Red Scare

I continue in what has become by now a time-honored tradition here at Le Jour-nelle of outing my adult self as the unfortunate offspring of Ineffectual Public School System and Unmotivated Student.



So I'm reading Jung Chang and John Halliday's biography of Mao Tse-tung. OK, I remembered that he played some starring role in making the Earth's most populous nation a communist state, and I had a vague recollection that he was a generally unsavory character (though I would likely feel this about any head of state of long standing). But I really had no idea how great his influence has been on the 20th Century, or just how unsavory he was.

Or how sociopathic. I was honestly shocked to learn that he is responsible for 70,000,000 deaths.

Seventy million human lives.

Jesus. How did I get thru college without that number burned into my consciousness? How do I remember six million jews and not remember a figure nearly twelve times that? A friend posits that for some inexplicable reason Americans are only able to keep one holocaust in the mind at a time, and we seem to have lit upon Hitler as the 20th Century Satan to whom we can most relate. But in this select trio of megalomaniacal sadists--Hitler, Stalin and Mao Tse-tung--(and I mean no disrespect to the victims of any of these monsters) Hitler ends up being the small-timer of the three. I suppose that, of these three nations, Europe is the world culture most like our own, and so it's easier to see ourselves in the events that swept over Europe in the '30s and '40s. Soviet Russia was further removed from first-world Western culture, and China was different animal altogether. Human suffering should be some kind of universal for us, but our ability to grasp the big picture of a thing reduces somewhat in unfamiliar circumstances; our vision narrows. Maybe this has nothing to do with it. Maybe the rest of the world understands Mao perfectly well while I apparently majored in navel lint farming.

I'm only a quarter into a quite long and detailed book, but several things stand out so far. First, there is that same quality in Mao that I've noted before with Lincoln and J.F.K, that quality of being extraordinarily inner-directed and able to focus on a goal often in the teeth of opposition. Maybe by practical definition nobody gets to be a world leader without this quality, but it is something foreign, in degree or kind, to most of us--certainly to me. That Mao wrested control first of the budding Communist party, and then of the entire country, at so young an age is plainly remarkable, a stark demonstration of some functional, if diabolical, genius.

The second thing that strikes me--as it clearly has struck most normal people who study the man--is that he pursued these inner-directed goals with a chilling and complete absence of conscience. He was willing to do or say whatever would further the goals that only he had clearly in mind, and the number of people killed and the amount of suffering his goals would require gave him not one nanosecond's pause. What might have been an antisocial tendency blossomed early on into full pathology, enough so that the question that often recurs to me in these situations of what liberties genius may rightly claim against the unthinking, uncomprehending masses is pre-emptively dashed.

This second point--here's where this whole blather becomes a civics lesson--puts me in mind of a quote from Sam Harris to the effect that the cornerstone of science is not really manipulation and measurement of the natural world, it's intellectual honesty. Either one is engaged in the pursuit of honest truth or one isn't. At its most elementary, science--and, I think, life--must be about an honest assessment of what is, and not of what we wish. And this seems the most functional bit of philosophy we might possibly carry around in our pocket, a principle the sanctity of which we should safeguard above everything else. I'm usually railing against religion when it comes to the willful blurring of the line between fact and fiction, but politics is right there. It's an issue wherever power is involved. In reading this biography, I am immersed in Mao's personal life, and also in the doctrines of communism. Our societal take on Communism is hugely colored by the ruthless dishonesty that has been systematically utilized in its application. Mao is so odious and foul a person that we never get to a place where we can evaluate the economic system which characterizes his reign.

I feel like I'm bringing everyone to kindergarden with me, wallowing around here gape-jawed at the foundation stones of evil. Better, I think, to look at it as a trip back to First Principles. My most elementary moral sense is that we cannot find our way to a place of benefit and goodness by way of a calculated and systematic application of lies and cheating and spin in the way that characterizes Mao's governing style, his regime, indeed his core person. (Would his followers have agreed with any part of my assessment? Would they claim that my judgment of his character was skewed? Or would they have said the ends justified the means?) What kind of person hungrily and ruthlessly pursues sole dictatorial power over half a billion people? OK, the answer is ready enough: a sociopath. But though I honestly feel this, it takes us to an unsettling place. Mao's (and Stalin's and Hitler's and Mussolini's) skillful use of lies and half-truths, and his cynical manipulation of everyone else's good intentions--including those who purport to be his allies; these odious things seem to have made their way to greater or lesser degrees into our own standard political playbook. In practice, if not in theory, we accept as inevitable that politicians must lie to make their way in the world, and we accept that truths are kept from us and that the information we do get is spun and filtered. So is it just a difference of degree?

Mao's story raises all sorts of other ethical and moral questions concerning the structure that he put in place beneath him, and the people who governed in his name and carried out his will. I have to wonder how much, really, Mao's underlings believed the things for which they so gleefully killed people in these thousands and thousands (as I wonder how many people really believe in gods--not what they say, but what they really believe in their most private selves. But that's another post). I suppose people went along with Mao because it was in their best interest to follow the lead of the guy with the gun. But there were always more guns that could be brought to bear against him than what he could wield against everyone else. So does such monstrosity occur because we want to keep our own skin intact? Or can we be so self-centered that there is no limit to what we'll do to others in pursuit of a better life for ourselves? I mean, they can't ALL have been sociopaths, can they? It's the same question asked of German society in the wake of Hitler (to again bring the subject matter to a more comprehensible place).

This is all part of the Cold War and McCarthyism, a subject I recently revisited in George Clooney's "Good Night and Good Luck." From classes in high school and in college it was clear that the Red Scare was not simply an economic phenomenon. "Communism" was an engine to which was attached a weighty train of associations, and these associations swirled around the typical American mind until the contents were thoroughly mixed.

I have no soft spot for Karl Marx--I always felt that his thinking had its head in the sand about some of the base realities of human nature But I could never find my own way from what he proposed to what we opposed, at least not under a single heading. I suppose one might argue that what we opposed was Stalinism, or Leninism, and that when we said communism we really meant one of those other terms. This is all shaky ground for my swiss-cheese education. Still, Marx must wish for a better proponent of his ideas than the unconscionable monsters of Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

(As an aside, it seems that our formal opposition to communism is ongoing and still fierce. The paper a couple days ago had a little tidbit about the FBI off-handedly releasing more of its John Lennon files--as though everybody knew and accepted that there would be FBI files on all rock and roll phenomena. It seems someone approved the expenditure of government resources to track his association with "leftist" groups. And the slide from "leftist" associations to subversive activities, well, that just goes without saying. My first reaction is to question why, in a free society, it's government's business to keep tabs on anyone's politics? I mean, isn't that what freedom is? Isn't that what free speech is all about? And if one's political convictions are contrary to the group in power--or even to the very governing system itself--is it not a bedrock feature of our system that one is free to express and act on this? Wasn't our very country founded by people committed to this very principle of self-determination? But here's yet another post.)
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1/1 Addendum

I talked above about initial impressions of this influential man about whom I knew next to nothing. I know a bit more now. And I realize that these above thoughts err in looking for some ideological underpinning to the phenomenon of Mao. The more I read, the more I think this misses the point entirely. His meaning lies not in his political ideology, and no evaluation of any larger school of politics to which he claims to belong gets one close to what he means. It isn't about communism. It's about catastrophic psychopathy.

70 million is not really a fathomable concept for us. But the book is full of individual accounts of the perversely inventive use of torture and the creative ways of killing people, episodes resulting in deaths in the hundreds or thousands. These numbers begin to be comprehensible, and give the slimmest handle to the extremity of Mao's brutality (though I might argue that even a thousand deaths by way of torture is still unfathomable unless we can think through each human act of suffering). It's just hard to get one's head around so vast an enterprise of cruelty and wanton infliction of suffering--indeed, maximum pain and suffering were the goals to which these people put their creative minds. This is monstrosity of the highest order. Mao simply killed with gleeful and satanic abandon anyone who stood in his way to any degree whatsoever. And many who didn't. He killed vast numbers of people just so that others might see it and live in fear. The brutality and cruelty is so extreme that one begins to understand where the concept of hell comes from. It's really hard not to wish infinite suffering on such a person, to desire to instruct them with the very things they have striven to inflict on others, things from which they were isolated with cool calculation. (Apparently Mao had secret escape passages installed in every residence from an early age, so that he could evade capture and, no doubt, the very treatment from his captors that he made his name inflicting on others.)

There's a great line spoken by Colin Firth in Frank Pierson's Conspiracy, a 2001 TV movie about a Nazi conference held in Wannsee where the details of the so-called Final Solution were worked out. Firth plays a lawyer who is concerned about the legality of what is being proposed:

"Any legal code worthy of the name restricts the enforcers of the law as well as its subjects; there are some things you cannot do."

It's ironic that it's a Nazi speaking these words. And, as we all know, his views were not honored.

Beware the Snare

I bought a new snare drum. Well, actually I ordered it. It's being built by a one-man shop (so far as I know) d.b.a. the Northern Drum Company, based right next door in a suburb of Green Bay. It'll be done in mid-January.

I'll write a bit about the process that led me to this drum, but first some background. The snare drum is the heart of a drummer's instrument, responsible for about 80% of what most people think a drummer does. Musicians often have an intimate relationship with their instruments, something that might get labeled "spiritual" by its depth or intensity. For drummers, the focus of this intimacy will rest with the snare drum, much more than with any other piece or the kit as a whole (though a specific cymbal can sometimes be the object of intense affection). Drummers are very particular about the snare drum's size, features and details, how it sounds, how it's tuned. These things are very tightly woven into a drummer's playing style and sense of musical identity.


(Not my drum, not even my manufacturer. Pics will follow upon delivery.)

This deep-rooted interface between mind and machine interests me. I'm fascinated by the technical / mechanical aspects of musical instruments--piano, violin, synthesizer, guitar; these are soulfully-crafted physical things that are intended for nuanced or artistic missions. Drums seem at first maybe to offer less opportunity for artistry in their construction details than other instruments. I mean, they're primitive, simple: two heads stretched over a cylinder and hit with a stick. (I feel the emergence of my inner cave man just writing those words. My wife's long hair suddenly appears to me like some kind of handle.) But if this is your instrument, this is what you obsess about; these are the details available to you for manipulation. (For those unfamiliar, a snare drum differs from any other drum--apart from existing in a pretty narrow range of sizes--only in having a band of metal wires--the snares--stretched taught across the outside of the lower drum head; thus, when the top head is struck, the bottom head and snares rattle sympathetically, producing a sound we've all heard a buzillion times before, even if we didn't know what produced it.)

I've owned several drum sets over the years, from rank beginner stuff to my personal high point, a German Sonor rosewood kit that I bought when I played for a few years in a band in Minneapolis. I originally bought that kit without a snare (the snare often being a separate matter from the rest of the kit) and later added a much newer Sonorlite 12-ply birch snare drum that was a magnificent bit of work. Fantastic drum. I sold that kit when my band experience ended, and went some 15 years with no drums at all. A few years back now I bought a cheap kit out of the paper, a going-out-of-business-already sale from a pimply teenager who decided, after making some expensive and well-directed upgrades, that he did not want to be a drummer after all. (I remember being puzzled that his mother asked me to play a bit when I came to get them--I had not played in years, remember--and she actually cried a little when we hauled them out to the car. Clearly she was much more enthusiastic about a bright future for her son of promiscuity, piercings and drug rehab than he was.)

But though I was no longer playing actively, I perhaps did not give the necessary consideration to how I would feel, after the thrill of again having some drums at my disposal, about, well, cheap drums. They weren't that bad, really, but I had previously owned the equivalent of, say, a Steinway piano or a Martin guitar, and now I found myself with an instrument suitable for, well, for the kind of wannabe who sits upstairs watching TV while his tearful mother hauls his drums out to a stranger's car. The snare was especially disappointing to me--the one drum that's not allowed to be shitty! It didn't actually sound awful, but it was the wrong size, and its features (or lack thereof) screamed "cheap drum." OK, call me a snob, but I just had trouble being at peace with that.

And so I began casually looking for its replacement a couple years ago. I wouldn't mind upgrading the whole kit, but for now I was concerned just to do this heart transplant. I looked at Yamaha--they do everything well, and their craftsmanship and material quality are world-beating--and at everybody's favorite drum company, Drum Workshop (one of their snares is pictured above). But this stuff is all quite expensive, and I am, after all, just banging a few minutes a day in my basement. No reason to let my delusions of grandeur run away with me altogether. I also looked into making my own drum from selected bits purchased from the Precision Drum Company of New York. The materials are of good quality, and I'd save a bit of money and take a hand in the finished product to boot.

This latter was what I finally decided to do, and I went out last week to look one last time at my local music stores to figure out how the big manufacturers solved a couple little details. And I managed during this little trek to run across this very unusual and striking drum, looking like a bit of heavy industrial hardware, something adapted from retired power plant machinery or some interior bit of a jet engine. I asked a few questions and learned that it was the hand-built product of a local manufacturer, the Northern Drum Company. I was thinking of assembling my drum from someone else's parts, and here was a guy who started with raw materials and constructed this jewel-like instrument from scratch! Out of (presumably) a little shop in the hinterlands of Wisconsin! The drum I saw was of cast bronze and weighed about 20 lbs. (most snare drums weigh, say, four pounds). They were asking about $800 for it, twice what it would cost me to construct my own from Precision. Too much. Still, I pored over it for half an hour, looked at the other instruments there, and went home. But I couldn't stop thinking about the bronze drum, and I decided on a lark to look at the company website and inquire what a drum made to my own specs (without bronze or a dealer's markup) might run me. I sent off an email request. And I went back the next day to the store and asked to take the drum into a back room and spend some quality time. We got to know each other a bit better. We became friendly. We became intimate.

The steel drum I'm having built is more modestly priced, though still on the expensive side relative to what I budgeted originally. But for what it is I felt the quote was most reasonable. And the company makes drums of any size to order, so if the snare drum and I turn out to get along I could follow later on with a whole stable of siblings. We'll see how this little adventure plays out, and I'll most likely put up a product review after we've spent a little time together.

Monsieur Incroyable!

I'm tempted to nominate The Incredibles as my second favorite movie ever (after my current rotating first-place choices of Gosford Park and Road to Perdition, all of which choices cause my wife to want to have me committed); so I'll write a paean to the film in hopes of purging myself of what threatens to become a fixation.

I watched it again, kind of by accident, at a friend's house the other night. This is probably the eighth or tenth time I've seen it. I loved it in the theater and, as a fan of animation generally, I looked forward to the DVD release so I could study it in closer detail. But I find that, far from satisfying my curiosity about a couple technical details of a kids' movie, these repeated viewings have only deepened my near-obsession with it.

First, as a general story it's brilliant. It's fantastically well paced, and while not breaking new ground for plotting, it's interesting and nuanced in lovely fashion. For the unfamiliar, it's (naturally) the basic good-vs-bad allegory in neon bright colors. The world has a class of people with special powers called "Supers," who use their skills to protect the public. As our story begins, the Supers have been forced into hiding by public outcry at the collateral damage done by them plying their trades. Their Supers all have cute, super-hero names, and the king of the pack is a fat, middle-aged dad named Bob Paar, a.k.a Mr. Incredible, who is basically Superman with a sense of humor (and no ability to fly per se). He is married to the former Elastigirl, a woman who can stretch herself obscenely. Their three kids, naturally, are all endowed with superhero talents (but it's fun that they haven't yet established their superhero identities or packaged their talents). The story follows the hapless super-hero dad and family as they try to right their personal (and the world's) wrongs.



From these potentially mundane origins, writer / director Brad Bird manages to put together a really engaging story, one that involves the audience in an edge-of-the-seat kind of way. You tend to know the outcome of things from the outset in a movie like this, but the little fits and starts, and the cliffhanger moments, are all done with such confidence and firm-handedness that the story pulls you along like a tractor. Everything is paced fabulously, lingering on the right things and rushing thru the right things, and the dialog and general family interaction is intelligent and feels so right as to be almost inevitable.

The husband / wife team of former superhero solo acts have taken to the exile of their skills quite differently, with the wife reveling in a normal family life and the husband pining for the stellar moments which formerly defined his existence. She is happy to be a mom, but he wants to be, well, Mr. Incredible. His yearnings threaten the stability of the family, and we easily buy into both points of view, an honest and understandable difference of coherent opinions between two really likable (OK, cartoon) people. This conflict between husband and wife serves as a backdrop for the raising of three children, each with their own burgeoning superpowers, who are themselves trying to fit in with their unendowed peers. Bird's writing / directing accomplishment is that we so readily buy into what might be easily passed off as a silly kids' movie.



And then there's the look of the movie, something so conspicuously spectacular that it threatens to upstage the action (and if a super-hero cartoon is not about action, then I can't imagine what would be). There is such care in even the tiniest detail of every shot that it's really an exercise in virtual reality. But Bird has kept the look of things whimsically tweaked firmly into traditional cartoon territory, which keeps the potentially scary and violent plot developments from being disturbing to the wee-uns. The details demonstrate over and over again that we have the ability at hand to duplicate reality outright, and one sees this in a movie like "Happy Feet," where it's not clear whether a given scene is computer animated or not. But Happy Feet serves, in my opinion, as a perfect example of how not to use realism in a cartoon. The Incredibles is much better for Bird's conscious tweaks on reality; there is art in the manner and degree of his deviation. Happy Feet, while being the culmination of an absurd amount of work, I imagine, seems more an exercise in proving that we can convincingly make realistic emperor penguins dance and sing (the singing is excruciating, sorry), than a justification that doing so is a compelling idea.


(Super-hero costume designer Edna Mode--clearly modeled after Edith Head--brilliantly voiced by director Bird.)



I loved the look of The Incredibles right away, but the extremity of the accomplishment did not hit me until I watched it a year ago on the aforementioned friend's 50" high-def plasma screen. In that setting, the attention to surfaces and lighting and to interior design details practically assaults one. You could pause the film--we did with a gasp a hundred times during the viewing--at nearly any point and print & frame what results. Absolutely spectacular.

Fantastic voice talent--Holly Hunter, Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Vowell, and a fabulous turn by the director himself, playing a woman!--a great soundtrack, and the very best that our current computer technology can muster: if you have not seen this movie, rent it on my recommendation and treat yourself. I DEFY you not to be brilliantly entertained!

I Wanna Crya

When I look at my sitemeter, I find a large proportion of the barely-double-digit visitors I have each day have found their way to the hallowed halls of Journal Wunelle by way of a Google search for "I wanna singa."

What the fuck?

I have never, prior to this present post, written the words I wanna singa. On this blog or anywhere else. Ever. It seems that a commenter of old wrote the words in response to this post a year ago about Looney Tunes, and that now seems to be the handle by which the great unwashed masses have found their way, two-by-two, Noah's Silly Ark style, to our door.

After all the posts about Douglas's fabulous DC-8, about all the angry W-bashing, all the bad cameraphone photos of architectural detritus strewn about the country, it appears I will go down in a sub-footnote of internet history as the guy who let someone else write "I wanna singa" on his blog.

(Now I'm really gonna get the hits.)

Today's Photo Tour: New York

A fabulous day for a walk in the city. Temps in the 50s, light breeze, sunshine. No matter how I try to vary my routine, I seem to end up walking a similar route each time I go exploring. (Since I always so enjoy myself, I guess there's little impetus to alter that routine more.) For all I remember, I may even have taken, and posted, about the exact same pictures before.

But the city is never quite the same twice, so here's a glimpse of today.

A holiday market in Union Square.



One of New York's original urban garden / greenspaces, apparently--the Liz Christy Garden. I've never heard of it, but it appears to have been the source of some controversy as a developer wanted the space. It's now a bit gone to seed, and the signs (from a year or two ago) indicate that a compromise has been reached and most of the garden gets to stay.




I saw the shopping bags from this place for several blocks before I found the store.



A couple street photos.




My favorite book store from which, I believe, I have never bought a book. But I love the idea of it. Between this place and Grammercy Park and the Dean & Deluca deli (which I refrained from photographing for the 75th time), it's like walking around in a Steely Dan lyric.




Today's lunch spot, on Broadway just South of Union Square. Amazingly (for me), I did not have chocolate.



Fun architecture in the lengthening shadows.



Wonder where the cheap housing is in Manhattan? (Well, it certainly LOOKS cheap; but I bet it isn't).



Perhaps the coolest single third of a block in Manhattan. I want everything in this store.



Odds & ends.





It seems so hopelessly touristy, but Times Square gets my attention on every visit (even when I try to avoid it). It's usually dusk when I'm making my way back to Penn Station, and there's so much light here that night seems not to fall on these few blocks. As in this picture, you can see, and sense, it coming from several blocks away. Of course, they're the busiest blocks in the city, though probably with the smallest percentage of native New Yorkers, and so everyone seems to be coming toward or away from this region. (The 42nd St. photo that begins the post captures a similar flavor--and it's all connected, of course.)



finis

Study Hall

Buried in the report from the Iraq Study Group is this little tidbit:

In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals . (emphasis mine)

I have not read the report of the Iraq Study Group, and I imagine I will do little more than skim my download of it; I had help in finding this quote from one of the speakers on National Public Radio this morning. But even buried away in the back of a government report, the quote seems a stinging criticism of the most basic functioning of our highest level of government. This is truer yet if one believes that the conclusions are non-partisan.

As I ruminated the other day on our situation in the Middle East, I wondered again how it is that our system of checks and balances can have deteriorated so far as to allow one man (or, if you prefer, a very small handful of men, say W, Cheney and Rumsfeld) to make decisions with such far-reaching consequences for the citizens of this country (to say nothing of the rest of the planet). How has it transpired that the business of international policy--and even war!--can be undertaken by a single person without any sure-fire mechanism for even the Congress to slow things down? Insofar as we elect representatives to act as professional politicians and run the country on our behalf, how can a single person even presume to act on behalf of 300 million people? And especially how is that possible when his course of action is controversial and radical?

This administration has systematically excluded alternative points of view and dissenting voices. This seems the worst possible approach for the governance of a superpower, and it stands in stark contrast to most other administrations (a point rather dramatically made in Michael O'Brien's biography of JFK). (Now, rereading that book report, I find that I celebrate the same go-it-alone attitude in Lincoln which I am castigating in W. But the course of action taken by Lincoln--fighting those who desired out of the Union--was not a shocking turn of events; his boldness was in his prosecution of what was more or less accepted by the North as a foregone conclusion. Also, Lincoln did have a diverse group held closely about him, so at least he had a clear idea of his options and his decisions were informed and weighed. Oh yeah, and Lincoln was an unfathomable genius and W is, well, not.)

A citizen calling into one of the morning NPR shows gave a sound thumping to the fourth estate, saying that we have been routinely given too little information about this war and that hard questions and critical analyses have been much rarer than they need to be when our democratic nation is engaging in actions of this kind. It's hard not to agree with him. I've read a couple different studies in the past two or three years which concluded that one of the most popular sources of television news, Fox News, is regularly failing to educate people about the facts and issues at hand; these exclusive Fox News watchers, when quizzed, are pretty consistently misinformed about both broad issues and details about the war. And the rest of the media, in deference to the Bush administration and its Fox News mouthpiece, have failed to hold the feet of this kind of shoddy journalism to the fire. Thus do we find ourselves passengers on a sinking ship.

But shouldn't we be outraged when the very government prosecuting that war--a pre-emptive war of aggression, it must be said--is itself systematically misinforming us? Who's in charge here? Who are the important people in our national equation? The nation does not exist to feed the bureaucracy and to obey it; the bureaucracy exists to do OUR bidding: we, the people, not the government, are the United States of America.

Why do I feel every time I pay attention to the news that we've somehow lost sight of this?

Inconvenient, Hell

We watched An Inconvenient Truth last night.

I'm not quite sure what to do with the information in the movie. Accepted as being exactly correct, I cannot see how the picture it paints is not absolutely dire. And his most basic premises--human population has exploded exponentially in the last hundred years or so; the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is directly linked to global temperature; the amount of carbon dioxide currently in our atmosphere, and the amounts being added by human sources, are unprecedented in any recorded history and are presently trending sharply upward; corroborating evidence that these things are contributing to a warming of the planet is amply at hand--these seem things which can't be credibly refuted. The consequences of global warming--as opposed to the argument that the planet is, in fact, getting warmer--seem only slightly less certain, but even then he puts together a pretty convincing summary of the effects of acidifying the oceans, of rising ocean levels, and of the effects on vegetation and other lower-tier life forms of these increasing temperatures.

The ten hottest years in recorded history have occurred within the past 14 years. And the recession of the glaciers (at least the dozen he showed before-and-after pictures of) and of the ice caps seem pretty tough facts to counter. He quickly dispatches with the argument that global temperatures are cyclical and that we're currently in a normal upward cycle by showing us exactly what the cycles have amounted to over the last 650,000 years and how completely out of the ballpark we are in our current conditions and our near-term projections. In my own lifetime, I have seen changes in, for example, the amount of snowfall we receive in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Growing up, we rode snowmobiles extensively, and now for the last decade, people have had to trailer their sleds further North to find snow. I used to need a four wheel drive truck to get around in winter; I would not have engaged the 4WD now for five or six consecutive winters, at least here in Appleton.

Whether all of this is responsible for, say, Katrina seems debatable; but when hurricane and typhoon and cyclone activity is looked at worldwide, it's hard not to see Katrina as something other than just another hurricane, as an outcome of measurable things--like increasing oceanic temperatures. In addition to record-setting high temperatures all around the world in the past handful of years, the number and severity of these tropical storms has risen everywhere, and they have begun threatening places previously thought immune to them. It just seems like quite a feat of denial is needed not to see all these elements converging toward a single conclusion.

Blowhards like Rush Limbaugh have long contended that global warming is some kind of hysterical liberal plot, and one can even find people who aren't bloated, self-hyping entertainers obsessed with the sound of their own voices who question the prevailing science. But their views are much harder to find (even if our current warped sense of journalistic "balance" implies that the topic has two equally competing sides, which seems far from the case), and personally I find their arguments less convincing than the case Al Gore is making--not least because his critics mostly concentrate on questioning his conclusions without putting forth a more convincing case for a different one.

The movie ends with a call to action, and an assurance that this problem can be tackled like many other difficult things have been tackled throughout human history, by awareness and by all of us pulling in the same direction. This may be, and in any case I think we must do what we can, but his presentation makes it seem as though we may already be far past the tipping point. We can have little short term effect on world population (and we may be able to effect very little long-term without the influence of certain opposed "moral" institutions), and the amount of fossil fuel being burned--a major contributor to this problem--cannot be curtailed simply. To bring about the kinds of changes he recommends--increasing the fuel efficiency of our cars and homes, for example--will take some time, and, I'm afraid, some more dire consequences felt by people, to bring about; and then the "healing" of the planet will take decades or longer. If, say, coral reefs and plankton are both negatively affected by the higher oceanic temperatures and by higher acidity levels in the water, these things begin to affect the whole food chain from the bottom up; and they'll take probably longer to repair than they took to break.

As I say, we have no choice but to do what we can do, but one wonders if a wholesale retooling of human civilization is not required (and, assuming it is even possible, if it would succeed in saving us from what is in store). The numbers of people who stand to suffer and die from the worst-case extrapolation from his data make Katrina seem like a walk in the rain. Roger Ebert said that after seeing the movie he found himself turning off all the lights in his house. I find myself doing the same thing, but without the optimism that I'm doing anything real to ward off armageddon. It's a useless symbolic act, something nowhere near as inconvenient at what may be in store for all of us.

Grades:

As a compelling entertainment: B+
As a message transmission: A-
As a feel-good flick: F-

Annual Report

The Director, Editorial Board and staff of the Journal Wunelle held their annual meeting yesterday in Minneapolis. The meeting was held at a Davanni's pizza restaurant near the University of Minnesota campus.

Almost no Journal business was discussed and lunch was enjoyed by all present. We did take note of how we do appreciate the continued patronage of our many readers.

We ought to put on seminars for how to conduct business meetings.

You Know What Gets My (pet) Goat?

OK, I suppose it's my conceit to think with any given post that I've brought some unique perspective to bear upon whatever trifle caught my attention. And I suppose I might just as often be an ignorant horse's ass. But this time I'm admitting to being an ignorant horse's ass up front. I'm about to spout off about something of which I admit PREEMPTIVELY I know not a damn thing.

There, I said it.

I was listening to NPR's "Marketplace," a daily show about financial things, and the host, some slick, 30-something dude named "Kai," was pontificating about the day's stock market performance (which they call, with self-congratulatory swagger, ...wait for it... "doing the numbers").

I'll try to paraphrase: "The Dow was pretty flat today on news of the government's pending third quarter productivity reports, which are expected to come in somewhere around half a percent below expectations; that caused an early rally to run out of steam, though some strength was regained at the end of the day after news of Kirk Kerkorian's sale of additional GM shares..." And on and on in similar fashion for the whole hour long show.

And the whole time I was thinking: You know what, dude? You don't know SHIT about what those stock market numbers mean. OK, I don't know shit about any of it, but I don't think you do either, and neither does most everybody else that dabbles in this bullshit. Who gives a fuck about productivity figures (or whatever the hell it was)? What does it even mean in a way that translates to anything human? Who even knows about the existence of these reports except a small group of people telling each other what they should or shouldn't like? One can hear, night after night, this stupid program interviewing one brown-nosed "analyst" after another about what this bevy of arcane flotsam means--because it's all so far from obvious to the rest of us--and it all sounds like a bunch of salesman-slick doubletalk, a mumbling wad of pseudo-speak. One would do equally well to read tea leaves or to gaze into a crystal ball. The whole setup seems like a grand, ritualized, business-suited circle-jerk, a kind of ongoing orgiastic, self-referential congratulatory frat party that appeals to a certain kind of money-grubbing lower tier mind who is convinced that he and his ilk are "players" and are responsible for making the world go round (and should be compensated accordingly).

This little snitty personal moment of mine led me, after breathing deeply from a paper sack, to ponder a reacquaintance I made a few days back. This acquaintance--not a friend, but somebody I kind of knew second-hand thru a close friend--had recently gone in a short span of time from the very edge of bankruptcy to renewed prosperity, a kind of riches-to-rags-to-riches-again story. Last I had heard, a couple years back, he was about to lose everything to a series of shady dealings by which he had backed himself into a corner. When I inquired now about how the fall had come, I was only a little surprised to hear that the phoenix had risen to even greater heights, somehow (yet again) bypassing that inconvenient ashes stage altogether.

This person has always struck me as the quintessential business type, the kind of person who listens to this above tripe and uses the information to bilk somebody. The guy had always been the proponent of the Big Deal, someone who deals with big debts, big risks and big payoffs. And when things went sour, well, the genius was in getting someone else's money to go down the drain, in getting someone else to take the fall. Instead of a pair of striped pyjamas, our hero is suddenly in possession of several impressive new personal properties scattered about the country (including shiny new wheels and strategic investment properties for each of the kids) and a renewed, jet-setting lifestyle. And not surprisingly, I learned that his super-lucrative new job involves titles and duties which are probably arcane and gaseous to Joe Consumer. He is some kind of Portfolio Manger now, some Asset Allocation Blah-Blah Specialist Whatever, whose work commanded an impressive salary.

In my bottomless pit of cynicism, I couldn't help but decide I'd been duped not to expect this all along: the guy whose contribution to society is least comprehensible--and, I might argue, would be least missed if he vanished--is most grotesquely compensated, compensated in a way that breaks entirely from any reality a working stiff could comprehend. During the business downturn of the past five years, story after story finds the top brass making huge salaries and obscene bonuses for heading companies which are losing vast sums of money. Failing executives are let go, punished with cumbersomely bloated severence packages. The guy throwing bags at United Airlines is just shit out of luck.

This all dovetails nicely with my utter incomprehension about the sanctity of stockholders in our present business model (a sanctity reinforced again and again during the hour of "Marketplace"). The stock price--which, near as I can tell, is merely an indicator of the general public's view of the merit of a company (after, that is, the huge initial fund raising of the IPO)--seems to have become the bottom line for business here; everybody--manager and peon alike, though the managers seem to have a nice insulating layer of blubber--appear to be in the service of supporting the stock price. Unless to add an additional set of smoke & mirrors between voting stockholder and overcompensated executive, I have yet to figure out why this business model has taken over from a simple supply-and-demand marketplace.

Is this naive of me? Would a jumbo jet ever get built without this kind of self-proclaimed mover & shaker? Would there be skyscrapers? Is there some seminal dreamer buried in there who has brought us medicine and advanced technology? Or is it just a slice of bell curve mediocrity playing a game of "Make Your Mark"? When the incomprehensibility (to me) of it seems to blur with the line between Have and Have Not, I fear the worst.