Two great podcasts I've been listening to lately:
Black Jack Justice
I cannot say enough good things about Decoder Ring Theater's presentations of Black Jack Justice. It's a golden-age-of-radio-esque presentation about two private detectives, Jack Justice and Trixie Dixon, girl detective. The stories have dialogue and sound effects that recall programs from the 1940s, as well as nicely crafted internal monologues both from Jack and Trixie's perspectives. Each program is about 25 mins long and are all well-written by Greg Taylor.
I'm pretty sure that Black Jack Justice counts as a romance novel because it's character-driven and because of the constant banter between Jack and Trixie. Because the plotlines need to be wrapped up in 25 mins, some of the episodes end a little too quickly and too cleanly. But the characters are funny, rich and vivid, the detectives confront a variety of interesting and controversial issues such as domestic violence, and the dialogue is very good.
The highest compliment I can pay to Decoder Ring Theater is that I have been "rationing" the episodes because I don't want it to end.
The BS Report
I've been a fan of Bill Simmons since before he moved to ESPN, and I regularly listen to the BS Report, his podcast.
I'm intrigued at how Bill Simmons has evolved from a sports-writer into an excellent interviewer and conversationalist through his podcasts. He routinely scores interviews with stand-up comedians such as Jeff Ross and Patton Oswald, writers such as Chuck Klosterman, writers and producers for SNL, fairly high-profile actors such as Jon Ham, and of course sports figures such as Steve Nash, Mark Cuban and even the legendary Jerry West. I think one of the most appealing aspects to Simmons' podcasts is that they aren't interviews so much as they are discussions about a variety of topics. He lets sports figures talk about movies and TV shows, and talks sports with the actors. He also interjects his own ideas into the conversations, which makes it less of an interrogation and more of a free-flowing discussion. And best of all, he's funny.
I want to give a particular plug to Chuck Klosterman's most recent podcast (part 1 and part 2). Simmons and Klosterman are both funny and smart and their discussions are always fascinating. I had never heard of Klosterman until the BS Report but I will be buying his latest book of essays to read between the semesters.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Too big to fail?
Too big to fail?
Gary Stern, former president of the Minneapolis Fed, co-authored a book called "Too Big To Fail" with Ron Feldman. At first glance, this book could be tossed into the pile of books flooding out of the wake of the financial crisis of ought-8. Except that this book was published in 2004, and sounds incredibly prescient based on Stern's conversation with Russ Roberts on Econ Talk.
Economists and libertarians regularly sound the alarm about "moral hazard", whether it's in relation to this most recent financial crisis, or in many areas of public policy. To put it as succinctly as I can, moral hazard means that you will act differently if your actions are insulated from any risks that your actions engender. So you will probably bet more aggressively with someone else's money than you would bet with your own money, especially if you get to keep any winnings garnered by your bets.
The moral hazard argument goes that bailing-out a firm is bad because the people taking the risks get paid if the risks pay out, but the tax-payers take the loss if the risks don't pay out. This sounds an awful lot like gambling with someone else's money, and it creates perverse incentives for future decision-makers to behave irresponsibly because they know that they will be bailed-out.
Before we move on, it's important to understand what, exactly, happens when there is a bail-out. My understanding is that, in general, bond-holders get bailed-out while equity-holders get wiped out. What does this mean? Equity
holders own stock in a company, so they reap large profits if the company does
well, but they can lose their entire investment if the company goes
bust. A bail-out of a trouble firm usually forces equity-holders to take big losses. Bond-holders, on the other hand, are essentially the firm's creditors: They loan money to the firm at a fixed interest rate, and expect to be paid back their principal plus interest, regardless of how well the firm does. Bail-outs usually protect bond-holders from big losses.
Why does it matter that bail-outs protect bond-holders but wipe-out share-holders? One of the counter-arguments is that, while bail-outs do create a moral hazard, there is still tremendous pressure from equity-holders for the firm to act responsibly because the share-holders don't want to lose their investment. The bond-holders, who are usually the ones who get bailed-out, don't really care if the firm acts irresponsibly because they are going to get back their investment anyway. So they're not exerting any major pressure on the institution because they're protected one way or the other.
Here's the key insight I took from Stern and Roberts. The pressure exerted by equity holders for firms to act responsibly is greatly, greatly exaggerated. Why is this the case? The majority of people and institutions who own stock are almost universally well-diversified, which means that they never own too much of one company (or one sector) that if that company goes bankrupt that they'll lose very much. There simply aren't any equity holders who have so much at stake with the success of one company the they're going to bother putting much pressure on that company to act responsibly. And the bond-holders don't own the company in the same way that the share-holders do, so they couldn't exert much pressure even if they wanted to. And bond-holders don't really care anyway because they are the ones that get bailed out.
This brings us to the decision-makers---the investment bankers and managers and CEOs---who are running the company. What are their incentives? As Stern and Roberts point out, investment bankers get paid a big salary, but they also get paid stock options. So they themselves are equity holders in the company and have an incentive not to bankrupt the firm. However, employee stock-options are rarely structured such that employees can cash out everything all at once, so the stock options are a little more theoretical than shares of stock you or I might have purchased in the firm with funds in our IRA. Now, throw onto this mix the fact that many managers are paid bonuses based on the "performance" of their firm, and you can see the moral hazard for excessive risk-taking start to take shape: You'll be paid more in bonuses if your risky bets pay off, and while you'll lose your stock options if those risks don't pay out, you can't exercise all of those stock options anyway, so there's nothing truly lost out of your pocket. Plus you're being paid a very large salary all along the way, and you'll be able to exercise at least a small number of your stock options. So why not take excessive risks to jack up your bonuses and the value of the few stock options that you can exercise?
The point is that there is no single investor on the hook for enough losses when a firm fails to put pressure on that firm to act responsibly. Equity-holders are either diversified investors with a plethora of other stock, or employees of the firm who can't exercise all of their stock options anyway, while the bond-holders get bailed out if the firm goes bust.
There's much more great information in the podcast, and I'm sure there's even more information in the book, such as a history of bail-outs over the last couple of decades. But one thing is for sure: I'm much less sanguine about the claim that some firms are too big to fail, and much more critical of why we let some firms get too big to fail in the first place.
Gary Stern, former president of the Minneapolis Fed, co-authored a book called "Too Big To Fail" with Ron Feldman. At first glance, this book could be tossed into the pile of books flooding out of the wake of the financial crisis of ought-8. Except that this book was published in 2004, and sounds incredibly prescient based on Stern's conversation with Russ Roberts on Econ Talk.
Economists and libertarians regularly sound the alarm about "moral hazard", whether it's in relation to this most recent financial crisis, or in many areas of public policy. To put it as succinctly as I can, moral hazard means that you will act differently if your actions are insulated from any risks that your actions engender. So you will probably bet more aggressively with someone else's money than you would bet with your own money, especially if you get to keep any winnings garnered by your bets.
The moral hazard argument goes that bailing-out a firm is bad because the people taking the risks get paid if the risks pay out, but the tax-payers take the loss if the risks don't pay out. This sounds an awful lot like gambling with someone else's money, and it creates perverse incentives for future decision-makers to behave irresponsibly because they know that they will be bailed-out.
Before we move on, it's important to understand what, exactly, happens when there is a bail-out. My understanding is that, in general, bond-holders get bailed-out while equity-holders get wiped out. What does this mean? Equity
holders own stock in a company, so they reap large profits if the company does
well, but they can lose their entire investment if the company goes
bust. A bail-out of a trouble firm usually forces equity-holders to take big losses. Bond-holders, on the other hand, are essentially the firm's creditors: They loan money to the firm at a fixed interest rate, and expect to be paid back their principal plus interest, regardless of how well the firm does. Bail-outs usually protect bond-holders from big losses.
Why does it matter that bail-outs protect bond-holders but wipe-out share-holders? One of the counter-arguments is that, while bail-outs do create a moral hazard, there is still tremendous pressure from equity-holders for the firm to act responsibly because the share-holders don't want to lose their investment. The bond-holders, who are usually the ones who get bailed-out, don't really care if the firm acts irresponsibly because they are going to get back their investment anyway. So they're not exerting any major pressure on the institution because they're protected one way or the other.
Here's the key insight I took from Stern and Roberts. The pressure exerted by equity holders for firms to act responsibly is greatly, greatly exaggerated. Why is this the case? The majority of people and institutions who own stock are almost universally well-diversified, which means that they never own too much of one company (or one sector) that if that company goes bankrupt that they'll lose very much. There simply aren't any equity holders who have so much at stake with the success of one company the they're going to bother putting much pressure on that company to act responsibly. And the bond-holders don't own the company in the same way that the share-holders do, so they couldn't exert much pressure even if they wanted to. And bond-holders don't really care anyway because they are the ones that get bailed out.
This brings us to the decision-makers---the investment bankers and managers and CEOs---who are running the company. What are their incentives? As Stern and Roberts point out, investment bankers get paid a big salary, but they also get paid stock options. So they themselves are equity holders in the company and have an incentive not to bankrupt the firm. However, employee stock-options are rarely structured such that employees can cash out everything all at once, so the stock options are a little more theoretical than shares of stock you or I might have purchased in the firm with funds in our IRA. Now, throw onto this mix the fact that many managers are paid bonuses based on the "performance" of their firm, and you can see the moral hazard for excessive risk-taking start to take shape: You'll be paid more in bonuses if your risky bets pay off, and while you'll lose your stock options if those risks don't pay out, you can't exercise all of those stock options anyway, so there's nothing truly lost out of your pocket. Plus you're being paid a very large salary all along the way, and you'll be able to exercise at least a small number of your stock options. So why not take excessive risks to jack up your bonuses and the value of the few stock options that you can exercise?
The point is that there is no single investor on the hook for enough losses when a firm fails to put pressure on that firm to act responsibly. Equity-holders are either diversified investors with a plethora of other stock, or employees of the firm who can't exercise all of their stock options anyway, while the bond-holders get bailed out if the firm goes bust.
There's much more great information in the podcast, and I'm sure there's even more information in the book, such as a history of bail-outs over the last couple of decades. But one thing is for sure: I'm much less sanguine about the claim that some firms are too big to fail, and much more critical of why we let some firms get too big to fail in the first place.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
What do education reform and health-care reform have in comon?
I've been reading (listening to podcasts?) about health-care reform and education reform lately, and both issues have one thing in common: We measure the inputs but not the outputs.
What does it mean to measure inputs but not outputs? Basically we measure what goes into the system, typically in terms of dollars, but we don't do a very good job measuring what comes out of the system.
In health care, this means that we measure health treatments (tests, medicines, doctor visits, specialists and so on) but we don't measure health outcomes (does the patient get better?). For schooling, we measure spending on education, but we don't have fine-grained data on student outcomes. It's true that NCLB has forced all states to use standardized testing, but only at a very course-grained level. We could do much, much better.
Why do we measure inputs? There are a number of reasons, but the most obvious, and probably most important reason, is that measuring inputs is fundamentally easier than measuring outputs.
Why is this the case? Well, consider the task of measuring health outcomes for a heart surgeon. A crude approximation is to measure the percentage of successful surgeries performed. Except maybe the best surgeons perform the most difficult surgeries, so they're going to fail more because they're better. So we need to take into account the difficulty of the procedure being done, which makes measuring the outcomes more difficult. Furthermore, some successful surgeries are more successful than other successes (and some failed procedures are worse than other failures), so we need to adjust for that as well. At the very least, we need standards for evaluating degrees of difficulty of the surgery to be performed, and we need to follow-up for years after the surgery to see how well the surgeon's work holds up.
Now consider measuring health outcomes for a general practitioner responsible for caring for people for many years. How do we measure a successful outcome? Average lifespan of the patient? Quality of life of the patient? What does a successful outcome even look like?
The point isn't that we can't measure health outcomes. We can track degree of difficulty for surgeries, we can do follow-up with the patient. We have the technology to do that. We can compare a GP's patients against the general population, while controling for factors like the region of the country, the age of the patients, their income, their heritable disease risks, and so on. We have the technology to store and analyze all this data, we just don't do it aggressively enough.
Once we can track health outcomes, we can evaluate doctors based on health outcomes. And once we can do that, we can stop paying doctors based on treatments administered, which can be very expensive, and start paying doctors for better health outcomes. So long as doctors are paid for treatments, there is incentive to order every test that a patient's insurance will pay for. I don't see how this can not lead to over-consumption of health care for people with insurance, since they're not paying for the extra tests, and litigation-averse doctors will happily order every test covered by insurance.
We have a very similar problem in education, namely that we measure how much money goes into the system, but we have crude measurements of what comes out of the system. And it's hard to evaluate teachers for the same reasons that it's hard to evaluate doctors: some teachers have wealthy students with highly-involved parents, and some teachers don't. Sometimes the best teachers educate the worst students, where 50% of the students passing a basic proficiency exam is a big success.
As in medicine, these challenges don't mean that it's impossible to evaluate student learning in a more fine-grained way. It just means that it's going to take some more work to collect better data.
One intriguing idea is Value-Added Testing (VAT), where you measure a class at the beginning of the year to establish a baseline of what they know, then again at the end of the year to see what they've learned---in other words, what value has the teacher added to the students' knowledge? This controls for some of the problem of diverse student bodies.
Another exciting trend is performance-based pay, or merit pay, for the best teachers. Right now, faculty salaries are determined by seniority and not much else. So if you work for 10 years as an industrial chemist, then decide to teach high school chemistry, you make the same money as a 22-year old college graduate. In fact you probably make less because you don't have the teaching certificate that the 22-year old has, and you have to go back to school to earn that certificate. And while I'm not very familiar with the literature, I'm pretty sure that there's very little correlation between teaching certifications and performance in the classroom.
So you can't switch into teaching and make good money, and if you happen to be an excellent 22-year-old teacher, the only way to get a raise is to wait until you've been there long enough. So long as you don't get fired, it doesn't matter how well or how poorly you teach, you get the same raises everyone else does. It doesn't matter if the teacher next door is terrible and you're great; you get paid the same. Very few competitive industries pay everyone the same; why do we expect it to work in education? I don't think there are enough selfless individuals who will work long hours for little respect and no chance at a raise.
Are there problems with merit-based pay? Certainly. Basing pay entirely on standardized testing or value-added testing puts an awful lot of pressure on tests, and tests never tell the whole story in education. Plus it creates a huge incentive to teach to the test, to the exclusion of everything else. Merit-pay will have to include other metrics, like classroom observation and follow-up studies on how well the students do down the road. But it's hard to imagine a worse system given the amount of money we spend on education in the US.
The point of all of this: Statistics matter. In 1986, we thought that batting average and home runs were the most important statistics; most fans didn't understand the value of on-base percentage. Hell, most general managers didn't understand the critical importance of OBP. Baseball stat geeks have revolutionized our understanding of the game of baseball by looking at the data in great detail.
How the heck can we understand baseball so well, but we don't know nearly enough about health care or education?
What does it mean to measure inputs but not outputs? Basically we measure what goes into the system, typically in terms of dollars, but we don't do a very good job measuring what comes out of the system.
In health care, this means that we measure health treatments (tests, medicines, doctor visits, specialists and so on) but we don't measure health outcomes (does the patient get better?). For schooling, we measure spending on education, but we don't have fine-grained data on student outcomes. It's true that NCLB has forced all states to use standardized testing, but only at a very course-grained level. We could do much, much better.
Why do we measure inputs? There are a number of reasons, but the most obvious, and probably most important reason, is that measuring inputs is fundamentally easier than measuring outputs.
Why is this the case? Well, consider the task of measuring health outcomes for a heart surgeon. A crude approximation is to measure the percentage of successful surgeries performed. Except maybe the best surgeons perform the most difficult surgeries, so they're going to fail more because they're better. So we need to take into account the difficulty of the procedure being done, which makes measuring the outcomes more difficult. Furthermore, some successful surgeries are more successful than other successes (and some failed procedures are worse than other failures), so we need to adjust for that as well. At the very least, we need standards for evaluating degrees of difficulty of the surgery to be performed, and we need to follow-up for years after the surgery to see how well the surgeon's work holds up.
Now consider measuring health outcomes for a general practitioner responsible for caring for people for many years. How do we measure a successful outcome? Average lifespan of the patient? Quality of life of the patient? What does a successful outcome even look like?
The point isn't that we can't measure health outcomes. We can track degree of difficulty for surgeries, we can do follow-up with the patient. We have the technology to do that. We can compare a GP's patients against the general population, while controling for factors like the region of the country, the age of the patients, their income, their heritable disease risks, and so on. We have the technology to store and analyze all this data, we just don't do it aggressively enough.
Once we can track health outcomes, we can evaluate doctors based on health outcomes. And once we can do that, we can stop paying doctors based on treatments administered, which can be very expensive, and start paying doctors for better health outcomes. So long as doctors are paid for treatments, there is incentive to order every test that a patient's insurance will pay for. I don't see how this can not lead to over-consumption of health care for people with insurance, since they're not paying for the extra tests, and litigation-averse doctors will happily order every test covered by insurance.
We have a very similar problem in education, namely that we measure how much money goes into the system, but we have crude measurements of what comes out of the system. And it's hard to evaluate teachers for the same reasons that it's hard to evaluate doctors: some teachers have wealthy students with highly-involved parents, and some teachers don't. Sometimes the best teachers educate the worst students, where 50% of the students passing a basic proficiency exam is a big success.
As in medicine, these challenges don't mean that it's impossible to evaluate student learning in a more fine-grained way. It just means that it's going to take some more work to collect better data.
One intriguing idea is Value-Added Testing (VAT), where you measure a class at the beginning of the year to establish a baseline of what they know, then again at the end of the year to see what they've learned---in other words, what value has the teacher added to the students' knowledge? This controls for some of the problem of diverse student bodies.
Another exciting trend is performance-based pay, or merit pay, for the best teachers. Right now, faculty salaries are determined by seniority and not much else. So if you work for 10 years as an industrial chemist, then decide to teach high school chemistry, you make the same money as a 22-year old college graduate. In fact you probably make less because you don't have the teaching certificate that the 22-year old has, and you have to go back to school to earn that certificate. And while I'm not very familiar with the literature, I'm pretty sure that there's very little correlation between teaching certifications and performance in the classroom.
So you can't switch into teaching and make good money, and if you happen to be an excellent 22-year-old teacher, the only way to get a raise is to wait until you've been there long enough. So long as you don't get fired, it doesn't matter how well or how poorly you teach, you get the same raises everyone else does. It doesn't matter if the teacher next door is terrible and you're great; you get paid the same. Very few competitive industries pay everyone the same; why do we expect it to work in education? I don't think there are enough selfless individuals who will work long hours for little respect and no chance at a raise.
Are there problems with merit-based pay? Certainly. Basing pay entirely on standardized testing or value-added testing puts an awful lot of pressure on tests, and tests never tell the whole story in education. Plus it creates a huge incentive to teach to the test, to the exclusion of everything else. Merit-pay will have to include other metrics, like classroom observation and follow-up studies on how well the students do down the road. But it's hard to imagine a worse system given the amount of money we spend on education in the US.
The point of all of this: Statistics matter. In 1986, we thought that batting average and home runs were the most important statistics; most fans didn't understand the value of on-base percentage. Hell, most general managers didn't understand the critical importance of OBP. Baseball stat geeks have revolutionized our understanding of the game of baseball by looking at the data in great detail.
How the heck can we understand baseball so well, but we don't know nearly enough about health care or education?
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
In defense of partisan politics
I highly recommend listening to EconTalk, hosted by Russ Roberts.
Bipartisanship has been the buzzword since Barack Obama's election, and bipartisanship is generally considered to be a good thing.
In a recent EconTalk, David Brady, a political scientist at Stanford's Hoover Institute, made a strong and provocative defense of partisans politics. (He also enunciated several clear reasons why bipartisanship isn't really feasible given the current dynamics of US elections, but I'm focusing on his intriguing defense of partisanship).
Brady claims, in essence, that major changes have always been partisan. The elimination of slavery was not a bipartisan (or bi-regional) compromise, it was a unilateral partisan decision enforced at gunpoint, and that was arguably the only way it was going to get done.
There are other, less dramatic examples as well. Social Security was pushed through a Democratic congress by a Democratic president. Republicans kept the US on the gold standard in the 1890s, and isolationists were swept from power after WWII and the debate in Washington has never seriously returned to that position.
The key is that all of these decisions were highly partisan and involved little compromise with the other side. And that's how things often have to change.
Another thing these decisions did, according to Brady, is shift the terms of the debate. Prior to the civil war, the debate was how to preserve the union and to preserve slavery; afterwards, slavery was off the table and the debate was about reconstruction. Prior to Social Security, the debate was welfare VS no welfare; now it's about how much welfare. It used to be isolationism VS engagement; now it's how much and what kind of engagement.
All of this reminds me of the classic problem of mediating disputes through compromise: The older brother asks for the whole cookie, the younger brother wants half, so the bipartisan compromise is to give the older brother 3/4 of the cookie. That's clearly not the correct compromise, unless you're the older brother.
I don't know the examples of great bipartisan legislation, so I don't know how properly to compare partisanship with bipartisanship. But listening to the podcast has me thinking more about why my gut instinct has always been to value bipartisanship, and whether I should be more careful about when I should do so.
Bipartisanship has been the buzzword since Barack Obama's election, and bipartisanship is generally considered to be a good thing.
In a recent EconTalk, David Brady, a political scientist at Stanford's Hoover Institute, made a strong and provocative defense of partisans politics. (He also enunciated several clear reasons why bipartisanship isn't really feasible given the current dynamics of US elections, but I'm focusing on his intriguing defense of partisanship).
Brady claims, in essence, that major changes have always been partisan. The elimination of slavery was not a bipartisan (or bi-regional) compromise, it was a unilateral partisan decision enforced at gunpoint, and that was arguably the only way it was going to get done.
There are other, less dramatic examples as well. Social Security was pushed through a Democratic congress by a Democratic president. Republicans kept the US on the gold standard in the 1890s, and isolationists were swept from power after WWII and the debate in Washington has never seriously returned to that position.
The key is that all of these decisions were highly partisan and involved little compromise with the other side. And that's how things often have to change.
Another thing these decisions did, according to Brady, is shift the terms of the debate. Prior to the civil war, the debate was how to preserve the union and to preserve slavery; afterwards, slavery was off the table and the debate was about reconstruction. Prior to Social Security, the debate was welfare VS no welfare; now it's about how much welfare. It used to be isolationism VS engagement; now it's how much and what kind of engagement.
All of this reminds me of the classic problem of mediating disputes through compromise: The older brother asks for the whole cookie, the younger brother wants half, so the bipartisan compromise is to give the older brother 3/4 of the cookie. That's clearly not the correct compromise, unless you're the older brother.
I don't know the examples of great bipartisan legislation, so I don't know how properly to compare partisanship with bipartisanship. But listening to the podcast has me thinking more about why my gut instinct has always been to value bipartisanship, and whether I should be more careful about when I should do so.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The mean face of mental illness
I'm the trustee for my disabled aunt, who hasn't worked for over 30 years due to severe anxiety. It's a gut-wrenching, challenging job for me because she's mentally ill, but not obviously so, and I don't always know how to treat her. She has a college degree, she's a good artist, and she can pass for a perfectly functional person at first glance. But if you look a little deeper, you see a messy picture. She lives in a filthy condo packed full of junk, she has no friends, and if she doesn't get what she wants, she lashes out as fiercely and as viciously as a cornered animal. I've heard her, as an grown woman, say to her own mother, "I hate you and I wish you had died instead of Dad."
The hard part is that I know that she's mentally ill, that she has anxiety, that telling her to just relax is like telling somehow with diabetes to just produce more insulin. She also has a host of other health problems, and is in the process of having her knees and hips replaced.
But at the same time, when she says the cruelest and most hurtful thing she can think of, is that simply mental illness? Does she get a free pass to hurt people whenever she wants? It's not like she doesn't know that she's trying to hurt someone, because if one hurtful tactic doesn't work, she's intelligent enough to try something else. She knows exactly what she's doing.
For example, when I was younger I used to get upset and defensive when she would tell me that my mother was no-good. Then I got a little older and started disregarding her opinions on the matter, so she tried other tactics. She would tell me that I was selfish. That my best friend confessed to her that he didn't like me. That my nieces don't like me. That my father is a no-good drunk. That I come from bad genes. That I was brought up without any class. That I'm spoiled. When all of that doesn't work, she'll instantly start crying because of all of her health issues, and beg me for sympathy. If that doesn't work, she'll go back to anger. She will never, under any circumstances, admit she was wrong, nor will she apologize, nor will she accept responsibility for any of her actions.
One night I tried to get her to admit that she was at least 1% responsible for the rift between her and her twin sister (my mother). She went through a litany of reasons why she was not responsible for any part of it. She was brought up to act that way. Her Dad was sick when she was young and that screwed her up. She hates my step-dad. We went in circles for over an hour, and in the end she was unwilling or unable to admit any responsibility for anything. She is beyond reproach for anything.
What sucks about the situation is that I have to treat her like a child, because she is unable to act like an adult, and that feels very condescending. It's not natural for me to treat adults like children, and even with children I try to teach them responsibility for their actions. She can't be taught anything, so I constantly have to remind myself that she's not an adult but that she's not exactly a child either. It's hard for me to take her verbal abuse when I have agreed to be her trustee for free, and paid over $2000 out of my own pocket to hire lawyers to handle her disability case. Like hell I'm selfish! Like hell I don't do anything for her! But it doesn't help me to explain that to her because she either doesn't care or isn't capable of understanding.
And what about her outbursts? Every single lie, outburst, nasty personal attack or bad decision she's made was not a choice but rather the result of mental illness? I don't know enough about the subject, but it's hard to accept that she has no ability to make choices. It's not natural for me to treat her, not quite as a person, but as a special type of person who is never responsible for their hurtful actions. That's not something I have much experience doing, and it's very draining.
What's especially hard is that her constant attempts to hurt me whenever she feels like lashing out have greatly diminished the amount of sympathy I can muster for her. She's bitter, alone, and nasty, and I can't even feel sympathy. All I feel is pity, and that doesn't feel very good.
The hard part is that I know that she's mentally ill, that she has anxiety, that telling her to just relax is like telling somehow with diabetes to just produce more insulin. She also has a host of other health problems, and is in the process of having her knees and hips replaced.
But at the same time, when she says the cruelest and most hurtful thing she can think of, is that simply mental illness? Does she get a free pass to hurt people whenever she wants? It's not like she doesn't know that she's trying to hurt someone, because if one hurtful tactic doesn't work, she's intelligent enough to try something else. She knows exactly what she's doing.
For example, when I was younger I used to get upset and defensive when she would tell me that my mother was no-good. Then I got a little older and started disregarding her opinions on the matter, so she tried other tactics. She would tell me that I was selfish. That my best friend confessed to her that he didn't like me. That my nieces don't like me. That my father is a no-good drunk. That I come from bad genes. That I was brought up without any class. That I'm spoiled. When all of that doesn't work, she'll instantly start crying because of all of her health issues, and beg me for sympathy. If that doesn't work, she'll go back to anger. She will never, under any circumstances, admit she was wrong, nor will she apologize, nor will she accept responsibility for any of her actions.
One night I tried to get her to admit that she was at least 1% responsible for the rift between her and her twin sister (my mother). She went through a litany of reasons why she was not responsible for any part of it. She was brought up to act that way. Her Dad was sick when she was young and that screwed her up. She hates my step-dad. We went in circles for over an hour, and in the end she was unwilling or unable to admit any responsibility for anything. She is beyond reproach for anything.
What sucks about the situation is that I have to treat her like a child, because she is unable to act like an adult, and that feels very condescending. It's not natural for me to treat adults like children, and even with children I try to teach them responsibility for their actions. She can't be taught anything, so I constantly have to remind myself that she's not an adult but that she's not exactly a child either. It's hard for me to take her verbal abuse when I have agreed to be her trustee for free, and paid over $2000 out of my own pocket to hire lawyers to handle her disability case. Like hell I'm selfish! Like hell I don't do anything for her! But it doesn't help me to explain that to her because she either doesn't care or isn't capable of understanding.
And what about her outbursts? Every single lie, outburst, nasty personal attack or bad decision she's made was not a choice but rather the result of mental illness? I don't know enough about the subject, but it's hard to accept that she has no ability to make choices. It's not natural for me to treat her, not quite as a person, but as a special type of person who is never responsible for their hurtful actions. That's not something I have much experience doing, and it's very draining.
What's especially hard is that her constant attempts to hurt me whenever she feels like lashing out have greatly diminished the amount of sympathy I can muster for her. She's bitter, alone, and nasty, and I can't even feel sympathy. All I feel is pity, and that doesn't feel very good.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
How made-for-sci-fi channel movies are like Scooby Doo
Made for sci-fi movies are great. Not "Lord of the Rings" great, or indy movie great, or even summertime blockbuster great, but genre-film great. Some decent dialogue, some comic relief, a few decent tricks with the genre-induced expectations, some stock characters and some depth, and occasionally decent direction. Sure, the plots usually unravel halfway through, but I enjoy these movies on a weekend. Especially when I'm folding laundry or doing other chores.
I just watched one about a Sasquatch that's killing people in the woods in the west somewhere (Colorado?). You've got bank robbers running into the woods, the local cops chasing them, Bishop the android coming after everyone because his wife was killed by a hit-and-run 12 years ago and with her last dying flip of the camcorder somehow recorded a sasquatch in the woods, and Cerina Vincent (who was in Cabin Fever, a reasonable horror movie from around 2003) as the hostage.
Before this there was the movie about the werewolf next door who thought that his cute teenage neighbor was his long-lost love. I didn't see the whole movie but what I saw had good comic relief, like the geeky teenage neighbor who also has a thing for the girl, the spunky little brother, and of course Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, as an actor who plays a big-game hunter.
I guess what fascinates me about sci-fi channel movies is that they're just like a typical Scooby Doo episode. Seriously, think about it... The beginning of each Scooby Doo episodes has a great setting and some kind of scary monster. The haunted swamp. The haunted amusement park. The haunted jungle with the Jaguaro. There's a new mystery to solve, with tons of potential!
Then we cut from the creepy setting that was just established to the Scooby gang, at the malt shop or in the Mystery Machine, and they somehow get stuck wherever the mystery is happening. At this moment, a Scooby Doo episode has peaked, and will play out the same way as every other episode. Some kind of trap with Shaggy and Scooby as the bait, the unmasking, the "meddling kids" line. If I could just watch the first half of Scooby Doo episodes, I'd be thrilled.
Sci-fi channel movies are quite similar. They establish a creepy setting, some stock characters, one or two heroes, some comic relief. If you're lucky there will be one or two spots where the genre conventions set you up for one thing, but something else happens instead.
Unfortunately, sci-fi channel movies usually play out in the same mostly uninteresting fashion as a typical Scooby Doo episode. This reminds me of how difficult it must be to end a movie, even when you've got a great set-up.
I just watched one about a Sasquatch that's killing people in the woods in the west somewhere (Colorado?). You've got bank robbers running into the woods, the local cops chasing them, Bishop the android coming after everyone because his wife was killed by a hit-and-run 12 years ago and with her last dying flip of the camcorder somehow recorded a sasquatch in the woods, and Cerina Vincent (who was in Cabin Fever, a reasonable horror movie from around 2003) as the hostage.
Before this there was the movie about the werewolf next door who thought that his cute teenage neighbor was his long-lost love. I didn't see the whole movie but what I saw had good comic relief, like the geeky teenage neighbor who also has a thing for the girl, the spunky little brother, and of course Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, as an actor who plays a big-game hunter.
I guess what fascinates me about sci-fi channel movies is that they're just like a typical Scooby Doo episode. Seriously, think about it... The beginning of each Scooby Doo episodes has a great setting and some kind of scary monster. The haunted swamp. The haunted amusement park. The haunted jungle with the Jaguaro. There's a new mystery to solve, with tons of potential!
Then we cut from the creepy setting that was just established to the Scooby gang, at the malt shop or in the Mystery Machine, and they somehow get stuck wherever the mystery is happening. At this moment, a Scooby Doo episode has peaked, and will play out the same way as every other episode. Some kind of trap with Shaggy and Scooby as the bait, the unmasking, the "meddling kids" line. If I could just watch the first half of Scooby Doo episodes, I'd be thrilled.
Sci-fi channel movies are quite similar. They establish a creepy setting, some stock characters, one or two heroes, some comic relief. If you're lucky there will be one or two spots where the genre conventions set you up for one thing, but something else happens instead.
Unfortunately, sci-fi channel movies usually play out in the same mostly uninteresting fashion as a typical Scooby Doo episode. This reminds me of how difficult it must be to end a movie, even when you've got a great set-up.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
A different angle on the auto industry bailout
I've heard all the regular theories about the failure of the American auto industry---that the unions have created an unsustainable set of benefits for their retirees ("the unions are to blame!"), the the companies haven't been agile enough to handle foreign competition ("poor corporate culture is to blame!"), that the companies are managed so poorly that there's no way for them to compete ("the management is to blame!").
I had also heard a vague theory that the car companies needed to get out of bad deals with their franchises, but I had no idea what the heck that meant. At least I just heard an explanation on an Econtalk podcast with Michael Munger (Econtalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of George Mason University and is currently my favorite podcast). Munger has been doing some reading about the auto industry and he floated some new information (new at least to me).
Here's the gyst of his analysis: It is illegal in 46 of the 48 continental states for the major auto companies to run their own dealerships. This is ostensibly so that the car companies don't use the threat of setting up their own dealerships to push around dealership franchises.
Car dealerships also cannot close any franchises without paying back the full franchise fee---only the franchisee can make the call to shutter a franchise. Now, on top of that, the car companies are required to produce and market a certain number of vehicles for each franchise. So if GM has a bunch of franchises selling an unprofitable line of cars, it's often cheaper to lose money manufacturing unprofitable cars than to pay back all of the franchisees to close them.
I'm not sure about the history of this legislation; it's very possible that state legislators passed these laws in a good-faith attempt to protect their local car dealerships from the big car companies. But given how the system works, it currently prevents the big three in the US from being nimble, agile, compete 21st century companies.
So let's review:
One other angle here is that car dealerships are extremely profitable, especially in rural areas, and are big contributors to political campaigns, especially in the house of representatives. This may explain why congress has had a strong appetite over the decades to bail out the car companies on a semi-regular basis.
After hearing the podcast, I was thinking a little bit about car dealerships, and I remembered hearing something about the relationship between TV ad revenue and car dealerships. If you notice, often the last commercial before the show starts back up is a spot for the local car dealer, which usually involves the owners of the dealership, poor acting and madcap antics ("You simply can't beat our prices! Why am I punching this monkey with a foam hammer? His name is Prices and only I can beat him!").
So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that car dealership franchises are extremely profitable, politically strong, and more than happy to throw the unions and the car companies under the bus to protect the deal they have set up.
I had also heard a vague theory that the car companies needed to get out of bad deals with their franchises, but I had no idea what the heck that meant. At least I just heard an explanation on an Econtalk podcast with Michael Munger (Econtalk is hosted by Russ Roberts of George Mason University and is currently my favorite podcast). Munger has been doing some reading about the auto industry and he floated some new information (new at least to me).
Here's the gyst of his analysis: It is illegal in 46 of the 48 continental states for the major auto companies to run their own dealerships. This is ostensibly so that the car companies don't use the threat of setting up their own dealerships to push around dealership franchises.
Car dealerships also cannot close any franchises without paying back the full franchise fee---only the franchisee can make the call to shutter a franchise. Now, on top of that, the car companies are required to produce and market a certain number of vehicles for each franchise. So if GM has a bunch of franchises selling an unprofitable line of cars, it's often cheaper to lose money manufacturing unprofitable cars than to pay back all of the franchisees to close them.
I'm not sure about the history of this legislation; it's very possible that state legislators passed these laws in a good-faith attempt to protect their local car dealerships from the big car companies. But given how the system works, it currently prevents the big three in the US from being nimble, agile, compete 21st century companies.
So let's review:
- The big three automakers in the US cannot legally run their own dealerships.
- The car companies cannot close franchises without paying back the full franchise fee to the franchisee.
- The big three must produce and advertise a certain number of (possibly unprofitable) cars for each of their franchisees, or else they need to close the franchise by paying back the franchise fee.
One other angle here is that car dealerships are extremely profitable, especially in rural areas, and are big contributors to political campaigns, especially in the house of representatives. This may explain why congress has had a strong appetite over the decades to bail out the car companies on a semi-regular basis.
After hearing the podcast, I was thinking a little bit about car dealerships, and I remembered hearing something about the relationship between TV ad revenue and car dealerships. If you notice, often the last commercial before the show starts back up is a spot for the local car dealer, which usually involves the owners of the dealership, poor acting and madcap antics ("You simply can't beat our prices! Why am I punching this monkey with a foam hammer? His name is Prices and only I can beat him!").
So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that car dealership franchises are extremely profitable, politically strong, and more than happy to throw the unions and the car companies under the bus to protect the deal they have set up.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Moving sucks, or why Jedi really developed the force
I just helped two of my closest friends pack up for the move from the Albany area to Oregon yesterday, so I have moving on the brain. So some thoughts on moving, in no particular order.
First, the dirty secret of the Jedi order is that the force was an evolutionary adaptation to having to move. Seriously, given a modest 2% economic growth rate per year for all the years until interstellar travel becomes possible, can you imagine how much stuff we'd have? Look at how much crap Americans in 2009 have compared with Americans in 1909! A hundred years ago, what did the typical American own? The bible, farming equipment, uncomfortable wool undergarments, and a very short life expectancy. Rich people also owned a piano. Kids played with dirt and rocks, and if they were lucky they could get a sticks. There was no need to rent storage facilities for all the crap that you couldn't jam into your house, because there just wasn't enough material wealth for people to own very much. Think about it: would you rather be the richest person in 1900 or make the median income in 2009? I'd rather make the median income today because even if I can't buy everything the richest person can today, I can still go to a useful doctor and buy an iPod and I didn't die in childbirth.
(So another quick aside about sparseness in home-decorating: One of my favorite details of Brokeback Mountain was that when Heath Ledger's character visits his Jake Gyllenhall's parents farmhouse, it's nearly completely empty, and everything is dusty and worn-down, because that's how a lot of ageing farmers live. Another quick aside on the topic of re-using things is that the Greenland Norse couldn't produce their own iron, so they re-used metal tools until there was just nothing left. Archaeologists have found knives with a handle bigger than the blade in Greenland.)
Anyway, so in 1909 America there were no beanie babies collecting dust in attics or baseball card collections languishing in basements. People didn't own that much stuff because the economy couldn't produce that much stuff. 100 years later Americans have quite a lot of stuff, most of the stuff in the world according to Affluenza. Now imagine these trends continuing unabated for centuries or millenia, up until humanity can colonize distant galaxies. Can you imagine how much material wealth we'd have by then? And by material wealth, I of course mean stuff. You think you have a lot of collectible mugs now? Imagine in 1000 years when you have around 398 million times as much disposable income as you do now! This is why I've never understood why Duncan MacLeod wasn't absurdly wealthy. He should have just invested a little money in the Royal Bank of Scotland and then waited 400 years. Silly immortals...
I think it makes sense that only Jedi, with the power to move objects with their mind, would be able to keep up with the constant need to move into bigger and bigger houses or palaces or spaceships. Imagine the sophisticated mating calculus that would go on... "Let's see, this girl is beautiful and smart and loving, but this other girl can move objects with her mind and would allow me to accumulate limitless amounts of junk and move it into bigger houses without throwing out my cybernetic back again... Jedi-girl, here I come!" Not to mention some of the less-than-PG sexual implications of Jedi sex.
Another incredibly dorky thought I've had about far-fetched sci-fi paraphanelia is that if transporter technology a la Star Trek ever arrives, it will be heavily used for immigration. You think it's hard to keep Mexicans from crossing the border now, wait until they can beam themselves into the country!
One of my favorite aspects of science fiction is that sci-fi writers take something to its logical conclusion. I especially like the notion that sci-fi writers don't predict future technologies, they predict the human implications of future technologies. So they don't take buggies and engines and imagine cars, they look at cars and imagine road trips and traffic jams (I read this from Robert Sawyer, though I don't know if he said it originally).
So I figure that there's a lot of potential for sci-fi writers to expand on sci-fi concepts themselves, like Jedi and transporters. Much of this has probably showed up in fan fiction or in other blogs that I haven't read yet.
So the take-home message of this posting is that moving sucks, but it was great to see my friends before they head to the west coast and I don't see them as much anymore. And we had a lot of laughs, for example Chadd's response to Debbie's frantic worry about us packing up the broom before she had a chance to sweep: "Honey, we have 79 boxes of stuff to put into the moving truck. Packing up the broom is the last thing on my mind. And everything needs to go outside at some point anyway. It's not like we're going to get so confused about what to move that we start moving things from the truck back into the apartment." I guess you had to be there, because at 87 degrees and 65% humidity in suburban Albany, that was a hilarious line!
First, the dirty secret of the Jedi order is that the force was an evolutionary adaptation to having to move. Seriously, given a modest 2% economic growth rate per year for all the years until interstellar travel becomes possible, can you imagine how much stuff we'd have? Look at how much crap Americans in 2009 have compared with Americans in 1909! A hundred years ago, what did the typical American own? The bible, farming equipment, uncomfortable wool undergarments, and a very short life expectancy. Rich people also owned a piano. Kids played with dirt and rocks, and if they were lucky they could get a sticks. There was no need to rent storage facilities for all the crap that you couldn't jam into your house, because there just wasn't enough material wealth for people to own very much. Think about it: would you rather be the richest person in 1900 or make the median income in 2009? I'd rather make the median income today because even if I can't buy everything the richest person can today, I can still go to a useful doctor and buy an iPod and I didn't die in childbirth.
(So another quick aside about sparseness in home-decorating: One of my favorite details of Brokeback Mountain was that when Heath Ledger's character visits his Jake Gyllenhall's parents farmhouse, it's nearly completely empty, and everything is dusty and worn-down, because that's how a lot of ageing farmers live. Another quick aside on the topic of re-using things is that the Greenland Norse couldn't produce their own iron, so they re-used metal tools until there was just nothing left. Archaeologists have found knives with a handle bigger than the blade in Greenland.)
Anyway, so in 1909 America there were no beanie babies collecting dust in attics or baseball card collections languishing in basements. People didn't own that much stuff because the economy couldn't produce that much stuff. 100 years later Americans have quite a lot of stuff, most of the stuff in the world according to Affluenza. Now imagine these trends continuing unabated for centuries or millenia, up until humanity can colonize distant galaxies. Can you imagine how much material wealth we'd have by then? And by material wealth, I of course mean stuff. You think you have a lot of collectible mugs now? Imagine in 1000 years when you have around 398 million times as much disposable income as you do now! This is why I've never understood why Duncan MacLeod wasn't absurdly wealthy. He should have just invested a little money in the Royal Bank of Scotland and then waited 400 years. Silly immortals...
I think it makes sense that only Jedi, with the power to move objects with their mind, would be able to keep up with the constant need to move into bigger and bigger houses or palaces or spaceships. Imagine the sophisticated mating calculus that would go on... "Let's see, this girl is beautiful and smart and loving, but this other girl can move objects with her mind and would allow me to accumulate limitless amounts of junk and move it into bigger houses without throwing out my cybernetic back again... Jedi-girl, here I come!" Not to mention some of the less-than-PG sexual implications of Jedi sex.
Another incredibly dorky thought I've had about far-fetched sci-fi paraphanelia is that if transporter technology a la Star Trek ever arrives, it will be heavily used for immigration. You think it's hard to keep Mexicans from crossing the border now, wait until they can beam themselves into the country!
One of my favorite aspects of science fiction is that sci-fi writers take something to its logical conclusion. I especially like the notion that sci-fi writers don't predict future technologies, they predict the human implications of future technologies. So they don't take buggies and engines and imagine cars, they look at cars and imagine road trips and traffic jams (I read this from Robert Sawyer, though I don't know if he said it originally).
So I figure that there's a lot of potential for sci-fi writers to expand on sci-fi concepts themselves, like Jedi and transporters. Much of this has probably showed up in fan fiction or in other blogs that I haven't read yet.
So the take-home message of this posting is that moving sucks, but it was great to see my friends before they head to the west coast and I don't see them as much anymore. And we had a lot of laughs, for example Chadd's response to Debbie's frantic worry about us packing up the broom before she had a chance to sweep: "Honey, we have 79 boxes of stuff to put into the moving truck. Packing up the broom is the last thing on my mind. And everything needs to go outside at some point anyway. It's not like we're going to get so confused about what to move that we start moving things from the truck back into the apartment." I guess you had to be there, because at 87 degrees and 65% humidity in suburban Albany, that was a hilarious line!
Monday, June 22, 2009
In defense of selfishness
So on my drive home from Ithaca, I was listening to a Bill Simmons podcast with Dan LeBatard as a guest. I've been a huge fan of Simmons since his days as the Boston Sports Guy, and while I only know LeBatard from some of his work guest hosting PTI, I really like what I've heard from him so far.
What got me thinking about selfishness was their discussion of how the sports media seems to create the same nice storylines to describe the winning team. For example, Simmons points out in a great column about Kobe the belief that in 2009 suddenly Kobe "gets it" (where "it" has something to do with teamwork, passing, or camaraderie), when in fact his performance in the finals was statistically the same in 2009 as it was in 2008. What primarily changed is that his teammates shot 40% from behind the three point line in 2009 and thus his team won. Kobe didn't change, or at least his numbers didn't change, but the storyline has changed, all because of the scoreboard.
LeBatard points out that the year Allen Iverson's 76ers made it to the finals, casual fans were convinced by pundits that Iverson had learned how to be a better teammate, when in reality his team outlasted a weak eastern conference to make the finals. Iverson hadn't changed, his team just won, and that changed his storyline.
This got me thinking about The Wages of Wins, three economists take on sports. They concluded that Kevin Garnett has been the league MVP for many of his years in the league, in that he has had the same extremely high statistical performance for many season. Until he got traded to Boston, he was labeled as a guy who can't get it done in the playoffs, when statistically, he played with well below average teammates. The year his Timberwolves team made the conference finals, Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell played extremely well, and Garnett's numbers were at essentially the same excellent level they had been every other season.
I'm also reminded of a classic conundrum in sports about how much quality, high-character role-players matter. If your team wins, it's easy to point to the "good chemistry" provided by your basketball team's 10th man who plays hard in practice, or by your baseball team's prankster utility infielder. But if your team loses, suddenly the lack of size on your bench or the .225 average from your backups matters a lot more. Do we create storylines about chemistry because it gives us something to talk about? For that matter, how much does chemistry really matter? The Mets won the world series in 1986, and the Yankees win with Reggie Jackson. Those teams had no chemistry. The Spurs in the 2000s had great chemistry, but they also had great players. I don't know if chemistry matters, but I suspect it matters a lot less than sportswriters say that it does. Good chemistry comes from the scoreboard. Chemistry is revisionist.
So what does this have to do with selfishness? Well, LeBatard brought up another good point: whatever job you work at, are you happy if you are underpaid and underappreciated but the company does well? I teach at Colgate; how likely am I to take less money so that the school can hire extra personnel and do better? I'll tell you this: If Swarthmore offers me a 25% pay raise to do the same job, I promise I will shed at least one tear as the emerald green campus disappears in my rearview mirror, but I'm moving back to Philly. Well, I'd have to see if the move made sense for me and for my family, and maybe I'd conclude the pulling the (hypothetical future) kids out of school and having my (future) wife switch jobs isn't worth the extra money. Fine. But throw in enough extra money, and I wouldn't even slow the J-Train down on my way south. It would still be a calculation of what's best for me.
How exactly is it that athletes shouldn't take these factors into account? How on earth was the city of Boston so mad when Johnny Damon took more money to play for the Yankees? They offerd to pay him a lot more money, both teams were good, and in NY he can do the talk show circuit and host SNL. How can fans criticize him for making a perfectly rational decision? The same fans that have no problem giving running backs their walking papers with their 30th birthday cake?
Anyway, how does this all tie back into selfishness? Well, fans don't want athletes to be selfish about money or personal success. We want our athletes to respect winning and not be greedy and play the game the right way. But sports fans secretly love and respect selfishness. Even if the don't know it.
Why? Well, what makes great athletes great? Selfishness. Athletes focus on only one thing in their life, usually to the exclusion of everything else. If they don't do this, we complain that they lack the passion for the game. They we engage in some kind of psycho-babble, then go back to surfing the web at work.
For many great athletes, their whole life is their career. Do you think Tiger woods gets up at 3am to change his children's diapers? Do you think Brett Favre does his own laundry? Do you think LeBron James picks up his suits at the dry cleaners and then heads to the bank and the post-office on the way home from practice? I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story that when Eisenhower first got out of office, he picked up a phone and told the dial-tone "Granite-two-four" because he hadn't made a phone call since 1951. People doing high-pressure, highly-sought after jobs don't have time for minute details.
And as fans, we love this about our athletes. Sure, in our own lives, we may not like obsessive, narrow-minded, hyper-competitive people who only think or talk about work... But we love the results when it comes to athletes. And most casual sports fans don't really care if athletes are good people or even if they are interesting people. We want them to sacrifice everything else in their lives for our enjoyment, just like we want from our artists and actors and entertainers.
I read a really interesting article from The Economist about autism that had one image I can't get out of my head: Autistic children will watch things like spinning coins or dripping water for hours on end, and where I would get bored quicker than a freshman who thinks that they're going to learn how to use excel in computer science 101, autists instead become experts on dripping water or spinning coins or counting toothpicks, and learn to spot subtle differences. They become connoisseurs of these seemingly identical events.
Now, I'm not claiming that athletes are autistic, but they certainly devote quite a lot of effort getting really good at one thing, typically to the exclusion of nearly everything else. With athletes we call this passion; with our neighbors we call this OCD and we try to run into the house before they can engage us in coversation.
Seriously, how well-balanced is Tom Brady really? Don't get me wrong, I admit without a trace of shame that I have a man-crush on Brady, and I've even been lobbying my girlfriend to put him on her "list" (from Friends). But I'm afraid that if I met him it would crush my illusions, because I'll bet he's pretty boring. Now, his profession is fascinating, and I'd gush like the middle-school boy who gets to help the hot substitute teacher wash the chalkboard after math class if Brady watched some game film with me... But come on, if he worked those kind of obsessive, meticulous hours at almost any other job, there's no way he'd be the coolest dude in the room. What if Tom Brady were a customer service rep, or an actuary, or a paralegal, and all he talked about was work? His friends would be all, "Tom, goddamit, nobody wants to hear about new innovations for modeling life expectancy!" But because his job is awesome and we want the Patriots to win another superbowl and put those Steelers fans back in their place, we are willing to excuse what could be called selfish, obsessive behavior.
(Plus if I met Brady, all the cultural reference points I've got that help me be the life of the nerd party would be useless---wow, you're in magazines and married to a supermodel and have three superbowl rings? Yeah, I just scored a silver medal on the lighthouse level of Left 4 Dead, so you know, I know a think or two about excellence as well. And there's no way that he can code. If Brady can hack Java, I'll cheer for the Cowboys. And don't tell me he took a Basic course in high school or something---I played football in high school but that doesn't make me a jock.)
The point is that sports fans like excellence, which comes from selfish, hyper-specialized athletes, but we want to read certain stories about chemistry, and players "getting it", and playing the game the right way, so sportswriters feed us stories about the winning team that probably aren't true in the least.
I'd like to read a book about the place of selfishness in sports. I'll bet a lot of top athletes are pretty obsessive about their craft, and I'd like to read more about this aspect of sports. I'm sure there are some biographies I need to look up.
In a related note, a lot of top scientists are incredibly narrowly-focused people as well, but that's a blog post for a different time.
What got me thinking about selfishness was their discussion of how the sports media seems to create the same nice storylines to describe the winning team. For example, Simmons points out in a great column about Kobe the belief that in 2009 suddenly Kobe "gets it" (where "it" has something to do with teamwork, passing, or camaraderie), when in fact his performance in the finals was statistically the same in 2009 as it was in 2008. What primarily changed is that his teammates shot 40% from behind the three point line in 2009 and thus his team won. Kobe didn't change, or at least his numbers didn't change, but the storyline has changed, all because of the scoreboard.
LeBatard points out that the year Allen Iverson's 76ers made it to the finals, casual fans were convinced by pundits that Iverson had learned how to be a better teammate, when in reality his team outlasted a weak eastern conference to make the finals. Iverson hadn't changed, his team just won, and that changed his storyline.
This got me thinking about The Wages of Wins, three economists take on sports. They concluded that Kevin Garnett has been the league MVP for many of his years in the league, in that he has had the same extremely high statistical performance for many season. Until he got traded to Boston, he was labeled as a guy who can't get it done in the playoffs, when statistically, he played with well below average teammates. The year his Timberwolves team made the conference finals, Sam Cassell and Latrell Sprewell played extremely well, and Garnett's numbers were at essentially the same excellent level they had been every other season.
I'm also reminded of a classic conundrum in sports about how much quality, high-character role-players matter. If your team wins, it's easy to point to the "good chemistry" provided by your basketball team's 10th man who plays hard in practice, or by your baseball team's prankster utility infielder. But if your team loses, suddenly the lack of size on your bench or the .225 average from your backups matters a lot more. Do we create storylines about chemistry because it gives us something to talk about? For that matter, how much does chemistry really matter? The Mets won the world series in 1986, and the Yankees win with Reggie Jackson. Those teams had no chemistry. The Spurs in the 2000s had great chemistry, but they also had great players. I don't know if chemistry matters, but I suspect it matters a lot less than sportswriters say that it does. Good chemistry comes from the scoreboard. Chemistry is revisionist.
So what does this have to do with selfishness? Well, LeBatard brought up another good point: whatever job you work at, are you happy if you are underpaid and underappreciated but the company does well? I teach at Colgate; how likely am I to take less money so that the school can hire extra personnel and do better? I'll tell you this: If Swarthmore offers me a 25% pay raise to do the same job, I promise I will shed at least one tear as the emerald green campus disappears in my rearview mirror, but I'm moving back to Philly. Well, I'd have to see if the move made sense for me and for my family, and maybe I'd conclude the pulling the (hypothetical future) kids out of school and having my (future) wife switch jobs isn't worth the extra money. Fine. But throw in enough extra money, and I wouldn't even slow the J-Train down on my way south. It would still be a calculation of what's best for me.
How exactly is it that athletes shouldn't take these factors into account? How on earth was the city of Boston so mad when Johnny Damon took more money to play for the Yankees? They offerd to pay him a lot more money, both teams were good, and in NY he can do the talk show circuit and host SNL. How can fans criticize him for making a perfectly rational decision? The same fans that have no problem giving running backs their walking papers with their 30th birthday cake?
Anyway, how does this all tie back into selfishness? Well, fans don't want athletes to be selfish about money or personal success. We want our athletes to respect winning and not be greedy and play the game the right way. But sports fans secretly love and respect selfishness. Even if the don't know it.
Why? Well, what makes great athletes great? Selfishness. Athletes focus on only one thing in their life, usually to the exclusion of everything else. If they don't do this, we complain that they lack the passion for the game. They we engage in some kind of psycho-babble, then go back to surfing the web at work.
For many great athletes, their whole life is their career. Do you think Tiger woods gets up at 3am to change his children's diapers? Do you think Brett Favre does his own laundry? Do you think LeBron James picks up his suits at the dry cleaners and then heads to the bank and the post-office on the way home from practice? I remember hearing a (possibly apocryphal) story that when Eisenhower first got out of office, he picked up a phone and told the dial-tone "Granite-two-four" because he hadn't made a phone call since 1951. People doing high-pressure, highly-sought after jobs don't have time for minute details.
And as fans, we love this about our athletes. Sure, in our own lives, we may not like obsessive, narrow-minded, hyper-competitive people who only think or talk about work... But we love the results when it comes to athletes. And most casual sports fans don't really care if athletes are good people or even if they are interesting people. We want them to sacrifice everything else in their lives for our enjoyment, just like we want from our artists and actors and entertainers.
I read a really interesting article from The Economist about autism that had one image I can't get out of my head: Autistic children will watch things like spinning coins or dripping water for hours on end, and where I would get bored quicker than a freshman who thinks that they're going to learn how to use excel in computer science 101, autists instead become experts on dripping water or spinning coins or counting toothpicks, and learn to spot subtle differences. They become connoisseurs of these seemingly identical events.
Now, I'm not claiming that athletes are autistic, but they certainly devote quite a lot of effort getting really good at one thing, typically to the exclusion of nearly everything else. With athletes we call this passion; with our neighbors we call this OCD and we try to run into the house before they can engage us in coversation.
Seriously, how well-balanced is Tom Brady really? Don't get me wrong, I admit without a trace of shame that I have a man-crush on Brady, and I've even been lobbying my girlfriend to put him on her "list" (from Friends). But I'm afraid that if I met him it would crush my illusions, because I'll bet he's pretty boring. Now, his profession is fascinating, and I'd gush like the middle-school boy who gets to help the hot substitute teacher wash the chalkboard after math class if Brady watched some game film with me... But come on, if he worked those kind of obsessive, meticulous hours at almost any other job, there's no way he'd be the coolest dude in the room. What if Tom Brady were a customer service rep, or an actuary, or a paralegal, and all he talked about was work? His friends would be all, "Tom, goddamit, nobody wants to hear about new innovations for modeling life expectancy!" But because his job is awesome and we want the Patriots to win another superbowl and put those Steelers fans back in their place, we are willing to excuse what could be called selfish, obsessive behavior.
(Plus if I met Brady, all the cultural reference points I've got that help me be the life of the nerd party would be useless---wow, you're in magazines and married to a supermodel and have three superbowl rings? Yeah, I just scored a silver medal on the lighthouse level of Left 4 Dead, so you know, I know a think or two about excellence as well. And there's no way that he can code. If Brady can hack Java, I'll cheer for the Cowboys. And don't tell me he took a Basic course in high school or something---I played football in high school but that doesn't make me a jock.)
The point is that sports fans like excellence, which comes from selfish, hyper-specialized athletes, but we want to read certain stories about chemistry, and players "getting it", and playing the game the right way, so sportswriters feed us stories about the winning team that probably aren't true in the least.
I'd like to read a book about the place of selfishness in sports. I'll bet a lot of top athletes are pretty obsessive about their craft, and I'd like to read more about this aspect of sports. I'm sure there are some biographies I need to look up.
In a related note, a lot of top scientists are incredibly narrowly-focused people as well, but that's a blog post for a different time.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Proposal: Nerds in Love
I'm engaged! I proposed to my girlfriend tonight. Let me lay out the story:
It's Thursday, May 28, 2009, my Mom and step-dad's 16th wedding anniversary (1993 was 16 years ago? Wow!). I head into work with Helen tonight to keep her company because she has instrument time around midnight. She's a chemistry post-doc, which means that she's tethered to her lab like I am to my laptop, only my laptop is a helluva lot more portable.
My Mom sent me my grandmother's engagement and wedding rings, and I had been trying to think of a nice romantic proposal. One idea I scrapped involved slipping the ring into the DVD box set of the Lord of the Rings, which I'm going to buy for Helen at some point anyway (you know, it's the lord of the rings so it would be clever!). Never mind that I would need to get the box shrink-wrapped after opening it (which my friend Brian figured out is totally doable if you can get your hands onto a shrink-wrap machine), but it didn't seem romantic enough.
Another plan I scuppered was to acquire a girl teddy bear for Ranger Bear (Ranger Bear is my teddy bear that I've had since I can remember and who has amassed quite a collection of pictures of himself in various exotic locales around the world), and present the girl teddy to Helen with a story about how Ranger Bear couldn't live his whole life alone, and neither could I, at which point she would notice that the girl teddy was holding a ring. Honestly, the main reason I scrapped this idea was that I'm afraid of commitment. Not to Helen, of course, because I can't imagine living without her at this point... I was afraid of the commitment for Ranger Bear! It's not like you can just pop into Walmart and find the perfect soulmate for your childhood teddy bear, and so far as I can tell there's no e-harmony for teddy bears. So that plan was out.
I finally decided to slip the ring into the rubber gloves to her glovebox and then have her put her hands in there to find it. So after she was done with whatever it is she was doing, I headed into the lab and stuck the ring into the glove. Then when she came back in I asked her if she could show me how to use the glovebox again. Puzzled, she put her hands in there and... Nothing. I shoved the ring too far into the finger of the glovebox. Damn. So to be smooth, I said something like "This isn't working... Can you do it again?" The elusive ring was still too far for her dainty little fingers to find... So finally I resorted to "Um, just, like, feel around in there..."
Then she found it, and now we're engaged! Yay us! She thought it was romantic and sweet, and I've scored a lot of points with the chemists that I know for originality and nerdiness. And it was a surprise because she didn't know it was coming. I mean, she knew something was coming because we've been talking about a July 2010 wedding for a while now, but the actual proposal was a total surprise. Go me!
Our relationship is based entirely on the desire to watch DVDs and have babies, which means that it's a very strong relationship. Seriously, we can watch DVDs together until we're, like, 100 years old, and having babies will be awesome because I can't think of anything more challenging for us to take on at this point in our lives. We've both done graduate school, figured out we're not going to be famous scientists, and we need something important to sink our energies into. Plus, what better way for me to watch kids' movies and read kids' books in a socially acceptable fashion?
Anyway, so Helen, you said yes and I couldn't be happier!
It's Thursday, May 28, 2009, my Mom and step-dad's 16th wedding anniversary (1993 was 16 years ago? Wow!). I head into work with Helen tonight to keep her company because she has instrument time around midnight. She's a chemistry post-doc, which means that she's tethered to her lab like I am to my laptop, only my laptop is a helluva lot more portable.
My Mom sent me my grandmother's engagement and wedding rings, and I had been trying to think of a nice romantic proposal. One idea I scrapped involved slipping the ring into the DVD box set of the Lord of the Rings, which I'm going to buy for Helen at some point anyway (you know, it's the lord of the rings so it would be clever!). Never mind that I would need to get the box shrink-wrapped after opening it (which my friend Brian figured out is totally doable if you can get your hands onto a shrink-wrap machine), but it didn't seem romantic enough.
Another plan I scuppered was to acquire a girl teddy bear for Ranger Bear (Ranger Bear is my teddy bear that I've had since I can remember and who has amassed quite a collection of pictures of himself in various exotic locales around the world), and present the girl teddy to Helen with a story about how Ranger Bear couldn't live his whole life alone, and neither could I, at which point she would notice that the girl teddy was holding a ring. Honestly, the main reason I scrapped this idea was that I'm afraid of commitment. Not to Helen, of course, because I can't imagine living without her at this point... I was afraid of the commitment for Ranger Bear! It's not like you can just pop into Walmart and find the perfect soulmate for your childhood teddy bear, and so far as I can tell there's no e-harmony for teddy bears. So that plan was out.
I finally decided to slip the ring into the rubber gloves to her glovebox and then have her put her hands in there to find it. So after she was done with whatever it is she was doing, I headed into the lab and stuck the ring into the glove. Then when she came back in I asked her if she could show me how to use the glovebox again. Puzzled, she put her hands in there and... Nothing. I shoved the ring too far into the finger of the glovebox. Damn. So to be smooth, I said something like "This isn't working... Can you do it again?" The elusive ring was still too far for her dainty little fingers to find... So finally I resorted to "Um, just, like, feel around in there..."
Then she found it, and now we're engaged! Yay us! She thought it was romantic and sweet, and I've scored a lot of points with the chemists that I know for originality and nerdiness. And it was a surprise because she didn't know it was coming. I mean, she knew something was coming because we've been talking about a July 2010 wedding for a while now, but the actual proposal was a total surprise. Go me!
Our relationship is based entirely on the desire to watch DVDs and have babies, which means that it's a very strong relationship. Seriously, we can watch DVDs together until we're, like, 100 years old, and having babies will be awesome because I can't think of anything more challenging for us to take on at this point in our lives. We've both done graduate school, figured out we're not going to be famous scientists, and we need something important to sink our energies into. Plus, what better way for me to watch kids' movies and read kids' books in a socially acceptable fashion?
Anyway, so Helen, you said yes and I couldn't be happier!
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Phantom Menace, 10 years later
I saw the new Star Trek movie the weekend it opened, and the experience reminded me that it was about 10 years ago that I saw The Phantom Menace. Needless to say, Phantom Menace was terrible, and I've spent the last 10 years vehemently denying that the first three prequels happened. (Seriously, they never happened. George Lucas considered doing another couple of Star Wars movies, but then he decided not to. They never happened. Am I right about this? Who's with me?)
This topic has been heavily mined over the last 10 years, so I won't repeat some of the more obvious complaints about Jar-Jar and metachlorians and the unnecessary nature of the entire first movie.
One small quibble... I think Lucas based the first movie around the "Pod Race" scene because he already had a deal in place to produce the video game. Which means that this movie should really be thrown onto the scrap head of terrible movies based on video games.
Now on to the more subtantial things that were wrong with Phantom Menace... What upsets me the most is that this movie had at least some potential, if some things were done a little differently. I feel the same way about Titanic, another movie that I hated, not because it was a bad movie (though it most certainly was), but because it had potential that was utterly wasted. Suppose Titanic, given its titanic production values, elaborate sets and costumes and makeup, and big-name cast, were done as a period piece where characters obeyed the norms of the 1910s. Suppose the evil fiancee wasn't a totally worthless and evil human being, but was a more sympathetic character who was a bastard because he was being the best man that he knew how to be. Suppose Leo DiCaprio's character was a tough, gritty lower class character, but had some darkness and violence to him, more like Stanley from "A Streetcar Named Desire" than a romanticized version of a 1990s teenager? And then maybe you could have a couple of other interesting plotlines related to the upcoming end of the long 19th century a couple of years later? That would have been a more interesting and challenging film to watch, at least for me.
So what potential does Phantom Menace, and by extension the other two prequels, manage to squander?
Well, for one, Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity. He's following in the footsteps of Darth Vader, one of the greatest screen villains of all-time. Vader is a huge, imposing, shiny gun-metal black bad-ass who kills his own crew with his mind and destroys entire planets on a whim. He was utterly terrifying to little kids of the early 1980s such as myself. Oh, as an aside, this reminds me of the Darth Vader nightlight someone gave me for my birthday---it was a ceramic bust of Vader painted glossy black with silver-and-red colored foil for his eyes and chest plate that would glow from the bulb inside it. It scared the hell out of me and gave me far more nightmares than I would have had without it, but damn, it was a beautiful gift and I wish I still had it!
Anyway, the point is that Vader is on par with Jason Vorhees and Count Orlock for scary, imposing, enigmatic villains of the silver screen, and following (preceding?) him is no easy task.
But, following up Vader we have Darth Maul. Maul is nimble and lithe and cloaked in black and red where Vader was big and synthetic and covered in black. Vader was faceless and masked, Maul was just ugly, with funny little horns and bad teeth. Maul seemed like a really good successor villain, but what exactly does he do in the movie? Does he destroy a planet? Does he choke a prisoner? Does he freeze anyone in carbonite? Nope. He shows up on Tatooine and sends out some annoying little probe-droids, then has a quick sword-fight. Would Vader have sent out roombas to do his dirty work? Hell no! Vader would have been out there torturing Jawas, ripping the arms off of droids, choking Tuskan Raiders with his mind, and wreaking various and sundry forms of havoc to find those renegade Jedi. No way Vader would have sub-contracted that type of work to a couple of roombas.
And so Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity to create a truly scary villain for a new generation. He was much scarier than Count Dookie and the emperor himself. I would have liked to see Anakin slay Maul to become the new big-bad.
The next wasted opportunity in the movie... At the end of Phantom Menace, Anakin the Yippie-Kid ends up destroying the single-point of failure for the bad guys, and they play it off like a big cosmic accident. The whole scene is mostly comic relief.
These movies are tragedy! Anakin should be Macbeth for the sci-fi generation. Imagine this alternate version: Anakin knows exactly what he's doing when he takes the ship into space to try to take out the droid mothership and save many lives, and he has some kind of discussion with R2D2 to this effect. Then when he does save all those lives, Obi-Wan and Yoda realize that he must be the chosen one, that they have to train him, and they inadvertently shower way too much glory on him way too soon. He now knows that he's the chosen one, that he's destined for greatness. And we see that the seeds of Anakin's self-destruction are inadvertently sown by his closest friends, with the best of intentions. That would be an awesome plotline! How did Lucas not see this? The plot elements are right there, he just needed to change some of the dialog a little. The scene practically writes itself!
The final bit of blown potential has to do with Anakin and Padme's relationship. The one point in the entire movie series that approaches drama is where Anakin slaughters all the Tuskan Raiders. His mother is dead, he's young, he's under pressure, he's powerful, and he snaps!
Upon returning, hurt and scared and angry, to Padme, he says something like, "I slaughtered them all, and not just the men, the women and the children, too!" At this moment, with this angry and scared boy becoming a powerful, wounded man before her eyes, I thought Padme would fall in love with him to heal him. She would be his caretaker, her love would assuage his pain, she and she alone in the universe would be able to tame the torrents of rage inside of him. At least that's what I thought would happen.
Of course nothing of the sort happens. Padme delivers terribly forgettable dialogue, there is no discernible reason for them to fall in love other than the fact that it's in the script, and the series never again approaches any real sense of drama.
But what if the movies had been a little darker? What if Anakin's arc were truly tragic? It's amazing to me how close, how tantalizingly close, some of the scenes of the movies came to actually being tragic, only to miss (avoid?) the opportunity completely...
Nothing better epitomizes the wasted opportunity of these movies than the juxtaposition of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock with "Everybody Loves Raymond" from this article from cracked.com. The point is that the same generation loved both of these things, at very different points of their lives. Can we expect the obscure, angst-ridden artist who made Star Wars in 1977 make the same kind of edgy, ground-breaking art as a middle-aged kazillionaire in 1999? Evidently not. Look, there's nothing wrong with being happy and well-adjusted. It's just that you lose a bit of edge. Unless you're Joss Whedon, but that's a different story for another time.
And so we got three terrible films that made anyone who's taken a decent literature course scream in frustration at the obvious wasted opportunities and blown potential. Blech.
At least the newest Star Trek movie was pretty good! Though I can't watch Star Trek the same way anymore now that I've seen Firefly show what character-driven sci-fi is supposed to look like, but again, a different story for a different time...
This topic has been heavily mined over the last 10 years, so I won't repeat some of the more obvious complaints about Jar-Jar and metachlorians and the unnecessary nature of the entire first movie.
One small quibble... I think Lucas based the first movie around the "Pod Race" scene because he already had a deal in place to produce the video game. Which means that this movie should really be thrown onto the scrap head of terrible movies based on video games.
Now on to the more subtantial things that were wrong with Phantom Menace... What upsets me the most is that this movie had at least some potential, if some things were done a little differently. I feel the same way about Titanic, another movie that I hated, not because it was a bad movie (though it most certainly was), but because it had potential that was utterly wasted. Suppose Titanic, given its titanic production values, elaborate sets and costumes and makeup, and big-name cast, were done as a period piece where characters obeyed the norms of the 1910s. Suppose the evil fiancee wasn't a totally worthless and evil human being, but was a more sympathetic character who was a bastard because he was being the best man that he knew how to be. Suppose Leo DiCaprio's character was a tough, gritty lower class character, but had some darkness and violence to him, more like Stanley from "A Streetcar Named Desire" than a romanticized version of a 1990s teenager? And then maybe you could have a couple of other interesting plotlines related to the upcoming end of the long 19th century a couple of years later? That would have been a more interesting and challenging film to watch, at least for me.
So what potential does Phantom Menace, and by extension the other two prequels, manage to squander?
Well, for one, Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity. He's following in the footsteps of Darth Vader, one of the greatest screen villains of all-time. Vader is a huge, imposing, shiny gun-metal black bad-ass who kills his own crew with his mind and destroys entire planets on a whim. He was utterly terrifying to little kids of the early 1980s such as myself. Oh, as an aside, this reminds me of the Darth Vader nightlight someone gave me for my birthday---it was a ceramic bust of Vader painted glossy black with silver-and-red colored foil for his eyes and chest plate that would glow from the bulb inside it. It scared the hell out of me and gave me far more nightmares than I would have had without it, but damn, it was a beautiful gift and I wish I still had it!
Anyway, the point is that Vader is on par with Jason Vorhees and Count Orlock for scary, imposing, enigmatic villains of the silver screen, and following (preceding?) him is no easy task.
But, following up Vader we have Darth Maul. Maul is nimble and lithe and cloaked in black and red where Vader was big and synthetic and covered in black. Vader was faceless and masked, Maul was just ugly, with funny little horns and bad teeth. Maul seemed like a really good successor villain, but what exactly does he do in the movie? Does he destroy a planet? Does he choke a prisoner? Does he freeze anyone in carbonite? Nope. He shows up on Tatooine and sends out some annoying little probe-droids, then has a quick sword-fight. Would Vader have sent out roombas to do his dirty work? Hell no! Vader would have been out there torturing Jawas, ripping the arms off of droids, choking Tuskan Raiders with his mind, and wreaking various and sundry forms of havoc to find those renegade Jedi. No way Vader would have sub-contracted that type of work to a couple of roombas.
And so Darth Maul is a wasted opportunity to create a truly scary villain for a new generation. He was much scarier than Count Dookie and the emperor himself. I would have liked to see Anakin slay Maul to become the new big-bad.
The next wasted opportunity in the movie... At the end of Phantom Menace, Anakin the Yippie-Kid ends up destroying the single-point of failure for the bad guys, and they play it off like a big cosmic accident. The whole scene is mostly comic relief.
These movies are tragedy! Anakin should be Macbeth for the sci-fi generation. Imagine this alternate version: Anakin knows exactly what he's doing when he takes the ship into space to try to take out the droid mothership and save many lives, and he has some kind of discussion with R2D2 to this effect. Then when he does save all those lives, Obi-Wan and Yoda realize that he must be the chosen one, that they have to train him, and they inadvertently shower way too much glory on him way too soon. He now knows that he's the chosen one, that he's destined for greatness. And we see that the seeds of Anakin's self-destruction are inadvertently sown by his closest friends, with the best of intentions. That would be an awesome plotline! How did Lucas not see this? The plot elements are right there, he just needed to change some of the dialog a little. The scene practically writes itself!
The final bit of blown potential has to do with Anakin and Padme's relationship. The one point in the entire movie series that approaches drama is where Anakin slaughters all the Tuskan Raiders. His mother is dead, he's young, he's under pressure, he's powerful, and he snaps!
Upon returning, hurt and scared and angry, to Padme, he says something like, "I slaughtered them all, and not just the men, the women and the children, too!" At this moment, with this angry and scared boy becoming a powerful, wounded man before her eyes, I thought Padme would fall in love with him to heal him. She would be his caretaker, her love would assuage his pain, she and she alone in the universe would be able to tame the torrents of rage inside of him. At least that's what I thought would happen.
Of course nothing of the sort happens. Padme delivers terribly forgettable dialogue, there is no discernible reason for them to fall in love other than the fact that it's in the script, and the series never again approaches any real sense of drama.
But what if the movies had been a little darker? What if Anakin's arc were truly tragic? It's amazing to me how close, how tantalizingly close, some of the scenes of the movies came to actually being tragic, only to miss (avoid?) the opportunity completely...
Nothing better epitomizes the wasted opportunity of these movies than the juxtaposition of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock with "Everybody Loves Raymond" from this article from cracked.com. The point is that the same generation loved both of these things, at very different points of their lives. Can we expect the obscure, angst-ridden artist who made Star Wars in 1977 make the same kind of edgy, ground-breaking art as a middle-aged kazillionaire in 1999? Evidently not. Look, there's nothing wrong with being happy and well-adjusted. It's just that you lose a bit of edge. Unless you're Joss Whedon, but that's a different story for another time.
And so we got three terrible films that made anyone who's taken a decent literature course scream in frustration at the obvious wasted opportunities and blown potential. Blech.
At least the newest Star Trek movie was pretty good! Though I can't watch Star Trek the same way anymore now that I've seen Firefly show what character-driven sci-fi is supposed to look like, but again, a different story for a different time...
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