WordPlay - Language, Culture, Media, and Meaning

Superficially Wise (But Actually Foolish) Sayings of Smart People (A Contest) - 2

    Our first foray into the realm of pseudo-wisdom has to be rated an unqualified success. I received more than 100 comments on the American Thinker website (click here) and another thirty or so e-mails directly. Most of these were entries into the Contest-Without-A-Prize, and most quite good.  (There were a few who damned me as some sort of moral relativist and anti-intellectual – quite a come-uppins for a strict Kantian and committed theist – but if the shoe fits, wear it, I say. Even if it pinches about the toes.) But I am not quite ready to close the books just yet – I think one more go-around is justified, before age withers and custom stales the extremely finite variety of this formula.

    For those taking this thing as a contest seriously, I will tell you that the current front runner is Charles Cammock, and his suggestion of a well-known phrase of Nietzsche's (here, in the version I prefer), 'That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.' This one was also very high on my list, since this utter nonsense has become a staple of American conventional wisdom, particularly with athletic coaches. However, the contest remains open, and someone may yet trump Mr. Cammock's ace.

    With that, once more unto the breach. The quotation of George Santayana I used in the first essay was actually not even in the my top five. I picked it because it was easy to write about. Since there is only so much of this the traffic will bear, today I will go to my all time number one, a bit off the beaten path, but quoted often enough to make the cut. It is not only fatally flawed, but subtly and frighteningly pernicious. It is this beauty from Jame Joyce (in Ulysses).

    A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and the portals to discovery.   
-James Joyce

    We owe Joyce the benefit of context here, since this is a dramatic utterance, made by a character in a work of fiction, and not a stand-alone quote. For that minuscule fraction of my readers not intimately acquainted with Joyce's masterpiece, this pronouncement is made by Stephen Daedalus, in the course of a discussion about Shakespeare that takes place in the Dublin Public Library. (Daedalus is one of the great insufferable prigs in all literature, made tolerable only by the fact that he is a merciless self-caricature of Joyce himself.) The 'man of genius' referenced is thus William Shakespeare. But it requires no great intuitive leap to infer that Daedalus considers himself included in the ambit of genius, and also inevitably Joyce the author.

    What can be overlooked in the glow of admiration for the conciseness and precision of Joyce's marvelously elegant diction is that this gem misstates almost everything that it is possible to misstate about talent, achievement, and human nature itself. Throw in a bow towards the excessive categorization that mars so much of Scholastic philosophy, and you have the ranking inanity (in my humble opinion) ever uttered or authored by an otherwise renowned man.

    Where do we begin? The first is that there is some clear, absolute, distinction between 'mere' talent and genius. See how the fates their gifts allot. A, the dear lad, is talented, but only so much – while B, lucky fellow, is a genius. A is in one pigeon hole, B in another one. Consign A to the plebes and think no more of him – while B is mounts to Olympus. Please.  Leaving aside the mundane fact that the experience of art is maddeningly relative, that something that I think is profound might leave you yawning and bored, the crushing burden of self-consciousness that this view of art and achievement generates is one of the great deadeners for any one striving to do anything.

    I wonder how many good writers are frozen into impotence by the need to meet the overpraise of critics for earlier work, how many painters can't face their palette, and so on. Joyce himself fell victim to his own misconception – he rendered himself speechless with self consciousness. (You are all welcome to Finnegans Wake. I'll meet you at the bar when you're done, laddie, and stand drinks for the house.) Charlie Chaplin came to world fame making slight comedies with terrific gags and a central character at once quirky, indomitable, endearing, and trivial. From the 1920's, when he was discovered by the intelligentsia, to the 1950's, his movies became steadily more self-conscious and morally sentimental – finally so far from the roots of his comedy that they became a type of self-parody. Buster Keaton, who never gave a damn about anything but the next gag, is more the people's choice these days. Something of the same can be said about Woody Allen, or Alfred Hitchcock after the book by Francois Truffaut. There are innumerable other examples.

    The actor Andy Garcia tells a story on himself about an incident that occurred during the filming of the movie 'The Untouchables'. He was having trouble with some scene, which he could not do to his satisfaction. Sean Connery, also in the case, finally move over and whispered to him, 'Just say the line, kid. It's not fucking Hamlet'.

    Which is my humble, bottom-line advice to one and all - the talented, the untalented, the geniuses, the wannabe's. Don't worry too much about it. There is no Joycean distinction between genius and talent – only a universe of triers and achievements in large and small part, some great, some not so great, all with flaws of one kind or another. So don't worry about whether it's Great or American or even a Novel. Just write the paragraph, daub the paint, focus the lens, kid. It's not fucking Hamlet.

    So. Joyce's thought is pretty demoralizing for all those young men portraying themselves as artists.  But it is in the larger arena of politics that the pernicious implications come into play. The  notion that genius is immune from genuine error, that even apparent error leads to the 'portals of discovery', contains within it the implication that genius is beyond good and evil, that the moral universe has no claim on it. Conventional wrongdoing is, after all, only a species of error.  Joyce's elegant assertion of the attributes of genius is actually elegant formulation of the rights of the the superman, the ubermensch – that much-misunderstood concept of the even more misunderstood Nietzsche.

    No mistakes? Volitional error? The Fuhrer beckons from just down the corridor, as do the leaders of the proletarian vanguard, as do all the others who claim to possess a wisdom – genius, in a word - far above and beyond that vouchsafed us ordinary members of the common herd. Claims of this type, and seizure of power on that basis, are the blight of human history.

    The subject of the claims of political 'genius', alas, has become topical again. Not a little of the hysterical adulation of the recently elected President is tinged with these hues. I'll come clean here, in an article published on the American Thinker. I'm not nearly as down on Barack Obama as most of my readers. I like the guy. From the start, I've sensed a big streak of pragmatic politician in him that negates much of the concern about his ideology. Also, it's terrific to have a US President who's universally popular – the first since Kennedy. Popularity is an extremely useful tool. If Obama was working with a Republican majority to keep him in check, I think the country would be in fine shape politically. (Its financial shape is a different story.)

    It's Obama's followers who scare me a little. Over the last two years, I've witnessed a number of persons whose thoughtfulness I respected, morph into True Believers. There is a core of Obama's constituency that would be quick to grant him the status of Joyce's genius, making only volitional errors, which errors themselves lead to 'portals of discovery' of the greater good. I will not be surprised if a grass roots movement begins to repeal the Twenty-Third Amendment – and before his first term is half up. When a country is blessed with a genius like Obama, why look for anyone else? The fact that much of this constituency is elitist and anti-democratic in the first place is not helpful in this context.

    Not good. There is no 'genius' of the type Joyce described, not in the form of an artist, definitely not in the form of a statesman. We will not be saved by a hero-leader, no matter how gifted. Whatever he may achieve, Barack Obama will also make his share (and maybe then some) of colossal mistakes – and they will be just that – mistakes. Our only hope lies, as it always has, with ourselves. The Great Blind Beast, as I call the amazing American public, possessed of zero intelligence and infinite wisdom, can give anyone fits with its inconsistencies, its meanderings, its bouts of indifference and impatience – but the only genuine power, the only true moral authority, lies with it and in it.

    And thus endeth the sermon.

    As noted, the contest remains open. If you have a candidate saying, please remember (a) it has to appear at first reading to be fairly sensible – obviously inane sayings don't get to the starter's line;  and (b) it has to be attributed – common sayings and folk wisdom are also disqualified. Mr. Commack's contribution meets both tests. The polls remain open. All contributions are welcome. Submit them here as comments, or to me directly at fdber@yahoo.com.

[This article originally appeared on the American Thinker site in a slightly altered form.]

Superficially Wise (But Actually Foolish) Sayings of Smart People (A Contest)

    A long time ambition of mine, which is being fulfilled in this writing, has been to conduct a competition to identify sayings, aphorisms if you will, that are often quoted, APPARENTLY expressions of great wisdom, that - when they are in depth and critically, reveal themselves to be utter nonsense or worse. The object is to take a hard look at REAL conventional wisdom - principles that most of us actually believe reflect wisdom, as opposed to attitudes and expressions to which we give lip service for the sake of getting along.

    Some tough rules apply here - because this is not an exercise in ridicule. The point is to identify the sayings at which we all nod sagely that don't hold up on second thought. So the rules have to be hard.

    1. No quotes from identified idiots or villains, e.g., bring your tired old game from Adolph Hitler or Mikail Bakunin into the key, and it'll be slapped back in your face. Rejection city, baby. Quotes from respected sources only - the more respectable, the better.

    2. No predictions. For one thing, predictions that have been proven disastrously wrong have no value as hard intellectual currency these days. We all know ther's no such thing as an unsinkable ship. For another, even the best and brightest go wrong in fortune telling. It's too easy.

    3. No obviously stupid sayings Hiqh quality counterfeit wisdom is the name of the game, stuff that can pass as coin of the realm unless it is bitten really, REALLY, hard.

    The contest is open to anyone with a candidate. (Sorry, there are no prizes.) But obviously I have some candidates of my own. I'll lead off with one of them to get the ball rolling in the right (I hope) direction. My first choice -

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana

    Something of a surprise? I'd be surprised if it were not. This aphorism (or innumerable variants thereof) of Santayana's is endlessly re-quoted, always with approval. It seems to state a principle of elemental, axiomatic wisdom. But in my (actually rather humble, in this instance) opinion there is some really dubious stuff here, relative to the notion of history as science and history itself.

    As to the first, the premise that history repeats itself in any meaningful sense is extremely suspect. The more I learn about some historical event, the more I am struck by the accidental aspects of it, particularly the importance of personality. Discuss the macro-economic factors behind the American Revolution till the cows come home - the importance of the personalities of the Founding Fathers, particularly Washington, are critical to the shape of the contours of the event. As time moves on, the contours become everything.

    How can the larger signficance of the Civil War be separated from the personalities of Lincoln, Grant, and Robert E. Lee? What happens if a man wi the courage and wisdom of Joshua Chamberlain is not at the end of the line at Liltle Round Top at Gettysburg? In the same way, the Russian Revolution cannot possibly take the form it does absent the personality of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin?

    If events of this magnitude devolve endlessly into details, and ever more profound detail, in what meaningful sense can patterns be deduced from them? I know that the thought causes Hegelian and Marxist scholars to weep buckets, but I don't believe there is any pattern at all to historical movements. The study of history is of supreme value, but as the best and most useful study of human nature, nothing more.

    Which leads to the second point. Even if the past did have lessons for the present, how could they possibly be applied? Let me wax lyrical and borrow a metaphor from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine - the characters in their Pulitzer Prize winning show 'Sundays in the Park with George'. I do believe that our perception of contemporary events can be deemed 'pointillist'. We are ourselves figures on the canvas, both participating in and observing the events of our time. We perceive huge arrays of data points, but too sprawling and unwieldy to be interpreted with any precision (unless we want to bring in our value judgments and decide that some are more important than others.) No one can distinguish for certain between a fad, a trend, or an irrelevant incident. It is a certain distance develops between the canvas and the observer, that these points form themselves into shapes, patterns, colors - and even then, undercut by the effect of random detail, as noted above.

    So even if solid lessons could be developed from history, deciding how and to what they apply is impossible - a matter of sheer hit and miss intuition. So what wisdom is there, really, in Santayana's aphorism? Not much.

    So this famous quote turns out to be a non-starter. As far as the science of history, there is no area of human study in which God - and the Devil - dwell more completely in the details - so completely that it makes any pretense of 'science' an illusion. (I'd apologize to all those Marxists and Hegelians, but they deserve all the misery they get.)

    In the sense in which Santayana uses the term 'history'. not only does history not repeat itself. It doesn't even happen the first time.

[This post first appeared on The American Thinker, in slightly different form, on February 28th.]

Good Movies, Bad Influences

    Some films are things of beauty in their own right, but possessed with rotten DNA. I am referring to movies that are masterpieces in their own right, but horrible influences on the future. It's easy enough to compile a long list, but I am going to start with just two. Both are in black and white, they were released within three years of each other, they are both superb pictures, and they are both grandfather and godfather to a whole slew of ghastly spawn.

    The first is Hitchcock's picture 'Psycho', which debuted in 1960. 'Psycho' is an undoubted masterpiece, an enthralling movie. The shock scenes, in the shower and on the staircase, as well as the revelation at the end, are so famous (aka notorious) that it is easy to forget that the picture is basically 'plotty'. The screen violence has the impact it does because the story starts life as an energetically told tale of a frustrated woman attempting to burst the confines of her life by an impulsive act of embezzlement. Her sudden death, totally unrelated to the major plot line, comes straight out of nowhere. The audience walks into the twist like a prizefighter leaning into a right hook. It is impossible to recapture that now, when the outlines of the plot are so well known, but the surprise was the reason it scared the initial audiences out of their wits in way back when. Add to that a career making (and ending) performance by Anthony Perkins, strong support from Martin Balsam and Janet Leigh (nominated for an Academy Award as a supporting actress), and you have quite a movie.

    Which unfortunately became the inspiration for the 'slasher' movie, a million and two of which have been cluttering up theaters ever since. Hitchcock may have made 'Psycho' with a lot of art and droll wit. But the moral a ton of second raters drew is that quite an effect can be obtained simply with a little shrill music and someone jumping out of nowhere holding a big knife - never mind the intricacies of plot. I am not a film historian, just a random observer, so perhaps in error, and correct me if if so. But I don't believe the 'slasher' genre existed before the success of 'Psycho'. As good as that movie is, its prestige came at a considerable price. Too great a price? That's a question beyond the scope of this essay.

    Three years later, in 1963, Frederico Fellini presented '8-1/2' to the world. It too is a masterpiece. The movie is as plotless as 'Psycho' is plotty, a discursive series of events and recollections of a film director trying to create an authentic picture. It was almost impossible to make coherent sense out of it from the subtitled dialog when it first came out (almost the only movie I know where viewing a dubbed version works better than the original). But I don't know anyone that wasn't completely dazzled by the picture. A superb performance by Mastroianni, a wonderful ensemble cast, a magnificent score by Nino Rota - but above all, the collage of events and recollections worked at some subliminal level.  Energized by Fellini's autobiographical intensity, the mishmash of imagery somehow coalesced into a satisfying, coherent whole.

    Which success establishes Fellini as a close-to-unique talent if not a genius (a word I like to avoid.) Unfortunately, it was also an open invitation to a lot of not-so-uniqe talents and anything-but-geniuses over the next two decades to put out all sorts of similar collages of arresting imagery that were internally vague and incoherent. The totally erroneous moral these auteurs drew from '8 1/2' was that consistency and clarity were dispensable qualities if the photography was arresting (and mystifying) enough. The result was a series of thoroughly wretched Fellini-esque imitations over the next two decades. The technique worked for Fellini (sometimes). But you have to possess a talent of Fellini's magnitude - which very few do - to make it work.

    Both 'Psycho' and '8 1/2' are masterpieces. They are both very good movies. They were both very bad influences.

Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead!!

    In the midst of the four day celebration now in progress of Obama's inauguration, one foreign commentator (here, reprinted from the Australian) takes the time to assess the Bush Administration a bit more soberly. Three points of note:

    1. It's already apparent that Obama is going to continue the major Bush foreign policies. With all the pronouncements about willingness to talk to anyone, Hilary Clinton in her confirmation hearing, articulated pretty much the same preconditions that Bush had announced. Query - faced with at least the notional possibility that the last five years were not as demoniacally evil as the Demented Left has been proclaiming, how will it react? By (a) branding Obama as a sellout, (b) re-evaluating the hysterical opposition and sheepishly conceding that some of it was a bit overblown, or (c) ignoring the apparent contradiction? My vote is on (c), with the pendant that every problem that Obama cannot surmount will be blamed on his predecessor, every triumph credited to him. (a) is possible, but very unlikely. (b) is out of the question. The Demented Left has been living on myth for forty years. Myth is not susceptible to revision.

    2. The author notes one interesting fact that does occasionally sound above the cacophony, that Bush is by miles the most Afro-centric President in US history - three times the aid to the sub-Saharan region as Clinton. I hope Obama continues with this.

    3. The author also notes (correctly, in my opinion) the reason for the difficulty in appraising the successes and failures of the Bush Administration - the virulent attitude of too many elements of the US media, particularly the New York Times. Its editors and columnists have needed rabies tests for nearly four years now. (The notorious editorial it ran in August 2007, demanding instant withdrawal from Iraq and blandly accepting the inevitability of carnage as a result, was one of the most shameful in its history. Although events have proven the editorial dead wrong, to the best of my knowledge, it has never retreated or retracted a word of it.)

    I don't know what history will say about the Bush Administration. But since there aren't all that many demons in actual history, I suspect it will draw a sort of balance. At least some Iraqi journalists see some positives.

Nassim Taleb, Barney Frank, and George W. Bush

   One last time on one of my favorite themes, before the sun sets forever in the West. That is the absurdity attempting to evaluate all the events of the last eight years without consideration of the alternative histories that might have come to pass.

    A Lebanese currency trader named Nassim Taleb established his reputation in the last four years with two books about decision making and markets, entitled 'The Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness'. Although the second one, 'The Black Swan', is the more colorful and widely noted, the first, 'Fooled by Randomness', is actually the more systematic and accessible. Both books are attacks on over-quantified thinking, emphasizing the significance of unpredictable events and the tendency to confuse random success with scientific skill.

    In Fooled by Randomness, Taleb illustrates his central point with a brutally effective hypothetical. He considers the case of a young man invited to play a game of Russian roulette for stakes of $10,000,00 a round. He notes the absurdity of judging the wisdom of taking this bet by the outcome. Five-sixths of the time, his biographers applaud his cold blooded willingness to risk his life for a grubstake. The sixth?

    Accepting the bet is obviously an appallingly foolish thing to do. Taleb's point is that it is only when the 'unknown histories', the outcomes that by the roll of the dice never came to be, that the actual soundness (or not) of the decision can be determined. He goes on to note that the easily calculable risk of Russian roulette is child's play, compared to the subtle, infinitely varied, and infinitely changeable risk-reward aspects of real life. But the principle is the same - it is not the outcome, but the method of decision generation that determines the wisdom of a decision.

    What occurs to me, taking this process one ply deeper, is that the player in real life who avoids the loaded chambers of the decisional revolver, is doomed to be the most despised of all the prophets without honor. Compare, for example, the situation of Barney Frank and George W. Bush. Franks is certainly not the only member of Congress who failed to respond to the looming danger of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mismanagement, but he's visible enough to serve as an example for our purposes.

    Supposing Franks had had the wisdom to recognize the threat, AND the political guts and will to insist on reform. What happens?

    Franks puts himself in the position of recognizing the loaded chamber in the revolver before it discharges. He demands, and gets, timely reform. This, of course, brings the manic mortgage lending of Fannie Mae to a halt, and with it (a man can wish) the whole insane house of leveraged derivative cards built upon its sandy foundation. What is Frank's reward for this prescience? To be roundly damned by everyone who stood to profit from the frenzied market, which is quite a number, and to receive no support whatsoever from those saved from loss, since they don't even know they were ever endangered, let alone who they are. The market was in good shape. These derivatives weren't that dangerous. We knew what we were doing. What needed reform? Why did you do this?

 

    Only a precious few would honor Frank for reacting to the unknown histories - the loaded chamber(s) - as well as the one that came to be. They are so few and so precious, in fact, that Nassim Taleb has just made a career out of pointing out the necessity of thinking in such a manner. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king; he's in big trouble. (Another aphorism shot out of the saddle.)

 

    George W. Bush is on the other extreme. In all of the eternal rounds of damnation that have been hurled at his administration in the last few years, I have read few if any who consider that a comparison of unknown histories is necessary to assess his actions, that the question is not the evils of the present course per se, but whether they are lesser or greater than the evils that might have been. My own thinking on this point was permanently influenced by the chance acquisition of a book, The New Yorker Book of War Pieces [ISBN 00805209018], a collection of articles that appeared in the New Yorker between 1939 and 1945. Over and over, particularly in the first pieces, the writers agonize - literally - over why the West let it come to war, let Hitler and Germany develop the momentum he did. These are anguished reports. The writers were frightened men and women.

 

    But of course if the West had reacted to Hitler in timely fashion, the world would never have known the wisdom of that course of action. As with Frank, the actual history becomes one of the unknown ones. It is entirely possible that the very same journalists who agonized in the world that came to be in 1940, would have condemned the reaction as an overreaction in the world that never arose. Hitler wasn't so bad. He made they trains run on time. Things were better under Saddam.

    If we were living in a world in which a psychopathic Saddam Hussein, bloated with oil money and emboldened by Western passivity, was racing with Iran to stockpile nuclear weapons, we'd know. Worse - if we were digging out of the radioactive ruins of Manhattan, we might be sharing the agonies of that 1940 world. No one can say for certain (obviously) - the calculation can only be intuitive. But the fact that such a judgment must be made is reason enough to restrain the demonization.

 

    What it comes down to is that Taleb insists that the unknown histories be considered, as well as the one that came to be, in evaluating the soundness of a decision. Otherwise, the winners of Russian roulette games are celebrated for wisdom rather than the simple luck of the survivor. George W. Bush may have saved the world, as horrible as that sentiment sounds to the Demented Left. Barney Frank for sure did not. That for sure does not end the thinking about momentous issues, but it is where it should begin.

'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' - A Book Review

    I was at the library recently, and casually opened the pages of a novel entitled 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society'. (A more complete description can be found here.) It turned out to be an epistolary novel, a form for which I am a sucker, chronicling the relationship of an authoress of light humor with the residents of a channel island (Guernsey), from its origins in an unsolicited fan letter to her full involvement with their community. The action of the book begins in March of 1946. The narrative consists in the main of a gradual unfolding of the events of the German occupation of the island during the Second World War, disclosed in the context of the heroine's own personal dilemmas of life and love.

    I took the book home, read it, and found it so unusual that I shared it with my wife. The odd feature of the book did not lie in anything out of the ordinary in the epistolary format, nor in the off-the-beaten bath subject matter. What was striking was that the exposition in the first half of the book was nothing less than superb - muscular, thoughtful, restrained, with one narrative surprise after another woven seamlessly into an account of the young heroine's romantic conflicts. The drop off in quality in the second half (by the way, the book is divided into parts I and II) is striking and remarkable. My wife had the same impression.

    The book is co-authored, by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Thereby hangs a tale, and a rather sad one. Annie Barrow is the niece of Mary Anne Shaffer. The book is evidently the product of Ms. Shaffer's life long interest in the Channel Islands and the experience of the islanders during the Second World War. Tragically, she died in February, 2008, about five months before the publication date of the book. 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' will be her first and only book. Annie Barrow, her niece and an experienced editor of children's literature, evidently saw to the publication of the book in good form.

    I have to emphasize how much of this is hunch. But if ever a novel shows the work of two different hands, it's this one. It's as if one very gifted writer wrote part I, and another, not nearly so gifted, did part II. The big question is which woman did which part. Did Ms. Barrows skillfully edit the first part while her aunt was alive, and then courteously leave the second alone? Or did Ms. Shaffer pass away, leaving part I in good form and leaving her niece to do the best she could with part II? An interesting question, but - unlike most interesting questions - one that does not necessarily deserve an answer.

    If anything above dissuades the reader from taking a look at this book, let me reassure you. It is a first class read, despite the drop off in quality. ('The Guernsey . . .Society' already has some enthusiastic fans. For example.) Part I is superb, part II merely good. But the book as a whole is still one of the most off beat and entertaining novels a well-read person is likely to encounter.

Some Movie Reviews

A little break. I see a great many movies, almost everything. The Christmas (aka Oscar) season this year has been particularly good. Some capsule reviews.

The pick of the litter in my utterly subjective opinion are (in alphabetical order) Frost/Nixon, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire. The reason is that these are the most complex of all the movies on which I am going to comment. I do see an enormous number of them, to the extent that anything remotely formulaic or even straightforward has two strikes against it. None of these three movies could in anyway be called simple or straightforward.

The source of the complexity in Frost/Nixon is, as one might expect, the character of Richard Nixon. The trailers to this movie really didn't do it justice. It looked like it was going to be The Trial and Conviction of Richard Nixon as Conducted by David Frost. I have no special love for Nixon, but resurrecting these old liberal bete noires for another hearty round of condemnation leaves me cold. (This was a big problem for me with Good Night and Good Luck a few years back. Joe McCarthy died 51 years ago. Enough.) But the picture is not at all a demonization of Nixon - rather, an exploration of an unusually complex human being. As magnificently portrayed by Frank Langella (my front runner for the Best Actor), he possesses a definite wintry charm, a lot of pride, a lot of guilt, a lot of ambition, and a huge chip on his shoulder. Watching these different aspects of Nixon's character play out in various permutations is what gives the movie its fascination. The ensemble cast, both English and American, is excellent.

The complexity of The Reader can be illustrated most simply with the observation that the title is ambiguous as to which character is meant. The story begins in 1958, when a 35 year old woman (Kate Winslet) begins an affair with a 15 year old boy (played as a youth by David Kross, as an adult by Ralph Fiennes). Not the least of the achievements of the movie is that the evolution of the relationship, from a simple physical attraction to a genuine (if a little unusual) love relationship, is shown naturally and convincingly. The boy grows up and becomes a law student. He encounters the woman again, as one of the accused at a trial of SS guards. Her guilt is never at issue, though the degree of culpability certainly is. His reaction to the revelations at trial is the central theme of his life and the movie.

Those critics who have disliked the movie have interpreted it as a Holocaust movie, which it is not. It is a rather unconventional love story, told over the course of the hero's life. The picture is moving and effective. If I were to make one criticism, it is that Kate Winslet usually portrays such intelligent characters that it takes a long time to realize that this one is not at all bright - rather, a direct, simple woman. (She starts sleeping with the boy because he is attractive, and continues because she likes him more and more - the character needs no better reason for her behavior than that.) That isn't much of a blemish. The enthralling issue is what exactly the impact of the relationship (including the trial) has had on the hero, and why it is as profound as it seems to be.

    Slumdog Millionaire is complex in a different way, crossing so many boundaries into so many different genres that it is awfully hard to say exactly what kind of movie it is. It starts life as a hair-raising look at the life of slum kids in Mumbai, touching lightly on themes of police brutality and religious conflict, then evolves smoothly into a sophisticated Bollywood romance. It is not a spoiler to note that the entire cast does a raucous dance number in a train station over the closing credits - a number that seems entirely appropriate, even though the movie is NOT a musical. It's that kind of picture.

    If all this seems high spirited and fun, that's because it is, even though the movie surely doesn't begin that way. I will not say more as the picture is very plotty and constantly surprising. However, if all this sounds like great fun for children, be advised that the movie includes a graphic scene in which a naive eight-year old boy, believing he is auditioning for training as a singer, is instead chloroformed and blinded (all this vividly shown on screen) to make him a more productive beggar for the mob. Usually a movie with a scene like that is an absolute no-starter for me, which will give you an idea how strong this picture really is.

    In the second tier are Milk and Doubt. Both are awfully good movies with very strong casts. But both are a little bit too linear to make my 'A' list. Sean Penn is another front runner for the Oscar. But the movie is mildly hagiographic, and also something of a Johnny One-Note. ("They're trying to take our rights!! We win!! We win!!") Also, the performance of Josh Brolin as Dan White is pretty poor. White was a man with real issues (obviously), and few, if any, redeeming qualities. But no one gets elected to a major urban office without at least flashes of personal charm, which are completely missing.

    Doubt, surprisingly, is even more linear. One would think that a movie themed around dealing with uncertainty would be rich in subtext, but not so. The plot is actually a type of non-violent melodrama that is quite engrossing, but moves vector-like in a single direction. The cast is quite good, and the movie worth the trouble. But it does not stay with you.

    Finally, there is Clint Eastwood and Gran Torino, or Dirty Harry Grows Old. It was great fun, with some nice elderly macho and a really charming cross-cultural story. But it probably has the weakest cast of any of them, and I am including Eastwood. The notion that he would get recognition for playing the same character in the same way for the last 40 years is somewhat astounding to me.

    None of which changes that this has been a great six weeks for a dedicated movie-goer. The worst of these pictures is pretty good. The three best (Frost/Nixon, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire) are terrific.

What Happened to the Family Farm

You have owned the family farm for a couple of generations. It has endured some hard times, but you endured. About 30 years ago, times got a little better. You could finally plant the crops you thought would do well, you did just that, and you made some money. Some of this gee-whiz computer stuff made your operation a little quicker, and you did much better. So did every one else.

So good that you relaxed. You started to spend more than you could sell the crops for. No problem, since the Great Bank of China (Warlords with a Heart!) was willing to loan you all you needed, and the market for the crops seemed unlimited. Then times got tough overseas, some of your workers went off to war, and you lost some ground there. You became a little lazy, and let a few of your seed fields go to flower. Not good - you'd gone from a pretty good manager to a lousy one.

But at least you knew this. You also knew you'd been there before and found a way out. Acts of mismanagement can be corrected by acts of good management. You deserved a good kick in the rear for all your complacency, but at least you had identified the problem. Nothing for it, but to solve it.

That is, until your youngest son came home and told you that he'd lost the deed to the farm in a poker game. That, you had not counted on. That knocked you for a loop.

 . . .

A little parable about the comparison between the problems with economic fundamentals in this society, and the disaster that has occurred in the financial institutions. I have been trying for two months now to get someone with more economic acument than I have - there are a ton of 'em - to tell me I'm wrong - but no one ever does. Meanwhile, I keep reading editorials deploring the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It's true, of course, that they were mismanaged - but that's not why we're in this mess.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are mortgage insurers. Their predecessors were founded during the New Deal to make home ownership possible to the middle class. After the Second World War, their ambit was vastly expanded to provide home ownership benefits for returning veterans.

The impact and importance of the program cannot be underestimated. Unless you are a very exceptional individual, you and every one you know owns a home based on a 15 or 30 year mortgage (and I am including ARM's, which in theory are amortized over that period.) It might surprise to you to know that that feature of the American middle class landscape is solely due to the creation of Federal mortgage insurance. In the 19th century and the first decades of the last, real estate mortgages were 5 year renewable notes. That's because lenders knew that collateral could lose value as well as gain, which was the case in the 19th Century. They would not loan on the collateral for longer than 60 months. (That's the reason you could have melodramas with Snidely Whiplash beasting about, threatening to foreclose on little Nell. He's not there because she missed a payment on a 30 year fully amortized note. He's there because the five years are up, the real estate market has changed, and the family farm is no longer adequate security.)

Fannie Mae changed all that by guaranteeing the mortgage so that the lender doesn't have to worry about collateral losing value. Nearly every middle class family in the US has benefited from that program. It was a valuable innovation, as important in its way as Federal deposit insurance. There would be very, very few families that would own homes did this institutional machinery not exist.

O.K. Bear with me. Sometime ten or 12 years, this mortgage insurance company began to lose its bearings. It encouraged lending that was too high risk and guaranteed the same. Its risk analysis was way, way off. No question that's bad. It's going to cause a real issue with the reserves that have to be allocated to pay off bad loans, etc. Like any other insurer, it's going to have to take stepso insure its liquidity and the adequacy of its cash reserves. BUT . . . . .

  . . . IT SHOULD NOT TRIGGER A GLOBAL BANKING CRISIS. The reason why all these financial institutions are in trouble is NOT the (still relatively low) level of foreclosures in the subprime market. It's that this home ownership was monetized, collaterized to a fare-thee-well, and traded between large institutions.

And why did this happen? What on earth is the point of monetizing and trading collaterized debt obligations? It bears absolutely no relation to the original point of Fannie Mae policy, which is to promote home ownership. It bears absolutely no relationship to the conventional creditor-debtor relation of bank and homeowner. It exists, so far as I know, only because the extremely sophisticated computer programs by which financial instruments are analyzed seduced financial managers of large institutions into believing they could make huge, 'safe' trading profits - and pay themselves huge bonuses accordingly. The market for these 'securities', if it can be called that, is entirely artificial. Traditionally, no one thought of home equity as a marketable security on which someone could make trading profits. There has never been a trading market for home mortgages.

Let me make the same point another way. Assume that me and a number of other men and women have bought term life insurance with a given company. That produces a cash flow of premiums, against which ultimately the company will have to pay certain cash sums, discounted over time. Assume that in some Alice-in-Wonderland world, the company, and others like it, are allowed to monetize the premiums, turning the cash flow into one large bond, and sell it. Assume further that the financial managers of the world have sophisticated analytical programs, with which they can analyze the actuarial assumptions of the company, compare them with others, and decide which of the life insurance bonds are irregular, i.e., the cash flow from the premiums is going to be a little more than necessary to pay off the contracted payouts, so the bond has economic value due to the projected surplus. Of course the differential is too small to make any significant trading profit - so it buys the bond at the insurance company par, leverages it thirty to one, and sells it at a premium based on the anticipated surplus - believing of course that the premium cash flow is absolutely safe.

(Does this seem like madness? In macro economic terms, it sure is. (Don't confuse this monetization with coinsurance, a type of risk sharing, which is another thing altogether.) The purpose of the term life insurance was to provide policy holders with protection against certain assumed risks. These policies aren't investment vehicles, and were never intended as such. The fact that you can ascertain a market irregularity with a variant of the Black-Scholes equation doesn't mean you have identified a marketable secutiry.)

If the insurance company has miscalculated its actuarial assumptions, it may run short of money to pay benefits and maintain reserves. That's serious, but correctable. You can raise premiums to new policy holders, and take various measures. But you are not going to collapse the banking system. That can only happen if you have monetized the premium flow, collaterized it to astronomical heights, and sold it highter and yon - insurance policies which were never meant to be traded, and for which there is no regular market. When the actuarial assumptions fail then, so does the colalterized bond, and the walls a'come a tumblin' down.

One final trope - if you're going to be stabbed by a knife, you'll do a lot better if you're fit, trim, with firm solid musculature, than you will if you're flabby and out of shape. (Note to me: stick to that New Year's resolution.) But the big problem is the knife wound, not the being out of shape.

Here's a link to a really good 12 minute 60 Minutes presentation on the same subject.

I close noting that all this is subject to correction. But I have yet to receive it. My tentative thought is that trading in this stuff is madness, and must be stopped or subjected to the strictest regulation.

A Reckoning for The Newspaper of Record

    I am of two minds about the New York Times. On the one hand, the existence of at least one newspaper with the resources and expertise to do in-depth reporting on complex current issues seems to be essential. Its current series on the financial crisis ("The Reckoning") is superb. On the other, the Times can degenerate into the crassest type of propaganda. Its columnists are bad enough - an incessant preaching to the choir, conducted at a deafening decibel level.

    But it is even worse when the propaganda comes disguised as 'objective' journalism. Its coverage of continuing news stories such as the Iraqi War and the recent Presidential campaign reflected an editorial bias that became downright embarrassing. This heart-before-head approach to factual stories damages the credibility of the institution as newspaper of record - a fact that may be reflected in its declining circulation and its financial difficulties.

    So a dose of reality may be a good idea for the paper itself. It is about to get two of them. First, it seems the Pulitzer Prize people are seriously considering revoking the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the dreadful Walter Duranty in 1932 for his coverage of the famine in the Ukraine. About time. Duranty is one of the most embarrassing figures in the history of the New York Times. Even more embarrassing is the fact that an entire series of editors never cottoned on to the fact that he was a propagandist, not a journalist. (The rumor is that the NKVD caught him in a honey trap and effectively dictated his stories.) To its credit, the story is carried by the Times itself.

    Even more interesting is the claim of slander filed by Vicki Iseman last Tuesday. Iseman was the lobbyist whom the Times linked to John McCain, in what was easily the most notorious and deplorable article of the Presidential campaign - a sewer of innuendo and speculation that would have been unworthy of the National Enquirer, let alone the newspaper of record. Ms. Iseman has her work cut out for her. To prevail, she has to either show negligence (if she is not a public figure) or malice (if she is) on the part of the Times. She can expect to meet a well-funded, determined resistance from the Times, aimed at ending the lawsuit with summary judgment, i.e., a decision by a judge that the case is without merit. If Ms. Iseman wins there, she can expect a generous settlement offer.

    But I sure hope that she wins the summary judgment and refuses the settlement offer.  My fondest hope is that the lawsuit does NOT resolve short of trial, and that the Times is forced to wash in open court all of the dirty linen that led to the publication of the article. I can't think of anything that would do it more good.

    I do believe that the editors of New York Times believe that credibility is theirs by divine right, a gift from a just and generous creator. Well, so did the FBI and the Office of the Presidency, once upon a time. Those institutions have both seen the implicit public trust that was once near absolute, damaged or destroyed by the abuse of the power with which they were entrusted. The same thing can happen - is happening - to the Times, as disbelieving as its principals might be. A chastening trip to the woodshed is long over due. 

 

What Happened to the Family Farm

You have owned the family farm for a couple of generations. It has endured some hard times, but you endured. About 30 years ago, times got a little better. You could finally plant the crops you thought would do well, you did just that, and you made some money. Some of this gee-whiz computer stuff made your operation a little quicker, and you did much better. So did every one else.

So good that you relaxed. You started to spend more than you could sell the crops for. No problem, since the Great Bank of China (Warlords with a Heart!) was willing to loan you all you needed, and the market for the crops seemed unlimited. Then times got tough overseas, some of your workers went off to war, and you lost some ground there. You became a little lazy, and let a few of your seed fields go to flower. Not good - you'd gone from a pretty good manager to a lousy one.

But at least you knew this. You also knew you'd been there before and found a way out. Acts of mismanagement can be corrected by acts of good management. You deserved a good kick in the rear for all your complacency, but at least you had identified the problem. Nothing for it, but to solve it.

That is, until your youngest son came home and told you that he'd lost the deed to the farm in a poker game. That, you had not counted on. That knocked you for a loop.

 . . .

A little parable about the comparison between the problems with economic fundamentals in this society, and the disaster that has occurred in the financial institutions. I have been trying for two months now to get someone with more economic acument than I have - there are a ton of 'em - to tell me I'm wrong - but no one ever does. Meanwhile, I keep reading editorials deploring the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It's true, of course, that they were mismanaged - but that's not why we're in this mess.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are mortgage insurers. Their predecessors were founded during the New Deal to make home ownership possible to the middle class. After the Second World War, their ambit was vastly expanded to provide home ownership benefits for returning veterans.

The impact and importance of the program cannot be underestimated. Unless you are a very exceptional individual, you and every one you know owns a home based on a 15 or 30 year mortgage (and I am including ARM's, which in theory are amortized over that period.) It might surprise to you to know that that feature of the American middle class landscape is solely due to the creation of Federal mortgage insurance. In the 19th century and the first decades of the last, real estate mortgages were 5 year renewable notes. That's because lenders knew that collateral could lose value as well as gain, which was the case in the 19th Century. They would not loan on the collateral for longer than 60 months. (That's the reason you could have melodramas with Snidely Whiplash beasting about, threatening to foreclose on little Nell. He's not there because she missed a payment on a 30 year fully amortized note. He's there because the five years are up, the real estate market has changed, and the family farm is no longer adequate security.)

Fannie Mae changed all that by guaranteeing the mortgage so that the lender doesn't have to worry about collateral losing value. Nearly every middle class family in the US has benefited from that program. It was a valuable innovation, as important in its way as Federal deposit insurance. There would be very, very few families that would own homes did this institutional machinery not exist.

O.K. Bear with me. Sometime ten or 12 years, this mortgage insurance company began to lose its bearings. It encouraged lending that was too high risk and guaranteed the same. Its risk analysis was way, way off. No question that's bad. It's going to cause a real issue with the reserves that have to be allocated to pay off bad loans, etc. Like any other insurer, it's going to have to take stepso insure its liquidity and the adequacy of its cash reserves. BUT . . . . .

  . . . IT SHOULD NOT TRIGGER A GLOBAL BANKING CRISIS. The reason why all these financial institutions are in trouble is NOT the (still relatively low) level of foreclosures in the subprime market. It's that this home ownership was monetized, collaterized to a fare-thee-well, and traded between large institutions.

And why did this happen? What on earth is the point of monetizing and trading collaterized debt obligations? It bears absolutely no relation to the original point of Fannie Mae policy, which is to promote home ownership. It bears absolutely no relationship to the conventional creditor-debtor relation of bank and homeowner. It exists, so far as I know, only because the extremely sophisticated computer programs by which financial instruments are analyzed seduced financial managers of large institutions into believing they could make huge, 'safe' trading profits - and pay themselves huge bonuses accordingly. The market for these 'securities', if it can be called that, is entirely artificial. Traditionally, no one thought of home equity as a marketable security on which someone could make trading profits. There has never been a trading market for home mortgages.

Let me make the same point another way. Assume that me and a number of other men and women have bought term life insurance with a given company. That produces a cash flow of premiums, against which ultimately the company will have to pay certain cash sums, discounted over time. Assume that in some Alice-in-Wonderland world, the company, and others like it, are allowed to monetize the premiums, turning the cash flow into one large bond, and sell it. Assume further that the financial managers of the world have sophisticated analytical programs, with which they can analyze the actuarial assumptions of the company, compare them with others, and decide which of the life insurance bonds are irregular, i.e., the cash flow from the premiums is going to be a little more than necessary to pay off the contracted payouts, so the bond has economic value due to the projected surplus. Of course the differential is too small to make any significant trading profit - so it buys the bond at the insurance company par, leverages it thirty to one, and sells it at a premium based on the anticipated surplus - believing of course that the premium cash flow is absolutely safe.

(Does this seem like madness? In macro economic terms, it sure is. (Don't confuse this monetization with coinsurance, a type of risk sharing, which is another thing altogether.) The purpose of the term life insurance was to provide policy holders with protection against certain assumed risks. These policies aren't investment vehicles, and were never intended as such. The fact that you can ascertain a market irregularity with a variant of the Black-Scholes equation doesn't mean you have identified a marketable secutiry.)

If the insurance company has miscalculated its actuarial assumptions, it may run short of money to pay benefits and maintain reserves. That's serious, but correctable. You can raise premiums to new policy holders, and take various measures. But you are not going to collapse the banking system. That can only happen if you have monetized the premium flow, collaterized it to astronomical heights, and sold it highter and yon - insurance policies which were never meant to be traded, and for which there is no regular market. When the actuarial assumptions fail then, so does the colalterized bond, and the walls a'come a tumblin' down.

One final trope - if you're going to be stabbed by a knife, you'll do a lot better if you're fit, trim, with firm solid musculature, than you will if you're flabby and out of shape. (Note to me: stick to that New Year's resolution.) But the big problem is the knife wound, not the being out of shape.

Here's a link to a really good 12 minute 60 Minutes presentation on the same subject.

I close noting that all this is subject to correction. But I have yet to receive it. My tentative thought is that trading in this stuff is madness, and must be stopped or subjected to the strictest regulation.