The Iron Heel and more.

Late in the Republic Plato outlines the decay of democracy into autocracy.  The details are supplied in a number of lesser works. Of course the sage of Baltimore did the same much more succinctly and colourfully.

Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908).

Good Reads meta-data is 155 pages rated 3.77 by 11,866 litizens.  

Genre: Fiction; Prophecy, Documentary.

DNA: USA

Verdict: Hamer blows! 

Tagline: It happened. 

 After centuries of rule by Iron Heeled oligarchs the socialist revolution triumphs in 2600 AD and unearths it own past in previous, failed revolutions of earlier times.  The protagonist in those early effort was Avis, a woman born to privilege, who becomes aware of the terrible conditions of the working class through a committed revolutionary husband.  

She sees through the free market rhetoric of the kleptocracy, and joins the doomed cause.  Proselytise though he does, Jack London also had a sharpe sense of humour as when he portray William Randolph Hearst as a socialist!    

The prose has the sledgehammer subtlety of Fox news and the characters are all cardboard for the preaching of the author, like Fox news. But there is also energy and conviction on the page, too. The story goes from 1913 to 1932.  For an update read more below. 

It has much contemporary resonance with the censorship of universities, stripping of opponents of citizenship, rounding up anyone and everyone for confinement behind wire in Florida, the complete corruption of the judiciary into hirelings….  Well, just watch the news tonight for further examples.  

It generated two Russian films 1919 and 1999 and stage adaptation was done in 2016. 

Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (1935)  

Good Reads meta-data is 400 pages rated 3.80 by 22,537.  

Genre: Fiction; Prophecy, Documentary.

DNA: USA

Verdict: Grim but boring. 

Tagline:  Ripped from today’s headlines!     

Mirroring Hitler, Buzz rises to power in the USA; his Boswell logs his course.  Once installed President Buzz disregards Congress and the Supreme Court and charges ahead, imprisoning critics, disappearing opponents, and loosening a masked Praetorian Guard on real and imagined enemies, as well as harmless bystanders to meet corporate KPIs of body count. Those who do not support Prez Buzz are threatened into compliance by these heavily armed, masked men who patrol voting sites in the states to make sure only Buzzards get in.     

The army is set on the civilian population, while Mexico is invaded, perhaps to change the name of Gulf of Mexico. The press is censored, and brought to heel with threats, intimidation, and violence.  The free market kleptocrats rule. Only Fox newspapers and radio stations are permitted and they sing the praises of the Buzz on the hour.  Two minute hate session are deemed inadequate to encompass all the enemies.    

Lewis’s exposition lacks the energy of London’s but it shares the bellicose urgency.  Huey Long provided the model of Buzz, as Lewis declared at the time.  See my previous posts on this creature of the bayou. 

Lewis himself collaborated on a stage version of the novel. A film based on the stage play was bruited in 1935 but did not proceed, because the script was judged ‘too anti-fascist’ to sell in fascist markets. Ah, the free market!  Available at a price but only for a price.  

Might add to this pair Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) with RFK re-parenting work camps for those who lack enthusiasm for the fascist supremo Charles Lindberg, the regime’s badgering of the media into silence, the murder of critics of the maximum leader, the administration’s support for the resurgence of the masked Ku Klux Klan, and….   Like the author’s other books, this one is mostly about himself, a subject of endless fascination … to him.  

For further details check the latest news from Yankeeland.  

Lightness, we need it.

Listening to Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ podcast on Colette (1873-1954) the other day brought to mind Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).  

How so?  

Lord of the Words Bragg

Bragg’s panel members were absolutely determined to read into Colette’s wondrous prose all manner of weighty and sharp points about gender, equality, class, history, power, and more.  When Colette wrote her sinuous and sparkling prose about sunflowers in a field, according to the savants, she was subtly undermine the patriarchy or denouncing it.  When she wrote charming vignettes about Claudine’s schoolgirl crushes on the film stars, she was subtly attacking social class.  And so for the prescribed 45 minutes, but this time I did not exercise the option of listing to the bonus five minutes afterward, so tedious and tendentious did I find the recitation.  

Colette at work.

When I thought about it later, Kundera came to mind.  As for the heavy-weights in Kundera’s novel, so for the Colette panelists, only meaning has any value at all. If Colette wrote about flowers because she liked doing it, was good at doing it, and found it satisfying as an end in itself, it does not have meaning at all to these scholars. They united in denouncing her most effervescent novel, Gigi (1944) categorically and repeatedly, including gratuitous ad hominem asides.  

It seemed to me as I listened, and it seems to me now in hindsight that the panelists were pursing their own agendas and not Colette’s.  That she wrote Gigi in German occupied Paris, living in constant fear that her Jewish husband would be arrested….  That did not enter into the discussion.  The lightness of Gigi was much needed when she produced it. That is remarkable.  

Before and during the war she published life-style articles and some stories in publications that were anti-Semitic, pro-German, collaborationist, and Vichy.  Again our panelists were silent. I expect she did so to eke out a living in hard times and from 1940 there were no other choices.  All that seemed much more important in her life than their abstractions about gender, class, patriarchy, capitalism, and other way stations on the tenure-track. Survival.  And to survive she looked to light side, the bright side.  

Nor was much said about her short but noteworthy career as a journalist of which she once said, in a lesson few journalists these days heed, ‘you have to see and not invent, you have to touch and not imagine…’  (By the way, she reported crime – robbery, rape, and murder – for a Paris scandal sheet, not flower shows.)

I read a long biographical introduction to a volume of her memorable short stories years ago, and cannot identify it today, but some of it stuck with me.  

The Durkeim Line

Have we reached the Durkheim Line? Once crossed is it possible to go back? (Over and back is a penalty, remember?)

‘Categories such as time, space, cause, and number represent the most fundamental relationships which exist among things…. If we did not have the same conception of time, space, cause, and number, all contact between our minds would be impossible,’ wrote Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), pp. 22-23. To emphasise their currency he called them Social Facts.  

This line is what I think of when I hear the latest nonsense spouted in D.C. by the GOP, which by the way, now stands for Group of Pygmies and the mindless robots on Pox News.  (Apologies for the insult to pygmies.) Then there are the antipodean echoes of that nonsense.  Did he anticipate Queensland’s war on daylight savings time?  Did he advocate faded curtains?

Edward Tufte,‘The Cognitive Style of Power Point,’ page 156-185.

Edward Tufte,‘The Cognitive Style of Power Point,’ page 156-185.

This is a chapter in his marvellous book Beautiful Evidence (2006) which ought to be mandatory study in business, engineering, economics, political science and much else.  

In this chapter Tufte eviscerates those who practice McKinsey management by Power Point. There are some humdingers.  One is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address reduced to Power Point KPIs. Thus drained of meaning, no would ever remember it.  Follow the link below.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/the-gettysburg-address-as-a-powerpoint/281636/

Likewise is the painstaking argument that NASA disasters have occurred partly because of the superficial decision-making using Power Point.  Gulp!  It is not just the low-bid contractors but the absence of specification, documentation, and clarification, favouring instead hierarchical bullet points and discussion.  Technical papers are boring compared to the light show!  When post-disaster inquiries asked for the technical studies from which the presentation Power Points were derived, they discovered there were no technical documents.  Just the PP slides derived from — wait for it — discussions. Now that is engineering!  Not!  Maybe that is how low-bid contractors keep the price down, saving on printing costs. (We all know how expensive toner cartridges are.) 

The curse of McKinsey is not just limited to Power Point, as Tufte shows. When at launch the heat shield problem was detected NASA officials decline to ask the US Air Force to turn one of its spy satellites on the space shuttle to get a look at the hole. Why? Because it  would have compromised the KPIs of the management team’s advancement to promotion.  Rather than find out right away how serious the problem was, the managers decided it was not serious enough to risk personal promotion. Eight astronauts died in that crash. 

Remember that O-ring?  I do.  He is even more direct in the piece linked below.

https://shorensteincenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/HO_SNOW_2014_PowerPoint-Is-Evil.pdf

Dare we conclude similar light shows are the basis for other, military decisions, too.  Probably, but these are only on the public record in Arlington. How Robert McNamara would have loved Power Point. Bad decisions, bad planes made efficiently!  

Edward Tufte who does not do Ted Talks for the same reasons.

In politics, we know that the Blair governments in Great Britain operated by discussion with the attendant vagaries, having nothing in writing that could be leaked or revealed through Freedom of Information requests now or ever. No doubt this approach explains much.     

2 Giordano Bruno

OP-ed

Whenever I learn of another rant on hate radio 2GB I pause.  The ‘GB’ in the name comes from the initials of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who inspired the founders of the station in 1926.  This fact is absent from both the station’s current website and its Wikipedia entry.

Bruno championed science, fact, religious toleration, freedoms for women. He ridiculed corrupt authority in the Vatican as a giant Ponzi scheme. He could never ingratiate himself with established authority in universities.  Not enough nationally competitive grants. He was also a scientific peer of Galileo.  

This statue of him is in Rome near the spot
where the hate masters burned him.

He was pursued by the Inquisition across Europe until, exhausted, he finally succumbed for refusing to compromise the truth of scientific fact for the ideology of the Roman Church, just as Socrates did for refusing to pander to the idiocracy. The shock jocks of the age rejoiced as Bruno was burned at the stake as they had done when Socrates was poisoned. Hollow triumphs for the shock jocks, because their names are forgotten while those of Socrates and Bruno live on. Obscurity likewise awaits all of today’s the kings of hate.

Though hate radio has a large following, no doubt it’s practitioners view these followers with contempt. See A Face in the Crowd (1957) with Andy Griffith for the illustration. Or check out Jimmy ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ Jones.  

Australian Foreign Aid and the Bush Fires.

Of late there have been  a few intemperate remarks about Australian foreign aid in the context of the continental fires.  As usual with followers of Pox News, the facts are lost in the red haze of outrage.  

Still the facts do count.

  1. Australia’s foreign aid is about half per capita that of the UK.  That is, it is not generous. In turn, the UK per capita amount is about half that of Sweden per capita.  
  2. Nor is it a free gift.  Nearly all the aid is invested in projects (clean water, sanitation, roads, ports, schools, hospitals, training) the materials for which are purchased in Australia.  The water purification plants are bought from Australian suppliers.  The nurses training is delivered by Australian schools.  That is, the money is spent in Strine.  
  3. In building projects, Australian firms are the preferred contractors, and secure the bulk of the business.  
  4. The vast majority of the aid money is invested near Australia, e.g., the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Timor, Tonga, Nauru, and the like. The strategy is to make a buffer from the increasing Chinese influence in the South Pacific.  The aim is to make lasting friends with the neighbours and to strengthen them to resist Chinese blandishments. (Look it up.) I taught a number of students from these parts whose education in Australia was made possible by Aid projects.  In that sense, part of my salary came from the Aid budget.   
  5. At no time are suitcases of dollars handed over contra Pox News.  

All of this and more can be gleaned from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade web site in five or ten minutes.  Of course, that is too taxing for a Pox journalist.  

The Solomon Islands, Timor, Tonga, Nauru and the like are in no position to come to Australia’s assistance in the fire crisis.  Pay a visit to one of these places to see why.  

Yes, the paper total is four billion sunbaked Strine dollars, but few of those bucks leave the country.  Moreover, to put that total in perspective the twelve-kilometre tram line I took today back from the blood bank today cost over one billion of those self-same dollars.  That makes it comparable to the sports stadia that state governments continue to build for football games most of us will never see.  The total cost of WestConnex, should it ever be completed, will probably dwarf the annual foreign aid budget as it moves Sydney traffic jams from one place to another.  

One cannot escape the feeling that part of the repeated and ritualistic outrage of the Poxes at foreign aid is racist.  We are giving our white dosh to darkies!       

Civilisation is in a race between education and catastrophe.

In his Outline of History (1920) H. G Wells wrote that ‘Civilisation is in a race between education and catastrophe.’* 

Catastrophe is winning. 

After one hundred and fifty years of free public education, the Enlightenment project seems to be spent.  Instead of reason and evidence, even ostensibly educated people celebrate, parade, and worship passion. Emotions are regarded as superior to reason.  Thus I have oft heard that it is praise to say a scientist is passionate, whereas I would prefer a scientist to be cool and detached, letting the facts and evidence lead to the conclusions, not the emotions. Ditto for journalists, doctors, teachers, and ambulance drivers and more. But no, they are congratulated for passion not competence, discipline, restraint, diligence, tenacity, skepticism, preparation, endurance, and the like.  

To say someone is competent, knowledgeable, effective, precise, industrious, or professional is faint praise compared to attributing passion.  

Indeed the self-advertising of universities follows the crowd, touting passion not perfection, belief not doubt in proclaiming their virtues.  

Emotional reactions are simple, binary, as when cheering on a sporting team. These days even the self-appointed newspapers of record, having forsaken the historic mission of public edification, put sports figures and celebrities on the front page in the vein attempt to hook buyers and readers by passions, not by information, insight, knowledge, or long and slowly accumulated intelligence that came from sitting still and reading or patiently listening.  Favoured instead is the direct intuition of passion. 

Press that button!  

The White School House at Corning Iowa last time I saw it.

Admittedly education itself has changed in that century and a half.  In the last two generations in a comfort born of the sacrifices of others, the denizens of higher education have largely devoted themselves to undermining the Enlightenment project, while enjoying its benefits, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and passed that on to their students who have gone on to become school teachers, parents, journalists, and community leaders. Witness the world they have made today in Whitehall and the White House where volume and repetition have replaced facts and evidence. Passionately saying it is so now makes it so. 

Intellectuals were the first to find facts irrelevant and spread the word in seminars, lectures, and books. The word has spread and now grows of itself. Truth is no longer privileged. This I have been told for years in seminars, conferences, and theses. All knowledge is tainted.  Everything is opinion.  (See Plato’s Republic Book Ten.)

*If some smartypants out there could supply the volume and page numbers I will thank them personally. 

The sign is nigh!

A sign of the coming Apocalypse appeared today.

While gasping and groaning at the gym this morning, my glance unfortunately fell on the television screen broadcasting the egregious Channel 7. That was bad. Worse followed.  There came the sign of the Beast: flared trousers coming back.  

Yes, there under the yakkety-yak trivialistas appeared a banner proclaiming that fashion experts (ponder that combination of words ‘fashion’ and ‘expert’) predict the return of the Beast – bell-bottomed pant legs. 

See what I mean.

Catastrophe was only narrowly averted when last these devils appeared: 1969.  Will thoughts and prayers be enough this time? Hardly!  Bring on the Terminator!  

To über or not?

After forty plus years of cab rides, good, bad, and ugly, here at home and around the world of late I have had several rides with Uber in Sydney, Adelaide, Los Angeles, and Houston.
uber-taxi-aa.jpg
So far, I like the Uber experience and here is why.
The eight Uber drivers I have met do not want to talk to me. They have not told me jokes. They have not asserted opinions about passers-by, what is on the radio, or the newspaper, or life. They have not asked my opinion in order to tell me theirs.*
The cabin is silent. They do not inflict their taste in radio or CD music on me.
The cars have been clean and tidy. They are not strewn with ‘les choses de vie’ around the driver in a kind of nest.
Cash does not change hands for all is paid as a flat fee ahead of time. We all know that matter is settled.
The car comes and I can see it coming. Not the ‘first available cab’ which may mean none at all. Tricky that when going to the airport for an early flight.
No Uber driver has by word, mien, or deed, shown displeasure at a short ride. They know the ride before I get in the car.
No Uber driver has yet pitched for a tip with a certain edge. And, yes, that has happened in Sydney. See above about short rides.
None has failed the hygiene test by a nose, mine.
No Uber driver has failed to help with luggage.
Nor has an Uber driver taken the long way around for no reason.
Never has the horn been used to announce arrival.
It has been easy to get an Uber during the sacred change-over period.
My experiences are not a sample nor are they numerous, but they are authentic.
As Uber continues I expect it to converge with taxis in the same way Optus has converged on the Telecom level of service after a few years, i.e., between zero and none. So I enjoy it while it lasts.
*Despite the recurrent journalistic trope that cab drivers are in touch with the public pulse, say at election time, I have never believed it, since the ones I encounter do all the talking.

Michael Shayne’s Seven embodiments by Lloyd Nolan (1940-1943)

Lloyd Nolan made seven B movies as Michael Shayne in the early 1940s. Within the limits of the genres, Noir and Comedy, they vary. Only one of them includes any reference to World War II. The details of the seven follow my comments.
‘Sleepers West’ is the most interesting.
Sleepers.jpg
Shayne escorts a secret witness on a train ride from Denver to San Francisco while villains on board plot to terminate that witness. The touch is light, and there is marvellous subplot involving two journeyman actors, Mary Beth Hughes and Louis Jean Heydt, a rarity to see these two with a chance to act, and they take it.
Hughes 11.jpg
The result is pathos amid the action. In another sidebar the train engineer has his moments, too, as does the fireman shovelling the coal. Further enriching the film, Lynn Bari crackles with intelligence as a newshound.
There is a deadly serious take on this story in ‘The Narrow Margin’ (1952).
‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Die’ is excellent in its noir mood. There is a separate review of it elsewhere on this blog. Seeing it stimulated me to watch the whole set.
Dressed to Kill’ is theatrical in its setting and has a convoluted plot.
Dressed Kill.jpg
It is formulaic but done with vigour. Henry Daniell adds the caustic tone in which he specialised. It seems all too typical of the times that the two actors playing the black stereotypes are mismatched in the credits. Most of the action takes place on the ocean liner. Superman is there, Steven Geray adds his Hungarian accent, but the real surprise comes at the end. No spoiler. There is a pip of a scene early in the piece in a convenience store run by Frank Oth and Mae Marsh, two veterans who shine in their small parts.
‘Time to Kill’ puts Shayne into Phillip Marlowe’s shoes with a variation on Raymond Chandler’s ‘The High Window’ aka ‘The Brasher Doubloon’ (1947).
Time to kill.jpg
It gets the highest rating from the cinemitizens.
‘Just off Broadway’ starts and ends in a court room where Shayne takes over proceedings. Sergeant Bilko enlivens the show. The knife-throwing act is better done in this instance than in most other films. Was it for real? Marjorie Weaver, a veteran of other titles in this series, is pitch perfect as his gal pal. No idea how the title applies to the story. There are two oblique references to the war in this one.
1.’Michael Shayne, Private Detective’ (1940), 1 hour and 17 minutes rated 6.7 by 317, released 10 January 1941.
2.’Sleepers West’ (1941), 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.8 by 303, released 14 March 1941.
3.’Dressed to Kill’ (1941), 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.5 by 862, released 16 October 1941.
4.’Blue, White and Perfect’ (1942), 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.8 by 264, released 6 January 1942.
5.’The Man Who Wouldn’t Die’ (1942), 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 6.7 by 340, released 1 May 1942.
6.’Just off Broadway’ (1942), 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 6.1 by 122, rated 24 September 1942.
7.’Time to Kill’ (1942), 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 7.0 by 124, released 22 January 1943.
Thereafter Nolan like much of Hollywood concentrated on war movies. He compiled 160 credits on the IMDb, but given how ubiquitous he is, that seems too few.