Oprah hates you, girlfriend

Oprah – what a gal! I didn't have to use her last name for you to know who I was talking about! She's on TV, she writes books, she has a glossy magazine, she raises millions for charity, she puts millions of her own money into philanthropic projects. Why does she have those millions of dollars? Because millions of people hang on her every word.

And what are those words saying? Often they're saying admirable things. Oprah (the NIH style book says I should call her Ms Winfrey, but really – she's Oprah!) – as was saying, Oprah was one of the few major American figures in either show business or the news business to question the utility of invading Iraq (which was a Good Thing regardless of whether or not you think the invasion was a Good Thing). She has played a major role not only in making the mainstream of society aware of the problems of people on its margins, but also in getting the mainstream of society to accept marginal people into the mainstream.

But...there's another side to Oprah. Much, if not most, of what she tells her audience, which consists chiefly of women, is "There's something wrong with you, girlfriend." There is a lot of money to be made in telling women they don't measure up, and Oprah seems to have made most of it.

The most frequent theme on her website is that women need to improve themselves. They need to be more organized, they need to figure out what they want to do with their life and then do it, they need to improve their health, and, most of all, they need to lose weight.

But – you don't have to take my word for it. Simply visit her website. I visited it on March 26, 2007 and here's what I found.

First of all, here are some of the topics on the page that day:

• Top five personal rules to live by
  
• How to improve yourself from the inside out
  
• The five best things to do for your relationship
  
• Dr. Oz's Excuse-Busting Workout

Do you get the feeling, girlfriend, that Oprah thinks that maybe you're totally messed up? I mean, you don't even have your
own rules to live by! Or, if you do, they're not as good as Oprah's!

What are those five rules to live by, anyway? They turn out to be the opinion of one Martha Beck, who starts her advice by writing "When you spend almost all your time thinking about how people can achieve their best destiny, as I do....." And here they are:

1. A little pain never hurt anybody.
   
2. Sunscreen is for necks and chests, not just faces.
   
3. Television is a vitamin (Ms Beck goes on to say that watching television is "essential for social and personal well-being").
   
4. It is good to be wrong.
   
5. You can work miracles.

Hmm. Do you think Oprah might have some ulterior motive in promoting the idea that television watching is essential to your well-being? And I wonder how much sunscreen stock she holds. No, I'm not being cynical here. It just seems strange to me that an intelligent woman like Oprah would think that two of the most important considerations in leading the Good Life should be slathering on the sunscreen and plunking yourself down in front of the box.

The advice about being wrong is good, and presents some important ideas from the philosophy of science in a way that's easy to understand. But, you know, a little pain can hurt you. For example, if you're like me and have a high threshold of pain, you can find out that those little pains you were feeling were symptoms of a big problem, the probability of whose existence you discounted because you weren't feeling big pain.

Anyway, Ms Beck advises you to get through pain at the dentist by thinking "It's only pain," when the most effective way of getting through it is to say "Hey, cut that out and give me some more freezing."

And then there's "You can work miracles." I have news for Ms Beck and Oprah – if anyone could work miracles, they wouldn't be called miracles. Ms Beck's idea of a miracle is the nice backyard she built for herself. That ain't a miracle, Martha – that's gardening. If you want us to believe in your power to work miracles, tell us how you managed to build that garden when people were throwing things at you every time you stuck your head outdoors (a request whose relevance will become apparent over the rest of this article).

The idea of people being able to work miracles is fundamental to Oprah's view of the world, as it is to her close comrade-in-arms Dr. Phil. Dr. Phil tells Oprah's followers that they have the power to accomplish whatever they want. Oprah also vigorously promotes The Secret, a book full of new Age nonsense about how your thoughts about becoming successful "magnetically" attract success to you. If you surf through the "Thoughts for the Day" on Oprah's website, you find one quotation after another about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Of course, that implies that you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and the rest of the site is about how you're too dumb to find your own bootstraps.

For example, as we noted before, Oprah tells you how to improve your "relationship" (by which is meant your relationship with the man – sic – you're sleeping with) by following just five simple rules for dealing with problems in it. Here they are:

1. Stop all shame, blame, and criticism
   
2. Change from a critical habit of mind to a positive one.
   
3. When your relationship has a "breakdown," deal with it by apologizing, showing affection, and promising to take action to improve things.
   
4. Don't expect your man to give you the sex a porn star would.
   
5. Don't let your relationship get stale.

Not bad advice, as far as it goes, but the problem is that it only goes as far as the woman. Men apparently need to take no action to promote a good relationship. The commentary about rule 1 advises women that "men need to feel competent." You know, maybe if they want to feel competent they could start being competent. Isn't that a plan?

As for rule 3, the irony of this advice being the tactic men use to cop out of their responsibilities in a relationship is lost on Oprah. "If you take me back, baby, I'll never do it again, I swear. C'mon, give me a hug." You know, Oprah, men are hip to that jive. Anyway, how about getting them to promise to take some action? How about them doing something to keep the relationship from going stale?

Oprah's vision of paradise is of a world in which women have improved themselves by becoming more satisfactory to men. Again, you don't have to take my word for it. Just visit her website and look at all the links on the home page to articles about losing weight, becoming more beautiful, and complying with men's wishes.

Where does this vision come from? My colleague Wentworth Sutton believes it may be a neurotic manifestation of psychic traumas Oprah suffered in childhood. According to Oprah, she was horrifically abused in her mother's questionable care, and became a success after going to live with her father, who loved her and encouraged her to become the success she is today. And today she thinks women are defective. Hmmm.

As Wentworth freely admits, his analysis could be a load of the old cobblers. I have included it here chiefly because I need a structural device to get me to my boffo finish. Nevertheless, Oprah's fondness for Dr. Phil, who advises people that
they become successful only when they liberate themselves from the influence of others, suggests that Wentworth may be on to something.

Wentworth's explanation, even if it's valid, does not, of course, imply that Oprah's advice to women is bad. The thing that implies that it is at least partly bad, though, is that it encourages women to believe that they are solely responsible for their own problems and that they can extricate themselves from their problems solely through their own individual action. Okay, sometimes that's true. I have good reason to suspect, though, that usually it's not. Ask the women who have tried to deal with their abusive husbands by implementing rule 3 about improving your relationship.

So, is Oprah a force for good? Yes. Is Oprah a force for bad? Yes.

In the end, then, Oprah is just like us.

What a gal!

Oprah Hates You, Girlfriend ©
John FitzGerald, 2007

Pathology is destiny

Thirty years ago the progressive opinion about the differences in the characteristic behaviour of men and women was that they were the result of sexist childrearing, but these days progressive opinion is divided. Behavioural differences are thought by some to be the product of hormonal differences, for example, by others to be the result of a conspiracy among men to oppress women, and so on and so on.

One possibility appears to have been neglected, though. When we look at the conventional catalogue of differences between men and women, we find that men are assumed to have characteristics remarkably similar to the characteristics of people with brain injury.

On the whole, men are more violent than women and more likely to express anger. They are more likely to be restless and impatient. They have been shown to have poorer verbal abilities than women. They are often assumed to have difficulties with attention (being unable to find things which are in plain view, for example) and with memory (as when they forget important anniversaries). They are often assumed to be more egocentric and impulsive.

All these characteristics are associated with brain injury. Men are twice as likely as women to be diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, and most victims are young men aged 15 to 30. Young men are more likely than young women to take dangerous risks and to suffer head injury as a result. These figures, of course, apply only to diagnosed brain injuries, injuries which at the very least have resulted in loss of consciousness, loss of memory, alteration of mental state, or neurological deficit – that is, injuries other people notice and arrange to have treated in hospital.

However, men are also more likely to suffer concussion which, although it usually does not have the catastrophic consequences of more serious brain injury, still has some pretty serious ones. "Repeated concussions," note Kelly, Nichols, Filey, Lillehei, Rubinstein and Kleinschmidt-Demasters in an article published in JAMA in 1991 (vol. 266, no. 20, pp. 2867-2869), "can lead to brain atrophy and cumulative neuropsychological deficits."

As children we often hit our heads without the idea crossing anyone's mind that we should undergo a neurological examination. Boys are more likely to hit their heads. As boys grow older they take part in contact sports. Kelly et al. reported that in 1991 football was producing an estimated 250,000 concussions every football season in the United States, and that 20% of high school football players in the United States suffered at least one concussion every season. The probability that at least some of the behavioural difference between men and women can be explained as a result of brain trauma seems fairly high.

History confirms the thesis. The behavioural differences between men and women are less marked than in the past, and society is less violent and less dangerous. Until fairly recently, for example, a large part of the male population spent much of its time working in dangerous occupations without head protection; one of these occupations was war, in which men often found themselves fighting hand to hand in conditions likely to lead to brain injury. Today, of course, jobs are less dangerous, workers wear head protection, and war is fought with weapons which act from a distance. As the likelihood of brain injury has decreased, so have the behavioural differences between men and women.

In North America, contemporary worship of sport threatens to widen the gap again. The most popular sport in the United States is football, while in Canada it is hockey. Both sports inflict head injury at a high rate, and both are played primarily by men. Women's hockey is popular, but the women's game is less violent (bodychecking is prohibited) and far fewer women than men play hockey. The fanatical devotion of young boys to these sports seems likely to create a more "masculine" generation.

In the end, then, the behavioural differences between men and women may not be due to hormones, the worldwide male conspiracy, or, as women seem commonly to suppose, men's inherent moral and intellectual inadequacy. They may after all be due to sexist childrearing, but not in the way people thought in the 1960s and 1970s. That is, the problem may not be that girls are trained to act in submissive ways, but rather that boys are encouraged to act in ways which endanger their physical, emotional, and intellectual function.

The question remains of how we are to eliminate this sexism. Well, one thing that would help would be for young women to stop encouraging young men in this behaviour. Young women reward football players, hockey players, motorcyclists, and so on. They reward the recklessness which produces brain injury. Another big help would be for schools, including our institutions of higher learning, to stop promoting sports which produce brain injury. Movies and television will have to stop promoting the invulnerable action hero as the model of masculine behaviour.

Okay, I knew it was too much to ask. We won't act on this problem, even though action, even if it didn't eliminate differences between the sexes, would reduce the horrible toll exacted by brain injury among both men and women. The opportunity for each of the sexes to feel superior to the other would be reduced, opportunities for profit would be reduced, and we couldn't have that. What was I thinking?

Pathology is Destiny © John FitzGerald, 2001

Lightning, lotteries, and probability

People often claim you have more chance of being struck by lightning than of winning the lottery. The argument appears to be that one Canadian in 5 million is struck by lightning every year, while your chances of winning the standard 6/49 lottery are about one in 14 million, and one in 5 million is a higher probability than one in 14 million. However, this reasoning is unsound.
The problem is that these two probabilities are not comparable. The estimate of the probability of being hit by lightning is an empirical one, derived from observation, and applies to an entire year's worth of thunderstorms. The estimate of the probability of winning the lottery is a mathematical one, derived from a formula which applies to a single drawing of the lottery.

We could derive from the first estimate the probability of being struck by lightning at the time the lottery number is drawn, which would provide a fairer comparison (and one which would favour the lottery), but the more important issue is why we would want to do that. The frequency of an event relative to electrocution by lightning is not a standard of worth. For example, the probability that an individual Canadian will become prime minister in the next year is lower then the probability that he or she will be struck by lightning, but no one would conclude that that difference in probabilities tells us anything about the value of the Canadian political system.

Lightning, Lotteries, and Probability ©: 2001, John FitzGerald

Howl

The Fifties, we are told, were a time when everyone and everything was trite, respectable, and boring. Louis St-Laurent led the country as it sleepwalked through the decade. Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver kept millions entranced in front of their television sets. Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie wrote best-sellers.

People, though, have forgotten John Diefenbaker, a prime minister vastly more interesting than the simulacra of corporate lemmings who have been running this country since the mid-Eighties. They have forgotten Charlotte Whitton, a mayor who makes Mel Lastman look like a retired refrigerator salesman. They have forgotten that in the Fifties the CBC routinely presented items like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" in prime time, as well as dramas about contemporary public injustices rather than about injustices conveniently long past. They have forgotten that in the United States, television brought down Joe McCarthy.

In literature the Fifties had a certain edge to them, too. Today's writers have been absorbed into the giant publicity and distribution systems of modern global publishing. In the 1950s, though, people actually published books that got banned and seized by the police.

One such book was Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, published in 1956 by the legendary City Lights Books of San Francisco. It was seized by U. S. Customs and by the San Francisco police, and was the subject of a long trial for obscenity (it was finally concluded that the book was not obscene).

These days, people don't get quite so upset about poetry. They don't really get emotional about anything. Contemporary life is basically a lock-step procession of zombies into the abyss. Having abandoned the use of our brains we have satisfied our need for guiding principles by adopting those sold to us by the same media which so effectively sell beer, tampons, and anything with the word light in it. The world is filled with dutiful citizens who spend their waking hours occupied with the thoughts "We must reduce the deficit; we must reduce the debt; I must save for my retirement."

These observations were inspired by a review that – thinking of the impending millennium, whenever that may be – I once conducted of poetry written in English during the twentieth century. It's frightfully refined, isn't it? Compare, for example, the horridly bloodless poems of James Kirkup to the highly raffish and scabrous life he vividly and engagingly recounts in the many volumes of his autobiography.

Certainly, great poetry was written in the twentieth century. There is the work of Wallace Stevens, for example, and one must admit that despite its superficial reserve it does have a distinct visceral aspect. Some – we repeat, some – of T. S. Eliot's work (or the work which he may have plagiarized) actually says something about reality, although something like "The Dry Salvages" deserves the name it is usually given around the literary department – "The Dry Heavages".

Nevertheless, the general run of poetry in the twentieth century is largely trivial. Poetic form has been abandoned, and what chiefly distinguishes poetry from prose these days is typography. Prose is written in paragraphs, while poetry is arranged differently on the page.

For example, on my daily trips in the funereal equipages of the Toronto Transit Commission, I have become acquainted with Poetry on the Way, a program which puts Canadian "poetry" in the place of advertising cards. The supposed poetry to which we are treated consists largely of trite and inelegant writing arranged in scattered blocks of print. Louis Dudek writes a couple of quick sentences about a seeming contradiction in his dogs' behaviour and then arranges them in arbitrary lines within a couple of blocks of print placed at random on the page and voilà…there's your poetry. In the literary department's opinion this type of work seems to have little in common with the definitely poetic – "Bateau Ivre," say – but that opinion is a minority one these days.

By modern standards, then "Howl," which takes up a third of Howl and Other Poems, is poetic. It doesn't rhyme and it doesn't scan, but it is written in a series of hanging indents, so it's poetry. But is it good poetry? That question has been much debated over the past forty-two years.

Certainly "Howl" is gripping. It seizes your attention at the very beginning and doesn't let go. It inspires you to read it aloud, an effect some people still consider to be a mark of good poetry. It inspires you to shout it aloud, and that may be a bit unrefined for most responsible contemporary citizens.

One of the characteristics preferred by modern consumers of poetry is obscurity. Obscurity allows the reader to bathe in a pleasant wonderment at the incomprehensibility of existence, which is apparently a pleasant experience for many. It is certainly a convenient preference for those whose goal is to maintain the populace in its apparently exemplary state of zombitude. "Howl", though, wants you to actually get up and do something, even if it's just to get excited. "Howl" is not obscure. It focusses your attention on actual real things and expects you to think about them.

Two other characteristics often considered these days to be defining characteristics of poetry are loveliness and fatuousness. Anything that deals too clearly with the facts of life is likely to upset the privileged types who make
up most of the modern poetry market. The poetry market in fact consists chiefly of social ballast – people with comfortable jobs and comfortable lives who don't actually do anything productive but who keep society stable by acting in accordance with one of the approved social myths. In poetry, as in fiction, in belles-lettres, and in non-fiction, this group prefers impressionist gewgaws, the elegantly puzzling, and the self-confidently stupid.

"Howl" is neither lovely nor obscure, and although it is often fatuous, there is still enough intelligent appreciation of the real in it to disqualify it on that score as well. How can you not like "I saw the best minds of my generation...who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz"? How can you not like "who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried"? How can you not like "[who] rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma sabachthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio"? How can you not like:

"I'm with you in Rockland/where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself  imaginary walls collapse        
O skinny legions run outside           
O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here                
O victory forget your underwear we're free"?

How can you not consider this to be good poetry?

Well, some of the ideas in those excerpts are trite, but so are most of the ideas
in much highly regarded poetry. One problem with the excerpts, though, is that they are exuberant, as is the rest of "Howl." Exuberance is démodé
these days, considered appropriate only in adolescence or in appreciation of a sporting event. In other ages or circumstances we are not to indulge in anything which might impair our solemn concern about the important social issues helpfully defined for us by the Liberal and Conservative Parties of Canada and the International Monetary Fund.

"Howl" also makes too many references to phenomena typical only of the lives of the less favoured, and these days the appetite for literary slumming is much less keen than it was in 1956. Memories of the Depression are much rarer and fainter now, as is the realization that the misfortunes of the poor are not a sign of their moral inferiority to us, the more favoured.

"Howl" also fails to meet contemporary standards by refusing to lie quietly on the page without bothering us after we lay the book down. The images stay in our heads, distracting us from contemplation of the moral necessity of the elimination of barriers to international trade.

"Howl" is just too raucous. It offends the contemporary sensibility by being vital, vibrant, and exciting. It provides an unpleasant contrast with the pageant of steely-eyed sadism which passes for both entertainment and news these days. It suggests that there is an alternative to the modern "lifestyle" of hard work and regular deposits in one's retirement fund. "Howl" is actually fun, and if the masses ever re-acquire a taste for having fun with serious ideas, whatever will happen to us?

Howl © 1998, John FitzGerald

God works in mysterious ways

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.

–Emily Dickinson

Did George W. Bush lie about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction? Did he lie about Iraq's supposed plans to obtain uranium? Did he lie about Saddam Hussein's supposed support for al-Qaeda?

Probably not. He probably didn't tell the truth, but the reason he didn't is far more interesting than the idea that he simply lied.

One fact which people consider important about the contemporary Republican Party is its strong support among evangelical Protestants. Chief among these evangelical Protestants is Pat Robertson, head of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which grew out of his evangelical television show The 700 Club. Despite the recognition of the importance of the evangelicals to the Republican Party, though, no one seems to have realized the connection between evangelical theology and the Bush administration's dubious assertions.

Now, no one questions Christians' abilities to come up with wacky ideas. After all, the largest Christian denomination continues to organize its worship around what it considers to be an act of cannibalism in which believers consume the body and blood of their god. Nevertheless the evangelicals have come up with a few lulus lately.

Pat Robertson is known as an exponent of Kingdom Now teachings. In themselves Kingdom Now teachings are not all that wacky, but he combines them with another type of evangelical teaching which is, to use the technical term, looney.

Kingdom Now teachings hold that it is the duty of Christians to establish dominion over the earth by taking control of government and social institutions (I said they weren't all that wacky, not that they weren't wacky). Is it all that surprising that sending missionaries to Iraq turned out to be one of the chief American concerns after Iraq fell? Anyway, Kingdom Now devotees believe the Second Coming will be postponed until this dominion is established.

Kingdom Now adherents have many close relationships with another Protestant school of thought, the Word-Faith movement, also known as Positive Confession (we have now reached the really wacky bit). Word-Faith holds that if a person has faith, any word that he utters as a consequence of that faith must be true. Often the proponents of this view – the most prominent these days being Kenneth Copeland, Paul and Jan Crouch, and Benny Hinn – encourage people to believe that faith can make them rich.

Wealth, in fact, is seen as the right of the believer. Word-Faith has a highly deistic view of God, and believes that if what you say is based on faith in God, God is required to make your utterances true. So if you say "God will make me wealthy" (a statement of the type known as a positive confession), God must make you wealthy. Really. They believe that.

On the other hand, Word-Faith preachers tend to be loaded, so maybe they're onto something. Have a look at Rod Parsley's television show sometime. Besides being one of the most entertaining people on television, Pastor Parsley simply reeks of moolah. His suits are magnificent, and his headquarters in Columbus, Ohio is starting to make the Taj Mahal look like a shack. Benny Hinn doesn't look as if he has to go down to the food bank too often, either, although you'd think if positive confession was all that effective he could do something about his hair.

Anyway, one Kingdom Now adherent who has close ties to Word-Faith is...Pat Robertson! The 700 Club has Word-Faith preachers like Rod Parsley as guests, and the show has long featured Word-Faith shticks like praying over stacks of viewers' letters containing prayer wishes.

Now, George W. Bush, as every Republican tells us, is a spiritual man. No doubt he has been heavily influenced by Pastor Robertson. When faced with doubt about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, what would a Word-Faith believer do? He would believe that if he said Iraq had WMDs, then Iraq must have them.

That does seem to be the most persuasive explanation of what happened. It is simply more plausible than thinking that a bunch of intelligent people like Mr. Bush's advisers could think they could lie about issues like that and get away with it. It's more likely that they thought that if they believed it then it must be true.

Of course, many people think like that without the encouragement of evangelical preachers, and this type of thinking is rampant among the wildly popular American success experts. Even Dr. Phil, who at least has had the decency not to start his own cult, tells people that they come into this world with every ability they need to get whatever they want. However, among the exponents of this doctrine it is Pat Robertson who is the power within the Republican Party and the source of much of its funding. President Bush is more likely to have been influenced by him than by Dr. Phil or Anthony ("if I can go from being an overweight slob living in a rundown apartment to being an immensely wealthy exemplar of fitness who is accused of stealing other men's wives then so can you") Robbins.

The Administration's response to the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction confirms my analysis. Instead of simply planting some evidence, they continue to tell us that they are sure they will find some WMDs. They believe they will, so it must be true.

When you think about it, isn't it much better to have your country run by a bunch of those lying bastard politicians that everyone is always complaining about than by a bunch of religious wackos who are immune to reason and evidence? A lying bastard would have known better than to lie about things you could be caught out on.

But what about Tony Blair? He's probably not a Word-Faith devotee, and he's not a lying bastard (because a lying bastard would have known better). So I guess that makes him a stupid bastard.

Originally published in 2003

God Works in Mysterious Ways © 2003, John FitzGerald

Better living through cynicism!

According to a passage in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Since being published in 1890, that little statement has enjoyed an attractiveness longer-lived than even Dorian's. It is approvingly quoted any time someone wants to castigate someone else for being a cynic.

Somehow the people who use this quotation seem not to have noticed that it's one of Wilde's characteristic paradoxes. It's a cynical remark about cynicism. So by quoting it to castigate cynics you become a cynic yourself. As Lord Alfred Douglas would have said, way cool.

So if it's contradictory to be cynical about cynicism, let's be consistent and be upbeat and positive about it! Wow! What a great idea! I can think of all sorts of wonderful things that the cynical community has given to the world!

• First of all, there's contemporary television! Cynical television executives realized that if they took the value, or quality, out of television programs they could reduce the price! When they reduced the value and price of television programs, they ended up with shows like Survivor and The Bachelor! And that's a good thing! How do I know? Because everybody likes them as much as those expensive "quality" shows they replaced! Wow! High ratings, low cost! I guess sometimes it helps not to know anything about value!

• Then there's contemporary fashion! Cynical marketers suspected that what people wanted in fashion was nothing more than a trademark that certified they'd spent a lot of money on a garment or accessory. How could they find out? Why, they marketed expensive clothes that were identical in every way to cheaper garments except that they prominently displayed the designer's trademark! That's how we got the $100 T-shirt! And you know what! Everybody bought them! Lower costs for designers, but higher revenues – who needs to know about value!

• And of course there's contemporary politics! Neo-conservative and neo-liberal politicians just couldn't see the value in democracy. For them, democratic values could be reduced to one question – how much did they have to pay? So they embarked on campaigns to cut social programs and to cut taxes. And you know what? Everybody loved the idea! They voted the slash and burn cynics into office, where they slashed and burnt! Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney, Mike Harris, they all slashed and burnt! And after they slashed and burnt they all got voted in again!

And you know what else – the possibilities are endless! What if...we combined all three of these things! What if we selected ordinary citizens at random to run for the Calvin Klein party on a platform of eliminating government service and reducing taxes to nothing! Now there you have absolutely no value at all! And everyone'd love it!

Instead of having to fork out to pay for the pet projects of a bunch of fat old ugly politicians, you'd have the discretion to purchase any service you wanted from any giant transnational corporation that was supplying it! You wouldn't have to put up with clunky old government health care, government police services, or government electricity, you could buy designer health care, designer police, and designer electricity!

And once Parliament was eliminated the parliamentary channel would be freed up for reruns of Survivor!

So what are you waiting for! Those old outmoded bleeding-heart do-gooder attitudes are yesterday's news! For a better society, for a better country, for a new improved, more confident YOU, let's all get cynical!

Better Living Through Cynicism © John FitzGerald, 2003

Frank who?

Ever heard of Frank Sprague? Sorry, you're thinking of Howard Sprague.

You may be asking, Why should I have heard of Frank Sprague? There's a good reason, really, which we'll get to after a largely cribbed but lively bio of Himself.

Anyway, Frank was a Connecticut boy who graduated from the United States naval Academy in 1878. He was interested in electricity a bit.

While serving in the navy, for example, he installed the first electric call-bell system on a U. S. Navy ship and invented a new type of dynamo. Okay, there were more types of dynamo still to be invented in those days than now, but there still weren't all that many people inventing them.

In 1883 he was persuaded to resign his commission and sign up with Thomas Edison. Frank introduced mathematical methods to Edison's operation, which until then had proceeded in its work by conducting trial-and-error experiments. Frank showed them how to use mathematics to select the experiments which would be most effective. He also fixed up Edison's system for distributing electricity from a central station.

The year after that – yup, he knocked those achievements off in his first year on the job – he decided he wanted to run his own company, so he resigned and set up Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company.

At the time, electric railways weren't all that profitable an item. The electric streetcar had already been invented, but could only run on single lines – that is, cars couldn't transfer from one line to another. But Frank apparently was confident in his ability to make something out of electric railways, which he did.

But first – he invented the first commercially practical electric motor, which was heavily promoted by Edison, and invented a system for returning electricity from electrical equipment to their main supply systems. Both of these developments are handy if you're interested in making money off electric railways, of course.

In 1888 Frank built the first streetcar network in Richmond, Virginia. People came, people saw, and people wanted to build their own. Electric railways meant people could get to work faster, which meant cities could be bigger, which meant businesses could be concentrated together more effectively. By the end of 1889 one hundred and ten cities around the world had completed or begun Frank-style streetcar systems.

In 1890 Edison, who built most of Frank's equipment, bought Frank out. Frank, you see, was now interested in elevators. He realized that increasing the capacity of elevators would increase the earnings of tall buildings. So he and Charles R. Pratt improved the electric elevator. They invented the automatic elevator, for example. The Sprague-Pratt Electric Elevator ran faster with bigger loads than the hydraulic elevators which were then the standard, so people started queuing up for them, too. Frank then sold his company to Otis Elevator.

For his next trick, Frank turned his attention back to electric railways, devising a system by which electric railway cars could be hooked up in a train and controlled simultaneously by a single motorman in the lead car. People wanted them, too. Trains without locomotives produce more revenue per unit of rolling stock, and run faster and accelerate quicker than trains with locomotives. Frank had invented the subway train.

So, before turning forty Frank had revolutionized urban life. Buildings could be built taller and produce more revenue, and the increased number of workers needed for business districts full of tall buildings could be accommodated in the larger cities which his streetcar and commuter train systems allowed people to build. Along with other pioneers of electrification, Frank invented modern life.

And Frank didn't stop, continuing to improve electric traction, both horizontal and vertical, for the rest of his life. And you'd probably never heard of him until you started reading this article.

Why is Frank an obscure figure today? An important reason is probably his penchant for selling his companies and inventions to other people. Those companies had no reason to promote the achievements of Frank J. Sprague. On the other hand, many of the other giants of the electricity business of Frank's day didn't sell their businesses, and they're no better known today than Frank. What people today think when they see SIEMENS on the side of a factory is probably better left unconsidered.

In the end, though, the reason is simply that we're incurious drones. We're trained by incurious drones to be incurious drones. And really, curiosity is a threat to the stability of society. If everybody was always asking questions about everything, Iraq would hardly ever get invaded and gun registries would never get set up. It's much better for people to abjure curiosity in favour of cheap thrills. Frank's contemporary Lizzie Borden is far better known today than he is, and according to her trial she never did anything. Frank's contemporaries Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth are better known today than he, because they excited people. They electrified crowds in ball parks, and Frank electrified society. We know what we'd rather watch. And who we'd rather honour.
Frank who? © 2005, John FitzGerald