I listened to an hour long interview of John Yoo the other day on KQED. You can listen to it here.
I found it fascinating. Usually, when you hear deranged people, you notice the harshness of their tone. Dick Cheney for instance is an outright lunatic. You can hear it in his voice, that certainty mixed with anger. I talked to someone who knew Cheney back in college. According to him, Cheney was a lunatic back then, too. He talked the same way. Yoo is different than Cheney. He talks in the calm monotone of the text to speech girl on my GPS. But there is no doubt about it. He's not simply an extremist. He's crazy.
In his conversations on KQED and elsewhere, Yoo tries to justify his authorization of the use of waterboarding in a number of ways. One is that it's no big deal. US soldiers are waterboarded to prepare them for future possible torture and suffer no harmful psychological effects. This is an incredibly specious argument. A soldier knows he or she isn't going to die. It's training, an act done with strict guidelines, not a random and uncontrolled act of psychological torture.
Another argument Yoo tries to make is that after 9/11 the environment in the White House was very tough. People were under extreme pressure and had to deal with issues where there was no precedent. This is an odd justification for his role in authorizing the use of torture on "enemy combatants" in our "war on terror." Because he was under pressure and stress, he's allowed to be immoral?
This leads me to another justification Yoo tries to make and one that the Justice Department apparently agrees with although they call Yoo to task for exercising "poor judgment." Yoo states that it is not the role of a lawyer to tell a client what is moral, simply what is legal. I happen to think that this justification is the only one I've heard from Yoo that makes any amount of sense. Mafia lawyers use this justification all of the time. What Yoo is saying is that he shouldn't be disbarred because he is a shyster. I agree.
But look at the memo Yoo authored to find justification for the use of waterboarding. You can find it here and here.
To write such a document, which in cold clinical terms describes, according to the author, just what kind of torture can be applied without being illegal, you have to be crazy and heartless. Essentially, what Yoo says is that the US can do whatever it wants to captured enemies on foreign soil in a time of war as long as it doesn't involve assault, maiming, or stalking with clear intent to assault, maim or murder. What Yoo is saying is that anything that doesn't leave marks or result in murder (or gives the victim the impression that they will be murdered or have permanent scars) isn't torture.
What kind of sane human being can come up with an interpretation like this? According to Yoo, it's legal for the enemy to be subjected to extreme heat and cold (at least one victim of US interrogations died due to hypothermia) and they can be subjected to pyschological torture to such an extent that out of despair they ultimately commit suicide. There have been tens of suicide attempts and at least five deaths by suicide at Guantanamo. In the words of Yoo:
"By contrast to 'severe pain,' the phrase 'prolonged mental harm' appears nowhere else in the U.S. Code nor does it appear in relevant medical literature or international human rights reports. Not only must the mental harm be prolonged to amount to severe mental pain and suffering, but also. it must be caused by or result from one of the acts listed in the statute."
So unless the mental harm is due to assault or maiming, unless it produces marks, it's OK. The Justice Department says Yoo in his work exercised "poor judgment" and in fact Yoo's interpretations were rescinded later in the Bush administration. This isn't poor judgment. This is in fact the writing of someone off his rocker.
The alternative spin on this is, of course, that Yoo isn't really crazy. He doesn't really believe any of this. He's just a lackey for true lunatics like Dick Cheney and tried to find whatever loopholes in current law that would allow the Bush administration to employ torture. In this interpretation, Yoo is just a cynical, immoral s.o.b. After listening to Yoo for an hour, though, I don't think this interpretation is correct. Yoo really is just plain nuts.
Here is what has happened in the US over the last several years. In response to 9/11, this country did a lot of immoral and loathsome things. We were angry. We were as a nation temporarily insane. We wanted retribution in the worst way. So we went into Afghanistan and with no coherent plan except vengeance murdered a lot of people. We then went to Iraq with no coherent plan except vengeance and murdered a whole lot more. We've spent probably close to two trillion dollars on this vengeance spree. We've lost over 5000 good young men along the way.
In order to justify our craziness, we tried to find some people to write legal documents that would find us within our legal right to do all of the immoral and loathsome things we did out of vengeance. John Yoo was one of those people. What he did was reprehensible. That he has no remorse for his immoral acts shows just how crazy he is or at the very least shows just how the human mind is able to rationalize the worst of actions.
Is John Yoo a war criminal? If he is there is a long list of them. We are still on a vengeance spree although we call it a mission to create democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. It sounds better to call it that. It also sounds better to call torture enhanced interrogation. Yoo has gone back to UC-Berkeley. Bush has gone back to Texas. Yet we are still murdering. We are likely still torturing. When will it end?
Friday, February 26, 2010
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
What I Want From Health Care
My brother passed a little while back. He wasn't a healthy man. But he was actually feeling pretty good at the time, and died unexpectedly. I'm still shocked and saddened by it. Anyway, over the time of his illness he decided that it might be better for him to leave this country. He wanted to find a place where he could get decent and cheap health care.
It turns out that through an obscure law, both he and I are eligible for Polish citizenship. My brother started preparing the paperwork to move to Poland. I told him he was crazy. He didn't speak a word of Polish and understood a lot less of it than even me. He wasn't convinced by my arguments. Would he have gone through with the move? I doubt it. But think of it. A US citizen born on US soil thought it advantageous to move to Poland, a place where he had never been, for health care. If that isn't an indictment on our health care system, I don't know what is.
For a year now, Congress and Obama have been trying to hammer out something they call "health care reform." Mostly, what they are proposing to do is expand the health care rolls. That's a worthwhile effort. But I have to ask - aside from the warm fuzzy feeling I would get if 30 million more people would have access to health insurance - what's in it for me?
Speaking selfishly, I want one thing and one thing only. If I get seriously sick starting tomorrow, I don't want to go bankrupt by the time I'm eligible for Medicare (if both Medicare and I are still around in a dozen years or so). I don't want my nest egg wiped out and to leave my sweetie with nothing just so I can hang on. I don't want to see anything worse than the following: I get really sick for many years and my total costs for all of my care end up in the 20 to 40K range per year. I can handle that. My sweetie can handle that.
I'm not trying to be morbid here. I don't expect this worst case scenario to happen or anything close to it. I hope to stay healthy for many, many more years. My uncle says I take after my grandfather who was lucid and in great shape until his 90s; I hope he's right. My daughter says I'm not allowed to age past 38. That's asking a lot don't you think? But I'm hoping to try to keep her unworried about my health for a long time.
Still, suppose I do get sick. My insurance rates will likely go up three to five times what they are now and that's if my insurance company isn't aggressive and doesn't try to find some ridiculous reason to kick me off the rolls. With inflation over the years, we'll be talking at least 50K a year to keep me going with out of pocket expenses. That's horrific. I could be out one million bucks easy.
Looking at what has been proposed by Congress and Obama, my prospects would likely be no better under "health care reform" than they are now. My insurance policy probably couldn't be terminated. There would be no two million dollar cap. But I'd still be paying at least 50K a year to keep me going. Health care reform for me personally is likely a big zero.
And what about other less fortunate people than me? If you're middle class or lower, you will benefit under the proposed changes because the government will cover up to around 70 percent of your insurance. So I'm getting a warm fuzzy feeling not just about 30 million who can't get health insurance now, but also a warm fuzzy feeling for those 10 million or so middle class people with individual policies like mine. That's better than nothing. A lot better than nothing. Still, those people are likely going to pay on the order of 15K a year for their care if they are sick even with government help. How many people can afford anything close to that drain on their finances?
As for me, if my cost estimates are too low (and they may well be), Poland may not be a bad option. Israel would be much better, though. I can speak the language. I have family there. Imagine that. With or without health care reform, an American citizen in bad health might be better off moving to another country. With or without health care reform, this country is not handling its health care crisis very well.
It turns out that through an obscure law, both he and I are eligible for Polish citizenship. My brother started preparing the paperwork to move to Poland. I told him he was crazy. He didn't speak a word of Polish and understood a lot less of it than even me. He wasn't convinced by my arguments. Would he have gone through with the move? I doubt it. But think of it. A US citizen born on US soil thought it advantageous to move to Poland, a place where he had never been, for health care. If that isn't an indictment on our health care system, I don't know what is.
For a year now, Congress and Obama have been trying to hammer out something they call "health care reform." Mostly, what they are proposing to do is expand the health care rolls. That's a worthwhile effort. But I have to ask - aside from the warm fuzzy feeling I would get if 30 million more people would have access to health insurance - what's in it for me?
Speaking selfishly, I want one thing and one thing only. If I get seriously sick starting tomorrow, I don't want to go bankrupt by the time I'm eligible for Medicare (if both Medicare and I are still around in a dozen years or so). I don't want my nest egg wiped out and to leave my sweetie with nothing just so I can hang on. I don't want to see anything worse than the following: I get really sick for many years and my total costs for all of my care end up in the 20 to 40K range per year. I can handle that. My sweetie can handle that.
I'm not trying to be morbid here. I don't expect this worst case scenario to happen or anything close to it. I hope to stay healthy for many, many more years. My uncle says I take after my grandfather who was lucid and in great shape until his 90s; I hope he's right. My daughter says I'm not allowed to age past 38. That's asking a lot don't you think? But I'm hoping to try to keep her unworried about my health for a long time.
Still, suppose I do get sick. My insurance rates will likely go up three to five times what they are now and that's if my insurance company isn't aggressive and doesn't try to find some ridiculous reason to kick me off the rolls. With inflation over the years, we'll be talking at least 50K a year to keep me going with out of pocket expenses. That's horrific. I could be out one million bucks easy.
Looking at what has been proposed by Congress and Obama, my prospects would likely be no better under "health care reform" than they are now. My insurance policy probably couldn't be terminated. There would be no two million dollar cap. But I'd still be paying at least 50K a year to keep me going. Health care reform for me personally is likely a big zero.
And what about other less fortunate people than me? If you're middle class or lower, you will benefit under the proposed changes because the government will cover up to around 70 percent of your insurance. So I'm getting a warm fuzzy feeling not just about 30 million who can't get health insurance now, but also a warm fuzzy feeling for those 10 million or so middle class people with individual policies like mine. That's better than nothing. A lot better than nothing. Still, those people are likely going to pay on the order of 15K a year for their care if they are sick even with government help. How many people can afford anything close to that drain on their finances?
As for me, if my cost estimates are too low (and they may well be), Poland may not be a bad option. Israel would be much better, though. I can speak the language. I have family there. Imagine that. With or without health care reform, an American citizen in bad health might be better off moving to another country. With or without health care reform, this country is not handling its health care crisis very well.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Sometimes Those Tricks Are a Good Thing
I went back to the Triangle last week for a few days. I moved away in 2001 and to say that I was ecstatic to leave is an understatement. I'm an urban, ethnic guy who has a chip on his shoulder about pretentiousness. The Triangle isn't urban. It's an easy, slow paced kind of place where every waking day I had to force myself to slow down lest I scare everyone around me. Academia - especially East Coast academia, which heavily influences Duke - is all about pretentiousness. I could go down the list of complaints I had about my time there, but it would bore even me to write them. Basically, I was monumentally miserable.
That said, I still commuted to the Triangle during the fall semester for four more years. It wasn't my first choice to do so, but the money was too good to pass up and rather than giving me one big lump sum severance payment, Duke for some reason wanted to draw the process out for a few years (I think, that they thought I'd see the error of my ways and come back to the fold; alternatively, they thought that I would blow up emotionally sometime along the way and they'd save some dough.). I still go back a few times every year to visit family. At first, this going back was very difficult. I had so, so many bad memories of the place that I could feel my heart race and bile rise every time I went to the airport to fly to NC. The first time I went back after I had formally retired, I was in a nasty rage for the first hour of the flight. What can I say? I'm an emotional guy. My sweetie sometimes calls me a delicate flower with plumbing skills.
Back in 2006, I ran into a former colleague while I was in Durham waiting for my sweetie who was visiting a friend. He said I should stop by the department. I couldn't imagine stepping foot on the Duke campus, much less visit my old office. Just the thought of it filled me with dread.
Last year, though, I went to the Duke Gardens with my sweetie and daughter. We had a great time walking along the pathways, looking at the changes and additions made over the years. When I first came to Duke, I'd walk through the Gardens every day on my way to work. I had a lot of fond memories watching the seasons change and the flowers bloom. But those warm memories stopped at the road that separated the Gardens from the main campus. I had no wish to cross that road last year. I still don't.
But the rage thing has disappeared. Last week, I walked with a relative around the American Tobacco complex and the new performing arts center, the DPAC. I felt a strange kind of pride. Durham was an absolute dump when I lived there. The only thing "to do" at night was to get mugged. It felt good to see some signs of real life. Even seeing the Duke basketball players on TV this year has given me a vague, fuzzy warm feeling despite the fact that most of them are 900 SAT types who have no real relationship to the academic side of Duke.
Where does this warmth come from? It really is my mind playing tricks on me, completely distorting my years in the Triangle. I still have nothing but contempt for many of the people I met at Duke - they were just too slimy - but I'm now able to separate the people from the place. My relative asked me if there was any time in the Triangle when I wasn't miserable. I said three years were pretty good. But I'd learned a lot there even in the bad times. I learned how to write a book. I learned how to be a good speaker. I learned how to force myself to slow down when it was clear that I was scaring the hell out of people. I learned about a different culture, the South. There was considerable value in my time there.
I couldn't have said that two years ago. I didn't have the perspective of time. I didn't have my mind working to erase the worst of it or at least pushing the worst of it into the background. I don't think that I'm unique in saying that having the mind alter the past to make it more palatable isn't always a bad thing.
That said, I still commuted to the Triangle during the fall semester for four more years. It wasn't my first choice to do so, but the money was too good to pass up and rather than giving me one big lump sum severance payment, Duke for some reason wanted to draw the process out for a few years (I think, that they thought I'd see the error of my ways and come back to the fold; alternatively, they thought that I would blow up emotionally sometime along the way and they'd save some dough.). I still go back a few times every year to visit family. At first, this going back was very difficult. I had so, so many bad memories of the place that I could feel my heart race and bile rise every time I went to the airport to fly to NC. The first time I went back after I had formally retired, I was in a nasty rage for the first hour of the flight. What can I say? I'm an emotional guy. My sweetie sometimes calls me a delicate flower with plumbing skills.
Back in 2006, I ran into a former colleague while I was in Durham waiting for my sweetie who was visiting a friend. He said I should stop by the department. I couldn't imagine stepping foot on the Duke campus, much less visit my old office. Just the thought of it filled me with dread.
Last year, though, I went to the Duke Gardens with my sweetie and daughter. We had a great time walking along the pathways, looking at the changes and additions made over the years. When I first came to Duke, I'd walk through the Gardens every day on my way to work. I had a lot of fond memories watching the seasons change and the flowers bloom. But those warm memories stopped at the road that separated the Gardens from the main campus. I had no wish to cross that road last year. I still don't.
But the rage thing has disappeared. Last week, I walked with a relative around the American Tobacco complex and the new performing arts center, the DPAC. I felt a strange kind of pride. Durham was an absolute dump when I lived there. The only thing "to do" at night was to get mugged. It felt good to see some signs of real life. Even seeing the Duke basketball players on TV this year has given me a vague, fuzzy warm feeling despite the fact that most of them are 900 SAT types who have no real relationship to the academic side of Duke.
Where does this warmth come from? It really is my mind playing tricks on me, completely distorting my years in the Triangle. I still have nothing but contempt for many of the people I met at Duke - they were just too slimy - but I'm now able to separate the people from the place. My relative asked me if there was any time in the Triangle when I wasn't miserable. I said three years were pretty good. But I'd learned a lot there even in the bad times. I learned how to write a book. I learned how to be a good speaker. I learned how to force myself to slow down when it was clear that I was scaring the hell out of people. I learned about a different culture, the South. There was considerable value in my time there.
I couldn't have said that two years ago. I didn't have the perspective of time. I didn't have my mind working to erase the worst of it or at least pushing the worst of it into the background. I don't think that I'm unique in saying that having the mind alter the past to make it more palatable isn't always a bad thing.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Lure of the Decimal Point
In the world of rock music probably the most influential tastemaker out there is a website, Pitchfork. It's known for taking pop music oh so seriously, so seriously that I find it hilarious. Here's an example of the style of Pitchfork's reviews. It comes from a recent album review for a band named Astro Coast:
"Nowhere is this more true than on their breakout single 'Swim', which spent the second half of last year generating so much praise that it threatened to make any future album unnecessary or future hype redundant. But even after so many listens, its snowblind-ish reverb is still disorienting-- especially contrasted with its crisp, power-chord hook. It may sound like they're hitting you with their best shot, but after an impassioned 'oh oh oh!' from singer John Paul Pitts, Surfer Blood explodes into an even bigger chorus and 'Swim' becomes almost overpoweringly fist-pumping."
College students, in particular music crazy male college students, seem to believe every word in Pitchfork's reviews. I've talked to them about this web site. They tend to be reverential, just like I used to be reverential about Rolling Stone back in the day. But the fact is that there are a lot of web sites like Pitchfork nowadays. What makes Pitchfork deserving of such influence?
I think it's due to one reason and one reason only. When Pitchfork rates albums, they don't just give them a thumbs up or thumbs down, or rate them on a scale of one to five. No, their rating scale goes from 0 to 10 in 0.1 increments. The Astro Coast album, which they love, gets a rating of 8.5. No, it's not merely 8 or 9. It's 8.5. An album by someone named Scout Niblet, which they simply like, gets a rating of a mere 7.3.
There's something about having the chutzpah to think you are so knowledgeable and discerning that whole numbers just won't do. You need a decimal point. It looks impressive. It just does. Pitchfork came upon a brilliant marketing idea by rating albums with 0.1 precision. You're inclined to believe them more than someone who simply rates on a 1 to 10 scale.
Pitchfork isn't the only one to understand this. Our nation's economists do the same thing. Every year they make forecasts for the growth in our nation's GDP. These forecasts tend, in hindsight, to be terrible. Yet we pay an ungodly number of economists to make such forecasts and use them for planning. The government pays economists to do this. Private companies also pay them because they have some crazed notion that there are some gurus out there that can do the impossible: make accurate forecasts of future economic activity.
When these forecasts come out, economists don't just use whole numbers and say the economy will grow or shrink by x percent. No, they, just like Pitchfork, feel a need to add that extra number beyond the decimal point. It just looks more impressive. So while their forecasts of GDP growth may well be off by two or three precent (which often equates to errors of 100 percent or more), economists always make predictions with faux precision. If they didn't, I honestly think they would command less respect.
Along those lines, I was traveling yesterday and noted the alert level of orange at the airport. I thought, man it's been orange forever. People have become so accustomed to seeing orange that they are probably getting blase about airport security. We need more than yellow, orange and red. There ought to be different shades of orange or better yet, we should just go to a zero to four numbering system.
Pure orange would be 3.0. But we could expect some variation from day to day. If a tape of Osama Bin Laden came out we could go up to 3.3 or maybe even 3.4 for the week. On a slow news day, we could go down to 2.7. I'm guessing that if we made such a change, the public just might pay more attention. They also might actually respect the national security people in Washington more. Faux precision seems to have its psychological benefits.
"Nowhere is this more true than on their breakout single 'Swim', which spent the second half of last year generating so much praise that it threatened to make any future album unnecessary or future hype redundant. But even after so many listens, its snowblind-ish reverb is still disorienting-- especially contrasted with its crisp, power-chord hook. It may sound like they're hitting you with their best shot, but after an impassioned 'oh oh oh!' from singer John Paul Pitts, Surfer Blood explodes into an even bigger chorus and 'Swim' becomes almost overpoweringly fist-pumping."
College students, in particular music crazy male college students, seem to believe every word in Pitchfork's reviews. I've talked to them about this web site. They tend to be reverential, just like I used to be reverential about Rolling Stone back in the day. But the fact is that there are a lot of web sites like Pitchfork nowadays. What makes Pitchfork deserving of such influence?
I think it's due to one reason and one reason only. When Pitchfork rates albums, they don't just give them a thumbs up or thumbs down, or rate them on a scale of one to five. No, their rating scale goes from 0 to 10 in 0.1 increments. The Astro Coast album, which they love, gets a rating of 8.5. No, it's not merely 8 or 9. It's 8.5. An album by someone named Scout Niblet, which they simply like, gets a rating of a mere 7.3.
There's something about having the chutzpah to think you are so knowledgeable and discerning that whole numbers just won't do. You need a decimal point. It looks impressive. It just does. Pitchfork came upon a brilliant marketing idea by rating albums with 0.1 precision. You're inclined to believe them more than someone who simply rates on a 1 to 10 scale.
Pitchfork isn't the only one to understand this. Our nation's economists do the same thing. Every year they make forecasts for the growth in our nation's GDP. These forecasts tend, in hindsight, to be terrible. Yet we pay an ungodly number of economists to make such forecasts and use them for planning. The government pays economists to do this. Private companies also pay them because they have some crazed notion that there are some gurus out there that can do the impossible: make accurate forecasts of future economic activity.
When these forecasts come out, economists don't just use whole numbers and say the economy will grow or shrink by x percent. No, they, just like Pitchfork, feel a need to add that extra number beyond the decimal point. It just looks more impressive. So while their forecasts of GDP growth may well be off by two or three precent (which often equates to errors of 100 percent or more), economists always make predictions with faux precision. If they didn't, I honestly think they would command less respect.
Along those lines, I was traveling yesterday and noted the alert level of orange at the airport. I thought, man it's been orange forever. People have become so accustomed to seeing orange that they are probably getting blase about airport security. We need more than yellow, orange and red. There ought to be different shades of orange or better yet, we should just go to a zero to four numbering system.
Pure orange would be 3.0. But we could expect some variation from day to day. If a tape of Osama Bin Laden came out we could go up to 3.3 or maybe even 3.4 for the week. On a slow news day, we could go down to 2.7. I'm guessing that if we made such a change, the public just might pay more attention. They also might actually respect the national security people in Washington more. Faux precision seems to have its psychological benefits.
Monday, February 15, 2010
It's A Lot Like Being An Actor Without the Glamor
There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week which tried to persuade students to avoid getting humanities Ph.D.s unless they were wealthy. The idea was that there were no jobs. Essentially Ph.D. students are being exploited by ego-maniacal professors and institutions that need warm bodies to justify their research programs. After seven years or so of toiling away on your dissertation, what you can expect at best is to live a life on the margins of academia, teaching as an adjunct or non-tenured staff.
Now it's true that I'm about as dyspeptic person as you can find on this planet. And you might think that I would wholeheartedly ascribe to this bleak view. But I don't. Not quite. I think this assessment is slightly off pitch. There are tenure track jobs in the humanities. Some of them are in places no one in their right mind would want to teach. But there are probably on the order of 500 decent tenure track jobs out there for new faculty in the humanities every year. Yes, it's true that about 300 people will vie for each one of these jobs and the odds of an individual getting a tenure track position in the humanities in this day and age are ridiculously slim. But the jobs are there.
What has happened in the humanities is that job availability is so tiny that getting a good job with a newly minted Ph.D. is a lot like getting a decent acting gig. Yes, the amount of work you have to put into your craft just to start in academe is ridiculously long in comparison to acting. Yes, glamor or big bucks don't await you even if you manage to get one of those cherished tenure track jobs, but you get to do more or less what you are (hopefully) passionate about doing.
OK, I'll back up a bit and show a little bit of my trademark pessimism. Let's roll with this acting analogy. I once spent about three hours with an actress chewing the fat at a bar in LA. She was a graduate of Julliard. She had an agent and she was consistently getting TV jobs. She'd get decent guest slots on shows like ER where she'd be, more or less, the patient of the week. She was making a living in a very perilous profession. But she wasn't happy. In most of her movie and TV roles she was a crack-addled hooker or worse. She was getting tired of playing the same part with the same stupid fake-ghetto lines. She would much rather have been playing Shakespeare in New York.
Now suppose you're a new Ph.D. and manage to get as lucky as the actress with whom I talked. You end up in some middling place. The students aren't so hot. You're teaching humanities to students with looks of boredom so profound that you wonder why you're even trying. Yes, you like your research, but getting an academic humanities book published these days is almost impossible and nobody reads those books anyway. You publish an article here and there. Your colleagues are petty and nuts beyond belief (this is true everywhere). You've made it in comparison to almost everyone you went to school with, but like that actress, you're miserable.
I have no sympathy for someone in that situation, actually. I didn't have sympathy with the actress, either. I told her that. I said that if she loved acting, truly loved acting, she shouldn't be complaining so much. She was clearly very talented otherwise she wouldn't be getting the jobs that she was getting in the ridiculous marketplace of Hollywood. She should be happy that others recognized that she was great at what she did. Wishing for Shakespeare was wishing for something that basically didn't exist. She needed an attitude adjustment, I said. She should be thankful that she could pay her rent doing something for which she had god given talent.
I don't think that anyone ever told her anything like that before. Actually, I know that they hadn't. She said so. And then she asked me to be her life coach, that I could make a living talking to actors and actresses like her. I declined the offer, but I was flattered I had to admit.
Now getting back to academia and the humanities. If you truly love the humanities and you are talented and lucky enough to get a half-way decent tenure track job, you should be mature enough to accept the fact that it isn't perfect. There are thousands who want what you have. If you can't find joy in your situation, you probably don't have much passion for your chosen field of research.
Those that know me will likely be astounded to have read the words above. After all, I walked away from a tenured job. I was miserable there. No, it wasn't a great place, but it was the academic equivalent of getting a regular slot on some stupid sitcom. Sure, I would have rather done the academic equivalent of Shakespeare, but it paid the bills and I had time for research.
The thing is that I didn't need that job and I had other passions besides doing academic research. If I had needed a steady paycheck, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have been fine where I was. I would have focused on the twenty percent of the undergraduate student body that was truly impressive. I would have kept on being very picky about graduate students and enjoyed the one or two students I had around who were bright and happened for some reason to need to live in the Triangle while they pursued their Ph.D.s.
And my colleagues? Yes it's true that eighty percent of them were absolutely nuts, and a good seventy percent of them were just plain miserable. I would have ignored them. There were plenty of other places besides my workplace where I could meet decent and fun people to be around. I already had gone that route by the time I received tenure.
What about leadership? Oh god, those people were almost all corrupt and disgusting through and through. Talk about slimy. But the fact is that leadership rarely intrudes on a professor's life. You can ignore deans and ignore committee meetings and no one will say boo.
Being an academic - in and out of the humanities - can be a good gig. If that's where your passion lies, I'd say go for it. I just have two caveats. One, you better love your field of study. Two, you better be aware that getting a decent academic job - not just in the humanities, but in any field - is almost as rare as getting a decent acting gig. The odds are very, very tough. If you don't like those odds, you shouldn't even take your GREs. Stop right now. Go think of something like law school or sales instead.
Or who knows? Maybe you should try your hand at acting. After all, the odds aren't much worse.
Now it's true that I'm about as dyspeptic person as you can find on this planet. And you might think that I would wholeheartedly ascribe to this bleak view. But I don't. Not quite. I think this assessment is slightly off pitch. There are tenure track jobs in the humanities. Some of them are in places no one in their right mind would want to teach. But there are probably on the order of 500 decent tenure track jobs out there for new faculty in the humanities every year. Yes, it's true that about 300 people will vie for each one of these jobs and the odds of an individual getting a tenure track position in the humanities in this day and age are ridiculously slim. But the jobs are there.
What has happened in the humanities is that job availability is so tiny that getting a good job with a newly minted Ph.D. is a lot like getting a decent acting gig. Yes, the amount of work you have to put into your craft just to start in academe is ridiculously long in comparison to acting. Yes, glamor or big bucks don't await you even if you manage to get one of those cherished tenure track jobs, but you get to do more or less what you are (hopefully) passionate about doing.
OK, I'll back up a bit and show a little bit of my trademark pessimism. Let's roll with this acting analogy. I once spent about three hours with an actress chewing the fat at a bar in LA. She was a graduate of Julliard. She had an agent and she was consistently getting TV jobs. She'd get decent guest slots on shows like ER where she'd be, more or less, the patient of the week. She was making a living in a very perilous profession. But she wasn't happy. In most of her movie and TV roles she was a crack-addled hooker or worse. She was getting tired of playing the same part with the same stupid fake-ghetto lines. She would much rather have been playing Shakespeare in New York.
Now suppose you're a new Ph.D. and manage to get as lucky as the actress with whom I talked. You end up in some middling place. The students aren't so hot. You're teaching humanities to students with looks of boredom so profound that you wonder why you're even trying. Yes, you like your research, but getting an academic humanities book published these days is almost impossible and nobody reads those books anyway. You publish an article here and there. Your colleagues are petty and nuts beyond belief (this is true everywhere). You've made it in comparison to almost everyone you went to school with, but like that actress, you're miserable.
I have no sympathy for someone in that situation, actually. I didn't have sympathy with the actress, either. I told her that. I said that if she loved acting, truly loved acting, she shouldn't be complaining so much. She was clearly very talented otherwise she wouldn't be getting the jobs that she was getting in the ridiculous marketplace of Hollywood. She should be happy that others recognized that she was great at what she did. Wishing for Shakespeare was wishing for something that basically didn't exist. She needed an attitude adjustment, I said. She should be thankful that she could pay her rent doing something for which she had god given talent.
I don't think that anyone ever told her anything like that before. Actually, I know that they hadn't. She said so. And then she asked me to be her life coach, that I could make a living talking to actors and actresses like her. I declined the offer, but I was flattered I had to admit.
Now getting back to academia and the humanities. If you truly love the humanities and you are talented and lucky enough to get a half-way decent tenure track job, you should be mature enough to accept the fact that it isn't perfect. There are thousands who want what you have. If you can't find joy in your situation, you probably don't have much passion for your chosen field of research.
Those that know me will likely be astounded to have read the words above. After all, I walked away from a tenured job. I was miserable there. No, it wasn't a great place, but it was the academic equivalent of getting a regular slot on some stupid sitcom. Sure, I would have rather done the academic equivalent of Shakespeare, but it paid the bills and I had time for research.
The thing is that I didn't need that job and I had other passions besides doing academic research. If I had needed a steady paycheck, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have been fine where I was. I would have focused on the twenty percent of the undergraduate student body that was truly impressive. I would have kept on being very picky about graduate students and enjoyed the one or two students I had around who were bright and happened for some reason to need to live in the Triangle while they pursued their Ph.D.s.
And my colleagues? Yes it's true that eighty percent of them were absolutely nuts, and a good seventy percent of them were just plain miserable. I would have ignored them. There were plenty of other places besides my workplace where I could meet decent and fun people to be around. I already had gone that route by the time I received tenure.
What about leadership? Oh god, those people were almost all corrupt and disgusting through and through. Talk about slimy. But the fact is that leadership rarely intrudes on a professor's life. You can ignore deans and ignore committee meetings and no one will say boo.
Being an academic - in and out of the humanities - can be a good gig. If that's where your passion lies, I'd say go for it. I just have two caveats. One, you better love your field of study. Two, you better be aware that getting a decent academic job - not just in the humanities, but in any field - is almost as rare as getting a decent acting gig. The odds are very, very tough. If you don't like those odds, you shouldn't even take your GREs. Stop right now. Go think of something like law school or sales instead.
Or who knows? Maybe you should try your hand at acting. After all, the odds aren't much worse.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Palin and the Republican's McGovern Moment
I watched a part of Palin's Tea Party speech the other day. Because Palin keeps criticizing Obama for his use of a teleprompter, she decided to forgo her own use of the device. That was a mistake. She gives great speeches when she uses one. Her rhythm is natural. She looks confident and poised. But when she reads from paper, all of that is lost. That's what happened during the Tea Party speech. Her cadence lurched around like someone who doesn't know how to use an accelerator pedal (insert Toyota joke of your choice here, haha). She looked tired and worried.
But the press reported none of that. They barely mentioned that the speech had no content. Instead they focused on the response of the Tea Party attendees, which was wildly supportive. That's the narrative the media has decided to focus on with Palin. The assumption is that she is indeed dumb as a brick, but a narrative that focuses on that fact isn't very interesting. The adulation of the crowds that attend her speeches is a better story in terms of grabbing interest. It's exciting. The press likes to focus on excitement.
It's true the press doesn't ignore the fact that Palin is an airhead. Due attention was placed to the fact that she had to write her talking points to pre-screened questions on the palm of her hand. Yes, Sarah Palin is an idiot. So was George W. Bush when he ran for office. In the Republican Party, being an idiot is not a disqualification for being a presidential candidate. That's why I think that Sarah Palin will be the Republican nominee in 2012.
Her approval ratings in the Republican Party are very high, over 75 percent. She has a wildly enthusiastic base that seems to be in the 20 percent range. Given the fact that there will be 10 or so people starting out in the running, 20 percent gives her an opening lead. Everybody loves a winner. Everybody (except me) likes to be part of a screaming and cheering crowd (those kinds of things scare the hell out of me). My guess it will be easy for Palin to go from 20 to 30 percent support just because people want to get on such a happy train. The same thing happened with Obama in 2008. Once she gets to 30 percent support who is going to stop her? Romney? No way will the Republicans vote for a Mormon. Plus he's smart (a negative in the world of Republicans unless you hide your intelligence, which Romney seems incapable of doing) and dull as dirt. Huckabee? Maybe, but his appeal doesn't seem to spread beyond the South. Pawlenty? Doesn't exactly inspire enthusiasm. Thune? A handsome block of wood.
It's important, I think, that everything bad about Palin has probably already come out. With Pawlenty and Thune, there will undoubtedly be skeletons that emerge in a national campaign that will diminish their appeal; freshly exposed skeletons are always worse than old ones. The criticism that Palin is a quitter resonates with Democrats, but for many independents and Republicans, the fact that she resigned as governor can be seen as a plus: she is a true outsider and not just another politician like the others. Her lack of intelligence is a plus in a "she's just like us" way, too.
Also on the plus side, Palin is telegenic. A huge group of people love how Palin lives her life. The press can't help but cover her every move. If she chooses to run, she will hog the news and her opponents will likely get lumped together as "the others."
Plus I don't think that the Republicans understand just how cooked they are. They seem to be completely unaware how far to the right their views remain relative to mainstream America. They seem to think that their losses in 2008 were a fluke and one of the key problems in their 2008 campaign was that their presidential candidate wasn't conservative enough. They'll look at the seats they will gain in 2010 in the House and Senate (not enough seats to get a majority but enough to give them hope) as some kind of sign that the public yearns for a conservative president.
The Democrats had a similar moment way back in 1972. They wanted a pure 100% liberal candidate. They got one. George McGovern. The only problem was that the general electorate had no interest in a pure 100% liberal candidate and McGovern was thoroughly trounced by the incumbent Nixon.
I believe that the Republicans are moving toward their McGovern moment. They want someone who is a pure 100% conservative. They want a born again, anti-government, anti-abortion, outsider. Who better than Palin could fit that role?
Should this happen, of course Palin will do horribly in the general election. Republicans love her, yes. Unfortunately for Palin, not enough of those not ardently Republican do. Obama will win in a landslide. It's then and only then that the Republicans will grudgingly abandon the idea that the general electorate yearns for conservative leadership.
There is a lot of talk in the media about the country being "center-right" or being in the center politically. I don't think that either are correct. Such discussion is simply irrelevant. The public is overwhelmingly apolitical. They don't keep abreast of affairs. They simply want low taxes with lots of services. They want to be safe from robbers and perceived foreign enemies.
The public's attitude is not center-left or center-right. It's simply self-centered. The success of any party resides in understanding that the battle for votes isn't about ideology, but about personality and the ability to tell the public that all is possible with little or no personal sacrifice. The last person who was able to do that convincingly happened to be a Republican, Ronald Reagan. When the Republicans realize that it wasn't Reagan's politics that the public adored, but Reagan the man, they will start winning elections again.
But the press reported none of that. They barely mentioned that the speech had no content. Instead they focused on the response of the Tea Party attendees, which was wildly supportive. That's the narrative the media has decided to focus on with Palin. The assumption is that she is indeed dumb as a brick, but a narrative that focuses on that fact isn't very interesting. The adulation of the crowds that attend her speeches is a better story in terms of grabbing interest. It's exciting. The press likes to focus on excitement.
It's true the press doesn't ignore the fact that Palin is an airhead. Due attention was placed to the fact that she had to write her talking points to pre-screened questions on the palm of her hand. Yes, Sarah Palin is an idiot. So was George W. Bush when he ran for office. In the Republican Party, being an idiot is not a disqualification for being a presidential candidate. That's why I think that Sarah Palin will be the Republican nominee in 2012.
Her approval ratings in the Republican Party are very high, over 75 percent. She has a wildly enthusiastic base that seems to be in the 20 percent range. Given the fact that there will be 10 or so people starting out in the running, 20 percent gives her an opening lead. Everybody loves a winner. Everybody (except me) likes to be part of a screaming and cheering crowd (those kinds of things scare the hell out of me). My guess it will be easy for Palin to go from 20 to 30 percent support just because people want to get on such a happy train. The same thing happened with Obama in 2008. Once she gets to 30 percent support who is going to stop her? Romney? No way will the Republicans vote for a Mormon. Plus he's smart (a negative in the world of Republicans unless you hide your intelligence, which Romney seems incapable of doing) and dull as dirt. Huckabee? Maybe, but his appeal doesn't seem to spread beyond the South. Pawlenty? Doesn't exactly inspire enthusiasm. Thune? A handsome block of wood.
It's important, I think, that everything bad about Palin has probably already come out. With Pawlenty and Thune, there will undoubtedly be skeletons that emerge in a national campaign that will diminish their appeal; freshly exposed skeletons are always worse than old ones. The criticism that Palin is a quitter resonates with Democrats, but for many independents and Republicans, the fact that she resigned as governor can be seen as a plus: she is a true outsider and not just another politician like the others. Her lack of intelligence is a plus in a "she's just like us" way, too.
Also on the plus side, Palin is telegenic. A huge group of people love how Palin lives her life. The press can't help but cover her every move. If she chooses to run, she will hog the news and her opponents will likely get lumped together as "the others."
Plus I don't think that the Republicans understand just how cooked they are. They seem to be completely unaware how far to the right their views remain relative to mainstream America. They seem to think that their losses in 2008 were a fluke and one of the key problems in their 2008 campaign was that their presidential candidate wasn't conservative enough. They'll look at the seats they will gain in 2010 in the House and Senate (not enough seats to get a majority but enough to give them hope) as some kind of sign that the public yearns for a conservative president.
The Democrats had a similar moment way back in 1972. They wanted a pure 100% liberal candidate. They got one. George McGovern. The only problem was that the general electorate had no interest in a pure 100% liberal candidate and McGovern was thoroughly trounced by the incumbent Nixon.
I believe that the Republicans are moving toward their McGovern moment. They want someone who is a pure 100% conservative. They want a born again, anti-government, anti-abortion, outsider. Who better than Palin could fit that role?
Should this happen, of course Palin will do horribly in the general election. Republicans love her, yes. Unfortunately for Palin, not enough of those not ardently Republican do. Obama will win in a landslide. It's then and only then that the Republicans will grudgingly abandon the idea that the general electorate yearns for conservative leadership.
There is a lot of talk in the media about the country being "center-right" or being in the center politically. I don't think that either are correct. Such discussion is simply irrelevant. The public is overwhelmingly apolitical. They don't keep abreast of affairs. They simply want low taxes with lots of services. They want to be safe from robbers and perceived foreign enemies.
The public's attitude is not center-left or center-right. It's simply self-centered. The success of any party resides in understanding that the battle for votes isn't about ideology, but about personality and the ability to tell the public that all is possible with little or no personal sacrifice. The last person who was able to do that convincingly happened to be a Republican, Ronald Reagan. When the Republicans realize that it wasn't Reagan's politics that the public adored, but Reagan the man, they will start winning elections again.
Monday, February 08, 2010
No They Can't Sing, But That's Been True for Awhile
I didn't watch the Grammys live this year. It isn't my kind of music. I'm a voting member of the Grammys, but as per usual my votes and the votes of the rest of the 10,000 or so voters didn't exactly jibe. I think I batted less than 1 for 10 in terms of voting for the winners.
I did watch some of the performances on Youtube after, though. I saw Pink sing on pitch twirling upside down, tied to a long rope, suspended in mid-air. Now that's some feat. Her music is junk, but the girl can sing. So can Beyonce.
Then there are those that can't. There has been much twittering, facebooking, blogging, and mainstream mediaing (look I made four fake nouns in a row I'm so hip!) about the fact that Taylor Swift can't sing. This shouldn't have been news. I saw her sing two years ago in Las Vegas at the ACM's, and it was painful to hear her. She's been singing live to huge audiences and on TV shows for a while now and every one of those performances has likely been miserable. Somehow, the sh*t didn't hit the fan until she sang with Stevie Nicks at the Grammys.
I guess it was the comparison between the two that did it. But the fact is that Stevie Nicks can't sing well either. She's sixty something and her voice is shot. It's just that in comparison to Taylor Swift, she sounds like Maria Callas in her prime.
The thing is that non-singing singers have been a staple of popular music ever since the emergence of rock and contemporary pop in the 1960s. Before that time, pop music was for both adults and kids and the expectation was that performers had to sing well. But with the emergence of rock and roll culture, popular music became oriented strictly to the needs of teens. Those teens put musicianship low on their list of needs when it came to performers.
First and foremost a performer had to have undeniable sex appeal. They also had to have energy, of course. Then somewhere below that was a vague desire to have them hit the notes. Most of the time they did so, not because the public demanded it, but because the record companies did.
Still it's telling that when Quincy Jones got tired of starving as a jazz producer in the early 1960s, he picked a little known singer, Lesley Gore, to make a couple of pop hits. When asked why, he said simply that unlike most people on the charts she could actually sing on pitch.
Quincy Jones has a high bar for musicality. Most singers back then got close to singing well, even if they didn't meet Q's standards. They sang at least as well as Stevie Nicks did the other night on the Grammys. Then Auto-Tune - invented by someone who did some pioneering work developing geophysical software - came along in the 1990s. You didn't have to be able to come close to singing in tune anymore. The computer could correct everything.
Since then, there have been a whole slew of non-singing singers that owe their careers to Auto-Tune and studio signal processing. Janet Jackson. Ashlee Simpson. Britney Spears. Miley Cyrus. They tend to be girls. Madonna also has problems with pitch and can't project at all, but she is close enough to the notes to get a passing grade in comparison to most of those out there today. Lady Gaga is similar to Madonna that way.
Auto-Tune isn't perfect. It does strange things to a voice when it corrects off-pitch notes that if you have any sort of ear are as annoying as the original bad note. There is a "hacksaw effect" that it does to a voice even when it's lightly applied that drives me nuts. The public apparently can't hear it. One thing interesting Auto-Tune does is make the non-singing abilities of today's crop of pop stars even more glaring because the difference between how they sound on recordings and how they sound live is extreme.
Not only can Taylor Swift can't sing. She can't really a write a decent song either. It's trite junk. What's interesting to me is that critics - real highfalutin critics from fancy media outlets like the New Yorker and the New York Times - have praised Taylor Swift out the wazoo for her songwriting craft. I don't get this. Take a look at Taylor Swift's recent hit song that I can't avoid when I walk into stores, You Belong To Me:
Em G
But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
D A
She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers
Em G
Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find
A
That what you're looking for has been here the whole time
D
If you could see that I'm the one who understands you
A Em
Been here all along, so why can't you see?
G D
You belong with me, you belong with me
This is really banal stuff, musically and lyrically. If you're more than 15 or not a girl, it's instant snooze material. There are a zillion teenie bopper songs written with these kinds of lyrics. Musically, the tune is saved from complete sing-songy grade school stuff by the use of a flat seven note toward the end of the chorus over a 2 minor chord. How stuff like this gets rave reviews from adults is beyond me. I've written about this disconnect before here.
Now about these singers that can't sing. Auto-Tune has let the genie out of the bottle. They aren't going to disappear. But I think there should be a new rule. If you dance a lot and are mostly known for your ability to jiggle and put on a show - like Janet Jackson and Britney Spears - you get a pass. You're entertainers and dancers first and foremost. If you can shake it, you don't have to really sing. Go ahead and go on the Grammys and strut your stuff. It would be better if you were like Pink and could do both, but the public likes you so what the hell.
But if you aren't a dancer, if you're just standing there and emoting with or without a guitar, if you're not putting on a show, you damn well better be able to hit your notes. If you can't, please stay off the Grammys. You're not only embarrassing yourself. You're embarrassing the entire musical community. Maybe the public can't tell the difference, but we truly deserve better.
Alternatively, I suppose you could use Auto-Tune live. Bon Jovi was using it on the Grammys; you could hear the click of Auto-Tune every time he went into his lower register. Perhaps Pink was using it too when she was singing upside down, but I'd have to listen to her again to know for sure. I was too busy watching her twirl to listen to the music all that carefully. I think that was the point.
I did watch some of the performances on Youtube after, though. I saw Pink sing on pitch twirling upside down, tied to a long rope, suspended in mid-air. Now that's some feat. Her music is junk, but the girl can sing. So can Beyonce.
Then there are those that can't. There has been much twittering, facebooking, blogging, and mainstream mediaing (look I made four fake nouns in a row I'm so hip!) about the fact that Taylor Swift can't sing. This shouldn't have been news. I saw her sing two years ago in Las Vegas at the ACM's, and it was painful to hear her. She's been singing live to huge audiences and on TV shows for a while now and every one of those performances has likely been miserable. Somehow, the sh*t didn't hit the fan until she sang with Stevie Nicks at the Grammys.
I guess it was the comparison between the two that did it. But the fact is that Stevie Nicks can't sing well either. She's sixty something and her voice is shot. It's just that in comparison to Taylor Swift, she sounds like Maria Callas in her prime.
The thing is that non-singing singers have been a staple of popular music ever since the emergence of rock and contemporary pop in the 1960s. Before that time, pop music was for both adults and kids and the expectation was that performers had to sing well. But with the emergence of rock and roll culture, popular music became oriented strictly to the needs of teens. Those teens put musicianship low on their list of needs when it came to performers.
First and foremost a performer had to have undeniable sex appeal. They also had to have energy, of course. Then somewhere below that was a vague desire to have them hit the notes. Most of the time they did so, not because the public demanded it, but because the record companies did.
Still it's telling that when Quincy Jones got tired of starving as a jazz producer in the early 1960s, he picked a little known singer, Lesley Gore, to make a couple of pop hits. When asked why, he said simply that unlike most people on the charts she could actually sing on pitch.
Quincy Jones has a high bar for musicality. Most singers back then got close to singing well, even if they didn't meet Q's standards. They sang at least as well as Stevie Nicks did the other night on the Grammys. Then Auto-Tune - invented by someone who did some pioneering work developing geophysical software - came along in the 1990s. You didn't have to be able to come close to singing in tune anymore. The computer could correct everything.
Since then, there have been a whole slew of non-singing singers that owe their careers to Auto-Tune and studio signal processing. Janet Jackson. Ashlee Simpson. Britney Spears. Miley Cyrus. They tend to be girls. Madonna also has problems with pitch and can't project at all, but she is close enough to the notes to get a passing grade in comparison to most of those out there today. Lady Gaga is similar to Madonna that way.
Auto-Tune isn't perfect. It does strange things to a voice when it corrects off-pitch notes that if you have any sort of ear are as annoying as the original bad note. There is a "hacksaw effect" that it does to a voice even when it's lightly applied that drives me nuts. The public apparently can't hear it. One thing interesting Auto-Tune does is make the non-singing abilities of today's crop of pop stars even more glaring because the difference between how they sound on recordings and how they sound live is extreme.
Not only can Taylor Swift can't sing. She can't really a write a decent song either. It's trite junk. What's interesting to me is that critics - real highfalutin critics from fancy media outlets like the New Yorker and the New York Times - have praised Taylor Swift out the wazoo for her songwriting craft. I don't get this. Take a look at Taylor Swift's recent hit song that I can't avoid when I walk into stores, You Belong To Me:
Em G
But she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts
D A
She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers
Em G
Dreaming about the day when you wake up and find
A
That what you're looking for has been here the whole time
D
If you could see that I'm the one who understands you
A Em
Been here all along, so why can't you see?
G D
You belong with me, you belong with me
This is really banal stuff, musically and lyrically. If you're more than 15 or not a girl, it's instant snooze material. There are a zillion teenie bopper songs written with these kinds of lyrics. Musically, the tune is saved from complete sing-songy grade school stuff by the use of a flat seven note toward the end of the chorus over a 2 minor chord. How stuff like this gets rave reviews from adults is beyond me. I've written about this disconnect before here.
Now about these singers that can't sing. Auto-Tune has let the genie out of the bottle. They aren't going to disappear. But I think there should be a new rule. If you dance a lot and are mostly known for your ability to jiggle and put on a show - like Janet Jackson and Britney Spears - you get a pass. You're entertainers and dancers first and foremost. If you can shake it, you don't have to really sing. Go ahead and go on the Grammys and strut your stuff. It would be better if you were like Pink and could do both, but the public likes you so what the hell.
But if you aren't a dancer, if you're just standing there and emoting with or without a guitar, if you're not putting on a show, you damn well better be able to hit your notes. If you can't, please stay off the Grammys. You're not only embarrassing yourself. You're embarrassing the entire musical community. Maybe the public can't tell the difference, but we truly deserve better.
Alternatively, I suppose you could use Auto-Tune live. Bon Jovi was using it on the Grammys; you could hear the click of Auto-Tune every time he went into his lower register. Perhaps Pink was using it too when she was singing upside down, but I'd have to listen to her again to know for sure. I was too busy watching her twirl to listen to the music all that carefully. I think that was the point.
Friday, February 05, 2010
The Bald, Bad and the Ugly
I noticed the Academy Award nominations came out the other day and I've seen a few of the movies nominated. Up I liked. Ditto for Food, Inc. Up in the Air was alright, but a little too pat. Julie and Julia was fun. Coraline was too grim. If you can find it, I'd recommend the nominated short, China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province; it's very gripping.
I'll watch Hurt Locker, An Education, and A Serious Man (recommended to me, but I have my doubts) and The Most Dangerous Man in America when they get to my house via the library or Netflix. In the Loop is currently sitting next to my TV and I'll get to it this week.
Avatar? For 15 bucks, three-D isn't enough. A four-D time travel version would be irresistible though!
Then there are a bunch a movies that are so far off my radar it isn't funny. The Blind Side? I'll leave syrup for my morning pancakes. Inglourious Basterds sounds completely infantile. Precious sounds too depressing and obvious.
I note that this year the best way for a movie to have increased its chances of getting some nominations was to have an "ious" word in its title. Precious. Inglourious. Serious. They should have changed the name of Invictus to Invictious. Julie and Julia should have been Julie and Julious or Simply Delicious. The only thing standing between the latest Alvin and the Chipmunk movie and a dozen Oscar nominations was the word Squeakquel in the title. It should have been Obsqueakquious. Or something like that.
For me, movies are about the lowest form of entertainment and art that I can handle. Basically, what happens with movies is that you need so much money to make them that you have to appeal to a broad audience to recoup your investment. That means there have to be monsters or car crashes or aliens or sex or maybe a combination of all of the above. Most movies are designed for twelve year olds.
Still, there is a twelve year old boy in me that loves to be entertained now and then. Even a bad movie can be fun to watch. The other day I was on the tread mill at the gym watching Dante's Peak. I only watched about 15 minutes, but it was inadvertently hilarious. The movie is about a volcano that's a threat to a community. But the scenery in the movie is a mix of the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada. It isn't volcanic terrane. Every once in a while there is a shot of a crystalline Sierran Nevadan peak that's supposed to be the offending volcano. That pile of granite isn't going anywhere.
Then the geologist in the movie - I think he's the Brit who was in a bunch of fairly recent James Bond movies - samples a little pond of water for acidity. I looked at that pond. I've sampled a lot of ponds in my life. Based on the surrounding vegetation and the look of the soil, I was thinking slightly alkaline, about a pH of 8.6. But not in this movie. The meter shows a pH of 3.2. Time to get a new meter!
One of the ponds proves to be so acidic that it eats the flesh off some bathing tourists! Now that would be a first.
But of course, Dante's Peak isn't the only bad movie I've seen. Most movies are horrible. Unfortunately, most aren't quite horrible enough to be funny. The day before I watched a few minutes of Flash of Genius. The true story it's based on is actually very interesting, but in movie form oh my. In the first fifteen minutes, you could tell exactly was going to happen for the next hour and a half. Most disappointingly, you knew who the bad guy was on first sight. He was bald. And that's something I've noticed a lot lately. Bald is the new sign of the heavy in movies.
I first saw this in another terrible movie I watched fairly recently, Iron Man. Every bad guy - and there were a lot of bad guys - was either bald or shaved his head. That was the actual moral of the movie I decided: don't trust bald men.
It used to be the swarthy guy with beady eyes, usually some goombah from Sicily, who was the bad guy. But I guess that Hollywood got tired of all the complaints from Italian American lobbying organizations. You could have a Jewish heavy I suppose but then the Bnai Brith would come after you. Those guys hold a grudge, too; they still haven't forgiven Shakespeare for Shylock. Black or Native American heavy? No way. So nowadays bad isn't someone of color or ethnicity. Instead, it's about the state of your androgen receptor gene. This bald is bad Hollywood meme may have its origins in the emergence of skinhead culture. Who knows?
But until some bald anti-defamation organization gets some serious clout, I expect that bald will be bad in Hollywood for some time to come. It's an easy thing to do. Anyone can be transformed into a heavy just with the use of an electric razor. Come to think of it, I could do this too. I have a Panasonic wet or dry razor in a drawer somewhere. It's my time to shine (sorry for the pun). I'm just one razor burn away from stardom. Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up!
I'll watch Hurt Locker, An Education, and A Serious Man (recommended to me, but I have my doubts) and The Most Dangerous Man in America when they get to my house via the library or Netflix. In the Loop is currently sitting next to my TV and I'll get to it this week.
Avatar? For 15 bucks, three-D isn't enough. A four-D time travel version would be irresistible though!
Then there are a bunch a movies that are so far off my radar it isn't funny. The Blind Side? I'll leave syrup for my morning pancakes. Inglourious Basterds sounds completely infantile. Precious sounds too depressing and obvious.
I note that this year the best way for a movie to have increased its chances of getting some nominations was to have an "ious" word in its title. Precious. Inglourious. Serious. They should have changed the name of Invictus to Invictious. Julie and Julia should have been Julie and Julious or Simply Delicious. The only thing standing between the latest Alvin and the Chipmunk movie and a dozen Oscar nominations was the word Squeakquel in the title. It should have been Obsqueakquious. Or something like that.
For me, movies are about the lowest form of entertainment and art that I can handle. Basically, what happens with movies is that you need so much money to make them that you have to appeal to a broad audience to recoup your investment. That means there have to be monsters or car crashes or aliens or sex or maybe a combination of all of the above. Most movies are designed for twelve year olds.
Still, there is a twelve year old boy in me that loves to be entertained now and then. Even a bad movie can be fun to watch. The other day I was on the tread mill at the gym watching Dante's Peak. I only watched about 15 minutes, but it was inadvertently hilarious. The movie is about a volcano that's a threat to a community. But the scenery in the movie is a mix of the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada. It isn't volcanic terrane. Every once in a while there is a shot of a crystalline Sierran Nevadan peak that's supposed to be the offending volcano. That pile of granite isn't going anywhere.
Then the geologist in the movie - I think he's the Brit who was in a bunch of fairly recent James Bond movies - samples a little pond of water for acidity. I looked at that pond. I've sampled a lot of ponds in my life. Based on the surrounding vegetation and the look of the soil, I was thinking slightly alkaline, about a pH of 8.6. But not in this movie. The meter shows a pH of 3.2. Time to get a new meter!
One of the ponds proves to be so acidic that it eats the flesh off some bathing tourists! Now that would be a first.
But of course, Dante's Peak isn't the only bad movie I've seen. Most movies are horrible. Unfortunately, most aren't quite horrible enough to be funny. The day before I watched a few minutes of Flash of Genius. The true story it's based on is actually very interesting, but in movie form oh my. In the first fifteen minutes, you could tell exactly was going to happen for the next hour and a half. Most disappointingly, you knew who the bad guy was on first sight. He was bald. And that's something I've noticed a lot lately. Bald is the new sign of the heavy in movies.
I first saw this in another terrible movie I watched fairly recently, Iron Man. Every bad guy - and there were a lot of bad guys - was either bald or shaved his head. That was the actual moral of the movie I decided: don't trust bald men.
It used to be the swarthy guy with beady eyes, usually some goombah from Sicily, who was the bad guy. But I guess that Hollywood got tired of all the complaints from Italian American lobbying organizations. You could have a Jewish heavy I suppose but then the Bnai Brith would come after you. Those guys hold a grudge, too; they still haven't forgiven Shakespeare for Shylock. Black or Native American heavy? No way. So nowadays bad isn't someone of color or ethnicity. Instead, it's about the state of your androgen receptor gene. This bald is bad Hollywood meme may have its origins in the emergence of skinhead culture. Who knows?
But until some bald anti-defamation organization gets some serious clout, I expect that bald will be bad in Hollywood for some time to come. It's an easy thing to do. Anyone can be transformed into a heavy just with the use of an electric razor. Come to think of it, I could do this too. I have a Panasonic wet or dry razor in a drawer somewhere. It's my time to shine (sorry for the pun). I'm just one razor burn away from stardom. Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up!
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
One Liner of the Day
All I have to do is move my arm (tennis elbow), plant my foot in the paint of a basketball court (loose cartilage), or try to even turn on my car without my glasses (20/200 vision) to know that intelligent design is a total myth.
If God made us, I think we're talking about a recall much, much bigger than Toyota's.
If God made us, I think we're talking about a recall much, much bigger than Toyota's.
No They Are Not All There To Learn
Last week was one of those once a year things when grade inflation popped up on the national radar. There was a NY Times article on Princeton's efforts to reign in grades (with a sometimes interesting discussion here). There was an even better article in the Madison Capital Times (the writer got a lot more space to show his stuff than the writer in the NY Times) on University of Wisconsin's problems with grade inflation. In my stranger than fiction role as America's grade inflation czar, I get quoted in both. Both papers are on the left and traditionally for reasons I don't understand, the left has always pushed back on the issue of grade inflation. Basically, the left tends to hate grades of any stripe. Evaluation is seen as something undesirable. I really don't get it. Why should rewarding outstanding achievement not be desirable?
It's worth noting that both newspapers don't show their liberal bias in these articles. They aim for balance. If anything in the NY Times article, the Princeton students who claim that grade deflation is unfair sound like spoiled toddlers crying for candy. But the quotes from the other side are interesting for their assumptions about the role of college.
Here's a quote from an earlier version of the NY Times article that I think came out in the local NY edition before it went national on Sunday. It comes from Laura Brown, the vice provost for undergraduate education at Cornell University:
“As Princeton moves toward creating more competitive and stressful relationships among students, I see that as pulling in a very different direction from the most innovative and successful trends in new pedagogies, which do bring students together as learners,” Dr. Brown said.
This is the push from the left. The idea is that grading is antiquated, places undue stress on students, and provides no motivation to perform well. The assumption is that 18-22 years-olds are all internally motivated or can be motivated by their peers to work hard and study hard in a collegial environment free of grading. Everyone can excel if everyone behaves in a cooperative way, especially at those institutions where on paper students come with outstanding high school records.
This is nice idea, but it has no basis in reality. Not all students come to a university with a desire to learn. In my experience, about one quarter to one third of them do. They are motivated, intelligent, creative and wonderful to be around. They, by and large, don't need grades. They have the internal motivation to excel.
But then there are the rest. There are legacies and athletes. Then there is something new under the sun that came about with the increased competition to get into a top notch college. These are the college students that worked their butts off in high school to such a degree - putting in 60 to 70 hour weeks to beef up their college applications - that they are completely turned off the idea of learning at the tender age of 18. Yes, they got into their college of first or second choice. But now that they are there, they just want to relax and enjoy the scenery.
The question is what do you do about these students, the other two thirds to three quarters in college? Let's say you use the approach promoted by Laura Brown in a classroom. I've actually tried this approach with a class. I read books about cooperative learning, the kind of stuff that the left gets all excited about. I decided to ignore the motivation of grades. We, the students and I, were all going to be in this together. I can tell you what the result was. Basically, the bottom two thirds brought down the level of the class to something akin to junior high. I ended up teaching to the bottom third of the class. The upper tier was bored. Yes, no one was stressed. But the level of learning I provided the class was pitiful.
What I did in that class was basically punish the best and the brightest. I didn't push them to excel and perform to their full ability. In terms of grading, I lumped them with everyone else. Unlike Laura Brown, I don't view this approach as "innovative and successful." I view it as an abrogation of responsibility to teach well.
Fair and honest grading serves a real purpose. It actually does motivate a significant percentage of a class. It also provides a reward for those who do truly excel. As for stress, who cares if a student is under stress? College is not a playground. It's supposed to be for learning. Learning requires work. Any effort where the goal is to push someone to do things they didn't think they could do is going to be stressful. Welcome to the real world.
Ignoring political bias, there is another side to this effort to forget about grades. It's the consumer push. For the "consumerites," college is about keeping students happy and making sure they graduate. This view is expressed well by former University of Wisconsin head John Wiley in the Capital Times article:
"Besides, argues former UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley, what’s the big deal if grades are going up? What’s worse, he says, is hearing stories from years ago when professors in some disciplines were ordered to 'weed out' weak students from their classes by making sure at least 30 percent received D’s or F’s, or dropped the course.
'That philosophy is no longer acceptable to the public or faculty or anyone else,' says Wiley, who notes that college leaders today are under increased pressure from the public and politicians to increase the number of college graduates. 'Today, our attitude is we do our screening of students at the time of admission. Once students have been admitted, we have said to them, "You have what it takes to succeed." Then it’s our job to help them succeed.'"
Wiley sets up a false dichotomy. He implies that somehow fair grading will lead to many students dropping out. That's not how it works. The real reason most people drop out is not because of grades. It's because they can't afford to go to school. That was true thirty years ago. It's even more true today. He also implies that somehow thirty years ago, the University of Wisconsin had little or no admissions screening. That's not the case.
What John Wiley is really saying is that he and the faculty no longer have control of the classroom. Instead, they are being forced by the "public and politicians" to push students through with lofty grades they don't deserve. Somehow that's no big deal in his estimation. But is a big deal in reality. It means that he and the faculty have abandoned their responsibility to challenge the best and the brightest.
About two months ago, I was on a plane working on a crossword puzzle. There was a clue that involved naming the part of a surf board. What do I know about surf boards? I looked up and saw my stewardess. She was young. I asked her if she knew the word. She looked at me like I was from Mars. "Look, I'm no smarter than a fifth grader," she said without a tinge of embarrassment.
A half hour later I was in the back of the plane talking to her and another stewardess while I got a drink. It turned out they were both college graduates. The one I had asked about surf boards teased me about asking her to help me with the crossword. "What do you think I am, some kind of brain?"
"Well you're a college graduate," I said. "Surely, you must know more than a fifth grader."
"Nope," she said and smiled.
"Me neither," the other one said.
"How come? I mean what did you learn in college."
"I learned to write it down and spit it out on a test. I just memorized a lot of junk. Then I forgot it after."
I admit that to some extent the stewardess's assessment of the college learning experience - memorize a bunch of useless junk and spit it out during finals week - has always been true. But it's even more true now. We are giving people college degrees who are happy to admit they have the intelligence and analytical ability of eleven-year-olds. We are, using the parlance of John Wiley, working "to help them succeed." But as educators there isn't a doubt that we are failing.
*Note that I'm assuming in the discussion above that since the quotes attributed to me are accurate, the quotes of others are accurate as well.
It's worth noting that both newspapers don't show their liberal bias in these articles. They aim for balance. If anything in the NY Times article, the Princeton students who claim that grade deflation is unfair sound like spoiled toddlers crying for candy. But the quotes from the other side are interesting for their assumptions about the role of college.
Here's a quote from an earlier version of the NY Times article that I think came out in the local NY edition before it went national on Sunday. It comes from Laura Brown, the vice provost for undergraduate education at Cornell University:
“As Princeton moves toward creating more competitive and stressful relationships among students, I see that as pulling in a very different direction from the most innovative and successful trends in new pedagogies, which do bring students together as learners,” Dr. Brown said.
This is the push from the left. The idea is that grading is antiquated, places undue stress on students, and provides no motivation to perform well. The assumption is that 18-22 years-olds are all internally motivated or can be motivated by their peers to work hard and study hard in a collegial environment free of grading. Everyone can excel if everyone behaves in a cooperative way, especially at those institutions where on paper students come with outstanding high school records.
This is nice idea, but it has no basis in reality. Not all students come to a university with a desire to learn. In my experience, about one quarter to one third of them do. They are motivated, intelligent, creative and wonderful to be around. They, by and large, don't need grades. They have the internal motivation to excel.
But then there are the rest. There are legacies and athletes. Then there is something new under the sun that came about with the increased competition to get into a top notch college. These are the college students that worked their butts off in high school to such a degree - putting in 60 to 70 hour weeks to beef up their college applications - that they are completely turned off the idea of learning at the tender age of 18. Yes, they got into their college of first or second choice. But now that they are there, they just want to relax and enjoy the scenery.
The question is what do you do about these students, the other two thirds to three quarters in college? Let's say you use the approach promoted by Laura Brown in a classroom. I've actually tried this approach with a class. I read books about cooperative learning, the kind of stuff that the left gets all excited about. I decided to ignore the motivation of grades. We, the students and I, were all going to be in this together. I can tell you what the result was. Basically, the bottom two thirds brought down the level of the class to something akin to junior high. I ended up teaching to the bottom third of the class. The upper tier was bored. Yes, no one was stressed. But the level of learning I provided the class was pitiful.
What I did in that class was basically punish the best and the brightest. I didn't push them to excel and perform to their full ability. In terms of grading, I lumped them with everyone else. Unlike Laura Brown, I don't view this approach as "innovative and successful." I view it as an abrogation of responsibility to teach well.
Fair and honest grading serves a real purpose. It actually does motivate a significant percentage of a class. It also provides a reward for those who do truly excel. As for stress, who cares if a student is under stress? College is not a playground. It's supposed to be for learning. Learning requires work. Any effort where the goal is to push someone to do things they didn't think they could do is going to be stressful. Welcome to the real world.
Ignoring political bias, there is another side to this effort to forget about grades. It's the consumer push. For the "consumerites," college is about keeping students happy and making sure they graduate. This view is expressed well by former University of Wisconsin head John Wiley in the Capital Times article:
"Besides, argues former UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley, what’s the big deal if grades are going up? What’s worse, he says, is hearing stories from years ago when professors in some disciplines were ordered to 'weed out' weak students from their classes by making sure at least 30 percent received D’s or F’s, or dropped the course.
'That philosophy is no longer acceptable to the public or faculty or anyone else,' says Wiley, who notes that college leaders today are under increased pressure from the public and politicians to increase the number of college graduates. 'Today, our attitude is we do our screening of students at the time of admission. Once students have been admitted, we have said to them, "You have what it takes to succeed." Then it’s our job to help them succeed.'"
Wiley sets up a false dichotomy. He implies that somehow fair grading will lead to many students dropping out. That's not how it works. The real reason most people drop out is not because of grades. It's because they can't afford to go to school. That was true thirty years ago. It's even more true today. He also implies that somehow thirty years ago, the University of Wisconsin had little or no admissions screening. That's not the case.
What John Wiley is really saying is that he and the faculty no longer have control of the classroom. Instead, they are being forced by the "public and politicians" to push students through with lofty grades they don't deserve. Somehow that's no big deal in his estimation. But is a big deal in reality. It means that he and the faculty have abandoned their responsibility to challenge the best and the brightest.
About two months ago, I was on a plane working on a crossword puzzle. There was a clue that involved naming the part of a surf board. What do I know about surf boards? I looked up and saw my stewardess. She was young. I asked her if she knew the word. She looked at me like I was from Mars. "Look, I'm no smarter than a fifth grader," she said without a tinge of embarrassment.
A half hour later I was in the back of the plane talking to her and another stewardess while I got a drink. It turned out they were both college graduates. The one I had asked about surf boards teased me about asking her to help me with the crossword. "What do you think I am, some kind of brain?"
"Well you're a college graduate," I said. "Surely, you must know more than a fifth grader."
"Nope," she said and smiled.
"Me neither," the other one said.
"How come? I mean what did you learn in college."
"I learned to write it down and spit it out on a test. I just memorized a lot of junk. Then I forgot it after."
I admit that to some extent the stewardess's assessment of the college learning experience - memorize a bunch of useless junk and spit it out during finals week - has always been true. But it's even more true now. We are giving people college degrees who are happy to admit they have the intelligence and analytical ability of eleven-year-olds. We are, using the parlance of John Wiley, working "to help them succeed." But as educators there isn't a doubt that we are failing.
*Note that I'm assuming in the discussion above that since the quotes attributed to me are accurate, the quotes of others are accurate as well.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Those Little Victories
If you have a lot of ambition, sometime in your 30s or 40s (younger if you're an athlete) you'll usually come to the realization that all those dreams of achievement you possess will not come anywhere close to fruition or you'll figure out that you were nuts for dreaming about them in the first place. That's certainly true of me. At a young age, I wanted to be a Major League catcher. There were was one big problem. I didn't have much of an arm. Then I moved on to the dream of singing at the Met. It turns out that there are a lot of great baritones in the world and I'm not one of them. In my 30s, I thought I could be a university president one day. After a few years of looking at what university presidents do and are like, I realized that dream was actually a nightmare.
Then there are disappointments that come as a result of external forces that you can't do a thing about. For example, the music business collapsed with the emergence of free downloading. Not just CD sales were effected. Everything eventually took a major hit. Prices for music plummeted across the line. For example, I just received a royalty statement for six song placements in movies the other day. Five years ago, that would have been an easy four figure check. Today it's about 100 dollars worth of revenue. All aspects of the music business are now a path to starvation.
That all said, I'm very happy with my life. I know I'm eccentric as all hell, but I think I do some interesting and good work. I am fully accepting that my work will never have a big audience. It's part of who I am to be obscure. There are also little victories that make me happy. They didn't always. But I think this joy in the little stuff comes along as you get older. At least it has with me. Or as Willie Nelson says, "Sometimes you got to take time to smoke the flowers."
Take for instance the other day. I was trying to open my hatchback and I heard an ominous crack. The car handle came right off the car body. It was still tethered to the car by a couple of electrical wires. Fortunately, I was in the garage of the JCC so at least I wasn't being pelted by rain. I found a way to stick the handle back onto the rear hatch door that I thought would last the drive home. It did.
I backed into my garage. The good news was that I knew the car door handle was going bad and about four months ago, I bought a replacement. I just didn't know its end would be so catastrophic.
I poked around to see what I would need to do to take the old handle off completely, both the wires and the stray plastic still bolted onto the car body. I determined that I needed to remove some interior hard plastic upholstery. There were no screws anywhere holding the upholstery so I gave it a good yank. Rrrrrrip. It came easily off its friction fit. I was lucky.
An hour later, the old handle was off and the new handle was on, held by bolts that I could only tighten by hand because of course I needed a special deep 10 mm socket that I didn't have (all cars today seem to require obscure tools for everything). But Sears had one of those and I picked one up next day for four bucks. Five minutes in the Sears parking lot doing some tightening and putting back the upholstery and I was done.
I know from experience that such stories don't always have a happy ending. But the new handle works great, probably better than the old one ever did. This little victory of mine gave me a long smile. Life's problems should always be so easy to solve.
Then there are disappointments that come as a result of external forces that you can't do a thing about. For example, the music business collapsed with the emergence of free downloading. Not just CD sales were effected. Everything eventually took a major hit. Prices for music plummeted across the line. For example, I just received a royalty statement for six song placements in movies the other day. Five years ago, that would have been an easy four figure check. Today it's about 100 dollars worth of revenue. All aspects of the music business are now a path to starvation.
That all said, I'm very happy with my life. I know I'm eccentric as all hell, but I think I do some interesting and good work. I am fully accepting that my work will never have a big audience. It's part of who I am to be obscure. There are also little victories that make me happy. They didn't always. But I think this joy in the little stuff comes along as you get older. At least it has with me. Or as Willie Nelson says, "Sometimes you got to take time to smoke the flowers."
Take for instance the other day. I was trying to open my hatchback and I heard an ominous crack. The car handle came right off the car body. It was still tethered to the car by a couple of electrical wires. Fortunately, I was in the garage of the JCC so at least I wasn't being pelted by rain. I found a way to stick the handle back onto the rear hatch door that I thought would last the drive home. It did.
I backed into my garage. The good news was that I knew the car door handle was going bad and about four months ago, I bought a replacement. I just didn't know its end would be so catastrophic.
I poked around to see what I would need to do to take the old handle off completely, both the wires and the stray plastic still bolted onto the car body. I determined that I needed to remove some interior hard plastic upholstery. There were no screws anywhere holding the upholstery so I gave it a good yank. Rrrrrrip. It came easily off its friction fit. I was lucky.
An hour later, the old handle was off and the new handle was on, held by bolts that I could only tighten by hand because of course I needed a special deep 10 mm socket that I didn't have (all cars today seem to require obscure tools for everything). But Sears had one of those and I picked one up next day for four bucks. Five minutes in the Sears parking lot doing some tightening and putting back the upholstery and I was done.
I know from experience that such stories don't always have a happy ending. But the new handle works great, probably better than the old one ever did. This little victory of mine gave me a long smile. Life's problems should always be so easy to solve.
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