They shall not pass!

There's been a lot of talk in the press these days, with the rise of he-who-must-not-be-named in American politics, about how to stop fascistic, totalitarian figures from coming into power. It appears to be something that folks in the US and UK haven't had to deal with before, and so they must look to Germany, or Spain -- but in fact, that's not true at all.

Back in Britain in the 1930's, there was a divisive political leader whose rallies were beginning to cause concerns. A former political liberal, he'd taken to denouncing his previous views; at massive indoor rallies (including one at the Albert Hall), he stirred his listeners to passionate cheers by denouncing immigrants, Jews, and a shadowy cabal of forces that were driving the common man down. He love to egg on protesters at these rallies, and had special squads of "stewards" to rough them up and throw them out, but in fact they served a purpose. Indeed, he credited them with making his speeches all the more effective, even saying he looked forward to them.

The man in question was Sir Oswald Mosley. And Britons weren't quite sure what to make of him; though many despised his views, his party -- the British Union of Fascists -- was granted the same rights as any other, and in the early 1930's their polling numbers were on the rise, although they did not yet have any elected member of Parliament. Mosley, inspired by visits with Mussolini and Hitler, decided to give his party a paramilitary flavor, initially going with plain black futuristic uniforms, but later graduating to jackboots and a peaked cap (for Mosley himself at least). From their large indoor rallies, they graduated to outdoor ones with marches; when Mosley was clobbered with a flying brick by protesters at one, he wore his bandages as a cap of pride. It was part of his strategy to march directly into areas, such as the East End of London, where the bricks were most likely to fly; this both fed his sense of justified anger, and forced the police into serving as his own personal security.

Things came to a head in October of 1936; Mosley had planned a rally and march through the East End, and had pulled out all stops; his new uniform was ready, as were many of his followers, some of whom rode in specially fortified vans. The Metropolitan Police, under the leadership of Sir Philip Game, mustered out 6,000 officers, one of the largest forces since the days of the Chartist rallies in the 1840's, but even then it soon became clear they were stretched thin; attempts to disperse a crowd of nearly 100,000 East Enders proved impossible. Those opposed to Mosley, whose planned route would have taken him down Cable Street, erected barricades of bricks and sticks, along with a lorry and some construction equipment they'd procured from a nearby builder's yard. They hoped to block the march by their mere presence, though they were also prepared to fight; one witness described men wrapping barbed wire around chair-legs as improvised weapons. The chant of one and all was simply this: "They shall not pass!" (I rather like to think that Gandalf's command to the Balrog, "you cannot pass," written a scant three years later, owed something to this).

In the end, Sir Philip Game persuaded Mosley to call off that part of his plans, and to march instead back where he'd come from to Hyde Park. Public alarm over the events led to the passing of the Public Order Act, which although it did not outlaw Mosley's party, prohibited political uniforms such as those the "blackshirts" had favored. When Britain and Germany went to war, the BUF was banned, and Mosley and many of its other leaders were imprisoned for the duration. One, though, did escape: the scar-faced William Joyce, who as "Lord Haw-Haw" broadcast mocking ripostes to nearly every one of Churchill's radio speeches. After the war, Joyce was convicted of high treason, and hanged at Wandsworth Prison. Sir Oswald returned to political life, though in his one election -- for Kensington North in 1959 -- he polled only 8% of the vote with an anti-immigration platform that included deporting those from the West Indies. 

Burst

There are still places on this earth where people do burst into song.

I was in Dundalk, Ireland, in an ordinary, nondescript Italian restaurant on the high street, with some friends who were there attending a conference, along with a few other miscellaneous diners, when suddenly a woman at a table nearby, probably in her forties or so, let out with the refrain to Cat Stevens’s “Moonshadow” – and at once we were all, instantly, “leapin’ and hoppin’” along. The strange thing was that the waiters and waitresses took no notice of it; she sang, and we all came in on the chorus. At the end of it, there was applause, and people looked ‘round the room at one another, and someone called out “Well, give us another song!” And someone did.

This would never, of course, happen where I live, in the United States. Here, no one bursts into song, except maybe in a Karaoke bar, and badly. If you were to start singing at the top of your lungs in a TGI Friday’s or a Pizza Hut, people would think you were crazy, and before long the police would be called, and you’d be taken away to face charges.

But here, in Ireland, it's understood that people do do such things, and that it's a perfect part of the ordinary. People could, actually, burst into song in a public place, and just as in an episode of  “Pennies from Heaven,” the other diners – if they didn’t join in themselves – would just carry on with their business as though it were the most usual thing in the world.

*     *     *     *     *

Growing up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, I was subjected to my parents’ deep and inexhaustible love of musicals. Living far from New York, we never actually went to one, but they blared forth from the stereo all the same. “My Fair Lady” – “Oklahoma!” – “The Most Happy Fella” – “The Pajama Game” – “The Mikado” – “Carousel” – “South Pacific” – the list seemed endless. My mother loved them, and my father loved them even more, turning out all the lights in the living room and turning up the stereo as far as it would go without distortion. “We are gentlemen of Japan!” … “All I want is a room somewhere” … “A p'liceman’s lot is not a happy one” …“Some enchanted evening” … there was an instant drama in every line, and though I hated the music itself, some portion of its feeling got under my skin, and planted a kind of weird seed for the future. I remember hating these songs, the darkened room, the way that my father would, from his prostrate position on the couch, quiver quietly with tears.

But now, decades later, when I hear these same songs, I’m the one that's weeping. Not for the fate of poor little Buttercup, or Liza Doolittle, or Billy Bigelow -- but for the lost world in which people indeed did burst into song. And in that world, it now seems to me, there was such a tremendous reservoir of pent-up emotions, such a backlog of heartache, that it was absolutely impossible to speak – it could only be sung. And yet, once the final lines had finished and the strings faded, everyone went back to their ordinary, pent-up ways – and it was this final loss, the loss of the miraculous world of people actually singing about their feelings, that touched me the most. For even then, when such things were common knowledge, they failed to transform the world with their beauty; people went back to ugliness, got on with their tawdry lives, and if asked would probably have said “Singin’? I didn’t hear no singin’! Did you, pal?”

All of this came rushing back to me recently on when I re-watched the 1981 film Pennies from Heaven with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. I’d seen it when it first came out in a theatre – a lonesome one, populated only by myself and the love of my life, two little old ladies, and an usher collecting for the Jimmy fund. Somehow, the lip-synching made these songs work, and made the self-representation tragedy of singing one’s heart out a double loss – for the voice these actors sang with was not their own. Of course, that was often true in the classic Hollywood era, when Marni Nixon provided the voice for everyone from Deborah Kerr to Audrey Hepburn, but I never knew that back then. Later, of course, I saw Singin’ in the Rain and realized what a strange fate it was to be the unknown voice of a famous actress. It’s an uncanny kind of real-time pathos that goes back at least to Cyrano de Bergerac and right up through Disney’s Little Mermaid: to watch another woo one’s love with one’s own words, or voice. It’s a kind of tourture, really.

Some years seeing the 1981 film, I tracked down a copy of the BBC series with Bob Hoskins. Until then, I hadn’t realized how heavy-handed the irony was – that a man who sold love-songs for a living could be, not just a low-grade jerk, but a complete asshole – so that the transformations he underwent, and witnessed were a sort of false, cruel magic, one in which the kiss of song transformed toad-like people into temporary princes, not because they were really princes inside, but because they and the whole goddamned world were so deeply, perversely, incurably toad-like that this formed for them a kind of cruel joke. I wondered whether Dennis Potter was a cruel man, or whether, in the manner of other dark comedies, it was meant to be humorous.  His genius, I decided, was that it didn’t matter – it worked either way.

But what's happened to musicals today? It's strange to realize that Pennies from Heaven was in fact the very last musical produced by MGM before its long descent into financial ruin and dissolution, its legendary film library sold to Ted Turner, and then to Warner's. It was Disney -- or, more properly, Ashman and Menken -- who revived the musical feature film in 1989 with The Little Mermaid. Somehow, bursting into song had become something that was too much for any human actor; it had transcended that world and moved into animation. Even Broadway was swept by this phenomenon, as adaptations of Disney films have been among the highest-grossing and longest-running stage musicals.

There are exceptions, it's true, but they're rare. I have to confess that Stephen Sondheim, for all his storied career, has always left me cold. His melodies never quite soar; like tethered birds, they tweet too close to the ground, and are soon forgotten. Wicked -- which I've seen in its current incarnation at the Gershwin -- is transcedent on stage, but the soundtrack doesn't really do it for me. There's soaring -- who can forget their first experience of "Defying Gravity"? -- but without the visuals, the music itself sounds overblown and frantic.

And then there's Glee. Many love it. I loathe it. Not because it lacks magical moments of bursting into song, but because there are too many. You can't just constantly be bursting into song; as Alan Jay Lerner put it,

"A man's life is made up of thousands and thousands of little pieces. In writing fiction, you select 20 or 30 of them. In a musical, you select even fewer than that."

And that to me is what a musical is -- a series of dramatic moments, carefully curated. But a serial musical is like a serial killer -- you never know when it will strike again; we live in dread instead of wonder. Each song must count, must form the peak of one of the mountains of our existence. We mustn't descend too soon to our tawdry, toad-like world -- we must allow these shadows of our better selves to burst, to break, to echo down the corridors of everyday life, daring to sing out loud.

Car sitters

Thomas Francis Barrow, from "The Automobile" (1966)

You've seen them. In your neighborhood, around the corner, at the edge of the park, or maybe even in front of your house. They are neither coming nor are they going; often they're idling, but sometimes the engine is off as the driver -- or the person who would be the driver, if the car were being driven, sits within. Smartphones have made the problem worse -- one can see just by the tilt of the head what the person is doing -- but the practice pre-dates such devices.

I hate them. True, they haven't done anything to me; they're peaceful and rarely make a scene, other than the still-life of car with a trail of exhaust -- but they occupy space in a way that makes no sense to me. I'd like to walk down the sidewalk -- often, I'm walking my dogs -- but the sight of a car-sitter puts me off, causes me to cross to the other side. It's more pronounced at off hours -- I walk my dogs early and late, but there are always a few of these vehicles sitting out there, even at four in the morning.

"Get on with it!" I want to shout -- but I don't imagine the car-sitters would hear me. Some are blasting their stereos, but even the quiet ones are fixated on their interior space; were I to shout and be heard, I would be as much an intrusion to them as they, by their just being there, are to me. And after all, I don't own the streets, or wish to exercise control over people other than myself -- but I would like those who are in motorized vehicles to, well motor. Get on with your lives, head toward your destination, whatever it may be. But go! -- don't just sit there! -- move along!

Tom Lehrer

The news of the death of Tom Lehrer hit hard.

No prophet is accepted in his own country, it's said. And yet, oddly enough, nearly fifty years ago there once was a man by the name of Tom Lehrer -- erstwhile Harvard mathematics professor, wry songster, and television parodist -- who managed to make music out of some of the most irksome and intractable issues of his day. Racism, pollution, Jim Crow, pornography, the nuclear arms race, the Second Vatican Council, and even World War III were all fodder for his astonishing show tunes, and there often seemed to be scarcely any line of propriety he wouldn't cross. And yet, since he sung every one with such verve, he managed to make nearly everyone laugh at their own folly, rather than throw rotten vegetables at the stage. By the late 1960's, his songs were the stuff of legend, exchanged by high school and college students like a sort of secret code: do you know "The Vatican Rag"? "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park?" "Smut?" At my high school, all the cool kids (that is, all the geeks, since I went to an alternative hippie Quaker school) had at least one of his songs memorized.

It was amazing to me and my friends in the late '70's and early '80's to think that many of these songs were first heard on network television in 1964 and 1965 on a program called That Was the Week that Was. You'll have to remember, this was a long, long, long time before Stephen Colbert.

Lehrer retired from comic songstering for more than 25 years, re-emerging briefly at a concert in 1998, where he was introduced by his old friend Stephen Sondheim, and performed a lovely redux of his famous anthem Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.

Asked in an interview some years ago why he wasn't writing songs satirizing our present moment, he observed that these days,  "everything is so weird in politics that it's very hard to be funny about it." True enough -- but he will be missed nevertheless.

Conspiracy Theory Theory

We seem to live in the age of conspiracy theories. Not that they haven't been around for a while, but that something in this postmodern moment seems to supply them, amplify them, and keep them alive longer than at any time in the past. An event scarcely settles into public awareness before someone steps forward to "question" it -- not simply to question why or how it happened, but whether it happened at all.

In the course of this post, I'm going to try not to mention too many specific such theories -- I have no desire to give their promulgators more attention -- but I do want to look at some of the reasons for the plethora of such theories at the present moment, and I believe I can do so without going into the particulars of any of them (though I will, on occasion, mention such theories about the Kennedy assassination, which in many ways is the model for them all).

What kinds of events generate these theories? And what does the their structure tell us about the shifting shape of mass media, and our own shifting modes of understanding the 'true' and the 'real'?

To generate such theories, an event has to be of a very specific nature: something that, at its very occurrence, was completely unanticipated, spectacular, and ideologically charged. Whenever something terrible happens to an individual -- a friend dies, one's home catches fire, or one's finances collapse -- we ask ourselves why.  Sometimes, there's a simple answer: he got cancer, the ashes were still hot, you invested in what turned out to be a pyramid scheme.  Even then, though, there are leftover questions: Why did someone with such a promising future have to die? How could such a small mistake destroy a home? Why didn't I realize much sooner that the promised returns were too good to be true?

It can take an individual years to sort through these issues, and to eventually decide it's time to move on. But what about when such a disaster overtakes an entire region, nation, or the planet as a whole? The causes and consequences of these disasters are vast and complex, and there may never be a completely clear and unambiguous reason why.  Why did the Light Brigade charge into the cannon? How was it the Roosevelt didn't anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor? How could a lone gunman have killed the leader of the free world, flush in the youth of his success?

The psychic cost of letting ourselves understand and accept such events is enormous, and the collective soul searches for some, for any kind of release from this torment. In the past, scapegoating was the easiest option; to identify and attack the purported cause of something terrible is undeniably cathartic, even if it later turns out that the person or people blamed were innocent.  It's harder to do today, although it can still happen.  But as it turns out, alleging a conspiracy -- even one so vast and profound that it turns out that what we thought happened didn't actually happen at all -- provides an even more effective balm.

On the face of it, these claims are absurd, but that doesn't matter. The people who make them do not put themselves under the burden of constructing a single, plausible alternative to what everyone else believes has happened; they simply exploit doubt and uncertainty to a sufficient degree that they can discard what they regard as the "official" and therefore false version. Having done that, they hint vaguely at a series of dark alternatives; they don't have to pick just one, and if one is shown to be patently false, they just point to another, and another, and another.

The Kennedy assassination's "grassy knoll" is one such point. One frame of the infamous Zapruder film seems to show a puff of smoke at this location.  Is it a puff of smoke? A puff of car exhaust? A slight fogging of the film? The first attack is simply to cast doubt on the "single shooter" version, and in this charge the puff of smoke is just the beginning.  The second move is to speak of another shooter as if he or or she was definitely known to exist, and search all the testimony one can find that correlates with this possibility; if any such claim is doubted, one simply cites another.

And here is why in this age, such theories have such traction: the informational background -- official reports, statements, maps, photographs, blog postings, 911 recordings, satellite photos, and so forth -- is so vast, and daily growing so much vaster, that the amount of informational fuel available is, for all practical purposes, infinite.

As anyone who has tried can confirm, it's impossible to ever win an argument with a conspiracy theorist. For one, they have bushels of information at their fingertips, and warehouses more if those run out.  For two, they don't have to produce a coherent account of what actually took place, just cast doubt on every particular claim, one after another, until eventually the whole thing shudders under piecemeal attacks.

Recently, some such theorists have defended their statements by saying that they are just practicing "critical thinking," that they are "questioning assumptions" and doing "investigative journalism." But none of these actually apply: what these theorists -- who often have, or are given, the name "truthers" actually possess is a very poor understanding of nature of truth.  To them, "truth" must be consistent, not only with every conceivable piece of data, but with their own ideological presuppositions. Anything inconsistent stinks to them of untruth.  And yet, the strange fact is, the truth of any actual event is full of inconsistencies, many of which can simply not be resolved completely.

The "truther" path dares those who accept a commonly-known fact or event to "prove" it happened. And yet nearly all human events cannot be proved in this way.  Prove that the ancient Egyptians existed! One points to the pyramids, and the Temple of Luxor.  But what if these were actually fake ruins put there by the Greeks thousands of years later? Prove that evolution is evidenced in fossilized life! But what if these fossils were put there by God to test our faith and confuse us?

Truthers are fond of documents taken out of context; the obsess over documentation but when documentation is provided, they simply say that it was forged or faked.  They insisted that neither the President's short form nor long-form birth certificates were "real" -- and yet an obviously, clumsily faked Kenyan one was held forth as confirmation of their suspicions. They point to photographs quite a bit -- and yet when it's shown that the image doesn't depict what they claimed, they simply say the photograph was altered by people trying to discredit them.

And they love eyewitness testimony.  Never mind that it's been conclusively shown that eyewitness testimony is quite often unreliable, they love the way the acid of testimonial inconsistency eats away at the "official" version.

The irony is that the reason eyewitness testimony is unreliable is the exact same reason that conspiracy theories are so attractive to their adherents. It's because the human mind detests information in a vacuum; we make stories of our memories even as we are making our memories, and the stories stick -- we hate to change them later.  In a classic Peanuts strip, Lucy sees what she thinks is a rare butterfly from Brazil on the sidewalk,  and wonders at the amazing natural ability of these tiny creatures to travel so far. In the next panel, her kid brother Linus points out that it's actually a potato chip. To which Lucy replies,  "Well, I’ll be! So it is! I wonder how a potato chip got all the way up here from Brazil?"

And so it is with the conspiracy theorist. The things which evidence may or may not point to are taken as givens, and any attempt to show that the preponderance of the evidence shows that it's a potato chip of local origin simply does not compute.  And, in the age when anyone who wants to can Google up millions of pages of information about butterflies, those of us who still see a potato chip are in trouble.

The Problem with Evil

The word "evil" seems to be trending once more. It's a harsh word, a powerful word, a sweeping word. There's no way to dilute it or qualify it; a person or a deed can't be more or less evil, just a little evil, moderately evil -- it's all or nothing. We reach for it in the same way we reach for the emergency brake switch on a train -- as a last resort, knowing that pulling that switch will be an irrevocable act.

"Evil" works for us when nothing else will. Like a pair of asbestos mitts, it enables us to handle things we could otherwise not bear to touch. "Evil" enables us to categorize and keep safe distance from people who would otherwise almost crush us with their horror, their unfathomability: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin. And it gives us unlimited power to denounce them, to condemn them, to convince ourselves that never, never, never would we have anything to do with them. Those who are "evil" are consigned to the world of devils and demons, the underworld of those whose motivations, personalities, influences, or thoughts no longer matter. How could they? -- they're evil.

But "evil" also blinds us. It convinces us that, while some judgments are just a matter of perspective or cultural context, others are absolute, and apply universally. And yet when, in re-creations such as that in the film Argo, we see the United States denounced in billboards as "The Great Satan," we smirk and think how ridiculous that is: "What, us, Satan?"

And this is the essential problem. In the relentless march of cultural and historical amnesia that our modern media-saturated world embodies, "evil" is the ultimate memory zapper. It convinces us that all we need to know about someone is that they were "evil" -- no more sense learning about their lives or motivations. Case closed. The fact that so many of the people we write off in this manner were, in their country and in their heyday, beloved by millions and widely admired, strikes us a irrelevant. The fact that so many people who ended up being "evil" started out being "good" seems merely an inconvenient detail. When we see women holding up their babies for Hitler to kiss them, or families weeping at the funeral of Kim Jong-il, we think to ourselves, what foolish people! How were they so hoodwinked?

But perhaps it is we who wear the blinders. "Evil" works so well in retrospect; it solves for us the problem of history. But if we really want to prevent future Hitlers and Stalins from arising, it's absolutely useless.  No one steps forward and calls themselves evil -- to do that would be almost comic, like Austin Powers or Aleister Crowley. No, the people who we may, eventually, find to be evil will always be people who arrived to meet some human wish or another: the wish for stability, the wish for prosperity, the wish for revenge, the wish for power. They will begin by being very attractive people indeed, so attractive that we don't see them in time to stop them -- or ourselves.

Panic over the airwaves

It's always been something of a miracle. From around 1920, when the development of signal amplification enabled the human voice to travel over radio waves, the thought that sounds spoken hundreds or thousands of miles away could by some mysterious process appear in our homes and cars as though the speaker were present, has been perhaps the first and greatest "miracle" of technology. Later, with the development of television, sights traveled by the same means, adding to this wonder, and shaping the baby boomer generation in a way no generation had ever been shaped before. But of course there were those who wondered: wasn't sending all this electricity, this radiation, through the air a sort of health hazard? Curiously, those who worried about that also worried about the tawdry nature of much mass entertainment, or the potential of words and sights so widely transmitted to alter or control our minds.

In a debate in the Radio Mirror back in 1934, Charles Shaw of NYU tussled with no less a figure than Nicola Tesla, the man who in many senses invented radio, long before Marconi. Shaw voiced the concern that, since radio engineers in close proximity with transmission equipment seemed to have higher body temperatures, that perhaps radio waves were going to bake us all while we slept! Not only that, but its noise and drivel "lowered our cultural standards." Tesla was left to point out that radio waves were far too weak in amplitude, and the wrong frequency, to do any cooking, and as to radio's content, wisely noted that "You can't blame lowering our culture on radio," he insisted, "blame it on yourself and myself. The type of program that comes over the air is the type you and I want to listen to."

A light pole in San Francisco

But in recent years, alas, these same two intertwined fears have arisen again about cell phone frequencies. Cell phones were "cooking" our brains, they said, or were leading to an increase in cancer. The panic has increased with the implementation of "5G" technology -- particularly since 5G will require many more antennas to give its higher frequencies coverage. Ironically, these higher frequencies are exactly the reason that 5G is harmless; it is much less able than lower frequencies to penetrate solid objects, which would include peoples' skulls and buttocks. The human body is impenetrable to frequencies above 70 megahertz, a fact which Tesla took advantage of in an experiment that demonstrated their safety. He took alternating current of a very high frequency, but a very low amplitude (power) and used it to electrify himself and others (Mark Twain among them). The high frequency prevented its penetrating the body, and the low amplitude eliminated any other risk of harm. And yet, a lightbulb in the hand of such an electrified person would glow!

Mark Twain in Tesla's lab in 1894

People today don't get much of an education in these matters, it seems. They tremble in fear of the word "radiation," not understanding that all sound and light and heat are also radiation. They confuse high-level radiation, which is known as ionizing radiation (x-rays, gamma rays, etc.) which can be lethal, with the many forms of low-level radiation (infrared waves, radio waves, etc.) which are largely harmless. They also don't understand frequency and amplitude, the two fundamental principles at stake. As noted, the higher frequencies of the radio band are in fact the weakest in terms of being able to penetrate things -- this is why, for instance, submarines use a very low frequency, so that their signals can penetrate the deep ocean, and even the earth itself. At the other end of the spectrum, so-called "short" waves are useful, since they can't penetrate the earth's ionosphere, but bounce off it instead, increasing their potential range. Getting back to cellular signals, there's the fundamental fact that, the higher the frequency, the more information they can carry, and more and more information is what's wanted. So, some years ago, the FCC moved television off the old VHF (Very High Frequency) and UHF (Ultra High Frequency) bands, and sold them off to cellular carriers. UHF peaked out at 3 GHz, and the new services will utilize the top end of UHF, and on upwards to 6 GHz. So at least a portion of this "new" frequency will be the same old frequency that once brought you midnight horror movies and Bowling for Dollars.

And then there's amplitude. The 5G signal will be far too low in energy to do any damage. With old-fashioned single transmitter systems such as radio, many watts of power were needed to give the signal a wide range, but the 5G antennas that spike these worries are in fact very very low power -- they're essentially "repeaters," picking up and rebroadcasting a very low power signal to give it range. No cell phone company would waste more electricity on these than needed to power these mini-antennas -- and even if they tried, the FCC's regulations on phones would prevent them from doing so. The current regulation for phones is for an absorption rate of 1.6 watts per kilogram of mass, which isn't enough amplitude to warm the surface of your skin more than a tiny fraction of a degree, assuming your cellphone is in direct contact with it. All phones sold in the US must meet this standard. Ultimately, these high frequencies, because they can't penetrate the body, are dissipated in the form of heat -- and if it's heat you're worried about, the electric hot pad you use for your sore neck puts out hundreds of thousands of times more.

All this leaves us with just the content of our signals to worry about. And here I would agree with Tesla -- we get what we deserve. Even when, at times, it seems we don't want it -- since now, with all our clicks tracked in one way or another, the system itself works to try to predict our desires. And yet, despite the screaming echo chambers of the 'net, it's just the sound of our own voice, really -- and we have only ourselves to blame for it if we listen.

Fake News and the Death of the Donut

Many years ago -- in another age, an age where newspapers, television, and magazines thrived, and journalism schools were filled with bright young students, one commonly taught principle of fair reporting used the humble donut as its metaphor. The center of the donut -- the hole -- represented facts and matters of general consensus: George Washington was the first president of the United States, men walked on the moon on July 20th, 1969, and vaccines were vital to winning the war over dangerous childhood diseases. No one disagreed -- then, at least -- about these matters, and there was no need to present alternative views about them.

The donut itself consisted of matters about which reasonable people might disagree: Was the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit a good idea? Was Sir Winston Churchill the greatest British Prime Minister? Should we get rid of daylight savings time? When an issue fell within the donut, responsible journalism called for balance, and the representation of opposing views. Then there was the outside of the donut. Earth was colonized by aliens in 40,000 B.C. -- the Holocaust never happened -- Abraham Lincoln was never assassinated, but lived to the age of 87 in a secret log cabin in the hills of Virginia. These ideas were the stuff of the "lunatic fringe," and the proper way for serious journalists to respond to them was not to respond to them at all. This model, of course, assumed that journalists -- because they alone had the opportunity to disseminate news to millions of people -- could and should function as gatekeepers of our shared sense of reality. In such a day, Walter Cronkite could reasonably say, "And that's the way it is," knowing that the stories on the evening news had been carefully reported, fact-checked, and vetted before they went on the air.

We shouldn't necessarily blame the journalists of today for the death of the donut. It's still there, to some extent, at the larger national and international newspapers, and some (though not all) network news shows. But the gate that the press was keeping was in a wall -- a wall representing the cost of disseminating news, printing papers, erecting transmission towers and building television studios -- that simply no longer exists. There's no need for any news to pass through this gateway; like the lovely wrought-iron gate of Cremorne Gardens in London, it stands by itself, is easily walked around, and the gardens to which it once led have long vanished. There's no chance of such a barrier being rebuilt in the future, and none of the efforts of social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter are going to have much effect, since anyone who wants to can find a workaround to whatever filters or barriers they erect.

Is there any hope at all? Well, certainly the remaining outlets of old-fashioned journalism should be taking the lead by calling a lie a lie, and continuing to robustly fact-checking their own stories. Sites such as Snopes.com can help, and the increase of traffic there is a healthy sign that some people actually do want to check up on an implausible or dodgy story they've heard. But what it really means is that everybody is going to have to do their own checking, and that in addition to teaching mere facts, the task of education, now more than ever, must be to give students the tools to sort out the wheat of information from the chaff of useless babble, and the poison of disinformation, rumor, and conspiracy theories.

There's only one problem with this hope, of course -- that those who write, share, and consume those poisons have the same robust tools to keep reality from their gates as do those who favor reality. It's going to be a bumpy night.

Dissolution

 Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, there was one common understanding, in the United States at least: a college education was a good thing. Returning soldiers took advantage of the original GI Bill, and their children took advantage of what was, for a time, a very affordable college education (at least at public colleges and universities). One result was the greatest economic boom in the nation's history, but another was its most educated public. It would be hard for anyone back in the 1980's, (to pick a decade) to imagine a time when college attendance wasn't a reachable ideal and an unquestioned good for anyone who could manage it.

Today, a college education is has been questioned on every front; tuition has risen dramatically, and pundits -- who seem to take for granted that the best way to measure the value of something is in the increased earning power it confers -- declare that a useful trade-school education would be a much better deal. We're told that we have to let go of the idea that college is for everyone, as pressure mounts on public institutions (public in name only, as decades of cuts by state legislatures have meant that most state colleges and universities receive less than 1/3 of their funding from the state).  And now, at the behest of the current administration, there's an active attack on the fundamental existence of universities, one aimed -- so far -- at the wealthiest and most prestigious among them. Various reasons are offered for this antipathy, but the likeliest one, to my mind, is that it's just part of a broader anti-intellectual drive, of the sort that's been seen many times before in authoritarian regimes.

All this puts me in mind of a much earlier moment when a large number of institutions whose work was universally understood as contributing to the greater good came under government pressure to prove that worth. Secured in beautiful gothic buildings, supplied with dormitories for their residents, dining  halls for their meals, and chapels for their worship, the inhabitants of these institutions little dreamt that, in a few short years, their buildings would be reduced to roofless rubble -- and by their own king. Thomas Cromwell (yes, that one -- whose career is revisited in Hilary Mantel's recent novels) sent out "visitors" to investigate the practices at these places, and the reports that came back were damning: the people there were not following their own rules, they were living lives of suspicious comfort, and worse yet -- by providing spiritual services to their neighbors -- like the loaning of blessed girdles to aid women in childbirth -- they were perpetuating false superstitions and scurrilous beliefs.

The king, Henry VIII, used these reports as the justification for what would, earlier in his own reign, have been an unthinkable act. He, with the collusion of Parliament and a few strokes of a pen, dissolved all the monsateries of England, seized their buildings and properties, and sent troops to round up the valuables. The golden altar furniture and books were added to the King's own collections, while the buildings and land were given to his political allies as their personal estates. The monks and nuns were supposed to receive pensions, but there seems no record of many collecting them. What the King's men left behind, local villagers pillaged, finding new uses for door-hinges and window glass. The lead that had protected the roofs was rolled up and hauled away (it being a valuable metal at the time), and before long, the unprotected beams and boards rotted and collapsed.

To add to the irony, some of the funds raised by some of these closures were used to fund colleges and endowments, including what later became Christ Church at Oxford.

Proclamations

There is something innately attractive in the power of a single pen, especially for a ruler with tyrannical tendencies -- why bother with Parliaments and Legislatures when one can simply command one's subjects to obedience in whatever matter one wishes? One sovereign who was especially attracted to this option was Henry VIII, who issued three hundred and eighty-seven of them; in them, the king -- always speaking with a royal "we" -- commanded obedience in everything from prohibiting heretical books to setting the prices charged by fishmongers to declaring war on France. In his use of these instruments, Henry enjoyed several advantages over previous monarchs, the foremost of which was the invention of the printing press. Richard Pynson, appointed printer to Henry VII, continued in that role with his successor, receiving an annuity of £4. His royal appointment also came in handy when the King was in a book-banning mood, as an exception was always made for his Majesty's printer.

It's not certain how many copies of any given proclamation were printed, but the records seem to indicate that enough were made so that, in each of the several key cities and market towns of England, a copy could be posted by the market cross for all to see. Of course, at a time when literacy rates were quite low, their direct effect may have been limited, but it was often commanded that they be read aloud, that all would understand. In several instances, they were first promulgated in London with a fanfare of trumpets before being read aloud, presumably in stentorian tones. They were, at the same time, sometimes subject to later defacement or theft, in some cases leading to charges against those responsible.

Along those lines, on key question about proclamations was how they were to be enforced. If, as it happened, the proclamation specifically instructed the King's agents or local authorities to act, they would of course have complied, but in other cases it's much less clear -- how, for instance, were women to be prevented from reading Holy Scripture aloud, or punished if they did? One venue available to Henry VIII was his own special tribunal, the Court of Star Chamber, and indeed its records contain numerous actions brought against persons who disregarded a proclamation. In one instance, regarding a proclamation of 1530 "Prohibiting Erroneous Books and Bible Translations," it was noted that one "John Croker" was "cited for keeping a New Testament contrary to the King's proclamation." Readers of Hilary Mantel's historical novels, or viewers of their BBC adaptations, will not be surprised to learn that Thomas Cromwell, who sat in the Star Chamber court, was particularly concerned with any visible instances of non-compliance; the court's records include prosecutions for subjects for shipping all manner of goods -- barley, corn, beer, and other grains -- "contrary to proclamation."

And yet, from the King and Cromwell's perspective, it apparently seemed that the enforcement mechanism of these proclamations was not as robust as was needed, since in 1539 they drafted, and Parliament passed, the "Proclamation by the Crown" act -- giving the King's edicts the same force as if they had been Parliamentary statutes. Blackstone, in his Commentaries, called it ""a statute, which was calculated to introduce the most despotic tyranny; and which must have proved fatal to the liberties of this kingdom, had it not been luckily repealed." This repeal did not, of course, prevent proclamations from being issued; my three-volume set of Tudor Royal Proclamations goes up through a proclamation of 1553,  the final year of Edward VI's brief reign, which was promulgated on June 28th; a week later, Edward was dead. The proclamation permitted merchants to carry £4 out of the realm.

Breaking Dad

What would my father, a chemist with frustrations of his own, have thought of Walter White?


Like countless others over the past few years, my family and I have been dealing with a drug habit: an addiction to Breaking Bad, the AMC television series about Walter White, a former high school chemistry teacher who takes up a second career cooking crystal meth after he’s diagnosed with cancer. We’ve often debated exactly why we find the show so compelling -- of course there are the great performances by Bryan Cranston as White and Aaron Paul as his partner (and former student) Jesse Pinkman, the inventive camera work, and writing that’s as clear and sharp as a tray of new-cooked product.  For me, at any rate, what really drew me in at the start, and has kept me watching ever since, was the way White’s backstory -- a chemistry genius who had a shot at making millions in a tech startup company, but ended up teaching a roomful of bored high school students -- meshed with his new persona as a dangerous man, a man who can put a bullet through a drug-dealer’s head if he has to. Before his diagnosis, Walt was a man who’d had to swallow his pride, and whittle away his gifts in a job that had become deeply unfulfilling.  After his diagnosis, though his body is wracked with cancer, he regains his pride by deliberately, willfully breaking the law in order to provide for his family -- all the while making it a point of pride that his crystal is chemically superior to anything else on the market.

My father grew up in the farm country of western Washington State, picking strawberries and working in a pea cannery to help his family make ends meet.  His boyhood hero was Thomas Edison, and he dreamt of a career as an inventor, once alarming his parents when his attempt to build a galvanic cell set fire to the corner of the chicken coop. After graduating from Washington State, he got his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Purdue, and went to work for the one company with the most direct tie to Edison’s genius, General Electric.  At their lighting division “campus” at NELA Park in Cleveland, he too cooked crystals -- crystals of gallium arsenide -- in enormous blast furnaces, then passed electrical current through them to make some of the world’s first multi-colored LED lights.  And, although his bookshelves at home were laden with the paperweight-size awards that GE gave out to its top inventors, the company -- whose profits increasingly came from its financial-services division -- downsized his laboratory again and again, eventually closing down the entire research department and outsourcing it to a subcontractor who hired Ph.D.’s from Hungary at a tenth of my dad’s old salary.  I don’t think he ever forgave GE, and though he tried teaching chemistry for a while, quit in disgust at the low level of motivation among his students.  And then, as with Walt, there came an illness -- not cancer in his case, but Parkinson’s disease, which he came to believe might have been triggered by some of the chemicals he’d been exposed to during his years in the lab; in 2004, he died of the disease and its complications.

He certainly had plenty of reasons to feel resentful.  But would my dad have sympathized with Walter White?

At first, I didn’t think so. My dad was the kind of guy who would walk out of a movie theatre if there was a scene depicting an adulterous relationship; he was as honest as a boy scout and faithful as an old dog.  He never lied on his taxes or went over the speed limit, except once a year when he wanted to “clean the carbon” off the spark-plugs of his blue Oldsmobile Delta 88. But he was proud of his chemical knowledge.  A walk through the woods was an occasion for an explanation of osmosis, the process through which the sap ascended to the branches; when I was a kid, he would bring home old beakers (no round-bottom boiling flasks, alas) and once gave me a chunk of metallic sodium so that I could throw it in a pond and watch it explode.  If there was a mistake in chemistry on a science show -- or even in a science-fiction movie -- he’d write a strongly worded letter to the producers.  And he expected a reply, too.

But lawbreaking?  Deliberately making something that made other people addicted, and sick? And, when it seemed necessary, killing those who threatened him or stood in his way? I couldn’t imagine it. And yet, when I saw those duffel-bags full of rolled $100 bills in the early episodes, I thought to myself: wouldn’t my dad have felt satisfied if, after being forced into early retirement by GE, he’d been able to earn that kind of money?  If he could finally have bought that fishing shack up in the Cascade mountains where he’d hiked as a boy, gotten a new car, or even started his own lab to make something better and more valuable than he ever had for GE? Wouldn’t he be rooting for Walter White?

My Dad believed in good guys and bad guys; back in the days of old-time radio, his moral sense was honed by the Lone Ranger and the Cisco Kid.  He liked a good adventure story, and got a kick out of retro-styled films like Indiana Jones.  And he was a very emotional viewer, although you could only see that river when it spilled over its banks.  He could be a little unpredictable, but there was never any doubt as to where his sentiments lay. I remember watching the climactic scene of James Cameron’s Titanic with him -- where the elderly Rose drops the “Star of the Ocean” off the bow of the ship -- he sat through all it as stone-faced as Buster Keaton, but when Tom Hanks lost “Wilson” in Cast Away he wept profusely.

But he also had a powerful sense of justice.  Back when he was a student at Mount Vernon Junior College, he’d submitted a science essay for a contest.  The science teacher disqualified the paper, citing as a mistake a formula my dad knew was absolutely correct.  Dad wrote an angry letter to the school’s principal, who refused to overrule the teacher. Years later, when he heard through a friend that his old science teacher had died, he gave a grunt of satisfaction -- “served the bastard right,” he declared -- this from a man who almost never swore.

And, although he had a comfortable middle-class life -- more comfortable than Walt’s -- my dad had his share of money troubles later in life.  When my mom suffered a stroke, and his General Electric health policy refused to pay because he hadn’t contacted them for permission before she was admitted to the hospital, Dad went ballistic.  He  picked up the phone and argued his case for weeks, all the way up to the top -- Jack Welch, a former research chemist himself, was head of GE then -- and got them to change their mind.  He was proud of that.

But what if GE hadn’t come through with the money for my mom’s care?  What if my dad found he couldn’t provide for his family, despite all his years of hard work?  And what if he knew that his knowledge of chemistry could cover all his family’s bills -- would he have used it?

I doubt he would have ever considered the path of Walter White, but I have a feeling that he’d have sympathized with him all the same.  I know he’d have been pleased when the show got its chemistry right, and critical when they missed the mark.  “Mercury fulminate!  That’s much too unstable!”  I can almost hear him saying those words, along with a number of explanations of other chemicals mentioned in the show. So I suspect that he would have been just as closely glued to his screen as I am now -- even given Walter White’s increasing lies and deceits -- and I think he’d have been quietly rooting for him. In many ways, he was Walt --  he too had to learn to swallow his pride, to defer his dreams and waste time trying to justify his research to bosses who scarcely understood it.  He’d looked out over a lecture hall full of community college students as they chatted, or dozed, instead of listening to his impassioned explanation of the carbon-hydrogen bond.

The anger in Walt’s voice reminds me of my Dad’s anger, his frustration.  The way Walt uses chemistry in every one of his plans and devices reminds me of the way my Dad would use it to solve every household problem, from cleaning a stain on the carpet with hydrogen peroxide to graphing the temperature curve of the Thanksgiving turkey to tell when it would be done. There’s a purity about chemistry, a symmetry, a predictable architecture -- that actual life often seems to lack.  I think that’s where Walt’s rage comes from -- and it’s a rage he and my father shared. Late in his life, his mind drifting in the mists of Parkinson’s-related dementia, the anger was the one thing he could hold onto.  He raged, raged, against the dying of the light.

And in this dark and unpredictable world, where justice is so seldom really served, this is a rage we all can recognize.  Maybe that’s why we’re addicted to Breaking Bad.

NB: This is a repost from a few years ago, on the occasion of the final installments of BB.

Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!

Thomas Gradgrind

Consider this a sort of open letter to the American education system. It's been twenty-four years since the passing of the "No Child Left Behind" law, and fifteen since the promulgation of the so-called Common Core curruiculum. In my college classes for some years now, I've had students who've experienced their effects for the entirety of their primary and secondary educations. The neo-utilitarians have had their day, and here are the results: a generation of students who have learned the real lesson of the new regime: hunker down, follow instructions, and learn whatever is going to be on the test. Fiction is out; nonfiction is in; reading for pleasure is out; reading for content is in. After all, the only skills that matter are the ones that can be measured.

This approach forces students to discard their interests and passions, and instead think strategically about how to focus their efforts on measurable things. They inevitably develop a habit of scanning syllabi and readings to see what will be tested, but this makes for poor readers; when they encounter an ambiguity, or a difficult reading, they tense up in anticipation of being taken to task for some vague failure. My endeavor has always been to share my love of literature, to (I hope) instill in students an excitement, an interest, a sense of something personally significant for themselves, in everything they read -- but it's getting tougher each semester. Their curiosity has been hammered; their personal experience belittled, their idiosyncrasies ironed out. As a result, it sometimes seems that the pleasure of discovery of something new has given way to an anxiety about the unfamiliar.

Are they better prepared for the wonderful world of employment? Perhaps, so long as the employment they find demands repetitive goal-oriented work, with little room for innovation and frequent employee evaluations. They may, so long as they've had the prerequisites, do well in science, technology, engineering, and math -- though only at a rudimentary level. It's hard to see many new inventions, innovative theories, or speculative hypotheses coming from this generation, as anything they did or thought which deviated from the appointed path earned them the electric shock of a poor grade. Curiosity seems to have been largely amputated, and in its place our brave new Benthamites have instilled a simple wish for nothing more than a clear set of instructions and evaluative rules. Learn, do, demonstrate. Wash, rinse repeat.

It's a sad day for me, and for college educators generally. We can't turn back the hands of time -- we'll have to do what we can to help these students regain their own self-confidence, to revive and replenish their ossified curiosity. It will be hard work, the more so as professors themselves have been sent the same memo; our departments, programs, and fields of study already have to produce the "documentation" of what skills and knowledge we add, and our "metrics" for assessing the "outcomes" of our labors. The madness of measurement has overtaken us all, and if anything resembling real education is going to take place, it's going to have to do so by flying under and around the radar of this new regime.

Phil Ochs Time

As I read the latest news from the state of Mississippi, which once again has taken the lead in raw, unbridled, smug, self-satisfied hatred, I felt increasingly angry. And then, as I sometimes do, I went beyond my anger, beyond my frustration: I decided it was Phil Ochs time.

And it almost always is. It's no coincidence that Billy Bragg found evoked him with "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night"-- for indeed, he's still "as 'live as you or me" -- in fact, he's more alive now than he ever has been. Phil always claimed to just grab his songs from the headlines -- as witness, the wry title of his first LP,  All the News that's Fit to Sing -- but there was a whole lot more to them than that. Phil was a sort of tuning fork for his times, but in being that, he was tuned right in to many of the timeless foibles every era shares.

Many hailed (or dismissed) Phil as a mere "protest" singer -- a label I'm sure he wouldn't have minded -- but there was so much more to him than that. He could write the greatest anti-war ballad ever penned ("I Ain't Marching Anymore"), and at the same moment depict the common sailor in a way any Navy veteran couldn't help but admire ("The Men Behind the Guns"). At a moment when many hardcore lefties were dismissing JFK as a sellout, Phil wrote an elegy for the slain president that stands with Whitman's among the finest ever written -- and yet, his acerbic tirades against American interventionism never lost their edge, as in "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo" or "Cops of the World." And he always had a crazy sense of ironic humor (on both sides), which bubbled up in songs such "Draft Dodger Rag" and "Love Me, I'm A Liberal."

Another side of Phil was that he dug deep in the annals of American poetry, and had an uncanny knack for setting poems to music. His version of Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman" rescues that poem from what, in mere printed words, might seem maudlin, crafting it into a ballad that can bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened anti-romantic. But still better is his setting of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells," which transmogrifies a tuneful poem into a poetic tune, complete with guitar harmonics for the bells themselves -- it's a masterpiece.

It's often said that Phil felt despair, and lost his way, later in his career. Fear he surely felt, but his way was always sure; in his late musings such as "The Flower Lady" and "Pleasures of the Harbor," he reached a lyric height far beyond the common songwriter's scope, and with "Crucifixion" he revisited the Kennedy assassination with an apocalyptic overlay of epic proportions. Many of these songs are the equal -- some might say, the better -- of Dylan's anthems of the time. Phil and Bob were, indeed, always linked together; it was Phil that brought Bob out of motorcycle-accident retirement to Madison Square Garden's Evening with Salvador Allende. And, back in the day, it was to Phil's apartment that Bob went to share "Mr. Tambourine Man" for the first time.

Phils Ochs took his own life forty years ago in Far Rockaway, New York. Och's biographer, Marc Eliot, wrote about how personally that loss was felt, He predicted that, when Dylan dies, his death -- though greater in some wider sense -- would never be felt as personally as was Phil's.

And I agree.

Debt

West Germany signs up for its 50% debt reduction in 1953

What, exactly, is debt? The question takes on new urgency as, yet again, the economic wise men of the European Union declare that Greece must submit to their terms -- for, after all, is there not a great debt at stake? Not to address it in the EU's terms, clearly, would be irresponsible and disastrous -- and so, their ministers speak to Greece -- the cradle of the civilization they claim to represent -- as one would to a child.

The Greek government has debts, indeed, and Greek banks have still more. But what does this really mean? Nietzsche was hardly the first to notice that the German word for guilt (schuld) derives from the older concept of debt (schulden). In English texts, "forgive us our debts" was an older and more common form of the Lord's Prayer's "forgive us our trespasses." Debt is sin, Christ is our "redeemer," and entrance into the kingdom of heaven is to be -- in these terms -- a forgiveness of debts.

We in the U.S. like to pillory the profligate -- it's almost a national passion. Republicans in the US Congress took the lead in making personal bankruptcy more onerous, and have harped, from the Reagan era to our own, on the evil of deficits, and the need to cover any expense with a parallel cut. It's become almost a mantra with the Tea Party set.

But there's a problem here. For one, the debt of nations is not at all like the debt of people. Ordinary people can't print their own currency, or re-value it, or issue bonds to fund their new chimney. Nations can do this, because they have the larger essential reserves -- a labor force, roads, cities, minerals and other natural resources to generate future wealth, and that creates the ability to evaluate their worth, and trade in it.  But even more than this, the debt of nations is not guilt, nor is their spending like the profligacy of private persons.

Greece has suffered. It has suffered for its overspending (which, as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has pointed out, was no so much more horrific than that of many other nations), for its failure to live up to the expectations of the creditors who loaned it and its banks generous funds during what seemed to be boom times. The EU forces have imposed austerity to an amazing extent -- cuts in pensions, tax increases, cuts in social services, privatization of national treasures -- its entire economy has shrunk by more than a quarter. If Greece today is less well-prepared to pay back its debts -- or rather, the debts of its banks -- than it was several years ago, it's largely because it's taken the EU prescription of austerity.

And what is "austerity"? Very clearly, it is a special sort of punishment, one reserved to errant nations. They must be made to pay! Even if every last citizen is to starve, even if the cure kills the patient, pay they must. The latest statements from the German finance minister make it quite clear that the goal of the latest agreement, is not to make it more likely to recoup Greek debt -- rather, it is to punish the Greeks.

One should see at a glance how much this sort of "debt" is like "guilt." But there's one way in which "debt" is different, when it's money that's at stake: those who loan money expect a profit from it. They don't lend out of kindness, nor was the debt incurred out of errant sins. They gave because they expected to receive, and then some.

But let's not focus on Greece -- let's look at Ireland, a country which willingly accepted the EU's austerity prescriptions. Now, seven years later, we are told that there are "signs of recovery" -- signs evident to economists, its seems, but hard for the ordinary Irish citizen to see. Any number of years is too much to endure such pain, the more so when all it really does is satisfy the creditors (who, one might imagine, might prefer to be satisfied sooner -- but not, it seems, as much as they prefer the glee of punishing another).

And seven years, interestingly, the the time laid out for Sh'mittah -- the traditional forgiveness of debts in the Jewish Torah. In that year, debts are to be forgiven, and the poor welcomed to glean in the fields. Seems to me it's time.

Blurred Lines

Blurred lines, indeed. The jury verdict of 7.4 million dollars against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke offers yet another example of how juries -- that is to say, how most people -- misunderstand originality in music. Because, in fact, music is by its very nature unoriginal -- every melody line, every hook, every grace note is but a variation on a number of ancient themes, progressions, and melodies. And in fact, that's why we like music -- precisely because it feels both new and familiar. As former Vandals drummer and present-day entertainment lawyer Joe Escalante remarked to the LA Times, it's a dark day for creativity, and in the end, this will be a net loss for music fans" -- but "good news for lawyers and the bitter everywhere."

There are, contrary to popular belief, only a limited number of musical possibilities out there. Nearly all pop music is in 4/4 time, and relies upon a number of common 'progressions' -- chord sequences -- I/V/vi/IV, I/V/vi/iii (the "Pachebel's Canon/Lighter Shade of Pale progression), vi/V/IV/V, and so on. There are a few less common ones, and of course jazz and other genres use a wider variety of them than popular music (though, it's been argued, all jazz essentially derives from the basic blues pattern). Within these, there' a restricted number of possible melodies -- many, but far from infinite -- and, like some robot throwing vast amounts of spaghetti against the fridge to see if it sticks, songwriters and composers have tried out them all. Some, it seems, are stickier than others -- and stickiness is what listeners want, after all -- so they are turned to repeatedly.

So of course we've been here before. And before. And before. Perhaps the most egregious example until now was the case of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" vs. the Chiffons "He's So Fine" -- or, as it's officially known, "Bright Tunes Music vs. Harrisongs Music" -- details at USC's fabulous Music Copyright Infringement Resource). In that case, it came down to a few of what were called 'grace notes'(actually appoggiatura), which suggested the possibility of what the judge called 'unconscious  borrowing.' The damages awarded for this were spectacular: 1.6 million dollars -- 6.5 million in today's currency, nearly as much as the Gaye case.

Such an award is justified by its champions as discouraging 'illegal' infringements, but in fact it does no such thing. If they had lawyers enough, there are tens of thousands of songs whose authorship could be litigated in this way -- and almost any new pop song you can imagine would be a fresh candidate. Instead, it will stifle creativity -- Harrison himself admitted he was 'too paranoid' to write any new material for years after the lawsuit --by preventing the natural and inexorable process of fusing the old and the new that's what Joni Mitchell called 'the star-maker machinery behind the popular song.'

Part of the problem is the way music copyright is handled. The songwriter rights, also known as publishing rights, date back to the era when sheet music sales were a key source of revenue. That's not true today, but these underlying rights still apply, since any recording of them -- including the 'original' one -- relies on a license to to 'use' them. It's why, when "My Sweet Lord" was in dispute, the parties weren't Harrison himself or the Chiffons, but Harrisongs and Bright Tunes, the music's publishers. And, when boiled down to sheet music, songs look a lot more similar than they in fact are -- since part of what makes a song a hit is the arrangement and performance of a particular version. Ins some cases, a cover version does better than the original -- Richie Havens's "Here Comes the Sun," for instance, was a bigger hit on the charts than Harrison's own version -- but in that case, the 'publisher' portion of the royalties went to Harrison anyway -- as would be the case with any covers.

But the problem is, almost all music is a 'cover' of something. Boiled down to sheet music, the similarities are greater than the differences -- but in this modern era, when sheet music isn't even printed in most cases, this hardly seems the point.

What we need, I'd argue, is the throw out the entire existing copyright system for music. Get rid of the 'sandwich' -- publishing rights/performance rights/broadcast rights/non-earthbound communication rights -- and replace it with a system in which 10% of all royalties for all new songs are placed in a fund available to those who can make a case for similarity to older ones; damages should be capped. Then, pay a fixed portion for any performance or rebroadcast, accounting for the (divided) writing royalties. This may sound complex, but in fact, it's been tacitly done within the industry for decades -- which is why cases such as the Gaye/Williams/Thicke one are rare. Let's 'fess up, folks -- when it comes to pop music, there really isn't anything new under the sun.

New Ideas about Policing -- from 1829

The very idea of a "police force" in the modern sense was in every way a Victorian invention. In London in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, crime was fought by an unwieldy array of forces: parish officers (beadles), private night watchmen, and the infamous "Bow Street Runners," whose principal job was apprehending persons wanted on charges to ensure their appearance in court, but who did little or nothing of what we'd conceive of as "patrolling."

The force behind this force was British PM Sir Robert Peel, whose name gave us two popular early nicknames for officers of the police he established ("Bobbies" and "Peelers"). In 1829, in the Police Act, he set forth a clear set of guidelines for these officers, which became known as Peel's Principles. Peel realized that, absent the public's trust and co-operation, the very idea of a police force was doomed to failure.

The police -- in London and elsewhere -- have changed in many ways since 1829. The MET, as it's known for short, has had to expand its mission and learn to tackle new challenges. The realization that plain-clothes police could help solve crimes led to the establishment of the Detective Division; the challenge of the Fenians, who were willing to blow things up to advance the cause of Irish independence, led to the creation of the Special Branch. The Met now even has special riot control units, some of members of which conducted themselves very poorly indeed in the killing of Ian Tomlinson in 2009, an event which -- though absent the element of race -- had much in common with recent American incidents.

But despite that, Peel's original principles would make as much sense for reforming the police in the UK as for reforming them here in the US where I live. The biggest difference is that the police were imagined primarily as a force to prevent crime, rather than merely apprehending criminals after the fact. But just as important was Peel's insistence that the police must be thought of -- and must think of themselves -- not as a special class of persons with unusual powers, but simply as "members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence."

"The police are the public and that the public are the police" -- that's the way Peel put it. We could hardly do better to "reform" the police than to re-assert this one-hundred-and-ninety-six year old sense of values.

The Assessment Craze

In the past decade, the movement for education “assessment” has reached a fevered pitch, moving from public elementary and high schools into higher education, at least at most state colleges and universities.  This has been done, ostensibly, in response to a public demand for “accountability,” another loaded word, and this demand has been translated into the most absolute of terms. At my own college, every department and program was, in essence, ordered to develop an assessment plan.  The buzzwords of these plans – rubrics, targets, educational outcomes, and so forth – came along with the orders, though each department was ostensibly free to decide what they would describe as their “outcomes,” and how they would say they would meet them, and measure their success in doing so. And it came with a not-so-veiled threat: if you don't come up with an assessment plan, we'll come up with one for you.'

The next step in this utilitarian, quality-control notion of education, of course, was to make sure that these "outcomes," elaborately measured and assessed, were used to reform -- or more precisely, to penalize -- the educators and pupils who failed to meet the chosen benchmarks. It's a notion so forward-looking that it takes one right back to the 1860's, when Lord Palmerston's government promulgated regulations stipulating the each pupil failing their exams on a prescribed subject would result in the school losing 2s. 8d. in the next year's funds. As the eminent Victorianist Richard Altick describes it, "a new premium was put upon rote memory, for throughout the year every effort was bent toward grinding into the child the sentences or the facts the inspector might demand of him." Bradley Headstone, Dickens's dark schoolmaster in Our Mutual Friend, could hardly have been more pleased.

The word "education" comes from the Latin ex-ducere, “to lead forth" and shares a root with “Duke.”  But it can also mean “to draw forth,” and shares this sense with ductile, meaning stretchable or pliable, as with ducts, and duct tape.  On the difference between these two senses a whole worldview depends: if to educate is to lead, to command, to instill by and with authority, then doubtless it makes sense to see how good one’s pupils are at following instructions, mastering principles, and learning protocols.  But if it means more to “draw forth” -- and this is the shade of its meaning I would emphasize -- then it is not a matter of commanding, but of encouraging students to stretch and bend their minds, making pliable the rigid postures into which authority, and life, have pressed us.   The first sense can be measured, up to a point: I’m sure many baby-boomers such as myself remember the 20-item quiz, which began with with “read all questions before you start” and ended with item 20 being “put down your pencil and don’t answer any of the questions.”  But mental ductility, unlike that of physical materials, is almost impossible to quantify, since some part of it necessarily involves breaking the rules, thinking outside of one’s ideological confines, and questioning presuppositions.

There has been, I will admit, an attempt to take cognisance of this vital quality -- the phrase that is usually used is “critical thinking.”  English professors such as myself generally like this phrase; to us it suggests a complex array of thought and capability.  But what is it, and how might we measure it? One current test defines it as “analyzing problems, generating logical and reasonable approaches to solve and implement solutions, reflecting consistent value orientations” (CTAB). Another assessment rubric recently discussed in my department speaks cryptically of “breaking down informational materials,” “using previously learned information in new and concrete situations” and “creatively or divergently applying prior knowledge.” Such definitions offer little encouragement; to me, they sound more like a plan for recycling than a definition of innovative or genuine analysis. But it matters not: in essence, all these plans are, at their foundations, anti-intellectual assaults on genuine learning.  For true learning is not a plan, not a fixed process, and very rarely a readily-measurable thing. As Albert Einstein -- a famously slow learner - observed, "It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. For this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom."

I've been teaching at the college level since 1986 -- thirty years and counting. If this new regime of supposed "assessment" has its day, then higher education as we've known it will soon be coming to a close, to be replaced by a utilitarian yardstick that knows no value other than, or beyond, mere functionality.  Would the last person in the university please turn out the lights?