Scary Moments

I've led a very charmed life knock on wood. And I have very few fears. I'm not scared of getting old. I'm not even particularly scared of dying although I was when I was a kid. But I've had my scary moments. Most of them as an adult have involved transportation.

One time I was traveling on the Interstate during rush hour between Norfolk and Richmond and an i-beam fell off a truck in front of me. I couldn't do a thing about avoiding it and I remember thinking that this is when I'm going to die. My eyes literally went heavenward. And when they say "my life flashed before my eyes" I know exactly what that means. From the cradle to my end, I saw it all in a literal flash.

Miraculously, I drove right over that i-beam in my pickup truck and kept right on driving. I still don't understand how I managed to do that. Fifty miles later my truck died. I looked underneath. There was one big mess of scarred metal.

A few years ago, I had an office at Stanford. I'd drive my motorcycle to work most days. A funny thing started to happen. Someone, I don't know who, started to deflate the front tire of my motorcycle sometime during the day. It was very strange. I had to carry a little bicycle pump with me to get back home. And then it got worse. I was driving my motorcycle and noticed the rear wheel was wobbling like crazy. I pulled over. Someone, that same person probably, had removed all but two bolts that attached the wheel to my bike. And those two bolts were so loose that they would have fallen off momentarily. I remember pulling over, seeing those bolts missing and feeling my heart race.

I figured that someone who knew me must be doing this. I knew academia was a nasty place, but this was ridiculous. I never rode my motorcycle to work again.

But most of my scary moments occurred when I was a kid. I was living in Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Mostly, I was picking grapefruit at a farm of a relative, but I decided to make a surprise visit to a former girlfriend up near the Galilee Sea. It turned out that it was so dangerous there that she had left and gone back to the States. Bombs rained all night long during my one night stay. My bed shook with one blast. Somehow I wasn't scared. But then I woke up in the morning and I saw where that bomb had landed. I looked at the crater in the field maybe 200 yards from where I was sleeping. My stomach sank with dread.

Maybe the scariest moment I remember was going back to the neighborhood of my childhood when I was a teen. It had an old amusement park that I went to looking for girls with a couple of new friends. It wasn't the best neighborhood in the world.

For some reason, we left the amusement park and started walking around. I was showing them my old haunts. We were walking along an alley and this gang started to approach us. My friends wanted to run. I said no way. If we ran we'd be pummeled or worse. I said we just had to play it cool and keep walking. My heart was pounding. I could feel the cliche cold sweat and clammy hands as we got closer to the gang. And then I heard someone at the front of the gang shout out, "Stuey!" Oh man, I knew that voice. I smiled. I had a huge afro at the time, had it in the old neighborhood too. He must have recognized me from that.

"Yeah, man, it's me."

"It's Stuey," he said to his gang buddies. "He's cool."

We got up close, did our handshake thing and asked about how everybody was doing. Our friendly exchange lasted maybe sixty seconds and we were on our way. One of my new friends asked me incredulously when we got outside of hearing range, "You know that guy?"

"Yeah, he was a good buddy. I used to help him with his homework." What goes around comes around.

Misunderstanding Russia

George W. Bush famously said several years ago that he looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his soul. I don't know what possessed W. to say this. But if you asked him now what exactly he saw back then, he just might say something different.

I don't mean to pick on W. this time although I often do. We as a nation don't understand Russia. We never have. I doubt we ever will.

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of one of Stalin's major butcherings. Russia is busy mourning this anniversary. But there were so many millions killed over Stalin's reign that I don't understand why they picked this particular day as one of remembrance. Clearly I don't understand Russia either. But I try because of my family history.

My grandfather spent time in a gulag in Siberia. My mother received most of her education in Russia. My father was in the Russian army. And growing up, Russia was a place frequently mentioned at the dinner table. It was a cold, forbidding place, suffused with hunger and desperation, where the NKVD/KGB could ruin your already paltry life in an instant. It sounded like hell to me.

The only silver lining was that somehow Russians had a collective spirit and generosity that came from all of this deprivation that I never quite understood. My father would tell tales of swarming like bumble bees in the middle of the night in St. Petersburg to keep from freezing to death, of Russian soldiers surging forward without ammunition in the hope of wasting a few German bullets with their bodies. What kind of country was this?

We can't fathom it. We'd have to have hundreds of years of corrupt and brutal leadership, of no food, of bitter cold, of life made barely tolerable by cheap alcohol to come close.

And because we can't fathom this culture we repeatedly make mistakes. After WWII, Roosevelt essentially gave away half a continent to Russian rule. In the 1990s, we threw tens of billions of dollars at promoting capitalism in Russia, money that ended up being stolen by a handful of gangsters. For the last twenty years, we've lived under the illusion that we can create democracy in Russia. We look at "polls" from Russia that give Putin overwhelming support and naively think that these numbers bear some relation to reality.

We want to simplify. We want to believe that the Russian people are just like us, that they desire everything we do. But even Americans aren't all on the same page in terms of wants and desires. How can it be that there are monolithic Russian dreams and wishes at all, much less ones that bear a relationship to those all Americans supposedly possess?

I remember once when I was a kid and the news came that the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was being allowed to leave the Soviet Union. This was during the height of the Cold War. US politicians were ebullient about this apparent victory. But not my parents. Sure, they were happy that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been released. But it was where they sent him that my parents found distressing. "They should have never agreed to let the Russians send him to West Germany," my mother said. The Russian people hate the Germans, she explained. What the West had done was to discredit Solzhenitsyn by having him defect to Germany. The Russian people will never forgive him, she said.

I listened to my mother and my jaw dropped. Even as a kid, I wondered who in our government had an understanding like this. Maybe someone did. But I'm guessing they knew it in an abstract way, not the visceral way of my mother. One of the strange conceits of this country is that we believe that everyone else around the world is fundamentally just like us. That certainly doesn't apply to Russia. It doesn't apply anywhere.

Looks or Talent?

As a frequent flier, I can identify their occupation instantly. Sex? Female. Age? Thirty plus or minus five years. Height? Five foot ten plus or minus four inches. Build? Athletic. In fact, if I talk to them I'll find out that they played soccer or basketball or some other varsity sport in college. Makeup? Republican style, on the heavy side. Clothes? Boring business stuff made out of some fabric designed to never stain or wrinkle. Occupation? There is no doubt about it. I don't even have to ask. Pharmaceutical sales rep.

It's no secret that drug companies hire young, fit, attractive, Republican looking females to sell their goods. They must hire a few that don't fit this profile. Maybe a male or two. Maybe a woman or three under the height of five foot six or god forbid over 35. But they must hide them or send them to out of the way places because I don't ever see them.

They hire them for obvious reasons. If you want to sell something to a doctor or a hospital administrator, it's easier when the person doing the selling is easy on the eyes. Plus in the old days (I'm told that this activity is no longer allowed), the sales rep would invite you out for lunch. It was almost like having a date with an attractive woman with someone else footing the bill.

In sales, drugs or otherwise, looks and talent are bundled together. You're trying to get someone to buy something that they can probably get from somewhere else. It's a lot easier to push a product when the potential buyer is dreaming about you at night.

I've been just as guilty (inadvertently) as pharmaceutical companies of using young women to sell my products. Well, not products really, but it was more or less the same deal. One summer, I happened to hire two tall, blonde, athletic college females to do some field work for a science project. For many months before I'd hired them, I'd been trying to get permission to make some measurements on an island owned by a cranky seventy year old geezer. I couldn't get him to say yes, no way no how.

But that summer, I went out to that island with those two female students. The old geezer turned to mush. He said that we could make measurements on his property no problem. After that, he and I were buddies. And for the next two years every time I'd call him, the first thing he'd ask was, "How are those girls doing?"

The two women I hired were smart and had talent. Did I hire them because they were also easy on the eyes? I swear I didn't. But it turned out to my benefit that they were.

In music, the idea used to be that talent came first. Sure, there were exceptions to the talent comes first rule. For instance, a couple of blog posts ago I mentioned the early 60s heart throb/no talent singer Fabian. But overall, if you couldn't sing you weren't going to make it no matter how big your muscles or bust size.

For example, there's an old story about Herb Alpert and the performer Sam Cooke watching a great looking male singer. Sam Cooke was going on and on about the singer. Herb Alpert - then a hip trumpet player, now a multi-zillionaire and retired co-owner of A&M records - said no way. "Sam," Herb said, "you're just being taken in by the guy's looks. Close your eyes and listen." Sam Cooke did just that. "You're right," Sam said. "The guy's no good." Who knows if this story is true? But the fact that it exists tells you something about the mind set at the time.

Nowadays, Herb Alpert recognizes that the rules have changed. "People listen with their eyes now," he says. Talent matters much less. If the person can't sing you can always add effects using the computer and fix pitch. What matters most is how they look in a music video. Ella Fitzgerald, the greatest pop vocalist of the 20th century, probably would not stand a chance today.

In movies, it's the same story. There are potato dumplings like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Kathy Bates who are simply so damn talented that they defy the "looks are everything" rule. But if you look at Hollywood actors, just about everyone is gorgeous. Not all of them are talented but they all look like a million bucks.

One funny thing about movies is that if you take one of these gorgeous people and put them in roles that play against their obvious glamor, they win awards. Charlize Theron is just a so-so acting talent, but my god she's gorgeous. And when she put on some weight, wore awful make-up and bad teeth inserts to play the role of a serial-killer prostitute, the result was an Oscar.

Looks or talent? As a betting man, I'd say looks almost always trump talent in entertainment and in life. Don't believe me? I have two words for you. Paris Hilton.

Substitutions

There's a painting of Edward Hopper that you'll see in poster stores around college campuses. Actually, it's a poster where someone has copied a well known painting by Hopper titled Nighthawks, an illustrator-like composition of four people in a diner late at night. The original comes from 1942. In the college poster version, three anonymous people in the diner have been replaced by James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis. I don't know when the college poster first appeared. I think it was sometime in the 1970s, well after the heyday of Dean, Monroe and Elvis. That it still is in poster stores and sells today tells you something about the durability of 50s pop icons.

Now for me, James Dean wasn't much. For example, when he appeared alongside Julie Harris in East of Eden, I thought Harris stole the picture. Obviously, others don't agree. Elvis wasn't much either. He translated black music and made it palatable to a white audience. For me, Elvis was a poor man's Sam Cooke. Again, I know I'm in the minority on this one. And Marilyn? Well now, that woman was a natural comic actress. And the poster? I prefer dogs playing poker posters. But I digress.

What's important about these substitutions is that many, maybe most, people don't even know the original painting. They don't know who Edward Hopper is. They don't know that the original is one of the best known American paintings of the 20th century. If you showed them the original they'd say, "Hey where's Elvis?"

We as a nation don't know art. Edward Hopper? Who's he? Ditto with Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and a whole slew of "famous" 20th century artists. We know Picasso. We know Van Gogh. These artists appear in college poster shops. They are icons. But sometime around 1940, we stopped caring about art. It didn't register anymore. And whatever wonderful artists have been around after that time are anonymous to the public at large.

The same goes for literature. We know Hemmingway. We've heard of Faulkner. But sometime around 1960, the public lost its appetite for literature. Docktorow? Pynchon? Never heard of them. Unless a book has been made into a movie, we don't know it exists.

It's even worse when it comes to music. Play someone some Mozart and they wouldn't have a clue who wrote it. Play Beethoven's Fifth and ask them who is that and you'll likely get a blank stare. As for contemporary composers, they just might not be aware that anyone is composing classical music today.

Sometime around 1960, this country made a shift. Art - paintings, literature, and music - didn't matter much anymore. And like that college poster insertion of 50s pop icons in Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, popular culture took its place. Paintings are the stuff of high society now. They are investments that few see or care about except for their monetary value. If a book of serious literature sells more than 10,000 copies publishers are ebullient. If a serious composer wants to pay his rent, he better find a gig as a college professor or try to squeeze into the hyper-competitive world of movie soundtracks.

What has taken the place of the middlebrow to highbrow world of art has been TV, movies and pop music. And what's different about these forms of entertainment is that most of its products aren't created for adults. The target audience is about twelve to fifteen years old. We have adults that seem perfectly happy to spend their leisure time listening and watching stuff that isn't particularly intellectually challenging or nuanced. Hell, they aren't happy; they seem ecstatic. I don't quite understand it.

How Bob Dylan Ruined Everything

Last post, I mentioned how Bob Dylan was one of the very few pop musicians over the last 40 years to go beyond being an entertainer. He is a gifted lyricist and wonderful outside artist. But the funny thing is that he is a lousy entertainer. He can't sing. He can't play an instrument well. His shows tend to be god awful affairs and they have gotten worse over time. Yet, people pay good money to see them.

Bob Dylan is a songwriter who happens to try to entertain and sing and is usually not successful at it. He wasn't successful at it when he was young either. But there was a paradigm shift in pop music when he was young. The change was that you didn't have to be able to sing or play to be an entertainer. There were two sides to this no talent as a performer coin. On one side you had people like Fabian, heart throbs with no talent who girls screamed over. Bob Dylan didn't qualify for that dubious role. But on the other side of the coin you had the songwriter who had no business entertaining. Not only did Bob Dylan fit that role; he created it.

When Dylan started out, the idea was that there was a separation between the songwriter and the performer. No one was really expected to do both. And since about the 1920s no songwriter was expected to write both music and lyrics although some like Cole Porter did so wonderfully.

Pop music had a chain of command. A lyricist and composer - people like Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne - got together in a room somewhere and wrote song after song. Many of those songs were lousy - you have to write a lot of bad songs to get a good one - but a handful were exquisite. The lyricist and composer would take their gems to their publisher. The publisher would then have someone plug those gems to entertainers like Frank Sinatra. Sinatra would select from the many songs sent his way.

That's how it was done. No one expected Sammy Cahn to write music. No one expected Jule Styne to write lyrics. And no one expected or wanted them to perform. Why should they? Did either of them have the tone of Mel Torme? No. Did either of them have the phrasing of Sinatra. Not even close. Cahn and Styne were two nebbish looking Jewish guys who couldn't sing but my oh my they could write a great song. That was their role: write. Someone else did the singing.

Now something changed in the 1950s or thereabouts. Maybe it was partly because of the folk music movement, but this country got an authenticity bug. There was a shift in how the public viewed pop music. Suddenly, the song and the song's message were expected to be an authentic representation of the personality of the singer. Sinatra caught this bug a bit as well. No he didn't start to write songs. But in tunes like in "I Did It My Way" (my father's favorite song by the way) the singer and the message became merged. When Sinatra sang that song every word was thought to represent his personal feelings.

It's a long way down from Sinatra to Dylan in terms of showmanship, but somehow because Dylan was "authentic" it didn't matter that he couldn't sing. It didn't matter that his guitar playing was dreadful. There was almost a reverse chic going on. It was a representation of just how authentic he was that he had no performance ability. It was cool to see someone so raw. It was real. To my ears, it was neither even when I was a kid. It was just painful. But obviously I was in the minority. I still am.

Dylan is essentially the father of the authenticity movement in pop music. And as that authenticity movement expanded, it was expected that all performers write their own songs. This change was dreadful too. Just as Dylan is a wonderful songwriter who has no business being an entertainer, there are many entertainers - almost all - who have no business trying to write a song. Madonna, for example, is a truly dreadful songwriter. But just like it was cool for Dylan to entertain, it was cool for Madonna to write stupid junk like Material Girl. Authenticity was everything.

But the fact is that pop music was better when there was a chain of command. The music was better. The lyrics were better. The performances were better. I don't give a hoot about authenticity. I just want to hear good music performed well. Damn that Bob Dylan. He ruined everything.

It's Probably Not Art

I come from a science background and it's undoubtedly true that you can't possibly do good work in science unless you have thoroughly studied those who worked before you. In my field, basically you start from Newton and work your way up. You don't make advances from scratch. As they say, you stand on the shoulders of giants. Hopefully you're fortunate to discover something new and exciting, but that new thing has its origins in work hundreds of years previous.

No kid without any background in science is going to suddenly write a shocking paper that revolutionizes the scientific world. You need training, a knowledge of what came before you.

Art is only slightly different than this. Generally, the mode of operation is the same. Art builds on art. Everybody in the art world is standing on the shoulders of people like Rembrandt. They know and study the past masters. When they make something new, they know exactly how it relates to the past.

There are exceptions to this grounding in the masters now and then. Some people like Rousseau seem to come out of nowhere to produce stunning works. In America, there are people like Henry Darger with wholly unique ways of looking at the world through their art. Whenever people like that come around, they have an additional label placed on them to denote their lack of grounding and training. Words like primitive, folk or outside are used.

Sometime in the 1960s and I'm guessing it was about the time FM radio and albums came to the fore, pop music entertainers started to be known as "recording artists." And suddenly people started to talk about their music in artistic terms. It's odd to me. Because at best, the grounding of most pop music today goes back to the Beatles. And I definitely don't consider the Beatles to be artists. They were pop music and pop culture icons certainly. But art? I don't think so.

When you look at the lyrics of the Beatles it's pretty flimsy stuff. Here's an example of one of the more famous tunes in the Lennon/McCartney catalog:

Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe
In yesterday

Suddenly
I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me
Oh, yesterday
Came suddenly

Yada, yada, it goes on from there. If this is art, I'm Beethoven.

What the Beatles are is wonderful entertainment. And there is nothing wrong with that at all. We need great entertainment. But great art is something different altogether. It isn't The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Prince or Madonna. That's entertainment folks. If you want art, please go elsewhere.

Great art makes statements about the world we live in that are unique and have some degree of resonance and depth. When I look at the world of pop music, I hear precious little that does this. It isn't grounded in the past in the least. Pop music writers don't even know the music of Duke Ellington (another wonderful entertainer), much less the work of Chopin. And without that depth of knowledge, it all ends up very thin in terms of content.

Plus it isn't very intelligent. For example, the number one pop album this week in terms of sales was made by Kid Rock, someone who seems to defy evolution by being a modern Neanderthal. I'm sure amoebas have more intelligence than that guy. He records, sure. But he isn't a "recording artist." Sorry.

Occasionally, like a Darger or Rousseau in the art world, someone will come up out of the pop music world and make great folk or outside art. For me, Bob Dylan is like that. But there are very few people that approach the caliber of Dylan in the pop world. And a funny thing about most of these self-taught artists is that their music and language really aren't for adults. It's for teens, essentially kiddie art. For example, I happen to love the band Nirvana, but if you're more than about twenty-five years old, the lyrics of Kurt Cobain sound childish and rambling. It's art limited to the young.

And as for me and my music? I'm definitely an entertainer. I don't make any pretense about it. I want my music to amuse and make people dance. I want to put a smile on people's faces. I don't want to be or aspire to be an artist. I'd much, much rather entertain. There is everything right with that goal.

On Public Relations

"Hellooo Mr. Frog!" called the scorpion across the water, "Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?"

"Well now, Mr. Scorpion! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?" asked the frog hesitantly.

"Because," the scorpion replied, "If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!"

So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river.

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back.

"I could not help myself. It is my nature."

Many moons ago, John Burness, v.p. in charge of p.r. at Duke, asked me to be his assistant. The offer came out of the blue. I didn't ask for the job or apply for it. But he and I both knew that my department was soon to be reamed by the powers that be and while I was on my way to getting tenure, it was questionable what value tenure in a disbanded department actually had. I'd likely have to leave Duke for elsewhere if I wanted to continue to do research, and my family wasn't too keen on moving.

Regardless, I said no in less than five seconds. I wasn't a p.r. guy. Sure, I could write a decent sentence and cleaned up well, but it wasn't in me to suffer fools on a daily basis. I instead sought a tenured job offer elsewhere and received one. I turned that job offer down, too. I couldn't move at the time.

Through the many months of the Duke lacrosse affair, I sometimes wondered what would have happened had I accepted the job offer and become Duke's assistant p.r. man. I doubt that I would have lasted six months. But suppose I had. I would have been in the thick of the lacrosse mess. I would have done what p.r. people do to save the good name of an institution: cut ties to all potential threats; slime your opposition off the record, but speak well of them on the record. After about a week of what Duke Trustee Bob Steel aptly described as doing what isn't fair but "had to be done," I would have looked at myself in the mirror and felt sick. More than likely I would have quit.

There are better things to do with your life than being a flack. But someone has to do it. Institutions need to be protected often by means that aren't very savory. Most people in an institution are the frogs in the scorpion/frog story above. They swim around and catch a few bugs. But every institution needs someone who can sting.

In reading about the Duke lacrosse affair, I would read nasty comment after nasty comment about John Burness. I didn't think these comments were fair. He was doing his job. It's what p.r. people are paid to do. You don't expect honesty from the White House Press Secretary. Why should you expect honesty from a university p.r. guy?

Not many people know this, but prior to the lacrosse affair John Burness was considered the guru of university p.r. He was the wise man that other major universities consulted in a time of crisis. He could have had just about any university p.r. job he wanted. He was that good.

What happened with the lacrosse affair was that standard methods of p.r. simply didn't apply. Maybe one in a hundred times doing the "right thing" instead of being expedient and pragmatic is the way out of an institutional scandal. The Duke lacrosse affair was one of those one out of one hundred events. Duke leadership failed precisely because it followed the p.r. playbook instead of acting with integrity.

John Burness announced his retirement today. I know him well, far better than anyone at Duke does. I haven't had anything approaching a real conversation with him in years. Nor do I want to. I wish him well.

The Red Light Specials

Attention values voters. On aisle three of the Hilton Hotel in Washington DC this past week you would have found a bushel full of red light special presidential candidates vying for your vote. And you would have found some wonderful breakout sessions on:

1) How to maintain your Christianity in the "fiery furnace" of the "University of Babylon." Apparently it takes special skills to avoid the evils of evolution, drugs, sex and rock and roll in college, which is deemed "America's most repressive atmosphere." I suppose that Gitmo doesn't count.

2) "The sanctity of life." From protesting abortion clinics to keeping a human vegetable in Florida alive in a hospital, we've got it covered. Life apparently is only sacred outside of the electric chair.

3) Just say no to homo. Yes, you too can fight the "homosexual agenda." Somehow I don't think that Pastor Ted Haggard was within 100 yards of that breakout session.

4) "Illegal immigration" or throw the wetbacks back. Included: a special refresher course on house cleaning and fruit and vegetable picking.

5) "Racial reconciliation in the church" or one of my best friends is a Supreme Court Justice! Registration included a custom made Anita Hill dart board.

6) "The power to choose." Yes you too can choose American hospital's emergency rooms as your primary health program. Anything else would be socialism!

7) "Science 'friction'" or hey, hey, ho, ho, stem cell research has got to go or forget about your mama's Alzheimer's or your daddy's Parkinson's disease. Registration included a years supply of Depend Diapers for your loved one.

8) "Radical Islam" or the other white meat, a primer. They're just as crazy as us Evangelical Christians except they don't eat pork.

OK, so I've stretched the truth a bit, but not by much. The quotes are real. The Evangelicals came to Washington this past week to attend breakout sessions on college life, homosexuality, etc. But most importantly they came to hear Republican candidates give their spiels about why they deserve the Christian vote.

Their top choice: Mitt Romney. Oh wait, I thought he was in favor of abortion. He isn't? Well maybe he changed his mind. Or maybe he didn't. Never mind.

Their second choice, Mike Huckabee, a former pastor. Gee, I'm so surprised. Too bad he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of winning.

I forgot who made it to number three and I'm too lazy to look it up (this is a blog you know) but number four was someone who was supposed to be the savior of conservative politics once he entered the campaign, Fred Thompson. I guess he isn't a savior anymore.

And way, way down at number eight was the Republican front runner, Rudy Giuliani.

One of the wonderful things about this election has been the way the Evangelicals shot themselves in the foot early on. They made a big to-do about how the leading candidates were no good. They have gone on record that if the Republican candidate isn't an anti-abortionist, they will bolt. Essentially, they are doing what the radical left did to the Democrats in the 1970s. And that's just fine by me. The Evangelicals are handing over the presidency to the Democrats on a silver platter.

Oh, and who did those dear Evangelicals vote as the candidate they wanted least? A sixty year old Christian woman, a mother, a graduate of Yale Law School who has stood by her man through thick and thin. Now that sounds like an ideal candidate for those good Christians. Apparently such credentials don't mean much if your last name is Clinton. I know these Evangelicals are crazy, but just think how much crazier they will be when their worst nightmare comes true? Ah, it will be sweet.

Global Warming and Adultery, Part II

As I noted on the last post, I buy fully into the idea that we have a moral obligation to minimize our impact on this planet. But that doesn't mean that we have to willpower to act fully on our moral obligation. There are many moral issues we confront where our track record is poor.

For example, one of them is adultery. And as the little joke at the top of last post notes (Jewish humor at its finest) it's one of the ten commandments. It doesn't get any more important than one of those ten. No adultery is allowed. It's clear as day. By the way, in the English version we dress up the ten commandments with "thou shalt not," but in the Hebrew there is no dressing up. It's simply "lo" or "no."

I'm perfectly happy with the no adultery rule. I've been married to my sweetie for many years and have seen marriages crash and burn over adultery many times. Adultery, in a word, is awful. It destroys relationships. It destroys trust. But it happens to be one of those moral issues where the public fails miserably. Somewhere around twenty percent of all married couples have admitted to adultery. I have no idea what percentage won't own up. It's so common that we have invented a cute euphemism for adultery to diminish its significance, "cheating." Adultery is the stuff of the bible and "thou shalt not." Cheatin' is the stuff you do in a Motel 6 with your wife's best friend.

Now I'm all for exhorting people not to commit adultery. Ministers, rabbis, and whomever wishes to should continually remind people to honor their marriage vows. But what we also do in our society is work on the back end of adultery. We try to repair relationships that have been hurt through counseling. There is an entire industry devoted to mending broken relationships many of which have been torn by adultery. In creating this industry, we implicitly admit that adultery is a common thing that isn't going away. And it isn't. Indeed two of our current crop of presidential candidates - the two leading candidates - have in a very public way either been adulterous or dealt with an adulterous spouse.

Similarly, I'm all for people and governments exhorting us to reduce fossil fuel burning. Al Gore deserves the accolades he has been receiving for turning global warming into an issue with worldwide visibility. And to some extent all of the exhortations and arm twisting that will take place over the next couple of decades will have a positive effect on reducing CO2 emissions. But we have to prepare for our failure to do what needs to be done. We have to work on the back end of global warming.

It may be that our worst case scenarios about global warming come true. Hurricanes and tornadoes could rage all over the planet. Diseases will run rampant. Drought and starvation will rule. And if that is the case, however unlikely, there is little planning that can be done for the future. We will have through stubbornness and greed created a massive calamity for this planet and for us.

But the more likely scenarios are more mild than this. Sea levels will rise but at a manageable level. Weather patterns will change but they won't be dramatic. Ecological shifts will occur, but they won't be catastrophic to life as we know it. And if that's the case, we need to plan for the possibility that these changes will take place. We need to have contingency plans for how we are going to manage our lives and protect other species through these changes.

I don't see much of this going on at the worldwide level at this point in time. Certain countries susceptible to global warming effects, the Netherlands in particular, are preparing for a future with a warmer planet. But Al Gore isn't talking about the engineering that is going to have to take place as a result global warming. For me, this is the most important issue. We will inevitably fail in our goal to limit fossil fuel use. What are we going to do in response to our failure? We need to start planning now.

Global Warming and Adultery, Part I

Moses: I talked to G-d and there's good news and bad news.
Aaron: What's the good news?
Moses: I got him down to 10 commandments.
Aaron: What's the bad news?
Moses: Adultery is still in.

Al Gore, as everyone including my cat knows by now, won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in combating human-induced global warming. Mr. Gore's heart is in the right place and if the Nobel Prize thinks that global warming constitutes a severe threat to this planet, then why not?

Mr. Gore's science, however, is not very good. He, like the conservative opposition, is willing to bend science for political gain. When I watched the movie An Inconvenient Truth I remember wincing several times during Al Gore's lecture. For instance, the disaster of Hurricane Katrina was linked to global warming. I'm sorry, but the evidence that Hurricane Katrina would not have happened had we not injected CO2 into the atmosphere is non-existent.

We know precious little about the influence of human-induced global warming on our planet today. We know even less about the future impact of human-induced global warming. We have models that make those predictions. But those models have no track record of success. They are about as useful as stock market predictions decades into the future. People like to look at them. But they are more curiosity pieces than anything with rigorous validity.

Human-induced global warming may indeed have catastrophic influence on this planet; or the effects may be mild. We simply do not know. We will never know about the impact until it happens. We don't have that kind of predictive ability.

In a nutshell the problem is this. For another one hundred or so years our carbon based economy will keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. As the world economy expands and energy use increases dramatically in places like China and India where 1/3 of the world lives, we will likely burn even more carbon than we do now and dramatically increase the concentration of CO2 into our atmosphere. Temperatures on the planet will increase a couple to several degrees. That's about all we know.

Oh, we know that the amount of ice on the poles will decrease, but we don't know how much. We know the rate of water cycling from land and ocean to the atmosphere will increase, but we don't know whether that means global weather will be more like that in Seattle - a lot of steady drizzle - or produce more severe storms; we don't know where weather will change the most and what the magnitude of that change will be. We know sea level will rise, but we don't know how much. We know there will be ecological shifts, but we don't know how severe they will be. We know ocean temperatures will increase, but we don't know if that will produce significantly more severe hurricanes worldwide. We never will until it happens.

It would be wonderful if we could make valid predictions of the impact of carbon fuel use and plan for the future accordingly. And my feeling is that if the scientific community could show solid evidence that we were headed toward catastrophic collapse of this planet as we know it as a result of our burning carbon, the world would collectively have the willpower to make corrective changes. But the scientific community can't do this - it is categorically impossible to produce such evidence - so we remain in our current state.

Our current state is that we lack the willpower to make substantive changes in our burning of fossil fuels world-wide. We will continue to burn until there is a cheaper source of energy. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that will happen about 100 years from now. Then our unintentional experiment of seeing how the planet changes in response to burning fossil fuels will end.

We do lack the willpower to change. And as evidence of that lack of willpower, let's look at the carbon footprint of one individual: me. I supposedly use 33 equivalent tons of CO2 a year, about 20 percent above the national average, and six times above the world average. Most of that use comes from equivalent carbon burning using airplanes, about 20 tons. I have no idea how that calculation is made or how valid it is. But even if it's off by a factor of two, I'm using four times what your average person uses in the world.

I have made some changes in my lifestyle not so much because of global warming but because for me conservation in and of itself is a valuable thing. I drive a hybrid. I keep the house at 61 degrees at night and 65 in the daytime. I have no air conditioning. The house is insulated with thermal pane windows. I have an energy efficient furnace. I live in a house below the national median in size. I use fluorescent light bulbs. I compost. Yada, yada, yada. The impact of these activities does reduce my carbon footprint significantly, by about six tons of CO2 per year. But I'm still above the national average and way above the world average.

And I'm not going to change. I'm not going to fly less. I'm not moving into a one bedroom apartment. I'm not selling my car. Basically I'm going to continue to be an energy hog.

And the fact is that hardly anyone is going to change and significantly reduce their carbon footprint. Al Gore lives in a house six times bigger than mine. He probably flies ten times as much. And those folks in China are adding 14,000 cars a day to their roads. They want to be energy hogs just like me and Al because energy use means wealth. And they want to be wealthy.

We lack the willpower to change our ways. Our carbon footprints will continue to grow until we start to use another energy source. CO2 concentrations will continue to increase although at the power plant level, from which a large chunk of our fossil burning emanates, things may well change. My guess is that we will significantly reduce net carbon use from power plants by mandating that utilities inject CO2 into the ground. Despite this change for the better, temperatures will continue to increase. The net impact of this on our lives and on the planet is anybody's guess.

Al Gore and many others - scientists like Edmund Wilson and even presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee - have said the we have a moral obligation to reduce CO2 use. I agree that this is a moral issue. But there are many moral issues over which many people have little willpower to change for the better. The title of this posting mentioned one of those moral issues as a teaser, adultery. I'll post more about the moral dilemmas of adultery and global warming next time.

The Impossibility of Free Speech

A couple of posts back, I noted that free speech doesn't exist on college campuses. I wasn't trying to provoke and be outrageous. I meant it. Someone might think it worthwhile to discuss whether having free speech would be a desirable goal. But I don't think that's even a valid question. In an institutional setting, free speech cannot exist.

At an individual level, free speech sort of exists. People can get on soap boxes or post blogs and say just about whatever they want. They can take out ads in a paper and as long as the newspaper agrees to take the money - sometimes the paper won't because of potential slander issues or because in some way the paper feels their ads shouldn't deviate too much from the paper's own political views - they can write whatever they want. But even then, if they advocate illegal activities or criminal activities they just might end up in jail. There are limits.

Disregarding an audience, there are personal limits to free speech. We all - except for those with a certain kind of brain damage - have an interior editor that tells us not to say things that are inappropriate. We are hard wired to limit our speech to that which is socially acceptable.

Scale up to an institution - a college, government, whatever - and free speech doesn't even partially exist. It's silly to believe that it does. It's not a goal of an institution to promote free and open exchange of all ideas. Even on a college campus the ideas presented are limited. And they have to be.

Speech comes with a value and a cost*. When a university or any institution invites or hires someone to speak or profess, they are implicitly saying that the value of that person's speech outweighs the cost of having them speak. If they deem that the cost outweighs the value, no invitation will result.

Recently Columbia hosted Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Someone or some group made the calculation that the value of having him speak outweighed any potential cost or backlash. Now you can argue with the math done by this person or group. But they did make that calculation. They don't allow anyone and everyone the privilege of promoting their ideas at Columbia. They picked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Now something strange happened with that talk. Instead of allowing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to simply speak, Columbia's President Lee Bollinger sucker punched Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not literally, but verbally in his introduction of the speaker. It was an odd thing and rude thing to do. I wrote about it in an earlier post.

If it was always Lee Bollinger's intent to sucker punch Iran's president, the invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should have never been made. I'm completely guessing here, but I don't think Bollinger thought he'd do this initially. But somewhere along the way he did his own calculation and decided that having Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak his mind came out negative in the balance. The invitation was already out. So he decided to make a partial recovery through his introduction. If that's the case, it's still debatable whether this augmented calculation of values and costs was good math.

This year, the Hoover Institution at Stanford invited Donald Rumsfeld to campus. That too was a calculation of values and costs. The Hoover Institution decided that inviting Donald Rumsfeld was something that would provide a net benefit. Of course, Stanford's Department of Political Science would have made that same calculation and decided the opposite. Unlike real arithmetic, the math of values and costs in speech does depends on whose calculator you use.

Three years ago at Duke, the powers that be decided that the value of holding a Palestinian Solidarity Movement conference outweighed the costs. I would argue that this was lousy math. Their calculator clearly wasn't mine. According to my calculations, the conference resulted in little positive dialogue. And it ended in the publication of this nasty piece of hate in the Duke student newspaper in The Chronicle:

"When former President Bill Clinton nominated his first two judges to the Supreme Court, both were Jews. Remarkable in the slightest? No, of course not. But the American public still can’t get over Clarence Thomas’s cultural heritage, after being appointed by Bush 41. To be Jewish is to have the right to move seamlessly between the majority and minority, without constraint. Thus, Jewish-American appropriation of the “oppressed” moniker is disingenuous, belying the reality of America’s social hierarchy.

What’s worst is that the “Holocaust Industry” uses its influence to stifle, not enhance, the Israeli-Palestinian debate, simultaneously belittling the real struggles for socioeconomic and political equality faced, most notably, by black Americans."

It's useful to note that The Chronicle justified the publication of this piece on the basis of "free speech." What they were really saying was they deemed the benefits of publication to outweigh the costs. I note that in that same year, the columnists of a humor column in The Chronicle were fired after they wrote a humor piece critical of Duke's Coach K. No one mentioned "free speech" when they were fired. Publish anti-Semitism. That's "free speech." Criticize Coach K and you're gone. That was the math of value and cost done by the editors of The Chronicle in 2004.

"Free speech" is a catch-all phrase used for allowing the presentation of controversial opinions. But it is oddly often used to stifle dialogue on the appropriateness of allowing those opinions to be expressed in an institutional setting. Everyone does the math of values and costs. Ultimately in an institutional setting, free speech cannot exist.

When a college president starts to trumpet free speech in relation to a controversial speaker, what he or she is really saying is, "I've done the math on this speaker. It's going to result in a net benefit to have this speaker come to campus." The public is of course free to disagree with that math. But it shouldn't get caught in the empty dialogue of the necessity of free speech on college campuses.

*When I'm using the word cost, I'm barely talking about money although certainly an institution might hesitate to pay someone 50K to speak. I'm referring to the cost whether it be money, negative p.r., hurt feelings of constituents, etc.

It's Still a Man's World

You see man made the car
To take us over the road
Man made the train
To carry the heavy load
Man made the electric light
To take as out of the dark
Man made the boat for the water
Like Noah made the ark
This is a man's man's man's world
James Brown, Betty Newsome

This is the first election where a woman has a reasonable chance of becoming a major political party's nominee and the nation's president. We're a little slow on the uptake with regard to the role of women in leadership. Other countries have had women as leaders for a long, long time. And no, those countries haven't crumbled. They've done just fine thank you very much. And no, those women haven't been wimps.

Why has it taken so long here? I would say that in America it's still very much a man's world. We aren't close to giving women equal status in this country. A woman can aspire to reach the top of the ladder in a profession, and she may succeed. But there are many ridiculous obstacles along the way.

Let's take for instance, Hillary Clinton. She is running a wonderful campaign. She has been articulate, incredibly smart and polished. By the way, I'll be voting for her come California Primary time. For what it's worth (not much I know), the Forty Questions blog and Stuart Rojstaczer endorse Hillary Clinton for President. I won't give her any money - she's getting so much dough that she doesn't need mine - but I will campaign for her.

Anyway, it's instructive to see how the media have covered her campaign. Sure, they discuss her sound bites and her proposals. But like all of the other candidates, the real emphasis of the media isn't on the issues; rather it's on personality. To some extent that makes sense because the American voter is in general purposely ignorant about the issues and votes on the basis of whether they like or dislike the candidate on an emotional level.

So we hear things like Thompson looks worn out and tired, Romney is robotic, Guiliani has a temper, etc. And what about Hillary? We've heard discussions of her cleavage. We've heard discussions about her laugh. Apparently she's showing too much cleavage and she's laughing too much. It's not as if we're potentially voting for her. It's as if we're dating her.

I believe that Hillary Clinton will be our first woman president. But mark my words, there will be a significant difference between the exit poll results and the actual tally. There will be a significant number of both men and women who will tell pollsters they voted for Clinton, but who did something entirely different in the ballot booth. It's still a man's world.

You don't have to be running for president to see this. Once a while back, a female colleague came to my office to talk about a candidate for a leadership position at my place of employment. She and I both knew the candidate had a history of sexual harassment and that she had in fact been harassed by this person. But she didn't want to go public about it. Rather, she was asking me to write a letter about this fact to the powers that be. At the time, I thought she was just being cowardly. But now I see it differently. Had she gone public, she would have been branded a troublemaker and it would have adversely impacted her career. That candidate with a history of sexual harassment was hired. It's still a man's world.

I live a couple of blocks away from the headquarters of Hewlett Packard. Several years ago, HP named as its CEO Carly Fiorina. She lasted five and half years. Every step of the way, she was vilified by employees for her reorganization of the company. HP was entrenched in a culture whose time had come and gone. Had she been a man, there still would have been resentment over her reorganization, but there also would have been some admiration for her guts. A "Carlo Fiorina" in a dark suit and suspenders would not have had to endure the verbal abuse and second guessing that Ms. Fiorina did. "Carlo" might still be head of HP, which is now a very healthy company. Carly is long gone. It's still a man's world.

There have been, of course, significant gains for women in the US. But a curious thing has happened. In my opinion, quite a few of those gains are the result of vacuums in the workplace. For instance, a majority of medical school students are now women. And at face value, you might view this as a distinct sign of progress. It is of course. But it's also a sign that being a doctor isn't quite what it used to be. It's a harder job than it once was. And there are now better ways for a man to make a living. From my viewpoint, the rise of women in medicine is perhaps more about men finding the world of finance more attractive than ever before than it is about women making progress. It's still a man's world.

The Free Speech Thing

A while back, I went on sabbatical at Stanford. A couple of weeks into my stay, the chair of the department - a great guy if you ask me - asked me into his office.

"The provost called me," he said. "He asked me, 'What is he doing here?'" The provost was not happy that I was at Stanford. The chair wanted to know what exactly I had done or said to the provost to make him hate me. I said, "Nothing. I never met the man. I never talked to him. I never even emailed him. I don't even know his name." The chair told me the provost's name, John Etchemendy, and asked if it rang a bell. I shook my head.

"Well, he seems to know you and doesn't like you. Please behave yourself while you're here."

I told him I would and left. In my office, I tried to think about why the provost of one of the best universities in the world would care a rat's ass about why I - little Stuey Rojstaczer, just a professor from Duke - was at Stanford. What made him so insecure to call up the chair and squeeze his balls? Why did he even know I was here? It was odd. I'd been a loyal alumnus of Stanford. I was a life member of the Stanford Alumni Association. Every year until recently - when I decided Stanford was so rich it didn't need my money - I'd given generously to my alma mater and received kind thanks.

And then I remembered. I'd written a book about higher education that had some mild criticisms of Stanford's handling of its overhead scandal. That scandal, which had taken place about a decade before, was still a very touchy issue at Stanford. Apparently, the provost had read or heard of my book (for some reason at one time there were eight copies of it in Stanford's Chemistry Library). As far as the provost was concerned, I was persona non grata.

I thought of this incident recently when I read about Stanford faculty getting upset about the Hoover Institution inviting Donald Rumsfeld to visit. As noted in the San Jose Mercury News:

"Stanford President John Hennessy cautioned that faculty protests over Hoover appointments might be seen as an infringement on academic freedom of speech.

'We’ll open ourselves up to scrutiny for any visiting appointment,” he said. “Do we want to take that step to an open door?'

Provost John Etchemendy agreed, defending Hoover’s right to bring in visitors - and to call them whatever they want.

'We have thousands of visitors,' he said.

Any damage to the university’s reputation by Rumsfeld’s appointment 'is far less than the damage done if we centrally try to regulate visitors to the campus,' Etchemendy said."

Apparently Provost Etchemendy isn't as worried about Donald Rumsfeld visiting Stanford as he was about me. He wasn't squeezing the director of the Hoover Institution's balls over Donald Rumsfeld. Screwing up this country apparently isn't a big offense. Criticize higher education, on the other hand, and you are no one Etchemendy wants hanging around Stanford.

Now between you - gentle reader - and me, I think that of the two personalities Donald Rumsfeld and Stuart Rojstaczer, the one that potentially can do more damage as a result of his visit is Donald Rumsfeld. Provost Etchemendy has his priorities all screwed up.

That all said, I'm all for Donald Rumsfeld visiting Stanford. Sure, the man was a disastrous Secretary of Defense. As the main architect of our failed efforts in Iraq, his incompetence has led to the death of probably hundreds of thousands and the displacement of millions more. He is arrogant, ignorant, dishonest and inflexible. Arrogance, by the way, I don't mind as long as you can back it up. But combining arrogance and ignorance is just too much for me to bear. If you are going to be ignorant, at least be humble about it.

Still, if the Hoover Institution wants to bring in Rumsfeld, let them. And let them give him any title he wants. He is a man with a prominent and lengthy career in public service. Why wouldn't Stanford want him on campus?

The answer is that the left-leaning faculty members of Stanford hate him. They don't want people at Stanford with whom they disagree politically even for a visit. And that's not to be unexpected. College campuses aren't about free speech. I don't think they ever were. They are about hegemony. Those in charge get to decide who can speak.

Ultimately, rather than free speech on college campuses there is "like speech." Campuses tend to invite people that they like and agree with to visit and give speeches. They definitely hire people that they like and agree with. And they will deny tenure to wonderful scholars who they don't like and with whom they disagree.

While free speech really doesn't exist, diversity in speech and hires can be present. It's just Balkanized. For instance if you want to hear some right wing lunatic give a talk at Stanford go to the Hoover Institution or to the business school. Want to hear a left wing nut case? Go to a place like Stanford's Department of Anthropology. People with more centrist views in their fields probably can be found speaking throughout campus. But don't expect left wing groups to visit right wings groups' lectures for "free spirited debate" or vice versa. They simply try to do their best to ignore each other.

I don't know why people tend to believe that free speech exists on college campuses. I think it comes from the fallacy that academics are committed to the idea of open and free exchange. But academics are just people. They are as irrational in their motivations as anyone else. And they are as close minded as anyone else. As someone once said - I think it was Darwin, but I could be wrong - you don't convince your opposition; you just hope to outlive them.

Which leads me to another point. It's not just political issues on campus where free speech doesn't exist. It happens in science as well. If you're a scientist whose work is controversial, you can expect no invitations to come from certain schools. If they don't agree, they don't want to hear it.

I know this first hand. I've been invited to tens of colleges and universities. But I know of several prominent and not so prominent ones where I would never be asked to speak and certainly never be offered a job. It's not even hidden. Once I was at a conference, and the chair of an Ivy League department motioned over to me to sit down at his table. "I just want to say something to you," he said. He gave me a tight lipped look. I didn't know what that was about. I'd never met the man before in my life. "We'd never look for someone like you and even if we had a slot available would never hire someone like you."

I'm usually not at a loss for words, but for a man to pull me over to a table with his colleagues just to insult me, well I didn't know what to say. The guy was crazy as far as I was concerned. What do you do when a crazy person starts to talk to you? You walk away without saying a word. That's what I did.

Welcome to the crazy world of academia. And free speech? Get that silly idea out of your head. Sorry it doesn't exist.

He Just Might Be Evil After All

Last week, I vented more than a bit about my former boss, Richard Brodhead. I started out by saying I didn't think he was evil. But since then, I read a blog posting by Jason Trumpbour that has made me reconsider my earlier assertion. In his posting "Too Little Too Late," he says a very disturbing thing; Duke was gung ho about the lacrosse case going to trial:

"The administration wanted the case to go to trial. It believed that, if the case were dismissed before trial for whatever reason, people would say that Duke used its influence to have it dismissed. Robert Steel, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees told me that a year ago....

If Reade, Collin and David had to be exposed to the risks associated with a trial by a corrupt, unethical prosecutor who had done everything he could to inflame the jury pool, that was just the way it had to be. Steel told me that it did not matter if they were convicted because all the problems with the case would be sorted out on appeal. That is not the way the appeal process works and I told him that, but that was still his plan."

If this is true, Robert Steel and Duke leadership are thoroughly lacking both ethics and humanity. It means that they were so obsessed with making sure that the lacrosse story wasn't about Duke that they were completely willing to sacrifice three people in the process.

One of the stranger things about the lacrosse affair is the political right wing's insistence that Brodhead's motivation in cutting ties with the lacrosse players was his fear of far left faculty. Why anyone buys this argument is beyond me. Anyone who knows Duke knows that faculty governance is virtually non-existent. It's a top down organization. Faculty opinion means next to nothing. The idea that Brodhead was kowtowing to extremist faculty is completely without merit. Yes, there are many hard left faculty at Duke. No, they don't have any influence on presidential decision making.

Taylor and Johnson have made this claim about the influence of faculty political correctness on Brodhead's decision making while promoting their book, Until Proven Innocent. Whether this claim is in their book I do not know. I haven't read the book yet, but I will in a couple of weeks. Regardless, it is a claim without any foundation. The idea that Brodhead was fearful of losing his job if he didn't heed his hard left, politically correct faculty is patently absurd. Duke is not Harvard. Richard Brodhead is not Lawrence Summers. People who have made these claims simply don't understand how Duke University operates. These boats just don't float.

Brodhead and Steel were motivated in their actions principally by one thing, public relations. They cut ties to the lacrosse team in an effort to try to get the lacrosse story off the front page of the national media. Their actions had nothing to do with the desires of Looney Tune left-wing faculty members.

When big name p.r. firms were interviewed by the news media about Duke actions, they stated at the time of the crisis that in their outside opinion Duke was doing everything right. Duke was following the public relations playbook to a T. Those p.r. experts didn't say that Duke was being motivated by political correctness. And they weren't. Does political correctness exist at Duke? Definitely. But the idea that political correctness drove decision making during the lacrosse affair is a canard.

The right wing loves to try to tie every dumb move on academic campuses to political correctness. But many dumb moves are the result of other factors. In this case, the awful behavior of Duke leadership was motivated by p.r.

If Jason Trumpbour is correct - and I have no reason to doubt his word - the length that public relations drove decision making was absolutely frightening. It means that Steel and Brodhead are people truly worthy of contempt. It means that they have no business leading a university.

I Have Seen the Future and It Sort of Works

Today, I went online and bought Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows. Given that this was the first day the album was available, the traffic on the In Rainbows web site was heavy and getting it to load was a little slow. Still, I was able to download the album and burn a CD in about a half hour. Not bad at all.

I'm not a big fan of Radiohead as I'll talk about below, but this was a great media event and I felt a need to participate. A popular band was bypassing the old world of record companies and embracing the new world of "pay what you wish" digital downloads. How well does it work?

Seeing as I was just a curiosity seeker, I wasn't going to pay anywhere near typical CD prices for the download. I settled on a price of 1/2 pound (plus the 0.45 pound credit charge). I suppose I could have downloaded it for nothing, but I didn't want to be a total piker. According to a small poll at Paste Magazine - about 1000 votes so far, 1/4 of which came from big-time Radiohead fans who bought the box set for the fixed price of 160 dollars* - the average price paid (not including the box set purchases) was about $8.30 including curiosity seekers/pikers like me.

That's a lot more than I expected. If this poll is at all accurate it says that at least when it comes to Radiohead, some people value music. Even if the average purchase price comes out to about 1/2 that amount, it means that a band with a big name can likely make some decent money selling whole albums online. Of course, I don't know what the total number of downloads is going to be for this album. It may be that while the price paid is decent, the volume is not. Time will tell.*

Radiohead is one of those rare bands that has the potential to be a commercial success for decades. They may be the next U2. They have a large and loyal fan base and while they have as of late been off the radar screen in terms of major press and popularity, it's worth noting that long lived bands like U2 and the Rolling Stones have waxed and waned in terms of visibility over their careers.

Now about the album. I listened to In Rainbows on a long drive a couple of times through. I can't say I adore Radiohead. They are too pretentious and twee for my taste. I did like their album OK Computer quite a bit. It was kind of like an updated and more intelligent version of Pink Floyd's The Wall. I never thought much of The Wall, by the way, but 13 year olds have been captivated by that album for three decades now. It must have some serious juju. It seemed worth an update. OK Computer had some nice humor. I listened to it about a half-dozen times before my daughter swiped it from me. She liked it too. If she's reading this, I wouldn't mind having it back one of these years! ;)

In Rainbows, on the other hand, is something that maybe a twenty-something can like. But I'm not a twenty-something. The drums and beats are way forward in the mix and kind of plod along in 4/4 time. They sound tinny. As a matter of fact, the whole album sounds very low-fi in terms of engineering. The vocals are way, way back in the mix and it's impossible to make out most of the words without a lyric sheet, something I don't have. The songs sound sort of meditative and maybe at times humorous in terms of lyrical content (not that I could understand most of the words, but I remember a line about being eaten by worms in the ocean). Some of the songs, House of Cards in particular, were a painful and hard listen.

While the music is just not my cup of tea, Radiohead is onto something in terms of marketing. Let people pay what they want. It sure is a hell of a lot better than having them complain about prices and in the end having them pay nothing. There may be a future for recorded music after all.

*Whoops, it's 80 dollars

**Update on October 12th. The unverified number of 1.2 million downloads was noted in the Chicago Tribune. That's right up there with the best selling CDs worldwide and would likely be #1 for the week if it was included in the Soundscan sales charts of albums. Given that in a typical record deal, bands receive less than 2 bucks a CD after all costs are recouped, this number if true, means that Radiohead is doing much, much better financially selling on its own.

Another Day in a Showman's Life

A showman's life is a smokey bar
The fevered chase of a tiny star
Jesse Winchester


In the business of performing music there are three viable professional pathways: you're under 30 and trying to make it, under 30 and already have made a name for yourself, or older than 30 have been a big star at one time. I don't fit any of these categories so if I'm out there, I'm in doing it for one reason and one reason only. Fun.

I play for enjoyment. I'm there to entertain, not to be too profound. I want people to dance. I want them to smile. That said, lots of gigs aren't fun at all. In fact they are just plain awful. Usually, the crowd is small and hardly anyone is listening. But once every three or four gigs things click and it's a fun time for everyone, me and the crowd. That's what keeps me going.

Then there are the strange gigs, ones where in hindsight you just have to laugh. My last gig was one of those strange ones.

I was the last act on the bill. The act before me was a six piece funk band and a whole bunch of drunks came in off the street including a lot of homeless people to dance. I said to the booker that the funk band should just finish the night. He said no way he wanted all these drunks out of here.

So I go on playing solo.

One of the homeless people, drunk woman with the real ropey kind of body that drunks get over time, comes on stage and starts to play the house piano while I’m tuning. Then she starts talking to me about where she was from, New Orleans, and that there aren’t any good churches in SF with music. We talk a bit about the gospel singer Shirley Caesar.

Then I start playing doing my solo thing. The drunks keep dancing, and I stick to playing blues numbers. I’m fingerpicking so hard on the bass notes to keep up a decent rhythm that I pop a blood blister on my thumb. I keep playing.

I tell the crowd I'm going to play a song about my mother, Black Cherries. They look at me suspiciously when I say that. One of them shouts out to me, "Can we dance to it?" I say, no problem. They dance away.

The drunk woman I talked to earlier comes up to the stage while I’m playing and tries to give me a full kiss on the mouth. My hands are on the guitar. I can’t stop her. I close my lips faster than you can say “yuck!” and keep playing.

It's clearly time for me to change direction. I start to slow it down, playing these somber folky tunes. The drunks leave and wave good-bye. The booker is very happy to see them go. That leaves about a dozen people who politely listen to a few more tunes and chat with me after.

Just another day in a showman's life.

Confessions of a Yankee Hater

I make no pretense about being a nice guy who wouldn't harm a fly. While I'm not violent in the least, I have been known to have my intense dislikes and heap verbal abuse on those I hate. How am I supposed to like someone or something intensely if I can't hate someone or something else just as intensely? You can't have one side of the coin without the other.

One of my intense dislikes is the Yankees.

I hate them, hate them, hate them. Yes, I'm childish about it. I'm so childish about it that during their last World Series appearance I made a Yankees voodoo doll and beat it up whenever the Yankees were at bat. It worked! OK, not really. But it sure felt good to see them lose.

This year, I won't have to make a voodoo doll. Despite their astronomical payroll chock full of future Hall of Famers, the Yankees have happily cleaned out their lockers and like me, will be watching the World Series on their televisions. All of those multimillion dollar players are going to be spectators yet again. I'm a happy man.

Why do I hate them? It goes back a long ways. When I was a kid, they were an organization of racist holdouts. Other teams had rosters full of black players, but not the Yankees. They kept up their racist ways until they figured out that they couldn't win with that approach. Then George Steinbrenner came along and gave me another reason to hate the Yankees. They bought all of their talent from other teams and killed parity in Major League Baseball.

I admit that while I hate the Yankees, I love seeing many of the players. Derek Jeter, for instance, is a joy to watch. And even though the Yankees keep buying talent with buckets of money, I haven't been too worried in recent years about their possible success. I know they are going to choke no matter how many All Stars they have. I can watch them in relative calm and just appreciate the caliber of players they have bought.

You can analyze the Yankees until doomsday, but there is one thing they haven't had in several years: a true leader in the clubhouse. They had one the previous decade, Paul O'Neil. That man was intense. He wasn't a Hall of Fame caliber player by any stretch, but my feeling is that usually the key guy in any winning clubhouse isn't your best hitter or pitcher. It's the guy who can't stand to lose and will do anything, absolutely anything to help the team. Paul O'Neil was that kind of player.

A team needs one "gamer." Without that one guy, you can forget about winning a World Series and probably forget about getting to one as well.

In the 1980s, the Oakland A's had a gamer, Carney Lansford. He was a decent hitting and fielding third baseman without much power. But forget about the numbers. He knew how to win. He kept the team focused. When he retired, there was no one to replace him. You could replace his bat and glove, sure. But you couldn't replace his intensity or his leadership.

Gamers are hard to come by. Usually it's some guy batting .270 or so who made it to the majors as a result of hard work not god given ability. And for some reason, teams like the Yankees are more obsessed about numbers than leadership. So they tend to buy people like Alex Rodriguez, guys with golden bats and tin hearts. I'm quite happy that they do. Keep spending that money, George. I hope you go bankrupt and die a pauper you lying, spoiled s.o.b.! See I told you I wasn't nice.

And as for my beloved As, the less said the better. Wait 'til next year!

Adventures in the Wilderness

I haven't gone backpacking in forever. Actually, the last time was probably when I went to Bolivia and hiked on the Inca Trail in the Andes. That was ages ago. It was kind of a last hurrah. I was going off to teach at Duke and an old friend was having a lot of hip problems from a football injury and we figured it was now or never.

But nowadays, hip replacement surgery is almost routine and my old friend is back at it after many years of being in pain. He came up with the idea of sneaking in a trip up to the Sierras before the snow hit. Well our timing, as the picture above will attest, was a bit off.

The weather forecast was for snow north of Interstate 80 due to an Alaskan weather front that was moving in. But forecasts like this are notoriously inaccurate and at midnight on our first day I heard the snow falling hard on my tent, which I pitched at 8300 feet and 40 miles south of I80. It got down to about 20 degrees that night and snowed about two inches. I stayed warm and slept through the night no problem.

I was using borrowed gear that was vintage, stuff that was so old it had actually been made in the US! And it was funny to be using the kind of gear that I last saw when I was a teenager. I felt very nostalgic. It was almost like I was a teenager in an adult's body. There was a slight disconnect between what were almost reflex actions and what my body could actually do. For example, getting inside that little mountain tent required a wee bit more work than it used to.

We woke up to more snow. It looked like it was going to stay around 30 and snow all day. So we decided to haul out early. My dreams of fishing for trout while my friend hit a peak or two would have to wait for next year.

I felt grateful for being able to enjoy something like this. Sure, it was cold, but I've always loved cold weather. The air was crisp. It was quiet, peaceful and beautiful. The last time, I'd been on that same trail, it was blanketed in lupine and Indian paintbrush. What a difference a season makes.

My friend said he couldn't believe how good he felt waking up in the morning. This was his first backpacking trip since his hip surgery. My sweetie keeps relaying news to me about friends of hers whose spouses keep going in and out of the hospital and would never even think of taking a hike, much less haul 30 pounds on their back for a few hours to get to the wilderness. My body has always done whatever I've told it to do, albeit a bit more slowly than way back when. I've been one lucky s.o.b. in many ways.

Our Love of the Lowbrow

A while back I was walking down the street and a random question entered my head. Whatever happened to the actress Robin Givens? I have no idea why I came up with that question. My brain is one weird thing. And then I pondered a bit as I walked. Let's see. She's probably in her forties, too old for TV and movies for a woman. She's black, which makes it even tougher. I guessed that she was on the chitlin' circuit, the traveling theatrical troupes that play soap opera-like plays about life in black America. Then I went on to my next random thought.

Two weeks later, there happened to be an article in the NY Times about the chitlin' circuit aka the urban theater circuit. And the photo accompanying that article had Robin Givens acting on the stage. Bingo.

Many moons ago when I was living in Durham, NC, a black actor of some renown put down his own money to stage a two week run of an August Wilson play in an auditorium that seats about 800 people. I'm not a great fan of August Wilson, but he is the real deal as far as playwrights go. I went to the show. It was a full scale production with quality sets and Equity actors. Perhaps thirty people were in the auditorium, all of them black except for me and my sweetie. It was so sad. I knew the actor that put this production together was losing his shirt. At intermission, I talked to another member of the audience. I was curious. I asked him how many people show up when the chitlin' circuit comes to town. He said about 500.

Lowbrow wins every time.

It isn't just blacks. Back in the day when Yiddish theater was popular in America it wasn't the serious plays that brought patrons. Show a Yiddish translation of Shakespeare or a new play by Shalom Asch and like that actor from Durham, a theater producer would likely go bankrupt. Rather it was the equivalent of chitlin' theater, trashy soap operas of Jewish life disdainfully referred to as "der shunt" that packed the houses. One of the biggest stars of der shunt was Boris Tomashevsky, who a very unreliable source says comes from my mother's home town in Poland, and who was the grandfather of the San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

I'm sure there is the equivalent of the chitlin' circuit for every minority. But bad art isn't just the domain of minority theater. It's everywhere. And it sells like crazy. You name the medium. Television shows, theater, movies, music, novels. Trash dominates. We can't get enough of it.

I don't get it. In general, I can't stand the lowbrow. I don't watch television unless I'm sick in bed. Even then it bores me to tears. You couldn't pay me to go to ninety percent of the plays on Broadway. I'd much rather see a new play in some warehouse that seats fifty. As for novels, I confess a love of Elmore Leonard because he knows how to write dialogue better than anyone else on this planet. Other than him, I avoid bestsellers religiously.

Movies? When I watched Titanic I couldn't wait for Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio to drown. I was hoping a shark would devour them for good measure I hated that movie so much. It was the most boring time I've ever spent in a theater. The second most boring time was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For me, blockbusters are a ticket to a good hour of sleep.

I do make an exception for trashy music. I can't say I like most of pop music. It's generally written with ten year olds in mind. But the songs are only three minutes long so at least it's a short burst of pain. Plus pop music often brings back pleasant memories of my childhood when I incessantly listened to the stuff on my transistor radio. Plus I have the talent to write it. Believe me it takes talent to write trash of any sort including music. I note that undoubtedly the dumbest song ever written by the songwriter Dave Berg - a very talented man - was number one on the country charts for five weeks last year. It probably will be the biggest hit of his life. Trash sells.

A little while back I was in a used bookstore in Nashville looking for something to read for the plane back home. A middle age woman, heavyset with a hair style that went out of fashion circa 1973, walked in. She started talking to the owner. "I'm looking for a book where I don't have to think," she said. "I think all day and I get tired of it." The owner steered her to some John Grisham, someone I have never read. I made a mental note never to read him. I thought about what the woman said. If I ever get tired of thinking it will be time for me to say good bye to this body of mine. So far it hasn't happened. Even during slack times, there's always the equivalent of a Robin Givens to think about.

Nobody's Perfect and Some are Even Less So

Last week, I was talking to a songwriter who's written a lot of hits who stopped me in mid-sentence to ask, "You're Jewish, right?" I nodded. It's pretty obvious. Even though I was born in this country, I still manage to speak with a slight Yiddish accent.* "My husband is, too," she said. And then she proceeded to tell me the story of another Jewish songwriter about my age.

He was having some success early on getting cuts on records. And as a result, publishers and big name writers started to get very interested in him. He got an invitation to visit a huge writer, one of the biggest names in the business, someone who is now a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I won't mention his name because I don't have absolute confirmation that this story is true. But it's very believable.

Anyway, the guy goes to visit this big name writer and he's all excited. This writer is one of his heroes. He's one of my heroes in songwriting, too. The big name writer ushers him into his study and the guy's jaw drops. Behind the desk, there is a huge Nazi flag. The room is chock full of Nazi memorabilia. The big-name writer has him sit down in this Nazi haven, gets behind his desk and smiles and mentions the guys surname. "That's a Jewish name isn't it?" They spend another tense fifteen minutes together and he leaves.

One of his heroes turns out to be a white supremacist. Now that guy does something I would never do. He surmises that maybe there are other neo-Nazis in this business as well. He wants to do well. So he decides to change his surname.

This story has repercussions for me. From now on, whenever I think of one of those wonderful songs the big-name songwriter wrote, I won't be able to shut out the information that the person who wrote it was a white supremacist. I'll hum a few bars of a tune and part of me will want to segue into Deutschland Uber Alles. But I'll still love that tune. And I'll still admire the hell out of the talent that wrote it.

For me, talent is divorced from personality. I don't care if the person is a monster. He or she could be a white supremacist, a mass murderer or even a Republican (just kidding about the Republican thing, you know). As long as they bring the creative goods to the table it doesn't matter to me. The truth of the matter is that many creative people, myself included, are at the very least neurotic as hell. We aren't normal otherwise we'd aspire to work on Wall Street and make millions. I was a professor for many years, a very respectable profession in most eyes. By the end, I was bored out of my gourd. It wasn't for me.

It's wonderful if a person is humble, moral and a great citizen. But when it comes to the creative world, it's not anything I'm concerned about. Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite who abetted the Nazis. Who cares? He was a wonderful poet. Woody Allen dumped his wife and married his own step-daughter. That's not my concern. In his prime he was one of the funniest writers of the 20th century. Now I am very reluctant to pay for creative works of such people once I realize they are scum - I'll stick with using the library - but I still admire their talent.

The public I know is far less forgiving. They want the whole package. The artist, just like the athlete, is expected to be a role model. There is a curious exception to this rule that's worth noting. If they are pop music artists - Madonna, 50 Cent, et al. - they can be as scummy as anything. As a matter of fact, that's part of their appeal. But aside from the world of pop music we want our artists to be wonderful people, someone our children can look up to and we'd want to invite over for dinner. It's fine that the public wants artists be likable. But if we included likability as a requirement, we'd miss much of the great art (and science) that has been created.

*When I was performing once, the MC introduced me as "the love child of Albert Brooks and Neil Diamond." The shoe fits.

Reflections on My Former Boss

It has been communicated to me on the basis of my last post that I must think that my former boss, Richard Brodhead, is evil. There is a big difference between being evil and feckless. In the emotionally immature venue of the blogosphere, name calling is rampant and the name Hitler seems to come up far more often than it should. I don't ever attach the name Hitler to anyone but Hitler himself, but when I think of Brodhead, I think of another prominent person of WWII vintage, Neville Chamberlain. Like Lord Chamberlain, Brodhead is a wimp. And wimps can do a lot of damage when they are in positions of leadership.

Brodhead's inability to show any sort of spine started literally from day one on the job. On that day, Coach K and Joe Alleva team tagged Brodhead in one of the dopiest and crassest power plays imaginable. Coach K leaked information to the press about a job offer that he received from the Los Angeles Lakers. The odds of him taking that job were slim, but he wanted to get something out of it. Coach K couldn't even wait a few days for the new president to settle into the job. He wanted money for his program. He wanted to show Brodhead who was more important on campus.

In response, Brodhead not only delivered a few million dollars in concessions to Coach K, but literally begged with students outside of the tower that houses Coach K. It was dopey beyond belief for a college president to do this. In one short week, Brodhead lost his authority on campus.

The fecklessness continued. For some reason, Duke was duped into allowing an anti-Semitic organization with ties to terrorists, the International Solidarity Movement*, to house a conference on campus. No, I don't think that Brodhead is anti-Semitic. My guess is that Duke was just lazy about doing its homework about this organization and didn't know what they were getting into. But once it was clear that they had made this mistake, Duke could have easily withdrawn their sponsorship of this conference. To do that, however, would be to admit that a mistake was made. And Duke, like most institutions, is reluctant to admit that it makes mistakes about anything.

Brodhead committed to let this hate-fest go on. In his dopey, feckless way he decided that this was a "teachable moment." There were only two things that were being taught: Brodhead was incompetent and universities can be duped into housing anything. At the end of the conference, a virulently anti-Semitic op-ed appeared in the student newspaper entitled, "The Jews" that brought forth every nasty stereotype imaginable. What Brodhead managed to do through his fecklessness was to cause immense hurt to the small community of Jewish students and faculty on campus. His effort at appeasement after this conference took place was to fund a campus kosher kitchen. Lovely. Had the Jewish community asked, he probably would have thrown in a mikvah, too.

About this same time, another strange thing happened. Peter Nicholas, Board of Trustees member and namesake of Duke's environmental school, somehow got a bee in his bonnet about getting more national recognition for the school. I don't know who came up with this idea, but Peter Nicholas decided it was worthwhile to fund to the tune of about 300K a series of advertorials in the NY Times about environmental issues.

The content of these advertorials looked like something that came out of the Duke chapter of the Sierra Club. They were embarrassing in their level of environmentalist bias. This was not surprising. Duke's environmental school is a problematic thing. It's rife with environmentalists masquerading as scientists.

Several scientists, including me, in the environmental school were not happy to see our good name associated with environmental indoctrination. I wrote a letter to Brodhead asking him to intercede. I received nothing in response. There was clearly no way Brodhead was going to say no to a billionaire Board of Trustees member. The advertorials continued throughout the year. Not only were they a waste of money; they made it obvious to anyone who read the NY Times that Duke was not a place for objective environmental science.

I left shortly thereafter. Then the lacrosse affair hit. Everyone knows about the fecklessness and spinelessness of Brodhead during the scandal.

People tell me Brodhead is a nice guy. I find that believable. But when people mention the word integrity in association with Brodhead, I find that laughable. When Brodhead was a dean at Yale, I raised a minor national brou-ha-ha about grade inflation at American colleges and universities. Yale would give me no data citing confidentiality issues. This seemed like a ridiculous excuse, but I let it pass without comment.

After my grade inflation work was published, an AP reporter called me to ask among other things, which schools refused to give me data. I mentioned Yale and the confidentiality excuse. He expressed disbelief that they told me this. I told him to call up Yale for confirmation.

The AP reporter did his homework and contacted Brodhead - someone I did not talk to directly - for confirmation. He received it. In response to the AP reporter's questions about grade inflation, Brodhead stated that grades were higher at Yale because students were better and working harder. The former assertion is debatable. The latter assertion is categorically false. When faced with a problem like grade inflation, Brodhead decided to: 1) hide the data; 2) try to finesse the problem away with b.s.

No Brodhead isn't evil. He is feckless. He is spineless. I've only received one communication from Brodhead. It was in response to an email I sent about him being as wimpy as Duke's previous president. He wrote back saying he had no intention of being a wimp. The facts show otherwise.

Now I admit, I don't have a thorough and detailed view of Brodhead's career as president of Duke. I only have a few snapshots. And they are rather ugly. It may be that behind the scenes he has shown real backbone in dealing with other problems. If that's the case, I'd love to hear about them.

*Correction, Palestinian Solidarity Movement