Fuel panic-buying: a prisoner's dilemma for the 21st century

The panic buying of fuel and subsequent shortages in the UK have given the Prisoner's Dilemma a new political twist, and it turns out that modern free market economics has a real problem with one of the key political tools of right-wing populists.

The fuel-buying version of the prisoner's dilemma goes like this: imagine a situation where a fuel station supplies 100 customers. There is a temporary slowdown in supply, such that if all 100 customers top up their tanks immediately, fuel will completely run out, whereas if they all wait until their tanks are nearly empty then there will be plenty for all. Now picture one of those drivers (X) whose tank is half full. There are 4 possible scenarios:

A) X refrains from filling up yet, as does everyone else, so supply is maintained. 

B) X fills up but everyone else refrains, so again supply is maintained,. 

C) X refrains from filling up but nobody else does and the fuel runs out, leaving X in real difficulties.

D) X fills up, as does everyone else, and the fuel runs out, but at least X's tank is (temporarily) full.

How X behaves (assuming they are a perfectly rational being) will depend on her/his degree of trust in others. If she/he believes that everyone else will behave with a social conscience and refrain from filling up until they need to, then unless they are an exceptionally selfish person (scenario B) they will refrain from filling up also (scenario A). However if X does not trust their fellow citizens then they will assume it is a choice between scenarios C) and D), in which case, clearly they should opt for D) and make sure they top up immediately. Which means that other drivers (seeing X at the fuel station) are more likely to make the same calculation, and the fuel runs out.

The problem is that a key technique right-wing populists discovered long ago is to turn citizens against each other, increase polarisation and decrease trust in order to scapegoat minorities and harden ones political base. In the US the polarisation is of Trumpers v never-Trumpers, but here in the UK we have, if anything, gone one better: brexshitters v remoaners. The referendum may have been years ago, but Johnson and his like have, if anything, sought to fuel the fires of mutual distrust by condemning the negativity of anyone who opposed Brexit. They did this with other issues too, such as the wearing of masks. To a large extent the UK government abandoned responsibility for containing the Covid epidemic some time ago, suggesting that it was down to 'individual common sense' to decide how the population should behave. Which was of course a recipe for turning us citizens against each other, but let the government off the hook.

So what is the relevance to the fuel shortages? Well, we have in this country (as, I believe in the US) a higher degree of mutual distrust than I can ever remember. People are quicker to get angry with each other over matters of what used to be seen as abstruse political jargon (before 2016 who even knew the European Supreme Court existed?) and certainly less willing to trust in each other's common decency and social conscience than ever before.

No, nowadays it's everyone for themselves and to hell with the [brexshitters, remoaners, anti-vaxxers, snowflakes, etc etc]. And the problem is, without a degree of mutual trust and social cohesion the modern sophisticated just-in-time supply chains collapse rather easily.

Could it possibly be time to just stop weighing the pig?

About the only upside I can see to the covid pandemic is that it has thrown a lot of things up in the air and forced us to reexamine some long-held assumptions. Nowhere is this more the case than in education. For instance, with home-schooling, millions of parents have been confronted with the reality of getting students through the post-Govian National Curriculum, and have come to see what a soulless task it is in some areas. It is no coincidence that fronted bloody adverbials have come under such attack and ridicule over recent months.

Even more significant though is the way that the GCSE fiasco last year caused many people to ask themselves quite fundamental questions about the whole purpose of that tier of national examinations. There have been those who have been posing those questions for years of course, but until the pandemic they were dismissed as soft liberals seeking to avoid accountability for schools. Now, at last, the question is being seen as a genuinely valid one - should we have GCSEs at all?

I do not propose to weigh into that debate here, because who cares what an ex-Head thinks anyway? Instead, I would like to pose an even more fundamental question: is it time to take the focus off weighing the pig entirely? I recognise that this is a rather radical question, and easily pilloried, because for as long as a national education system has existed, the idea of testing, and ranking, the children within it has been central. Indeed, tests are often seen as the end product or even the purpose of education. Each key stage (or, Key Stage, more recently) has always been defined by some sort of terminal assessment that sorts the wheat from the chaff and determines subsequent progress, whether these be the 11 plus, O-levels/GCSEs or A levels. And it is important to remember that, in the UK at least, these tests are not seen as diagnostic (used to determine the sensible next stage) but hierarchical (used to decide who deserves to progress to a higher tier of the next stage and who does not). Tests are there to be passed or failed.

This thinking permeates all of our attitudes about education, so that judgements about schools and teachers depend on them as well. These judgements too have become hierarchical rather than diagnostic: an inspection of a school determines whether it has passed or failed, and its place on exam league tables decides whether it is better or worse than others. And that, of course, determines the popularity of the school and hence the nature of its intake, because the market is king.

But surely this is inevitable, isn't it? Life is about success and failure, and education exists in the real world, not in a Utopian fantasy of lets-be-nice-to-everyone, doesn't it? Hence the need for those Govian watchwords: toughness and rigour.

That is a reasonable argument in a sense, and it derives from a fundamental human competitiveness that has driven progress for centuries. The problem is, it is an approach to both education and life itself that is becoming more and more problematic, and is being increasingly questioned. It is not just that the price of failure within such a system is becoming more of an issue - endemic drug addiction, the creation of an underclass, and right-wing populism might all be traced back to some people's sense of having lost the race, and the bleak life-chances for those who fail within the education system certainly can be - it is also that people are beginning to understand that competitiveness and meritocratic hierarchies don't always yield the best results. Forward-looking and successful businesses now put far greater emphasis on collaboration, teamwork and creativity than on goal-driven competitiveness.

There is another grave price to be paid for the competition-focused approach to education, namely the effect it has on the curriculum. I used to work in ILEA, and was part of what now seems like a renaissance of thinking about education. The focus shifted from a knowledge-based curriculum (recite the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England) to an enquiry-based one (examine these historical sources and ask how reliable and/or biased they might be). An enquiry-based curriculum was much harder to test, and so this approach led to the development of innovative approaches such as Assessment for Learning and 100% coursework GCSEs. However the problem for Gove and his like was that systems like AfL were no good for putting the screws on teachers or 'bog-standard' comprehensives, so back we went to a nice, simple, factual (and in my view largely pointless) knowledge-based curriculum that could be tested in 'rigorous' exams and Key Stage assessments.

I wrote a post some time ago posing the question of whether education should be 'tough', and I think it is even more valid now. Another lesson that the pandemic has taught us is that notions of winning and losing are often illusory and unhelpful in this context. There have been, for instance, surprisingly few reports of people cheating or jumping the queue to get vaccinated. Why? Because it is largely irrelevant where you come in that particular race: nothing much is going to change for anyone until everybody else gets vaccinated too. It's an analogous situation to a group project in school, or a small start-up company in the real world: the performance of the group as a whole is far more important than any individual's position within that group.

And the point is, that sort of focus is actually much more likely to yield concrete beneficial effects in the real world than a dog-eat-dog, competition-focussed one. What is the point of beating your co-workers in every conceivable test, if your company goes bankrupt because of the whole teams' dysfunction?

In a sense, too, this is a pretty uncontroversial view for most teachers. There are very few who believe that the most effective learning comes when students are pitted against each other. Ask any teacher, or any inspector, to pick a lesson where learning was at its best and I can almost guarantee that they will choose one where students were working collaboratively rather than competitively. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with competitiveness (it is a natural impulse in young people), but we learn best when we spark ideas off other people, and we do that best when we are working with, rather than against them. The controversy comes when we start thinking about ways to measure how successful teachers (and schools) are being, and whether they are enhancing or damaging students' life chances. We need assessment for that, don't we? And assessment means competition, surely. Which means tests of some sort and establishing of rank orders.

Well no, not necessarily. In the last paragraph I actually referenced an assessment that teachers and inspectors carry out all the time: the assessment of the quality of learning. Because that for me is the crucial measure of success of any education. And note, I said the quality of learning, not teaching. Where students are empowered with the ability to learn, to question, to be creative and to work with others they are given a gift that is of incalculable value, not just to themselves but to society as a whole. If you were setting up an innovative start-up, would you prefer somebody with those skills, or somebody who had used more fronted adverbials in a piece of creative writing than any other student and scored nineteen out of twenty in a test of the dates of accession of the Kings and Queens of England?

Trump's support is cratering - not because he tried to mount an insurrection, but because he failed

 I wrote an essay years ago entitled Radicalisation and the Fifth Column that threatens to undermine America from within, but though it looks prescient today, I don't think I had the faintest idea what was going to ensue once Donald Trump was elected president. That essay was about the (now very tame looking) move by Tea Party senators to use a government lockdown to stymie Obama's healthcare reforms. In it I argued that Ted Cruz, a strident voice at the time, represented a sort of radicalisation that had its roots in the Dirty Harry/Hans Solo/John McClane trope of Hollywood action men. Hollywood, I argued, has long promoted an image of a maverick lone wolf who alone can see through the corruption and ineptitude of officialdom and indeed government itself. They therefore choose which laws to follow and which to break, and in doing so are lauded as heroes. A large swathe of Americans, I argued, have become radicalised by this incessant diet of anti-establishment machismo to the extent where they regard destructive rulebreakers as more worthy of respect than the forces of law and order themselves.

Well, it seems now as if that process of radicalisation was both deeper and broader than I suspected at the time. My tone then was one of wry amusement at the quirks of a society that spent too much of its time watching movies. Ted Cruz and his like seemed a bit of a joke - an irrelevance in the brave new post-racial world that Obama's election had summoned up. How wrong could I be?

Trump's presidency, viewed from over the pond, was disturbing for two main reasons. The first (and truly terrible) reason was the substance of what he was doing - reinforcing white supremacy and brutal prejudice against immigrants and Muslims; destroying international collaborative structures; and giving aid and succour to dictators across the world. The second reason was almost as bad though. In all this time it was clear that for all his stupidity, narcissism, misogyny, ineptitude and racism, nearly half of the population of the USA liked what he was doing. And then, when he capped his four years with the most callously ignorant mismanagement of a global pandemic, the response of 74 million of his fellow Americans was to attempt to give him four more years as president.

And then the final act. An attempted insurrection that, had it not been hamstrung by its own ineptitude, could have led to Trump being installed as permanent dictator (he often promised to his rallies that he would serve 8 or maybe 12 more years). Shortly after the failed invasion of the Capitol, Trump's allies began turning against him and his popular support collapsed, to the point where (according to Pew) it now stands at a mere 29%. Leaving aside that even that figure represents near enough 90 million Americans who still reckon Trump is the man for the job, one might assume that this is evidence of the US finally coming to its senses.

Well, yes and no. It is worth remembering that the defection of Trump's allies was nowhere near immediate. Even after being shut away for their own protection whilst an unruly mob stormed the Capitol, 147 Republican lawmakers continued the attempt to defy the will of the People by voting against the certification of the electoral votes.

Since then the mood has unquestionably changed though. Ten Republicans voted to impeach and a growing number of senators are suggesting that they might even vote to convict. And in the wider population, though Trump's aggregated popularity still stands at 38% or so, it is plummeting at an unprecedented rate. One might assume that this is because of the emerging understanding of just how potentially terrifying the Capitol invasion was, and I am sure things like the death of Officer Sicknick have disgusted many. However I would argue that the main feature for Trump's falling popularity is not the realisation that he is a narcissistic sociopath (that surely was always obvious) but the fact that he is also a proven loser. 

Just for a moment imagine that the mob had seized and destroyed the electoral votes, had maybe taken some prominent Democrats and 'turncoat' Republicans hostage and had then been called off by Trump and instructed to hand their hostages over to the authorities. Imagine then that Trump had declared a state of emergency, cancelled the election results as fraudulent and instigated martial law (he has packed out the pentagon with sycophants and clearly has supporters in the armed forces, if not at the highest level).

The question is, would his popular support then have cratered? I am afraid to say that if anything it would have hardened. This would have been Trump definitively doing the thing his supporters had been praying he would - taking on the Swamp.

But his support has cratered, so why? I wrote a while back another (then tongue-in-cheek) essay, suggesting that the continued support for Trump could be explained by another Hollywood trope, the High School bully The thing is about bullies, while they reign supreme everybody wants to be on their side, but when get their comeuppance those same people turn against them. And maybe the explanation is as simple as that. For all the grand-guignol theatrics and the violence-and-hate-laden conspiracies, Trump's Great Awakening/Kraken Unleashed/Trust the Plan (other melodramatic terms are probably available) wannabe coup was a failure.

And in Hollywood, nobody likes a loser.

The narrative of conspiracy theories

 I wrote some time ago (here) about the universal nature of narrative in the ways we engage with the world. Just recently I have become aware of a striking illustration of that phenomenon. In the period after Trump's defeat in the election I (unwisely) responded to a Twitter thread about how fishy it was that Alaska and North Carolina had still not been called for Trump, when Pennsylvania and Arizona had been called for Biden.

The responses to my contribution gave me a glimpse of the dark and dangerous rabbit hole that seems to have swallowed up the large numbers of Trump supporters who are buying his 'Big Steal' conspiracy theories. Of course I knew about the prevalence of conspiracy theories in contemporary far-right 'politics' - QAnon anybody? - but it was interesting watching new theories being constructed in real time. I shan't bother with the details - something about pro-Biden states being called too early and pro-Trump states too late, so that the corrupt Lamestream Media could create a false impression of Biden having won - but what I noticed was some of the language, which people on this thread exchanged without feeling the need to expand or explain what, to outsiders, seemed very cryptic messages.

And the word that jumped out most was 'narrative', often used alone. Here is one example: "And they called Virginia with 1% reporting. Narrative." Another: "If you think that matters you haven't been paying attention. Narrative" and a third, simply: "Narrative, you cocksucker."

This got me thinking, and I suddenly realised that narrative is in fact completely central to any conspiracy theory. You see, the creators and disseminators of conspiracy theories face a fundamental problem in that they generally have little or no actual, hard evidence on which to base their claims. So what do they do? They use what in QAnon world are actually called breadcrumbs: little snippets of largely unconnected or irrelevant 'facts' that they suggest are in fact intrinsically and causally related and together reveal a massive, previously untold story.

This is precisely the way narrative works. History may be (in Alan Bennett's immortal words) "One fucking thing after another" but we simply cannot prevent ourselves connecting those things: this happened because that happened. We construct a narrative to make sense of the things, because that gives the world meaning.

But in conspiracy theories the human narrative imperative has a very powerful effect: it draws the listener in and makes them entirely complicit, and in a sense the less clear or relevant the base 'facts' of the conspiracy theory are, the more powerfully they draw people in. Why? Because it is the listener who is making the connections themselves and the listener who is, in a sense, constructing their own narrative out of them. And the more other people say, "That's ridiculous, those facts don't lead to that conclusion!" the more they can say, "you just don't understand. I can see the narrative that connects them but you can't, because you are stupid/ a Democrat/ a Remainer/ blinded by mainstream media etc etc."

In fact, any attempt to persuade a conspiracy theory victim of the absurdity of the narrative they have bought into risks itself becoming part of the same narrative: "You would say that, because you're obviously [insert appropriate insult here]." 

So how can conspiracy theories be combatted? Well, one way is simply not to pay much attention to them. To frame it, yet again, in narrative terms, the despised and rejected truth-teller who fights tirelessly against the hordes who deny his truth (and yes, it's largely a masculine image, I believe) is a heroic figure. The deluded fantasist who walks the streets shouting whilst others simply ignore him is not.

The continuing mystifying support for Trump and the hollywood trope of the High School bully

 I am sure I am not the only one who daily checks Project 538's Trump approval tracker to see whether the latest examples of the US president's stupidity, boorishness, racism, support for foreign tyrannies or attempts to subvert his own country's democracy have 'moved the dial' of the American electorate's approval of him. Only to find that they haven't.

And therein lies something of a mystery. Whilst Trump was an insurgent candidate, playing the outsider card, I sort of understood how people could choose to overlook his misogyny, crudeness, ignorance, short attention span... (I could go on) because they wanted somebody to go in there and shake things up a bit. Many Americans' lives no longer come even close to the dream they were promised, and the easiest people to blame are the (undoubtedly self-serving and out-of-touch) politicians who ply their trade within the Beltway.

Trump is no longer an insurgent, however. The big beasts in 'the swamp' are now generally his creatures (even if he spends a great deal of his time deriding and condemning them) and he is making almost no attempt nowadays to present any agenda for change. In 2016 the slogans of 'lock her up'. 'drain the swamp' and 'build the wall' might have been crude, simplistic and fundamentally meaningless, but at least they gave the illusion of an agenda for change, but this time round there isn't even a pretence.

And yet, according to opinion pollsters, at least 40% of Americans (that's 120 million people!) say that they approve of the job Donald Trump is doing and will vote to give him four more years (if not more) to carry on doing it. I could list all of the appalling, incompetent, shameful things that Trump has done or not done, said or not said, but it would make no difference. That 120 million seems to be an absolute floor, of people who (as Trump himself boasted) would carry on supporting him even if he shot somebody dead on Fifth Avenue.

So, why? Some factors are clear of course. Trump's increasingly strident dog whistles towards the overlooked white underclass no doubt have an effect, because they allow the Bob Ewells of 21st Century America to rally behind a leader who can shout their resentment from the rooftops. Another factor is the facebook-enabled siloisation that insulates people from any opinion that challenges their own. Yet another is the appallingly partisan nature of US politics that separates everything into red and blue and blinds many to anything beyond that. There have been many thousands of words written by much more knowledgeable commentators than me on these and other factors.

But still...

One hundred and twenty million people. If they stood in a line, 10 abreast, they would reach from LA to New York. All saying Donald Trump is doing a pretty good job, and we want more, thanks very much. 

Of course, one possibility is that all 120 million are racist, misogynist enablers who simply don't care about the suffering of their fellow Americans or the future of the planet, but might there not be a slightly more forgiving narrative to add into the mix? It's not that I think the well-worn traditional arguments, like those I have listed above, are wrong, it's just that they are all problematic in some way as a means of explaining such a high floor to Trump's popularity, particularly now that he is no longer an insurgent outsider. So my additional factor to consider is this: the experience that many Americans seem to share of having been bullied at High School. I don't know this first hand of course, but you can learn a lot about a society by considering its fairy tales, and in more movies than I care to admit to having watched, the villain is the jock who wields unquestioned power to intimidate and harass in the corridors of a High School.

In these fairy tales the jock is always dethroned, whether by the nerd or the cool outsider, but that is clearly wish fulfilment. In reality, jocks in US High Schools seem to benefit from a high degree of official protection, because of their financial value to the school (High School football for instance is very, very big business) and the only sensible response to their bullying, I imagine, is not to challenge them - indeed to try and get on their side.

If this is indeed the case, then it provides a ready-made reason for millions of (otherwise not vile) people to want to be with Trump rather than against him. Bullying is the very essence of his personality and he has shown many times how vindictive and cruel he can be, to the extent even of saying that 'Red' states which elect Democrats had only themselves to blame for coronavirus deaths and deserved no support.

When a bully that powerful and impregnable is standing with his acolytes in front of your locker, are you really going to tell him you don't like him very much?

Living in Interesting Times

You will almost definitely have been reminded at some point over the last months and years of the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." If you are anything like me you will probably have responded with a sadly bewildered shake of the head, accompanied perhaps by some comment about Trump, Brexit or Covid-19. "Interesting times. You're telling me," you may have said. You won't have had to ask to have the reference explained, because it is such a well-established truism, with the sort of paradoxical incisiveness that gives saying like this such force.

Except there's a problem: there is no real evidence of any such Chinese curse ever having existed.

So why do we like to think that one did? Well, until very recently there was a sector of society who believed at a pretty instinctual level that too-rapid change of any sort was fundamentally worrisome - that the best thing the world could do was to keep pretty much everything as is, except for improving the availability of avocados and consumer electronics. This of course was conservatism, and back then it aligned pretty closely with Conservatism. Agitating for change was what socialists and animal rights activists did, and framing your resistance to change as a piece of ancient Oriental wisdom gave it a sort of solemn legitimacy.

And then, suddenly, in the US and the UK at least, everything went topsy-turvy. Who are the angry ones now, taking up arms and invoking the language of war, their faces red with fury? It is the brexiteers and the Trumpians who talk of American carnage and fighting them on the beaches, whilst the anti-racists and the climate activists and the liberals engage in passive resistance and "take the knee."

So how come? Well, my theory is actually an optimistic one. For decades, the movement of societies across the developed world has been away from patriarchy, white supremacy and parochial nationalism. The process has hardly been smooth or consistent, but just look back fifty years to see how far we have come. I am still shocked watching clips from seventies TV shows to remember how little I questioned the profoundly racist, sexist and xenophobic tone of many of them. But back then, so much existed to support the innate sense of privilege of the white, hetero, English-speaking male and it must have seemed that that was the way it was always going to be. Conservatism and a profound desire not to rock the boat made sense for white, English-speaking males, particularly those with limited other sources of privilege (such as wealth, education or elevated social class). And then, when change did begin happening (women's lib, gay rights, increased immigration, more awareness of other counties, languages and cultures) conservatism was a vital protection against the forces of anarchy.

And then change began reaching a tipping point. The innate privilege that had seemed so permanent began to weaken. The voices of women, people of colour, gay people, foreigners (for God's sake!) began to be heard. Still nowhere as much as they deserved to be heard, but still far too much for the fragile egos of the Donald Trumps, Nigel Farages, Steve Bannons and Boris Johnsons of this world, and certainly far, far too much for their otherwise completely unprivileged, but still White, male and English speaking supporters.

So, suddenly, resisting change was no longer enough. The change had happened, and now it had to be undone, and that wasn't going to happen without a fight. Now it was a question of recapturing rather than just retaining that innate privilege. And so Conservatism (or Republicanism in the US) abandoned the notion of conservatism and became activist. The had to take back control, make america great again, build the wall, send the asylum seekers back. And there was an obvious place to look for the language and imagery they needed - the Second World War. Pretty much the epitome of the 'interesting times' that that mythical Chinese curse evoked, but a time when (at least in the hazy, one-generation-removed 'memory' of the trumpy/brexiteers) the innate privilege of the white hetero English-speaking male was at its height.

So, suddenly, 'interesting times' is what the Trumpians and the Brexiteers seem to want - chaos, division, ripping up of well-established customs and protections and a leap into the economic unknown of twenty-first century isolationism. And why do they want it? Because they know they've lost, and this is their last, desperate roll of the dice.

The trouble is, ancient Chinese curse or not, these interesting times are going to be pretty bloody difficult for everybody.

A strange sort of nationalism

So back in the days of good old-fashioned xenophobia, nationalism was when you believed your country to be superior to any other country and hung your nation's flag over your balcony to prove it. Other countries were sly, untrustworthy, useless or dangerous. THEIR judges were corrupt and/or stupid, THEIR politicians on the take and/or useless and THEIR whole system of government and public service overpriced, weird, ineffective and convoluted.

Somewhere along the line though, that all changed, though it took 2016 (the year of Trump and Brexit) to make that fact clear.

You see, what the brexiteers had in common with Trump was their populist nationalism, to the extent that the two campaigns seem to have come to define nationalism for the 21st Century. And the thing is, it is actually a very weird sort of nationalism indeed when you come to think about it, because to 21st Century nationalists it's not THEIR judges, politicians and public services that are shit, it's OURS!

Take the brexiteers. British Nationalists they may be, but look at the range of things they are willing to turn against: British judges (aka Enemies of the People); the British civil service (foot-dragging Remoaners, every one); British ambassadors ("emotionally needy", according to Theresa Villiers, and expressing sour grapes, according to IDS); the British Parliament (not to be trusted with any sort of decision on Brexit) and of course the Act of Union with Scotland, hence the United Kingdom itself.

Pretty much the full house, you might think, but still trumped by Trump, who has repeatedly described the entire system of government in the US as a swamp in need of draining. But that's not the weirdest thing. The xenophobic arch-nationalist has then turned on his own country's intelligence services whilst praising the leader of a foreign power who has been exposed as engaging in cyber-warfare against the US. You really couldn't make it up.

So it seems that 21st Century nationalism goes hand in hand with full throated attacks on pretty much every institution of that same nation. So what exactly is it that nationalists these days support? Even the flag is problematic, surely. Even more in the US than in the UK, the national flag is an inseparable symbol of the national institutions that Trump's nationalists attack with such gusto. The stars and stripes flutters constantly over the swamp they chant about (over every State building in the land, in fact), and if Russia is suddenly more to be trusted than the US's own intelligence agencies, then which flag should they be rallying behind anyway?

You see it seems that 21st Century populist nationalism is a very direct and emotional concept that bypasses systems of government and national institutions, so that the 'nation' becomes whatever any individual nationalist deems it to be. It's generally a pretty vague concept, but can be easily conjured by well-chosen three-word slogans, apparently: "take back control", "build the wall", "lock her up", "brexit means brexit" and "drain the swamp." Not that specific maybe, but they clearly work, and certainly a hell of lot simpler than the average National Anthem.