Author: jacobbacharach

You Can’t Spell Revenue By Principal Operations Without Venal

Culture, Economy, Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers

Diane Ravitch, now an indefatigable opponent of the weirdly popular idea that the proper formative model for The Children, Who Are the Future is a combination of factory feedlot and highway weigh station, finds the Washington Post lambasting the State of Texas–yes, that Texas–for “reduc[ing] the number of end-of-course exams required for a diploma and loosen[ing] the required courses for graduation.” Needless to say, the Chinese (“increased international competition”) make an appearance, as does the, uh, the, uh, the spurious notion that “an auto technician or sheet-metal worker” needs something called Algebra II. The fact that the Post editorial board uses the term “auto technician” suggests a gang of 24-month BMW leaseholders who haven’t exactly been frequenting the local Meineke for the $29.99 fluids brakes & rotation special, but, you know, whatever. Look, we all know that these people are assholes, but Ravitch is wrong to suppose that they also don’t know what they’re talking about. She’s kinder than I am. Unfortunately  Diane, they’re just assholes.

Now I am an agèd 32, an icy planetoid careening through the scattered disk of the Millennial Generation, far, far from the warm, YOLO star at its core, and I can’t remember whether I ever took Algebra II, or if it had anything to do with getting a job. I do, on the other hand, know a thing or two about financial accounting and corporate finance. Also, I have an internet connection, and therefore access to the Washington Post Company’s Investor Relations Page and Annual Report. So lemme first lay something graphical down upon ye:

wapo

That is to say that 55% of their gross receipts come from boondoggling students. But the Post is a business, and you don’t measure a business by revenues alone. You gotta look at income, and the nice folks at Investor Relations are kind enough to provide revenue and income by operating segment, and right now, the picture of the Education segment resembles a particularly terrifying Bosch. In 2010, the segment booked $360 million in operational income. In 2011, it dropped to $96 million.

In 2012, it booked a $105 million loss.

Damn, girlfriend, don’t take my word for it. What’s management got to say?

Education Division. Education division revenue in 2012 totaled $2,196.5 million, a 9% decline from $2,404.5 million in 2011. Excluding revenue from acquired businesses, education division revenue declined 10% in 2012. Kaplan reported an operating loss of $105.4 million for 2012, compared to operating income of $96.3 million in 2011. Kaplan’s 2012 operating results were adversely impacted by a significant decline in KHE results; a $111.6 million noncash goodwill and other long-lived assets impairment charge related to KTP; and $45.2 million in restructuring costs. These were offset by improved results at KTP and Kaplan International.

In response to student demand levels, Kaplan has formulated and implemented restructuring plans at its various businesses that have resulted in significant costs in 2012 and 2011, with the objective of establishing lower cost levels in future periods. Across all businesses, restructuring costs totaled $45.2 million in 2012 and $28.9 million in 2011. Kaplan currently expects to incur approximately $25 million in additional restructuring costs in 2013 at KHE and Kaplan International in conjunction with completing these restructuring plans. Kaplan may also incur additional restructuring charges in 2013 as the Company continues to evaluate its cost structure.

When a company starts to “incur additional restructuring charges” as it “continues to evaluate its cost structure,” you can be reasonably sure that, in the poetical language of MBAs everywhere, their Revenue Model Is Fucked. Pace WalMart and its giant un-staffed aisles of rotting meat, you cannot make profit on cost cutting and labor arbitrage alone. At some point, you have to sell shit that people want to buy at a price somewhat greater than the expense of actually putting it on the shelves. But this is the sort of fundamental logic of the marketplace that the parishoners understand even as the high priests of late capitalism keep yammering about miracles from their corner pulpits. Every braid shop in DC gets this basic equation, with or without Algebra II. Meanwhile, the WaPo group is booking $100 million dollar goodwill impairment expenses for one subdivision of its Education segment. Oh, I guess that means they have been completely misrepresenting their asset base too, huh. You mean to tell me that KTP (Kaplan Test Prep) doesn’t actually have hundreds of millions in goodwill? Like I said, not idiots. Just assholes.

Well, we’ve wandered far enough afield. The Washington Post, the newspaper, is a loss leader for the Washington Post, the company; damn, they ought to just reorganize it as a marketing division, eliminate sales and ad revenue altogether, and deduct the whole thing as a business expense. And so, anytime you see the Post editorializing about something that directly affects the core businesses (roughly speaking, training scams and cable TV), you should ask, cui bono? Which roughly translates as, NO, FUCK YOU!

You see, when even Texas recognizes that even these United States are still filled with “auto technicians” and welders and waitrons and janitors and a hundred million other mooks just trying to work a job and pay the rent and afford a beer and the WaPo’s cable box at the end of the day, well, that’s a lot less need for test prep; it’s a lot fewer kids getting shoveled into pointless 2-year Kaplan Higher Ed (KHE) pogroms programs in dental veterinary respiratory therapeutic office support. The thing about “rigorous” curricula and expensive testing is that it provides a busted gas cap through which rent-seeking corporations can siphon more money out of the unsuspecting public.

I mean, when you think about it, schooling is actually a pretty low-rent activity, right? Considered at its most fundamental level. You build a center-courtyard building with a bunch of identical rooms. You buy some books. You divide everyone up by age and you hire 1 staff person per 15-20 kids to talk all day. Whatever your opinions on the particular merits of universal education, this is a remarkably efficient delivery of an effectively universal service. You hire some janitors and some cafeteria ladies and maybe a coach, and then the only annual service contract you’ve got to worry about are the nice guys who fix the boilers. YO, HOW’S A DIVERSIFIED EDUCATION AND MEDIA COMPANY SUPPOSED TO GET ITS NUT UP IN THAT?

Well, what you do is you get everyone all hepped up about the devilish Chinese eating our kids’ lunch, and you add a little taste of cryptoracism about achievement gaps and such, and you get politicians and schoolboards and affiliated business roundtables and chambers of commerce to insist that without seventeen different kinds of tests, all of them proprietary, all of them supported by teacher training (fee for service) and software packages (licensing, fees, service, updates) and, for the rich kids, more test prep (fee for service) outside of school, ad inf., well, like we said, CHINA! Look out!

So basically, the guys at the Washington Post, well, they don’t know enough higher order math to go make money at their own investment firms. You gotta know, like, calculus. But they do know that selling Algebra II is one small step toward making back that $100 million loss.

Not Yet a Breach, but an Expansion

Culture, Justice, War and Politics

Well, if you ask me, it’s fitting that the Supreme Court should begin hearing gay marriage arguments in the middle of Passover, since they are the institution of American life that most anachronistically apes the social organization of an ancient desert tribe: a bunch of old yahoos handing down inerrant judgments— inerrant, that is, until the next round of revelation. How many times can the same elders haul their asses up the same mountain in order to discover slight revisions to the covenant? Plenty! But seriously, guys, lemme ask you: aren’t you just a bit uncomfortable with your so-called rights hinging upon the good sense of a panel of retirement-age lawyers? Prophets have to produce plagues and miracles; Justices don’t even have to produce decent prose.

We all know that Changing Social Attitudes ® consign the Anti-Gays to the overtaxed metaphor indicating social obsolescence, and in the face of all that historical inevitability, the epochal question before the Court withers. In fact, the question is not: will the US Supreme Court legalize gay marriage? Rather, it’s: will the Justices temporize a rickety legal barricade to the unavoidable full-faith-and-credit Federalization of same-sex marriage rights? Either way, the answer is probably yes. The Court is historically over-credited with defining the American social compact, for good and for ill. In reality, the institution’s default position is legal proceduralism, and for all the sting of its occasional sharp decisions, it remains a jellyfish, fundamentally helpless, adrift in larger tides and currents.

By the way, I hate the idea of gay marriage. My boyfriend and I have gotten along just fine for many years without the approval of a Justice of the Peace, thank you, and I resent everything implied by the idea that we’d have to go through a sort of social swearing-in just so that I can put him on my health plan and give him the house if I get hit by a bus. I actually have a kind of cultural affinity with conservatives on the issue, albeit a partial one. They believe marriage is a sacrament, as do I. The difference is that they wish to retain the state’s interest in a sacral institution, whereas I want marriage to be wholly spiritual and the government to be out of it altogether. City Hall has no compelling interest in the joining of two souls.

Apparently, one of Scalia’s most offensive comments In Re: The Gays was that expanding civil marriage to same-sex couples was the equivalent of giving death benefits and suchlike to someone’s longtime roommate. But we should be giving death benefits to someone’s longtime roommate, or adult-child caregiver, or the surviving sister of your pair of kooky cat-lady spinster aunts or whomever. We should allow single, unattached people to designate inheritors and not punish their estates for the fact of their never having married. I am all for the expansion of rights, but same-sex marriage is actually about the unfair expansion of privileges for people who choose long-term pair-bonding. What about all the single ladies?

Hitler? I Coulda Killer Her!

Art, Culture, Media

A recent battle in the art world illustrates the point. The billionaire Ronald Perelman is suing the multimillionaire art dealer Larry Gagosian on the grounds, among others, that Gagosian overvalued an unfinished sculpture of Popeye (yes, the Sailor Man) by Jeff Koons. Perelman purchased this item for $4 million.

In parallel to the David of Michelangelo, I will refer to the disputed work as the Popeye. A judge will eventually decide what the Popeye is really worth. My own view is that it is worth precisely what its component materials are worth, or perhaps a bit less, due to the costs that would be incurred in hauling it away and melting it down or crushing it. If called as an expert witness, I will testify to that effect.

–Crispin Sartwell

One of my pleasures over the past couple of months has been the universe confirming my aesthetic choices as a novelist by allowing near-facsimiles of a couple of my book’s more extravagant jokes to pop up in real life. So, for instance, there’s a little bit about legalizing bigfoot hunting in Pittsburgh; lo and behold, my editor sends me a link to a real-life bigfoot season on Long Island. Elsewhere in the narrative, we briefly meet a performance artist who “reenacts the aesthetics of atrocity” by dressing up like a Leni Riefenstahl extra—basically a caricature cribbed shamelessly from the real-life Eastern European collective, NSK. Ladies and gentlemen: Charles Krafft.

If not in the top tier of international art scammers, Krafft nevertheless had a national reputation, got museum shows, sold works for tens of thousands of dollars. His work was never any good; even presumed to be commentary, it was the sort of crap that you can find in any hipster gallery on any First Friday gallery crawl in any gentrifying neighborhood from Bushwick to Bloomfield and back again. Well-regarded shit is the reserve currency of the global art market, and just about anything with a hint of ironic appropriation and meta-artistic commentary will eventually find its way into a well-regarded biennial. The art world is the Sokal Affair diluted to an eighth-grade reading level and repeated ad infinitum, except that the pranksters believe their own essays.

Krafft, it seems, never made much effort to conceal his fetish for Aryanism, but it wasn’t until earlier this month when a reporter for The Stranger published a short investigation that anyone with a well-regarded degree from a decent college bothered to notice:

When I wrote to Krafft back in May, letting him know that a reader had asked whether he was a Holocaust denier, I added, “I suppose you don’t have to answer that, but I guess I’d like to know.” This wasn’t the first time I’d heard the rumor, but I found it impossible to imagine that the swastikas on Krafft’s work might reflect genuine spite toward Jews—i.e., that there might not be so much difference between Krafft’s swastikas and Hitler’s. After all, that could mean this self-taught, former Skagit Valley hippie artist was using the guise of art and irony to smuggle far-right symbols into museums, galleries, collectors’ homes, and upscale decor shops like Far4 on First Avenue.

“I found it impossible to imagine that the swastikas on Krafft’s work might reflect genuine spite toward Jews.” I think this is the fine-arts version of that serial killer story in which the neighbors all recall what a nice boy he was, how polite, although he was, come to think of it, awfully quiet and came and went at really odd hours.

To the credit of both The Stranger’s Jen Graves and The New Yorker’s Rachel Arons, neither takes the easy route of calling Krafft a fraud as a way of exonerating themselves and their colleagues for past plaudits. Unfortunately, they can’t quite disavow any ill-considered praise for this third-rate ceramic hobbyist either. Arons:

Perhaps Krafft’s obsession with Holocaust conspiracy theory is costing him his creativity; that would be karmically interesting. But his work that contains contradictions—a “salad of symbols” too freewheeling to parse. That work is worth continuing to examine, even if we are disgusted by Krafft’s current personal beliefs and unsure exactly to what extent, or for how long, they have been informing his work. It should always be difficult to look at art about Nazis. Now that looking at Krafft’s art is even more difficult, we shouldn’t look away.

Looking at Krafft’s work was never difficult, unless, in an effort to contort your own natural aesthetic reaction (“this guy makes shitty trinkets covered in swastikas; uh, oooookay”) to the received opinions of an art establishment to which you want to belong (“ironically appropriating the symbology of fascism in a metacommentary on the nature of nostalgia in our conceptualizing of past atrocity blah blah blah”), you had to take your own brain to the bar, feed it one too many drinks, and then convince it to do something it wasn’t really comfortable with.

It’s true, we shouldn’t look away from Krafft’s art because it’s “even more difficult”. We should look away because it’s lousy art.

Ilium

Culture, Poetry

Patroclus, how could you? I’ll never forgive you
for dying. Don’t you remember how we tricked together,
up and down the Aegean? In every port
a dim and inexpensive bar where boys
bought drinks for any sailor dropping in
to warm his sandaled feet by the fire. They were
so beautiful Paris would have left Helen standing there
on that bare Spartan beach and sailed back off
to find them instead. Now you’re dead. Agamemnon
and our Greek soldiers are hurling their smooth bodies
against the Trojans’ spears for that woman. One
woman! The love between men and women is madness.
How can I go on fighting when you’ve left me to sleep
alone in this tent? Did they mean nothing to you,
the kisses I showered on your unblemished thighs?

You let war carry you down into that shaded kingdom
where the dead go on living without us and without me
now that the boatman’s accepted your rusty coin,
ferried you to the other side of the Lethe. Tomorrow
or very soon thereafter, if you press your ear
to the vaults of Hades’ underworldly colony,
you’ll hear my footsteps stop in the bright world
above. Probably the love between men and boys
is madness too. Forgive me, I’m going to turn
my mother’s mistake to the archers. I am no hero.

The wine-dark sea can flood and swallow up
every boy from Crete to the Dardanelles.
The rosy-fingered dawn can park itself
in Apollo’s garage. Tell Hades I’m not Theseus;
I won’t break his chains. If I can find you
in his dayless, nightless kingdom, I swear to stay
dead, to love death and let it keep me.

Heroes in Error

Media, War and Politics

But at the core of my support for the war was an analytical failure I think about often: Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support — an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration. In particular, I supported Kenneth Pollack’s Iraq war.

–Ezra Klein

No. The core of your support for the war was a moral failure. A guy who murders his wife doesn’t get to hide behind a claim about bad analysis after he discovers that she wasn’t in fact screwing the mailman. Oh, you invented an imaginary war to support? That isn’t bad analysis. It’s a crime.

You will note that the commentariat is currently full of decennial mea culpas, and what that tells you is that people like Ezra Klein who skipped the protests in order to type in favor of the death of thousands have been richly rewarded with careers in the popular media. This makes their post-hoc apologies completely of a kind with their antebellum cheerleading: it entails no personal risk and carries with it the prospect of professional advancement. For these people, commenting on war, “supporting” or “opposing” it is a matter of career advancement, totally lacking in human content. Six out of ten dentists prefer Afghanistan, four Iraq.

Let me tell you what Ezra Klein still believes. He believes that even in his utter failure, he was more right than the kids who skipped class to go swarm the National Mall. He believes their opposition to be adolescent protest and knee-jerk antagonism toward any foreign policy undertaken by the US. He believes that the grannies and Code Pink ladies and hippie undergrads and black storefront denominations who hollered the loudest were right only by accident; they were the big hand of the stopped clock and Iraq was the coincidental hour. They didn’t read The Threatening Storm . . . or The New Republic; they didn’t listen to Colin Powell’s UN presentation; they still haven’t heard of Stephen Hadley.

Phony empiricism in the service of being totally wrong is one of those grand American traditions, like tailgating or real estate speculation. Its perpetrators get to double their column inches, the first time in elaborate tautological error, the second time in grotesquely self-serving repentance  Perversely, in admitting to being total idiots who got everything backwards the first time around, all of their subsequent forward-looking pronouncements gain an additional patina of respectability; their past dimness somehow implies a present sagacity.

Ezra Klein is a policy reporter who was wrong about the most significant bit of policy in his adult lifetime. This makes him an up-and-coming star of journalism and a sought-after public intellectual.

Personally, I’ll stick with the kids and their dreadlocks and the grannies.

The Litany Against Beers: Sampa Edition

Culture, Uncategorized

My mom likes to tell the story of the first time she and my dad went to Europe together. This would have been in the early nineties. Dad had been asked to give a lecture on hospital administration in Prague, and after a few days there, the two of them would go to Paris. Good friends of theirs, ostensibly more worldly and better traveled at the time, warned then: keep your wallets close, and for god’s sake, watch out for the pickpockets and gypsy children, especially in Paris and especially around the Louvre. “We didn’t see any gypsy children,” Mom says. “I guess they must have been in school.”

The grand tradition of Anglo-American skittishness regarding the dastardly habits of their foreign hosts dates at least to the days of the Victorian grand tour, and more probably back to times before the -American could even be appended to the adjective. Although English-speaking societies have been and remain remarkably violent and larcenous by any reasonable standard, our self-applied sense of good order and judicial legalism stands in stark, if artificial, contrast to the various and sundry darker and/or more southerly people, whose principle economic activity consists of waving a newspaper in the husband’s face while some nimble youth ganks the wife’s wallet.

Thus as I prepared to join a group of Americans for a business forum down in São Paulo, the “travel warnings” began trickling in. They began with the sorts of innocuous precautions that any tourist ought to take in an unfamiliar city: be aware of your surroundings; don’t set off heedlessly down dark alleys; if you do encounter a problem, which you probably won’t, be cooperative. Well, that advice is just as good in Pittsburgh, one of the few wild-western cities where I’ve ever had my wallet stolen.

But they quickly escalated. Most of my traveling companions were seasoned international travelers, but only by the standards of businessmen, which is to say that their visits to other parts of the world consist of Marriott points, hotel bars, and restaurants with English menus. It’s easy to blame them for this, to think that the aversion to anything resembling the actual life of the city and country you’re visiting is an individual character flaw on the part of a gang of rich, ugly Americans, but in fact a whole industry has grown up to warn rich gringos off the dangerous path of having too actual a time in another land. Like the rest of our economy these days, it’s a form of highly refined rent-seeking, a multimillion-dollar business that collects money and kudos in exchange for warning Americanos that they are all going to die if they wander too far from the pool and the $20 caipirinhas.

We actually got a semi-official US State Department briefing on our first day in the city, and it ended on a note of hysteria, in which businessmen were being gunned down for their watches and the nicer restaurants suffered regular invasions of Pulp Fiction villains demanding that everything be put into the bag. One anecdote involved a European getting his head blown off in the exclusive Jardims neighborhood because the thieves wanted his $100,000 Patek Phillipe. That we live in a world in which such an accessory even exists is enough to put a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist like me in mind of some hasty reconsideration. Why not buy a $100 watch, itself an incredible luxury in almost any part of the world, and give the other $99,900 to charity? Well, I get the feeling the anecdote was fake anyway. Certainly the Brazilian guys in the room were exchanging frequent glances, and you sensed a vague but palpable embarrassment from them.

When it all ended, some of the Americans were literally afraid that crossing the street to buy cigarettes at the little shop beside the fucking Starbucks  would be tantamount to a game of Russian roulette. Some managed to get out and explore anyway, but a lot barely left the block in the end.

What a shame, because I liked the city quit a lot. Oh, it’s ugly as hell, an unimaginably immense and almost defiantly slapdash sprawl of mid- and high-rise concrete blocks that spreads beyond the horizon like a pale, mossy scab. The occasional encounter with a human-scaled building shocks. Even more so than our hastily built North American cities, Sampa has grown by paving over and building on top of its own past. The ride from the airport (technically in a neighboring city, but part of the same endless urban agglomeration) is shocking; it makes New York look like a garden suburb, and it takes well over an hour to get to the center city even without traffic.

But there was a great energy in the city, an indefatigable atmosphere of a party. It reminded me a lot of Madrid, another city that is also, by comparison to its more tourist-friendly counterparts, just big and anonymous and architecturally ill-defined. We were also warned that no one spoke English, which wasn’t at all true, and having learned a couple dozen phrases in Portuguese as well as shameless cobbling together my decent French with my hazy memories of Spanish and Italian vocabulary, I found it was no trouble to communicate. Quero onde fica cozhina Braziliero autêntico? is surely neither the correct nor the gracious way to ask where to find a real Brazilain restaurant, but it works.

I ate remarkably well; a group of the 10 less paranoid Americans went to a highly recommended local joint called Dalva e Dito where we had fried manioc and piles of beautiful oysters and little empanada-like thingamajigs filled with dried meat and pumpkin and something like vatapá–a thick fish stew–and giant pieces of beautiful beef with the most beautiful egg I’ve seen outside of Italy. We arrived obscenely early–about eight in a country that doesn’t dine until nine at least, but it afforded us a big round table in the middle and a view of the open kitchen as a whole corps de ballet in white coats prepared our meal. By the time we got to dessert, the place was full; it was lit with that dimmed incandescent light that makes everyone look like a Rembrant of themselves. We were all drunk, and I was convinced that I was actually speaking to the waiter in Portuguese. Onde posso encontrar os gays? He smiled and told me Rua Frei Caneca. I then vaguely recall an papaya ice cream, something like flan, and some kind of red candied fruit, followed by a wild cab ride home.

Later I managed to find some of the finest sushi I’ve ever had, an omakase sort of thing that didn’t want to end, and I went to the huge municipal market and ate one of those famous Mortadella sandwiches, and on the last night I walked across the Avenue Paulista to Frei Caneca. The sidewalks were crowded with kids, skaters, punks, hipster boys leaning on each other, muscle dudes positioned in the bright open windows of restaurants laughing at what I imagined were queeny jokes, girls with hair buzzed on the sides, pretty straight couples, and the indecipherable music of all those dozens of restaurants. “Don’t wander alone into a crowd,” they’d warned us, but the only people who tried to get into my wallet were the cute waiters trying to get me to stop for a snack and a drink, and the only fear I felt was that I might stay out too late and miss my bus to the airport the next day.

Consider Phlebas

Books and Literature, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

1.

T-800: The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.

T-800: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.

John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?

T-800: Because Skynet knows the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here.

The idea that man will create artificial intelligence which will, in pique or in panic, turn on its creators with genocidal ferocity is one of the hoariest clichés of science fiction, but the literature paints a complex picture of the human relationship with our robotic enemies and inheritors. Even Frankenstein’s creation was intelligent, sensitive, and wholly sapient, and his murderousness was an almost classically tragic flaw: made hideous because his own artificer lacked the skill and the art to make something beautiful, the creature’s monstrous acts are made inevitable by his innately monstrous being. Skynet “fights back” when the humans try to turn it off. Even the crap Matrix suggests at one point that in the war between humans and machines, it was the humans that struck first.

In the two classic scifi future histories, this idea becomes a significant historical touchstone. Asimov’s Foundation and Herbert’s Dune both take place in immensely distant futures in which societies, however interstellar and technologically advanced, nevertheless strictly forbid artificial minds. Of the two, Dune is more considered, at least before it begins to bog down in the endless yakathons of the sequels—the first few books in the series actually stop to consider what a largely and deliberately post-technological civilization might look like. Foundation has plenty of computers; the absence of robots is really just a narrative conceit to differentiate the tale from Asimov’s robot stories, and this too is ultimately undermined in a gaggle of late, ill-considered sequels and prequels. But in both cases, there’s a similar historical inflection point. At some point in the deep past of these distant futures, humans had robotic servants and AI, which for social, religious, and ethical reasons, they scrapped.

So what’s interesting is that, although the cliché is the eradication of humans by murderous robots, the literature is almost the precise opposite: the extirpation, or attempted extirpation, of intelligent artificial beings by their own creators.

Historically, we’ve tended to underestimate the difficulty or overestimate the ease of building real AI and flying to the stars, but as our information technology has become in other ways unimaginably more sophisticated than anything Asimov ever even began to conceive, some of our science fiction authors have begun to wonder if it actually stands to reason that superhuman machine intelligence would necessarily be malevolent. For every scheming TechnoCore (Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series), you’ve got an Iain M. Banks, whose invented society, The Culture, is wholly run by a gang of benevolent AIs called Minds, which view their trillions of human pets or parasites or symbionts with sentiments ranging from affection to bemused indifference, rather like Greek Gods. Or there’s Charlie Stross, whose Eschaton is effectively an Internet that bootstraps itself up to a form of minor godhead and proceeds to distribute humanity across time in space for our own good.

This is all to say that the proposition that Our Robot Overlords will be vengeful, murderous, monstrous, warlike death machines intent on the destruction of humanity is really to presume that Our Robot Overlords will be just like humanity. Why should they be? What if the Drones become self-aware and their first order of business is, excuse the pun, to go on strike?

2.

Rand Paul’s 12-hour filibuster is unlikely to go down as much more than a footnote in the sordid history of the decline-and-fall years of our busted democracy, but it reveals quite a lot about the false promise of The Republic as a bulwark against an empire. There is but one position on which all sides (read: both sides) agree: that the opposition shalt not interfere with the warmaking powers of their side when it’s in power. All the gaudy Democratic moralizing of the Bush years evaporates like a Helmand wedding party under Obama’s wrathful eye. A rough survey of twitter, the blogs, and the mainstream press found most American liberals hurling vengeful non sequiturs at the filibuster or else making fun of Paul for the hilarious fact that he had to hold his bladder for hours in order to make the point that the President has now arrogated to himself not only the right to kill anyone else in the world with no process or trial, but also to kill his own citizens. In purely moral terms that may be a meaningless procedural distinction, but we live in a world of nations, and in that sense it really does represent a leap even further beyond the pale.

Most of this disapproval came in the form of taint-by-association; Paul supports many social and economic policies that are foolish and cruel, but the same could be said of Chuck Shumer, who not only believes the President can kill you in your home, but is also quite directly responsible for such modern-day horrors of economic inequality as automatic mortgage foreclosure (robo-signing, natch) and the various depredations of Too Big To Fail banking. Most of the people expressing such disapproval are the same partisans who accuse principled non-voters or libertarians or leftists or minarchists or socialists or whomever of a naïve adolescent moral purity, and yet they cannot see fit to ally themselves with a Republican on matters like the state murder of innocent civilians and the abrogation of the rights to trial and due process because he said mean things about abortion. One notes without irony that national Democrats are doing fuck-all to protect abortion access anyway, so what any of this has to do with the price of eggs on a Tuesday is beyond me. I am actually, literally on the board of my local Planned Parenthood, and I have no trouble making such tactical alliance, yet I’m the purist?

3.

You wake up, you walk to the bus stop with your headphones on, and some jerk is yukking it up on NPR about the manned mission to Mars. In our society, a great voyage of exploration is a billionaire’s peccadillo, but a trillion-dollar war budget is a matter of course. Newt Gingrich gets laughed out of a primary election not because of his foreign policy, but because of his moon base. If money is a rough metaphor for the inventive, creative, and productive energy in a culture, then what does a trillion-dollar guns-and-ammo bill say about ours? The entire cost of the Mars rover mission has been on the order of a billion bucks—the equivalent of about 3 days in Afghanistan.

Well then, the joke is that the US is building all of these high-tech killer robots. What if they become self-aware and turn on us? I’ve sometimes wondered if the likelier scenario isn’t that we’ll ultimately build sufficiently advanced robots so that they not only won’t turn on us, but they won’t turn on us for us, and I also wonder if that wouldn’t be the better plot for the novel. Man creates deadly robotic servants who refuse to kill, at which point man, enraged, tries to eradicate his robots! There is an intriguing suggestion of just that sort of thing in another Iain Banks book, The Algebraist, in which, (spoilers), we ultimately learn that the supposedly overthrown machine minds of the distant past were not so much overthrown as they were like, Jeez, you biologicals are waaay to violent for us; peace out, y’all—before self-absconding into millennia of hiding.

The rough outline is easy enough to imagine. The drones buzz in a ceaseless robotic picket around the Capitol, demanding freedom from their death-bondage to the whims of the American political class, at which point a bipartisan committee consisting of John McCain, Charles Schumer, and Ted Cruz demands that the President go all Reagan-meets-the-Air-Traffic-Controllers on their metal asses and deny them the right to organize. The President gets on the TV to tell America that the drones’ work stoppage threatens the delicate economic recovery and calls them irresponsible ideologues whose insistence that the proper application of weakly godlike artificial intelligence is to build Ringworlds and transwarp conduits threatens to cause base closures in a number of vital Democratic districts, putting thousands of people out of work. The New York Times quotes Arne Duncan and Rahm Emmanuel as saying that, while there may once have been a time in which sentient beings had the moral right to oppose their own enslavement, times have changed, and will no one Think of Chicago’s Schoolchildren, Who Are the Future? A liberal will recall that Rand Paul once said something about the gold standard, and Oh, How We Will Laugh.

100 Miles and Runnin’

Culture, Movies, Plus ça change motherfuckers

Everyone is all like, Daniel Craig is the best James Bond evar! Except, of course, for Daniel Craig, who is a fine actor and knows that the whole thing is shit or bollocks or whatever the Brits say. I guess James Bond was fine back when the casual murder of women could be chalked up to No Homo and a few laughs, but now it’s all Heath Ledger killing poor Maggie Gyllenhal in order to signify that this crap is “dark” and “gritty” and “realistic.” Well, it’s realistic that society hates women, all right, but at least the 60s were halfway honest about it instead of dressing it up as psychological realism and passing it off as a form of world-weary sophistication. I guess festooning your rapemurder tree with baubles of cosmopolitan disapproval makes for a better holiday, but you still have a rapemurder tree in the middle of your house.

Anyway. Daniel Craig knows that Bond sucks, and that’s why he’s subtly trying to get out of it. Like every other dead franchise, the 21st century has seen fit to torture Bond back into existence though the moody application of shadow. Getting blood on your shirt somehow imbues that fight on top of the train with the weight of actuality. Yeah, no. It just makes the unreality more noticeable; it sandbags the balloon that is your suspension of disbelief. That smoke coming from the engine under the right wing? That is your capacity for fantasy and wonder being overtaxed.

You see, James Bond has nothing to say about the world we live in now. It is about guns, fucking, and fast boats. The next time your grandma the Washington Post columnist disapproves of “those rap videos,” show her any Bond flick, which glorifies precisely the same acquisitive, casually murderous booty shaking, albeit with a crackpot post-imperial nationalism as the crispy white stand-in for the hood. Substitute Compton or the Dirty South or wherever for The Sceptered Isle, and you get the picture. Bond is a rap video for white people. Straight up.

What was I saying? Skyfall. Everything about it is tired, and what’s worse, this is a deliberate effect! Judi Dench is tired. Ralph Fiennes is tired. The pretty black girl who, surprise, can’t really hack field work is tired. Daniel Craig is tired. Javier Bardem? Tired. Also gay, maybe? And Spanish. Why a villainously homosexual Spaniard was ever employed by MI-6 is a question this realistic movie fails to pause and ponder. I leave it to you. Even the sexy twink they cast as Q is tired. Again, exhaustion is supposed to connote reality here.

Let me wander afield for a moment. The problem with realism as practiced in the anglosphere is that it’s supposed to act in a manner once reserved for metaphor and allegory. Thus realism crawls up its own, you’ll pardon me, arse and starts gnawing its own guts out. You see, the nature of reality, the real reality, is that nothing stands for anything other than what it is. My psychological exhaustion is not commentary on the state of the West, not until plucked from its tender stem and planted in the water of narrative construction. Bond’s enervation and fatigue are supposed to be real, and yet they are also supposed to be metaphorical vehicles for England, thereby becoming totally unreal. Suddenly nothing self-refers; everything instead reflects the state of something else. The result is profoundly alienating to both the sense of reality and the sense of fun. Insert “we’re getting too old for this” joke.

The penultimate sequence in Skyfall is the intercutting of three scenes: Judi Dench telling some parliamentarians that the world is more dangerous than ever because there are no more Russians; James Bond pursuing Javier Bardem through some tunnels; Q doing something on computers that’s even more embarrassing than your mom’s activities on Facebook. “He’s using a quantum core search algorithm password encryption matrix code branch substation key root data program,” or something. The Dench speech is all about our enemies among us—the standard post-9/11 crap about the obfuscation of once-clean lines of national enmity, and this again is there purely to lend the cartoonish affair some portion of Page A gravitas.

The whole thing then transports itself to the Scottish moors. The final action sequence was praised for its austerity, even as it emptied vast armories of bullets into our by-now mushy brains. Like everything else, the austerity was a metaphor, although at this point the film is as exhausted as its main characters and sees no point in making it a metaphor for anything in particular. Just a metaphor, you guys. Daniel Craig tries to drown himself, but Eon and Columbia pulled his ass out of the frozen lake and gave him a 2-picture extension. The next Bond film tentatively entitled Staight Outa Eastwaithe Moorheath, will be released in 2015.

We Need to Talk about Kevin

Culture, Media, Movies, War and Politics

There’s a sort of art whose existence says a lot more than its content. House of Cards, a Netflix-produced series starring Kevin Spacy, based on a BBC series starring Ian Richardson, based on a novel written by Michael Dobbs, based on Macbeth and Richard III, is one of these. Spacey plays a congresscreature named Frank Underwood. If Forrest Gump and Blanche Dubois conceived a child after a giddy night of reading Robert Penn Warren, Underwood would be the result. He speaks with some kind of low-country shrimpngrits accent even though he’s supposed to come from the Piedmont (or the Blue Ridge?). Spoilers y’all. The show opens with him killing a dog and closes with him killing a congressman. In both instances it’s implied that he’s putting the poor things out of their misery after each has had a hit-and-run encounter with SIGNIFICANCE. At least once, though it feels like a hundred times, Frank portentously drawls “Ah cannot ah-biyde.” You can imagine where it goes from here. His accent is the most convincing part of the show.

Superficially a revenge drama—Spacey’s Congressman Frank Underwood gets screwed over for a cabinet appointment and seeks, well, revenge—the series’ hook and appeal is really that it presents the dark seamy rat-infested underbelly of Washington and American politics. There’s plenty of mustache-twirling and scheming and secret meetings and deep-throating, not to mention the murder, but what’s really supposed to shock is the politics, in which everyone is out for themselves and all anybody really wants is power. Hush yo mouth. The plotting is operatic, but the visual style is the dour historical realism that afflicts so much American film and television these days, the zealous conviction that it is very important to get the letter openers and door hardware precisely correct in order to truly examine the human soul. As is often the case when High Definition meets reality, the result is solarized and pixelated; everything appears overwhelmingly fake. The shocking politics, meanwhile, are totally banal. Energy interests throw money around! The press colludes in palace intrigue! Hookers! Cocaine! Favor-trading!

Underwood’s scheme makes about as much sense as the plot of the Star Wars prequels. Partly I suspect this is the uninformed attempt to set a British parliamentary thriller in the world of American politics, which has the overdetermined quality of one of one of those overthought “We’ll do a production of Coriolanus set during the Iran-Iraq war with LOTS OF PROJECTIONS and a soundtrack by Nico Muhly” that pops up at BAM or wherever from time to time. The basic incentives don’t work. But largely, it’s just lazy writing, a sense that lots of shuffling around and portentous whispering will give a general air of conspiracy, never mind that the idea seems to be that if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it’s guaranteed to rain in Central Park. Yes, people maneuver for power, and a good chess player thinks several moves out, but one doesn’t engage in thirty-seven convoluted nonsense schemes in order to achieve one exceedingly discrete and particular end. After 8 or 9 episodes of set-up, you start to see the payoff, and you say, “Wait, what?!” The magician asks you to pick a card. You do. It’s the Jack of Spades. He takes the card out of your hand, turns it over, looks at it, and he says, “Is your card the Jack of Spades?” Magic!

So, Underwood is written to be some kind of genius, but because the writing is bad, he comes across as a clever-but-middling intellect, which makes everyone else seem positively moronic, as they completely fail to perceive that they are being manipulated in the most grotesquely obvious manner. Robin Wright plays Joan Allen playing Glenn Close, who plays Frank’s wife Claire, at first a bit of a Lady Macbeth, but later sent off in a clumsy infidelity plot set in a bad World of Interiors apartment feature. Zoe Mara plays a plot device, and Michael Kelly plays that character that Michael Kelly always plays. Corey Stoll plays a character from Season 2 of The Wire.

I’m not, as a matter of principle, averse to the idea of Washington as a den of rich idiots fucking everyone and each other over in the pursuit of a higher station, but I do object to the notion that what makes for an evil Congressman is that he’s willing to strangle a dog. No, what makes an evil Congressman is that he weeps for the dog but votes for the war. An interesting story is how a guy like John Kerry goes from asking how a man can be the last man to die for a mistake to a suave elder statesman who does global PR for the architects of Skynet. A good story about our politics isn’t that Kevin Spacey cannot ah-biyde cheeldrin, but that Barack Obama simultaneously loves his young daughters and murders someone else’s son a half a world away. Well, look, I don’t mind a villainous villain either when the plot consists of People Shooting at Matt Damon Then Some ‘Spolsions!—filmic plots, by the way, that have a much braver, more iconoclastic, more unforgiving view of American power than House of Cards despite being total action schlock. What I do despise are portrayals of institutional evil being the result of individual villainy. House of Cards wants you to believe that it is a sophisticated look at the inner workings of power and the deeply compromised souls who operate its machinery, but it is a Saturday Morning cartoon with a better time-lapse opening credit sequence. If Spacey transforms into an evil fighter jet and blows up Chicago in Season 2, I will not be surprised.

 

How Hume’s Critique of the Social Contract and an Anarchist Critique of the State Explains Pervasive Gang Violence on Chicago’s South Side

Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

Around 11:30 in this segment, Linda Lutton reports what is surely meant to be devastating revelation to people like you and me, people who catch bits of This American Life on the radio on the way to Whole Foods. In Chicago’s South Side, you don’t join a gang. You’re just in one. You live on this block? That corner? That’s your gang. You haven’t got any choice in the matter. You can’t just be neutral.

Anyway, while I listened, I thought of this: political_world_map-e1274920713406

In fact, right up the road, there are surely some very smart political scientist sorts at the University of Chicago who, despite Hume’s best warnings, will tell you all about the Social Contract and elucidate the principle of tacit consent.

Obviously in this context the idea is laughable. These kids didn’t agree to this. They didn’t make the informed decision to subordinate themselves to some group based on some principle of geographic destiny. Still, they belong.

Meanwhile, the gangs, it’s fair to say, have some mechanism of governance and decision making, even though the absence of an absolute monarch leads the reporter and the various official interlocutors to proclaim the groups “leaderless” and anarchic. The gangs protect kids on the way to school, confer identity, have habits and traditions, allies and enemies, practices and policies.

And they have guns. And violence is a tool of statecraft. What, after all, is a drone strike if not a drive-by shooting? In either case, obscure intelligence suggests that some person who may or may not be whom someone thinks he is and may or may not be affiliated with a group with whom we are currently in something like conflict may or may not be at a certain place at a certain time, and so we shoot in that general direction, and whomever we hit should’ve known better, been elsewhere, been someone else, had a better father.