The sushi myth

Often when I mention sushi to someone who has never eaten it, I get a response like, "Well, raw fish ain't my cup of tea." It seems that every American who hasn't directly encountered sushi believes it is just another word for raw fish. They hold this belief firmly, like it's a simple fact.

I don't know where this misconception got started, but it's widespread. I myself held it at one time. Snopes even has an entry debunking it. But it takes on an added irony when it comes from people (and Jews in particular) who don't realize they have been eating a type of uncooked fish for years, called lox.

"What?!" they exclaim. "How can lox be raw? Everybody knows it's smoked salmon. Even the dictionary says so."

Okay, now wait a second: do you know what smoking means in this context? It refers to cold smoking, a preservation process that does not expose the fish to heat. Furthermore, not all lox is smoked; it is mainly preserved through curing--soaking in brine (hence the salty flavor).

Like sushi, it is an acquired taste. It's a little weird, actually: eaten by itself, it's borderline unpalatable. Add cream cheese, and it becomes delicious. The raw fish that is found in some sushi has a similar quality.

In the last ten years or so, kosher markets have begun selling sushi. To remain kosher, it must forgo traditional ingredients such as crab. The first sushi I ever ate, I made myself. I was guided through its creation while sitting in a Sukkah, in a program hosted by my college's Hillel during the holiday.

If sushi isn't raw fish, what is it? Usually it consists of rice wrapped in seaweed, with a middle that can contain just about anything--fish generally, but there is also vegetable sushi and fruit sushi. I even once tried chicken sushi, though I didn't think the combination worked.

Snopes defines it as "vinegared rice that can (but need not) be paired with raw seafood." That's also the definition offered by Wikipedia, which then links to the Snopes page. But does it really need to have rice? I once ordered something from a sushi menu, and was given simply a slab of raw tuna on a plate. I say "tuna" because that's what the menu called it, but it didn't look or taste anything like the sort of food you find in a Chicken of the Sea can. It was dark red, with a jello-like consistency, and was about as appetizing as baking soda toothpaste.

But if it doesn't need to have rice, and doesn't need to have fish, what makes sushi sushi? I tried asking this once to a sushi chef, but he didn't know enough English to explain it to me, or even to understand my question.

I made some a few weeks ago using a kit, the first time I've done it without supervision. The kit provided the seaweed and rice, and I added lox, carrots, cucumbers, and celery. The people I served it to liked it, but it was far from perfect. I put in too much rice, making it hard for me to keep the pieces together. I've asked for tips on Internet forums, and watched what the chefs at local restaurants do. The latest technique I learned is to wet the knife before cutting the rolls.

Let's face it. Sushi is just more fun to make--or to watch being made--than it is to eat. The chefs always remind me of artists, their products more visually dazzling than gustatorily appealing. But you should try it some time, just to say you've had it.

A nerdy examination of nerdiness

What, exactly, is a nerd? Roger Ebert once attempted to answer that question, in his review of one of the Revenge of the Nerds flicks:

These aren't nerds. They're a bunch of interesting guys, and that's the problem with [this film].... A nerd is not a nerd because he understands computers and wears a plastic pen protector in his shirt pocket. A nerd is a nerd because he brings a special lack of elegance to life. An absence of style. An inability to notice the feelings of other people. A nerd is a nerd from the inside out, which is something the nerds who made this movie will never understand.

I must confess that I find Ebert's definition rather strange, especially his contention that the protagonists of this film couldn't be nerds because they were "a bunch of interesting guys." I've always thought nerds were the interesting guys. It was the popular kids who were the bores, who went on to boring, regular jobs, while their nerdy classmates went on to become the inventors, the rocket scientists, the CEOs, the movie stars. (If you don't believe me about that last one, go read an interview with Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck about their high school days.) I presume Ebert doesn't include in his definition a tubby, bespectacled guy who analyzes movies for a living. He doesn't because he seems to define nerds as dysfunctional human beings rather than the people you learn to respect when you grow up.

Ebert is afflicted with a condition I like to call lexicitis, which is the desire to provide precise definitions for words that defy any. The word nerd is little more than a loose collection of stereotypes, rooted in the superficial world of teen cliques and in-crowds, but applied to adults without any consistent, universally accepted meaning.

I wouldn't even call it a character type, for it can encompass many character types. Rick Moranis's mad scientist in Honey I Shrunk the Kids is nerdier than Christopher Lloyd's mad scientist in Back to the Future, but then Moranis made a career out of putting a nerdy spin on characters who might not seem nerdy if played by other actors. In Parenthood he played a perfectionistic snob, but a nerdy perfectionistic snob.

Like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography, you know 'em when you see 'em. I think of nerds as social oddballs, but not all social oddballs are nerds. Nerds are often thought to be intellectuals, but not all intellectuals are nerds, and not all nerds are intellectual.

Above all, the word evokes particular images: a guy who wears glasses with a piece of tape in the middle, a guy with pens in his shirt pockets, a guy who reads comic books and plays video games and likes science fiction movies and memorizes UNIX manuals.

Nerds are traditionally pictured as male. Girls and women have been described as nerds, but nobody's sure what that means. Women nerds defy a sexual stereotype almost as much as women football players do.

Nerds are, also, usually pictured as Caucasian. Of course blacks can be nerds too (think Urkel), and in black youth culture, nerdiness blends with the idea of "acting white." As for Asians, according to Hollywood in recent years, all Asian guys are nerds (this has apparently replaced the older stereotype that they all know martial arts). And all Jewish men are nerds, except for Israelis.

The commonest explanation for the word's origin is that it came from the name of a creature in a 1950 book by Dr. Seuss. How it acquired its current sense is unknown, but by the 1960s it was being used by teenagers to describe those they considered uncool.

The twin word geek has a different history, originally referring to a performer at a carnival sideshow who bit the head off a chicken. It later evolved into a synonym for nerd, a fact that hasn't stopped people from coming up with a distinction between the two. The filmmaker John Hughes once explained it in the following way: "A geek is a guy who has everything going for him, but he's just too young. By contrast, a nerd will be a nerd all his life."

Personally, I've never heard anyone else use that definition. But I agree that the two words are not always identical. It's one of those pairs like morality and ethics that seem interchangeable but upon closer inspection turn out to have a subtle difference in connotation. Geekiness usually suggests an element of the grotesque, whereas nerdiness is something you can find endearing. The heroes of most teenage comedies are nerds, not geeks, despite what John Hughes may think.

Still, it seems like both words don't mean quite what they used to. Early in the 2000s, Comedy Central had a game show called Beat the Geeks, in which contestants would try to match their knowledge against Star Wars geeks, horror geeks, James Bond geeks, Simpsons geeks, Playboy geeks, hip-hop geeks, wrestling geeks, and so on. What was striking was how many of these so-called geeks were immersed in pop culture, something you would not associate with the geeks of old.

Nerds were once thought to make up the computer-literate population, but now that we've entered an age of iPhones, Blackberrys, webcams, Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging, you're considered uncool if you aren't caught up on the latest computer or Internet development. It's not surprising that I haven't heard the phrase "computer nerd" in a long time.

This is what happens when you take a term invented by adolescent boys and try to apply it to adults, most of whom have long lost their sense of what's cool and what's nerdy. The word may shed light on some of the qualities of today's culture, but let's not take it too seriously, lest we become a living example of the word in its negative sense.

The line between cranks and scholars

What is it with some linguists and claiming a mysterious relationship between English and Hebrew? First there's Isaac Mozeson, the literature professor (I hesitate to use the term "linguist") who maintains that all English words can be traced to Hebrew. Then there's Ernest Klein, a rabbi/linguist who saw Semitic origins where other scholars didn't. I never expected John McWhorter of all people to enter the fray. But he does, in a recent book that features an eccentric theory about early Semitic influence on the language that would become English.

Superficial relationships
Even in my early childhood, I noticed resemblances between certain Hebrew words and their English counterparts: camel is gamal, wine is yayin, and earth is eretz. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Animal names often come from languages spoken in the region where the animal is found. Hence, moose comes from a Native American tongue, and camel comes from a Middle Eastern Semitic tongue that may or may not have been Hebrew, but was certainly related. Similarly, the ancients would have referred to wine using the term from the culture that first disseminated the drink, just as we today adopted the Japanese word sushi instead of inventing our own term using pure-English roots (e.g. "seafood roll"). As for eretz and "earth," that's probably just a coincidence.

That last statement, in my experience, often provokes the response, "I don't believe in coincidence." But it has nothing to do with coincidence in a cosmic sense. The Hawaiian word kahuna meaning "priest" sounds remarkably similar to the Hebrew word for priest, but unless you can devise a story about an ancient encounter between Semitic tribes and Polynesians, it is likely that the two languages just happened to hit upon the same combination of sound and meaning in this one instant. These things happen from time to time.

Isaac Mozeson
In his 1988 book The Word, Mozeson maintains not only that the English language (as well as all other languages) comes directly from Hebrew, "the language of Eden," but that this fact can be discerned by examining the roots of English words. According to Mozeson, "Hebrew vocabulary has as much affinity with English as it has with Arabic. More English words can be clearly linked to Biblical Hebrew than to Latin, Greek, or French."

As for the Indo-European theory of modern linguistics, Mozeson argues that it is nothing more than a racist plot by white Gentiles to segregate their languages from other cultures and undermine the eternal truth of the Torah. As Mozeson puts it, "The third son of Noah, Ham, is behind the generic term for African languages, and white gentiles in the linguistic community have no trouble with the evidence of a related Hamito-Semitic language family. Let the Blacks and Jews share the ghetto, whisper the professors, as long as Indo-European remains lily white." It never seems to occur to him what the "Indo" part of the theory signifies.

The book is filled with his unorthodox etymologies. "Sparrow," he claims, comes from the Hebrew tzipor ("bird"). The English word "lad" derives from the Hebrew yeled ("boy"). "Direction" comes from derekh ("path, way"). He even traces "samurai" to the Hebrew shomer ("guardian")--via Japanese, of course.

This is all quite clever. But I can't help thinking of the father in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding who insists that if you give him any English word, he can explain how it is derived from Greek. He shows how it's done with some easy examples, like arachnophobia. Then one of the kids says "kimono!" The father is stopped short for a moment, then he explains that it comes from the Greek word for winter, himona, and in winter you stay warm by wearing a robe--kimono!

If Mozeson considered other theories, he'd find his own wanting. For example, mainstream linguists trace the word direction to the Latin directus, which is the past participle of the verb dirigere, "to set straight." That word comes from a combination of dis- ("apart") and regere ("to guide"). Not exactly a plausible candidate for connecting with the Hebrew derekh. But Mozeson disregards the mass of historical and literary evidence, as well as the theories of systematic sound change between languages, used by mainstream linguists to establish cognates. Ironically, Mozeson's picture of language evolution makes the process seem far more random and haphazard than in mainstream linguistics.

Of course, his method could be used to "prove" that any language came from any other language. John McWhorter demonstrated this in his 2003 book Power of Babel. Not specifically in reference to Mozeson or any other crank linguist, McWhorter "proves" that Japanese comes from English, based on the following words:

sagaru: hang down (i.e. "sag")
namae: name
mono: thing, single entity
nai: not
mo: more
miru: see (hence, "mirror")
taberu: eat (hence, "table," where one eats)
atsui (ott-SOO-ee): hot
hito: man (i.e. "he")
yo: emphatic particle (i.e. "Yo!")
kuu: feed your face (i.e. "chew")
inki: dark-spirited or glum (hence, "inky")

I actually think Japanese shows a close relationship to Hebrew. In Hebrew, karati means "I read." And what people are more in need of learning self-defense than the guys with their noses in books?

Ernest Klein
Klein was a linguist and Orthodox rabbi best known for two works: an etymological dictionary of English, and one of Hebrew. He had a tendency to suggest Semitic origins for English words more often than other scholars did. Unlike Mozeson, however, he worked entirely within the framework of mainstream linguistics, and in fact his dictionaries are widely respected works of scholarship. The Online Etymology Dictionary, which has had considerable influence across the Internet, relies a great deal on Klein's research. One time I was reading a word-origin blog that traced the word traffic to the Arabic tafriq meaning "distribution." I immediately suspected--and quickly confirmed--that the blogger had gotten his information from the Online Etymology Dictionary and ultimately from Klein.

John McWhorter
In his earlier books on linguistics, McWhorter mainly attempted to explain the views of professional linguists before the general public. He does some of that in his latest book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, talking about the flaws in conventional conceptions of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as well as debunking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that a language's grammatical properties affect its speakers' thought processes). But he also proposes some theories he admits few linguists accept.

For the purposes of this blog entry, I will mention just one of the theories: He thinks that the Phoenicians, who spoke a language very similar to Hebrew, made their way to the area that is now Germany and Denmark and had such a profound effect on the languages spoken there that the entire Germanic subfamily (which includes modern German, Dutch, English, and the Scandinavian languages) was the result of Semitic-speaking adults struggling to learn an Indo-European tongue.

Linguists have long believed that Proto-Germanic underwent strong non-IE influence. For one thing, one-third of Proto-Germanic vocabulary cannot be traced to IE roots. McWhorter discusses several lines of evidence, including Proto-Germanic's substitution of fricatives for stop consonants (compare English's father with Latin's pater), its tendency to put verbs into the past tense by simply changing the vowel (e.g. drink/drank), and its extreme simplification of the IE case system.

McWhorter speculates on a possible connection between certain Germanic and Semitic roots, such as the English word fright compared with the Semitic root p-r-kh meaning "to fear." Particularly interesting is his attempt to connect the names of two Germanic deities, Phol and Balder, with the Phoenician god Baal. Also, an archeologist allegedly found the remains of a Phoenician cooking pot in the shallows of the North Sea.

McWhorter is quick to admit that none of this comes close to proving his case; he simply argues that his hypothesis is an intriguing possibility worthy of further investigation.

Final thought: the line between cranks and scholars
Etymology is far from an exact science. Look in any dictionary, and you will find scores of words with unknown origins. In those situations, even the professionals end up resorting to guesswork, some of it as crude and far-fetched as anything Isaac Mozeson could have dreamed up. The difference, I suppose, is that legitimate researchers try to gather up as many facts as they can, and acknowledge when the limits have been reached. Usually.

Different routes to the same destination

Back to the Future Part II has one of the more bewildering plots of any movie I count among my favorites, and a wild theory about it occurred to me a few years ago. I've never heard anyone else propose this theory, but it resolves several plot holes and makes sense on its own terms, once you think it through. My theory is that Doc's true motive in taking Marty to 2015 isn't to help Marty's son as he claims, but to teach Marty a lesson that will help prevent the accident that destroys Marty's musical aspirations.

The scene at the end of the first film, replayed at the beginning of the second, raises a number of questions. In this scene, Doc assures Marty that "you and Jennifer turn out fine," and that the problem is that "something has got to be done about your kids." After he takes Marty and Jennifer to visit the future, however, these statements don't match up with what we see. The middle-aged Marty from 2015 hasn't exactly turned out fine, and only one of Marty's kids needs help. Why did Doc mischaracterize the situation?

It should be noted that the filmmakers have stated in interviews that they created this final scene before they had any real plans for sequels. As such, Doc's statements were probably just throwaway lines they found amusing at the time. But that doesn't explain why, when working on the second and third film, they chose to contradict Doc's statements.

The entire scene was re-shot for the second film, ostensibly because the actress who played Jennifer in the first film--Claudia Wells--had been replaced by Elisabeth Shue. Somebody on a message board pointed out to me a subtle difference between the two versions of the scene, which are otherwise quite identical. In the Claudia Wells version, Doc's line "you and Jennifer turn out fine" is spoken smoothly and confidently. In the Elisabeth Shue version, Doc visibly hesitates before saying the line, and he utters it a bit too rapidly to sound convincing. (You can examine the difference with this video. Pay particular attention to 1:25-1:38.)

Still, Doc's behavior in either version doesn't make much sense. Why is he interrupting Marty's life only hours after Marty returned from the first adventure just so they can rectify something decades in the future? Why doesn't he let days, or weeks, or months pass before asking Marty to come with him? Since they have a time machine, what's the rush? If my theory is correct, Doc is trying to keep Marty away from the present. That makes sense given what we learn in the third film: the pivotal car accident is supposed to occur later the same day.

You might ask why Doc doesn't just tell Marty straight out about the accident. He could say, "You know, Marty, later today you'll be involved in a car accident that permanently injures your hand and destroys your musical aspirations, all because you took a guy's dare." The reason for Doc's silence is explained during a brief exchange in the third film, when Doc blurts out the truth:

Doc: Marty, you can't go losing your judgment every time someone calls you a name! That's exactly what causes you to get into that accident in the future.

Marty: [Suddenly stops and turns toward Doc.] What? What about my future?

Doc: [Realizes what he just said.] I can't tell you. It might make things worse.

Marty: Wait a minute, Doc...what is wrong with my future?!

Doc: Marty...we all have to make decisions that affect the course of our lives. You've gotta do what you've gotta do. And I've gotta do what I've gotta do.

Doc realizes that if he interferes directly with Marty's future by warning him about the accident, Marty might manage to avoid that particular catastrophe, but he'd retain his habit of acting foolishly whenever somebody calls him "chicken." Then, with his future thrown into flux, something even worse might one day occur as a result of that habit. The only safe way for Doc to improve Marty's future is by inspiring him to grow out of the habit. And what better way to do that than to show him the consequences of his son's acquiescence to peer pressure?

In other words, taking Marty to 2015 to help Marty's son was basically a ruse. Ordinarily, Doc wouldn't concern himself with a matter so remote from their current lives. He hopes that Marty, by seeing what happens to his son, will begin to reflect on his own weaknesses.

Of course, Doc thinks they'll go straight home after dealing with the son. He doesn't anticipate the chain of events that lead them to 1885. But by the time Marty gets back home at the end of the third film, he has in fact matured enough to avoid the accident on his own, as Doc had hoped, though influenced by different experiences than what Doc originally had in mind--a different route to the same destination.

Crazy professors

Just about everyone who has been through college has stories about crazy professors. I'll tell you a couple of mine.

My first encounter with one came in my second year of community college, in a required course focusing on several thinkers who shaped the modern world including Darwin, Marx, Toynbee, and Einstein. The teacher was an African Sorbonne graduate who wore his watch on the pulse side of his wrist. I had an inkling of his ideological leanings when he criticized our assigned textbook as "too Eurocentric."

There are times when even I question Eurocentrism in traditional histories. As I suspected, however, this professor was merely replacing one "centrism" with another. I could feel his frustration as he looked for openings in the assigned material to tell us about his beliefs, which included the idea that much of Ancient Greek civilization was "stolen" from black Egyptians. It wasn't easy for him, since he was assigned to be teaching us about DWEMs (Dead White European Males). I was immune to his digressions because on the first day, I had gone to the library and borrowed a copy of Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa, which debunks Afrocentrist claims about history. I learned more from that book than I did from the entire course.

He was only a moderate Afrocentrist. At the extremes is Professor Leonard Jeffries of City College in New York, who holds that mankind is divided into "ice people," comprising those of European descent, and "sun people," comprising everyone else. Ice people are violent, materialistic exploiters, while sun people are kind, compassionate peacemakers. Dr. Jeffries also maintains that Jews financed the slave trade and continue to use Hollywood to promote black subservience. It's like he took the Nazis' master-race theory and flipped it around. Around the Jews, that is.

Later on, I got an American history professor who was almost as weird as the Afrocentrist guy, though in a different way. He looked like a character out of Roald Dahl: slight build, pointy nose, pencil-thin mustache. The oddest thing about his appearance was his hair. "Never trust a professor with strange hair" should be my motto. He looked like he would have been an ordinary bald man except that he had a big clump of hair resting on top, almost like a cockatoo. Bad use of monoxodil, I thought.

On the first day, he mentioned that previous students had complained he hadn't made his teaching relevant to the current times. He promised not to make that mistake with us. He kept his promise. For one thing, he had a relentless obsession with Bill Clinton, whom he considered the most corrupt president since Nixon. (This was a while before the Lewinsky scandal.) Throughout his lectures, he kept throwing in comments about how "Slick Willy" and his wife were letting the country go to waste.

He didn't seem to recognize any boundary between fact and opinion. FDR, he taught us, was a great president, though not because of his liberalism. Truman was overrated, Eisenhower was underrated, and Vietnam was unwinnable. The prof's most fervent belief was that there was a conspiracy behind JFK's assassination. He wasn't sure of the nature of the conspiracy, he just knew beyond any doubt that there was one. And he let us argue our favored conspiracy theory on the final exam for extra credit. Accepting the findings of the Warren Commission wasn't an option.

For several years afterward, I went mad trying to read up as much as I could on the stuff we had covered, which I felt had been tainted by the guy's political and ideological proclivities. I eventually concluded that apart from his hangups about Clinton and JFK, he was reasonably fair and accurate most of the time.

I'm not implying these two professors were in any way representative of my overall college experience. After I transferred to U. of Maryland, I no longer met any ideological fruitcakes. A few of my professors there articulated liberal political views in front of the whole class, a practice I considered unprofessional (at least in non-political courses). But there was relatively little weirdness and flakiness. Yet the fact I encountered this sort of thing at all is significant. These are the kinds of experiences you hear and read about, and can't believe when they're actually happening to you.

P.S. For those who may not be aware, the picture at the start of this post is of the late comedian Sam Kinison playing a crazy professor in this scene from the 1986 movie Back to School.

Urban bubbe meises

Linked to at DovBear's Blog

Blogger Wolfish Musings recently wished for a Jewish version of Snopes, the premier site for investigating urban legends. He made this wish after receiving an email listing ten "proofs" of the Moshiach's imminent arrival. As it stands, such a site already exists, and it is called Jewish Legends. Unfortunately, it lacks the scope or professionalism of Snopes.

Snopes was hardly the first urban legend-debunking site, but it took a new approach to the subject. For one thing, unlike previous sites of its kind, Snopes didn't deal exclusively with tall tales. Some of the claims that Snopes investigates end up being true. According to Snopes, what sets urban legends apart is not their truth value but their mode of transmission. They're the types of stories you "know" happened because you heard it from a friend of a friend (or read in an email forwarded to you by a friend). Occasionally such stories may in fact be accurate or nearly accurate. The problem is verifying them, and that's where Snopes comes in. It categorizes the truth value of stories with a red light for false, a yellow for uncertain, and a green for true.

Jewish Legends adopts the same color-coding, but with Stars of David instead of traffic lights. Unlike Snopes, it includes roughly the same number of "green" stories as "red" stories. Because so much of it is true, the site begins to sound more like a weird news page than an urban legends page.

Some of the green stories are reasonable choices, such as the report that Coca Cola tastes better during Passover season than during the rest of the year, because it uses sugar instead of corn syrup. Religious Jews are aware of this fact, but because it's so word-of-mouth, it's the type of claim for which verification is useful, if for no other reason than to convince skeptics.

But why do we need the site to tell us, for example, that the first pro-baseball player was Jewish? That may be a noteworthy fact in itself, but it's not a story that has been passed around by word of mouth. I had never heard the story before I came to the site, so it's probably not something that was in need of investigation.

Likewise, the site puts Christopher Columbus's Jewishness in the yellow category. That belief is not an urban legend by any definition. It is a legitimate hypothesis still being debated by scholars.

I also wonder why the site bothers itself with answering the Protocols or the business about a kosher tax. Once you start getting into the debunking of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, your task is practically endless. And it gives the site a graver tone than a discussion about urban legends ought to have. Is the site going to start taking on Holocaust deniers? That would be a perfect way to kill the fun.

The site's best entries include whether the name of the Satmar sect comes from "Saint Mary," whether the Israeli archaeologist Vendyl Jones was the inspiration for Indiana Jones, whether Mordechai was Esther's uncle, and whether "hip hip hooray" has anti-Semitic origins. (Click the links to find out the answer to each of those questions.) Those are all beliefs that have swirled around the Jewish community for quite some time, and are worthy of investigation. I just wish the site would also tackle more current stuff, like the chain emails targeted at Jews. And the weird news entries, interesting as they may be, should at least be placed in a separate section and be less focused upon.

The site seems to have an Orthodox standpoint, but it never tells you that it does. It considers the existence of the Golem to be an open question. It asserts that the actor Ben Stiller, contrary to popular belief, is not Jewish (his father is, and his mother had a Reform conversion before he was born). I suspect that Ben Stiller would disagree.

The corporatists

Though a proud and lifelong Democrat, there's a point where I begin to feel just as out of step with the left as I do with the right. That point occurs when people start using the word corporate with a conspiratorial tone.

For example, I was recently in the library and saw a book on Barack Obama that didn't seem to be either attacking or praising him. I assumed it was a detached journalistic analysis, an approach I haven't seen much of these days. My interest piqued, I took it out.

I should have noticed the back-cover endorsement by Noam Chomsky.

The book was called Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. I didn't read the whole thing, but I did happen to glance at an appendix in which the author referred to Obama's "corporate- and Empire-friendly" views on capital punishment, gun control, and civil liberties, as well as his "conservative and imperial positions on Iraq, Iran, or Israel."

These characterizations may raise the eyebrows of those who think of Obama as the latest incarnation of Karl Marx, but they are frequent in hard-left publications such as The Nation, where the U.S. Democratic Party is considered "center-right." That isn't as absurd as it sounds if you take an international perspective. As Nation writer Eric Alterman argues in his 2003 book What Liberal Media?,

The entire context of American politics exists on a spectrum that is itself well to the right of that in most industrialized democracies. During the 1990s, Bill Clinton was probably further to the right than most ruling West European conservatives, such as Germany's Helmut Kohl and France's Jacques Chirac. Indeed, virtually the entire axis of political conversation in the United States takes place on ideological ground that would be considered conservative in just about every nation in democratic Western Europe.

The 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate was a paranoid right-wing thriller about communist takeover. The 2004 remake is a paranoid left-wing thriller about corporate takeover. In the new version, Meryl Streep plays a senator and Hillary lookalike who, aided by a Halliburton-esque corporation with family connections, instigates a plot to make her son president through blackmail, murder, and brainwashing, in which a Gulf War platoon have devices implanted in their bodies making them "remember" her son as a war hero. Throughout the movie, a sinister cable news network is seen in the background in various public places (and the anchor is played by Al Franken, no less).

Hey, I'm not saying critics like Ralph Nader don't have a point about corporate influence in society. But when they start to sound like left-wing versions of the old John Birchers seeing communist infiltration in every corner, I have to jump ship. The nice thing about being a non-ideological Democrat, by far the most common variety, is the relative freedom from paranoia. You can just sit comfortably on the left of the good old fuzzy middle.

The walking America

Toward the end of his inaugural address, President Obama said, "This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed....why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath."

This is one of the only times I have ever heard Obama even allude to his race. Throughout the entire campaign, he remained remarkably silent on the subject. The only time his race was mentioned at either of the conventions was in one gracious line by Mike Huckabee at the Republican Convention. If you think that's easy, contrast it with how often Joe Lieberman referred to his Jewishness during the 2000 campaign. For example, Lieberman's acceptance speech contained the line, "I cannot express with words the gratitude that I feel in my heart today as the first Jewish-American to be honored to be a major party candidate for the Vice Presidency." Find me one moment where Obama talks about feeling honored as an African American. He not only rarely brings up the subject, but when he does, it is usually indirect, as in his quip last summer about not looking like the men on the coins.

That's why I'm astounded whenever I hear people say his candidacy was entirely about race. How did that perception come about? Well, for starters, his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father that first brought him to public attention is largely about the struggles of a biracial man to find his identity in a racially polarized world. Another reason is that his "race speech" in the wake of the Rev. Wright controversy became perhaps the most memorable moment of the entire campaign.

More significantly, though, the pundits couldn't shut up about the subject. And no matter what Obama did, there was undeniably a symbolic aura surrounding his candidacy. People were intrigued by him, who he was, and not just what he said. They found his life story, while not as heroic as John McCain's, equally fascinating.

His mantra of "change" resonated in different ways, because on one level it highlighted a substantive program to reverse the destructive policies of the Bush Administration, but on another it was a call to remake the image of the American government before the entire world. Outside the United States, Bush has always evoked the worst stereotypes of Americans--the country bumpkin, the frat-boy, the privileged son of rich whites, the member of an elite class with a callous disregard for the plight of the weak. (If any of those stereotypes seem to conflict with one another, that is partly a reflection of Bush's image-making, which cast this Ivy Leaguer as a rural American.) It may not be fair, but Obama overturns those stereotypes all at once, simply because of who he is: a walking America.

Before Obama appeared on the national stage, anyone would have predicted that the first black president would have a name like Harold Williams, or even George Washington. Obama isn't just the first black president, he's the first president with a funny name. His biological father was Kenyan, but he was raised partly in Indonesia by an Asian man, and the rest of the time on American soil by whites. I don't mean to imply that his background is unusual. On the contrary, it speaks to the greatness of America in a way that the office of the presidency has tended to conceal.

Even though he doesn't talk about his own race very often, one of his central messages has always been bringing people of different backgrounds together. That was much the thrust of his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention ("There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America"), which propelled him to national attention and convinced many people, including yours truly, that he was potential presidential material.

It isn't just rhetoric; he seems to have accomplished some of this goal in the diverse coalition he built. He didn't just attract a higher percentage of blacks than usual, he also received a larger proportion of the white vote than any Democrat since Carter. He also won every region of the country except the South, and even there, he won three of the eleven states from the Old Confederacy: Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. A black candidate could have won the presidency with a narrower band of support.

That America would eventually elect a black man as president was probably inevitable; that it would be someone like Obama is unexpected. He didn't just win, he smoothed out a range of demographics that most people considered to be deep, insuperable divisions. In this scheme, he doesn't need to talk about his racial identity because it so clearly informs how he has approached the task of trying to unite America.

Sandlerism

I am going to ask a question that, as far as I can tell, nobody has ever asked before: Is Alanis Morrissette Jewish?

This question occurred to me when I visited her Wikipedia page recently. The section on her early life described her father as French Canadian. That much I knew already. But then it said something I did not know: her mother was a Hungarian immigrant named Georgia Mary Ann Feuerstein.

Feuerstein? Feuerstein?

I did some checking, and I came to a Google Books preview of Morrissette's biography, written by music journalist Paul Cantin. The book revealed that Ms. Feuerstein came to Canada as a child when her parents were escaping an anti-Soviet uprising. She and Morrisette's dad met as teenagers, but "Georgia's strict European parents did not allow her to date, and so they spent their time together playing badminton, broomball, and street hockey."

Neither this book nor the Wikipedia article gave any indication that Feuerstein--or Alanis, for that matter--had Jewish roots. I typed the words "alanis feuerstein jewish" into Google and found nothing.

This episode forms part of a bizarre pattern I've noticed. With most famous people, any smidgen of Jewish ancestry will get some press as soon as it is revealed. I remember the hoopla over Madeline Albright's discovery that her mother was a Jew who converted to Catholicism. Christopher Hitchens, too, seemed deeply affected when he found out his mother's mother was Jewish.

In 2006, it happened to Senator George Allen in the wake of the controversy over his "macaca" moment that probably cost him his Senate seat and his presidential aspirations for the 2008 election. (Since "macaca" is a racist slur in some French dialects, reporters were spurred to look into the background of Allen's French-speaking Tunisian mother, Etty Lumbroso, who turned out to be a Sephardi who had hidden her Jewishness from her husband and son all those years.) You simply don't see comparable attention given to people who discover, say, an unknown Italian ancestor.

In the 2004 presidential election, I saw at least one article describing the Jewish connection of three of the candidates: John Kerry's grandfather was Jewish, Wesley Clark's father was, and Howard Dean is married to a Jew.

There are even celebrities who have long been commonly, incorrectly thought to be Jewish by many people: Charlie Chaplin and Dr. Seuss (born Theodore Geisel) come immediately to mind. (I admit to being surprised about Dr. Seuss, who was apparently German-American. I always thought his pen name was a reference to the Hebrew word for horse. It turns out that Seuss is his actual middle name, and it is properly pronounced "soyce.")

That's why it's curious whenever a celebrity has hints of a Jewish past but no one seems to talk about it. John Goodman has a Jewish-sounding surname, but I have been unable to find any information at all about his ethnic or religious background. Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkey) might have Jewish paternal ancestry, but it is rarely mentioned anywhere, and Starr has never identified as a Jew. Michael Caine (born Maurice Micklewhite) claims not to be Jewish, but he attended a Jewish school as a kid and speaks Yiddish.

You might wonder why I'm obsessing over this topic. I am afflicted by the condition made famous by Adam Sandler's Chanukah song, of having a weird preoccupation with trying to determine which celebrities are Jewish or of Jewish descent. Jews with this condition can easily be mistaken for anti-Semites, and vice versa. (The neo-Nazi site Jew Watch keeps a list of celebrities it identifies as Jews--often unreliably. An innocent observer stumbling on the page might easily think it was written by a Jew.) It is such a prevalent condition that it's a wonder no one has coined a word for it. I'd call it Sandlerism.

Mistaking Sandlerism for anti-Semitism was the subject of a funny anecdote in David Zurawik's informative book The Jews of Prime Time. An old SNL skit, co-written by Al Franken, featured a game show in which panelists were shown a photograph of someone famous and asked to guess if that person was Jewish or not. "Our first famous personality," said the host, "is Penny Marshall, the star of television's Laverne & Shirley. Okay, panelists, Jew or not a Jew?"

The skit cut to a mock commercial parodying a series of IBM commercials at the time called "You Make the Call." The narrator says, "Sandy Koufax is on the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers. It's Game Seven of the World Series against the Minnesota Twins. The stylish left-hander is involved in a tense battle.... Okay, IBM invites you to make a call: Sandy Koufax--Jew, or not a Jew?"

The game show returns and the host tells the audience that Penny Marshall is in fact Italian--and then awards prizes to the contestants who guessed "not a Jew."

The night after this skit aired, SNL producer Brandon Tartikoff (himself Jewish) received a call from his mother. "I'm embarrassed to call you my son. This Jew/Not-a-Jew sketch was the most anti-Semitic thing I've ever seen." There was a long pause. "Besides," she said, "I always thought Penny Marshall was Jewish."

A stumble for the Republican Party

A recent story about four of the candidates vying for the Republican National Committee chairmanship indicates the troubles that may lie ahead for the GOP in its attempt to rebuild itself after its stunning electoral defeat this year:

Chip Saltsman, a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members this month a holiday music CD that included "Barack the Magic Negro," a parody song first aired in 2007 by talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Created by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin, the song puts new lyrics to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," and it is performed as if black activist Al Sharpton were singing it. Limbaugh played it after the Los Angeles Times ran an opinion piece with the same title, arguing that a vote for Barack Obama could assuage white guilt.

"A guy from the LA paper said it made guilty whites feel good, they'll vote for him and not for me cuz he's not from the hood," the song goes. "Oh, Barack the magic negro lives in DC, the LA Times they called him that because he's black but not authentically."

I'm sure Limbaugh thinks that Democrats who take offense at this ditty are simply proving the age-old truth that liberals have no sense of humor. (You won't get much argument there from Stephen Colbert.) And it is worth considering Clarence Page's defense of the song.

Still, I'm not sure that Republicans have earned the right to be hip and ironic on this subject. I found Sacha Baron Cohen's "Throw the Jew Down the Well" routine very funny, but I wouldn't feel comfortable if an Arab American organization began playing it. Sometimes you're just not in a position to be making certain kinds of jokes.

Another candidate for RNC chair is Katon Dawson, who recently resigned his 12-year membership in a whites-only country club.

When I read about these incidents, I have to think: are the Republicans out of their heads? They just lost a presidential election to a black man who received 96% of the African American vote. They know they cannot go on forever being the party of whites. If current projections are accurate, white Americans will be a minority less than half a century from now. To survive electorally, the Republican Party must make inroads into the African American community.

Unfortunately, a situation like this may drive them toward careless tokenism, as it has in the past. There are currently two African Americans running for RNC chair, Michael Steele and Ken Blackwell. As a Marylander, I am all too familiar with Steele. He may pass the Joe Biden test for black politicians--he is "articulate and clean and a nice-looking guy." The trouble is, he's also a bit of a nitwit.

I will mention one anecdote from his unsuccessful Senate run in 2006. A Roman Catholic, Steele was talking before the Baltimore Jewish Council when he was asked about his views on stem-cell research. His answer became the most notorious remark of his campaign: "You of all folks know what happens when people decide they want to experiment on human beings, when they want to take your life and use it as a tool. I know that as well in my community, out of our experience with slavery, and so I'm very cautious when people say this is the best new thing, this is going to save lives."

Jews did not take kindly to that remark. Somebody, somewhere along the line, should have informed Steele that Jews, unlike Catholics, overwhelmingly support embryonic stem-cell research. I think most Jews would respect any Catholic politician who took a principled stand on the issue. But if there is any sure way for a non-Jew to irritate a Jewish audience, it is by making an inappropriate Holocaust comparison. What was Steele thinking?

Still, I was willing to cut him some slack. Many capable politicians have said dumb things from time to time, and I don't like our gotcha culture where one regretful remark follows a politician around for the rest of his career. But I was not impressed by how Steele handled the aftermath. He quickly apologized for the remark, but he then proceeded to make an incoherent flip-flop on the issue. He stated that he actually supports embryonic stem-cell research--just so long as it doesn't destroy the embryo.

The rest of his campaign ran along similar lines. Maybe he didn't stand a chance: he was in an uncomfortable position as a conservative in a very liberal state. But Robert Ehrlich, a Republican, managed to win one term as governor with a good triangulation effort that attracted many Democrats. Steele didn't have that finesse. He seemed to lack both vision and leadership.

As for Ken Blackwell, the other black politician running for RNC chair, I know nothing about him. But the name! I mean, can we get any more subtle? I can imagine it now. "Meet our new token black, Mr. Blackwell."

If Republicans can find someone with the stature of Colin Powell or Condi Rice, they might be in good shape. But their credibility problem among blacks cannot be solved just by having blacks in prominent positions.

After all, polls show that African Americans tend to hold some conservative views, yet they continue to vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Though they aren't uncritical of the Democratic Party establishment, as the Clinton-Obama fight earlier this year demonstrated, they see the Republican Party as an old white boys' club. If Republicans want their votes, the first thing they're going to have to do is purge their party of any hint of racism. Since blacks are the future, a party that continues to alienate them will have no future.

The virtues of pluralism

Grammar books tell us that the word media should be treated as a plural. You're supposed to say, "The media are covering the story," not "The media is covering the story." Nobody can explain what "a medium" is in this context, and the media people themselves often do not follow this rule, or they follow it inconsistently. I've read articles and even books where in one paragraph it's plural, in the next it's singular, and in the next it's plural again. It's beginning to take on the qualities of a noun like sheep, which can be either singular or plural.

The word is actually one of several Latin-derived plurals that have gradually become singular in English. Another example is data, which is a shibboleth among techies. You're supposed to say "The data are misleading" rather than "The data is misleading," and you'll get a stiff whacking if you get it wrong, even if hardly anyone uses the singular datum.

Of course, there are other examples that not even the pickiest of grammar cops treats as plural. You never hear anyone say "The agenda are ready," even though agenda is as much a Latin plural as media and data. Then there are Italian plurals like opera and spaghetti that English speakers have always treated as singular. If you heard someone say "The spaghetti are cooking," you'd give that person a stiff whacking!

But unlike any of those examples, the plurality of media is more than just a grammar issue. People almost always use the word to suggest that news coverage is distorted, slanted, or subtly manipulated. This connotation does not exist in terms such as "the newspapers" or "the networks." Although by now the plural use of media is mostly a formality, its transformation into a singular noun contributed to the popular image of the news business as a single unified entity conspiring to present the news in a particular way. All the critics left, right, and center talk about the media this way, even when they attach the term to a plural verb just to show what a smartypants they are.

Religion and influence

There is a school of thought suggesting that atheistic Jews like Marx and Freud were creating essentially surrogate forms of Judaism. I was intrigued to learn that James Joyce's novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man suggests a similar thing about lapsed Catholics. The protagonist Stephen Daedalus rejects the Catholicism of his upbringing, yet as he is explaining his philosophy of art to a friend, the friend coyly observes, "It is a curious thing...how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve."

When I had to do a paper on the novel in college, I seized on this idea. I posed the question of why Stephen abandoned his Catholicism, and my answer was that he found in art what he had been seeking in religion, namely a way to transcend the temptations of the flesh. Stephen's philosophy is that when examining art, a person should separate his impression of a piece from any physical or emotional reaction it may provoke. Superior art, according to Stephen, is created through a detachment between the artist and his work, whereby the artist's personality "refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself."

I traced the development of Stephen's philosophy throughout the novel. As a child and teenager, Stephen reacts to artistic pieces---books, poems, and the like--by letting himself be overcome by them. Conflict arises one day when he wanders into a bad part of town where he has his first sexual encounters. He knows he faces eternal torment for his actions, but at first he feels "a cold lucid indifference." Then his school has him attend a three-day retreat by a priest who gives a harrowing description of what Hell is like. Here is a brief excerpt from the priest's vivid speech:

In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, Saint Anselm, writes in his book on Similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it....

The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench.... Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

For all its raw emotional power, the speech has an important limitation. The priest describes the speech as being about "death, judgment, hell and heaven," but it is almost entirely about Hell, with scarcely a word about what Heaven will be like. Stephen becomes a fervent worshipper, but soon doubts begin to surface, and he wonders if his new devoutness is driven more by fear than by sincere belief. He has trouble finding a more positive basis for his faith.

What he gains most from that period of atonement is considerable practice at inhibiting his physical reactions. He walks with eyes to the ground; avoids eye contact with women; subjects himself to loud noises and unpleasant smells; and refuses to make himself comfortable in bed. By quelling his receptiveness to sensory experience, however, he undermines the very quality that allowed the priest's speech to influence him in the first place. He ultimately leaves his Catholicism behind when he satisfies his need for a chaste vantage point from which to observe life, without the "chill and order" of the priesthood that first attracted him. And he achieves that purpose through his newfound appreciation of art.

When I looked back on my essay later, I noticed a curious irony. Stephen's philosophy of art was almost the polar opposite of mine. Whenever I'm examining a work of fiction, or film, or music, the first question I ask myself is, "What effect did it have on me?" That question leads me to the most sincere and, hence, authentic, answers. Depersonalizing the process only leads to an artificial response, in my view.

In fact, that's exactly how I approached Joyce's novel. I wasn't sure what my paper was going to be about. But the point in the novel that had the most immediate impact on me was the priest's description of Hell. I knew I had to pivot my reaction to that scene into a larger thesis, and that's exactly what I did.

I wonder if my approach to art has something to do with my Jewish background, just as Stephen's has to do with his Catholic background. Judaism emphasizes the idea of a person being transformed through his actions. That's why Jewish thought is relatively weak on theology. Even Torah study is viewed in this light: you're encouraged more or less to lose yourself in it and then see how it affects you.

Then again, I could be totally off about this theory. I'm generalizing based on two limited examples, my own personal philosophy and that of a fictional character (albeit one based on Joyce himself). But I do believe that it is hard for people to escape their initial influences in life.

Opinions with results

On August 11, 2008, writing for the ironically named conservative publication The American Thinker, Steven M. Warshawsky proclaimed, "As I wrote last December, '[t]he pundits can talk until they are blue in the face about Obama's charisma and eloquence and cross-racial appeal. The fact of the matter is that Obama has no chance of being elected president in 2008.' I am more convinced of this conclusion than ever."

On October 9, shortly after the second presidential debate, Warshawsky wrote, "I have received numerous emails from Republicans and Democrats alike, asking whether I still think Obama will lose the election. Yes, I do. But what about the polls, they ask? The polls show that Obama is winning. No, they don't, as I will explain." And he did.

Even by October 25, he did not back down: "In a few more weeks, the political environment in this country is likely to become a heckuva lot nastier. For there are real signs pointing to a McCain victory this year, whether or not the mainstream media wants to acknowledge them."

Needless to say, after Election Day he was shocked: "I cannot understand how a man like Obama became president. It contradicts everything I know, or thought I knew, about American history, culture, and politics." But he didn't conclude that his own thinking was at fault. He acted as if the country had pulled a fast one on him. He even made a whole new set of predictions about the damage that Obama and the Democratic Congress would do, and he ended by saying, "I hope that the Democrats will prove me wrong again." Judging from his track record, his hopes will likely be fulfilled!

He is hardly the only commentator to have underestimated Obama. But unlike any mainstream pundit I'm aware of, he continued to predict Obama's demise after primary season, and with firm conviction ("no chance of being elected"). To suggest as late as August that Obama might lose was reasonable, but to suggest that he definitely would lose was insane.

The sheer insularity is striking. Not surprisingly, The American Thinker has also been a repository for wild conspiracy theories about Obama, from the birth certificate business to the claim that William Ayers ghostwrote Dreams from My Father. I have no doubt that the people who believe these things will continue to believe them in the years to come. That's the beauty of having opinions: nothing can shake your belief in them, as long as you choose to consider them true. Making a specific, concrete prediction about the near future is another matter. Once you expose yourself to objective reality, you can't hide from it.

The fallacies in Warshawsky's analysis weren't hard to spot. His most telling statement was, "Why am I so confident that John McCain is going to win the election? In short, because Barack Obama is not an acceptable choice to lead the country." It didn't seem to occur to him that the American public might not share his standards of what is acceptable.

His refusal to believe the polls was also notable. The success of polls at predicting presidential winners has increased dramatically since the days of "Dewey Defeats Truman." In a very close race, there may be uncertainty. But by mid-October this year, McCain was consistently trailing Obama by at least five points, and the electoral map looked even worse for him. It was conceivable that public opinion might change before Election Day, but there was no reason to believe he was already in the lead.

Warshawsky may be an extreme case, but the punditocracy is littered with erroneous forecasts, and the pundits are rarely taken to task for them. I believe that the quality of prognostications can be a gauge of a commentator's analytical skill. We should pay more attention to them.

Let's consider some of the factors that inspire bad political predictions. One is wishful thinking. Another is projecting one's own outlook on the public. A notorious example of the latter was the title of conservative columnist Shelby Steele's early-2008 book A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win. Steele later apologized for the "stupid, silly subtitle that was slapped on to the book" and claimed it did not represent what the book was arguing. Not having read the book, I'll take his word for it.

Some people will predict a candidate's victory in the hopes of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's why candidates themselves rarely admit they're losing even when it's obvious they are. The final nail in the coffin of Fred Thompson's candidacy may have been when he admitted to the press that he wasn't likely to get the nomination. For a politician in those circumstances to lie is understandable, but we expect more honesty from commentators, who should always tell at least what they believe to be the truth.

None of the aforementioned factors explain why many Democrats doubted Obama would win, even days before the election when he seemed practically unbeatable. The crucial factor here was paranoia, inspired by past defeats. They felt their own party had a knack for "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory," and they believed that Republicans might steal the election again. (To this day, there are liberals who think even the 2004 election was stolen.) They also worried about the Bradley Effect, the alleged phenomenon that public opinion polls overestimate a black candidate's support because some respondents are afraid of revealing racist motivations.

One Democrat whose predictions were spectacularly vindicated was Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. A baseball statistician by trade, Silver developed a unique method of averaging together the presidential polls to determine the winner. His final estimate had Obama beating McCain by 52.3% to 46.2%. The initial results on Election Night were 52.4% to 46.3%--within a tenth of a percent of Silver's predictions. (Subsequent counting, however, has widened Obama's lead by a whole percentage point, making Silver's estimate less accurate.) He also correctly predicted the winner in every state except Indiana, which Obama won narrowly. It's worth asking whether Silver would have been as accurate in a year that was bad for Democrats. My impression is that he doesn't let his biases interfere with his mathematical estimates.

Sometimes good predictions come from unexpected quarters. During the 1996 primary campaign, liberal comedian Al Franken correctly predicted that Dole's running mate would be Jack Kemp. He based his conclusion on a quip by Newt Gingrich that Kemp (a former NFL player) has showered with more blacks than most Republicans have shaken hands with. Franken followed this quote with a list of "Politicians Who Have Showered With Blacks," consisting of former athletes who went into politics.

In 1999, Franken released a book describing a bizarro version of the upcoming 2000 election in which Franken himself becomes the Democratic nominee, with an all-Jewish staff. And guess who his running mate is? Why, Joe Lieberman, of course. His stated reason is that he wants to balance the ticket because "I'm Reform and he's Orthodox."

After these two episodes, I began to pay more attention to Franken's musings. Maybe buried beneath the comedy was some sound insight, I figured. That's why I was puzzled when his 2005 book hinted that the next president would be Barack Obama. At the time, Obama had told the press "unequivocally" that he would not run in 2008. I thought to myself, "I guess Franken is finally wrong about something." Hmmmph. (To be fair, I should mention that the book also predicted that the Republican nominee for 2008 would be Bill Frist.)

What's Franken's secret? Good instincts, or dumb luck? You be the judge. Nobody can know with certainty what the future holds. But I value predictions, because they are opinions with results. They test a person's capacity to think objectively, without letting wishes or fears get in the way. They also tell us something about the quality of the person's reasoning. And they help us weed out the shills.

The cartoon that made science cool

Stephen King and Stephen Jay Gould each wrote a foreword to a Far Side gallery, and they had such opposite perspectives on a comic they both praised that it illustrated different approaches people can take toward humor.

King, in his foreword to The Far Side Gallery 2, refused to explain what made Larson's cartoons funny. He wrote that The Far Side was a "uniquely unique" comic that "will make you laugh your butt off," but "I can't tell you why," because "There's no way to explain humor any more than there is a way to explain horror."

Gould, introducing The Far Side Gallery 3, apparently disagreed. His essay, which was twice as long as King's, examined various Larson cartoons to give a sense of why The Far Side was especially popular among scientists. According to Gould, Larson (who never worked as a scientist) understands "the intimate details of our lives and practices." As an example, Gould points to a Far Side cartoon showing astronomers fighting over a telescope, and the caption says "All day long, a tough gang of astrophysicists would monopolize the telescope and intimidate other researchers." Gould claims that this cartoon resonates with scientists because "telescopes are in desperately short supply, and...scientists (particularly Ph.D. students low on the totem pole) often wait months for a few hours of evening viewing (tough darts, and back to 'go,' if it's cloudy)."

Another cartoon showed an "average size" American family consisting of two parents, a whole child, and, literally, a half-child sitting in front of a TV set (alluding to studies that say things like that the average American family has 1.5 children). To Gould this illustrates that "language is not a neutral medium of optimal communication, but also a reservoir of illogic, cultural chauvinism, and literally senseless cliché."

Gould also talks about how Larson "places animals into human situations--using the differences to show how less than logical or universal our unquestioned practices can be." One recurring theme he sees in Larson's cartoons is the idea that "Animals have intelligence different from ours; they are not just primitive models of our achievements."

I prefer Gould's perspective to King's. Of course King is right that you can't rationalize humor. Either you laugh, or you don't, and nobody can persuade you to laugh at something you don't find funny. But Larson's cartoons are more than silly diversions. They have a point of view that resonates with people.

Larson's own thoughts on the matter can be found in his 1989 book PreHistory of the Far Side, a behind-the-scenes look at the process he goes through as a cartoonist. Among other things, he shows the doodled cartoons in his sketchbook alongside the final published versions. For example, a sketch of "If dogs drove," in which dogs are seen driving cars while hanging their heads out the window, was made into a cartoon called "When dogs go to work," in which dogs are sitting on a bus hanging their heads out the window, and the driver is also a dog doing the same thing.

Larson claims that he doesn't know where he gets his ideas: "Some cartoons spring forth from just staring stupidly at a blank sheet of paper and thinking about aardvarks or toaster ovens or cemeteries or just about anything" (p. 42). But in the process of developing an idea, he can be pretty analytical. He deals at length with how the subtle features of his cartoons--a character's facial expression or clothing, or something in the background--can have an effect on the humor.

Unlike the slightly conceited Bill Watterson in his annotated Calvin and Hobbes book, Larson is charmingly self-effacing. He kids himself a lot and never seems fully aware that he rules the field when it comes to single-panel cartoons. If you think what he does is easy, I'd like you to name another nationally syndicated single-panel cartoonist who even begins to approach Larson's mastery of the genre. I've seen plenty of comics try, but come up short.

One such comic is Mother Goose and Grimm. What struck me about Larson's sketchbook was how many of his initial ideas were at about the level of published Grimm cartoons, then he'd improve them. In one of his doodles, for example, two spiders are standing by a web and one of them says, "Nice threads." That's the sort of dumb pun I've seen in Grimm many times. But the final version is almost unrecognizably different. Four spiders are sitting around a little table next to a web that appears to have flowers stitched into it. The caption goes, "You and Fred have such a lovely web, Edna--and I love what you've done with those fly wings."

While he often starts with a simple gag, the cartoons he develops are usually more complex. They typically tell a little story that we are expected to unravel. I think of the one in the pet shop, where we see a piranha on display, and at the far end of the shop is a cat with wooden forelegs. This cartoon has no caption; it doesn't need any. The picture speaks for itself.

As Gould discerned, Larson's most frequent conceit is putting animals into human situations in order to comment on human behavior. In one cartoon, we see a mother chicken feeding a bedridden chicken a bowl of soup and saying, "Quit complaining and eat it!... Number one, chicken soup is good for the flu--and number two, it's nobody we know." The absurdity of the situation is what creates the humor, but we also end up thinking a little about human morality.

Larson admits to being flattered by his popularity among scientists, but he says it has its downside: every time he makes a scientific error, he receives a flurry of letters correcting it. For example, in one cartoon a husband mosquito walks into his house and sighs that he has been "spreading malaria" across the country. Numerous readers pointed out to Larson that only female mosquitos bite. Larson's response: "Of course, it's perfectly acceptable that these creatures wear clothes, live in houses, speak English, etc." (p. 124).

One often overlooked point is that The Far Side appealed not just to scientists but to scientifically informed laymen. Gould's favorite Far Side features a group of Protozoa watching a slide show, when one says, "No, wait! That's not Uncle Floyd! Who is that? Criminy, I think it's just an air bubble!" Scientists get the joke, but so does anyone who has ever operated a microscope.

In many cases, Larson takes a familiar biological fact and mixes it up with a stereotypical human situation. In one cartoon, an insect couple are sitting on a sofa in their house. Dad is reading the newspaper, and Mom is yelling to their daughter, who is walking out the door: "Hold it right there, young lady! Before you go out, you take off some of that makeup and wash off that gallon of pheromones!"

Larson did for cartoons what Douglas Adams did for fiction: take scientific ideas and derive humor from them that general audiences could understand. Even nonscientists appreciate Larson's attention to detail. His drawing ability is underrated, perhaps because of the crude, broad style of his faces and bodies. But when he draws animals, even highly anthropomorphized ones, the details are far more authentic than you'd expect from a syndicated cartoonist.

Larson also explains how he came up with some of his worst cartoons. A notorious example is "Cow tools," which features a cow standing by a table on which rest four oddly shaped objects, one of which looks like a saw. He admits the cartoon simply didn't work, but he explains what he intended it to mean, and while his explanation doesn't make the cartoon funny, we do get a sense of his thought processes that usually lead to better cartoons.

I've never thought of The Far Side as subversive, but a few of his cartoons have provoked controversy. Some readers are put off when he shows animals being hurt. None of these cartoons ever bothered me in the least, and I'm an animal lover. I love cats, but I was always amused by the cartoon where two dogs are playing "tethercat." As Larson points out, dogs beating up on cats is just an old cartoon convention: "I could understand the problem if these were kids batting an animal around a pole, but the natural animosity between dogs and cats has always provided fodder for humor in various forms" (p. 158).

On the other hand, when he shows some cartoons of his that his editors refused to publish, I admit he did push the boundaries of good taste. In one of them, a snake is crawling through a baby's crib and has a lump in the middle of its body at exactly the place in the crib where the baby should be. According to Larson, "editors, I'm convinced, have saved my career many times by their decision not to publish certain cartoons" (p. 176).

Other aspects of the book include the somewhat inspirational story of how he got into cartooning; examples of his first comic, Nature's Way; cartoons he based on personal experiences or short stories he wrote; some of the embarrassing mistakes he and his publishers made; and a lengthy gallery of his own favorite Far Sides.

Lastly, I should mention my own personal favorite, which happens to appear in the book. A dinosaur is standing behind a podium, speaking before an audience of dinosaurs. He says, "The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen.... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut."

I won't try to analyze it for you.

Why Obama will probably be a two-termer

Obama's presidency is certain to disappoint, no matter what he does or doesn't do. The expectations for him are not only unusually high, but contradictory. His liberal supporters are happy to finally get an unabashed liberal in the White House, while his conservative supporters hope he will be a pragmatist. If he compromises on rolling back the controversial policies of the Bush years, he will disappoint many supporters, but if he pushes too hard, he risks alienating many other people. He has already made a range of promises that may be hard to implement in the current financial crisis, which may come to define his presidency regardless of how he handles it.

Does this mean he will be un-elected in 2012? Possibly. But that is less likely to happen than many people realize, no matter how far his star falls. He won by defeating the party in power. So far, our nation has seen fifteen presidents reach the office that way and not die in their first term. Those were (in reverse order) Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Eisenhower, FDR, Wilson, Harrison, Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln, Pierce, Polk, and Jefferson. Of that group, eleven were reelected (though Cleveland lost his first reelection bid due to an Electoral College fluke). The remaining four--Polk, Pierce, Harrison, and Carter--each had unique circumstances stand in their way.

Polk never ran for reelection, due to poor health. Pierce ran but wasn't nominated by his party. Harrison was nominated and went on to lose in the general election, but he hadn't won the popular vote the first time around (due to the aforementioned Electoral College fluke). Carter is the only president in U.S. history to win the popular and electoral vote against the party in power, serve one term, get nominated for reelection, and lose (popularly and electorally)--an indication of how badly his presidency went. Even then, it took a Reagan to defeat him. In the 1980 election, Carter was actually leading in the polls until Reagan gave a strong debate performance a week before Election Day. Astonishing as it may sound, a weaker Republican candidate than Reagan could easily have guaranteed Carter a second term.

Many of Obama's opponents would like to believe he'll be the next Carter. From the evidence of the campaign, it's unlikely. In the 1976 election, Carter managed to shrink a 33-point lead down to a virtual tie, then win in a squeaker. Obama, in contrast, exceeded the expectations, winning in an electoral landslide that seemed like a stretch just months ago. Regardless of the job Obama does as president, he has proven himself to be a far more skillful politician than Carter ever was. If Republicans fail to accept that fact, they will continue to lose power. They might not be where they are today if they didn't already make that mistake.

The myth of the myth of the popular vote

In making the case against the Electoral College, I frequently run into an insidious argument which states that the "popular vote" not only doesn't determine the winner but is a meaningless concept in our system. The argument goes as follows. Because of the Electoral College, candidates campaign in some states and not others, and this affects the outcome. Al Gore may have received half a million more votes than George W. Bush, but that was the end result of two campaigns that had been conducted on a state-by-state basis. We have no way of knowing what the nationwide totals would have been in a non-Electoral College system, because the campaigns would have been conducted differently, yielding different results. Therefore, Gore's apparent popular-vote lead doesn't mean anything.

I heard this argument several times from Republicans in 2000. I heard it most recently from Charles M. Kozierok, a blogger and self-described Democrat who is presumably not speaking from partisan bitterness over what happened eight years ago. I find the argument insidious because it attempts to whitewash the damage that a split between the electoral and popular vote does to public confidence in our system. The fallacy of the argument is that it confuses the causes of public opinion with the measurement of public opinion.

The purpose of an election is to ascertain the will of the people. It cannot ever be a perfect measure, since we can't read minds. A flat tire on the way to the polling station can distort the outcome. So can a medical emergency, or bad weather, or problems in the voting machines, or any number of other factors unrelated to people's intentions. Nevertheless, an election is meant to reflect as accurately as possible what the public thinks at a particular moment in time.

Campaigns do affect the outcome, of course. But they have nothing to do with the accuracy of the election in measuring public opinion. Rather, they have an effect on the public opinion itself before it is measured. For example, if a candidate campaigns in Missouri but not Kansas, the election will probably turn out differently than if he were to campaign in both states. But that simply means he has influenced the voters in a particular way, before their views were measured in the polling booths. The combined vote total in both states is still an accurate and meaningful measure of the collective will of Missouri and Kansas voters, whom the candidate helped influence. So too with the collective will of voters in all fifty states (plus DC). It may not determine the winner, but it is independently significant--a "valid metric," to use Kozierok's terminology.

Still, I agree about one thing: the state-by-state campaign strategy used by U.S. presidential candidates is the most obvious consequence of our having an Electoral College. A true split between the popular and electoral vote is in fact quite rare. It has apparently happened four times in our history. What is seldom pointed out, however, is that only once was the split uncontroversial. That was in the 1888 election, when Benjamin Harrison lost the popular vote but won the election, apparently without any controversy over the results.

The other three cases were a different story. In 1876 and 2000, the election ended in a months-long battle over the voting results in Florida, and the man who finally triumphed was widely viewed as an illegitimate president, not because he lost the popular vote but because his triumph in Florida was called into question. Thus, in both cases the popular-electoral split was arguably an illusion.

The 1824 election was the strangest. Andrew Jackson received a plurality of the popular and electoral votes. But because there were four major candidates, he failed to reach an electoral majority, so the election was thrown into Congress, which made John Quincy Adams president. (Jackson would gain the presidency four years later.) Partly that was because of Speaker of the House Henry Clay, whom Adams subsequently appointed Secretary of State, an act that struck many people (including Jackson) as bribery. Constitutionally the outcome was legitimate, but an expression of the public will it was not.

Given the relative rarity of these kinds of situations, the difference between the Electoral College and a direct-vote system might seem more theoretical than practical. But one very tangible difference that shows up in every election is the suppression of third parties. The most striking example was the 1992 election, when Ross Perot, running as an independent, received 19% of the popular vote but not a single electoral vote.

Earlier that year, Perot had led in the polls. What would have happened if he had maintained that lead into November? Probably he would have won enough electoral votes to throw the race into Congress, which would then almost certainly have gone for one of the major-party candidates (probably Bush).

That outcome would not have impressed the Founders, who opposed the idea of a two-party system. Actually, the Founders failed to anticipate many things about the Electoral College. And no wonder. That was a time when Thomas Jefferson referred to Virginia as "my country," and when the term United States was treated as a plural. None of them predicted the gradual weakening of the states and strengthening of the federal government over the course of two centuries. That's why I'm amazed whenever I hear defenders of the Electoral College talk about the "wisdom" of the Founders in creating this system. If you're going to defend it, at least acknowledge that its value is due as much to luck as to foresight.

Secret Catholic terrorist

It's been enlightening reading about past presidential campaigns in this country.

For example, when John Frémont ran for president in 1856, he was rumored to be a secret Catholic. (He was actually Episcopalian.)

When Al Smith, the first actual Catholic nominee, ran in 1928, people said that as soon as he entered office he would extend the Holland Tunnel to the basement of the Vatican.

Nowadays, this issue has receded so much from our national consciousness that no one seems to notice we're on the verge of electing the first Catholic vice president.

It's striking how much has changed, yet how little.

Party swap

At this year's Republican Convention, Mike Huckabee said, "Abraham Lincoln reminded us that a government that can do everything for us can also take everything from us." I've been trying to figure out what he meant by that. In Lincoln's day, it was the Democratic Party that preached laissez-faire, free trade, and states' rights, while the Republicans advocated increased taxation, protectionism, and an activist federal government. Was Huckabee mythologizing Lincoln as a small-government conservative? Or was he criticizing the massive government expansion that Lincoln in fact engendered? I suspect it was a little of both, because nowadays the party of Lincoln is also the party of neo-Confederates.

I often see Republican politicians walk that tightrope, invoking the mantle of Lincoln without directly praising Lincoln's politics. It's striking that Democrats rarely do this with their presidential godfather, Thomas Jefferson, who, similarly, didn't have much in common with today's Democrats. ("That government is best which governs least.") Huckabee's reference to Lincoln was one of several during the Republican Convention, but the Democratic Convention featured just one reference to Jefferson, and it was in a speech by Jim Leach, a Republican.

I can understand why. Historians of all political stripes consider Lincoln the greatest U.S. president, who kept the nation from splitting apart and oversaw the abolition of slavery, perhaps the most important moral development in our nation's history. When reading about Republicans in the nineteenth century, it is hard not to think of them simply as the good guys and the Democrats as the villains. While the picture was more complicated than that, the Republicans did begin as an anti-slavery party and continued to support the interests of African Americans after the Civil War, even as Democrats were loudly proclaiming the inferiority of the Negro. The Democrats' racism continued well into the twentieth century, with their support for the Jim Crow laws.

Modern-day Republicans like to point out these ugly facts to undermine the Democratic Party's legitimacy on race issues. But the fact remains that the Democrats, to a large extent, were the ones who first embraced the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That a white-supremacist party evolved into a civil-rights party--and, ultimately, became the first party to nominate a black man for president--is one of the more remarkable facts about our nation's political history.

How and why these realignments happened is the subject of Lewis Gould's 2003 book Grand Old Party. Gould argues that certain features of the Republican Party have remained constant even as its philosophy of government, as well as its demographics, changed. Among other things, Republicans always had a close relationship with the business community. That they initially saw no conflict between this relationship and their regulatory views suggests how radically different society was back then.

According to Gould, Teddy Roosevelt's departure from the Republican Party was a seminal event in solidifying the party's conservative philosophy. The other Roosevelt's presidency, on the other hand, represented the beginnings of the Democratic Party's embrace of welfare capitalism. That was when blacks began migrating to the Democrats. Southern whites remained attached to the party and wouldn't start to become agitated until Truman's administration.

It was in the 1960s, especially in the candidacy of Barry Goldwater and in LBJ's passage of key civil-rights legislation, that the white South became solidly Republican, while African Americans became solidly Democrat. Goldwater's role in this process was not entirely fair. He was generally supportive of civil rights, and he had helped desegregate the Arizona National Guard. But his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had an important symbolic impact.

Both parties eventually reached a consensus on the issue of desegregation. But it is hard to forget what initiated the realignment of the South. One notable Dixiecrat-turned-Republican was Strom Thurmond, famous for the longest filibuster in history to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (which Goldwater supported). On the other hand, ex-Klansman Robert Byrd remained in the Democratic Party. Of course, neither of these men continued to preach racism after the 1960s.

That's what makes the question of "Where did the racists go?" so complicated. Some of them had a genuine change of heart, regardless of which party they ended up in. They all grew old while the younger generation forged its identity in a world more accepting of diversity. But African Americans have not forgotten how the parties developed to their current state, which is why the vast majority of them vote Democrat to this day despite holding some conservative views.

There is still evidence of racism among whites in both parties. A recent study suggested that one-third of white Democrats and independents hold negative views of blacks. Blogger Nate Silver has criticized the survey for both its methodology and its attempts to draw conclusions about the current election, but I have observed throughout this year that many Democrats are beginning to notice the old-fashioned racists still lurking within their own party. It is time to engage in a little reflection and stop placing the blame solely with the other party.

Tea/No Tea '08

The Republican race this year has begun to remind me of a point in the old Infocom text adventure Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

In that game, you are making your way through a spaceship when you find an object called tea on the ground. You can pick it up by typing "TAKE TEA." There is also an object called no tea which you can pick up: "TAKE NO TEA." But you cannot pick up one while holding the other, since you cannot be simultaneously holding tea and no tea.

The problem is, you have to do just that in order to access the ship's computer. To make this seemingly illogical act possible, you must temporarily become a microscopic entity inside your own brain and remove the Common Sense Particle. Once it is removed, you are free to hold tea and no tea at the same time.

After campaigning on experience and deriding his opponent for a lack of it, John McCain has now selected an inexperienced running mate. She not only lacks foreign policy experience, she has virtually no record of even expressing foreign policy views. In an interview from last month, she didn't even recognize that we have an exit plan for Iraq!

The hypocrisy was so transparent it even caught the attention of many conservatives, including David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Ben Stein (who called her "the most peculiar vice-presidential choice there has ever been"), and former McCain strategist Mike Murphy. Others did 180-degree turns on things they had said, prompting a great bit on The Daily Show.

But those who thought McCain could no longer invoke the experience argument were quickly rebuffed by the RNC, which flaunted McCain's experience and Palin's non-Washington status. Somewhere along the line, he removed the Common Sense Particle, figuring he could convince voters to elect tea and no tea at the same time. The odd thing is, he may be right.

While I'm too much of a wimp to make any definitive predictions, I see Democrats falling into a trap. It's the same trap they fell into with Bush in 2000, setting the expectations so low that very little was needed to exceed expectations. You know something's seriously out-of-whack when all a candidate must do to quell many people's doubts about her readiness is capably deliver a speech she didn't write.

I won't go into a detailed refutation of the RNC's attempts to puff up Palin's record while tearing down Obama's. Many other sites have already taken up the task. What's telling is the unstated assumption that her experience must be measured against Obama's. Obama never ran on experience; McCain did. Had Palin been a presidential candidate earlier this year, McCain would almost certainly have assailed her lack of experience, as he in fact did against Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson, all of whom have considerably more experience than Palin.

"We don't have time or opportunity for on-the-job training, and the other candidates for president I don't believe have the qualifications that I do to hit the ground running and immediately address these serious challenges," the four-term Arizona senator and Vietnam veteran told reporters following a speech on the military.

"The country would be safer with me as its leader," McCain added. He said that while he respects his opponents, "this is all about who is best equipped to take on the challenge of radical Islamic extremism."

The selection of a running mate is important not just because of who gets picked, but because it tells us something about how the person at the top of the ticket makes decisions. Obama made a pragmatic if unexciting choice. McCain made a political choice. If experience matters to him as much as he has claimed, what does his selection tell us about his commitment to putting "country first"?

At the convention, Republicans adopted the Lloyd Bentsen strategy. Their message was, "We know Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is a friend of ours. Senator Obama, you're no Sarah Palin." The trouble is, that first sentence is a lie, and anyone who's been paying attention realizes it.