THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/18/06 -- Vol. 25, No. 7, Whole Number 1348
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent will be assumed authorized for inclusion
unless otherwise noted.
To subscribe, send mail to mtvoid-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To unsubscribe, send mail to mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Topics:
Oh Fudge! (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
What Can an Interview Do? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
War on Terrorism (letters of comment by Mike Glyer and
Andre Kuzniarek)
This Week's Reading (THE MUSEUM OF HOAXES; CHEATS,
CHARLATANS, AND CHICANERY; EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR
DELUSIONS & THE MADNESS OF CROWDS; HOAXES; FADS
& FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE; and Stephen
Jay Gould) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Oh Fudge! (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I can be truly amazed to see a magician doing tricks. Some can
be really mystifying. When I see a trick I may be desperate to
find out how it is done. However finding out how it is done is
really disillusioning. The trick is demystified and brought down
to comprehensible terms. It is sort of an anti-climax to find it
just isn't as impressive. Curiously I find the same thing when I
cook. For example, my whole life I have been tempted by fudge.
It is this marvelously chocolatey candy with a rich flavor. I
decided to make some of this stuff for myself. So what is it?
It is powdered sugar flavored with cocoa and vanilla and it is
all stuck together with melted butter. That's it. That is what
fudge has been all along. And when you are eating it if you
think about it, it tastes like powdered sugar and cocoa. I am so
disillusioned. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: What Can an Interview Do? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
You are watching "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" And the host
asks the contestant a question. You are listening to a scientist
being interviewed on a television network news magazine. On the
radio a dog expert is being interviewed. In each case a show is
being put on for the audience. In each case you may make
different assumptions about the degree of collaboration between
the questioner and the person answering.
I was listening to National Public Radio and a crime novel writer
was being interviewed. The interviewer asked something I thought
was an odd question. He asked, "what can a crime novel do?" And
the writer went off for a minute or so talking about how a crime
novel can educate the reader about police procedure or whatever.
It answered the question perfectly. The question might not have
made much sense to me, but it did to the writer being questioned.
I was left a bit confused. What kind of a question is "What can
a crime novel do?" Is it a question that anyone would ask
spontaneously? The host clearly did not just ask that question
out of curiosity, though that was how it was presented. I cannot
imagine someone sitting around wondering what a crime novel can
do and looking for a crime writer to ask. Transparently the
guest had provided the questions he wanted to be asked. This is
in a minor way a small deception on the listener. It is in a
minor way dishonest.
This is an issue we rarely think about with interviews we read
and hear on the radio may be less than honest with us. To what
extent is the interviewer collaborating with interviewee? What
are our expectations? In the quiz show scandals of the 1950s,
the viewing public had assumed the contestants were answering
strictly from their basic knowledge and it was discovered that
some were being fed the answers. There was collusion between the
person asking the questions and the person answering.
There is a whole spectrum of possible levels of complicity. At
one end of the spectrum the interviewee has no idea what he is
going to be asked and just has to depend on his fund of knowledge
and wit to respond to the questions. Or perhaps the interviewee
may just suggest topics that he may be asked about. At the far
end of spectrum the interviewee actually provides a list of
questions and says "ask me these." The interviewer's only
purpose is to provide the topic sentences for sections of the
interviewee's presentation. The listener or reader is never told
what are the rules of the interview, but clearly there are some
ground rules and they will vary from interview to interview based
on the situation. This level of collaboration may be very
important in determining how the interviewee sounds to the
public. How professional the speaker sounds can be dependent on
how much he knows about what he is to be asked.
My point is that there is any number of ways to appear simply to
be presenting reality, but to editorialize subtly. You can
choose photographs that make the politician you dislike look like
an idiot. Even playing with the color of a photograph can make
its subject looks sleazy. One really needs to be sensitive to
the tricks used to make one person look better than another while
appearing to present nothing but reality.
News media can actually use their hidden factors and ambiguity to
slant the news. Let me invent a hypothetical news program that
has a specific political agenda. Let us call this very
hypothetical news program "One Hour." Maybe their logo is a
stopwatch ticking off one hour. When "One Hour" interviews
somebody they like they can have good lighting, flattering choice
of camera angle, and they can prearrange what questions the
person being interviewed will be asked. I suppose they could
even counsel the interviewee on how best to answer. The result
will look very different from what they will get if they just
barge into somebody's office, set up a camera, and start asking
hard questions. [The name of the news program was a joke, by the
way. I am not accusing any particular investigative news program
as being any worse than any other.] My point is that interview
techniques and how the interview is conducted allow a great deal
of latitude to slant results and still make the results look like
reality. Only occasionally is this obvious to the listener. It
becomes more obvious when the interviewer asks a weird question
like "what can a crime novel do?" [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: War on Terrorism (letters of comment by Mike Glyer and
Andre Kuzniarek)
In response to Mark's editorial on terrorism in the 08/11/06
issue of the MT VOID, Mike Glyer writes, "Mark gives persuasive
reasons for the difficulty in extinguishing the terrorist threat.
Another thing that keeps them going besides Internet
communication is international news coverage, which multiplies
the attention to local acts of violence. Thanks to current
technology, a terrorist not only receives encouragement from his
fellows via the Internet, but a magnified sense of accomplishment
by other terrorists via news imagery and reports instantly
broadcast via satellite through TV and internet outlets. Sports
fans exult over trivial results with a feeling of 'Scoreboard,
baby!' I expect that's all the more true for terrorists when
their kind of violence is reported." [-mg]
Andre Kuzniarek points to a similar article by Ron Suskind in
Salon which can be found at http://tinyurl.com/rb3su.
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
When I buy books, they go on my "to-read" queue, which is mostly
a "first-in-first-out" queue. But there are really three kinds
of books in it--"obligation" books, regular books, and "popcorn"
books. The obligation books get read early because I have to
review them, vote on them, or return their to the library by a
certain date. The regular books get read more or less in
sequence. But the popcorn books get read whenever I just want to
enjoy myself. THE MUSEUM OF HOAXES by Alex Boese (ISBN
0-452-28465-1) is a popcorn book. This does not mean it is not
well-researched, or well-written. It just means that I had a lot
of fun reading it.
Along similar lines is CHEATS, CHARLATANS, AND CHICANERY by
Andreas Schroeder (ISBN 0-7710-7953-2), a sequel to SCAMS,
SCANDALS, AND SKULDUGGERY. I have not seen the first book, but
CHEATS, CHARLATANS, AND CHICANERY covers such capers as the
"discovery" of the Tasaday tribe in Philippines, the question of
just who actually got to the North Pole first, a nineteenth
century plan to rotate Manhattan Island to keep it from sinking,
and the writing of NAKED CAME THE STRANGER. (Whether you
remember the latter scam will definitely give people a clue as to
your age. I do.) This is a much more light-hearted look at
scams than such books as Charles Mackay's EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR
DELUSIONS & THE MADNESS OF CROWDS (see below). It is true that
much of what Mackay covers, such as the Great Tulip Craze, could
not be considered a scam, but there is a similar psychology
between that and many of the scams in CHEATS, CHARLATANS, AND
CHICANERY. I would recommend either of Schroeder's books, but
also Mackay's.
(As proof that hoaxes are notoriously difficult to pin down, For
example, Boese claims that the story of the "Manhattan Island
rotation hoax" is itself a hoax, and that someone who
investigated it found no mention of it until over forty years
after it supposedly happened. Both he and Schroeder agree that
the Tasady were a hoax, but the Columbia Encyclopedia and
Wikipedia seem to think they were real.)
If you liked any of these books, you should read Charles Mackay's
EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS & THE MADNESS OF CROWDS (ISBN
0-486-43223-8). This was written in 1841, so the delusions,
schemes, and manias are all fairly old--though most are still
with us in some form or other. We do not have tulipomania, but
every generation seems to have some commodity that becomes vastly
over-priced until the bubble bursts. (The 1932 introduction by
Bernard M. Baruch mentions the 1929 stock market boom and bust.)
Mackay writes about scams such as "the Mississippi Scheme" and
"the South Sea Bubble", follies that recur in slightly modified
forms such as the Crusades and the witch hunts, as well as
seemingly permanent delusions such as alchemy and fortune-
telling. Of the Crusades, Mackay says, "Every age has its
peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it
plunges, spurred on either by the love gain, the necessity of
excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it
has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious
causes, or both combined. Every one of these causes influenced
the Crusades, and conspired to render them the most extraordinary
instance on record of the extent to which popular enthusiasm can
be carried." A hundred and fifty years later, that statement
probably still holds. I will admit to not re-reading this whole
book to comment on it, but I was sorely tempted, and given that
it is seven hundred pages long, that is a strong recommendation.
And then of course, I have to mention HOAXES by Curtis D.
MacDougall (ISBN 0-486-20465-0), a 1940 volume which covers the
Cardiff Giant, John Wilkes Booth's mummy, and the baby picture of
Adolf Hitler (among many others). And even Martin Gardner's
classic FADS & FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE (ISBN
0-486-20394-8) covers some of the same territory, though it is
more about the delusions than the outright scams. (In some
cases, it is hard to tell for sure--was Bridey Murphy a scam or a
genuine delusion?)
And this could easily segue into several of Stephen Jay Gould's
collections, such as THE MISMEASURE OF MAN. But I've probably
suggested enough books to keep you busy for a while already.
[-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
There is no safety for honest men but by
believing all possible evil of evil men.
-- Edmund Burke