Bear baiting and cock fighting (aka US journalism)

The last couple of weeks of The Daily Show have been particularly good - some sort of end of term feeling, perhaps? Or maybe it's the increasing frustration with the absurdities of the health care debate in the US (especially the bizarre claims about the UK's NHS which, incidentally, isn't even the model that's being proposed for the US).

Anyway, it's good to see someone in the US media call the "death panel" idiots out on their claims. It's a shame it has to be a comedian on a cable channel.
Here's the difference between UK and US journalism:
In the UK, someone makes a bizarre claim. Journalists investigate it and if it's loony they ignore it (and make a note not to listen to that person again). If there's something behind it, they report the story, not the claim.

In the US, it seems, the claim itself is the story. Irrespective of whether there's any substance to it. Just get that person on camera and let them make their claim, then ask someone to respond. It's like bear baiting, or cock fighting. Except the journalists are the owners, setting up a fight for the entertainment of the audience.
Where's the analysis? Where's the fact checking?

I'll tell you where: it's on the Comedy Channel! How screwed up is that?

What Jon Stewart and his team do is invite people on to the show and instead of simply letting them repeat their claims, they ask them for evidence. Or present them with reasoned, logical arguments. He did it with Bill Kristol recently and got him to admit that military health care for veterans was excellent - that would be government-run health care.

He also pointed out that a discussion on cable news about health insurance was sponsored by an insurance company. But not a health insurance company - no, a car insurance company. The irony being that it is illegal to drive in the US without insurance, but not illegal to have no health insurance.

Here's Stewart interviewing Betsy McCaughley, who identified the "death panels" in the health care bill. Except that when she's asked to show where it mentions those, she can't. She points to how doctors will be evaluated on their use and adherence to statements from patients about "life sustaining treatment" which as Stewart points out could mean "keep bringing me back no matter what" rather than mandatory "do not resuscitate" instructions.

Something Stewart points out but which is lost in the general melee is that "end of life counselling" was actually introduced by a certain George W Bush. It was seen as a great idea back then - allowing people to make their wishes known to avoid burdening loved ones with dreadful decisions or putting people through long and painful but ultimately futile treatment. But that was then. A Republican was in the White House. Now we've got a Kenyan Nazi (apparently) who wants to ship anyone over 60 off to the gas chambers.

Apparently that's what we do here in the UK. Really?

Er, no. Far from having death panels, and poor health care because of the NHS, the UK not only has a better life expectancy than the US but the number of 100-year olds is steadily rising to such an extent that it's no longer a big news event when someone reaches their century, as it was when I was a kid.

"Babies born nowadays in the UK are expected to live to the age of 100, while it is predicted that the number of centenarians will increase from the present-day total of 10,000 to 1million by the year 2074"

Compare "death panels" with the current denial of care that exists in the US, as covered in this fascinating but depressing story.

Or, for an uncomfortably funny/despair-inducing few minutes, watch as Jon Stewart tears apart the "death panel" argument with logic rather than rhetoric.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Betsy McCaughey Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Betsy McCaughey Pt. 2
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Most of the images of "town halls" I've seen have shown politicians standing dumbfounded in front of the (somewhat organised and well-briefed, if wrongly briefed) critics. You really want them to say simply that their concerns are unfounded.
All praise to Barney Frank who had the guts to go one step further:

Jon Stewart takes down CNBC and Jim Cramer

If you've been watching the Daily Show over the past week you'll know that Stewart has been exposing the shoddy and dodgy advice that CNBC gave out before the collapse of the stock markets. That led to a war of words with Jim Cramer which culminated in his appearance on Thursday's Daily Show.

If you missed it, here it is in three parts. It's crazy that it takes a comedy show to expose the bullshit that came out of that network but this is exactly what satire is for:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Vote McBlinky and Winky

According to Sarah Palin you can't blink. It's a sign of weakness.



But it's okay to wink



Mmm...



McBlinky & Winky 08

Sarah Palin at the UN: The secret footage

(I'm not the only one to spot the similarity - Andrew Sullivan got there first)

Argh! Make it stop!

If only this film were real:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Oh wait a minute. It is:


Watch CBS Videos Online

And in case you've still not scratched your eyes out of your head...

Sarah Loves Charlie

I ran Sarah Palin's Charles Gibson/ABC interview (part 1) through title="Wordle: Palin 1">Wordle and, as suspected, she uses "Charlie" like it's some sort of punctuation mark. A great bit of coaching by her handlers.

If you read the transcript and substitute your chosen expletive, it's a lot funnier. And God knows, reading it back, we need all the laughs we can get...

Quick summary: the woman knows nothing. Heaven help us all.

Americans left abandoned by Bush

The parallels were amazing: in the wake of Hurricane Katrina thousands of Americans were huddled together in a sports centre wondering where their president was. And in the wake of Hurricane Gustav, thousands (just about) of Americans were huddled together asking the same question.

I was glad to see The Daily Show spot the irony. This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. Enjoy:

Ten Freedom Points if you guess where this happened

Guess where this happened:

Protesters here in [XX] have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the [XX] police department and the [XX] handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the [XX] sent teams of officers into at least four [XX] area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

A: China

B: Russia

C: Cuba

D: Minneapolis, USA

E: Tibet

F: Iraq

Read this in full to see if you were right

Being runner up in Miss Alaska is great practice for being runner up in November

Apparently Sarah Palin, McCain's pick for Vice President, was a runner up in the Miss Alaska competition. (The swimsuit round must have been nippy, no pun intended - but go ahead if you spotted it).

Seeing as the female population of Alaska numbers around 260,000, that's not saying much. Given those odds, I reckon if I padded up and wore a dress I'd stand a pretty good chance.

On a more serious note, given that she is three years younger than Obama and has even less experience of government than he does, it seems inconsistent to argue that he's not ready to be President but that she is. Watching her next to McCain earlier just made him look even older and more wooden than usual. In a few weeks time I think the Republicans who thought this was a good idea will think again.

A moment in history

The BBC's Justin Webb on the nomination by acclamation of Obama:

It was stunning - a moment of brilliantly produced political theatre and a moment to cherish forever. Television conveys something but to be there, to see a death and a birth; that was something else.

What made it was the chaos, the crowd, the press of bodies, the tears, the consequence of it all. It reminded me of the British parliament at its best, rowdy and physical yet serious of purpose and aware of its potency: consequence.

People died years ago for America's right to be able to have these moments and their descendents have done them proud, though in a way most of the nation's founders would have found impossible to imagine.

The roll call went state by state (Hawaii happy, talk of sunshine, Michigan miserable, talk of lost jobs in the Bush years) and all was proceeding with that ceremonial and genteel decorum that America is so good at ('Guam, can you repeat your numbers please? Oh thank you Guam!') - and then came New York.

What made it was the physicality of the moment - she swept in from a tunnel, on to the crushed, cramped floor, arm-in-arm with the governor of the state and its other senator. When she took the microphone, it was not at a distant podium with music and autocue and clocks to time the start and the finish.

There on the floor Hillary Clinton uttered the words that she needed to utter, in slightly courtly language (reminders of the Brits again) but clearly and with awareness of their consequence.

Then Nancy Pelosi called for the seconder to the motion that Obama be selected, and the roar was surely felt down the years. She did not pause for those opposed - they were crushed too. That, too, is politics. A reminder that all this is the exercise of power, of one group of human beings forcing others to accept their dominance.

As people cried and hugged each other and the music blared, I thought of the little black children stolen from their parents, the daily cruelty and humiliation suffered by black people in this country for so long in what one historian calls 'America's Original Sin' and, to a lesser extent, the daily miseries they still endure. From slavery to the nomination of a black man as the leader of a major party. Sometimes it really does appear that our political evolution matches our physical progress...

(Via BBC NEWS | Justin Webb's America.)

It certainly looked dramatic. Up until then the DNC had made even British parties' annual conferences look like things of substance.

Prediction Obama 311-227 McCain

I watched Hillary's speech to the DNC on C-Span (via BBC Parliament) and I very nearly applied for citizenship there and then. Blimey she was good. And I got the feeling a lot of people in the crowd were thinking "what have we done?".
Too late, Hillary, too late. But Michelle Obama was good too - you get the sense she won't be the sort of First Lady who sits quietly and smiles on the official Christmas card.

Based on my extensive knowledge of US politics (I watched every season of West Wing at least twice and saw every episode of Commander in Chief before it was cancelled) here's my prediction.

Mind you I got the last one wrong - I still remember sitting there with my pack of American Hard Gums waiting for the results to come in, and giving up in the early hours after Kerry's spokespeople started looking glum.

My rationale this time round is any state with a coast will likely go Democrat because there has to be a link between passport ownership and common sense; if the margin in the last election was within about 3% it will go Democrat; Florida and Ohio will not make the same mistake as last time. (Although I'm not sure about Alaska - both the people who live there tend to vote Republican if memory serves, but the latest poll had them down for Obama. But the whole Russia/Georgia thing might make them nervous enough to vote Republican) [Addendum - Sarah Palin makes it certain, I think. Alaska's going Republican]

I thought about giving any state where a candidate lives to that candidate, on the basis of home advantage, but given the current uncertainty over the number of homes McCain possesses (he can't remember how many he has, apparently) that might result in a clean sweep for the Republicans.

Having said all this, I'm just guessing. But then so are all the people on the US news channels. All I'll say is this: when McCain lambasts Obama for being loved by the rest of the world, just remember that when electing the self-proclaimed "leader of the free world" it's polite to consider who the rest of us think that should be.



Pollster.com currently puts Obama 10 EVs away from the winning post. It would be sweet if the national vote is close but the electoral vote gives it so clearly to Obama.

John Oliver analyses Fox News

I loved this when it was broadcast on The Daily Show. Take a look - as well as being extraordinarily funny, it's also pretty good analysis of an appalling "news" network.

Part 1



Part 2

Proof that McDonald's beverages are undrinkable

A story in The Guardian that Fox News channels in the USA have started selling McDonald's the opportunity to have their iced coffee on morning programmes comes with this interesting bit of info:

Two cups of coffee, their cubes of ice glinting in the studio lights, now daily stand before the channel's morning presenters. The presenters conspicuously do not drink from the cups, which is just as well – the cups contain a bogus fluid and fake ice to prevent the cubes melting.

From my recollection, in the UK McDonald's tea has always contained an undrinkable fluid so it's nice to see some consistency.

Like-ability does not equal ability

Jamison Fraser on why the US media's obsession with politicians' "like-ability" is a bad thing

Voting for president based on who seems the most likable -- or, in the media's favorite shorthand, based on who you would rather have a beer with -- is a spectacularly bad idea, what with the almost total lack of similarity between talking about the Knicks over a bottle of Bud and running the world's most powerful nation.

It requires very little judgment or analytical skills to determine that the Knicks stink. Deciding whether to send Americans off to die in a foreign land is (or should be) a little different.

(Via Media Matters for America.)

Nice to see the US media focusing on the real issues in the election

Good grief

During the 10 a.m. ET hour of the July 16 broadcast of MSNBC Live, host Monica Novotny devoted a segment to discussing Sen. Hillary Clinton's 'new look,' specifically the 'short[ness]' of Clinton's hair and the fact that Clinton 'shifted her part from the left side to the right side.'

At the beginning of the segment, Novotny contrasted a video of Clinton's July 15 speech on the floor of the Senate with her official publicity photo in order to illustrate the difference, stating, 'All right, if fashion -- as far as hairdos go -- isn't your forte, Clinton's hair is apparently shorter than it used to be, and she's shifted her part from the left side to the right side.'

Novotny asked MSNBC congressional correspondent Mike Viqueira, 'So, it's Hillary's part that's shifted to the right? Not her political positions?' Viquiera replied: 'Monica, all I can say is, I'm not really crazy about standing here talking about a senator's hair, especially Senator Clinton's hair, but I'll just say this: When it comes to senatorial hair, she's way ahead of the game. I mean, we've got some combovers around here that are engineering marvels, modern engineering marvels, I tell you. And look, I mean, you know the price of Grecian Formula these days -- I could use -- I could use a raise for that, and some Rogaine.'

Novotny later stated: 'Look, I'm just going to say this: I mean, you remember there have been some other reports where people were focused on other things, so I say, better the coif than the cleavage. That's just me.'

As Media Matters for America documented, on July 30, 2007, MSNBC devoted a total of 23 minutes and 42 seconds to segments discussing Clinton's (D-NY) 'cleavage' between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET.

Better the coif than the cleavage... oh yes, I get your point. We wouldn't want people focusing on other things in this election, would we?

(Via Media Matters for America.)

What the New Yorker teaches us about visual literacy

Richard Adams on the New Yorker cover 'scandal' makes a valid point:

John McCain can say that he doesn't know much about economics and later deny it flatly, then have one of his top economic advisors say it will take one term for a McCain presidency to balance the budget, only to turn on a dime and say it will take two term, and almost nothing of it gets reported in the media. But hey, Jesse Jackson gets overheard using the word 'nuts' and it's time to break out the ink.

If that's what the 'mainstream' news media can do when left to their own devices, a cartoon is nothing.

Seems to me, as one of the commenters on this article says, this is another example (like the 'nuts' episode) of the media reporting on itself rather than on the stories.

But it also suggests something else: when we start summing up complex issues in illustrated form the scope for misunderstanding is huge.
At the New Views conference it was asked why critiques of design have to rely on words, why can't we use design? (Similar arguments are made in favour of letting students create 'visual dissertations') Because writing depends on redundancy - it contains clauses, clarifications, opportunities to go off on tangents or rehearse devil's advocate positions. Create a design to critique a design and you can't guarantee that the message will be decoded correctly. The irony here is that I've just read several thousand words explaining what the New Yorker cartoon is supposed to be saying.

I think the New Yorker cover is a brave attempt to highlight the way the media and others pick apart minutae like the Obamas' fist bump, unpicking images (often because there's not really enough real news to fill a 24 hour news 'culture') but falls foul of precisely the same problems: images have no redundancy. The article that accompanies the cartoon is a few thousand words long and makes it clear what it is saying. The cartoon has no words and is consequently translated differently depending on who reads it, or (importantly in this case) reads about it. If the cover had instead been a cartoon alongside the article it might have made sense. As a cover, it doesn't and simply exacerbates the problem it seeks to analyse.

Barthes famously said that images are polysemous, they have multiple meanings. Text, he said, fixes meaning.
I don't think we've yet reached a level of visual literacy (or ever will?) where images like this can be divorced from the textual context.

To hell via Chicago

I just got back from a great conference in Dallas organised by the chaps on the Visual Communications programme at the University of North Texas. I'll write more about that when my brain catches up with me - suffice to say I really enjoyed it and met some fantastic people.

But I thought I should share the hellish experience I had on the way back. I wrote this at Edinburgh Airport and haven't had a chance to edit it - it was one of those 'get it out of my head in one go' things...
My thanks to American Airlines for making my journey so, erm, eventful.

I arrived at Dallas Fort Worth airport well before time on Sunday for the flight to Edinburgh via Chicago and Heathrow. When I got there I saw the flight was delayed by an hour (thunderstorms in Chicago - the news was full of floods in Louisiana and other states, quite bad), but as this was the flight to Heathrow anyway it didn't matter. The poor buggers going to Brussels were given a choice: go to Chicago and hope, go to Chicago and stay over, or stay in Dallas.
For me it was just a case of getting to Chicago and waiting till they'd refuelled.
So the flight to Chicago is packed, mainly with domestic flyers. I'm sat next to a young lad who clearly hasn't flown before as he asks me all sorts of questions, like I'm the Ancient Mariner or something. He's going to Jordan.

As the flight lands in Chicago, the pilot tells those of us going to Heathrow that we need to go to gate L8 and get a plane from there instead. So a few of us confirm what we've heard and, not knowing what time it's going (the information screen just, very helpfully, says 'on time') we all leg it to L8 which is about half a mile away in the same terminal. You have to go through all the shops and things and step over people sitting down on the floor using their laptops or calling on their phones.
Eventually I get there and discover the flight to Heathrow isn't going until 6pm, so an hour to kill. So I kill it - having gone to the desk to check this is the right flight. It is.

Come 6pm the flight just starts to board and as the guy at Dallas helpfully moved me forwards in the plane I'm one of the last groups to be called forward. I give the woman my boarding pass, she swipes it and... a red light flashes.
"You're not on this flight you need to be on AA86" she says. That's the flight I was on before, the one they told us to change. She shouts to another woman "is AA86 gone?" They're still boarding, apparently. "You'd better run".

So I run. It's half a mile at least and everyone's really slow and really fat and I've got my laptop bag on and my leg's sore from a cramp that morning, and it's hot hot hot.
I don't think I'm going to make it but I run to the desk and see the words 'Heathrow boarding" and throw myself in front of them, breathless. "Calm down sir, you're fine" says one of the staff there. I don't feel fine, I tell her, through gasps.

She scans my pass and checks me in and I go to join everybody else in the departure lounge. I don't see any of the other people from the earlier flight and I wonder what happened to them.
There's another flight letting people on and an attendant goes up to the girl and says 'all done, let's go' and they both step on to the plane and I watch the bridge retract, leaving the plane alone on the tarmac. By now I'm beginning to catch my breath and I look around and see another passenger looking at the screen I'd seen earlier. "7.45" she says and I assume this is when my flight is going, which is too late for my connection to Edinburgh. So I get up to go to the desk to check I can make a later flight at Heathrow and I see the words "Heathrow: Boarded". I look back to the window and I realise: that's my fucking plane! And it's going!

There are two passengers talking to a lone attendant at the desk and a religious-looking guy behind him. I decide not to be British and interrupt: "Excuse me, that's my flight! I'm not in it!" I'm staying calm inwardly but screaming like a madman externally.
"Didn't you hear the call?" she says. There was no call, I say. I was waiting for the call. In Britain if you check in but don't get on the flight they shout your name from the rooftops. "I can't get you on the flight, sir, there's nothing I can do."
"But my bag's on there," I say, at which point she thinks. The thing that surprises me about the US and Chicago in particular: the security is tight. At DFW I had to go through a body scanner that puffed compressed air at me and made some grinding noises, which interestingly had no one staffing it, so I suspect it was just some bicycle pumps and an old washing machine.
And there are no calls. At Chicago the only calls I heard were that members of the military service were welcome in the smoking area (which is public, so it's hardly a perk) and that the current threat level is amber. And I think that's what's got her concerned so I press the issue: "How can the plane leave with my bag on it? Surely that's a security risk?" One thing I know after Lockerbie is that they introduced rules that say baggage that's checked in by a passenger can't go if the passenger isn't on the plane. Which is one of the reasons they make all those calls for "Passenger X" to get out of the bar or the duty free shop and get to the gate before they have to go through all the bags to get theirs off.
This hadn't happened here, and they hadn't even done a head count: 500 passengers checked in, only 499 on the plane equals, as Dickens might have said, a might cock up.

She took my name and disappeared for a minute, then came back with a man. "You'll have to get the bridge back out there" she told him and he rushed me to the door. I stopped to gather my stuff, dropping bits everywhere.
Now you know that scene in Star Wars where Luke and Leia are running from Stormtroopers and they come to a retracted bridge? Luke nearly falls in but Leia pulls him back.
Well this was very nearly what happened as I ran after the little fat man but didn't notice that he sidestepped into a control booth while I clattered towards the open door leading to the tarmac. He started moving the bridge while I steadied myself. Eventually it hit the plane and he, get this, *knocked* on the door! Like he was just popping round for a cup of sugar. God knows what they were thinking inside but after a few seconds the door opened and I fell inside, completely unable to speak, dropping things everywhere. The attendants smiled at me and asked for my boarding pass - but I'd lost it! I only had the ones for the first and last leg of the journey, not this one! "I'm in seat 23H" I said, remembering it from the ticket.
"I trust you" said the head woman - you trust me? It's bloody amber alert out there and you TRUST me??
Suits me, I thought, and went to get to my seat, still dropping then picking things up.

I get to my seat and I'm sat next to a young woman who smiles at me like "bugger I thought I was going to be sitting on my own" but then an attendant comes up to me and says "that row's free" and points to the back row in the front cabin, lots of lovely seats all unoccupied except for one American woman who spreads herself over three of them and says "they're mine" while miming sleep. Fine, I think, and sit down, still sweating from the half mile jog.
After this the flight seems to go smoothly except there's a screaming baby up the front and across the aisle from me there are four American lads who don't know the meaning of the words 'quiet whisper' who talk and laugh all the way through the flight. The woman next to me knows them (turns out she's their teacher) and tells them twice to be quiet so others can sleep, which they are for about five minutes. At about 4am UK time I tell them to shut up too and that works for about three minutes. Bastards.

The flight makes up time and we land an hour late. I notice my connection to Edinburgh is actually half an hour later than I thought so I have time to make it. I rush off the plane to get the bus to Terminal 5 (third visit now, still don't see what the fuss is about) and then through security, which is held up, as last time, by a lack of trays to put stuff in. Unlike last time I don't have to hold a random baby while his mother folds up the push chair, but I do worry about the large old American lady who's puffing away behind me while telling the staff she can't go through the metal detector because she has a pacemaker.
I get through all that and rush to the gate... and the plane's delayed anyway. Of course.

On the flight to Edinburgh I find I'm sat next to a compulsive throat clearer. But not just a normal bit of throat clearance - he makes a meal of it (well, not quite literally) getting a good run-up to it. Every few minutes. For the full 55 minutes of the journey plus the 20 minutes sitting on the tarmac. But at least I made my flight - I'm going to be on time getting back home despite everything!

The flight lands (during the flight the staff try to wheel the breakfast trolley up the aisle while the plane's still ascending and all the meals slide out on to the floor, but as I got mine I don't chalk that up as a personal event in teh catalogue of disasters) and we all go to belt 6 to get our bags. Now I remember joking with the guy at DFW as my bag disappeared behind him. "Will it get transferred all the way to Edinburgh?" I asked him. "It should" he said, "but this is an airline". I watched it go off fearing I'd never see it again and wondering if I'd been insured for the trip.
Belt 6 goes round and bags appear. Last time I did this the first thing that appeared was a suitcase handle. Just the handle, with the airline luggage tag attached to it. No suitcase. Poor bugger, I thought and, judging from everyone else's faces they were thinking the same too.

The belt went round. More bags. More bags. Then not so many bags. Then just a couple. Then more bags! But this was the next flight. Eventually I gave in and went to the baggage office.
"Was there any problem with the flight?" the guy asked me. "Any delays?" I wanted to tell him the full story but I thought it might get in the way of any film rights I could exploit, so I just murmured something about delays in Chicago. He typed something in to his computer. "It's on the next flight" he said, "should be here at 12.30. Do you want us to send it on?" When he learned where I lived he said it wouldn't arrive with me till tomorrow so I said I'd wait the 90 minutes. "You sure?" he said. "Oh yes" I said and then I went to have a little cry but couldn't. So I sat down with a cup of tea (a real one! Yes!) and typed this.
I'm going to be writing a brief letter to American Airlines soon to suggest that their boarding procedures might need a little bit of tightening up. And maybe a few useful announcements in the airport instead of telling us we're good to smoke if we're soldiers or that we need to keep our baggage with us at all times. I'm beginning to think I learned that particular lesson.

The Post-American World

Bruce Nussbaum reviewing The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria.:

When the US was the overwhelming power, everyone else had to learn American culture. The big change in the 21st century is now the US has to learn everyone else's culture. It needs to share power, build coalitions, create legitimacy, in order to lead and prosper. It has to stop being the Voice of Authority and learn to Curate a Global Conversation--or many of them.

(Via BusinessWeek Online - NussbaumOnDesign.)

Can't be arsed to be rational

Michael Lewis, Professor of Art at Williams College claims in the Wall Street Journal that

It is often said that great achievement requires in one's formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.

Sometimes you want to give a really reasoned and rational response to things like this.

And sometimes you just want to say "bollocks".

It's funny how the only people that say these things are the people whose jobs and reputations depend on it being true...

Creativity

In New Paltz, New York last week I gave a presentation to senior students there on the Master of Design programme at the University of Dundee. One of the core philosophies of the course is its concern with 'design for a changing world'.

I illustrated this by showing a satellite image of the campus, courtesy of Google Earth, showing the proximity of the University's life sciences building to my own office in the College of Art and Design.
On the image I placed two labels, one saying 'Anti-cancer gene discovered here', the other saying 'my office'.

The point I was trying to make was that when it comes to the word 'creative', surely it's the people who work on cures for cancer, among other things, who are engaged in true creativity? Designing logos and leaflets doesn't really compare at all.

It was interesting to note the vigourous nodding of heads at this. I felt like someone explaining this new thing called fire to a group of people bathed in electric light.

At the start of the academic year I asked my new undergrad students to choose a term from a grid I presented on the screen - terms such as 'ageing', 'poverty', 'ethics', and 'disability' - and consider how their own disciplines were affected, or could affect, that particular area.
After a few minutes I asked what people had written.

"What do you study?" I asked one.
"Graphic Design".
"And what did you choose from the grid?"
"Disability"
"So how can graphic design intersect with disability?"
"Well graphic designers can design the signs that go on toilet doors so you know which one is for the disabled".

Now it's easy to laugh at that, and to dismiss the student, but remember this is someone starting out and, to be honest, that's how graphic design represents itself. In the last lecture of the year I ask students to return to that exercise and ask themselves if their ideas have changed - if they have, I've done my job properly.

To a lot of people,'creativity' and 'creative thinking' means exactly what that student said: coming up with good-looking ways to communicate a fact. You're disabled, you want to know which toilet is for you, here you go.

What I think we're trying to do in Dundee (and I'm speaking entirely for myself here) is to change that idea: creativity and creative thinking are about changing attitudes to disability, not designing ways to describe it; about designing the world in such a way that a disability is simply a physical condition, not a way of life or an obstacle.

Can graphic design do that? That's an interesting question - one that makes it ripe for that type of study. The Masters programme is more interested in the question-asking than the answering (although if the questions are answered, that's great of course) and this makes it an exciting course to work on.
Being in Dundee means we're well-placed to interact and work with other disciplines: medicine, law, economics, education, computing, engineering. And in doing so we've in part got rid of the one thing that stops interdisciplinarity happening: disciplines.
So although we occasionally describe a Masters student by the discipline they studied at undergraduate level (graphic designer, textile designer, architect, weaver etc) we don't ask them to identify a problem and say "How can I, as a graphic designer, tackle this?" We ask them to say "How can we, as designers, help tackle this?"
Because designers shouldn't be constrained by disciplinary boundaries, they shouldn't work alone, and they shouldn't claim to know better than anyone else.

Personally I think it's a shame this level of thinking has to wait till Masters, but until the creative disciplines start being creative about their own practice, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

When I was a child I used to be taken to Mass and week after week read the words on the order of service. The longest of sections was the Credo ("I believe"). It wasn't until I was about 13 or so I realised this thing actually consisted of words and sentences, rather than just sounds (Vatican II really not working in my case), and I began to wonder if I actually did believe in these things at all. When I started teaching design I found colleagues telling me how they taught and assessed. Unlike them I'd never gone through 'art school' and so my first reaction was to think "why on earth do you do it like that?" They were reciting the credo, enacting the rituals, despite the fact that the world had moved on and it was clear that few of the methods worked anymore (if they ever did).

While at New Paltz I met the inspirational head of the print-making course. He was lamenting the burden of tradition within his own discipline. I asked him if he knew anything of the English Reformation. At the time, crowds of people went through the medieval churches, cathedrals and abbeys ripping out and smashing statues, icons, stained glass and anything that smelt of Popery. It is widely held to be one of the biggest acts of cultural vandalism the world has seen, and something that set it aside from the more general reformation happening on the continent. Yet it also meant that as far as English crafts were concerned, everything had to start again - there were no models to work from, no statues to copy or paintings to emulate.
This, in part (and until European methods of teaching art and craft invaded our shores) explains why English craft, thought and science developed the way they did. Unburdened by tradition, without the constraints of paying deference to all that had come before, the English Reformation, for all its evils (and there were many) paved the way for innovations we take for granted.

(An historian of the period would no doubt go ashen faced at my summation here but, hey, I'm being 'creative'!)

Design education needs that reformation, a bold sweeping away of tradition. It needs to stop being so disciplined and learn to embrace the mess of fuzzy logic, intuition and sheer creativity that comes from letting go of the past. Whatever was true of design in the 19th and 20th centuries is no longer so true today. We are no longer the 'creative disciplines' because we like tradition too much, and see skills as rituals rather than a grammar - like people intoning a Mass without understanding the meaning of the words they're saying. Or teaching in a certain way without wondering if it does more harm than good.

We can't wait for a Martin Luther or Henry VIII to turn up and change things. We can do better.
Subject area aside there is one thing that separates the 'creative disciplines' from the truly creative disciplines: they eat their own young. By which I mean they identify their best students and they keep them. They continue teaching them, they let them do research, they show them how to teach. And then they let them loose on students and start it all over again.
In design, we identify our best students, spend ages on them so they can win an award or two, help them get jobs at prestigious firms and then either get them in every so often to give guest talks and praise us (after all, we must be good cos look what happened to them) or we wait thirty years until they're burnt out and then ask them to come and teach when they repeat the rituals they went through (after all, they must be good cos, etc etc).

This myth, that only practitioners can teach, has to be ended.
Our Martin Luther is sitting in our courses right now. And there's more than one...