An ongoing review of politics and culture

A completely oversimplified look at US vs French education systems

I’m pretty sure the US educational system is superior to the French one. This is sort of a counterintuitive idea, in part because the narrative the US school reform movement tells itself is based on the idea of OMG US education is THE WORSE EVAR that won’t let us win the future by beating the Chinamen at math.

And there are those international comparisons that look pretty bad (even though they’re generally not normalized by income, family situation and the like).

But here’s another way to look at it. Let’s play a little veil of ignorance game: what can you reasonably expect, as a child, in either country?

Painted with a very broad brush:

Born in the underclass, in the US: You’re pretty much fucked. Your school is a stereotypical rundown den of pathological behavior where unionized, talentless, unmotivated teachers are just punching the clock.

Born in the underclass, in France: You’re pretty much fucked. Your school is a stereotypical rundown den of pathological behavior where unionized, talentless, unmotivated teachers are just punching the clock.

Born in the middle class, in France: Your local public school is mediocre. You will come out with terrible spelling and grammar. You probably won’t be numerate.

If you have any affinities beyond the most narrowly academic, unless you’re very lucky or very determined, you’re fucked. You will be categorized as dumb and put in tracks that will end up with you on the unemployment line.

Want something better, or just different? Tough luck. Maybe there’s a local Catholic school, but it’s a big expense, and anyway private schools must obey government curriculums, which means they won’t really be any different.

Born in the middle class, in the US: Your local public school is mediocre. You will come out with terrible spelling and grammar. You probably won’t be numerate.

But hey, at least you can pick and choose among some of your classes, there’s a school play, there’s probably a sports team, there’s a glee club, and A/V club or whatever. High school is a mean, and cruel scene, but there’s probably a little bit of something for everyone.

If you want something different, however, you’re in luck! It’s not going to be easy, but there’s plenty of options. Private school is expensive (even though there are scholarships—not for everyone, but better than the zero of France). And by now, even the smallest cities in the US have either a magnet school or a charter school, or some weird school that focuses on teaching classics or arts or is a Montessori school. If your parents want to homeschool, there are probably other students and parents near you who are doing it who will help you, and there’s a wealth of resources on the internet.

The point is that things could and should be a heck of a lot better, but there are many more opportunities to do something different.

Born in the upper class, in France: If you enjoy schoolwork, you will come out of high school knowing a lot of math, more than sophomore math majors at all but the top-tier US universities. You will also probably know some history (nothing before 1789), and have read two or three classics of French literature (nothing before 1830). You will vaguely know who Plato, Descartes and Kant are. If your parents are old-fashioned, you will know a few words of Latin. Your odds of having proper spelling and grammar are about 50-50.

If you enjoy extracurricular activities of any sort—programming, or chess, or art, or music, or sports at any sort of advanced or competitive level—sorry, you’re on your own! And anyway you probably shouldn’t have extracurricular activities, because if you want a good shot at life, after high school comes 2-3 years of cram school for the entrance exams to the grandes écoles, where you’re expected to study for 70-80 hours a week.

Born in the upper class, in the US: You have access to schools that are orders of magnitude better than anything else the world has to offer.

Again, painted with a very broad brush, but the core idea, it seems to me, from both anecdotal and statistical evidence, is accurate, that for a given family in a given situation, if you’re in the US, it’s hard to be worse off than in France, and often there are many more possibilities to be better off.

On "Bad Religion"

(This post is written at 11pm, so it might not be coherent.)

Bad Religion is an important book that should be read by anyone with interest not just in religion in the American 20th century but by the trends that animate contemporary society and the thinking of our contemporaries.

The first part of the book is a fascinating history of American religion and theology in the 20th century. The second part of the book is an illumination of some of the most pervasive cultural memes that undergird many social trends today.

And the conclusion, which I don’t want to say is the most valuable part of the book but is certainly the one I enjoyed the most, is a very smart and useful clarion call for a renewed Christianity in the West, which as soon as I’m done typing this I will go staple to the foreheads of many people, whether turgid ecclesiastics or la-di-da churchgoers.

It’s an important work that straddles theology, history, sociology, politics and more. Ross borrows some phrases from himself, but they’re good ones.

That’s the sales pitch. If you’re at all interested by any of the stuff we talk about here, go buy the book and read it. Really.

I said to David on Twitter that I’m not sure I would make a good reviewer for the book, as I basically found myself nodding in agreement at every page. But I’ll give my best effort.

One thing I found striking was the parallel with Ross’s previous book, Grand New Party. Both books follow the same structure: they’re basically two books in one, the first part about the past, and the second about the present.

In both, the first part is an intelligent and illuminating reexamination of (what the reader thought was) well-understood 20th century history that it casts in a new and convincing light.

But while in Grand New Party the second part was about how the world could or should be, in Bad Religion the second part is about how the country’s gone to the dogs.

This makes for less bracing reading, but it shouldn’t discourage you from reading it. The heresies that Ross eviscerates are much in need of eviscerating, and he does it not just using the tools of theology, but also uses history, sociology and cultural criticism to analyze these heresies and show their nefarious influences. This makes these examinations valuable even (especially) for non-believers, who either might think that the Gospel According to Oprah (or Joel Osteen) is a footnote in our Weltanschauung instead of important trends, or who might have trouble finding the right framework for understanding and critiquing that contemporary worldview.

(The NYT review faults Ross for spending too much time debunking the lost Gospels industry, but he wrote a very useful primer and crucially, the idea that “the real Jesus” is up for grabs undergirds all the following heresies, and it’s worth understanding the origins—and limits—of that view.)

In particular, as a European Catholic who thinks his Church would do a lot of good in the world if it embraced more libertarian economics, I found that Ross strikes a perfect balance in his critique of the prosperity gospel, showing how orthodox Christianity can and should be highly suspicious of Mammon while remaining compatible with the free markets I hold dear. (My Political Views on Facebook: “John Paul II + Milton Friedman”)

And the chapter on “The God Within” was just a joy, a perfect perforation of perhaps the most pernicious postmodern virus.

One criticism: I wonder if in his rush to highlight the heresies he condemns, Ross didn’t give short thrift to potential inklings of, if not an orthodox revival, then certainly orthodox vitality. I was surprised that someone like Rick Warren only gets passing mentions. Warren may be a Hawaiian shirt-wearing megachurch pastor, but he is, in today’s America, very mainstream for an orthodox Christian, let alone an Evangelical.

While much of evangelicalism seems to have responded to the general culture’s disdain with either political belligerency or withdrawal into a subculture bubble, some evangelicals are trying and not doing too badly at building a sort of proto-neo-orthodoxy. (Indeed, Warren often gets called “the new Billy Graham.”)

If there’s a key to Warren’s success beyond his skills as an ecclesiastical entrepreneur, one which might point a way to a successful 21st century orthodoxy, it’s that he has co-opted the most successful aspects of the heresies Ross denounces—the things that makes them resonate with so many of our contemporaries—, and used them to promote orthodoxy. Like the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the title of his best-seller “The Purpose-Driven Life” hints at a self-help message from a therapeutic God Within, but the book delivers an unambiguously orthodox message, right from the famous first sentence “It’s not about you.” Warren is morally conservative but inclusive and nonpartisan. He likes capitalism and his sermons are friendly to the aspirations of the upwardly-mobile but (as Ross notes) he straightforwardly rejects the prosperity gospel.

Maybe Ross thinks this path and the efforts of Rick Warren and others like him are doomed to fail, and he’d probably have a good case, but I wish he’d made it. (Ross believes, and I agree, that the renewal of orthodoxy must also be aesthetic, and that seems highly unlikely to come from the megachurches…)

That criticism lodged, as I said, the conclusion is the part I enjoyed the most.

While reading the book’s most pessimistic moments, one of my first instinctive responses was that, as a dweller of grey Europe, I’d rather have a nation of heretics than a thoroughly secularized one. I was then planning on writing the following critique: are we doomed? Or might not Bad Religion seem irrelevant in a few years? Aren’t there inklings of a 21st century orthodoxy somewhere? More importantly, what is it that a 21st century orthodoxy could and should look like?

Before I could put fingers to keyboard though, Ross answered all of these questions in his conclusion, which by itself is worth twice the price of admission. He paints a portrait of a 21st century Christianity which (and I hope that’s not the only reason why I love it) matches up with most of my frustrations and aspirations for contemporary Christianity. One which is renewed spiritually and aesthetically, in the world but not of it, equally eager, as Jesus was, to preach eternal truths and to wash the feet of sinners.

As important and worthwhile as the first two parts of the book are, I really hope—and pray—that the conclusion will be read very widely and will prove to have the most lasting influence.

Philosophers vs Breeders, Part Deux

Given that I don’t want to bore our few remaining readers to death, I’ve mostly kept silent to that piece in The New Yorker about breeding to which many on Twitter have alerted me.

(I mostly found it dismaying. The piece gives two-thirds time to the anti-kids perspective and one-third to the pro-kids, and oversimplifies and misrepresents their arguments.)

But, since TAS Overlord Ross decided to chime in, and since this is Easter (a day which, naturally, is even more about birth than Christmas), I wanted to complete what he says.

Ross takes on the most anti-kids philosopher portrayed in the piece but, to my sense, only takes up half the argument.

Here it is (quoth NYer):

Benatar’s case rests on a critical but, in his view, unappreciated asymmetry. Consider two couples, the A’s and the B’s. The A’s are young, healthy, and rich. If they had children, they could give them the best of everything—schools, clothes, electronic gaming devices. Even so, we would not say that the A’s have a moral obligation to reproduce.

The B’s are just as young and rich. But both have a genetic disease, and, were they to have a child together, that child would suffer terribly. We would say, using Benatar’s logic, that the B’s have an ethical obligation not to procreate.

Ross eloquently takes up the argument that, no, we would not (or at least, not so readily) not say that the A’s don’t have an obligation to reproduce. (Enough negatives here?)

But this is only part of the problem with Benatar’s case, and in my view, the least problematic and insidious part. (Ross also does a fine job taking apart breeding philosophers’ “the Repugnant Conclusion”, which to me sounds a lot like “the Awesome Conclusion.”) The most important part is the case of the B’s.

Benatar (and the author, more importantly and tellingly, since she self-consciously represents the Candide point of view on the whole kids debate) casually take it for granted that we would say that the B’s have an ethical obligation not to procreate.

This casual assertion strikes me as extremely widespread, extremely misguided, and, at the end of the day, extremely inhumane.

Why should the genetically diseased not reproduce?

Not because they would sully the gene pool. Surely, we don’t think that. (Do we?)

Ah, it’s because their child would “suffer terribly.” But this is a non-sequitur.

I actually agree with Benatar: all life involves suffering. But this is precisely why it cannot be a criterion for whether a life should be lived (or else you reach Benatar’s conclusion that all human life should be extinguished). All life involves measures of terrible suffering and measures of bliss. And, most importantly, we cannot know ahead of time what the mix will be, for anyone. Including those with a “genetic disease”.

It is the height of arrogance to believe otherwise. It is, in a fundamental sense, inhumane because it entails a lack of real empathy: yes, even the sick, even the handicapped, even the poor, even the downtrodden, have life experiences that are worth living.

If you truly put yourself in others’ shoes—truly, not as “How would I feel if I were…” but truly take others’ perspective, it is impossible not to see this.

It is, of course, an impulse of good intentions that lead us to believe some lives are not worth living. But it is a logically and humanely intenable position.

(And, obviously, the slippery slope is real: once we decide that some lives are more worth living than others—literally, worth more than others—the circle of the blessed keeps ever narrowing. Those who use Rawls’ veil of ignorance to justify redistributive taxation ought to apply it to more areas of life.)

There are, of course, countless examples. Many with genetic diseases lead very happy, productive lives. No one who has met children with Down syndrome would seriously claim that they do not by and large enjoy life immensely. (I can think of, in fact, a couple exactly like the B’s: both of them wheelchair-bound with degenerative diseases, who had a daughter who is lovely and precious, and take care of her very well thank you very much. Since you ask, the girl does not share their disease, though there was a big chance she would have.)

But once we’ve decided that we can determine a priori which lives will be worth living, that some people have a duty not to bring into the world people who are different, then truly we are missing something fundamental.

Do I think the B’s have a duty to reproduce? I don’t think they have more or less of a duty than the A’s, because I think all people are equal in dignity. I do think society has a duty to make it easier for the B’s to lead normal lives, which includes bringing up children should they want to.

It’s kind of amazing that this has to be said.

You Don't Get to Keep The Sexual Revolution And Give Back the Sex

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a mini-symposium on whether or not the sexual revolution was good for women, a massive topic to be addressed in relatively brief op-eds. I think Hanna Rosin did a pretty good job with “yes” side, and was hoping for a thought-provoking view from someone more skeptical. I’ve never heard of Mary Eberstadt before this, but it’s difficult to imagine a “no” response that better evades the central question at play in the debate.

I’ll skip the first three myths Eberstadt lays out, even though I have plenty to argue with about those. (Her contentions, all of which are directed toward demonstrating that the “war on women” is a myth: All women aren’t liberals, lots of Christians besides the Catholic Church care about contraception, and social issues aren’t going away.) The real evasion comes in Myth #4: “The sexual revolution has made women happier.”

It’s possible that this is actually a myth propagated by people on the other side of the question from Eberstadt, but I’ve never heard it from any of the liberal women I read regularly on these issues. They would argue, as Rosin does in her piece, that women are on balance better off than they were before the sexual revolution. But Hanna explicitly wrestles with the fact that women do not seem to be happier now than they were before, and I’ve never heard a prominent feminist defend the sexual revolution on the shallow grounds that it made women happier. It gave them more of a say over their bodies and lives, and freed them to become, as they are now in certain demographics, more educated and higher earners than men. By making the question about “happiness,” Eberstadt has avoided the much more substantive, much more difficult question: overall, are women more free to lead lives they choose and find meaningful than they were before? Are they more able to do so without facing cultural disdain and male harassment? If the answer to those is yes, and it obviously is, I’m much less concerned about whether they are significantly more “happy.”

I don’t believe the happiness question is irrelevant, even if it is thorny. (What is happiness? Are conservative religious women more likely to delude themselves about their choices making them happy? Who says the most satisfying life is necessarily the most traditionally “happy?” Etc, etc.) But there is a reason anti-feminists, conservatives and other traditionalists always jump right away to happiness. Partly because the studies are in their favor, and partly because they don’t want to face the more telling question. Because it’s pretty self-evident that women are better off than they were in 1950. You’re free to think it’s better to have a society where women have less choice about what to do with their lives, less ability to support themselves without a man, and less ability to pursue the education and career opportunities they clearly excel at, but you’d be in a fractional minority of even conservative women.

The reason conservatives don’t want to admit this obvious reality in public is what is behind the profound change, the profound improvement, in women’s standing in such a short period of time: the breaking away from traditional ideas about gender roles and sexual morality. This is in large part thanks to the pill, but it’s much more than that. As Hanna puts it, it is all thanks to “the ability to have temporary, intimate relationships that don’t derail a career. Or to put it more simply, to have sex without getting married.” You cannot have one without the other: if you continue to protest women’s ability to have sex with who they want without getting married or to limit the size of their family so that they are able to do other things with their lives, you have to reject the relational, education, professional and economic benefits as well.

Obviously, the subject of marriage and childbearing is complicated, and there are many factors beyond mores that impact it. But the central question at play here, outside of the complex economic questions involved in the current state of marriage, is whether the gains that came from the decline of traditional gender roles were worth it. And what traditionalists must be pressed to admit is that the positive changes the sexual revolution wrought would not be possible in a world where women must marry the first man they want to have sex with or are at constant risk of becoming pregnant. In that sense, the people who want to keep the gains of the sexual revolution but roll back their conditions of possibility are rightly said to be waging a “war on women.”

The final word on French parenting

Just perfect.

Mutiny on the NFL:Bounty

Revelations surrounding “bounty programs” in the NFL, where players and coaches provide teammates with financial incentives to make game-changing plays or injure opposing players, have elicited broad public disgust; at least for the intent-to-harm part of the equation.

Killing people aside, I typically love performance-based incentives – anything that provides real-time sticks and carrots to help govern decisions and encourage performance. My company generally does a good job of rewarding performance, fortunately, but some days it would be a nice stimulus if my boss would drop by and say, “Hey, I’ll give you fifty bucks if you send me that report by 3pm!”

DJ Gallo writing for ESPN makes an amusing – though not altogether unreasonable – argument that performance-based compensation should be encouraged broadly throughout the league: “Instead of punishing the Saints and opening up a can of worms that might force the NFL to punish every team in the sport, the league should instead embrace bounties.” He then outlines how the lines between real football and fantasy football are getting hazier by the weekend and suggests allowing fans to get in on the action, too.

It’s not difficult to imagine how these bounty programs can give birth to corruption and distorting forces that change the way the game is played. Ultimately, you start to have capital flows making on-the-field decisions, like whether to pass or run or even fumble. It’s like having an infinite number of bosses, each of which exercises control in proportion to the size of her wallet.

It wouldn’t take long before the emergence of negative incentives, such as side betting against positive incentives or as under-the-table payoffs for dives. In short, if officially expanded beyond the locker room, the system would go haywire in no time. Performance-based incentives are only effective if either a) there’s only one agent providing incentives; or b) everyone providing incentives generally agrees on the strategy and objectives. In such a plutocracy, the “coach” would quickly become just another engaged spectator, or a marginal investor, and his players could effectively mutiny. Capt. Bligh would not be pleased.

Wait a minute. Is this really so horrible? Isn’t there another spectator sport that already works this way? A game where hidden influencers provide players financial incentives to behave in certain ways, including attacking opponents, and the players must make decisions to ensure the largest possible return on investment for their shareholders?

We’re willing to permit capital flows — from anywhere and nowhere — to influence government and its players’ behaviors. Why not allow open-game on, you know, games?

Star Wars (cont)

Via Dan Drezner, comes news that Star Wars contrarianism isn’t extends beyond first trilogy, and that some people actually argue that Revenge of the Sith (?!?) is a better movie than Jedi. This is ludicrous, and Drezner does a fine job of dismantling that idea.

But while we’re on talking about Star Wars, I just want to gratuitously share some of the best material I’ve seen about the series.

If you have lots of time on your hands, want to laugh and also getting some good film criticism and insight, Red Letter Media’s amazing video takedowns of the prequel trilogy are a must-watch.

Even more intelligently, the Star Wars Origins site is simply one of the most precious artifacts on the internet. The author breaks down all of the influences of the Star Wars trilogy using the “Hero with a Thousand Faces” template that Lucas famously aped. In doing so, Star Wars Origins goes way beyond fanboyish analysis but provides simply the best deconstruction I’ve ever seen of mythical/epic storytelling. If you have any interest at all in storytelling broadly understood, you simply must read the site, and I guarantee you that even if you’re familiar with “Hero with a Thousand Faces” and many of the influences that shaped Star Wars (Flash Gordon, Kurosawa, Lancelot…) you will still learn many things.

Still Empire

Lest ye think that the Scene has become baby central, let’s talk about an equally important topic: Star Wars.

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has a great post arguing that (audible gasps in the audience) Return of the Jedi is actually the best movie in the original trilogy. (Via Scene alum Peter Suderman )

Drum lists all of the good things that there are in Jedi, and argues that the movie wasn’t ruined by the much-reviled Ewoks because they’re only incidental to the story and are only there for a couple scenes.

I actually agree with much of Drum’s praise for Jedi, which you should definitely read, but I still reach the same conclusion as most fans: Empire is still the best movie in the trilogy.

Before I explain why, I first need to settle some scores.

Firstly, I’ve never been that pissed off about the Ewoks. It’s probably because I watched the third movie as a kid, not a teenager. Sure, they’re manipulatively cute, and they’re there to sell action figures to kids, but should they really send people into fits of conniption? Everything in Star Wars is there to sell merch (that was Lucas’ business genius): lightsabers, X-wings, Vader’s helmet, yet we adore those iconic things. Disney’s business is based on merch, and that doesn’t mean The Lion King and Toy Story aren’t great movies.

The Ewoks are also there to provide comic relief, which annoys some people, but that’s also what R2 and 3PO do, and people seem to love those fine, too.

It should be noted that the Ewoks also serve as a powerful symbol: the idea that it’s the Hidden Forces in the universe that rise up to defeat the Empire. Those small, backward furballs are dismissed by the almighty empire, but the grain of sand in the gears stops the machines. That’s something to like.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of the Ewoks. But I don’t think they’re awful either.

Secondly, I’ve always been left cold by one of the most-mooted arguments for Empire: that it’s the “darkest” episode in the trilogy. Yes. So what? Does a movie have to be “dark” to be good? Since when is that a criterion? If you’re older than 16, that shouldn’t figure in your calculations.

Ok, with all that said, and with Drum’s praise for Jedi endorsed, why is Empire still the best movie?

It’s because it’s the movie where the characters are at their most raw, and where the characters undergo the most change.

At the end of the first movie, none of the characters is radically changed. Luke reaches a huge milestone, because uses the Force, but at the end of the movie he is still an idealistic boy who wants to be a fighter for Justice and the American Way like his father. Han leans to his good side but is still a mercenary rogue at heart. Leia is still a virginal princess who cares only about abstract principle. Vader is still a complete villain.

And during the third movie, with the crucial exception of Vader, every character knows what they have to do. Luke is a world-wise Jedi with scars, literal and otherwise—he has big doubts and big problems, but he is still fundamentally the same person at the beginning of the movie and the end. Han has gone through his transformation from fundamentally selfish to fundamentally selfless, through both his love for Leia and his dedication to a greater ideal. Leia, who was fundamentally a girl in the first movie—virginal and almost fanatically principled—has become a woman, fighting for love as well as abstract ideals.

During the course of Empire, though, every character is thrown through the wringer, salt poured through the still-live scars of their conscience. And as the result they are all fundamentally changed. Luke, obviously, wracked between loyalty to his friends and his desire to train as a Jedi, between the Light Side and the Dark Side. Han and Leia also have to rethink everything: they each have to overcome their fear of love and redefine their life. Even secondary characters: Lando confronts the consequences of his cowardice, and 3PO, who was only a bumbling comic-relief fool, gains a measure of agency.

Between the beginning and the end of Empire, each character has gone through that radical transformation, for the protagonists an entry to adulthood. Luke goes from teenager to man, scars and all. Leia goes from girl to woman. Han also definitively sheds what remained fundamentally a teenage outlook—self-centered, aimlessly rebellious. Even Vader is different at the end of the movie, the seeds of doubt sown by Luke’s stunning rejection.

It’s Screenwriting 101 to say that in your movie your protagonists much reach resolution and that a movie worth watching is one where the protagonist goes through some form of resolution and even redemption. While there are elements of that in each movie (Obi-Wan, Luke in the first; Vader, crucially, in the third, and also Luke), it is in Empire that each character is thrown into the starkest relief, made to confront the biggest choices (again, with the exception of Vader), and reach the most consequential resolution.

So while I agree with all the great things Drum has to say about Jedi, the strength of the character arcs, not “darkness” or Ewoks, is why Empire is still the best movie in the trilogy.

New Ventures, Too

I’m sorry to see Noah go, but have already bookmarked his new blog.

I’m going to follow his lead in this regard. As many readers here know, I usually cross-post each of my pieces to TAS and The Corner. I think it makes more logistical sense, in a world of RSS, etc. to just put the posts up there.

You can find all of my posts, the archive, the RSS location and my email on my author page at NRO.

I have a great fondness for TAS, and its greatest strength has always been the commenters. Commenting at The Corner requires free registration, but that’s about it. I do my best there, as here, to respond to all non-vituperative comments. I hope you will continue to chip in at that location.

Iron Chef Millman V

You know the drill:

Prelude: Latkes three ways: – topped with goat cheese, melted leeks and smoked salmon – topped with pea and roast garlic puree and roast lemon salsa – topped with persimmon and apple puree and sushi ginger

Soup: a duo of soups: – roast olive and garlic – roast red pepper and carrot – served together with a dollop of herb pesto

Crudo: thin-sliced hamachi topped with slivers of jalapeno, green lemon-infused olive oil, and sea salt

Salad: fennel and apple salad with tarragon and a lemon and olive oil dressing

Pasta: ricotta and swiss chard malfatti (like giant gnocchi) with sage brown butter sauce served over a bed of butternut squash pureed with mandarin orange-infused olive oil

Main: broiled arctic char dusted with ground porcini mushroom and fennel seed, served atop an oven-roasted tomato and a bed of white beans and wild mushrooms

Dessert I: crema fritta, deep-fried breaded cream

Dessert II: Rosemary lemon olive oil cake

Menus from years one, two, three and four also available.

This year we also had a signature cocktail – the maghreb martini. Gin, vermouth and preserved lemon brine, garnished with a wedge of preserved lemon. Color was a bit yellow; I think the brand of preserved lemons I used had saffron in the brine. But the flavor worked wonderfully, and paired very nicely with the latkes.

In fact, this is the first year that I can recall that really every course worked. The only hiccup was that the first batch of malfatti dissolved upon hitting the water. I had formed them in advance and frozen them, but I’ve done that before successfully, so I think either they didn’t have enough flour (I don’t think that was the problem) or the ricotta and chard between them retained too much water (I suspect this was the problem). Anyway, I heated up another pot of water, defrosted another batch quickly and re-formed them (you twirl the dough in a wine glass with a bit of flour to make the football shapes), and the second batch came out fine if a little bit late to the party. But other than that hitch, everything came off well and everything worked, in terms of flavor and presentation. If I had to pick standouts, I’d choose the soup duo, the fish, and the crema fritta.

I really enjoy doing this. I don’t entirely know why. It’s in part because I love to be the entertainer, the provider, the host; I like showing off, but I also like making people happy. And it’s in part because I love to eat. But it’s in part because cooking is one of the very few activities I engage in where I really use my hands. I don’t play a sport; I don’t paint or do woodworking or futz around with motorcycles. But I do cook. And when I cook, I still use my brain, but I use it differently, and I don’t feel so much as if I’m living in it, more like it is living in the world. Which is a very good and too-rare feeling with me.

And it seems to work for my guests.

As always, recipes available upon request – and please, don’t be afraid to email me and pester me if I fail to post something in response to a comment. Sometimes I don’t notice that a new comment has been posted; I can be bad that way. My email is available on the “About” page of the site.

What Is a Gene “For”

Analogies or metaphors are often useful for starting to understand a given topic, but in my view, serious engagement requires that we progress from this to a description of what is really going on operationally. (Technically, at some linguistic level, I’m sure it all remains some kind of metaphor, but at least things get much, much more concrete.)

The blog Gene Expression has a recent post which explains why when we read a headline about a “gene for depression” or whatever, this is usually very misleading. It is a model of science writing. It’s not easy to engage seriously with the science, avoid jargon, and keep your eye on the main issue. I think that a broadly educated person in the 21st century should have the level of understanding on this topic that you will get from the post.

I wrote an article for National Review a few years ago in which I argued that the fact of our ignorance in this area – that while intelligence and other mental traits have been understood to be somewhat heritable since at least the time of Homer, we do not have the practical ability to understand why person X has normal psychological make-up Y based on analysis of his or her genome – is likely to be very important to thinking about public policy in the upcoming decades.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)

Oscar the Grouch

Others have commented that The Muppets serves as, by embodying or enacting, an answer to the fears fans had about what Disney would do with the Muppets franchise. That is to say: Disney knew fans would be afraid that they would exploit the Muppets and thereby destroy them, and this is exactly what the villain in the movie tries to do – replace the Muppets with the odious “Moopets.” By acknowledging the fear, and refuting it by making a movie that is true to the actual Muppet spirit, Disney has proven that they are not the villain in their own movie.

But has anyone noticed that this means the climactic speech of the movie is delivered in bad faith?

Near the end of the film, the Muppets have failed to raise the money necessary to save their old studio and keep their cherished name and brand from being strip-mined by Chris Cooper. As they file out of the home they’ve lost, Kermit gives a rousing, inspirational speech about how they haven’t failed at all, because they did get back together, they did put on a show, and if they want to make a go of it again, they can do that – and Chris Cooper and his contracts can’t stop them. They don’t need their old name and their old studio. They just need each other.

But if that’s true, then why did Disney buy the franchise?

I have mixed feelings about the movie as a whole. There were things in it that I thought were brilliant – and very true to the original Muppets. Top of the list, from my perspective, were the opening “growing up muppet” sequence of Walter and Gary, and the amazing ballad, “Man or Muppet;” close behind is May (Amy Adams) and Miss Piggy’s song, “Me Party.” And there were a variety of other moments that “clicked” with the original. The “rain” on the window that Mary looks out of that turns out to be water from a hose. Traveling by map. The fact that Mary is reading a thesaurus when she’s waiting for Gary back at the hotel. The verse, “Life’s a filet of fish….yes, it is” from “Life’s a Happy Song.” And so forth.

But precious few of these moments involved the original characters. Indeed, apart from Miss Piggy, I didn’t feel like any of them had their old joie de vivre. It was striking, to me, how easy it was to “get the gang back together.” Also how easy it was to whip the show into shape – we see one rehearsal going badly, and then the show going like clockwork. And none of the acts in the show remotely lived up to the original – Gonzo’s “head bowling” was particularly lame, but even the best act, the chickens singing “Cluck You” was a joke that wasn’t spun out to its full potential (I can’t believe they missed the opportunity to play off the fact that Gonzo, basically, keeps the chickens as a harem, but even if you didn’t want to go there the joke as it was delivered was just a bit of reference humor, because the actual song and dance routine the chickens do wasn’t, itself, funny).

And Kermit’s was the most problematic “reboot” of all. The outline of a character arc was there. Kermit needed Walter to remind him of what he really loved about life, which wasn’t being a star but putting on a show with his friends. Except that, from where I was sitting, it just didn’t happen on screen. In virtually every scene – most especially in his emceeing of the show – Kermit seemed to me to be phoning it in. It’s partly a problem of character – this Kermit is exceptionally passive, never coming up with solutions for problems, always ready to admit defeat. But this could have worked brilliantly if it had built to a big moment of recognition that this is what he was doing, and he finally returned to his true self. (Kermit is the Aragorn figure of the movie, the true king in self-imposed exile because he doesn’t believe he is actually fit to be king.) But that moment of recognition never really came. We got the speech after the moment – the speech about not having really failed and how it doesn’t really matter if they lose the studio or their name. But we didn’t get the moment.

But it was more a problem of performance. Kermit, in his prime, was a great leading man, a blend of Humphrey Bogart’s rumpled integrity and Cary Grant’s barely-suppressed hysteria. (Sorry, I’ve been reading Stanley Cavell again.) This Kermit doesn’t seem like that character grown old – it seems like that performer going through the motions.

There’s one flash of the old Kermit in the movie, in this exchange with Fozzie:

Kermit the Frog: Guys, we can’t kidnap Jack Black. That’s illegal!
bq. Fozzie Bear: What’s more illegal, Kermit: Kidnapping Jack Black, or destroying the Muppet name for good?
bq. Kermit the Frog: Kidnapping Jack Black!

There are plenty snappier and fresher lines in the movie, but this is the only one I remember Kermit delivering as if he were the old Kermit. (Unfortunately, Jack Black doesn’t actually do anything for the show he’s kidnapped to celebrity-host.)

To my mind, most of the best things in the movie involved the new characters: Walter, Gary and Mary. The old characters felt crushed under the weight of nostalgia. Their story was about their recovery of their true selves, but they never actually got to be their true selves. Their telethon show, after a while, started to feel like Mickey Rourke’s nostalgia bout at the end of The Wrestler. I can’t imagine that’s the effect the movie makers were aiming for.

All of which loops back to my original question: why do the reboot? If a reboot was to happen, it is obviously vastly preferable that it not be a Moopets-like desecration, and Disney is to be praised for sparing us that. But I sense that the level of praise this movie has received is partly due to sheer relief. It isn’t a desecration. But it’s a work of nostalgia. And nostalgia is not, in the end, a generative sentiment.

Or maybe it’s just that my son was kind of bored by it.

The Beginning of the Ways of God

Rod Dreher asks:

Question: Are there any happy-go-lucky saints? Any great artists who are thoroughgoing optimists? I can’t see that.

I’ll take a pass on the saints, and I’ll take a pass as well on “optimistic” because that’s a very shallow word – as is pessimistic. But Dreher is telling himself a story about the relationship between suffering and meaning, or about the transcendent value of a radical disconnection from ordinary modes of being (manifested by saints and holy fools and such). And I’ll nominate two artists who don’t, I think, fit the picture Dreher paints of the relationship between suffering, meaning and the divine: Henri Matisse and Samuel Beckett.

I like picking Matisse because his career proves you can make profoundly beautiful work that really is about nothing but being happy.

And I like picking Beckett because his career proves you can live what must be accounted a deeply meaningful life while not only staring into the abyss, but setting up house there.

And I like pairing them with each other because their moods could not be more opposite, and yet both are plainly comfortable in the world, this world, the word of sense and feeling that anyone can participate in.

At the end of the Book of Job, God speaks to his faithful servant out of the whirlwind. He does not tell him that his suffering had a transcendent purpose – we know it didn’t; it was inflicted on Job because God made an absurd bet with Satan. Nor does he (contra Archibald Macleish) simply browbeat Job into submission by showing him how much he doesn’t understand, and how much more powerful God is than a puny mortal man. Instead, God calls Behemoth his chief creation and lavishes line after line in praise of the wondrous Leviathan. That’s the climax of God’s message – that these wondrous monsters are what God is most proud of.

Then, of course, God tells Job’s comforters that they were wrong and Job was right, and gives Job back everything he lost – new house, new cattle, new family. But what does Job do? He names his three new daughters Jemima, Kezia and Keren Happuch – roughly, sunshine, perfume and eyeshadow.

Which, when you think about it, is not so far from “luxe, calme et volupte.”

That Rotting Smell is College Sports

I’m a little disappointed that Ross Douthat, a sophisticated moralist, could look at the monstrous fiasco at Penn State and think that the compelling independent variable in all this is Joe Paterno. Douthat compares Paterno to Father Darío Castrillón Hoyos, the Colombian priest who went from humble service to the poor of Medellin to flakking for pedophile priests in Rome. You can read what Ross says about Father Castrillón, but I just want to ask: Why should we start out from the assumption that Joe Paterno and his program are exceptional in their dishonesty, their bland bureaucratic evasions of basic moral responsibilities?

What happened around the Sandusky allegations, after all, is what big-time athletic programs do – they lie; they cover up; they fudge; they condone cheating; the require cheating; they scapegoat to avoid accountability; they force crude double standards of assessment and behavior on their universities (which put up little fight); they claim flagrant zones of exemption in admissions requirements, which they often get their universities to basically waive altogether; they minimize misbehavior, often criminal, when they cannot describe it out of existence; they secure their talent in a mortifying pageant of “recruiting” in which grown men, like clumsy Casanovas, wheedle and lie to high school juniors via endless text messages; and, while these men make piles of money from their recruits, the recruits don’t actually get what you’d call “paid,” because they’re amateurs, or as their coaches sometimes say, into cameras, for national audiences, with straight faces, “student-athletes” (that the people on the receiving end of these reassurances don’t burst out in derisive laughter is grist for another rant about the funny idea of sports journalism).

Actually, this isn’t just what they do. It’s who they are. It’s how they exist, at all. The compost smell from this steaming pile of sordid practices is their smell. That smell is their steaming-compost essence. It might have been an interesting hypothetical, a month ago, even for someone with as jaded a view of college sports as I possess, whether a program defined by such a compost smell would cover up something as heinous as a coach raping boys in its own showers, thus freeing him to rape boys hand-picked from his foundation-for-boys for as long as he cared to. It’s not a hypothetical anymore. Now we know the answer.

So, when people wonder what it was about Joe Paterno, personally, that made this disaster possible, I can only shake my head and ask: Where’s your materialism, people? Joe Paterno was the nice, avuncular, highly successful, stunningly old boss of such an organization. He did what his organization wanted him to do. Proof of this is that, given the chance, his organization – from the “graduate assistant” (let’s linger over this exquisite term for just a moment: graduate assistant; it almost sounds as if his function as an “assistant” is tied in some way to his academic standing as a “graduate,” that is, a graduate in some subject in the learning of which he is now “assisting” other aspirants to this august status as a “graduate”) to his nominal superiors in the Penn State athletic department and university administration – did the exact same thing he did. They did what the organization wanted them to do.

Surely these men are not as great as Joe Paterno, and thus subject to the same great-man blindnesses that brought him low, and yet they did just as he did. They fudged, they covered up, they did the minimum necessary so as to avoid bringing a powerful man to account, they redescribed the rape of a 10-year-old boy as “horsing around in the showers,” and like college coaches everywhere when they talk to recruits and reporters about what their programs are really about, and like administrators when they describe these programs as having a legitimate or even comprehensible place in their universities, they lied. What happened at Penn State was the scheme of big-money college sports working as it was designed to work. The act of looking away, repeated by so many in State College, is the perfect emblem for the cognitive politics of the NCAA. It should be on their flag.

Focusing on Joe Paterno, and puzzling how this could happen in idyllic State College, Pennsylvania, or, conversely, snarking about the unique evil that must lurk below the surface in State College, Pennsylvania (I mean, the students rioted for their coach; students wouldn’t have done that anywhere else) are ways for everyone to advance the state of cognitive dissonance that made this disaster possible in the first place.

Let me ask a sobering question: How do we know this isn’t happening at other big-time programs, or things just as bad, or worse, or almost as bad? Just for the most easily imagined category of malefaction: How many coeds do you think have been raped by athletes over the years, at the countries’ other athletic powerhouses, and then shamed by administrators into covering it up, or just stonewalled and ignored by campus officials, or just convinced by such prospects to shut up on their own, preemptively? What number do you think that is? Or does that just happen at Penn State, because of Joe Paterno’s unique blindness as a great man? Why shouldn’t the conceit of Joe-Pa’s integrity make us wonder how much worse it is in those many college towns where the king of the dung-heap is more of a manifest scumbag? Jerry Sandusky just happened to get caught, or caught up with, thirteen years after the first sick-making suspicions arose. Clearly, these are people with stronger stomachs than you and I have. You might say they have “iron stomachs.” They can, after all, stand their own smells. So perhaps we should start widening our imaginations, to ponder how many other disgusting things they can stand downwind of, and for how long.

there, I fixed it

Let’s fix college sports, shall we? We do it like this:

1) Eliminate all athletic scholarships. (What’s that you say? Athletic scholarships have been key to getting people from poor and otherwise marginalized communities into the nation’s colleges? Then let’s take the scholarship money that now goes to athletes and send it towards those communities without asking whether the young people involved can run fast or kick a ball accurately. Since big-time sports are money-losing propositions for almost all schools, there may even be some extra money for scholarships.)

2) Keep all the sports that universities currently sponsor, but treat them largely as clubs. Or, if the varsity/club distinction must be maintained, limit the number of coaches and pay them on the same scale used for, say, theater or dance teachers.

3) Disband the NCAA.

4) Encourage the boosters who have poured millions of dollars into their favorite universities’ sports teams to work with the NFL to create something like England’s Football Association. Ideally, the NFL would become the equivalent of the Premier League, with only the twenty best teams in the top tier, and a promotion/relegation fight each year. The boosters would likely be far happier as team owners, able to shop for and buy talent without having to try to dodge onerous NCAA regulations. At the outset, the second tier of FA-USA would be made up of the twelve weakest current NFL teams plus eight teams located at the sites of long-standing college football powerhouses: Austin, Tuscaloosa, Baton Rouge, Pasadena, Norman, Columbus, Ann Arbor, and so on. With the application of some marketing skill — including shrewd color choices and the signing of local heroes — fan loyalty could relatively easily be transferred from the universities to the new professional teams. And the universities could make some money by leasing their stadiums to the new leagues.

5) The promotion/relegation model could be applied to basketball and perhaps baseball as well, again drawing on local fandom and university arenas. (Imagine how much fun it would be to see the Tar Heels promoted and the Bobcats relegated in the same year. Talk about rivalries!) Connect the traditional basketball powers to the NBA’s developmental league — assuming the NBA eventually gets its act together — and the traditional baseball powers to appropriate levels of the minor leagues.

6) Eliminate aluminum bats at all levels of competitive baseball. (Yes, I know that’s not really relevant here, but while I’m dreaming. . . .)

7) Encourage the FA-USA to create college scholarships for their players, to be taken advantage of in the off-season or after retirement. Let those who like the current system because they are concerned about the athletes having opportunities after college make contributions to this fund.

There, it’s all better now. You’re welcome.

No Margin For Error

I saw the movie Margin Call a couple of weeks ago, and had a couple of points to make about it that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Actually, three, but the additional point has been made before, to whit: see it. It’s the first movie about Wall Street I’ve ever seen that gets it even remotely right – at least, right based on my experience. I’ve worked with every single one of the guys depicted in that movie. The world depicted is real. Not, of course, in every single detail – but in the important ways, yes, it’s real. And for that reason alone – along with the wonderful ensemble acting and the surprisingly strong pacing of the writing and direction (since almost nothing actually happens, it seems superficially slow, but it’s actually paced almost perfectly).

Now, for my actual two points.

First, John Tuld, the Jeremy Irons character is regularly being compared to Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers. But if I understood the action of the movie correctly, and the actual events of 2008, Tuld does exactly the opposite of what Fuld did. After Bear Stearns was basically forced to sell to JPMorgan Chase in March of 2008, everyone looked over to Lehman as the next domino potentially to fall. But the Fed started allowing investment banks to borrow at the window, and for a few months everybody relaxed. Fuld did not take the opportunity of the spring and summer lull to clean up the mess at his firm – rather, he tried to brazen his way through the crisis, assuming he’d be bailed out. This outrageous arrogance is a major reason why the government refused to lift a finger to save Lehman, which, in turn, led Lehman to seek the protection of Chapter 11, at which point we entered the full-fledged phase of the financial crisis.

Now, I’m not saying that Dick Fuld caused the financial crisis single-handedly. Had he done what John Tuld does in the movie, and aggressively liquidated his portfolio of sub-prime-mortgage-backed securities, he might have failed – or he might have succeeded in driving Merrill Lynch over the brink instead of Lehman. Who knows. The same weekend Lehman went under, AIG, a much, much bigger ship, was revealed to be hulled way below the water line. This was a systemic crisis; every major Wall Street house, and plenty of minor banks, along with the Federal Government and quasi-government entities like Fannie and Freddie, not to mention independent quasi-regulatory organs like the ratings agencies, was implicated. But I am saying that John Tuld, who appears to be the villain of the movie (inasmuch as there is a human villain, as opposed to the abstraction of “Wall Street”), does exactly the opposite of what his model, Dick Fuld, one of the widely-recognized and vilified villains of the actual financial crisis, did in real life. Which should tell us something about the nature of decisionmaking in the crisis.

Tuld reminded me, in fact, of the structural heroes of Michael Lewis’s book, The Big Short. Lewis’s narrative follows a handful of guys who, following John Tuld’s three possible ways to make money on Wall Street (“Be first. Be smarter. Or cheat.”) were first, because they were smarter. They saw through the flim-flam of the sub-prime mortgage pyramid scheme and, rather than join the party and try to ride it as far as one could, decided to short the whole business. In the popular understanding, these guys were among the villains of the crisis – or, rather, the instrument (the naked default swap) that they used to execute their trades, and the investment banks (most notably Goldman) who facilitated them were the villains. Because what these guys were doing was picking the worst mortgages and shorting them (betting they would default) by having investment banks package the other side (a long position in said junk mortgages) into securities to sell to buy-side accounts as legitimate investment products. Which said banks did. So they are understood to be part of the chain of villainy: their trades kept the game going, and made the game more toxic, and made them a whole lot of money while trashing the world financial system. But in Lewis’s book, these guys are – structurally – the heroes. Because they are the guys who didn’t cheat. They were smarter, and earlier, than everybody else in assessing what was likely to happen. They placed their bets, took their chances, and profited. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. The villains, in the Lewis book, aren’t speculators like these short-sellers, but the guys who put mortgages together into securities and marketed them as investment vehicles without caring what junk was was in the pools. The short-sellers were making money off that villainy, but they weren’t the villains.

So, to get back to Tuld, he – and his fictional firm – had been playing the game for years. And Tuld figured out – early, thanks to the smart work of risk analyst Peter Sullivan (the Zach Quinto character) – that the music was stopping, and that when it stopped his firm would be bankrupt. And so he made the call: liquidate everything, immediately, before the crisis hits. Save the firm. Screw the clients.

Which is the right call. It has to be the right call. It’s not a disinterested call – I’d assume more than 50% of the fictional Tuld’s wealth is tied up in his firm’s stock. But the whole reason he’s got all that stock is to incentivize him to do what’s right for the firm rather than what’s right for him individually, by making what’s right for the firm and what’s right for him individually identical. Of course you screw the clients when the survival of the firm is on the line. You’re not there to serve the clients. You’re there to serve the shareholders.

And there’s no systemic reason not to do it either. As John Tuld says: “I don’t cheat.” He doesn’t pull the accountants in and say: I order you to hide the loss. He doesn’t pull risk management in and say: I order you to change how we calculate VaR. He says: sell it all. To willing buyers. At the best price you can negotiate. If that’s not what he’s supposed to do, then I’m really not sure what he’s supposed to do. I suppose try to blackmail the government into bailing him out. Which is what Dick Fuld did.

All of which brings me to my second point: Sam Rogers, the Kevin Spacey character. Now, over the course of the movie, this guy, the head of the trading floor responsible for all this crap, moves from the periphery to the center of the movie. He’s the one who questions Tuld’s decision to sell everything. He’s the one who everyone looks to as the “good” guy – the one who gives the pep talks to the folks who haven’t been laid off as well as the guy who the folks who were laid off still trust and look up to, and don’t really blame for what happened. He’s the veteran, the lifer. He appears, structurally, to be the hero – a tragic hero, like Michael Corleone, who sacrifices his own sense of right and wrong for the good of the family, but a hero nonetheless.

And that’s a load of self-pitying horse-hockey.

Let’s take a closer look at Sam Rogers. The first thing we learn about him is that he’s got a dog who’s dying, and he’s totally broken up over it. Now, you could take this as a save the cat moment that makes us sympathetic toward the character – and it is, except that’s a trick. We do become sympathetic to him. But precisely because we do, we don’t notice – not until later, when we’re supposed to – what the dog’s death is really telling us about him. Because his mourning for the dog is so over-the-top, it should clue us in to something about this guy. It’s not that he’s so caring that he’s broken up over the death of his dog. It’s that the dog is all he’s got left. Which is confirmed at the end of the movie, when we find him burying the dog on the lawn of his ex-house, now occupied by his ex-wife. This is where his loyalty to the firm has got him: to a place where he cannot afford to walk away from a job he now despises because he lost all his assets in what we must presume was an ugly and acrimonious divorce.

At the big, late-night executive committee meeting, Rogers is the one to stand up to Tuld, and tell him he can’t do what he’s planning to do – he can’t screw over their entire client base this way. They’ll never trade with the firm again. Tuld says he understands. Rogers asks: do you? To which Tuld responds: do you? This is it! Meaning: there’s no point in keeping our clients if we don’t have a firm left to trade with them.

All of which is true. But, of course, Sam Rogers is not the firm. If he gives his sales force the order to liquidate everything, their clients will be furious. With his sales force, and with him. He, personally, stands to suffer. The firm may survive, but his career won’t.

But that’s the conflict. To do his job, he must sacrifice his career. To preserve his career, he’d have to refuse to do his job.

It is very, very difficult for me to see this as a moral conflict. It sounds an awful lot like a question that can be resolved monetarily: how much do we need to pay you to do your job so that you don’t worry about the fact that you’ve just torched your career?

But that assumes that Rogers’s career is just a way for him to make money. That it’s not a vocation. And, obviously, that’s not the way Rogers sees it. He, in his own view, has been doing something more than just earning a living. He’s been a leader. A mentor. A man people look up to.

Corporations need people with Sam Rogers’s skills and their self-conceptions. But the Sam Rogerses of the world would do well to bear in mind that these skills and this self-understanding is being exploited. There is no higher purpose for which they are leading their teams. The only purpose is making money. The moment when there is no prospect of doing that, the team will be disbanded.

This character, Sam Rogers, lost sight of that fact. His lack of cynicism makes him seem like the hero of the piece, but it’s just self-delusion. The only choice he faces is the choice I identified above: preserve your career, or do your job. That’s a purely self-interested question. There are no higher values involved. But the choice forced him to recognize that he had imbued both sides of the equation with emotions that were undeserved. He didn’t just feel like the firm was a good place to work; he felt loyalty. He didn’t just feel like his career was a way to make money; he felt like it was an identity. Being forced to betray your identity to prove your loyalty is a lot more serious than trying to decide whether $6 million is adequate compensation for ending your career on a sour note. But that is, in a fundamental way, Sam Rogers’s fault. He’s the one who decided that he couldn’t do his job unless it was more than a job.

The real message of the Sam Rogers character’s story is: if you’re that kind of character, you don’t belong on Wall Street. Because these character traits, which in the normal world we think of, basically, as strengths, are weaknesses that will be ruthlessly exploited – like everything else is – in the pursuit of profit. Exploitation which it’s difficult for me to fault guys like John Tuld for engaging in. Since, after all, that’s their job.

And that would have been a very good message indeed for the Peter Sullivans of the world to get before they got on the money train. Because once you’re on that train, as pretty much every character in the movie admits, it’s extraordinarily difficult to get off.

Which is another thing this movie gets right.

UPDATE: I was remiss in not pointing out at least one reviewer who understood that the story isn’t really about Lehman specifically. I don’t recall whether I read his review before writing mine, but I probably did, and he deserves the shout-out. Sorry for the omission.

O captain, my captain

For me, the question that looms largest about the Penn State sexual-abuse scandal is this: How could someone see a man raping a child and fail to intervene? Fail even to call 911? I can contemplate many difficult, challenging, frightening situations that cause me to ask myself what I really would do if faced with them — and cause me to have no clear answer. This isn't one of them. How could Mike McQueary not have done more?

The answer, I think, lies in the tradition — as old as football itself — of pretending that football is a branch of the military. Players often talk about other players they'd go to war with. That linebacker is a warrior. The guys in this locker room, they know I've got their back. Football coaches, more perhaps than coaches in any other sport, play up the idea that the team is comprised of a besieged band of brothers who can trust only one another. (Even at the school where I teach — a Division III school with no athletic scholarships, thank God — the football players sit together at dinner and chant and shout.) Moreover, the coaches themselves are the primary beneficiaries of this governing military metaphor: they are your commanding officers, and to them you are uniquely and solely accountable. I bet it never occurred to Mike McQueary to call the police. I bet the first, last, and only thought he had was: I have to tell Coach.

This pretense that sport is war and a team an army obviously extends to other sports as well, but it functions most powerfully in football. In most other sports there aren't enough players to make the metaphor work really well, and there is more room for purely individual initiative and achievement. But a football team really is like a company made up of three platoons — offense, defense, and special teams — whose assistant coaches are very like platoon leaders. It's no surprise that McQueary thought only of telling Coach Paterno. He was reporting to his commanding officer, than whom no higher (or other) authority could be imagined.

Marc Hauser is in hot water (again)

A few weeks back, the philosopher Gilbert Harman had posted to his personal Web site a short paper arguing that Marc Hauser had borrowed excessively, and without proper attribution, from the ideas of the scholar John Mikhail in Hauser’s book Moral Minds. When it started to get some public attention Harman quickly took the document down, saying that he didn’t mean for it to be widely read, and had put it up just to solicit some comments from friends and colleagues. But the other day, Harman re-posted his argument (in a revised form), together with a substantial response from Hauser. (The Boston Globe has a story on the incident, here, and here is something on the subject from the Wall Street Journal.) I’ve not read Hauser’s book, but if his response to Harman contains the best that can be said in his defense, then the situation looks dire. This is the sort of thing that students can be expelled from school (at least, from my school) for, and whether or not it is in violation of institutional guidelines or disciplinary best practices, what Hauser has done is clearly dishonest and unethical — and none of that changes if Hauser did all this “by accident”, whether because he didn’t recognize the extent of Mikhail’s influence on him or because he didn’t see the need to give him more credit. (That would just make him culpably ignorant.) To argue, as Hauser essentially does in his reply, that he really wasn’t influenced by Mikhail as much as he oh-so-obviously was, does not do much to help his cause.

But that’s just what I think. How about you?