The Perfect Burger: Black & Orange, DC

This is foremost a blog about ideas, even when I'm doing food reviews. Maybe especially when I'm doing food reviews. So below you will not find pornographic images of food, a slapdash bio of a chef or restauranteur, or anything like that. I'm going to tell you what I think a burger should be, and why Black & Orange in DC gets closer to this ideal than any other burger joint, bar, or restaurant I've ever been to.

Prior to Black & Orange my burger standard was the now-widespread Five Guys. Five Guys makes a great burger because it follows all the important laws of what a great burger should be. First, it's greasy and melty, such that the juices and grease from the meat and the surface it was cooked on commingle with the melted cheese (a burger must have cheese). Second, the meat patties and the bun are relatively thin, giving the burger a good balance of meat to bread to other ingredients. Third, these burgers don't take themselves too seriously; they don't come with quinoa and creme fraiche or two whole avocados.

Where burgers go wrong, in my view, is by hopping on the "gourmet" burger train. You know a "gourmet" burger well, because they're (unfortunately) the standard at bars and restaurants: a huge, thick patty that might as well be a giant meatball placed gently between two halves of an oversized roll, optionally topped with some kind of bleu cheese crumble, soggy bacon, avocado, any number of obscure ingredients, practically a whole onion and a whole tomato, piled high to the point at which you have to eat it with a fork and knife because you can't really fit it in your mouth to take a bite.

Other variations on the "gourmet" burger include some kind of "special" "Angus" beef, a "steak" burger, or even a Kobe beef burger. The misguided people who make you these things are effectively catering to the fat, middle-aged businessman who wants a steak in a bun because he has no taste, and feels guilty ordering another steak this week.

But if you want Kobe beef, order a steak! A burger is a sandwich, after all; not a gourmet meal. It's not supposed to have the thickness of a cut of prime rib, nor be as lean as a filet, nor as decoratively dressed as a circus performer.

Black & Orange is everything a burger should be, and, crucially, none of what it shouldn't be. For starters, the meat is perfectly seasoned (the "Square One" is seasoned simply with salt and pepper, and it's *fantastic*). The patty isn't paper thin--a little less than a half-inch--so it doesn't become a physical challenge to take a bite. And when you do take a bite, you're guaranteed to get an optimal balance of well seasoned beef, bun, choice of melted cheese, and consistently (amazingly so) fresh tomato, onion, and lettuce. The bun itself is medium density, such that it doesn't disintegrate from the grease and juices from the burger, but doesn't overwhelm the other ingredients either. And unlike the better greasy burger chains like Five Guys, Black & Orange will actually cook your burger to order, striking 'medium' with perfect accuracy. If there's any hint of "gourmet" to this burger, the well-cooked patty that remains juicy from first to last bite is it; but otherwise we're talking about a burger that stands on the simple, aesthetic strength of its perfect proportions, consistently fine preparation, and crisp veggies.

You will want to get one of these burgers, even before I tell you that the fries are double-fried and crispy, everything a fry should be as well...

3 Dumb Arguments Against Gun Control, and How to Refute Them

1) Controlling guns won't stop murder. Crazy people will always find a way. Look at what Timothy McVeigh did. You can't outlaw fertilizer.

First, no one arguing for any form of gun control ever argued that gun control would eliminate murder or violence as we know them. When people make the argument above, which is true but irrelevant, they're pointing to a red herring to evade the actual issue of whether gun control could reduce gun death; not whether gun control would *elminate* gun death and violence outright, and usher in a new utopia. This response is like answering "but you can't stop eating or you'll die!" to a person who says they intend to cut back on saturated fats. So if someone throws this red herring at you, simply refocus (if possible) the discussion back to the meaningful question that silly argument 1 evades: could gun control measures *reduce* gun death?

2) Cars/cigarettes/alcohol kill far more people than guns do. So you wanna ban cars, now?

This argument is another attempt to avoid the central question by making ridiculous comparisons. But when we consider "concentration of lethality" for these things--guns, cars, cigs, and booze--it becomes clear that there really is no sensible comparison here. If every time you lit up a cigarette, took a single drink, or went for a ride in your car, you possessed in that single action the potential to kill equivalent to firing a gun one time, you better believe we would be regulating these things more heavily than we already do.

By the same token, if, statistically, as many people fired guns in this country as often as we light a cigarette, go for a drive, or drink a beer--in other words, if frequency and prevalence of use were controlled for in a comparison between the lethality of guns and that of these other things--we'd be stepping over bodies on the way to the grocery store every day. The reason we shouldn't regulate tobacco, cars, and alcohol--very deadly things over the long run and in extreme quantities--as much as we should regulate guns is that guns are exponentially more deadly than any of these other things. One gun shot one time can end a life. If you shotgun a person they die. If the comparison in this argument were valid, it would give a whole new meaning to shotgunning a single beer, which, we know, doesn't kill you. Imagine how many beers you drink, cigarettes you smoke, and car trips you take in a given week. Now imagine what this country would be like if for every instance of those, we all also fired a bullet.

3) Americans are safer because we have more guns.

Usually this argument is accompanied by cherry-picked data or anecdote about how guns make us all safer. You'll get an example of data without controlling for population density, different national cultures, socioeconomic factors that impact crime across the board, etc. Someone will point out that a small, monolithic town in a meat-and-potatoes region of the US (usually in the South or Midwest) has a population of 3000 people, all of whom own a gun, and there hasn't been a murder in Podunk, KS in 55 years! What they won't tell you is that cities with the highest rates of gun homicide and gun death, like Chicago or Detroit, are full of guns, and no safer for it.

Up next you might get sent a chain-mail story about that one teacher in Smalltown, Texas who came to work one day with a pistol and gunned down a criminal trying to stick up the lunch ladies in the cafeteria for cash. What a hero! Also, an outlier.

If you listen long enough to a person making this argument, you'll eventually get some ranking table stats, e.g. the handful of "right to carry" states in the US have less gun homicide, or Switzerland has lots of guns but hardly any gun murder. Again this is cherry-picked data reported without controls and focused not on what happens in the majority of the world, but on outliers plucked to make an untenable case. They're not telling you that without controlling for other factors, the simple fact that a "right to carry" state or a country like Switzerland has less gun homicide--if this is indeed a fact at all--doesn't demonstrate causation between the absence of gun control and the absence of gun murder.

Likewise, that the US witnesses over 9000 gun homicides a year but, fear not, still has a lower gun murder rate than Hondouras and Swaziland, is supposed to convince you that our ratio of guns to homicides is favorable. Hey, look, the US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world, but we're only 20-something in gun homicide rate! Who are these other countries that we share this coveted position with? El Salvador, Jamaica, Colombia, South Africa...

This sort of argument amounts to throwing shit against a wall, because it relies on outliers and non-controlled studies or data to mislead people. As this clear and useful Harvard Public Health literature survey concludes (using controls and spanning the breadth of the published research), more guns = more gun murder.

Are You a New Zombie?

Today's post is about connecting three points of reference in popular culture today: the cultish interest in zombies and zombie memes, the widespread embracing of "geek" culture, and the ironic detachment that is essential to both of these phenomena.

I love making fun of people who are really into zombies and zombie films in an "ironic" way. This is perhaps the filmic equivalent of embracing the "ugly Christmas sweater": an ironic celebration of something known and accepted as corny and uninteresting simply for the sake of irony itself. And this is supposed to generate humor, viz.: "HAHA, this is funny because it's so BAD. I am funny because know its BAD but I STILL LIKE IT!" In a few minutes of brainstorming I'm sure we could come up with dozens of such examples of ironically elevating something to high desirability status precisely because it's so undesirable.

The "geek shall inherit the Earth" mentality similarly relies on a certain kind of irony: "geek chic" means embracing the awkwardness and social ineptitude stereotypically associated with geekdom as manifestations of a higher order of thinking. Geeks laud themselves as too preoccupied with more important things to sufficiently bother with personal hygiene, friendliness, or meaningful human contact. Being removed in this way excuses the geek to revel in technological advancement.

In each of these cases ironic detachment stands in as a way of refusing the questions of whether to pursue or aspire to something better, and how to judge what is deserving of our attention. Embracing crappy art might have started out as a laudable attempt at tearing down antiquated hierarchies of taste, but at this point it's become a way of constructing a new hierarchy with the ass end at the top. Similarly, embracing disconnectedness and antisocial behavior may have started as an admirable attempt to reclaim a derogatory word--"geek"--from the mouths of dumb jocks and bullies who wrongly deride people with technical or scholarly interests, but today it has become simply an excuse for the fetishization of technology and esoteric personal interests at the expense of meaningful human interaction.

Irony is the culprit here. Generally deployed with puerile thoughtlessness and (memes being exhibit A) an appeal to tribal thinking, today's tactless, diluted irony is a shell of its former self. Irony should have the power to make our hair stand on its ends; instead it makes expressionless people staring at computer screens and smartphones type LOL in silence.

What is deliciously ironic, however, is the way in which people walking about town staring into their smartphone screens actually resemble zombies. These are the new zombies, and I write this with sincerity. They amble around in zigzags bumping into things, feeding off the insipid e-content of other malnourished brains. Inside their heads there are no thoughts of their own; in fact, to be left without some kind of numbing stimulation--Facebook and Twitter updates, a news feed, a low-skill video game, etc.--I wonder whether these zombies are capable of achieving a single original thought, or whether they'd simply keel over or fall asleep if forced to live for a matter of seconds with nothing but the low buzz of their central nervous systems to distract them from living.

We need less irony, more sincerity today. We need to learn not merely to throw technological solutions at real problems, nor to duck them with ironic remove, but how to figure out which things we should sincerely care about. New Zombies are the sort who can't even figure out which things they themselves care about, or to abandon the idea of caring altogether. How can we take these people seriously? And how can we ever progress as a society that's too ironic to believe in progress?

College: What Exactly are You Paying For?

Without question, higher education in the US is too expensive, and this situation is only getting worse. Rising expenses fuels the secondary problem of rising student loan debt, which has become such an issue that it's now commonplace to question the very "value" of a college education.

For those who don't know anything about a university budget, it's easy to conjure a picture of elitist, tenured professors stretched out in leather recliners in their spacious offices, drifting off for afternoon naps, while students and their families go into unsustainable debt while struggling to pay for college. The repugnant Naomi Scheafer Riley plays upon this stereotype in the title of her book, The Faculty Lounges. But the idea that faculty salaries are fueling the increase in higher education expenses is simply untenable, easily disproved by a short look at any university budget throughout the country.

You'll perhaps notice that I'm favoring the word "expense" instead of "cost," because the truth is that a world-leading college education doesn't have to cost what it does; it's as expensive as it is currently because those who run universities are running them at a budget so far above the cost of their central mission that speaking of the "cost" of higher education is simply a misnomer.

Faculty pay has remained relatively stagnant for years, increasing below the rate of inflation and below the median wage increase for all US workers. At the same time, university expenditures on buildings, nonacademic resources, and administrative salaries have gone through the roof, increasing in some cases by hundreds of percentage points in recent decades. Even as universities try to trim their budgets in the face of high expenditures and growing student loan debt, administrative salaries grow while faculty salaries remain stagnant.

Anecdotally, many who have gone to college in the last decade or so will have noticed how little the pristine campus on visitors' day resembled the construction-engulfed campus on which you actually spent your college career. Outside the window of my university office the most common noises are jackhammers and football scores on the stadium loudspeaker, and the most common sights are cranes and orange blockades.

For someone of my generation, however, this is just life as usual at a US university. As a student I certainly enjoyed some of the amenities that, erected by the time I studied at my college, would have plagued students before me during a "quiet" afternoon of studying, just as the next generation of new building projects plagued my generation of students. As a faculty member today, then, I'm used to the jackhammering and the cranes beeping outside my window, but I'm still not convinced that this is always as necessary to a college education as I might have assumed in my youth.

But the question all along has been one of expense, never mind the cost of having such constant distractions on campus. When we talk about high tuition that only increases year to year, then, we're talking about these kinds of extraneous expenditures: a new dean or sub-dean or deputy-dean or tertiary dean of student affairs; a new director of this or that; a new, rent-seeking luxury student living complex; a new gym with televisions on the treadmills.

So if you're thinking about sending someone to college, and you're exploring the expenditures versus the rewards, pay close attention to what it is that you'd be paying for. And when you fret about the costs of higher education, think carefully about whether you're paying for an education or a four-year fantasy fun camp. Tragically, as a consumer, what you pay for will dictate what the college experience looks like. You have every right to complain about high tuition expenses, because tuition is needlessly expensive right now. But remember this, too, when you're getting your campus tour.

Election Recap: The Republicans' 'Minority Problem'

As I've been saying for quite some time, the Republicans had an opportunity (certainly as they would see it) in the Great Recession to establish themselves as a desirable alternative party to the party of Barack Obama; but they overreached extremely. They focused at both the state and federal levels not on 'economic' issues, but on attacking abortion, contraception, and gay marriage, demonizing and repealing the Affordable Care Act without proposing a viable alternative, slinging mud at the president as 'not an American,' and, curiously, constructing an entire political identity around being privileged, for which living on a golf course near a country club is the universal American dream.

That the American public rejected all of this in 2012 tells us something very important, beyond the obvious fact that the American public is not so fond of the cynical politics of the Romney-Ryan campaign and the wider GOP today: the American public cares about a lot more than 'economic' issues. And we should! And the fact that we've resisted the economic-issue pandering of a candidate selling himself as a businessman who can right the ship, and the fact that we've refused to let ourselves be held hostage to the idea that we must trade contraception, marriage equality, women's reproductive rights, and basic social provisions for the indigent and poor for a shot at a better 'economic' deal with 'job creation' shows a layer of good sense and fortitude in the American electorate that I was pleasantly surprised to witness. Witness Romney supporters' predictable turn to posting data on the futures market or imperiled quotes from small business owners and you can see that this is something Republicans today simply haven't figured out yet: it's not 'the economy,' after all; and maybe it never was.

But there's something else going on here that helps explain why Americans seemed not to have voted on (the incumbent's) 'economy' this election. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, among other conservative pundits on the media circuit last night, candidly named this factor the 'minority problem,' or the fact that, as O'Reilly put it on Fox, 'the white establishment is now the minority.' He went further to say that the 50% of the American people--not those representing 'traditional [white] America,' but those voting for Obama, 'want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.' Following up on this, Republican pundit Mike Huckabee noted, rightly, 'I think Republicans have done a pathetic job reaching out to people of color.'

In an election in which significant majorities, some of them quite staggering, of voters under 30, women, African-Americans, and Latinos voted for Obama, Huckabee's comment rings true. The more interesting question, though, is why doesn't the Republican party reach out and find ways to appeal to minority voters, given that the minority vote turnout wasn't all that hard to predict?

My speculative answer is that, as O'Reilly's tone and association of 'traditional' America with 'white' America suggest, Republicans truly are the party of the white establishment, unconcerned (at least, perhaps, until this election) with the concerns of US minorities. A quick sample of Republican issue stances that affect, Latinos, African-Americans, and women disproportionately reflect as much: opposition to the Dream Act and the idea that illegal immigrants should be squeezed and marginalized to the point at which they 'self deport'; opposition to basic health, unemployment, food assistance, and education programs that benefit the (disproportionately black) urban poor; and the twisted approach to abortion and contraception that denies women the agency to make health decisions on their own (to say nothing of how a contorted discussion of rape was regularly brought into this conversation as a kind of blessing if it resulted in impregnation). If we bring marriage equality and minorities of sexual orientation into this conversation, we can see that the Republicans have even further shunned a growing majority of Americans.

The Republican response to being at severe odds with all of these demographics was not to reach out and compromise or find common ground on policy, but to (candidly) try to suppress voter turnout, noting blithely that higher voter turnout in general, and voter turnout from a more demographically representative portion of the American public, will almost always yield a Republican loss. This choice to try to suppress the minority vote rather than reach out to minority voters was a deliberate ideological choice by Republicans, not a miscalculation or accident.

What this all suggests to me is that the Republican party is one that wants to pull up the drawbridge of white establishment privilege, comprised as such primarily of people who are rather happy with their institutionalized privilege, and have found a way to justify ideologically--by this every man for himself, social darwinist mentality--the fact that being sensitive to the needs of people who haven't historically had that kind of privilege in US society might mean facing their own.

My late grandfather, for example, was a Democrat, but probably agreed with most of the principles of today's Republicans. In his youth, as part of a family of Irish immigrants in a period in American history in which establishment types were wary of immigrant families like his disrupting the social order, requiring or wanting assistance, and taking jobs away from 'real' Americans, there would have been a similar kind of (Republican) attitude, despite that my grandfather still looked like the people who would question his role in American society. Urban Democrats surely pandered to people like him--an Irish steelworker--while post-New-Deal establishment Republicans worried that they were the ones without a voice. We have a new wave of US immigrants now, as well as a progressing minority population that fights hard with incremental gains to achieve that elusive 'American dream.' Pity that my grandfather's generation and their children would so readily fight to pull up the drawbridge now. This is America; this kind of change is kind of the whole point of it all. And the great thing about America is that, despite those who look upon the progression of this nation as a potential threat to establishment privilege, we find ways to continually broaden that access to privilege. This election reflects just such a sentiment. A breadth of Americans do want 'stuff' and 'things.' But these 'things' are not government handouts in the crude way O'Reilly assumes. What Americans want is an even playing field, not a game fixed for the likes of the presidential candidate we turned away last night.

7 Simple Reasons I'm Not Voting Republican (and Neither Should You)

1) A Republican-run government says gay people can't get married.

Marriage can be a wonderful thing. But if I had it my way, the government would have nothing to do with marriage, and people wouldn't get special benefits just for getting married (and, statistically, divorced shortly after). Marriage is for some people a sacrament or a religious ceremony, and for others a practical or "worldly" expression of love and commitment. But in any case, for everybody, marriage is a private affair. So long as we're treating it as government business, however, according special privileges to the married, the government has no right to say that some people can have access to those privileges through marriage and others cannot. Republicans support restrictions on marriage equality, or the ability of all Americans to marry who we love, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. I think that stance is backward, misguided, hypocritical, and antithetical to the most fundamentally important and profound principles of the Constitution, the idea that we're all created equal.

2) Republicans want to make it harder for you to vote.

Despite an overwhelming lack of evidence that voter fraud is an issue in US elections, Republicans are using the boogeyman of widespread voter fraud to justify making it harder for people to vote. Some have even been rather candid about which specific people they'd prefer wouldn't make it to the polls: people who are poor, black, and likely to vote against Republicans. From Ohio to Pennsylvania to Florida, Republican officials have passed or attempted to pass restrictive voter ID laws at the last minute before the election. They have also shortened early voting periods despite high demand and long lines for voting during this period. I have always been a proponent of Blackstone's formulation that it's better to have 10 guilty people walk free than to hang one innocent person. I would apply the same to voting: even if there were marginal voter fraud (which hasn't been demonstrated), preventing people who have the right to vote from voting is a greater crime. Why should we elect Republican officials who demonstrate such a level of crude cynicism at the expense of perhaps the most sacred democratic right, the right that makes democracy possible?

3) Republicans want the government to control women's reproductive health decisions.

Putting aside what we're told are the extremes of the Republican party, like those who invoke God's will to justify their beliefs that a woman who is raped and impregnated should be forced by the state to carry the child to term, or risk being punished in the court of law for failing to do so, Republicans have taken a hard-line stance on what they understand to be the beginning of life: life begins at conception. Putting aside also the logical and philosophical quagmire of why, if the "potential" of human life is enough to start life at conception, life can't also start at ejaculation, or perhaps even the registering of the intention of procreation in the mind of a man or a woman, the real-life consequences of this ill-thought-out position on contraception and abortion are dire. If life begins at conception, such that terminating a fertilized egg becomes murder under criminal law, will we prosecute women for having miscarriages? Will we ban condoms and the pill? Will we force couples and women to launch themselves down the stairs, or to perform risky, do-it-yourself home abortions to rid themselves of the remnants of a rape? Will we outlaw stem-cell research? If we follow the Republican argument on women's reproductive rights to its logical terminus, all of these things become real. Not only that, but what is our justification for going down this path? What is our argument for imposing such restrictions on the bodies of female citizens in a secular democratic republic? If we're imposing a religious argument, it's the wrong thing to do, since individuals have the right to do and believe as they will according to their religions, but the rest of us shouldn't have to follow suit. If we're imposing these restrictions based on scientific reasoning and evidence, then we're misunderstanding the science. In either case, though the situation is messy, a woman, in consultation with her doctors, should have the ultimate right to make decisions about what's going on in her own body. Republicans disagree.

4) Republicans hold education and educators in contempt.

From a local ad in one of the Dakotas criticizing a Democratic candidate running for an environment-related government position for having been educated at Cambridge University and living and working on environment issues abroad, to Republican presidential candidates calling people with college degrees "snobs" or attacking Barack Obama for having graduated from Harvard Law School, the Republican strategy on education is to paint it as something that puts us out of touch with the "average American." The logic of this strategy, of course, suggests that the "average American" is an uneducated buffoon who would look upon getting into Harvard not as an achievement, but as some kind of personality defect. In Republican political discourse, teachers are represented not as public servants working long hours for little pay to educate our children (many of whom go home to parents who couldn't care less about their education, making it that much harder on teachers), but as evil liberal indoctrinators, or, by way of synechdoche, as a union lobby. If there is to be anything resembling the "American dream" of social mobility and self-betterment, education plays a crucial role in this. Yet Republicans like to insist, quixotically, that elbow grease is enough to turn a poor, inner-city kid into a success story. They want to cut education to the bone, do nothing about the increasingly insurmountable costs of higher education, and score cheap political points by labeling educators and the educated "snobs" and "elitists." One way of preserving a true elite ruling class, however, is by assuring that the population is too poor or too proud to pursue an education, a path to a better financial future to be sure, but much more importantly a path to a better society with better, more responsible citizens.

5) Republicans think America is the best at everything.

If you already think your country is the greatest at everything, from health care to social mobility to foreign policy, even when there is ample evidence to the contrary, how can you begin to understand how to make things better? Republicans aren't well positioned to address the glaring problems we face because their brand of stubborn American exceptionalism blinds them to the reality of these problems. Further, the rest of the world is not blind to this blindness, and knows that it will have a more difficult time working alongside America, and pulling weight on global issues that Americans can't address alone, if Republicans are running the show.

6) Republicans favor aggressive business and corporate welfare.

One Republican idea I can get behind is that coddling people is often a poor way to instill the motivation necessary for people to help themselves. Republicans think this way when it comes to poor people (notably I don't think basic social welfare constitutes "coddling"), but magically reverse this most central philosophical stance when it comes to treating businesses. Nevermind the public servants, the public services, the educators, and the military, who all work tirelessly to provide the best possible conditions for a thriving business--paved roads and infrastructure, safe streets and government stability, an educated and well-trained work force, etc.--Republicans believe that all the credit for anything from a strong economy to low unemployment to more efficient solutions to military and environmental challenges should go to businesses. As a consequence, one of the biggest Republican selling points in this election season has been "talk to small business owners about how they feel; they're scared!" Curiously no one in the Republican party cares about how anyone else is "feeling" right now; we're supposed to let the "feelings" of small business owners--whatever a "small business" is--define not just our fiscal policy, but our entire budget and the whole election. This is to say nothing of corporate access to the electoral and legislative systems, and huge tax loopholes and benefits for companies that literally make billions of dollars each year. Business is important, and the economy--whatever that means--is important too; but we have other important challenges that need to be addressed by serious people in serious ways. Republicans are guided by the need to coddle and acquiesce to business needs, which diverts crucial attention from the rest of our issues, some of which I've noted above.

7) Republicans think you, the voter, are an idiot.

All politicians lie and manipulate words and data to get themselves elected. But Republicans--one very important one in particular--will say anything they think you want to hear on all major issues. The Republican presidential candidate has not only launched a campaign attacking the very health system he himself created; he's changed his tune radically and in the space of mere months on issues from climate change and abortion to foreign policy in the Middle East. He's outwardly lied about simple, provable things, then doubled-down on his lies well after being caught. He's made up scary stories to influence voters in Ohio who fear for the loss of their jobs (and those of their friends and family); and he's outwardly admitted, via his campaign officials, that this is precisely the strategy, which will not be affected by fact-checkers: say what you need to say, regardless of its relationship to the truth, or his own personal convictions, if, indeed, he has any. What this says to voters is simple: you're too stupid to remember that just last week I said the opposite thing I'm saying now, too lazy to care, not likely to catch me in my lies, and unwilling to investigate the specifics of my proposals, the disclosure of which I've rigorously avoided. Something interesting to consider in this presidential election is the huge difference of means and objectives between running a business successfully and running a government successfully. The Republican candidate might have been a savvy businessman by lying to and manipulating people around him, always keeping his cards close to his chest; but in pubic affairs, all of these lies and tactics are exposed, scrutinized, and laid bare before the world. When we can see your cards, Mr. Romney, you can't play that hand as effectively as you might have in the past.

Top Ten Worst College Majors For Your Life

The Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University recognizes a simple truth: that 'as more people get information from YouTube, Twitter and other non-traditional sources, newsrooms need journalists who understand how to tell compelling public affairs stories in cutting edge ways.' As a consequence, the program aims to train experienced journalists in marshaling social media to tell their stories. Where might those cutting-edge journalists come from? In the case of W.M. Kiplinger, namesake of the Kiplinger program, it was Ohio State's undergraduate program in journalism. But of course journalists can come from a broad range of undergraduate backgrounds. The bottom line is that universities house a number of undergraduate and graduate education and training programs for turning out professional journalists.

One caveat for that bottom line is that journalism is among the majors that appear regularly these days on lists of 'worst college majors' for your career and financial prospects. According to Forbes, the unemployment rate for recent journalism graduates is 7.7%, and the average salary for recent journalism grads is $32,000 a year.

This brings me to a recent Kiplinger.com article in the popular genre of 'worst college majors' for your career. Kiplinger is of course a major publishing company founded by W.M. Kiplinger, namesake of Ohio State's journalism fellows program, former journalism major. The ten very, very bad, bad college majors on the Kiplinger list are, in order:

10. English
9. sociology
8. drama and theater arts
7. liberal arts
6. studio arts
5. graphic design
4. philosophy and religious studies
3. film and photography
2. fine arts
1. anthropology

For some context, bearing in mind that journalism, not on the list, but the course of study that resulted in the modern-day entity known as Kiplinger.com, a very respectable and very lucrative business and finance news outlet, has a recent graduate unemployment rate of 7.7% and average starting salary $32,000, this Kiplinger article informs us that:

English majors (infamous number 10) who are recent grads have a lower unemployment rate (6.9) and a median starting salary of...$32,000. Drama and Theater Arts recent grads (infamous number 8) have an unemployment rate of 7.8% and median starting salary of $26,000. Notably, the Kiplinger article characterizes such circumstances as 'a brutal combination of low compensation and high unemployment.' Imagine what you could earn were you to major in one of Kiplinger's Ten Best College Majors for a Lucrative Career? If you majored in medical assisting services (laudatory number 10), your unemployment rate as a recent grad would be as low as 5.4%, and your median starting salary would be as high as $43,000 a year. Obviously majoring in medical assisting services over English is, for Kiplinger, a no-brainer. And journalism? I'm sure good old W.M. Kiplinger himself would have traded his journalism training for a guaranteed more lucrative career in medical assisting services, or management information systems (laudatory number 9), or construction services (laudatory number 8), or medical technologies (laudatory number 7). If I'm reading correctly: if your major has the word 'services,' 'technology,' or 'systems' in it, you're good to go. If your major has the word 'arts' in it, you're fucked.

To this point I've put aside the fact that many of these 'majors' are actually just buzzwords and assemblages of actual courses of study that in many cases bear little relationship to actual college programs. 'Philosophy and Religious Studies,' for example, sounds great if your purpose is to write an article demeaning non-vocational majors; but philosophy and religion are usually and broadly two different majors that feed into two very different career paths. Likewise it's easy to lump 'medical assisting services' into one big category, as though training in a top nursing or physical therapy program is the same as doing a two-year associates degree in 'hospital communications.' Once we start seriously splitting hairs--in other words, once we start evaluating courses of study based on the factors that matter most, rather than how closely the names of the courses resemble the names of jobs in general fields of work--it becomes clear that these lists of 'good' and 'evil' majors tell us nothing more than this:

These majors don't sound like any jobs, so these majors are bad for your career.
These majors sound like jobs, so these majors are good for your career.

Beyond the specifics of programs, it's also important to consider quality and reputation of degree, regardless of major. Would Kiplinger by any chance want to compare the unemployment rate of Yale sociology majors to the unemployment rate of entrepreneurial studies majors at Gateway Community College in New Haven? Would Kiplinger dare to compare the average starting and mid-career salaries of 'liberal arts' graduates of colleges like Bucknell, Amherst, or Dartmouth, regularly ranked among the top colleges for graduates' salaries, to for-profit or open-admissions colleges' medical technologies graduates? I'm not suggesting that elite colleges are the only way to go, or even necessarily the best way to go; but judging even the market value of a degree by type of major is even more shallow than judging the value of a degree by institutional prestige. And if we're judging on a shallow basis already by creating a hierarchy of degrees, perhaps Kiplinger should have the courage to fully own the elitism behind its article and note, as any responsible journalistic outlet should, that graduating from Harvard still means more for your pocketbook and your career prospects than graduating with a degree in management information systems.

All of this is of course beside the point, really. The most disgusting thing about this genre of 'worst majors for your career' articles is that they're written by a bunch of narrow-minded, know-nothing business and finance reporters whose job is essentially to tell you that your value system ought to be primarily monetary, and anything else is idealistic or, dismissively, 'a nice sentiment.' For these people, there is no acknowledged, practical middle ground between 'doing what you love' and completely selling out to a mind-numbing job that's clearly in demand because what it demands, in more cases than not, is to be an unthinking body performing a series of alienating tasks for 8-10 hours a day. At the end of the day, you can have a salary of $43,000 instead of $37,000, because you gave up that totally idealistic pursuit of studying something in college that you find interesting. Now, with that extra dough, you can buy things to occupy the rest of the life you've traded for Kiplinger's version of career-minded practicality. Congratulations.

In all seriousness, making a few extra thousand dollars a year is a big deal. It can be the difference between saving for a home, a vacation, a more comfortable retirement, etc., and living check to check. But if we put all of this in perspective--not Kiplinger's warped perspective--even making $32,000 a year is doing pretty well for yourself, better than many of our parents and grandparents ever had it. If you can start out at $32,000 a year as a teacher, a museum curator, a journalist, a theater manager, a graphic designer, an editorial assistant, a grantwriter, an analyst at a nonprofit organization, a community organizer, a social worker, a psychologist, etc., doing something that doesn't make you feel alienated or like you're lending 40-50 hours/week to a cause or purpose in which you feel no stake whatsoever, you're at worst doing pretty damn well for yourself, and at best in the early stages of a truly great career. Maybe as a founder of a highly respected and highly profitable publishing business like, say, Kiplinger.

I feel sad for all the young students and their parents who are consuming these kinds of articles about what college major is best or worst for a career. I feel especially sad for those who will enter a course of study simply because such articles say it's hot, and find that by the time they've graduated the technology has changed or the industry has changed or the economy demands something entirely different. I feel bad for the fact that the United States, whose most far-reaching and lucrative exports are our arts and creativity industries, has begun to lose sight of the bigger picture, to lose sight of the value of not merely creative enterprises themselves, but the relatively expensive time and space it requires to innovate and to achieve great things. I feel bad for the fact that so many of today's college students won't have the opportunity to understand college as perhaps the only time in their lives where they'll be afforded the privilege of learning about something they love, find interesting, find relevant, no matter what job it ostensibly leads or does not lead to. I worry for a country of excellent widget producers, non-thinkers, safe betters. I wonder about those who think that the expert building of scaffolding around substance will somehow come to replace substance itself.

Why I'd Like to Stop Tipping; or, Against Lazy Businesses

One thing about Americans is we tend to confuse generosity and entitlement. Even across the political spectrum, we have a fairly distinct sense of what people should have, but a foggy sense of how people should get it. For example, few would argue that society's poor, indigent, and mentally ill should be left to die in the streets. Some think that we should collect taxes to fund systematic government programs to provide baseline care and sustenance for the poor, while others think that we should rely on the generosity of private individuals and organizations to meet these needs. But in either case, what one group calls a charity and the other an entitlement are both ways of conceiving of the same basic thing as a mixed issue of both.

In some ways this confusion is a positive thing, bespeaking honesty about what I think is a genuine American desire to be helpful and charitable toward the less fortunate. On the other, this confusion is a serious problem that allows us to talk about what people should have but then to choose to do absolutely nothing to provide it.

Perhaps the best example of the kind of confusion of generosity and entitlement that I'm zeroing in on is the American custom of tipping. Though tipping is so commonplace and ingrained in American commerce that we seldom think on a daily basis about why we're doing it, injecting a foreign visitor into the conversation has a way of forcing us to explain and justify the practice, which is considered odd and confusing by most of the wider world. Our responses typically cover two points: 1) tipping is an incentive for better service (and service is generally better, in a loose sense, in America); 2) our service staff are not well compensated for their work in either pay or benefits, and rely on tips in order to earn about minimum wage.

Though I'm inclined to find both of these justifications for tipping to be plausible, I think they constitute a major problem, rather than a distinctly American solution.

Let's consider the first point, service. I am one of those people who regularly says (and means) that I don't pay, or want to pay, for service when I eat at a restaurant. This is to say I don't go to a restaurant to be waited on or to boss people around or to have things brought to me the instant I request them, etc. I go to a restaurant for the food. The service is just a necessary complication of purchasing food in restaurants, a function of the fact that they won't let me pick it up from the kitchen and bring it to my table myself, and a faraway secondary concern (so much so that I often choose takeout places, street carts, and counter service restaurants precisely to avoid the weird and uncomfortable scenario in which someone must bring me the food that I order and tend to me while I'm eating it).

But let's for the sake of argument say that service matters to us, because though I think it's overrated by most Americans, it does truly matter to many. Let's consider that a restaurant is a business. The product that restaurants offer is primarily food, but also service and atmosphere in many cases. This means that restaurants employ both people to prepare the food and people to bring it to us. All of these people, though perhaps working on different components of the product, are under the employ of a single business, the restaurant. The bill we pay at the end of our meal does not get broken down into 'food' versus 'decorator' versus 'service,' no more than when we buy a stapler our receipt says 'alloys,' 'assembly,' and 'marketing.' The point I'm making is that when we eat at restaurants, food is the main draw, but it's also a component of the whole product; which means the cost of service, and all other operating costs of the business, are included in our food bill. We may think of the bill as reflecting a menu price listing for a food item, but those prices are themselves set according to a much more complex formula, which necessarily includes considerations of labor costs, electricity, and other components of overhead balanced against expected revenue and a desired profit margin (to put it crudely).

This leads into the second justification for tipping, which is the low pay of service staff. Let us consider, again, that the responsibility of a business is to pay its labor costs, which in the case of restaurants means paying at least a minimum wage to its service staff. This means that restaurants are being at best disingenuous by advertising a lower food cost, then deferring the remainder of the actual cost of the total product slyly onto the consumer through the expectation of a tip for the service staff; or, at worst restaurants are simply expecting not to have to pay their service employees because customers will be generous enough to pay them instead. Notably, tipping defers the responsibility for getting paid onto the service staff, rather than the employer accepting what should be the employers responsibility to pay their staff).

The obvious question here is a leading one: shouldn't service employees be entitled to pay for their labor? And, as a corollary, shouldn't the employer, not the consumer, be responsible for paying the people it employs?

Quite obviously we would all expect that someone who works a job is entitled to compensation, and that compensating employees is the direct responsibility of the employer. Nevertheless, we've gone so far down the path of confusing generosity with entitlement that for some designated kinds of service, like table waiting, hair cutting, bar tending, cab driving, and the like, we've unthinkingly accepted that it is not the responsibility of the people who own and run these businesses to pay their own employees, but somehow our responsibility as generous, well meaning consumers.

How absurd is this?

In my view, this is just one (albeit extensive) example of what is unmistakably the greatest, most expensive, most pervasive form of entitlement in American society: the entitlement of businesses and corporations. No other segment of society, at either the individual or institutional level, is as entitled and needy and demanding as the business sector. This is so pervasive now that whereas only one political party is likely to advocate for 'entitlement' social programs for the poor or unemployed, both parties in our two-party system regularly step over each other's tongues trying outdo one another over how (small)business friendly they are, how much they'll aim to coddle and hand-hold businesses, how willingly they'll bend over backwards for the sake of businesses, and how dogmatically 'pro-business' they are. Despite how on-the-face-of-it ridiculous is the claim, we've rushed to dub (small)businesses the 'engines of the economy,' and to singularly credit businesses for 'creating jobs.' The idea that any credit for economic growth, including that which is reasonably generated through business, could go to research breakthroughs, educators (for training all those employees), forward-thinking investors in both the government and the private sector, etc., for 'job creation' is anathema in today's climate of coddling and aggrandizing the business sector.

I happen to think that a business can be a great thing when it provides a product or service with honesty and integrity that people honestly want, and when it owns the risks and responsibilities involved in this endeavor. I'd rather pay more for my meal and walk away knowing that tipping isn't expected of me by an entitled business that's deferred its responsibility of compensating its employees onto me, hoping I'll be generous with my own money while forcing its employees to hope the same, or risk not being paid for their work. This is the kind of slippage from a well established definition of a reasonable entitlement (pay for work) into the murky realm of generosity, which is itself a fine thing when it's not exploitatively taken for granted. Sure, when I frequent an establishment and get to know the staff there, I'm inclined to show generosity (in tips) for their willingness to be especially kind and attentive to me; but in every other exchange, why should you or I shoulder this burden? Are we not just feeding irresponsible and lazy business behavior?

Parents, Babies, and Facebook Oversharing

I'll begin this post with an issue that regularly gets lost in discussions about Facebook, Pinterest, and other social media 'oversharing' of photos and information about young children by their parents: I still care a lot about my own privacy.

Even as an educated and fully functioning (no wise remarks!) adult in charge of my own choices to post photos or information about myself online, I try to be guarded and conscientious about what aspects of what I define as my personal life I share online for public consumption. For example, whereas I used to be OK having lots of photos of myself on Facebook, I have since come to the realization that I don't like the idea of others having or using photos of me without my control or consent. Related considerations are, for example: will people download and alter photos of me for their own purposes or to manipulate my (however confined) public image? Will these photos be archived in servers whose content and security are beyond my control, and could end up in the hands of people doing things with such information that I wouldn't condone? To what extent are my photos and data already 'out there' being used for marketing at no cost to marketers? To what extent are companies able to use my photos and data to approximate my consumer preferences or lifestyle choices?

You might think some of this sounds like paranoia, given the extent to which privacy has been eroded in the 'online' era, and oversharing is routine (and here I'm thinking less about what we typically conceive of as traditional privacy infringements, like re. medical records or household affairs, and more about more subtle tracking of our quotidian interests and consumption habits via data mining). But just because we have lower standards of privacy today than perhaps we once did before we all acquired a global audience by virtue of acquiring a cell phone with a data plan, doesn't mean there aren't real privacy issues still in play, even for those of us who choose what to post and what to withhold.

I'm increasingly troubled, for example, by the fact that the consumer is now more or less expected to give away valuable personal data and marketing information for free, not through the conscious signing of a contract, but passively, through the ever-changing and labyrinthine 'privacy' policies of online and social media tools whose very livelihoods depend largely on user-generated value from user-generated information. I wonder if users, disparate and disconnected, are getting a good deal in this marketplace by paying nothing to use Facebook, but at the same time handing over our most valuable commodity to Facebook for free. You might think free is free, until you consider that the resale value of a free 2012 BMW is higher than the value of a free pencil.

This is admittedly an unsophisticated discussion of internet privacy, but it's meant merely to frame what I want to say about parents oversharing baby photos and information. It happens that, for my own selfish reasons, I'm one of those horrible people who thinks your kids are less cute and less interesting than you think your own kids are. I happen to think when they shit and vomit it's less of an event in my day than it is in yours. And the gap in appreciation there is something I'm comfortable stating, even if it offends you to know that I don't love your children as much as you love your children, because they're not my children.

But I understand that you're not posting things about your kids for me. You're posting for you. And that's your right. It's your right so much so that when posting for you, I don't think you should have to think about me or my preferences. Your posts, your kids, your life to share. I get that.

I'm only inclined to offer my opinion about your posts when I think (as is my right, my preference) that what you're doing is insensitive and maybe even potentially harmful to your children, not to me. I'm not writing this to moan and gripe about how I'm slightly and unremarkably annoyed by your baby vomit and nosebleed photos. I understand that I could de-friend or filter my Facebook feed to block them out if I were oh so bothered by them. This really is not about me or my personal preferences with respect to you, and that's the first thing here that you need to understand.

I'm concerned about two related aspects of parental oversharing in the abstract, whether I see this content or not:

First, your children aren't old enough to consent to having their childhood documented on Facebook and Pinterest for all the world to see. Second, by putting their images and information out there without filter and without their consent, you're potentially exposing them and their images to creeps, crazies, and pedophiles, to unscrupulous marketing companies and data miners, and to an archive whose further use and exposure we cannot presently know (remember, just as I can filter my news feed, you can choose to only send baby photos and updates to family and close friends; so don't think I'm suggesting either that the people in your life who matter to you shouldn't care about your life or your kids).

When grumps like me bring this up--this broader issue for the future of privacy and children's privacy, which I would think parents would want to consider, even if they disagree with me--the responses are always the same:

"You can block me from your Facebook feed."
"I love my children; deal with it!"
"If you hate it so much, that's your problem/fuck off/you're mean."
"A (parent) should/has every right to show their love for their children."
"You don't have children, you don't understand how much they mean to me."

These are inevitably fortified with cheers and laudatory remarks like:

"Fuck that guy, you go momma!"
"It's no one's business but your own that you love your children so much" (ironically)
"I love your children too!"
"Your children are beautiful/an inspiration/wonderful/adorable/superlative!"

Frankly, most of this is great on its own. There's nothing wrong with being proud of your children and loving them so much that you can't describe it, that you want to share your pride and love for them, that they are the center of your world. This is perhaps as it should be, or as it always will be, between parents and their young children. It's just that this is all beside the point that when you share photos and information about your children online and with little or no filter for whom you're sharing it with, there's still a legitimate question of whether this is in your child's best interest. Making me the asshole may deflect this point, but it certainly doesn't address it, nor change the reality about which it's meant to raise caution.

In the end, it's certainly your decision. It's not my role to tell anyone how to parent their children, or what to share or not to share. But as someone who is getting to that age where we start thinking about children of our own--no light decision--I do have my own opinions and concerns.

Hipsters Are The Worst

By way of explanation, I live in a trendy urban neighborhood with a few very cool bars. The first thing about hipsters is that they're pretty good at finding the cool bars. And notice I'm not putting any scare quotes around 'cool'; these bars are genuinely cool. They have great decor, not too loud, cheap drinks, decent staff, but one fatal flaw: they (deliberately?) attract hipsters.

At this point I should say that I've read a good 50,000 words on why everyone hates hipsters, which includes variegated attempts at defining 'hipster' and a series of explanations or propositions for why 'everyone hates hipsters.'

Let me simplify this whole belabored genre of cultural commentary by saying this: the reason 'everybody hates hipsters' is pretty straightforward. It's not a question of aesthetics or political affinity. It's fundamental to a thinking human. Hipsters are a subculture or cluster of subcultures whose identity is based on an irreverence for authentic striving, whether it be a commercial corporate/office striving (careerism, consumer culture) or a general disregard for 'trying too hard.' And yet hipster subculture is one of striving to be anti-striving, trying too hard to be insouciant. Everybody hates hipsters because everybody hates hypocrisy.

So when I go to a local bar and some balding guy with outmoded jeans and thick-rimmed glasses happens to be standing directly in front of the door to the stairwell, and when I open that door slowly but happen to hit him in the back with it because his dumb ass is standing in front of a high-traffic door, and he says 'you have to sneak by; GO! Come one man, GO!,' my response can be nothing other than blank stare and vigorous thought processing. What I had just received was attitude, and it came from a man who was thoroughly confident that he was not only in the right, but also in the know. This kind of blind and unsubstantiated self-assuredness is not only the hallmark of the hipster subculture; it's a stain on human progress.

Rhythmic Gymnastics and the Problem of the Olympics

My love-hate affair with the Olympic Games continues as I watch the magnificent display that is rhythmic gymnastics. Without question this is an activity that requires tremendous athletic ability, gymnastic acumen, coordination, body control, grace, flexibility, skill, etc. The dedication of these athletes cannot be questioned, nor their excellence, nor the pride they should feel for representing their countries in the Olympic Games.

Still, despite how vulnerable I am to Olympic spirit, I struggle to fend off the impression that this is an activity that does not belong in this competition. Or at least this is an activity that ought not to be framed as a competition at all.

In truth I'm reluctant to make definitive or sweeping pronouncements along these lines one way or the other; but it seems to me that rhythmic gymnastics crosses a boundary into the realm of performance rather than sport. Even plain old gymnastics, diving, figure skating, and other 'judged' competitions would seem more performative than competitive, with 'artistic' components that, unlike the relative beauty or awkwardness of a runner's form as s/he approaches the finish line, can actually determine who wins the event.

To be sure, all sport has strong performative elements (else we wouldn't be flocking to stars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Chad Ochocinco), and all performance has strong competitive aspects (else we wouldn't have films like Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan). There is no inherent or clear-cut line between sport and performance.

On the other hand, when we construct events around the concept of friendly and sanctioned athletic competition (i.e. the Olympics), perhaps we should pay better attention to the boundaries (or lack thereof) we're implying. To suggest that maybe rhythmic gymnastics is the sort of activity that doesn't belong in the Olympics is not necessarily to slight rhythmic gymnastics, but actually to argue for the fact that reducing it to gold, silver, and bronze judgments is itself a slight.

There is a broader context for these kinds of assessment mismatches. This is time in which awkward assessment protocols are brought to bear on a laughable breadth of activities: not just costumed, choreographed gymnastics performances scored as competition between performers (I use 'performers' here for effect, but as I suggested an athlete can be a performer and a performer can be an athlete), but humanities scholarship evaluated by the standards of 'impact' constructed for science and engineering projects, or visual art installments judged by their surrounding political import, or politicians judged for their construction of narrative.

Ultimately it's a messy world, a world in which evaluative frameworks are regularly misapplied. When watching the range of sports that today fall under the banner of the Olympic Games, I'm reminded that it's of great value to study and evaluate evaluative frameworks themselves.

Notes On Chick-fil-a

Chick-fil-a (hereafter CFA) is a company that makes delicious chicken sandwiches, but they are also run by people who have expressed bigoted views on homosexuality. As a consequence we've seen lots of backlash against the company. People who don't like the views expressed by the company's ownership have organized boycotts and protests, and people who think it's awesome to hold bigoted views on homosexuality (and perhaps also like their chicken) have been patronizing the company as a gesture of political solidarity. This is all business as usual. That said, however, lots of people seem confused about the freedom issues and legal issues that this scenario raises. I'm here to clear that up for you in an uncharacteristically concise manner.

1) Full disclosure: I support marriage equality and gay rights, and I'm disgusted by the remarks of the CFA owners. But I also like their products. And if I stopped buying the stuff of every company whose politics I abhor, I'd be making my own clothing and soap, providing my own energy with a foot-pedaled generator, and firing homemade arrows at pigeons and neighborhood pets for food. Which is why I tend to fight my political battles with my words and actions and not my wallet.

2) No individual or private activist group is violating CFA's free speech by boycotting them or denouncing them. Despite the claims being made by conservatives who have stolen the self-victimization tactic from the left (only without a history of oppression felt by women and minorities to accompany it), there is no First Amendment violation going on here. To say there is suggests a serious misunderstanding of free speech, which is the right to speak your mind, but not to be shielded from criticism and other legal consequences of your speech. The only way this becomes a free speech issue is if city mayors (like Boston's) actually block the company from fair access to zoning licenses; but even there the law suggests that the prospect of having a bigoted company in the neighborhood risks lowering properly value, harming the local economy, etc., such that mayors can actually get away with that kind of thing. The case law allows room for such judgments, though I'm not a big fan of too much leeway here. Nevertheless, the Boston mayor (and others) are well within their rights to speak out against CFA, and this speech in mo way violates CFA owners' own free speech protections.

3) Much of 2 applies regarding freedom of religion as well. CFA is going to get criticized for anti-gay comments, but no one is infringing upon their freedom of religion in making such criticisms. Likewise individuals have the freedom of their own consciences to boycott the company because they don't tolerate bigoted views, religiously based or otherwise. However, if governments do discriminate based on zoning laws, as with the First Amendment discussion above, there may be a freedom of religion case. And there may not. Because...

4) What is actually illegal in many places is discrimination based on sexual orientation. If CFA turns out to discriminate in its hiring policies or it's treatment of employees, then the legal issue becomes a fraught one: not a question of freedom of religion, but of freedom from anti-gay discrimination. And a city most certainly doesn't have to grant zoning licenses to bigoted companies that violate discrimination laws. Mind you, CFA is a a fast food chicken restaurant, not a church or religious organization.

Can Mitt Romney Read?

I do think that one of the most basic, visible, and practical applications of studying literature is the ability to understand words in context. This ability is regularly taken for granted; and yet every four years those who run campaigns for the US presidency place multi-million dollar bets on the probability that you can't understand words in context.

In fact, outside of election years, the entire industry of political punditry is driven by the perpetual, reciprocal struggle of one side trying to persuade an audience by using words to distort meaning while another side tries to put the words back in the context in which they are meaningful. One might even argue that this is true of the entire institution of democracy, the "currency" of which is said to be "information" ("information" being short-hand for that which is by definition without meaning and without context).

The amount of money, energy, and strategy that goes into using words to manipulate meaning, and thus to manipulate rather directly the views of people who elect our leaders to govern, boggles the mind. And while much of this process of misleading is handled by chart-wielding wonks and technocrats, narrative remains the core medium by which political ideas are bought and sold. It should go without saying that the final step in this process is real policy that affects your life in real ways. Again, we tend to be dismissive about the level of verbal bullshit and manipulation in politics; but in the germination cycle of real-life policy, it shouldn't be surprising how close together are narration and application.

The reason I bring this up is because the Romney campaign has been particularly hard at work in exploiting the inability of most Americans to understand words in context.

The first sign we got of this tactic was in a Romney campaign ad back in November. The ad depicted Barack Obama, in a speech, saying "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." In the ad and on the campaign trail after, the Romney campaign blasted Obama for saying this, criticizing him for trying to avoid talking about the bad economy and running away from the issue. Of course, the full quote from the Obama speech, which the Romney ad neglected to show was "Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.'" As we can see, the thing that Romney accused Obama of saying was actually, in context, a thing that Obama's former Republican opponent John McCain was saying; and a thing that Obama was actually criticizing McCain for saying. The Romney ad took the quote out of context to make it look like Obama was espousing an idea that Obama was actually critiquing. The ad, in short, conveyed the exact opposite meaning of the truth.

One of the things we teach in literature classes is that you don't accept the meaning nor the validity of a singular quote without doing the research necessary to place it in context. This context may be textual, as, for example, in determining that a statement is ironic rather than sincere in light of the surrounding text and events in a chapter. It may also be historical, as, for example, when we match the commentary in the text of Gulliver's Travels to Swift's critique of a group of eighteenth-century politicians.

Consider, for example, the frequently quoted poem "The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost. Certainly, if not guilty yourself, you know someone who has quoted the most famous lines of this poem as a celebration of individuality, having the guts to choose the more difficult or uncommon path, bucking the tide, being your own person, and so on:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

If we take a second look at this poem, however, and place this very famous quote in its proper context within the poem, a very different meaning reveals itself to us:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

As you can see, then, the speaker in the poem tells of having taken the road less traveled by "with a sigh"; so our traveler is not a proud individualist taking the difficult path to fortune or success, but instead someone with deep regret. All of you who quote these clipped lines from this poem as inspirational lines are wrong, in other words; you're drawing inspiration based on bad reading, while those who know better rightly understand "The Road Not Taken" as a rather depressing poem that, if anything, suggests that by taking the "road less taken," you're not distinguishing yourself in a positive way, but setting yourself up for longstanding and crippling regret.

But do leave it in your Facebook profile.

We can turn now from Frost to Romney (never thought I'd have the chance to write those words) for the latest installment of misleading language and the inability of "readers" to properly contextualize what has been said.

Yet again Obama is at the center of Romney's attack, stating on video "If you've got a business, you didn't build that."

Of course the Romney campaign has gone to great lengths to milk this clumsy comment of Obama's, claiming that Obama is trying to discredit business owners and entrepreneurs. Romney's camp even held a business forum with a giant backdrop that says "We DID build it."

Though Obama's spoken message comes through more clearly when heard, the full text of his comments is:

"If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. "

Though Romney and Republicans are sloppily assuming the "that" in Obama's remarks refers to "business," such that Obama is saying to people who own businesses that they didn't build the businesses, the "that" in Obama's "you didn't build that" actually refers to the "roads and bridges" referenced in the previous sentence. Obama misspoke here in using "that" to refer to the plural "roads and bridges," and he used awkward syntax, but in context it makes absolutely no sense for the "that" to refer to anything but "roads and bridges." Obama's point here is that if you own a business, you likely didn't build the roads and bridges (and other structural and civic advantages) that aid your business.

Taking the whole of these comments (especially when comparing them to Romney's nearly identical comments about Olympic athletes getting help to make it to the Olympics), it's clear that Obama's meaning is to acknowledge the ways broader society aids and facilitates individual talent and effort, even when individuals deny that they have been nurtured by such societal privileges. On a smaller scale, however, it's also clear that Obama was simply saying in those two controversial lines that most business owners likely didn't build the roads and bridges that benefit the business, not that they didn't "build" the business itself. Sure, because of the sloppy way in which Obama spoke that passage, there is some ambiguity in the lines that the Romney campaign seized on. But after paying a little critical attention to the passage as a whole, the Romney campaign's reading of it is exposed as implausible.

In the end, the Romney campaign and anyone who is unfortunately convinced by its out-of-context quotes are a bit like the misreaders of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken": an embarrassing inability to read renders the opposite meaning of what is and is said in truth. In fact, meaning isn't always as readily apparent as we'd like to think it is or should be.

On the Penn State Problem, The NCAA is a Disgrace

It's telling that what is perhaps the NCAA's most forceful intervention in collegiate athletics and athletics-related institutional misconduct (at Penn State) is also such an utterly colossal fuck-up.

The NCAA's punishment for Penn State consists primarily of a $60,000,000 fine, a ban on post-season football for Penn State for four years, and the loss of 20 scholarships per year over a four-year period.

I'm happy to translate this punishment for you. There will be:

1) a $60,000,000 fine to be born by the University, which, however foolishly, has too much of its finances tied up in its disgrace of a football team. This means that those who suffer most from this fine will be the real student-athletes at the university: people who play softball, track & field, volleyball, soccer, and so on, not as slave labor in a fake-amateur, exploitative professional sporting atmosphere, but as true extracurricular athletes. How or whether this fine will affect the primary mission of the University (purportedly)--to educate students--is something I'm not sure about.

2) a guarantee that instead of not spending time preparing for classes and learning stuff and instead rooting for Penn State in the Bowl Season, the rabid PSU football fans for the next four years will spend time not preparing for classes and learning stuff and instead rooting against Michigan and Ohio State in the Bowl Season.

3) a guarantee that with the loss of scholarships current student football players will have to seriously consider uprooting their lives to transfer to a new institution to play football, along with a guarantee that young people will lose scholarship opportunities, perhaps the one partially redeemable aspect of big-time NCAA football.

As you can see, the NCAA has imposed a penalty designed to make the NCAA look tough on sports and sports-program related misconduct, as though the NCAA, the lousiest rent-seeking fake agency there ever was, would ever truly consider what happened at Penn State as a fine occasion to dismantle itself, pack up, and fade the fuck away into the darkest recesses of the annals of the history of unrepentant shame. But no, the NCAA has found a way to make a terrible situation at Penn State even worse by posturing and penalizing more or less any innocent student and potentially reasonable side effect of the institutional dominance of that bloated beast of a distraction, the Penn State football team.

Not that the NCAA actually has any legitimate power that a university president and board of trustees couldn't swat away with full institutional authority (were any of these people serious about the fundamental mission of higher education, which is to say, higher education); but if it were up to me and I had the power to impose sanctions on Penn State, I'd order the football team to pay that fine to the University itself for education, and for merit and financial need scholarships, never to be spent on football again. I'd demand that the football team operate as a nonprofit entity in relation to the University, such that any and all profits at the end of the season go directly into the general fund, under the discretion of the trustees, administration, and faculty of the university, never to be spent on football again. Instead of taking away scholarships, I'd demand that Penn State honor all of its football scholarships, even if the players decide to quit playing football or transfer to another university (PSU would have to pay for these students to attend another institution up to the cost of PSU tuition). For starters.

Admittedly, however, it's awfully difficult to separate out the football program for punishment when the football program was able to gain such influence over the institution as a whole. I'm sure we'll continue to have a national conversation about what all this means for Penn State football, forgetting entirely that the fundamental issue of a child abuse cover-up was the direct result of an institutional power imbalance that is not unique to Penn State, and whose evils are not confined to sexual abuse scandals.

Non Gun Owners: It's Your Fault

As the fallout of the Aurora, CO movie theater shooting unfolds, those on the left and right will get busy accusing one another of using a terrible tragedy to make a political point about gun rights versus gun control.

Once we get through this layer of bullshit we'll proceed to a second layer, the debate about whether more guns versus fewer guns present in that Aurora movie theater when the shooting occurred would have made the people there more or less safe.

For the record, I'm of the opinion that the ability to purchase hundreds and thousands of rounds of ammunition on the internet, semi-automatic assault weapons at gun shows, and virtually anything that enables you to fire off 60 rounds in a minute makes all of us less safe, regardless of how many holstered heroes happen to be haunting our public entertainment venues.

Others, however, will argue that if only guns were easier to get and more acceptable to carry with us at all times, tragedies like the Aurora shooting could be curtailed or avoided altogether. Says Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America:

'It is very sad that there was a no-guns policy in that theatre and that nobody had thought to take a gun with them anyway.'

'At a church in the same city four months ago something somewhat similar occurred but with a very different outcome. A dirtbag ran his car into another car in a church parking lot and stormed out of his car, killed a woman, and people were leaving the church at that time. So as soon as he did that somebody that had a concealed firearm drew down and killed the attacker, and his slaughter was put to rest immediately. So a clear take-away message from what happened is "don't go into gun-free zones unless you are willing to break the law".'

'The idea that you tell people they've got to go into a public place without a firearm is setting them up for this kind of disaster. Most of our mass murders have occurred precisely where the criminal knew that he would find unarmed victims, and by and large he has been right.'

You will see plenty of these kinds of arguments, which will begin with an example of an incident in which someone besides the attacker was packing heat, and that person managed to take down the attacker. From this point you will hear arguments that, as such an incident demonstrates, the increased presence of guns only makes us safer, and more of us need to be carrying concealed weapons in public for our own, as well as public, safety. After all, violent criminals tend to stay away from those kinds of movie theaters where they know that everyone inside is strapped; they only prey upon the kinds of movie theaters where they figure it's likely that everyone decided not to bring along a lethal weapon.

Such arguments are contestable head-to-head. Presumably, for example, the fact that the US is up there with the likes of Columbia, Jamaica, Mexico, and Nicaragua in per capita gun deaths (and we fight our drug wars in these other countries; not our own) says something about the fact that even if guns make us 'safer' in some sense, they definitely make the consequences of altercation more lethal for us than any comparably developed country in the world.

But once you strip away all the bullshit, all the technocratic arguments by economists and lobbyists for and against greater measures of gun control, and all the sappy stories about modern John Wayne figures gunning down an assailant at the local Church, the real argument of people like Larry Pratt becomes clear.

For Mr. Pratt, the NRA, and the broader gun lobby, the reason some lunatic armed to the teeth with multiple handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, explosives, and enough rounds of ammunition to hold down a fort for an afternoon was able to take over a movie theater filled with innocent people and commit mass murder comes down to you, average citizen: it's your fault. And if only you were a better educated and more reasonable person, and if only your government would allow you even greater access to deadly weapons, you could have prevented this senseless tragedy. If only you would have had the foresight and the freedom to bring your personal-issue Glock 19 along with you and your children to eat popcorn and watch Batman, you could have mowed down this crazy with a flurry of high-minded civic action right to the chest, and saved your fellow moviegoers from this monster.

This is really what the pro-gun argument comes down to. We don't have enough guns because decent, well-meaning people like you are being stopped by your tyrannical government from pursuing the right of lethal self-protection that you were born to embrace. If only we could get rid of Obama and the liberals and gun restrictions, you would all be free storm your local gun shows and Wal Marts and suit up for combat.

The thing is, I'm personally not very interested in the nuclear detente theory of personal responsibility. I'd like to think that, based on what I'm told by gun lobbyists, it would actually be a greater affront to my individual freedom if I had to think about going to the movies or Church or the grocery store or anywhere outside of my home (which, presumably, should resemble a barracks) as though I lived in Fallujah. Well, I'm sorry Mr. Pratt, but fortunately I don't live in Fallujah, and I'm not interested in conceiving of everywhere I go as a potential war zone, for which I should be packing heat and prepared to use lethal force to protect myself and my loved ones. The fact is, we all deserve better than that, and we can do better than that. The average American, I'd wager, avoids bringing a gun to the movies because the average American doesn't want to live that way, and isn't interested in "protecting" themselves with lethal weapons. We choose not to bring guns to the movies because we don't want to bring guns to the movies, not because the government is stopping us, or because we feel an unwarranted social stigma about carrying.

When you argue that a greater gun presence would make us safer, you're arguing smoke and mirrors. It may even be true that, hypothetically, the good guys would have a better chance against murderous gunmen if the good guys thought of themselves as a militia, and 6 in 10 of them were armed, trained, and prepared to return fire. But in reality this isn't the way we live, nor the way we aspire to live. There will always be crazy people who will do what they can to harm others, and there will always be altercations. Our job as a society is to reduce the lethality of these unfortunate circumstances. Our job as a society is to make it harder for a disaffected individual to purchase 3000 rounds of ammunition on the internet, not to make sure that more of the rest of us are purchasing 3000 rounds of ammunition on the internet as a counterforce.

So go on and say what you will about your twisted utopia in which the imminent threat of death for any person at any time, at home, at the movies, at the store, or at a political speech in the public square guarantees that we're all sufficiently wary and suspicious of one another's lethal intentions that we all keep our concealed weapons in their holsters. But for the rest of us in the real world, freedom means something more that that; and we'll work toward more sensible and desirable solutions to the problem of gun violence.

Do We Want A Really Rich President?

I espouse the radical view that the president of the United States should be held to higher standards than the average person. This doesn't mean that presidents and presidential candidates must be demigods who aren't allowed to make human mistakes, but rather that I have a serious problem with what you could call the Sarah Palin criterion for leadership: the more average, the more appropriate.

I admit that my expectations put presidential candidates in a tricky position: they must be at once exceptional and relatable, elite and populist, above the chatter of daily life and yet very much in touch with the chatterers.

The question then becomes: in what specific ways should our leaders be held to higher standards, and in what ways should they be expected to think like and relate to the average person? A related question is: how elite is too elite?

The second question is perhaps easier to address. Consider intelligence or intellectualism on a scale of zero to absolute elite. Many countries in the world, including the US, would and should be happy with leaders who also happen to be scientists, lawyers, doctors, and professors. These are certainly elite professions, but by and of themselves they don't plausibly remove their practitioners from daily encounters with a multitude of social types. Sure, there are plenty of demagogues who would call someone with a PhD in history from a well regarded state university who makes $56,000 a year on 60-hour work weeks an 'elitist,' but in practice such characterizations are pretty thin. There are always exceptions, of course.

But would you want an Albert Einstein for president? A T.S. Eliot?

I would think not (at least I'm not so sure I would myself), because this is the sort of person whose understanding of the world, while perhaps infinitely valuable to humanity, is so distant from that of the average person that the task of leadership on a national or international scale would seem fraught. Of course the Einsteins and T.S. Eliots of the world could very well make an effort to connect with a breadth of people and demonstrate fitness for high-level political leadership--which is why 'type' or 'profession' should never be absolute barriers to leadership--but they would have to show me something else besides the Theory of Relativity and The Waste Land before they could win my vote for president.

If it's not clear, my point here is that while presidents and other high-level political leaders should be exceptional (to the extent that they can cope with the exceptional expectations of an exceptional job), extreme elitism is something that must be countered and explained for viable presidential candidates. The question of whether such a leader can not only handle the rigors of the job but also keep a finger on the pulse of the common constituency is a legitimate question. Could you imagine T.S. Eliot speaking productively on pedagogy and assessment strategy before a panel of frustrated, inner-city school teachers as a prelude to education policy reform? Could you imagine Einstein making personal calls from the Oval Office to the families of lost and wounded military heroes?

It's easy enough to speculate in this way about various levels of intellectual elitism precisely because America's tolerance for leaders with intellects verging on the elite is extremely low; so low, in fact, that we rarely get a glimpse of that kind of elitism in public office. If President Obama, a lawyer (like everyone else in government) and part-time law school lecturer is considered the extreme end of that spectrum, then, and no offense to Obama, we're a long way off from being ruled by T.S. Eliot or Albert Einstein.

Other forms of extreme elitism, however, would seem more acceptable in mainstream American politics. While having attended Harvard (despite how many people in government have attended Harvard) is considered a relatively extreme mark of elitism (such that all those politicians who attended Harvard have to be pretty quiet about that), having a seven-figure annual income is at worst a neutral reality, and at best the cornerstone of a presidential campaign. Elitism in wealth, to extremes that far surpass any intellectual elitism in government, is conventionally taken not as a sign of removedness, but one of industriousness and, ironically, blue-collar values.

We would be naive to think, however, that extreme wealth doesn't have the ability to separate those who possess it from the average person any less than extreme intellectualism. The likes of Mitt Romney, the obvious and until now unnamed subject of this meditation, does not hunch over the kitchen table to do his taxes once a year the way the rest of us do. He doesn't cram into a bus on the way to work every day; and when he flies, it's not on the way to his only vacation of the year, a 5-day trip to a mid-Atlantic beach, in coach between two screaming infants. When he asks you to borrow money from your parents to attend college, he assumes that your parents, like his did, have money to lend. I could go on.

Now when this kind of elitism, which serves to disconnect in very practical terms the likes of Romney from the quotidian lives of average people, is pointed out, they call it class warfare. What pointing out such realities really is, however, is asking the same kind of question that every one of us, left or right, asks about a presidential candidate: can I relate to this person, or are they so removed from my world in their elitism that I can't trust them to govern on my behalf? Conservatives continue to ask the same question about President Obama; the only difference is that they tend to frame it in terms of Obama's intellectual 'snobbery' or elitism.

So I put the question to you: do you want a really rich president, a president who is in terms of financial elitism more like an Einstein or a T.S. Eliot than is Barack Obama?

An important thing about this question is that, contrary to the way it's too often received, there is no implication that being elite is somehow immoral or a bad thing. Say what you will about Romney, but I certainly don't begrudge him his wealth. No more than I begrudge Einstein his intellect (though if given a choice between the two, I certainly think the latter has brought far more to humanity than Romney's business dealings; but that's another topic). No one says (or ought to say) that in our own private lives we shouldn't be free to pursue wealth or poetry theoretical physics to the apex of our abilities and opportunities. The question is simply whether extreme elitism in any form is something we want in a president. Because right now only one presidential candidate occupies the extreme end of the elitism spectrum, and it ain't Barack Obama. As for me, Mr. Romney will need to show me something apart from his financial elitism that qualifies him for the presidency of the United States; and revealing his offshore bank accounts and labyrinthine trail of semi? legal tax avoidance is no start. If only he were offering that much.

Mitt Romney and the Denial of Personal Responsibility

I have written previously about how political ideology takes on strange forms in the US as a result of arguments based not in principles, but in reaction to political opponents. The politically schizophrenic Mitt Romney embodies this phenomenon, perhaps no more so than in his recent denial of anything to do with Bain Capital post-1999, when some of Bain's dealings resulted in bankrupted companies and mass employee layoffs.

I believe Romney when he says that he wasn't involved in the day-to-day running of Bain post-1999. Further to this point, Fortune has found conclusive evidence that Romeny was not managing Bain funds after he left to run the Olympics.

But this is really beside the point. It's also a demonstrable fact that Romney remained on the books as CEO, President, Chairman, owner, and sole shareholder of Bain through 2002, the period after Romney "left" to run the Olympics and during which the Bain business practices and decisions that have since come under fire occurred. Romney can state all he wants that he wasn't involved directly in Bain's post-1999 questionable actions--and it's true--but that doesn't mean that as paid CEO, President, Chairman, owner, and sole shareholder of the company, he isn't responsible for the actions of the company.

One of the main reasons that CEOs and corporate board members get paid large salaries is because, in such roles, they bear significant responsibility for the actions of the company. For example, if some employee you've probably never heard of makes a mistake that results in a $7 billion loss, it's the CEO's head on a platter. Maybe it's your opinion that guys like Jamie Dimon nevertheless make too much money for what they do; but when guys like Dimon and their defenders justify such high executive-level pay, it's important to note that part of that justification is the remarkable level of responsibility that CEOs and board members are expected to bear.

The important thing about this deal, if we're going to conduct it fairly, is that you don't get to take the big bucks but refuse the responsibility that comes with them. This is why, despite being removed from the day-to-day dealings of his company, Mitt Romney must ultimately admit to some responsibility for what Bain did between 1999-2002. Romney received a large salary, the prestige and accordant benefits of being owner, CEO, etc. of the company; he received these benefits and continued to travel back to Massachusetts regularly for board meetings and company business because he was very much involved--or expected to be involved--in the strategic running of the company.

Instead, Romney shirks his responsibility and denies anything to do with the company during the time in which the company was in his own damn name. He could have made a quick series of statements about "yes I wasn't directly involved, but we did make a few mistakes back then; this happens in business; you win some, you lose some; etc, etc." He could have explained himself. He could have had some faith in his own damn message: that his business record qualifies him to turn the economy around. But alas he did what he seems to do best: equivocate, disavow, and pretend that everyone watching is so stupid that we won't pick up on these things.

What's especially shameful about Romney's handling of the Bain attacks is that, as a Republican, he purports to be all about personal responsibility. You might say personal responsibility is one of the cornerstones of Romney's presidental campaign. But when it comes to taking responsibility for his own company, and with it his own highly remunerated duties of strategic guidance for that company, Romney is simply not interested in personal responsibility.

Increasingly, when people like Romney--conservatives who defend and romanticize the accumulation of wealth absolutely and at all costs--talk about personal responsibility, they're talking about you, not them. They'd prefer that you take responsibility for the fact that you weren't born the son of a millionaire businessman/politician and his politician wife, and may not be able to borrow money from your parents to attend college and get a good education. You take responsibility for the misleading mortgage form you were sold by a huckster; you take responsibility for the underperforming schools in your neighborhood, the last round of layoffs at the company you used to work for, the inability of your insurance company to offer you coverage with your preexisting condition (or that sudden illness that resulted in your bankruptcy). By the way, you also take responsibility for that trader who lost your entire retirement savings, that company that failed but also had to be bailed out by the taxpayer, and that industrial farm whose cattle feed off your subsidy while you struggle to put food on the table for your own family.

If we were serious about personal responsibility, our presidential candidates would own up to what goes on under their vast and ornate corporate roofs. The risks associated with making large investments or providing student loans would be accountable to individuals, rather than socialized and born by the taxpayers. And we probably wouldn't be in this financial mess to begin with.

Addendum:
What's also especially sad about this affair is how easily I can see someone like Romney being genuinely vexed and perplexed by the fact that some people are trying to hold him accountable for the actions of his own company. In Romney's world, there probably is a certain expectation that one with as much privilege and corporate experience as himself can simply kick back with what they take as a corporate board sinecure, do nothing, and let the benjamines roll in without a second thought. I'm sorry to report for the likes of Mitt that you can't have it both ways. Either these corporate board members are super important strategic visionaries who deserve the high pay, and so must be accountable for their super important strategic visions; or they're lazy fucks collecting a paycheck for doing nothing, and they should be scolded for being the bums they are.