Poem for Memorial Day

May 29, 2010 by Sanjay.

Architect, by Shauna Singh Baldwin

With a few lines on paper
you structure a war
memorial and explain
the strain of translating
abstractions: Freedom,
Democracy, the difficulty
of integrating high concept
with vernacular landscape.

We turn to your screen for
a virtual walk-thru. From
two dimensions, we create three.
In the fourth lie

The Great War, Good War,
Forgotten War, Cold War, Vietnam War,
First Iraq War, Second Iraq War
and all the little genocides
permitted in between.

You point to a void at the center
where a strong golden light
will one day break through.
You say it’s the beam of Liberty.

Lobbyists will gather in the lobby
Airmen will tell bold tales of bombings
Seamen will display models
of their battleships and carriers.
Infantry men will enshrine their boots and guns.

The Proxy War, the Lost War, the Oil War,
The war for the sake of war. Ongoing war.
Every war a civil war.
You say major battles
can be simulated in safety.
And we will not remember
those who fought against us
or at our nation’s side.

Old men seek the balm
of recognition; we oblige.

(More by Baldwin at her site.)

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Simply Write

May 19, 2010 by Sanjay.

I should write more simply. Smaller words. Shorter sentences. Fewer ideas jostling each other into incoherence. Most days I convince myself that my self-defeating tendency to complicate matters is a mere side-effect of my techie education; once over the 10,000 hour hump of writing experience, simplicity shall flow from my keyboard like twisters from Arjun Basu’s smartphone. Which is by way of introducing an exercise I recently underwent: writing a “how to” for a native Spanish speaker with very little English. This is how that came about.

With the encouragement of a local pilot friend, I recently signed up with a volunteer organization called Angel Flight (AF). AF offers private pilots a chance to fly for a reason: helping folks that need healthcare-related transportation. The focus is not on acutely sick people; they are better transported by medical professionals. AF pilots typically fly patients (and family members) who need to get from and to a medical facility. Sometimes it is for treatment. It could also be for a simple exam. In all cases, the appointment is understood to be non-time-sensitive. A volunteer-flown small plane trip makes the most sense if the passenger cannot arrange, afford or bear a long road trip. To ensure that pilots don’t get too mission-focused and inadvertently disregard safety, passengers are asked to have an alternate mode of transportation in case the volunteer has to cancel the trip. About one in three planned trips are actually cancelled or rescheduled.

I figured my first AF mission needed to be bone simple. So I signed up to transport a lady – I’ll call her AC - from the Central Valley town of Madera,  CA, to my home P1000722base of Palo Alto. AC was visiting her infant daughter at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital where she had had renal surgery. AC has no health issues. She could reach the hospital just about any time, we were under no time pressure. And Madera is a mere 115 miles (185 km) away, less than an hour’s flight. What could be simpler, right? Well, after signing up for the mission, I learned that AC spoke no English! The only Spanish I know is “no habla Español”! Houston, we have a problem.

Since this was AC’s first ride in a small plane and her first Angel Flight, I felt we needed to go over the many, many small details in preparation. My AF mentor had helpfully armed me with a pre-trip letter he sends each passenger. A phone call to AC verified that her only available interpreter was a family member with very rudimentary English. Clearly, my mentor’s letter was too sophisticated and culturally-encoded for a non-American non-Anglophone. So I rewrote it entirely. As simply as I could.

I then asked a friend – a Mexico-born housepainter - to discuss it with AC en Español. They spent about 30 minutes on the phone painstakingly dissecting each item. At least partly as a result of that conversation, AC and I had no expectation management issues on our trip. Though she seemed preoccupied much of the time, she seemed quite comfortable. I got her to her child. All was well.

Below is my letter to AC (with identifying details removed). I make no representations as to optimality in content or tone. I post it for three reasons. First, as a reminder (to myself) to write simply. And second, to see if readers can identify additional simplifications. Money left on the table, as it were. And finally, for those who have only flown on commercial carriers, some of the details might provide a flavor of recreational flight.

AC,

I look forward to flying you on your next Angel Flight trip. I thought you’d like to know a few things before your trip:

1. About the trip
Date: May 17, 2010
Pick-up: 3 pm

Passengers: 1 (you)
Weight: 185 lbs (including people, baggage and medical equipment)
From: Terminal building, Madera Municipal Airport, 4020 Aviation Drive, Madera, CA 93637
To: Palo Alto Airport (I will call your taxi when we get there.)
Travel time: About 1 hour

2. About me
Name: Sanjay Saigal
Profession: Computer (IT) consultant
Phone: XXX XXX XXXX
Email: xx@yy.com

3. About the plane
Type: Cirrus SR-20 (4 seats, single engine)
Color: White with green stripes
Registration: N903CD

4. Things to keep in mind (especially if you are new to small planes)

a. Unlike airlines, private flying times are just estimates. If there’s a headwind, a two hour trip could take half an hour more. We could spend extra time going around bad weather. Sometimes we might even arrive earlier than expected. It’s normal.

b. Since we will fly closer to the ground, you might feel more motion than you’re used to. The plane is engineered to bear many times the load the worst turbulence puts on it. Bumpy flights aren’t fun, but they’re safe. (If you start feeling sick, let me know and we’ll try to get to smoother air. I also keep sick bags in the plane!)

c. If you feel uncomfortable before or during the flight, tell me. We can delay our take-off. If we’re in the air and you feel not so great, we can quickly land at a nearby airport. You’ll be surprised how many small airports there are around here.

d. We fly with the help of air traffic control, just like big planes. That means that sometimes I will be busy on the radio. Most other times, I’ll be free to talk. If you have a question or want to tell me something, go right ahead. If I can’t talk right then, I’ll let you know.

e. I’m not getting paid to make this trip. I do it because I love to fly and because I enjoy helping people. Above all, I am concerned with our safety and comfort. If the weather is bad, if the plane isn’t in tip top condition, or if I am not at my best, I will cancel our flight. Of course, I will give you as much advance notice as possible. But if your trip is absolutely essential, make sure you have another way to get to your destination.

f. Even if it’s warm, carry an extra jacket. It will get cooler as we climb. If it’s cold, dress in layers. It could be warmer if we climb through clouds and the sun shines into the cockpit. Weather can be quite a bit different as little as 50 miles away from where you sit. That takes only 20 minutes in a plane!

5. What I expect from you

a. Please be at the pick-up point listed above on time. Call my cell if your plan changes, as far in advance as possible. I cannot get phone calls in the air. So leave a voice-mail message if I don’t pick up the phone.

b. Even though the plane may have extra seats, I am not prepared to carry more people or stuff than listed above. If you expect to have more, call me at least the day before so we can try to work it out.

c. Angel Flight West asks all passengers to sign a waiver before we fly. This form is legal protection for the organization and my family. I will bring a copy for you to sign.

d. I’d like to take a picture for Angel Flight’s pilot recruitment work and for my own records. I hope you’ll be ok with that.

I look forward to meeting you soon, and taking you comfortably and safely to your destination. If you have any questions before then, do let me know.

Posted in Communication, Flying | No Comments »

Close, So Faraway

April 8, 2010 by Sanjay.

I avoid writing about flying in part because it’s embarrassing to rhapsodize over something that so many of my kith cannot, or will not, share. But I cannot avoid the honest–to-goodness truth: flying the single best thing I do entirely of my own volition, with an entirely clear mind, with unalloyed pleasure. I recall that mindful flow when I read Whitman’s strange and incantatory Passage to India, a poem that connects temporal history to Eastern notions of divinity. Inasmuch as flying is grossly material, grubbily scientific, and inescapably a fruit of affluence, for me it is also an atomic causative for unexpectedly spiritual insight: “Thou, rondure of the world, at last accomplish’d.”

“I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest scenery in the world;
I cross the Laramie plains—I note the rocks in grotesque shapes—the buttes;
I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions—the barren, colorless, sage-deserts;
I see in glimpses afar, or towering immediately above me, the great mountains—I see the Wind River and the Wahsatch mountains;”

This is the northward prospect over Dixie National Forestin southern Utah. The snow-covered ridges to the farnorth are the Wasatch mountains east of Salt Lake City.

P1000534
P1000634

“I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle’s Nest—I pass the Promontory—I ascend the Nevadas;
I scan the noble Elk mountain, and wind around its base;
I see the Humboldt range—I thread the valley and cross the river,I see the clear waters of Lake Tahoe—I see forests of majestic pines,
Or, crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains,I behold enchanting mirages of waters and meadows;”

A couple of hundred miles south of Dixie NF, east of Flagstaff, Arizona,is the utter desert seen here. As the sun sets, it comes hauntedwith bleached spirits and flooded with the ghosts of long-driedwatercourses.

Flying lets me hear America sing.

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Good Sound from a Strange Mountain

September 30, 2009 by Sanjay.

Discussions about Pakistan are invariably problematic. If the participants are mainly American, there’s much head-shaking about Pakistan’s role in US-targeted terrorism. With Indians, there’s the inevitable nationalistic jaw-clenching about brutal invading hordes putting babies to the sword, the perfidies of Jinnah, and (if the gathering is intimate enough) how Pakistanis simply can’t be trusted. Worse than either alone are mixed groups. The prejudicial cross-infections about Pakistan that Indians and Americans can instigate in each other are scarier than MRSA on an HIV unit.

In light of the fear and loathing, encountering a truly excellent development in Pakistan is doubly pleasurable. First, because excellence, by its rarity, deserves celebration. And second, because it comes from a supposed area of unmitigated darkness. This development is a show on Pakistani television called Coke Studio. First broadcast in 2008, Coke Studio is a studio-based music show with a full orchestra and killer production values. PBS viewers of Austin City Limits and especially Soundstage will find the format familiar. However, in its second season, Coke Studio has dispensed with the studio audience. The resulting reduction of spontaneity is more than made up by the slicker production values.

So, what’s so special about Coke Studio? One way to answer that question is to see a couple of standouts. Exhibit A is the fabulous (in the classic sense of the word) Sufi itinerant Saieen Zahoor. On Aik Alif, Zahoor is accompanied by the Paki-Pop band Noori, who lend a modern smoothness to the archetypically rough-hewn mystical lyrics of Bulleh Shah, the pre-eminent eighteenth-century Panjabi Sufi. Zahoor is reputed to have left home at 13 to realize a mystic dream. Though it’s tempting to think of Zahoor as being in the mold of Delta Blues singers such as Robert Johnson, his class of illiterate, free, folk mystic has no real analog in the West. (The actual gypsy Reshma comes to mind as another exemplar. But assertively secular, singing mainly of lost loves and broken hearts, Reshma’s oeuvre is reminiscent of a Lucinda Williams.)

You read it all to be wise but never your self
You run to enter every mosque and every temple but never your heart

Every day you confront Satan but you never your self
Says Bulleh Shah, each day you grab at the sky,
but never capture what’s in your heart

My friend, stop pursuing the knowledge out there, stop seeking
The Aleph inside is all you need, the Aleph is all you need
Truth

Refrain: Allah, my beloved

I walk, I walk, with the yogi

He who knows not truth’s power has not God’s strength
We drown in the torrents of our selves; what boat, what rapids?

(Transcription and initial translation from Babelsongs.)

While I’m no reflexive fan of musical fusion, in this performance Zahoor’s dreamy raggedness and Noori’s Putomayo flavoring (“hip and saucy"!”) combine beautifully in the smoothly professional blender of Coke Studio. My translation from the Panjabi is limited by a weak grasp of the language or its melody. Yet the poet’s contemplative spirit shines through the ungainly verbiage.

The song below – Husn-e-haqiqi - is also a spiritual kafi in Panjabi, but there the resemblance ends. The words belong to Khwaja Farid, a nineteenth century poet. The singer, Arieb Azhar, is anything but a wandering mendicant. Rather, he’s a vodka-loving, Croat-Pakistani producer-musician with a definite awareness of his exotic stylishness. It will surprise nobody to learn that Huan-e-haqiqi has become somewhat of an anthem among subcontinental youth.

True beauty

O’ Beauty of Truth, the Eternal Light!
Do I call you necessity and possibility,
Do I call you the ancient divinity,
The One, creation and the world,
Do I call you free and pure Being,
Or the apparent lord of all,
Do I call you the souls, the egos and the intellects,
The imbued manifest, and the imbued hidden,
The actual reality, the substance,
The word, the attribute and dignity,
Do I call you the variety, and the circumstance,
The demeanor, and the measure,
Do I call you the throne and the firmament,
And the demurring delights of Paradise,
Do I call you mineral and vegetable,
Animal and human,
Do I call you the mosque, the temple, the monastery,
The scriptures, the Quran,
The rosary, the girdle,
Godlessness, and faith,
Do I call you the clouds, the flash, the thunder,
Lightning and the downpour,
Water and earth,

The gust and the inferno,
Do I call you Lakshmi, and Ram and lovely Sita,
Baldev, Shiv, Nand, and Krishna,
Brahma, Vishnu and Ganesh,
Mahadev and Bhagvaan,
Do I call you the Gita, the Granth, and the Ved,
Knowledge and the unknowable,
Do I call you Abraham, Eve and Seth,
Noah and the deluge,
Abraham the friend, and Moses son of Amran,
And Ahmad the glorious, darling of every heart,
Do I call you the witness, the Lord, or Hejaz,
The awakener, existence, or the point,
Do I call you admiration or prognosis,
Nymph, fairy, and the young lad,
The tip and the nip,
And the redness of betel leaves,
The Tabla and Tanpura,
The drum, the notes and the improvisation,
Do I call you beauty and the fragrant flower,
Coyness and that amorous glance,
Do I call you Love and knowledge,
Superstition, belief, and conjecture,
The beauty of power, and conception,
Aptitude and ecstasy,
Do I call you intoxication and the drunk,
Amazement and the amazed,
Submission and the connection,
Compliance and Gnosticism,
Do I call you the Hyacinth, the Lilly, and the Cypress,
And the rebellious Narcissus,
The bereaved Tulip, the Rose garden, and the orchard,
Do I call you the dagger, the lance, and the rifle,
The hail, the bullet, the spear,
The arrows made of white poplar, and the bow,
The arrow-notch, and the arrowhead,
Do I call you colorless, and unparalleled,
Formless in every instant,
Glory and holiness,
Most glorious and most compassionate,
Repent now Farid forever!
For whatever I may say is less,
Do I call you the pure and the humane,
The Truth without trace or name.

(Translation by Arieb Azhar)

Though those two performances are the most interesting, Coke Studio’s episode archive is a great place to dip into a spectrum of modern Pakistani music from straight-ahead studio-folk to backup babes working over The Monkees! Anyone sampling this musical feast will undoubtedly find much to be curious about:

  • Is this level of sophisticated programming emblematic of Pakistani television?
  • Does the program reflect a purely urban, cosmopolitan sensibility? How does it play in Pakistani Peoria?
  • How does “Pakistani music” fit with the wide and deep Indian musical tradition?
  • What kind of crazily liberal Muslims were the Sufis, and did “regular Muslims (as heard and seen nightly on Fox News) IED them out of existence?

I refer anyone interested in these, and other, questions about Pakistan to the very accessible All Things Pakistan blog. For me, this musical encounter is pleasure enough.

Posted in Criticism | No Comments »

Zapping up the Ulti Lingo*

May 20, 2009 by Sanjay.

Sifting through old papers, I ended up riffling through my thesis. Back to front. Perhaps I wanted to know how the story ended. Or perhaps in its opacity - 18 years down the road - it seems to be written in a truly foreign language, like Persian. Whatever the reason, when further paper shuffling - avoiding work is an avocation - yielded the following poem by Nissim Ezekiel, I had to laugh. It was just too appropriate to the laboriousness of my own forays in writing. (I am on week 3 stuck in a supposedly straightforward technical report…)

Some people are not having manners
this I am always observing
For example the other day I find
I am needing Soap
for ordinary washing myself purposes
So I am going to one small shop
nearby in my lane and I am asking
for well-known brand soapThe shopman he’s giving me soap
but I am finding it defective version
So I am saying very politely –
though in Hindi I’m saying it,
and my Hindi is not so good as my English
Please to excuse me
but this is defective version of well-known brand soap
That shopman is saying
and very rudely he is saying it
What is wrong with soap?

Still I am keeping my temper
and repeating very smilingly
Please to note this defect in Soap
and still he is denying the truth
So I am getting very angry that time and with loud voice I am saying
YOU ARE BLIND OR WHAT?

Now he is shouting
you are calling me blind or what?
Come outside and I will show you

Then I am shouting
What you will show me
Which I haven’t got already?
It is a vulgar thing to say
But I am saying it.

Now small crowd is collecting
and the shopman is much bigger than me,
and I am not caring so much
for small defect in well-known brand soap
So I am saying
Alright OK Alright OK
this time I will take
but not next time

Nissim Ezekiel
from: Very Indian Poems in Indian English

* The post title is the headline of a September 1988 article in India Today about college slang. Ulti, here a contraction of ultimate, carries a double meaning. The identically spelled Hindi word means upside down.

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Seeing the Light

February 16, 2009 by Sanjay.

My non-agenda for this blog, I told myself, was to write about whatever interested me. And, like most people, I have convinced myself of my impressively wide range of interests. Imagine my surprise then, when I looked at the “word cloud” generated by the ultra-cool web site Wordle. Click on it to see the full-size picture:

Wordle: SanjaysNewBlogPic

I’m political! Who knew!!

Posted in Communication, Politics | No Comments »

Fly Past

December 30, 2008 by Sanjay.

Professionally, 2008 was indeterminate. Muddy. My experience starting a new venture is hard to compare with others’, especially given the amorphousness of consulting. But I confess that the ghosts of (regular) paychecks past have visited me more than once. I described the ups and downs of being self-employed to a childhood friend. Tridib put my ambivalence in stark relief by recalling our shared petite bourgeoisie upbringing in India. “Let’s face it,” he said, “you are basically a government servant type, as am I.” Ah, the bracing bluntness of old friends. Nevertheless, I remain determined to fight the entrepreneurial fight!

On the personal front, 2008 has been a year of highs. Chief among them was the opportunity to deepen and broaden my flying logbook. I flew two near-transcontinental trips – from California to Duluth, MN, thence to Springfield, IL and back, and a few weeks later, from California to Appleton, WI and back for that incomparable fly-in, Airventure. Each trip consumed an entire day, with actual flying time being in the 10+ hour range. The autopilot engaged and the plane purring contentedly, the long flight legs provided a great opportunity to observe and reflect.

Flying, as has been oft-observed, is humanity’s second-oldest collective dream, up there with immortality. To be above it all, to “slip the surly bonds of earth”, is divine sensation indeed. But flying is only partly sensual or spiritual. What it provides is a rarity in our circumscribed modern existence: a truly existential experience. No other enterprise places one so actively in the moment: existence precedes essence. The pilot’s actions determine the lived reality.

This connection is far more visceral than people who only fly commercial realize. In the few moments of take-off in a small place, you feel the earth’s slipping grasp as you as you escape her embrace. Within a few minutes, you feel her below you change from protective habitation to an incomprehensibly alien desolation wilderness.

And then, there is the magical experience of being in charge. A trained private pilot, in a well-maintained aircraft, is unambiguously in command. Not the air traffic controller. Not his boss or boss’s boss. Not even – for once – his wife! Before the flight, he decides on the route and stops. During the flight, he decides how to address the vicissitudes of weather and circumstance. After the flight, he decides what he takes from that particular flight by how he analyzes and logs it. Very little in life is so purpose-driven.

After all that analysis though, I return to the notion that the attraction of flight is elemental. Purely child’s play. The Kiwi poet Allen Curnow expresses it beautifully in A Time of Day:

A small charge for admission. Believers only.
Who present their tickets where a five-
barred farm gate grapes on its chain and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock.
Out of the afternoon pearl-dipped light the
dung-green biplane descendedand will return later, and later, late as
already it is. We are all born
of cloud again, in a caulof linen lashed to the air-frame of the age
smelling of the scorched raw castor oil
nine whirling cylinders pelt

up-country-smelling senses with, narcotic
joyrides, these helmeted barnstormers
heavier scented than hay,

harnesses, horsepiss, fleeces, phosphates and milk
under the fingernails. I’m pulling at
my father’s hand Would the little

boy for selling the tickets? One helmet smiles
bending over yes, please let me,
my father hesitates, I

pull and I don’t let go.

Happy 2009!

Posted in Flying | 1 Comment »

How We Think Today

September 18, 2008 by Sanjay.

I have been following the 2008 US electoral cycle with keen interest, chortling pleasure, and an occasional prickling of concern.

Interest, because the world is clearly at an inflection point - the old order changeth, giving way to the new, etc. How Americans choose to deal with the changing reality is reflected in their political choices. And who is elected to lead America will undoubtedly have a major impact on history.

Pleasure, or more accurately - schadenfreude - because while presidential politics is the highest stakes game there is, its principals are so nakedly trying to learn as they go along, slipping and sliding to political perdition along the way. Not just John “My Friends” McCain, but also Carly “Not Qualified to Run HP” Fiorina, Jeremiah “My Kingdom for a Mic” Wright, the “monstrous” Samantha Powers, the ever-hapless Tucker Bounds, and many more.

And finally, concern, because if these “leaders” don’t know what they are doing, who does? I feel a bit like Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

But the most interesting phenomenon has bloomed following the Sarah Palin selection as McCain’s running mate. This breathtakingly stupid decision has split right-leaning opinionators into two stark camps: those trying to deal with it analytically, and those attempting to trans-subtantiate a lipsticked pig into a silk purse.

David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and a few other pundits are currently marvelous exemplars in a slow-mo “five stages of grief” type of enlightenment. (David Frum is the only pundit who instantly recognized the light at the end of the Rupublican Convention as that of a freight train.) These folks started off rah-rah-ing Palin. Since then, they’ve been talking themselves and their readers back off the ledge.

(Parenthetically, it’s hard enough being a journalist and committing your judgments to forever-Googleable bits. Add to that the pressure of having to opine in real-time, on television and blogs, and you have a logorrheic masochist’s dream profession.)

Others - sad to say they’re the majority - doggedly continue to ascribe the relentlessly unfolding messiness of the Palin selection on the ever-convenient “liberal media”. (Parenthetically, it remains surprisingly common for American commentators, even many who have traveled the world and theoretically gained perspective on the domestic US scene, to fail to understand the fundamental conservativeness of mainstream American media.) My Facebook friend and Forbes Online editor Rich Karlgaard is in the latter camp. Rich has even resorted to selectively quoting from the firebrand narcissist Camille Paglia’s Salon column on Palin’s supposed ur-feminism to bolster his repeated contention that Palin is a “good thing” for McCain and (scarily) for the country.

Until recently, I would have rolled my eyes at attempts to square the circle by an otherwise intelligent man. But I was reminded of something another lifelong Republican friend (the improbably named Pierre Redmond) once told me - “Sanjay, to do anything meaningful you have to pick a team. You can’t go through life evaluating everything everytime.” (That’s a rough paraphrase.) I believe that a misplaced “team affiliation” lies at the root of the wilful-seeming analytical blindness displayed by Palin-boosters.

To begin with, you pick a team - in Rich’s case “free-market conservativism” - that has an internally consistent analytical framework. Should the framework be resilient enough, it allows you to build on previous analysis without having to revert to first principles. That is all to the good. But what happens when your team decides to change games? Alert observes figure this out quickly. It’s not difficult. But what is difficult is deciding what to do next. Should you switch teams? Should you attempt to influence your team to reset the game? I figure that the more closely you emphasize with your team’s “brand”, the easier it is to go along with the new game. And it’s human nature to rely on brands rather than the reality behind them.

Breaking with one’s team is wrenching at best, unthinkable for most. It isn’t having to reexamine ideological underpinnings that’s the worst. It’s the Solomonic cleaving of social assumptions - old friends who now disapprove of your views, your freakish and presumptive new fellow travelers, etc. - that present the greatest disruption risk. Only the boldest, the true free-thinkers, are thus capable.

I’ve long found there to be a structural inverse correlation between free thought and modern conservatism. The finest counter-example to that notion was William F Buckley Jr. I’ve also been impressed by Andrew Sullivan, a prolific blogger at The Atlantic, even though his book The Conservative Soul: How we Lost it, How to Get it Back, is ultimately unpersuasive in its attempt to redirect the current of American conservatism.

Today I read a remarkable article by Wick Allison, the former editor of National Review (another WFB connection!) titled A Conservative for Obama. Its defense of conservatism and its rationale for a break with the Bush-McCain brand is remarkably cogent. (Its dour description of liberalism, not so much. But that’s a quibble.) Here’s Allison’s core argument for ditching his team:

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results…. But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts - a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war - led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Wick Allison now joins my (very short but growing) list informally titled “a thinking-man’s conservatives”.

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Telling Truths in America

August 20, 2008 by Sanjay.

Today’s NYT has an in-depth examination of Barack Obama’s tax philosophy and proposals. While interesting in and of itself, the article is especially useful in showing how the candidate thinks… in fact, in showing the candidate’s startlingly live intellect. A mind in a national-level politician is a strangely exotic notion, given George W Bush’s depressing inarticulation and John McCain’s distressing tic of seeming like he’s reading a teleprompter even when he isn’t.

Towards the end of the article, Obama quotes from Robert Kennedy’s “Soul of America” speech from the ‘68 campaign. Delivered less than three month before his assassination, the speech has the trademark Kennedy humor, a characteristic appreciation of history, and most of all, a richly poetic vein doomed to lie fallow in American politics until Senator Obama’s emergence at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Obama picks one of his “favorite quotes” from the following wonderful riff on the limitations of Economics:

[the] Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

That is, indeed, a clever juxtaposition. It’s not difficult to see why Obama, RFK’s stylistic descendant, highlights the section. However lyrical though, it is far from the rhetorical gut of the speech. That is RFK’s truth-telling of the country’s two major challenges - Vietnam and its attendant unrest and alienation, and domestic poverty:

…we as a people, we as a people, are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand. This country needs honesty and candor in its political life and from the President of the United States. But I don’t want to run for the presidency - I don’t want America to make the critical choice of direction and leadership this year without confronting that truth. I don’t want to win support of votes by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions. I want us to find out the promise of the future, what we can accomplish here in the United States, what this country does stand for and what is expected of us in the years ahead. And I also want us to know and examine where we’ve gone wrong. And I want all of us, young and old, to have a chance to build a better country and change the direction of the United States of America.

RFK spends the rest of his speech - some 2800 words - describing Appalachian poverty, the mess in Vietnam and laying out the hard work ahead.

Critiquing the recent Rick Warren theofest starring the two major party candidates, my wife observed that Obama “dumbed down” his delivery for the (largely right-leaning) evangelicals, that Obama soft-pedaled to avoid antagonizing the (largely white) audience. Her comments reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ similar complaint about Senator Obama’s timidity:

Obama can’t bring the same moralism to bear on the wider he country which he applies to the black community, that he can’t point out to Americans that oil prices going up is a good thing. Polluting the world your children will inherit is a moral issue. A system that allows people to buy homes with no money down is a moral issue. Telling people that the best thing they can do after the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, is go out an shop is a moral issue.I hear all of this talk about Obama as a post-racial candidate–but that only applies when its time for white people to pat themselves on the back. A truly post-racial candidate would be free to preach morals not just to African-Americans, but to all Americans.

The parallels between RFK’s and Obama’s respective situations are remarkable: Vietnam vs. Iraq, widespread poverty vs. the current economic meltdown. Perhaps Obama should hew less to advisors-generated tactics and focus more on speaking his mind a la RFK. Maybe “the real Obama” is more like RFK than Hillary Clinton.

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Follow the Many

June 25, 2008 by Sanjay.

The success of prediction markets in the electoral arena hinges on the idea that while talk is cheap, nothing sharpens the mind like real money. Combining the wisdom of the crowd with real money yields better predictions.

So, if how third-party observers choose to use their money tells us what they really think, can the same be said for campaign expenditures? (Key: Expenditures as opposed to campaign rhetoric.) Now, we could dissect the strategy of either presidential campaign (e.g., the famous McCain Strategy Briefing). But we have to contend with incomplete information, possible misdirection, and sample bias. It may be more instructive to analyze the financial actions of the most interested market actors: congressional candidates.

We want to know - where are congressional candidates up for election putting their hard-bought campaign dollars? Are Republican candidates, for instance, tying themselves to the GOP candidate? Or are they assuming a posture of independence from the party establishment? (It goes without saying that all candidates in the 2008 cycle are either attacking or ignoring President Bush.) How much of each candidate’s campaign expenditure co-opts the Obama theme of “change”, how much focuses on the candidate’s individual brand, how much on party affiliation, how much on the economy, etc.

From data on each candidate’s media expenditure - along a breakdown similar to that implied above - we can find regression coefficients that essentially mimic the market price for each “meme”. These market prices could be aggregated regionally or nationally or through district segmentation (”hard red”, “leans blue”, etc.). Extrapolating based on such prices at the state level should provide a better forecast of the electoral dominos than opinion survey-based polling.

An illustrative instance comes from the following ad released by Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR). He is not only allocating dollars to the “bipartisanship” meme, he is explicitly attempting to leverage the Obama brand.

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