To Beethoven via South Korea

I read recently that nineteenth-century violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim had said, “The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.

I know them, but curiously hardly ever hear them. Why? Well, one of the paradoxes of classical music is that when a piece gets played often enough, it gains “warhorse” status, and people then tend to shun it. Think I’m wrong? When was the last time you heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?

Of the four concerti, Beethoven’s is the oldest and—some would argue—the best. It’s also fiendishly difficult: the violin has to go into the stratosphere and still be utterly lyrical. It’s therefore almost unbelievable that Beethoven gave the part to the violinist Franz Clement so late that Clement was sight-reading (that is, playing it for the first time) at the first performance. That may have been why Clement chose to play a little ditty for one string with his violin held upside down between the first and second movements. In fairness, breaking up movements was a fairly common practice at the time; earlier generations were less fussy in those days.

At any rate, the debut was not a great success, and the concerto went essentially un-played for a couple of decades, when it was revived by a twelve-year old Joachim with Mendelssohn conducting.

It’s a typical concerto—nothing revolutionary here. OK—it’s a little weird to have those four somber timpani notes starting the whole thing, but other than that, it’s fairly traditional. It starts out with the orchestra playing the tutti, which introduces the principal themes, as well as giving the soloist time to fully feel his dry mouth, sweaty hands, and churning stomach. Then we get the soloist coming in, and playing a miniature cadenza—a solo passage which is or should feel improvised and which, generally, is highly virtuosic. There’s nothing virtuosic here, it’s mainly meant to tease—when is the violinist gonna get down to business and play us some tunes?

He or she does for about twenty minutes—Beethoven takes his sweet time wrapping this thing up. And the first movement ends with a true, fiery cadenza. The second movement is Beethoven at his most lyric, and the third movement—which is connected to the second, a typical Beethoven trick—is almost fatally a rondo.

A good blogger would look it up, and give you the formula for the damn thing—it goes something like aabbaaccaaddaa and then—at last—the end. So the first problem is that you’re gonna hear the aa six zillion times. The second problem is that the tunes chosen by the composer tend to be mildly irritating at the start, so by the end? You’ll be gagging.

And Beethoven, with all his skill, comes very close to not pulling it off. He has, however, to his aid an incredible violinist, Kyung-wha Chung. Chung has quite a story—her mother was a singer, and two of her siblings are professional musicians as well. So she grew up playing with her cellist sister and pianist brother, and was famous in South Korea, their home. From there, it was off to Julliard, where she had two major challenges—Juilliard was filled with child prodigies as good as she, and her teacher, the famous and feared Ivan Galamian, didn’t think much of female violinists. He thought she’d make an orchestra violinist, not a soloist.

The life of a conservatory student took its toll on Chung. Although she was fiendishly disciplined, she grew depressed: other people were dating, having fun, dancing in clubs. She was practicing every waking moment; despondent, she considered giving up the violin.

The family reacted by having an emergency meeting. They decided: Chung would enter the prestigious Edgar Leventritt Violin Competition. If she didn’t win, she could give up. If she won, she’d go on. She told Galamian, who adored her, but feared she would be lost to marriage.

He was also teaching a kid named Pinchas Zuckerman, who had the chromosome that Chung lacked. So, she didn’t get much support. Oh, except for her mother, who sold the family home to buy a Stradivarius for the event.

She didn’t win—she did something better. She tied with Zuckerman, the first time that any two people had been declared winners; some years, no one wins the thing if the judges don’t feel there’s anybody up to snuff.

Zuckerman’s career took off; hers languished. And then, she got a break—Zuckerman’s wife was giving birth, and Chung was asked to step in. She prepared the Tchaikovsky concerto, the orchestra played the Mendelssohn, instead. Right, so she could do that—they prep you for stuff like that in Juilliard. She played it perfectly, and the London Symphony Orchestra, which thought she was a lightweight, was impressed.

In the clip below, she’s at the peak of her career, and playing with a wonderful orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, with Klauss Tennstedt as conductor. The orchestra has this wonderful, rich sound; Chung goes from fiery virtuosity to almost unbearable tenderness. It’s a knockout.

A Banker, Dispatched

News of the day, here in our sunny isle, is that a lawsuit has been filed in federal court by the widow and daughter of Maurice Spagnoletti, a banker gunned down by professional hit men on 15 June 2011.

(Grammatical Readers, please note that the computer, in general correctly worried about excessive use of the passive voice, has gently suggested this: “News of the day, here in our sunny isle, is that professional hit men have filed a lawsuit in federal court by the widow and daughter of Maurice Spagnoletti, a banker gunned down on 15 June 2011.” Your choice!)

And if even a few of the allegations of the suit are true, it’s a shocker.

According to the suit, Spagnoletti was hired by Doral Bank as Chief Operating Officer in 2011; he moved to Puerto Rico from New Jersey, and once on the island, began sniffing rats.

There was the million-dollar loan backed by a hotel—all well and good, but where was the hotel?

Didn’t exist.

There was the architect who got several hundred thousand dollars for a branch that was never built. Or what about the loan for $900,000 for a condo in Isla Verde? Spagnoletti went out to see it himself—the place had been trashed by its previous owner; even the kitchen appliances had been removed. Spagnoletti figured it was worth 600,000, max.

There were other irregularities—money paid to contractors for lighting supplies and office furniture that were never installed or delivered. Oh yes, and what about the $30,000 that was transferred weekly from Doral Bank or Doral Financial for services that were not performed?

Then Spagnoletti—according to the suit—began wondering about the accounting practices: were the numbers right? He asked the Chief Financial Officer, Robert Wahlman, and never got a clear answer. He then pressed for an audit by an outsider CPA—that didn’t happen either.

Spagnoletti focused his attention on Annelise Figueroa, Executive Vice President of Facilities and Operations, and began to press for her dismissal. He locked horns with Enrique Ubarri-Baragano, Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Chief of Compliance of Doral Financial. Ubarri-Baragano insisted that Figueroa stay, the two men had a fierce argument. At one point in the argument, Ubarri-Baragano tells Spagnoletti that he would “regret it” if Figueroa was fired.

According to the suit, Spagnoletti was having a hard time sleeping at night—who wouldn’t?

The suit says that the FBI was aware of “irregularities,” and that the bank was being investigated; the suit also claims that the FBI has documents that would corroborate the allegations, documents that the feds have refused to give up to the wife.

Spagnoletti appealed to Glen Wakeman, the CEO and president of Doral Financial, the man who had hired Spagnoletti. And Wakeman agreed that Figueroa had to go; he left it up to Spagnoletti to do the termination, though Figueroa reported to Wakeman.

It turned nasty—Spagnoletti walked into work one day and found a photo of Figueroa with a black “X” over her pasted on his door. He told Wakeman, the bank investigated, and told Spagnoletti that there was no credible threat. Wakeman, in the meantime, got increased security; Spagnoletti could neither ride in the same car nor elevator with his boss, due to “security protocols.”

Then the family began to feel that they were being trailed.

The hit came on 15 June 2011. Spagnoletti had left the office, and was driving to his home in Condado, a wealthy and safe (usually) beach community of San Juan. Apparently, he was racing, aware that he was being followed; the car behind him drew up on his left, and three shots were fired, expertly delivering him.

So expertly, in fact, that almost immediately the police suspected that nobody on the island was that good: it had to be professionals from outside.

Which was what the guy told Spagnoletti’s widow, Marisa, at the airport two days later. The man told her that he worked for Doral in the security department, he was aware of the plot to kill Spagnoletti, and that the director of the department, José Robles, had been involved.

The suit lists Doral Financial Corporation, Doral Bank Puerto Rico, Glen Wakeman, Enrique Ubarri-Baragano, José Robles, Annelise Figueroa, John Does 1-10, Jane Does 1-10 and ABC Corps. 1-10 as defendants. Doral Bank has stated that the claims are frivolous, harmful, and completely without merit.

Whether true or not, it can’t be said that the bank is doing particularly well. In November of 2012, the stock exchange considered delisting the stock, which had been selling below a buck for over thirty days. Caribbean Business reported that in March of 2013 the bank had created a “bad bank,” called Doral Recovery, to handle all the assets that had tanked. And Investigative Reporting Workshop’ Banktracker reported that in March of this year Doral had a 105 ratio of troubled assets versus reserves; the industry average is 10.9.

No one knows, at this point, how many of the allegations are true, or to what extent. What’s sure is that one man, Maurice Spagnoletti, might have had some answers.

And he ain’t talking….

Cage recaged?

It’s been a day when all my rituals got shuffled, if not dropped. I woke up late, the morning went untrotted, the students never got their assignment, and there was seemingly nothing to write about. In a funk, I turned to a TED Talk on music by the contemporary composer Mark Applebaum.

And Applebaum is an engaging guy—bright, witty, funny. And his music is just as idiosyncratic as he is. He started out by playing a bit of Beethoven and then asking the question—is it music?

He then began to talk about his compositions, among which is the Concerto for Florist and Orchestra (nope—you’re gonna have to look it up yourself). And then he went on to demonstrate a new instrument he had invented: it had, among other things, all the combs he could find in the house, what looked like the ball from a toilet tank, and a coiled metal door stopper).

Right—so that was interesting. Now then, what about the music?

Well, it’s something that used to be called avant-garde and might now be called devant-garde. By which I mean that there was a time, in those days of the sixties, when blindfolded artists were flinging paint at canvases for a set period of time, letting it all dry, and then shipping it off to be displayed at museums, where people would stand about and pontificate. Or, painters would paint a canvas one solid color; there’s a whole room full of such art in the MoMA.

“Are we going to try to take this seriously?” I asked Johnny, who was standing next to me.

“Nah,” he said, and we both headed for the next hall.

Well, we all got busy doing other things, and somehow all that experimental zaniness faded away. So I was quite prepared, in fact very cheerfully prepared, to dismiss Applebaum as another gimmick, another in a long line of guys doing essentially the same thing.

Wrong. I ended liking the piece below, entitled “Aphasia,” which was inspired by seeing two deaf mutes having a heated conversation—a discussion full of affect but with no sound. And it’s clear—the guy must have worked long hours both to compose it and then to memorize it.

So what’s it all about? It’s a metaphor for the “expressive paralysis” that comes on in that dreaded moment when it’s a battle between the empty page of music and the composer—and the empty page is winning. Here’s what Applebaum said about it….

"Kids love it. So do people who need a break from conventional modes of expression."

Aha!—that’s why I liked it!

In this, however, not all people join me. Has anyone else noticed—the people who comment on YouTube videos have to be the most churlish in the universe? So I was unsurprised to run into this: Typical liberal arts bullshit. Trying to be edgy but comes off looking like something Tim and Eric created.

Tim? Eric? Who are they?

Well that was interesting, so what about the piece, Echololia? And what, by the way, was echololia? Echolalia I knew, as any old psychiatric nurse would—schizophrenics occasionally repeat the last three or four words of a sentence; kids do too, at a certain stage of development. The difference? Kids grow out of it.

The piece, at any rate, is a sequence of sounds that we wouldn’t necessarily consider music—drills, hammers, the screech of duct tape. Curiously, the only sound from a standard musical comes at the very end of the piece—and no, I won’t spoil it. So how would it sound?

Applebaum scores again! And here the churl that inevitably taps out his frustration in YouTube scoffs—John Cage did it all years ago.

Well that seemed like something I had to check out, and yes, as you can see below, Cage did much the same thing years ago.



Speaking of Cage, I didn’t know that he had been Merce Cunningham’s romantic partner for years—a fact of absolutely no significance. Just a drop of trivia dripping into the blog—sorry!

Well, that got me thinking—there is indeed nothing new under the sun. And I’m sure that Applebaum knows of Harry Partch, especially since they are (was, in the case of Partch) both Californians.

Partch was a definite loose screw—at one point he was a hobo, at another point he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And yes, he too invented his own instruments—he described himself as “a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".

He did more—he decided to throw out the traditional scale and created, well…let Wikipedia describe it….

Inspired by Sensations of Tone, Hermann von Helmholtz's book on acoustics and the perception of sound, Partch based his music strictly on just intonation. He tuned his instruments using the overtone series, and extended it past the twelfth partial. This allowed for a larger number of smaller, unequal intervals than found in the Western classical music tradition's twelve-tone equal temperament. Partch's tuning is often classed as microtonality, as it allowed for intervals smaller than 100 cents, though Partch did not conceive his tuning in such a context.[28] Instead, he saw it as a return to pre-Classical Western musical roots, in particular to the music of the ancient Greeks. By taking the principles he found in Helmholtz's book, he expanded his tuning system until it allowed for a division of the octave into 43 tones based on ratios of small integers.

Confused? Join the club—I had several semesters of music theory, and I can barely wade through the paragraph myself.

So yes, Applebaum had people who had trod down the path he’s now treading—so what? Haven’t we all? And yes, I’ll go along, at the moment, with his answer to the question of the Beethoven? Is it music?

His response?

It’s the wrong question—it should be, “Is it interesting?”

Yes—to both Beethoven and Applebaum.

Back on the Fence!

OK—a fact, a story, and a change of mind (maybe)….

Fact—in 2012, the federal government made 1856 requests for warrants to the FISA judges. And guess how many of those requests were granted?

1856.

Caveat—I haven’t checked this number out; I’m trusting Gail Collins of The New York Times, those fire-eating liberals up there. But if correct, we could save money on the whole FISA thing and buy a rubber stamp, instead.

Story—in 2004, several bombs were detonated in the Madrid subway system. Spain asked the FBI to search its database of fingerprints after a print was found on a detonating device; the FBI complied, and sent back a response: they had a match. A 100% match.

The FBI’s own records would reveal that there were 20 possible matches, but the FBI focused on Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer who had served in the military (which was, ironically, why his prints were in the database) and who had converted to Islam.

Strange things began happening in the Mayfield home—doors were locked that hadn’t been, a computer screen was half unscrewed, and the computer itself had a hard drive half sticking out. The family became convinced that somebody had been entering the house.

Nor was it just Mayfield—remember those 19 other possible matches? Well, the same thing was going on with them. Oh, and by the way, Spain, which had never been convinced about the fingerprint anyway, now had a suspect a bit more credible than a guy raised in Kansas. It was an Algerian man named Ouhnane Daoud.

In April, Spain notified the FBI that they believed Mayfield’s print was a negative match. Amazingly, the FBI keeps right at it, and on May 6, 2004, the FBI arrested Mayfield. They then turned around and leaked the news to the media, which was how the family found out where poppa was.

Mayfield sat uncharged in prison for 20 days; it took Spain announcing the name of the suspect and international attention before Mayfield was released.

Ready for the punch line?

Mayfield had not left American soil for eleven years prior to the explosions in Spain.

The FBI conducted an internal review and found—hang very tight to your seat here—that they had not misused the PATRIOT Act. I can feel the relief of all you readers out there; relax—have a beer.

Mayfield—well, there’s always somebody to spoil the party, isn’t there—wasn’t satisfied. Explicably, he sued; just as explicably, he won, at least partially. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

On November 29, 2006, the U.S. government settled part of the lawsuit with Mayfield for a reported $2 million. The government issued a formal apology to Mayfield as part of the settlement. The settlement allowed Mayfield to pursue a legal challenge against the Patriot Act.[7] The FBI was also cleared of wrongdoing in an earlier internal investigation.

On September 26, 2007, two provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act were declared unconstitutional. Finding in Mayfield's favor, Judge Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, "now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment," which violates the Constitution of the United States.[8] The Federal government appealed that ruling, and Mayfield's attorney, Elden Rosenthal, argued in front of the Ninth Circuit court on February 5, 2009.[1] The ruling was overturned in December 2009.

It seems that Mayfield had committed two crimes: he had served in the military (which got his prints into the FBI database) and he had converted to Islam (which was a red flag for the FBI).

You could argue that it was an isolated case, but I’d return that 19 other people were also being investigated. But what’s completely troubling is the mindset of the FBI—they are determined, despite all evidence, to get this guy, to nail him for a crime he didn’t commit on foreign soil.

I wrote a couple of days ago about Thomas Friedman and his argument—the time to start a database is not after you have a suspect but before. Persuasive—I bought in briefly. But now I’m wondering—if you want my vote, there have got to be better safeguards against abuse than those now in place. 

Sorry, Tom!

Just Another Battle

“Courage,” somebody or other once said—I’m too lazy to look it up, though I am putting it in quotes—“is a muscle that grows stronger with exercise.”

It’s probably true, because why did I come out, unwittingly, to a roomful of strangers? Oh, and out Mr. Fernández too.

Granted, it was hardly a backwoods bar in rural Mississippi; it was room full of poets, or poetry lovers. So the chances of being asked to step outside and settle our differences with our dukes were slim. Instead, the crowd laughed and two women of our sort gave us amused smiles as they passed near to us.

Mr. Fernández was there at my bidding, reading a poem of my mother’s. One of his many talents, besides cooking and holding contrarian opinions (and things not to be discussed here), is reading poetry. So I had assigned him the poem, and prepped him to mention me and especially Iguanas. Sales are terrible—actually, non-existent….

In the course of his introduction, he mentioned Franny as his friend—this I found sweet. However, he also mentioned me as his friend—this I found odd. So I found myself, in my booming teacher’s voice, saying something like, “Sweetheart, I’m your husband!”

He looked up and over at me, grinned, and said, “yeah, we got married four years ago.” Then he went on to read—very well—the poem.

I tell you this story because of what didn’t happen—neither Raf nor I mentioned it after the incident, and nobody commented on it except the owner of the place; she thought it was great.

This is completely unlike what I went through the first time I came out. Then, I couldn’t even speak the words; I had to write a letter. That meant a wait of five days or so, during which my stomach was knotted into dreadlocks.

I also tell you the story because, for many of us, we’re not living in a roomful of poets, but the aforementioned backwoods bar in Mississippi instead. Or maybe Omaha, Nebraska, which is where Danielle Powell was attending the religious college of Grace University.

Well, all was well with Danielle: she was the first person in her family to attend college, she was close to graduation. Then, a “spiritual advisor” ratted the news to the school’s Judiciary Board: Danielle was having an affair with a woman.

They hauled her in, asked her if she was sorry, and told her that she could continue, if she submitted to a “restoration process,” lived off campus, and didn’t sleep overnight in the dorms. Oh, and they also suspended her and didn’t allow her to finish the semester.

All this is bad—what catapults the story into heinous is that Danielle was forced into coming out to her parents and family before she was ready to. And you can imagine—from the very fact that she was attending a religious school, and was the first person in her family to do so—that her family was probably quite conservative.

Danielle then decided—smart move—not to go back to Grace; she found another college to attend. But guess what? Grace told her she has to pay 6300 bucks to get her transcript transferred to the other school.

Why the $6300? Here’s what the Huffington Post said:

James (Executive Vice President of Grace University) said anyone who withdraws before the semester is 60 percent complete will usually owe a balance, because federal law obligates Grace to return Title IV funds -- federal grants, loans and work-study funds -- on behalf of the withdrawn student. "Suspension or expulsion constitutes withdrawal," James said in an email.

Right—so the school suspends her, and then pours a little salt into the wound, forcing her to pay $6300 for it all?

Oh, and by the way, notice to whom the school is repaying: the federal government. So Uncle Sam is giving money to schools with religious scruples (their term) or which practice hate and blatant discrimination (my term!) Yeah? That’s where the taxpayers’ money is going?

Well, I looked it up, Grace University, and immediately had Mathew 6:12 flashed into my eyes. And then came across this:

Grace University has a long-lasting reputation of developing servant leaders for the home, the church and the world through excellence in biblically-integrated education. Here students receive a life-changing experience in a personal and discipling environment, all for the glory of God. Review the links below to learn more about our history, educational goals, beliefs, and more.

Biblically-integrated? Discipling?

Danielle is fighting back, along with her wife—the couple married in Iowa. There’s an online petition asking Grace to forgive the debt. I’ll certainly sign that, and my start one on my own.

How about denying federal funds to any institution that practices discrimination in any form, including sexual orientation?

Wrong, Again

Hmmmm—so maybe I was wrong, signing that petition in my knee-jerk fashion this morning. You know, the online petition supporting Edward Snowden, the 29 year-old guy now somewhere—supposedly—in Hong Kong.

I’m thinking this way because of Thomas Friedman and his column this morning, “Blowing a Whistle,” in The New York Times. Here’s the crux of his argument:

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

Friedman argues as well that, to date, there have been no known abuses of the data mining programs and goes on to quote David Simon:

The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.

Simon makes a point: there’s a big difference between collecting data—in this case collecting phone numbers or emails—and actually analyzing the data—that is, listening to the calls or reading the emails. To listen / read, the government has to go before a judge and give good reasons. Yes, the public won’t know—no suspected terrorist should be reading in The New York Times that the feds are on to him. And yes, it’s a little difficult to ascertain that the government is really playing by the rules. But still, it’s a system.

OK, you say, but why not go after the data when you have a suspect, and a court order to do so? Are you seriously going to give me the have-to-have-a-haystack argument?

Looks like I will. Why? For reasons of time and space.

Look, let’s pretend there a terrorist with a dirty bomb that he intends to put in Times Square at 9AM on Monday. He knows that; you don’t. Do you collect his phone history while the clock is ticking, or do you have the material at hand and then race to analyze it?

OK—that’s time, what about space? Well, you may be dealing with foreign governments, some of whom may not be in any hurry at all to comply with or honor requests from the US government for data. Which, by the way, they may not even have.

“Nobody is listening to your calls,” said Obama, who went on to say that if we don’t trust the executive, judicial and congressional branches of the government…um, don’t we have a problem?

Two thoughts.

As I wrote a day or two ago, the analysis of data tends to come in to an investigation after a tip is received, a laptop is discovered, and interrogation reveals a plot or a suspect.

Now two cases.

First case took place in Orlando shortly before September 11, 2001, when José Meléndez Pérez, a US Custom and Border Protection agent, confronted a Saudi national, Mohammed al Qahtani, and smelled a rat. Al Qahtani didn’t have a place to stay, he didn’t have a return ticket, didn’t have a credit card, but guess what? He had $2800 in cash. Some of his answers were contradictory; he was hostile.

Remember, now we know—no credit card because he didn’t want the trail, hence the large amount of cash. And probably a member of his cell was picking him up and giving him shelter, and as for the return ticket? Meléndez Pérez didn’t know any of that. But Melendez Perez said no way: the story didn’t add up, and he denied Qahtani entry. And that’s why Flight 11 had four, not five hijackers.

Second story—Russia tells the FBI about a guy in Cambridge, MA, who may need a bit of looking into. They do, they drop the ball, and two years later, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, completely unscrutinized by our sophisticated systems, drops the bombs at the finish line to the Boston Marathon.

So my first thought? A system is as good as the people who use it, and I worry that the bells and whistles of technology will dazzle people and delude them into thinking that that’s enough.

And my second thought?

It’s so damn hard to believe a president who says, “trust me,” when his director of national intelligence tells a lie to a congressman. Wyden asked a simple question, and deserved an honest response.

So did we all.

Popes, Presidents and Lies

Right, so now we know. The pope—the new one, not the old one—has come out and said it, and the Vatican has not denied it; so that’s pretty high on the credibility scale. Now then, hold on to your seats, take a deep breath, and prepare for the unimaginable.

There is a gay lobby in the Vatican.

Also, of course, many many saints, said the pope. But yes, in addition to that gay lobby, there is a “stream of corruption.”

You remember the question of Ratzinger, the old pope, who retired last February and trotted off to Castel Gondolfo, to spend pleasant days and nights with his personal secretary, Padre Georg, a hunk who makes Clooney look like Archie Bunker. Here’s a sweet photo of them together:

Right, I’d be grinning too, if I had that guy that close to me. Well, the old pope is proposing to live the rest of his days in the Vatican; Padre Georg will be secretary during the day for the new pope, and then walk home where he will be secretary during the evenings for the old pope.

People in Italy found this situation unusual; as one reporter put it, the pope routinely enjoys robust health until the day he dies. For a man not known as a trailblazer, Ratzinger caused millions of jaws to drop the day he decided to retire.

The press then speculated—was there any reason that the pope decided to retire? Age and frail health are nothing new to the papacy—what had changed that had made it necessary for the pope to retire? Two things came up, two very old things: sex and money.

There was talk of a secret report written by three cardinals; the report, it was said, would be given to the new pope personally by the old pope. The Vatican press agent, of course, completely dismissed the idea of a “gay lobby,” essentially calling the idea absurd.

Well, chatting in Spanish to the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Religious (CLAR), Francis dropped the news, and the press office, declaring the event private, had no comment.

I’m thinking a lot lately about secrecy and deception. The Vatican knew about a situation and lied; the head of our national security agency, James R. Clapper, looked a congressman straight in the eye and lied. And I am trying to remember—when was the last time I lied?

Well, I’m either a completely dishonest person—and thus incapable of seeing the terrible truth that I’m prevaricating at a prodigious rate—or I’m pretty honest. Barring social lies, I really can’t remember the last time I lied to anyone.

Cancel that—I pleaded a headache recently to get out of an engagement. But I did feel guilty about it. Which, perhaps, is more than Clapper feels; here’s his justification for lying to Senator Wyden:

 "I have great respect for Senator Wyden," Clapper said in an interview with NBC on Sunday. "I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked-- 'When are you going to start-- stop beating your wife' kind of question, which is meaning not-- answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner by saying no."

This is an insult. A senator asked you a question, Clapper, and there was nothing of a trick or ruse about it. It was a simple, direct question that made you uncomfortable, and so you decided that it couldn’t be answered by a simple yes or no. But what did you do? You said, “no, Sir.” And then weaseled around by saying, “not wittingly.”

What’s worse is the White House’s response to the controversy. Here’s CBS News on the subject:

President Obama "certainly believes that Director Clapper has been straight and direct in the answers he's given" Congress, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday, adding that Clapper has been "aggressive in providing as much information as possible to the American people, to the press." 

Well, Clapper certainly was straight and direct. “No, Sir,” is both; unfortunately, it wasn’t true.

That said, no one really gets off the hook. Obama says that all the activities of the National Security Agency have been vetted both by congress and by federal judges. If true—and it hurts to write those words—then everybody knew, and it took a 29 year-old kid, now branded as a traitor, to tell the people the truth. But if true, why was Senator Wyden asking the question in the first place?

And tell me, how does it jeopardize national security by telling the public in general terms how we’re going about doing national intelligence?

The Obama administration is saying, as did the Bush administration, “trust us.” Unfortunately, neither administration has proved worthy—on this issue—of trust.

On Questions and Intelligence

Well, it’s a story with many levels. But first, let me point out—we’re spending enormous amounts of money for something that gives us nothing.

There’s a theory among economists called the broken window theory. It goes like this: if I throw a brick through the plate glass window of the store below, I’m actually improving—according to some—the economy. Why? Well, a cop will have to come and arrest me (or investigate the incident), and an employee will have to come to secure the store (that’s overtime, which he’ll spend at the mall), a boarding-up service will be called, a new glass window installed. My toss of a brick has caused a lot of money to be spent, and so is wonderful for the economy.

The problem? All that money could have been spent on teaching a kid to read, researching how to eliminate cancer, and do a host of other useful things. We don’t get anything of value from a broken window.

And I’m beginning to think that our obsession with security is nothing more than that old American paranoia that we do so well. That would be fine, but is it worth spending 53 billion dollars, as we did in fiscal 2012?

Maybe it’s time to say it—the rest of the world, or at least much of it, has lived with terrorism for a long time. The British had the IRA, Spain has ETA—every country has its enemies. And it might be worth it to spend some money guarding against terrorism—but shouldn’t we at least do it well? Is there any reason to think that data mining will make us safer?

I think what will make us safer is to stop dropping drones on civilians in places like Yemen. I also think that doing intelligence the old-fashioned way, instead of relying on the bells and whistles of technology, would yield more results.

And it’s curious—how did a 29 year-old dropout get a job paying $200,000 a year?

Well, the New York Times has the answer—security companies are desperate to get people who can run their sophisticated systems. And that means kids, nerds, geeks.

And apparently, also according to the Times, Snowden was a classic geek—he refused to chat with neighbors; he spent endless hours with his computer. That, says one Time’s columnist, is the problem: too many kids are growing up in a world mediated with technology. They’ve lost the ability to interact in person with the world. And they’re increasingly isolating themselves, and falling prey to paranoia and libertarianism.

Might be. But I’m not so sure that that’s all there is to it. As I understand neurology today, the current thinking is that the brain is still growing at age thirty. In that case, Snowden, with his 29 years, is at the very end of what we called adolescence.

Which means that he is thinking abstractly, not concretely (as he did when he was a child) or as adults do.

Remember that time of your life when you branded your mother a hypocrite because she had said, “sure, you don’t have to go to church, if you don’t believe in God,” and then there she was, begging you to go to church just because her mother was visiting and she was too tired to argue with her mother whom she couldn’t stand anyway?

It’s a very principled time of life, young adulthood, which is why it’s also a time a lot of zealots are made. So I’m not sure that technology has created Snowden, though it certainly played a part.

It’s also easy to see why Snowden is concerned, especially when confronted with headlines like this, in the liberal New York Times:

 Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy

Guys? Are you seriously telling me that we cannot know what programs and activities our government is engaged in, because that would breach secrecy and thus endanger us?

Look, do you think our enemies don’t know, or operate under the presumption, that we are carrying out domestic espionage? Did any al Qaeda operative wake up this morning and say, “wow, I’ll have to think about using my cell phone, now that the US….?”

It’s screwy, any way you look at it. There’s also the fact that this is a contractor, who has access—according to him—to vast sources of information. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that even giving access has been outsourced to third parties. So Booz Allen has decided who could look at my telephone use.

And inevitably, politics comes into play. The coauthor of the PATRIOT Act, James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is horrified that the act is being used in this way. Well, yesterday I read the letter he wrote in The Guardian, and very virtuous it seemed. However, the Times this morning threw a little ice water on that with a link to an editorial from 2005:

The House's Abuse of Patriotism

So it’s another mess, though an interesting one. One last thought—remember what I said about the young thinking abstractly, ideologically, reading to sacrifice anything for their ideals? Well, here’s the woman Snowden left behind….

1984 Is Not Behind Us

There’s something screwy about it. The United States government has collected this enormous amount of information about whom we’ve called, how long we’ve talked; it also has connections to the largest servers in the country, and so it knows—minimally—who we’ve emailed. And if the government has access to servers, it seems logical to me that it can also monitor Internet use.

We cannot have, says Obama, 100% safety and 100% security: there has to be a trade-off. And he says that these programs have thwarted terrorist attacks in the past. What he doesn’t say is what attacks, and how the information helped identify the threat.

And according to at least one guy, Shane Harris, this kind of data mining is really only useful when you have a specific lead. And where do those leads come from? Here’s Harris on the subject:

Those leads tend to come from more pedestrian investigative techniques, such as interviews and interrogations of detainees, or follow-ups on lists of phone numbers or e-mail addresses found in terrorists' laptops. That shoe-leather detective work is how the United States has tracked down so many terrorists. In fact, it's exactly how we found Osama bin Laden.

So we have an enormous pile of data, and yet we’re still relying on tips, interrogations, or information found on terrorists’ laptops. Why collect all this information? Couldn’t the government get a court order when needed?

It’s also a little screwy that the government, with all this data on its hands, was unable to prevent a couple Boston kids from making bombs, killing several people, maiming scores more, and shutting down a major American city for a day. The Russians had told the FBI—watch out for this guy. That said, why wasn’t the government looking at all Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Internet usage, which presumably is where he was “radicalized” and / or where he learned to make the bombs?

I also understand that the last thing Obama wants is to have a terrorist attack on his watch. And God knows, I would have continued the program, too—what president wouldn’t? But the real question is whether a president, with the help of Congress and the Supreme Court, should be making these decisions.

And let’s be honest, if given the power, the government will use it. But is it legal, collecting all this data? Well, here’s what James Sensenbrenner wrote in the Guardian last Saturday:

In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as "two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress". But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting.

To obtain a business records order like the one the administration obtained, the Patriot Act requires the government to prove to a special federal court, known as a Fisa court, that it is complying with specific guidelines set by the attorney general and that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Intentionally targeting US citizens is prohibited.

The point should also be made—how do you get the genie back in the bottle? We have invested billions to obtain the technology to spy on our citizens. Is it likely that the government will walk away and leave it rusting there?

We went nutso after September 11. But actually, our freedoms had been eroding for years before. Am I the only person in the US who thinks that being asked to pee into a plastic cup in order to get a job stocking cereal in Wal-Mart is an unjustified invasion of privacy? And why is it that I am photographed countless times a day, sometimes without my knowledge? Since when did walking out onto the street mean implied consent?

“If you’re not doing anything wrong,” goes the line. Yeah? What if a major al-Qaeda figure dials my phone number by mistake? What if he emails the wrong person? Or what if my vengeful ex-wife, working away for our homeland security, decides to tap into the system, read my emails, and then start stalking my girlfriend?

Even if I trust this president not to misuse the information, will I trust the next one? Oh, and by the way, what if I write the sentence, “It is completely untrue and without basis that I want to kill Obama?” Will that ring alarms bells for Homeland Security? Am I to expect a knock on the door shortly?

The guy who leaked the information is 29, and though making a pot of money, wasn’t particularly high up in the hierarchy. He’s intelligent and speaks well; I believe him when he says that his intention was to force the issue onto the national stage.

Guess what.

He has.