Henry Louis Gates: Déjà Vu All Over Again

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As it happens, Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates is a Cambridge man (he did a PhD in English at Clare College), so my ears pricked up when I read about the fracas in which he was arrested for breaking into his own house in a leafy suburb of Cambridge, Mass. It turns out that the story also made Stanley Fish sit up and take notice. After which he wrote a terrific OpEd piece in the NYT.

I’m Skip Gates’s friend, too. That’s probably the only thing I share with President Obama, so when he ended his press conference last Wednesday by answering a question about Gates’s arrest after he was seen trying to get into his own house, my ears perked up.

As the story unfolded in the press and on the Internet, I flashed back 20 years or so to the time when Gates arrived in Durham, N.C., to take up the position I had offered him in my capacity as chairman of the English department of Duke University. One of the first things Gates did was buy the grandest house in town (owned previously by a movie director) and renovate it. During the renovation workers would often take Gates for a servant and ask to be pointed to the house’s owner. The drivers of delivery trucks made the same mistake.

The message was unmistakable: What was a black man doing living in a place like this?

At the university (which in a past not distant at all did not admit African-Americans ), Gates’s reception was in some ways no different. Doubts were expressed in letters written by senior professors about his scholarly credentials, which were vastly superior to those of his detractors. (He was already a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so called “genius award.”) There were wild speculations (again in print) about his salary, which in fact was quite respectable but not inordinate; when a list of the highest-paid members of the Duke faculty was published, he was nowhere on it.

Gates went on to a tenured Chair at Harvard, which is where, presumeably, Obama got to know him. Fish goes on to link the episode (and the arresting policeman’s mindset) to the strange tribe of fanatics — the birthers — who are obsessed with trying to prove that Obama was not born in America but in Kenya, and is therefore ineligible to be president. Professor Gates committed the sin of being HWB (Housed While Black). Obama has committed an even bigger sin in the eyes of birther bigots — he’s not only WHWB but PWB.

This isn’t just a phenomenon in the US btw. I know from anecdotal evidence that one way to receive a lot of unwanted police attention in the UK is to be a black man driving a Porsche or an upmarket BMW.

So where is the alternative government?

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Thoughtful Observer column by will Hutton.

The essence of democracy is alternative governments. After 13 years of New Labour, the country is ready for change. But the question it will and must ask is whether David Cameron’s Conservatives are the answer to Britain's problems. To jump from the frying pan into the fire would be stupid. Brown, like the tortured heroes of Shakespearean tragedies, is complex: he has strengths that partly compensate for his all too obvious flaws. One strength is that he is assembling an array of policies that are right. This, along with his astonishing tenacity, makes it so hard for his party to junk him. And here's the rub. The country may find it has the same difficulty.

One of the Conservative party’s problems is that it does not have the intellectual, political and philosophical wind at its back and it has no surefooted sense of what it should do as the economic and social crisis unfolds. Thus Boris Johnson’s London mayoralty in which little positive has been done. As somebody close to him acknowledged admiringly to me, Boris is the classic Tory. It is as important to occupy power, so denying its use to others, as to do anything constructive with it. That may excite Tory camp followers; others may feel that the point of power is to use it.

The size of the prospective budget deficit has given the Tory leadership a new confidence. The Conservatives’ task is to do what comes naturally: to take an axe to public spending and the regulatory arms of government like OfCom or the Financial Services Authority that displease the Tories’ natural constituencies, whether Rupert Murdoch or a stage army of City traders. Yet under Adair Turner, the FSA has begun to get serious about insider trading, investment banker bonuses and the structure of banks’ business models. Just as it gets its act together, it is to be disbanded and its powers handed to what City minister Paul Myners calls the “bookish” Bank of England, whose record of both spotting asset price bubbles and handling bank crises is dire. Thinking City people concerned about the dominance of speculative finance are shaking their heads in disbelief. Equally, Sky’s competitors and many consumers are no less dismayed that a champion of competition is to be abolished.

Bill Gates Dumps Facebook

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From Mashable.com.

Bill Gates confessed at an event in New Delhi today that he gave up on Facebook because he couldn’t keep up with the friend requests. Gates remarked that there were “10,000 people wanting to be my friends” after he tried out the service, and it was time consuming to decide if he “knew this person, did I not know this person”.

Pity, given that he had such a promising FaceBook page.

Even Microsoft stumbles

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“Somewhere down the road”, writes Good Morning Silicon Valley, “somebody should take a whack at calculating how much Vista has cost Microsoft — in lost or postponed sales, missed opportunities and damaged reputation — as an illustration of just how badly off track you can get when you find yourself moving at high speed in the wrong direction at the wrong moment”.

And an annus horribilis it was — the first since the company went public in 1986 that it saw a decline in annual revenue. For the quarter, Microsoft fell short of analysts’ revenue expectations by more than a billion dollars, and the bad news came from all directions. The online business, the Entertainment and Devices division, the unit that makes Office, even the server software group, all slid. And then there was the Client division, the one that makes Windows for PCs — revenue off 29 percent, operating profit down 33 percent. Microsoft blamed slumping PC sales, and while the recession was certainly the major culprit, it didn’t help that Vista gave customers few reasons to upgrade and more than a few to keep waiting. The company said it was also hurt by the growth in the netbook niche. Vista can’t play in that market, so those sales went to the lower-margin Windows XP.

Vista was a self-inflicted wound. But even without it Microsoft would have stumbled: the downside of its monopoly on business customers is that it is bound to be affected by a recession.

Amazon and the memory hole

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This morning’s Observer column.

Up to now, the debate about eBooks has been dominated by technical issues: ergonomics, portability, storage capacity, the readability of display screens, the quality of the user interface and so on. These are important matters, but ignore the biggest issue of all, namely the ways in which the technology enables content owners to assert a level of control over the reader that would be deemed unconscionable – and unacceptable – in the world of print.

Our societies have spent 400 years developing legal traditions which strike a reasonable balance between the needs of authors and publishers on the one hand and those of users on the other.

Compromises like the doctrine of ‘fair use’ are examples of that balancing act. One of the reasons the publishing industry is salivating over the potential of electronic texts is that they could radically tilt the balance in favour of content-owners in a single decade. We’re sleepwalking into a nightmare of perfect remote control. If nothing else, the tale of Amazon, Orwell and the memory hole ought to serve as a wake-up call.

Update: Bobbie Johnson had a good piece about this in the Technology section of Thursday’s Guardian and the following day reported the reaction of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, to the debacle. Bezos wrote:

“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle… Our ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted and we deserve the criticism we’ve received.”

Provence!

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Flickr version here.

“The man who is tired of London”, said Samuel Johnson, “is tired of life”. The same applies to Provence. We’ve been coming here every summer for years, and yet over the English winter the memory of its magic fades, with watercolours exposed to sunlight. And then we step out of the plane and are struck by the wall of scented heat, the chorus of cicadas, the azure sky, the amazing umbrella pines and palm trees and — whoosh! — it’s back.

Yesterday we decided to eschew motorways and big roads and lit out for the hills, picking our way along smooth, virtually-deserted country roads that snaked through valleys and woods and ochre-tinted villages baking in the afternoon sun to St Maximin-la-Ste Baume where we stayed in a converted Dominican monastery next to the basilica of Sainte Marie Madelaine.

This is a vast church, as big as some English cathedrals, built in the 14th century to house the skull of the woman who is supposed to have been one of Christ’s followers. According to the legend, she was the sister of Lazarus (he of the great comeback), was driven from Jerusalem by persecution and wound up in Provence, where she retired to a grotto in the Sainte Baume mountains we had driven through. She died, it seems, in the arms of St Maximin — the Bishop of Aix — in the town to which he gave his name and where we had found lodgings for the night.

Flickr version here.

The relic is a blackened skull encased in a hideous gilt enclosure on a sedan-chair apparatus — which suggests that it is paraded around the streets from time to time, no doubt accompanied by clerics in elaborate frocks. The size and magnificence of the basilica reminds one that possession of a high-class relic with provenance linking it back to Christ must have been the basis for a great business model in the Middle Ages. Just imagine it: all those pilgrims; all those indulgences to be sold. And just think of the spin-off merchandising opportunities.

Not that the merchandising opportunities were confined to the Middle Ages. In recent times, Mary has become a staple of bestselling fiction: think of the role she plays in, for example, The Da Vinci Code.

Onwards and downwards?

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The report of Alan Milburn’s inquiry into social mobility in contemporary Britain is deeply depressing. It charts the extent to which this is an unequal society. As Ian Jack observes.:

Many of its statistics are shocking. Only 7% of the population attended private schools, but 75% of judges, 70% of finance directors, and one in every three MPs went to one. And unto those that hath, etc: among nine out of 12 professions examined, particularly medicine and the law, the proportion of entrants coming from well-off families has been increasing; doctors born in 1970, for example, typically grew up in families with an income nearly two thirds higher than the average. Connection matters. ‘Soft skills’ in interviews matter: how to be confident, how to please. Unpaid internships and work experience schemes, particularly in glamorous professions such as the media, tend to be monopolies of the well-connected. Milburn describes it as “the closed shop society”, with a geographic bias towards London and the south-east.

Jack is as astonished as I am by one finding of the report relating to the mainstream media:

Figures 1F and 1G in the report. The first shows that more than half of “top journalists” were privately educated. The second shows how this proportion has actually increased since the 1980s – alone among eight professional categories, including barristers, judges and vice-chancellors.

As far as this phenomenon is concerned, the decline of the print media looks like a consummation devoutly to be wished. Once the stranglehold of the print and journalistic unions was broken by Murdoch & Co, the closed world of British national newspapers was transformed into an environment tailor-made for shoehorning well-connected Oxbridge kids into cushy roles. With a bit of luck this agreeable system of outdoor relief will wither on the vine: these brats won’t find the online world quite so accommodating to folks whose main qualification is an assumption of entitlement and superiority.

But the wider problem laid bare with scarifying clarity by the Milburn report remains. And nobody — and this includes Milburn — has any real idea what to do about it.

Armchair farming

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Well, I’ve heard of ‘set-aside’, i.e. getting subsidies from the EU for not growing anything on your land, but this is ridiculous. Sit-aside, perhaps?

Spotted today on my drive home. Flickr version here.