Martin C. Winer

Film Review of “Babel” — Spoiler Warning (however this movie was written spoiled)

– An alternative view

Biblically, Genesis Chap 11 tells of the story of humans who sought to build the tower of Babel such that they could reach God. God then responds by confounding their speech and understanding of one another and spreading them all over the world. This is the Genesis account for the origin of religions and races.

If the movie “Babel” has anything to do with its biblical namesake, in this case, God makes all the people of the earth extremely stupid. First we start with a couple in marital trouble as a result of the recent death of one of their newborn, likely from SIDS. This brainy couple decides to take a trip to Morroco (without the remaining kids) to solve their problems: stupid.

Compounding this stupidity, a Morrocan father procures a rifle to help rid his flocks of jackals. He gives the rifle to his stupid young children who decide to test the efficacy of the weapon on passing tourist busses. On this bus is? Yup you guessed it, the stupid couple with marital troubles. Who gets shot? You guessed it, the wife from this couple. Now some would look upon this as an artistic study of cause and effect. I look on it more simply: Stupid people shooting at stupid people is simply natural selection at its finest.

But wait, one would think this expose of stupidity would suffice for a two hour and twenty minute film, but there are more stupid entaglements. The rifle was originally given to a local Morrocan by a Japanese hunter. This Japanese man recently had his wife commit suicide and he stupidly leaves his younger (deaf and mute) daughter alone for great spells of time such that she needs to compensate by seeking sex from any and every available male. In the films most unbelievable stroke, she fails on every attempt. I have the fortune of living in a male body and as such am qualified to inform you that this would never occur.

But wait again, there’s still another stupid entaglement. The housekeeper of the stupid maritally challenged couple has a wedding to attend in Mexico. She was originally promised the day off, but upon hearing of the tragic string of events which happened to her stupid employers, she’s informed that she won’t be able to get that day off. What follows is a screenplay that could be accomplished by going to Taco Bell and using 8.5″ x 11″ stock as toilet paper to clean up.

She takes the kids, American citizens, into Mexico with her. The kids experience the cultural diversity of a Mexican wedding, at first seeming to enjoy it. Things go awry when stupid people allow a drunk driver to drive the kids and Nanny back to San Diego. The rest is just too hard to believe; first that it could actually happen and next that the screen writer wrote it. The driver is hassled at the border. He panics and runs the border with the police hot on his tail. He abandons the children and the Nanny in the desert with promises to return. (He was likely fleeing the scene of a crime in screen writing.) The Nanny and children are left to fend for themselves in the desert when he never returns. Eventually they are picked up by the border patrol and the children are returned unharmed, and the Nanny is deported. I am a critic of US Immigration Policy, however, not in this case.

In the end Babel is an example of Oscar seeking formulaic writing. The formula is simple: create an appearance of meaning, when, in fact, there is none. In so doing, you automatically embarass any critics of the film by allowing the argument that they are simply dullards who can’t grasp the great meaning of the film. The truth is far more simple in this case: Stupid people understand stupid people very well and are able to write a painful two hour and twenty minute discertation on the interactions of stupidity.

If you starve two patients, and only one develops an infection, one would still typically cite the bacteria and the starvation as (probable) causes of the infection.  Margaret Macmillan looks at this scenario strangely in that she infers that because only one patient developed a bacterial infection, the cause is solely the bacteria and not the starvation.

Margaret Macmillan is not writing about pathology hower, but the history of  international relationships at its greatest defining moment Paris 1919, the Treaty of Versailles. 

It has been commonly held that the harshness of the reparations exacted upon the Germans laid the grounds for Hitler’s rise and WWII.  Macmillan sites other historical examples of harsh reparations — such as those after the Franco-Prussian war – which didn’t lead to despotic reigns.  To my way of thinking her logic is like the smoking lobby gathering together 90 year old smokers to prove that smoking is harmless.

This flaw aside, Paris 1919 – the documentary (based on Macmillan’s book) should be required reading (viewing)  for anyone interested in history, war and peace, or international affairs.

It airs Wed Nov 11 @ 9PM on TVO followed by an interview of Margaret Macmillan by Allan Gregg

Paris 1919 on TVO:
http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?b?3003401257991231000

Margaret MacMillan interviewd by Allen Gregg:
http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?b?8587281257996911000

Paris 1919 Book:
http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780375760525

(Honest Title) Why Men Don’t Like Chick Flicks

(For those politically minded) Why Men Don’t Like Female Centric Films

(For those with a penchant for subtlety) Why Men Don’t like Baby Bird Films A Case Study : ‘Notting Hill’

1) Plot inconsistencies. The plot in all female centric movies seems to center around prolonging a certain romantic uncertainty. This is usually done at the expense of logic. There are two good examples of this in Notting Hill:

i) William (Hugh Grant) goes out in the morning to find a frenzy of Paparazzi outside his door. He knows this will upset his actress girlfriend Anna (Julia Roberts) but only mentions ‘don’t ask’ when she asks him what’s going on outside. He lets her walk outside and be confronted by the same Paparazzi. This, of course, upsets Anna who wrongly accuses him of summoning the Paparazzi and causes a ‘break up’. This, in turn, provides Hugh Grant a grand opportunity to apologize (despite his innocence), setting the female audience swooning and the male audience hurling.

ii) William goes on a movie set where Anna is being filmed where she greets him warmly and intimates that she’d consider getting back together. Unfortunately, she’s just in the middle of a shoot so she walks off to film a scene and William is provided with a headset to hear what is going on unbeknownst to Anna. While casually preparing for the scene, a fellow actor asks Anna: ‘Who was that rather difficult chap (referring to Grant) you were talking to on the way up?’ Anna replies: ‘Oh… no one… no one. Just some… guy from the past. I don’t know what he’s doing here. Bit of an awkward situation.’ Grant reacts negatively and leaves. When Grant asks her later as to why she would say such a thing, she dismisses it as: ‘You expect me to tell the truth about my life to the most indiscreet man in England?’ This is an example of terrible writing where the writers dig themselves out of a whole by floating to the top in syrup. Why didn’t she just answer the fellow actor with ‘He’s a friend’ and leave it at that? Why does Grant have to put up with such behaviour and accept such lame excuses? Of course, in tradition with all Grant films, he accepts the explanation and leads up to:

2) The grand apology. It seems a new trend in the effeminized America to have the leading male prancing around apologizing. In every Grant movie there is a huge apology where he apologizes to some horribly behaved woman to get her love. Watching Grant wince his eyes and beg forgiveness having committed no wrong, aside from his selection in screenplays, is like fingernails on the chalkboard for the male audience. Ross (from Friends) and Grant (in every movie) always apologize for no apparent reason, and in fact, often apologize for not apologizing. Perhaps the only real apology in such films should be an on screen cameo by the screenplay writers apologizing for overly syrupy content. Looking at the movie script: http://www.juliaroberts.de/script2.htm, Men apologize some 23 times compared to 8 times for their female counterparts. The male lead Grant apologizes some 12 times, compared to Julia Roberts apologizing a mere 3 times. Somewhere around the 10th apology, women in the audience are becoming enraptured while their male counterparts are wondering when the next episode in the Star Wars saga will premier so they can watch a movie where men can proudly wield their light sabers and offer no apology in so doing.

The State of The Union – As Seen on TV
Martin C. Winer

But first a word about how this article was written:  This article was the result of a ‘cluster’ or a free-word association.  This is an exercise which is meant to use the ‘right brain’ to spur creativity and generate writing topics.  You can create your own clusters or bubbles here: http://www.bubbl.us/ but it’s best to do them with pen and paper since one tends to self edit when typing.  Each word you see italicized below is from the cluster.  Usually, the idea is to take one theme from the cluster and write about it.  I thought it would be a challenge to include ALL the words and still have the article tell a cohesive story.   Read the article, taking note of the italicized words.  Then see the cluster below.

I have been worried about the state of the world as of late.  Being recently unemployed with no meaningful job on the horizon, I was wondering when I’d be returning to the 9-5 lifestyle.  It’s not that I ravish 9-5, as Dolly Parton’s famous song correctly puts it, 9-5 is all “takin and no giving” but it beats aimlessly strolling on sidewalks waiting for a direction to unfold.  Up until recently I was a member of the over 30 and unmarried class.  Fortune changes quickly and I now find myself suddenly being married with children.  The responsibilities are understandably far different.  Curious as to what direction my life would take over the next months and years, I turned on the familiar glowing oracle fitted in every living room, the television.

While I waited for my big screen TV, a vestige of my former employed self, to come to life, I recalled that a comic had mentioned that Dolly Parton had insured her breasts.  I wondered if the comic was putting us on, as he was apt to do.  Would an insurance company take premiums for such a ridiculous item?  What was the counterparty risk?  Were her breasts in good hands with Allstate (TM)?  The TV came to life with the evening news reporting of another hemorrhage on Wall Street of 213 ethereal points, with AIG requesting more bailout money.  Evidently, indeed, insurance companies would take premiums on just about anything and the only boobs in the interaction were the policy holders who actually thought the policy was worth something.  Bored with the evening news I changed the channel.

Dick Cheney was on “State of the Union” with John King on CNN.  Cheney, a bastion of the old guard was set to be ‘grilled’ by King as to the sins of his administration.  I flipped right past the interview because I knew it could not yield the satisfaction I was seeking.  Waterboarding and assassination squads would be second nature to a man like Cheney who shot his hunting partner in the face.  Waterboarding I imagined was just his technique for cleaning his felled game, human or otherwise.  I wasn’t interested in the past, I was curious to know what my future held.

There was an infomercial on with 90 year old Jack Lalanne sporting his leisure suit and his juicer.  I am a late night TV watcher and infomercials plague the airwaves from dusk ‘til dawn.  Jack Lalanne was born in 1914 and looked to be in better health than myself all thanks to his 1/2 horsepower juicer.  In went an orange, apple, and every other healthy fruit your mother tried to get you to eat as a child.  Out poured a fountain of youth which had purportedly kept Lalanne in such great shape over these many years, yet somehow, it hadn’t managed to save his fashion sense.  The leisure suit was last popular when the juice on everyone’s lips was Juice Newton, “Grease” was the new movie and disco was still in style.  I was intrigued with the notion of extended life and wondered if indeed Lalanne’s juicer could provide it.  Even if it could, what would my life be like, aged 90+ years drinking fruit and vegetables all day?  Would my life be fulfilling?  I changed the channel seeking an answer from the glowing oracle of TV.

The next infomercial was for Extenz tablets; an all natural ‘Male Enhancement’.  Well this held some promise now didn’t it?  At least my latter years could be herbally augmented with extra length and girth.  But just what were these pills I thought to myself?  “An all natural male enhancement?” I wondered to myself.  Didn’t we already have such a thing in Dolly Parton?  What were these herbs and how were they discovered?  Did someone eat a salad with wild herbs one night with shocking results in the bedroom?  How did they then suspect the salad and not anything else?  My mind was awash with questions and I wasn’t much in the thinking mood.  I wanted answers, not questions.  Come on oracle of television, what would my life be like?  The only effort I was willing to exert was in flipping channels.

Yet as I flipped there were a plethora of Viagra and its new copy Cialis ads.  Was the television intimating that my future would need these?  A Viagra ad promised that at age 50 I could trade in my sedan for a Harley Davidson and with one pill have the vigor of a 20 year old.  A Cialis ad promised 36 hour or daily dosing options to make sure I would be able to respond when the mood was right.  If I was as old as Jack Lalanne, would my wife still be ready for me?  I’d be worried about breaking bones at that age.  Another flip would quell that fear.

Once a month Boniva would rebuild my wife’s bones without the need to remember a weekly pill.  There would be no need to take those chalky calcium pills once a day.  Of course memory at that age will be compromised so the once a month dosing is ideal.  Side effects could include liver and kidney disease but at least you would only have to endure them once a month.  God bless Big Pharma.  I could have a once a day boner and my wife could have healthy bones all month.  I was comforted that the future would be bright.  My comfort was not long lasting, at least not as long lasting as 36 hour Cialis promised to be, when it occurred to me that Big Pharma was suffering from a horrible case of misplaced priorities.  With all of their attention focused on bones and boners, they had dropped the two big balls of cancer and heart disease.  I curiously imagined a big Pharma strategizing kick off meeting with people brainstorming on new drug targets and somehow bones and boners getting to the top of the list over cancer and heart disease.  I only hoped that Jack Lalanne’s fountain of youth Juice could get my wife and I past those two roadblocks.

I calmed myself thinking that my 90th year was well off, I being only 35 now.  Big Pharma had time to readjust their priorities.  I continued my flipping to discover yet another Big Pharma commercial for Requip, a medication for Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS).  My legs were perfectly atrophied into their TV watching position.  I didn’t believe that such a condition could occur.  “My doctor said ‘Requip’” said the announcer as a television doctor mouthed “Requip”.  I imagined that the doctor mouthed “bullsh*t” in response to the patients complaint.  [0u92R90U R ‘ jixz-]0039;ffaS980059-09ATRE MT3.  Oops, I’m ever so sorry about that previous mess, you see my arms tend to spontaneously move uncontrollably every so often…  Oh my, could it be I have Restless Arms Syndrome (RAS)?  Well at least I know that Big Pharma is on the case.  Perhaps if I ingest Requip while standing on my head, the medication will settle in the appropriate appendages?  Parenthetically I wonder if all Requip contains is a bottle of gel caps filled with Brandy?  All it seemed Big Pharma could do for me in my latter years was give calm legs and arms and a rock hard erection.  The Viagra commercial warned that any erection lasting over 4 hours constituted a medical risk and thus I knew my fulfillment from Big Pharma would leave me with 20 remaining hours in the day to fill with what?  What would I do?  I looked to the financial stations to see if I had any prospect of finding a job.

CNBC was heralding the success of the latest Apple Computer quarterly results.  The IPhone and the IPod were unrelenting successes.  The host discussed the failing health of Steve Jobs as a concern for the future of the company and since we now know all that Big Pharma is good for, the concern is justified.  I myself am not a gadget freak.  I often mockingly eye people walking down the street sweaty palmed typing at lunatic speeds on their Palm, Blackberry or blueberry or whatever the latest berry is.  I have no need to be so totally connected, but evidently there is a huge market for these devices.  Just the same I was delighted to see the success of Apple whose Macintosh computer was, in my mind, the superior computer in 1985.  Bill Gates was the smarter CEO, not the better innovator.  Steve Jobs didn’t allow clones of Macintosh’s while Gates allowed clones of the PC.  As a result Apple’s market share fell like Newton’s apple under newly discovered gravity.  With all the discussion of executive compensation these days, I think Steve Jobs deserves the lion’s share of the reward when it comes to innovation.  The IPod is simple to use media device which takes advantage of the recent wave of music piracy and MP3’s that puts the tale of the Maersk Alabama to shame.  Now don’t get me wrong, copyright infringement was not created by Jobs, he only capitalized on it.  The IPhone is the next logical extension of a handheld computing device incorporating maps, navigation and a whole host of other useful features we come to expect from Apple.  The Macintosh, the IMac as it’s now called, is gaining market share in leaps and bounds.  I guessed that I had attained some inspiration from the glowing oracle;  perseverance, like that of Steve Jobs in the face of constant opposition and I too could one day go on to innovate a pile of handheld devices – or something like that.  Of course this special was being aired on CNBC the so called financial news network that managed to complete miss any predictions of the financial collapse which had claimed my job.  I wasn’t about to take any advice from them.  No, the Corruption National Broadcasting System as I had renamed them would have to find another mark. I dismissed them with a flip of the channel.

The Cheney Interview was over on CNN and now Anderson Cooper on A.C. 360 was sporting a pie chart showing the distributions of the American reinvestment Plan.  There were huge allotments for infrastructure building projects.  A clip revealed workers building bridges all over the country.  Wasn’t it another Democratic president who wanted to build a bridge to the 21st century?  Now are we building bridges out of Chapter 11?  There was discussion of incentives to homeowners to renovate and rejuvenate their properties.  I thought of stopping in at Home Depot but immediately balked because the 27 minute hand waving discussion with 17 year old ‘Skippy’ who works there never seems to get me the results I want.  For all the talk of hope and economic plans CNN was pushing out, I knew that the recession was receding faster than Dick Cheney’s hairline.

Rembrant - Raising of Lazarus

Then they aired a clip of the master of hope: President Obama.  “America has been great and shall rise to be great again” he prophesized.  I thought this had a familiar tone.  I quickly switched to the Catholic Television Service and the pastor proudly boomed “and the phoenix shall rise out of the ashes just as Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.”  The pastor went on to solicit donations for a new building project.  This also had familiar overtones and I flipped back quickly to CNN.  “It will take considerable investment from us all but we shall rebuild and come back stronger” proudly acclaimed Obama.  It then occurred to me that Obama was more than just a President, he was our primary minister.  He then intimated at his plan to remove toxic assets from the books of the banks without providing the necessary details I was looking for; undoubtedly he would turn water into wine.  The rhetoric of hope was overflowing my ears and I needed a counter position to ground myself again.  Luckily there was the FOX network who was lambasting Obama as the bane of humanity whose short stint in office had already thrown the economy into apocalypse from which only a miracle could now save us.

Putin and other former Soviet interviewees were quoted as saying that the end of capitalism has finally come.  A commentator remarked: “the American dream of picket fences has been replaced by picket lines” as the video showed protesting auto workers.  Am auto worker protested: “The companies are trying to divide and conquer us, taking advantage of this downturn to cut our benefits and pay.  I say enough taxing the middle class!”  Cheers and hurrahs followed.  My brain was like a pair of Levi’s jeans iconically being pulled by these two polarized stations in opposite directions, at the risk of ripping.  There had to be some truth on the glowing oracle of television.  PBS I thought to myself quickly.  That will save me.

Jim Lehrer

(Ed. Note: Actually it’s IOWA that is ok with Gay Rights, not Oklahoma.  In my cluster, I confused the two, but I went with it because the challenge was to write an article using all the clustered words.  I was only off by a 10 hour drive anyways.    )

Public Broadcasting, publicly funded and publicly ignored in favour of watching MTV to hear if Britney Spears of Lindsay Lohan were wearing underwear today.  Today Jim Lehrer was discussing the state of Gay Rights.  Evidently in Ahnold’s (sic) California the rights of gays have been ‘terminated’.   Ironically, Oklahoma seems “Ok” with gay marriage.  Is that what the song “Oklahoma, OK” is about from the musical Oklahoma?  The world seemed upside down.  Had I inverted myself such that Requip went to my arms and forgot about it?  Oklahoma was a place where I expected politicians to spout the bible about ‘being Fruitful and multiplying’ and how homosexuality was unnatural.  In liberal California, I expect them to say anything goes, from Gay Rights to cloning dolly the sheep.  After all doesn’t Hotel California by the Eagles promise “Plenty of room at the Hotel California / Any time of year, you can find it here”?  I couldn’t make sense of my world.  I was about as comfortable as a man swimming in itchy wool trunks.  I needed to flip the channel quickly.

Kim Kardashian

Chicks Who Love Guns

Up next was a documentary “American Justice” revisiting the O.J. Simpson trial.  It brought back names like Mezza Luna, Nicole Brown, Robert Kardashian, Kim Kardashian… whoops my mind wandered.  Robert Kardashian had helped set a murderer free but brought us Kim Kardashian.  Now they say justice should be blind, but have you seen Kim Kardashian?  He was off the hook in my books but the rest of the characters who let O.J. go were open to attack in my imagination.  I recast the events of that fateful night as a Quentin Tarantino movie.  I’d have my justice, if only in my imagination.  Nicole Brown would now be Jackie Brown.  She would seductively seduce O.J. by dancing for him like Salma Hayek in Tarantino’s “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn”.  She’d then immediately turn into a vampire and eat him alive.  Next, Travolta and Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction would show up and after quoting Ezekiel 25:17 would lace into the O.J. lawyers.  Finally the women from “Chicks who love Guns” as seen in Jackie Brown, armed with the AK-47 and they would deal with every “mother [t]ucker” in the jury room.  Returning from my daydream I realized that 10 years had passed and there was no justice to be spoken of.  The only thing I had learned from the episode was that justice is a function of wealth and that O.J. stood for Orenthall James, not Orange Juice.  I’m not admitting I was that stupid however, I’m about to write another article: “If I was that stupid, here’s how I’d admit it.”

I knew how the O.J. saga ended so I flipped again to see what else was on the glowing oracle.  John Sebastian crooned “Welcome Back, to the same old place where you started from…”  It was a rerun of Welcome Back Kotter.  Truly, I was basically back where I had started from, only an hour of flipping elapsed.  I knew nothing more of the future than when I started.  Sure I knew that my bones and boners would be safe, boobs could be insured, and that if I worked very hard, I might find a job.  But I was looking for important answers to important questions like, what would justice be like in the future?  What would the economy be like?  I was sure that Kotter’s Vinni Barbarino wasn’t going to be able to answer my questions.  With that, I turned off the glowing oracle for the night.

‘Apple’ cluster which generated the article.

This is the free word association (or cluster, or bubble) which generated the article.  Again, each italicized above came from the cluster below.

Many discuss, argue and berate the contents of the big three religious texts: the Quran, The Old Testament and The New Testament.  Discussions have been going on for millenia about what is contained therein.  I’ve been more interested, indeed dismayed, by what is missing.  These books are held to be the writ word of God by the adherents of their respective faiths.  Now, if God be the author of these texts, I wonder how it was possible to omit some critical information.

Slavery:  All the aforementioned texts allow slavery.  Sure, they may put limits on it.  They may even dictate humane ways to treat your slaves, but slaves be they just the same.  It was humans, noble humans at least, that put a stop to the practice only not so long ago.  All of humanity has been enriched by the emancipation.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Environment:  “Be fruitful and multiply” the Lord of the Old and New Testament declares boldly.  But what of population control?  What of greenhouse gasses?  The Old Testament contains passages urging the ancient Israelites to bury their excrement outside of the camp to keep the place clean.  But what of the future generations?  Religious texts are supposed to be written for all generations.  Otherwise why should we at a later generation be compelled to abide by them?  So true, at the time of their writing, there was no concern for population control or emission of greenhouse gasses, but there would be for future generations.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Democracy:  Democracy isn’t the perfect solution; far from it.  Just the same it’s far better than any other system that’s come along so far.  Moreover democracies are largely peaceful compared to their predecessors.  So why then is there no mention of it in any of the religious texts?  Why is it a Hellenic invention?  Centuries of warfare might have been averted had democracy taken an earlier hold which it certainly would have if it were sanctioned by the big three religious texts.  Wouldn’t God know that?

Health:  The big three religious texts go to excruciating details into what can and cannot be eaten.  Restrictions of shellfish, rules for butchering methods and the like go on and on for pages and pages.  Yet on those pages we find narry a mention of things which are currently obvious.  How about a few words about high fat, high cholesterol diets?  How about a few words about not smoking?  Now this knowledge may not have been accessible to the people of the day but wouldn’t God know that?

Finance:  All religions have prohibitions against usury.  However, readers must be careful in that when they read these prohibitions they must realize that these prohibitions apply to lending with interest to someone of the same faith.  Lending to others, outside the faith is allowed.  So then what about financial disasters we’ve faced?  They were caused by manipulation of currency and powerful bankers taking control of our financial system.  How about some laws defining a fair monetary system?  How about laws preventing partial reserve banking ( a current system where banks lend money they don’t actually have on reserve )?  How about laws prohibiting the artificial contraction and expansion of the money supply which caused the Great Depression, the Great Inflation of the 70′s and now plays a major part in the current recession of 2008?  Now the people of the day may not have understood these concepts but wouldn’t God know that?

This week I will appear in:
http://plasticsnews.com/index.html  (Monday Nov 2, 2009)
and
http://www.goodnewstoronto.ca/ (Tuesday Nov 3, 2009)

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (Canadian Link): http://watch.thecomedynetwork.ca/the-colbert-report/full-episodes/#clip174780

Walter Kirn on The Colbert Report (USA Link):  http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/228190/may-19-2009/walter-kirn

Review of:
“Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever”
By: Walter Kirn (Doubleday)
Reviewed By: Martin C. Winer
June 28, 2009

When I picked up “Lost in the Meritocracy:  The Undereducation of an Overachiever” by Walter Kirn (Doubleday), I expected a semi-dry expose on the problems facing the American Education system with an emphasis on the Ivy League schools.  The only semi-dry thing in the book was the champagne Kirn poured over two fawning exchange students during a graduation night orgy on his way to Princeton.  Told with prose and wit more common to novels, Kirn details his experiences as he rises out of the rural Minnesota winning one of 20 transfer student spots at Ivy League Princeton.

By Kirn’s account it is a wonder that there is any ivy left due to the propensity of the students to smoke any mildly herbaceous looking thing.

“There is no drug scene like an Ivy League drug scene.  Kids can’t just get high; they have to seek epiphanies.  They have to ground their mischief in manifestos.  The most popular one around … held that drugs, … especially plant based psychedelic drugs helped to break down the rigid inner partitions that restricted one’s full humanity.” (p. 124)

Recreational drug use was pervasive at Princeton as were many other illicit activities, with education taking a back seat.  I was so engaged with the stories that I was half way through when I reexamined the title and asked “what is a meritocracy anyways?”

Meritocracy was introduced as a more equitable replacement for aristocracy. Insofar as education, Harvard’s James Conant championed the cause of educational reform towards meritocracy as a realization of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a “natural aristocracy among men, founded on virtue and talents.” (Jefferson used the term ‘natural aristocracy’ instead of ‘meritocracy’ because it wasn’t coined a term until the 1958 book “Rise of the Meritocracy” by Michael Young.  Incidentally it was intended pejoratively.) As with many high minded theories, the implementation often renders an imperfect reflection of the ideal.

Conant set the controversial School Aptitude Test (SAT) as gatekeeper for the bastions of higher learning guarding all the rewards of power that lay beyond.  When Walter Kirn took the SAT, he discovered he “had a natural talent for multiple-choice tests [which] landed [him] without the vaguest survival instructions [at Princeton]”. (p. 6)  Throughout the course of the book which details his experiences at Princeton Kirn suggests that his education consisted of learning how to succeed in the education system;  this is a far cry from becoming educated.

The distinction is eloquently revealed when Kirn is asked to discuss the ‘critical assumptions’ he’s made in reading the Norton anthologies;  unfortunately, Kirn had done little reading at all:

“With virtually no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as though they were conclusions I’d reached myself. I’d honed these skills on the speech team back in high school, and l didn’t regard them as sins against the [Princeton Student] Honor Code. Indeed, they embodied an honor code: my own “Be honored” it stated. “Or be damned.” To me, imitation and education were different words for the same thing, anyway.  What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?” (p.119)

Throughout the course of the book Kirn refers to himself as a fraud – sometimes proudly but more often with remorse.  But is Kirn a fraud or instead a sufferer of “Fraud Syndrome”?  Fraud Syndrome (also Impostor Syndrome) is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a topic well known and documented by psychiatrists and psychologists.  It is an intellectual condition where the intellect feels disconnected from any accomplishments or abilities.  If the intellect were a tree, then the tree would lack any knowledge of its roots and thus mistakenly think that its ability to grow upright was the result of undeserved serendipity.

Kirn’s notion that he somehow managed to beguile and finesse the system into accepting him to its highest ranks is significantly, and ironically, weakened by the quality of the writing he uses in making said point.  What follows is an example of Kirn’s average writing:

“Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable.  For example: what is Death?  To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff.” (p. 30)

Witty and clever turns of phrases such as these are found on every other page.  While this made for a delightful read, it served to undermine one of his main tenets.  It seems far more likely that Kirn didn’t finesse the system, but that the system managed recognized his talent despite his own inability to do so – marshalling him exactly where he ought to be: in the commensurate Princeton English Program.

If Fraud Syndrome ever does make it one day to be an official diagnosis, then Kirn should appear on the Public Service Announcement poster.  The text is rife with examples of Kirn’s detachment from his talent and feelings of being a fraud:

“My genuine tears [over the news of John Lennon’s death] flowed along with my false tears, as they did the distinction between them blurred.  I wasn’t ashamed of this.  My fraudulence, I was coming to understand, was in a way the truest thing about me.” (p. 77)

“The need to finesse my ignorance through such trickery [(using catchphrases)] — honorable trickery to my mind, but not to other minds, perhaps — left me feeling hollow and vaguely haunted.  Seeking security in numbers, I sought out the company of other frauds.” (p. 121)

“I grew to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they too, were fakes.” (p. 122)

“[My poems] were concerned with grander matters such as the creeping loss of “personhood” in an era of technological change. How I’d hit on this theme I wasn’t sure, but the more time I spent on it the more convinced l grew that I’d borrowed it.” (p.140)

“I confessed that my poems were all a sham and that [my] Bittman [character] was a hybrid version of Eliot’s Prufrock and Berryman’s Henry two famously beleaguered characters from the North anthologies.” (p.144)

“I felt in [my friend’s] company, as in no one else’s, that my bullshitting was a defensible activity, a circular approach to enlightenment.” (p. 168)

One of Kirn’s Princeton encounters offers a possible cause for Fraud Syndrome.  Kirn has a conversation with Julian — undoubtedly Dr. Julian Jaynes best known for his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” – in a bar following the production of one of Kirn’s plays.  Julian explained that the human mind was actually two distinct entities, that in ancient times were:

“… virtual strangers to each other.  When a thought arose in one of them, the other one, acting as a receiver, processed the thought as a voice, an actual voice.  …  But who was this being?  …  Man had answered these questions in many ways.  He’d conceived of gods and spirits, angels and demons, trolls and fairies.  Muses.” (pps. 93-94)

When Julian asked Kirn: “did you ever feel, during the composition of your script, that someone else, not you, was in control?” Kirn replied: “Honestly, I feel that way a lot.  Down deep, in a quiet way, I feel it constantly.  And sometimes it shakes me up a little.” (p. 94)  Perhaps this is why Kirn was unable to identify with his obvious talent; it felt external to him.  While Kirn makes this point incidentally in his book, it is nonetheless a very important one.  While Kirn fails to connect with his talent due to this separation of the mind, many more do something far worse:  Many fail to express their talents at all – failing to listen to that other ‘voice’.

While Kirn fails to impress upon me that his placement at Princeton was either coincidental or accidental, he does make some well taken points about the education he received once there.  It seems that when reading in the English program, pretension superseded comprehension.

“We … concluded, before we’d read even a hundredth of it, that Western canon was “illegitimate,” a veiled expression of powerful group interests that it was our duty to subvert.  In our rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors, … we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.” (p.121)

“To thinkers of this school, great literature was an incoherent con, and I — a born con man who knew little about great literature had every reason to agree with them. In the land of nonreadability the nonreader was king it seemed.   Long live the king.”  (p.122)

Kirn found that many of the supposed ‘greats’ they were asked to read were completely incomprehensible by students and professors alike:

“Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution by the Frenchman Jacques Derrida, the volume’s most prestigious name. “He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.” On the same page I encountered windpipe-blocking “heteronomous’ and “invagination.” When I turned the page I came across – tucked in a footnote –“unreadability.”

That word I understood of course.” (p.120)

For Kirn, university was a process in learning to jockey jargon words and phrases effectively.  Phrases like ‘semiotically unstable’ (referring to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”) and words such as ‘hermeneutical’, ‘gestural’, ‘recursive’, ‘incommensurable’ were all synonyms for ‘hard’.  Kirn was extremely confused by the works he read but he realized that confusion was not something to be escaped by understanding, but instead something which could be exploited by mirroring it back at its source.

“I was a confused young opportunist trying to turn his confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.  The literary works they prized — the ones best suited to their project of refining and hallowing confusion — were, quite naturally, knotty and oblique.  The poems of Wallace Stevens, for example.  My classmates and I found them maddeningly elusive, like collections of backward answers to hidden riddles, but luckily we could say “recursive” by then.  We could say “incommensurable”.”  (p.122)

Kirn was adrift in a sea of confusion but it seemed that he was managing to navigate it by drinking the sea water and rolling with the currents.  It wasn’t long before Kirn’s thirst for meaning caught up with him, just as he had become completely intellectually dehydrated, basking in the scorching sun of the top percentile.  Kirn suffered a collapse, unable to continue the charade:

“For a few weeks I was still able to write, but it was a punishing, grind, self-conscious labor. I began most of my sentences with “the.”  Then I went looking for a noun. “The book” was often the result. Next, I seemed to remember, should come a verb. “Is” is a verb. It because my favorite verb. I liked it for its open-endedness — the way it allowed for a wide range of next moves. “The book is always . . .”  “The book is thought to . . .”  “The book is green and . . .” Impermissible. Yes, a book might be a certain color, but starting an essay with the fact wasn’t what college was all about. What was it all about? It was about making statements that weren’t obvious for people who made such statements professionally. “The book is a gestural construct possessed of telos.”

There I could rest.  I’d done it.  An hour’s work.” (p.178)

Eventually Kirn recovered after undertaking a course of self guided education which he found more fulfilling.  He continued his academic career at Oxford as a recipient of the “Keasbey Prize”.  Kirn draws two broader conclusions from his experience.

The first is a ‘roll with the punches and everything will turn out alright’ sort of message.  “… I discovered the truth — if words like “truth” mean anything.  And even if they don’t perhaps.  Pause in your knowing to be known.  Quit pushing — let yourself be pulled.  Stop searching, frantic child, and be found.”  (p. 205)  This advice may bear meaning for someone like Kirn with an innate and wonderful talent.  Its relevance to the rest of us who must work at it is somewhat questionable.

The second conclusion comes out more strongly in the interviews surrounding the book, but it is mentioned briefly.    In an interview (The Colbert Report: May 19, 2009.) Kirn claims that the current meritocracy does not reward depth, but instead rewards the “ability to define ‘incipient’. “Basically people who are very good at cross word puzzles end up running the country.”  “They are able to shine in every cocktail party they attend, but when it comes to running the economy, fighting the war on terror, … not very good.”  Kirn is referring to Donald Rumsfeld and to certain Lehman Brothers board members, who are Princeton Alumni.  Given Kirn’s experiences, it is easy to imagine jargon slinging economists brandishing terms like “Collaterized Debt Obligations” and “Credit Default Swaps” using them as talking points, rather than understanding their deeper implications.  Terms like these undoubtedly are mentioned in numerous A+ Ivy League Economics theses, confounding both the authors and the readers while leading to economic ruin.

This second summation is made in the book when Kirn discusses a run in, after graduating Princeton yet before going to Oxford, with an old friend who was self taught and well read.

“We had a great deal in common, Karl said.

But we didn’t, in fact, or much less than he assumed, and I didn’t know how to tell him this. To begin with, I couldn’t quote the transcendentalists as accurately and effortlessly as he could. I couldn’t quote anyone, reliably. I’d honed other skills: for flattering those in power without appearing to, for rating artistic reputations according to academic fashions, for matching my intonations and vocabulary to the backgrounds of my listeners, for placing certain words in smirking quotation marks and rolling my eyes when someone spoke too earnestly about some “classic” or masterpiece,”       for veering left when the conventional wisdom went right and then doubling back if it looked like it was changing.

Flexibility, irony, self-consciousness, contrarianism. They’d gotten me through Princeton, they hadn’t quite kept me out of Oxford, and these, I was about to tell my friend, were the ways to get ahead now–not by memorizing old Ralph Waldo. I’d found out a lot since I’d aced the SATs, about the system, about myself and about the new class that the system had created, which I was now part of, for better or for worse. The class that runs things.” (p. 210)

In 2001 Alan Greenspan at the Fed (Federal Reserve) lowered the interest rate to try to rejuvenate the economy after the fallout of the .com bubble burst. History will record that Greenspan went from the sublime to the ridiculous when he cut the interest rate to 1%. This set off a spate of irresponsible borrowing and lending the effects of which are still being dealt with today.The banks took advantage of this by starting to offer mortgages to subprime borrowers. Subprime borrowers are borrowers with a poor credit rating (specifically a FICO (credit) score of < 620). Typically these are individuals who habitually are unable to make credit card payments, or those who have suffered a foreclosure or bankruptcy. In the past they wouldn’t be able to get a loan, but thanks to the low interest rate, some could now afford the payments. With great fanfare out went the ads: “Send us your poor, your homeless, your great creditless masses!” Lured by the prospect of home ownership and lulled by the chimera of ‘buy now, pay later’, loans were issued as fast as the printers could print them.

Banks noticed that the default rates were lower than they expected. This led them to think that there was an untapped market in subprime lending. They developed many products, of which 3 were common 1) Variable rate mortgage with a higher rate due to the risk, 2) An interest only loan where they would start paying off the capital after an initial period and 3) low fixed rate initially, resetting to market rate after a few years.

The people who took these loans did so for two principal reasons 1) they hoped their income/credit would improve during the initial period of the loans and 2) the housing market was so hot, they hoped to use the newly gained equity in their homes to refinance the loans with more agreeable terms. Regrettably, Alan Greenspan, noting the now uncontrolled inflation, agressively started to increase the interest rates in 2004 right back up to around 5% and beyond.

For people with loans of type 1) and 3) above, the loans were typically huge so these interest rate increases made the payments impossible to cover, leading to defaulting. Those with loans of type 2) were pushed over the edge when the capital component of their loan kicked in.

Now, were it not for the avarice of the bankers, this crisis would have ended there; that is, a large number of repossessions but no further economic upheavel. However, bankers are weasels and behind the scenes they were pulling more ridiculous stunts.

Behind the scenes, bankers were looking to mitigate the risk of this subprime debt and also to make more profit on profit by creating and selling subprime mortgage bonds. To accomplish this they pooled together all subprime debt. Next they broke the subprime debt into levels. Suppose there were 3 banks involved in a given mortgage. The banks that would get hit by a default first were put into the lower levels and the banks that would be hit last were put into higher levels. By doing so, each level bore a reduced amount of the total risk. Now, many financial institutions that cannot purchase subprime debt were able to get around this limitation by purchasing bonds in the higher levels (less risk) of these mortgage bonds. Now, subprime debt was distributed all around the world to various institutions in this masked mortgage debt trading instrument.

So when the debt hit the fan, the big institutions which normally make loans to one another on a regular basis to keep the economy rolling, suddenly mistrusted one another. No one knew who held what amount of subprime debt. As a result the overnight lending rate went sky high and the Fed had to step in to push cash into the economy to help stave off a liquidity crisis — a crisis where cash flow starts to freeze.

At the time of this writing (Dec 2007) we are beginning to see the end result of this crisis. The large financial houses are beginning to crumble under the weight of their own stupidity. Just yesterday financial giant Morgan Stanley reported its first quarter loss in its 73 year history. Even more alarming, in seeking to assuage their woes, not only are they turning to the US government for help, but have successfully enlisted the help of the Chinese Government.

What may not be obvious, but should have the reader seeing red is that as the result of the irresponsibility of US financial institutions, we’re witnessing a wide scale buy out of US assets and institutions. What’s more, who speaks for the countless duped masses who have lost homes, equity and security as the result of this mass irresponsibility? There can be only a partial answer in paraphrasing Herbert Hoover who said: “Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” In this situation it is the financiers who tinker with the economy. But it is the working class that must work and suffer.

I’m currently reading: “Did God Have a Wife?” by William Dever. In it he mentions the literacy rate of the ancient Israelites.
From page 28:
“… Writing does not become widespread before the 8th century B.C., and then the coprus indicates only what I would call “functional literacy.” That is, a number of people could write their names, numbers and the names of a few commodities. But that is a far cry from being truly literate, able to read literary material such as we have in the books of the Hebrew Bible. It has been estimated that even in the Roman period, no more than 5 percent of the population was literate by the above definition. In ancient Israel the figure was certainly lower. That has important implications for the question I have raised here concerning how early the Hebrew Bible could in fact have been written, and whether ordinary people could have read it if they had had it.”

News of the latest diatribe against Orthodox Judaism crossed my computer screen recently.  In his first book, R. D. Gold’s “Bondage of the Mind” attempts to lay out solid counter proofs against the supposed moral authority of the Orthodox.  In my 34th year of life this isn’t the first attempt I’ve seen nor is it likely to be my last. 

I haven’t read the book but I have read several reviews.  Some of the main points discussed are:

1. The Torah is a work of man, not the writ word of God.
2. The survival of the Jewish people throughout the millenia is remarkeable but not necessarily a work of God.  Many other peoples have survived in place for centuries
3. The Torah does not describe an ultimate justice citing the punishment of righteous king Josiah for the sins of Manasseh.
4. The problems of modern society are not related to a loosening of religious standards.  Religious standards themselves proscribe certain immoral behaviours.  Gold cites several examples including the Orthdox treatment of women.
5. Gold examines several controversial figures (Rabbi Ovadia Yosef) and several Orthodox scandals.  The subtext to his discussions would appear to be that the presence of controversial characters or scandals places the moral supremacy of the Orthodox under suspicion.

I can’t speak to Gold’s intentions in writing his book but I can speak to it’s anticipated effects.  It will and already has upset some of the Orthodox.  It may prevent some borderline candidates from becoming Orthodox.  It will not move many Orthodox to leave the ranks. 

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked…
– H. L. Mencken

That may sound as if it was intended as an insult.  Not so.  I, having been orthodox myself, fully understand the joy of belief.  Just the same, being a servant of the truth above all else, I must admit I was deluded during my stint of Orthodoxy.  There are no magic bullets that can be used to, in an instant, disprove Orthodoxy.  It isn’t a problem of logic, it’s a problem of psychology.  The fabric of belief is ripstop nylon which has been reinforced under centuries of attack.  Ripstop nylon in turn is the stuff of hot air balloons, full of hot air yes, yet they offer long peaceful rides just the same.  It’s only upon a paradigmatic shift away from Orthodoxy that one is able to look at the body of knowledge and notice many, not just a few, magic bullets of failed logic.  I have an armory of magic bullets at my disposal, which have come from a lifetime of reflection and re-evaluation.  I’ll share my favourite bullet.  It’s a subtle point but personally I find it undefeatable.

Orthodox Judaism holds two bodies of law to be of divine origin:  the Torah and the Talmud.  The Torah is the written law allegedly passed down to Moses at Mount Sinai and the Talmud is a compilation of the Oral Tradition.  In common law there exists the notion of Statutes and Regulations.  The former allocates the legislative authority and the latter are the laws created based on that authority.  Both reference eachother extensively and one is meaningless without the other. 

Orthodox Judaism likewise claims that the Talmud and Torah are inseperable.

The Gemara (also known as the Talmud or Oral Torah ), an explanation of the Written Torah, was given to Moshe at Sinai. Without the Talmud the Written Torah can’t be understood. There are a lot of critical facts and points that are only hinted at or not even mentioned in the Written Torah that were explained in the Talmud.
– http://www.beverlyhillschabad.com/gemara.htm

I agree that they are inseparable, in that the Torah makes little sense without the Talmud.  However, the Torah doesn’t mention the Talmud, not even once.  Now, not to be stereotypical, but Jews have no shortage of lawyers.  I find it very hard that God, the father of this nation, would write two bodies of law one of which contains no reference to the other.  It just wouldn’t happen.

The Orthodox, of course, disagree and claim that the following verse proves divine origins of both bodies:

And I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment, which I have written that thou mayest teach them.
–  Exodus XXIV, 12.

Where is the mention of the Talmud?  It says the laws and commandments which I have WRITTEN.  Where is the mention of the Oral Tradition (Talmud)?  The Talmud itself tries to explain this away:

R. Levi b. Hama says further in the name of R. Simeon b. Lakish: What is the meaning of the verse: And I will give thee the tables of stone, and the law and the commandment, which I have written that thou mayest teach them?  ‘Tables of stone’: these are the ten commandments; ‘the law’: this is the Pentateuch; ‘the commandment’: this is the Mishnah; ‘which I have written’: these are the Prophets and the Hagiographa; ‘that thou mayest teach them’: this is the Gemara.  It teaches [us] that all these things were given to Moses on Sinai.
– Berakoth 5a -> http://www.come-and-hear.com/berakoth/berakoth_5.html

Am I to accept that an interpretation of God’s word is God’s word because a human interpreted God’s word to be God’s word?  If you’re confused by that previous sentence, it was intentional, and pretty much sums up my point.  To rephrase, you can’t claim that the Talmud is the divine word of God by interpreting the Torah in the Talmud to suit your purpose.  The only proof I’d accept is the Torah itself saying: “today I give you the oral laws and the written laws”.  Short of this, I say to the Orthodox when they play Moral Monopoly: “Do not pass Go, Do not collect 200 shekels”.