I've been even more delinquent since my last post, I know. I have an excuse, however: getting both a book and a magazine to press.  This is time-consuming stuff; don't try it at home. 

A lot has happened since March 12, a fair bit of it strange.  The strangest thing of all, seems to me, is the decision of the Obama Administration to turn all bubbly, warm and fuzzy about the economy. The buzz this past weekend and into Monday, or the spin rather, was that things are looking up.  Recovery in `09 even, not just 2010, they're now saying.  I am skeptical. But I think I understand the reason for this.  These guys understand herd instinct. They understand the psychology of fear. So there're trying to use the media, which has been harmful to the economy for a year, to turn the spin around.  I doubt this will work, and it amounts to a huge political wager. Indeed, I think it is likely to turn out a calamitous wager come the mid-term elections. We'll see. 

I promised last time to comment on education and science. Let me do that now, very briefly.

When the President reversed Bush Administration  policy on stem cells last week, he didn't literally do much.  This was always mainly a symbolic issue, since the ban only applied to U.S. government funding, and that was never the major source of funding.  But it was a good thing to do all the same; the "Catholic/Evangelical" opposition to stem cell research is not frivolous, but on balance it is mistaken. So good.

The President's broader remarks about science regaining its "rightful place", however--a line from the Inaugural you will remember--were both mistaken and, intellectually speaking, quite frivolous.  Does the President really think that decisions scientists make about the life sciences are value free?  Yuval Levin said it all in a Washington Post column the next day, in which he wisely quoted an abominable speech John Kennedy made in 1962 in Ann Arbor, the one in which he said that all the moral questions were answered, and that all that was left to do was of a technical nature. In the Skinnerian climate of that time, one can perhaps forgive Kennedy's naivete. But to say such things now?!  Has Obama never read a book on the sociology of science?  Did he miss that class in high school?  Sheesh. The idea that only right-wing religious types politicize science is about the the most outrageous thing, again, intellectually speaking, that Obama has ever said (at least that I know of). Someone should clue him in before he embarrasses himself further.  This is my way of doing what George W. Bush says -- that we should all help the President. (Bush is already a better ex-President than he was a President.)

As to education, well, the headlines last week said the NEA might get mad at Obama for proposing merit pay for excellent teachers. Anything that pisses off the NEA, the most hidebound pseudo-liberal union in town, is OK by me. But all this misses the point, and is so small bore as to bring one to tears. 

Do these guys have any real ideas?  They propose stringing up nicer wires for the electrical/communications grid, instead of burying the lines like anyone with a brain would do. And so in education, the President talks about merit pay for good teachers and a longer school year. Folks, this is embarrassing, too. How does anyone know who is really a good teacher?  Can a really good teacher be isolated from the overall quality of a school or from the socio-economic echelon sending its children there?  All else equal, a teacher is going to be successful if the school is well-funded, well-managed, and if the kids coming to it are from a hearth culture that cares about and encourages high achievement in education. The teacher who will be best for kids at West Philly high is not the same teacher who will be best for kids in Scarsdale, where the median family income is ten-times higher and the schools many times better funded, and where the kids' parents have been reading to them and having coherent conversations with them since they were 2. So by what universally applicable criteria does one reward a very good teacher?  And who chooses--parents, administrators, other teachers, the union!?  All this is fraught with potential abuse and misuse. It's a stupid idea, and not just because the NEA doesn't like it -- because it dislikes it for all the wrong reasons.

And it's not how long kids are in school that matters, it's what they do when they're there. Like, duh.  Our schools for the most part still resemble the 19th century model upon which they were built. Here's just one example out of about 50 I can name. 

Why do we teach math separate from natural science?  This is dumb. Math and science, at least once kids get past about 3rd grade, should always be team-taught.  The science should come first -- the concepts explained and illustrated. Then, once basics are done with, the math that allows the science to be used should be taught. Then the next science unit, and then the math that goes with it, and so on up to advanced physics and the calculus you need to do it. This is how math developed anyway, for the most part--cf Leibnitz and Newton. It's the natural sequence. Very few students can understand math in its rarified form because they just don't care about it, they don't see what it's good for. There are some students who happen to be fascinated with abstract logic, because that is what pure math is, but they are a tiny minority. If math is taught as a practical joined-at-the-hip adjunct to science, which is inherently fascinating and obviously purposeful, we'll end up with students who're better at both math and science. That would be a good thing.

This is so obvious once you think about it that you could just shit for how dense we've been. Just think of how many millions of hours of student time we've wasted trying to get kids to see what math is for. What's stopping us from restructuring the science/math curricula to make better sense? Well, NEA for one......

And finally for today, I will mainly resist the urge to comment on AIG and Sect. Geithner and so on....except to say the following.  I once travelled to Russia and back with former AIG chairman Hank (Maurice) Greenberg.  I did not like him. Now that I know what AIG was really up to all those years, I sort of see why my instincts acted as they did. I can't say that old Hank ought to be in jail, like another old magazine benefactor of mine, Conrad Black. (I know him, too, yes.) I don't know that Hank technically broke any laws, anymore than the assholes who directed and received these AIG bonuses with TARP money actually broke any laws. But legalities aside, I can't help how I feel about it, and hey, that's right, you don't have to be a card-carrying Democrat right now to be plenty pissed off at these plutocrats. 

Just one caveat: this is nothing new. Rich people have been using jerkwads in Congress to tilt the playing field in their favor since before Mark Twain was born. From time to time we get rid of them: think Andrew Jackson, think W. J. Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt (and William Allen White) and, well, it's time again, isn't it?  Norm Ornstein and a buddy did a book not too long ago called The Broken Branch, in which they tried to show what's wrong with Congress. It's a good book, but it doesn't tell the whole sordid story. It all goes back to money, to the TV ad syndrome and to the basic sleaze associated with lobbying. As I have said before, unless the Obama Administration changes the transactional culture of this town and gets rid of the human filth that keeps it going, he's not only not going to accomplish anything lasting, he is going to blow the opportunity of a lifetime.