Representation

I showed some of "The Times of Harvey Milk" in my state/local politics class the other day, and it ended up spawning a fascinating discussion on representation, which has been a recurrent theme in my class. Usually, I focus on the extent to which a district or a voter is represented ideologically. That is, do liberal districts get liberal legislators? What kind of legislators do moderate districts get?

As the film notes, Milk ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unsuccessfully three times, and finally got elected only because the city switched from at-large to district-based representation in 1977.  Suddenly, it was possible for the Castro to amass enough votes to send a gay man to city hall.  And Milk wasn't the only beneficiary -- that same year, the city elected its first African American, its first Asian American, and its first avowed feminist to the city board.

Several people in the film, including Milk himself, talk about what it meant to them to have an openly gay city supervisor.  Suddenly, the city government didn't feel like a hostile place.  Gays and lesbians had a voice.  And the film offers evidence that Milk's election affected people far outside San Francisco.

In his famous yet unpublished manuscript "Why Parties?", Tom Schwartz writes,

To get something from government, do not make the government more representative of you; make it more responsible to you.

I tend to subscribe to this theory.  Lord knows, there are plenty of hucksters who can get elected by looking like their constituents yet do very little for them once in office.  Yet, as this film shows, symbolic representation is not something to be taken lightly.

Update: Somehow I missed Jonathan Bernstein's excellent and substantively similar post on this subject.

From the Realistic Expectations Department

Denver Post:

Health summit unable to heal partisan rifts

Are partisan rifts actually a disease now?

Life before Google

Relying too much on polls

So I was watching the Obama health care summit today on and off.  It was pretty fascinating to hear Republican members of Congress persistently repeating their claim that the administration's current health reform plan is unpopular, and therefore it should be scrapped and we should start the whole thing over.  One could call this hypocritical -- these same GOPers regularly criticize other politicians for following polls.  But it's hardly unusual for a politician to rely on polls when they support her position and to brag about her bravery when the polls oppose her position.

Nonetheless, the reliance on polls has been particularly misleading during this whole debate on health care. First of all, as Ezra Klein notes, Americans oppose health reform until they learn what's in it.  Basically, the public opposes it in general but supports every component of it.  Also, the polls reflect aspects of the political debate right now but can't really say how people will feel about health reform five or ten or fifty years from now.  As I suggested the other day, expansions of the social safety net usually start off controversial but then gain near-universal approval over time.  It's also reasonable to question the GOP's sincerity on this.  That is, it's not that they want Obama to work on more popular legislation.  They want to kill this legislation because that will benefit them in the midterm election.  Saying we should start over is another way of requesting a delay until the elections, or forever.

But the main problem here is that this just isn't a great subject for measuring public opinion.  Health reform is tremendously complex and the media don't do a great job reporting on it substantively.  Opinion polls on the subject are highly sensitive to issues of question wording and ordering.  If you want to know whether people approve of the job Obama is doing or for whom they intend to vote in the next election, polls are pretty reliable.  But for this subject, it's just not terribly revealing.

Civility

I'm not sure if there's a way to increase civility in our public discourse, but if there is, I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve courageously attacking anonymous commenters on unnamed websites.  Yet that's the path Dick Polman chooses.

It should be clear that using Internet commentary as an indicator of declining civility is methodologically problematic.  As I've mentioned previously, I take the percentage of jerks in society to be a relative constant over time.  I am entirely confident that there were people who celebrated the death of John F. Kennedy and who rejoiced when Ronald Reagan was shot.  Surely there were those who danced upon learning of Abraham Lincoln's assassination.  But those folks didn't write comments about it on websites, for obvious reasons.

Of course, one difference, other than the lack of an Internet, was that mid-20th century newspaper editors and TV news producers felt it was inappropriate to air certain views deemed too extreme or incendiary.  If you wanted to go public with a comment about how great it was that JFK got shot, there weren't many places for you to do so.  Of course, people who want to write stuff today about how great it is that Teddy Kennedy died still don't have a huge forum -- they mostly write anonymous comments on random websites.  These views don't get much of a public airing until, you know, syndicated columnists like Dick Polman choose to repeat them.

"Caprica" and balance

Marc, in previous comments:

It looks to me like fictional Caprica is a world that embraces tech in a more selective way that we do in the real world. It makes no sense to use a steam train, so they use a high-tech one. But there are a lot of arguments in favor of older cameras and even videotape over digital technology. In a show about the uneasy relationship to tech, I don't think this isn't mainly a question of the show wanting to look a certain way. I think they're saying -- though this may as well be my own preferences talking -- that adopting a technology simply because we can is the nut of the show's story, and on Caprica, some technologies have been rejected.

I think it's a bit unclear what exactly "Caprica" is doing with technology, and this also ties in with the portrayal of marriage on the show.  It is interesting that the destruction of Caprica by the Cylons, in both "Galactica" and "Caprica," is referred to not as a holocaust (the term used in the 1978 series) or a sneak attack, but as "The Fall."  This draws an immediate comparison to, say, the Roman Empire, or to any civilization that had a hand in its own destruction.

So why would Caprica be responsible for its own demise?  Well, the civilization is portrayed as one that's reach its apex.  It has reached profound technological heights, but it's also decadent and amoral, making it ripe for the destructive monotheistic religion eventually adopted by the Cylons.  So the portrayal of widely-accepted same sex marriages and group marriages on the show could be perceived in different ways.  Maybe it's a sci-fi show doing what sci-fi does -- offering a different version of society as a way of critiquing our own.  Or maybe it's suggesting that these different forms of marriage are a sign of decadence and inevitable demise.

Back to technology.  Again, the civilization on Caprica is not much different than our own, except they have fantastically better robotics, virtual reality, and transportation.  But they've notably rejected some other forms of advanced technology.  So maybe, as Marc says, this is a sci-fi critique of our own society -- just because a technology can be developed does not mean that it must be.  Or maybe it's a sign of Caprica's inevitable demise.  After all, creating robots, like cheating death, is a form of hubris -- it's a way of having the benefits of slavery while avoiding the associated moral baggage.  Creating robot soldiers is even more of a sin in this light, as it allows for perpetual war without the main impediment to warfare: grieving families.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

My father-in-law introduced me to the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan a few years ago, but it turned out I already knew his music -- or at least his voice.  I just didn't know I knew it.  He did some amazing vocals on the "Dead Man Walking" soundtrack, and he also provided some haunting sounds on Peter Gabriel's single "Signal to Noise."  If you don't know that latter song by name, it's the music that scored the opening battle in Martin Scorsese's  "Gangs of New York" (2002).

Anyway, NPR did a nice piece on Ali Khan yesterday, and only then did I learn that the Pakinstani has been dead since 1997.  Which explains why Gabriel used a recording of Ali Khan's voice when performing "Signal to Noise" live in 2003.  It all makes sense now.