2190) No, the idea here ... seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment - and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite - and, ultimately, in its best expression, do so in a cause that meant something to thousands, to a people, a nation, to humanity, to God. Nor was there a test to show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzying progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even - ultimately, God willing, one day - that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men's eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[ellipses in original]

2191) Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot ... coming over the intercom ... with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself (nevertheless! - it's reassuring) ... the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because "it might get a little choppy" ... the voice that tells you (on a flight from Phoenix preparing for its final approach into Kennedy Airport, New York, just after dawn): "Now, folks, uh ... this is the captain ... ummmm ... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not ... uh ... lockin' into position when we lower 'em ... Now ... I don't believe that little ol' red light knows what it's talkin' about - I believe it's that little ol' red light that iddn' workin' right" ... faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I'm not even sure all this is really worth going into - still, it may amuse you ... "But ... I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol' light ... so we're gonna take her down to about, oh, two or three hundred feet over the runway at Kennedy, and the folks down there on the ground are gonna see if they cain't give us a visual inspection of those ol' landin' gears" - with which he is obviously on intimate ol' buddy terms, as with every other working part of this mighty ship - "and if I'm right ... they're gonna tell us everything in copacetic all the way aroun' and we'll just take her on in ... and, after a couple of low passes over the field, the voice returns: "Well, folks, those folks down there on the ground - it must be too early for 'em or somethin' - I 'spect they still got sleepers in their eyes ... 'cause they say they cain't tell if those ol' landin' gears are all the way down or not ... But, you know, up here in the cockpit we're convinced they're all the way down, so we're just gonna take her on in ... And oh" ... (I almost forgot) ... "while we take a little swing out over the ocean an' empty some of that surplus fuel we're not gonna be needin' anymore - that's what you might be seein' comin' out of the wings - our lovely lovely little ladies ... if they'll be so kind ... they're gonna go up and down the aisles and show you how we do what we call 'assumin' the position'" ... another faint chuckle (We do this so often, and it's so much fun, we even have a funny little name for it) ... and the stewardesses, a bit grimmer, by the looks of them, than that voice, start telling the passengers to take their glasses off, and take the ballpoint pens and other sharp objects out of their pockets, and they show them the position, with the head lowered ... while down on the field at Kennedy the little yellow emergency trucks start roaring across the field - and even though in your pounding heart and your sweating palms and your broiling brainpan you know this is a critical moment in your life, you still can't quite bring yourself to believe it, because if it were ... how could the captain, the man who knows the actual situation more intimately ... how could he keep on drawlin' and chucklin' and driftin' and lollygaggin' in that particular voice of his -

Well! - who doesn't know that voice! And who can forget it! - even after he is proved right and the emergency is over.

That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, "they had to pipe in daylight." In the late 1940's and early 1950's this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots, and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

[...] Chuck Yeager was at the top of the pyramid, number one among all the True Bothers.

And that voice ... started driftin' down from on high. At first the tower at Edwards [Air Force Base] began to notice that all of a sudden there were an awful lot of test pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. And pretty soon there were an awful lot of fighter pilots up there with West Virginia drawls. The air space over Edward was getting so cain't-hardly supercool day by day, it was terrible. And then that lollygaggin' poker-hollow air space began to spread, because the test pilots and fighter pilots from Edwards were considered the pick of the litter and had a cachet all their own, wherever they went, and other towers and other controllers began to notice it was getting awfully drawly and down-home up there, although they didn't know exactly why. And then, because the military is the training ground for practically all airline pilots, it spread further, until airline passengers all over America began to hear the awshuckin' driftin' gone-fishin' Mud River voice coming from the cockpit ... "Now, folks, uh ... this is the captain ... ummmm ... We've got a little ol' red light up here on the control panel that's tryin' to tell us that the landin' gears're not ... uh ... lockin' into position ..."

But so what! What could possibly go wrong! We've obviously got a man up there in the cockpit who doesn't have a nerve in his body! He's a block of ice! He's made of 100 percent righteous victory-rolling True Brotherly stuff.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[all ellipses except bracketed ones in original]

2192) [I]n the X-1, the X-1A, the X-2, the D-558-1, the horrible XF-92A, the beautiful D-558-2 [...] In those planes, which were like chimneys with little razor-blade wings on them, you had to be "afraid to panic," and that phrase was no joke. In the skids, the tumbles, the spins, there was truly, as [Antoine de] Saint-Exupery had said, only one thing you could let yourself think about: *What do I do next?* Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, with all aerodynamics long gone, and not one prayer left, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: "I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C! I've tried D! Tell me what else I can try!" And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next? [...] And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)
[all ellipses except bracketed ones in original]

2193) It was John Glenn who realized from the first that Project Mercury was like a new branch of the armed services, despite its civilian coloration. It would have simplified matters tremendously if NASA had given everybody formal rankings and had done with it. That way people such as [NASA Administrator James E.] Webb would have known were they actually stood. The seven Mercury astronauts could have been designated Single-Combat General, a category with the honors and privileges of a five-star general but with none of the duties and obligations of command. After his flight John Glenn, then, would have been promoted to Galactic Single-Combat General, a category ranking slightly above the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Services and slightly below the Commander-in-Chief. Webb, as NASA administrator, would have been a two-star general and would have known the protocol for dealing with GSC General Glenn.

Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff (1979)

2183) [I]n an ideal world, artists would be compensated in proportion to some combination of the following:

1. the degree of creative innovation in the work


2. effort expended in the creative process


3. aesthetic value of the work (there's a big debate)


4. social value of the work (another grand debate!)


5. amount of skin shown in latest video (oh, sorry!)

Zenon M. Feszczak
posted on [AMB] (11/14/1996)

2184) If I'm listening to a jazz solo, I know that it was played by the person listed, and it most likely was improvised by the player. When I'm listening to a remix album, (or an ambient project in general) the lines of musical communication are blurred, and it is impossible for the non-insider to know who gets the credit/blame for the various creative decisions.

Emile Tobenfeld
posted on [AMB] (7/14/1996)

2185)
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is THE BEST

Frank Zappa
"Packard Goose" (song)
Joe's Garage (LP, 1979)
posted by Alan Blattberg [IDM] (11/14/1996)

2186) The noises must become music.

Robert Bresson
Notes on the Cinematographer (1996)
quoted by Simon Fisher Turner in
liner notes to Shwarma (cd, 1996)
quoted by Rob Young in
"The Soundtrack Syndrome" in
The Wire [UK] (11/1996)

2187) Growing up in the early 70s, I remember having the phantasy that I had a tiny movie camera implanted behind my eyes, and that everything I saw was being transmitted in real time to some distant network, possibly on the other side of the planet. (Subsequent enquiry reveals that others of this generation experienced the same syndrome.)

Rob Young
"The Soundtrack Syndrome"
The Wire [UK] (11/1996)

2188) The Factory was a place where you could let your problems show and nobody would hate your for it. And if you worked your problems up into entertaining routines, people would like you even more for being strong enough to say you were different and actually have fun with it.

Andy Warhol
quoted (in part) by Michiko Kakutani in
"Culture Zone: The United States of Andy" in
New York Times Magazine (11/17/1996)

2189) Media moguls normally resist antitrust policing on the ground that costly cable-laying makes them "natural monopolies." Yet when faced with the regulation that is appropriate for monopolies - regulation bearing on prices and program requirements - they claim the free-speech protection of the First Amendment. The absurdity of the paradox is never argued. It is simply buried beneath tons of campaign contributions and mountains of costly legal arguments.

The best way to resolve the paradox is to separate cable from content, track from freight, to make all media companies (the phones included) choose between owning wires or traveling on them. Those owning a cable can then be regulated, as a monopoly, granted a fair profit on their sizable investments and required to deal fairly with the transmitters of content. Those choosing to be transmitters of information and services can be liberated, to let 500 channels bloom.

Max Frankel
"Word & Image: The Inside Track for Cable" in
New York Times Magazine (11/17/1996)

2181) After a few hours in a Best Western I find my way to the [Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas], and a helpful curator. He shows me the old Eisenhower campaign posters ("let's clean house with ike and dick!") and the letter imploring Eisenhower to run for president signed by nineteen Republicans, including Gerald Ford of Michigan. It nicely illustrates that the longing in our democracy for The Unpolitical Politician, the man who doesn't seek power but instead has power thrust upon him, has been around awhile: "...if our own country is torn asunder by corruption and greed, by disloyalties and opportunism, by the avarice of selfish men, by the lack of vision of pseudo-statesmen greedy to retain public office, all the good and constructive work you have done will be destroyed."

The curator explains that Eisenhower's presidency had triggered a boom in Abilene much like Dole's might in Russell. By the end of the Second World War Abilene looked to be headed toward extinction. What saved it was first the Eisenhower Museum, created in 1946, and then the Eisenhower Library, which now draws about 125,000 visitors a year. Once tourists began to come, the town built further attractions to divert them: the Greyhound Hall of Fame, the Museum of Independent Telephony, and other places that no one in his right mind would build a vacation around but which perhaps lend dimensions to a visit to Abilene. The people of Russell have Abilene as their model. One of the biggest Dole authorities in Russell even gave me a tour of the site for the Library. It would be shaped like a silo, he said, and built entirely of glass.

It only takes a few minutes to find the exhibit my friend described. Before every major engagement of the war General Eisenhower penned what amounted to a press release in which he took full responsibility for failure. Every time but one he tore up his note and threw it away. But after D-Day an aide with a sense of history fished one of the notes from the trash can. "The thing of it is," my friend had explained, "was that it was all in the first person--I, I, I. Then he wrote another press release in the event of victory in which it is all we, we, we." To my friend this pattern said something not just about Eisenhower but about Dole. It represented an entire way life that has fallen from fashion.

The actual press release sits behind a pane of glass:

Our landings in the Cherbourg and Le Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the Air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

There is no second note announcing the success of the operation in the first person plural, however. The curator tells me that Eisenhower never bothered to declare D-Day a success, which, when you think about it, makes his personal admission of failure even more striking. My friend in the Dole campaign embellished the story, no doubt unconsciously, so that I might feel what he wished me to feel. Such is the power of stoicism over stoics. Such is the current weakness of the creed that it must be compromised if it is to survive.

Michael Lewis
"Campaign Journal: The End"
The New Republic (11/xx/1996)

2173) Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole world by scientific power. This invasion by active knowledge tends to transform man's environment and man himself - to what extent, and with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and of the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing - that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us [...] we do not know and can by no means imagine where.

Paul Valery
"Unpredictability" (1944) in
History and Politics (1962)
quoted by Edward Tenner in
Why Things Bite Back (1996)

2174) [Edward] Tenner shows convincingly that unintended and undesired consequences are the norm whenever new technologies are introduced: the revolution that now permits information to be stored and transported electronically has produced a proliferation of paper. Flood-control work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has actually increased the damage caused by floods. Helmets and other protective gear help to make football more dangerous than rugby. Roads designed to relieve congestion are themselves clogged with traffic. Clear, straight roads often have the highest fatality rates.

The more we introduce conspicuous safety measures, Tenner argues, the greater becomes the likelihood of a Titantic-style disaster in which "belief in the safety of the ship [becomes] the greatest single hazard to the survival of the passengers.

John Adams
"Mistakes Were Made"
Scientific American (10/1996)
[review of Why Things Bite Back
by Edward Tenner and The Logic of
Failure by Dietrich Dorner]

2175) The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.

Herbert Spencer
"State-Tamperings with Money and Banks"
Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (1891) [WQ]
quoted by John Adams in
"Mistakes Were Made" in
Scientific American (10/1996)
[review of Why Things Bite Back
by Edward Tenner and The Logic of
Failure by Dietrich Dorner]

2176) On Thu, 14 Nov 1996 02:43:00 -0800 Lenoel, James wrote:

The intellectual snobbery I have read over the last few months is far more odious than a syntactically imperfect but emotionally genuine posting.

Embedded in James's view is the presupposition that it is reasonable for anyone who writes with lucidity and rhetorical efficacy either in responding to an ill-conceived or misguided post to be automatically labeled and consigned to the abhorrent "intellectual" category, whilst simultaneously being charged with "snobbery". At the same time the "emotionally genuine" is thought to be preferable, no matter how fatuous, ill-thought-out or poorly constructed. This is in effect both a 'reductio ad absurdum' of the old Intellect v. Emotion (false) dichotomy, and, further, may be seen as part of what happens when egalitarian democratising values (A Good Thing) are over-literally transposed (A Bad Thing) to a sociolinguistic context.

Alan R. Lockett
posted on [AMB] (11/15/1996)

2177) The America to which the textbooks [of the early twentieth century] welcomed the children of Whitney Creek [Montana] was secular, progressive, rational, scientific and can-do practical - a world full of the glory of man and his achievements.

Jonathan Raban
Bad Land (1996)
quoted by Verlyn Klinkenborg in
"Railroaded" in
New York Times Book Review (11/10/1996)

2178) Reunite Gondwanaland!

bumper sticker
the favorite of Michael Novacek, from
Dinosaur of the Flaming Cliffs (1996)
quoted by James Shreeve in
"Bonespotting" in the
New York Times Book Review (11/10/1996)

2169) [Fascism] resembles pornography in that it is difficult - perhaps impossible - to define in an operational, legally valid way, but those with experience know it when they see it.

Walter Laqueur
Fascism: Past, Present, Future (1996)
quoted by Robert O. Paxton in
"The Uses of Fascism" in the
New York Review of Books (11/28/1996)
[review of the Laqueur book and
A History of Fascism: 1914-1945
by Stanley G. Payne]

2170) [F]ascism [is] a political practice intended by its leaders to serve quite specific functions: to unite, purify, and energize nations or ethnic groups that have been put under strain by internal divisions, by the fear of decadence, or by tumultuous social change.

Robert O. Paxton
"The Uses of Fascism" in the
New York Review of Books (11/28/1996)
[review of the Laqueur book and
A History of Fascism: 1914-1945
by Stanley G. Payne]

2156) Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. [...] It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck need going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2157) I looked at one of the discarded [elephant] trunks and wondered how many millions of years it must have taken to create such a miracle of evolution. Equipped with fifty thousand muscles and controlled by a brain to match such complexity, it can wrench and push with tonnes of force. Yet, at the same time, it is capable of performing the most delicate operations such as plucking a small seed-pod to pop in the mouth. This versatile organ is a siphon capable of holding four litres of water to be drunk or sprayed over the body, as an extended finger and as a trumpet or loud speaker.

The trunk has social functions, too; caresses, sexual advances, reassurances, greetings and mutually intertwining hugs; and among males it can become a weapon for beating and grappling like wrestlers when tusks clash and each bull seeks to dominate in play or in earnest. And there I lay, amputated like so many elephant trunks I had seen all over Africa.

Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton
Battle for the Elephants (1992)
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

[Note: Cf. #685 Pinker]

2158) However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2159) [Natural selection] has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)

2160) There is a supremely banal reason why transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level. [...] [Z]oologists always insist on classifying a specimen as in one species or another. If a specimen is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists' legalistic conventions still force them to jump one way or the other when naming it. Therefore creationists' claim that there are no intermediates has to be true by definition at the species level, but it has no implications about the real world - only implications about zoologists' naming conventions.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2161) To a first approximation all animal species fly.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

[Note: This is a modification of an aphorism by Robert May: see #103 May and #102 Lewin.]

2162) It cannot be said too often that Darwinian theory does not allow for [species'] getting temporarily worse in quest of a long-term goal.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2163) All questions about life have the same answer (though it may not always be a helpful one): natural selection.

Dr. Henry Bennet-Clark
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2164) The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even when its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world. If wild animals and plants can be said to be put into the world for any purpose - and there is a respectable figure of speech by which they can - it surely is not for the benefit of humans. We must learn to see things through non-human eyes. [...] Marginally more defensible [is] the idea that [flowers and animals] are placed in the world for the benefit of others with whom they have a naturally evolved mutualism: flowers for the benefit of bees, bees for the benefit of flowers, acacia bullhorns for the benefit of ants and their ants for the benefit of acacias. But this notion of creatures being "for the good" of other creatures is in peril of reductio ad absurdum. We must have no truck with the pop ecologists's fallacy, the holisty grail of all individuals striving for the good of the community, the ecosystem, 'Gaia'.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2165) Flowers and elephants are "for" the same thing as everything else in the living kingdoms, for spreading Duplicate Me programs written in DNA language. Flowers are for spreading copies of instructions for making more flowers. Elephants are for spreading copies of instructions for making more elephants. Birds are for spreading copies of instructions for making more birds. [...] The DNA of an elephant constitutes a gigantic program, analogous to a computer program. Like the virus DNA it is fundamentally a Duplicate Me program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is an elephant. The program says "Duplicate me by the roundabout route of building an elephant first." The elephant feeds as to grow; it grows so as to become an adult; it become an adult so as to mate and reproduce new elephants; it reproduces new elephants to propagate new copies of its original program instructions.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2155) Dead Cities see-saws between the steadying grounds of nebulous chill out and digital attack. The twin planets of Jungle and Ambient now exert so much gravity on digital experimentation that any music unable to reach critical mass on its own steam will be polarised into some well-rehearsed dialogue between New Age and nightmare.

Matt Ffytche
review of Future Sound of London
Dead Cities (cd, 1996) in
The Wire [UK] (10/1996)

2146) Mainstream journalism proudly honors objectivity, balance and accuracy. Buts its execution often sifts these values through the filters of prevailing opinion, new knowledge, old prejudices and standard assumptions about who's worth quoting.

Abe Peck
"Don't Ask, Don't Print"
New York Times Book Review (11/3/1996)
[review of Straight News by Edward Alwood]

2147) The press is committed - properly, though sometimes with weird effects - to neutrality on matters of policy. They confine themselves to matters of presentation, which they chew over and reduce to a single piece of consensual wisdom with astonishingly speed. [...] These judgments are entirely based on style points, though, because style is a matter it has been granted to the commentators in the press and television to judge. A position may be wrong-headed, but the candidates cannot be marked down for that. He must be marked down for failing to connect with the American public, for speaking in jargon or abstractions, for repeating himself, or for looking at his watch.

Positions on the issue can be brought into the equation only when they are sufficiently disreputable for the press to feel professionally comfortable about criticizing them [...]

Louis Menand
"Dole's Three Strikes" (10/17/1996) in
New York Review of Books (11/14/1996)

2145) There's a lot of hypocrisy in this talk of big government. [...] There has not been a shrinking of the government, there's been a shrinking of the helping functions of government, the progressive functions of government.

Barbara Ehrenreich
(possibly paraphrased)
on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer
(PBS TV program, 11/5/1996)