Andante

I'm not sure who the ensemble is here . . . I'm pretty sure it's the Alban Berg Quartet, AKA the greatest instrumental ensemble ever in the world forever. They have this very distinct and very slight rubato that makes the beautiful descending thirds figure especially yearning and wistful. Mozart famously didn't care for the "Prussian" string quartets, or at least he apocryphally called them boring, but they are deep and subtle compositions and very forward-looking in their own way. I have always thought that this second movement of the last of them, the F major (K.590), has a fair claim to be the loveliest several minutes of music that Mozart ever wrote.

He Fixes the Cable

As is often the case, the Right Reverend Smith and I were occupying the same quantum plane last night, two virtual particles called simultaneously into potential existence, distant, yet exactly the same. While he stalked the halls of his northern Marienbad, I stood upon the parapet of my Amalfian redoubt high above the Allegheny. A tugboat sounded. A solitary gull wheeled steadily in the gray wind.

I have the terrible habit of listening to NPR while ujjaying my way through the primary series after coming home from the office. I keep the volume low so I can't actually understand what they're saying--the irrythmic white noise of unintelligible human speech beats whale songs or throat singing or whatever it is that people too in a thrall the the hoaky theosophical spiritism that often accompanies yoga's pure calisthenic awesomeness listen to; it's nice to have a little something in the background, but when I try Bach, I get so caught in the moto perpetuo that I end up completing the entire one-hour sequence in three minutes. Curiously, the same thing used to happen when I practiced my violin, which is probably why I was never any good at it. Anyway, I had the misfortune of ending my practice and falling into an exhausted corpse pose right as the very same story that sent Mister Smiff running came on the air. Just as we we yesterday examined the prototypical Times piece, today, let's cast our yellow eye on Nominally Public Radio, and what I propose to you is a single sentence summarizing the entire output of that magnificent edifice to cruise-missile liberalism, the whole station, all of its component programs, its entire diverse, variegated identity boiled down and then distilled into a single declarative sentence:

Bruce Hoffman is a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

Lord. You can imagine where it goes from here.

Today is thursday, say experts who are familiar with the days of the week.

“Iran is the big winner here,” said a regional adviser to the United States government who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

-The Times

I adore this particular genre of Times-granted anonymity, unlike the more insidious identity-hiding that the major papers engage in to allow governments and businesses to slander, attack, and discredit rivals and dissenters. There is almost a poetry to it: an opinion, snatched from the ether, deposited in a story, credited to no one in particular. Sing, O Muse! I could get better quotes for bus fare from the downtown homeless. But of course, the homeless are unbound by authorizations; they are gloriously free to utter any banality that comes to mind without the written consent of their supervisor and a Human Resources rep.

The comfortable burrow from which this particular anonymouse squeaks is a prototypical Nyawk Times chinstroker about The Ramifications of something or other, and it opens with that old, familiar Squeak Chorus:

The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said.

While it is far too soon to write the final chapter on the uprisings’ impact, Iran has already benefited from the ouster or undermining of Arab leaders who were its strong adversaries and has begun to project its growing influence, the analysts said.

Experts! The Analysts! I sort of imagine Bill Keller and Paunch Lulzberger keep 'em in the basement, a collection of perpetually unappeased, demiurgic, liminal beings, a treasurey of diaphanous spirits from whom the occasional leg of Waverly-burnt lamb can call down an oracular pronouncement . . . or seventy. There are more "according to experts" and "said some analysts" in this article than you can fling a gallon of softened ghee at. Who are these experts, and why don't the ever say anything interesting? Do they pass around their single shared eyeball solely for the purpose of reading USA Today?

Anyway, the junk shot of the piece is that, having maintained a tenuous regional peace in some alternate universe accessible via a musty wardrobe in a back office at Times headquarters, the US and, of course, Israel, find themselves suddenly confronted by a bunch of countries governed by something more closely approximating the wants and desires of their actual inhabitants. I am of course just as skeptical of Arab democracy as I am of the ersatz American version, but I can't help but tremble in almost gleeful anticipation of some newly liberated Emirate somewhere recognizing Palestine, and as far as the fortunes of Iran are concerned, its regional ascendence in recent years, so directly the result of America's viciously inept wars in the region, is some kinda proof that the universe truly runs on an inexhaustible karmic fuel.

More Dick

Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just spirit of equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war- horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!

-from "Knights and Squires", Moby Dick

Someone remembered that Melville had kind words for Cervantes, and here they are among some marvelous anarchism.

Windtalkers

Matt Taibbi famously covered this sort of thing, but since Thomas Friedman is the Milton of infelicity, there is never too much scholarship to go around:

What’s unfolding in the Arab world today is the mother of all wake-up calls. And what the voice on the other end of the line is telling us is clear as a bell:

“America, you have built your house at the foot of a volcano. That volcano is now spewing lava from different cracks and is rumbling like it’s going to blow. Move your house!” In this case, “move your house” means “end your addiction to oil.”

Why doesn't the wake up call just tell us to end our addiction to oil? Why is the wake-up call speaking in fucking code?

If Essene It Once, Essene It a Thousand Times

I do not often find myself in the position of defending Christopher Hitchens, and I'm not really going to start now, but I will say that this is the most transcendently ridiculous and immaculately overdetermined piece of casuistry I have ever read. The whole thing plays like a transmission from beyond Narnia. It is as magnificently absurd as a Gaudi. The author proposes that the existence of Jews proves the realness of their god, an exercise in question-begging that curiously applies to Jews and only to Jews, and he says that questioning the biblical accounts in Exodus is literally the same as Holocaust denial. Then he says:

Hitchens’ anti-Judaic diatribes may yet prepare the way for another Holocaust.

May yet! Oh, Lulz. I may yet go home later today to find Johnny Weir, a sling, and a five-day-bender-worth of poppers. Go tell it on the mountain!

Loose Fish

Is there anything better than Moby Dick? It is just so fucking good, every single page a visceral pleasure. I was going to punt and say that without Melville there'd have been no Conrad, but I am feeling particularly declamatory this morning, and I'll come right out with it. There have only been three truly inventive writers in the novel form, and they are Cervantes, Sterne, and Melville. As Hillel said about something else altogether, the rest is just commentary.

Fault Lines

I think that Reason magazine's evident conviction that a Democratic president making fairly bland pro-labor statements and his political party seeking to curry favor with one of their larger single voting blocs in the run-up to a presidential election year are characteristics of the imperial presidency, right up there with the presidential right of assassination and the long global war on everyone everywhere all the time, is both partially true and faintly, hilariously hysterical, like the notion that Christina Aguilera's botched Superbowl anthem signals irreversibly an America in decline--true, but not true. And I think that the Reason magazine staff's understanding of unions, collective bargaining, and labor negotiations occupies a mental rung just barely, barely up-ladder from the Matthew Yglesias contribution to the field of economics: it has, in particular, that spectacular internal consistency that is inevitably born of being persistently and insistently wrong.

Unlike most Reason writers, I have had the occasion to negotiate union contracts, always on the side of management, and as I must--persistently and insistently--remind my colleagues, some of whom were also on the goddamned negotiating team, we agreed to the terms and conditions that we love to bitch about. CBAs are not imposed by powerful union goon squads on helpless managers, although hapless managers can be out-negotiated by the stubborn dummies who make up most union leadership. It isn't a wholly unfair point that public employee unions benefit from negotiating with political factions they helped to elect, but anyone involved in a large enterprise with a union shop (or several) finds this point, pulled out like a real Trump in the linked Welch post, likewise faintly laughable, because it is always, always, always the case that mutual interests muddy the adversarial nature of labor negotiations and drive both sides to make disadvantageous concessions in the name of the collective scam.

Management in any case has all the real advantages in a negotiation if management is willing to use them. But most of the time, managers are lazy negotiators and fail to do their work in advance. An unconquerable belief that unions are irrational combined with a childlike wonderment in the face of a bargaining unit that does not acquiesce to management demands with the supine, college-educated spinelessness of the at-will staff in the upstairs offices, leads managers to enter negotiations with functionally final proposals. A few union officials willing to start off asking for the sun, moon, and stars then move toward a more agreeable (for them) middle, which is still far from what management wants. But management just sat dumbly reiterating the points that it thought every rational person would naturally agree to. And in the end, managers are pissed that they got what they consider a bad deal, because it was not the shining deal they wanted, and they act like they had nothing to do with it, even though they were at the table the whole time.

You could of course try to do a better job negotiating next time, or you could try to make unions illegal as punishment for your or your predecessors' terrible tactics, absent strategy, and lack of acumen at the bargaining table. This is the lens through which you have to view various state efforts to make collective bargaining illegal and to decertify labor unions: management is trying to punish labor for management's own failures.

Teach Your Children Well

Here is a a sad story to illustrate a piece of advice I often hang my hat on. When anyone in a position of authority--an employer, the police, a school administrator--advises you not to hire an attorney, it's time to hire an attorney. When they advise you not to hire an attorney because it will create a confrontational atmosphere, you should have hired one yesterday; you're being railroaded.

And isn't it especially true in a disciplinary action? Anything other than a confrontational hearing is a process based on the presumption of guilt. The entire idealized system of justice is based on the necessary and desirable nature of confrontation, especially the accused's right to confront his accuser and demand proof. It's a long-since perverted ideal, obviously--just consider the extraordinary power and latitude of prosecutors and police in this country. But the idea is sound enough, and it's an important principle to hang onto. There is a popular complaint that we live in an overly litigious society, but the opposite is true. We are an insufficiently litigious society. We are in particular far too willing to depend on institutions to fairly arbitrate disputes to which they themselves are party, whether through the costumer service department or the school disciplinary board.

So in the linked story, some poor kid, nice quite literally to a fault, gets busted for buying what he thinks is a pot pill, and then his school effectively sets out to ruin and destroy his life. His parents presume--why?--the best intentions on the part of the school until it is far too late. If the school had the slightest interest in mediating the situation reasonably, they'd have made the guy write "I will not buy fake drugs" a hundred times on a blackboard. He'd've felt ruhl bad and never done it again.

If you are a parent and have a kid in school, especially in public school, you should impress on them the imperative never to say anything to anyone until they've spoken to you first. They should politely decline to answer any questions, sign any papers, or make any statements until they've spoken to mom or dad. Remind them that teachers and administrators will try to shake them from this position, as surely as cops will try to convince suspects not to call their lawyers. They will imply that a lack of cooperation with the relevant authorities will harm their case, and they will suggest that they will not be able to be helpful or lenient unless your kids forgo rights and consultations. These are all lies and damned lies.

As a trial lawyer uncle of mine sometimes observes, the system has a word for a guy without a lawyer, and it's guilty.