Daily Office:
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
¶ Only yesterday, we heard for the first time of Mike Rose, whose books about intelligence and education (and the disconnect between them) promise to appear in our reading pile PDQ; now, today, we encounter a blog about apparel manufactoring in particular and the “sustainable factory floor” in particular, Kathleen Fasanella’s Fashion-Incubator. Adverted to this Web log for designer entrepreneurs by the tirely Tyler Cowen, we fastened with great interest on this discussion of the alarming and fundamentally bogus split between “knowledge workers” and worker workers. Complete with references to Mike Rose!
We have a schizophrenic attitude about manufacturing in the US. If we’re not thinking it’s horrible, on the other hand, when we find domestic producers, we celebrate them as some kind of hero, that they are unusual and made of more special stuff than we are. I’m telling you I know they are not. They are no different from you, their sources of information are no different from yours. The only difference I can see is that they don’t think manufacturing is beneath them; manufacturing excites them; they work hard at it. F-I visitors often send me inspiring articles about such and such company producing domestically but I often can’t write about them because I can’t separate what I know directly versus what’s been published in a newspaper or appears in a video -and then it annoys me that some of the facts in the story are wrong and I can’t correct it without betraying confidences.
Grace sent me a link to an interview called The Meaning of Intelligence featuring educator Mike Rose, author of Lives on the Boundary. Mike could tell you this story both ways. Due to an error in processing his high school test results, he was shunted into remedial classes deemed more appropriate to his IQ. He has a lot to say about the presumed intelligence of workers. He’s probably the nation’s best known advocate for respecting and encouraging education among tradesmen and factory workers. Mike also says that tradesmen and workers harbor deprecatory impressions of the presumed intelligence of college graduates that are likewise dysfunctional with the end result of disrespect between the two camps. I don’t know where the truth of it lies. I only know that mutual disrespect gets us nowhere and if you propose to assume the role of leadership in starting a manufacturing enterprise, it becomes your responsibility to breach and repair the impasse. But you can’t get there by denying your role in the affair because you find manufacturing repugnant to the extent that you deny you’re a manufacturer even though the law says you are. Denial is nothing if not repudiation and distancing.
¶ Nige responds to the news that Kazuo Ishiguro’s best-known novel, The Remains of the Day, is being adapted for the musical theatre. We are in complete accord with his dismay.
The mind initially boggles at the prospect, but then musicals aren’t what they were (more’s the pity) in terms of either story or music. With modern ‘serious’ musicals (yes I mean you, Stephen ‘no tunes’ Sondheim) nothing happens, and you’re likely to leave the theatre humming the programme notes rather than the dreary up-and-down-the-scale recitative that passes for song (naturally I speak from a position of near total ignorance here – c’est mon metier). So, as neither happy-ending storyline nor singalong tunes nor showstoppers are required, almost anything could be grist to the musical mill. Ishiguro’s own The Unconsoled could make a terrific night out at the theatre, don’t you think?
¶ In a wittily-titled entry, “Legends of the Fall,” Joshua Brown deconstructs the swarm of financial pieces that presume to posit seasonal doom based on historical indicators &c. Eyewash, cries Mr Brown. What he says for investors goes for us onlookers as well.
4. But wait! – About halfway through the post which has just given you all the historical reasons you should just blow your brains out rather than be invested, a White Knight shall come galloping up over the crest of the hill, banners aflutter, with a reason to live, dammit! The White Knight will be the Chief Investment whatever at an asset-gathering operation whose prima facie mission is to keep you invested, read his commentary accordingly.
5. The non-conclusion – the last sentence will be exactly the evidence you need to tell you that you’ve just read something with almost zero value to anyone other than Scottrade, who have had the 1 minute-and-15 second opportunity to flash banner ads at you like a 42nd Street vagrant.
¶ Here’s a story to chill if not kill the idea that natural ills can be vanquished with genuine once-and-for-all finality. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the cessation of smallpox vaccination 20 years ago opened the door to monkeypox — a not unforeseen development. If you want to see what monkeypox looks like, click here. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
Monkeypox is spread by animals including squirrels and, fairly obviously, monkeys. As humans encroach upon the DRC’s tropical rainforests, the risk of being exposed to an infected carrier grows. Indeed, Rimoin found that the odds of contracting monkeypox were higher for people living near forested areas, and for men. As civil strife continues to affect the DRC, locals are being forced to rely more on hunting to get enough food and that brings men in close contact with furry viral reservoirs.
It’s an emerging threat, but Rimoin isn’t calling for smallpox vaccination to resume. Doing so would be logistically difficult in an area where even collecting data can be fraught. It might be better to take a more targeted approach, vaccinating only health workers who treat infected patients, and people who come into frequent contact with animal carriers. It may also be worth educating local people about the dangers of handling carrier species and the benefits of isolating people who show the very obvious symptoms, until they can be treated.
¶ New boy in town, “sleight of mind” artist Matthew Michael Cooper makes a big boo-boo mistake (from which he is not shielded by interviewer or editor, and in response to a question out of left field), but he responds well to correction in the comments. New York makes people better people!
What’s your opinion of the Ground Zero Mosque?
I’m certainly against it, not because I don’t subscribe to any religion, but because I think the best response is to rebuild the towers in their entirety. We have to continue with the whole business as usual thing. It’s the only way we can demonstrate our strength as a nation.
In the comments, Mr Cooper apologizes.
As much as it pains me to realize my own ignorance, nothing delights me more than to be enlightened. My thoughts were clearly under false pretenses, which made linernotesdannys remark quite accurate I will admit.
Please do forgive the error, and thank you for the help. I will do my best to grow into a better New Yorker.
¶ Once upon a time, colonial powers would have dreamed of doing what China is doing, in the way of running railroads into Southeast Asia. China, which still calls itself the Central Nation, is probably untroubled by Western-style pricks of conscience. (China Post; via Real Clear Nation)
The standard-gauge is 1.435 meters wide, compared to Thailand’s existing one-meter tracks. The proposal will herald a new era of rail development in the country. In the next stage, the Nong Khai-Bangkok route will be linked with the same-size track in Laos before crossing into southern China to join Beijing’s national high-speed train network. From Bangkok, the route will be further extended to Thailand’s southern region. In the following stages, China hopes the network will reach Malaysia and Singapore.
As the world’s second largest economy since overtaking Japan in the second quarter of this year, China has grand designs for its high-speed railway diplomacy. Besides Southeast Asia, the Chinese plan to export technology to other parts of the continent, including Central Asia.
¶ Lizzie Skurnick does a bang-up job of highlighting the comical parallels — sure to be savored no more richly than by the author himself — between the media hoo-ha already surrounding Freedom, the Jonathan Franzen book that came out, officially, only yesterday, and the awkward scrutiny that’s brought to bear on the novel’s characters, all of them “frequently undone by how poorly their public selves match their private desires.”
These are people defined not by their public selves but by the pettiness, chaos, and squalor of their interior ones. Sure, the novel takes us everywhere—from trips to buy rusty munitions in Paraguay, to music-festival campaigns against population explosion around the country, to mountaintop clearing to create bird sanctuaries, to unsatisfying artistic careers in Brooklyn—generally signs a novelist has lost the thread.
But these forays are purely incidental, as if Franzen spun a globe with no particular goal in mind. For instance, Joey’s trip to Paraguay to buy rusty munitions isn’t important because it’s about Iraq. It’s important because that’s where he digs through his own shit to find the wedding ring he’s inadvertently swallowed before the flight, on a trip where he plans and abandons a sleazy affair. It’s an apt metaphor: in Freedom, Joey and each character seek only the slim circlet of truth hidden in their own moral waste.
So while it’s probably annoying to Franzen that his novel’s launch has been occluded, yet again, by an unrelated media frenzy, it’s also refreshing. Freedom’s characters also found their interior motivations revealed at odd, inappropriate moments. The cultural tsunami provoked by Franzen’s Time magazine cover, too, has apparently been lying in wait for some time.
¶ George Packer marks the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the mission that has achieved nothing in over seven years. (Interesting Times)
For almost all purposes, Iraq has no government. Almost six months after national elections, the country’s politicians remain unable to compromise and cut a deal, showing the persistent lack of maturity and vision that has earned the political class the justifiable contempt of the Iraqi public. Meanwhile, Iraq’s neighbors are playing their proxies against one another and jostling for a piece of the action. In the vacuum, Sunni extremists are showing just how much—and how little—Iraqi security forces are going to be capable of in the post-American-combat-mission era. It’s not a very encouraging picture. Even if a return to civil war or a military coup, or both, doesn’t happen in the near future, Iraq remains fragile and extremely violent. Daily life—electricity, water, security, the same things Iraqis have been complaining about since 2003—is pretty hellish for most Iraqis. Read the comments from Iraqis in these New York Times interviews. They show the same range of views, some of them within a single individual, that one heard throughout the war. There is great disappointment in and resentment of America, but only one expression of pure hatred, and a fair number affirmations that, at least, Iraqis have been allowed to join the world and enjoy a margin of freedom. Almost all of them fear the future and can only imagine a normal life years or decades from now (fifty years is a common marker). Many of them (especially in Sunni areas), as much as they dislike the occupation, dislike more the prospect of a return to the levels of chaos seen in 2006, which could accompany an American withdrawal. It’s a real possibility, and August 31, 2010 was actually not such a good choice for the end of the combat mission. March 31, 2010, right after the elections, would have been better.
And then there are the hundreds of thousands, the millions, of Iraqis who have fled the country and not yet deemed it in their interest to go back. Among them is the core of the country’s educated, secular-minded middle class, including the younger generation—those who had the most to gain by the American invasion. It’s going to be much harder for Iraq to build itself into a stable, modern country without them.
And yet, to hear the President tell it, Iraq is on the right path and in a surprisingly good position to take its destiny in hand. Those passages from the speech remind me of nothing so much as the fatuously optimistic updates one regularly heard from President Bush and others in the earlier years of the war. Whatever Iraqis said, whatever the evidence of one’s senses, things were always getting better (though “challenges†always remained). And, as it turns out, as of August 31, 2010, this is still the case. As a candidate, Obama was in a position to tell the truth about Iraq, and he did. As President, he’s learned the official language of euphemism and vagueness and distortion. Administration officials who, three years ago and not yet in power, were withering in their assessment of the war and Iraqi politicians, have become their unlikely boosters.
¶ Josh Barkey’s modest proposal for green high school students. Guys, that is. (Good)
¶ Jane Fonda, Juliette Lewis plug Scissor Sisters. (Joe.My.God.)
¶ Boring Conference 2010: Save the date! 11 December, “somewhere in London.”