Do you think that when Phillip Morris bought Kraft in 1988, they had any idea it would come to this?

In some circles, it was assumed Philip Morris bought Kraft as a chance to associate itself with something more wholesome, more family oriented, more life giving than tobacco.

So what happens? Food becomes the tobacco of the 21st century.

According to a recent report, the increasing number of overweight and obese Canadians poses a threat to public health.

“The prevalence of this serious health risk is almost exactly what we faced with tobacco use 30 years ago – when half of Canadians smoked,” says Dr. Anthony Graham. Since that time, smoking rates have dropped by half – but during those same three decades, we’ve been losing ground in the area of overweight and obesity.

“We continue to face the impact that tobacco use has on our society,” says Dr. Graham. “At the same time, we are confronted by the reality that almost half (47%) of Canadians are overweight or obese.”

Geez. Poor Philip Morris. Out of the frying pan into the fire. No, wait…

References

Burros, Marian. 2005. U.S. Diet Guide Puts Emphasis on Weight Loss. New York Times, January 13, 2005.

Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation report here

Here are the results of my Face Analyzer results. I couldn’t be more proud.

My usual photo:

The “50% chimp” treatment from yesterday:

Notice that my “planet of the apes” transformation drops my ratings for intelligence, risk, ambition, the “gay factor,” and income, and an increase in honor, politeness, socialibility, promiscuity. So much for devolution. This really just turns the clock back to the 17th and 18th century, does it not?

I know that some day science will thank me.

From Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, a link to the Face Analyzer, ‘the only automated face reader in the world.” Submit a picture of yourself on line, and the Face Analyzer will rush to conclusions about your character and intelligence.

Here are the ratings Alex got.

Intelligence: 3.9 (out of 4 maybe but out of 10? I am crushed).
Ambition: 3.7 – low. Low ambition? I’ll show them!
Gay Factor: 1.0 – very low. Good, I think. Maybe. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Politeness: 3.2 – low. Stupid Face Analyzer. What do you know.
Income: 10-30 thousand. Hah!
Promiscuity: 6.1 average. My highest score. Don’t tell my wife.

Alex is right to be unhappy. The Face Analyzer is sure to be used by college admissions and hiring committees everywhere.

Technology to the rescue. Don’t like your face analyzer score? You can beat the system! Use the transformational software from the University of St. Andrew: The Face Morpher. Change your gender, age, race, or aesthetics. Watch those Face Analyzer scores soar!

I offer myself up a test subject. I took this image

and asked the Face Morpher to give me what it calls the Afro Caribbean treatment:

Then I asked it to give me the El Greco treatment

I can’t help feeling that looking like Derek Walcott and Isaiah Berlin will be good for my test score and my career opps. Of course, I can’t find out because the Face Analyzer is jammed. This is what happened when you get a nod from Marginal Revolution, as I know from my own experience.

Watch this space.

Yours truly,

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to the ever-interesting Steve Portigal for the link to the Face Morpher.

The Face Analyzer can be found here

CNN has parted company with Tucker Carlson and plans to end “Crossfire.”

Given the opportunity to explain, Jonathan Klein, the new president of CNN, said he wants to do “roll-up-your-sleeves storytelling,” not “head-butting debate.” He agrees with Jon Stewart’: partisan talk shows are “hurting America.”

Klein’s motive? I wonder if it’s that the Liberal Left keeps losing the debates. Time to roll up the forums on which this frequent embarrassment is allowed to happen.

There is a clear division of media by ideology. The Liberal Left has long controlled American storytelling, especially narrative television and the film world, mainstream and alternative. It’s good at story telling and it uses it often to prosecute a “critical” angle on things (think Judging Amy and American Beauty).

The Right is good at debate and better at “holding forth.” This gave it an advantage in the 80s world of radio, and increasing presence in the world of Talk TV.

Is this a new strategy for the Liberal Left and Democratic party, a way to reposition following the election loss of ’04? Go with what you know? Stop picking fights you cannot win? (Of course, it’s possible that the viewership numbers are not strong for Carlson and Crossfire. The Times article is unforthcoming on this key point.)

But here’s what makes me suspicious: Klein’s choice of phrase when he refers to “roll-up-your-sleeves storytelling.” I take the phrase “roll up your sleeves” to be a short form for “let’s get practical, let’s get serious, let’s set aside the posturing and engage with the world.”

So what’s “roll up your sleeves” story telling? Two choices: a) a contradiction in terms, or b) a rhetorical effort to position CNN as the party that does “real,” hard headed journalism as against those posers who merely talk.

If it’s “B,” we are looking, perhaps, at two nascent Democrat strategies: Getting out of debates you cannot win and painting the venues so abandoned as clueless and unworldly.

The world might let you get away with the first strategy. But the second? Please. Let’s hope this is just Klein shooting from the hip. Because strategy “B” is not a strategy. It’s a delusion. And this must be the natural weakness of the story teller: to fail to see the limits of the story telling.

References

Carter, Bill. 2005. CNN Will Cancel ‘Crossfire’ and Cut Ties to Commentator. New York Times. January 6, 2005. subscription required here

What is blogging for?  How does blogging pay?  I have a couple of "answer candidates.” 

1.  What is blogging for?

I have a friend whose mom, an avid gardener, retired to West Africa.  If Mom doesn’’t like the look of her new garden, she only has to replant, and, hey presto, she has something new and fully formed in a couple of weeks.  Things grow so fast, Mom has taken to experimenting.  "What would happen if we made everything blue?”  Twelve days later, she knows. 

Blogs are experiments.  Each of them says, in effect, what happens to this way of thinking if we apply it to a variety of topics for an extended period?  Do the ideas flourish or wither?  Do they evolve or merely repeat?  Do they scale up in their complexity, or, forgive me, bog down.

If things go well, I guess, blogs go off like an alpine ecosystem: tiny flora make a platform for minor flora which make a platform for major flora.  Pretty soon, there’’s a forest on a slope.  Actually, in the best case, blogs "terra form."  By steadily converting ambient resources, own and others, they create a sustainable intellectual space where none before was possible.  They make their own worlds, and so prove the possibility of these worlds.    They "discover"” worlds by creating them. 

To be sure, we can’’t intervene or experiment as my friend’s Mom does.  Bloggers are notoriously resistant to external influences when these are unsolicited.  But then we probably don’’t have to intervene.  There are so many blogs out there, any thing we might want to try is probably happening on a "naturally occurring"” basis.  Curious about a libertarian take on the politics of the opera world on the eastern seaboard?  It’’s out there somewhere. 

One of the key questions here ("loose concept/sliding metaphor"” alert) is whether the blog is actually ventilating.  Anyone can build a little world sui generis.  Just bang away at our favorite topics often and at length, and Bob’’s your uncle.  But good blogs inhale data before they exhale comment.   And we expect them to address the big issues in a timely fashion (the presidential elections, say) even as they show a certain imagination and versatility in finding issues not now on reader’s’ radar. 

A friend at Cambridge did his thesis on the epic poem and he was particularly interested in the notion of the "sustain."”  Could the poet sustain themes in large and small over the vast architecture of a poem?  And this is an issue for blogging.  Some people are entirely without themes and pretty completely episodic.  Others are the captives of a few mighty themes and their slavish repetition.  All of us hope for a sweet spot: a body of smart and various themes that organize without compressing discourse, that give us analytic range without costing us focus, that give the blog an exoskeleton without specifying what it must look like day to day. 

To put the matter more honestly: every little blog is buffeted by the high winds of a dynamic culture even as it has its favorite "go to"” ideas with which it is most comfortable making sense of the world.  This is, I think, pragmatic sweet spot of the blogging world.  The real challenges here, I guess, is constantly to cultivate and enlarge the "go to”" ideas without taking on or forswearing too much of the world in the process.  Our sweet spot should be the smallest, most powerful ideas that illuminate the largest, most various parts of the world most cleanly.  I do realize there is a notion of parsimony here that the "po mo" party no longer cares about or thinks possible.  But it is worth pointing out that it is precisely this parsimony that gives a blog its claim to something like an identity and a readership. 

Finally, blogs are tests.  Can the blogger sustain a discourse that is recognizable but cannot be anticipated, in which utterances play back constantly in the reformation of the code from which they come, over a set of applications that is neither too small or too large, out of which emerges a way of thinking that draws from, touches on, but does not duplicate other players in the field, in the creation of an "idea space"” that is disciplined and reckless, venturing and themed, marshaled and fecund, and finally, getting some where?  This is hard, and this is the test of blogging. 

And the test of the test is the sheer daily press of blogging.  We have to do it every day, or just about every day.  And this means we are, as journalists are, forced to go with what we have, forced to live with the imperfections of the moment and the limitations of our "art."”  You can’’t be precious. You have to go with what you know.  This puts you in intimate contact with your own limitations, and now you have an additional ”carrying cost”: a certain self loathing.  But constant bloggers are a lot like journalists, professional athletes, theatrical performers.  It isn’’t perfect?  Of course, it isn’’t perfect.  Just do it.   "Good enough for television"” is a phrase most bloggers would recognize. 

Tomorrow, the second question: how does blogging pay?

One thing particularly disturbs the sleep of the power elite in China: that the urban, and especially, the rural, poor might march against them.

In a multimedia series called The Great Divide, Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley of the New York Times examine the gap between the rural poor and urban rich in contemporary China. This is a effective voice-over slide show, and worth the price of an on-line subscription to the NYT all on its own.

But Kahn and Yardley open a big question even as they try to answer a number of smaller ones. The question: how is it that so many people can find themselves excluded from the new prosperity and not take part in larger, more constant, more vivid acts of protest?

This is of course the question that vexes political scientists and we have learned from them that the mysteries of consent (and quiescence) have to do with the threat of force and other acts of intimidation, the calculation of interest and advantage, variously and sometimes falsely imagined, AND the operation of hegemony and that notion that the inequities are somehow intelligible if not legitimate.

Kahn and Yardley leave us with the impression that unrest is ubiquitous, growing and inevitable. Chinese authorities are engaged in a series of little firefights in the hope that they can stave off a larger conflagration. But one can’t help feeling that if a conflagration were going to happen, it would have happened by now. There is nothing inevitable about a conflagration. Unrest can, and probably will, simmer for years.

Kahn and Yardley could have presented this as a recruitment model. Wealth is pouring into rural communities like a torrent. You go to the “edge of town” on one visit and see the dividing line between urban wealth and rural poverty. You come back on the next visit and you see how far the line has moved, and how many people have been relatively speaking enfranchised. The issue of unrest will be decided as a race. Will the marketplace enfranchise faster than disaffection does.

But some of this will be decided by another contest, and the distribution of resources that are as precious, as they are, often, extra-economic. Recently, a confrontation took place in Wanzhou between two men of middle age, Yu Jikui and Hu Quanzong. I refer you to the story by Kahn for the full details and these are deliciously intricate, but the confrontation would appear to come down to that age old collision between “Don’t you know who I am?” and “Who do you think you are?”

The two parties brushed while passing in the street. Hu Quanzong pulled rank, striking Yu Jikui and threatening him with death. He was in effect claiming special treatment, if not actually deference, in this public place on the grounds that he was a party official. Thus did Hu offer the age old claim of privilege: “Don’t you know who I am?” (The Party has since denied Hu’s claim to party membership, insisting on a recantation which he supplied for television cameras.) Yu Jikui, for his part, insisted on a flatter view of the world, withheld his deference, demanded more dignified treatment and said in effect, “Who do you think you are?”

Doesn’t seem like a lot. By the end of the day, this episode had filled the central square with tens of thousands of people angry enough to tip over government vehicles, pummel policemen and set city hall ablaze.

“Dignity,” “respect,” “face,” “honor,” call it what we will, this is a most precious resource caught up in its own little economy that is only sometimes adjudicated by the marketplace. How it is manufactured, to whom it is given, in what amounts it is due, these are specified by social rules.

These are always under a certain amount of contestation, but in contemporary China they are of course especially hard to pin down. There are a number of schemes, imperial, Western, revolutionary, and capitalist, by which this can be decided. This is being worked out now. As 1.4 billion people decide what “China” is, what a pole man like Yu Jikui deserves, what the party should give and get as a part of the new experiment.

It’s a little like trying to work out, design and install the aerodynamic properties of your bobsled even as you use it to hurtle to the bottom of the hill. Everyone in our neck of the woods, if I may presume to say so, is interested in dynamism. China should be our next watch. Have we ever seen so many people, change so much, with such speed?

References

Kahn, Joseph. 2004. China’s ‘Haves’ Stir the ‘Have Nots’ to Violence. New York Times, December 31, 2004. here

I think 2004 will be remembered as the year China finally impinged on the American consciousness as the inexorable fact of the new century.  It will take several more years before the other shoe drops: that China may own the 21st century as utterly as America did the 20th. 

There are lots of measures of China’’s rise.  I have one that is highly anecdotal, and I offer it with all due caution and the usual reservations.  It wouldn’’t be worth anything at all, if it weren’’t so darn suggestive. 

I visited China in 1996, 1997, 1999, 2002, four times, that is to say, over seven years.  I was doing ethnographic work for Kodak and for the Coca-Cola Company.  I was in Beijing on every visit and a variety of other cities including Chengdu, Shanghai, Ziyang, Shenyang, Jianjin, and Wuhan. 

When I first arrived in 1996, hotels even in the biggest cities were struggling to meet international standards.  Indeed sometimes, it seemed to me that the hotel staff were trying to reenact a musical comedy on the strength of someone’’s distant memory of this musical comedy.  The hotel "event"” had many random moments.

By 1997, just a year later, things were markedly better. By 1999, they were dramatically better.  And by 2002, they were note perfect. 

Yes, of course, we have to acknowledge that most of the hotels I was staying in had American or European partners.  Some of them, towards the end of this 7 year period, were being managed by people with American and European experience or training.  But I think where this measure works, if it works, is in its ability to capture the behavior of hotel staff well down the staff hierarchy.  This is where, in 7 years, the staff I encountered went from random to perfect. 

This means that at the very moment that the Chinese are installing the vast infrastructural changes required by industrial capitalism, they have been, at least here, making the smaller, less collective, and in some ways, more difficult changes on which empire will depend.   If my seven years of "research"” are anything to judge by (and of course they may not be), the Chinese have formidable powers of assimilation and adaptation.  I am in possession of research data that suggests they also have formidable powers of innovation.  I think it’s fair to say that they will be restless, experimental, and rule bending in ways the Japanese could not dream of being.  They are, in a manner of speaking, the Americans of Asia.

I remember when I came back to Canada after the first trip in 1996, I begged my sister to find a Chinese baby sitter for her daughter that my niece might grow up speaking one of the languages of opportunity.  After the trip in 2002, I came back wondering whether I shouldn’’t be studying it myself.

Last note:

Sorry not to have been posting the last couple of days.  I quit smoking on the 23rd.  This is distracting because you spend a good deal of your time wanting to pull your head off.  But again I am impressed by how much I have relied upon the rapids of caffeine and nicotine to find my way to bloggable topics and treatments.  One of the favorite themes of this blog has been "where do ideas come from"” and one of the answers can now be only honored in the breech.

In 1995, the NFL changed hip, thigh and knee pads from “mandatory” to “recommended” equipment because so many players were stripping down that the earlier rule was considered unenforceable.

That’s funny right there (as John Madden might say). Changing a rule because people are breaking it? Aren’t these the ones you’re supposed to enforce? Funnier still: this from the NFL, a league normally incapable of administrative flexibility.

Players are now wearing the “bare minimum:” no knee, thigh, kidney, elbow, or forearm pads.

Their motive? Speed, baby, speed. In a brilliant explication, Antuan Edwards, Rams safety, says “The game is so fast, you want to be as light as possible. You feel a difference. At least you want to think you feel a difference.”

The game is speeding up. Players are obliged to follow suit, both actually and psychologically.

The NFL will bend the rules because it wants a faster game, too. If basketball and hockey have an opportunity to close the competitive gap, it’s here. They are fluid and very fast, where football, in the famous words of George Will, often looks like a deliberate combination of violence and committee meetings. Faster players in faster equipment (and someday a mandatory no-huddle offense?) helps secure football’s place as the preeminent game of a very fast culture.

But if I may impinge for a moment on Virginia Postrel territory, this is also a matter of style. There was a saying in the old football: “look like Tarzan, play like Cheeta.” Thus did players express their disdain for guys who looked the part but couldn’t play to save their lives. “Look like Tarzan, play like Cheeta,” was a way of saying that performance counted for more than looks.

But now looks (especially the fast look) are everything. The equipment manager for the Rams, Todd Hewitt, says that rookies who ask for a full complement of pads get ridiculed in practice. One Ram tried a larger, more protective helmet. His teammates said he looked like ‘that little dude on ‘The Flintstones.’” You want to look fast out there. Now, apparently, it’s “look like (a) cheetah, play like Tarzan.”

Plainly, all this makes a nice little “response” set. Players respond to the tempo of the game, the League respond to the demands of consumers and the competitive set, each responds to the other. But, most of all, this is culture responding to practice.

The rules of football are being blithely rewritten (damn the injuries to players and teams) because football wants to remain America’s game. And America’s “game” is famously Sicilian or at least Mediterranean in its willingness to make form conform to practice and not, as most of the Northern Europeans would prefer, the other way round. Soccer, that’s sacrosanct and, in its rules, as arcane and practice-proof as the European economy. Football? Well, what works here?

Blaine Saipaia, a 330 pound offensive lineman for the Rams, says that diminished padding makes him feel “lighter and freer.” This is of course a deeply frightening thought but it nicely describes the state of the American economy, ever larger, ever faster, ever more responsive. And not a moment too soon because China’s coming. And it won’t be wearing any pads at all.

References

Fatsis, Stefan. 2004. In the NFL, Playing Safety Doesn’t Mean A Lot of Padding. Wall Street Journal. December 28, 2004, pp. A1, A6. (All quotes from.)

If you can think a problem through and have clarity about what you think needs to be done, with a healthy respect that you may be right or you may be wrong, then people will say that’s anti-intellectual.

Well said, Mr. Rove. And long live the anti-intellectual approach.

Here, if I may, is the “intellectual” approach. I offer it as a rudimentary handbook for the liberal arts programs that have yet to install it.

1) take kids who are, many of them, not very gifted.

2) introduce them to a body of ideas that are, many of them, not very clear.

3) insist on a relativism that gives each student a certain freedom from judgment, as in ‘this is what I believe, so you may not judge me.”

4) engage these kids in a classroom debate in which political or personal correctness is more important than power or acuity.

5) engage these kids in a classroom debate in which certain hallowed beliefs are ‘taken off the table” and removed from scrutiny.

6) evaluate these kids on written work in which they are allowed to reproduce the lack of clarity (aka discursive delirium) of the authors on which they have been raised.

7) create a classroom in which “real world” issues and outcomes are never discussed in strategic or practical terms unless they might be seen as ways ‘to fight the man.”

The “intellectual” and “anti-intellectual” approaches are, how shall I put this, different. And the difference makes for differences: in presidential elections, the on-going culture wars, and the changing disposition of the American campus.

The “intellectual” approach pays dearly for it’s epistemic and pedagogical investments. Smart kids are obliged to forego some of their intelligence. Not very smart kids are confirmed in their mediocrity. The “anti-intellectual” approach creates astonishingly capable people. Native intelligence is multiplied and maximized. Smart kids get smarter. Ordinary kids get smart.

Karl Rove qualifies as a poster-boy here. (He did not get a college degree, but just as clearly he learned something from the 5 schools he attended.) But my favorite example is a student I taught at the Harvard Business School. I described “Jack Dawkins” [not his real name] in a piece I published a couple of years ago. I reproduce a passage here [lightly edited]:

Jack […] used to sit on the uppermost row of the classroom, the “sky deck,” as it’s called. Jack was amiable in a Gary Cooper, Kevin Costner sort of way. In a room of 80 gifted students, he was not the most aggressive or the most vocal. In the courtly, challenging convention of the school, I would have to call on him. “Mr. Dawkins, what do you say?” He would describe the problem with great clarity and then he would strike the problem with such power and systematic ferocity that it disappeared. Other students would continue to fight over the remaining “problem parts,” but, really, the class was over. After a particularly dazzling Dawkins strike, I heard one of his fellow students murmur, with a touch of envy and irritation, “Thanks for coming, everyone. Drive safely.”

Mr. Dawkins had just given us a little tutorial in the “anti-intellectual” approach: the application of intelligence, whetted by system, rigor and clarity, to a real-world problem. I remember being visited by a little revelation of my own after a Dawkins’ display, “Perhaps the liberal arts have become just a little too liberal.”

References

Tumulty, Karen. 2004. The Rove Warrior. Time Magazine. December 27, 2004, (unpaginated; roughly: bottom of second page of text)

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Stephen Karlson for keeping us on issue.

Two and a half weeks ago, a columnist for the Globe and Mail phoned to ask if I had any thoughts on Christmas trees.  She said she’’d call me back.

By the time she did, I had posted 700 words on Christmas trees.  My internal grammar has been so refashioned by blogging that it is now hard for me to think about anything that does not then threaten to issue in bloggable form.

According to the old logic, the Christmas trees idea was hers, and I guess I should not have posted before she had filed her story.  On the other hand, if you ask me to work for free (as she was effectively doing when she solicited my opinion), it seems to me you can hardly complain when I repurpose my gift to my advantage.

Anyhow, she asked me to take the thing down and I was happy to.  Then something odd happened.  My computer crashed and I now had no copy of my Christmas trees post.  I phoned the columnist and asked her if she wouldn’’t mind returning to me the email in which I had sent the post to her.  I phoned her 4 times over a week, leaving a message in each case.  She responded once in a vague way, and did not return the email. 

Happily, I found a copy of my Christmas trees post in the MT archive.  Bless you, Movable Type.  And I posted it on the weekend.  I still have not heard from the journalist.  Were it not for the MT archive, my post would remain her captive.  (It may be of course that she deleted the email in question.  It may be her own computer crashed.  A clarifying phone call would have been helpful.)

I can’’t imagine what her motive was, and there might have been a miscommunication here.  (Though I must say it is hard to imagine a journalist who ignores her answering machine…or permanently deletes her email.)  I think it’s possible that she was happy that I had lost the email.  Perhaps she imagined that this preserved the uniqueness of her piece.  And if this is so, we may see her acting according to the old logic twice: first, when she asked me to take my piece down and again when she refused to give my post back (if this is indeed what she did, one can’’t be sure).

What are the rules of the old logic?  Is it that people who publish play a zero sum game?   If blogging has done anything, it is to encourage a somewhat more collaborative, "creative commons”" approach.  In the blogging world, several takes on the same topic are welcome, if not the very name of the game.

But the real question: why would she be threatened (if she was) by a "little blog that could"” like this one.  It’’s not like I have Tyler Cowen’’s readership or anything.  It’’s not like any blog has a readership that can rival the numbers of the Globe and Mail (Canada’’s newspaper of record). 

My conclusion (and I do have one): that journalists in the mainstream are perhaps beginning to feel the heat, they can hear the typing, that they are now a little nervous about the thousands of bloggers who, many of them, produce in a day what the journalist labors (heroically and gainfully) to produce in a week.   

Competition, it’s a wonderful thing.

p.s., some weeks later after this post appeared, the journalist in question sent me an absolute scorcher of a reply.  Really it was something to behold.  Darn near hysterical.  You would think the critic had never been criticized before.  And, come to think of it, chances are, she hasn’t.  Scrutiny, it’s a wonderful thing. 

Oh, baby. Here we go. There is a movement afoot to restore ROTC programs to the Ivy League campus. Let the culture wars begin anew.

We have found a new battle field. That the battle will be joined is suggested by the sympathy of Lawrence Summer, Harvard president, for the ROTC. He wants one. His faculty, famous for their reluctance to defer to higher authority, do not. The culture wars have found a new battle field and it is Harvard yard.

The “yeah” side says that America needs “a cross section of America represented in its officer corps.” (Lt. Col. Brian Baker, commander of the ROTC Army battalion at MIT).

The “nay” side says that as long as the military discriminates against gays, universities may not admit them to campus without violating their own antidiscrimination policies.

But the real issue is clear.

America as Rome finds it gauling that the military should be excluded from these prestigious institutions. It dislikes being stigmatized as brutes unfit for the realm of the mind and the institutions of the elite. Officers are gentlemen and gentlewomen, and, often, scholars, too. The ROTC exclusions of the Vietnam era were more than a strategic loss. They were a stain upon honor. Militaries fight with bravery, but they stand on dignity. And this has been diminished.

There is a deeper issue. America as Rome is as much offended by the expellers as the expulsion. “Who are you, ‘they wonder, ‘to say who can and cannot be part of this community?” Those who presume to exclude the ROTC implicitly claim to be the party of higher moral and or intellectual authority. And the military is, as they should be, loathe to surrender this high ground to anyone.

America as Greece wishes to remain inviolate, a liberal bulwark against almost all the things the military stands for: regimentation, chain of command, creativity-flattening discipline, extra-American intervention, interference with the autonomy of others, violence, and of course the arts of war. From their point of view, a “military officer” is a creature straight out of the Stanley Kubrick casting office: General Turgidson, Major T.J. King Kong, and most tellingly, Brig. General Jack D. Ripper. You think I’m kidding and I wish I were, but last night I saw an interview with Henry Rollins, who praised Dr. Strangelove as must-see viewing on the grounds, that ‘the people at the top are pretty psychotic.”

The deeper issue for Greek America: several liberal bastions have fallen, but this one belongs to us, and, yes, by virtue of our education, intelligence, and thoughtfulness, we are well situated and entitled to “say who can and cannot be part of this community.” We can hear the rally cry. “We must stand for something and we will not endure officers in our classrooms. We will not contribute even so much as a rambling, semi-coherent lecture to their education.”

It is a New Yorker cartoon waiting to happen, as a rag tag band of anarcho-socialist students, wearing the rags and tags of their identity politics, as they face off against the cool, impersonal, discipline of the supporters of the ROTC. But of course in the delirium of a post modern culture, we can expect the two parties to switch identities. The ROTC camp will conduct itself with pretty un-war-like decorum. The liberal camp will engage with their usual instruments of contestation: spray paint, street theatre, building occupation, and a good deal, “hey, hey, ho, ho…” There will be the inevitable reversal of positions as well. The liberal camp will argue the case for exclusion. The ROTC camp will call for inclusion. The intellectual side will let fly with moral certainties. The warrior camp will respond with rational argument.

In sum, we have all the elements of a dandy contest: clearly defined combatants, an issue that mobilizes them deeply, the opportunity to settle old scores and addresses recent outrages (the Kerry loss), and the perfect stage: Harvard yard. Most important, we have an inflection point: the moment that President Summers must decide. (Assuming the ROTC is allowed back to Harvard, it is hard to keep the imagination from summoning images of officers-in-training brought to campus under the protection of U.S. marshals.)

But as usual, nothing will be clarified. The chief winner will be the 6 o’clock news. And, in a cynical moment, we might find this apt. We are interesting, we are actual, to the extent that we provide one another with good television.

References

Hechinger, John. 2004. At Ivy League schools, ROTC, long banned, plots a comeback. Wall Street Journal. December 16, 2004, pp. A1, A12.

Kavulla, Travis. R. 2003. Respecting ROTC: The Learning Curve. The Crimson. October 28, 2003 here

Kubrick, Stanley. 1964. Dr. Strangelove.

House is a new drama from Fox.  Hugh Laurie (sporting a new American accent) plays a doctor.  His character falls somewhere between Monk and Becker.  He’’s eccentric.  He’’s irascible.  He’’s gifted.

But the interesting thing is the dialog.  There is lots of talk that is actually quite hard to follow.  We are treated a great rush of medical lingo and diagnostic contemplation.   Rarely, do we get an appearance from "Dr. Exposition"” (thank you, Mike Myers) to clear things up.  In the place of a detailed understanding, we are left with a mere gist and a general understanding: it’’s complicated, they’’re smart, this is urgent, go figure.

In The Wire (HBO), there are long moments when I can’’t understand the dialog, and several moments when I can’’t follow the plot.  The former is "straight out of Compton"” or in this case Baltimore.  The latter is so fiendishly complicated that the viewer is obliged to just sit back and hope it all comes out in the wash. 

There is a fundamental contract in pop culture between producers and consumers: that the latter shall always understand what actors are saying and where the plot is going. 

This contract reflects several things: first, that the American cinema has always been attended by people who have English as a second language, second, that people are often deeply distracted by other things: eating, day dreaming, necking, wondering whether they turned off the stove.  Good writing always finds a way of sending back a rescue party for anyone who might have lost their way.  Enter the trope of repetition and of course, Dr. Exposition.  ("So you’’re saying is the butler did it!”)

Most of all, the contract of pop culture is driven by the fact that the Hollywood and Burbank are commercially driven.  You can’’t baffle the consumer and expect to make your numbers.  (It is precisely because the American cinema respected or at least enforced this contract that it has world wide reach, while the more sophisticated French cinema so infrequently escapes the art house.)

The pop culture contract has never sat well with writers and directors.  They yearned to create stories with nuance and intricacy to satisfy their "art."”  But someone on the production team then must intervene with a brusque instruction: "keep it simple, stupid.”"  This tells us that there has always been an internal pressure in the industry to break the contract, and how assiduously it was enforced.

Hollywood has been attempting to rework the contract for some time.  In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman was happy to give us dialog we couldn’’t quite hear and plot points we couldn’’t quite follow.  I worked on this film as a chauffeur.  I heard the shouting when Warren Beatty got his glimpse of the first rushes.  He was not happy.  He didn’’t quite say to Altman, "you have broken the fundamental contract of pop culture,”" but we got the idea.

Of course there has always been a community of film goers who don’’t mind plot and dialog indeterminacy.  The art house crowd expects this sort of thing.  It was proof that they were unmoored, man, that they were brave enough to space walk without a harness, that they take their leave of the culture capsule.  Bangin!  Plot indeterminacy was proof of citizenship in hipster city. (Even as it was, to be fair, the very condition of certain kinds of artistic illumination.)

Those of us who have done hard time at art house, welcome the developments that House and The Wire represent.  We are well prepared and grateful, even when confused.

But what about the poor souls who bought the bargain, the ones who believe that it is Hollywood’’s job to keep things simple?  These people must be very unhappy indeed.  They can always turn the channel, and I don’’t doubt that that’’s exactly what they do.  But now there are enough viewers to sustain shows like House and The Wire, we can be certain that there will be an upward pressure on all the other shows to embrace plot indeterminacy too.  The artistic credentials of writers and directors will see to this. 

If the plot indeterminacy of House and The Wire is the coming thing, we are watching pop culture cut away one of the conditions that made it converge, hew to the middle, keep it’s finger on the pulse, and otherwise stay to the mainstream.  If pop culture is lifting off, we can expect it to fragment and innovate ever more fiercely.  Without the pop culture contact, it is unmoored, and, yes, I do mean Michael. 

References

website for House here

I am in Toronto doing idea generation for Sterling Rice.  I arrive at the "Coach house,”" a building on what used to be a grand estate.  I enter and discover that food is being served and I help myself from the serving table.  People smile and nod.  I don’’t recognize anyone but I know introductions will be forthcoming in due course.  This is a Velcro world.  Sterling Rice brings together strangers.

I sit at one of the round tables.  A woman is already sitting there and we fall to chatting.  She is from P&G.  Interesting, I think.  P&G must be the client.  We talk about A.G. Lafley, one of my heroes, and the innovations that now pour from this corporation.

Eventually, the woman asks what I do and I say I am an anthropologist.  What do I do in particular, she wants to know.   "Well, sometimes it’’s idea generation,"” I say with that English panic that I have been forced to state the obvious.  "Interesting," she says,  "So why are you joining us,  exactly?"”   "Well,"” I nod encouragingly, "Sterling Rice uses me from time to time.”"  "Who is Sterling Rice?,"” she asks. 

Oh, fine.  I have joined the wrong group and I am now eating their food.  And I have a 15 minute conversation under false or at least mistaken pretenses.  And the strange thing is, this "gaff”" matters not at all.  As this naturally occurring experiment demonstrates, we are all pretty interchangeable.  My fellow conversationalist and I speak exactly the same language.  And we might as well be working on the same project.  And this conjunction of perfect strangers, brought together to serve the corporation, is routine.  We have a good laugh.  I thank them for their generosity.  They say, "you’’re welcome anytime.”"

This reminds me of the time I was working for the Royal Ontario Museum and I went to what I thought was a cultural event for the CBC at the Sutton hotel.  It was only when I got back to my office that I realized that I was one day late, that I had gone to an event sponsored by the Globe and Mail.  Here too the mistake made no difference.  I had gone to the same place, had drinks with exactly the same people, talked about precisely the kinds of things I would have talked about the night before, and come back with precisely the same kind and quantity of illumination. 

There’s a difference.  In the case of the Sutton Place affair, I was meeting with fellow gatekeepers, the group who shape Canadian opinion, giving to and taking from the same, well fermented, trough of news and views.  Not only were we interchangeable but our ideas, especially by the end of the evening, were interchangeable too.  The Sutton Place experiment demonstrated, much too well, that the formative institutions (CBC, Globe and Mail, and Royal Ontario Museum) were way too chummy, way too convergent, and, to this extent, way too exclusive of the range of Canadian opinion.

In the Sterling Rice case, something very different is going on.  This event brought together not too chummy chums, but perfect strangers.  And these strangers are chosen to poll the differences of contemporary culture, not exclude them.  The group consisted of home makers, engineers, artists, bankers, the owners of small businesses, jazz musicians, creative directors, product designers, new age gurus, and assorted other creatures.

What they had in common is the ability to play well with others, a certain joy when faced with messy problem sets, the ability to beat their way through low clouds, some turbulence, and a good deal of noise, like the tacked-together flying machines of World War I.  It’’s not always very pretty, but eventually the clouds clear and, yes, that is almost certainly the coast line of France.  Actually, the real objective here is to get blown well off course, so that when the clouds clear, you are not quite sure where you are.  "Newfoundland?"” someone asks.  Yes, you are always hoping for Newfoundland.

This is a difference between capitalism and the cultural institutions that continue to "represent”" us.  The latter are staffed by "chattering classes.”"  (Buckley?)  They cluster densely.  They network redundantly.  No "weak links”" here.  (Granovetter?)    They spend their time tracing the links over and over again.  ("Oh, so you know so and so.”")  Thus, do they reproduce themselves, wearing away differences, asserting commonality.  Thus do they erase divergent opinion.  Thus do they regress to the mean. 

The Sterling Rice affair is, within limits, devoted to capturing diversity and turning it into creativity.  And a fountain of new ideas appeared in the course of the day.  This creativity will, some of it, pour back into the marketplace, and consumers will vote "yeah"” or "nay."”  More to the point, new cultural ideas will find their way in the form of these new products out into the world.  Within certain limits, Sterling Rice is a difference machine.

We can choose: cultural institutions who converge (however avant-garde  and progressive they insist they are) or capitalism that operates, sometimes, like a multiplier of dynamism.  Capitalism, if I pay myself an extravagant compliment, has a way of making itself comfortable wherever it finds itself.  Cultural institutions on the other hand prefer to stick together.

I have a niece called Laura. She is 7. Laura is bounding and boundless. I rarely see her without a bump, a bandage or a boo boo. The wedding reception was scarcely a hour old when Laura appeared with a cut on her cheek. Laura charges into life and life has not yet learned to get out of the way.

When Laura was about 3 and a half, Steve and Michele, her father and mother, talked about Laura’s verve. They agreed that if they were going to redirect this “force of nature,” the time was now. But they agreed, without much difficulty, that it was more important to accept her for “who she was” and to live with the consequences.

The consequences are pretty delightful. Laura makes free with her feelings. When we were playing ball in the yard, and I missed one, she said, not so sotto voce, “He’s hopeless.” Laura does not so much enter a room as pass through it at speed. She does not so much take part in a conversation as tell you exactly what she thinks. Laura continues to charge into life.

This is not the way we used to bring up girls. Seen but not heard. Decorous. Petty, little, unassuming. Compliant, demure and non charging. These were the standard terms of reference. That conversation between Steve and Michele would have been unlikely 40 years ago, improbable 80 years ago and unthinkable 120 years ago. Convention would have put its stamp on her.

That conversation was a triumph of individualism over gender roles. What mattered was not what girls are but who Laura is. This is another way of saying that Laura, not social convention, gets to choose who Laura is. She springs into life, vital, bounding, relentless, and gender stereotypes must now lay down arms and step aside. Steve and Michele are not avant-garde parents, feverishly nurturing every trace of individuality. They are Americans of the mainstream who prize some things more than form.

Every so often we get a glimpse of how fast we are changing. And Laura is very fast indeed.

Great piece by Nora Jacobson on anti-Americanism. Jacobson is an American living in Toronto.

For me, it’s been [an] almost daily confrontation with a powerful anti-Americanism that pervades many aspects of life. When I’ve mentioned this phenomenon to Canadian friends, they’ve furrowed their brows sympathetically and said, “Yes, Canadian anti-Americanism can be very subtle.” My response is, there’s nothing subtle about it.

Thus, Canadian media discussion of President Bush’s upcoming official visit on Tuesday focuses on the snub implied by his not having visited earlier. It’s reported that when he does come, he will not speak to a Parliament that’s so hostile it can’t be trusted to receive him politely.

Jacobson concludes:

Living here and coping with it has forced me to confront my own feelings about America. And it’s helped me discover what I do value about it: its contradictions, its eccentricities, its expansive spirit, all the intensity and opportunity of a deeply flawed, widely inconsistent, but always interesting country. Perhaps I am a typical American, after all.

References

Jacobson, Nora. 2004. Before You Flee to Canada, Can We Talk. Washington Post. November 28, 2004. here

McCracken, Grant 2004. Carolyn Parrish is a big fat idiot (on anti-Americanism in Canada) here

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Verbum Ipsum for the head’s up.