 Hello there. It's Thursday at noon. I know it is. Do you remember our arrangement? Thursdays at noon on CFUV. Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called First Person Plural. You make it sound excessively attractive. That's what I have in mind. Traditions of celebrating the day when a person was aboard date back thousands of years and are tied up with beliefs about the spirit world and the effects of the stars upon our lives. In contemporary times there is great variation in the ways in which birthdays are honored. Subcultures regard specific milestone birthdays as particularly important. Jews regard the 13th birthday as a passage into adulthood. In several Latino cultures a girl's 15th birthday marks such a passage. In Chinese and Japanese cultures the 60th birthday is regarded as a passage into old age and wisdom. There are also variations in celebration customs among cultures. North American children endure spankings equalling the number of years they have lived plus one more to grow on. Children in Argentina receive pools on their earlobes one for each year. A traditional Irish birthday includes birthday bumps. A practice in which the child is held upside down and their head is gently bumped on the floor. Again one for each year with an extra bump for good luck. Today, November 21st is Carl's birthday and I've put together a special show celebrating this day. Okay I'll admit that I thought about spanking him pulling his earlobes or bumping his head gently on the ground 37 times for yours and my entertainment. However I weigh the practical problems of attempting such feats along with the fact that these things would be much more fun to watch than to listen to on the radio. And I decided that it would work better to re-run two of my favorite segments by now. I have chosen to re-run his analysis of the cultural context of eBay the online auction website from Episode 3 which we first aired on May 23rd and re-run his essay about the dawn of modern baseball. On why one cannot regard major league baseball as a legitimate game until after the color line was broken by Jackie Robinson in 1947. From Episode 6 which we first aired on June 13th. I hope you enjoy the re-runs along with some of Carl's music. Please join me today in wishing Carl a very happy birthday. After I finished my MBA at the Gazeta School of Business at Emory University I wanted to work for myself. I wanted to take a hobby of mine and put it together with my business knowledge. I had a computer. I had internet access. I had research capabilities in other areas. I decided to build an online business. I had a product. The business was to be one in sports collectibles. My desire to do this coincided with the rise of online auctions. Tatted by its originators it was fast becoming the predominant online secondary source for collectibles and seemed like a good place for me to tap into my target market. Like many other vendors I found that I could sell my stuff on eBay and advertise my website at the same time. At first it seemed efficient and powerful. I was intrigued. What I didn't realize when I started was how much I could learn about markets and economies from this experience. eBay made for a nice postgraduate laboratory to understand the social contexts of markets. eBay is a great example of increasing returns. The concept of increasing returns being one I credit to Polymath Brian Arthur. Arthur's considerable accomplishments can be found on his bio page at the Santa Fe Institute website. eBay has become the place for online exchange. The more people who come to eBay to buy and sell the more appealing buying and selling become on eBay. You can put stuff on other auction sites or classified ad sites but because the traffic is so much less than it is on eBay you have the feeling you aren't reaching enough people. So you are encouraged to use eBay because that's where all the people come. But all the people are coming because that's where all the items are listed. Thus eBay's position becomes increasingly strong. The more it does the bigger it gets, the more solid its position becomes. You call it circular reasoning or groupthink. Arthur would call it increasing returns. If traditional economics were correct there would be competitors to eBay who would begin to take away part of the market. Particularly if their products were comparable to or better than eBay's. There are plenty of disgruntled customers. Websites whose primary purpose is to facilitate complaining about eBay exist with many contributors posting their horror stories. But eBay hasn't experienced diminishing returns. In a sense, eBay is the provider of a marketplace. It is not a market maker in the sense in which that term is used on Wall Street and overseer of the physical and procedural aspects of a marketplace. For a market to function it must have the capacity for buyers and sellers to discuss terms if only for the necessary mutual agreement to a set of terms to be expressed. Storefronts in downtown areas are markets. Flea markets have booths where sellers show their goods and buyers inspect them and sometimes make offers. The organization called the New York Stock Exchange has a physical aspect namely its essentially permanent structural facilities in Manhattan. When we talk about a market in the sense of a venue for commerce as opposed to the sense reflective of the actions of the participants within that venue we mean first and foremost a place. It can be a place in the physical world or it can be a constructed or intellectual space. So one of the players in the economy is the provider of the place as is the landlord, the real estate broker, the stock exchange owner, the auction house or the flea market manager who uses that place for its intended purpose. But eBay is a player in the world of e-commerce. With its forms and fees and so forth it often acts as the umpire who both officiates the game and participates in it as a player. eBay isn't an impartial provider of a place it is more akin to a casino manager. At eBay the house always wins. eBay doesn't especially care how well its clients make out of using their facilities. Whether profit of any sort is realized by buyer or seller, the transaction fees have to be paid. This dual role leads to real conflict. eBay has been an easy target for corruption. Because of its fee structure eBay is motivated to get as many players into the mix as possible because the more listings the more money eBay makes. eBay has had a poor track record of keeping con artists out of the market. Because buyers and sellers need to trust each other in order to make the exchange work. Any corruption in the system undermines all of the transactions in the system. eBay makes money whether or not a sale resulting from one of its actions can be completed in practice. So eBay has little motivation to ensure that any particular transaction is successful. Thus, horror stories of ripoffs are plentiful. I began to have problems with the link with clients soon enough and I learned quickly that law is not cut up with the realities of online commerce. I sent money to a seller in New York. He never sent me the item I purchased. I found out later by posting to several related internet forums that he had done this to more than one other person. Texas begged off on jurisdiction because the guy only said he was in Texas. Florida, where I lived at the time in New York where the seller had moved at some point said that it was California's problem California being where eBay was based. As for the federal government investigating the matter of using they were apparently too busy with other projects to be bothered. The transaction was too small to merit my retaining compensated legal representation let alone traveling to California to go to small claims court. My only alternative was to give the guy a bad rating on eBay's feedback system which I will discuss in detail in a moment and to warn people in the sports collectibles world about him. But by the time I was able to do that he was long gone with my money and several other people's money as well. eBay has a formal system available to allow buyers to provide useful feedback regarding service and product for other buyers to read. The rating system is one of the best features about eBay and it speaks to the marketplace being a social system. Buyers and sellers not only conduct transactions with each other they pay attention to what other people say about their counterparts in the transactions. We ask for recommendations in all our transactions and sometimes are willing to pay a higher price for someone who comes highly recommended or are willing to forego the lowest price because of the reputation of someone as being a bad risk. In addition there are forums, bulletin boards for people to discuss their problems with eBay though little evidence exists that eBay actually pays attention to these problems or their problems with specific vendors or buyers. Within different genres of product online communities grow and develop social relationships that contextualize the market. This happens in the real world as well. People are regulars in spend time at stores and restaurants to the point that they become part of the experience of that particular market. Eventually however I found myself bogged down into details I never anticipated as being part of the process. I love the commercial for a courier company that shows a toy football popping out of a fax machine after someone has purchased it online. The point of the commercial was that once the transaction took place shipping had to be part of the equation. Shipping has not caught up in technological efficiency as distinct from the administrative kind to online commerce. It took longer and was more detail oriented than I liked. I envisioned spending time with a hobby I enjoyed and talking with customers who cared about the same features of the hobby that I did. Instead entirely too much of my time was spent trying to find the best cardboard box in which to ship my oddly shaped merchandise and beating the virtual bushes for the best available shipping deal that was too small a player to get the courier company's full attention. I also had to think about how many items I was willing to keep on hand. Similar activities rounded out the lion's share of the everyday experience of running the business and I suspected throughout that my education had prepared me for better things. I grew tired of the eBay culture. The spoilers were successful far too often intending the whole experience. I grew weary of trying to figure out who wasn't trustworthy and in what way they weren't and whether they had come up with any new ways to ruin my enterprise since the previous day. When I wasn't successful in anticipating this whenlers, it took a disproportionate amount of time to straighten things out. It simply didn't constitute a worthwhile venture for an adult. Perhaps the last straw was that the word money defied its conventional definition within this context. eBay was coming up with systems of escrow and prepayment that addressed part of the unsavory matters at hand but added bureaucratic complexity. Lots of vendors were credit card only vendors to whom checks of money orders were not acceptable. After a while I was becoming convinced that money wasn't liquid anymore. Also I was dealing in such small amounts that I actually had people send cash through the mail to me which made me nervous. I knew it was just a matter of time before someone said they had sent cash when they had not and I would have no way to prove they had not. The culture of eBay was evolving into a new genre and I wasn't having any fun at all. The prisoner's dilemma in game theory seemed pertinent. The guys are arrested for committing a crime. The police do not have any real evidence that they have the right guys so they need one of them to confess and turn in the other guy. They are put in separate rooms and asked about the crime. They are told that if one of them confesses he will be given a light sentence for his testimony and the other one will confess and they will both go to prison since neither confession will be needed to convict the other both having admitted to the crime. If neither confesses they will both go free. It is simple to set up the situation so that it is in each prisoner's individual interest to inform on the other and the example serves in textbooks and several subjects to illustrate how individuals each of whom acts out of self-interest can combine to create a situation less advantageous to the result that would have ensued had cooperation been allowed. eBay is a place that could work if everyone worked to the good of the market but the advantages that occurred to spoilers were and are too great for many eBay users to resist. Thus, acting only in one's best interest is not enough for optimization of global gain. The only hindrance to someone taking advantage of such a system comes when a general understanding of the mutual profit of keeping the system intact is matched by action that systematizes that mutuality. Everyone, absolutely everyone ends up losing in the end if the whole system breaks down. It is true that Game Theory allows for a certain number of predators being sustained within a population, but this is a tendency that arises only to the extent that the cost-benefit trade-offs permitted to do so. It is also true that it is not the successful parasite which kills its host or which simply annoys its host so much that its host takes it between two fingers and flicks it distance away. I dissolved the corporation I had formed to the end of selling sports collectibles in the middle of the year 2000. You're listening to First Person Plural. This week we are wishing Carl Wilkerson a very happy 37th birthday. Stay tuned for Carl's essay, The Don of Modern Baseball. I perceive that Major League Baseball began in the late 40s, not in 1871, 1876, 1901, 1920, or any of the other dates commonly cited by so-called baseball historians. I support this claim by noting that the top Caucasian professional baseball leagues that existed before the Kola Line began to go down in the 1940s cannot reasonably be called Major League Baseball. My defense will not be reliant upon the social utility of drawing the line as a way to get even with bigots, although I personally find such reciprocity not without appeal. It is rather an internal attack on the Major League Baseball of those pre-war years, dismantling the notion that the games in pennant races could have been legitimate in and of themselves in the context of the race issue. My initial motivation for such specificity in setting a single date on the Don of Major League Baseball was the perceptible lack of agreement as to how long the top North American professional leagues have been playing essentially the same game they do now. Television announcers regularly report on a player having broken one modern record or another, with closer inspection revealing that the date of transition used in the particular case may correspond to, tautologically, nothing other than the last time another player was more successful in the given category. The examination of the more perceptible discontinuities in Major League play since the first professional team was formed in 1869 is instructive in other respects. The central precepts of team sport were violated in the days of the Color Line to an extent that severely contextualizes and perhaps entirely invalidates American League and National League standings and statistics before that time, and the violations stem with logical inevitability from the ban itself. It is imperative to the integrity of an event that is competitive and presented as such, that all sides attempt as a matter of good faith to win. Otherwise what transpires is not a contest but an exhibition at best of farce at worst. The 1919 Black Sox Scandal was not about the Chicago players intentionally playing poorly as much as it was about their intentionally playing less well than usual. The point of law as it were had to address the latter act. Else any player who threw a game could counter-argue that he hadn't done anything he had only declined to help it as much as usual on that particular day. This rhetorical play was known by early 20th century baseball fans and administrators to be used by would-be game fixers and approaching players thought to be potentially helpful. The popular term for intentional underperforming was laying down and playing a more passive and less detectable variety of subversion than flagrant misplay. The ban on blacks playing in the American and National Leagues created a conflict of interest in players that discouraged them from full display of their talents. As in Las Vegas where every successful new strategy employed by gamblers is made illegal upon discovery by the casinos and the biggest individual winners are rewarded with an informal request to leave Nevada and never return. The professional baseball players of the day were subject to attack on the race issue if they became too good at what they did. Babe Ruth himself was suspected of being a quote secret negro close quote a claim which he felt compelled to deny frequently throughout his career. His denials may have been rooted in whatever racism he harbored personally, but the prospect of his being removed from his profession however slim the probability must have motivated him as well. Did it perhaps motivate him and others with a little extra ability to burn to keep a lower profile on the field? It cannot have encouraged better play on his part. Less prominent players also had to be concerned with passing the quote test close quote. For example, teams wanting to use Cuban players had to establish that the players in question were quote true Cubans close quote that is as opposed to black ones. Some of the players so examined passed the test and some failed. Player abilities are largely developed by the individual player. A young person begins to hone baseball skills at an early age. The young person spends certain amounts of time and energy on batting, throwing, running and other skills. Development is largely a function of this allocation. Later, when coaches and managers become involved, it is still the young person who has to execute and the physical and mental processes that accompany every action of the eventually mature player can still be said to spring from the player's own past and present regiment to a great extent. The call line could not have been reasonably ignored by a prospective professional baseball player. Players had to allocate a certain amount of their stamina and intellect to beating the ban continuously, evading at every moment of their brief professional and professional lives. Certain players did not have to worry as much as others about it, which only added to the inequities it caused. And, as with Ruth, those who survived the entrance exam still had to worry, at least in theory, about becoming good enough at the game to draw negative attention and possible witch hunts with the resulting absurdity that it was possible for a player to be too good in what was supposed to have been a competition, taking practical steps to prepare for race scrutiny or at least the player's anticipation of its becoming a non-trivial influence on his career, necessarily compromised player training effectiveness and performance in league games. The resulting contests were not entirely about who played baseball the best. As the ban was an informal one, never appearing as black-letter law in any official American League and or National League documents, the individual teams were technically at liberty to field black players from the beginning of the 20th century and before. That they did not attempt to do so, preferring to participate in the unspoken moratorium, violated the principle of competition as well. Some cooperative elements, inevitably, must exist for league games to be held, but blanket immunity for collaboration cannot be granted in an environment in which competition drives the validity of the enterprise to such an extent. It is difficult to blame the successful teams for preferring the status quo. It is easy to blame the perennial losers for not hiring all the black-ball stars they could and going to any extreme to see to it that none of their opponents got too rambunctious with the new talent. The athletics of the late 1910s, the Red Sox of the 1920s and the Phillies of the 1930s would unquestionably have benefited from having had Rob Foster, Martin De Higo and Ray Dandridge respectively. Preferring to take the easy route, these teams effectively through season after season in the same way the Black Sox through the 1919 World Series. They couldn't be bothered to try. Is there anyone who could explain why watching a game in which one team is losing on purpose is worthwhile? I am not referring to situations such as the insertion of the mop-up reliever in baseball or the third-stream quarterback at the end of a football game. The situations are marked by the presence of competing factors. The teams are cutting their losses so that they have a better chance of winning future games and the personnel in the field, given their identities, are still trying to win the game if possible. No conflicts of interest exist. Even conceding for the sake of argument that the athletes in the American and national leagues were in general superior to the Blackball mainstays in pre-war times, a concession that one might well prefer to describe as falsehood, or their ability to pursue the goal of winning to a perceptible extent by the side effects of the co-align. Teams that abdicate the goal of winning in favor of deliberate sub-optimality are not teams. They reduce to triviality the completion of the games in which they engage, games which are the only evidence their league has to offer of its legitimacy and worth. A thrown game is no game, and the games played by the American and national leagues during the days in the strictest sense of the term. The pre-war pennant races took place in the shadow of conditions that were measurably more racist in certain major league cities than in others. St. Louis and Boston, for example, were often cited as worst towns than most for Blacks. To claim that the racism and regional fluctuations therein were irrelevant since there were no Black players in the majors of that time is like saying that racism is not a problem in all county Georgia, became noteworthy in the early 1990s for not having had a Black resident in several decades. Closer examination suggested that the absence was a result of conditions so inimical to Blacks that none had remained in the county long enough to have been rightly called residents. It was the social condition in question that had caused and maintained the demography. The concept of the level playing field is not strictly enforced in baseball with franchises building their teams parks and on occasion their parks around their teams. However, there are and must be some restrictions on home team advantage. Minimally killing off or maiming for a life opposing players is and must be implicitly forbidden. Such an observation may seem ridiculous now unless you have lost a relative to a lynching and there are quite a few people alive who have. It has been nearly 50 years now since Brown versus Board of Education was first addressed by the US Supreme Court. A lot of people who are around then are around now or at least their first two or three generations of descendants are or they should be. It would be petty to assess the historical effect of regional pockets of racism solely in terms of how they have influenced baseball games. That is not to say that one cannot conversely assess the games in terms of how they have been influenced by regional pockets of racism. What should the manager of the Chicago Cubs for example have to cave into those who would maintain a hostile environment in St. Louis by leaving any of his players home when playing road games against the Cardinals. If I had been managing the Cubs in 1935 I would not have left Gabby Hartnett home for a road game against the Cardinals. Had I been managing the Cubs in 1998 I would not have left Sammy Sosa home for such a game. The implications for fair play of having to leave any number of players home for road games are obvious. Racism did have a casualty count and the pervasiveness of its more violent aspects was such that not even a baseball game could take place in certain parts of the country without being influenced by it. One hears often that history is written by the winners. Examined more narrowly, history is written by those who are still around to write it today. It follows that any version of history which a given group promulgates at the expense of other group's ability to articulate other versions must be looked upon as suspect. It is not petty to mourn the effect of genocide on discourse. Eliminating persons with knowledge of a culture has been a historically effective way of curtailing the presence and influence of that culture in general discourse. As the individuals who sustain the culture are dispatched the culture itself naturally succumbs to attrition. Is there a black American Indian, Mexican, Cuban, Honduran, Salvadorian, Balencian or Falcon Islander alive who will maintain the exclusion of quote colored men, close quote from the American and national and indeed federal leagues between 1884 and 1947 had no measurable effect on the game as played by these leagues? To claim that the damage is done and cannot be undone that it is best to let bygones be bygones is to accept the initiators on the color line. If one dismisses the loss incurred by the game never mind the persons thus excluded is not worth examining. One is guilty of upholding the color line oneself in the sense that the color line was a line of propaganda that was sustained by passive as well as active destruction of opposition and evidence that might serve opposition. So far from having no choice but to accept what transpired under such twisted circumstances is valid, one has no choice but to throw out the results. This practical and theoretical imperative is binding for scientific reasons as well. Reality control encompasses diddling with the conditions before the testing has begun as well as throwing out subsequent results that one does not like. Without taking this statement to be true in the extreme, I know that history is consensual. Some range of popular ascent would be a necessity in redrawing a line initiating modern major league baseball history if it were to be put into practice. To maintain that the color line was not of sufficient import to merit-select 1946 or 1947 as when modern major league history began is to take on the counter-arguments of quite a few black Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, Cubans, Hondurans, Salvadorians, Beletheans, and Falkland Islanders in addition to taking on the responsibility of coming up with a more logical year for candidacy. Are you so worried about Babe Ruth that you don't know of a statistical legitimation that you never even think to extend the same amount of concern to Josh Gibson? Did your parents have to use the side or rear door to the stores in their hometown? The doors are still there in the rural south, by the way. They're isolated and architecturally inefficient presence along otherwise featureless long brick walls, a tangible and measurable reminder of exactly how willful the segregationists were about ensuring their ideals. Did you have an older sister of yours who nonetheless received little or no math education while not too bright kids went to public schools that were better funded than your siblings by several orders of magnitude? We won't even talk about the so-called literacy tests that were administered in the United States to blacks but not to whites to prevent the former group from voting. If you really think that Jackie Robinson was an inadequate auger of the world to come, don't convince me. Convince a black woman or man or better still convince someone who wasn't quote really close quote black but who got pigeonholed as such early on and never escaped the label. Because until you do, you will never ever get the consensus necessary to establish any other time as historically more significant. And if brushing them off in the hope that they will ultimately grow weary of arguing and go away is your preference I remind you that it was the failure of this approach that allowed the coal line to go down in the first place. It may seem hard-headed of me not to believe the pre-1946 American League and National League to have been major league baseball. With Ruth Wagner, Matheson, Garrick, Hornsby, Cobb, and others spending their careers playing in one or both of the two leagues, one may ask how I could not regard them as having been major league. My response is that on the contrary I didn't regard them as having been baseball. Race is a term that is often used not without cause synonymously with assigned social role. Assignment of a given player to the white group or the black group was ultimately at the discretion of the commissioner's office which was the authority of last resort on such matters during Kenneson Mountain Landis' term in office. The assignment of status was even made explicitly by Landis in some cases with a given organization trying to classify a player as white but being thwarted. This operationalization of whiteness was such that once it was in place competition among the teams in the white leagues could not possibly have retained integrity. This was in part because the team wasn't truly at liberty to improve itself under such a system. An upwardly mobile team could not freely scout, recruit, acquire, develop or trade players under such a system since their fortunes might ultimately hinge on whether Landis' temperament would favor them in a particular case. With such a specter at the end of the tunnel teams gave up on certain players just to be on the safe side with some of the players being dismissed before they had a chance to play for the organization at all. Landrum, given the simple-minded taxonomy employed by the baseball establishment must have been the issue of how to deal with Cubans, Apollon Asians and Native Americans and Arabs and Mexicans of heterogeneous ancestry and so forth. The ban on, quote, blacks, close, quote, presuppose that race was univariate, dichotomous, and discreet. With such tepid assumptions as the foundation of their conceptual model, the racists made it impossible for Landis or anyone else to be, quote, fair, close, quote, within the context of its application. There is no logically-consequent standard against which fairness could have been judged. I expect the racists would have said that they just knew who was white and who was black. A statement whose articulation would only have supported my case. Tell me about Stairway to Batman. When did you write it? Right after I got sick of hearing Stairway to Heaven every damn time I turned on the radio. I didn't keep precise count but I can probably tell you the logarithm. It was approximately the ten to the fourth time I heard Stairway to Heaven between ten to the third and ten to the fourth in any case. That's one thousand and ten thousand. And I said, okay, something has to be done about this. Plus, I thought the Batman thing was cool. So the... So why Batman? There was no why. It simply synthesized itself in my mind that way. Oh, I thought, see, you were a great admirer of Batman. Well, I am personally. It's more that the Batman theme song possessed the necessary trivial timber to cause the maximum negative interaction effect with Stairway to Heaven. Every male born between 1962 and 1967 spent the latter half of the 1970s listening to Led Zeppelin and watching reruns of Batman with Adam West. Or, well, at least it seemed like it at the time. Here is Carl's satirical take on his adolescence called Stairway to Batman. At the store. It's over seven minutes. He was originally going to be part of a larger piece, but I liked it the way it was. There's some backwards electric guitar about 30 seconds into the song. Is that what the B sounding, the B buzzing sound is? Yeah. How'd you do that? I played it on the Fostex. Are you serious? That's how you came up with that? That's how I did that. You played guitar and then you turned it over in the Fostex and played it. And it came out backwards. And it didn't have any messages, demon messages, or evil things in it or anything. No. Not unless... It just sounded like a B buzzing. Not unless a piece with two guitars and one of which is only on for about 15 seconds is evil. We're on Star Trek. We're the people set up. I'm sorry to god you're such a pain in the ass. There are many reasons to do a radio show such as First Person Plural. We of course hope that our show provides a public service and showcases people, places, and ideas that don't get a lot of coverage in mainstream sources of information. But we also do this show for the love of ideas and the passion of creativity. Humans, we think, can be much more than simply cogs in the machinery of production. The role we feel we play in this show used to be known as the public intellectual. The term has gone out of vogue in recent years and many regard the role as an extension of academia. We do not. We believe that it is important to have voices from a variety of experiences, including from those who choose to think about the world even if that thinking takes place outside the confines of formal education and academic tenure. But without the tenure protection of forwarded professors, living the life of the public intellectual and or artist is difficult and often not sustainable for long. We believe that the place of the intellectual needs to be reasserted and that education is lifelong and occurs just as validly outside academia as it does within it. I think the intellectual is whatever the intellectual desires to be. I think that there are no a priori intellectuals. People who are just brainy. I think it's why you deal with it and I resist putting any definition on it at all. Because if it were ever defined it would immediately have to be something else much like art. I think that people who do an excellent example of that would be people in the fine arts. I don't think they're usually called intellectuals but I think they do use their intellect. They do use their minds, their hearts. Call what you will. They use something within them or they use themselves to frame what's around them. That isn't usually considered intellectualism. Usually the term is restricted to people in the humanities or perhaps the social sciences and I don't like that. I think that one can pick from many different fields and still be living a life of the mind. I wouldn't even restrict it to that in fact. Calling it the mind? It implies not the heart. It implies not the soul. It implies ego and there's some question in my mind as to whether the ego exists, quote exists, close quote. I guess the best answer here is that I'm suspicious of any definition of it. I pursue different media in different realms of knowledge. I learn things. I try things. I try to bring as much of it to other people as possible through one medium or another and I try like hell not to care about how vulnerable that makes me. Not emotionally vulnerable mind you, but vulnerable in more tangible ways economically being person foremost. The medium is the message and we all hear that and I think we all have an intuitive understanding of what it means that how something is communicated is inseparable from the quote content, close quote or a priori construct, medium versus message, that really doesn't fly in real life. We can make up the words, but when you try to point to it in real life you find out that they are intertwined. It would be very easy for me to sit here and say oh when culture collapses there is no society anymore and we all become automatons and life itself is lost and I'd like to say that but it depends on the specific case. We all want to think that the arm of history is longer than it is towards justice but that can be an awfully long arm. Eventually it can be an awfully long time. Are you suggesting though that the examination of ideas the examination of feelings the evocativeness of art bends towards justice? Different cultures use quote art, close quote for different things. I think it's worth pointing out that the first thing any dictator does when he gets into power is squash the artists. That is a pattern throughout history that is very strong and has been much overlooked. So empirically I think you can make that argument. Theoretically I'm not sure how you can go about it. I was told many times when I was younger that democracy was strong because it was the only sustainable system. Okay maybe they were right but it can take an awfully long time or an unsustainable system to die as a practical matter and it can take a lot of people with them as they go. I've seen it happen. We all have. Do you think cultural production and the life of the mind, the life of the heart offers a site of resistance? It can. I think it has for me personally I don't even consider what I do resistance so I don't know how to answer the question. I think what I do is what I would do anyway. I think that the oppression that you describe is in fact resistance to me. I don't consider myself to be out of the center on this. The anomalous one. I consider what I do to be if not natural then at least advisable. And I consider efforts to counter free speech, free expression whatever it is you want to call the medium like or so to be the abnormality. Carl is not old enough yet to leave a legacy and his life as an intellectual has only begun. But I cannot help but believe that he only lacks a sustainable forum for the richness of what he has to offer. I am happy that we have found a home here on CFUV for a while so that both of us can hone our intellectual skills as well as our radio skills. I hope you have enjoyed my celebration of Carl's birthday including his audio essays and his music. I know that the next 37 years will be filled with opportunities to hear and see Carl's public intellect at work and I for one am looking to have been listening to First Person Plural because how people get along with each other still matters. Carl Wilkerson and Dr. Patty Thomas to examine social and organizational issues. Music for First Person Plural Wilkerson visit our website constructioncompany.com How you came up with the Carl Wilkerson band club theme song. Well I've always been at the school of thought that says if you want something done right do it yourself. It became clear to me after a while that nobody was going to write a band club theme song for me. So I thought well and I did exactly that. Did you in fact have a band club at the time? Well it was a loosely formed and informal one but I'd like to say yes. I think it's more accurate to say that I did and to say that I did not. However once the band club theme song was well I want to say released but in truth I changed it. Everyone wanted to be my band club afterwards especially when I heard about the complete lack of obligation in the tale. So all of these guys in the song are in your dorm and are not I mean are they car carrying members of the Carl Wilkerson band club? We don't carry cars. I'm not sure if you approached any of these people today if they would admit to being members of the Carl Wilkerson band club but then it was almost 20 years ago I haven't seen people employment since then I don't want to jeopardize that by admitting any association with them. Call the answer to a