Timbre! Elvis vs. The Beatles

In an earlier one of these Blog essays, I complained that popular music has become more about the spectacle than the soul. The actual music and the individual singing it are usually drowned out by the pyrotechnics mounted in connection with any live performance. It's now a rarity to see a person simply stand and deliver a song, unadorned by gaudy skimpiness, wild background writhing, and deafening-dazzling special effects. But in all this cacophony, the thing I miss most is the individual human voice. What I miss most are telling lyrics, clearly sung in a voice with a moving, expressive timbre.

There are rather technical, mathematical definitions of the word "timbre." The difference between the timbre of a clarinet and a flute, between one singer and another, has to do with ratios of overtones, waveforms, and frequencies. But the reason one timbre can be so emotionally affecting, while another one leaves us flat - remains largely a mystery. We can only say we know it when we feel it.

There aren't many modern singers whose voices have a moving timbre, who convey some unique combination of joy and pathos. There aren't many modern singers with mature, distinctive voices that are immediately recognizable and that therefore in and of themselves provide grounds for imitators. Perhaps Jimmy Fallon could imitate Justin Bieber's hairstyle and dance moves. But Bieber offers no distinctive vocal timbre that can be imitated, and that can evoke surprise and recapitulation of some strong emotion. Any imitation of Bieber can only be an imitation of exteriors in order to produce a derisive laugh.

It's the same with almost the entire roster of American Idols. When that show first came on the air, I thought it would be a true search for another Elvis, for someone with a searingly distinctive style and voice. But that hasn't happened. It has found people who can sing competently - even beautifully. Its finalists could all give gladdening performances as choir soloists or lounge singers or in some re-imagined version of "The Lawrence Welk Show." But there has been almost none among them whose voice has a memorable individuality. With all due respect to Kelly Clarkson's ability to render a song faithfully and with appropriate feeling, there is very little that's distinctive about her voice. It has no compelling singularity that makes it recognizable and uniquely evocative. There's nothing there to give imitators a toehold now, and there certainly won't be an industry of Kelly Clarkson imitators fifty years from now.

It's not some characteristic smooth and easy mellowness that I'm looking for in a voice and whose absence I'm regretting in the modern world, although when I really pause and listen, I can appreciate that quality in the "old standards" of Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Dean Martin… But I want more than that in a voice. I want "gravitas," that word that's applied to mature actors who can freight the most incidental dialogue with import and a sense of inevitable succession. I want a foreshadowing of triumph and defeat. I want that quality that makes a voice both imitatable and inimitable.

A lot of the people whose voices thrill me with such qualities have fallen roughly into the category of "country-western" singers whose heyday was in the 70's and 80's, although their renderings transcend any set time and classification. They're beyond country-western, rock, or blues.

Willie Nelson is an example of a singer who has one of the most touching timbres for me. His voice is so much an onomatopoeia of the dry desert winds that sweep through his songs. When he sings in "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys" -

You could die from the cold

In the arms of a nightmare

Knowin' well that that your best days are gone -

his voice and that lonely fate form an uncanny confluence. His voice is that lonely fate. In the same way, he embodies the long wistfulness of love when he sings in "Will You Remember?" -

I have sat 'neath the trees

While the cool summer breeze

Blew away the sands of time…

And when you've heard, all the songs of love,

Will you remember mine?

Similarly, something of the melancholy that suffuses our short time on this earth is a strain in other of my favorite voices. There's Tom Waits' whiskey-wasted search "for the heart of Saturday night" and his "breakin' all the rules in the cold, cold ground." Hoyt Axton conveys the richer bourbon worldliness of drifting down "every road I see," to find what's waitin' round the bend. There's Rod Stewart's hoarse hopefulness when he wonders, "Will I see you tonight, on a downtown train?" There's Leonard Cohen, whose voice has truly become "golden" only in the last decade or two, as he extols Joan of Arc's "solitude and pride." Even Johnny Cash, whose voice is so much the macho of solid oak, can have the admixture of that other, more complex craving as becomes apparent, again in a lesser known song he sang - "I've been sittin' here thinkin' about old times, some old times - dead and gone."

I see that most of the voices that affect me are men's voices. I don't know if that's because I'm a woman and therefore automatically more drawn to the male principle, or if men do cast a wider range of rebellion and individuality in their tones. But there are women whose voices, although they can't be thrillingly basso profundo - are still profunda. There's Edith Piaf who so fiercely regrets nothing. There's the incomparable crying catch in Patsy Cline's voice. Then no one conveys a pining romantic nostalgia better than Bernadette Peters singing an Irving Berlin song, wondering "When I'm alone, with only dreams of you, that won't come true - What'll I do?"

All these people have recognizable, distinctive voices that pave a pathway to the heart of things. Their singing is supremely affecting in a way that no rapper's cannonade can ever be. I can't help but think that most people who claim to enjoy the latter's performances do so for the same reason they claim to enjoy the spatterings of a lot of modern art. They say they like it, not because they find the work intrinsically expressive and interesting, but because they want to fit in with a certain crowd. They want to project a certain persona, and their choice of music must conform to their assumed character and to the part they're playing.

It's more difficult for me to understand though why so many people seem to be sincerely enthusiastic about singers who have no distinct personality, no unique voice - singers who are unripe and dependent on electronic synthesizers for the homogenized sounds they produce. More generally, it's difficult for me even to understand people's enthusiasm for most groups. Again, that's because the ultimate for me in popular music is an individual expression. Just as I wouldn't care for a novel written by a committee, I'm not often able to care deeply for the combination sound of barbershop quartets, choirs, or groups of any kind.

That's why the popularity of the Beatles has always been something of a mystery to me. Their joint sound never struck me as having any rich resonance. Then as they fractioned off into solo careers, I didn't find that any of them had that kind of moving individuality of voice that I value. People have argued with me about this. One friend claims that Paul, for instance, does have a distinctive voice that's anywhere recognizable, and that its unique timbre does provide fodder for imitators. Well, I don't know about that. Somehow, I doubt it. I can't help but think that people who claim to find that Paul, or any of the Beatles, produce a touching sound that, beyond any intellectual content of their songs, speaks directly to our emotions - are imputing qualities that aren't really there. I often feel that Beatles fans have ulterior reasons for attributing striking vocal ability to their idols. Perhaps fans are associating the advent of the Beatles with their youth or with some generally happier, freer time in their lives. They surround the Beatles with the glow of those better days.

Sometimes though, I worry that the shift from appreciation of someone like Elvis to groups such as the Beatles was the result of a more profound shift in Western culture - a shift away from my personality type and the kind of individualism that I still feel is the best hope for a sound, interesting, and humane society. Perhaps sociologist David Riesman put his finger on this swing in temperament in his 1960's bestseller The Lonely Crowd. He traced what he thought he detected as a progression of dominant personality types in our culture over the last couple of hundred years. It started with people who were guided by, and often bound by, tradition. Then society transitioned into favoring individualists, both bad and good. There were the robber barons, but also the creative artists and thinkers who forged their own paths. These newer generations of people incorporated the singular experiences they had growing up in eccentric, often self-sufficient families. As adults, they maintained inner compasses that reflected the unique circumstances in which they had been forged and which caused them to forge ahead in divergent directions. Riesman called these generations "inner-directed."

But then Riesman believed that somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, another personality type emerged and became dominant. He wrote that these most recent generations are primarily shaped by peer expectation. They take their cues from the likes and dislikes of the amalgamated group around them. They follow the crowd and are more geared to "group-think" than to rugged individualism - although the words "crowd and group-think" have a more strongly pejorative connotation that Riesman probably intended. He was primarily making an observation that the latest generation was what he called "other-directed or outer-directed."

Of course any such cultural analysis is a vast over-simplification. There have obviously been people of all types in all eras. Still, I can't help but feel that some such cultural shift might have marked the shift from widespread appreciation of Elvis to widespread appreciation of the Beatles. Or, to de-escalate the enthusiasm and to widen the time-scales just a bit - it was a shift from people who liked the extravagant, energetic individuality of Al Jolson to people who, from an early age, cried out after the passive uniformities of the line of Barbies and the Spice Girls. It was a shift from the apotheosis of the non pareil to the apotheosis of the united front.

There is indeed a "generation gap" between the two fandoms, although it's not really along the lines usually cited. The difference between the Eisenhower era and the hippie era is usually said to be the difference between conformity and a "do your own thing" outlook. Actually, it's closer to being the reverse. In the decades before and including Eisenhower, movie stars, singers, heroes, were people who had some distinctive, vivid aspect - people whose wit, beauty, or brains, seemed largely unattainable, above and beyond. But in the decades that followed, it was the "Average Joe" who was sought after - someone like everyone, someone who blended in - in appearance - and in voice. It was someone who sang, not alone, but in unison.

But I do miss that solo voice, the outstanding performance of an individual who stands stark, free from background noise. I miss the ravishingly distinct timbre that comes out of the darkness and touches some emotional core of me, one-on-one.

Sometimes I think perhaps there can't be any new voices with such unique tones, that perhaps all the possibilities have been used up. I think that after Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Elvis, and those other often-imitated/never-duplicated voices, that all the available band wavelengths, all the most striking registers, have been taken. Unlike the children in Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone, everyone can't be "above average," and so maybe we are left with just the ultimately unmemorable averageness of most of the American Idol voices.

I hope not. I hope that other truly distinct and moving voices can emerge and not be drowned out by the necessity of presenting with accompanying pyrotechnics. I think many of us were flabbergasted during the recent Oscar Awards Show to hear that Lady Gaga has a truly affecting voice when she sang without all the usual distractions. Maybe other such talents will come to light and find a platform.

If not though, there are always the recordings of those older unique voices to turn to. When the present world is too much with me, I can always turn to something like that 1956 recording of Elvis Presley singing "Love Me Tender" - pure and simple. He sings almost a capella for some stretches of the song, then with only the occasional guitar strum as accompaniment. His unique voice comes through - before he became a caricature of himself - before the hype and the hysteria so often tended to drown him out in the way that current singers purposefully, panderingly drown out any individuality they might have.

And even though the national character might have shifted in the way Riesman described, I won't be alone in my preferences. There was a scene from the movie Pulp Fiction that brings home the persistence of people who prefer Elvis over the Beatles. Director Quentin Tarantino had the scene deleted from most modern copies of the film - because he thought it sounded too scripted and because it became a cliché among dating couples. Nevertheless, it makes a telling point. On their arranged date, Uma Thurman's character tells John Travolta's character that there are only two kinds of people in the world - those who like what's in Column A, and those who like what's in Column B. She proceeds to quiz Travolta about his A or B preferences. The most notable choice she challenges Travolta to name is between the Beatles and Elvis. It seems likely she knows his answer in advance.

When Travolta unequivocally responds "Elvis," he stands with all of us who respond less to the necessarily homogenized sound of a group and more to an individual with a touching timbre for all times.

Let Her R.I.P. - The Art of the Epitaph

I've seen many collections of witty or telling epitaphs, and I've known people who make a hobby of roaming cemeteries to find interesting epitaphs. Sometimes they make rubbings of epitaphs that give funny or historically enlightening send-offs, or that are on the gravestones of famous people. So when my parents died - first my father and then two decades later, my mother - I gave a lot of thought to epitaphs for them. I didn't want to simply have them lying their labeled with their expiration dates.

I think I managed  distinctive, arresting summations for both, summations they'd probably approve. But when I've visited at their separated graves (the cemetery didn't have adjacent plots available), I've found no sign that anyone has ever come over to take a rubbing. That's despite the fact that my father is in a high-traffic, high-visibility area of the cemetery, in a spot my sister-in-law, then a new mother, initially greeted with the enthusiastic relief of, "That's great! It's near the washrooms!" But even though at least one of my parents has such a prime location, no one ever seems to have noticed the epitaphs. No one has ever contacted me to inquire further about their meaning or applicability. So I'll tell the story of them here.

My father lies under the rather jaunty, enigmatic assertion:

The Bright Ones Can Stay Home

That derived from an instruction one of my college professors issued, and that became a byword and family joke among the three of us. I didn't go away to college. I attended the school that had sprung up just down the street from me. There, at what is now Chicago's Northeastern University, my math teacher decided to have a review day for the students who were still lagging.. She said that those who already knew the material needn't attend that class session. Then, less tactfully, she rephrased her instruction as, "The bright ones can stay home."

That had been the only major class I'd had that day, so I indeed stayed home - the whole day. When my father saw me lounging about the house, he was curious. He asked why I wasn't in class as usual. "Oh," I told him, "the teacher is having catch-up review. She said 'The bright ones can stay home.'"

It was one of the few times I ever saw my father laugh with genuine warmth - at something that wasn't simply the slapstick cruelty of a Three Stooges gouge-in-the-eye. He was laughing at the alacrity, and perhaps the downright chutzpah, with which I had assumed myself into that charmed circle of "bright ones." My mother soon caught the hilarity of it. It became a catch-phrase and family joke among us three. After that, whenever one of us was spotted shirking a duty or simply lazing about when there was work to be done, another of us was bound to chide, "The bright ones can stay home, eh?"

When my father died, I thought of our family joke again and realized it could have a larger encapsulating applicability for him. My father had been quite a gad-about in his youth. He'd worked briefly for Al Capone, designing and printing labels for the bottles of booze coming off Capone's distillery assembly lines. My father had been a minor bootlegger himself, greeted as the life of the party wherever he went. He partied all night, every night. He was a high roller living the high life.

But by the time I came along, several decades later, he had completely reversed course. His experience after the Roaring 20's dwindled to a beaten growl soured him on people. As soon as Prohibition ended, he was persona non grata among all his old pals. He realized how empty all those old associations had been. They'd never wanted him - only the booze he brought. He turned his back on going places and seeing people. He became something of a hermit. He was content to stay home in the circumference of our family printing business. Since we had our business attached to our living quarters, that meant he hardly ever traveled farther than the little candy-and-cigarette store at the end of our block.

Although he wouldn't have recognized or acknowledged any "exotic" philosophy such as Buddhism, he in effect became an advocate of the wisdom of staying home in contentment with and appreciation of whatever a person had in the here-and-now. Unlike most youths who at least initially want to fling themselves out into the larger world, I was generally disposed to follow that more inner path myself. Oh, after high school, I would occasionally become roused by a notion to go somewhere other. I once saw an invitation to Americans to attend college in Japan and I actually started to make serious plans. I got a book on the Japanese language and made lists of "things to take."

My parents would have supported any decision I made, but my father was a little deflating. He wondered why I would want to go all the way to Japan when there was still so much of Chicago I hadn't seen. When I would argue my case in favor of Japan, he would say, "Yes, but have you seen 55th and Halsted?" I really don't think he knew or had any interest in what was at that particular Chicago intersection. I think he just chose the spot at random, perhaps because that conjunction of number and name had a certain poetic ring to it.

I groaned, and continued to champion the advantages of Japan, but much more feebly. I could see his point. In the end, and with quite some relief at not having to go through the trouble of packing and departing, I did stay home and happily attended the college in my neighborhood. But "55th and Halsted" became another catch-phrase in our household, advanced whenever one of us started to entertain some infatuation with the far-flung, instead of pursuing a more deep, abiding familiarity with our own home ground.

So in the end, "The Bright Ones Can Stay Home" seemed the most apt way to summarize my father's last, best philosophy of life.

I'm not as pleased with the epitaph I finally settled on for my mother. It too has a certain summary aptness, but it has a cynical, sour cast that perhaps shouldn't be a person's parting shot to the world. I often think of having her stone re-carved with a more upbeat afterthought, but in the end, her stone will probably remain as it is.

My mother majored in languages at Northwestern University (which is east of the misnomer Northeastern I attended). She especially enjoyed her Spanish classes and the classical Spanish poetry that was assigned reading. She memorized some of the stanzas of Romantic poet Adolfo Becquer, and remembered them. In lieu of lullabies she would soothingly recite them to me years later when I was a child….

             "Volveran las oscuras golondrinas

              en tu balcón sus nidos a colgar,

              y otra vez con el  ala a tus crystals -

              jugando llamaran."

Freely translated, that says, "The black doves will come to hang their nests on your balcony and will once again call to you, playfully tapping with wing on your windows."

I was moved almost to tears just a few years ago when (against anything my father would have wholly approved), I took a whirlwind tour of Spain. Our guide was a young woman, seemingly barely out of college. So I had no hopes of her having any familiarity with Bequer or with the Spanish writers my mother studied in the 1920's. But I was wrong! The young guide lit up the moment I mentioned Becquer's name - and she immediately started to recite in unison with me his poem about the lost love to which the doves were witness. When my mother died, I thought I would never hear those lines again - or in fact meet anyone with any memory of them. It certainly would be hard to find any young Americans who could recite whole poems by classic poets so readily ("The Dead Poets Society" notwithstanding). But perhaps they take a different educational approach in Spain - one that puts a slightly nationalistic emphasis on honoring their noted writers, even from centuries past, with remembrance of their words.

However, it was the last line of this Becquer poem, this "Rima" from the 19th century, that my mother invoked most often, not as lullaby but more as lesson. The English translation of that last line reads roughly, "Disenchant yourself of the idea that anyone will ever love you as I have loved you."

That might seem a cruel, even a psychotic thing to say to a young girl who is so eager, so hopeful of finding romantic love in the world. I can see any psychiatrists who might read this shaking their heads in dismay at what they'd probably interpret as signs of a Norman Bates mother with a cripplingly jealous attachment to her child. But it wasn't like that at all.

Well, perhaps there was just an iota of self-concern in my mother's occasional interjection of this bitter line from an old poem. She had a mild form of agoraphobia and doubtless was afraid that I would leave her, and she would have to struggle out into the terrifying world on her own.

But for the most part, she was just putting into words what I myself could perceive but might be too dangerously needy of companionship to acknowledge. She might mutter the words when she saw me inclined to pursue an indifferent youth who came late to our date, who honked his car horn hurrying me out to him rather than bestirring himself to come up to the door, and who gave every sign of only grudgingly buying me dinner if he was assured of my delivering what he inevitably wanted. Looking at this parade of calculating, appraising peers, I had to admit what so many foolishly refuse to admit - that unconditional love will be hard to find once you move outside the sphere of good parents. "Oh yes, he slaps me around, but I know that deep down, he really loves me." I was impressed with the destructive illogic of any such attitude early in life, by the reminder of the line from Becquer's poem.

The line might just as well have been delivered by my mother to the world at large though. She did everything effusively for free, while others were always bent over their calculators, figuring what they'd charge. She excitedly considered every potential guest as a State event - while, at best, they squeezed her in between other appointments. Little did they know how much they meant to her as they hurried out the door on their way to somewhere else.

So there her epitaph is carved, hiding its rue behind the original Spanish which I thought it unlikely any relative could decipher and resent:

Como yo te he querido, desengáñate - así - no te querrán

Then how about me? I think I might have settled on my own epitaph. Once again, it's a line provided by someone else. It was suggested to me years ago by Stuart Brent, Chicago's famous bookseller. Brent had his little shop, which often served as salon for the literati, on Michigan Avenue, part of the City's "Magnificent Mile." He became one of the last independent booksellers, holding his own against the chains, the mega-bookstores, and the warehouse operations. He did it by maintaining his personal interest - in every book and every customer.

Sometimes his habit of voicing his own, often crusty, opinions about his customers' reading preferences ran contrary to what most merchants would consider good business sense. When an acquaintance of mine once failed to find L. Ron Hubbard's then best-selling Dianetics anywhere in the store, he rather accusingly asked Brent why he didn't stock such a popular book. Brent roundly rebutted that he didn't want pseudo-scientific drivel like that taking up room on his shelves. However Brent finally relented and agreed to order a copy to satisfy my friend's persistent desire to read "that hack junk." Another, even more antagonistic exchange occurred when Brent called my friend to tell him his order was in, and my friend informed him that he hadn't been able to wait - that he had already bought the book elsewhere. In the wake of the verbal abuse that Brent then dished out, my friend never patronized Brent's store again in its fifty-plus years of existence.

I never quite made it plain, but frankly, I was on Brent's side in this scuffle. I felt on Brent's side in most things. While many of my peers were swooning over the Beatles, I became a Stuart Brent fan. He had a local weekly TV show devoted to book reviews. My mother and I would both watch the show faithfully.

If pinned down, we would have to admit that all his reviews sounded much alike. Whether he was reviewing what was then the latest book of social critique, Riesman's The Lonely Crowd,  or whether he was reviewing a classic such as Eliot's Middlemarch - Brent would trot out pretty much the same observations. He would simply use whatever book he selected for his morning talk as a hook on which to hang his dissatisfactions with modern society.

Brent would even work the same phrases into most of his reviews. He was sure to find in each book-of-the-week some support for his blasts against "mass culture," "group-think," and our current educational system intent on producing merely "educated fools." My mother and I, as alienated as we were from popular culture, reveled in these criticisms.

If Brent couldn't find direct support for his contrarian views in whatever book was under discussion, he would freely go off on a tangent. He always introduced these tangents in the same way. He would preface any digression with the fetching admission - "Apropos of nothing…"

Thinking back on those old TV reviews, I realized that Stuart Brent had handed me my epitaph on a platter. I've never really had a job, and certainly not a career. My school attendance was desultory at best since I mostly learned at home. Therefore, I've never felt had any strong affiliation with a school, a class, a team. I've never attended any religious services. I have mostly eschewed collecting things or having a hobby of any sort. I've generally lived beyond the pale, completely irrelevant to the worldly doings and lives of others. So the phrase will suit me perfectly:

Here lies Marlene Vorreiter

Apropos of Nothing

J'Accuse! Who Is Really To Blame for the Oil Spill?

Most people blamed abstract entities for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The entire company of BP was blamed. Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BR, was reviled, but only to the extent that he was seen to represent BP as a whole. Similarly, various government regulatory agencies and governments in general were blamed. Some people have criticized President Obama, but again, only because he stood for the U.S. Government as a whole.

However, my impulse is not to blame any abstract agency or any composite, corporate entity. I want to blame individuals. It’s true that there is such a thing as a corporate culture, and specifically some sick corporate cultures that push employees to all kinds of ruthless expedients just to make a profit. It’s similar to growing up in a bad neighborhood. The bad influences hold sway and eventually push many youths to conform to the criminal standards of their peers.

Judith Rich Harris wrote a controversial, but generally convincing book entitled The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do; Parents Matter Less Than You Think and Peers Matter More. That title sums up her thesis that peer group influence, rather than parental mores, is the primary determinant of most young people’s behavior. She points out that if you take a juvenile delinquent out of his gang environment and put him in a relatively crime-free school in which criminal behavior is considered an alien, outlandish, and even laughable mode of conduct by most of the student body - chances are the delinquent will literally re-form.

Other authors have extended this concept of the primacy of peer group mores into adult settings. In the classic book The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman argued that most people in Western cultures have long since moved from being “inner-directed” to being outer-directed and “other-directed.” Most people no longer stand stalwart in an individualistic identity transferred to them in the form of the mores and expectations of their parents. There is very seldom any “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” mentality in people. Rather, people are protean, assuming whatever shape fashion and their peers dictate. So now you CAN take the country out of the boy.

Considering the influence of peer pressure from another angle, it’s obvious that a twisted mob psychology can grip people at certain times and turn otherwise civil people into holocaust perpetrators. Everywhere we find instances of the madness of crowds.

So there’s a cogent argument that would blame people’s misdeeds on the pressures they experience from their peers, from their fellow students, from their prevailing neighborhood gangs, from their companies’ established cultures, from their society’s expectations. Nevertheless, I STILL want to blame individuals. I STILL want to name names. I STILL want to point the finger at specific individuals rather than at abstract, faceless groups such as governments or corporations. It’s individuals rather than teams I want to admire; it’s individuals rather than teams I want to accuse.

In a courtroom, we still ultimately convict the individual rather than the society that individual came from. We are more and more taking into consideration bad environments, extenuating circumstances, etc. But in the end, the individual stands alone in the docket. So I want to place each individual involved in any man-made disaster in the docket alone.

That’s why when it comes to the recent oil spill, I felt frustrated not to know the names of the individuals whose actions contributed to the accident. Certain individuals might be in the process of being called to account for the accident and might be prosecuted, but most of society’s blame still has been falling on those abstractions of company, agency, and government. No! I wanted to see the faces of individuals.

The closest that I was able to come to assigning such blame was through the "60 Minutes” interview given by Mike Williams, a chief electronics technician on the oil rig. Williams gave very intelligent testimony about the behavior that piled hazard upon hazard – until the final explosion. He talked about the series of mechanical failures that came about as the result of individual decisions. Williams told how someone okayed a plan to speed up the drilling into the Gulf floor. That caused the bottom of the drill hole to split, the way wood will split when a nail is driven into it at a bad angle or without benefit of a pilot hole. The mud that circulates through the casing around the drill bit and drill pipe to cool these elements consequently spilled into these cracks. The workers had to start drilling a new hole. I blame that individual who thought it was okay to speed up the drilling process.

Then during a test, the drill was carelessly raised out of the hole, causing it to scrape away some of the necessary seal, the “annular,” that has to be kept intact in order to maintain pressure on the gas that will emerge. I blame the individuals who allowed and who executed this haphazard lifting of the drill.

Chunks of the annular started to appear in the liquid circulating to the top of the drill hole. When Williams called these chunks to the attention of some of the supervisors, they pooh-poohed his concerns. They okayed a go-ahead. I blame these indifferent individuals.

Because of the damaged seal, gas rushed out past the seal and was sucked into the rig engines. The rig exploded and eleven people were killed.

Williams reported a more fundamental human failing that preceded all these negligent decisions though. He talked about how BP supervisors and TransOcean supervisors disagreed earlier in this chain of events about what drilling technique to use. Men from the two different major companies involved in the drilling disagreed about procedure and predictably turned their disagreement into a jousting match. The men from each side were only intent on being right, on winning the argument. As TV judge Marilyn Milian says, it became a matter of “Quién es mas macho.” Or as Williams put it, the conference became a “chest-bumping.” I blame the men who let the discussion degenerate into verbal combat.

But that sort of impulse to turn what should be conversation into contest is all too frequent an occurrence, especially when all the conversants are men. This isn’t a sexist comment I’m interjecting out of the blue. There have been many serious sociological studies documenting (as a broad generality with many exceptions, of course) men’s and women’s different conversational styles. Deborah Tannen is one of the sociologists who has documented this difference most convincingly. In books such as You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, she observed how women tend to make a collaboration of their discussions, while men tend to enjoy pitting themselves against each other until a clear winner of the confrontation can be declared. Even those men who come out on the bottom of any particular exchange prefer to enter the next exchange as a contest, because there’s always a chance they might come out winners in that next verbal fray. Having rules, keeping score, driving towards a central victory, tends to be preferable to them than what strikes them as the indecisive, mealy conciliations of women’s talk.

So here blame gets bounced off the individual from another angle. Here the fault is seen to lie not in ourselves, but in our genetic inheritance from primal ancestors. We are acting out the gender strategies that made our early families most successful.

Deborah Tannen and other authors on the subject usually bend over backwards to make it clear that they don’t feel the women’s conversational style is superior to the men’s. The styles are just different. Tannen emphasizes that men and women simply arrive at resolutions with different shadings. Women’s style reflects the use of a mixed and muted palette. The decision reached is a committee compromise. Men’s style favors vivid primary colors. The dominant man’s view is imposed as a coherent whole, in a winner-takes-all flourish of primacy and consistency.

I don’t think I would be as generous as Tannen and others though in granting what’s defined as men’s conversational style equal validity with what’s defined as women’s typical style. Men’s styles too often do seem to result in a Gulf oil spill, in destruction, in war. The dominant man, having failed to take into consideration any countervailing views for fear that might signal weakness and therefore a loss of face, a losing of the contest – issues a plan that is therefore limited and preemptory. It’s “Damn the torpedoes - full speed ahead” too much of the time when an issue is decided only by men engaged in verbal sport.

But can’t men see how damaging it is to operate by contest, to make every encounter an occasion for a challenge to a duel? Can’t they see how succumbing to this primal instinct to be the alpha male is no longer serving them, their communities, or the world well in most cases? This is where I would like to come in and shake those men who “chest-butted” in order to reach a decision about how to proceed with the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. This is where I would like to name names, to assign individual blame. Rather than billowing regret about “big corporations,” “corporate culture,” “capitalist greed,” and the like – I would like to bring it all down to a personal level, to point my finger at Tom, Dick, and Harry (and Tony) each in succession and punish them for their destructive competitiveness.

My wish to place individual blame and to punish as a parent or a spouse might – with full frontal finger-pointing - is probably MY counterproductive impulse. When has blame ever really changed a person? When has simply yelling at a person, “Don’t BE that way!” ever spurred anyone to self-improvement?

It is probably better in some ways to hold those larger, more abstract entities responsible for much of the evil that men do. It is probably more productive to try to reform school environments, neighborhood ethics, corporate cultures, and societal presumptions than it is to try to reform individuals independent of the network of influences they operate in. But just as many men will continue to find women’s method of coalition emotionally unsatisfying, so I find putting the blame on abstract organizations emotionally unsatisfying. As futile as it might be, I still long to find out exactly WHO issued the order to speed up drilling in the Gulf of Mexico – and to harangue, blame, prosecute that person into making an apology, into making personal amends, and into becoming a better person in the future.

I don’t want to blame the wheel; I want to blame the faulty cog. I don’t want to blame the system; I want to blame the individual at fault in the system. I don’t want to blame the Devil; I want to blame the person who chose the Devil as mentor.