state where Bachmann’s forebears, the Munsons, settled in 1857, twelve years after the manifesto was written. Then, in 1861, they moved west, to the Dakota Territory, near present-day Elk Point, South Dakota. That is where, according to the family history that Bachmann relied on, they encountered the awful winter and the flooding and the drought and what the text calls “grasshoppers.” The Munsons seem to have been part of the group that established the first Lutheran church in the Dakota Territory, but there were already Lutheran congregations in Iowa when they arrived there, in late 1864 or early 1865. As the author and historian Chris Rodda has pointed out, the story chronicled is not quite one of superhuman perseverance on the frontier; rather, it’s the story of a family fleeing to the relative safety and civilization of settled Iowa. In other words, Bachmann’s dramatic tale happened near Iowa, but not actually in it.
Perhaps better "libertarian ideologue," and the distinction may be important. It's not always easy to sort out the repressive and Bible-thumping "conservatives" from the let-it-all-hang-out dope-smoking libertarians, but it may be important that the number two Google hit on Lane just now (right behind Wiki) is a fanpage from the Cato Institute where she shares billing with the celebrated athiest Ayn Rand and with Rand's sometimes-acolyte, Isabel Paterson
So, what would it be: the brutalizing weather? The charmless landscape, the loneliness, the repeated vulnerability crashing disappointment: what is it about the great midsection that generates a mythology so compelling and with which it is so difficult to come to terms?
==
*Matt Taibbi, take that to heart as well as to mind.
Sunday, August 07, 2011
Conversation in the Computer Lab
Athos: So, when is Amazon going to come out with a new Kindle, to try to claw back against Ipad?
Porthos: You kidding? They don't need to claw back against Ipad, they're doing fine. People like something that just reads books, without all the bells and whistles.
McGinnis: You're both nuts. Kindle was a big mistake. They can make all their money selling books through apps. I read mine on my Iphone. They don't need the device. They'll drop it.
d'Artagnan: You're all missing the point. Amazon needed the Kindle to introduce people to e-books--to show them how they could be used. They knew they'd be upstaged on hardware by Apple but that's fine. They've established themselves as the dominant player in content, and they will stay there. So, they did need the Kindle, and it did its job. And now they will let it drop.
[They drink up, pay their bill, and depart for a merry round of swordplay. The matter of who, if anyone, is correct, is left as an exercise to the reader.]
Porthos: You kidding? They don't need to claw back against Ipad, they're doing fine. People like something that just reads books, without all the bells and whistles.
McGinnis: You're both nuts. Kindle was a big mistake. They can make all their money selling books through apps. I read mine on my Iphone. They don't need the device. They'll drop it.
d'Artagnan: You're all missing the point. Amazon needed the Kindle to introduce people to e-books--to show them how they could be used. They knew they'd be upstaged on hardware by Apple but that's fine. They've established themselves as the dominant player in content, and they will stay there. So, they did need the Kindle, and it did its job. And now they will let it drop.
[They drink up, pay their bill, and depart for a merry round of swordplay. The matter of who, if anyone, is correct, is left as an exercise to the reader.]
Larry Summers Decides, What the Hell,
No Point in Pretending to be a Liberal Any More
Squeeze 'em until the pips squeak:
Lawrence H. Summers, President Obama’s former chief economic adviser who has returned to his previous role as a professor at Harvard, said that exacting a toll from creditors could constrain future growth by discouraging future investments.No one?
“No one is satisfied with the efforts to reduce foreclosures and support the housing market,” he said. “The barrier to doing more has not been ideology or any solicitude for the financial sector, but concern about the adverse effects of inducing nonpayment by homeowners or reducing the flow of new mortgage credit.”
Mr. Summers argues instead that the government should focus on tax cuts and directed spending to stimulate private spending and investment, policies for which there is little political appetite.
Obama, Non-Charmer
I don't suppose you can honestly say that they are just tracking Underbelly (link, link, link, link), but everybody seems to be out after the President this weekend, in search of the vanished mojo. First, Drew Westen un the NYT, and right now number three on my Times most emailed list:
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.And here's Virginia Postrel with an intriguing possible explanation:
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. ...
A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.
[T]the enthusiasm of his 2008 campaign has certainly vanished.=====
What happened? In 2008, after all, not just political pundits and regular folks were expecting big things of Obama. So were certified leadership gurus....
There was only one problem. Obama wasn’t charismatic. He was glamorous -- powerfully, persuasively, seductively so. ...
What’s the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.
That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too....
Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combined youth, vigor and good looks with a vague promise of political change. Like Kennedy, Obama was both charming and self-contained. Kennedy’s wealth set him apart, but Obama’s mystery stemmed from his exotic background -- an upbringing and ethnicity that defied conventional categories and distanced him from humdrum American life. Obama was glamorous because he was different, and his differences mirrored his audience’s aspirations for the country. ...
If you think of Barack Obama as a charismatic president, it is hard to explain why his supporters are so angry. He should be able to win them over. But if you understand his appeal as glamour, then his problems aren’t surprising.
With glamour, any specific action that stands outside the fantasy breaks the spell, alienating supporters who disagree. Even trying to remain above the fray, as Obama often does, infuriates those who want a fighter.
A well-established sales tool, glamour is a tremendous asset if you’re running for office. But once you have to govern, it’s a problem. Although charisma can continue to inspire, glamour is guaranteed to disillusion. The only thing surprising about Obama’s predicament is how few people expected it..
And finally, a shrewd word from Michael Froomkin:
Part of President Obama’s problem is that his opponents do not fear him, and he too oftenseems to want to be loved. Have we read a single story of President Obama wreaking vengeance on a political enemy? Or even threatening it?They can't all be saying the same thing, right? No, I suppose not. In particular, I think Postrel(at least if you read the whole thing) comes closer to believing that Obama couldn't possibly be a charisma president: listen to him closely and you'd reject what he says. This certainly isn't Westen's point, nor Froomkin's. But in general, they are on the same page: lost or forever absent, there's a mojo deficit there tht is crippling the presidency at least now, and perhaps permanently.
Note that the people who do fear Obama, because they think he’s a Black radical Kenyan socialist Muslim Black Panther palling around with terrorists do not count, for they only fear demons of their own making, or of their masters’ making.
Note also that I do not count the many stories of Obama attacking (google “hippie punching” if you don’t know what I mean) and betraying on his liberal supporters (think Elizabeth Warren or the public option or the nonexistent jobs bill) for, despite what he seems to think, those are not his enemies.
Saturday, August 06, 2011
Rien
Nothing. What Louis XVI is said to have written in his diary on July 14, 1789, the day the mob stormed the Bastille, the beginning of the end. Fusspots insist that he wasn't talking politics, only reporting the day's hunting bag.
Happy hunting, Mr. President.
Happy hunting, Mr. President.
Rumble in the Hamptons, Maybe
My friend the Crank directs me to a item from a local rag out in the Hamptons,which I cheerfully reprint here despite a nagging suspicion that it just might be a fantasy to astonish the yokels:
Old Man McGumbus, 99 years old and retired World War II fighter pilot, organized a rally outside of Jack Hempstan’s establishment, The Shelter Island Book and Coffee Shop. McGumbus has a very public feud with Hempstan, and calls him, “The owner of the headquarters of the hippie menace that is destroying America.” McGumbus and 15 other men who are all members of the Shelter Island Assault Rifle Owners Club, of which McGumbus is the President and C.E.O., were all holding signs that read, “Go home hippies” and “This is America! Are You Kidding Me?” while chanting out the words, “What do we want? The hippies gone! When do we want it? Now!” Hempstan then, in what appeared to be a sign of truce, offered a plate of freshly made brownies from his establishment. Not one to say no to a brownie, McGumbus and his men happily ate, when suddenly all of his men started to burst into laughter and began singing the song “Kumbaya.” Realizing the treacherous trick, McGumbus, while hysterically laughing, walked into the Shelter Island Book and Coffee Shop and lunged at Hempstan. The two men wrestled around the establishment and while all this took place, the other men outside entered the store and began eating ice-cream milkshakes which the Shelter Island Book and Coffee Shop is known for. When police arrived, they found McGumbus holding Hempstan in a headlock and 14 members of the Shelter Island Assault Rifle Owners Club asleep on the floor with chocolate around their lips. While being arrested, McGumbus was heard yelling, “So help me, I will stop this hippie infection from spreading any further through my town!” You can watch the entire ordeal on the Internet as many hipsters inside the store videoed it with their cellphones.Granted, if he is a fantasy he is a fantasy with (as of this writing) 504 Google hits.
I So Hope John Huntsman Doesn't Get Traction
(cf. link), because then I will be tempted to vote for him and if he gets elected he will do something unforgivable and I will wind up saying what was I thinking? Happens so often with Republicans.
Oh wait, happens with Democrats too.
Oh wait, happens with Democrats too.
David Lat is Not Sold
Fascinating maybe-he-didn't story over at Above the Law. A stretch, but David Lat will look like a hero if it turns out to be true. Remember Gary Condit? Remember Richard Jewell? Lat may have discovered a nifty way to gain a reputation as a defender of the accused, without having to do the actual heavy lifting at trial.
Friday, August 05, 2011
Ol' Ivan Offers a Refesher Course in Bubba
U.S. Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala) says of Barack Obama: "We survived Jimmy Carter … we can survive this ol' boy." The Opelika Auburn News is not impressed. "Rogers needs to apologize for what we hope was a momentary lapse in judgment. We find his comments to be offensively disrespectful. Our president is nobody's 'boy."
Ol' Ivan, Underbelly's crack Alabama bureau chief, uncharacteristically comes to Ol' Mike's defense:
Ol' Ivan, Underbelly's crack Alabama bureau chief, uncharacteristically comes to Ol' Mike's defense:
Rogers did not use the expression “boy” in referring to Obama, which is as insulting as using the “N” word. He used the express “ol' boy” as in “that good ol boy may be dumber than a log, but he knows catfishing.” Or, “that ol' boy aint got the sense that gawd promises a billy goat.” In other words, “boy” by itself is racist but “ol' boy” or “good ol'boy” has nothing to do with race. Used here, it says while I disagree with Obama, we’re “ol' boys” or really “good ol' boys” in this political world together, though on opposite sides.
PS – If Rogers had the sense that God promises a billy goat he would have tacked a “bless his heart” onto his comment. You can say anything about anybody in da souf so long as you include a “bless his (or her) heart.
Mr. Creosote Gets a Wake-up Call
For no particular reason I chose this week to make my way through God and Gold
, Walter Russell Mead's cheerful romp through several hundred years of modern history, mostly dominated by brave, plucky, enterprising Anglo-Americans who, as Mead insists, singly or jointly "have been on the winning side of every major war in which they have participated since the late seventeenth century." This assertion may require careful construal of terms like "winning side" and "every" and "major" and "war," but let that be. It's a mostly sunny story, glowingly told.
And (why do I remember this just now?) it is amazing how much of the story gets its energy from finance, and in particular, the public debt. Mead zestfully recounts the tale of the creation of the Bank of England, as a device to fight William III's War against Louis XIV; then of the burgeoning--no the bloat--of the British public debt through the 18th Century, to the point where it looked a lot like John Cleese as Mr. Creosote (infra.). He also recounts (oddly, in less detail) the role of Alexander Hamilton in creating an American bank on the same model. Mead brings the same kind of enthusiasm to the subject of private debt with, inter alia, his retelling of the tale of A. P. Giannini, "a porter and laborer" (as Mead descibes him) who went on to create an entity that now stands near the top of the banking heap.
Of course it wasn't simply a matter of borrowing tons of money. "Public credit" was part of a whole complex of ideas that drove a dynamic economy: optimism and enterprise, the conviction that things would get better, the will to make them so. And chiefly, of course, the idea that debts would be paid back, one way or another. For its advocates, Mead stresses, "the system was essentially moral." "business was rooted in character and morality, and inconceivable except under free and accountable government." Here's Mead, summing up the advocates:
, Walter Russell Mead's cheerful romp through several hundred years of modern history, mostly dominated by brave, plucky, enterprising Anglo-Americans who, as Mead insists, singly or jointly "have been on the winning side of every major war in which they have participated since the late seventeenth century." This assertion may require careful construal of terms like "winning side" and "every" and "major" and "war," but let that be. It's a mostly sunny story, glowingly told. And (why do I remember this just now?) it is amazing how much of the story gets its energy from finance, and in particular, the public debt. Mead zestfully recounts the tale of the creation of the Bank of England, as a device to fight William III's War against Louis XIV; then of the burgeoning--no the bloat--of the British public debt through the 18th Century, to the point where it looked a lot like John Cleese as Mr. Creosote (infra.). He also recounts (oddly, in less detail) the role of Alexander Hamilton in creating an American bank on the same model. Mead brings the same kind of enthusiasm to the subject of private debt with, inter alia, his retelling of the tale of A. P. Giannini, "a porter and laborer" (as Mead descibes him) who went on to create an entity that now stands near the top of the banking heap.
Of course it wasn't simply a matter of borrowing tons of money. "Public credit" was part of a whole complex of ideas that drove a dynamic economy: optimism and enterprise, the conviction that things would get better, the will to make them so. And chiefly, of course, the idea that debts would be paid back, one way or another. For its advocates, Mead stresses, "the system was essentially moral." "business was rooted in character and morality, and inconceivable except under free and accountable government." Here's Mead, summing up the advocates:
Public Credit is a fragile being; the conditions have to be just right for her to emerge and flourish. But where those conditions exist, a stable funding system and a mighty central bank will raise up a power that can defy all its foes.It's an idea that was still current in my childhood. My father was Taft (really, a Hoover) Republican. I wasn't terribly clear in those days what a Taft or a Hoover Republican might be. But I did know that a Republican was someone who paid his debts. And now, finally, a wafer-thin mint:
Blog Recommendation
My friend Taxmom, a connoisseur of mommy-blogs, recommends Mimismartipants. Link, link. Sounds like Sandra Tsing Loh, except without the self-admiration.
Somehow I Feel Better About This Guy...
As one who spent his first three years in college pretty much setting fire to a stack of his father's dollar bills, I somehow feel more kindly today about Rick Perry.
My Desert Island List
UB groupies will recall my fondness for Desert Island Discs, the venerable BBC favorite where the interviewer reels in the great and good, allowing them to be charming and ingratiating, perhaps unexpectedly so, as they choose some favorite music. My phone hasn't rung yet but preparedness is the secret to the good life so it is none too soon for me to identify my own eight musical choices so I won't go all tongue-tied when the time comes.
Kurt Weill, September Song. The only piece of pop music I really liked in high school. I was aware even then that there was something a little weird about a 14-year-old committing himself to a song about an old man who falls for a younger woman. What I didn't learn until later was that I was being introduced to Weill and through him, the incomparable Lotta Lenya. Note to producer: find the Lenya version
or failing that, Eartha Kitt.
Wanda Landowska, The Goldberg Variations
. Before I went to college, the only Bach I had heard was old-style Victoriana with tubas and tam-tams. What a revelation to discover Landowska: as spare and elegant as a marble column in a Greek temple. I'm not sure I'd be quite as dazzled today; I might prefer Rosalind Turek
. But nostalgia has its claims.
Pablo Casals, Kol Nidre. Another artifact of my untutored youth. Have heard it said that he is not the best cellist ever and that we supported him only because of his opposition to Franco. Maybe; but I think he pretty much convinced me that the cello is the best instrument ever. And he's still pretty good.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lodi. (aka "Oh ! Lord, Stuck in Lodi again!"). I listened to a lot of folky stuff when I was young, for much of which I now feel justly ashamed. I make an exception for some of the crossover bands, though, like Steeleye Span and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and these guys. In general, my favorite California song, although this is a close second. BTW I happened to drive through Lodi last weekend. Hasn't improved much, so fas as I can tell.
The Roches, The Married Men ("All o' that time in hell to spend/for kissin' the married men."). I stumbled across this during my brief excursion (long ago) into middle-aged singlehood, and it still delivers a wry charm. Oddly enough, Mrs. Buce appears to agree. Driving home from a Roches concert one night, I remarked that I'd marry any one of them. Mrs. Buce said she would, too.
Johnny Cash and June Carter, Jackson
. Chez Buce is unanimous: sexiest mainstream number of the 20th Century.
Earl Scruggs, Cripple Creek. Blues-jazz crossover by one of the greatest technicians of the 20th Century, with a pure Landowska sound, how can you beat it? I gather these guys in their youth would travel from gig to gig for days at a time, sleeping in the car and without a change of clothes; and that Scruggs once quit to go back to work in the cotton mill because he wasn't making enough money in his musics. Unaccountably, the Amazon link bills this as "Lester Flatt," but don't believe it. There's also a cool Sesame Street version with Buffy Sainte Marie.
And finally--I've done a lot of opera over the last 20 years or so; not before, and maybe it shows. I've liked a lot of things though I've never got quite as obsessed with anything as I did with the stuff I liked in my youth. Still, for one choice, I guess I'd go with the famous "second act of Tosca" with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, retrieved from a Covent Garden performance in the 60s. Honorable mention, Bryn Terfel and Cecilia Bartoli doing La Ci Darem La Mano, one of the world's great seduction songs.
There, now that wasn't so hard, was--actually, yes, it was hard, getting it down to eight. My, what a nostalgia trip. I am sorry I couldn't find room for this. And this. And for this
Kurt Weill, September Song. The only piece of pop music I really liked in high school. I was aware even then that there was something a little weird about a 14-year-old committing himself to a song about an old man who falls for a younger woman. What I didn't learn until later was that I was being introduced to Weill and through him, the incomparable Lotta Lenya. Note to producer: find the Lenya version
or failing that, Eartha Kitt.Wanda Landowska, The Goldberg Variations
. Before I went to college, the only Bach I had heard was old-style Victoriana with tubas and tam-tams. What a revelation to discover Landowska: as spare and elegant as a marble column in a Greek temple. I'm not sure I'd be quite as dazzled today; I might prefer Rosalind Turek. But nostalgia has its claims.Pablo Casals, Kol Nidre. Another artifact of my untutored youth. Have heard it said that he is not the best cellist ever and that we supported him only because of his opposition to Franco. Maybe; but I think he pretty much convinced me that the cello is the best instrument ever. And he's still pretty good.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Lodi. (aka "Oh ! Lord, Stuck in Lodi again!"). I listened to a lot of folky stuff when I was young, for much of which I now feel justly ashamed. I make an exception for some of the crossover bands, though, like Steeleye Span and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and these guys. In general, my favorite California song, although this is a close second. BTW I happened to drive through Lodi last weekend. Hasn't improved much, so fas as I can tell.
The Roches, The Married Men ("All o' that time in hell to spend/for kissin' the married men."). I stumbled across this during my brief excursion (long ago) into middle-aged singlehood, and it still delivers a wry charm. Oddly enough, Mrs. Buce appears to agree. Driving home from a Roches concert one night, I remarked that I'd marry any one of them. Mrs. Buce said she would, too.
Johnny Cash and June Carter, Jackson
. Chez Buce is unanimous: sexiest mainstream number of the 20th Century.Earl Scruggs, Cripple Creek. Blues-jazz crossover by one of the greatest technicians of the 20th Century, with a pure Landowska sound, how can you beat it? I gather these guys in their youth would travel from gig to gig for days at a time, sleeping in the car and without a change of clothes; and that Scruggs once quit to go back to work in the cotton mill because he wasn't making enough money in his musics. Unaccountably, the Amazon link bills this as "Lester Flatt," but don't believe it. There's also a cool Sesame Street version with Buffy Sainte Marie.
And finally--I've done a lot of opera over the last 20 years or so; not before, and maybe it shows. I've liked a lot of things though I've never got quite as obsessed with anything as I did with the stuff I liked in my youth. Still, for one choice, I guess I'd go with the famous "second act of Tosca" with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi, retrieved from a Covent Garden performance in the 60s. Honorable mention, Bryn Terfel and Cecilia Bartoli doing La Ci Darem La Mano, one of the world's great seduction songs.
There, now that wasn't so hard, was--actually, yes, it was hard, getting it down to eight. My, what a nostalgia trip. I am sorry I couldn't find room for this. And this. And for this
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Deflationary Spiral?
If the bank charges me to let me park my money there--and if I take the bait--aren't we in a deflationaary spiral deflation?
Really?
Even (or all the more) if every word of this is true, I'm still right that he doesn't seem to know how to explain himself.
Anyone You Know?
Andrew Redleaf explains the difference between socialism and crony capitalism:
The socialists are an intellectual party comfortable with abstraction and with theory. Moreover, precisely because they have visionary and ambitious goals, at least since Lenin and his New Economic Policy the socialists have recognized they can get where they want to go only by riding on the back of capitalism.
Crony capitalists have neither the inclination for theory nor the interest in general economic success that attaches to the socialists. ...
No one is more sophisticated than the crony capitalist, to whom everything is gray and no man is a greater fool than the man of principle. The crony capitalists pride themselves on their grim realism, on being unburdened by ideas, on their infinite flexibility and pragmatism. All of which comes down to you can't trust them as far as you can throw them.
Unlike the socialists, the crony capitalists do not depend upon the general success of the economy to achieve their larger goals. For one thing, they can hardly be said to have larger goals. The crony capitalist is instinctively satisfied with the notion of a zero-sum game, which, for his purposes, is better than a rising tide that lifts all boats. What good is it to the crony capitalist to see all boats lifted? Will all boats remember the favor?
Crony capitalism is widely identified with the personal corruption that everywhere ultimately attends it. This is a mistake. The crony-capitalist politician is often not corrupt in the ordinary sense. What did Hank Paulson gain personally from bullying financial markets to the brink of a general economic collapse?
At its heart crony capitalism consists in a deep skepticism about the efficacy of ideas, the practicality of principle. Or at least it is a deep skepticism in the breast of the rare crony capitalist contemplative enough to achieve such a highly intellectual state. For most of them, it is not so much that they are skeptical of the power of ideas but that the notion of such power has never occurred to them. . ...
Crony capitalists are always statists, not in theory, like the socialists, but in practice, because they cannot let go of the impulse to control events. Controlling events means staying within the narrow boundaries of their experience and imagination, not to mention their Rolodexes. Iraq needs to be rebuilt? Call in the certified, pedigreed, well-connected, quasi-official rebuilders. The Democrats would do the same thing in their place (with bigger minority set-asides) and tell themselves they were doing it for the people.
--Andrew Redleaf (2010). Panic (Kindle Locations 2840-2884).
A Note on Nye, and the Nature & Purpose of Reading
Still trying to buff up my international relations skill set, I've more or less finished (i.e., with a bit of cheating) Joseph Nye, The Future of Power
, and why would that be, exactly? Nye is a smooth and engaging expositor; and he offers a subtle take on an important topic: power is more complicated than you might think; let me show you some of the permutations of power. So far so good, although I found myself getting strangely impatient with it all, almost as if I already knew just about everything that he had to say.
This last is an illusion, of course: if by "I knew," I mean "I could have written this book," then surely I did not know what he had to say: Nye articulates a lot of important stuff that I don't think I had seen written down elsewhere, certainly not nearly so comprehensively or so well put.
And? Well, and one of two possibilities, I think. One--perhaps the more dramatic--that Nye's views, once articulated, have become so much a part of second nature that we take them almost for granted. This is a recognizable phenomenon: I suppose it is true of, say Isaac Newton's Principia. But Nye's publication date is last February 11, and I doubt that any such whirlwind has coursed through our intellectual life (the blinds would have rattled). The other, more subtle possibility--that Nye is articulating what was inchoate in the minds of a lot of readers, thus ready and able to shout "hats off, gentlemen!" This is a far more provocative and potentially insidious possibility, because it remains so hard to tell the difference between one who truly gives voice to the incipient consciousness of the audience and one who merely articulates the conventional wisdom. I haven't quite made up my mind on Nye; I lean tentatively to the former, but if he really is as original as some of his press would suggest, how come we understand him so well?
Loosely related question: on what morning did the New York Times' Thomas Friedman wake up and find that he had gone from being a foreign-policy guru to being the butt of a mean joke?
, and why would that be, exactly? Nye is a smooth and engaging expositor; and he offers a subtle take on an important topic: power is more complicated than you might think; let me show you some of the permutations of power. So far so good, although I found myself getting strangely impatient with it all, almost as if I already knew just about everything that he had to say.This last is an illusion, of course: if by "I knew," I mean "I could have written this book," then surely I did not know what he had to say: Nye articulates a lot of important stuff that I don't think I had seen written down elsewhere, certainly not nearly so comprehensively or so well put.
And? Well, and one of two possibilities, I think. One--perhaps the more dramatic--that Nye's views, once articulated, have become so much a part of second nature that we take them almost for granted. This is a recognizable phenomenon: I suppose it is true of, say Isaac Newton's Principia. But Nye's publication date is last February 11, and I doubt that any such whirlwind has coursed through our intellectual life (the blinds would have rattled). The other, more subtle possibility--that Nye is articulating what was inchoate in the minds of a lot of readers, thus ready and able to shout "hats off, gentlemen!" This is a far more provocative and potentially insidious possibility, because it remains so hard to tell the difference between one who truly gives voice to the incipient consciousness of the audience and one who merely articulates the conventional wisdom. I haven't quite made up my mind on Nye; I lean tentatively to the former, but if he really is as original as some of his press would suggest, how come we understand him so well?
Loosely related question: on what morning did the New York Times' Thomas Friedman wake up and find that he had gone from being a foreign-policy guru to being the butt of a mean joke?
Communitarian Factoid of the Day
Geoffrey Hosking, reviewing Russia in 1913 by Wayne Dowlling:
Civil society does not necessarily bring social harmony: it generates its own frictions. In late 20th-century Britain, the region most abundantly endowed with institutions of civil society was Northern Ireland; but that was because Catholics and Protestants had separate institutions.Link.
The Two-for-one Play
I was telling the Wichita Bureau just now that for all its meteoric rise, the price of gold has been outstripped over the past decade by both lead and copper.
Go for the two-for-one play, Wichita advised. Buy ammo. Copper-plated ammo.
Or could it be that the reason for the runup is that all of Wichita's neighbors are buying ammo?
JPH Adds: As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls. When you figure it out, explain it to me.
Go for the two-for-one play, Wichita advised. Buy ammo. Copper-plated ammo.
Or could it be that the reason for the runup is that all of Wichita's neighbors are buying ammo?
JPH Adds: As Wichita falls, so falls Wichita Falls. When you figure it out, explain it to me.
Coffee Shop Moment
A bit of excitement in the coffee shop this morning: guy collapsed with what appeared to be an epileptic fit. Clerk was on the phone in a heartbeat, presumably to call 911. Response time: 4-5 minutes, at which point the victim had the services of both a paramedic paddywagon and a hook-and-ladder firetruck.
]
I know next to nothing about emergency operations--and honest, I am not complaining--but I guess I don't get the point of sending the fire laddies for this kind of emergency. I suppose it is comforting to know that, in these troubled times, we still have a firetruck and a paramedic paddywagon.
Afterthought: This is a college town. Maybe the victim had just seen this.
]
I know next to nothing about emergency operations--and honest, I am not complaining--but I guess I don't get the point of sending the fire laddies for this kind of emergency. I suppose it is comforting to know that, in these troubled times, we still have a firetruck and a paramedic paddywagon.
Afterthought: This is a college town. Maybe the victim had just seen this.
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
Better Not Say This to the Housemaid
Benedetto Croce thinks he has his job, she has hers:
Certamente, la verità corre per le strade, come l'esprit nel noto proverbio francese, o come la metafora "regina dei tropi", secondo i retori, che Montaigne ritrovava nel “babil” della sua “chambrière.” Ma la metafora della cameriera è la soluzione di un problema espressivo, proprio dei sentimenti che agitano in quel momento la cameriera; e le ovvie affermazioni, che di proposito o per incidenti tuttodì si ascoltano sulla natura dell'arte, sono soluzioni di problemi logici, quale si presentano a questo o quell'individuo che non fa professione di filosopho, e che pure come uomo è anche lui, in qualche misura, filosofo. E come la metafora della cameriera esprime di solito una breve e povera cerchia di sentimenti rispetto a quella del poeta, così l'ovvia l'affermazione del non filosofo risolve un lieve problema rispetto a quello che si propone il filosofo.That is:
Certainly, truth does walk the streets, like the esprit of the well known French proverb, or like metaphor, “queen of tropes” according to rhetoricians, which Montaigne discovered in the babble of his housemaid. But the metaphor used by the maid is the solution of a problem of expression proper to the feelings that affect the maid at that moment; and the obvious affirmations that by accident or intent one hears every day as to the nature of art, are solutions of logical problems, as they present themselves to this or that individual, who is not a philosopher by profession, and yet as man is also to some extent a philosopher. And as the maid’s metaphor usually expresses but a small and vulgar world of feeling compared with that of the poet, so the obvious affirmation of one who is not a philosopher solves a problem small by comparison with that which occupies the philosopher.
--Benedetto Croce, Breviary of Esthetics (1913)
(Douglas Ainslie, trans.)
This the text of a lecture first presented by Croce in 1912 at, of all places, the opening of Rice Institute in Houston, TX (i.e.,
Rice University). Apparently it was widely used as a school exercise in Italy, though whether this is still true today, I cannot say.
(Douglas Ainslie, trans.)
This the text of a lecture first presented by Croce in 1912 at, of all places, the opening of Rice Institute in Houston, TX (i.e.,
Rice University). Apparently it was widely used as a school exercise in Italy, though whether this is still true today, I cannot say.
Zuleika Apologies for Her Crudity
"You don't believe in the love that corrodes, the love that ruins?"
"No," laughed Zuleika.
"You have never dipped into the Greek pastoral poets, nor sampled the Elizabethan sonneteers?"
"No, never. You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself."
--Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson 100 (1911, 1985)
Stanley Greenberg Tries to Explain What it Is with the Democrats
[Oops: yesterday I called him "Goldstein." Brain f*rt. sorry.] There's probably nobody better equipped to know what center-left Democrats are thinking than Stanley Greenberg. He's been making his living by listening to them since 1992. Here's what he is hearing:
More: I may not be well-informed enough to judge, but my guess is that this is one factor that pervades the current malaise across a bunch of countries. The specifically financial crisis takes different forms in, say, Greece, Ireland, Italy. Problems like youth un (or under) employment, like the off-the-books shadow economy--these seem to prevail more generally. I suppose there are differences of degree. In Spain, with perhaps a longer history of systemic unemployment, one hears reports of what amounts to a fully-developed two-tier economy, one of which is doing quite well, thank you, and one, scratching for bits. I wouldn't say we've got quite to that point at home yet, but one might argue that we seem to be on our way.
Greenberg follows up with a set of positive recommendations which you can find here. Some of them may sound like same-old same-old; some (immigration) perhaps more appealing, albeit probably utopian. But none of them seem very ambitious --none betray an understanding that we seem to face a widening gap here, not so much between rich and poor as between already-got-mine and still-trying to get on board. It's one of those instabilities which, like the San Andreas fault, will only get more dangerous until it cracks.
Government operates by the wrong values and rules, for the wrong people and purposes, the Americans I’ve surveyed believe. Government rushes to help the irresponsible and does little for the responsible. Wall Street lobbyists govern, not Main Street voters. Vexingly, this promotes both national and middle-class decline yet cannot be moved by conventional democratic politics. Lost jobs, soaring spending and crippling debt make America ever weaker, unable to meet its basic obligations to educate and protect its citizens. Yet politicians take care of themselves and party interests, while government grows remote and unresponsive, leaving people feeling powerless. ...All this is powerful, if not entirely novel, stuff, but I'd give it a slightly different spin. In a word, ring-fencing: we seem to have created a system that protects entrenched insiders and let everybody else fend for themselves. That would include Wall Street bankers and their "elected" minions,, but it would also include disparate other constituencies as well: public employees who have been around since the first big hiring freezes; pensioners old enough that they will be lucky enough to die before the money runs out (that would be me, your honor); hell, throw in Californians foresighted enough to have bought their homes before 1978, and even a range of private-sector workers who bought their homes early, stayed on the job for a while, and kept their nose clean. These are the constituencies not specifically rich enough but better described as connected enough so it looks like their particular bowls of gruel will stay full. Everyone else can go hang.
In our recent Web survey of 2,000 respondents, voters respond strongly to Democratic messages on the economy only when a party leader declares, “We have to start by changing Washington. ... The middle class won’t catch a break until we confront the power of money and the lobbyists.”
Why is that?
You do not have to look very far. If there is an article of faith among contemporary center-left leaders, it is that investment in education will pay dividends with increased productivity and increased income. And yet the evidence is piling up that the economy is not working for the middle class. Productivity and education increase but wages do not follow.
When presented with vivid descriptions of income inequality in America, people are deflated, rather than empowered to bring change. In surveys, they tell me that they think the politicians and the chief executives are “piggybacking off each other.” They think that the game is rigged and that the wealthy and big industries get policies that reinforce their advantage. And they do not think their voices matter.
That government and the elite appear blithely to promote globalization and economic integration, while the working population loses income, makes the frustration more intense.
Our research shows that the growth of self-identified conservatives began in the fall of 2008 with the Wall Street bailout, well before Mr. Obama embarked on his recovery and spending program. The public watched the elite and leaders of both parties rush to the rescue. The government saved irresponsible executives who bankrupted their own companies, hurt many people and threatened the welfare of the country. When Mr. Obama championed the bailout of the auto companies and allowed senior executives at bailed-out companies to take bonuses, voters concluded that he was part of the operating elite consensus. If you owned a small business that was in trouble or a home or pension that lost much of its value, you were on your own. As people across the country told me, the average citizen doesn’t “get money for free.” Their conclusion: Government works for the irresponsible, not the responsible.
Everything they witness affirms the public’s developing view of how government really works. They see a nexus of money and power, greased by special interest lobbyists and large campaign donations, that makes these outcomes irresistible. They do not believe the fundamentals have really changed in Mr. Obama’s Washington.
More: I may not be well-informed enough to judge, but my guess is that this is one factor that pervades the current malaise across a bunch of countries. The specifically financial crisis takes different forms in, say, Greece, Ireland, Italy. Problems like youth un (or under) employment, like the off-the-books shadow economy--these seem to prevail more generally. I suppose there are differences of degree. In Spain, with perhaps a longer history of systemic unemployment, one hears reports of what amounts to a fully-developed two-tier economy, one of which is doing quite well, thank you, and one, scratching for bits. I wouldn't say we've got quite to that point at home yet, but one might argue that we seem to be on our way.
Greenberg follows up with a set of positive recommendations which you can find here. Some of them may sound like same-old same-old; some (immigration) perhaps more appealing, albeit probably utopian. But none of them seem very ambitious --none betray an understanding that we seem to face a widening gap here, not so much between rich and poor as between already-got-mine and still-trying to get on board. It's one of those instabilities which, like the San Andreas fault, will only get more dangerous until it cracks.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
What's Different About Rape?
Here's one that intrigues me, although I suppose it is old stuff to the experts. That is: I'm looking at data on the incidence of crime, state by state and I think I'm seeing a huge difference between all other crimes and rape. I haven't done any real stats, but I think I'm looking at a very low correlation, perhaps negative.
Example: here I am scanning the list of the 15 most high-crime states in the country. Nevada laps the field again, a veritable East Germany in the crime Olympics. But--well, first a technical point. Specifically: the overall rankings go from one (safest) to 50 (least safe). But on the specific crime numbers, it's just the reverse--a low number (e.g. "1") means a lot of crime; high (e.g., "50") means not a lot of crime). Got that? Good; then ere's Louisiana, number three most unsafe overall, first in murder and fourth in assault. But Louisiana's rape ranking is just 33, i.e. pretty safe. Or even more, Maryland: number eight overall, number two (nasty) in murder and robbery, number 45 (safe) in rape. Alaska, fourteenth most unsafe safe, is number one (most unsafe of all) in rape (also an unsafe number three in assault, but that's another story). Meanwhile California, fifteenth most unsafe, but a relatively safe 41 in rape.
Works the same way at the other end of the scale, too. Here's New Hampshire, first over all, but only 29 in rape, worse than Louisiana and much worse than Maryland. South Dakota, ninth safest overall, number three (very, very unsafe) in rape
What's going on here? Just on a skim, I get the impression that a lot (not all) of high-rape states comprise vast open spaces (Alaska, South Dakota, etc.)--something about propinquity, or the absence thereof? Or are there some states where men are more likely to regard women as sexual conveniences? Or am I just data-mining, or are my thumbnail guesses wrong or, or, or...
Example: here I am scanning the list of the 15 most high-crime states in the country. Nevada laps the field again, a veritable East Germany in the crime Olympics. But--well, first a technical point. Specifically: the overall rankings go from one (safest) to 50 (least safe). But on the specific crime numbers, it's just the reverse--a low number (e.g. "1") means a lot of crime; high (e.g., "50") means not a lot of crime). Got that? Good; then ere's Louisiana, number three most unsafe overall, first in murder and fourth in assault. But Louisiana's rape ranking is just 33, i.e. pretty safe. Or even more, Maryland: number eight overall, number two (nasty) in murder and robbery, number 45 (safe) in rape. Alaska, fourteenth most unsafe safe, is number one (most unsafe of all) in rape (also an unsafe number three in assault, but that's another story). Meanwhile California, fifteenth most unsafe, but a relatively safe 41 in rape.
Works the same way at the other end of the scale, too. Here's New Hampshire, first over all, but only 29 in rape, worse than Louisiana and much worse than Maryland. South Dakota, ninth safest overall, number three (very, very unsafe) in rape
What's going on here? Just on a skim, I get the impression that a lot (not all) of high-rape states comprise vast open spaces (Alaska, South Dakota, etc.)--something about propinquity, or the absence thereof? Or are there some states where men are more likely to regard women as sexual conveniences? Or am I just data-mining, or are my thumbnail guesses wrong or, or, or...
Author of "This Time is Different"
Warns that "This Time is Different"
I assume Kenneth Rogoff does understand he is committing an act of aggravated double irony?
Monday, August 01, 2011
"...and Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them"
I won't even begin to sort out all the responses to the Grand Bargain, even limiting myself to the center-and-left, though I suspect the prize for dignified eloquence in disappointment goes to James Fallows, with the shrewdest early appraisal of the content from Ezra Klein. Against the fairly general left rage at Obama's apparent incompetence, you can weigh Glenn Greenwald's argument that he meant it all along (with Greenwald, recall Harry Golden on Barry Goldwater: "I always knew that the first Jewish president would be an Episcopalian").
Me, I'm willing to go with a little of both. I do think Obama is temperamentally a centrist, most at home perhaps among Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller. a prodigal spender of other people's money while ferocious on crime (though Obama, unlike Rockefeller, will always have to live with the curse that he is not Rockefeller). Yet also, Obama has shown himself to be an unskilled negotiator, a mix of earnest naïveté and an almost utter lack of political timing. But there's another perspective that doesn't seem to be receiving much attention (though I picked it up a while back from Walter Russell Mead). That is: whether or not Obama's deals make sense, he doesn't have any knack at all for convincing us that they make sense. As is so often the case, the Roosevelt comparison is apposite here. After a dismayingly mixed-bag first term, FDR was able to keep the electorate on board with the idea that he was still part of the solution and not the problem--and the voters gave him a huge bye, and he rolled back into office 46 states to two. So in a different way Lyndon Johnson: even those who pretty much saw through him from the start still had to grit their teeth and smile in admiration at his legerdemain in bringing it off. Obama on his best days can somehow make us feel he is having his worst.
I know, I know, his friends who will try to take comfort from other Presidents who looked braver and craftier in retrospect than in their own time. I'm one of those who oozed contempt for Eisenhower while he was in office, yet who believes today that he was, while far from perfect, srill a far more crafty politician than I understood at the time. And who was it who said of Lincoln that he had the peculiar knack for not caring that other people thought him stupid?
I'm sure I run the risk of historical-analogy overload: between this and earlier posts, I hate to think how many other Presidents I've drawn on for historical comparison. If we are somehow misunderstanding the real Obama, I don't think it is strictly a matter of craft (as with Ike) or moral courage (as with Lincoln). It is, at best, one more evidence that we're watching a rookie play a rookie game. Still, I'm taken with Ezra's appraisal that the (immanent) compromise is on the whole a rather mixed bag, i.e., not nearly the disaster the liberal critics would make it out to be.
Oh, and the headline? Irony? Sarcasm? The simple truth? Could be, could be.
Me, I'm willing to go with a little of both. I do think Obama is temperamentally a centrist, most at home perhaps among Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller. a prodigal spender of other people's money while ferocious on crime (though Obama, unlike Rockefeller, will always have to live with the curse that he is not Rockefeller). Yet also, Obama has shown himself to be an unskilled negotiator, a mix of earnest naïveté and an almost utter lack of political timing. But there's another perspective that doesn't seem to be receiving much attention (though I picked it up a while back from Walter Russell Mead). That is: whether or not Obama's deals make sense, he doesn't have any knack at all for convincing us that they make sense. As is so often the case, the Roosevelt comparison is apposite here. After a dismayingly mixed-bag first term, FDR was able to keep the electorate on board with the idea that he was still part of the solution and not the problem--and the voters gave him a huge bye, and he rolled back into office 46 states to two. So in a different way Lyndon Johnson: even those who pretty much saw through him from the start still had to grit their teeth and smile in admiration at his legerdemain in bringing it off. Obama on his best days can somehow make us feel he is having his worst.
I know, I know, his friends who will try to take comfort from other Presidents who looked braver and craftier in retrospect than in their own time. I'm one of those who oozed contempt for Eisenhower while he was in office, yet who believes today that he was, while far from perfect, srill a far more crafty politician than I understood at the time. And who was it who said of Lincoln that he had the peculiar knack for not caring that other people thought him stupid?
I'm sure I run the risk of historical-analogy overload: between this and earlier posts, I hate to think how many other Presidents I've drawn on for historical comparison. If we are somehow misunderstanding the real Obama, I don't think it is strictly a matter of craft (as with Ike) or moral courage (as with Lincoln). It is, at best, one more evidence that we're watching a rookie play a rookie game. Still, I'm taken with Ezra's appraisal that the (immanent) compromise is on the whole a rather mixed bag, i.e., not nearly the disaster the liberal critics would make it out to be.
Oh, and the headline? Irony? Sarcasm? The simple truth? Could be, could be.
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