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Louts online
I've long said that schools — public schools, especially — foster the kind of egoism and bullying that is common amongst tribes and chiefdoms and other small societies. Civil society discourages such behavior. I'm not so sure any longer. Surely, in email discussion groups, and around them, bullies and indecorous louts can easily dominate. That's why on my discussion groups I have a simple rule: no one may publicly complain about the behavior (speech) of another. If a person is offended by someone else's manner of writing, then write privately to the list manager, who has the legal clout to make decisions. Arguing publicly about behavior should never be encouraged, since bullies and louts will shout loudest in discussion groups, and then even in private threaten others (I will contact your upstream provider and other such bullying tactics). Fortunately, in my discussion groups, we have had no problems in ages. But in other groups I participate in, there are problems galore. The most popular strings are the complaint strings, where people endlessly chew over offending bits of speech, talk about justice, etc. It reminds me of politics, in a sense. Jockeying for power and position, using abstract concepts, myths, and nasty words. In discussion groups, the problem is almost always that the managers don't squelch such talk quicker. It should always be a rule that no one complains about another publicly. It should be handled behind scenes. When it is not, then disaster can result. Even off-list.
Human beings behave well only in context. Email is not necessarily the best context. Like schools. Like elections. Like . . .
Designations | November 02, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Filling in the ovals
I just voted. I realize I use some principles in voting. Here are a few:
- Unless you really like an office holder — agree with him or her on 90 percent of things, say — then vote against the incumbent.
- If an incumbent is running unopposed, never vote for him or her; leave the slate blank.
- In a slate with Republican, Democratic, and Independent candidates, all of equal distinction, always choose the Independent.
- Unless the Libertarian candidate is a real nincompoop, vote Libertarian.
- In an
iffy ballot measure, where the proposed reform is far from perfect, but the status quo is a mess, vote for the reform if only to stick it to the establishment.
I've only twice deliberately not voted for a Libertarian. That's how libertarian I am. Andre Marrou, who ran for the presidency during the First Bush's Second Presidential Bid, annoyed me too much to vote for him. Oregon once offered a politico up so annoying that I couldn't vote for the numbskull. Those are the only two instances.
I was pleased to vote for judge Richard Sanders today; here was a rare incumbent I could support. On the various measures before Washington state voters, my votes changed in temper from issue to issue. I hesitated a bit before voting for charter schools — institutions that I don't put a lot of faith in, but hey: they may shake up the establishment a little. Anything to annoy the teachers' unions, which are arguably the most destructive political institutions in America in the past fifty years, at least as regards domestic policy. I readily voted against 872, which annoyingly would undermine party sovereignty. Of course, getting rid of primaries altogether, making the parties select their candidates at their expense, is an issue that probably won't be resolved until IRV becomes the law of the state.
But I was most pleased by the method of voting. I filled in an oval. That was the method, on a paper ballot. No electronic nonsense!
As for voting for the man to fill the Oval Office, you can be sure it wasn't the current reckless imperialist, nor his major-party opponent who affirmed with great emphasis a princple of gross immorality, that of pre-emptive war. Yup, I voted Badnarik.
Designations | November 02, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
A clear bright day in November,
and the clocks are striking thirteen
A clear, bright November day; slightly chill, but lovely. The valley echoes with the buzz of distant power saws. On the rocks at my feet, a garden snake slowly slithers away. The local store offers coffee for free, in celebration of the election results. I drink Diet Coke. And prepare to work, or else read an obscure F. Marion Crawford novel. A thousand thoughts clamor for attention. I give few free rein. I wrote a long rant this morning, but won't post it here. Yet.
Designations | November 03, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
The Libertarian Euthanasia Project
The Libertarian Party's Michael Badnarik was on many more states than Ralph Nader. But he got nearly 99,000 votes less than Nader. Looking at the evidence, it doesn't seem to me that Badnarik succeeded in spoiling even one race.
The Libertarian Party die-hards find a silver lining, of course — Badnarik's vote total was more than the Green and Constitution party candidates combined — but a silver lining on a casket isn't exactly a cause to celebrate.
On Instead of a Blog today I advocate the only sensible thing: kill the LP. Not because I don't like it, and not because it is not in many ways impressive, but because it stands in the way of ushering in a freer society.
Libertarians will need an umbrella organization, of course. Some place to meet on the Web and in real space. I suppose they could swell the ranks of ISIL, but really, a new PAC or something would probably be better.
But however uncertain the future, it shouldn't stand in our way of the great certainty of the present, that the Libertarian Party is counter-productive, and should be put down like a rabid dog. It had potential, but its time is up, and foaming at the mouth about it won't solve a thing.
Designations | November 4, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
The United States of Canada?
Disappointed leftists and other Democrats are commisserating with each other. And are sending around this picture (origin unknown to me):
It is interesting how Canadian the Blue states seem, compared to the rest of the country. More people in these states promote the old socialist notions of Elections Continually Redivvying Up Wealth, and grinding down civil society while doing it.
I live in a Blue State, but I'm not blue. And I'd never want to be part of Canada. At least, not as a citizen. Canadians are those wimp-out Americans who thought staying with monarchy was a good idea. I'd take up guns against a king. I'd take up guns against a Blue Nation, too, frankly.
But neither do I see red as my color. These deluded red-state citizens think that they show their values by preventing homosexuals from marrying. What a pathetic bunch of homophobe goobers. And they accept their government's tall tales of innocence in foreign policy, too, and so support the neo-imperial (neo-imp) cause of Endless War Against Islam. Vile genocides, these red-in-tooth-and-claw conservatives, vile genocides.
The cartoon remapping, above, is annoying on several levels. Not only does it show how un-American some leftists are, it shows how anti-Christian they are, too. Now, I'm no Christian, but I would never cast an asperion upon the historical person of Jesus (Yeshua) by identifying him with the fearful, Pharasaic posturings of the conservative Republicans. This is to grant them too much. What would Jesus do? He wouldn't engage in pre-emptive war like the neo-imps do, nor play at the stone-throwing tactics of the vapid value-mongers.
So, let's redraw that map. Leave a Green Place for me and my neighbors, and the rest of you can go to hell if you really want to:
Designations | November 4, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Every vote counts?
There are honest people and there are pious people. About elections, one is supposed to repeat the Verities, piously, even when they deserve a Nay rather than a Yea, and are obviously idiotic. I prefer honesty, and try not to repeat nonsense. But consider what I just heard on the radio:
Here's proof that every vote counts : In Gearhart, Oregon, the race for City Commissioner differs by one vote. Carol Brenneman had led incumbent Ed Tice until the votes started coming in from around the county. Currently, Tice leads Brennamen by one vote.
Of course, this proves nothing of the kind stated. Every vote may count in Gearhart, but in the rest of the nation, even in squeaker races like Washington state's race for governor, one vote isn't going to decide the race. Many votes over or under decide it. So individual votes can't count. It's a mass of votes that count.
In most cases in voting, the marginal utility of one's vote for the productive end ostensibly sought is nearly zero. People reluctant to give up their pious devotion to voting should think of it like this. One's vote doesn't count, strictly speaking, if, had one changed it, no outcome would have changed. But of course votes do have other kinds of value. Voters, for instance, value expressing their opinions, and value the act of siding up into tribes and fighting over issues peacefully. But this gives the votes value only in a non-counting sense.
Of course the votes can have utility in the instrumental sense, too, just not to the voters themselves. Candidates, for instance, can evaluate the productivity of their various efforts in terms of votes won and lost.
But to the individual, one's vote almost never has instrumental value. Oh, but this election, perhaps it does. In Gearhart.
Designations | November 5, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
No Fly-over Zone
After the Florida debacle in 2000 we heard talk of the alleged obsolescence of the Electoral College. No surprise, since George Bush received fewer popular votes than did Al Gore.
This time, Bush got more popular votes than Kerry, so the grumblings have hushed to a murmur as people move on to other reforms.
Good. I agree that Democrats have some legitimate gripes. The Electoral College just ain't one of them.
Everyone should be disgusted, for example, with our Presidential Primary system. It often selects very bad candidates. John Kerry this time, Bob Dole a few elections back. Neither were suited to unseat their incumbent rivals. Both parties would have been better served were the primary dates bunched up more, distributing some of the selecting power away from the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire's primary voters.
And were the parties forced to pay for — and control — the selection of their own candidates, then they might select even better candidates.
Whatever we do to improve our democracy, let's be wary of tampering with the Electoral College. Is it an out-dated relic of the 18th century? Hey: it succeeds in making the candidates speak to the concerns of numerous states with small populations.
I say, let's keep making presidential candidates speak to people outside the biggest population centers. Long before Wilbur and Orville, our founding fathers figured out a way to counteract politicians' tendency to treat vast tracts of the nation as a fly-over zone. This wasn't just savvy for the 1790s, it was prophetic. It works today.
Designations | November 6, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
Not an issue
I was watching C-SPAN yesterday, and some expert was being interviewed, and callers were calling in, adding comments, asking questions. One woman from Louisiana said that she was a Republican so disgusted with Bush that she voted for Kerry. But, though most of the Republicans she knew were also disgusted with Bush, they all voted for the liar and bonehead anyway. Why? Because they were afraid of electing a liberal Democrat, a Big Spender, to office. The woman not unreasonably asked if this factor played a part in the re-election of Bush.
The expert said that this was an old issue, but not a live one this election. He didn't think it played a major role.
But I wonder, did it not play a major role first because the Bush campaign couldn't make it an issue without undermining its own efforts (it was horribly vulnerable on government spending), and second because the press, dominated by big-spending liberal ideologues, didn't want it made an issue, and ensured it by not asking the right questions?
I mean, if you don't ask the question about Big Spending in your multiple-choice polls, it is unlikely to show up in your answers!
I suspect that this was an important theme held by the people, but not by the elites. The elites are utterly unreliable on the issue. The Democrats, because they want to revive Big Government and its popularity, and the Bush Republicans, because they've become worse than Democrats in many ways in actually enacting larger and larger government and greater and greater spending, yielding to ever-increasing debt.
But the people themselves? They still have deep reservations about profligate living and increasing debt. They know how dangerous it is in private life, and suspect it might even be more corrupting in public life.
And the people would be right.
Democrats still pretend this issue doesn't matter. It was, they like to think, not an issue this past election. But it may be on this issue that they've lost the country.
Designations | November 8, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
Limited vote-stealing zone
Twice in one week, my support for the Electoral College yielded similar results from my friends. I had argued, in essence, that it was good for federalism, ensuring that presidential candidates make regular stops into the Fly-Over Zone. But my friends offer another reason for support. I'll quote Jon Kalb from ThinkingMatters:
I may suffer from too much cynicism, but I see another advantage to the
Electoral College. I think it limits corruption. Suppose there is a state so
wholly dominated by one party that the possibilities for getting away with
election fraud are pretty substantial. In our current system the most that
state could effect the election is limited to the number of electoral votes
of the state. A state that, if wholly dominated by a single party is
probably not a "battle ground" state anyway. The only incentive for election
fraud would be for state-wide and local races.
But under a system of national popular election, there would be a great
incentive to report the largest possible margin because the larger the
margin the larger the state's "say" in the outcome of the election.
Or to put it another way, the corruption of the Chicago Democrat party is
limited to 21 electoral votes.
This is a good point.
This does not mean, however, that there is no vote fraud in the U.S. today. According to my Kerry-supporting friends, things looked awfully fishy in Ohio and Florida. They even risk sounding like whining losers to mention it.
Designations | November 10, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
| ThinkingMatters
Why Not Dukakis Peroutka?
I make a point of rarely reading WorldNetDaily. Why? Obvious right-wing weirdnesses aside, I tire of the grammatical errors. Nearly every time I stumble across a WorldNetDaily article, some gross error glares out at me, challenging me, as if to say Sure we're nearly illiterate, but we're right! Nope. Just far right. The latest article did it again, in the subtitle: 3rd-party influence barely a blip: Badnarik, Peroutka, Nader don't draw 1% of vote between them. Well, change that to among them, and the WorldNet folks would be right. But the real peculiarity showed through after the electoral analysis was over:
Peroutka issued a statement yesterday, which said, in part:
Last night, we celebrated God's glorious and gracious sovereignty over all things. As Christ tells us in Matthew 28:18, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Of course, this includes authority over civil government and over political elections. His will be done.
Our victory is in declaring God's sovereign nature and submitting ourselves to His will. We do this when we run for office acknowledging God, defending the family, and working to restore the American republic. We do this when we vote only for those men who have submitted their lives to faithfulness and obedience to His Word.
With this victory in mind — His victory — I encourage all Americans of good will to join us in the coming days, months and years to build our effort to honor God, defend the family and restore the republic.
Now, this is the strangest silver lining to losing an election imaginable. If conservatives wonder at why secular intellectuals tend to make fun of the religiosity of the red state voters, look no further than this statement. It's full of religion, yes; but it is more properly just full of it. To call a ringing defeat a victory because of an arcane theological doctrine is, well, silly. Of course, the doctrine itself is philosophically incoherent, as well.
And as a matter of logic, there can be no meaningful talk of victory where failure is impossible. Since Christians who believe in the sovereignty of God believe that anything that happens is the result of God's sovereignty, then the contest is a misnomer. Talk of victory in such circumstances is otiose.
The next time you see Peroutka, ask this question for me: Sir, if your wife were raped, would you praise God for his sovereignty, and celebrate this gross sexual invasion? For surely, by your stated beliefs, God has sovereignty, and every act, political or micropolitical, is thus an expression of His will . . .
The doctrine of the sovereignty of God was one of the first tenets of the Christian faith I rejected. I had to reject it out of piety, because the doctrine's clear implication is that God is unjust. If the Christ has all authority, that means that no authority on earth exists without his explicit permission. For authority is rightful command, or power. To have it all must be to have it not only in right, but in actuality. If he takes it all, then he's responsible for it all — which includes all the crimes, all the moral horrors, all the outrages, all the injustices.
Now, were he to cede some of that to human beings, as morally autonomous, and to tactically give some of it up to, say, allow human beings to learn to cope with their lot, etc., then maybe an omnipotent deity could be excused from the horrors of His creation. But the passage quoted by Peroutka takes that option away from Christians. Nope. They must swallow the unswallowable: that a sovereign, omnipotent deity is somehow not responsible for that which He could change.
I once thought this option important: if people have authority, too, and God's is limited, then God's justice might be saved. Also, were it conceded that God be not omnipotent, then his authority would be merely formal, and the world would be best seen as at war between Good and Evil. When I was young and sorting these issues out, I figured that monotheism was either maltheist (God is unjust and an enemy of the Good) or, to keep a theophiliac attitude, God must be self-limited in His authority by a self-limiting ethic of allowing a great deal of human autonomy. This latter appealed to me, but was nowhere stated in the sacred texts I had grown up with. (Though theologians like Swedenborg nevertheless imputed it to the texts.) So I veered towards Dualism, which expressly denied omnipotence (and thus, in effect, absolute authority), to the Good God. It didn't take me long to realize that this mess was all the result of nutty notions at the get-go rather than real things for which we have any evidence.
The best expression of this philosophical dilemma was made by Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is not just. Is he both able and willing? Whence then evil?
It seems unanswerable, to me. The doctrines of the Sovereignty of God and of His Providence both fall to this argument. Thankfully, it's all moot: no gods exist.
As for why less than one percent of the voters voted for minor party presidential candidates, that requires no reference to any deity. In close elections, the felt (if still illusory) utility of a single vote tends to increase, as chances of a tie increase. (As economists correctly argue, the instrumental value of a single vote to the voter can be positive only when the vote decides an election.) So those who prefer one major candidate over another are more likely to vote for that candidate rather than vote for another candidate more congenial, though with less support. It's simply a matter of perceived instrumental value of votes. It happens every close election. When the election is less close, then voters see their votes as having more symbolic value than instrumental value, and they vote for candidates who make an ideological message more than a real-chance run for the office.
Designations | November 13, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Does your vote count? Ex ante or ex post?
Yesterday, when I wrote this . . .
As for why less than one percent of the voters voted for minor party presidential candidates, that requires no reference to any deity. In close elections, the felt (if still illusory) utility of a single vote tends to increase, as chances of a tie increase. (As economists correctly argue, the instrumental value of a single vote to the voter can be positive only when the vote decides an election.) So those who prefer one major candidate over another are more likely to vote for that candidate rather than vote for another candidate more congenial, though with less support. It's simply a matter of perceived instrumental value of votes. It happens every close election. When the election is less close, then voters see their votes as having more symbolic value than instrumental value, and they vote for candidates who make an ideological message more than a real-chance run for the office.
. . . I had a thought. Should we speak of a vote's instrumental value (to the voter) in ex ante and ex post terms?
What I was trying to explain in the quoted paragraph was the idea of what I call marginal futility, or the lack of marginal utility of a vote understood as an instrument of its putative productive end (selecting the candidate or ballot measure in question).
This sort of explanation annoys a lot of people, especially those who prefer ignorance and illusion to reality. My neighbors here in Washington state demonstrate their preference for illusion every time they complain about the media calling an election before the polls have closed here in the West. I, who prefer reality to illusion, have no problem with such knowledge. For such knowledge is true knowledge: our votes don't really count. They just pretend they do. Only those who vote after an election has been secured in other states know this for sure. In the East, a voter has to rely on economic theory for this knowledge. (No surprise, then, that the knowledge ain't common.)
But this preference for illusion over reality is a factor in every election, really. This makes the utility of votes a bit more complicated. Many voters value their votes in error. And, when it comes to error, hindsight is where we discover it. So, to speak of utility before the act (ex ante) and utility after the act (ex post), should be of some help. Before the vote, the voter hopes his vote counts, that is, will decide the election. After the results, if his candidate is elected, knowing that his vote contributed to the election, he can impute a false instrumentality to it, and feel good about it. If his candidate lost, then . . . he knows that his vote failed.
So the voter's ex ante utility of his vote is positive by almost groundless hope; afterwards, by misapplied causality, if at all.
No wonder politics is such a mess. The central political act is governed by unreasonable hope, self-serving delusion, and everyday disappointent.
Note: As I've written before, not everyone — perhaps not even most people — value their votes in terms of instrumentality, seeing, instead, voting itself more as symbolic action. But that's another question entirely.
Designations | November 14, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Facile believers
It's approaching midnight, and as I was clipping the downstair cat's toenails, I was also watching C-SPAN. David Brooks was on, offering very interesting ideas about red and blue culture, without ever mentioning red and blue — at least while I watched. Three things he said have kept in my head, even as a I marvel at the first ingrown toenail I've ever seen on a cat.
People tend to choose their political party affiliation before they choose their political ideology. This certainly doesn't apply to everyone, since some people change their party after they change their belief. This has happened over time, surely. But the fact that people's party affiliations are largely social is indeed astounding to me.
But then, I'm a person who developed an ideology, joined a party, quit that party, and now, still with the same beliefs, want the party to disestablish itself. What category do I fit in?
So perhaps readers will forgive me, then, when I say: if you choose a party for non-ideological reasons, you are no philosopher. Further, if you remain within a party over time, even as it changes, and you are as loyal as ever, what reason would an intelligent person have to listen to you talk on politics? Other than in study of moral pathology.
This is not just judgment against red-rock Republicans; true-blue Democrats are just as guilty. Perhaps even more so.
People tend to behave the same no matter the cultural divide between liberal and conservative. The same numbers of evangelicals get divorced as skone-eating latte-drinkers. In fact, Brooks observed, our impression of the conservative voter as conservative monogamist is wrong, and in Massachussetts they have the statistical antithesis ready for you: liberal Massachussetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country.
What this suggests is how shallow the "values" are of today's "true believing" Democrats and Republicans.
In fact, let's jettison the phrase true believer for these voters. I'll call them facile believers, people who believe things for poor reasons, and hold those beliefs in a rather trivial fashion, in part for reasons of fashion. They are life-style accoutrements, not convictions. They are things to say at parties, and to vote for. They barely matter — but the pretense of deepness must always be maintained.
Brooks also mentioned that people choose to live in areas that please them, and their neighborhoods have become more ideologically segregated over time. I wonder where I'm supposed to live. Where do philosophical individualists live? Where's our country. An old patriotic homily says that Where liberty is, there is my homeland. Trouble is, liberty is nowhere, and any homeland we find, it will be filled with facile believers pretending they are profound. All the while making sure liberty never takes hold.
Designations | November 15, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
It's a French thing;
I wouldn't understand
Though fond of Continental philosophy, particularly Austrian value theory, Husserlian phenomenology, and that trans-disciplinary science, semiotics, I'm not fond of the French variants of the same. Too often one is reading through a French philosophical work and one bumps up against huge chunks of nonsense. There are exceptions to this rule — namely Paul Riceour, who seems mostly reasonable — but it doesn't take long to find the nuttiness in Sartre, Merleu-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and the like.
Usually it's just Marxism that's the trouble, some way to stuff Marxian error back into civilized thought. Or else it's some way to parallel Marxian error, but in a new and trendy package.
Other times it's just sex.
I was skimming through Roland Barthes's The Semiotic Challenge, and stumbled upon something quintessentially French:
True rhetoric is a psychagogy; it requires a total, disinterested, general knowledge (this will become a topos in Cicero and Quintilian, but the notion will be made insipid: what will be asked of the orator is a good general culture ). The object of this synoptic knowledge is the correspondence or the interaction which unites types of souls to types of discourse. Platonic rhetoric sets writing aside and seeks out personal interlocution, adhominatio; the basic mode of discourse is the dialogue between teacher and pupil, united by an inspired love. Thinking in common might be the motto of the dialectic. Rhetoric is a dialogue of love.
This all to define eroticized rhetoric! Frankly, I prefer the allegedly insipid Cicero and Quintilian (I treasure my aged two volumes of Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory; nothing by Barthes comes close.)
There's a lot wrong with the quoted passage — even if one ignores the stylistic nightmare that this kind of writing presents. But it mainly comes down to one thing: sex.
It's just out of place in a discussion of rhetoric and dialectic. Yes, I know, The Symposium is about love. But that's no excuse for anything in the Barthes passage quoted above. It's a shotgun marriage of speech and writing and argument and persuasion on the one hand, and sexual passion and intercourse on the other.
Indeed, Roland Barthes here proves himself a paragon of the Pepe Le Pew School of French Culture. He's not alone.
Years ago, at a conference, I had the adulterated pleasure of meeting a Quebecois economist, he also of the Pepe Le Pew School.
This gentleman objected to the hotel's policy of no smoking. He insisted on smoking, as an expression of his freedom. He raised a stink about this.
The next thing you know, he told me, honestly exasperated, they'll demand special rooms for making love.
I raised an incredulous eyebrow. I was too polite to say what I was thinking, though: He was in a hotel. What did he think bedrooms were for?
But for the Pepe Le Pews of this world, sexual passion and activity — like their own stink, cigarette-induced or otherwise — belong everywhere, not just in their privately contracted-for space. On conference panels, for example. And, apparently, in dialectic, too.
Designations | November 16, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
When whirlwinds collide
Category 6: Day of Destruction, the goofy made-for-TV movie that aired in two parts on Sunday and Wednesday, shows us the worst in modern science fiction: multiple misconstrued sciences combined with multi-character melodrama.
"Dan, what have you done?" A conscientious corporate security functionary decides to sabotage a power grid to prove the logic of his Cassandra calls for action — just as two storms began to converge. Dan — with poetic justice as thunder-fisted as one could hope for — gets electrocuted by his own recalcitrant power grid. His greedy bosses die in a copter accident as the storm brews. Then the storms collide.
The meteorology is about as silly as can be imagined; this is science (and fiction) as understood by the boys responsible for The Day After Tomorrow. Were a tornado system and a hurricane system to collide, well, it wouldn't. We've never seen anything like this, the Brian Dennehy character says over and over, and for good reason. I bet it's impossible. A literary imagination (what if two bad things were to happen at once?), not a scientific one. (Of course, when I was a wee lad economists thought stagflation was impossible; so perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps when whirlwinds collide, a superstorm can result. But the history of technical science in cinematic fiction — or on straight TV, fiction or non- — suggests that my side of this presumption is almost certainly the right.)
And yet it is the storm coverage (so to speak) that keeps the audience watching (I mean, those few, like me, who did). It certainly isn't the adultery story-line, or the teenager daugher shot by her creep of a boyfriend, or the pregnancy (!) . . . There are moments of, er, amusement. Randy Quaid being taken up in a whirlwind made sort of a Reverse Slim Pickensish moment, ride 'em cowboy and all that. No Ezekial references, of course. This ain't that kind of movie.
As the storms begin to converge, the composer throws in a pseudo-Stravinskian motif, from The Rite: thump thump thump thump Thump thump thump thump Thump thump Thump thump. . . . Of course, for television, no dissonance. Just a weak imitation of the rhythm. This almost epitomizes the whole effort. For all the power fictionally unleashed, the emotional power is always muted, sanitized, with real dissonance taken out.
But certain discords remain. Discords with reality. Now, I've no doubt that regulated companies that do business with cooperatives and governments and other corporations often behave very badly — I mean, just look at our corporate devil-in-chief, VP Dick Cheney, and the shameless shennanigans of his politically connected cash cow, Halliburton — but the corporate idiots depicted in this flick strike me as so moronic and short-term in thinking that even the worst crony-capitalist system would weed them out. I mean, without benefit of a helicopter lurching out of control to Roto-till them into oblivion.
The most likely consequence of a sabotaged power grid would be better expressed in sadder, less dramatic tones, and take a longer time. Just think what three weeks without power would do to the MidWest. Or three months — alas, also a possibility, thanks in part to the vulnerabilities of the Windows NT systems that run far too many of the controls on the power grid. There would be massive deaths, even in good weather.
It would probably take a feature-film mentality to tell that story right. Multiple story lines may be a staple of the modern thriller, but doing it well on film takes genius. I wonder what Robert Altman is up to these days? I bet he avoided this disaster, no matter what category we put it in.
Designations | November 17, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Songs, if you must
One of my favorite songwriters, Tom Lehrer, once characterized rock 'n' roll as children's records. I think he had it about right. Most rock has pretty childish (or, at its best, youthful ) lyrics, painfully simple and predictable harmonic, melodic, timbral, and rhythmic elements, and a spirit of rebellion that nicely fits into late childhood. Its persistence as the dominant form of music in our popular culture, even among people who have ostensibly matured, demonstrates a good example of arrested spiritual development on a mass scale.
Not that I don't like a lot of rock. But I also like children's songs, too. Teddy Bear's Picnic, Rolling Over the Billows, and Three Wooden Pigeons are pretty cool songs. The fact that they are children's (or campfire) songs makes my point. Your average rock song is no better than these. Often, much worse.
Rolling Stone, a magazine that has done its best to help keep adult culture infantilized around the youth music market that engorged to full enormity in the 1960s, has recently offered its list of Top 500 Songs. Surprise, surprise, but the mag chose Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone as its Number One song, and Satisfaction, by the Rolling Stones, as Number Two. More than a Feeling, a terrible song unleashed on the world by Boston — a song that brings back many bad memories of the '80s, for me — came in last on the list. But somehow, it all makes sense. No?
I don't have the Rolling Stone article in front of me, so I'm not certain how the mag characterized their list. But take the Top 50 (below). Would you describe them as the best songs ?
- Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone 1965
- Rolling Stones, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction 1965
- John Lennon, Imagine 1975
- Marvin Gaye, What's Going On 1971
- Aretha Franklin, Respect 1967
- Beach Boys, Good Vibrations 1966
- Chuck Berry, Johnny B Goode 1958
- The Beatles, Hey Jude 1968
- Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit 1991
- Ray Charles, What'd I Say 1959
- The Who, My Generation 1966
- Sam Cooke, A Change Is Gonna Come 1965
- The Beatles, Yesterday 1965
- Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind 1963
- The Clash, London Calling 1980
- The Beatles, I Want to Hold Your Hand 1964
- Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze 1967
- Chuck Berry, Maybellene 1955
- Elvis Presley, Hound Dog 1956
- The Beatles, Let It Be 1970
- Bruce Springsteen, Born To Run 1975
- The Ronettes, Be My Baby 1963
- The Beatles, In My Life 1966
- The Impressions, People Get Ready 1965
- Beach Boys, The God Only Knows 1966
- The Beatles, A Day in the Life 1967
- Derek and the Dominos, Layla 1971
- Otis Redding, (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay 1968
- The Beatles, Help! 1965
- Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line 1956
- Led Zeppelin, Stairway To Heaven 1971
- Rolling Stones, Sympathy For The Devil 1968
- Ike & Tina Turner, River Deep, Mountain High 1966
- The Righteous Brothers, You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' 1964
- The Doors, Light My Fire 1967
- U2, One 1991
- Bob Marley and the Wailers, No Woman, No Cry 1974
- Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter 1969
- Buddy Holly and the Crickets, That'll Be the Day 1957
- Martha and The Vandellas, Dancing In The Street 1964
- The Band, The Weight 1968
- The Kinks, Waterloo Sunset 1967
- Little Richard, Tutti Frutti 1956
- Ray Charles, Georgia On My Mind 1960
- Elvis Presley, Heartbreak Hotel 1956
- David Bowie, Heroes 1977
- Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water 1969
- Jimi Hendrix, All Along The Watchtower 1968
- The Eagles, Hotel California 1977
- Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Tracks Of My Tears 1965
I admit that a few of my favorites do appear. Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay, Hey Jude, Dancin' in the Streets, Georgia on My Mind, Bridge Over Troubled Water — I catch myself singing these every now and then. But admirable and spirited childish songs, like Be My Baby mix too easily on the list with children's songs so bad they make me want to retch, such as I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
Truth is, most of the time when I listen to music, I don't want to hear the human voice. I prefer symphonies, concerti, string quartets, ballets, divertimenti, sonatas, bagatelles. You get the idea. Popular music is now so closely wedded to singing (and its shouted mimicry, as in rap) that, unlike in the jazz era, it's a rare thing to get a pop musician to play music without the encumbrance of the human voice.
Most of the people I know look at my avoidance of song with something like incredulity. They put song at the peak of artistic expression. Combining words and music — how can I resist?
Well, I most often do resist. But if I listen to songs, I'm more likely to listen to these:
- Douce dame jolie and Quant je sui mis by Guillaume de Machaut
- The Cage, At the River, and Ann Street by Charles Ives
- Psyche by Manuel de Falla
- Childhood Fables for Grownups by Irving Fine
- Blake Songs by George Rochberg
I notice that NPR has the college graduate's alternative list to Rolling Stone. NPR's Top 300 Songs starts with Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. Hint, you alleged sophisticates: Barber's most popular work is not a song! A song is sung by one or two (or sometimes more) people, it has words, and it usually has accompaniment of some sort. Add more instruments, or more voices, or length, and the song category starts to burst at the seams. You get works, perhaps, that I'm more likely to listen to. Manuel de Falla's Psyche, listed above, is probably too long and too elaborately accompanied properly to be listed as a song. Here are a few more of my favorites that don't qualify, though they all feature singers and instrumentalists:
- Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott (cantata) by J.S. Bach
- Renard (burlesque) Igor Stravinsky
- L'Homme et son desir (
plastic poem /ballet) by Darius Milhaud
- Ancient Voices of Children (song cycle) by George Crumb
- Ambiance by Jeffrey Jones
Then there are the huge works for lots of singers and lots of instruments. But they come in many different forms, none of which qualify as songs, properly defined. Here are more of my favorites:
- Messiah (oratorio) by Georg Frideric Handel
- Carmen (opera) by Georges Bizet
- Oedipus Rex (opera-oratorio) by Igor Stravinsky
- Symphony of Psalms (choral symphony) by Igor Stravinsky
- Akhenaten (opera) by Philip Glass
In all of the above works, a choir of human voices often dominates. There exists a great repertory of great choral music, accompanied and unaccompanied. Here are a few of my favorite works for choir, some with soloists, but with no accompaniment:
- Un Cygne by Paul Hindemith
- Hymn to St. Cecilia by Benjamin Britten
- Pater Noster by Igor Stravinsky
- Passio by Arvo Pärt
- Vigilia by Einojuhani Rautavaara
Well, I've not listed some of my favorite works for human voice, ranging from the medieval period to contemporary production. There's a wealth of such music that will not find its way onto the Tops lists of America's mainstream media. So much of it is so great, I have to ask myself: How could I not mention Britten's Ceremony of Carols or Poulenc's Gloria or Mozart's Requiem or any number of great madrigals by Gesualdo? Whatever the answer, there is one thing I must insist upon: these works, listed and unlisted by me, are so far superior to The Top 500 pop songs that Rolling Stone cranked out for our list-lapping pleasure that the mossless masses should blush. And I'll go further. If you know nearly every song on its list, but almost no musical work mentioned by me, it could be that you are a . . . well, I shouldn't descend into slinging epithets. Let me just say that your education is lacking. And your aesthetic experience stunted, inundated with pabulum, kiddie music, and the brummagem. You might consider growing up and trying the fine art of music rather than just music's mass-produced and folk-limited variants.
Designations | November 21, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Self-image
How often does one's self-image match the image that others have?
Consider the picture, right, taken when I was in my third year of life. I'm afraid this picture better captures my own self image than any recent snapshot.
Note the laid back posture. I still sit like this. Note the hat. I still wear hats. Note the farm-house front-porch setting. I still (or: once again) inhabit a rural, rustic world. I'm looking off in the distance in this picture. That seems about right, now, too.
So, if you want to know how I see myself, just look at this picture. Elsewhere (far below, I think) on this page a slice of my face gazes outward; compare, if you must.
Designations | November 22, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Insuring against lawyers
I've been trying to get insurance on my office, and it's amazing how much trouble I've gone through — and still not have any insurance. It looks like my car insurer may finally come through, though not without about a dozen conversations and no small amount of finessing. The insurance company doesn't insure freelance writers, you see.
Well, most of my writing and editing these days has been under long-term contract, so I may be able to sneak around this qualification. It's most bizarre, since all I want is liability on my existence in my office building. Toe-stubbing insurance, really. I'm not asking for coverage for libel, or legal insurance should the government become another degree totalitarian and decide to make an example of me.
But our legal climate is so royally screwed up that insurance is not as simple a business as it should be.
On a not unrelated note, I met a young woman recently. The fact that she was cheerful and smart and lovely is not relevant to the current topic. Something she said surprised me, a bit, and what she said is relevant. She claimed to be on track to become a lawyer. My reaction was a sort of inner sadness, a kind of disappointment, rather like when an attractive woman asks you what your sign is, meaning astrological sign, of course. Astrology may be buncombe, but with that one might be able to put up. But a lawyer?
Do we need another lawyer?
Hmmm. I probably need one or two on my side. A pity. This is yet another instance where the public good and the private good does not naturally coincide. it would be in the public good if there were less lawyers doing less litigation. But, in this lawyerly climate, it is in my private interest to insure myself against unwarranted legal action, by contract putting lawyers on retainer, so to speak, and thus increasing the lawyer-infested climate.
But there is one great place for lawyers, and that's not in Congress. It's in David E. Kelley TV shows. Hasn't Boston Legal picked up since its rather dismal beginning? It's almost as good as the final year of The Practice, a show that suffered terribly before the end, but had several great years before it spiralled down and then picked up. It will be interesting to see if Boston Legal develops a moral spirit, as The Practice had in the beginning. As it is now, it is a sort of immoralist romp through the higher end of the status quo, moraline-free, and significant only in its chaos. Still, funny.
Designations | November 24, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
Amens
The simple plagal Amen is one of the joys of Protestant hymnody. Since childhood I've preferred the sound of subdominant-to-tonic cadences, perhaps because of its ubiquity in Protestant hymns that I grew up amidst. The standard dominant-to-tonic cadences of classical music — and especially the dominant 7th to tonic chord progression — is probably my least favorite feature of classical harmony, and one of the chief reasons I quickly looked back past the Baroque to Renaissance and medieval harmony, when I first began studying harmony.
Over the years I've come up with some alternatives to the standard consonant plagal cadence. Here are two:
The first simply inserts the tritone into the plagal triad, and resolves to the tonic. The first chord of the second cadence is what I call a tetrad: a four-note chord that does not contain a triad. It, too, resolves to the tonic, in this instance with impeccable voice leading, with notes of the tritone leading out to settle as a sixth.
I love both of these cadences, and have used them in improvisation quite a bit. I've composed precious little choral music, however, so they've had little repeat play. (I use some pretty strange concluding chord progressions in my setting of Whitman's Spring's First Dandelion, but I don't remember either of these being used.)
Today, however, as I was playing an old Finnish hymn, Oi Kuinka Ihana, I wondered about doing a set of choral variations on it, with flute and piano for accompaniment. The hymn seemed a proper candidate. I mused about it for a few moments. And all of a sudden I came upon a new amen, this one embracing the devil in music (tritone) even more emphatically. (You'll have to click here to open up a new window; the image of the cadence won't fit on this page properly.)
The piano's bass register plays B-flat/F/b-flat, while the choir sings a dissonant chord F/G/b-flat/e, which resolves into an e-minor chord in the choir, with G/D/g playing in the bass register of the piano. It sounds great to my ears! I just don't know how many people would want to join with me on this Amen.
Designations | November 26, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
The People of the Video Protest
I haven't seen Oliver Stone's Alexander yet, so I'm no judge of its aesthetic qualities or historical accuracy. I had intended to see it this Sunday, but I got a cold the day before and had to put my plans on hold. It looks like by the time I recover, the film may be out of theaters!
That it has caused controversy is no surprise. Our culture is a descendent of Hebraic as well as Hellenistic elements, and some people get so upset about sex. This is the Hebraic obsession. The Hellenes were pretty open-minded about such things. Not so with many today.
In The Independent, John Hiscock (what a name!) and James Burleigh offered Alexander the (not so) Great fails to conquer America's homophobes. The article included a number of ideas and perspectives, but it's just this one passage that concerns me at the moment:
. . . conservative Christians have loudly denounced Alexander as pro-gay propaganda from Tinseltown, insisting that Alexander was a firmly hetero hero. To add to the film's problems, the public has stayed away from what was to be the big movie of the Thanksgiving weekend.
There are two things troublesome here. On what evidence does anyone, Christian or otherwise, insist that Alexander, son of Philip II of Macedon, was firmly hetero ? Or, for that matter, firmly homo? These one-track sexual orientations did not dominate the ancient world. But, more importantly, why hero ? I can see why lovers of mass slaughter and conquest and empire and such would call Alexander a hero. But why would a Christian call a perpetrator of slaughter and conquest and empire a hero? Is it because they now worship George W. Bush more than they worship their putative Savior?
I, an Epicurean, often feel more Christian than the Christians who surround me.
Designations | November 29, 2004 | Wirkman Virkkala
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