Oxford University Press's Blog, page 669

The History of Grove Music: an interactive timeline

Since 1873, Grove Music has expanded from one piece of hardbound reference detailing the work and lives of musicians to becoming a powerful online encyclopedic database that serves to educate the world about music. George Grove, founder of the Grove dictionaries, was motivated by the lack of music reference works available to scholars and music professionals. He compiled the first volume of Grove’s Dictionary in 1878 with the extensive help of venerable editors. Today, Grove’s work is published online as a continually evolving digital database, formally known as Grove Music Online. For a detailed history of Grove’s inception, explore this interactive timeline from Oxford Music Online.

Headline image credit: Photo by Sara Levine for Oxford University Press.

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Afterwar – Episode 22 – The Oxford Comment

As 2.6 million men and women return home from war, the prevalence of veteran suicide and post-traumatic stress is something that is frequently discussed by civilians, politicians, and the media, but seldom understood. These changes extend beyond psychological readjustment, physical handicap, and loss of life. The greatest wounds, in fact, may not even be visible to the naked eye. While the dialogue concerning veteran assistance typically involves the availability of institutional services, military hospitals, and other resources, there is also an increasing need to address the “moral injuries” sustained by soldiers during combat.

But what, exactly, is moral injury? In this month’s episode, Ryan Cury, a Trade Marketing Manager in the New York office, sat down with Nancy Sherman, author of Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers, to discuss the painful questions veterans bring home from war, as well as the possibility of inner healing.

 Image Credit: “New York City Veterans Day Parade 2012″ by Dave Bledsoe. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Parliamentary procedure

On May 7, British voters will head to the polls to elect a new Parliament. If mid-April forecasts are correct, the formation of a government will be a bit more complicated than in elections past. The results of those elections will have important ramifications for the conduct of economic policy in both Britain and the European Union.

For most of the last two centuries, British governments have been formed by one of the two major political parties of the time. Before World War I, either the Conservative (Tory) Party or the Liberal Party; since then, either the Conservatives or the Labour Party.

The dominance of two parties can be explained, in part, by Britain’s first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral system. Under this system, there are no primaries and no run-off elections – the candidate who garners the largest number of votes in each constituency wins the seat. Hence, a minor party with 20 percent support in each constituency will not win any seats in Parliament. The only way for such a party to be a serious contender is if its votes are concentrated in fewer constituencies, for example, if their candidates received 50 percent of the vote in 40 percent of the constituencies. Hence, it is not surprising that British governments have been overwhelmingly one-party affairs during the past two centuries.

Contrast the FPP system with proportional representation (PR), which exist in Germany, Israel, and elsewhere. In PR systems, winning 20 percent of the overall vote is likely to translate into approximately 20 percent of the seats in Parliament. Governments in PR countries are usually coalitions of two or more parties, since in multiparty countries it is unusual for any one party to secure the 50 percent of seat in Parliament necessary to govern alone. Coalition governments are therefore the rule, rather than the exception in PR countries.

The results of Britain’s 2010 elections were unusually close. Neither the Conservatives nor Labour won enough seats to form a government on its own; the Liberal Democrats (LDP) – which already had some strength in the west and north of England and in Scotland—had a slightly better-than-usual result and gained enough seats to put the Conservatives in power, make David Cameron Prime Minister and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg Deputy Prime Minister.

2010 UK General Election results, by Johannes Rossel. Blue equals Conservatives. Red equals Labour. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In the five years since the previous government was formed, a number of developments have made the results of the May 2015 election even more difficult to predict.

First, party loyalty appears to be a thing of the past. In 1951, according to the Economist, Labour and the Conservatives took a combined 97 percent of the vote. These days, however, dyed-in-the-wool Tories and Life-long Laborites are increasingly dinosaurs: the two big parties are currently polling around a third of the vote each and, according to mid-April projections by Election Forecast UK are likely to win only about 280 seats (plus or minus 40 seats), short of the 326 or so needed to govern.

Second, the Liberal Democrats will likely make up a much smaller contingent in the incoming Parliament, making it unlikely that they will again play the role of kingmaker. Viewed ideologically as holding the middle ground between Labour and the Conservatives, going into a coalition with the Conservatives has alienated many of their supporters. This resulted in a poor showing in last year’s local elections, in which the LDP lost more than 40 percent of their local office-holders. Additionally, one of the LDP’s main accomplishments—and a condition for entering the coalition—was to hold a referendum on introducing proportional representation to Parliamentary elections. That referendum lost by a two-to-one margin in 2011, making them less relevant on policy grounds. Finally, the LDP’s pro-Europe stance is increasingly unpopular.

Third, the Scottish National Party (SNP) is poised to make substantial gains. After proposing—and losing—a referendum on Scottish Independence, the SNP has rebounded and now looks like it will be far more popular in Scotland than Labour, which held the majority of Scottish constituencies in the outgoing Parliament, or the LDP. The SNP has said that it would back a Labour government—only because it holds an even greater distain for the Conservatives. Since the Labor Party opposes Scottish independence, it is not clear what the consequences of a Labour-SNP coalition would be for the future of a united Britain.

Finally, the fallout from European sovereign debt crisis has led to a rise in anti-EU sentiment across Europe. David Cameron has had an increasingly contentious relationship with the European Union, blocking several measures that had widespread support among the other EU members, supporting a long-held view in Europe that Britain is not a full-fledged partner in the European enterprise. As leader of the most euro-skeptical of the large UK parties, Cameron has promised that if he is reelected he will hold an “in-or-out” referendum on Britain’s continued presence in the European Union in 2017. Cameron is looking over his right shoulder at the rise of the UK Independence Party, which advocates withdrawal from the European Union and has already drawn some defectors from Conservative Party ranks.

It is impossible at the time of this writing to predict what coalition will emerge from the May 7 election; in fact, the results may remain unclear for several days and weeks as the parties scramble to find a winning, stable coalition. In addition to the parties mentioned above, there are a handful of other tiny parties (e.g., Welsh Nationalists, Greens, and several Northern Ireland parties) which may hold the balance of power. Any coalition that leads to a break-up of the UK or the removal of Britain from the European Union will be costly to Britain, Europe, and the wider world.

Featured image credit: Ed Miliband, by ‘Ed Miliband for leader’. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Legislating for justice

Legislating on land rights is an exercise fraught with challenges. States are reluctant and often opposed to any central legislation on the subject viewing such an exercise as an encroachment into their domain. The Constitution also lists ‘land’ exclusively as a state subject meaning the Centre does not possess the authority to legislate on related issues.

There are multiple problems with land ownership in India. It doesn’t help that ownership of land is no longer protected as a fundamental right. It doesn’t help that an active and creative mafia works overtime to exploit vacant lands and loopholes in the judicial system. It doesn’t help that ownership is only presumptive and not conclusive (as in other developed countries).

Yet solid and informed policy is necessary to address the challenges faced in India. It is essential to give people a sense of security over their land which in a large number of cases is directly tied to their livelihood.

Land acquisition, which falls under an entry in the concurrent list (meaning both the Centre and the States are qualified to make laws), offered us an opportunity to address some of these injustices. A decision was taken to repeal the 1894 law enacted by the British. This in itself was a big step as every single exercise prior to this revolved around amending the 1894 law. A new law was written with the intention of starting from a clean slate, to distance ourselves from the baggage of the 1894 law and build in safeguards that would remedy historical injustices and prevent them from happening again.

The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013 was a small step in that direction. It altered the status quo, abridged the powers of the State to take over land, and empowered the common man with a series of rights and protections.

It is telling of the degree of dependence and reliance on land acquisition, that the Government now wants to revert to a position as it existed prior to the 2013 law (albeit with higher compensation and rehabilitation/resettlement provisions in place).

What is equally telling is how no one, in the year since the law was passed, has bothered to take on an exercise to fix those problems that make acquisition necessary in the first place. States need to improve record keeping, they need to guarantee the titles of those who choose to buy land in their jurisdictions, and above all, they need to prevent frivolous and vexatious litigation designed to tire out bona fide land purchasers.

Whenever the State needed land, it resorted to acquisition. Which is why the need for improving land laws was never felt. In the absence of that crutch, State Governments should begin work on addressing the flaws that make land purchase such an unattractive option. That will be the next stage of land reforms. If the Central Government is successful in amending the 2013 law, by effectively stripping it of the safeguards that set it apart from its predecessor, then we will have taken a step back on that long march to land reforms.

Featured image credit: Woman walking in rural India. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Minding your stems and crowns

Since evolution became the primary framework for biological thought, we have been fascinated—sometimes obsessed—with the origins of things. Darwin himself was puzzled by the seemingly sudden appearance of angiosperms (flowering plants) in the fossil record. In that mid-Cretaceous debut, they seemed to be diversified into modern families already, with no evidence of what came before them. This was Darwin’s famous “abominable mystery.”

Birds arose around the same time, but for them we have a detailed fossil record documenting the evolution of their feathers, wings, and specialized skeletal features. For plants, there is still a huge gap between living angiosperms and fossil groups that might be related to them, but we do have tools for whittling away at the mystery.

The “top-down” approach uses modern methods of DNA-based phylogenetic analysis to build accurate trees of living angiosperms, identify the most archaic taxa among them, and make predictions about their common ancestor from their characteristics. By definition, the living members of a group of organisms, their common ancestor, and any extinct species—or “dead ends”—among them, constitute a “crown group” (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. The angiosperm stem group consists of extinct seed plants that branched off after the common ancestor with other living gymnosperms, but before the common ancestor of the crown group of living angiosperms. Image Credit: Figure 6.2 in Plant Life: A Brief History by Frederick B. Essig (page 119).

The “bottom-up” approach analyzes the available fossil record, identifying which extinct species might be most closely related to the crown group, and which of their structures might have been transformed into the characteristic organs of the angiosperms, particularly their flowers. The extinct organisms leading up to the crown group are referred to as the “stem group,” which, by definition, extends backwards to an earlier ancestor shared with the next most closely related group of living organisms.

For example, the closest living relatives of birds are the crocodilians and their stem group includes all of the dinosaurs. That may sound like the “tail wagging the dog,” but it is during the long line of dinosaurian ancestry that we see the evolution of feathers, wings, and flight, along with other features shared by birds and dinosaurs but not found in crocodilians. Similarly, the stem group of amphibians is where fish turned into land animals, and the stem group of reptiles is where amniotic eggs evolved, freeing vertebrates from aquatic reproduction. The stem groups are where all the fun is!

But who were the “dinosaurs” of the angiosperm story? The stem group of the angiosperms goes back some 300 million years to where it split from the ancestor of the living gymnosperms—conifers, cycads, etc. (Fig. 1). The common ancestor of both gymnosperms and angiosperms, which lived some 300 million years ago, was some kind of seed fern, a plant that bore seeds and pollen on its leaves. The first full flowers, which may have come into existence around 140 million years ago, were bisexual, with distinctive closed carpels, flattened stamens with four pollen sacs, and embryonic seeds (ovules) that were “bent” and contained by a double envelope (integument).  The plants that might tell how, why, and where ancient leafy structures were transformed into these distinctive organs are not only extinct, but also largely missing from the fossil record.

Among known members of the angiosperm stem group, one bright spot lies within the extinct order Caytoniales. Some phylogenetic analyses of fossil Mesozoic seed plants reveal this group to be the most closely related to the angiosperms. This supports an older hypothesis promoted by evolutionary botanist G. L. Stebbins, which argued that the peculiar bent angiosperm ovule was derived from the seed-bearing cupule of the Caytoniales (Fig. 3).  Known members of the Caytoniales, however, provide little information about the possible origin of stamens and carpels.

Figure 3. The bent ovule with a double integument characteristic of the angiosperms (C) may have evolved from the seed-bearing cupules of the Caytoniales (A), as the number of ovules within was reduced to one (B). Image Credit: Figure 6.10 in Plant Life: A Brief History by Frederick B. Essig (page 130). Redrawn after Brown, 1935, The Plant Kingdom, Ginn & Co., Boston and New York, with permission.

Why should there be a gap in the crucial part of the record? The various Mesozoic seed ferns left a fair number of fossils; why not those leading up to the first angiosperms? Aside from the lower fossilization rate of plants in general, it may be that the pre- and proto-angiosperms evolved in habitats where fossilization was particularly unlikely. For Stebbins and others, that habitat was semi-arid subtropical uplands. Stebbins felt that the patchy physical environment and seasonal, marginally sufficient rainfall in such environments provided the maximum stimulation for the evolution of new growth forms, particularly for the short reproductive cycle that is characteristic of the angiosperms. Such environments are the primary hotbeds (“cradles”) of angiosperm innovation and diversity today, and wet tropical forests serve more as refugia or “museums” for archaic angiosperms.

The study by Taylor Feild and his colleagues in 2004, which included analysis of the anatomy, physiology, and ecology of archaic living angiosperms, resulted in a very different hypothesis about the crown group ancestor. Feild argued it was adapted to the disturbed margins of dark, damp forests, where there might be similar pressures for a more rapid reproductive cycle. Who was right?

The answer depends on our reference point.   The top-down approach defines the nature of the crown group ancestor, while the bottom-up approach makes hypotheses about adaptive events along the long stem lineage. Angiosperm precursors may very well have lived in a variety of habitats, including upland, semi-arid habitats, prior to moving into damp, disturbed habitats.

The accumulation of the distinctive features of the angiosperms probably took millions of years, paralleling the progression from feathered dinosaur to true birds. In fact, if we designate the first plant with closed carpels as the first angiosperm (“hidden seeds”), and if other standard features of the flower evolved either before or after that, then “angiosperms” and “flowering plants” are not exactly synonymous. And the crown group ancestor refers to a still later reference point. The crown group ancestor was not the first angiosperm, just as there were true birds prior to the bird crown group ancestor. All we can say for sure is that it was a successful angiosperm with all the standard floral features in place, and that it proliferated at the expense of other early angiosperms.

Therefore, when postulating the origins of groups of plants, we must be careful to mind our stems and crowns.

Image Credit: Pink flowers from Central Hong Kong by Marbenitse, CC BY SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Cyber won’t protect us: the need to stand behind the Iranian nuclear framework agreement

After two years of negotiations, Israel throwing whatever they can against any possible agreement, and the Republicans in the US Congress doing what they can to scuttle the deal, we finally have a framework for an agreement between Iran and its negotiating partners. It is not a perfect deal, but it is likely the best the West can get and given the other options, it is literally the only hope standing between a rational dialogue with Iran and outright conflict.

The idea is that to control the Iranian threat, the West needs to limit Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons. While this threat framework may be problematic at best, accepting the realities of the tone of the conversation leads us to accept that something needs to be done about Iran. The question though is what? The only real solution is a multi-country agreement that commits the interested parties to a system of monitoring and reinforcement that will allow Iran to join the international community. Other options include a preventative military attack, economic sanctions, and cyber-attacks. The cold hard reality of the situation is that none of these other options will really limit Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons.

Of the three options to control Iran’s nuclear production, each seem more far-fetched and irrational once dissected. The John Bolton favored option option of bombing Iran fails to note that we have little knowledge of where the important nuclear sites really are, that the sites we do know about are prepared and hardened for an attack (the likely impenetrable Fordow site is rendered a research facility under the agreement), or that attacking Iran in such a manner will likely unleash their proxies throughout the world to wreak havoc. What is more, force generally pushes the opponent to fight back with more resolve and often achieves the opposite of that which was intended. A military solution will only ensure a hardened Iran intent on demonstrating its ability to produce nuclear weapons.

Cyber Endeavor 2011 by US Army Europe Images. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Economic sanctions have been in place for decades now. We can make these sanctions smarter, more targeted, and more efficient. Europe can join and strangle Iran by not buying its goods or its oil. Yet the bottom line is that the Iranian regime is insulated from such eventualities. Those who will suffer, like Iraq before it, will be the wider Iranian population. Sanctions are not a rational or moral path to foreign policy achievement.

This leaves the new options, the mythical options that statesmen have only dreamed about. The goal of the 2010 cyber-attack on Iran launched by the United States and Israel was to wound and degrade Iran’s nuclear production abilities. This was seen as a safe option in that it did not expose the limitations of a military attack or the ineffective nature of sanctions. If the United States could destroy Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, and do so in such a way that would make it suspect all its own operatives and scientists of sabotage, this would be the magical bullet we have been looking for all this time.

Yet cyber options are not the path to victory. The cyber path in Iran, which took the form of the Stuxnet attack, was ineffective. Iran actually enriched more uranium during the height of the operation, likely in order to compensate for the centrifuges that were knocked offline by the cyber-attack. What is more, ten percent of the centrifuges were timed to fail, yet the centrifuges were so old and out of date that they failed at a rate of 11 percent anyway. We have no idea if the cyber action by the United States was actually responsible for most of the damage, yet the current brokered agreement knocks offline two thirds of Iran’s current first generation centrifuges.

Possibly a greater, larger, more robust attack could bring down Iran’s internal nuclear networks and destroy their ability to produce uranium, but these options are purely in the realm of speculation. The Stuxnet attack took years to develop, hundreds of millions of dollars, the direct involvement of two of the most capable intelligence organizations in the world, and a series of mishaps and streaks of luck that allowed for the Stuxnet attack to go forward. In the end it was not very successful, nor are we assured another future attack would do much more damage.

There are no easy options to stop Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons. Military attacks, sanctions, and cyber actions will all fail. All we are left with is traditional diplomacy and mutual confidence in the measures used in the new framework agreed to this week. There is no new tool to save us from our enemies, the real solution takes time and mutual respect that comes from the framework of verification and coordination that the West is establishing with Iran.

Image: Iran negotiations about Iran’s nuclear program, Geneva, November 2013. US Department of State from United States. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The “Blurred Lines” of music and copyright: Part two

Possibly the highest-profile copyright case of the past 12 months centered on a trial between the creators of the catchy tune, “Blurred Lines”, and the Marvin Gaye estate over the song’s supposed similarities to the 1977 hit, “Got to Give it up”. The jury’s decision to award the Gaye family $7.4 million has been met with some consternation in both law and music circles, with Pharrell Williams reportedly telling the media that this verdict spells disaster for the creative industries. We asked two Oxford authors to give their opinions on the case in this two-part blog, which will look at the jury’s decision from a musical perspective, as well as a law perspective. In this second part, Neil Wilkof, co-author of Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights, discusses how evidence was presented to the jury.

The infrequency of two high-profile songsters or their representatives going all the way to trial over claims of copyright infringement, means that such a case usually receives heightened public scrutiny. This is especially so when mere sampling of the plaintiff’s song is not at issue. In recent years, few cases have drawn more public attention than the dispute between the Marvin Gaye estate and singer/songwriter Robin Thicke and song producer Pharrell Williams, over whether the song “Blurred Lines” infringed Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit, “Got to Give It Up.”

After eight days of testimony, a jury in US federal court in Los Angeles, decided unanimously that Thicke and Williams had infringed the 1977 song. Rapper T.I., who was also a named defendant, was not found liable. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the evidentiary part of the case was that the Gaye estate was not allowed not introduce the full recorded rendition of the song “Got to Give It Up”, since the estate owned the copyright only in the sheet music to the song (though it appears that the judge did allow modified versions to be heard by the jury). The jury awarded the Gaye estate an overall amount of nearly $7.4 million in damages. The evidence had shown that the song had generated over $16 million in profits, including more than $5 million for Thicke and Williams.

Robin Thicke, performing, by City Year. CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0 via Flickr.

Those who engage in copyright law sometimes forget that the issues of what is protectable, and what is not, and how much needs to be copied, are devilishly difficult and reasonable people can disagree. Nowhere is this uncertainty more acute than with a musical composition, comprised of various artistic layers, laced with the fact that a musical work is meant to be performed, which adds a further layer of complexity. As the well-known U.S. judge,  Learned Hand famously said in fashioning his “abstractions test” for distinguishing between idea and expression in copyright in the case of Nichols v. Universal Pictures, “[n]obody has ever been able to fix that boundary [between idea and expression], and nobody ever can.”

Imagine that you are a member of the jury in this case, who is told that a melody, song structure, and aggregation of notes are protectable, but that a genre, style, or groove is not; that the case is only about the rights in the sheet music, but not about the percussion and the singing. You may comprehend the differences between these categories as they apply to a song, or you may not. Add that both sides brought expert witnesses in the form of musicologists, each of whom presented a view that was meant to fatally undermine the testimony of the opposing expert. All of this uncertainty derives from the nature of music and the way that copyright law has been developed to protect the interests of both rights holders and the public. As one entertainment lawyer observed about the jury’s decision, “[n]o verdict ever surprises me. Trials are like slot machines—you never know when you’re hitting on lucky sevens. There are always risks in trying any case because there are so many factors one can’t control.”

Nevertheless, reaction to the verdict by the cognoscenti was almost unanimous that the jury had gotten it wrong, For example, Professor Christopher Sprigman of the New York University Law School stated that while melody is protected, a musical genre is not. He then observed, “[i]t’s not a jury of musicologists. You have a jury falling back on their intuition. I’m not sure that their intuitions are so great here.” The problem was, however, that the kind of analysis that is required to determine what exactly is being protected by copyright and, if so, has infringement taken place, does not have the luxury of professorial time and reflection. The immediacy of a courtroom is a very different dynamic.

“Imagine that you are a member of the jury in this case, who is told that a melody, song structure and aggregation of notes are protectable, but that a genre, style or groove is not.”

At the end of the day, this case was decided by a jury. As such, beyond the difficult legal questions involved, it seems that broader questions of credibility and reasonable motivation were at issue. After all, from the juror’s point of view, one does not need a law or musicology degree to assess when someone is telling the truth. Or, as a retired London, IP-savvy judge once told me over lunch, “I seldom, if ever, could really tell if a witness was lying” (unless there was an admission or the like). In this context, portions of the closing argument, as reported, are revealing.

Counsel for the Gaye estate stated that “[W]hat it boils down to is, ‘Yes, we copied. Yes, we took it. Yes, we lied about it. Yes, we changed our story every time.’ It boils down to this: Who do you believe? Are you going to believe Robin Thicke, who told us he’s not an honest person?” (Thicke disclosed in deposition that he had lied in interviews, and he was both high on Vicodin as well as inebriated while in the recording studio with his partner).

In retort, counsel for Thicke and Williams replied “[W]hy would Mr. Williams need to copy anyone to create a hit. Why would Mr. Thicke and Mr. Williams endure a proceeding like this, when their personal financial details are revealed to the world?”

This argument is a version of the time-worn claim: “would my client be so stupid as to have committed the wrong attributed to him?” Maybe “yes”, maybe “no”. In my experience, this kind of argument is risky strategy (as the same English judge observed, a claim such as this would likely merit a question from the bench: “Is this your best argument?”, often leaving distraught counsel with little choice but to find the first available hoe to start digging his own hole). In any event, closing argument as framed seemed to require the jury to decide between credibility and stupidity (or more precisely its claimed absence). When no one believes your credibility, and when you are also viewed as acting stupidly, it may difficult to convince the jury otherwise, no matter what the law professors may think.

Featured image: “Vinyl Player”, by Fabio Sola Penna. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr. 

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Keep the Cadillac tax

The Obamacare “Cadillac tax” is currently scheduled to go into effect in 2018. However, last week, sixty-six members of the House of Representatives, including both Republicans and Democrats, proposed to repeal the Cadillac tax before it becomes effective.

The Cadillac tax will be imposed at a 40% rate on the cost of health care insurance, exceeding statutorily-established thresholds. Unions and many of their Democratic stalwarts, otherwise supportive of Obamacare, oppose the Cadillac tax because generous union-sponsored health care plans will trigger the tax. Many Republicans reject any kind of tax. Thus, there is a substantial possibility that Congress will follow the lead of this bi-partisan group and repeal the Cadillac tax before it goes into effect.

That would be unfortunate. We should keep—indeed we should strengthen—the Cadillac tax. U.S. health care costs increase incessantly for many reasons. Chief among these reasons is that the Internal Revenue Code encourages the unknowing consumption of employer-provided medical care by excluding the cost of such care from employees’ gross incomes. Because employees do not report the substantial medical insurance premiums paid on their behalf as income, employees never confront the cost of such premiums. The Cadillac tax is an initial, minimal effort to sensitize employees to the cost of employer-furnished medical care, and should be retained and strengthened.

The Cadillac tax is an initial, minimal effort to sensitize employees to the cost of employer-furnished medical care, and should be retained and strengthened.

Under Section 106 of the Internal Revenue Code, employees do not report the premiums paid by their employers for medical care as gross income. The decision to exclude the cost of employer-provided medical coverage from employees’ gross incomes was made quite casually, in an earlier age in which health care was a minimal burden to employers and to society as a whole.

There are many reasons why medical costs have subsequently escalated. Section 106 is among these reasons. As employers grapple with the rising costs of health care, the premiums employers pay are excluded from employees’ incomes for tax purposes. This hides the costs of employer-provided medical care from employees. Costs are never controlled when they are hidden.

Abolishing Section 106 would require all Americans to confront the cost of employer-provided health care by including such cost in their gross incomes for tax purposes. Removing Section 106 from the Internal Revenue Code would force hard decisions in the workplace about health care coverage, as employees would pay income taxes on the medical insurance premiums employers expend on their behalf. Despite the strong consensus among health care experts favoring this step, neither the Obama Administration nor Congress had the political courage to repeal Section 106 and thereby include employer-paid premiums in employees’ gross incomes. Instead, in the legislation we today denote as “Obamacare,” Congress approved the Cadillac tax and President Obama signed it into law, carefully delaying the tax’s effective date until 2018.

Compared to the repeal of Section 106, the Cadillac tax is a tepid response to the need to confront the cost of employer-provided medical care. Under the tax, the employer—or the insurance company engaged by the employer to provide health care coverage—will pay a 40% tax on “excess benefits.” In general, excess benefits subject to the 40% Cadillac tax will be annual premiums or other health care costs in excess of $10,200 for a single person’s coverage, or in excess of $27,500 for family coverage. For example, if an employer pays an insurer $11,000 in premiums in 2018 for a single employee’s medical coverage, the insurance company will pay a Cadillac Tax of $320, i.e., 40% x [$11,000 – $10,200].

Those who drafted the Cadillac tax presumed that this tax of $320 would be passed on to the employer and that the employer, in turn, would transfer this additional cost to its employees. In this indirect fashion, the Cadillac tax should sensitize employees to the high costs of their health care coverage.

It would be better, and certainly more direct, to simply include part or all of the medical premiums paid by employers in their employees’ gross incomes. This would alert the employees to the cost of their medical coverage and would impel employers and employees to confront the expense of such coverage together.

The Cadillac tax is a modest, indirect means of moving the tax law in this preferred direction. Despite its limitations, the Cadillac tax is better than the status quo which, under Section 106 of the Code, shelters all employees from confronting any of the costs of their employer-provided medical care.

In apparent recognition of the indirect, tepid nature of the Cadillac tax, the Obamacare statute also requires that each employee’s W-2 form will report to them the cost of their employer’s medical care premiums, for informational purposes only. This too, like the Cadillac tax, is a very modest measure; employees rarely focus on extraneous data that does not affect their tax liability. These purely informational reports are little more than background noise.

Some fiscal conservatives object to the Cadillac tax because they oppose taxes of any kind. However, the tax can be made revenue-neutral. In particular, the modest revenues to be raised by the Cadillac Tax can be used to make equally modest reductions to federal income tax rates. In this way, the Cadillac tax, while imposing no net burden on taxpayers as a group, would shift the tax burden to sensitize taxpayers to the significant—but today untaxed—value of their employer-provided health coverage.

It would be best to repeal Section 106 of the Code altogether and thereby require all employees to report all of the cost of their employer-provided medical coverage as income. This too could be done in a revenue-neutral fashion, using the funds raised by the abolition of Section 106 to reduce federal income tax rates.

Alternatively, Section 106—emulating the Cadillac tax—could be capped so that employees include in their respective incomes employer-provided premiums above specified thresholds. Or the Cadillac tax could be strengthened by reducing the statutory thresholds triggering the tax. This would expand the tax’s reach and thereby enlarge the number of employees alerted to the cost of their employer-provided health care.

Far from being repealed, the Cadillac tax should be kept and strengthened, serving as a modest, limited measure to begin sensitizing employees to the costs of their employer-provided health care.

Image Credit: “Spring = Tax Headache” by Swire. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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May the Fourth be with you!

May the Fourth be with you! Playing off a pun on one of the movie’s most famous quotes, May the 4th is the unofficial holiday in which Star Wars fans across the globe celebrate the beloved blockbuster series. The original Star Wars movie, now known as Star Wars IV: A New Hope, was released on 25 May 1977, but to those of us who waited in line after line to see it again and again in theaters, it will always be just Star Wars. The film introduced characters who are now staples of our cultural iconography. They are immediately recognizable today, even by those who have never seen Star Wars: Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness), Darth Vader (embodied by David Prowse, but voiced by James Earl Jones), C-3PO (Anthony Daniels), R2D2 (Kenny Baker), and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew). We know them by their clothes and hair and light sabers. We also know Star Wars by the resonant voices of its characters and by the unique language they use, words and phrases we never heard before the Star Wars phenomenon began.

Of catchphrases, Eric Partridge, a great twentieth-century lexicographer of Non-Standard English, argued in A Dictionary of Catchphrases (1977), “example is better than precept.” They are often “conversational gambits” and are “pithy, perhaps earthy,” and “the categories Catch Phrase, Proverbial Saying, Famous Quotations, Cliché” all run together. It isn’t easy to say what a catchphrase is, but Partridge reports a friend’s definition as “a phrase that has caught on, and pleases the populace.” The Canadian linguist Jack Chambers argues that “the only obvious [linguistic] effect of mass communication . . . is the diffusion of catch-phrases,” which “are more ephemeral than slang, and more self-conscious than etiquette. They belong for the moment of their currency to the most superficial linguistics level.” That’s meant to put catch-phrases and TV in their places, at least as far as linguistics is concerned.

History, science fiction films and television have provided us with many words: for example, the Star Trek franchise gave us Vulcan, Klingon, holodeck, and transporter. Though prime directive had been in English since 1947, the Prime Directive is a product of Star Trek, too. None of these is as useful as sci-fi geeks would like to believe. Battlestar Galactica’s expletive frak, was no match for the perfectly good F-word already in daily use, and hasn’t proved a popular euphemism for it, either. Star Trek has offered up plenty of catchphrases, too: Live long and prosper; Beam me up, Scotty; Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not an X.

Stormtrooper Reading Star Wars by Musgo Dumio_Momio. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Star Wars is no different. It has words — Wookiee, Jedi, comlink, escape pod, and light saber, for instance — no more or less useful in everyday conversation than words from other sci-fi films. But it also has some of the most powerful catchphrases known to human kind. From the very beginning, in the film’s opening crawl, we read the eminently repeatable catchphrase for any fantasy moment: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. When we’re in trouble, we convince our friends that they’re our Jedi masters and we need them, with Help, me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope. Obi-wan reassures Luke, The Force will be with you, always and later in the film, Han Solo shows his solidarity with May the Force be with you, the form more widely used in speech. We register ability where we don’t expect it and don’t quite believe it by echoing Darth Vader’s evaluation of Luke: The Force is strong with this one. Just one scene, when imperial storm troopers challenge Luke and Obi-wan as they enter the seedy port city of Mos Eisely, yields several catchphrases useful when some mystification is going on. In the scene, Obi-wan controls the storm troopers’ minds, and they repeat his words: You don’t need to see his identification, and most especially, These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Any catchphrase with Obi-wan or droids or the Force in it is coy, perhaps verging on parody when used in everyday speech — that’s why Han Solo smirks when he says, “May the Force be with you,” and if we use it ourselves, we’re probably self-conscious about it, too. At least one Star Wars catchphrase, however, has entered English so completely that no one thinks about its origin when using it. At my university, when members of the faculty are recruited into administrative positions, some colleagues accuse them of “going over to the Dark Side.” The Star Wars version, given by Obi-wan as partial explanation of how Luke’s father died, is “Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force,” but this was quickly rephrased by fans as go over to the Dark Side, which is a catchphrase useful in contexts even where the Force is irrelevant.

By now, for all but the geekiest English speakers, go over to the Dark Side has shed its association with the film. It seems so natural. It could have been in English for centuries. Yet Jeff Prucher insists in Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (2007) that the term the Dark Side for “force of evil” originated in Star Wars — according to Prucher, it first appears in the revised fourth draft of an early script for the movie, titled The Adventures of Luke Starkiller, dated 15 March 1976. English has never been the same since. Contrary to Chambers’ predictions, go over to the Dark Side is hardly ephemeral, though I suppose everything is ephemeral on some scale.

There are plenty of catchphrase opportunities in Star Wars yet to be exploited. I await the day when I can say to some antagonist, If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine, but I don’t say it, because I know if I do, that I’ll sound, not like Obi-wan Kenobi, but more like one or more characters from The Big Bang Theory.

Good side by kPluto. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

Star Wars prompted seismic changes in the media environment. It was heavily merchandized, to say the least. But no one needed to write ad copy; the ad copy was in the script. Soon it was also on posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and lunchboxes. Fans and non-fans alike were frequently reminded of catchphrases that, in an earlier age, would have been confined to the film. In Convergence Culture (2006), Harold Jenkins writes that “Watching the advert,” or the film or the television show, “or consuming the product is no longer enough; the company invites the audience inside the brand community,” and the audience participates with gusto: posting boards, fanfiction, continuous — often very intelligent — talk about the language of movies and TV shows and the way it converges with other aspects of our thoroughly mediated lives. Star Wars is a principal example in Jenkins’ book.

Nowadays, catchphrases are an essential component of memes, and Star Wars images and catchphrases have proved effectively and abundantly memic. “Keep Calm and May the Force Be with You,” we’re admonished. A photo of President Obama looking very serious and reaching forward with his hand, as though casting a spell, is captioned, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” Memes extend the life of Star Wars catchphrases and repurpose them for the twenty-first century, but at what cost? Can we wear a catchphrase out, moving it along the spectrum into mere cliché? If catchphrases are continually reproduced for commercial purposes, have they gone over to the Dark Side? Don’t worry. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along, move along.

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In memoriam of M.H. Abrams

My first encounter with M.H. Abrams involved a bicycle. In a Beckettian scene in Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell, I stopped a gentleman in shorts one spring morning with a bicycle. “Excuse me, do you know a Professor Abrams?” Removing a pipe from his mouth, he smiled and said “Follow me.” I did, and he stopped at an office door, asked me to hold the bike, fished out a key, and directed me to bring the bike in and sit down. “But what about Professor Abrams? I’m to be his new assistant,” I added nervously. The cyclist sat down among the piles of books, relit his pipe, and said through a grin, “Let’s get started.”

From that moment on, I learned to appreciate the modesty, acuity, and gentle humor of Mike Abrams. For the next two years, I was his student and research assistant, startled almost every day by his casual grasp of German philosophy, Coleridgian aesthetics, and Shelleyian imagery. Without lecturing or imposing, he transferred his understanding of these figures in a subtle but persuasive manner that glided over his years of deep study and complex reasoning. He often gave the impression that he had just picked up Hegel for amusement, as he pointed out contradictions in his argument or flaws in his judgment of aesthetic perception. He just as lightly pointed out major flaws in one’s writing or how one overlooked a critical point in an argument. Perspicacity was a word he rarely used but always demonstrated.

And then there was Harold Bloom, his former student. One afternoon he sat in on our Romantics seminar. Before Mike could even introduce him, Bloom grabbed a seemingly unread copy of Visionary Company from the table. “Mike,” he cried, “you didn’t even open the book and I dedicated it to you!” “Not quite right, Harold,” Abrams calmly answered, as he flipped through several pages, pointing out his barely visible “NB” marks in pencil. “But there are only two on this page,” Bloom complained. In an instant, Abrams whipped out his pencil and added two more. “That’s more like it,” Bloom said.

Abrams was equally responsive when writing. Having drafted a section of Natural Supernaturalism, he startled me by asking me to review it, not only for its accuracy but style. This 550 page work, subtitled Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, covered philosophy, religion, literature, and history from 1789 to 1835. Not only the range but the clarity of thought expressed his vision that the central Romantic ideas were, in fact, secularized forms of traditional theological concepts. Kant and Hegel vie with Saint Augustine and Gerrard Winstanley, a 17th-century visionary pamphleteer, in understanding Romantic self-perception. But while the book was shattering in its scope, he shared its learning with restraint. Combined with The Mirror and The Lamp, where he often pointed to sections he might have expanded or revised, the volumes redefined our understanding and study of Romanticism.

“Books” by Curtis Perry. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Mike published his first book, The Milk of Paradise—concerning opium and the Romantic imagination—at age 22 and published one almost every decade of his life. His last was a collection entitled The Fourth Dimensions of a Poem, coinciding with his 100th birthday. In an interview at that time, he recalled hearing T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and e.e. cummings read, as well as Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas. Poetry and literature, for him, were teeming with life and intensity, which he attempted to convey in an anthology that generations of English majors in North America could barely carry: the two-volume The Norton Anthology of English Literature, which he conceived and edited through seven editions. “If you can actually lug it around, you’ll graduate,” many quipped.

During WWII, Mike worked in a secret lab at Harvard devising better communication techniques for troops on the frontlines. His qualifications for the job included an interest in psychology and phonetics, but his commitment to communicating the value and joy of literature never stopped.

Mike’s legacy for his students was multifaceted, beginning with a persistent engagement with intellectual history and a dissemination of ideas that made you want to learn. This was clear in the opening pages of The Mirror and The Lamp, where he offered a simple framework for the comparison of aesthetic theories. A diagram placed a work in the center of a triangle with the universe above it, the artist on the lower left, and the audience on the lower right. The problem, he remarked, is that theories orient themselves to only one element, not all. But finding the critical orientation of a theory is only the beginning of an “adequate analysis,” he added.

Context was another concern of Abrams. You couldn’t understand Wordsworth without knowing the French Revolution. You couldn’t understand the revolution unless you read Carlyle. You couldn’t understand Carlyle until you read Gibbon. And he would often repeat that good criticism required “a keen eye for the obvious.”

Mike, of course, seemed to have mastered it all but never in an imposing manner. In The Mirror and The Lamp, he argued that the test of a poem was no longer “Is it true to nature?” but “Is it sincere? Is it genuine?” He was always genuine, framed by an openness and generosity of learning, eagerly inviting his students to follow him on his unfolding intellectual journey. The ideas and concepts were there for all of us to pick up. Most of us are still cycling after him.

 Image Credit: “Souvenir from a bike ride” by Ulises Santamaria . CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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