The Rehearsal Studio

Getting out of the Hole, or Digging it Deeper?

2009-11-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I focused on the proposition that "irrationality knows no bounds." Today's news brings evidence that the same can be said about greed. (Resolving the question of whether or not greed is irrational is left as an exercise for the reader.) The evidence comes from Candice Choi, Personal Finance Writer for Associated Press. It takes the form of an anecdote of one of the major victims of the current economic crisis, an ordinary citizen faced with the problem of credit card debt. Her name is Lindsey Pappas, she is 25 years old, and she is fortunate enough to have a job here in San Francisco in public relations. Here is Choi's account of her story:

She received a letter from Citi Wednesday that her interest rate was being hiked to 19.99 percent, up from 14.99 percent.

If she spends $750 a month, however, she can get a refund for part of the higher interest rate charges.

The problem is that Pappas is trying to pay off a $5,000 balance on the card, so she tries not to charge any money on it.

"I'm just going to have to deal with the higher interest rate. Spending that much would be irresponsible," she said.

Choi does not provide the details for how Pappas got into her $5000 hole, but that last sentence seems to indicate that she has learned the consequences of unmanageable debt. At the very least she has learned that you do not get out of a hole by digging it deeper.

Choi also explains the context behind Citi making this offer (which, depending on your point of view, is either predatory or preposterous) in the first place:

The change by Citi comes as the industry rushes to adjust to sweeping reforms to start in February that will limit when and how much card issuers can hike interest rates. In a statement, Citi said the actions were necessary given elevated losses from souring loans and "regulatory changes that eliminate repricing for that risk."

The bank also noted that "customers who do more business with us will have the most opportunity to reduce their rates."

Citi's reasoning (deliberately?) overlooks the obvious corollary that, in their semantic model of the world, "doing more business" actually means "building up more customer debt." Ultimately, this is a last-ditch effort to promote one more Ponzi scheme before new regulations take effect. The only way in which Citi distinguishes itself from Bernard Madoff is that, while Madoff preyed on the substantial retirement assets of a relatively select few, Citi can go after the sizable percentage of all of its 92 million credit card customers who do not pay off their balance in full every month, making up for the relatively small profit from each account by the high volume of the number of accounts.

So, someone remind me, was Citi one of those businesses declared by our government as "too big to fail?" If so, is it about time to promote the new motto of "too devious to succeed?" Sadly, that will never be more than wishful thinking. If greed does, indeed, know no bounds, then there will never be any such thing as "too devious!"

Honoring the Opposition

2009-11-19T11:48:00.000-08:00

I used my lunch hour to (finally) watch the Book TV broadcast of Howard Dean at Politics and Prose last August promoting his book on health care reform. While I did not disagree with any of his major points, I found myself disconcerted by his worldview of political practice, which reflected a naïveté that may ultimately be his undoing. In a nutshell he is willing to show too much honor to the opponents of health care reform, assuming that differences of opinion can be resolved through reasoned conversations. This seems to disregard the likely premise that those who oppose health care reform are more interested in winning for the sake of building political capital than they are about what happens to the American people, both those in their electorate and the population at large.

Thus, in commenting about how problematic the opposition has been, all Dean could say was, "We didn't realize they would go that low." His worldview simply could not imagine that someone like Sarah Palin could turn arguments about health care into arguments over death panels. Dean's admission reveals an interesting principle, which should serve as a warning to all who try to engage in argumentation in the present day:

Rationality defines is limits through fundamental principles of logical reasoning; irrationality knows no bounds.

The very concept of a death panel was so far off the map of just about anyone in the Democratic Party that they simply could not anticipate those who live by fear-mongering putting it on the table.

There was another instance of naïveté that might be a bit more forgivable, since it was basically a matter of wishful thinking. This was Dean's prognostication that fear-based irrationality had run its course and would begin to decline. His reasoning was that the younger generation who turned out in such great numbers to vote for Barack Obama simply would not put up with the bill of goods that the fear-mongers have been selling. Admirable as Dean's aspiration may be, we are now three months on from his book talk; and we may be witnessing its refutation. The warrants for that refutation are to be found in the public response to Going Rogue and the book tour Palin has organized to promote it. This morning Kevin Connolly posted a report from Grand Rapids to BBC News on the "couple of thousand supporters" waiting in the Woodland Mall for Palin to sign their copy of Going Rogue; and what Connolly felt was most important to report was that quite a few of those prepared to wait hours for this opportunity were young people. One of them had a simple reason for being there:

She's cool.

Think about that. Eighteen months ago Obama was cool. Young people were drawn to him for a variety of reasons; but that "cool" factor cannot be ignored. Now that he occupies the White House, he is no longer cool. Cool people don't do things like that to their friends. So, having found this whole new base of the electorate to mobilize, it turns out that what mobilizes them is the cool factor; and, for now at least, Palin has it. (Remember, irrationality knows no bounds!) Think of it this way: The generation that grew up on the "What's Cool" button in the Netscape browser is now participating in the electoral process. What, if anything, can this tell us about next year's congressional campaigns and the presidential race in 2012?

The Complexity of the Abuse Problem

2009-11-18T08:33:00.000-08:00

This morning the BBC NEWS Web site ran an interesting report about the problem of abusive practices, particularly towards children, in the brave new world of social software on the Internet. Given that the undiscriminating embrace of this technology may be equaled only by the mindless evangelizing that continues to promote it, these stories are valuable. Nevertheless, this particular account reflects a bias that may not be particularly productive. Here is how the story opens:

Major social networking websites have been criticised for not introducing a help button for children to report concerns about grooming and bullying.

Jim Gamble, from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), hit out at the sites as one site, Bebo, adopted the button.

He said there was "no legitimate reason" why other sites like MySpace and Facebook had not done the same.

As Bill Clinton would have put it, I feel Gamble's pain. I have long argued that the Internet is a hazardous place whose dangers have been consistently overlooked or downplayed by social software evangelists, and most of my attention has been towards hazards to adults. By all rights the risks to children should be even greater, and we need voices like Gamble's to raise consciousness about those risks.

Nevertheless, I fear that Gamble may not entirely grasp the nature of the technology. The Bebo "button," which is illustrated on the BBC NEWS Web page, is an instance of what tends to be called reporting technology. Most of us have encountered it in some setting or another. Indeed, anyone reading this should be aware of the technology, because it is at the top of the page. If I write something that offends, then a reader can click on the "Report Abuse" hyperlink to notify the Blogger support team that I have done so; and, whatever my past rants and inquiries into the dark side may have been, I have tried very hard both to edit my text before submitting it and to stay on the right side of the boundary of normative social practices.

The rub, however, resides in that second infinitive phrase. Where is that "boundary of normative social practices?" When reporting technology is engaged, it is basically a request for a judgment on where a particular item sits with respect to those practices. How does such judgment take place? More importantly, in the midst of the heavy volume of content flowing through the Internet pipes, how can each such judgment be made both effectively and efficiently?

The bottom line is that there are no good answers to these questions, so Gamble's indignation has missed the point. Where MySpace and Facebook are concerned, the question is not whether or not they choose to adopt a simple button-based reporting technology. The real question has to do with what happens when the button is clicked? What sort of account (and, once again, the concept of λόγος from Plato's investigation into the nature of knowledge in "Theaetetus" rears its head in the world of Facebook) is elicited when abuse is reported? Then, what happens to that account (even if it is nothing more than "the abuse button was clicked") after it has been submitted? To offer a reductio ad absurdum example of just how vulnerable this process is, I recently learned of a situation in this brave new world of outsourcing in which reports of abuse were being read by individuals who did not understand the language of either the content or the account very well.

So, while it may distress Gamble, there is, indeed, a "legitimate reason" why MySpace and Facebook have not jumped on the reporting technology bandwagon. Worse yet, it is unclear that Bebo is quite the paradigm of vigilance that Gamble would like it to be. Consider the following excerpt from a BBC Panorama report that I cited this past March:

Internet ratings company Nielsen claims that Bebo, with its one million Irish users, was the most popular site in Ireland after Google in 2007.

Sectarianism on the site hit the headlines after threatening posts surfaced following the 2006 murder of Catholic school boy Michael McIlveen in Ballymena.

Three years on, and some pages on Bebo brazenly continue to promote violence.

Has this situation changed since March; and, if so, was the change the result of the adoption of the reporting technology that Gamble so admires?

As I see it, the real problem with social software is that problems of offense and abuse are human problems for which humans have to be in all parts of the loop from the very beginning. The most dangerous consequence of Internet volume has been the gradual erosion of person-to-person "Contact Us" mechanisms in favor of alternative technologies, such as blogs in which users can discuss problems among themselves (which may or may not be monitored my the technology support team) or FAQ pages (where one may be able to vote on how informative they were without any confidence that one's vote counts for very much). The erosion is, of course, understandable. There are just not enough individuals available for "contact" to keep up with the load of users trying to make contact.

Thus, conditions are such that technology providers search frantically for bandages because no one seems to have the resources to analyze the nature of the problem and think about solving it. One would think that there are plenty of educated people out there who would be more than happy to work the problem. Is it then a question of not wanting to put budget into those resources? If so, then we are back in the days of the Ford Pinto, when managers decided that the cost of settling with the victims of a defective product was lower than the cost of repairing the product. I wish I could say that this is another instance of a farcical repetition of history; but, where the safety of children is concerned, this just is not the case.

The CHUTZPAH to Believe in Representative Democracy

2009-11-17T10:20:00.001-08:00

In the wake of yesterday's rant over our obsession with universalist ideals that can only lead to irreconcilable differences and destroy any pragmatic hope of getting things done, I was pleased to see that at least British Foreign Secretary David Miliband prefers getting things done to getting stuck in ideological mud. Consider the beginning of a report that Al Jazeera English compiled from their wire sources:

Britain's foreign secretary has suggested that senior Taliban figures be given positions in the Afghan government to bring an end to the violence in the country.

At a meeting of Nato's parliamentary assembly in Edinburgh, Scotland on Tuesday, David Miliband said that history suggested many Taliban members could be persuaded to stop fighting.

Miliband said the Afghan government would need to reach out to "high-level commanders that can be persuaded to renounce al-Qaeda and pursue their goals peacefully".

"This will be far from straightforward. But the historical lessons are clear," he said.

"Blood enemies from the Soviet period and the civil war now work together in government. Former Talibs already sit in the parliament.

"It is essential that, when the time is right, members of the current insurgency are
encouraged to follow suit," he said.

In the midst of all the current hand-writing over corruption in an Afghan government that, for all intents and purposes, was installed by the United States as part of the War on Terror, here is someone with the chutzpah (I suppose the British would prefer to call it "temerity") to suggest that, if we want to spread our love of democracy to Afghanistan, then we should not impede their forming a government that would be truly representative. He also made his case with an appeal to history, which, as far as I can tell, is a concept that remains alien to prevailing American culture. This is a gesture that is almost guaranteed to induce considerable aggravation in Washington, which makes it perfect for the Chutzpah of the Week award!

Deception by Connotation

2009-11-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

William Shakespeare may have known how to capture the romantic moment, but he did not always get it right:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

This may be true in a world of denotations; but Juliet was apparently too love-struck to recognize that words have connotations, too! The best joke about the power of connotation is the one about the designer of a new perfume who realizes that, if he wants to sell his product, "Evening in Paris" will be a much better name than "Morning in Brooklyn!" Taken on its own, a name may be nothing more than an impartial sign; but, as soon as a reader makes a symbol out of that sign, all impartiality goes out the window.

What, then, is "in" the name "Factery?" According to the latest Web Crawler blog post by Josh Lowensohn on CNET News, this is what is in the name:

New start-up Factery Labs is launching its first service on Tuesday, a technology called FactRank that can tear through Web pages and collect what it calls "facts." These are bits of information from each source page that Factery Labs' algorithm then organizes into an order of importance.

What this means for you is that developers will soon make use of the technology in third-party search engines or on Web pages to very quickly deliver reading summaries. This cuts out most (or all) of the parts you don't care about, while organizing the bits you might. It also manages to do all this in real time.

The FactRank technology was created by Paul Pedersen, who has a good background in search, including gigs at Inktomi, Google, and Powerset. CNET News met with him and co-founder Sean Gaddis (former Skype and eBay'er) on Monday to get a demo of how the technology works.

Note the scare quotes in the first paragraph. Note them well. After providing a readable summary of the technology and offering a demonstration screen shot, Lowensohn launches into the obvious question:

Of course, one of the problems with Factery Labs' approach across multiple sources--be it Twitter, or multiple URLs is accuracy; like how can it realize something like The Onion is not the same as the Associated Press?

The short answer is that it can't. Factery Labs can't determine the truth value of what it finds, nor will it ever. "It goes beyond any existing technology. And nobody knows how to do that. I mean, I don't even know how to do that--people don't even know how to do that," Pedersen said. "We are absolutely neutral. We have nothing in the system that has any bias in terms of anything. The only mechanism we maintain is egregious spam, the bad guys."

In other words what Pedersen is really saying in all of that verbiage is that his technology has nothing to do with facts, at least in the way that most of us use the word (which, at least according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, is the foundation for any meaning that word assumes). The appearance of "Fact" in the company name is, to appropriate shamelessly from William Schwenck Gilbert, "intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing" technology! Personally, I prefer the smell of morning in Brooklyn!

Barack Obama and the Question of "Universal Rights"

2009-11-16T08:48:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama made a bold move in participating in a "town hall" meeting with Chinese students in Shanghai. However, on the basis of the Al Jazeera English account of this meeting (taken from both wire sources and their own staff), he was even bolder in how he participated:

During the question-and-answer session, Obama said that "universal rights" of expression, religious freedom and free information should be available to everyone, including those in China.

Aspects of the event, which was streamed live on the White House website, were subject to delicate negotiations between US officials and Chinese officials up to the last minute.

A transcript of the session was posted on the website of the state-run Xinhua news agency and it was broadcast on local Shanghai television with a several-second delay.

It other words he chose to speak his mind about his value system; and, whatever their general practices of censorship may be, the Chinese government allowed the circulation of news of his actions.

Is there any significance to this event? The Chinese must still remember the link between the official visit by Mikhail Gorbachev and the initial protest gathering in Tiananmen Square on May 13, 1989. One assumes that they weighed heavily whether or not Obama's presence would induce a repetition of history, possibly as a second tragedy rather than a Marxian farce. If so, then they seem to have concluded that the risk of protest in the name of "universal rights" was too low to pose a threat.

This led me to consider the proposition behind Obama's words and why so little threat was associated with it. Presumably, he (with or without assistance from his speechwriters) took his words from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations. Consider, however, the text that introduces this Declaration on its Web page:

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."

I found myself reading this in the context of how difficult it had been to get a unanimous endorsement of our own Declaration of Independence by all thirteen colonies and wondering just what the adoption process was. Considering conditions among the initial member nations, it is hard to imagine that adoption was a matter of a unanimous vote of approval. Cynic that I am, I cannot imagine anything other than a rather vague voice vote having established adoption.

So perhaps it is time for us to let go of this rhetoric of universality and its close ties to the worldview of the victor nations of the Second World War. Instead, we should recognize that, on a global scale, there is considerable diversity in the underlying view of the nature of humanity itself, which precedes any questions of "inalienable rights" and "inherent dignity" in the language of the Universal Declaration. Consider, to choose an example that does not pick on any individual countries, the radical difference in the sense of humanity assumed by Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank and that of the more profit-based financial institutions that dominate the world economy. If there is no universality of humanity in the business of finance, regardless of the countries in which that business is conducted, what hope is there for agreement over human rights?

Yet business goes on, because business runs through negotiations, rather than agreements to accept universal truths. Those who succeed in business tend to be those who succeed in communicating; and communication involves engaging with a wide variety of interests (suppliers, partners, customers, competitors, etc.), each of which requires different communicative strategies, tactics, and actions. Like it or not, worldviews and value systems differ; and we probably understand more about how the diversity of life forms has evolved than we do about the emergence of such differing views of humanity itself. We should definitely see to our own interests and values, but that is likely to involve negotiation with those who do not share them. Negotiation, in turn, is more about being able to get things done, rather than whether or not one worldview can "win" over another. To a great extent the history of the world is a chronicle at just how poor we have been at such negotiation. Can we look back at our track record for getting it wrong and start thinking about getting it right for a change?

Inconvenient Truths about Health Care as Industry

2009-11-15T10:33:00.000-08:00

As I continue to argue that one of the most significant impediments to serious health care reform has been the efforts of a "consciousness industry" to induce a general acceptance of the phrase "health care industry" and thus accept, by implication, industry-based thinking in all sectors of health care, including providing care, providing insurance to cover the care, and providing supporting agencies (to use the terminology of Kenneth Burke), such as pharmaceuticals and new technologies. However, such industry-based thinking has its own implications; and I found myself thinking about them while reading Arthur Loesser's account of the transition of piano-making from craft work to manufacturing. The most important element of that transition is the migration of a craftsman's personal shop, which tends to involve only a few people, to a factory that supports mass production. Loesser raises the interesting point that, while the craftsman may only have to worry about supervising and coordinating a few assistants and apprentices, the move to the factory necessitates a change in worldview:

Inevitably, the head of a factory tends to regard sales as more important than production. Unfilled orders give him less of a stomach-ache than excess inventory. A piano maker who expands into a factory ceases to be a craftsman; he becomes a businessman.

Where health care is concerned, this is the inconvenient truth that dare not speak its name. We may be comfortable enough thinking of the production of pharmaceuticals and advanced medical technologies in a factory setting; but, in accepting the concept of health care as an industry, we accept the implication that, from the businessman's perspective, the view of hospitals and clinics as factories is more important than the view of them as care centers. The same can be said about insurance providers; but, as our relationship with our insurance providers becomes more and more depersonalized, it is easier for us to think of them as some form of cubicle-based factory. My point is that, when it comes to patient care itself, those who provide it must now contend with business processes that have more to do with extrapolations of the concepts of "sales" and "inventory" than with either what is taught in medical school or the broader issue of, as Jerome Groopman put it, "how doctors think." Indeed, Groopman's latest critique of medical practice aligns nicely with Loesser's observations: Doctors now think more like the sort of businessmen that Loesser had in mind than they do about patient care.

Of course all that attention to sales and inventory escalates to broader questions of supply and demand, which, in turn, leads to demand creation in the interest of increasing sales. This brings us back to the primary domain of the consciousness industry and the recognition that it has been warping our view of medical care for several decades. The primary agency of demand creation is advertising, and advertising has now corrupted just about every aspect of health care. Doctors are besieged with advertising, primary for those pharmaceuticals and new technologies; and there should be no question that such advertising warps their diagnostic judgment as much as advertisements from the food industry warp our perspective of good nutrition. The pharmaceutical sector has now become even more devious, taking their advertising to the general public but always concluding with that ask-your-doctor punch line.

It should be no surprise that none of these issues have surfaced in Congressional debate over health care reform. Calvin Coolidge may have been the one who said it, but it is hard to imagine anyone of either political party currently working in Washington who does not accept the precept that the business of America is business. The ultimate goal of the consciousness industry is the reinforcement of that precept, even if it implies that the health of the individual citizen may be an insignificant inconvenience to the smooth operation of business.

Second Edition?

2009-11-14T07:52:00.000-08:00

It was during the sesquicentennial celebration of the birth of Johannes Brahms that my interest in his music began to escalate from the serious to the exhaustive. At the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, the Guarneri Quartet joined forces with the trio of Joseph Kalichstein, Jaime Laredo, and Sharon Robinson to perform a series of programs that covered all of the chamber music that Brahms composed for piano and strings. My wife-to-be Linda and I attended every one of those concerts (even inviting my parents up from Philadelphia for one of them); and I still remember how revelatory each evening was for me.

That was a time when I did a lot of browsing in the many Manhattan record shops that had interesting collections of classical music. On one of our "dates," Linda saw a Deutsche Grammophon box marked Brahms Edition containing all of his songs performed by soprano Jessye Norman and baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, all accompanied on piano by Daniel Barenboim. We were both crazy about Norman; so there was no question of adding this to my collection, even if I was not the most enthusiastic Barenboim follower. (I would later play the track of "Von ewiger Liebe," Opus 43, Number 1, at our wedding.) Over the following months I picked up several more of the Brahms Edition boxes, all of which had vocal content: the Vocal Ensembles collection, the Choral Works, and the Works for Chorus and Orchestra. As I have previously written, we grew particularly fond of Giuseppe Sinopoli's approach to the German Requiem in that last collection.

With the move into the era of compact discs, it seemed as if the masters of many of my favorite Deutsche Grammophon recordings had been condemned to languish in the archival vaults. This included all of the Brahms Edition material, which may have been set aside under the assumption that demand would not be particularly high in the absence of any major anniversary celebration. After a couple of decades of waiting (and living with the decision to get rid of all of my vinyls when we "downsized" to our condominium in San Francisco), I eventually decided to satisfy my Gesamtwerk approach to listening to Brahms with the Brilliant Classics' collection of his complete works, using this blog to document several impressions of its assets and liabilities. Recently Deutsche Grammophon finally released their own Complete Edition box, and I looked forward to reviving my memories of those vinyls that were eventually played to death. I even wrote about that anticipation in conjunction with reexamining Sinopoli's Requiem performance in light of all the negative things I had been reading about him.

Thus, when the Deutsche Grammophon box arrived, the first thing I did was review the "table of contents" booklet. It was neatly organized in sections that corresponded to the individual boxes of vinyls that had originally been released, but I was surprised to discover that the Sinopoli Requiem was not there. It had been replaced by a performance conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, while all the other Sinopoli recordings from the original box were included. Checking the recording details, I discovered that this "substitute" was recorded in 1987, roughly five years after all of the Sinopoli recordings for the vinyl box had been made (and four years after the sesquicentennial year). Was this a reaction to all of Sinopoli's negative press receptions? That seemed unlikely, since Deutsche Grammophon had already released the complete recordings that Sinopoli had made with the Philharmonia Orchestra of the music of Gustav Mahler.

Further investigation revealed that the CD version was, indeed, a "second edition" of the original vinyl product. All of the Herbert von Karajan recordings of the symphonies and Haydn variations made with the Berlin Philharmonic had been recorded in 1987 and 1989; and the recordings of the piano sonatas were made in 1996! Were those replacing the recordings that Krystian Zimerman had made in 1979 and 1982 that had been released as their own 2-CD set? When a book goes into a second edition, there is usually at least a rough account of what has changed and what motivated those changes. However, the Compete Edition booklet provides no information other than the lists of all the tracks and the recording details. Is there a story behind the decision that the second edition should revise the content of the initial project?

The Glitz Question

2009-11-13T10:40:00.000-08:00

At 12:05 PM (Eastern time) today Daniel J. Wakin used a post to the Arts Beat blog maintained by The New York Times to pose the inevitable question about Gustavo Dudamel. Actually, he framed the question within an observation made by Larry Livingston, Chairman of Instrumental Conducting at the Thornton School of Music of the University of Southern California. Having run through the usual encomia to praise Dudamel ("huge talent," a "breath of fresh air," "thrilling"), Livingston popped the question that was really on the mind of probably every musician striving for a career in (at least) the classical domain:

Do we need glitz to save classical music?

I give points to Wakin for recognizing that there is nothing new about glitz and for tracing it back at least as far as the popularity of Italian castrati (which I found a particularly appropriate example, since it was only two days ago that the BBC had a Newshour slot for an interview with Cecilia Bartoli about her new CD that celebrates, if that is the right word, the castrato repertoire). He might also have recalled Donald Francis Tovey's entry for "Music" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (now available in the book The Forms of Music), in which he discussed the impact of "the efficiency of [the] press bureau" on the progress of music history, although that institution does not really emerge until the nineteenth century.

Wakin does not provide his own conclusive answer to Livingston's question. Instead he threw it open for discussion through comments. So I found it interesting that, after an hour and a half had elapsed since his post appeared, no comments had accumulated. Are Arts Beat readers really that uninterested in the question? Have they grown tired of it because it has already been discussed to death over water coolers or in concert hall lobbies?

One problem may be that the question actually unpacks into two questions:

Does classical music need saving?
Can salvation be achieved through glitz?

From a historical point of view, Tovey demonstrated that the second question hardly needs asking. What we would now call "serious music" has been grist for the mill of "press bureaus" for as long as they have existed; and, from Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, we know that "critical assaults" (to borrow the phrase from Slonimsky's subtitle) preceded the institutionalization of the press as we now know it. Like it or not, public opinion rules, which is why Jacques Offenbach should be remembered for turning Public Opinion into the central character of his opera Orphée aux Enfers (which I have always preferred translating as Orpheus Goes to Hell). Notwithstanding Brüno's scathing exposé of what some people will do to get their children (or themselves) in the spotlight, I doubt that any institutions of serious music would still be with us without the efforts of those press bureaus.

The trickier question is whether public opinion feels the institutions of serious music are worth saving. Ironically, even though I live in a city that lacks its own radio station for the serious listener (as opposed to those who simply want a higher-class level of background music), I think that even the first question is not worth posing. Serious music is part of our environment, and I do not see its future as being in jeopardy. Even many of those for whom it is not preferred listening seem to recognize it for what it is and acknowledge the value of institutions such as Davies Symphony Hall and the War Memorial Opera House. This was particularly evident when I was doing my "Great Recession" coverage from Examiner.com, and I realized how much interest there was in opportunities to enjoy serious music on a tight budget.

In other words Wakin may not be getting any comments because both he and Livingston are asking the wrong question. The real question is:

Why am I not getting as much attention as Dudamel?

Some of the answers to that question clearly have nothing to do with music, and that is ground that those who implicitly want to ask this question fear to tread. If Dudamel is currently doing well in the spotlight, it is because he understands "spotlight rules" (even when they involve getting enthusiastic about Gustav Mahler while being interviewed by Andy Garcia sitting there looking like he neither knows nor cares who Mahler was) as well as he understands his performance technique. If he can get people to listen to Mahler under conditions as adverse as that television interview (which seems to have been the case, at least in the world of iTunes), then more power to him! After all, one day he may be able to do the same for former Los Angeles resident Arnold Schoenberg!

Trying to Correct a Misconception of Media Bias

2009-11-12T08:52:00.000-08:00

Al Jazeera English just pulled the following report from their wire sources:

A Jewish-American, who settled in the occupied West Bank, has been charged with killing two Palestinians and attempting to murder more people.

Jack Teitel told reporters at a Jerusalem court on Thursday that he had no regrets for shooting the pair and trying to kill the others with explosives and poison, and that God would approve of his actions.

"It has been a pleasure and an honor to have served my God," Teitel, an ultra-Orthodox Jew originally from Florida in the US, said.

Teitel has a total of 14 charges against him including two for murder and three for attempted murder.

He has also been charged with illegal possession of explosives and weapons and incitement to racism.

The indictment said that Teitel, 37, was trying to avenge the deaths of Israelis killed by Palestinian fighters.

It added that he began his assault by killing a Palestinian taxi driver in 1997. He also attacked a dovish Israeli professor and messianic Jews who venerate Jesus.

No date has yet been set for the beginning of the trial.

Teitel faces up to life in prison if convicted.

I reproduce this story to refute the discriminatory practices of many media sources that seem to assume that "Muslim" is the only modifier for the noun phrase "extremist terrorist." Al Jazeera is to be credited for trying to right this imbalance, as well as for recognizing that this is being treated as a criminal act to be handled by the Israeli justice system. I shall be curious to see which American media decide to treat this as newsworthy (particularly since the BBC NEWS Web site gave en even more detailed account than did Al Jazeera)!

Laura Flanders' Armistice Metaphor

2009-11-12T06:57:00.000-08:00

As I continue to read each piece of economic news as if it were a dispatch from the front lines of the War Against the Poor, whose objective seems to be the banishment of those below the poverty line from the virtual world of financial practices in which "real world" concepts of value need not interfere with articles of faith based on mathematical models, I took some comfort in seeing that Laura Flanders used The Notion blog on the Web site for The Nation to pursue this metaphor in her own way. Her post this morning was entitled "No Armistice In War on Poor;" and it was clear that she was using Armistice Day as a point of departure. Here is her opening paragraph:

Armistice Day reminds us that when wars end, the winners and losers are supposed to make peace. For the first time, in 2009, leaders of World War II enemies, Germany and France, commemorated the date together as a sign of new mutual respect. But this week also marked the ten-year anniversary of a different kind of war -- a war on Americans' assets and the poor. Ten years later, while the winners and losers are obvious, there's no armistice in sight.

Unfortunately, this concept of armistice, at least as Flanders has conceived it, is a relatively recent one. Peace was not made with the "losers" of the Trojan War. Those who were not slaughtered were enslaved, and we have Euripides to remind of the full extent of humiliation associated with that slavery. While the motivation for war may have been a matter of controlling resources, the "winners" of that control maintained it through the strongest exercise of domination. Winning was not the only thing; one also had to keep a secure hold on one's victory.

This particular view of the nature of war is far from outmoded, so Flanders will not find an armistice in the War Against the Poor because there is no need for one. As her post observes, after the initial setbacks of the economic crisis, the rich are regaining control of their resources, particularly the virtual ones through which they maintain their power. It is, as Flanders observes, "obvious" that they are the winners; and their domination is so secure that there is no need for armistice. Still, the question remains as to why this victory was so important. Was the War Against the Poor nothing more than, as I put is a little over a year ago, "a fight to 'control all the marbles?'"

One theme I have considered since I first invoked the war metaphor is that, as was the case in the Trojan War, this was a matter of domination insured through enslavement. The technology through which man could control nature was now engaged to enable man to control his fellow man. This then brings us back to yesterday's unpleasant theme and its relation to Euripides' account of the aftermath of the Trojan War. Control is not enough; control must be exercised through humiliation. Not only must the "losers" be dominated; but also they must be (in yesterday's language) ravaged to make sure they are "kept in their place." Victory is not only about control but also about the pornographic thrills that can come with the exercise of that control.

The irony is that, back in the eighteenth century, the emergence of capitalism was tightly coupled with the origins of humanistic thinking. As Arthur Loesser put it in his social history, Men, Women and Pianos, "a wealthy, educated, public-spirited cotton manufacturer could rightfully tell himself that he was a better man than the gracefully mannered ne’er-do-well son of an impoverished baron." Nobility could no longer control by rank when manufacturers and merchants controlled resources that the nobles needed. This spirit of humanism culminated in the words of Friedrich Schiller's "An die Freude" in 1785 (later set to music by Ludwig van Beethoven) which, as its Wikipedia entry put it, celebrated "the ideal of unity and brotherhood of all mankind."

It took less than a century for that ideal to lapse into a hollow platitude, but when did the rich discover that the poor could be viewed as a source of pornographic titillation? This is a question that demands further research. I suspect that Charles Dickens was one of the first to bring attention to this dark side of wealth and power, and it is clear that his influences are still with us. Could it be that he started the trend because he was able to apply his literary skills to his own life experiences? Where does that now leave us as readers and observers? Shall we continue to let Arthur Rimbaud's "savage parade" of pornographic indulgences pass us by; or have we the will to recover that spirit of humanism that once tried to heal the social divisions of the eighteenth century?

Disadvantage Pornography

2009-11-11T09:31:00.000-08:00

Presumably, the title of Jonathan Raban's piece about the photographs of Dorothea Lange for the New York Review was entitled "American Pastoral" because, as his point of departure, he invokes William Empson's Some Versions of the Pastoral. As Raban put it, Empson's book "casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses." Under that hard light this was a genre "in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land" (Raban's words). Raban's article reviews two books about Lange and her images of poverty, particularly during the Great Depression; and his own hard light does not try to hide the extent to which photographs now declared to be "iconic" were actually artifacts of scrupulously applied techniques that often distorted the "reality" of the original image. Thus the images we now celebrate were actually products of, to put it bluntly, the most manipulative form of propaganda; and, while that propaganda may have been serving the noble causes of the Farm Security Administration, it is still a precursor of that consciousness industry that now manipulates the judgments of public opinion as skillfully as Lange manipulated her negatives.

This led me to wonder whether or not the concept of pornography needs to be broadened beyond its usual sexual connotations. This is far from an original idea. In Plato's "Republic" we are treated to the spectacle of the ordinary man walking through a field where a bloody battle has just been concluded, struggling over the temptation to look at the corpses. The implication is that such voyeurism is vile but that it is hard for our all-too-human nature to resist succumbing to it. These days television has made this particular form of voyeurism socially acceptable in the name of crime investigation programs that dwell on "scientific" approaches to the analysis of evidence from a crime scene. My guess is that Plato would have recoiled from not only the imagery but also the self-serving justification of revealing those images for their "scientific" nature.

As Henry Miller once observed in an essay concerned with the distinction between obscenity and pornography, the obscene may offend; but the pornographic titillates. He saw himself as a writer of obscenity but denied that it was ever his intention to titillate his reader. This reader was certainly never titillated by his texts, certainly not in the visceral way in which I responded to the texts of The Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin. On the other hand I have come to appreciate the titillating affect that other subject matter can have, whether on myself or on others. Thus, those with a constitution for reading the Marquis de Sade are more likely to be aroused by his rich palette of assaults on the body, rather than just the sexual elements. Ultimately, the theme that links Sade back to those corpses in "Republic" is one of violation, whether it involves leaving a body to the ravaging of nature or invoking a human agent to do the ravaging. Whether the reader is aroused by identifying with the violator or the violated is left as an exercise for the student. I have not pursued this question in any great depth, but I would guess that both options are possible.

In this broader context, then, should we smash the iconic status that society has accorded to Lange and view her work, instead, as a new genre of pornography? Poverty clearly ravages the body (not to mention the spirit). It is all very well and good to make a spectacle of poverty to provoke a public reaction that will rise to the aid of its victims; but what about that sector of the public that, for one reason or another, just gets off on the spectacle? Long before cable television required us to use three digits to select a channel, I remember seeing a play set in the future about parents who become concerned when their children spend all of their time in front of the television watching "The Hungry Children Channel." The implication was that this was entertainment that had displaced cartoons about mice beating up cats. The corollary of that implication is the proposition that the disadvantage of (many?) others had become the "new" source of entertainment, if not the sort of titillation we associate with pornography. In many ways The Hungry Children Channel served as a reductio ad absurdum of the Farm Security Administration in terms of both their goals and the methods applied to achieve those goals.

Today, however, it is not just hungry children. It is entire families that still have not been able to rebuild their lives in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It is the entire population of the Maldives, whose very land will be under water in their lifetimes if we do not act on the climate crisis with more determination. It is the current generation's version of Lange's own subject matter, out of work and displaced from foreclosed homes with absolutely nothing productive to do and nowhere to go to seek change. The family depicted in that play can now draw upon the whole world for the entertainment it gets through its television set. If one simply indulges in the images without trying to do anything about them, is that not pornographic?

Reinforcing the Progressives

2009-11-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I used my Chutzpah of the Week award to call attention to the nine Democrats in the House of Representatives who voted against health care reform in betrayal of their representation of a sizable portion of their electorate currently without any form of health insurance. Having done this, I should probably make it clear that, while those Representatives voted against the bill for being "too much," I stand with the progressives who also voted against the bill for being "not enough." They seem to be the only people representing the electorate who take the semantics of "reform" seriously enough to persist doggedly in calling attention to what the real problems are and how they need to be solved. Fortunately, John Nichols continues to keep his fingers on the progressive pulse; and his post today to The Nation's The Beat blog enumerates "six smart progressive complaints about the House bill."

One of the greatest virtues of the progressive movement has been its persistence in thinking things through in all of their hoary complexity rather than trying to reduce everything to simplistic slogans. I realize that their efforts to negotiate that complexity can sometimes separate them from the electorate (or, at least, make it easier for Fox-style demagoguery to encourage and widen that separation); but I am sure that it took Hercules more time to clean up the mess in the Augean stables than it took (for example) Joe Lieberman to prepare for his latest call to arms on Fox News Sunday. So please bear with me while I reproduce the (admittedly verbose) complaints that Nichols enumerated:

1. FROM THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN: "This Bill Obliterates Women's Fundamental Right to Choose"

The House of Representatives has dealt the worst blow to women's fundamental right to self-determination in order to buy a few votes for reform of the profit-driven health insurance industry. We must protect the rights we fought for in Roe v. Wade. We cannot and will not support a health care bill that strips millions of women of their existing access to abortion.
Birth control and abortion are integral aspects of women's health care needs. Health care reform should not be a vehicle to obliterate a woman's fundamental right to choose.

The Stupak Amendment (to the House bill, which was approved and attached on Saturday) goes far beyond the abusive Hyde Amendment, which has denied federal funding of abortion since 1976. The Stupak Amendment, if incorporated into the final version of health insurance reform legislation, will:

• Prevent women receiving tax subsidies from using their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;

• Prevent women participating in the public health insurance exchange, administered by private insurance companies, from using 100 percent of their own money to purchase private insurance that covers abortion;

• Prevent low-income women from accessing abortion entirely, in many cases.

NOW calls on the Senate to pass a health care bill that respects women's constitutionally protected right to abortion and calls on President Obama to refuse to sign any health care bill that restricts women's access to affordable, quality reproductive health care.

2. FROM THE CALIFORNIA NURSES ASSOCIATION: This Bill Fails to Control Costs

While the current bills will provide limited assistance for some, the inconvenient truth is they fall far short in effective controls on skyrocketing insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital costs, do little to stop insurance companies from denying needed medical care recommended by doctors, and provide little relief for Americans with employer-sponsored insurance worried about health security for themselves and their families.

3. FROM CONGRESSMAN ERIC MASSA: "This Bill Will Enshrine in Law the Monopolistic Powers of the Private Health Insurance Industry"

At the highest level, this bill will enshrine in law the monopolistic powers of the private health insurance industry, period. There's really no other way to look at it. I believe the private health insurance industry is part of the problem.
This bill also, I believe, fails to address the fundamental question before the American people, and that is how do we control the costs of health care. It does not address interstate portability, as Medicare does. It does not address real medical malpractice insurance reform. It does not address the incredible waste and fraud that are currently in the system.

4. FROM PLANNED PARENTHOOD'S CECILE RICHARDS: This Bill Embraces Religious-Right Extremes

It is extremely unfortunate that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and anti-choice opponents were able to hijack the health care reform bill in their dedicated attempt to ban all legal abortion In the United States.
Most telling is the fact that the vast majority of members of the House who supported the Stupak/Pitts amendment in today's vote do not support HR 3962, revealing their true motive, which is to kill the health care reform bill.

These single-issue advocates simply used health care reform to advance their extreme, ideological agenda at the expense of tens of millions of women.

5. FROM CONGRESSMAN DENNIS KUCINICH,: This Bill Worries About the Health of Wall Street, Not America

We have been led to believe that we must make our health care choices only within the current structure of a predatory, for-profit insurance system which makes money not providing health care. We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are. But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem. When health insurance companies deny care or raise premiums, co-pays and deductibles they are simply trying to make a profit. That is our system.
Clearly, the insurance companies are the problem, not the solution. They are driving up the cost of health care. Because their massive bureaucracy avoids paying bills so effectively, they force hospitals and doctors to hire their own bureaucracy to fight the insurance companies to avoid getting stuck with an unfair share of the bills. The result is that since 1970, the number of physicians has increased by less than 200% while the number of administrators has increased by 3000 percent. It is no wonder that 31 cents of every health care dollar goes to administrative costs, not toward providing care. Even those with insurance are at risk. The single biggest cause of bankruptcies in the U.S. is health insurance policies that do not cover you when you get sick.

But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies - a bailout under a blue cross.

By incurring only a new requirement to cover pre-existing conditions, a weakened public option, and a few other important but limited concessions, the health insurance companies are getting quite a deal. The Center for American Progress' blog, Think Progress, states, 'since the President signaled that he is backing away from the public option, health insurance stocks have been on the rise.' Similarly, healthcare stocks rallied when Senator Max Baucus introduced a bill without a public option. Bloomberg reports that Curtis Lane, a prominent health industry investor, predicted a few weeks ago that 'money will start flowing in again' to health insurance stocks after passage of the legislation. Investors.com last month reported that pharmacy benefit managers share prices are hitting all-time highs, with the only industry worry that the Administration would reverse its decision not to negotiate Medicare Part D drug prices, leaving in place a Bush Administration policy.

During the debate, when the interests of insurance companies would have been effectively challenged, that challenge was turned back. The 'robust public option' which would have offered a modicum of competition to a monopolistic industry was whittled down from an initial potential enrollment of 129 million Americans to 6 million. An amendment which would have protected the rights of states to pursue single-payer health care was stripped from the bill at the request of the Administration. Looking ahead, we cringe at the prospect of even greater favors for insurance companies.

Recent rises in unemployment indicate a widening separation between the finance economy and the real economy. The finance economy considers the health of Wall Street, rising corporate profits, and banks' hoarding of cash, much of it from taxpayers, as sign of an economic recovery. However in the real economy - in which most Americans live - the recession is not over. Rising unemployment, business failures, bankruptcies and foreclosures are still hammering Main Street.

This health care bill continues the redistribution of wealth to Wall Street at the expense of America's manufacturing and service economies which suffer from costs other countries do not have to bear, especially the cost of health care. America continues to stand out among all industrialized nations for its privatized health care system. As a result, we are less competitive in steel, automotive, aerospace and shipping while other countries subsidize their exports in these areas through socializing the cost of health care.

Notwithstanding the fate of H.R. 3962, America will someday come to recognize the broad social and economic benefits of a not-for-profit, single-payer health care system, which is good for the American people and good for America's businesses, with of course the notable exceptions being insurance and pharmaceuticals.

6. FROM "SICKO'S" DONNA SMITH: The Bill Does Not Cure What Ails Us

Passing a healthcare reform bill that does not provide me with better access to care or protection from bankruptcy and financial ruin is not what I asked you all to do. Stripping away all reference to a progressively financed, single standard of high quality healthcare for all – also known as single-payer -- is done only to more deeply ensconce the deep pocketed interests in healthcare: the private, for-profit insurance giants, the big pharmaceuticals, the medical equipment companies, the hospital corporations and all the other making huge profits as thousands die needless deaths.
Healthcare is a basic human right. Granting that right is not something to be calculated differently in swing Congressional districts, off-year election strategy or second-Presidential term planning. It is your (members of Congress') duty to me, to my fellow citizens and to your nation.

And (members of Congress) are marching away from reality when you think all the hard-working people who counted on you to make this a better healthcare system will not notice when you deliver insurance purchase mandates and a corporate bail-out that will dwarf the Wall Street trillions you've already justified.

Hopefully readers will find Nichols' summaries useful, but one has to read through the arguments to appreciate how far off the track any progress towards reform has gone. At the very least this should remind us of just how much effort the consciousness industry behind profit-based capitalism is willing to put into a status quo that serves them so well while virtually demolishing any prospects for American citizens to enjoy the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. By sticking to their guns, the progressives are trying to remind us that resistance does not have to be futile. All we have to do is pay more attention to what they are saying; and, if we agree, then we can engage the very strategies that Michelle Bachmann has been fomenting on Fox News to make sure that their voices are not ignored. Our very health may depend on the strength with which our voices are heard.

Betrayal CHUTZPAH

2009-11-09T14:00:00.000-08:00

I was wondering whether or not news behind this weekend's vote on health care reform in the House of Representatives would lead to an early Chutzpah of the Week award. The good news is that I was right: It was pretty easy for find grounds for the award. The bad news, as one might guess from what actually came out of the House, is that this is an award for the negative connotation of chutzpah. Even so, the recipients are those who voted against the bill, even after interfering with watering down the version actually put to a vote.

Once again, I have The Notion, the blog site maintained by The Nation, to thank for digging up the material on which I can base my award. Today the useful post came from Ari Berman:

The New York Times has an excellent graphic up today profiling the 39 Democrats who voted against healthcare reform in the House of Representatives on Saturday night. The Times notes that 31 of these Democrats represent districts won by John McCain, as if that's a sufficient excuse. But take a closer look at the numbers. Paradoxically, those Democrats voting against healthcare reform represent constituents most in need of health insurance.

Dan Boren of Oklahoma, arguably the most conservative Democrat in Congress, leads the way. Twenty-nine percent of his non-elderly constituents lack health insurance. He's followed by Harry Teague of New Mexico (25 percent uninsured), Waco's Chet Edwards (23 percent), North Carolinians Mike McIntyre (23 percent) and Heath Shuler (21 percent), Blue Dog leader Mike Ross (22 percent) and fellow Southerners Gene Taylor (22 percent), Jim Marshall (22 percent) and John Barrow (21 percent).

Needless to say, the Chutzpah of the Week award will be shared by the nine Democrats enumerated in that second paragraph for betraying the needs of their constituents, many of whom probably put them in office in that spirit of change that Barack Obama had invoked in everyone's hearts on Election Day. These are all individuals who would rather sell out to the influence of the highest bidder than give their constituents the fair shake they deserve. That is chutzpah enough for me; and, since it emphasizes just how difficult it will be to reform our pathetically broken health care system, these guys (and, yes, they are all men) deserve to share the Chutzpah of the Week award.

The Consciousness Industry Flexes its Muscles

2009-11-09T07:44:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, when we were still ramping up to any Congressional vote over health care reform, I wrote the following remark about the impact of the "consciousness industry" on any likely outcome:

Thus, the future of health care will rest not on either the underlying principles of "how doctors think" or even religious convictions of the faithful over the difference between right and wrong but on the power of the "consciousness industry" to bias prevailing opinions based on both reason and faith. If these biases continue to hold sway, then both doctors and their patients will be the losers in any effort towards health care reform.

If this weekend's vote in the House of Representatives, along with the debate leading up to that vote and the post-vote comments from key figures in the Senate, was not enough to establish the impact of that consciousness industry, then we have only to see how Fox demonstrated its mastery of consciousness industry methods on Sunday. For a change the arena was not the usual forum of what Calvin Trillin once called the "Sabbath Day Gasbags." No, if you are going to go for the jugular of electorate consciousness, you have to hit them where things matter the most on Sunday. That is neither the talk show circuit nor the Church; rather, it is the most sacred of American Sunday traditions, professional football.

In this case the target of Fox' consciousness manipulation was not health care but the promotion of our ongoing military adventurism (presumably in defense of our right to manipulate other people's consciousness). Ostensibly as a gesture in honor of Veterans Day, Fox NFL Sunday was broadcast from Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. Having received my Bachelor of Science degree from a school without a football team, I have little interest in football as either an athletic or a media event; but I have long been fascinated by the many strategies that Fox invokes in the interest of mucking with people's minds. So I read Neil Genzlinger's account of Fox NFL Sunday for this morning's edition of The New York Times with great interest.

True to his responsibility as a reporter, Genzlinger concentrated on giving an account of his personal experience in front of his television:

The broadcast was full of mutual back scratching, both during the show and in promotional spots during the commercial breaks: Fox and the National Football League trying to establish themselves as the country’s most fervid supporters and thankers of the troops, the military steering the Fox crew to feature segments without an ounce of blood or moral ambiguity.

Each member of the Fox on-air crew — Howie Long, Terry Bradshaw, Michael Strahan, Jimmy Johnson, Jay Glazer and Curt Menefee (who was excellent as the frontman) — wore a uniform commemorating a different branch of the service. Early on there was a segment spotlighting N.F.L. players and employees who have served in the military and relatives of current players and coaches who are serving now.

A military unit led into a commercial break with a marching chant promoting the show and its personalities. (“I wanna hear the news by Jay; his latest scoopage makes my day.”) A promotional spot in which the N.F.L. honored the troops wrapped both football and military images around the words “teamwork, courage, leadership.” In a feature we saw American soldiers advising a village on agriculture, trying to encourage it to be self-sustaining and, presumably, to stay out of the opium business.

And then the lines got even blurrier. In another feature Mr. Bradshaw tried to use a robotic device to pick up a football. Presumably in real life it’s used to poke potential bombs and such. A group of soldiers joined the Fox men on an impromptu field to demonstrate the blitz — the football one, not the military one.

At no time, though, was the show more eerie than when, in the second hour, it turned its attention to Pat Tillman, the N.F.L player who left football to enlist and was killed in Afghanistan in a 2004 friendly fire incident that is still reverberating.

Mr. Menefee introduced the Tillman segment without mentioning how he died, and then the camera shifted to a festive scene inside the Pat Tillman Memorial U.S.O. on the base. Soldiers extolled the computers, phones and other nifty communication gear in the lounge, named for a man whose death was shrouded in miscommunication and cover-up.

Having laid out his evidence, Genzlinger could then confront us with his conclusion:

For two hours the Fox show — though it acknowledged several times that soldiers, not football players, were the real heroes — gave us the illusion that the war and the game were the same. Maybe Tommie Harris of the Chicago Bears had been watching it just before heading onto the field for his 1 o’clock match against Arizona and became confused about which world he’s living in. Within the first 10 minutes he was ejected from the contest for slugging an opposing player.

Those last sentences sealed the deal for me, providing a simple example of the consequences that arise from mistaking illusion for reality.

"Illusion" is the operative word in the way in which Fox runs its consciousness industry. It is one thing to offer dramatic fictions, for which we are willing to suspend disbelief while the story is told, only to return to the "real world" when that story has concluded. It is quite another thing to deliberately engage devices that distort the cognitive apparatus that turns sensation into perception. That is the apparatus responsible for our "sense of reality;" and illusions arise when that apparatus is induced to go out of whack. Ironically, there are times when such illusions may actually have survival value; but we are blessed with a cognitive capacity that can learn that first impressions can be deceiving. We thus have the ability to reflect on our first impressions and sort out illusion from reality.

Ultimately, the consciousness industry succeeds through undermining not only our capacity for reflection but also our will to reflect at all. With any interference from reflection safely out of the way, the industry can shape our opinions and actions to satisfy whatever contract it has made with a particular customer. If that customer is the Pentagon, then one can see why it might be useful to identify war with professional football. If the customer is the health care industry (as opposed to those trying their best to practice health care), then the prevailing illusion seems to be a profit-based capitalism has a higher priority than a healthy life for every American citizen. The playing field may change, but the game will remain the same.

Did Puccini Know about Schoenberg?

2009-11-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

The risk in trying to view music history in terms of how composers may have appropriated the models of their predecessors and put them to new use is that one may seek out associations where none exist. During yesterday's HDLive broadcast of Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, I found myself confronting that risk. In one of Turandot's few authentically poignant moments, I could have sworn that, behind her voice, I was hearing echoes of the Wood-Dove announcing Tove's death at the conclusion of Part One of Arnold Schoenberg's monumental Gurrelieder. It is hard to tell to what extent Puccini kept himself aware of other composers of his time. We know that La Rondine was composed in response to a request from the Carltheater in Vienna in October of 1913 for a comic opera "like Rosenkavalier but more amusing and more organic;" but it is unclear how well Puccini knew Rosenkavalier itself, the music of Richard Strauss in general, or any of the musical activities in Vienna in 1913 (such as Gurrelieder having received its premiere there on February 23, 1913). At the very least there was probably considerable buzz over the enormous number of resources that Schoenberg's oratorio demanded, but would that buzz have attracted Puccini's attention? My guess is that it is very unlikely that Puccini would have been exposed to Gurrelieder in its entirety. On the other hand the scaled down arrangement of the Wood-Dove's song was prepared by Schoenberg for a performance in Copenhagen in 1922, and Puccini began his work on Turandot in 1920. There is thus at least a remote possibility that the influences behind his score involved more than a music box playing "Chinese" tunes cited by Patricia Racette in her introductory remarks for yesterday's broadcast. However, if that influence is there at all, I doubt that it involves anything more than a few surface-level features and any awareness that Puccini's had of this particular Gurrelieder excerpt was a product of coincidence. More likely the association is a product of my listening to a lot of Schoenberg in preparation for the visit of the Berlin Philharmonic later this month!

Restructuring the "Dynamic Duo"

2009-11-07T07:49:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I suggested that House Republican from Minnesota Michelle Bachmann had turned my "dynamic duo of demagoguery," Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, into an "unholy trinity." While I think that it is dangerous to assume that someone like Newt will fade into the background, it's beginning to look like there is still a "dynamic duo" but that it has been restructured around Palin and Bachman. I would like to cite for support an article by Jim O'Neill from this past Tuesday that begins with the following paragraph:

Several readers have informed me that they would like to see a Palin/Bachmann ticket in 2012, and this article is an attempt to take an informal survey, to access how popular such a sentiment is.

O'Neill's posted biographical statement (at the bottom of his article) is, to say the least, interesting:

Born in June of 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Jim O’Neill proudly served in the U.S. Navy from 1970-1974 in both UDT-21 (Underwater Demolition Team) and SEAL Team Two. A member of MENSA, he worked as a commercial diver in the waters off Scotland, India, and the United States. In 1998 while attending the University of South Florida as a journalism student, O’Neill won “First Place” in the “Carol Burnett/University of Hawaii AEJMC Research in Journalism Ethics Award. The annual contest was set up by Carol Burnett with the money she won from successfully suing the National Enquirer for libel.

The article appeared on the Canada Free Press Web site, whose connection with Canada seems to be as questionable as its slogan:

…Because without America there is no Free World

Whether or not this is some extreme outlier of opinion or the beginning of a groundswell, O'Neill's article was picked up by Gary, one of the active participants on Yahoo! Buzz; and, since he installed a pointer to it twelve hours ago, it has received 171 "Buzz up!" votes. Apparently Yahoo! has decided to move beyond its unscientific approach to polling by turning the vox populi concept of democracy into a popularity contest based, probably, on the American Idol model. As they probably still like to say, "The Internet changes everything;" but, in terms of how politics does its thing, the tools may be different but the practices is clearly the same-old-same-old.

Incrementing Eric Schmidt's CHUTZPAH Count

2009-11-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

When it comes to Google-based Chutzpah of the Week awards, my recent practice seems to have been to assign them at the corporate level, rather than singling out individuals. Nevertheless, Eric Schmidt is one of the earliest Chutzpah of the Week award winners; and, in a week in which he has given us back-to-back chutzpah over two successive days, it seems appropriate to increment his award count. Recall that yesterday he tried to frame the problem of service for enterprise customers in terms that, hopefully, would have made most of those customers flinch:

The first thing a CIO is going to say is, "where is that person and how do I wring their neck?"

One usually applies the adjective "sophomoric" to such recklessly frivolous use of language; but I would like to believe that even a college freshman knows enough to take this for the major blooper that it is. However, as if this were not enough, today we again have Tom Krazit to thank for another "Schmidtism," this time in his identification of Google's policy on privacy:

we're trying not to cross what we call the creepy line

Is this how a technology advisor to the Obama Administration views the general question of personal privacy in the brave new world of Internet technology? Does it all come down to whether or not it is perceived as "creepy?" If so, how does one determine whether or not it is "creepy;" and how many people have to declare it to be "creepy" before Google recognizes it as "creepy?"

Recall that Schmidt won his first Chutzpah of the Week award for trying to lecture an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace as if, where questions of Internet technology were concerned, they were unwashed dummies, an attitude that he had previously directed towards our elected representatives in our system of government! After all those years of Bush-speak, I had hoped that Barack Obama would revive the practice of thinking before speaking; but this clearly has not been the case. Instead, the "Age of Bush-speak" has now reemerged as the "Age of Schmidt-speak;" and the only virtue of this evolution may be that Schmidt-speak will provide as many opportunities for Chutzpah of the Week awards as Bush-speak did. Thus, while this may be only the second award to go to Schmidt as an individual, there is the promise that he shall be received many more!

Demagoguery on the Rise (again)

2009-11-06T08:53:00.000-08:00

Apparently, my "dynamic duo of demagoguery," Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, will have to make room for a third party, sacrificing their alliteration and becoming an "unholy trinity." According to a report last night from Associated Press Writer Laurie Kellman, House Republican from Minnesota Michelle Bachmann wants in on the game and seems to be getting her way:

Chanting "Kill the bill," thousands of conservatives incensed over the Democrats' health care overhaul protested at the Capitol on Thursday, arguing that the legislation amounts to a government takeover of the nation's medical system.

The crowd, invited on national television by Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., was staunchly anti-government — "Politicians lie, people die," read one sign — but loudly cheered the House Republicans who hosted the event. The protest attracted many of the so-called Tea Party demonstrators angry with increased spending and an expanded government role under the Obama administration.

Note how this "invitation" was proffered:

On Oct. 30, she invited viewers of Fox News to Washington to roam House office buildings and confront lawmakers.

"I'd love to have every one of your viewers join me so that we can go up and down through the halls," Bachmann said. "Find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, 'Don't take away my health care.'"

The Republican leadership seems at bit ambivalent over one of the lesser members of their ranks summoning the latest march on Washington; but House Republican leader John Boehner seems to know a good bandwagon when he sees one. He appeared before Bachmann's roused rabble to encourage them with this bit of persiflage:

This bill is the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen.

For those who might find my phrase "roused rabble" a bit extreme, Kellman offered some examples of this particular vox populi approach:

The crowd, including many older Americans, carried placards that ranged from pithy — "Free health care isn't free" — to harsh.

"Ken-ya Trust Obama?" said one, referencing the president's African roots and claims by some that he wasn't born in the United States.

One protester carried a sign reading, "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy," a reference to Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who died of brain cancer this past summer.

Of course none of this is really about health care. It is all about certain Republicans determined to recover political power by any means necessary, and the means that seem to be most effective are the ones grounded in passionately emotional divisiveness. It is hard to forecast where that divisiveness will lead, regardless of whether or not health care gets the reform it so desperately needs; but I continue to believe that our best model for forecasting may still be the historical data on the rise of the Third Reich. At the very least, this should have what the media used to call (back in the days when they still respected qualities such as civility) a "chilling effect."

Google Gets it Wrong About Service

2009-11-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

I see that I compared Google to "that small boy with a hammer who sees everything as a nail" back in November of 2007, which is when we saw the first signs of Google's everything-can-be-reduced-to-search philosophy sticking its nose under the health care tent. Less then a year later, Nicholas Carr pursued a similar theme and proposing more dire consequences. Titling his Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," Carr viewed the technology in terms of how it was "chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation." My own reaction to his argument was that "Google searches cultivate a view of knowledge as the ability to deliver straightforward answers to straightforward questions." At the risk of sounding too reductive, I might suggest that Google has facilitated our becoming a culture that seeks knowledge without thinking.

If I am to believe Tom Krazit's latest Relevant Results column for CNET News, Google is now turning its search-based myopia from health care ("My work here is done?") to providing service to software customers (particularly its own). This is not particularly new. Google products have long been notorious for providing no means to communicate with a human being, leaving the perplexed user to navigate poorly organized Web sites (often, ironically enough, with little useful support from any available search tools). As usual, CEO Eric Schmidt has reacted to the problem by trying to make light of it, at least at the enterprise level:

The first thing a CIO is going to say is, "where is that person and how do I wring their neck?"

It apparently has not occurred to Schmidt that providing everyone involved with IT support (all the way up to the CIO) with opportunities for productive conversation might preemptively defuse that urge to wring someone's neck.

Problems are not solved by information alone. Solutions emerge as information is engaged in the situation in which the problems have arisen. In the real world communication often plays the strongest role in that engagement. Schmidt would do well to spend some time watching Apollo 13 to see how much communication takes place that is not directly involved with the exchange of information, even in a crisis situation as serious as the one portrayed in the film. He should then reflect (if that capacity has not been entirely disabled by the Google culture) on how and why the communicative actions that are not exchanging information are still productive to the overall problem solving taking place. The comments to Krazit's article may not be statistically representative; but it is interesting to read in them accounts in which, even on those rare (and apparently costly) occasions when Google people actually enter the loop, their problem solving effectiveness leaves much to be desired. Reviewing the near catastrophe of an Apollo mission may seem a bit extreme, but it is about time for Google to recognize that useful lessons can be learned from all sorts of situations.

None of this involves dismissing the merits of powerful search technology. I have even recognized the value of coming up with new ways to use search tools. Nevertheless, we should not go around with a tool box containing nothing but the single hammer of search. There are a hell of a lot of other things out there in the world besides protruding nails!

What Constitutes a Religious Community?

2009-11-04T07:22:00.000-08:00

Much of my skepticism (cynicism?) directed towards the rising adoption of online churches arises from my detached (which is to say atheist) perception of religion as a major exemplar of the concept of community. I find that most of those who evangelize (what an appropriate verb!) social software technologies are, at best, naive about the subtleties that determine what makes communities "tick" and, at worse, willfully ignorant of any concept that does not fit in the technology-based worldview they happen to be promoting. This raises a more interesting general question: In a culture in which coming together virtually may be inducing coming apart physically, can we find any good exemplars of the community concept; and, if so, where are we likely to encounter them?

I know one answer in San Francisco, and I suspect it applies to other American cities of a variety of sizes. We find the concept of community in the dog park. Through all of their fixations on "communication" (scare quote intended) technology, people may be losing the social skills through which they get along face-to-face; but (notwithstanding that classic New Yorker cartoon) dogs have never communicated through the Internet (and I really hope that technology continues to ignore them). Thus, they come to a dog park with a set of social skills that probably arise from both heredity and environment and pretty much work out for themselves the sorts of engagements that seem appropriate. In other words dogs commune with dogs better than people commune with people.

So, if, in some sense of the word, the concept of "community" comes naturally to dogs, can those interested in maintaining or growing religious communities learn from those dogs? One answer to this question may come from the Reverend Tom Eggebeen, described by Associated Press Writer Gillian Flaccus as "interim pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church" in Los Angeles. Here is Flaccus' account of one approach Eggebeen has taken to his ministry:

He would turn God's house into a doghouse by offering a 30-minute service complete with individual doggie beds, canine prayers and an offering of dog treats. He hopes it will reinvigorate the church's connection with the community, provide solace to elderly members and, possibly, attract new worshippers who are as crazy about God as they are about their four-legged friends.

Before the first Canines at Covenant service last Sunday, Eggebeen said many Christians love their pets as much as human family members and grieve just as deeply when they suffer — but churches have been slow to recognize that love as the work of God.

"The Bible says of God only two things in terms of an 'is': That God is light and God is love. And wherever there's love, there's God in some fashion," said Eggebeen, himself a dog lover. "And when we love a dog and a dog loves us, that's a part of God and God is a part of that. So we honor that."

From my (let me stress again, atheist) point of view, this strikes me as a far more effective approach to cultivating a religious community than the use of social software. After all, one consequence of the ways in which dogs socialize at the dog park is that their people are more inclined to do the same. So, if Eggebeen wants to provide an opportunity for his parishioners' dogs to commune with God, perhaps the parishioners themselves will acquire a deeper (possibly more sincere) appreciation of their own spirit of communion. Thus, while there may be an abundance of opportunities for frivolity (such as Eggebeen's hymn "GoD and DoG" or the Boston church that has been taking a similar approach under the name "Woof 'n Worship"), there may also be an underlying spirit that could well be far more genuine than many other prevailing approaches to socialization, religious or otherwise. After all, those who believe must accept that the Lord works in mysterious ways!

This is My Body; This is My Blood; This is My URL

2009-11-03T08:09:00.000-08:00

It had to happen sooner or later. A culture that has had such firm determination in industrializing education, health care, and even the food we eat would obviously find a way to industrialize religious practices. All it needed was the right supporting technology, like the Internet, for example. So it should not have been a surprise to find that yesterday Associated Press Religion Writer Rachel Zoll prepared an extended piece on the rising adoption of online churches. After all, isn't religion just another element of the service sector and therefore subject to all of our recent "insights" in the name of "service science?"

In the grand scheme of things, using social software to facilitate the practices of a religious community is probably neither better nor worse than any other application of that technology. However, if religion is one effort to bring the faithful to the sublime when the world is too much with them, then a Web site where "viewers can click on a tab during worship to accept Christ as their savior" is nothing if not downright ridiculous. More debatable, however, may be recent innovative approaches to engage Internet technology for purposes of proselytization:

LifeChurch.tv has even found a way to attract people surfing for experiences that are far from pious. The congregation buys Google ad words so that a person searching for "sex" or "naked ladies" sees an ad inviting them to a live worship service instead.

Zoll's article concludes with the URLs of five of the online churches discussed in her article. Has the Internet redefined the come-to-Jesus moment?

A New Take on "You Are What You Eat"

2009-11-02T09:13:00.000-08:00

After having vented (excessive?) spleen at the United Kingdom on this basis of its warping of the semantics of "taste" through its mass media, I have to give credit where credit is due and call attention to recent research at University College London reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry. The research results were summarized on the BBC NEWS Web site as follows:

Eating a diet high in processed food increases the risk of depression, research suggests.

What is more, people who ate plenty of vegetables, fruit and fish actually had a lower risk of depression, the University College London team found.

Data on diet among 3,500 middle-aged civil servants was compared with depression five years later, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported.

The team said the study was the first to look at the UK diet and depression.

They split the participants into two types of diet - those who ate a diet largely based on whole foods, which includes lots of fruit, vegetables and fish, and those who ate a mainly processed food diet, such as sweetened desserts, fried food, processed meat, refined grains and high-fat dairy products.

After accounting for factors such as gender, age, education, physical activity, smoking habits and chronic diseases, they found a significant difference in future depression risk with the different diets.

Those who ate the most whole foods had a 26% lower risk of future depression than those who at the least whole foods.

By contrast people with a diet high in processed food had a 58% higher risk of depression than those who ate very few processed foods.

There are many issues that have to be resolved to establish the significance of these findings, and they are given due attention in the remainder of the BBC report. However, if this study does little more than warrant the close coupling between physical and mental health (as was observed by Margaret Edwards of the British mental health charity SANE), it will have served a valuable purpose. Here in the United States the ABC News crew has been running a series of stories on the problem of obesity, but they have not yet taken on the dimension of any connection to mental health. I am hoping that they will pick up on this new source of data as they continue their own effort to take on the damage that the "industrial" approach to food provision is wreaking upon all of us, particularly when we are deliberately kept in ignorance of what it is we are actually consuming.

Talent for What?

2009-11-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

It all began when my colleague, SF Opera Examiner Cindy Warner, called my attention to the YouTube clip of a salesman at CarPhone Warehouse in Britain singing "Nessun Dorma" on Britain's Got Talent. I have never been a big fan of this kind of television programming in either the United States or the United Kingdom. At the risk of sounding too much like a sourpuss, I think I am beginning to home in on just why things like this rub me the wrong way. It comes down to the simple fact that neither the judges nor the audience are particularly serious about opera; and, for them, "Nessun Dorma" is nothing more than a World Cup anthem. I find myself reminded of the Knaben Wunderhorn poem, "Lob des Hohen Verstands" (Praise of Lofty Judgment), about a jackass called upon to judge a singing contest between a cuckoo and a nightingale. Lacking any other criteria, the "judge" awards the prize to the bird singing the loudest (the cuckoo). I suspect it was not by chance that Gustav Mahler selected this as one of the poems he would set to music, and it would not surprise me if this was one of his personal favorites. I do not begrudge either the Britain's Got Talent judges or their audience (who could barely hear the music for all of their cheering during the performance) their enthusiasm; and, if the guy in this particular video clip benefits from that enthusiasm, I wish him the best. If he is serious about singing opera, he may be able to apply his newly advantageous position to getting himself a good teacher; and that would be a win for all of us!

Establishing Power by Choosing your World

2009-10-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

Having now launched myself into Arthur Loesser's "social history," Men, Women and Pianos, I found myself fascinated with the way in which he works the rise of the Pietist movement into his account of the origins of the piano as we know it (basically, by way of the clavichord, which he views as the first keyboard instrument to allow note-by-note control of amplitude). Here is how Loesser sets the context for the origin of Pietism:

Seventeenth-century Protestant Germany offered spiritual contentment for the landed, the learned, and the logical; but many others were at a disadvantage.

Basically, Pietism emerged as a recourse for those "at a disadvantage" through the precept that "intense personal feeling" was more important than property, education, and logic. The title of his chapter captures both the sincerity and the awkwardness of this position:

"Feeling" Seems Better than Logic

What is the verb "seem" if not the expression of feeling-based evaluation, casting a tautological cloud over any attempt to read that title as a logical proposition (which may, indeed, have been the rhetorical intent behind formulating the text that way)?

Another way of examining this transition might be through current perspectives of social theory. The premise behind that context-setting sentence is that logic provided a path for being learned and, if not landed, at least in an advantageous position to do business with the landed. Those who embraced this premise believed, probably as an article of faith, that the objective world was the only world that mattered, if not the only world that existed. From this point of view, Pietism can be seen as grounded on the hypothesis that there is also a subjective world that, at least as far as any religious communion is concerned, was more important than the objective world. This is not to suggest that subjectivity was "discovered" somewhere around the turn from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century; but it did achieve a level of legitimacy that justified talking about it in the course of normal conversation.

Does this view of social history inform how we think of music history? My guess is that, while it may offer insights into religious life, it may be somewhat myopic where the practice of music is concerned. Loesser has a tendency to see a wide gulf between sacred and secular music that, for example, ignores the extent to which Luther himself saw the value of appropriating popular tunes for the singing of hymns. Albert Schweitzer's biography of Johann Sebastian Bach stresses this by quoting Luther as saying, "The Devil cannot have all the good tunes to himself!" Thus, while there may have been significant divisions of social strata over the practice of religion, those divisions probably narrowed (if not disappeared) where the practice of music was concerned. It is hard to imagine musical practice that totally disregarded the subjective world (although that may just be a result of contemporary thinking that accords equal status to the objective and subjective worlds).

Consequently, the idea that the performance of music should become more "expressive" as a result of the legitimation of the subjective is probably a red herring. More important may be a criterion that Loesser almost dismisses as an aside, which is the extent to which musical instruments have the same expressiveness as the voice. It is in the imitation of vocalization, so to speak, that the flexibility of dynamic control in the clavichord surpassed the keyboard instruments that preceded it. The success at achieving that flexibility could then drive further technical development that would lead to the piano as we now know it.