That’s me in the
photo, looking bleary and wearing a strap-on wineglass at the recent New York
Wine and Food Festival, which I attended thanks to Allen Salkin, meaning
that I cannot pretend to be fully objective when I urge you to pick up his
now-in-paperback volume From
Scratch (I bought two!) about the colorful, flavorful,
tumultuous history of the Food Network.
Of course, cuisine itself is pretty subjective. Even
professional wine critics can be duped into fawning over cheap wines if told
they’re super-fancy, apparently. A recent experiment involving organic food
experts showed they can be duped with comparable ease into praises pieces of
McDonald’s food. The power of suggestion
permeates all things, though snooty rich tastemakers and frowny-faced
government inspectors, for example, will not admit it.
Even the cold, hard facts of life aren’t so clear cut once
political judgments (inevitably) color their assessment.
•Is ebola
overblown or, since NYC just today reportedly got its own ebola patient, should
I view these as the final good days before civilization fell apart?
•Was the cop who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson the first cop of many there to use excessive force or, as
the official police report and autopsy now suggest, a man reacting reasonably
to a cigar-stealing, shopkeeper-assaulting, cop-car-rushing, drug-crazed,
six-foot criminal powerhouse (as
seven black eyewitnesses, reportedly terrified of being publicly identified and
vengefully attacked by pro-Brown mobs, apparently say)?
(And while we’re at it, while believing everything cops say
is far from wise, it was shameful the way columnists even at some prominent
publications began eulogizing Michael Brown as a peace-loving, harmless youth
even with evidence to the contrary. And I say this as someone who wants to
abolish the Department of Homeland Security and end the drug war, not some
fascist who wants the streets to run with blood. More than one columnist
pointed as vindication of Brown to the fact that the store he appeared to have
robbed never pressed charges -- though given that the “protesters” burned down
at least one other convenience store that they thought was the one Brown
targeted, I’m not surprised the real store opted to stay out of the whole
conflict. This week, other
“protesters” in Ferguson, responding to the police report, raided Walgreens,
the true locus of evil, apparently.)
•Shouldn’t it be harder to jump over the White House fence than the latest such incident, this week,
suggests it is? Or should we be delighted government is so inept it can’t even
protect itself, let alone us?
•Does Keene, NH
really need Homeland-subsidized military-style vehicles to cope with its
notoriously radical libertarian population, as was once suggested by police
there, or, as this week’s ruckus there suggests, just to cope with its pumpkin festival
crowds? (Seriously, though, as is so frequently the case, it sounds like cops
tried to hem people in, turning what could have been a loose agglomeration of
individuals departing the area into a dense impromptu phalanx of anti-cop
rioters. Do the authorities really not see that that self-fulfilling dynamic
happens time and again?)
The world of political ideology, by contrast, ought, you’d
think, to be neat and tidy and idealized -- the realm of philosophers -- but even
there, it’s unclear what constitutes evidence and proof and what our litmus
tests should be. And (as I often find myself thinking) it’s not even close to
clear what the “default” or “neutral” position should be when one is uncertain
about politics or philosophy. Democracy? Anarchy? Status quo? Tradition?
That ambiguity-about-ambiguity is the topic of the
twenty-fifth-anniversary issue (and many before it) of the political philosophy
journal Critical Review (Vol. 26, No. 1-2). In particular, the
academics contributing to the issue wrestle with whether there are even any
obvious implications from public ignorance for democracy. Is the “correct”
result in a democracy whatever the public comes up with? What an informed
public comes up with? What the most expert members of the public come up with?
Do we even acknowledge that each of these groups can make disastrous mistakes,
or will we pretend whatever the process produces is vindicated by the process?
And how do the kinds of errors different segments of the populace make differ
(petty grudges among the masses, perhaps, and overblown schemes among the
brainy experts?)?
Faced with so much uncertainty, I should really take that
long-overdue break from the Net and curl up in a ball for a few months, wracked
with doubt (or at least squirreled away doing some ghostwriting). But before
that: a look back at what I think may have been learned since this blog was
launched, and a few entries with video and music links, coming up.
No comments:
Post a Comment