Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Colours light up brain structure
It's not often that research results look this good. An elegant new way to visualize individual brain cells not only provides a major boost to scientists trying to understand how the brain works, but has also won one of its developers a major prize in science photography. The method — described by neuroscientists at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in today’s Nature — allows researchers to see more clearly how individual neurons connect with each other by colouring each one from a palette of about 90 shades. In this way they will be able to build up a detailed diagram of the brain's wiring, which will help to study how it computes.
More than a century ago, neuroscientists developed the first method of staining individual neurons — with silver chromate. Work with this technique was the basis of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. But this could only stain neurons with one colour. Only in the last decade have scientists improved on this technique, using genetic engineering to transfer genes for fluorescent proteins into mice such that they are expressed in neurons. But until now they could transfer no more than two florescent-protein genes at a time, lighting up the brain with two colours. “It was clear that two colours were not enough to map connections efficiently in the brain’s complex tangle of neurons,” says Joshua Sanes, one of the paper’s senior scientists.
A Review of the Play Sunlight at Midnight
Natasha Tsangarides in Electronic Intifada:
Despite the promise of the international community, the camp [Shatila] was later desecrated. Using oral histories, Naji and the audience are taken into the world of Shatila refugee camp, where it is estimated that between 2,000 and 3,500 people were murdered in 1982. Here, we learn of the testimonies of a population displaced not once, but several times, who endure hardship within a hostile environment.
The play [Sunlight at Midnight] is thought-provoking, bringing into question many themes such as identity formation, exile and the power of memory, while simultaneously highlighting the failures of the international community and the need to commemorate this tragedy.
As we are introduced to different characters throughout the play, we gain an insight into selective memory and historical narrative. The process of exile has affected each person differently, with the sense of belonging to a Palestinian heritage stronger within the camp. History adopts two meanings in the two worlds we enter: one is associated with power, knowledge and purity, and the other with something threatening or irrelevant.
Fodor on Adaptation and Natural Selection
This picture – that our minds were formed by processes of evolutionary adaptation, and that the environment they are adapted to isn’t the one that we now inhabit – has had, of late, an extraordinarily favourable press. Darwinism has always been good copy because it has seemed closer to our core than most other branches of science: botany, say, or astronomy or hydrodynamics. But if this new line of thought is anywhere near right, it is closer than we had realised. What used to rile Darwin’s critics most was his account of the phylogeny of our species. They didn’t like our being just one branch among many in the evolutionary tree; and they liked still less having baboons among their family relations. The story of the consequent fracas is legendary, but that argument is over now. Except, perhaps, in remote backwaters of the American Midwest, the Darwinian account of our species’ history is common ground in all civilised discussions, and so it should be. The evidence really is overwhelming.
But Darwin’s theory of evolution has two parts. One is its familiar historical account of our phylogeny; the other is the theory of natural selection, which purports to characterise the mechanism not just of the formation of species, but of all evolutionary changes in the innate properties of organisms. According to selection theory, a creature’s ‘phenotype’ – the inventory of its heritable traits, including, notably, its heritable mental traits – is an adaptation to the demands of its ecological situation. Adaptation is a name for the process by which environmental variables select among the creatures in a population the ones whose heritable properties are most fit for survival and reproduction. So environmental selection for fitness is (perhaps plus or minus a bit) the process par excellence that prunes the evolutionary tree.
More often than not, both halves of the Darwinian synthesis are uttered in the same breath; but it’s important to see that the phylogeny could be true even if the adaptationism isn’t.
But, please. No more apologies.
Fifty years ago, New American Library published the Mentor Philosophers series, each with a title beginning The Age of . . . Belief, Ideology, Reason, and so on; the 20th-century selections bore the title The Age of Analysis. Had the series continued to the end of that century and into this, the volume should no doubt be The Age of Apology. Our postmodern ethos seems to hold that if anything can be proved to have happened, then surely someone needs to apologize for it.
We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church, which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul) for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade, an event for which the late John Paul II expressed “deep regret.” No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed.
more from The American Scholar here.
Thousands of Cubans and foreigners have been flocking to a mausoleum in central Cuba to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. For 10 years, the Cuban government has been telling the world that the body inside the mausoleum is that of the famous guerrilla.
It's a lie designed to bamboozle the population into worshiping the Argentine-born revolutionary as if he were a saint--and the Cuban Revolution as if it were a religion. A brilliant investigation by French journalist Bertrand de la Grange, recently published in Spain's El Pais newspaper, demolishes the official version.
In 1995, Bolivian Gen. Mario Vargas, who had fought Che's guerrillas in the 1960s, revealed that the revolutionary's body was buried a few meters from the airport runway in Vallegrande, a town close to La Higuera, the village in eastern Bolivia where Guevara was killed on Oct. 9, 1967. (Guevara had been executed after the Bolivian president ordered the soldiers who ambushed and captured him to get rid of him.) Cuba sent a forensic, diplomatic and legal team to Vallegrande. On June 28, 1997, they claimed to have found the body, which was brought to Cuba a few weeks before the 30th anniversary of the guerrilla's death.
Numerous facts belie the Cuban claim.
more from TNR here.
The meaning of Kahlo’s art comes across in reproductions, but not its full dynamic, which involves brooding subtleties of surface and color. The reproduced images are shiny and bright. The paintings are matte and grayish, drinking and withholding light. (Their display calls for intense illumination—that of the Mexican sun, say. They should not be hung on white walls, as they are at the Walker, where the contrast makes them look like holes in a snowbank.) The lovely, highly varied, blushing colors (even Kahlo’s browns and greens blush) don’t radiate. Fused with represented flesh, foliage, fabrics, and, yes, ribbons and jewelry, they turn their backs to us. The payoff of this reticence is an absorption in the artist’s touch. It’s easy to fantasize that Kahlo’s brushes were fingertips, able to mold her own more than familiar features in the dark. The tactility of certain self-portraits is, among other things, staggeringly sexy. In “Me and My Parrots” (1941), it combines with sharp tonal contrasts of warm color to convey invisible moistness, as of a summertime, full-body, delicate sweat. Elsewhere, the felt oneness of sight and touch stirs harrowing empathy, as in “The Broken Column” (1944). Kahlo’s nude body is split open to reveal a crumbling pillar, nails penetrating her flesh everywhere. Tears flow from her eyes, but her face is dispassionate, as always. Her pain is not her. It just won’t let her mind stray to anything else, for the moment. The work belongs to a category of images with which Kahlo confronted and endured episodes of agony, including heartbreak and rage. (Most piercing are laments of her disastrous pregnancies; she longed for children but physically could not bring a baby to term.) They aren’t great art, but they are moving testaments of a great artist.
more from The New Yorker here.
There was no Herodotus before Herodotus
"There was no Herodotus before Herodotus." This little pearl, courtesy of the historical polymath Arnaldo Momigliano (1908–1987), belongs to the class of truly illuminating tautologies. When Herodotus, in the middle of the 5th century B.C.E., composed his "history" of the Persian wars, there was simply no one around to tell him how it was done. The result, as anyone who has lost the thread amid one of Herodotus's labyrinthine geographic detours knows, is anything but a "history" in the familiar sense of the term — that is, scrupulous, meticulous, and humorless. The project is better understood as an "inquiry" — a more accurate translation of the Greek word anyhow — into the shape of the known world, almost as if such an inquiry were necessary to understand, as Herodotus put it in his preface to the work, "the reason why the Greeks and barbarians fought one another."
more from the NY Sun here.
Robert Macfarlane on mountains, Romanticism, the sublime, etc.
The cultural understanding of mountains seems so bound up with the aesthetics of the sublime and the advent of Romanticism that it is hard to understand exactly what mountains meant before the eighteenth century. Were they simply seen as blanks, deserts, wild places?
It would be wrong to propose that there’s no refined mountain perception prior to Romanticism. You only need to look at someone like Leonardo da Vinci. He’s making extraordinary sketches of mountain phenomena in the Italian Alps: they’re beautiful, and attentive both to meteorology and geology. In so many ways—as he always does—da Vinci anticipates what’s to come by several centuries. There’s also a biblical tradition of revelation at height: Moses, obviously, on Sinai, or on Mount Pisgah, looking down into the promised land. So there are visionary traditions that precede the late eighteenth century. Petrarch claims to have climbed Mount Ventoux in April 1336; doubts have been voiced about whether he actually made the ascent, but the falsifiability of the account doesn’t really matter, because he gives us one of the first expedition journals (the book of Exodus would be another of these), and one of the first mountain descriptions in which mountain and text, or mountain and representation, become blurred almost to the point of interchangeability. So, in one sense, you can construct a tradition of the visionary and the beautiful for mountains which precedes Romanticism, going as far back as you want to go. But on the other hand, it’s quite possible to argue that mountains existed as little more than wallpaper, by and large, through the Medieval and Early Modern periods.
more from Cabinet here.
The future of air travel
Kroo believes the way we fly planes may change. Currently all commercial airliners cruise at speeds of around Mach 0.85 (85 percent of the speed of sound). Kroo believes in the future planes may slow down, say from Mach 0.85 to Mach 0.75.
He also believes planes could fly at lower altitudes because of concerns that contrails affect the atmosphere. Other environmental impacts would also be reduced. Nitrogen oxide emissions, unburned hydrocarbons and water vapor all have an impact strongly related to how long they stay in the atmosphere: lower altitudes help reduce this.
"It's uncertain, but people are actively planning flight paths at lower speeds and altitudes. The sky in the future may not be filled with white lines," Kroo said.
This would mean very efficient airplanes flying at slightly slower speeds -- a small change in convenience but a profound reduction in environmental impact. A reduction in fuel burn of 50 percent is not out of the question, according to Kroo.
J. Craig Venter on the Colbert Report
Bush honours Mockingbird legend
From The Guardian:
Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by George Bush. Whether or not one of the world's most publicity-shy literary stars will relish being given America's highest - and very public - award remains to be seen. According to the citation the reclusive author has been honoured for "an outstanding contribution to America's literary tradition. At a critical moment in our history, her beautiful book, To Kill a Mockingbird, helped focus the nation on the turbulent struggle for equality."
Lee was born in Monroeville in 1926, in the deep South, at a time of strict racial segregation. She was a voracious reader who moved to New York determined to become a writer, and succeeded with To Kill A Mockingbird. The book was an instant bestseller and won a Pulitzer prize. It was also made into a hit film starring Gregory Peck, which quickly gained similar "classic" status to the book's.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
John Milton's On Time
It continues at Harper's.
Fly envious Time, till thou run out thy race,
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy Plummets pace;
And glut thy self with what thy womb devours,
Which is no more then what is false and vain,
And meerly mortal dross;
So little is our loss,
So little is thy gain.
Nicole Martinelli in Wired:
Professor Stefano Mancuso knows it isn't easy being green: He runs the world's only laboratory dedicated to plant intelligence.
At the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology (LINV), about seven miles outside Florence, Italy, Mancuso and his team of nine work to debunk the myth that plants are low-life. Research at the modern building combines physiology, ecology and molecular biology.
"If you define intelligence as the capacity to solve problems, plants have a lot to teach us," says Mancuso, dressed in harmonizing shades of his favorite color: green. "Not only are they 'smart' in how they grow, adapt and thrive, they do it without neuroses. Intelligence isn't only about having a brain."
Plants have never been given their due in the order of things; they've usually been dismissed as mere vegetables. But there's a growing body of research showing that plants have a lot to contribute in fields as disparate as robotics and telecommunications. For instance, current projects at the LINV include a plant-inspired robot in development for the European Space Agency. The "plantoid" might be used to explore the Martian soil by dropping mechanical "pods" capable of communicating with a central "stem," which would send data back to Earth.
From the Annals of Altruism, Wikipedia Again
A closer look at the Good Samaritans at Wikipedia (via EurekAlert):
Dartmouth researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.
The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The researchers discovered that Good Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or corrected.
"This finding was both novel and unexpected," says Denise Anthony, associate professor of sociology. "In traditional laboratory studies of collective goods, we don't include Good Samaritans, those people who just happen to pass by and contribute, because those carefully designed studies don't allow for outside actors. It took a real-life situation for us to recognize and appreciate the contributions of Good Samaritans to web content."
Debating Race and the American Electoral Scene
Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong discuss the southern strategy, the undoing of the New Deal coalition, and the future of America's electoral terrain over at TPM Cafe. Krugman:
To give you a sense of just how little there is to be explained once you take this shift into account, here’s a statistic from Larry Bartels, my Princeton colleague. Everyone knows that white men have left the Democratic Party. But what everyone knows isn’t true, if you exclude the South. In 1952, 40 percent of non-Southern white males voted Democratic; in 2004, that was down to, um, 39 percent. (And no, the choice of years doesn’t matter – a fitted trend line tells the same story.)
Now, you could argue that the distinctiveness of the Southern vote isn’t about race. But during the rise of movement conservatism, conservative politicians clearly campaigned on race – that is, they behaved as if they thought that was what it was all about. Ronald Reagan – the real RR, not the latter-day saint – was best known in the 70s for his tales of welfare queens driving Cadillacs. He began his 1980 campaign with the infamous states’ rights speech at Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers were murdered.
Back in the 1920s, you see, there were a lot of northern liberals who voted Republican because Lincoln had freed the slaves (they were called "Progressives") and a lot of southern conservatives who voted Democratic because Lincoln had freed the slaves ("Dixiecrats"). The Great Crash and the Great Depression broke the allegiance of northern Republican liberals, so from 1933 on northern liberals vote Democratic. Southern conservatives, however, by and large continue to vote Democratic until the 1980s or so.
This means that from 1933 to 1994 the partisan balance of seats in the congress (and, to a much lesser extent, the presidency) is substantially to the left of where America is. From 1933 to 1960 or so the fact that southern conservative Democrats are long-serving and hold the committee chairs moderates the effects of the partisan balance. But by the 1980s the committee chairships are mostly held by northern liberals--pushing the balance of power in congress substantially to the left of the country. And in the 1990s the balance shifted back as southern conservatives stopped voting Democratic.
Russell Roberts over at Cafe Hayek and Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias argue about the value of statistical techniques. Roberts:
The nature of the analysis is such that neither side can convince the other that "their" analysis is reliable. That's not always true. As I suggest in the podcast, Milton Friedman was able to convince the skeptics that inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. Friedman won the debate. But how many other studies can you think of where someone staked out a controversial position and convinced the skeptics based on empirical analysis? I think it can be done, but it's rare. And in today's world, most of the interesting empirical claims are being made in cases where the data are too incomplete and the issue is so complex that we can't move to a consensus. The empirical work doesn't improve our understanding of what's going on. It masks what's going on. It gives a patina of science when in effect the numbers aren't really informing the debate.
If Russ relies little on data to draw his conclusions, then on what does he rely? Perhaps he relies on theoretical arguments. But can't we say the same thing about theory, that we mainly just search for theory arguments to support preconceived conclusions? If so, what is left, if we rely on neither data nor theory?
Try saying this out loud: "Neither the data nor theory I've come across much explain why I believe this conclusion, relative to my random whim, inherited personality, and early culture and indoctrination, and I have no good reasons to think these are much correlated with truth." That does not seem a conclusion worth retaining.
[H/t: Saifedean Ammous]
My basic point was that when it comes to high-powered sophisticated statistical techniques, our biases as researchers and as consumers of that research often triumph over truth. The truth is elusive in complex systems with many things changing at once. It’s hard to isolate the independent effect of one particular variable. When scholars can run hundreds of multivariate regressions at very low cost, it easy to convince yourself that the results that confirm your prior beliefs are the “right “ results. The ones that failed must be the “bad ones.”
An Open Letter from Akbar Ganji to Ban Ki-Moon
In the Boston Review:
The people of Iran and Iranian advocates for freedom and democracy are experiencing difficult days. They need the moral support of the proponents of freedom throughout the world and effective intervention by the United Nations. We categorically reject a military attack on Iran. At the same time, we ask you and all of the world's intellectuals and proponents of liberty and democracy to condemn the human rights violations of the Iranian state. We expect from Your Excellency, in your capacity as the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to reprimand the Iranian government – in keeping with your legal duties – for its extensive violation of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights covenants and treaties.
Above all, we hope that with Your Excellency's immediate intervention, all of Iran's political prisoners, who are facing more deplorable conditions with every passing day, will soon be released. The people of Iran are asking themselves whether the UN Security Council is only decisive and effective when it comes to the suspension of the enrichment of uranium, and whether the lives of the Iranian people are unimportant as far as the Security Council is concerned.
Make Your Own South Park Character
South Park Robin... courtesy of SP-Studio:
The Manhattan in The Manhattan Project
In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.
“It was supersecret,” Dr. Norris said in an interview. “At least 5,000 people were coming and going to work, knowing only enough to get the job done.”
Manhattan was central, according to Dr. Norris, because it had everything: lots of military units, piers for the import of precious ores, top physicists who had fled Europe and ranks of workers eager to aid the war effort. It even had spies who managed to steal some of the project’s top secrets.
“The story is so rich,” Dr. Norris enthused. “There’s layer upon layer of good stuff, interesting characters.”
Still, more than six decades after the project’s start, the Manhattan side of the atom bomb story seems to be a well-preserved secret.
Two Women, Two Histories: A feminist, an antifeminist, and their exercise of power
From Harvard Magazine:
As the second world war drew to a close, two women thought about applying to Harvard Law School.
The first was an African-American native of North Carolina, the granddaughter of a slave and the great-granddaughter of a slave-owner, who had moved North for college, survived the lean years of the Depression, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and sought unsuccessfully to do graduate work in sociology at the all-white University of North Carolina. When instead she finished Howard Law School at the top of her class, she sought the fellowship traditionally awarded to Howard’s best student: a year at Harvard to complete a master’s of law degree. But, wrote the admissions committee, “Your picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.”
The second woman who thought about applying to law school was a Midwesterner of Scottish descent, educated in Catholic schools paid for by her mother’s hard-earned wages. After politely defying her teachers by declining a full scholarship to a local Catholic college, this woman spent the war acing a full course load in political science at her state’s best university by day, and working eight-hour shifts testing firearms in a munitions factory by night. Upon her graduation, Columbia, Radcliffe, and Wellesley all offered her financial aid for graduate study; she chose correctly, and so impressed her Radcliffe professors that one offered to sponsor her application to law school. The steep cost of a legal education led her to decline, and she was off to Washington to seek a job in the federal government.
The first woman was Pauli Murray, whose remarkable contributions to American legal and women’s history are beginning to be recognized, thanks in large part to the voluminous personal papers she left to the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. The second woman is, quite decidedly and proudly, not a feminist icon. She is Phyllis Schlafly, A.M. ’45, who some say is more responsible than anyone for the rise of grassroots religious conservatism and the transformation of the Republican Party, and who all agree can take the lion’s share of credit or blame for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the rise of antifeminism as a force in American politics.
Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat
From The New York Times:
All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone. While some scientists are enthusiastic, others are skeptical. The mice may be less fat after standing on the platform, these researchers say, but they are not convinced of the explanation — that fat precursor cells are turning into bone.
“Bone is notorious for ‘use it or lose it,’” Dr. Rubin said. “Astronauts lose 2 percent of their bone a month. People lose 2 percent a decade after age 35. Then you look at the other side of the equation. Professional tennis players have 35 percent more bone in their playing arm. What is it about mechanical signals that makes Roger Federer’s arm so big?”
At first, he assumed that the exercise effect came from a forceful impact — the pounding on the leg bones as a runner’s feet hit the ground or the blow to the bones in a tennis player’s arm with every strike of the ball. But Dr. Rubin was trained as a biomechanical engineer, and that led him to consider other possibilities. Large signals can actually be counterproductive, he said, adding: “If I scream at you over the phone, you don’t hear me better. If I shine a bright light in your eyes, you don’t see better.”
Over the years, he and his colleagues discovered that high-magnitude signals, like the ones created by the impact as foot hits pavement, were not the predominant signals affecting bone. Instead, bone responded to signals that were high in frequency but low in magnitude, more like a buzzing than a pounding.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Below the Fold: A World without the Rich
Can you imagine a world without the rich?
You might say that the rich we have had as long as we have had the poor. As the incredulous swell in an old wine commercial said to the ingénue: “How do you think I got so rich?”
Most Americans today accept the rich as they do death and taxes as another one of life’s annoying basic facts. It is unusual for Americans to realize that we as a society are responsible for their existence. We believe what they tell us. Once again, an old commercial suffices: As John Houseman, bow-tied, and quintessentially the patrician Harvard law professor he once played put it about his client: “At Smith Barney, we make money the old fashioned way – we earn it!”
(Parenthetically, who among the moneychangers would dare run this ad now?)
We need not countenance their existence forever. One need not bring back Stalin to reduce or eliminate the rich. Scandinavian countries do quite well in minimizing their presence. And there is little mystery in how to reduce or eliminate the economic power of the rich. Steeply progressive income taxes, elimination of inherited wealth through estate taxes, and income redistribution along with a robust welfare state can do it.
If Americans examined the deeper damage that the rich do to society, perhaps they might be willing to try cutting the rich down to size.
Let’s look at how the rich damage American society.
First, they burn up resources. Andrew Hacker in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books paid tribute to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society for its scathing critique of the lifestyles of the rich and its condemnation of how they squandered national resources on personal consumption. These resources, Galbraith argued, could be better put to solving the country’s social problems. As noted above, there are remedies that Americans thus far refuse to apply, and they are as obvious as they are ignored.
Second, the rich corrupt the major institutions of American society. It bears repeating that the rich don’t get rich or stay rich simply by making better widgets and saving the profits from their corporate endeavors. They make legislatures dysfunctional, regulatory authorities their watchdogs, and professions their poodles. They corrupt presidents. They even corrupt each other, as corporate heads are bribed with board positions and in turn protect the interests of the company that bribed them.
Consider their corruption of several essential marketplaces for goods and services. What is the recuperative value of a luxury hotel inside a major hospital, complete with chef and concierge services? That depends, I suppose, on what is being recuperated. In the hospital’s case, they recover money, they claim, and lots of it, when compared to serving those Medicaid-assisted poor and the Medicare-dependent elderly and disabled. Instead of lamenting low Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, they are pandering to the rich. Often it is for more than just money for services rendered. There are new hospital wings and prestigious care centers and institutes to think about, and who better to hit on but the rich who have just spent a week at the local Plaza Hotel hospital?
If pampering patients makes them get well, then how can it be denied to others? But that isn’t the point of the white glove treatment, is it?
Even as doctors desert careers in internal medicine owing to perceived lower pay and longer hours, other internists open boutiques, shrink their practices to a quarter of their former sizes, and charge $3000 per person annual membership fees (See my column “Is There a Doctor in the House?”). Every time internists create boutiques, they diminish the number of doctors, already declining, that provide medical care for everyone else.
The rich even corrupt careers like hospital administration. A recent Boston Globe story disclosed that the presidents of Boston’s major teaching hospitals make near or over a million dollars each a year (NB: without bonuses added). The last time I checked, hospitals of this sort were non-profit institutions. One would think that the boards of these non-profit hospitals would blanch at paying them a million, if only for fear of bad publicity. Yet, as the boards are composed mostly of very rich people, they by practically class instinct would acknowledge that someone whom they employ with so much responsibility deserves a comparable reward. This, after all, is their divine right to ungodly compensation too, so the divine right must be defended everywhere, or it will eventually obtain nowhere.
The rich corrupt universities. Elite schools become elite schools because they service the elite. If that seems tautological, that’s because it’s causal, not casual. The rich made elite schools with their money, and the payback for their accumulated billions, according to Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal reporter in his new book The Price of Admission, is legacy admissions for their heirs. The subtitle of his book could be “how George Bush got to Yale,” and perhaps how he managed to actually get “C” grades. (You have heard of the gentleman’s “C” haven’t you?) Golden shows how elite schools take in hefty percentages of legacy undergraduates. He also shows in the case of Duke how the university effectively solicited bribes by admitting rich students with the expectation that endowment money would follow from them and their families.
And we thought we lived in a meritocracy. Horatio Alger was right: the best way to succeed in business is to marry the boss’ doctor – or, it seems, play lacrosse at Dartmouth with his son.
But there is a third and perhaps the most insidious way whereby the rich corrupt American society. They corrupt the nature of society itself by turning their corrupting powers and dubious satisfactions into cultural standards for the rest of America. The great if largely forgotten social critic Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) made this point precisely and with disarming if utterly cynical simplicity. Wealth, Veblen argued, was a source of honor, and thus having it created an invidious distinction. Others emulated the rich to achieve wealth and status. Seeing this, the rich manifest their dominance through conspicuous consumption, which also has the happy effect of controlling and corrupting American institutions, as I have suggested above in the cases of elite higher education and medical care.
Thus, for instance, philanthropy, though universally considered generous and altruistic, has a predatory component. It is, as the French sociologist Marcel Mauss would have noted, a gift that demands reciprocation – in this case power – in return. When Mike Bloomberg gives upwards of a billion dollars to the Johns Hopkins medical colossus, he receives respect in return, and probably influence in the future direction of the institution. Bill Gates, to take another case, is now one of a handful of the world’s most influential people directing global world health initiatives. Warren Buffett has decided that his friend Bill, Gates that is, should use his wealth in Gates-sponsored initiatives too. All of this is done without a whimper about the loss of democratic control of our priorities, and without a whisper of the impropriety of handing over state and in Gates’ case global sovereignty to the rich.
The rich also receive sanction for their wealth and the means by which they made it. Gates’ Microsoft may have been found by the European Community to have used monopoly power to kill off its competition, but this fact is buried on the financial pages. His philanthropy is strictly page one. And the rich actually claim their legitimacy from beyond the grave, a power for which every legacy student at Harvard rejoices. Everyone remembers that the great Andrew Carnegie, either out of soulful suffering or by virtue of his attachment to the strictures of Scottish Protestantism, gave away his total fortune. Those beautiful rural town libraries and several foundations are the result. Few remember how his steel company was responsible for the bloodiest and most lethal counterattack on a union strike in American history. With money, the rich not only predate the rest of society, but also produce a sanctifying grace that absolves their sins.
Go thou and do likewise, the rich can be heard to say. Instead of stripping the rich of their predatory and envy-making wealth, several hundred million Americans put their hopes and dreams into a chase after wealth and an orgy of conspicuous consumption. No more just social order emerges. No, instead the rich and their divine right are affirmed. After all, how can you be against wealth and predatory power if you chase it? Millions of American lives are wrecked in emulating the rich and pursuing their path. Millions more may not emulate the rich, but the rich and their wannabees economically and socially run them over anyway in the great chase for wealth and power. The poor, the working classes, hell, everyone in the bottom four fifths of American society are exploited by the rich at the same time they are upbraided for falling behind. You’d have to be a swell not to notice that the rich create a standard of living that only the rich can afford.
Ponder this and this observation of Thorstein Veblen’s:
“The fact that the usages, actions, and views of the well-to-do leisure class acquire the character of a prescriptive canon of conduct for the rest of society, gives added weight and reach to the conservative influence of that class. It makes it incumbent upon all reputable people to follow their lead. So that, by virtue of its high position as the avatar of good form, the wealthier class comes to exert a retarding influence upon social development far in excess of that which the simple numerical strength of the class would assign it. Its prescriptive example acts to greatly stiffen the resistance of all other classes against any innovation….” (Penguin Books, 1994, 200)
'Gut gemacht, Rex!'
Do they give acting awards to dogs? Perhaps they should in the case of the television program Inspector Rex—Kommissar Rex—an amazing German Shepherd (or series of Shepherds) who helps the Criminal Bureau solve murder mayhem in Vienna. See Rex get jealous when a woman comes onto the home ground of his detective owner. Watch in amazement as Rex uncovers evidence in the grounds of Schönbrunn. Laugh when Rex steals yet another ham roll from one of the detectives who is slow on the uptake that this is one extremely clever canine. Invariably, Rex is told he is wonderful somewhere towards the end of each episode. Which he is.
Yes, the plots are are often absurd, and no dog can be that clever. However, this is a show that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than an entertainment. It is warm bath television that is enjoyable without getting into Derrick territory, my favourite police series, which seemed to cram an amazing amount of metaphysical speculation into its hourly format.
Some people start foaming at the mouth the moment you indicate that you are not going to spend your entire life getting saddle sore with Sontag or become spellbound before the latest speculations of the Four Strawmen of the Atheistoclypse. Will & Grace. Cue a thousand put-downs. The Sound of Music. Could anything be more banal.
Popular culture can provoke the worst kind of snobbery in some. We know that nuns didn’t stop the advance of the Nazis by mucking around with engine parts, just as we are perfectly well aware that people don’t suddenly burst into song with orchestral accompaniment in the Austrian alps. However, we accept the aesthetic boundaries within which various genres operate, and enjoy them for what they have to give. I might regard Wagner as one of the most interesting representatives of Western civilisation, but I certainly don’t want to go around listening to Wagner all day. I couldn’t think of anything worse. ‘Edelweiss’, and its kind, it must be, more than occasionally.
Oliver Hirschbiegel, who directed some episodes of Inspector Rex, went on to direct Der Untergang, the compelling film about Hitler’s last days with a magnificent ensemble cast led by Bruno Ganz. And I have heard more than a few people admit to the cataclysmic effect their first encounter with The Sound of Music had on them. In other words, there is no gap between the varieties of irreligious experience. The Hegel reader can fall for the nonsensical intellectual blather that’s about these days; the ABBA aficionado may be reading Moby-Dick. So far, so obvious.
The digital spread of culture has been a good thing, despite those who want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that all cultural product prior to circa 1995 was marvellous. Yes, there’s a lot of indulgence about now, the price to be paid for the new freedoms, but there are still some who try to ignore the fact that culture has become democratised for the first time in history. They don’t like it, but that’s too bad because it’s going to happen at any rate. Serious culture has to earn its stripes, and if people get off on a sitcom rather than listening to some music of the Darmstadt School, that is a choice made freely by free citizens. The fact that I don’t like a great deal of contemporary culture, think that it sells the human condition short, or is simply product manufactured to make money, is really neither here nor there, just as some names in the present cultural diaspora do nothing for me—they can take care of themselves. However, the worst thing is to go around in a state of high seriousness all the time insisting that one must get through on a diet of severities that would mortify a saint.
‘A crazy planet full of crazy people, / Is somersaulting all around the sky. / And everytime it turns another somersault, / Another day goes by. / And there’s no way to stop it, / No, there’s no way to stop it, No, you can’t stop it even if you tried. / So, I’m not going to worry, / No, I’m not going to worry, / Everytime I see another day go by.’
‘No Way To Stop It.’ One of the best songs in The Sound of Music, cut from the film version, but containing the kind of common sense you won’t find in the Solemn Times Weekly or Preaching To The Unconverted Standard.
In the contemporary imagination Salzburg may turn out to be be the place where Julie Andrews sang Maria rather than the city that sent Mozart packing. But you can still visit the place where Mozart lived in Vienna and dwell upon the mystery of greatness. It’s not exactly secret knowledge, yet.
? . . . !
Bring in my German Shepherd now. . . .
Nice dog. How do you solve a problem like Maria? With some Nietzsche, perhaps?
Stop licking me. But, oh well, why not.
Amazingly enough, Rex had transformed himself—Tardis assisted— and was now beside me, sitting just in front of the large Anselm Kiefer painting that had taken over my loungeroom wall. You can imagine how taken aback I was.
But then, even more amazingly, Rex began to speak and, what’s more, in perfect English, which is a bit odd for an Austrian German Shepherd, you’ll agree. A poem.
Happy is he who has loved,
She who has known the hour
Of earth’s inexplicable marvels
And is content not to want more.
Incredible. (But . . . aren’t marvels explicable these days?)
Oh, that is good Rex. You wonderful dog. I was so stunned I could say nothing more.
But I thought, ‘Gut gemacht, Rex!’
Rex recites his poem hereabouts. 0' 54''
A Fan's Notes On The 2007 World Series
MVP Mike Lowell and the Boston Red Sox poured down hurt on the Colorado Rockies in the wretched World Series that ended in last night’s mercy killing Game 4 Sweep. Outside of Red Sox Nation, it was surely one of the dullest of Series in recent memory, the sum total of high drama amounting to the pitchers’ duel in Game 2, about two innings in Game 3, and, to be charitable, the final few innings of Game 4. Boston fans, during the 13-1 battering in Game 1, probably took a sort of Imperial Roman delight in feeding God's Baseball Team to the lions. (The Rockies look for players with “character” and once hosted an event called "Christian Family Day" at Coors Field). The Rockies might be God’s Team, but remember what the Big Guy did to his own Son, after all. As for the Sox, they’re a pretty secular religion: Fenway's ballpark organ played “Halleluiah” after Carlton Fisk’s 12th-inning Game 6 Homer in 1975.
The diehard Red Sox fan believes in his or her heart of hearts that if the score is 13-1 in the ninth that they will still lose, or that if the Sox are up 3-0 in the Series the other team will come back even though it is impossible. Tragedy, after all, is older than Christianity, and Fenway Park, as everyone knows, was built before the birth of Jesus. Fans of small market teams should enjoy or even pity rather than fear and loathe Red Sox Nation in their new ill-fitting dominance. Red Sox fans are now a little bit like lottery winners whose minds might teeter into self-destruction amidst so much inexplicable success. They’ll need counseling for post-post traumatic stress. The Sox are in their revolutionary Bolshevik stage: Their red banners have overthrown the joyless autocrats of Yankee Stadium, the power has shifted their way, and they are still honeymooning, no longer underdogs and not yet developed into fully-fledged bullies.
But, then again, see it the Sox Way. Manny Ramirez, asked about the improbability of the Sox getting to this Series at all after being down 3-1 to Cleveland, said, “Who cares? It’s not like the end of the world.” Manny is a Zen Master. Manny Being Manny reminds me of that old commercial for beauty products which said: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.” Sox closer Papelbon Riverdances in his underwear on the field and sits in the dugout between innings he is pitching in a trance of semi-permanent psychosis. The bullpen clangs spoons and bottles in rhythm on walls and each other. Knuckleballs, dreadlocks, an undone hex, a manual scoreboard and a cranky old ballpark at home. What’s not to love, seriously?
Sure, the contemporary game is a model of conglomerate capitalism, in which not a monopoly but a consortium of big-time corporations squeeze out the competition, buy up anyone who threatens to beat them, and use sheer weight to crush smaller enterprises. Moneyball, the raiding of small market clubs, the bulldozing success of the big payroll teams. The small markets essentially becoming farm-teams, a minor league within the Bigs in which promising youngsters audition in Oakland and Florida for jobs in other cities. In some ways, the Red Sox fan is like the irrational Republican voter described by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas. He or she maintains a fervid belief in the underdog status of a dominant corporation, and is made to feel like helping “the little guy” by shoveling cash into the pockets of multimillionaires. Boston and New York: Not Red and Blue exactly, but a lot like the two-party electoral system.
2007’s World Series MVP Lowell and Boston pitching star Josh Beckett, of course, were on the 2003 Florida Marlins, who beat the New York Yankees at home in the Championship: Somebody up in Boston took note of that series. It’s intriguing to trace out the fortunes of the members of that Marlins team, and realize how many of those players have given propulsion to the playoff bids of other teams since then. I think of those Marlins in part because they were the team that benefitted from the Bartman Play that kept my Cubs out of the 2003 World Series. (Governor Jeb Bush offered asylum in Florida to Bartman, a Cubs fan who accidently spoiled a key out trying to catch a foul ball in the stands.) Your 2003 World Champion Florida Marlins! Catcher Ivan Rodriguez, who made his major league debut and threw out two base runners on the same day he was married, went to the World Series with the Detroit Tigers after leaving the Marlins. Juan Encarnacion won another world series with St. Louis. Derrek Lee helped my Cubs win the NL Central this year. Juan Pierre, who holds the record for lowest strikeout percentage among active baseball players, and Brad Penny, a 2007 All-Star, both went to the Dodgers and even so the team can do nothing in the sluggish smog. Carl Pavano had one of those terrible Yankee pitching experiences that don’t work out. Ramon Castro became a Met, along with, eventually, Luis Castillo, a lifetime .294 hitter who was at bat during the Bartman Fiasco. Dontrelle Willis stayed in Florida, and this year he didn’t seem very happy there (surely the Red Sox should acquire his services as soon as practicable). The fact that all these players – Beckett, Lowell, Rodriguez, Encarnacion, Lee, Pierre, Penny, Pavano, Castro, Castillo, and Willis – were on the same small market team at the same time is wholly remarkable, the fact that the team was in Florida is even more remarkable, and the fact that this particular roster scattered with such velocity and haste after winning the Championship is more than remarkable, it’s sad. Connie Mack did the same thing to his Philadelphia Athletics when he needed money, back in the day.
I digress, but researching whatever happened to the 2003 Florida Marlins was how I managed some of the dullest, open-laptop innings in postseason baseball for the last ten years. Something about baseball seems to invite all sorts of unsatisfying analogies, templates imposed upon a game that in truth cannot mean anything. Manny is right on the literal level – Who Cares? If He is There, we must hope God does not, he has bigger Fish to fry than answering Rockies prayers, although a sports-distracted Fan-God could be a powerful mechanism for explaining the current state of world affairs. But Manny’s “Who Cares?” is not a fan’s statement, it’s too cosmic and impartial, it’s too calm and wonderful, too blissed out, too correct, too perfect. Who Cares? Then why did we throw so many hours away watching this season? What exactly were we watching or waiting for? Gerald Early wrote in his essay “House of Ruth, House of Robinson,” in The Culture of Bruising, that baseball is a game “inextricably bound to story.” Franklin Foer wrote a witty book about How Soccer Explains the World. How Baseball Explains America has already been done very well by Ken Burns and Co., and, on a more literary level, by Don DeLillo in Underworld, amongst myriad examples. We care, so we make the game mean something it probably doesn’t, except that it does, because it means something to us, right?
PERCEPTIONS: flight photos
Sughra Raza. Landing at Logan. 2006.