1, b3, b6, b9

The Office and TV Tokenism

2012-03-01T22:38:00.000-06:00

The Office is not a prime-time drama; however, I think it is fair to say that it has as close to as much prestige as a comedy can get. Moreover, while it does not necessarily directly fit the definition of TV tokenism that Mr. Bolos put forth, each element of TV tokenism is satirized in The Office, whether it is through some character or some recurring theme.

Consider Kelly. Upon any criticism of her job performance, she immediately goes nuts, suggesting that the accuser is being extremely racist and immediately dispelling their claim. Stanley also behaves, on occasion, like the token minority; while he is most certainly not the always well dressed, morally simple character in a position of authority that token minority is defined as, but michael often touts him to be, talking about his black savviness, how he struggles and is just trying to get by, when none of that is really true. Later on in the show, Daryl attempts to play the role that would be considered the token minority on a drama, wherein he becomes a boss alongside Michael, but because of his lack of experience, he fails miserably.

The Evolution of Music

2012-01-15T20:18:00.000-06:00

Being a musician who plays jazz, a genre of music that is notably unpopular, particularly among the younger generations, I often consider the types of thing that make music 'popular.' While I am not a fan of the whole allegorical approach to deriving facts about a culture from its art, I think that there certainly some instances where such a method is appropriate, this being one of them.

Jazz was popular when music was not simply used as pretty noises to fill the silence. Music was not seen as something that happened everyday, and listening to it was an activity in and of itself. However, with the advent of technology like portable MP3 players (e.g., iPods), CDs, and iTunes, music has because much less of an 'activity,' and more of something to just take up a sonic emptiness that people are not comfortable with. Jazz, which is a music that is almost entirely about the intricacies of each solo, cannot fulfill this role, as enjoying it requires that one is listening actively to it. Pop on the other hand, especially more modern pop, is meant to be enjoyable in the sense that it does not intrude in on any other activities that you are doing.

This is where the allegorical approach comes in. It seems to me that as music moves from more to less involved, society also moves from being more to less actively concerned with its well being. That is, people are taking less and less of an invested interest on how successful the communities that they are a part of, and tend to only do things that further this interest when it is convenient. For example, at http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm, the amount of people who actually vote is graphed as a percent of people who are eligible to vote. It shows quite clearly that voting frequency spikes only when there are huge issues that affect many individuals in the nation; for example, the recent economic downturn, caused voting percentages to go way up, while the economic boom in the late 90's and early 2000's showed lower voter turnouts.

I'm tempted to say that people are becoming lazier, but I don't necessarily think that this is the case; lazy implies that even if someone were to care about something, they would not work very hard at it, which is clearly not true of at least my generation. In class a little while ago, we talked about how the head of admissions at Harvard (I think, I can't quite remember which school it was) said that students are becoming better and better 'hoop jumpers.' I think this statement more accurately reflects the same change that causes pop to becomes more mainstream than jazz than does the description 'lazy'. Rather, people are becoming more focused on the end-result of a process; that is, they do not see the journey they take to get to an end as beneficial, but only the end itself.

For example, 'hoop jumping' students do not concern themselves foremost with learning the material. Their focus is far more oriented towards getting as good of a grade as possible, with an even larger 'end' of getting a stable job. In this same way, jazz is more about enjoying the process of listening to music, whereas pop music just serves a function, in this case to break the silence, representing an 'end' goal.

Presidential Campaigning

2012-01-11T19:25:00.001-06:00

With the 2012 presidential campaign coming up, we are once again starting to see potential candidates for president advertise themselves to the voting body. Typically, when a candidate creates a commercial, they employ one of a few tactics: smear campaigning, displaying their views, or playing to the popular opinion. I can't say that I have any evidence for that, but just based on the two presidential elections that I've been old enough to really experience, I can say that with some confidence. Then, I saw this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EL5Atp_vF0. This video appalled me. When I saw it, I literally thought it was a movie campaign at first. There are zero statistics cited (unless you count the 'zero jobs created,' which I don't, because it only sounds negative towards Obama because of the way it's said, it's pretty positive compared to the years before it). More time is put into the actual LOOK of the video than the content. Not a single opinion or credential of Perry's appears. The point is JUST to appeal to the ethos of the viewer. It really makes me worry, because this video clearly tries to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but really, who would be convinced by this?
I thought it was particularly interesting how, in the last 40 seconds or so, basically random images appear, with the only connection between them being that they all contain pro-American imagery. The one that was most strikingly irrelavent to me was the small black child with a toy airplane. I thought it was a clear case of Rick Perry trying to subconsciously say 'look at me, I'm not rascist, and even though I can be serious, I can be fun too, just like you!'. It just appalls me how these advertisements for such an influential thing don't even attempt to inform, only to create a character. It's sort of frightening.

Civil Liberties in Perilous Times, Part Two

2012-01-10T10:05:00.001-06:00

Yesterday at dinner, my dad brought up an article he read in the New York Times about a group of scientists in the Netherlands who are about to publish information that could make it possible for terrorists to spread avian flu, a deadly virus, at an epidemic level. The article can be found online here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/health/fearing-terrorism-us-asks-journals-to-censor-articles-on-virus.html?pagewanted=all. The US government has asked the scientists involved to not publish some of the more sensitive information to the general public. This made me think about the civil liberties paper we turned in a little while ago, because despite the fact that the Netherlands is obviously not the US, it still involves the issues of limiting the free press.
If there is a correct time to limit civil liberties, this is it. This strain of the H5N1 virus could potentially wipe out half of the human population if it is abused by people who have destructive goals, and while the information that the studies provide could be advantageous to biologist and other sceintists, clearly the death of half of the people on the world in such an arbitrary and preventable fashion outweighs whatever benefit that might be. As one of the doctors involved said, the struggle is "'how to get the information out to the right people and still have a barrier'.
I think that this speaks to the increasing sectionalization of the world, wherein people only have access to the aspects of life that involve their particular niche; for example, being a musician, I wouldn't really have any window into the world of, say, medicine, largely because of perceived security and trust issues. While I certainly believe that these findings should at the very least be filtered, I think that this is a precedent-setting moment, and that it has the potential to lead to even more sectionalization as more and more information is abridged.

Practicality vs. Constitutionality, Revisited

2011-10-24T19:07:00.000-05:00

   While we were in the library the other, it occurred to me that the blog post I made earlier regarding the occasional conflict between certain aspects of the Constitution and the modern world also could have applied to the idea of denying civil liberties. When you think about it, what would a government's justification for doing something like attempting to silence dissenters? The government (if you could somehow coax them into talking about it, but good luck) would tell you that sacrifices in the Constitutionality department are necessary, and the benefits, which are ultimately in terms of security, outweigh the cost.
   It's interesting how, although there are certainly highly technical aspects to this fundamental issue of 'what violates the Constitution,' in essence, both sides are making arguments of degree that can't really be proven. If you think about it, how could you 'prove' that silencing dissenters in a very specific instance is not worth the cost? What numbers could you show? On the other hand, what specific statistics could you show that do directly support it?
   To me, many of these types of arguments feel slightly aloof and unnecessary; it seems to me that picking either side definitively, regardless of which one it was, would be far more effective than bickering endlessly and getting a net total of nothing done, which is currently what is happening. I have the same opinion about most politics. While I identify more closely with liberal views, I think that going 100% conservative would be more effective than this bipartisanship we have going on now. While dissent is certainly patriotic, it's not dissent if half the country agrees with you.

The Death of an Icon

2011-10-24T18:43:00.000-05:00

   A few days ago, Muammar Gaddafi, the former ruler of Libya, was killed by Libyan revolutionaries. As one would expect, because of the nature of Gaddafi's rule and his actions towards dissenters, his death was largely hailed as a success, being seen as exemplifying how freedom in the world still reigns, and the world is righteous, etc.. However, I think the real story lies in the fact that it was seen as such an important and momentous event, when the war was essentially already won for the revolutionaries.
   For some reason, the idea of putting a face to a cause (opposing or not) is appealing to people; if you even turn on a news station for 10 minutes, you'll hear countless phrases like 'Obama administration,' 'Harry Reid's Republicans,' and so on. Moreover, it tends to be seen as a big deal when these 'figureheads' are taken down in some respect, even when the general administration or organization remains largely the same.
   For example, consider how Osama Bin Laden's death was seen, and in some cases, explicitly hailed as, bringing justice to those who perpetrated the events on 9/11. Despite the fact that Bin Laden himself really was not, as most think, the mastermind of Al Qaeda, because the CIA placed him at the top of their target list, people saw his death as such a victory that it beat theirs on 9/11.
   I personally think that this phenomenon has everything to do with the way choices are made in the modern world of politics. That is to say, everything represents something larger; a vote for a candidate for office is really a vote for their party, a vote for a president is really a vote for his cabinet, etc.. Because there is strength in numbers in a democracy, people tend to eventually blob together under one demeanor so that they can accomplish most of their goals with the greatest frequency. This mentality leads to the oversimplification of something as complex as Al Qaeda to someone as relatively insignificant as Bin Laden, similar to Gaddafi's death signifying the loss of the loyalists, when in reality they had lost long ago.

Practicality vs. Constitutionalism

2011-10-23T15:35:00.003-05:00

      Our nation currently suffers from the adverse effects of bipartisanship; that is, when you vote for a member of Congress, you're actually voting for their political party, because politicians fear public outrage if they vote on any bill against their political party. This creates a sort of stagnation, whereby issues that are universally acknowledged to be of great importance do not get resolved because neither side wants to budge. For example, although most everyone agrees that our current spending and tax laws are not appropriate for the situation that we're in, because the democrats favor raising taxes more heavily, versus the republicans who want to cut spending significantly more, the laws aren't getting changed at all.
     I think that the fundamental reason this occurs has to do with people's vision of what America represents. For some reason (which will, as it so happens, probably be the topic of a later blog post), America puts an importance on the fact that it is a symbol for something, whether it be business, freedom, progress, or whatever. In the context of this particular debate, practicality vs. constitutionalism, I think that the two conflicting ideas are that a) America has to represent success in every way, and b) America has to represent freedom at it's truest level. While at first, these don't seem to conflict, when you think about it, because the Constitution was written primarily to give the people who live in America the ability to self rule, rather than be led by a single entity, while it may not have interfered with the way the nation functioned in the global economy at the time, because of the way that the world's economy has evolved, specifically with the way banks and particularly assets have assumed their modern roles, some conflicts have arisen that come from the fact that in order to prevent certain misinformation from being spread, such as credit agencies giving toxic assets AAA and AA ratings in order to keep having banks come to them, things put forth in the Constitution may have to be violated by the government.
   This is where the Supreme Court comes in; it is their job to 'interpret the Constitution,' that is, to try to figure out what its writers might have written had they written it today. Thus, they have to determine which is more important to them; the idea of freedom, or the idea of (in this case, fiscal) success. Personally, it seems to me that in order to have the largest amount of freedom, fiscal success (which does not necessarily mean the largest economy, at least to me, it's closer to the idea of socioeconomic equality) is entirely necessary, because otherwise, while people will have equal civil liberties, the actual amount of opportunities will be entirely skewed towards those who have more money.

'Society'

2011-09-17T20:58:00.000-05:00

Recently, I was at a friend's house, and we were listening to the radio. We had tuned it to some station that I wasn't familiar with, and to be honest, I wasn't really paying too much attention to it, as we were also talking about something completely different (and playing Wii Archery, because we're ballers). However, the phrase 'society tells us' popped out at me, among the rest of the crackly jargon that I wasn't listening to. I'm not really sure why, but the idea of 'society' really piqued my curiosity. When we talk about things like politics, art, and entertainment, society seems to be a buzz word that we just throw around to describe what might be most accurately summed up as a general attitude. But how useful is that idea? What does a 'general attitude' even consist of?

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines 'society' as (among others) 1) the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community, and 2) the aggregate of people who are fashionable, wealthy, and influential, regarded as forming a distinct group in a community. I think that both definitions reveal something about the idea of a society, but some context might be helpful to understand why. Being a jazz musician, a somewhat frequent discussion I have with my friends consists of talking about why jazz has become so much less popular in the last 40 or 50 years. We will say things like 'modern society dictates that people don't want to have to listen closely to enjoy music.' Obviously, that's sort of a packed and specific statement, but the implication is quite clear: modern 'society,' whatever that is, tells people to listen to music a certain way.

In other words, society is some sort of authoritative figure whose invisible hand (attempts to) control things in everyone's life, hence the OAD's first definition. However, who determines what values to impose? The second definition answers that question sufficiently; a small group of elites, due to their disproportional influence in the image of an entire group of people, forms the concept of 'society' around their own ideals. For example, think about the people who are wealthy in America today. The first people who come to mind are executives of large companies. Certainly, not all corporations are corrupt and immoral. However, they are, to be sure, not innocent as a whole. For the past 3 years, despite the enormous negative impact things like increasing pay disparities between higher and lower status employees (e.g., CEO vs. salesman), price fixing, and mergers have had on the economy, because it would be to the advantage of those wealthy people (who happen to be the people on the winning side of said disparity) to place emphasis on job creation rather than refining corrupt and improper methods, when anyone talks about fixing the economy, they nearly always talk about job creation. It almost makes sense though, that the most materialistically successful people should represent the ideals of a country; maybe it's just sort of a vulgar idea to me because of the values of our particular nation.

The Value of Originality

2011-09-10T21:59:00.000-05:00

In class, we've been discussing to some length the idea that Chris McCandless set out on his journey, in part, as an attempt to achieve individuality and uniqueness. As a musician, the concept of originality is something that I think about a lot, but it might be more true to say it's something that I struggle with. In particular, when I try to come up with a legitimate reason to strive for originality, I always end up with nothing.

Especially for me as an artist, the idea of originality has a confusing appeal. On a base level, it makes perfect sense to me; I want to stand out just as much as the next guy. But when you think about it, if I'm an artist, is that really a good goal? Ultimately, as an artist, the goal is to express yourself, at least for many people. Where does individuality fit into that? It would seem to me that the desire to be noticed opposes artistic creation, rather than fostering it, because commerciality and self-expression often don't have much in common. I think that the masters of art all simply tried to express themselves, and it wasn't so much their art itself that was unique, it was the concept (their 'selves') they put forth that stood out.

This applies to everyday life, too; decisions like what clothes you wear, how you walk, the things you eat, etc., are all simply other forms of self-expression, whether you are conscious of it or not. Especially today, using things like that to reflect your personality is a common and culturally important phenomenon; the mentality of a certain time period can often be derived from the clothes that were most common during that era. For example, the 50's and 60's were a period of protest, from the issue of racial equality, to the Vietnam War, to the rise of rock and roll. Accordingly, the clothes of the youth became much louder as well; colors became bright, skirts became shorter, hair got longer, and so on.

But really, what is the value of being recognized for the things that express only your desire to be original, such as Chris McCandless' journey, or art for the sake of becoming known? In a world that is becoming increasingly post-modern, it seems whimsical and a little bit immature to expect or try intently to be a revolutionary.