(1) What with all the big papers getting a little WikiLeaks action, I thought I might too. So here, from WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables on the problem of what to do with the 174 remaining Guantanamo detainees (via the February 2011 issue of Harper's--no link) is proof that politicians can be clever even behind closed doors:
"I've just thought of something," the king [Abdullah of Saudi Arabia] added, and proposed implanting detainees with an electronic hip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth. This was done with horses and falcons, the king said. [White House adviser John] Brennen replied, "Horses don't have good lawyers."] -U.S. Embassy Riyadh
Brennen might have also noted that the Government of the United States of America, should, as a general rule, avoid treating people in its custody like horses and falcons...
(2) And speaking of laughs, let's turn to the Republican National Committee. Though Michael Steele and his off the hook, lesbian bondage fiasco-style politics are gone, there is at least one reason to keep an eye on the RNC: the fascinating intonation of new RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. As Mark Liberman at Language Log notes:
In the tradition of English intonational description that goes back to Henry Sweet, Harold Palmer, and Roger Kingdon, the contours of the tonic syllables of tone-units have come to be called "nuclear tones". There are various inventories and taxonomies of these patterns — thus David Crystal ("The analysis of nuclear tones", in L.R. Waugh & C.H. Van Schooneveld, Eds.,, The melody of language: intonation and prosody, 1979) discusses seven ("Low fall", "High fall", "Low rise", "High rise", "Level", "Rise-fall", and "Fall-rise"), and alludes to others (e.g. "fall-level", "rise-fall-rise"). The question of how to characterize these patterns remains a subject for debate: What are the tonal "atoms" that make up these contours, and how do they combine? What are their dimensions of quantitative variation? For example, American linguists since Pike have generally preferred to decompose rises and falls into sequences of level targets. Other recent approaches have decomposed local regions of pitch contours via orthogonal polynomials or functional principal components analysis. In any system, it's natural to wonder whether the "high" and "low" variants of rises and falls are really qualitatively distinct patterns or just parts of a pitch-range continuum. The most important difficulty is the lack of any intonational equivalent of psychological "word constancy". If you promise a class of elementary-school kids that the first one to raise a hand when you next say "chickadee" will get a dollar, you can expect some arguments about whose hand went up first, but not about whether you said the word; in contrast, if you offer a reward for flagging your next "high rising nuclear tone" (of course exemplifying it rather than naming it), you'll get confused looks at first, eventually replaced by plenty of arguments about whether you produced one or not. For similar reasons, it's hard to trust phonetic studies of intonational categories whose data is produced by asking laboratory subjects to pronounce particular contours. But the distribution of English intonational patterns in natural speech seems to be roughly as non-uniform as the distribution of words; and so some contours are less studied than others just because they're usually less common. This is where Mr. Priebus comes in. Judging from his remarks after being elected the new chair of the Republican National Committee, he's a reliable source of the "level" nuclear tone, which is otherwise somewhat difficult to find.
If you know what the hell Liberman is talking about, then I'm sure you're very excited (and smarter than I am). There are examples of Priebus's fascinating intonation at Language Log.
Thank God, I guess, that someone is studying these sorts of things.
(3)The following are excerpts from the forum, "A Super Bowl Spot for Uncle Sam," a transcript of which appeared in the February 2011 issue of Harper's (no link). The premise of the forum is this:
During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, polls showed that more than 70 percent of Americans trusted the federal government, purveyor of such beloved products as the interstate highway system, the G.I. Bill, and the Social Security check. Then, abruptly, in 1966, the government's favorability ratings began to fall, and fall. Last September, when pollsters at Gallup asked Americans to "describe the federal government in one word or phrase," 72 percent of the responses were pejorative. ... We may be more politically polarized than ever, but when it comes to the federal government, we stand united in our disgust. One often hears that we should run government like a business. What would a business do if it saw brand loyalty give way to such brand hostility? Wouldn't its executives summon the alchemists of advertising? The day after last November's midterm elections, Harper's Magazine gathered creatives from four ad agencies and assigned them a daunting task: to develop a television spot for the federal government. And not just any television spot. We wanted one both memorable enough and entertaining enough to compete in the most expensive televised-marketing event of the year--the Super Bowl.
So, best. premise. ever. right? Some choice moments:
Perry Fair: The train station I use has a huge sign saying, THIS RENOVATION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE STIMULUS PACKAGE. I'm like, "By who?" There's no branding. I walk away all, like, "Thank you, that's nice." This is the worst print ad I've ever fucking seen.
And,
Thomas Frank: As far as government advertising goes, we're not aiming for anything dishonest. That's what the Soviets did. If the Soviets said it, it was propaganda. Mark Fitzloff:They had some really nice posters, though.
And,
Fitzloff: Let's mate a donkey and an elephant and have their offspring talk. Perry Fair: A donkephant. A green donkephant. Sobier: Green's to polarizing. Hohn: All the colors are taken! Fitzloff: Purple. Hohn: No, purple's got some problems.
And, from a storyboard of an ad
The Supreme Court justices dance onstage in a Rockettes Kick line. A surprisingly nimble Ruth Bader Ginsburg breaks the line to do a high to-touch jump, landing in a split.
I must say, I like the idea of "branding" the government, but I'm not sure a superbowl ad is necessary. How about better "print ads" for construction problems? How about a receipt for your taxes (Ezra Klein links to a couple of examples)? More effective, I would think--though far less funny.
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