two is not enough

President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court will accomplish at least one thing: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will no longer feel quite so lonely.

Obama would clearly have been in some trouble had he not nominated a woman for the seat. Here's my question: will there be repercussions if he picks a man for the next vacancy? (Assume here that the next vacancy is not Ginsburg; obviously her replacement must be a woman.) When John Paul Stevens - who joined the Court when Sotomayor and Chief Justice John Roberts were in college - finally retires, will Obama be expected to name a third woman to the Court? And after that - a fourth?

Given that women comprise 51% of the national population, a representation rate of 2/9 is still quite miserable. And 3/9 won't be good enough. I'm not saying that the percentage of women on the Court must precisely mirror national demographics. But the figures also shouldn't demonstrate a blatant and dramatic bias - which they will until women hold more than a third of the seats.

But at what point do people start saying "so many women in a row! Give men a chance!"?

This is a real problem with historically entrenched discrimination. Any systematic attempt to correct it inevitably looks like a new form of ("reverse") discrimination. Does Obama have the political fortitude for that?

the evo-psych of not being Larry Summers

I’ve just finished reading Robin Dunbar’s 1996 book, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Dunbar is an Oxford anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, most well known for the ‘Dunbar number’: the hypothesis that the ratio of human neocortex to overall brain size predicts (successfully, it seems) stable human social groups of around 150 individuals. Although the book bears a Harvard University Press imprint, it reads at times like popular science, a bit scanty on citations and too-quick with some important arguments. Nevertheless, it’s quite fascinating to read; Dunbar attempts to explain human language (and high-level cognition) as an evolutionary solution to the problem of social friction in a species whose group size has outgrown the practical limits of bonding behavior in other primates (e.g. reciprocal grooming).

I want to riff on a few different points in the book, starting in this post with a point about gender differences in the use of language, and its relation to the status of women in intellectual professions. In chapter 9, Dunbar describes research conducted with colleagues, from which they conclude that “conversations often function as a kind of vocal lek. Leks are display areas where males gather to advertise their qualities as potential mates to the females.” (176) This idea is based upon data gathered from studies of actual human conversations. In one-on-one male/female dyadic conversations, men and women talk for more or less equal periods of time. However, in conversational groups of any larger size, men tend to dominate air time. This is true even when one particular man and one particular woman break off to form a dyadic sub-conversation on the periphery of the main group; the man will tend to speak much more than he would were the pair isolated.

Dunbar and his colleagues think that the lek hypothesis can explain this difference between male/female conversational behavior in dyads and in larger groups. In lek species, males engage in competitive displays to persuade observant females of their reproductive superiority. The females are welcome to sit back and merely observe; indeed, they must do so if they want to pay attention and accurately size up the males. Dunbar and colleagues hypothesize that a similar thing happens in human conversational groups; the men (unwittingly, most of the time) are driven to speak up, to out-compete one another for the attention of the women. Such competition is unnecessary when there are no other men around, hence in isolated dyads men and women share speaking time more evenly.

One more bit of data ties this into the status of women in intellectual professions. Dunbar and colleagues analyzed not only the total quantity of speaking time, but the frequency of particular conversational content. In general, all humans of any gender tend to talk mostly about social matters; about 65% of their talk-time centers around ‘who-is-doing-what-with-whom’. (That’s one bit of critical data behind Dunbar’s central hypothesis that language evolved primarily to facilitate gossip.) Dunbar observes that in single-gender conversational groups, certain relatively intellectual topics like “work and academic matters or religion and ethics” take up only 0-5% of total conversational time. However, in mixed-gender conversational groups, the proportion of male talk-time devoted to these topics rises significantly, with much less increase in corresponding female patterns.

Dunbar offers a somewhat sketchy evolutionary hypothesis to explain that last bit. In mixed-gender groups, discussion of relatively intellectual topics increases among men because they are a way of advertising intelligence, a type of reproductive advantage. Women have no need to advertise (they are the ones who get to be choosy about mates) and so no need to out-compete each other (or men) in conversational prowess. Hence, women are less likely to increase their conversational attention to abstract subjects. (It’s important to note that all of the underlying data comes from observation of casual conversations – like those in the lunch room or hallway – not from formal contexts as in the seminar or board room, where participants gather with a specific purpose in mind.) Following on all of this, Dunbar concludes the section with the following remarks, whose relevance to his preceding points about gender difference is left unclear:

In the intellectual world of the university, demonstrating your intellectual skills by showing off your knowledge of Kant or the Romantic poets, or by being able to explain yesterday’s lecture on the second law of thermodynamics, may be quite acceptable hallmarks of competence and status. They mark you out as a cut above the rest, the obvious choice in the mating stakes. In that kind of environment, intellectual prowess is as appropriate a criterion of future status or earning power as being the best card player in a bridge club or the best musician in a music club. Knowledge, as it is so often said, is power. (177)

Given all the attention he’s just paid to the relative preponderance of intellectual topics in male conversation, and their role as a competitive advertising mechanism, is Dunbar here attempting to explain the greater success of men in intellectual, academic fields? He doesn’t say – presumably he’s smart enough not to explicitly stick his leg into that political bear trap. But it certainly sounds as if he’s suggesting as much.

Now, here’s the thing. I think we can react to this with the sort of bristly outrage that usually greets evo-psych-fueled gender difference research in feminist circles. The research is reductivist and essentializing; it provides ammunition to those who would naturalize (and implicitly justify) oppressive stereotypes. Et cetera. But I don’t think that’s the correct reaction. I actually think this sort of research should be welcomed by feminists, provided that it rests on solid methodological grounds (about which I won’t judge here).

Notice that nothing in Dunbar’s story implies or entails that men are actually better at intellectual pursuits than are women. The account just explains why men are more prone to talk about them even in informal contexts, and why men are more prone to dominate conversations regardless of topic. So it is entirely consistent with the Dunbar story that we might insist there is no (presently relevant) evidence for suspecting latent intellectual superiority in males. Instead, the account offers us two different tools for correcting gender imbalance in the intellectual professions.

First, the account provides a potential debunking explanation for gender imbalance. We needn’t invoke (as Larry Summers once did) a natural superiority among men in certain intellectual areas. Rather, we need merely presume certain sociological facts about the intellectual professions, and add these to what Dunbar and colleagues tell us. Who is most likely to get ahead? Those who speak up in front of the professional power-brokers. Who is most likely to speak up? Men. Does tendency to speak up have anything necessarily to do with actual competence? No. So we may very well understand the relative success of men in intellectual fields as an incidental consequence of behaviors that are simply arbitrary as to ability.

I would go one step even further. If Dunbar et al. are right, then all of us – men and women alike – are hardwired to expect differential linguistic behaviors between genders. We expect men to be more dominating and intellectual (even in casual conversation), and we expect women to be more quiet, or attentive only to gossipy matters. We’re generally not aware of having these expectations, still less of why we have them. But have them we do – and as with all expectations, we are unnerved when they are not met. We are biologically conditioned to react appreciatively to dominating, intellectual discursive behavior from men, and to react with at least some measure of confusion to the same from women. Hence, in addition to the success-generating basic tendencies mentioned in the last paragraph, we see another explanatory factor for relative male domination of intellectual fields: we are disposed to reward intellectual success-seeking men, and to punish similar women. Indeed, this might explain why, until very recently, nearly every human culture excluded women from political and other intellectual discussion, on grounds of propriety.

Building upon these explanatory stories, Dunbar’s account offers us a practical tool for remediating gender imbalance. Consider your academic department ‘s or workplace’s resident alpha male blowhard. He seizes control of every conversation. He clearly experiences intellectual discourse as a form of combat. Merely pointing out to him that his behavior edges out other conversational participants probably has zero effect. He cannot understand why they don’t just talk more, if they want to!

But imagine now another strategy. Show him Dunbar’s research. Explain to him that his behavior is at least partly explicable as the bidding of his lek-frenzied ape brain. Ask: does he want to be the sort of creature whose manner of participation in an abstract, rarified environment conforms better to that of a horny chimpanzee? He is a conscious, reflective being; if he wants to, he can modify the output of his evolutionary programming through a regime of attentive habituation. And with this new insight, he might also try to correct inferences he makes about the competence of others based upon their inability or unwillingness to act just like him. Is such an argument likely to work on most blowhards? No - people’s self-concepts are extremely resilient. But getting the story out might have appreciable effects upon more moderate men, and more generally on everyone in authority, whose assessments of individuals’ conversational practices matters to their advancement in the profession.

If nothing else, here’s a take-away point. Evolutionary psychology, even gender-difference evolutionary psychology, needn’t always be a vehicle for unreflective stereotype reification. We – our brains, our behaviors, or social institutions - are products of naturally selective forces. Some of the outcomes of these evolutionary processes worked perfectly well for our primate forebears, but they have come out of sync with modern, reflective, socially-conscious humans. Evolutionary psychology can sometimes allow us to trace (speculatively, at least) the causal origins of these undesirable behaviors, and so might sometimes point us to the causal-psychological joints where they may be most efficiently dismantled.

image (c) Charles Burns at edobarn.demon.co.uk

Freedom's never free. It's $3.1 billion.

The new World Trade Center got its first commercial tenant today: Beijing Vantone, a Chinese foreign trade group, agreed to lease 5 floors of the flagship tower, whose skeleton is only now beginning to protrude above street level. Interestingly – as pointed out this morning on WNYC, the local NPR affiliate – the contract refers to the building as “1 World Trade Center”, and not as the “Freedom Tower”. (See an NY Times article cryptically referring to it as “once called the Freedom Tower”. And, released even while I’ve been writing, here is confirmation of the official name change. )

Evidently there’s been some decision to let the “Freedom Tower” name gradually dissipate. I have mixed views about this change.

It would seem to be a good thing. The name was always a bit embarrassing, appearing to merely recapitulate America’s disturbingly possessive attitude toward the concept (if not the practice) of freedom. Wasn’t it enough that the building’s forcedly symbolic height was already a 1,776 foot long stick in the eye of America’s enemies? (Incidentally, is preservation of this purported symbolic measure going to end up another argument against converting to the metric system?)

Worse yet, the name carried certain vague yet unmistakable links to the Bush administration’s ideology of promiscuously vengeful victimhood. Why did the terrorists attack us? Because they hate our freedom! You know who else hated freedom? Saddam Hussein! Alongside the eyes-wide-shut moral permissiveness endowed on American policy by that slippery sentiment, the semiotic presence of undefeated ‘Freedom’ at Ground Zero doubtlessly also helped salve wounded national pride. Comforting and perhaps understandable in the attack’s aftermath, the whole thing is a bit awkward eight years, two wars, and one Abu Ghraib later.

And, for goodness sake, this is commercial real estate. Hey, I think that capitalism is the least-bad socio-economic system ever invented by our species. But even I wonder if the ‘Freedom’ logo is a bit tarnished attached so prominently to a shiny robber baron encampment. (Not to mention that the artist’s conception depicts an enormous jagged blue phallus rudely erupting from graceful lower Manhattan.)

Now, to be fair, there’s nothing new about embarrassingly sentimental public nomenclature. Indeed, Liberty Street, which lines the southern boundary of the Trade Center site, was known as King Street until, in a fit of fraternal regicidal pride, New Yorkers celebrated the French Revolution. But haven’t we as a society moved beyond unselfaware triumphalist civic dubbing?

Yet. A part of me – presumably the same part that secretly enjoys Disney World – wonders if maybe the old name was a good name. Us postmoderns are all so ironic, detached, sensitive and self-conscious. We’re bred to greet heart-on-sleeve expressiveness with nary but an awkward cringe-snicker. Couldn’t it be healthy, just sometimes, to indulge in a bit of old timey earnest naïve glorious romanticism? The Freedom Tower, for all its sleek lines and energy-efficient ventilation, might have borne a name, a mere name, radiating fuzzy proud American can-do-ism, the spirit of our grandparents’ generation, out over the Hudson River and into the jaded fallow countryside beyond.

No? Well, dear friends and countrymen, we’ll always have One World Trade.

image from Wikipedia

ofessionalpray ournalismjay

A light article in the NYT includes an unexpected word.

THE earth held firm in its orbit. The continents did not founder. Martial law was not imposed. This, despite the fact that the “21” Club has loosened its tie for the first time since it opened at 21 West 52d Street 79 years ago.
...
Actually, “21” instituted the policy “after Labor Day, a soft opening if you will,” said Bryan McGuire, the manager for the last, yes, 21 years. “We wanted to be on a more level playing field with our competitors,” he said, adding, “We didn’t think it was that big a deal.” Especially since, during lunch, the tie policy was ixnayed in 1996, he said.

Goodness - the Grey Lady is using pig latin! Perhaps it helps capture the tone of the story, the ebbing of rigid expectations amidst economic spiral. But, still, definitely a surprise.

a thoroughly modern presidential honeymoon

Once upon a time, newly married western couples would get to know each other during a period known as a honeymoon, a ‘sweet month’. For most, especially those in arranged marriages, the weeks following nuptials required adjusting to a shared life together, a series of mutual compromises and sometimes unwelcome discoveries. But the inevitable personal friction could be mostly smoothed over by the sheer novelty of the experience.

Modern honeymoons are usually quite different, because many modern couples live together for months or years before becoming formally married. Nevertheless, there remain new challenges, especially the legal, financial, and emotional consequences of being bound to another person for (one then expects) the rest of one’s life. Perhaps this is why we have invented such elaborate rituals around marriage, and why so many modern honeymoons take the form of lengthy vacations to exotic places. For couples who already share a life together, novelty must be generated artificially.

The metaphorical ‘honeymoon period’ enjoyed by a new public figure, especially a new president, seems to be now undergoing a similar shift. Normally, the goodwill and cooperation a president receives for the first few months (the ‘first hundred days’ usually) follow in part from the novelty of regarding this unfamiliar person - and retinue of officials and advisors – as the nation’s leadership. We, the public and the congress, grant our new administration the benefit of the doubt, and we try to meet awkward adjustments with good humor.

Barack Obama’s incipient administration, however, has begun to look like the live-in boyfriend with whom the marriage is just a formality. Obama appointed nearly his entire cabinet weeks in advance. He arrived in DC earlier than most new presidents do (so that his daughters could begin attending school). He has already begun negotiating with congress for a new economic stimulus package. Despite the ‘one president at a time’ rhetoric, Obama’s administration has already leaked the imminent closure of Guantanamo Bay, and other foreign policy signals are emerging. Surely it means something that, two weeks before inauguration, Bill Richardson accomplished the functional equivalent of a cabinet resignation.

None of this is a mistake on Obama's fault. It would be irresponsible to sit idle while the economy teeters. The Bush administration’s discredit is so complete that Obama was sucked into the policy-making vacuum even before officially winning election. But the transition has been so competent and so thorough that we’ve now been thinking of him as the president for weeks. Do we now even get a honeymoon with Barack? Just like any modern marriage, we’ll need some artificial novelty to spice things up. There will be an enormous display for the inauguration, and reminders for weeks afterward just how special this new president happens to be. Mark your calendar: Barack Obama is taking the country to a suite in the Bahamas for a week.

(photo from barackobamamain08.com)

metaphysics on board

Here is the start of an AP story:

There were 124 passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 59 when it left the Netherlands. There were 125 when it landed in Boston.

Phil Orlandella, a spokesman for Logan International Airport, says a woman went into labor and gave birth to an apparently healthy baby girl over the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday during the eight-hour flight from Amsterdam.

The first paragraph (unwittingly?) takes a position on a rather contentious issue in politics, ethics, and metaphysics!

How many passengers were on the flight when it left the Netherlands? If you think that a fully-developed fetus is a person, then the answer is 125. If you think otherwise, then the answer is 124. The story appears to be taking sides.

I wonder if this occurred to the writer or editor at any point. Obviously the aim was to produce a punchy lede paragraph. But that’s not all that happened… You might say that this article was a human interest story when it took off, and a maneuver in the culture wars when it landed.

the honorable thing

Last week R. Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, a French hedge fund manager working in New York, tabulated his losses: 1.6 billion dollars, his own money and that of his clients, poured down Bernard Madoff’s bottomless cavity. He called one important Parisian client and confessed his anguish; he had “betrayed” those who trusted his acumen. He tried but failed to recover the money. That night, he asked the cleaning staff to leave early, so that he might work late in peace. When morning came, according to the New York Times:

Security officers discovered the body of Mr. de la Villehuchet, a co-founder of Access International Advisors, in a chair, with one of his legs propped on his desk. His wrists and his left biceps were slashed, said Paul J. Browne, a New York police spokesman. A wastebasket had been placed under his bleeding biceps, Mr. Browne said.

It is possible to see de la Villehuchet’s suicide not as cowardice or comeuppance, but as an expression of deep moral courage. He had made a drastic mistake, an act of inexcusable negligence resulting in terrible consequences for a great many people whose vulnerability was a direct result of the trust they granted him. There was absolutely no way for him to repair the damage, and nothing in his power could possibly achieve suitable contrition. Facing an unthinkably large debt of guilt, he surrendered his only comparable asset – his entire universe.

In Victorian England, this was “doing the honorable thing”. Were you fully disgraced, your friends and colleagues would leave a bottle of whisky and a loaded revolver in your study, and you knew what was yours to do. Your end, achieved in privacy and dignity, would eventuate a sort of clearing of the moral air for everyone involved, most of all yourself. Under appropriate circumstances, this was understood to be obligatory on your part, although no one else would be justified in bringing about the desired end were you discovered uncouthly alive.

These cases are importantly different from suicide prompted by despondency or fear. People like de la Villehuchet might very well wish to go on living, apart from their moral guilt. Nor are these cases of martyrdom; nothing positive is accomplished. No – these are deaths for the sole purpose of salvaging honor. By these lights, an honorable suicide is merited once one has irrevocably destroyed one’s social status in life. Honor might be recaptured for one’s legacy (and perhaps for the sake of one’s heirs) with a suitably monumental display of regret. But anything else will forfeit honor eternally.

In 1912 the Emperor Meiji died of cancer. As his funeral procession passed through Tokyo, General Nogi Maresuke and his wife drank some sake, put on fresh linens, and then carefully disemboweled themselves. Nogi thereby completed the ancient (but by then illegal) samurai ritual of junshi, the following of a vassal upon his master’s death. In his suicide note, Nogi pleaded culpability for mistakes made while commanding in the Russo-Japanese war. Given these failings, it would have been dishonorable for the general to remain alive once the emperor had passed. (That Nogi’s wife should also die, despite bearing no recognizable personal blame, was a separate tenet of what was even then deeply archaic samurai lore.)

Nogi’s seppuku divided Japanese public attention. It was an act of supreme loyalty and, in a sense, beauty. Samurai death rituals possess intricate, highly symbolic structure, including the composition of delicate jisei (death poetry) and a tightly prescribed sequence of blade movements. The act plainly requires extraordinary discipline, especially when, like Nogi, one has no assistant to deliver swift decapitation and must instead die slowly from the stomach wound. At the same time, Nogi’s seppuku marked an abominable encroachment of primitive custom on the rapidly modernizing Japanese culture. It was embarrassingly crude for a people rushing toward industrialism and democracy. There emerged agreement that such things must cease – and so they did, until a brief upsurge in interest among the military caste in 1945.

I wonder if the Apocalypse Lite flavor of today’s economic climate encourages actions like de la Villehuchet’s suicide, just as the epoch-making death of Meiji Tenno did for Japanese a century ago. As the global order sputters and staggers, does it seem more appropriate to balance one’s own moral accounts in a suitably conclusive manner? Can this really be the honorable thing to do?

I have mixed views about honor. The concept seems deservedly obsolescent, suggesting a desperate grip on the fraying tail of Romanticism, and carrying the faded but unmistakable odor of feudal patriarchy. Suicide for honor looks like a perfect example of just so much self-important insanity. Really, honestly, exactly what is accomplished by this sort of death? The end of de la Villehuchet’s life undoes exactly none of his mistakes; it leaves absolutely no one better off. The only result is that a human life, an irreplaceable singularity, a still-glittering prospect of extraordinary redemption, is no more. That, for this archaic vagary, this half-digested pseudo-virtue, this ‘honor’?

And yet. There is something admirable in a person’s saying through conduct: ‘This is my mistake. I own it, absolutely and permanently. There will be no equivocation, no blame-ducking. I deserve the consequences that I can’t prevent from falling on others. And with this act, all discussion is closed.’ Silly and romantic it might be, but such an unreluctant embrace of personal responsibility seems, for lack of a better word, noble. If nothing else, while Bernie Madoff smirks his way home and Rod Blagojevich names his own senator, one can’t help but wonder if they might have learned a thing about honor from Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet.

The Master of the World
has passed away--
and after him,
eager to serve my lord,
go I.
Nogi Maresuke, death poem

surprises and expectations

Here, in its entirety, is a story from Reuters:

”What are you doing here?”: man asks wife in brothel

WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment's employees.

Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

"I was dumfounded. I thought I was dreaming," the husband told the newspaper on Wednesday.

The couple, married for 14 years, are now divorcing, the newspaper reported.

Here’s what I want to know: was the woman surprised to see her husband in the brothel? And why doesn’t the article address that question?

Advanced primates that we may be, we’re still wired to notice the unusual or unexpected. What seems to be unusual or unexpected here (both to the man and to us) is that someone’s wife happened to be working in a brothel. It is not unusual or unexpected that someone’s husband happened to be frequenting a brothel. The man’s behavior is (relatively) normal; the woman’s is not.

Can you imagine this article having been written from the other perspective: ‘brothel employee surprised to see husband as client’? I don’t think we’ll ever see such an article. It’s too hard for us (and for the reporter, our proxy) to identify with this abnormal creature, the brothel employee who is also a wife. But we recognize familiarity in the brothel customer who is also a husband. It’s not that we’re necessarily any more similar to him. It’s just that we’re used to him. And so the story gets told from his angle.

There’s an interesting reinforcing mechanism at work here. The story treats the wife’s presence at the brothel as the surprising factor, because it is the part of the story that surprises us. And it surprises us because of articles like this.

Why I don't read political blogs anymore

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
-Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth”


September and leaves are already falling, only slightly less rapidly than the standards of civic decency.

Something unusual has happened recently: I’ve stopped enjoying politics. For someone who began watching C-SPAN at age 12, this is a bit of a traumatic self-discovery. Admittedly, my political enthusiasm has always been tempered with a lumpy dose of irritated cynicism, but lately this has flared into actual distress. Especially on the internets: it’s gotten so that I need only glimpse the name ‘McCain’ or (especially) ‘Palin’ anywhere in a blog post and I begin cringing in anticipatory revulsion.

Let’s be utterly clear about what I’m now to say: I fully acknowledge that the haters of Obama et al. are just as capable of vomiting clouds of uncharitable abuse into the aether. But I don’t know those people. I don’t read their diatribes, half-truths, their hooded jeremiads. Doubtlessly I would find their claptrap equally disturbing, if not more so, were I to encounter it. But I don’t run in those circles.

Instead I read insinuations that John McCain has lost higher cognitive function, that Sarah Palin is a ruthless moron, that anyone who would even consider voting Republican cannot be anything but the most foolish, vile, degenerate specimen of proto-human. Political discussions seem nothing more than contests amongst ideological clones to offer the most nastily emotive expression of hatred for their mutual enemy, a great echo chamber for badly-informed belligerent self-righteousness.

Living as I do on the great blue isle of Manhattan, my encounters with such attitudes are not confined to the web. At a picnic a couple weeks ago, one guest laughingly remarked of McCain that “crashing your plane on your very first mission doesn’t qualify you to be president!” The audience chuckled, but I did not: “After that plane crashed, McCain was stomped, beaten, and stabbed by the locals, was handed over to guards who systematically tortured him for years, and refused early release out of fear for how this would affect those left behind. No matter what you think of John McCain, you do not mock him for anything even remotely connected to this incident.” I didn’t say quite all that, being insufficiently spontaneously punchy. But I said some of it, and wish I’d said all.

Demonizing conservatives has become one of the few expressions of prejudice still acceptable in tolerant communities. Yet it’s still nothing more than the ancient ritual of ostracism, the union of a group of people through their mutual effort to pointedly deny even the signifiers of simple decency to a ceremonially designated Other. Justifications will be proffered, reasons frantically thrust forward, rhetorical covers drawn over the ugly primal motives thundering below. Fine. But when you write that you “hate Republicans” and enjoy the approving comments, bear in mind the spiritual kinship that verb forms between you and earlier groups who have bonded by hating those outside the bond.

The right has been a bit too gleeful in its seizure of Barack Obama’s unwise statement about “bitter” middle American voters who “cling to guns or religion”. Yet there is something of substance here. Obama’s comment reveals a disturbing myopia (in himself and his liberal San Francisco audience), a smug inability to appreciate that others’ refusal to share one’s views may be motivated by anything beyond the most base or foolish instincts. Republican voters are not grimy caricatures or hoodwinked yokels. They are real people with real concerns, real values, real perspectives on a world that can bear the weight of more than one conception of human existence. If you find yourself completely incapable of empathizing with them, then that is your failing, not theirs.

In the end much of the offensive materials could be explained by a few concepts from psychology: confirmation bias, ‘my side’ bias, correspondence bias. Over and over, when I see blog posts enthusiastically declaring that the latest McCain gaffe or Palin revelation shows the Republicans to be indubitably unfit for office, I just know that these same bloggers would dismiss as irrelevant these same mishaps, had they been committed by Obama or Biden. Perhaps what most pains me is watching this election season reduce otherwise fair and nuanced observers to binary detectors whose tunnel vision is sensitive only to the variable of party affiliation.

All that said, I don’t expect anyone to cease the partisan gesticulation on my account. Whatever it is – catharsis, distraction, social totem – it plainly has a purpose for its authors. But my reserves of effortful indifference and prudent selective illiteracy are approaching their end; I cannot read much more. And it is only September.

America the aesthetically unobjectionable

Today we Americans celebrated our common heritage by charring the entrails of hoofed mammals and blowing up quadrants of the sky. As ritual sacrifice goes, it’s all a bit solipsistic and gluttonous, but then so is the nation thus aptly signified.

On Monday, Barack Obama gave his ‘what patriotism means to me’ speech, cleverly completing his long-delayed 4th grade social studies project while simultaneously reassuring heartland America that he is neither a black separatist nor John Kerry. The precise content of this speech wasn’t particularly important, provided the audience understood that Barack Obama loves apple pie, his grandma, puppy dogs, and you, my fellow Americans, you. So put down the pitchfork.

Patriotism, somewhat trivially, means love and loyalty to one’s nation. But this is often far from trivial in the individual case. Is a patriotic citizen of Montreal loyal to Quebec, to Canada – or even to the global Francophony? Where belong the loyalties of refugees in the permanent camps across the river from the West Bank? To the perpetually zygotic Palestinian state? The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan? The Dar al-Islam?

Most Americans enjoy the conceptual luxury of having been born, raised, and indoctrinated within and by the same fairly discrete political entity. But even this doesn’t quite solve the problem. To what, exactly, is a patriotic American loyal? To the government? To a myriad of federal bureaucrats, to a clutch of vain ephemeral politicians, to some monstrously scenic granite forewalls in Washington DC? Or to the history? To George Washington’s wooden teeth, to the pocket contents of Lincoln’s fatal theater jacket, to the hot tub where Franklin Delano Roosevelt expired in a most agreeably patrician manner?

The certified correct answer, of course, is that a patriotic American is loyal to American ideals, just as a patriotic __________ is loyal to __________ ideals. So said Obama on Monday: “patriotism is always more than just loyalty to a place on a map or a certain kind of people. Instead, it's also loyalty to America's ideals, ideals for which anyone can sacrifice, or defend, or give their last full measure of devotion.”

The mildly Socratic among you have already formulated the next step: what, exactly, are American ideals? Celebrity worship? Cheap gasoline? Equal rights for all, so long as it doesn’t mean that I have to live next door to those people? At this point in the dialectic, serious politicians bleat safely vacant platitudes about freedom, family, and fortune.

And this is all we really expect of our candidates; except for the tin foil hat constituency, none of us really worry that the next president will decide, free-agent style, to go home with the other team at the big diplomatic summit. In political practice, affirmations of patriotism are ultimately about non-weirdness. Obama’s patriotic avowals aren’t promises to avoid defecting to Pakistan or Sweden. They are signals to Middle America that he won’t personally officiate at gay marriages in San Francisco or gleefully pass out bricks at the next big-city race riot.

So for politicians, patriotism actually has little to do with love of country, and everything to do with exhibiting the dispositional profile of your standard Midwestern bank teller. But what about the rest of us? We whose aspirations do not necessitate the adulation of throngs or the sweaty-palmed groping of the levers of power, might patriotism mean anything more to us? Should it? Those are difficult questions. Let’s go have a beer and watch the public shaming of the stars’ obsolete monochromatic twinkle.

no dandies please, we're american

Well, at least we know that Homeland Security has its priorities in order. If Osama bin Laden shows up in Newark wearing a top hat, he will not be permitted to enter the country!

Last month Sebastian Horsley, a British "dandy" attempting to promote his drugs-and-prostitutes memoir, was denied entry to the United States on grounds of "moral turpitude". Evidently his self-confessed past drug abuse disqualifies him from participation in the visa-less entry program between the United States and United Kingdom.



Or perhaps it's because he says things like this: "Add the platform shoes I sometimes wear, and I’m well over 7 feet tall. I figure most people are born to be talked down to.” (NYT)

Or maybe it's because he decided to commemorate the 2000th anniversary of Christ's death on the cross by travelling to the Philippines and having himself crucified - without anesthetic - and then posting the video on youtube.

Or, possibly, it's because when explaining the difference between himself and Oscar Wilde, he says, "Wilde was an aesthete. Unlike dandies, aesthetes care about food and wine. And they breed. The only place a dandy would push a pram is into the river." (globe and mail)

Whatever the reason, the entire thing is quite ridiculous. To me, he sounds like an irritatingly self-absorbed and useless person. (Which, so far as I can tell, is precisely how he wants to be perceived.) But this hardly seems a reason to deny him entry to the United States. Americans allow Silvio Berlusconi to come and go all the time!

Whatever you think of Horsley, you have to acknowledge the supreme Wildean wit in this, his declaration to Customs officials while being directed to his deportation flight: "I am the only thing of value in your country, and I am removing myself immediately!"