Rumpelstiltskin

Given American-Crackpot Justin's really commendable and interesting recent posts on one of my own favorite bugaboos, economics, I thought it might be illuminating to turn to Auden's introduction to the old Portable Greek Reader:

The great difference between the Greek conception of Nature and later ones is that the Greeks thought of the universe as analogous to a city-state, so that for them natural laws, like human laws, were not laws of things, but laws for things. When we speak of a falling body "obeying" the law of gravitation, we are unconsciously echoing Greek thought; for obedience implies the possibility of disobedience. To the Greeks this was no dead metaphor; consequently, their problem was not the relation of Mind to Matter, but of Substance to Form, how matter became "educated" enough, so to speak, to conform to law.

Justin struggled to make clear that the failure of economics as a scientific worldview is that economics is not scientific in any meaningful modern sense. (I don't, by the way, mean to imply that Justin's writing fell short of making this point, but that the casual readers who happened by to comment struggled to understand it.) Whereas a "law" of physics will surely be descriptive and ideally also be predictive, it is not prescriptive. To use Auden's phrase: there is no possibility of disobedience. As Justin points out, in economics, this situation is often reversed. The observable universe breaks economic law; human behavior is neither accurately described nor accurately predicted by the models and formulas of economists.

The non-regular commenters don't appreciate the distinction, and here is a telling and typical example:

It is easy enough for me to agree that the Tennessee fire episode was both loathsome and stupid.

But ... given that fires are not put out by a generous human spirit, but by firefighters, suitably equipped with firetrucks, firehoses, and such - how should those things actually be arranged for?

I propose to you that the notion one would apply economic models to this reasonable question is functionally equal to applying alchemy to the lead paint at your neighborhood playground.

I Fear Tomorrow I'll Be Crying

This, however, is why I’m genuinely confused about the extent to which the current debate tends to construe people like me and my colleagues on the CAP education team as the enemies of K-12 teachers.

-Woody Mattchuck

Matthew Yglesias tends to deploy his genuine confusion whenever he discovers that the population of the world is not so fully composed of hack, Harvard-undergraduate, self-flattering, not-so-polymathic, nebbish meshugenahs as his own succubic circle of young Washington remoras. You mean that a benighted workforce tasked with the impossible job of turning The Children into a razor-edged temporal weapon to be deployed against the future China even as their cities go back to pastureland and all the world's oil dries up, a bunch of workers who want only to preserve some modest semblance of wage security in an increasingly desperate age, do not wish to hop aboard the cocktail-napkin ideations of some hoggish know-nothing who, between subsidized junkets to Helsinki and slack-jawed rediscoveries of the antimajoritarian tendencies of our fucking Rome-derived senate, finds it occasionally necessary to turn out such dazzling strophes as:

But schools also matter. Effective schooling is possible and important. Lack of strong evidence about which methods are most effective points to the need for rigorous assessment, organizational flexibility, and choice.

Yes, what America really needs are more thunderingly dull declarative sentences and really precise, meaningful terms like important, strong evidence, effective, rigorous assessment, organizational flexibility, and choice. Livelihoods are certainly worth the sacrifice when some ivy-league imbecile bearing management jargon with all the fluency of a phrasebook tour of Europe shows up demanding a table at the bistro. Exkyoozay-mwwah mizzyor, may zhe voodray beeyen voo veeray ay too voh confrayers ohsee. D'akor? Maresee! Supayer! Poor lays onfontz, kee sawnt laveneer!

The only good thing to say about the American system of public education is that it provides lots of people with regular work, reasonable pay, decent benefits, modest protection, and civilized hours.

Their Natural Habitat

Oh-ho, how did I miss this!?

I take gratuitous pleasure in watching the Times furrow its brow at the world of real employment, especially when mediated through the brain of a brow-furrowing academic who has dedicated his life to studying white-collar office chimps, binoculars to weathered skin, hair drawn neatly back from tan forehead, like Jane Goodall. The academic in question proposes that in place of performance reviews, businesses put in place a system of . . . performance reviews. The novelty item is that instead of a mere top-down appraisal, they will be colloquys for the purpose of mutual goal-setting, which is of course the exact fiction currently in place in every company in this great green land.

And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them

Only an Obama gamble can break the logjam by September. He should go to Jerusalem in May and address the Knesset. He should spell out all the ways America will guarantee Israel’s security.

-Roger Cohen

I don't see why the President of the United States needs to spell it out when even Wikipedia seems to know the answer. These squealing appeals to pet and coddle the little puppy that is Israel always put me in mind of one of my favorite chapter that isn't in Ecclesiastes, which is Isaiah 3, truly some fine fucking anathema:

The LORD will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses.

What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord GOD of hosts .

Hulk Clash

David Brooks joins the stable of writers who are much better when they are not sure what they're supposed to say about something. On the other hand, the real problem with Huntington's work wasn't that it misapprehended Islam in some gross feat of Orientalism, as is so often the charge, but rather that it completely and totally misrepresented the so-called West.

Someone Must Have Been Telling Lies about Private Manning

On Wednesday, the Army announced 22 additional charges against Private Manning, including “aiding the enemy.”

The charge sheet did not explain who “the enemy” was, leading some to speculate that it was a reference to WikiLeaks. On Thursday, however, the military said that it instead referred to any hostile forces that could benefit from learning about classified military tactics and procedures.

-The Times

A thing to remember about tyranny is that it is always absurd; as it becomes more cruel, it becomes more ridiculous. Well, as a commenter here recently reminded us, the precogs are never wrong, but sometimes they disagree.

Pretty Fly for a White Guy

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, who along with Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, has been calling for a no-flight zone, said Wednesday after Mr. Gates’ testimony: “Is it complicated? Yeah. Can we do it? Of course.” He noted that “we did it for a long time and quite successfully in Iraq."

-The Times

Oh boy, oh yeah, that really worked out well for everyone involved.

The Barbary Boast

Oh, yes. Let's fucking bomb Libya because of the invasion of Grenada.

You're a Lebowski, I'm a Lebowski

Friedman's column is a gem, truly. I am not sure if I'm more convinced by the young Arab musing that he, too, could one day be President of the United States or by Friedman's insightful point that the problematic dispossession of the underclass by a landed aristocracy literally never occured to anyone in the entire history of humanity until the advent of Google Earth.

The Menu

Seconded.

I have always felt that to properly understand the operative meaning of the description "humanitarian," you should compare it to the descriptive use of the word "vegetarian."

Do svidaniya

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

-Vidal

The cover of Johnny Weir's--well, I won't call it an autobiography--his book, Welcome to My World, is pink, but it is an aggressive pink, very nearly magenta. Before drawn curtains with tasseled tie-backs, Weir lounges in black leather leggings and a tank top, supporting a large disco ball on one suggestively raised, stiletto-ankle-boot-clad foot. He is alarmingly tan, a color somewhere between John Wayne and John Boehner. He is making a face that's meant to be sassy but which instead suggests that he has just eaten either a lemon rind or a bad oyster.

Caveat about books and covers aside, the design predicts the dilemma faced by every amateur memoirist: the difficulty of capturing one's own image. It is one thing to photograph well, quite another to take a flattering self-portrait with your own cell phone. Johnny just isn't a very good writer, and whoever edited or ghost-wrote performed only the minimal housekeeping to make the thing presentable. He tries hard to be revealing without being exhibitionistic, but he comes off as merely coy. When he talks about his own bad behavior, his faked injuries or trantrums, he tries to be self-lacerating, but he comes off as merely petulant. His family, whom he obviously loves, are ciphers. His best friend and ex-boyfriend barely register. Have you ever gotten stuck at a party with a gossipy clique who assume you know all the same people they know? The feeling is similar.

I didn't expect it to be a good book, exactly, but I expected it to be more fun, a guilty pleasure rather than an embarrassment. More than anything it made me feel bad for Johnny Weir, because more than anything he comes across as a lovely young man whose self-conscious preening and loud pronouncements on his love of his sport sound to the attentive ear like music played loudly to drown the insistent muttering of regret. Frankly, all that figure skating shit seems even more awful than I'd already assumed it to be, a catty, backbiting sport that is mostly embarrassed by its own artistry.

Weir famously discovered skating on a frozen field behind his childhood home in Pennsylvania, and I can't help but regret that he didn't discover a sawhorse in the garage and take to the barre instead. Of course, the routes to fame for a dancer are even fewer and more circuitous than for a figure skater. Without an Olympic platform, it appears that one must impregnate Natalie Portman to get onto the celebrity circuit, and every page of Weir's book screams another of Vidal's bons mots, that envy is the central fact of American life, but each time Johnny Weir talks about "my sport" I hear a distant echo, "my art," and I can't help but wonder how his life in retrospect might now appear had he become a great artist instead of a decent athlete, modest prestige in the small world of dance instead of gaudy celebrity for everything other than his actual accomplishments as an athelete.

"Money Is a Running Concern"

The Times s'épate la bourgeoisie with late-night parties (midnight counts as late), French, cross-dressing, and the smell of pot. It is hard not to be dismissive, and yet toward the end, a glorious nugget: "His own salary, around $150,000, is generous by literary-world standards." Ha! As my old man always advises: never begrudge another man his successful scam. You bet your tight asses that if I could get someone to drop a buck fiddy per annum on me for playing a "whippet-thin" cyproPlimpton, I'd buy the first round for the bar.