Month: November 2013

Yesterday, Congressman Mike Michaud, the frontrunner for governor of Maine, came out:

I wasn’t surprised to learn about the whisper campaigns, insinuations and push-polls some of the people opposed to my candidacy have been using to raise questions about my personal life. They want people to question whether I am gay.

Allow me to save them the trouble with a simple, honest answer: “Yes I am. But why should it matter?”

That may seem like a big announcement to some people. For me, it’s just a part of who I am, as much as being a third-generation mill worker or a lifelong Mainer. One thing I do know is that it has nothing to do with my ability to lead the state of Maine.

Mark Joseph Stern thinks that “Michaud’s announcement isn’t likely to sink him—or boost him”:

In 2012, Maine voters approved same-sex marriage, with 53 percent of voters on board, in a historic statewide referendum. (Mainers still support marriage equality by that same margin.) Most of the “no” votes on the referendum came from Michaud’sconservative-leaning congressional district, the second most rural in America, while the “yes” votes sprang mostly from the urban, coastal pockets in the state’s 1st Congressional District. That shouldn’t be a problem for Michaud: In the governor’s race, the congressman will be vying for these urban votes in addition to his home district’s votes. These pro-gay votes are likely to outweigh any anti-gay votes from Maine’s rural interior.

If Michaud’s sexuality won’t be a problem for him, it almost certainly will be for Maine’s current Tea Party-backed Gov. Paul LePage. LePage, a social conservative, is known for his churlish ad libs, including a possible anal rape joke about a Democratic state senator.

Keith Wagstaff adds:

[R]oughly one third of America still wouldn’t vote for a candidate who was openly gay. The trend, however, is clear: Americans are more willing to accept LGBT politicians now than they ever have been before. Michaud is betting that those changing attitudes will send him to the governor’s mansion in Maine. Other potential Senate and gubernatorial candidates in the LGBT community will be watching closely.

A reader writes:

While Stanley Milgram may have misled us, in science, the question is whether the results can be replicated. So isn’t the real question whether Milgram’s thesis was replicated in later studies? Like this one, for instance. Or this one. Of course, there have been attempts to replicate Milgram that challenged the results, but narratives like the one posted seem to perpetuate the notion that one experiment gives us a scientific conclusion, just as the notion that finding errors in an experiment debunks the conclusion. The results come in the process of replication or failure to replicate results. The deeper flaw was that we took one experiment to be the authoritative word on a question, instead of seeing it as one piece of a puzzle.

Another reader:

I’m a social psychologist, so I have some background in the substance of Milgram studies. I’ve not read Gina Perry’s book, but I’ve heard her talk about it and I’ve been extremely unimpressed by her take on the meaning of the research. One example of a thoughtful response to Perry’s book is this review by Carol Tavris:

“Deep down, something about Milgram makes us uneasy,” Ms. Perry writes. There is indeed something that makes everyone uneasy: the evidence that situations have power over our behavior. This is a difficult message, and most Americans have trouble accepting it. “I would never have pulled those levers!” we cry. “I would have told that experimenter where to go!” Ms. Perry insists that people’s personalities and histories influence their actions. But Milgram never disputed that fact; his own research found that many participants resisted. “There is a tendency to think that everything a person does is due to the feelings or ideas within the person,” Milgram wrote. “However, scientists know that actions depend equally on the situation in which a man finds himself.” Notice the “equally” in that sentence; Ms. Perry doesn’t.

“Milgram’s definition of obedience,” she writes, “despite his arguments about the power of the situation, seemed like a life sentence, as if people were frozen forever that way—fixed, stuck, like butterflies on a pin.” By the end of her investigation, she is transformed: “I had traded my admiration of Milgram for a better view of people.” These remarks would be naive coming from a nonprofessional; from a psychologist, they are perplexing. Milgram’s message, which has stood the test of time and replications, is precisely that people aren’t fixed and stuck like butterflies on a pin. People aren’t cruel by nature. To accept the findings of the experiments doesn’t require us to abandon a “better view of people”—it requires us to understand that ordinary people are capable of both obedience and rebellion, conformity and heroism. Forget Nazis; think of workers who bend to the will of employers when told to ignore evidence that their product is unsafe.

Update from a reader:

Radiolab did a really great episode (at around 9 minutes) on an alternative interpretation of Milgrim’s experiments.  They consider some of the discarded evidence and actually have a somewhat different explanation: that although the subjects were administering deadly shocks, they weren’t motivated by obedience per se, but hoped their participation furthered science.  I thought this was a rather compelling interpretation, because it addresses why anyone would trust the authority of someone in a lab coat in the first place.  In other words, that it wasn’t blind obedience.

Stephanie Simon reports on a fierce fight in a Douglas County, Colorado, “which has gone further than any district in the nation to reshape public education into a competitive, free-market enterprise”:

The conservatives who control the board have neutered the teachers union, prodded neighborhood elementary schools to compete with one another for market share, directed tax money to pay for religious education and imposed a novel pay scale that values teachers by their subjects, so a young man teaching algebra to eighth graders can make $20,000 a year more than a colleague teaching world history down the hall. Conservatives across the US see Douglas County as a model for transforming public schools everywhere.

Kris Nielsen has more on the implications of today’s election:

Douglas County schools are not urban and they’re not failing — not a usual target for privatizers — and we’re seeing a different strategy at play.

The drive from the current board is to create “niche” schools, where students are tested, matched to a future career based on the scores, and then eventually placed into a niche school where they fit best, based on those criteria.  Parents aren’t okay with that.  And neither are most community members, since it is probably the least democratic way to run a school system that we’ve seen so far in this country. So, we have four challengers running for school board, and the grassroots movement to get them elected has been very active.  Hundreds of volunteers spend every hour of free time canvassing, picketing, attending meetings and forums, and speaking to anyone who will listen. Apparently, it’s working, because the “other side” is getting nervous.  So nervous, in fact, that they’ve decided to call in the cavalry.

Ravitch counts the biggest elephants:

The Koch brothers have contributed $350,000 to the free-market campaigners. They would, if they could, privatize all of what we now know as public education. The current board, fighting to maintain control, hired conservative icon Bill Bennett for $50,000 to be a consultant. It also hired Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute to write a paper praising the district’s initiatives, for $35,000.

Another top donor, Jeb Bush, makes his case in National Review:

The new board decided that striving to be the best in Colorado no longer was sufficient. Instead, it set a goal of competing “against students across the nation and the world for the most sought-after careers.” Now, Douglas County is taking on Massachusetts and Maryland, Finland and Singapore. … The lesson here is a valuable one. Our students are falling behind students from other nations in an academic race that will determine our place in the 21st-century global economy. Our children are, at best, mediocre performers on international assessments in science, math, and literacy. We have become complacent, and complacency is the bridge to stagnation and mediocrity. It can no longer be an option for kids at any academic level. Reform is often associated with turning around failing schools. But in Douglas County, it is being used to turn good schools into great schools. …

[T]he Denver Post recently endorsed all four [conservative] reformers in an editorial titled “Retain innovation in Douglas County schools.” The paper called the district’s market-based reforms “an innovative plan that respects teachers and is sure to be imitated.” You can appreciate how threatening such enlightenment is to union bosses. And the Post is hardly a conservative outlet, having twice endorsed President Barack Obama.

Update from a reader:

We lived in Douglas County until our youngest graduated from high school in 2012. Both of our sons got a damn good education. Our sons both had freshman college classes that were not as difficult as their high school classes. Over the 12 years we were there we ran into a few teachers that were not so hot, but I defy anyone to find a profession that does not have a few members who are not peak performers. On the whole, those teachers were putting their hearts, souls and knowledge to work to help my kids.

I watched this new school board come in and they made it very clear that they are against public schools. They started an experimental program to provide vouchers, assuring one and all that the schools getting the money would comply with the standards and testing required of the public schools. That went by the wayside as soon as the first religious school said “uh, no. We’re not going to comply with those standards.” The school board paid out the money nonetheless.

The school board brought in a new superintendent a couple of years ago. The only thing that they said about her qualifications was that she cut $40 million from the Tucson AZ school system budget – but she did that the year she was hired by Douglas County, so there was no opportunity to see how those cuts affected the students. It was enough that she had shown she could cut the budget. Nothing was said about quality during the announcement of her hiring (believe me: I was scoping out everything I could find from the school board).

This school board has taken a great school district, with great teachers and decimated the teaching force. When we returned for a visit this year, teachers were openly talking about getting out and how awful things were generally in the district. As my husband said “it’s not surprising they would be that open with you because you volunteered all the time and they know you. But me? They don’t know me well enough to be saying things like this.” And teachers I didn’t know well were saying the same thing.

In the end, I am so glad that my sons made it out and to college before the board went even crazier. It makes me sick to see a board that so hates public education in charge of public schools. And they are destroying what was a great school system.

And that bit about the Denver Post recommending Obama? Hey, look at who Obama was running against. It wasn’t a reach for a conservative paper to endorse Obama over Palin and Romney.

Malcolm Forbes observes that in Berlin, “the powers-that-be have ensured that the dead live on”:

We can make a distinction here between celebration and commemoration: Berlin celebrates the dead through its plentiful street-names and statues but commemorates them in the form of plaques and memorials. And due to the horrors of the 20th century, Berlin is, unquestionably, a city of memorials.

Malcolm praises Zerstörte Vielfalt (“Diversity Destroyed”), the 2013 Berlin initiative that “highlights the social and cultural diversity that was dismantled and destroyed in Berlin by the Nazis”:

Especially hard-hitting are the open-air portrait exhibitions or urban memorials. There are 11 in total, dotted over the city in specific areas. Each is comprised of a cluster of striking advertising columns — so-called Litfaßsäule, actually invented by a German printer — which give accounts of Nazi-era episodes relevant to that locality, together with photographs and potted biographies of the many that suffered under the regime. Of the 200-plus portraits, some are famous figures like Einstein, Brecht, and Hannah Arendt, who were persecuted but became exiled survivors. Most of the portraits, however, are those of victims, their lives prematurely snuffed out.

[T]hese exhibitions have two vital new things to say. Firstly, and more directly, they provide histories of lesser known victims, restoring existences that the Nazis tried to permanently expunge from collective memory. Secondly, and more indirectly, they reveal a new German mindset, perhaps a generational shift, one that is now — for want of a better word — more comfortable at tapping into its calamitous past, as willing to commemorate untold dead in the street as to name that street after a renowned 19th-century philosopher.

Previous Dish on German notions of “memorial” here, here, and here.

(Photo of Zerstörte Vielfalt memorial by Allan Grey)

Tressie McMillan Cottom asks herself, “Why do poor people make stupid, illogical decisions to buy status symbols?”

For the same reason all but only the most wealthy buy status symbols, I suppose. We want to belong. And, not just for the psychic rewards, but belonging to one group at the right time can mean the difference between unemployment and employment, a good job as opposed to a bad job, housing or a shelter, and so on. …

I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel colored cape or knee-high boots but I know that whatever she paid it returned in hard-to-measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double-take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a form that you would not have known to ask about? What is the retail value of a school principal who defers a bit more to your child because your mother’s presentation of self signals that she might unleash the bureaucratic savvy of middle class parents to advocate for her child? I don’t know the price of these critical engagements with organizations and gatekeepers relative to our poverty when I was growing up. But, I am living proof of its investment yield.

Geoffrey O’Brien is impressed by millennial composer Nico Muhly’s new opera, Two Boys, a whodunnit set in early 2001 and centered around the intrigue of IMs:

It is hard to imagine anything less songlike than the terse and truncated utterances of an anonymous Internet chat room, or indeed of an environment less suggestive of music than the Internet itself. The Net’s openness to an infinity of destinations seems to encourage a mood of disembodiment and isolation, at least as rendered in this opera. … Two Boys challenges itself to find music in that multiconnected zone of disconnection.

The premise here—the inexplicable stabbing of a young boy by a slightly older boy he met online—is altogether grim, an anecdote (apparently, as they say in movies, “based on a true story”) that could almost serve as a cautionary tale for parents wary of their children’s computer use. The parents here are as clueless as they can be, unsurprisingly since we are at the turn of the twenty-first century, that remote period, in an implicitly drab and emotionally worn-out English urban milieu.

Anne Midgette came away less impressed:

[Muhly’s] most ambitious and innovative goal, in “Two Boys,” was to create a musical portrait of the Internet, and his best ideas came in the scenes, largely choral ensembles, where he set out to realize this, notably the chorus when Brian first enters the chat room, singing the same brief repeated phrases (“Are u there? Are u there?”) over and over, in overlapping driving patterns. Spotlights penetrated the black mesh facades of [designer Michael] Yeargan’s sets, revealing people sitting alone at keyboards, while around them the projections whirled in geometric patterns offering images of connectedness and fragmentation, images evoking helixes and atomic models and the lights of night cities seen from space, all glowing and changing and presenting the enormity and fear and exhileration of the unknown.

But the idea didn’t develop significantly, musically or dramatically or visually, beyond the first chorus, apart from the addition of elements illustrating the treacherous terrain online: Brian stumbles across a gay sex scene, adding to his mounting sense of dread and titillation and uncertainty. I don’t think Muhly quite meant to signal “Internet bad!” in such broad terms, but for all of the inventiveness of his initial idea, the opera is oddly straitlaced and old-fashioned in its depiction of online life.

Robinson Myer has more on Muhly’s ability to represent the digital world:

Here is how Two Boys represents instant messaging: Brian sits at the right side of the stage, in his room, behind his computer, and the character he’s chatting with stands at the left. Towers loom behind both of them; on the towers are the simulacra of chat windows. The words he types, and the words his companion types, appear on the towers behind both of them simultaneously. … The effect is this: We see what Brian imagines. We see the words appear on his screen, the person he imagines typing them, and the screen he imagines, too.

[Mark] Grimmer and [Leo] Warner, the designers, very much intended this. “It’s very important that the seeming reality of the situation is shown physically onstage. Brian genuinely believes he’s having these interactions with these characters,” says Grimmer. “We wanted to keep reminding people that there is something really banal about the experience of having a conversation online. It’s about letters appearing on a screen, but yet from out of that, it’s as much about imagination as it is about anything else.”