Seeing the Airplane

One day I was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight, while another passenger stood at the window with her daughter, trying to show her the airplane we were about to board. But the little girl couldn't see it. See could see the fueling trucks on the tarmac, she could see the baggage carts and the airport staff on the ground. But she couldn't see the airplane itself.

"Where's the plane?" the little girl kept asking. "Where's the plane?"

The problem was scale. The child couldn't recognize the shape of the aircraft standing there in plain view, because she was looking for a much smaller shape. She simply didn't have any precedent, or any cognitive model, for an object of the size she was looking at, so she couldn't connect the sight of metal or paint or tire rubber into the larger outline of the plane. She didn't link the bits she was seeing into a picture of the whole because she didn't expect and couldn't imagine that such a whole might exist.

Lately I've been thinking about that little girl every day. She's a good illustration of how we process information, as human beings, and of how difficult the big and unexpected can be to process. When confronted with something too large and too strange, we can fail to apprehend it at all.

Most of our handling of the financial crisis boils down to one real question: who has seen the plane yet, and who has not? There have been furious daily stories in the news about this or that detail of the large, terrible shape overshadowing us. But it becomes increasingly clear in each day's news that most of the players, and certainly most of the journalists, haven't managed to perceive that shape, or even its shadow.

A CEO of a major bailed-out institution who can not only defend exorbitant employee compensation but get self-righteous about those employee's deserts has not seen the plane yet. CNBC pundits trying to defend their own performance and scapegoat others have not seen the plane. Congressmen who obsess about spending cuts or even spending freezes during a massive economic contraction really have not seen the plane. It's not simply denial, although there is a measure of that. It's a basic and all-too-normal failure to apprehend the largest and most important part of the landscape, precisely because it is so incredibly large.

Most people, with the normal human mix of benign and selfish intentions, are trying to keep doing the things that worked for them, and even seemed virtuous to them, before the situation changed, because they haven't yet grasped that this is a new, and very different situation. There need not always be a Goldman Sachs; entitlement spending is not the biggest fiscal challenge the nation faces at the moment; CNBC's business model is not necessarily viable any more. It takes a certain amount of time to grasp fundamental change, perhaps especially for the experts who are trained to deal with intricate details of a large and commonly-understood model. It takes longer to see the plane if you're trained at analyzing tire treads, and you're looking for a car. And once you've seen the plane, you have to begin the long, difficult process of thinking about what it means.

It's very clear from his banking plan that Tim Geithner, for all his expertise, has yet to see the plane. Barack Obama has not seen it clearly either. That's not good at all. Obama planned his campaign, and his administration, for a different set of problems. And like most of the other key players, what Obama tends to say is what Obama tended to say before the crisis. The economic plan that he recommends is the plan he stumped on in the primaries. That's not dishonesty or stupidity: it's simply a sign of not yet having taken on board the basic facts of the new environment.

Obama, to be fair, could not have been elected already seeing the plane; the plane only came into view a few months before the election, and anyone who had been predicting a crisis such as this earlier would not have been able to achieve the nomination. (You can't win a broad-based election based on priorities that the vast majority of the country does not share.) His success or failure will not be linked to his foresight, but to his adaptability. The question isn't whether Obama has a plan. Any plan he might have would be based on assumptions that aren't viable any more. The question is how quickly he realizes he needs to throw the plan away, and think of something new.

The child never did spot the airplane that day. She wasn't ready yet. But she had to ride in its belly, just the same. And so do we.

McCain Mocks Mormon History

Jonathan Chait has a nice post at The New Republic about McCain's shallow, twittering mockery of various bits of budgetary pork, and about Maureen Dowd's witless applause of McCain. As Chait points out, McCain's "method" is to pick anything that can be made to sound silly. Dowd, of course, lauds this method as the height of wisdom.

In the list of "silly" projects McCain scorns is this:

$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. "Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?" McCain tweeted. ...

Get it? McCain can pun! And he can make fun of Brits who play silly sports while wearing sweaters (like Churchill)! Who ever heard of a Mormon cricket anyway?

Pretty much everyone in Utah, I would think. Since an infestation of Mormon crickets nearly wiped out Brigham Young and the rest of the Mormon settlers of Salt Lake during their first year, those crickets are pretty much stuck in the locals' historical memory. There's a monument in Temple Square to a pair of seagulls, because if seagulls hadn't eventually eaten many of those crickets the Mormons in Salt Lake would have starved to death.

So that's all it is. A local pest species that once almost killed off the original founders of the state. No big deal. After all, why spend a whole million to prevent local agriculture from swarms of ravenous locusts? And anyway who would know such a thing? Apparently not a Republican Senator from a neighboring state. Good thing there are no Republicans in Utah.

Jindal's Trivial Autobiography

Plenty of others have written about the many, many things wrong with Bobby Jindal's response to President Obama Tuesday night, especially its intellectual bankruptcy and Jindal's ghastly delivery. But at the risk of piling on, I want to talk about something else that's been bothering me about that speech, something which seems to have passed without comment: Jindal's bizarre decision to begin his response by discussing his biography.

I understand that this is the Age of the Memoir, both in politics and in the arts. We have a President who published a memoir before beginning his political career, and whose volunteers were trained to tell their own personal stories as a means of persuading voters. We have an entertainment landscape increasingly rich in nonfictional and allegedly non-fictional personal narratives. But was I the only one who appalled when Jindal, speaking on national TV during a national economic crisis, began prattling about his family history and the things his father used to tell him? With the banks failing and the economy in shambles, what Jindal wanted to talk about was, well, Jindal.

I found that approach grotesque, and eerily disconnected from reality. This was a moment to speak to a worried nation about its legitimate worries, to talk about where we are and what we need to do. The occasion demanded an explicit focus on the audience, not on the speaker. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing their jobs; this is not about Jindal.

Of course, such an autobiographical preamble is expected and necessary in a campaign speech, especially when a candidate being introduced to a new group of voters. Jindal's little family stories make sense if he's running for President, but to respond to a speech about a major crisis, a month into a new President's administration, by beginning to run for President oneself is similarly grotesque and irresponsible. The televised pundits took it for granted that Jindal would do this, and to them it evidently seemed natural. They are interested in political "personalities" they can shape stories around, and on simple horse-race storylines they can cover without thinking. They're artificial public "personalities" themselves, dedicated to publicizing their personal brands; Jindal's grossly inappropriate behavior was simply the kind of thing the media talking heads do every day. And they have been interested in the run-Bobby-run storyline for some time now: it's a new storyline they want to roll out, with a new character they want to introduce, as if the American political process were merely a game show like Survivor.

After Jindal blithely ignored the economic crisis, various pundits (including bloggers I like very much) asked whether or not Jindal had harmed his presidential aspirations in 2012. This is a profoundly stupid question. In ordinary times, there is nothing wrong with such speculation. But these are not ordinary times, and there are more pressing questions: Will there still be an American auto industry in 2010? Will we have functioning banks six months from now? Will we be able to recover from the recession by 2011? Questions like these not only dwarf the significance of questions about Candidate Jindal, but they obviate them. Bobby Jindal has no political hopes separate from the fate of the nation or of its economy. The success or failure of the economic recovery will determine the political landscape in 2012. Asking whether Jindal helped or hurt his "chances," as a question distinct from the fate of the country, is as stupid as wondering about how the tie you wore to lunch with the boss might affect your career prospects at Citibank. The real questions are whether Citibank will continue to exist, and in what form. The question the pundits natter about can only be answered by the questions that they, like Jindal himself, ignore.

It's clear from the speech what Jindal wants. He's hoping that Obama's attempts to rescue the economy fails, so that Jindal can run on a blame-Obama platform. Thus Jindal's refusal to offer any constructive suggestion, and his urgency to go on record as opposing Obama's policies. That Jindal chose to position himself politically in case of an economic failure, in fact to pin his hopes to four more years of economic disaster, should in itself disqualify him for national office. No one who chooses to play a private game when the public stakes are this high can be trusted.

A Larger Peeve

I've realized this week that I've developed a peeve slightly too large to keep as a pet, a specific peeve about the business of academia.

Every so often in a university setting, one meets an older white man who speaks and carries himself with great authority although he hasn't earned the academic credentials that the people whom he's addressing have earned. He may not have published any scholarship; he may not have gotten a doctorate; he may never have been to a major professional conference, let alone given a paper or gotten a job there; but that's okay. He's still perfectly comfortable giving the benefit of his wisdom to junior colleagues who have done all of those things and who might, in some technical sense, outrank him. How else are the youngsters going to learn?

These types seldom hassle me. I'm male and I'm loud and someday I'll probably have nice white patriarchal facial hair. So at least some of these people, alas, tend to decide that I'm their kind of guy, and treat me with more collegial respect than they extend, for example, to women.

That doesn't make the behavior any less appalling to watch, or less insulting. It was one thing in the bad old days, when most of the women in the profession were, of necessity, new to it, and therefore junior to various patronizing graybearded colleagues. The condescension offered to younger female scholars in those days was ugly, and the world could always do with less of that, but it could travel under the color of genuine seniority. But when an older man with limited credentials pays no respect to a scholar's achievements simply because she's a younger than he, when he feels entitled to talk to women who hold degrees that he himself does not as if they were his students, what he's saying is that a white-haired man, indeed any white-haired man, will always have authority over younger women, no matter how much they know, no matter how much he does not. There can be no excuse for that. It's not only a profound insult to women, but a denial of the very project of learning. If knowledge matters less than gender, if a woman's learning counts for less than a man's years, then what on earth is a university for?

And yes, these characters are typically marginal figures, and relatively (albeit insufficiently) rare, and their behavior is transparently asinine. Few people accord them the kind of authority they accord themselves. But they get on my nerves anyway.
To them I say, horsefeathers!

A Small Peeve

I've spent a lot more of the week in the office than I'd like, and a good part of Sunday on hold with various customer service reps, including a rep for the same company with whom I spent a good bit of last Sunday on hold. So it's made me a little peevish, and made me a connoisseur of the "on hold" music they play for you while you wait.

I wish I were big enough, this Sunday, not to be annoyed by the new generation of on-hold recordings, which for some reason feel that you should not be allowed to tune out the Muzak and go about whatever errands you can with the phone pressed to your ear, but should instead be interrupted every ninety seconds by a recorded assurance that they will be with you soon. The effect, of course, is to make the caller think, for a second, that he or she has reached a live operator, as the music cuts out and the infinitesimal pause of expectation follows it. Which means, gallingly, that you are once more forced to pay attention to the nothing happening over the phone, rather than allowing your mind to wander more profitably. It gets me every time. I clearly have a conditioned reflex to read that little hiccup in the music as the advent of a human voice. And this seems to be deliberate: some marketing wizard has decided that things go better for them if the caller's mind is not allowed to wander. It's a small complaint, but I'm peevish today, and it seems a bit uncharitable coming from companies who have generally gotten my attention by not quite providing the services they've sold me.

The company with which I was on hold for a second Sunday in a row has actually refined the snap-the-reader-to-attention trick by prefacing the recorded voice with noise like someone fumbling with a phone. That's right, they have recorded the sound of someone picking up a phone from its cradle to begin their recorded message. That's commitment, baby.