Smooth baritones of summer #2 Armstrong and Crosby

I meant to get this up Friday. Oh well.

This is not a great song. The melody is stolen and the lyrics are, well, disposable is probably the nicest thing anyone will ever say about them. That said, the lyrics work well for the point I want to make. There is no terribly profound meaning to be excavated here. You have a song about being musical being sung by two guys who were better at being musical than just about anyone else alive in the twentieth century.

This is one of those rare occasions where the medium actually is the message.



Because the lyrics are stupid, you can ignore them and notice how each man makes his voice work first against and then with the other mans voice. They can sound very distinct for a few bars and then turn around and blend like Scotch (Armstrong) and Soda (Bing). It's very easy to listen to but just try doing it yourself.

And here is the thing, Sinatra couldn't sing like that to save his life. And he knew it.

He used to say that his kind of singing was harder than Crosby's kind but that isn't really true. Sinatra was a genius with phrasing and he could go up to F#, which is a major third higher than Crosby could go*, which is to say, there were things Sinatra could do that Crosby couldn't. Sinatra also mastered the long-playing format that Crosby had only a few successes with. But it's nonsense on stilts to pretend that what Crosby could do wasn't hard. It was very hard and the fact that he made it look easy only makes it more daunting.

I love Sinatra, with some reservations, but Crosby was the more significant artist.


* It's telling that some Sinatra fans use range when trying to make the case for their man as neither Sinatra nor Crosby had much range (by serious singer standards that is, my own range is right between the two men's).

Socially conservative Catholicism

Earlier today I was blogging about when some forms of social conservatism and some forms of  feminism line up. It reminded me of a conversation I had a while ago with a Catholic woman who put of sex until marriage and didn't get married until her very late twenties.

She started by running down this long list of health problems she had in her twenties, most of which were the sorts of health problems that show up in people who are not happy and are living stress-filled lives as a consequence. Then she tells me about these long arguments she had with her doctor. This doctor had tried to convince this young woman that she'd be happier and healthier if she was sexually active. My friend was incensed at this and triply so because the doctor was also a Catholic and woman, which my friend regarded as betrayal of the values that go along both with Catholicism and womanhood.

I bit my tongue, as I so often do in conversations with socially conservative Catholics or feminists but the truth is that she most likely would have been both happier and healthier if she had been sexually active. No, she should not have had sex if she believes it is morally wrong to do so; no one should have sex ina situation where they feel it is morally wrong to do so. But, that said, there is lots of evidence that having sex is physically and mentally more healthful for women than abstaining (but not promiscuity which tends to be bad for both physical and mental health.)

Both social conservatives and feminists reflexively bristle at any suggestion that men might be good for women.

I'm a traditionalist Catholic myself, especially with regards to the liturgy. But sometimes when I talk to other traditionalist Catholics I find myself wondering at the tendency they have to assume that simple factual disputes will always line up with their moral views and, consequently, the tendency they have to exaggerate or even simply make up facts to support their arguments. Traditionalist Catholics, for example, regularly make claims about the degree of risk of breast cancer associated with the pill that are so far out of touch with reality as to be insane. Likewise, the claim that the pill is a a potential abortifacient at all  is far from clear and yet many traditionalist Catholics argue as if the pill always has abortifacient effects.

A little culture: the bachelor life

Is more and more attractive. Here is why:



On the other side of the argument, this is one of those cases where, perversely enough, some social conservatives and some feminists tend to line up. Both sides think that men should just suck it up and deal with it even though it is obviously not in men's interest to do so. They argue as if men should willingly sacrifice their own interests to claimed social benefits just because feminists and social conservatives want he to.

The conservative reaction to Dr. Helen’s Men On Strike is interesting because it is the opposite of their general stance on government creating the wrong incentives.  When high income taxes discourage investment and production, conservatives point to the Laffer curve and advise lowering tax rates to rectify the problem.  The liberal response to conservatives pointing out that high taxes are strangling the economy is to accuse those responding to the current incentives of being selfish or unpatriotic.  We see the same pattern across a slew of issues, including stifling environmental regulations, capital gains taxes, minimum wage laws, and rent control.  Liberals tend to want to shame actors into going against their own best interest in order to prop up bad public policy, where conservatives tend to point out the folly of using shame and moral coercion to overcome bad policy.  The solution to bad policy, conservatives regularly point out, is to fix the policy, not to try to strong arm companies and individuals to go against their own best interest.

But all of this suddenly changes when the bad policy is regarding marriage.  Then the same conservatives who stand ready to offer a detailed lecture on the need to match risk with reward, authority with responsibility, and to have consistent and fair enforcement of contracts suddenly switch to the tactics of a liberal defending a 90% marginal tax rate.

But Dr. Helen is absolutely right, if you take away the positive incentives to marry, then a lot of men will make the rational choice and stay single.

I'd add this: history has some very brutal ways of dealing with societies that don't recognize that men and women have different strengths and fail, as a consequence to cherish men who possess masculine virtues. Our civilization will fail very quickly if this does not change.

By the way, pretty much any time you find feminists and social conservatives on the same side of an argument you can be sure it's the wrong side. Both ideologies have outlived their usefullness.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Looking at feminism through manly eyes Pt1

As I've often joked, the worst possible thing you can do is to do a good study that comes up with inconvenient results.

You run this risk in a big way if, for example, you do a study comparing the political knowledge of different groups.  Why? Because there isn't a lot of room for questioning your methodology; it's a pretty straightforward project. And there is a good chance that those results are going to cause discomfort because, little as we like to admit this, some groups tend to do a lot better than other groups when you test them on their political knowledge. Or, to put it in a way that people really won't like, some groups tend to do a lot worse than other groups when you test them on their political knowledge.

What groups? Well, women.

In a finding sure to inflame the gender wars, research funded by the U.K. government suggests women around the world, and especially in Canada, are significantly more ignorant of current affairs and politics than men.

How very inconvenient. But facts are stubborn things.

And this result shouldn't surprise anyone who has been paying attention. Compare the good morning shows on the big networks to the evening news and you will immediately note that the morning shows, whose audience is primarily women, tend to focus a lot more on gossip, make up, fashion and other lifestyle issues than they do on politics. Over the last few decades as the media has tended to focus more and more on female readers, they have done so by increasing the amount of gossip they cover. That is why once-respectable newspapers now treat Pippa Middleton's clothing choices as serious news.

No, I don't think this is a good thing nor do I think there is nothing that can be done about it. But nothing will ever change so long as we don't acknowledge that some things are women's fault. The people responsible for the study are desperate not to do that.

The mystery of what causes this alleged knowledge gap is the “extraordinary question at the heart of this study,” said the lead author, James Curran, professor of communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and director of the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

“I think it’s because public affairs is indeed dominated by men. It may be that there is also patriarchal bias, but it isn’t possible to determine whether reality is being distorted or whether it is merely being reflected,” he said in an interview.

He suggested three partial explanations. One is a “historical hangover” from an age when public affairs was men’s work, and women stayed home. Another is that women can be more busy than men, with less time for news. A third is that the men seem to be more prominent in current affairs, which can discourage some women from taking an interest or feeling involved.

Notice that all of those "partial explanations" treat women as helpless victims of their environment. None of them suggest that maybe the solution might be for women to stop wasting their time on tripe like women's magazines The Vagina Monologues and the like and read the political news that grown ups read instead.

Imitatio: a drinking habit

I started a mint julep before settling down to this one.

There are very serious problems with the way Mad Men handles Don's drinking.

The big one is that it, like the entire entertainment and literary field, the show has not absorbed the disease theory of addiction. The key point is this: Addiction to alcohol or drugs is a cause and not a symptom. Alcoholics drink because they are addicted to alcohol and not because they have character faults or because they have deep psychological problems or because they have a bad habit of anesthetizing their feelings instead of "dealing with their issues".

You may want to dispute that. You may feel that alcohol abuse is a function of psychological problems or bad ways of dealing with stress. And you can believe that if you want, it's still a free country. But here is the thing: YOU! ARE! WRONG!

You're entitle to your own opinions but not your own facts. And here is what you need to know: every single therapy based on the theory that alcoholism is a symptom of other problems has been a miserable failure. There are no exceptions.

On the other hand, the twelve-step method used by alcoholics anonymous, which is based on the assumption that alcoholism is a disease, has had incredible success. More success than every other method of helping alcoholics live ordered lives put together.

So here is the question: Is Don an alcoholic? If he is, then he needs to go to an AA meeting.

This question has dramatic implications as well. Why? Because whether he is or isn't alcoholic has nothing at all to do with his character or psychology. It's like getting cancer: it's not your fault!

Now it is your fault if you don't do anything about it; it is your fault if you ignore the symptoms.

But that is not the way this show (as well as hundreds of other TV shows, movies and novels) handles alcoholism. It treats Don's drinking problem as if it is a symptom of the way he lives and of the way he handles his problems. And all that is, to use a technical term, bullshit. (Notice the double standard by the way: none of the habitual users of marijuana or LSD have any problems.)

Having a drink at the end of a stressful way is not a bad habit. It will not lead to ruin. It will not cause you to explode like a boiler because you have been ignoring "the root causes" of your stress. In fact men, who are more likely to to do this, tend to have far fewer stress-related diseases than women, who don't tend to handle stress with a drink.

Okay, I hear you say, but Don drinks too much. Yes he does. But how do we explain that? If we put it down to alcoholism then it has no implications at all characterwise.

I think the way out of the problem is to treat it merely as a bad habit. In real life, that is a bad approach because a heavy drinking habit is often, but not always, a sign of alcoholism. But the show can't have it both ways and, since the show has chosen to present Don's heavy drinking as related to his psychology and character, we have to treat it as a bad habit.

Implications for my character J.A.C.? He has to have a bad habit that he has formed through long practice that he needs to overcome. I'm not sure it should be alcohol because, for the reasons stated above, alcohol tends to muddy the issue. I'll have to think about it. (My first inclination is to go with something sexual because, in my experience, the most common bad habit men have is to stick with a woman they are having regular sex with even though she is bad for them and they ought to dump her.)

Imitatio project: so where was I?

Last Tuesday, I suggested that any attempt to make a more positive type of "Don Draper" than what Mad Men offers us is faced with certain limiting facts. And since I am starting something new here, I am going to assign these facts to a new fictional character with the initials J.A.C. They are:

• JAC didn't have a strong father to provide him with a good example of manliness
• He grew up in a feminized environment driven by social policing and dubious sexual morals
• He has a drinking problem.
• He has a a lot of romantic baggage that he brings along from the past.
• The replacement he found for his first failed relationship is another weak and ineffectual woman who never grew out of her princess stage. 
• He has burned some bridges by admitting publicly that he has a shameful past.

I'll deal with just the first two today.

• JAC didn't have a strong father to provide him with a good example of manliness
• He grew up in a feminized environment driven by social policing and dubious sexual morals

Let's begin with the show. It overdoes these things quite a bit. Dick's natural father is a hot-headed man prone to drinking too much. He also doesn't trust anyone. His adoptive father is a pimp. Dick's birth mother is a prostitute and his stepmother becomes a prostitute when times get hard. That's not just hard times, that's Dickensian!

With an important difference: Dickens had actually experienced hard times and Matt Weiner experienced a life of privilege from the very beginning. Weiner has no notion of what people are like. It's not inconceivable that a woman who says, "Communists have souls but they cannot be saved," would, in difficult times, resort to prostitution. But she'd be a lot sneakier about it than Dick's mother is in the story.

But it is extremely unlikely that  she'd do such a think in the first place.

A dishonest man lives here

The important thing to grasp is that Draper uses his past as a kind of mythology. Nobody else seems to have grasped this. They take his flashbacks as factual remembrances even though he couldn't actually have experienced some of the things he has flashbacks of (the most notorious of these being the flashback to his own conception).

And even this mythology isn't enough. Dick also has an encounter with a hobo who introduces him to "the hobo code" back in the first season (one of the best episodes ever, BTW). This hobo code is what gives him the basis of his own personal moral code. And the thing that code gives him is the warrant to reject his own father's morality.

When we reduce Dick to these essentials, I think we begin to see a fairly recognizable type. His parents both advocate strong morals but show little capacity for love and both show themselves to be hypocrites because they can't maintain their high moral standards in the face of life's vicissitudes. That sounds like, well, that sounds like a whole lot of people.

In other words, Matt Weiner has used all this mythology to take a pretty common childhood blight and distance it a bit so that it makes worthy fiction.

But what about the dishonest mother?

So these first two limitations are not limitations at all. That older Don retells the story of Dick's youth this way is a healthy and honest way to deal with parental relationships. Every young man (or woman for that matter) needs to confront their father's moral limitations.Father's have a tendency to sell you a moral code that is based on the way they wish life was rather than what they know it actually is.

No, Don's he problem is that he doesn't blow up the relationship he has with his mother. Weiner has a good thing but ruins with a lot of Freudian bullshit. His chief problem is that he is still fighting with his mother as an adult. He has relatively little trouble finding male father figures to relate to. It's his relationships with women that are a problem.

So our fictional character J.A.C. is still struggling with the his mother.

Holiday,

... today is one, no posting.