Speaking of Debt...

Not that I was, though God knows I spend enough of my time reading about it on the net, trying to understand whether we are truly in a situation where assets are temporarily undervalued or, by contrast, where assets are absolutely correctly valued at their new low prices, having for some considerable number of years been getting themselves highly overvalued.  As an English major and a philosophically inclined sort, I’m partial to some kind of Platonic view of value, which is to say that I like the idea that things have absolute value.  The economist, including the one I live with, is inclined more to the idea that the value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it.  Thus, a house might well have been worth $100K last year but now be worth only $65K this year, even though nothing about the house has changed.

So I am puzzled by the idea that economists talk about the housing bubble, and about how people were paying more for a house “than it is worth,” since I have been schooled by the economists to say that whatever someone pays is what its worth.

And, Huzzah!  As I puzzle over these matters, the CBC brings to my attention last year’s Massey Lecture, a series of five hour-long lectures on the topic of debt.  It is written and presented by that famous economist (irony alert), Margaret Atwood.  I have listened to three hours so far and, though I am not a very big Atwood novel fan, these lectures are a delight.  She is reading them and she is not the best reader of lectures that I have ever heard, but it is easy enough to look/hear/think past that because the material she is presenting is so extremely interesting.  She ranges all over the place: etymology, mythology, religion, literary criticism, economics, history, psychological theory, here there and everywhere she goes, showing how debt and its concept-cluster siblings play a central role in the meaning of western culture.

For example: Debt is likely to be understood differently depending upon whether the culture is in a phase in which having things is seen as a mark of God's favor, as opposed to a more ascetic phase in which having things is an embarrassment.  Another example: Jesus, the redeemer.  I’m obviously used to the phrase from my own religious background, but I never thought about why that is the word that is used to describe his role.  The most common meaning of redemption, for me, is in the context of pawn shops.  You redeem things you’ve pawned with a redemption ticket.  I’ve never actually pawned anything, but it’s a common enough phenomenon in novels.  But what does Jesus have in common with pawn shop redemption?  Ah, you’ll have to listen to the lectures to learn.  (The link function of Blogger isn't working today, so you'll have to cut and paste:  http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey/massey2008.html)

The Massey Lectures are one of the things that keep me in mind of Canada’s place in the public intellectual pantheon (as compared to the U.S., say), and especially in the public broadcasting world.  Five nights a week, the CBC puts forward a one-hour program, a documentary in essence, about some important issue.  The program is called Ideas and that’s what it is.  The U.S. public radio system copied the Canadian’s CBC’s news program (“As It Happens”) to give U.S. public radio  ‘All Things Considered.’  Unfortunately, it never took up a similar effort with regard to Ideas, although “This American Life” rises to the challenge many weeks.  But it’s not a five-hour a week program!

In addition, each year, Ideas’ producers select someone to give a five-part Massey Lecture, and then they broadcast it, one hour each night for a week.  I’ve heard most of them over the past 16 years and never been disappointed, though some have stayed with me longer than others.  They’re all available on their website.  Just in case you’ve got five hours available.  They deserve special credit for doing Atwood’s Debt series last year.  Just-in-time supply, indeed.

Music to Someone's Ears

A friend who lives on the other side of the U.S.-Canadian border urges me by email to write in protest to the CBC. It seems that the CBC2 program that he used to listen to while driving home, which played Mozart to calm his weary and presumably frazzled brain, has been replaced by a new CBC2 radio program which plays the music of the DHKS, which appears to be pronounced ‘ducks’ and which appears to be the name of a band out of Winnipeg. My friend is not happy.

Probably none of us old folks is happy about this, even if we are not regular 5 p.m. Mozart listeners. The CBC, which in many ways is one of the crown jewels of Canada—even more than U.S. public radio is a crown jewel of U.S. radio broadcasting—has come upon hard times. The CBC is adequately funded by the government. It is not always having to beg listeners to give them money.

What the CBC is facing up to is a generational challenge. People who listen to CBC radio are old people. And if only old people listen to it, then the old people will eventually depart the radio scene in their grand departure from all scenes, and then the younger people will no longer be interested in funding the CBC. So the CBC embarked about eight years ago on a project to make its programming more relevant to younger people (and, alas, less relevant, to its long time and older listeners).

I have never been a big listener to CBC2, which is the classical radio channel that my friend is so unhappy about, but I surely have noted how the programming on CBC1 and 2 has changed. I used to listen to CBC1 much of the day, even though I could just as easily listen to U.S. public radio. But no longer since the Big Change. Programs about books and reading are replaced by programs about bands from Winnepeg; interviews and conversations with people involved in serious issues are replaced with interviews and conversations with singers and bands from the world of rock and contemporary popular music and people who blather about 'human interest' matters. I don’t even know the right words to categorize the bands. They’re not my mother’s music, for sure, and not mine, either; maybe not even my children’s, but possibly my grandchildren’s. Even a program that plays some of the best music on the CBC and hosted by a young-ish classical/jazz pianist who is a wonder in his knowledge of music and his ability to talk about it is cluttered about 40% of its running time with mindless babble that reminds me of Valley Girl talk. This program, ‘The Key of Charles,’ is one of the most schizophrenic radio music programs I’ve ever heard. I listen now and then and am always charmed by the actual music and appalled by the conversation. Maybe it’s the CBC’s attempt to keep both audiences attending. It does make me cringe, even as i continue to listen.

I heard someone talking on the radio a few months ago about some study showing that most people’s musical tastes solidify by the time they’re 35, and after that, they rarely buy CD’s or otherwise choose to listen to any one they didn’t listen to before that time. I mentally checked my own purchases and preferences and was pleased to identify quickly at least a half a dozen new people in my listening repertoire who showed up long after my 35th year. However, upon reconsideration, I realized that almost all the new people were actually old people: performers who were recording before I was 35 and I just hadn’t gotten around to listening to them until well after then. Miles Davis and Bill Evans, for example. And the few who didn’t fit that category? Well, Kristen Chenoweth who would have been the brightest star on Broadway if only she’d gotten there 20 or 30 years sooner; The Ahn Trio, whom I first heard playing Jimmy Hendrix’s ‘Rider in the Rain;’ and Eva Cassidy, who also is a singer of the 70’s who wasn’t born soon enough to have performed then. Madeleine Peyroux? Well, mostly she sounds like Billy Holladay, who was way before my thirties.

I guess the CBC is entitled, like the moving finger, to write and move on to the ‘DHKS.’ It’s just that us old ‘uns are stuck back at the beginning of the music.

Radio: Turn It Up!

As Van Morrison said. I’ve always been a radio listener, perhaps because my father built a crystal set when he was just a kid and then grew up to fix radios for a living. I can remember lying in bed at night, listening to big, powerful stations that came through only in the dark: Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Seattle. I used to be a big public radio listener, as well, but now I’m down to ‘To the Point’ (KCRW), ‘Prairie Home Companion,’ ‘Saint Paul Sunday,’ ‘The Jonathan Schwarz Show’ (WNYC), and ‘This American Life.’ And I listen to them all on the computer.

When I came to Canada, I discovered the CBC and a kind of radio that was really quite different from radio as I knew it. The 3-hour morning show, called ‘Morningside,’ I believe, might as easily have been called ‘Here’s What You Need to Know to Be a Canadian.’ It was run/hosted by a long-time CBC radio person named Peter Gzowski and he was a national treasure. Smart, funny, amiable, welcoming, interested and interesting, and indefatigable. Five mornings a week for three hours a morning, he carried on interesting conversations with people from all over the world and always with a view to my better understanding of how a Canadian would approach the topics that were covered, whether it was popular music or world peace. From Gzowski, I learned what it was like to be--that is, how the people of Canada were affected by-- living next to a behemoth like the United State. Some of living next door to the U.S. was good, some of it was bad, some of it was neutral. He never tried to create conflict for entertainment value or to increase conflict in those areas where there was already too much conflict for clear thinking. One of the best teachers I ever heard and one, of course, I never saw. What Gzowski showed me was how it is possible to teach without arrogance, to be a ‘pundit’ (which he would have denied he was, of course) without arrogance. And when I listened to American radio, I would hear that arrogance in so many of the voices, even on the public radio.

A national treasure, but he died anyway. And the CBC decided it didn’t want to spend quite so much money keeping the national culture before the population on a regular basis, and maybe there wasn’t anyone who could live up to Gzowski’s legacy. Michael Enright tried for a year, but it’s a brutal schedule and he moved to a more forgiving Sunday show. Then the CBC decided that young people didn’t listen to the kind of shows they had on: smart, literate, educated programming. So now, the CBC is largely populated by younger people who are hip and hiphoppy or whatever. In any case, now I rarely turn it on.

Except for ‘Ideas,’ an equally wonderful and strange throwback program that is remarkably un-American in its very nature, or at least since the U.S. got out of the 19th Century. ‘Ideas’ is like having Chautauqua every weekday night in your living room. You turn it on at 9 p.m. and you listen to a lecture on monetary policy that some smart dude is giving in Montreal, or a documentary about how to cultivate and eat oysters in the waters of B.C., or how women live in cloistered convents, or whether the idea of progress in human affairs is a reasonable idea to an Oxford historian, or even five consecutive lectures by Michael Ignatieff on human rights. When I first started listening, ‘Ideas’ was run by Mr. Sinclair. I thought it strangely Canadian to call him this, but it was sort of like Mr. Rogers, I thought. Certainly Mr. Sinclair was to adults as Mr. Rogers was to children. Eventually, I realized that his name was “LISTER” Sinclair, not Mr. Sinclair. Not the first nor the last time that I misunderstand something because I thought of it as being peculiarly Canadian.

Lister Sinclair, too, was a national treasure, and he also died anyway. But the program goes on still, Monday through Friday nights. Michael Enright fills one regular slot and the rest has the same kind of variety that Lister Sinclair gave it. And I seriously doubt that it appeals much to a younger audience, so its days may be numbered. But for now, you too can listen to (some of) it, because one program/week is podcast. Go to cbc and then to ‘ideas.’ Or you can listen every night on the net. Radio: turn it up! And about progress in moral and political affairs? ‘Not a chance,’ says the Oxford professor.