Genius and What It Isn't

The Bard

Van Gogh

By Terry Rodgers

On a more abstract level, his works concern his fascination with the dialectic coalescence of contradictory impulses in a subjective perspective.
--Blog post describing painting by Terry Rodgers

There is much blather in political discourse.  People who love to hear themselves talk, auditory narcissists.  Geniuses full of gravitas, like Henry Kissinger, Zigneb Brezhinski, and with less affectation of gravitas, Rush Limbaugh.

There is much tedious nonsense in academia.
Anyone who has spent much time listening to pundits in either area will sooner rather than later want to tear out his hair (or her hair) and run screaming from the room, "What utter bullshit!" 

There is even stupid talk masquerading as wisdom in places where you'd least expect it, like science, an area where the whole  idea of the scientific method is to "prove" what you are saying is irrefutable, at least today.

But no place in the intellectual universe can outdo art for drivel, and people talking to hear themselves sound important and intelligent.
Genius's are anointed every day in the galleries and art shops along Madison Avenue, in Santa Fe and San Francisco, by phonies who would not know what makes good art if they could even recognize it when they see it.

Just recently, the Phantom stood before six paintings by an unfamous local New Hampshire artist and someone trotted out the word, "Genius," and the Phantom thought. "Not actually."

It was true the pictures were stunning, and left you a little breathless. It was like seeing a really beautiful woman for the first time. But would the effect hold, over time?

And there's something else that typifies "genius" for the Phantom: When the Phantom stands before a van Gogh, almost any van Gogh, there is a different sensation entirely. You have the feeling you have caught a glimpse into a man's soul, and you want to know more about the painter. J.D. Salinger once remarked he knew a book was good when he finished the last sentence, and he felt the urge to run to the phone and call up the author immediately. Just had to speak with him. 

For the Phantom, it's much the same. You see that painting and all the selection and rejection and inclusion wrapped up in it, and you just want to buy that artist lunch and listen to him, to ask him about where that painting came from. 

In all likelihood, the conversation would be disappointing, like talking to Ernest Hemingway. You would not have a clue from the banality of the person what he was capable of creating.

But sometimes, when you stand before a painting, you have to shake your head and wonder: Where did that come from?  Is this artist even from planet earth? For the Phantom that happens with van Gogh, with Picasso, with some of Thomas Eakins but not so much with one of the Phantom's  favorite artists, Edward Hopper. 

Hopper is a wonderful painter and the Phantom's calendars abound with Hopper,  but somehow the gut punch is not there with Hopper, most of the time. It is with "Chop Suey" but not with "Nighthawks."  It is with every vanGogh and with Utrillo and Pizarro. 

The Phantom had a childhood friend, Terry Rodgers, who grew up to be an artist. His paintings are viewable on line, just google @ www.terryrodgers.com/artist.   Talking with Terry, you hear what might sound like an artist's blather, but it's not. Terry talked that way since he was nine years old. He is no phony. But, at least for the Phantom, he is no genius either. His work is very dark and interesting. You look at the pictures and you do want the story behind them, but if you look at more than a half dozen, you realize, there really is no story. They are depressing and arresting and technically dazzling, but there is an emptiness behind the eyes. Hard to explain. It's just not vanGogh or Vermeer. There is no girl with the pearl earring, just naked ex-debutantes with nipple piercing and cocaine noses. 

As for music, well there is much genius in music. Dylan, "genius"  has his picture by it in the dictionary.   

But musical "genius" is present in the act of almost any good musical riff which works. but it's not "genius" in the sense of a vanGogh or a Bob Dylan.  It's a wondrous technical virtuosity, which allows a man to write the riff for "Heard it Through the Grapevine," or "Piano Man" or "Your Song" or "Lean on Me." 

Whatever that wonderful collection of genes, experience and will which allows musicians to be musicians, there are thousands of them around.

But there are very few Bob Dylans, or Vincent VanGoghs. 

Looking at the life stories of the real "geniuses" it is not at all clear that  genius is a blessing. May be a curse. But, whatever it is, it does not occur often in the life of a species.

Terry leaving his studio

Not Since Nick and Nora: The Killing's Linden and Holder

The Phantom loved Myrna Loy, as Nora in the "Thin Man" movies. 

What does not hold up well is the whole "Thin Man" notion that getting drunk, talking about wanting to get drunk, being drunk, seeing people take pratfalls who are drunk.

What endures, however, about that pair is the idea of a woman who is smart, quick, adventurous, competent,  unafraid, and who does not come undone at the thought of her husband playing around. 

It is hard to think of a woman who matches Nora in anything since that series, although Cary Grant had one or two women who were written to match him, there was never enough real fire to light up the screen.  With Grant you always had the idea he would simply move on to the next woman and might not be able to recall the current lady's last name, even if she looked like Grace Kelly. 

As couples go, there has never been anything to match Nick and Nora, until now.

In "The Killing" Sarah Linden (Mirielle Enos) and Holder (Joel Kinnamon) have got it. They have a slow cooked relationship. Their best scenes do not occur until the final episode of the final season, but they have been building toward this all along.

What is even more extraordinary is that their relationship escalates to the highest realm of American writing only after it has been established that they do not love each other romantically; it is only after you see Holder is really in love with his lawyer girlfriend and Sarah is in love with exactly the wrong man, that the relationship between Holder and Sarah flowers completely.

There is one scene, in particular, with Holder teasing Sarah as they drive along, in pursuit of yet another body, which is like nothing the Phantom has ever seen. The background has been perfectly laid.  You watch them through the window of a moving car, and Sarah is not completely center stage. But the execution of Holder's teasing,  which fleetingly turns Sarah into a blushing little sister whose secret has been exposed--is stunning. 

The third season ends so surprisingly, you cannot believe the season, the show is actually over. No, that can't be the final scene. There has to be more.

But all the threads have been knotted.

In its bleak, Scandinavian way, the end comes suddenly, completely, irretrievably, and like death in real life; it is not what you expected, and it is too soon, too unvarnished. It is like that scene in "The Seventh Seal" where the knight and his family are at dinner and the knock comes suddenly at the door, and someone says, "So soon?"

"The Killing" is not the greatest TV show ever made, by the Phantom's standards. It is not even the greatest police procedural. It is too ponderous, spends too much time on the angst of characters who are not as important as Wallace or Deangelo ("The Wire") and it has not been cut as ruthlessly. There are too many scenes which could be cut or shortened without losing anything important.  But it does have one thing in it which is unparalleled: The Holder (Kinnamon) Sarah Linden (Enos) thing.  Not McNulty and Ronnie ("The Wire") nor the Underwoods ("House of Cards") nor Carrie and Brody ("Homeland") have the sparkle and shine of Holder and Linden.

What a loss to the world if these two are not paired again.

The Phantom is already working on the screenplay.

Norman Mailer at Yale: Of Privilege and Class

Today's New York Times Book Review has an article about Norman Mailer, one of two "Towering Figures" in American letters, according to the headline.

Personally, the Phantom never thought much of Mailer as a writer. The Naked and The Dead could not hold the Phantom's attention, and even Armies of the Night never struck much of a chord. 

But, in 1980, while The Phantom was doing some graduate training at Yale, he noticed a poster for a visit by Norman Mailer, and the Phantom walked over to the building where the event was scheduled.  It was a lovely, large room in some university building which was neither a library nor a residential college, just some building used for events and it was lined in bookshelves with long windows flooding the place with light.  Undergraduates filled the floor space, sitting mostly on the floor because there were only a few dozen chairs and the Phantom stood along one of the walls. 

Mr. Mailer came in, ushered by some faculty member and he shrugged off his trench coat and stepped up to the lectern. He was 57 but looked older, shrunken--he could not have been more than 5 feet six inches--puffy faced, a man you would not have looked twice at on the New York City subway. Just some middle aged guy grown old before his time. 

The Phantom cannot recall his remarks, but the Phantom can never forget the reaction of the students. From among some of those sitting in front, on the floor, a chant arose, "Boring. Boooring. Boring." 

And, for the Phantom, it was all he could do to restrain himself from throwing something at these twenty something undergrads, these highly selected children of privilege, who were insufficiently entertained in the first few minutes of the visit of this--perhaps inordinately--celebrated author.

They were saying, "You may be a literary celebrity. You may be famous. But we are Yale students and you have not met our expectations."

And the Phantom thought: Mailer may have been many things, but as far as the Phantom knew, he was not a fraud.  He had, after all, served in combat during the Second World War. He may not have landed on the beaches of Normandy, but he was in the Pacific and like any soldier posted in combat zones, he was at risk.  

What had these twenty somethings, chanting "Boring" ever done? What risks had they taken? What had they seen in life? Were they ever part of something as enormous as waging war against the Axis powers?  

The biggest thing that ever happened to these chanting brats was they had been admitted to Yale. That was their greatest accomplishment and their most intense experience, to date. 

And now they were whining because they were insufficiently entertained. 

To this day, the Phantom is sorry he did not say anything. The Phantom now thinks of some dramatic moment he might have provoked. He might have spoken up: "Mr. Mailer, I apologize for Yale, for the behavior of these students. You have been inducted into the armed forces of the United States, shipped out to the Pacific war, survived that war and returned to write about the experience. You have had a career none of these students will likely ever achieve, and yet they revile you, after just a few minutes, for disappointing them.  They are spoiled, over indulged children, to whom too much has been given and not enough demanded, and though they may be highly selected brats, with high test scores and lots of community service and extra curricular activities and all sorts of embellishments on their applications, they have swallowed, uncritically, the notion that because they have matriculated at Yale, they are special and they are your equal. Yale has failed them, and they have embarrassed Yale."

Or words to that effect.

But the Phantom remained silent, as did every member of the faculty, and there were dozens in attendance. 

This posting is not about Mailer. It is about class and arrogance and nastiness and memory. And it is about Yale and places like Yale, where the upper classes acquire their sense of entitlement and self worth.

Lux et veritas. Heaven help us all.

Command and Control: More Command than Control

Working his way through Eric Schlosser's  Command and Control the Phantom retrieves memories which are now brought into perspective.

How well The Phantom recalls the Russians' launch of Sputnik in August 1957, and the general hysteria that wrought in Washington, DC. The Phantom, as a boy, reading about it in Popular Mechanics could not fathom why adults thought launching a beach ball into space caused such alarm among the adult population. But the idea was, if the Russians could launch a beach ball into space that beach ball could be, next time, a hydrogen bomb, which could land in Washington, DC.  Around this time the Russians managed to shoot down a U-2 spy plane, with an air to ground missile and that suggested they could use rockets in a pin point and accurate fashion, again suggesting they could put a hydrogen bomb down the chimney of the White House.

Nikita Krushchev, a pugnacious reformer, who de Stalinized the Soviet Union, was also a bit of a dope, a blustery short man possessed of that short man syndrome, and he apparently wanted to remind the US it wasn't the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog, and knowing the Soviet Union did not have nearly as many nuclear weapons as the United States, claimed he had or would have thousands of rocket mounted bombs targeted at all the US cities and the USSR could annihilate the entire continent.  

That threat, was actually a stupid move. The United States Army was feuding with the Air Force and with the Navy, each service demanding a starring role in the next war, and each wanted its own role to drive the approach to responding the USSR's challenge.  Krushchev played right into the hands of the American armed forces, the corporations who wanted to sell the bombs and planes and missiles and the Democratic candidates for President, most notably John F. Kennedy, who wanted to ride the "missile gap" into the White House. 

In the background, American efforts to launch rockets which could reach the Soviet Union were public and catastrophic: Missile after missile launched from Cape Canaveral in full view of the television cameras rose tentatively from the launch pad, up, up a few hundred feet,  only to collapse, and explode.

A few Air Force generals, Curtis LeMay among them, had devised our defense system on the idea that we would have hours to get bombers off the ground, but with the Soviets capable of launching a surprise attack,  which would reach us in minutes, that systems was rendered instantly obsolete, a new Maginot line, which technology had leap frogged. The Air Force, in the form of the Strategic Air Command, desperately sought to stay relevant, and its new leader a General Power, came up with the idea of keeping American B-52's in the air 24/7/365, so when the Soviets launched their missile attack,  the planes would simply turn right and head for targets in the Soviet Union. 

Problem was, the technology  was not up to the promise. It was all a lie. The bombs in the planes could not be active  atomic weapons because if they were, when a plane crashed in bad weather or blew a tire landing back at base, the United States would suffer a nuclear detonation from its own planes.  Keeping a substantial number of planes aloft constantly was beyond the capabilities of the Air Force. But, because the whole game was about "deterrence" and psychology, we could bluff and tell the world and the Soviets we had a plan for mutual assured destruction. Of course, the Soviets were lying too: They simply did not have the missiles or capabilities Krushchev said they had.

Meanwhile, American planes based in Turkey, England and Morocco kept crashing with nuclear weapons aboard. A crash in Morocco just narrowly avoid setting of a North African mushroom cloud. The American government denied the dangers of all those bombs carried aloft along the Alaska, Greenland, Main perimeter; the government, or parts of it, lied about the risks of accidental nuclear detonation connected to its Strategic Air Command.

Most extraordinary, was the phenomenon of the rise of instant, bogus seers. A Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, wrote a book which appealed to a nation hungry for news Armageddon  could be avoided. Kissinger assured disaster could be avoided, by limiting nuclear weapons to "tactical" nuclear weapons used in Europe to halt the advance of Soviet troops who could overwhelm American Army defenders by sheer numbers any time they wanted to sweep from the East to the Atlantic. The American Army had been demobilized and only a skeleton crew remained along the Russian front, to act as a trip wire to slow the Russians and give time for the nuclear response. But, Kissinger said, we could have just a little, limited exchange of nuclear bombs with Russia and then everyone could pull back for a breather and negotiate. Which would make shrewd diplomats like Henry Kissinger central int he scheme of things.

As technology started to catch up to the rhetoric, the idea of shifting away from World War II vintage airplanes to land based missiles in silos which could withstand a surprise attack and launch a devastating reply emerged. This was good news for the Army, which commanded some of the silos, and for the Air Force missile command, but the Navy felt ignored. It was also wonderful news for Boeing, and for other large American corporations who would reap huge profits, building thousands of missiles. 

Eventually, the Navy developed the Polaris submarine missiles, which could not be attacked even by a surprise attack which wiped out all life on the continental United States. With every land bound American dead, all its silos kaput, the Navy could deliver annihilation from the sea, and continue the threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD).  So, for a while, the Air Force was happy because it still had funding for the B52's circling around, and the Army was happy with its ground silo missiles, and the Navy had a crucial role as the invulnerable instrument of final revenge.

All the while, President Dwight Eisenhower, who, as it happened, actually had real experience with war,  tried to talk good sense to the American public, but he was largely ignored. He had presided over our passive unpreparedness in the first place. He was the old, the gray, the tired and the obsolete warrior. John F. Kennedy was the new, the young, the vigorous guy who could lead us into battle against the forces of evil who now out gunned or rather out missiled us. 

The Phantom recalls how dull and slow Eisenhower seemed on television, compared to Kennedy. The Phantom had no idea what Ike meant by his warning about an emerging "Military/Industrial" complex.  Ike could see the real motivations of generals who wanted to be the key players, of corporations who wanted to build missiles and submarines with missiles and air planes with bombs. And he could assess the reality of what the Soviets had, because he had his U-2 spy planes, which, when they weren't getting blown out of the air by Soviet rockets, pretty clearly showed what the Russians had and did not have.

The Phantom rejoiced when Kennedy was elected, and was relieved to see Eisenhower, old dull, bald, slow, inarticulate Ike, driven away to his farm in Gettysburg. The Phantom ran home after school to see Kennedy's wonderful televised press conferences, where he looked like a movie star, spoke with that wonderful Boston brogue, called on members of the press and responded with sly wit and occasional eloquence and generally inspired the idea that if you were young, good looking and you had a Harvard education, you could be the leader of men, the creme de la creme and that's what a real 20th century hero looked like.

Women like Marilyn Monroe, who had steamed up the screens and adolescent minds in "Some Like It Hot" went for guys like Kennedy.

It was a wonderful story line. 

Unfortunately, it was not the whole story.

The Killing Or How I Learned to Hate Netflix

Sarsgaard

Enos

Kinnamon

Let it be understood: "The Killing" is not "The Wire."
Both are bleak police procedurals,  but "The Killing" has none of insight into social and economic complexity of the "Wire." 
While both deal with dysfunctional institutions, the dysfunction of "The Killing" derives simply from the dysfunction of wounded, twisted, inadequate individuals, not from a more complex miasma of disintegrating,  structurally flawed cauldrons of destroyed families, desperate economic conditions, foul political structures and inadequate educational and journalistic institutions. 

In "The Killing" it's personal angst and anomie turning its hollowed out face to the gray green rain of Seattle, where people crawl out of their holes to slink through another day of existential dread, and where life is, to paraphrase Hume, squalid, brutal, ruthless and short. It's that Munch painting, "The Scream," but with a different palate: grays, blacks, muted greens.
 And yet...there are unforgettable characters, namely Holder (Joel Kinnaman) Linden (Mireille Enos) and a condemned death row inmate (Peter Sarsgaard.)

If an actor has ever given a more powerful sustained performance than Sargaard's, if an actor has ever created a more complex, enthralling character who is by turns repellent, sympathetic, hardened, vulnerable, real, The Phantom has not yet run across that.

The best argument against the death penalty is simply that human beings are too pathetically inept to get the verdict right often enough to justify the death penalty. That elaborate charade of pseudo truth seeking, which has a much chance of actually rigorously examining facts and arriving at the correct conclusion as a monkey has of writing Hamlet on his first try at a keyboard, which we call a "trial" is simply inadequate to the task. 

So we put innocent people to death with regularity. Only DNA science has been powerful enough to expose the thoroughgoing ineptitude of juries, the venality of prosecutors the stupidity of police and the phoniness of the whole system.

When you watch the state executing its somber, sanctimonious will in the form of legal execution, you learn more about America than you care to.

It is a bleak, Scandinavian view of  America the beautiful, and of life,  and you finish watching an episode and turn on the lights, in a cold sweat, relieved it was only a bad dream.

Of course, if you watch it on Netflix, which streams the drama interrupted every 30 seconds by ads for the same zombie programs, you had better have your thumb on the fast forward.  The third season is only available in the zombie riven form.

But if you can wend your way past Netflix defiling the art, and if you can accept the occasional implausible explanation and connection, the reward for working your way through "The Killing" is the closest thing you are likely to find since "The Wire."

It's bleak, in a good way. 

Worlds better than Breaking Bad, which is more to the American taste, with explosions and lots of cartoon characters, "The Killing" is worth it because you can see astonishing actors in memorable roles. If you read The Stranger in college and could never quite forget it, you really ought to watch, "The Killing."

Command and Control: How Things Spin Out of Control

Eric Schlosser

A single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
                --Joseph Stalin


The Phantom's general theory of large numbers is that the bigger the number, the less likely it is to represent anything real. The corollary to this rule is large numbers of things become unmanageable and if you really want to lose something, do not hide it in a desolate place,  but in a place filled with large numbers of things.

To illustrate:  Whenever you hear a particular disease kills ten million people a year, you know that is wrong. That can only be based on death certificates and even one death certificate is unreliable, and a hundred is 1/100 less reliable and so forth. Whenever you hear a disease, like osteoporosis costs $15 billion a year, you know, ipso facto that's a bogus number. Nobody in the cost analysis of disease business knows how to count that high.

On the if you really want to lose something, hide it among lots of other things: You have only to think of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc, where the arc is hidden, for good, in a large government warehouse, in a wooden box amid thousands of other wooden boxes--the classic needle in a haystack.

As for manageability--you have only to read Eric Schlosser's wonderful book, Command and Control, to see firsthand, how, when you have thousands of nuclear missiles, as opposed to dozens, the supervision of each missile becomes thinner, less expert, more likely to devolve to the care of less than rigorous human beings.

So, here you have a nuclear missile in Arkansas, one of thousands peppered across the continent, cared for by several shifts of Air Force enlisted men and officers, most of them in their 20's, which is perforated, accidentally, by an airman wielding a wrench, which loses its socket, which falls and clangs off the side of the missile, perforating it's metal,  penetrating to the fuel supply, which spurts out in a pressurized stream from the inside of one compartment near the bottom of the three staged missile, which results in a compartment at the base of the tower becoming empty and unable to support the weight of the missile compartments above, which will then collapses down toward the concrete floor in a collapse like what we all saw in films of the World Trade Center collapsing, which will set off a nuclear detonation, which can trigger nuclear detonations in nearby silos and which can vaporize the state of Arkansas and parts of a few neighboring states. 

And the whole idea of having thousands of missiles was that it was supposed to make us safer.

And this all happens--the manufacture and placement of thousands of missiles--because somebody had an idea and sold that idea--that all these missiles would make us safe from Soviet attack. 

Problem is, this idea is not, you'll excuse the phrase, rocket science. In fact, as far as this theory of nuclear "deterrence" is concerned, there is no science at all, which is to say, no testing of the theory.  All this effort gets made because somebody thinks it will work, without ever being able to, or inclined to test that theory.

It's essentially a theory of psychology: We can frighten them with all these missiles.  We can hold our cards and never have to play them, because they will all be terrified of calling our cards. They just won't risk their pot.

Could we have terrified the Soviets with just 100 missiles, spread out among nuclear submarines, along the 48th parallel and along the Alaskan coast?  

We had General Curtis LeMay talking to how many generals in the Pentagon, to the President and to how many Congressmen?  And this system of 10,000 missiles gets built. 

We would never invest that kind of effort or money on any medical research effort, or on any healthcare system.

But when it came to building a missile attack system built on a dream, we were all over that, right here in America.

One has to ask:  Why is that?

Alan Rusbridger: The Trouble with Whistle Blowers

Tougher than he looks Alan Rusbridger

Okay, the Phantom admits he likes the Guardian on line newspaper.  For a long time, he did not know why, exactly, he liked it, but he found the stories confirmed many suspicions he harbored about the world.

But now, in a piece in The New Yorker he learns more than he ever really wanted to know about what goes on at The Guardian.

It turns out, the paper is not like any other, in the sense it really does not need to make a profit: It is supported by a trust fund, and the whole goal, financially, is to simply lose money less rapidly than it is currently doing, and to sustain itself for as long as it can, until it bleeds its trust fund dry.

This allows it to pursue stories like the publication of articles based on material released by Mr. Edward Snowden, which showed the NSA spies on Americans by tracking their cell phone data. Presumably, conversations of ordinary Americans are simply too dreary and boring to warrant actually listening to them, so the NSA simply tracks who called whom when and for how long.  Listening to American cell phone conversations would constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and would  require heroic levels of stoicism we cannot expect even from America's most heroic heroes. 

Anyone who has ever had to ride from Washington, D.C. to New York when all the seats in the quiet car are filled,  and been stuck for over 4 hours, listening to the intensely inane cell phone conversations  knows this form of torture would be too much to ask, even of intrepid National Security Agency agents. 

One learns, to one's chagrin,  all about Buffy's troubles with Jimmy, and Jimmy's room mate and about  Buffy's job, the accounts she has to visit in New York, the dress she almost bought, the shoes she saw at Jimmy Choo's , where she ate lunch and what she ate and what was wrong with it, and how drunk she got last Friday at some club,  and we just passed Wilmington, and whatever goes on in Wilmington?...We are spared no detail.

So, when the grand master editor of The Guardian was handed the treasure trove of information about the NSA listening in or not listening in, but at least tracking all these conversations, he had a special room at The Guardian done up and three new computers put into that room loaded with Mr. Snowden's stuff, and to get into any of them, you needed three passwords and only one password was given to each of three people and, oh, it was very James Bond.  On these computers was the Snowden stuff. 

And to make it even more important and clandestine sounding, there was a gay reporter in Brazil, an American ex-pat and a sultry woman documentary maker and some other guy who sounds pretty nerdy, but he had won a Pulitzer prize, which lends a little gravitis if not veritas to the whole fan-dangle. 

It is all compared with that great whistle blower scoop, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers which showed, among other things, the war in Vietnam was a bad idea, which anyone who watched Walter Cronkite during those years already knew four years before the Times published Mr. Ellsberg's revelations. 

But the big revelation from The Guardian's efforts at walking in Mr. Ellsberg's tracks has been, so far, the revelation that the American government, through its clandestine super secret agency, is tracking cell phone conversations.

But, really, did anyone  ever think their cell phone conversations were secret or confidential?  After blathering for hours on the train, walking down the street, in the park, shouting into the damn things, annoying everyone for blocks around, is there anything secret about cell phone conversations? If only.

The major revelation about all this, as far as the Phantom is concerned, is that the grand wizard editor of the Guardian, which loses tens of millions every year, this editor makes almost a million dollars a year, although recently, in a grand gesture, he accepted a pay cut of around $100,000 a year, just to show how very committed he is to the special kind of journalism possible at a not-for-profit news organization.

This wizard editor, Mr. Alan Rusbridger is an Oxbridge type, who plays piano recitals of Chopin for select friends,  and who has written a play about Beethoven,  and who, in order to be the grand wizard, had to write a "manifesto" no less, which the other board members had to embrace before he could be made grand wizard.

Of Mr. Rusbridger, it is said, "His physical appearance doesn't tell you how tough he is," which is a good thing, because, as you can see from his photo, he does not look very tough at all, so it is good to know.

In fact, reading this long, fascinating profile by Ken Auletta, the word "effete" kept drifting up before the Phantom's eyes. Here is how people in England cash in on their long tribulation in private (called public) schools.  They call each other tough and brilliant and accomplished and really very upper crust, first rate sort of chap, and they latch on to huge salaries  which from all appearances,  appear to be unconscionable, and they play Chopin for their friends.