UPPER CLASS EUROPEAN LEADERS. The article by Elaine Sciolino (see today’s other post) has some wonderful observations on how startling it is for the French to have the change to Sarkozy from “the much older and more formal Chiracs, with their discretion, impeccable manners, old-fashioned style and easy slow motion.” Sciolino says that that the Sarkozys are criticized in the same terms that people had used for former Italian head of state Silvio Berlusconi.: “showy, vulgar, acquisitive, more nouveaux riche than old money.” The same attitudes show up in England. Margaret Thatcher was criticized because she bought her clothes off the rack—and sometimes at Marks and Spencer.
Archive for May, 2007
UPPER CLASS EUROPEAN LEADERS.
Thursday, May 31st, 2007TU AND VOUS.
Thursday, May 31st, 2007TU AND VOUS. Today’s New York Times has a good article by Elaine Sciolino on the cultural significance of the new French President Nicholas Sarkozy. The article gives an example of the gradual change toward informality in the French language. “Mr. Sarkozy uses the informal ‘tu’ instead of the formal ‘vous’ with colleagues and journalists alike. But two weeks ago, when Mr. Sarkozy addressed Alain Juppé, one of his senior ministers and a former prime minister in the formal Chirac era, with ‘tu’, Mr. Juppé seemed so flummoxed that he replied in a convoluted formulation, avoiding both ‘you’ forms.” Juppe is about ten years older than Sarkozy. In 1970, I had a friend, a young French woman (probably born in the same year as Juppe), who was a translator at the UN. She told me that she used “tu” with her colleagues at the UN, but that when her oldest childhood friend visited from France, they had been unable to bring themselves to use “tu” to each other.
GARBAGE CAN ISSUES—FURTHER APPLICATIONS
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007GARBAGE CAN ISSUES—FURTHER APPLICATIONS. The garbage can concept can help you sit through that painful committee meeting. Think how wonderful it is that there is this garbage can issue to keep these folks busy. Then the only hard part is getting through the discussion of the garbage can issue. The lesson is that if it weren’t for the garbage can issue, the people making those heated inconsequential arguments would be arguing anyway. but about issues of substance. I sometimes wonder about whether this kind of thinking is being used by professional politicians with certain public debates. Take, for example, confirmation hearings (to use a historical example, the lengthy debate when Eisenhower appointed Admiral Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce). The thinking of a President might include the thought that there are going to be adverse hearings on some subject; why not have the attention focus on this issue? I have to confess that there have been some public policy issues in the past where I have thought that the issue was not important, but that it served to keep a lot of people I tended to disagree with busy and out of trouble. You probably already think the same way from time to time, without calling it a garbage can issue.
GARBAGE CAN POLITICS AND FACULTY POLITICS.
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007GARBAGE CAN POLITICS AND FACULTY POLITICS. Years ago, I came across an article on what the authors called garbage can politics. I can’t find the article now, but Google lists a number of articles on “garbage cans”, which is evidently a term of art in political science. “Garbage cans” are organizations with a lot of opinionated voters and no political parties or other structure. Examples of a garbage can would be a college faculty or a typical committee. The article I have mentioned provided how-to guidance for a faculty dean dealing with a faculty committee. It said, imagine you are the dean of faculty. You have fifty or so egomaniacs who love to talk. You need a “garbage can issue.” Parking is always a good garbage can issue. Introduce it first, let everybody talk for two or three hours and then when almost everybody is tired and happy and goes home, you introduce topics like the budget and have your people primed to vote on them.
A PITFALL OF ARGUING WITH FRIENDS.
Monday, May 28th, 2007A PITFALL OF ARGUING WITH FRIENDS. Dick and Chris Weisfelder visited recently and after dinner Dick and I sat down to argue about politics. To our consternation, we kept stumbling into areas where we were in agreement. I think if we saw each other more often, we would be able to avoid subjects where we agree. Joe Foley and I used to argue regularly about whether inflation was good. He would point out that overly ambitious inflation-fighting policies increased unemployment and reduced growth over an economic cycle. I would argue that inflationary expectations were long lasting and that inflation interfered with the workings of the price system. Then one day we discovered that if we quantified our opinions, he would be willing to live with inflation of four per cent a year, whereas I would look to three per cent as the maximum (the discovery was over ten years ago and I imagine our numbers might be different today). This discovery brought an end to our arguments. Every so often, one of us would bring up the subject and the other would sadly point out that basically we were in agreement.
A NINETEENTH CENTURY ROMANCE.
Sunday, May 27th, 2007A NINETEENTH CENTURY ROMANCE. An article by David Bodanis in this weekend’s Financial Times told a romantic story about an inventor. Bodanis focused on the lessons the story gave on how to innovate, but he told the story movingly. In the late nineteenth century, a poor young immigrant, a teacher, traveled to Nantucket to ask for the hand in marriage of one of his students, a girl from a wealthy family. He was turned away, not even allowed in the house despite a drenching rain. He resolved to make a great invention that would make him rich. He made the invention and became rich. And the invention grew out of the time he had spent teaching his future wife. If I were telling this story at the dinner table, I would make my listeners guess the identity of the inventor, giving more clues along the way, in the fashion of Bill Stern, and “MR. PRESIDENT’ and Paul Harvey, radio programs I grew up with. But here the answer would appear as the next post above this one. The poor young man was Alexander Graham Bell. His love was one of the deaf students he tutored. One of his teaching techniques was to have his students touch their throats and then his, to feel from the vibrations how the sounds were produced. The key to Bell’s invention was the translation of the vibrations in a diaphragm into electrical signals.
MOE BERG.
Saturday, May 26th, 2007MOE BERG. Moe Berg was a good-field-no-hit catcher in the major leagues in the twenties and thirties, playing for several teams, including the White Sox. He was a lawyer and a linguist and knew a great many things, as described in this article, which includes the following summary of his baseball career: “’When told that Berg spoke seven languages, Senators’ outfielder Dave Harris replied, “Yeah. I know, and he can’t hit in any of them.’” Moe Berg joined the OSS during World War II. One of his assignments was to parachute into Yugoslavia and evaluate the resistance groups. Berg reported that Tito headed the strongest resistance group. In the latter part of World War II, “news about [Werner] Heisenberg giving a lecture in Zurich, Switzerland reached the OSS, and Berg was assigned the task of attending the lecture and determining ‘if anything Heisenberg said convinced him the Germans were close to a bomb.’ If Berg came to the conclusion that the Germans were close, he had orders to shoot Heisenberg.” Berg determined that there was no need to shoot Heisenberg.
THE GRAND PRIX SABOTEURS.
Saturday, May 26th, 2007THE GRAND PRIX SABOTEURS. This weekend’s Financial Times has a review by James Allen of THE GRAND PRIX SABOTEURS by Joe Saward. Grover Williams, an Englishman, won the first Grand Prix in Monte Carlo in 1929 in a Bugatti. In World War II Williams and Robert Benoist, another Grand Prix driver, became secret agents who sabotaged Nazi infrastructure in Paris. They died in a concentration camp. Allen says, “[Racing drivers] revel in the beauty—and brevity—of a life lived on the limit.”
EATING CICADAS.
Friday, May 25th, 2007EATING CICADAS. The seventeen-year cicadas are out in the Chicago area. I remember experiencing them in 1956 and 1990. The sheer number of them is thrilling. In 1990, a friend remarked that he had never seen such fat birds. This Yahoo article says that the Brookfield Zoo is feeding cicadas to the zoo animals. I recall a Wall Street Journal article that claimed that cicadas taste like a cross between an avocado and a raw potato. I have never investigated this.
DOES AMERICA NEED A QUEEN?
Friday, May 25th, 2007DOES AMERICA NEED A QUEEN? This question is asked from time to time by people who point out the practical advantages for the United Kingdom in having Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. The argument goes that the Queen and her family bear much of the burden of the ceremonial obligations that the President must perform in the United States. Nicholas Lemann in his review of the Reagan diaries says that, “The Presidency in Reagan’s hands seems almost boring: a ceaseless round of plane flights, official dinners, greetings proffered to groups of visitors, adjudication of squabbles among aides, and flattering phone calls to wavering members of Congress.” The official dinners and the groups of visitors are an important part of the job. I remember that it was Lemann who pointed out years ago that Clinton and Reagan were both extraordinarily good at entertaining visitors and putting them at ease. Lemann speculated that they had developed this talent because each had spent a lot of time in his youth with an alcoholic relative, and had become good at distracting visitors and averting embarrassing situations.
