There are a lot of young men who are hurting and social media is full of people trying to take advantage of them by offering pretend sympathy through parasocial relationships which will only make things worse. Instead, young men need to find older male friends who will stick with them and give them real sympathy.
Author: Christopher Lansdown
http://www.chrislansdown.com/
Don’t Optimize the Fun Out of Everything
A while back I started playing the MMORPG1 Hypixel Skyblock so that I could play it with my sons. It’s an interesting game because it has a functional economy and (accidentally) teaches some important economics lessons in a way even older children can understand. We ended up dividing the labor, with me specializing in mining in order to earn (pretend) money to buy equipment for dungeon runs we’d go on, and I noticed something very interesting about other players who were earning (pretend) money in the game: they had optimized all the fun out of it.
The game was set up such that there was quite a lot of (pretend) money to earn in order to buy the tip-top best stuff, taking potentially a thousand hours of game play or more. Many people wanted to minimize the time they spent earning the (pretend) money, so they figured out how to absolutely maximize the (pretend) money they earned per hour. The problem with that is that fun comes from making decisions, even if very small decisions such as aiming, and decisions take time. The efficiency-maxers worked hard to eliminate every possible decision point so that every second could be spent earning money. That is, they inadvertently optimized the fun out of the game.
And they complained about how the game was no fun. Quite a lot. It was, perhaps, the most popular subject in the in-game chat in the mining areas.
I took a more laid-back approach, aiming to get to about 90% of the maximum amount of (pretend) money I could earn per hour, while doing a bit of exploring and mining whatever I found, and for me mining was a pleasant and relaxing activity. It wasn’t nearly as fun as playing in the dungeons with my sons, but I enjoyed doing it for what was probably a few hundred hours over the more-than-a-year I did it, while many others burned out.
I think that this lesson generalizes.
- Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game ↩︎
Murder She Wrote: My Johnny Lies Over the Ocean
On the tenth day of February in the year of our Lord 1985, the thirteenth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled My Johnny Lies Over the Ocean, it’s set on an ocean cruise. (Last week’s episode was Murder to a Jazz Beat.) Unusually, the episode begins with a kind of dream sequence.
Pictured in the title sequence and with blurring around the edges because this is a dream, Pamela Crane, one of Jessica’s nieces goes for a swim in a pool. She doesn’t spend long in it, gets out, then walks into her house and finds her husband dead, with a gun in his hand.
She then wakes up in a mental hospital. The dream sequence turns out to be a nightmare of something that happened months ago. A nurse calms her down and she goes back to sleep.
The scene then shifts to the next day, where her father, Dr. McGill, is talking with the doctor in charge of Pamela’s case.
He’s releasing Pamela, and Dr. MacGill has his doubts, but he’s a surgeon, not a psychiatrist, so he’s willing to trust the unnamed doctor who’s releasing Pamela. The doctor goes on to say that the boat cruise that Dr. MacGill is sending Pamela on is just what she needs—sun, fresh air, and the companionship of her favorite aunt.
That favorite aunt is, of course, Jessica. Dr. MacGill is her brother, which means we’ve finally met an actual blood-relative of Jessica’s.
As they are discussing this they walk up to a place where Pam is waiting by a car. It’s a bit counter-intuitive that this discussion would happen after Pam is already waiting outside, but also curious is the palatial nature of this mental hospital:
I don’t think it is meant to convey much, past, perhaps, that Dr. MacGill is a successful surgeon. It may just be part of the general rule that if the setting doesn’t matter much to the plot, pick a visually interesting setting.
Dr. MacGill and his daughter greet each other and hug, and the scene shifts to the cruise ship.
Man, cruise ships were so much smaller in the 1980s. This is probably an exaggeration, but you might be able to fit this cruise ship in the on-deck pool of modern cruise ships.
(The limo isn’t for Dr. MacGill and Pamela, it’s for another set of passengers.)
Those passengers are Andrea:
And her husband, George:
Looking at the ship, she tells him, with a smile, that she’s almost glad that the talked her into this. Breaking stereotypes, she goes off to make one final call to the office before the trip to make sure that there are no emergencies. (In the 1980s, the character trait of being a work-addict who has to constantly check in at the office and can’t enjoy himself because Business is all he can think about was usually given to the husband.)
On her wait to make this call, she runs into Marshall (Dr. MacGill), Pam, and Jessica. Marshall is taking pictures of his sister and daughter:
It’s a little odd to have bothered to attach the flash to the camera for taking outdoor pictures during the day (it would normally be removed when the camera is put into the camera bag for transport), but I suppose it makes the camera look more imposing, and possibly on 1980s-era TVs, more like a camera even if there’s static.
Marshall than says he wishes he could get a picture of the three of them just as Andrea is walking by. He stops her and asks her to take the picture, which she does, but says she has no idea how to work a camera. It’s easy, though, you just aim and press the button, as Marshall assures her, and she does.
Marshall then gives Pam the camera and tells her that there are several more rolls of film in her bag. He also mentions that they’ve got developing facilities onboard the ship, I think the implication being that they should periodically send him pictures at the various ports the ship puts into.
As he’s wishing his sister and daughter a fond goodbye, two more characters come up in a taxi which pulls in hastily, tires screeching.
If you didn’t recognize the two comediennes, you would be able to tell that they’re the comic relief from the way that they bicker. (One of them thinks the boat is leaving without them and calls to it to wait for them.)
Later, as the ship is under way, Jessica and Pam are walking on deck and a young man bumps into Pam.
His name is Russell Tompkins, though we won’t learn that for a while. He apologizes and is obviously quite taken with Pam but can’t think of anything to say, so after awkwardly trying to think of something for a few moments, he excuses himself.
Pam goes off to get film developed while Jessica goes to cash some traveler’s checks. I mention this mostly because I find it interesting that it is now a historical curiosity but at the time was a commonplace activity.
For those who don’t know: traveler’s checks (or traveller’s cheques, if you prefer that spelling) were a means of bringing money while travelling to foreign places which were used before the use of international credit and debit cards became easy. The traveller would, for a fee, deposit money with a bank that would issue the checks. The checks had two lines for signatures on them, one to be signed at the time of issuance and one at the time of use. The bank guaranteed that if the signatures matched, the check would be paid, even if they were stolen. The double-signature offered some protection against theft, since the checks would be worthless unless the thief couldn’t successfully forge a signature to match, possibly in front of the merchant who would be accepting them. They could be cashed in the local currency, rather than the issuing currency, which is why foreign merchants would accept them. They were also a slightly safer way to carry cash than actual cash, because of the double-signature involved was a little more protection than cash would be. It was also the case that for higher values, traveler’s checks were less bulky can cash.
As Jessica hands the check to the purser to cash, she mentions that she hopes that she didn’t cause inconvenience—she’s sure her publisher used its influence to get her on the cruise at the last minute. The purser reassures her that she didn’t cut ahead in line—the cruise is only 90% booked.
The purser further explains that the ship is old and has just been refurbished, and this is a “shakedown” cruise which was only added to the schedule a month ago. They were taking last-minute bookings through yesterday.
When Jessica returns to her room, she finds Pam crying. She had been reading her husband’s last letter to her, which was a kind of extended suicide note. As Jessica comforts Pam we get some backstory. Johnny had financial trouble, and had always been secretive. He was adopted and was ashamed that his birth mother had been an unwed teenager—Pam had only found that out four months after their wedding.
Pam asks Jessica to read the letter—she hasn’t shared it with anyone else, yet—but after handing it to Jessica they’re interrupted by room service, who brings them a bottle of champagne. The crewman, who is a living Italian stereotype named Ramon provides a bit of comic relief for a minute, then leaves. When he’s gone Pam reads the card that came with the champagne and is trouble. It says, “Bon voyage, Pepper. Have a lovely trip.”
“Pepper” was a pet name that Pam’s deceased husband had for her—he was the only one who called her that.
One grave look and a quick establishing shot of the ship under way at sea at night later, the scene shifts to the dining room. The two comedy relief ladies walk in and see the Maitre d’, who tells them their table number.
Carla, the one in red, spots a wealthy man (“An Oklahoma Cattle King”) and bribes the Maitre d’ to assign them to his table. He complies, though it’s unclear whether he’s actually doing it because of the bribe or if it’s generally acceptable to make seating requests. Since most people on a cruise don’t know each other, it’s hard to imagine it can make much difference which table people are seated at or, for that matter, that the cruise has any way to assign people to tables other than randomly.
As they’re shown off to their table, George Reed spots Jessica and wants to meet her and introduce Andrea to her. Andrea is a little shy but goes along with it. When they get to Jessica’s table, George professes to be a big fan. He introduces Andrea, but Jessica says that they’ve already met and Andrea then recalls the photo she took for them by the dockside.
A small amount of chitchat later, Jessica invites them to join her and Pam for dinner, but George declines as he doesn’t want to intrude. As they walk off, Jessica notices that the nice young man who bumped into them earlier is eating alone and suggested inviting him to join them. Pam admonishes Jessica to not try to set her up and Jessica unconvincingly professes that the thought never entered her mind.
As they start looking at their menus, Pam notices a special, paper-clipped to her menu.
This was Johnny’s favorite meal; Pam made it up and never shared the recipe with anyone. She’s shaken and gets up, scattering silverware and knocking over a glass, drawing attention. After she runs off the Maitre d’ comes over and asks what’s wrong. Jessica asks whose idea the special was (it was clipped to her menu, too). The Maire d’ says that it was no one’s idea as it’s not on their menu and must be someone’s idea of a joke. Strangely, he seems angry at Jessica for having had the temerity to have this joke played on her, and after ripping up the card he walks off.
As much as this is an interesting part of the mystery, I do have to say that the recipe is not very complex. Stuffing chicken is a common enough idea and while cheese is probably more common than nuts, nuts aren’t too far behind. And mushrooms are well known for going well with chicken, at least if you’ve sauteed them in wine first.
Anyway, Jessica looks baffled by the news that this item was not on the menu, so much so that she takes off her glasses, then we fade to black and go to commercial.
Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back from commercial, after an establishing shot of the ship underway at night, Jessica is in the purser’s office, asking the purser if it’s possible to find out who sent the anonymous champagne.
The purser looks it up in her filing cabinet and it turns out that it was an unsigned note with cash enclosed. (Enclosing cash was far more common in the 1980s than it is now; it’s not odd that the purser didn’t think that suspicious.) They give us a closeup of the note:
Jessica pulls out Johnny’s suicide note and the handwriting matches. Or, I should say, seems to match. The way that Johnny was found dead, by Pam, in the opening sequence, leaves no doubt that he is genuinely dead. Jessica says that she’s going to keep the note requesting the champagne and walks off.
Later that night Pamela is walking alone on the deck when she hears the name “Pepper” whispered in what sounds like a man’s voice. We cut between eerie moments of Pam trying to find the voice and Jessica back in the cabin trying the champagne that was sent. Why, I’m not entirely sure, since if it was purchased with cash and an anonymous note, it would have been selected and delivered by the ship’s staff and couldn’t possibly be tampered with. Of course, enough strange things are happening that it may be wisest to take nothing for granted, even the seemingly impossible.
After a little bit of comic relief on deck with one of the comediennes who is walking with the “Oklahoma Cattle King,” Jessica comes up and asks if they’ve seen Pam. Jessica describes Pam as “very pretty, blonde.” I find this description interesting. Maybe I’m just being put off by the giant 1980s hair and overly red makeup, but in any event, with opinions of beauty varying so much I would have used a more objective description, such as mentioning her height and hair style. Which suggests to me that this might be a way to play up the character for the audience. Be that as it may, they’re interrupted by the sound of a woman screaming.
It turns out to be the other comedienne, who is frightened at the sight of Pam lying unconscious on the ground. I’m not sure why she screamed at this—screaming is usually a fear reaction—but it was dramatically useful. Jessica and the young man who admired Pam, Russell Tompkins, rush up and the Russell, after ascertaining that she’s alive, called out to get the ship’s doctor.
The scene then shifts into the ship’s infirmary where the doctor finishes applying a bandage to Pam’s forehead, remarking that it was a bad fall but could have been worse. As he walks off the Captain, played by Leslie Nielson, questions Pam.
At the Captain’s request Pam tells the story; the only part we didn’t see for ourselves was that she was pushed down the stairs. That said, since we just got back from commercial break this is a good way to catch up anybody who just flipped to this channel.
Jessica asks that Pam spend the night in the infirmary. The ship’s doctor says that it would be best since she lost some blood. This is convenient to the plot but a little silly—how much blood can she have possibly lost through a cut on her forehead? Anyway, the captain agrees and Jessica asks that a constant guard be posted, to which the captain reluctantly agrees. Jessica then asks if she can speak with the Captain privately.
Back in his office, Jessica shows him the notes. The Captain agrees that the handwriting on the notes is identical, though Jessica suggests it might also be an excellent forgery. Since Johnny was known to be quite unambiguously dead, that really is the only option, but Jessica doesn’t mention this. Jessica suggests that the champagne be “tested” but the Captain incredulously points out that they don’t have the kind of facility that would test for “poison” aboard. (Given that there are thousands of poisons, even if they had a forensic laboratory on board, it would be far more productive to feed some to a mouse and see if it dies. It’s one thing to test for specific poisons based on symptoms, it’s quite another to test for every possible poison.)
Anyway, the Captain is a bit taken aback by the scope of the problem. There are 680 people aboard the ship. Jessica suggests that they can narrow the suspect list down considerably. Whoever is after Pam must have booked after Jessica did, and since Jessica booked only four days ago, there can’t be that many people who did that.
The Captain looks at the records and only about a dozen people booked after Jessica did. He shows her the list, remarking that it’s amazing what computers can do, nowadays. Jessica also requests 24 hour protection for Pamela and the Captain agrees.
The next morning she runs across George and Andrea. Andrea asks after Pam and Jessica tells her that it was just an accident. Pam was climbing the stairs and just slipped. I’m not sure why Jessica is lying, but I suppose it’s less awkward than admitting the truth. Or perhaps the idea is to put the killer off his guard.
In the next scene Jessica and Pam are walking along the deck discussing the case. There’s a moment of humor about the bodyguard who’s following them—for some reason Pam wasn’t told about this—but we do get a bit of backstory. Johnny’s adoptive parents died in a car crash several years ago. There is a bit of a lead with his adoptive mother, though—several months before he died she contacted him. She wrote a note and asked to meet, but she never showed up.
Shortly after this comes out, Russell Tompkins shows up and asks Pamela how she’s feeling. Jessica invites him to join them on their walk, pressures him into accepting, then immediately remembers she has an appointment for which she is late and runs off. This is close to the least subtle I’ve seen Jessica be.
This does segue us into Jessica using the ship’s radio phone to call her brother Marshall and ask him to do some digging into Johnny’s birth mother. She suggests contacting Marshall’s drinking buddy Judge Willis and getting him to help in view of the extraordinary situation. Marshall agrees, and tells Jessica that, though it doesn’t seem to mean anything, Pam’s house was broken into a couple days ago and nothing seems to be missing.
After the phone call she and the Captain discuss the situation. If the person terrorizing Pam is Johnny’s biological mother, that narrows the list down from the original twelve who booked after Jessica to women in their 40s who booked after Jessica, which are the two comic relief women and Mrs. Andrea Reed. The Captain won’t believe that Andrea is terrorizing Pam. He’s known her for years and the Reeds even honeymooned about his ship last year. “If she’s insane then I am too,” he declares. To which Jessica responds, “That’s precisely what the Bordens said about their daughter Lizzie.”
For those who don’t know, Lizzie Borden was accused (and acquitted) of the murder of her parents, and about whom the poem was written:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.
As Jessica prepares to leave, the Captain tells her that there is a fourth candidate: the purser, Miss Shelley. She’s forty three years old and three days ago the scheduled purser took ill and Miss Shelley volunteered to replace him and was quite insistent about it.
And on that bombshell the scene fades to black and we go to commercial.
As Pam and Russel Tompkins get acquainted, Jessica, elsewhere on the ship, receives the developed pictures Pam had put in the day before. Then the PA system pages “Passenger Pepper Crane” and directs her to the purser’s office. Pam runs off, and Jessica, hearing it, runs to the purser’s office.
In the purser’s office, the purser is confused as to why Pam is yelling at her about a practical joke, but upon hearing her name she says that she doesn’t know about any joke but they did receive a telex for her.
Upon reading it, Pamela faints.
I’m a bit unclear as to why they paged “Pepper Crane” when the telegram is addressed to “Pamela Crane,” and it doesn’t seem like we’re going to get an explanation Perhaps this is just be a mistake that the prop department made. The scene shifts to sick bay where the Captain orders that no one is to come in or out unless it’s an emergency. Jessica then suggests that they have a talk with Miss Shelley.
Miss Shelley explains that she took the assignment because she needed an escape from a difficult relationship. The man’s name is Geoffrey Windom, but don’t call his house because his wife will answer. She also looked into the “telex” and it was placed several days ago with orders to delay transmission until today. The sender remained anonymous.
Jessica then goes off to find the two comedy relief comediennes to interrogate them in her inimitable, subtle style. By which I mean that Jessica pretends to be dim-witted and superstitious. After a bit of small-talk she tells the women that they were able to get on the ship at the last minute because it’s a “jinx ship,” which explains how many things have been going wrong for her. A mention of their travel agent prompts them to explain their backstory—they had been planning a longer vacation the following year but then the company policy changed and they couldn’t save vacation, so they had to use it or lose it. This ship was the only one they could book on such short notice.
As George Reed passes, Jessica excuses herself to talk to him. She says that it’s urgent that she talk to his wife, and he says that Andrea has been sleeping in the cabin. That alarms Jessica, since a little bit ago one of the stewards had been sent to find all of the suspects and he checked Andrea’s cabin and couldn’t find her.
They rush off to her cabin and discover that she’s dead.
We then get a closeup of the items on the floor by her hand:
Jessica takes George back to her cabin. When the Captain comes in, they’re looking through photographs. They show the Captain the paper that was clutched in Andrea’s hand. It was a photograph of Pam with Johnny:
There were a lot of other photos, all taken with a telephoto lens, in her luggage. There was also a copy of Johnny’s birth certificate and a sample of Johnny’s handwriting.
George then narrates the events of the last few hours. They were sunning themselves on the deck when they heard the page asking her and two other women to come to the Captain’s office. She suddenly became agitated and said that she didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially to the Captain. She said she was going to their cabin to lie down. He offered to go with her but she refused.
This is interrupted by Jessica getting a phone call on the radio phone in the Captain’s office. It’ turns out to be’s from Jessica’s brother Marshall with the information Jessica had requested. Johnny Crane had been born to a seventeen year old high school student named Andrea Jeffries.
George confirms that Jeffries was Andrea’s maiden name.
The Captain concludes the case is over, which Jessica seems to accept. She walks with George Reed out of the office. He remarks that she’s been very understanding, given all that Andrea put her niece through. Jessica comforts him, saying that once the authorities find the private detective who took the photos, the case will be closed. George is surprised at this and says that he’s certain that Andrea took the photos herself since she was an expert photographer. As he walks off, Jessica looks concerned.
Jessica meets Pam in the infirmary. When Pam remarks she feels bad for Andrea, to be so unhappy as to do that kind of thing, Jessica replies that Andrea wasn’t unhappy at all. She was a bright, hard-working woman who made a mistake early in her life, but she didn’t deserve to be murdered. When Pam asks by whom Andrea was murdered, Jessica says that it was by her husband, but she’s just not sure how to prove it.
And on that bombshell we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial Jessica tries to talk the Captain into detaining George Reed, which the Captain flatly refuses to do simply upon Jessica’s say-so. I’m really not sure why Jessica was asking for George Reed to be detained, since it was hardly likely that he would jump overboard and escape by swimming, especially when he didn’t think that anyone suspected him.
We then cut to George Reed in his cabin, pouring himself a drink and talking to a photo of his dead wife. He toasts to love and fortune, and elaborates on the fortune part, looking forward to having all the money himself. Then there’s a knock at the door and Jessica calls out to him.
When he opens the door, we see Jessica pretending to be drunk.
Angela Lansbury is a talented actress, so it’s a decent impression of someone pretending to be drunk in an over-the-top way. She accuses George of murdering Andrea, and shows him the evidence—the photo she took of Jessica, Pam, and Marshall right before the trip.
This contradicts Andrea being an expert photographer, as George said, proving that he killed her.
George says that there’s a reasonable explanation and invites her in, but she refuses. She staggers off and George grabs a bright red jacket then follows her. The chase takes surprisingly long for how slowly a pretend-drunk woman staggers, and then George finally catches up with Jessica and tries to kill her, throwing an arm around her neck. Jessica then throws him over her shoulder and Pam and Jessica step out of a nearby doorway, and Pam takes a picture of him on the ground. He looks up and the “Jessica” he tried to murder turns out to be Russell Tompkins in a blond wig and the same coat and hat Jessica had been wearing.
The next day the ship’s crew delivers George Reed to the local authorities.
I’m not sure where the cruise could have made it to where the authorities where panama hats, shorts, and knee-high socks that’s one day away from where the cruise departed, but then it’s also slightly strange that they’re handing George Reed over to the local authorities. The murder was committed, so far as we can tell, in international waters and so far as we know the ship was flying a US flag so it is the responsibility of the United States to prosecute the crime.
The Captain then greets Mrs. Fletcher. He informs her that George Reed made a full confession. Jessica says that she can’t help but think that Andrea would still be alive if they had only come to the truth sooner. The Captain doubts it; George had been planning this for months. His original plan had been to terrorize Johnny but Johnny died too soon for that. By the time he realized the plan would work just as well on Pam, Pam had entered the sanitarium, so he had to wait for her to come out.
The Captain then says he owes Jessica an apology and offers to take her to dinner. She makes a joke about one something the comic relief Italian Stewards, Ramone, had said, they both laugh, and we go to credits.
I think that this is a very clever episode. I have to admit that I thought that the culprit was the purser, and I really didn’t see it coming that George Reed was going to murder his wife. It’s actually quite rare for a Murder, She Wrote to put the first murder after the second commercial break, but even apart from that, it had me convinced that the mystery was primarily about who was tormenting Pam. It built it up well, laying in clues and keeping the suspense going.
That’s not to say that the plot was flawless. A lot of the plot hinged on the person tormenting Pam having followed them to the cruise, but how could George have done that? He could hardly have kept a twenty four hour watch on the sanitarium in order to know that she made plans with Jessica for a cruise. Are we supposed to assume that he bugged her telephone? I don’t see how he could have. Or did he bribe the psychiatrist handling Pam’s case to tell him of any travel plans Pam might make? That hardly seems likely. But that just about runs the gamut of ways he could have known about Pam’s plans. This seems especially hard to justify because he would have had no reason to assume that Pam was going to go on a cruise at all. The most natural thing would be to expect Pam to go home after her stay in the sanitarium.
Which actually brings up a curious question: why did he follow Pam onto the cruise? If we assume he somehow got the knowledge that it doesn’t seem possible for him to have had, why didn’t he just wait until Pam was back? He wasn’t in a particular rush.
That said, the cruise probably would have been better than killing his wife randomly, had Jessica not been aboard. Well, I’m not sure. On the one hand, the cruise gives a much better chance of Andrea being “caught” which really helps to explain her “suicide,” but without Jessica I’m not so sure that would have happened. It seems equally possible that without Jessica, Andrea being the one terrorizing Pam wouldn’t have been discovered, and her suicide is hard to explain apart from her being caught. That said, it might still have worked since he could present all of the evidence of her having been obsessed with Pam and on the cruise, recognizing Pam would be fairly easy since she made herself conspicuous on several occasions. On balance, if we ignore the impossibility of George knowing that Pam was going on this cruise, I think it does make sense that he followed her.
That said, I do wonder how he dealt with Andrea being paged. She would have no reason to not immediately obey the summons, since she had no idea she was implicated, and it would be difficult for George to persuade her to go to her room and have a poisoned drink first. I suppose the best explanation is that he happened to have killed her right before the summons, and was just making the most of the coincidence when he was telling Jessica and the Captain the story.
So, overall, I think the plot held together quite well except for the part where George knew that Pam was going on this cruise at the last minute. And unfortunately the entire plot depended on that. They did, at least, bury this plot hole pretty well. About the only way to have made this work that I can think of would have been to have George have taken steps to forge some kind of connection or acquaintance with Johnny and Pamela Crane, which would entail the setup having been longer. That would provide a way for them to have been notified, though it possibly could have made them more direct suspects and reduced the degree to which “it was somebody who booked after us.” On the other hand, that was only ever the assumption because they had nothing else to go on, and it could have been worked such that they still assumed that.
Leaving that aside, I think they did a great job of leading us to believe that the culprit was the purser. She always had an explanation, but also always seemed to be at the center of what was going on. It was some top-notch misdirection.
The unbelievable coincidences were also kept to a minimum. In fact, the only one I can think of was that Jessica and Pam just happened to pick, at the last minute, a cruise captained by a man that had captained many cruises that Andrea had taken, including her honeymoon cruise. That seems too much of a coincidence to be believed, but it also was kind of a throwaway line that didn’t affect the plot in any way.
Speaking of the Captain, he was an interesting character. I can’t really convey it in my description of the episode but Leslie Nielsen has tremendous charisma which he brought to the role of the Captain. So much so that it’s hard to separate out the character as written from Leslie’s portrayal of him. As the primary authority figure with which Jessica interacted, he was somewhere in between the typical two extremes of asking Jessica to investigate and asking her to keep her nose all the way out of the investigation. I can’t help but think that apart from Leslie’s charisma he wouldn’t have been very interesting. There’s a lesson, there, I think, about improving merely functional characters with interesting characterization. I think that can be overdone, though. For example, Ramone, the Italian stereotype was certainly given traits beyond what were necessary for his very minor function of delivering champagne and searching for the suspects, but it was mostly just annoying. I think that the important thing is that the characterization must be related to their function in the story. The Captain was concerned both with the individual passenger (Pam) as well as with his hundreds of other passengers, as well as his responsibility to the cruise liner. Ramone being an Italian stereotype was as relevant as having a dancing bear on stage.
I think it worth noticing, too, what the setting of the ship contributed: it gave a closed circle of suspects like you get in the classic mystery setting of the remote mansion. That always makes mysteries interesting; it reminds me of Chesterton’s dictum that the limits of an artistic work make it interesting; the frame is part of the painting. This kind of closed environment gives us something of a tight frame around the painting. It draws our attention closer to the details. Which made it especially interesting that the episode had such an element of misdirection to it as to who the victim of the episode was.
Overall, I think that this was a good episode and a very interesting one.
Next week we’re on a private Mediterranean island for Paint Me a Murder.
The Trouble With Secular Priests
There seems to be a kind of person who really, really wants a job which consists of conducting rituals rather than doing something where the outcome matters. That’s not illegitimate. Rituals matter to community. But I think we’ve made way too many secular priests.
Perhaps the chief example I’ve seen of secular priests are academics. Not all, of course. Hence why some people like to focus on STEM1. But a lot of them. And a big part of the problem with these secular priests is that the rituals they do are hidden away. They’ve become untethered from the community they (theoretically) serve.
This is a partial explanation for why people are getting PhDs with dissertations that argue that complaining about smells associated with the transmission of disease is racist. I’m sure the academic who wrote that convinced herself it’s true, but that wasn’t the point. The point was writing a dissertation. If it wasn’t this topic, it was going to be something. The point wasn’t the contents of the book, but the book itself. The point wasn’t what was said in the viva voces (aka thesis defense), the point was that things were said in from of a thesis committee. The point was the performance of the ritual.
In itself, the point being the performance of the ritual is not necessarily a problem. Rituals, by their nature, exist because doing them has some benefit apart from the things they effect. In this case, though, the ritual is completely divorced from the community that the ritual is supposed to unify. The result is that the ritual has become weird.
I started out by saying that the people who want to be secular priests want jobs where outcome doesn’t matter, but that’s not actually an accurate description of what priests do. If you look at any religion which has existed for centuries, you will see that its rituals change over time.
Sometimes more, sometimes less, but they change.
This is because the authorities responsible for the rituals are in touch with the people and look at the effect that the rituals have, and modify them. Sometimes it’s explicit, as in the case of the Catholic Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, which publishes authoritative manuals on how rituals are to be performed within the Catholic Church. Sometimes it’s just that some rituals are more popular than others and the popular ones survive while the unpopular ones wither away. But whatever the mechanism, the rituals change over time in response to changes in the people and how existing rituals affect them.
In Academia, which is a secular religion that’s been around for perhaps a hundred years or so, we’ve managed to create a secular class of priests who conduct all of the rituals behind closed doors. Which means that there’s no feedback loop on what effect the rituals are having on the community, which means that the only feedback loop is on what effect the rituals are having on the secular priests. This has the effect of being an unchecked amplification loop, as each new generation of academics tries to outdo the previous one, and doesn’t really try to do anything else.
And I don’t think that it has entirely escape the notice of the academics that their rituals aren’t doing anyone any good. In fact, I suspect that’s one reason why insane2 social justice movements have become popular with them. They must be insane, because otherwise they would just be ordinary work where the outcome matters. But they are about social justice because this has a (theoretical) relationship to the community to whose benefit the rituals are done.
On some level, they know that they’re supposed to be doing someone some good.
1. “Science Technology Engineering and Math”
2. I mean that the means have no rational relationship to the goals and no reasonable person would think that the proposed means would achieve the stated goals.
SNL’s Home Headache Test
An oldie but goodie:
One-on-Several Fights
Incredibly popular in movies and other media are fights where one good guy takes on several bad guys and wins. Not quite as popular, but still popular, is explaining how unrealistic this is. And, to be fair, it is unrealistic. But it’s not as unrealistic as the critics make it out to be. After all, the entire social order of the middle ages was built around the fact that one guy, if he’s big and strong and well trained and armored and well-armed, can take on several less well-armed, less well-trained men and beat them (almost) every time.
We have, of course, all seen the classic triumph of cool-over-realistic which is a single good guy taking on a mass of bad guys in a featureless room where at least the good guy is unarmed and the bad guys helpfully wait their turn to fight the good guy one-on-one and be immediately dispatched with a single punch, not even necessarily to a vulnerable spot. And yes, this is nonsense. It mostly exists in reference to previous things, where they’ve taken what was cool about a more realistic fight and turned it up to eleven. It’s the fight-choreography equivalent of someone falling out of a building and we see them at least five feet away before we cut to commercial and when we come back someone manages to grab their arm and save them. It’s unrealistic, but it was intentionally unrealistic as a means of being more-cool-than-real. It’s cheating, basically. But this exaggeration no more means that every one-on-several fight is unrealistic than the exaggeration about falling means that people can’t stay on buildings.
An interesting example of this is from the movie Reacher:
When the head tough says that it’s five against one, Reacher (played by Tom Cruise) replies that it’s three against one. He’ll need to contend with the leader and two wingmen. The last two always run. And there’s a lot of truth here.
Before getting to the true parts, I do need to say that there is a problem with the casting of Tom Cruise as Reacher. While he’s a fantastic actor, he’s just way too physically small for the part. Tom Cruise is 5’7″ and about 150 pounds (that’s 170cm and 68kg in tyranny units). Reacher is supposed to be 6’5″ and 250 pounds (195cm and 113kg). When it comes to unarmed combat, that’s night-and-day. The amount of damage a muscular 6’5″ man can do in a single punch is so much greater. Plus all of the street toughs here look to be under six feet tall; a 6’5″ man would be able to hit them at distances they can’t hit him (the name “Reacher” actually comes from frequently being asked to reach things for people because of his heigth). He’ll also have an absurd advantage in any kind of grappling because of his substantial mass advantage. If you imagine this scene with a 6’5″ tall guy instead of Tom Cruise, as it was written to be, it will feel a lot less unrealistic.
But even with Tom Cruise, the basic psychology is correct. A lot of fight analysis and even fight choreography assumes that people in a fight are like video game enemies—all willing to fight to the death no matter how much damage they’ve taken. In reality, most human beings dislike pain and try to avoid it. Moreover, most people who become criminal toughs don’t do it because they’re hard working, disciplined, clever, capable, and adaptable and choose to not go into legitimate business because Evil is their passion. A great many people are happy to kick a man when he’s on the ground but would prefer to wait until he’s on the ground to engage. Cowardice—which is quite common—will have a very similar effect to people waiting their turn.
This aversion to getting seriously hurt will also influence the actual attacks people make. They’re going to be far more likely to only get a little close to the good guy. The downside is that they won’t be able to do much damage if they do hit him, but the huge upside—as far as they’re concerned—is that he won’t be able to do much to them. But they’ll still look like they’re doing their part.
A similar sort of thing will also explain the good guy taking bad guys out with a single punch. Now, a size, strength, and technique advantage will tend to make his punches far more effective than theirs, but the bad guys being cowards will also do a lot of that work—after getting hit, they’re going to be far more likely to exaggerate how much they were hurt. After all, they probably don’t care very much about the objectives of the evil organization for whom they work. As bullies, they’re happy to hurt people who are weaker than themselves but when it comes to fighting someone who is stronger, their chief aim is to protect themselves. This will be as much to protect themselves from the evil organization as from the good guy; if they just run away the evil organization might shoot them as a deserter. But if they fight a little bit and get a minor injury then play it up for all its worth, well, they probably won’t have done any worse than anyone else on their team. If you get hit in the head and it only hurts but you lie on the ground until the fighting is over, who is to know that you weren’t really knocked unconscious for a few minutes? Or if the good guys hits a bag guy in the stomach, will Team Evil really administer medical tests to find out if it was a genuine liver shot or if he was just lying down because it was much safer?
I know that in the movies Team Evil will capriciously shoot anyone who survived who doesn’t tell his story convincingly enough, but in real life foot soldiers aren’t unlimited and while there are certain advantages to having the people on your side believe that you’ll shoot them if they fail so they will consider fighting to the death, this has the unfortunate side-effect of encouraging desertion and never noticing the opponent because if you never start a fight you won’t get shot for not finishing it.
Also, soldiers who all fight to the death die a lot, and there are a lot of circumstances where a tactical retreat is far superior. (People who won’t retreat are very vulnerable to being picked off a few at a time because they won’t retreat to where there are superior numbers.)
Of course, the unarmed one-on-several fight is the most extreme possible example. In real life people often carry weapons and don’t tend to fight in large arenas. Somebody, like the good guy, who routinely gets into fights might well wear at least some level of body armor. Especially with modern materials, it doesn’t take a lot to get a pretty high level of protection from fists and knives. Body armor that protects against rifles is cumbersome enough that it’s questionably worth it, but armor that protects against handguns is significantly more practical. (And it works to add decorative abs and pectoral muscle bulges to body armor.) Add in a complex environment that a clever person who has practiced can take advantage of and the one-on-several fights become quite a bit more realistic.
Of course, any kind of fight is extremely dangerous and a one-on-several fight is particularly dangerous because it’s so much more likely that a mistake may get exploited. I’m just saying that they’re not laugh-out-loud implausible if written correctly.
Murderers Who Make Bad Choices
Sometimes in murder mysteries, the plot will involve the murderer making a bad choice. Sometimes this is picking a bad time to put their plan into action. Sometimes this is thinking that something would work that wouldn’t, or predicting that someone would react to their plan in a way that they didn’t. Sometimes this is just coming up with a bad plan. So, what are we to make of this? Are any of them legitimate or are they all bad storytelling?
With the exception of a completely bad plan, I think that they can be legitimate, but I do want to elaborate on the counter-argument first. The most fundamental problem with the murderer making a bad choice is that it spoils the denouement. In the denouement, the detective takes the tangled mess woven by the intelligence of the murderer and sets it out, rationally, so that things now make sense. This is spoiled by the murderer making a bad choice because it is intrinsically impossible to give a good explanation for a bad decision. It is possible, of course, to give a good explanation for a good decision made upon mistaken premises which works out badly because the mismatch with reality has consequences, but that’s not a bad decision.
Against this, the writer of detective fiction must balance that every clue for the detective to find is, by definition, a mistake on the part of the murderer who does not want to be caught. The weakness of all detectives is the perfect murder—a murder in which no clues are left. The heart of detective fiction is that the perfect murder is not really possible since murder is wrong. Someone who uses murder as a tool is a fallen creature and fallen creatures do not commit only a single sin, since sin warps and deforms the soul. Very commonly this takes the form of the murderer assuming that he can control all circumstances so as to leave no clues and the world being out of his control intrudes and causes clues to be left, in effect punishing him for his hubris.
And here we see, I think, why it can be legitimate for the murderer to have simply made a bad decision: the murderer already made a bad decision in making the decision to murder someone, even apart from the morality of it, because the murderer should have known his limitations and that it is not possible to fully control the circumstances as he needs to in order to get away with it.
But not all bad decisions are created equally. A bad decision may be legitimate as far as the structure of the art form goes, but yet not be artistically interesting. The problem with a fundamentally bad plan is that it is irrational at approximately every level, and so there is nothing for the detective to explain. “And then he put hot sauce in the coffee because he thought it was poisonous. When that didn’t work, he bought his father another hat in the hope that two hats would cause his father to die of a broken heart. When that didn’t work, he tried dying the new hat green to give his father a heart attack by freight, even though his father was blind…” You could, perhaps, make this work in a slapstick comedy like the movie Murder By Death, but then Murder By Death was only sometimes funny.
I suspect that the line which demarcates artistically acceptable bad choices from artistically unacceptable bad choices is how commonly that kind of bad choice is made. Picking a sub-optimal time, under stress, to put a reasonable plan into motion is the kind of bad choice that anyone might make. Trying to use hot sauce to poison someone isn’t. The examination of partial mental breakdown is far more artistically interesting, because we all live among that, than is the examination of near-complete mental breakdown.
The Science of Test Driving a Potential Spouse
I recently saw someone try to support the idea of “test driving” a potential marriage partner prior to getting married in order to ensure that they are “sexually compatible”, and then in the ensuing discussion I was told to look up the research on “the wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”. My understanding is that what research in this “field” exists doesn’t support the importance of “test driving” a potential marriage partner, but that’s irrelevant because there simply can’t be any good science on this subject. We can tell that by the simple expedient of asking what kinds of experiments could get us the data we want, and discovering that it’s not possible to do them.
So, what kind of experiment would show us that “there’s a wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”? Clearly, we’ll need to have a large number of females copulate with a wide variety of partners and measure their responsiveness during each copulation, then compare the things to which each female maximally responded to in order to see how big the range is. You can’t leave off any of these things; if you only study a few women, you won’t have the statistical power to conclude anything. If you leave off the wide variety of partners, then you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to versus there simply being a wide variety in the degree to which women respond at all. If you leave off measuring, instead relying on surveys, you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to and there being a wide variety in how women describe their response.
This experiment is both impractical and impossible; let’s discuss the impracticality of it first. One obvious problem is recruitment: there are very few people willing to copulate with a large number of strangers in a laboratory, covered in probes to measure responsiveness, and observed by experts, on command. Also, since you will have to pay the participants and this amounts to prostitution, there are relatively few places you can legally conduct this experiment, especially since bringing in the variety of women you want may well count as sex trafficking, doubly so because of the use of blindfolds to eliminate attractiveness as a confounding factor when measuring the effect of physical variations of anatomy. Moreover, getting this approved by an IRB (ethics committee) is pretty dicey. Never say never, of course.
But supposing one were to manage to work all of these practicalities out and conduct the experiment, it would not produce any data relevant to real life because people’s enjoyment and satisfaction in copulation is largely determined by their relationship to the person with whom they are copulating. Married people frequently report greater enjoyment of sex after five or ten years of marriage than right at the beginning, and it is impossible to have your experimental subjects form real relationships for years to each of the many subjects with whom they will be paired. If nothing else human beings don’t live that long, but repeated pair bonding is also well known to weaken subsequent bonds, especially without time between them. Plus people don’t form real bonds on command.
It is thus impossible, even in theory, to scientifically study the kinds of things which might support the idiotic idea of “test driving” a potential spouse. And bad science is worse than no science.
I should probably mention that the idea of test driving a spouse, in addition to being immoral, is also idiotic because it’s predicated on two premises, both of which are false:
- people can’t learn
- people don’t change
Young people are told to not pay too much attention to the looks of a potential husband or wife because looks are only skin deep and virtue, character, and personality matter far more. This is all quite true, but it’s also the case that selecting a husband or wife based on their looks is futile anyway because their looks will change as they age. You can find this with any celebrity who is in their sixties—just look at pictures of them from the various decades and while they are recognizable, they will be quite different. And celebrities tend to be selected for being people who change the least as they age.
In the same way, people’s tastes and preferences change. Women’s bodies change after pregnancy and childbirth. Quite apart from the immorality of the thing, the idea that finding who people who happen to match each other in their sexual enjoyments will be conducive to lasting happiness is simply unrelated to reality. Everyone must learn and adapt. There are no exceptions to that in this world.
Angela Lansbury’s Exercise Video
A friend recently told me about Angela Lansbury’s exercise video. It’s really quite fascinating:
I’m not entirely sure that “exercise video” is really the right word to describe it. The actual title is Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves. It’s subtitled, A Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being At Any Age. It reminds me of some of the videos I’ve seen of old people doing Tai Chi in public parks in China—mostly slow, deliberate movements through a fairly large range of motion.
Given the popularity, today, of moving quickly and lifting heavy things (or even of lifting heavy things quickly) it’s easy to look at a video like this and scoff. Is it even an exercise video? At the time (1988) it was possible to cover oneself neck to foot in spandex, throw on some leg warmers, and move with a great deal more vigor to Jane Fonda’s workout tape. Or you could sweat to the oldies with Richard Simmons. And if you didn’t have the spandex and leg warmers, you could do the same thing to Jack Lalanne’s TV show—and you could even buy one of his “glamour bands,” which was basically a modern resistance band before they were popular. (If you could get reruns; his TV show ended its long run in 1985.)
So why get Angela Lansbury’s tape where, by modern standards, she barely does anything?
The thing is, there’s a lot embedded within those modern standards. It’s not just what we do, such as pumping iron. It’s also what we want. Those of us who grew up in the 80s, 90s, and beyond have different goals for our bodies than people who grew up in the 1930s and 40s did. Even those of us who don’t work out want to be muscular and strong. That was not nearly so much a goal of people who grew up in the 1930s and 40s. Especially by the time they were in their fifties and sixties in the 1980s (by “grew up” I’m referring to when they were old enough to remember cultural influences). Not all of them, of course. Charles Atlas and other strong men had a market back in the 1930s. But for a lot of people, and especially women at the time, they had no great interest in being strong and muscular; mostly what they wanted, if they had aspirations of fitness at all, was to not fall apart. You have to remember that they grew up at a time when medical advice often featured the health-promoting benefits of rest. Women might be prescribed weeks of bed-rest after giving birth; there’s a family story of my grandmother finally being allowed to dangle her legs over the side of the bed several days after giving birth to my mother (or one of her sisters; I can’t remember which).
Angela Lansbury’s exercise video makes a great deal more sense for that kind of goal. Moreover, if that’s a person’s goal, they might already have weakened to the point where Positive Moves is actually challenging. There are various points at which Angela gives alternatives for if the movement she’s doing is too strenuous or the viewer otherwise can’t do it. And thinking back, they were movements it seems possible that both of my grandmothers in the 1980s might have found challenging. It’s something to consider that there are people who haven’t sat down on the ground and gotten up from it in years.
If a movement is too hard to do, and by doing a modification you’re able to work up to it—that is, by definition, building strength. It can be misleading, to us, that the maximum amount of strength that someone wants to build is so far below the maximum that they’re capable of, but I think it’s interesting to try to imaginatively enter into this kind of mindset. The more difficult it is to imagine, the greater the benefit to our ability to see things from another’s perspective in trying. I’m not going to stop squatting with a barbell loaded to hundreds of pounds on my shoulders in favor of doing Angela Lansbury’s positive moves, but I think it is useful as a workout video for one’s imagination.
The Parable of the Dishonest Steward
The parable of the dishonest steward appears in the Gospel of Luke, and is very interesting:
Then he also said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another he said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”
This is a perplexing parable because Jesus is drawing a lesson from a dishonest man, which presents the difficulty of figuring out which parts we’re supposed to copy and which parts we’re not. And other questions like, “why did the master praise the dishonest steward for giving away his property?” To figure this out, we need to look at what actually happened: yes, the dishonest steward gave away some of his master’s property by canceling some of the debt, but he didn’t give it all away. And he could have.
In modern times, when a person is fired, the usual procedure is to lock them out of all of the computer systems of a business before telling them that they’re fired, so they can’t do anything bad on their way out. But the master doesn’t do this with the dishonest Steward. Instead, he leaves him Steward until he has drawn up a full account of his stewardship. Why?
Because the master didn’t know what he had.
In order to know what was his, he needed the dishonest steward to tell him. The dishonest steward was thus in a position to give away everything. If he told his master, “I’m sorry, but you’re broke” the master did not know better.
Further, since he was still steward, he was within his rights to entirely cancel the debts of the people whose debts he partially forgave. It was not honest, but it was his right. So why didn’t he entirely cancel out the debt of those debtors?
We’re not told, of course, but there is a strong hint in the fact that he did not forgive the same amount to both debtors. He forgave one half his debt and the other a fifth of his debt. Since he was praised for being prudent, we must assume that he forgave different amounts because of reasons specific to each, that is, because it was prudent. Perhaps the one could only repay half anyway, and the other could repay four fifths. Perhaps the one who was forgiven half had done something for the master earlier while the one who was forgiven a fifth hadn’t. We don’t know, but we must presume that the actions made sense in context.
And what about this from the master’s perspective, when he hears about it? Had the Steward canceled the entire debt, he would be very angry at the dishonest steward. But he was left with two thirds of what he was owed, which was far better off than he might have been. It’s not optimal, but if the master was realistic—and he seems to have been realistic—he got rid of the steward far more cheaply than he might realistically have and better than many have. (Just look up the history of how many sports figures were left penniless by dishonest business managers.) Moreover, he might even have received some small benefits from the forgiveness of the debt in addition to the money he got back. If the one who was forgiven half of his debt had done something for the master, that debt is now paid. If the debtor was only able to pay half, he might now get the half promptly. If nothing else, in not making a fuss over the canceled portion of the debt, he might at least receive good will from the debtor in case the situation is ever reversed and the master is the one who owes. It’s possible that he got rid of the dishonest steward even more cheaply than we know.
This also shows a great deal of understanding of human nature on the part of the dishonest steward, because consider what happens next: he’s going to ask the people whose debts he reduced for a job. That’s a delicate thing to do when he was just fired for dishonesty. Sure, they have reason to like him, but at the same time a job for many years can easily cost a lot more than twenty kors of wheat, especially if the guy is dishonest. Critically, he shows that while he’s dishonest, he’s not too dishonest. If the debtors are at all reasonable, they know that it’s very hard to find a completely honest man—consider how long Diogenese looked without finding one—so one who is only a bit dishonest is a reasonable choice. And he proved himself to be only somewhat dishonest by his actions when the metaphorical fecal matter had hit the artificial wind generator, i.e. when he was deeply stressed and might have been desperate or resentful.
Putting this all together, we can see what Christ referred to when he said that the children of his world are more prudent in dealing with this generation. The dishonest steward knew how people thought and acted, and acted accordingly. In modern terms, his psychology was good, even if his morals were not. He knew how to effectively manipulate people; he manipulated them with the truth. The great advantage of manipulating people with the truth is that, when they find out, they are not angry with you.
And here we come to the part to imitate: the common name for manipulating a person to his own benefit is “supporting” him. We, each of us, have an influence on the people we meet in this life, and if we will their good, we should support them. To do that, we must be able to understand things from their perspective, and how we and they and the things under our control relate, and then use the truth to manipulate them to their benefit. That is, to effectively support them.
I think that this also sheds some light on what Jesus says after—to use dishonest wealth to make friends so we will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. All wealth—all possessions—always have some dishonesty about them because we never do a perfect job. Everything we make, or deliver, or do for another is always, because of our human weakness, at least slightly less than it should be. But this does not completely invalidate it; there is still good that we can do with it and if we use it well—that is, prudently—it can make people better off and it’s worth doing this. And it’s not easy to do this and it’s worth putting the effort into doing it well.
This stands against the mistake of being “so good that you’re good for nothing,” that is, so fixated on purity that you never accomplish anything good. That’s not to say that one should choose to be dishonest; heaven forbid. But it does mean that there are limits to how much one should allow the fear of what is technically called “remote material cooperation” to prevent one from ever doing anything.
World War 2 And the Religion of the State
I was recently reminded of how much of western culture, in the 1970s, was about World War 2. In that period, the second world war was only thirty years before and the people of responsible age (that is, those in their forties through their sixties) had spent many of their formative years in it. And World War 2, which was in many ways only the second great industrial war, had been a total war in a way the world had not really seen before. And I think that this total war had the effect, as few other things besides Communism have had, of turning the state into a religion. And I think that this may have had some strange effects afterwards.
When I say that the second World War turned the state into a religion, I mean that the war, and by extension the state, became the primary purpose of its citizens’ lives. (I’m going to confine my remarks to America, since I know its history best, but from what I’ve read this was largely true of many other countries as well.) This was not absolute, of course, and individuals might have maintained a better set of priorities. Still, the state tried very hard to make itself the purpose of its citizens lives. You can see this in the way that people were encouraged to do everything “for the war effort”. You can find all sorts of examples of magazine ads by companies who aren’t selling products because their factories are now making weapons, but that they will one day resume, so don’t forget them! There was also an enormous amount of propaganda produced, which covered almost everything, since the war touched on almost everything. There were ads which encouraged people to accept rationing of food. There were ads encouraging people to put all their spare money into government bonds rather than buy things for themselves. There were ads that encouraged young women to get a job in the war effort to help bring their sweethearts and husbands home sooner. And from what I recall talking to relatives to had lived through it, much of it worked. As much as people might grumble and there was a thriving black market, people did take up the spirit of the thing and often think about the war effort whose nearest land battles were many thousands of miles away.
And the thing is, while all this can be done as a matter of secondary loyalty, fallen human beings are weak and this kind of total subservience to the state had the effect, I am beginning to suspect, of supplanting God with the state in the hearts of many people. I’ve heard the explanation that many people fell away from Christianity after WW2 because Christian churches were too compliant with the governments that brought us to such an awful war. The horrors of World War 2 broke people. Christianity’s old tired answers were no longer good enough. I’ve heard many such things. And, truth be told, they’ve never sounded very convincing. Christianity made sense under the horrors of the Roman empire and Germanic barbarism but didn’t make sense after the horrors of World War 2? The secular governments of the world plunged people into war and starvation, and Christianity didn’t stand against them enough, so let’s abandon Christianity and become completely secular? These aren’t serious explanations.
The explanation that the people started worshiping an idol—the State—and as idol worship does, this caused the people to turn away from God? That does, at least, explain.
I don’t want to overstate this idea. I’m just beginning to turn it over in my mind. But it does explain a bunch of things which had always not-quite-fit.
Rumpole of the Bailey Seems Almost Good
Starting in the mid 1970s, there was a British TV series called Rumpole of the Bailey, which was about a barrister named Rumpole. It was a bit of a courtroom drama and a bit of a comedy. Rumpole was a highly skilled barrister who had a tendency to quote the poetry of Wadsworth and to wax occasionally philosophical. My father used to watch it, when I was a child, and I recently had a hankering for it.
Here’s the first episode ever made:
The actor, Leo McKern, did a fantastic job. He really sold the character, and gave him an outsized amount of vivacity. It’s easy to be quite taken with Rumpole.
Until you watch a full episode or two.
Rumpole is not a good man. The writer, John Mortimer, who was a barrister and from his biography on Wikipedia not a good man either, plays a trick that I’ve seen a fair amount in nihilistic works: putting in little tidbits that suggest that Rumpole is a good man in order to keep the audience going.
To give an example: in the third episode, Rumpole has successfully defended a woman on a major drug charge by impugning the evidence against her, but the case adjourns for lunch before the charge can be dismissed and during that adjournment she tells Rumpole that she did in fact buy the drugs. Once she has told him that she is guilty, he can no longer defend her and only advise her to enter a guilty plea. There’s a scene where he explains this to her, but rather than saying that he is morally obligated to be truthful, he says that the book containing the barrister code of ethics is his religion.
I’ve grown to rather despise this kind of trick, of suggesting that the character has principles only to pull the rug out and have him say that he doesn’t, but always in a way that it’s just possible to doubt. Except that there is also the clear evidence that he doesn’t really have principles. In the first episode, there’s the issue of his son who he has raised spectacularly badly. So badly, it’s clear that he never tried—a point his son makes by pointing out that at age seven he was sent away from home to various boarding schools and never really knew his parents after. In the third episode, Rumpole (a married man) more-or-less accepts sexual bribery from his client in order to stay on the case when he wants to leave after she confessed to the crime.
I was strung along for about four seasons of the show House by this same basic trick, until I finally figured out that Dr. House was, in fact, the villain of the show.
It’s a great pity because Rumpole could easily have been a really good show. It did not depend on the poor character of Horace Rumpole for anything that made it good.
Mary Harrington on Lily Phillips and Possession
Mary Harrington wrote about our modern day Messalina, Lily Phillips, who recently and famously fornicated with 100 men in a day as a PR stunt for her pornographic OnlyFans channel. This event would be fairly unremarkable, given what society is presently like, except that a documentary film was being made of it and her immediate reaction upon finishing was deep distress, which has spawned a great deal of commentary. In the face of most people arguing about individual responsibility vs. responsibility to others, Ms. Harrington’s piece suggests an unusual framing: that of possession. (Demonic if you are tough enough for solid food, symbolic if you haven’t yet been weaned, though of course she doesn’t put it that way and for all I know doesn’t think of it that way.) This is a very interesting framing, and I’d like to explore it a bit.
Before I get into the main part, I do want to make some notes about demons, possession, and demonic influence which I think will be helpful to ensure that we’re all on the same page because popular culture tends to depict demons in egregiously stupid ways.
The first thing that I want to note is that within Catholic philosophy, the symbolic interpretation of things like demonic possession is not exclusive of the literal interpretation of them. They can be both at the same time, just in the way that a father can feed his child when the child is hungry as a simple physical act but, at the same time, this also archetypally represents all manner of things from God’s act of creation to a teacher teaching a student. None of these is wrong or one real while the others are fake. They’re different, but all legitimate as themselves.
The second thing is that full-on possession2 is not the same thing as a person being influenced by a demon; demons are capable of subtlety. Demons are simply angels who reject the good; they are beings of pure spirit and greater intelligence than humans, so they’re capable of more subtlety and cunning than human beings are. They can make bad ideas seem good and let us do the rest. If you are taking the symbolic interpretation alone, the complexities of social interactions are more complex than an individual, and can mislead us without completely overwhelming us.
The third thing to note is that demonic possession is not necessarily adversarial with the person possessed. A human being is capable of cooperating with a demon, in whole or in part. Demons make promises, which are usually empty, and people may well cooperate with the demon because of them. In the purely symbolic interpretation, you can see this in something like a person who takes foolish risks or a reality show contestant.
The fourth and perhaps most important thing to note is that demonic possession is not exclusive of things like psychological or social pressures. A person can be possessed by a demon and also worry about what his neighbor will think of him and be anxious about how to pay his bills.
OK, so that common ground established, I’d like to consider Ms. Harrington’s framing of Lily Phillips’ stunt as possession, or the alternative phrase she offers, an “egregore”. (An egregore is “a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals”.) Put very abstractly, the question which arises when one hears of Lily Phillips’ stunt and how predictably bad she felt afterwards is: how could anyone choose to do something so foolish? And the answer of possession or an egregore is, basically, that she didn’t choose this, she is a slave to a wicked master, and that master chose it for her.
To modern ears this can sound like trying to shift blame. And indeed, some people are trying to do that; to some degree that’s what Louise Perry’s article, The Myth of Female Agency, is about (though it is more complex than that). Properly understood, though, demonic possession is not about shifting blame. It’s about understanding that we are not gods. We must serve something; the most important choice in our lives is who or what we will serve.
Ms. Harrington quotes the story from the gospel of Luke where Jesus asks a demon its name and it replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” More illustrative is when Jesus describes what happens when an unclean spirit is driven out:
When an unclean spirit goes out of someone it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says, “I will go back to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it wept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, and so that person ends up worse off than before.
If you merely reject a spirit because you don’t like it—even if you just want to think of it as the zeitgeist or spirit of the age or an egregore—if you do not replace it with something, you will remain empty until it comes back. But nature abhors a vacuum, and your emptiness will pull in more than just what you drove off, because you will take in several things hoping they’ll fill the emptiness. You’ll probably think that you’re just trying them or considering them, but you’ll take them in.
On a technical level, this is because your life must have some kind of purpose for you to do anything at all. People who have merely absorbed their purpose from the zeitgeist will often doubt this because they’ve never paused to consider what the purpose of their life is and so can foolishly believe they don’t have a purpose, but they eventually tend to notice this as they get older and especially if they’re successful at the purpose they absorbed. “I’ve gone to school and gotten a job and paid for therapy so I can be better at my job so I can afford more therapy so I can be better at my job—but what’s it all for? Is this it?”
The only people who make their own purpose are madmen—this is necessarily so on the technical level since people who make their own purpose cannot work toward the same goals as others except accidentally and cannot be intelligible to others who do not share their purpose. Moreover, we find ourselves in a physical world we did not create with physical properties we did not create that requires us to do things we do not choose in order to stay alive. Whatever purpose we create for ourselves must necessarily include these things that we did not choose, which is a simple contradiction. You can’t create something you didn’t choose. If you are to survive, you must discover a purpose, not create it. And our purpose is just another way of saying who or what we serve. Which brings us back to Lily Phillips and possession.
Lily claimed, in the weeks leading up to her stunt, that she was serving herself. She wanted to bang 100 men in a day, was excited for it and looking forward to it, etc. etc. etc. Then when it happened, she was devastated. There’s a good reason why my favorite part of the Catholic baptismal promises are “Do you reject Satan? And all his empty promises?” Lilly Phillips was not serving herself, since that’s not really possible, and, critically, she was not serving anyone she held to be worth serving. Feminism told women that it was there for them, that if they just gave it their souls, they would not die, but would be gods. It turns out that’s an old story. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun3.
So, ultimately, I think that Ms. Harrington is right to frame this in terms of possession, though it is important to understand that this is a voluntary possession. Lily became an OnlyFans prostitute because of the spirit of the age meeting her particular circumstances; she came up with this stunt for some reason then felt an obligation to her fans to go through with it and to not let them down—she served many masters, and none of them were good. And there is only one outcome to serving a bad master.
1 . Wife of Emperor Claudius, who famously held a contest with a prostitute to see who could copulate with the largest number of men in a day. (Messalina won.)
2. Technically, there is a form of possession where there is no cooperation and the demon literally possesses the body of the person against their will. Philosophically speaking, this is very akin to a viral infection and, from reports by exorcists, is incredibly rare and far more akin to the kind of thing you see in a movie like The Exorcist. An unfortunate person in this state may be confusable with someone in the throws of deep mental illness, but not with a normal person making bad choices, so this kind of thing is irrelevant. I will be using the term “possession” in the sense of persistent influence or cooperative possession, rather than this sense, because Ms. Harrington does and because this sense is so sui generis that no reasonable person will mistake the two.
3. Except Christianity. True or false, before Christianity no one had the idea of God taking on flesh and becoming his own creature in order to offer himself as an innocent blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of his creatures and so make them fit to become incorporated into the divine life.
When Libertines Advocate Self Control
Several years ago, a British feminist by the name of Louise Perry wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve read a bunch of things Ms. Perry has written, including her own description of the book. She is careful to explain that she does not want to return to the sexual morality of before the sexual revolution, just to avoid the excesses of the sexual revolution. And I recently read an essay (originally published in 2022) which discusses the book, by libertine writer Bridget Phetasy, titled I Regret Being a Slut. She, too, does not want to return to traditional sexual morality, she just doesn’t like the results of the sexual revolution either. And neither of these women is at all unique.
In both cases, their writing is a bit like a man who talks about how it’s exhilarating to jump off a building, but not to hit the ground, so it’s best to continually fall past the seventh floor. That might be the point in one’s fall which is the most fun, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.
The problem with this kind of thinking—it applies to all libertines who want the benefits of self-control without the downsides of self-control—is that it is, at its core, utilitarianism. There are many problems with utilitarianism (see Why Consequentialism Doesn’t Work), but the relevant problem is that it has no power to motivate people. Forgoing certain short-term benefit for the sake of uncertain long-term gain is very tricky to justify. And even if you can, a justification which is best done in a complicated Excel spreadsheet will, at best, be lifeless and dull, even if it does manage to convince someone in the abstract. And that’s ignoring the problem that, since we can’t know the probabilities with any certainty, you can always doubt the conclusion by quibbling with some of the numbers.
To put it more concretely, forgoing certain short-term benefit for uncertain long-term benefit only makes sense under one of two conditions:
- Extreme optimism
- A principle which says that you should even if it doesn’t benefit you
Very few people are extremely optimistic, for the simple reason that, in a secular sense, it’s stupid to be that optimistic. Lots of people are unlucky. And there’s a further problem: if you’re this optimistic, you might just as easily be optimistic that you can have both the short-term and long-term benefits.
That only leaves option #2: principle. But principles are exactly the thing that the libertines don’t want.
To take it back to the example from which this started: the libertine feminist advocating for sexual restraint is in the awkward position of saying that people should be free to have as much sex as they want before marriage, if they even want to get married, but they shouldn’t want sex before marriage and should want to get married because that works out better in the long run. The problem is that, if something actually does work out better in the long run, it means that you’re wise to do it and foolish to not do it. And it’s bad to be foolish.
That’s the thing which always sabotages this kind of quasi-libertine in the end: they want people to make good decisions about everything except for who to associate with. Because the only people who willingly associate with fools are other fools1. Deciding who we depend on is very nearly the most important decision we can make; asking people to exercise good judgement except for in their associations is nonsensical. Doubly so when it’s a particular kind of association that you want them to exercise good judgement on.
If a person has been sexually promiscuous, and it is accepted that sexual promiscuity is bad judgement, it means that the person has bad judgement. This is, by the way, as true of men as of women. If you read old literature instead of modern pornography set in older times, you will find that a male being sexually continent was praiseworthy and expected, while being sexually promiscuous was something he was quite desirous of hiding. The only difference was that a male was, typically, not dependent on forming a marriage to pay for his upkeep because there was a great deal of difficult work to be done in the world (soldiering, sailing, and the like) and so even as an outcast from polite society he could at least feed himself on his own. Also, people just didn’t care as much what happened to males. (You can find stories where a male who does need to make a good marriage will go to great lengths to hide his promiscuity, such as the King of Bohemia in the Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia.)
Anyway, the point is that you can’t have a society in which it is accepted that only fools with poor self control are sexually promiscuous and it’s also considered just fine to be sexually promiscuous if a person wants to be. You can see this exact problem with alcohol. No one wants to associate with a drunkard (except for other drunkards2) and anyone considering marriage with a drunkard will be warned off of it by all of their friends and family. The same is true of gambling addictions, or narcotic addictions. In fact, you will be very hard pressed to find any behavior that is generally regarded as extremely foolish where only low-self-control people engage in it that people would not try to dissuade someone from marrying into.
Which is why a libertine cannot make an effective case for self-control. If they manage to make it, the world will cease to be one in which people can freely do whatever the libertine is trying to discourage.
I don’t have much patience for people who discuss sex and marriage without relation to children and child-rearing, but there is something especially tiresome about people trying to do so in order to promote things which are much better argued in reference to children and child-rearing. Perhaps this is done in order to soothe the reader; to lull her into a false sense of security so she’ll actually hear the authoress out. I have my doubts that any such deception will work, and I gravely doubt that it will work in the long-term, because it will damage the trust placed in the authoress.
Though perhaps, for the intended audience, this is one of those “white lies” like the stereotypical answer to the stereotypical woman asking her stereotypical husband whether a stereotypical hideous dress she is going to wear anyway looks good. Perhaps no one believes it, so no one will be deceived, but the willingness to tell the superficial lie signifies that the person is on the other’s side. “I’m only telling you to exercise a bit of self control. I’m not telling you that you have to believe in God or listen to your grandma or do anything for anyone else.”
Well, there are a lot of very weak and timid people in the world.
1. And saints who are trying to help them. But there aren’t many saints to go around, and they don’t associate in the same way anyway. A saint may well take on the company of a young fool and advise them, but the saint doesn’t marry the young fool or depend on them in any other way.
2. See 1.
Clearing Plates at Family Gatherings
In America, Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to be occasions for family gatherings with a large meal. People often talk while they eat, and when people are done eating and only talking, it is extremely common to see the women of the family get up and start clearing the plates away while the males continue to talk. Around this time, a few unpleasant women who don’t understand human beings very well will write articles complaining about this. So for the sake of young people who might be taken in by one of those articles, I will explain what’s going on.
Unless you’re really into cooking, making thanksgiving dinner isn’t actually a lot of work. It takes perhaps fifteen minutes to put the turkey on a tray, season the skin, and put it in the oven at 325F for 3-5 hours (depending on size). Mashed potatoes or if you have better taste mashed sweet potatoes are another fifteen minutes of work. Bread, you can easily just buy at the store. If you’re not making it from scratch, add another fifteen minutes for the stuffing. Putting that all together, it’s an hour of work for a single person. That’s not trivial, but it’s not that much work. I’ve done significantly more work than that for minor dinner parties, and it’s not more work than one might do barbecuing food at a cookout. Cleaning up a dozen plates from a table is, if you’re doing it yourself, perhaps five minutes. If you have a dishwasher (as everyone who writes articles complaining that men talk instead of helping does), add another five minutes for scraping food off of plates and loading them into the dishwasher. If this is a major amount of work for you which might break you unless you get help, as the kids would say, you’re NGMI (not gonna make it).
Of course, that’s not what’s going on. Except for the occasional host with significant health problems—and the family member with significant health problems almost never hosts family gatherings—the host of family gatherings is not overwhelmed by the work involved and doesn’t need help. The reason why all the women help is because this is an expression of female social bonding. Identifying ways to help each other and helping unasked is a way that women reinforce their social bonds. When there’s nothing to do, asking, “what can I do to help” is a next best thing, which is why you will see it asked even when there’s obviously nothing to do to help. The point isn’t the actual work, but the affirmation of the social bond in the offer. This is also why the typical response is, “there’s nothing right now,” followed by a list of what’s going on. The point of this is not the actual inventory, but the affirmation of the bond by sharing concerns and implicitly inviting the other woman to help monitor them. (There’s actually a bit of an art to this because a woman can give offense by usurping some decision-making in her effort to help; young women generally watch their elders navigate this and learn the art by the time they’re old enough to take part as adults.) This is why when one woman gets up and starts to collect plates, the rest of the women jump up and start collecting plates too—they are affirming their social bonds by all working together.
This type of social bonding is markedly different from male social bonding, which can be readily observed at a cookout, where it’s traditionally the males who do most of the work. Males can, without giving offense, make a perfunctory offer of assistance to the male host, but mostly they don’t because assuming that another man can handle everything is a sign of respect. Further letting the male host do whatever grilling and other work is involved in hosting without interference is also an implicit sign of respect. Males will, however, make a point of hanging out with and talking to the host, because conversation about interesting subjects is a primary way adult males affirm social bonds.
So at the big family meal, when the women clean the plates together and the males keep talking, both are engaging in their sex’s typical form of social bonding. The two groups bond with each other by the men showing appreciation for the (in truth, quite small) labor of the women, and the women bond with the males by enabling the conversation which is maintained. The males can be rude by taking the generosity of the women for granted, the women can be rude by interrupting the conversation with work that can easily be left for after people are done talking.
The unpleasant women who write articles complaining about this dynamic at social gatherings are people with poorly developed social skills that don’t know how male social dynamics work and who assume that female social dynamics are the only social dynamics and so regard males as dysfunctional women. So they’re trying to guilt them into being functional women. (They’re also trying to parasocially bond with other women with poor social skills who don’t understand the full range of social dynamics by communal complaining.)
Useful Mistakes, or The Three Principle Virtues of a Perl Programmer
There’s a great meme that goes around on occasion, which is a motivational poster of some kind with the words:
We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.
If you’re not familiar, it’s a reference to a line from JFK’s famous speech, justifying the moon program:
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
There is truth in Kennedy’s approach—it is the basic foundation of how we teach children—but it is extremely rarely done by adults for the simple reason that adults usually have better things to do. The truth is that the moon shot program wasn’t really about human advancement. It was a massive game of capture-the-flag played with the Soviets as a PR stunt, which is why we and they both stopped shortly after the US captured the flag (by which I mean, planted a flag on the moon).
Which gets us back to the original quote: there are a lot of times when somebody does something useful because he thought it was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be, but by the time he put a lot of time into it he found that the harder version was actually worth doing, especially because he was now in a place to do it with a lot less work than if he was starting from scratch. And this is an example of what I would call a useful mistake. Another example would be what Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language, famously called the three principle virtues of a Perl programmer.
Those virtues were: laziness, impatience, and hubris. These are, of course, rhetorical, since laziness, impatience, and hubris are actually vices. What Larry meant (and explained in his own words) was that there are things that look like these things, but are actually good habits. What he called laziness is really foresight; good design so as to avoid having to do excess work in the future. What he called impatience is really ambition, or the desire to solve problems—to not be willing to sit through endless drudge-work when it was possible to write a program to do the drudge-work instead. And what he called hubris was really faith—the faith that one could see the task through to its conclusion. “I can do this,” in spite of not (yet) being able to point to conclusive evidence that you can.
The ideal would be, of course, to have a perfectly accurate estimation of both the amount and difficulty of the work to be done, and also of one’s ability to get it done. We very rarely achieve perfection, though, and so choosing the kind of failure mode we want is important. Would we prefer to fail at our estimations in a way that makes us start more projects, or start fewer projects? That is, is it better to waste time when we make imperfect estimations of difficulty and our ability, or to leave undone things we could have accomplished? I think that there is much to be said for the former, because we can always give up when it turns out that something was too difficult for us, and this will help to refine our skill at estimating difficulty. If we bias our failures towards leaving things undone, there’s no reason we’d ever decide to start up, and there will be nothing giving us feedback about our accuracy of estimating difficulty.
So I think that there’s a lot to be said for slightly under-estimating how hard things will be; your life will tend to be better off for it. And to counter-balance people saying that you should be humble about your abilities, this is just being humble about your ability to estimate how difficult something is. Ultimately, when it comes to worthwhile things, we never know what we’re getting ourselves into, so we have to live by the faith that something good will come of our efforts. This is really just making the decision to have some faith.
There Are Two Kinds of Extremists
J.D. Vance once made the observation that the real danger of social media isn’t living in an echo chamber, it’s only being exposed to the most extreme versions of the positions of people who disagree with us. I think that this is an important insight, and speaks to how it is important to seek out the reasonable version of extreme views that we see made fun of. That said, there are two kinds of extremists, and the more reasonable version is only important for one of them.
Let’s start with that kind: the extremist who is a monomaniac. This kind of extremist is extreme because he has abandoned most kinds of good in life and cares only about one kind of good. To make up an example so as to not be accidentally controversial, let us suppose that there is a man who loves the color blue. If he merely loves blue, but loves other things as well, he may well have many blue things in his house but he will not seek to paint the whole world blue, because he knows that trees and grass need to be green, and have their own value. If he was a monomaniac in his love for blue, he would not recognize the good of grass and trees and so would not care that they need to be green to achieve it (I’m speaking of photosynthesis, not of their aesthetics), and so he would seek to pain the grass and trees green, and would kill them. This kind of extremist, though highly concentrated online, is rare in real life. Most people love more than one kind of goodness, and so no matter how much free reign they are given to realize their ideal world, they will balance out competing goods and not wreck the world. These kinds of reasonable people are important to seek out. (I should also note that this highly simplified form of extremist is not what one typically meets online; I need to explain the other kind before I can clarify further.)
The other kind of extremist is a man who is dedicated to a philosophy of life and is not afraid of the opinions of his fellow man, but takes his philosophy to its logical conclusion. This is the Catholic saint, the Protestant Puritan, the Buddhist ascetic, and the Soviet dictator. People who are not extremists of this kind are not people who balance out goods, but merely people who lack the courage of their convictions. They do not live out their philosophy of life, not because they think it lacks something, but because they lack something. Most of the time, it’s social sanction that they lack. That’s why, for this kind of extremist, it is precisely the extremists you should pay the most attention to. If society were ever to adopt their beliefs, it would become more like them.
Now that I’ve explained the second kind of extremist, I can describe where you are actually most likely to meet the first kind of extremist: as someone posing as the second kind of extremist. The technical term for this is a heretic, though it’s an unpopular word with baggage, so let’s stick to “monomaniacal extremist.” For that same reason I will avoid religious examples, so let’s take a secular one: environmentalism. There are plenty of people who want to take care of the planet on which we live in a balanced way. They consider measures to ensure that we don’t poison our water supply, but also consider other goods like industrial production, nice housing, having pets, growing food, and a myriad of other goods that need to balance each other out. Then you have the monomaniac who only loves nature where it has not been affected by human beings, and so champions anything that removes human influence, at the fullness of expression being the human self-extinction project.
This example also shows the importance of distinguishing the two types of extremist. On the one hand, it is important to figure out that the monomaniacal environmentalist merely hates people, he doesn’t love the environment as one good among many, and so he does not represent the views or policies or much of anything of the people who merely consider clean air and water and an interesting variety of wildlife to be goods to balance out among other goods. On the other hand, the people who are members of the human self-extinction project are merely the monomaniacal environmentalists with the courage of their convictions. One should not ignore the human self-extinction people and seek out the more moderate “strangle the economy with regulation” environmentalists because those are only distinguished from the human self-extinction people by being unwilling to say what they really mean.
The Communist Manifesto is Unbelievably Bad
I recently read The Communist Manifesto (in English translation, of course) since from time to time I read primary sources and I literally have great difficulty actually believing how bad it is. It does not really contain either a political philosophy or an economic philosophy; it has a few scant elements of these, and is about as much a considered work of political philosophy as is Star Trek: The Next Generation.
For those not familiar, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a TV show set in the twenty fourth century where it is a post-scarcity world in which everyone has an unlimited amount of whatever they want without effort. In TNG (as it is commonly called for brevity) this is accomplished through free energy by unspecified means coupled with “replicators” that can make anything, instantly, with no cost. (I believe various unauthoritative technical manuals suggest there is some hidden feed-stock of protons, neutrons, and electrons, but there is never any kind of limit to what replicators can replicate, and there are episodes where feed stock is clearly not required.) I bring this up not as a tangent, but as oddly similar: it is fairly clear, from TCM (as I will call The Communist Manifest, for brevity) as well as several FAQs (which Marx called a “catechism”) that Marx believed that the industrial revolution was bringing about a post-scarcity world.
TCM was published when Marx was 30 years old, and I’ve been told it’s not why he was influential—that was Capital, or Das Kapital, as it is often known, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, which is it’s full title. That book is around 1,000 pages long, and I don’t find it even slightly plausible that communists read the whole thing, so I’m still quite unsure of what to make of it. I’m willing to believe that Capital did flesh Marx’s ideas out somewhat, since they were basically only a few partial bones in TCM. Capital was published when Marx was 48, and presumably the intervening 18 years and the extra 970 pages lent themselves to a little more thought. I have trouble believing much, since the author of TCM was clearly not a thoughtful man.
It’s difficult to even critique TCM because there’s so little to it. It begins with the idea that the key to understanding history is class conflict, which is just wrong. That’s not the key. It mostly doesn’t even apply. It’s like saying that the key to understanding history is belts. I mean, yeah, you can identify belts at times and places in history, but if you think that they’re the key to understanding history you’re just a moron (assuming you’re older than fifteen; if you are fifteen you just need to think about this more). There is no single key to understanding history, because human history is as complex as human beings. And if there was a single key, interdependence would unlock quite a lot more of history than class conflict would.
Marx’s arguments are often beyond asinine, too. When he tries to address objections to abolishing the family, he starts by saying that families don’t really exist anyway so nothing will be lost. He defends all women being held in common, rather than marrying, by saying that the bourgeoisie has extramarital affairs so often that they effectively hold all women in common anyway. This is just rhetoric, not an argument, and it’s not even good rhetoric. Moreover, it’s rhetoric where actual ideas would be most natural, highlighting that there are no ideas.
To give another example of idiocy: among the general points that a communist system would have (there are only 10), Marx says that factories will be interspersed with agriculture such that there will no longer be a town/country distinction. This is only starting to become sort-of possible in certain types of manufacturing with modern high-end 3D printers in low-volume markets. In Marx’s time, when factories were enormous and required the labor of a huge number of people, this was pure insanity. Ignoring how factories would get in the way of farmers, this would require either factories so small as to be unproductive or absolutely enormous commutes to work at a time when horse was the dominant form of transportation. To say nothing of the great difficult of transporting raw materials to random locations and finished goods from them. (Factories were often on rivers because river transport is so much cheaper than overland transport; they were often near each other because one factory’s output might be used as an input by another, and not needing to transport these goods hundreds of miles was far more efficient.) If you even begin to try to work through what randomly locating factories throughout the countryside would entail in terms of transport and coordination, of the running of rail lines through farm fields and so on, it becomes immediately clear that Marx never gave a moment’s thought to what this goal would entail.
And that’s a theme of TCM. There is zero thought given to how to accomplish… anything. For example, he states that all property will be owned by the state, but he never so much as raises the question of how the state will say what will be done with its property, let alone provide even a hint of an outline of an answer to the question.
Incidentally, this is a point which a lot of people sympathetic to socialist rhetoric seem to miss: any form of socialism where the means of production are owned by The People is necessarily totalitarian, for the simple reason that if The People own the means of production, they clearly will have to say what gets done with their means of production. That computer in the apartment in which you live—that can be used to write things, so the people should get to say what their computer gets used to write. The oven in the common area of the apartment building in which you live produces cooked food, so The People should say what food their oven is used to cook.
Socialist-sympathizers will balk at this and say that all manner of things are excluded from ownership by The People, but all they’re doing is saying that what they actually want is only a little bit of socialism—often, in practice, only socialism of the things that they don’t want to own, but then most human beings are hypocrites.
Anyway, Marx says nothing in TCM about how The People (or The State) will say what happens with all of its property. He gives not a word to how this will, in his way of looking at things, only set up a new class conflict between the bureaucrats and the civilians, or between the politicians and the civilians, since clearly you can’t say what happens to everything by direct democracy. Especially since nations will fade away and there will only be one worldwide government.
A world government is, of course, a recipe for minimum accountability, but that requires some minimum of knowledge of how human beings work, which was clearly beyond Marx, or perhaps against his beliefs; but I would have expected him to at least give some vague hints about how the world government is supposed to work, even if it was beyond him to say how it wouldn’t work and what to do to correct against its failings.
Science Is Only As Good As Its Instruments
There’s a popular myth that science progressed because of a revolution in the way people approach knowledge. This is a self-serving myth that arose in the 1600s by people who wanted to claim special authority. This is why they came up with the marketing term “The Enlightenment” for their philosophical movement. If you look into the actual history of science, scientific discoveries pretty much invariably arose a little while after the technology which enabled their discovery was invented.
There is a reason we did not get the heliocentric (really, Copernican) theory of the solar system until a little while after the invention of the telescope. There is a reason why we did not get cell biology until a little while after the invention of the microscope. If you dig into the history of specific scientific discoveries, it’s often the case that several people discovered the same thing within months of each other and the person we credit with the discovery is generally the one who published first.
This is not to say that there are never flashes of insight or brilliance. So far as I can tell Einstein’s theory that E=mc2 was not merely the obvious result of measuring things using new technology. That said, it would almost certainly never have happened had radioactivity not been discovered a decade earlier, which would not have been possible without certain kinds of photographic plates existing (radioactive decay was discovered by Henri Becquerel and Marie Curie in the 1890s as they were studying phosphorescence and exposed photographic plates wrapped in black paper, which showed that something else was going on besides phosphorescence, many further experiments clarified what was going on by the time Einstein was working on the mass-energy equivalence).
Which gets me to modern science: there are a lot of things that we want to know, for which the relevant technology does not seem to exist. Nutrition is a great example. What are the long-term health effects of eating a high carbohydrate diet? How can you find out? It’s not practical to run a double-blind study of one group of people eating a high carbohydrate diet and the other eating a low-carbohydrate diet for fifty years. The current approach follows the fundamental principle of science (assume anything necessary in order to publish): it studies people for a few weeks or months, and measures various things assumed to correlate perfectly to good long-term health. That works for publishing, but if you’re more concerned with accuracy to reality than you are with being able to publish (and if you’re reading the study, you have to be), that’s more than a little iffy. Then if you spend any effort digging into the actual specifics, let’s just say that the top ten best reasons to believe these assumptions are all related group-think and the unpleasantness of being in the out-group. (Please actually look into this for yourself; the only way you’ll know what happens if you don’t just take people’s word for something is by not taking their word for it, including mine.)
And the problem with science, at the moment, when it comes to things like long-term nutrition is that the technology to actually study it just isn’t there. (It’s different if you want to study things like acute stimulation of muscle protein synthesis related to protein intake timing or the effects on serum glucose in the six hours following a meal.) And when the technology to do good studies doesn’t exist, all that can exist are bad studies.
This is why we see so much of people turning to anecdotes and wild speculation. Anecdotes and wild speculation are at least as good as bad studies. And when the bad studies tend to cluster (for obvious reasons unrelated to truth) on answers that seem very likely to be wrong, anecdotes and wild speculation are better than bad studies.
That doesn’t mean that anecdotes and wild theories are good. It would be so much better to have good studies. But we can’t have good studies just because we want them, just as people before the microscope couldn’t have cell biology no matter how much they wanted it. The ancient Greeks would have loved to have known about bacteria and viruses, but without microscopes, x-ray crystallography, and PCR, they were never going to find out about them.
As, indeed, they didn’t.
The Infamous Football Tweet
As in Astonishing Incompetence, I’ve waited until now to talk about this so that my post can be about the incompetence and not the politics: Tim Walz, when he was a Vice Presidential candidate, played a game of Madden Football with Alexandra Ocasio Cortez which was streamed on the streaming service Twitch. Afterwards, Tim Walz put out a hastily-deleted tweet:
The text was:
@AOC can run a mean pick 6—and I can call an audible on a play.
And we both know that if you take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re gonna use it.
I’m going to explain a bit of backstory before we get into the barely-believable incompetence of this tweet as messaging. The context unavoidably mentions politics, but I will do my absolute best to present the context in a completely neutral way, I promise, because the politics is not at all the point of this post.
The second half of the tweet was a reference to “Project 2025” which was a plan drawn up by the think-tank The Heritage Foundation, which President Trump disavowed and Democrats claimed was his plan. (Who is more correct about this is not the subject of this post.) This tweet was part of the effort of Democrats to convince people that Project 2025 was, in fact, Trump’s plan.
A further bit of backstory is that Tim Walz claimed to have been a football coach. (It turned out that he was an assistant high school football coach. For the sake of non-Americans: in both cases I mean American football.) This use of Madden, and of Walz’s putative familiarity with football, was generally understood to be part of the Democrats’ strategy to appeal to male voters.
So we finally come to the first half of the tweet, which defies belief. I have seen very little football and don’t know much about the game, so I had to look the terms up. To “run” a play is to have a plan, communicated to the players, which they then implement. A “pick 6” is where the football is thrown by the team who has possession and intercepted by the opposing team, who then conveys it to the throwing team’s end zone, scoring 6 points. (Most of the time, teams only score points when they begin play with possession of the ball.) You cannot “run a pick 6” of any kind, mean or otherwise. (“Mean,” in this context, is a metaphor for being well-planned and well-executed.) I mean, technically you could, but that would constitute trying to lose the game, since it would mean having your quarterback throw the ball not to your players, but to the opposing team, and then stand aside to let them get to your end zone. There is no normal circumstance in which you do that intentionally, and letting your opponent score points can never be described as “mean,” not even metaphorically. He clearly had no idea what the term meant. (Making it even worse, by the way, is that “pick 6” definitionally requires the scoring of six points, while the Madden football game that Walz and AOC streamed ended a 0-0 tie, meaning that no pick 6 happened, intentional or otherwise.)
That was widely talked about because it’s absurd in any context, but the incompetence of communication doesn’t stop there. I also looked up what it means to “call an audible.” It means for the quarterback to throw out the planned play in part or in whole in favor of what he’s making up on the spot and telling people. (Hence, “audible”—he has to say the new plan because it wasn’t a pre-arranged one.) While it is quite possible for a quarterback to intentionally call an audible, the coach can’t, by definition, and moreover this is exactly the opposite of what the second half of his tweet is saying. It makes exactly no sense to cite your ability to throw out a plan in favor of improvisation as your source of knowledge that “if you take the time to draw up a playbook, you’re gonna use it.”
I don’t know football well enough to say whether there were worse terms that Walz could have picked in order to make his point, but there can’t be many. It boggles the imagination as to how Walz (or an intern who clearly knows nothing about football) wrote this tweet. If you just check out Wikipedia’s page on American football plays, there is a long list of plays, by name, with descriptions. It would take only a few minutes to scroll through and find two plays which sound kind of cool. Also of note: neither the words “audible” nor “pick” appear on the page. So how did this tweet get written? How did someone go to the trouble of finding out that “pick 6” and “audible” are words associated with football without taking the extra ninety seconds to find out what they mean?
Like with the Al Smith dinner video (linked in the first paragraph), this level of incompetence is right at the border of my ability to believe it. Well, it used to be beyond it, but then this clearly happened, so I had to adjust the border of what level of incompetence I find believable. But wow. I’m a cynical man, and yet it turns out: not cynical enough.
Astonishing Incompetence
I’m hoping that enough time has passed that I can talk about Kamala Harris’s video that she sent to the Al Smith dinner in lieu of attending without it being political. Whatever you think of her or Donald Trump, or her policies or his policies, all but a few people recognize that she ran a terrible campaign. And though which was the most incompetent part of it is debatable, I think it was her video submission to the Al Smith dinner, and I think it’s interesting to look at how incompetent it was, because it was a level of incompetence we rarely see from adults. But I’ve waited until now because I want to talk about the incompetence, not the politics, of it.
For those who don’t know, the Al Smith dinner is a charity dinner hosted by the Catholic diocese of New York City which happens every four years to raise money for Catholic charities in New York. Since the 1950s, it has been a tradition for both major nominees for President to attend and for them to make jokes, both about themselves and the other candidate. Only two candidates have ever not attended. The first was Walter Mondale, who lost the election in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. (Mondale received only 40.6% of the popular vote and won only the electors of Washington D.C. and Minnesota.) The second was Kamala Harris, who sent a short, theoretically comedic, video in lieu of attending. This is the video that I want to discuss.
And to explain the point of view from which I want to talk about it: back in college, I was a writer and actor in one of our small university’s two competing sketch comedy shows (we would put on three or four shows a semester). What I want to look at is the creative decisions which went into this from the perspective of comedy and effective communication.
To begin at the meta level: the very act of sending a video instead of attending was a strange thing to do, but though it was taken as an insult by attendees of the dinner, it probably could be a defensible choice. If so, it was the last defensible choice.
The video begins with Harris saying “Your Eminence, and distinguished guests, the Al Smith dinner…” when a sixty year old woman in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit runs behind her. As Harris continues to say, “…provides a rare opportunity to set aside partisanship…” when the figure walks behind her again and says, “so cool.” At this, Harris notices and asks what’s going on and who that was. The woman runs up, shakes Kamala’s hand, and introduces herself multiple times out of excitement. She’s Mary Katherine Gallagher.
For those who don’t know—and I didn’t until looking it up—this was a character invented in 1995 for the long-running comedic TV show Saturday Night Live. The character was used until 2001, and was the star of the 1999 movie Superstar (“superstar” was a catchphrase of the character). Superstar made $30.6M on a $14M budget, which wasn’t bad, but was hardly a big hit.
So, right off the bat, we have the bizarre decision to bring in a pinch hitter. That will, necessarily, make Harris look weak, no matter how good the pinch hitter is. This is a counter-intuitive choice, given that she’s running for chief executive of the United States; a role for which virtually everyone agrees strength is a virtue. Then there’s the aspect of the pinch hitter being a long-forgotten character from SNL—a comedic show famous for going years at a stretch without being funny. Comedy rarely ages well and SNL’s brand of comedy tends to age especially badly. And it had been 23 years since the character was last a regular on SNL.
Then there’s the issue of this being a character designed to make fun of Catholics to a secular audience being used at a Catholic charity dinner. That is such an extraordinarily bad choice; it’s only a notch or two better than telling the archbishop to go “f” himself.
Then there’s the ancillary issue brought on by it being more than a quarter century since the character was introduced: this parody of a Catholic schoolgirl is being played by a sixty year old woman. Yes, she has professional makeup, but even professional makeup artists can’t make a sixty year old look like a sixteen year old. And there is very little that’s more pathetic than watching someone old enough to be a grandparent sincerely pretend to be a teenager. I mean, just look at this:
Having said that, I looked up some clips of the character twenty five years ago, and frankly she wasn’t convincing back then, either:
To be clear: there’s nothing in the world wrong with being a sixty year old woman. Which is why sixty year old women shouldn’t pretend to be sixteen.
Anyway, Mary Katherine is incredibly excited to meet Kamala; she can barely speak for the excitement. More collected, Kamala responds that it’s very nice to meet Mary Katherine, but right now she’s trying to record her speech for tonight’s dinner. Mary Katherine replies that she knows, she’s Catholic, and tonight is one of the biggest dinners next to the last supper.
I suspect that this was supposed to be a laugh line but there’s no actual joke there. Perhaps the joke is that she’s comparing a mere charity dinner to one of the most important events within Christianity, but then the joke is that Mary Katherine is an impious idiot. Since she shouldn’t even be here (whether you’re talking about in-story or in-reality), that’s not a joke. That’s just character development of a character meant to insult Catholics.
Kamala replies that it’s an important dinner and an important tradition that she’s so proud to be a part of.
Mary Katherine then says that sometimes when she gets nervous she sticks her fingers in her armpits, squeezes them, then smells her fingers. She suits the action to the words and Kamala looks on with a faint air of disgust. Mary Katherine then says, “but that’s gross.” Yes, in fact, it is. Which is entirely inappropriate to the entertainment of a dinner. I mean, having looked up vintage clips, it was never a good joke. But it’s a particularly bad joke now.
Kamala then says, “So tell me something. Um. I’m giving a speech. Do you have some thoughts about what I might say tonight?”
This is an awful transition into the main part of the sketch. Comedy is not supposed to be realistic, but the parts that aren’t jokes are supposed to have some kind of internal logic that the jokes get to play off of. Here the premise is that Kamala had so little idea of what to say—despite having started recording—that she’s asking a random idiot for advice merely because this random idiot happens to be Catholic. This implies that this random idiot is literally the first Catholic Kamala has been able to find. Given that about 20% of Americans identify as Catholic, the best case is that Kamala is portraying herself as hopelessly out of touch. She’s also portraying herself as recklessly unprepared. That could be a funny setup for jokes at her own expense, but that’s not at all what she’s trying to set up. “Are you here to give me advice on what I should say?” would have been way better. It would imply an appropriate level of annoyance, it would not imply she was unprepared or knows no Catholics, and it makes a certain amount of sense as possibly the fastest way to get rid of the person in front of her, which also implies superiority, not being a subordinate. And that took me two seconds to come up with. I may have some skills as a comedy writer, but there are a lot of people who are far, far better at it than I am.
And this awful transition is so unnecessary. The framing story of Mary Katherine running around and interrupting the recording was stupid. They could easily have had Mary Katherine being brought in as an expert on Catholicism and Kamala being skeptical. That would have been a massively better framing story, both for how Kamala would want to portray herself as a presidential candidate (competent) and as a setup for jokes.
Anyway, Mary Katherine replies in a rapid-fire monotone, “My feelings on what you should say tonight would be best expressed in a monologue from one of my favorite made-for-TV series.”
This is Mary Katherine’s face while she delivers the monologue:
Kamala then says, “OK, let’s hear it.” We then get the monologue:
Don’t you see, man? We need a woman to represent us. A woman brings more heart. More compassion. And think how smart she must be to become a top contender in a field dominated by men. It’s time for a woman, bro. And with this woman, we can fly.
Wow, that’s a real thigh-slapper alright. It’s a good thing they brought a comedian on as a pinch hitter to deliver jokes like that.
Kamala asks what series that’s from and Mary Katherine replies that it’s from “House of Dragons, now streaming on HBO Max”. So we get product placement in a recorded video message for a charity dinner. How can a human being have judgement that bad? Did HBO sponsor this video?
Kamala then transitions to the next joke, asking, “is there anything that you think that maybe I shouldn’t bring up tonight?”
Speaking as someone who wrote sketch comedy: transitions to different topics for jokes are not easy, so I’m not unsympathetic. At the same time, they’re important, and I don’t understand why the writer put no effort into this transition. “Is there anything I should avoid saying?” is an unnatural question, except perhaps when you’re prepping for an intimate dinner with someone and you’re expecting a wide range of subjects. Unnatural transitions ruin the suspension of disbelief that helps to make the jokes funny. A much better transition to things to not say would be to bring up something and have her say “oh no, don’t say that.” You’d want it to not be insulting, so maybe something like, “I was thinking of complementing the cardinal on his dress,” to which Mary Katherine could reply, “Oh no, don’t call them dresses, they don’t like that,” at which point the question, “is there anything else I should avoid” would be natural.
Anyway, after the unnatural transition, Mary Katherine gives a terrible setup for Kamala to make a joke. She says, “Um, well, don’t lie. Thou shalt not bear false witness to thy neighbor.”
As she misquotes the ten commandments, she folds her hands as if in prayer.
In both versions of the commandment she’s trying to quote (the Ten Commandments appear both in Exodus and Deuteronomy, slightly differently), the actual commandment is to not bear false witness against your neighbor. If you’re going to quote someone’s holy texts, it’s insulting to lazily get it wrong. And this was recorded. They could have done another take if the actress flubbed her line.
Kamala then responds, “Indeed. Especially thy neighbor’s election results.”
So we’ve gotten to the first real joke in this sketch, and it is, at least, funny. The humor is marred by the delivery not making any grammatical sense, though. I don’t mean that people listening will be picking apart the grammar; that’s not how people listen to things. But grammar that actually works makes it easy to immediately understand what’s being said, and sudden reveals are important to humor. Slowing the listener’s comprehension down with nonsensical grammar makes the reveal slower and thus less funny. There’s a reason why “wits” refers both to people who are funny and to quick thinking. And again: this is a recorded skit with multiple camera angles they cut between. If an actor flubbed her line, they could just do another take. When you are presenting something edited, the bar is higher because it’s so much easier to get everything right since you only need to get each individual part right once out of maybe twenty tries.
If you care enough to try more than once, that is.
Also, and this is a general thing: it’s an absolutely terrible idea to say that you won’t lie because to bring up the subject at all is to imply that you would lie if you thought you could get away with it. There is no way to have Mary Katherine tell Kamala to not lie that doesn’t sound like she thinks Kamala might lie. Which brings up the question: why does she think Kamala might lie?
This is especially the case given that she points her finger at Kamala accusingly when she says, “don’t lie.”
When this joke is over, Mary Katherine hastily adds, “just so you know, there will be a fact checker there, tonight.” Kamala says, “Oh, that’s great. Who?” Mary Katherine says, solemnly, “Jesus.” Kamala nods and smiles… well, look for yourself:
She doesn’t agree, or point out that Jesus is always watching, or… do anything. She just smiles awkwardly as if she doesn’t believe it and wants to move on. About the only way for this to be a joke is if the punchline is that Mary Katherine believes that Christianity is true. That my work at an atheist charity dinner, but it’s a terrible joke to try to pull off at a Catholic charity dinner.
Mary Katherine then hastily adds, “and maybe don’t say anything negative about Catholics.”
Again, this implies that, but for this advice, Kamala would say negative things about Catholics. That may well be true, but why advertise the fact to Catholics? She’s already skating on thin ice by not even showing up; suggesting that she would lie and disrespect Catholics by unnecessarily denying that she would do either is a bad idea and pointless because it’s not even part of a (funny) joke. While only a fool would shop for a vehicle at Honest Bob’s Reliable Used Cars That Definitely All Work, at least it makes for an interesting logo because there are enough words to do something with, graphic-design wise. Plus, Honest Bob only needs enough fools to pay the bills, and there’s no shortage of fools in the world. He doesn’t need the majority of the population to come buy a car from him.
Kamala then replies, “I would never do that no matter where I was.” So far, fine, though it was a bad idea to bring it up in the first place. But then it turns out that this is the setup to a joke, or at least to what I’m pretty sure someone thought was a joke:
“That would be like criticizing Detroit, in Detroit.”
This is a reference to a remark Donald Trump made in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, where he said, “The whole country will be like — you want to know the truth? It’ll be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president.”
It’s a reference to what Trump said, but it’s not a joke about it. There’s no contrast, no twist, no juxtaposition of anything. There’s no wit. It just mentions it.
Worse, it contradicts what she just said about never insulting Catholics no matter where she was. Criticizing Detroit in Detroit is not like criticizing Catholics anywhere. If anything Kamala might do was like criticizing Detroit in Detroit, it means she will insult Catholics, just not here.
They then move on to the next bit without attempting a transition. Mary Katherine asks, “Does it bother you that that Trump guy insults you all the time? Because it really bothers my friends and me.”
This is dumb on several levels. For one thing, the character of Mary Katherine Gallagher, so far as I’ve been able to tell, doesn’t have friends. She’s a socially awkward teenager who does things like smell her armpits when she’s nervous. Further, she’s a Catholic schoolgirl. Is she really supposed to be following politics so closely that she knows what Trump says about Kamala? And at the same time, it’s ridiculously partisan; you have to have your head pretty far up the democratic party’s backside to think that Kamala doesn’t constantly insult Donald Trump. That’s not compatible with the level of naiveté involved in this question. The point of all of this is not to say that the character is unrealistic—comedy is not supposed to be realistic—but that it doesn’t have any kind of internal consistency. Now, you can violate internal consistency to make a joke, such as an when illiterate character who never wrote a book suddenly extensively quotes Aristotle, but violating internal consistency in your setup undermines your jokes.
Kamala replies, “Oh Mary Katherine, it’s very important to always remember: you should never let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”
I mean, OK. That’s not the worst advice in the world, though taken literally it means never listening to feedback and even when not taken literally it suggests never being open to the idea that you’re wrong or should change, but it’s not good advice, and it’s not a joke.
Mary Katherine then quotes a Taylor Swift song, saying “haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate; shake it off.”
Kamala replies with the next line from the song: “Shake it off.”
After another round of each saying “shake it off,” an assistant walks on and starts to drag Mary Katherine off.
As she pulls on Mary Katherine, the assistant says, “Madam Vice President, they’re ready.”
They’re ready? “They” haven’t been ready the whole time? I guess the writers forgot that the skit started with Kamala beginning her address and being interrupted by Mary Katherine. And are we really to suppose that someone only just noticed that Mary Katherine was here? Why would Kamala want to pretend that she’s surrounded by incompetents?
And what is the story supposed to be? Were “they” not ready when Kamala started the first time? If so, why was she giving the address to people who weren’t ready? Or are we supposed to pretend that the address she’s about to give will be a live video call? But we’ve been watching this and Kamala told Mary Katherine that she was trying to record her speech “for tonight’s dinner.” So who is now ready? There’s no way that “Madam Vice President, they’re ready,” makes any sense. And that’s on top of the absurdity that Kamala was recording her speech without someone operating the camera and teleprompter, or that if there were, they weren’t ready during the ongoing recording, or that they had no reaction of any kind to Mary Katherine.
Anyway, Mary Katherine then pulls away from the assistant and says, “one more thing: don’t worry if you make a mistake because Catholic people are very forgiving.”
We all make mistakes, but that (literally) goes without saying. Bringing it up suggests that the normal level of “we all make mistakes” is insufficient. That’s not the kind of thing you want to suggest when you’re trying to impress people. Especially when you’ve already got one strike against you because you brought in a pinch hitter to help you with something that should be easy to do on your own.
Perhaps this was meant to try to encourage the Catholics at the Al Smith dinner to forgive her for not showing up?
Anyway, Mary Katherine then adds another one more thing: “don’t forget to say Supahhstaaaaaaaa!”
This is apparently a callback to the character’s catchphrase (“superstar”) which was also, you will recall, the title of the movie she featured in. I can’t imagine who fondly recalls this character from twenty five years ago, but Kamala’s reaction suggests that she does. Does she really expect anyone at the Al Smith dinner to remember this character fondly, such that her out-of-context catchphrase will bring the happiness of recalling good times?
Kamala then thanks Mary Katherine, who replies, “Thank you, Momala!” as she finally leaves. Who thought that calling Kamala “Momala” in this context was a good idea? It’s not funny, and Kamala Harris was running to be the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States. One of her campaign planks was making the armed forces the most lethal fighting force in the world. Projecting a “mom” image is directly counter to this. (Not necessarily so a “mother” image. “Mom” is specifically about the tenderness between a mother and her children. “Mom” does not encompass the entirety of motherhood and has no suggestion of a mother willing to defend her children. “Mother” can be very different depending on context; “mom” specifies a context. If Kamala is “mom” to the whole country, this means that she’s tender and indulgent to rapists, murderers, and home-grown terrorists. It’s a political question whether she would have been indulgent to them, and I’m not here considering that political question. It’s simply a question of messaging that she was not trying to project that image in her campaigning and so projecting it here is mixed messaging.)
After Mary Katherine finally leaves, Kamala then goes up to the main camera where the sketch started and begins again, “Your Eminence, and distinguished guests, the Al smith dinner provides a rare opportunity to set aside partisanship…”
I don’t get why she’s repeating this part, as if all of this really happened and she’s now actually recording what will be played from the start. This certainly is not funny, and it’s annoying to anyone with a functioning memory.
Her serious remarks, which, including the repeated opening, last 1 minute and 13 seconds, are anodyne remarks about how the Catholic Church does good work for the poor and needy, concluding with “God bless you and may God bless America.” This part was fine. Better, in fact—no less funny and far less cringey.
I am a deeply cynical man and I still can’t believe that this video got made. How did it even get past the proposal stage? When Kamala decided to skip the Al Smith dinner but not entirely skip it, and to do this by sending a video, why didn’t she just get a scriptwriter who can do humor, or else a comedian, to just write a five minute monologue? Who on earth proposed, “let’s bring back a quarter-century old SNL parody of Catholic schoolgirls as a pinch hitter” and why wasn’t she laughed out of the room? I mean, I obviously she wasn’t laughed out of the room because no one on Kamala’s staff has a sense of humor. But why wasn’t this proposal just immediately dismissed? How can it have possibly sounded like a good idea? Is Kamala Harris so incredibly insecure that she’d rather show up next to a sixty year old woman sincerely playing a sixteen year old girl than stand in front of a camera on her own and read a few jokes? Or did someone think that getting an aged comedian with a reasonably successful career to reprise a an ancient SNL character was some kind of tour de force? Look at how socially powerful Kamala is because of who will show up to help her?
And once this got made, no one looked at the result and thought, “this is awful, let’s try again?”
What I really find astonishing is that this awful, nonsensical almost joke-free farce was considerably more work than a bland, unremarkable monologue would have been. People tend to use the term “mediocre” as a criticism, but being mediocre is, in fact, greatly superior to being abysmal.
What Causes Inflation
There are two things which are meant by inflation, the first being the primary cause of the second. The first is an increase in the money supply. This is the straightforward meaning of “inflation,” it’s like more air being blown into a balloon—the balloon gets bigger. The second meaning is a universal increase in prices. An increase in the amount of money without an increase in the amount of goods and services to buy with them means that more money is chasing the same amount of goods and services, so the prices of them will rise until an equilibrium is reached.
How It Happens
The main cause of inflation is the creation by a government of money faster than the increase of goods and services. (The latter is, generally, caused by increases in economic productivity, chief of which is an increase in population.) Colloquially this is referred to as governments “printing money,” though it’s been many decades since the majority of money existed as printed currency. This is possible because virtually all people use what is called a “fiat currency,” that is, a currency which exists because a government said that it does. This is a reference to the latin translation of the first words of God after creating the heavens and the earth, when the earth was a formless void and darkness was over the deep: fiat lux. (“Let there be light,” is the common English translation.)
Prior to fiat currencies, which were widely adopted in the 1900s, precious metals tended to be used as currencies. These do increase, though their increases are limited by the amount of them that can be found. That said, while it is far harder to inflate a currency through mining precious metals, it has happened in history, though usually only on a local scale.
Why It’s Bad
If a government announced a date on which it would double the money supply and on that date doubled the money supply instantly and instantly handed the money out uniformly to people according to how much they already had, such that everyone received an extra dollar for every dollar he had, everyone would double their prices and other than the math for transactions being slightly harder and everyone selling anything facing the inconvenience of printing up new price tags, nothing would change. That is not, however, how governments do it.
What they universally do, because it is a fallen world, is to give themselves the money and not tell anyone that they did. They then spend this in order to be able to buy more than what the taxes they brought in would allow them to. This slowly filters into the economy, raising prices first in the places where they are buying things, then rippling out as those people buy from their suppliers. (Since governments rarely do this exactly uniformly, it also has a tendency to create economic bubbles where increased demand gets met with increased production and then demand falls off, but that’s a story for another day.) If they stop making the new money, eventually these ripples go throughout the economy, everyone has more money, prices are increased, and a new equilibrium is reached. But people are impacted; the people who have not yet received income increases have to pay more before they receive more, and often have to dip into their savings to make up the difference. Anyone who has saved is penalized for this savings, because they receive nothing extra for their savings and their savings is now worth less. Thus governments inflating the currency is a kind of stealth taxation. (This is why it was an excellent idea, when it became clear that the government’s response to COVID was to create massive amounts of new money, to make any large purchases of durable goods with one’s savings, locking in that value before the stealth taxation hit. E.g. buying a weight set, a new car, a new water heater, re-roofing one’s house now rather than in a year, etc.)
Other Causes of Universal Price Increases
There is another causes of universal price increases besides inflation: a contraction in the amount of goods and services available for purchase while the supply of money stays the same. This can be caused by the population shrinking, but that has been (so far) pretty uncommon in human experience. Not unheard of, but uncommon.
A more common cause of the contraction in goods and services are wars: wars consume large fractions of the productive capacity of people and literally throw the results away. Granted, they often throw them away for military purposes, as in the shooting of bullets or the dropping of bombs. Still, bullets and bombs are not economically productive. Further, soldiers at war are not part of the economy, and thus their labor is removed from the economy.
Another cause of a contraction in goods and services is the expansion of the regulatory state. Regulators do not produce anything (besides regulation). People who are employed as regulators are, therefore, not contributing to economic production and the more people who are shifted from the economy to the regulatory state, the smaller the pool of laborers and the fewer goods and services there will be to purchase. (This is not a value judgement on regulation; experience has shown that some regulation is necessary for the common good; it just must be understood that regulation is in no sense free.)
Another cause of a contraction in goods and services is the limitation of the resources to produce them. For example, if energy policy reduces the amount of energy available to the economy, fewer goods and services will be able to be produced. This can be effected either through the direct limitation of energy production or by the taxation of energy production.
Always Question Science
One of the great things about science is that, when done properly, it’s easy to scrutinize it. So whenever you see someone cite a scientific study, always look into it. A friend recently gave me a link to this article in the NY Post titled, A Third of Women Only Date Men Because of the Free Food: Study. (note: he didn’t endorse it, just provided it for context).
If you look at the article, it links to this article in The Society for Personality and Social Psychology. This article describes the study in slightly more detail, but we need to look at the actual study, which is titled Foodie Calls: When Women Date Men for a Free Meal (Rather Than a Relationship).
So, first question: what was the study? (There were actually two, since my purpose is to illustrate why one should read the original paper critically, for brevity I’m going to only discuss the first study; go read the paper for the second one.) It was a survey of 820 women on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service who were paid $.26 to answer a survey. (If you’re not familiar, Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s service where people are paid small amounts to do extremely short, simple tasks; it works because Amazon streamlines the process of getting many small tasks in succession so it’s worth it to the people doing it.) These were then filtered down to 698 self-identified heterosexual women. They were given personality questions as well as the question which makes the headline.
Have you ever agreed to date someone (who you were not interested in a relationship with) because he might pay for your meal?
Right off the bat, I dislike the phrasing on this because I’m used to “date” as a transitive verb meaning to be in a relationship with someone where the couple regularly go on dates. Which would make this question nonsense because it would be asking whether the women have been in a relationship with someone they were not interested in a relationship with. Clearly, by “date someone” they mean “go on a date with someone,” but this weird usage is going to influence how people respond. Among the possible reactions is to interpret the question more loosely, which means that both “yes” and “no” answers will mean a wider variety of things depending on how the responder interpreted the question.
And that’s apart from the way that people may well vary in interpreting the question. I could easily see women interpreting this to mean, “Did you ever go on a date with a man who hadn’t piqued your interest but, since he was paying for the meal, you thought you’d give him a chance to see if he improved on acquaintance?”
If what they wanted to ask was whether the woman ever intentionally misled a man into thinking she was open to a relationship with him when all she wanted as free food, why didn’t they ask that? Because such harsh language would color the results? Because if they said what they actually meant women might be embarrassed to admit it? So what was the goal? To try to trick them into revealing the truth?
I’m going to get back to that in a moment, but let’s take a short break to point out that when you read the paper, a third of women answered positively to the question, which only asks if they’ve ever done this even once. The study had a followup question about frequency; 20% of the women who went on a “foodie call” did so frequently or very frequently; since that’s 20% of 33%, that works out to 6.6% of all women. This is a long ways away from “a third of women only date men because of the free food.”
But back to the question: I imagine that people would try to defend the ambiguous language because words lie “deceive” imply judgement, and so will discourage respondents. Perhaps, but that’s because the thing being described is bad. Anyway way that the person understands of describing the intentional deception of a person to defraud them out of material goods will sound bad, because it is bad. The only way to make it sound not-bad is to phrase it in such a way that the respondent doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
Which gets me to the bigger point about this kind of psychological research: the simple expedient of phrasing your question ambiguously guarantees you publishable results. There’s no need to engage in p-hacking or other statistical tricks. Unlike with some of the stricter sciences like biology, getting fake results can be done with everything being completely above-board. It’s a great racket, which is why it will keep going for quite some time. Which is why you should never trust a summary of the results. Always track down the study and find out what the actual questions were.
Always question science. Good science is made to be questioned.
Murder She Wrote: Murder To A Jazz Beat
On the third day of February in the year of our Lord 1985, the twelfth episode of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Murder to a Jazz Beat, it’s set in New Orleans. (Last week’s episode was Broadway Malady.)
The opening shot was actually a closer-in shot of the paddle boat behind the bridge. Even in the 1980s paddle boats were antiquated; screw-driven propellers are more efficient and less bulky. The paddle boat was iconic of the Mississippi river, though, so it makes perfect sense that our establishing shots have one. Mysteries frequently make use of iconography. There is something very fitting about suggestive imagery in a genre that’s all about interpreting clues. Murder, She Wrote, in particular, also made heavy use of types and archetypes to convey more in the relatively short time that it had. (Upbeat Jazz music plays over these images, solidifying the New Orleans feel.)
The episode begins with Jessica in a cab.
The cabbie, Lafayette, is explaining that the secret to good gumbo is using stale beer to make the fish stock, because that makes for an excellent roux. Jessica is polite, but not super interested. She does like his outlook on life, though, which is that if you spend your time with good food, good friends, good music, and good conversation, a man can’t die no ways but happy.
When Jessica observes that he’s a philosopher, he offers to take her on a tour of the city (off the meter) so they can keep talking and there isn’t a man alive who knows New Orleans better than he does. Jessica is tempted, but has her obligations. Specifically, she needs to be at the TV station to tape a segment for New Orleans Today. When Lafayette asks if she’s a celebrity, she replies “I sincerely hope not. But, uh, the taping starts in six minutes.” Lafayette asks her why she didn’t say so before, then takes a shortcut (which starts by going the wrong way down a one-way street).
The establishing shots in Murder, She Wrote are interesting because they do so much of the heavy lifting for the set decoration, and this one is no exception:
Lafayette screeches up with two minutes to spare. He tells Jessica that he’ll drop her luggage off at her hotel, and they’ll meet up later for sightseeing.
When Jessica gets inside, she goes to the stage, which is empty. The stage, by the way, is quite interesting from the perspective they show it:
This angle does a very good job of highlighting how fake the stage is; it’s a tiny oasis of New Orleans themed decoration in a larger sea of functional production that could be anywhere.
We then meet Jonathan, the man who is going to interview her.
He’s surprised to see her, because the taping is in two days. Jessica checks her pocket calendar and it turns out she’s transposed the dates of two engagements. At the moment, she’s supposed to be forty minutes into dedicating a new school library.
Jonathan is excited for the opportunity to show Jessica New Orleans and all it has to offer in terms of food and entertainment, since she’s clearly going to be in town for a few extra days. Which he does.
We then meet some Jazz musicians. Here’s Eddie Walters:
He appears to be a personal assistant to “Ben.” He’s got to get the coffee he’s holding to Ben while it’s still hot. Ben doesn’t like it when it’s not hot. (Eddie speaks in a halting and inarticulate way that suggests he’s got some kind of intellectual impairment.)
And then we meet Ben (Coleman), who’s giving an interview:
He’s in the middle of saying that there’s no denying that luck played a big part in his move to Vegas, but so did a lot of hard work. The woman sitting next to him is Lisa.
We then meet Dr. Aaron Kramer:
He’s Ben’s manager. And not too happy with something, though it’s not made clear what. If Lisa turns out to not be Ben’s wife, then it might be her.
Shortly after this, Jonathan comes up to the table and introduces Jessica to Ben and Aaron. There is small talk and the topic of the upcoming move to Las Vegas comes up. At the mention of this, two of Ben’s band-mates come up and angrily bring up the subject of whether they’re coming with him.
The guy on the right is named Eubie, the one on the left is Jimmy. Ben and Aaron try to avoid the subject, but eventually admit that they and another musician (Hec) are being dropped from the group in Vegas. Eubie feels betrayed. He spent sixteen years helping Ben and feels he’s owed gratitude. Instead, Ben insults him. When Eubie says that he aught to kill Ben, Ben insults him further, saying that he doesn’t even have the guts to do it.
I think we can tell who’s going to die in this episode.
Aaron promises the guys that he will take care of them—he’s got other groups. They leave, disappointed, but partially consoled.
Jonathan asks Aaron if this will interfere with the taping that night and Aaron assures them that it won’t—they’re all professionals and will fulfill their duties, whatever their private disappointments. He then invites Jessica to attend and Jonathan assures Aaron that she will.
Back stage, at the venue for the evening, if you can call it “that”back stage”, since the venue is a barn, we meet Callie.
She’s Ben’s wife. So it’s likely Aaron was indeed unhappy because Ben was fooling around with Lisa at the table earlier. Anyway, Eddie, Ben’s factotum, gives her a flower. Eddie, incidentally, speaks haltingly, and like he has some kind of mild mental impairment.
They discuss the latest news—she heard it from Eubie. Eddie is upset about Ben cheating on Callie.
Callie takes it more in stride, though. “Ben’s latest? She won’t last longer than any of the others.”
Eddie says that sometimes he doesn’t like Ben much, and Callie says that sometimes she doesn’t either. But then adds, “but we can’t help loving him, can we?”
Jessica and Jonathan have come early and go backstage to visit Ben and Aaron. On their way, they hear the two men shouting at each other in an office. (The barn has been sub-divided to provide a few rooms.) Aaron leaves and runs into them, embarrassed. After some minor talk about this, Aaron shows them to their seats.
After they’re gone, Ben comes out of the office and runs into Callie. They have some ambiguous dialog where Callie tells Ben if he wants to be free all he has to do is say so and he says that it’s not that simple and she knows why. So, yeah, Ben is definitely not long for this episode.
We then get a minute or two of the concert itself, then, at the end, there’s a special song, where Ben plays a song from his famous mentor, “Sweetman” Buddy Brunson, using Brunson’s famous clarinet. (Until this point, Ben had been playing a saxophone.) A minute or so into this song, Ben collapses. A doctor who was in the audience rushes up and, after taking his pulse, pronounces him dead.
After a few reaction shots in which everyone expresses surprise and dismay, we fade to black and go to credits.
Had you been watching back in 1985, you might have seen a commercial like this:
When we come back from commercial, Jonathan tells Jessica, “it’s like something out of one of your books.” Jessica gravely replies, “As a matter of fact, it is.”
The doctor who pronounced him dead remarks that it’s a pity for someone so young to die of a “coronary,” but Jessica is having none of it. The drained color around his lips and feint blue on the moons of his fingers suggests that it was poison, which she’s sure an autopsy will show.
When the doctor says that he’s not conversant with poisons, Jessica says that it’s unlikely that he would be with this one—it’s a very deadly, fast acting, and rare poison. Jonathan recognizes the book of hers this featured in. It’s called, “Murder on the Amazon.”
When Callie hears the word “poison,” she slips the coffee cup that Ben drank from right before he started playing into her purse. A moment afterwards, the police arrive.
They’re led by Detective Lieutenant Simeon Kershaw.
He asks who called them in and the doctor introduces himself. It doesn’t really make sense for the doctor to have called the police since he would have been with the body and wouldn’t have known where the telephone was, but I suspect that this is just TV economy—saving the money of hiring another actor to be the person who called the police. The doctor mentions Jessica’s theory, and Lt. Kershaw is extremely offended that she offered an opinion without being a medical pathologist.
In the ensuing conversation, we find out that the poison is an obscure curare derivative. This is curious because curares (curare is a family of plant alkaloids) are ineffective orally and must be introduced intravenously. Hence their popularity for being used to tip arrows and blowgun darts for hunting. (It does you no good to kill your food with a poison that will kill you when you eat it.)
Anyway, he suspects Jessica of a publicity stunt and says that an autopsy costs time and money, and if the coroner doesn’t find anything, he’s going to charge her and Jonathan with obstructing a police investigation. “Do you still say poison?”
Jessica starts to reply, “In chapter 18…” but he cuts her off and says, “Ten O’Clock tomorrow. My office.” He then walks out of the barn. It’s a dramatic exit, but more than a little strange that he evinces no interest in investigating anything at the scene of the death.
An older man, named Carl Turnbull, then walks in and talks with Jonathan.
He demands to know why he had to get a call from the cameraman instead of Jonathan. They have less than an hour to get the tape edited for the 11:00 news. Jonathan will have none of showing the footage of Ben dying on the news and they agree to see the station manager to settle the dispute. Aaron offers to drive Jessica to her hotel while the two men hurriedly walk off.
We then cut to Jessica investigating where the cup had been.
Aaron gives Jessica a ride, but they stop to have a “nightcap” since “sleep won’t come easily.”
At some restaurant they talk for a bit and Aaron explains that he wishes he could make music but can’t, all he can do is appreciate it, so he tries to help the various starving musicians make a little money, which is difficult because there are so many talented musicians in New Orleans. Many of his groups tour, as well as play locally. He lists them, and Jessica notes that Ben’s group just got back from playing in South America.
The next morning Jessica is in the Lt’s office where he plays her a tape of the 11 O’Clock news from last night where they showed the footage of Ben Coleman dying. The Lt. blames Jonathan for it, but he comes in and tells the Lt. that he (the Lieutenant) would have done well in the old west, being quick on the draw but none too bright. The station manager sided with Turnbull, so Jonathan quit.
He doesn’t seem to have gotten much sleep last night either, and looks the worse for wear.
Lt. Kershaw apologizes to him. When Jonathan tells him that he’ll be making another mistake if he doesn’t listen to Jessica, Kershaw tells him to stuff it, as he had a long night too. He pulls out a copy of Murder on the Amazon and tosses it on his desk, explaining that he roused a bookstore owner from sleep to get it. He tells Jessica that it’s not half bad. And this morning when the coroner called to say “heart attack,” he told him to check the “inner lining of the liver” and, sure enough, it was just like in her book.
Jessica graciously accepts his apology.
Oddly, no mention is made of the fact that curare paralyzes the voluntary muscles, not the involuntary muscles, so victims die of asphyxiation, not heart failure. I guess this is a very derived derivative of curare.
Lt. Kershaw also mentions that Ben had traces of narcotics in his system. The Lt. isn’t surprised; when he first met Ben, Ben was a “two bit street punk.” He adds that they were tipped that one or two of the band members might have been doing some smuggling, but they could never catch them.
Lt. Kershaw also recounts the story of how, fourteen years ago when he was just a beat cop, he had Ben and his brother dead to rights in a liquor store holdup where the clerk was killed, but they couldn’t obtain a conviction because Callie—then Ben’s girlfriend—swore that they were with her at the time. He muses that the brother died in a street fight a couple years later, and now Ben got his.
Jessica wonders how the poison was introduced. She asks if any marks were found on the body and Lt. Kershaw ridicules the idea of a poisoned dart blown from a trumpet. Jonathan asks if it could have been in his coffee. Kershaw says that he thought of that but the cup is missing. Jessica then points out that three cameras were rolling, so perhaps the killer was caught on tape.
This leads us to the next scene, at the TV station, where Jessica, Lt. Kershaw, and Jonathan (plus an extra playing the equipment operator) review the tapes. As they go over it repeatedly, Jessica notices something.
During the clarinet performance, Callie takes a drink from Ben’s cup. Which clearly proves that the coffee couldn’t have been poisoned.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back, Jonathan suggests that maybe Callie didn’t actually drink the coffee, but was just faking it. Lt. Kershaw suggests that perhaps the poison was elsewhere. But if that was the case, Jessica asks, why did the coffee cup disappear?
At this point Turnbull shows up and asks what they’re doing there since Jonathan isn’t an employee of the station anymore. Then he notices Lt. Kershaw and changes his tune. Jessica then says that she was going to make public a theory she had about Ben Coleman’s death on Jonathan’s show, but since he doesn’t have a show anymore, she’ll have to go to a competing station.
Turnbull is alarmed at this and says that shouldn’t be necessary. He’s sure that Jonathan’s program can be easily reinstated. Jessica then wishes him a good day.
This is a very strange turn of events, given that Jonathan wasn’t fired, he quit out of principle. Jessica getting him his show back suggests that his principle of not being willing to work with people who would air the footage of Ben Coleman dying on camera no longer applies. If so, Jonathan has very short-lived principles and it’s doubly weird that Jessica initiated this move which relies on his principles being so short-lived.
Jessica then walks out as Turnbull assures her that it can be straightened out and begs her to not leave. On their way out, Kershaw asks Jessica what her theory is, and Jessica replies that she’s still working on the theory, but she found Turnbull so insufferable that she just had to say something.
Later that day, Jonathan calls her from a payphone to relay the latest news on the investigation. Kershaw is checking all the chewing gum he can find at the barn. He believes Callie poisoned Ben because Ben only bought three tickets for Las Vegas. One for himself, one for Eddie, and one for his new girlfriend. Kershaw believes that Callie was going to be dumped like the rest, found out, and killed Ben in revenge. Jessica is dubious, though. You can’t get rid of a woman who saved you from a murder charge in the same way you can get rid of a trumpet player.
Jonathan invites Jessica to go have lunch to celebrate his show being back on the air, which confirms that this wasn’t just a thing to tweak Turnbull, Jonathan’s principles really didn’t last a full day.
Jessica declines, though, because she needs to make good her boast to Turnbull about having a theory to make public. Accordingly, she goes and finds Lafayette the cab driver. She asks if he knows where Eubie, Jimmy, and Hec are. Lafayette, making good his boast about knowing New Orleans better than any man living, takes her right to them. They’re in a restaurant auditioning for a spot as the restaurant’s entertainment.
They’re none too happy to talk to Jessica, and when the subject of Aaron saying that he’d get them work comes up, they explain that Aaron is a terrible businessman and can’t really get anyone work. When Jessica says that he must have something going for him, since he managed to keep on going, Eubie suggests she keep that kind of talk to herself. She might get someone in trouble with it.
Jessica then runs into Aaron outside and relays the news that the audition didn’t go wonderfully. He offers to give Jessica a lift, but Lafayette butts in. When he refers to Aaron as “Mr Kramer,” Aaron asks, “Do I know you?” Lafayette responds that there’s no reason he should, but he knows all about Aaron. Jessica tells Lafayette it’s OK and accepts the ride from Aaron.
In the car, Jessica accuses Aaron of smuggling, and he confesses to it. He’s not much of a business manager, and smuggling was a way to keep things going during lean times—to put a few dollars into the pockets of musicians when they weren’t working. Jessica says that there is no excuse for smuggling drugs, but Aaron exclaims that it wasn’t drugs—drugs are what customs always looks for. His fight with Ben Coleman was actually about drugs; Ben brought some in on almost every trip and if he’d gotten caught, it would have ruined everything.
But he didn’t kill Ben. There was no point. It wasn’t going to last anyway; the way Ben was going he was probably going to burn out in less than a year.
Aaron is also certain that Callie didn’t kill Ben. She loved him and would have gone through hell for him. In fact, that’s what she’s been doing for the last sixteen years.
That night, at a wake for Ben (which is being held at the barn where he died—I assume because it saved on set costs), Eddie puts the clarinet in the casket with Ben.
After he does this, Callie tells Eddie that it’s time to go, but Eddie doesn’t want to. Moments later, the police arrive and Aaron is arrested for smuggling. After Aaron is led away, Kershaw says that he figures Aaron killed Ben, too. He had motive and opportunity, and did it with the clarinet.
When he picks up the clarinet to collect it as evidence, Eddie gets deeply upset. He says that Ben told him to never let anyone touch it, and that Kershaw must put it back. Callie tries to calm him down but it doesn’t work; he’s inconsolable and uniformed officers are forced to restrain him.
When they drag Ben outside, Kershaw explains to Jessica and Jonathan.
It couldn’t have been the coffee, and they tested every spec of gum they could find and the poison wasn’t there, so there was only one other place it could have been: on the reed of the clarinet.
And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial, Jessica, Jonathan, and Lt. Kershaw are in Kershaw’s office. He lays out the case of Aaron being a smuggler, which Jessica doesn’t argue with since she knows that he is. But she still doesn’t see how that makes him a murder suspect.
Kershaw says that Aaron had a contract with Ben and Ben threatened to tell the authorities about the smuggling if Aaron didn’t let him out of it. When asked, Jonathan says that the Buddy Brunson tribute song (the one for which Ben switched to the clarinet) was Aaron’s idea.
Jessica counters that it wasn’t Aaron who smuggled in the poison, since at the time he didn’t know that he was going to be blackmailed. Her guess is that Ben Coleman was the one who smuggled in the poison. (Presumably to kill Callie, since he was planning to drop her but couldn’t leave her alive to take revenge by recanting Ben’s alibi for the convenience store murder.)
Then Kershaw gets a call from the lab. There was no trace of poison on the reed. There was nothing at all; it was absolutely clean. Kershaw is perplexed by this, as is Jessica. Why the lack of saliva doesn’t immediately indicate to them that the reed was changed out, I don’t know. Possibly because there’s still five minutes left in the episode, so it can’t end now.
The next scene is at the station where Jessica and Jonathan are going to tape the show. Turnbull shows up and says that the show is going to be aired live and he hopes Jessica is ready to deliver on her promise. I guess Turnbull has been repurposed as the station manager because that’s cheaper than hiring a another actor to play the station manager. Anyway, while Jonathan argues with Turnbull, Jessica watches a denture cleanser commercial being filmed.
(They’re showing off removing blueberry stains from dentures.)
Somehow, this commercial gives Jessica the crucial insight into how Ben was murdered. She then runs off and calls for a taxi. By coincidence, the taxi she hails is driven by Lafayette. When he asks where she wants to go, she says “Saint Charles Cemetery.”
At the cemetery the funeral is going on in New Orleans style.
The band is playing a lively version of When the Saints Go Marching In. They start marching off, and lead all of the mourners away except for Callie and Eddie.
Eddie is upset that Aaron let the police take the clarinet, and Jessica explains that Lt. Kershaw was only doing his duty. He thought that Aaron had killed Ben by poisoning the clarinet reed. Eddie says that he couldn’t have; only he and Ben were allowed to touch the clarinet. Jessica says that she knows.
Callie tries to get Eddie to leave, but Jessica tells her that she knows who killed Ben. Callie denies this, but Jessica doesn’t care and just explains. Callie took the coffee cup off of the piano. She did this, not because it was poisoned, but because it wasn’t. He was poisoned via the clarinet reed, but via the reed that was on the instrument when Ben played it, not the fresh reed that was replaced on the clarinet after the murder. (Jessica points out that Ben drank black coffee right before he played, so the reed should have been stained, but it wasn’t, proving the reed had been replaced.)
When Jessica gently tells Eddie that he replaced the reed to hide the poison, he confesses. Ben had always been a good friend to him. Ben wasn’t nice to many people, but he was never not-nice to Eddie. A long time ago, Ben, Eddie, and Ben’s brother did a real bad thing, and Callie told the police that they were with her. He and Ben loved her for it. But then Ben didn’t love her anymore. He wanted to leave Callie behind, but thought she would tell the police that she’d lied. He got the poison in South America to kill Callie so he could leave her without going to jail, and told Eddie about this plan. Eddie couldn’t let him do that to Callie. He told Ben Callie would never hurt them, but Ben wouldn’t believe him. When he told Callie about Ben’s plan, Callie didn’t believe him. So he didn’t see any other way to keep Ben from killing Callie except to kill Ben. He then says that Ben didn’t love Callie anymore, but he still did. He repeats the last part several times as he breaks down crying and puts his head on Callie’s shoulder.
And on that sad note, we go to credits.
This is an interesting episode which has a lot of strong points. The mystery features the always-fun plot element of the victim having been caught in his own trap, or at least killed because of his own plan to murder someone else. And it’s done well. Additionally, this episode has an interesting setting (mostly in terms of music) and several vivid characters.
One big issue to consider in this episode is the poison: as a rare south-American poison, it is allowed to have any properties that the author wants it to. This can be easily abused if the properties of the poison are revealed toward the end of the story, but it has no major fair-play implications if all of the properties of the poison are immediately identified, as they were in this episode. The only major consideration is that it turns the episode into fantasy, just as much as if the killer had used a ray-gun or a magic want to kill the victim. (Just as much, but far more plausibly, since there are, undoubtedly, a great many poisons that we don’t know about.) It’s also a bit annoying that the writers got the properties of curare wrong, though this could be worked around by having Eddie have known Ben had a cut in his mouth.
That said, the identification of the poison was a bit fraught. It’s extremely implausible that a poison which kills within a minute would have time to do anything detectable to the lining of the liver, since blood circulation stops at death. Also, what lining of the liver? The liver is a dense organ that processes the blood. It’s not a pouch that stores stuff on the inside that it would have a lining, like the stomach or intestines.
In any event, the major effect of the poison being an obscure South American poison is that it effectively limited the circle of suspects to the band plus Aaron, which was useful. It’s a little unfortunate that it just happens to be the same poison that Jessica wrote about in one of her books but the killer didn’t know this. It would have been more interesting if the killer had gotten the idea from Jessica.
There are several characters in this episode which are worth considering. Let’s start with Jonathan, who’s a very vivacious character but also a bit strange within the episode. He serves two main functions: on a technical level he’s the primary connector between Jessica and the mystery. That doesn’t, in itself, make him a compelling character, but his broad range of connections that enables this is played up; people who know everyone are often interesting because they’re rare and this form of social connection is a kind of power. He also adds energy because of his boundless enthusiasm for all of the culture of New Orleans. Much of a setting being powerful is about how the characters react to it; this is a bit like how it was said of Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers that she gave him sex appeal and he gave her class.
Lafayette is another fascinating character. He’s a character with far more ability than is required for the job he performs. The thing about that is that it’s very rare in efficient economies with a lot of job mobility as has existed in the United States to a great degree after the second world war. It’s not universal, so it’s possible to find someone who’s just hard up on his luck, but in post-war America while it’s not completely unbelievable it just doesn’t ring true. What you can have, though, is someone who is simply content with what he has and who works a job he doesn’t find stressful in order to pay the bills and give him as much time to spend in a way he enjoys as he likes. The actual economics of driving a cab are a bit iffy, here, but he is portrayed as someone who enjoys meeting people, so I think it works. And they do lean into this with his character; he has an easy-going manner and a marked enthusiasm for enjoying the simple pleasures of life.
Lt. Kershaw is a striking character. Police lieutenants are often one-note characters in Murder, She Wrote and he’s got far more depth than most. He takes Jessica seriously and is willing to admit when he’s wrong. He is not passive, though, and does real investigation for himself. While he certainly doesn’t carry the episode, giving the police character some depth gives the whole story far more depth. Several real characters playing against each other makes for a far richer story because it creates a lot of possibilities.
Aaron Kramer is also a curious character. I’m not sure exactly how far we’re supposed to take the things he says as reliable, but he at least portrays himself as a lover of Jazz music who will do almost anything to help out the artists he can’t help by being competent as a manager. That kind of love is interesting. They keep it from getting too dark by having him smuggle things to avoid taxes rather than smuggling harmful things such as drugs, and tax evasion is, certainly, a much nobler way to make money than are highly addictive drugs, but at the same time struggling musicians are, perhaps, a dubious cause. It is interesting that he ends up paying for this approach to supporting the music that he loves with what is likely to be a lengthy prison sentence.
Callie isn’t a major character in this story, but she is still interesting. We’re left wondering why she has such a profound devotion to Ben Coleman. We certainly didn’t see him as having any redeeming qualities. But we didn’t see a lot of him, which is why this works. Her devotion raises a question which his relatively little screen time leaves possible there’s an answer to.
Having described the many interesting characters, one unfortunate thing about this episode is that none of them get closure. We last saw Jonathan when Jessica left him right before his newly reinstated show was going to air live. We last saw Lt. Kershaw when he was arresting the wrong man. We last saw Aaron when he was arrested for smuggling and was falsely accused of murdering Ben. We last saw Lafayette when he drove Jessica to the cemetery and was still hopeful he’d get to give her a tour of New Orleans. In none of the cases does the last time we see the character feel like the last time. That’s not the end of the world, and it’s particularly forgivable in a Murder, She Wrote episode which crams quite a lot into 48 minutes of screen time.
I’m in two minds about Eddie being the murderer. I didn’t really like the character, since he had the kind of hollywood intellectual impairment which feels extremely fake. Like with Forest Gump, it’s a kind of affectation of speech rather than an actual intellectual state. Eddie’s limitations are whatever the authors want them to be in the moment. On the other hand, having the murderer be the victim’s devoted friend is very interesting when it’s done well, and it’s done reasonably well, here. Eddie’s devotion is given an explanation—Ben was never not nice to him, which might well count for a lot to someone who was often picked on because of his intellectual disability—as is his being willing to murder his friend. He just couldn’t let Ben murder Callie. And I do like the touch that they hinted at this when Jessica said she guessed that it was Ben who bought the poison.
Next week we’re going to the sea for My Johnny Lies Over the Ocean.
Secular People Still Need to Explain Religious Truths
There are a lot of stupid secular theories abounding today, such as red pill dating advice or mimetic-rivalry-hoe-phase-theory, which receive a lot of criticism from people who are sane. But this criticism usually has no effect because, to believers in these theories, it amounts to nitpicking. This is because they are secular people trying to explain religious truths. Their theories are (necessarily) secular and when you try to explain religious truths with secular theories, the theories have to be idiotic, for the same reason that if you jam a square peg into a round hole, it will end up as a very funny looking square.
The religious truths that people are trying to explain are the necessity of having ideals and the impossibility of achieving the ideals, or to give them their proper names, everything has a nature and it is a fallen world. God created the world to be perfect, but the world chose sin over perfection, but God has not abandoned the world and is working to save it. Within this religious framing, it’s easy to explain why it is that we must strive to achieve perfection and also why we must accept quite a bit of imperfection. You do not need to throw out the ideal for one which seems achievable, and you do not need to worry (overmuch) about not achieving it.
This framework is not available to secular people. Secular people can, of course, have lofty ideals and, in pure pragmatism, accept that no one achieves it and keep going anyway. Most people want some kind of rational relationship between their thoughts and actions, even if they are completely incapable of expressing that rational relationship in words. So for the vast majority who can’t just hold incompatible beliefs with no explanation, they either come up with an explanation (which doesn’t make sense if you look at it too closely) or alter the beliefs.
Red pill dating and hoe-phase-theory are the same basic philosophical move of throwing out the ideal and substituting one that they think is achievable. The benefit to this is that trying to achieve the ideal is actually a rational activity since the ideal is achievable. The downside, of course, is that it’s an evil ideal.
Modern ideas about marriage are the opposite, though with a bit of a twist. Modern ideas of marriage demand the perfect realization of the ideal, which is no small part of why so many people aren’t marrying (though by no means the only cause). The twist is that the ideal is modified to one which makes sense within the secular worldview, so we get marriage not as a covenental relationship or as the mutual self-sacrifice of the parents for the sake of their children, but as a thing which is supposed to be mutually fulfilling. That is, marriage is supposed to fill both parties up so that they are happy. And this happiness is increasingly demanded; where it is lacking this is taken as a sign that the marriage isn’t real and so divorce is just recognizing the reality of the failure to form a real marriage. This is not particularly more sane than the red pill dating ideas, though its insanity is less spectacular.
I am reminded of a wonderful section of G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive, about being happy in marriage:
“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they– they do attract women, I don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night. They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment– you’ve got used to your drinks and things–I shan’t be pretty much longer–“
“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I, for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute– a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”
“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, “and do you really want to marry me?”
“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man–that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself– yourself, yourself, yourself–the only companion that is never satisfied– and never satisfactory.”
(It must be born in mind that Michael Moon is his own character and not a mouthpiece for Chesterton; Michael does have some good points among his mad ramblings, even if he doesn’t have the fullness of appreciation of the committed single vocation.)
But his fundamental point is quite sound: it is a mistake to try, as one’s primary goal, to be happy in that earthly sense of the word happiness. There will always be pain and sorrow and trials, and worst of all we will let ourselves and each other down. The big thing is whether we always pick ourselves up again. But happiness is a terrible goal in marriage, because marriage exists to accomplish wonderful things—making new people and teaching them how to be human—and trying to be happy gets in the way of accomplishing things. There’s so much more to aim for in this life than happiness.
Happiness in the sense of smiling and having a good time and enjoying yourself, that is. Happiness in the sense of the Greek makarios, which can also be translated as “blessed”—that’s quite a different thing. But in that sense, it’s important to remember that this is a painting of the happiest man alive:
I’m sure that Chesterton has said it before me, but the problem with reasonable goals is that they always end up being completely unreasonable. And that’s because this world is about God, and so doesn’t make sense on its own. And every attempt to make sense of it in itself, without reference to God, will fail in one of only a few ways.
Why Modern Art is Bad
My title is a little over-broad, as there is Modern art which isn’t bad. But a large enough fraction of it is to justify the title, and I’d like to talk about why that is. Because it’s not an accident.
The first reason is that Modern art arose from Modern Philosophy, which jettisoned the idea of truth. (If you only know a little bit about Modern Philosophy this might sound odd; a few hundreds more hours of reading it will clear things up.) Since beauty, like truth and goodness, is a kind of apprehension of being, the rejection of truth was also a rejection of beauty. Art without beauty quickly becomes very strange, and also bad. That is, it becomes deconstructive. There is a thing which can be called deconstruction whose purpose is to give insight into the inner workings of something good, in order to better be able to appreciate it or to make goodness oneself; this is not what happens, though sometimes in the early stages it is what people pretend is going on. A complete rejection of truth and beauty means that deconstruction can only be for the purpose of destruction; the only enjoyment the feeling of power which comes from ending something which is good. Of course, not all Modern art embodies this perfectly. God is the only one who accomplishes all things according to His will, so human artists with bad intentions sometimes fail and make good art by accident. And, of course, not all Modern artists even fully buy into the idea.
The other major reason why Modern art is bad is because it is a status symbol of the upper classes. Well, not just that it’s a status symbol, because they don’t have to bad. Ideally, status symbols are good, and can be when the highest quality is limited in availability. Ermine furs and imperial purple dyes were both high-status and beautiful in the days when they were incredibly hard to get. The problem is when beauty becomes cheap, as modern chemistry has largely rendered it. Exclusive items with quality can still go together, as in the case of fancy wrist watches or luxury cars. But cheap reproduction and efficient markets have made beautiful art (relatively) easy to come by, so the only way for art to become exclusive is to artificially limit it to only certain producers. Modern art, being ugly, helps in this, because people won’t pick the selected artists by accident, that is, merely because they happen to like the art. Because no one naturally likes the art. High status people train themselves to enjoy the art because enjoying it confers status.
You can learn to enjoy Modern art, but the same skill would allow you to enjoy any random patch of dirt on the ground. Dirt is actually interesting stuff, if you take the time and trouble to look closely at it. But dirt is common; dirt is cheap. It’s dirt cheap, in fact. In consequence, few people have the humility to learn to appreciate dirt. If you learn to appreciate dirt, you will probably be happier, but no one but you and God will know it.
Murder She Wrote: Broadway Malady
On the thirteenth day of January in the year of our Lord 1985, the tenth episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Titled Broadway Malady, it’s set in New York City. (Last week’s episode was Capitol Offense.)
The episode begins with the retired actress Rita Bristol…
…watching an old black-and-white movie that she starred in.
A young woman named Patti walks in and guesses that the movie is “Holiday in San Jose” but it’s actually “Moon Over Rio.” Moon over Rio was not a real movie, but I suspect that the clip was from a real movie that Vivian Blaine, the actress who played Rita Bristol, was in. The clip looked quite real.
“Oh look at me,” she says. “I was always a pushover for that bilge we cranked out, even while we were doing it. Were we ever that innocent?”
The young woman objects, “Mama, that’s not bilge. It’s terrific!”
Then Rita’s other child, her son Barry, comes in.
He announces that the play with both mother and daughter is going to happen on Broadway. “Si Parrish finally came through!” Rehearsals start in six weeks.
Some time later, over in Cabot Cove, Jessica gets a phone call from Grady. He’s gotten a job as the bookkeeper on the play that Rita Bristol is in. He tells Jessica that on her upcoming trip to the city (she’s coming to meet with her publisher) he’ll get her into the rehearsals and she’ll get to meet Rita Bristol. Also, she’ll get to meet his new girlfriend, Kate.
The scene then shifts from Grady, back stage, on the phone with Jessica, to Rita Bristol on the stage complaining about the scenery being in the way. She goes on a tirade about the general lack of skill of the production. This gets her into a fight with the director, who is unimpressed by Rita.
“I only know what I see, and it’s just laying there,” he says.
After this, backstage, Barry asks Rita if she wants him to fire the director, but Rita says no. Unfortunately, he’s the best there is. She does wish he’d be less hard on Patti. Rita’s not so sure about trying to make a comeback at her age, but Patti is terrific and she’ll do anything to help her career.
Later that night Jessica arrives and Grady meets her. He introduces his latest girlfriend, Kate Metcalf.
She’s Patti’s understudy.
Grady then ropes Jessica into going to a celebration dinner with Rita Bristol and the other important cast and production people. In fact, the dinner involves almost every character that will be in this episode, though we haven’t officially met them all yet. The setting is a fancy Italian restaurant, or at least I assume that it is since the waiter has a thick Italian accent.
I believe the photos on the wall are supposed to be of movie and Broadway stars. We then meet the man financing the play, Si Parrish:
Investment banking was becoming a bit of a bore, so he decided to get into theater.
Then, at the mention of Jessica being a writer, we meet the two writers of the play:
(They are worried that Jessica is being brought on to replace them.)
There’s a bit of back and forth in which Si thinks Jessica writes romance novels and Rita corrects him. I’m not sure if this is meant for humor or as a sneaky way of reminding viewers that Jessica is a mystery writer and hence why the title of the show is what it is. You’d expect people to know by now, but TV was always on the lookout for new viewers, who had no choice but to start in media res.
Barry then makes a speech in which he praises his mother and raises a toast to his sister. (The director conspicuously doesn’t raise his glass.) He also adds a small announcement, that Si is so confident in the show that they’re not going to try it out in Boston, they start Broadway previews in two weeks. The director rolls his eyes and Si, sotto voce, tells him to keep his negativity to himself.
Outside the restaurant, after dinner, Si offers Jessica a ride home, which she accepts. He also offers a ride to Barry and Patti, but Barry declines, saying that his car is only a block away.
As Barry and Patti go into an alleyway to get to the parking garage, a man jumps out.
“Your Money and your jewels, lady, fast!” he says.
Before either of them can react, he shoots Patti, who falls down.
Barry looks at Patti for a moment, then pulls his own gun and shoots the man, who crumples to a heap on the ground. As Barry cradles his sister in his arms, a crowd gathers, we fade to black, and go to commercial.
Here’s a commercial you might have seen, had you been watching the episode back in 1985:
When we come back from commercial, Barry is at the police station, on the phone with his mother , to whom he says that he’ll be there as soon as bail can be arranged.
The detective is Sgt. Moreno. Barry then conveys the news that the bullet nicked Patti’s spine and they don’t know if there will be permanent damage, or even if she’ll live. Barry is in trouble for using a concealed firearm to kill the guy who shot his sister. The Sgt. tells him that had he used the bad guy’s weapon, or even his bare hands, he’d have gotten a pat on the back, but the concealed firearm is a problem. Though the Sergeant does, personally, consider him a hero. (Barry explains he bought the gun after being mugged three times in the last 8 months.)
For context, this was during the NYC crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s which carried through the 1980s. (It began reversing in the early 1990s.) This was part of a broader trend in violent crime which gave us action figures like Dirty Harry.
A uniformed officer brings Sgt. Moreno a piece of paper, which he looks at, then tells Barry that he’s free to go, as the DA knows where to find him if he wants to file charges. Barry thanks him, but he replies, “No, thank you. You gave me one less bum to worry about.”
The scene then shifts to Jessica’ hotel room, where Grady is reading a news story about the shooting.
I find it interesting that this was just a story on the inside of the paper. I suppose that even Murder, She Wrote couldn’t pretend that in New York City of the 1980s a mugging would be front-page news.
Grady is also watching a news show about it, in which a strange man who had been preaching on the street next to the alley is being interviewed by the news.
He mentions two facts which catch Jessica’s attention. The first is that the shooting started immediately, and that a three-card monty dealer was even closer and took off like a flash when the shooting started. We hear that Patti remains in critical condition and that the drifter has been identified as “Manny Farkus.”
Jessica is bothered by what the strange man said. If it’s true, Patti was shot before either she or her brother had a chance to do anything (which we in fact did see was true). Which suggests that the motive wasn’t her money or jewelry.
Jessica then goes to the police station where she harangues Sgt. Moreno about the case. He’s unmoved, though, so Jessica says that she’ll do the investigation herself.
Incidentally, we’re shown the piles of paper on his desk to convey how busy he is:
It’s a nice touch that his nameplate is all but hidden.
Also interesting is that he quotes statistics at her to disprove her assassination theory; eleven people were shot yesterday, which is the number who are supposed to be shot each day. It really drives home the context of the crime wave.
This takes the form of Jessica visiting Rita Bristol. It seems that Jessica was invited because Rita could really use company. Jessica is willing to lend a sympathetic ear, but she’s surprised Rita wouldn’t prefer a friend. Rita explains that the funny thing about stardom is that, when your star fades, you discover how few friends you actually have. And she had fallen into alcoholism, which didn’t help. The few friends who didn’t disappear she chased off. She also lost two marriages and almost drove her children away until she became sober, seventeen years ago.
She breaks down crying about Patti and Jessica comforts her.
We then cut to Jessica finding the guy who does three card monty outside of the alleyway. She does this by finding a woman who plays three card Monty, who Jessica is sure knows the guy for reasons not explained to us. She takes out a $100 bill, rips it in half, and gives it to the woman, telling her that she’ll give the guy she’s looking for the other half, and what they decide to do with their halves is up to them.
Jessica walks off looking very self-satisfied.
It works, because the next seen is of her talking to the three card monty player at some street restaurant.
He confirms that the mugger shot immediately after demanding money and jewels but before giving her any time to comply. This strikes him as very amateurish, since it would involve wasting time to have to rifle through her pockets for the stuff to steal after having drawn attention to himself with the gunshot.
Back at police headquarters, Jessica harangues Sgt. Moreno some more, and he gives her the file on Manny Farkus.
He had no known address and his fingerprints were not on file with the FBI. There was no possible connection with Patti Bristol. Sgt. Moreno thinks that the three card monty guy was right: he was just an amateur mugger. And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
We come back from commercial at the hospital, where Jessica and Rita are going to visit Patti. They’re met in the hallway by a doctor in scrubs who jumps straight to giving her the news that Patti is going to make a full recovery—there will be no paralysis. Rita is overjoyed and goes to see her daughter.
We then cut to Barry, on stage, giving a speech to the cast and crew thanking them for their effort and hoping that they’ll all be able to work again some day. Right as this concludes the director comes in with the famous actress, Lonnie Valerian.
She’s willing to take over Patti’s role. Barry’s none too happy at this, but at Si’s request says that he will ask his mother if she’s willing to do it.
Back at Grady’s apartment, Jessica tells him and Kate that Patti’s first words to her mother were, “Mom, I want you to go on.” The conversation over dinner includes Grady mentioning that it seemed like the director had been planning to replace Patti for weeks. (Lonnie, in expressing her willingness to take the part, mentioned the lyrics to a song that had been cut two weeks before.)
Conversation then turns to the shooting of Patti, and Jessica just can’t get it go. Right when she admits that there’s no connection between Manny Farkus and anyone in the play, she sees him on TV.
To make sure we believe her, the camera zooms in on the TV, with a much clearer shot of him:
It’s interesting that they gave us two different shots, one where it’s harder for us to see but Jessica identifies him, and one where it’s quite clear that Jessica is right. This might be a technique for making us more impressed with Jessica, since she can spot the clue before we can, and we’re given immediate confirmation that she’s right in order to cement the impression.
Anyway, she goes and rents a tape of the movie and brings it to Sgt. Moreno. The movie was made fourteen years ago. He was credited as Morley Farmer, but of course that’s a stage name. The Screen Actor’s Guild gave Jessica the name of Morley’s agent. Sgt. Moreno refuses to follow this up—he’s too busy and as far as he’s concerned the case is closed—so Jessica vows to investigate herself.
Jessica meets Morley Farmer’s agent, Lew Feldman, who is played by the inimitable Milton Berle.
He last saw Morley two years ago. Like a lot of Lew’s clients his ability to get work was spotty, especially since the Catskills dried up. (The Catskills are a mountain range in southern New York, contiguous with the Poconos in eastern Pennsylvania; before air conditioning was common, people from NYC would often go to resorts in the Catskills and Poconos for the summer to escape the heat and accompanying spread of disease. This resulted in a ton of seasonal work for entertainers.)
Morley was mostly a failure as an actor. The last thing Lew saw of him was in an off-off broadway one-man act that Morley wrote for himself, which was the worst thing that Lew had ever seen. He’s confident that Morley never met Patti Bristol; the Bristols are a class act and Morley was a schlepper who failed at everything he tried. Jessica asks for a list of Morley’s credits and Lew says that will take a few hours, but he’ll get it for her.
Lew then gives Jessica the last address that he had for Morley, and Jessica goes to investigate.
While she does, the scene shifts to the stage where rehearsals are taking place. Rita is unhappy at how Patti’s part has grown considerably now that it’s not Patti’s part, and she lashes into the director for the way he clearly wanted to get rid of Patti. She points out that he and Lonnie Valerian got lucky with Patti getting shot. She asks if his plan had been to make Patti so miserable she dropped out? After storming off, Barry says that he’s pulling his mother out of the production and a big argument ensues with the director. After the director points out that Barry was riding his mother’s coat-tails just as much as his sister—he didn’t get on-broadway on his own abilities as a producer—Barry punches him. As he walks off, Grady tries to talk to him about Si Parrish, and that there seems to be a problem.
The scene shifts to Jessica and Grady in a horse-drawn cab in central park.
This is kind of a strange place to have a conversation, but I suppose that there is, at least, little danger of being overheard. I can’t help but wonder if this is a deliberate reference to Sherlock Holmes, since the hansom cab is Holmes’ most iconic form of transportation.
Anyway, this morning when Grady when to get the books from Si Parrish for the weekly audit, he grabbed some papers he probably wasn’t supposed to. It looks like Si Parish has double-sold the show, meaning that he will be out an enormous amount of money if the show is a success but will pocket the extra money if the show is a flop. Jessica can’t believe it, since Si Parrish seems like such a gentleman, but in any event this gives him a whopping good motive to have Patti shot.
That night, Grady drives Jessica to the address that Lew gave her for Morley Farmer.
There are two things interesting in this shot. The first is the location, which actually looks quite nice except for the poor illumination and the poster boards with writing on them. I think that this is meant to be a very bad neighborhood.
The other interesting thing is Grady’s car. Grady is normally shown as a a struggling young man, if a skilled accountant, and it’s very unclear how he would own a red convertible sports car. To say nothing why he would own it—that hardly seems like his personality, except perhaps that he does like to try to impress women.
And for once, Jessica doesn’t go into a dangerous place alone. (Grady goes with her.)
The woman—no idea who she is—is astounded by the idea that Morley had mugged someone. According to her, he had just run into an “angel.” That is, into some idiot who said he was about to come into a lot of money and that he’d produce Morley’s movie. She has no idea who it was, but the money guy was going to let Morley direct and play the lead. Jessica takes alarm at this and they leave. She sends Grady to wait at Lew Feldman’s table at the restaurant until Lew gives him all of Morley’s credits, while she takes a cab to go check on Rita Bristol, who she believes is in a great deal of danger.
At Rita’s place the doorman lets Jessica in after smelling gas they find Rita on the floor of the kitchen.
I really want to know who designed her kitchen; a free standing oven like that in front of cabinets whose doors are too close to be able to open all the way seems extremely impractical. As the doorman opens the windows, Jessica turns off the gas then bends down and takes Rita’s pulse, after which she notices an empty pill bottle next to her. After saying oh dear, we get a panning shot.
This is a very strange kitchen; as far as I can tell it has no sink. Anyway, we then fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial, we see an ambulance driving on the street, its sirens flashing, then we cut to the hospital where most of the major characters in the episode are waiting in a hallway.
I wouldn’t normally include this screenshot, but the framing is interesting. It’s a sort of tableau of the characters, only two of whom does it make sense to be here. And i f it makes no sense for the director to be here, it makes even less sense for Lonnie Valerian to be here. This may be related to catching people up after several minutes of commercials, or possibly to making people who just switched channels feel a little more like they know the characters. Or perhaps it’s just to visually convey how important whatever is going on is, for both aforementioned groups of people.
Anyway, Grady walks in and sits down next to Jessica. Rita’s not in good condition, but apparently she’s at least not dead. Si starts asking the director if he knows anyone who can replace Rita if worse comes to worst. Barry takes offense at this and Si defensively says that he’s concerned for the actors and chorus people. Jessica then whispers to Grady that he was right; Si needs the show to start or he’ll have to give back the investor’s money. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it at least does tend to exonerate Si, since trying to kill your two leading ladies isn’t conducive to a play opening. It would have been much better for him to kill them after opening night.
Jessica adds that Si Parrish doesn’t have the money; Jessica’s “tedious attorneys” play squash with Si Parrish’s “tedious attorneys” and the word on the squash court is that Si made a number of disastrous investments lately.
The doctor then comes out and says that Rita’s vital signs have stabilized for the moment, but gas, alcohol and barbiturates are a bad combination and it could go either way. He suggests that they go wait downstairs, grab a cup of coffee, and he’ll let them know the moment that there’s any change.
Jessica then asks Grady for the list of credits for Morley Farmer from Lew, which Grady hands her:
We don’t get to see the whole sheet, but Morley hardly seems like a complete failure. In the part I can read, he was in two episodes of one show, nine episodes of another, and was a guest star in a bunch of others. That’s better than many of the actors with bit parts in Murder, She Wrote episodes—the actors, I mean, not characters.
I also find it curious that this is an official-looking document and not a bunch of names scribbled on a napkin. Perhaps an agent keeps this kind of sheet for his clients to give to people who might want to cast him. Anyway, Jessica seems to recognize something from it, and we cut to the waiting room where all of the characters in the hallway, except Jessica, are. Various people say things either of blaming themselves or comfort, then Jessica comes in. Almost immediately, Barry is called to intensive care.
The scene then shifts to Rita’s apartment, where Jessica is pouring Barry coffee and he is saying that he can’t believe it. They make some small talk until Jessica starts saying (in an accusatory voice) that Rita didn’t kill herself. She always kept a coffee pot going, but when Jessica found her the coffee pot was empty and cleaned. She believes it had been laced with a strong sedative to knock Rita out. Then “alcohol was forced into her system” and the gas jets were opened. (Jessica doesn’t elaborate on how you force alcohol into the system of an unconscious person, so I suppose we are supposed to assume it’s not just possible, but practical.) Jessica then converts the accusatory tone into an outright accusation.
To that, she adds an accusation of trying to kill Patti. It was about the money. He not only wanted his mother’s money, but he wanted all of it.
When Barry denies this, Jessica starts imitating Rita Bristol, asking Barry why he’s lying to her. She reminds him of when he was a production assistant 12 years ago on Guns Over Abilene, in which Morley Farmer acted. He also worked with Farmer two years ago, “on location in Colorado.”
She keeps pestering him with facts and assertions, doing her best nagging-mother/Rita-Bristol impression, and Barry starts to forget who he’s talking to, shouting, “You can’t do this! You can’t spoil everything for me! Not anymore.” With some more nagging, he smashes the things on the mantle.
He then stares at the picture of his mother in her heyday up above the mantle.
He slowly says, “I can’t remember when I didn’t want to see her dead.”
Jessica asks if it was lucky that the director brought in Lonnie Valerian, and Barry agrees that it was.
Barry then tries to explain himself. “Do you have any idea what it was like, to be Rita Bristol’s little boy? To have a self-involved, penny-pinching lush for a mother? She never gave a damn about me. She hardly even admitted that I was alive.”
This goes on for a bit; Jessica doesn’t believe him and he explains further what a terrible mother Rita was. Finally he grabs Jessica and makes as if to throw her off of the balcony.
He’s interrupted by Rita calling his name from a door to the bedroom that just opened.
Pretending that she was dead was Jessica’s idea; the doctor cooperated and Rita was so, so sure that Jessica was wrong. He slumps and cries on her shoulder while she apologizes that he never knew how much she loved him. We then cut to the play on the stage with mother and daughter singing.
Grady is backstage and on the phone with Jessica. He holds it out so she can hear the music and singing. Jessica, back in Cabot Cove, says that it’s marvelous.
The set decoration here is interesting. Jessica has her phone immediately next to her typewriter, I believe in her kitchen, and on the desk she has her own books, though with the spines faced away from her. I presume that was for the audience’s sake, but in broadcast quality I don’t know that many people would have been able to read the spines; we can barely read them in DVD-quality.
According to Grady the show is fabulous and is going to be a huge success. Jessica observes that this is going to be big trouble for Si Parish, and Grady agrees, saying that the DA has been talking to him since 10am.
Jessica asks how Kate is doing and Grady says that there’s not much to tell. She ran off with some TV weatherman from Pittsburgh. Jessica expresses her sympathy and Grady tells her to not worry about it. She was OK; they didn’t have much in common. “But wait till you meet Francesca. Aunt Jess, she’s beyond belief.”
When Grady asks how soon Jessica can get down to New York City, she laughs and we go to credits.
This is an interesting episode. It leans very hard into the nostalgia that Murder, She Wrote was often known for. The washed up actress making a successful comeback is also very much in the dominant theme of Murder, She Wrote: that old things are still valuable.
The plot is quite solid in this one, possibly at the expense of the murderer being relatively obvious. Once it was established that Si Parrish desperately wanted the play to open (then fail) he was eliminated as a suspect. Aside from Barry, the only other person with a motive was the director. (Though if you really want to stretch things there was also Lonnie Valerian. Since she’s established as a highly successful actress, this seems too slim a motive, even for Murder, She Wrote.) And they could have gone in the direction of the director being the murderer, at least until the attempt on Rita’s life. That said, he wasn’t nearly so good a suspect. In particular, he had no plausible control over Barry and Patti going down that alleyway. (This could be worked around if it was obvious that they would, but that would really need to have been established as a pattern and that would require the mugging to have happened after a rehearsal.) Barry, by contrast, had complete control over where they would go after the dinner.
I don’t think that it was painfully obvious that it was Barry, though, and it’s a bonus that, at the end of the episode, it feels like there was only one possible suspect. I think that the actor did a good job of looking distraught over the things happening to his mother and sister, which was a good bit of misdirection. I think it also helped that the connection between Barry and Morley Farmer was obscured until the end. This does bring up some issues with fair play, but they’re not huge.
There were a few loose ends in this episode, but they were pretty minor. The main loose end, I think, is where the name “Manny Farkus” came from. Jessica said that the name “Morley Farmer” was a stage name, but it was used consistently by Morley’s agent as well as the people who knew him in the building where he lived. I almost wonder if this wasn’t more about having some name by which people could refer to him in the episode rather than being any kind of plot point. The names “Morley Farmer” and “Manny Farkus” sound similar enough that the audience might easily confuse them, and “Manny Farkus” is dropped as soon as the name “Morley Farmer” is introduced. As I said, this is a pretty minor point, though it would also have been easy enough to have fixed it.
The other loose end would have been how Barry convinced Morley Farmer to murder his sister. We’re given enough to figure it out—Barry told Morley that he would come into the money if he got rid of his sister—but it does feel a little at odds with what little of Morley’s character we’re given and a few lines about how he persuaded Morley would have been nice.
Despite this, I think my judgement is that this is a merely average episode of Murder, She Wrote. It works. It is entertaining. But it doesn’t grab one.
I think this is because there are no stand-out characters. This may be a personal quirk, of course. I don’t generally find show-business people to be sympathetic characters. Further, I generally don’t find people whose children turned out terrible to be sympathetic characters. Don’t get me wrong; children are their own people and make their own choices for which they are responsible. One bad child is easily chalked up to a personal choice. All of the children turning out bad seems… unlikely to be in spite of good parenting. Especially when the parent is known to have been a bad parent.
I do like the character of Grady Fletcher, but he’s not much in this episode and isn’t enough to redeem it. (And Grady is generally given some grating personality characteristics, too, which are a big too on-display for my taste.)
The one non-showbiz character (other than Grady) which we’re given is Sergeant Moreno, but he’s mostly just in the episode as comic relief and to provide a few bits of exposition. Still, it’s a decent enough mystery.
Next week, we’re in New Orleans for Murder to a Jazz Beat.
The World’s Top Scientists and Doctors
There’s a cartoon going around which shows a man pointing at his computer and calling out, “Honey, come look! I’ve found some information all the world’s top scientists and doctors missed!” It’s been roundly and deservedly criticized, but I’d like to focus on a few points I haven’t been touched on.
The first point is the level of generality that is used (“all the world’s”) when “top” scientists and doctors are all specialists. If the guy may have discovered some information about whether dietary fructose causes insulin resistance, what does it matter whether the world’s greatest geologists don’t know this? Who cares whether the best heart surgeons know it? Would anyone be surprised if the world’s greatest ophthalmologist knows nothing about it? The cartoon makes it sound like tens of thousands of brilliant people have all been studying the exact question the guy has been researching, but the reality of specialization is that the number of people who are actively studying whatever exactly the guy may have found may well number less than a dozen. There’s no guarantee that this small handful of people are among the best and the brightest, except in the narrow sense that someone who took bronze in a competition with only three people in his division is the best in the world who showed up at that meet.
This, of course, is even assuming that anyone is actively studying the field. The inclusion of “doctors” suggests that what the man has found relates to health, and the number of things being studied in health is absolutely dwarfed by the things that there are to study. It’s entirely possible that there are no experts in the specific subject that the guy believes he’s found information in because no one has funded research into it in the last twenty years. And even if they had, it’s entirely possible to be an expert in only one aspect of a subject; a scientist who conducted the world’s greatest trial on the effect of aspirin in reducing heart attack incidence may be completely ignorant as to whether it’s effective for treating lower back pain.
Then we come to the thorny problem that many people are not courageous enough to consider: who has declared these people to be the world’s top scientists and doctors? Was it themselves? In theory, there is no one more qualified to identify the best in a field than the best in the field. But, of course, a man saying that he’s the greatest is worthless. So is it the world’s average doctors and scientists? But how do they know that these other people are better than they are? How did they even form this opinion? Where would a heart surgeon get the information necessary to know how good another heart surgeon is? Do they, in their copious free time, watch each other perform surgery? And what of researchers? Are we to suppose that scientists drop in and conduct audits of each other’s labs to see how well they’re actually conducting their research? Or does this all come from people who are not experts at all, observing? That might be valid for doctors like heart surgeons for whom we can collect easily evaluated data such as “how often was the surgery successful” and “how often did the patient die on the table”. Though even there, any system which relies on measurement can be gamed. A surgeon can look fabulous by only accepting the healthiest patients compared to one who takes on the riskiest patients. And most fields in science and medicine do not admit of even this kind of measurement. No one expects everyone with chronic back pain to become pain free, and the only reliable way to judge a doctor’s nutritional advice is to wait until all his patients die and see how old they were, and what their qualify of life was over the years. Since they may well outlive the doctor, this is useless.
So suppose you find a doctor who says that fructose induces insulin resistance and you need to limit your sugar intake, while a government-sponsored doctor says that you should eat as much fructose as you want but limit your fat intake. How do you know that the government-sponsored doctor is the top doctor and not merely the doctor with the best political connections? How do you know that the doctor with the plain office is not, in fact, the top doctor, in terms of ability?
People really want infallible oracles that they can query for whatever knowledge they want, but it’s just not available.
And, truth to tell, even if they found it, most people would reject it because they wouldn’t like the answers that it gives.
Conservative vs. Progressive Artistic Talent
A debate which comes up from time to time is about why are most artists “progressives” and is this because conservatives don’t have artistic talent. There is, perhaps, something to be said for the idea that the kind of extreme creativity involved in artistic work tends to be unbalancing to a person’s sense of how the real world works, so a wildly creative person is more apt to believe absurd things (like socialism) will work in the real world, but I doubt that this explains the majority of what causes the tremendous skew towards progressivism in the arts. For that, we need to look at selective pressures, envy, and the defense against envy.
First, let’s consider selective pressures. Most of what is called conservatism is about producing the best environments possible for the raising of children. This puts all sorts of restraints on parents and communities for the sake of children. Included in these is needing to earn one’s living in a reliable way, because children (and sometimes a spouse) are relying on one to provide their living for them. The arts, in general, are an extremely unreliable way to earn a living. There’s an excellent reason that the words “starving” and “artist” go so well together. Thus there is a massive selective pressure against people who value family and the raising of children. And the talents that underlie art can, generally, be put to more practical uses, and practical uses pay better. This is especially true if the person with artistic talent has other talents, too.
From this we can see that it’s no accident that a large fraction of artists come from broken homes. Not only does coming from a broken home make a person less likely to understand the value of raising children well (though it can have the opposite effect), it also makes them more likely to seek attention. Putting the talents which underlie art to practical use tends to get you a paycheck but not nearly so often praise. (Don’t get me wrong, people can make art out of love. But it takes a lot of love. It takes a lot less love if you also have a deep-seated psychological need for approval.)
There is a secondary selective pressure on art to appeal to buyers or (in the case of advertising-subsidized art) viewers. This can be done through quality, but it is easier to do it through adding pornography. There is an absurdly large market for pornography that comes with social sanction or plausible deniability. Just check out the short film It’s Not Porn, It’s HBO. The success that this kind of pseudo-pornography brings allows for bigger budgets which makes for higher quality in the output (largely by being able to pay more people to work on it).
The other major thing to consider is envy. If you study history for even a few minutes, one of the most dominant themes you will find is that if somebody put in the work to make something worth having, someone else wants to take it from him rather than make it himself. This gets modified slightly when it comes to competition, where envy wants to win by dragging down others. “He did not deserve first place, I did.” You see this kind of envy constantly in third-rate artists. And progressivism is practical just codified envy; the progressive ideal is that all men are equal by dragging down any who are ahead, justified by fairy tales about how they only got ahead by cheating. This explains why third rates artists are so often progressives. But what of first-rate artists?
Here we come to the universal need of the successful to defend against envy. On an international scale, the primary defense against envy is a powerful army. On an international scale, if you want to steal what others have built, you must take it with an army, and their army being large enough to defeat your army protects them. This does not work within a nation, though, where the state retains to itself most of the use of violence. There are still defenses against envy using direct violence, such as front doors with locks and the police. But within a nation the envious can work within the legal system to enact laws to use this machinery of the state to take what belongs to others and give it to themselves. This is the reason why the rich are usually politically connected; as long as the laws are crafted in a way to allow loopholes, it doesn’t matter what the law is meant to achieve. And this is why, wherever you have a progressive party with enough power, the rich are always members of the progressive party. But it’s not the only reason. It also defends them against excessive envy being directed at them, personally. And this is why we see successful artists being progressives—it (partially) defends them against the envy of third rate artists.
(It should be noted that the individual political views of the artists making it don’t matter very much on collaborative projects, because most artists, and especially most progressive artists, will do whatever they are paid to do. The people who made movies were not wonderfully better people during the days of the Hayes Code, they just did what the men with the money told them to do, and that happened to be to make morally decent movies. So they did. It’s very easy to find the documentation that they didn’t want to.)
The Acolyte Season 1: The Bad, The Laughable, & The Interesting
A look at the entire season, now that it’s over. A look at the basic facts about the world it gets wrong, plot holes, and considering it as “Frozen meets Kill Bill”.
The Taming of the Shrew is Very Strange
I must begin by confessing that I’ve never seen The Taming of the Shrew and only have read most of it. What I have seen performed is the 1953 movie Kiss Me Kate. It’s very funny and I highly recommend it, by the way. Anyway, it motivated me to look into the actual play by Shakespeare, and it’s a rather extraordinary one. It’s very hard to know what to make of it.
The first thing to note about the play is that it’s a comedy. But it’s not merely a comedy, it’s an utterly absurd comedy. So it’s not necessarily the case that it is possible to make anything of it; part of the comedy may be that it is nonsensical.
The play begins with a very strange framing story, where a tinker by the name of Christopher Sly is drunk and a Lord notices him and has his servants play a practical joke on Sly that he is, in fact, a lord who for the last seven years has been affected by a madness, thinking he is a tinker. Then a troupe of players happens by the lord has the troupe of players put on the main play for him. We never heard of Christopher Sly or the lord again. The framing story is simply dropped after the introduction.
There is a main plot and a sub-plot in the play-within-a-play (which I will henceforth just refer to as the play, since that’s what it really is). The main plot is about Petruchio and Katherine (the titular Shrew). The sub-plot is about Katherine’s younger sister Bianca and her suitors. I say main plot and sub-plot, but the latter takes up about as much time as the former. It also involves various suitors pretending to be tutors and a servant pretending to be a suitor and, frankly, it’s so absurd I have a hard time keeping track of it.
All of this is the context for the taming of the shrew to which the title refers. It seems unlikely that we’re meant to take it seriously. For all that, though, there does seem to be a mildly realistic foundation to the absurdity.
When Katherine is called a shrew, this has nothing to do with different time periods having different ideas of decorum or it being considered, in Shakespeare’s time, immodest for a woman to speak her mind. Kate is an outright bully. She ties up and beats her younger sister out of jealousy (she claims that as her motivation) and physically attacks her music teacher for daring to try to correct her fingering on the lute. She is sharp-tongued in the sense of gratuitously insulting people. Her behavior would not be acceptable in any culture, in any time period. (Imagine a stereotypical Marines drill instructor, except with everyone, not just recruits.)
Petruchio is not a virtuous character, but he is, at least, polite to his social equals. And he is cunning. Moreover, he takes a liking to Katherine precisely because she has a powerful personality. The “taming” of Katherine is, perhaps, an apt metaphor, because her behavior is outright antisocial (in modern times it would be criminal). What it consists of is where there seems to be a minor element of truth underlying the absurd humor: Kate becomes content when she finally finds a man who she can’t intimidate. It is true that women do not, as a rule, like a husband who they can easily overpower. (For those who are young: that’s not because marriage is a Nietzschean power struggle, it’s because life is difficult and a man who can be easily overpowered can be easily hurt by accident when a woman is concentrating on other things, such as caring for young children, and feminine instincts don’t protect against this. The reverse is not nearly so important, since masculine instincts do include being gentle to the mother of his children, though even there, only so much; males do not usually want a wife so delicate relative to their force of personality that they can easily hurt her by accident, either.)
It is often said that when it comes to husbands and wives, opposites attract. This is true of many qualities, but certainly not of all qualities. You tend to find “assortive mating” (i.e. similarities attracting) in things like education, social status, and intelligence. A truth underlying the absurd humor of The Taming of the Shrew is that you also find assortive mating with force of personality. People with big, forceful personalities tend to get along better with a husband or wife who also has a big, forceful personality. When it comes to what two human beings get along well, there are no absolutes. But this is a trend you readily see.
The Taming of the Shrew seems to take this then turn it up to eleven.
But it should be remembered that it is an absurd play, and should not be taken too seriously.
Murder She Wrote: Capitol Offense
On the sixth day of January in the year of our Lord 1985, the ninth episode of the first season of Murder, She Wrote aired. Called Capitol Offense, it takes place in the swamps of Washington, D.C. (Last week’s episode was Death Casts a Spell.)
It opens with a congressman talking with some lobbyists in a richly furnished room. We’ll find out later that the taller one is Roy Dixon and the shorter one (mostly obscured in the picture below) is Harry Parmel. The congressman (getting a drink) is Dan Keppner.
For some reason the woman serving drinks has a camera in her lighter, which she uses to take pictures of the congressman doing nothing incriminating. He’s drunk, but that won’t show up in photographs, especially photographs from tiny cameras using 1980s technology.
A few moments later Congressman Joyner shows up and tries to take Dan “home.” The lobbyists try to get him to stay and Joyner unloads into them, calling them rattlesnakes and saying that the next day he will make a full complaint to the house ethics committee. For what, I cannot imagine and he does not say because he immediately has a heart-attack and dies. (As the scene closes, someone says to call an ambulance and someone else replies, “No. No ambulance.” The waitress then takes a picture of them over the body with her cigarette lighter.)
The scene then shifts to Cabot Cove, where Jessica answers her door to an aid from the governor. Congressman Joyner was found by his housekeeper dead in his bed this morning. Why on earth the other congressman and the lobbyists moved the body will, I presume, be something Jessica has to figure out, but it seems quite absurd on its face.
Anyway, the long and short of the rest of the conversation is that Jessica is named as Joyner’s replacement on an interim basis, until an upcoming primary takes place, so Jessica is off to Washington, D.C.
Before Jessica shows up, we see her soon-to-be-secretary, Diana Simms, answering the phone:
For once, I can actually believe the set decoration.
We then see Jessica arriving in town. She’s been picked up from the airport by Joe Blinn, the Media Liaison Officer.
Joe’s job is to get her name in the papers, or to keep it out, whichever she prefers.
On the way in to her office in the capitol building, she meets congressman Keppner. He asks to stop by later to discuss the Maine cannery bill and others.
Inside her office she meets Diana. Diana tells her that her resignation is already on Jessica’s desk but she’s prepared to work closely with Jessica’s incoming staff. Jessica retains Diana, however, for pretty obvious reasons. This is portrayed as Jessica being pure and honest, but it’s a little absurd to expect a mystery writer from Maine who is only serving for a few weeks to hire her own staff.
Right after Jessica crumples up Diana’s resignation letter and throws it in the trash next to her desk, Harry Parmel comes in and introduces himself.
He tries to invite Jessica to lunch, but Diana signals to not accept. After he leaves, she tells Jessica, “Most lobbyists are good people. They know the rules. Harry not only breaks the rules, he’s never heard of them.”
Later that night, Dan Keppner calls Jessica from a payphone in a bar. He’s sorry if he woke her, but there’s something he really needs to talk to her about. Jessica asks if it can be in the morning and he says sure, and makes an appointment to have breakfast.
He goes outside the bar and runs into Marta Craig. She was the bartender with the camera-lighter.
She tells him that she’s scared about the other night and moving the body. She then hands him a photograph of Keppner and the lobbyists crouched over Joyner’s body.
We then fade to some guy.
He kind of looks like he’s following Jessica, except that he loses her and she turns up behind him. When she asks who he is, he flashes his badge and introduced himself as Detective Lieutenant Avery Mendelsohn. He tells Jessica that he’s following her in the hopes of finding out who killed Congressman Joyner. And on that bombshell, we fade to black go to commercial.
Here’s a Northwestern Mutual life insurance commercial you might have seen, had you been watching on that fateful night in January of 1985:
When we come back the Detective Lieutenant is massaging his foot while talking to Jessica in the lobby. He says that maybe Joyner wasn’t murdered, but somebody moved the body. When people move a body, he asks himself why. After a bit of a comedic routine about taking pain medicine for his bad back, his stomach gurgles, and he says that perhaps he’s making something out of nothing, but when his stomach starts to growl, it’s a sure sign there’s a fox loose in the china shop. He then pauses in perplexity as his own metaphor and takes his leave.
It’s unlike Murder, She Wrote to run an investigation of a crime we saw in the beginning of the episode, Columbo-style. I guess we’re still in early-first-season experimentation.
Later that morning congressman Keppner wakes up in an alley with a bum going through his pockets:
He chases the bum away then runs after the bum and a passing police car notices him and picks him up. They have a photo of him for some reason.
At the police station Detective Lieutenant Mendelsohn is interviewing the congressman. Apparently, Marta Craig is dead. She was beaten to death in her apartment some time the night before. His jacket was found in her apartment and his hands have blood on them, so he’s got some questions to answer.
Back at Capitol Hill, Jessica is talking with Diana about the cannery bill, which would permit the building of a fish cannery on McHenry’s Point, which is only a few miles from Cabot Cove. It’s a classic case of business interests vs. the environmentalists. (Given that this is 1985, the business interests are supposed to be the bad guys.) Congressman Joyner was going to vote against the measure. Jessica says that she may also vote against it, after she’s shifted through the testimony herself and had a chance to make up her own mind. No mention is made of the opinion of the people from the congressional district she is representing.
Jessica then asks Diana where Joyner was the night before his body was found and there was nothing on his schedule but Diana remembers that Harry Parmel invited him to a party that evening but Joyner turned him down.
There’s then a bit of congress-related stuff where Jessica attends a committee meeting where testimony is heard from one of the lobbyists. This involves some digs at how things are done in Washington, including people reading out their prepared testimony. This was very much in the style of a kind of quasi-populism that was popular in the 80s and early 90s. The post-war consensus was breaking down and people who grew up with it didn’t know what to make of what government looks like when not everyone agrees, and one popular explanation was that there was just some imperfection in the system, and if common folks with common sense were put in charge, everything would be fine.
It was certainly a seductive idea at the time, but it’s absurd if you think about it for more than a few seconds. If common folks with common sense would do such a great job, and the populace was not to blame for the failures of democracy, then why does the populace not elect these common folks with common sense?
Anyway, back in Jessica’s office, Joe Blinn is remonstrating with Jessica for not having lunch with Kaye Sheppard, who is “the empress of Washington gossip, syndicated in 98 papers.” After this bit, the Lieutenant is waiting in Jessica’s office. He asks about her breakfast date with Keppner. Jessica says that she overslept and he never showed up. It’s not like Jessica to oversleep; she’s normally a very early riser. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that we didn’t get any shots of Jessica jogging around D.C. in her sweat suit. Anyway, he tells her that they’re holding Keppner for the murder of Marta Craig. His feet hurt, which is a sign that something isn’t exactly kosher, so he asks if she can spare him a minute.
In the next scene Jessica is talking with Keppner in the Lieutenant’s office, explaining that it was dumb to move Joyner’s body but he was too drunk to think straight. No explanation is offered for why it seemed like a good idea to him drunk, because I don’t think that there can be one. Anyway, he explains that Marta was at the party where Joyner died and last night met him at the bar he called Jessica from (he doesn’t remember which) and showed him a photograph of him over Joyner’s body. He went with her to her apartment and had a drink—ginger ale. That’s the last thing he remembers.
He says that the key to her apartment was planted on his jacket and the Lieutenant says that doesn’t explain the blood and makeup found on his shirt. He says that he doesn’t understand it but he’s not a killer. He turns to Jessica and begs her to believe him. And on that bombshell, we fade to black and go to commercial.
When we come back from commercial break, Jessica views the body. After being suitably disgusted and the Lt. saying that he told her it wasn’t pretty, Jessica says that Keppner certainly didn’t kill Marta. While there was blood and makeup on his shirt, there wasn’t that much, and there was only blood on his hands—no makeup. Had he beaten her as severely as she was beaten, he’d have had both blood and makeup on his hands.
Jessica has the Lt. take off his coat then demonstrates how the killer—who had blood and makeup on his hands—would have moved the unconscious body of congressman Keppner.
Thus explaining the blood and makeup found on Keppner’s shirt. The Lt. is impressed and says, “maybe you should have been a cop.” She replies, “I am a cop, when I’m at a typewriter.” He replies, “you’re not at a typewriter now.”
In the next scene we’re back at Jessica’s office and Diana is giving us some backstory on Keppner, with Joe filling some details in. He used to be an alcoholic, then recovered about 6 years ago—attended meetings, etc. Then a few months ago his wife left him, took the kids, and went to New York. Keppner started drinking again. Jessica then tells Diana and Joe that Keppner was framed, very clumsily, and assigns Joe to dig up everything possible on Marta Craig since he’s an expert in this town. Joe protests that he’s not a detective, but promises to do his best.
The next scene is at a restaurant where Roy Dixon (the lobbyist from the first scene) is waiting for a senator to show up and Harry Parmel comes in and tells him that his job doesn’t include covering up murders, before, during, or after the fact, and at the first sign of trouble, he covers his own rear end, not anyone else’s. This is clearly meant to implicate Dixon, who then tries to look guilty for the camera.
Which, of course, means that he definitely didn’t do it. The murderer never tries to look guilty for the camera.
In the next scene Diana gets home and is started to see a man standing there. But only for a moment, then she recognizes him. He’s a lobbyist we only saw for a few seconds who Diana directed Jessica to treat rudely. His name is Thor, and he comforts Diana about the news about Marta.
After embracing her, he tells her that some photos came in the mail. He shows her one.
She says that he showed her these photos a week ago and said that they were faked and she believed him. He then says that they came with a note.
The music then turns dramatic and we get a dramatic closeup of Diana. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Possibly nothing more than this is supposed to be important. We still have almost twenty minutes to go in this episode so perhaps they will pay this off.
The scene then shifts to Marta Craig’s apartment.
Jessica observes that Marta lived very well for a secretary. Jessica says that she didn’t know the woman—all she knew was what was on the police report, which wasn’t very much.
The Lt. incredulously asks, “you call two charges of extortion and blackmail, ‘not very much?'”
While the Lt. makes small talk about how he should have been a doctor, Jessica finds a picture in a frame which has Diana in it.
Jessica has then seen enough and they leave. She asks the Lt. to drop her off at the library of congress, though the next scene is at a restaurant called Sans Souci. Apparently she accepted Kaye Sheppard’s invitation after all.
(This was in the era before people called their pets emotional support animals to bring them to places where animals weren’t allowed, so her having a cat in a restaurant (which is a health code violation) is a sign of her enormous importance.)
It turns out that Jessica is there because Kaye sent her a note saying that she has information that might help Jessica about Marta Craig’s murder. She does have a price for her information, though. When Jessica solves the case, she wants an exclusive.
Kaye’s sources tell her that Marta was playing both sides of the aisle. Also, three nights ago, Marta came running out of the Watergate hotel and Roy Dixon came running after her and looked mad enough to kill.
Back at Jessica’s office, Joe comes in and reports what he learned about Marta. She had six jobs in the last four years and did the party circuit 5-6 nights per week. That’s all he learned. Also, Diana called in sick after lunch.
After Joe leaves for a “hot date,” congressman Keppner comes in. He thanks Jessica for all she did for him but asks her to not go to any more trouble. He’s decided that he’s not going to seek reelection. He’s got a phone call into someone or other to make that official. Jessica talks him out of it, and to instead go back to New York and to see his wife and talk to her and find out what she thinks about whether he should seek reelection. “She might surprise you. Women in love do that.” Keppner hugs her and tells her that this is the first time in 8 weeks he’s felt good about himself. He then says that he’s going to cancel his call, but he will stay around an extra day to vote against whatever Ray Dixon (the lobbyist) wants him to vote for.
That night, Jessica visits Diana at home. Diana doesn’t want to let Jessica in, but Jessica politely forces herself in, saying she has some important questions about the cannery bill. She then says that perhaps they can ask Thor to help. Jessica suggests asking him to come out of the bedroom. (She points out the heavily used ashtray and the no smoking sign on the desk in Diana’s office.)
Thor asks how she knew it was him. Jessica explains that she noticed a Lion’s head tie pin Thor was wearing during the moment she met him in the hall when Diana was rude to him, then she noticed it was the same as on the cheerleading costume that Diana and Marta wore in the picture in Marta’s apartment, and went to the library of congress and dug up an old yearbook and found that the three had gone to school together.
We then get a bit of backstory: they used to be good friends with Marta, but then Marta started hanging out with the wrong crowd. She worked with Harry Parmel and men like him, working the “party circuit”. They didn’t say anything because they were scared. Thor figured he’d be at the top of the suspect list. And on that rather tepid bombshell, we fade to black and go to credits.
When we come back, Thor is showing the photos to the Lt. in his office. He points out that they’re faked, which you can tell because he’s clearly unconscious in the photo. Marta had asked him up to her place and he had one drink—she must have drugged him. Diana says that Thor wanted to show the police the photos but she stopped him since it would cost him his lobbying job at the ecological foundation at which he works since they’re very publicity-shy.
The Lt. says that they can go. But, of course, don’t leave town.
After they’re gone, he remarks that the case is very complicated, but it seems to him that with all of the bad stuff that Marta was into, it’s likely that the guy she worked for is the one who beat her to death. Jessica asks why she says “guy,” since it could just as easily have been a woman.
In the next scene Joe is driving Jessica around and gives her a bit more information on Marta. At 6:30 she had lunch with a married mid-level man from the state department. They left separately, and she picked up Keppner at around 9:30 outside the Stockman’s bar. She had no close friends and had no known associates.
In the hall of congress Dixon runs into Jessica. She presses him on Marta, he denies knowing her, Jessica says that he’s very good at lying—it’s a difficult skill—and he says that they play a game in this town. Those good at it get things done. It’s the amateurs who get hurt.
Back in her office, Jessica finds out that the vote starts in less than two hours, then says she has to go out and to not let them start the vote without her.
Some time later, when the committee meeting started, Jessica finds Joe and brings him into her office and tells him that she got a great lead from Kaye Sheppard. It seems a jilted boyfriend of Marta’s was hanging around her apartment when she brought Dan home with her. A few minutes later the boyfriend saw another man go inside. He didn’t get a good look, but Jessica says that it had to be Ray Dixon. He must have the photos that Marta took of Joyner. They need to get into his penthouse. Right now she needs to go to the committee meeting, but she wants him to meet her afterwards. They’ll talk to the Lt. and get a court order.
Jessica arrives at the committee meeting and has some brilliant idea that solves all problems (including jobs for her community) while still sticking it to Ray Dixon. And everyone claps when she’s done talking because her common-sense speech was so common-sensical and brilliant and moral and good.
Over at Ray Dixon’s penthouse, Joe breaks in to plant the photographs Jessica expects to find. Unfortunately for him, Jessica and the Lt. are waiting for him. The Lt. isn’t impressed with the hiding spot that Joe had chosen and remarks, “Give us cops a little credit. Ray Dixon would have been smarter than that.”
Jessica admits that she was baffled until this morning. She asks Joe what happened—did Marta get greedy? He still protests his innocence, so Jessica asks Joe what happened to the fancy driving gloves he had been wearing the first time she met him. He stopped wearing them after Marta was killed. Clearly that’s because he wore them when he beat Marta to death. It’s almost impossible to get blood and makeup out of suede, so he had to get rid of them.
That’s only part of it, though. He slipped up badly when he said the name of the bar that Marta picked up Keppner from. It wasn’t in the police report and Keppner didn’t remember it. They checked with the bartender and the waitress who worked at Stockman’s Bar that night and neither remember Keppner, so the only person Joe could have learned it from was Marta herself.
Joe is done in by this. His confession starts out interestingly
I’m no different than anyone else in this town, Mrs. Fletcher. You buy and you sell. People. Legislation. Influence. There’s a price tag on everything and everyone. And I was doing real well, too. Until Marta got just a little bit too big for her pantyhose.
When he’s done, Jessica asks him if he thought that he was the only one allowed to buy and sell. After he’s led away by the uniformed officer present, the Lt. asks Jessica if he can take her out to lunch. There’s a deli run by a friend of his cousin Sadie and they make a lox and cream cheese platter you could die from…
And with that, we freeze frame and go to credits.
Well, this episode definitely doesn’t make my top ten favorites list. Hollywood is never good when it touches politics, and Murder, She Wrote was no exception. It’s not that was unrealistic. It was, but TV was generally unrealistic about everything. It’s how smugly self-satisfied Hollywood always is. Hollywood is generally populated by the worst people, and they’re convinced that they’re the best, and their self-congratulations are quite grating. For example, after Jessica’s speech about re-using canneries that have closed down even if it’s less profitable and the round of applause from everyone, the committee unanimously voted against the bill. It’s really unpleasant to watch narcissists convinced that everyone loves them taking a victory lap in their own imaginations.
About the only thing to learn from this episode is: don’t do this.
The one decent thing in this episode is the character of Detective Lieutenant Avery Mendelsohn. This is as much the actor who plays him as the character, but he was quite likable. It’s also the case that non-stupid detectives who work with Jessica tend to be more fun.
As far as the plot goes, there are fewer plot holes (in a strict sense) because the episode doesn’t explain much. Why did they move Joyner’s body? The closest thing to an explanation which we’re given is, “I was too drunk to think straight.” There’s some vague hints that Keppner shouldn’t have been at the party, but there’s no obvious reason why that would have been compromising. And even if there was, all that would have to happen would be for Keppner to leave before the ambulance arrived.
We’re never given any kind of explanation for why Dan Keppner has puppydog-like faith in Jessica. It’s so strong that despite having spoken only a half dozen words with her, he drunkenly calls her up at her hotel—how on earth did he get the number and memorize it?—and plans to confess to moving Joyner’s body to her the next morning.
And why did Marta bring Keppner to her apartment and drug him? She drugged Thor to take incriminating pictures of him in bed with her. She didn’t need incriminating pictures of Keppner in bed with her since she already had incriminating pictures of him over Joyner’s dead body at, presumably, a place he shouldn’t have been.
It’s a huge coincidence that Diana and Thor happened to be friends with Marta Craig, though on the other hand nothing came of this coincidence, so it doesn’t matter much. Much more important to the plot is the enormous coincidence that Marta happened to be working for congressman Joyner’s media liaison officer. That’s part of why Joe is such a surprise murderer at the end—there was no on-screen connection to the victim other than living in the same large city. We do get on-screen clues that Joe was the murderer, though as clues go not wearing driving gloves in a later scene isn’t a great one. Especially since driving gloves weren’t really a thing in the 1980s. Cars had had steering wheels that were comfortable in bare hands for enough decades that the practice had long since died out (outside of racing).
We’re also given no explanation as to why Joe picked the night he did to kill Marta. Normally, someone getting “too big for her pantyhose” is not an urgent matter, and he didn’t pick a great time for it. (To be fair to him, we’re only on episode 9, but I’d have waited until the mystery writer who’d solved at least 8 real life murders prior to this had gone home.)
Also given no explanation is why Joe tried to frame Keppner and why, if he did frame Keppner, he dragged him out to an alley to do it. Leaving Keppner at the scene of the crime would have more directly connected him to the crime, and also would have been less risky since Joe wouldn’t risk being seen dragging an unconscious body outside.
Another loose end in the story is the threatening note that Thor got with a second copy of the picture of him with Marta. Who was supposed to have sent that? So far as I can see, the only person who had any motive was Roy Dixon (or Harry Parmel), but the only person with opportunity was Joe Blinn. And they made a big deal out of this. It was so important they showed us a closeup.
Oh, well. It must be said, one consequence of being given no explanations for anything is that none of the explanations we didn’t get contradict anything that happened—or each other. It’s not a great way to avoid plot holes, but it does, technically, work.
Next week we’re in New York City for Broadway Malady.
Chris Lansdown 
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