Marcus' World

The Ides of March and SMU Library Grand Opening Video

Today is the Ides of March. Beware!  My stepfather, Bob, turns 60 today.  My sister-in-law by marriage, Marilyn, turns 33.  Marilyn lives in Kuala Lumpur so it's already not her birthday anymore.

Tonight the Samuel Merritt Library celebrates the grand opening of our new and expanded space.  This has been a many-years running endeavor, requiring great fundraising and many hours of planning.  I'm looking forward to the opportunity to thank our donors and make (very brief) remarks.

Thanks to the talents of our staff we made an excellent 2 minute welcome video to the new space.  Take a gander here. 

Mayor Quan and Occupy Oakland

For the last few weeks Oakland Mayor Jean Quan has been pilloried for her inconsistent approach to the Occupy Oakland movement.  After letting the tent city grow at City Hall, police ended the encampment in tense raids with campers that involved tear gas and the wounding of an Iraq war veteran. After that the camp grew again.  By now the movement has led a peaceful general strike that closed the Port of Oakland last Wednesday, a triumph soon marred by midnight looting by a small band of protesters.  Meanwhile some businesspeople are talking about leaving Oakland if the camp continues much longer, inflicting further economic damage on an already struggling city.  Quan claims to want the camp to end, but is very reluctant to use police force against the protestors.

In City Councilman Iganacio De La Fuente's view, "[H]er nature cannot allow her to make a decision."  I can relate to this, as I too ponder situations from every angle excessively.  It's the type of critical thinking that is prized in literature class but not in the real world, in which most people are looking for clear direction that they can either support or reject.

But the truth here is deeper. In her heart Quan sides with the protestors, given her long activist history and frosty relations with the police.  In another situation she might be part of the camp; indeed, her husband was part of the group that blockaded the port.  But she is the Mayor, responsible for adjudicating the competing claims of all sides.  So she's attempting to weave a middle course, and faring poorly. Her calling is in the streets, not at City Hall.

The Death Penalty and American Shame

Yesterday's execution of Troy Davis should never have happened, whether or not he was guilty.  State-sanctioned killing is reminiscent of the gulag, and far from a mark of living in a civilized society.  As I've argued ever since ninth grade, while debating my friend Todd, you can't kill people to show that killing people is wrong.

In the 2008 Presidential campaign, Michelle Obama was pilloried for saying that the nomination of Barack Obama was the first time in her adult lifetime she'd been proud to be an American.  But I knew where she was coming from.  What's to recommend a nation that thinks that justice equals the death chamber?

September 11 and Iraq, a Decade Later

Next Sunday will be the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.  On that fateful Tuesday I was living in Evanston and working for the Massage Therapy Foundation. Three days later I led a group of my colleagues to a memorial service at Alice Millar Chapel on Northwestern's campus, and that night was part of the throng that lined Ridge Avenue for Evanston's official candlelight remembrance.

At the time we were living in a studio on the top floor of a downtown apartment building.  I briefly put a small American flag up on the door, before taking it down for fear of being perceived as jingoistic.  Right after the attacks there was a spate of anti-Muslim fervor throughout Chicagoland, and the nation, and I saw that little flag as an implicit endorsement--us against them--of that hostility. 

Some things never change.  Just this year Osama bin Laden was killed, and I was horrified by the jubilation before the White House gates. Just the other week a friend at work told me her view that national flags are really just large gang symbols, and I heartily agreed. Then again, this is my country and--like my efforts to mark the tragedy in its immediate aftermath--I want to do my part to make it better.

Ten years is a good time to take stock.  In the NYT Magazine slated to be published in print next Sunday--exactly ten years later--Bill Keller reconsiders his support for the war in Iraq. He concludes that, on balance, the war was unjustified.  Iraq is free of Hussein but still must endure random killings; and the post-invasion rebuilding was arrogantly and tragically botched. That said, Keller still thinks that the intelligence available in 2003--namely, those supposed weapons of mass destruction--means that his support of the war at the time was justifiable, or at least understandable.

I never believed that "evidence," not for one second. President Bush was behind it, and there was no doubt that his people wanted war.  I don't think Bush is evil; the trouble was fixation upon a single course, with no room for dissenting opinion. 

The greatest equivocation was the connection of the 9/11 attacks, which were nurtured in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the need to remove Saddam Hussein in Iraq.  This was a spurious connection made from hubris. In 2003 Bush was in the middle of a first term that had been handed to him by the Supreme Court, after losing the popular vote to Al Gore.  I didn't and don't see that first term as fully legitimate. 

And it was then, in the middle of that disreputable first term, that the war began. Sometimes--sorry, Bill Keller--you know whether something is true by noting the messenger.

Leadership, Communication and Politics

One of the quirkier pleasures of our home life is daily paper delivery of the Wall Street Journal.  Pi Wen has been a subscriber to the Journal for a while, and now I enjoy the benefits.  It seems very unlikely that I will ever be a captain of industry, and so I'm not really the prime demographic.  But I do appreciate the peek at (mostly) hard right political thinking on the opinion pages.

Two weeks ago, arguing from the right, Bret Stephens claimed that President Obama isn't that smart and stated, "In politics, a failure of communication is always the fault of the communicator."  Today, Mortimer Zuckerman took a more centrist tack to criticize the President, but echoed Stephens with this: "But in politics, a failure of communication is invariably the fault of the communicator."

There is no doubt that President Obama can be too aloof, too remote, unable or unwilling to jump into the fray. He's claimed that he will offer a bold jobs plan come September, and I hope he does. 

That said, it's not fair to rest all the blame for a failure of communication on him.  This absolves the President's listeners of all responsibility, and assumes that these listeners are listening in good faith in the first place.  In politics-or at least the public, theatrical elements of politics--good faith listening to another perspective is not required or even encouraged.  Zuckerman and Stephens's theory of communication rests upon the notion of a listening audience that actually might change its mind. Herein lies the flaw in their critiques.

In my own work, I've often struggled to persuade staff or administrators of the rationale for a new initiative or different approach to doing something than has been tried before. This is a big part of the job, and after a particularly hard day I am tempted to wonder why people just don't see the light.  But the difference in my case is that I can trust the good faith and good will of my people.  So if there is a failure of communication at this level, it really is my fault. 

Not so for the President, and this is true whoever they are. 

The Debt Ceiling

These past few weeks I've followed the debt ceiling debate with unseemly focus, regularly consulting my usual news sources and even branching out to Politico and Talking Points Memo.  Now that the circus has concluded I am a bit bereft.

The general line is that President Obama got played because there are no guaranteed tax rises but there are ironclad spending cuts.  The next round of negotiations is supposed to be better for Democrats because otherwise big defense cuts are on the table. The safe bet, though, is that the GOP will defend against tax hikes even more than defense cuts. 

And so we could be looking at an all spending cut outcome, even though our tax burden is low by historical standards.  Paul Krugman is apoplectic about a Presidential "surrender," while others argue that the spending cuts don't go deep enough to get the deficit under control.

I think Obama got the best deal he could under the circumstances, exactly as I argued when the Bush tax cuts were extended late last year in order to preserve unemployment insurance.  This time the benefit to this unbalanced plan was an avoidance of default on the national debt.  The right wing remains more radical than the left, but the responsible thing remains not to let the nation go over the cliff.  This is akin to negotiating with terrorists, but that doesn't mean you let the terrorists win.

Amy Chua, Memoir, and Parenting

We've long known that you can't judge a book by its cover. Now we must state that you shouldn't judge it by a sensational but out-of-context excerpt either.

Ever since the WSJ ran the excerpt from Amy Chua's new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother a few weeks ago, the blogosphere has been abuzz.  Is she serious? Is she nuts? etc. etc.  The paper reported that almost 6,000 comments came in to WSJ.com (it's probably more now), a new record.  The excerpt depicted a very grim mother who never gave her a children a moment's rest from music practice, and never thought they were good enough.   Well, sort of...even in the excerpt you can feel that Chua is poking fun at herself, and not writing a how-to manual but a memoir.

Chua must have said this a thousand times by now--"this is a memoir, not a how-to manual."  She said it many times the other night in Berkeley, where I was part of the packed house for her interview/reading at the Hillside Club. If people choose to read the book in full, as I have, they will see this is true. 

If the book were a how-to manual, then why would Chua have had such a tough time raising her second daughter Lulu?  Lulu wanted to be her own person from the get-go--not the stereotypical "Chinese" daughter--and she's gotten her wish; no more grueling violin lessons, tennis it is.  And if Chua were so callous and cruel toward her daughters, why would she forever be leaving sweet notes on their pillows and in their lunchboxes? In what I thought was one of the most touching passages, Chua acknowledges that she has a hard time being verbally loving, and so she uses these notes as a proxy.

I'm not saying Chua is a perfect parent, and neither would she.  But that's not the point of the book.  Here we have an individual person's story, warts and all.  And that's all we have.

But, of course, the world doesn't work that way.  Once a piece of writing--or any piece of art--is packaged and framed, its reception is no longer in control of the artist.  (This is what Roland Barthes and George Lakoff were talking about.)  And so we have Asian-Americans furious that Chua has reinforced some of the most persistent stereotypes; we have non Asian-Americans worried that they are coddling their own children too much; and we have general cultural anxiety that we are losing educational ground to China.  This last is the most absurd--Chua is an American, born in Illinois to immigrant parents.  If we're going to continue discussing Chua's writing in these terms, we should at least acknowledge that we're not talking about the book she's actually written.

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All of this hub-bub has made me think back to my own childhood.  Looking back, I had a great deal of autonomy for such a little pip-squeak.  As long as my homework was finished it didn't matter when I did it (and thus, I often did it on the school bus the morning before it was due.) I could read whatever books I wanted, no matter how adult the themes.  I could pursue my own interests without clearing them with my parents, a freedom that extended to college and my frequent change of major.  My folks treated me as a little adult to the greatest extent possible, and I am very grateful for it.

On the other hand, the "Western" idea that "it's OK as long as you do your best" did seep a little too deeply into my bones.  In tenth grade I studied geometry with a teacher whose honest-to-god name was Ms. Elvira Moscovici.  I'd struggled when some basic geometric concepts were introduced in seventh grade (by Mr. Elwood Combs), so when tenth grade rolled around I convinced myself I just couldn't do it.  And so the year rolled on--I ended up with a B and not an A, which was an unusual event. 

At the end of the year I sat on the couch and looked back on what I had missed on tests throughout the year.  I was trying to learn.  In that frame of mind, I could tell instantly what the right answer should have been.  It was obvious once I'd set my mind to it, and stopped psyching myself out.

If there is any wisdom in Chua's advice, it is to push your kids past the point where they would want to go naturally.  Success in anything requires a combination of talent and persistence--and talent is usually easier to come by. You don't need to go as far as Chua, precipitating a full-throated rebellion once your child reaches 13.  So yes, balance is the key.  But that means that Chua's ways have some merit too.

President Obama and the Tax Deal

To use the coinage by David Brooks, I must be a "network liberal" rather than a "cluster liberal."  I'm just not all that angered by President Obama's tax compromise with the GOP.

Cluster liberals (like cluster conservatives) go to the barricades on every issue, seeing any compromise as a sign of mortal weakness.  Network liberals share the same values as their cluster brethren, but recognize that you have to give in order to get.  So, as a network liberal, Obama yielded on keeping lower tax rates for everyone [nobody disagreed about 98% of people; the dispute was tax rates for the top 2%] and on a broad estate tax exemption.  In return, he got a 13 month extension of unemployment insurance and a 1 year reduction in the payroll tax. 

Neither the unemployment extension or payroll tax reduction are Republican ideas; those are solidly Democratic.  Had Obama gone to the barricades, these wouldn't be in the plan.  They were the President's non-negotiable demands, so it's unfair to say that Obama just folded.

The estate tax bit hurts the most, but accepting this allowed for broader tax relief for low and middle-income workers.  And accepting the overall rates for 2 more years is what allowed the unemployment extension and payroll tax reduction.  If Obama had been intransigent, the Republicans had enough votes in the Senate to thwart him, and all taxes would have gone up Jan. 1.

So this is a crystalline "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" moment.  Senator Sander's vigor today on the Senate floor, in opposition to the proposed plan, is admirable.  But I'm with Bill Clinton that this was the best deal we could get today.

The Story of Stuff and Lessons for Librarians

Thank goodness for To the Best of Our Knowledge, a public radio gem that is making my packing for the upcoming trip to Malaysia go by much more smoothly.

Annie Leonard, creator of the documentary The Story of Stuff, was a guest this hour.  Leonard documents where all the stuff we throw away, or attempt to recycle, really goes.  From landfills in the US to trash heaps in the Phillipines, our stuff squirms out all over the earth and causes environmental destruction in its wake.  It was a sobering message indeed. 

After stating the case, most people in Leonard's position would then extol the virtue of individual action.  Make sure to recycle your electronics carefully. Be mindful of what you purchase.  And so on.  All of that is fine as far as it goes, but Leonard pointed out--refreshingly--that this doesn't go very far. 

Our entire consumer system is geared towards producing rapidly obsolescent products and mountains of waste.  So the real solution is to work to change that system, which is a very large assignment indeed.  But that would ultimately be a better use of our time. If we had a world in which the default were not to waste, we would no longer think in terms of ad hoc, disconnected actions.

This made me think about why librarians have trouble changing the publishing system, despite clear problems: peer review may not be legitimate; we aren't leveraging the capacities of the Web if we just post a PDF and call it an electronic article; the costs are too high, because librarians serve as vendors for low supply, high demand content.

The real problem, though, is that we don't have a solution beyond expressing our legitimate frustration at this state of affairs. The everyday academic still is not likely to have any idea what an institutional repository is, but will know the top journals in their field.  So, in essence, we are asking people to abandon what they know in order to take a great leap forward into the unknown.  Most people won't take that leap.  So we have to show, very clearly, an alternative that will allow researchers to continue to flourish.  Just like Leonard with respect to stuff, librarians have to adopt a systems-thinking approach with respect to scholarship. 

We can do it.

 

Ranked Choice Voting in Action

I'm still having a hard time explaining ranked choice voting, but it made a huge difference in this month's Oakland mayoral election.  Councilmember Jean Quan defeated former State Senate President Don Perata, even though Perata had the most number of first place votes.  This is because people could vote for three candidates in ranked order, and Perata had almost no second or third place votes.  His initial lead wasn't a majority lead (there were ten candidates running), and so there were nine successive rounds of elimination. Perata still led after the ninth round, when Rebecca Kaplan--a close ally of Quan--was eliminated.  75% of Kaplan's voters chose Quan as their second choice (which is exactly what I did.)  That surge of support for Quan pushed her beyond Perata, and she became Oakland's next mayor with 51% of the aggregated vote. 

The round-by-round tally is here.

This outcome made me happy, for several reasons.  Part of it is that Robert Gammon's exhaustive reporting in the East Bay Express convinced me that Perata was arrogant, imperious, and corrupt.  But even if Perata has been a worthy candidate, ranked choice voting is welcome.  For here we have a voting system that embraces complexity and nuance, rather than the tired old yes/no game.  (In his concession speech, Perata acknowledged that he ran a traditional campaign that wasn't suitable to the new landscape; meanwhile, Quan mastered the concept of ranked choice voting.) Kudos to FairVote.org and the New America Foundation for pushing this innovative idea forward.

For national presidential elections, we are doubtlessly a long way off from ranked choice voting. But at the very least the Electoral College could offer electors in proportion to the votes cast in states rather than winner take all (Nebraska is ahead of the game in this regard.)  Our supposed division into "red America" and "blue America" is much more symbolic than factual, because the electoral maps for states every 4 years are solid red or solid blue.  This obscures the more complicated reality of blue pockets within red states, and vice versa.  [All that said, I did delight in the fact that the blue city SF Giants defeated red state Texas in the World Series this year.]

Who knows? Perhaps we will have ranked choice Presidential ballots in 40 years.  Or perhaps not, because the continued dominance of 2 major parties will prevent anything else interesting from emerging.  Sadly, the latter would be guess.  But at least we have innovation at the local level.  Oakland, welcome Jean Quan.