The Silent Majority

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The Republican Party --or various constituents of it-- have frequently claimed to represent the majority of Americans. They claimed that
1. Most Americans were against equality of women. This is obviously false, since half the citizens of the US are women to begin with, and most women have hoped for equality of women. It is mathematically possible, even if a majority of women desired legislation that guaranteed equality, that they were a minority among all voters. But in my humble opinion, the vast majority of citizens are in favor of equal rights for women.

2. They claimed that most Americans were against government services such as public transport, public schools, student loans, public tv and radio, medicare, medicaid, and disaster relief. In the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary, it is hard to refute this. But I am firmly convinced that all these services are necessary, and welcome.
3. They claimed that the majority of Americans were against the separation of religion and government (Church and State). My belief is that a narrow majority is yet in favor of separation. However, religious hysteria seems to be on the rise, and it is possible that conservatives have so denigrated non-religious people that opinion is shifting the other way.

4. Some conservatives have claimed that they are sick of Evolution being taught in schools and that a majority of Americans would like "Creation Science" to be taught in schools. I think otherwise. I think that the states in the South have adopted Creationist "Science" because of the agitation of a minority.
5. Republicans have claimed that the majority of American citizens are against protection of the environment. There are many who mistakenly believe that opening up the wilderness for commercial exploitation will result in a bonanza for everyone. This is false. Big business is very adept at exploiting natural resources in such a way as to benefit only the stockholders. I live in a state where there is an upsurge in exploration for so-called Shale Gas. Shale gas is extracted using a highly pollutive procedure that releases vast amounts of toxic Rare Earth metals and other toxic organic compounds as by-products, not to mention deploying fleets of heavy vehicles that pollute the air, the ears, and destroy the roads, and destroy forests. But so far only people in the real estate business are profiting by the "Boom". And maybe truck-stops. They hire mostly workers from the oil states (Texas, Alaska, Louisiana), and a little of the money does flow down to workers in those states. The folks who owned the land now being exploited have got large sums of money. But they are a tiny minority.
6. Republicans have claimed that the vast majority of people are against gun control. Is this true? You tell me.

7. Republicans have claimed that the vast majority of people are against gay and lesbian marriage, and even against civil unions. Recently Starbucks is reported as having made a statement in support of equality for gays and lesbians. Let's see whether there is a backlash against Starbucks, or a huge wave of endorsement.

I honestly believe that there is a large majority of people who believe in liberal principles and objectives, but who are tired of arguing with conservatives and their slogans. This is regrettable, but I can see their point. I spend a lot of time trying to think through the possible advantages of permitting unrestricted gun ownership, for instance. (I have not found any.) But I doubt that those against gun control spend any time at all considering the positives of gun restriction. They treat each of their principles as if they were the doctrines of a religion, and not as a principle that flows from rational thinking.

On the plus side, President Obama can be guaranteed a second term if the silent majority votes. The difficulty is to get the vote out, given the miserable tone of the political discourse at the moment. I can just see Rush Limbaugh claiming that he was thrown off the air by liberal special interests. The conservative minority is adept at demonizing the reasonable majority.

I see that the tone of this post is taking an unfortunate turn towards the very thing I want to speak against, so I will stop now. The main thing is not to begin to believe that the noisy sounds coming out of Fox TV represents the majority. I'm sure it doesn't. But we will know only in November ...

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A Ton of Bach Music for a Dollar

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You might want to hurry on this: Amazon is offering a large volume of the music of J. S. Bach via download, for $0.99 just over the next few days.  The deal is called the Big Bach Set (follow the link) and it is, according to them, over 9 hours of music.

Today is the day that I celebrate as J. S. Bach's birthday; it is the day entered in the Baptismal Registry in the town church in which he was born (Eisenach, in Saxony). [Added later: it was yesterday, sorry! March 21st, the first day of Spring, according to Katie.] That same day was given different dates in different parts of the world, due to non-uniformity of calendar usage, and we would have considered it sometime in July, based on the time of year, and the angle of the sun. But that doesn't matter; I still celebrate March 21 of every year as Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday, and it makes me happy to do so. [I explain how March 21st happened to be so late in the summer in an earlier post.]

Oh, what wonderful pieces there are in this collection! Think carefully about the consequences of establishing a financial relationship with Amazon; this 99 cents will be the first 99 of many cents you will inevitably spend on Amazon purchases. (If I had never discovered this website, I would be a richer man today.) Still, this is one way of getting some really awesome music, which you could simply delete if it gets underfoot.

The first one I listened to is Dominus Deus, from the B minor mass. Gorgeous! (The link is to the teaser on Amazon.)

Next, the Concerto for 3 harpsichords. There is a reconstruction for three violins (possibly not included in this set); it is believed that Bach wrote a number of multi-instrument concertos in his youth, which he later re-wrote as keyboard concertos, because his sons were keyboardists. Bach himself was an all-rounder; we know he played viola, and very likely, viola da gamba, and, of course, the organ. Only the re-written keyboard concertos have survived.

If you happen to see a version of this concerto (BWV 1063) for flute, violin and oboe, snap it up; it is delightful! The contrast between the three instruments is fascinating.

The last movement from the Italian Concerto (just a solo piece for harpsichord) is a fast piece that is a wonderful, mad rush from beginning to end, but it builds the rhetoric of the music systematically, so that the delight of the listener simply cannot be held back. Andras Schiff plays this at a very reasonable speed (though it is marked Presto: very fast).

The famous French Suite in G has this rollicking jig as its last movement. It could make anyone want to dance.

Bach's grand Orchestral Suites (called Overtures in his time) were glorious responses to the music of Versailles. The second suite features the flute as a solo instrument; here's a clip from the Rondeau.

At one time, the most famous of Bach's works were the Brandenburg Concertos, written for the Duke of Brandenburg (Brandenburg is a small town near Berlin). It was a set of six concertos; apparently every composer composed a set of six concertos, which he gifted to some noble. The Concerto no. 5 is famous even among these, and was mentioned in the novel Love Story, which was a best seller in the seventies. It was subsequently made into a hit movie starring Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neil. This concerto established the harpsichord --which had up to this point been merely a background instrument-- as a solo instrument. All the other keyboard concertos we know now came after.

The famous Ave Maria (well, one of the famous Ave Marias) is a melody by Charles Gounod sung over a Prelude by Bach. (I read somewhere that it was a common exercise for students to write a melody over the Bach Prelude, so there must be other such pairings out there that nobody has ever heard). Here the melody is played on the violin.

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Bozoification of Education

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I am deeply sorry to witness the first steps towards accepting online courses being taken at my home institution.

At the moment, it is restricted to permitting students to take one course off-campus that uses an online delivery system, and up to four online courses to be accepted for transfer for a new student, if they have been taken elsewhere, and are acceptable otherwise. (The previous policy was no online courses, period.)

Is this going to be the thin end of the wedge, or is it going to stop here? Both situations are possible. Younger faculty joining the institution are often more rigid in their expectations, but surprisingly, also more likely to embrace methodology that could compromise standards. They're also more likely to subconsciously sympathize with a consumer attitude towards education ("we took their money, we owe them something, even if they're incompetent! We can't just flunk them!!").

I firmly believe that education should be free. But I think health care should be free, too, and look what happened to that idea! No; the US seems to be firmly entrenched in the idea that it should not be a utopia. Struggle is good.

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Bill Maher's "Religulous", and the Problem of Religion

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When I was a little kid, I was completely convinced that by the time I was 50, human stupidity would be naturally selected out, and the vast majority of people in the world would be very bright.

Somehow, it appears, we've managed to defeat the mechanisms of evolution, and people around us seem to be just as dull as ever, if not duller. Certainly if clinging to superstition is any measure of dullness, dullness is alive and well, even possibly on the rise.

We were recently watching Bill Maher's movie Religulous (2008), and I was stunned by the sheer gullibility of the people interviewed in the movie. In addition to the regular lay people (i.e, not clerics of any religion), there were also clergy. The remarks of the latter were also often confusing and confused. The exceptions were a couple of high-ranking Catholic clergy whose thoughts were very clear indeed. It all goes to show that the clarity of thought of the upper echelons of the Roman Catholic Church is in regrettable contrast to the muddy thinking of (some of) the Roman Catholic laity. In other words, it is not that the intelligentsia among the Catholic Clergy don't know any better; it must be that they think it not worth their while, or an exercise in futility, to attempt to demythologize their religion for the benefit of the masses.

Having said all that, and having acknowledged that some of Bill Maher's remarks (in the form of monologues, of course) are very insightful, I must say here that I was very unhappily amazed at the way in which Bill Maher baited some of his victims. Some of them were either charlatans or imbeciles; of course one would expect him to bait them. But others who were incapable of seeing the contradictions within their statements, to them we would expect him to make his point quickly, and cut away. But he (Bill Maher) stays with the interviewees, continuing to ridicule him or her.

In the photo at right, we see an actor who portrays Jesus in a theme park in Florida, called, I believe, the Holy Land Experience. The actor insisted on patiently trying to convince Bill Maher that he was wrong. Regrettably, Bill cut away from the interview without allowing "Jesus" to have the last word. This put me, at least, on the side of the interviewee, because it seems unfair to wield the advantage of having editorial control so heavy-handedly.

When Bill Maher interviewed islamic folks, it was most difficult to watch. The Islamic world, of course, is not as far along as the Christian World is, in terms of dealing with the extreme views of their respective holy books. It is much easier for Catholic philosophers to put the bellicose old-testament exhortations in perspective than it is for enlightened Islamists to do the same for fire and brimstone in the Koran. (Bill Maher was equally scornful of the obviously irrelevant parts of the Bible and the Koran, assuming that most Christians and most Muslims would be equally shocked at the idea of discarding even the most minute passage from their respective holy books. I believe, though, that the majority of Christians would reject the mythical parts of the Bible as being irrelevant to their "faith", and a significant minority of Islamists would do the same, understanding the greater importance of lasting principles vs. the lesser importance of instructions that had to be taken in historical context.)

Maher's main thesis throughout the movie was, very appropriately, the violence of religious extremists generally. Religious extremists have been responsible for some of the worst decisions that have ever been taken in history, counting both Christians and other religions. Even Nazism, Maher declares, could be considered a religion, and he gives his reasons.

Bill is thrown out of the Vatican (since he has, apparently, been black-listed by them for some years). His attitude towards Catholicism has been colored by many Sundays spent in Catholic Sunday-School, which he describes as hours and hours of boredom interspersed by moments of terror. But in the movie he manages to connect with a priest who is happy to join Bill in rejecting the most idiotic parts of typical Catholic behavior, such as the many layers of mediation between the believers and The Founder, e.g. saints, priests, the Virgin Mary, the Pope, and so on.

The most refreshingly reasonable of Bill Maher's interviews was conducted at a church for Truckers, where a half-dozen born-again truckers carefully explain to Bill why they believe what they do, and why he is to be pitied. These are big guys, and we heave a collective sigh of relief when Bill is mostly polite to them until he beats a hasty but dignified retreat.

Bill kept his most vicious attacks for Mormons and Scientology. His denunciation and ridicule of those sects was deservedly no-holds-barred. Two ex-Mormons said that for a Mormon, choosing to leave the religion was "social suicide". As far as I'm concerned, no words are too harsh for those belief systems, though of course there must be thousands of members of those sects who do not subscribe to the most ridiculous portions of their respective mythologies.

[Added later: oops; in the paragraph above, I'm confusing Scientology with Christian Science. They are not the same, though in my opinion both religions are misguided.]

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Decency in America: Hotels and Motels

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One thing most observant immigrants and visitors to America seem to agree on is that the behavior of citizens is extremely variable. Some are crass and inconsiderate, others are polite and considerate in the extreme. But there seems to be a weird tradition about how to conduct oneself in a motel or inn.

At least two friends have informed me that the thing to do in a hotel or motel is to leave one's room in a complete and filthy mess.  These were two entirely unrelated friends: one, a colleague from graduate school who tended to travel only professionally, and the other a very close friend from a family that one could only describe as civilized in the best sense. You were supposed to trash the place.

The reasons I was given by the two sources were a mixture of sensible and quite irrational.

A. You would be considered a provincial if you left the room clean. Only farm folk cleaned up after themselves.

B. The cleaning staff needed to know which items of linen had been soiled at the end of your stay.

C. The whole place was carefully cleaned after you leave: this was mandated by the hospitality and sanitation laws, so why bother?

D. A hotel or inn was one of the few places that you could make a mess in with impunity, so why not?

I had to smile to myself at reason A. The last category of people whom I could possibly have an interest of impressing with my non-farmliness would be hotel or motel staff. Whom was I impressing: the cleaning staff? The management? The front desk?? And why? Of course, when you're young, you want to impress everybody. But ... well, never mind.

Reasons B and C made some attempts to sound reasonable, but in the last analysis, they seem to be urban myths, or the sorts of rationalizations that adolescents would use. Adults really don't spend a lot of time thinking about their impact on places of commercial hospitality, and they go on autopilot, so these habits of conduct in inns and hotels are probably left over from their youth.

The fact is that at one time, hotel guests were civilized and considerate. Perhaps this was from a time when only the wealthy could afford to travel, and the wealthy employed servants at home, and were accustomed to treating them with decency even away from home. As travel became more affordable, a new class of hotel guest must have found some pleasure in vandalizing hotel rooms, and spread the myth that it was an actual requirement, in order to fully enjoy one's stay in the hotel, to leave a mess behind. Popular musicians of the mid century were notorious for leaving their hotel rooms in terrible condition, but popular musicians are often undisciplined and uncouth, and bad examples of conduct for anyone. (I'm a great admirer of some of the worst-behaved ones, but I wouldn't emulate their hotel behavior.)

Look around you at the motels and inns that spring up like mushrooms. In contrast to old, established turn-of-the-century establishments built of stone and marble and brick, these places are intended to be used like shoes: they have a finite lifetime, during which they will be trashed by waves of guests. At first, while they were still charging top dollar, they would be regularly repaired and maintained by professional builders and craftsmen. The value of the property is based mostly on superficial things, such as the decor, the rugs and the wallpaper, and the veneer on the counters, and the haughty attitude of the front desk staff would reflect this. As the cost of a room stays around $200 a night, the efforts to clean the rugs and the drapes is considerable.

As the property ages, it is sold off to a medium-grade hotel chain, which would employ people of lesser talent and qualification both to staff the place, and to maintain and repair it. The rugs and drapes are cleaned less frequently, the plumbing left to its own devices, especially if all the rooms are never filled most of the year, and guests can be assigned any remaining functional rooms, until eventually all the rooms are in need of repair.

 

I believe this is actually not a view of a location in the USA

After a decade or two, I suppose, the buildings are sold to investors who focus on extracting the last penny of profit from the place, before it is handed over to the arsonists. Smokers and bums are permitted to stay in them for long stretches of time, and eventually the property is razed to the ground, to make space for a parking lot.  In my mind, hotels and motels in strip malls represent the worst aspects of suburban sprawl.


Is it impossible to go back to building something to last: a concrete or brick building that could last several decades? No, because modern standards of profitability dictate that the hotels and inns must be built precisely where they can attract the greatest number of guests of the highest strata of society, and it is difficult to decide on suitable locations once and for all. One location would work for a few years, and then lose its shine. So you want to build your motel to last, say, about four years, and no longer. It's planned obsolescence, really, one of the worst ideas that ever wafted over the soon-to-be-blighted landscape of America.

It is peculiar to regard a motel or hotel as a consumer item. It is as though these places are constructed to be slowly destroyed, rather than to endure. A lot of things we use are disposable, and I deplore the fact. Ballpoint pens, razors, carpet slippers, soda and water bottles: the list is endless. And now motels are on the list.

These are the mindsets that have to change, if this society isn't to blight itself to death.

[Added later:
Now it is common to find little notices in hotel rooms such as:
"Please help to save our Planet; if you can re-use your linen, please do so, and save many gallons of water. Place towels you cannot use again on the floor; if you can re-use a towel, hang it up. ..."

This seems a good idea, generally. I wonder why it should require so much more water to launder 100 towels rather than 50, but it is probably a matter of saving energy and costs as well.

In my youth, I was accustomed to showering before I climbed into bed, simply because I had to do my own laundry, and showering beforehand lengthened the number of days the same linen would serve before it needed to be laundered. The people of today palm off laundering linen to their parents first off, and then consider themselves too tired to shower at the end of the day, and do it in the morning. Bed linen, as a result, tends to get soiled very rapidly. It is easy to see how this habit would result in very little likelihood that hotel linen can be used without laundering for more than a single night.

To summarize, personal habits of people are possibly migrating towards habits that are more harmful to the environment. To reverse this trend, reasonable kids of reasonable parents can probably be steered towards routines which, in later life, are conducive to less environmental impact.

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Who are the people in your Neighborhood?

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When the USA entered World War 2 (encouraged by Pearl Harbor), it was the end of US isolationism. (You can read all about the philosophical bases of this particular attitude towards foreign policy: look under the Monroe Doctrine.) But the American involvement in World War 2 had its social implications too; after the War, Europe was no longer a mysterious place where only the elite dared to go.

It seems to me that it was very much as though The United States of America grew up, and went to College. We met different people, and we were no longer dominated by the world view of our Parents. Blacks and Native Americans, Hispanics and other non-white minorities looked more like human beings, just as if we had met and gotten to know them in College. It seemed possible to get some wisdom from those who did not wear the traditional face of wisdom, namely white Europeans.

Interestingly enough, Sesame Street went on the air, and within a decade or so, our kids were listening to a song: Who are the people in your neighborhood? It's the people that you meet, when you walk along the street! The conservatives of today would view that song as subversive in the extreme. It encouraged little kids to regard people who appeared to be aliens as actually their neighbors. A neighbor is someone with whom you share a vested interest: an interest in your neighborhood.

Hillary Clinton boldly declared this vision: there are certain things that must be approached communally. The list was far larger than any fiscal conservative could tolerate: Education, Housing, Health, Aging, Transportation. No, no; just Defense and Highways, people; everything else has to be privatized! Are you crazy?

This is probably still the battlefront between the haves, and the have-nots, including all liberals of any level of income: our neighborhood is much larger. We're not really happy with the gun-owning, bible-thumping, gas-guzzling guys in the big house up the street, but he's in our neighborhood too. He thinks he's a one-man neighborhood all by himself, but if tuition costs go up much higher, he's going to have to beg to get into our neighborhood, and of course we're going to let him in.

The amazing thing is that a good many economic elitists out there heard this very song in their young days. But it is much harder for people who either have large incomes, or dream of them every night, to enter the mindset of our Neighborhood than it is for a Camel to go through the eye of the proverbial Needle.

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College Students Critique Lectures

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College is not for everybody.  Some colleges aren't any good for anybody.  No college is good for everybody.  When lots of kids are railroaded to college, this is what happens.  Kids end up wanting to be entertained in college.  They think their professors should be Jerry Seinfeld, or whatever funny guy or gal the kids watch these days.

I was incited to write this post by this article that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which referred to a video on YouTube.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum and Mit Romney ridicule President Obama for suggesting that most students should go into higher education (even if not traditional college).  Their point was that we must dignify all occupations, so that students who take on jobs that are currently considered undesirable will not feel looked down upon.  It seems to me that this would only happen if all jobs provide the same pay.  Conservatives, of course, are the last ones to look favorably on such a situation.

Nor would a conservative be happy paying big money to people such as, to take a random example, a store clerk, who has little higher education.  (These days many store clerks would have at least a bachelor's degree.)  Why?  because that would result in higher prices for consumer goods.

[It is right that society rediscovers the dignity of labor.  But it seems unfair to doom some citizens to low-income or low-satisfaction jobs based on their limited education.  This condemns both the worker and the job, because the job comes to be associated with people of low intelligence or low scholastic achievement, at the very least.  It seems more reasonable to me that people be given incentives to take on (presently) unpopular jobs on a part-time basis, or during a period of community service.  No job should be so terrible that it cannot be done for a brief stint.]

But what about this business about college professors not being sufficiently entertaining?

There seem to be two schools of thinking about this.

The Archimedes school of thinking goes as follows.  You're in college to educate yourself.  College is a place in which you can learn things, but no one is going to stuff your head with education while you relax and are entertained.  You've got to stuff your own head with the information.  What is the professor paid to do?  She is there to arrange for you to know what information is out there, to help connect the information and the reasoning together.  But not to do it for you.  So why should you pay big money for someone who is not going to do the learning for you?  I don't have an answer.  Society wants you to be educated, and so society should pay for it.  I don't think education is a consumer item.

The other school of thought is that it is indeed the professor's job to make the subject interesting.  If the professor can't do that, he should give up the profession, and allow someone more entertaining to take his or her place.  Unfortunately, the expectation of students tends to escalate, and there's no satisfying a student who has had a sequence of entertaining professors in the past.  You've gotta come on like Crazy Eddie, or junior is going to be bored.  I, even I have been accused of being too entertaining.  But I draw the line at a certain level of entertainment.  I make a joke or two, intersperse a set of difficult example with a little levity, but we grind on.  I get the students to go to the blackboard to work out examples, so that the class doesn't go to sleep.  I do make everyone move to the front of the class (so that all the empty seats are at the rear).  But that's about all I do.  I seldom or never use PowerPoint, unless there's an image or a diagram that I want the class to see.

Having said that ...
I have to confess that really terrible instructors --who are more likely to be teaching in institutions that have great difficulty in finding staff-- can use PowerPoint presentations as a crutch.

Even given the fact that faculty by and large reject the notion that it is their responsibility that the students should learn the material, faculty do feel that it is their duty to their subject to persuade the interested student of the value and the fascination of the topic that is being presented.  A professor of literature is either in that occupation because he or she loves literature, or because they're unable to find anything better to do.  It is an unfortunate school indeed that is the home for the latter.  But it is just a little unrealistic to expect that, if you put a mass of text on a slide and put it up on the screen, that the material will speak for itself.  Occasionally, it will.  Usually, it will not.

Often a professor will merely show a famous person explaining a topic on YouTube.  It seems somewhat crass, however, to expect that your entire series of lectures should be a sequence of YouTube clips.  The temptation in the social sciences is great, to outsource your entire course to YouTube, or a series of video clips from any source.  Many institutions, such as MIT, have put entire lecture series on the Web, and it is possible for the interested student to learn from these videos.  But then, what you have is distance learning.  The jury on distance-learning for undergraduates is still out.  However, some experts advocate using what is called blended learning, which is a combination of web-based or video-based learning, with face-to-face teaching.

A colleague of mine uses PowerPoint heavily.  But his slides have many blanks, which the students must fill in.  He hands out his slides, with the blanks, and as they go through the lesson, the students fill them in.  This keeps them minimally engaged, and provides opportunities for questions.  Questions form a great nucleus for real learning.

However, PowerPoint is most useful for pictorial or graphical information.  If your point requires a pictorial reinforcement, it is criminal not to present it!  So there are things that you should not do in PowerPoint (or equivalent presentation software, such as OpenOffice), and there are things that make great sense to do in that way.

So, I guess I'm saying that entertainment in class is not an entitlement.  Professors are allowed to be boring to anyone who has no business being in their class.  Sometimes a topic is just over your head, and you won't find the topic fascinating.  If you're held in thrall despite your unpreparedness, it is only delaying the inevitable moment when you should depart.  Sometimes a topic is too simple for a student, and boredom is unavoidable.  I don't know how to deal with that situation; evidently someone has decided you have to be bored in that class, and there's no help for it.

But some people are bored no matter where they go.  As a society, we should give these people an income, and keep them out of our hair.  Or there's always the Army, though they probably don't like wet blankets there, either!

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Gawrsh!

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11180 people have looked at this blog.  I don't know that many people!!!  I'd better be careful ...