lsujp's Open Salon Blog

Public intellectuals for a culture with no attention span

Mon, 6 Apr 2009 20:04:26 -0400

We seem to have room even in our very best outlets for news and information about art, science and culture for one and only one expert about anything.

There's room for one serious documentary film maker, Ken Burns. Famously, in his series "Jazz," he relied on one Greatest Living Jazz Performer, Wynton Marsalis, one official jazz historian/theorist, Gary Giddens, and one official African-American contrarian, Stanley Crouch. (The topic of how many educated African-Americans white America can hold in its collective short-term memory is another, although closely related, issue. You're on in five minutes, Prof. West.)

There's room for one great cellist, Yo-Yo Ma. Poor Mr. Ma has to serve as the Ambassador for classical music as a whole so much of the time that I wonder he hasn't run away from home and taken up harmonica.

In the last few years, we have room in our TV screens and prefrontal lobes for one official public scientist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Dr. Tyson seems to be kept so busy shuttling between NPR and LPB sound stages, Congressional hearings, and public events where he's expected to be the Face of American Science. He does a fine job, and is an appealing fellow to boot, but I bet he gets lonely in the green room.

History seems to be relatively well off. It is represented in by a Ray Milland/Rosie Greer composite of Doris Kearns Goodwin and a rotating cast of male historians. It's almost as if our own history were, you know, relevant or something. (Naah.)

John Adams has stepped willingly into the role of The Only Classical Composer (Opera Division) You'll Need. His recent, quite entertaining autobiography helped quite a bit. But I can name another dozen living American composers that deserve the public's attention, and so can Adams.

The uniqueness property of America's public intellectuals and artists is a symptom of our historically uneasy relationship with education and anything that requires an education to appreciate and enjoy. The first American composer (non-sacred music division) to speak American, Charles Ives, suffered a great deal of anguish over his commitment to, and talent for, an art that most Americans of his time and place (small-town New England in the last several decades of the 19th century) felt was OK at church services or county fairs, but no job for a decent, self-respecting family man. In those pre-Elvis years, musicians were looked down on as marginal characters (and marginal wasn't yet cool), possibly unsavory and certainly producers of nothing useful. Some of Ives's own misogynistic and homophobic fulminations result from a life of defensiveness about his talent and passion for music; in fact, he was a "closeted" artist for most of his adult life, living the life of a (phenomenally successful) insurance agent during the week, then writing music in the evening and on weekends.

The Ives case aside, it didn't used to be quite this bad. In the post-Second World War era, we were actually proud of being an urbanizing, world-connected nation, one that had given shelter to many performers, artists, scientists and scholars who had fled the destruction of Europe. Energized by the Americanization of so much European art and culture, we produced Leonard Bernstein, a native-born great conductor, composer, performer, and (most importantly, for present purposes) music educator. His "Omnibus" broadcasts (later collected in his book The Joy of Music) proceeded from the assumption that knowing something about high art was a good thing. And this was shown on commercial TV.

But now we seem to understand only vaguely that the arts have any value whatsoever, and science is only valuable when it churns out drugs that can be fed into the maw of our obscenely dysfunctional health care system, netting preposterous sums for whichever corporation holds the patent. (As a friend of mine in biology once explained to me, most drugs are developed and marketed well before the basic research that explains how they work is done.) Right now, even in Louisiana, we have this insane notion that public funding for the arts, which amounts in total to something in the low seven digits, is a waste of money; meanwhile, the state is buying into a chicken farm that may or may not open sometime in the near future with an eight-figure subsidy.

I can't help but think that the singularity of spokespeople for our arts and sciences is a troubling sign. If music, astronomy, drama, etc. were actually held in high esteem, we would need more than one spokesperson for each. Notice how Madoff is only the most reviled of the many Captains of Non-Industry that now decorate our TV screens, but we have only one astronomer, one cellist, one jazz trumpeter...An American composer I know who has lived in Italy for many decades once told me that the U.S. has plenty of great ingredients, but doesn't know how to use them. We were discussing food at the time, but I think his point is valid for many other fields of worthwhile human endeavor as well.

The following universities can kiss my butt

Sat, 4 Apr 2009 22:04:02 -0400

Last week my son received his final rejection. He applied to four universities for admission in next year’s freshman class, three private schools of moderate-to-high prestige and one public university, the one I teach at. Two of the three private universities rejected him outright, and one wait listed him. This is a kid with combined SAT scores of 1500, a National Merit Finalist; he recently took first place in the statewide Advanced Calculus competition held by Mu Alpha Theta. He isn’t much of a joiner or a club guy, but has an impressive track record of church mission trips to places like Gentilly (next door to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans) and Belize.

In the wake of these rejections, my wife and I were much more outwardly dejected than Jack was. (He’s not an especially demonstrative kid, but it was clear he was disappointed, although not crushed.) We listed (and re-listed) all the reasons we could imagine for these rejections, which, frankly, we had not expected:

(1) He doesn’t have enough extra-curricular activities on his résumé. We haven’t pushed him to join a sports team or anything like that; after scholastic results like his we feel that (even though the exercise would be good for him) if he wants to kick back and spend his leisure time on the Internet hobnobbing with friends, or slaying evildoers on his Wii, that’s his right. So one “qualifications” he presumably lacks is extroversion. Cripes, the kid wants to major in engineering.

(2) He insisted on filling out the online applications himself, without letting us look them over before sending. Maybe he sold himself short in his essays? Other missing qualifications: Self importance? Excessive dependence on his parents?

(3) His parents, while solvent, employed homeowners, have a less than stellar credit rating. We had some bad luck and made some lousy decisions a while back and filed for bankruptcy several years ago. This hasn’t kept us from being able to keep our house, which will be paid off at roughly the same time that our eighth-grade daughter finishes college, finance two cars when the older ones we drove died sequentially, loads of orthodontic work on both kids and my wife, etc. But maybe it makes us bad credit risks to the universities? You can imagine the self-recriminations that this has caused us. Is having parents with a certain credit score one of the requirements for admission to these schools?

(4) We’re in one of those in between brackets where we would need significant amounts of financial aid to be able to afford the tuition the private schools charge. I’ve heard recently in the N. Y. Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere that universities are actually allocating more financial aid resources to recruiting kids from higher tax brackets, because their parents will cost them less overall, and will probably be more generous donors. So one of the “qualifications” that Jack is alleged to lack is well-to-do-parents.

(5) As a young man who expressed interest in math, the sciences, and engineering, he’d be competing in what I would assume are fields filled with males and short on female applicants. So are there simply too many male 18-year-olds who want to be scientists, mathematicians, and engineers?

(6) Geography—Are students from Louisiana seen as backward Third Worlders who are unable to compete with their peers in other states? (We create this impression by the way our schools churn out functional illiterates in large numbers. Our contempt for education is well known and rooted in racism, backwardness, and a stubborn desire to shoot ourselves in the foot, since dammit it’s our gun and our foot.)

We’re trying to get some perspective on the whole thing. While I remain unconvinced that students like my son grow on trees, and that he got judged not on his own merits, but on the basis of some other calculus that reflects not at all well on the universities in question, the silver lining is that he qualified for the top-level tuition grant offered by our state. A decade or more ago, in an effort to reverse the brain drain afflicting our fine state, the legislature decided to grant free tuition to any state resident who had a certain (quite modest) combination of ACT scores and class ranking. Admission to the research university I teach at is slightly more selective than to the other public universities in the state.

In any event, Jack has a free ride for tuition and fees, even garnering an extra grant for his National Merit status. The college savings fund we’ve been paying into for him would have paid for half of one semester at any of the schools that rejected him; now we can use it to pay for his room and board at one of the residence colleges the University has set up as an alternative to either conventional dorm living or the frat system. He just attended a three-day early orientation program at the university that introduced him to the curriculum he’s chosen (for now he’s going with electrical and computer engineering, a very strong program here), gave him a chance to explore the campus from a perspective different from the one he’s had over the past fifteen years as a faculty brat, and gave him first pick at his first semester courses. He took some placement tests which, combined with the AP scores he earned as a junior, allow him to place out of almost an entire year of prerequisites and General Education courses (which are also called distribution requirements in some places). When he takes this year’s batch of AP exams he’ll probably place out of still more.

He’s quite excited, in his usually stoic way, at being able to look at the entire engineering curriculum and seeing what he’ll be learning over the next four years—things that he’s never even heard of in high school, like signal processing. And if he decides to pursue his first love, math, or explore a scientific field, he can do that as well. Or become an English major and develop his aptitude for writing, which is quite good (as much as he hates to admit it or even let anyone know about it). It’s a large, comprehensive research school with more departments and programs than any of the schools that wouldn’t take him; he has four years to explore the sum of human knowledge and dig in wherever he sees fit. The university's Honors College program means that he’ll have some small, accelerated classes and individual advising too.

The thing that says a lot about the dire state of the economy is that a large bunch of his high school friends—the sons daughters of professional folks, college professors, and the like, A students with high test scores and all of that—were at the orientation with him, and will probably end up at the university with him. Parents of those who have been accepted to other schools out of state are either still waiting to hear about financial aid, or have already determined that they’re out of reach financially. We’re fortunate to have the fallback of a major research university, as woefully ill-funded as it is (and facing cutbacks in the coming year, like all public schools at all levels everywhere), right here in town.

I have my share of ambivalence about having my son attend the school that has employed me for fifteen years. I’d put our best students up against anyone’s, and philosophically I’m very much in favor of public education and public schools at all levels; but as a creature of our state government, we suffer from the shortsightedness and venality of that government. Hence we’re a “flagship university” with ludicrously low undergraduate admissions standards, and see 50% of incoming engineering majors, for instance, wash out after a year. It would be more honest for us to admit only students with a demonstrable shot at completing a bachelor’s degree program. Instead we admit almost anyone with a high school diploma who wants to attend, load them down with remedial courses, and let them graduate in five to six years. The more successful programs in the sciences and elsewhere have steep barrier requirements that let them retain their professional accreditation, but the university still has too many not very successful students who create a culture of hard partying and just squeaking by. Jack will have no trouble finding his natural peers, but we were looking forward to having him see what life was like in a part of the country different from the one he grew up in. He can still do that, just not as soon.

And I think he was looking forward to living on his own, at a certain geographic remove from his parents (as was his father). Now he’ll be within the same square mile or two of where both his parents work (and a mile or so from where his sister goes to high school). But something tells me he’ll find a way to create the amount of separation he’s comfortable with. Selfishly, I’m glad he won’t be all that far away.

I don’t know what the problem is with the private universities that rejected my kid. It’s their loss, and he’ll do just fine. I detest the term “human capital,” since it suggests that people are valuable mainly because they’re like money (how do you spend a person? and when does their value, their intrinsic, human value, ever really change?). But if the new Depression causes universities and other institutions to play it safe and undervalue the young adults who will live in the crazy world we’ve made for them, things will take that much longer to improve. We’d better remember that investment in education as well as infrastructure will be needed to dig ourselves out of this mess.

Gustav was a hell of a hurricane, but reruns? Nah.

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:03:28 -0400

Last night a storm band passed through our city, leaving a path of destruction that was smaller than that left by the late, unlamented Gustav (the hurricane that hit us dead-on in September), but just as destructive. A friend of ours told me, "In twenty-seven years of marriage I've never dove under the bed, but last night that's what my husband and I did." A small tornado touched down in several spots in the Red Stick, making the morning commute interesting. Some sports facilities were damaged at the University; the metal roof of one practice facility was transformed into a bunch of crinkly bands of aluminum, and the insulation that had been underneath ended up being blown across the street to near my wife's office, where some pretty amazing damage control crews with leaf blowers set to "heavy suck" had it corralled and stacked soon after it fell.

We do one thing well in Louisiana. No, we do two or three:

(1) Disasters. We've finally learned that the rugged individualist model of post-hurricane cleanup and survival doesn't work. Oddly enough, little daimons from the Free Market don't magically materialize after a natural disaster; guys from nearby states who want $2000 to even look at the tree that fell on your kitchen do. You file an insurance claim, and unless you're really lucky you'll get $200 toward what you paid them. Meanwhile, there are roads and schools that the Free Market somehow doesn't spontaneously clean up and repair. It takes a village, and it takes taxes, and it takes government. Today the local paper quoted my off-the-shelf cookie-cutter conser'tive, Republican state representative as saying that we'd probably have to raise taxes. That's like hearing Lawrence Welk say we' re probably going to need to hire an electric guitarist.

(2) Food and parties. When the power goes off, a block party will spontaneously erupt. Since my neighborhood has become close to a 50/50 racial mix since Katrina, I wonder if this will still be true. I'll bring whatever I have in my fridge if you will.

(3) Selective memory. We can remember that somebody is supposed to educate our kids and fix our roads, but somehow when we get to the part of determining who that might be (Jimmy Swaggart? Jesus? WalMart?), we get brain-locked. When will we discover the sense of community responsibility that characterizes every place worth living in? I'll bring my ladder and hacksaw if you'll bring your chainsaw.

So. Another feeder band coming through tonight. Wonder how we'll do?

When Banks compete...

Sat, 7 Mar 2009 18:03:58 -0500

If you're like me, and I know I am, you enjoy your weekly dose of NPR's Car Talk while you're driving around doing errands on Saturday morning. Today, though, something I'd never noticed about the program struck me as problematic, or even downright sinister: I'm talking about the fact that one of the Magliozzi brothers' sponsors is an organization called LendingTree.com, whose slogan is "When Banks Compete, You Win!"

Now, I know nothing about LendingTree.com, and I'm positive that they are a fine, reputable public-spirited, astute, rock-solid corporate citizen. But take the slogan qua slogan, which was no doubt cooked up by an ad agency someplace: When Banks Compete, You Win. Now think about...banks...today, in real life, America, 2009.

The deregulation of the banking industry is something I know relatively little about. I know that banks were, once upon a time, limited in the geographical scope in which they could practice their trade; they used to have to choose what sort of shuffling around they engaged in with their depositors' money: they could offer savings and checking accounts, or they could offer mortgages and loans of various sorts, or they could launder the proceeds from this or that dictator's repressive regime--and so on. One bank couldn't offer intrinsically different kinds of services. That explains why Old Man Potter in It's A Wonderful Life doesn't just run Jimmy Stewart's Building And Loan out of business by offering lower interest rates and a free toaster. Potter owned the bank, which lent money to the Building & Loan, which lent people money, according to terms that are not made in clear in the movie, to build houses. It was a charmingly specialized sort of business, as if you could only get incandescent light bulbs from one kind of store, and fluorescents from a different kind of store.

Evidently, the 1980 Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act led to the banking situation as we now know it. No more Building & Loans; Old Man Potter's grandson, young, suave Chip Potter, probably came home from Yale and took the reins, adopts the business plan I mentioned above; no more Bailey Building & Loan. (His S&L promptly went out of business in the '80s. Chip's testimony at the Keating Five scandal in 1990 was a minor footnote that wasn't reported locally, since the Bedford Falls paper had folded a few years earlier.)

And since then, banks have been competing up a storm. Once they were allowed to compete in, essentially, very abstruse forms of gambling, it was a competition to see who could get to the bottom the fastest: who could make bad mortgage deals, spin them off into collateral for securities so abstract that it would take a French Post-Structuralist professor with Jacques Derrida in his rolodex three expressos and a full pack of Gîtaines to explain them. Then there was the insurance that some entities a little further up the food chain sold that was basically a way of betting on how fast, and how badly, the mortgage-backed securities would lose their value. Sort of like what Michael Vick liked to do, but with other people's homes and livelihoods instead of with pit bulls.

So...the cheery, rather Frank Capraesque assurance that "When Banks Compete, You Win" seems to me to reflect an optimism that was, once upon a time, perfectly reasonable. Once upon a time, competition was a good thing in finance, as it is in any other kind of business; now, though, it seems that we're talking not about the competition between sane men, but rather something like the competition between compulsive gamblers with nothing to lose, no home to return to, and an infinite amount of cocaine to snort as they play with what seems an inexhaustible supply of money.

Who wins when Godzilla and Megalon fight it out to determine who's the best at destroying Tokyo?

Competition between sane people should be a good thing. Competition between addicts is not. Engineers talk about positive feedback--adding more and more energy into a system, be it an engine, a chemical refining process, or a financial market--and how, without negative feedback (e.g. a throttle, a brake) it will eventually cause any system to explode.

It's a well-worn analogy, but without the negative feedback of government intervention, the financial sector has effectively exploded. (I'd say "imploded," but when other people get hurt, I think the right word is "exploded.") Whatever else the Obama administration does, it must re-educate Americans about the consequences of such esoterica as banking and finance policy for all of us. Just as Americans received a crash course in the relevance of the stock market to daily life in 1929, we now know that economics sort of matters, to everyone. It would be great to return to the kind of society where "when banks compete, you win."

Congress in the Age of Bulworth

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 15:03:26 -0500

This is a response to Saturn Smith's "Government for Grownups" thread. (Forget the guac, where are the chips?)

The two-party system is entirely post-Founder. So are the realities of campaign finance. Last weekend on NPR Bob Edwards interviewed Robert Kaiser on his book “So Much Damn Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government,” in which Kaiser mentions that the average member of Congress (either branch) spends at least one day per week doing nothing but raising money for re-election. Since this is the main reality that determines the behavior of both houses of congress, let’s look at how it alters the realities of 1787.

There seems to be a sense at the Constitutional Convention that over time geographical loyalties would trump all others; that southern planters would vote with southern planters (for low tariffs and a gag rule on discussions of slavery), northern merchants with northern merchants (for high tariffs and against incipient labor unions), rough-hewn, tobacco-chawing coonskin-cap wearing frontiersmen with others of the same ilk (for keeping the Mississippi free to American commerce and annexing any and all land still in the hands of native Americans and Mexicans). So the founders sought to divvy up responsibilities between the two houses of Congress as a means of crossing these natural divides.
The House is the money chamber (Article I, section 7). Appropriation bills must originate there; the dirty work of raising and spending tax money get done there, and this has to a large extent determined the chamber’s character and structure. Competition between districts (even within a single state) for federal spending—the other white meat—makes this a more fractious body than the Senate, perhaps requiring the more elaborate leadership structure that has evolved in the House. (By the way, it’s only pork if it’s in your district. In my district it’s farsighted economic development.)

Today's Senate is somewhat more like a late 18th century legislative body than today's House is. Its leadership structure is, of course, just as determined by members’ partisan identity as that of the House, but the Senate historically has had a veneer of muted partisanship about it. This is probably due in part to the fact the Senate must give its “advice and consent” to all presidential appointments, and ratifying all treaties. Interestingly, although the House has the sole power of impeachment, “the Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation.” In other words, when deciding whether to remove a public official from office, the Senators are empanelled and sworn in like a jury; the House, whose function in voting whether or not to impeach is more like that of a grand jury, has no such requirement. Add to this the fact that the Senate, not the House, must ratify judicial appointments, and you get some interesting judicial resonances in the Senate’s role that are missing altogether from that of the House.

The high-minded ideal seems to have been that having more responsibility for the people’s money would cause Representatives from the different regions to think outside their regional boxes (Hey, we’ve got a budget to pass here, people), while having more to do with constituting the nation’s judiciary and overseeing the President’s foreign policy (death to Barbary pirates!) would bring the Senators together despite their territorial interests. Does this still work, even residually? These days geography is destiny to a far less extent than it used to be. When the bulk of money for the campaigns of some senatorial and congressional candidates is raised outside their states, clearly a new dynamic is in play. The fact that all of two GOP senators crossed party lines to vote with the Democratic majority on the stimulus package, and that party discipline was enforced within House GOP ranks, suggests that regionalism is far less important than it was for our founders. After all, the sovereign states of 1787 are far less sovereign today.

Should Senators, or some number of them, be elected at-large, or by region, or in some rotating manner, like the U.N. Security Council? Should House districts be larger, and multi-member, so that Louisiana (for instance) has a chance of electing more than one African-American congressman at a time? Remember, the founders’ ideal was to acknowledge human venality and defeat it as well as possible with checks and balances. So what’s the best way, now, today?

P.S. I rented Bulworth (1998) the other day. An uneven film, but it still packs a pretty good punch. And Warren Beatty is at least as good a rapper as Michael Steele.