free variable

I generally don’t listen to commercial radio (with the exception of crack-like ESPN Radio), but Andrea likes some of the music on “Triple-M,” a station we have in town. (Since my charming, intelligent, and cultured wife enjoys this station, I should probably redact my earlier assessment of its probable target demographic.)

“Triple-M” has this unbelievably vapid morning show. (Andrea and I both agree on this point.) One gets the sense that “Zach and Kitty,” the hosts, are just as stupid as any other commercial radio morning show personalities, but — unlike their peers — are about as aggressive as refrigerated mayonnaise and ludicrously inoffensive to boot. I know this because the gym in which I used to work out played the “Triple-M” morning show every day. This imposed a rigid structure on my workout:

I could start to bench-press upon hearing another “daring” joke involving the word “whoopee;” I could move on to the treadmill when they read another fawning, unctuous letter from a listener who was SO HAPPY that their station ACTUALLY PLAYED obscure music by that edgy, hip Dave Matthews Band; and I could hit the showers when they started reading “zany” news items, glossing them with irrelevant and poorly-thought-out commentary.

This morning, Andrea gave me a ride in to the office. I turned the radio to the Unbelievably Vapid Hour with Zach and Kitty. After yapping at each other about how EXCITING it was that Sting would be gracing the Kohl Center with his presence sometime (and OMG TICKETS GO ON SALE THIS WEEK!!!), they moved on to their “zany” news item. Apparently, many people are angry about an “American Girl” story that makes Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood appear undesirable; Mattel has not backed down and is using words like “censorship.”

For future reference: If someone other than the government does it, it’s not censorship. That’s just how these things work.

In the book, the girl’s family moves from Pilsen to the suburbs; the girl’s mother claims that this is necessary because that part of the city is “no place to grow up.” This is really a non-story, and it’s not that funny; therefore, it fails on both the “substantial” and “zany” counts. Why are they wasting my time reading it when they could be playing some morose R.E.M. song for the fiftieth time? Cue the asinine editorializing:

Zach said: “Well, obviously I’d be happier about this if they had moved to Wisconsin.” [ed.: ?]

Kitty then started to say something smart: “Are we just saying that it’s OK to censor^* somebody just because they say something bad about the inner city?” Wow. I’m amazed. Are we actually admitting that unpopular speech shouldn’t be intimidated out of the public sphere by the most organized groups of thin-skinned lackwits? Unfortunately, apparently we are not. Kitty continued: “I mean, let’s clean up the inner city and then there won’t be anything bad to say about it.”

Andrea and I instantly started laughing. She wondered if Kitty planned to show up in some rough neighborhood with a broom and dustpan; I pictured a busload of Madison West High National Honor Society members heading south on I-90, singing the latest from Hootie and the Blowfish together. What on earth could it mean to “clean up” the inner city?

Since I don’t hold myself to the same standards as radio personalities, I’ll use an amusing anecdote as an excuse to dive into a tangentially-related screed.

To me, Kitty’s sentiment — that, hey, it’s undesirable to restrict or inhibit speech, so let’s just create a world where we all agree — reflects a the real failing of a certain subset of the political discussion in America. This sort of utopian rhetoric is just a way to avoid talking about difficult problems. Indeed, were there a new, perfect creation, we’d have no cause to argue, but who’s to say that it’s possible for us to build it? Certainly, empirical evidence doesn’t support the idea that we can construct a flawless society or eliminate social ills. Of course, it is well within the effect of policy decisions to ameliorate many problems affecting the public — but why bother making someone’s life better when you could, in just a few short years, make it perfect?

Since progress towards the immanent Elysium always seems to come up quite short (when it is measurable and forward at all), these sorts of arguments rapidly shift to the process, plans, and ostensible motivations involved: How are we creating heaven on earth? Aren’t we smart for coming up with such a theoretically beautiful approach to these policy minutiae? Look at how sincere I am about human suffering!

When progress inevitably fails, the excuses start rolling in: We didn’t try hard enough! We didn’t spend enough money! This was an inauthentic or insufficient implementation of my beautiful approach — it’s never really been tried! You therefore have no empirical evidence to sully my framework! When I hear these things, I think of Pyramid Power.

In the sixth grade, I entered the science fair at my school. I had written a BASIC program to calculate what lengths of steel conduit would vibrate at certain frequencies, and had built an equal-tempered glockenspiel using this information. (No one told me that it wasn’t an “Engineering Fair!”) Across the aisle from me was Pyramid Power, which is perhaps the greatest science fair project I’ve ever seen.

The hypothesis of Pyramid Power was simple and elegant: if one built a pyramid out of cardboard and covered it with electrical tape, then one could run a wire from said pyramid to a potted plant. The plant would then flourish uncontrollably, thanks to Pyramid Power. To demonstrate Pyramid Power, the student had executed a controlled experiment.

The poster contained all of the typical elementary-school science fair details: hypothesis, experimental method, equipment, results, and conclusion. The experiment, sadly, had not gone well: the control group plant had flourished uncontrollably, but the experimental plant had withered away and died. Fortunately, this did not put a damper on the success and theoretical beauty of Pyramid Power; as the conclusion detailed: “Clearly, we needed a bigger pyramid.”

This story is funny because it is obvious to anyone with the remotest sense of how science is supposed to work that a falsified hypothesis should not lead you to conclude that your hypothesis is correct, but your implementation was flawed. There’s no justification for deriving that belief from a failed experiment!

What isn’t funny is that we don’t accept that sort of reasoning from students once they get to junior high school. Funding agencies certainly don’t accept it from professional researchers, whose operating budgets generally require vast amounts of cardboard and electrical tape. Why should we accept it from our politicians, whose “experiments” cost astronomic sums and have the potential to ruin lives and families, not just potted plants?

^* Kitty, please see my above note about “censorship.”