I was thinking a lot today about Hurricane Earl, as some of my neighbors in the northeast and Atlantic states made unusually careful preparations for what – at least for now – seems to be a diminishing threat. I didn’t for a moment “pooh-pooh” all the caution, but it summoned memories of another hurricane and another time.
This summer I made a moving visit to New Orleans along with a group of talented and dedicated researchers from the Academy for Critical Incident Research at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. We come from any number of disciplines, yet are all interested in the impact of sudden incidents – from violence to natural disaster to other catastrophes — on social fabric, on community ties and cohesion, and on individual well-being.
The extraordinarily dedicated people with whom we met and spoke – activists, residents, clergy, officials, doctors, mental health professionals – formed an awe-inspiring critical mass of passion and persistence.
Today, though, it was all the preparation up here in the northeast for Hurricane Earl that stopped me cold.
People in my neck of the woods freely admit that the Katrina experience remains a looming cloud, a dark memory that has led many to think more carefully about disaster readiness, a warning to take news about storms and tornadoes and earthquakes more seriously.
And why not? Other than some amusing types of ” preparation-overkill, ” (you can see people buying duct tape in such a frenzy that sometimes I think they are planning to eat it) all the shopping and planning sometimes seems more revealing of people’s anxiety than what actually will make them safer. But they are preparing.
The problem is that using Katrina to motivate disaster planning masks an absolutely fundamental distinction between most weather-based catastrophes and the unique and tragic events in New Orleans five years ago.
It was a bad hurricane. A horrible and lethal hurricane. But it was the long neglected levees that caused most of the death and destruction, levees that didn’t magically materialize and blow into town, but levees that were inadequately constructed and then, with even more lethal result, inadequately and negligently maintained.
I once had a brilliant professor, a distinguished sociologist named Gaye Tuchman, who – among other things – had a profound and deeply held shtick about human agency and action. Always be aware, she implored us, to look behind language that would seem to attribute social change or calamity to unpreventable weather or randomness. This narrative and this vocabulary, she warned, denied human agency. It minimized the individuals and institutions whose actions could often be found hiding behind all the talk of water and wind.
So I am fine with people thinking more carefully about preparation. But when I hear Katrina summoned as a reason for this increased vigilance, I want to ungraciously and angrily yell out:
Yeah, they had a horrible, horrible hurricane. And we may have one too.
But never, ever stop your mental film of Katrina at the point when the wind blows and the water flows. That water and wind may – in its almost biblical force – make for a good Cecil B. DeMille moment, but it also may obscure the almost banal and bureaucratic human actions or inactions that – when combined with the weather – were what really wreaked havoc.
That is why I support and admire enormously the work of New Orleans activist and resident Sandy Rosenthal and her dedicated colleagues at Levees.org. You really should take a look at what they are doing and how they are refusing to accept anything other than a full accounting of what happened when disastrous weather met historic negligence with unspeakable consequences. The engineering excellence needed to withstand hurricanes in vulnerable locations may have already existed, but it was nowhere to be seen when the levees gave way in New Orleans.
And — in the event you find yourself touched by a natural disaster — always look at the actions of flesh and blood people, of institutions, before you blame wind and water. The media love the wind and the water and the fire and all the rest of the catastrophic imagery. Great visuals. Great painters have produced seascapes of incredible majesty and beauty. But, at least right now, I can’t think of any museums exhibiting paintings of city council meetings and Army Core of Engineer planning sessions. Not very scintillating.
Media coverage of engineering and infrastructure, often at the core of supposedly “natural disasters,” does not make for great visuals. Cement and pumps aren’t half as sexy as some exhibitionistic anchorman being blown around in his new LL Bean parka.
But that cement and those levees and those canals have more to do with the resulting mayhem than all the drenched and waterlogged reporters in the world.
My friend Dominic — accomplished filmmaker and animator – just sent me the link to the video below. I’m really stunned.
When we remember the past, we use our always selective memory to create a detailed, idiosyncratic picture. What we sometimes forget is that there are also billions of other people of a certain age who are looking back and remembering the same period of time.
I remember 1969 as a year of excitement, anticipation, and incredible social turmoil. I was starting my freshman year at UCLA, and still reeling from the previous year of assassinations and political instability. It was the only time in my life that I wondered whether the social fabric was strong enough to keep society in one piece.
I had completely forgotten that, in the midst of all this social ferment, the television program below was one of the most highly rated on network television. It may be one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.
Millions of people watched every week. Who were these people? What were they thinking? Did they smile? Laugh? Were they eating fondue?
Yet again, we are challenged to see new scientific research findings in all their complexity and to avoid media coverage that jumps to conclusions or oversimplifies.
One study, however important, does not settle a complex question.
But if you have any interest in the issue of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it’s worth a look.
Just moments after my last post about my friend Jeff’s adventures in blogosphere transparency, I opened the NY Times and read a story.
And now I need to be transparent.
I have tears in my eyes and feel sick with sadness. Usually I can distance myself from news just enough to study it and be immersed in it. But I can’t. Not just now.
Each of us brings a history and a self to our encounters with media and culture, and there are some things I need to share, things that – no more than ten minutes ago – I had with me as I started to read the story.
1) Ten years before I was born, almost an entire generation of my family (8 people) were killed in one horrible traffic accident in Los Angeles. It was many years ago, but the loss has shadowed us for generations.
2) Every summer as an adolescent and young adult, I worked as a camp counselor. It was joy.
3) I have a daughter with mild special needs who has been the beneficiary of some of the most wonderful and dedicated camp counselors and staff members you can imagine.
For the three young people, for their families, and for the 600 special needs children and adults who will now — as we all do sooner or later — have to face a moment of grief, a moment when –without warning — time stops and pain becomes a flood.
In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Aeschylus (525-426 BC)
I’d like to share an ongoing discussion taking place over at Jeff Jarvis’s blog BuzzMachine.
Jeff, an old friend and neighbor in a Brooklyn co-op , is a CUNY journalism professor and the author of What Would Google Do, a fascinating take on how a number of organizations and services could be transformed by applying aspects of the Google ethos, especially the importance of listening carefully to customers/clients. Jeff advocates a kind of radical listening that actually enlists the customer as partner. I can’t do it justice here, but any of you wondering how the digital age and link economy might affect health care should definitely take a look.
I just noticed that I made it this far without using any of the clear, transparent, Jarvisian language that would have at least given you a hint about what Jeff wrote. Clearly, my own admiration for what he has done has not yet fully transformed my own essentially private nature. So let me get it out of the way: Jeff talks about incontinence and his difficulty getting an erection without an ounce of reluctance or embarrassment.
I will say this: You will find a number of comments on Jeff’s site and elsewhere criticizing him for over-sharing, narcissism, exhibitionism, and probably a few more DSM-listed disorders. You can make up your own mind, but you should know that I don’t buy these criticisms for a moment. Jeff had been thinking about publicness for a long time when he faced the question of how public he would be about himself. And he simply has too much integrity to urge us all toward “all cards on the table” openness without being that way himself. Publicness and generosity of spirit are not some grand buzz-generating strategy for Jeff, they are at the core of who he is.
I’ll be curious what you think. In a similar situation, could you imagine yourself sharing these kinds of details in a public forum?
1. An article is published in a prestigious medical journal, say JAMA or Lancet.
2. Media coverage reduces what is likely a complex, nuanced article to one headline and several talking points.
3. Public reads the headline , and maybe a couple of the talking points , and — without reading further — applies the headline to their own experience.
4. Public feels a) confirmed when the headline confirms their experience or b) threatened when it contradicts their experience.
5. Sometimes, without reading further and often without reading the study itself, the wider public (and sometimes even specialists who should know better) rushes to the cultural barricades to proclaim either the wisdom or fallacy of the study.
6. Lay experts, or those who live with a condition of one kind or another mentioned in the article, speak in support or opposition to the article.
7. Cautious voices urging that the study be carefully read are drowned out
8. Public conflict rages over findings that people still do not fully understand.
9. Original study setting off this chain of events remains largely unread.
10. People watching this unfold, perhaps people directly affected, become even more confused about whether there is anything they need to do in light of the study.
11. Eventually a health care professional or first-rate health journalist publishes a careful analysis of what should and should not be safely concluded from the study.
12. This careful analysis remains buried in avalanche of claims and counterclaims that are now driving the public discussion of the study.
I mention this pattern for a simple reason. Perhaps this time, before the battle is fully joined and cacophony is at full volume, we should read the study ( or read a careful analysis of the study) before we let the frenzy go too far.
I haven’t read it yet, but I will as soon as I am done with this post.
WedMD has an article about a possible link between the HPV Virus and subsequent diagnoses of squamous cell and basal cell carcinoma. The article reports findings from research published in the British Medical Journal.
This is a link to the full BMJ research paper which, not surprisingly, reports nuanced and careful findings that cannot be easily translated and simplified. Among other things, the findings are qualified by the specific type of HPV virus and the specific type of carcinoma.
And just to show you how perilous it is to reach any medical or scientific conclusion simply from a quick reading of a headline or article title, take a look at the two headlines from WedMD and from BMJ (British Medical Journal).
They seem clear enough. One can easily imagine someone glancing at the headline, registering the finding, and moving on. The only problem is that farther down in each article, the authors report that people on long-term steroid medications for chronic conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and asthma are at special higher risk of HPV-associated skin cancer.
My health science colleagues will almost certainly have quickly realized that these drugs have a mild, immunity-suppressing effect. In fact, HPVs have already been linked to skin cancer in transplant patients on immune-suppressing therapy and in people with a genetic disease (epidermodysplasia verruciformis) that suppresses immune responses.
But do you see how quickly a headlined “finding” got more complicated?
Which leads to an ongoing serious problem: Medical findings, when reported in the quick, brief manner typical of the mass media, are almost never treated with the nuance they deserve. The public reads a headline about an alleged connection between “virus A” and “heart ailment B” and almost automatically leaps to a belief in a direct, causal elationship:
“Oh no, I had virus A so I am going to get heart ailment B!”
Those of you in the health or social sciences, though, already know where I am headed. The connection might be complex and involve multiple variables. All sorts of other intervening variables might also be at work complicating the possible causal relationship.
And, while all of these findings might be clear in the actual research article, few of them find their way into media coverage.
In this hypothetical example, it almost certainly would be a very specific genus of virus A and a specific type of heart ailment B. And the connection might only be seen in people of certain ages and even certain ethnic backgrounds. And the correlation might or might not rise to the level of clear, unambiguous causation.
This would be just another standard media critique, but something quite serious is at stake. Many news consumers, for good or bad, will be using these findings to reach conclusions and take action. And in the case of health and science news, even highly educated, statistically literate consumers very well might not read the actual research article with all of the qualifications.
I can’t suggest an easy solution, although I do strongly feel that we need to be concerned about statistical literacy and the place of statistics in everything from elementary to higher education. It is astounding how much news — not only health and science — rests on embedded assumptions about correlation, causation, frequency distributions, variance, and all the rest.
Armed with such knowledge, people might begin to see that in many cases, the alarming headline they have seen isn’t actually as alarming as they might think.
Without better statistical literacy, we will continue to be plagued by social panics and anxiety about alleged perils that simply don;t hold up to statistical scrutiny.
It happens that every guy I know who has gotten a slightly elevated PSA test is also a frequent eater of chicken. But we can’t assume that …….
I am still thinking about how I feel about the tweet and its circumstances. I don’t, though, have to think about the death penalty, which I oppose on every ground that some use to support it.
In fact, the absence of an empirically verifiable deterrent effect of the death penalty on homicide rates was, I think, lesson #1 or #2 in criminology grad school. I don’t know if it was before or after the lesson about the extent to which the mass media distorts what actual statistics tell us about the frequency and characteristics of specific types of crime.
Someday I want to try and explain this Ronettes thing. Seriously.
For ow, all I can tell you is that, many, many years ago in my adolescence, they overwhelmed and transformed everything I thought I knew about music and excitement.
The performance below is particularly thrilling because- as far as I know – it is the only time that the wall of sound was so elaborately created by a live orchestra. The genius of conductor and arranger Paul Shaffer is on full and glorious display.
The wonderful Ronnie Spector is — as always — luminous. What a thrill to see Nedra Talley. And a reminder that we will never, ever forget Estelle Bennet.
If it’s not your thing, skip to 6:38 for the incredible solo drum introduction to Ronnie’s extraordinary renditon of “Be My Baby.”
Several weeks ago, I posted some comments about a 19th-century painting depicting the fall of Rome. I later found out that the painting is part of a well-known five painting series by Thomas Cole entitled The Course of Empire . Cole, of the Hudson River School, painted the series in the 1830s.
At the time, I was interested in the fact that the painting seemed to compress hundreds of years of decline into one apocalyptic moment. And I noted that much news coverage seems to also focus on the dramatic, apocalyptic moment at the expense of the complex, historical context in which institutions and states decline and, sometimes, collapse. Social problems developing over time often only become widely visible with the arrival of a calamity.
It actually turns out that the five-painting series depicts a more gradual decline, and the specific painting of Rome collapsing (above) that I happened upon was the one when everything collapses. It turns out, in other words, that — while my point about the media’s interest in sudden catastrophe still holds — Cole’s vision was, it turns out, one of incremental decline and loss of an agrarian ideal.
But get this: Yesterday, a reader of Media and Mayhem pointed out to me that the historian Niall Ferguson, writing recently in Foreign Affairs, was also moved by the same image, and the other paintings in the Cole series, to write about how the public perceives and understands the decline of empires. The articles is called Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos.
But Ferguson reaches a very different conclusion. Empires, he says, are eminently capable of quick and catastrophic collapse. Things can come apart quickly. Social scientists are trained to look for long-term cracks and fissures in social structures, but sometimes, he argues, a cataclysmic ”final-straw” brings everything tumbling down.
While I’m still pretty certain that media and culture often elevate the visibility of catastrophe and obscure the subtleties of incremental social change, Ferguson’s argument about the fall of empire is intriguing.
And I find it fascinating that he was inspired by the same painting that led me in a different direction.
My good friend and postwar historian Glenn Speer reminded me of one of Dennis Hopper’s greatest performances , one that might not immediately be remembered given the focus on his film career. I am embarrassed that I forgot it, because it had an enormous impact on me as an adolescent.
On January 24, 1963, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone aired an episode entitled ”He’s Alive,” one of the program’s most famous and controversial episodes, and one of Serling’s favorites. Serling had even hoped to expand it into a feature film.
The problem was that this episode, and many others — while the best things on television at the time — often relied on one plot thread or surprize ending. This could be brilliant in short-form television, but it is hard to imagine stretching some of the ideas into feature films.
Dennis Hopper plays the role of Peter Vollmer, an American neo-Nazi inspired by Hitler.
This is the final, shattering scene featuring Hopper. I f you would like to someday see the entire episode, you probably shouldn’t watch it given the plot spoiler.
Bring me any ten nerdy college professors who spent the 60s in graduate school, wandering through libraries, working in politics, or engaging in other similarly dangerous, high risk activities.
My guess is that at least half of them, maybe more, would have chucked it all to be 1/10th as cool as Dennis Hopper.
We fooled oursleves into thinking that he was the guy our parents wouldn’t let us be. That even worked as an excuse for a while.
But the day eventually came — sooner or later — when we admitted something a little more embarrassing:
He was the guy we were terrified to be.
Rest well, Dennis. There have been movie villains and there have been movie villains. But your brilliant performnace as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet will always stand alone.
Southern California. Adolescence. I may never get it. But neither can I forget or escape it.
Miles and miles of sameness. No center. Crowds in which you feel alone. Strip malls. Driving 20 miles to a launderette. Crystal cathedrals. Feeling lost when you know exactly where you are.
Complexity. Many of us say we want it. Many of us complain about media coverage that avoids it.
But it”s hard not to notice that news about health – after it is shaped and formed and telescoped into a form palatable for the general public – often obscures a much more interesting, if somewhat unsettling, scientific narrative.
We crave cures, dramatic discoveries, and individual stories of triumph over adversity. But isn’t it just like the complexity and elegance of science to confound our desire for simplicity with ambiguous findings, uncertain remedies, and stories without neat and comforting endings?
I know how many of my health science colleagues already knew about him this, but I’m even more curious about what percentage of the general public really understands the complexity and diversity of multiple strains of E. coli bacteria. In fact, there are hundreds of strains of the bacterium Escherichia coli, many of which are harmless and some that are not.
Take a look at this painting. (And, by the way, tell me the name of the painter if you know.)
Rome is collapsing in one giant cataclysm – drowning, suicide, homicide, every other-cide, fires, floods, and more. This is a complete collapse that will end in total devastation. By that afternoon, by the way.
Seriously, though, what in the heck does a painting like this have to do with modern mass media?
Here we have a painting that takes 500 years of political and economic and social upheaval and telescopes it into one miserable day when everything comes tumbling down. The problem is that empires and civilizations don’t just collapse in one day, or in one week. Weakening institutions, political miscalculations, economic hardship slowly create the conditions that make the collapse possible.
Sounds like much current news coverage to me. We see the catastrophic and dramatic incidents in which states are both born and destroyed. A statue is ripped down, a fire started, or and angry crowd overruns the capital and does away with the leadership. Good old-fashioned reality television.
The problem is that these cataclysms come at the tail ends of long processes in which moral and economic decline and heaven knows how many other factors slowly plant the seeds of destruction.
From looking at this painting, and from watching the evening news, it’s easy to get the impression that the world is a place without a long complex history, a place where one day there is a Soviet Union and one day there isn’t, where one day there is an authoritarian state called Romania — run by a tyrant named Ceausescu – and the next day he and his wife are running around their backyard being executed after a revolution.
My point is that much culture — still photographs, paintings, and news coverage — is inherently distorted and ahistorical because , while an image captures a moment, the social change leading to that moment can be long, obscure, and frustratingly incremental.
Television news is great at doing car chases, but scandalously inept at all the pre-history and context and build-up that lead to those cataclysmic moments.
And lest I sound like I am blaming the main stream media, ask yourself this question: Would you rather see a drama about the fall of Rome or a lecture about the complex factors that led to its decline? Would you rather watch footage of exploding volcanoes and villages being buried or see a documentary on the nature of lava?
Believe me, there are some times when — given the choice – I’m not sure how I would answer.
At one point in graduate school, too many years ago, I got a consulting job at a major broadcasting company asking me to summarize the body of research on the media-violence connection and the question of whether high-profile crimes might cause copy-cat incidents.
I should have refused.
It’s not there wasn’t a literature. It’s that there was a massive, nuanced, complex, and almost limitless literature. And that literature came from every imaginable discipline and reached every imaginable conclusion. Lab-based social psychology, ethnography, psychiatric epidemiology, anthropology, biology, and many others were represented.
My report actually ended up being about the breadth and complexity of the question itself rather than the answers provided by the research.
I mention this only to highlight the fact that this literature is still large and inconclusive, and still poorly understood by a public that consistently confuses the concepts of correlation and causation, aided by similarly confused media institutions.
However, to say that the research is inconclusive is not to deny the existence of a number of methodologically rigorous studies that do show a causal link between media exposure and subsequent aggression and others that don’t.
OK, I am prepared for all the ridicule you want to send my way. Because we are definitely not in the realm of cutting edge music.
But I have always thought of Tommy Roe as more than a Buddy Holly wannabe and quite a performer and song-writer in his own right.
Some of his songs are pop classics and, while they were originally and somewhat unfairly considered “bubble gum,” that term doesn’t begin to encompass his contribution to pop, rock, rockabilly, country, and — OK — bubblegum.
Sweet little Sheila, you’ll know her if you see her
Blue eyes and a ponytail
Her cheeks are rosy, she looks a little nosey
Man, this little girl is fine
Never knew a girl like-a little Sheila
Her name drives me insane
Sweet little girl, that’s my little Sheila
Man, this little girl is fine
Me and Sheila go for a ride
Oh-oh-oh-oh, I feel all funny inside
Then little Sheila whispers in my ear
Oh-oh-oh-oh, I love you Sheila dear
Sheila said she loved me, she said she’d never leave me
True love will never die
We’re so doggone happy just bein’ around together
Man, this little girl is fine
Never knew a girl like-a little Sheila
Her name drives me insane
Sweet little girl, that’s my little Sheila
Man, this little girl is fine
Me and Sheila go for a ride
Oh-oh-oh-oh, I feel all funny inside
Then little Sheila whispers in my ear
Oh-oh-oh-oh, I love you Sheila dear
Sheila said she loved me, she said she’d never leave me
True love will never die
We’re so doggone happy just bein’ around together
Man, this little girl is fine
Oh, this little girl is fine
Yeah, this little girl is fine
Oh, this little girl is fine
Enjoy a hilarious improvised 48 minute “talk” by Conan yesterday at Google HQ.
Aside from the biting comedy, the clip includes a brilliant explanation about how, when precluded by his contract from performing, he turned to the Internet — Twitter, actually — and went viral.
Today I read a headline stating that Helen Wagner had died. She was a long-time cast member of “As The World Turns.”
When I saw the headline, my immediate reaction was to ask myself: Is it possible no one remembers that she was the cast member speaking on live television at the moment when Walter Cronkite interrupted the broadcast to announce JFK’s assassination?
Photo Credit: Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum, for The New York Times
Late last year, I called your attention to a riveting piece of investigative reporting that was a cooperative venture of the non-profit investigative journalism group Pro Publica and the New York Times.
Photo Credit: Tony Carnes/ Christianity Today
Reported and written by Sheri Fink and A.C. Thompson, The Deadly Choices at Memorialdescribes the frenzied and painful struggle inside a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina as the staff dealt with seriously ill and terminal patients.
I don’t want to give the impression that dispassionate distance is my automatic response to every bit of craziness that occurs in society.
I am not always a social scientist. I feel rage and anger. My first reaction on hearing some loony extreme view is not to immediately to unfurl the flag and celebrate the right to free expression. I do eventually celebrate free expression, but that is not until I finally calm down and pull back from some of the nastiness of which I am capable.
Today, though, after a week of hearing some of the most vicious and extremist rhetoric I can recall, I have been thinking a lot about three pieces of writing that strike me as indispensable in understanding our latest period of lunacy. Believe me, I almost choked when I heard Sarah Palin talk about “reloading,” but today I am thinking less about her mindlessness than about how and why we periodically produce movements so drenched in rage and racism. Why does the United States have such a rich and revolting tradition of individuals like Palin who — while not even remotely equipped to think with any originality – are brilliantly equipped to read the rage and stoke the hate and irrationality of others?
This is obviously a complex question. But just over 45 years ago, in a classic essay entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, the historian Richard Hofstadter opened a door on one of America’s creepiest corners, a place where every loony strain of racism, nativism, millenialism, sexism, homophobia, and nuttyism come together in an incoherent, yet incendiary, brew.
This where you find the library for every imaginable conspiracy theory that a twisted mind is capable of imagining. And this is also the setting for Hateland’s fully stocked pharmacy – shelves full of folk-devils of every race, ethnicity , gender, and sexual orientation available to relieve anxiety about everything from a recession to an upset stomach.
Hofstadter understood so much of this and I can’t recommend his essay strongly enough.
Also, in today’s New York Times Frank Rich covers some of the same territory. Rich zeroes in on one of the key symptoms of paranoid politics — a group enraged, out of control, and armed with a lengthy and astoundingly incoherent list of grievances. These are the sophisticated political thinkers who can weave Chinese food, unpolished shoes, and aspirin into the evidence that finally proves the government’s secret plan to require weekly colonoscopies.
Finally, I recommend the latest annual report of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism, by Mark Potok. The report is packed with proof that all the hate and incoherence and bizarre conspiracy theories have attracted adherents, money and angry people eager to move from anger to violence.
We can laugh all we want at their mind-bogglingly nutty ideas, but we would ignore them at our great peril.
You don’t have to make sense to make trouble. Serious trouble.
I am thrilled about the healthcare bill that the President signed today.
My comment, though, does not have to do with the substance of the bill, nor with the arguments on either side. I’m thinking about the opposition’s strategy.
Why do you think the bill’s opponents chose almost “out-of-control” anger and fear rather than substantive persuasion?
Last week I was talking with an accomplished historian and one of the shrewdest observers of legislative politics I know. Each of us have more than a little experience in and around government and politics, and we found ourselves shocked that we virtually never heard the alleged flaws of the bill carefully and rationally discussed by the opposition. All we heard was a lot of anger about bills getting “shoved down people’s throats” and “government takeovers” and “people losing the freedom to choose.”
This only happens in politics when a party makes a calculated decision that a fear appeal is likely to be effective. So they chose the “fire in a theater” strategy, trying to get people all hot and bothered. Fair enough.
Well, time will tell, but I think they made a huge strategic mistake.
Not that screaming and shouting is always ineffective. It actually does work with the extreme flanks. The ranting brought the tea-partiers into line. Screaming and shouting even occasionally got me a “Big Hunk” when I was in third grade.
But I think that a broad middle of undecided voters did want to hear a reasoned and calm presentation of their gripes. And all they heard was noise. Believe me; I know that the opponents thought fear was a smart political calculation. In fact, any professor of media and rhetoric will tell you that fear appeals can, in some circumstances, work.
So legislators made the choice to repeat — almost verbatim — the same talking points about fear and government takeovers that were written and developed by their leaders.
I will always wonder why the opponents didn’t talk to their potential supporters like adults. Their ranting had already convinced their extremists. But they also had a slew of Democrats who were in play, and other possible opponents from the center. And what did they do? They gave them rage rather than reason.
And they lost.
Hey, you’ll hear no complaints from me. They made a great choice as far as I am concerned. But I can’t stop wondering what they thought they were doing? Did they even consider that all the rage and red faces would look, not simply indignant, but out of control?
Perhaps, seeing an inevitable defeat, they pulled a “Dylan Thomas” and simply raged against the dying of the light.
I debated whether to put this clip up given that, while the song on this clip is directly from the soundtrack of the film, this visuals obviously are not. If any of you can find the clip from Disney’s Pinocchio in which Jiminy Cricket sings “When You Wish Upon a Star,” please let me know.
Perhaps the most beautiful Disney song ever, “When You Wish Upon a Star” became so popular after it appeared in Pinocchio that it has been used by Disney in various contexts ever since, a virtual company theme song.
Embarrassing confession: At times when adulthood feels so oppressive, and when it seems I can’t summon any of the feelings and images of childhood, it takes only three or four bars of this song to melt away years of cynicism. I tried to think of some appropriate words, but I am simply unable to describe how and why this song, more tha n any other, made me feel so safe and cared for as a child.
It was written by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington and first heard in the 1940 Walt Disney movie Pinocchio, and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song that year.
The haunting, ethereal voice of Jiminy is Cliff Edwards, a major star of vaudeville and jazz.
The only music that I find even remotely as evocative of childhood are Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen (“Scenes from Childhood”), Opus 15, a set of thirteen pieces of music for piano written in 1838. Von fremden Ländern und Menschen and Träumerei are my favorites.
It turns out that an active group of the over 30 million Americans without health insurance – adults and children who scrimp on medications and doctor’s visits – have joined to oppose health reform.
There is a magical moment in François Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules et Jim when the breathtaking Jeanne Moreau sings a French folk song — Le Tourbillon” (“The Whirlwind”) — to her two male companions. Unable to decide between the two men (played by Oskar Werner and Henri Serre), she sings this song about emotional turbulence.
It became a popular hit in France. But I warn you: Once heard, it takes up permanent residence in your head and will be heard in perpetuity.
Netflix has added much of the Criterion catalogue to the films they make available for instant viewing/streaming. This means that, if you are a Netflix member, much of the 20th century film canon (with an admittedly Western European bias) is there for you to enjoy.
I would never argue that this is the best way to appreciate a great film. A DVD played on a decent sized monitor will almost always trump your laptop. (In an era when,sadly, seeing a film on a large screen is almost too much to ask for!) But if you’d like to check off some classics you somehow missed, this is worth checking out.
I just quickly glanced at the Netflix “instant-viewing” list and saw G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Marcel Carne’s Les Enfants du Paradis, and an incredible treat that I first saw thanks to my colleague Mick Hurbis-Cherrier, Henri-George Clouzot’s Le Corbeau.
I almost forgot to mention that this collection includes Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, a haunting meditation on rootlessness and loss with a beautiful, spare screenplay by playwright Sam Shepard.
I’ll probably get angry in a few minutes, but right now I’m just sitting here stunned and speechless at a privacy violation that would seem to set a new standard of odiousness.
I’ll say this for the Lower Merion School District: At least they did us the favor of violating privacy with such heavy-handedness and lack of sophistication that no one will be able to sanely argue that their actions were in some gray or uncertain realm. This was surveillance at its best and most sinister, straight out of Orwell.
Posted by Steve Gorelick 
