"Only an Expert Can Deal with the Problem"

Remember Laurie Anderson? The funny female comedian from the 80s*? I thought that was her on David Letterman a week or so ago...

But singing.

Now let's say you're invited to be on Oprah
And you don't have a problem
But you want to go on the show, so you need a problem
So you invent a problem
But if you're not an expert in problems
You're probably not going to invent a very plausible problem
And so you're probably going to get nailed
You're going to get exposed
You're going to have to bow down and apologize
And beg for the public's forgiveness.
Cause only an expert can see there's a problem
And only an expert can deal with the problem
Only an expert can deal with the problem...

Turns out she's more a performance artist than a comedian or a singer. And she's married to Lou Reed, to boot. (I think she kept her name though. Both of them.)

So while the song lifted my eyes to the tv, and inspired the later Google search, I was wondering how exactly to work it into the blog...

Wonder no more! David Brooks today:

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era — when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute it to the have-nots. It’s not a conservative era, when the governing class concedes that the world is too complicated to be managed from the center. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

This progressive era is being promulgated without much popular support. It’s being led by a large class of educated professionals, who have been trained to do technocratic analysis, who believe that more analysis and rule-writing is the solution to social breakdowns, and who have constructed ever-expanding networks of offices, schools and contracts.

Already this effort is generating a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash. It is generating a backlash among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.

It's a catchy tune, really. Only an expert can deal with the problem...

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*

In addition, in lieu of making another music video for her Strange Angels album, Anderson taped a series of 1- to 2-minute Personal Service Announcements in which she spoke about issues such as the U.S. national debt and the arts scene. Some of the music used in these productions came from her soundtrack of Swimming to Cambodia. The PSAs were frequently shown between music videos on VH-1 in early 1990

.