Y'all look alike to me

Will Smith has claimed that an older couple mistook him for Barack Obama. I'm not kidding. I hope that he was. I suspect most Americans would agree that the two men look nothing like each other. Then again, the article makes a noble effort to find a photo pair that highlights their similarities:

Though an isolated incident, this kind of story always feeds the common perception that a substantial amount of white people think all black guys look the same--or, in this case, all black guys with ears that stick out.

The popular explanation is that people are more sensitive to differences within their own race. I'm not so sure. I think it has to do with exposure. The more you're around people of another race, the better you are at noticing the features that distinguish individuals.

Maurice Berger's book White Lies contains an essay by African American artist Renee Cox, who complains that white people often mistake her for Whoopi Goldberg, even though their only common feature is their braids. According to Cox, "I wouldn't be running down the street screaming...'Oh, that's Marilyn Monroe,' just because she's a blonde." Maybe not, but somebody recently wrote a letter to Parade Magazine claiming that Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler "look like twins." Parade showed the following picture to compare:

I don't know about you, but judging from this photo I don't think the two women look even remotely alike. I guess some people think all white girls look the same.

The fact is that many people are just plain rotten at telling people of any race apart. The average person, when asked to describe someone, will usually talk in the broadest, most general terms. "She's a blonde." "He's tall, dark, and handsome." "She's got a big nose." My father was once talking to a friend at an Orthodox Jewish wedding and asked him to describe someone he'd seen. The friend said, without a trace of irony, "He's the guy with the beard and the dark suit."

I, a white guy, have had plenty of experiences where other whites have confused me for someone else. Whites may make these kinds of mistakes more often with blacks than with other whites, but it's a matter of degree. We needn't jump to the conclusion that it's always due to race.

A virtue worth defending

Previously, I mentioned James Carville's notorious "Judas" remark. ("Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.") A commenter named Jimmy got on my case for dismissing the remark, and I would like to clarify my views. I first thought Carville's remark deserved only ridicule, but now I believe it's a good starting point for a larger discussion.

I've never heard anyone defend Carville's remark before. Other members of the Clinton team backed away from it, probably figuring that for a campaign that has presented its candidate as the experienced Washington insider and policy wonk, fire-and-brimstone imagery might give the wrong impression. Obama supporters were predictably unimpressed, and as for Republicans...well, they could just sit back and enjoy the spectacle from afar, content at the comparatively dignified fight happening on the Republican side, like Huckabee seeming to insinuate that Romney was a shade away from Devil worshipper.

Carville, however, wrote an entire op-ed defending his remark, and the column must set some kind of record for its utter absence of anything remotely resembling a logical argument. He went on and on about the importance of loyalty, but he didn't bother to define the concept, nor did he explain why calling the wife of your former boss the second-best candidate in the race is a prime example of disloyalty, much less why it merits comparison to a Biblical villain. His column could be summed up in two short sentences: "It's an old-politics thing. You wouldn't understand."

As it stands, Carville's definition of "loyalty" is as vague and slippery as Bush's definition of "the enemy." Just because you worked for a president doesn't chain you to him for life. And what's even more ridiculous is the idea you're also chained to his wife. That's what was so unsettling about Carville's logic: it reinforced many people's uneasy feeling that Bill Clinton was seeking a third term.

Judas's real crime wasn't disloyalty; it was aiding and abetting murder. I struggle to understand how that applies to the current election. "Murdering" a candidacy--which Richardson's endorsement was far too late to do--isn't a crime but a civic duty, one we practice every time we go to the polls. Of course, the term "murder" is absurd in this context. Hillary didn't have a "right" to the nomination the way people have a right to life. No candidate does. Being nominated isn't a right but a privilege. What is a right, and an absolute one at that, is the right of all citizens in a democracy to choose any candidate they please. The notion that anyone "owes" anyone a vote or an endorsement is fundamentally undemocratic.

I can predict one possible response. "Get real. Richardson wasn't honestly expressing his preferences. He was kissing up to the Obama team, perhaps anticipating a vp slot or some cabinet position." I would disagree, but I'm not interested in debating the point, which would be impossible to prove one way or the other. What's clear is that Carville implied that Richardson's preferences were irrelevant. Hillary could be the most dreadful candidate imaginable and Richardson would still be obligated to endorse her (or to endorse no one), according to Carville's way of looking at things.

Of course, if we accept that logic, how can we be sure even Carville likes the Clintons? Maybe he secretly despises them but feels obligated to continue supporting them. That's what happens from this brand of "loyalty": you can no longer tell who your real friends are. How ironic.

Loyalty has never been an absolute virtue that trumps all else. (Compare, for example, the loyalty of the Nazis who claimed to be just following orders, with the disloyalty of the Founders who waged war against the country that nurtured them.) The loyalty that deserves our admiration is the kind tempered by honesty and integrity. A friend who never criticizes you, who never says what he thinks of you, who just blindly follows you wherever you go, is no friend at all.

A lot of people who were once big supporters of Bill Clinton now believe that Obama is the best candidate to bring America forward. These people haven't necessarily changed their minds about the Clintons; they have simply moved on, as our nation must always do. Carville is entitled to disagree. We can respect his beliefs without calling him names--and that, not his twisted understanding of "loyalty," is a virtue worth defending.

Musical rorschach

One of the paradoxes of contemporary popular music is that lyrics are both necessary and irrelevant. I can't remember the last time an instrumental piece made the charts, and yet most listeners pay little attention to a song's lyrics. It's no wonder that when they do, they usually get it wrong. I'm not talking about "mondegreens" or misheard lyrics--a fun topic in itself. I'm talking about misunderstanding a song's message.

Somebody on a lyrics discussion page suggested that Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was about Freddie Mercury contracting AIDS. The person seemed unaware that the song came out in 1975, long before anyone knew what AIDS was. I suspect the person first heard the song through Wayne's World in 1992 and assumed it was brand-new. Another person suggested the song was about Mercury's bisexuality. That interpretation is harder to disprove, but it still doesn't fit.

Why assume this mock opera is autobiographical? The opening lines could hardly be clearer: "Mama, I just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead." The song is about a man who killed someone and is pleading for mercy. I guess some people are just so attuned to interpreting songs metaphorically they don't even consider the plain meaning.

One thing I've noticed on these lyrics sites is that for every song, there is at least one person who thinks it's about drugs. And why not? If people can interpret an innocent children's ditty like "Puff the Magic Dragon" as a pothead anthem, they can do it with any song. On the other hand, I found people denying that Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" is about smoking pot. (That's the one where he sings, "Everybody must get stoned." If you think he means death by stoning, you're on crack.)

Some interpretations are so obviously wrong you wonder if the people who came up with them were paying the slightest attention. One example that comes to mind concerns one of Nirvana's strangest songs, "Rape Me." According to Songfacts.com (where all the information is user-submitted), "Kurt Cobain wanted to make a strong statement in support of women and against violence toward them.... A guy rapes a girl. He ends up in jail and is raped there."

I've seen this explanation going around the Internet for years, even though it doesn't make the least bit of sense. While I'm not sure what the song is about, the lyrics make no mention of women or jails or really any context to the "rape" being described. Frankly, I don't think the song is even about rape. It sounds more like some kind of sadomasochistic desire, assuming it's to be taken literally at all.

Curiously enough, there is a song from around the same period that is clearly about a man who rapes a woman then ends up getting raped in prison. The song, Sublime's "Date Rape," uses straightforward storytelling, leaving no doubt what's happening. Maybe somebody mixed the two songs up.

I have heard people claim that Cobain himself gave the rape-as-poetic-justice explanation for his own song, but that could be an urban legend on par with the one about Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight." The latter has many variations, but the commonest is that Collins was singing about a brother who drowned. Rolling Stone has listed this belief as one of the top 25 urban legends of rock music, alongside "Paul is dead" and "Mama Cass died eating a ham sandwich." It's so widespread it even made its way into Eminem's song "Stan."

According to Collins, who had no brother who drowned, the song expressed his feelings after a divorce. The source of the urban legend is the line, "If you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand." The funny thing is, even if you ignore the rest of the lyrics, that line doesn't sound like it's talking about literal drowning. I'm amazed how many people accepted the false interpretation when the evidence against it was staring them in the face.

In some cases, the feel of the music can mislead. That may help explain why so many people incorrectly thought "Born in the USA" was a patriotic anthem rather than a bitter criticism of our country. The song has such an upbeat, energetic groove it's easy to gloss over what the verses are saying. But really, what did people think Springsteen meant with lines like "Sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the yellow man"? Did anyone seriously believe he was celebrating the slaughter of Asian people?

I often suspect that a large portion of the public is unable to understand irony. I was shocked when I learned that Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" was widely perceived as anti-Catholic. Sure, the song's narrator, a young man trying to seduce a nice Catholic girl, complains about her religion's restrictions. But I never assumed that Joel himself was endorsing that attitude. Part of the song's humor stems from the narrator's failure to veil his true intentions, which we realize are cruder than he wants to reveal. It is a song about sexual frustration, not a critique of Catholicism or any other religion.

Still, I can understand why listeners tend to assume that a song speaks in the songwriter's voice. That is the standard convention in popular music. Making a distinction between the songwriter and the narrator isn't always convincing.

Take the controversial 1992 record "Cop Killer." In a widely circulated essay, the sociologists Mark Hamm and Jeff Ferrell defended the song by asking why no one ever complained about the Bob Marley/Eric Clapton hit "I Shot the Sheriff." Well, I would think the answer should be obvious to anyone who knows the difference between swearing you acted in self-defense and boasting about committing premeditated murder. Nevertheless, defenders of "Cop Killer" argue that if you think the song is advocating what the narrator is boasting about, you simply don't get it. My response is, guilty as charged.

I've observed that many people who fall back on the "irony" defense don't understand what the word means. You can't even depend on Alanis Morrissette, who thinks irony is what happens when it rains on your wedding day. (As the comedian Ed Byrne put it, that would be ironic only if you were marrying a weatherman and he set the wedding date.) If a songwriter as gifted as Morrissette can't get the concept straight, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I'll tell you what's ironic. When people think a song is about drugs, it isn't, and when they don't think it's about drugs, it is. When people interpret a song metaphorically, it is literal, and when they interpret it literally, it is ironic, and when a song is titled "Ironic," it is anything but.

The pursuit of weird happiness

It seems like in every discussion about gay rights, opponents raise the specter of sex with youngsters, siblings, sheep, goats, dogs, corpses, and just about every other forbidden--and sometimes not-so-forbidden--union. As Justice Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion to Lawrence v. Texas, "State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise...called into question by today's decision." Imagine that: if we're soft on homosexuality, next thing you know they'll be allowing masturbation.

Commentators usually call this type of reasoning a slippery slope, but it is more of a reductio ad absurdum. The difference is subtle but important. With a slippery slope, you're opposing a policy on the grounds that it will lead to worse policies--regardless of logical connection. With reductio ad absurdum, you're attempting to expose the flaw in an argument by showing that its logic leads in unacceptable directions. The classic example is the cliché response to peer pressure: "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?"

People often use reductio ad absurdum to hide the weaknesses of their own arguments. It's pretty easy, with the help of a little self-delusion, to shut your mind to nuanced distinctions. Then all you have to do is tell your opponent, "If you hold X, you might as well hold Y." While he's busy explaining why he doesn't hold Y, he doesn't notice that you've shifted the discussion away from X.

Over at DovBear's blog, I recently had a debate with a fellow who calls himself Lawyer-Wearing-Yarmulka. He reiterated an argument he made two years ago in which he suggested that the philosophy of consent underlying gay rights could be used to justify sex between men and cows. His point was that we never demand consent from cows for anything else we do to them. If we can turn them into burgers without their consent, why shouldn't we be allowed to have sex with them?

LWY fails to understand that consent has a particular significance with regard to sex acts, which doesn't apply to other types of acts. By their nature, unwanted sexual experiences are highly traumatic. The notion that there's something inconsistent about opposing cruelty to animals while condoning slaughter of animals is an argument I would expect from a PETA member, not a Bible-believing Jew.

I'm astounded by LWY's suggestion that the law against raping a cow is entirely for the human's benefit, not the cow's. (It brings to mind Lord Macaulay's statement, "The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.") This certainly is not the common view in our legal system, where bestiality is typically classed under "animal abuse." While that may differ in some ways from the traditional perspective, that just goes to show that our society has over time shown an increasing concern for the treatment of animals, even if it is still far from perfect.

Notice how far this discussion has drifted from its original topic. In that whole time, LWY didn't offer even one justification for his position on gay rights. All he did was make an egregiously poor analogy, but because it concerned treatment of animals, an area of public policy that is controversial and by no means perfectly consistent, he was able to keep the discussion pointed away from himself.

I've repeatedly encountered this sort of evasive attitude from critics of gay rights. Instead of explaining their own point of view, they spend an inordinate amount of time trying to catch defenders in an inconsistency regarding other sexual deviances. What's especially surprising is that they tend to jump on the least relevant examples, where there is clearly a victim.

Ironically, LWY dismissed the importance of incest, a much better example to create the sort of reductio ad absurdum he was trying to establish. Let's say an adult brother and sister become lovers. Let's say they're not going to have kids: they use birth control, or one of them is infertile, or the woman is past menopause. Their affair would still be illegal in most places. Yet it is a purely victimless act between consenting adults, and so, by the standard argument in support of gay rights, it should be allowed.

What would happen if we did allow it? We might then have to make provisions to ensure that incestuous lovers never have children. Further, we would have to deal with the competing argument that they have a right to have kids, even ones who will likely have genetic defects. And I haven't even mentioned the marriage issue. This is all a big can of worms to open up in the name of consistency (according to Wikipedia, this form of incest is extremely rare), but it is something our society might have to face, if we are to remain committed to the principle that people have the right to pursue their own happiness as long as it doesn't hurt others.

Some gay rights activists, of course, would object to this example on the grounds that incest is "sick" and "disgusting." That's what critics of gay rights want the defenders to concede, that there are certain acts that just fall outside the bounds of civilized behavior, even if they seem to harm no one. But it's unlikely that this example will persuade anyone to abandon a belief in gay rights. This reductio ad absurdum at best reveals an inconsistency in the views of some advocates, but it doesn't come close to dismantling the philosophy behind gay rights.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and yours is wrong

In the season finale of Boston Legal, a show I've never seen before, a judge files a motion to have the town of Concord, Massachusetts secede from the Union. Alan Shore (James Spader) argues for the defense. Denny Crane (William Shatner) takes the opposing side. Their arguments get so heated (at one point Alan tells Denny to "just shut up") it threatens their friendship.

The case centers on questions we've all encountered over the past several years. Has Bush put our country on a road to tyranny unlike any previous president? Do we face a uniquely dangerous enemy that justifies Bush's actions? Is attacking the president wise in a time of war? Can dissent be patriotic?

Denny privately tells Alan why the case bothers him so much. His explanation is so heartfelt we realize their differences go beyond mere politics. Whereas Alan views the case as an intellectual exercise, for Denny it runs much deeper.

Denny: Something I thought you understood but you clearly don't understand: for people of my generation, being an American is personal.

Alan: I realize....

Denny: No, you don't. You don't. In your life, growing up, you just took for granted that America would always be. Why not? It's a superpower, strongest country in the world. In my lifetime, with Hitler trying to take over the world and having the means to do so, we went to bed scared at night that America would end. Imagine that feeling. The tragedy for me here is, you have no idea how deeply offended I am by the idea of a town wanting to secede...which means you don't know me, Alan. Not really. Our friendship has all the depth of a jigger of scotch.

I wondered why the show wanted to explore how two people of very different political persuasions navigate a friendship with each other. Some in the audience will relate to the situation, others will marvel that the feat is even possible. I'm sure there are Americans who go through life without ever having a close relationship with someone with a different political outlook. How frequent this is, I don't know. It sure doesn't describe me, a lifelong liberal from a conservative community, Orthodox Jews.

I think that political diversity among friends is healthy. It helps prevent people from dehumanizing the other side. Let's say your friend seems like the most decent and reasonable guy you know until he starts talking about politics, and suddenly he sounds to you like an ogre with asinine ideas. You may never come to respect his opinions, but at least you realize that a person you respect can hold them.

Political differences mean a lot to some people. Sean Hannity actually runs a dating site for conservatives. I can't judge that choice--after all, some people cannot understand my decision to date only Jews--but it still seems odd to me.

One couple who'd agree is James Carville and Mary Matalin, who not only belong to different parties but have worked for opposing candidates. They claim not to talk politics at home, though sometimes you wonder at his motivations. When Bill Richardson, a former member of the Clinton Administration, endorsed Obama instead of Hillary, Carville said, "Mr. Richardson's endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic." Carville subsequently wrote an entire op-ed piece defending this idiotic remark, but nowhere in the column did he explain what we all wanted to know: if Richardson is Judas, then who's Christ? Bill or Hillary? Or is that Billary? I must have missed the rule which states that political loyalty must be extended to the person's spouse--unless, of course, your name is Carville.

The last person you'd think of as a poster child for inter-political romance, Ann Coulter, has had a series of them. You begin to wonder about her statement that liberals have "joyless sex." Either she's no selfish hedonist, or we've been right in suspecting that her venomous persona is some kind of act, though if so, I have no idea what it means. Ask her suitors.

I have little patience for villain-style politics because I see most issues as complex. I didn't always feel that way. As a kid, I perceived my own views as nothing more than common sense. But I gradually discovered that views I considered indefensible turned out to be quite defensible once I listened to the other side. This happened to me over and over again. That's why I'm amazed at the number of people who maintain a black-and-white outlook into their old age.

Not that I'm a moderate. I opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, and I'm annoyed by politicians from both parties who started criticizing the war only after it became fashionable to do so. At the same time, I understand why good and reasonable people were led to support it. The decision to take out Saddam is not something I can just dismiss as evil, no matter how unjustified I believe it was.

On the other hand, I may be guilty of over-intellectualizing. I don't have loved ones stationed in Iraq. I haven't been personally screwed by Bush's policies. Thus, it's a bit too easy for me to think of the debates as an intellectual exercise rather than something serious that impacts lives.

Manimal

One time when I was a kid, a younger boy I was hanging out with insisted that "Insects aren't animals!" after I referred to them as such. Where did he get that idea? Well, according to some dictionaries, animal sometimes means "mammal." On rare occasion, this definition even shows up in professional writing. (For example, my 1993 edition of Compton's contains the following sentence: "The birds of Australia are even more diverse than the animals.") But this is an obscure definition that sounds pretty strange to me. Why would a child adopt it? I think it has something to do with Jewish education.

When teachers at Jewish schools discuss the laws of kashrus, they almost always say that a kosher animal must have split hooves and chew its cud. But this is only true of mammals; there's a whole different set of laws for birds, fish, and insects. If they mean mammal, why don't they say mammal? Partly it reflects the classic Bible translations, which were written before the word entered English. Hebrew itself didn't have any such word, and "animal" is a pretty accurate translation of chaya, which is derived from chai, meaning "life."

While mammal isn't a totally erudite word, the category has a fuzzy existence in many people's minds. When I once suggested feeding chicken to my parrot, I was asked, "Wouldn't that be cannibalism?" I replied, "Is it cannibalism when humans eat beef?" We tend to think of birds as basically one thing, but mammals as many different things, even though Aves and Mammalia are at the same taxonomic level: class. The presence of mammary glands is just not as memorable a trait as feathers. Substituting animal avoids this problem, because the word is taken to denote any creature that isn't a person, a bird, a fish, a vermin, or a plant. It's the default category that's left over after you've taken away the "special" categories.

This isn't just a semantic quibble; it can affect life decisions. At age eight, my brother decided he was a vegetarian, and he considers himself one to this day, even though he never gave up fish. He reasons that fish isn't meat, and according to Jewish law, he's right. The law against mixing milk and meat is derived from the Bible's injunction not to boil a baby goat in its mother's milk. The law originally applied only to mammals, since only mammals produce milk. But an old rabbinic decree extended the prohibition to birds. As a result, the Hebrew word for meat--basar--usually denotes the flesh of mammals and birds, but not fish. This dichotomy carries over into the English that Jewish kids learn, and my brother based his brand of vegetarianism on it.

My reading preferences

Around the time The Da Vinci Code came out, people kept telling me, "The writing isn't very good, but it's got a great plot!" That is not an effective selling point for someone like me. It's like saying, "The singer has a bad voice, and the instruments are out of tune, but the song is catchy as hell!" I'd rather read a book with vibrant prose and a boring plot than the other way around.

I don't claim my outlook is the only valid one. It's just a personal prejudice. You may feel differently. I have always been drawn to books with vivid sensory prose that pulls me right into the page. One of my favorite authors as a teenager was Ray Bradbury, whose prose sparkled with possibilities. Here is a quote from The Martian Chronicles:

A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked woman. It flourished on the air softly in vapors of cobalt light, whispering and sighing.

In this story, explorers from Earth enter a Martian colony, whose inhabitants proceed to lock them in a Martian asylum. Since Martians are telepathic, the hallucinations of the mad and deranged are visible to everyone. Therefore, the fact that the Earthlings have a spaceship doesn't convince the Martians that the men come from Earth. The Martians simply assume that the spaceship in front of them is a figment of the men's diseased minds. The problem, of course, comes when one of the Martians touches the ship and discovers that it is a bit more substantial than vapor.

The psychologist emerged from the ship after half an hour of prowling, tapping, listening, smelling, tasting.

"Now do you believe!" shouted the captain, as if he were deaf.

The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose. "This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I've ever encountered. I went through your 'rocket,' as you call it." He tapped the hull. "I hear it. Auditory fantasy." He drew a breath. "I smell it. Olfactory hallucination, induced by sensual telepathy." He kissed the ship. "I taste it. Labial fantasy!"

He shook the captain's hand. "May I congratulate you? You are a psychotic genius! You have done a most complete job! The task of projecting your psychotic image life into the mind of another via telepathy and keeping the hallucinations from becoming sensually weaker is almost impossible. Those people in the House usually concentrate on visuals or, at the most, visuals and auditory fantasies combined. You have balanced the whole conglomeration! Your insanity is beautifully complete!"

You'd think fiction this clever would work on screen. But so far I've never seen a movie do justice to any of Bradbury's works. Even when the ideas are there, there's something missing, and that something is the prose. Taking the prose out of Bradbury is like taking the dough out of bread.

I had a somewhat different experience recently as I read Elsewhere, a 1991 novel by Will Shetterly. It is part of a series by several authors about a place called Bordertown, existing between the human world and the land of Faerie. The extreme prose minimalism of this book surprised me, because I associate the urban fantasy genre with Charles De Lint, whose prose swirls and engulfs the reader.

Elsewhere is told in first person, for reasons that escape me. The narrator does little more than describe what happens, with only occasional entries into his inner thoughts. His attitudes, his feelings, his personality are seen mostly through his actions. A third-person approach would have worked better, but even then, I would have trouble picturing the events. The story concerns a teenage runaway who flees to Bordertown. After being thrown off the train, he is met by two half-elves, who are described as follows:

Two people in dusty black leather straddled dustier black bikes on a road maybe two hundred feet uphill. In the shadow of an ancient oak tree, they'd been invisible until one of them clapped. Their skin was almost as dark as their hair, which rose from their heads like raven's wings. Their ears came to perfect points.... A small difference in pitch and attitude told me that she was female, and the other, male. From where I stood, they looked identical.... They were both lean and strong and bigger than me.

It isn't until well into the story that the narrator hints that he's attracted to the female. I found this rather odd, considering her initial description. There was nothing that made me picture her as a beautiful woman, though she is finally described that way--on p. 183! As I read the book, I repeatedly felt I was getting a less-than-complete picture of what was happening.

Though I have a clear preference for lavish prose, I am able to appreciate other styles. I have no problem with Hemingway's famously terse prose. It's still good writing. It still gives a complete picture of what's happening. (It reminds me of Einstein's remark, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.") What I don't like is bad writing, whatever the style, and even if the work has other good qualities.

My Amazon reviews

I have just added a sidebar link to my Amazon book reviews. There are only nine so far. (I may in the future review other types of Amazon products.) I have already discussed some of these books here, though the reviews are never exact replicas of my blog entries. If you don't go to the sidebar, you can also click here:

Amazon reviews

My small but significant influence

As a casual Wikipedian, my most frustrating project has been maintaining the anti-Semitism section in the article on Roald Dahl, one of my favorite authors as a kid. Dahl made several widely publicized anti-Semitic remarks in the 1980s, such as "there's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.... even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason." For years he insisted he was only anti-Israel. Finally, in 1990, he admitted in an interview that he was also anti-Semitic. He didn't say this in a regretful way; he spoke as though his anti-Semitism was justified. It was a striking remark, since very few public figures openly admit to anti-Semitism.

I remember reading about this interview at the time. A few months later, he died. (I thought to myself, "Good riddance.") But curiously, I stopped hearing about this final admission of his. A biography I purchased years later talked extensively about his anti-Semitism but didn't mention the interview. When the Wikipedia article on him appeared, it featured several of his notorious quotes but made no mention of the one where he admitted to being an anti-Semite. I couldn't find the quote anywhere on the Internet.

Checking the newspaper databases at my university, I found a letter to the editor by Abraham Foxman in The New York Times quoting him as having told the British newspaper The Independent, "I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic." I inserted this citation into the article, though it was questioned by some because it was an out-of-context quote from an activist trying to discredit him.

Some time later, I obtained the full text of the interview from LexisNexis. Here is the entire quote: "I'm certainly anti-Israeli and I've become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism." That's a tad more ambiguous than the Foxman version. But I put it into the article.

Every now and then, anonymous users try to delete the information in the anti-Semitism section. Many try altering the title to "Criticisms of Israel," ignoring the fact that his attacks were specifically directed at Jews, not Israel. It seems that anytime someone gets accused of anti-Semitism, people swoop down and call it criticism of Israel, whatever the facts suggest.

But I have managed to keep the section intact, and I am gratified to see how it has influenced others. Until I dug up the Independent interview, that quote was nowhere to be found on the Internet. Now it is mentioned on various websites, all because of yours truly. It's funny the effect you can have on the world from just your computer.

Lions and tigers and bears

A book I was reading a while back referred offhandedly to Frank Baum's conception of Oz as a dream. The writer must not have read Baum's book, where Dorothy's journey to Oz is never suggested to be a dream. That idea came from the 1939 film. It's striking that so many people remember The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, one of the most beloved stories of the twentieth century, through the famously interpretive screen adaptation.

Ironically, Baum disliked the "it was all a dream" convention in literature. (He must have turned in his grave in 1939.) I agree with him. It's a much overused device that has the smell of copout. I can understand its use in Alice in Wonderland, which deals with absurdity. But Oz, beyond being magical and impossible, is hardly absurd. Dorothy's adventures seem far too coherent to plausibly represent a dream. Therefore, why did the 1939 film work so well?

My theory is that it worked by largely ignoring the dream motif. Sure, it linked several characters in Oz to people Dorothy knew back in Kansas, none of them from the book. But once the movie reached Oz, it portrayed the book's events more or less faithfully.

Had the movie been made today, I don't think they'd have gotten it right. Modern movies--from the 1970s onward--are much more naturalistic than old ones. It's a prime reason for the decline of musicals. In recent musicals like Dreamgirls, there's a certain awkward, pretentious quality that didn't exist back in the 1930s, when audiences found nothing strange about seeing characters burst into song. That kind of casual surrealism doesn't jibe with the style of modern movies, which aim to evoke a feeling of reality. Acting is more understated, scenes more slow-paced. In this climate, movies about dreams try to approximate what dreams actually feel like, which is to say, fleeting and bizarre. This approach limits the possibilities in some ways while broadening them in others.

Many sitcoms have featured at least one episode in which a character is dreaming. The classic example is the "Twilo" episode of Dick Van Dyke, where Rob dreams of going to work and discovering that all his friends have turned into pod people, in a hilarious sendup of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

But what works in a twenty-minute sitcom doesn't necessarily work in a feature-length film. The conceit of having a story take place almost entirely in a character's head has inspired some dreadful films. Two that come to mind are Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984) and Delirious (1991). The first is more or less an extended music video by Paul McCartney. The second is a spoof in which John Candy plays a soap writer who dreams he finds himself trapped inside a real-life version of his own show. In both films, the story becomes increasingly jumbled as it progresses, and the protagonist wakes up before he completes his mission. That's just what dreams are like, but what fun is there in watching a movie with those qualities?

The problem with using dreams as a basis for comedy is that comedy requires rules, and dreams have no rules. You can get a quick laugh out of the absurdity of a dream, but dwell too long on the conceit and it starts to become more strange than funny.

Nowadays, the more ambitious films about dreams tend to embrace the weird factor. Three that come to mind are the Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes (remade in the U.S. as Vanilla Sky), the David Lynch drama Mulholland Drive, and Richard Linklater's Waking Life. In all these films, we're led to suspect that a significant amount of what we see is a character's dream, but the extent of it is left tantalizingly ambiguous. These films greatly exploit the old philosophical conundrum that it's impossible to know for sure at any moment in our lives whether we're dreaming or not.

Exploring that kind of dilemma would have tanked The Wizard of Oz. Unlike modern movies on dreams, it retained a straightforward approach to the storytelling. Because it wasn't bound by the belief that a movie about dreaming must display dreamlike qualities, it didn't try to alter the story to fit a preconceived idea of what dreams are like. This kept the essence of the story intact even as the dream motif gave the story an added psychological dimension, a balancing act that today's movies have forgotten how to achieve.

Language and its needless but inevitable watchdogs

Love of language, like love of country, is most often expressed by bashing those perceived not to have enough of it. You practically can't go anywhere without meeting someone who thinks the language is "going to the dogs" because people no longer write or speak it correctly. The fact that critics have been voicing this complaint for hundreds of years, yet the language hasn't withered away into dust, does nothing to quell their belief that something is seriously wrong today.

There's no way to reason with these critics, who will probably always be with us. So I just leave well enough alone. But I take satisfaction in being among the few who know the truth. Here is my favorite quote from Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English, a book by linguist John McWhorter:

"What we must realize...is that during these changes, because renewal always complements erosion, all languages are eternally self-sustaining, just as while our present mountains are slowly eroding, new ones are gradually being thrown up by the movement of geological plates. Thus at any given time, a language is coherent and complex, suitable for the expression of all human needs, thoughts, and emotions. Just as linguists have encountered no languages that do not change, they have also not encountered any languages whose changes compromised their basic coherency and complexity. We have encountered no society hampered by a dialect that was slowly simply wearing out like an old car. Anthropologists report no society in which communication is impossible in the dark because the local dialect has become so mush-mouthed and senseless that it can only be spoken with help from hand gestures. In other words, there is no such thing as a language 'going to the dogs'--never in the history of the world has there existed a language that has reached, or even gotten anywhere near, said dogs." (pp. 17-18)

Color is in the eye of the beholder

Last year, The New York Times ran an article on the debate over Columbus's ethnic origins. It featured a chart (which doesn't appear in the Internet version of the article) listing pros and cons to each hypothesis. When it reached the hypothesis that Columbus was Jewish, it mentioned the following as a con: "Most Jews in Southern Europe at the time were Sephardic Jews of North African descent, but preliminary analysis of Columbus's DNA suggests he was Caucasian."

This ill-informed remark stopped me short. I don't know what's more ridiculous, the assumption that Sephardic Jews in medieval Spain were of "North African descent," or the implication that this made them non-Caucasian.

I'm not trying to pick on the article, which was just trying to be balanced. And I have no stake in the question of Columbus's origins. I mention this quote only because it raises some interesting points about how the public perceives Jewish ethnicity.

First, there's the confusion over the meaning of Sephardic, a term that comes from the Hebrew word for Spain, Sefarad. In the strictest sense it refers to medieval Spanish Jews and their descendants. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, they went everywhere--as far west as Holland, as far east as India, even to the New World. But the bulk of them settled in the Middle East, and consequently, Sephardic has become a general term for Middle Eastern Jews.

Actually, the common convention is to apply the term to all non-Ashkenazic Jews, whatever their origin. That includes Dutch Jews, Italian Jews, Greek Jews, Turkish and Moroccan and Yemenite Jews. I grew up knowing only this binary way of classifying Jews, which still permeates the media. But careful writers use the term Mizrahi or "Oriental" to describe Middle Eastern Jews who don't have a family history in Spain.

How does race factor into the discussion? Mizrahi Jews even more than Sephardim tend to look relatively dark compared to the common Western image of the Jew. The convention of calling them Sephardi, coupled with the association of dark skin with Africa, is probably what led the article to think that medieval Spanish Jews were of "North African descent."

The fact is that many Jews physically resemble their non-Jewish countrymen. Russian Jews often look like ethnic Russians, and Iranian Jews often look like ethnic Iranians. This fact may seem surprising when you consider the religious and political barriers to mixing with the native population. Not only does Judaism discourage conversion and prohibit intermarriage, the countries themselves often enacted laws against those things, and in many places Jews lived separately from Gentiles for centuries.

But conversion and intermarriage did occur, occasionally on a large scale. Some scholars have maintained that modern-day Jews are more closely related to their non-Jewish neighbors than to Jews in other parts of the world. This hypothesis, which has been used to support as well as refute anti-Semitic beliefs, looks increasingly doubtful in light of genetic research over the past few decades. The research suggests a close kinship among Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim, despite their diversity in appearance. Only a few groups that don't fit any standard classification--the black Jews of Ethiopia, the Bene Israel of India, the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng--do seem racially distinct from the rest of world Jewry, and their origins remain a source of debate.

If Jews of different colors are fundamentally related, can they be called Caucasian? Well, it depends how you define the term. Its meaning has shifted over time, as has "white." Originally it encompassed not only Europeans but also the darker skinned inhabitants of Mediterranean lands. But in early twentieth century America, Jews, Arabs, and many European ethnicities were classed as non-white or non-Caucasian. Nowadays, Ashkenazic Jews are usually considered white or Caucasian, as are most indigenous Europeans, but the perception remains that Arabs and other Middle Eastern groups are people of color. This dichotomy has contributed to the curious notion that Ashkenazim belong to a different race than Sephardim.

But that just goes to show that the boundaries of whiteness are more political than biological. I saw a telling example in Nelson Mandela's criticism of U.S. intervention in Iraq: "Israel has weapons of mass destruction.... Why should there be one standard for [Iraq], especially because it is black, and another one for another country, Israel, that is white?"

The idea that Israel is a "white" country while Iraq is a "black" country is laughable. If you define Iraqi Arabs as black, then how can you call Israel, whose Jewish population is about half Sephardi/Mizrahi, a white country? Anyone who's lived in Israel can tell you that it is sometimes impossible to tell the Jewish and Arab residents apart. That's because Jews and Arabs are ethnically closely related. But for political reasons, one group is seen as white and the other as non-white.

And when it comes to political classification, it seems Jews can never win. They came to be regarded as part of the white majority around the same time that being a minority started being fashionable. (The term minority itself is far more likely to be applied to blacks and Asians than to Jews, even though in a worldwide sense Jews fit the definition far better, and even within the United States are far fewer in number than blacks.) It is in situations like this that Jews remind me of the kid who isn't accepted by either the in-crowd or the nerds.

Lucasbert, evil SW director*

There are Star Wars fans who hate the prequel trilogy far more than I do, but few seem to question why it was made in the first place. Years before The Phantom Menace, I wondered why Lucas wanted to make prequels instead of sequels. I would have preferred to see the continued adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han.

Would that have resulted in better films? It's hard to say. The series was already showing signs of wear and tear by Return of the Jedi. But at least we would have been in the company of characters we had come to know and love. The prequel trilogy failed to create any new, engaging characters, and even familiar characters like Yoda and Obi-Wan seemed curiously flat.

There's no obvious reason why Lucas needed to make movies about the events before A New Hope. Put differently, there's a good reason why he began the series at the point he did: that's when all the interesting stuff starts to happen. If the prequels fail to come alive, it's because he conceived them more as history than narrative.

That's why you can practically hear the crankings of the plot. Padme and Anakin must fall in love, whether or not they have chemistry. Anakin must turn bad, whether or not his transition will be believable. The story cannot progress on its own terms; it is weighted down by inevitability.

I don't mean to imply the films could never have worked. There simply needed to be more effort to give the events and characters the spark of life. This challenge, however, goes a long way in explaining why prequels are so rare. Lucas himself helped popularize the term as well as the concept. Temple of Doom takes place a year before Raiders, but its prequel status is a technicality. There's no story arc, not even a single reference in one film to events from the other.

The Star Wars prequels are better described by an older term, coming from comic books: the origin story. They don't merely depict events from before the first trilogy. They aim to explain how the situation from the first trilogy came to be.

That required skills that I don't believe Lucas ever possessed. Vader was a convincing character as long as Lucas kept him mysterious. Many of the Star Wars novels, written by authors with more depth than Lucas, portray Vader as morally ambiguous. But on the evidence of the films, he seems almost purely evil, an unrepentant mass murderer. Despite Luke's repeated claim that "there is good in him," what turns Vader against the emperor is simply love for his son--hardly a sign of true goodness.

The first trilogy gives no information on how Vader turned evil. It doesn't need to. The Star Wars films have always worked best when they've stayed at a basic, archetypal level. Explaining complex moral transformations is not their strong suit.

Film critic Stephen Hunter disagrees. In his review of Revenge of the Sith, he writes that Lucas successfully "answers The Question," which was previously addressed by "Melville and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare," who "could never agree on the answer." That question is, "What makes man evil?" According to Hunter, the depiction of Anakin's fall from grace "explains how you could fly a plane full of mothers and babies into a skyscraper and think you were going on a date with 72 virgins, or how you could goose-step your way toward conquest and genocide while singing schmaltzy oompah music."

I agree with Hunter that the film attempts to answer this age-old question, but I cannot imagine what makes him think it succeeds. Beyond its solid understanding of the seductive qualities of fascism, the film provides little insight into the nature of evil.

In a previous post, I pointed out that real-life killers usually perceive themselves as the good guys, whereas fictional villains tend to know they're evil. (This tendency was satirized in the Star Wars parody Spaceballs when Dark Helmet says, "Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.") The Sith don't so much think of themselves as evil as think that darkness is good--sort of like Satanists.

That's about the extent of Lucas's insight into the subject. So it's no wonder that Anakin's turn to the Dark Side proceeds as if a light switch gets flicked off. One moment he's a conflicted individual unsure where his loyalties lie; the next he's slaughtering children without breaking a sweat. Not exactly the most profound explanation for Al Qaeda or the Nazis.

We shouldn't be too surprised. Back in the early '70s when Lucas began work on his Buck Rogers-inspired screenplay, I doubt he had any idea he'd one day have to deal with these issues. He was seduced by the power of his unforeseen success.

^{*Dilbert reference. See "Catbert, evil HR director."}

In defense of celebrating black identity

Cross-posted at DovBear's blog

In 1994, National Review editor David Klinghoffer wrote a refreshingly candid piece about Orthodox Jewish racism. Klinghoffer is a baal teshuva¹ who was shocked by the casual racism he encountered in the frum² world. I mention his article now because it hits upon some of the themes that Obama covered in his race speech. While not condoning bigotry in any form, Klinghoffer argued that some of the bigotry coming from Jews should be understood in the context of their experiences, a consideration he did not extend to American Jews who denigrate blacks.

I began to wonder what Klinghoffer, as a conservative, is saying about Obama now. It turns out that he has defended Obama, sort of, but from a perspective I find highly problematic. In a recent article, he argues, "The Bible makes it clear...that God has chosen some races to teach important lessons to the rest of the world.... [W]hatever unique contribution Africans have to give to the world, it is not racist to suggest that a black church, even a black theology, could be a vehicle for making that contribution."

I think Klinghoffer isn't exercising anywhere near as much caution as he should in using the term "race." The Torah talks about different peoples. The ancient concept of a people is not equivalent to the modern concept of a race. What we call race arose largely as a means of establishing differences where there needn't be.

Klinghoffer was addressing the charge that a "black church" should be considered racist in the same sense that most of us would consider a "white church" to be. But his answer was inadequate. The main purpose of black pride is to raise up a group that has been pushed down.

Whatever the white power movement may insist, whites do not fall into that category. Individual white groups might; there's nothing wrong with ethnically Irish or Italian or Polish people having their own organizations to express pride in their heritage. But an organization for white people is a different matter. Whiteness is an elusive concept that tends to be defined as whatever is left over after you've excluded "other" groups. In practice, it usually ends up excluding many Caucasians.

Some people try to apply the same argument to blacks. Why should we recognize black or African identity at all? Why not talk instead about ethnic Nigerians and Kenyans and Ugandans? In a perfect world, this argument might hold water. But blacks were brought to this country by force and stripped of their previous ethnic identity. No matter where they came from in Africa, they ended up as one group, today known as African American.

You might ask why Obama, who is not descended from slaves, should be considered a part of this group. It's a good question. I will answer it with an anecdote from several years ago. Tiger Woods insisted he was not black but "Cablinasian," an acronym he coined to highlight the many races in his ancestry. Gregory Kane, a black conservative who writes for The Baltimore Sun, retorted that Woods should be given "the cab test": "Stand him on a street corner in any large American city and have him hail a cab. If he gets one, he's Cablinasian. If he doesn't, he's definitely black" (Apr. 27, 1997, pg. 1B).

For the vast majority of people, even those of mixed ancestry, racial identity is not a matter of choice. It is something thrust upon them. Let's get real: when most Americans look at Obama, they see a black man. The notion that he chose to call himself black to advance his career is preposterous.

Whatever you may think of hip hop music or contemporary inner-city culture, African Americans as a group have made significant positive contributions to America. They are as much a legitimate cultural group as Jews, Italians, Irish, and all the rest that make up this great country. Group identity of any kind has a danger of turning into chauvinism, and often does. But that's the price we pay for having a heterogeneous society. The solution is that people should learn to respect differences, not that they should stop having differences.

Glossary
¹returner to the faith
²religious

Hitchens is not great

I have never understood the adulation accorded to British pundit Christopher Hitchens. An ex-leftist who turned somewhat neo-con in his later years, he has acquired begrudging respect from people across the political spectrum, who see him as a sharp-thinking curmudgeon. He has always struck me as an obnoxious creep a bit too preoccupied with tearing others down and trying to prove his smug superiority to the masses.

But there are jerks, and then there are dishonest jerks. Until last week, I would not have placed him in the latter category. (But then, I'm far from a regular reader of his writings.) That was when he reached for one of the oldest and crudest tricks in the hatchet-man grab-bag, where you select a portion of a quote to make a person appear to be saying the opposite of what they're really saying.

In this essay ("Blind Faith"), he comments on Obama's recent "race speech." The essay is not a partisan attack on Obama. It is a rambling hate-fest against organized religion, in which he takes shots at both parties. But one paragraph caught my attention:

Look at [Obama's] accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been--and were--applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement.... But is it "inflammatory" to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it "controversial." It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood.

Ouch. To think that all this time we took Obama's speech to be condemning the views of his former pastor. How gullible we were to think so, until Hitchens came along and showed how Obama's word choice suggested nothing of the kind. All Obama did was use adjectives that could just as well apply to Martin Luther King! My God! How stupid could we have been to have fallen for this?!

But then I decided to check Hitchens' quotes against a transcript of Obama's speech. I did not find any mention of the word inflammatory. All I found was one incendiary and two controversials, the second of which appears in the following statement:

"But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial.... Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country...." (emphasis added).

The speech goes on to condemn Wright's most notorious remarks in quite clear, unequivocal language.

Did Hitchens actually hear or read the speech, as opposed to merely skimming it over? Or is he just a plain old liar? The most charitable judgment I can muster is that he was quoting from a highly selective memory.

My only remaining question is how he could get away with such a flagrant and obvious distortion of the most talked about speech in the campaign so far. Even hatchet-men usually don't commit their nefarious acts in broad daylight. I guess there are just a lot of things you can get away with when you're an already esteemed commentator whose current piece goes unexamined under a mountain of punditry.

Update (4/8/2007): Someone suggested to me that Hitchens was directing his criticism not at Obama himself but at the "phalanx of reporters" and "men of the cloth" who fawned over the speech. Therefore, he was not distorting Obama's words, but commenting on a general trend.

Nice try, but no cigar. His criticism would make no sense if applied to reporters, who would never be expected to call anyone "wicked" or "stupid" in a news report. As a reporter himself, I'm sure Hitchens understands that. And if he wasn't directing his criticism at reporters, there's no way you can possibly read his paragraph as limiting the criticism to "men of the cloth."

The only way his paragraph can make the slightest sense is if it's criticizing Obama for using ambiguous language, and criticizing reporters and clergymen for overlooking this flaw.

Limited interpretations

I occasionally listen to a college radio station in my area. Whenever I turn to it, I expect to hear songs I've never heard before. It plays music from different genres and eras, with an emphasis on indie or obscure or up-and-coming artists--things that fall below the radar of the mainstream.

One day, I heard on this station an odd song with striking, evocative lyrics that I assumed were directed at President Bush. The genre was hard to place: it sounded like folk, but had a certain jazzy quality. Featuring a synth riff and a sort of pop-gospel chorus, it was sung by a man with a very low, raspy voice that might have become annoying if not for the infectiously catchy melody and complex chord arrangement.

I learned that the song was Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," and that it was recorded in 1988, kind of early to be talking about Dubya. What made me think it was an anti-Bush anthem? Well, read the first two verses:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

If this song were part of the current Bush-bashing bandwagon, it would probably be the best thing along those lines ever written. Most such music today just sounds cranky and self-righteous. (Green Day is the worst offender in that area.) This is surprising when you consider the many great protest songs from the Vietnam era. Those were better in part because their grievances had less to do with a specific U.S. president, in part because the threat of censorship encouraged more subtlety.

I'm not the only person to have interpreted Cohen's song this way. The only Youtube video currently playing the studio version consists of slides attacking the Bush Administration. Whether Cohen would approve of his song being used for that purpose, I have no idea.

If the song isn't about Bush, what is it about? Commenters on Youtube said it was about the AIDS virus. While I do agree that the song alludes to AIDS (especially in the fifth verse), I don't think that's the whole picture. The pivotal line "Everybody knows the war is over / Everybody knows the good guys lost" would seem to encompass more than the battle against a disease. At least I like to think so. Listen for yourself if you want. (It is five-and-a-half minutes long.)



A popular cover version by alternative rock band Concrete Blonde, done for the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume (which I have not seen), provides a somewhat different take on the music and lyrics. I go back and forth on whether I prefer this version. On the one hand, the female lead, Johnette Napolitano, is a far more polished and expressive singer than Cohen (who sounds like he has laryngitis, and not in a charming Louis Armstrong sort of way). On the other hand, the cover omits two of the six verses and rearranges the remaining ones so that it ends with the one about infidelity, which almost makes the song sound like a failed-relationship ballad. (Here is the official video, which is four-and-a-half minutes long.)



I don't think the song can be reduced to one topic. It's more of a general meditation on the endless cycle of suffering and betrayal in the world. (I suspect it was partly inspired by the old black spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.") In limiting its scope to war or infidelity or AIDS, listeners overlook the poetry. They ought to sit back and lose themselves in the words and imagery before intellectualizing the experience.

The Three Jews

What's the difference between a schlemiel, a schlimazel, and a nebbish? The schlemiel spills the soup down the schlimazel's neck, and the nebbish has to clean up the mess.

That's my personal variation on Leo Rosten's version of an old Yiddish joke. A few years ago as I was watching The Three Stooges, it occurred to me that this joke provides a perfect description of Curly, Moe, and Larry.

Curly is the schlemiel, the clumsy oaf who always causes problems. Moe is the schlimazel, the guy who's always at the receiving end of bad luck. And Larry is the nebbish, the meek middleman who gets punished for Curly's mistakes.

The schlemiel/schlimazel distinction is played out throughout the series, as Curly is chronically stupid but not necessarily unlucky, while Moe is chronically unlucky but not quite as stupid as Curly. There is even an episode (I can't remember the title) in which Curly is blessed with good luck.

Would their fitting into classic Yiddish character types by any chance have something to do with the fact that the actors were Jewish? When I watched the films as a kid, at first I didn't know they were Jewish. And even when I found out, the fact didn't resonate with me. I didn't think of the jokes as "Jewish humor" per se. I perceived them as nothing more than slapstick by comedians who happened to be Jewish, and all that mattered to me was that they made me laugh.

Seeing the films as an adult, I was a little surprised that I still found them funny. But I began to notice things I hadn't noticed before, notably the Jewishness of the humor.

For starters, they use many Yiddish words, which may not have been known to general audiences at the time. It was like their personal inside jokes. I suspect that Larry grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household. When he disguises himself as a Chinese person, he simply speaks Yiddish in a stereotypical Chinese accent. And when he wants to be Indian, he dons a turban and...you guessed it, speaks Yiddish with an Indian accent.

There are also some general Jewish jokes, as when the wind blows in a scrap of paper containing an advertisement for "O'Brien's Kosher Restaurant."

In 1940, they did an episode called You Nazty Spy! parodying Hitler and the Nazis several months before Charlie Chaplin did something similar in The Great Dictator. These films were significant, for they were the first time Hollywood took a stand against the Nazis, in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. And it's interesting to compare the perspectives of Jews and non-Jews, since Chaplin later regretted having made The Great Dictator, but the Stooges always considered You Nazty Spy! their best film.

They liked it so much they eventually made a sequel, I'll Never Heil Again. This one actually referenced The Great Dictator, parodying the scene where Chaplin dances with a balloon globe. In the Stooges' version, several world leaders are fighting over a beach ball globe, and suddenly it looks like they're playing football.

More is less

Is it just me, or does the special effects in movies from thirty years ago often look more convincing than in films today? The technology has progressed by leaps and bounds. The question is how efficiently it's being used.

One of the issues is CGI. No matter how sophisticated it gets, it doesn't look as real as physical models. You can see the difference by comparing Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi to the CGI Jabba in Phantom Menace.

The catch is that CGI seems to get better with each passing year. Will it ever achieve photo-realism? The tentacled Captain Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean comes close. Yet just this year, the third Pirates movie curiously lost a Visual Effects Oscar to The Golden Compass, which created a CGI bear that, to my eyes, looked like it came right out of a Pixar cartoon.

Another issue is changing actor's heights. By manipulating the angle of the camera, you can make someone look substantially taller than someone else, even if the two aren't far apart in height. It's an old trick: I remember seeing it in the Faerie Tale Theatre version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" when I was a kid. It wasn't convincing back then, and it still isn't today.

But today they seem to do it a lot more. In the past, when they wanted a giant, they got a giant: Lock Martin as Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca in Star Wars, Andre the Giant as Fezzik in The Princess Bride. Nowadays they get an actor of relatively normal size and try to make him seem much taller.

Hence the Harry Potter films have 6'1" Robbie Coltrane play seven-foot Hagrid. Sometimes they use the old camera-angle trick, as in the scene where Hagrid enters the bar. Sometimes they play around with the props, as when Hagrid has to duck through a doorway (which may simply not be that high). Sometimes they have him loom above the camera as if to suggest that the other characters are craning their necks upwards to see his face. But most of the time they just avoid shots of Coltrane standing next to the other actors, especially the adults. To fully appreciate how unconvincing this is, you need only look back at The Princess Bride, which featured many ordinary shots of Andre the Giant towering above Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin, both reasonably tall men.

Lord of the Rings went in the other direction, casting ordinary-sized men as hobbits. Why they felt the need to do so is curious, since there are many talented dwarves in Hollywood. But one way or another, they did it, and while they used more sophisticated techniques than in Harry Potter, in no way does it look real.

The films seem to assume that we can't estimate an actor's height unless we already know the height of someone standing next to him. Therefore, they use no special effects at all when the hobbits are seen only with each other, which is most of the time. In those shots, the hobbits have normal, proportionate bodies like any average adult male in our world. But when allegedly tall characters like Gandalf or Aragorn appear, suddenly children or dwarves are used as body doubles for the hobbits, and I suspected the filmmakers of occasionally resorting to the technique popularized in Forrest Gump, where an actor gets superimposed over separate footage.

What past filmmakers had that the current filmmakers don't can be summed up in one word: restraint.

Steven Spielberg famously agreed to direct Jaws only on the condition that he wouldn't show the shark at all in the first hour. Even by the second hour, we only see fleeting glimpses of the shark at first, and it isn't until the climax that we get a really good shot of the thing. The mechanical shark they created was spectacular, but Spielberg took his time in getting to it.

Similarly, the original Alien features very few shots of the creature. Even in the famous scene where the alien eats its way out of John Hurt's body, we see it for no more than a split second. If we had seen it any longer, we might have started to notice it was an effect.

Undoubtedly, the effects wizards today can make better-looking sharks and aliens than they could thirty years ago. But the filmmakers have lost a sense of when to stop, to leave things to the audience's imagination. They shoot for too much and end up with too little.

Entertainment about entertainment

Vivian Vande Velde's science fiction novels User Unfriendly and Heir Apparent brought back memories of the computer adventure games I used to play as a kid. I enjoyed even pure text adventures better than arcade-style action games, because of the unique mixture of creativity and logic required to win them. I will briefly discuss these games before reviewing Vande Velde's two books.

When I first began playing Infocom's text adventures at age nine, I felt hopeless without the clue books that came with the software. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, Mr. Prosser would have his bulldozer in front of my house, and no matter what I typed into the command prompt, he would demolish the house. So I consulted the clue book, which told me the solution: "Lie down in front of the bulldozer." It makes sense, if you think about it. Prosser won't kill to get his job done. But I simply didn't consider that possibility--partly because I lacked experience or cleverness, partly because I had never read the Douglas Adams novel on which the game was based.

Beyond Infocom, most text adventures did not come with clue books. But they helped prepare me for games like The Legend of Zelda that are part arcade-style action, part strategic adventure. With or without graphics, computer adventures all have the same basic setup. They can have any storyline, though they are traditionally magic tales featuring kings and castles and wizards and dragons. You always make your way through some kind of complex setting and collect various objects in your path. Figuring out the solutions to problems usually involves trial and error. Find a piece of cotton? Try throwing it, or eating it, or sticking it in your ear.

How well do science fiction books fare in portraying these sorts of games? A few weeks ago, I discussed Killobyte, Piers Anthony's 1993 novel about characters who become trapped in a role-playing VR game. I decided to dig up a particular young adult book with a similar plot, Vivian Vande Velde's User Unfriendly, which I first read in 1992. I remembered very little about it other than that I enjoyed it.

The gaming machine in this novel actually places you into REM sleep and hooks directly to your brain to make you think you're in the virtual setting. The session lasts no longer than an hour, but feels like five days. You can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste your surroundings. You're able to experience pain, and you must eat and sleep in the course of your journey. You are provided with new memories and skills, corresponding to the character you occupy.

That almost makes the technology in Killobyte sound primitive by comparison. It brings to mind Orson Scott Card's warning to novice sci-fi writers about presenting an extraordinary invention without considering other uses it might have. If one hour can be made to seem like five days, then (doing the math) three days can be made to seem like an entire year. Such a device could in effect greatly prolong a person's life--or at least provide a little extra time for reflection.

As for the implanted memories, if a computer can do that, what need is there for school (much less Jeopardy)? Just hook your brain to a machine, which will feed you all the information you need to know.

Needless to say, the book does not deal with any of those possibilities.

The narrator is Arvin, an eighth-grader who enters the game along with several of his friends. One of his challenges is figuring out which of his friends appear as which characters. His mom is also playing, much to his chagrin. I may have missed it, but I didn't catch what she thought of the fact that they're using a pirated version of the software.

Vande Velde's greatest strength is her attention to detail. She has plotted out the game in great depth. She structures the book in numerous short chapters that end in cliffhangers, as the characters encounter wizards, elves, trolls, orcs, goblins, and dragons, not to mention enchanted boots, sand hands, and giant rat zombies. The book kept me reading, with its fun blend of excitement and humor. (One example of the latter involves a dwarf who feels compelled to recite his entire genealogy any time someone asks his name.)

But the book compares poorly with Killobyte, which spent many pages in the real world, fleshing out its two main characters. User Unfriendly begins in the game itself and stays there until the very last few pages, without any flashbacks along the way. There are more than a half-dozen characters, all vaguely drawn. Arvin comes off as a typical teenager, embarrassed in front of his mom, eager to prove himself before his peers.

In Killobyte, the characters weren't just trying to win the game but were literally fighting for their lives. The stakes are lower in User Unfriendly. Because the game is pirated, some bugs and glitches appear, and the kids cannot exit the game prematurely. But the book bases a great deal of its plot around our vicarious experience of the game rather than anything more urgent.

The game itself is lacking in the qualities of computer adventures I mentioned before. Most of the time, the kids seem to be winging it, and their successes feel arbitrary. Again, Killobyte does a better job on this front, which is doubly impressive since Piers Anthony admits to having very little gaming experience.

In 2002, Vande Velde published Heir Apparent, about another game from the same company. It is narrated by a fourteen-year old girl named Giannine, who was a relatively minor character in the first book. It makes no mention of the events in User Unfriendly, and it may take place earlier. The front, inside, and back cover do not mention the older book at all.

Vande Velde writes on her website that she does not consider Heir Apparent a sequel, just a story taking place in the same universe. I have another theory. I think she was attempting to do User Unfriendly over again, but better. If so, she has succeeded. It improves on User Unfriendly in all the areas I mentioned.

For the first time, we get to see the world these kids occupy when they remove their VR helmets. In the first chapter, we encounter a robotic bus driver and a tiny, genetically engineered dragon. The setting can't be too far in the future, however, for we also see conventional-looking email, Windows Freecell, and a $50.00 gift certificate enabling Giannine to play a VR game of her choice. (By the time all this advanced technology exists, wouldn't fifty bucks be pocket change? Never mind.) She chooses a medieval fantasy about a peasant girl who becomes king. The session will last thirty minutes but will feel like three days. The catch is that any time her character dies, she will have to start over from the beginning, which she can do indefinitely.

That reminds me of the old Atari game Pitfall II. Possibly compensating for the fact that the original Pitfall was almost unwinnable, Pitfall II was made literally unlosable. Any time you'd get hit by an enemy, you'd merely be transported back to the last red cross you touched. The only way to end the game without winning was by turning off the computer. In the VR game depicted in Heir Apparent, however, you cannot just turn off the machine, or leave it sitting and come back to it later. You're stuck until you win the game or a technician pulls you out. That's practically asking for trouble.

The trouble comes in the form of an activist group called Citizens to Protect Our Children, or CPOC (pronounced "sea pock"), who feel that VR games are corrupting the youth. To show just how concerned they are for the children's welfare, they break into the arcade and sabotage the equipment. The problem is, Giannine is already hooked up to the game.

A technician briefly enters the virtual world to inform her that if they detach the equipment, she may suffer brain damage. But if she stays hooked up for too long, her brain will surely fry. All she has to do is win the damn game--and avoid getting killed too many times.

Easier said than done. The game is set up so that that there are many ways to succeed, and a lot more ways to fail. At first, it seems that every time she stumbles, a character pulls out a knife and slaughters her. Then she finds herself back on the sheep farm at the beginning, where she has to do the whole game over again. This aspect of the novel has an intriguing Groundhog Day vibe to it, as she meets the same characters in a host of different situations that change depending on all the little choices she makes.

There is, for example, a boy caught by guards who claim he stole a deer. The evidence is lacking, and Giannine has no desire to sanction the boy's execution, even though he is only computer-generated. But if she simply frees him, more problems will occur.

The technician gives her only two clues on how to win the game: find a magic ring, and keep a weird, mystic nun away from Kenric, one of Giannine's three half-brothers vying for the throne. (The nun, who seems to worship Oneness rather than God, is made nondenominational by the game's manufacturer so as "not to offend anyone.") Among the many challenges she faces is a knight who will chop her head off if she does not create a poem he likes. The poem can be absolutely inane, so long as it's original.

Unlike User Unfriendly, she is the only real person in the game--the rest of the characters are computer-generated. But they all have personalities, and they seem able to carry on nuanced, naturalistic conversations. I presume they're simply responding to cues in her speech, but the effect is quite convincing.

One way or another, I enjoyed the book much more than User Unfriendly. The game is still not much like the computer adventures I remember as a kid. It's ten times better! Maybe that's the point of books like these, to depict games we wish we could play, but which exist only in the author's wildest imagination.

Lex Luthor was a good person

Every time a public figure says something that causes a stir, he will claim to have been misquoted. The trouble is, in many cases he'll be right.

One of the silliest instances of this has to be the recent flap over Will Smith's "Hitler" remark. For those who haven't been following the story, here is the quote: "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.'" The headline to the article falsely claimed Smith had said that "Hitler was a good person." Just this week, Smith won damages and an apology for this idiotic mistake.

But I get the strange feeling Smith's comment would have passed unnoticed if he had replaced "Hitler" with "Bin Laden." For some reason, people tend to think of Hitler as a psychopath but Bin Laden as a true believer. I'm not sure either assumption is correct.

Everyone knows Bin Laden is an Islamic extremist, but many people are confused about what Hitler believed. I saw a debate between Bill O'Reilly and Richard Dawkins over the existence of God. In the course of the debate, O'Reilly claimed that Hitler was a "confirmed atheist," while Dawkins insisted that Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Both were wrong. Hitler rejected the Catholicism of his childhood (despite public pronouncements to the contrary) but continued to say he was doing the will of God.

In any case, his religious beliefs were almost irrelevant. The Nazis had Protestants, Catholics, and atheists in their ranks. Nazi ideology was a hodgepodge of Christian anti-Semitism, Enlightenment racism, neo-pagan Nordic mythology, Darwinism, and Nietzscheism.

The only two things consistent about Hitler were his desire to rule the world, and his abiding hatred of Jews. Did he really "believe" Jews were that terrible, or did he simply concoct a giant excuse for his murderous tendencies? I wouldn't claim to know the answer.

Comic-book villains, unlike real-life ones, always wear their motives on their sleeves. Lex Luthor knows he's evil and is proud of it. He has no delusional belief system. Indeed, he seems like a clearer thinker than Superman.

You could search the world over before finding someone that transparently evil. Most bad guys in our world espouse an ideology that casts them as the good guys and us as the villains. Whether they believe in it themselves is less important than the fact that they're able to persuade others to believe.

It's scary to admit that people can have such warped perceptions, because it means there's no universal agreement on what's right and wrong. Maybe that's why children like comic books. There's a certain comfort in believing that the world is only threatened by self-aware baddies.