My Bogus Journey through Airport Security

January 21, 2009

sesame-street-homeland-security

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last week I was on the road, and coming through airport security on my way home Friday I was selected for special scrutiny. It was a truly disheartening experience.

Not because I mind being scrutinized, but because of the amazingly incompetent way it was done. If I’d been carrying any contraband, it would have been ridiculously easy to evade security.

We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. Look at the irrationality of the way they screen the general population. They scan our shoes separately because years ago some guy snuck in a bomb in his shoes. I guess there’s no other part of our clothing we could ever use to sneak in a bomb! And they strictly control the liquids we’re allowed to bring on. Unless those liquids are contained in a baby bottle or prescription vial, in which case they’ll be waved through without inspection.

And let’s not forget Danielle Crittenden’s experiment wearing a full burka for a week to see what it was like. In the last of the four installments, she goes to DC’s National Airport wearing the burka and buys a one-way, same-day, refundable ticket to New York, announcing to the ticket agent that she has no luggage. She’s pulled aside for additional screening – but they never look under her burka. She could have had a bomb under there, and nobody would have known. They don’t even feel confident that they have the right to look at her face to confirm that she is the person depicted on her ID:

“Do you have to wear black?”

“No,” I replied. “But black is more traditional, more conservative. You blend more in.”

“Not here.” He laughed. “You stand out.”

The woman began telling me about her religious upbringing. It was at this point I realized my security inspection was over, and I was now conducting an Islamic tutorial: Burkas 101. Other passengers selected for secondary screening came and went. I’d been held back for a good quarter hour.

Then the female guard, growing cautious again, asked if it was “culturally okay” for me to remove my face covering. “When women like you come through, we don’t know what’s ‘correct.’ Like if I want to see that your face matches your ID, can I ask you to show me your face?”

It’s a good thing I was wearing a mask so the guard could not see my astonishment. The security agents at the airport serving the nation’s capital–bare seconds of air distance from Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, the White House–did not feel entitled to check the identities of veiled women. Clearly, they hadn’t even received any special sort of instructions about it.

I assured the security agent that it was indeed okay for a woman officer to ask a veiled woman to show her face. More than okay! I stressed again and again: So long as only women saw my face I’d have no trouble removing my mask if you wanted to check my ID!! Really, it’s fine…!

The guard nodded. “Thank you–you’ve been so helpful,” she said, rising. “We don’t want to keep you. Hey, have a great time in New York!”

And so I passed through security without ever having to show my face.

Fortunately, my ticket was refundable. Just as the friendly Delta agent had promised.

If you want to read the whole thing, here’s parts one, two, and three, along with three subsequent discussions.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s my own excellent adventure:

When the guy at Dulles checking boarding passes looked at my pass, he turned around and shouted, “runner!” Then he turned back and, without a word to me, started checking the next person’s pass.

Let me pause for a moment to note that here in Milwaukee, I’ve seen people selected for extra screening, and they’re politely told that they’ve been selected for extra screening, and the process is then briefly and politely explained to them. And there was almost no line behind us, so he wasn’t rushing to accomodate a crowd.

But the more important point is that, while he was waiting for a “runner” to come and take my boarding pass, the man paid no attention to me whatsoever. My carry-on and my “personal item” (a plastic bag) were sitting on the floor. If either or both had contained contraband, I could have simply left them there and picked up the bags of my associate who was travelling with me, and my associate (who was the next person checked and who therefore knew right away that he had not been selected for additional screening) could have picked up mine. No one would have been the wiser.

Then the “runner” comes and takes my boarding pass, and the guy checking passes grunts that I’m to take my bags (not that he knows which ones are mine) and go through security.

So I take my bags over to the security line and start taking off my coat and shoes, etc. The “runner” has now handed off my boarding pass to the guy on the other side of security and is doing other things. Nobody is watching me as I fiddle with my stuff, open my bag and put my keys and cell phone inside, etc. If I’d wanted to dump something under the table, it would have been easy enough to do – I had a bulky coat that I had to take off and fiddle with, which could have been used to transfer something to the floor while I was bent over to take off my shoes, even if somebody had been watching over my shoulder, which they weren’t.

I go through security, then I’m taken aside and wanded. Then I’m sat down in a chair and my bags are brought over and placed on a table. The guard explains that he’s going to open my bags one by one and inspect them, and it’s important that I not touch my bags until the inspection is complete.

Then he picks up the first bag and moves it over to another table to open it, turning completely around so that his back is toward me as I sit there, unobserved, right next to the bags that I’m not supposed to touch.

He inspects each bag with his back toward me the entire time. Then I’m free to go.

I would feel nervous about revealing these weak points to potential terrorists, but they’re so obvious that anyone who cares to know about them already will. It’s clear that the TSA isn’t anxious to prevent people from circumventing security, and who am I to try to be more TSA than the TSA?

Airport security is a placebo. They knew it was a placebo when they tightened it after 9/11. The goal was to get people feeling like it was safe to fly, so that the economy would come unstuck and grow again. But now, they dare not admit it was a placebo. So the farce rolls on, year after year, getting ever more farcical as new and more ridiculous features are stuck onto a system that does nothing whatsoever to accomplish its ostensible core task.

It’s kind of like how we hold elections whose real outcome is determined by which side is more proficient at vote fraud and judicial manipulation. It’s a collossal lie that the smooth functioning of society requires.

5 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Al Gore, Frozen in Time

January 20, 2009

frozen-gore

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Since we’re on an economics kick today: Craig Compeau of Fairbanks, Alaska has sponsored the creation and display of an 8 1/2 foot tall, five-ton ice sculpture of Al Gore. He has organized a local contest to guess how much colder the winter will be in 2008-09 compared to the winter of 1947-48, the year of Al Gore’s birth, with proceeds going to a local charity. This winter Fairbanks has already hit 47 degrees below zero (as in 79 degrees below the freezing point) so the guesses are going to have to be almost as low as Gore’s credibility.

The Associated Press dryly reports that the ice sculpture will be on display “through March unless it melts before then.”

(edited for typos)

8 Comments | economics | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

A Real Education Bailout

January 8, 2009

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Over on NRO, Petrilli, Finn and Hess note that yet another radical expansion of federal education funding is reportedly being considered for inclusion in the “stimulus” package, e.g. in addition to building lots of roads and bridges, we’ll build lots of schools.

PFH (as I’ll call them for short) note that more spending has not only proven itself an ineffective way to improve schools, but may actually even harm them:

Naturally, the leaders of any organization would rather sidestep problems than confront them. In good times, budgets expand, payrolls grow, new people come on board, and managers delay difficult decisions. Tough times come to serve as a healthful (if sour) tonic, forcing leaders to identify priorities and giving them political cover to trim the fat.

So instead of more money, they advocate less:

Education, then, cries out for a good belt-tightening. A truly tough budget situation would force and enable administrators to take those steps. They could rethink staffing, take a hard look at class sizes, trim ineffective personnel, shrink payrolls, consolidate tiny school districts, replace some workers with technology, weigh cost-effective alternatives to popular practices, reexamine statutes governing pensions and tenure, and demand concessions from the myriad education unions.

And while we’re at it, I’d like a pony, and a spaceship, and a million dollars.

One thing they don’t point out is that “stimulus” spending, like all pork, is notorious for going to politically useful projects rather than to projects that serve the public interest. Just because you spend more money building bridges doesn’t mean you get the bridges that you actually need. Never mind the “bridge to nowhere” – remember that big bridge collapse in Minneapolis a while back? In the immediate aftermath, some liberals rushed to blame the deaths on hard-hearted budget cutters. But it later came out that plenty of money was being spent on road and bridge repair, but it didn’t go to the bridge that needed it, despite the bridge having been rated “structurally deficient” for two whole years.

PFH then go on to ask:

Is there a way to make the impending bailout actually help those kids as well as the nation? Team Obama and its Congressional allies could take a page out of the Troubled Assets Relief Program playbook and require the various education interest groups to “take a haircut,” just like auto workers, investors, and shareholders have had to do. As the auto bailout required the U.A.W. to forfeit its beloved “jobs bank,” states taking federal dollars could be required to overhaul their tenure laws, ban “last hired, first fired” rules, experiment with pay-for-performance, make life easier for charter schools, and curb unrealistic pension promises.

I’m not in a position to throw stones since I’ve advocated the same thing, but I’m not holding my breath.

Next on their wish list, inexplicably, is a big pile of money for summer programs. If there’s any research showing that summer programs are a good investment, they don’t cite it. To their credit, they insist that solid empirical evaluation should be a condition of the money. But if we want to set up big new federally funded pilot programs for educational innovations, why not do it for an innovation that is solidly proven to work in many limited trials but has never been tried on a larger scale?

They also wish for better data systems (who doesn’t?) and, as always, whether it’s relevant to the topic or not, “national standards.” About the latter, our own Matt Ladner has already given us what I think is really the last word.

(link added)

4 Comments | money myth, politics | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Charters Work, Unions Don’t

January 7, 2009

building_unions

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

On Monday the Boston Foundation released a study by researchers from Harvard, MIT and Duke, examining Boston’s charter schools and “pilot” schools using a random assignment method (HT Joanne Jacobs).

Pilot schools were created in Massachusetts in 1995 as a union-sponsored alternative to charter schools, which came to the state a year earlier. Pilot schools are owned and operated by the school district. Like charter schools, pilot schools serve students who choose to be there (though it’s easier to get into a charter school than a pilot school; see below). Like charter schools, pilot schools have some autonomy over budget, staffing, governance, curriculum, assessment, and calendar. Like charter schools, pilot schools are regularly reviewed and can be shut down for poor performance.

There are two main differences between charter schools and pilot schools. First, the teachers’ unions. Pilot schools have them, and all the shackles on effective school management that come with them. Charter schools don’t.

Second, some pilot schools are only nominally schools of choice, not real schools of choice like charter schools. Elementary and middle pilot schools – which make up a slender majority of the total – participate in the city’s so-called “choice” program for public schools, and thus have an attendance zone where students are guaranteed admission, and admit by lottery for the spaces left over.  So while on paper everyone who goes to a pilot school “chooses” to be there, some of them will be there only because the city’s so-called “choice” system has frozen them out of other schools. The students compared in the study are all lottery applicants and are thus genuinely “choice students” – they are really there by choice, not because they had no practical alternatives elsewhere. However, the elementary and middle pilot schools are not “choice schools.” (Pilot high schools do not have guaranteed attendance zones and are thus real schools of choice.)

The Boston Foundation examined two treatment groups: students who were admitted by lottery to charter schools and students who were admitted by lottery to pilot schools. The control groups are made up of students who applied to the same schools in the same lotteries, but did not recieve admission and returned to traditional public schools.

As readers of Jay P. Greene’s Blog probably know already, random assignment is the gold standard for empirical research because it ensures that the treatment and control groups are very similar. The impact of the treatment (in this case, charter and pilot schools) is isolated from unobserved variables like family background.

The results? Charter schools produce bigger academic gains than regular public schools, pilot schools don’t.

The two perennial fatal flaws of “public school choice” would both seem to be at work here. First, public school choice is always a choice among schools that all partake of the same systemic deficiencies (read: unions). Choice is not choice if it doesn’t include a real variety of options. And second, public school choice typically offers a theoretical choice but makes it impossible to exercise that choice in practice. In this particular case, if each school has a guaranteed-admission attendance zone, the practical result will be fewer open slots in each school available for choice. (Other kinds of public school choice have other ways of blocking parents from effectively using choice, such as giving districts a veto over transfers.)

Charter schools are only an imperfect improvement on “public school choice” in both of these respects. Charters have more autonomy and thus can offer more variety of choice, but not nearly as much as real freedom of choice would provide. And with charters, as with public school choice, government controls and limits the admissions process.

But charters are an improvement over the status quo, even if only a modest one, as a large body of research has consistently shown.

There are some limitations to the Boston Foundation study, as with all studies. Pilot high schools are not required to admit by lottery if they are oversubscribed, while charter schools are. (Funny how the union-sponsored alternative gets this special treatment – random admission is apparently demanded by the conscience of the community when independent operators are involved, but not for the unions.) Of the city’s pilot high schools, two admit by lottery, five do not, and one admits by lottery for some students but not others. Thus, the lottery comparison doesn’t include five of the pilot high schools. It does include three high schools and all of the elementary and middle schools.

As always, we shouldn’t allow the limitations to negate the evidence we do have. Insofar as we have evidence to address the question, more freedom consistently produces better results, and more unionization consistently doesn’t.

3 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, research reports, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

AFT and UAW – More Alike Than You’d Think

December 30, 2008

aft uaw1

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Lots of people are picking up on the temper tantrum about alleged “demonizing of teachers” begun by a Randi Weingarten speech and continued in Bob Herbert’s column on the speech.

Even that notorious right-winger Eduwonk points out that Weingarten and Herbert are hitting a straw man. I think the real problem is not that school reformers demonize teachers but that defenders of the government school monopoly angelize them. When we reformers insist that teachers should be treated as, you know, human beings, who respond to incentives and all that, rather than as some sort of perfect angelic beings who would never ever allow things like absolute job protection to affect their performance, it drives people like Weingarten and Herbert nuts.

guardian-angel

A typical teacher, as seen by Randi Weingarten

But what I’d like to pick up on is the question of whether the troubles of the government school system are comparable to the troubles of the auto industry.

Of the alleged demonizing of teachers, Herbert had written:

It reminded me of the way autoworkers have been vilified and blamed by so many for the problems plaguing the Big Three automakers.

Eduwonk points out Herbert’s hypocrisy (though he delicately avoids using that word) on this point, because elsewhere in the column, Herbert praises Weingarten for expressing a willingness to make concessions on issues like tenure and pay scales. Union recalcitrance on these types of reform, Eduwonk points out, is precisely why the auto industry is in so much trouble, and Weingarten has been driven to make noises in favor of reform because a similar dynamic has been at work in the government school system.

On the other hand, Joanne Jacobs thinks the comparison between the AFT and the UAW is inapt:

 I don’t think skilled teachers and unskilled auto workers have much in common.  Auto unions pushed up costs, especially for retirees, making U.S. cars uncompetitive.  In education, the problem isn’t excessive pay, it’s the fact that salaries aren’t linked to teacher effectiveness, the difficulty of their jobs or the market demand for their skills.

But teachers’ unions have pushed up costs – dramatically. In the past 40 years, the cost of the government school system per student has much more than doubled (even after inflation) while outcomes are flat across the board. And this has mainly been caused by a dramatic increase in the number of teachers hired per student – a policy that benefits only the unions.

It’s true that high salaries aren’t the main issue in schools, although teacher salaries are in fact surprisingly high. The disconnect between teacher pay and teacher performance is much more important. But the UAW has the same problem! Their pay scales don’t reward performance, either.

The source of Jacobs’ confusion is her mistaken view that auto workers are “unskilled.” Farm workers are unskilled, but not auto workers. The distinction she’s reaching for is the one between white-collar or “professional” work and blue-collar work. But some blue-collar work is skilled and some is unskilled, and auto workers are in the former category. This matters because with skilled blue-collar workers, as with white-collar workers, there’s a dramatic increase in the importance of incentives as compared with unskilled labor.

In fact, a lot of smart people have been arguing (scroll down to the Dec. 26 post) that exorbitant salaries and benefits aren’t nearly as much of a problem in the auto industry as union work rules – including poor performance due to absolute job protection, pay scales that don’t reward performance, and rigid job descriptions that make process modernization impossible.

Sound familiar?

(Edited)

4 Comments | economics, teacher pay, teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

How a Physics Textbook Changed My Life

December 23, 2008

books

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Jay Matthews argues that most textbooks don’t serve enough of an educational function to be worth using:

Textbooks still make good dictionaries, with glossaries at the back. They also reassure parents, who don’t get to see teachers in action but are comforted, in a perverse way, that their kids’ schoolbooks seem just as dry and predictable as theirs were. But like the newspapers that have been my life, textbooks are creeping slowly toward obsolescence.

(HT Joanne Jacobs)

I can’t tell whether Matthews thinks textbooks are becoming obsolete simply because books themselves are becoming obsolete – he talks about how some teachers are starting to “write” their own textbooks for their classes by using the internet to gather material, etc. – but it sure looks like he thinks there’ s something especially obsolete about the textbook.

If so, I must strongly demur. Matthews seems to have missed what has always been the primary function of the textbook – to compensate for the teacher’s deficiency. It’s certainly true that some teachers are so on top of their material that they can write their own textbooks, but others are so not on top of their material that they just lean on the textbook as a crutch, teaching everything straight out of the book.

Indeed, who has not heard the frequent complaint about teachers who just teach everything straight out of the book? Welll, where would we be if they couldn’t even do that?

I must confess that looking back on when I first taught my own class at the college level, the biggest weakness of my teaching in that class was that I did too much by rote out of the textbook. But I did it because, as a novice, I lacked the confidence to strike out on my own.

But I have an even more striking example to set before you. When I was in high school, I had a really brilliant physics teacher who didn’t use the textbook at all. He spent the whole class illuminating the subject matter in his own highly motivated way, bringing in unusual examples and exploring subtle nuances.

As a result, his teaching was incredibly engaging to the few students who shared his intense interest in the subject, and completely useless to the majority who did not. They needed to be walked through the basics slowly and carefully – sort of the way a textbook does.

There was one girl in my four-person lab group in that class who was completely lost. She was getting a D and had no idea what was going on. So I started helping her out with her homework.

“Just ignore the teacher,” was my main advice. “Read the textbook and learn what’s in it. Don’t pay attention to anything in class, because almost all of it isn’t going to be on the test and will just distract you from what you really need to be learning.”

She went from a D to an A.

And you know what? I’m married to that girl today.

So don’t tell me textbooks are obsolete.

As a great rumination on the science of physics once put it:

This day and age we’re living in
Gives cause for apprehension,
With speed and new invention,
And things like fourth dimension.

Yet we get a trifle weary
With Mr. Einstein’s theory.
So we must get down to earth at times,
Relax, relieve the tension.

And no matter what the progress
Or what may yet be proved
The simple facts of life are such
They cannot be removed.

You must remember this:
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo,
They still say, “I love you.”
On that you can rely!
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs,
Never out of date.
Hearts full of passion,
Jealousy and hate.
Woman needs man,
And man must have his mate – 
That no one can deny.

It’s still the same old story,
A fight for love and glory,
A case of do or die.
The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

(Copyright Warner Bros. Music, 1931)

12 Comments | instructional reform, teacher quality | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Ford Foundation Upgraded from “Destructive” to “Useless”

December 22, 2008

generac1

The Disturbinator 4000XL, a state-of-the-art disburbance generator.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

A while back, in his well-read takedown of the “free market” think tanks endorsing the original bailout that got us into the present mess, Jay mentioned that the donors to those think tanks probably didn’t intend for their money to be used to endorse a radical expansion of government intrusion into the economy.

I thought of that post when I opened an e-mail this morning from the Ford Foundation. The e-mail was sent to people (like myself) who work for grantmaking foundations.

To help us “think and talk about” good grantmaking, Ford is distributing a deck of “role cards” representing the roles grantmaking staff play, such as “advocate,” “talent scout,” and “disturbance generator.”

It makes you wonder what life at the Ford Foundation is like. They spend all day inventing decks of cards, apparently. 

Not only that, but being insulated from the discipline of the market, it looks like Ford isn’t up with the latest technology. As soon as I arrived at my new workplace in August, I had a state-of-the-art disturbance generator installed in the basement. But at Ford they’re still generating disturbance by hand.

I’m sure this is exactly what Henry Ford had in mind for his money when he gave it to a charitable foundation. On the other hand, given what Ford does with most of its time and money, I suppose we should be glad for every cent and every working hour that gets diverted into activities that are merely useless rather than actively destructive.

2 Comments | economics | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Pass the Popcorn: Payback’s a Bitch

December 19, 2008

 vesper-1

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Last weekend I finally got to see Quantum of Solace. I had heard it wasn’t as good as Casino Royale, so going in, I tried to manage my expectations.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s as good as Casino Royale,” I told myself. “It’ll be fun, and it’ll probably be better than just fun, and that’s better than most movies. I’ll just enjoy what’s on the screen without worrying about what’s not.” That’s how I try to approach most movies.

It wasn’t enough.

Don’t get me wrong. Quantum of Solace is not a bad movie. I enjoyed most of the two hours I spent watching it. However, not only was there a tremendous amount of lost potential – an approach to the Bond story that could have taken the francise to a whole new level – but there were actually some pretty significant stretches that I couldn’t enjoy even on the level of fun or coolness.

quantum_of_solace-table

These data over here illustrate the precipitious decline of cool gadgets in James Bond films, as measured by both quality and quantity. I’ll move this electronic display across the tabletop just by moving my hand, so the audience will momentarily forget that this table-computer thingy is not an adequate substitute for a buzzsaw wristwatch.

 

The lost potential here is pretty darn serious. Casino Royale not only gave us a really cool  Bond movie, but the setup for what could have been a two-part (or longer) serious epic story arc- the first real epic storyline in the franchise.

vesper-2

I can’t find it now, but in the runup to the new movie, some fan put together a desktop wallpaper image of Vesper Lynd with the tagline “Payback’s a Bitch.” That got me more excited to see the movie than anything in the official advertising – Bond both loves and hates Vesper (“the bitch is dead”) and thirsts for revenge on her killers even as he hardens his heart against all natural human affection.

bond-and-vesper-shower1

Quantum of Solace does try to redeem that promise, and there are some really good moments. The very last thing Bond does before the end credits roll is a really shocking twist – not so much a plot twist as a “character twist” – that works perfectly. It violates our expectations pretty radically, yet resolves the story perfectly, though not in the way we had thought.

And about two-thirds of the way through the movie, there is a scene that pays tribute to a famous moment in an earlier Bond movie that could have been incredibly cheap and derivative, but is pulled off with note-perfect direction and ends up being extremely effective.

There are also a number of great dialogues in the movie. Bond’s intereactions with M at the beginning are great – Judy Dench is finally permitted to do more than scowl at Bond, and her talents unexpectedly provide real depth to the M character here. And there’s a short but really powerful scene between Bond and Felix Leiter, about which more later.

But while there is some good action, some coolness, and several good moments that show us the epic this movie could have been, the movie not only doesn’t fulfill its potential, it frequently doesn’t even work on the level of standard Bond movie.

It wasn’t just the absence of a decent villain – although that flaw alone is more than enough to shame any director who makes a Bond movie.

 quantum_of_solace-villains

That guy on the left? Literally the instant he came on the screen I was scared of him. He’s in the movie for about five minutes. The loser on the right is the “villain.”

One does wonder just what has to happen to a man to cause him to make a James Bond movie with a lame villain. All action/adventure movies, but especially Bond movies, depend on the personality of the villain; his cunning is needed to test the hero’s wits, his ruthlessness to test the hero’s courage, his power to test the hero’s strength, his evil to test the hero’s good. The lame villain would have prevented the film from reaching anything like its full potential even if there were no other flaws.

quantum_of_solace-villain

He’s supposed to be scary. I’m told that if you stare long enough you’ll start to see it, like those “magic 3D” posters from the 90s. Anyway, I think they were going for “creepy guy who makes your skin crawl,” but they got “bug-eyed pervy loser.”

 

 

It wasn’t just the gaping holes in the plot. In case you’re curious, those holes arise primarily because the filmmakers decided to give the movie an environmental theme. I say “theme” because the movie is not at all didactic about the environment. They were smart enough to avoid that trap. But they wanted the evil scheme to somehow involve the environment, and what they came up with (I won’t spoil it, though really there’s not much to spoil) doesn’t pass the laugh test.

As for the lengthy scene in the middle of the movie that takes place at a radically avant-guarde European opera performance, while many (including my wife) found it annoying, I actually didn’t mind it.

quantum_of_solace-opera

I can see why they put it in – just like they put in that scene at the “dead bodies” museum exhibit in Casino Royale. They’re trying to reintroduce the tone of the older Bond movies that was simultenously highbrow and exotic. Flying off to Brazil (or wherever) used to be something only the rich could do, and for those who couldn’t do it, it was a little like flying to Mars. Today, when the Bond audience is comfortably upper-middle class and airfares to just about everywhere in the world are within their reach, it’s hard to take Bond to esoteric places. While the scene probably doesn’t work as well as the director hoped it would, I think it’s serviceable.

But now back to the flaws.

It wasn’t just the movie’s anti-Americanism. Here the movie is didactic, alas. One winces to hear the mass-murdering psychopath Haitian dictator Aristide discussed (though he is identified by a generic description and not by name) as a saint. And the filmmakers don’t seem to be aware that the Aristide whom they so admire was returned to office by U.S. power after being deposed in a coup.

But the damage here is pretty radically mitigated by several factors. First, it’s obvious that they felt they had to have something left-wing in there to counterbalance the fact that the movie’s villain is a phony environmental philanthropist, which might be taken as a critique of certain real-life phony environmental philanthropists. (“I did learn something about the environment from this movie,” my wife said to me afterward.  “I learned not to trust people who claim to be acting on behalf of the environment.”) There’s a sense, or at least I had the sense, that when they denounce American imperialism, they do so out of a sense of obligation. Second, on some occasions America really has been guilty of the kind of evil attributed to it here – although one wonders whether either the filmmakers or the audience are aware of who the real perpetrators of those evils were (and are), and which of the two political parties they tend to be clustered in.

But most importantly, Felix Leiter is given an opportunity to point out that if America has sometimes done nasty things, it is, on balance, not the world’s worst offender. In a Bolivian bar, Bond snorts, “you guys have carved up this place pretty well,” and Leiter spits back, “I’ll take that as a compliment – coming from a Brit.” Even by the standards of civilized nations, America stands up pretty well.

bond-leiter

 

In the Bond films, Felix Leiter has always stood for America. He lacks Bond’s air of elegant sophitication and savior-faire, but also Bond’s arrogance and hard-heartedness. Bond is the advanced-but-decadent Old World, Leiter is the plain-but-decent New.

Watch, for example, the first few minutes of Goldfinger, and see how differently Bond and Leiter treat the girl in the bikini by the poolside. If you’ve studied your Tocqueville, you know how to pick out the American in any crowd of men – he’s the one who talks to women like they’re human beings, not property.

On the subject of Felix Leiter as representative of America, it’s almost amazingly appropriate that the Felix Leiter character has switched races – and not for the first time, if you’re prepared to accept the quasi-official Bond film Never Say Never Again, where Bernie Casey took the role. Race is the most distinctive aspect of the American experience, so it’s fitting that the representative American should be alternately black and white. America is as much the slick East Coast sharpness of Jack Lord in Dr. No as it is the wry “aw shucks” Midwestern charm of Cec Linder in Goldfinger; America is also the simultaneous smoothness and bluntness of Jeffrey Wright.

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“Felix Leiter – a brother from Langley.”

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I’ll go out on a limb and say that if Quantum of Solace had to be the first ever anti-American Bond film, it’s appropriate that the task of sticking up for America’s good name should fall to a black Felix Leiter. Those who hold themselves out as representatives of black America often don’t have much good to say about America, but that was not always the case, and if I may trust my personal experience, I find black Americans to be among the most intensely patriotic. Indeed, they’re almost the last sizeable population group among the core politically left groups who obviously mean it with all their hearts when they protest that they, too, love their country. And that’s not at all surprising – around the world, we are discovering that those who have been deprived of their liberties are the ones who cherish them most, while those who have long enjoyed liberty come to take it for granted. Why should we surprised to discover this at home? True, it was against American oppression that American blacks had to fight to gain their liberties, but now that they have liberty, they cherish it, and will not allow it to be lost. And they know that America, even with all it has done wrong, stands for liberty as no other nation does, or ever has.

But now, again, back to the flaws.

I think the main flaw in Quantum of Solace is the mandate that a sequel must be bigger and flashier than the original. Where Casino Royale centered around a card game and gave us intrigue, cunning, dialouge, and character development, Quantum of Solace is nonstop car chases, explosions, etc. Everything has to be bigger and blow up more spectacularly. That just doesn’t leave any time for the revenge plotline to develop properly.

This flaw is badly exacerbated by the poor editing and bad pacing of the action sequences. Each individual camera shot is too short, while each action sequence as a whole is too long. Because of the rapid-fire editing that spoils so much of the action, someone has called this “Bond for the ADD generation.” But I disagree; no one with ADD would have had the patience to sit through these interminably long action sequences. I barely had the patience to sit through them myself.

I wish I could say that this movie is good but not great. As I said, it’s not a bad movie. I enjoyed watching it, for the most part. But I just can’t bring myself to type that it’s a good movie. Looking at my grand unified field theorem of Bond movies, I’d have to say that where Casino Royale was “Reboot Awesomeness,” Quantum of Solace has skipped right past the “Still Good” phase and landed squarely in “Passable,” alongside The Spy Who Loved Me and The World Is Not Enough. That doesn’t bode well for the next one.

But remember the tagline to the end credits of every Bond movie: “James Bond will return.” And so he shall.

5 Comments | Pass the Popcorn | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

PJM on the Incredibly Interesting Uninterestingness of Arne Duncan

December 18, 2008

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(Guest post by Greg Forster)

This morning, Pajamas Media carries my column on the selection of Arne Duncan as Obama’s education secretary. At first, I agreed with Jay’s assessment that the choice is a boring subject, but after thinking about how boring it is, I now find it fascinating:

It really is amazing how totally uninteresting — how completely devoid of any possible justification for paying attention to it — the choice of Duncan for education secretary is. In fact, the selection has succeeded in fascinating me by achieving such an unprecedented level of anti-fascinatingness. It repels my interest so strongly that I can’t stop thinking about it.

Not that this means I’m wowed by the pick:

If Duncan is acceptable to everybody, that’s another way of saying he’s the lowest common denominator. And as a great education reformer once said: “Woe to you when all men speak well of you.”

2 Comments | politics | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

School Voucher Mythbusters

December 17, 2008

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(Guest post by Greg Forster)

A while back, I posted this to help people find comprehensive lists of the research on various subjects related to school vouchers. It’s a list of lists – in case you’re looking for a list of all the available research on whether vouchers improve education for the kids who use them, or whether they improve public schools, and so forth. Some of the lists are more scholarly and contain a lot of technical information, while some are presented in a more easily accessible format.

Well, here’s a big update on the list-of-lists front: the Friedman Foundation has released a set of “myth buster” guides to the research on the six most common school choice myths. For each myth they’ve provided a brief, handy reference sheet and a slightly longer, more detailed guide to the research. Even the detailed version of each myth buster is still less technical than the other lists on my “meta-list” page, compiled by Jay and other scholars, but it does go over the most important technical issues (how do we distinguish the impact of vouchers from the impact of other factors like family influence?) and provides the references you’ll need to dig further if you wish.

 

Myth: Vouchers hurt public schools and take the best and brightest.

Research: Short version, detailed version.

 

Myth: Private schools aren’t really better than public schools.

Research: Short version, detailed version.

 

Myth: Vouchers will lead to increased segregation.

Research: Short version, detailed version.

 

Myth: Private schools are hostile to tolerance and democratic values.

Research: Short version, detailed version.

 

Myth: Vouchers are costly and drain money from public schools.

Research: Short version, detailed version.

 

Myth: Private schools exclude difficult students.

Research: Short version, detailed version.

 

Take note that these are true comprehensive lists, including all high-quality studies on each of these questions. I’ve noticed that it’s always voucher supporters who are willing to discuss all the evidence, while voucher opponents typically cherry-pick the evidence, mischaracterize the evidence they’ve cherry-picked, and then falsely accuse voucher supporters of cherry-picking evidence.

So I would say Jay’s theory about why school vouchers keep winning against impossible odds is well supported by the empirical evidence – although in this case I haven’t compiled a comprehensive list.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted!
Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just,
And he but naked, though lock’d up in steel
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

Henry VI, Part II, Act 3, Scene 2

2 Comments | civic values, competitive effects, money myth, school funding, special ed, vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

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