I realize that hardly anyone votes on education issues in Presidential campaigns, so this may be only of academic interest, but I’ve been looking at the Kerry campaign’s plan for education (k-12, I don’t know much about higher education policy issues), and thought I’d give my tentative take on them for what its worth. There’s some good and some bad and some obscure. Just to demonstrate my non-partisanship I’d say much the same of Bush’s promises and, believe it or not, of Bush’s record – in fact, my suspicion is that if you really cut through the detail of the two programs the most significant thing in both is the same thing – promises of a great deal more Federal funds – promises that I happen to believe in both cases, but which don’t really bring me deep joy.

Anyway, the first thing to note is the one thing that is not an issue here, despite Kerry’s promise in the NEA TODAY that ‘you will never see a voucher proposal coming from my office as President’, is vouchers and choice. (Sorry, the interview doesn’t seem to be online, but I assume that the quote doesn’t need verification!) Both campaigns mention choice, and Kerry is on board with the right kind of charter programs, but Bush downplays choice, understanding that his important constituencies don’t care much about it. Vouchers, in particular, are not going to win votes for the Republicans, because floating voters, and most existing Republican voters, have no interest in them, and because the people who are interested – urban Black voters – are not about to defect to the Republicans over the issue.

Kerry’s website was revamped after the convention, and the most peculiar, not to say ludicrous, promise – that the Feds would make sure every teacher has voicemail – was removed. This is to Kerry’s credit, but I admit that it still worries me a bit that anyone could have even thought it up, let alone thought that it was something to make public as a priority.

On to the main points.

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I posted a few weeks ago about the bland soggy pap that is EU official art – last week, I found a particularly entertaining and incongruous example of it in the European Parliament’s information center. _Troubled Waters_ is a graphic novel put out by the EP to explain what it does in language that the young uns can understand; it details the adventures of one Irina Vega, crusading Parliamentarian, whose nationality and party identification are left deliberately unspecified.[1] Surely, this is destined to become a kitsch collectors’ item in years to come, if only for the contortions that it goes through in its efforts to reconcile a watered-down and slightly incoherent version of the comic book political thriller (evil chemical companies conspire to pollute the water supply and blacken each others’ names), with the legislative minutiae of co-decision, conciliation and voting in plenary. ‘Immiscibles’ is the technical term, I believe. I’ve scanned a couple of pages and PDFed them for the curious – available here and here.

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fn1. Although Corkonian and former president of the Parliament, Pat Cox, is clearly identifiable in some of the drawings.

I’d come across Stephen Schwartz as TCS’s resident ranter against “Islamofascism” and producer of _ex post facto_ rationalizations for such wise decisions as the Tariq Ramadan exclusion and the Cat Stevens deportation. Now I see that he's turned his hand to literary criticism . Apparently, the Swedish Academy “have returned to their habit of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic.” At one point he interrupts himself, mid-rant, to write

bq. But the Nobel Prize is bestowed for writing, and one must therefore address Jelinek’s publications.

Before going on to make clear that his only knowledge is based on a film adaptation of one of Elfriede Jelinek’s books!

Anyway, that list of unknown, undistinguished leftist fanatics ….

bq. scolding lefty turned Nazi-nostalgic Gunter Grass, in 1999; Jose Saramago, a vulgar enemy of religion and former Communist censor in revolutionary Portugal, in 1998; and the repellent Dario Fo, an Italian playwright specializing in denunciations of capitalism, in 1997…. Other Nobel stars have included Claude Simon (1985), a Stalinist who defamed George Orwell; Castro-lover Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982); Pablo Neruda, Stalinist secret police agent (1971); and Soviet plagiarist and propagandist Mikhail Sholokhov (1965).

Incidentally, is “Nazi-nostalgic” Schwartz’s take on _Crabwalk_ ?

I saw Ken Loach’s latest film, Ae Fond Kiss , last night. Very good it was too. I don’t want to post spoilers, but the film is about a love affair between Casim (Atta Yaqub), a Glaswegian Muslim with a Pakistani background and Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an Irish Catholic schoolteacher. His family, who have arranged for him to marry Jasmin, a cousin he has never seen, and are less than thrilled at his relationship. I thought the depiction of the intergenerational tensions within this Muslim family was terrific. The film works dramatically because Loach is sensitive enough not to play it just in terms of true love versus backward tradition: Casim’s parents aren’t ogres or dictators but caring and engaging characters who are nonetheless bewildered by their children. One of the best films I’ve seen in ages.

[I also saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy in Before Sunset . I’d estimate that a third of the audience walked out. I wish I had.]

Speaking of the nature of excellence, my sister-in-law Sarah Dupré Healy ran her first marathon today — the Chicago Marathon. She finished seventeenth in the Women’s Race, which is not too shabby, given there were about 40,000 people running altogether. Conditions were windy and she suffered a lot over the last 10k or so, dropping a few minutes off what had been a 2:38 pace. But I think it’s just fantastic that she finished in the Top 20, which is why I’m telling all of you about it.

Matthew Turner has been reading John Gunther’s _Inside Europe_ , a classic from 1936, and (in two posts )regales us with some of the facts about Britain contained therein. I particularly liked this one:

bq. * The decline in the birth rate, which, according to competent estimates, will reduce the population to thirty-three million by 1985.

When doing research interviews in Brussels last week, I was intrigued to come across a free pro-business rag called the “EU Reporter” in several places, and even more intrigued to find that it contained an advertisement from our old friends, Flack Central Station, for a euro 2500 competition for the “best commentary piece” on European Health Care Reform. As the ad describes it:

bq. “Europeans endure long waits for medicines, treatment and surgeries – and pay high taxes for this substandard level of care” says TCS Europe editor, Craig Winneker. “Patients lack choice and access to the best medicines.”

TCS is looking to engage “Europe’s best minds” on the question of how to improve their countries’ health care system. I reckon that it’s a safe bet that proposals to improve European health care by increasing the role of state provision are unlikely to win the 2,500.

I’m intrigued by the increasing frequency of ‘competitions’ of this sort, frequently (but by no means always) funded by right wing lobbies or think tanks. Health care reform is a particular topic-du-jour – the Simon Fraser Institute in Canada has run a similar competition in the very recent past, touting, as best I could understand it, for attacks on the Canadian system of health care provision. I wonder why TCS (which seems to me to be a very US-centric organization) is funding the competition. Given PhRMA’s role in funding TCS, my best guess is that this is an effort to trawl for stories about the horrors of European health care, which can then be used as ammunition in the internal US debate about health care (let me note in passing that the WHO ranks the US health care system as being worse than the systems of all fifteen of the EU’s rich member-states). Other essay competitions seem to me to have the more straightforward aim of encouraging intellectuals and journalists towards certain policy questions (and certain ways of considering those policy questions).

Brad DeLong takes issue with Chris’s characterization of Achilles and Che Guevara as heroes.

bq. As far as I’m concerned, we “respond” to Achilles–we may even pity him–but we do not admire him. None of us would wish to have the character of Achilles. Hektor is the one we admire. Hektor is the hero of the Iliad. And none of us would wish to have the character of Che Guevara.

This misses the sense in which Chris (and others) might very fairly regard Achilles (and Guevara) as heroes, despite their very evident personality flaws, or indeed because of them. For Brad, a hero is someone whom we should both admire and emulate. Thus, we should aspire to the virtues of the sagacious Hektor, who fights only because he must, and not those of the vainglorious Achilles. But Homer and his interpreters among the classical Greeks surely understood Achilles in a rather different way. To them, he was an embodiment of the _arete_ of the hero bound by his self-understanding and his honour-code to choose glory over a life of respectable insignificance, and to seek retribution for affronts regardless of their consequence (as in Achilles’ vengeance after the slaying of Patroklos).The fate of the hero is bound up in tragedy – he (and it is usually a ‘he’ of course in early Greek thought) does what he must, even when he knows that he will be punished by the gods. He is bound by his fate and his code of honour. Bowra captures this sense of heroism quite well in this fragment – as he argues elsewhere, it is precisely the capacity for heroism that distinguishes men from the gods.[1] Just because Guevara did “personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity,” he was a hero in a certain sense, and his fate was precisely a tragic one – it was a direct consequence of his aims and personal limitations. His _arete_ may not be one that anyone sane would want to emulate in today’s world, but it’s surely an _arete_ nonetheless.

fn1. Although note that Bowra’s personal enthusiasm for this ideal goes hand-in-hand with some rather unsavoury political opinions.

As I scanned the hallway for signs of the party, an arch of red, yellow, green and blue balloons extended a welcome. I entered the grand ballroom where fun sounds of karaoke and a sea of neon green glassware greeted me. To the left was a large screen with random words scrolling quickly: Elmers glue effect on skin; [Hebrew characters]; [Chinese characters]; pokemon cards. Scattered across the room were people forming small lines for massages, caricature drawings and tarot card readings. Ninety-five percent of those present were women. It reminded me of my college years – having attended a women’s college – and what a blast you could have putting a group of women in a room with great music. This is probably a cliché, but you really could feel the excitement and energy especially when people – whether in their 20s or 40s – crowded the dance floor for the Macarena and the electric slide. I couldn’t help but think that the songs for karaoke were not randomly selected as I listened to people sing the words to “I’m a Barbie girl” and “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover”.

Welcome to the party hosted by Women of Google at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Chicago. The meetings were sponsored by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Association of Computing Machinery. Anyone doubting whether there are still social barriers for women in computing fields needs only talk to the attendees. The young women – undergraduates or just a few years out of college pursuing graduate degrees in computer science and related fields – cannot contain their excitement of and appreciation for what this meeting offers them. Unlike the vastly male-dominated conferences and classrooms that make up most of their professional experiences and that are still often hostile to women, the Grace Hopper Celebration affords them a chance to see and meet extremely successful women in their fields – corporate VPs, university deans, inventors, inspiring mentors – who are supportive of their pursuits.

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I’m too biased to be able to judge well who won or lost in the second debate; G.W. Bush makes my skin crawl. What did strike me was the different strategies that the two candidates employed. Kerry seemed to be trying to do two things, quite deliberately, in his answers. First, he was very obviously trying to combat the Republican talking-point that he’s a pessimist. He referred to himself explicitly as an optimist at one point, and several of his answers were all about his hopes for the future. Second, he seemed to be reaching out to Republican-leaning undecided voters who were disenchanted with Bush – at every possible opportunity, he mentioned Republicans like Hagel, Lugar and McCain who have criticized the administration in one way or another. Bush, in contrast, seemed to me to be more interested in shoring up his core vote among conservatives. As I say, I came into this with a bias – still, these are the things that jumped out at me while I was watching the debate (apart from Kerry’s fluffing the response to Bush’s answer about mistakes, which many others in the blogosphere have written about already).

Matt Yglesias had some sensible comments the other day concerning Paul Berman’s philistine reaction to The Motorcycle Diaries. As a film, I thought it was OK, though I looked at my watch from time to time. There’s a real question, though, about how to portray Guevara and I’ve strugged with writing something about this for a week. I haven’t reached a satisfactory conclusion, just assembled some provisional thoughts partly inspired by Hegel and partly by Alasdair Macintyre.

Hagiography should be out, but so should the sort of reaction that just carpingly lists bad things he did or unwise decisions he made. One reaction to that type of braying criticism is Hegel's discussion of critics of Alexander in the Philosophy of History (scroll down to § 34). But Hegel’s remarks are inappropriate for Guevara because of the way in which he points to Alexander’s success in the conquest of Asia. Lack of success and damaging facts should not necessarily be enough to deprive a hero of heroic status: Achilles was flawed, and Achilles was cruel, and Achilles failed, but we still respond to him.

And then there’s the question of sympathetic identification with the cause. In his essay “How not to write about Lenin”, Alasdair Macintyre argues:

bq. For those who intend to write about Lenin there are at least two prerequisites. The first is a sense of scale. One dare not approach greatness of a certain dimension without a sense of one’s own limitations. A Liliputian who sets out to write Gulliver’s biography had best take care. Above all he dare not be patronizing…..The second prerequisite is a sense of tragedy which will enable the historian to feel both the greatness and the tragedy of the October Revolution. Those for whom the whole project of the revolutionary liberation of mankind from exploitation and alienation is an absurb fantasy disqualify themselves from writing about Communism in the same way that those who find the notion of the supernatural redemption of the world from sin disqualify themselves from writing ecclesiastical history.

Guevara wasn’t Lenin, just as he wasn’t Alexander, but he did personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity. Thersites from Des Moines (or wherever) can carp all he wants — and much of the carping will consist in a recitation of facts — but criticism that isn’t appropriately informed by a sense of grandeur, tragedy, heroism and tragic failure just misses the mark.

This is very weird. I was filling in the details on my latest DS-156 form, a form the State Department quite helpfully makes available electronically. When I went to fill in question 35, “Has Your U.S. Visa Ever Been Cancelled or Revoked?” on my defeault Firefox browser, it automatically marked “Yes” whatever I clicked. Needless to say, this is _not_ the answer I wanted to communicate to the State Department. So I tried opening up the form in IE, and the problem goes away, i.e. it is possible to mark “No”. Nothing in the source code for the page suggests why there should be a problem here, at least to my untrained eyes. It’s just odd.

Jacques Derrida has died; Jack Balkin has a good and nuanced appreciation here, while the New York Times has a somewhat cooler summation of his life here.

Update: Scott McLemee has the best short summation of Derrida’s intellectual life and influence that I’ve seen so far.

I’m trying to build up a small archive of articles that explain important things about financial markets in clear language to an educated liberal audience. This article in the Guardian by Edmond Warner is worth ten minutes of your time.