The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Where Dylan Thomas meets Atul Gawande; or, Let Go Gently, for Here Comes the Night

    If Atul Gawande had been the editor for Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” we might have gotten something like, “Let Go Gently, for Here Comes the Night,” the long and “The long, the long and lonely night night, night, night, night, night, night…” as Van Morrison sang with Them, fading away.

    Atul Gawande, the Harvard Medical School professor, general and endocrine surgeon, and advisor to presidents, argues, in his latest New Yorker article, “Letting Go,” that Dylan Thomas’s famous poem might more efficiently and effectively have gone something like this:

    Go gentle into that good night, Old age need not burn and rave at close of day; No need to Rage, to rage against the dying of the light. Wise men know dark is right, night is night, night is right, And they know whatever their words, those closest to them care. So wave bye-bye while you still can lift your hand, While you can still dance with your nurses, While you are still a wild man singing in the face of the sun, Do not grieve – grief is for those you leave behind. Grief is rage spent. Go, go gentle into that good night.

    And maybe he’d throw in some stuff about shooting stars and eyes and then end with a prayer: “…my father, now brought gracefully down from the sad heights of the elevated hospital bed, all the tubes pulled out, the IV’s withdrawn, and you back in a warm pair of faded blue jeans, back home, back in the saddle again…while we with our mild tears fear and pray, go gentle into that good night; don’t ‘Rage, [don’t] rage against the dying of the light.’”

    Gawande’s thesis is simple, clear, difficult but delivered with clarity: we need to have this discussion, to juxtapose Dylan Thomas’s poem against the raw night with the one now descending outside our window, the one the doctors can’t help us avoid, for they are not gods, and besides, like the gods of old, they make mistakes.

    Dylan Thomas wrote his poem about his father dying just a short time before his own premature death. I’m not sure if Dylan raged against the dying of the light, but he sure seems to have worked it while he could. Yet, perhaps this poem is his own rage against his own hand he sees reaching for the light switch.

    Listen to Dylan Thomas reading his poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

  • Gaggle Me-Researcher Project Spilled on WankiLeaks

    Gaggle, a new Internet start-up whose IPO and purpose have been double-secret rumors for months (it’s not yet clear if Gaggle portends a new great vowel shift or if there’s a schism in the works), has just had its cover blown by WankiLeaks, the surreptitious, hole-and-corner whistle-blowing site.

    According to the story just leaked, Gaggle’s primary project is called “Gaggle Me-Researcher.” You enter your information in the Gaggle Me-Researcher tool, and it reveals “thyself,” which you can then come to know.

    Using a kind of sic et non computer code, Gaggle Me-Researcher collects all the data from your computer, from your email, your social networking sites, your documents, your Excel files, your photos – any program, file, or folder beginning with “My.” It also collects all of the data from all of your friends’ computers, from anyone ever connected to your computer in any way, including spammers – the information, the data, from anything you’ve ever touched using your computer. Gaggle Me-Researcher then compiles a comprehensive profile of you, called “Meself.”

    It’s not yet clear how Gaggle Me-Researcher collects your DNA, but it apparently does. This allows Gaggle Me-Researcher to trace the individual user’s “self-data” all the way back to Mitochondrial Eve or Y-chromosomal Adam. Thus, ultimately, according to Professor emeritus Stephen Jama of South Santa Monica Bay College, insider consultant to the Gaggle Me-Researcher project, to “know thyself,” is to know everyone else.

    According to WankiLeaks, Gaggle’s introductory offer will include the catchy claim, “It’s never been easier to ‘know thyself.’”

    “Ask not for whom the whistle blows,” Professor Jama concluded, somewhat cryptically, “it blows for thee.”

  • Where Flannery O’Connor meets Julia Roberts on Late Night Talk Shows

    We watched some late night TV last night, after class and before getting back to work on a suspended sestina, flipping back and forth between the two format giants, Letterman and Leno. Polished Letterman is the APA stylist of the late night television talk show. His “Top 10” list, for example, is always delivered according to strict formatting rules. He doesn’t wait for the laugh, but interrupts himself after each number, announcing the next number, tossing each card away – it’s a throwaway joke. He could be reading from a menu announcing the evening specials at a swank restaurant. If Letterman is APA, Leno is MLA, and The Tonight Show proceeds with ethos borrowed from Johnny Carson, the original stylist. For both Letterman and Leno, strict formatting rules govern the fit of suits, the colors and knots of ties (the tie remains the essential costume piece, signifying a governing body) the buttoning and unbuttoning of jackets. They both must sit stage left, slightly elevated above their guest, protected by a faux desk, a prop, but note their desks are at opposite ends of the stage, a stylistic difference that conforms to the meaningless but self-sustaining differences between APA and MLA. Form and content merge into one smooth, purposeful style. Last night, both Letterman and Leno sported purple in their ties, surely an oblique reference to Flannery O’Connor’s use of color as an ecclesiastical prelude to sanctifying grace.

    Letterman’s grace last night appeared in the form of Julia Roberts, introduced by Letterman with such gravity one expected the appearance of an angel, and in this the audience was not disappointed.

    According to the Inland Register, in a review of Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Flannery appeared on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen, the original host, which would have put the appearance sometime in the mid-1950’s. We’ve not read the Gooch biography, but any reference to a TV sighting of Flannery on The Tonight Show should be rigorously pursued, cited, and referenced. We’ll see, but a few Google Books searches of other Flannery biographies found no references to Steve Allen or The Tonight Show. Who knows, maybe Flannery had her own TV talk show in a broadcast limited locally around Andalusia, live peacocks walking around the set instead of fake New York City night-lit backgrounds.

    Meantime, it appears to be common knowledge that Conan O’Brien, briefly usurping Leno last year as MLA-Tonight Show host, wrote his Harvard thesis on Flannery O’Connor. According to the New York Times (para. 28), O’Brien’s thesis was on Flannery and Faulkner. We’re not sure if Flannery’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen is an arcane piece of trivia or if it too, like O’Brien’s Harvard thesis, is common knowledge. In any case, it seems an irony that Flannery would appreciate, her admirer O’Brien hosting the same show on which she appeared, only to be yanked. O’Brien failed to secure the revision of The Tonight Show manual of style because of the cumulative effect of wearing the wrong tie each night.

    Last night we took a look at “Good Country People,” later, watching TV, imagining Flannery chatting and laughing about her characters with Letterman (no idea at the time she actually had been on a talk show back in the 50’s), as Julia Roberts was doing, laughing for the audience, maintaining the stylistically approved appropriate authorial distance. Yet Julia commented, referring to the audience, “they want to be part of the experience,” and illustrated by gracefully acknowledging one like-minded woman in the audience who had commented on her running routine. But who wants to be part of a Flannery O’Connor experience? Maybe that’s why O’Brien failed. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Ah, Flannery; ah, humanity!

  • Bob Dylan Knows in Singing the Highway Dust is All Over; or, The Tunes They are a-changin’

    The oven bird, the icebox batty, the kitchen nook warbler – Bob Dylan can sing. Dylan’s voice blasted into the room on our old tin can speakers, that voice rising falsetto like a broken water heater then falling basso profundo like a coal car slowing for some hobo, a Sinatra nightmare, a barker in a carnie show, a crier of the street court. What do you think voices inside burning bushes sound like – Bing Crosby? But Dylan could do that too, as he showed on Nashville Skyline and the critically despised Self-Portrait album. But the voice of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, with the harmonica – a train wreck between the ears. But listeners may not value that kind of wake up call, a noogie across the ears, so they say Dylan can’t sing; but what do you want to hear in a song? He’s singing songs here, not soap or perfume ads, not elevator rides (“The yellow curb is for the loading and unloading of passengers only: no parking”). Dylan’s voice? It was electric before he ever plugged in. Dry location use only. Other types of fuses may burst. Put a nickel in your ear and a quarter in the machine. Dylan’s voice today? A slowly melting high voltage fuse. Like Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” Dylan “knows in singing not to sing,” and the “highway dust is over all,” and for that itinerate weary hobo, the dust is all over.

    From a 2006 Guardian review of Dylan’s Modern Times: “Here are the kind of jazzy songs that would count as mild-mannered crooning if they were performed by Bing Crosby, but which invariably take on a slightly unsettling air when subjected to Dylan’s catarrhal death rattle.”

    But the tunes they are a-changin’: check out Ben Sidran’s 2009 jazz covered Dylan, “Dylan Different.”

  • Where Everyone is a Writer and a Reader

    Writing in the New Yorker in December of 1928, E. B. White recounts an encounter with a paid for hire writer. The writer is getting paid “fifty cents a word,” and is grimly disappointed when White advises that “willy-nilly” gets a hyphen, “at a cost of half a dollar.” Laura Miller, writing in Salon, must be getting paid per word, for her June 22 article, bemoaning the recent rise of self-publishing, is about twice as long as it needs to be. Ostensibly about her concern for readers deluged in the self-published detritus of a slush pile tidal wave, the piece laments the loss of the professional slush pile reader, the entry-level editor who combs through trash piles of unsolicited material like an astronomer searching the night sky for life on another planet. Several assumptions support Laura’s claim that the adulteration of traditional publishing by self-publishing is ultimately to the detriment of the general interest reader: professional writers are better than amateur writers; all self-published works result from slush pile rejections; traditionally published material guarantees quality, and this stamp of official approval saves readers from having to make that decision for themselves. But at risk is an old character, a kind of modern-day Bartleby, the professional reader, the slush pile expert who is now out of work, who has been laboring at the risk of blindness and insanity all these years on behalf of the general interest reader to ensure only works of the highest quality reach their book of the month club selection options.

    We discovered Laura’s article in a post at HTML Giant, a relatively recent addition to our blog feeds, but yet another example of the kind of self-published material Laura bemoans. Roxane Gay presents a kind of opposing viewpoint to Laura’s piece, at least where the slush pile going public motif is concerned.

    So what do we have to add to the already too long and boring discussion? Well, we were thinking of self-published music. Most of what we hear on the radio, in spite of its imprimatur, sanctioned by the traditional music publishing system, in other words, professional work, we find hackneyed, superfluous, and platitudinous. Or consider television – also full of terrible work sanctioned by professional license. And against these works place the street corner crooner, the independent label, the throwaway zine, the twice visited blog, the indie film. We don’t see self-publishing as the problem in the same way that Laura views it as the problem.

    Writing again in the New Yorker, in December of 1948, E. B. White, under the title “Accredited Writers?” remarks: “Perhaps, as democracy assumes, every man is a writer, every man wholly needy, every man capable of unimaginable deeds.” As for us, we don’t mind taking the time to try to read what everyman, or everywoman, has to say, for every person has a story to tell. How well they tell it, how persuasive their argument, how lovely their prose or poetry, how surprising their style – these are our values, too, but, like Roxane, we also value the opportunity to compare and contrast, the better to evaluate for ourselves whose story for its honesty and originality bears repeating, for if every man or woman is a writer, they must also be a reader.

  • Drum, drum, drum

    Essays on music, as Greil Marcus has tried, just might save the personal essay from oblivion. “There is that stick coming down hard on the drum and the foot hitting the kick drum at the same time…”: Marcus takes a book to explicate Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which begins with the rim shot heard around the world, yet “the sound is so rich the song never plays the same way twice.” It’s hard to understand what comes later, drum machines, every time the same, and then no drums at all, according to Rick Moody, writing in the 2010 Believer music issue (July/August), quoting Depeche Mode’s David Gahan: “…were put down for using a drum machine onstage but the worst thing they ever did was to get a drummer.”

    Moody’s evaluative argument reprises the attitudinal value of live music played on instruments of personality, instruments that, like humans, vary, depending on the heat, the mugginess, the age and treatment, the locale. Depeche Mode, according to Moody, not so much evolves but matures, against a backdrop of Kraftwerk, whose machines, unlike Brautigan’s, don’t watch over us with loving grace, but with something else, something inhuman, but after surviving all the nihilism “you can’t help, it seems, to begin to express some gratitude. And then the music begins to reflect this gratitude, this human feeling.”

    The Believer’s Moody essay is apparently a clip from a longer version to be included in another collection of essays on music, this one to appear later this year from Little, Brown. Looking forward to seeing Rick Moody at Powell’s on Tuesday, August 3.

    Meantime, we are left wondering about this, from Moody’s essay: “…or in the case of Mouse on Mars, by affecting a very comical warmth that depends on reggae, bossa nova, surf, tango, and other disgraced and somewhat effusive music.” I hope Moody clarifies this comment somewhere in his book of essays on music – is he saying bossa nova, surf, and tango are disgraced? What about polka? What about Cajun? Slack-key? Slack-key cowboy?

    Reading the Moody essay and thinking of drumming was reminded of the “Venus HB” piece on Benny Goodman Today: Recorded Live in Stockholm (London SPB 21, 1970). This is Mozart’s “Turkish March,” arranged by Goodman, played on a Venus drawing pencil (and teeth). On the album, it functions as an intro to “Sing, Sing, Sing,” a drummer’s dissertation.

  • Where John Cage Lip-synchs with Lloyd Thaxton while Playing Guitar Hero

    “Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell advised, while Humanities instructors encourage students to “write about your passion.” But what if we find ourselves blissless and passionless? Or if we are passionate about anything, the last thing we want to do is to write about it, for that will suck the passion right out of the marrow. Better to write about what we lack passion for, about that which we know nothing. Then, like Beckett, we might write about the condition of our very blisslessness, blisslessly laughing at characters hoping for something to happen that might arouse their passion.

    Following one’s bliss might involve endless hours of playing Guitar Hero. Kiri Miller, an ethnomusicologist at Brown, writing in the Journal of the Society for American Music, challenges the common assumption that virtual instrumentalists have different values (want something different) than real instrumentalists. “Trouble,” the Music Man persuaded the good folks of River City, is a pool table; better to lip-synch with virtual instruments – the confidence man encourages learning music through the “think method.” Combining Miller’s Guitar Hero analysis with the Music Man’s “think method,” we might call reading a kind of virtual writing. When we read, we recreate the text, like a Guitar Hero player recreates the text of a song. Lloyd Thaxton was the king of lip-synchers, and on his show, The Lloyd Thaxton Show, real musicians lip-synched through canned performances of their own songs.

    Miller briefly evaluates the electronic music of John Cage in her article (pp. 404-405). Cage might be a precursor, probably not, but we can easily imagine him taking an interest and no doubt incorporating a Guitar Hero guitar into a composition. Cage also sums up the debate of the usefulness or value of virtual versus actual experience. In his manifesto on music, written in 1952, he says that “nothing is accomplished by writing [hearing or playing] a piece of music: our ears are now in excellent condition.” Yes, and ready for real guitar, Guitar Hero, or to read something by Beckett. Or, as Garry Moore said of Cage’s “Water Music”: “I’m with you, boy.”

  • Writing and its Discontents: Lady Gaga to Replace McChrystal

    I read with interest Caleb Crain’s recent post, about Freud, which begins with a doubt about blogging. Doubts about blogging can quickly reduce to an absurdity: why write at all? I’m beginning to suspect there are more readers than are being counted in the polls. The question is, what are we reading. Attendance at baseball games is down this year, but I still hear the hollow pop of the Whiffle ball in the street.

    When Eric’s new Rolling Stone arrived in the mail earlier this week I again shied away from the hardball cover. I glanced at the contents, made note of the McChrystal article, thumbed through the Lady Gaga interview. I missed the scoop, for suddenly Rolling Stone and McChrystal were big news. A post headline occurred to me: Lady Gaga to Replace McChrystal. According to the cover, she appears to have the qualifying equipment.

    I sometimes get the feeling professional writers would rather not have to blog. Hendrik Hertzberg’s post on the McChrystal story, at the New Yorker site, for example, argues that the McChrystal story is really about the fragmentation of journalism, the co-opting of stories by anyone with a laptop, and presentations carefully staged for a VIP audience, all of which creates a morale hazard for troops, a hazard which didn’t exist in previous wars. Hertzberg suggests that Rolling Stone and McChrystal conspired to pose the general and his cohort “…as really cool macho dudes.” Hertzberg says that “frontline troops nowadays are also online troops.” He thinks this is good, but how can it be good if at the same time, as Hertzberg suggests, we should still censor their mail? And why does Hertzberg conclude that McChrystal and his gang of on-line blogging-warriors “understood none of this”?

    Why should we keep from the troops the true character of their leaders, even if part of that character is a desire to fictionalize and present itself as something it’s not? But I didn’t read the Rolling Stone McChrystal article as fiction. (The Lady Gaga interview – now that’s fiction.) Do we think we can protect the troops from knowing what war is really like?

    Freud concludes his Civilization and Its Discontents with a discussion of ethics as a product of the super-ego to control “the constitutional inclination of human beings to be aggressive towards one another; and for that reason we are especially interested in what is probably the most recent of the cultural commands of the super-ego, the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself.”

    It may have been a fictional account carefully orchestrated, but I liked the profile of McChrystal in the Rolling Stone. I liked that he’s always been a discontent, that he wrote fiction, that, in fact, he may not be a very likable guy.

    Freud concludes: “One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgements of value follow directly his wishes for happiness – that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.” Freud thought our capacity for destruction, and particularly for self-destruction, a bad thing, and worth thinking about. No doubt, but deconstruction is not the same thing as destruction. We may have lost a general (through his own tendency toward self-destruction) willing and able to deconstruct the war in Afghanistan. Now we’re left with more Lady Gaga.

    Update, June 26: New Yorker editor Amy Davidson weighs in on her blog, Close Read, discussing the General of all bad comments, Patton. The comparison was inevitable. But Amy might have compared McChrystal to another WWII general, Omar Bradley (Patton’s nemesis and in many ways the archetypal opposite of McCrystal and Patton types) . The Google timeline (follow link) omits my famous meeting with General Bradley in front of the LA International Hotel, where I held a job parking cars at the front door, circa late 1960’s. The General came out in his dress uniform, having just addressed some dinner group. I’m sorry now that I don’t remember the exact date or the purpose of his appearance. But he stood at the curb in a waning Los Angeles beach evening (the hotel only a couple of miles from the water, at the east end of the airport), tall and stately in his dress uniform, alone, and so I walked up to him and introduced myself, and shook his hand. “General Bradley,” I said, “just wondering if I might say hello and shake your hand.” He shook my hand, and said, “of course.” “How are you, sir?” I asked. “I’m fine, thank you. It’s a lovely evening.” “Yes, sir.” His car (a small, chauffeured limo) by then had arrived at the curb and I opened the door for him and the car drove off. Not quite enough for a Rolling Stone article. Still, I was about to be drafted, but neither the prospect of my being drafted nor potential visceral evenings in Vietnam seemed to preclude a lovely evening in Los Angeles, then or since. Generals will always know more, and less, than their troops; reporters will always be most interested in what the generals knew they did not know.

  • How to Live Happily to 106: Happy Bloomsday, Mr. Leopold Bloom

    Articles celebrating victims of extreme old age usually ask about diet, so let’s get that out of the way first:

    “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

    The time is morning, the scene the house, the organ the kidney, the art economics, the symbol the nymph, the title Calypso, the technique mature narrative (Gilbert, 1930). The day was June 16, the year 1904, the place Dublin, the book James Joyce’s Ulysses.

    Speaking of mature narrative, Jonah Lehrer, over at the Frontal Cortex, has put up a post titled “Old Writers” in which he dispels the myth that writers do their best work when very young, that older writers can’t match the quality or creativity of their younger work, as if writer’s ink were a kind of dark blue testosterone that fades and weakens in potency with age. Lehrer concludes his post with “…different circumstances call for different kinds of creativity…The most successful artists aren’t slaves to their chronological age. Instead, they succeed by speaking to the age in which they live.”

    Works want readers, listeners, viewers, and they always want new readers, new listeners, new viewers, and when they don’t get them, they feel old and weak, remaindered and marked down, bagged for the garage sale: Books Penyeach.

    Pomes Penyeach was first published in 1927, when James Joyce was 45 years old. Joyce’s works are remarkable for their consistent creative originality that insists on new forms to communicate the events that parallel the writer’s age and the age of the writer. And they have not weakened over time, but have grown stronger with age. Perhaps it was those nutty gizzards. Almost certainly it must have been the burgundy, as Bloom suggests (although Joyce preferred white wines). In any case, the example of Joyce’s works expresses Lehrer’s definition of the successful artist, that the work has nothing to do with the age of the artist, but everything to do with the age at which the work is experienced.

  • Poetry, Politics, and the Mail; or, Fishing Without a License

    Why does anyone want to be a poet, and what events of chance make it possible? “It’s more original being a postman,” Pablo advises Mario.

    There’s something wrong with Mario. He’s a fisherman allergic to boats and the sea. So he takes a public servant job; he becomes a postman. But not just any postman. He’s the personal postman to Pablo Neruda at the time of the Chilean statesman-poet’s exile.

    Mario comes to poetry by accident, inspired not by poetic works but by desire for the women he hopes to attract and impress by simply being a poet. This is not so unusual; men do all sorts of silly things for the same reason, and Mario has seen that most of Pablo’s letters are from women and concludes they are amorous admirers of the poet.

    “It began as a mistake,” Bukowski’s Chinaski explains of his becoming a postman in the first line of Post Office, his novel about his experiences working postal jobs in the waning of post-WWII Los Angeles. Chinaski begins enthusiastically, thinking, like Mario, there might be women in his future.

    “This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes,” chirps Chinaski. Except that things don’t work out as expected. Just like Mario, Chinaski “didn’t even have a uniform, just a cap,” perhaps the first sign Chinaski would reject postal grace. He comes and goes in a kind of anti-route, and one imagines him chucking the letters, bills, and adverts and delivering instead poems like fish lures to casually selected homes.

    Indeed, “poets can do a lot of damage to people,” the politician Di Cosimo cautions Mario. Yes, and it’s no accident. The local politicians have been promising water for the island residents with every new election, only to renege once elected. The poet promises water, too.

    “Mail, over any length of time,” poet Charles Olson said in his The Post Office: A Memoir of His Father, “will tell secrets a neighbor could not guess. Nor do I mean the reading of postcards or the ‘lamping’ of letters. Nor what a man hears over coffee. Or that a man’s mail does not always come to his house, or a woman’s either. It lies more in the manner in which people look for, ask for, receive their mail. And talk about it.” We begin to see where Olson got his penchant for writing poetry. The postal bosses disliked Olson’s father for his strong work ethic and his union activity, and they tormented him until the route inspector finished him off, and he dies like a dead letter his son spends a lifetime searching for.

    Of the three, the only one who gets free is Chinaski, who wakes up alive to write a novel.

    The brick that’s pulled from Mario’s wall and explains his fall is his ability to read, unusual on the dry island, and explains the accident that follows: his winning poem prized by the communists who invite him to read at the political rally that erupts into a riot where he’s trampled and killed, a poet of the people, his paper dissipated under panicked feet, for every poem is a fish caught without a license.

  • Casual Causality: Beyond Proximate Cause; or, The O-Ring Syndrome Revisited

    An accident is an event that is fortuitous and unforeseen. That’s how life works. Yet we try to figure out what we did to deserve it and why we didn’t see it coming. But if we can figure it out, then it was not an accident. We might know how, but we can’t know why.

    First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes mama with the baby carriage. Love is an accident. BP’s drills appear as effective in avoiding undesired consequences as the Catholic Church’s promulgating the rhythm method for birth control. Both allow drilling to continue as a risky business with high promise of failure. For the Church, the method aimed to keep pews full; for BP, the deep water drilling without adequate protection aimed to keep its stocks on the rise.

    Ellen Goodman, writing in the Tri-City Herald back in 1983, discusses an ultimate proximate cause she labels “the O-Ring Syndrome,” the tendency to view catastrophic events as triggered by the failure of minute considerations. The term comes from the dramatic and awful disintegration of the 1986 space shuttle Challenger. The mission failure was attributed to an O-ring that malfunctioned, a tiny rubber seal that failed to perform its job and set in motion a chain of events that ultimately ended in damage and death. A correlative cause may have been cold weather. In any case, working backward from the first moment of irreparable or irreversible harm, one stops at the O-ring because it appears to be the end (and thus the beginning, or proximate cause) of the unbroken chain of events that lead to the accident.

    The problem with Goodman’s O-Ring Syndrome is that as an explanation it creates an illusion of control. If the O-ring is properly identified as the cause, we can avoid future accidents by ensuring the O-ring does not fail in the same way again, because, applying the “but for” test, had it not been for the failure of the O-ring, the accident would not have occurred. But the O-ring Syndrome as an explanation for accidents limits the explanation to events of physical or bodily damage. But what if an O-ring fails but does not lead to damage? Can the definition of accident be broadened to include events that do not necessarily lead to physical or bodily damage? If so, in the case of BP and the current Gulf oil leak, multiple accidents have already occurred.

    Finding the O-ring responsible for BP’s oil leak isn’t difficult, and correlations from ineffective regulatory agencies to manipulated workers to greedy BP executives have been suggested. If we look beyond the O-ring, prior to proximate cause, to explain the accident, we find BP operating like one of E. O. Wilson’s massive ant hills, a single organism that is emergent from smaller parts, not predictable from any one part. BP’s ant hill includes what we value, and what we value isn’t necessarily good for us. We value oil. The oil leak in the Gulf is an accident of value.

    James Surowiecki, on the regulation crisis in the June 14 & 21 New Yorker, speaking of the recent rash of financial accidents, Bernie and the [other] Jets, (as well as the Massey mining disaster) correctly estimates that “these failures weren’t accidents.” But he’s still caught in the O-Ring Syndrome: “They were the all too predictable result of the deregulationary fervor that has gripped Washington in recent years, pushing the message that most regulation is unnecessary at best and downright harmful at worst.” If the events were predictable, they were not accidents. The proximate cause is value, what we want. Moreover, in many cases, the failures did not lead to physical damage or bodily harm; to the contrary, the bailout, like some benevolent insurance policy, made some people whole again and more. The mistake is to assume that adequate regulation would have prevented the failures. Adequate regulation may have minimized the frequency and severity of the events, but the only way to avoid accident is to avoid risk, because of a true accident, we can never know why.