Truly honorable people—in the wake of some monumental botch—fall on their swords. Most of us, however, would prefer that someone else be chosen to take the hit. In “Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People,” British writer Charlie Campbell traces the habit of buck passing back to the Garden of Eden, where Eve, an apparently gullible person with far too much time on her hands, blamed a talking snake for persuading her to pick the forbidden fruit, thus unleashing our continuing pageant of sorrows.

So begins the review of Scapegoat, the new book by Charlie Campbell.  The review paints an interesting picture of the book and if you enjoy pop nonfiction, it sounds like a potential good read.  You might want to check it out.

Where’s the persuasion?

Attribution Theory!

When the kick sails wide right, why did we lose?  The Kicker, aka an External Attribution.

P.S. For more on Eve as the mother of Attribution Theory, consult this analysis.

P.P.S. Please let there be no scapegoats in today’s Super Bowl.

The esteemed British Medical Journal publishes a meta analysis on the effect of chocolate consumption on mortality with a particular eye to stroke, heart disease, and heart attacks.  This Table tells it all and rather nicely.  Click to enlarge.

As the authors put it,

On pooling the retrieved measures of association, we found that high chocolate consumption was associated with about a third decrease in the risk of cardiometabolic disorders—37% in the case of any cardiovascular disease (relative risk 0.63 (95% confidence interval 0.44 to 0.90)) and 29% in the case of stroke prevention (0.71 (0.52 to 0.98)) (see fig 2). No significant association was observed in relation to heart failure (relative risk 0.95 (0.61 to 1.48)).

How about that?  Chocolate is good for you, particularly High Consumption.  That means eat more chocolate rather than eat less chocolate.

Of course, you could also reduce your risk of death and gain more life if you:

Run:  RR = .75

Walk:  RR = .81

Pray:  RR = .82

Or you could engage in High Consumption of chocolate and earn,

Eat:  RR = .63

Of course, all of these findings are based upon Observational Research with Huge Samples and Highly Significant Statistical Significance with, albeit, Small Windowpanes.  And they are published in prestige peer review sources.

Pray and pass the bon-bons or walk and run.  They have the same effect.

What’s your preference?

Persuasion mavens, gather around the body and feast!  If you cannot make money on Eat, Pray, Walk, and Run you didn’t know Jack Kennedy.

Rock ‘n roll music, as a creative expression of social change, is dead.  The End of History killed it even though Francis Fukuyama didn’t predict this and since he has also renounced his Great Hypothesis, he would also resist the inference.  He spoke truly first and he errs lately, so I persist on his past.  The End of History killed rock ‘n roll.

I point you to Simon Reynolds and his book, Retromania, a keen analysis of contemporary music and its fascination with all things past.  Reynolds properly notes that since the third millennium, all pop music only looks back.  Re-tro.  Re-issue.  Re-visit.  Re-vival.  Re-make.  Re-join.  Re-trospection.  As a creative force of change and expression, pop music no longer leads, it re-gurgitates.  It can’t even re-bel anymore.  Reynolds who presents himself as a hipster also reads the lit crit and employs Professor Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence as one explanation for the re-living the past.  But, consider even larger forces than the poetic agon.

I would argue that the death of dynamic pop music (and pop culture more generally) is a predictable outcome from Fukuyama’s analysis of human progress in his 1989 work, The End of History and the Last Man.  Fukuyama argues that people have determined the most effective institutions for organizing large national groups:  liberal democracy, free markets and capitalism, and the SET of science, education, and technology.  Everyone wants this trilogy, if in their own accent, dialect, and tradition, and finds no appeal in other combinations of institutions – monarchy and genetic engineering, anyone?  We are arriving at the End of History, the Big History as in the conflict of dictatorships versus democracies.  We all want the same Big Things and we will find each other in the same place:  Overland Park, Kansas with good schools, safe streets, friendly neighbors, no crime, no pollution, and easy access to everything.

Fukuyama employed his analysis to predict the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union with the uncanny accuracy of the Great Carnack come to life.  And no ironic Greek oracles with mixed messages.  He called it with footnotes!  Since then Fukuyama has renounced his Great Hypothesis more on the threat of science than the lessons of history.  His expertise leads him to question his prior expertise which is pretty much the way of expertise.  Achieving the Correct Answer is the death of analysis and if you value your thinking more than your thought, you will always question everything, including your own Correct Answers.

I am content with some kind of Truth even with contingencies and find the End of History most useful for seeing the future and explaining the past.  Even with the End, life and death still rolls on, but the Great Clash of Progress has changed scale.  We no longer pursue Existential Answers on the battlefield involving millions of combatants; the World War series ends at II and will not return like the latest Roman Numeralled Super Bowl.  We fight over Tastes Great versus Less Filling, CenterLeft versus CenterRight,  Some Belief versus More Belief.  The center has held and Mr. Yeats was only right for his time.

But, the price you pay for peace and prosperity is bad pop music and worse pop culture.

P.S. The only hope for Real Change is from cycles.  Ah, Vico.  Argh, Nietzsche.

P.P.S.  Michael Azerrad offers a review of Retromania.  Even if you aren’t interested in the book, read the review.  Azerrad balances the objective (the book and author) and the subjective (Azerrad) on a razor’s edge.  He shows how to write a great book review.

We’re in the midst of a major persuasion play between the President and Congress and between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of the Debt Ceiling.  Raise Taxes?  Cut Spending?  Lots of One, and Little of the Other, but which proportion?  I don’t know everyone’s TACT for the Other Guy, so it’s hard to handicap the play, but I do know this -

So from Mr. Obama’s perspective, if you’re going to take the pain for a deficit deal anyway, you might as well get real gains along the way.  In a phrase Mr. Biden has been using, “There’s no point in dying on a small cross.”

“Dying on a small cross” can only please a speaker who enjoys the sound of his voice and his clever phrase more than any change from the Other Guys.  This is a stupendously bad metaphor from anyone’s mind or mouth.

Worse than the immediate persuasion effect it may or may not have is the unfortunate revelation it makes.  How can a guy playing cards this way hope to win?  Man, just get him in a big moment in front of a large crowd, and he’ll destroy himself.

As the Wall Street Journal writer may be letting him do with this quotation.

Jon Meachum provides a great example the persuasive book review.  Rather than merely describe a book and criticize it, Meachum uses Robert Alter’s new work, The Wisdom Books:  Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, as a means to persuade about President Obama and, along the way, Meachum’s considerable heft and insight as a thinker.

About Alter’s book, Meachum describes little, critiques less, and commends next to nothing.  Alter is a “master translator” and has this new book that follows up his translations of the Pentateuch and Psalms.  Would even Alter’s mother find this meager acclaim cheering?

But at least she could take comfort in knowing that Meachum sees more in Alter’s book than Alter or anyone else:  It explains Obama!  In Obama, Meachum sees parallels to Job.

Unfortunately for the powerful, the plight of the biblical Job is a story with perennial resonance. A man seemingly rich in the gifts life has to offer, happy and blessed, finds himself — unjustly, from his perspective — bereft. Protected and apparently invincible one day, he is buffeted as God turns his back on his former beloved, producing rage, confusion and self-pity.

Yeah, this is Obama’s problem.  Inscrutably, God has turned His back on His former golden one.  What’s a President to do?

I wonder how Alter could have missed this in his thoughtful analysis of the Wisdom Books.  Kinda like a DaVinci Code in there that Alter missed.

But not Meachum.