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By Michael F. Duggan

Okay, so I am not a part of Taylor Swift’s target audience, and I would be surprised if I have listened to more than a dozen of her songs. But like her or not, pop music’s billion-dollar woman is impossible to ignore.

I have noting against Swift. She is clearly talented and protects energy and a positive image for her legions (armies, really) of young fans, or Swifties. The fact that she has tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of enthusiastic followers who are willing to shell-out big bucks for albums and sold-out concerts corroborates this. They, and in some cases their parents, love her and her music, and there is no reason to think that they are faking it. But does she warrant such acclaim and pecuniary reward?

Right after Swift’s Eras tour broke the billion-dollar mark, a friend of mine called me and asked me what I thought of her. In truth I think about her fairly little, other than during the occasional news story. Of her relationship with what’s-his-name, the football player, I couldn’t care less. To be fair, at 34, she is now a veteran in a cutthroat business that makes extreme demands on touring musicians, and her first album, released in 2006, is now older than many of her fans.

But my friend’s point was that, taken on her artistic merits, she seems to be a kind of patron saint for the mediocrity that characterizes so much of the music of our time. I listened to some of her songs and they struck me as unobjectionable, if unexceptional, and possessing verve and confidence. Her lyrics occasionally rose to the level of moderate (if unexceptional) inspiration. She also has a nice voice, and her songs sound overly-worked to me in a technological sense (like some of Beyonce’s songs). But is the whole package worthy of a clean billion for a single (albeit long) tour? I suppose a free trader would argue that anybody who can make that kind of money legally in a free market deserves it. Perhaps. But as regards aesthetics, I disagree.

It is pointless to argue over taste and preferences, but I think that we can make meaningful qualitative statements about art and entertainment. For instance, do Swift’s songs, which speak so powerfully to her fans, rise to the level of the nearly universal appeal of the better songs by the Gershwins, Hoagy Carmichael, Lennon and McCartney, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart/Hammerstein, Schubert, Simon and Garfunkel, or Fats Waller? Are her lyrics as fresh and original as those of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and the better acts of the British Invasion during the early and mid 1960s? Does her musical virtuosity push the limits to the same degree as the young Louis Armstrong, Big Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jimi Hendrix, Stanley Jordan, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Django Reinhardt, or The Who? Does her voice, although good, carry the depth of feeling of a Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding, or Hank Williams? Is her voice as fine as Sarah Vaughn or Ella Fitzgerald, as distinctive as Sinatra’s or Crosby’s, or as big as those of Aretha Franklin or Linda Ronstadt?

From what I have listened to so far, she does not rise to the level of any of these apples and oranges in these respective categories, and yet none of them ever made anything like a billion dollars in a single tour. During their first U.S. tour, The Beatles made an impressive minimum of $50,000 per concert (a little under half a million dollars when adjusted for inflation). By contrast, Swift makes between $10 and $13 million per concert. Is she really 20-26 times better than all four Beatles?

Where entertainment is powerful and singular, art is more subtle and multifarious, leading to innumerable interpretations and reactions. There is of course a huge grey zone between the two. Using this distinction, it seems to me that Taylor Swift has both feet in the entertainment category as a runaway pop sensation, although possibly not as an entertainer (much less and artist) for the ages. Time will tell, and I may be wrong. But then, even all these years later, I still don’t understand the unwaning appeal of Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Britney Spears among their fans.

By Michael F. Duggan

In Washington, D.C., a city crowded with monuments, the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, is my favorite.

We all know of the historian and writer, Henry Adams, but less well-know is his wife, Marian Hooper “Clover” Adams, a pioneering photographer who took her own life in 1885. Henry would commission the sculpture that would mark her grave, now his grave too. The sculptor is Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who called it The Mystery of the Hereafter and The Peace of God that Passeth Understanding. Although heavy, it is prossibly my favorite American sculpture as well.

It was Eleanor Roosevelt’s special place in the city, and she would go there to sit and think. Twain liked it too and is supposed to have given it the informal title of Grief, the name by which I first knew it (it has also been called Despair). Adams opposed and resisted all of the names bestowed on the sculpture.

Of the androgynous, draped figure in bronze, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—who was friends with the Adamses and who once sat for a photographic portrait by Clover—wrote: “I should not call it despair any more than hope. It is simply the end and silence. The universe escapes epithets. It is enough if you find it beautiful and awful.”

Like Mrs. Roosevelt, I see the figure as female. Unlike Justice Holmes, I see in it a depth of human emotion confronted with loss.

By Michael F. Duggan

Americans love a parade and they love a military hero. I know, my father was one. Forty-five U.S. presidents were veterans and twelve generals became Commander in Chief. Until fairly recently, military service was virtually a requirement for national elective office.

Years ago a friend of mine who worked at a veterans memorial, was asked by some visitors what they could do to contribute (meaning volunteering in a conspicuous way at a symbolic site). He asked them if they had ever considered volunteering at a V.A. hospital. It wasn’t the answer they wanted to hear. Americans love yellow ribbons and bumperstickers supporting the troops, but we frequently lose interest after the parade.

We celebrate our veterans on Armed Forces Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day. We celebrate their service and sacrifice. But if we really appreciated the cost of war to veterans, their families, and the country, wouldn’t there be a day set side to reflect on the causes of war and the reasons why we mortgage the lives of young American men and women? If you wish to celebrate the sacrifice of American servicemen and service women, take off one day every year and quietly reflect on the reasons why in recent years the country has gone to war. Whenever you hear or read about U.S. servicemen or servicewomen killed abroad, ask yourself about the wisdom of the policy that put them in harm’s way and if it is worth such sacrifice.

Such meditation might also provide a basis for precluding bad policies. And it is the very least a citizen can do to honor our soldiers, sailors, airmen/women, and marines. Of course we’d have to come up with a catchier name than Policy Meditation Day,

Please check out my new article in the European journal Symposion at: http://symposion.acadiasi.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/2023.10.2.3.duggan-1.pdf

Errata: The parenthetical in the sentence “The mild eleven-thousand year summer – the Holocene (alternatively, Eremozoic) – that permitted and nurtured human civilization and allowed our numbers to grow will likely be done-in by our species in the not-too-distant future,” at the bottom of page 216, is incorrect and should be stricken.  Eremozoic is not a synonym for Holocene, but may be used as an alternative for Anthropocene. The terms Eremozoic and Anthropocene are accurately characterized in footnote 5 at the bottom of page 217.

By Michael F. Duggan

Henry Kissinger died yesterday at 100. George Kennan died in 2005 at 101. I can’t help thinking that there is a metaphor here.

By Michael F. Duggan

The first thing you have to realize is that the giant panda is an absurdity of natural selection.¹ It is a carnivore reverse-engineered into a clawed-and-fanged herbivore with a dietary niche limited to bamboo, a staple so nutritionally desolate, that the creature is reduced to spending its days on its back, stripping and eating leaves.

But the panda has one overwhelming advantage over so many other endangered animals: it is what is called a “charismatic” species. In other words, it is a fluffy, photogenic, teddybear-like animal that appeals—panders (sorry)—to a deeply-rooted human instinct for cute things. To be fair, with 1,500 to 3,000 individuals in the wild, the giant panda is not a robust species, and is listed as “vulnerable.” Because of habitat destruction, its range is limited to the bamboo mountain forests of the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan. They are a precious rarity (they are so valuable, that whenever there was a public relations “panda naming” contest, I favored the moniker “Cha-Ching”). It’s just a shame that the Yangtze dolphin and turtle, now both likely extinct, were apparently not charismatic enough to be diplomatically valuable species, the former falling victim to, among other things, the Three Gorges Dam.² So much for bio-altruism.

But back to the Chinese teddybears. All of this, the rarity of the panda, its universally-acknowledged adorability, and its uniqueness to China, all made it a natural for zoological diplomacy. The original exchange pandas were brought to the United States in 1972, just as U.S.-China relations were thawing. Although the returning of Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji  to China is due to the expiration of the exchange lease, what can we infer from it more generally in diplomatic terms? And what does panda diplomacy hold for the future?

Notes
1. See Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb.
2. https://news.mongabay.com/2007/08/extinction-of-the-yangtze-river-dolphin-is-confirmed/

By Michael F. Duggan

Who would have thought that Hezbollah would the voice of reason in the Middle East? For while Hassan Nasrallah threw out a lot of predictable red meat to the crowd today, he did not call for a wider war.

Beyond the bluster, and reading between the lines, Nasrallah is giving Israel, the United States, and the world a chance to pull back from the brink. It was a warning, but it is also a window, an expression of restraint that should be met with an equal measure of sanity and realism. It is a signal from the other side, like Khrushchev’s message of October 26, 1962 to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. By not calling for an expanded war against Israel, a war that would set the Middle East and the rest of the world on fire, Nasrallah has provided an opportunity for deescalation.

I suspect that nobody in the Israeli government reads this blog. But if they did, I would advise them to look at the bigger picture, the long game, and to stop taking the bait. There is no plausible military solution to this crisis, and the killing of civilians in Gaza and sending IDF troops into this Stalingrad on the Mediterranean is exactly what Hamas wants Israel to do.

By Michael F. Duggan

Forty years ago, at little past 7:00 on the rainy evening of October 23, 1983, Jessica Savitch left the Chez Odette restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with Martin Fischbein, vice president of the New York Post. Fischbein was driving and exited the wrong way out of the parking lot and down the towpath of the Pennsylvania Canal on the Delaware River. There were no guardrails along the canal and the car flipped over the edge, falling 15 feet upside-down into four or five feet of water. Sinking in the mud, the car doors of were effectively sealed. Unable to get out, Fischbein (who was knocked unconscious), Savitch, and her Siberian husky, Chewy, drowned.

Savitch had been NBC’s “Golden Girl”—the gold standard for the female broadcast news reporter of the late 1970s and early eighties and one of the first women to anchor a nightly network news program. On the air, she projected charm, competence, and confidence and was unflappable. But stories abounded of a private life in turmoil, including a failed marriage, drug use, and the suicide of her second husband, Dr. Ronald Payne. There were also stories that she was a perfectionist who was difficult to work with. In spite of the stories of substance abuse, the autopsies showed that Fishbein and Savitch had had no more than a single glass of wine between them at dinner.

During a live 60-second top-of-the-hour news update on October 3, 1983, she slurred her words and was clearly off her game. This led to speculation that her career was in crisis and perhaps over at NBC (even though she had supposedly signed a contract for another year at the network and was also hosting the new PBS news magazine Frontline). She would do a flawless news spot later than night and then over the coming days and weeks.

There is something especially somber about people now long gone but who live in memory as living memory recedes. It is as if they will be soon forever lost even there. Perhaps this is the natural course of things. Eventually we will all be forgotten. Except for a couple of tell-all books and a movie based on one of them, Savitch seems mostly forgotten these days. The killing of 241 Marines in Beirut on the same day, followed by the invasion of Grenada, all but wiped the news of her death off of the headlines. Rather than sympathy, the tragedy and sorrow of her life became ammunition for resentful stories.

I couldn’t care less about the gossip, rumors, or even the truth about Savitch’s private life and personal problems. Insofar as memory persists, she deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of a generation of women reporters, now retired or late into their careers, that include Linda Ellerbee and Judy Woodruff.

Savitch and Chewy were cremated together and their ashes were scattered into the ocean at Atlantic City. She has no headstone.

By Michael F. Duggan

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”
-Jake Sullivan, September 29, 2023

The Hamas attacks in Israel this weekend are as shocking in their scale, scope, sophistication, and operational success as they are horrifying in terms of civilian losses. Israel appears to have been caught off guard in what looks like a Middle Eastern version of the Tet Offensive, the coordinated nationwide attacks in South Vietnam during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 1968. Many hundreds of people have been killed and wounded on both sides. Scores of Israeli civilians were taken hostage.

I am sympathetic to the Palestinian people and know of their plight and despair. But this wave of attacks by Hamas will only initiate another round of insanity in the region. Could that be the goal? The attacks seem as self-destructive as they were murderous. Now Israel will bring down a ferocious wrath upon them—a payback for a payback—and more civilians will die.

The Gaza will bear the brunt of the initial retaliation even though there are Israeli hostages being held there. An overreaction is what Hamas wants. What are the prospects of an Israeli victory if they invade a city with a population greater than Baltimore (more than 590,000 in Gaza City with a total of more than 2 million in the Gaza Strip) with infantry, and what will happen to the hostages if they do? One can only wonder how they will respond on the West Bank. The impact of the new war on the power structure and relations of the Middle East can only be guessed at. What is the possibility of a wider regional war? Will Hezbollah get involved? Will Syria? Iran? And all at a time when relations between Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia appeared to be heading in the right direction. It has also pushed Ukraine out of the headlines.

The Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group is on its way to the eastern Mediterranean.

Although the nature of existence is poorly understood, I tend toward Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds” model, postulating the realms of the physical, the cognitive, and the ideational.¹ Consciousness arises from physical (electrochemical) processes, and we can consciously interact with ideas. The questions is whether the physical or ideational is primal or if they require each other. The fact that the physical world runs on what seem to be finely-calibrated relationships and laws is striking, although possibly an accident via cosmological natural selection.²

Whenever I feel that there might be a “mathematician” behind the laws and “just six numbers” that make the cosmos work, I think of what a friend of mine observed about pi, the fact that the ratio behind the beauty and simplicity of a circle is a repeating, irrational number, a number that goes on forever.

Notes
¹²

1. Karl Popper, “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,” Objective Knowledge, 1972 (1968), 106-152. ↩︎
2. See generally, Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos. ↩︎