One of the things I like about LSE is its program of events. In the last year, they've had Dmitri Medvedev and Michael Chertoff (when he was still DHS secretary), and every couple of days there's another interesting-sounding event - so many that you actually have to limit yourself from going to all of them in order to have any time left to actually work. It's one of the things I absolutely prefer about living in cities. In any case, this evening I went to a talk by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, the NYU political scientist who uses a complex game-theoretical model to predict the outcomes of complex negotiations. He's an interesting, charismatic guy - which you can see from his recent appearance on the Daily Show - and I think there's something to his prediction model, for which he claims 90% accuracy.
But something about the whole thing bothered me a bit. Partly, it's arrogance - which is referenced in a mostly-flattering recent New York Times Magazine profile - exacerbated by false self-deprecation (he gave us several variations on "no one listens to me" but bragged about how well he knew Condoleezza Rice, for example). Partly, it's the fact that for all his talk about transparency, he won't actually release the design of his prediction software - there is some complicated copyright arrangement, but it also conveniently means that he has a lock on its use in consulting gigs for corporate and government clients, for which he can presumably charge a decent fee. And partly it's my innate suspicion of anyone who glibly claims a 90% success rate at anything much more complicated and difficult than walking to work without being struck by a bus.
During the Q&A, someone asked about the idea of black swans, unpredictable events that completely change the factors on which predictions are based. Bueno de Mesquita agreed that those can negatively impact his predictions, but he also claimed that he'd written code into his software that allowed him to model the impacts of such events - and, he added, the point about rare and unpredictable events is that they're rare. Which is a reasonable point, although I'm not sure I'd be quite so glib about the power of random and unpredictable events to change history.
I also actually managed to ask a question, based on my sense that there was something else about his approach that I found pretty unsettling. I'll admit I didn't phrase it as well as I might have, but the basic gist of it was that between his game-theory model (which I wasn't arguing the accuracy of, since I had no alternative evidence) and the predictive success of statistical models like the ones Nate Silver uses, is there a danger of complacency in the idea that we can actually predict the future? I don't think he cared for the analogy between his model and stats-based approaches like Silver's - a point he clearly considers very important, since he repeated it with another questioner a minute later. He then basically said that he wasn't worried about broader ramifications since not very many people take him seriously. But I think that's a dodge, really, particularly given that in response to a later question he rattled off the level of influence he had with every presidential administration since Reagan. So I think it's really a failure to engage with the idea that accurate prediction of the future, whether it's in fact possible or not, may not actually be a desirable end.
But getting back to the main point about the presentation, I didn't quite put my finger on it until after it was over what it was that bothered me about it so much. It's because for all his one-liners and charisma - and it was an entertaining lecture - the whole enterprise seems very Robert McNamara-ish to me: it embodies the "systems analysis" model that if you just sanitize your inputs and use the right equations, everything else falls into line. I realize that both computer processing power and the sophistication of game theory have advanced hugely since the 1960s, but the principle remains the same, and I don't think the problem before was that the computers were using vacuum tubes and punch-cards. With better technology and methods, you can get some improvement on your successful prediction rate, but paradoxically that may be ultimately a danger: the higher your rate, the more confident you become in the method, and the more willing you may be to push the envelope and act in (possibly risky) ways that you would not have without the prediction. He referred to "engineering" the results of negotiations based on his tool, which I assume was in reference to his business consulting primarily, but convinced me that despite his studied insistence that game theory is an academic tool, he saw it as something else as well.
I can see that Bueno de Mesquita realizes that he can't make claims that are too absurd for his model's abilities - he included a list in his presentation about "what game theory can't do," and I think his repeated insistence that it wasn't a statistical model was to reinforce the idea that game theory isn't a perfect crystal ball that can predict markets and help you find true love, or whatever. I respect that. On the other hand, I think the renown it's brought him has in many respects gotten the better of him - his new book is called "The Predictioneer," for example, which isn't exactly a subtle approach. And that approach makes me worried that in his attempts to understand and "engineer" human behavior, he's only going to push it to an extreme.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Split the Nobel
Most people I've talked to (and much of the media commentary I've read) about Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize has been pretty negative. There's a nasty undertone in a lot of it - and not just from the usual right-wing suspects - about him, even though he had nothing to do with the decision to award the prize. Furthermore, I think his comments about it strike exactly the right tone of self-effacement and non-complacency. That said, I agree to some extent that it's premature to award such a distinction to a president who's only been in office for a few months and doesn't have a major treaty or peace agreement to his name. I've been surprised over the last few days how many non-Americans I've talked to who dislike the idea of Obama getting the prize - obviously, graduate students at LSE are not a representative sample of anything, but it undermines the easy explanation that Americans are opposed to the decision and foreigners (or Europeans) are in favor. But I also agree with Rachel Maddow (amongst others) that there are absolutely justifications for awarding the prize to him, even at this early stage. I think and hope he'll take the right lesson from it, and I believe it will have a net positive effect, but I'm not completely sanguine about it.
But in any case, all this ground has been covered before, and I doubt anyone is going to change their mind at this point - and my scribblings certainly won't have that effect. But I quite randomly had an idea that I haven't seen written anywhere else before which I think is worth floating.
Alfred Nobel's will stated that the Peace Prize should go to, "the person who has done the most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Obviously the awarding committee has taken some liberties with that intention - Martin Luther King Jr., for example, obviously deserved the award, but had done nothing to promote "fraternity between nations" or to abolish standing armies. The same is true with the man who many people argue was the logical winner this time around, the courageous Zimbabwean prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai. President Obama's win makes sense using Nobel's original formulation, but makes much less if we stick with the broader formula that the committee seems to have used at least since the 1960s. And the committee has said nothing in its public statements about changing their procedures or considerations.
So instead of arguing endlessly about whether someone like Tsvangirai deserves it more than Obama, I have another proposal. Why not split the Nobel Peace Prize into two?
The first would be a prize basically set up along the lines of Nobel's original proposal, to be given to a person (or an organization) who had done the most for international peace. I think you could in fairly good conscience give this award to Obama, partly because he's redefined the critically important US relationship with the rest of the world on the grounds that he has made some legitimately important decisions: closing Gitmo, canceling the deployment of anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe, and backing up his stand against nuclear proliferation in Iran with the stated intent to slash the US nuclear arsenal. Yes, it's early, but various other Peace Prize winners were given the award despite not having achieved their goals. I think the stronger argument against Obama for an international peace prize is that he's overseeing two wars, one of which only seems to be getting worse and worse, but at the same time I'm not sure who else would qualify - it hasn't exactly been a bumper year for peace, after all.
The second could be a prize for human rights or social justice in more general terms, and that could be awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, or (posthumously) to Neda Agha-Soltan, or to various other people who have advanced - and in many cases made huge sacrifices for - a particular cause or a broader social justice movement within one particular nation. This award could be given much wider latitude, and allow the committee to recognize particular causes or nations without shorting people or groups who had a truly international impact.
This division would refocus the award and allow it to sidestep this controversy and possible future ones - and if there were no obvious winners in either category, the committee could simply redirect the prize money and hope for a better next year. After all, they've done it before. It may not be a perfect solution, but with the growing sense that the Peace Prize has become increasingly irrelevant, it might be the kind of vast re-organization needed to restore its credibility.
---
* That distinction, to my mind, definitely belongs to the decision to award the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, with Yassir Arafat a close second.
But in any case, all this ground has been covered before, and I doubt anyone is going to change their mind at this point - and my scribblings certainly won't have that effect. But I quite randomly had an idea that I haven't seen written anywhere else before which I think is worth floating.
Alfred Nobel's will stated that the Peace Prize should go to, "the person who has done the most or best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Obviously the awarding committee has taken some liberties with that intention - Martin Luther King Jr., for example, obviously deserved the award, but had done nothing to promote "fraternity between nations" or to abolish standing armies. The same is true with the man who many people argue was the logical winner this time around, the courageous Zimbabwean prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai. President Obama's win makes sense using Nobel's original formulation, but makes much less if we stick with the broader formula that the committee seems to have used at least since the 1960s. And the committee has said nothing in its public statements about changing their procedures or considerations.
So instead of arguing endlessly about whether someone like Tsvangirai deserves it more than Obama, I have another proposal. Why not split the Nobel Peace Prize into two?
The first would be a prize basically set up along the lines of Nobel's original proposal, to be given to a person (or an organization) who had done the most for international peace. I think you could in fairly good conscience give this award to Obama, partly because he's redefined the critically important US relationship with the rest of the world on the grounds that he has made some legitimately important decisions: closing Gitmo, canceling the deployment of anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe, and backing up his stand against nuclear proliferation in Iran with the stated intent to slash the US nuclear arsenal. Yes, it's early, but various other Peace Prize winners were given the award despite not having achieved their goals. I think the stronger argument against Obama for an international peace prize is that he's overseeing two wars, one of which only seems to be getting worse and worse, but at the same time I'm not sure who else would qualify - it hasn't exactly been a bumper year for peace, after all.
The second could be a prize for human rights or social justice in more general terms, and that could be awarded to Morgan Tsvangirai, or (posthumously) to Neda Agha-Soltan, or to various other people who have advanced - and in many cases made huge sacrifices for - a particular cause or a broader social justice movement within one particular nation. This award could be given much wider latitude, and allow the committee to recognize particular causes or nations without shorting people or groups who had a truly international impact.
This division would refocus the award and allow it to sidestep this controversy and possible future ones - and if there were no obvious winners in either category, the committee could simply redirect the prize money and hope for a better next year. After all, they've done it before. It may not be a perfect solution, but with the growing sense that the Peace Prize has become increasingly irrelevant, it might be the kind of vast re-organization needed to restore its credibility.
---
* That distinction, to my mind, definitely belongs to the decision to award the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, with Yassir Arafat a close second.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Afghanostic
I just got back from a fairly contentious debate at Chatham House on the topic of Afghanistan and whether British troops should be involved there or not. It's an interesting debate to watch from an American perspective, for a number of reasons. For someone who pays quite a lot of attention to American politics, it's interesting to observe a debate occurring in parallel - and a casual watcher of the debate as it unfolds on British TV could be forgiven for thinking that the British had the largest contingent of troops in the country (although, to be fair, the same casual viewer watching American TV would probably think that the international contingent was the setup for a bad joke - a Frenchman, a German and a Briton).
The organizers had done a good job of getting people to cover the bases of the debate. There was the Ministry of Defence official who I ended up feeling pretty sorry for, since he had to toe the government line and was getting it from both sides, an anti-war campaigner, the former EU envoy to Afghanistan, a Scottish Labour MP who clearly didn't care much for his own party's platform, and an academic from the King's College Department of War Studies. It wasn't an American cable news-style smackdown, but there were definitely some sparks, particularly between the MP and the MoD official. Oh, and the anti-war campaigner was accused by an Afghan expat in the audience of "doing the Taliban's work for them." Unlike many of the debates I've seen on the BBC and Channel 4, there was a significant amount of discussion of Britain's role in the war vis a vis the United States, and it wasn't particularly favorable towards the "special relationship" - by and large, the discussants seemed to view the US as simply dictating policy to the UK. Brigadier Howes argued that the UK had helped set American policy from time to time, but didn't seem especially convinced of his own argument, and all in all the opinion in the room seemed to be focused on the idea that the UK needs a more Europe-focused defense policy. That's fair; I'm not enough of an American nationalist to think that the UK's interests or situation are or should be inherently aligned with ours.* And to my (foreign) ears, the argument that British boots on the ground in Afghanistan are stopping terrorist attacks back home ring a bit hollow - as several people pointed out tonight, the much more effective counter-terrorism operations are conducted by British security services operating domestically. But I didn't find the anti-war message - that we should just give Afghanistan over to the Afghans, come what may - especially convincing either.
I guess what the panel reinforced for me is my agnosticism on the topic of Afghanistan. I think it's pretty unarguable that the war was botched almost from the outset, and that we missed a huge opportunity to build functional state and security mechanisms between the Taliban's defeat in 2001 and its resurgence around 2006, in no small part because we (speaking here for both the US and the UK) were occupied with Iraq. Eight years is a long time to ask people to put up with a steady drumbeat of cost and casualties for an uncertain benefit, and the three to five more years that Stanley McChrystal is apparently planning for is difficult to imagine. And I agree with the argument - advanced by various war opponents but with particular eloquence by Ahmed Rashid - that Western military activity is only inflaming the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and further destabilizing Pakistan,** leading to a potentially devastating wider conflict of some variety. Most vividly, though, the sham re-election of Karzai was a disaster, a slap in the face to everyone who worked (and, in the case of some Afghan, British and American soldiers, died) in order to try and improve Afghanistan's lot and bring about something like meaningful self-rule.
And yet... I also understand the worries of the Pakistanis that if the West pulls out of Afghanistan, the insurgency in their northwest provinces will escalate. I can only imagine the propaganda victory al Qaeda - which, granted, has little presence in Afghanistan these days - would achieve if they could claim that they had helped drive the West out. The "flypaper theory" is mostly BS, but there's every reason to believe that bin Laden and Zawahiri are still in the border region, and keeping a military presence nearby means that they're limited in what they can do, where they can go and who they can meet, not to mention keeping the possibility alive that they might be killed or brought to justice. And as rotten as things still are for Afghan women and girls, leaving would only enable their further oppression. Finally, there are many, many Afghans who would be targeted for their cooperation with Western forces if we up and left, and our record of protecting those kind of people in places we've pulled out of isn't particularly encouraging.
I should say too that I don't find myself caring very much about the domestic political side of the American Afghan debate - I don't buy the argument that Petraeus or McChrystal are trying to undermine Obama in support of some right-wing political agenda. I'm pretty sick of the political scorekeeping getting in the way of real substantive argument in general, and particularly on foreign policy - I want everyone involved making what they see as the best decisions possible, no matter what the outcome of the 2010 or 2012 elections are (although that level of nonpartisan focus is admittedly a pipe dream).
So I'm really, honestly torn, and not for lack of reading or thinking about the subject. I want to believe that Gen. McChrystal and his COIN experts can turn things around, but I don't have any faith in the Afghan government to make the political progress that's an absolute necessity for the war to succeed. I understand the importance of the mission and the desire to be able to answer the question of why we're still killing and dying there, but at the moment even the best outcome of any course of action looks fairly grim. I appreciate that in war there are no half measures and yet expect that since politics are involved, they are inevitable.
Given the topics I'm working on, I can't imagine that my views on this topic will remain unsettled forever, or even for all that much longer. And events certainly seem to be moving along - at the moment, with the elections and the high rate of casualties, pessimism seems to be the reigning opinion on the topic, which pushes the needle further towards the "take our ball and go home" option. But I'm not ready to make that jump just yet. So we'll see what Obama orders and how the Europeans react, and hope that whatever it is, Afghanistan's losing streak ends and ends soon.
---
* One big way in which this is true is the different characteristics of our immigrant communities - as a (very minor and anecdotal) example, in four years of living in New York and Washington, I never saw anything like the Muslim demonstration I saw in North London on Saturday.
** Which is labeled "nuclear-armed Pakistan" with such frequency that I wonder when the country is going to amend its title card at the UN to include a little picture of an A-bomb.
The organizers had done a good job of getting people to cover the bases of the debate. There was the Ministry of Defence official who I ended up feeling pretty sorry for, since he had to toe the government line and was getting it from both sides, an anti-war campaigner, the former EU envoy to Afghanistan, a Scottish Labour MP who clearly didn't care much for his own party's platform, and an academic from the King's College Department of War Studies. It wasn't an American cable news-style smackdown, but there were definitely some sparks, particularly between the MP and the MoD official. Oh, and the anti-war campaigner was accused by an Afghan expat in the audience of "doing the Taliban's work for them." Unlike many of the debates I've seen on the BBC and Channel 4, there was a significant amount of discussion of Britain's role in the war vis a vis the United States, and it wasn't particularly favorable towards the "special relationship" - by and large, the discussants seemed to view the US as simply dictating policy to the UK. Brigadier Howes argued that the UK had helped set American policy from time to time, but didn't seem especially convinced of his own argument, and all in all the opinion in the room seemed to be focused on the idea that the UK needs a more Europe-focused defense policy. That's fair; I'm not enough of an American nationalist to think that the UK's interests or situation are or should be inherently aligned with ours.* And to my (foreign) ears, the argument that British boots on the ground in Afghanistan are stopping terrorist attacks back home ring a bit hollow - as several people pointed out tonight, the much more effective counter-terrorism operations are conducted by British security services operating domestically. But I didn't find the anti-war message - that we should just give Afghanistan over to the Afghans, come what may - especially convincing either.
I guess what the panel reinforced for me is my agnosticism on the topic of Afghanistan. I think it's pretty unarguable that the war was botched almost from the outset, and that we missed a huge opportunity to build functional state and security mechanisms between the Taliban's defeat in 2001 and its resurgence around 2006, in no small part because we (speaking here for both the US and the UK) were occupied with Iraq. Eight years is a long time to ask people to put up with a steady drumbeat of cost and casualties for an uncertain benefit, and the three to five more years that Stanley McChrystal is apparently planning for is difficult to imagine. And I agree with the argument - advanced by various war opponents but with particular eloquence by Ahmed Rashid - that Western military activity is only inflaming the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and further destabilizing Pakistan,** leading to a potentially devastating wider conflict of some variety. Most vividly, though, the sham re-election of Karzai was a disaster, a slap in the face to everyone who worked (and, in the case of some Afghan, British and American soldiers, died) in order to try and improve Afghanistan's lot and bring about something like meaningful self-rule.
And yet... I also understand the worries of the Pakistanis that if the West pulls out of Afghanistan, the insurgency in their northwest provinces will escalate. I can only imagine the propaganda victory al Qaeda - which, granted, has little presence in Afghanistan these days - would achieve if they could claim that they had helped drive the West out. The "flypaper theory" is mostly BS, but there's every reason to believe that bin Laden and Zawahiri are still in the border region, and keeping a military presence nearby means that they're limited in what they can do, where they can go and who they can meet, not to mention keeping the possibility alive that they might be killed or brought to justice. And as rotten as things still are for Afghan women and girls, leaving would only enable their further oppression. Finally, there are many, many Afghans who would be targeted for their cooperation with Western forces if we up and left, and our record of protecting those kind of people in places we've pulled out of isn't particularly encouraging.
I should say too that I don't find myself caring very much about the domestic political side of the American Afghan debate - I don't buy the argument that Petraeus or McChrystal are trying to undermine Obama in support of some right-wing political agenda. I'm pretty sick of the political scorekeeping getting in the way of real substantive argument in general, and particularly on foreign policy - I want everyone involved making what they see as the best decisions possible, no matter what the outcome of the 2010 or 2012 elections are (although that level of nonpartisan focus is admittedly a pipe dream).
So I'm really, honestly torn, and not for lack of reading or thinking about the subject. I want to believe that Gen. McChrystal and his COIN experts can turn things around, but I don't have any faith in the Afghan government to make the political progress that's an absolute necessity for the war to succeed. I understand the importance of the mission and the desire to be able to answer the question of why we're still killing and dying there, but at the moment even the best outcome of any course of action looks fairly grim. I appreciate that in war there are no half measures and yet expect that since politics are involved, they are inevitable.
Given the topics I'm working on, I can't imagine that my views on this topic will remain unsettled forever, or even for all that much longer. And events certainly seem to be moving along - at the moment, with the elections and the high rate of casualties, pessimism seems to be the reigning opinion on the topic, which pushes the needle further towards the "take our ball and go home" option. But I'm not ready to make that jump just yet. So we'll see what Obama orders and how the Europeans react, and hope that whatever it is, Afghanistan's losing streak ends and ends soon.
---
* One big way in which this is true is the different characteristics of our immigrant communities - as a (very minor and anecdotal) example, in four years of living in New York and Washington, I never saw anything like the Muslim demonstration I saw in North London on Saturday.
** Which is labeled "nuclear-armed Pakistan" with such frequency that I wonder when the country is going to amend its title card at the UN to include a little picture of an A-bomb.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
London Week One
Today I passed an important milestone. No, it wasn't one week living in London, or one year since I started class at St Andrews. It was a much more important event than that: the day I stopped eating off paper plates with plastic silverware. Yes, today I finally got real flatware, like a real adult. Or something.
I'm pretty sure - at least I hope I'm pretty sure - that this is the last time I'll ever live in institutional housing. I don't regret the choice: moving to a new city, starting a doctoral program without a built-in social group means that it's possible that you'll be very, very isolated. A dorm, even one as relatively quiet as mine (I still, after a week here, haven't met three of the ten people on my hall), is infinitely more sociable than what my mom calls "some grotty bedsit" on the outskirts of the city. And you can't beat the location, either. Still, it's odd to think about the fact that while my contemporaries from high school and college are getting married, buying houses and having children, I'm living in a dorm and considering activities as part of "Freshers Week."
That oddness aside, I'm very happy right now. I'm fundamentally more of a city person than a small-town person; maybe that will change when I'm older and have a family, but for the foreseeable future I think I'll stick to urban areas. And London definitely qualifies. One of the things I really prefer about city life is that, with so much more happening, you can accrue a bunch of semi-interesting mini-stories in a week's time:
- The "One and Other" project, which is still running at Trafalgar Square, in which random people living in Britain are invited to stand atop the empty fourth plinth for an hour at a time and do whatever they want. I wandered in that direction with a friend on Friday night, and came across a bizarrely magical scene: a full moon illuminating a woman in a cyan ballgown and a rooster mask playing the theremin.
- The range of transportation options taken by suit-wearing City types. Aside from the seemingly endless supply of Bentleys and Aston Martins, my personal favorite has been the pinstriped gentleman I saw riding a tiny moped with a black apron daintily draped over his pants.
- The street juggler in Covent Garden, who wore nothing but pink shorts which left nothing to the imagination, rode an eight-foot-tall unicycle and juggled machetes and a running chainsaw on a cold, windy evening. He earned my £2.80 like nobody's business.
- The demonstration I saw in Camden Town by about a hundred British Muslims, the men sporting skullcaps and full beards, the women speaking in broad North London accents from underneath their burqas. They had a sign which read "Communism is dead, capitalism is dying, ISLAM is the FUTURE." A few passerby were arguing more or less good-naturedly with the pamphleteers, but I decided that my post-sports practice shower was more important than pointing out the conflation of religion and economic policies on their banner.
- The cabbie who managed to live up to all the bad London cabbie stereotypes during a five-minute ride when he asked why Obama was giving "Gordon Blair" the cold shoulder; I said something about the rumors that Obama has bad feelings about the British because his uncle was tortured in British custody in Kenya in the '40s; he responded by saying, "Well, we should'a drowned the whole bloody lot of 'em then." To his (very partial) credit, he responded to our stunned silence by saying, "Oh, well, I don't actually believe that," but it was a bit late for that...
So you could say things are more interesting here, and mostly in a good way. I've become the Smilingest Man in Central London (which is admittedly not a difficult title to acquire) with the realization that I'm finally back in something like the right place for me. I'm sure that will wear off over time, but for the moment, I'm definitely enjoying it.
More soon.
I'm pretty sure - at least I hope I'm pretty sure - that this is the last time I'll ever live in institutional housing. I don't regret the choice: moving to a new city, starting a doctoral program without a built-in social group means that it's possible that you'll be very, very isolated. A dorm, even one as relatively quiet as mine (I still, after a week here, haven't met three of the ten people on my hall), is infinitely more sociable than what my mom calls "some grotty bedsit" on the outskirts of the city. And you can't beat the location, either. Still, it's odd to think about the fact that while my contemporaries from high school and college are getting married, buying houses and having children, I'm living in a dorm and considering activities as part of "Freshers Week."
That oddness aside, I'm very happy right now. I'm fundamentally more of a city person than a small-town person; maybe that will change when I'm older and have a family, but for the foreseeable future I think I'll stick to urban areas. And London definitely qualifies. One of the things I really prefer about city life is that, with so much more happening, you can accrue a bunch of semi-interesting mini-stories in a week's time:
- The "One and Other" project, which is still running at Trafalgar Square, in which random people living in Britain are invited to stand atop the empty fourth plinth for an hour at a time and do whatever they want. I wandered in that direction with a friend on Friday night, and came across a bizarrely magical scene: a full moon illuminating a woman in a cyan ballgown and a rooster mask playing the theremin.
- The range of transportation options taken by suit-wearing City types. Aside from the seemingly endless supply of Bentleys and Aston Martins, my personal favorite has been the pinstriped gentleman I saw riding a tiny moped with a black apron daintily draped over his pants.
- The street juggler in Covent Garden, who wore nothing but pink shorts which left nothing to the imagination, rode an eight-foot-tall unicycle and juggled machetes and a running chainsaw on a cold, windy evening. He earned my £2.80 like nobody's business.
- The demonstration I saw in Camden Town by about a hundred British Muslims, the men sporting skullcaps and full beards, the women speaking in broad North London accents from underneath their burqas. They had a sign which read "Communism is dead, capitalism is dying, ISLAM is the FUTURE." A few passerby were arguing more or less good-naturedly with the pamphleteers, but I decided that my post-sports practice shower was more important than pointing out the conflation of religion and economic policies on their banner.
- The cabbie who managed to live up to all the bad London cabbie stereotypes during a five-minute ride when he asked why Obama was giving "Gordon Blair" the cold shoulder; I said something about the rumors that Obama has bad feelings about the British because his uncle was tortured in British custody in Kenya in the '40s; he responded by saying, "Well, we should'a drowned the whole bloody lot of 'em then." To his (very partial) credit, he responded to our stunned silence by saying, "Oh, well, I don't actually believe that," but it was a bit late for that...
So you could say things are more interesting here, and mostly in a good way. I've become the Smilingest Man in Central London (which is admittedly not a difficult title to acquire) with the realization that I'm finally back in something like the right place for me. I'm sure that will wear off over time, but for the moment, I'm definitely enjoying it.
More soon.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Scattered Observations
I'm getting on my plane to London this evening, having spent a couple of days in Pittsburgh visiting my brother and a few more in DC visiting various friends. A few observations from the last few days:
- I had a couple of hours to kill in my old neighborhood, so I went to the new Pentagon Memorial. In stark contrast to the Air Force Memorial nearby, it's stark, tasteful and not in any way overdone. "Like" is the wrong word for a memorial to a recent act of mass violence, but I think it's well-executed and moving. Unfortunately, not everyone understands the word "memorial" - as I was leaving, I passed a middle-aged tourist couple who were taking a photo by the sign for the memorial. The woman knelt down next to the sign and grinned for the camera the way you would in front of a London phone booth or your dog. It was pretty appalling. I remember going to the Vietnam memorial when I was about 15 and noticing that everyone around was either respectfully silent or crying quietly; when I went back a couple of years ago there were kids running around with no apparent supervision and folks blabbing obliviously into their cell phones. I wonder if that's just my impression.
- Being nice does actually sometimes work. I had to get my large, heavy suitcase and large, heavy backpack from one friend's house in Van Ness to another's in Fairlington, which is not exactly a straight shot on public transit. So I hired a Zipcar for a couple of hours for the task (cost: approximately $14). Predictably, everything went wrong. I couldn't get into it when I arrived, so I had to wait five minutes on hold to speak to someone, the Rock Creek Parkway turns out to be closed going south on weekday afternoons, and I got lost in Alexandria, the worst-signed city in America. Twice. So, seeing as I was going to be late anyway, I pulled over into a parking lot to call Zipcar and notify them that I was not going to make it back on time. 10 minutes on hold later, the very nice young lady who answered informed me that I would probably be assessed a $50 late charge. I arrived back 15 minutes late and was indeed assessed a charge. Fair enough; car-sharing wouldn't really work without late penalties, but it bothered me that I had basically been penalized for doing the right thing instead of talking while driving or just arriving late without explanation for the next driver. So I wrote Zipcar a polite note and asked them to consider adding an automated "I'm going to be late" function to their phone tree. They immediately responded, thanked me for the suggestion and rescinded the late charge. I doubt they'd have done that if I'd called up and screamed at them. So score one for being nice.
- I remember getting on the way to St Andrews almost exactly one year ago and feeling, for lack of a better term, a bit nervous. Today - not so much. The next 48 hours look like they might be pretty messy for various reasons too boring to get into, but I'm not feeling any particular nervousness about what comes afterwards. Which is odd, given that I feel like doing a PhD is a much bigger step than doing a Master's program. But this time I'm not moving to a new country, not completely changing my lifestyle from yuppie-lite to grad student, and trading a small town for a city, rather than the other way around. Plus I feel like I did my homework better this time around, and I know what I'm getting myself into a bit better - at least for the first year or so. Beyond that, I might be getting in a bit over my head, but if you don't get yourself in over your head enough to find your way back, what's the point of doing a doctorate?
We'll find out.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Things I Found While Cleaning Out My Old Desk
Today was the long-delayed Desk Cleaning Day at home. I have an enormous desk that's well out of proportion to the size of my room - I originally got it back in my high school video-editing days to store all of my various computer and display items, and I've been using it as a repository for all sorts of random objects since. Most of them are now on their way to the dump, which is a bit of a shame (if entirely necessary); but since it's not every day that you go through all the detritus of your past, I thought I'd offer this small list of random things I found while deciding what to keep and what to toss. In no particular order:
- A miniature tape recorder, which astonishingly still had charged batteries and contained a tape of some kind of half-comprehensible conversation between me and some high school friends, probably relating to a video we were making at the time. Or, given the number of audible references to guns and knives, just a discussion about Things We Thought Were Awesome. Kept.
- A transcript from the end of my second year at Hampshire, with evaluations from all my courses up until then. The consensus of my professors seemed to be that I was noticeably good at showing up for class (a rare trait at Hampshire, apparently) and speaking up. Furthermore, I somehow managed to bamboozle my Biochemistry teachers into thinking that I knew the first damned thing about Biochemistry. Kept.
- A pair of TI-82 graphing calculators, hooked together with some kind of primitive wire for transmitting entire kilobytes of data. Each one is about the size of, and has approximately the same processing power as, a standard brick. Picking them up brought back instant memories of Pre-Calculus, taught by a man named David Bowie who in all other respects resembled Seymour Skinner. Kept.
- Four ring binders full of heavily-doodled-on notes from high school and college. On the first page of the binder for the Art of War and Peace class at Hampshire, I had taken about four lines of notes and then written, "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO." Tossed.
- A number of photographs of people from high school who I vaguely remember but can't summon any names for. Kept, for some reason.
- A binder full of my work from high school creative writing class. Tossed with extreme prejudice.
- A strobe light, inherited from an older friend in high school and never to my recollection used by me. Tossed.
- Two Hi-8 tapes containing video projects shot in high school. Kept, to embarrass future generations.
- About forty pounds of phone bills and bank statements for phone and bank accounts I no longer have. Tossed.
- A union ID card in my name, proving that I was - briefly and basically coincidentally - a Teamster. Kept, obviously.
- A mix CD a friend in college made for me which I shamefully never listened to, but upon looking at the track listing, looks quite good. Kept.
- An external CD burner, which, judging by its scorching 4x speed and hyper-modern SCSI bus, dates from approximately 1994. Tossed.
- Three plastic army men and one plastic army man fortification. Tossed.
- And, of course, this, which was posted completely without irony in the bathroom of my first year hall at Hampshire (the Activists and Social Justice Hall):
You can't toss memories like that.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Ghost Stories
I was at my favorite place in the world this weekend - a family friend's house across the bay from Mount Desert Island, the site of Acadia National Park (which happens to be the single most-visited national park in the country, and for good reason). We've been going there since I was a small child, and I haven't gotten any less fond of it: waking up in the morning eighty feet from the ocean and looking out across the sea speckled with lobster buoys and sailboats to the mountains of the park rising directly from the water is pretty much the best thing in the entire universe, as far as I'm concerned. Her place is a century-old, sprawling summer house that's been repaired piecemeal over the years; as a result, it's got a new roof and a fairly new kitchen, but also peeling paint, creaking floors and a septic system which is apparently "delicate." Speaking as a visitor, I actually like those characteristics - they make the place something special, something more than just another house. But I never thought of it as haunted.
This time around, though, she told us that the woman who cleans the house had reported seeing a ghost upstairs on several occasions. When our friend showed her a picture of her mother, who died a few years ago, the woman said, "That's her." Moreover, she reported that the contractors who had done some renovations on the house had reported seeing an elderly woman staring in through the windows, and that their radios would only receive stations playing classical music - all characteristics of our friend's mother.
It should be said that our friend, who has spent more time in this house than probably anyone else, said that she had never felt the presence of her mother or any other supernatural entity there - or anywhere else, for that matter. I don't believe in ghosts either, but that night, once everyone else had gone to bed, I found myself in a darkened room in an old house that was swaying slightly in a stiff breeze, with a door down the hall swinging open and shut unpredictably every few minutes, and suddenly it was much harder to maintain that lack of belief.
I can't say I've ever seen a ghost, or felt a "presence," or had any kind of experience that I can't explain. I don't entirely discount the possibility that things happen that are beyond science's ability to explain, exactly, but I tend to agree with Carl Sagan's line about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence - and "science can't explain this yet" seems like a simpler claim than "ghosts are real!" But I don't instinctively dismiss ghost stories, and that's partly down to personal experience.
A few years back I was an Emergency Medical Technician-Basic, which meant that I spent about three hours a day providing very basic medical care and transport and about nine waiting in a state of marginally controlled panic for the radio to go off. During the latter nine, the options were either to watch Animal Planet and talk politics with my much older (and overwhelmingly Republican) coworkers in the ready room or seek out a bit of solitude in the cab of one of the trucks in the garage with a book or a pillow.
You'll be shocked to learn that I found myself in the cab quite a lot.
Most of the time, an occupied ambulance is an appallingly loud thing. Between the wind noise, the growling diesel, the siren, the squawking radio and the country or rap-metal your partner is almost certainly listening to, it's already ear-splittingly loud before you add in whatever noise your patient is making. So to climb in and shut the door in a quiet garage and find yourself in an ambulance silent but for the ticking of your watch is... discomfiting. Enough so that I couldn't help thinking about ghosts.
Most of the ambulances at that station were pretty old, especially given their near-constant use. One in particular was a 1997 model with over a hundred and thirty thousand miles on it. No matter how many times or how thoroughly we washed it, we couldn't quite expunge its particular odor - latex and plastic smells layered atop the odors of long-evaporated solvents, saline, bodily fluids and engine leakages. We were always told that nobody dies in the ambulance,* but I know for a fact that's bullshit. Even leaving aside for a moment the bleeding and burned who survived, how many people took their last ride in the back of that very truck, on that very gurney? I transported at least two to "end of life care" in it, and I was there less than a year as a part-timer. My gut feeling says for that one truck, at the time I sat down in it, the number would have easily been in the hundreds, if not higher. By that standard, I'm not sure if I can think of a place that's any more haunted.
And yet... we don't think of ambulances as haunted places. We - as far as I can tell, from the reactions I've gotten when my EMT days come up in conversation - don't like to think of them much at all. It could be that they don't fit our standardized conception of a haunted place - the cobwebs, the musty grandfather clock, the stillness. Nothing about an ambulance fits into that conception, really - we associate ghosts with age and decrepitude, so our ghost stories revolve disproportionately around haunted mansions and old Indian burial grounds and ancient Gypsy curses and so on. We may see cars, computers and other sorts of gear as having frightening sorts of potential, but "haunted" doesn't seem to be in the picture when we talk about technology.
Partly, I think the issue is that our superstitions haven't yet caught up with our technological progress. Take this, for example. The story itself is a fairly straightforward case of friendship-gone-wrong-turns-to-murder. But the victims had lives which stretched onto the growing online social network; although their lives ended suddenly, their virtual avatars did not. When I first read that story, I thought it showed what we might understand "haunted" to mean in the future: the dead living on through the traces they'd left behind on their technology, made accessible to their friends and loved ones (and the rest of the world) via the Internet. But upon more reflection, I think that's another, related phenomenon - something about how we leave our mark upon the world, which isn't quite the same as haunting it. The Internet may be full of anonymous trolls, but being on it entails some kind of interaction with other human beings, no matter how attenuated by distance and technology. Whereas I think when we talk about truly haunted places, we're really talking about a fear of being alone.
And maybe that's why no one tells stories about haunted ambulances. For all the suffering and death that they carry, the sufferers are never left alone in them. Most people's experience of ambulances is of riding in them either as a patient being tended to, or as a friend or family member of the patient. In either case, loneliness isn't the issue. My experience, of climbing into quiet, empty ambulances and imagining them to be full of screaming ghosts, is fairly unusual.** But being alone, in unfamiliar surroundings and facing some version of the moaning wind and the banging door is a pretty universal experience. As is, I imagine, having no idea what it means.
I didn't expect to see a ghost when I finally got up and went to shut the door that had been swinging open and shut in the wind. In fact, by the time I actually got out of bed I was sure I wasn't going to see one. And I was right. There was no ghost, no spirit, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I closed the door, went back into my room, and went to sleep.
But maybe the ghost had just moved on.
* As a matter of protocol, they're either dead on scene (DOS) or dead upon arrival at the hospital (DOA). EMTs in every jurisdiction I know of lack the authority to pronounce death in the ambulance, and therefore are obliged to continue providing care until such time as the patient is delivered to the hospital.
** But not by any means unprecedented - a good example is Joe Connelly's novel Bringing Out the Dead, later turned into quite a good movie by Martin Scorsese, which features as its protagonist a burned-out paramedic who sees the ghosts of the patients he couldn't save, and comes to believe that his job isn't about saving everyone but about bearing witness to suffering. I don't remember whether I thought about ghosts in the ambulance before I read it, but I sure as hell did afterward.
This time around, though, she told us that the woman who cleans the house had reported seeing a ghost upstairs on several occasions. When our friend showed her a picture of her mother, who died a few years ago, the woman said, "That's her." Moreover, she reported that the contractors who had done some renovations on the house had reported seeing an elderly woman staring in through the windows, and that their radios would only receive stations playing classical music - all characteristics of our friend's mother.
It should be said that our friend, who has spent more time in this house than probably anyone else, said that she had never felt the presence of her mother or any other supernatural entity there - or anywhere else, for that matter. I don't believe in ghosts either, but that night, once everyone else had gone to bed, I found myself in a darkened room in an old house that was swaying slightly in a stiff breeze, with a door down the hall swinging open and shut unpredictably every few minutes, and suddenly it was much harder to maintain that lack of belief.
I can't say I've ever seen a ghost, or felt a "presence," or had any kind of experience that I can't explain. I don't entirely discount the possibility that things happen that are beyond science's ability to explain, exactly, but I tend to agree with Carl Sagan's line about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence - and "science can't explain this yet" seems like a simpler claim than "ghosts are real!" But I don't instinctively dismiss ghost stories, and that's partly down to personal experience.
A few years back I was an Emergency Medical Technician-Basic, which meant that I spent about three hours a day providing very basic medical care and transport and about nine waiting in a state of marginally controlled panic for the radio to go off. During the latter nine, the options were either to watch Animal Planet and talk politics with my much older (and overwhelmingly Republican) coworkers in the ready room or seek out a bit of solitude in the cab of one of the trucks in the garage with a book or a pillow.
You'll be shocked to learn that I found myself in the cab quite a lot.
Most of the time, an occupied ambulance is an appallingly loud thing. Between the wind noise, the growling diesel, the siren, the squawking radio and the country or rap-metal your partner is almost certainly listening to, it's already ear-splittingly loud before you add in whatever noise your patient is making. So to climb in and shut the door in a quiet garage and find yourself in an ambulance silent but for the ticking of your watch is... discomfiting. Enough so that I couldn't help thinking about ghosts.
Most of the ambulances at that station were pretty old, especially given their near-constant use. One in particular was a 1997 model with over a hundred and thirty thousand miles on it. No matter how many times or how thoroughly we washed it, we couldn't quite expunge its particular odor - latex and plastic smells layered atop the odors of long-evaporated solvents, saline, bodily fluids and engine leakages. We were always told that nobody dies in the ambulance,* but I know for a fact that's bullshit. Even leaving aside for a moment the bleeding and burned who survived, how many people took their last ride in the back of that very truck, on that very gurney? I transported at least two to "end of life care" in it, and I was there less than a year as a part-timer. My gut feeling says for that one truck, at the time I sat down in it, the number would have easily been in the hundreds, if not higher. By that standard, I'm not sure if I can think of a place that's any more haunted.
And yet... we don't think of ambulances as haunted places. We - as far as I can tell, from the reactions I've gotten when my EMT days come up in conversation - don't like to think of them much at all. It could be that they don't fit our standardized conception of a haunted place - the cobwebs, the musty grandfather clock, the stillness. Nothing about an ambulance fits into that conception, really - we associate ghosts with age and decrepitude, so our ghost stories revolve disproportionately around haunted mansions and old Indian burial grounds and ancient Gypsy curses and so on. We may see cars, computers and other sorts of gear as having frightening sorts of potential, but "haunted" doesn't seem to be in the picture when we talk about technology.
Partly, I think the issue is that our superstitions haven't yet caught up with our technological progress. Take this, for example. The story itself is a fairly straightforward case of friendship-gone-wrong-turns-to-murder. But the victims had lives which stretched onto the growing online social network; although their lives ended suddenly, their virtual avatars did not. When I first read that story, I thought it showed what we might understand "haunted" to mean in the future: the dead living on through the traces they'd left behind on their technology, made accessible to their friends and loved ones (and the rest of the world) via the Internet. But upon more reflection, I think that's another, related phenomenon - something about how we leave our mark upon the world, which isn't quite the same as haunting it. The Internet may be full of anonymous trolls, but being on it entails some kind of interaction with other human beings, no matter how attenuated by distance and technology. Whereas I think when we talk about truly haunted places, we're really talking about a fear of being alone.
And maybe that's why no one tells stories about haunted ambulances. For all the suffering and death that they carry, the sufferers are never left alone in them. Most people's experience of ambulances is of riding in them either as a patient being tended to, or as a friend or family member of the patient. In either case, loneliness isn't the issue. My experience, of climbing into quiet, empty ambulances and imagining them to be full of screaming ghosts, is fairly unusual.** But being alone, in unfamiliar surroundings and facing some version of the moaning wind and the banging door is a pretty universal experience. As is, I imagine, having no idea what it means.
I didn't expect to see a ghost when I finally got up and went to shut the door that had been swinging open and shut in the wind. In fact, by the time I actually got out of bed I was sure I wasn't going to see one. And I was right. There was no ghost, no spirit, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. I closed the door, went back into my room, and went to sleep.
But maybe the ghost had just moved on.
* As a matter of protocol, they're either dead on scene (DOS) or dead upon arrival at the hospital (DOA). EMTs in every jurisdiction I know of lack the authority to pronounce death in the ambulance, and therefore are obliged to continue providing care until such time as the patient is delivered to the hospital.
** But not by any means unprecedented - a good example is Joe Connelly's novel Bringing Out the Dead, later turned into quite a good movie by Martin Scorsese, which features as its protagonist a burned-out paramedic who sees the ghosts of the patients he couldn't save, and comes to believe that his job isn't about saving everyone but about bearing witness to suffering. I don't remember whether I thought about ghosts in the ambulance before I read it, but I sure as hell did afterward.
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