I was walking down 24th Street the Monday or Tuesday after Michael Sanchez was shot at 24th and Shotwell. It was about 11pm, and there was a group of young men and women all gathered around the corner store, drinking beer and talking. On the wall of the store were dozens of photographs and notes, and there were candles and flowers arrayed on the ground. I was just thinking that it seemed like a pretty sketchy crowd when I noticed a black-and-white had just parked on the other side of Shotwell.
The cop who got out of it was incredibly imposing: very tall, black, totally bald, hugely broad shoulders, ramrod-straight back. His uniform looked like he had just been ironing it in the car. He slowly walked across the street, and I was sure that he was there to tell the group that it was time to get on its way.
But that's not what he did. He didn't talk to them at all. He went down on one knee, produced a candle of his own, lit it, and set it down with the others. Then he went back to his car.
Global Health Magazine is a publication of the Global Health Council, an NGO devoted to health issues around the world (particularly women and children's health issues, HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases, and health systems).
If you poke around in their kicky web site, you'll come across this shocking graphic:
Are you shocked? I'm shocked.
First off, the purpose of a pie chart is to represent relative portions of a whole, not comparative scalar quantities. If one wedge is made bigger, another is necessarily made smaller, and the whole pie represents 100%. This chart suggests, bizarrely, that one way we could reduce the amount of bad things happening in Jordan would be to collect statistics for more countries, since adding countries to this graph would make Jordan's slice smaller.
This is compounded by the fact that the wedges converge on a point that's not in the center, and the shape of the pie is not circular. So, Serbia and Georgia's wedges should be the same size, since one represents 6.2% and one represents 6.9%. Are they? Well, first off, what's their size, anyway? Is it the angle the two sides describe? Is it the surface area? In a circular pie chart whose wedges converge on the same point, these two things are one and the same; not so in this chart. I think that it may be the angle, and not the area, that represents the number, which is unfortunate because Serbia's wedge is noticeably larger than Georgia's.
Actually, now that I compare Rwanda and Jordan, I think that the person who drew this is just an idiot, because there's no way of looking at those two areas that makes one nearly twice as big as the other.
And now, another issue: What do Vietnam, Laos, Georgia, and Iraq have in common? What about Serbia and India? Nepal and Honduras? Well, nothing, or at least, nothing that makes any sense in the context of this chart. So why are Serbia and India black? Why are Nepal and Honduras red?
Let's not even get into the information-destroying jagged lines and concentric arcs.
And now let's move beyond the terrible, terrible graphic design to ask another question: why aren't Tajikistan, Kosovo, Guatemala, and Nigeria on this chart? Is this a graph of the 16 countries with the highest percentages of women who believe it's OK for their husband to hit them? Or is it just a sampling of third-world countries? I'd suspect the latter - I mean, not that I have it in for Sudan, but given that they're a Muslim country in sub-Saharan Africa, I'd think their numbers would be closer to Ethiopia's or Jordan's than to Serbia's or Belize's. But really, who can fucking say?
And wait, I'm not done yet. There's one more thing that bugs me about this. Why is Laos labelled as "Lao PDR"? Yes, the long form of the country's name is "Lao People's Democratic Republic," but I don't see "HK" in front of Jordan or "SR" after Vietnam. What's up with that?
The answer to that last question, at least, can be found in the source data, which for some reason singles out Laos for this weird special treatment. And while there are dozens of countries with percentages higher than Serbia's (so much for the top-16 theory), there's no data for Sudan. Too bad, Janjaweed wives, no statistical recognition for you!
Also, this data is even sketchier than I thought it is. The source for the chart is an appendix to a UNICEF report. Nothing wrong with that, except that as the data set makes clear, these numbers come from five completely different studies, which sort of makes the already suspect three significant figures even more so. Not that anybody involved with making this chart gave a shit, but would it have killed them to pick numbers from the same study?
Rather damningly, the biggest, most dramatic number on the chart - Jordan's 90% - is the only number in the entire data set whose source is not a study but a preliminary report on a study.
And finally, there's the little matter of changing the meaning of the data. This report doesn't list the percentage of women who think it's OK for their husbands to hit them. It lists the percentage of "girls and women aged 15–49 who responded that a husband or partner is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances." It's like the difference between saying it's OK to steal money and saying it's OK to steal money from thieves.
This is a very bad chart.
That's quite an act you've got there. What do you call it?
It's always an exercise in futility to try and clarify what you've written after people have read it, but here goes.
The key phrase - it's buried in the penultimate paragraph, so my bad - is "in my mind."
Of course Jackson was human. But he also appeared to be so utterly out of phase with ordinary human existence that he couldn't interact with it in any normal way. His response to the world, in general, seemed like it was intended to lessen his connection with what for want of a better word I'll call "humanity." But he was certainly human, for all that he appeared to be something else. Saying that he was "no longer really being human in any meaningful sense" is hyperbolic, to say the least. It's because he was human that what happened to him seemed so terrible.
On to the issue of molestation: I used the word "probable" for a reason. I have uncertainty about what actually happened. But at the same time it seems likely to me that if someone's attorneys let him pay millions of dollars to settle a civil suit, they have some reason for not thinking that he's not going to win it. Hence, "probable." But I don't know the truth, and I don't pretend to.
This brings us to the most important point about all: There is no way, no way in the world, that I know what Michael Jackson was really like. And not in the "we can never really know another human being" sense of not knowing what he was really like, either.
Our word "fame" comes from the Latin fama, which originally meant "rumor". Virgil described Fama (the Romans' goddess/personification of rumor) as a hideous feathered creature who had as many eyes, ears, and tongues as she had feathers.
That's who told me everything I know about Michael Jackson.
My knowledge of Jackson is not only imperfect, it is also, almost certainly, fundamentally wrong. It's based on the crazy-quilt of public relations, gossip, art, and parody that hung between me and the real Michael Jackson.
But even though it's fundamentally wrong, it's also all I have. And even though there's a crazy-quilt of myth hanging between me and the real Michael Jackson, there was a real Michael Jackson, a real person whose real outlines could be perceived through it.
So why bother?
Two reasons.
First, he was literally inescapable. It was practically impossible to be a normal American growing up in the 1970s and 1980s and not be confronted with the idea of Michael Jackson. This idea was originally crafted with great care. It was the work of many hands. The idea's central objective was to be as known by as many people as possible. The people whose handiwork this idea was (including, it's essential to recognize, Michael Jackson himself) were extremely successful. I have ideas about who Michael Jackson was because it is close to impossible for me not to.
The second reason is that there was, at the core of this idea, a real person. That real person, what I could make out of him, seemed to be in misery for a very long time.
The understanding I've fashioned for myself about what caused that misery is, at the very best, contingent. I recognize that. But its contingency is not something to apologize for. It can't be helped. As Joan Didion pointed out thirty years ago, we tell ourselves stories to live. This is a strength, in that it lets us endure what she called "the shifting phantasmagoria" of our actual experience. It's also a weakness, because in constructing narratives, we impose an order on the real world that is not necessarily accurate or even present, and it is that distorted order, and not the real world, that we actually understand. The best I can do - the best anyone can do, really - is to remain aware of this process whenever I can, to remain aware that the stories I'm telling myself are, at best, only based on truth, and not the truth themselves.
I think the people who've called this posting "wonderful" (hi Cory!) and "smart" (hi Patrick!) are moved to do so because the narrative I've constructed for myself about Michael Jackson resonates, in some significant way, with the narrative that they've constructed for themselves. It's not because I'm in touch with the truth about Michael Jackson. If I'm in touch with any truth, it's the truth of what the emotional and intellectual experience of coping with the idea of Michael Jackson is like.
tl;dr: It's all shadows on the cave wall.
I'm not really any sadder about Michael Jackson's death than I already was about his life.
It was clear that this was a guy whose Maslovian pyramid took a sharp turn somewhere above "safety needs" and ended up with its tip pointing in a direction nobody else has ever been interested in going. It's always uncomfortable to see someone who's been ruined by fame; what was distressing about Jackson was that even though he was ruined by fame before his 20th birthday, he kept pressing the lever, and getting rewarded with still more fame, and still more ruination. Fame ruined him as an artist and it ruined him as a person, and then it kept on ruining him.
In one sense, Neverland is just a point on the same curve that connects Iranistan, San Simeon, and Graceland. But unlike its predecessors, the overarching sense that I got from everything I ever heard or saw about Neverland is not "this is what happens when you marry too much money to too little taste" but rather "this is an inarticulate expression of uncontained misery." Also, Barnum and Hearst and Presley held their citadels of damaged self-expression till the day they died: Jackson lost his. And he didn't seem too unhappy about losing it, either.
The saddest thing about Jackson was not just that his fame ruined him, it's that it continued ruining him even after he was essentially finished as an artist. In the last decade of his life he was no longer a great singer or a talented composer or a brilliant choreographer; he was someone who had once been all those things and was now Michael Jackson. Here was a guy whose entire existence from early childhood had been wrapped up with what happened when he did things that made other people happy and excited. And that was unavailable to him. He still could make people happy and excited by showing up and having his picture taken, but that's all he had left.
Someone on the WELL used a word about Jackson's probable history as a child molester that made me stop and think: "unforgiveable." It strikes me that it never even occurred to me whether or not to forgive Michael Jackson. In my mind, he was so far away from normative that the question of forgiveness seems totally irrelevant. Not that his no longer really being human in any meaningful sense justified his actions, or mitigated the harm he did, but that it makes no more sense to judge the morality of his actions than it would to judge Henry Darger's. Their creepiness, sure. But this was a man (it's a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him "a man", just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States) who spent every day of his life embedded in a matrix of perverse incentives. The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.
His death has made me stop and think, but it hasn't made me mourn a loss. We lost Michael Jackson fifteen years ago.
There's a reason commentators are using words like "bloodbath" and "slaughter." Though it reminded me more of one of those nightmares where you find yourself in your math class, on the day of the final, and you realize that you've been going to the wrong class all semester: the exam is covered with equations that you can barely recognize, you don't know where to begin, and for the next three hours all you can do is fail.
Cramer walked onto that show ready to defend himself against what Stewart had already accused him of. He was utterly unprepared for what he got. Which is strange, because what he got was really just an elaboration of what Stewart said in the original piece about CNBC and Rick Santelli: this network seems to be in league with the traders against the investors, it's uncritical to the point of appearing collusive, and that if the network actually has a purpose beyond entertainment (and, seemingly, telling the fish how to line up for the sharks), it has manifestly failed.
And Cramer had nothing to say to any of that. It was weird. It's like he's never in his life prepared for a midterm by looking at a practice test. The only thing he was ready to talk about was that sure, his predictions could have been better. It's like he focused on the one single thing in the original piece that made him look silly, and paid not the slightest bit of attention to anything else.
I actually started to feel bad for him at one point. Not bad bad, mind you - the clips from his 2006 interview that Stewart kept playing kept that under control. But he was in zugzwang very early on. Whatever ammunition he might have had to use in disagreeing with Stewart's criticisms of CNBC he left at home. His knowledge and experience and common sense, which he did bring with him, gave him nothing he could use to counter Stewart - largely because Stewart's fundamentally right and he knew it.
But if he couldn't disagree with Stewart, agreeing with him was even less of an option. Agreeing with Stewart would destroy him.
So he babbled ineffectively. You would expect that someone with his persona would be irritated if he got interrupted in mid-sentence by a long speech. But every time that happened to him he looked unperturbed, maybe even relieved. He was safest when he wasn't talking.
And so he let Stewart talk. And what Stewart let loose with was, seriously, the clearest and simplest articulation of what has happened to us, of who did what, and to whom, and how it was done, that I've seen anywhere.
Cramer walked onto that show ready to defend himself against what Stewart had already accused him of. He was utterly unprepared for what he got. Which is strange, because what he got was really just an elaboration of what Stewart said in the original piece about CNBC and Rick Santelli: this network seems to be in league with the traders against the investors, it's uncritical to the point of appearing collusive, and that if the network actually has a purpose beyond entertainment (and, seemingly, telling the fish how to line up for the sharks), it has manifestly failed.
And Cramer had nothing to say to any of that. It was weird. It's like he's never in his life prepared for a midterm by looking at a practice test. The only thing he was ready to talk about was that sure, his predictions could have been better. It's like he focused on the one single thing in the original piece that made him look silly, and paid not the slightest bit of attention to anything else.
I actually started to feel bad for him at one point. Not bad bad, mind you - the clips from his 2006 interview that Stewart kept playing kept that under control. But he was in zugzwang very early on. Whatever ammunition he might have had to use in disagreeing with Stewart's criticisms of CNBC he left at home. His knowledge and experience and common sense, which he did bring with him, gave him nothing he could use to counter Stewart - largely because Stewart's fundamentally right and he knew it.
But if he couldn't disagree with Stewart, agreeing with him was even less of an option. Agreeing with Stewart would destroy him.
So he babbled ineffectively. You would expect that someone with his persona would be irritated if he got interrupted in mid-sentence by a long speech. But every time that happened to him he looked unperturbed, maybe even relieved. He was safest when he wasn't talking.
And so he let Stewart talk. And what Stewart let loose with was, seriously, the clearest and simplest articulation of what has happened to us, of who did what, and to whom, and how it was done, that I've seen anywhere.
Of the small set of people who read this blog, a vanishingly small subset will care about this:
Because I needed an LRU cache in the project I'm working on, and I couldn't find one anywhere, I built one. Since there's nothing proprietary in the code, and I'd like other developers to look it over and maybe even use it, I've released it as open source. You can find it at http://csharp-lru-cache.googlecode.com.
Because I needed an LRU cache in the project I'm working on, and I couldn't find one anywhere, I built one. Since there's nothing proprietary in the code, and I'd like other developers to look it over and maybe even use it, I've released it as open source. You can find it at http://csharp-lru-cache.googlecode.com.
Cain killed Abel, and the blood cried out from the ground - a story so sad even God took notice of it. Maybe it was not the sadness of the story, since worse things have happened every minute since that day, but its novelty that He found striking. In the newness of the world God was a young man, and grew indignant over the slightest things. In the newness of the world God had perhaps not Himself realized the ramifications of certain of His laws, for example, that shock will spend itself in waves; that our images will mimic every gesture, and that shattered they will multiply and mimic every gesture ten, a hundred, or a thousand times. Cain, the image of God, gave the simple earth of the field a voice and a sorrow, and God Himself heard the voice, and grieved for the sorrow, so Cain was a creator, in the image of his Creator. God troubled the waters where He saw His face, and Cain became his children and their children and theirs, through a thousand generations, and all of them transients, and wherever they went everyone remembered that there had been a second creation, that the earth ran with blood and sang with sorrow. And let God purge this wicked sadness away with a flood, and let the waters recede to pools and ponds and ditches, and let every one of them mirror heaven. Still, they taste a bit of blood and hair. One cannot cup one's hand and drink from the rim of any lake without remembering that mothers have drowned in it, lifting their children toward the air, though they must have known as they did that soon enough the deluge would take all the children, too, even if their arms could have held them up. Presumably only incapacity made infants and the very old seem relatively harmless. Well, all that was purged away, and nothing is left of it after so many years but a certain pungency and savor in the water, and in the breath of creeks and lakes, which, however sad and wild, are clearly human.
- Marilynne Robinson, from her novel Housekeeping
In case you're unclear on what just happened in South Ossetia, here is Gary Brecher to explain it all to you. I'm a big fan of the little creep (oh, come on, that's what he'd call himself), and I love, for instance, his breakdown of why the Pentagon condemned the Russian response as "disproportionate":
By the way, I don't know if you were watching, but the Russians shut down The Exile back in June. Oh, I'm sorry, they didn't shut it down. They have a free press in Russia, after all. They conducted a surprise audit of the newspaper and scared its investors into backing out. First time they'd done that to an English-language publication, so there's another landmark.
Anyway, Ames was the editor of The Exile, so if there's anyone who'd be likely to take a less than sanguine view of the Russian government, it's him. You'll note he's not cheering for Georgia in this affair.
If you want a translation, luckily I speak fluent Pentagon. So what “disproportionate” means is—well, imagine that you’re watching some little hanger-on who tags along with you get his ass whipped by a bully, and you say, “That’s inappropriate!” I mean, instead of actually helping him. That’s what “disproportionate” means from the Pentagon: “We’re not going to lift a finger to help you, but hey, we’re with you in spirit, little buddy!”Less comprehensive (and funny), but no less informative, is Mark Ames's take on things, and in particular John McCain's delusional reaction to them.
By the way, I don't know if you were watching, but the Russians shut down The Exile back in June. Oh, I'm sorry, they didn't shut it down. They have a free press in Russia, after all. They conducted a surprise audit of the newspaper and scared its investors into backing out. First time they'd done that to an English-language publication, so there's another landmark.
Anyway, Ames was the editor of The Exile, so if there's anyone who'd be likely to take a less than sanguine view of the Russian government, it's him. You'll note he's not cheering for Georgia in this affair.
