Monday, June 28, 2010

When New Ideas Prevail--and When They Don't

One of the biggest disillusionments of my life was when I discovered that the academic world is not open-minded. Not even the science subset of that world, despite what we are made to believe about science.

Now and again we hear about someone who had a revolutionary, visionary, or counter-establishment idea that ultimately prevailed and became the new accepted wisdom. These people, when they initially presented their ideas, were confronted by all the power and weapons that orthodoxy can bring to bear against them: skepticism, ridicule, even difficulty in finding employment. But the story has a happy ending and in the end they won recognition for their ideas and their vision. You read about them, they appear on TV.

But for every story like this, how many stories are there—the ones we don't hear about—where the guy allowed all the obstacles and opposition he faced to beat him down? Five, ten, many more than that?

Surely it takes a certain personality type to successfully suffer through all the discouragement he encounters. Perseverance, belief in self, ego strength: it takes all these and more. Plus perhaps the ability or willingness to suffer financial hardship. When one is told, in effect, Don't quit your day job; when one has doors slammed in his face—well, you get the picture.

Those who have been successful in their fight against the obstacles thrown up in their road typically have not had to supply all their own support from internally. One hears that they were supported and encouraged by spouses, sometimes a parent or even a sibling. It definitely helps to have those things, someone "in your corner," as we say. Anyone who is or wants to be an academic or any kind of wielder of ideas had best have family who know the terrain or some mentor who can offer advice and encouragement. When these things are absent and the obstacles can just have too much force, it is humanity in general that loses.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Friday, June 25, 2010

Firemen More Admirable than Cops?

Regular readers of this blog are aware that I've written several postings that criticize the police for their misdeeds and their seeming lack of impunity.

Every group has good and bad members. It's a human trait to seize on the bad actions of the few and then tar the whole group. So I plead guilty to this: I am human. (When we do this to a racial or religious minority, we call it prejudice. If I have thus explained prejudice, I don't mean to trivialize it; and, that's getting off the subject.)

I am sure that a great percentage of police officers do their jobs with conscientiousness and integrity, and serve and protect the public. And try to catch the bad guys. Still, it's undeniable that there have been a few rotten eggs. On this blog I have called attention to a few egregious cases and to indicate that I've been bothered when they seem to escape justice.

On the other hand, take firemen. Over the years there have been very few incidents that cast their calling in a bad light. (Once or twice a fireman was found to have pyromaniac tendencies and had himself been setting fires.) So it seems as though maybe 99.8% of firemen--well, probably even more than that--are good guys and they do heroic deeds every day, saving lives and property. They are truly heroes and deserve all the credit we can give them.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Monday, June 21, 2010

Not the Real Thing--But That's Okay, Right?

It never ceases to amaze me how Americans are willing to accept substitutes. In everything from imitation whipped cream (Cool Whip) to an artificial Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas.

The trend has been going on for over 100 years. Nylon, the first true synthetic fiber, was made in 1935 and was promoted as a substitute for silk, particularly in women's stockings. (Another man-made fiber, rayon, was earlier but it's not considered a true synthetic fiber because it is made ultimately from natural materials.) Another early faux product was Formica, which can be made to look like wood, marble, etc. And we have "stone-look" this, "wood-look" this, and "fur-look" that. I happened to see plans for a quite upscale apartment or condo building built near St. Louis. It has these nice stone balustrades on the exterior. Except the "stone" is plastic.

I was touring the Dalmatian Coast, the Mediterranean coast of countries such as Croatia and Slovenia that were once parts of Yugoslavia. The program included a visit to what I might call a farmstead, where the owners were operating a little business for the sake of tourists, serving them salad, prosciutto, and wine, and demonstrating how olive oil was formerly made (with a donkey pulling the olive press). I could point out this was phony insofar as the olive oil that you and I buy in a bottle, in a store, isn't made using donkey power. But maybe that was not so totally bogus: that was the method once used, and it may even still be used in some places in the world to make small batches of olive oil.

But now my point: One of the other tourists said, for the benefit of anyone and everyone within earshot, "You can go to Disneyland, you can go to Vegas—but this is the real thing!" I found that a striking thing to say, and it's stuck in my mind. Why go to Disneyland or Vegas at all, and see phony castles or phony Eiffel Towers? I personally have no desire to do so.

It bothers me when children are fed substitutes and inaccurate representations. I heard just a little snatch of a mother talking on TV about something she took her kids to: "You go through this door and you're in a Wild West town." Presumably some incarnation of some inaccurate stereotype of a "wild west town."

We don't care very much about feeding our children only accurate stuff. Children are given pictures of a "train" which has a steam engine. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, for many years, illustrated the word airplane with an old biplane, like from World War I! After being out of date for decades, that was finally corrected.

Just imagine if warning labels were required that said something like "Warning: Not the real thing," or "Not an accurate representation." We'd see them everywhere.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

How to Shop for Healthier Food

Nowadays we're all concerned about eating healthier. And of course food manufacturers keep their finger on our pulse and try to tailor their products to what people are looking for.

But, as always, the buyer needs to be wary and as well-informed as possible.

For example, many products are claiming to be "multigrain." But that can be pretty meaningless. Having or being made with more than one grain is of no particular advantage if those grains are not whole. So look for "whole grain." "100% whole wheat" is the best claim to find. Not as good is "made with whole wheat," because you don't know what the percentage of whole wheat is, and it could be a trivial amount. (You can get a little information from the ingredients label if you keep in mind that ingredients are listed in order of their amount, by weight. So if "whole wheat flour" is the first ingredient, that's good.)

Another word used by makers and advertisers is natural. Again, meaningless. Natural does not mean that it's good for you, let alone that it won't harm you. Snake venom is natural. Poison mushrooms are natural.

Lastly, sugar has become a dirty word with some consumers. So food manufacturers are using ingredients like "evaporated cane juice." Now, what is that? No more nor less than sugar. Other sweeteners in that ingredient list, like a concentrate of one or more fruit juices (apple, pear, etc.) or "brown rice syrup" are still sugar.

The only sweeteners that are not sugar by some other name are artificial sweeteners. Some of those have not been satisfactorily tested for safety. Therefore, I often feel I'd rather have sugar. On the other hand, when it comes to soft drinks, which have large amounts of sweeteners (usually high fructose corn syrup) that may be contributing to our rising rates of diabetes and obesity, the "diet" version is the better choice. If you are concerned about the safety of the artificial sweeteners, just limit your consumption of soft drinks.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Monday, June 7, 2010

But Surely You Jest. . . .

They just said on TV, 70 is the new 80. But that was the weather report.

Gary Coleman's wife is now under suspicion for having had a role in his death. My theory: She stepped on him.

That old broad of a news lady, Helen Thomas, is definitely entitled to have an opinion on Palestine. She was there in Biblical times.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Do We Need Commentary on Art?

Yesterday I attended a special exhibit at our local art museum, an assemblage of paintings by the modern French artist, Henri Matisse.

I went with a friend and had arranged to hook up with two other friends who were going. One of the latter told me, after I'd left, that he read all of the commentary. I had not done so; I read only part of the vast amount of elucidative material provided by the museum's curators.

I am not extensively trained in art but I am trained in literary scholarship. I feel that I can make some comparisons between a piece of art and a literary work.

Specifically I want to examine the question of whether we need the commentary. I feel that, to a degree, a work, be it a work of art or a literary work, should stand on its own. It communicates (if it works at all), and does so in its own language, a language that cannot be paraphrased. If a musical composition or painting could be paraphrased in words, then the message should have been presented in words and not with musical notes or paint on canvas.

Still, that does not rule out a role for scholarship or criticism. These are aids that extend or deepen our appreciation, perhaps by calling our attention to details we hadn't noticed. Sometimes a literary work needs footnotes to explain, for example, obsolete language. (The poet T.S. Eliot supplied one of his poems with his own footnotes. That makes me think that the poem, rather than standing on its own, was made too recondite by its author.)

However, I do not want any commentary by the work's own author or painter or composer. Why? Again, the artist should have achieved his or her message in the work itself. Also, and more importantly, with writers it's notoriously true that you can't believe what they say. They may say they are doing one thing in their work and yet, if you look at their achievement, what the artist realized is in fact something else. Just as one example, Edgar Allan Poe states his belief that a poem should be no more than 100 lines long. Yet many of his poems are longer than that.

I don't want to say that writers (etc.) are deliberately deceptive in what they say about their own craft. I think it's more likely that they just don't consciously know what they are doing. The novelist William Faulkner, when he was Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia, would be asked what symbolism he intended by this or that element in one of his books—and he would say something like, Well, that's just something I dug up out of the lumberyard in the back of my mind.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Friday, June 4, 2010

Bad Cops Get Off in Court

In two recent court trials, policemen who were charged with wrongdoing got off essentially scot-free.

One was the case where, in a video seen all over the country, a big, heavy Chicago policeman named Anthony Abbate allegedly beat up a female bartender half his weight when she refused to serve him any more drinks. In his trial, which was as I guess a couple of months ago, the cop got off on a legal technicality such that the core of the prosecution's case was thrown out.

Very recently another policeman also got off scot-free. This policeman, it was alleged, had been driving drunk and had a crash in which his vehicle hit another and the two occupants of the latter vehicle were killed.

I have to admit here that I might be a bit fuzzy on the facts, but it seems there was conflicting testimony as to whether this cop was drunk. Very strangely, his blood alcohol didn't get tested for seven or eight hours after the crash. On the other hand, there was video showing him in the bar.

This cop also tried to walk away from the crash--right down an expressway off-ramp--instead of staying at the scene (as is, in fact, required by law in the case of such an accident) to have his testimony taken. The relatives of the two young men who were killed are crying that justice was not done, and here I certainly agree with them.

It seems to me (and I wish I had some statistics on this) that policemen seldom get convicted. Or if they are found guilty, they get probation or a suspended sentence--in other words, nothing more than a basically meaningless slap on the wrist.

It seems to be hard to convict a cop. It's proverbial that cops support one another and almost never testify against one another. In the two cases above, it was the judges' rulings as to admissibility of evidence (or, rather, the lack thereof) that pulled the rug out from under the prosecutors' cases. So I wonder if the judges are impartial or biased in favor of the cops. If they are not predisposed to believe only the best of the police, they may cave in to pressure--from the police union, from the police commissioner, from politicians such as the mayor. None of these parties seems to want to own up that the police ever do any wrong.

The danger is that, whenever a cop escapes punishment for his wrong actions, that makes other cops feel invincible and convinces them that, whatever they do, they] need never worry about any consequences of their actions.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein