Review: Burning Down the House by Jonathan Gould

Book Review:

Burning Down the House

Jonathan Gould

Mariner, 2025

Talking Heads was one of my bands as a young person. I was a bit too young to be with them from their beginnings as a sort of quasi-punk band in the mid-seventies–I was probably still listening to Kiss–but by the 1980 or so, they along with the Clash were the bands that really spoke to me.

The Clash started life as one of the prototypical London punk bands but quickly evolved into being something quite different. Talking Heads was always a sort of square peg on the punk scene in New York City. Both scenarios were completely all right with me. Though it matched my own mood, it always seemed to me that making a huge deal out of nihilism was a bit childish and contradictory.

If nothing matters, it also doesn’t matter that nothing matters, so . . . 

For the Clash, all posing to the side, there were things that mattered: solidarity between the white and black working classes, for instance. For early Talking Heads, nihilism was really more of a personal matter. An interior matter. A matter which they’d turn into a big public success, but not one they insisted you pay attention to.

That really matched my mood in the 1980s. I aspired to the sort of activism the Clash involved itself with, but actually trying to deal with people generally threw me into the very sort of angsty despair that lies behind some of Talking Heads most memorable moments.

Jonathan Gould’s recent band bio of Talking Heads, Burning Down the House, does a great job of documenting the band from its humble beginnings through its unlikely success and beyond. It also contextualizes the band’s history within the events and culture of the times that the band rose up in and flourished. And, even without the cooperation of a single band member, covers the personal and artistic challenges they faced fairly well.

What with all that general historical context, the rock scene, personal histories and the history of the band to present, Gould had a complex task in front of him. One that he handles pretty well–keeping things basically chronological and more-or-less compartmentalized, with in-depth consideration of the albums in chapters of their own, and historical context usually sectioned off on its own.

One does wish for a bit more integration of these elements, though. Gould switches from one to the other often enough that connections can be woven in pretty effectively. Managing something more might have required that an already long book be even longer.

And there is plenty of band history to tell. Talking Heads grew and changed considerably as it grew older; in membership, in popularity, in artistic ambition. The band we see in Stop Making Sense, their grand-scale, Jonathan Demme-directed concert film–is not at all the band that made Talking Heads ‘77. Yes, the band has more than doubled in size, but even that aside, they’d moved from quasi-punk to eclectic funk; they’d gone from weirdly static and awkward to outright visual spectacle; they’d gone from minimalist to multilayered; they’d gone from laughable outcasts to surfing the zeitgeist.

And this isn’t just a difference that we recognize in retrospective: Gould cites multiple critics and collaborators who noted the same thing over the later history of Talking Heads: the band and, especially Byrne, were developing quickly. Sometimes in very surprising directions.

For some fans of Talking Heads early work, myself included, the spectacle and crowd-pleasingness of Stop Making Sense were a betrayal. Critics and audiences fell over themselves to praise the film and the performance it documented. They ought to have been befuddled and put off, by my lights at the time.

I didn’t actually watch the film until years after it came out. And then only because one of my college roommates would play it on continuous loop in our living room for days on end. For months. After having watched it in snippets, probably several times over, more or less by accident, I was converted. It was solicitous of our attention and involvement, yes. But it was also weird and offputting and cryptic and thought-provoking and really, really musically intense.

The band that I’d come to identify with could never have done anything remotely like this. But here it was. And I was glad it was. Was it a betrayal? Maybe. But it was a triumph.

You don't have to read between the lines too much to answer the question of how such an extraordinary transformation could have happened. Gould's answer is David Byrne, an Asperger's sufferer of unique talent, who was fortunate enough to be born into, find or fall into situations that nurtured and directed that talent in ways that ultimately got its uniqueness recognized. The extraordinary element in the Talking Heads story is undoubtedly David Byrne. Everyone else was along for the ride.

But Gould also recognizes that Byrne would probably not have gotten far without the help of a series of family, friends, lovers and collaborators who gave him ordinary things like friendship and support often without much reciprocity from him.

New York City is a huge character in this story. Not the New York City you know today, not the New York City of baby strollers and endless coffee shops, but the New York City of danger, recent de-industrilaization, near-bankruptcy, garbage strikes and declining population. This was the New York City where people with no ready means of income could move and find their way. Because more people wanted out of New York City than in.

Talking Heads was, initially, three of the many young people on the make coming to New York City during this time. (The fourth member, keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison would join in 1977, more than a year after the band formed.) All three had attended the Rhode Island School of Design. Two of them, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, had graduated. David Byrne, who would quickly become the band’s main composer and singer, dropped out and was refused readmission.

As college kids, the Heads were distinct from most of their peers on the downtown scene in New York City. The other musicians tended to be from working class backgrounds. If they went to college, art would be about the last things they’d think about pursuing there. (“I wish my parents were rich enough to send me to art school” was Patti Smith’s response to meeting Tina Weymouth for the first time.) Spending a lot of money to pursue a career that you probably weren’t going to make much money at was, definitively, a rich person’s move.

According to Gould, most of the retrospective heroes of the CBGBs era were themselves hero-worshippers. They wanted nothing more than to become the new, updated versions of Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. The punks called the Rolling Stones The Strolling Bones not so much because they thought the actual music was bad or outdated, but because they were continuing to occupy the cultural space that a younger generation–they themselves–would like to occupy.

Not so Talking Heads. Byrne’s fraught relationship with rock hero-dom was apparent to anyone who saw him in the early days of the band. Not that he wouldn’t take the pay and benefits when offered, but Talking Heads as a band was far more skeptical of rock stardom than their peers. Even after their success, Byrne’s ability to act in the role of rock frontman was distinctly limited to a sort of brainy parody. Early in their career, the band as a whole considered bringing on a “more traditional” singer and front person (Deborah Harry was actually asked about it!) and they collectively decided to stick with Byrne more or less because he was so awkward in that role.

Byrne, specifically, and Talking Heads more generally have often been disparaged because they seemed completely disinterested in, or even hostile to things like “reviving the spirit of rock n roll.” Byrne (like me, I have to admit) has always seemed rather puzzled by what that even is, or why it ought to have been revived. At their formation, Talking Heads defined themselves negatively by articulating a list of  “don’ts”. No show-offy solos, no rock moves or poses, no pomp or drama, no rock hair, no rock lights, no rehearsed stage patter, no singing like a black man.

Talking Heads was built on a foundation that was similar to many of their peers: little formal musical education, little skill on their instruments but a passion to express themselves artistically through music. But the band was established with the ideology of an anti-rock-star band rather than as a wanna-be-rock-star band. 

Though Talking Heads and, especially, Byrne would end up violating all of these strictures eventually, these violations were, characteristically, done self-consciously and surprisingly late in this history of the band. The basic idea that rock stardom wasn’t an end in itself and that they didn’t want to become new versions of the old rock stars still defined the band as much as anything, even late in life. Byrne would never become “the posturing clown yammering away about his baby” that the early band so despised. That negative identity was really the glue that held this band together for as long as it did hold. 

But it barely held. The tensions and “frictions” within the band were significant from the start. Byrne and Chris Frantz had been in a RISD band called the Artistics, but Byrne was not really friends with Frantz and Weymouth. Something akin to a family atmosphere developed in the early days of the band when they lived together in a loft honing their skills and trying to work through potential songs.

For Tina Weymouth, in particular, this stage of the band’s development–with Byrne living as part of her domestic arrangements (she and Frantz were lovers and would ultimately marry)--would seemingly become the norm against which all later, much less intimate, situations would be measured. But the domestic arrangement was already over by 1976, when Weymouth and Frantz moved to a flat in Queens. Before the band had ever recorded.

Talking Heads began with three people from art school united in their desire to try to make it as an anti-rock band. And, famously, Talking Heads ended with four band members deeply at odds with one another. Weymouth, even before the breakup of Talking Heads, often bitterly complained about Byrne’s self-centeredness, social disfunction and “pretentiousness.” During and since the breakup of the band the bitterness of her complaints has intensified to the point where many speculate that she sounds like a scorned lover. (For me, the tone is a bit more spurned-older-sibling-ish.)

That bitterness is on full display in Gould’s book. The speculation as to motive also gets a brief airing. Weymouth doesn’t come off well. Byrne, on the other hand, gets an Aspberger’s diagnosis along with some tut-tutting about his tendency to take more than due credit for himself.

While this isn’t necessarily the result of the pervasive misogyny of rock and rock writing, it is worth considering. Gould is conscious of this, and seems to believe that neither Byrne nor Weymouth is the monster their haters portray. But it hard to replace those well-known, hated figures entirely when he is so dependent on the very sources that helped create them.

The breakup, the behavior of band members, and who deserves credit for what were all matters of controversy at the time Talking Heads was a going concern, and some of them still are. Gould's judgement on them is that of a seasoned music biographer--he has acclaimed books about Otis Redding and The Beatles to his credit. While we might question whether he has suffieient data to exercise his judgment on (I, for one, suspect he had more co-operation from band members than he can openly acknowledge, but . . .), he does seem to try hard to be judicious.

As to that “pretentiousness” that Weymouth (along with a host of Byrne critics) complains of. It points an undeniable and unbridgeable rift in the band that was apparent even in the early days of their collaboration with Brian Eno: David Byrne was an ambitious musician and artist who was rapidly developing his musical palette and sensibilities to try to do new things with his art.

Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth were not. Their playing certainly developed and improved over the history of Talking Heads, but not nearly at the rate that Byrne’s vision was developing. What they really wanted to have a good time and make some money playing fun music. Chris and Tina wanted to be like the B-52s. Or the Bangles. 

Byrne wanted to and did keep moving busily from influence to influence. Collaborator to collaborator. Medium to medium. Collecting new tools and elements as he went along. The results weren’t always great, but the forward motion was always there. Byrne was looking to gain the perspective, facility and scope to be an auteur. And he’d at least partially succeeded both with and without the rest of Talking Heads.

The tension between those two perspectives was certainly productive, as Stop Making Sense makes clear. The fun lovingness of Chris and Tina absolutely rubbed off on Byrne. But it is telling that Byrne’s aesthetic seriousness never seems to have rubbed off on Frantz and Weymouth. It was mostly just another annoying thing about David Byrne.

Early reviews and interviews with the band focussed very strongly on their art school background, and perhaps it was that highly assertive sense of aesthetics cultivated in art school that led the group to set themselves in such clear opposition to the world they were immersing themselves in. But what really set them apart was the fact that they all hated a lot of what rock ‘n’ roll had come to stand for, even among their new generation peers, even while ambitiously pursuing success as a rock band.

For some this was the ultimate indication that they were really nothing but parvenues and sell-outs. But what was it they were selling out? The hero worship of people who had no moral or artistic claim on it? A hedonistic lifestyle? As Tina Weymouth put it “Rock isn’t a noble cause.”

But what is? I’m not really sure the band came up with a great answer to that. But they played with better ones than “rock,” certainly. And that was the charm of the band: that they could rise above their milieu just enough to ask some interesting questions about it and us.

The fixations of Byrne’s songwriting were at the time of writing one of the most distinctive things about Talking Heads. In retrospect those fixations seem not only distinctive or eccentric, but prescient. The conflict between fact and meaning for the casual observer (Crosseyed and Painless, The Great Curve); The difficulty of resolving one’s identity in a free-flowing modern environment (Seen and Not Seen); The attractions of past certainties; The strong tendency toward violence for those who fail to negotiate meaning and identity in this untethered world (Psycho Killer, Life During Wartime, Listening Wind)

For Byrne, perhaps, the noble cause was human connection. Something that most people take for granted, but which, as someone on the spectrum, he had some critical distance on. Figuring out the self, its thirst for connection, how it connects and how it ought to connect. A project too big to work through in one lifetime let alone the lifetime of a band. But you have to admire the ambition.

A band biography, on the other hand, might not seem to be a terribly ambitious project. But Gould succeeds at placing the phenomenon of the band within a broader historical context that makes that narrow-focus history take on new interest and new meaning. Bravo.

The System Isn't Broken. The People Are Broken. And the Party Needs to Be.

 

After Kamala Harris's rather shockingly bad defeat on November 5th, there are calls for a post-mortem. And there should be one. Things obviously went wrong in what should have been a relatively easy win. Now we get to see how far Trump can push us along toward fascism on a permanent basis.

But, typically post-mortem, there are a lot of jackals and vultures gathering to join in the discussion. People whose only real opportunities come at the time of disasters. People who will say Harris's loss is proof that "The system is broken" or "The system is the victim of its own corruption" or, in short, the apocalypse is at hand and everything is allowed. Including their insane, self-destructive ideas.

These are people who won on November 5th. Sometimes both literally and figuratively, sometimes just figuratively. People who significantly outperformed Harris because their brand of apocalypticism, not coincidentally, appeals to many who enjoy Trump's brand of apocalypticism.

And that is the matter at the moment, really. People like apocalyptic narratives. Trump provides them. The middle-of-the-roaders think that ignoring these narratives--not responding when they come from the right and tolerating them when they come from the left--helps in some way.

Both extremes of the political spectrum thrive on the feeling that we've come to the end days. The right-wing version we can do less about: It's based on a hidebound embrace of old prejudices. So a black president with a foreign name, gays ascendant, blacks & weirdos seeming to dominate sports and culture, urban unrest, a pandemic, calls for universal vaccination, the decline of traditional rural work all feed into these narratives quite strongly. Whenever there is progress, there will be reactionism. But Democrats have done little to blunt its force.

In fact, they've played footsie for far too long with the leftist brand of apocalypticism: everything is horrible! racism is rampant! no progress has been made! no progress can be made without [insert extreme, unpopular measure here]!, the system is broken!, everything is rigged!, the food is poison!, the earth is dying! etc.!

Many of these narratives, and the tone of it all, are red meat for the reactionary beast. And that should be no surprise: the game plan for the far-right and far-left is the same: make people believe everything is broken beyond repair and use that conviction as the opportunity to push a strong-sounding, but vague agenda for change ("drain the swamp" "a political revolution is coming"). And, once in power, to push a much more concrete, radical, hitherto partially hidden agenda that in more normal times would never garner 5% support from the electorate.

It's time the Democratic Party did the right thing, so to speak, and got rid of these folks--all the closet and not-so-closet revolutionists, the crypto-Trots, the neo-Luddites, all the folks who despise the party but find it useful as a beard. It's pretty clear that their moment has come and gone, so there isn't really going to be a whole lot of electoral force there anyhow. And their tendency to intentional and unintentional sabotage made them as much trouble as they were help even at their peak.

The Democrats will be better served as the somewhat-less-ambiguous centrist party. The leftists will be better off being honest with themselves and the voters. And the voters will be better off having a clear choice between the somewhat left-of-center reformists and the really left of center "overthrow the system" types.

How and why did the non-MAGA electorate go for Trump? Because they are ill-informed and not very easily changed from that state. Because hate, fear and resentment are very strong drivers of their voting behavior. They are afraid because for quite a long time now, representatives of both the left and right have been bombarding them with messages that tell them they cannot trust "the system." That everything is hopelessly corrupt. That nothing the government does works. That everything is contaminated. That the Earth is dying. That everyone and everything is racist and sexist and evil. That we've always been racist and sexist and evil.

The Democratic Party, if it hopes to win, needs to unambiguously attack those messages of fear and doom. They can't if a bunch of voices in the party see fear and doom as strategic opportunities.

On Reading History: Hannah Arendt vs. The 1619 Project

I've been reading a bit about the 1619 Project. Slavery and its centrality to American colonial life do get short shrift in American history as usually taught, so it's cool to have something that focusses attention on that central factor.

I'm interested in the perspective with which we read stuff like this, though. A LOT of people seem to see the 1619 Project as some sort of essential corrective to the American history as just a hero story.

But I went to Philadelphia Public Schools in the 70s and 80s--hardly a hotbed of cutting-edge pedagogy-- and we weren't taught the straight-up hero story. Remember the Aztecs and Incas and the conquistadors? Remember the triangle trade? Remember the struggles over slavery and how to count slaves at the Constitutional Convention? Remember the Trail of Tears? Remember this all leads up to the Civil War? (All, by the way, included in my middle-school-and-earlier history classes.)

Clearly not, in many cases. But not because these things were never taught, I bet, but because you weren't paying attention.

The 1619 Project is not so much an antidote to previous attempts to teach you history so much as to your imperviousness to them. When history has a whiff of radical chic, NOW you pay attention.

It is interesting to me, too, HOW we seem to absorb the 1619 project. It's all about our judging the past by our present day criteria. And that, certainly, is part of what history should be about. 

But when that all we do, it really devalues history itself. We can look for exemplars and moral tales and things to be proud of and guilty about everywhere. We can make them up (that's called fiction, with exemplary honesty).

If we let go of the absolute primacy of ourselves and our present-day moral and ontological crises for a bit, we can reap other, I'd say greater rewards from history. One of them being, to a degree, appreciating someone else's, radically different, perspective.

1619 doesn't arise out of 2023. People living and acting in 1619 had absolutely no notion of us or the perspective we bring to their stories. What they knew was 1619 and before.

To us, 1619 is important because of the lessons it teaches about who we are, where we come from and how we failed to live up to our ideals from go. To those is 1619, we don't figure into the equation at all. And there was absolutely nothing new about failure to live up to ideals. We'd always been doing that. All of us.

What are ideals for but to fail at them?

And the barbarity of colonization was nothing new either. To anyone. Very few people welcomed the conquering Aztecs to town. The Mongols weren't particularly nice imperial masters. The crusaders were hardly justice warriors so much as savage pirates. The Barbary Corsairs were, literally, pirates and slavers. Rome wasn't a good neighbor to have. Or China. Or the Songhai empire.

Taking whatever you could wrest from someone else; slaughtering people whose presence was inconvenient to your purposes or who just happened to be there when you were in a mood for slaughter; rape; wanton destruction and enslavement were not everyday things in 1619, but certainly they defined the horizon of awful things that could happen to you. And they actually happened with a fair degree of regularity.

None of that--theft, rape, murder, slavery, vandalism, genocide--was new to America in 1619. What was innovatory was the scale on which these things could now be done with a slowly industrializing Europe on one side of the Atlantic and three newly-within-easy-reach continents ripe for ruthless exploitation. *That* situation was relatively new.

The importance of looking at history like America's history with slavery and, later, racial exploitation and hatred is just for us to observe how far we fell from our present-day standards. Or even how far we fell from contemporary standards. But also to see the degree to which these failures were really just another day at the office for human kind. These failures are a big part of what we do and have always done. Except perhaps in 1619 we had upgraded from mimeograph to a Xerox machine.

Years ago, reading Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, I was struck by how matter-of-factly she asserted that in classical times everything that we would call "civilization"--philosophical contemplation, great speeches, debate about matters of public interest, great public deeds, the writing of history--were all built on the foundation of excess wealth created through the ruthless exploitation of slaves and women. 

Civilization requires economic excess and the only real place to get it before modernity was by exploiting the labor of other people. And the greater footprint the civilization left, either in terms of archaeological or intellectual remains, the greater the exploitation.

The development, dissemination and mass inculcation of the very ideals that we still so fabulously fail to live up to were all done through usually ruthless exploitation.

Now I say this not to let us all off the hook of trying to live well through our post-colonial legacy in the West. We still have to do that, best we can. But one of the essential contexts to see 1619 in is pre-1619. 1619 makes a convenient beginning for a story we are still living through today, but it was also the continuation of a story that goes back much further than that, a story at least as ugly and one that implicates us even more so than the one beginning in 1619. A story that we also have to find ways to internalize.

The Enduring Stupidity of American Foreign Policy Discussion

President Obama recently gave what was hyped as a "major foreign policy" statement before the graduating class at West Point this past week. Given the strong realistic streak in Obama's overseas maneuvering to date, I thought that this would either be a huge redefinition of terms or a complete and utter non-event. It turned out to be the latter.

This has given a lot of folks who are otherwise critical of Obama, both left and right, a chance to be further critical of him. And it gives me the chance to point out that it was pretty stupid to set himself up for this fall.

Unless somehow his message of extreme moderation somehow slips through the chorus of mostly nonsensical caterwauling and reaches the public. It is possible.

What amazes me about foreign policy discussion in this country is the extent to which it is dominated by people who utter little that isn't complete & utter bullshit. I've written before (mostly here and here) about the essentially theatrical attitude many purportedly expert commentators take toward foreign policy; where foreign policy is all about cutting a figure, creating an image that is pleasing to the American public (and, allegedly, one that is terrifying to our enemies), whatever the reality behind it.

This is essentially a cynical attitude: Americans know little about the rest of the world and don't care to know very much. The *reality* of our involvement vis-a-vis the rest of the world is not something they are likely to become cognizant of, at least in the short term. The image of a forthright and defiant American President, gazing off into the middle distance with a light wind rippling his hair. That's something that'll reach them. Albeit briefly.

Obama's hairstyle is not the only thing that makes him ill-suited for this role. He had his chance to rework this image after his own predilections after he was elected. He had, after all, did a bang up job of reworking our image of presidential candidate over the prior year. But there was a pesky financial crisis and ensuing recession to deal with, and he always seemed a bit . . . mmm . . . ill at ease with the purely theatrical elements of politics. His middle-distance stare always had an element of "I wish I were anywhere but here" to it, rather than the "I really LOVE me, and so should you!" or "They really LOVE me, and so should you!" that we see in leaders who have really mastered the art.

At heart, Obama is a tinkerer and improver. A realist. A man who hates stupidity and waste and who has had plenty to do just unwinding the commitments left to him by the prior administration, which came to be defined by stupidity and waste.

Translating what he really feels about foreign policy--that he doesn't hold with any religious mission at the core of American foreign policy, that he doesn't hold with fomenting paranoia (and the ensuing overseas commitments) as a civic distraction, that he realizes America is not omnipotent and intends to behave that way--telling that truth would require confronting a whole host of contradictory feelings America has about itself. That we can do anything!; that we're terribly and unjustly overburdened. That we're the best!; That we've been in decline throughout living memory! That everyone needs to do what we say!; That we don't feel like making any sacrifices.

The usual talking heads we see complaining about the Obama foreign policy and mostly would-be directors of a much better political/theatrical presentation than currently on offer. They are interested in *exploiting* these contradictions in our attitudes.

Someone we don't like ruling Syria? Well how can Obama possibly let that happen? He is weak!

But this is a very easy complaint to make. The suggestion being that a "strong" President never has to live for long with anything he doesn't like. But is this true? Of course not. And when asked particularly about what they are suggesting ought to be done, the essential actions are always either in the past or nebulous in the extreme. Apparently Obama didn't sacrifice the right chicken to the right God or something, and if he had Bashir Assad would have been smothered in his crib as an infant. Or something. I can never quite figure out what is being suggested.

Which is nothing new, except for the fact that journalist who cover this sort of thing seldom push the questioning to the point where real answers must be forthcoming. In fact, they are complicit in mystifying foreign policy because that give their sources (and they themselves) an aura of privileged knowledge (however nebulously presented) for access to which we are dependent on them.

When in fact, foreign policy is largely about learning to lose well. It's about acknowledging where you can't win or can't win without undue risk. It's about scooping up an easy win here or there and putting your effort and taking your risks where they really matter. It's about playing a high stakes game. It isn't primarily about principles and it isn't theater. There are disagreements about how that high-stakes game should be played, about whose bluffs should be called when; about when risks are justified.

But those who image of foreign policy seems to be Wagnerian bellowing from the "World Stage"--well, there's a reason they aren't at the table, even in their childish imaginations!

The Irish Pub: Drinking and the Irish

OK: More cliches.

The Irish are a bunch of drunkards.

Well, not really, but the Irish (I'm mostly of Irish extraction, btw. Obviously.) have had an interesting and complex relationship with booze. Alcohol is very much woven into a lot of Irish sociality. Whiskey is customary at get-togethers in Ireland much like vodka is in Russia. Just recently in Ireland I've seen the whiskey broken out on a few occasions when cousins or old friends meet around a kitchen table. And neighborhoods and villages have traded gossip and lamented and shared news and talked politics over pints in pubs.

There have, of course, been problems. The Irish journalist John Waters has written that “Drinking in Ireland is not simply a convivial pastime, it is a ritualistic alternative to real life, a spiritual placebo, a fumble for eternity, a longing for heaven, a thirst for return to the embrace of the Almighty.”

The drunken Irishman like the Irish pub is a cliche, but not just a cliche. There's a truth behind it. During the long struggle for independence, Irish patriots often lamented their biblious countrymen. And the Irish middle class, even when they were not slavishly emulating the English middle class, went to great lengths to separate themselves and their customs from taint of alcohol. A whole host of problems seemed to go hand in hand with Irish drinking both in Ireland and abroad: unemployment and underemployment; gambling; domestic violence and other crime; prostitution; disease.

These aren't just sepia-toned 19th century problems, either: Irish drinking is on the rise in the 21st century, and many of these associated problems are still felt quite acutely. There's actually a bit of a moral panic going on about it in Ireland right now. (Perhaps symptomatic, but very well done, really: The Irish Times' Sobriety Diaries.)

Given all these historical and contemporary problems, you'll see in certain quarters a resentment that Irish social life should be so closely associated with the pub. Or that Irishness itself should be so associated with it. You'll see people who are saying "good riddance" to the pub.

I am not among these. While I fully recognize the problems inherent in tying social life and personal life so closely with dispensaries of alcohol, I also love and long for the sorts of "third space" pubs have always been at their best. And I also highly value the pleasure and the dis-inhibiting influence of communal drinking. These things are not to be discounted, I believe, even in the face of all the obvious problems that drinking leads to for many among us.

More later.

The Irish Pub

Paddy Foley´s Irish Pub. Schandauer Straße 55, 01277 Dresden, Germany

I'm just back from a trip to Ireland, which was wonderful in a lot of ways and a bit worrisome in some others. One worrisome thing was the state of the Irish pub.

The Irish pub is something of a cliche here in America. Literally thousands of corporate and not-so-corporate bars play to the image of the Irish pub as the beating heart of the community; the center of boozy sociality and fun. I once worked for a man who made a fortune supplying bric-a-brac for these and similarly themed bars.

But there was a truth behind the stupid cliches: pubs in Ireland were often vital social centers for the communities in which they resided. Being in and participating in the din of conversation in a smoky, too-warm pub with a pint in front of you was always one of the highlights of any trip to Ireland.

But Ireland and its pubs have undergone many changes since I was there last in the mid-nineties. Ireland is, decidedly, part of Europe now. The economic boom I saw happening then has busted, and there has been a further boom and bust in the real estate market. Ireland is no longer a country remarkable for being mostly empty and is no longer remarkable for the number of its younger people working abroad. Those younger people stayed home in the nineties to take advantage of the economic good times, and after that prospects elsewhere were hardly sunnier than prospects at home.

The population, which had stayed at about three million for decades, is now steadily closing in on five million. The change is most obvious in Dublin, which has become a truly expensive cosmopolis, but every county in the Republic is seeing substantial rises in population.

I've lived in and visited many bustling towns--New York City, Philadelphia, London--but today's Dublin may well take the cake as the most harried-feeling of them. This is indicative of some great changes in Irish culture, but also of some lingering elements of the old Ireland.

One reason why Dublin is so harried is that the people seem to want to live up to their self-image of Dublin as a modern, bustling "world city." But another reason seems to be that the Irish feel that their current economic difficulties and austerity are their just deserts for having so enthusiastically embraced Mammon. Guilt is a far stronger current in Ireland's response to the economic travails of the last 15 years or so than America's. To be harried and hurried is a sort of ritual penance for having enjoyed wealth, for having central heat, for having borrowed money, for having used a credit card, for having eaten pate.

This guilt, played upon pretty nakedly by the government's "get working" campaign, shows how, in some ways at least, the new Ireland isn't so different from the self-hating Ireland of the past. (Irish self-hatred, while not a big part of the cliche-Ireland we see so often, is an absolute fixture of Irish literature and cinema.)

In the pubs, though, change is obvious. Older locals--the former beer-soaked, urine-smelling centers of neighborhood sociality--are now beer-soaked, urine-smelling centers of not much. Young folk don't frequent the locals as their elders did before them. This is partially because there are so many young folk around (the 15-30 cohort is significantly larger than, say, the 35-50 cohort), that they have developed a pretty strong generational consciousness. This big cohort also coincided with a number of great changes in Ireland--the growing realization that Ireland could be part of Europe, and not just a former part of the decaying British Empire; and the growing realization that Ireland need not be poor and backward, that Ireland could be a place where others came seeking opportunity, not the place that supplied cheap labor to construction crews in London and Irish-themed pubs in America.

Forgoing the traditional pub is, apparently, part and parcel of becoming the new Ireland. But the new Ireland is a bit soul-less, and, in many ways seems to partake a little too strongly of the guilt and self-hatred of the old Ireland. Slavishly becoming more European or more American upper-middle-class is really little better than slavishly becoming more English. In fact, in some respects worse.

The old Irish pub that I knew--with Guinness and strong lager as the near-exclusive beverages, with damn-near everyone smoking, with windows shut against fresh air (known in Ireland as a "draft) with a universal and absolute determination--was hardly a paradise. And it wasn't really "traditional" if what you mean by that is unchanging. The lager of the 80s and 90s was a change made in response to changing consumer preferences, as were the video game machines, the televisions, the formal music events, etc. etc.

The pub as vital social institution always meant that the pub changed with the society around it. And while Irish society pre-1990 changed more slowly than it seems to now, it was not unchanging. But the rate of change does now seem to be overwhelming the old institution, and some of the changes happening inside of pubs seem to be mitigate against its social role in a way that, say, the introduction of lager did not.

Can a genuine & distinctive entity know as an Irish Pub survive when the TV is omnipresent and always on? Can it survive when loud music makes conversation impossible? Can it survive when there is so little distinctive or communal about it? Can it be reinvented to fulfill more or less the same social role in a new social setting?

I've ordered a (seemingly pretty pessimistic) book called A Pint of Plain by Bill Barich on the history & decline of the Irish pub to help me along toward answering some of these questions and I'll be posting more here as soon as it arrives.

Political Theater III

Picking up on a theme I wrote about (wow!) ten years ago . . . the press and talking heads still seem to be obsessed with "signalling" and "messages" and "perceived weakness" as if global politics were Kibuki theater and not a pursuit of real, material advantages.

Part of this is because theater is something we all understand. We all watch TV and we all are familiar with the images of power and gamesmanship we've seen on shows like the West Wing. Very few of us are familiar with the real stakes in international politics and the cards in the hands of the multitudinous players. So it is far easier for us and far easier for our hired storytellers to tell the story of international conflict as a continuation of West Side Story, where there are no stakes to speak of, just posturing, pointless risks and revenge. Conflict boiled down to pure image is something we can all understand.

And there is another side to this as well. International politics, like poker, is about maturely accepting the right losses. For a long time the US had such strong hands that it seldom had to do this--we could chase most pots, because we had the good cards. Today, the good cards are spread around the table. We've still getting good hands, but we have be a bit more careful how we play.

This conflicts pretty seriously with our self-image, though. We usually think of ourselves not as a player at the table, but as above the game--as an officiator or policeman who governs the game. Well, we're not. We cannot control how other people play their hands. Which means that we will lose some pots. We have to accept this.

We also have to accept that the behavior of others is NOT a mere reflection of our behavior, of our "perceived weakness" or "perceived strength." The other players have hands that they can play and multiple interest groups and audiences to whom they are playing.

Did Putin invade Ukraine because he thought the US was weak? The way you answer that question isn't to ask "Well do I think we look weak?" The question is about Putin, about Putin's interests and Putin's perceptions. So, assuming Putin wanted to act to keep Ukraine within his sphere of influence, what had he to fear from the United States? Chest thumping from the President? I am skeptical that Putin actually fears that. Armed intervention? Well that's be something to fear, but clearly that has never been in the cards anyhow. Not under Bush, not under Obama. Sanctions? Well, only a moron would have expected these not to come, and they will. And as the Europeans begin to really consider what a belligerent and expansionist Russia means to their interests, we will see those sanctions get pretty tough, particularly if Russia pushes its advantage in the region (they're already there, we & the Europeans aren't) too far.

So why now? Because we look weak now? No:Because up until now, Russia had a compliant regime in place in the Ukraine. They had been using all sorts of covert means to ensure that was the case. Why didn't they intervene during the last pro-Western regime was in power--they did, refusing to sell gas to the Ukraine. But during the last pro-Western regime nothing of a lasting change was made as the pro-Western forces spent a great deal of time fighting each other.

Now the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement is on the table. That could turn into a lasting change of orientation for Ukraine. That changes things. That makes Putin willing to seize the pretext of constitutional crisis in Ukraine to take what he can, in spite of the risk of sanctions. Taking this opportunity has shored up his power base at home and may get him a naval base and, perhaps, in the end, a satellite country to his west. The cost for all of this will be more or less the same cost he'd have paid under Bush--sanctions and a more hostile posture from the US and many of its allies.

Under either President, the maintenance of that hostile posture would have been difficult--the Europeans have complicated interests and fears in regard to Russia. Under Bush that would have been compounded by the fact that they despised him and his chest-thumping. (See, for instance, the amount of cooperation he attained for his Iraq invasion).

Bush's approach would probably have been to loudly declare that any Europeans not going along with the strictest possible sanctions regime were miserable appeasers and we'd no doubt seen plenty of tiresome clips of Neville Chamberlain and "Peace in Our Time." We'd have looked like "leaders." Administration officials would have taken every opportunity to bask in their Churchill, but such an approach would have distracted the Europeans: their hate and resentment of us coming to the forefront just as we'd like them to be focused on their fear and loathing of Putin. Our image: tough guy defenders of freedom. Their image: vacillators. End result: Russia goes largely unpunished. So if image is your be all, end all. We win. But if the point is to discourage people like Putin from misbehaving . . . we haven't accomplished the goal, we've only covered over our failure with a lot of posturing.

Obama takes a quieter approach, and in this case that's all for the good. By NOT being the leader, by NOT calling attention to our brave opposition stance, by NOT calling any who disagree miserable appeasers, by NOT becoming the issue, he lets the Europeans concentrate on Russia and come to their own conclusions. And they are: Putin is scary.

Probable result: US image: lots of hand-wringing over not "leading"; European image:  determined; probable result: some pretty stiff sanctions, significant cooperation between US & the rest of NATO to stem the threat posed by Russia.

If you are concerned only about image, this is bad. We aren't leading (to a failed outcome), we're merely influencing (to a desirable outcome).


Always playing to our self-image is like going all-in on every hand in poker. It's a stupid way to play. Image is only one factor in winning at this game. Over the long haul you win by advancing your interest with reasonable expenditure of resources. That means walking away from some pots; that means letting the bad guys win sometimes; that means letting YOUR calculation of interest determine your behavior, and not being a predictable slave to some notion of credibility that is easily manipulated by the other players.

All of the hand-wringing over our "image" and how, apparently that's all that matters in foreign policy is hand-wringing by cynics (who know better, but who also know that most people DO NOT know better) and the many naifs who can only understand cheap melodrama, not actual politics.

The problem with The Trolley Problem

Opened the last Atlantic and finally read the piece I'd been putting off for some time--Robert Wright's essay on innate morality ("Why We Fight and Can We Stop" in the print version). I put it off because I often find Wright to be . . .umm, rather credulous, I guess is the phrase I want. He seems to believe strongly that information about the origins of a human trait is always immediately useful in guiding us as to how to deal with that trait. I think that's a hopelessly naive attitude, so I often find Wright's work to be more than a little patience trying. On the other hand, he usually deals with interesting topics and its often pretty productive in making me try to figure out why I think Wright (or his subjects) have got something wrong.

For instance in this piece Wright prominent features the work of Joshua Greene, who has helped make the Trolley Problem--an ethical thought experiment--famous. Here it is as conveyed by wikipedia:

There is a runaway trolley barrelling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. Unfortunately, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice?

There is a variation:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

Many people opt to pull the lever but not push the fat man, in spite of the fact that the end results are the same. Some use this result to argue that human moral reasoning is essentially irrational, or that our moral reasoning has less to do with outcomes than it has to do with keeping ourselves above moral reproach:

. . . people who obey their moral intuitions and refrain from pushing the man to his death are just choosing to cause five deaths they won’t be blamed for rather than one death they would be blamed for. Not a profile in moral courage! 

But there is a big problem with this sort of thought experiment--they depend on the subject feeling a sense of certainty about outcomes (the five people in the car are definitely heading to certain death; the fat man's fall will definitely stop the train; the diverted train will definitely hit the one person on the track you divert to). Our life experience--the experience our brains have evolved to cope with--is all abut dealing with unexpected contingencies. We very seldom face situations where we know for certain what the consequences of our actions will be, and our natural suspicion when faced with the fat man situation is not that we'll have one death blamed on us--it's that we'll have six. That's how we think, even when told not to. We are beings who have evolved and grown up to deal with unexpected contingencies--we actually come to expect them in a way, and we tend to act modestly as a result. That's what the Trolley problem really points out. That's why we like Captain Kirk's solution to the Kobayashi Maru dilemma (he cheated), because in life there are lots more contingencies, uncertainties and opportunities than there are in tests and experiments (experiments being designed to absolutely minimize all of these). By attempting to test real-world judgements with a controlled experiment, all the Trolley Problem does is reiterate the difference between experience and experiment.