Great Men Theory

A couple of weeks ago, TIME Magazine mentioned a survey on who was the greatest Russian leader. Of course, this was a survey run in Russia. You couldn't run such a survey in the U.S., where most people wouldn't be able to locate Russia on an unlabeled map of the world, let alone name one of their past leaders.

Reading the results, which are immaterial to my point, I tried to classify those leaders in my head. I came up with this: there are the feckless ones, the sinister ones, the dour managers, and the transformers. Arguably, the latter category included the Great Catherine, who brought Russia in contact with Europe and pulled it away from its Central Asia roots; Lenin, who upset the old order and ushered in the great and ultimately failed laboratory experiment of Communism; and Gorbachev, who closed that parenthesis. Note that I am not saying that their transformations were good or entirely successful: I am just saying that they were enormous, in some way "inspired," changes of direction. Whether Putin is just one of the "dour managers" à la Krushchev, or ranks among the sinister ones (Ivan the Terrible, Stalin) is yet to be seen, although it would be a stretch to compare his behavior to the degree of malevolence of those two.

After I had finished thinking of Russian leaders, I realized that it is a lot easier to start with another country, assuming one knows something about its history, than with one's own. For example, most French people learn about Napoleon in school in a very biased way. While he created a set of institutions and legal principles that endure to a large extent today, he arguably had a disastrous impact on all of Europe, not just France, through fifteen years of incessant wars. And to start with, he was basically a dictator who seized power in a coup, ostensibly because the previous governments were so dysfunctional that only a "providential man" with full powers could save the day. Which brings to mind the debate on whether Pétain, 140 years later, was a sinister or a feckless leader, a conscious ally of the fascists or a half-senile grandfather who was abused and manipulated by his ministers.

My model is too simple in many cases, for sure. If you look at U.S. leaders, what was Nixon? At home, he was sinister, but overseas, he was practically a transformer, considering that he ended the war in Vietnam and dealt constructively with China. For Bush No. 1 and Bush No. 2, the verdict of history will probably be one of double fecklessness, the second case being worse than the first because of the presence of some sinister puppetmasters named Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Now we shall see if Obama is a transformer. If his presidency is anything like the speech he gave the night of his election, there is a good chance of that.

A Perfect New England Day

So many things have happened in the past six days, including the real beginning of the end of the Bush presidency, and the slap in the face we got in California with the success of the discriminatory Prop. 8, that I was in danger of glossing over what was a perfect day in Boston, last Saturday.

It was warm in the morning, I had breakfast at Crema Café in Harvard Square, then chatted with my other half for a long time, mostly about the election, while sitting on a brick ledge at the corner of Brattle and Eliot Streets. Being able to sit outside on Nov. 1 in Boston is a hit-or-miss proposition. It can still be Indian Summer, or it can be winter. Actually, two days earlier, it had been 36°F (2°C) in the morning. And now it was in the mid-sixties (18°C).

I went to the Symphony box office to buy a ticket for that night, then I walked over to my old haunt, Aquitaine on Tremont St., for brunch. I got the best table in the house — in the corner, in the back, facing the whole restaurant — and a very good server named Rebecca. And they had not run out of the pressed duck sandwich, my favorite brunch dish there.

After brunch, I walked through the Public Garden and the Boston Common to get on the T at Park Street. There were musicians everywhere, including an accordionist, a jazz duo that was rather incongruously made up of a young Asian couple, with the girl playing the trumpet and the guy playing the bass, and a lone saxophonist playing a little farther down.

I Don't Get Richard Strauss

I went to the Boston Symphony last Saturday, Nov. 1. The first part of the program was Brahms' Violin Concerto, the second one was Richard Strauss' Symphonia domestica. I don't "get" Richard Strauss, except perhaps the famous and soaring Also sprach Zarathustra. I probably would nickname this piece the Cacophonia domestica, and that does not even take into account the gross narcissism of the whole thing, which is supposed to describe an entire day of the life of the Strauss family. If you want to describe "A Day in the Life..." of anything in music, give me the Pastoral Symphony anyday.

The program notes were very smartly written. About the Brahms concerto, they did not just focus on that piece, but contrasted it with the other great violin concertos (the Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Bruch — I have no idea why it omitted the Tchaikovsy). Some of the criticism made by others in the past, and reported in these notes, was rather shocking. For example, von Bülow said that other concertos were written for the violin, but Brahms had written his against it. And the reviewer contemptuously dismissed the Mendelssohn as an easy and gentle piece. I can't say anything about the ease aspect, but I have always found that concerto to be very moving, starting from the first bar (one of the earliest entrances of the solo instrument in the repertoire, I'm sure).

Rendez-Vous 2010

After the success of California Proposition 8 on the ballot three days ago, which writes into the Constitution of California that same-sex couples are not allowed to marry, my friends and I seem to have been shellshocked for a couple of days — even though the polls had actually predicted that we would lose this fight.

We're finally emerging from this catatonic state, and some of us have been exchanging messages. I wrote this today to other Board members of Stanford Pride, and I don't think I could paraphrase it better again, so I'll just quote myself here (I know it sounds arrogant the way I just said it):

"We need to lick our wounds a bit, but I think that this accident teaches us a lesson: we need to be proactive, and not wake up a month before the election, suddenly realizing that the polls are against us, and do a rearguard fight in the last couple of weeks to come back.

This being said, we can all be immensely proud that we did come back from a 10% deficit in the polls a month ago, to only 4% (and perhaps less once all the ballots are counted) in the end. This is still a tremendous improvement over the 22% spread from elections on this topic years ago.

History is on our side. In 2010, there will be about 3% of the voters who are currently between 16 and 18 years of age. While they are not all on our side, I think it is clear that young people are much more liberal on social issues, and much more used to studying and living side by side with "out" LGBT people whom they wouldn't think of hurting on the basis of their sexuality. Conversely, 3% of last Tuesday's voters, out of the older age range, will have passed away, and while I don't wish anyone dead, this is how the electoral base shifts over time even if you don't convince anyone else to change their vote.

I really believe that if we organize better, and maintain the effort throughout the period from now to the next election, we can reverse this unfortunate vote. And if not in 2010, then surely in 2012 (but 2010 must be our immediate goal).

I also welcome the idea that Stanford Pride should play a bigger role. I wonder if we can meet with our counterparts at Berkeley, UCLA, etc… the larger universities in the state. I also notice that one of the first Facebook groups about "repealing Prop. 8 in 2010" was created by UC Davis students. An intercollegiate consortium could be very effective in terms of its outreach. Everyone in the state must be at most 2-3 degrees apart from an LGBT alums from one of these colleges. Well… perhaps not in the boondocks, but the people in the boonies are not really a very useful target audience for us. The primary audience are the people who are educated and intelligent enough to change their vote once we explain to them what's really at stake and that some of the things they were told are lies."

I don't yet know if we will succeed in our resolution to be activists about this. Two years is a long time to maintain a level of engagement such as that which may be required here. But we must try.

Icing on the Cake

I'm just back from seeing Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal at the Wortham Center, home of the Houston Ballet. Interesting program with two resolutely contemporary pieces, Toot and Noces, the latter on the eponymous music by Stravinsky.

I enjoyed the program, but the icing on the cake was the chance encounter with Connor Walsh during intermission. Mr. Walsh is a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, with whom I had a very interesting conversation after a very moving performance — see my "Art and Politics" entry dated February 23rd. While I was buying a snack at intermission tonight, I saw a man rush through the line to order a pasta dish and sit down with it at a table. I thought I recognized him and chose a table that gave me a chance to observe... and got convinced that it must be him. Dancers can of course be hard to recognize in their street clothes, without makeup, and in his case with the beginning of a beard. He was obviously totally wolfing down his food to make it before the end of intermission, so I didn't interrupt then, but I kept staring and got worried that he'd be offended, although I would assume that he get stared at a lot!

Finally, he shoved the last bite into his mouth, it was high time to go back to our seats, but I went over and asked him if he was Connor Walsh. He was very gracious, we chatted for a second, mostly so I could remind him of the performance of Swan Song I had liked so much, and off we went our separate ways. I felt a bit like a groupie. Artists in general humble me, and people like him who personify the union of art, beauty and grace (I know this is multiply redundant to some extent) are exceptional. When I shake their hands, I wish that some of those gifts would rub off a little on me.

The End of "Hamlet"

At the end of "Hamlet," everyone dies. It would be a literal bloodbath if some of the deaths weren't by way of poison instead of the sword.

I thought of the Bard's most famous play a lot in the past month, as I have literally been assaulted by news of people's deaths. Almost always people who were to young to die -- not that there is ever a good age, but you know what I mean. Some whom I didn't know, some whom I knew well, and every degree in between. Too many. The kind of events that makes you alternate between sadness and a sense of revolt: "f!@#, s$%^, why is this going on?"

My self-centered view of this started on Sep. 23, as I was talking to a colleague at the cafeteria of our offices in Clamart, outside Paris. He told me that a man whom I had casually known as a colleague for 30 years had died the week before, after a sudden relapse of a cancer he had fought off several years earlier. And then, as I was absorbing this, he asked me if I knew about another ex-colleague, who had left a few years back, was apparently working from home in the countryside, and had died of another long illness six months ago. I had not seen this man in many years, contrary to the first one, but this means that I could vividly remember him as his young self -- not only that, but I can even still hear his distinctive, constantly ironic tone of voice!

The next morning, as I walked into another one of our office locations, this one in Montrouge, I was greeted by two colleagues. We said hello and then, almost immediately, the woman went on: "Have you heard about M...?" When sentences start like that, you know what's coming. M..., a woman ex-colleague who was 58, had had a sudden heart attack (uncommon for a woman at that age), remained in the hospital for a while, and then died. So by now, that was three people whose passing away I was learning about in two days.

Back in Houston the following week, someone who actually used to work for M... was visiting for a training course, and invited me to have dinner. That was a nice chance to reconnect, as I hadn't seen him in two or three years. The last time was in a really ugly traffic jam at the end of the M4 coming into London, when I dropped him at an intersection where he could get on the Tube and I could turn around and go back to the airport (where I still missed my flight). We weren't in a panicked rush this time, and we ate a leisurely dinner at Churrasco's, an Argentinian steakhouse (the one near the Beltway, not the one near Montrose, for your locals). And then D... said, "oh, and by the way, did you know A...?" I did. Last time I had seen A..., in 2003, he had driven up from Houston to Austin, where I lived then, to discuss a project we were both working on. We spent the afternoon working together, then I took him to the Oasis to have a drink and watch the sunset over Lake Travis. When he left to drive back to Houston, we hugged and said "okay, let's make sure we see each other soon again." But A... left the company, and I had no chance to really remain in touch. And then D... dropped the bombshell: A..., who I think D... said was 35 years old, had accidentally killed himself just recently.

Six days later, on October 8, the "care page" maintained by my friend C... for his wife since she started her fight against inflammatory breast cancer four years ago took an ominous turn. There had been bad incidents before, and she had always come through. This time, after fighting infection and respiratory failure for days on end, she had just "crashed." The day went by, and early the next morning there was an urgent update: I opened it reluctantly -- she had passed away in the evening, at the age of 37. I will be going to a memorial service this week-end...

15 days, 5 deaths -- ranging from a dear friend to estranged colleagues. The last one was of course the one that affected me the most, but in some way the other deaths compounded the sense that something unusual had happened and that mortality wasn't just a concept.

Finally (for now), last week, while I was in Orlando at a conference, I got an email from one of the Stanford alumni with whom I work on alumni matters: a car carrying three business school alumni, aged 23, 24 and 29, had fallen off the road on the Pacific Coast Highway as they were on their way to a reunion in Big Sur. All three were killed. I didn't know them -- only one was listed among the members of the group I help manage, and I had never met him. Apart from the obviously tragic aspect of this event, this coming after the other five deaths seemed to continue a dramatic and improbable series.

People die all the time, of course. But in our age it's not often, absent wars or epidemics at home, that you hear about the deaths of 8 people, with whom you have some sort of connection, within a three-week period. Our ancestors had a sense of fatality about this -- all it took was an exceptionally harsh winter for people to fall like dominoes. But that was over 200 years ago.

I'm coming up on six days without hearing about another death. It would sound callous to say "I hope this series has come to an end" because it would seem to place my own mental comfort over the tragedy of these deaths and the anguish of those who have lost loved ones. All I can do is reflect on our fragile status, and cherish even more all the friends I still have among the living.

Bristol Palin's College Applications

Do you know why Bristol Palin is not planning to apply to the University of Southern California (USC)?

Because the campus newspaper is called the Daily Trojan.

(Yes, I made this up myself, and I am proud of it...)

How People End Up Believing in the Irrational

I'm glad I have my head screwed reasonably well on my shoulders, because otherwise I might have become tonight one of these people who are spooked into believing the irrational.

Uncharacteristically, I had my laptop on my dining table, doing miscellaneous stuff while waiting for dinner to be ready. My friend Mark, from the northern latitudes (he doesn't really like to be identified much more precisely than this), comes in on LiveMessenger, as he does almost every night, with some variant of "sup buddy?" I told him I was ready to eat dinner, he replied that he and his partner were too, and I wrote "cool". Then he wrote this sentence, which I reproduce verbatim because it is important for the rest of our story:
ya got a nice bottle of wine

Now, there are two ways to understand this sentence: "yes, we've got a nice bottle of wine!" or "have you got a nice bottle of wine?" because, at least on such an informal medium, "ya" can pass equally, I think, for an abbreviation of "yes" or of "you," and who cares about precisely placing commas in instant messages?

I understood the sentence the second way, which didn't seem far-fetched since, after all, I did have a bottle of wine -- which a friend offered me a few days ago -- and I looked at the label and typed:
Malbec 2006 from Argentina
,,, and what came back was:
um how'd you know
I'm scared

At first, it didn't make any sense, and it took me a little while to figure out what had happened: they had the same wine in front of them, and Mark, who had not meant to ask me what I was drinking, but just to tell me that they were having some wine with their dinner, thought I had guessed what they were drinking!

I was silent for a while, first because it took me a while to figure out what the heck had just happened, and then after that because I was playing games with him, letting him spin his brain around this little mystery. He "nudged" me (in LiveMessenger, a "nudge" is a command that makes the message window shake while your computer buzzes, as if you were given a shock) because he really couldn't take it -- not knowing how I had guessed correctly. At that point, I must admit that I embellished in a somewhat underhanded way: I didn't explain that I had misunderstood his statement, instead I said that I was just using the wine I was drinking as a wild-ass guess for the one they were having -- a half-truth at best.

End of the anecdote. What does one make of it? Well first, Malbec is now very much en vogue right now, so it's not too surprising that they would also be drinking it. Perhaps no less than one chance in 10? Secondly, there are not that many vintages in active circulation in supermarkets, I would guess mostly three: 2005, 2006 and 2007. So that leaves us with one chance in 30, if I oversimplify. So it's not so far-fetched that we would accidentally be drinking the same wine from the same year (for the record, these were at least not the same vintner or brand: mine was Domaine Jean Bousquet, from Tupungato Valley, Mendoza; theirs was Trivento Amado Sur, a blend with some syrah and bonarda, a grape I had never heard about).

But my point is this: if you take the average person with no knowledge of probabilities, and somewhat influenceable into finding a supernatural explanation more convincing than a statistical one, that person could be very easily convinced at this point that I am some sort of medium with clairvoyant powers. We know that people talk about "the laws of series" when three plane crashes happen the same week in unrelated contexts; or that many amateur gamblers believe that if the roulette has come out on black four times in a row, it is more likely than the next throw will come up red; etc. So surely, my wild but successful guess would have been interpreted by many of these people as a sign that a higher power was at work. The same people, of course, do not notice when plane crashes do not occur, or are very equally spaced, which is just as improbable as three in the same week; or when the roulette goes "black, red, black, red" which has the same probability as four times black in a row.

If I wanted to take the time, and antagonize some of my friends, I could be convinced to drift into how this kind of superstition is probably the source of most religions. But it's getting late and this is the kind of theory I need to explain when I have not had a glass of... Malbec 2006 from Argentina.

An Oversimplified Model of Recent World History

I just read some news item that said that tourists who went to Beijing for the Olympics were "dazzled and daunted" by the event, and that this was an unprecedented exercise in increasing the maturity of a country in such a short time span. Last night, the NBC commentators marveled during their retransmission of the closing ceremonies (bits of pageantry shown during the infrequent gaps left between commercials and the incessant replays of the achievements of almost only U.S. athletes) that Beijing had spent about $40 billion and mobilized up to one million volunteers for the games, and that one was unlikely to see an effort of this size any time soon, "or perhaps ever."

The description of the advances made in Beijing for these games may well be true. But what the media, and U.S. media in particular, do not seem to grasp, is that we're talking about the durable emergence of China as a pre-eminent economic, political and social power, not about a temporary flash of brilliance. And for that matter, I can look in my crystal ball and tell you exactly when the Olympics will cost more and mobilize more people than the 2008 games did: this will happen the next time the games are hosted by China, and I am pretty sure that this will happen again some time in the next 30 years (OK, make that 32), because China is in the front seat for good now.

So here's my oversimplified geo-politico-historical model: the 18th century was French (the Enlightenment, French spoken in the palaces of Europe, the Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen). The 19th century was British (Waterloo, Queen Victoria, the building of the Empire, international maritime commerce). The 20th century was American (the U.S. conclusively intervenes in two world conflicts, rules the economy, develops the atom bomb, puts a man on the moon, and ends up as the sole superpower in the last decade of the century). And the 21st century will belong to China: 1.3 billion people, a 9% annual growth rate in GDP, the world's largest manufacturer and soon the world's largest consumer.

Americans still think that they are God's chosen people: this hubris will only delay the inevitable realization of China's preeminence. The U.S. still has the best universities in the world... but students are increasingly dropping scientific subjects in order to choose careers in Finance, Business, and the law. Can you build an economy solely on that basis? No, you can't. The modern world isn't just virtual: someone needs to grow our food, make our clothes, build our homes and our cars. Increasingly, all these things come from elsewhere. And that elsewhere more and more takes the form of this little label that reads "Made in China." OK, food is a little different, because the cost and duration of transportation already make it expensive and/or inconvenient, and will make it increasingly so, to import foods from afar (we still cherish our Chilean strawberries in winter, but for how long?). Crude oil at $120/bbl is actually increasing the interest in local/regional food production. But will it cause a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S. (and other Western countries)? Only when the cycle completes and our countries' economies sag so low that we will be the "new poor," and our ill-educated work forces, aided by a dollar worth 50 euro-cents or less, will make it cheaper for an American consumer to buy goods made in Mississippi than made in China (you can name the equivalent "bottom of the barrel" regions in your own countries).

The two questions that remain in my mind, because I believe the above scenario to be almost ineluctable, are: what accidents can happen in the meantime to delay or modify it? and what happens after that? Is this is a one-way street, or will the "decline of the American empire" and of other Western countries result in some sort of compensating pendulum swing, where China will find itself, by the dawn of the 22nd century, in a similar situation that the U.S. is finding itself now, unable to prolong its fading grandeur, and sobered-up countries with significant natural resources (the US, Brazil, Nigeria, Canada, etc.) will restore a different balance?

It will help China extend its domination if the Chinese government at the time does not repeat the errors of the most recent U.S. politicians, which caused the sudden and profound moral bankruptcy of this country on the international scene. Assuming that China grows out of the current climate of quasi-dictatorship and human rights violations, let's fast forward. If anything similar to the U.S. 2000-2008 political catastrophe happens in China in 50 or a hundred years, will the Chinese people have the political education, the will, and the ability to change things before it damages their country's standing in a similar way to what Bush & Co. have just done to the U.S.? Of course, today, it is clear that they probably wouldn't be able to. But as the country continues its rapid progress, a time will come when they will probably have that power. So the last question is whether the Chinese people in a few decades will have the knowledge needed to make the right decisions (as opposed to, say, Americans who can't locate Iraq on a globe, or still believe that there were WMDs in Iraq because Fox "News" tells them so). The future of the world may well depend on this more than on anything else.

Friends, Friends Everywhere! -- take 2

My blogging was paralyzed for almost three weeks, not because I had too few things to mention, but because there were too many. Every time I thought of writing, then either I was having dinner with someone, or I was looking forward to the next dinner and thinking, "I'll wait another day, then there will be more to write about."

I had two trips almost back to back: the Stanford Pride Board held its annual face-to-face meeting (the rest are teleconferences) at Stanford on June 21-22, and I added some personal visits, so I was gone June 19-24. Then I had a business trip to Paris on June 29-July 8. So at the risk of sounding like a vapid star's journal for People magazine, here's what happened (there is a moral to all this, at the end, if you can wait that long):

• Thursday, June 21: arrived in the Bay Area, and had dinner with my colleague and friend Julien L. (there will be another Julien later) at Bambino's in the City. What do you mean, "which city?" We talked about social networking, among other things -- a common passion of ours. We're lucky that something we're passionate about is part of our jobs.
• Friday, June 20: I had lunch with B. at Café Brioche in Palo Alto. He is one of my "friends" from Facebook, with whom I originally connected because he was one of the first people to accept my invitation to join the Stanford Pride group after I created it. I've always been intrigued by his whimsical status messages, and I often ask him what they mean. I guess one thing leads to another, and we had decided to meet in person. I'll summarize by saying that I hope I can remove the quote marks around "friends" in the future, because the discussion confirmed that he is a really nice and thoughtful guy worth knowing.
• Friday evening, June 20: Dinner at "Home" in the City with a subset of the Stanford Pride Board. Nice, but I arrived last, and was at the end of a very long table that did not make conversations very easy.
  
• Saturday, June 21: First day of the Stanford Pride Board meeting. We recently elected 13 new Board members, 12 of whom (I think) were present. What energy and diversity in this group! What's funny is that some of them tend to act like my longevity on this Board is something amazing, and then I'm chuckling and thinking, "how would I want to leave something that puts me in touch with such great people?" And still it's hard work: we met from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., then we had dinner together from about 7 until 9.
  
• Sunday morning, June 22: end of the Stanford Pride meeting. I now have an Assistant Treasurer. Woo-hoo! And he is actually eager to pitch in, and seems very easy to work with. This is going to test my proverbial deficiency in delegation capabilities, but I'm working on it.
• Sunday afternoon, June 22: I don't know anyone else than my friend Carol with whom I can spend 9 hours solid, doing very little, both of us talking effortlessly about any number of things of varied importance, never worrying how to occupy the time or restart the conversation, never feeling like I should be on my guard or have to prove anything. At the end, we're always just surprised that so much time has passed and that it felt so good. This is just amazing. Totally drama-less, and boy, do we need this from time to time, both she and I! We always comment on this to each other, too: this is our little "mutual admiration society" topic.
• Monday afternoon, June 23: I visited with S. and N., who are back from their trip to India, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia, at the Emeryville Marina, where they currently camp on their sailboat. It's probably unrealistic to expect that they would make plans to settle down for any period of time, but this is taking an especially interesting turn with their idea to trade their current boat for a larger and much more comfortable one and live on it. That could make for some interesting visits. I'm not sure I'd want to live that way, but I'll sure come and visit!
• Monday evening, June 23: B. (that's B no. 2, not B. from June 20) and I had dinner at Maverick, in the Mission. Very nice restaurant, tiny but friendly. The price was what could be expected for a small nice restaurant in San Francisco, about $60 per head with wine. B. is from Stanford, is a geek (the smart kind, not just the well educated kind, that's a huge difference), is a skier (infinitely better than me), which is how I know him after two successive winter ski week-ends, is super-nice, and 100% unpretentious (otherwise, I would obviously never had had a chance to have dinner with him). And we had a chance to talk about our favorite acrobat... an inside joke that said acrobat, and a couple other people, will understand.
• Sunday evening, June 29: After sleeping all afternoon to recover from the flight to Paris, I decided to go to Josselin for crêpes, and took the subway to the Vavin station. I hesitated in the station: I could get out on Boulevard du Montparnasse facing west, and then turn left to walk up the rue du Montparnasse, or I could, slightly less obviously, take the opposite steps going east, turn the corner, go up rue Delambre to the Edgar-Quinet crossroads, and then walk down rue du Montparnasse. For some reason, the latter option appealed to me in spite of its lesser logic (drumroll, please). This staircase leads right in front of the terrace at the Dôme. I had probably taken five steps on the sidewalk when I heard my name, pronounced with a slight tone of interrogation. Here was, having coffee with a friend at said terrace, my ex-colleague, friend, and "comrade" (alumnus from the same engineering school) Jean-Christophe, whom I had probably not seen in ten or fifteen years! To make things even more eerie, I had just e-mailed him two days earlier announcing my trip and asking if he had time to meet. This is the kind of encounter that makes you say "I am not superstitious, but..." The evening did end with crêpes, but the three of us together instead of by myself, and at the Saint-Malo because Josselin was packed.
• Monday evening, June 30: Here's where Julien No. 2 comes into play. And he is also the third Facebook friend I met for the first time in this saga. Same Engineering school (many, many years apart) and he had missed a dinner of the gay alum club last time I was in Paris. He had given me a not unreasonably reserved "oh well, yes, why not?" answer when I had proposed to have dinner during this trip. I'm not sure what he thinks now, but I had a nice time, conversation seemed to flow easily over a great many topics, etc. I took him to l'Amazonial, which may be a little cliché for gays in Paris, but the place is good enough that it has become much more mixed over the years ("gay is the new black," some people say), plus it was the perfect weather to sit outside. Is there such a thing as making too many friends? Is it like the stock market, where when you issue more shares, it dilutes their value? I hope not, because I'd prefer not to stop given the quality of the people I meet.
  
• Tuesday, July 1, lunch time: Ben managed to make time (well, 20 minutes late, but he did manage) to have lunch with me. He is one of the most demonstratively affectionate straight men I know. That's a compliment, by the way.
• Wednesday, July 2: Went to dinner at my friends' P. and A. near Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Their boys make me think of the Olympic motto "citius, altius, fortius," except that in their case it would have to be something like "smarter, more mature, and more handsome" each year. P. was in engineering school with me, same year, but we really had no contact then. Our friendship developed later. We have fairly different political opinions, but we've always been able to have reasonable conversations, as intelligent people arguably should, Daumier's sketches notwithstanding. Their American friend L. also came, and the five of us talked about a lot of things, including American and French politics, switching constantly between French and English. That was easy for P., A.,L. and me, but I was pleased to see the boys follow us easily in this flexible exchange.
• Thursday, July 3: Back to Saint-Germain for the official business dinner of the week, at Le Petit Zinc. Charming Art Nouveau décor, especially the wrought-iron-and-glass canopy above the entrance, reminiscent of the original métro stations around 1900. But it wasn't the dinner that leaves me the best memory, it is the after-dinner drinks just down the street, in a jazz café with the Three Musketeers of IT innovation (yes, I know, that makes me d'Artagnan -- this was calculated): Julien no.1, David, and Laurent. I'm not sure we talked much about work, but it doesn't matter.
  
• Friday afternoon, July 4: This was the fourth and last instance, in just two weeks, of meeting a heretofore unmet Facebook "friend." This time, B. (no. 3) went to both Stanford and Polytechnique, and I had just recently noticed that he was in both schools' gay alum clubs. Having contacted him about this coincidence, I found out that he was travelling to Paris the same week I was. So we had coffee in the gardens of the Palais Royal, the original plan of meeting at the Café Marly having been thwarted by the heat and the café's attitude, relegating the non-diners to outside tables that are directly on the stone courtyard, under the sun, and that none of the arrogant waiters ever bother to visit.
• Friday afternoon, July 4, two hours later (this looks like a title screen from "Law & Order," doesn't it? Boom-boom!): soft drinks with A., an ex-colleague and perhaps new friend. We gave each other a kiss when we met, and shook hands when we parted -- I hope this doesn't mean anything other than the fact that we weren't keeping track of our protocol. He looks like he's floating on a little cloud because of a very positive turn in his private life. It's nice to see happy people.
• Saturday and Sunday, July 5-6: I had been so sad to tell J.-N. two weeks earlier that I might not be able to go to his wedding ceremony, and then when this business trip got scheduled, I was so happy to be reverse myself. And it was a really, really nice event. Three things will remain in my memory: the fabulously embroidered dress that his wife changed into in the middle of the reception; the rare sense of complicity and mutual love between the groom and his younger brother; and the fact that without anyone saying anything special, at some point, I just started crying with happiness realizing that the year-old kid I had bounced on my knee once when visiting his parents had just finally won three years of battles with consular and religious authorities to marry the love of his life, against all "reasonable" advice, and end their forced separation by winning the right to have her at his side permanently.
  
• Sunday, July 6: I messed up my return to Paris a bit -- I should have dropped the car at the entrance to the city, or even in Saint-Denis, and taken the subway in order to be on time to meet Jorge. But I insisted on driving all the way, so I arrived over an hour late. This limited our visit, but it was still nice to catch up, even briefly, before he left for a business trip to East Africa.
• Monday, July 7: I hadn't seen M. and R. for several years, and was a bit ashamed when M. told me, not too long ago, "ah, I see in your blog that you've been in Paris several times, how come we never hear from you?" Whoops. So instead of making excuses, I made time, which is better. We had dinner at the Pub Renault on the Champs-Elysées (classy... but somewhat logical since M. works for Renault). Another evening of good conversation aided by decent wine.

So here we are, and although it took me two hours to write this, I feel like I have just paid tribute to all the people who made my life so full during the past three weeks. I realize that apart from a few people looking for what I am saying about them, no one in their right mind will have read the whole thing. That's fine -- it served me well to write it, finding words that would hopefully be seen as positive by the people who will recognize themselves, and that at the same time are absolutely sincere, because I would rather shut up that make false compliments, as those who deal with me must know beyond doubt.

It sounds like after this, I need to take it easy for a little while. Fred, don't worry: I told you we'd have dinner this week, and I'll be ready to treat you like a friend too. For some reason, I'm not actually getting tired of having good times with good people...

A Moment of Screaming, Please

As I started my almost weekly drive from Austin to Houston this afternoon, the classical radio station (KMFA) was finishing Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, From the New World. After that, the announcer came on and said that on the occasion of Memorial Day, the station would join its listeners in a minute of silence to honor the servicemen and -women who had died. Silence dutifully followed.

I don't know about you, but while I am tremendously saddened by the lost of those young lives, and I am as ready as the next person to honor their memory, the last thing that comes to mind as a reaction to the current war, which has so far cost more than 4,000 such lives, is silence. In fact, what I want to do when I think of that war is scream. I want to scream to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld (wherever the last two are now hiding in deserved disgrace): I know you didn't fire the bullets or arm the IEDs that killed these people, but you manufactured the conflict in which they were killed. You are thus complicit in their deaths. And the memory of these poor people is not well served by silence, it is better served by an outcry -- hopefully an outcry that will continue until November 4, Election Day, so that you are not succeeded by more of the same.

On the same drive a week earlier, I heard a reading from the book "War Wounds: a Father and Son Return to Vietnam" by Tom Bissell. One quote struck me, so I sent a text message to my own email address in order to remember to look it up, and I now have it as one of my email signatures, ready to be used for the right audience:
"War, when necessary, is unspeakable. When unnecessary, it is unforgivable."

Love the Sorcerer, and the Witch Mezzo

I went to the Houston Symphony on Thursday evening, for a concert that had a Spanish theme throughout: De Falla's El Amor Brujo (which was translated in the program as "Love the Magician," although I think that "Love the Sorcerer" better conveys the ambiguous and sometimes malevolent tone of the piece); Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez; De Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain; and Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol. Altogether a long and rich concert, one that I would still recommend to people who read this early enough to be able to catch the Sunday matinee performance (tomorrow).

The only sour note (so to speak) came from the first piece, strictly because of the singer. I know that photos in programs are always dated, but this was so extreme that it makes Elizabeth II look positively age-sincere on UK stamps. I'm talking about someone looking 30 in the program, and being 60 in reality. She did look like a witch, which is actually quite appropriate for this piece, but was clearly not intentional. Her voice did not carry well (and I was in the middle of the fourth row). She sings opera, and that's perhaps why she kept taking dramatic poses and making exaggerated faces to convey the emotions of the gypsy girl, but it just looked absolutely ridiculous when just standing by herself in front of an orchestra. And her red-and-black gown must have been badly tailored at home (or else she needs to get a refund), because the left strap kept falling off. Believe me, any "wardrobe malfunction" would not have been very pretty to witness in her case!

While this was a shame, the next piece obliterated this bad experience quite nicely. The solo guitarist, Eliot Fisk, was amazing... and the audience recognized this so well that he played two encores: a transcription for the guitar of Paganini's Caprice n° 24, and a piece by Francisco Tárrega (it might have been Recuerdos de la Alhambra, but I'm not sure).

After the intermission (I told you it was a long concert) Shai Wosner was the pianist in De Falla's Noches en los jardines de España, which I found a little long and discursive, less packed with tense emotion as the rest of that composer's œuvre. And finally, as befits this sometimes very loud and brassy orchestra, Rimsky-Korsakov provided the sonorous (some would say "noisy") finale.

Friends, Friends Everywhere! (and Restaurants, Too)

Okay, it’s a corny title, perhaps not more than usual; but it was indeed raining friends in Paris last week.

As my overseas trips go, this was one of the shortest ones. I arrived at midday on Monday, and left around the same time on Saturday. Had I not been in Europe three weeks earlier already, I would have been the first to find this uncivilized.

These 120 hours included four fairly long and intense days of work, but I managed to cram quite a social agenda within that time, and I even got a decent amount of sleep, in an unpretentious but nice hotel room very close to the Eiffel Tower, at the bargain rate for Paris of 105 euros a night.

Monday was my recuperation day after the overnight flight, and I just went to a brasserie to eat by myself. On Tuesday, I had plans to meet Jean-Noël. When he called me around 7 p.m. from a town north of Paris where he had been for the day, we settled on 9:15 p.m. at a Tibetan restaurant in Montmartre, Gang Seng, to which he had previously introduced me. He ended up arriving at almost 10, but we still managed to spend a great two hours catching up on each other’s life and work.

On Wednesday, I had plans to meet my ex-colleague Emmanuel, whom I hadn’t seen in probably five years. He selected Yamamoto, a Japanese restaurant tucked away in a side street near the Opéra (note to tourists: for a real Parisian, there is only one Opéra in Paris), in an area where I found out that there are now dozens of them (Japanese restaurants, not operas). The amazing thing about meeting him after all this time is that he is still exactly the same: a permanent smile on his face, the nicest guy in the world, GQ-handsome, totally hyperactive, and not looking a day older than five years ago. And we fell back into the same friendly and easy banter we were used to when we went out to dinner in Islington then, as if we had seen each other a week earlier. It just warmed my heart that there are people like that, not just in the world in general, but in my world.

Thursday was an unplanned, but equally successful evening. I was actually not sure whether I was going to want to see anyone, because my project for the week still required work. I was getting nervous that there might still be too many holes in the resulting "white paper" by Friday afternoon, when it was due. But by 7 p.m.-ish, I was also getting tired of the day. I had told another ex-colleague that I was in Paris and had hoped for a last-minute call from him, but nothing had come. I was reasonably content with the idea of eating late by myself at Josselin in Montparnasse, but on a hunch I called Mohamed (see my prior "You Write Too Much" post). It turned out that he was expecting his friend Isabel, a medical student from Colombia whom I had seen a couple of times at parties in Boston last year (she was part of a group gravitating around our contingent of summer interns from France). She was due to return that evening from seeing one of those ex-interns, Ben, in Poitiers, and therefore was coming back on the TGV... at Montparnasse station! So we immediately made plans to meet at Josselin at 9:45, and had a wonderful time. This being Isabel’s first time in Paris, it was a great opportunity to give her one of the experiences that are not particularly mentioned in tourist guidebooks. Mo was crazy as usual (he doesn’t speak Spanish, but he did recognize "loco" when I was making fun of him talking to Isabel). Giorgio recognized me and couldn't let us go without buying us after-dinner drinks, so Isabel got to taste her first Calvados. They took me back to my hotel just before midnight, so I told them to turn the corner by the Ecole Militaire after dropping me off, so they would have a chance to see the tower’s sparkling light show at the top of the hour.

So there remained Friday. I had exchanged e-mails with my friend Jorge (the accidental model for Givenchy’s "Irresistible" eau de toilette for men, but this is another story) earlier in the week, and knew that he was coming back from Dubai in the morning, and was leaving for London in the evening to see his girlfriend, who lives there. So it wasn’t entirely clear that between his mad schedule and the demands of my own project, we could find the time to meet for lunch — but Jorge called mid-morning and offered to come to our office so it would take me less time. We only had an hour and a half, but made the most of it. This was another one of these easy, relaxed conversations that can only take place when you're good friends and you're not trying to put up appearances, you don't have anything to prove, you can just be yourself and the talking and the listening just alternate spontaneously.

That may be what was missing from my dinner meeting that same night, in an eastern area of Paris I am a total stranger to, with members of the gay alumni group from Ecole Polytechnique. Only three people came in addition to me, which was disappointing. They were all very nice, although different from my usual crowd in a way I could not really define. I certainly felt like we were strangers observing each other. The conversation revolved a lot around the food and the wine, and was helped by the ebullient personality and familiar behavior of the assistant manager, Camille, quite a character whom the others knew well. When we discussed American politics for a while, especially the Democratic primaries, one of my companions soon remarked, "what a serious topic we’re discussing tonight!" I think he was relieved when the more superficial banter resumed. It was certainly a pleasant evening in good company in an excellent restaurant, but nothing close to the four previous get-togethers of the week. I may certainly have more dinners with that group in the future, and meet more of them, and may get more comfortable with that crowd over time. But for now, it served a really useful purpose: it allowed me to benchmark my relationships and friendships, and appreciate the difference.

Merci Jean-Noël, Emmanuel, Mohamed, and Jorge (in order of appearance). Gracias a tí también, Isabel, although I certainly know you less. I am happy that I just got to see all of you, I love you... and I can't wait to do this again.

Blaming People for Saying the Truth

The Democrats' race for the presidential nomination continues, and is growing more vicious. One hopes that the Pennsylvania primary will mark the end of this internecine battle, but that was said before — in February and in March, several times, to no avail.

That the standard bearer for the party is chosen through a protracted series of contests that keep them in the limelight for weeks is not a bad thing per se. On the contrary, one might argue that many Republican voters have been disenfranchised by the early consecration of John McCain — and I'd be surprised if many of them felt motivated to vote in the remaining state primaries, given how little meaning they have left.

However, extending the ideological contest between Clinton and Obama would be fine it it served to shed light on their policy proposals, and if it wasn't destructive to the survivor's chances in November. Unfortunately, on both counts, the trend is exactly in the wrong direction.

Witness the latest clash about Obama's remarks to the effect that some people, feeling left out by shrinking federal (non-military) spending and disproportionally hurt by the recession, "cling to their guns and their religion" and their anti-immigrant sentiments to make sense of their lives. Since he said that, both Clinton and the Republicans have attacked him, the media have been all over his case ("elitist" being the milder adjective employed to describe him), and he has himself backpedaled — all in spite of one simple, all too easily ignored factoid: he is right!

The populist mood in the country (and the inability to discuss religion in factual terms) is such that making the statement he did is toxic. Clinton is now wrapping herself in a very ill-fitting cloak for her: someone who is "close to real America" — and by implication, is so unconditionally embracing it that the idea of critiquing how people form their judgments is considered tantamount to treason.

Yet it is true that some of the most vociferous opponents of gun control, the most pious proponents of school prayer or of the dismantling of barriers between church and state, and the most xenophobic (and, let's say it, racist) people in the U.S. are Democrats, not Republicans. Especially in southern states or in poor rural areas. This is not unlike the xenophobic current that existed in the Communist party in France in the 1980s and 1990s, based on the same fear that "they are taking our jobs," which led to this revolving door phenomenon in which people disappeared from the extreme left to reappear on the extreme right and vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen, thus proving that the political continuum is not a straight line, it is a circle!

I was, and I still am, positive about a Clinton presidency because of her ability to tap into a large talent pool of advisers and potential cabinet members. I was, and still remain, concerned that in a tight election, the lingering "race factor" could throw the election to McCain in some southern states if Obama is the candidate. But Clinton's tactical move last week — joining the critics rather than supporting Obama by acknowledging at minimum that his remarks, however undiplomatic, raise a real issue — do not reflect well on her character. If she wins because she cannot have the honesty to support an "inconvenient truth," then there will be some sadness mixed in that victory. But if Obama wins because he retracted what he knows to be correct, then it is equally sad.

Frog Readings

A quick post, fueled by guilt... I've been on the road for two weeks, and I was sick last week, so while there were interesting goings-on in Paris, Cambridge, Madrid, and Boston, I haven't shared anything. "Sick" for me means that I was maintaining an almost normal work schedule from 8 to 5, then taking the T (I was in Boston) back to the hotel, crawling under the covers with three aspirins, and trying to sweat out the fever so I could restart the same grind the next day. That may be crazy, but the MIT Media Lab visit and discussions were, as usual, superbly motivating.

Then I also had a miserable 15-hour trip (door to door) from Boston to Austin -- but I'm not even really mad at Delta Airlines: it wasn't really their fault, they rerouted me as well as they apparently could, and my bag made it before me. Next time, perhaps I should travel in my bag.

I am reading two books now. They could hardly be more different. "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely is about the ways in which we make economic laws useless because our decisions are not based on rational calculations -- but interestingly, those irrational decisions follow some pretty stable emotional laws, such as the fact that "free" has an irresistible appeal. The author conducted fascinating experiments (on unsuspecting MIT students...) that illustrate his points, and he tells the stories with wit and perspicacy. He's a little less convincing when he makes sweeping generalizations to public policy, but he may be onto something. It's an excellent read anyway.

"The End of the World Book" by Alistair McCartney could be described as the modern, gay man's version of Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary." It is presented in the form of short A-to-Z articles that range between facetious, literary, surrealistic, and erotic. If you thought you might guess what word you can find under the letter F, think again... you might be suprised by some of the entries (no, I haven't reached F already, I just couldn't resist getting an early peek). Alistair McCartney is the long-time lover of Tim Miller, the performance artist. I love Tim Miller's work, and I think I've seen each of his shows (well, I can remember at least five). So when he mentioned McCartney's book in his newsletter last week, I ordered it from Amazon. Now the challenge will be to get the autograph. Miller's is easy to get, if you can catch one of his memorable performances -- he is quite happy to chat with the audience after the show. But his BF doesn't travel with him, as far as I know, so this may require some plotting...

Of Jokes, Cartoons, and Freedom of Speech

The four of us who had dinner on Sunday in Les Halles plunged into a very serious discussion by the time our pizzas arrived. I can't remember how it started (my colleague Nigel would tell me that if I had blogged in real-time from one of the gadgets he loves so much, like an iPhone, I wouldn't have let this memory slip), but we ended up talking about the relative understandings of freedom of speech in different countries and cultures.

One of the first things that was mentioned was how denial of the Holocaust is a crime in France and in some other European countries. I pointed out that while I find the denials both abhorrent and ridiculous, in the U.S. people would have the right to express those opinions — and let the public be the judge.

(I didn't think of Scientology as another example of this. While it is certainly a cult in my opinion, and a harmful one by most accounts, the U.S. protects their expression even to the debatable point of recognizing them as a church, while at the other end of the spectrum Germany, I think, has banned their activity and gone after their financial empire and the way they relieve credulous people of their money).

Back to what we did discuss. I made the point, without actually taking sides, that a tenet of what Americans consider freedom of speech is that it protects even expression with which most reasonable people disagree to the point of finding the ideas objectionable and pernicious. The U.S. constitution still gives the proponents of those ideas the right to express themselves, as long as they do not directly incite illegal action. In that sense, the Bill of Rights follows the position expressed by Voltaire a few decades earlier, when he wrote to someone, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write it." And today, the American Civil Liberties Union (of which I am a card-carrying member) also takes that position, although some bloggers have complained about a trend toward a form of "political correctness" among the ACLU's national board, leading it to accept some restrictions on objectionable speech — but I am not sure if those bloggers are correct or are crying wolf on the basis of scant evidence in cases whose complexities should be further scrutinized.

One should note, by the way, that in practice the American principle of protecting objectionable speech unless it directly incites lawless actions is not consistently followed, or at least not without fighting. Professors have been disciplined for expressing objectionable opinions (including Holocaust denial, or the opinion that the state of Israel was illegitimate). Facebook has banned a group called "WP forever" where "WP" stood for "White Power." If you Google "freedom of speech objectionable opinions" you will find multiple examples, as well as many thoughtful discussions of this issue by other bloggers.

Being all computer professionals of one form or another, we touched on the issue of banning the sale of some items, such as nazi memorabilia, on the Intenet, especially on eBay. If this is illegal in France but not in the U.S., and given the difficulty of ascertaining on the Internet where the seller and the buyer actually are, it is not obvious for the intermediary to police these restrictions. As a result, the safe thing for them to do may be to ban such items everywhere, thus arguably denying someone, in a country like the US, the ability to do something that is legal there because of another country's law. And one might argue, in this case, that trading nazi memorabilia is not necessarily a sign of adherence to the ideology (this may be somewhat more credible on the seller's part than on the buyer's...).

When we were discussing whether Holocaust denial should be one of the "objectionable but permitted" expressions in the U.S. sense, one of my new friends mentioned that some of the prohibitions in European countries could "prevent historians from doing their work." I replied that surely, there is a lot of serious work that historians can do without infringing on the restrictions in question. No one is talking about preventing research into how fascism arose, how it was sustained for so many years, etc. One could even study the resurgence of extreme-right groups in various countries without violating the laws against promoting or defending the deniers. So I didn't buy that argument... but the question remained whole.

Another controversy that exposed differences in national attitudes, my friends pointed out, was the issue of the Armenian genocide. This issue has been raised by several countries, including France and the U.S., while the Turkish government seems to essentially prohibit discussing this historic event, and considered the various actions in western parliaments regarding the recognition of that genocide to be meddling in its internal affairs.

Now one could accuse me of steering away from trouble in discussions, and since my companions were all Algerian, I had to say something like, "for a similar situation, look at the controversy about the Danish cartoons." The reaction, while muted and friendly, showed me that "objectionable" is quite relative, and that I still have much to learn. Of course, my acceptance of a cartoon that makes fun of another group's divinity is in part based on my atheism. I can truthfully claim that it wouldn't make any difference to me if it was a cartoon of Jesus, the Buddha, or Mohammad. But my friends thought that while the Iranian or Saudi fatwahs against the catoonist and the publishers were unjustifiable, the negative reaction in the Muslim world was understandable. Of course, based on the earlier discussion, we could all agree that saying that something should be protected free speech doesn't mean that you can't find it objectionable, but I sensed that my friends wouldn't have minded if this particular expression had been judged illegal. And I wouldn't be surprised if one could find something (perhaps along the lines of homophobic opinions) that I would find so abhorrent that my heart would wish it outlawed, while my brain would calculate that it should be protected free speech.

"You Write Too Much!"

"Claude, you write too much," said Mohamed as we were walking from the RER exit at Les Halles toward the Fountain of the Innocents (which, incidentally, is a rendezvous point for so many people who intend to become guilty of something or another). He was talking about something he had read in this blog.

I wasn't sure how to take it, and our other two companions had a good chuckle over this statement, which made Mo spend the next ten minutes backpedaling furiously. Of course, we didn't cut him any slack. "I meant it in a good way: you write a lot!" he said, having a hard time convincing us, and probably even himself.

Last week, one of my bosses called me and said, "since you write well, I wonder if you could help me with a small task." The small task has since become a big project, but I knew that when I accepted to help her. Now, even if you're only asked to write the report for a working group, the writing doesn't just reflect the thinking — it influences it. If it is written at the very end of the project, it will only influence the thinking of the audience to whom the report is destined; but if it is written iteratively, and the working group members see some of the interim versions before they're completely done, these versions can help frame the priorities they give to different positions. That may not be exactly what Ben Franklin had meant, but there is a definite if subtle "power of the pen"!

Notwithstanding this clear opportunity to have more influence than was perhaps meant to be granted, it was diplomatic to hesitate before telling the boss that I would accept, and since she was referring specifically to another report I had recently issued, I was able to repeat a common but always serviceable and self-deprecating aphorism: "so, no good deed goes unpunished, right?"

She also asked me if this was a "hidden literary talent" of mine. I was actually not amused by that question. The extent of my writing, at least in a professional context, is easily known of anyone who cares to look at my online internal CV (we post them on a company Web site), which includes two books and a number of articles and conference papers. "Hidden" talent"? I could have replied "how about 'clearly known but not by you'?" but I actually like my boss, so I made a much more agreeable repartee and we went on with our business.

Now the interesting thing to me is that when I write, and especially in French, I adopt a much more formal style than I would normally use in speech or in letters to friends and family. And I have found that this respect for stylistic levels (which are more pronounced in French than in English) is very important when it comes to getting the reader to respect the writer. Call it "style over substance" if you wish, but it is a way to command attention.

Truth be told, I am a royal pain when I review other people's writing. But then I give myself the same amount of grief. And some people who have been through the ordeal have actually come back later and asked for more, not because they are masochists, but because they found that they had learned something useful.

I've been asked, "how did you learn to write?" I can't really tell. I think I have simply synthesized everything I've heard and read over the years, from teachers and role models and good writers, and I was perhaps more prone to find it important than the average student. But I can't tell what form of brain wiring it takes to have this inclination. And I should hasten to say that not everyone was appreciative: a French professor in 10th grade annotated a piece of homework, which consisted of writing a sonnet, with something like "some people hide their lack of artistic capability behind linguistic pirouettes." He was right, but it may not have hurt me as much as he thought.

Holding a Hand

I saw three very pretty and well-attired girls on the métro on Monday (Line 6, Etoile-Nation), and I heard part of their conversation. At one point, they were discussing their preferred brands of nail polish. One of them casually picked up another one's fingers, held them up to look at her friend's nails, then let go of her hand.

This was perfectly natural. No one looking would have found this strange, or indicative of a potential same-sex attraction. But if two young men made a similar "intimate" gesture (let's assume they were not talking about nail polish, but they might compare their earrings, for example, and one would touch the other one's ear lobe to have a closer look), don't you think that people would find it uncommon? I think some people would wince, and many would certainly suspect them of being gay. Even gay people would probably think those two guys were gay, and some of them would be uncomfortable about such a gesture in public, even if they were gay themselves.

I am still a bit puzzled at the double standard. Is there something about our assumptions of how differently men and women interact, that causes us to have such different levels of interpretation and acceptance of similar gestures between the two sexes?

Supertitles

The Houston Symphony's home, the Jones Auditorium in downtown Houston, has two screens above the stage, far left and far right, that are normally used to project close-ups of the musicians. I don't mind this, because otherwise it is pretty hard to see the woodwind and brass players from an orchestra seat. There are two cameras, apparently placed in front of the first balcony on each side, so they have a "plunging view" that allows you to see much better what's going on behind the strings.

(Actually, depending who is at the controls, you sometimes get something similar to the quality that filmed concerts may reach: that's when the video person cues a camera on a player who's going to have a particular "moment of fame" in the piece being played, and cuts to that camera at the right moment. Of course, for a concert that's filmed and then edited, it's easy to do this after the fact; but here, we're talking "real-time" camera changes, and that would be impossible if you didn't know the music. I'd like to know who does this work.)

Tonight's concert opened with the Four Seasons, for which Vivaldi wrote some cheesy sonnets that he obligingly transcribed on the score itself so you would have no doubt when the birds are signing (or even which birds they are). Well, the Symphony decided that this was important enough to project these words on the screens during the playing of the four concerti. Please don't do that again: it was distracting, and it left nothing to the imagination any more. Yes, since I first heard the Pastorale, I can recognize when the music imitates a thunderstorm, thank you. And if I hadn't been told that the notes played on the cello at some point represent the barking of the shepherd's dog, I might have missed it, but I don't think that it would have marred my enjoyment of the music. At least not more than the occasional false notes by the solo violinist, who wasn't the one announced on the program and might therefore have had too little time to rehearse properly, who knows?

The second part of the concert consisted of Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony, Italian, and Verdi's Overture to La Forza del Destino. Both excellent in my opinion.

I didn't expect to be disappointed by Vivaldi — but I will always remember a performance I attended in the millennium-old church of Saint Germain des Prés in Paris a few years ago. I was in the third or fourth row, the chairs were hard as usual in those churches, it was cold in there... but it was pure bliss.

Fair Science

I was a judge at the Science and Engineering Fair of Houston on Friday. Sounds grand, but it's pretty simple, really: you go around with a clipboard, talk to the kids, try to ask some meaningful questions, then you rate their projects according to a bunch of boilerplate questions that don't sound all that different, and where you have to put a mark between 0 and 10, even though you'd be hard-pressed to explain the difference between a 6 or a 7. Then you add up your marks, normalize, combine with the other judges... and then the fun starts: you're discussing why you thought project A was better than B, or the opposite, and you learn from the other judges and come to a consensus. In reality, most of the projects are good, and you end up wishing that you could make everyone win.

I saw twelve computer science projects, all done by senior students individually (for those of you not used to the US school system, this means last-year students, so they would be about 18 years old at this point).

One guy built an FTIR multi-touch interaction table, just like the one some people working for me built in the summer of 2006 at our lab in Boston. "My guys" are about 25, but this kid is 18 and in high school, and did pretty much the same thing. True, he mostly focused on the construction of the device rather than on the computer part... but that's exactly what we had found to be the challenge ourselves.

Another guy (there were a couple of young women in the group, but only a couple, as usual most of the engineering or computer science projects were presented by male students) had done a simulation of the growth of a colony of cells — inspired by Stephen Wolfram's book that claims that all complex systems in nature can be described accurately by simple computational systems. This was of course reminiscent of Conway's "Game of Life" from a Scientific American article published in 1970, which those of us who learned computer science in the 1970s were all crazy about.

Another young man presented as his science project something he's worked on for two years: a chess-playing program in which he combines several sophisticated algorithms to prune search trees (starting with the α-β procedure I learned 34 years ago...) and got his program to apparently play at grand master level.

And a fourth candidate simulated the flow of traffic through a city grid, including the fact that some drivers are more aggressive than others, comparing what happens when traffic lights are on the same cycle, as opposed to the "green wave" where the lights turn progressively green along some routes, so that in theory traffic can flow uninterrupted once released from a red light. He found that, counter-intuitively, the "green wave" method is usually not effective, unless the timing of the greens is within a very narrow range, and that it is very sensitive to how heavy traffic is: if traffic is heavy, for example, people may be slowed down just enough that they get to the next light just as it is turning red, and this repeats itself, so in fact you hit all red lights instead of all green ones.

Altogether, this was rather impressive. What fascinates me about any sort of poster sessions, science fairs, and the like, is that they ask me to judge, when in fact I feel that I am learning from the students. It's humbling to see so much talent at such an early age.

Some Men

On Sunday afternoon, I went to see "Some Men," a play by Terrence McNally, at the BCA in Boston. This was a last-minute decision, but I am glad I made it. The play was very well acted, and I found it good, even though the reviews pretty much dismissed it. I'm a bit confused as to why.

The reviews say the play is formulaic — that it uses every cliché in the book about the lives of gay men in the 20th century. Well, unless you've lived at Castro and 18th all your life, I don't really find those things cliché. The play has the "obligatory" scene with the dying AIDS patient in the hospital, whose friends come and visit and say pathetically hopeful and unrealistic statements about his improbable recovery. I'm sorry, but while we may have seen that same scene, in one form or another, in several books and plays and movies ("Longtime Companion" comes to mind), I defy a normal person (by "normal," I mean emotionally competent, not straight, in case there was any doubt) not to feel something move deep inside them when they watch that scene.

The play talks about the meaning of gay marriage, and how many gay people have changed their minds about it — from "who cares?" to "goddammit, yes I should be able to, so I will"; about people who led a happy life even though they weren't "out"; about internalized homophobia; about the dishonesty of the men who were married and fooling with other men on the side, but who felt they had no other choice at the time; about stereotypes and prejudices of all kinds; about the disconnect between young gays and old gays; about the wrong assumption that the younger generation has it easier across the board (ever heard of Laramie, Wyoming?); about what is and isn't courage. These may all be common themes in "gay literature," you could even say that "Some Men" is in a sense a collage of previous work by McNally (such as "Love, Valour, Compassion") and others, like novelist Ethan Mordden. But it's unfair to dismiss any work that makes you think as much as it makes you laugh... and sometimes cry.

La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était

I was in Boston all last week, interviewing students at MIT and hosting some colleagues who were visiting from Europe, looking at some of our research work as well as that of the MIT Media Lab. The week ended with a deluge on Saturday and a brilliant day on Sunday, lots of things didn't go as planned (a ski trip to New Hampshire and a dinner with a friend both fell apart), yet the week ended well.

This was the longest time (one full week) I had spent in Boston since I left six months ago. I often fear those visits back to places where I lived. I was ambivalent about moving back to Houston in the first place. While that city has matured since I left in 2002, it's still a "wannabe" big city compared to a venerable place of both scientific and cultural excellence like Boston. But more generally, I've always faced an emotional challenge when leaving a city I love, and it seems to be related to the fear that it may be the last time. I remember feeling this in Montréal, in Madrid, in Quito, among others.

And then, some time back, I can't remember exactly when, this feeling went away. Sure, there will be a last time in every city I visited, and some of those last times must have already happened. Simone Signoret, the French actress, titled her memoirs, published in 1976, "La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était." Nostalgia is no longer what it used to be. When I realized on several occasions that I was back in a place that I had mentally said a sad "goodbye" to earlier, and so I was able to push that feeling away and replace it with a more optimistic, or perhaps just fatalistic, "until next time!"

Art and Virtual Friendship

I thought I'd start with "Art and..." for the heck of it. But it's interesting that three times in a row, a performance made me want to blog.

Tonight's notes for Respighi's orchestration of Rachmaninoff's "Cinq Etudes - Tableaux" said: The seascape portrayed in the central étude is an especially masterly orchestration, employing high woodwind and violin solos to depict the lonely cries of seagulls, cascading string passages for the crashing waves and rich, even-flowing notes in the lower orchestra to suggest the constant rhythm of the ocean depths."

And so my thoughts went to someone I've never met, a "friend" on Facebook, who recently wrote on his "wall" that for him, the ideal person was someone who would know to take him to the ocean, even if he hadn't told him that he loved it. And I daydreamed about meeting him some day, and taking him to eat lunch near the seaside, and then walking on the beach together, just basking in our common love of this feeling of being near this immense power of the sea, feeling good that I was fulfilling one of his desires, and perhaps even that I had surprised him by remembering what he had once written.

So tonight, as I'm back home and the day is seriously winding down, I'm grateful to my yet-unmet friend that he gave me the opportunity to feel better (and I needed that today...), even in my imagination.

Thank you -- you know who you are!

Facebook, College Degrees, Money, and Persuasion

(I posted this before on an internal blog at Schlumberger, and I just realized that if I removed one or two comments, it could be made public.

There is no moral to this story — I think it's just interesting that Facebook is the object of a college course, that it allowed some students to make money, and that a key issue is how people persuade their friends to install a new application. OK, now please excuse me while I go and reject one more invitation to be a "vampire" or to play "Texas Hold'em Poker.")

On December 12, while I was in California for a meeting of the SOA Consortium, Prof. BJ Fogg hosted the final presentations by the students in his Stanford Computer Science course CS377 entitled "Creating Engaging Facebook Applications."

As the name indicates, the focus was not on the technicalities of using the Facebook "platform" to create an app, but on how you make people (a) come back, (b) invite their friends. In other words, what influences virality? This is consistent with the fact that Fogg is an experimental psychologist by training, not a computer scientist. But regardless, I am fascinated by the topic, given the recent uptake of social networking in professional environments, including Schlumberger, which has about 4,000 employees on Facebook right now.

Prof. Fogg had asked me to be a judge (we happen to indirectly know each other), which gave me an obligation and a chance to look at the apps in more detail than I might otherwise have done.

He gave an introductory talk on "Persuasive Applications and Metrics: the Stanford Experience with Facebook." He said that he came to Stanford in 1993 as a psychologist, and since then he has been looking into how computers involve and persuade users. "Facebook is the #1 persuasive technology of 2007." It demonstrates "mass interpersonal persuasion." Could this principle then be used to entice people to solve larger problems? I noticed that he avoided the question of whether the same phenomenon might be used negatively.

The process followed by sucessul applications goes through these steps:

• Acquisition: get an address to which to send an invitation
• Activation: the target visits the site and registers
• Retention: the user keeps coming back
• Referral: the user invites friends to use the same application or site
• Revenue: some mechanism is used so that these visits generate money

At each step, you lose some people. The key to success is to maximize the conversion percentage from each stage to the next.

When Fogg announced the course, about 100 students showed up at the first session. After they understood the focus of the course, 73 remained, and they teamed up to create almost 30 apps. Those apps were, altogether, downloaded 10 million times within 10 weeks. 5 of the apps achieved more than one million users each, and were placed in the "Facebook 100" top downloads. 10 applications had more than 100,000 users, and 20 more than 5,000 users. At the end of the course, there were 925,000 daily users of one or more of the applications. Students tended to spend 20 hours per week on this course, even though it is only a 3- or 4-unit course that should occupy much less time.

Some students included a way to monetize their application (probably by placing sponsor ads) and made real money. Rumors has it that one team essentially got enough money to pay for this year's tuition, but this may be exaggerated.

Here are some remarks about the applications that struck me as... being worth remarking on. I'm passing on a lot of applications that are just variants on the "Poke" widget or the "SuperWall" widget in Facebook, which are redundant ways to say hello or send a photo.

• PhotoGraph: there are 4.1 billion photos on Facebook, so how can you search for anything? The app builds a collaborative filtering mechanism, where people who browse photos can select which of 3 proposed photos they want to see next. The app captures these links to "thread" the photos together and propose this sequence to others, so that navigation becomes more relevant.


• Polls: this allows people to poll their friends about any chosen topic. Usage was modest until they made the polls focused on rating your friends. In the end, this app was installed 61,000 times.


• SuperStatus: elevates the posting of status to a sort of "microblogging" by allowing the comments to be longer, and allowing crosstalk.


• SocialBuzz: this allows people to use their friends as sources of information and recommendations, but also to enter feedback on a recommendation. As a result, the app keeps a record of how much you trust each source in each area (you may trust someone'a advice about computers, but not about restaurants, or vice versa), and this affects the recommendations you see the next time. This seems very relevant to Knowledge Management in an enterprise, and I talked to the creators of this application after the presentation.


• OneVoice: allows people to "video jockey" YouTube videos.

An interesting remark by some students was that "Facebook is the most convenient and respectable way to stay connected with other people." This confirms to me the way Facebook has differentiated itself from MySpace over the last couple of years, with MySpace trending "down-market" while Facebook, true to its Harvard origin, took on a definite "college-educated" flavor.

Art and Politics, part II

I went to the Houston Ballet on Saturday night. It was a long and rich program. It started with what, in Houston, I call the "obligatory Balanchine piece," Sérénade on music by Tchaikovsky. That's the piece that they have to dance so that the blue-haired ladies and the men with the sterling silver banknote clips don't run away screaming.

(Actually, I'm way too harsh: the Houston Ballet has become much better since Stanton Welch took over as choreographer-in-residence, and the audience is now also much more diverse in terms of age, gender, looks, etc. But I digress...)

The second piece was Swan Song by Christopher Bruce, on a score by Philip Chambon. The third piece was The Core, Welch's rendition of Gershwin's Concerto in F for piano -- a piece set in post-war New York that was boisterous and colorful and funny and had a wonderful decor and costumes, but a little too close to Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free for comfort, especially since the latter is danced to music by Leonard Bernstein, who is certainly Gershwin's heir.

But it is Swan Song I want to talk about. Curtain up: three male dancers -- two dressed in khaki slacks and shirts, clearly a uniform, standing on both sides of the third man, seated on a chair, wearing a red tee shirt and blue jeans. Almost from this first tableau, and certainly after the first moves, you get the point: two torturers and their victim. The scenes of simulated violence alternate with the prisoner's dreams of escape, and with his attempts to placate his enemies by obeying their commands -- in a brilliant metaphor, this is symbolized by the victim repeating his captors' footwork after them.

I found the piece mesmerizing because of the dancers' skill, but hard to watch because of the evocation of brutality and hopelessness. At one point, the torturers pick up their victim by the legs and hold him upside down, clearly mimicking the act of half-drowning him. With the recent discussion of waterboarding of terrorism suspects by the CIA, this was frighteningly relevant. I was also impressed by the fact that the dancer who played the victim actually looked scared when he was sitting in the interrogation chair at the beginning. Now there is always a bit of acting in most dance routines, but perhaps because of how serious the subject was, his acting seemed more compelling than usual.

After the performance, there was a small "meet the performers" opportunity in the Wortham Center's "Green Room." It was actually poorly attended, perhaps because 10 p.m. is bed time for Houstonians. Three of the dancers were conversing with people. I noticed principal dancer Connor Walsh, still wearing his sailor's costume from The Core, but whom I recognized as the "victim" in Swang Song. So I went over and asked him how it felt to dance on this subject, and whether he was totally focusing on his moves or thinking about the theme of the piece at the same time. He told me that actually, the piece is physically brutal to the dancer: he does get thrown around a lot, and said that "it's a long and difficult piece, and as it progresses I feel more and more tired, and I actually hurt from all that's happening. So it is very realistic to me, and the look of exhaustion and pain is really not faked. Right now, I am bruised all over." I mentioned noticing that he really looked scared at the beginning, sitting in the chair between the other two guys, and he said "thanks for mentioning that, but in a sense it's because I really am scared of what is about to happen."

We didn't discuss the relationship with current events -- Mr. Walsh only said something very short about "how this is so important right now." By then, someone was waiting to talk to him, so I got him to sign my program and I went on.

Oh, I forgot to mention that when the ovation had ended after that piece, the man sitting next to me in the theatre had turned to me and said, in a tentative way, "what was that about?" As I was trying to recover my breath after feeling so tense during the piece, I didn't burst out as I might otherwise have done ("what do you mean, you idiot, what was that about?). I just calmly said "torture." And he said "oh." I guess if you can't recognize a metaphor for torture (and believe me, it wasn't that hard to "get it"), you're probably not the kind of person who will think much about what the U.S. is doing to itself when the Attorney General refuses to say what his position on waterboarding would be if it came up to him for a decision on its legality! I just think I know which party the gentleman in seat 29-3 is going to vote for...

Yup, art and politics, once again.

Arts and Politics (or Why I Love Carl Orff, But...)

I went to the Symphony last night. Well, the Houston Symphony, but it's still the symphony (please don't shoot me for saying that; the symphony is still one of the ways in which Houston is a wannabe big city: it wants to play with the grownups but hasn't quite gotten the hang of it yet).

I was actually pleasantly surprised. The program was awkwardly chosen, in the sense that it consisted of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, followed by Orff's Carmina Burana. Why put two contemporary choral works in the same program? If you have a limited tolerance for this, then you obviously won't go at all -- as opposed to coming to a mixed concert that contains one piece outside of the mainstream, and therefore getting a chance to stretch your experience a bit. And if you love these pieces, the fact that they are both choral works may result in some sensory overlap, with the second piece obliterating your memory of the first one.

This is definitely what happened to me. I remember loving the Chichester Psalms, which I don't think I had ever heard before. But after Carmina Burana, I don't remember much about them.

Now, the program notes for Orff's piece are completely devoid of the usual biographical sketch. Instead, they totally focus on the work itself: its origin, the history of the manuscript (lost, found, and almost forgotten again), the orchestration. I have heard Carmina Burana in concert several times (including an impressive performance by the San Francisco Symphony, at Davies Hall, with two full choirs combined -- the "O Fortuna" almost blew me out of my seat -- and I don't remember which program was a bit more explicit about Orff's life, but it made the point that Carmina Burana was largely overlooked for many years because Orff had been associated, in somewhat disputed ways, with the Nazis (see the Wikipedia article for more information).

At minimum, Orff "collaborated" with the government by responding to a call for alternate music to the Midsummer Night Dream, to replace the famous version by Felix Mendelssohn, whose music was banned because he was a Jew. Surely, he could have simply abstained from responding to this request without incurring much risk. The omission of this controversy in last night's program bothered me. For one thing, the same program talks about Tchaikovsky in the notes for another concert, and clearly mention his homosexuality, which was long ignored in such publications. So if it's now become all right to acknowledge this aspect of the Russian composer's life, which may or may not have a relationship with his work, then why the silence over Orff's controversial relationship with Hitler's minions?

Then I remembered another instance of controversy over the relationship with art and politics: the cinema industry was active in Paris in 1940-44, during the German occupation. It is claimed that the Germans encouraged it because it served their propaganda purposes (the book "Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation" by Evelyn Ehrlich seems to provide particularly in-depth treatment of the subject).

Is it fair to expect artists to essentially "go on strike," emigrate, change jobs, or otherwise abandon either their environment or their families, or their profession, rather than work under the regime of the moment? Why do we tend to expect this from artists, and not from butchers or postal workers? I think there are two reasons: we assign morality to art, and art has a different ratio of "appearances vs. necessity." What I mean by the second point is that the butcher's work is necessary if people are to eat meat, and that work doesn't really make the regime look good (although in some places and times this point could be debated); the artist's work can be stopped as a form of passive resistance without damaging anyone's immediate well-being (other than the artists') and if the work goes on, the regime can, as was perhaps the case in Paris during WWII, use this as a way to project normalcy: "see those happy Parisians going to the movies, clearly we're not what the evil American propaganda is trying to tell you."

I tend not to provide answers in these pages -- I'm content enough to raise what I think are important questions. In fact, I don't know what to think about this, other than what I wrote above about Orff's options. Similarly, should Marcel Carné have put his camera away and waited until after the war to film his masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis? The inspiration might have been gone by then. Was he complicit in the Nazi propaganda machine -- or, as has been claimed, did he help shelter resistance fighters by providing them with jobs on the set, knowing that his work enjoyed some level of protection from the authorities?

The work itself was beautiful, the Houston Symphony was actually pretty good at it... I just had this nagging feeling all evening that something needed to be discussed, and that the program author had missed a chance to make people reflect about a moral issue of great importance.

Blanc bonnet, bonnet noir ?

Excuse me while I blab on in French, but a good friend of mine in Paris asked me to tell him about "Obama and Clinton." I thought that others might be interested, so here's my open letter to my friend.

Mon cher Michel,

Tu me demandes ce que je pense de Barack Obama et d'Hillary Clinton, car depuis la France vous ne comprenez guère ni les enjeux ni les différences entre les deux candidats.

L'enjeu n'est clair que sur un point, qui est de remplacer l'incompétente marionette qui occupe actuellement la Maison Blanche par un président démocrate qui pourra commencer à redresser la barre. Et je dis bien commencer, car contrairement à la légende herculéenne, nettoyer ces écuries d'Augias-là ne se fera pas en un jour.

Cela ne veut pas dire que les démocrates ont la clé de la porte de sortie en Irak. Personne ne l'a, du moins tant que l'on ne veut pas admettre que ce pays n'est pas viable en tant que tel, que c'est la Yougoslavie du Moyen-Orient et qu'il vaut mieux une partition honorable qu'une guerre civile prolongée, et cela même si un sud chiite se joint, de droit ou de fait, à l'Iran, et si un nord-est kurde attise des velléités séparatistes de leurs frères turcs ou iraniens. Mais je digresse.

Mais même si sur ce terrain tout le monde, de quelque bord qu'il soit, aura les mains plus ou moins liées de la même manière par les conneries de la troika Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld, d'autres sujets sont toujours traités de manière sensiblement différente par les démocrates et les républicains, et cela se résume au rôle accordé au gouvernement dans la vie publique : les démocrates penchent pour que le gouvernement intervienne pour assurer un certain "contrat social" concernant l'éducation, la santé, etc., alors que les républicains sont en principe pour un gouvernement central réduit... ce qui en pratique les amène à laisser tomber ceux qui auraient le plus besoin d'aide. En revanche, ce même parti cesse totalement d'être minimaliste quand il s'agit d'imposer une uniformité morale et confessionnelle au pays : c'est le parti favorisant un "moment de prière" dans les écoles, le parti proposant un amendement constitutionnel déclarant qu'"un mariage est un lien sacré entre un homme et une femme", etc. Dès qu'il est question de morale chrétienne (essentiellement protestante), les républicains ne sont plus du tout libertaires, et se complaisent assez à venir voir ce que nous faisons dans nos chambres, et cela malgré les frasques de certains de leurs sénateurs dans les toilettes pour hommes des aéroports (cherche "Larry Craig" sur Google ou Wikipedia si tu ne comprends pas l'allusion) !

Bon, mais tu ne m'as pas demandé de dire pourquoi je vais voter démocrate, je pense que tu me faisais assez confiance pour cela. Donc, revenons à nos moutons.

Clinton et Obama représentent tous les deux une rupture significative avec le passé, puisqu'il s'agit d'une femme et d'un noir. Mais Clinton est évidemment marquée comme étant la femme de l'avant-dernier président. Cela a deux implications contradictoires. Pour certains, c'est l'assurance de son expérience supérieure, de son accès aux conseils de son mari (qui est maintenant respecté comme ayant été un très bon président, malgré son utilisation peu orthodoxe du cigare et, pardonne le jeu de mots, de la pipe), de la facilité avec laquelle elle pourra assembler un gouvernement ultra-compétent, etc. Pour d'autres, c'est la promesse d'une alternance Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton qui fait que seules deux familles se seront partagées la charge suprême de 1988 à 2012 ou 2016, ce qui est aux antipodes du changement espéré.

Obama, de ce point de vue, peut presque se targuer de son inexpérience. Et pourtant il essaie un peu maladroitement de répondre à cet aspect critiqué de sa candidature, en disant par exemple qu'il comprend la politique internationale parce qu'il a été à l'école à l'étranger ! C'est un peu faible.

Obama se présente comme plus crédible pour le retrait des troupes d'Irak que Clinton, parce qu'elle avait voté pour donner à Bush le pouvoir de lancer l'opération militaire de 2003. Là, Clinton joue mal : au lieu de dire, "on nous avait menti, et comme beaucoup d'autres j'ai voté pour ces pouvoirs parce que cela aurait été la bonne décision si les informations que nous avions reçues avaient en fait été correctes, et si j'avais su que c'était faux je n'aurais pas voté pareil," elle a voulu éviter le faux pas de Kerry en 2004 ; mais du coup, elle s'est enferrée dans une défense au moins aussi maladroite que lui de ce vote.

Mais il est clair aujourd'hui qu'Obama, tout en s'en défendant, profite du fait qu'il est investi par la communauté noire d'un grand espoir, qui a son importance vu l'histoire du pays : l'espoir de mettre enfin réellement l'ère du racisme et de la ségrégation au placard en élisant un président noir. Et cela, malgré le libéralisme des Clinton à ce sujet (entre autres), c'est un argument imparable dans sa symbolique dans un pays qui n'a pas réussi à se débarrasser complètement de ce spectre depuis la Déclaration d'Emancipation promulguée par Lincoln en 1863.

Conclusion ? Il n'y en a pas encore. Pour moi, les deux candidats sont valables, représentent un espoir et un changement, et seront certainement sensiblement meilleurs que le régime actuel. Il est intéressant que l'électorat démocrate soit aussi partagé qu'il l'est après qu'une trentaine de primaires (sur 50) aient eu lieu. Il est donc possible qu'il faille attendre la convention démocrate cet été pour qu'une décision soit prise. Ce qui exclut complètement un "ticket" Clinton + Obama, car ils se seront trop heurtés d'ici là pour pouvoir travailler ensemble ensuite avec crédibilité.

Reste le problème de l'éligibilité. Ce qui me frappe pour le moment, c'est que les électeurs des primaires semblent plus spontanés que calculateurs : ils votent pour Clinton ou pour Obama (ou, avant qu'il ne se retire, pour Edwards) plus parce qu'ils aiment réellement leur candidat que parce qu'ils pensent que c'est le plus susceptible de gagner contre leur opposant de novembre (qui semble aujourd'hui devoir être l'antique mais crédible John McCain).

Or chacun des deux, Clinton et Obama, entrerait en lice pour novembre avec un lourd handicap. Pour Clinton, le fait d'être une femme n'est peut-être pas très grave -- les hommes susceptibles d'être le plus misogynes voteront probablement républicain de toute manière. Par contre, sa candidature provoquera une levée de boucliers des forces religieuses qui la considèrent comme le diable incarné à cause de ses positions sociales, et elle ne s'est pas fait que des amis, même dans son parti, par son attitude arrogante pendant les premiers mois du mandat de son mari, alors qu'elle essayait de faire passer un programme ambitieux de réforme du système de santé en n'étant investie d'aucun mandat, étant simplement chargée par son mari d'un "groupe de travail" (task force) sur la question. Les blessures d'amour-propre ne sont pas encore toutes refermées...

Quant à Obama, pas besoin de faire un dessin pour comprendre son handicap. Il suffirait d'une petite proportion de démocrates racistes dans certains états pour lui faire perdre ces états, même si les démocrates y sont en majorité, et ce serait assez pour lui faire perdre l'élection. Mais personne ne veut dire à haute voix "ne choisissons pas Obama parce qu'étant noir, il n'est pas éligible". C'est ce que l'on murmure aujourd'hui dans les chaumières, mais personne ne le dit publiquement de peur de se faire accuser d'être soit raciste, soit manipulateur clintonien.

Devant ce dilemme, que j'ai voulu résumer par le titre choisi pour ce blog, "blanc bonnet, bonnet noir", les électeurs démocrates qui votent aux primaires ont une lourde responsabilité : de leur choix (et de tous les impondérables qui peuvent se présenter dans les neuf mois restants) dépend le fait que le changement arrive ou non en novembre.

Affaire à suivre. Ce qui est certain, c'est que la campagne actuelle est plus intéressante qu'on ne le soupçonnait il y a encore quelques mois, quand on parlait d'"Hillary l'incontournable".

Mon cher Michel, j'espère ne pas t'avoir trop ennuyé du haut de mon perchoir électronique, et dis-moi si je t'ai un peu éclairé ou si j'ai semé une confusion encore pire.

Claude