Rational Philosophy

Quention Tarantino - Inglorious Basterds

On Friday night my wife and I watched Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. Having enjoyed much of Mr. Tarantino’s previous work (Pulp Fiction, in particular) I was anticipating with great relish another dose of his enormous flair for form, pacing, humor, dialog, color, and hubris. He did not disappoint. Bloody, violent, and disturbing, yes, but a great treat all the same.

I had two philosophical issues with the movie. One quite limited and aesthetic, and the other raising a broader question. The first I will explain by saying that I prefer solid wood to veneer. Veneer inserts a fiction between the viewer and the object. Solid wood permits the viewer to see the object for what it is. Tarantino’s script rewrote certain important, nay critical, aspects of the Second World War. While a pleasing veneer from a plot perspective, his choice seemed to me to be unnecessary.

The second issue had to do with something more fundamental. Ends and means.

The script bristled with rousting “let’s stick it to those krauts” moments with its eponymous hand-picked cadre of scalping killers bent on instilling rampant fear in the ranks of the German army. But once or twice I wondered whether Tarantino didn’t perhaps want us to feel just as uncomfortable about the brutality of the good guys as he did about the brutality of the bad guys. (If so, the movie perhaps ventured into new moral territory for Mr. Tarantino, who has previously cleaved to the open plain of moral expedience.)

The Inglorious Basterds slaughter and scalp and leave bloody mark on their victims, and we root for them, don’t we? I mean they’re fighting against the Nazi’s, after all. Later we see the self-important Nazi sharp-shooter hero turned actor picking off allied soldiers in a Goebbels propaganda movie and we’re supposed to feel disgust for him, aren’t we? After all, he’s fighting the allies.

After a while there’s so much wanton mayhem on both sides that we begin to lose sight of who holds the moral high ground. I was confused. I got the feeling that perhaps Mr. Tarantino was confused.

Top (left to right): Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor. Bottom: Kennedy, Stevens, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas.

But that’s not what I really set out to write about. I really set out to write about those inglorious basterds the conservative supreme court justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. As written about in the NY Times, their recent majority decision on campaign finance puts the free speech rights of corporations and other organizations on a par with that of individuals, opening the door to an increase in corporate money in politics.

Lead dissenter, Justice Stevens pointed out that no new principle required overruling two major campaign finance precedents. “The only relevant thing that has changed since” those two decisions, he wrote, “is the composition of this court.”

The conservative justices sought to equalize the rights of corporations and individuals. But surely the freedoms of corporations or organizations should be distinguished from those of individuals rather than equated to them?

Society affords certain rights and privileges to its individual members by virtue of the fundamental equality it wishes them to have. This is eminently sensible. But to say that corporate entities inherit these same rights by default rests on nothing but a sleight of hand. Corporate entities or other organizations serve society only as far as they don’t impose on the general rights or wants of society. That’s why corporations are regulated, so that we can keep them in check.

The right of free speech implies the voice of an individual conscience expressing itself. Where in a corporation would you find that individual conscience? If it’s in one person, then let that person speak. If it’s in a board room, then let those board members speak. If it’s in the shareholdings, then let those shareholders speak.

Let’s be frank, corporate free speech implies corporate special interest. Permitting it willy nilly in politics further dilutes the voice of the average American citizen.

“While American democracy is imperfect,” writes Justice Stevens, “few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Bravo, Justice Stevens.

I was happy to hear this morning that the recession has officially ended. I heard it on NPR. And you can clearly see this is the case from the graph below:

null

(The red bar at 2009 Q3 goes up instead of down.)

This is wonderful news, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The memory of this latest economic fiasco can now begin slowly to fade from individual, institutional, governmental, and collective memory. Oh, happy day.

PBS tried to throw me into despair on the night before the first World Series game by showing a documentary about the economic collapse that preceded the great depression. Those PBS folks are such wet blankets. Who wants to be reminded that we’ve made the same mistakes before and we’ll make them again?

In a related story, Professor Gordon Marino (yes, that professor Gordon Marino… what do you mean you’ve never heard of him?) tells us that we’ve lost contact with the exquisite malaise that is human despair. “If Kierkegaard were on Facebook,” he says, yes, he actually says that, “If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video,” yes, he says that, too, “he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.”

Soren Kierkegaard, being miserable

Marino argues that Kierkegaard argues that whereas depression is a mental disorder, despair arises out of an imbalance between our character and our achievements. If despair had a pair of arms and a mouth it would be shaking us and saying “wake up!”

So, how did Kierkegaard know this way back when, but we’ve forgotten it? (And here I’m agreeing that Marino and Kierkegaard are onto something.) The pressure to feel good has begun to stunt our ability to submit ourselves to self examination. Evolution in reverse.

So, too, with running, we’re told. Forgoing the opportunity to use a reference to the term gluteus maximus for comic effect (tragic in itself) Tara Parker-Pope in her Well column presents the intriguing argument that the human body evolved to be good at long distance running:

We sweat, which is apparently much more cooling efficient than panting (even though we often do both at the same time), and therefore we’re well adapted to running long distances without over-heating. And the gluteus maximus (or, big-ass muscle) is the biggest of our muscles but rarely gets fussed when we’re walking - it’s all about running, apparently.

-

How ironic that these days we generally take great pains not to sweat, and put our gluteus maximus to use as a cushion for those long hours of sitting while we avoid running.

It’s the end of the end, as Kierkegaard would have Twittered. But he didn’t Twitter, he wrote books and this is how he opened his “despair” opus:

A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.

We forget history, but wring our hands at the tragedy of its repetition. We reject the rigors of self-examination, but lament endlessly about our fate. And we wonder why our ass is so big when we drive 0.2 miles to fetch a pack of Twinkies.

You can thank me later…

I have been stirred from my cave by reading a piece of Spring madness by David Brooks. With the catchy headline The End of Philosophy Brooks turns out a column of such ill-reasoned sophistry that it roused me from my long hiatus.

In the first two sentences Brooks manages to diss Socrates while he incorrectly describes what Socrates was all about. That’s unforgivable for someone writing for the Times and I wonder what his editor was thinking in publishing it.

In the tradition of all good sophists, Brooks’ real target turns out not to be philosophy nor Socrates but rational morality. Brooks argues that morality derives from subjective impressions, myriad emotional responses to the many situations we encounter that all add up to judgments of good and bad.

But it’s not until we reach the last paragraph that we find out just why Brooks has embarked on this particular Op Ed assault.

“Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Ah, so you don’t have to explain things as long as you feel them.

This is not an attack on philosophy or rational morality, it is an attack on reason, an attack on science, and, by association, an attack on the man who leads our country, Barack Obama, a man of intellect and reason who has declared that he will return science to a rightful place of prominence in our decision making.

Brooks’s piece is good-old American conservatism masquerading as learned philosophical analysis.

Brooks says that Socrates believed “moral thinking” to be “mostly a matter of reason and deliberation.” Well, yes, that would be moral thinking wouldn’t it. Moral feeling would be something else, right? A nice sophist twist.

But what did Socrates really do that Brooks is so afraid of? Socrates tried to encourage people to examine their feelings as a way of understanding whether they were really valid feelings, or just learned biases and prejudices. Isn’t this essential to living as a conscious and sensible human being. If not, we could just defend any action or moral judgment by saying “that’s what I feel, I don’t need to examine it.”

I don’t disagree that we tend to judge and act from an accummulated store of moral impressions, but that ignores the fact that moral strides, great and small, come through reflection and bold conviction. The person who reflects on his or her past actions and decides that he must change. The activist who speaks out in eloquent defense of a new morality (e.g., abolishing slavery) and persuades people to the reason and rightness of his cause.

Moral code is painted in broad brush strokes. For the most part we agree on the way these strokes are painted. But we can only disagree or change our moral code by engaging in a rational debate, either with ourselves or as a society.

Finally, morality as a concept, which Socrates encouraged people to seek for themselves, does indeed have an objective basis. Whether we like it or not, our fundamental moral objective is to continue to persist as individuals, as a society, as a species, and as an integrated part of the universe. As we progress morally over time we tend to come closer to this objective standard.

UN Ambassador Andrew Young

I am sure that many have cried at some point since 11pm last night. My own tears caught me by surprise. I was emptying the dishwasher this morning as I listened to NPR. Ambassador Andrew Young, the first black ambassador to the UN, (who witnessed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr) was speaking in calm, measured praise of Obama and the weight of the history of Obama’s accomplishment. I’m not black, but in the upsurge of emotion that brought my tears I felt suddenly, immediately aware of what this moment meant historically in a country with such a poor record of racial discrimination, both overt and covert — it was a mixture of relief and joy.

This joy is in part the very pure philosophical joy of a good thing happening, a thing that will change the future. In Andrew Young’s words: “a victory of grace over greed, of vision over violence.”

Can change really happen and if so how?  This is the country that twice elected George W. Bush. Many who voted-in perhaps the worst president in the nation’s history, twice, must have decided to vote for Obama over McCain. So are we a conservative nation simply disillusioned by a lousy president, or are we a nation newly and differently inspired, a changed nation?

Barack Obama Victor

I can’t know the answer. I can only give an opinion based on what I see and hear.  Obama and his campaign team have wrought change by reaching out and engaging people with new ideas. These ideas have rubbed up against old, automated, reactive ways of thinking. Obama has spent the last couple of years asking people why we should see the intractable problems of the country as hopelessly intractable. He’s also stood and overtly and covertly challenged people to find him wanting because of the color of his skin, or the unamericanness of his name, or the power of his rational intellect.

Many failed to meet this challenge. After all 47% of America voted for McCain, or against Obama. That’s tens of millions of people who have proven themselves insusceptible to a force for powerful, positive change.

The world is now a different place. Obama’s skill and insight in his campaign promise great things for his presidency. Thank you, Barack.

Congress And The Bailout

I just deleted several hundred “spam” comments from my comment moderation queue. The mysterious originators of these comments, which are then automatically generated in huge numbers around the Internet, aim to attract or influence commercial traffic in their direction. I don’t really care whether the operation works. I presume it does, since otherwise why would they keep doing it? But I care about having to delete all of those messages when I have better things to do with my time.

A couple of weeks ago I was on the phone with my friend in Australia just after the AIG bailout and he mentioned that had AIG gone under he would have been left in the hole for several hundred thousand dollars. Many clients of his medical business have insurance with AIG. The fingers of this particular invisible hand spread far.

But why did AIG, with its trillion dollar balance sheet and stalwart history of conservative risk management need to be bailed out?

Joseph P. Cassano AIG Financial Products

Well, if the NY Times has its story straight, AIG’s problems were catalyzed by the overreaching overconfident overpowerful work of one man — Joseph J. Cassano, a former executive with Drexel Burnham Lambert — Michael “the-junk-bond-king” Milken’s old investment bank. Cassano helped found AIG Financial Products in London and built it into a very profitable, very independent entity within AIG that leveraged AIG’s tremendous financial strength and standing to sell ever more speculative products. AIG Financial Products, being drastically overleveraged, eventually imploded. Cassano left and now lives quietly in a Knightsbridge town-house. (I love this picture from the NY Times; Cassano peering around the corner in his bright red shirt like a con at the perimeter of the prison yard.)

When McCain debated Obama last week after supposedly spending several days in intense economy-recovery sessions he didn’t seem to have much of a grasp on what had happened to cause the problems in the first place, nor on what needed to be done to avoid them happening again. It was as if invoking the specter of regulation caused him such shudders that it wobbled his brain off-kilter.

John McCain at a loss

Ideally, regulation is what we do when we don’t want something bad to happen. Avoiding regulation is something we do when we care more about a belief or concept than real-world consequences.

The Bush administration has been bad for America and the world for many reasons, but there has been one overriding and all-pervasive reason for its badness — the arrogance of favoring faith over fact. The administration has consistently argued for, lied for, evaded for, invaded for, and bullied for its ideologies in the face of the evidence against them. They have set the bar very low for what a government can do to manipulate and subvert in the name of ideology and get away with it.

All that being said, when the congress began beating up on Paulsen and his three page proposal I felt for the first time in a long time that we were seeing government in action. Rusty, creaking, inept as it may have been, the house gave us the hint of an idea of what it should be doing for us — working in our best interests. For once we got a glimpse of the invisible hand.

The Invisible Hand Part 1

Related posts from around the web:

Walter Williams and Bryan D. Jones: The Most Important Election … - Choose McCain and likely opt for a third term of the governing philosophy that has pushed the United States back toward the economy of the Great Depression. Select McCain and keep the governing approach of unregulated free market …

McCain Touts Plan to Privatize Bailout [3rd attempt] - “The problem with the earlier plan,” McCain explains, “is that it relies on big government to save the banks. My plan puts the bailout in the hands of the free market, which is the only solution that works in times like these.” …

The Invisible Hand

Ah, the invisible hand, what a fine, dark metaphor to match these dark times. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: The individual who “intends only his own gain is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

Wednesday’s New York Times editorial “Mr. McCain and the Economy” criticizes McCain on several fronts. 1. His claim that the economy is fundamentally sound, despite the latest cataclysms. 2. His clarification that what he meant by “fundamentally sound” was that he “believed in American workers.” and 3. His broadside that any blame that could fall fell surely on Wall Street’s “unbridled corruption and greed.”

“The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices,” says the editorial, and with a flick of the wrist ends with a call to McCain to proffer new solutions or approaches that might correct the problems.

McCain, we’ve heard and he admits, suffers from a fundamental lack of interest in things financial (he doesn’t recall how many properties he and his wife own — eight). This is an unfortunate quality in the prospective leader of a country, especially during economic upheavals.

Record Profits in 2007 $1,300 per second

The invisible hand has another meaning here, too. McCain, intent on gaining the presidency is led by the invisible hand of greed in the Republican power-makers. It is no part of McCain’s intention to lead the country into financial disarray, to risk further dismantling of what was, prior to Bush’s presidency, a remarkably strong economy.

Economics is a complex subject. Even the experts don’t understand how economies really work. They are too vast, multi-faceted and irrational.

This last is an incredibly important point. Emotion, fear, mania, addiction, overoptimism all play significant roles in the way the economy heaves and rolls. The concept and model of a completely free market fails in the real world on this basis alone.

Subprime mortgage rescue plan (Simplified Diagram)

Subprime mortgages and the resulting current woes illustrate the second point about the illusion of the completely free market. A free market, a market without restraint, is free to collapse. If we want to prevent this (and who would argue that it’s not in the nation’s best interests to prevent occasional collapse of the economy) someone outside the market needs to be monitoring, reviewing and, if necessary, regulating such things as new financial instruments.

The last problem with the notion of a completely free market is the dangerous relationship with the seat of government. Large, wealthy corporations have deep pockets with which to influence government policy. And, worse yet, if agents of those corporations influence government thinking, policy and strategy (think Rove and Cheney) the power of government will exert an ultimately skewed and even destabilizing influence on the market.

This is exactly what has been happening, as the Times editorial points out: “The disconnect between work and reward has been especially acute during the Bush years, as workers’ incomes fell while corporate profits, which flow to investors and company executives, ballooned. For workers, that is a fundamental flaw in today’s economy. It is grounded in policies like a chronically inadequate minimum wage and an increasingly unprogressive tax system, for which Mr. McCain offers no alternatives.”

The free market is a nice idea, a useful model to illustrate one of the forces at work in an economy. But we should not forget that the invisible hand bends and shapes the market according to the will that wields it.

Related posts from around the Web:

Senate Democrats Discuss Bush-McCain Economic Policies - Senators Boxer, Stabenow, and Menendez discuss how the turmoil on Wall Street is a direct legacy of Bush-McCain economic policies that have failed this nation for eight years. Refusing to police lenders and neglecting to protect …

McCain’s Economic Solution: Hemorrhage More Money - … GOP nominee for his statement this morning — which they asserted was an announcement of support for $25 billion in government loans to the auto industry. So there we have it. McCain’s solution to our terrifyingly failing economy? …

McCain Follows Obama With Direct Economic Ad (VIDEO) - “You, the American workers, are the best in the world,” says McCain. “But your economic security has been put at risk by the greed of Wall Street. That’s unacceptable. My opponent’s only solutions are talk and taxes. …

“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil,” Socrates

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a lie is 1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true, or 2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression. This, ironically, makes lies a lot more concrete than the truth, philosophically speaking, which is a much harder quantity to pin down.

McCain Campaign Lies

Why has John McCain, the self-annointed “straight talker,” resorted to lying? It’s a simple question and one that’s impossible to answer without some inside information. But if we’re to have any hope of understanding McCain and guessing his future actions it’s worth trying to figure it out.

If you’re interested in knowing what McCain is accused of lying about, the Democratic Party has established “Count the Lies” a chronicle of “independent, nonpartisan” fact checks “debunking John McCain’s lies and distortions.” Even some conservatives have tutted at McCain’s recent stoops. Even Karl Rove (!!), as reported in the Christian Science Monitor, of all places, has said that “McCain has gone, in some of his ads, similarly one step too far in sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100 percent truth test.” If you’re a Republican presidential candidate and Karl Rove is accusing you of distorting the truth, you know you’re a big fat liar… or a pawn in another one of Rove’s despicable schemes.

John McCain with President Bush

(This is a bit of a digression, but the Salon published a very interesting piece back in January asking why in all of the election coverage of John McCain’s losing primary bid in 2000 no journalist had mentioned who it was that smeared John McCain so successfully that he lost. The answer, of course, George Bush and Karl Rove…)

Perhaps we can find in our children the unadulterated origin of the impulse to lie. My son, now 4-years old, has just begun to lie. His reasons are transparent: He lies either to get something he wants (usually cookies, candy, or toys), or to avoid something he doesn’t want (typically to take responsibility for a transgression). McCain’s lies seem to fall squarely in the first category. As a “maverick, outsider” it suited him to talk straight. But as an establishment insider, it’s much more effective for him to lie. He’s always wanted power and success, and now that lying seems to offer the best path to victory, he’s adopted it with the same zeal he once reserved for honesty. The tactic is all the more successful because, in Obama, he seems to be up against a candidate who has some genuine integrity — a terrible handicap against smear tactics.

What does this tell us about the kind of president McCain would make?

Politicians the world over resort to lies, many of them relatively successful leaders. Lying in itself isn’t a guarantee of poor government and lousy leadership. Although Bush has overused and abused this privilege, the security of a country, for instance, relies to some extent on the ability of its government to keep secrets from its enemies, which also means keeping secrets from its people.

In order to understand the degree of concern we should have about McCain’s lies, we really need to consider what his goals will be as president. We can then assume that he will lie to achieve them.

And given that McCain has dropped most if not all of his firmly held political beliefs in order to gain the highest office, one can only assume that his primary goal as president will be to consolidate his power and popularity — in other words, he’ll lie in order to keep the conservative political base as happy as possible. That’s a scary thought.

Footnote - What about Palin?

What about Palin? She’s a big fat liar, too, and a scary character in her own right. The Times has an extensive piece on her political MO. Not a pretty picture. Here’s a quote from Laura Chase who was Palin’s campaign manager during her first bid for mayor:

“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she says, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

Related posts from around the web:

McCain Lies Again - But McCain is still airing ads telling the same lie. He has also still not retracted his lie on The View when he point blank said that Palin has refused all earmarks as governor. I cannot remember a candidate for president telling such …

Romney: McCain Lies - So Rove has declared McCain’s campaign overly harsh and Romney has declared it deceitful. I honestly have no idea how that sort of criticism from those people is possible to recover from.

Obama Campaign Launches Ad Hitting McCain’s Lies As “Dishonorable” - We’ve been waiting for it, and here it is: The Obama campaign launches its first ad hitting McCain for his lying and his mendacious adver-sleazements and slamming his campaign as “disgraceful” and “dishonorable”: …

McCain Lies About Obama’s Health Plan- JUST THE FACTS! - In our ongoing efforts to expose Senator McCain’s lies about Senator Obama’s policies, we need to look at the McCain campaigns lies and then provide some “straight talk” about the facts. McCain claimed that Obama’s health care plan …

John McCain on The Daily Show with John Stewart

Last night, as I watched a TiVo’d John Stewart skewering delegates on the last day of the Republican convention, I wondered what it is about small town values that the Republicans love (but can’t define) and that seems to keep America stuck in the mire of bad politics.

If you didn’t see it, Stewart’s convention crew walked around with microphones asking Republican delegates what ’small town values’ meant to them. With big smiles on their faces and earnest willingness to answer the delegates came up with such laughable answers as “real people, real values,” “traditional marriage,” “fishing,” “church.” (The video is posted on the Daily Show website - highly recommended.)

But even those of us who distrust and disagree with the sentiment with which republicans freight the term, we all seem to understand that the essence of ’small town values’ might mean something genuinely appealing and good. So what is this essence, and how has it become distorted and misused.

Block Island, Rhode Island

I spent the bulk of the summer on Block Island with my family. Block Island is essentially a small town with a lot of tourists. (And these are mostly east-coast tourists from New York and Connecticut.) It’s easy to distinguish the tourists from the islanders. The tourists are in a hurry. They’re often nervous and rude. They lock their cars. They expect to get screwed over. They complain about stuff. The islanders understand that there aren’t that many places to go on the island, and everywhere is pretty close. You can trust people because for the most part, there’s nowhere for them to escape to. You couldn’t steal a car and get it off the island (which is car-accessible only by ferry.)

Block Island is a great lens through which to observe that the essence of small town values means enforced responsibility through enforced community.

It’s a lot easier to be rude or unfair to someone if you don’t know them and if you’ll never see them again and don’t have to rely upon their personal contribution to the community you live in. In a small town, people do know one another and rely upon one another and society functions very much as it has done for millions of years. The inherent rules of small social groups therefore tend to operate without the need for too much overt oversight and enforcement. What’s not to like about that?

But this is the problem: The rest of the country is made up of places where that kind of reinforcement can’t be relied upon. And this is the other part of the problem: Conservative Republicans wrap a whole lot of crap into the concept of small town values that has nothing to do with the core function of a mutually-reliant community (such as traditional marriage, fishing and church.)

And this is why ’small town values’ have become the political ruin of America. So much hog-swill passes for the reasonable subject of informed debate under the auspices of what small town folk care about. Every Republican candidate dives in or gets sucked in to the vortex of endless political distraction of the conservative agenda. And this means the every Democratic candidate gets sucked in, too, for fear of committing political suicide.

Other advanced Western nations don’t waste political time endlessly rehashing abortion statutes, gun control, separation of church and state, the teaching of creationism. ‘Small town values’ are the concrete boots of American politics, and until we lose them we won’t have an effective political process that will allow the nation to move forward and solve the very real problems of war, alternative fuel sources, and climate change.

Related Posts from Around the Web:

Small Town Values? I Gotz ‘Em - I’m from a small town in New Jersey, and I’m politically progressive in every possible way. Watch this clip from The Daily Show, in which people attending the Republican National Convention spoke about their views on small-town values. …

The Small-Town Values Palin Didn’t Mention - From The Seattle PI By John Kelso Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s touting of the wonders of small-town values in her acceptance speech reminded me of my ride in a red convertible a few weeks ago while serving as the …

Small Town Values? - You can’t cherry pick values. If you claim to be the party of small town values, you have to take the good and the bad.

Billionaires stubbing out smoking, brains logging on to solve problems, and mirrors as healing devices.

“I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself.”

- Terence

Roman comic dramatist (185 BC - 159 BC)

Businessman, philanthropist, and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been joined by Bill and Melinda Gates in his $500M anti-smoking campaign fund. This may not seem like a whole lot of money when compared to the billions that cigarette companies make selling cigarettes around the world, but it dwarfs the WHO estimate of $20M per year currently being spent to combat smoking in low to middle income countries. The fund is expected to save hundreds of millions of lives over the next couple of generations. Yet another reason to shake our heads over the spending priorities of our elected administration (such as the decision to airlift $12B cash into Iraq without keeping track of where it all went…)

Pinky Dinky Doo

Not yet a potential target of big tobacco, my four-year old son fortunately wouldn’t know the Marlboro man if he rode in on his horse. One of my son’s favorite shows of the moment is Noggin’s Pinky Dinky Doo (parents take note — no ads on Noggin!!) Pinky, the show’s heroine, engages her little brother, Tyler, with stories related to a problem he’s encountering. At some point in every story, Pinky’s fictional self “thinks big” in order to solve a problem. Thinking big means thinking laterally, or outside the box. Very entertaining. And now I read that there’s a whole network of Pinkies (not to be confused with pinkoes) who can sign up to compete to solve problems and win cash prizes. “InnoCentive,” reports the Times, has “solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.” Cool.

And all of this relates to mirrors how? I’m getting there.

It’s a little all over the place and fluffy, but Natalie Angiers piece on mirrors has some interesting moments. (I scurried off to research her claims about mirror images, thinking she’d got something wrong, but for the moment I have to admit she’s right and I’m feeling a little chagrined.) Here are the pertinent nuggets:

1. Scientists have been “applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.” Wow!

2. “Subjects … in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. … people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion. ‘When people are made to be self-aware, they are likelier to stop and think about what they are doing,’ Dr. Bodenhausen said. ‘A byproduct of that awareness may be a shift away from acting on autopilot toward more desirable ways of behaving.’ Physical self-reflection, in other words, encourages philosophical self-reflection.”

So if I imagine for a moment that I’m Pinky Dinky Doo and that Mike Bloomberg is offering a prize for the person who can come up with a device that would help people quit smoking, I’d say that he should use some of the fund to distribute hand mirrors to smokers or their loved ones so that they can watch themselves puffing away day and night and hacking up gunk first thing in the morning. Just an idea.

(I would say that he should send a big old mirror to George Bush, but the researchers have also found that not all conscious animals recognize themselves in their reflection. “‘Tellingly,’ said Diana Reiss, a professor of psychology at Hunter College who has studied mirror self-recognition in elephants and dolphins, ‘animals raised in [or preferring?] isolation do not seem to show mirror self-recognition.’”)

Related posts from around the web…

Gates, Bloomberg pool riches to fight smoking - Microsoft founder Bill Gates, left, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg walk on stage to announce their $375 million global anti-smoking campaign at a press conference in New York, Wednesday, July 23, 2008. …

What does an elephant see when it looks in the mirror? - But on further inspection it is thought that they may realise they are seeing themselves as they will repeatedly touch a mark painted on their heads which they wouldn’t be able to see if it were not for the mirror. …

“Art is science made clear.”

- Jean Cocteau

“your head gonna make a dead end on your street”

- Velvet Underground (White Light / White Heat)

Yesterday’s post left me with a disquieting murmur in the back of my mind. ‘Too easy,’ it muttered. And here comes Jean Cocteau to remind me that art is science made clear.

Can we criticize the New Yorker and Barry Blitt on social or political (or sociopolitical) terms for portraying the Obamas as a Muslim and a terrorist in the White House? No. Can we criticize them on artistic terms? Perhaps…

Decrying Blitt’s cartoon as tasteless and offensive doesn’t mean it’s not satirically funny; instead, it lends the cartoon a couple of the stock credentials of satirical humor.

To understand the failure of the cartoon one must look to Cocteau: ‘art is science made clear,’ he insists. Considering the New Yorker’s high standards, does the cartoon make clear the science it satirizes?

Yes, and  no.

Yes, it parodies the ridiculous public fears and scurrilous Foxian paranoia about the Obamas as anti-American sleepers.  The New Yorker satisfactorily defends each subversive element of the cartoon (the Muslim garb, the gun belt, the burning flag) as a reinforcement of its plain and simple satirical intent — to explode the damp squib of right wing racism.

But… and here Cocteau helps enormously, it isn’t necessarily funny, because, despite all of these well placed clues, it isn’t made clear.

The New Yorker is a liberal magazine. I love to read it.  I’ve often said that I could be happy reading the New Yorker and nothing else.  (Not strictly true, but it has some damn fine writing.) It’s also, despite the wry, dry, sprightly daggers of its prose, an essentially sensitive publication. It skewers the bad guys. While for the good guys it reserves a blunted point.

I worked so hard yesterday to repress this awareness. I wanted to laud the New Yorker and Barry Blitt. But as I scrolled through the New Yorker cover cartoons seeking out examples of the same kind of abrasive satire I knew deep down that I wouldn’t find anything quite like the Obama cover.

We see Ahmadinejad being being enticed to a game of footsy in the bathroom stall, Bush as a housemaid standing over a cigar-smoking Cheney, the neocons up to their necks in a muddy flood… Jubilant snickers at the expense of the bad guys.

But with the Obama cartoon, those at whom we would snicker are absent.  If we laugh at the cartoon, we don’t laugh with the Obamas and we can’t laugh at them.  The objects of our laughter, the conservative commentators and our narrow-minded neighbors, don’t even make the frame.  They’re nowhere but in the dim recess of the cartoonist’s mind’s eye.  Considered from this perspective, the cartoon veers toward the tragic. The victims take center stage.  But clearly the cartoon cannot be tragic if the supposed victims don’t know it. The Obama’s expressions betray satisfaction and mischievous glee.

If the New Yorker in its cover cartoon had, as does the Onion in its copy, a history of satirical lampoon with no holds barred, the cartoon would make more sense; its art would be science made clear. But given the absence of this history, the cartoon’s immediate psychological impact tends to muddy its message.

Not that any of this matters in practical terms. The tiny fraction of the population who even read the New Yorker and would pay any attention to what it has to say aren’t inclined to think that the Obamas might be terrorists, no matter what cartoon it runs on the cover.

A couple more for Barry Blitt, with sympathy and respect…

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”

- Jean Cocteau

“Hey, white boy, what you doin’ uptown,”

- Lou Reed

Related posts from around the web…

Satire To Sue New Yorker - In an unprecedented legal move that should shakeup the dictionary industry already under siege by critics and linguists, Satire - the word and its definition - has filed suit against The New Yorker for classifying its cartoon depiction …

Why the New Yorker fails miserably at satire. - When you attempt satire, you start with the truth and present it in a manner that is powerful, gut-level, even shocking. So, where did The New Yorker go so terribly wrong? First they started with a fantasy - that the only reason people …

Did the New Yorker cartoon miss its mark? - So why the huge outcry over the messages contained in the New Yorker’s front page cartoon? Surely it should be taken as yet another in the magazine’s long list of playful, if sometimes controversial satire? One previous post-Hurricane …