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!
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
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.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
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.
(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.
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.
Friday, February 8, 2008
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
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
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