An ongoing review of politics and culture

The Biggest, The Dumbest, The Blockbusteriest

My quick take on 2012 is up at Reason. Here’s a sample:

Not content merely to be another Big, Dumb Blockbuster, it aims for something greater: to be the Biggest, the Dumbest, the Blockbusteriest.

And with its never-ending parade of glorious, ludicrous, and utterly improbable catastrophes, it more or less succeeds. 2012 is the sort of movie so aggressively hyperbolic and devoutly over-the-top that it makes traditional descriptive labels obsolete and thus requires the invention of whole new words. My suggestions? How about catastrophaganza—the subgenre to which 2012 (and most of Emmerich’s oeuvre) belongs—and retardiculous—the best combo word to describe its barfy blend of low-quality yucks; treacly, social-welfare obsessed melodrama; buzz-word-laden psuedo-scientific babble; and gleefully apocalyptic pyrotechnic spectacle.

Why I'll Never Be a Singer-Songwriter

What I’d love is if I posted these absurd lyrics on the Internet, and someone composed some accompanying music. Naturally we’d split the vast royalties sure to result.

When I was young, before my West was won
I didn’t like whiskey or gin.
Out on the town, when my friends were around,
My hankerings would cause me chagrin.

They say you can’t lose, when you’re buyin’ the booze
They won’t question your testosterone
It’s true drinking whiskey, or even Vermouth
But this beverage I crave alone.

So I’d summon the man, with the towel in his hand
And his finger on the club soda gun
Thirsty as Texas, parched as a prune
My booze-hounding not yet begun.

I’d started to think, “I’ll need a shrink,
if my order causes him to make fun.”
He said, “We’ll serve you some whiskey, or even some Skyy
but I won’t serve Bacardi Limon.”

So over the years, I conquered my fears
of spirits that coarsen the tongue.
I started with Boons, and when I made it to Cuervo
I knew that my journey was done.

That’s when I met you, drinking spiked Mountain Dew
My eyes filled to the brim with tears
Sure as God reigns I knew, that if I married you
I could feel manly just drinking beers.

CHORUS:

And now it takes seven beers until I can’t remember
The sixth sense that I had you’d be my wife.
You spent 5 years in my head, four months in my bed.
Now it’s three in the morning
and the odds you won’t call are two to one.

1919

I’ve finished up 1919, and started on The Big Money.

Anyone who abandoned the project before the end of 1919, go grab your copy, skip to the end of the book, and read “The Body of an American” chapter. It stands alone as a prose poem, a sort of “I Hear America Putrefying.” But it also pulls together Dos Passos’ ambitions and his omnivorous approach to portraying WWI-era Americans. Well, white WWI-era Americans, but that’s another conversation.

The idea of the Unknown Soldier always had an imaginative pull to me: as a kid, I was fascinated by the way indeterminacy could stand for universality. (Uh, spoiler alert: the Unknown Soldier dies near the end.) In this one chapter, Dos Passos does for the dismembered doughboy what he does for all his other characters, but more so. He follows the soldier not just from birth, but from conception, all the way to his confused, shell-splattered demise. Along the way, the soldier’s identity slips from one person to the next, and since Dos Passos’ characters often serve as little more than cameras through which we see places, the soldier stands for the land in all its variety as much as for the American people. Read it.

For those of you still keeping up, here are some topics for consideration.

Sex

What a miserable bunch of sad sacks these characters are, fumbling along in frustration until someone gets pregnant, at which point everything falls apart. The revolutionaries all talk big about freeing themselves from bourgeois notions of sexual propriety, but their revolution never quite arrives. Sexual liberation proves just as elusive — or illusory — as the workers’ uprising, and the two ideals are caustically juxtaposed. The bourgeois characters also dabble in liberated rhetoric when it suits their urges, but always fall back on convention somehow. Pregnancy, in almost every case, sets the rules.

So I keep wondering: if these characters could exercise the autonomy they claim they’d enjoy, what would they do with it? Would they be any happier?

Violence

Dos Passos makes no secret of his sympathies for the Wobblies and other heroes of American socialism, and his account of the Seattle General Strike, and the brutal response of the forces of reaction, makes Howard Zinn’s version seem cool and dispassionate. But there’s nothing about these earnest revolutionaries that suggests they’d be any less eager to employ rifle butts than Ole Hanson was. Just as with sex, none of the characters seem to have what it would take to wisely use the power they’re chasing. A pessimistic read of the series (is there any other kind?) suggests that by WWI, our institutions were already beyond democratic control, even by the well-intended, and that in the U.S., force and only force would dictate peoples’ economic and political lives.

American Immunity

Conspicuously absent in the book is a “war is hell” thread. Dos Passos hints at the horrors of trench combat, but the American characters who volunteer for service in WWI, whether in the military or driving ambulances, spend their time whoring and cafe-hopping. Pregnancy is a bigger threat to their well-being than Zeppelins or mustard gas. Americans are revered by the French not for their heroism, but for the material abundance they represent. I consider this one of the novels’ finest touches.

Along these lines, here’s a picture of an American ambulance driver. The driver’s name is Walt Disney.

Did you know someone made a rock opera about the Seattle General Strike? Now you do.

A Radical or Marginal Change?

The excellent blogger Rod Dreher writes:

I understand the case for same-sex marriage, though I don’t agree with it, but look, if you’re reduced to having to tell the public that they have no right to be consulted about the radical redefinition of a bedrock social and cultural institution, then you have a big, big problem.

Since he’s grappled many times with arguments for and against gay marriage, I haven’t any desire to rehash the whole debate, but I do want to challenge Rod on one small aspect of how he characterizes this issue: Would the legalization of gay marriage really be a “radical redefinition” of the social and cultural institution? Maybe same sex marriage is a radical departure from marriage as understood by orthodox Christians, or people for whom it is primarily a procreative union.

But I submit that a majority of Americans subscribe to a definition that more closely resembles the following: Marriage is the union of people who fall in love with one another, decide that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, and commit to do so monogamously. The definition I’ve offered isn’t merely more commonly accepted among Americans than whatever Rod Dreher would describe, it is perfectly consistent with marriage laws as now written.

Expanding marriage to include gay people doesn’t radically redefine the understanding of marriage that prevails in our culture. As Rod himself writes, “heterosexual America has already conceded the philosophical grounds on which traditional marriage was based.” It is therefore specious for opponents of same sex marriage to invoke as an argument the proposition that “it’s dangerous to radically redefine the status quo.”

Obviously, Rod has other arguments to offer against same sex marriage, but if they want to remain on intellectually solid ground, he and other opponents of same sex marriage must stop using that particular argument. Same sex marriage may be an advantageous or disadvantageous change in our society’s understanding of marriage — I believe it is the former — but it is most definitely a marginal change that flows logically from the institution’s prior evolution, not a radical change.

Bad-itude

It’s difficult to describe just how terrible and uninspired the new Weezer record is, but I give it a shot in today’s Washington Times.

More on the Video Game/B-Movie Connecton

Woke up this morning and caught a half hour or so of a surprisingly good French action flick called The Nest. It was hardly groundbreaking, but as low-budget shoot-em-ups go, it was pretty sharp — mixing equal parts John Woo and Luc Besson into what I’d call a highly competent B-movie. Naturally, I immediately browsed over to IMDB to check the director’s credits. What did I find? Not only did the director helm 2005’s Bruce Willis actioner, Hostage — it turns out Florent Emilio Siri is also listed as the director of the 2002 sneak-and-shoot video game Splinter Cell.

4 Items, One Post, I Crave French Toast

1) Jamelle tries to explain why libertarians care about state imposed constraints on freedom, but don’t care much about cultural constraints on freedom:

It seems that insofar that libertarians experience oppression or constraints on their liberty, it is through the actions of the state rather than through culture, which makes sense. Libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male, and in a culture which highly values whiteness and maleness, they will face relatively fewer overt cultural constraints on their behavior than their more marginalized fellow-travelers. Or in other words, a fair number of libertarians are operating with a good deal of unexamined privilege, and it’s this, along with the extremely small number of women and minorities who operate within the libertarian framework, which makes grappling with cultural sources of oppression really hard for libertarians. After all – socially speaking – being a white guy in the United States isn’t exactly hard and that’s doubly true if you are well off.

That seems unpersuasive to me. In the United States, black people faced constraints on liberty imposed by the state that were orders of magnitude worse than any constraint on liberty that the state imposed on whites. If being robbed of liberty by some entity resulted in libertarian views about it — which I think is the argument offered above — African Americans would be far more anti-state libertarian than whites, wouldn’t they? There must be another dynamic at play.

2) Over at True/Slant I continue my conversation with The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about dissident conservatives. (Rod Dreher has been party to it as well.) It took longer for me to write that it would take you to read!

3) Strange how folks responded to Ross Douthat’s latest. His argument is obviously that Islam and Christianity are pitted against one another in an effort to win believers and converts — and that Catholicism is now participating in that contest more aggressively. His critics imagine that he is calling on Christian denominations to unite and wage holy war on Islam. Having just articulated his views in The New York Times, Mr. Douthat is obviously unashamed about stating them publicly. Does anyone want to make a large wager on whether or not he in fact advocates a holy war against Islam? I’ve got everything in my wallet on the “he does not think that” position.

4) Perhaps the solution to the situation Freddie writes about is to describe the racial problems that exist in America with more specific terms than “that’s racist.” Being labeled a racist is getting to be like being labeled a sex offender. Did you rape a 5 year old or go skinny dipping with your 17 year old girlfriend as an 18 year old? The sex offender list won’t tell you! When Freddie calls for more accusations of racism but less opprobrium aimed at the guilty, he presumably means the term should be applied to lesser racial sins. Well how about instead we reserve racism for actually hating people of other races, or thinking they’re inferior, or using racial slurs, or committing hate crimes, preserving the well deserved stigma against these acts, and then, for example, when a manager implements hiring practices that are shown over time to disadvantage minority applicants, one could say to him, “Hey, I’m not saying you’re a racist who hates blacks and Hispanics or anything, but look at how this mechanism you’ve set up to filter the resumes you receive systematically disadvantages people of color! It’s very possible you didn’t do this intentionally, but shouldn’t you fix it?”

UPDATE: In comments and elsewhere I am seeing the argument that the real problem with Ross Douthat’s column is his assertion that Islam is incompatible with reason. The problem with that line is that he never argued it! Here is the relevant excerpt:

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

He is reporting on what the Pope said as an illustration of his confrontational approach, not himself asserting that Islam and Western reason are incompatible, a question on which he takes no position.

ALSO SEE this thoughtful critique.

And They Have a Plan?

Remember how the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica were supposed to be operating in accordance with some mysterious, long-running plan? Well, there’s a new direct-to-video movie chronicling its origins. The movie’s supposed to be pretty sharp, but it turns out that their grand plan wasn’t much of one:

The titular “plan” the Cylons had wasn’t the least bit complicated. The survival of Anders, Tyrol, Foster and the Tighs comes as a complete surprise to Cavil. “It’s amazing,” he confides to an injured Ellen Tigh. (And there’s no explanation of that scene in the “Razor” webisode in which Doral arranges for Lee Adama to be assigned to Galactica immediately prior to Cylon War II.) The Cylons don’t arrange for the Galactica to escape the holocaust. The Cylons don’t seem interested in tricking the colonists into leading the Cylons to Earth or anything. It turns out Cavil was merely determined to wipe out the straggler humans in the fleet. That was the whole plan.

I still love Battlestar Galactica, despite showrunner Ron Moore totally dropping the ball with the ending. But I think it’s pretty clear by now that the show’s biggest flaw was that, despite what the opening credits claimed each week, neither the Cylons nor the writers ever had a plan.

Cities White People Like

As always, I’m late to the conversation about Aaron Renn’s post at The New Geography, probably because my better judgment tells me that blogging about race is something I should simply avoid. Reihan and Ta-Nehisi Coates have staked out two hermeneutic poles, with Reihan at the wonkier end discussing preferences in housing wealth accumulation and Coates (there’s that damn first name/last name blogger’s conundrum again — having never met nor exchanged tweets with Mr. Coates, I’ll default to the last name but defer to his preference if it matters) steering the debate toward a more personal scale.

For those who haven’t seen it, Renn’s post argues that self-described white urbanists have claimed all the cachet of urban living without any of the social or political challenge by gathering in enclaves like Portland and Minneapolis — places that turn out to have suspiciously small black populations:

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

Renn is using a rhetorically convenient definition of “progressivism” here, since it means a particular combination of fussy transportation policies and land use regulation, not left-leaning politics as generally understood. He has stacked the deck in other ways (whites manage to self-segregate quite well in larger metros, for instance, and how, exactly, would one “call these cities on it?”), but it’s the source of his resentment that I find interesting. At the risk of putting a lot of words into his mouth, I think he’s implicitly claiming that any American cultural experience is inauthentic if it fails to reckon with the presence of African-Americans, not as victims, but as members of a shared history and culture. He’s reminding white Americans to check themselves before settling for any cultural accomplishment that excludes blacks, who, as James mentions in citing Sullivan, are quintessentially American in even the most reactionary sense. You could make the case, for example, that we have seen the Front Porch Republic and it’s full of black people.

I like Coates’ response to Renn, and respect his admonition to resist dragging blacks into what is, at bottom, a political and aesthetic argument among whites. I’d prefer to live in a country that lets Denver be Denver, in his words. But let’s cut Renn some slack. There are still white people out there trying to reckon with America’s racial heritage as a story of black people living as ‘something apart, yet an integral part.’ He’s part of a tradition of well-meaning whites scolding one another for the gaps in their definition of “American.” Sometimes this comes off as tendentious, sanctimonious, and patronizing (remember Sasha Frere-Jones’ idiotic claim that Stephin Merritt was a bigot for not liking Outkast? ). Other times it’s just awkward (see “Mellencamp, John”). But a lot of white guys — especially Southern white guys — who had to read The Invisible Man in high school took it to heart and still feel under its authority. They try to thread the needle between self-segregation and PC condescension, and if they fail, I hope they try again.

So here ends my foray into writing about race. Now go read Renn’s roundup of crazy utopian homesteading in Detroit.

Oh, to have a license to shoot hippies on sight...

Via Scene regular Freddie, I happened across this gem by someone whom I assume is an advocate of vegetarianism and/or veganism. Let me state at the outset that while I have no problem with people eating whatever the hell they want as a matter of religion, health, or simple personal preference, but that I find the ideology that underpins vegetarianism and especially veganism quite repugnant. And also, that we should be allowed to hunt hippies for sport.

So, here’s the quote:

Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it.

This is quite the facepalm moment. The reason we have a problem with a man raping an animal (and conversely no problem with him eating it) is not because it’s demeaning to the animal, it’s because it’s demeaning to the man. Thanks for undermining your own premise, dude.

Someone get me my rifle. The one with the scope, I think this one’s gonna be a runner.

Hospitality with a Purpose

This is a lovely passage:

We wanted our children to grow up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of “significant others.” A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children–that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education. We had no great confidence in the schools; we knew that if our children were to acquire any of the things we set store by–joy in learning, eagerness for experience, the capacity for love and friendship–they would have to learn the better part of it at home. For that very reason, however, home was not to be thought of simply as the “nuclear family.” Its hospitality would have to extend far and wide, stretching its emotional resources to the limit.

Hat Tip Front Porch Republic.

We Don't Need No . . .

Matt Yglesias asks a very good question: how do we measure value in education?

Well, usually we measure “value” with reference to an objective. You can, for example, measure value-added in classroom instruction by measuring what students’ level of mastery is before the class and what it is afterwards. That should eliminate the selection effect. But it’s meaningless if you don’t agree on what you’re supposed to be teaching in the classroom – or, for that matter, whether what is being taught in the classroom is the main driver of “value” for consumers of education.

Yglesias’ post is a comment on a Lamar Alexander piece calling for colleges to provide a 3-year BA (something that is already generally available – a budget-conscious friend of mine graduated Swarthmore in 3 years, by taking an extra-heavy course load and getting as much credit as possible for work done in high school). But why 3 years? Why not provide a college version of the GED, a battery of exams that you can study for and, if you pass, get the equivalent of a college diploma. Why shouldn’t such a thing exist?

Well, if anyone wanted it, it would exist. “Anyone” means employers. If you’re looking to hire for a position that requires a BA in a relevant field, why would you care whether an applicant had a “real” BA with a B average from XYZ State or a certificate stating that he or she had scored the equivalent of a B on the Baccalaureate Equivalency Exam (BEE)? Indeed, I would think there were certain ways in which you’d prefer a BEE holder to a BA holder: the former might be more of a striving self-starter, able to learn independently; he or she might be more eager to get out into the working world without wasting time and money; and, most important, you wouldn’t have to wonder wether the BEE holder had “really” earned that B average, or whether he or she went to a “gut” program or school, because the exam would be the same for all BEE holders, and would be readily audited by the public.

But we don’t have such a thing. Which suggests that employers and professional schools aren’t that interested in how well you may have mastered a bunch of material you were supposed to have been taught in college. So what are they interested in?

I once worked for a hedge fund that fancied itself as a kind of Microsoft of the investment world. They were extremely open to weirdos of various kinds working for them – guys with whole-body tattoos, guys who spoke almost no English, guys who’d run away to join the circus when they were 16, guys who liked to wear colanders on their heads to keep away the bad voices; they even hired the occasional female. But every job applicant had to submit their SAT scores as part of their resume. And, at least when I was there, every entry-level generalist applicant was put to work delivering the mail.

What was the logic behind this? Well, they were using SAT scores as a proxy for an IQ test, because you’re not allowed to administer IQ tests (any exams administered as part of a job application have to be narrowly tailored to the specific requirements of the job or have to have near-perfectly equal outcomes for all racial groups, and since the latter is very unlikely the former is really the requirement). And they were using the mail-room time as an extended period for observation of the applicants: to observe if they play well with others; if they are self-starters who finagle their ways into more substantive projects than delivering mail; if they are hyper-attentive to detail (the obsessive weirdness of the mail-room routines was something to behold) – and if they are too proud to do boring scut work if that’s what the higher-ups tell them to do. So that’s basically what they wanted to know: your IQ; any relevant experience; and your personality and character.

Obviously, different employers are going to have different needs. IQ matters for just about every job, but not to the same degree, and there are plenty of jobs out there where you don’t want people who are too smart either (because they’ll get bored). But I’m hard-pressed to think of any employer who’s going to care that much about the substance of an applicant’s college education outside of the narrow area of expertise in question. If you’re a recently-graduated psychology major applying for an entry-level job at a local television station, what about your psychology degree could your interviewer possibly care about? And if you don’t really care about the substance of the degree, then the substance of the BEE isn’t going to be terribly relevant either, right? Which makes it clearer why there’s no real impetus (from employers, anyhow) to conjure such a thing into existence?

The folks who should care about “value” in education are parents and students. And they do! It’s just that, if you’re thinking about economic value, then most of what a college degree confers is precisely the sorting function that happens before you even show up. The Harvard degree mostly says that you got into Harvard, and secondarily that now you know lots of other people who got into Harvard.

Once upon a time, City College provided the kind of “value” degree that Yglesias is looking for: tuition was free and the school was tough. But (a) those were the days when you could sit in an intro lecture class and your professor could say “look at the person on your left; look at the person on your right; one of the three of you will not be here by the end of the semester” and mean it. We’re still sorting in this model – we’re just sorting after admissions. And (b) those were the days when hordes of Brooklyn Jews could not descend on Harvard en masse because of a variety of quotas. If Harvard renewed its commitment to having a student body that “looks like America” – and therefore a lot less like Westchester County (or Davos, Switzerland) – then the “value” of degrees from schools lower down on the list would start to go up, because the sorting mechanism would be broken. But education consumers don’t want the sorting mechanism to be broken. They want it to work.

I’m more familiar with the question of evaluation from the perspective of primary and secondary education, since I’m involved in the charter school world. But charter schools have two huge ways of passing the buck that colleges don’t have. First of all, there are state-mandated standards of various kinds that we have to conform to. We don’t need to figure out if we agree with those standards; we just have to teach to them. And we can measure how well we do that. Second of all, we’re trying to get our kids into – and through – college. That takes longer to measure; our school hasn’t graduated its first class yet, and it’ll be 4 or 5 years after that before we know how well we’ve prepared our kids for college. But that’s data we’ll eventually get. And in the meantime, we can do all kinds of absolute and relative assessments of how our students are mastering the material we’re trying to teach them. Because there is such a radical disconnect between what is taught in general degree programs and what employers want to know about recent graduates, colleges can’t pass the buck in the same way (or, I should say, 4-year colleges can’t; 2-year programs, which are basically training for specific jobs, do pass the buck, training students to do precisely what specific types of employers want).

And we don’t want them to! We want college to be able something other than adding economic value. We just don’t really agree on what that “something” is – and therefore we don’t have any good way of measuring it.

And we shouldn’t agree! Ultimately, I come at this whole question from another end. The last thing we need is one number that measures “value added” across various academic institutions. All that would do is improve the sorting mechanism; if people really cared about the number, the schools with high value-added scores would get more applicants, become more selective, and become the “new Harvards.” To a considerable extent this is exactly what happens already; second-tier schools invest in new infrastructure, poach academic stars to beef up particular departments, etc., and wind up with better students and move up into the first tier.

What we need, rather, is greater diversity in mission between institutions so that something other than the status/prestige/sorting mechanism is driving competition between institutions. We need more schools that say, “we follow a Great Books approach”, more schools that say, “we have a strict labor component to our educational program”, more schools that say, “we expect our student body – and our faculty – to lead an upright, Christian life”, more schools that say, “we take student democracy very seriously – the student body and their reps basically run this place, including choosing the faculty” – you name it. Some of these ideas are going to strike any given student as absolutely ludicrous, and so they’ll self-select out of the pool. But others will be right up that student’s alley – will be places he or she would turn down Harvard (ok, maybe not Harvard – Columbia) to go to.

The more mission-driven an institution is, the more secure it is going to be in answer the question “why are we doing this?” The more self-selecting the student body is, the less institutions will obsess about their selectivity. And if there were less of a focus on selectivity, there would be less of an arms race driving ever-greater expenditures on things not terribly closely related to an actual educational mission (whatever that may be).

How do you get more mission-driven institutions? The answer to that is shockingly simple: you need institutions to be led, and frequently created, by lunatics with a mission. And since institutions of higher education are incredibly expensive, that means we need crazier rich people.

This is something I harped on almost 2 years ago, in response to another Yglesias post. Our super-wealthy show an incredible poverty of imagination – and when they do something crazy, it’s really embarrassing. This country is badly in need of a totally new breed of culture warrior – not somebody who rants on Fox News, but somebody who can preach to the obscenely wealthy and explain to them that they are obliged to devote themselves to some eccentric ambition that will fire the imaginations of generations yet to come. And that they are competing with other obscenely wealthy people in this.

I mean, I’m all for the Robin Hood model of getting rich jerks to give money to supremely competent and data-driven “philanthropic portfolio managers”. But I’d trade a considerable amount of “value” for a bit more sheer awesomeness, and a bit less conformity.

100 Yards is a purely subjective measure of success

A while back Brooks wrote a much-derided column on lost stoicism of our noble forbears – compared to the epidemic of self-celebration that afflicts us now – which Jim echoed here to further derision. I tend to resist Brooksian generalities as sociology, though I enjoy them as provocation. (I usually agree with them even if I doubt they’re actually true, if you know what I mean.)

But one small moment in this weekend’s college football left me, in a Brooksian sort of way, wondering about the young people today. (Switching, herewith, to the sports present tense.)In the third quarter of the Alabama Florida-Arkansas game, Arkansas receiver Greg Childs catches a pass and heads towards the goal line, fighting off Alabama tacklers. He sheds what looked like a final tackler inside the five yard line but as he reaches the goal line an Alabama defender flies in from his right and punches the ball free. Though replays seem to show Childs losing the ball before the goal line, the touchdown call is upheld on review. (There was no goal-line camera to offer decisive rebuttal.) But the remarkable thing the replay shows is the reason the final defender is able to knock the ball loose. In basically the next step after slipping the last tackle, Childs, who has been carrying the ball in his left hand, away from the approaching defenders, begins switching it to his right hand. It is while he’s switching it that the ball is knocked loose. It is because he is switching hands that the ball is so easy to knock loose. (The announcers, oddly, were mute on this point, and praised Childs for scrambling to recover his own fumble in the end zone.) Why is he switching hands so soon, while his would-be tackler is still falling at his heels, before he has even crossed the goal line, bringing it towards the defender approaching him from his right? There is no comprehensible football reason for the switch. The only plausible reason to switch hands in that spot is to put the ball in his natural hand, so he can raise it over his head in celebration and self-display. Indeed, the replay shows him switching it to his hand and not to the inner part of his lower arm, in the manner of ball-carrying. But why start celebrating so soon? The distinction between scoring and celebrating is not even a distinction. The two overlap. The celebrating starts not after the touchdown, but as soon as the touchdown seems inevitable. Despite the perverse football consequences – a goal-line fumble or near-fumble, almost a lost touchdown – it is actually impressive how quickly Childs’s mind passes from one consideration to the next. How could he have the presence of mind to start celebrating so perversely early, in virtually the same motion as breaking that last tackle? I can only guess that it was a reflex, deep-seated, stitched into his mental archetype of a notable play: One throws off a flare of performative excess as soon as is humanly possible.

Read the full article

On Going to Law School

Justice Scalia worries that “we are devoting too many of our very best minds” to lawyering. Scalia mentioned people who seem to be happily employed — a brilliant “defense or public defender from Podunk” — but there are also some pretty smart people who get unhappily stuck. Young people who aren’t quite sure what to do, and think they might benefit from further study or a professional degree, end up going to law school because they haven’t thought of anything else. By the time they’re out, they’re saddled with debt and ushered into the law, where they’re promptly put to work reviewing documents. As Monica Parker, author of The Unhappy Lawyer, put it:

A lot of us went to law school by default. We’re people who don’t quite know what we want to do, but think law school will create opportunities. So we get sucked into a funnel of going into a law firm, and then, there you are! You’re miserable. You’re miserable because you didn’t choose this career. It pretty much chose you. You were never taught how to select a career, think about the possibilities, how to experiment, how to learn about what’s important to you.

It’s not the most efficient way to exploit our best minds.

A separate phenomenon is that legal education is becoming more interdisciplinary. This is probably not of particular benefit to the legal profession or to those who depend on it. A client, I would imagine, doesn’t much care if his attorney is schooled in sociology or in law and literature. Most likely, better and more responsible lawyers come out of an educational system that treats law as an autonomous discipline. But maybe legal education ought to account for the reality that many smart people who shouldn’t be lawyers end up in law school too. As the liberal arts become less interdisciplinary maybe a general education rooted in law, which is after all the organization of social life, isn’t a bad option.

Zapped

Do you like artsy-fartsy indie rock? Are you now or have you ever been a grindcore fan? If your answer to both is yes, well, have I got a record for you: The new Lightning Bolt, Earthly Delights, is audacious, brutal, absurd, clever, weird, impenetrable, bizarre—in other words, totally awesome. No, it’s not quite as wrenching or outlandish as, say, The Locust or The Flying Luttenbachers, but as art-noise goes, it’s tough to beat. Sample tracks here! Lala members can stream the whole thing.

On Fire!

I was all set to declare The Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca record of the year, but now it looks like The Flaming Lips are making a serious bid of their own with Embryonic. Pitchfork gave the record a rare 9.0, but if anything, I think their review actually underrates the record. Oh, I can hear your fingers typing away in the comments section now: Hype much, Peter? Maybe, maybe not. But either way, hear for yourself.

To name something is to own it.

I don’t know what’s more annoying: the pedantry of French bureaucrats, or the pedantry of American conservatives who like to pick on them. And no one brings those two together quite like the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Thus this article on a (heretofore unknown to me) French bureaucratic commission tasked with inventing French equivalents of foreign (in practice, American-originated English) words or phrases that make their way in the French vernacular.

In linguistics as in many other cases, I am somewhat of an outlier for a French guy. Whenever the subject comes up (rarely), it is usually split between curmudgeons who think it is an outrage to use any foreign (read: American) words in French prose, and dilettantes who just don’t give a damn about proper language. I love the French language, but also love new technologies (and to do so, in France, is to use English in every sentence). I reject cultural protectionism, and yet believe in the uniqueness of French culture and language.

What to say? That the efforts of this commission and others like it are doomed? Of course. That it is sadly risible that the people staffing it are so out of touch that they did not understand the term “cloud computing” or think it was a trend important enough to deserve their attention? Sure.

French was once the lingua franca (heh) of the world, and it looks like it won’t be for the foreseeable future. The people with the tailored suits and the smattering of degrees who are doing this are really troglodytes, wasting their time (and my money, as a French taxpayer) on a quixotic rearguard fight.

A cursory look at any French daily newspaper will tell the educated reader that what French writers need is not an education in English-to-French translation but, tragically, a course of basic grammar and spelling. (In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I have a vested interest in this, since the company I’m starting deals with precisely this issue.)

The French government, meanwhile, far from protecting the French language, actually attacks it on all fronts. Misguided government directives in the late nineties pushed for the feminization of the names of professions, in contempt of the actual rule of French grammar, which is that the masculine gender is also the neutral gender. (A note to all the chairwomen and chairpersons out there: this is also true for English. But at least chez les Anglo-Saxons grammatical vandalism has been privatized.)

The WSJ article correctly points out that the French Constitution holds French to be the national language, drawing on legal precedent dating back to the 16th century (or even the 9th, but postulating this leads to hair-splitting), but the government has been not only tolerating but encouraging the proliferation of regional languages and other patois, a slap in the face of centuries of tradition and policy.

And of course the French government leaves school teaching methods and programs up to the radical left-wing unions since May 68, which has resulted in an appalling drop in education standards. My future father in law, who doesn’t have a high school diploma, has impeccable spelling, unlike many of my classmates at my top-ranked school.

Like an economy, I believe culture thrives best when open. The historical evidence that languages in general, and French in particular, are enriched by additions from other languages, is overwhelming, as any reader of Rabelais can see. The common sense proposition that the proper use of language cannot be mandated beyond the classroom, but evolves organically, seems self-evident to me.

A government which claims to protect French culture but undermines it on one side, backward-looking troglodytes on the other, and me, stuck in the middle with them.

Le sigh.

Super Cute!

Via Kottke.

On "Antichrist"

I saw Antichrist at the same showing at which someone had a seizure but I have been more curious about the contortions of critics who want to defend the film against charges of misogyny . According to Robert Cargill there are ongoing arguments “about whether the film is decidedly misogynistic or wildly feminist.” The idea that Antichrist is a feminist film must be the product of some sort of cognitive dissonance among those who fancy themselves both aficionados of art-house cinema and also good progressives — and who assume these two commitments will never conflict. Because I am not so constrained, I face comparatively little difficulty in pointing out what is pretty obvious: Antichrist is an extended polemic against female sexuality.

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