From the Archives: James Robinson discusses 'why nations fail' at George Mason University

James Robinson discusses 'why nations fail' at George Mason University
May 4, 2013 7:37 PM MST

In his first speaking engagement at George Mason University on the evening of May 2, Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson paid a compliment to the school by noting its “distinct intellectual atmosphere.”

Robinson appeared at the Arlington campus of GMU at the invitation of the Mercatus Center to discuss his recent book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, which he co-wrote with MIT's Daron Acemoglu.

In his lecture, Robinson explained how his and Acemoglu's empirical research had led to a predictive theory about how nations develop economically and politically. All countries, he said, can be plotted on a matrix using the categories “inclusive” (politics and economics) and “extractive” (politics and economics).

Success or failure for nations depends on whether they have inclusive or extractive institutions, Robinson said, and these institutions have their origins deep in history – although circumstances can change through the adoption and adaptations of new, better institutions.

England and Virginia

As an example of this kind of change, Robinson noted that 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, England was an economic backwater on the edge of Europe. Elizabeth I's defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was unexpected and unpredictable, yet by 1788, Great Britain was Europe's most formidable economic power and the world's leading colonizer. This was the result of institutional change in law and society.

After signing books for fans and admirers, Robinson clarified and expanded some of his remarks in an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

He explained that although the Spanish and English colonies in the Americas both began with the same model, the English experience at Jamestown, Virginia, set North America down a more economically prosperous path than the colonies in South America trod.

The circumstances in Virginia and, for instance, Buenos Aires, “were very different,” Robinson said.

“Because there were very few indigenous people [who were] organized in a very different way in Virginia as compared to, say, the central valley of Mexico, a very different type of society emerged.” This society was “based on creating incentives and opportunities for European [settlers] rather than exploiting indigenous people,” which was the case in Latin America.

Mysterious development?

Asked whether there is a difference in the questions of “why nations fail” and “why nations succeed,” Robinson replied that “they're two sides of the same coin.”

The reason his book has the title it does is that he and his co-author “don't think of economic development as being mysterious.”

Instead, he said, “to us, the puzzling thing is, why on earth don't poor countries that ought to be able to generate huge amounts of wealth and improve the living standards of their people” do so by investing in education, adopting technologies, and securing property rights?

“Why don't they do it?,” he repeated. “We've always found failure more puzzling. Why is it people don't take advantages of these huge opportunities?” This question is particularly salient when countries have abundant mineral resources, climates and soils conducive to agriculture, and convenient locations for trade and industry -- yet still fail to develop economically.

Cultural predictors

Many commentators on economic development – Thomas Sowell, for instance – focus on cultural values as the basis for success or failure. Robinson and Acemoglu take a different approach by emphasizing institutions.

Their approach, Robinson said, came about “mostly because of the empirical work we've done, all the scientific research. We've always found measures of institutions to have much more predictive power than different measures of culture.”

He conceded that “there's a problem of language here. When I talk about institutions, I don't just mean things written down, like the U.S. Constitution.”

He gave the example of the limit of two presidential terms, which was established as “a social norm that lasted for 150 years” by George Washington, before Franklin Roosevelt parted with the tradition and, eventually, the Constitution was amended to make the tradition statutory.

Nobel laureate economist Douglass North, he pointed out, “talks about informal institutions, social norms, and I think that's enormously important. It's not just about written-down laws. Social norms and informal institutions are quite similar to what a lot of people talk about when they talk about culture.”

When Robinson and Acemoglu talk about culture, however, “it's not about values or normative beliefs or normative principles or religious principles. We don't find that to be important; we don't think it's important” in terms of predictive value for economic success or failure.

Why Nations Fail is published in hardback by Crown Business and in paperback by Profile Books Ltd.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on May 4, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Trends of the New Economy

The last major economic crisis to have a discernible effect on culture as well as politics was probably the one that started in the mid-1970s and reached its nadir during the Carter Administration. It is memorable for such fads as Pet Rocks (1975), leisure suits (c. 1976-77), and the "preppy look" as satirized (and, ironically, solidified) by Lisa Birnbach's illustrated guide, The Official Preppy Handbook (1980).

While the brief recession of 1991-92 might have stimulated memorable cultural trends, they don't pop easily to mind. What emerged in the '70s, however, has been embedded in popular culture through That '70s Show (the early years) and last summer's guilty pleasure, Swingtown.

Whether the current economic contraction leads to similar trends that will one day be recalled fondly (or with cries of "What were we thinking?") remains to be seen. But a few mini-trends have emerged that are worth noting.

The Economist, for instance, has discovered a spike in sales of books by Ayn Rand, the Objectivist philosopher/novelist whose major works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, generally have continuously steady sales even though the author died in 1982.

According to the British weekly:

Reviled in some circles and mocked in others, Rand’s 1957 novel of embattled capitalism is a favourite of libertarians and college students. Lately, though, its appeal has been growing. According to data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks bestseller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book’s 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on February 21st, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On January 13th the book’s ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama’s popular tome, “The Audacity of Hope”.

Tellingly, the spikes in the novel’s sales coincide with the news (see chart). The first jump, in September 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by central banks, and the Bank of England’s bail-out of Northern Rock, a troubled mortgage lender. The October 2007 rise happened two days after the Bush Administration announced an initiative to coax banks to assist subprime borrowers. A year later, sales of the book rose after America’s Treasury said that it would use a big chunk of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to buy stakes in nine large banks. Debate over Mr Obama’s stimulus plan in January gave the book another lift. And sales leapt once again when the stimulus plan passed and Mr Obama announced a new mortgage-modification plan.

There is a chart accompanying The Economist's article that dramatically illustrates the ups (and downs, but mostly ups) of sales of Atlas Shrugged.

At CPAC last weekend, a number of speakers posed the question, "Has Atlas shrugged?" with an implied affirmative answer. The Economist notes the existence of a Facebook group with the name, "Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life," one of 111 groups dedicated to loving (or hating) the Ayn Rand novel. The group's 828 members are spread across the globe, but I note a disproportionate number from Scandinavia.

While some people are asking, "Who is John Galt?," others may be more curious about what John Galt is eating these days. The New York Times has a partial reply:

The cube steak is suddenly one of the hottest cuts of beef in the country, according to figures from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The amount of cube steak sold during the last quarter of 2008 was up by almost 10 percent over the same period a year earlier. The overall amount of beef sold went up only 3 percent.

It doesn’t take a wizard to figure out that the economy’s swan dive has much to do with the cube steak’s resurgence. But even before kitchen budgets became tight, the cube steak had its fan base.

No doubt some entrepreneurial cookbook writer (or publisher) is already preparing new editions of recipes our parents, grandparents (or, in terms of the Facebook generation, great-grandparents) remember from the Great Depression and World War II. There's nothing like an economic downturn to create business opportunities.

Be sure to visit my CafePress store for gifts and novelty items!
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'Solzhenitsyn and American Democracy'

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the towering literary figure who gave us the phrase "Gulag Archipelago" and whose life spanned from Lenin to Putin, died on Sunday at the age of 89.

Solzhenitsyn cut an imposing figure. With his curled beard and high forehead, he resembled a cross between a Biblical patriarch and a 19th-century Mormon pioneer.

While he led a brave life, unbowed by the pressures of totalitarianism, he was, apparently, meanspirited personally and loathe to keep friendships alive and active. If there is a photograph of him smiling, I have not seen it -- unless it was taken upon his return to Russia in 1994 after 20 years in exile in decadent Vermont.

In 1978, Solzhenitsyn delivered a commencement speech at Harvard University that was highly critical of Western culture. He condemned freedom and democracy and accused the West of soullessness.

As the New York Times' obituary described him in this context:

His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.

The Washington Post's one-time Moscow correspondent, Robert Kaiser, adds:

Living in this country confirmed Solzhenitsyn's worst fears about the West. He deplored the American way of life, and was not reluctant to say so. At Harvard in 1978, he gave a remarkable speech to the graduating seniors with a clear warning that Western civilization was in grave jeopardy. "The fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future," he said. "It has already started. . . . A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger." He criticized the reliance on law; he criticized the idea of freedom: "Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space" by Western civilization, he said.

In his tirade against Western culture, Solzhenitsyn lamented:

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

He also said in this speech (titled "A World Split Apart"):

... the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

Harvard graduates, then as now, no doubt listened to Solzhenitsyn's harsh judgment on American society and Western values and nodded their heads in silent agreement. In 1978, remember, Americans were in the midst of a "malaise" that many identified as having its roots in the hypermaterialism of the "Me Decade." (That, and the high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, and gasoline shortages exacerbated by misguided Carter administration policies.) Others, however, were not so sanguine and suggested that Solzhenitsyn, a virtual recluse, was personally clueless about America and the West.

Two years after the Harvard speech, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I was working at the time as a Georgetown undergraduate, published a collection of essays called Solzhenitsyn at Harvard. It included some of the editorials and op-eds that had been published in reaction to Solzhenitsyn's address shortly after he delivered it, plus six specially-commissioned essays.

On September 16, 1980, the book was launched at a dinner in Washington with two speakers commenting on it: newspaper columnist George F. Will and social philosopher Michael Novak. Their speeches were later collected in a slim pamphlet called Solzhenitsyn and American Democracy. (The pamphlet seems to be no longer in print, while the larger volume is still, in theory, available through Amazon.com.)

In his remarks, Novak -- who contributed one of the original essays to the larger volume -- began by noting:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's commencement address at Harvard might be viewed as a contemporary updating of Pope Pius IX's famous critique of modernity, "The Syllabus of Errors." Solzhenitsyn, like Pius IX, is adept at pointing out the errors, onesidedness, and blind spots in many of the things that we, in a liberal, democratic society, hold most dear. Like Pius IX, he holds up in contrast some of the models of Christian civilization from the past -- their ideals rather than their practices.

Novak suggested that, for all his emphasis on religion and spirituality, Solzhenitsyn failed to see the link between those and liberal democratic values. He continued:

The great novelist, however, in concentrating so singlemindedly on soul, sometimes overlooks its necessary political, economic, and social artifacts. Human soul does not live alone. It is embodied. It is embodied in social, political, and economic systems as well as in its own human skin, tissues, sinews, and organs of feeling and sensibility.

Solzhenitsyn often seems to wish to reject modernity. "Western ideas" -- above all, democracy and all its works and pomps. He sometimes seems to desire a world of soul alone, leaders infused with virtue, peoples astonishingly and simply committed to the evangelical laws of peace, justice, order, and charity. If this were a world of angels, Solzhenitsyn's vision would create a City of Light. Its rulers would be saints, its people willing followers, its constitution the very laws of God. The civilization he envisages would be a heavenly city. The state would wither away. There would be a kind of benevolent dictatorship of, not the proletariat, but the gentle Christian community.

Upon reading that last paragraph, it should come as no surprise that Novak sees a paradox in Solzhenitsyn's thought:

It is stunning, after all, to see how closely the dream of Solzhenitsyn mirrors the dream of his archenemy, Karl Marx, how he has turned Communism inside out as a vision of effortless Christian civilization, populated not by sinners but by the virtuous, organized not by trial and error, checks and balances, separation of powers, and the differentiation of systems (political system, economic system, moral-cultural system, each relatively independent of the other), but by simple righteousness. He guides us to a heavenly city, before we have learned to live in the sinful climes of earth, protecting ourselves against its inevitable tyrannies.

(It may be worth noting that Novak's words in the preceding few sentences foreshadow the central theme of his then-yet-to-be-published book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.)

The utopian vision suggested by Novak's interpretation of Solzhenitsyn's thought has another unintended paradox, one often unrecognized by Rockford Institute-type social conservatives who are wary of individual liberty and free enterprise. Novak goes on to say:

Solzhenitsyn does us honor, though he may not think so, by being so affronted by the awful cheapness, vulgarity, and open sinfulness of our way of life. Any system open to human liberty as it actually is must necessarily abound in visible signs of sinfulness. Not even a coercive regime can repress the sinfulness of the human heart. No more can democracy be sinless than can Communism (committed, as Solzhenitsyn sees it, to systemic lies, immorality, and lust for power) drive out all virtue.

One sentence there bears repeating: "Any system open to human liberty as it actually is must necessarily abound in visible signs of sinfulness." That is a profound insight, related to the fundamental truth that virtue must be freely chosen, else it is not virtue.

As Novak approached his conclusion, he proved to be remarkably prescient. Remember, this speech was delivered in September 1980. Ronald Reagan had not yet been elected president, and there was no certainty that he would be. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other "students" still held American diplomats hostage in Iran. Leonid Brezhnev would be General Secretary of the CPSU for another two years, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire lay a decade in the future. The Cold War had every indication of being a perpetual condition. So what does Novak say?

Yet with Solzhenitsyn's basic message we stand in agreement. The world is, sadly, split apart. World War III did begin in 1945, and the "correlation of forces" is less in our favor now than then, less so than at any time in the history of this republic. We are at an hour of maximum peril.

Yet so, also, is our foe. A system based on lies cannot endure. The world cannot survive half slave and half free. The reckoning rumbles in Poland. Events are picking up speed. The great chapter of our age is drawing toward its climax.

Whether Novak was aiming for dramatic effect or was somehow clairvoyant is up to him to reveal; few commentators in 1980 would have suggested an "approaching climax" to the Cold War except in apocalyptic terms, predicting nuclear war rather than an outcome favorable to liberty and democracy. (To be sure, Novak's prediction is ambiguously shaded. Perhaps it can only be read as optimistic in retrospect.)

For his own part, George Will focused less on the spiritual notions than the practical political ones suggested by Solzhenitsyn's critique of the West. He drew on American history, with a focus on James Madison's theory of faction. Will spoke mostly without notes, except for a long excerpt from Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, and the published version of his speech is based on a transcript from the recording.

Will said:

It is essential to the understanding of America to realize that it was founded by men who sought explicitly to tame and submerge passion, to drain it into commercial undertakings and away from the ideological and religious and political divisions that had turned the Old World into a boiling pot and that could ruin a melting pot. James Madison's great breakthrough in the understanding of democracy was the realization that all previous political thinkers had been wrong in one critical particular. All previous political thinkers had said that if -- and it was an enormous hypothesis -- if democracy were possible at all, it would be possible only in a small, face-to-face society, something like Pericles' Athens or Rousseau's Geneva; in such a society, the people, knowing one another and enjoying a relationship of neighborliness, would not be riven by factions, which were assumed to be the enemy and ultimate destroyer of democracy.

Madison's breakthrough was to turn that idea on its head. He began with a progression like this: The problem of any political system is the prevention of tyranny; they tyranny to which democracy is prey is the tyranny of the majority; the way to prevent that is to avoid having a majority, to have only shifting coalitions of minorities that can never become a stable and oppressive majority. Therefore faction is to be celebrated, and the United States is to succeed through a saving multiplicity of factions, made possible by a complex economic system and a continental expanse.

Continuing, this widely-syndicated newspaper columnist went on to explain:

To find American political thought summarized in two short newspaper columns, read two of the Federalist papers: Number Ten, where Madison celebrates factions, and Number Fifty-one, where he says, "You will see throughout our system the process of supplying by opposite and rival interests the defect of better motives." Ours is the first nation founded on the premise that it could get along without anyone having good motives, without anyone being public-spirited; that out of the cheerful maelstrom of factions would emerge something that could be baptized, in a magnificent a priori swoop, "the public interest."

But what of Solzhenitsyn, the reason for this speech in the first place? Will argues that Solzhenitsyn

says that statecraft cannot just be a matter of social control; it must be, to some extent, soulcraft.

(I have to wonder if this was the first time that George Will used the formulation "statecraft as soulcraft," later the title of his 1983 collection of essays.)

Solzhenitsyn, Will says,

is understandably startled by the raucousness of American life. He's not the only one, and it's not just American life. George Orwell made the point, not long before he died, that "all popular entertainments have one thing in common: they seem to aim at the numbing of consciousness." (He said this before recreational drugs, and he never saw American television.)

Recreational drugs, I would note, have been with us since man was still a hunter-gatherer. But I might add that Orwell never saw Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, either -- nor, I suppose, did Solzhenitsyn. Back to George Will:

Solzhenitsyn understands that there is something profoundly disturbing about the sensory blitzkrieg that is part of our social life. He understands the irony of an age in which self-expression is the ultimate -- and some would say the only -- value, yet all the themes of modern literature seem to converge on the fragility of a sense of self.

After quoting historian John Lukacs, who had suggested in his 1978 book 1945: Year Zero that Solzhenitsyn would turn out to be the pivotal figure in the conflict between East and West and (perhaps -- remember, this was 1980) in the collapse of the Communist East, Will concluded by saying:

For two centuries the human race has been assailed by the misconstructions first of physics, then biology, then psychology, more recently sociology, and today biochemistry, all telling us in different ways that man is not free, that he is a creature of vast impersonal forces, and that individuals do not make a difference. Solzhenitsyn's life says, "Not true."

With the perspective of nearly 30 years, we can add a few more individual lives that say "Not true": Lech Wałesa, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, and others. None of them singly but all of them interrelatedly through their individual efforts made the difference between liberty and serfdom for millions of human beings.

For all his faults, and for all his shortsightedness with regard to Western values and achievements, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was very much an individual who made a difference that mattered -- even to those he disdained.

Support Harry's Place: A Blogburst

(I am usually, and appropriately, averse to pasting the words of others in a blog post of my own. But this case is exceptional. As you will see by reading through to the end of this posting, the text below is being copied and pasted onto blogs throughout the world, as a movement against intimidation against bloggers in general and one blogger in particular. Please feel free to do, as I have, and copy this article for use in your own blog. I first saw this on Combs Spouts Off and took the text from NeoConstant. -- Rick Sincere)

Harry’s Place, a UK blog dedicated to promoting the ideals of freedom and democracy, is being sued by Mohammed Sawalha, the President of the British Muslim Initiative, which has been linked to Hamas and the Islamic Brotherhood, both terrorist organizations. The blog reports that Mr. Sawalha, according to the BBC…

“master minded much of Hamas’ political and military strategy” and in London “is alleged to have directed funds, both for Hamas’ armed wing, and for spreading its missionary dawah”.

In their revelation of the impending lawsuit against them leveled by Mohammed Sawalha, they write:

Mr Sawalha claims that we have “chosen a malevolent interpretation of a meaningless word”. In fact, we did no more than translate a phrase which appeared in an Al Jazeera report of Mr Sawalha’s speech. When Al Jazeera changed that phrase from “Evil Jew” to “Jewish Lobby”, we reported that fact, along with the statement that it had been a typographical error.

Mr Sawalha has been the prime mover in a number of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood associated projects. He is President of the British Muslim Initiative. He is the past President of the Muslim Association of Britain. He was the founder of IslamExpo, and is registered as the holder of the IslamExpo domain name. He is also a trustee of the Finsbury Park Mosque….

…Mr Sawalha says that the attribution of the phrase “Evil Jew” to him implies that he is “anti-semitic and hateful”. Notably, he does not take issue with our reporting of the revelation, made in a Panorama documentary in 2006, that he is a senior activist in the clerical fascist terrorist organisation, Hamas.

It looks like Harry’s Place is going up against some pretty top-notch lawyers on this one, and they’ve got guts, but as the post goes on to say:

If Mr Sawalha persists in attempting to silence us with this desperate legal suit, we will need your help.

We won’t be able to stand up to them alone.

This is why we’ve started this blogburst, to get the word out that we won’t let members of Hamas or any radical terrorist group censor us or any of our fellow bloggers.

If you’d like to add your site to the blogroll, simply email us at admin@neoconstant.com, and include your site’s URL.

Then copy and paste this entry into one of your posts. Future posts will be emailed to you. Thanks, and don’t forget to head over to Harry’s Place to show your support of their freedom of speech!

WE SUPPORT HARRY'S PLACE!

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Lower East Side Story

In an article published earlier this week, the Jewish Daily Forward notes the 50th anniversary of the opening of West Side Story on Broadway by pointing out that the four co-creators -- Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim -- all had something special in common. (That's right, they're all Jewish.)

The key paragraph is here:

What might the cultural historian make of the ethnic homogeneity of the creative team behind “West Side Story”? Is its achievement not only central to the evolution of a supremely American genre but also an illuminating artifact of Jewish values? Did Robbins, Bernstein, Sondheim and Laurents happen to have in common not only the experience of circumcision but also the sort of attitudes that are a distinctive — or at least authentic — expression of one minority group in particular?

Others of us might approach that question differently -- not by reference to the religious or ethnic backgrounds of the four, but to the fact that all four are (or were) gay.

The Forward article never mentions this salient fact. How can the reporter miss it, when it can be found so readily in the lyrics of "I Feel Pretty"?

Gay-rights pioneer Frank Kameny (whose lifetime of service was recently accorded the rare honor of having some memorabilia, which he created and preserved, put on display in the Smithsonian) comments on the Forward's web site:

While Stephen Whitfield writes at length and cogently about the implications of the fact that Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim, who created West Side Story, were all Jewish, he ignores the surely equally relevant fact (perhaps more relevant to the opus itself) that all four were gay.

An article exploring and enlarging upon the implications of that, in the cultural milieu of the 1950s, and its impact upon the Story -- or perhaps the interaction of both: that they were Jewish AND gay -- might be well worth reading.

While popular culture might joke about the contributions of gays (and Jews) to the Broadway stage -- think Family Guy or Monty Python's Spamalot -- there are others who would rather have the role played by gay men (in particular, but lesbians have had a large role to play as well) forgotten. A dozen years ago, the literary and film critic Bruce Bawer wrote in The Advocate:

...there's no part of the cultural landscape without a gay element. Even if gays constitute as much as fifteen percent of the population, the gay contribution to Western art, architecture, music, and literature far exceeds what it should be statistically. If you accept the right-wing claim that only one in a hundred people is gay, then the gay contribution is truly extraordinary. Think about it: A group comprising one percent of the population producing Erasmus, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Marlowe, Bacon, Hölderlin, Hans Christian Andersen, Tchaikovsky, Proust ... the list goes on and on to include three of the four major nineteenth-century American novelists, one (perhaps both) of the two great nineteenth-century American poets, and two of the three most noted mid-twentieth-century American dramatists.

In this essay, which was reprinted in the 1996 anthology Beyond Queer, Bawer continues:

The immensity of the debt that Western civilization owes to gay and lesbian genius is pretty ironic, given that homosexuality is often described as a threat to Western civilization by those strangest of allies, the culturally philistine religious right and neo-conservative intellectuals. Especially ironic is the case of Allan Bloom the late author of The Closing of the American Mind. That 1987 best-seller, which defended the traditional literary canon against multiculturalism, became the neocon bible, a key text in the so-called culture wars. As those wars wore on the neocons began to mimic the rhetoric of the religious right, bizarrely linking the decline of American art, culture, and higher education to a deterioration of "family values," which in turn was blamed mostly on increasing acceptance of gays. Gays, then, were Western civilization's worst enemies — and Bloom its most ardent defender.

Yet what few readers knew was the Bloom (who died in 1992) was gay. His allies knew but that didn't keep them from bashing gays in print. Years ago, at a social occasion, a leading neocon was overheard saying to an associate, "Isn't it a shame about Allan Bloom?" He meant, of course, "Isn't it a shame that he's gay?" In fact the real shame was that neocons saw no moral difficulty in celebrating Bloom while vilifying gays generally — and that Bloom, for his part, never publicly confronted them with the fact that Western civilization, far from being threatened by homosexuality, is to a staggeringly disproportionate degree the creation of gay men and women.

"Do you want to protect your children from gay influence?" I imagine him writing. "Very well. Destroy the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, silence Messiah and Swan Lake, and burn Moby Dick and The Portrait of a Lady. Gay culture is all around you — and it belongs to everybody."

The Forward article reminds me of the old joke about how various newspapers would report the impending end of the world: The Washington Post headline reads, "World to End Tomorrow; Minorities, Women Hit Hardest"; the Wall Street Journal says, "World to End Tomorrow; Markets Close Early"; the Weekly World News reports, "World to End Tomorrow; Lizard-like Space Aliens to Blame"; the New York Post says, "World to End; Paris, LiLo React on Page Six"; etc.

That is to say, we all have our parochial way of looking at things, but that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge other facts that have relevance for the bigger picture.

That Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim are both gay and Jewish has meaning for the creative process, for the history of the Broadway musical, and for American popular culture in general.

A Special Anniversary

Were they still with us, today would be my parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Reproduced below (in two sections, scanned from a tabloid page) is the nicely-detailed wedding announcement that appeared in the Brookfield News (in Brookfield, Wisconsin) on September 12, 1957, just short of three weeks after the ceremony.

Half a century ago, apparently, the bridegroom was an afterthought in a news story about a wedding, relegated to a short sentence at the end and unworthy of inclusion in the accompanying photograph. Things have changed; now Jay Leno regularly puts articles about weddings in his "Headlines" segments on The Tonight Show, and the bit simply wouldn't work if the bridegroom was not featured on an equal basis with the bride.

Click to embiggen, then read down through both JPEGs, returning to the top again for the full story.



A good number of members of the wedding party listed above were able to attend my sister's wedding three years ago in Las Vegas. That was quite a reunion!

Speaking of my sister, she has the official wedding photos from August 24, 1957, in her possession. But I was able to dig up a few snapshots taken by an unknown photographer.

Fortunately, she (I can tell by the handwriting that the Unknown Photog was female) wrote captions on the back of each photograph, which I transcribe below:

"Joanne with Jug Girouard in background, Camille in foreground - Maria way back, Miriam real close, and Theresa to the side"

"Dick & Joanne immediately after ceremony"

"Dick & Joanne
Have you ever seen Richard so happy?"

Judy Garland and Homosexual Identity

At the Green Valley Book Fair a few weeks ago, I picked up a darling coffee table book called When I Knew, edited by Robert Trachtenberg and illustrated by Tom Bachtell.

When I Knew is a compilation of memories from gay men and lesbians from all walks of life (though a disproportionate number of them, it seems, are somehow connected to the entertainment industry), with a specific reference to the identifiable moment of their discoveries of being gay. It's a quick read, with only a handful of entries longer than a page. Many of the authors are well-known as adults and their childhood memories are sweet, bittersweet, sometime campy, sometimes wry, and always illustrative of what it is like to grow up gay in a straight world.

My favorite entry -- perhaps because it emphasizes the value of words and how artifice affects one's reality -- comes from playwright Arthur Laurents, who writes on page 50 about growing up in the 1930s:

When I was twelve, I had sex with one of the kids on the block. We also went to the movies together and one day saw the picture called, Let Us Be Gay. Back then "gay" merely meant bright, lively, merry, but for some unfathomable reason, whenever one of us wanted sex, we used the code phrase "Let Us Be Gay." I think we may have pioneered the use of "gay" to mean homosexual sex. More meaningful than a Tony or Oscar, but not quite worthy of the Nobel.

Arthur Laurents -- librettist and neologist.

My reason for bringing up this two-year-old book now, however, lies in today's most remembered anniversary: On June 22, 1969, Judy Garland died in London. A few days later, shattered by her death and funeral, gay New Yorkers at the Stonewall Inn fought back against a police raid, sparking what would come to be known as the modern gay rights movement. (We should never forget, however, the pioneering efforts of those who came before Stonewall.)

The first entry in When I Knew is so brief, it borders on haiku. It comes from Andrew Freedman, now a marketing and public relations consultant:

1969
My father was watching the
evening news. The announcer
said that Judy Garland had died.
I fainted. I was nine.

This evening in dining rooms and bars, nightclubs and restaurants, in front of our TV sets or in the lobbies of theaters, let us raise a glass to toast the memory of Miss Judy Garland.

(P.S.: Doesn't the title of this blogpost sound like that of a paper delivered at an MLA convention?)


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So Totally Ich-du

For those who think that popular culture lacks depth, Elisa Albert posts these thoughts about the parallels between Legally Blonde's Elle Woods and Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

If ever there was an odd impetus to see a new Broadway musical, this is it.

Be sure to scroll through the comments to see the answer to Albert's challenge to her readers to produce a similar comparison between Baruch Spinoza and Canadian chanteuse Avril Lavigne. It's priceless.

Gay Stories with Odd Angles

Tomorrow's edition of The Forward features a report on the large number of gay men and lesbians who exhibit an interest in Yiddish culture, including especially klezmer music.

The author, New York attorney Kathleen Peratis, asks:

Never heard of the Queer Yiddishkeit movement? Until last summer, neither did I.

Then, an Israeli friend told me he had learned from his (straight) daughter, a doctoral student in women’s Yiddish literature at Berkeley, that a large proportion of her colleagues are gay. Really? Interviews over the next several months of past and present YIVO staff members, klezmer performers, Yiddish scholars and others confirmed it: Gay Jews have flocked to Yiddish and klezmer.

Peratis suggests some possible explanations for this connection:

The affinities between gay people and Yiddish, and especially bundist, culture are, when you think about it, obvious: both are staunchly secular, cosmopolitan, progressive and often marginalized. “Queer Yiddishkeit gives me permission to go back to the world of my grandparents without leaving myself behind,” juggler Sara Felder said.

“It’s about alienation from the Jewish religious establishment,” said Alisa Solomon, a former staff writer for The Village Voice. “There’s a kind of analogy people make with the marginalized status of Yiddish itself. It’s an outsider stance.”

She also writes that the association is not exactly recent, pointing to articles from the 1980s and 1990s that make a similar connection. But it goes back even farther, she says:

The presence of gay people and gay themes in Yiddish culture, however, is not new. Queer Yiddishists tell us, for example, that Yiddish cinema in the 1930s contained “encrypted messages” on homosexuality — think Molly Picon in her trouser role in “Yidl Mitn Fidl,” what Eve Sicular calls “cross-dressing in the service of family values.” She refers to the “gay subtext of Yiddish cinema during its heyday, from the 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, which reveals distinctly Jewish concerns of the time” such as “conflicted identity, passing, and same-sex attachments.”

Now I know why I spent Thanksgiving weekend last year reading Michael Wex's fascinating book, Born to Kvetch.

On another topic entirely, the March issue of Details magazine -- which appears on newsstands on February 27 -- reports that

America's most desirable managers all have one thing in common: homosexuality.

In the article, correspondent Danielle Sacks cites a recent academic study:

In The G Quotient: Why Gay Executives Are Excelling as Leaders . . . and What Every Manager Needs to Know, author and USC business-school professor Kirk Snyder argues that gay bosses embody a style of personalized attention that allows high-maintenance Gen Xers and Yers to maximize their performance. "Gay executives tend to look at how each individual brings unique abilities, and they see their job as figuring out how best to take advantage of those skills," he says.

In fact, during Snyder's five-year study of American executives, he stumbled on some startling findings: Gay male bosses produce 35 to 60 percent higher levels of employee engagement, satisfaction, and morale than straight bosses. This is no small achievement: According to human-resources consulting firm Towers Perrin, only a measly 14 percent of the global corporate workforce are fully engaged by their jobs. And the Saratoga Institute, a group that measures the effectiveness of HR departments, found that in a study of 20,000 workers who had quit their jobs, the primary motivator for jumping ship was their supervisors' behavior.

So what makes gay bosses different? It may have to do with the way they survived high school. "Gay people are constantly having to dodge and weave and assess how and where they're going as they grow up," says Snyder. "And that manifests itself as three huge skills: adaptability, intuitive communications, and creative problem-solving." In other words, your boss is cool with your leaving a little early one day a week to pick up your kid from school, or happy to offer a learning experience that helps you close a crucial deal.

What could all this mean? Perhaps it means that when you mutter under your breath something about your boss being a "first-rate c**ks**ker" (this is a workplace-friendly blog), you're really expressing your admiration and envy of him.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Visionary

About a year ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia.

O. Winston Link (his parents thought it cute to give him the initials “OWL”) was a trained engineer who went into the public relations business during the 1930s. A self-taught photographer, he experimented with light and shadow for his own amusement and also took photos for his PR projects and advertising campaigns.

In the mid-1950s, Link decided to photograph the dying years of the Norfolk and Western Railway in Virginia. At his own expense, and with no intention of exhibiting or selling his work, he devoted almost two full years of his life to setting up elaborate photographs of coal-fired train engines, watering stops, train depots, railway trestles, and other sites along the tracks of the Norfolk and Western. Oddly enough, this photographer supported his hobby by recording the sounds of the railroad and selling the records to train buffs around the country.

Link used his engineer’s training to create what is no less than sculpture of light and dark, of shadow and smoke. He created many of his photographs simply because he saw a challenge in getting them done. For him, photography was as much an intellectual as an aesthetic experience. He sought self-satisfaction and perfection in his work.

It was not until years after he completed his project that his photographs landed in a public exhibition. When a New York gallery put them on display, they elicited sensational reviews. People simply had not seen the kind of photographs that O. Winston Link created – largely because he found unique settings and went to great lengths to get the light and movement exactly right.

In the process of enjoying himself, Link created a new vision for photography, one that has echoes in contemporary works, such as the black-and-white cinematography in George Clooney’s 2005 film, Good Night, and Good Luck.

I was reminded of my trip to the O. Winston Link Museum (which is housed in an old railroad terminal in downtown Roanoke) when I came across a young artist in New York City who is also working in a new medium and expressing himself in pioneering experimentation.

Calling himself Skydin, he just turned 18 years old but already has a bachelor of fine arts degree from New Jersey City University. He has exhibited his work at the Jadite Gallery in New York City and at the VAB Gallery and Courtney Gallery in Jersey City, the Puffin Foundation in Teaneck, and the Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, New Jersey.

Skydin’s medium is computer generated imagery (CGI) – something most of us are familiar with in animated movies like Toy Story and Antz, as well as the epic battle sequences in the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies. A lot of CGI in daily life can be mundane and banal – it is simply the background that shows up on web sites and TV commercials, sort of a visual white noise in too many cases.

Skydin’s ambition is to make CGI into something greater: “I want to change how digital art is viewed,” he says. To him, “it is the new ‘painting.’”

“People have a misconception of CGI or digital art,” Skydin explains, because “they believe it’s inherently commercial. It isn’t, it’s a tool like any other, [but] it’s a non-physical tool.” Continuing to make his point, Skydin argues that “it’s the motive that defines what’s commercial. When I create digitally I’m doing it to sell a concept or image, not a product. A painting can be used to sell Coke,” he says, or it can be appreciated simply for what it is.

Noting that many consumers of art – which includes all of us, whether we realize it or not – have trouble accepting CGI as highbrow as well as middlebrow culture, Skydin offers that “the reason it’s misunderstood is the same reason photography was misunderstood: it’s a new medium, one step less physical than the previous, one step more technological. However, the artist is still the controller.”

Skydin aims to open the eyes of the 21st-century arts audience. “One problem with the viewing of art,” he explains, “is that many tend to equate quality with physical difficulty or physical labor. Even with digital art there is high degree of technical understanding and work that has to be undertaken. But even so, that’s not the sole identifier of strong work; concept and composition are very important and are actually inherently more focused elements in this quasi-physical medium, digital art.”

Something of a prodigy, Skydin got his start early in life. “When I was around 6,” he told me, “I was drawing more than other kids. It was a pretty big part of what I did during the day. But [as far as] realizing I had talent, that came later, when I was 11 or so. My parents were supportive, especially my Dad who taught me my first color rendering techniques with colored pencils.”

He experienced different environments growing up. “I grew up in many, many neighborhoods, [with] no stable memory of home,” he says, which may have influenced the slightly disoriented feel for some of his landscape and architectural renderings. Even his portraits – many of them self-portraits – have a certain dream-like quality, suggesting both alienation and eroticism.

These aspects of Skydin’s work, however, make them fascinating to observe. They are neither static nor mundane. They insist that the viewer think about them. When I first came across Skydin’s work on the Internet, I associated it in my mind with the challenging, photographic self-portraiture of Anthony Goicolea, who populates his group scenes with images of himself. Both Goicolea and Skydin possess ethereal, androgynous personae that leap from the screen (or wall) and become integrated with the immediate environment. Their faces haunt you from the moment you first see them.

Skydin is an exceptionally gifted and ambitious artist. He jokes that, through his art, “I’m going to make everyone think I’m an angel and when I have power I’m going to create an army of giant robot toys and take over the world.” That impishness permeates the gallery of works available for viewing on his web site. Some of the self-portraits, especially, leave you wondering whether this artist is a devil in angel’s garb, or an angel disguised as a devil.

That’s up to you to decide.

The O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia, is open 10 am to 5 pm , Monday through Saturday, 12 pm to 5 pm, Sunday. Entrance fee is $5 for Adults, $4 for Seniors, $3 for Children. Call the Museum at (540) 982-LINK for information or visit the web site at www.linkmuseum.org.

Skydin’s digital imagery can be seen at www.skydin.com. Some of Skydin’s works are available for purchase through the Yessy Art Gallery and at ArtWanted.com.

Is This Irony or Just Odd?

An article in Monday's Washington Post about "homophily" -- "a somewhat grand word to describe the idea that birds of a feather flock together" -- entitled "Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You" reminded me of the old joke about the Harvard professor who, in 1972, couldn't understand how Richard Nixon won re-election by a landslide because everybody he knew had voted for McGovern. ("Don't Blame Me: I'm from Massachusetts," said the famous bumpersticker.)

The article, by Shankar Vedantam, includes this tidbit (note the last sentence below):

Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do. No Walter Cronkite figure unites audiences today, the sociologist noted. We can now choose cable stations, magazines and blogs that see the world exactly as we do. If the research on homophily is right, those heavily e-mailed partisan screeds from the op-ed pages are largely talking to those who agree with those points of view to begin with.

What's odd -- or ironic, I don't know which -- is that, according to the Post's calculations, Vedantam's page A2 article is number two on the list of the 20 most emailed article from the Post's web site.

Private Money for the Arts

Unlike the neighboring Paramount Theatre, which unashamedly sucks at the public teat (the Virginia General Assembly just appropriated another $50,000 in taxpayers' money to what is, in form and function, a commercial performing arts venue) the City Center for Contemporary Arts, which houses the Live Arts theatre group as well as Light House (a film and video educational organization) and the Second Street Gallery (which displays graphic arts) has prided itself on its refusal to take public money.

(I wrote about C3A about a year ago in an article on taxpayer subsidies for arts institutions.)

Today a news release crossed me desk, announcing that Bama Works, the charitable wing of the Dave Matthews Band, is giving C3A a booster shot of more than half a million dolllars.

Here's the news release in its entirety:

DAVE MATTHEWS BAND ANNOUNCES CHALLENGE GRANT TO CHARLOTTESVILLE ARTS COMPLEX

Bama Works Fund pledges $550,000 to City Center for Contemporary Arts

Charlottesville, Virginia (February 23, 2006) – Bama Works Fund, the charitable giving arm of the Dave Matthews Band, announced today a $550,000 pledge to Charlottesville’s City Center for Contemporary Arts.

The pledge represents half of the $1.1 million left to raise to complete the C3A Building Campaign. For the remainder, the band is challenging the local community to pitch in and finish the campaign by the end of the year.

“I believe strongly that everyone should have a chance to participate in the arts,” said DMB’s Carter Beauford. “We feel that there’s a role we can play to help people have access to creative opportunities – not just by funding the arts ourselves, but also by challenging everyone to continue to support the arts and nurture other artists.”

The result of a collaboration between three Charlottesville nonprofit arts organizations – Live Arts, Second Street Gallery and Light House – City Center for Contemporary Arts opened the doors to its partially completed facility in the fall of 2003. The award-winning arts complex houses theater, gallery and film education spaces run by each of the independent organizations.

The organizations hope to finalize their capital campaign, complete unfinished spaces in the building, and provide for long-term maintenance needs by raising funds to match the Bama Works pledge by December 31, 2006.

“Bama Works’ pledge to the completion campaign for City Center is a wonderful way of leading by example,” said organization Chair Thane Kerner. “Their commitment to the arts and philanthropy is without question, but they’re also encouraging our community by saying ‘meet us half way’--which makes their gift doubly powerful.”

Bama Works Fund was established as a part of the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation by the Dave Matthews Band to carry out the band's commitment to charitable works, both close to home and world wide. Bama Works has given to numerous nonprofit organizations, community programs and charities that work for environmental causes, human services, education, and the arts. Dave Matthews Band has also performed at a number of benefit concerts.

For more information about the campaign for City Center for Contemporary Arts, or to make a tax-deductible contribution, please call (434) 293-7552 or visit www.c3arts.org.