California

Victor Davis Hanson
California, Here We Stay
Reasons not to flee an imploding state
Autumn 2012

California’s multidimensional decline—fiscal, commercial, social, and political—sometimes seems endless. The state’s fiscal problems were especially evident this past May, when Governor Jerry Brown announced an “unexpected” $16 billion annual budget shortfall. Two months later, he signed a $92 billion budget that appears balanced only if voters approve an $8.5 billion tax increase in November. According to a study published by a public policy group at Stanford University, California’s various retirement systems have amassed $500 billion in unfunded liabilities. To honor the pension and benefit contracts of current and retired public employees, state and local governments have already started to lay off workers and slash services.
Not just in its finances but almost wherever you look, the state’s vital signs are dipping. The average unemployment rate hovers above 10 percent. In the reading and math tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, California students rank near the bottom of the country, though their teachers earn far more than the average American teacher does. California’s penal system is the largest in the United States, with more than 165,000 inmates. Some studies estimate that the state prisons and county jails house more than 30,000 illegal aliens at a cost of $1 billion or more each year. Speaking of which: California has the nation’s largest population of illegal aliens, on whom it spends an estimated $10 billion annually in entitlements. The illegals also deprive the Golden State’s economy of billions of dollars every year by sending remittances to Latin America.
Meanwhile, business surveys perennially rank California among the most hostile states to private enterprise, largely because of overregulation, stifling coastal zoning laws, inflated housing costs, and high tax rates. Environmental extremism has cost the state dearly: oil production has plunged 45 percent over the last 25 years, even though California’s Monterey Shale formation has an estimated 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Geologists estimate that 3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas sit untapped as well. Those numbers could soar with revolutionary new methods of exploration (see “California Needs a Crude Awakening,” Summer 2012).
Between the mid-1980s and 2005, the state’s aggregate population increased by 10 million Californians, including immigrants. But that isn’t the good economic news that you might think. For one thing, 7 million of the new Californians were low-income Medicaid recipients. Further, as economist Arthur Laffer recently noted in Investor’s Business Daily, between 1992 and 2008, the number of tax-paying Californians entering California was smaller than the number leaving—3.5 million versus 4.4 million, for a net loss of 869,000 tax filers. Those who left were wealthier than those who arrived, with average adjusted gross incomes of $44,700, versus $38,600. Losing those 869,000 filers cost California $44 billion in tax revenue over two decades, Laffer calculated.
Worst of all is that neither the legislature nor the governor has offered a serious plan to address any of these problems. Soaring public-employee costs, unfunded pensions, foundering schools, millions of illegal aliens, regulations that prevent wealth creation, an onerous tax code: the story of all the ways in which today’s Californians have squandered a rich natural and human inheritance is infuriating.
So why, you might ask, would anyone stay here?
For some of us, family heritage explains a lot. Sometime in the 1870s, my maternal great-great-grandmother homesteaded our farm and built the farmhouse in which I currently live, near what is now the town of Selma. I grew up working alongside her grandson—my grandfather, who was born in the same farmhouse in 1890 and died there in 1976. He worshiped California. Even in his eighties, he still marveled at the state’s unique combination of rich soil, lengthy growing season, huge aquifer, and water flowing down from the Sierra Nevada mountains. He planted most of the fruit and nut trees growing in my yard today. On my father’s side, my great-grandfather helped found the nearby Swedish colony of Kingsburg, where a plaque in a municipal park—thankfully not stolen during a recent wave of bronze thefts—marks Hanson Corner, the site of the ancestral family farmhouse.
My mother, a 1946 Stanford law graduate, was one of the state’s first female appellate court justices and would lecture me about the brilliance of California’s four-level court system. My father—a Pat Brown Democrat convinced that technical training was in short supply for the influx of Southeast Asian and Hispanic immigrants—helped found a vocational junior-college campus in the 1970s. Countless Californians are like me: determined to hold on to the heritage of our ancestors, as well as our memories of better times and the property on which we grew up. We feel that we played no part in our state’s current problems, and we’re reluctant to surrender to those who did.
Another draw to California is its culture. The California way, casual and even flaky, can sometimes become crass and self-indulgent; for evidence of that, just visit Venice Beach or Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. But at its best, California still creates a ’49er bustle of self-invention that makes little allowance for class, titles, or hierarchy. As someone who established a classics program with mostly minority students at California State University’s Fresno campus, I can attest that real talent is often found unfettered by hierarchy. In a state with no majority culture, where it is almost impossible to determine a person’s income by race, dress, accent, or bearing, performance tends to trump reputation or appearance. The proverbial “millionaires and billionaires” whom I see drinking coffee on University Avenue in Palo Alto on Monday are dressed no differently from the loggers I talk with in the Huntington Lake bar in the Sierra on Friday. Some of the wealthiest farmers in the world are indistinguishable from their tractor drivers. In California, one earns respect more from what one does than from what one has done.
Some of the reasons that people began migrating to California haven’t changed, even in the twenty-first century: dysfunctional politics cannot so easily mar what nature has so abundantly bestowed. California will always be warm, dry, and beautiful, and it boasts an unparalleled diversity of climate and terrain. This past winter, I could leave my Sierra cabin (altitude 7,200 feet, with 20 feet of snow piled nearly to the roof) in the morning, drive down to 70-degree afternoons on my farm in the Central Valley, and arrive in the evening at the Stanford University campus, with its cool bay breezes. What’s most striking about California isn’t its rugged mountains, gorgeous beaches, and vast plains, but their proximity to one another. That nearness is an obvious incentive for Californians to stay put. In the winter, when midwestern sunbirds fly to Arizona and New Yorkers go to Florida, Californians are never farther than a few hours’ drive from the coast.
This beauty is economically profitable as well. Thanks to its climate, California can grow three crops a year, while most states struggle with one or two. The long growing season—plus great soil, plenty of irrigation, vast agribusiness economies of scale, and technological support from nearby universities—means that California’s farms can produce almost twice the usual tonnage of fruits and vegetables per acre. Not only are California’s cotton, wine, fruit, and dairy industries more productive than any in the world; hundreds of millions of affluent Asian consumers translate into skyrocketing export-commodity prices for the state’s farmers. This year, beleaguered California farms—fighting water cutoffs, new regulations, and encroaching suburbanization—will nonetheless export over $17 billion worth of food overseas (see “California’s Water Wars,” Summer 2011). In so mild a climate, moreover, outdoor construction is an all-year enterprise. It’s hard to believe that the world’s most productive farmers and most innovative builders would pack up and leave without a fight.
California also possesses enormous natural wealth in oil, gas, minerals, and timber. With commodity prices high and new technologies for energy exploration emerging all the time, the dollar wealth below California’s surface is greater than ever. The existential stuff of any civilization remains food and fuel, and California has more of both than any other state. So we wait for sanity to return to our officials, as our natural untapped wealth grows ever more valuable.
And no explanation of California’s appeal would be complete without mentioning how many top universities it hosts. In most rankings of the world’s universities, Stanford, Caltech, UC Berkeley, and UCLA make the top 20. The industries that best explain why California is still the world’s eighth- or ninth-largest economy—Silicon Valley, the Los Angeles aerospace industry, Napa Valley wineries, and Central California agriculture—originated in the research and development programs of the state’s vast public university system.
True, that system faces considerable budget pressure and has increasingly adopted a highly politicized and therapeutic curriculum. California State University, in particular, has lowered its standards, admitting students who don’t meet traditional GPA and test-score thresholds, so that over half of entering freshmen must enroll in remediation courses. But the state’s 50-year-old master plan for higher education—which instituted a tripartite arrangement of junior colleges, the California State University system, and the elite ten-campus University of California—remains viable. The schools still draw top scholars from around the world. And students come as well, especially engineering and computer students from China, India, South Korea, and Japan. Many end up settling here. Even in these bad times, it’s difficult to destroy such an inspired system.
Another reason to feel hopeful about California is that it’s reaching the theoretical limits of statism. To pay for current pensioners, the state simply can’t continue to bestow comparable defined-benefit pension packages on new workers, no matter how stridently the public-sector unions claim otherwise. And as public insolvencies mount—with Stockton, Mammoth Lakes, and San Bernardino seeking bankruptcy protection a year after Vallejo emerged from it—public blame is finally shifting from supposedly heartless state taxpayers to the unions. The liberal unionism of an aging generation is proving untenable, as we saw in recent ballot referenda in which voters in San Diego and San Jose demanded that public-worker compensation plans be renegotiated.
Though the fiscal situation is dire, Californians can take comfort from the fact that their budget, unlike the federal government’s, is smaller than at any time since 2006. The state constitution currently requires two-thirds of the legislature to approve any tax hike (though Governor Brown’s ballot initiative in the November election would raise taxes without the legislature’s approval). Since Democrats lack the supermajority necessary to raise taxes, and since California cannot print its own money, the legislature has been forced to shrink budgets.
Californians are also fickle and can turn on a dime. For all its loud liberal credentials, the state is as likely to cut government as to raise taxes. Over the years, Golden State voters have passed ballot propositions limiting property taxes, outlawing free public services for illegal aliens, ending racial preferences, demanding “three-strikes” incarceration for repeat felons, and abolishing bilingual education programs in public schools. Two statewide propositions at the ballot box in November would limit public unions’ prerogatives and require balanced budgets. The state and federal courts and Sacramento bureaucracies overturn most resolutions of this kind or try to avoid enforcing them, but the referenda demonstrate how California can explode into conservative anger at any moment. No wonder the Democratic state legislature regularly tries to change the ballot process.
At some point, the state’s southern border will finally be closed, and with it the unchecked yearly flow of illegal immigrants. The economic downturn in the United States, globalized new industry in Mexico, and increased border enforcement have already resulted in lower numbers of illegals. No national support exists for wholesale amnesty or for open borders. And with an enforced border, California will see not only decreased remittances to Mexico and Latin America and a reduced draw on state services but also, perhaps, a change in attitude within the state’s largest ethnic group. After all, illegal immigration warps the politics of the Mexican-American community, which constitutes more than 40 percent of the state’s population. The unlawful entry of Mexican nationals into California not only ensures statistically that Mexican-Americans as a group suffer from disproportionate poverty rates; it also means that affluent third- and fourth-generation Mexican-Americans become part of a minority receiving disproportionate state help. As one of my middle-class, third-generation college students once put it: “Without the illegal aliens in this school, I wouldn’t get special treatment.”
Without influxes of massive numbers of illegal immigrants, California Latinos could soon resemble California Armenians, Japanese, and Portuguese—whose integrated, assimilated, and intermarried ethnics usually earn more than the state’s average per-capita income. With controlled borders, Chicano Studies departments should eventually go the way of Asian Studies and Armenian Studies—that is, they would become small, literary, and historical, rather than large, activist, and partisan. Indeed, the great fear of the liberal Hispanic hierarchy in government, media, and academia is that without illegal immigration, the conservative tendencies of the Hispanic middle class would cost the elites their positions as self-appointed spokespeople for the statistically underachieving.
To grasp a final reason for optimism about California’s future, you need to understand that many of the state’s political problems result from a bifurcation between the populous coastal strip from San Diego to San Francisco, where the affluent make state policy, and the vast, much poorer interior, from Sacramento to San Bernardino, where policy dreams about immigration, agriculture, public education, and resource use become nightmares in practice. But this weird juxtaposition of such different societies within one state is starting to change. Hispanic Redwood City, nestled next to tony Atherton and Palo Alto, now has as many illegal aliens per capita as do distant Madera and Tulare. Living in high-priced Bel Air, Brentwood, or old Pasadena no longer shields one from crime or from the decay of the California transportation system.
On the congested coastal strip, building regulations, zoning absurdities, and environmentalist prohibitions on new construction prohibit almost anyone under 40 from acquiring a house without a sizable inheritance or an income in the upper six figures. Elites in Santa Monica and Menlo Park are starting to notice that their once-premier public schools don’t perform at the level that one might expect from the astronomical sales, income, and gas taxes. Shutting down thousands of acres of irrigated farmland in the state’s interior, at a time when foreign buyers are lining up to buy California produce, translates into higher prices at the Santa Barbara food co-op. Soon, even the Stanford professor and the La Jolla administrator may learn that illegal immigration, cumbersome regulations, and terrible elementary schools affect them as well.
The four-part solution for California is clear: don’t raise the state’s crushing taxes any higher; reform public-employee compensation; make use of ample natural resources; and stop the flow of illegal aliens. Just focus on those four areas—as California did so well in the past—and in time, the state will return to its bounty of a few decades ago. Many of us intend to stay and see that it does.

Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal and a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

A Giant Congratulations!

Fact Checking at the New Yorker

Last month, Columbia Journalism Review Books and Columbia University Press released The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, an anthology of insights and reminiscences from top magazine editors. The book is based on talks given to students as part of the Delacorte Lecture Series at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The following is excerpted from chapter five, “Fact-Checking at The New Yorker,” which is itself taken from a lecture delivered by New Yorker fact-checking director Peter Canby on February 28, 2002.

Preventing errors from appearing in the magazine is not a simple process. For openers, you need to know that in addition to the basic reporting pieces, we also check “The Talk of the Town,” the critics, fiction, poetry, cartoons, art, captions, the table of contents, certain of the several-paragraph-long essays in the “Goings On” section. We also fact-check the contributors page, the cover wrap, the letters column, all the press releases, and a good deal of the recently mounted Web site.

To start checking a nonfiction piece, you begin by consulting the writer about how the piece was put together and using the writer’s sources as well as our own departmental sources. We then essentially take the piece apart and put it back together again. You make sure that the names and dates are right, but then if it is a John McPhee piece, you make sure that the USGS report that he read, he read correctly; or if it is a John le Carré piece, when he says his con man father ran for Parliament in 1950, you make sure that it wasn’t 1949 or 1951.

Or if we describe the basis on which the FDA approved or disapproved the medical tests that ImClone used for Erbitux, then you need to find out what the complexities of that whole situation were. And of course, this kind of thing has consequences, because if you get it wrong, it matters. We also work on complicated pieces such as the ones we’ve been running this fall about the Pentagon’s top-secret team that is trained to snatch nukes away from belligerent countries, or the piece about the Predator drone that had a clear shot at Mullah Omar, for better or for worse, and didn’t take the shot because the CENTCOM attorneys were not clear on the legality of that operation.

But the unfortunate thing is that when The New Yorker is wrong on these allegations, which we are from time to time, the cry goes out not for the writer or for the editor but for the fact-checker. In the department, we refer to that as the Shoot-the-Fact-Checker Syndrome, which is one of our occupational hazards.

Prior to the Tina Brown period, there were eight checkers. And particularly during the editorship of William Shawn, which was when I started—Shawn was the editor of The New Yorker from ’52 to ’87—stories progressed in an orderly, almost stately way toward publication. Writers would work on pieces for as long as they felt was useful and necessary, and that often meant years. Once the pieces were accepted, they were edited, copyedited, and fact-checked on a schedule that typically stretched out for weeks and sometimes for months.

This process could produce some really wonderful writing. The last piece I worked on before I left The New Yorker the first time around was something that I always think epitomizes a Shawn-era piece, although it was published by Shawn’s distinguished successor, Bob Gottlieb. But I think it was commissioned by Shawn. This piece was The New Yorker’s four-part excerpt of Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, which is a Vietnam book that went on to win not only a National Book Award but also a Pulitzer Prize.

Sheehan was one of the top Vietnam journalists. He was the reporter to whom Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers. The subject of A Bright Shining Lie was a man named John Paul Vann. Sheehan had met Vann in the early ’60s when he was a UPI reporter in Vietnam and Vann was a kind of maverick army officer who was very critical of the way that the world was being conducted even then.

Not only a maverick but also a loose cannon—he talked readily to the press, and he was a source for a number of the early journalists. But Vann increasingly became a strident dissident voice within the military, which did not make the military happy. Eventually he alienated himself from the army command and left the army in disgrace. But due to a peculiar genius that this character had, he returned to Vietnam as a civilian and became the number three person in command of the Vietnam War after the ambassador and the commander-in-chief, which I think is completely unprecedented in American military history.

He was eventually killed. It was typical of him that even in this elevated position, he was involved in a battle and had to escape by helicopter. The helicopter got shot down, and he was killed. After his death he became an obsession for Sheehan, who had worked on the book about him, A Bright Shining Lie, for sixteen years.

Another checker and I spent two months working on The New Yorker excerpts of A Bright Shining Lie. It was made particularly difficult because Sheehan lived near Washington and he had his sources for this book in twenty-five army-surplus file cabinets lined up in a special room in his house. And these were not little Door Store file cabinets, these were heavy industrial file cabinets that stretched a good three or four feet back to the wall, and they weren’t filled up with fat reports but with single sheets of paper. This was sixteen years of work, and it was really out of the question for him to send this stuff to New York, so we went to Washington. Then life got more complicated because Sheehan is an insomniac and he didn’t get up till three in the afternoon every day. So we had to adjust our schedules to that.

One more thing I want to say about Neil Sheehan is that it was a particularly frustrating experience for us fact-checkers because Neil Sheehan never got anything wrong, and at the end of two months we would go, “Neil, give us a break, you know? Give us one little thing we can change.” If every writer were like this, the checking department would be a complete waste of time, but it is really to Neil Sheehan’s credit that he was like this.

I can’t leave the subject of the Shawn-era New Yorker without at least one more story that illustrates a completely different aspect of the old magazine, and this was its tendency to warehouse complicated fact pieces. There was an inventory sheet that went around every week, of fact pieces, and I think it was 100 pieces long. And considering that each of these pieces was worth $10,000 or $20,000 to the magazine, that was a lot of inventory.

One of these bottom dwellers had been in house for many years. It showed no signs of running, but I took a liking to it. It was called “A Scottish Childhood.” I can’t remember the name of the author, but it was a woman who had grown up in a drafty little castle in the Highlands of Scotland, and when her father died, her oldest brother inherited everything through primogeniture.

She was essentially, sort of in a gentle way, disinherited. She went to London. She wrote a memoir about growing up in this delightful and strange environment and she sold it. She sold it in The New Yorker as a work of fiction, but it was thinly fictionalized. By the time I latched onto this piece, it had become a fact piece and showed no signs of ever getting published.

But one day it kicked up on the schedule. So I was able to call the woman in London and say that the piece that you sold twenty years ago is going to press tomorrow or something. In the meantime she had gotten married. She’d had a child. The child had grown up and the child had gotten married and divorced—so long was this piece in house. And it was really a delightful piece, and though perhaps for her not worth the wait, she didn’t miss a beat when I called her.

So that was the old New Yorker. The biggest difference between David Remnick’s New Yorker today and the Shawn New Yorker is timeliness. During the Shawn years, book reviews ran months, even years out of sync with publication dates. Writers wrote about major issues without any concern for news pegs or what was going on in the outside world. That was the way people thought, and it was really the way the whole editorial staff was tuned.

All this changed when Tina Brown arrived. Whereas before, editorial schedules were predictable for weeks or a month in advance, under Tina we began getting 8,000-, 10,000-, 12,000-word pieces in on a Thursday that were to close the following Wednesday. But something else changed in a way that is more important. Prior to Tina, the magazine really had been writer-driven, and I think this is why they gave the writers so much liberty. They wanted the writers to develop their own, often eccentric, interests.

Under Tina, writing concepts began to originate in editors’ meetings, and assignments were given out to writers who were essentially told what to write. And a lot of what the editors wanted was designed to be timely and of the moment and tended to change from day to day. So the result was that we were working on pieces that were really much more controversial and much less well-formulated than anything we had dealt with previously, and often we would put teams of checkers to work on these pieces and checking and editing could go on all night.

When the new, remade The New Yorker of the last decade was gearing up and we started getting all these late-breaking stories, issues such as logic and fairness and balance—which previously had been the responsibility of the editors—began to fall on the checkers. This wasn’t by anybody’s design. It was because the editors were really busy putting these stories together and they wanted us to look at things from the outside and see how they were framed, and look at them from the inside and look at the logic and the way they were reported and the way quotes were used and many other such things.

That responsibility came to us not in the way of anybody saying suddenly, “You’re doing that.” It just became that when a problem arose, they would come to us and say, “Why didn’t you warn us?” And so it just became clear that there was this gap between editing and checking that had opened up under the pressure of later-breaking stories, and it just seemed logical that we should fill it. It made our job more challenging, and more fun.

Another change that took place in The New Yorker fact-checking during this same period came about in the mid-’90s as the result of the fallout from what was known as the Janet Malcolm case. Janet Malcolm is aNew Yorker writer of great distinction. In 1983, she wrote a profile of a psychoanalyst named Jeffrey Masson, who subsequently sued her and the magazine for libel (it was an unfavorable story).

The court case didn’t resolve itself until 1994. The charge was that Janet Malcolm had compressed, rearranged, and even fabricated quotes. In 1993, The New Yorker was separated out of the judgment and in 1994, Malcolm was cleared of libel charges in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Prior to this resolution, when writers gave us their sources, they gave us books, magazine clips, news clips, and phone numbers, but they didn’t give us notes, and after the resolution of the case, we began to insist that writers turn in their notes to us as well.

And prior to the case, when people were quoted, we would call them up and we’d go over the information in the quote, but we would never go over the quote with them, for obvious reasons. You go over a quote with somebody, they don’t like the way they sound. Even if they said something, they are going to say, “Oh, that’s not what I meant.” Then there’s a problem. So that standard still holds. When we call people on the phone, which we do all the time, we never read them their quotes.

But after the Malcolm case was settled, we began to ask writers to include their notes, their tapes, and their transcripts with their source material, and this gave us a great deal more flexibility in how to approach stories. We continued to call sources, as I mentioned, but whenever there was a particularly controversial or sensitive issue or it was somebody that we couldn’t reach for whatever reason, we had the notes to fall back on. And the ideal for us—in fact, pretty much the norm—is both to use the notes and to call people, because notes can be wrong, just as with everything else.

And we always did the best we could to give people who were mentioned in a piece the chance to let us know if there was some wild-card reason not to publish the piece. It also allowed us the courtesy of telling people that they were about to appear in The New Yorker, so they wouldn’t be hit completely out of the blue. I feel strongly about this, because whether you’re delivering them good or bad news, the contact with these ultimately real people humanizes the process. I often think of the fact-checking process as setting off a series of controlled explosions, where it’s much better to have people go off before publication than afterward.

The use of writers’ notes raised another set of complicated issues. At the inception of this policy there was a lot of internal debate about how to go about it, and the suggestion was made that we require writers to use tape recorders. And this was rejected because of the general feeling that we didn’t want to put writers in a methodological straitjacket. But the result of that is that we got notes in all shapes and sizes, ranging from completely clear and legible and word-processed to the completely illegible.

Sometimes writers presented what were clearly second-generation notes. One long-term Shawn-era writer who didn’t like the change in procedures gave us for several stories a notebook filled with scrawls—you could picture her at home going, “Ha ha ha.” She got over that eventually.

Most of the complications surrounding the new policy revolved around the question of how we would use notes. When you actually report something, you’re sitting and talking with somebody. If you’re writing it by hand, it’s really not possible to write as quickly as somebody speaks to you. So you don’t actually write down what somebody says, you write down a distillation of what somebody says.

You might write keywords, key phrases, sentence fragments. You also know that when you’re writing down what somebody says to you, you have to work with a split mind, probably a three-part mind. You have to be focusing on writing what the person said a few minutes ago. You have to pay attention to what the person is saying in the present, which is different from what you are writing, and you also have to worry about what your next question is going to be.

Then when the interview is done, you put your notebook in your pocket, you put your pen away, you walk out to your car, you do whatever you do, and then the person stops you and says the most important thing of all. And you realize that their saying that at that moment has something to do with the fact that your pen is not in your hand and your notebook is put away, and you realize that if you pull out your notebook and pull out the pen it’s going to break the spell and you will wreck this moment of revelation.

So what do you do? You spin the conversation as long as you can get. You get as much as information as you can get, and you go back into your car or hotel room or your coffee shop and you write it down after the fact. And again, that’s not exactly what the person said to you, but it’s legitimate. This is the way reporting happens.

All of this means that working with someone’s notes is not a science. It requires judgment and discretion and a strong sense, which comes only with practice, of what is acceptable and what is not.

Ultimately we make mistakes. I wish we didn’t, but they are inevitable and constant. It does seem to be something of a national sport to write letters to The New Yorker and point out these mistakes. And often the mistake letters we receive explain that the letter’s writer has been reading The New Yorker for years and he’s never seen anything like this, that Shawn and Harold Ross must be turning in their graves, that the writer didn’t realize that as a cost-cutting measure The New Yorker had eliminated its fact-checking department, and did we know that there used to be fact-checkers in the old days?

These letters aren’t a great deal of fun for us, but we take some consolation in the idea that the indignation is perhaps a reflection of their high expectations and the degree to which we are generally successful in getting the magazine out there in a fairly sharp and timely fashion.

And the only reason that The New Yorker system works, however well it does, is because we’ve always had very good institutional support. All the editors have been big supporters of the checking process.

And with the help of all these people, fact-checking has become a big part of The New Yorker’s editing process, and our end of the bargain is to try to be intelligent and diplomatic. To try to make things work out. To try to not obstruct publication, but to get things as right as they can be, and as right as we can. This doesn’t always make us popular inside the magazine, but it seems to work.

Lewis Lapham

The counter­revolution has its embattled forward outpost on a genteel New York street called Irving Place, home to Lapham’s Quarterly. The street is named after Washington Irving, the 19th-century American author best known for creating the Headless Horseman in his short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The cavalry charge that Lewis Lapham is now leading could be said to be one against headlessness—against the historically illiterate, heedless hordesmen of the digital revolution ignorant of our intellectual heritage; against the “Internet intellectuals” and hucksters of the purportedly utopian digital future who are decapitating our culture, trading in the ideas of some 3,000 years of civilization for...BuzzFeed.  Lapham, the legendary former editor of Harper’s, who, beginning in the 1970s, helped change the face of American nonfiction, has a new mission: taking on the Great Paradox of the digital age. Suddenly thanks to Google Books, JSTOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all the civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexus of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet—here is the paradox—the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever. There has been no great librarian of Alexandria, no accessible finder’s guide, until Lapham created his quarterly five years ago with the quixotic mission of serving as a highly selective search engine for the wisdom of the past. Which is why the spartan quarters of the Quarterly remind me of the role rare and scattered monasteries of the Dark Ages played when, as the plague raged and the scarce manuscripts of classical literature were being burned, dedicated monks made it their sacred mission to preserve, copy, illuminate manuscripts that otherwise might have been lost forever. In the back room of the Quarterly, Lapham still looks like the striking patrician beau ideal, slender and silvery at 77 in his expensive-looking suit. A sleek black silk scarf gives him the look of a still-potent mafia don (Don Quixote?) whose beautiful manners belie a stiletto-like gaze at contemporary culture. One can sense, reading Lapham’s Quarterly, that its vast array of erudition is designed to be a weapon—one would like to say a weapon of mass instruction. Though its 25,000 circulation doesn’t allow that scale of metaphor yet, it still has a vibrant web presence and it has the backing of a wide range of erudite eminences. When I asked Lapham about the intent of his project, he replied with a line from Goethe, one of the great little-read writers he seeks to reintroduce to the conversation: “Goethe said that he who cannot draw on 3,000 years [of learning] is living hand to mouth.” Lapham’s solution to this under-nourishment: Give ’em a feast. Each issue is a feast, so well curated—around 100 excerpts and many small squibs in issues devoted to such relevant subjects as money, war, the family and the future—that reading it is like choosing among bonbons for the brain. It’s a kind of hip-hop mash-up of human wisdom. Half the fun is figuring out the rationale of the order the Laphamites have given to the excerpts, which jump back and forth between millennia and genres: From Euripides, there’s Medea’s climactic heart-rending lament for her children in the “Family” issue. Isaac Bashevis Singer on magic in ’70s New York City. Juvenal’s filthy satire on adulterers in the “Eros” issue. In the new “Politics” issue we go from Solon in ancient Athens to the heroic murdered dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 21st-century Moscow. The issue on money ranges from Karl Marx back to Aristophanes, forward to Lord Byron and Vladimir Nabokov, back to Hammurabi in 1780 B.C. Lapham’s deeper agenda is to inject the wisdom of the ages into the roiling controversies of the day through small doses that are irresistible reading. In “Politics,” for example, I found a sound bite from Persia in 522 B.C., courtesy of Herodotus, which introduced me to a fellow named Otanes who made what may be the earliest and most eloquent case for democracy against oligarchy. And Ralph Ellison on the victims of racism and oligarchy in the 1930s. That’s really the way to read the issues of the Quarterly. Not to try reading the latest one straight through, but order a few back issues from its website, Laphamsquarterly.org, and put them on your bedside table. Each page is an illumination of the consciousness, the culture that created you, and that is waiting to recreate you. *** And so how did it come to pass that Lewis Lapham, the standard-bearer for the new voices of American nonfiction in the late 20th century, has now become the champion for the Voices of the Dead, America’s last Renaissance Man? Playing the role T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and their magazine The Criterion did in the 1920s: reminding people of what was being lost and seeking some kind of restoration from the wasteland around them: “These fragments I shore against my ruin,” as Eliot wrote at the close of his most famous poem. Lapham traces his inspiration for this venture, his sense of mission, to the spellbinding influence of one mostly forgotten soul, an intellectual historian he met at Yale named Charles Garside Jr. who dazzled him with his polymath ability. With the very idea that becoming a polymath, coming closer to knowing more about everything than anyone else, was something to strive for. “He was an inspiring figure,” Lapham says, recalling long, late-night disquisitions in an all-night New Haven diner. “It was like I found a philosopher wandering in the academy.” It took Lapham a while to find his way into that role himself. His great-grandfather had co-founded the oil giant Texaco and his grandfather had been mayor of San Francisco. After graduating from Yale, he got his first job as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, where he got a grounding in life outside books from covering the police beat, crime and punishment on the streets. He also found himself in the golden age of bohemia. “Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey were already gone but Allen Ginsberg was still there, Kenneth Rexroth was still there and so was [beat poet icon Lawrence] Ferlinghetti.” He left the Examiner to do a stint at the legendary New York Herald Tribune, known then as “a writer’s paper” (Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Charles Portis, et al.). “I liked the raffishness” of that kind of newspapering, he says, but it wasn’t too long before he found himself disillusioned by the world of journalism and media. “The election of Kennedy changed everything,” Lapham recalls. “No longer were people interested in talking about ideas—it was about access. After Kennedy’s election suddenly you had journalists wanting to be novelists and thinking that they are somehow superior to politicians. There once was [thought to be] some moral grace to being a journalist—which is of course bullshit....” When I suggest to him that journalists had at least an edge on moral grace over, say, hedge-fund operators, he says, “Jefferson and Adams, though on opposite sides of policy, always supported the right of unhindered speech. Though they regarded journalists as vicious.” “You believe in viciousness?” “Yeah I do. In that it’s [journalism’s] function. But I just don’t think that’s necessarily moral grace.” As the editor of Harper’s from 1974—with a brief interruption—to 2006, Lapham attracted a unique cast of new and celebrated writers (Tom Wolfe, Christopher Hitchens, Francine Prose and David Foster Wallace, among others) and freed them from the shackles of the third person to write in their own voice and offer readers their own truths. (It’s remarkable how many of the excerpts from the classical age in the Quarterly are in the first person. It’s ancient as well as modern.) I was fortunate to write for him, so, not being entirely objective myself, I asked New York University professor Robert S. Boynton, head of the literary reportage program there and author of The New New Journalism, to describe Lapham’s significance: “He pushed the idea that the memoir form might influence ANY piece—an essay, report, investigation—and make it more, rather than less, true. Another way to put it is that he attacked the false gods of ‘objective journalism,’ and showed how much more artful and accurate writing in the first person could be.” Lapham left Harper’s in 2006 to found the Quarterly; he says he’d been thinking about the idea for the magazine since 1998. “I had put together a collection of texts on the end of the world for the History Book Club,” he recalls. “They wanted something at the turn of the millennium and I developed this idea by looking at the way the end of the world has ended [or been envisioned to end] many, many times and how predictions of doom have been spread across time. Whether you’re talking about the Book of Revelation or tenth-century sects. So I had this wonderful collection of texts and I thought what a great idea. “Also it was fun,” he says. “Here history was this vast resource; I mean truly generative. I figure that if we’re going to find our way into answers to, at least hypotheses to, the circumstances presented by the 21st century, that our best chance is to find them floating around somewhere in the historical record. I mean Lucretius, for example, writes in the first century B.C. and was rediscovered [in a monastery!] in 1417 and becomes a presence in the main work not only of Montaigne and Machiavelli but also in the mind of Diderot and Jefferson. So that history is...a natural resource as well as an applied technology.” An app! Actually then, to call Lapham a Renaissance man is more metaphorically than chronologically accurate. He’s an Enlightenment man who embodies the spirit of the great encyclopedist Diderot, each issue of the Quarterly being a kind of idiosyncratically entertaining encyclopedia of its subject. A vast repository of clues to the mystery of human nature for the alert and erudite detective. “In some ways you are finding a way to recreate a vision of Garside’s—your mentor at Yale....” “Oh, I can’t do that, no I can’t,” he demurs. “But with a staff?” In addition to 11 dedicated in-house seekers of wisdom, and an erudite board of advisers suggesting texts, he’ll recruit the occasional distinguished outside essayist. Here’s the great Princeton scholar Anthony Grafton, for instance, taking a somewhat contrarian view (in the “Politics” issue) about the much maligned 15th-century Florentine theocrat Savonarola: “In America now, as in Florence then, the fruit of millennial politics is a mephitic mixture of radical legislation and deliberative stalemate. Savonarola’s modern counterparts, show little of the humanity, the understanding of sin and weakness that was as characteristic of him as his desire to build a perfect city.” Lapham speaks about his rescue mission for the sunken treasure of wisdom (not just Western—plenty of Asian, African and Latin American voices). “I can open it up to other people—again that’s my function as an editor. Somebody comes across it and reads it and thinks ‘Jesus’ and goes from a smaller excerpt in the Quarterly to the whole work by Diderot. In other words, it’s to open things up. “We learn from each other, right? I think that the value is in the force of the imagination and the power of expression. I mean...the hope of social or political change stems from language that induces a change of heart. That’s the power of words and that’s a different power than the power of the Internet. And I’m trying to turn people on to those powers and it’s in language.” Language as power. What a concept. “Language that induces a change of heart.” And that, I think, is the sharp point of the Quarterly. Its very presence wounds us with our ignorance. Leaves us no excuse for not having read—or at least glimpsed—the possibilities that the history of thought offers. But I think there’s one sentence he spoke in the beginning of his description of the Quarterly that’s important: “Also it was fun.” *** Some are more fun than others. I must admit my favorite so far is the one on eros from Winter 2009. What a pleasure it was in the weeks after I’d left his office to read the “Eros” issue, not 224 pages straight through, but opening it at random. One found an utterly non-solemn whirligig of memorable excerpts and quotes that touched on every aspect of eros in a delightful way that left you feeling the spirit of love, longing and loss, love, physical and metaphysical, in all its manifestations, seductive and disgusted. Not a manifesto or a consideration of issues, but cumulatively an unforgettable wild ride—an idiosyncratically cohesive work of art itself, a trip! It somehow created its own genre so skillfully that one never had the sense of the dutifulness of anthology but something closer to the exhilaration of a love affair. One which was capped off by the final one-sentence quote on the final page, from Michel Foucault, of all people: “The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.” Sigh! *** Lapham has no love for what web culture is doing. He laments Google for inadvertent censorship in the way search engine optimization indiscrim­inately buries what is of value beneath millions of search results of crap. Even if that was not the purpose, it’s been the result, he avers. “And that aspect of the Internet I think is going to get worse.” He can sound a bit extreme when he says Facebook embodies “many of the properties of the Holy Inquisition. I mean its data-mining capacities. Or what Torquemada had in mind. I mean, the NKVD and the Gestapo were content aggregators.” He’s nothing if not fiery. Did I hear someone say Savonarola? (Although the Florentine, who presided over “the bonfire of the vanities,” was a book-burner; Lapham is a book illuminator.) Perhaps the best indication of his self-identification as an American revolutionary comes in his introduction to the “Politics” issue. After scornfully dismissing pay-for-play politicians of all stripes and all eras—“the making of American politics over the last 236 years can be said to consist of the attempt to ward off, or at least postpone, the feast of fools”—there is one figure he singles out for praise. One figure in American history who fearlessly told the truth, Lapham says, and paid the price for it. He’s speaking of Thomas Paine, whose ardent 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” sold half a million copies and, Lapham reminds us, “served as the founding document of the American Revolution.” Nonetheless, after he was charged with seditious libel in England for challenging monarchy in “The Rights of Man,” was sentenced to death in France, and managed to offend the pious everywhere with his critique of religion, “The Age of Reason,” Paine returned home, a lonely but heroic dissident, to die in poverty, not celebrated the way the “patrician landlords”—as Lapham calls the sanctified founding fathers—are. Because, Lapham says, Paine refused to stop “sowing the bitter seeds of social change.” Bitter to the fools at the feast at least. The Irving Street irregulars fight on. Ron Rosenbaum's books include, Explaining Hitler, The Shakespeare Wars, and most recently, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.

Obama Promise Unfullfilled

One of the more melancholy moments of the presidential campaign occurred for me in a screening room. The film was Rory Kennedy’s documentary about her mother, Ethel — the widow of Robert F. Kennedy. Much of it consisted of Kennedy-family home movies, but also film of RFK in Appalachia and in Mississippi among the pitifully emaciated poor. Kennedy brimmed with shock and indignation, with sorrow and sympathy, and was determined — you could see it on his face — to do something about it. I’ve never seen that look on Barack Obama’s face.
Instead, I see a failure to embrace all sorts of people, even members of Congress and the business community. I see diffidence, a reluctance to close. I see a president for whom Afghanistan is not just a war but a metaphor for his approach to politics: He approved a surge but also an exit date. Heads I win, tails you lose.
I once wondered if Obama could be another RFK. The president has great political skills and a dazzling smile. He and his wife are glamorous figures. He’s a black man, and that matters greatly. He remains a startling figure for a nation that was still segregating its schools when I was growing up — and killing the occasional person who protested. I went up to Harlem the night Obama won and heard Charlie Rangel wonder at the wonder of it all. The street outside was named for Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, an earlier black politician. His aides were not permitted to eat in the House cafeteria.
History was draped over Obama like a cape. His bona fides in that sense were as unimpeachable as Bobby Kennedy’s. The crowd adored Obama, although not as much as I think he adored himself. Liberals were intolerant of anyone who had doubts. Obama was not a man, but a totem. A single critical column from me during the campaign triggered a fusillade of invective. The famous and esteemed told me off. I was the tool of right-wing haters, a dope of a dupe.
Kennedy had huge causes. End poverty. End the war. He challenged a sitting president over Vietnam. It could have cost him his career. It did cost him his life. The draft is long gone, and with it indignation about senseless wars. Poverty persists, but now it is mostly blamed on the poor. When it comes to the underclass, we are out of ideas . . . or patience. Or both. Pity Obama in this regard. It’s hard to summon us for a crusade that has already been fought and lost. We made war on poverty. Poverty hardly noticed.
But somewhere between the campaign and the White House itself, Obama got lost. It turned out he had no cause at all. Expanding health insurance was Hillary Clinton’s longtime goal, and even after Obama adopted it, he never argued for it with any fervor. In an unfairly mocked campaign speech, he promised to slow the rise of the oceans and begin to heal the planet. But when he took office, climate change was abandoned — too much trouble, too much opposition. His eloquence, it turned out, was reserved for campaigning.
Obama never espoused a cause bigger than his own political survival. This is the gravamen of the indictment from the left, particularly certain African Americans. They are right. Young black men fill the jails and the morgues, yet Obama says nothing. Bobby Kennedy showed his anger, his impatience, his stunned incredulity at the state of black America. Obama shows nothing.
The Post has endorsed Obama, and I cannot quibble with the editorial. He expanded the nation’s sorry health-care system. He steered the country around the banking, housing and financial crisis that threatened to crater the economy. He got Osama bin Laden and that was good, but he also let Syria fester and that was bad. Most important, he has not been taken hostage by a bumper-sticker ideology. Mitt Romney promises never to raise taxes — either a lie or a fool’s oath.
On the movie screen, Robert F. Kennedy’s appeal is obvious: authenticity. He cared. He showed it. People saw that and cared about him in return. With Obama, the process is reversed. It’s hard to care about someone who seems not to care in return. I will vote for him for his good things, and I will vote for him to keep Republican vandals from sacking the government. But after watching Bobby Kennedy, I will vote for Obama with regret. I wish he was the man I once mistook him for.
cohenr@washpost.com

It's the birthday of Ezra Pound (books by this author), born 125 years ago today in Hailey, Idaho (1885). He was known as "the poet's poet" because he was so generous about promoting the work of other writers — including James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and T.S. Eliot.

In his early 20s, he started teaching literature at a small college in the Midwest, until he caused a scandal by allowing a stranded vaudeville actress to sleep over at his place and was fired. But the college gave him the rest of his year's salary, and he headed off to Europe with it.

He believed that Yeats was the greatest poet writing in English, and he was determined to make himself an apprentice to Yeats. He found him, befriended him, worked as his secretary, and later, he married the daughter of Yeats's former lover.

In 1914, Pound met T.S. Eliot, and he campaigned to get "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" published in Poetry magazine. He's sometimes credited as "discovering" Eliot because of this.

He spent most of his writing life on The Cantos, a modern epic. There are 109 completed Cantos; the first of The Cantos begins:

"And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship.
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess."

Catastrophe

A disaster that science brought upon itself

The jailing of scientists for failing to predict an earthquake is the sad conclusion to the scientific community’s depiction of itself as soothsayer.

Brendan O’Neill
 

The jailing of six Italian scientists and a government official for failing to predict an earthquake has caused uproar in the scientific community. The men were convicted of manslaughter on the basis that they failed to give an adequate risk assessment of the 2009 earthquake in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, which killed 300 people. Outraged by the court’s verdict, the CEO of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science wrote to the president of Italy to tell him ‘there is no accepted scientific method for earthquake prediction that can be reliably used to inform citizens of an impending disaster’. The verdict is ‘perverse’ and ‘ludicrous’, says the science journal Nature.

That’s true - the verdict is perverse. It has a strong whiff of the Middle Ages about it, except instead of dunking witches for bringing about a harsh winter and destroying crops, we lock up scientists for failing to foresee a fatal earthquake. But at the same time, isn’t the verdict also the tragically logical conclusion to the scientific community’s feverish adoption in recent years of the role of soothsayer, predictor of the world’s end and proponent of solutions for how to prevent it? Over the past decade, leading scientists have repositioned themselves as modern-day diviners, particularly in the climate-change debate, where they insist that not only can they tell us what the world will look like in 50 years’ time, but also what minute changes all of us must make now if we want that future world to be different. And their predictions are treated as unchallengeable credos, as all those awkward, anti-green question-askers who have been branded ‘deniers’ will know.

In such a climate, is it really surprising that scientists who fail to predict a natural disaster, who do not fulfil the role of saviour of mankind that the science community has carved out for itself, can be demonised? If scientists play God, it’s also possible for them to be treated as the Devil.

Of course, outrage about the verdict is justified. These men should never have been arrested, never mind jailed. The trial effectively criminalised uncertainty, with the prosecution arguingthat the men’s information about the earthquake was ‘generic and ineffective’ and ‘incomplete, imprecise and contradictory’. The crux of the case was that 29 of those who died in the quake had intended to leave L’Aquila, following a series of small tremors, but they were persuaded to stay by a statement given by the government official who has been jailed, Bernardo De Bernardinis. He said during the tremors period, ‘The scientific community tells me there is no danger because there is an ongoing discharge of energy’. This was incorrect - the scientists had actually told De Bernardinis that the tremors pointed to an increased risk of a quake but it was impossible to be precise about where or when such a quake might strike. This was clearly an instance of bad communication between officials and scientists, and between officials and the public, and it’s highly unfortunate that, in L’Aquila’s attempts to find someone or something to hold responsible for the devastating quake, it has all been dragged before a court and held up as something fatally sinister.

Fundamentally, the criminalisation of people for failing to predict an earthquake, and potentially lessen its impact, speaks to Western society’s discomfort with the idea of accidents or disasters, with the the idea that some things just happen and no one is responsible. Ours is an era in which we find it very hard to accept that some events have no logic behind them. And so we continually go on Medieval hunts for a malevolent force or person who might be blamed for various terrible things that occur.

Whether it’s quakes in Italy, flooding in England or tsunamis in Asia, there’s a blame game after every natural disaster. Religious believers blame sinful mankind, claiming he brought God’s violent or watery judgement upon us; environmentalists blame polluting mankind, arguing that our temerity to be industrious has upset ‘Gaia’s balance’; others blame government officials, accusing them of failing to safeguard every aspect of society from the whims of nature. In each case, the impulse to blame is a backward, pre-modern one, fuelled by a belief that some sentient, probably wicked force either caused a natural disaster or exacerbated its effects. It is not unlike when, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, eccentric old women were branded witches and held responsible for, as one author describes it, ‘[bringing about] years of extreme hardship, in particular the type of misery related to extreme climatic events’ (1). Today, too, we seek out individuals or institutions we can blame for extreme events.

Indeed, it is worth comparing Italian officials’ response to the L’Aquila quake with the response of Enlightened thinkers to the Great Lisbon Earthquake of November 1755. That quake, which killed up to 100,000 people, became a key reference point for Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant. They wrote about and argued over it for years. Kant in particular challenged the idea, then a given, that quakes such as this were acts of divine providence, punishment from on high for mankind’s errors. That simply didn’t make sense in relation to Lisbon, a devout Catholic city, in which virtually every church was toppled but the notorious red-light district was left standing. Kant posited that earthquakes ‘are not supernatural events’ but rather are natural disasters, over which we have no control (2). This was a radical, and radically reasoned, reading of natural events, which challenged the idea that mankind was at the mercy of some external, watching force. Where the Lisbon quake generated heated Enlightened debate, the L’Aquila quake gave rise to a rush to apportion blame - signalling what a crisis of Enlightened thought there is today in comparison with 250 years ago.

But even as we condemn the Italian court for jailing these scientists, and Western society for failing to accept that sometimes disasters just happen, we should also ask whether the scientific community itself bears some responsibility for how these men have been treated. Because today, scientists are at the forefront of depicting natural events as being easily blameable on the behaviour of human beings. Through its fulsome and ceaseless promotion of the climate-change agenda, the global scientific community (as it has fashioned itself) continually makes a simplistic causal link between what men do now and what will befall the planet in the future - just as a link was made between the behaviour of those Italian scientists and the quake deaths that followed.

Also, the scientific community is forever depicting itself as soothsayer, as an almost all-knowing force, whose predictions of future calamity must not be challenged. When radical green activists march behind banners declaring ‘We are armed with peer-reviewed science’, and critics of the environmentalist agenda are slammed for being ‘anti-science’, you can clearly see that science has become a kind of unquestionable gospel of the future, a respectable version of what Nostradamus used to do. It isn’t only that court in L’Aquila that demonises uncertainty, lambasting those seven men for saying things that were ‘incomplete, imprecise, contradictory’; through the phrase ‘the debate is over’, the scientific community does the same thing in relation to climate change, frequently slamming those who seek to inject some healthy uncertainty about the future into proceedings.

Today it is those who pose as pro-science who are most likely to treat natural events as being caused by individuals’ behaviour, and who are most likely to argue that catastrophes can be predicted and potentially offset through a secular form of eco-penance. They even claim that earthquakes are caused by climate change, as evidenced in recent headlines such as ‘Climate change will shake the earth’. They would probably have blamed the Lisbon quake on consumerism, just as religious folk blamed it on sin. In such an increasingly unhinged, pre-Enlightened climate, is it so shocking that scientists who fail at being seers can be ruthlessly punished?

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.

(1) Witches and Witch Hunts, Wolfgang Behringer, Polity Press, 2004

(2) See Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman, Princeton University Press, 2002

Ned Rorem

Rorem's "Nantucket Songs"

"From whence cometh song?" ask the opening lines of a poem by the American writer Theodore Roethke . . .

That's a question American composer Ned Rorem must have asked himself hundreds of times, while providing just as many answers in the form of hundreds of his own original song settings.

In addition to all those, Rorem has sizeable body of orchestral, chamber, and choral music to his credit, and a number of very successful literary collections of perceptive reviews and lively personal diaries. About his own music, Rorem tends to be a little reluctant to speak. "Nothing a composer can say about his music is more pointed than the music itself," he writes.

On today's date in 1979, Rorem himself was at the piano, accompanying soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson in the premiere performance of a song-cycle he called "Nantucket Songs," a cycle that began with Rorem's setting of the aforementioned Roethke poem.

"These songs," wrote Rorem, "merry or complex or strange though their texts may seem, aim away from the head and towards the diaphragm. They are emotional rather than intellectual, and need not be understood to be enjoyed."

Speaking of personal enjoyment, Rorem adds this footnote about the premiere performance of his "Nantucket Songs," which was recorded live at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C: "Phyllis Bryn-Julson and I, unbeknownst to each other, BOTH had fevers of 102 degrees."

Mariachi

Mexico City school seeks to dignify mariachi music

By Associated Press  |   Saturday, October 27, 2012  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Music News

MEXICO CITY — In the golden age of mariachi, thousands of music lovers would crowd into theaters and fancy restaurants or fill the Plaza Garibaldi in the heart of the capital just to hear their favorite tunes played on guitar and violin. On a recent evening in the same plaza, that golden age was a distant memory.

Roving bands of musicians chased down cars on one of the city’s busiest avenues, leaning into windows to bargain over the price of a song. Black-clad musicians in cowboy boots then assembled ragtag groups that played out of tune while singers hoarsely belted out mournful ballads about love and heartbreak.

The aching music may remain one of Mexico’s top cultural exports, by which the country is known worldwide, but its fortunes have fallen in its homeland, with few well-trained musicians and few decent venues to play in.

A new mariachi school in Mexico City is seeking to revive a music that’s lost ground over the years and that sometimes seems relegated to commercial jingles and elevator Muzak. Called the Mariachi School Ollin Yoliztli, meaning life and movement in indigenous Nahautl, the school teaches folk bands how to play professionally while grooming a new generation of songwriters and composers.

"What this school will do is dignify mariachi music," said director Leticia Soto.

Housed in a former nightclub on the plaza, it’s Mexico’s first professional school dedicated to the genre. Eventually, Soto said, she hopes to offer Mexico’s first university-level degree in the music. Another school in the western state of Jalisco, the birthplace of mariachi, offers workshops but not a degree.

The goal is to formalize a music that has largely been passed down among the generations, without formal instruction. Last year, UNESCO recognized mariachi as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the city has tried to protect that heritage by both cleaning up the plaza and helping set up the school.

Most of the more than 2,000 musicians who ply their trade at the newly renovated colonial plaza learned to play traditional favorites such as "Cielito Lindo" and "Guadalajara" from their parents or other relatives. Most of the players there can’t read music and run through the songs by ear.

Miguel Martinez remembers a different time. The 91-year-old began playing the trumpet 78 years ago in the Plaza Garibaldi, when there were only five mariachi groups working there, with only two including trumpet.

He joined the Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, Mexico’s top ensemble, in 1940, when the music was featured almost daily on the radio. Hundreds also packed the Blanquita Theater for shows that included some of the top singers of ranchera, another, more guitar-based genre.

"It makes me very sad to see what these mariachis have done to the music that el Mariachi Vargas did so much to honor," Martinez said. "The truth is that I would leave this world very happy if I could see that our folklore will continue, because we were losing it."

With that in mind, he called the school "a fantastic idea and something that authorities should have done a long time ago."

For guitarist Arlette Gudino, one of a dozen women accepted at Ollin Yoliztli, playing mariachi music is a passion passed down by her trumpet-playing great-grandfather.

"There are places outside of Mexico where people get more excited to listen to mariachi than here," said the 23-year-old actress. "I would like to do something to get people to value the musical treasure we have."

The 102 members of the first class range from a 14-year-old junior high school student to a 68-year-old retired nurse. They started school last week and are scheduled to graduate in three years with a technical degree.

During that time, they’ll learn music theory and mariachi history and be taught how to sing as well as play the trumpet, guitar, violin and the round-backed guitar called the vihuela.

Trumpet player Raul Rosas, 38, who waits in the plaza for clients, admitted he and the other musicians there could use some training.

"We all should go that school because we don’t play the music like it should be played," said Rosas, one of nine brothers who play in mariachi bands. "We’re musicians who play by ear, why fool ourselves?"

The first mariachi bands, in the 18th century, played only stringed instruments and dressed in white cotton fabric, huarache sandals and wide-brimmed straw hats — the clothing of Mexican farm workers of the time.

Trumpets were added in the early 20th century, and mariachi bands began wearing the more elegant charro, or cowboy, outfits familiar to modern audiences: a short, embroidered jacket, snug-fitting pants with shiny buttons along the legs, fluffy bow ties and the iconic wide-brimmed sombreros.

By the mid-20th century, mariachi music had become a widely popular symbol of Mexican culture, played by radio stations and featured in charro films during the country’s Golden Age of cinema, from 1935 to 1959. By then, the music had become popular in Central and South America and the United States.

The 1980s saw the genre fade as radio buzzed with more commercially successful music such as norteno and banda, which includes lyrics about drug trafficking, or pop music.

Now, few hit songs are done in the mariachi style, and only a handful of places in this metropolis of 20 million feature live, professional mariachi bands.

The genre’s absence in the mass media and intellectual circles also contributed to its decline, said anthropologist Jesus Jauregui, the top expert on the music in Mexico.

"The place mariachi bands get in movies nowadays is not very dignified because they are usually second-rate characters who are accompanying the singer," Jauregui said. "Another factor is the contempt with which the Mexican intelligentsia treats mariachi. No historian or sociologist, musicologist or folklore expert has done studies on mariachi music."

Nonetheless, mariachi retains deep roots in Mexican culture, with many people knowing by heart longtime favorites. Almost every big event in Mexico, from weddings and funerals to Mother’s Day celebrations, includes a mariachi band, and abroad, the music offers a tie for many Mexicans to their native land. Most of that music is amateurish at best.

The handful of top mariachi stars left can nonetheless still fill auditoriums in Mexico, and fans can catch the best mariachi at occasional festivals.

"In the United States, the music is viewed with more respect and that has to do with the fact that they teach it in junior high schools and in high schools and that doesn’t happen in Mexico," Jauregui said.

Soto’s school has tried to turn that around by hiring some of the best musicians in the business, including former members of the group Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, which continues to tour worldwide, often performing with classical orchestras and symphonies.

If anything, the market has shown it’ll pay more for higher quality mariachi, said Victor Lemus, 44, who has played violin with Los Emperadores in Plaza Garibaldi for the last 22 years.

Many in the 14-member ensemble have taken private music classes, and they practice twice a week. That lets them charge twice the average rate of $8 (100 pesos) per song for bands with six members.

Still, on a recent night, none of the Mexican and foreign revelers dancing to the energetic two-step rhythms at the plaza seemed to mind that most of the bands lacked polish, instead requesting songs until they ran out of money or energy.

"Most mariachis right now just put on the charro suit and go out to the street to play and they forget that after the flag, the mariachi is what best represents Mexico," Lemus said. "But if the new generations learn to play it like it should be, they will ennoble the music."

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/entertainment/music/general/view.bg?articleid=1061170727