We are very pleased to announce our very first winner: George Will (he of most note for unleashing “oxymoron” and “chattering classes” into the mainstream of public discourse), for his column headed “Race obsession on the march”in the Seattle Post Intelligencer of Tuesday, September 13, 2005 . (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/240372_will13.html)

Will writes (excerpt):

“America’s always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its banks, and last Sunday on “This Week,” Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois” freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president’s inadequate “empathy” and an amazing criticism of the government’s “historic indifference” and its “passive indifference” that “is as bad as active malice”. The senator, 44, is just 30 months older than the “war on poverty” that President Johnson declared in January 1964. Since then, the indifference that is as bad as active malice has been expressed in more than $6.6 trillion of anti-poverty spending, strictly defined.

“The senator is called a “new kind of Democrat,” which often means one with new ways of ignoring evidence discordant with old liberal orthodoxies about using cash — much of it spent through liberalism’s “caring professions” — to cope with cultural collapse. He might, however, care to note three not-at-all recondite rules for avoiding poverty: graduate from high school, don’t have a baby until you are married, and don’t marry while you are a teenager. Among people who obey those rules, poverty is minimal.” (George Will, “Race obsession on the march”, Seattle Post Intelligencer, Sept. 13, 2005)

Here we have George Will at the heighth of his considerable powers of supercilious smugness. Note, for example, the adroit deployment of the high-falutin’ word “recondite” just before saying, in effect:

“The reason those people found themselves abandoned in water up to their bums is they’re dumb animals that breed like rats.”

Let’s test Will’s hypothesis about the three “not-at-all-recondite” rules for avoiding poverty. Suppose one of the Bush twins had broken all three of these rules. Suppose Jen or Jenae or whatever-their-names had got knocked up her junior year of high school and decided to drop out to follow the rodeo-rider daddy. Would the young scion of the House of Bush be doomed to the dustbin of perpetual poverty?

Right. Apparently Will’s “rules” don’t apply to everybody.

And if Mr. Will is really concerned about the dire repurcussions of teen pregnancy, would he support family planning classes for all sixth graders? Would he support free condoms, no questions asked, for all secondary students?

Right. To champion such programs would bolix the electoral strategy of the Party Mr. Will favors.

If Mr. Will really cared about the problem of teen pregnancy, one would think he’d have written a fistful of columns advocating universal youth access to family planning. Heck, why not even a book , replete with a glowing blurb from the president of Planned Parenthood. (I’m wildly assuming here, without research, that nowhere in the Will oeuvre will one find acolumn, let alone a book, advocating universal access to family planning)

But of course Mr. Will doesn’t care about unwed poor mothers. Indeed, “to care” is apparently a term of derision in the Will lexicon: his column directs a couple swift (though all so gentile, even recondite) kicks at the shins of “liberalism’s…’caregiving’ professions.” (I suppose Mr. Will comes down foursqauare on the side of the “f- you! professions”)

No, for Mr. Will, teen pregnancy is just a rhetorical device to tell us: “It’s their own damn fault these people are poor and there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s return to our regularly scheduled discussion of the evil estate tax.”

Speaking of rhetorical devices, note also Mr. Will’s sophist-icated application of a few judiciously plucked statistics. This, along with Oxford english verbiage, is a George Will trademark. I mean, statistics are real , right? And Will is nothing if not a hard-headed (not to mention sunken-chested) realist.

[Before proceeding, let me assure you, dear reader, I do not write to defend LBJ's "War on Poverty". These programs were indeed ill-conceived, way over-bureaucratized, and just plainlame. It does not follow, however, that "nothing can be done" to eliminate poverty. Unlike Mr. Will, I believe in progress. Radical solutions are what's needed-- now.]

Let’s consider for a minute that shocking, shocking  “$6.6 trillion of anti-poverty spending, strictly defined.”

Good gravy! $6.6 trillion!?!? That’s an awful lot, an awful, awful lot. Why, a trillion is a thousand billions, and a billion is a thousand millions, and even a million is an awful, awful,lot. Gosh, there aren’t even a trillion stars in our galaxy!

Sumbitch! No wonder them folks down in New Orleans was alla time whoopin’ it up. Lordy.

I am reminded of the old adage about the two kinds of statistics (“lies” and “damned lies”).

Let’s give Mr. Will the benefit of the doubt and assume his statistic is accurate. ( He cites no source, nor does he bother to adumbrate which programs he includes as anti-poverty spending “stricly defined”, nor whether to figure is in current dollars.)

Now let us realize that the “$6.6 trillion” represents spending: A)over forty  years; and, B) in a nation of over 200 million people (rounding way down for simplicity sake).

Doing a little head figurin’ here [6.6 trillion/(40years x 200 million people)], I get:

Annual per capita expenditure of $825. Now we’re rasslin’ that bear of a number to the ground.

To what shall I compare this $825 annual per capita spending to fight poverty?

Well, what do I spend for coffee every morning at Starbucks? Let’s see: $1.50 for the first cup; $.50 for a refill; a quarter tip each trip. That’s $2.50 a day x 365 days a year, equals…

$912.50! That’s my annual morning coffee spending. Good Lord, no wonder  Howard Shulz is so rich and I’m so poor.

That’sit ! Starbucks is the cause of poverty in America!

Well. (As George Will himself is so wont to say in a Jack Benny way.)

You see we can truthfully say (again assuming the accuracy of Mr. Will’s statistic), both:

A) Over the last forty years the U.S. federal government has spent more dollars fighting poverty than there are stars in the galaxy;

and:

B) Over the last forty years the federal government has spent less annually per capita fighting poverty than Tommy T., the noted bum, spends on morning coffee every year.

Clearly, statistical truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Even more clearly, Mr. Will in his column is blowing smoke (see my song “Blue Smoke ‘n’ Mirrors”.)

“Those people you saw on tv up to their butts in toxic muck, fighting off rats and water moccasins as corpses floated by, chanting, ‘We’re dying’…?” (puff, puff) “their own fault, you know: can’t keep it zipped…” (puff, puff) “government’s lavished gushers of money on ‘em; still won’t get a decent education…” (puff, puff) “…tsk, race-obsessing, when will it end? It’soverflowing banks, that’s what’s inundating them…” (puff, puff) “…picture’s getting hazy, no? Rules not-all-that-recondite…” (puff, puff) “…look into this mirror…” (puff, puff) “just cultural collapse, nothing for it…see the pretty blue smoke?…see the message floating?….The Estate Tax is Evil…E-e-e-vil One‘s Estate Tax…“

Oh, yes, Mr. Will earns his keep as Apologist for Corporate Oligarchy!

Notice Mr. Will is not stirred to delve below the surface of the statistics he cites. The question is: why is teen pregnancy disproportionately prevalent in the African-American population?

Don’t tell me it’s “cultural” (as Will insinuates): you won’t find any black preacher intoning from the pulpit: “Kids, y’all go enjoy yourselves and screw around!”  Nor does Jesse Jackson lead chants of, “Knock ‘em…up! “

Indeed, I think all black leaders would agree that “babies having babies” is a problem to be addressed, along with the concomitant problem of irresponsible fathers.

But to aaddress a problem you have to understand it. Surely the stark fact that we’re only six generations away from the slave era just might have some relevance. And surely it’s even more relevant that we’re barely one generation away from the era of Jim Crow.

Most of those young mothers in New Orleans have grandaddies that were sharecroppers who had to bite their lips while white folks called them “boy.” They knew if they didn’t impassively endure this, and so very many other whips and scorns, they might end up a mutilated corpse in a ditch (see Emmet Till, murdered 1954, culprits still unpunished). To get just a taste of what this must have felt like, listen to Muddy Waters’ cuts of his song “Mannish Boy” (my favorite being the live version with Johny Winters, a record I somehow doubt is in Mr. Will’s CD collection).

There’s a good reason why Mr. Will felt no need to explain  why teen pregnancy is higher among African-Americans. That “why?” is readily filled in by the racial stereotype still-prevalent in so many minds (probably including Georgie-boy’s): “Them nigras is sex-crazed animals.”

Personally, I think we’re all sex-crazed animals, whether white black blue brown green or purple, and none more so than homo sapiens in their mid- to late- teens (you do remember, don’t you, Dear Reader?). It’s just that children of the well-off to well-to-do to rich have access to more of …well, everything, including condoms and up to abortion (legal or illegal).

That’s why I’d advocate universal access to birth control as a start to solve the problem Mr. Will is so happy to point to and let fester.

We come now, marching in reverse order, to the third of George Will’s “not-at-all recondite” rules. To wit: Mr. Will advises the marooned citizens of New Orleans that they oughta “graduate from high school.”

Here Mr. Will reveals his true colors as just another liberal. (In fact those who today label themselves “conservative” are just one variety of liberal. More on this later blog.)

(We’ll set aside Will’s blithe but dubious assumption that a high school diploma these days is a ticket to anything better than a retail clerk position at McDonald’s or Wal Mart, i.e., if not fully mired in the swamp of poverty, certainly scrabble-scrambling at its slippery shore.)

How long have we been futiley subjected to this liberal mantra of universal education as a solution to poverty? It’s a pet peeve of mine, this perrenial, chimerical shibboleth of education as the off-the-shelf panacea for economic ills. [Take that, Will! You ain't the only s.o.b. with a vocabulary.]

Now hear this, liberals! If every single teenager in the U.S. today were to go on to earn a Ph.D., we’d then have nothing more than millions of retail clerks and janitors entitled to be addressed as “Dr.”

You cannot  “educate poverty away.” As long as we accept a stratified economic system, we’llhave ”people at the bottom” no matter how many degrees are handed out.

And boy, do we have a stratified economy. Do we ever. The average CEO in 2004 was paid 431times as much as the average production worker. “If the minimum wage had kept pace with bosses’ pay since 1990, it would be $23.03 an hour.” (NY Times. Source: United for a Fair Economy, Institute for Policy Studies)

Don’t be deluded into thinking that this is the result of some “right-wing Republican plot.” The boss/worker disparity ratio peaked at over 500 under the Clinton-Gore regime. During the course of that administration the disparity index increased some 150%.

The above stat. about the minimum wage offers a good clue to a policy that would trulyeliminate poverty.

–More on this later blog–

Until then, remember, cowboys and cowgirls:

It’s The System, Smarty-pants!

Y uno otro mundo es posible.

The short answer is: music weds passion and logic. The interplay of feeling and reason is a pretty good definition of being human.

In my work as a busker (street musician) I am reminded every day that a thirst for music is built into to us. Children one-, two- or three-years old will positively astonish me in the exuberance of their gleeful response to, say, “Twinkle, Twinkle”. One little girl, Elke, for example, hops up and down turning in a circle, pounding each knee with each hand each time she lands, laughing in vigorous rhythmic grunts. Her parents and I watch and are warmed by her pure delight.

Thus is music a great purveyor of empathy, an expression of our common bond as people.

The melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle” (which is also the melody of “ABC” and “Baa Baa Blacksheep”) is a very old French folk tune. Young Mozart, when he stayed in Paris for a while, amused himself composing variations on the tune. It was decades later, in the mid-1800′s, that the lyrics of “Twinkle, Twinkle” were grafted onto the tune.

The interval between the first “Twinkle” and the next “Twinkle” expresses an exact mathematical ratio: 2:3. That is, when you sing “Twinkle, twinkle…”, on the second twinkle your vocal cords vibrate 50% faster (to the extent you’re on pitch!). Say you start on the note designated as concert “A”. On the first “twinkle”, you vocal cords vibrate at a rate of 440 times per second. On the second “twinkle” they vibrate at 660/sec.

This interval, expressing the ratio of 3/2, musicians call a fifth, because it is the distance between the first note of the scale (‘do”) and the fifth note of the scale (“so”). These two notes played simultaneously form the second most harmonious chord (a chord being any two or more notes sounding simultaneously).

The number one most harmonious chord, of course, is the octave. The “do”‘s that start and end “do,re,mi,faso,la,ti,do” bracket an octave. The first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” (“some where…”) are an octave apart. The sound of the second note is vibrating twice as fast as the first note (e.g., 220>440; that would begin “Over the Rainbow” in the key of “A”).

If you pluck a taut string and then “stop” it (by, say, pressing it against a hard surface) at the exact mid-point of its length, then pluck it again, thus stopped, so that only half of the string vibrates, the second note will be an octave higher in pitch.

So you can begin to see how logical, mathematical is this thing we call music. Yet every musician is acutely aware (or better be!) that music is feeling! (“It don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”) When we hear Judy Garland sing the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” (or better yet, check out the Ray Charles/Johny Mathis duet of this song on the recent “Genius Loves Company” CD), our heart is like to be pierced. Yet fundamental (as it were) to that is the octave, expressing the 2:1 ratio in sound.

The great wonder of it is that our ear “hears” this mathematical relationship unmediated by calculation. Im-mediately.

Just the other day I was goo-gooing with the newborn baby of a friend (Christine, actually) who stopped by my busking pitch. You know how we do when meeting an infant staring at all the streaming stimuli and just barely starting to knit it together? Well, I finally broke into song, an acapella “Twinkle, Twinkle”. That brought a wide baby-grin to the infant’s face. The mom observed that the little guy (Matthew, Jr.), not yet two months old, “loves it when I sing to him”.

This baby, so new, but already en-joying those “logical” sounds. Clearly “music appreciation” is somehow built into us. Why so, I don’t think anyone yet can ultimately say. But it’s fun to wonder.