Politics as a Nasty Vocation

November 17, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Politics, as Weber said, inevitably involves a tension: “the attainment of ‘good’ ends” comes at the price of “using morally dubious means.”

Earlier in this blog (here), I put it in terms of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is really the close cousin of Hypocrisy — changing your perceptions to make them square with your larger ideas. Cognitive Dissonance went to grad school; Hypocrisy chose religion and politics.

Secret recording is morally dubious, to say the least, as we have seen recently here in New Jersey. When a Rutgers student committed suicide after two other students streamed video of him in a romantic encounter with another male, Gov. Christie was quick to say that the secret taping was a violation of conscience. “I don't know how those two folks are going to sleep at night, knowing that they contributed to driving that young man to that alternative.” (Was it a violation of the law? Christie, whose previous job was US Attorney, said that he would leave it up to his attorney general.)

Now another secret taping has emerged. According to Bob Braun, who’s been covering education for the Star-Ledger since anyone can remember, a young man followed a special ed teacher, Alissa Ploshnick, into a bar,

bought drinks for Ploshnick and began asking about tenure. Ploshnick talked about how difficult it was to fire a tenured teacher. She said some things she shouldn’t have said. She quoted someone else as having used a racial obscenity, the so-called “n-word..”

All the while, he was secretly videotaping, and Ploshnick’s comments are part of an anti-union web video, “Teachers Gone Wild.”

Gov. Christie’s goals include the weakening of the union. But what about the morally dubious means? Did the governor deem this secret taping a violation of conscience?

Christie recently praised O’Keefe’s secret taping of Ploshnick and others and said: “If you need an example of what I’ve been talking about for the last nine months — about how the teachers union leadership is out of touch with the people and out of control — go watch this video.”

The dissonance goes further. The person whose privacy or confidentiality you violate should be someone who deserves it. But Ploshnick doesn’t seem like such a bad person or teacher. In 1997,

Alissa Ploshnick risked her life to save the lives of a dozen Passaic schoolchildren. She threw herself in front of a careening van to protect her students and landed in the hospital with broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a badly bruised pelvis and glass cuts in her eyes. She could have died. . . . She says she spent $9,000 of her own money on school supplies for her students, made sure a child in her class made his dental appointments by bringing him there and was just asked to be a godparent to the child of another student.

Author, Author

November 16, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

 “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

Apparently, many students are taking Dr. Johnson’s words to heart.

“Ed Dante” writes only for money. And unlike Dr. Johnson, he doesn’t even get his name on his work, just the cash. He works for a “research” company, writing papers for students and sometimes admissions essays for applicants. His article in the Chronicle is quickly making the rounds. It’s a sort of update of a similar article (pdf here) that appeared in Harper’s fifteen years ago: “This Pen for Hire,” by the similarly pseudonymous “Abigail Witherspoon” who worked for a similar company.
Some things haven’t changed much. The clients still include those who have insufficient English or more than sufficient cash, or both. Clients seek papers in all fields except perhaps the hard sciences – literature, history, hospitality, sociology, etc. The future teachers of America are still well represented. Seminarians didn’t appear in the 1995 article; now Dante gets lots of them:

I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.

Rates have gone up. In 1995, students were paying $20 a page. Dante’s clients pay per project – $2,000 for a 20-40 page paper, which works out to $50-100 a page. The writer-company split is still the same – 50-50.

Some other things have changed. Witherspoon, writing in 1995, was ghosting pre-Internet. She had to go to libraries, and students often showed up in person to get “their” papers. Each page of the paper was stamped with the company name, so the student had to retype the essay, or pay someone to retype it – not a problem in the digital era.

Witherspoon also took more liberties, substituting her own leftish opinions for the conservative ones clients wanted. A request to “Show why immigrants are dead weight on the economy and take jobs away from us” became an essay on the INS’s unequal criteria for refugee status. Nobody complained, probably because, despite the required retyping, nobody noticed.
Both writers take a certain pride in their uncredited work, and both view academia with skepticism that spills over into contempt. Dante sees his services as a critique of university teaching. (“These students truly are desperate. . . .They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.”) Witherspoon’s resentment is mostly class-based, directed at those who are lazy, wealthy, and anti-intellectual:

When I’m alone in my room, in front of the computer and between the headphones, it’s hard not to write something good for myself and maybe even for the imaginary absentee professor or appreciative T.A., something that will last. But when I’m standing in the crowded Tailormade office, next to someone elegant and young and in eight hundred bucks’ worth of calfskin leather, someone who not only has never heard of John Stuart Mill and never read Othello but doesn’t even know he hasn’t, doesn’t even mind that he hasn’t, and doesn’t even care that he hasn’t, the urge to make something that will last somehow vanishes.

Find Friends, Lose Friends

November 13, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Random thoughts on “The Social Network,” which I saw last night:

1. The central irony (which nobody could possibly miss): Facebook is hugely popular because it lets people create and maintain friendships of all sorts. Yet the person who created it, when it comes to personal relationships, is utterly inept. Compounding the irony is that the missing piece is “relationship status.” That isthe element  that, when Zuckerberg thinks of it and adds it to the template, finally allows him to put Facebook online.

2. Boys. The source of energy for most of what happens in the film is the adolescent boy mentality. What eventually becomes Facebook starts when Zuckerberg creates a tournament variant of Hot or Not but with pictures of Harvard female students.


Women are objects for boys to rate rather than people they might interact with as human beings. It’s what we might expect from stereotypical computer nerds, but they are not the only ones who prefer this version of male-female relationships. The hits so numerous that they crash the system come mostly from Harvard boys.  We see the same mentality at the Porcellian, the exclusive Harvard final club Zuckerberg can’t get into, where the upper-class boys bring in girls by the busload. No doubt, some of these rich boys were graduates of prep schools where a similar mentality reigned.  (See this earlier post on the Landon School.)

3. Sorkin. Nobody comes close to Aaron Sorkin in writing dialogue for really smart characters. He did it on the West Wing, and he does it here. In several places in the film, I had the feeling I was watching a chess match where one player was thinking three moves ahead of me, the other five moves ahead. As consolation, I prefer to imagine that each of those ten or twenty seconds of dialogue took Sorkin half a day to write.

4. Lonely at the top – something of a cliche in American films. At the end of “Godfather I,” Michael Corleone has defeated his enemies, he has climbed to the top. A door closes, with Michael on one side, his wife on the other. He is estranged from his family (those who are still alive). He has no friends, only courtiers bowing to him. He does not look happy.

At the end of “The Social Network,” Mark Zuckerberg has settled accounts with his enemies. On the soundtrack, the Beatles sing, “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.” Zuckerberg is at the top. But, like Michael Corleone, to get there he has made a pact with the devil (Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, shown in the inferno scene below), and he has screwed the person who had been his only friend. When Facebook logs its millionth subscriber, everyone else is celebrating, but Zuckerberg barely smiles.


5. Floor lamps? For your $45,000 a year at Harvard, you don’t get very good lighting in your room.

6. Capitalism. In the Wall Street Journal last June, Alex Tabarrok was muttering that “when it comes to the movies capitalism never seems to get a fair shake.” True, Hollywood does not turn out many pictures that show entrepreneurs creating, sustaining, and expanding a business.* And in most of these films, capitalists face moral dilemmas – if they didn’t, it wouldn’t be much of a story – and, like Zuckerberg in this film, they frequently make morally questionable choices in pursuit of business success.

As I noted at the time (here), I didn’t see why Tabarrok was puzzled, even dismayed, by this scenario.  Surely Tabarrok, an economist, would understand supply and demand.  Hollywood is supplying what the public is demanding. In seven weeks, “The Social Network” has grossed a very respectable $85 million – nowhere near “Jackass 3-D” of course, but several lengths ahead of “Secretariat.”

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*For my money, the best movie about business is still “Save the Tiger” (1973), which presents the moral and financial dilemmas of capitalism on a much smaller but probably more realistic scale.

Ashes and Allegories

November 11, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Firemen’s Ball,” (1967) was the last film Milos Forman made in his native Czechoslovakia. Many critics see the film as satire, a critique of communist society.  They credit Forman for his genius in being able to make the film at all, given the stodgy communist censorship that prevailed in the Soviet bloc at the time.

If the movie is allegory, it’s about the mistrust, dishonesty, cruelty, and above all incompetence built into the state bureaucratic system. The firemen, with their committees and bickering and attention to silly aspects of the ball, can’t seem to do anything right. At one point, there’s an actual fire at an old man’s farmhouse, but the fire engine gets stuck in the snow, and there’s no water pressure, and the house burns down. The only help the firemen can offer the old man is to suggest he keep warm by moving his chair closer to the fire. Then they thoughtfully turn the chair around so he doesn’t have to watch his house burn down.



I hadn’t thought about “Firemen’s Ball” in a long time, but my son e-mailed to ask if he should go see it when it was shown at his university’s film series.

Could there be a similar allegory about American capitalism? Socialist collectivism can lead to bad outcomes. But what about individualized and privatized systems? Could the rules of such a system result in a man’s house burning down while firefighters on the scene did nothing?



This incident happened over a month ago, and it got much coverage in the media and the blogosphere. But as far as I know, nobody saw a parallel with “Fireman’s Ball,” perhaps because Forman’s film was so different in one important respect. It was fictional.

If you see “Fireman’s Ball,” be sure to get the version with Forman’s own spoken introduction in English. When the movie was released in Czechoslovakia, he says, 40,000 firemen resigned in protest. So he explained to them that the movie was not really about firemen and that “the firemen in the film are merely symbols of the whole society.” This, he says, made the firemen “peaceful and happy.” Then Forman adds for the movie audience, “But the film is about firemen.”

Forman says this almost with a wink, so in the end you don’t really know if he intended the movie to be a simple story, poignant and funny, or whether he was going for  larger meanings.  Maybe it is, as he says, just a story about firemen. But as with the Tennessee fire, the intent of those who created the story has little to do with whether that story can serve as a more general commentary on the society.