But the trains are fantastic

Given my earlier whinge about airlines, it is only fair that I say how fantastic the trains are. Earlier this week I went to see Professor Hibbard at the University of Oregon (about 500 miles down the coast). I went by train. They were fantastic. The cost was about 60 quid return, which is substantially less than the UK (unless you booked about 3 months advance at 2 o'clock in the morning on alternate Wednesdays). I took business class out as I intended to work on the train. But frankly the coach class I took back was as good as English First Class. You had in train movies if you wanted, AC power points for lap tops in Business and Coach. And the stations were something else. All polished wood and tile, beautifully clean and well cared-for.

I was massively impressed with Grand Central when I was in New York. My experience suggested that its elegance (if not its grandeur) is not so atypical.

For the record my meeting went well, and I continue to make pleasing progress. Eugene is an intriguing little town, and the University campus itself is a genuine delight.

Swearing

One of the things that has surprised us is the very different approach to television censorship. There is no watershed as one would recognise it in the UK. Therefore all manner of theoretically adult material can be seen at tea time. At the same time there is an extremely high tolerance to violence, but none to sex or language. Any female nipple will be routinely pixellated (giving the bizarre impression of a Barbie doll - which is frankly far more distasteful). Any even mild cuss will be bleeped or (far more irritating) replaced with something else – making the dialogue meaningless.

This leads to some deeply odd juxtapositions. Fargo was on the box a couple of weeks ago and the scene where Steve Bucsemi gets half his face shot off by William H Macy's father was left uncut in terms of the gore and gristle, but the resultant torrent of (let's face it, understandable, if perhaps not intelligible) f-words turned into “fudge”, “freaking” and “fruity” (fruity??!). So presumably the generation of murderers being raised will at least not be foul-mouthed.

Even more bizarre was the fact that policies to what can be shown and when seem to be entirely inconsistent and private to each network rather than operating consistently across them. So one night at 7.30 Louise was flicking through and found Scarface on (as in the Brian de Palma/Al Pacino version, as in the people being hacked to death with chainsaws version). At 10 that night we came upon Ferris Bueller on a different channel and settled down for a bit of adolescent nostalgia, only to find "damn", "screw" and "hell" being edited out – deeply strange in the circumstances (not to mention unintentionally hilarious).

I'd really like this to be a little vignette that illustrates cultural differences about the conception of morality at individual rather than societal levels. However, I expect it's simply the result of reactive policy setting in response to inconsistently received and recorded viewer complaints.

Tempting faith in an American Theocracy

The nexus of faith and politics part one. I'm working up to writing more coherently about this as it seems to me important in understanding the development of policy here. It is also something which I am profoundly interested in, and have always been troubled by. But to warm up, a vignette.

Before I left, my men's group at church kindly gave me a book called American Theocracy written by Kevin Phillips. Phillips is an ex Republican strategist and was, I believe, a staffer in the Nixon White House. He is not, therefore, a typical critic of the Bush administration. He is, nevertheless, a trenchant one. His thesis is essentially that the Bush administration has been a “perfect storm” of fundamentalist religion having far too much power, manipulation of policy to suit the needs of oil men, and excessive borrowing at federal, corporate and individual level (which is clearly a great crime for fiscal conservatives). Such a combination he sees as analogous to the end stages of all historic empires from Rome to Britain and hence presages bad times ahead for America. Part of his thesis is, of course, the millennial obsession of the end-timers and its influence on Republican middle east policy (which he sees as disastrously one-eyed).

In contrast, the last two weeks have seen much discussion over here about the release of another book, Tempting Faith by David Kuo. Kuo is interesting, he was the deputy director of the faith-based initiative office inside the Bush White House, the department responsible for hiving off the provision of social services to church groups. Now I think this is a bad policy for a whole host of reasons, but, to be fair, Kuo seems to have been sincerely motivated by a concern for the poor: and to be someone who could be held up as evidence that “compassionate conservative” is not always an oxymoron. He was also either a bit naïve going into work in the White House or he has had some sort of crisis of conscience since. Kuo has raised interest and hackles in equal measure by exposing the dishonesty, cynicism and hypocrisy with which the administration viewed and used the faith based programme.

From what I have seen from news reports and reviews of the book, his critique is basically four-fold.

1 The Republican machine publicly lauded the more notorious leaders of the religious right while privately holding them in contempt. They had no concern for the religious right's agenda but wanted their votes.

2 The president deliberately lied about a new $8bn dollars being made available for faith based welfare programmes, when this money was in fact already available to the programmes – the actual new money was less than 1 per cent of $8bn.

3 The mega tax-cut for the mega-wealthy was paid for by stopping the very federal programmes that were actually funding faith based welfare, and so the poor suffered.

4 There was political chicanery around how the office was used which was designed to help Republicans in close seats.

Of these charges, 1 and 4 seem to me of lesser significance. Of course, politicians will seek to exploit programmes to win marginal seats, name one place where that doesn't happen. I also detect a distinct whiff of hypocrisy around the horror that has greeted the news that Rove (or was it Rove's office) thought Pat Robertson was “nuts”, Jerry Falwell “goofy” and James Dobson “out of control”. Er- I think that's what most people think actually, particularly the media commentators saying how outrageous it was that Rove said it.

The second accusation is again fairly unsurprising, double counting new money is kind of de rigeur; although there is something pretty distasteful about the casual way that Bush apparently decided to lie.

The third charge seems to me the really serious one. This is the substantive policy decision, this is the substantial moral issue. To take from the poor to give to the rich is a serious issue, something which is profoundly destructive to individuals and to society – especially in a society with such a flimsy welfare safety net as the US. There is also something ironic, if not nauseating, about trumpeting your Christian credentials and then ignoring Amos and Micah, even Christ himself (eg Luke 6:20-26 ) while taking from the indigent to give to the “haves and have mores”.

Leaving that aside, the complex issue is who is right, Phillips or Kuo? Logically, it cannot be true that the administration is dominated by dangerous fundamentalists but regards them with contempt at the same time. It cannot be the case that the religious right's agenda is distorting policy and being ignored simultaneously. So who is using who?

I suspect that the answer is that both are seeking to use the other. 'Twas ever the case with coalitions. There is little logical common ground between social authoritarians and small-government libertarians, beyond a dislike of “big government” (although both mean different things by this). Who has most successfully used the other? Well probably the administration (notably the 2004 election victory – although one needs to be a little careful about how this is interpreted). Does the Kuo book represent a severing of the religious right's umbilical link with the Republican Party? I think it is unlikely that the GOP will get such a large proportion of self-identified conservative evangelicals voting for them at the mid-terms, but I think the situation is far more fractured and less monolithic than one assumes from England. I also think that some of these terms need translation to be properly understood.

So was Phillips wrong in his assessment? Not entirely, but doing him justice will require a lot more time and space than I have here.

karmic physicality pt2 - I rest my case

Jimmy Stewart redux








vs

watch out kids, too much right-wing nuttery and you could look like this

American TV proves the theory of karmic physicality (pt 1)

One of the things that you have to write about being an Englishman in America is the differences in TV culture. We have a "basic" cable package with around 80 or so channels. Coming from a five terrestrial channel home (we have resisted the blandishments of Murdoch and hmmed and hahed over Freeview) this is something of a shock. There are numerous essays to be written about the shopping channels, the televangelist channels, the bizarre approach to censorship etc etc.

Its worth confining my comments here to the fact that, while it may be due to the sheer number of channels, there is almost always something worth watching. On any given evening there will almost certainly be two episodes of Friends, two of Seinfeld, two of Frasier and one of Monty Python. There is also, every weeknight, two hours of left-ish satire on primetime television. Actually, if you take the view that Faux News is a post-modern ironic joke you can make that six, but let's assume for the sake of argument that Hannity, O'Really?, Coulter and the rest of those jokers are being serious.

Louise and I have become particularly fond of a nightly show called Countdown with Keith Olbermann. There is really no equivalent to this on British television. It sits somewhere between Newsnight and Bremner, Bird and Fortune. It's a well-researched news review show, gossipy about politics (you need to watch it a bit to get a sense of the players in the soap opera), but serious about abuses of power, and scathing of celebrity culture. Olbermann also has a running feud with Fox News (he was a former Fox Sports sportscaster - although whether this has anything to do with it I don't know).

Apart from its odd format there are two other interesting elements to it. The right consider it to be very left-wing . I'm not so sure that we would recognise it as such. It is certainly massively anti-Bush, although some of this is simply that the Bush administration is sinking in a Bermuda triangle of its own making, with Ideological Inflexibility, Incompetence and Corruption marking the three corners. Any mildly humerous topical news show would be calling a government in this situation - there is a large element here of shooting fish in a barrel. What is interesting, though, is that the criticism is rooted not in what we might consider to be internationalist or universalist ideas such as human rights, derived from the post WW2 settlement, but rather it derives from two distinctly American angles. The first, explicitly, is from the US Constitution. For example, the abolition of habeas corpus for "terrorist" suspects, sneaked through under cover of another bill, led to a consideration of what effect this would have on the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments of the constitution). In fact only one was left - the others rendered meaningless or obsolete by the abolition (but at least soldiers still can't kip over at your house without you giving you permission - so that's OK then).

The other appeal has been to American exceptionalism. What I have noticed is that American self-perception, or self-mythology if you like, is of being a "good" nation. I say this not to ridicule in any way. This seems to me a higher aspiration for any nation than any other. It creates problems in that no nation could hope to live up to this of course, but I suspect that this is a subject for another blog. But many of the critiques of Bush on the show have at their heart that the administration is not living up to what an American should be. Olbermann has issued some pretty vituperative critiques of e.g. Bush's attempt to redefine the Geneva Convention to allow torture (oh yes he has), from precisely this position. Simply, America, the land of the free, the land of the poor huddled masses, a land which I have found to be stuffed full of people of tremendous decency, friendliness and generosity, should not be torturing people.

This sort of argument, of course, is far more dangerous to Bush and his supporters than traditional left-wing critiques, which could be dismissed as the rantings of "godless Euros". It helps that Olbermann comes across as a cross between Jimmy Stewart and Ed Morrow - he manages to project decency very effectively (whether he is decent, I'm afraid I have no way of knowing - there are no skeletons in his wiki entry, but, so what?). The contrast with Jon Stewart (Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert (Colbert Report) is striking. For the record, I think both are genuinely brilliant but they can come across as too clever by half and contemptuous of many people not as intelligence as they.

The second, frivilous, point is that it helps that he is a good looking man. There is a childish psychological assumption (which I think many people don't grow out of) that physically attractive people are more "good" than ugly ones. Nonsense of course, but then you see Bill O'Reilly looking something like a grizzly bear with a 20 year bottle a day whisky habit, stuffed in a suit and being employed as a children's entertainer, all the warts on his soul clearly visible on the outside, and compare with Olbermann doing his decent 1940s small-town lawyer schtick and you wonder. Whatever, Louise has officially placed him at no2 behind Hugh Laurie in her “greying 40 somethings I fancy" list, which means we both get to watch his show every night.

Nom de guerre

Why exiled in mainstream? Obviously the geographic dislocation is in there, but the real reason is that punning on Stones' album titles is the closest I'll ever get to writing like Ian Rankin...

We've come for your children ha-ha

Given the shared heritage of Europe and America, the transatlantic sniping that goes on over the blogosphere is somewhat depressing. The most recent manifestation of this that I came across was a thread debating the moral superiority or otherwise of having lots of ice in cold drinks.

Over the summer the world cup introduced all manner of this stuff - most good natured banter - but including the most hilarious pseudo-intellectual nonsense about football being "the quintessential expression of the nihilism that prevails in many cultures, which doubtlessly accounts for its wild popularity in Europe". This was reprinted on the redoubtable Andrew Sullivan's blog, although he went up considerably in my estimation by describing the authors as "tossers".

I say only this. My cycle home tonight included a detour via Green Lake library which is immediately opposite the sports fields at the lake. I saw two baseball diamonds - empty; two basketball courts - empty; no gridiron pitches - empty or otherwise; six soccer pitches, full of elementary school boys and girls. Give me a child 'till they are seven, as they say...

How reading Discworld makes you a better researcher

At what point does bad research turn into propaganda? Over the last week I have have had the misfortune of reading two pieces of work which might qualify as such. One was a piece of research which purported to show differences in outcomes and rates of improvement of outcomes for patients belonging to different ethnic groups. The design was flawed and it was poorly written up, but more fundamentally the conclusion, that people from minority ethnic groups did worse than whites, was flatly contradicted by the results. In fact, the results showed little variation, with what variation there was being greater between minority ethnic groups than between BME groups and whites. Indeed, the frustrating thing was that there were some generally interesting anomalies which were worthy of further consideration which were missed because of the authors' desire to show institutional racism.

A still worse piece of research was lauded by a representative of the US right on another blog which quoted the Commonwealth Fund's figures on international expenditure of health services. This was produced by Heritage Foundation, a well known US conservative think tank. Its thesis was that multi-purchaser health system (such as the US one) were inherently superior to single purchaser ones such as Canada and the UK.

I need to declare an interest and state that I don't think that this is true: notably because increased transaction costs seem inevitable, and because it is harder to maintain a public health focus in commissioning decisions in a multi-payer system. However, my problem was with the approach taken in arguing. In short there was neither a coherent conceptual framework nor a convincing evidence based comparison presented to justify the position. What was available was a list of failings noted in single payer systems, with no consideration of either how these were caused by the single payer system or that they were not present in multi-payer systems. Of course without this the research becomes little more than a write up of a google search for “problems single payer health systems”.

Why does this sort of stuff get produced and published? It's tempting to allege incompetence and dishonesty. But I tend to a more subtle explanation. I think what is going on is that the researcher holds mental model which acts as a prism through which evidence is interpreted, and crucially which discourages against objective consideration of the evidence. Hence, “health services are institutionally racist and here is evidence that proves it”, or “socialized medicine is inferior – look at all the problems it has”. To an extent we all hold mental models and interpret what we see in the light of them, but the key to avoiding seems to me bound up in the old quote from (I think) Keynes,
“When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do?”

Or more pertinently from Sam Vimes,
"Never overlook the possibility that you might be completely wrong"

Fall-ing

It has been a weekend to gladden the heart. The weather has remained beautiful but with an early autumnal nip in the air. But I have been struck by beauty and goodness in many ways this weekend. Our landlady and partner came to dinner Friday night, good food and great company, chat and laughter. We talked of cars (...and where to drive them - hey vague Blur lyric misquote). Two offers of help, a loan of a car today and an offer to accompany us on our car hunting expedition. (We have finally given in and recognised that we're going to need one...OK I've finally given in). Their kindness to us has been phenomenal, we are so grateful.

Saturday was lazy and familial. Charlotte invited to a party. Amelia, Evie and I went to the library, the swimming pool, the play park. The centre of Green Lake seems like Bill Bryson's "Amalgam", the understated nobility of the library doubling for the courthouse. Think about home while watching Inspector Lynley and Monty Python on PBS in the evening.

Today dawned colder. We drive to church in the morning. We chat at some length to the early year's co-ordinator, discussing all the usual things, why we are here, how old the girls are etc. Later, the preacher cracks one of the best jokes I have heard in the pulpit - analogising between Colosse and Seattle (both are/were wealthy, diverse and educated). The analogy continued. The source of Colosse's wealth came from having local minerals that gave it the monopoly on the trade in purple dye in the ancient near east. The analogy continued still further, "Well there was somewhere else that could do purple dye too, but they had problems delivering to schedule, so Colosse kind of had the monopoly" (think about it - clue:aviation). He and I spoke leaving the service. I agree to e-mail.

To Evie's party with her desk mate Ruby Rose this afternoon. I chat at length with her parents - charming people clearly proud of their daughter. When I return with Amelia later in the afternoon to pick Evie up, they have an extra party bag for Amelia. Small acts of kindness make the world a happier place. Late afternoon is spent sweeping spent brown leaves from the porch, as the air cools. With the girls in bed, I write up a week's worth of thinking, some to be blogged and some logged, over a glass of Fat Tire, brewed in Colorado at a brewery powered by a wind generator.

There are times when it's worth remembering the everyday blessings. It has been an idyllic weekend