HostGator, my ISP, had some router issues this morning, so apologies if you tried to access the site and couldn’t. Things appear to be stabilizing now.
February 7, 2010
February 6, 2010
Tweet of the day
loresjoberg
When all you have is a hammer, a nail, and 95 theses, everything looks like a church door.
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February 5, 2010
Objectivists should not read this
Theodore Dalrymple, in his mundane disguise, looks at the founding deity of Objectivism:
Rand’s virtues were as follows: she was highly intelligent; she was brave and uncompromising in defense of her ideas; she had a kind of iron integrity; and, though a fierce defender of capitalism, she was by no means avid for money herself. The propagation of truth as she saw it was far more important to her than her own material ease. Her vices, of course, were the mirror-image of her virtues, but, in my opinion, the mirror was a magnifying one. Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do.
Rand believed all people to be possessed of equal rights, but she found relations of equality with others insupportable. Though she could be charming, it was not something she could keep up for long. She was deeply ungrateful to those who had helped her and many of her friendships ended in acrimony. Her biographer tells us that she sometimes told jokes, but, in the absence of any supportive evidence, I treat reports of her sense of humor much as I treat reports of sightings of the Loch Ness monster: apocryphal at best.
A passionate hater of religion, Rand founded a cult around her own person, complete with rituals of excommunication; a passionate believer in rationality and logic, she was incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work. She was a rationalist who was not entirely rational; she could not distinguish between rationalism and rationality. Of narrow aesthetic sympathies, she laid down the law in matters of artistic judgment like a panjandrum; a believer in honesty, she was adept at self-deception and special pleading. I have rarely read a biography of a writer I should have cared so little to meet.
I’ve read a fair bit of Ayn Rand’s non-fiction, but I’ve always found her fiction to be a tough slog: as Daniels says, “[h]er work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature — and nineteenth-century Russian literature at that.”
Update, 8 February: Publius always found that Frédéric Bastiat’s dictum “The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended” really was correct for Objectivism:
Having met a very large number [of Objectivists], my own anecdotal assessment is that about three-quarters are high-functioning neurotics. Highly intelligent, quite disciplined, but utter social misfits with low self-confidence. They are walking, and sadly talking, liabilities to the philosophy. Now this will seem like an admission of guilt. Wacky people adhere to wacky ideas. Hardly. Some of the most wacky ideas in history were adhered to by perfectly ordinary and decent people. Take socialism as a modern example. Some very important ideas, like representative government, were early on advocated by people who were certifiable flakes. I don’t think the wall between personal philosophy and personal psychology is an iron one. There is some overlap. Jean Jacques Rousseau, for example, was the embodiment of his beliefs. An emotional mess of a man advocating an emotional mess of a philosophy.
But new and radical philosophies tend to attract marginal people, those somehow discontented with life as it is.
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Amtrak’s odd pricing policies
Jason Ciastko sent this tale to one of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to:
Go to www.amtrak.com
One way ticket from Erie PA (ERI) to Elkhart IN (EKH)… One adult passenger, no discounts or anything else… The day I picked happened to be tomorrow, but it should not matter….
Now your options should be train 49 (Lake Shore Limited) that departs Erie at 0136 and arrives in Elkhart at 0825 or train 449 (Lake Shore Limited again) that departs Erie at 0136 and arrives at 0825… Those observant will notice this is the same train… 49 is the New York to Chicago section and 449 is the Boston to Chicago section… They are combined into the same train in Albany New York (well before Erie PA…
The riddle is I got a ticket cost of $47 for train 49, and $59 for 449… Probably be in the same seat…
One heck of a way to run a railroad…
I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for this . . . but I can’t come up with one.
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China ramps up submarine activity
Strategy Page reports on increased activity around China’s maritime periphery:
Recently, the Taiwanese Navy detected an unidentified submarine outside one of its major naval bases. Ships and helicopters pursued the contact, but the suspected submarine left the area. A Chinese boat was suspected, mainly because for the last decade, Chinese subs have increasingly been showing up close to Japan and South Korea as well.
[. . .]
Chinese Song class diesel electric and Han class nuclear powered boats have been detected and tracked with increasing frequency over the last few years. In that time, one of each of these was spotted stalking the American carrier USS George Washington, as it headed to South Korea for a visit.
China is rapidly acquiring advanced submarine building capabilities, and providing money (for fuel and spare parts) to send its subs to sea more often. Moreover, new classes of boats are constantly appearing. The new Type 39A, or Yuan class, looks just like the Russian Kilo class. In the late 1990s, the Chinese began ordering Russian Kilo class subs, then one of the latest diesel-electric design available. Russia was selling new Kilos for about $200 million each, which is about half the price other Western nations sell similar boats for. The Kilos weigh 2,300 tons (surface displacement), have six torpedo tubes and a crew of 57. They are quiet, and can travel about 700 kilometers under water at a quiet speed of about five kilometers an hour. Kilos carry 18 torpedoes or SS-N-27 anti-ship missiles (with a range of 300 kilometers and launched underwater from the torpedo tubes.) The combination of quietness and cruise missiles makes Kilo very dangerous to American carriers. North Korea and Iran have also bought Kilos.
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Crying “Wolf!” about China
Jon, my former virtual landlord sent me a link to this article by Robert Fogel, suggesting that it was “time for another one of your ‘whistling past the graveyard / you can’t trust the numbers’ posts”. And he’s quite right.
As with just about every other “forward looking” report on China, Fogel focuses on current trends which cannot continue in a straight line:
In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040. Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.
Maybe. Or maybe the demographics that this ultra-expansionist scenario depends on won’t play out the way Fogel thinks. There’s also the problem of depending (in any meaningful way) on official government statistics:
Most accounts of China’s economic ascent offer little but vague or threatening generalities, and they usually grossly underestimate the extent of the rise — and how fast it’s coming. (For instance, a recent study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace predicts that by 2050, China’s economy will be just 20 percent larger than that of the United States.) Such accounts fail to fully credit the forces at work behind China’s recent success or understand how those trends will shape the future. Even China’s own economic data in some ways actually underestimate economic outputs.
[. . .]
though it’s a common refrain that Chinese data are flawed or deliberately inflated in key ways, Chinese statisticians may well be underestimating economic progress. This is especially true in the service sector because small firms often don’t report their numbers to the government and officials often fail to adequately account for improvements in the quality of output. In the United States as well as China, official estimates of GDP badly underestimate national growth if they do not take into account improvements in services such as education and health care. (Most great advances in these areas aren’t fully counted in GDP because the values of these sectors are measured by inputs instead of by output. An hour of a doctor’s time is considered no more valuable today than an hour of a doctor’s time was before the age of antibiotics and modern surgery.) Other countries have a similar national accounting problem, but the rapid growth of China’s service sector makes the underestimation more pronounced.
Well, then, at least Fogel accepts the notion that the official data may not be accurate. That’s better than a lot of commentators, although he’s still looking at it as if the official numbers were some sort of “baseline”. They’re not (although he does make a very good point that GDP numbers don’t capture improvements in quality . . . but that’s true for all economies, not just China’s). They’re even more pure fiction than the Climate Research Unit’s imaginary data.
It’s not even a deliberate lie: it’s a natural artifact of the current Chinese economic model. China’s economy is much more free now than it was ten years ago, but it’s not a free market economy yet. The central planners still attempt to control the “levers” of the economy — and they have some pretty crude ways of doing that. During the modernization of the industrial sector, probably the biggest driving force was the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA). They needed huge quantities of equipment, and the government didn’t want to buy everything from former Soviet and Warsaw Pact inventories (for one thing, the quality was generally poor and the technology was at least a generation behind the West).
This meant that the PLA needed — and got — much more say in what was produced and where it was produced. In other centrally planned economies, the state handled this sort of industrial policy. In China, the PLA got directly involved. A Soviet arms factory might have a military liason office with a general, several staff officers, and some GRU/KGB/NKVD oversight. The Chinese equivalent would have the general directly in charge of the factory, running it like a division of the army.
In this way, the PLA stopped being just the customer/end user. They cut out the middleman and absorbed the entire supply chain. The PLA became a significant economic player in the Chinese industrial economy . . . and this is still true today. The generals aren’t formally in charge, but they own the companies that do military production.
So what? So let’s look at how a civilian corporation’s incentives differ from one owned directly by the army. In a civilian corporation, the CEO runs the business with an eye to generating the largest profit possible while staying (for the most part) within the law. A CEO who deviates from this to ride a favourite hobby horse will eventually face the wrath of the stockholders who want that maximized profit. There are natural limits on how much freedom to invest in uneconomic activity any CEO will be given. Sensible stockholders don’t try to micromanage the firm, but do raise questions if too much of the company’s efforts are devoted to things clearly not related to the company’s long term benefit. Company accounts can be rigged, for a time, to show misleading results, but eventually (Enron, Worldcom, etc.) the truth will out.
A Chinese firm that’s owned by the army? Profit may be nice, but the “CEO” reports to a different master: the guys with the guns. The company accounts will show exactly what the guys with the guns want them to show . . . and the oversight and auditing committee members carry submachine guns. You’re told that your target is 10% growth? Don’t you think that the reported result will be at least 10%? Because your life may depend on the reported results being acceptable.
If the PLA had scaled back their involvement in the economy as the economy liberalized, this might only be a problem in old fashioned “heavy” industries. There’s not much evidence that this happened, however. The PLA’s portfolio may not include all sectors of the economy (even the PLA must have limits), but the official stats can’t indicate what portion of reported growth is from freer parts of the economy and what portion is from the 47th PLA industrial army.
Then there’s the other factor that will hobble China’s reported growth, demographics:
It’s the same story with the relative decline of a Europe plagued by falling fertility as its era of global economic clout finally ends. Here, too, the trajectory will be more sudden and stark than most reporting suggests. Europe’s low birthrate and its muted consumerism mean its contribution to global GDP will tumble to a quarter of its current share within 30 years. At that point, the economy of the 15 earliest EU countries combined will be an eighth the size of China’s.
Europe does indeed have a falling birthrate: most population growth in Europe these days is from immigration and the vastly higher birth rate of recent immigrants. Set aside the immigrants and the immigrant birth rate and most EU countries are well below replacement rate — they’ve stopped growing and started shrinking in population. Is it any wonder that Europe’s predicted share of the world GDP is poised to shrink as well?
China has a different demographic problem, and one that has the potential to cause disruptions far beyond their own borders: the aftermath of the famous “one child” policy. China has a vast disproportion of males, because Chinese parents opted to keep boy babies and abort girl babies. This may be another case where we can’t depend on the official numbers, but even if you do think they’re close to accurate, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture:
To say that China’s one-child family policy has been a disaster is an understatement. A report released earlier this month by the nation’s top think tank — the Communist Government’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) — says that the policy has created a huge gender imbalance with significant implications for future social stability.
Indeed, according to the report, 24 million men reaching marriageable age by 2020 will never marry because of the sex imbalance. Think of it in these terms: what if the entire population of New York City or of Australia was never able to marry. Imagine the social implications in a city or nation that large where no one can marry. Imagine if that city or country is comprised solely of 24 million men; men with no homes to return to at night; men without the responsibilities of a family to keep them engaged in productive pursuits.
Military adventurism may be in the near future for China’s neighbourhood. It’s one of the traditional ways to control and direct the excess of young males away from domestic social disruption. Fogel still prefers the rosy glow of the positive scenario, however:
Of course, China faces its own demographic nightmares, and skeptics point to many obstacles that could derail the Chinese bullet train over the next 30 years: rising income inequality, potential social unrest, territorial disputes, fuel scarcity, water shortages, environmental pollution, and a still-rickety banking system. Although the critics have a point, these concerns are no secret to China’s leaders; in recent years, Beijing has proven quite adept in tackling problems it has set out to address. Moreover, history seems to be moving in the right direction for China. The most tumultuous local dispute, over Taiwan’s sovereignty, now appears to be headed toward a resolution. And at home, the government’s increasing sensitivity to public opinion, combined with improving living standards, has resulted in a level of popular confidence in the government that, in my opinion, makes major political instability unlikely.
I’m not too sure that the Taiwan situation is even close to a peaceful resolution, but that’s a different topic altogether.
Anyway, speaking of hobby horses, I guess this topic counts as one of mine:
- August, 2004 – Rant: “The Chinese Economy”
- October, 2004 – More Economic Voodoo — or is that Feng Shui?
- April, 2007 – The Chinese economy
- May 2008 – Those untrustworthy Chinese economic numbers
- January, 2009 – China’s economic situation
- May, 2009 – Official Chinese statistics
- November, 2009 – Contrarian investment strategy: short Chinese stocks
February 4, 2010
Men at Work lose court battle over plagiarism
Remember the flute part in “Down Under”? Men at Work now probably wish they’d chosen a different way to highlight typical Australian tunes, as they’ve been ordered to pay costs to the estate of Marion Sinclair for using the theme to “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” in their song:
Larrikin Music had claimed the flute riff from the 1981 hit was stolen from Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Marion Sinclair in 1934.
The federal court in Sydney ordered compensation to be paid.
That amount has yet to be determined but Larrikin’s lawyer said it could reach 60% of income from the song.
“It’s a big win for the underdog,” said Larrikin’s lawyer Adam Simpson after the judgment.
Sinclair, who died in 1988, wrote the song for performance at a Girl Guides Jamboree in 1935.
Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree has since been sung by generations of Australian schoolchildren.
Oddly enough, I downloaded this song just last week, prompted by a recent Mark Steyn column.
Men At Work came from a land Down Under and in January 1983 they were on top of the world: “Down Under” was Number One not only in Oz but also in the United Kingdom and in the United States, and to this day Men At Work are the only Australian band to have topped simultaneously both the British and American singles and albums charts. A lot of the pop songs from that period you’ll still hear on the Eighties oldies stations: in America, Men At Work were succeeded at the top of the Hot One Hundred by Toto and “Africa”, which is pleasant enough in a bland sort of way; and in Britain they made way in the Number One slot for Kajagoogoo and “Too Shy”, and gosh, it’s years since my fingers have had cause to type the word “Kajagoogoo” and even then it was as a punchline for a cheap gag. But “Down Under” transcended the passing fancies of the hit parade and has become an Australian anthem. There have been other international Oz hits, of course, notably Rolf Harris’ classic recording of “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” – and, as we always have to point out whenever the subject arises, a truly great novelty song like “Tie Me Kangaroo” should never be confused with a truly atrocious one like Charlie Drake’s “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back”.
But “Down Under” has become a kind of musical shorthand for contemporary Australia
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Unemployment insurance systems can deter hiring
Jay Goltz discusses how some state-level unemployment insurance systems actually deter firms from hiring new employees:
The unemployment insurance tax may be the most confusing and misunderstood tax there is. It is run by the states, and the rules can vary as much as the weather from one state to another.
Here’s how it works in Illinois. The important point for business owners to know is that when the state pays out claims to a company’s former employees, that company’s unemployment tax rate goes up. For each business, the state calculates how many dollars have been paid in compensation over the previous three years and adds on about 48 percent through various calculations. The result is that in Illinois, you end up paying for incremental compensation claims at a rate of $1.48 for every dollar that a former employee collects.
If you lay off or fire someone without “cause,” that person is eligible for unemployment compensation. “Cause” means that the employee violated a company policy, like coming in late or threatening a co-worker. “Cause” does not include doing a bad job, being very slow, or having a bad attitude.
I’d always assumed that the Canadian system (which is run by the federal government) was more generous than the various state-level systems in the US, but there appears to be more variation state-to-state so that may not be true. Certainly the Illinois system’s top payment of $531 per week is well above the Canadian EI top payment ($457 before taxes, according to the servicecanada.gc.ca website). If the Illinois amount is after tax, that’s significantly more than a Canadian claimant would get.
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February 3, 2010
Turning a retreat into a rout
ESR calls for even more naming and shaming of the climate fraudsters:
I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they’ve earned for themselves. But revenge, while it’s a tasty dish that long-time public “deniers” like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn’t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life. The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:
If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.
He’s quite right, many of the people deeply involved in the swindle would have been just as happy in another pseudo-scientific attempt to wrest control of the economy in order to “protect us” from ourselves.
Any conspiracies in sight? Yes, actually . . .
Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.
Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.
My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.
There’s lots here . . . go read the whole thing.
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Perhaps the Vikings should draft to replace McKinnie
Judd Zulgad rounds up the rather pathetic story of Vikings offensive tackle Bryant McKinnie’s Pro Bowl antics:
McKinnie was booted off the NFC roster after missing three of four practices, all but one meeting and even the team photo last week. After using his twitter account to document his partying ways, McKinnie also used twitter to say that he was in the process of pulling out of the game because of injury. However, that did little to help his NFC teammates. The fact is McKinnie was kicked off the roster and it was too late to replace him.
Craig was told that McKinnie became a “running joke” among players on the NFC roster — something that isn’t funny at all in reality. So how is McKinnie taking all of this? Well, it appeared that last night and early this morning he was back to using twitter to express himself.
Among McKinnie’s tweets:
— “What I realize is ppl like negative that’s what sells [at] the end of the day.”
That was followed by:
— “HATERS MAKE ME STRONGER SO THANX 4 THE FAVOR! I DON’T BREAK SUCKAS!”
— “That’s My Motto! So Feed me the hate! All yall doing is make me stronger! Don’t know what yall Talking bout! THanx 4 getting me followes!”
— “I’m thankful 4 every1 who voted 4 me from the bottom of my heart!”
— “I give the LORD PRAISE 4 giving me the strength 2 deal anything that come my way and 4 being by my side! ONLY GOD can JUDGE ME!”
Unlike defensive linemen, where hearing their names mentioned during a game usually means they did something good, hearing the name of your offensive tackle mentioned in a broadcast usually means they’re scraping your quarterback up off the turf. McKinnie’s name got mentioned a lot this year.
If his Pro Bowl behaviour is typical of his regular season behaviour, the Vikings would be well advised to look to replace him during the draft in April. Stars who have behaviour issues can be tolerated, but his star value isn’t anywhere near as high as he seems to think it is.
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Canada’s economy judged (marginally) more free than the US
H/T to Power Line blog for the image.
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Paul Volcker praises Canadian banking system
Expect this to continue to be the story of the week in Canadian newspapers:
Paul Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve Board chairman who’s now a key economic advisor to the White House, told U.S. lawmakers Tuesday they ought to learn from Canada’s banking system as they seek to overhaul rules governing the biggest U.S. banks.
Speaking at a hearing to tout his proposal to rein in risky investing activities by large U.S. commercial banks, Mr. Volcker said the life’s work of Canadian banks is retail banking: “That’s no longer true of great big American banks.”
With just five or six banks dominating the industry, Canada’s banks benefit from having less competition, Mr. Volcker said. “It’s a stable oligopoly.”
There’s a mixed blessing in that: fewer banks means less competition, so there’s less need for banks to compete for customers in meaningful ways. Look at the feeding frenzy once banks were allowed to buy trust companies . . . partly because trust companies were more actively competing for business. Having a “stable oligopoly” has benefits, but consumers have fewer choices on where to bank, and banks have far less pressure to lower fees or increase services.
Here’s what Americans may find the most unexpected part of the story:
Canada’s banking system also has been shielded by the fact that it has less government interference in its mortgage market, unlike in the United States, where banks have been pressured by the government to make low-cost loans to the economically disadvantaged, he said.
Mr. Volcker’s endorsement of Canada’s banking system — the only Group of Seven nation that didn’t need taxpayers to bail out its banks — came two days after The New York Times published a piece by Nobel Prize-winning economist and columnist Paul Krugman that said the United States should emulate Canada’s financial regulatory regime.
Unfortunately, the wrong lesson is likely to be drawn from this: much of the reason Canada’s banks didn’t need to be bailed out was the much lower political interference in their lending policies. Instead, US politicians are likely to insist on even more political interference to achieve the “right” result.
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February 2, 2010
Haiti still at high risk of further quakes
Wired discusses the results of NASA’s first UAVSAR 3D image of the devastated area:
NASA’s radar-equipped jet has returned its first 3-D image of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This false-color image clearly shows the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault extending east of the city.
The image supports a Jan. 21 U.S. Geological Survey report that suggested the section of the fault (indicated by the black arrow above) nearest to Port-au-Prince (yellow arrow) did not slip significantly in the magnitude 7 Jan. 12 earthquake.
The new image, taken by JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar attached to a modified Gulfstream III jet, shows that the ground rupture moved westward from the epicenter. The section of the fault in the image did not rupture, a situation that increases the risk of another significant earthquake in the future.
[. . .]
The colors in the image, which shows a swath of about 12.5 miles, are the result of three different radar polarizations that make vegetation appear green, water appear blue and urban areas look reddish.
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QotD: Who’s on for halftime? And what does it actually mean?
This year’s Super Bowl halftime act is The Who, a band that would be eligible for Medicare if its members were American — Roger Daltrey is 65, Pete Townshend is about to turn 65. Now, I like senior citizens who scream into microphones as much as the next guy, but isn’t the Super Bowl halftime format getting a bit geriatric? Last year we got Bruce Springsteen, age 60. The year before — Tom Petty, age 59. Yes, recent halftime shows have been more up-tempo than the 1970 Super Bowl halftime act: Carol Channing. But there have got to be some younger groups out there that merit the Super Bowl stage, and could broaden the appeal to those younger than the Baby Boomer demographic.
Surely The Who will sing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” When rock anthems are heard on television or in advertising, often they are electronically edited to emphasize well-known lines and downplay or delete anything that might make audiences uncomfortable. When this song is heard, the refrain “We won’t get fooled again!” is amped up — it sounds bold and defiant. Done away with are other lines such as “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” or “We’ll be fighting in the streets/with our children at our feet/and the morals that they worship will be gone.” And the following lyrics — what, exactly, do they mean? “I’ll move myself and my family aside/if we happen to be left half alive/I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky/for I know that the hypnotized never lie.” What does any of the song mean?
Originally, the song was received as anti-war or an extremely vague call to revolution. Some thinkers maintain the song is conservative — a disillusioned revolutionary declaring that street-protest tactics are useless. Townshend, who wrote the song, maintains the lyrics are apolitical, and mean, “Don’t expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.” Huh? My guess is that, like a lot of what was received as “deep” in this field — Bob Dylan’s music, some of Springsteen’s — the lyrics don’t have any coherent meaning, they’re just a bunch of interesting individual lines cobbled together. I wince to think that a billion people watching the halftime show will nod happily as the line “We won’t get fooled again!” echoes around the world, when the majority of those watching will, most assuredly, get fooled again.
Gregg Easterbrook, “TMQ: Colts vs. Saints a contrast in styles”, ESPN Page 2, 2010-02-02
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