Bobo is addressing “The Other Education.” He says while our scholastic education is formal and supervised, our emotional education, the one we glean on our own from artists and musicians, is more important to our long-term happiness. Mr. Cohen, in “Iranians in Exile,” says President Obama has been too weak on human rights abuses in Iran. He needs to express outrage. Prof. Krugman, in “Taxing the Speculators,” says while a financial transactions tax would not completely prevent any future crisis, it could generate substantial revenue while providing a useful check on reckless short-term speculation. Here’s Bobo:
Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.
But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.
We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.
In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.
This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.
The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.
From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.
Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning.
I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.
What mattered most, as with any artist, were the assumptions behind the stories. His tales take place in a distinct universe, a distinct map of reality. In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their dignity. Their choices have immense moral consequences, and are seen on an epic and anthemic scale.
There are certain prominent neighborhoods on his map — one called defeat, another called exaltation, another called nostalgia. Certain emotional chords — stoicism, for one — are common, while others are absent. “There is no sarcasm in his writing,” Landau says, “and not a lot of irony.”
I find I can’t really describe what this landscape feels like, especially in newspaper prose. But I do believe his narrative tone, the mental map, has worked its way into my head, influencing the way I organize the buzzing confusion of reality, shaping the unconscious categories through which I perceive events. Just as being from New York or rural Georgia gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so spending time in Springsteen’s universe inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.
Then there is the man himself. Like other parts of the emotional education, it is hard to bring the knowledge to consciousness, but I do think important lessons are communicated by that embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself. I do think a message is conveyed in the way he continually situates himself within a tradition — de-emphasizing his own individual contributions, stressing instead the R&B groups, the gospel and folk singers whose work comes out through him.
I’m not claiming my second education has been exemplary or advanced. I’m describing it because I have only become aware of it retrospectively, and society pays too much attention to the first education and not enough to the second.
In fact, we all gather our own emotional faculty — artists, friends, family and teams. Each refines and develops the inner instrument with a million strings.
Last week, my kids attended their first Springsteen concert in Baltimore. At one point, I looked over at my 15-year-old daughter. She had her hands clapped to her cheeks and a look of slack-jawed, joyous astonishment on her face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing — 10,000 people in a state of utter abandon, with Springsteen surrendering himself to them in the center of the arena.
It begins again.
And afterwards he took her for a special outing to the Applebee’s salad bar… Here’s Mr. Cohen:
There is a Persian saying that goes, “Your coming is in your hands, but your leaving is in the hands of God.”
Shortly before I left Iran on June 24, there was a late-night knock at the door of my hotel room. Alright, I thought, this is it.
By then I was one of the few Western journalists left in Tehran after a savage post-election clampdown and I had been working for more than a week despite the revocation of my press pass.
As I moved, heart thumping, toward the door, I imagined being dragged blindfolded into the hell of Evin prison, built by the shah for the brutalizing of his political prisoners, used for the same purpose by the Islamic Republic.
“Laundry, sir. We forgot these.”
A hotel employee was holding a couple of shirts. I thanked him, tossed them on a sofa, and breathed out: Fear the worst but never bow to it.
I looked down at the lights of Tehran, cradled in its mountainous amphitheater. In 1936, the shah’s father had banned the veil in a furious Ataturk-like push for Westernization. In 1979, the Islamic Republic had re-imposed the hijab on all women. Now, in 2009, a reformist movement trying to chart a middle course — a non-theocratic but also non-secular path — had been bloodied before my eyes. Iran’s tragedy overwhelmed me.
A few days later, I did leave and found my parting in the hands not of God but of the Revolutionary Guards at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The stubble-faced ghouls duly toyed with me, leaving me humiliated, before letting me go.
The last people I saw were Nazila Fathi, long the wonderful New York Times local correspondent in Tehran, her husband Babak Pasha, and their children, Shayan, 5, and Tina, 3. Through 12 tumultuous post-electoral days Nazila was at my side as we were chased and tear-gassed. She never lost her composure.
By then her apartment — seen in paranoid regime eyes as a center for fomenting “velvet revolutions” and “soft overthrows” — was under constant surveillance. Evin, or worse, beckoned.
On July 1, a week after me, Nazila and her family left with a suitcase for a long-planned vacation in Canada. Five months later, they have been unable to return. They have followed millions of Iranians — an immense pool of lost talent — into exile. Dual Canadian and Iranian citizens, they have settled for now in Toronto.
That is why I came here. My debt to Nazila is immense.
She calls me — that bright, sing-song voice — and tells me there’s been a murder at the entrance to her Toronto apartment building. I start laughing. But it’s true. Canada has put on a little Iran show for us.
On Nazilia’s table are Iranian pistachios — a taste of the forbidden. She turns on the TV and there, on “60 Minutes,” is another Canadian-Iranian journalist, Maziar Bahari, who was seized in June and held in Evin prison for 118 days. We see images, filmed by Bahari, of the Basiji shooting into the crowd on June 15 and a slain man falling. Nazila and I were 100 yards from the scene.
I shudder. Bahari, a Newsweek correspondent, tells his story (as he does also in the current Newsweek) with a fine lucidity: the slapping, the lashing and death threats, the accusations that he was a velvet revolution “mastermind.”
When Bahari watches himself making a forced “confession” — that the media did give “moral support for the people who took part in those illegal gatherings” — his remorse is almost too much to bear. When you’re “broken under pressure,” he remarks, it’s hard to “gather your pieces.”
Nazila and I give each other a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God look. There are hundreds like Bahari. Iran since June 12 has veered into a paranoid bunker. President Barack Obama has been too weak on human rights abuses in Iran.
To say “the world continues to bear witness” to the “powerful calls for justice” of Iranians, as he did on Nov. 3, is not good enough. He needs to express the outrage of the United States of America.
Sure, Iran sees Evin as the mirror image of Guantánamo. But undoing that U.S. aberration was central to Obama’s message. Speaking out against the abuse of Iranian political prisoners must be equally so. Obama should continue to seek engagement — it’s the only way forward — while denouncing the outrages.
His bedside reading should be Haleh Esfandiari’s brilliant, shattering book “My Prison, My Home,” in which the Wilson Center scholar recounts her own 2007 Evin nightmare.
Hillary Clinton did mention Bahari. That, the Newsweek man says, is the “best thing that can happen to any prisoner, that you know someone cares about you.” Obama has not made it clear enough, name by name, that he cares.
“Fathi” — the name of his beloved, lost, longed-for grandfather — is the word little Shayan has scrawled on his bedroom walls.
Iran is betraying its aching children. There is a middle path, Shiite and democratic, of which Nazila and Babak and countless others could be part. Their country has been hijacked. The waste is immeasurable — and unnecessary.
Now here’s Prof. Krugman:
Should we use taxes to deter financial speculation? Yes, say top British officials, who oversee the City of London, one of the world’s two great banking centers. Other European governments agree — and they’re right.
Unfortunately, United States officials — especially Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — are dead set against the proposal. Let’s hope they reconsider: a financial transactions tax is an idea whose time has come.
The dispute began back in August, when Adair Turner, Britain’s top financial regulator, called for a tax on financial transactions as a way to discourage “socially useless” activities. Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, picked up on his proposal, which he presented at the Group of 20 meeting of leading economies this month.
Why is this a good idea? The Turner-Brown proposal is a modern version of an idea originally floated in 1972 by the late James Tobin, the Nobel-winning Yale economist. Tobin argued that currency speculation — money moving internationally to bet on fluctuations in exchange rates — was having a disruptive effect on the world economy. To reduce these disruptions, he called for a small tax on every exchange of currencies.
Such a tax would be a trivial expense for people engaged in foreign trade or long-term investment; but it would be a major disincentive for people trying to make a fast buck (or euro, or yen) by outguessing the markets over the course of a few days or weeks. It would, as Tobin said, “throw some sand in the well-greased wheels” of speculation.
Tobin’s idea went nowhere at the time. Later, much to his dismay, it became a favorite hobbyhorse of the anti-globalization left. But the Turner-Brown proposal, which would apply a “Tobin tax” to all financial transactions — not just those involving foreign currency — is very much in Tobin’s spirit. It would be a trivial expense for long-term investors, but it would deter much of the churning that now takes place in our hyperactive financial markets.
This would be a bad thing if financial hyperactivity were productive. But after the debacle of the past two years, there’s broad agreement — I’m tempted to say, agreement on the part of almost everyone not on the financial industry’s payroll — with Mr. Turner’s assertion that a lot of what Wall Street and the City do is “socially useless.” And a transactions tax could generate substantial revenue, helping alleviate fears about government deficits. What’s not to like?
The main argument made by opponents of a financial transactions tax is that it would be unworkable, because traders would find ways to avoid it. Some also argue that it wouldn’t do anything to deter the socially damaging behavior that caused our current crisis. But neither claim stands up to scrutiny.
On the claim that financial transactions can’t be taxed: modern trading is a highly centralized affair. Take, for example, Tobin’s original proposal to tax foreign exchange trades. How can you do this, when currency traders are located all over the world? The answer is, while traders are all over the place, a majority of their transactions are settled — i.e., payment is made — at a single London-based institution. This centralization keeps the cost of transactions low, which is what makes the huge volume of wheeling and dealing possible. It also, however, makes these transactions relatively easy to identify and tax.
What about the claim that a financial transactions tax doesn’t address the real problem? It’s true that a transactions tax wouldn’t have stopped lenders from making bad loans, or gullible investors from buying toxic waste backed by those loans.
But bad investments aren’t the whole story of the crisis. What turned those bad investments into catastrophe was the financial system’s excessive reliance on short-term money.
As Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick of Yale have shown, by 2007 the United States banking system had become crucially dependent on “repo” transactions, in which financial institutions sell assets to investors while promising to buy them back after a short period — often a single day. Losses in subprime and other assets triggered a banking crisis because they undermined this system — there was a “run on repo.”
And a financial transactions tax, by discouraging reliance on ultra-short-run financing, would have made such a run much less likely. So contrary to what the skeptics say, such a tax would have helped prevent the current crisis — and could help us avoid a future replay.
Would a Tobin tax solve all our problems? Of course not. But it could be part of the process of shrinking our bloated financial sector. On this, as on other issues, the Obama administration needs to free its mind from Wall Street’s thrall.
