I’m in the office working late; I need music in the background to keep me focused.  Here are some YouTube vids I’ve been using for that purpose. 

Heartography, by Zoe Deschanel.

Al Wood on a RISA Solid Tenor Uke.

I Can See Clearly Now, played by Colin R Tribe.

Tico Tico, performed by Bernard Massuir.

Printouts of my recent comments

I (Acilius) am a frequent commenter on Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For blog.  As regular readers of Los Thunderlads are all too well aware, I can get pretty long-winded, so I try to restrain myself.  I was doing pretty well on the current thread, until I broke down completely and left a multi-screen essay about The Nature of Democracy.  After the jump, an explanation of how I came to display such poor manners.

Alison’s post is a picture of a Jack o’Lantern carved to look like Mo, the central character in the Dykes to Watch Out For strip for most of its existence, together with an explanation of who carved it.  My first comment was a single line, praising the Jack o’Lantern:

Fantastic! That’s my favorite piece of DTWOF homebrew yet.

So far, so appropriate.  Then another commenter mentioned two violent incidents in the UK, one of which resulted in the victim’s death.  I asked if the victim of the other was likely to make a full recovery; the answer came back yes.  I asked if violence in general was becoming much more common in the UK of late; the answer came back no, probably not. 

Commenter “Kate L” mentioned the referenda on rights for same-sex couples that were about to be held in Maine and Washington state.  After the voters in Maine rejected marriage equality, Kate and others expressed the opinion that civil rights issues should not be put on the public ballot.  That’s the sort of question that gets me going at great length, so I kept myself from commenting.  Instead, I picked up a remark by Seattle-based commenter  ”MC” announcing that Bailey-Coy, a bookstore in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, would be closing:

@MC: Sorry to hear about Bailey-Coy. Horizon Books on Capitol Hill closed this May (or was it April?), and now this. Is Spine & Crown still there? I suppose the Twice Sold Tales location on Harvard Avenue and the Half Price Books on Belmont are still in operation.

MC responded that those three stores are hanging on, and that Seattle’s jumbo bookstore Elliott Bay will be moving to Capitol Hill.  I replied to this:

@MC: Thanks for the update! I consider both parts of that to be good news. I avoid Pioneer Square, so I rarely get to Elliott Bay books. And Spine & Crown is my idea of the perfect bookstore. It’s tiny, cluttered, with an extremely idiosyncratic selection and a proprietor who is usually too engrossed in intellectual discussions with his regulars to bother you while you browse. I do have mixed feelings about the proprietor’s daughter’s habit of licking the logo on the Penguins, though I don’t know if she still does that. When she was three she used to lick every Penguin she could reach. I think she may by now have reached the ripe old age of four and outgrown such childish ways.

On the other hand, Bailey-Coy was my wife’s idea of the perfect bookstore- spacious, clean, with a very small but very well-chosen selection of titles in social science, and usually a number of children who gather round her wheelchair and ask politely to pet her assistance dog. More than once she ended up reading to a circle of little ones there. So I’d better be diplomatic when I break the news to her.

(Getting a little lengthy and a little personal, but still not multi-screen.) 

The idea that civil rights questions should not be decided by popular vote kept coming up, though.  I kept wondering what other procedure people had in mind for settling them.  It got very confusing, as commenters talked about “the political process” or “the democratic process” when they appeared to mean the particular process Maine had just gone through.”  So I broke down and wrote this:

Hmmm…

I grant you that the electoral process in modern states is a very strange way of deciding important questions. Large numbers of people file into little booths where they will be briefly isolated from human contact. Alone in the booth, each person fills out a form expressing his or her preferences on various questions. Public policy is set based on a tabulation of these anonymous responses.

What I have to disagree with is the identification of this odd ritual as THE political process, as though any process for deciding questions of civil rights and public policy were not political. The deliberations of courts are political processes, and are usually reactionary political processes at that. When courts have been forces for social progress, as the US Supreme Court was from about 1954 to about 1974 and other courts have been here and there, it’s been because there were movements in civil society that pushed them in that direction. Left to their own devices, the judges give us Dred Scott, the Reconstruction cases, Plessy v Ferguson, Hopwood v Texas, Bush v Gore, Ledbetter, etc etc etc.

What is true of the judges is true of legislators, army officers, and all the other authorities various groups turn to when voting doesn’t produce good results. As of course it would be- those groups are all chosen by the elite and staffed by people who either belong to the elite or aspire to join it.

As for the 0-31 result of the state referenda on marriage equality, I’d call for some historical perspective. The losses keep coming, it’s true. But they get narrower and narrower, and the defeated measures are bolder and bolder. Five years ago, a measure like the one that barely lost in Maine on Tuesday would never have made it to the ballot- it would have been much too radical. Ten years ago, it would have been science fiction. Today, civil unions are the conservative position; when Bill Clinton was president, they were the most anyone involved in the issue thought we would see in our lifetimes. That progress has not come from the abstract rightness of marriage equality and certainly not from the benevolence of any group in power, but from the debates that have gone on around the country. Even people who have voted to discriminate against same-sexers have seen people standing up for their rights and asking why they shouldn’t be free to live their lives. The longer we keep that going, the more effect it will have. If we retreat to the courts or the academy, we may get some good results in the short term, but we will never build the social consensus that is the chief reward of political activity.

You can see that I was getting carried away, not only by the excessive length, but also by the over-the-top conclusion.  I would certainly not be able to defend the claim that “social consensus” is “the chief reward of political activity.”  In my defense, I would say that like all blog comments, it was a hasty composition, not rewritten.  

One commenter encouraged me by praising this contribution; another encouraged me even more by arguing intelligently against me.  That was the point at which I lost all restraint and wrote this monster comment:

@Feminista: “Brilliant”? I’m blushing. Thank you!

@Andrew B: Thank you for your thoughtful reply. For my part, the only part of the Anglo-American judicial system that I see as a defense against the tyranny of the majority is the jury system. If you put twelve randomly selected citizens in a room and insist that they sit down together and talk until they come to a consensus, you get far different and far more enlightened results than you would if you sent the same twelve people to file into little booths one by one. Not perfect results certainly, but how hard do you think prosecutors would have to work to prove cases against poor defendants if criminal verdicts were decided the way we decide elections for public office? Judges and prosecutors are no real defense against the tyranny of the majority, since they hold their positions by virtue of the ability of their sponsors to follow and manipulate majority opinion.

Also, I must say that the examples you give of influences on the Warren Court and the early Burger Court are also examples of civil society movements. The elites who were concerned about how the USA was perceived in the countries undergoing decolonization may not have been part of mass movements, but the perceptions people had in those countries were relevant to their government’s policies only insofar as they showed up in popular movements that made demands for or against alliances with the USA.

While the the NAACP and others presented fine arguments for civil rights and civil liberties in federal court in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, their predecessors had been making equally fine arguments in the same courts since the 1870s, only to meet with judicial rulings that upheld absurdly narrow readings of the Reconstruction Amendments. What changed was not the soundness of the arguments the lawyers brought to court, but the willingness of the judges to listen to those arguments. And that willingness in turn came from a recognition of political demands for equality.

Secret ballots may be the best way we’ve come up with so far to minimize voter intimidation and bribery, and for that reason may sometimes be necessary. But that doesn’t keep elections by secret ballot from being a bizarre way of making political decisions. Politics is about people, about relationships among people. It’s how we keep groups of people working together. So it is not intuitively obvious that political decisions ought to result from a process that requires individual people to be concealed from those around them and to interact only with an inanimate object.

And it isn’t just casting ballots in secret that is strange. Counting votes is strange too. Social scientists have studied groups that operate by consensus and contrasted them with groups that operate by majority vote. What they keep finding is that the groups that make decisions by consensus don’t take any longer to get things done than do those that make decisions by majority vote. Majority-vote groups may announce decisions more quickly, since all they need is 50% + 1. But after they’ve announced that decision, they have to spend as much time cajoling and wheedling and browbeating the minority into coming along with what they are supposed to do as the consensus-based groups had spent in open discussion.

Anyway, I grant that we are stuck with mass society, and bureaucratization, and vast inequalities of income, and other circumstances that make direct democracy impossible. So we are stuck with a choice between, on the one hand, doing a lot of voting and getting involved in campaigns preparatory to voting, or, on the other hand, becoming isolated from each other and letting the power elite do as it will.

Again, both the excessive length of the comment and its culmination in an indefensibly exaggerated claim show that I was getting carried away.  The discussion has returned to bookstores, with no additional remarks on the question of how we can best put rights into law.  I have apologized for being such a blowhard and have resolved to be less long-winded in the future.

The 40th anniversary of US children’s TV series Sesame Street has been getting a great deal of publicity; for example, the Google homepage has been decorated with Muppets all week.  So I keep wanting to hear Nancie de Ross’ version of  the Sesame Street theme.  Go to her myspace page to hear it. 

 I also want to mention a user-generated website, “I Used to Believe.”  Readers tell of how they understood things when they were little.  For example, “Dawn” admits:

When I was about 7 I stayed with my grandparents for the summer. They kept talking about how they were going to “win a bagel”. I just didn’t understand why they were going to win a bagel. I later learned they were going to buy a camper, a Winnebago!

From “j.m.”:

Before I could read, but with some letter recognition, I mistakenly believed the crosswalk in front of the church said “Presbyterian Crossing”. One morning I asked my Dad where the Baptists and Catholics crossed the street.

From “reset button”:

up until the age of eleven i used to think that all pregnant women had to do was push their belly buttons back in to make the stork bring the baby. when i asked my mother this she laughed at me and said through happy tears “if only”!

Here’s the first new YouTube uke video from New Zealand’s Anna Van Riel in quite a while. 

Einey Meiny Miney Mo

If you have a time machine, you can travel back to when they were selling pomegranates for $2.00/lb and save even more!  

Al Wood, proprietor of the indispensible Ukulele Hunt, is also an excellent uker himself, as this cover of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Music for a Found Harmonium” shows. 

I’ve been a fan of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (their stuff is for sale here) since running across the ballet Still Life at the Penguin Cafe, which PCO founder Simon Jeffes wrote based on pieces he’d done with the original incarnation of the group.

UPDATED, 6 November: Armelle Europe has put an interview with Al on Ukulele and Languages in which this video is featured.  The interview is terrific, as we would expect of Ukulele and Languages.

Not the sort of art you usually find on a bathroom wall.  Click the picture to read more.

implicit.harvard.edu

“Project Implicit blends basic research and educational outreach in a virtual laboratory at which visitors can examine their own hidden biases.”

Take a test.

Florence King

Fifteen writers list “The Best Books You Haven’t Read“; I don’t know about you, but the only one on any of the lists that I had read was Sam Tanenhaus’ pick, The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham.  And that one did not make a very good impression; it struck me as one part dumbed-down Max Weber and three parts shameless plagiarism from Lawrence Dennis.  The other books all sound good, though.  In particular, David Bromwich’s recommendations of two stories by Elizabeth Bowen (“Mysterious Kor” and “Sunday Afternoon”) sent me to the library.  And I always take notice when Florence King speaks; she recommends Kathleen Winsor’s Star Money, which upon its publication in 1950 was received as quasi-pornography.  That first edition sold extremely well, but garnered just one respectful review.  Granted, that review was by André Maurois, which may have taken some of the sting out of the rejection by the other critics.   

Florence King also comes to my mind whenever the name of Ayn Rand is mentioned, and in this issue a piece discusses Ayn Rand’s  Atlas Shrugged.  King’s review of a biography of Rand, reprinted in her With Charity Toward None, quotes a line of Rand’s about how it feels to be a truly creative individual confronted with the unreasoning hatred of lesser beings.  Read the line again, King says, and you’ll realize that it is a very apt description what it’s like to be on the receiving end of any kind of senseless prejudice.  King surmises that Rand, who spent her girlhood as a Jew in late-Tsarist St Petersburg, had found “a way to write about anti-semitism without ever mentioning the Jews.”  That’s a neat trick. 

Nor is it the whole of Rand’s appeal.  Her extreme individualism may not stand up to philosophical analysis, and it may not survive exposure to any well-developed social science.  But what she tries to offer is something that is urgently needed in today’s world.  Look at the USA.  Ever more of the young are in schools, ever more of the old are in nursing homes, ever more of those in-between are in prisons.  At this rate every American will eventually be an inmate in one or another such institution, always an object of service, of scrutiny, of control.  One will create nothing, own nothing, decide nothing.  The major political parties don’t seem to object to this trend; on the contrary, both are committed to accelerating it.  The Democrats promise better accommodations to inmates; the Republicans remind them that the institutions in which they are confined have to turn a profit.  Rand may not have known how to stop this trend, but at least she demanded that it should be stopped.   

A review of George Gilder’s The Israel Test includes a couple of provocative paragraphs:

After thumbing through The Israel Test, blogger Matthew Yglesias speculated that Gilder may be a kind of WASP who “likes Israel in part because he wishes American Jews would leave him alone and go live there instead.” This interpretation strikes me as insufficient. Perhaps a better one can be derived from Gilder’s final chapter, in which he paints a portrait of his artistically and financially successful ancestors and the upper-class WASP world in which he was raised. The focal point is an incident that occurred when he was about 17. While trying to impress an older girl, his summer tutor in Greek, he blurted out something mildly anti-Semitic. The young woman dryly replied that she was in fact “a New York Jew.” Gilder was mortified. He relates that he has never quite gotten over the episode. It is the kind of thing a sensitive person might long remember. Variations on this pattern are not uncommon in affluent WASP circles to this day: guilt or embarrassment at some stupid but essentially trivial episode of social anti-Semitism serve as a spur for fervent embrace of Likud-style Zionism. Atonement. It would not be surprising if a similar process helped to shape George W. Bush’s mentality.

This sequence might be amusing if the real-life consequences were less sinister. It is now often acknowledged—if not widely regretted—that Palestinians have had to pay the price for Nazism and the Holocaust. It is they, after all, not the Germans, who are now stateless. But Gilder’s confession, and the book it animates, establishes a corollary to this truism: Palestinians are now required to pay not only for the crimes of the Nazis but for the genteel anti-Semitism of America’s fallen WASP elite. 

How right these paragraphs are, I don’t know.  They fit very nicely with my usual suspicion that philosemitism, including “Christian Zionism,” is simply an aspect of antisemitism. 

Eve Tushnet is proud of her column this month, a description of Washington, DC’s Martin Luther King, Junior Public Library.

Last night I dreamed my allergist told me I was allergic to- and I quote- “Flying Ravioli Monster.” I questioned her (in my dream) and she explained that particular allergen comes from the inside out. I woke up feeling itchy and snotty. I had somehow forgotten to wheel my air purifier into the bedroom last night.

Of course we all know there’s no Flying Ravioli Monster.

There is, however, a Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Sauce be upon It!

Ramen!