Elsewhere I've critiqued two of Jonathan Tropper's earlier novels, The Book of Joe and Everything Changes. Favorably. Tropper is one of the few US lad-kit writers with a flair for it, as evident by Tobey Maguire signing on to to EC in a movie form sometime soon at a theater near you. Since I wrote that review, I hunted down Tropper's first published novel, Plan B, the tender story of long-time friends doing an intervention by kidnapping their now movie star friend and holding him hostage while hilarity and romance ensue. It's actually good.
So I was looking forward to his finishing his latest, How to Talk to a Widower, which also has movie written all over it. Read it in half a day, not disappointed at all. By now, Tropper's books all have familiar elements that resonate despite the familiarity--adrift young man trying to grapple with the crap reality is dealing, women you'd fall for (even the ones thrown away), family issues with a cast of irregular characters, effective and usually unexpected violence--covered generously with both melancholy and in the end uncertain hope along with great dialogue and laugh-out-loud situations.
You may not see how you'd laugh out loud about a story of a guy who fell hopelessly for a vibrant, talented, and of course beautiful woman 11 years older who dies (not a spoiler--did you read the title???) and leaves him in effect with her teenage son, but you do. As usual, there's the colorful family, as mentioned, and enough moral vacillation and tussling with self-absorption by most concerned to make you think for a while. Of course, there's the predictable "back in the dating pool" run of bad blind dates, but Tropper plays them well, delivering most as a montage and making the hero one himself in one of the scenes that will play funniest in the movie.
Tropper's not Shakespeare or even Richard Russo, but he's talented, readable, and memorable. Most of all, when you're done, you immediately start getting impatient for his next one. According to an interview I read, it's supposed to be about divorce, which he should make touching and hilarious. Hurry up and get that thing finished, Tropper.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
How to Talk to a Widower
Friday, July 06, 2007
How the Good Guys Finally Won
While Woodward and Bernstein were getting the glory and sales after Nixon took the hint, the book that really explained how RMN's near-impeachment happened was written by Jimmy Breslin--How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer. The rope and scaffold for Nixon weren't initially prepared for him. They were prepared for Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who eventually resigned for heavy duty bribery while governor of MD before he could be impeached. But, as Breslin noted, Tip O'Neill, in getting the machinery ready for Agnew, got people used to the idea of impeachment, past all the hand-wringing and "oh, no, it won't work" and "what will it do to the country?" that similar hand-wringers are now going through. So, when the time came for Nixon to face the Congressional music, the legislators and the public, and Nixon, were psychologically prepped and the possibility was real. A masterful bit of politicking by O'Neill, who knew how the game was played and, imagine this, was willing and ready to play it.
Clearly, Breslin's book has relevancy now. I'm not going to rehash and get in the mud with the arguments that claim "we can't win so let's not do it" and "it'll divert us from other things" and, my favorite at a time when laws and the Constitution are what Bushnev lines the bird cage with, "defund him" (as if the Busheviks and the Supreme Court will buy that). If impeachment weren't meant for exactly this, Congress' one power not subject to reversal by the other two branches, then let's instead get rid of the damn clause altogether because its only use will be for the right-wingers to fraud up another prosecution and coup in case of blow-job or littering. If we really want to stop an Iran war, then make President Cheney play defense.
And I mean President Cheney. We don't need any more proof that he's the driving force of the worst (and it's all terrible) of this administration so go after him. The latest polls show majority support for it, and an investigation would allow all the necessary questions from the beginning of this administration to be explored EVEN IF THE CHARGES NEVER BRING IMPEACHMENT OR GET ACCEPTED BY THE SENATE. He needs to be crippled as severely and quickly as possible and the magical defunding won't do that. The Dems can demonstrate the testosterone that Digby (surprisingly ineffectual on this question) always advocates, show they stand for making the government responsible again, and shoot holes in anyone who tries to defend Cheney and the rest of the apparatchik in the 2008 elections. As well as put everyone on notice that there are criminals setting up that election. And the downside? "We might lose?" "All the Dems have to do is defund the administration WHICH THEY KEEP REFUSING TO DO???" It would contribute to impeachment as a political mechanism rather than one that should only be used when . . . an intern flashes a thong???
We know how to do it. O'Neill showed us. The pluses far outweigh the minuses, in fact, provide the weapons that the Dems have been lacking. Leadership there? Maybe not. But the other choices (waiting for a 2008 election that will likely have more than a few fears led by Cheney and manipulations foisted by Rove? expecting Bushnev and his "unitary executive" Supreme Court to give in to legislative supremacy?) are worse. Oh, and there's that explicit statement and precedent that no other option provides--WHAT THESE GUYS HAVE DONE IS NOT ONLY WRONG, IT CAN NEVER BE PERMITTED AGAIN. Go send a copy of Breslin's book to every Congresscritter who's demonstrated even an ounce of guts and start the scaffold.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
A Republic, If You Can Keep It
Good review of what sounds like the perfect Fourth of July book. As you read this review, ask yourself, “Would these people and all the others who have died for this country, the soldiers, Abe and MLK, the families that sacrificed their loved ones, would they have gone through all this if they had known it would end with O’Reilly and Russert, Oprah and Walters, “Idol” and “Survivor,” the Versailles on the Potomac and Fox News, Bushnev and President Cheney?
[I'm sure others have noted this, but, since this is the third President we've had named George, does that make him George III?]
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Four More Quickies
Let's add another quickie list to our book reviews with four new ones that you might find interesting. I did, but I realize what that counts for.
The first one is probably the weakest content-wise but also the most readable, which may be related. That doesn't mean the three below are hard to get through, they're not. But Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich by Robert Frank is a tour of those who count for wealthy these days, the single-digit millionaires, the multiple-digit ones, and the new "millionaires," the billionaires, and it's done in the manner of a really good tour guide. He's based his book on columns on the rich he's been doing for the Wall Street Journal, and it's fascinating, mostly in a car-wreck sort of way. He claims no bias in his presentations, and indeed, there are no screeds here. Those who think the rich are cool and want to be like them will probably walk away from this reinforced in those views.
But those of us who question the lives of anyone with more than any human needs to survive comfortably, especially when those lives come accompanied by expected entitlement and superiority, find the whole new country of rich people (and that's what Frank posits, that the world's rich literally live in a different place than anyone else) both obnoxious and pitiable. He details their lives, how the lower-level rich still don't think they have enough, the ways some of them made and lost and maybe remade fortunes, and the different ways the New Rich view politics and social commitment compared to the Old Guard (more Democrats, for example, and with the power of money, as the 2006 elections in CO showed). He wisely starts with a first chapter on "butler boot camps" which are churning out those long-departed servants (now called "household managers") to well-paid employment and still can't keep up with the demands of newly rich folks whose lives have to be run like businesses. Periodically, he shows us others who are doing quite well also, from catering to the needs of these rich people, sort of a minor industry spreading loot around. Like I said, it's riveting stuff. But in a democracy, the gaps between us can't grow too large without us losing the "us" that's needed for compromise and cooperation. This book will scare any true democrat, if not the Dems, who have pretty much hopped on the wagon.
After reading about all these rich people and wondering if it's really worth it, both for individuals and for our nation, maybe you'd like to ponder the mysteries of happiness. We've reviewed books here before on happiness and its components (or lack thereof), but here's a new one for you, Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong: A History of What Really Makes Us Happy. My first thought when seeing the title was, okay, another happiness book, but then I saw that Hecht had written it. One of the best books I've read in a long time was her Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates to Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickerson, so I thought, well, this has to be given a chance. As you might suspect, books with these massive titles have heft, and you should be prepared to give them time. But it's worth it. She's a very good writer, with a nice light sense of humor leavened throughout, and a grasp of history of these topics that makes you feel smart reading her. Her basic point is that the concept of happiness varies from culture to culture and time period to time period. She looks at five basic paths to happiness historically--wisdom, drugs, money, bodies, and celebration--and tears away much of the "myth" that these things can't make you happy. They aren't sufficient for total happiness maybe, but, if used wisely, they've made some people happy for some time. And she relieves those who can't get quite skinny enough or rich enough or smart enough of any guilt for those "failures" which haven't been in past history or peoples. And those who keep buying those magazines and books on how to get happy? Save your money. Just accept and be.
That there aren't certain paths to happiness and that individuals lack major control of the events that shape their lives (and so should make the most of what they have available) wouldn't come as news to Mark Buchanan. He also wrote an earlier book which I enjoyed, Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen, so I knew his The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You would be worth reading. It was. Buchanan makes a convincing case for a "social physics" that we frequently discuss here, the idea of applying work in complexity, nonlinearity, networking, and resulting patterns of interacting agents to explain what happens in the world. It's certainly a much better explanation and predictor than traditional social science delivers, particularly economics, which Buchanan takes apart well and forever. The key is to remember that humans, despite the zany ideology of economists, do not live or operate in isolation from other humans. Social psych counts. History counts. Being able to picture what those around you will think and do counts. Once you accept that, you start seeing how the subsequent patterns of behavior make more sense, now, in the past, what is likely the future. We've lived way too long with a bizarre paradigm of individuality that has warped everything about how we interpret the world. As the sciences of complexity and the others develop and expand, those old views will be challenged and, hopefully, finally fall, to be replaced with a better understanding of the trade-offs, good and bad, of everyday living. There's not much new here for those who have kept up with this topic for a while, but the systematic takedown of econ, along with the refresher material, will be entertaining even for them. For those just now being exposed to the material, Buchanan is an entertaining and lucid guide.
The problem for all these writers, talking about "worlds" and views that aren't dominant in the culture, is getting people to listen to them, making their ideas stick. Fortunately, there's a book for that, too, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. Technically a business book, built around business examples, it has wider application to all the concerns that the Dems and, more importantly, people who will actually change things for the better in the future want to address. (For the record, the Repubs have had this down pat for decades, maybe because they're tied better to effective corporate PR.)
Their thesis is simple and stated in the subtitle, and their book is a history and instruction manual on the topic, well-written, quickly read, and hard to forget. These guys know that, for every stat you give or research you cite, you better have a story to go with it, one that meets clear "principles" for SUCCESs: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories. (Yeah, that's only one S at the end but notice that you will probably remember that, making it easier to pull up the acronym when you decide you need it.) IOW, you can't just assume that the superior logic and evidence of your message will win a debate. You have to make conscious and determined efforts to get that message to "stick."
With their own stories and memorable examples like Jared the Subway sandwich guy (and the fact that you know who I'm talking about and everything Subway wants you to know about him proves the point), they get messages like these across:
Sadly, there is a villain in our story. The villain is a natural psychological tendency that consistently confounds our ability to create ideas using our principles. It's called the Curse of Knowledge. . . .
This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.
-----
How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We sow how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities--not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.
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The problem [with direct and abstract presentation of facts] is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you're implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument--judge it, debate it, criticize it--and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story . . . you engage the audience--you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
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In addition to creating buy-in, springboard stories mobilize people to act. Stories focus people on potential solutions. Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode. Clearly, the amount of "problem-solving" we do varies across stories. . . . But springboard stories go beyond having us problem-solve for the main character. A springboard story helps us problem-solve for ourselves. A springboard story is an exercise in mass customization--each audience member uses the story as a springboard to slightly different destinations.
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For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it's got to make the audience:
1. Pay attention.
2. Understand and remember it.
3. Agree/Believe.
4. Care.
5. Be able to act on it.
The Heaths end with a "symptoms and solutions" section for common problems with messages not "sticking" and a helpful "reference guide" that should be tattooed someplace accessible for quick recall when debating and discussing policy issues. Seriously. Dump all the wonk books, dump Lakoff and the "framing" debates. This is the "how-to" Bible we should all be carrying and referring to. Might even wake up the Dems. If it can't, there's no hope. Maybe you should start with this one and see if you can come up with "sticky ideas" for the others. Although anyone who can come up with "Richistan" probably doesn't need it.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Are We Rome Yet?
The question is legit. Every great nation has ceased to be so great. The life cycle is well known and always denied by the brighter lights of every great nation until it was made painfully clear one way or another that it had ceased to be so great. When you're a nation with the global scope of the United States, with military bases everywhere, cultural and economic dominance everywhere (until the Chinese stop lending, anyway), the comparisons aren't just with other great nations (which include the Dutch and Spanish and Venecians, remember) but with the one that still holds the imagination of everyone--Rome.
A lot of people invoke Rome without knowing much about it, just a few incidents or emperors, the stories of Jesus, its fall with your choice of all kinds of proposed causes. In fact, one proof of the ignorance of Rome despite its invocation is the realization that the Roman Empire went on for centuries after the fall of Rome and historians really can't pinpoint any specific moment when, like a light switching off, life changed even for those in the lost western portion of the empire.
These are the sorts of things you can learn when you read the new works comparing Rome to the U.S., works like Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Murphy's task is to explain how Rome went from a powerful republic to its transformation into an empire to its eventual (and IMO inevitable) decay. And then to relate that to our present day. The common elements are conspicuous: the degenerate and self-impressed and insulated capitals, the degraded and trivial public life, the vagarities and porosity of borders, the community-eroding results of over-hyped privatization, the truly monumental ignorance and stupidity regarding the rest of the world and how we're networked in it, the pure corruption of the government. You'll learn a lot from this journalist/historian even if you're familiar with the histories of the two countries; you'll feel like the smartest guy on earth if you knew nothing beforehand.
After this thorough review, comparison, and analysis of the situations of the two empires, here are some of the lessons of Rome he says are relevant to us today:
There is, to begin with, a psycholological tendency that is nearly impossible to shed. The idea that you should preserve everything you already have, exactly the way it is, exerts a powerful grip, even when logic suggests that only adaptation can preserve what is essential and worthwhile. . . .
Then there is a simple fact of life: the status quo never stays that way. Thucydides observed that empires start to decline when they cease to expand. You can't read an account of Rome in the third, fourth, or fifth century, when expansion is over and emperors are trying desperately to hold things together, without marveling at the blizzard of variables in play. Every Roman action to address one urgent problem . . . creates unintended new problems. . . .
And from this comes, finally an unhappy generalization: large systems are inherently unstable. . . .
For a long time Rome was able to organize the world according to its own convenience--until there came a point when doing so became difficult, then impossible. . . .
Deja vu, huh? And from that, here's what Murphy recommends as the best course for US to avoid following down that same path:
First, instill an appreciation of the wider world. Start teaching it round instead of flat. Immigration helps us here. The influx of foreign students does too. . . . To drive home the idea that "we are not alone," there is no substitute for fluency in another language. . . . Americans have their priorities backward. They worry needlessly about . . . whether the immigrants will ever learn English. They should be worrying about . . . : whether the elites will ever speak anything else.
Second, stop treating government as a necessary evil, and instead rely on it proudly for the big things it can do well. Privatization has its uses, and farming out government functions has its place--but the loss of civic engagement and loyalty across the board is a very real threat. . . . Besides, government can be held accountable in ways that the private sector can't. Yes, it takes some imagination to see how corrosive privatized government will prove to be many decades down the road--and that's another thing: start thinking in centuries.
Third, fortify the institutions that promote assimilation. . . .
Fourth, take some weight off the military. . . .
Seriously. You see these things happening within the context of our current politics? Me either. That's not the only thing ultimately demoralizing about Murphy's book. He concludes by pinning his hopes on what he sees as the American tendency to believe in possible improvement as compared to Rome's "it doesn't get any better than this." But the people he quotes as evidence of this trait, Jefferson, Lincoln, Eisenhower, are all part of an older value-system now overrun by triviality and unseriousness. (How's Paris doing today? Bill O'Reilly and Tim Russert are more as authorities than Murphy is. Barbara Walters still lives.) We're a nation that now leads the world in incarcerating its citizens, and the political leaders of CA, when given a chance to reform its crushing prison problems, just voted to spend $7b. more on 53,000 more prison beds. Other states will inevitably follow suit. That's a nation with its eye on continuous possible improvement?
This nation's station as leading power in the world, whether we gratuitously argue over whether we're an empire or not, will vanish one day. Maybe from China calling in its notes, maybe from other sudden economic shocks, maybe from just the arteroschlerosis that Murphy describes for Rome. Maybe we'll have to complete the transformation from republic to the imperial government that Bushnev and Cheneyov are finalizing from the early designs of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the First and then have the world gang up on us to put us back in our place. I know we've been through these belches of authoritarian excess here before and racheted back somewhat each time. But I also look at the tendency of resource scarcity to require authoritarian regimes and we're coming up on the Mother of All Resource Scarcities, and I look at determined ignorance of a critical mass willing to give away freedom and democracy in the name of protection from boogey men, and I wonder if our resilency will hold through my lifetime. Some generation had to be the one to suffer for its nation's decline and fall. It's always hard to believe it could be yours, but Murphy makes clear it will happen to someone. Why not you? But I've only got a couple or three decades left. I may get lucky.
I really am sorry, sonny.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)
We’ve all been there. We did something wrong (incorrectly, evil, whatever, take your pick). But we’re capable, we’re good, so this can’t be true. There has to be another explanation. Somebody else’s fault. Not wrong, just not right yet. This is what I actually intended. This is even better. As I’ve said here before, Jeff Goldblum nailed it in “The Big Chill”—we can go a long time without sex but we can’t go a day without a rationalization.
Social psychologists have long had a term for it—cognitive dissonance, when two realities collide in our belief systems and force us to either make them fit (however bizarrely) or jettison or deform one or both of them. Cognitive dissonance is the theme of Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson’s Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.Tavris and Aronson are two of the best known social psych folks, and this book should be required reading for anyone laying claim to intelligence. It’s extremely easy to read, except for all the dogearring, margin-writing, and quoting you’ll be doing to anyone close by. And it’s applicable to every reader and everyone they know. Except you and me. Here’s their thesis in a nutshell:As fallible human beings, all of us share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for any actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral, or stupid. . . . The higher the stakes—emotional, financial, moral—the greater the difficulty.
It goes further than that: Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. The authors then spend the rest of their book illustrating exactly how with examples from politics (which is built on cog diss), science, wealth, personal memories (which are readily and frequently unreliable), psychoanalysis (and false memory debacles), alien abductions, love and relationships, fixing the starting point of blame. And, importantly for our constitutional future, trials and sentencing.
The section on how government officials, in this case, judges, prosecutors, and cops, can explain away their many errors has obvious implications for what is going on with Iraq, global warming, virtually everything happening on most levels of government today. Picture this. You send the wrong guy to prison. Do you admit being wrong? Or do you deny it, claim the new evidence is wrong, the guy’s a “bad guy” who’s done other things. You’re still a “good guy,” you’re still possessed of truth and righteousness, God still personally makes you His spokesperson on justice. “The alternative, that you sent an innocent man to prison for fifteen years is so antithetical to your view of your competence that you will go through mental hoops to convince yourself that you couldn’t possibly have made such a blunder.” IOW, the “bad” prosecutors we highlight here when they make these ridiculous, self-protective, God’s representative statements, like the OR DA they take to town for his blowhard hubris over and over.
Once cops and DAs zero in on someone, their training and experience over and over bracket off any contradictory info, and you don’t need this book to know that, although far too many of them do deny it themselves. The authors’ detailing of deceptive interrogation techniques that allow no refutation is scary, as scary as DAs' active efforts to block mitigating evidence from freeing innocent people. (Scariest, and the best proof of where their heads really are and what they really believe in, is their apparent indifference to reopening the cases in which this happens and finding who really did do the crime.) They know what they know, and disagreers are just wrong, despite all those facts and evidence on their side.
You come away from this book with many feelings, none good. Foremost is the realization of just how little contact someone really has to have with reality to survive and even prosper on this planet. You’d think all the wake-up calls we’ve gotten from sweeties and those we wished were in our lives would alert us to our innate confusion and blindness, but apparently not. They were stupid, and, really, they weren’t that hot anyway.
The book also gives us a very good answer for why evidence and reason, despite Al Gore's fond recall of them from this country's good old days, find such tough sledding and will likely never be what its advocates want it to be, the answer to those questions about “why don’t people listen to reality???” Unless the costs of ignoring the evidence are just so high that all but the diehards recognize the need to change, the old guard will resist. The authors thankfully include the example of the doctor who figured out that washing hands before sticking them on patients would save lives made progress only funeral by funeral of the old guard doctors who refused to believe it. Why wouldn’t they, why won’t the current policymakers and practitioners? Because accepting the evidence would mean admitting they’ve been WRONG all these years, that they’ve put people away who shouldn’t have been, or for longer than they deserved. Who wants to own up to that? So it’s “you can prove anything with statistics” or “yeah, but I had a case once . . . .” La, la, la, can’t hear you.
Tavris and Aronson don’t promise us remedies to all these dilemmas and disasters that our cog diss can lead us to. What they do offer is a thorough and unforgettable overview of what it is and does so that we can try to overcome the problems. “Drivers cannot avoid having blind spots in their field of vision, but good drivers are aware of them . . . . We cannot avoid our psychological blind spots, but if we are unaware of them we may become unwittingly reckless, crossing ethical lines and making foolish decisions. . . .” Until we get that fact and reality are more important than our beliefs and egos, we will keep blundering along with dogma and illusion governing our society and, frankly, our personnel lives. We will keep being the unserious people who will make up such a large part of the future American history books. Tavris and Aronson should be required reading for anyone who claims to take reality seriously. And even more so for the vast majority in this country who don't.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Only Fools
Vincent Bugliosi's latest self-promoting screed on criminal justice is out, this time making money off JFK's assassination rather than the tragedies of Sharon Tate and Nicole Brown. No, I'm not going to link to it. He's the prototype of the self-inflated, overzealous prosecutor put on earth specially by God to save Him from having to sort out the "bad guys" from the "good guys." This time, he's put together the classic DA case of "weak point, pound pulpit" with an over-thousand page recap of the equally massive and equally flawed Warren Report. Also in classic DA style, he attacks critics and their evidence and views as if that proves his case. It doesn't. Because there have truly been lunatics out there in the analysis of JFK's assassination, that doesn't mean all the critics are equally crazy or crazy at all. As I said, it's an old prosecutor trick to lump all together to discredit the valid. And unfortunately from the idiotic reviews I've read in the NY Times, Boston Globe, and LA Times, it's impressed the credulous and ahistorical once again. (No, I'm not linking to them either. Nonsense, bad nonsense, has no right to distribution.)
Let's remember a point I've made here in the past. The "educated" among us are taught early and often that "conspiracies don't exist" and that anyone who believes that people with or wanting power would do illegal things and try to cover them up is a (oooohhhh) "conspiratist." In the "educated" world, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Iraq, the US attorney scandal (well, actually, anything the Busheviks have done) could never have happened, and it's this "we're all good people who would never shaft people for power" BS that's gotten the Dems and the nation into the crappy position we're now in. In Bugliosi's world, any conspiracy that might happen only started with Watergate, apparently. Our government before then would never look on something that happened and decide to slant investigations and cover up evidence to protect the American people from knowledge, especially knowledge of bureaucratic failure to protect a president.
If you should choose to read this garbage, keep in mind that the evidence Bugliosi uses to support his position comes from a Warren Commission which never knew certain things. One, that Nicolas Katzenbach (who ran DOJ in RFK's breakdown after the killing) and Bill Moyers (LBJ's aide) virtually immediately had a memo specifically requiring that the American people be convinced of Oswald's guilt and that he was the only one responsible (ostensibly because they really thought Castro was behind it and it would start WWIII). It was from that that everything else derived. Two, that the FBI had been supervising Oswald (to the point that Oswald showed up at their offices prior to the assassination and left a note to the agent in charge to tell him to back off) and had nevertheless allowed a presidential motorcade pass directly by the place where this (suspectly) Castro supporter and defector to the USSR worked. Three, that Jack Ruby was a long-time bagman for the Mafia running their clubs in Dallas. Four, that the administration had partnered with the Mafia to rid Cuba of Castro and then backed off, pissing off both the Mafia and the CIA zealots who saw it as a betrayal of the highest order. Had any or all of these points been presented to the Warren Commission, it's doubtful that it would have relied on the evidence it did, disregarded the evidence not supportive of the Katzenbach-Moyers memo, and reached the conclusions that Bugliosi now sees as engraved in stone and worthy of this megaphone he published (once again with absolutely no word from the defendant who NEVER GOT TO DEFEND HIMSELF). Why am I so sure the Commission wouldn't have been so quick to the trigger? Because two of the people who did know most or all of these things--RFK and LBJ--both went to their graves convinced that there was more than just Oswald behind it.
No one who understands the history of power or of bureaucracies could accept that the Warren Report tells us what happened that day in Dallas. And no one who knows the ways and mindset of prosecutors could accept it or Bugliosi. We know well that once law enforcement zones in on a suspect, all evidence and investigation goes with the assumption and perspective of building the case, coloring all questioning and acceptance of evidence, not finding the truth. Look at all the guys who've been released from prison on DNA evidence lately. Not just that they were falsely convicted based on prosecutors' briefs that were likely not as prejudiced as the Warren Report, but that the prosecutors and law enforcers subsequently spend so little time going back and trying to find who really did it, if they even accept that they've made a mistake at all. Bugliosi has always been a glory-seeking prototype of the worst kind of DA, and it's clear he hasn't gotten over the fact that his "win" in a mock trial of Oswald decades ago didn't settle the case (again, because the defendant had no voice and the FBI stood behind the evidence against Oswald). What an ego.
Here's a classic example of how his "experience" and perspective color his analysis of the assassination. According to him, anyone who believes that Jack Ruby, the neurotic blowhard manager of Mafia clubs who killed Oswald simply because he was overwhelmed with grief about the killing of a president no one had ever heard him express anything good about before and his worry that the poor widow would have to come to Dallas to testify (good God, how naive do you have to be to believe a ridiculous story like this?), had anything to do with the grudge of the Mafia leaders who had been humiliated by the Kennedy brothers is a conspiracy nut. "Ruby, he writes, was 'close to law enforcement, emotionally volatile and erratic in his behavior, and someone who couldn't keep a secret, all of which would automatically disqualify him as a Mafia hit man.'" (From one of the idiot reviews.) Or maybe he wasn't close to law enforcement, just bagging cops to protect his strip clubs, was in debt to the Mafia bosses and reacting predictably when one is in such a situation, and maybe he CAN keep secrets if HE WAS ASSOCIATED WITH THE MAFIA FOR THREE DECADES AND NOT DEAD OR IN PRISON YET. If you've already decided your case, you come up with the Bugliosi and Warren Report picture of Ruby. If you haven't, there are multiple other interpretations of what he did, and none of them support the "Oswald acted alone" case. Yet the idiot reviewer from which this quote is pulled used it as an example of Bugliosi's "cogency." My ass. What an ego that reviewer has as well.
The truth about JFK's assassination right now is that we're never going to know the truth. It's all just guesses because the investigators and the Commission had agendas that paid for obscuring everything from the American people. What do I think happened? I think Oswald was part of the "rogue" culture of "America protectors" whose existence needed to be kept from the public after they went off the reservation with their Mafia partners and killed a president. I think Oswald was part of it (why else have him killed?) but was he a plant or a participant, I don't know. I do know that, once JFK was dead, the bureaucratic impulse was, as always, to ensure asses were covered and that the "expertise" and authority of officialdom had to be reinforced in every way. I don't believe the FBI or CIA "killed" him, but I do believe it was in their and others' interest to come up with "Oswald acted alone" as THE answer. I also know no other "assassin" or wannabe in our history took the worst possible shots at their targets, yet Oswald, never a marksman, used a clumsy rifle with a bad scope to fire at JFK not when he was right in front of him but at the farthest point and speeding up. The Warren Report came up with its famous theories, some folks have shown that those theories are theoretically possible, and Bugliosi claims that solves the case. How inconvenient for him (and the reviewers lauding his "cogency") that new evidence was presented this very week on the bullet fragments that raise even more questions about whether one or two or more guns were used. Can I prove anything I believe about this? Never in a million years. Not now. That chance was passed up when the Katzenbach-Moyers memo went out.
That won't stop the "educated" from using this doorstop as "proof" that those crazy conspiratists have gotten their comeuppance. You already see it in their triumphant hoo-yahs in these reviews. They're just as self-impressed and clueless as Bugliosi. The truth is that the Warren Report was fundamentally flawed not just in its "evidence" but in the entire context in which it was done. Anyone using it to bolster a case about the assassination is running games, although, in fairness, their own myopic and faith-based views that authorities never have any other fish to fry than truth in presenting reports to the public and that prosecutor briefs are always and everywhere the TRUTH may actually have them believing their own mirrors. But here's the final truth of the JFK assassination. ANYONE who tells you they "know" . . . is a fool.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Quickie Book Reviews
Four interesting books for you to check into next time you're at the book store and looking for something to challenge your synapses.
John Dominic Crossan, God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now
You can tell from the title that Crossan, one of the more iconoclastic theological scholars, has an agenda of linking Jesus' mission and opposition to empire with what's going on in the Middle East, and he's not shy about it. From his perspective, Jesus preached a message of peace in opposition to empire that resonates today, and he tracks that message through his readings of the Bible. His whacking of Revelations is worth the price of admission. On the downside, he, like the Catholic he is, sees a Paul whose ties to Jesus never really existed but prospered because Jesus' family and followers in Jerusalem were wiped out by the Romans, replacing the original mission and vision with Paul's epileptic dreams. Well, I guess that says more about my religious beliefs than you needed to know. Anyway, you'll get a good tour of the history of Jesus' time and the role Caesars and empire played in everything we read in the New Testament, all with Crossan's usual verve. You'll definitely finish it thinking.
Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
Again, another title that tells the story. Page is frequently cute in his writing here, and not always in a good way, but his thesis is worth pursuing. I've written here before about complexity theory and the way it will rewrite how we think about the world by the time it's done. Page takes the same view, only he's much more credentialed and experienced in explaining it. Through a sometimes labored but always on point application of complexity findings to his research, he manages to prove his overriding view that diversity outperforms centralized authority and action and rides it to several interesting examples. It won't be that new to "wisdom of crowds" readers, for much the same reason, but carries more scientific proof. He may have written the book that brings it all home to a broader public. It'd be a shame if others get it read before you do.
Jerome M. Segal, Joseph's Bones: Understanding the Struggle Between God and Mankind in the Bible
Our traditional reading of the Bible is that it's been passed down from God to us and that God is this inerrant force for a consistent morality from which we get our rules or we'd all act like a bunch of drunk frat boys. But what if you were someone from another planet who dropped down and read the Bible cold, without all the cultural baggage? Would you get the same story? Probably not. Read from the perspective of an outsider, the Bible is more a story of both God and humans learning how to interact and what rules should apply. God whacks humans regularly, has to be talked out of killing innocents, screws with people simply because they didn't get it the way his whims carried him at the moment, as in, Moses hit the rock instead of talking to it so for that he never makes it to the Promised Land after all he's done for God??? Okay. Segal's point is that there is an independent morality by which God is even limited and the role of many Biblical heroes was to point it all out on behalf of humans, who come off far better than our traditions allow. A challenging book, interesting, demands you accept the Bible as more or less consciously literature, a big stretch. But you'll learn stuff even if you never buy it for real. I mean, accept it for real. Buying it would be okay.
Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln's Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words
Bunch of books out there on Lincoln and his speeches right now and on how the great man developed his style and approach. The latest doesn't actually focus on any particular one, like Gettysburg, the first or second inaugural, Cooper's Union. Wilson's take is to look at all of them and how his life and habits got him to them, how he learned to write, how he consistently jotted little notes down for later use, how he wrote and rewrote, how he got them to the proper audiences in the days before PR took off. The idea that he could fire off the Gettysburg Address on a train going up to the battlefield isn't completely wrong, but it jettisons so much of the process, previous thought, and ties to past utterances as to be simplistic. (And, yes, wrong.) A good overview of the man, his times and wisdom, as well as the role that words can play in pulling a nation together in its toughest times. Wilson wrote the previously well-received Honor's Voice on Lincoln's early life. This is a very worthy follow-up. As you'll see as you browse the store.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Wikinomics
In a world of MySpace, Second Life, and Wikipedia, it's kinda hard not to notice a lot of swirl and remixing going on. This very blog is an example (not a very large one, I admit) of the impressive changes in networking and communicating info that are exploding around us. The idea of using the Internet to open new channels for exploring, testing, reworking how we do things may not have yet hit Gutenberg stage, but it's done a hell of a lot more than CBs did. (And if you have to ask what a CB is, you've proven my point . . . and I want you to leave the room right now.)
With such change, the temptation for existing organizations, ways of thought, and the people who inhabit both is to hunker down and resist. Standard operating procedures, chains of command, hierarchical structures are all threatened whenever new technologies are swarming the gates. And, indeed, we've seen companies and corporations doing as much to repel the new "wiki"-world as to embrace it.
That's the essential theme of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams--the tension between the existing order in business and the new swirling, centerless, topless possibilities of internetworking within and without traditional orgs, the "art and science" of peer production. Some businesses, they say, have already sprung up based on the new lines, and others have hopped on board, to their success and advantage. Far too many, in the authors' view, have failed to do so and risk being swept away as the proverbial world whizzes by them. And, in chapter after chapter, they spell out why and how.
Wikinomics is based on four principles, Tapscott and Williams tell us: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally, and they helpfully provide examples of each. They all tie into a philosophy of massive, networked collaboration. No copyrights, patents or entitled privilege here. You solve problems by inviting networked partnerships, like the famous "open source" development of Linux. The product generally is the "ideagoras," a growing and evolving global marketplace of ideas and inventions shared and expanded to take advantage of what all participants have to offer. The result? New orgs, ways of working, necessary skills, a new, more creative and less hierarchical world.
Okay, for those of us who like stable jobs and skill sets, this doesn't make us think "utopia" that the authors fear might be derailed by stubborn resistance of established (and blind) powerbases unable to understand the genius here. (However, since in the music industry, the latter roles are played by some truly unlikeable folks, fighting Napster et al., this sort of balances that possible job loss thing.) And, while the examples for the most part are cool and thought-provoking, this all has the "we'll all buy groceries online" dot-com kind of patina on it. So, let's not get carried away here yet. Too much of this ignores politics and power or believes the wonderfulness of wikiworld will pull it through. Potentials for new collaborations and their results are impressive, yes, but it's likely this will be a supplement to, not a replacement for, the powers-that-be, may be eventually assimilating or being assimilated into the other. (Ready to eat my words, though, if all industries go the music route and risk losing everything to whoever does put it together.)
What interested me here most was the overall lack of application to government organizations. Granted, it's a business book, but is there no overlap? I think there is. Let's look at a normally hierarchical gov org such as a corrections department (you could think "school district" or "public hospital" if you prefer). Problems of top-down direction, communications, record-keeping and transfer, just goal sharing itself are well known in most DOCs. So why not recommend the wikinomics principles for these frequently ineffective bureaucracies?
What might that mean in practice? How about a blog that disseminated not only department news and policies but the latest research and experience on correctional management or programs? Prison staff and parole and probation staff sometimes end up talking different languages or using the same terms for different concepts? Isn't that perfect for a DOC-wikipedia? The org too big for people to know each other anymore at anything but top levels? Staff don't know who to talk to to find info or how something's done? Just want everyone to feel part of the same common org, purpose, mission? MySpace anyone?
Tapscott and Williams are clearly onto something, for government as well as for business. The politics of power still has to play out, and their visions of wiki-greatness are likely to go unfulfilled as power and inertia work their magic. But even half a loaf here will be something amazing. It already is. The future is just not what it used to be, and reading this book will show you where it might go. And they thoughtfully left their final chapter blank for you to contribute to the journey (through their website).
What are you waiting for?
Sunday, March 04, 2007
The Thomas Flanagan Trilogy
When I was young, growing up with Irish blood, I took the phrase "luck of the Irish" as a good thing. Made me think I was superior. It wasn't until I got into college really that I realized that no one ever attached "good" to the "luck." Once you read much of the last 500 years or so of Ireland's history, you figure out why.
Britain's first and last colony, Ireland has one of the sadder pasts of the Western world. History is filled with winners and losers and, despite our tendency to pride, we Irish have almost always been on the short end of that stick. But what it lacks in success, Irish history more than makes up for with drama and narratives. The heroes of Irish history have been tragic in the classical sense, and the villains (homegrown as well as external) are among the most despicable of humankind (people starving to death and you sell their grain and blame them for it--sounds like some current day US types, huh?).
There are a lot of good Irish histories and biographies out there, particularly if you find one written by guys named Coogan, Kee, or Forster. And as much as or more than any people, the songs of the Irish tell their tales in as much detail as beauty, and not all of them are Gaelic. But for the best feel of the events that led finally to the release by Britain of three-quarters of Irish land back to the Irish, you'll be best served by reading the novels of the late former English professor, Thomas Flanagan.
In three novels--The Year of the French, The Tenants of Time, and The End of the Hunt--Flanagan took three major events leading to the British withdrawal, filled the space around them with history before and after, and produced a trilogy that will get you from the late 1700s to Irish independence in the 1920s. The Year of the French relates the time the French sent ill-fated "help" to Irish rebels and got whipped for their efforts. Of course, the Irish themselves who came to their cause ended up much worse. Tenants and Hunt both tell stories of two fictional, second tier rebels whose own lives paralleled the rise and tragedies of two real heroes of the time, respectively Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Collins. If you're not familiar with either, Parnell turned Irish representation in Britain's Parliament into political power that gave the Irish their first real leverage on their modern future. Collins turned British rule in on itself with a masterful espionage and terror campaign and then led the forces consolidating a less-than-complete independence. Both ended up dead and their reputations controversial. Flanagan shows why and uses his own secondary heroes to delve well into why.
The air of tragedy and its subsequent melancholy, even in moments of success, hang over every word, phrase, scene of Flanagan's works here. The clear and elegant writing is vivid in elucidating both characters and environment. I hadn't been to Ireland before I read these books, but really I had. What I saw when I did finally get there felt like a familiar homecoming, not something surprising and new. The place where Collins was gunned down in an ambush was deja vu when I saw it. Each of the books is long, with multiple characters and subplots, and they hop around in space and time. The best criticism of them, I think, is that you can get the people mixed up, especially if you can't read in one gulp. But they also have helpful rosters of characters so you don't have to thumb back to where you first met them.
The common theme of the books, besides the inexorable stream toward Irish independence, is the sense that all the major characters have been pulled to where they are by that stream. The heroes are not necessarily noble people or even good. The most memorable to me is the IRA assassin Ned Nolan in Tenants, a guy who will without qualm put a bullet in the head of a turncoat and is himself killed possesing a copy of Shakespeare, the ultimate of ponderers on the fates of humans. But all the characters will mark you and leave you thinking about how their lives had no real options.
Which makes you realize that maybe yours doesn't either. They say when you look back on your life, it looks like a story that had to end up where it does, despite all the alternatives and choices that you had along the way. These characters could relate. Flanagan basically gives us Shakespearean stories and characters and shows how humans aren't so much in control as floating in historical streams, streams that echo earlier ones and presage those to come.
He really drives the point home in Tenants, in which a young historian (who turns up again in Hunt) tries to capture the whats and whys of a particular early event (an example of "boycotting" which got its name in Ireland) and concludes after reading and interviewing that he could write a history but could never relate the actual truth. He skips around through the Parnell period, back and forth in time, to make the point that we just live in the period we inhabit, just like we live in that space. We think we control our destinies but time rules, forcing us into the same patterns and outcomes that the tenants of other times ended up with. You leave all of Flanagan's works with the clear sense of common humanity, good and bad, and of the flows that our interactions create, flows that we can at best influence, but usually even then get swept along in ways that aren't clear until we get to the end of our story.
I could give you details on plots, but the Amazon links will do better with more space. I will tell you that I've read these long books multiple times, predictably finding things each time that mean more or different the next time through. Prepare to invest time and to be moved. The payoff is more than worth it. These novels touch. You'll have a better sense of modern Irish history, of the inexorable streams of time, and maybe even the luck of the Irish, which in Flanagan's hands is not "good" but definitely memorable. In the best of ways.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
The Origin of Wealth
There are certain books that change the way you look at the world, fiction, non, bio, poetry, whatever. I don't have that many, some I've mentioned here, some I haven't, To Kill a Mockingbird, stuff by Richard Russo and John Jay Osborne, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, The Evolution of Cooperation, Taylor Branch's trilogy of Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, Isaiah Berlin's essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Richard Fox's bio of Reinhold Niebuhr, my first intro to cognitive science. Some I'm not going to mention because I'd never live it down.
The books that have had the biggest impact on me as a group, however, have been those connected to the research on complexity, nonlinear dynamics, and applications to the world, like artificial societies and the punctuated equilibria that constantly shake our world, unpredicted by the wise people who proclaim their linear, staid truths. I can't say they changed my world view as much as gave structure and verification to the way I've been cursed to see the world from pretty much my beginning. It's just been nice to see that I'm not the only crazy person.
What's been lacking in the complexity literature has been the synthesis that's been needed to pull the threads together into a whole that can serve as the new paradigm for all future study, including criminology and any research into corrections sentencing. The folks at the Santa Fe Institute have been doing incredible work on this, and individual writers have published books using nice examples. But nobody has combined it in one source in a way that leaves no excuse for pretending that a coherent body of knowledge isn't ready for application.
Until now.
The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric D. Beinhocker is the book that has done it. It's a very long book, and I'm not silly enough to try to summarize in a couple of paragraphs the accumulation of evidence and structuring of the new perspective that he's put together here. He effectively dismantles the present discipline of economics (I hurt my shoulder punching the air with every shot) which has bizarrely held "gold standard" status in the social sciences for far too long, outlines the work in complexity previously done, shows how the complexity models explain social and economic development far better than others, and outlines the strategies that businesses and organizations need to follow to adapt effectively to the environments that confront them.
Most of all, he crumbles the "liberal-conservative" dichotomy that has crippled our confrontation of the problems that clearly face us, including (by implication) the problems we have in corr sent policy. One of the more direct applications is his treatment of the impact of trust or lack of it in building constructive communities and the loss of legitimacy of institutions when a culture doesn't maintain strong communities. This comes after the discussion of the role of social technologies, including law and justice institutions, in providing the structure for ordered progress.
Beinhocker might or might not be shocked to be told he'd written a social policy book, given that his book's closest parallel is The Wealth of Nations, which has set our social policy for good or bad for centuries. But, with this synthesis, we can hope that the work being done will broaden, especially as funerals clear out the old, incapable of change guard, both in academe and policy. The old paradigms from econ, criminology, poli sci, etc. that do not incorporate the new knowledge are already being shown deficient and barely relevant, and so are the policies based on them.
The new paradigm will teach us to expect ebbs and flows of social problems and our success dealing with them as matters of course, that punctuated equilibria are common in social interaction (meaning that the efforts to address crime, for example, that coincide with the jumps will unfairly and unwisely be considered successful or not when they had little to do with anything at all). It will encourage constant monitoring of the ebbs and flows of our environments, never being comfortable with the status quo because it will change, and a more contingent and adaptable approach to our actions. Most of all, it will let us know that "truth" in our policymaking is just dangerous human hubris and, hopefully, teach us to be more accepting of our human fallibility.
Complexity studies and applications will change (are changing) the way we understand the world and are capable of doing in it. It's just a question of how long it takes. Those who get it sooner rather than later will beat the ones who lag. The reason it hasn't reached the broad culture and audience is that no one has put it all together before. Beinhocker has.
Don't be left behind.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity
One time when I was in high school, I went out cruising one night with a group of lunatics. One of them had obtained a new, very old car that was still capable of impressive speeds. I know this because we obtained them late that evening on the relatively empty Interstate. I remember how the speed made everyone, including the driver, borderline crazy as we cranked the engine up to max and principles of aerodynamics seemed to start coming into play. I remember the giggling and shouts and curses of amazement as we flew along, and it was very clear to me that just one minor thing, a car changing lanes, misjudgment of others' speed, a blown tire, a twitch by the idiot driver, could make this insanity disastrous in a heartbeat.
I was in the backseat between two hyenas, aware that this might possibly be the most dangerous situation I would ever be in in my life (I was unfortunately proven wrong in that a few times too many). I also developed one of the most profound calms I've ever had in my life because I realized that there was nothing I could do, that whatever happened was going to happen and my fate was not in my hands. So I just sat there, not peeing my pants, watching the others and thinking that there are sometimes in individual and group histories when you just don't have control and shouldn't waste your energy and time denying it. Just be prepared to deal with the consequences, good or bad, and try never to let this crap happen again.
Well, obviously, sanity eventually prevailed, the cackling got too shrill, the driver's teen hormones quailed, whatever, and we survived, not necessarily wiser but certainly older. But I've never forgotten that first real foray into fatalism, and it's been popping into my head more and more in the last few years. Mainly because I've realized that this country is that car, the driver and the people around him are crazy and cackling, and I'm just along for a ride I can't do anything about.
The feeling can apply to so much, which probably adds to it--the dumbing and self-defeating narcissism of our citizenry, the refutation and betrayal of our First Amendment by the press, higher ed's selling out of what it was created for, science's demotion to our ayatollahs and their prehistoric followers, the inability of politics to address any important issue, what's on your list that I've left off? But the major thing that brings the calm back is what I emphasize here so much: Weather, Water, Energy. Why? Because on these overarchingly important needs, I've been in the back seat for 30 years now, thinking "this is crazy, can't anybody see what's happening?, we need to slow down and get things back under control." How do I know it's been 30 years?
Because of this book, written in 1977, William Ophuls' Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity. (Back when I taught American government, and God, am I glad I don't teach it now since everything in the books is now inoperable, I spent a full lecture on this book and on one test got a response about "the politics of Scare City." Actually pretty much fit, as you'll see.) There's nothing really new in 2007 in Ophuls' description of the ecological crisis that this nation and the world faced and what needed to be done to stop the clear disaster from happening, but it really was in 1977, which is my point. Nothing we're talking about now is new. The timing may be more or less off what he predicted, but he nailed just about everything. In 1977. And those of us in the back seat have just been watching the back of the driver's head ever since.
The "Scare City" part of Ophuls' work wasn't really even the ecological predictions. It was his clear delineation of the type of political philosophies and structures would have to be in play to deal with this world of scarcity. Needless to say, full and free deliberation of options and subsequent democratic decision making do not fare well in triage situations. He went back not to Locke and the liberals, writing in their periods of relative progress, but to Hobbes and his ilk, writing in their periods of disorder and, yes, scarcity. That's what we were looking at, he told us, if we didn't get our ecological acts together. Authoritarian governments accepted because people couldn't trust each other in the "dog eat dog," "nasty, brutish, and short" world that would come about.
Honestly, in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I was still naive enough to think that we were smart enough and not so self-absorbed to recognize the need for action. Jimmy Carter sat down with us, treated us like adults, and spelled out how great we would be if we stopped the disaster from happening. Pied Piper Reagan came forward singing "play, play, play." The rest is history. The car's just going faster and faster.
It's a good example of the kind of slo-mo calmness of this situation to note that in 1992, 15 years later, Ophuls and a co-writer, A. Stephen Boyan, Jr., republished a revised version, cleverly titled Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revised. How much things had changed in those 15 years is evident from the differences in the subtitles: the 1977 version, Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State v. the 1992 version, The Unraveling of the American Dream. Can you guess what they considered the prospects for our future to be?
Which is why I'm bringing Ophuls up right now. It's been another 15 years. Will we be seeing a revised revised version in a few months? Or will there be only silence? And what would that silence mean? Right now the most important sounds are still cackles and hoots, and even if we slow down, the costs are going to be high, even higher than 15, 30 years ago. And there's no guarantee the driver and the key cacklers will ever gain any sanity. The evidence is not in favor.
Me? I'm where I've been for 30 years. In the backseat. Calm and hoping I'll be able to help pick up the pieces.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
There Goes the Neighborhood Redemption
Not a big Jefferson fan (big talker, erratic and neurotic walker, wish he would have just once lived up to the fine words in his memorial) but one thing he said has always stuck with me (besides that Declaration thing). He said that he prayed for this nation when he considered that God was just. He was talking about slavery and its long-term damage to our country, clear and threatening even then. And on this at least, he's turned out right.
Race and the people who continue today to claim superiority based on it (as strongly if less vigorously and overtly as a rule than in the old days) have corrupted our American Legacy, what we literally fought the Civil War over, ever since. They still dominate Southern politics and, through gerrymandering, outright mendacity, and idiot media, our national politics as well, despite our best efforts to deny it. Like Holocaust deniers, our inability to confront the evil in our midst then and now still poisons our democracy, our potential, and our legacy even today.
Some people do get it, and some of those people write books. Two of the better ones out right now are There Goes the Neighborhood by William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub and Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann. The former is an examination by the authors and a cadre of students of the recent history and demographic changes of 4 Chicago neighborhoods. One in a stable white community just experiencing (and resisting) Latino newcomers; another, a white-to-Latino transitional neighborhood; another, a community that has fully undergone that white-to-Latino shift; and the last, a stable African-American community. Through interviews with current and former residents, they track how the development and use (or not) of community institutions and standards impacted the (in)stability of each neighborhood. It's a quick but deep read of the ebb and flow of people, communities, stability and instability that any general reader can gain from. (Plus, it borrows heavily from the conceptual framework of one of my favorite books ever, Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty, to which I have sung hosannas in the past.)
Neighborhood is valuable not only as a study of contemporary impacts and perceptions of race and how we get to our current politics and social (dis)order. It's also a nice reminder of the intricacies of racial perceptions. Residents of the stable African-American community are just as resistant to lower class blacks as their white counterparts in that other neighborhood, not to mention their distrust of Latinos. And Latinos are far more likely to side with whites on most issues than with their "minority" counterparts. The authors do note how education or other issues can unite all groups, or two against the third, but, as Nicolas Vaca pointed out in the terrific The Presumed Alliance, the superficial perceptions of majority v. united minorities is just not accurate. Political strategy based on it will likely fail, although that doesn't stop pundits from talking their usual silliness.
Neighborhood is a short quick read that will leave you a little disquieted but basically feeling informed. Redemption is a short quick read that will leave you very disquieted and feeling very pissed and aware that the Southern style of politics we've suffered through in recent decades is deeply embedded in our national DNA. Lemann is not my favorite writer, too old school and Beltway, too disdainful of blogs and ruffians at the journalistic cotillion, but he does this topic well. Describing the fall of Reconstruction through the success of white militias in LA and MS and the wimpy, ineffective leadership and opposition of a major political party (sound familiar??), his work leaves echoes of today's politics pounding in your ears. (And sends a message about ultimately self-defeating vacillating and equivocating for political expediency that will likely chill your bones.)
I personally wanted to pound heads as he detailed the way the right-wing cancer of that period blustered its way into an overthrow of the Northern Civil War victory. The re-writing of this crucial period's history by "professional" historians in the aftermath in the name of "keeping us all together" and being tired of confrontation of evil is so infuriating and unjust that it rivals all the disingenuous b------t spewed by academics, pundits, and political "leaders" today. And, sure enough, there are plenty of "let's understand and get along" moral weaklings at every step of the betrayal of the War and the people it freed.
It's very easy to play the game of picturing who from then and who from now could have traded places without skipping a beat. (All the idiotic praise of Ford and his binding up and enabling of the infection that Nixon and his people injected into our national veins to bring us to the potentially fatal point we find ourselves today provides plenty of great examples, and if that was too "annoying" and "defeatist," Atrios, when you mature at least a little, maybe you can learn some of the history your econ teachers taught you to ignore.) We had it in our power to institutionalize the American Legacy for all people of all colors, and we threw it away with vacillation, cowardice, temporizing, weariness, and unwillingness to stand for principle. Everything Dr. King was still condemning from his Birmingham jail cell almost a century later. (And don't get me started on JFK, who at the end of the books shows his true patronizing and ignorant shades.)
The scariest thing about this horribly enlightening book is the realization you get that "leaders" like we have today on all sides can throw away decades and generations simply through expediency and ignorance. For example, the justification for not sending federal troops into MS to ensure an honest election in the face of militant, organized white bigots was that it would hurt Republicans in the coming states like OH. Well, they won in OH. And threw away the South. Which they have now regained by adopting the same aggression of those militant, organized white bigots. And the rest of us get to live with that legacy.
God is just.
Friday, December 15, 2006
The Evolution of Cooperation
If I asked you to list the book that made the most impact on the way you looked at the world, you’d probably have as much trouble as I would. But if I asked to name one in the top 5, without the singling out, maybe it’d be easier. It would for me. And this is one I’d say it about—Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation. And now it’s back out in a revised edition so you can likely find it at your local bookstore if you don’t want to go online.
Axelrod had already established himself as an international relations specialist, especially with this applications of cognitive schema and mapping. But he’s made his most lasting mark with E of C, one of the first and still most important computer simulations, back in the day when desktop PCs were still pretty much sci-fi and being written off as unworkable by IBM.
What Axelrod did was perversely simple by today’s standards. He sent out a request to a range of scholars across many disciplines to have them submit what they thought would be the strategy that would pile up the most points in a long-term game of “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Then he ran them against each other to determine what the most successful strategy was.
Don’t know “Prisoner’s Dilemma”? I could just tell you it’s a game played with weird enthusiasm by a bunch of academic nerds seeking esoterica for publication. But, less snidely, the game basically posits that you and your buddy have been caught dead to rights on a lesser offense, but the cops believe (but can’t prove) you’ve done worse together. To prove the latter, they have to get confessions. Now, being smart interrogators, they separate you two and offer you a deal. You finger your partner for the crime—he does the full time for the worser offense, you walk. Of course, he’s being offered the same deal, so, if you both rat each other out, you’re both doing harder time. On the other hand, if you both keep quiet, you’ll get a lesser sentence than if you both snitch. What do you do?
Axelrod assigned values to the four options—you “defect” and your partner “cooperates,” vice versa, you both snitch, or you both keep quiet—and played out the strategies. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, short-term, defection will be more popular, having the biggest payout and all if your partner is stupid enough to trust you. But, over the long-term, especially when you don’t know when the game will end, is it still smarter to be a jerk all the time?
No. Turns out that defectors bring on defectors, and the harsher penalties. But then, cooperators don’t do well either because, known for their predictable and certain cooperation, the defectors can dump on them at will and still pile up the big gains. Which leads us to the simple strategy for winning long-term—that is, reciprocity or TIT FOR TAT. Which is exactly what it sounds like—whatever is done to you, do it back. Defect, defect, defect until the idiot figures it out. Once you’re both on “cooperate,” you’ll get consistent points even if they aren’t the highest possible per turn. And groups of interacting cooperators, having demonstrated their willingness to defect when defected upon, pile up the points.
Now, Axelrod later found that a little mercy sometimes worked a little better (if the partner mistakenly defected or only did it once in a very great while, like your sad, sad lovelife), but overall TIT FOR TAT was an amazingly successful strategy. Change the rewards for defecting or cooperating, or course, and the game can change dramatically. But the message was essentially this: Do unto others as you would . . . well, you get it. And it was scientifically proven.
Having read Axelrod and seen the account of “cooperators” getting walloped by defectors, I have just shaken my head as Dems faced the Gingrichs, Delays, and other rabid Repubs in the 26 years since the book first came out. As they dealt with Willie Horton and Swift Boats and semen-stained dresses. You just can’t let demonstrable defectors get away with it. It’s a proven loser strategy.
Axelrod’s book, and subsequent sequels, The Complexity of Cooperation and Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier, have far more depth and nuance than I can relate here, including the answers to the objections you undoubtedly came up with as you read my summary. And his major concern was international relations, not interpersonal ones. But the lessons apply to any interactions in which gains and losses are distributed based on practicing reciprocity or on asserting superiority—parents/children, bullies/bullied, sweetie/sweetie, crook/cop, boss/employee, political party/political party. A lot of great analysis has connected Axelrod’s dots in the last 26 years. There’s a lot more to be learned and applied. It’s good to see the book still has an audience. I hope you’ll be in it.
Saturday, December 09, 2006
The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth
Where the Dems screwed up the 2004 presidential election (well, among other things) was the placement of their candidates for P and V-P. John Edwards, as focus groups showed, had a much more powerful message than John Kerry, who waited two years before figuring out he should be mad at the Swift Boaters. Edwards' "Two Americas" theme, played only on the campaign trail at backwater stops where he couldn't show up Kerry, was clearly one that touched the strings that need to be played, especially now, to solidify Dem acceptance among marginal voters. Not more pandering to Repub special issues, not "I'm OK, You're OK" centrism. "Two Americas"--one of those who have made it and one of those who still have the dream but are losing the means and are looking hopefully or desperately for someone who will support them.
The nice thing about Edwards' version of the American Legacy to human history--a nation based on opportunity for all and governed by all v. a nation institutionalizing the stagnating status quo--is that the choice which Edwards pushed is demonstrably the best for the long-term economic as well as democratic health and welfare of our country. What do I mean by "demonstrably"?
This. Norton Garfinkle's The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy. Garfinkle, the chair of The Future of American Democracy Foundation, lays out the evidence for the success of the two opposing concepts and clearly shows that the "Dream" has been far superior to the "Gospel." Or, to use humans as symbols, Lincoln was far better for this country than Carnegie.
Lincoln plays an important role in Garfinkle's tale, literally the prototype of the person who rises from nothing to something not just through work but through opportunity made available by a supportive economy and government, opportunity available in America not available anywhere else at the time. Lincoln understood his situation and luck. It was why he favored free labor over slavery, why he saw slavery not only as a moral wrong but also as an economic threat. But, most of all, he saw it, and fought a civil war over it, as the sickness that, if allowed to spread, would undermine the ideals expressed in the Declaration. As Garfinkle says,
The freedom guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was of value, in Lincoln's view, precisely because it enable humble individuals to attain an independent, middle-class standard of living by the work of their own hands. America was the first nation on earth to offer this opportunity of economic advancement to all, even to the humblest beginner, and this was what made the nation unique and worth preserving.
The American Legacy, our contribution to human history, in a nutshell. And while government would be limited "by the people," it was also "of the people" and "for the people" and had an active role to play in providing and protecting these opportunities.
But Lincoln was barely cold in the ground (tomb) when the Gospel of Wealth slithered into American life with post-war industrialism and the popularity of Social Darwinism. In this view, epitomized by Carnegie, "successful businessmen . . . were responsible for building a growing economy. Justice would be defined by the principle that those who contribute most to the economy deserved to be rewarded most and . . . could be relied upon to use their wealth for the good of society."
These two views--American Dream and Gospel of Wealth--have competed politically ever since. Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ v. Coolidge, Hoover, Nixon, Reagan, the Bushnev Dynasty. The "Dream" has a stronghold, with better symbols and images, but the "Gospel" easily incorporates those ideals into its own deceitful and self-serving rhetoric and actions. As Garfinkle realizes, each valued basic concepts--economic freedom, rags-to-riches. However, at their cores, they held opposing values: prosperity and advancement for the ordinary worker v. worship of the exceptional individual as prosperity's engine, universality and equality of opportunity v. exceptional rewards for exceptional achievement, government (with taxes) as a potentially constructive force v. government (with taxes) as the central problem, and, most importantly, a middle-class society v. a society sharply divided between rich and poor. (The shared symbols masking the stark and unconquerable divide between the two groups is why "bipartisanship" and "moderation" seem possible to superficial minds which fail to understand when "Gospel" types dig in and use governmental power to increase their own.)
A strong and broad middle-class is key for Garfinkle. Democracy requires it to buffer the class distinctions created by capitalism that separate consensus and reciprocity. As he states,
It is through the middle-class dream that Americans come to share common aspirations--aspirations that help to mute the differences in wealth, culture, race, and ethnicity that might otherwise threaten to tear a democracy apart. To survive, a democracy must also be a community--a society bound by shared values.
This is familiar stuff to democratic students, if not the Busheviks and the other counter-revolutionaries who use politics, business, and media to entrench the "Gospel." In itself, if you're familiar with this line of thought and want new insight on these points, it's probably not worth purchasing (although, if you are weak on US econ history, this is a good review). But Garfinkle's contribution is his thorough takedown of all the "scientific" (that is, the usual cherry-picked and purposely deceptive) justification of the "Gospel" and its dismantling of the middle class. Hot knife through butter. Not only that, he provides the truly scientific backing for "Dream" arguments that our economy works best with policies directed toward strengthening the middle class. The bulletpoints from those chapters alone should be a handout by every Dem candidate in 2008.
And that's really where the value of the book is. Proposals to strengthen the middle class, to extend opportunities to all Americans, especially children, harken back to RFK and MLK and would resonate even more now in far more perilous econ times. Yes, Repubs will claim their proposals do the same, but Garfinkle supplies plenty of bullets. Yes, Repubs may whine "class war." Just point at Paris and George. Garfinkle has laid out the story, the data, and the leaders to link to. It's practically paint-by-numbers now (did that just tell my age?). The Dems just need candidates who get it.
Edwards did and may still. Obama might step into the shoes if he'd stop aspiring to "Great Black Lieberman." Gore actually could, as he tried in 2000 but suffered from idiot media. That's the problem for Dems. The MSM doesn't have the mindset (or mind, frankly) to get the reality out. Dems will need other platforms and media. Blogs and Internet are clear options but teach-ins and marches (with more kids the better--"Please save the Dream, please, please" or "What Will Your Grandchildren Say?") might be part of a more creative action plan. But accepting and pushing the message, the "Two Americas" will hear to come first.
Our history for almost 150 years has been a contest between the "Dream" and the "Gospel." We have prospered with the former and floundered with the latter (not to mention the corruption and cynicism). That's reality, not opinion. Garfinkle proves it. But the "Gospel" will always have its greedy fingers out. It's up to the Dems now to slap them back once again. They have no excuse now. This book does give them the bullets.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Everything Changes The Book of Joe
It's pretty apparent from the listings on the left that fiction is an area that neither I nor The Boy spend a lot of time on. It's not from disdain, at least on my part, or really even not having the time. I just don't find most of what's offered fiction-wise that appealing. I don't mean this as snotty or snobbish. I read book reviews in several papers, go to online sites, and the plots and characters that are described just don't sound like anything I would prioritize over other things, too formulaic and predictable, like most entertainment media these days. That's why I do the same with movies and tv and that's why I haven't been to a movie in months and end up watching telenovelas. (Hmm . . . telenovelas and Albert Hirschmann books, no wonder he can't afford to be snotty or snobby).
I love fiction. I've had plays produced in community theater. I have a shelf of novels that I read over and over, some new, mostly old. Captain Newman, M.D. Red Sky at Morning. Dead Solid Perfect. The Man Who Wrote the Book. Plainsong. About a Boy. Skinny Dip. All of Richard Russo's novels and his short story collection. Steve Martin's novels and plays and adaptations. Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe. Second copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. (And, yes, I enjoyed Jane Green's Jemima J my wife and I read aloud on a long road trip.) But the current literary lights and the best-sellers year after year haven't offered me much I wanted. I'm open to suggestions from any kind readers who see the titles above and think of others along the same lines, but I have a stack of nonfiction I haven't gotten through so please make them good.
All that said, there are times when I have to break from the surrounding reality when it feels like it's going to strangle me, and that usually means running to fiction. Work silliness and Wednesday, November 8, have been doing a number on me lately, so I headed to the store for something new to divert me before I turned to the old reliables. And I got lucky. Found two novels by a guy named Jonathan Tropper--The Book of Joe and Everything Changes--that didn't solve work or Wednesday but did give me interesting stories, some laughs, and some thought.
Tropper's audience really isn't a guy like me. I've been married over 32 years (roughly the age of the guys he writes for), and he describes the world of the guy with so much past baggage that he isn't happy with having everything the world says he should want, financial success, beautiful women and beautiful sex, a future that seems assured. In both books his heroes systematically respond to a sudden life crisis (terminally ill relative in one, possibly terminally ill him in another) by blowing up the "successful" lives they've built. Maybe it's because I've sort of done that a couple of times, know the desperation when you know you're on a path that just isn't right (personally and morally), that I enjoyed the books despite the demographic chasm.
I'm sure the "literary" among us can criticize Tropper's books for being too "sitcom" or "movie-ready." In fact, they're both in movie treatment apparently. Before Angelina, Brad and Jen had optioned(?) Joe, and probably would have done it themselves. Aniston would still be great as the female lead who was dumped by the hero after a high school love so he could go off and be a famous author. Now he's come back home 17 years later to a town he trashed in his hit book (pun), and she's one complication he has to reconcile, along with a dying father and a dying best friend (and psychopaths who want to do to him literally what he did to them literarily). I guess Pitt would have been okay as Joe (I've never been that into him, in any way, and have never really seen the appeal, even if he is a Mizzou boy, sorry.) If I'm Jen (may I call you Jen?) and I still have rights to the treatment, call Matthew Perry up right now. Do I have to spell out the PR for you? (Even though Cusack would be the more obvious choice, "Friends" aside.) As for Changes, Natalie and Zach? You have a return call on line 3. (Come on, a guy shafted by a delinquent father who's suddenly turned back up (with a big surprise at the end) thinks he has cancer, lets his feelings for his late best friend's widow come through in time to blow off his marriage to a rich, beautiful daddy's girl--who's going to do it better?)
I've never bought the "too sitcommy" or "too box office" line for books, plays, and movies. I know what they mean and it's a legit complaint at times. But it's too easy, too, like those lines you learn to say in grad school for seminars where you're asked to respond to a presentation that you haven't thought twice about. "I have questions about the methodology." "I'm surprised you didn't mention [put obscure author reference here.]" "I'm wondering if using tobit here was really the right choice." It's a lazy copout and substitutes for thought and real analysis. Both of these books play out quickly and well as ready-to-be screened stories. But so did To Kill a Mockingbird (which, surprise, was a great movie). Steve Martin wrote for tv, so did Woody Allen. I don't think Russo has, but the guy churns out screenplays and his books have moved to screen just as well as these will. The dialogue is sharp, the knowledge of businesses is impressive, the interactions among the characters and settings reminded me of Russo, and the plot turns are handled well and sometimes surprisingly. Plus, he lands the dismounts on the endings, which is the most important thing an author in any medium can do.
Most importantly, his message in both books is something this culture needs to hear and take to heart. His male leads have everything the media tell him he should want, the Playboy girlfriend and/or lifestyle, a future of polish and glamour. And they're miserable because that's not what life is about, despite everything a 30-year-old these days has been told. At the end of each book, they've (re)connected with a solid woman who offers them the internal path of love and responsibility that should be all our goals, the sad and ridiculous Hef not withstanding. They start out as self-absorbed but decent enough to know that it's wrong and there has to be a better way. There is, and through sudden and unexpected turns and surprises they find it. It's the message Natalie Portman delivers in different ways to Timothy Hutton in "Beautiful Girls" and Zach Braff in "Garden State." Grow up, for God's sake. "Sex in the City" and "The Man Show," while very funny, are both very pathetic. Tropper's characters find that out via lives they made harder than they needed to be, blinded by things they thought they wanted but didn't. "Finding yourself" and "I've got to love me before I can love anyone else" is just crap. Most of us become worthy of love through loving others, not loving ourselves first, and what if you find yourself and "yourself" is a jerk? We know how to be good, productive people who leave something that made our being here worthwhile (that global warming thing notwithstanding). Just do it.
His characters finally figure it out by the end. And those are stories that even an old guy in his mid-50's will be his audience for. Please keep them coming. I've cleared more space on my shelf.