Dave Badtke’s Blog

Recent picture from "The New York Times." See the April 27, 2010 article by Deborah Sontag: "Despair Grows on Devastated Street in Haiti."

The people of Haiti freed themselves from slavery more than 200 years ago, on New Year’s Day, 1804, but they remain slaves to a cataclysmic history.

In 1825 France demanded 100 million francs in return for granting Haiti’s freedom. One can imagine that the French argument centered on payments for investments they had made to develop the island, an island that was founded on exploitation of its land and people, most of whom were slaves. In 1789, e.g., it is estimated that of the 556,000 people on the island, 500,000 were slaves, and almost all of these had been transported from West Africa. (This and other historical information is from “Haiti.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Standard Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2010.)

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president who fled Haiti in 2004 in the face of internal revolution and the withdrawal of U.S. and French support, has estimated that the current-dollar equivalent of those reparation payments is 21 billion dollars. In a country of some nine and a half million people, this would amount to approximately $2200 per person. While this doesn’t sound like much in a country ravaged by corrupt governments, poverty, disease and natural disasters, including the recent earthquake that killed more than 100,000, it’s important to remember that the per-capita income is ~$1,200 per year.

During Haiti’s 200 years of independence, presidents have named themselves kings and emperors, have been assassinated, have committed suicide, and have generally served themselves more than their people. Between 1843 and 1915, there were 20 rulers, 16 of whom were overthrown by revolution or were assassinated (“Haiti” 12).

And then U.S. Marines occupied Haiti for 19 years, from 1915 to 1934, ostensibly to provide relief, though Haitians tend to believe the Marines were there to protect American interests, among them them Panama Canal, since Haiti could be used as a base of operations to protect access to the canal.

But the U.S. occupation brought a racial attitude in addition to force, for the U.S. during this period was a highly segregated society. The aftermath of a failed reconstruction had intensified southern racism, and the diaspora of African-Americans north heightened racial tensions in urban areas like Chicago, Detroit and New York City. And because the armed services weren’t integrated by President Truman until after WWII, the Marines who occupied Haiti were white.

As a result, Americans favored Haitian’s of mixed race, who seemed more “white,” over their darker brothers, worsening a color divide that was a legacy of French rule.

One effect of the Marine occupation was the nominal reestablishment of the mulatto elite’s control of the government. Black Haitians, in contrast, felt that they were excluded from public office and subjected to racist indignities at the hands of the Marines, including the corvée, an old law permitting forced labour for road construction; in response, peasant cacos (guerrillas) carried out a series of attacks. The Marines’ public works program also included building new health clinics and sewerage systems, but most Haitians felt the effort inadequate.

A Dominican massacre along the border followed in 1937 as did repressive rulers like François Duvalier, “Papa Doc,” and his son, Jean-Claude, “Baby Doc,” who created a paramilitary group, the Tonton Macoutes, the “Bogeymen,” to control and terrorize in their police state.

But nature has had a hand in the disasters as well. AIDs affects 2.2% of the population, which is almost three times the world average. And hurricane Gustav flooded much of the deforested island in 2008, followed by the recent earthquake in an area of substandard housing where the last major earthquake struck in 1842. Since Haiti’s name derives from the Arawak word Ayti, mountainous land, perhaps one might expect some seismic activity, but really, going from nothing to a magnitude 7.0 quake on January 12 of this year is, to say the least, unexpected.

And so the question becomes, can Haiti’s future be changed and how might this happen? Ethics plays a role in analyzing the alternatives, but ethics may not make our decision much easier since resources limit our options whereas the ethical dilemmas presented by Haiti cry out for simultaneous actions on so many fronts.

My English 1 students will recognize something familiar in Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us since Brent Staples whistles exactly this to put people at ease. We learn this about Staples, a friend of Steele’s, in Staples’ “Black Men in Public Space,” an essay that has been anthologized in most introductory English texts.

What distinguishes Staples, who’s an adjunct professor at several colleges and who writes occasional columns for The New York Times, is the empathy he expresses when he’s stereotyped by those who fear him. “Black Men in Public Space” relates how when he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, his skin color and size — he was a young, 6′2″ African-American man who tended to wear fatigues and an Afro — defined him more than his intellect.

Brent Staples

Instead of getting angry for being treated unfairly, however, he empathized with those who feared him and used coping strategies, like whistling Vivaldi, to put strangers at ease. Some might object that one shouldn’t modify one’s identity to please others. This strategy, it would seem, runs so counter to the American libertarian ethos that some believe so strongly — I own myself and so do you, so leave me alone — that empathy, like liberal, is becoming an epithet for some.

It’s important to remember that empathy is a state of mind. It’s the ability for someone to walk in someone else’s shoes, to understand his or her needs, her impediments, her turning points, her resolutions. Empathy should be the precursor to action. Only after understanding another’s point of view should we decide what action to take at which point we might decide to express sympathy or antipathy, kindness or anger. While empathy doesn’t predetermine what action we’ll take, it does encourage us to step outside our too-often self-serving opinions before taking action.

This is the ideal, but Staples understood that if a young woman walking in Hyde Park at night encountered him, not knowing anything more about him besides his appearance, she might well run for her life because we’re not always able to do a proper assessment if we are fearful. And so he developed a coping strategy that put others at their ease.

While I’ve just started reading Steele’s book and won’t really have time to continue until the semester is finished, final papers are graded, and grades are in, Steele seems to suggest, based on psychological studies, that stereotypes have a significant effect on how we behave and, that teachers, who can affect students in subtle ways, need to understand how easily they can discourage students when they intend just the opposite.

Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire by Robert Perkinson, reviewed today by Daniel Bergner in the New York Times Book Review, claims that, and here Bergner is paraphrasing,

Not only do we incarcerate at some six times the rate that Britain does . . . or around seven times the rate of Canada, but, Perkinson relates, African-Americans are seven times as likely to be locked up as whites, and African-American men today go to prison at twice the rate they go to college.” (Emphasis mine)

Perkinson claims that America moved from “the age of slavery to the age of incarceration.” And Texas is the worst. From the 1960s until 2000 the number of prisoners has increased 600 percent nationally, that’s a factor of 6, but in Texas the number has increased by 1200 percent, a factor of 12.

See the review for more on Perkinson’s proposed causes for this horrible state, but the fact that there are approximately 2 million in prison is more than a reason to be concerned: it’s an indication that we don’t seem to care much about the least well-off in our society. And shouldn’t we measure the health of a society by the way in which it treats the least well-off, not the most well-off, since the latter, by definition, fare well even in the most totalitarian, unjust societies?

Here it’s good to remember John Rawls’ difference principle, one part of which states that we can tolerate inequality as long as the least well-off benefit (the following is from the Stanford philosophy website):

The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past three decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, (Rawls 1971), and Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993). Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:

1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls 1993, pp. 5-6. The principles are numbered as they were in Rawls’ original A Theory of Justice.)

In brief, rights and liberties should be equally available and social and economic inequalities, which can never be fully eliminated, “are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”

If the nation’s financial deficit is one measure of our economic health, perhaps the percent in prison is one measure of our ethical health. The graph at left is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Note the steep increase in the number of adults on probation between 1980, when it was approximately 1/2 percent of the population to 2008, when the number had more than doubled to approximately 1.3 percent of the population.

The BJS statistics are shocking:

Summary findings

• In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole, 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults.
• About 70 percent of the persons under correctional supervision at yearend 2008 were supervised in the community, either on probation or parole, while 30 percent were incarcerated in the nation’s prisons or jails.
• At yearend 2008 a total of 4,270,917 adult men and women were on probation and 828,169 were on parole or mandatory conditional release following a prison term.
• State and federal prison authorities had jurisdiction over 1,610,446 prisoners at midyear 2008: 1,409,166 in state jurisdiction and 201,280 in federal jurisdiction.
• Local jails held 785,556 persons awaiting trial or serving a sentence at midyear 2008. An additional 72,852 persons under jail supervision were serving their sentence in the community.

If all this seems as though it’s too much to fathom, remember above all that an African-American male is twice as likely to go to prison than college.

I’m a fan of Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN. He’s smart, he’s a good interviewer, and his show’s guests and his approach almost always teach me something. You can see him on CNN on Sundays or you can find him on the web.

This Sunday he interviewed Felipe Calderon, President of Mexico, who states at one point that 80% of the guns, many of them assault weapons, that have been seized during the escalating drug conflicts in Mexico have come from the U.S. But, he adds, even if you don’t believe this study, which was done 1 1/2 years ago, there are 10,000 gun shops in the U.S. along the border with Mexico. I wonder how this compares to the number of food stores and gas stations.

Zakaria then has a segment on a Saudia Arabian woman poet who’s on a poetry show that’s something like our American Idol except that the contestants recite Bedouin poetry. She’s already been praised for her poetry and she’s the first woman to make the finals — and condemned by fatwas for the ideas she expresses in her poems in a country that still does’t allow women to drive.

Finally, there’s an intelligent discussion between Paul Krugman and Robert Samuelson on the recently passed health care bill. Krugman is at his best in this show when he’s being a Princeton economist with a Nobel Prize rather than a NY Times Columnist, which is his other job. Robert Samuelson is a contributing editor at Newsweek.

Check it out: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/fareed.zakaria.gps/

Alan Tonelson and Kevin Kearns, both of the United States Business and Industry Council, claim in a column in today’s NY Times that we’re miscounting productivity changes when we fail to incorporate the effects of offshoring. (I didn’t know that this had become a verb, here used as a gerund, but now I do.) In other words, it is frequently the case in our modern world that parts of products are made offshore, this a result of “free trade” policies that encourage, or at least don’t discourage, companies from seeking the lowest production costs independent of national boundaries. And this offshoring can lead to an incorrect calculation of productivity. Consider the following example:

Let’s say I make a paper cup in two steps. In the first I make the paper for the cup in large rolls. In the second step I feed the rolls into a machine that stamps the paper with artwork, cuts it, and folds it into its final form. (I’m thinking of paper cups because as I write this I’m sitting at Rrags coffee shop in Benicia where they make the best lattés with extra foam in the world.) To accomplish these two steps I use 100 workers, 50 for the paper part, 50 for the stamping, cutting and folding part.

But then I decide that I can save money by offshoring the paper-making part to a country where production costs are much less than in the US. Since my paper costs are reduced dramatically and since I really don’t care what happens in some far-off corner of the world where my paper rolls are made, I’ve managed to almost double the productivity of my workers since 50 can now produce the same cups that previously required 100, which is only true, of course, if I don’t count the offshore workers, who may be more numerous than my 50. But who cares?

Of course, I laid off 50 US workers who are now still looking for jobs, collecting unemployment pay for a short time, and who, unless they are young, will probably never be able to recover financially.  But, hey, that’s their problem because we’re a capitalist country that really doesn’t believe that family and community values and caring for one another should extend beyond our family rooms with their big, flat-screen TVs, the production of which was offshored long ago, to the places where we work.

Work is about profit, and if profit and people collide, profit wins.

But I digress. Tonelson’s and Kearns’s point is that there’s something wrong with this calculation of productivity when I lay off 50 workers, offshore my paper production, and then claim that my workers’ productivity has increased by almost 100%:

But what if wages lag because productivity itself is being grossly overstated, especially in the nation’s manufacturing sector? Then, suddenly, a cornerstone of American economic policy would begin to crumble.

Productivity measures how many worker hours are needed for a given unit of output during a given time period; when hours fall relative to output, labor productivity increases. In 2009, the data show, Americans needed 40 percent fewer hours to produce the same unit of output as in 1980.

But there’s a problem: labor productivity figures, which are calculated by the Labor Department, count only worker hours in America, even though American-owned factories and labs have been steadily transplanted overseas, and foreign workers have contributed significantly to the final products counted in productivity measures.

The result is an apparent drop in the number of worker hours required to produce goods and thus increased productivity. But actually, the total number of worker hours does not necessarily change.

This oversight is no secret: as Labor Department officials acknowledged at a 2004 conference, their statistical methods deem any reduction in the work that goes into creating a specific unit of output, whatever the cause, to be a productivity gain. (Italics mine!)

This continuing mismeasurement leads economists and all those who rely on them to assume that recorded productivity gains always signify greater efficiency, rather than simple offshoring-generated cost cuts — leaving the rest of us scratching our heads over stagnating wages.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you that when I laid off 50 workers, I scared the s**t out of the remaining workers. They were so afraid that they would lose their jobs because I might offshore the whole business that I was able to decrease their pay and demand more hours from them. So, actually, my plant’s productivity went even higher. It was off the charts. Did I tell you I made executive vice president with more and better stock options?

Now when my mother comes to visit — I tell you this with all humility, you understand — she couldn’t be more proud of what her son has achieved.

While a no-brainer, it’s nice to have quantitative support for this psychological consequence: turn off violent video games and you’ve increased your child’s chances of being empathetic and ethical:

Exposure to violent video games makes kids more aggressive, less caring, regardless of their age, sex, or culture. That’s the conclusion of a study analyzing 130 research reports that included more than 130,000 subjects worldwide.

We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method — that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal — and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects, says Craig Anderson, Iowa State University Distinguished Professor of Psychology.

And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior.

In my English classes I’m at that point in the semester when we discuss the three fundamental elements necessary to think and write critically about a thesis: description, compare-contrast, and effect-cause. (Until yesterday I would have said cause-effect, but then one of my students pointed out that actually we should say effect-cause since we notice the effect before we look for the cause. Go students!)

To make clear how these three fundamental elements work, consider the current health care debate which has as its thesis something like the following:

Because so many Americans do not have insurance or can’t afford the insurance they have or are surprised to find that the insurance they have doesn’t cover their illnesses or discover when they become ill that they are no longer covered, and because private insurance companies can deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions and because there is too often too little competition between insurers and because medical care has devolved into a profession in which doctors and their patients are no longer the primary focus of health care and because these intolerable conditions obtain right here in these United States of America, the only industrialized nation without universal health care, we, the American people, have decided to reform health care in such a way that all will be covered and that will enable doctors and their patients to focus on staying and getting well.

This is a mouthful I know, which probably, even at this length, has left some important concerns out. It certainly leaves out President Obama’s paramount point in his speech on health care reform that fixing health care is a moral imperative: we need to fix health care because the moral character of our country must extend beyond me to you; each of us is to a degree our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper because we care about others, not just about ourselves.

Ideally, we and our government representatives should critically examine this thesis using the three fundamental elements of critical thinking:

Description: We need to describe in detail each element of the thesis, using evidence as necessary as well as examples and illustrations. We can quote statistics, and certainly we want to hear the horror stories about those who weren’t properly served and about those who died or were injured for life.

Compare-Contrast: We then need to compare and contrast our health care system with others that seem to work better and worse than ours, looking in detail at the moving parts in and design of each.

Effect-Cause: And in each case we need to examine the why of our system as well as of the others. Why does a particular system produce better or worse health care? Why does a particular system cost more or less? (Actually, it seems that there is no system that costs more than ours.) Why do doctors and patients prefer one system over another?

Sadly, much of our “discussion” of health care here in the US is about as far from critical thinking as is possible for a people who have putatively evolved beyond  throwing stones at one another. Shrill cries from some that we are creating death panels, are enabling government to take over medicine, and are constructing a public-option Trojan horse that will lead inevitably to “socialized” medicine in which all will wear gray suits and speak without humor are hardly signs of a rational, critical discussion.

For an antidote to this sad state of affairs and to celebrate critical thinking, see T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America, reviewed by Dr. Abigail Zuger in The New York Times, in which Reid describes health care in the world, compares health care systems, looks carefully at why they work, and examines possible effect-cause solutions to what ails us in the US.

Because English 1 starts off focused on advertisements, which Neil Postman considers our new theology,  I’m reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell to get me into the mood of discussing our consumer-driven society.

One of the themes of Shell’s book is that cheap goods, which used to be forbidden by law during the fair-trade days before World War II, demand ever cheaper goods, which have brought us to our current state in which “Technology, globalization, and deregulation have made competition a death march.” And since “Many companies have had no choice but to reduce costs almost continuously” and “Since payrolls are the single largest expense of most businesses,” skilled jobs become fewer, livable wages are harder to find, and benefits are increasingly not part of an employment package (51).

This is to say that our desire for ever-cheaper goods is undermining our ability to educate, support, and employ our citizens.

This I think I knew, but I didn’t suspect that cheaper prices go hand in hand with less accommodating service.

I had thought it strange, for example, that the McDonald’s on East Second Street in Benicia didn’t install shades on its southern-facing windows since these windows extend from floor to ceiling, letting the sun heat the high tables right next to the window like an oven in the afternoon when sometimes I stop — I admit to this failing — to get one of those cheap $1 hamburgers.

It used to be that one could sit farther away from window tables in booths along the back wall, but then they remodeled and reduced the number of seats beyond the range of the scorching afternoon sun.

Odd, I thought, until I read Cheap. First there was the Gruen-transfer effect, named after retail-landscape architect Victor Gruen who created in the 1960s the first malls that were designed to welcome customers like a park to their gardens and in some cases even caged birds. For a while this worked, because people who spent more time in the mall ended up buying more, but then people actually began treating malls like parks. Now teenagers wander the malls with their friends and seniors nurse a cup of coffee for the better part of a morning without buying anything more (94).

So Gruen transfer was replaced with the Golden-Arches approach to social engineering:

At McDonald’s and many other fast-food restaurants, the lighting tends to be unflattering fluorescents, and the seats are bolted to the floor at an awkward distance from the tables. The purpose of this is not to prevent theft of the chairs, as many think, but to discourage elders, teenagers, and other undesirables from getting comfortable and congregating for hours over a small coffee, or an order of fries. Discomfort does seem to keep the customers churning; on average, fast-food patrons spend only eleven minutes at their tables. (The optimal fast-food customer — as defined by the fast-food industry — takes no table time at all but does a quickie through the drive-through.) (95)

So perhaps this explains the oven windows as well: in order for a business to sell cheap goods and make a profit, more and more goods must be sold in less and less time, so people who like a business so much for its environment that they want to spend more time than money can kill the business’s bottom line.

Have you noticed that there seems to be more Starbucks with drive-through windows? Does this also explain ubiquitous background music and over-scented stores that encourage us to get our business done and leave?

Zadie Smith’s article in the lastest New York Review of Books, “Speaking in Tongues,” revisits the exploration of cultural, mixed,middle, mimic identities that so many have written about before — Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, V. S. Naipaul, Richard Rodriguez, and, of course, Smith herself in White Teeth. She regrets that she has not had the courage to keep her double tongues alive in her personal life, the tongues of the London district of Willesden, where she grew up, and Cambridge, where she was educated.

Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the culture warns against it! As George Bernard Shaw delicately put it in his preface to the play Pygmalion, “many thousands of [British] men and women…have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.”

She compares her own identity diffusion that has replaced one tongue with another, one language or dialect with another to Barack Obama’s ability in Dreams from My Father to seemlessly add identities, building one on the next, juxtaposing them, mixing them, using them to bridge distinct identities.

In Dreams from My Father, the new president displays an enviable facility for dialogue, and puts it to good use, animating a cast every bit as various as the one James Baldwin—an obvious influence—conjured for his own many-voiced novel Another Country. Obama can do young Jewish male, black old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers, and even a British man called Mr. Wilkerson, who on a starry night on safari says credibly British things like: “I believe that’s the Milky Way.” This new president doesn’t just speak for his people. He can speak them. It is a disorienting talent in a president; we’re so unused to it. I have to pinch myself to remember who wrote the following well-observed scene, seemingly plucked from a comic novel:

“Man, I’m not going to any more of these bullshit Punahou parties.”

“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time….”

“I mean it this time…. These girls are A-1, USDA-certified racists. All of ‘em. White girls. Asian girls—shoot, these Asians worse than the whites. Think we got a disease or something.”

“Maybe they’re looking at that big butt of yours. Man, I thought you were in training.”

“Get your hands out of my fries. You ain’t my bitch, nigger…buy your own damn fries. Now what was I talking about?”

“Just ’cause a girl don’t go out with you doesn’t make her a racist.”

This is the voice of Obama at seventeen, as remembered by Obama. He’s still recognizably Obama; he already seeks to unpack and complicate apparently obvious things (“Just ’cause a girl don’t go out with you doesn’t make her a racist”); he’s already gently cynical about the impassioned dogma of other people (“Yeah, that’s what you said the last time”). And he has a sense of humor (“Maybe they’re looking at that big butt of yours”).

Obama has inspired so many of us because of his uncanny ability to add rather than subtract, his ability to live a dream that is both rational and pragmatic as well as rhetorical and ethereal. She relates this to the dream-city character portrayed by Cary Grant.

What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? ” The Man from Dream City.” When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man—we see in them whatever we want to see. ” Everyone wants to be Cary Grant,” said Cary Grant. ” Even I want to be Cary Grant.” It’s not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.

But I haven’t described Dream City. I’ll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of “I.” By speaking so, he wasn’t simply avoiding a singularity he didn’t feel, he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives.

It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City, how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn’t so strange to them.

But his multiplicity skill also makes many nervous, for they suspect that behind his chameleon-like identities is something sinister. Perhaps they find it impossible to believe that one can live out multiple points-of-view without being duplicitous, an actor, a Cary Grant who’s someone for the people, someone else when he’s offstage without makeup. And so they wait for his mask to drop, convinced that at some point the true Obama will be revealed.

Which brings us to the single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They rage on in the blogs and on the radio, waiting obsessively for the mask to slip. They have a great fear of what they see as Obama’s doubling ways. “He says one thing but he means another”—this is the essence of the fear campaign. He says he’s a capitalist, but he’ll spread your wealth. He says he’s a Christian, but really he’s going to empower the Muslims. And so on and so forth. These are fears that have their roots in an anxiety about voice. Who is he? people kept asking. I mean, who is this guy, really? He says sweet potato pie in Philly and Main Street in Iowa! When he talks to us, he sure sounds like us—but behind our backs he says we’re clinging to our religion, to our guns. And when Jesse Jackson heard that Obama had lectured a black church congregation about the epidemic of absent black fathers, he experienced this, too, as a tonal betrayal; Obama was “talking down to black people.” In both cases, there was the sense of a double-dealer, of someone who tailors his speech to fit the audience, who is not of the people (because he is able to look at them objectively) but always above them.

Despite all the problems we face and the newness of the man we’ve selected to lead us, Smith ends her essay on hope, the hope that so many of us have that we’re living through a new period that may not be replicated again, that may be unique to the individual, but that will surely have a positive effect if we can discover a more “decent human harmony.”

It’s my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws, suitable for general application. I even hope that he will find himself in agreement with George Bernard Shaw when he declared, “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.” But that may be an audacious hope too far. We’ll see if Obama’s lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice “I love my country” while saying with another voice “It is a country, like other countries.” I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.

Above is the title of Emily Wilson’s review in the current, August 3, Times Literary Supplement of two books about Isidore of Seville, “who became patron saint of the internet in 1999.” Unfortunately the books from Cambridge University are expensive, really expensive: Barney et al.’s The Etymologies of Isidore is $150 for 475 pages, and John Henderson’s The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words is $99 for 244 pages. But these would be fun books to peruse if they were affordable or if the library purchased them.

Isidore’s effort in sixth-century Spain, when it was ruled by the Visigoths, to reestablish the importance of Roman culture through its language, specifically the etymology of Latin, had an impact that was comparable to the Bible’s. Indeed, Isidore’s family “played an important role in the conversion of the Visigothic kings to Roman Catholicism, away from Arianism (a form of Christianity which denied that the Son is co-eternal with the Father).”

While Isidore’s cultural impact was profound, much of what Isidore wrote, much like the internet today, was made up. “Most of Isidore’s supposed etymologies are — by the standards of modern academic philology — complete twaddle.” Take, for example, his entry on beavers:

It may often seem as if Isadore, like a bad search engine, offers little or no control over all this material. Certainly, much of the “information” he provides is (from a modern perspective) blatantly false, albeit entertaining. For instance, we are assured that “Beavers (castor) are so-called from castrating (castrare). Their testicles are useful for medicines, on account of which, when they anticipate a hunter, they castrate themselves and amputate their own genitals with their teeth.”