Got your Goat?

The goat-screeching remix of Taylor Swift's Trouble makes me smile.

Perfect.

Then to see the many subsequent goat-enhanced videos — Bon Jovi's Livin' on a Prayer = favorite — I can't help but blush.

What's going on?

Edward Albee has a good idea.

His excellent play, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? presents unsettling questions of love and infidelity, human and bestial sexual appetites and more.

Since Swift's song offers and ode to breaking up...

Do we need to know something more about the goading-goat creator?  Or Swift?

All quite fascinating.

Plus good reason for more people to read or see Albee's play, well worth your time.

Trouble, trouble, trouble...

Back to the Future

History triumphed at the Oscars.  From Argo to Lincoln, Anna K and Les Mis, this year's blockbusters shared a way-back-when patina that lent an extra gravitas to their theatrical brilliance.

Less brilliantly, Seth MacFarlane's appallingly minsogynst performance, complete with an ode to cleavage and jokes about domestic violence, reminded us of history's darker underbelly.  (When you get scolded by Denny Crane, you know it's really, really bad.)

Hollywood often looks to Great Men and Great Moments for great drama. At their best, historical films can broaden our understanding of and appreciation for the past—far more so than the abysmal textbooks and memorize-to-death approaches of standard high school social studies courses.

I can't imagine the Civil War without Ken Burns and for better and worse, my memory of the Civil Rights era will be forever shaped by The Help.

War wins disproportionate cinematic attention, pre-designed for suspense and special effects: Hurt Locker, Band of Brothers, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning Vietnam—you could fill a page without even trying.

This year's Zero Dark Thirty made history as much as any film ever has, with a powerful ideological gaze back upon 9/11 and the global response to twenty-first century terrorism.

Argo, a bit tamer, got the highest honor, announced from the White House in a coup of Oscar-night performances.  (Even descending from the Star Trekked heavens, William Shatner can't come close to competing with Michelle Obama.)

Indeed, Iran better watch out because the next movie in which it appears might have a lot more bunker-busting, nuclear-weapons-destroying drama than this quite tame story of hostages' escape.

Why all the backwards-looking films?

We have a troublesome future, from cyber warfare to super storms, failed states and needless human suffering—poverty, disease, violence against women and poorly funded or non-existent educational systems.

We combat this future with well-coifed beards and other subtle signs of male power.

Having grown up in the futurist worlds of Terminator and Blade Runner, I've both enjoyed and been profoundly troubled to watch these movies of yesterday become the reality of tomorrow.  Though I think I got a head start from reflecting upon the costs and consequences of these dystopic depictions.

With the Oscars as a reflection of popular culture, we've got our backs to the future. Not a Michael J. Fox-like adventure with the chance to change the fate of human relationships, but a closed-minded, narrow-minded view of the way things were that blinds us to the desperate, trying realities we now and will soon confront.

It's time we turned around.

Killer Bodies

On Valentine's Day, Oscar Pistorius, the famed legless runner, shot and killed his supermodel girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Controversy surrounds Pistorius' status as a killer.  Did he act in self defence?  Or murder out of rage?

In a country troubled by violent crime, Steenkamp's death has become trapped between homeowners' fears about violent robberies and the everyday reality of South African women, who live under threat of violence more severe than almost anywhere else in the world.

Does Pistorius body bear as much responsibility as his mind and emotions?

In his defence, lawyers claim he faced a greater threat as a legless man and thus needed to shoot multiple times through a closed door in order to protect himself.

Many athletes favor supermodel partners: Steenkamp poses for FHM.

Prosecutors stumbled over the discovery of potential stimulants or other body-enhancing products in Pistorius' apartment—could this have been a hormone-induced mania?

If one or both carries any weight, the truth that remains: Steenkamp died in a bloody puddle.

Athletes' violent relationships make regular appearances in the news.  OJ Simpson and Nicole Smith, to provoke a now distant memory, or Tiger Woods' infidelity and car-accident escape from his home.  Boxers, baseball players, football stars, hockey champions -- even mild-mannered runners it now appears.  Or cyclists: Lance Armstrong as delusional, egotistical perpetrator of unreality.

The list goes on and on and on.

Whether as part of the massive doping scandals unfolding before us, or on high school sports fields or elementary school play yards, we must take on the role of harmful, uncontrolled violence in competitive athletics.  

Sports should subsume our animalistic and inhuman rage in a controlled, rule-governed and reasonably safe arena of play.  Off the field, then, we can relax and enjoy one another's company as friends.

Tragically, much of men's off-the-field violence gets directed toward women.  They yell, they grab, they beat and strangle and kill.

Women often direct that violence against themselves (or occasionally, other women -- Tonya Harding?!?)  

Yesterday after leaving the gym, a female friend commented: they lined up for the scale.  Truly -- a line, waiting for the scale, to weigh themselves and stare and self-critically explore every aspect of their body.

Some men eventually devolve into the self-consuming depths of dementia, like hockey player Derek Boogaard, who killed himself in a haze of depression and addiction.  (The New York Time's feature story about his career and death serves as a model of investigative journalism.)  

Endless women live as anorexics or at least burdened by obsessive body image issues and incredibly restrictive eating habits.  For men, Alzheimer's may eventually act like a sort of physical anorexia, slowly eating away at their minds and bodies.

So with all these athletics and teams and workout routines, we learn to scorn those who end up fat and we truly do live with killer bodies.

Apocalypse Now. Save Me!

Why is the same book published over and over again?

Regurgitate knowledge, I call it.

This question arose while speaking with a friend -- much more well read than I will ever be, two or three lifetimes over.

We identified some annoying tropes—I take full responsibility for the editorialising:

• You're wrong!  Everything you think about X or about the world - WRONG.  (Though I've got a clever knew way to explain everything.)  Think Malcolm Gladwell.

• You're right!  You just don't know it yet, and you must find your strong, determined inner-self and find truth and happiness and love and great sex and free cable for the rest of your life.

• Why can't we all just get along?  Everything, everybody - so divisive and cantankerous and hostile, yelling shouting heads, why can't it be like before, calm and civil and productive.  (These people appear thrilled to advertise their total ignorance of history, at least of U.S. political history.)

• The sky is falling!  Literally or figuratively, it's the end of the world.  Whether economic collapse, plague, too much immigration, not enough immigration, global warming, cyborgs and terrorists -- doom, doom, doom.  (Occasionally a modest author or two will then continue to explain how they alone possess the solution to one or all of these problems.)

But more seriously -- the last points the way to the One Book that's published today. We've one-upped our Puritan forebears and have dedicated nearly all of our intellectual energy to awaiting the apocalypse. Second coming. End times.  Revelation. However you'ld like to call it.

But unlike those godly Puritans, we want it to be easy. Chips or fries? Sit back and watch it all unfold in 3D surround sound -- simply chosen ones.

There's no easy buck to be made, or solution to discover.  Real problems get solved with real, hard work and sustained thinking, original argumentation, research, newly discovered or newly refined or understood knowledge.  It's messy.  Slow, confusing, often wrong, sometimes worse that the initial problem, but never easily dispatched in a single shiny 265 page monograph that's nothing more than an auto-expanded version of what once appeared as a decent article in the New Yorker.

We await the audience that will buy that!

Until then, I'm going to read fiction.  Awaiting my salvation.

United Airlines: Mind your manners to avoid self-desctruction

I'm still waiting for United Airlines to offer an appropriate apology.  Or thank you.  Or any kind of indication that I'm an even remotely valued customer.

My obstinacy -- and my willingness to continue to lambast United -- arises from an incident a few weeks back at the DFW airport.

I had a seat of the last Sunday evening flight to Newark.  I checked in at the gate about a half hour before departure; the agent told me the plane had just arrived; it needed to deplane; and boarding would begin in 15-20 minutes.

I went to the United Club and returned in about 25 minutes, at what would have been 1-2 minutes before the scheduled departure time.  When I got to the gate, the door had been shut and the plane just pushed back from the gate.

I stood there speechless.  Eventually, when the gate agent returned, I stared with baffled frustration and could barely ask: "what?!?"

His general response: "too bad."

Now, I had a reserved first class seat as a Platinum-level frequent flyer.  I had been in the United Club.  And the plane left without me, after I had made it known that I was in the airport and intended to travel.

After the 787 debacle, UA might have considered putting
some eggs in other baskets - like customer service.

I have never missed a flight in my life -- with hundreds of hundred of flights under my belt.

The agent in the United Club offered some considerate help.

In the end, the best I could do - I had to be back for work the next morning: I bought an $800+ ticket to Philadelphia on American, arrived at midnight, and then drove home to New York, in bad weather, making it to my apartment at about 3:00am.

United's response?  Shrug.

I realize they must get a billion silly complaints a day.  But when a loyal customer takes the time at offer feedback, should it take days before even sending a basic response?

I must say, the Director of Operations at DFW went out of his way to be helpful after-the-fact.  Though the rest of the airline let down his excellent example.

Am I asking too much?

Honestly, if within a few days I had gotten a nice, hand-written apology with a small token of appreciation - say a $100 gift certificate to a nice restaurant - I would have been impressed and dropped the matter.

The counter-example: I bought a gift at a high-end retail store in Dallas, around $300.  Without any expectation, I got a nice, hand-written note thanking me for the purchase.

Now, I can imagine Gucci has a much higher profit margin than United.  But I also know I spent nearly twenty times as much money on United since the first of the year.  With nothing more than some poorly conceived, adversarial emails and a measly 10k FF miles from customer care -- which I need like a hole in my head.

I can only hope other airlines and management can learn from this and, at a low cost and very simply, actually value customers and their loyalty.

Cote Laramie. A life lost.

Genius: a brilliant, poetic writer; a compassionate friend; a talented musician; a heartthrob of a young man.

Cote Laramie.  Harvard undergraduate.

In early September, Cote, about to begin his junior year, killed himself.

I just found this out this morning, and I am still enraged.  How could this happen?

I've been meaning to write about teenage depression, especially amongst adolescent men.  It's a subject too close to my own heart.

I knew Cote from the St. Paul's School Advanced Studies Program, which he attended between his junior and senior year of high school.  I helped him as a college advisor. I knew, from our first conversation, that Cote possessed something more.  He had a way with words, a wisdom about him.  He had lived many more than his sixteen years, that was apparent.

I helped Cote with his college entrance essay—we corresponded during the fall after ASP.

He began his essay:

"When my mother got pregnant, my father wanted nothing to do with her. I was born not knowing who my father was. I still have no idea."

We talked about missing fathers: mine died when I was thirteen.

His essay continued:

"My mom is a manic depressant schizophrenic. At four years old I was taken away from her and put into a foster home, until my aunt adopted me. Soon after I was taken, my mom began antidepressants in exchange for visitation. From then, until my 13th Christmas, I did whatever I wanted to on the weekends with her. The night I learned of her illness, I became responsible for her actions as well as my own."

We talked about dependent mothers: mine developed Alzheimer's and I served as her legal guardian and care giver.

I knew Cote struggled with depression.  I encouraged him to seek help, to remember the joy as much as the unbearable sadness.  I was so thrilled for him when he got in to Harvard.

Just months after my own father died, in the darkest days of February in New England, at the age of 14, I came very close to taking my own life.  That's nearly twenty years ago, but if you've ever gotten to that place you will never forget it. Never.

I have been extremely fortunate to have received tremendous support and treatment over the course of my life, and now know much more about myself, about depression, and about how to live a healthy, balanced, emotionally complex life.

But it took many, many years.  And I doubt most people who knew me ever realised the depths of my depression at the moments it held me in its tightest grasps.

We so desperately need to educate and care for our selves and especially our children.  Innumerable teenagers suffer from depression.  Suicide, a highly preventable end, registers as the third leading cause of death amongst 15-24 year olds.  

Yet we act as if feeling a bit blue just comes with the territory -- of growing up, of hormones, of the turmoils of middle and high school.  

Maybe.  But it's more.  Too many people suffer, truly suffer, tragically suffer.  Were they walking around with broken arms and open sores, we would be aghast and develop a crisis plan.  But since it's on the inside, we pretend.  

We pretend, at great peril.  

Please: if you or someone you know comes even remotely close to considering suicide, get help immediately.  We all need help.  I only wish I could have helped Cote. There should be no shame.

In-fat-ocide; or, why you kill fat people

You can't understand Rwanda?  Or Cambodia or the Nazis?

By the end of the day, you will be killing fat people.  Your logic with be as perversely irrational as it is perfectly logical.

I presented my case to a group of students after hearing Daniel Goldhagen speak about his most recent book, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminiationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity.

How could people ever do this?



We forever ponder this question, protecting our imagined, invariable innocence against such horrors.

But we do hate fat people. Consciously, subconsciously this hatred saturates our culture.

If we are not actively attempting to make ourselves skinny, we are fat. Damnable. Damned.  Asking for our punishment.

So for those of us strong enough to be skinny, our killing would be buoyed by Far People's self-hatred.

Yes, let's make them a class, a type, a capitalised other: those Fat People. A cancer, corroding the true nature of being human -- other than human. Fat People.

Spit, scorn, hack. Kill.


•••


Could this happen?

We're well on our way. Billions spent on dieting, insecurity, self-killing anorexia, depression, anxiety.

Better than a genocide, we have an auto-in-fat-icide and we don't even know it.

What's to do?

I'm headed to the gym.

Corpus Confusio; or, a Female Pope to Fix the World?

When the Pope calls it quits, we know we've reached a new chapter in the relationship between body and mind.

I've no basis to speculate on His Holiness' condition, but I do wonder if he has found himself with some kind of degenerative disorder like Alzheimer's -- and the awareness that his physical body may be left as the mindless leader of a great faith for an extended period of time.

At such an extreme, the Church's views on the sanctity of life and its opposition to any kind of euthanasia would test the limits of the Papal responsibility: how little human can a being be before no longer occupying the position chosen by God -- or, when does the soul leave the body?

Death has a clear and final meaning, but we can die a lot before we're dead.

This shedding of self, whether willful, contingent or divined, connects to other odd aspects of our current relationship between our physical and metaphysical and emotional selves.

I am ever struck by the legions of women walking the streets of Manhattan (and so many other centers of success), skinny to perfection, single, sour-pussed and sad-looking.  They stare at the ground, pound away at the treadmill—and so infrequently show any sense of a smile or laughter.

Perhaps its my own redoubled feminist misogyny, but my sense is that image and body have been put ahead of a wholeness of being, a happiness and lightness and adventuresomeness -- ahead of any free and open, curious, playful and creative potential.

Are such things the primary provenience of men?  Must we remain bound by a paradigm that defines strong, brilliant women as bitches?



If you've worked hard to have a hot body, why not be proud and confident?  I guess having to stare down the socially approved, constant lecherous glances and comments from men would exhaust even superwoman.  (For instance, I don't think this video is the answer, butt it does have over 2 million views.)

Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the Church so vehemently refuses to admit women into the priesthood.  I don't know how, exactly, but I have a hunch -- related to why conservative sects of Judaism and Islam insist upon women wearing certain kinds of hair styles or head coverings.

Do we still live the great temptation of Eden, day in and day out?  Really—we keep blaming women and causing them pain with their guilt?

Oh Papa.  Will it ever be -- oh, mama mia.

Cardinals -- go for it.  This election will be precedent-setting in any case.

Freedom — In America, you have a real freedom

En route to the Cairo airport -- after a morning together -- my driver began to open up a bit more about the current political situation in Egypt.

He shared some very wise observations.

Amusingly, if problematically in terms of gender: the women, he reflected upon seeing two stunning young ladies walk by - the last two years - wow, what the women have been able to share.

Pop music, rather than corrupting "authentic," fragile local cultures in fact inspires people to confront death-defying odds to seek liberty.  Pitbull is a current favorite, as is Kei$ha.  I shared Taylor Swift with him, and Wilco's "War on War."

John Kerry is extremely well regarded.  America needs a strong man as Secretary of State, he should be the next President.


When conversation turned to the gridlock in which we found ourselves, I recounted the great Saturday Night Live skit about hurricane Sandy in which the actor depicting Mayor Bloomberg says to President Obama, don't come to NYC, you cause traffic headaches, I'll have you arrested.

Obama -- arrested -- he chuckled.  

To make that kind of joke. 

Freedom.  In America, he said -- in America, you have a real freedom.

I continue to reflect on his words, in awe of our great democratic experiment.

Areopagitica Revisited: Or, talking about drugs and other controversial things

As Stanley Fish points out regularly, John Milton set the modern agenda for discussion of freedom of speech, liberty of conscience and the protections vested in academic tenure.

I don't agree with Fish about everything, but I believe he has the correct argument in this case, if I understand him correctly.

It's been a while since I read There's No Such Thing As Free Speech (and it's a good thing, too) or his Trouble with Principle.  But I'll do my best.

Really, it's pepped up pragmatism, a little less jargon-laden that Richard Rorty but not as elegant as its earliest American exponents—as described decently well in The Metaphysical Club.

Where does the law intersect with our right to express ourselves?

On the one hand, the right to swing one's fist ends where the other man's nose begins.  On the other, we can't yell fire in a crowded theater.  And what about checking out another person while you're in a committed relationship?

Between the three, where does the law intervene?

I'm not a lawyer (thank goodness) but my sense as an historian: you need to be very careful when you facilitate the communication of information that is either itself illegal or facilitates illegal behaviour.

For instance, child pornography creates big problems.  Can we read classical philosophers and study relationships between older men and younger boys without running afoul of some very restrictive laws that limit anything having to do with a minor's body or sexuality.

Or Fascism poses a frequently debated problem—for instance, Germany's restriction of Nazi material versus its permissibility in the US.

Also, when does it become proper to take action based on an idea, emotion or behaviour?  We've debated recently the concern about mentally ill people getting guns.

If someone says, "I'm going to get a gun and kill so and so," a therapist or a priest or a lawyer, I believe, must violate confidentiality and report the problem.  But, "god, I wish so and so got killed"?  Does that merit reporting?

I believe, in a paternalist way -- Filmer before Locke -- that an institution must protect its charges from acting in a way that could cause themselves dire harm.  If I presided over a school and on my campus I saw a student about to inject herself with heroin, for instance, I would feel a responsibility to stop the student.

Arguments at the extreme help, but they don't solve sticky problems in everyday life.

Currently, I lean toward thinking that institutions should ere on the side of caution when it comes to facilitating the transference of knowledge about illegal activities.  Institutions' primary responsibilities -- to its trustees (think of the word literally) - must include protecting its assets and preserving its existence against internal and external threats.  Such moral, ethical and financial stewardship cannot be taken lightly.

We can disagree with the law, but then we should take on the responsibility of changing it.  For instance, when it comes to pot, the citizens of Colorado and Massachusetts have taken this matter into their own hands.

Now, this doesn't establish the practice by which such determinations should be made.  That's a whole different matter, and deserves careful scrutiny, redundancy and review, consultation with legal counsel, and a means for appeal.

Talkin' Texan

A great story.  I'll practice once I buy my ranch.

Via @nprnews: Texas Twang Fixin' To Ride Off Into The Sunset n.pr/TJI5bM@reed_college_ Prof contributes to this story.
— Christopher Moses (@CityUponAHill) February 12, 2013

United Airlines: A company ruined by poor management and deceit

United Airlines knowingly mis-represents Mileage Plus account balances on its website.

After an exhausting phone call, I finally got an airline employee to write to me and admit this fact, stating: 

<<At this time we are experiencing some technical problems with the View All Activity area showing an incorrect balance on the account.  This is due to corrections that have been done to the account making a large amount of 2012 flights show on the statement throwing the balance off.  The correct balance on this account is 18,946 miles as indicated on the My Account welcome screen right below the account number.  The 80,135 balance that is showing for statement period 1-01-13 to 2-10-13 is not correct.>>

I asked why United did not display information as to this known problem.  He offered no explanation. I asked why United had not contacted its members to explain the situation.  Again, no answer or explanation.

I can only wonder how many people are unable to know their true balance.  I know that for my account at least, this has been the case for weeks.

I have other, smaller problems with United but this strikes me as scandalous.  I hope some journalists can inquire and investigate.  I am happy to provide the email and other information.

With their 787 mess and other problems, something simple like this would appear a terribly foolish coverup.

So much for the friendly skies.

Emotional Economics

We're depressed.  Not yet ready for growth.  Still unable to get credit despite all our hard work.

It's no surprise that we use an emotional vocabulary to speak about money and markets.  Just like we use economic words to discuss (poorly) our feelings:

Managing anger, stingy with words, selling our souls.

Adam Smith in Edinburgh

Few know that before he wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, Adam Smith wrote an equally great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Far from embracing the person-less world of an Invisible Hand (he uses the phrase just three times in hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing), Smith believes in the complex connection between our feelings, how we work, and the incredibly difficult meaning of experiences like the division of labour, productivity and the like.

A couple weeks ago I walked through the Providence Place Mall, with a number of big empty storefronts.  I felt terribly discouraged.  

We need to think more about these connections between feelings and finances, both personally and nationally — and especially avoid the hysterical fears of toughen-up-or-starve Spartan austerity.

Movie Star Robin Wright as economically
 savvy and sexy Moll Flanders

We might consider the crucial importance of gender — the role it played in creating our current global financial slump, and the ways thoughtful female leadership might help solve some of our problems.  (Goodness knows that Larry Summers isn't going to be the feminist beacon leading the way, for instance.)

I wrote about this way back when in 2009, and it's been on my mind as of late.

But economists like to think about gender just about as much as they're willing to consider the irrationality of human behaviours, or to believe that anyone thought about economics before Adam Smith.  (Reading Bernard Mandeville would help with both problems.)

Honestly, I think we would be better served reading Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders than any column or monograph I've encountered in the last year.

Professor Joyce Appleby

If you're interested in this history, two extremely smart if very academic books:

Emma Rothschild's Economic Sentiments and Joyce Appleby's Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth Century England both have brilliant things to say.  

Appleby's more recent Relentless Revolution speaks to a broader audience.

(Wow, both by pioneering female academics.)

I hope we're feeling better soon!