Rousseau and Our Selfish Age (Revised)

In July 2012, I posted the following:  The lead essay today on Arts and Letters Daily is "What would Rousseau make of our selfish age?" by Terry Eagleton in the Guardian.  The main point the author wanted to make was that Rousseau would be shocked by today's educational institutions, because they have moved away from the ideal of developing people capable of critical thinking across a broad range of issues and ideas.  Instead they are concentrating on "education" to serve the narrow interests of capital. On the way to making his point, Eagleton gives us a tour of Rousseau's thinking, the kind of liberal ideas that would give Mitch McConnell et al apoplexy.  If you have time to read the essay, keep questions like this in the back of your mind:  Why would anyone oppose universal healthcare?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/27/rousseau-our-selfish-age-philosopher
Recently someone accessed this piece, and I took a look myself, since I couldn’t remember what was in there.  I read the Guardian article again and liked it just as much as the first time.  Then I read the comments, which weren’t available the first time around.  I was appalled.  Virtually all of them were negative.  The constant theme throughout was that the only legitimate purpose of an education is to prepare one to do some specific kind of job.  So much for creative thinking or any kind of creativity.  It’s to be a brave new world in which our only purpose is to produce stuff.  If that’s really the way it’s going to be, I’m glad I’ve lived most of my life already, and I am distressed about the prospects for my grand children.

The Green Pastures Revisited

The other day I happened to think of my grade school and high school friend Joe McCabe.  I googled him and was disappointed to learn that he is the late Joseph Martin McCabe.  We were neighbors in Kensington, MD for a few years in the early 1970s, which is the last time I saw him.  After a career in government , Joe moved  to West Virginia and became a successful playwright.  Joe and I were debate team partners at Regis High School in Denver during our sophomore and junior years.  Each year there was a national debate topic, which we chewed over for the whole school year.  I still remember the topics and we’re still debating them now:  Should the President be elected by a direct vote of the people and should there be socialized medicine.  We were equally comfortable with either side of either question and often took the affirmative in the morning and the negative in the afternoon or vice versa.  Joe was a much better debater than I was.

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There were lots of other events at speech meets.  The exact names have slipped my mind, but the hardest for me was the one where you drew a topic and had about three minutes to think before you started talking.  I still remember my first topic. “Why do you like ice cream?”  I bombed.  I did better at extemporaneous speaking, where you were given a serious topic and had about 30 minutes to prepare.  I tried oratorical declamation for a while.  For that you had to memorize some famous speech and then recite it.  I had the one Winston Churchill addressed to the French in 1940.  I also tried an event where you acted out a scene from a play.  A standard for lots of people was a scene from Marc Connolly’s The Green Pastures.  This was the first play produced on Broadway with all black actors.  Although it won a Pulitzer in 1930, it was controversial and even banned in some countries, because of the way it scrambled up the Bible stories, and it was not loved by black intellectuals.  I doubt that it would be considered politically correct today.

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I do remember the first lines.  Gabriel says:  “I guess that’s all the important business for this morning, Lawd.”  I think he was anxious to go to lunch.  If I were doing it today, I would modify it a bit.  Gabriel goes on to say:  “Lawd, you bin working full time for five days now makin the earth.  I think you gonna need somebody to take care of the place.”  God says: “Don’t worry, Gabe.  I’ve got an ape for that.”

Fly United or Not

Yesterday I boarded my United flight from Reagan National to Houston for a 1300 takeoff.  The itinerary was Houston-Denver-Montrose.  We started on time, taxied around for a while and then taxied back to the gate to fix something and get more gas.  I'm glad they fixed whatever it was, but taking off an hour late meant I missed my connection to Denver.  At the gate in Houston a Delphic looking person pointed me toward gate C42 to ask there whether my flight had actually left.  Before we landed, we had been told that all flights out of Houston had been delayed about 20 minutes because of bad weather, so it seemed there might be a chance.  There was no one at the gate and it looked like the flight had left.  Soon I discovered the line at Customer Service and after a while my turn came.  The agent told me that I was confirmed to go our of Houston the next morning at 0600 and that United would put me up for the night because I had been delayed for mechanical reasons rather than weather.  I asked if there was another flight to Denver that evening and could I get on it.  She said there was so I could have my choice of over-nighting in Houston or Denver.  I chose Denver and she put me on a flight that left almost immediately.  With a lot of keystrokes she set me up for an overnight stay in Denver and the early flight out for Montrose the next morning, and she gave me a $10 voucher to buy something to eat.  When I looked at my boarding passes, I saw that the Denver flight would arrive at 2045, a full hour and 15 minutes before the 2200 flight to Montrose on which I had originally been scheduled.  At the desk for the Denver flight, I asked if I could be put back on the 2200 flight to Montrose.  Many keystrokes later it was done.  I was back on my original schedule and the only changes were less waiting time in Denver and  my seat number on the Montrose flight.  We took off from Houston with only a slight delay "to repair an armrest."  When I got to Denver, I learned that the flight for Montrose was delayed for three hours, because they had to bring in a replacement aircraft.  It turned out that the delay was only two and a half hours and miracles of miracles the bag I checked arrived with me.

Everyone at United was pleasant enough.  Fortunately I wasn't carrying a guitar.  See below

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Obama, the Catholic Church and Birth Control

I remember well my first rebellion against 16 years of Catholic education.  I discovered birth control.  Now the issue is back big time, but it’s hard to understand why.  If Catholic institutions had to provide health insurance plans that included contraception, I can’t see how the burden of conscience on the poor bishops and Rick Santorum would be any greater than my burden of conscience every time the state executes a prisoner.   As for the people covered by the health insurance, they don’t have to use birth control.  Health care plans would make it available to those that want it, but its use would be entirely voluntary.  Are the bishops afraid that they will have an even harder time forcing Catholics to use rhythm or abstinence?   

Logic has to enter in here somewhere.  I took a look at a few Christian Scientist sites and learned that even Mary Baker Eddy said one could get conventional care if he or she was in unbearable pain.   Apparently current policies permit church members to get conventional care but when they do they are expected to drop spiritual care.  Mixing the two is considered an aberration.  An exemption from the health care law was requested but not granted.  (The Amish do have an exemption on religious grounds, the same one that exempts them from Social Security and Medicare.  They could get the exemption because they do provide medical care for their group).  With the Christian Scientists, I was hoping to find a case analogous to the birth control issue for the Catholic Church, i.e., a requirement that Christian Scientist institutions provide health insurance to their employees, even though the Church is opposed in principle to conventional medical care.  The commentary seems to address only two issues: opting out completely and questions about whether health insurers could offer spiritual healing.  I think the answer on the first was “no,” except for clergy and “yes” regarding spiritual healing.

Then I thought about Quakers.  Shouldn’t they be exempt from the proportion of taxes that go for the military budget?  So back to the bishops.  If it’s wrong for a Catholic institution to make birth control devices available to its employees, can pension funds at Catholic institutions own stocks in corporations that manufacture or distribute birth control devices?  Wouldn’t those same limitations apply to individual Catholics?  So maybe it would be sinful for a Catholic to patronize Walgreens or Rite-Aid because that would be supporting institutions that distribute and profit from birth control devices.  I’m sure my former Jesuit masters would have an answer for that, but I don’t.

Why does this remind of the apocryphal old lady in Warsaw who sold condoms at her news kiosk but made sure she put a pinhole in each one.

Museum of the Mountain West

Along US Route 50 just east of Montrose, Colorado there’s a collection of 17 rundown looking buildings that saw their best days 100 years ago.  It’s the Museum of the Mountain West founded in 1997 by Richard Rike, starting with one building and with boxes of artifacts he had been collecting since he was eight years old.  From what I could see from the highway, I would have blown on by, but my brother lives in Montrose and knows Mr. Fike.  We decided to explore, and it was a pleasant surprise. 

In a two hour guided tour for $10 each, we started in a bar with a violano, a machine built in 1928 that plays a violin and piano duet, originally for a penny and now for free during the tour.  We heard other machines that played music; there was a faro table and a roulette wheel and just about anything else you might have found in a bar in the late 19^th Century.  We moved on to doctor’s office, a dentist’s office  -- you don’t want to know what went on there – a pharmacy, a general store, a milliner’s shop, a one room school, the teacher’s quarters, a Lutheran church restored to its 1913 original configuration, a blacksmith’s shop and a gunsmith’s shop, a Chinese laundry – everything you would find in a small western town in the late 19^th Century.

There are 500,000 artifacts, absolutely anything and everything you might think of.  I was reminded of pictures of my great grandfather’s medical office and drugstore in Trinidad, Colorado.  As I looked at this amazing record of American life from the 1880s to the 1940s, I wondered at the old machines all through the exhibit.  I think young people today would be as puzzled by what they saw as their forebears would have been when confronted with an I-pad or a Blackberry or this blog.

For more details on the museum, see their website:

www.mountainwestmuseum.com/

If you are passing through Montrose, visit this museum.  It will be an experience you won’t forget.

 

Is a College Education Worth It? (2)

A few weeks ago I saw Winter’s Bone about a girl named Ree who wanted to stay in school despite an absent father and a mentally challenged mother.  What struck me most was director Debra Granik’s realization of pickup truck society in rural Missouri where the men mostly cook meth and grow weed and the women somehow get by.  If anyone there ever had an abstract thought it was probably Ree.  Then a few nights ago I saw Harlan County, U.S.A., a documentary about a 1973 coal miners’ strike in Kentucky to try to get recognition of the UMW and a union contract. 

The film crew went into a mining town and practically lived with the striking miners’ families and documented a lot more than the issues in dispute between the miners and the Eastover Mining Co. and the Duke Power Company.   I couldn’t watch it all.  These were people struggling for their very existence.  There’s no way to describe their lives without sounding elitist.  From what I saw of how they handled themselves as they tried to provide their families with the bare essentials to sustain life, there was no question about their ability to distinguish right from wrong and to fulfill their duties within their families and with respect to their jobs, but the idea of reading a book for pleasure or self-improvement may never have occurred to any of them.  I found it hard to imagine that any of them had an opportunity for even a decent high school education much less aspirations for anything beyond that. 

This all made me wonder how a society with a net worth of around $75 trillion could have left so many people out of the mainstream of Western culture and, even more worrisome, how so many of its leaders today could be promoting educations that are unlikely to transmit the learning that is necessary to appreciate and participate in that culture.  Yes, we need to invest in education but the purpose of that education has to be twofold.  Of course we need to send young people into the workforce with skills that equip them to compete in our globalized and technically and scientifically advanced world, but the effort is wasted if we don’t also give them the intellectual tools to realize their full human potential.  I want to see an education system that encourages future carpenters and coal miners and future scientists and engineers to take AP English in high school and for those who go on to college, I want them to take something other than “Engineers English.”

Is a College Education Worth It?

I keep seeing news stories that ask whether a college education is worth the cost.  If college is a higher level trade school, the question is appropriate.  If we assume that it takes about four years to get a college degree, then we can ask if one can make enough additional money over a career to offset the total cost of four years of college tuition, books and living expenses, lost earnings during those four years and the cost of interest on any student loans required to get through those four years.  But is that what it’s about?

Maybe I should stop right there.  Posing the question may be enough.  Those who think that education is about earnings potential will not change their minds.   In my own education, where I was subjected to the Jesuits’ ratio studiorum, I’m sure I upgraded my abilities to organize my thoughts and to write and speak about them, and in the history courses I took for my major, I learned a great deal about government and politics.  These things became the substance of my working life as a naval officer, civil servant and Foreign Service officer.   The cost of my education was the best investment I ever made in financial terms, so I can say “yes,” paying for a college education was worth it even on the terms suggested in the news stories referred to above, because much of what I studied contributed to my earnings potential.  (Full disclosure: the Navy paid the bulk of my college expenses in return for a commitment to three years of active duty, but that only made the investment of my time and my own money even more profitable).

If the purpose of our lives is to earn enough to feed and house ourselves and produce our eventual replacements, then it might be appropriate to calculate the monetary value of a college education, but I can’t live with that.  What about literature and philosophy and music and the other arts and all those long conversations far into the night with classmates questioning what we heard in class and anything and everything each of us found in our own reading?  College is about ideas, about learning to think and evaluate the world around us, about realizing our full potential as human beings.  My life has been so much richer because I was exposed to the world of ideas.  I cannot imagine living without the foundation of knowledge I acquired in college and continued to build on right up to today.

Save Daniel Mendelsohn from “Mad Men”

My daughter and son-in-law watch “Mad Men” regularly and, I hope irreligiously.  I thought I would try it, and I lasted about 10 minutes.  It just seemed like a kind of mean spirited soap opera.  Full disclosure: I confess that years ago I watched “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest.” God knows why.   I was surprised when I saw that Daniel Mendelsohn had reviewed “Mad Men” in the New York Review of Books.  I always think of him as a reviewer of Greek tragedies and the like, but when I googled him to prepare to write this, I found that his brief is much broader than that.  Here is what he had to say about “Mad Men:

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

Worst of all---in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”---the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic…..it proceeds….like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture and so forth.

There were still seven long columns remaining, and I was left wondering what else there was to say.  There were lots more choice phrases in just the next two columns:

….fads depend as much on the public’s willingness to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them….

…the unpunished crassness…..

In the kind of cultural winking in which the show’s creators like to indulge….

….the pervasive theme of falseness and hypocrisy….

In a typical bit of overkill….

….the secret that lurks behind Don’s private life becomes a burden that’s increasingly hard to bear.

….the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work---it’s wearying rather than illuminating.

He says that as he watched the first season the characters and their milieu were so unrelentingly repellent that he kept wondering whether the writers had been trying, unsuccessfully, for a kind of camp—

Mendelsohn says he has seen all 52 episodes of the first four seasons and there were only two instances in which the writers dramatized rather than simply advertised their chosen themes.  So why did he keep watching?  He says he was impressed with a scene at the end of Season 1 in which one of the pitchmen invents the term “carousel” for a slide projector and then makes this even more attractive by using slides of his own family, which looks great but is actually falling apart.  He goes on to say that “The child’s-eye perspective is…one of the most original elements of the series.”  He strings this out to say the appeal of the show to its target audience is that they get to see their parents’ generation acting badly.  He has a point, I guess.  Maybe it didn’t appeal to me, because I was part of that earlier generation.  Still, I wonder how Mendelsohn was able to sit through 52 hours of this tawdry spectacle.  You can Google his review.  As always, it’s a nice piece of writing.

Netflix DVDs and Streaming Video

What I Know about Netflix
Revised October 13, 2013

I have an unlimited netflix subscription  for one film by mail at a time, which costs about $10 a month.  Maybe because I live close to a Netflix distribution center, I'm usually able to get two films a week.  Sometimes I get new DVD releases quickly, but sometimes the wait is very long.  I haven't tried video on demand from Verizon or Amazon -- maybe they are faster for new releases but what makes Netflix special is its huge instant view library, which you can use for an additional fee, or you can skip the mail service and just use the library. 

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Netflix has a library of about 15,000 films available for streaming to your computer, where you can watch if you want, but if you have a router for your computer and a new TV or DVD player or a play-station, you can also stream instant view movies to your TV wirelessly.  Many new foreign films show up on instant view as soon as they are released on DVD or just a few weeks later.  I put them in my regular queue and just wait until they show up as available on instant view.  The only downer for instant view, is that films don't stay on it forever.  Netflix gives you just a few days warning, before a film is taken off of instant view, so you have to monitor your queue on your computer or you may lose an opportunity to see it on instant view.   

If you don't yet have  Netflix capability in your TV or DVD player, you can buy a Roku for $59 for the most basic model (or more if you want 1080p HD ).  Ira Plato's guests recommended the Roku on PBS's Science Friday.  You set up your instant view queue in your Netflix account on your computer, and then the Roku will receive the whole thing direct from the router, and you can choose any movie in your queue and search for more films directly from the Roku -- and using A/V cables (those red, white and yellow ones), you can even watch on that old analog TV in the bedroom that you were about to take to the dump.   Note:  This was the situation in 2011.  There are many more options for streaming now.  Also, please note, the newer models of the Roku may not have all the connections you might need to connect to older TVs.

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Note:   If you TV is 1080i, you might want to call Roku before you buy one.  I had to spend an hour talking to India to get my first one set up because 1080i and 720p use different systems to produce the same level of definition.  You could also check to see if there is still a model available that has the output connections that match your old TVs inputs.

LG's New LED Projector

DLP Projector

When I was still teaching art history at Montgomery College, I occasionally gave a lecture or a slide presentation someplace else, and for that I had a Kodak projector and some mediocre slides.  Making the slides and getting them developed was a real pain.  I’ve just treated myself to a new toy, an LG Electronics Model HS-201 DLP projector, which I bought from Amazon after a bit of research on the internet.  The customer reviews on Amazon were amazingly detailed and accurate.  The projector bulb is an LED which is supposed to last for 30,000 hours.  The reason I hadn’t bought a projector sooner was because they cost a fortune and replacement bulbs cost a small fortune and always burn out in the middle of a presentation.  This projector is about the size of a small, thick book.  It has analog video and audio inputs, a VGA input for connecting to a computer and an HDMI input for connecting to anything digital that has an HDMI out.  The unit has speakers but one wouldn’t want to use them for anything but ensuring that there was sound from the input source.  There’s an output jack for audio which can be used with earphones or plugged into any device that has an amplifier.  I’m using the speakers in an old TV at the moment.  The amazing feature is a USB port which allows one to show still pictures and video clips from nothing more than a cruzer.  I think I’ve tried all of the features, including watching a Netflix instant view movie streamed from my laptop and SD quality cable TV from Verizon, both while I was on a treadmill.  I watched some digital still pictures and a video clip from a cruzer and they were great.  The room has to be fairly dark for a really good picture.  The colors are vivid.  My screen is about 68” wide.  The picture was great when I watched the NFL playoffs last weekend.  I don’t know if the picture would still be bright on a larger surface such as a whole wall.

Egg-on-My-Face Book

How I Survived Facebook

I had gotten a couple of Facebook invitations in my junk mail from people I know well, and I kept seeing things on NBC, MSNBC and elsewhere on TV that said such and such was available from them on Facebook.  I decided to try it out in a cautious way, joined and responded to the people who had invited me and sent feelers to a couple of others in the same group and to my daughter.  Bang.  Apparently Facebook then had access to my whole email contacts list and sent invitations to everyone on it, including my wife's friends, some of whom I've never met.  I accepted all of the positive responses, so that I would be certain not to forget them when I shut the whole thing down.  I sent an apology to everyone who had responded one way or another.  It was all over in 48 hours  It’s uncomfortable to think that more bogus invitations are probably still out there lying in people’s in-baskets or junk mail folders, and I expect there will still be some more clean up.

I can report that two or three people out of at least 20 who commented had something positive to say about Facebook.  All the rest were negative and their senders mostly said they never check it any more or that they were in the process of backing themselves out of it.  Many mentioned privacy concerns.  Such concerns have to be real when an organization has access to your personal information, and you have no way of knowing what they will do with it.