The majesty of the law

We got a couple "Claim forms" at our house the other day, related to some lawsuit against Apple by aggrieved owners of the first-generation iPod nano. Our girls are apparently among the wronged throng, and have an opportunity to salve the pain and suffering that may or may not have been caused by disfigurement of the tragically-too-easily-scratched case of said nano. (By the way, does Apple get to trademark an ordinary lower-case word -- "nano" (ok, not so ordinary, and strictly speaking a prefix, but still...)?)

Why do such lawsuits bug me? Is it that class-action lawshops are the lampreys of the legal world, which somehow have slimed into our economic ecosystem to suck nourishment from vital corporations?

Or am I just jealous? There are nefarious but perfectly legal ways to make piles of money for the clever and audacious. The law sets the rules of the game, but it is a game, so playing by the rules should be all the morality anyone needs...

Debasing the Currency

Rational thought is under attack from all sides. New Agers, political ranters, religious fundamentalists are the usual suspects, but having so obviously eschewed logic they are not really a threat. No, the most insidious form of illogic is the ostensibly scientific statistical study. Statistical work is a currency of science (though its Platonic assumptions of underlying truth are tricky), and like any other valuable script it invites counterfeiting. There are the obvious crude imitations in newspaper columns and political arguments, so incoherent or self-serving that they almost negate themselves. But even respectable publications can get passed bad paper. In this occasional series I will more or less randomly pluck some sample from some source that should know better and give it the gimlet eye...

This month's "Atlantic" has, in its Quick Study column a piece called "Grade School Gamblers".

Children who showed high levels of hyperactivity and inattentiveness as kindergartners were much more likely to buy lotto tickets, bet on sports, and play video poker in the sixth grade than were less impulsive students. This suggests that impulsivity is a “developmentally continuous” trait that can lead to a lifetime of risky behavior. And since youthful wagering often precedes compulsive gambling—which leads to poor health, criminality, and substance abuse—it could “easily unravel into a public health issue.” —“Predicting Gambling Behavior in Sixth Grade From Kindergarten Impulsivity,” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine

The odd thing about the quoted assertion in its (apparent) context is that it seems to indicate something is new, changing, growing -- "unravelling". Yet there is no change in the pre-conditions: a more-or-less constant proportion of kids are hyperactive; they tend to become risk-taking youth and then gambling adults.

Does that mean the original article is reporting a non-event, as it were, and using the alarmist phrase to make the mundane more interesting? Or, was a key assertion left out of the précis we see (i.e. hyperactivity is affecting more children these days)?

So we were not actually presented an argument, but just the vague form of one. The fault of the original article, or "The Atlantic"? One more bit of imitatation truth, debasing the real thing.

All our sweetness

Since a hunger yawned within him
he attended all their lies —
of the sacred faith they fought for,
of virgins in Paradise —

but knew the soil of a body
holds a restless, precious flower
that wants no heaven's forever
nor but one transcendent hour.

So he, like the ancient god-kings,
gave himself as sacrifice,
and smiled as his handlers strapped him,
their visionary eyes like ice.

And then, in the sudden thunder —
before blood and screams and pain —
his sad soul bloomed its moment,
not ever to shine again.

"Leave the gun, take the cannoli."

When Joe Fox refers to that line in You've Got Mail the film is not just wittily referring to another film. The Godfather is more than a movie (or two) -- it's a touchstone. Actually, a bit of the reason Godfather is iconic has to do with that reference. We quote it with a laugh, and it bounces around the echo chamber of our public conversation (this very blog is one of its distant reverbs), and becomes part of our larger cultural vocabulary.

Likewise, those who still remember The Odyssey get a complicated pleasure from that moment when a character in Cheever's novel cries out, "Tie me to the mast, Perimedes," as his boat steams past a particularly appealing scene. Though Cheever was hardly a distinguished student, he grew up in a time and place that still gave the Illiad and Odyssey, along with the Bible, full shrift. He expected that his readers would pick up the reference without any fuss.

Alas, these days kids who suffer through Lattimore's dutiful versions of Homer come out unfazed with eyes glazed. They remember a few salient plot points for the test, and then shake the remnants out of mind like a dog shaking water off his hide. So, who, pray, is going to enjoy Margaret Atwood's little Penelopiad?

Penelope looks at the whole shebang -- the war at Troy and the leisurely wend home -- through the wrong end of the telescope, summarizing the panoply of great deeds in a few offhand phrases. At the time she was stuck in rustic Ithaca without friend or kin, her virtue continually under siege. But the time of her reminiscence is now: she's a long dead spirit still wandering the dreary Elysian fields. She has her memories and reports an occasional (parodic) glimpse, via spiritualist or magician, of our modern world.

Upon reflection, she doesn't mind so much the empty years and the great indescriminate slaughter of the good, the bad, and the ugly suitors. But those twelve maids, her pretty, cheerful little serving girls, strung up on the one rope? For what?

Homer's heroes were warlords and pirates: barbarians. Of course, the fact that one needed in latter days to be a Greek scholar to read him has made the tales the province of an educated, effete elite who don't notice the barbarity, just the heroism.

Perhaps it's better that Homer has dropped out of our cultural consciousness (though it leaves few to appreciate delightful riffs like Atwood's): those piratical virtues do not have much of a place today. Even Michael Corleone is not as cold as Odysseus: he would have got the maids "escort" work at his casino in Vegas.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive...

I just read a lovely book called The People's Act of Love by James Meek. Meek, a Scotsman who spent a fair number of years in Russia shortly after the dissolution of its Union (that is, in the 1990's), manages to get inside the soul of the old, crazy Russia. (Which may, in many ways, be like the new, crazy Russia.) But there was a moment back in 1919 when the world seemed new -- before Stalin, before shortages and five-year plans, when the cruel landowners and aristocrats were on the run and the foreign powers were beaten back -- and it seemed that a New Man was being born, who would joyfully give all that he had, and humbly take only what he needed. Ah, those were the days!

But Russia is a huge country with an even larger land within it -- Siberia. The Revolution progressed like a plague across its vastness, slowly but inexorably; at the same time the Great War was dying out in tatters, but still the Czech Legion held the length of the Siberian railway. Native peoples still rode reindeer in the endless forests, and traveled by mushroom to the Upper World and the Lower World. And stranger sects yet flourished in that Asian North.

The setting is a village five time zones east of Moscow, just one of the nondescript settlements along the trans-Siberian railway. But things are coming to a head, the strands of history are starting to intertwine, right here.

History is one thing, but it is the people within it that we care about. Meek weaves their tales before this backdrop, and he writes beautifully. His story is thrilling, exotic, compelling, and feels more real than anything you might remember about the details of your own recent life. I haven't felt so drawn into a book for years. I read it in three days, which is speedy for me. It was actually a case of slowing down to savor it. But I couldn't slow much.

Duh!

David Owen, writing in this week's New Yorker, has pointed out almost in passing something that mildly distresses me for not having thought of, but that should deeply shame various policymakers -- alas of a Democratic stripe -- and environmental advocates:

The popular answer—switch to hybrids—leaves the fundamental problem unaddressed. Increasing the fuel efficiency of a car is mathematically indistinguishable from lowering the price of its fuel; it’s just fiddling with the other side of the equation. If doubling the cost of gas gives drivers an environmentally valuable incentive to drive less—the recent oil-price spike pushed down consumption and vehicle miles travelled, stimulated investment in renewable energy, increased public transit ridership, and killed the Hummer—then doubling the efficiency of cars makes that incentive disappear. Getting more miles to the gallon is of no benefit to the environment if it leads to an increase in driving—and the response of drivers to decreases in the cost of driving is to drive more.

Oops!

You, personally, may have bought that Prius because you wanted to be gentler on the environment, and also, perhaps, because you wanted to point the way to others. "Why can't we all just drive less wasteful cars?", you might have asked yourself and like-minded friends. How dreary and embarassing to realize, then, that the whole lower-mileage thing is, in the aggregate, useless. Yes of course you yourself do not succumb to the vulgar temptation to make unnecessary trips, increase the length of your commute, or just drive around because the miles you drive don't cost as much. But dammit, statistically that's what people do.

Of course as fuel costs rise so will fuel efficiencies. But, folks, we've got monumental problems with environmental degradation that's primarily caused by too many people having built too much driving into each day. For starters, let's just tax gas back to the Stone Age, so that we won't find ourselves there.