Google Voice misgivings

A friend invited me to Google Voice a while back. I accepted the invitation because he's my friend, not because I felt I needed the service. Initially, I simply didn't see the point. Having thought about it, and having read David Pogue's enthusiastic overview, I understand better what purpose it serves and why it appeals to people. The gymnastics of "Call me at 111-111-1111 before 11, 222-222-2222 from 11 to 6, and 333-333-3333 after 6--unless I have to pick up Jimmy from soccer practice, which will mean you won't be able to reach me until 7 at the earliest" can be replaced by, "Call me at 555-555-5555," and magic will happen so you can take the call on whatever phone is handiest. As inventions go, I'd have to rank this just a notch or two below sliced bread: it's genius. (I don't believe it's Google's invention, either, although Google is likely the first not to charge customers for the service.)

On the other hand, it gives more of my life -- or at least the information therein -- to Google. That bothers me from a privacy standpoint: Google, and therefore the world, already know more about me than I would like. Moreover, adopting the service would place me even more deeply in thrall to the company. Every time Google simplifies access to and management of another sector of data in our lives, it does so by consolidating control of that data in its servers. Those servers used to hold merely our search queries; now they store our email, photographs, videos, spreadsheets, word-processing documents, and calendars. By positioning itself as a person's de facto personal data hub, Google is becoming as indispensable as the water or power provider. However, I don't know how to forage for my own water or to generate my own electricity; I do know how to manage my own data, and I take a certain pride in doing so. That attitude may turn out to be as anachronistic as clinging to the horse and buggy in the face of the automobile, but there it is.

So I remain ambivalent about Google Voice.

Drinking

What does it say about me that I'm drinking more today than I did when I was eighteen?

It says I'm keeping bad, bad company. Like you, MMJ (no, not My Morning Jacket) and CB, from last night. Or EB from a couple of weeks ago. Or JRL and BT at that Belgian bar before that. Tsk, tsk, tsk -- bad influences all.

Talking past each other

As part of a moralistic essay in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks contrasted the hard work of the fictitious "Ben," a fellow who "labored when others didn't," with those whom "Ben" saw in Washington, DC:

People in Washington spent money they didn’t have. They just borrowed it from the Chinese. People in Washington taxed those with responsible homes to bail out people who’d bought homes they couldn’t afford.

"Ben" feels that neither the mainstream Republican nor mainstream Democratic candidate suits him, so he picks one of the more polarizing candidates on left or right. As Brooks warns:

In a few years’ time, Ben is going to be disappointed again. He’s going to find that the outsiders he sent to Washington just screamed at each other at ever higher decibels. He’s going to find that he and voters like him unwittingly created a political culture in which compromise is impermissible, in which institutions are decimated by lone-wolf narcissists who have no interest in or talent for crafting legislation. Nothing will get done.

Brooks' moral:

[T]hese days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.

I agree that the center is all but unrepresented in this country's governance, but perhaps that's because the center has been all but completely discredited in our national debate -- unfairly so, in my opinion, but discredited nonetheless.

Satirist Stephen Colbert's shtick is discomfiting because it more accurately reflects the failure of our national debate than any of his fans, including me, would like to admit. When he thunders, "Pick a side: we're at war" on every trivial issue, his peremptory challenge to his opponent (not his "guest") is funny because it's absurd -- yet the bluff, discourteous outburst is altogether too representative of the bluff, discourteous way in which "debate" and even "discussion" are conducted today.

We don't speak to each other: we yell at and past each other. We have been encouraged to do so by decades of polarizing rhetoric on left and right. I have my own feelings about which is more responsible, and you do too, but we're past the point where the infamous "blame game" is going to serve any useful purpose.

Actually, that's not true. I know who is to blame, and I think it would do an enormous amount of good if we could shame the guilty party into facing its culpability.

So ... who is it?

Us.

I'll lay a few cards out on the table, just so we have a concrete basis for discussion. I think Fox News and conservative talk show radio are mean-spirited and feed their audiences' basest instincts. I think they love to assume that liberals and leftists are compassionate beyond all reason (the shorthand is "bleeding heart"), and that those liberals and leftists want to use government to take every dollar from every citizen to redistribute according to the warped priorities of every failed socialist/Marxist/Communist theoretician and revolutionary in history so as to bring about some kind of paradise on earth.

It's a terrible caricature of liberalism and progressivism. Yet I can see how some quite rational and concrete fears could underlie this twisted picture.

For instance, somebody with progressive tendencies needs to explain how Social Security and Medicare are going to continue to operate when as far as I can tell, intake of funds is and will continue to be insufficient to cover current obligations for the foreseeable future.

What about illegal immigration? If you don't want to build a border wall, what do you want to do about the problem? (I think a border wall is a stupid idea -- it didn't do much for East Berlin, did it? -- but I'll admit, I don't have any alternative suggestions.) And by the way, can't we admit that it is a problem, by virtue of being illegal? You don't need to impute other motives, such as the handy charge of racism, which is altogether too easy to make and too hard to refute. If you think that the folks who are here illegally should be here, the argument should be about our immigration laws, not about how we enforce them. Changing immigration policy is a tough row to hoe, I'll agree, but that's the situation we're in.

Yet conservatives, it would be nice if you'd admit your world view has a number of holes in it, too. You may think that fighting terrorism should be the government's highest priority, but do you know exactly what that means? How heavily should government control the production and distribution of raw materials that could be turned into an explosive or toxin, for instance? Should there be a national identification card? (For the hard-core "Obama birthers" out there, by the way, if he should be required to show his birth certificate, shouldn't we all?) Should our private communications be subject to random monitoring? (They already are, sadly.) Perhaps the bottom-line question on anti-terror: if fighting terrorism ends up drastically modifying the society in which we live, haven't we done the terrorists' work for them?

What about Grover Norquist's vaunted government-you-can-drown-in-a-bathtub? Is that really what you want, fiscal conservatives? Do you want all our roads to be privately owned? Do you wish for agencies like FEMA not to exist, or would you like them to be privately owned, too? I can't say that the recent actions of BP, or the records of our contractors (like Halliburton and Blackwater) in Iraq, convince me that the profit motive is the best guarantor of good services in all situations.

How's that drug war going? Do you still think the best way to fight it is to quash supply, when that supply is far, far away but the demand is right here? Are you sure that you have all the facts on marijuana and its real dangers relative to, say, alcohol, or tobacco? Is there anything we could learn from our experiment with Prohibition nearly a century ago?

None of the points I've raised has an easy solution. We'd do well to stop pretending that they do, and to stop vilifying "the other side" when they object to our pet schemes on rational grounds. That's how we might rediscover "the center." We're never going to stop arguing (nor should we), but let's at least try to make the arguments go somewhere by figuring out how to listen -- and to talk -- to one another again. And let's not wait for those increasingly mythical "moderate politicians" Brooks seeks.

Thoughts on the Mehserle verdict

Former BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police Officer Johannes Mehserle was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter yesterday.

Mehserle shot and killed BART rider Oscar Grant on New Year's Day 2009. A number of riders witnessed the shooting, including one who captured the incident with a cell phone video camera. The video was played repeatedly on local newscasts and undoubtedly contributed to the decision to change the trial's venue to Southern California.

The footage convinced many that Mehserle shot deliberately, so the verdict was something of an unwelcome surprise. A protest erupted in downtown Oakland earlier tonight, reportedly degenerating into looting of at least a couple of businesses.

I don't understand how you can justify trashing somebody's business (or home, for that matter) when you're supposedly angry about a verdict that is totally unrelated to that business. It happens all over the world, so it must be something quite fundamental in human nature that prompts this stupidity -- but it's sad that innocent parties whose buildings and property happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time end up paying for our primitive behavior.

However, what prompted me to comment on this case was not the violent protest, but the implication that "the system" once again failed a black victim:

John Burris, an Oakland attorney representing Grant's family, decried "a true compromise verdict."

"The system is rarely fair when a police officer shoots an African American male," Burris said. "No true justice has been given." Grant was African American and Mehserle is white.

Grant's uncle, Cephus "Bobby" Johnson, said that "we knew from the beginning that we were at war with the system. ... We have been slapped in the face by this system that has denied us true justice."

I didn't follow the trial so I don't know where Burris or Johnson saw bias. However, it's likely their remarks encompass the jury, which included no African Americans. This dearth at first blush lends credence to Burris' and Johnson's accusations. Yet how likely is it that the jury consisted only of racists and spineless cowards content to be led by those racists?

Perhaps Burris and Johnson see the non-African American community not as crudely racist, like the Ku Klux Klan, but as blindly racist -- unaware of their own bias, yet biased all the same. That might indeed account for the verdict.

I think there's another possible explanation. Mehserle asserted that he mistook his pistol for his Taser, pulling the wrong weapon out. This may sound ludicrous to you; I'm sure it sounded unbelievable to Grant's family. However, there's no way to know how it sounded to the jury.

More generally, it's next to impossible to have the same perspective as the jury without being a juror. Jurors see and hear only what the trial judge permits: they're not necessarily present for the entirety of the trial. They are supposed to ignore news reports about the trial while they are empanelled. Their deliberations are guided by specific restrictions, embodied in the instructions they receive from the judge.

I served on the jury in a murder case. None of us had wanted to serve: we all had jobs and lives that would suffer, and I'm sure more than a few of us didn't want the burden of deciding someone else's guilt or innocence. Yet once we were picked, we took the oath seriously. If, like me, your closest exposure to a murder trial is a rerun of Law & Order, there's something about the atmosphere of the courthouse and a trial that makes it unthinkable to be anything but earnest and honest.

A few of my fellow jurors were jocular enough at lunches and during breaks in the trial, but as soon as we got down to deliberating, we all became deadly serious. None of us was a lawyer, but we spent a fair amount of time pondering and parsing the language of the jury instructions. There were fine distinctions to be made between the charges of murder and manslaughter, and even finer distinctions between first- and second-degree murder, and voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. We rehashed the facts adduced at trial, and had to determine who was to be believed and to what degree. At times, our deliberations became heated: we would disagree over how to interpret an instruction, or whether a witness had asserted some fact, or, worst of all, what to do about seemingly critical missing information.

As in the Mehserle case, the defendant in our case was convicted, but not for the highest count of first-degree murder. According to subsequent news accounts, the victim's family was disappointed and angered by our decision. Not all of us jurors were thrilled by it, either. Yet whatever our shortcomings as jurors and as a jury, we did our best to render a verdict that accorded with the facts we had and the instructions we were given.

The Mehserle decision isn't what a lot of people expected or wanted, but not being on that jury, I can't second-guess it.

Don't write like this

Most of what I read is written for a reasonably intelligent and mature audience. Perhaps that's why this article, listing things not to ask your t(w)een offspring, struck me so forcefully: I seldom encounter articles aimed at adults that sound as if they were written by a (stereotypical) teenager.

Believe it or not our kids even like us and want us in their lives! (Really!!!!)

Four exclamation points? I can't take seriously any writer who thinks this is a good way to denote emphasis.

More US kids than anywhere in the world believe ...

There's no way to make a construction like that work. "More kids in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world believe ..." is closer to the mark, but it's still awkward. Something like, "More so than anywhere else, kids in the United States believe ..." might have worked better.

Neuro-imaging confirms that their pre-frontal cortex is still developing – the exact place where decision-making and impulse regulations are forming.

Why doesn't "the exact place where ..." immediately follow "pre-frontal cortex"?

Tweens are discovering the “opposite sex” and have their first “crushes.” When there’s a friendship tiff or breakup with a “first love”, ah the anguish! Though the anguish may seem juvenile, don’t dismiss your kid’s hurt and tell her to “Get over it.”

Overusing quotation marks seems to be a curse of the age. Aside from denoting text directly copied from another source, the main, if not only, reason to use them is to mark off words or phrases requiring special attention, often because they are unusual and are being introduced to the reader. What is so unusual about the phrase "opposite sex"? Why quote "crushes" and "first love" but not "friendship tiff," a phrase not in common use? (And since that last sentence won't stand by itself without the quoted phrase, "get" shouldn't be capitalized.)

If the article were aimed at the t(w)eens under discussion, that might excuse, or at least explain, its breathlessly silly tone. However, it's aimed at their parents.

The author, Michele Borba, holds a doctorate in education. I assume she knows how to write well. I hope this wasn't a representative sample of her best effort.

Of Mice and Magic is 30!

It's hard to believe it has been thirty years since the publication of Of Mice and Magic, one of the earliest histories of animation in the United States.

I ran across this book in 1980 or 1981 quite by accident. The paperback edition's distinctly and delightfully cartoony cover first caught my eye, but both eyes bugged out when I read the subtitle: "A History of American Animated Cartoons." I couldn't believe such a book existed. Who would have expected anyone would write a book on cartoons? I mean, I'd always hoped for one, but never imagined I'd see that hope fulfilled.

The store's only copy was torn on the spine, but I bought it anyway. It ranks as one of my favorite spontaneous decisions ever.

If you aren't a fan of old cartoons, it's next to impossible to explain this book's appeal (I know: I've tried). But if you are a fan, you must have this book. It is, quite simply, the best, most engaging overview of Hollywood cartoons ever written.

For my part, it changed my life -- not by turning me into an animator or filmmaker, but rather, by validating my nascent, hardly articulable sense that these cartoons were something special. Have you ever had your self-confidence boosted by finding that others shared, or exceeded, your passion for an arcane hobby? Suddenly, you were no longer a singular freak. More accurately, you might still have been a freak in the eyes of the community at large, but you were no longer alone. That kind of validation is powerful, especially for a socially awkward teen.

Today Leonard Maltin is far better known as a film critic at large, and Jerry Beck is a respected animation historian and booster of cartoons of all stripes. My collection of animation books is larger than I ever thought it would be, and includes additional tomes by each of the aforementioned. But even after thirty years, their collaboration on Of Mice and Magic stands head and shoulders above all the others in my affections. Michael Barrier might have been the first to shine a long-overdue light on the history and background of old cartoons via his seminal zine Funnyworld (and Barrier has started, at least, to share some of the long-defunct magazine's articles), but for those not already part of the then-small community of animation devotees, Of Mice and Magic remains the book that started it all. Messrs. Maltin and Beck, to you I offer congratulations on the book's thirtieth anniversary -- and my deepest thanks.

Steele on Afghanistan

RNC chairman Michael Steele's claim that the conflict in Afghanistan was a "war of Obama's choosing" is arguably the worst underestimation of the collective recall and intelligence of the public that any Washington politico has made in recent memory. Dana Perino and Rudy Giuliani have both tried to burnish Bush 43's time in office by falsely claiming that the country was safer in that time than it is now, and let's not get into Dick and Liz Cheney's nightmarish surrender to terror in the name of fighting terrorism (yes, it's such a good idea to live in mortal fear of terror because that's exactly what the terrorists don't want us to do -- geez, how bereft of vision and genuine love of the country's ideals do you have to be to embrace such a counterproductive and self-defeating strategy as that?), but Steele's idiotic remark could only be accepted at face value by people whose only functional brain component is the medulla oblongata.