De Bah Bah Blague

Euro Hold 'Em

6/29/2015

    I don’t have a good grip on the Greek debt crisis. Of course, I’m for the Greeks and against the bankers. I know that if the Greeks cave in, the bankers win. What I don’t know is which outcome would be better for the Greeks or, to put it more pragmatically, which would be less hurtful to them: to default and exit the Euro, or to let the bankers win and agree to more austerity in exchange for temporary debt relief?
       Not knowing what outcome to root for, I’ve followed the news on the Greek debt as if it were a poker game – something like the climactic hand at the end of The Cincinnati Kid. Greece is Steve McQueen, “The Kid;” Europe is Edward G. Robinson, “The Man.” The poker variant they are playing is Euro Lose ‘Em. What’s in the pot is not money to be won, but money to be lost. When the hand is over, the debts are exchanged and the winner is the player who loses the least.
       When Tsipras called for a public referendum, my poker hand analogy seemed to come apart. What would be the corresponding move in a poker game? The best I could come up with was that it was as if The Kid had turned to someone nearby and said, “Would you go find my wife?” The effect of this callow and amateurish behavior was to discombobulate The Man, break his concentration and make him angry and less likely to fold. Was this The Kid’s intention, or has The Kid really lost his nerve and genuinely needs his wife’s moral support and advice?

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Bye, Bye, Miss Academia Pie

6/26/2015

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       In a previous post on this blog I wondered why there were no protests from academia when the Post Office decided not to withdraw a stamp honoring Maya Angelou which included a quotation ostensibly by Angelou but in reality by someone else. I mentioned in particular three public intellectuals (a label currently being bandied about which trips pleasantly into the brain and off the tongue): Cornel West, Toni Morrison and Henry Gates.
       Scratch Henry Gates. He’s in the public eye, yes; he’s an intellectual, yes; but he is not a public intellectual, because it is not his intelligence that he brings to the commons, it is his renown. That is to say that, evidently, what he wishes the public to appreciate about Henry Gates is not his wisdom, but his celebrity, his identity as the guy who made the national news when he sat down for a beer with Obama and the cop who falsely arrested him on his own front porch. This is the guy, not some fusty academic, who hosts a PBS teevee program, Finding Your Roots, in which the ancestry of other celebrities is researched and revealed.
       That is made clear in the really shameful affair of his withholding the fact that one of the ancestors of Ben Affleck, a well-known movie actor, was a slave-owner. Affleck asked Gates to leave that information out of the program and Gates complied.
       While pondering what to do about Affleck’s request, Gates sent an e-mail to Sony Pictures’ CEO, Michael Lynton, saying, "Here's my dilemma: confidentially, for the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors — the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including (documentary filmmaker) Ken Burns. We've never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He's a megastar. What do we do?" Lynton, who is allowed to be a Machiavellian, since he is a businessman and not a keeper of the flame of truth, replied that it all depends on who knows about the information.
       (Gates may have e-reached out to other luminaries about his moral dilemma, but thanks to WikiLeaks’ publication of the hacked Sony e-mail trove, this is the only one we know about.)
       Gates’ e-mail to Lynton went on to say, “We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found...Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand.” Lose control of the brand? What does that even mean in this context? What it means to me is that Gates is presenting himself as some sort of mover and shaker within the entertainment industry.
       Since he does see it as a dilemma, Gates seems to be aware of the most troublesome implications of censorship, implications which would bother an intellectual. But if he really wanted moral advice, he would have written to other intellectuals – Cornel West or Toni Morrison, for example – not to the head of Sony. Perhaps he did; if so, it is unlikely that to them he posed his quandary in terms of brand integrity.
       This may be old news to most people. I missed it though, perhaps because I snobbishly ignore stories whose headlines include the names of movie stars. I came across it only because the latest article on it appeared in The New York Times’ Business Section, which I read in the loo (fully aware of the symbolism that implies), not because I am interested in business per se, but because I feel that, since we are living in a plutocracy, what happens in business is germane to what happens in Washington. (“What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the country.”)
       (If you did miss the story, as I did, just google Affleck Gates to read all about it.)
       Frank Bruni whom, evidently, I should read more assiduously than I do, wrote about the affair in an April 22 column. His conclusion is that Gates was “diminished” as soon as he took on the job of hosting a teevee show. But Bruni is wrong about that. The statuses of Carl Sagan, Kenneth Clark and Leonard Bernstein were not diminished by their becoming, in Gates’ term, “megastars” of public teevee. Gates was diminished because, faced with a moral dilemma, he chose the immoral action. It’s as simple as that.

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Bias

6/20/2015

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       I receive an occasional catalogue of cut-price academic books from Labyrinth Books, based in Princeton. My perusal of it is an absorbing twenty minutes and occasionally I’ll place an order.
       I can’t say I was surprised, but I still I was a little disturbed, to read the following description for Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks:

Via vivid profiles of billionaires -- ranging from philanthropic capitalists like Bill Gates to hedge fund king John Paulson and the infamous Koch brothers -- McQuaig and Brooks illustrate why we hold dearly to the belief that these figures "earned" and "deserve" their grand fortunes, when such wealth is really a by-product of a legal and economic infrastructure that is deeply flawed.

       Do you see the problem? Perhaps you don’t. But if you happen to be a Conservative, a right-winger, or just a plain vanilla Republican, you will spot it right away.
       This is a catalogue aimed at academics and academic-leaning book buyers. The intent is not to tempt only liberals, progressives, Democrats, but anyone interested in buying books somewhat pithier and more specialized than those generally covered by the New York Times Book Review – perhaps Edmund Burke: The First Conservative by Jesse Norman, or John Diggins’ adulatory biography of Ronald Reagan, or one of the American Library’s Mencken collections, all of which can be purchased through Labyrinth.
       With a general, bi-partisan – let’s say non-partisan – audience in mind, how did “infamous” come tripping off Labyrinth’s blurb writer’s fingertips as a description of the Koch Brothers? Sure, the Koch Brothers are infamous to patrons of the liberal media; even I, someone who likes to think of himself as more precise and particular in his ideology than most people, would have no compunction calling the Koch Brothers infamous. But for that judgment to be made in a book catalogue intended for readers of all stripes substantiates conservatives’ claims of a liberal bias in academia.
       Certainly there was no sinister intent at political propaganda in the pairing of “infamous” with “Koch Brothers.” The fact that there was no intent, that the adjective simply was taken for granted, points to a true bias, a real prejudice – so ingrained that it is not even recognized. I consider the Koch Brothers infamous, my friends consider them infamous, Labyrinth Books considers them infamous -- because they are the deep pockets for the most backward, retrograde, cockamamie and plutocratic (intentionally or unthinkingly) interest groups and political candidates.
       Still – that is my opinion, it is my friends’ opinion, it is Labyrinth Books’ opinion. We all have a right to express that opinion, which I am absolutely confident is a correct opinion. However, for that opinion, correct or not, to be expressed in a book catalogue intended for the general academic reader does validate the right’s complaint that there is a liberal bias in academia.
       If a professor calls the Koch Brothers “infamous,” in class, or in a book or an essay – fair enough. It is an opinion. If every professor in a political science department calls the Koch Brothers “infamous” – well, perhaps that political science department is somewhat narrower in scope than it should be. If an academic book catalogue calls the Koch Brothers “infamous” then we are dealing with what basically is an unconscious bias. It would not have been biased to refer to the Koch Brothers as “conservative” or “right-wing” or “reactionary,” but only history can decide infamy. For example, the James Brothers (Jesse and Frank, not Henry and William), Nero and Charles Ponzi are universally recognized as infamous, and can complacently be described as such in a book catalogue. The jury is still out on such people as Henry Kissinger, Hugo Chavez and King Edward VIII; I do not think one would find one of them described as “infamous” in a catalogue such as Labyrinth’s.
       Labyrinth’s “infamous Koch Brothers” either makes Labyrinth an active participant in current politics – which I do not believe it means to be – or a reflection of a left-wing bias which permeates academia.
       A liberal education is not an education informed by liberal values but, according to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (per today’s Wikipedia), is “a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a stronger sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement ... characterized by challenging encounters with important issues.” An academy which without reflection dubs the Koch Brothers “infamous” mutilates the idea of a liberal education.

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I Don't Know Much about Birds, But I Know a Dodo when I Hear One

6/15/2015

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        You’ve probably read the story about the Nobel Prize winning scientist, Tim Hunt, who was forced to resign his honorary professorship at a London college after telling the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea: “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry."
       Evidently unable – as a scientist and/or an honest man – to prevaricate, Hunt could not summon up the appropriate remorse in his various apologies. He told the BBC, for example, that he was "really sorry that I said what I said", adding it was "a very stupid thing to do in the presence of all those journalists". His remarks, he went on, were "intended as a light-hearted, ironic comment" but had been "interpreted deadly seriously by my audience.” He almost made it to the required posture of abject self-criticism – "I'm really, really sorry I caused any offence, that's awful. I certainly didn't mean that” – and then ruined it by adding, “I just meant to be honest, actually."
       University College of London issued a dour statement: “UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome [Hunt’s resignation] is compatible with our commitment to gender equality." The UCL statement is in lock step not only with the grim political correctness that grips academia everywhere, but also with the unfortunate propensity, among educated 21st century British writers and speakers, to use “to” as a generic preposition, (it should be “on equal terms with men” not “to”) as if they have more important things to do than to exercise their left frontal lobes.
       The Royal Society, of course, has joined the po-faced, we-are-not-amused crowd. After an ambivalent initial reaction, "Sir Tim Hunt was speaking as an individual and his reported comments in no way reflect the views of the Royal Society," the Society evidently decided that Hunt need not fall on his sword and resign from the Society, but that just a token bit of self-harming would suffice. It accepted Hunt’s resignation from the Society’s Biological Sciences Awards Committee with a statement that calls Hunt’s “recent comments so disappointing,” but also warmly praises his contributions to science and his efforts to support “the careers of many young researchers.”
       While on-line and on-camera pundettes (sorry! mea culpa!) flung the now boring epithet “sexist” at Hunt, accusing him of being a typical man, who goes around stereotyping women, the reaction of Hunt’s victims – women scientists – has been, predictably, as light-hearted as Hunt says he intended his remarks to be. (I say “predictably” because, in my experience, women involved in the sciences tend to be a particularly jolly bunch of people.) For example, this tweeted pictorial response to Hunt by a lovely soil scientist:

           You may have missed the April news story that a commemorative postage stamp honoring Maya Angelou features a sentence written by another author, Joan Walsh Anglund, “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” (Somewhere along the line the pronoun of the Anglund line was changed from “he” to “it”. Ordinarily, “it” would be better than “he,” since we are talking about a generic bird. However, male birds generally are the songsters of the class. Whatever – we can be thankful it was not changed to “he or she”.)
       The Post Office excused itself by noting that the stamp was approved by Angelou’s family. Anglund said it was okay by her, she was an admirer of Angelou and it was nice to see her words on a postage stamp. Angelou used Anglund’s line (presumably with “it” instead of “he”) in public speeches. President Obama quoted it when presenting an award to Angelou. In normal circumstances – that is, when you are fact-checking a project somewhat less momentous than a commemorative postage stamp on which, incidentally, is printed the word “forever” instead of an amount of tariff – the mistake would understandable.
       But this was a major blunder. A Post Office spokesman (who seems to come from the same village on the Island of Liars and Truth-Tellers as does Tim Hunt) admitted, “Had we known about this issue beforehand, we would have used one of [Angelous’s] [sic per the Washington Post] many other works.”
       The proper procedure, once the mistake was discovered, would have been to recall all the unsold stamps and issue another with a true Angelou quotation. That would have been an expensive proposition, of course, amounting perhaps to the cost of a drone attack on a wedding, but – unlike the drone attack – it would have been offset a wee bit by the stimulus to the economy afforded by the windfall to philatelists who owned copies of the original erroneous stamp.
       But no. The stamp was not recalled. My local post office currently has a small poster advertising it as its featured commemorative. When I see it, I am outraged – far more outraged than I am about Tim Hunt’s clueless and injudicious remarks re girls in the lab. What if the Post Office had issued a Steinbeck stamp, with the quotation, “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”? Or a Hemingway stamp with a quotation from George Peele’s poem, A Farewell to Arms, perhaps “His golden locks Time hath to silver turn'd; O Time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!”? Or a Henry James stamp with the verse from Ecclesiastes from which he drew the title for “The Golden Bowl”?
         To issue a commemorative stamp honoring a writer and then print – in quotation marks, beside a portrait of the honoree – the words of another writer is an error. Not to rectify it is a travesty. The general sense I get from the different articles I’ve read, in which the Post Office’s laissez-faire attitude is excused, is that it’s so great that yet another black woman has made it onto a postage stamp, why make a fuss?
         Ian Crouch, in The New Yorker, takes over 1,000 words to convince us, and himself as well perhaps, that it’s really okay to honor a writer with a quotation ostensibly hers, but really someone else’s, on a commemorative postage stamp. Where are those level-headed academicians who are supposed to keep an eye on our literary heritage? Did Henry Gates have nothing to say about this, or Cornel West? You’d think Toni Morrison might have put up a fuss, foreseeing a day when her picture might appear on a stamp with the words “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here today to witness and celebrate the wedding of ____ and ____”

   To add insult to injury, Anglund’s quotation is anodyne pap compared to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy,” which is where Angelou found the title of her best known book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Here is the entire text of “Sympathy”. Get past the lugubrious Victorian parlor language and you will find a deeply moving poem.


        I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
                When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
            When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
             And the river flows like a stream of glass;
                When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
            And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
            I know what the caged bird feels!

            I know why the caged bird beats his wing
                Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
            For he must fly back to his perch and cling
            When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
                And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
            And they pulse again with a keener sting--
            I know why he beats his wing!

            I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
                When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
            When he beats his bars and he would be free;
            It is not a carol of joy or glee,
                But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
            But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
            I know why the caged bird sings!

       Still – there’s hope. (Not for the caged bird, but for Western civilization.) Just as there always will be jolly women scientists to help us keep our balance in an over-excited world, there always will be Mad Magazine to pin “kick me” on the backsides of the portentous.

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China. Maybe It's the MSG?

6/1/2015

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       Why are we demonizing China? Why is it in our national interest constantly to complain about China – its criminal justice system, its one-party political system, its expansionism, its monetary policies? Without doubt, these are real issues, real problems, but why do we so often single out China for criticism when not only are many other countries similarly culpable, but we ourselves are guilty to one degree or another of the same shortcomings?
       Does setting up China as an antagonist make the United States stronger, richer, better respected, more influential than we would be if we treated China as we treat, let’s say, Japan or Australia or Brazil? One could say that China and the United States are in an almost symbiotic economic relationship – just look at the “Made in” stamps on all the stuff in your house. Why does the media, the intelligentsia (if we could be said to have such a thing) Congress, the State Department, the military, treat China as if it were our Number One Enemy among sovereign states? (Pardon me – Number Two now that Russia has been misbehaving so baldly.)
       Might our demonization of China simply be a knee-jerk reaction? a force of habit, of historical habit? We are the old superpower, China is the up-and-coming superpower. Should that automatically put us at odds? Should that automatically make us geopolitical adversaries? Why not scoff at the antagonism between an old superpower and an up-and-coming superpower as being just so 20th century (and 19th, and 18th, etc.)? Instead of basing our attitude towards China on primeval fear and machismo, why not step back and take a mature and rational view of China’s new status in the world?
       China has become a major world power. That is a fact. The question we should be asking ourselves is: how can the United States best take advantage of that fact? China’s growing stature, its burgeoning middle class, its increasing industrial capacity, is due in large part to its relationship with corporate America. Instead of demonizing China and bucking the inevitable, the United States government should acknowledge its close economic ties with China and encourage, participate in, its advancement.
       Enmity between China and the United States can mean only trouble, for both of us. An alliance between China and the United States would be mutually beneficial. What is stopping us? Let’s look clear-headedly at what our leaders and our pundits, on the left and the right, have against China:

China’s unfair criminal justice system.
       China’s propensity to jail political dissidents is a reprehensible practice and it is right that we speak out against it, just as we officially have protested to the Egyptian government over its mass indictment of those connected with the government it overthrew in 2014. That has not stopped us from considering Egypt an ally and sending it over one billion dollars annually in military aid. Egypt’s maltreatment of dissidents arguably is broader and crueler than China’s, yet our objections to it are muted, while our objections to China’s are shrill. Why is that? We need Egypt as an ally against ISIS, yes. But in the long run, our relationship with China will be more important to us than our relationship with Egypt.
       Furthermore, as long as we remain notorious for imprisoning the largest proportion of our population of any other country (except the Seychelles) – 707 people out of every 100,000, compared with China’s 172 out of 100,000 – we don’t really have the right to complain about other countries’ criminal justice systems. Add to that the Obama administration’s use of the 1917 Espionage Act against government whistleblowers – who are not the spies for foreign powers at whom the controversially broad law was aimed – and China’s treatment of dissidents becomes a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

China’s undemocratic one-party system.
       From Ben Franklin’s courting of Louis XVI to our relations today with Saudi Arabia and other monarchies in that part of the world, it’s clear that if it is helpful for us to have friendly relations with a country whose political system is something other than a democratic one, we are willing to overlook that failing.
       Let’s look at the specifics of China’s government more closely. The Chinese political system is not a dictatorship. Essentially it is a one-party system, although there are other token parties, subservient to the Communist Party, which allow China to call its system “democratic centralism.” China does have elections, in which voters from local districts choose representatives to the National Congress from slates nominated by the Communist party. Power struggles happen behind closed doors. Every five years the National Congress chooses a Premier. The Premier enjoys vast power, although not enough, and not for long enough, for him to be called a dictator. Since the end of Mao’s dictatorship, no Premier has reigned (if that is the word) for more than ten years, two terms.
       Mayors and governors are not elected, but appointed by Beijing; that is the most distasteful aspect of Chinese government, in comparison to our own. When it comes to national government, given the fact that 21st century American democracy is really a plutocracy – and there is general agreement about that – our two-party system, in which the electorate chooses which lackey of which special interests to send to Washington, has little to recommend it over the Chinese system. And, looking at the two systems, one cannot say that one of them is more resistant to the possibility of reform than the other.
       Although the United States enthusiastically proselytizes democracy throughout the world, democracy has never become a stultifying ideology inhibiting our strategy on the international stage. We made nice with Stalin when it was necessary, and we cozied up to Mao when it wasn’t exactly necessary, but just clever realpolitik, so why have we gotten on our high horse about the Chinese political system? Clever realpolitik calls for good relations, friendly relations, close relations with China.

Chinese expansionism.
       The American left is incensed over China’s economic expansion into Africa. The American right is outraged at China’s claim of sovereignty over disputed islets in the China Sea which are economically worthless but which, evidently, China regards as strategically important.
       Superficially, China’s gobbling up of large portions of sub-Saharan Africa – for the extraction of oil and minerals and for agricultural purposes – is not unlike Europe’s behavior there in the last two centuries. There are significant differences, however: Europe appropriated pretty much all of Africa by force; China is purchasing the land it wants. Europe carved Africa up into colonies; China respects local sovereignty. Europe extracted what it wanted from Africa without any compensation; China’s exploitation of Africa is contractual, with governments, corporations, and/or landowners being compensated. Is China’s expansion in Africa a good thing or a bad thing for the average African? Surely, the answer is complex – just as the answer to the same question vis-à-vis European colonialism is complex. Considering the corruption and tribal and sectarian violence endemic in much of sub-Saharan Africa, it is unlikely that the Chinese presence there adds substantially to peoples’ troubles there, and it might actually – as an economic engine – go some way towards alleviating them.
       When it comes to China’s disputes with Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam over islands in the China Sea, the United States cannot ignore its security commitments. However, the efforts we make on behalf of our Pacific allies should be in supporting their cases at the UN and in international courts, not in sabre rattling. Would we really to go to war with China over islands in the South China Sea? The answer is obvious. In that case, should we be engaging in a game of chicken with China over the South China Sea? The answer is just as obvious. The China Sea islands sovereignty question is one which, eventually, will be settled by international courts – at least, we’d better hope so – and it is in that arena – where, incidentally, compromise is possible that is not possible in military confrontation – that we should be spending our time and prestige.

China’s manipulative monetary policy.
       I don’t understand money (which, as far as I can tell, is just numbers drifting around in computers), so I don’t understand monetary policy and have nothing to say about it.

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Euro Hold 'Em

Bye, Bye, Miss Academia Pie

Bias

I Don't Know Much about Birds, But I Know a Dodo when I Hear One

China. Maybe It's the MSG?

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