All posts by Steve Stern

The Blind Side

Americana, Books, Current Affairs, Film, Religion, Sports, What's a man?

Michael Oher and family

I just finished reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis and I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in football, or US social policy, or the human potential, or race relations, or, for that matter, just wants a good read.I just finished writing about David Foster Wallace and how much I have enjoyed his writing and The Blind Side is the polar opposite.

With DFW, I am always aware of, and dazzled by, the writing. In the The Blind Side, the story is everything – more accurately, what is being told is everything. All the words, all the sentences are pushing a narrative forward. And I mean that in the best possible way. 

At this point, I think everybody knows the basic plot – how a poor black kid, Big Mike who become Michael Oher,  is discovered (not quite the right word, maybe found) by a very rich, white, Christian, family and how his life and their lives are changed. That does not do it justice. Michael Oher is a 350 pound, 6'4", freakishly quick, and astonishingly graceful black kid who is invisible.  He goes to school, sort of, but nobody cares if he learns anything – they just pass him on to the next grade where he is invisible again.  He is one of those kids we read about every once in a while that just slipped through the cracks. At 6'4" and 350 pounds!

Except that, when he is starting his junior year in high school, everything changed. Michael is very likable but he is very lucky. As the book says, among other things, Pity the kid inside Hurt Village who was born to play the piano, or manage people, or trade bonds. This book made me realize, again, that we, me and the people who read this blog, were all born on third base, at least, and, even on our best days, think we hit a double.We didn't we are just enormously lucky.

A Nation of Owners? Renters? Both?

Americana, Current Affairs

This is a post from Richard Taylor.  The last time I stepped in as the
blogmasters' avatar I was posting from Italy, just south of Switzerland.
 That seems like a good enough segue to muse for a moment on a great
article by the economist  Robert Shiller in the Sunday
New York Times. (You have to read the article to find the connection.)
Noting the myriad federal subsidies to the housing industry, Shiller
asks "what is the long-term justification for putting taxpayers on the
line to subsidize home ownership?"

Old_timer_structural_worker2

His answer is a complicated
one.  I won't try to summarize it here; there is enough nuance and food
for thought that it deserves its own reading.  I will say that I
appreciated having an economist acknowledge that our decisions cannot be
reduced to simple economic efficiency.  He talks about the role of
values (and not the kind showcased on "The Price is Right"). In addition
to finding policies that make economic sense, those policies need to
take account of some fundamental values that run much more deeply in our
national psyche than simple economic efficiency.  His point is a bold
one because his critics could argue that the values he describes are
contrary to the change in policy direction he seems to be proposing.  He
seems more committed to recognizing, naming, the values than in winning a
technical argument (and willing to insist that we look deeply at the
values before jumping to policy conclusions).  The piece feels like an
invitation to conversation rather than a prescription for legislation.

Some
may differ with his take on our values as a nation.  That could be an
essay in itself.  To me, the first step is to acknowledge that values
have a place in the discussion.  Now we can talk.

More about cows

Americana

I ran into this Philosophical ramble – and, I am sorry to say, I lost the link – and thought I would pass it on: Suppose that you are a cow philosopher contemplating the welfare of cows. In the world today there are about 1.3 billion of your compatriots. It would be a fine thing for cows if all cows were well treated and if none were slaughtered for food. Nevertheless, being a clever cow, you understand that it’s the demand for beef that brings cows to life. How do you regard such a trade off?

If each cow brought to life adds even some small bit of cow utility to the grand total of cow welfare must not beef eaters be lauded, at least if they are hungry enough?  Or is the pro beef-eater argument simply repugnant.

Should a cow behind a haystack of ignorance choose the world with the highest expectation of utility?  In which case, a world of many cows each destined for slaughter could well be preferable to one with many fewer but happier cows. Or is it wrong to compare the zero of non-existence with existence?  Should a cow philosopher focus on making cows happy or on making happy cows?  If the former, would one (or two) supremely happy cows not be best?

I think these questions are important both for thinking about cows and animal rights and for human beings. I have never thought about this for cows, but I have thought about it in regard to Ducks Unlimited1 but I am very glad that somebody is thinking about it. The world a better place.

1Who spend a lot of time and money on duck habitat so they can kill them (the ducks) and, of course, duck art for duck stamps.

1999 Duck Stamp


An surprisingly unsurprising quote from David Foster Wallace reduex – unburying the lead

Americana, Books, Religion, What's a man?

I just ran into a quote by David Foster Wallace that really hit me. It is a short fragment
of a commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. The fragment
is short, less than 1/2 a page and it is the best case for spirituality that I have ever read. It starts out: Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

He was so brilliant and I am so sorry that he is gone. When David Foster Wallace committed suicide some time ago, I was staggered. It seemed so unlikely. I felt like I knew him from his writing and he seemed so confident. He was incredibly competent but, I guess, not as confident as he appeared. Two of my favorite pieces of writing were by David Foster Wallace – and he seems to always be David Foster Wallace, never David, or Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Tense Present; Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.  Both were, IMHO, brilliant: interestingly written, interesting and informative, and great fun. And even though I read them when I was well into my 50’s and 60’s, I was greatly influenced by both of them.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was written in 1997 and was about going on a cruise ship. It was a vicious takedown of the Cruise, but in a very funny and gentle way. The two things I most remember about the article was how jam-packed the cruise was – leaving no time to relax or contemplate the day – and the incredible amount of footnotes that were a huge part of the article. One of the footnotes even had it’s own footnote1. For months, if not years, my footnote use went way up much to the annoyance of some people who were trying to read what I had written.

But Tense Present; Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage  was the biggest influence on me. It was a very favorable book review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner. But it was also about the the importance of of good grammar and the use of the right word in the right way. It is about the importance of language in our democracy and how language defines class and much more such as why he doesn’t like Politically Correct English: Were I, for instance, a political conservative who opposed taxation as a means of redistributing national wealth, I would be delighted to watch PCE progressives spend their time and energy arguing over whether a poor person should be described as “low-income” or “economically disadvantaged” or “pre-prosperous” rather than
constructing effective public arguments for redistributive legislation or higher marginal tax rates on corporations….As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully refers to him as “economically disadvantaged” rather than “poor.” Were I he, in fact, I’d probably find the PCE term insulting — not just because it’s patronizing but because it’s hypocritical and self-serving. I bought the dictionary, still use it, and highly recommend it.

1. He writing about a fire extinguisher in the passageway by his room, he footnoted that the sign said Break glass to access Fire Extinguisher and then footnoted the footnote with Duh!