But Where Do We Draw The Line?

John McWhorter advised in one of his Great Courses that you can enter an earnest controversial discussion on virtually any topic, whether you know anything about it or not, by listening in for a few minutes to get the flow of the controversy and then asking "But where do we draw the line?" Humorous, but very nearly true. It's why there is any discussion going on at all.

So even people who call themselves gun absolutists will think something has gone badly awry if the kindergarten teacher is bringing loaded pistols for the children to play with without any instruction, and few absolutists in the other direction (though frankly, there may be some) will argue that there should be no armed private security firms. There's a line, and we're arguing about the line. We get carried away with our phrasing in order to be dramatic, but really, there are lines within lines. Some people say they will never ride anything but a Harley, too, but will happily jump on an old Indian or even a 70s Ducati.

So in discussing risk versus safety, it's going to be a lines, and different lines that we draw for ourselves, for those we have responsibility to teach, and for the society around us. There are long traditions of embracing risk because it teaches us not to panic, to remain calm in case some emergency comes up. It is a virtue in many modes of thought to take on risk and to teach the young to take it on as well. I raised five sons, and I have done this. One son had been skiing after school a few years and was still too cautious.  So I went skiing with him myself, too fat, long out-of-practice.  But I attacked the mountain more than he did and he saw it was possible and had changed over by the end of the day. I did not injure any hip, knee, or ankle. But mostly with boys you are going in the opposite direction, getting them not to drive so fast, and especially not to tailgate, because really son, your reflexes aren't that good. And we have seen this go bad, of a father in our circle who thought it unmanly to wear his seatbelt and taught his son to do the same. It ended as badly as you might fear, with the boy dead driving home from college on Mother's Day years ago. And teaching children to manage risk mostly applies to training for physical situations, not imbuing a sense of calm. I don't see evidence that such things really work.  A lot of that is hard-wired, but training can be given to anyone. Almost having accidents doesn't teach boys not to tailgate anywhere near as much as you think it would. Even if it did, I don't think new driver's ed classes are going to come out teaching them to practice going twice the speed limit so that they get good at slower speeds.  It doesn't work that way.

Dealing with social risk is also a virtue to be passed on to children. It comes in many forms, and as JMSmith offered at the the Othosphere and James notice at his site, "Peer pressure is good for those who are worse than their peers!" Well, we are all better and worse than our peers in something. But there does come a time, dramatic or quiet, when the choices are stark, and only physical downstream of the social and political choices. By the light of burning martyrs, indeed. Learning to have risked social disapproval, or even humiliation, and learning that you did not die from this, but came through on the other side, is a valuable thing to have risked.

Yet it is different in what we put ourselves up to because we are inspired and what we make our children go through, or our charges at school, or scouts, or Basic training. We believe we are doing well by them, but so did many evil and abusive people throughout history.  How much do we know is actually good for their character, and how much is just myths that we tell ourselves, supported by myths that earlier authorities told themselves? Did the challenges i put my children up to actually improve their character?  I can think of examples where they did not, and might have been damaging.

How much more when it is other people's children?  Yes, we do not want to artificially protect the children in our town from real life, as that might leave them unable to face everyday stresses.

Or will it? We tell ourselves that and find convenient examples from the news to prove how badly other parents or cultures did by not challenging children enough. So have abusive cultures throughout time. How do we measure such a thing? Risks can go bad. In Tolkien, the Shire is protected from risk, and this is taken as a very good thing on balance by those who undertake the real risks.

The parallel example of suffering was put before me, quite to my surprise. Suffering can be good for us, sometimes the highest good, and sometimes the only voice we will hear. Yet I don't think anyone claims we have the right to inflict suffering on others, that it might be good for them and make them better people. It compares quite closely to risk. Those who reject the guesses of the authorities about risk judge no better - and the effect is not only on themselves and those they have some authority over, but on all of us.  

Worse, contagion is a different type of risk than physical or social dangers.  We don't learn much about dealing with contagion by facing contagion, as we might with skiing or criticism. If my choice increases your risk, how is that defensible? I know the myth.  I was raised on it.  I have five sons, as I said.

Well, it's all lines we draw, as I said at the outset. But I think one side of this that I have always thought had something solid behind it may just be justification for doing what we feel like doing.

Worrisome (A Rant)

A reduction in the percentage of people getting their children vaccinated was one of my worries. I hope this news out of Texas is not a trend. I say that know that of course it's going to be a trend.

I have lost nearly half my readership over the covid issues, but the part that bothers me most is that the ones who have left are the ones who most need to hear it.  Such is always the way, I suppose. But being skeptical about what the government says never stays put.  People immediately find some other source to believe instead, and they stop applying the same skepticism.  They believe someone who claims to be the father of the mRNA vaccines (he wasn't) who never goes to a forum where he is challenged. They believe a nursing instructor in England - not a bad one, but not a #1 source.  They believe the predictable scare stories that it's all going to affect your reproduction system somehow. To be fair on that one, lots of things can affect menstrual cycles, but it's usually temporary and minor and does not impact fertility. They start treating all "experts" as if they are taking orders from the government, rather than independent researchers gradually arriving at similar answers. They believed rumors about people dying from vaccines - sometimes thousands of them - and somehow all the doctors in the world decided to cover that up and enter different causes of death on the certificates.  Because the hospitals got $3K each for those patients, they heard. 

I heard some of this nonsense from my own children. At least the Romanians have an excuse for a little paranoia.

I have a post started on safety and risk, but I have waited on it trying to check myself and my own motives.

But this is what happens when skeptics panic. Your local hospital did not go hysterical, even when it took some precautions that turned out to be unnecessary, like making sure no one shared pens.  Well, the hospitals did sometimes get close to hysterical, when their ICUs were overflowing and they couldn't keep enough ER staff, going on into months. Nerves fray. But it was the skeptics that panicked and stopped thinking. Not everyone believed all the crap ideas, but lots of people needed to demonstrate that they were at least somewhat skeptical. It was a point of honor. Yeah, you can't take them in.  They're too smart for that. Did they fear the social pressure of the opinions of friends, or of their opinions of themselves, of the Type of Person I Am? It has been cool to be a skeptic in many places. 

My really ugly fear is that this was a dry run for a much more dangerous epidemic - because we have seen how one can spread in this interconnected world, and slowing things down until we get a vaccine may be the only real strategy - but we learned all the wrong lessons.

Recommendation for Locals

I have had Maine Lunch, an IPA from the Maine Beer Company, at a few restaurants, especially out near the coast. I like it quite a bit. I usually opt for NH breweries, then Maine, then Massachusetts, then Vermont. I have sprung for the Brooklyn Beer Co's lager a few times - and am not utterly opposed to Connecticut and Rhode Island, but generally don't have to consider them.

I also get Guinness or Boddington's at times - mostly for nostalgia - or whatever is local to where I am traveling. The rest of the world is on its own.

Heredity

Chuck Klosterman (pronounced KLOSEterman, I learned) "Definitely having kids does seemingly solve the nature versus nurture thing.  It seems. like. nature. Like it really seems obvious" The discussion with Tyler Cowan included that children are using niche strategies in the family, as they will seek niche strategies in other environments in the future.  But as those drop away, their genetic similarity will become more prominent.

Though I think this is true, the argument does not quite cover the waterfront. The genetic material we inherit from parents is not identical in each child, which he certainly knows, as he was discussing it in terms of his own siblings a moment before. It was his interviewer who mentioned the niche strategies first, though he embraced it.  He was likely oversimplifying to make a point. There are family similarities, sometimes more visible to outsiders because fish don't know they are wet, but the niche strategies are both genetic and derived from what was available when you were born and as life progressed. So some of that does not melt away, for the good reason that it is just as hardwired.

I find Klosterman interesting to listen to, though occasionally infuriating.  I tried to understand after this interview if there was some common thread to the places where I think he has gone wrong. He really is quite good at finding larger ideas in his observation of popular culture. Yet I think his weakness is that strength swollen out of proportion, as is usually the case for all of us. He thinks popular culture is more important than it is, likely because he likes observing it and drawing conclusions from it, and it is what he knows. Coaches see life lessons in sports - partially true; teachers see the world in the microcosm of the classroom - also partially true. So I suppose it sucks for my friends and family that I worked in a psychiatric hospital all my life, eh?

Woke Ideology, or Fear of Lawsuit?

Conservative sites are fond of bringing up examples of academics or government officials making statements that would have been greeted with suspicious looks (or shrugs) just a decade ago, and the focus is on the culture war aspect of "theses people believe crazy and dangerous things." Having worked for a government agency which is always on the edge of where culture might be going, I wonder if another force is more powerful. There might be the warning "you might be sued," but frankly, I don't think they care about that anywhere near as much as WE might be sued. What they believe in their heart of hearts may not be the issue for them, but protecting the nest. We might think it contemptible when there is some philosophical or even moral issue on the table, but it is at least concern for something larger than oneself, some attachment to the jobs and reputations and ability to accomplish something of the people around them.

Yes, certainly, "let's not be sued" can be selfish or pusillanimous or blinkered as an overall philosophy of life, but it's not a bad guideline to keep along with the others. Let's keep the babies fed and the products moving and the bankruptcies at a minimum.  Wokeness, then, may be as much a product of the multiplication of administrators bustling about keeping everyone from doing things that will put us on the 6 O'clock News. We can blame it on having too many lawyers, but our lawyers are often there to protect us from our own poor judgement. Things that look right to us at first thought might contain injustices and negligences we had not considered. Son #5 in the Army Reserves said a few years ago "Half our trainings are basically 'Please don't rape anybody,' plus a bad instructional film." Well, there were reasons for that, and they made the news. That's often where careers end. That the first order of business should be protecting America from outside forces gets easily lost when  no one seems to be losing their job for screwing that up.

I saw it in mental health, that you had to continually resume focus on the patient's psychiatric issues, because a dozen other things, many also important, kept grabbing your attention instead. There are housing issues, financial issues, public relations issues, safety issues - plus an awareness that secondary mental health issues, which will only be key with a minority of patients, are nonetheless occasionally central, and always have watchers in the background making sure you are taking care of their people. So we have to address if they are veterans, if they are gay or trans, if they have endured trauma (remote or recent) , whether they are in danger of violence now, if mobility or disability issues are present, what their primary language is and cultural considerations. We did experience situations of patients or agencies reporting us or even suing us somewhat as a flier when they did not like our clinical decisions.  We talked about the legal implications of our decisions a great deal.

Interestingly, I see that City Journal has a new article relating this to managerialism. While I think there is much to this, I note that in the examples given, the fact that people were being sued seems to be what brings the outside managers in.

Prisoner

An interesting update from Glenn Loury's newsletter about a prisoner hoping for a parole hearing after 25 years. You could blame the potential backlash or the reason the politicians earned the backlash. But justice is impaired when it becomes political.

Update:  But see the comments for the other side.

Bridal Veil Falls Again

I have been many times before and reported on it twice - with photos - in 2012 and in 2007. I went again yesterday on the spur of the moment. I took a mild spill up by the falls, but no harm done. I still did not find the plaque, but spoke to Gradon Peckett on my way out and have a clearer idea where to look next time.

Safety

I have been chewing on a long post about public safety and what is proper for a culture to do about it, because there are disagreements and thoughts go in many directions.  I had not much thought of gun laws in that context, but of course those are pertinent. For those who don't usually go over Grim's recent post Addendum illustrates how the proposed legislation might be more dangerous for black people, including black children, creating a worse situation for them than now exists, even without looking at the rights issues that make the proposals unconstitutional.   You may find that you need to reed the previous post Dear Senator for context.

I again note that I am not a gun owner and have no interest. I have simply learned over time that the reasoning and use of statistics behind gun regulation are at best mistaken and more likely intentionally deceitful.  It is a cultural battle, based on naive beliefs about what causes violence.

Give That Wolf A Banana

 

Shrodinger's Serial Killers

Jonah Goldberg over at The Dispatch has a lot of my ideas, stated more clearly and elegantly, about school shootings.

Anyway, in that NPR segment Cory Turner says that experts say that we should make schools “softer”—i.e., more welcoming and nurturing—not “harder” as in more secure. I think there’s a bit of a category error here. Making schools more nurturing and supportive is not in conflict with making them physically safer. I don’t know this, but I am pretty confident that there are some schools that are incredibly well-designed and heavily guarded that are also quite nurturing.  If you see a family home with a state-of-the-art security system there’s no reason to assume it’s less loving and nurturing inside. My friend Charlie Cooke is armed to the teeth; he is also as far as I can tell a wonderful and nurturing dad. 

Regardless, I just don’t believe that schools have become less tolerant since Columbine. I don’t think bullying has increased. If anything, I think the opposite is true. “Antibullyism,” Izzy Kalman writes at Psychology Today, “unofficially launched in response to the Columbine massacre of 1999, has become the most popular social movement in history.” Even you think—as I do—that that’s probably an overstatement, the point remains. Over the last two decades schools have leapt into the anti-bullying cause. I am sure there is less bullying in my high school today than there was when I attended.

And I am older than Jonah and know there was far more bullying at my school when I was there.  Mill city 1960s. We didn't define such things as an assault then, so if you asked men my age thirty years ago if they were the victim of an assault when they were young, most would have scoffed and said no. For openers,if you fought back and won or at least came to stalemate, you didn't think you had been assaulted. Even then, you might still just think of "assault" as something that needed an adult, or at least later teen initiator to qualify. If you asked men now, now that we have been taught to notice the physical reality, there would be a lot of hesitation and uncertain looks before answering. By the simplest definition, nearly all boys were assaulted. It was just part of reality. Lot's of 'em thought the whole thing was fun to boot, like an informal sport of who could "take" who.

Very few of us became mass shooters, except of frogs. The kids who came closest to such actions - the kids who ended up at youth detention and eventually prison, were generally the bullies, not the bullied. Though that does remind me about the reality of their psychology.  Bullies do not have low self-esteem, they have unreasonably high self-esteem, overestimating their class rank and the number of friends they have. It is when the world refuses to reinforce their narcissism that they lash out. So in the discussion of mass shooters who were bullied, I wonder how many would have been described as the ooposite by their peers.

Probably not.  That's likely only for regular level violence that makes only local news. The mass shooters do seem to have universally noted to be weird, not just mean.

Cats Kill Birds

 ...and Iceland is wondering what to do about the extinctions,

Dry Bar

 

Offhand

Reading a few distressing stories tonight and discussing them with others who tied them to local events we both knew about, I was thinking about people who were essentially unaccountable because the people whose job that was had their power tied up with them. In this instance, a wife who was co-pastor of an independent church with a husband who had had sex with a parishioner 27 years ago, starting when she was 16. (Their children were also in pastoral roles at the church, where they had all been continuously at least that length of time. We know a church like that now and knew one a few decades ago that we even had some involvement with. This dynamic occurs too often in independent ministries.) I thought of Bill Clinton, with a wife desirous of power that was tied up with his, and her lack of even ordinary wifely accountability on him. Then I expanded the idea beyond sex to scandals and infractions in general. 

Tie it in to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the group which over time becomes devoted to the organisation rather than its stated goals. Also Samo Burja's research that bureaucratic decay is so predictable as to be "nearly quantifiable." So is this the large part of the deterioration of organisations, that the longer one goes on, the longer a bureaucracy exists, the more everyone involved is complicit in the sins of everyone else? Not necessarily with great scandal that will make the news, but with steady drops of poison entering the water all are drinking from. I was in a single bureaucracy for over forty years. Perhaps it is best that I not launch into explanations how this doesn't apply to me. Likely, it must apply to me, and I have disguises in place.

A Comfortable Place To Sit

The various states have different laws about firearms, some with more registration requirements, some with greater penalties for misuse, allowing or forbidding open carry or concealed carry - there is variety. Some municipalities have additional restrictions. These have changed over the years, so there are comparative numbers in the same places. You don't need any special training to research this or special permissions to get the important information. Other people have even assembled a lot of the comparisons for you if you like, or if you don't trust them you can do the digging yourself. A bit tedious, perhaps, but doable right in your own home. You can move the pieces about, looking at the differences in violent crime or homicide in states that allow X, and some trends of what might happen if you do Y or Z.

What you will find is that the laws make very little difference, if any. You will find things you may consider counterintuitive, such as easier access to guns or ammunition actually resulting in less crime occasionally.  Not a lot less, but you were surprised to see any at all. We could have long and controversial discussions about what does change crime rates in a place, which is how I keep getting off into long essays, unable to get the wagons in a circle.

Nor is there any evidence that making laws restricting guns will change our culture away from our violent history to a peaceful and gentle people. No, not even gradually. Europe's internal crime rate went down long before they changed the laws. And they didn't even get a final reduction when they did get around to making it very difficult for people to own guns or to account for all ammunition. The rates had gone down already, didn't move any further.

Once you grasp this you will see how deeply offensive it is to take the attitude after a tragic shooting that it's just obvious what we need to do, but all those terrible villains, those gun lobbies buying politicians, or our gun-obsessed culture, or the gun manufacturers making all that money, or the cowards who refuse to stand up to them, all refuse to do the obvious. This shows that those villains are stupid or evil or both, not caring about little children and deserving to be publicly confronted and shamed. As with so many things, we say, we could do it if we only tried.  If we only had the courage and the nerve to do X - in this case, one of a dozen things about guns - If only we really cared, it would get done easily.

Whenever you find yourself thinking such things, understand that it could be a projection, or at least an irony. It could be you who has found a comfortable place to sit, requiring no courage or caring, but getting the benefit of feeling like a crusader, an opponent of evil. Please notice that this supposed evil just happens to coincide with cultural groups you don't like, cultural groups that are in fact in competition with yours for political and status dominance in America. Huh, funny thing.  I wonder how that happened? 

I am hard on you because I once sat among you and know now my own darker motives. Perhaps not yours? I hope so for most of you, but the national behavior and the individual comments even from Nice People over the years has convinced me I was not unusual. Gun regulation outrage with disdainful cultural comments is a comfortable place to sit.

The belief in the obviousness makes it more insulting, and thus morally offensive. Complaining at politicians "You should have done something, this is your fault" is just vile. Fun, though, I imagine. Asking what the church's response to this should be - isn't that a question that has already assumed the only answer it wants to hear? "The church has failed if it doesn't show the courage to do something about this." Wait, what's your real religion again?

The protest will come "Well can't we even try?" We have tried, many things. One of the difficulties is that once you have a regulation in place and the means for effecting it, it tends to stay in place forever. Not always.  Massachusetts passed a very restrictive mandatory incarceration law in the 90s and crime went up. It was still hard to get rid of - ask yourself why people would still want to keep it and you come up against the fantasies of people who think that it should work, and would, if we just tried harder - but they managed it.

I very much liked Aggie's comment under "Expectations."  It was in the context of the continuous-improvement work they needed to do in drilling, and in that industry it had gone well, because people wanted safety, not to find others to blame.  Yes. When there is a society-wide problem, the first thing that is required to improve matters is honesty and good faith in communication, usually the last things to become apparent - and even then, in deficit. The biggest task in creating a proactive safety culture is gaining acceptance that this is the priority at the outset. Once people buy in, the culture of continuous improvement takes wing. Ironically, to work safely one has to first feel safe in being able to communicate their observations and ideas without fear of criticism. Shame is a very powerful emotion. 

So sure, we can try. But it has to be about real-world change, in the context of costs, whether there is infringement on freedoms of the innocent, and acknowledgement that it's not magic.  It can't just be another one of those things where we Do Something in order for people to feel they have made things safer when all they have done is won a cultural battle by manipulative means. I'm not even a gun owner and I find myself continually moved to defend them against unfairness.

Colin Kaepernick

Okay, now I have two long drafts of posts about gun issues, both of them not as focused as would be hoped for.  What is happening is that I am deeply irritated by some public comments which come my way even though I try to avoid them,and I am trying to fit that into more measured and helpful observations. Prediction: you probably won't get measured and helpful observations here.

In the meantime, Colin Kaepernick has gotten a workout with the Raiders, and everyone is all atwitter about that. I try to reduce messy-looking controversies to simpler formulations in hopes of ignoring the distractions and seeing clearly what is happening.

Kaepernick believes that he was, and still is, a very good quarterback that did not fit the traditional pro football mold but proved himself when given a chance to play. He has a very good point there. He was a running QB when that was still considered the wrong way to do things.  Teams wanted Drew Brees, Phillip Rivers, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, to stay in the pocket and just pass accurately.  Running was only a surprise move, almost a trick play. Cam Newton came out of college the same year and despite being the first pick, had many doubters because of his running style. Both did well on the field, Newton much better. Newton came out of Auburn, Kaep Nevada, so that gave him less cachet, and benefit of the doubt as well. But Kaep was just a bit ahead of his time. He was Josh Allen before Josh Allen. So his road was harder, and that's an unfairness in his life. If 2011 Kaepernick were coming up now, he would be more desirable.  Not his fault.  But not anything racist or anyone else's fault either.  The game changes.  He was early. Life is unfair sometimes.

He was pretty good, but streaky.  He did win a playoff game against the Packers and Aaron Rodgers - that's worth something - but also went 1-10 his last year as a starter. He moved into that borderland between being a legit starter, maybe more in the right situation, versus being a top backup. Lots of top backups resent their lot, not unreasonably, knowing that they are better than at least a few of the starters for some team or another. But there are only a few ways of being a backup, and if you aren't one of those, your market is depressed. You can be the new young QB who is being prepared to be the starter.  That has evolved over the years, but it's a recognisable slot. Or you can be a guy who is very similar in style to the starter to cover if he gets injured. Or you can be someone of recognisable talent, perhaps a veteran at the end of his career, who can come in if everything is falling apart.  With all three of those possibilities, you can make yourself more valuable by being a good guy in the QB room or with the clipboard on the sideline, trying to help the team even if it temporarily makes your case worse. Mentoring the third-string QB. Making suggestions during film sessions. Encouraging the guys whose job you are competing for anyway. While those are not absolute requirements for the job of backup, they are important.

Colin Kaepernick does not bring that extra, never has. He's not the clipboard guy, not the QB room guy. This got even worse when he decided to become politically controversial. He thought his cause more important than helping the team - well, he is free to think that and we all have a cause we think the same about somewhere - but teams don't want extra controversy.  It's a distraction. Some teams will put up with it.  I thought he might be a good backup for Russell Wilson having similar style and a Seattle team not uncomfortable with his politics. But I can't think of too many other places that would want him. Controversy is expensive, and he brought no extras.

His girlfriend has convinced him that this is all because of racism. I won't say that is impossible, but think a distinction between "racism" and "approach to racial politics" is much clearer. He was already on the edge, he undermined his own value. I hear he is still pretty good, but no one is oohing and aahing. You listen to him and know he will go to his grave believing he was blackballed because of his political beliefs. It's an entertainment business, he likely has a point. But it's only 10% of the point he thinks it is. A few NFL players are politically controversial and it doesn't seem to cost them their jobs. No team wants a celebrity backup. Think Tim Tebow, Johnny Manziel, now Baker Mayfield, Cam Newton. 

There.  Solved it for ya.

Expectations

I will be writing at more length about why, when there are mass shootings, we keep thinking that something about gun laws or mental health screening is going to make this better despite the complete lack of evidence for those ideas. It does fascinate me why generally rational people keep resorting to those irrational ideas, especially as I once held some of those ideas myself and now cannot quite recapture why. I am searching for an earlier AVI, perhaps. But the essay is more than a little scattered at this point.

Yet it deserves to be said that there are in one sense A Great Many people like this out there - you walk past a few every day, most likely - but also that there are Very Few, because no one has shot up your neighborhood this week, have they? Let me hit you with the uncomfortable truth that whatever criteria you develop for identifying 1) We should not be letting this person have access to a gun, or 2) We should be making sure that this person is under stricter mental health observation, or even the more general 3) This person spooks the shit out of me and what can we do about it, if you want to then apply it to everyone who crosses that threshold, you will be intervening in the lives of 100x more people at a serious level, and requiring little evidence to do that.  How big a police force do you want? How many hospitals? Prisons? I don't want to ruin the lives of too many people by singling them out, but frankly, if everyone who met the criteria for needing an ankle bracelet had one, other people would be shutting themselves indoors...

Yeah, hey, there's the fantasy to play out. If in February 2020 we made everyone who met criteria for dangerousness just wear an ankle bracelet, we wouldn't have needed to close any businesses or enforce any social distancing or mandate any covid precautions at all. The number of people who would stay home, not go to restaurants, church, shopping, concerts, indoor sporting events or whatever VOLUNTARILY would make that unnecessary.  A huge number of businesses would go belly-up already. You think there are many bars that would survive that? Yes, people would be quarantining themselves for nonviral reasons so it wouldn't be an exact match, but the numbers would have been so large that even highly authoritarian governors would say "I have nothing to add to this." You worry about guns? Look who has driver's licenses. They kill lots more people with their illnesses and substance abuse, just in smaller batches.

This was my career. Judges and defense attorneys and prison guards and ER personnel see the same thing. Even in very nice places, we live on a precipice. That's why we can't fix it.

Dark Tevye - and Dark Fiddler?

The New Neo had a post about four years ago about a production of "Fiddler on the Roof" that she had seen years before that was quite dark, and now found the brighter versions a bit disappointing. I objected and she was dismissive. I didn't push it. I won't review my reasons here but they boiled down to the idea that the script, especially the music and lyrics, are comic with poignancy, not grim with some comic relief. It is not the forced gaiety of "Cabaret," and certainly not something out of Beckett, using the conventions of humor and vaudeville for contrast and effect.  It's fully in American Musical Theater style (see also composer/lyricist Bock and Harnick's "The Rothschilds," Harnick wrote "The Merry Minuet" recorded by the Kingston Trio, if that gives you the flavor), with the irony light. There are some scenes in the play that could be done more somberly than usual, or at least backing off from the hijinks of the production I was in decades ago, but there's not getting away from what's on the page.

Let me admit, however, that I did not see the production on Long Island that she saw, and if I had I might eat my words. Maybe I just don't imagine very well. (Spoiler alert: a change of opinion is coming.)

Yet the idea of playing Tevye more darkly has not gone away from me over the years, and I think I will have to allow that Dark Tevye might be possible. Mostel did a bombastic, comic Tevye that owed something to Bert Lahr and Ed Wynn, without going quite that far.  Looking back, The Tevye in the production I was in went full Bert Lahr. For community theater that works, and you likely can't do much else at this point. If you tried to go dark with Tevye people would complain that you didn't bring enough "energy" to the role. They want Mostel, or more. Your director would likely be poking you with sticks throughout the rehearsal period. Dark Tevye would have to be a university production or some other place where the audience might expect you to do something different. 

I love Tevye and have joked that I have played him in every role I have had since, including Christmas skits since I did the show in 1972. I have to admit I sort of play him in real life as well, and it has even rubbed off on my two oldest sons a bit. I am too old to play him now, but if you know someone who is going to give it a try, or a director who is doing the show you might suggest it. We know the Tevye that is described as "lovable." But what if he isn't really lovable, but instead "beloved" as an eventual understanding? Sholem Aleichem's Tevye is more tragic, his cheerfulness a last-stand defense against despair. 

To get some picture of what I mean, think of Inigo Montoya in "The Princess Bride."  The whole movie is comic, over-the-top, tongue in cheek, but draws its power from Montoya's seriousness and playing it straight, right through the ridiculous antics of bringing Wesley back to life and having a Holocaust Cloak or the wedding ceremony, where he stays right in on his life's goal and says in fury "I want my father back, you son of a bitch!" Many of Tevye's lines can be un-buffooned and said seriously, even angrily. Upon meeting Perchik "This is not mine." In the argument about Scripture "Somewhere it says something about a chicken." All the leadup to "Fruma Sarah" is overdrawn on stage, but a real Tevye would have to tell his wife the story of her Grandma Tzeitl in dead seriousness to pull it off. Much is made of his interior debates, such as considering Tzeitl's marriage to Lazar Wolf, and the joyful musical number "L'Chaim" which follows. Yet look at the text.  He knows there is nothing romantic about this for his daughter.  "But she will never starve." That's a light remark to us, but a real issue in 1890 Russia. That willingness to celebrate, that embrace of the-best-we-could-do does have an air of Brecht or Ionesco, a forced gaiety. 

With that in mind, watch the scene again, including the Russian soldiers - there is not just tension relieved by celebration, which is the part we like. Their dancing is athletic, showing strength; their boots stomp heavily; their actions are commanding, with only hints of deference; and there is key change in the music that is not accidental. 

When we hold our focus on the girls and their romances and their embrace of modernity (look, they are becoming like us! It's a happy ending!) we can leave the theater humming "Matchmaker." But maybe the dark production idea is correct after all. Everything else is going steadily downhill. When Tevye sings "Little Chavaleh" he is drawing ever-nearer to losing everything.  It is only our blinkered values "But she is bookish, just like us in this theater, and marrying a bookish boy! Who cares if their lives are going to suck?" 

What if when Tevye says “A bird and a fish can fall in love, but where would they build their home?” it is not mere humorous frustration but has anger - and real pain for their lot - in it? 

Hmm.  When I thought the play was merely sad in parts for some characters - especially the old ones who don't really understand about LUV* like I did at 20 - but basically a lot of fun, I may have missed more than nuance, I may have missed the script. 

Well, perhaps I like Dark Tevye and Dark Fiddler more because I am older and darker myself now. I may be overselling this. Aleichem's Tevye ends up widowed, daughters to the four winds, but Stein's character is going to America with his wife! Where we know many good things will happen! And that is what is in his book, the play, and the movie. Yet I can now see that someone would want to reframe it, even if some of the script and the music would have to be overridden. It can start in that comic style but you could break it down, step by step.

*Even though there is a number in the show that specifically addresses this. I thought it was cute and quaint but these old people still didn't understand that they were settling for a consolation prize. I suppose that love is a Consolation prize in a truer sense. Hmm.  Even that song could also have a gruffer, irritable Tevye rather that Zero's cute one.  "But my father and my mother said we'd learn to love each other and now I'm asking Golde - do you love me?" could be sung almost despairing, almost angry, nearly defeated by everything in life.

Professional Women and Informality

I had started a post about academic women behaving in what I thought was an embarrassing fashion. I had been collecting examples in some irritation over the last couple of months.  Once you notice something enough to put a name to it, you start to see it more frequently. Yet I also was consciously looking for examples of men doing this as well. Are men doing the same thing, engaging in some sort of Bro talk with each other on these podcasts and I'm just not picking it up? Are these actually politically slanted rather than gendered, of liberals all a-twitter about meeting powerful liberal men? Is this something performative that their male-dominated academic circles force them into slowly, invisibly over the years of their school successes?  What exactly is happening here?  

I don't have anything like a full answer, just some information based on the (many) professional women I have worked with and how their responses were not always like the men's, plus listening to an abundance of podcasts on a fairly narrow range of topics at this point. (Literature; anthropology and archaeology; genetics; prehistory, ancient history, and medieval and renaissance history; economics and international economics; Inklings; probably a few other things.  I don't want to give the impression that I cover those topics in any sort of systematic completeness.  Pretty random.  But I did want to mention that I can't generalise beyond these things.)

The occasion was what I thought of as schoolgirl giggling, which I thought not quite right for a serious discussion.  Two women were talking about what sex was really like in the Middle Ages, and it was a tone I recognised from psych students at the hospital, almost showing off how adult they were by being able to talk about sex*, while not really doing that in an adult fashion. A couple of days later, there were three women about to discuss a Roman burial site in England, but in the introductory two got distracted by the news of a younger sister's wedding. A few days out, and other women were talking about one getting to meet a powerful political figure and the other remarking how exciting that was. Okay, maybe that's just less exciting if you are from NH, so that may be unfair of me.  But another show the next day - completely different professors/researchers - got started with the topic by going over what each had been doing since they last spoke, and one related that she had gotten to meet (star recognisable even by me, prominently liberal) and even gotten to shake his hand. It was the two back-to-back that alerted me, perhaps. But I've listened for about three weeks.  Few people, male or female, have shown this. People are talking about cultural covid responses between countries and status groups, and that's what they talk about. Anything that smacked of sex or romance or widely popular people was merely noted offhandedly.  But there were a few exceptions.

I thought at first the exceptions were all females, but looking over my shows I realised there is one quite major exception to that rule, a three-man podcast that I no longer listen to for exactly this reason.  The first part of every episode was taken up with talk about fiances and what they were doing, and many episodes had fanboy stuff about the important CS Lewis/GK Chesterton/JRR Tolkien people they had met at conferences or in the past. 

I was jumping to conclusions, but thought I must be missing something. Getting an advanced degree and getting yourself hired by prestigious institutions requires a fairly high minimum of social awareness about those cultures. They clearly aren't stupid, they don't seem irresponsible - what's up?  I compared their behavior to that of the many professional women I had worked with. One pattern I had seen repeated over many years occurred to me. When meeting a new psychiatrist or PhD psychologist, it is polite to address them as "Doctor" until you get some signal otherwise. Some prefer you address them as such for as long as you know them. Few males give you permission to address them by their first name, and nearly all of those are young. Some doctors big on camaraderie will take abbreviated monikers like "Dr. K." I think about half the females will quickly say "Call me Linda." I always pushed back on this and would give my explanation. Because it is nearly always some females being addressed by their first names and males being called Doctor, the hospital-wide culture was that male doctors were addressed more respectfully, and I didn't want to buy into that.** They would look a touch surprised , and sometimes grin and say "Well that's very nice. Thank you. But call me Linda." Light laughter.

I have preliminary observations but zero real data. What I see might be skewed from the start by my field, or false perspective, or my age or region or six other things.  Insights appreciated. Tentatively, this is what I have got.

1. It is much more common in younger women.

2. It occurs when only women are in the conversation - which has odd twists buried in it when one considers that a podcast has both male and female listeners. Men actually are present in some sense. I would suspect that topics that appealed more to women might show this even more strongly. Don't know. 

2A. It would occur occasionally at work in a situation where it was a female-dominated team culture, even if males were sometimes present.  Psychiatric teams are mixed, but percentage higher female over male in the main, because some common groups - nurses, social workers, occupational therapists - were predominantly female. The MD's,  the attorneys, the physical therapists, the psychologists - those are more 50-50.

3. On the one male-only podcast where this chit-chat smoothing occurred, only one of the men was employed as an academic. He engaged in it much less.  Another was a writer and the third a statistician. Maybe that matters.

4. It occurs mostly at the beginning of the podcast or the team meeting, during a light introductory phase that men are more likely to skip when it's their circus.

5. I may be imagining this or borrowing over from observing the female psychologists or attorneys I knew live, but I can sense that some of the older academic women are rather impatient with this and are quick to steer the conversation to the intended point.

6. I humorously note it even occurs at the frequent social gathering of four couples that is founded on a Bible study we shared for decades. We all used to sit at the same table or in a large circle of chairs and sofas.  Now the men and women immediately split and have very different conversations. ("What did you think of the article I sent you this week?") My wife has occasionally wished she were in the men's conversation when she overhears a line or two.

Well, it's interesting.  There seems to be something more common in female culture that it is important to set a tone of friendliness and caring about who you are and what is happening to you. That doesn't seem especially blamable, though it doesn't much appeal to me.  When men control the culture it may be that some women (not all, clearly) find it...what?  Distant? Chilly? Unsupportive? Yet men rather obviously can do this in situations they perceive

I have to figure that someone in linguistics or one of the social sciences has filmed a few thousand hours of this stuff and drawn conclusions. There is likely to be some awareness of code-switching of when this can take place and when it can't.

* I thought of Jane Studdock from That Hideous Strength. 

** I have also wondered whether this subtly changes the power dynamics in the building. An occasional woman would complain over the years about promotions going unequally to males. I never said it aloud as it would sound accusing and unsympathetic, but I did wonder if embracing this chumminess worked against them. 

Arrangements

It is a mark of unsophistication in music to pay no attention to the arrangement.  That would be me, generally.  I think of a song as the tune and the lyrics, the rest fairly optional. I do at least know this is quite wrong.  I suppose this approach to arranging is similar to the old military saying that amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics. 

Yet sometimes even I notice things.  I put this song up on a family text thread when discussing camping vacations from 25-40 years ago. (We were trying to remember what our nickname was for a particular camping food.) I did notice, as I had before, that it used unusual instruments for a 60s pop song. My wife commented on the films in the background, finding them inappropriate for the song. "I always thought it was more Eastern European. Those old scenes look English." Well, Hopkin was British - Welsh, I believe - and probably no one worked too hard to be authentic.  But I agreed. "I always thought it was sort of klezmer. It sounds more Greek or Russian." I think someone told me it was a gypsy song years ago. Klezmer and Cigane were two styles that had enormous mutual influence.

So I listened more closely this time.  A clarinet, a cimbalom, a balalaika, something oompah sounding which contributes greatly to the air of forced gaiety - I kept expecting an accordion or derivative. 

I looked it up.  The song was originally Russian with somewhat similar lyrics, had been sung by a gypsy, was in a British movie in 1953 with new English lyrics, and had been arranged in 1968 by someone more familiar with jazz than pop. Hopkin was only 17 at the time.

DNA Numbers

We have new DNA updates that break down which parent our ethnic mixes come from.  Fun.  With us, there are not only the two of us but our Romanian sons and our nephew/son whose mother was 50% Jewish (now pretty clearly Russian Jewish according to the 1950 Census.) So even though my wife and I are descended from the coasts of That Giant Lake That Is The North Sea (plus some Irishmen), we gradually added in variety.  And JA adding in a wife from the Philippines makes us now outrageously varied, The numbers are clearly wrong in some spots, but perhaps a bit closer than the last updating.  Whether they will be able to trace another step back and differentiate my grandparents is unknown to me at present. Yet how can the numbers be that wrong? I have a 100% Swedish grandmother.  That's 25% for me.  So how do I get a number of 36%? Sure the East Anglians or the Scots might have brought in a little bit, but that's a big spread.  If you are looking at your own numbers and scratching your head, I have a little knowledge.

1. This isn't your whole genome.  This is a sampling of targeted spots which have had good value in identifying regions of origin in the past. It's likely to get better, and as whole genomes drop even lower in price - I think they are on the way to a hundred buck apiece at this point - the focus of these companies will increasingly be on interpreting this more complete data, not on finding good SNPs that can suss out whether the rumor your great grandfather was from West Yorkshire might be true or not.

2. There often isn't a lot of difference between nearby places that we think of as very separate, or necessarily a lot of similarity among places we think of as related. If ancestors were from "France" we think of them as likely to be the same, Normandy to Nice, and different from "England." But looking over 1000-3000 years ago, that is going to be deeply untrue. Where the boundaries now are and what languages people speak have interesting connections to the realities of the year 1, but thinking in those terms misleads more than enlightens. As an example, my wife's mother had both parents born in the Netherlands and was conceived there herself. (Family Story) But my wife's deeper DNA has consistently shown nothing from that area as a central focus. This new computation that identifies her mother's DNA more distinctly also shows none of it.  However, it shows all the areas around it: England, Germanic Europe, some Scandinavians and some Balts. Does this mean that her ancestors were "really" from Germany or East Anglia, not Holland?  That would be odd, because we have tracings on both sides back 400 years, all Holland. Somebody in that crew has got to be the result of persistence in the area. More likely, the identifying genes for East Anglia are also fairly common in Holland and Denmark and Saxony. Ancestry.com might call it an English identifier because it is more common there.  But there was plenty of it in Holland also. On the coasts, people moved about and bred with a wider choice of folks.  Up in the hills people stayed in their own valleys much more.

3. You don't actually inherit 50% from each parent.  That's only the average. Most people fall between 45-55%, but there are some down to 40% and even down to 35% vs 65% is not unheard of.  So you really might have gotten a different mix from your parents than your sister did. Maybe that helps you breath a sigh of relief. 

I am also on Living DNA and one can see on both sites the same combos.  Sweden is in the batch with the top half of Denmark, those are separate from Norway, which includes Iceland. Danelaw England shares a secondary circle with Normandy and Benelux. Western Lowland Scotland bleeds down into Northern Ireland (genetically true long before the Enclosure Act), Eastern Scotland into the continent and Scandinavia and the north of England, and The Highlands are a touch distinctive right the way back.

For those with any European Jewish ancestry, the belief has always been that there is a Generic Ashkenazi, with Galician and Litwak concentrations sprinkled in.  A Chinese researcher looking at one of the million-sample experiments detected that there are in fact only two - the Litvak (think Lithuania) is quite distinct, but the Galician (think Transylvania/Hungary/Slovakia) DNA  turns out to be indistinguishable from "all the rest."  It's now Litvak vs All Others.