But, I Digress

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:19:57 GMT

I am an archeologist of dreams.

The Fool's Errand of the Security State

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:11:47 GMT

The Christmas attempt to take down an American airliner and the following and predictable obsession with security is simply another reminder of how far we are from “defeating” the terrorists.

More pat-downs and high-tech scanners won’t do a thing; as long as there are sufficient numbers of people who are upset with Western foreign policy, a few of them will be motivated to randomly kill Westerners.

So here’s an idea: stop doing things that piss off the terrorists.

Of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds, but neither is building an ever-more invasive security regime. The difference between the two is that the former works and the latter does not.

And if anyone seriously believes that this would be somehow “coddling” terrorists or “negotiating” with them, consider that the terrorists may actually have a legitimate beef with us. That they choose an illegitimate means to redress their grievances is immaterial to their claims.

We know this process works because the British used it successfully to disarm the IRA. Granted, it took them a century of “troubles” to figure this out, but the violence in Northern Ireland has considerably declined since the Brits started listening to and taking seriously Sinn Fein’s complaints.

By not listening to the Afghans, Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis and so forth who are angry at us, we merely prove their case: that we don’t view them as fully human, as enough like us to have genuine thoughts and feelings. Thus we doom ourselves to another forty years or more of terrorism.

Poetry is . . .

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:36:54 GMT

At best, a sickness. If you're lucky, not a terminal one.

Who We Want Dead: a Taxonomy

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 22:20:51 GMT

This essay was inspired by an NPR story on depression and other psychological disorders among college students. The story presented itself as an investigative report revealing the relative lack of counseling and mental health support services colleges and universities are able to provide in comparison to an increasing need. As serious as this issue is, it brought up a much more serious issue in my mind: we as a society clearly don't want people to kill themselves and spend money on suicide prevention and counseling (even if it is inadequate), but at the same time, we don't feel the need as a society to spend the money it takes to prevent people from dying of ordinary illnesses by providing everyone with health coverage. Likewise, while we don't want people to kill themselves, we also don't want to improve their quality of life and extend overall life expectancy by assuring a living wage, or, for that matter, adequate nutrition or clean water or breathable air to all of our citizens.

Given this seeming disconnect, I asked myself what, exactly, it was about suicide (as opposed to physical disease or simple starvation) that we find so repugnant as to merit actual economic attention. The answers I came up with led me down some disturbing pathways indeed.

Many of us object to suicide on traditionally Christian grounds. The preponderance of Catholics and conservative Protestants contend that your life does not belong to you; rather, it is a gift from God that you have no right to reject. Therefore, it is wrong to permit suicide since it is a sin, ie an affront against God. This is problematic in a secular society for a variety of more or less obvious reasons, and one wonders if perhaps the church organizations that profess these theological strictures could do more to support suicide prevention independent of government mental-health agencies. Even more disturbing is the idea brought forth by certain conservative Christians that suicide is pernicious because it is the “easy way out,” and that all human suffering is because God has a “plan” or a “reason” for it. This postulates a cruel torturer-God that may appeal to fans of Jack Bauer but has serious cosmological implications. Besides, isn't this the God the Book of Job exists to refute? The Lord-as-Earthly-Torturer, however, does satisfy important criteria for determining in the minds of these Christians who deserves to live or die, who is worth saving and who is not, who is “guilty” and who is “innocent.” Making sure potential suicides are not able to act on their thoughts is one way of forcing people to face their perceived sins and accompanying guilt. This has little or nothing to do with why people want to commit suicide to begin with, of course, and fails to account for the psychological and neurochemical pathways to despair, but it does make those who are suffering but not suicidal more comfortable in their decision to remain alive.

In the same way, many of us not of the fundamentalist bent shore up our own right to exist by condemning large groups and often entire nations by labeling them “enemy” and waging war against them. Terrorists are the popular bogeys these days, but in times past they've been Communists, “gooks,” Nazis, “Krauts,” “Injuns,” rebels, Yankees, Redcoats, and many species of Other the existence of whom was considered either a threat or a pestilence or both. Enemies forfeit their right to live through incorrect thought and ideology (Communists) or through perceived behavioral problems (terrorists, “criminals”) or some combination of the two, usually resulting in the label “evil” (Nazis, terrorists again). The more not like ourselves we want the enemy to seem, the more likely we'll label them “evil.” We reserve the term “pure evil” for those whose humanity we want to entirely revoke.

In the U.S., we claim not to desire the death of those who are simply the wrong ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation. But we have frequently acted differently, notably with our 19th Century policy of killing and displacing Native Americans. To prove our good faith, we often destroy others through abuse or neglect rather than active extermination, as we did with Africans enslaved to work our southern plantations and as we continue to do with the poor. But more on that later.

Extremes on the political Right often try to link those whose behavior they think worthy of death with ethnicity or what they see as theological or ideological perversions. This may inadvertently reveal their own inner motivations or biases, but lately there has been little attempt to hide even those. Extremists on the Right declare “Islamo-fascism” to be the motivating factor behind terrorism, or, at an even greater extreme, blame Islam itself as a hateful and violent faith that must be dealt with in a hateful and violent way. At its most extreme, this position would advocate the elimination of perhaps a billion people, about one-sixth of the the world's population, unless those wrong-believing Muslims convert.

Attempts at conversion by the sword are nothing new, particularly when Islam and Christianity clash, and extremists on the Muslim side are no less fervent in their assumption that Christians should either follow Mohamed or die. The eschatological implications for both sides are quite dire, with the destruction of between four and five billion people at stake either through supernatural intervention or divinely inspired “holy war.”

I bring up these extreme examples in order to compare them to those who (merely) seek the destruction of others because of their perceived behavioral or character flaws. This tends to be the position of the Center-Left in the U.S. which, like most of Europe, places terrorism in the law-enforcement category and not a good candidate for war. For them, the problem is the terrorist as an individual, whose poor decision-making or because of personal issues has been led to a life of violent struggle. This approach, at least, since it is individualized, tends to lead to less killing, but seldom to none. Timothy McVeigh was a widely acknowledged terrorist the U.S. put to death, as we would Osama bin Laden if captured alive. That President Obama promises bin Laden will be “brought to justice” puts him in this camp in theory, even though his recent decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan indicates otherwise.

Most Americans, no matter our politics, share some of this view, and it arises either from the the need to enforce theological precepts of innocence and guilt or from ideas about the “proper” way to enforce “the rule of law” or “social order.” Upwards of 80% of Americans support the death penalty for certain crimes, though which crimes and what aggravating factors should trigger it vary. This leaves a mere 20% of Americans, on our most merciful day, who think that others should not be killed for their misbehavior.

Ideology continues to be a motivating factor to kill, and it was the primary reason the U.S. invaded Vietnam and Korea, and it was the professed reason Stalin killed so many of his own people—though the primary reason was no doubt simple paranoia. Poorly practiced ideology also led Chairman Mao to let millions of his own peasants die of starvation, but that event may be better placed in the neglect section below. Ideology is a clear motivating factor in the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and in some of the civil wars in Africa following decolonization. The most obvious example is Nazism, which used its ideological precepts to justify both its expansionist war and its internal genocide against Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and anyone else deemed undesirable by fascist eugenics. By a very rough estimate, between 10 and 50 million people were killed during the 20th Century alone due to ideological warfare. But, of course, these numbers could not be so large if the notion of the nation-state were not still with us. The nation-state concept ties ideology to the leadership of a country and, theoretically, as the regime goes, so goes the population. In longstanding totalitarian regimes such as North Korea, this may come close to the truth. But in practical terms, the vast majority of those targeted because of perceived ideological deficiencies hold few strong convictions and are simply unfortunate enough to have leaders whose viewpoints are seen as problematic by other leaders.

The nation-state concept also links killing because of ethnicity closely to that of killing due to ideology. We are mostly members of a nation by birth, just as we are born into an ethnicity. Despite that, recent wars in the Balkans, Rwanda, the Congo, and currently in Darfur are still waged on the premise that enemies are worthy of destruction because they are members of an undesirable ethnic group. World opinion claims that this is a poor reason to kill, but we in the developed world are not so appalled as to actually do anything about it except, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, when it's close to our own dominant ethnic homeland (Europe) and/or the people there look like the majority of us. This may also reveal deep-seated ethnic bias, and while we may not actively want the people in Darfur to die, neither are we sufficiently moved to try to keep them alive.

This brings us back to the other way we condemn people to death, neglect and abuse, and brings us back to the problematic question of suicide prevention that created this paroxysm of thought. In the United States, the poor are often also members of ethnic minorities, and so the decisions by the ruling classes to let them suffer and die may be based on ethnic biases. But it is also a question of ideology and bad behavior: capitalism postulates economic failure is a result of an inability to compete in the marketplace because of bad character or poor decision-making. Thus the poor are simply not fit to live, or at least not fit to thrive. The market has spoken on the matter and found them wanting. When the underclasses petition the government for redress, the successful capitalist--who has obviously done the “right” thing, made the “right” decisions, had “what it took” (ie. the right character)--feels imposed upon. He would rather these people be “taught” the “lesson” of the marketplace than be helped because it reinforces his ideological position. So in a capitalist state, the poor are deserving of neglect because, while perhaps innocent of out-and-out malice, they are guilty of not “helping themselves.”

This ideological/behavioral approach can be scaled up to the global level. Presently, some one billion people are in danger of starving to death, which from the perspective of the neo-conservative “global marketplace” is just fine. Still, I can't help but see this as also a problem of class combined with good old-fashioned xenophobia: the world's rich and middle-class are “us” and the poor are “them.” We haven't really “earned” the wealth we were born into, but it defines us over and against those whose births were not so blessed.

What I find so disturbing about these thoughts is that despite all of our protestations to the contrary, nearly all of us want someone or some group of people dead, generally for reasons we could readily change if we wanted to. That we don't want this points to either some deep-seated need to reinforce an internal viewpoint or, perhaps, some deep-seated need to justify or exercise a homicidal urge. Some argue that certain circumstances like war make it “necessary” to kill or let others die but that we find the notion personally repulsive. If that is so, then why are we not more willing to find alternative ways to meet the necessity that will spare the life? The necessity position fails unless and until every possible means, as is already the case in suicide prevention, has been exhausted first.

Need to Stop Grading for a While

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:05:57 GMT

I just read a paper that noted the DTs were sometimes "very fatal."

Yeah, uh. What?

From an Actual Student Paper

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:37:58 GMT

A true "WTF?" moment, ostensibly describing a PlayStation 3:

"The heparin comes in place with the charters and the games environment."

From a Leprous Student Paper

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:24:26 GMT

"During the teaching lesion I thought that I did pretty well coming in to it I was nervous because I didn’t know if I was able to teach a good lesson."

Holiday Dinner Planning

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:29:18 GMT

What wine does one serve with smurf?

I am Thankful for . . .

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:48:21 GMT

. . . boost.

I also like Ensure.

No, seriously: in a rare automotive post, I have converted an old Volvo 940 turbo to run on E85 (I know, taking tortillas out of the mouths of starving Mexican kids, but hey, it's still renewable, so shut it), which, among its other charms (don't want to start for shit when it's cold) is about 105 octane.

The car's PO ("previous owner," to you non-Craigslist-addicted folks) had installed a manual boost controller. So, putting two and two together, I took some time post-turkey to turn up the wick a bit. The result is 14 psi with zero detonation, probably all the little Mitsubishi-sourced turbocharger will give. Translation? I spent about 200 bucks and gained 32 horsepower, while (theoretically anyway) actually reducing the car's carbon footprint.

And, yes, I can mop the streets with a Prius.

Total investment, including the price of the car: about $1800.

Rumsfeld Meets Robert van Winkle

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:14:29 GMT

From an Actual Student Paper:

"The effects of how the future generations will be effected will be deiced by the people of today."

Kollij.

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:57:21 GMT

So, I realize I'm preaching to the choir here, but I've been grading papers all day and I have to say that the quality of student entering college right now is, perhaps, the lowest I've seen in 13 years of teaching. Here are a list of random observations about them, conveniently numbered to make them seem less random:

1. They know nothing. My film students, generally a pretty smart bunch, had no idea who Leonard Bernstein was and, when writing about On the Waterfront, kept on referring to Marlon Brando as "that main actor guy." It's one thing not to know who important figures of the 20th Century were, but it's quite another not to know who important contributors to a film you just saw were. This leads to another observation:

2. They aren't paying attention. Ever. This is because they are not capable of paying attention. So trained are they by constant distraction, that they literally can't focus on any one thing for even the briefest amount of time. They're trained to do several things at once, all of them poorly, but they can't do one thing at a time with any degree of attention or accuracy.

3. They cannot spell. You really can't blame this on txting or Twitter or whatever has them going LOL right now; the number of abbreviations I get is pretty small. But they don't know the difference between "weather" and "whether" or even "where" and "were" (?)! See also, #1.

4. They expect sympathy for the pain caused by their own poor decision-making. Maybe Balloon Boy is a good indicator of where my freshmen are--you know, where daddy breaks down in tears for having scolded the boy who just sent hundreds of people on a wild saucer chase? But not a day goes by that students don't trot out the old "But I only got two hours of sleep last night!" garbage, like I'm supposed to suddenly feel sorry for them for staying up all night playing Madden: NFL 10? Like I'm supposed to feel sorry for them because they spent all that time awake and didn't spend any of it reading the measly 30 pages I asked them to read for this week?

5. They're all going to turn pro. Really. No shit. Let me know how that works out.

6. They've got this thing about their phones. I actually had one tell me that his phone is his life. His phone. Seriously, dude, that's not endearing. It's pathetic.

7. They cannot read. The good news here is their aliteracy is not illiteracy. It's simple refusal. Tell it from the mountaintops: if you're not willing to read a lot, you're not ready for post-secondary ed.

So if you're like me and a Gen. X "slacker" or a Millennial who is being accused by your elders of being solipsistic and/or spoiled, just remember that the kids younger than you are even worse. Their parents sent them to college to somehow prepare them for life, but they really need to live a little before they'll have the perspective, not to mention the time-management skills, for college. I can't help but think that No Child Left Behind and what it does to K-12 education is somewhat to blame, that we don't have a culture that loves learning for its own sake, that our celebrity obsession essentially glorifies stupidity. But at some point, you just have to knuckle down and be a little responsible, read things that you may not "relate" to, get your ass to bed on time. It's not that hard; grown-ups do it all the time.

From an Actual Student Paper

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:00:17 GMT

It makes sense in context. Really. OK, not really:

"When I first looked at this I thought that I was a Klondike bar. When I started to put the pieces together though I realized that this is something greater then a Klondike bar out in space though."

More Student Paper Fun

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:26:59 GMT

From an actual student paper, Heavy Breathing Edition:

"When panted, darker shading was used on the creasing, giving the paper a three dimensional look."

Now That's F'ed Up

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:59:19 GMT

From an actual student paper:

"That is too much money to just give away; even though it would be the right thing to do. It would also make things less confusing and copulated."

Ethix

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:24:13 GMT

Having applied for a library job over the summer, I was shocked at being given an interview last week. I was even more shocked at having been successful.

I am now within a hair's-breadth of getting an offer. The position would be long term, fairly well-paying, and stable. It would also be in a small town (with all its ancillary crap) and excessively time-consuming.

But here's the real dilemma: I now am in the middle of a not-very lucrative semester at an institution that has been increasingly alienating me. Leaving now would screw over my students along with the administration. The students do not need to be collateral damage; the administration deserves to be screwed over, no kiss, no lube.

Staying would be the right thing for my students. Leaving would be the right thing for my pocketbook and my sense of spite.

Complicating factors: taking the library job would preclude being able to take an (essentially) free trip to Europe in the spring and would take time away from my attempts to publish, not to mention postmodernvillage.

My gut instinct is to turn down the library job. I mean, free trips to Europe don't come along as often as job opportunities do, even in this crappy economy, plus my students didn't pay their tuitions to be the pawns in a labor dispute. My greed is saying, take the ca$h and run.

Plz. advise.

From an Actual Student Paper

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:06:50 GMT

Hey, even a dirty win you have to grovel for is a win:

"Jodi was confident in the begging that her team would surly win and that they where not going to be stopped no matter what got in the teams way."

You Lie?

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:02:09 GMT

1. The fact of South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson heckling Obama during his health care speech the other night has already been analyzed to death, from its breach of decorum to its implied racism, but what it really represents is the problem with the Obama-Clinton style of accommodationist politics.

You see, Republicans, while purportedly hating Darwin and all he stands for, live by a social-Darwinist ethos that posits that the weak should be destroyed. They play this out through legislation that punishes the poor and subsidizes the rich. They smell blood in the water, and they attack.

What's striking about Wilson's outburst was not that it occurred during an address by the first black president, but that it happened when Obama was making a particularly bipartisan and conciliatory speech. The outburst follows Republican party logic perfectly, though: the more the Left compromises, the more radical the Right will portray them to be. That solidifies the Right's position and makes the Left look wishy-washy and weak on one hand and dangerously out of touch on the other.

Republicans will only respond to strength, and that is what Democrats should have shown from the beginning. They should have presented a universal, single-payer plan as the only option and held fast. And with the fastest-growing voting bloc being independents, a dauntless Democratic party might have impressed even indifferent them.

2. Later the evening of Obama's address, Sean Hannity falsely accused Obama of saying that insurance company executives are bad. What the president said was that insurance company executives make decisions that deny coverage "not because they are bad people," but because these decisions are profitable. The president is also wrong: I can think of no ethical or moral system under which decisions that knowingly lead to harm to others is right. Yet that is exactly what these same insurance executives do on a daily basis. If they were mafia Dons making decisions that led to others being harmed or killed for the sake of the profitability of the enterprise, they'd be thrown in jail. Why is it OK for an insurance company executive to do the same thing?

The president, being who he is, can't go out and say these people are bad people. But, being nobody, I can: they are bad people. Health insurance company executives make decisions that they know will harm other people. They do it purely for the sake of corporate greed. They do it repeatedly; indeed, they do it to great personal remuneration. If doing that does not make you a bad person, I'm not sure what does.

How Corporate Groupthink Squashes Talent

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:13:54 GMT

When J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first fission bomb explode in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first thing that popped into his head was a line from the Hindu Upanishads: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” That would not happen today. The idea of a useful scientist reading outside his “field” would be frowned upon by his doctoral committee, for one, but it would also be dismissed, as would he, by the corporation that would, these days, likely employ him. Yet Oppenheimer’s ability to think broadly and to make connections served as a warning to the potential dangers the world would face with the creation of this new, and terrifying, technology.

Imagine if the Wall Street wunderkinder who authorized selling and repackaging all those high-risk loans in the mid-to-late 2000s had had that kind of perspective. Would we face the economic hardships we now face? Imagine if these people’s bosses had had even half of Oppenheimer’s perspicacity. But it is hard to imagine these things. Here’s why.

We would like to think that capitalism is best suited to recognize and exploit talent. We have been told since Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations over 200 years ago that the market fosters creativity by rewarding the smartest and most innovative workers and letting the incompetent and the merely adequate languish. Some elements of this way of thinking are no doubt true: the intense competition among car makers in the past 25 years has produced automobiles that are, pound-for-pound, safer, better performing, and more fuel-efficient than ever before. But that same system has led two of America’s Big Three over the edge of bankruptcy. It has also seen the proliferation of clearly inferior products, such as Microsoft software and SUVs. It has seen the utter failure of the health care industry to self-regulate or produce decent cost-effective patient outcomes for those it does insure, and it has failed, even more tragically, to insure nearly one in five Americans.

Before I proceed, I must make clear that I am not advocating Socialism or Communism or any other “ism”; rather, I’m suggesting a more enlightened approach to the way we think about talent and the goals to which we set it going. To think that any reform of our current system is tantamount to Stalinism is a product of the marketing departments of major corporations, the thinktanks they fund, and the lobbying groups they set up. It is also absurd. Sadly it has impaired our ability to think clearly about the subject and gotten in the way of reforms that would allow the truly innovative to save American manufacturing and service industries.

At the heart of the problem is that, rather than nurture and encourage thinking that challenges old, outmoded ways of doing business and creating products, contemporary capitalism recognizes as useful and good only those ideas with which it already agrees. The bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler happened not just because they couldn’t see the rise in gas prices coming—anybody with half a brain could see that. These companies failed because top executives refused to look in the first place. Corporate groupthink among the capital aristocrats at the top led them to accept that the global oil crisis of 2008 was as improbable as global warming. After all, didn’t the scientists and economists hired by the oil companies’ thinktanks say so?

Management at the corporate level is virulently anti-democratic. Despite recent trends toward “employee empowerment” and flattened company structures, decision-making still rests at the top and among a very few individuals, an aristocracy of mostly white men with MBAs. Those MBAs are almost invariably the product of a few key business schools, most of which have been heavily influenced by the Chicago School of Business and its extreme laissez-faire ideology. We can see how this groupthink influences decision-making when we see company after company making the same decisions about outsourcing, downsizing, union-busting, just-in-time delivery. Homogeneity of thought pervades investors as well, most of whom are also products of the same ideology. So a company can be guaranteed an increase in stock price when, say, it cuts a thousand jobs and sends them overseas, no matter the actual impact on the company’s bottom-line or the quality of the product. The CEO, who is answerable to the shareholders, has made them happy by making them richer despite the possible long-term effects on the company and the customers it serves. In keeping with this mentality, American corporations essentially gutted their workforces over the past thirty years, simultaneously destroying the ability of their workers to buy their own products, leading in part to the financial mess we’re in now.

Supposedly “innovative” financial products like credit default swaps and bundling of risky loans into higher-rated products just exacerbated the problem, forcing more and more already over-leveraged Americans into bankruptcy. These products were created by the “best and brightest” Wall Street had to offer, and the result of them proves that these men and women (mostly men) were neither the best nor particularly bright. But they were judged with the very narrow terms corporate America is used to using, one that ignores long-term consequences and is studiously ignorant of human impact. They were judged by an ideology that opposes labor in vehement and often personal terms, that cannot conceive of a good or useful tax. A truly innovative economist, and there are a few out there, could and would have taken these factors into account. But alternative perspectives are not welcome and seldom heard in the corner office.

This tin ear to new ideas extends to the very businesses themselves. Consider what motivates an engineer. Sure, like everyone else she wants to be well-compensated. But she didn’t get into it to get rich; if so, she would have been an entrepreneur. Rather, she is in it because she enjoys it. Our engineer likes working out the design of a new bridge or water pump. She loves seeing the numbers become real things. She gets a kick out of making things work. She’s a wonk, and that’s what makes her capable of doing a good job. Her boss, on the other hand, with his MBA, is schooled to think that what motivates people is self-interest and that manifests itself primarily as cash. He might give her a bonus if the product is successful, but he’s not likely to let the engineer influence his thinking on what product is really market-worthy or deserving of R&D. This disconnect, a frequent subject of the Dilbert cartoon strip, indicates just how our narrowly-drawn notions of corporate leadership can hurt industrial production. The CEO, after all, is the “decider,” and no doubt thinks himself better qualified to make decisions.

Chances are, of course, that the CEO has never designed anything at all. “Working your way up” from an assembly line or design department is an idea as quaint as parasols and haberdashery. But, like them, it also had a reason for being, an extremely practical component: those who work their way up know how things work and understand the mindsets and motivations of those doing the job. The number of engineers and line workers and designers and other nerds who are also tireless self-promoters, in other words, those likely to appeal to a corporate executive’s view of the way people should act, are few. Furthermore, such things take away from what those workers do best: design and build things, provide services and create ideas. The MBAs are unlikely to understand how a marketing person reading Faust at work would be anything other than a waste of the company’s time and money. They might even not recognize why an engineer would want to read the latest blue-sky research in physics.

Of course, American companies, at one time, were involved in blue-sky research themselves. Bell Labs produced groundbreaking research from the 1920s up through the 1990s, pioneering and perfecting lasers, transistors, contemporary microprocessors, and the C computer language, among many others. This was primarily due to the fact that its corporate minder, AT&T, largely kept its hands off and let the eggheads be eggheads. AT&T, not to mention the rest of society, ended up benefitting in uncountable ways from basic research driven by the sheer curiosity of the scientists at Bell Labs. Deregulated markets, though, tend to breed corporate hegemony: all must be brought to heel at the command of the bottom line, or, more importantly, what the MBAs upstairs think will be most immediately profitable. The free market was not kind to Bell Labs, and it completely ceased to be by 2008, according to Wired magazine.

Another object lesson in how the corporate mindset tends to kill innovation can be found in the now infamous story of the creation of the mouse-driven graphical user interface. This technology, with which we are now so familiar as to render it second-nature, was actually developed by Xerox at its answer to Bell Labs, the Palo Alto research facility. But, of course, the MBAs at Xerox corporate had no idea what to do with it; they made copiers, after all, and copiers, everyone knew, used buttons. Fortunately, Steve Jobs of Apple computers did know what to do with it, and, since he is both a good businessman and a good designer, the McIntosh was born. Despite the Mac’s popularity, though, it still has a tiny slice of the computer pie. Windows, still a buggier, less secure operating system, dominates the PC market, and competes not with Apple, but with older versions of itself. Contemporary free-market reasoning would dictate that the superior product will always win, in this case despite its premium price. But, of course, PCs dominate because they have traditionally been considered the more “serious” business machine by the MBAs calling the corporate shots. Windows wins because of groupthink, despite the fact that each iteration comes with its own set of security flaws, and each new version is even more of a bloated memory hog than the last.

Lockheed’s Skunk Works is another ready example of the way a bunch of extremely smart people, left alone, can produce innovative products. This team of aeronautical engineers created the P-80, America’s first jet fighter; the P-38, the first fighter to break 400 miles an hour in level flight; and the innovative U2, the SR-71 spyplanes, aircraft that have set altitude and speed records that have yet to be broken. The latter two are designs that are half a century old, and they’re still better than anything flying today.

What is at issue here is the type of thinking that goes into innovation. It is holistic thinking, connective thinking. It is not beholden to ideology or the bottom line, or even immediate practicality. It is done primarily for its own sake and is therefore not hampered by the constant need to please a market perception or even a boss. Rather than “thinking outside the box,” truly creative thinking doesn’t even recognize a box, and corporate groupthink is not equipped to even recognize these possibilities.

But other problems plague the way corporations deal with innovators. Hiring is often a matter of sheer luck, and truly talented individuals must not merely be what they are, but must be in the right place at the right time to get noticed, much less hired. In theory, getting noticed in the Internet Age should be a breeze: just put your innovative, creative work out there on the Web, and they’ll beat a virtual path to your virtual door. Practically speaking, though, your unique voice is bound to get drowned out by the sheer cacophony of all the voices out there doing exactly the same thing. The power of search engines like Google means that unless a potential employer is looking pretty precisely for you or for your specific label, you’ll just be one of a million or so hits. This is made worse by the fact that corporate executives often don’t even know what they’re looking for. A CEO might want “creative business solutions,” but if he Googles that, he’s going to have to work through 24 million hits (but a mere 42,000 is he is smart enough to put it in quotation marks). And if the solution the corporate king wants is very specific and technical, what chance is there that this person knows the business well enough to see the possibilities or to search for the specific strengths that will solve his problems?

How many immensely smart and talented people just never got the chance to make the pitch? How many creative and innovative thinkers are just too weird to seem like good risks to the suits upstairs? We always hear of big companies descending onto college campuses in the spring to pick the best and the brightest young people to help them gear up for the future, but these best and brightest are already the products of departments that have geared their curriculum to the industries their graduates serve. How does this foster innovation? Further, how do we know these companies aren’t risking inexperience merely for the sake of a younger worker who will be relatively cheap to employ? If human resources departments and executive aristocrats were really interested in the most creative people, why are they so quick to look abroad for workers trained in schools and societies for whom creativity and originality is not a virtue? When power rests in the hands of a few who already think they know best, looking for innovative workers is really just looking for trouble, and if it’s a toss-up between that and people who will work cheap, the corporate aristocrat will always choose cheap.

Rather than take the risk on new talent in the executive ranks, the suits upstairs are more likely to hire people they know, people who are not scary, but also people who have perspectives very much like their own. Creative people, after all, are scary. They keep strange hours and wear strange clothes. They sometimes have tattoos and green hair. They read. They obsess over things like the way aluminum fractures and how cognitive frames develop instead of normal things like golf. They listen to post-Bop and Arnold Schoenberg instead of smooth jazz. They don’t network in the clubhouse or at mixers, preferring to hole up with books and microchips and solder. Sometimes, they have beards. Networking tends to bring us in contact with people who have similar educations and socioeconomic backgrounds, and so it is not all that helpful when a company is seeking to find the most innovative thinkers. The aristocracy of the corporate office tracks well with the existing aristocracy of wealth, and creative thinkers are, literally and figuratively, often “out of network.”

Networking, as currently practiced, is actually a form of protectionism. As much as contemporary capitalism decries economic protectionism based on national borders or the status of employees, the corporate aristocracy is quick to network truly new upstarts right out of the business. The status quo, after all, has been good to them; it has given the aristocrats what they have. And what they have is, at last check, substantial, with the top 5% controlling 40% of all wealth in the US. Innovation that can’t be directly and immediately harnessed into profits through existing means becomes, therefore, a threat worthy of destruction. Consider what happened to T. Boone Pickens’ grand plan to increase wind power production in the US. It collapsed for lack of backing. One of their own, a member of the corporate aristocracy, crossed the line and was yanked back in. Pickens is a maverick, but he’s not a revolutionary, and he quickly fell back in with the rest of his class. The history of American industry is full of bold innovations that were too good to succeed: the Tucker, the Betamax, the EV1. Even universal health care should be the sort of innovation the corporate aristocrats would like to embrace. After all, it takes a massive expenditure off the books. But it also comes from the wrong people, from people who are not “in network,” from people who are not “like us.” Rejection of universal health care acts as a rite of intensification, an indication of ideological purity among the corporate classes. They cling to their opposition despite the fact that it is against their long-term best interests to do so.

One need not posit conspiracy to see how this happens. It’s the regular and familiar process of the creation of a social group, one centered around a limited set of roles and positions, one sharing patterns of thought. Instead of a conspiracy, all you need are people who know one another and share educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. But it also demonstrates that the fact of capitalism is not enough to grow and recognize innovation. Innovation must itself be a shared value, and for that to happen, the people who really run the economy, namely the corporate aristocrats, must begin to embrace change; they must share their power just a little in order to keep our remaining collective power intact.

Cinema and the Cerebrum

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:51:37 GMT

It's not that you can't reason with the masses; it's that you can't reason with the visual media we use to reach them. Visual media, and moving pictures in particular, do not lend themselves to complexity of thought, or, in particular, to thought at all. This is not to say that thought-provoking films and images don't exist, but they exist in spite of their media, not because of them. Film finds itself better used by the polemicist than the intellectual: Jean-Luc Godard's tendency toward filling his movies with lectures is a case in point; in opposition we see Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda, which can be understood almost completely without a single word coming into play. Even the seemingly subtle masters of the form are more likely to produce emotional punches than provoke rational discourse: Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is frequently noted as asking profound questions, but it asks maybe three or four of those in its almost two-hour running time, and it asks far less of the viewer than the Phillip K. Dick novel upon which it is based. Even Stanley Kubrick failed, by his own admission, to successfully address the issues brought up in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange.

The intellectual content of movies, at least that which isn't expressed through the standard narrative techniques familiar from theater, exist in and are created from the juxtaposition of images. Eisenstein recognized this early on: that meaning could be created beyond the juxtaposed images themselves through the act of juxtaposition. Montage does not discount the meaning in the images themselves, but the moving picture doesn't often allow the kind of interaction with an image that a static picture invites. A still photograph, painting, or sculpture, creates a distinct relationship between the viewer and the work. There is a boundary of surface and space that eventually forces the viewer back into herself, the moment of contemplation. Cinema, with its incessant images in motion, tends to cloy the senses and therefore demands increasing levels of sensation in order to reach its numbed audience. The viewer becomes invaded as much as she invades; contemplation, the movement back into the self, becomes increasingly difficult.

The basic problem of making moving images mean, and not merely emote, can be seen in what television has done to the electoral process. Even if Barack Obama had wanted to discuss complex solutions to difficult issues, he would not have had the chance: there just isn't time until the next question, the next image, the next segment. Radio, which is slightly more “literary” and certainly more verbal, has become the new medium of the mind, such as it is. And even it is extremely time-sensitive, unable to maintain the close audience/author relationship of text.

All this is well known—nothing I've written here hasn't been observed before. But what is even more interesting is how current trends in visual media are to substitute something even more primeval than emotion into their communications instead of any intellectual content. Orwell approached this idea with the concept of “ducktalk”: ideological blather so devoid of substance that its delivery resembles the quacking of a duck. What we go for now is pure gut-(re)action, the physical movement within of tension, the simple stimulation of some basic vestige of the lizard-brain. We wish, after all, not to feel, as that might make us aware of our actual state. We wish to avoid the subversive possibility of compassion—both our corporate minders wish to avoid this and we ourselves do. All we really ask of our mass media is that they force us to react, that they check to make sure our reflexes are still functioning, like a doctor's little rubber hammer.

So numb we are in our little felt-walled cubicles and our commutes, our savage layoffs and our abstract wars, that we seek entertainment that elicits only the most simple of reactions. The broad comedy, the slasher flick, the graphic war movie, all circumvent the most problematic human attributes, feeling and thought, and place us back into the cognitive state of the mayfly. Thus atrophied, the two distinguishing sensibilities of higher-order creatures are easily dismissed so that we can more efficaciously ignore the inhumanity and alienation of what we do: obeying idiots, “serving” the customer, eating empty calories out of Styrofoam clamshells.

These media have not really caused the end of a civilization predicated on a literate populace, but they have marked it. For certainly it is possible to create great and thoughtful works both cinematic and televisual. Our lives as led make the lowest and worst of these compelling. Some of the best television consists almost entirely of just two people talking, like what Bill Moyers has done on PBS over the years. But what percentage of the 200 some-odd cable channels provide this? And many of the best movies ever made move slowly enough for the viewer to ask questions—the films of Abbas Kiarostami come to mind—and ask either directly or through the trials of their characters important questions about life, love, morality, jazz. But how many of the movies most people see would have any plot at all if it weren't blown from place to place by big, orange explosions? The latest Batman movie may be a good movie, but do most people see it for its finer points, or do they just want to gut the dead guy who plays the Joker?

All this may also be why some of the better films and TV shows these days are satires or allegories: we let them exist because they work on a gut level that rarely infects the intellectual level on which they also work. They can be “read” by those who are capable and willing, and the rest can just enjoy the dick and fart jokes.

It's no surprise, either, that the World Wide Web became popular only when it became the Web, that is, when it became visual. The strings of text that populated BBSs and listservs had a limited appeal, and anyway, it was hard to do hardcore porn in ASCII. Hypertext led the way, of course, by giving people the ability to gut their way through webpages; the destination was always clicking through, not hassling with content. Thus the user has the illusion of control, of exercising judgment, of “interacting.” But what is created in the mind of the user by this is debatable, and real change occurs in the mind when intellectual work is done. Blogging offers some hope, and the numbers who fall away from it every day offer hope as well since those who have something to say and some compulsion to say it may have a chance to be read in the aftermath of the collapse. But it, too, rarely encourages a sustained reading, being more about pith than wit, quirk than commentary.

The best of the moving-image media stick with the viewer not in terms of the trauma of their imagery, but because of their ability to expand, improbably, what the viewer is able to imagine.

Quick Notes on Politcs

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:48:28 GMT

Re. the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.:

More proof, if any is needed, that to a large number of white Americans, what they see when they see the singlemost influential living scholar of African-American history is just another loud, "disorderly" nigger.

Oh, and just because Sgt. Crowley taught classes on how to avoid racial profiling does not mean he's not a racist.

Further, if early reports that Gates laid a "yo' mama" bomb on the Sgt. are true, that would be hilariously biting; Gates literally wrote the book on the subject.

Let's face it. If any of us were in a similar situation, we'd be pissed off too. You're in your own home, and the officer sent to arrest you for forcing a sticky door open arrests you for being upset when he doesn't supply his name and badge number? Yeah, I'd be pissed. But then, I wouldn't have been arrested. I'm white.

Re. Health Care:

This is a human rights issue, but it's also a public health issue. Do you really want the guy building your Big Mac to not be able to afford the swine flu vaccine? Really?

But, like many faltering empires before us, we're more interested in appeasing the gods--in this case the Gods of Wealth, who are still angry even after our pittance of a trillion dollar tithe--than we are in fixing our problems. And, of course, the living gods are too stupid and out of touch to realize that they have gutted the middle class that keeps their businesses afloat and genuinely believe they can skate through on their hedge funds and derivatives. In other words, we've substituted genuine investment in businesses that make things and provide services for what is, for lack of an even more accurate word, a complicated form of gambling.

But more on that later. I spent the summer reading Adam Smith . . .

Suffice it to say that the Obama Administration and the Congressional Dems are happy with a "fix" that doesn't even address the problem and further enriches insurers and drug companies who are, indeed, the problem. If this current bill passes, the Dems deserve to lose. Sadly, the only party they have to lose to is even worse.

Speaking of Worse: Sarah Palin:

Has it occurred to no one that Palin essentially insulted all of Alaska when she stepped down, basically saying that governing them wasn't worth the trouble? Meanwhile, Mark Parkinson, the current governor of Kansas, who replaced Kathleen Sebelius when she became Secretary of HHS, has pledged to stay on as a self-declared lame duck, in the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. This is why moderates like Parkinson, who used to be the head of Kansas' Republican party, are no longer welcome in the GOP; they actually think of public service as, well, you know, service. To the public. I respectfully disagree with Parkinson on a number of issues, but at least I can respectfully disagree.

Hey!

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:17:28 GMT

I know you're just waiting for my tomatoes to get ripe, aren't you, Mr. Bluejay?

American Politics, a Lamentation

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:59:23 GMT

In some ways, the American political system is working as intended: the elite, or at least an elite, is making the decisions, just as the proverbial Founding Fathers designed. Sadly, that elite does not comprise the actual representatives we elect—perhaps a blessing, since our electeds tend to be kind of stupid after all. There's no irony here: candidates are selected by the two parties because they are weak: weak minded and weak-willed. They are therefore more moldable into the electable product. Witness George W. Bush, a blank canvas upon which Karl Rove could paint his masterpiece. Still, a certain level of competence is necessary, as the meltdown of Sarah Palin's candidacy evinced. This is not to say that, had the press actually scrutinized W. the same way that the same thing couldn't have happened to him, but they weren't then in love with Obama, didn't have the evil temptress of Palin to gird up their loins to resist.

But parties are cognizant of the need to kowtow to their masters, the much maligned “special interests,” by which we can read “wealthy businesses interests.” The Right may complain about the Sierra Club or the ACLU, but those entities take to the courts because they can't afford to run candidates; only the really loaded can finance a campaign. The open-secrets of the senators from coal country or the representatives from Boeing wouldn't seem so tired conceptually if they weren't actually just that. In the biggest coup (all puns intended) yet, we have just passed an era in which the president and vice president were wholly owned subsidiaries of the oil and gas industries. This worn path, however, leads us to the gates of our true masters.

By doing so, we follow the money too, and even after the recent collapse, the top 5% still control almost half of all there is. And just as the feudal lords' powers ebbed or flowed depending on their relationship with the Holy See, so too do the current elites see their wealth enhanced or degraded by political patronage. Boeing never missed a major government contract when the powerful triumvirate of Nancy Kassebaum, Bob Dole, and Dan Glickman represented Kansas, where Boeing has a major plant. But when these were replaced by the relatively weak and ineffectual Brownback/Roberts/Tiahrt delegation, Boeing lost a major bid, and to an overseas company to boot.

It doesn't help that this delegation is at least 2/3 intellectually dim either; the downside of being able to control a politician is simply that he or she lacks personal power. In this, George W. Bush seems to have won the day for Big Oil but lost the war, as America's global position was weakened vis-a-vis OPEC, its relationship with Russia shot, and its access to Iraqi oil fields remains doubtful. In the short term, the almost unimaginable boon of oil prices at $120 a barrel last year have come back to haunt a wrecked economy and Venezuela and Russia renationalizing their supply.

The American people, of course, hardly even enter the picture. Even during election years, they are so docile and suggestible, so apathetic, that it's nearly certain they'll fail to surprise. The election of Barack Obama reinforces this idea. He may be black, but he's also unrelentingly centrist, even conservative, in times that call for bold and progressive action. No puns intended, in Obama the electorate did not back a dark horse, as that would have been a Kucinich or a Nader. The American people have failed to riot in the streets or even calmly protest even in the face of eight years of obvious incompetence, a quarter century of declining wages, and complete economic meltdown. George Orwell, it turns out, was wrong about this: the proles need not be poorly educated. In fact, despite increasing numbers of college degrees, we're now less likely to agitate than we were when things were going relatively well. The system that we purportedly love, that we send our kids to die in order to supposedly protect, has broken down, been hijacked by the same people who have cynically outsourced our jobs and dismantled the industry we worked so hard to create, and in order to “show them” we elected a man who packs his group of economic advisors and regulators with them.

It's as if, along with middle-class expectations and middle-class educations, we've also adopted bourgeois conservatism, even if it makes our actual lives less certain, less wealthy, less satisfying overall. The middle class that, in its ascendancy, demanded more freedom is now, in its senility, demanding less.

I suppose we get what we deserve, but it is hardly meaningful politically to exist so, with half of us living up to our expectations to vote one way and half the other and neither way promising actual change. What has happened in this country over the past 30 years is the largest voluntary handover of power in history, with literally a hundred million of us not even participating in any election and tens of millions more not demanding that their parties do better. We fail to question the party lines that, inevitably, fail to improve our lives.

There is something of the mindset of war about this, and much of that egged on by the Right wing media and the Republican Revolutionaries who took over congress in 1994 but whose first major victory was the Reagan-Bush regime from 1980-1992. We still fight on their battlefields; they have long held the high ground in the minds of most Americans and even the mainstream media so often touted as leftist. The latter are all solidly in the realms of the wealthy, after all, and are still more worried about their investments than the plight of the poor. The Right determines the language--”taxpayers” instead of “citizens,”--and projects the power relationships—the supposed control of the “intellectual elite” and the threat to freedom that is the ACLU. The lack of push-back and redefinition from the Democrats is an indication that they, too buy this language to some degree. This is also why universal single-payer health care, the only system that actually makes sense, is an impossibility in this country.

They manage to do this by false dilemmas: the system we have or socialism, the vagaries of the market or the “rationing” of health care, and that feeds into the scorched-earth politics of a two-party state wherein winning is the point, governing is secondary. And the only way to win such costly campaigns is to enlist the power, and thereby pledge fealty to, the rich.

The question history will have to ask, and the answer is not exactly clear, is why such a powerful and hopeful and active people gave up on their democracy, why we decided that solutions that actually work were too ideologically scary to try, why making our public servants actually serve the public was too much to bother with after all.

Writer's Block: I Can Relate

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:23:59 GMT

What fictional character do you most identify with?

View 509 Answers

The hanged man in Ambrose Beirce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek."

Meme Whore

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:25:36 GMT

1) What author do you own the most books by?

Probably Michael Meyers, who does tons of literary anthologies for Bedord/St.Martin's. I get those free, so he wins by default.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?

JS Mill's On Liberty. For some reason, it was popular with my profs. in college. Either that or Gatsby, again because of the freebies.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?

It is something up with which I shall not put.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?

Becky Sharp.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?

Probably Gatsby because I read it in high-school and college and taught it a few times in lit. courses. Maybe Conrad's Heart of Darkness for the same reason. I once spent an hour and a half analyzing a single image in Conrad's novella. That was a good (and patient) class.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Wasn't it everyone's?

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?

The Purpose Driven Life. It literally made me physically ill.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?

Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?

Probably Kevin Phillips' Wealth and Democracy since he predicted exactly what has happened to America's economy--and he did it ten years ago. Needless to say, nobody listened.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?

Andrei Codrescu

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?

They should just cut out that making books into movies business already.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?

Finnegan's Wake--oh, wait, somebody already tried.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.

I dreamt I had coffee with Amy Tan one time, and we all know that's totally weird because if I actually met her we'd be all doin' it and thangs.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?

The Purpose Driven Life, which I read as research for a satire I wrote for EastWesterly Review. That people find in that book a viable guide to life is utterly terrifying.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?

Probably Kant's Critique of Pure Reason since he seems allergic to examples. It was difficult because it was both fascinating and utterly unable to keep me consistently awake. Kant really, really needed an editor. And yes, I've read both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. They at least made me laugh.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?

I don't know if I've ever seen a Shakespeare play live outside of the park.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?

I respect the French for their wit, the Russians for their tenacity.

18) Roth or Updike?

Updike. Roth is funny, but altogether too cruel, and the whole self-absorbed thing gets old after a while. And Updike is subtly profound, Roth not really profound at all.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?

That isn't even a serious question.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?

See above.

21) Austen or Eliot?

Eliot.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?

Philosophy, but there's so damn much of it!

23) What is your favorite novel?

The Idiot.

24) Play?

I'll take anything Shavian.

25) Poem?

You can't be serious. That's like asking a drunk what his favorite fortified wine is.

26) Essay?

"A Modest Proposal" just because it's such delicious fun to teach.

28) Work of non-fiction?

No such thing as a "work of non-fiction" exists.

29) Who is your favorite writer?

This is an impossible question to answer, but reading Wallace Stevens will make you a better person. If you survive.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?

TC Boyle.

31) What is your desert island book?

Complete Works of Emily Dickinson. She knew how to make isolation interesting.

32) And ... what are you reading right now?

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The man was obsessed with corn. Corn and ducatoons.

Cranky Critic

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:08:01 GMT

At one time, the worst one could accuse The Iowa Review of being was occasionally boring. But the Winter 2008/2009 issue commits the literary crime of publishing a piece that's downright bad, sloppy and wrong.

Worse yet, they gave Andrew Mortazavi's “Stop Six, Ft. Worth” the annual Iowa Review prize for fiction. Judge Ethan Canin might simply have been having a bad day, or he might simply be clueless, but Mortazavi's short story barely rises to the level of what one might expect in an advanced undergraduate fiction workshop.

I first became alerted that something was amiss when I ran across a glaring usage error. Mortazavi's narrator, Jeremy, refers to the rear lights on his older brother's Cavalier as being “break” lights when they should, by all accounts, be brake lights. Now, I've selected a few imperfect manuscripts for publication, but that was based on the overall quality of the work. After that, I made sure the minor errors got sorted out before the piece went to press. You'd expect a story entered into a contest to be a bit more polished from the get-go.

The narrator is also utterly unconvincing. How Jeremy can simultaneously pull off being a 13 year old, a near drop-out, and someone who prefers to sit at home all day and read is beyond me. I'm sure there are a few people out there like that, but I've never met them. The 13 year old dropouts I knew read comic books if they read at all, but mostly they just played video games and got high. The readers were all in class, probably because they were not intimidated by the classroom, were rewarded because of their linguistic acuity, and admired educated people. Even in the inner-city setting Mortazavi tries to explore, the intellectually curious are welcome in school and tend to advance.

Mortazavi, no doubt, posits this nearly impossible narrator in order to give himself the excuse to write lines like this one: “Pale blue lights shined from both ends of her swimming pool, the surface undulating in the night breeze, casting the backyard and the brick house in an eerie incandescence easier felt than seen.” That's a lovely line, poetic, even. But no 13 year old male would ever think like that, no matter how precocious. He'd be too embarrassed, to begin with, too interested in posing and narrowing his thoughts into some media-driven notion of cool. Problematically, Jeremy actually does a bit of the cool-posing at another point in the story, which comes off as an inconsistency rather than an enrichment of characterization.

Creating an unrealistically literary character is the sort of move that probably resulted from a creative writing workshop, and it has become so common as to be a cliché: need to fit in all of your darling lines but still appear gritty and real? Have your hitman/barkeeper/bouncer/steel mill worker be a former (or budding) English major! Or, worse yet, make your short story/novel/novella about an English professor! I've been around a few of the latter, and I can tell you that, with a few exceptions, they're extraordinarily dull people who lead remarkably boring lives. English majors become writers because they express themselves better in writing, so they're really not all that much fun to hang out with, but they're grand fun in correspondence. Not surprisingly, stories about their lives are either unrealistic or just plain tedious.

I suspect in Mortazavi's case, though, he simply doesn't know well enough how an inner city kid would talk and thus can't really sustain the voice of a 13 year old ghetto kid over the course of a 14 page story. So he finds an excuse to make the kid use a voice very much like his own, in this case making Jeremy actually a middle-class white kid whose broken family falls on hard times and has to go live in a bad neighborhood.

But even that fictional kid would never utter a line like the one above. If anything, he'd be even more sullen and disaffected than a 13 year old bookish black kid who has lived in the 'hood his whole life.

Since the story is past tense, one could argue that Mortazavi's narrator is a literate adult simply reminiscing about an important event of his adolescence. Fair enough. But that would mean that Jeremy-the-near-dropout eventually does turn his life around and become successful, and then what's the point of looking back at this particular time? There's no question of the narrator's fate, and there's no suspense and little to think about. If this interpretation holds, the story falls thematically flat. So perhaps it's really about the other elements in the story: the death of two black twin girls and the cops' indifference to it, the depressing ironies of an inner-city drug trade fueled by the habits of spoiled suburban white kids, the vagaries of economic decline. But if so, then wouldn't it have been more productive to have written the story from the point of view of Jeremy's older, drug-dealing brother, Stanton? Stanton's connection and the father of the dead girls? The father's daughter and the dead girls' older sister, Ciara? The middle-class druggies Kyle and Chelsea? If these are the themes Mortazavi wishes to explore, using Jeremy as a narrator just complicates things and gets in the way of saying anything definitive or even exploring interesting questions about these matters.

But again, none of the other characters would have been capable of noting so wistfully “I now longed for that kind of bland uniformity, a return to safety and assuredness . . . .” And if these other characters had been the focus, Mortazavi would not have had the chance to show off his awesome wordsmithing.

There are a couple of ways Mortazavi could have gotten around this problem of voice, and only one is significantly fraught with peril. The dangerous way would be to actually spend some time in the inner-city listening to people talk. One could live or work there, volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, or even just go hang out in a park or walk the streets to get a feel of the sound and sense, the sight and smell of the rougher parts of town. After awhile, writing like these people think wouldn't be all that much of a challenge, but the traditionally lovely lines might not so readily come to mind. One might just find the beauty and the grace of the language poor, uneducated people use. But perhaps privileging the real voices of the poor and uneducated is slightly threatening to those editors and contest judges who already think they know what's wrong with the world and how to fix it.

Hanging out in the inner-city might have revealed to Mortazavi that, unlike in “Stop Six,” male drug dealers rarely even know their kids, much less live with them. It's typically the mothers who feed and clothe and house the children. He might also have observed that those men in the inner-city who do live with their own teenage children don't give them alcohol, and because they don't, SRS doesn't take the kids away. The character in question, Ciara's father, and father of the twins, must reasonably be in his early thirties at the youngest, even if he started having kids as a teenager himself, in order to have a teenage daughter, Ciara. As a drug dealer, the chances of this character staying alive and out of jail at that advanced age would have mitigated against his allowing a man armed with a sawed-off shotgun to grace his front-yard barbecue, as Mortazavi has him do. Drug dealers who survive past thirty and remain at liberty to cook their own food tend to be low-profile. Maybe this story was so captivating to its judge because it reinforces certain fantasies we have about inner-city life. Perhaps it lets the reader feel “edgy” for reading it, no matter how much it fails to comport with reality.

Another way Mortazavi could have overcome his problem with narrative voice would have been to just make the damn thing third-person. Third person narratives are, as far as I know, still allowed, and then the narrator would not have to have been a realistic character himself and could have waxed as poetic as Mortazavi wished without peaking the ol' bullshit meter. Granted, such a move might have led to some interesting and possibly unintentional postmodern juxtapositions of tone, but that sure as hell beats a failed attempt at realism. A third-person narrator might also have given Mortazavi the option of not so directly researching his subject. He could have boned up on his reading and relied on Google Earth and still come up with something convincing enough for 14 pages.

One final option would have been to simply write a poem with inner-city Ft. Worth as its subject matter, and the problem of a narrator could have been dispensed with entirely, the lovely lines could have been retained, and a mining of the mundane and even dangerous for its beauty and depth could have happened. That is, after all, what a poet does, and he need not encumber himself with pesky characters and their peculiar voices at all.

There are other problems, like the gratuitously disgusting way Ciara eats her barbecue, which makes one wonder if Mortazavi is just trying to gin up the edginess after it got blunted by all the literary soft-focus. That would make the story border on exploitation: Ciara can't just be angry and slightly dissolute; she has to be nasty as well.

But none of this bothers me as much as the failure of Ethan Canin as the judge who awarded this dog of a story a winning prize. Mortazavi can be forgiven for writing a clunky, crappy short story; I've written a zillion of them myself. But what was Canin thinking even publishing this trash, much less giving it first place? The Iowa Review contest's second-place short story, Jacob M. Appel's charming “Helen of Sparta,” presents a pre-teen female narrator who is not only convincing but is at a stage in her life in which the events change her perspective in a more mature direction. The story explores ideas in a way that's thought-provoking and with characters and situations that are realistic, and it doesn't feel the need to be edgy in order to do it. “Helen of Sparta,” in its own quiet, petit-bourgeois way, says more about regular people than “Stop Six” manages to say about anything at all.

In the same issue is Ron Carlson's even better “Victory at Sea” which is not only convincing in its characterization, plot, and setting, it's also poignant, sweet without being sentimental, and also funny. Those are the sorts of qualities a journal like the Iowa Review ought to prize.

At this point, it would be easy to start making suppositions about how these literary contests are actually run, but I think the larger issue is what the academic paradigm is doing to how we approach good writing. MFA programs in Creative Writing as an academic pursuit already privilege largely white and middle-class voices by being university-housed. But beyond that, they tend to blunt aesthetic experimentation and tend to turn us away from the artistic force of the lives we actually lead, no matter how banal. If Emily Dickinson could write head-removing poems while in self-imposed isolation in her father's Amherst home imagine what we could do while suffering through death-defying daily commutes, precipitously collapsing economies, and ecosystem-devastating climate change. Granted, we're not all Emily Dickinson. But we can create writing curricula that enhance our mindfulness and our powers of observation. We can create a literary climate that encourages experimentation and openness to voices not normally heard. We can create, in other words, a literature that hears.