Richard Barrios has lectured extensively on film, served as a commentator on numerous DVDs, and co-hosted a series on Turner Classic Movies. He currently lives outside Philadelphia. His book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd edition, illuminates the origins of the movie musical from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan. In the original post below, Barrios looks at the 10 worst musical films ever made.

Musical films, as most of us are aware, are among the greatest mixed blessings in American art. They can be transcendent and glorious at times, and quite often they can be inept, foul, and obnoxious. On a few choice occasions, some individual movie musicals can offer us all these at once. They are part of our lives and our culture and our subconscious, and yet often we are not permitted to adore them unreservedly; they have let us down too often for that.

While I was writing my history of the early movie musical, I was struck again and again by the trial-and-error nature of how the musical was born, and how the mistakes counted for as much as the successes. The two coexist steadily, especially in early musicals, which usually lack the smooth-grained professionalism of later efforts. The filmmakers learned as much from what they got terribly wrong as what they did correctly, and sometimes more so. The resulting films demonstrate this so vividly that, as a historian, I found myself steadily compelled to reflect on both sides of the coin. This naturally sets aside the entire fact that the dogs are often a great deal of fun to write about.

Fourteen years after Oxford first published it, A Song in the Dark now sings anew in an extensively revised and updated second edition. In celebration, I’ve compiled a “Ten Worst” list—technically, it’s “Eleven Worst”—that spans nearly the entire 80-plus year history of musical films, with the genre’s most odious cinematic mistakes and annotations of how and why they got that way. While it may strike some as a somewhat perverse celebration of musicals to offer a list of their worst achievements, I remain gleefully unapologetic. We all learn from our errors, and if they should not be celebrated they must still, ever, be recalled. Naturally it all must remain subjective, much like politics and religion, and I hope that readers will feel free to compose their own lists as well. As a palate-cleanser, I promise a “Ten Best” list in the near future.

The Singing Fool (1928)
A major film, in fact the biggest sensation of its time. Far more important in many ways than The Jazz Singer, beloved by many millions, one of the highest-grossing films made prior to Gone With the Wind. Alas, all this history and triumph don’t count for much when you just try to sit through it today. The annoying technique—back and forth between silent and “talkie”—is the least of it. The most is Al Jolson, who redefines “star ego” for all time. For anyone wondering why The Jazz Singer is shown so frequently and this follow-up so seldom, spend a few minutes communing with Jolson and his excesses, and you’ll know. If you were ever inclined to like the song “Sonny Boy,” seeing it introduced here, and driven into the ground with bathetic repetition, will cure you.

Golden Dawn (1930)
Seldom has terrible ever been this irresistible. A monstrosity of a Broadway operetta—think Emperor Jones meets Rose-Marie—transferred to the screen with all its excesses utterly intact, and for good measure it’s almost as racist a tract as The Birth of a Nation. Stalwart British soldiers try to keep the peace in East Africa, and the native heroine is considered a goddess because she wasn’t born black. There’s lots more, including a fearful idol who resembles a Smurf, a put-upon cast who somehow manages to keep straight faces, and songs such as “My Bwana” and “Africa Smiles No More.” Until you’ve seen and heard a darkly made-up Noah Beery sing “The Whip Song,” you don’t know from bad taste.

Down to their Last Yacht (1934)
Have you ever seen a film destroy itself while it runs through the projector? Behold, then, this ridiculous indigent-millionaires-meet-randy-Pacific-islanders concoction, so incoherent that it appears to be slabs of several unrelated movies glued together. Sidney Blackmer (Ruth Gordon’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby) stars as one of the most ill-at-ease musical heartthrobs in history. There are lots of jokes about cannibals and sex, and if it had been made in recent years there probably would’ve been a song about Viagra. The climactic number, an enormous and incoherent “South Sea Bolero,” seems to have been done by Busby Berkeley while high on drug-spiked papaya juice. Depression audiences weren’t fooled, and Yacht lost so much money that the angry studio fired the producer.

Rosalie (1937)
Overblown, overpriced, overstuffed, overproduced, overlong, overeverything. There’s a teeny princess-meets-commoner story, which is buried under so many tons of rotten MGM meringue that watching it gives you a headache. Eleanor Powell was an incredibly skillful tap dancer, but this thing doesn’t give her enough opportunities to redeem tons of excess and inertia. Nor are Ray Bolger and the beautiful Ilona Massey treated well, while Cole Porter’s songs range from wonderful (“In the Still of the Night”) to stupid (the title song). And chunky, placid Nelson Eddy as a college football star? In what universe?

Panama Hattie (1942)
Ann Sothern, a talented and appealing performer, wasn’t a good fit for Ethel Merman’s stage role. Strike one. Most of Cole Porter’s Broadway songs are cut or mangled, and replaced with lesser work. Strike two. And the strike three nail in the coffin is some interminable and boring slapstick relief involving Red Skelton and a haunted house. Only Lena Horne emerges unscathed, probably because she’s only given two songs and no role in the wretched script. The producers reshot and tinkered with the film, and must have felt redeemed when wartime audiences, eager for escapist relief, made it a hit. Just remember that the public isn’t always right.

Pal Joey (1957) and Can Can (1960)
Sure, Frank Sinatra was a great singer and could be a fine actor, but these two Broadway adaptations were made around the time he decided that he would only need to do one take of any scene. The results of such a blasé lack of commitment? A pair of lavish, worthless dinosaurs. Pal Joey lost all the nasty cynicism, and many of the Rodgers/Hart songs, that made it so striking and innovative onstage, and Can Can—set in 1890s Paris—is about as French as a small order of McDonald’s fries. Some of the other performers do try, but Frank’s phone-it-in Rat-Packy attitude sabotages them. Definition of a dispiriting experience: watching an expensive movie whose center is occupied by a star who doesn’t give a damn. Listen to the soundtracks, and skip the rest.

Paint Your Wagon (1969)
The late 1960s was rife with expensive and bloated musical blockbusters that were totally out-of-step with the time. This was the worst of all of them, and further proof that even an accomplished stage director like Joshua Logan shouldn’t necessarily be allowed near a movie camera. There’s a dumb Gold Rush plot, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and poor Jean Seberg form a musical ménage-a-trois, both men do their own vocals (alas!), and the whole thing comes off like a suburban dad trying to pass as a hippie. Lerner and Loew’s Broadway show deserved better, but as Lerner was co-producer he doesn’t rate a pass. With overblown rubbish like this, no wonder audiences turned to films with smaller budgets, bigger brains, and less music.

Lost Horizon (1972)
A debacle that deserves its near-legendary reputation, this abomination spelled finis to the film career of producer Ross Hunter. There had already been a failed attempt at a Broadway musical version of Frank Capra’s classic romance, but this one, with painful songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was worse. Poor Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann head a worthy, completely misbegotten all-star cast, and the details, script, and musical numbers are all minor classics of wrong-headedness. Choicest detail: the shelves of the Shangri-La library, supposedly a repository for the world’s finest literature, upon which can be clearly seen a number of Readers Digest Condensed Books.

Showgirls (1995)
Perhaps not a musical in the conventional sense of the word, but why pass up any opportunity to call out this classic backstage stinker? Trying oh, so hard to be a scorching erotic exposé, it succeeds in being asinine, juvenile, and very funny. Writer Joe Eszterhas cribbed his plot from All About Eve and his dialogue from old issues of True Confessions and Hustler, forming a worthy setting for Elizabeth Berkeley’s star-breaking acting and hysterical (lap) dancing. Given the appalling musical numbers, it’s somewhat of a surprise to note that Marguerite Derricks is the credited choreographer, not St. Vitus. It’s all cheaper, in every sense of the world, than a trip to Vegas, and if you’re in the right mean mood a whole lot more fun. Viewing note: the hilarity is even greater if you have a pitcher of Cosmopolitans.

Glitter (2001)
Mariah Carey’s high-powered, multi-octave vocalism is not to all tastes, but at least it demands a certain amount of respect. Then there’s her acting… As with Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, Johnnie Ray, and many other pop singers, she tries to make the leap onto the big screen and fails utterly. A downtrodden-waif-makes-good saga, this is a glaring of example of old, bad wine poured into a new, cheesy bottle. Nobody wins, Mariah can’t read lines and isn’t photogenic, and the single worthy moment is a shot—one of its final screen appearances—of the World Trade Center. It was fortunate that Chicago came along the following year to rescue movie musicals after Glitter nearly killed them.

IGNOMINIOUS MENTION

Mother’s Boy (1929), The Lottery Bride (1930), Take a Chance (1933), George White’s 1935 Scandals, Anything Goes (1956), Song of Norway (1970), Man of La Mancha (1972), Mame (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), A Chorus Line (1985), From Justin to Kelly (2003)

Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll tells the story of three generations of treacherous, bloodthirsty power-brokers. It is the sensational saga of the House of Guise, one of the greatest princely families of the sixteenth century, or indeed of any age. In the short excerpt below, Stuart Carroll talks about the run-up to the infamous Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.

Paris was not only sixteenth-century Europe’s largest city; it was its first metropolis. To wander the warren of streets behind its medieval walls was to experience such a bustle, noise and stench that it was compared to an entire province. Everywhere the visitor was reminded of its extraordinary Catholic heritage: its 300,000 souls were crammed into nearly 300 streets, divided into 39 parishes and served by 104 churches and monasteries; its conservative and celebrated university was spread over 49 colleges on the city’s Left Bank.

As he left the Louvre at 11 am on Friday 22 August 1572, Gaspard de Coligny paid little attention to his surroundings. He had just attended a council meeting, chaired in the absence of the king and the Queen Mother by the Duke of Anjou, and as he walked along was absorbed in reading an important piece of business. He did not return the hostile looks of the locals. At 55 he was the kingdom’s most experienced politician and soldier and used to the menacing gazes of Catholics. The curious were kept at a distance by a dozen bodyguards. His serious expression, penetrating gaze and white beard lent him a gravity that was out of place amid the gaiety of a rejuvenated court. Even his enemies respected his courage and piety. He was often compared to his contemporary, François de Guise—France’s ‘two shining diamonds’. Better educated than the friend who became his bitterest enemy, he was a good Latinist and maintained a journal (since lost) for posterity. Like Guise, the admiral spread fear among his enemies. There was an uncompromising element in his character which suited him well to Calvinist discipline. In war he knew the value of cruelty and terror as a weapon. To the Protestants this made him a hero, and the leadership was in awe of him. That morning he was making the short walk to his lodgings in the rue de Béthisy. Soon after he turned into the rue des Poulies a single shot rang out from a hundred feet away. Protestants placed their trust in providence for good reason: at the very same moment the shot was fired Coligny stopped and turned suddenly, and the shot missed his vitals, fracturing his left forearm and taking off an index finger. His men immediately rushed to the house from where the shot had been fired and tried to force the door, but the assassin had planned well. The house had a rear door that opened onto the square in front of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois church, where a horse was awaiting him.

Coligny was not killed by the bullet; he would have lived. And yet within forty-eight hours he was murdered. Several days of anarchy followed in which between at least 2,000, and perhaps as many as 6,000, Protestants were butchered. Upwards of 600 houses were pillaged. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is the greatest imponderable of sixteenth-century history. The barbarity with which defenceless women and children were massacred has echoes of the horrors of the twentieth century—horrors that were literally unspeakable: such was the cruelty and terror of those August days that very few were ever able to set down in words what they had seen or experienced. The task of the historian is made all the more difficult because the sources that survive, written amid the confusion or put together much later in an attempt to shift the blame, are even more than usually partial and suspect. Over the centuries a plethora of suspects and motives have been put forward. Older interpretations rested on Catherine’s reputation as a wicked Italian Queen schooled in the dark political arts of Machiavelli. Coligny’s assassination, it is claimed, had been planned years before and was the signal for a premeditated programme of extermination. Catherine [de Medici], it is claimed, was driven insane by maternal jealousy. Coligny was increasingly powerful at court and threatened to supplant her in her son’s affections, and so she employed the Guise to eliminate the admiral. This conjecture relies more on xenophobia and misogyny than hard evidence. In fact, the evidence for Coligny’s pre-eminence is rather thin: in the year before his death he was at court for a total of only five weeks. In a major reinterpretation in 1973, Nicola Sutherland argued that an assassination was inconsistent with Catherine’s larger political aims. Catherine had spent more than ten years trying to preserve the peace by balancing the Catholic and Protestant factions, and there is little reason to believe that she would suddenly abandon these consistently held policies and order the death of the Protestant leader, let alone a more general policy of extermination. If not Catherine, then who? Sutherland claimed to have uncovered an international Catholic conspiracy, involving Spain, the Papacy, and the Guise. The Spanish scenario is plausible. In the summer of 1572 Coligny was pressing for immediate intervention in the Low Countries. Philip II of Spain and the Duke of Alva wished him dead. Once again, however, the evidence is flimsy. Spanish policy was tempered by realpolitik, recognizing that the admiral was a force for division and therefore contributed to France’s present weakness. There are other suspects and motives: the Duke of Anjou, the Italians on the council, or a combination of the two—all have their accusers. Charles IX has recently been rehabilitated as an idealistic philosopher-king who, fearing that his dream of concord was about to be shattered, played a decisive role in planning Coligny’s murder. Fresh clues have been gleaned from the prosaic (rising grain prices) to the esoteric (the neoplatonic environment of the court). One benefit of recent research has been to uncouple the plot to kill Coligny from the general massacre that followed. Few historians would now argue that the plotters had a premeditated plan to murder thousands. In order to understand the Massacre we must first answer the riddle of Coligny’s death. Only then will we begin to uncover the link between aristocratic conspiracy and mob violence.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an the 40th birthday of the internet.

I began writing this online message 40 years to the minute when the internet went live.

At 7:00 pm on Oct. 29, 1969 UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, who organized the internet’s first day, had one of his programmers, Charley Kline, send a message from his computer at UCLA’s engineering school to his colleague Bill Duvall, who was sitting at a second computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto. Kline typed LOG, one slow character at a time, and Duvall’s computer was to supply the IN to form the complete command, login, which would connect the machines. Duvall was also connected by telephone to Kline, and he reported each letter as it got through. First the “L,” then the “O.” But when Klein typed the “G,” the Stanford computer crashed. That makes LO the first electronic message.

A month later, the University of California at Santa Barbara joined the first computer network, called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Network, and in December, the University of Utah was added. Eventually the loose configuration of computers at research facilities around the country, and then around the world, came to be called the internet, or as Dr. House would have it, the interweb.

120 years earlier, Henry David Thoreau, skeptical of the telegraph — which we sometimes refer to in retrospect as the Victorian internet — wrote in Walden, “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The telegraph succeeded despite Thoreau’s complaint, but Samuel Morse, the telegraph’s inventor, thought Bell’s telephone was just a pretty toy. Morse was convinced that no one would want an invention that was unable to provide a permanent, written record of a conversation. These minutes from a Western Union meeting clarify concerns that no one would use the telephone to communicate anything important: “Bell’s instrument uses nothing but the voice, which cannot be captured in concrete form. . . . We leave it to you to judge whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communications.”

And so not everyone was excited when UCLA spoke to Stanford. Kleinrock has noted the almost prophetic nature of that first message, “Lo,” as in “Lo and behold.” But except for programmers, most people in 1969 had little use for one computer, let alone two hooked together. What could these machines — electronic brains or electronic toys — possibly have to say to one another?

The internet may be 40 years old today, and no one reading this post would dream of starting their day without checking email, Facebook, and one or more online news sources, but until the 1990s few people used the Net. For all anyone knew, it was little more than a series of tubes.

In the time-honored tradition of distrusting new communications devices, in those early days computer giant IBM and telecom monopolist AT&T saw no future for networked computers and refused to bid to develop that first Interface Message Processor. In order for the internet to spread, they reasoned, managers would have to type. Even computer programmers wrote with pencil and paper, not on their mainframes, which were designed to crunch numbers, not words. Typing was for secretaries and the odd hunt-and-peck writer who didn’t have access to the typing pool.

Several things helped the internet take off when it finally did, not in 1969 but in the 1990s. Affordable, user-friendly personal computers, like the 1984 Apple Macintosh; easy-to-use email programs like Eudora (1988) that worked like word processors; and browsers like Mosaic, launched in 1993, which enabled ordinary people to search the web without a computer science degree. Without those developments, the Net would have remained the province of researchers and nerds instead of a welcoming home for almost 1.7 billion people around the world, everyone from honest citizens like you and me, to stalkers and spies, dollar-hungry marketers, hate-mongers, pornographers, and Nigerian scammers.

Talking about the internet’s birthday, Kleinrock told CNN, “We didn’t anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust. . . . I knew every user on the Internet in those early days.” Back in 1969 no one suspected that the internet would even have a dark side. But no one knew, either, that along with “What hath God wrought,” and “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you,” and “Fiat lux,” “LO” would go down in history as the start of a great communications revolution whose dark side is but a minor annoyance compared to the enlightenment and the fun-filled hours it brings to us, and allows us to bring to others.

And no one suspected, back in 1969, that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of computers would produce, not “Hamlet,” but HamBASIC.

Peggy Pascoe is Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Her book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, has won two awards from the Organization of American Historians: the Lawrence Levine Prize for the best book on American cultural history and the Ellis Hawley Prize for the best book on political economy or American institutions. In the post below she looks at the actions of Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell.  Read her previous OUPblog post here.

Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refuses to marry interracial couples. He’s been doing so for years, but it wasn’t until October 2009, when he refused to marry Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, that his actions attracted attention.

Appalled by Bardwell’s practice of checking with every couple who comes before him to see if they are interracial, then insisting that interracial couples go to other justices of the peace for their wedding ceremonies , Humphrey and McKay, the ACLU, the NAACP, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu have all called for Bardwell’s resignation.

Bardwell insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. “It is my right,” he said, “not to marry an interracial couple.” He doesn’t even understand why Humphrey and McKay were offended by his refusal. “I’m not a racist,” he insists. “I try to treat everyone equally.”

“In some parts of this country,” a friend of mine commented wryly, “it’s still the 1930s.” For most of American history, Bardwell’s refusal to marry an interracial couple would have been standard public policy. Laws against interracial marriage were, in fact, America’s longest-lasting and most fundamental form of race discrimination.

After the first such law was passed by the colony of Maryland in 1664, miscegenation laws thrived for the next three centuries. By the 1930s, 30 states banned interracial marriage, many of them prohibiting whites from marrying Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks.

Courts justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was “unnatural,” a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage. Judges claimed that because the laws punished both the black and white partners to an interracial marriage, they affected blacks and whites “equally.” Like Keith Bardwell, they persuaded themselves that equality somehow demanded that public officials refuse to marry interracial couples.

The U.S. Supreme Court exposed the absurdity of this line of thinking in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, which declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional. “There can be no doubt,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” Ever since the Loving decision, refusing to marry an interracial couple has been—and despite Bardwell’s protestations, still is—a clear denial of constitutional rights.

In the forty years since Loving, there has been a historic turnabout in public opinion; today most whites and blacks tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage. There has also been a steady increase in interracial marriages, which now number in the millions. According to some estimates, in 2005 as many as 7% of American married couples were interracial, though the number of marriages between whites and blacks stood at a much more modest 422,000.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes like Bardwell’s can be safely consigned to the past. A significant segment of several state populations still refuses to recognize that interracial marriage is a legal right. In 1999 and 2000, when South Carolina and Alabama finally got around to removing bans on interracial marriage from their state constitutions, the public vote was roughly 60 percent for removing the bans and 40 percent for leaving them in the state constitutions.

In other words, Keith Bardwell is entirely wrong, but he’s not entirely alone. Perhaps this helps explain why he’s gotten away with his outrageous behavior for so long. In the end, though, it only makes it all the more important that he be removed from public office. The disappointed bride, Beth Humphrey, said it best. “He doesn’t believe he’s being racist,” she said, “but it is racist.”

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at local elections. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As we follow the NJ and VA gubernatorial races, and the special election for the 23rd congressional district in New York (NY23), the debate has overwhelmingly been about whether or not these races are wind vanes for the electoral weather to come.

So some thoughts in this vein, before the main point of this post. Obama is campaigning hard for NJ Governor Jon Corzine because he needs to show errant Democratic members of Congress that he still has coat-tails. If Corzine pulls off his re-election bid, members of Congress seeking a presidential endorsement in 2010 will at least think twice about voting against the president in 2009. If both Creigh Deeds and Corzine lose (and in the former’s case, it is practically a foregone conclusion) in their respective gubernatorial races, then the rationale for party unity suffers and it is every politician for her/himself here on out. If this happens, Obama will face an even more recalcitrant Democratic aisle of Congress than he does now.

Meanwhile, with the exit of Dede Scozzafava from the race in NY23, the conservative movement looks set to shake up the Republican establishment, as Sarah Palin has promised. The soul-searching of the Republican Party continues; may the most powerful faction win.

Notice that none of these observations pay any attention to local concerns and local consequences. The significance of these races is entirely predicated on their potential impact on the balance of power in Washington, DC. When the punditry agrees without acknowledging that they do, their consensus is worth examining. There was a time when all politics was local. When the media establishments were not yet centralized in a few major outlets and the coverage of issues nationalized. A time when voters came out to vote for candidates at the local and state levels. Such races did not depend on huge television advertising budgets or endorsements by nationally elected officials, and they were not seen merely as divinizing tea leaves for the future but as important contests in their own right.

Today, voter turnout for local and state elections is paltry, and turn-out off-year elections is abysmal. An army of national media, however, has descended in Virginia and New Jersey and even in upstate New York, to cover the races not for the benefit of local and state residents, but for the impact it will have on the balance of power in Washington. Even conservative, states-rights oriented politicos understand that all local politics is national. (The revealing contrast is the high turnout for national elections in Europe and the low turnout for elections to the European parliament owing to the different balance of power between the center and its confederal parts in Europe.) Power resides in Washington, not in states, cities, or communities, because Washington’s potential reach into every state and locality is extensive. Even those who want to invert this balance of power have been compelled to concentrate their attention and energies to the Federal City. We are all Federalists now.

Politics is no longer local because the return to turn-out is minimal at the state and local levels. In the 19th century, local party workers toiled to get the vote out because there were patronage jobs to be earned if their candidate won. Parades, torch-light processions, rallies, barbeques, banners, buttons, and insignia got people worked up and ready to go to polling booths. Contrast this level of enthusiasm for a 22 year old voter in Virginia who had voted for Obama last year. “Politics is boring,” he said. “I know Obama is making changes, but it takes so long to make things happen.” And that is why he is probably not going out to vote next Tuesday.

The lesson to be learned in next week’s contests is not what they will predict about the future, which will be endlessly debated even if only time will tell, but what they reveal about the transformation of American democracy, which time has already told.

By Edward Zelinsky

Because the rate of inflation for 2009 has effectively been zero, the Social Security Administration has announced that Social Security payments will stay flat for 2010. In response, the Obama Administration has asked Congress to send every Social Security recipient an additional $250 in 2010.

This is a bad idea. The Administration’s proposal is both unfair and misfocused.

Many Americans would be delighted to have the same deal as Social Security recipients, namely, the identical cash income in 2010 that they received in 2009. To millions of newly unemployed Americans, that looks like a good deal. Not as good as being president of a bailed-out bank, but still a good deal.

For 2010, the salaries of many Americans working in the private sector are frozen or reduced. In countless cases, compensation decreases are taking the form of fringe benefits eliminated or reduced, for example, the termination of employers’ 401(k) contributions.

As the latest saying goes, for these working Americans, flat is the new up. It is inequitable for federal taxpayers to finance $250 checks in 2010 for Social Security recipients with stable incomes, but not for the working and unemployed Americans whose incomes have declined, often precipitously.

And this is before we consider the tax-free nature of most Social Security benefits.

To illustrate, compare a young married couple with a retired couple receiving Social Security benefits. Let us suppose that both of these families have annual incomes of $20,000. The members of the hypothetical young family have minimum wage jobs while the retired family receives yearly Social Security benefits of $20,000.

While the nominal, pre-tax incomes of these two families are identical, the younger couple pays FICA taxes of $1,530. In contrast, the retired couple receives all of its Social Security payments tax-free. Thus, on an after-tax basis, the younger family has substantially less income per person than the older couple.

If federal checks are to be sent to either of these couples, the younger family is the more deserving recipient. Neither of these families is rolling in dough. However, there is no reason to target federal largesse to the retired couple rather than the young working family, with the same nominal income but which pays FICA taxes on all of its income.

In effect, the younger family would, by its FICA tax payments, finance the $250 checks the President wants to send to seniors.

The Administration has suggested other programs for 2010 which make more sense than the proposed $250 check to Social Security recipients. The Administration has advocated that, in light of the poor job market, unemployment benefits be extended and that so-called COBRA subsidies also be prolonged to help the unemployed purchase continuing medical insurance from their former employers. Both of these suggestions are compelling. Indeed, the COBRA subsidy should be made permanent.

If the federal fisc provides additional relief beyond this, Congress should expand the earned income tax credit for 2010 to relieve low-income working families, like our hypothetical younger couple, of some of their tax burden.

In contrast, the proposal to send all Social Security recipients $250 is ill-conceived. This proposal is not fair to working and unemployed Americans struggling with reduced incomes and tax obligations. This proposal misdirects the focus of federal assistance. When it comes to the $250 checks for seniors, Congress should just say no.

Robert Tattersall is an internationally recognized authority on diabetes.  He received specialist training at King’s College Hospital, London and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  He moved to Nottingham in 1975 where he became Professor of Clinical Diabetes.  His most recent book, Diabetes: The Biography, is part of the series Biographies of Disease which we will be looking at in the upcoming weeks.  Each volume in the series tells the story of a disease in its historical and cultural context – the varying attitudes of society to its sufferers, the growing understanding of its causes, and the changing approaches to its treatment.  In the excerpt below we learn about the discovery of insulin- a moment that changed the lives of diabetics forever.

After war service in Europe, Frederick Grant Banting (1891-1941) failed to get a surgical job at the prestigious Toronto Hospital for Sick Children and so set up as a doctor in London, Ontario. This was not a success, and to make ends meet he got a part-time job at the University of Toronto. In October 1920 he had to lecture the students on carbohydrate metabolism, about which he knew little. While preparing, he read an article about a man in whom a stone had blocked the pancreatic duct leading to atrophy of the digestive-enzyme-producing part of the gland but leaving the islets intact. This was hardly new, since it had been known for thirty years that this was what happened when the duct was tied in animals, but in his notebook Banting wrote:

Diabetus [sic]
Ligate pancreatic ducts of dog. Keeping dogs alive until ancini degenerate leaving Isletes.
Try to isolate the internal secretion of these to relieve glycosurea [sic]

Against the background of the fruitless attempts described in the previous chapter, it is not surprising that Macleod did not take Banting seriously. Macleod wrote: ‘I found that Dr Banting had only a superficial textbook knowledge of the work that had been done and no familiarity with the methods by which such a problem could be investigated in the laboratory.’ Quite apart from Banting’s ignorance, Macleod had lost interest in diabetes and was researching acid-base balance. Banting later said that during the first interview Macleod was so disinterested that he started reading letters on his desk. Nevertheless, he offered Banting a disused lab and two students, Charles Best (1899-1978) and Clark Noble (1900-78), who were to do alternate months. They tossed a coin to decide who should to the first month. Best ‘won’, but was so involved at the end of the first month that Noble agreed that he should continue.

Banting need an assistant, because he did not know how to measure blood sugar, and Macleod had wisely insisted on this as the end point of their experiments. During his research on the blood sugar of the turtle, Best had learned the new Lewis-Benedict method, which needed as little as 0.2 ml blood, whereas other methods needed 25 ml. Another stumbling block was that Banting had never done a pancreatectomy, an operation that at the time was used only in animal research. Macleod assisted at the first operation, but Banting and Best then worked alone, writing from time to time to Macleod, who replied with advice. In August 1921they depancreatized two dogs and treated one with pancreatic extract leaving the other as a control. The untreated dog died in four days which the treated one remained well. Macleod was encouraged by their results but felt that the falls in blood sugar might be due to dilution or even normal fluctuations. He suggested further experiments, to which Banting objected violently and accused Macleod of trying to steal their thunder. Nevertheless, the experiments were done. When Macleod returned in October, he had a stormy interview with Banting, who threatened to go elsewhere if better facilities were not provided. At a departmental meeting on 14 November 1921 Banting and Best gave a preliminary presentation of their work. One important suggestion at this meeting was that the best of showing that the extract worked would be if regular injections could prolong the life of diabetic dogs.

This was a logistic problem, because the duct-ligation method needed many dogs and a wait of seven weeks while the exocrine tissue degenerated. Banting’s solution was to use foetal calf pancreas, which Best got from the local abattoir. The rationale, as Sobolev had suggested twenty years before, was that it contained a high proportion of islets in relation to exocrine tissue. An important breakthrough came in December, when Banting decided to use alcohol in making extract (an idea Macleod had suggested some months before). It worked well and led them to wonder whether they could get a similar result with the more easily available adult beef pancreas. That they did must have been a surprise, because the original rationale for duct ligation was that the internal secretion would be destroyed by pancreatic enzymes. In fact, although Macleod and others believed this, it had been known since 1875 that fresh pancreas did not break down proteins. The intact gland contains an inactive precursor trypsinogen, which is converted into the protein-dissolving enzyme trypsin only by contact with duodenal juice. Around this time Banting and Best were joined by a biochemist, Bert Collip (1892-1965)-more accurately, he was foisted on them by Macleod, who regarded him as a proper scientist. Collip had come on a Rockefeller fellowship and was studying the effect of pH on blood sugar. Later he was asked to help with the purification of insulin and made rapid progress, although afterwards he downplayed his role, suggesting that any biochemist could have done the same.

Some time in December 1921 Collip began making extracts from whole pancreas and, at Macleods suggestion, tested them on rabbits. The extracts reduced the rabbit’s blood sugar, and how far it fell was a useful and cheap way of telling how potent the extract was.

The first use of insulin (an extract made by Charles Best) on a human being was on 11 January 1922. The pancreatic extracts were relatively impure, and the house physician at Toronto General Hospital described what he injected into the buttocks of 14-year-old Leonard Thompson as ‘15 cc of thick brown muck’. Thompson has been on the Allen diet since 1919 and weighed only 65 lb (29.5 kg). After the injection, his blood sugar fell from 440 to 320 mg/dl (24.4 to 18.3 mmol/l), but no clinical benefit was seen. The experiment was resumed on 23 January, when he was given Collip’s extract, and now his blood sugar fell during one day from 520 mg/dl (29 mmol/l) to 120 mg/dl (6.7 mmol/l). He continued treatment for ten days with marked clinical improvement and complete elimination of glucose and ketones from his urine. Subsequently he lived a relatively normal life, although reliant on insulin injections, before dying of pneumonia in 1935.

The first clinical results were published in the March 1922 Canadian Medical Association Journal, where the authors reported that they had treated seven cases…

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Earlier in the week we posted a musical riddle by Thompson and below he explains the answer.  Check out Thompson’s other riddles here.

Riddle me when, riddle me why; can you name the song this time?
Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.
More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.
Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.

Forty years ago, the Beatles were in the process of disintegrating: John Lennon and George Harrison were performing separately from the band and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would individually begin recording material for independent release. In the past, a separate but equally new single would shortly follow a new Beatles album. The first time they had done this had established the pattern: “From Me to You” (11 April 1963) came slightly less than three weeks after their first album, Please Please Me (22 March 1963), with both reaching the top of British charts in early May.

On 26 September 1969 (and on 1 October in the US), the Beatles had released the last LP they would record together, Abbey Road (see last month’s riddle). Returning to the studio to record a separate single presented an unlikely scenario: the fab four no longer functioned as a unified entity. Consequently, on 31 October 1969 (and on 6 October in the US), Apple released George Harrison’s “Something,” with John Lennon’s “Come Together” on the flip side of the 45 rpm disk. The recordings had already appeared on Abbey Road and the choice of these two songs suggested at least a partial symbolic ostracizing of Paul McCartney, the odd-man-out in the internal group negotiations.

Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.

George Harrison in the Beatles Anthology video seems to relish the ironic humor of Frank Sinatra (ole blue eyes) declaring “Something” to be his favorite Lennon-McCartney song. After years of laboring in the shadows of two of the most successful songwriters of the sixties (if not the century), George Harrison had grown into a consummate songwriter who saw his material routinely rejected by his band mates. These rejections meant more than simple social dismissal: a song on a Beatles album meant substantial income from royalties. While Lennon and McCartney held a substantial share in their publishing entity Northern Songs (a company their manager Allen Klein would soon let escape from their grasp), Harrison had recently established Harrisongs to handle the royalties accumulating from his material. “Something” would be one of the most substantial contributors to the coffers of that company.

More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.

“Something” (definitely more than nothing) began an era (a plateau?) of successful songs by the “quiet one” (as press coverage had characterized George Harrison). Songs like “My Sweet Lord,” “Wah Wah,” “Isn’t It a Pity,” and “All Things Must Pass,” which appeared on his first post-Beatles album All Things Must Pass, displayed a songwriter-producer-musician of substantial talent. They also revealed a musician who had discovered the art cooperative and communal creation. As he had initially with the Beatles and would later with the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison had learned how to let other musicians graciously and generously contribute to his recordings. In the case of “Something,” Paul McCartney’s spectacular bass playing compliments Harrison’s singing and guitar playing such that it almost takes the center of the listening experience, much the way a concerto is meant to contrast a soloist with the rest of the ensemble.

Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.

Although Harrison had first tried his hand at pop imitations (e.g., “Don’t Bother Me”), he made his mark as a songwriter-composer with his explorations of Indian music. His sitar contribution to “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” demonstrated his interest in the textures he had heard percolating in London in 1965. “Love You To” on Revolver showed he had the ability to merge the basic ideas of the South Asian tradition into a pop format. However, after studying in India with Ravi Shankar, his contribution to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “Within You without You,” revealed a masterful combination of the Hindustani tradition and British pop. Taking the core instrumental idiom that North Indian classical musicians call “gat” (consisting of contrasting sections they identify as sthā’ī and antarā), he wove them together to produce perhaps the best representation of mid-sixties Indian-western musical fusion.

However, in the post-Sgt. Pepper world, he had found his own voice (e.g., “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) and, in “Something,” Harrison’s musical sophistication shone brighter than it ever had previously. In Hindi, “nahi” negates what has just come previously. Not only did he forgo use of the sthā’ī-antarā gat form, he adopted a new style of musical composition built on what he had written in the past, but that had evolved into something new.

Part of the song’s charm lies in its internal contrasts. Where the verse finds the singer obsessed with the beloved (“Something in the way she moves…”), the chorus surprisingly questions the very nature of the attraction. In response to a question that the author perhaps asks of himself (“Will your love grow?”), he responds with an expression of ignorance: he does not know the answer, a strange acknowledgement for someone who otherwise finds himself transfixed by the beauty of his lover.

Jennifer Weber, author of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, and Professor in the Department of History, University of Kansas, sent us this picture. This kitten has brightened my week and I hope he brightens your Friday!

Kit’s Lit

Lots of people enjoy Oxford’s books, but OUP’s fans aren’t limited to humans. Ike here has a deep interest in the Civil War, and OUP’s list slakes his thirst for knowledge.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Below is a hint to a musical riddle with sixties British rock and pop as its subject. Be sure to check back Friday for the answer. Check out Thompson’s other riddles here. Feel free to guess the answer in the comments.

British pop musicians in the sixties transformed what had been quiet imitations of Americana into the height of hip artistic creativity. In the early sixties, the only British music to break into the American charts sounded weird (Joe Meek’s production of the Tornados performing “Telstar” in 1962) and wacky (Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It’s [sic] Flavor (On the Bedpost Over Night)” in 1961). A few years later, Time declared London to be the self-evident center of the western cultural universe. Whether you considered James Bond, Twiggy, Mary Quant, or the Who, the Brits had established a place in pop culture that in the fifties we could hardly have imagined.

In another twisted attempt to obscure the obvious, I offer one more of my riddles celebrating an anniversary in sixties British pop. I look forward to your guesses. We will post a solution in two days.

Riddle me when, riddle me why; can you name the song this time?
Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.
More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.
Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.