Culture: March 2003 Archive Page

"Language bullying... advances a stuffy and old-fashioned view of language, the rules of which it considers set by supposed experts, such as the authors of grammar books, rather than common usage. It is deeply anti-populist and snobby, not to mention just plain wrong and cranky.... I suspect many of Bush's critics would want to avoid the distasteful varieties of prescriptivism that amount to little more than 'white speech good, black speech bad.' But once we 'go nuclear' on 'nucular,' it's hard to see how different we are from prescriptivists who sneer at the inventiveness of non-standard English. Lots of people other than Bush say 'nucular.' It even follows its own rhetorical logic..." Andy Lamey --Going Nuclear over NucularNational Post)

"[T]he Civilization series is infused with an American ideology that is comforting insofar as it justifies genocidal practices and the stealing of land by positing an empty virgin continent....Among other ideological effects, Civilization III makes inevitable, natural and universal several Western-centered ideas of technological progress, the use of the land, and the opposition between 'civilization' and 'savagery.' In this way, historical specificity is forgotten, and the game reinforces the sense that those who have been displaced were only ever natural obstacles erupting randomly from the wilderness to block (American) civilization's advance.... A player playing the Iroquois nation, or India, for example, might dominate the game, crushing opponents such as the Americans and the British and the Chinese, and win by either defeating everyone else or by sending a colony ship to Alpha Centauri (Civilization II's and III's other 'winning condition'). In a lovely moment of irony and anachronism, a player playing Mohandas Gandhi (the game's suggested ruler name for one playing as India, whose robed portrait appears during the diplomacy screens), might face down and conquer Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, and others. What would be revealed in such a narrative is the contingency of human history; that things might have turned out differently..." Christopher Douglas

--"You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!": Fighting Indians, Playing Games, Forming DisciplinesPostmodern Culture)

About six years ago, Chris and I were graduate research assistants, working on the University of Toronto English Library for Ian Lancashire. I recall he spent quite a lot of time playing Civilization II, and had figured out how to crush the computer at the highest level. "I never negotiate," he said.

"Dennis Jerz asked me a question about the length of time it takes for a Google query to be performed. We resolved this with a series of 50 tests to determine an answer." Elwyn Jenkins

--Google Search Speeds: Overpopulation and Underpopulation ComparedMicrodoc News)

Thanks, Elwyn.

"The year 2000 marked a turning point, with the population’s 'momentum' becoming negative; there will be fewer parents in the next generation than in this one."

--Europe Shrinking as Birthrates DeclineTimes)

This is a straightforward summary of an article to be published in Science. It might have been a more interesting article if it interviewed someone from one of the overpopulation scare groups. Let's try a little experiment:

• Google hits on "overpopulation": "about 121,000. Search took 0.05 seconds".
• Google hits on "underpopulation": "about 1,170. Search took 0.11 seconds".

Hmm... why did it take Google take 100% longer to find 1% of the hits? Is it because the "underpopulation" websites are more obscure? Help me, Elwyn (who, I see, has now broadened his focus from Google in particular to "exercising personal power in the Information Age").

"If Canada's security had been threatened, he said the United States would respond immediately. 'There would be no debate. There would be no hesitation. We would be there for Canada, part of our family.' | It was that reference to family, hokey though it might sound, that rang most true of all. 'Canada is not there for us,' he said, at a time when U.S. security is threatened. What made it ring true is this. The greatest threat to Canadian security in recent decades has been Quebec independence. And when Quebec separatism last threatened Canada, via the 1995 referendum, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien did indeed make that 'family' call to the United States for assistance." Terence Corcoran responds to comments by US Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci.

--The US Was There for CanadaCanada.com)

I lived in Canada for six years, and saw plenty of ill-informed knee-jerk anti-Americanism (from rabid fans of the transplanted Toronto Blue Jays and folks who were unable to define Canada in any way other than identifiying it as not American). But I'm reminded of how much it meant to me and my fellow Americans when Canadian Gordon Sinclair's 1973 radio editorial spread via e-mail after the 9.11.2001 terrorist attacks. Whether you agree or disagree with the ambassador whose comments are quoted above, Corcoran's analysis is worth pondering seriously.

"It started as a routine downtown patrol. An officer cruised a sports bar, then went behind the bar to rinse off his hands and looked up as a fight broke out in the crowd. As it grew, tavern employees intervened, trying to muscle the combatants outta the bar. The officer helped, and even in the cooling outside air, the antagonists continued to go at it. Arcata Police asked for help and before long were hosting their own fairly formidable badge 'n' acronym party, guests being HSUPD, HCSO and the CHP. 'Have HSUPD head this way with a taser,' reads the narrative. Confronted by a phalanx of glinting badges, the watering-hole warriors slammed their car doors in wussy surrogate defiance and drove off."

--Arcata Eye Police Log (Arcata Eye)

A stunningly beautiful police activity report from a small town newspaper. Weeks and weeks of backlogs, with some reports written up as limericks. Thanks for suggesting yet another another alternative to productive work, Matt.

"It was Milton's Satan and Dante's Inferno that made them two of the most powerful Christian artists of all time. Because they understood evil and did not shrink from it, their depictions of goodness had power. In order to be redemptive, art has to convince us there is something real from which we need redeeming. | Conversely, much secular art in the last half-century illustrates confusion and pain brilliantly but provides no antidote." Eric Metaxas --To End All Christian FilmsChristianity Today)

Waking Ned Divine is a charming movie about a tiny Irish community that schemes to support a plot involving impersonating the dead winner of a lottery. While surfing around to find context for a posting on Richard Rorty, I came across this surprising article by Crystal Downing. Here's an exerpt:

"Rorty's neopragmatic ethic is grounded in "we-intentions": immorality is "the sort of thing we don't do"2?like defy the "intentions" of an entire village to share a dead man's lottery winnings. Of course, these weren't always the "we-intentions" of the community in Waking Ned Devine; the new solidarity of Tullymore is shaped by the two protagonists who see potential for positive change. Jackie and Michael thus illustrate Rorty's concept of irony: a force that brings into view the contingency of a community's vocabulary. Ironists prevent a community from stagnating or becoming legalistic, providing "new metaphors" for new contexts. A metaphor, of course, is when one object represents another: "My love is a red, red rose." In Waking Ned Devine, one person represents another: Michael O'Sullivan is Ned Devine, an incarnated metaphor that benefits the entire village." --Richard Rorty for the Silver Screen: Waking Ned DevineChristianity Today)

"The cost to burrow down is dropping, while the price (and hassle) of erecting a skyscraper in a dense urban area just keeps rising. The breakthrough comes thanks to tunneling technologies that are now being used on huge transportation projects, like Boston's Big Dig and Moscow's Lefortovo highway tunnel project. Over the next 10 years these techniques will be used to hollow out space beneath the world's great cities." [Elmer Rice's 1926 play The Subway prefigures some of these observations. Here's a passage from Technology in American Drama:

[The Subway] opens in a windowless office at the Subway Construction Company, which builds tunnels far below the ground and skyscrapers high above it.... The office manager, Bradley, who disapproves of the rose on Sophie'sdesk, is a committed futurist: ?The light is artificial and indirect. Its color and intensity have been determined by a long series of expert tests. It never varies: day and night, summer and winter, rain or shine, it is always the same; unvarying in its brightness and efficiency? (16). He praises a working scenario much like the one Tom Wingfield [the hero of The Glass Menagerie] finds unbearable and which social historian Lewis Mumford --Sub-Urban Renewal: Thanks to new tunneling technologies, real estate trends are down. Way down.Wired)

The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, 1961.] would later critique: "With air conditioning and all day fluorescent lighting, the internal spaces in the new American skyscraper are little different from what they would be a hundred feet below the surface. No extravagance in mechanical equipment is too great to produce this uniform internal environment: though the technical ingenuity spent on fabricating sealed in buildings cannot create the equivalent of an organic background for human functions and activities" (480?81).

See also the underground worker cities in Metropolis.

"Now that almost all of her books are out of print, however, she may be best known as the Doris Day character in the treacly 1960 film version of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, which erases Kerr's extraordinary literary career and morphs her into a home remodeling-obsessed, suburban stay-at-home mom. While the movie's producers may have been trying to streamline Kerr's discursive collection of essays into a standard-issue Hollywood plotline, the result completely misses the point of Kerr's work: She wrote about combining work and family at a time when that was still an unusual choice for an upper-middle-class mother." Elizabeth Austin --Giving Mirth [Appreciation of Jean Kerr]Washington Monthly)

"Time and again the public has shown its willingness to help produce happy endings. Citizens' use of the Amber Alert is credited with saving 47 kidnapped children. In its 15-year history, America's Most Wanted claims viewers have helped capture 746 criminals featured on the show. | Those successes aren't merely the result of miracles. They happen when an alert public gets clear and timely information."

--To Crack More Crimes, Arm Citizens with InformationUSA Today)

A feel-good essay for a jittery and weary nation. Information is powerful. Information in the hands of trained experts is more powerful. Information in the hands of armies of amateurs is more powerful still -- provided the experts have a good mechanism for filtering the good info from the bad. Police were slow to act on a tip provided by Elizabeth Smart's little sister (who witnessed the abduction and fingered a suspect). Shortly after they publicized the sister's info, they had their suspects and Elizabeth was back in her family's arms. In the Beltway sniper case, police didn't release their information about a burgundy sedan, and the public went wild chasing down white trucks. Shortly after the news about the burgundy sedan was leaked, the police had their suspects. But releasing information to the public has its downsides, too -- remember Richard Jewell, the security guard whom the media nearly crucified in connection with the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing in 1996.

"You've never seen anything like St. Patrick's for bringing the Irish out in people," said P.J. O'Doyle, owner and proprietor of O'Doyle's Pub in Pittsburgh. "For one magical night, all the wonderful things you hear in all the grand old stories come true: the glorious thirst for drink, the endless singing, the pining for the fields of lost Erin. And, of course, the inevitable rollicking donnybrook that ends with a beer glass getting smashed over some poor lad's head. It's possibly the most appalling display of seasonal ethnic conformity you're ever likely to see, and that's including Christmas Mass." --Irish-Americans Gear Up for "The Reinforcin' O' The Stereotypes"The Onion)

"The great majority of the readers who adore the warm and relaxing bath of their accustomed New Yorker were very upset by the 'shock treatment' of my covers. Those readers will feel more at ease with the calm and submissive New Yorker of the tradition which, since the 1920s, mixed intelligence, sophistication, snobbery, and complaisance with the status quo." Cartoonist Art Spiegelman slams the New Yorker after his departure. --Art Spiegelman, Cartoonist for The New Yorker, Resigns in Protest at CensorshipElectronicIraq.net)

Thanks, Jim. The quote above is from an "unoffical translation" of an interview published in Corriere della Sera (Milan).

"Phrases like the population bomb and the population explosion breed racism. Few Americans know that, on average, woman round the world have less than three children each. They don't breed like rabbits. And by 2050 a majority of the world's population will be likely to live in countries with fertility levels below what demographers regard as replacement levels. It all avoids looking at the real issues on our own doorstep - of over-consumption, for instance." Betsy Hartmann, interviewed by Fred Pearce

--The Greening of HateNew Scientist)

I've been a fan of the late economist Julian Simon for some time. Hartmann, as a radical feminist, agrees with some of Simon's philosophy, particularly the notion that more population does not equal poverty, since more population (under the right economic and social conditions) means more hands to work. It's impossible to tell from a printed transcript, but does Pearce seem... well, almost stunned when he asks Hartmann, "How can you be pro-choice and anti-population control?"

"Twenty Broadway theaters fell dark tonight, as more than 1,000 musicians and actors took up picket signs and went on strike to protest producers' attempts to reduce the minimum number of orchestra players at each musical.|From "Rent" to "The Producers" to "Chicago" to "Hairspray," the biggest moneymakers on Broadway closed down." Michael Powell and Christine Haughney --The Lights Go Out on BroadwayWashPost [resgistration; will expire])

"There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them?"

Here are Park's warning signs:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

Robert L. Park

--The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus ScienceChronicle)

Park omits a very important sign: The discoverer has a tendency to shake his fist and shout, "Fools! I shall crush them all!"