Help me brainstorm about other points of view that might be invited to moderate political debates.

That’s too bad, because Glenn Kessler, who writes the Washington Post column, “The Fact Checker,” observes that Obama’s explication is “silly” and “wrong” when compared to those pesky things we call facts. Ouch.

Read more here.

BTW, three Pinocchios represents three-out-of four on the scale of mendacity, indicating “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”

Update: Here’s Daniel Henninger’s take in the Wall Street Journal: Obama as The Godfather.

There is that defining moment when Michael Corleone says to Fredo, his brother, “You’re nothing to me now.” When even as party leader, a president of the United States gives a major speech in which people get singled out repeatedly as basically enemies of “the middle class,” one has to wonder if they are nothing to him.

You then have to wonder about the tenor of another Obama term in office. If in fact there are categories of Americans he simply doesn’t like, a second Obama term, like the last half of “Godfather II,” could be a clinical exercise in hammering the people he singled out in this speech. Metaphorically speaking.

Metaphorical would be the best-case scenario.

This is how it works: Someone screams “mic-check” to grab everyone’s attention and get the people’s mic started. The speaker will then say something, for instance, “Thank you for your patience tonight,” which the crowd repeats. This goes on until the speaker is finished.

The article quotes Sheila Nichols describing mic check’s uniquely participatory character:

[The] people’s mic forces people to be participatory, to listen, to understand that we’re in it together… And it’s an active experience that forces people to be a part of something that’s a whole…It’s sort of an undefined, decentralized experience overall, which is what makes it an amazing and unique experience.

Participatory, undefined, decentralized… I’m not so sure. Does any voice have the privilege of the public mic? Or is there an explicit or tacit understanding within the group regarding who are the leaders to whom the group will grant its collective voice?

Here is an example of “mic check” in action, in the “pepper spray” incident at UC Davis.

In this instance a small handful of leaders are directing the crowd’s collective action in confronting the police. The crowd is not deliberating, it is obeying the commands of these leaders, chanting their slogans and instructions. Watching this, I recalled the children’s game, “Simon says,” in which one person instructs the group in a series of silly actions, and tries to trip them up by slipping in a command without first saying, “Simon says.” In the UC protest, the group leaders’ voices were recognized as “Simon says,” and the voices of the police were not. The crowd follows their Simons with near robotic obedience, although a  few of the wiser ones have enough sense to know that their Simons are putting them in danger, and get themselves out of harm’s way.

More importantly, perhaps, this scene illustrates a process Rene Girard describes as “mimetic contagion.” “Mimetic” refers to imitation. The leaders are focusing a group’s attention on a common enemy, in this case the police. The group literally imitates and acts out the words of its leaders. The group finds its unity not so much in shared ideals as in the identification of a common enemy. Girard observes that one of the greatest achievements of western civilization has been the establishment of the rule of law and its accoutrements, including a near-universally respected judicial system and police force. In effect, by identifying the police as their common enemy, the group aims its attack at this core of civilization. This has been a common theme of the occupy movement, particularly in its insistence that laws intended for the common good, most notably laws enforcing public health practices and prohibiting camping in urban public spaces, ought not apply to OWS demonstrators. I’ll be writing more about Girard’s mimetic theory in future posts.

The NPR narrator sums up the grand, egalitarian principle that supposedly guides the OWS use of mic check:

It was the process of working as a group, building consensus, and listening to every word everyone had to say that was most important to them.

“Listening to every word everyone had to say.” Apparently we must take the term “everyone” with a shaker-full of salt. The article concludes with this sparkling example of consensus building and listening to every word everyone has to say:

Protesters have taken their call-and-response to disrupt public meetings and events. Newt Gingrich recently got mic-checked.

As he introduced the Gingrich Productions’ film City Upon on a Hill, someone called out, “Mic-check!” A crowd repeated, and the protester then said, “We love you Newt … thank you for standing up for corporations.”

Michele Bachmann also got mic-checked, as did President Obama on a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire.

So then, “mic check” is not about “listening to what everyone has to say,” after all. One can’t know, I suppose, whether the writer of the piece recognizes the disjunction here. But clearly the leaders of this “decentralized” movement use “mic check” to guide and direct their willing mob to instruct them in what and how to think, what to say, to whom to listen, and whom to ignore or disrupt.

The story concludes:

Occupiers say the people’s mic is coming to a shareholder’s meeting or public event near you.

I can’t wait.

Now I’m reliving my higher-education choices from another perspective, that of a father who’s daughter Catherine wants to go to college. In fact, she’s already in college, a participant in Washington State’s fabulous “Running Start” program: local school districts pay tuition for promising high-school juniors and seniors to take courses at the local community college. Running Start is not what worries me. It’s the next step.

Catherine wants to become a published writer of fiction, and in order to develop the necessary skill-and-knowledge base to accomplish this, she’s planning to major in English.

Now this might work, or it might not. One thing that’s certain is that a BA is not a necessary credential for successfully authoring fiction. I say this on the narrowest of samples: my son Joe, ten years Catherine’s senior. Joe was a terrible high-school student (in fact, a terrible K-12 student). He wanted to play role-playing games as soon as he could talk. His early sketches were all of pirate ships. As he grew older he created what he called “boffer” weapons—lengths of PVC pipe surrounded with padding secured by duct tape—so he and his friends could do battle without breaking bones. He passed standardized tests, and failed his classes. After years of exasperation we entered him into a high-school completion program  at the local community college, where he finally got on track, earning both a high-school diploma and an AA. His “major”? Theater, although he failed some of those classes, too.

Despite the world urging Joe to buckle down and conform, he has relentlessly pursued his own interests. He married a girl he met at a Christian camp at age 15, and with whom he carried on a trans-continental romance. She’s an accountant with an excellent job. Joe, meanwhile grew more and more serious about swordplay, exchanging plastic-and-ducttape for steel blades, and taking classes in fencing and sword-fighting. He was also committing some of his stories to written form. One of his fellow sword-play enthusiasts turned out to be a well-known fantasy and science-fiction writer. We told Joe, “Tell him you’re a writer; maybe he can help you out.” Joe wisely demurred, and after several months said writer turned to him during a workout and said, “Joe, you’re a writer, aren’t you?” Joe was invited to submit a writing sample, and then he was invited to join the writing team for a new fantasy series, The Mongoliad. Eventually Amazon bought partial rights, and Joe got a real paycheck. Joe now has an Amazon author page. And he’s still managing online role-playing games.

Working on The Mongoliad has provided Joe with an experience surpassing a graduate course in writing and publication, and he has earned remuneration. So my question is: how will Catherine fare pursuing the more “normal” route,  paying for a four-year college education? Will her professors be able to teach her how to write?

Perhaps, perhaps not. Professors are particularly good at being professors, i.e., analyzing other people’s work, and teaching students to do the same. I’ve run across two pertinent articles making this point, both linked by Alex Tabarrok on the blog, Marginal Revolution. The first, “The Magic of Education,” by Byran Caplan, deconstructs the pretenses of higher education by pointing out that professors are isolated from The Real World.

Most professors’ experience is almost as narrow as mine.  If you want to succeed in academia, the Real World is a distraction.  I have a dream job for life because I excelled in my coursework year after year, won admission to prestigious schools, and published a couple dozen articles for other professors to read.  That’s what it takes – and that’s all it takes.

The mechanism by which what students do in college translates to good job performance is essentially magic, or more technically, “signalling”:

According to the signaling model, employers reward educational success because of what it shows (“signals”) about the student.  Good students tend to be smart, hard-working, and conformist – three crucial traits for almost any job.  When a student excels in school, then, employers correctly infer that he’s likely to be a good worker.  What precisely did he study?  What did he learn how to do?  Mere details.  As long as you were a good student, employers surmise that you’ll quickly learn what you need to know on the job.

Fine, if you aspire to “a job,” in which your job is to learn tasks, which you will then repeat for the rest of your life. But successful fiction writing requires more than an ability to “quickly learn what you need to know on the job.” It requires the curious combination of imagination channeled by self-discipline, in a word, creativity. Most of the professors under whom I studied throughout my two decades of higher education wrote for other professors. An English professor might write a treatise on Chaucer or Longfellow, but write a short story or a novel? I don’t remember any. So as soon as I can pry Catherine away from the movie she’s watching at the end of a straight-out 12-hour day, I’ll advise her to find out who the English professors are at the colleges she’s considering, and then do an author search on them to see what they’ve written. If they haven’t published fiction, they probably can’t teach her how to write it.

Seth Roberts responds to Byran Caplan with a critique of professional academia’s myopic focus on IQ and “brilliance.”

At Berkeley (where Bryan went and I taught) and universities generally, the highest praise is brilliant. Professor X is brilliant. Or: Brilliant piece of work. People can do great things in dozens of ways, but somehow student work is almost never judged by how beautiful, courageous, practical, good-tasting, astonishing, vivid, funny, moving, comfortable, and so on it is. Because that’s not what professors are good at. (Except in the less-academic departments, such as art and engineering.) To fail to grasp that students can excel in dozens of ways is to seriously shortchange them. To value them at much less than they are worth — and, above all, to fail to help them grow and find their place in the world after college.

The exception Roberts notes, particularly art, has been crucial for both my kids. Catherine’s been involved in the local community college theater program for many years. Academic theater is a different animal from academic English. In the theater department you learn how to do theater. You also learn theory and analysis, but the main thrust is to learn the theater production enterprise from the inside out. You learn how to act, how to stage manage, how to construct sets, by doing it. And the professors are people who in their spare time do theater.

Roberts goes on to describe an open assignment he gave to one of his classes, in which they could do anything, so long as it did not involve the library and was off-campus. He was most impressed that one of his students gave a lecture to a high school class. Why? She had paralyzing stage fright, and decided to overcome it. This completely transformed his own perception of her.

Yes, Roberts says, people who succeed in college tend to be more successful in society. But the people who study such things have

failed to see the possibility that the whole world had been shaped to reward the things that the people in power (i.e., they themselves) are good at. Not because those talents work (= produce a better economy). But because they are easy to measure (by college grades). The glorification of IQ has had a solipsistic aspect and has ignored what should be obvious, that diversity of talents and skills promotes innovation. Without a diverse talent pool, any society will do a poor job of solving the problems that inevitably arise.

In my short experience as a college lecturer, I quickly realized how easily I could reward the wrong things. I realized that if I required a hand-written essay during an exam, I was privileging those students whose penmanship flowed from their hand, and whose thought processes were linear. These attributes had nothing to do with the content of the courses I was teaching. Examples abound.

My hunch is that successful fiction writers don’t flow out of college English departments. My hunch is that the broader one’s life experiences, and the more fervently one pursues one’s own interests, the better writer one will become. College can facilitate and enrich this development or hinder it. As long as Catherine continually bears in mind that professors are, for the most part, principally good at being professors, she’ll be fine. I hope.

The second, a sneak peek at a forthcoming documentary called The Silent Majority, draws some parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the protests during the 1972 election. Richard Nixon and his campaign coined the term The Silent Majority to refer to all those people who weren’t out in the streets protesting. The video linked to the article shows some home-video Super 8 footage shot over Nixon’s shoulder of his admirers by one of his aides. It’s astonishing how many young people there were in the crowd. I don’t think it will bode well for President Obama if the OWS protests gain strength between now and the election.

The third is a blog post by a former Harvard classmate, Peter Enns, in which he is analyzing the ongoing debate among Christians on what role, if any, evolution should have in the Christian understanding of the universe. I made some comments there, including this one:

There is an issue in one of the comments above that I struggle with every Sunday morning (in the pew, not the pulpit). It is the implicit and also explicit equation: The (Christian) Bible is the (only and unique) Word of God. And Word of God comes to mean something like “words directly uttered by God for which the human writers were merely intermediaries.” My current pastor put it this way: “God speaks to us through the Bible; we speak to God through prayer.” I find this odd, because it is not what parts of the Bible teach about prayer; clearly God speaks to humans through prayer in biblical stories. Personally, I see the Bible as “the word of God” in a different sense of the genitive: not composed by God, but about God. It is, in fact, a collection of rather widely disparate points of view about God, the unity of which is located in the Jewish-Christian community from which it sprang. Parts of the Bible teach that God is also revealed through nature and through the human conscience. So for me the very notion that “The Bible is the Word (i.e., comprehensively and uniquely divine text) of (i.e, from) God” is itself imposed from the outside onto a collection of texts that as a whole does not teach this doctrine.

I welcome your comments.

Worker A is in the bottom quintile of income. He is an itinerant worker who is also a union member. Unable to find steady work in his field, he travels from town to town, living out of a suitcase and staying in motels and occasionally in his car between towns. He does not have a permanent residence, so he stays with his parents for a week over the Christmas holidays. By government and activist definitions, he is officially homeless.

Worker B is in the upper quintile of income. He is a small-business owner. He does not belong to a union. He works locally, but takes out-of town jobs when they suit him. He owns a nice home on 11 acres, and is about to pay off his mortgage. He has leisure time for participation in the arts, and helps support his local church.

Worker A is a college drop-out. He graduated from high school and went to the local community college for one quarter. Realizing he had no idea why he was there, he left and went to work as a laborer. Looking to develop a trade, he re-entered community college the following year in a electronics technician program. He also tried to enlist in the air force, where he had been promised electronics training, but was declared 4-F, a medical disability due to poor eyesight. After one year of vocational training he dropped out, because of the eye strain involved in doing the close work required by the profession. He lives paycheck to paycheck.

Worker B has a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters, and a doctorate. He has worked in several careers. His training has given him the flexibility to navigate the difficult economic climate. He has money in his retirement account and cash on hand.

Worker A’s father is an alcoholic from generations of alcoholics. Although the family managed to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, the emotional climate at home was less than optimal. One of worker A’s siblings developed a mental illness.

Worker B’s father is an engineer with a good state job. His father was unable to complete college, but due to years of independent study managed to pass the civil engineer’s license exam without a college degree. His mother works for a bank. Worker B’s parents instilled into him the value of hard work and education. Both of his siblings graduated from college.

Worker A married his high-school sweetheart when he was 20. But as soon as his work turned into permanent itineracy, the marriage fell apart. He is now divorced. He does some recreational drugs, some on a regular basis. This has at times jeopardized his already-tenuous employment.

Worker B is in a stable marriage and has two children. He doesn’t take any drugs, except by prescription and only when absolutely necessary. He once threw out a prescription for Xanax. He does enjoy a beer in the evening.

Through no fault of his own, worker A was born into disadvantage. He is a hard worker, but he has been unable to take advantage of the meager opportunities provided him. If anyone is deserving of government help, it’s him.

Through no merit of his own, worker B was born into advantage. His parents taught him to direct his own life and to pursue his dreams. They helped him through difficult times in his life. If anything, worker B has not maximized the advantages life has offered him. Looking at him now, one might conclude that he has coasted through life to prosperity, and could afford “to pay a little bit more.”

Now for “the rest of the story.” Worker B doesn’t really think he needs to help out worker A, and he’s even more certain that increasing his contribution to the federal treasury wouldn’t help worker A one bit. This is because worker B is worker A, 36 years later. Worker A realized that the path his life was on was a dead end, and might become literally so. Responding to the witness of a friend, he confirmed his childhood faith and became an adult Christian (if a lousy one). He quit his job as an itinerant nightclub musician, moved back in with his parents, got a manufacturing job, began saving money, and went back to square one at the community college. This time he applied himself, went on to a four-year school, and graduated.

While in college he married again, and as it turned out his wife found her dream profession as a registered nurse, and went on to earn a significant living. The worker continued to work at academics until he had earned three degrees, dabbled in several careers, and ultimately decided that the best thing he could do for his family was to support his wife in her career and find ways to give back to the community. And yes, we have a great life and great kids.

It’s all in how you tell the story, isn’t it?

Opponents of 1183 imply, and cite a Centers for Disease Control study, that allowing the public sector to sell hard liquor will make it more readily available to kids. The only evidence that might persuade me of this would be a state-by-state comparison. Do kids get their hands on more alcohol in Massachusetts or California than in Washington? I don’t know, but the opponents don’t even try to make that case. Besides, alcohol in forms much more desirable to underage drinkers — beer and wine coolers — are readily available practically everywhere, including in single cans and bottles at gas station mini marts. This essentially zeros out the kid argument for me.

They also argue that a loophole in the law would allow some mini marts to sell hard liquor. I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, but if true it’s apparently based on a small exception to the 10,000 square foot rule. Hard liquor would not be appearing at the vast majority of mini marts.

Again, opponents charge that state revenue will increase, and that this increase will be born by consumers of alcohol. Well, duh! All taxes on products sold at retail in Washington ultimately come from consumers. But there is a problem here: the assumption is that because revenue to the state will increase, therefore the cost of hard liquor to the consumer will increase. This does not necessarily follow, because the initiative also unleashes the price-lowering forces of competition into the marketplace. Costco, and many other stores, for example, will be able to add liquor sales to their existing stores with very little increase in overhead. So while the tax on an individual bottle might increase, the whole price to me might decrease.

But here’s the main issue: our state is broke. We’re facing a 2 billion dollar deficit in the current fiscal period. So the state must necessarily cut some non-essential services and find some new revenue. 1183 accomplishes both. Can anyone argue with a straight face that monopolistic control of retail liquor sales is an essential state function? No. Moreover, I as a state taxpayer have to pay for the salaries and benefits of the state employees who run the state liquor business whether I buy liquor or not. When I walk into Costco or some other store and buy a six-pack of beer, I’m taking care of the needs of the employees in that operation on the spot, in the course of that transaction. If I never touch a bottle again, I don’t have to continue paying their retirement and health care forever.

Legislators almost never close state departments or reduce the growth and control of government. I’m glad to have a direct say in this, and I say, get the state government out of the retail liquor business! Then I can get my particular brandy or adult beverage of my choice right here in my home town.

I suspect that FB appeals mostly to the feminine aspects of human behavior and personality. It’s really kind of domestic: we post pictures, we talk about our kids, we share recipes. I come from a family that has been matriarchal as far back as I have been able to trace. The men have died young and left their widows to raise the kids and to see to the grandchildren for decades. The women mostly thrive, but the men have fallen into dysfunction. Those of us who survive manage to get along in an emotional system ruled by women. So I plunge into FB because it feels like home.

But I’m not entirely feminized. I have this masculine side that wants to be right, that wants to influence other people more directly. So when I start saying what I think about the way the world works and the way I’d like it to work, people, both men and women, who also like to exercise this more masculine approach to human relationships, assert themselves. Competition escalates, and almost instantaneously an online shouting match ensues.

One of the problems is that FB just isn’t constructed to facilitate focused debate or discussion. It’s filled with the distractions of domesticity: The president is a jerk! Look at my cute kittens. My child has a cold, any ideas for remedies? No he’s not! I’m having home canned peaches for lunch. Here’s a picture of my vacation in Sweden three years ago. Who’s not? Anyone up for a party? You’re a racist bastard! Here’s a cute, clever, inflammatory poster I copied from somewhere. Here’s the song I listen to when I’m depressed. And the 99%… You get the idea.

For me the problem is that I really don’t want to argue for argument’s sake. I want to figure things out and talk with other people who want to figure things out. And that almost never happens on FB. It’s too distracting.

So here’s my new tack: a blog. Original, eh? Here I can post my ideas (if I have any more), and people can discuss them or not. I realize that they will also have on the radio and the TV and FB and a dozen other browser and chat windows going simultaneously. But I nevertheless have this slim home that a few people will gather here to talk about issues and ideas. We’ll see.