The perfect book for August - or so it would seem. In fact, Tom Lutz demonstrates just how much work serious loafing requires.
This jolly book got a so-so review in the Book Review, and I duly took note in these pages. Mr Lutz got hold of me to tell me that, in his opinion, the review was completely wrong. How could I doubt him?
I am not a philosopher. I do not believe in systems, metaphysical or otherwise, that explain how the world works. If I believe anything, it's that we're far too unintelligent as of yet to be claiming to know how the world works. We're still working on building bridges that don't fall into the Mississippi.
In common parlance, "philosophy" denotes a way of living, an understanding of virtue. My "philosophy" is built on a single concept: decency. I believe, crazy optimist that I am, that everyone who has survived adolescence knows what decency is. I've written two pages about it; if you're interested, you'll find a link to the older page in the newer.
Have you got all day? Here's a very long page about art and art criticism. What's amazing to me is that I seem to know what I'm talking about. I read the page now with a gate-keeper's eyes (to which I'm not entitled, either): what incredible impertinence!
There's one sentence, though, that I really don't understand.
We're wired, sadly perhaps, to distinguish the things that happened before our parents' generations from the things that happened earlier. We seek a richness of detail about what's closest to us.
I think that the first sentence is missing a "not" - "We're not wired." But I'm not sure that the sentence means anything. Every once in a while, I fall into fatuity. If you can figure out what I'm trying to say, let me know.
It was not hard to decide which of this week's stories I wanted to showcase as a Friday Front, but it wasn't clear that I was ever going to get round to writing about it. Yesterday's podcast caused a tremendous upheaval in my already disorganized everyday life. If the equipment had been easy to install and stable once installed, that would have been one thing, but it was neither, and I won't be up to speed for a few weeks. I still don't have a clue about how to make it possible to download podcasts.
¶ Simon Head on Information Technology, in The New York Review of Books.
From Mark Schmitt's Op-Ed piece, "Too Much Information," about the ridiculousness of lengthy policy statements (eg health-care proposals) in electoral politics:
We don’t give our presidents total power to enact policy. They have to work with a Congress made up of people with their own views and constituencies. Does anyone really think that a plan cooked up by a bunch of smart 20-somethings after a couple of all-nighters amid the empty pizza boxes and pressures of a campaign is superior to what could be developed with the full resources of the federal government and open Congressional hearings and debate?
Kevin Baker's warning, in the current Harper's, about the unsuitability of Rudy Giuliani for the White House, ends with a fairly gratuitous basing of the current administration. That is, it's unnecessary to Mr Baker's essay. At the same time, however, it constitutes a magnificent if brief catalogue raisonné of Bush's crimes against civilization, charged with a stark power that, unimaginably, surpasses everything that one has already read and thought.
The worst excesses of the bush regime have stemmed directly from its leader's character - that is, its rampant cronyism; its arrogance and egotism; its peremptory, bullying tone and methods; its refusal to brook criticism from within or without; its frighteningly authoritarian impulses; its need to create enemies as a means of governing; its impulsiveness and naïveté; its outright contempt for the law; and its truly staggering ability to substitute its own versions of what it wishes the world to be for any recognition of objective reality.
As a technical amateur - nobody's paying me to do "this website thingy" - I felt morally obligated to read Simon Keen's somewhat screedish The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. For most of the first half of the book, I thought I was reading a rant. For most of the second half, however, I was persuaded that the anti-authoritarian propensity behind so much "Web 2.0" talk is not only childish but damaging.
Mr Keen's book does not offer much in the way of solutions. Even he cannot conceal the fact that current delivery systems for creative cultural work are moribund. The Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular have blossomed because established cultural institutions don't know how to reach young people - probably because the people who run them don't really understand computers or the Internet. I hope that Mr Keen's book will come to be regarded as the excellent diagnosis of a crisis that was ultimately contained and corrected.
Shortly after I put down Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton, I came across a something that Fran Lebowitz said about Philip Johnson: "He was very cultivated in a way that probably no American is now." (In the Times.) I realized that I hadn't heard the word "cultivated" in a while, and hadn't thought about what it means, either. And yet how clear it was that I've been cultivating myself since my teens. I was pretty fatuous when I was young, but as I got older and more honest, I pursued only genuine interests. I'm not brilliant If I were, I wouldn't have to work so hard at learning new things (and remembering old ones!)
Cultivation sounds precious today. It certainly takes a lot of time. I thought I would try to argue the case for cultivation as a pleasure, because that is how I've acquired such cultivation as I've achieved.
When it comes to books about current affairs, I bore very easily. I'm willing to put in a lot of thought, but I don't want to be raked over padded-out lists of problèmes du jour. Happily, there is no risk of tedium in Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. Written by an Oxford-educated reporter at the Financial Time, In Spite of the Gods crackles with wit and understanding. Mr Luce dispenses a boatload of information in a digestible drip, and his chapters are studded with portraits of interesting and notable Indians alike. Perhaps because he's English, Mr Luce writes as though everyone has already had enough of the British Raj, and there is very little about it. For someone my age, who grew up during India's first decade of independence, this account of the ever-more-powerful India makes sense of the great changes that have occurred in India's economic climate since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru.
If I recall correctly, Mr Luce does not once use the term "Subcontinent." I wonder what that's about.
Herewith I tip my hat to Édouard, at Sale Bête, for alerting me to the referenced phrase, which appears at John Rogers's blog, Kung Fu Monkey. Follow the link below to read the entire passage.
Do we on the left have the testicular fortitude to recognize the moment when fruitful stability becomes fatal sclerosis? I ask myself that question every day. So far, dreamlike as it is to say so, we live in fruitful stability. That is not an illusion. But as injustice and irresponsibility mount up, stability petrifies. How do we properly fear the corruption of the Republic when fear itself is so powerfully confusing?
The New Yorker is stuffed with good stuff this week. There's an article about the folly - well, that's what I think it is - of fMRI-based lie detection. There's a neat piece on hedge-fund simulation at bargain prices that I didn't quite catch the first time around. Joan Acocella writes brilliantly about the Waughs. But the indispensable piece is Ken Auletta's "Promises, Promises," an fair-minded report of Rupert Murdoch's courtship of The Dow Jones Company. For a link to the story and my two-cents' worth of Friday Front, click below.
¶ Ken Auletta on the Murdochs and the Bancrofts, in The New Yorker.
A funny cartoon has already appeared in The New Yorker. Man walks into his apartment with a bolt of lightning stuck in his back. Wife reminds him that she warned him against reading "the Hitchens book." The joke, of course, is that the man is still walking. He may have to see a specialist about removing the lightning bolt, and he may even experience some pain. As a killer, however, the lightning bolt is a dud. What the cartoon captures perfectly is the idea that it's not nice to be disrespectful about religion.
Christopher Hitchens is not nice.
What if our economics was humanist instead of "scientific"?
Has anyone ever even talked of a humanist economics?
If not, I claim dibs.
¶ John Lardner on Uchitelle, Bogle, and LeRoy, in The New York Review of Books.
With Memorial Day behind us, I have the empty feeling that nothing is going to change very much on the political front until Labor Day is also behind us. The Democrats may have recaptured Congress last November, but I can think of nothing that has changed since then. The Bush Administration continues to be arrogant and out of touch, and the Iraqi misadventure slogs on. Rudy Giuliani is consolidating his candidacy, while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue their kabuki. Why, when poll after poll shows that most Americans want an end to the war, does it persist? The other day, I wrote about the problem with polls, but even assuming them to be trustworthy there would still be something missing. What? Paul Krugman put his finger on what's missing in his column on Monday.
Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.
Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.
When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.
And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.
But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.
Americans need to be roused to their better selves. Ideally, the Republican Party would act responsibly and stop manipulating anxieties for purely political purposes. Perhaps the Democrats could persuade a plausible presidential nominee to sit this election out and spend the campaign denouncing the fear-mongerers as such.
Not too long ago, I bought a copy of Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, because I thought that Kathleen ought to know how ordinary men behave when there aren't any women around. I ended up reading the book first, and in one captivated day (I did nothing else). I expected a book about the adventures of passing as a man, but that's not what Ms Vincent wrote. As she herself says, passing was the easy part. The hard part was learning how tough life is for most guys. The alleged power and privilege of belonging to the dominant gender seems to be nothing more than smoke; in actuality, men are crippled by stoic homophobia on the one hand and the unrealistic expectations of women on the other. Ms Vincent was very surprised to find where her sympathies lay, and, when she recovered from the experiment, she was very happy to be a woman.
Until yesterday afternoon, I was going to write about Peter Hessler's immensely intriguing article about "The Great Wall of China," which, it should come as no surprise to anyone by now, is a Western construct. There is no "Great Wall." There are walls, here and there, but they are not continuous. What most people think of as "The Great Wall" is properly known as "The Ming Wall," because it was built by that late-medieval dynasty to protect Beijing, where the Ming emperors were installed in the Forbidden City (the Ming carried Chinese xenophobia to new and startling heights).
There is no body of academic scholars anywhere devoted to studying the Ming Wall. It has been left to amateurs, the most eminent of which - unbeknownst to many of the Chinese who also study the wall - is an American, David Spindler. Spindler, in the mid-Nineties was awarded a Master's Degree from Beijing University for his work on an ancient Chinese philosopher, Dong Zhongshu; after that, he went through Harvard Law and then worked for McKinsey & Company in Beijing. Now he just walks the wall. Quixotists will want to know about him. (Mr Hessler's piece is not on-line.)
Then, however, I read Michael Tomasky's piece in the current New York Review.
¶ Michael Tomasky on the Hope for Political Discourse, in The New York Review of Books.
As a rule, I regard David Brooks's presence on the Times's Op-Ed page as something of a Trojan Horse. Instead of Greeks, his column is often full of plausible conservative arguments that upon examination - examination by me, that is - turn out to be more clever than sound.
Today, however, I'm in complete accord. "Wolfowitz's Big Mistake" goes straight to the heart of what's literally maddening about the Bush regime, it's ironclad determination to cooperate only with itself. Mr Brooks points out that even though the World Bank staff is composed primarily of people who vote Democratic, it would have been easy for Paul Wolfowitz to win support, if only he had made nice. But he "forfeited that opportunity by being aloof." Then Mr Brooks goes on to the nature of scandal itself.
The conflict of interest charge is out of proportion to the hubbub. But scandals are like that - they are never about what they purport to be about. The Clarence Thomas scandal wasn't about a hair on a soda can. The Larry Summers scandal wasn't about comments at a conference. Most scandals are pretexts for members of an establishment to destroy people they don't like.
In most scandals, people adjust their standards of rectitude, depending on whether they support or oppose the person at issue. The subjects enemies whip themselves into a fever of theatrical outrage, and the subject's defenders summon up fits of indignation at the lies of the accusers. Scandals are playgrounds for partisans, and everybody gets to play the rose of the junior high school bully, ganging up on whoever seems weakest and most alone.
Although I have very little good to say of the American electorate, I wonder if it isn't scandal-fatigue that has rendered it so inattentive. I myself cannot get worked up about various eminence's awful but entirely incidental misdeeds - not, at least, while genuine problems, such as the debt balloon and the abrasion of our regulatory structures, go utterly unchecked. Is "popular culture" to blame for the normalization of junior high school behavior?
Although I agree with everything that David Brooks has to say today, I don't agree with some of his silences. I suppose I ought to be happy that he doesn't include the very real Alberto Gonzales scandal in his list. In an adjoining essay, "He's Impeachable, You Know," Frank Bowman writes,
The president may yet yield and send Mr Gonzalex packing. If not, Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzalez would be politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.
It seems that we are all in agreement about murder: it's wrong. How to punish it may be unclear, but murder has no defenders.
Why then, are we in such disagreement about handguns, which have only one purpose: murder. ("Self-defense" is a delusion. As Adam Gopnik observes in The New Yorker this week, "If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.) And yet, according a poll reported in today's Times*, 64% of Americans are opposed to a ban on handguns.
Surely there is no stronger evidence of the failure of American, and Democratic Party, leadership. If Americans cannot be persuaded that the civilian possession of handguns is as wrong as murder, then I don't much see the point of democracy in America.
*Not as of this writing online, but appearing on page A22 of the Late Edition.
The news this week has been, to say the least, demoralizing. Everything that I know about the Virginia Tech massacre I know from the Times and from the few Web logs that I've read that have mentioned it. There is really nothing to say that hasn't been said in response to other recent American disasters.
It was fun, sort of, to read the excoriating editorial about the Attorney General, "Gonzalez v Gonzalez," in today's paper. But then it stopped being fun. That such a doofus could rise to a position of eminence is proof that our political culture is both corrupt and demented.
So pardon me while I take refuge in my ivory tower.
¶ Cynthia Ozick on critics; Siddhartha Debs on Roberto Bolaño, in Harper's.
Although I've never listened to Don Imus on the radio, and have no intention tuning in, I believe that NBC's bow to the forces of political correctness is a terrible mistake. Mr Imus may make racist remarks, but the simple fact is that those remarks have an audience. So long as the entertainer's remarks steer clear of the imperative mood, openly urging listeners to act on their prejudices, market forces ought to be allowed to determine whether his show is viable. By acceding to the likes of Al Sharpton, NBC executives are showing that they don't know their own job, which is to keep the airwaves open to a diversity of voices.
This isn't to say that Don Imus oughtn't to be sanctioned. Banishing him from the airwaves for a couple of weeks - I've no problem with that. His fans need a time-out, too. Mr Imus said a bad thing, and he deserves to sit in the nuisance corner for a while. And then he deserves to be forgiven. To drop his show is to brand him with a permanent (or semi-permanent) stigma; it is to withhold forgiveness. And for what? For being rude and insulting. To say what he said about the Rutgers basketball players was uncivil and nasty. But it was not "racist." Quite the opposite! Can't anybody see that the remark was a lame attempt to sound like a bro'? If there's an issue here, it's low-grade Afro-American misogyny.
Don Imus is, on the evidence, a jackass. And so are his listeners. So are all the middle-aged white men who misguidedly cling to their youth by affecting the styles of the young, which they will never really understand. Hurt feelings aside - and I must say that I am very tired of living in the era of Hurt Feelings - Mr Imus's comment was what in the law is called a "harmless error." There was no real damage. To banish the talk-show host from MSNBC - to refuse forgiveness - is both childish and infantilizing. Taking Don Imus off the air is not going to raise anybody's consciousness. He ought to be on the air until, like me, no one listens.
You have to love social science. From the Tierney Lab at the Times:
Similarly, according to the study, a 5-foot-0 guy would need to make $325,000 more than a 6-foot-0 man to be as successful in the online dating market. A 5-foot-4 man would need $229,000; a 5-foot-6 man would need $183,000; a 5-foot-10 man would need $32,000. And if that 6-foot-0 man wanted to do as well as a 6-foot-4 man, he’d need to make $43,000 more.
Is it Valentine's Day? Or is there some other item in the calendar that I'm unaware of and that prompted the editors of the Science Times sections to barrage readers with several feature articles about Topic A?
Yesterday, I had lunch with my francophone friend and fellow carnetier, Édouard, at the Cornelia Street Café. I asked Édouard how he sustained his interest in politics, and he very lucidly explained that he's not so much interested in the wrongdoing of the Bush Administration as he is in the impact that a waspish Blogosphere is having on both Congress and the media ("the media" meaning, very largely, The New York Times). It is certainly true that Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo is a national hero, slugging away at such malefactors as Randy Cunningham and, now, Alberto Gonzales. But the feeling that American politics has altogether gone off the rails dispirits me greatly. If we have a system, it's broken. (My choice-du-jour of culprit is Buckley v Valeo). When I read this morning that the President has just resorted to three recess appointments of conservative clowns who would never be confirmed by today's Senate, I feel more than ever that I'm living in something that ought to be called post-America.
A big donor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth will be our ambassador to Belgium. A vocal critic of government regulation will head the Office of Management and Budget. Andrew Biggs will be deputy commissioner of the Social Security Agency, whose services he would like to privatize. "All three are extraordinarily bad appointments," opines the Times, "- and all three more reminders of how Mr Bush's claims of wanting to work with Congress's Democratric leadership are just empty words."
Presidential shenanigans, however, are really nothing to worry about, compared with the resistance to doing anything about global warming.
¶ Behind Global Warming: John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.
Surely the greatest difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraqi misadventure is the realignment of the military's symbolism. The armed forces no longer provide a banner that only conservative supporters of the war are likely to wave. "Support the troops" has become profoundly ambiguous, as much an anti-war slogan as pro-. My primary objection to what we're doing in Iraq has always been the outrage of invading a country in order to effect regime change, but my concern for ill-equipped and poorly-trained soldiers is a very close second.
Robert Wright writes today about how growing up on Army bases informed his liberal outlook. ("My Life in the Army.") He also discusses the love that good officers have for their troops - a love that has been constrained by political interference in Iraq.
Sending people into battle isn't something a good person does with detachment. Before the Iraq war, when the Army chief of staff, Gen Eric Shinkseki, testified that the postwar occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he was showing not just prudence but devotion. He didn't want his soldiers needlessly imperiled.
As a reward for his devotion, General Shinseki was disparaged by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld wanted to show how cheap war can be, and now our soldiers are paying the price. I wish some people on the left had a deeper respect for the military, but lately the left isn't where the most consequential disrespect has come from.
The crowning indignity was Abu Ghraib, an outrage that was initiated by civilians high in the Bush administration and has stained the US military's hard-earned honor, strengthening stereotypes that I know are wrong.
In the Vietnam era, I would not have been likely to sympathize with the perpetrators of such an outrage, but now I regard the soldiers who ended up taking the rap at Abu Ghraib to have been no less victimized than the unfortunate prisoners by a situation in which remote corporate interests had placed them.
Abu Ghraib comes up in the Times's Science section as well. Claudia Dreifus interviews Philip G Zimbardo, the social psychologist who devised the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 - only to call it off when a colleague complained to him, "It's terrible what you're doing to those boys." Dr Zimbardo more recently testified on behalf of Sgt Chip Frederick, a soldier who was ultimately sentenced to an eight-year term as a prisoner himself. When asked if his was not, in effect, absolving Sgt Frederick of personal responsibility, Dr Zimbardo explains that
"... human behavior is more influenced by things outside than inside. The "situation" is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you're not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Louis XVI, Benedict XVI... can we arrange a switch? Louis was actually a good old boy who was true, in his way, to his school. Benedict is not so worthy.
The title of Elaine Sciolino's story, "Typical French Town Is Split Over Elections," is misleading. Ms Sciolino's report is all about voters who can't make up their minds about "Sarko, Ségo," or the self-styled Third Way, François Bayrou.
The indecision cuts across class and ethnic lines, uniting workers, merchants, union leaders, students, bureaucrats, the children of immigrants and the unemployed. Even voters who have chosen a candidate confess that their support is shallow at best.
Everyone Ms Sciolino talks to appears to have surrendered to a certain realistic cynicism: none of the candidates, if elected, will fulfill campaign promises.
Has Jacques Chirac's careerism been so corrosive as to undermine the French electorate's faith in representative government? Or does a Yoplait worker, Jean-Pierre Bertin, put his finger on the problem when he says, "France is always complaining. We always complain. But we never take action."
France today is like a guy who's sleeping in. He's very comfortable - oh! so comfortable. He would like to stay where he is forever. Trouble is, he has to pee. Five more minutes, he says. And keeps saying. Until finally he sweeps the bedclothes away and lurches to his feet. He knows that there's no point in going back to bed; that delicious comfort has been lost forever. Life goes on.
France has been dawdling in a bed of bloated public-sector employment and stringent job-protection regulation. It would seem that everyone in France must have a family member who works for the government, or who holds a job thanks only to laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Why, in other words, would anyone outside the functionally excluded pool of magrebin children want to change the system? But the system must be changed - who knows how.
Charles DeGaulle was the last man truly to lead the French, and even the slightest glance at his character and competence makes it painfully clear that there is no one like him on the scene today. French voters are probably going to have to learn to make do without magisterial authorities. They - the voters - are supposed to be the ultimate authorities. They're the ones who will have to decide to get out of bed - who ought to be making that decision now. Democracy goes on.
Rory Stewart is a young British diplomat who is redefining what it means to be a "British diplomat." A former soldier, he is now very much a man of peace, overseeing the reconstruction of civil society in the Kabul region. He was reluctant, he writes in an Op-Ed column today entitled "What We Can Do," "to help re-establish ceramics, woodwork and calligraphy and restore part of the old city of Kabul." But he found that these were objectives in which Afghans were keenly interested, and thriving markets emerged, at least according to him. He modestly asserts that there are many more successful projects running throughout Afghanistan.
My experience suggests that we can continue to protect our soil from terrorist attack, we can undertake projects that prevent more people from becoming disaffected, and we can even do some good. In short, we will be able to do more, not less, than we are now. But working with what is possible requires humility and the courage to compromise.
We will have to focus on projects that Iraqis and Afghans demand, prioritize and set aside moral perfectionism; work with people of whom we don't approve; and choose among lesser evils. We will have to be patient. We should aim to stop illegal opium growth and change the way that Iraqis or Afghans treat their women. But we will not achieve this is the next three years. We may never be able to build a democratic state in Iraq or southern Afghanistan. Trying to do so through a presence based on foreign troops creates insurgency and resentment and can only end in failure.
"You are saying," the politician replies, "that we ought to sit back and do nothing." On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
In other words, as has been clear to me since before the Iraqi misadventure was even undertaken, the problem lies not in the Middle East but in arrogant, apparently faith-based ideologues in Washington: the people who agree about "ought" implying "can" but who believe in the moral obligation to undertake the impossible. Especially the impossible. "Bring it on!"
Barry Schwartz in the London Review of Books, writing about Avner Offer's The Challenge of Affluence:
Offer points out how much we care about what he calls 'regard,' how we look to others. Status or regard can be derived from many things: virtues of character, occupation, acts of kindness or charity and of course wealth. In a society in which efforts are concentrated on increasing GDP, and life is oriented toward consumption, wealth becomes an increasingly important yardstick of status, and other things recede into the background. Thus the treadmill: how much wealth is enough? The answer is: more wealth than your neighbours. A rising tide that lifts all boats doesn't change your own relative position; you may be a better car, but you won't get more status. The result is a kind of arms race of wealth acquisition that thrives on inequality but leaves no one better off.
The disgust roused in me by this morning's House & Home story, "The Year Without Toilet Paper," is as visceral as the most rabid homophobe's response to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act (a bill that I support). I have an overpowering desire to exterminate (why beat around the bush?) preening and precocious urban environmentalists like Michelle Conlin and Colin Beavan, who ought to be thrown out of their Lower Fifth Avenue building for keeping a composter in their apartment.
Someday, I'm sure, the post-consumer life that the Conlin-Beavans are trying to lead will be forced upon all of us, but I expect an industrial, not a Thoreauvian, solution. That is, we will finally apply our enormously sophisticated technology to the task of minimizing its own impact. What the Conlin-Beavans are doing is a retrograde, autarkic form of playing house.
Those who did not experience the folly of the Sixties seemed doomed to repeat them. "If I was a student," Ms Conlin tells Penelope Green, "I would march against myself." The more telling quote is Mr Beavans.
Like all writers, I'm a megalomaniac," Mr Beavan said cheerfully the other day. "I'm just trying to put that energy to good use."
The far more urgent task is ridding Manhattan, and perhaps the entire Metropolitan Area, of diesel trucks.
It's not something that I'm proud of, but I rarely read the Letters to the Editor in the Times. (Lately, I haven't been looking much at the editorial page itself. I'm in agreement with most of the positions taken by the Times editorial staff, but that's just it: what's new?) Today, however, a passage from a letter from Daniel J Callaghan, of Manchester, New Hampshire, caught my eye.
The administration began this war four years ago with inadequate planning in Iraq and disregard for those who would serve. As a result, the war has become a quagmire in Iraq and more than a million veterans have returned home to face insufficient care and services.
I looked up and saw that Mr Callaghan's was one of six letters gathered under the rubric "On the 4th Anniversary of the War." I read them all and agreed with them all. Ita Hardesty Mason, of Kingston Spring, Tennessee, writes, "We have more enemies now, not friends." Meg Hillert, of Dallas, reminds us that "If America were in Iraq's shoes, we would fight to the death to protect our country, families, and way of life." Cy Shain, of San Francisco, regrets that "We are paying a heavy price for our haste to invade Iraq without having a full appreciation of the fatal consequences and painful complications or our actions." Judy Brewton, of Stamford, Connecticut, lashes out at the President. "From the outset of this falsified war, George W Bush has used America's soldiers cheaply - almost as if they were poker chips."
But if I had to choose only one of these letters to endorse as my own, it would be the one written by Rick Armstrong, of Brooklyn.
Frank Rich reveals that 71 percent of sampled Americans supported the war on March 19, 2003. He also mentions that on March 17, 2003, NBC cut short its news coverage to show "Fear Factor" because it knew that was where the ratings were.
Both of these examples show that in the end, American citizens deserve the blame for this war because politicians respond to perceive voter approval.
The buck stops here.
What exactly is critical thinking? There's a Wikipedia entry that suggests an approach to understanding the matter, but it's written at a fairly high level of abstraction. What it boils down to in my view is a corrective for the natural virtuosity at self-justification that accompanies average-to-superior intelligence. Most of "what stands to reason" generally doesn't, for the simple reason that reason hasn't been applied.
In The New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco reviews six books about the "Scandals of Higher Education." Which is worse, madly skewed admissions policy or the failure to educate the lucky ones who get in?
This week's Friday Front.
Because I never read the paper yesterday, I breezed through it this morning and didn't read Nicholas Wade's "A United Kingdom? Maybe" until Eric pointed to it this afternoon. The article reports findings that the DNA of the English and the Irish doesn't significantly differ. The English aren't a "later" people who forced the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots into the hinterlands. What if there were no Irish or British "people"? As in "race"; as in "nation." What if the Gaelic tongue came to the Atlantic Isles as part of the agricultural division of labor package? Unaccompanied by a handful of farmers from the Continent?
I was reminded of a wonderful little book that I picked up at the National Gallery (DC) bookshop a few years ago. In The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2001, 2003), Patrick Geary more or less explodes the idea pf great throngs of biologically related Huns, Vandals and Visigoths, sweeping out of central Asia and forcing the current occupants of Europe to find somewhere to sweep to. It is a nightmare concocted by Roman historians and Christian annalists as they grappled with the disorders that followed the collapse, very much from within, of the Roman Empire.
As the boundaries between Roman and Barbarian dissolved, what today is called "identity politics" became one means of organizing and motivating followers. New constellations claimed names of "ancient" peoples. Old polities vanished into the melting pot of Gothic, Hunnic, or Frankish lordship. Some were never to reappear. Heterogeneous groups of adventures and defeated enemies agreed to accept a common leader and, in time, a common identity. In other circumstances, opposition leaders, claiming to embody the ancient tradition of a people, might lead their followers to conquest and a new future or else to annihilation.
This is all a reminder that the Europeans who embarked on the Age of Exploration were already exponents of highly developed racism.
A century ago, the United States was not a nation in the traditional sense. Its inhabitants came from all over. Time seems to have clouded that distinction. Americans whose families have occupied this country for four generations or more think of themselves as more "American" than other people. (The same thing happened in the early Nineteenth Century, before the great influx of European immigrants.) I wonder how many kids today are unaware that the United States was not established when Noah's Ark touched dry land.
I've no way of knowing how many North American Pompadourians tuned in to the second and final episode of Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour on TV5 this evening, but I hope that we'll all connect. It was a preposterous soap opera, not because it was wildly unfaithful to the facts - it wasn't, not wildly - but because it would have bored the Marquise to death. All that royal family contumely! Who knew that the dauphin (Damien Jouillerot, in a supremely unendearing performance) was such a pain in the ass? Until this show was made, he was simply a cipher who predeceased his father, making way for Louis XVI. Now he's someone to detest! In Jeanne Poisson, art and politics take second fiddle to tirades out of The Queen.
Hélène de Fougerolles turns out to be a magnificent Pompadour. You don't think so at first; she's much too easygoing and, in the American sense of the word, fresh. But she ages into the part, so to speak. She does her best with impossible lines and ridiculous, silent-movie situations. She manages to honor the woman she's reincarnating while playing to a gallery of people who have no idea of Pompadour's singularity. The best joke comes at the end, when the credits name the lady's surviving mansions. Dont, as the French say - in their abominable conceit considering it a complete sentence - the official residence of the French Président, Le palais d'Élysée. Imagine old Bushois, dying to get out of a house rebuilt by a woman. I mean young Bushois.
When I say that Charlotte de Turckheim is also fantastic, as Marie Leszczyńska - Louis XV's queen - it's quite as though, what with all these aristocratic names, the very court had come back to life to impersonate itself. Happily, there is Vincent Perez as Louis XV. M Perez is quite above the aristocracy - and abysses below it. I have never seen royalty played with such conviction. An extraordinarily handsome man (as Louis XV certainly was) puts more faith in his God than in his looks - now, that's sincerity! I don't know how M Perez kept a straight face, but perhaps it was remuneration in ducats.
The only thing wrong with Jeanne Poisson is that Joan Crawford isn't in it. Well, she is in it, somewhere, motivating the actors to do their best with ridiculous material. The show a raté les Énarques - precious few genuine locations were made available for filming. Les BCBG decided that the project was beneath them. It was - and their disapproval matters. Jeanne Poisson gives us a Pompadour whose primary legacy was the screwing up of a happy family, and the humiliation of a king who let himself be advised by a woman. I suppose it's not insignificant that TV5 is operated by Le Figaro. They'll let Catherine Deneuve sing the praises of France's second greatest arts patron (Pompadour would have been the first to hail Louis XIV). But when they address her life, she's just a powdered pute.
Which is wrong.
Jenny Diski, one of the great voices of the London Review of Books, reports on Second Life. If you are a regular reader of this site and the host of an avatar at Second Life, the time to speak up is now.
Ms Diski runs a moderately agreeable blog. She doesn't post very often, but when she does, the news is news. How about a red-brick university's taking To The Lighthouse off the syllabus because it's "too difficult"?
You're right. It's my generation that's supposed to be shot. Don't shoot me!
We can't know what we don't know; we can just have a good idea of some matters that have got to be cleared up in a way that will add to what we do know. For the earlier millennia of human history, what was known and knowable was set in stone, and philosophers busied themselves with interpreting it. Ever since the Renaissance, however, we have lived with a bang of increased knowledge that bangs louder and more frequently every year, so that now, for most of us, it is just a staticky hum. Most pessimists will tell you that we still haven't learned anything about the real human mysteries, but there's reason to believe that those have only recently begun to be studied in a meaningful way, through neuroscience. Pat and Paul Churchland are philosophers who have devoted their careers to scrutinizing neuroscientific concepts and applying them to life outside the laboratory. Larissa MacFarquhar profiles them in The New Yorker.
I need a drink. My dopamine levels
need lifting.
Read about the Churchlands at Portico.
Catching up on The Nation, I came upon a passage that had, for me, the effect of a bombshell in reverse: it created order where there had only been disarray. It's Terry Eagleton, reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Dancing in the Streets.
Sport is one of the most formidable adversaries of the political left, one that offers ordinary people a uniquely powerful alternative to political engagement: cherished traditions, camaraderie, strenuous competition, a glittering pantheon of heroes and heroines, factual erudition, aesthetic appreciation, technical prowess and a good deal more. It is all rather more entrancing that the average cell meeting. The bad news for baseball-loving leftists is that they are going to have to choose.
I try not to write about sports, because I have nothing good to say about the subject. Sometimes I think, grand-inquisitorially, that it's just as well that the circuses keep the hoi polloi distracted, because who knows what mischief they'd get up to if it weren't for Super Bowls. Another inversion: whereas as racists usually get on well with individual members of the despised group by treating them as exceptions, I have no strong feelings about the mass of sports fans out there but am disappointed and hurt whenever a friend tells me that he's just enjoyed a game. My antipathy has grown much worse in the current century, because I am convinced that American sports madness is a sine qua non for the election of types the likes of George W Bush.
William Pfaff's ought to be a household name in the United States. I believe that he reflects our best traits: pragmatic, clear-eyed, constructively self-interested, and - not a widespread trait, although it is not uncommon - able to understand how we might appear to others. Mr Pfaff does not see what he wants to see; he is not about to tell you what you want to hear. You wouldn't want your doctor or your lawyer to mislead you, however sweetly, and you ought to expect the same leveling from your political analysts.
Interestingly, there are two articles in The New Yorker this week that feed the same thought, a reflection on human nature's preference for stable calm over rule of law. The longer is Michael Specter' indispensable survey of civil freedom in today's Russia; the shorter is a review, by Caleb Crain, of Matthew Warshauer's Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law (Tennessee, 2006).
Last October, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in her Moscow apartment building. A month later, Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, died of polonium poisoning. Both were critics of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself who has decided, it appears, that Russia does not need critics at the present time. In his Letter from Moscow (not available on-line), Mr Specter notes recent adulatory coverage in the the Russian press of Leonid Brezhnev's centenary and Augusto Pinochet's recent death. Both are thought to have made their countries "stable and strong."
Putin, who has called the breakup of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," clearly agrees. Sick of the lines, the empty shops, and the false promises of Soviet life, Russians looked to the West - and particularly to the United States - to provide an economic model. What followed was an epic disaster: the sell-off of the state's most valuable assets made a few dozen people obscenely rich, but the lives of millions of others became far worse. The health-care system fell apart, and so did many of the social-service networks. Russia became the first industrial country ever to experience a sustained fall in life expectancy. Russian males born today can, on average, expect to life to the age of fifty-nine, dying younger than if they were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is not surprising, then, that by the time Putin became President most Russians were only too happy to exchange the metaphysical ideas of free speech and intellectual freedom for the concrete desires of owning a home and a car and possessing a bank account. They also wanted to feel that somebody was in control of their country.
The curious thing is that, according to publisher Alexei Volin and broadcaster Aleksei Venediktov, most Russians don't care about newspapers or TV news. They're even less important in Russia than they are in the United States, where hoi polloi do a magnificent job of keeping themselves ill-informed.
The imposition of martial law in New Orleans on December 16, 1814, on the eve of a Battle of New Orleans that would mean nothing, because the what we call the War of 1812 was officially over before it was fought, was unconstitutional, and Andrew Jackson was fined a thousand dollars for the offense. In 1844, his campaign to have the fine refunded finally met with success. The refund implicitly ratified Jackson's action (without making it any less unconstitutional), and it appears to have been the precedent for Abraham Lincoln's suppression of habeas corpus in 1863. And so on. But the Battle of New Orleans was the making of Andrew Jackson, and he became the first President to exploit his countrymen's love of a bold and robust, if occasionally ruthless, leader. When a big guy can get the job done, Americans will look the other way rather than hold him to account for misdeeds. In "Bad Precedent," Mr Crain writes,
The evidence certainly suggests that it has always been difficult to find a reliable base of support for habeas corpus in America; it's a vulnerable right, especially during emergencies and when a charismatic leader is involved.
Ironically, the only American branch that has the power to suspend habeas corpus - the Congress - has twice supported the expropriation of this power, first by refunding Jackson's fine and then, last year, by ratifying President Bush's suppression of habeas corpus at Guantánamo Bay. Mr Crain quotes F-X Martin, a New Orleans judge who went on to write a history of New Orleans. As an appeals-court judge, he had declined to penalize Jackson for imposing martial law; he argued that he lacked the jurisdiction. Later, in his history, he would write, "In free governments, dangerous precedents are to be dreaded from good and popular characters only."
In The Nation, Columbia historian Eric Foner reviews The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, by James Oakes (Norton, 2007). Mr Foner's review (also not on-line - yet) is favorable, but what caught my eye were the two opening paragraphs, which I think that everyone ought to read closely, because they explode some very widespread myths about the Civil War, and do so quite neatly.
The abolition of slavery in the United States appears in retrospect so inevitable that it is difficult to recall how unlikely it seemed as late as 1860, the year of Abraham Lincoln's election as President. Slaveowners had pretty much controlled the national government since its inception. The 4 million slaves formed by far the country's largest concentration of property (their economic worth exceeded the value of all factories, railroads and banks in the country combined). Racism was deeply entrenched in the North as well as the South. Blacks, free as well as slaves, had few rights anywhere, and abolitionists were a despised minority.
Obviously, Lincoln's election and the civil war it triggered made emancipation possible. But Lincoln campaigned for President pledging to prevent slavery's expansion into the Western territories, while insisting that he had no intention of interfering with the institution where it already existed. It was by no means certain when the war began that it would become a crusade to destroy slavery.
It was very good news to learn that The Girls Who Went Away was nominated for a Nonfiction award by the National Book Critics Circle. It's good just to know that Ann Fessler's book appeals to a general audience. I read it with mounting obsession, but, then, I'm an adopted child.
The ball is in my court on the reunion front. I've received the "non-identifying" information that the New York Foundling Hospital could release, and I've been notified by the New York State Department of Health that when each of my parents registers with the Adoption and Medical Information Registry, then we can all get in touch.
I'm sorry, but that's profoundly unacceptable. The state has no business here. One of my parents is supremely unlikely to be alive - he would be one hundred ten years old - while the other is in her late eighties, living who knows where. Thanks to The Girls Who Went Away, I no longer believe that the State of New York had or has the right to hand me over to biological strangers while denying me access to information about my birth family, which may, as it happens, include as many as three half-siblings and their children. My daughter has a right to know her not-so-distant cousins.
That's why I'm happy about the nomination. The success of The Girls Who Went Away will be a step toward the repeal of New York State's inhuman adoption-records statute.
I'm back from a brilliant lunch with an old friend, and I have to share our findings. We discussed the difference between Help and Support. No etymology was involved, and you may switch the definitions if you like. We decided that, while Help and Support manifest the same behavior, they engender contrary expectations. When we Help, we look for positive results that reflect our efforts (change). When we Support, we risk a sort of no-questions-asked enabling. Much of the pain of life is attributable to the tremendous difficulty of deciding which to offer (Help or Support), and, just as important, how much of either we can afford.
Hrant Dink may not have died in vain. The assassination of the Armenian-Turkish journalist by a seventeen year-old "nationalist" has prompted massive outpourings of grief, not only in Istanbul, where one might expect it, but elsewhere in Turkey as well. The government is all but patronizing a big-deal funeral. Denial of the Armenian genocide isn't the biggest problem that Turkey faces (Kurdist separatism is), but it is the major obstacle to the final step of Turkey's secularist reformation: union with Europe. I wish I could join the crowds for this particularly sad but generally joyous observance.
Clear up one problem and another will appear in its place, as is shown Times coverage, "Armenian Editor's Death Leads to Conciliation," by Susanne Fowler and Sebnem Arsu.
Turkey calls the loss of life a consequence of a war in which both sides suffered casualties, and has suggested that a group of envoys from each country analyze the history. Armenia has expressed a willingness to participate but insists that the border must first be reopened to trade.
But many Armenians living abroad hold a much harder line and are lobbying the United States and European governments to deny Turkey entrance into the European Union until Ankara recognizes the killings as genocide.
I know that not all of the Armenian "expats" (many the grandchildren of emigré refugees) live in the United States, but a lot of them do, and they are among the hardest of hard liners. They have plenty of company: Irish-Americans who have supported Sinn Féin, Cubans who have plotted against Castro, and American Jews who have "settled" the West Bank - just to name three groups of powerful quasi-diasporans. The basic idea seems to be that you get thrown out of your homeland for one reason or another and come to America, where you prosper. But you do not forget the Old Country, for vengeance is yours!
The sad fact is that we all live locally, whether we want to or not. People living in California gradually cease to be Armenians, not because they abandon traditions but because actual Armenians, the people who live in Armenia, come to have different experiences, and probably don't see "tradition" in quite the same way as their collateral exiles. The very lack of an overall American "sentiment," or national feeling, makes it possible for newcomers to feel at home within a short space of time, but it also encourages them to hold on to and fetishize the more portable aspects of the culture they have left behind. The rest is money for guns.
For a bookish person, I'm perhaps unusually averse to spending time in or making use of public libraries. It's partly because I find it very difficult to focus on books when I'm in a crowded room (a crowded moving vehicle is something else). But it's also partly because of what Ellen Moody, in her entry about the Library of Congress, calls "institutional bullying." One of the most shameful things about the United States is the unwillingness of so many of its citizens to understand that the staffs of public institutions ought to be among the most highly-compensated workers in the land.
Now that the White House and the Pentagon are pushing for a "surge" of additional American troops in Iraq, it may be too late to mastermind a massive redistribution of Edward N Luttwak's "Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice," which appears in the February issue of Harper's.* Before reading this article, my resistance to the Iraqi misadventure was strong but intuitive. Taking the tack of failing to see any good reason for invading the country spared me the obligation to analyse my conviction that the invasion couldn't succeed - not in the long term. The dots were all there in my head, but I didn't bother to connect them.
Mr Luttwak has connected them for me, however, and now I know why I believe that our military undertaking in Iraq can never succeed - not, that is, so long as we remain a modern Western democracy. Our national commitment to humanitarianism means that we cannot continue to save villages in the only way that we know - by destroying them. We have tied one hand behind our back, and I am fairly certain that any attempt, by the president or anyone else, to untie that hand would rouse very considerable public outrage.
If only life could always be this simple.
Please watch this video. It packs the wallop of a feature film in an eggtimer of minutes.
And, by the way, if violinist Robert Thompson comes to New York to give a recital or a concert, I am there!
Thanks to Jason Kottke, who got it from Tom and Eric.
There are two must-read pieces in the current issue of Vanity Fair. After years of condescending dismissal, I've broken down and subscribed. As a devoted reader of Spy and a longtime (but no longer) subscriber to the New York Observer, I can tell myself that I'm just following editor Graydon Carter's star. As it happens, I'm in the middle of Spy: The Funny Years, by George Kalogerakis, with assists from Mr Carter and co-editor Kurt Anderson (Miramax/Melcher Media). Reading this handsome production is more than funny: it's a trip across time. The magazine's trademark was a wicked but attentively proofread mischievousness, and month after month it made me howl with laughter. I find from the newly published retrospective that it still can. Here's the weather squib from the top of a New York Times parody dating from 1992:
New York. Today, Sunny. High 85. Tonight, mostly dark, low 72. Tomorrow, canicular heat burns through early diaphanous clouds; aestival breezes expected. High 80. Yesterday, Tuesday. Details, page B14.
Observe that the piece is not immediately funny in any way, and doesn't have to be, because the seasoned reader of Spy loves to be lulled into thinking that there aren't any creatures under the bed, only to be transported into ecstasies by the sudden attack of a tickle-monster. The blend of fine writing, banality, and sheer irrelevance is sublime.
And before Spy, there was Esquire. Frank DiGiacomo's piece in the current Vanity Fair, "The Esquire Decade," sketches the steps that Harold T P Hayes took, once he became managing editor in 1960, to make Esquire the edgiest magazine going. I didn't come to that particularly party until it was half-over, but I remember the excitement with which the "Dubious Achievements" issue was greeted every year. Who could forget something that went like this:
oh, we thought it was at six oaks for the thousandth time. Mickey Rooney got married for the sixth time at his home in Thousand Oaks, California.
The simple genius of the "Dubes" was to print the comic reaction to a story before the story. Talk about pre-emption! Mr DiGiacomo writes,
As Nora Ephron says, Esquire and the 60s were "the perfect moment of a magazine and a period coming together - not trying to say the period was something other than what it was, but telling us everything about it." And though the decade climaxed in violence and hysteria that no monthly magazine could stay ahead of, Harold Hayes and his troops at Esquire not only cracked the code of the new culture but also engineered the genome for the modern magazine. Traces of its DNA can still be found in today's magazines, including this one.
I have the October 2006 issue of Esquire before me. Beneath a not-very-flattering picture of Brad Pitt (but that's the point, of course), there's a lot of print about "The Esquire 100." This is what George W S Trow might call "the format of no format." It permits a jumble of items and photographs on every level of importance (and unimportance), presented in apparently random order. "No 038: Omega-3's: The New Fluoride." "No 039: Misguided Expert of the Year: The Dog Whisperer Should Just Shut Up." It's hip, sort of, I suppose. But it isn't funny. There's an earnestness the writing that is almost desperate. Just as the writers of the old Esquire and Spy behaved like ace eight year-old cutups, today's young journalists aspire to the gravitas of greybeards. (And don't go blaming boomers. Esquire may have shaped the intelligent boomer's sensibility, but it was not at all shaped by it.) Esquire and Spy both demonstrated, moreover, that high humor lies not in particular subjects but in the way even the most ordinary subjects are handled. Spy, for example, specialized in insulting but not inaccurate Homeric epithets. If Homer's sea was invariably wine-dark, Spy's Shirley Lord was always a "bosomy dirty-book writer." It didn't stop there. Here's a gem from 1988: "... all across town there was voiced astonishment at just how dirty a dirty-book writer the bosomy dirty-book writer is."
As you can imagine, I hope it won't be long before someone with half a brain realizes that there's money to be made in DVD packages along the lines of the (amazing!) Complete New Yorker. I've spent a lot of my lifetime laughing at funny magazines, and I that nothing else makes me half so nostalgic.
The other must-read is "Ruthless with Scissors," Buzz Bissinger's report on reasons why writer Augusten Burroughs (né Chris Robinson - did you know that? I didn't) might be worried about landing in deepish doo-doo. A looming court case may Frey the memoirist alive. Members of the Turcotte family - the original's of the Finches of Running With Scissors - feel humiliated by the book, as well as grossly misrepresented. The author's claim that it is they themselves who have outed themselves is severely undercut by one little detail:
It was so easy to figure out who the Finches were that Burroughs himself, in a 2003 interview with the online publication Bookslut, essentially told reporters how to do it. "The doctor was notorious in that area, absolutely notorious, so I always felt it was laziness on the part of reporters to question [the veracity]," he was quoted as saying. "All you have to do is search western Massachusetts doctors in the '70s, in North Hampton [sic] - how many psychiatrists were there - and you can access a lot of stories, lots and lots of stories. In September of 2002, the real name of the family was used in a People magazine profile of Burroughs. When I interviewed Burroughs, he said that he had not given People the name and has never revealed it publicly.
Hmm. Mind you, I'm not going to get very worked up about that "veracity" issue. While I can't say that I'm indifferent to the truthfulness of a self-proclaimed memoir, I'm going to take the wilder and more entertaining ones with a grain of salt and wait for the inevitable fallout that sooner or later blankets frauds. At the heart of Running With Scissors there is an abandoned child, or a child who felt abandoned. The antics of the people around him, which may or may not be true, help us get the depressing story down. If Mr Burroughs projected his own misbehavior onto the Turcottes, as their complaint appears to suggest, that wouldn't be the strangest thing that I've ever heard of about a dysfunctional childhood.
If you want to watch a decrepit old dinosaur rattle off a squeak instead of a roar while grimacing with a mouthful of missing teeth, don't miss Christopher Hitchens's profoundly witless column, "Why Women Aren't Funny." For shame, Mr Carter; this is the sort of trash that Spy would never have published.
Here's what I did during my Christmas vacation: I read all the reviews in nearly twenty back issues of The Nation. Including the "Spring Books" issue from May. When I get behind, I don't fool around! The Nation's criticism is so much more substantial than the trash that too often appears in the New York Times Book Review that I feel somewhat foolish for taking the latter to task every week. At the same time, I have a terrible headache. All that brainy thoughtfulness!
I clipped five essays. David Thompson's warm appreciation (May 29, 2006) of Alan Bennett's Untold Stories will be tucked into the book. I don't know where to tuck William Deresiewicz's brisk dismissal (October 9, 2006) of Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, but I had to hold on to it because it sums up succinctly my dissatisfaction with the one Powers novel that I have read, Galatea 2.2.
The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like. And that, crudely put, is what novels are for.
Mr Deresiewicz is particularly struck by the fact that Richard Powers wows his readers with unstinting displays of science. He's given a pass on affect because his material is "difficult." The review traces this back to a wistful yearning for science and literature to engage in fruitful conversation.
From Matthew Arnold to C P Snow to today, there's been a vague feeling afloat that if only somehow those two modes of knowledge could be made to talk to each other, science would be humanized (whatever that means) and art made relevant to the scientific age (as if it weren't already).
I doubt this demand will ever be satisfied, for the simple reason that no one really knows what it means, least of all the people who make it. But certainly one way it won't be satisfied is by treating the novel as a container for scientific ideas.
Jon Wiener's review of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S Brown (October 23, 2006), is valuable for cutting Hofstadter down to size, or at least for stressing the distorting effect that a dread of American fascism had upon the writer's work. Another reassessment of received truths, Eyal Press's "In God's Country (November 20, 2006), reviews nine recent books under a "church and state" rubric. Mr Press reminds us that strong religious convictions have done far more good than harm to American life, as the single issue of civil rights for Afro-Americans makes perfectly clear, and he thinks that secular liberals are too easily scared by extreme fundamentalists. In any case, religious conviction must be respected; it was to ensure that respect, for any and all creeds, that the Founders proscribed an established religion. Mr Press quotes Madison, who wrote that religion
"flourishes in greater purity without [rather] than with the aid of government." He was right. The level of religious observance in America has long dwarfed that in various European countries where official churches still exist.
One cannot hope to change the religious conviction that, say, homosexuality is wrongful without first taking it very seriously indeed.
Finally, Lynn Hunt's review (May 29, 2006) of two books about the Terror seemed worth keeping, because it makes a very important point that I hope that it's not paranoid of me to regard as extremely important these days. Writing of Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Mr Hunt observes,
Scurr sets out to answer the same wrong question that has bedeviled so many accounts of the Terror. She asks how Robespierre could have come to incarnate the Terror and with it the entire French Revolution. The question rests on a double fallacy - that Robespierre is the Terror, that the Terror is the French Revolution - whose lure is easily understood.
In fact, Mr Hunt argues, Robespierre became a tyrant not by main force but by the consent of the Convention.
Robespierre undoubtedly turned many a memorable phrase because he believed that he spoke for the Revolution's most profound principles. But the other deputies only tolerated this pretension as long as the situation demanded what he offered: an ability to keep popular violence in check while indefatigably pursuing victory on the Revolution's multiple fronts and obscuring the fact that the "regime" lacked all the basic elements of rule. Once the French gained the upper hand in both the foreign and civil wars, Robespierre's days were numbered.
Mr Hunt concludes with chilling relevance.
Rumor, conspiracy, constant harping on imminent dangers, accusing political opponents of being unpatriotic, internment camps, even lists of suspects vaguely defined have all made a shocking reappearance in the US "war on terror," along with torture, a practice repudiated by the French even though they had grown up under a monarchy that routinely administered it under court supervision. If the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world can react in this fashion to the threats, albeit real, of small cells of terrorists financed by foreign powers, is it really so hard to imagine that the French responded as they did?
Well, one thing we know: you're no fake. You're a genuine idiot! (North By Northwest)
One of the most refreshing Op-Ed pieces in ages appeared in yesterday's Times. In "Our Overrated Inner Self," sociologist Orlando Patterson came out and dismissed the concern for "authenticity" as an impediment to the working of civil society. It's about time.
I couldn’t care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. The criteria of sincerity are unambiguous: Will they keep their promises? Will they honor the meanings and understandings we tacitly negotiate? Are their gestures of cordiality offered in conscious good faith?
As Professor Patterson says, the American warp on authenticity has led the electorate to support George W Bush as somehow "real," while it has prodded the pundits and the press to suspect that Hillary Clinton is a "fake." Beyond foolish consistency, I can't see what distinguishes "real" from "fake" in these cases. Mr Bush is a genuine bully whose mind has been genuinely sealed shut as an alternative treatment for alcoholism. Ms Clinton is a politician, that is, someone whose compromises are informed by core values. (Otherwise, she would just be an opportunist.) Mr Bush is utterly insincere - you might even say, authentically insincere. Ms Clinton is obviously trying.
Trying is good. Setting out to be a better person means accepting that one is not yet a better person. "Authenticity" would prohibit self-improvement. "Authenticity" has enabled hundreds of thousands of loutish males to complain to their better halves, "You're trying to change me!" Well, yes, that is the idea: you can't become a better person without changing. And you can't change without trying to change.
Eventually, at least with persistence, the attempt produces a real transformation. Why get lost in the semantics of authenticity? Genuine transformation is good; it's more than good: it is enough. Who you were when you started out is simply not important. And there is no better example of the beauty of deliberate personal metamorphosis than the late Cary Grant.
In later life, the actor would say, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." A balder admission of inauthenticity cannot be conceived, and yet the record of Grant's life - not just his films, but his personal dealings as well - could hardly have been more admirable, short of helping out Mother Teresa. He worked on himself constantly, grooming his character as scrupulously as his hair, and eventually - as Aristotle assures us will happen - his good habits made him a good man.
So take your pick. Are you happier with an inauthentic, self-made gentleman whose word is his bond and whose eagerness to make you comfortable is automatic? Or would you prefer an authentic lunk, incapable of pushing beyond the least resistance?
Historically, the concern for authenticity followed an era of widespread hypocrisy. But authenticity is not the antidote. Sincerity is. Sincerity brings hypocrisy to an immediate halt. Sincerity rules out opportunistic self-improvement. It legitimates change.
Although I'm not a religious person, I agree with the Christian proposition that we are all authentic sinners. And that, I would hope, is a point of departure.
The New Yorker never fails to surprise me. I'd have expected to see Orhan Pamuk's "Nobel Lecture" in, say, The New York Review of Books, but it sits very nicely in this year's fina issue of The New Yorker. As it's online, you ought to have no difficulty accessing and reading it. It happens to be an excellent introduction to the writer's themes, but it also makes an important declaration: Istanbul is the center of the world.
Having been lucky enough to visit Istanbul, I have no trouble going along with this proposition (which Mr Pamuk intends to be taken figuratively, as we'll see). Istanbul is a socket from which both the West and the Middle East swing. A Turkish, quasi-secular, quasi-Islamic city today, it has left many traces of the West uneffaced. There are, of course, the great Byzantine remains, most notably Ayya Sofia. There are also the souvenirs of more recent Western influence, dating back to the nineteenth century and the final decades of the Caliphate. The fact that Turkey's modern capital sits at Ankara has had a preservative effect on Istanbul as well - if too often, as Mr Pamuk points out in his book about the city, in the form of neglect. To a greater extent than any other city that I have visited (and I have never been to Rome), Istanbul appears to exist on several time-planes at once. Some of the bizarre things that theoretical physicists say about the world feel a little less unlikely by the banks of the Bosporus.
When Mr Pamuk was growing up, in the Fifties and Sixties, Istanbul happened to be about as backwatery as it is possible for a major city to be. No longer acknowledged by the rivals who begat it, the city limped along with a rudimentary, somewhat embarrassed cultural life. To be a Turk, one crossed the water to Anatolia. To be a writer, one went to Paris. Mr Pamuk's father, an amiable bon viveur who invested his inheritance in a string of failing enterprises, spent some youthful time in Paris, where he filled up notebooks with "poems, paradoxes, analyses." Two years before he died, the father gathered up his notebooks, put them in a suitcase, and delivered them to his son, in whose success as a writer he had never had any doubt, going so far as to predict that Mr Pamuk would win the prize that occasioned "My Father's Suitcase." The idea was that, at his convenience, the son would go through the notebooks, and see if there was anything that might - and this was left wide open.
In the event, Mr Pamuk did not find anything that might conceivably appear anywhere but in his father's notebooks. Reading them appears to have been a very unpleasant experience, because Mr Pamuk loved his father deeply but could not pretend that his writing was not that of an amateur. Early on in "My Father's Suitcase," Mr Pamuk writes,
By this time, I had been working as a writer for twenty-five years, and his failure to take literature seriously pained me. But that was not what worried me most: my real fear - the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover - was that my father might be a good writer. If true and great literature emerged from my father's suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man who was entirely different from the one I knew. This was a frightening possibility. Even at my advanced age, I wanted my father to be my father and my father only - not a writer.
But, knowing what I know from Mr Pamuk's work, that "real fear" concealed a real hope. I expect that the contents of the suitcase were bitterly disappointing, because they were the work of a provincial writer, someone working far from the center. A writer without faith.
Orhan Pamuk has made Istanbul the center of the world by taking its complexity as seriously as possible and trying to set it in prose.
... for the past thirty-three years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its night, making them a part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world that I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings seemed to begin to talk among themselves, interacting in ways that I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books but for themselves.
Equal parts courage and obsession, Mr Pamuk's identification as a writer of Istanbul constitutes exactly the commitment that every great writer makes to what we call his "material." His belief in its importance transcends argument; it even transcends love. And it signifies that, however familiar the writer may be with Dostoevsky or Kafka, he is not a provincial who wishes that he could write about Paris or New York, where the "real writers" are. The real writers, he knows, are wherever they believe in what they're writing about. There is nothing easy about this faith, because it is essentially a faith in one's own creative powers. Mr Pamuk doesn't write about Istanbul, he creates it. He displaces the physical city with the literary city, which is a thousandfold more accessible. It is a miracle that writers writers of his caliber conjure out of bravado and hard work.
The question remains: does accepting the greatest literary prize that the West has to offer make Orhan Pamuk a "Western" writer? Don't look at me. It's a litmus-test sort of question, its answer pre-determined by the prejudices of the inquirer. In a way, all writers whose work reaches the Swedish Academy's attention are "Western" writers, toiling in that capacious and cosmopolitan tent in which capturing life in words is the only real project. At the same time, the grain of Mr Pamuk's outlook is distinctly "foreign" - Turkish. That's the most important part of his faith: that he write as a Turk. Not as someone who, like his father, ran into Sartre in the streets of Paris. I expect that, at least to all fearful and ungenerous minds, Mr Pamuk will appear to aspire to both titles, "Western" and "Turkish," and to be unworthy of either.
Last Sunday, there was a gathering at my house. I hesitate to call it a "party" because it was so sober. Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God was there, as were the Farmboyz. Édouard, of Sale Bête, arrived with his copain, as did PPOQ - who as of this writing remains blogless. M le Neveu and Ms NOLA were on hand, too. Kathleen talked with everybody while I basically watched what happened happen. Never have I - all right - given a party that required so little fuss - no fuss, in fact. Never has giving a party been so satisfying or so agreeable. So sane! It left me in a trance. While entranced, I tried to take note of the epiphany. The results as published, I hope, have been optimally de-gassed.
By yesterday, I had recovered my composure, only to find myself restless. I had an appointment at three-thirty, so I headed off to the Met for lunch, in the cafeteria. I have been to the museum so often this season that I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to see, so I headed over to the American Wing with a view to tracking its mazes. The American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would make a very fine museum on its own. In addition to the conventional picture galleries and the period rooms, there is the Henry Luce Center for the Study of American Art, a kind of glazed attic, with racks and shelves of old chairs and china, and a few curios, such as the ivory pagoda, with its own pyramidal carrying case. There's a Childe Hassam, not behind glass I'm happy to say, that deserves a more prestigious mounting. There are even a few Sargents! But most of the paintings are portraits of venerable ancestors, many of them, unlike the sitters on the rack of Gilbert Stuarts, unidentified. The Luce Center is the Met at its barniest. I wouldn't want to fail to mention John Vanderlyn's panorama, The Palace and Gardens of Versailles. It's very woo-hoo.
Leaving the museum, I walked down Fifth Avenue in the watery, late-afternoon sunlight. It was rather gloomy, really, and very black-and-white. I felt old. How I wish that I could turn forty on my birthday, in two weeks, instead of fifty-nine. That's the bittersweet of discovering, in early antiquity, that my life makes complete sense. I'd have done so much more with my Forties if I'd known that! And I'd have known, it too. I think that I should have learned it from blogging just as quickly at a tenderer age as I have in fact.
What are you reading these days? I'm reading two books by authors appearing in From Boys to Men - a book that was much discussed and passed around on Sunday afternoon - Through It Came Bright Colors, by Trebor Healey (a novel), and You Are Not The One, by Vestal McIntyre. They are both absorbing books, but the latter is somewhat better-written than the former. More on that later. I'm also stalled at the beginning of Ward Just's new book, Forgetfulness.
First, the good news. An Australian Army officer and anthropologist, David Kilcullen, has an office at the US State Department, where he works on a strategy of "Disaggregation" that might prove as useful in the "war on terror" as the policy of containment was helpful in the Cold War. Item number one on Lt Col Kilcullen's list would presumably be to ditch the phrase "war on terror," and replace it with "effective counterinsurgency." The basic idea is to isolate potential jihadi hot zones from one another and to deal with each one individually, paying particular attention to local needs and complaints. Localizing insurgents makes it far easier to undermine them; just about the worst thing that you can do is lump all the bad apples together into something really dumb, like the "axis of evil." Henry Crumpton, Lt Col Kilcullen's boss, says,
It's really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms. The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat. The threat is big enough without us having to exaggerate it.
The bad news is that this new way of dismantling insurgency - which is not very new at all - probably won't be taken seriously until the current incumbent is no longer President of the United States.
George Packer's report, "Knowing the Enemy: Can social scientists redefine the 'war on terror'?", does not, unfortunately, appear online at The New Yorker's site. It is very worth rustling up. For one thing, it's encouraging, and we can all use a little encouragement on the war front.
As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success has more to do with luck than with strategy.
As always, the moral of the story is to ask "What would George do?", and then do the complete opposite.
Off the top of my head, I'd have to say that I've never had anything good to say about President Bush, not ever. His impact on events is, in my view, purely negative. It's only now, though, as the depths are being sounded by writers such as Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind and James Risen, that I'm getting a sense of how negative that impact is, and it surprises me that I am surprised. Suspecting that someone is up to no good is very different from finding out the ways in which someone has been up to no good. Mark Danner, reviewing books by each of the authors I've named in a very long essay, "Iraq: The War of the Imagination," has shaken me in a way that I didn't expect to be shaken. One passage in the review just won't go away. Both excerpts below appear on the same page of the current New York Review of Books.
Irresistible as Rumsfeld is, however, the story of the Iraq war disaster springs less from his brow than from that of an inexperienced and rigidly self-assured president who managed to fashion, with the help of a powerful vice-president, a strikingly disfigured process of governing.
Woodward tends to blame "the broken policy process" on the relative strength of personalities gathered around the cabinet table: the power and ruthlessness of Rumsfeld, the legendary "bureaucratic infighter"; the weakness of Rice, the very function and purpose of whose job, to let the President both benefit from and control the bureaucracy, was in effect eviscerated. Suskind, more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason."
Yes, I thought as much - except that I didn't. The anatomy of the Administration's recklessness is a truly shocking sight. "Unencumbered by information or consultation" - what a phrase! For the sake of such convenience, thousands of people have died in Iraq, many of them GIs. I remember, years ago, comparing the Bushies to teenagers too young and unseasoned to drive the family car, but Mr Suskind's analysis is more devastating. Teenagers don't listen. Mr Bush and his cronies deliberately silenced the inputs.
Talk of impeachment is back in the air, and I won't be surprised if it gets positively noisy by the beginning of summer. I feel more strongly than ever that impeachment is the wrong way to go, because it mixes up the office of the presidency and its incumbent. I should like to wait until the government of the nation has passed to other, unavoidably more capable, hands before pursuing Mr Bush, preferably in a state with the death penalty, for the first-degree murder of several thousand American soldiers. There is no statute of limitation on murder, and I am convinced that a plausible case can be made. The president's reckless disregard for human life, amply hinted at during his governorship of Texas, is implicit in every Iraqi failure, from the decision to invade the country without a plan, to the de-Baathification program (for which no one currently takes final responsibility), to the shoddy state of our military's body armor - to name only three of the more egregious mistakes to which Mr Bush's willful ignorance has committed us. He has worked the levers of government without a shred of diligence, and brought deep shame upon his country.
Ever since the election of 2004, I've found it more useful to contemplate the electorate's seriousness than to fret about the Administration's incompetence. The more recent election, and the return to reality-based journalism that's ever more in evidence, didn't change my thinking. But Mr Danner has.
From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up, an anthology edited by Ted Gideonse and Rob Williams.
A few months ago, when From Boys to Men appeared, I bought a copy, because it's a print breakthrough for Joe Jervis, the author of Joe.My.God. But I was in no hurry to read it, and it languished on a shelf until just the other day, when I heard a clip of Joe talking about the book on Sirius Radio. I pulled it down and began at the beginning. I was hooked immediately.
It's important to note that this is not a collection of coming-out dramas. The stories told here are more delicate, as each writer attempts to trace the journey from childhood ignorance to adult self-acceptance. There are common themes, of course - coping with being called "faggot" in the schoolyard, surreptitious play-dates with Barbie, and no end of unrequited affection - but they are played with amazing variation. Eric Karl Anderson, in "Barbie Girls," uses the doll to characterize his utterly asexual relationships with middle-school classmates, cultivated solely to secure him a place among the cool kids. After a spellbound moment at summer camp, the young Mr Anderson "knew that these weren't the right friends anymore" when he went back to school. Aaron Hamburger, in contrast, always knew that he was interested in other boys, but he broke his own heart anyway, with assiduously-maintained friendships with boys who rarely gave him more than the time of day.
To what extent is this material dated? Will little boys always be warned away from homosexual leanings, even after most people understand that choice is not involved? Will beautiful gay boys ever arrive at their young triumphs with the heedlessness of their heterosexual brothers? Will we ever know where the "homosexual" ends and "being different" begins? So much of the pointless pain inflicted on the contributors to From Boys to Men seems to have been motivated by a fear of alien-ness. So much of it seems peculiar to ill-educated, lower-middle class America in the second half of the Twentieth Century. (Although in Tom Dolby, whose contribution is entitled "Preppies Are My Weakness," we have one alumnus of Hotchkiss.) The life of secrecy endured by so many of the writers here must surely have been somewhat deforming, even if only privately.
Good fathers are in extremely short supply here, something that suggest to me not a causal relationship between lousy parenting and homosexuality but the possibility that a broken or unloving father will create an atmosphere full of problems for his son to write about later. The unhappiness of living with an unsympathetic stepfather suffuses Jason Tougaw's "Aplysia californica," perhaps the most conventionally literary contribution to the project. Mothers, as you might expect, appear both more to the fore and in greater variety. There is the sweet slut of Michael Gardner's "The Competitive Lives of Gay Twins," and there's the clueless loyal wife of Trebor Healey's "The Upshot." For me, the most harrowing piece is David Bahr's "No Matter What Happens," which features two moms, Sadie, the writer's biological mother, a disturbed woman incapable of nurturing a child; and June, his foster mother, who turns on him after an aborted sojourn with Sadie. Lee Houck's "Inheritance" presents an instinctively hostile grandfather, a man who can somehow see that his grandson is queer. Remarkably, nobody reports extensive beatings or other serious abuse.
From Boys to Men offers a catalogue of narrative strategies. Blogger Francis Strand writes about himself in the third person in "Five Stories about Francis," and this alone makes his piece a little bit funnier than it would have been otherwise, by accentuating the "drama" of the boy's reactions and resolutions. Viet Dinh's "A Brief History of Industrial Music" poses as a learned note about a pop genre to which the author has appended footnotes devoid of scholarly apparatus but crammed with intimate snapshots. In "Peristalsis," Mike McGinty offers a suite of droll thumbnails taken from years five through seventeen. Raymonde C Green switches among moments from his past to delay the impact of his high-pitched self-discovery. Two stories, "Guide," by Austin Bunn, and "The Boy with the Questions and the Kid with the Answers," by Horehound Stillpoint, focus more on troubled older boys than on the authors. Michael McAllister begins his fragment, "Sleeping Eros," with a moment of sexual awakening, but the moment quickly fades into the remarkable story of his parents' divorce. In this, he's in a sad but altogether normal position; it's his parents who have discovered that they are gay.
Vestal McIntyre, in "Mom-Voice," and E M Soehnlein, in "The Story I Told Myself," show how their own creative work as adolescents led them to self-discovery. In "Dick," in contrast, Alexander Chee gets creative as soon as he makes that discovery, at the age of eight. D Travers Scott, in "Growing Up in Horror," took a little longer, perhaps, but the results are not only funnier but more concrete - I wonder if he still has the film. Todd Pozycki's "The Lives and Deaths of Buffalo Butt" project an amiable figure whose homosexuality is something like the relieving resolution of childhood OCD.
I've saved Joe Jervis's "Terrence" for last, because, since I know Joe somewhat, his contribution has a VistaVision intensity that puts it in a class by itself. Perhaps the piece would be vivid even if I didn't know Joe, because the star of this story is the title character. With his dyed-brassy hair and his southern-belle gestures, he is the most exuberant queen in From Boys to Men. I call him the star because, like the sun, he illuminates and nourishes life. When the story begins, Joe is in an interesting place, actively but discreetly gay. He has not yet come out to his mother. As it turns out, Terrence has nothing to do with the eventual change in status on that front, but it is Terrence who teaches Joe first the shame of trying to keep his sex life apart from his daily life, and then the pride of uniting them with brio. Still a discreet gentleman - that's just who he is - Joe has found his own way to be proud of himself. Who knew that that pride would make him into a published writer and one of the most popular bloggers in the 'Sphere?
In a perfect world, there would be a companion volume, entitled From Boys to Men: Straight Men Write About Growing Up. Books such as the gay version subtly suggest that straight men have an easy time of growing up, but the only ones for whom that's true are assholes. Everyone else has to figure out a series of moves that will take him from latency to manhood. Unfortunately, our culture encourages men to forget each step of the way as soon as it is completed, giving rise to a bad faith that has filled the land with sour Gary Lamberts. Gary's creator, novelist Jonathan Franzen, has been critically roasted for sharing his missteps and compromises; in The Discomfort Zone, Mr Franzen violates the code of omertà that silences discussion of adolescent insecurity. Once you make it into the world of salaried heterosexuality in our world, you're expected to bluff your way onward with phony bonhomie. This may be why I've encountered so few engaging straight male blogs.
From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up, an anthology edited by Ted Gideonse and Rob Williams.(Carroll & Graf, 2006)
The one article that you have to read this week is "Walled Off," John Lanchester's review, in The New Yorker, of The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U (FSG, $25). If you know anything about Burma, it's probably that a ruthlessly corrupt but notably incompetent military junta rules the country along severely isolationist lines, and that Aung San Yuu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has lived under house arrest for years because of her commitment to democracy. And that's all correct. What you probably don't know anything about is the peculiar nature of Burmese nationalism, a toxic hormone that responds to international sanctions with a troublesome vibrancy.
One of the subtlest things in The River of Lost Footsteps is the connection Thant charts between Burma's current predicament and its colonial past. A deep sense of humiliation gave rise to a curdled nationalism that eventually made the military dictatorship possible. The great British experiment in regime change created a Burma that was, in Thant's words, "entirely different from anything before, a break with ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy valley since before medieval times" - a Burma "adrift, suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past."
Hmm, might something similar have happened with all the post-World-War-I regime change in the Middle East? At least Burma is geographically Burma, notwishtanding its imperial pretensions. (Yes!) Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia were all wrenched untimely from the womb of an Ottoman Empire that was too old to be giving birth; they are all profoundly bogus nations.
I used to be a big believer in sanctions. Just cut people off from the advantages of participating in the international community until they cry "uncle"! It seemed to be working with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, especially given the no-fly zones, under which certain cities prospered in peace. Mr Lanchester's essay suggests that I may have been simplistic (how American!). What one really wants to do, he points out, is to create a middle class, using whatever works.
A middle class. More and more, we recognize this property-owning but non-elite class as the binding force in any civil democratic society. But even in English, the "middle class" is contemptible for reasons having nothing to do with the care and feeding of civil societies. Anyone in a governing position has undoubtedly been subjected to an anti-bourgeois bias in the course of his or her education. We come back to a familiar Western conundrum: nobody from any background - aristocratic/plutocratic, bourgeois, or proletarian - can tolerate a "middle class" after a first-class education. It may be nothing more the crazy legacy of poets who romanticized the well-mannered ancien régime, but it clings like kudzu. Westerners have had a genius for creating middle classes. Why is it something that we understand so poorly that it's the last thing we think of exporting?
It's a bit creepy. The Wikipedia page for writer George W S Trow has registered his death, a couple days ago, of "natural causes." Why am I having such a hard time believing the cause of death?
There was a time when Trow was the coolest writer going, no question. "Within the Context of No-Context" came as a bombshell.
In the New History, nothing was judged - only counted. The power of judging was then subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.
The piece appeared in the November 17, 1980 issue of The New Yorker, and I didn't really understand it. I had no idea that something called "popular culture" was going to occupy center stage in the coming decades. I thought that the Sixties were over. I didn't know that the Sixties were about to come back, in Living Dead format.
Looking at the essay today, I'm inclined to say that the old History is still vital in certain parts of the world, and that anti-Americanism is its hallmark. People still make momentous judgments there. Americans, in contrast, living in the New History, are almost ridiculous - and Trow was the first to show why. He sailed past the known poles of right and left, capitalist and marxist, to discover an awful new world, one in which the serious is relentlessly menaced by the inconsequential.
This wonderfully raunchy satire would be amusing even if it weren't for the drunkenly libinous "Oh, yeah..." right in the middle, but that one line lifts the whole piece to a higher level. Now turn over.
The cover of this week's New York Times Book Review bears the beginning of a serious essay by Michael Kinsley that pretends to review ten recent books about the state of American politics. The reviews are perfunctory in the extreme, however, sometimes consisting of no more than a sentence of comment. That's a disgrace on the part of the Book Review, perhaps, but the piece would be important wherever it appeared.
To cut to the chase, Mr Kinsley enumerates the things about American politics that need fixing. Voting machines. Electoral districts. Campaign finances. A more aggressive journalism. In the end, however, he concludes that there is only one thing that must be fixed. We need to put an end to our "enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty" - and for politicians who don't stand for anything but winning. The most brazen recent example that Mr Kinsley finds is the planning of the Bush campaign on the eve of the election of 2000. Fearing that Al Gore might win in the Electoral College, the campaign developed a plan for overcoming that outcome, arguing that it would be undemocratic. When in fact the election turned out just the other way, the Bushies because staunch advocates of the Electoral College.
Of all the things Bush did and said during the 2000 election crisis, this having-it-both-ways is the most corrupt. It was reported before the election and is uncontested, but no one seems to care, because so much of our politics is like that. And no electoral reform can fix this problem. Intellectual dishonesty can't be banned or regulated or "capped" like money. The only way it can be brought under control is if people start voting against it. If they did, the problem would go away. That's democracy.
When I read this, I understood something that had been bothering me. Why wasn't I paying attention to the campaigns this year? Surely they're as important as any mid-term elections could be. But I haven't had the slightest need for a campaign this time; my mind was made up before the season began. I will vote against Republican hegemony in any way that I can. And because I only have my one set of votes, it really doesn't matter to me what other people are planning to do. There is simply no news factor adhering to this election cycle. But the real reason for staying out of it is to avoid the appalling bullshit that, every once in a while, reaches up to the windows of my ivory tower. What is claiming that James Webb is unfit for the Senate because his novels have racy sex scenes in them but pure, unadulterated bullshit? Intellectual dishonesty isn't just a matter of bending the truth. It involves disregarding the concept of relevance. It short-circuits rationality. No matter how clever, it is fundamentally stupid.
As Mr Kinsley urges, try to vote against it.
There's a lot of good stuff in this week's New Yorker. The two pieces that stood out for me were John Seabrook's Profile of Will Wright, the designer of Raid on Bungling Bay, Sim City, The Sims, and Spore. Although Mr Wright never earned a college degree, he has filled a large corner of the computer world with food for thought disguised as fun. Mr Seabrook's portrait is complex and intriguing, but Mr Wright's world will never been my world. I jumped with sympathy at a remark of Joell Jones, a painter and Mr Wright's wife (from whom he has separated, it seems).
I think it frustrates Will that I don't play his games. Clearly, his games matter, on a deep level, to many people - take these online diaries people keep about their Sims. Wow. I don't know if they're avoiding their lives or learning about them. Me, I don't want to play a game to learn about myself.
The other piece was Steven Shapin's review of Steven Johnson's "vivid history," The Ghost Map: The story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic, and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. At the heart of this book is a map drawn up John Snow, a Victorian physician, who was sure that the cause of cholera - which even he thought must be some sort of "miasma" - was waterborne. He was right, but people were slow to listen. The real engine of London's great sanitation schemes was, as Mr Shapin reports, the flush toilet, which vastly increased the amount of effluent produced by Londoners and eventually brought the Thames to a high reek. Mr Shapin's conclusion is trenchant.
Victorian London illustrates how much could be done with bad science; the continuing existence of cholera in the Third World shows that even good science is impotent without the resources, the institutions, and the will to act.
The most astonishing news emerges from a parenthesis in Hendrik Hertzberg's opening Comment in "The Talk of the Town" "(... the reported two-million-dollar salary conferred upon a Republican congressman who became the pharmaceutical industry's top lobbyist immediately after shepherding into law a bill forbidding the government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs.)" I'd like to know more about that; it's another item for the album that I've started to keep about the privatisation of public wealth. Although perfectly legal, it seems, the two-step strikes me as falling somewhere between letters of attainder and treason. It certainly keeps the government out of the free market! But then, Republicans aren't as ideological as they seem; bottom line, they're kleptocrats.
Looking for something fun to do that costs only $25? Buy a book. (Jason sent me.)
Here is a portrait of the Democratic candidate for one of Virginia's two US Senate seats, James Webb.*
He saw himself as a creature of a pervasive but nearly invisible Scot-Irish subculture, descended from the warrior clans of Ulster who migrated to North America in large numbers in the eighteenth century. They came to live mostly in the Appalachian South - a stubborn, bellicose people, fiercely individualistic and egalitarian. They settled the frontiers, invented country music, and fostered a truly native form of American democracy. Most important, they bore the brunt of fighting the nation's wars. ,,,
In Webb's world, manhood was a standing, to be earned. When he was a small boy, his father, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, would clench his fist and dare his son to strike it, taunting him o keep punching until the tears flowed. But Webb accepted that a father's highest duty was to prepare his son for manhood by teaching to fight, to hunt, and to handle a weapon. He got his first gun when he was eight, and Jimmy [his son] did, too. In such a culture, going off to war is part of what Webb calls "the Redneck Bar Mitzvah." **
Reading this for the first time, I felt myself bristling, and not because I thought that it misrepresented Mr Webb. No; I stiffened because everything about Mr Webb's "subculture" repels me, right down to the country music. What I have to face, though, is that what Mr Webb sees in the Northeast elite subculture to which I belong is the very same thing that I see in his: a smug smirk that I want to smack. Anything that we can do to marginalize one another, we will do, because the dislike is bone-deep. I hate his people for breaking the elite American republic created in 1789 - a republic that offered a very limited franchise. And he hates mine because we tried to do everything to block the influence of his Founding Father, Andrew Jackson. I honestly don't believe that we were meant to cohabit the same sovereignty, not then and not now, and it's why I curse my Yankee forebears for not allowing the South to secede upon the election of Abraham Lincoln. (There would still, in all likelihood, have been a war over the West.)
To Webb, himself once a distinguished member of the Marine Corps, military service was not just a patriotic gesture but a test of honor and courage, an essential rite of passage.***
I cannot express how pathetically benighted I find the musky reflex that associates honor with warfare. And then to complain about bearing "the brunt"? Of wars that might not be undertaken were it not for Mr Webb's need for rites of passage? Sending rednecks to war while sparing Ivy Leaguers seems just about right to me.
But what if James Webb and his tribe were our only allies in the fight to subdue the corporate colonization of the United States?
* From "Southern Discomfort," by Peter J Boyer, in The New Yorker, 30 October 2006. ** page 43. *** page 42.
Because I read it, for the most part, in transit, I took a while to get through Thomas Blaikie's slim but heartening book about behavior, To the Manner Born: A Most Proper Guide to Modern Civility (Villard, 2005). Title notwithstanding, Mr Blaikie is not really very interested in being proper. He lays out his credo, appropriately enough, in his Introduction:
This book is a guide to modern manners. I say: Let's have manner based on common sense and reason; manners that bring people together rather than drive them apart; manners that make people feel comfortable and confident.
And then he proceeds to apply this thought to areas of modern life in which trouble arises. He couldn't, for example, care less about how to write a thank-you note, as long as you're agreeable about it, and everything except acceptances of wedding invitations and condolence letters can be sent by e-mail. In fact, he thinks that we just ought to forget about writing thank-you notes on most occasions: not imprudently, he saves this bombshell for a later chapter, which is subtitled "A Major Rethink." Mr Blaikie is also not interested in which piece of silver you use at dinner, as long as you use it to move food unobtrusively from the plate to your mouth. He does not care, in short, for any prescriptions that do not directly conduce to the general pleasure and comfort.
If there's one thing that Mr Blaikie insist upon, it's paying attention. Most of the lapses that he bullet-points occur not because someone doesn't know what to do but because someone simply isn't thinking.
Continue reading about To the Manner Born at Portico.
Connie Bruck has written an awfully interesting piece, "Millions for Millions," in the current New Yorker about the difference between microcredit and microfinance, both of which lend money to the poor. As you know, Muhammad Yunus, the Bagladeshi founder of the Grameen Bank, a microcredit institution, will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December, after several years on the speculative shortlist. Mr Yunus, and other advocates of microcredit, would like to eliminate poverty. Pierre Omidyar, the inventor of eBay, is a major force behind microfinance, which seeks to make banking available to hundreds of millions of unaffluent strivers. "Microcredit" signifies not-for-profit operation. Microfinance is frankly capitalist. According to Ms Bruck, the divide between the camps is becoming acrimonious. Microcreditors deplore the insertion of a profit motive, which rules out lending to the extremely poor. Microfinanciers complain that philanthropy distorts the market, keeping unsuccessful programs alive. Just to make things interesting, there's no evidence that microlending of any kind has altered the world's aggregate poverty - even though microlending is known to work in individual cases, and quite well at that. It follows that there is no evidence that one kind of microlending is more effective than the other. Enter the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (might it not have been better to title the piece, "Billions for Millions"?), and you've got some real excitement going. All that virtuous moolah!
Making an objective choice between microcredit and microfinance seems to me to be almost an impossibility, because the two varieties of microlending have been generated by very different mindsets. Mr Yunus believes in highly constructive charity; Mr Omidyar believes in the free market, "creative destruction" and all. Be sure to read the piece; at a minimum, it'll be good exercise for your brain.
Ms Bruck does not mention any microlending operations within the United States. You'd think there wasn't a need.
The other day, I went to see The Queen. This is a movie that everyone expected me to rush to see, but, perhaps for that very reason, I was dragging my feet. I'd concocted a perfectly good excuse - prophetic, really. "I'm going to like it so much that I'll want to watch it again and again, right away." True. I can't wait for the "window" - the gap between the release of films in theatres and their release on DVD - to close. But really, if I didn't rush to see The Queen the minute it came out, that was only because there were good movies opening in my neighborhood, where The Queen isn't showing.
I went the other day because an old friend wanted to see it a second time, and I owed him big-time for having brought a copy of Les Bienveillantes back from Paris, sparing me oodles of shipping charges and Amazon.fr's somewhat elevated price. We went to the first showing, at 11:20, and had lunch afterward. That was my treat, too.
Reviews of The Queen seem to me to have taken a strongly anti-monarchical edge, seeing the film as an argument in favor of abolition. Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II, never much of a fan of Diana Spencer to begin with, wants to regard the princess's death as a private matter. In her view - correctly, but only in the worst sense - Diana was no longer a member of the royal family at the time of her death; ergo, no fuss. Elizabeth is convinced that seclusion at Balmoral is best for her grandsons, and in this she is backed up by her dimwitted husband and her reactionary mother. It takes all of newly-elected Tony Blair's tact (Michael Sheen) to order her to come to London and make contact with Diana's mourners. For the first half of the film, Blair rolls his eyes and asks, rhetorically, how he can save "these people" from themselves.
He winds up a staunch admirer and a defender of the Queen. He talks to his entourage about her stoicism, and about the diligence with which she has done her job for nearly fifty years. What he does not express is any regret that the Queen's model - respectable dependability - has been junked in favor of Diana's - charming hedonism. I do not suppose that the princess was a tireless visitor of hospitals only because she knew that grim settings would transform her into a radiant, healing angel. Whatever one's motivation, it is always good to visit the sick. As a woman, however, Diana appears to have been little more than a classier Paris Hilton, living her life on remote beaches and private jets when she wasn't at Kensington Palace. Whatever gave anyone the idea that she was a "people's princess"? She was a celebrity who proved that she was not up to the job of princess, which, in England at least, is a matter of grinning and bearing.
What the outpouring of "grief" that flooded London during that week in 1997 speaks to me about is resentment. People whom Diana wouldn't have looked at in private, much less spoken to, could seize her extinguished life as an icon for the ordinary, and then project their own self-pity as a simulacrum of sorrow. Looking at the televised throngs that are clipped into The Queen, I was seized by a horror of the mob, stupid as a cow and dangerous as a bull. But I was not surprised when Her Majesty shows up at last and turns the tears into smiles.
The Queen is a smart, sophisticated movie that is stuffed with great performances and food for thought alike. It is greatly enlivened by Alexandre Desplat's formidable sound track.
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin, 2006), by Ian Buruma, is, if nothing else, a top-notch work of journalism. Mr Buruma, who was born and raised in the Netherlands but whose English mother assured that that he would be Anglophone, has put together a comprehensive dossier on the van Gogh case. As you may recall, filmmaker, talk-show host and social hatpin Theo van Gogh was horrifically murdered on the morning of 2 November, 2004 by a fellow Nederlander of Moroccan descent, Mohammed Bouyeri. Bouyeri fully expected to be killed in the aftermath, but he was taken captive, duly tried, and given a sentence of life imprisonment. The crime appeared to polarize the nation, but Mr Buruma's book makes it very clear that tensions and alliances alike run along multidimensional lines toward a pandemonium of inconsistency and contradiction. That is the great value of his book. Having read Murder in Amsterdam for the case study that it is, and chased the largely conflicted men and women who are its subjects toward some kind of resolution in your own mind, you will be in fine shape to deal with the Theo van Gogh show when it comes to a venue near you, as it very well may.
Continue reading about Murder in Amsterdam at Portico.
A friend recently asked me if I have any documentary evidence to support my theory that the principal goal of the Bush Administration is to transfer public wealth into private pockets. My answer was that I didn't; my theory is an inference from the facts. And I don't expect to find much documentary evidence, because I believe that the goal is less than conscious. It is the consequence of certain espoused philosophical views about free markets and invisible hands - views of which there is no end of documentary evidence. At the same time, I've gone on the lookout for statements that support my theory - which I'm sure is not just mine.
In a disheartening but unsurprising article about Senator Barack Obama in the current issue of Harper's, by Ken Silverstein ("Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington Machine"), Ted Patzek, of the University of California at Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is quoted as saying that ethanol production - something that Senator Obama supports - is based on "the massive transfer of money from the collective pocket of the US taxpayers to the transnational agricultural cartel."
In his attempt to become a viable progressive - that is, a legislator who can count on the contributions that will get him re-elected - Senator Obama has done a fair amount of trimming. I gave up on him a year ago, when he was nowhere in the public discussion of ethnic cleansing in New Orleans. I'm afraid that he's just another Kennedy.
The current, 16 October, issue of The New Yorker, devoted to media matters, is full of good stuff, but even more compelling than Malcolm Gladwell's report on computerized movie plots is Ian Parker's profile of Christopher Hitchens. Mr Hitchens belongs to the elite squadron of preposterously gifted English writers that also includes Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. I remember rather liking him when I first saw his byline, but I was brought up short by the piece in which he discussed the discovery that his mother, long dead, was Jewish. There was something not quite right about it; in Mr Parker's profile, Mr Hitchens is quoted as "being pleased to find that I was pleased" by the "tidings." That's the sort of thing that I might say to a friend, or even write in a letter; putting it in front of the public is reckless. Then I was startled by his campaigns against Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa. Again, I agreed with him - particularly about Mother Teresa - but I didn't share his passionate engagement. Most recently, of course, Mr Hitchens has tilted toward the neoconservatives, resigning as a columnist at The Nation and becoming a regular on Fox News. I have no use for the man now, at least as a commentator, although I shall probably have a look at his forthcoming God Is Not Great.
Although I am about the same age, Mr Hitchens's bluster gives me an insight into the revulsion that "baby boomers," taken collectively, inspire in younger people. There is the imperious idealism that can't be bothered with practical matters, such as driving carefully and giving up smoking. Mr Parker works in a few mild zingers, and the best of them is on point:
At times, Hitchens can look like a brain trying to pass as a muscle. He reads the world intellectually, but emphasizes his physical responses to it. Talking of jihadism, he said, "You know, recognizing an enemy - it's not just your mental cortex. Everything in you physically conditions you to realize that this means no good, like when you see a copperhead coming toward you. It's basic: it lives or I do."
Mr Hitchens is an ardent advocate of human rights; one might say that dedication to that cause is his leading edge. But his determination to force recognition of them upon various sovereign states is unlikely to foster something more important than human rights: human happiness. Idealists never seem to care about happiness other than their own.
In the current issue of The New Yorker, Milan Kundera has compiled some notes in answer to the question, which is also the title of his piece, "What Is A Novelist?" He begins by determining what the novelist is not, id est a lyric poet. The following passage rings true as a bell (never mind what it is that we can make deductions from - Hegel, actually):
From this we can deduce that the notion of lyricism is not limited to a branch of literature (lyric poetry) but, rather, designates a certain way of being, and that, from this standpoint, a lyric poet is only the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard.
I have long seen youth as the lyrical age - that is, the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him. If we start with that hypothesis (necessarily schematic, but which, as a schema, I find accurate), then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude.
If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.*
It must be observed, first of all, that the world is awash in lyrical novels. I dislike them as a rule; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one of the few exceptions that I can think of, and even then the extent to which that book is a novel is uncertain. Young writers, like young people, are self-absorbed because they're busy absorbing the world, or enough of it to convey a sense of their own place, their own limits, their own follies. The world is new, fresh, and exciting. And it's a struggle. Lyrical people usually have a somewhat difficult time building a career. (Better to outgrow lyricism in the natural way. Mid-life crisis, which is nothing but the eruption of stifled lyrical impulses in creaky middle age, can cause real damage, and it is usually fairly ridiculous.) Only irresponsible types find the conditions of youth amusing. But, as Mr Kundera goes on to say, it is only when we can make out the "soft gleam of the comical" on the surface of every human ego (especially our own) that we can call ourselves mature.
Sadly, the piece is not available online, so hunt down the October 9, 2006 issue in any way you can.
* Translated from the French by Linda Asher.
The news from the Deutsche Oper Berlin will make everybody crazy for a while, but I hope that something can be learned from the episode. Two things, actually.
First: it's time for opera directors to stop fooling around with operas, to refrain from changing the period of their settings and adding gratuitous (silent) bits just to make some sort of "point." The only point that opera has is beautiful singing that is also psychologically true, and the visual aspects of the experience are distinctly subordinate to the auditory. Every now and then, there's a true spectacle, but for the most part operas speak vividly to the blind - as thousands of opera lovers who have never actually seen an opera can attest. Larding a production of Mozart's Idomeneo - which tells a story related to the Homeric epics - with the severed heads of major religious figures (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the opera's own deus, Poseidon) is simply flabbifying.
Second, and much more important: it's time for a time-out on Western-Muslim critiques. Notice that I do not say "Christian-Muslim," for this is very definitely a post-religious argument on one side. Or, better, an argument about whether there can be a post-religious discussion at all. There is indeed a clash of cultures going on, even if it's not quite the one that Samuel Huntington writes about.
What's at issue is the right of an individual to determine his or her own sexual life. The sooner we all come to see this, the quicker we'll get to where we need to be next. Muslims deny the right, as human beings have done for most of their existence. The Western recognition of the right remains provisional: many in the West - many in the United States - do not recognize it. We need to consolidate our side of the argument, coming to terms with Westerners who persist in patriarchy. Until the West works out a deal with patriarchalists, whether by granting them a geographical territory in which to practice their beliefs, or, as sometimes seems likely, by simply reverting to patriarchy itself, we have no business spreading "democracy," which, currently in the West, necessarily means equal rights in most secular matters for women.
A good place to start would be convincing Europe's Muslim leaders that members of their flocks have the right to reject Islam, while at the same time allowing behaviors, such as the wearing of head scarves, that are obviously more cultural than religious in nature. The hard but more essential place to start is finding jobs for all those North African kids.
Changing my mind on the adoption issue has unleashed a lot of strong sentiment. Giving up one one lie - refusing to regard the American way of adoption, between World War II and Roe v Wade, as anything but monstrous - seems to have set off at least one other sudden switch. It's about the acceptability of American football.
I can understand wanting to play a game, dimly. Whether my poor hand/eye coordination is innate or inane doesn't much matter. I used to like to play Monopoly, but now I'm afraid that it would bore me to death, and the "original edition" set that I bought a few years ago remains shrink-wrapped. I don't relate well to games. And exertion for its own sake puzzles me. My fondness for conversational ballroom dancing might be a pointer to the kind of physical activity that appeals to me. I like to dance, but not with someone I'm not talking to.
I can't understand sitting and watching other people play a game. I can fake it. I can talk about crowds projecting themselves upon the teams that they're rooting for. But what's the point? I still don't get it.
So: I don't have a favorite sport. I'm absolutely indifferent to sports. I'm neutral.
Except, I'm not. I'm not indifferent to football. All the grace of a completed forward pass cannot redeem what is essentially a brutal game that domesticates violence. It doesn't transcend violence, as, say, basketball does. Football simply harnesses it to the line of scrimmage, and sauve qui peut.
Having received two degrees from the University of Notre Dame, I know a thing or two about the sociology of football. In my undergraduate career, I went to no games after my freshman year. As a law student, however, I went to most of the home games, because it was a hoot to sit with classmates and carry on. I'd have been perfectly happy if the teams had been playing soccer.
Why weren't they? What does that say? How can we be complacent about what's going on in the field?
Discretion forbids my discussing the background of this unforeseen enlightenment, but I can say that it has upset the foundations of an important friendship. That's why I am writing this. This entry is not an argument against football. It is simply a form of notice. Your elation about a football victory is only going to excite my disgust.
Little did I know that yesterday's Times would prolong the quandary that I spoke of in the previous entry. The front-page story was entitled "In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power: Judges Without Legal Degrees or Oversight Rule in Arcane System Across State."
Does that sound, maybe, a little Iraqi to you? Let's not go into why it does. (If it doesn't, you're reading the wrong blog.) Let's just take a breath and sing "O Canada." Things are so much simpler there. There are so many fewer people, for one thing!
Why has no one written of the melodrama that yokes New York City, an international entrepôt that draws thousands of disaffected Americans-from-elsewhere to its bosom every year, to New York State, a red-meat outfit that, except for all of Ithaca and just the University of Syracuse, ought to be offloaded to Tasmania? Where are the witnesses to this atrocity? The non-New-York-City parts of New York State are just big enough to arm-wrestle the city to the ground. There ought to have been a "civil war" in New York, just to free the enslaved intellectuals.
The whole story about the baboon judges is great, but here is my favorite excerpt:
In an interview, Justice Pennington said the commission had treated him unfairly. But he may not have helped his case when he told the commission that "colored" was an acceptable description.
"I mean, to me," he testified, "colored doesn't preferably mean black. It could be an Indian, who's red. It could be Chinese, who's considered yellow."
There are probably lots of provincial Americans who think that "colored" is still a useful term. That's how we are. But we don't have to make them justices of the peace, capable of incarcerating strangers who don't gratify their expectations. And here is my question: if this is the state of things in New York State, why would we expect anything better in Guantánamo or Iraq? When on earth, people, are we going to clean up our own little mess? We're certainly not going to do any good abroad while "simple men, and their simple wisdom" are running the show in American localities.
Hearty thanks to Joan Didion, who has sat down with the record and concluded that Vice President Cheney's ideology, if he has one, could be summarized as effecting "the transfer of public wealth to the private sector." Those are my words, not Ms Didion's, and I published them last May. Once I'd reached that conclusion, I found that it made so much sense that I couldn't imagine any other. It is the only explanation that makes sense of White House policies.
Here are Ms Didion's words:
"Other priorities" suggests what the Vice President might have meant when he and the President talked about the "different kind of war," the war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight." As a member of the House during the cold war and then as secretary of defense during the Gulf War and then as CEO of Halliburton, the Vice President had seen up close the way in which a war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight" could facilitate the flow of assets from the government to the private sector and back to whoever in Washington greases the valves.
As Ms Didion notes, we won't need to send more troops to Iraq if we just contract out more of the war to private contractors. Ms Didion's essay, "Cheney: The Fatal Touch," covering sixteen books, appears in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. (5 October 2006)
A photo from Le Monde, 8 September. Our supine media gods would never let it run here. This man is a jerk.
At Sale Bête, I read that there's a march against Bush this morning, outside the UN. Édouard's going to be one of the marchers. "You can't just do nothing" is how I would translate his French - idiosyncratically, to be sure, because I can't imagine doing anything except sitting right here and writing. I'm still working out the personal consequences of Bush's second presidential victory. It forced me to recognize that there simply is no question about it: I'm living in a closet. I'm pretending to be as patriotic an American as anybody else. Well, I may like the idea of the United States, and think highly of the Constitution and so forth. But as for Americans - Gawd. Too many of them voted for the man.
As of right now, I am a member of United Professionals, an organization founded by Barbara Ehrenreich and others "to help white-collar workers, be they unemployed, uninsured, downsized, stressed out or merely anxious," according to Steven Greenhouse in the Times. I qualify as "merely anxious." The current dues are doable - ten cents a day, or $36.50 per year.
If and when the group achieves critical mass, Ms Ehrenreich sees it lobbying Congress just as AARP does, probably for universal health insurance and for requiring companies to provide severance when they lay off workers.
I don't think I know anybody who oughtn't to belong to this organization.
Well, Laura Bennett won. And Kayne Gillaspie got auf'd. Oh, the depths, the depths - that I know such things, because I just watched them with my very own eyes! Where's my Rolodex of excuses?
What? I threw it away? In the interest of better blogging?
I know that I'm a goner for the rest of this season, and I accept that. The question is, what happens when the next season starts? With luck, I will tune in dutifully (grrr!) - and realize that I just can't go through this again.
Project Runway is a brutal reality show, but the brutality is strictly professional. The designers have personalities, just like anybody, and they vent and carry on - or don't, like Michael Knight and Uli Herzner. But it doesn't matter: the grading is strictly on the fashion and its construction. Best line from last week's show: "Vincent, are you glueing?" Vincent Libretti got auf'd last week because of his really rather mistaken creation.
And what I mean by "brutal" is that the remaining five contestants thought they'd seen the end of him. Surprise! Vincent and Angela Keslar, the previous loser, were given second chances - with a twist. If they didn't win, they'd be out. Comebacks are always possible, but they're never probable, and I wasn't surprised when both designers fell into familiar traps - Angela was too strange, and Vincent just didn't plan very well. As Laura said, he's a genius in his own mind. You might think that he has Jeffrey's confidence, but what he really has is a bluster to compensate for it.
So - how demoralizing can it be: I got auf'd twice. That's something to tell the kiddies. The nephews and nieces.
But the experiment was far more demoralizing for the five who had survived the last round. The deflation was reflected on every face. Competitors love small fields. Anything can go wrong - so why have two ringers brought back from the dead who just might get something right? I couldn't have gone on. When Laura broke down, in her sharp, sort-of, way, I was totally with her. Why bother? Bringing Vincent and Angela back on the show was the most Sisyphean thing that has ever happened on television.
I am hoping that Laura will win. She's a tough broad, but I think that she combines a great design sense (that might work quite well outside of Project Runway's freakish time constraints) with an obvious command of the nuts and bolts, dollars and cents of fashion - as she showed last night, with the fewest fabric extras. I'm really wondering about the wisdom of this (now showing!) pregnancy, but, again, that's personal: it has nothing to do with her abilities as a designer. The failure of her Paris dress was striking, because what worked well on the bâteau mouche got sat on in cargo and looked tired in New York. (It was definitely a dress for an outdoor venue, not for the cave of Project Runway's studio.) But Laura's confidence has had a battering. Her dress for Jeffrey's mother ought to have fit a lot better. Tonight's dress couldn't have been a better fit. Good for her.
Given a good backer and a sane life/work environment, Michael will almost certainly be a successful designer, even if he's never a brand. As the judges said tonight, falling all over themselves, he knows how to dress a woman. That will never fail him. Uli knows how to dress a woman, too, but I worry that she's stuck on things she might have seen her mother wear twenty or thirty years ago. And Jeffrey doesn't like women. His winning dress for the last show was all about gift-wrap. It was a fun dress and I liked it. But it was a disguise, something that Edith Head might have dreamed up for someone with a poorly-proportioned body.
Although I never watch television - but never! (sob) - I do believe that the idea of fashion is central to the functioning of civilization. It gives the libido an opportunity to show up in polite society. A dress is not supposed to advertise what its wearer actually looks like without any clothes on; a dress is supposed to suggest how great she looks without any clothes on. Or, rather, how great she is. Plus (I can say "plus" in a piece about fashion, can't I?), human beings crave novelty, and the genius of fashion is to provide it inconsequentially, just for pleasure.
Next week: Heidi Klum in The Night Porter!
The Times Magazine this Sunday comes in two parts: a gruesome report of what Katrina has done to the children of the Gulf Coast, and a "New York Issue." The latter features excerpts from diaries that Susan Sontag kept between 1958 and 1967. The following comes from the last cited entry.
My image of myself since age 3 or 4 - the genius schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one side or the other.
Sartre (cf. "Les Mots") the only other person I know of who had this "certainty" of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.) A kind of suicide - with the "work of genius you know you'll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible.
Sartre was very ugly - and knew it. So he didn't have to develop "the schmuck" to pay off the others for being "the genius." Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn't have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself 'stupid' in personal relations. (For 'stupid,' also read 'blind.')
Although one might just as well say that Sartre, as a European, did not feel the demotic pull to ordinary-ness that always seems to have needled Sontag, the line about the posthumous life, about the most glorious tombstone, is brilliant, if also slightly mistaken. I should think that the "certainty" is more widespread than Sontag thought. It might not be a certainty of genius, exactly, and perhaps "certainty" is not the word that I need. But to live as though what one wrote were certain to survive - even though one can't be certain of any such thing - the resolution to live "as if" is the key to all intellectual life. And by "intellectual life" I simply mean participation in some of the strands of thought that have come down to us from the past and that will continue to worked wherever life is stable.
In an earlier entry, Sontag confesses to a "morbid" appreciation of beauty. This may have been the cause, or it may have been a side effect, of a brilliant sense of surface. Surface is all that we get to see, but what we think about when we look at something is often something that we can't see, such as the thing's function. This obliquity prevents us from seeing other possibilities - a good thing most of the time, because who needs the distraction? But in order to invent or to understand, we have to strip away our half-conscious associations and deal directly with the elements at hand. And to begin, we have to see them. Sontag had very gifted eyes, and she saw things with a poet's rigor. Her writing is accordingly astringent. It forces us to squint and frown until we see what she sees - or until we give up, in which case she makes us feel the chill of her contempt.
Sontag had the good luck to be an aggressively self-centered beauty at a certain moment in time, one in which it was not intellectually acceptable to be "pleasant." She quotes Simone de Beauvoir: "To smile at opponents and friends alike is to abase one's commitments to the status of mere opinions, and all intellectuals, whether of the Right or Left, to their common bourgeois condition." Ah, the contempt of the bourgeois for the bourgeois! It runs through Sontag's prose like a strong electrical current - to question it is to make fatal contact with it.
The entries show what one might have guessed, that Sontag was a great bluffer.
I write to define myself - an act of self-creation - part of process of becoming - in a dialogue with myself, with writes I admire living and dead, with ideal readers.
But of course! Why else go to the trouble of writing? But how insincere and dishonest it can seem to more workmanlike minds. In the intellectual life - as in no other walk - the only way to grasp something new is to pretend that you can grasp it.
The entries published in the Magazine have been selected to compose an informal essay "On Self." What distinguishes the intellectual from the scholar and scientist, and from the artist as well, is that the intellectual's self, his or her person and character, is part of the equation. To a greater or lesser degree, the intellectual's way of life speaks of his work. How she lives, what kind of parent he is: these must accord with the published thought. Intellectuals don't, as a class, find it any easier to live up to their ideals than other people do, but they are never allowed to forget this. The pressure for intellectuals to live proper lives is bifocal. in one sense, they see themselves as social vanguards, understanding their society better than other types of professional. Very much against this smugness is the shame of knowing that their lives, like that of the people to whom they feel superior, are unspeakably privileged vis-à-vis the lives of the world's poor and disenfranchised. In her diaries, we find Sontag engaged in an unremitting attempt, sometimes breezy, sometimes miserable, to bring her life up to snuff. She may have been the smartest girl in the room, but success at this central task was elusive.
Bob Staake's adorable cover for the current New Yorker, "Back to Cool," got me thinking about phrenology, the "science" of determining character from bumps on the skull. Given what was known about neuroscience in 1800, when Franz Josef Gall's protoscientific work took off - next to nothing was known about neuroscience in 1800 - I wondered about just how given protuberances (or the lack thereof) were associated with particular traits and skills. I haven't been able to find an answer, but I do know that actual brains were never examined. One of Gall's theories was that the skull takes it shape from the brain that it houses (an idea that strikes me for some reason as perfectly backwards). His empirical findings were necessarily limited to taking certain measurements and assessing the characters of his first subjects. The rest was extrapolation and generalization, not research.
And yet Gall and his followers were so convincing that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, some employers demanded phrenological examinations in the way that they might demand background checks today. How perfectly ridiculous - given what we know now. And that's my point. What we know now, besides knowing that phrenology is not useful for assessing character and fitness, and besides knowing about axons and ganglia and SSRIs, is that we have a lot still to learn about brains. We have a lot to learn, and it's going to be painstaking work, not least because of the ethical issues involved in studying living brains - which of course belong to living human beings.
Within the space of two centuries, homo sapiens has gone from being a vulnerable creature to becoming a potential destroyer of life on Earth. That's not nearly enough time for the species' brain to evolve adaptive neurological structures. We're still wired to take what we can get while we can get it and hope for the best. We're learning that this is no longer a viable way to plan for our children's future, but you don't stop multi-millennial thought patterns in two hundred years. Thinking about the folly of phrenology this morning, I wonder if something exactly inverse is happening to the claims that we're willing to make about the extent of our knowledge. While acknowledging our mushrooming capacity to do harm, we admit that there is much to be learned about doing good. And we'll learn it: we won't make it up, as Dr Gall made up phrenology. We won't respond to the unknown with fine-sounding speculative plausibilities and then applaud our cleverness.
If nothing else, phrenology has served cartoonists well since its heyday. Its division of the head into "organs," each of which is associated with a mental propensity, can be readily hijacked for lampooning the private preoccupations that animate current fads. Mr Staake's bluff but confident middle-schooler is as up-to-the-minute as he could be.
To read the Daily Blague lately, you might think me unaware of the trouble in Lebanon. Aside from a conviction that it's foolish to have opinions about such a volatile situation, I see right and wrong on both sides, and I decline to play Solomon until formally invited to do so. I paused, nevertheless, over an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's Times by Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a student of terrorism. In his work on terrorism during the last Israeli occupation of Lebanon, he writes in "Ground to a Halt," he discovered that, of thirty-eight suicide bombers whose backgrounds he was able to examine, only eight were "Islamic fundamentalists." Three were Christian.
What these suicide attackers — and their heirs today — shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force.
Hatred of foreign occupation seems to be a universal human trait that in modern times has been given voice by communications and weapons technology. It was always there, but the strong could always overmaster the weak - until recently. It is taking the powers that be one hell of a long time to readjust their expectations, and, it may be, all of today's powerful men (and women) will have to die off in order to free us of a stubborn mindset. Occupation of foreign territory is always wrong. And you would think that Israelis know this best of all, having established their state with a healthy dose of terrorism (so to speak). Unfortunately, their determination to re-occupy their land two millennia after exile was contested. It does not seem to me that, in the past thirty years at least, Israel has done much in the way of coming to terms with its neighbors. I believe that Arabs and other Islamic people must accept the Israel of 1948, because I believe that a special case can be made for a Jewish state, reversing a wrong that ultimately sent millions of Jews to gas chambers. I also believe that Israel must end its occupation of the Occupied Territory - Palestine. I derive both positions from what I think we have all learned, if we would pay attention, about the grim determination of a certain kind of human dignity.
And perhaps I should make it clear here that I believe that there is only one race of human beings.
And as for us, the US - but my views on our Iraqi misadventure and other ill-advised actions can easily be retrieved by means of the search engine in the sidebar.
I picked up Kenji Yoshino's Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights when it came out, but I was very slow to get round to reading it, and did so finally because Ms NOLA had read it and liked it very much. I knew I was going to like it - and that was just the trouble. I thought I knew the book's contents, on the basis of an article in the Times Magazine and an interview with Leonard Lopate. Don't scoff - all too often, writers spill all the good beans that way, and there's nothing to discover in their books. But Mr Yoshino hasn't fallen into that trap. The last part of Covering is devoted to a magnificent concept, a real tool for getting from here to there. I couldn't believe it: a critic who delivers a solution! But first, a word about covering.
Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream. In our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way. Nonetheless, being deemed mainstream is still often a necessity of social life. For this reason, every reader of this book has covered, whether consciously or not, and sometimes at significant personal cost.
That's how Covering begins, with a challenge to the reader to acknowledge the ubiquity and the inescapability of covering. Socialization requires it. We must learn to control our tempers in public - if we have them. We learn not to steal things that we want. Society requires a certain minimum of covering of each of us, and since we're taught to believe that we're better off for the habits that cover our antisocial urges so well that we hardly know they're there, we don't think of personal sacrifice. The covering that interests Mr Yoshino could be thought of as "optional" covering. Failing or refusing to cover won't land you in jail. If you're willing to forego the benefits that require covering, you're free to do so. But there is something vaguely theoretical about this freedom, because exercising it can be very lonely, and few people have the resources to live truly solitary lives. So we refrain from singing at our supper.
Everyone covers everywhere on earth, but the United States is a unique arena...
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The Times reported yesterday that radio station WNYC is about to vacate the premises in the Municipal Building that it has occupied since 1924, thus finalizing its separation from city government. In his story about the move, Glenn Collins quotes our own local Rambo, Curtis Sliwa, the populist host of a program at WABC.
"If you have a blue collar or no collar, and you listen to WNYC, you're going to turn the dial because you know they aren't talking to you; they speak the language of the suites, not the language of the streets."
Mr Sliwa's wordplay may be clever, but it's deeply wrong. The idea that all educated people share a certain political outlook is sheer nonsense, and I would venture that most of WNYC's listeners regard "the suites" with hostility even greater than Mr Sliwa's contempt. I don't know where else one might find local discussions in support of raising the minimum wage and in general improving the lot of Mr Sliwa's colored collars.
There ought to be a name for this maneuver - this dismissal of all educated conversation as "elitist," in the sense of being unconcerned about "the real world." It's the worst sort of demagoguery, not so much because it misidentifies college grads as the enemy of "ordinary" people but because it suggests that education itself is a sort of toxic transformative process. Get an education, it implies, and you'll be ruined for regular life. In fact, it is the lack of education that is toxic. To be an adult in our society without the resources that a college education opens up is to be hobbled by mental malnutrition. Trying to navigate the modern world without the intellectual training provided by higher education, intelligent people nonetheless fall for this or that conspiracy theory, this or that simplisticism. Such as Curtis Sliwa's notion that WNYC speaks "the language of the suites." What rubbish. WNYC speaks the language of "get an education!" Which, failing all else, the station's listeners can work on just by paying attention.
According to Glenn Collins' report, WNYC has not only the largest public-radio audience in the nation but also the largest share of Manhattan's radio listeners.
Tom Lutz's Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), embodies a new type of book - new to me, anyway - one that I'm tempted to call the "California Monograph." The first exemplar of this sort of writing that I came across was Leo Braudy's From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Knopf, 2003), which I read two years ago. I didn't write it up, because I didn't know quite what to make of it. Mr Braudy had lots and lots of interesting things to say about manliness, but I feared that I'd missed the message. Mr Lutz's book suggests that looking for messages in this kind of literature is superfluous, because messages are superfluous. The idea is to present the complexity of life while avoiding neat, reductive generalizations.
Doing Nothing is an engaging read, almost as stuffed with interesting details as From Chivalry to Terror. It is in one way a companion volume: where Mr Braudy looked at warfare as the defining masculine activity, Mr Lutz recognizes that idleness is the masculine daydream. (It's interesting to note that the two come together in the underworld of thugs, where extended idleness is punctuated by occasional improvisatory violence.) Doing Nothing delivers on its promise to trace the history of this daydream in America, and it does so by parading the various shapes and figures that have incarnated idleness over the past two centuries and more, beginning with the apparent philosophical difference between Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson. Franklin exhorted his readers to be busy and productive; Johnson published The Idler. Right from the start, however, Mr Lutz is eager to muddy the picture. Late in life, particularly during his long mission at Paris, Franklin was a sybarite, spending his days and nights enjoying the pleasure of conversations with pretty ladies. Johnson, meanwhile, labored to produce the Dictionary, a monumental effort that indeed produced a monument. Which one was the worker, which the drone? In each of the seven subsequent chapters, we're presented with the equally puzzling archetypes of indolence that were associated with the age: the loungers and Rip van Winkles of the early Republic, the communists and bohemians of the Civil-War era, the neurasthenics of the Gilded Age, the Flappers of the Twenties and the bums of the Depression, the Beats, the hippies, and, finally, today's slackers - many of whom, such as the Japanese hikikomori, seem to me to be in serious need of medical attention.
Relying wholly on documentary evidence, Doing Nothing is necessarily a review of narratives. Only occasionally does Mr Lutz dig for facts and figures; his concern is with changing attitudes toward work and leisure, and these are for the most part reflected in writings (and in other media later) of some sophistication. I was intrigued to meet Joseph Dennie...
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The New York State Court of Appeals has not disappointed me. In denying the right to same-sex marriage, it has shown itself to be the organ of a backwoods state that just happens to have Gotham pinned to its edge.
More important than the right to gay marriage (for the time being): throwing those hicks off our back. The State of New York is composed of New York City and its watershed. The rest is the State of Erie Canal, or somesuch.
Lose the creeps!
It's as though I'd been handed a telegram announcing that I'd won a prize. Not a prizey-type prize, such as an Oscar or the Nobel, but a recognition, an honorable mention. The "telegram" is John Gray's review, in The New York Review of Books, of three books by or about Isaiah Berlin.
I've been drawn to Berlin for a long time, but because I'm not a student of philosophy I've had a hard time putting his work in any kind of context. Which is to say, understanding him. I think that John Gray has just handed me a context, however, and I look forward to reexamining The Proper Study of Mankind and Against the Current, the two Berlin titles in my library.
Not too far into his review, Mr Gray appears to complain that Berlin was not more precise, more systematic.
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Chapters Four and Five of Cities and the Wealth of Nations deal with complementary phenomena - regions that farmworkers leave, and regions that farmworkers get kicked out of - and show how the health of cities predicts which phenomenon will occur.
In "Regions Workers Abandon," Jacobs visits several regions where life hasn't changed much, except with regard to population. She gets right to the point.
The difference between stagnant regions that lose populations and stagnant regions where people stay put is simply that people from places like Scranton, Wales, and the deserted parts of Ontario can have realistic hopes of doing better somewhere else and have the means to get there, while people in such stagnant places as Haiti, where most people stay put, lack a way of getting out or a place to go.
Ingeniously, Jacobs hits on a perverse way of proving her point. She focuses on Napizaro, a town in Mexico, that (at the time of writing, at least) looks as though its economy is improving because so many houses are in good shape, and the public infrastructure has been greatly improved. But the economy of Napizaro must be subsumed within the economy of North Hollywood, California, because that is where Napizaro's men go to work, usually in clothing factories. Their abandonment of Napizaro is qualified. They themselves have left, but their families remain behind. living on remittances.
Like the men of Napizaro, you will be asking why, given such industriousness, they could not do the same work...
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Yesterday was Flag Day, not that you'd know it in Manhattan, and so it's time to remind readers of Anne Lamott's call for a "green revolution" on Bastille Day, a month from now. It's very simple: wear something green and get out into the crowds. Greet anyone who appears to be doing the same thing. I'm going to hang out at the Metropolitan Museum that Friday afternoon. Up on the roof, if it's nice.
Pelosi Murtha
It's taking me a while for the Huff Post habit to gain traction, but I want to share something that I came across yesterday: Craig Crawford's call for Jack Murtha to replace Nancy Pelosi. What a great idea! Ms Pelosi has been worse than useless as House Minority Leader; a noted backroom dealster, she patterns her public utterances on the advice of her marketing people, and it stinks. Well, that's my impression. She is manifestly no leader. Having a man as outspoken as Rep Murtha might remind the Democratic Party's congressional delegation that it's supposed to have some backbone. If nothing else, Mr Murtha is an outspoken proponent of the notion that the best way to "support our troops" is to bring them home.
If you haven't been urged by another blogger to read Kevin Baker's essay, "Stabbed in the Back!: The past and future of a right-wing myth," in the June 2006 issue of Harper's, then let me do so. Sadly, it is not online - Harper's content rarely is - and I hesitate to say that the essay is worth the $6.95 newsstand price, so let me urge you to subscribe today. Harper's comes right after The New Yorker in importance for me; it is always thoughtful, and never ideological. It has a leftish lean (in today's skewed climate, anyway), but it does not have a leftish agenda (as, say, The Nation does, quite openly). The monthly Essay almost always tells me something that I didn't know, or puts together pieces that I've been fiddling with in vain.
Kevin Baker's essay is a deconstruction of the Siegfried legend. In Die Götterämmerung, the final opera in Wagner's Ring tetralogy, the hero, Siegfried, is stabbed in the back with a spear. His killer, Hagen, has learned from the deviously betrayed Brünnhilde, that Siegfried is invulnerable except at one spot on his back, where a fallen leaf prevented Fafner's gushing blood from soaking his skin. (See "Achilles Heel.") Hagen has also treacherously set Siegfried up so that he will appear to deserve to die. The truth comes out soon enough, and Hagen is swept away by the flooding Rhine at the end.
According to Mr Baker, demagogues on the right have made use of the Siegfried legend to explain national setbacks since the end of World War I. While noble and tragic in Wagner's opera, the legend takes on a distinctly kitschy feel when put to work in a democratic setting. The nation is seen as a strong and virtuous youth. It is beset by internal enemies who know its secret vulnerabilities. Thus the nation is strong and at the same time weak. It is heroic; it is also victimized. Betrayal is made possible by the possession of speical knowledge. That citizens should be willing to buy into such an image of the nation tells us something about contemporary democracy. One would think that the adolescent and none-too-bright hunk would be an inadequate symbol of a complex body politic, and it is, but it appeals to voters who see themselves participating in democracy not as old, wise, and deliberate, but rather as young, untested, and at least a little bit hotheaded. Add to that the Anglophone mistrust of intellectual brilliance, and you have the perfect environment for rabid conspiracy theories.
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled the tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to inscrease the number of internal enemies.
That's the start of Mr Baker's essay. He ends it on a quietly breathtaking note, citing an address in which George W Bush asserted that the Yalta Agreement was one of the greatest wrongs of history. This has been a claim of the right ever since the Iron Curtain went up after World War II: looking for a culprit, the right forgot its own intransigent opposition to foreign engagements (prior to Pearl Harbor) and blamed Roosevelt for handing Eastern Europe to Stalin on a platter. As an American myth, the "treason" at Yalta is a classic stab in the back (specifically, an ailing Roosevelt was stabbed by Alger Hiss, of all people). The funny thing about Mr Bush's address is that his audience was Latvian: he was in Riga at the time (May 2005).
The ultimate irony of Bush's perpetuating the ageless right-wing shibboleth is that for once it wasn't intended for home consumption. The Yalta myth has finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary America. Nor did Bush make any special attempt to let his countrymen know that he was apportioning them equal shame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest calamities of the twentieth century.
In so far as Latvia was wronged at Yalta, America itself loosed Hagen's spear. Leave it to our fine president...
That I liked one of the Domestic Adventure books that I mentioned last Tuesday much better than the other is not really of interest. I could try to explain why Stephen Clarke's A Year in the Merde tickled me, while John Grogan's Marley and Me: didn't (it did make me cry, though), but in essence I would just be talking about myself, not the books. Just.
What is "Domestic Adventure," you ask? The titles give some clues. Both tell stories that are purportedly encounters with something alien. In keeping with the promise of the Adventure genre, the adventurers present self-portraits that have been truncated to permit the peaceful co-existence of characteristics not often found in harmony in human nature. Sensitivity and "manliness," for example. (Each writer is politely but insistently heterosexual.) Both men are evidently mature and responsible adults, but they never miss a chance to let their inner adolescent make an appearance. The candor of true autobiography is deftly avoided, and neither guy is on the couch. Or, if he is, his feet are on the coffee table. That is at any rate what he wants you to believe. In fact, both men are professional writers, more clever and probably more complicated than their literary stand-ins.
In A Year in the Merde, the writer recounts his abbreviated year of ...
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The other night, a law school friend who followed the link from "Kathleen in the News," below, gave us a call. She lives with her daughter in the middle of nowhere, and has a daily round-trip commute of sixty miles. With gasoline approaching four dollars a gallon, she is beginning to feel a pinch.
In case you just tuned in, Kathleen and I live in New York City. We haven't owned a car in seven or eight years. ever since we decided that the country-house thing was not working for us. Every once in a while, Kathleen has a car service take her to work, as she does when she leaves the office after ten-thirty at night; but for the most part, she gets to work via public transportation. That's how I get around, too. The automobile, at least in its owned form, is not part of our life. Kathleen hates to drive, moreover, and I really oughtn't to, given the immobility of my neck. We're delighted, in other words, not to have a car.
Our friend's plight, while it reminded me of how lucky Kathleen and I are, because the majority of Americans share it to some degree or another. Assuming that the price of gas continues to rise, at what point will our friend have to find herself a place to live that's closer to her law firm's offices? And who will buy her house? I wonder who would be rash enough to buy her house even now?
The United States imports more than half of the oil that is consumed here, and the percentage will surely rise. The economies of China and India, meanwhile, are swelling their demand for oil. Our present course would appear to be set for a train wreck, even without the bad news previewed in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which opened yesterday in New York City and Los Angeles. The consequences of ignoring Mr Gore's slide show, of course, will be much worse than a train wreck, and I hope that its power inspires some creative discussion in our rather sclerotic public discourse.
In the third and fourth chapters of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs distinguishes between two kinds of non-urban regions. The first, which she calls the "city region," is the inevitable byproduct of economically vibrant cities. The second, "supply regions," do not replace imports and tend to export one or more staple commodities. Neither type of region can be economically self-sufficient.
To recapitulate Jacobs's second premise, vibrant city economies excel at import replacement and export creation. They replace imports with locally produced goods, and through innovation they develop new types of goods which they then export to other regions. Transactions between cities and their city regions, however, do not constitute imports or exports. Indeed, one of the ways in which cities replace imports is by drawing on city-region production.
City regions are areas of activity that is intimately dependent upon their center cities. They lie beyond the cities' suburbs. (Jacobs also refers to such regions as hinterlands.) Not all cities sprout city regions. Jacobs's list of cities that don't is interesting. It includes many capitals and administrative centers. "Rome," she writes, "has an amazingly small and feeble city region, considering the city's own size." This makes sense, however, because symbolic cities, such as capitals (and certainly Rome) don't require active economies at all. The inhabits work in the city's symbolic industry, which either grows slowly over time or doesn't grow at all. Churches and legislatures don't produce more and more of something; they just go on reproducing and exporting the same sorts of things in the same quantities. Their populations are stable. Not that a capital need be stable. London, Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam are just four examples of capitals that double as active economic centers, and they all have vast city regions.
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Ms NOLA writes:
Please read and share this important article. It hits the nail on the head. While New Orleans, like many major global cities, has severe racial and class issues and a not so hot track record with local government, those things didn't destroy the city. The Army Corps of Engineers is largely to blame and this cannot be stressed enough. Who funds them? Congress. Not Ray Nagin, not Kathleen Blanco. It's all too easy to think that what happened during Hurricane Katrina was an act of God or a local failure, indicative of national perspectives on the South.
I would add that, insofar as prosperous New Orleanians may have seen the Corps's failure to protect their city as a good thing (that is, as a racial cleanser), it was the Federal Government's responsibility to counter and defeat such views.
The death of Jane Jacobs prompted me to do something that I ought to have done at least upon the inauguration of the Bush Administration: to re-read Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life. Reading this book when it came out in 1984 was a moment of startling political clarification, for its challenge to traditional economics was instantly persuasive, and for the first time in my life I could conceive of a truly desirable civil arrangement. There is no doubt that I already shared Jacobs's preference for the small and open-ended to the large and controlled, as well as a dislike of large corporations. The latter is only implicit in Cities, but there is no way that its principles can be reconciled with the furtherance of business organizations that hire more than, say, 150 people. What Jacobs could only guess was the role that computers might play in making her dream of a world of city-states come true.
This will be the first of several pages on Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Some of them will discuss things that Jacobs actually writes, while other will tease out implications and obstacles. The book's last three chapters read like a springboard into...
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At the recent White House Correspondents Association Dinner, the inimitable (o were it so) Stephen Colbert roasted President Bush, who was sitting at the dais, in his trademark fashion. "Every night, on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut. I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument." With "friends" like Steve Colbert, the president doesn't need enemies.
Édouard, at Sale Bête, has posted a link to Thank You Stephen Colbert, a shrine to Mr Colbert's heroism. The site also offers links to video clips of the performance. It hasn't been much discussed in the MSM for obvious reasons: the target of Mr Colbert's sarcasm isn't the Bush Administration but the supine, compliant press.
Thanks to Turtletek, at Embracing Chaos, for being the first to tell me about the event.
Contrary to first impressions, this entry is not about Israel. Not really.
In The New York Times on 19 April, Tony Judt published an Op-Ed piece, "A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy," urging Americans - insiders and regular folk alike - to debate this country's policies regarding Israel, which, as a recent report in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt makes painfully clear, have been protected from discussion by an extremely powerful "Israel Lobby." Mr Judt writes,
But above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Ha'aretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.
Having fallen behind in my reading, I hadn't got to the report, and it's very likely that I wouldn't have read it without Mr Judt's prodding. It's not that I'm not interested, it's that I'm long since convinced that our Near East foreign policy has been hijacked by a group of Americans whose loyalty to the United States is clearly not undivided. Messrs Mearsheimer and Walt (at Chicago and the Kennedy School respectively) back up their argument with a lot of facts and figures, but this only makes the blatancy of the operation more depressing. They conclude with the argument that it is the Israel Lobby, and nobody much else, that's behind the push to take some sort of pre-emptive action against Iran.
Well, I'm not going to belabor this point. Whether or not there's a powerful Israel Lobby is not a matter of argument to me, and, as a New Yorker, I'm used to ritual kowtowing to Jewish sensibilities on the part of all civic leaders. What I do fear is that the excesses of Israel Lobby policies is going to breed some genuine anti-Semitism in this country. The LRB report - what a scandal that, whatever its merits, it hasn't been published here! - brings one to the point of wondering if certain Jews and their evangelical sympathizers aren't out to fulfill the libels of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This isn't what's really on my mind, though. What's on my mind is the fact, never quite stated by the report, that the Israel Lobby, like all lobbies, commands what power it exercises largely by means of campaign contributions. And where do these campaign moneys go? Dash me if more than half the money doesn't wind up on television spots (often produced by lobbyists who take a commission of the production costs, thus recouping part of their outlay). And television spots are only as important as the intelligence with which they are received by the public. In the course of my lifetime, I've watched television hone its powers of dumbing down even as it flatters. Flattery is arguably the most effective dumbing-down tool in existence.
So, don't flatter yourself. Don't suppose that you're clear-headed enough to resist the spuriosities of campaign ads. They're not aimed at your head. They're aimed much lower than that, especially at the insecurities that you don't like to acknowledge. They are wholly corrupt, and you can no more consume them without consequence than you can drink a shaker of martinis without getting drunk. To those who say, "But what can I do?" I reply, "Don't watch television." Yes - making campaign contributions, even writing letters and volunteering to canvass the wards sounds easier. But as a young man who was here the other night agreed with me, the longer you go without watching television, the harder it is to go back to. It becomes less tempting every day that you don't watch it, and inevitably you find other, more satisfying occupations. Television may be good for invalids, and for people of unusually low intelligence. Now you can flatter yourself.
(Tip: watching movies is a great substitute. Just stay away from anything pretending to be factual.)
Let's see how long it takes this bit of news to reform economics:
If one truth shines through, it is that people are not consistent or fully rational decision makers. Peter L Bossaerts, an economics professor at the California Institute of Technology, has found that brains assess risk and return separately, rather than making a single calculation of what economists call expected utility.
So reports Tyler Cowen in "Enter the Neuro-Economists: Why Do Investors Do What They Do?"* Predicating a world in which decision making is informed by rational self-interest is perhaps the greatest folly of academic economics. It may not differ much from the faith of pre-modern doctors in bleeding. As researchers are finding out, bleeding has its uses, but they're limited to a small class of wounds, more as healing accelerators than as actual fixes. "Rational self-interest" probably has just as limited a role in economic life. Perhaps in Adam Smith's day - The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 - the pace of life was slow enough and sufficiently free of abrupt change to allow genuine deliberation. In those patriarchal days, men wealthy enough to make economic decisions lived in a world that was fairly tailored to their way of thinking. That world has vanished into relative chaos.
*The New York Times, 20 April 2006, p C3.
You had to admit that Secretary Rumsfeld can take the heat.*
Asked whether he saw any validity in the criticisms of his critics, who have said he has been dismissive and contemptuous of advice, and said that he committed strategic failures in connection with the Iraq war, Mr. Rumsfeld said he would prefer to "let a little time walk over it."
"I would like to reflect on them a bit," he said.
In other words, "Next question?" This isn't a story of how blindly incompetent Mr Rumsfeld is. It's a story about how conditioned the press corps has become to the Bush Administration's bland stonewalling. It's as though Karl Rove had advised senior personnel that American brains now rely exclusively on Google searches, so that their attention can be diverted by bold evasion and non-sequitur.
* Christine Hauser in The New York Times, 18 April 2006.
If I'm not doing quite as well as yesterday, it's because I gave up waiting for my New Yorker to arrive and read Seymour Hersh's article, "The Iran Plans," on line. Mr Hersh, you will recall, was dead-on right about the consequences of Secretary Rumsfeld's dismissal of the Pentagon's carefully constructed invasion plans, the TPFDL. Once again, Mr Hersh has made me feel like a doomed member of the chorus in a Greek tragedy, impotently commenting on the hubris enacted by deluded and incompetent leaders. And, as always, the problem of Israel, which may indeed be the "tragic flaw" that brings down Western civilization. In any case, impeaching George W Bush is suddenly something that I am no longer undecided about.
Thanks to a link at Joe.My.God, I've heard what the Dixie Chicks sound like. Their new song, "Not Ready to Make Nice," may prove to be something of a rallying call.
14 July will fall on a Friday this year. Anne Lamott has called for a peaceful manifestation on that day, and it occurred to me the other day that a great Manhattan site for the show-up would be the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I can't help chuckling at the idea of masses of anti-Bush souls thronging the usually deserted Old Master galleries simply because there's nowhere else to stand, while museum officials rake in the admission fees and wonder what the hell is going on. I am going to make a point of being there, and I urge you to do the same. In the alternative, choose something closer to home. Just be sure to wear green and bring some bananas!
Saboteur (1942) has never figured among Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved movies, and there are good reasons for that. If I have a weak spot for it, though, there are several explanations. There's Bob Cummings, who was a brilliant TV star in the Fifties. Here, he reminds me of my late Uncle John. There's Priscilla Lane, with whom John's parents were photographed on a studio tour not long after Saboteur was made. Mostly, though, there's the preview of North By Northwest. Anybody who loves that movie ought to know Saboteur just to see the seeds that would flower in greatness. Like North By Northwest, Saboteur is even more obsessed by monuments and great public buildings than the ordinary Hitchcock film. It also involves international espionage. And it hinges on an innocent man's cross-country attempt to clear his name. The most striking difference between the two movies is that it's the bad guy who's hanging by his fingernails at the end.
Actually, Saboteur is a party tape. Who can make the most connections between the two films? It's not as though North By Northwest has the more prestigious monuments, either. Saboteur boasts the Hoover Dam, Radio City, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the smashingly iconic Statue of Liberty - a gift, it is noted, from the French.
The Cold War - it was cold. Who could work up a lot of hatred for James Mason's Vandamm? He was just a bad guy. The bad guys in Saboteur are far more toxic. They hate America. They despise it even as they want to rule it. Sound familiar? Here's the exchange between the Wrong Man (Barry Kane) and the Bad Guy (Otto Kruger) in the last of the film's discursive scenes. Even James Stewart couldn't have made it more patriotic.
Barry Kane: Why is it that you sneer every time you refer to this country? You've done pretty well here. I don't get it.
Charles Tobin: No, you wouldn't. You're one of the ardent believers. The good American. There are millions like you. People who plod along without asking questions. I hate to use the word "stupid," but it seems to be the only one that applies. The "great masses." The "moron millions." Well, there are a few of us who are unwilling to just troop along. A few of us who are clever enough to see that there's much more to be done than just live small, complacent lives. A few of us in America who desire a more profitable type of government. When you think about it, Mr Kane, the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours. They get things done.
Barry Kane: Yeah, they get things done. They bomb cities, sink ships, torture and murder so you and your friends can eat off of gold plate. It's a great philosophy.
Charles Tobin: I neither indent to be bombed nor sunk, Mr Kane. That's why I'm leaving now. And if things don't go right for you, if, uh, we should win, then I'll come back. Perhaps I can get what I want then. Power. Yes. I want that as much you want your comfort or your job or - that girl. We all have different tastes, as you can see. Only, I'm willing to back my tastes with the necessary force.
Barry Kane: You certainly make it sound smooth and easy. Well, that's a trick. I know the results of that power you believe in. It killed my friend and is killing thousands like him. That's what you're aiming at, but it doesn't bother you - I can see that. Because you really hate all people. Let me tell you something. The last four or five days, I've learned a lot. I've met guys like you, and I've met others. People that are helpful and eager to do the right thing. People that get a kick out of helping each other fight the bad guys. Love and hate. The world's choosing up sides. I know who I'm with. There are a lot of people on my side. Millions of us in every country. And we're not soft. We're plenty strong, And we'll fight standing up on our two feet and we'll win: remember that, Mr Tobin. We'll win no matter what you guys do. We'll win if takes from now until the cows come home.
Charles Tobin: Mr Kane, I think we've discussed the rights of man sufficiently.
There are days when I believe that William F Buckley should be dragged out à la lanterne while he's still alive, just to make clear the utter blackness of his sin against the republic of which he professes, quite without justice, to be so proud. He was never at any time very different from Charles Tobin, except in staying in situ, to oversee the plot that eventually made anybody who sounds like Barry Kane seem to be a radical leftist. Mr Buckley, father of modern conservatism, also hates the plodding millions. His message was always Charles Tobin's.
In any case, rent the movie. Put up with its starch. You will never forget the ending.
Be sure not to miss Malcolm Gladwell's summary of Charles Tilly's Why? in the current New Yorker. In "Here's Why," Mr Gladwell enumerates the four modes of explanation that Professor Tilly has distinguished. Each is as valuable in its own way as the others, and we make use of them according to the relationship that binds us (or not) to those to whom we're explaining something. First, there's convention, which is a form of dismissal. Second, there's story, which is just the opposite. Third, there's code; legal explanations are in code, which is why they're so frustrating to the parties involved in a lawsuit. Finally, there's expert analysis, which is pre-emptive and final, at least to the extent that the explainers are respected.
Corporations employ all four modes of explanation. Slogans quickly become conventions; warranties and "terms and conditions" are codes; instruction manuals appear to offer technical expertise. Corporate stories - ranging from advertisements to human resources - are not like normal stories, however, because everybody knows that they're not true. They can't be! How can an artificial person bind with a real one? How can an artificial person care about anything but itself? The only true story that corporations can tell is the one that they never do: "We're in this for the money."
Do the spokespersons who actually tell the stories on behalf of corporations expect to be believed? I don't think they really care. What a well-crafted corporate story does best is jamming the discourse. Creating an unanswerable position in the form of a story means that the time for explanations has passed, but without finality. When a corporation attributes an oil spill to a negligent ship's captain but insists that it is tightening its training and surveillance of ship's captains, that's that. Maybe it will follow through and maybe it won't. After enough oil spills, the time of explanation will be over in earnest, but meanwhile the corporation has bought time, time for the public's attention to drift on to something else.
It's the damage that corporate stories do to our language that bothers me.
Over the weekend, the Times published a report by Daniel Gross, "Invest Globally, Stagnate Locally." I urge everyone to read it. I wish I could propose something to do after reading it. A plan, perhaps, to bombard economists with demands that they think more creatively about avoiding the rendezvous with an iceberg of "democratic nationalism" that HSBC's chief economist in London, Stephen King, foresees. (And I suspect Mr King of seeing only the tip.)
Thanks to globalization and the opening of new markets, Mr. King said, "it's increasingly difficult to argue that companies themselves are attached to a country." He notes, for example, that Vodafone, the giant British telecommunications company, has more than 80 percent of its sales and employment outside of Britain. And as of 2002, Mr. King found, the 50 largest multinational companies had 55 percent of their employees and 59 percent of their sales outside of their home countries.
Let's say that Americans get fed up with being excluded from the benefits of capitalist prosperity at some point prior to the realization of Alan S Blinder's vision of a nation populated by investors and their servants. Let's say that "leaders" are forced to take protectionist measures against, oops, the countries that prop up the dollar. We cannot afford to take such protectionist measures, period, but that won't necessarily prevent their enaction. What if disgruntled French and German workers resolve to withdraw from the European Union? Nationalism is a deadly beast, fond of war. Human beings have not yet evolved to resist its appetite. Racial supremacists on both sides of the Atlantic keep the pilot light of hatred burning. Economic downturns threaten to take us right back to 1914, if not to something worse.
Has the air gone out of Western Civilization? Are we just coasting, comfortable for the moment but out of control? Every Monday morning, instead of a bleak office I confront this bleak prospect. I see a lot of good reporting - that's how I know that I've got something to worry about. Beyond that, however, I don't see much evidence of creative initiative. Much of the analysis that I see is spoiled by anger. Is this the inevitable consequence of a culture of "individualism"?
I myself am not angry. I've done the anger thing and gotten it out of my system. But I am unhappy. As Jeremy Denk noted a few weeks ago, the opposite of happiness is not sadness. The opposite of happiness is worry.
The March/April issue of Foreign Affairs is focused on Iraq; I found Joel Rayburn's "The Last Exit from Iraq" - about the British pull-out in 1932 - interesting and instructive. But it was an essay by Alan S Blinder, an economics professor at Princeton, that gave me pause. "Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution" seems to be an excellent analysis of the Internet's impact upon the world of work, but one from which the author fails to draw coherent conclusions. Or so it seems to this untutored mind.
Prof Blinder sketches the industrial revolutions of the past. The first turned farmhands into factory workers, while the second, after World War II, turned factory workers into office workers. The third revolution, if that's what it is, will turn office workers into people whose clients and employers may never see them, owing to thousands of miles of physical distance. Prof Blinder notes, for example, that radiologists are already feeling a competitive challenge from India. Having thought long and hard about this revolution, he sketches a prediction of the kinds of jobs that Americans ought to be training for.
But first, some figures.
Contrary to current thinking, Americans, and residents of other English-speaking countries, should be less concerned about the challenge from China, which comes largely in manufacturing, and more concerted about the challenge from India, which comes in services. India is learning to exploit its already strong comparative advantage in English, and that process will continue. The economists Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, and T N Srinivasan meant to reassure Americans when they wrote, "Adding 300 million to the pool of skilled worker in India will take some decades." They were probably right. But decades is precisely the time frame that people thinking about - and 300 million people is roughly twice the size of the US work force.
Prof Blinder astutely draws a distinction between personal and impersonal services. Your barber and your divorce lawyer provide personal services involving face-to-face contact. Your bank and your answering service provide impersonal services. You want a barber who's nearby, but you don't care where your answering service is. The providers of personal services, according to Prof Blinder, have relatively little to worry about. It's the impersonal service providers whose jobs will be offshored.
This makes sense. It's in his what-to-do phase that Prof Blinder breaks down. Of course he is adamantly opposed to any attempt to hinder or prevent offshoring. Such interventions won't work - and perhaps Prof Blinder is right about that as far as today's world goes. But how long would today's world continue into a future populated by investors and their personal service providers? Prof Blinder never asks this question, but all of his (admittedly tentative) explanations point to the question.
Am I being naive? Am I wrong to assume that we don't already live in this world?
Prof Blinder blithely posits ever-falling transportation costs. It seems clear to me that we are going to have some serious reckoning about fuel allocation - the more serious the longer the reckoning is put off. How much of our oil to we commit to power generation? How much to industrial production (plastics, &c)? And how much to transportation? I don't believe in a free-market answer to this question, just as I don't believe in a free-market solution to the problem of smoking. Some things must be decided by society, pre-empting individual choice.
I was no socialist in my early life, and the extreme forms of socialism attempted by Russia, China, and other countries was demonstrably a failure. But the perils of the free market are not so modest, either. When are we going to hear reasoned, non-partisan discussion of them?
When Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer two years ago, I shrugged. It was awful, but Corrie was a troublemaker. I don't like troublemakers. Don't try telling me that troublemaking is effective. Patriots on the right can wail that it was lack of support at home that cost us the Vietnam War, but this is nonsense. The war ended when it became clear that it could never be won. Now we're on a similar trajectory in Iraq, only, this time, opponents of the war are careful to honor soldiers, not revile them. To people in power, demonstrators are unarmed terrorists - and all the more contemptible for that.
I say this knowing that the struggle for equal civil rights for all Americans required a lot of troublemaking. Trying to figure out how to respect people who fight for a good cause with my bone-deep, profoundly bourgeois dislike of disorder keeps me busy.
I make an exception, very characteristic, for troublemakers who are very amusing, but I don't believe that there was anything amusing about the idealistic twenty-three year-old Washingtonian who suffered such a horrific death. Whether I'd change my mind about Rachel Corrie is pretty much a matter of how I felt about My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Like most people, I didn't even know that a production had been slotted, if not scheduled, until the day its cancellation was announced. It was dreadfully discomfiting news, because it seemed that unnamed "Jewish interests" were pushing for censorship. Perhaps the play ought to have opened somewhere else in the United States. When I was growing up, they used to say that there were more Jews in the Metropolitan Area than there were in Israel. Is that still true? I somehow think not. But anti-Semitic folks can expect to be made very uncomfortable in the Big Apple.
And, as Bernard-Henri Lévy asserted at the end of January, anti-Semitism = anti-Zionism. By a quick equation, Rachel Corrie = terrorist supporter. In "Why These Tickets Are Too Hot For New York," Philip Weiss's clear-eyed account of the very much ongoing Corrie affair, in the current (April 3) edition of The Nation, playwright Tony Kushner explains his own reluctance to step forward in to denounce the New York Theatre Workshop's self-censorship, attributing it to fatigue. In part, he has just been through a similar brouhaha about Munich, which he co-wrote. But the longer perspective is daunting.
There is a very, very highly organized attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel's policies, and it's a very unpleasant experience to be in the cross hairs. These aren't hayseed from Kansas screaming about gays burning in hell; they're newspaper columnists who are taken seriously. ... [They leave challengers] overwhelmed and in despair - you feel like you should just say nothing.
When Tony Kushner is too worn out by wingnuts to speak out, I conclude that my canary is about to give up the ghost, and that I'm in trouble.
Regardless of what I feel about Rachel Corrie, a play that memorializes her words - drawn from her diaries, the show professes her to be its playwright - should be mounted without hindrance. At a minimum, the NYTW's director, James Nicola, owes us a list of the names that brought pressure upon him not to open My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
Readers of Mr Weiss's story will discover that there is a constellation of New York theatre blogs. Oui bien sûr! The impatient can start reading Parabasis, Superfluities, and Playgoer right now.
Yesterday, I was exhausted. I could not really get up, and didn't make the bed until after dark. The dishwasher remained full of Monday night's dishes. I got dressed several hours after I cleaned up. I kept falling asleep over All Souls Day, the mighty Cees Nooteboom's novel, and it certainly wasn't the writer's fault. I re-read an unwittingly alarming piece in Foreign Affairs; I'll be sharing my thoughts about that presently. And then I watched Kinsey. I expected it to be distracting, and it was.
My first thought, after rewinding the disc to prove that, yes, that was Lynn Redgrave playing the "Final Interview Subject," was that I wish that everybody felt the way I do about other people's actual sex lives. I don't want to hear about them. That's my sex hang-up. If everybody shared it, then nobody would care much what other people did (and they'd know better not to entertain comparative guesswork), and, in that case, Kinsey's research would never have been necessary. Nobody would make anyone else's life a hell by proscribing certain acts. Aside from protecting everyone from any involuntary sexual encounters, society would simply not recognize sex. This would greatly improve flirting.
Sex for me becomes plumbing when I am not personally involved, and hearing about other people's plumbing alienates me from myself. We all work more or less the same, it's true, but unfortunately our nervous systems don't recognize this fact.
I suppose I'd better note that none of the foregoing means that I'm against sex education! On the contrary. Perhaps everybody ought to flip through the Kama Sutra and The Joy of Gay Sex. Nor am I against sex writing that's really well-written, where the artistry interposes a screen of discretion.
In any case, Kinsey made me squirm, because it was constantly running along the knife's edge of dissociating love from sex. Lots of people can keep the two distinct, but lots of people can't, and almost everyone around Kinsey seems to have discovered that the ability to do so can vanish in an instant, leaving dreadful hurt. The performances were as marvelous as everyone said when the movie came out, and the film was beautifully shot. But there was one expectation that Kinsey turned into a conclusion: I wouldn't want to watch it with anyone else in the room.
I share Maureen Dowd's indignation: if Harry Samit can provide evidence of the seventy memos that he sent to FBI superiors on the subject of Zacarias Moussaoui, then David Frasca and Michael Maltbie should be terminated at once. These gentlemen were the recipients of the memos, but declined to take action because to do so would be "troublesome" for the Bureau. Makes me feel safe and protected.
It's heartwarming, but not satisfying, to read further that, according to an "administration official," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "does not hold the same sway in meetings anymore," but is regarded "as an eccentric old uncle who is ignored." One imagines an entire cabinet of eccentric old uncles, all being ignored. What a can-do country we live in.
In the Business Section, there's a dark little story about the so-called Wright Amendment, enacted some thirty years ago to stunt the growth of Southwest Airlines. Moral: democracy works, eventually. But O that Lone Star State. The Texans are different.
In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich at least got some jobs. They were lousy, no-collar jobs that didn't quite support her. She lived on the margin of poverty and reported a lot of her co-workers' very serious headaches. The grit was bearable partly because of her humor, but also because you knew that the author was going to experience a happy ending - you were holding proof, in the form of a printed book, in your hand. This good feeling is absent from Ms Ehrenreich's account of trying to get a better, white-collar job, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, because she never gets a job to begin with. The only people she meets are sadly laid-off people and the hucksters who "teach" them how to find their way back to work. The futility noted in the subtitle suffuses the entire book. There is still plenty of mordant humor. But there is also plenty of despair.
It's not easy to break into a line of white-collar work without some serious educational channeling. Ms Ehrenreich, an investigative reporter, figures that she can find something in reporting's evil twin, publicity. She legally resumes her maiden name and cobbles together a plausible resume. She devises a schedule, which ends every afternoon with a trip to the gym,
as recommended by all coaches and advice-giving web sites. I would work out anyway, but it's nitce to have this ratified as a legitimate job-search activity. In fact, I find it expanding to fill the time available - from forty-five minutes to more than an hour a day. I may never find a job, but I will, in a few more weeks, be in a position to wrestle and job competitors to the ground. On the downside, I have no clue as to how to use the gym as a networking opportunity. With whom should I network? The obviously unemployed fellow who circles the indoor track for at least an hour a day? The anorexic gal whose inexplicable utterances on the Stairmaster are not, as I first hoped, attempts to communicate but an accompaniment to the songs on her iPod? No matter how many inviting smiles I cast around the place, my conversations never seem to get beyond "Do you mind if I work in?" and "Whoops, I guess that's your towel."
As this passage suggests, the business of looking for a job involves a lot of pretense - and very active pretense at that. I'm not talking about the bland politeness with which I navigate formal social settings. I'm talking about always appearing to upbeat and interested in other people. For a happy few, such behavior comes ...
Continue reading about Bait and Switch at Portico.
Carl Elliott's "The Drug Pushers," in the current Atlantic, reminds me how important it is to disassociate our health care from free market ideology. The idea that people consume medical goods and services in the same way that they buy cars is imbecile. It doesn't make sense to anyone who has suffered a chronic illness or a serious crisis. The detached attentiveness required to make intelligent free-market choices plays no part in the psychology of an ailing and probably panicking human being.
Dr Elliott writes about drug reps, the salesmen who tout their medicines to doctors. There is almost always one of these people in the waiting room of my internist's group practice. Sleek and organized, they're usually dragging a small suitcase on wheels, like business travelers. They're certainly not sick, and if they look a little bit tense or stressed, they do so without the worry that creases the faces of patients and their companions. I know that my doctor sees the reps, because when he starts me on something new, he accompanies the prescription with a generous supply of samples. He has even, on occasion, had small shopping bags for carrying all the boxes, which typically contain only a few pills. I have to hope that he has chosen these drugs without considering anything but my health, and no sample drug has ever hurt me. But I don't like seeing the reps in the office. They wear their business like a cologne, and I don't want to think about business when I'm not feeling well.
Everything is not, in a word, business. Trying to make a business - a big business - out of everything is degrading the world we live in.
Heaven knows I've benefited from pharmaceutical research. But I wonder if the enrichment of stockholders is the only imaginable incentive to guarantee that such research is undertaken. Why can't universities develop and test drugs, receiving healthy grants into the bargain? These can then be licensed to mere manufacturers, whose only product costs would be ingredients and purity assurance. Why wouldn't that work just as well, if not better, than the current system. Bear in mind that conditions suffered by the poor and disadvantaged are said to go begging for treatments.
In the current New York Review of Books (LIII, 5), constitutional scholar Richard Dworkin delivers a brief and wise judgment on the Danish Cartoons, while cautioning against the spread of laws that prohibit insult and ridicule. It was wise of British and American editors to refrain from republishing the cartoons, because of the peculiar history of the conflict (which was beautifully laid out in The New Yorker last week). Noting that the European Convention on Human Rights is moving toward a ban on the criminalization of Holocaust-denying and religious insult, Mr Dworkin writes,
If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept.
And, by the same token,
No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one's religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.
(NYRB LIII, 5 appears not yet to have been made available at the Review's site.Sorry!)
Today's scandal: federal aid and credit for virtual universities. According to Sam Dillon's story on the front page of today's Times, "Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid."
The provision is just one sign of how an industry that once had a dubious reputation has gained new influence, with well-connected friends in the government and many Congressional Republicans sympathetic to their entrepreneurial ethic.
I sure don't want to board a plane designed by an engineer who never had to show up for class.
After a weekend away from the Times, I was sickened by the tenor of the news in general and by this first-page story in particular:
One of Halliburton's most persistent critics, Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a written statement about the Army's decision, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus."
What made this so appalling was something that I'd read over the weekend, in an amazingly instructive debate about health-care systems that New Yorker writers Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell conducted at the Washington Monthly. A fan of the generous French system, Mr Gopnik observes that
Although I should add that we pay in France almost to the penny the same amount of tax that we paid in New York City, because by the time you add in the state tax and the city tax and the taxes we pay to build weapons we will never see and will never be used, it comes out to be very much a wash.
(Read the whole discussion here). How did the Land of the Free get taken over by guys who are so into death? The title of Bob Herbert's Op-Ed piece in today's Times is entitled "Ike Saw It Coming." Remember Ike's warning about "the military-industrial complex?"
Lord, how long.
First it was $12,000 garage renovations. Now it's outrageous email written by students with poor ideas of boundaries. Jonathan D Glater's "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me" had me spluttering this morning. The students who, having missed class, request notes. From the professor! The students who pre-submit their term papers for comments. Consider:
Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College in California, said she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message.
"One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.
I'd have thought that students raised in a house with indoor plumbing would have the sense to know what Professor Worley has to teach. The question may be whether students understand that they are the less powerful persons. As more and more families regard the university experience as a service that is purchased with the price of tuition, students will come to see themselves as customers, placing the burden of instruction squarely on the faculty. This is the ultimate trivialization of education, which can have no intrinsic value under such circumstances.
When I went to college, students proved themselves - or not. Nobody would have put it this way, but tuition bought the chance to fail. Where there's little or no chance of failure, degrees, including degrees from Harvard, don't mean a thing.
The cover story in this month's Atlantic is "How Do I Love Thee," by Lori Gottlieb. Here is the tag:
A growing number of Internet dating sites are relying on academic researchers to develop a new science of attraction. A firsthand report from the front lines of an unprecedented social experiment.
While interesting enough, Ms Gottlieb's piece strikes a somewhat underwhelming note after such an organ blast. "A growing number" turns out to be three. As for "academic researchers," I was more than a little dismayed to find Dr Helen Fisher, of Chemistry.com, has built her site's questionnaire on the familiar Myers-Briggs personality assessment test. Dr Fisher may be right to correlate each of the MBTI's four poles - Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling and Judgment/Perceiving - to a specific hormone or neurotransmitter, but so long as subjects are presented with the test's grossly ambiguous questions, the results are destined to be oracular rather than empirical.
By chance, the very next thing that I picked up was Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, a book that has languished in my pile for a disgraceful stretch of months. One of the very first things that Ms Ehrenreich has to do in the job hunt that forms the book's narrative spine is to take a Myers-Briggs text. This, she finds,
is marginally craftier than the [Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales], in that I am not asked simply to choose the attributes that fit me, but am given somewhat more roundabout questions, such as "Do you usually get along better with (A) imaginative people, or (B) realistic people?" Once again, the only sensible approach is a random one. Do I usually show my feelings freely or keep my feelings to myself? Hmm, depends on how socially acceptable those feelings might be. If it's a desire to inflict grievous bodily harm on some person currently in my presence - well, no. When I go somewhere for the day, would I rather plan what I will do and when, or "just go"? Again, it's somewhat different for a court appearance than for a trip to the mall. I race through the test with the mad determination of a monkey that's been given a typewriter and assigned to generate Shakespeare's oeuvre, hoping that some passably coherent individual emerges.
Having fiddled with the MBTI myself, I conclude that its predictive force will increase as the subject approaches language strictly as a utility. Such people are unlikely to be faced with Ms Ehrenreich's dilemmas; they'll see "going somewhere for the day" as a spot of vacation, and they'll have no trouble writing off "imaginative" people as unrealistic. For more nuanced individuals - writers especially, perhaps - the test is all good for only one thing: identifying abnormal constitutions. At the beginnin of her piece, Ms Gottlieb is told by Neil Clark Warren, MD, head of eHarmony.com, that his service has been unable to provide her with any matches because
You're too bright. You're too thoughtful. The biggest thing you've got to do when you're gifted like you are is to be patient.
Thanks, doc.
I don't mean to badmouth online dating services. I don't happen to know anybody who has actually found love, long-term or otherwise, through such a service, but then I don't get around much, and most of my friends are, well, like Ms Gottlieb. But Chemistry and eHarmony seem to operate on premises just as phoney as the hurdles in Ms Ehrenreich's fruitless search for a PR job. The point of tests like the MBTI is to weed out the oddballs. If corporations are less inclined than ever to leave this weeding to prospective employees themselves - Ms Ehrenreich notes that more and more large companies are running credit checks, which sounds like a great way to keep the unemployed unemployed - then the dating services probably aren't too far behind. eHarmony's Galen Buckwalter notes, "I don't think we'll be relying on self-report twenty years from now." What's that supposed to mean? In the end, a would-be suitor at Match.com is no different from a Human Resources staffer: both are in the market for a desirable commodity but hamstrung by incurious caution. Both appear to assume that there isn't enough time to get to know anyone the old-fashioned way.
What are we calling it? The Whittington Affair? Shotgungate? (Drop a 't' and a 'g' there, and you have the kind of regime Dick Cheney wishes he were running.) Whatever we call it, I hope that we all learn its lesson, which is that the Bush Administration regards public opinion with an indifference that masks fear and contempt. There was no good reason for Mr Cheney not to step forward with a prompt, sportsmanlike statement. Instead of which he's huddling in an eye of Utter Irresponsibility. Poor old Whittington stepped into the line of fire; the Armstrong lobby decided how and when to break the news. God only knows what Mr Cheney meant when he told Mr Whittington that he "stood ready to assist." "Don't let that asshole near me" would have been an apt reply. But the Vice President, however characteristically clumsy and maladroit, did nothing wrong. Accidents happen.
So, what held the Vice President back? I would say that it was an adherence to the CEO playbook that, so far as I can tell, is the only explanation of the Administration's behavior overall. CEOs fear public opinion because it can be surprisingly powerful. They have contempt for it because it is so often unintelligent and misinformed - no thanks to CEOs and their flaks. These uncomfortable responses are powdered by an indifference that almost but not quite sincerely wonders why a "personal" matter is of any interest to strangers. I am convinced that the Vice President believes that what happened at the Armstrong Ranch on Saturday concerns no one but the people who were present and (possibly) their families. The accidental shooting - O! how I'd like to believe that the trigger was pulled nefariously! (but I can't) - in no way amounts to an affair of state. The normal thing to do, if you're following the CEO playbook, is to wait to see how bad the damage is before going public. If the damage is slight, then there's no story and no problem.
Who knew how serious Mr Whittington's injuries were? The important thing, from the playbook point of view, was not to fly off the handle with lamentations and regrets. I can almost hear Mr Cheney patting himself on the back for "holding it in" while waiting for the doctors' report. Right. Sadly, Mr Cheney is not a CEO. He is employed by the most public company of them all, the government of the United States of America, and he was elected to that position by voters who are not to be confused with shareholders. Shareholders might be as interested in keeping mum about the shooting as Mr Cheney; who knows what such news might to do the share price. But American electors are not investors. They see themselves as the investment.
At last we have a scandal that parallels the Clinton debacle. The original sin was not so bad, and it would have been forgiven if the sinner had 'fessed up. But the sinner in question didn't and doesn't want to do that. Mr Clinton denied that he'd had sex with Monica Lewinsky because he was misguided by pollsters. That was not an impeachable offense, but it was a serious presidential failing (lying about the relationship was more serious still). Mr Cheney didn't lie about anything, but there seems to be a strong feeling that his letting a day go by before confronting the story in public was inappropriate at best.
I'm not calling for impeachment - please! I'm simply pointing out that Mr Cheney's behavior after the accident is identical in spirit to that of corporate desperadoes from Ken Lay to Martha Stewart. Treat the public like the fool that it usually is, and hope for the best!
In the not-too-distant future, Brokeback Mountain is going to be released on DVD, and it will probably win some Oscars, too. There will be a lot of talk about why this movie is such a big deal. As Daniel Mendelsohn points out in his essay on the reception of Brokeback Mountain (NYRB, LIII.3), much of this talk will be anxiously wrong-headed. The next time you catch someone in the act of assuring others that Brokeback Mountain tells the story of two lovers who just happen to be men, cough discreetly. Brokeback Mountain tells the story of two lovers who have been brought up to hate their love and to hate themselves for loving as they do. It is a story of the closet: of denial and repression and strangled family life. It's not the love-story part of Brokeback Mountain that makes for great film, but the long aftermath of furtive coupling and feigned romance. Mr Mendelsohn concludes:
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual - that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people" - you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
In short, the "universal love story" approach simply doesn't hold up. Maybe it's useful as a permission for otherwise homo-averse people to see the movie. Certainly the film has done almost everything to shield tender sensibilities from direct contact with actual true love between two men, and perhaps we're still at the stage where it would have been foolhardy rather than courageous to cast openly gay actors. Having seen the movie, however, viewers ought to find the "beautiful love story" thumbnail empty and unfeeling.
This brings The Family Stone to mind. I've seen it again, and liked it even more - and decided for certain that the dinner-table scene will prove to be an important one for people to talk about. As Kathleen said afterward, of course Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) is right to say that no parent would wish a child to shoulder the burdens imposed on homosexuality in today's society (lightened though these may have been). But she is an ass not to recognize that the Stone family has created a world in which those burdens simply don't exist. It is not hard to imagine that sensitive parents would bend over backward to accommodate the needs of a deaf child, but it's not necessary to ask why it is that Sybil and Kelly Stone have flushed away any and every trace of reproach or disregard for the sexual preference of their son, Thad (Ty Giordano). (Kathleen didn't even recognize that Thad and Patrick (Brian White) were lovers until well into the action.) All we need to know - and what we take away from the dinner table - is that we're striving for a world in which Meredith's position really is nonsensical. A world in which Ennis Del Mar would grow up unashamed to love another boy. The more indignantly the high priests point to their sacred texts in support of their anathemas and abominations, the more clearly we see that their world makes no sense.
Sunday was a big day for "culture." There was MET Orchestra concert in the afternoon, and in the evening a discussion, at the 92nd Street Y, of Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo, conducted by the author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.
The place was packed - not a seat to be had (although the one to my left remained vacant). Mr Gopnik announced at the beginning that the discussion would also touch on M Lévy's thoughts about the implications of the Hamas victory in Palestine. At this moment, I sensed a presumption that everyone in the hall was Jewish. M Lévy (hereinafter "BHL") would shortly pronounce the 92nd Street Y "the beating heart of liberal Judaism in New York," or words to that effect. This was not your ordinary book talk.
In France, they still have overt intellectuals, and BHL is certainly one of them. Mr Gopnik would probably not put himself forward as an intellectual, but that's clearly what he is. What is an intellectual? Like a prophet, the intellectual critiques the morality of the moment, both as a standard and in its breach. But the intellectual eschews the prophet's stripped-down message; he would not agree that complication is necessarily bad.
It is a habit of American intellectuals to hedge their judgments with enough qualification to convince the ordinary man that they are incapable of making decisions. This is not a failing of postwar French intellectuals, most of whom have always been ready to interrupt their mandarin analyses unequivocal denunciations. BHL has concluded that the way to deal with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority is to refuse to deal with it, because while it is democratically empowered, it espouses an unacceptable program of anti-Zionism. Working up to this conclusion, he enumerated historical stages of ant-Semitism, noting a consistent displacement in their rationales. The latest brand of anti-Semitism, in BHL's view, is anti-Zionism. A century ago, Jews were hated ostensibly because they were an international group incapable of local allegiance. They didn't have a country. Now, according to BHL, Jews are hated ostensibly because they do have a country. What never changes is hatred of the Jews. Which is pre-eminently hatred of The Other, a premise that led to a neat discussion of the philosophy of Emanuel Lévinas.
But American Vertigo was not slighted. The discussion explored the difference between French and American conceptions of nationality, with America's seen as flexible and pluralistic; our country is currently inhabited by a hyphenated population. BHL was delighted to discover that the model for assimilation professed by the Arab-Americans of Dearborn, Michigan, is none other than the Jewish American. He also dismissed the idea of an "imperial United States." No - as he sees it, we're more like Carthage than Rome. A sobering comparison!
Mr Gopnik and M Lévy spoke very highly of one another; sincerely, I thought. Mr Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, a collection of "Letters from Paris" to The New Yorker, is to some extent a counterpoint to American Vertigo - although, unlike Vertigo, it appeared in book form in its writer's native language first. It will be interesting to compare the two volumes. Friendly and like-minded as they appeared to be, however, I saw not two Jews but a New Yorker and a Parisian on the stage of the Kaufmann Concert Hall. Two ways of being intellectual; two different cosmopolitan accents.
*
This afternoon, Kathleen and I will be flying to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Kathleen will attend a conference, after which we'll retire to a seaside resort for a few days; we're to return on the eighth. I'll be taking the laptop that I haven't used in six months, but attaining connectivity may prove to be too much of a hassle for my somewhat low spirits. Having worked at my French for two years, I'm not a little miffed about traveling to a Spanish-speaking destination, but then I think I may have lost the taste for travel altogether. I have not set foot off the Island of Manhattan in over a year - since returning from Istanbul. (That can't be right, but neither can I remember anything to the contrary.) You'll probably attribute the touch of depression to that fact alone! But my Manhattan-bound year has also witnessed the greatest transformation in my life: discovering a vocation. Compared with writing here among my books, CDs, DVDs, and other scraps of information (beautiful and otherwise), anything that takes me away from it for more than a few hours feels worse than trivial.
Yesterday morning, I dragged myself out of bed only to pitch headlong into the slough of despond. Reading the Times only made things worse. It occurred to me to issue an SOS: can anybody out there buck me up? Gradually at first but then quite quickly, the malaise evaporated.
When I wake up, I think of all the things that I have planned for the day. Normally, they amount to something to look forward to, but on days like today they're empty burdens, chores to be performed for no good reason. Except for that best of all reasons: don't make things even worse.
What's causing this spontaneous negativity? A dread that I have to talk myself out of every day - a dread that the United States is in a rudderless little boat heading straight for Niagara Falls. Does it matter which particular rocks destroy the ship and its passengers? An oil shock? A debt shock? The evisceration of the Republic's vitals by theocrats? The rudderless little boat is, of course, the Administration. We're still too far from the precipice for outright panic. But the anxiety is wearing.
We liberals stand by uselessly while our countrymen swallow the line from Washington. Here's a sterling example of how stupefying that line is, taken from a Times editorial about the White House's refusal, so far, to do anything about New Orleans.
But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a plan.)
How does the man get away with it? Thomas Frank sheds some light on the problem in the current Harper's (February 2006). Mr Frank has been trying to understand how Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America has held onto its Best-Seller listing. After all, as Mr Frank is able to show, there is nothing, quite literally nothing, in Mr Goldberg's book that could not be cobbled together from popular conservative Web sites. How can it be that so many book-buyers lack the critical acumen to see that Mr Goldberg brings nothing new to the discussion? (And that they are really - unless they wish to support Mr Goldberg - wasting their money?) Mr Frank eventually hit upon an explanation.
Like so much of today's right-win thought, 100 People owes its success to the remaking of American consciousness by television. The book's episodic structure, for example, reflects TV's amnesiac style: Each little hit-piece flickers by, the previous installment's outrage instantly forgotten, the staggering, mind-stopping contradictions between them (were Goldberg somehow to critique himself, he would no doubt call them "hypocrisies") flowing without narrative consequence.
Mr Frank does not leave it at that, but goes on to suggest why television has such mindless impact.
A convenient rhetorical benefit of this emphasis on electronic speech is that it solves the difficult problem of real-world power - by which I mean a problem that is difficult for conservative populists who like to depict themselves as society's victims. If offensive speech is the raw material of politics, then things like ownership or wealth distribution are not worthy of consideration. Nor can the threat posed by liberals be minimized or made to seem less dire by pointing out those liberals' inability to win elections: as long as liberals exist, getting their ten seconds on TV or posting their liberalisms on the Internet, the danger to America is clear and present.
Just as speech trumps deeds, so do individuals trump larger social forces. In the world of the right, as in the world of TV, personalities rule. Character is king. "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher said; there are only individuals.
And so Bernard Goldberg scolds Kenneth Lay of Enron but has nothing to say about the moldy climate that has spread through the nation's executive suites as the sun of federal regulation has been dimmed. I want to take Mr Frank's point one half-step further, if only because I've never thought of this before and am feeling somewhat eureka-ish: television can't handle institutions. It can only reduce them to individual representatives or spokesmen. Institutions, insofar as they are more than rude collections of individuals, are necessarily abstractions. They're very real abstractions: they own property and file lawsuits about it all the time. But when television inquires into a bit of litigation, it can't see the abstraction that is, say, the General Motors Corporation. It can only see lawyers and executives - individuals all. You, meanwhile, following the camera and trying to understand what it's showing you - you will find it very hard to keep the abstraction in your mind, no matter how bright and sophisticated you might be. The only way to judge television footage critically - to discover, that is, what is being ignored or withheld - is to have seen it before.
The invisibility of abstract institutions, from the "Federal Government" on down, is dandy for conservative pundits, because if we could see institutions on television we'd be asking a lot of questions about how, for example, so few people own so much of the country. Instead of which we see the occasional plutocrat, on his way to prison or not as the case may be. We don't see his wealth, however. We see a few of the things that it has bought, but we will never learn from television that most of the assets of the rich are highly liquid, and therefore much too boring to look at. (Television is also constitutionally incapable of registering quality, obvious to the naked eye, on the screen. That's what makes the home-shopping networks so successful. Visit a TV set if you doubt me.) And we will never see "the rich." So they don't exist - on television. There are only rich people, and someday, if you're lucky, you might be one of them. Although that's highly unlikely, given the collective power of "the rich" to keep you right where you are.
Torture:Others :: Watching Television:Self.
In general, I'm very pleased with the education that I received at the University of Notre Dame in the late Sixties. The version of the Great Books program that the faculty had devised suited me down to the ground, and in all my later reading, I have never felt that anything fundamental, at least in Western thought, was omitted. Upon reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, however, I can no longer claim such pleasant innocence. A book that had been in print for over fifteen years when I went to college, Totalitarianism is perhaps more important than ever, as the United States fumbles amidst reckless experiments and faces underestimated dangers in debt finance and fuel supply.
We are still too close to the twin dawns of the late eighteenth century - the industrial revolution and the inauguration of the nation-state - to understand how each effected the other. Nor, to follow the analogy to natural cycles, do we know where to put totalitarianism. (I'm inclined to regard it as an adolescent breakdown.) What we do know is that all three developments are related. It is possible that the nation-state might have eschewed totalitarianism, instead of steaming toward it, at least in Arendt's view, with deliberate speed, had there been none of the uprooting of the industrial revolution, filling the cities with superfluous people. I am only beginning to reassemble my grasp of modern European history from the rubble to which Arendt reduced it, but I do see that some sort of totalitarian episode was inevitable by the end of the old regime and the upsurge in scientific and technological expertise, both of which occurred in the late eighteenth century. Because I had not been properly grounded in modern European history, and also because I grew up in an exceptionalist America that has not suffered modern Europe's ongoing crisis of political legitimacy, I had a very hard time understanding Hannah Arendt until well into The Origins of Totalitarianism.
In the American view, the American and French revolutions put an end to monarchical tyranny and ushered in an era, perhaps more than just an era, of democracy. The proposition that democracy is a boon is one that Americans have a very hard time questioning, possibly because it means little more to them than the right to elect their own leaders. Democracy does indeed seem to be the least-bad political system, but its benefits are hardly unmixed with serious drawbacks. Local circumstances, however, worked to shroud these drawbacks in the United States. Take, for example, the very European problem of identifying the "demos" in the first place This was swept aside in the United States by degrading a slave class identifiable by skin color and facial features, compactly if erroneously recognized as a "race." Everyone who did not belong to this outcast group was included in the American demos. That's because the American "nation" (as distinct from the formal American state) consisted wholly of immigrants. Earlier-arriving classes invariably tried to lord it over late arrivals, but without long-term success. (It was perhaps vital for the persistence of racial bigotry that, from first settlement until quite recently, the American Southeast did not attract immigrants from outside the United States.) Regardless of personal prejudice, Irish-Americans are no better or worse than Italian-Americans, or Jewish-Americans, or any other kinds of American. Everybody is equally American. The struggle to extend this equality to the descendants of slaves persists, but it is under way.
From the moment of emancipation, however, the people of Europe had a hard time defining their nations - initially, races in the political and characterological sense, but soon enough racial in a voodoo biological sense - and the relation of those nations to states. France, the pre-eminent nation-state, declared that everybody living within French frontiers was...
Continue reading about The Origins of Totalitarianism at Portico.
Garry Wills's review of Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis is so favorable that I'm actually tempted to buy a presidential tome. The piece, "Jimmy Carter & the Culture of Death" (I'd have swapped the ampersand for a "vs"), appears in the New York Review of Books for February 9, 2006, and it is perhaps the strongest essay yet to contrast true religion with hateful religiosity. What few people knew at the time was that Jimmy Carter was awkward when he made religious statements because he didn't really believe that he ought to be making them, but felt badgered by the press. Mr Carter belongs to the Baptist World Alliance, an organization with which the more fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention has severed ties, the better, in Mr Wills's view, to promote its culture of death.
Mr Wills' deftly argues that the "pro-life," anti-abortion movement of the Religious Right maintains an anti-life agenda. When abortion is illegal, women desperate enough to get them not infrequently die, but that is only one part of a program that focuses on death. By refusing to limit the distribution of guns, this movement makes the United States a world hub of homicide; it is also among the top four sovereignties that inflict capital punishment. It insists on the United States' right to the first use of nuclear weapons; its myopic foreign policies reap a world-wide harvest of contempt for this country. Mr Wills winds up beautifully, with solid praise for the former president:
Carter is a patriot. He lists all the things that Americans have to be proud of. That is why he is so concerned that we are squandering our treasures, moral even more than economic. He has come to the defense of our national values, which he finds endangered. He proves that a devout Christian does not need to be a fundamentalist or fanatic, any more than a patriotic American has to be punitive, narrow, and self-righteous. He defends the separation of church and state because he sees with nuanced precision the interactions of faith, morality, politics and pragmatism. That is a combination that once was not rare, but is becoming more so. We need a voice from the not-so-distant past, and this quiet voice strikes just the right notes.
"Punitive, narrow and self-righteous" - a comprehensive description of patriarchs on the defense. I wish that Mr Wills had mentioned the word "patriarchy," but perhaps to do so would have raised an awkwardness. The "not-so-distant past" to which he hearkens was a settled patriarchy, with white men firmly in possession of all executive power,. Not only that, but their possession was not seriously questioned by most Americans. If you wanted a secure place in this patriarchy, you sucked up to it if you were a man and served it if you were a woman. Those who were drawn to alternatives could take their chances (in the big cities), but with no expectation of rescue in case of failure. Welfare wasn't wrong because it was expropriation - that just made it "unfair." What made it wrong was that it rescued folks who had opted out of the patriarchy. PS: It is understood, in a patriarchy, that those who haven't found a place within its structure have chosen not to, at least insofar as they haven't tried "hard enough."
Whether we are living through the patriarchy's last gasp, or whether natural and economic catastrophes will make the patriarchy look like the best chance for survival yet again, remains to be seen.
The current issue of The Atlantic contains the magazine's fourth annual State of the Union section. Arguably the most centrist periodical in the country, inclined these days to snort at the left while blandifying the right, The Atlantic publishes the occasional alarmist article (usually by William Langewiesche), but its editors seem determined not to get flustered about American life, and that in itself is a good thing, or at least a respite. In the kickoff essay, "The Values Racket," they make two very interesting points. First: the culture war
is between those who want a culture war - a vocal minority demanding political attention - and those who don't.
This is an idea that E J Dionne works out in his contribution, "Why the Culture War Is the Wrong War." The other point is well worth ponderation.
As Paul Starobin argues, the United States has become isolated by its values. Many of the cultural attributes that have made America attractive to outsiders - boisterous democracy, economic opportunity, respect for human rights - have proliferated abroad. Some have been tarnished at home. At the same time, many of the values that remain uniquely American do not endear us to most other societies. No other country is both as devout and as libertarian as America, and this unusual mixture has of late exacerbated mistrust of the United States.
Implicit here is the fact that there has been no real need for the United States to "export" its democracy; the citizens of other countries, admiring it from afar, have cleared the way for its welcome import. We're at our best when we're simply being our best and not worrying about the rest of the world. I would go so far as to say that the world would be a better place without official United States charity (always excepting Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, the latter of which reflected a cosmopolitan pragmatism rarely approximated in our aid schemes).
Good Morning again! It's a bright, cold Tuesday - perfect weather for "I told you so." Today's headline:
IRAQ REBUILDING BADLY HOBBLED, US REPORT FINDS
PROBLEMS FROM THE START
Understaffing, Infighting and Lack of Expertise Are Cited in Draft
by JAMES GLANZ
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.
Except, I didn't tell you so.
2 May 2003: Hurrah! The war in Iraq is over! Saddam Hussein hasn't been accounted for, and neither have his weapons of mass destruction, but military opposition to American troops has ceased. As our intervention in Afghanistan ought to have taught all thinking people, the American mission would come down to this: the war would be over when resistance to our invasion melted away. Installing a US-friendly person as the nominal head of local affairs (in the case of Afghanistan, 'local' means 'Kabul and environs,' no more), we would hale our troops home to a hero's welcome. The Administration could rest assured that no one except nigglers like me would fault it for having altogether failed to accomplish its trumpeted prewar objectives. Is it so hard to remember six-week-old headlines? (Link)
I truly had no idea what a disaster our Iraqi misadventure would be. I knew that it wouldn't succeed, but my conception of its failure was pretty limited.
Of course, it's not over yet.
"Problems from the start" will keep me chuckling all day. Oh! Almost forgot. The headline is from The New York Times.
The other night, I was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and coping with the tangents that shoot forth from Hannah Arendt's pages like guided missiles. I wonder if the New School offers a course in this book. I'd love to be guided through it by a seasoned professor. Quite aside from the main thrust of Arendt's thesis, there is much historical interest in this book that is about as old as I am. Arendt's contempt for the bourgeoisie, for example, strikes a quaint note. It's quaint precisely because I can remember the prevalence of such an attitude among "thinking" people, among whom bourgeois values and, more vehemently, bourgeois hypocrisy were invoked to explain everything that was wrong with the world.
I can no longer recall just what it was in Origins that triggered a sudden recognition: to wit, that, because the implicit template for journalism in American life is the sportswriter or -caster, reporters will always struggle to reduce current events to some sort of contest between two teams. They will also root for whichever team performs better (not necessarily the winning team). And for the simple reason that sports are value-free - teams have no 'content,' no non-game agenda - media rooting will always tend toward the amoral. Hence today's "liberal" media falls over itself presenting right wing elements in a positive light. Regardless of the programs that Republicans and Democrats stand for, the Republicans are obviously performing better in the "game of politics."
Whoa, you say. Just where did I get that bit about sportswriting as the template for American journalism? Hell knows. M le Neveu would call this another one of my "Egyptian beer" brainwaves. (I was right about that one, though.) But it is difficult to read political journalism without encountering the language of games.
Following a link from Joe-of-Joe.My.God's friend Aaron, I discovered a magnificent term of abuse at Steve Gilliard's The News Blog: "Vichy Dems." (Scroll to the bottom of the entry.) It's brilliant! In an ashen sort of way, of course, given that this is a mid-term election year.
Kathleen woke up with a sore throat, and decided to take a sick day. I seem to be doing the same, by association.
In case you've thrown away the weekend's Times Magazine without opening it, here are links to two unusually interesting pieces. The first is Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino's essay proposing a replacement of jurisprudence of equality with one rooted in liberty. Where the former seeks to redress the inequities of the patriarchal culture from which we are emerging (a movement that Islamists have resolved, for the time being, to resist), the latter simply refuses to recognize any patriarchal values. Mr Yoshino's primary concern, as his title indicates, is "The Pressure to Cover," where "covering" is the tendency of individuals in outsider groups (black, lesbian and so on) to minimize their deviations from mainstream behavior and appearance. Current jurisprudence encourages covering by refusing to uphold discrimination charges brought by employees for, say, having been fired for wearing a skullcap while in uniform.
When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the "angry straight white man" reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn't racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control - wearing cornrows, acting "feminine" or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depressions, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless anomie. I, too, am one of the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Why should legally protected groups have a right to self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?
I surprise these individuals when I agree.
The other piece, not intentionally related but oddly inverse, is about hikikomori, or the withdrawal of as many as a million Japanese teenagers and men from all social contact. Maggie Jones's "Shutting Themselves In" describes a disturbance that has taken root in Japanese culture, which presses young men to succeed while discouraging their parents from acknowledging failure. The "solution": to withdraw to one's bedroom. I was about three fourths of the way through the text when I realized that a friend of mine suffered from something very similar after a bad job experience (and, for all I know, he still does).
That was Leon Wieseltier's advice to a young man who asked how to begin a career in writing about the arts. The question was actually directed at Jed Perl, art critic at The New Republic (where Mr Wieseltier is literary editor), the evening's featured speaker, and Mr Perl had replied with sensible advice about persistence and finding one's own voice. But Mr Wieseltier thought it important to add an up-to-date caveat, which caused a ripple of laughter from the audience and a smile from me. I knew exactly what he meant. I may even know better than he does how important it is not to "settle" for writing any old thing for the Web if you seek to make writing your career. I would intend, of course, to be the exception to his rule, if I were not - like the parents in Radio Days - "already ruined."
I should note that Mr Wieseltier was moderating the event, which took place at the 92nd Street Y - the only real New York address that sounds taken from The Royal Tenenbaums.
Mr Perl's remarks, à propos of his latest book, New Art City, startled two thoughts into life. The first concerns the evaluation of art. How do you know that what you like is any good? Ultimately, you never do, and while we're on the topic, just who are "you"? If you like something now, and you think it's good, what about ten years from now, when you can see why you thought it was good, and might still even admire it, but, in the end, you somehow see through it? This is only one reason why, ultimately, you can't know whether what you like is any good.
But we try. Mr Perl remarked in passing that things change in an artist's life during the course of making a work of art. If we can extrapolate from the experience of novelists, who write about this phenomenon often enough, one of the things that surely happens during the process is an alteration, however slight, of the artist's means or goals. A true work of art teaches its maker something, and does so in the making, not just afterward, when the artist is merely another spectator. How can we tell? I think that we can detect the absence of an alteration, the lack of a lesson. Because the change in plans disturbs the work of art in a way that disturbs us.
This is hugely tentative. We're not always ready to be disturbed. Encounters with art are always enormously intimate, frighteningly chancy. The click is at least partly erotic. As we get older, however - and by this I mean no more than that we see more and ever more art, at however slow a pace - we build up experience as spectators. (If we start out in possession of such experience, then we ought to have been making art ourselves.)
In short: when a work of art strikes you as pat, as executed according to plan, then it's not any good, no matter how alluring, as art. In the old days, they used to call what I'm talking about "struggle," but we don't want to go back to those burly times.
The other idea that Mr Perl sparked is the observation that the people who complain most about "elitism" in the arts are either elite themselves or elite wannabes. Mr Perl did not say this. But he did say that he thinks that there's nothing elitist about having the opportunity to enjoy the rare treasures of, say, the Morgan Library. The wonder of democracy (by which I think Mr Perl means a society without recognized classes) is that such experiences are open to everybody, thanks to our great museums. It was his feeling that he had to defend this wonder from the charge of elitism that woke me up. I realized that one part of the anti-elitist camp is made up of slackers like George W Bush, born to the elite but too arrogant and too lazy in every way to do the homework that makes privilege bearable; while the other part is made of very smart people with no personal connections or advantages who are too bitter and too lazy to do the homework that usually propels hard workers into "the elite." (If there's a third constituency, let me know.) Each of these types is easy enough to spot, and if you want to be courageous you can always be bold about identifying them, to their faces if possible.
Talking about this as we walked down Lexington Avenue afterward, Ms NOLA and I agreed that Mr Perl was not quite right in claiming that the museums are open to all. They're not. Nor are such events as the discussion that we had just attended. Thinking of the young man's question about how to start out, I said that it was a shame that we leave the real education of artists to chance - and to a young person's ability to put up with gruesome privations. There ought to be programs, I said... and pretty soon I was spinning yet another Big Idea. This one is a master's program that (a) lodges candidates in safe and not grossly inconvenient housing while (b) supplying an open-sesame to all or most "cultural" events in New York City and (c) requiring periodic reports and a final thesis. Some of the candidates will be artists, some prospective journalists, and a few will simply be "old souls." C'mon, someone out there must know the odd millionaire.
You've heard me talk about the Democratic Party; you've heard me say that it gave up its strength to promote civil and economic equality. But does that make sense? Wouldn't the success of its efforts have strengthened the Democratic Party? What happened? How did the once-vibrant association of progressive Americans become a convention of zombies, sucking up political oxygen while betraying the nation to ideologues?
The other night, I was talking about this with M le Neveu when suddenly it occurred to me to say something about bad faith on the part of the Party. "What bad faith?" I was asked. I had to admit that, for the moment, I had no idea; it had just come to me, this thing about "bad faith." I was about to apologize to my nephew, and ask to adjourn the conversation until I knew my own mind better. But before I could do so, the bad faith of the Democratic Party was clear to me.
It wanted to be thanked.
It wanted the people who had benefited from its exertions never, ever to forget their debt of gratitude. It wanted those people to follow its lead, and it resented very much the fact that they did not and, for the most part, do not.
It wanted to be congratulated, fêted, patted on the back. It wanted to have plenty of opportunities to show off its false modesty.
I'm not really talking about "the Democratic Party." I'm talking about its supporters - individual men and women. I'm talking about any white person who has ever flared with resentment when treated with insufficient respect by a black person. I'm talking about any white person who pretends to wonder why young black men take to drugs and thuggery. I'm talking about anyone who can't feel the suffocating aftercloud of condescension that attends most bountiful gestures.
I am especially talking about anyone bright enough to feel guilty about wanting to be thanked.
The people who used to be good Democrats need to forget their achievements. Making the world a decent place is truly - and necessarily - a thankless task.
Despair.com was one of the great discoveries of 2004. I bought a set of Demotivator™ note cards and had a little frame made so that I could rotate the display - notwithstanding which I have never been motivated to replace "Motivation." (Tag line: "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.") This year, just in time for Christmas, I got a catalogue in the mail, just to remind me that Despair.com exists, I suppose. The catalogue was a lot of fun, and I jumped at the opportunity, promised last year, to buy The Art of Demotivation: A Visionary Guide for Transforming Your Company's Least Valuable Asset - Your Employees, by E L Kersten, PhD and head of Despair.com. The fact that The Art of Demotivation is bloodcurdlingly funny should distract no one from its profound usefulness as a hermeneutic of today's business world.
No, I still don't know what "hermeneutic" means. But it sounds good.
Dr Kersten will doubtless some day share with us the history of his enterprise, but I suspect that it began something like this: instead of throwing up at the sight of yet another vapid inspirational poster hanging on some toady accountant's wall - say, this one, "Teamwork," showing a circle of parachutists holding hands - Dr Kersten retired to a convenient drawing board, thereupon creating "Idiocy," and adding the great tag line, "Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Groups." A good laugh was had by all.
As this critique of the motivational industry progressed, however - and it does have it coming, after all - Dr Kersten had an even brighter idea. Instead of aiming his argument at sophisticates like you and me who see right through the psychobabble of motivational coaching, Dr Kersten pitched it to a constituency that suffers a great deal more than you or I do at the hands of motivational coaches, to wit, CEOs. CEOs are admonished from every public pulpit to treat their employees as their most valuable asset! They don't believe this for a second; they know it can't be true. But they have to go through the motions. They're obliged to bring in the consultants, who only make things worse. Dr Kersten wrote his book, therefore, with the crusading purpose of convincing CEOs that they can forget about motivators! Not just that, but that they ought to de-motivate their employees, so as to get more work out of them, and less fuss, too.
Much of what passes for motivation in the motivational industry is little more than egoistic, short-term enthusiasm, or warm feelings generated by the creative packaging of the "principles" of the human potential movement, which itself is little more than a curious amalgam of common sense, humanistic religion, sophistry, and psychological snake-oil.
Can't argue with that. But watch the insidious appeal unwind:
The primary objective of the motivational industry is to stoke the fires of your employee's narcissism so that they fall in love with themselves all over again, just like they did when they saw their own beauty in the distorted reflection of their mother's adoring gaze, prior to their exposure to any of the objective, real-world criteria that would define them otherwise. The insights peddled to your employees resolve around the ideas that they are uniquely equipped to do something special, that they have a proprietary configuration of underappreciated skills that they have yet to discover (or show any evidence of), that their weaknesses are really strengths, and that they are winners who have simply not had the chance to win.
The breath of contemptuous Mr Moneybags for the Little People is actually quite chilling, I think. Dr Kersten attributes the confusion of today's business environment to the Myth of the Noble Employee. As anyone who has ever hired a cleaning lady knows, employees are never noble. They never do their jobs the way you want them to, even when you take the time to point this out to them. Employees, in fact and in short, are per se unsatisfactory. That being the case, there is no need to mollycoddle them; they'll just take advantage of you. What you want is Demotivated™ employees, and Table I shows you how effective Demotivation™ can be.
| Demotivational Characteristics | Demotivational Benefit |
| Feeling of powerlessness | Employee is satisfied with less |
| Sense of victimization by fate | Feels desperate loyalty to company |
| Low self-esteem | Loses need for employee recognition |
| Acute defensiveness | Does extra work as a means of ingratiation |
| Acute self-doubt | Works hard as a means of salvaging identity |
| Lack of emotional resilience | Works hard to avoid humiliation |
| Intense risk-aversion | Is satisfied being an extension of executive ambition |
| Chronic pessimism | Has better judgment; less money |
| Pervasive surliness | Experiences accelerated acquiescence |
These characteristics and benefits are then spelled out, one by one, with horrific clarity. The section closes with the following reassurance:
It should be clear that embarking upon a program of Radical Demotivation™ does not require filling your company with unskilled slackers who require more oversight than they are worth. Instead, it is an unobtrusive process of persistently changing the way your employees see themselves, their role in the company, and their sense of entitlement. Moreover, this process leaves your employees' skills intact and may even enhance them in some cases. It should also be clear that the "negative" emotions that most employees will experience in the process are not just natural, they are also instrumental in reinforcing the veracity of the path you are leading your employees down. In that regard, they can be considered "positive" emotions. But the key benefit - above any organizational optimization and heightened self-knowledge of your employees - is financial. Radical Demotivation increases profitability by raising productivity and lowering costs. In so doing, it improves shareholder value and the incentive value of executive profit-sharing-plans. As an executive who has been where you are, I can confidently say "there is hope." You can not only have it all, you can spend a lot less to get it. Progress begins when you boldly start a covert program of Radical Demotivation™.
Ah, covert. The Art of Demotivation™ is written in such deadpan prose that if it were not for little hints such as this, we might actually begin to take Dr Kersten at his word. For the book really is a catalogue raisonné of the abuses of power with which a manager can keep his workers in line. That's what keeps it from being a one-joke product. If you are an employee, you will find this a very helpful book - notwithstanding the stern warning on page vii:
This book was written for executives. If you are not an executive, do not intend to become an executive, or have no hope of becoming an executive, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. Early feedback from focus groups comprised of typical business book readers have repeatedly evidenced that non-executives find its contents confusing, controversial, and on occasion, offensive.
The Warning is followed by "A Special Note About This Volume":
Given the controversial nature of this book and its aforementioned potential to confuse and offend the non-managerial class, it is imperative that the reader exercise extreme caution when reading this book in the workplace. To that end, this edition has been equipped with a secondary dust jacket, a cover for a fictional book called Ethics, Integrity, and Sacrifice in the Workplace.
I took this to be a joke, but I fingered the dust jacket and it felt a little thick. Sure enough, there's a second cover inside the first! As an employee, you can use this cover to fool your manager!
The Art of Demotivation comes in three editions. I bought the cheapest, the Manager Edition. The Executive Edition comes with a more impressive binding - it's a "a costlier edition of greater style and declarative power" - and it retails for $39.95. What I hope somebody got for Christmas is the Chairman Edition, which runs for $1,195.00. In addition to a lot of bookish folderol, it comes in its very own humidor, complete with hygrometer. C'mon, you're worth it!
On the Sunday before last, I promised that I would get round to Barry Gewen's essay, "State of the Art," which appeared in the Book Review for December 11. Mr Gewen mentions eight books in the course of his piece, but it is not a review so much as a consideration of the current state of art criticism. Art critics, after all, are the people who tell us about the art world, distinguishing, in the process, the good from the bad, the worthy from the meretricious. What most critics have not been distinguishing, for the past half century, however, is art from non-art. We have been living in an anything-goes art world, largely because critics have resisted the urge to reject, to exclude offerings from the rubric of art.
There are conservatives, of course; Hilton Kramer, founder and still editor of The New Criterion, is an unhesitating debunker of much of what passes for art these days. But as Mr Gewen points out, there are limits to what we can expect of a critic who proclaimed, in 1980, that Juan Miró was the greatest living artist. More typical of modern criticism is the moonlighting philosopher, Arthur C Danto, of The Nation. Mr Danto finds room for almost anything in his big tent, and he writes (as I know from reading him) with an almost amused pleasure about his encounters. His actual philosophy of art is rather more difficult to grasp, which is perhaps as it should be. The question that I came away from Mr Gewen's overview was this: why have theories in the first place?
Continue reading about Art and Criticism at Portico.
President Bush has admitted that he systematically instructed subordinates to violate the law, to wit, 50 USC 1802. He feels that this violation was justifiable, but that's an argument that he would have to make in court - in Congress, at impeachment proceedings. Mr Bush would, of course, prefer to be tried in the court of public opinion, and we'll soon see if that's going to happen. Right now, those of us who dislike and mistrust Mr Bush and his administration are asking ourselves whether trying to stir up a racket would be a good thing.
That's what it feels like to me, anyway. If I can't work up much enthusiasm, it's because the violations - pointless, it seems; the wiretaps could have been imposed lawfully - seem so slight and technical when placed alongside the administration's War on Truth. For the sake of my sense and sanity, I pay the White House as little attention as possible, because it is nothing but a compost heap of disinformation and pep talk. When the president's voice comes over the radio, I rush to mute the sound: his is a voice that makes me want to stand on the rooftop and bellow.
Already I have thought about this matter for longer than is good for me. I begin to see that the fabric of American government has been rent to tatters, and that the executives of large corporations, in the blind pursuit of self-enrichment, will eventually push our economy into the abyss. Language has been so adulterated by fools and scoundrels on the right that the discourse without which a democracy cannot sustain itself will never be resumed.
And I begin to have dark, adolescent revenge fantasies. No, it's not good at all. I must not think about impeaching the president.
I do harbor hope of seeing the man in the dock at the Hague some day. That would be suitable.
On Friday, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain came to the nabes, so I ran around the corner to see the first showing. I wanted to get the experience of seeing the movie for the first time behind me as quickly as possible. As it happens, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have adapted E Annie Proulx's story of the same name so faithfully that, if you know what Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal look like on screen, then the movie does little more than fill in the color - so far as seeing it the first time goes.
When I saw how faithful Brokeback Mountain is to "Brokeback Mountain," I stopped paying attention to what was going to happen next, and a second story emerged. ...
Continue reading about Brokeback Mountain at Portico.
Let's try to do this without tiring me out; just dragging the stack of magazines to the computer was wearying.
¶ Granta 91: Wish You Were Here. How long has Simon Gray been scribbling memoirs on the Barbadian strand? This installment is eventually about Mr Gray's friend and colleague, the late Alan Bates; it takes seventeen entries for the piece to reach its subject. Happily, Simon Gray is an adorable procrastinator. Also absorbing was Simon Garfield's memoir of stamp collecting, "The Error World." Not that I've read much, but this is an excellent essay on the pleasures and pitfalls of philately, which all boys ought to be made to take up between the ages of eight and eleven. Stamp collecting is the royal road to mastering geography, and a subtle witness to modern history as well. Mr Garfield, his interest reawakened in middle-ages, teeters on the edge of an obsession with Errors - misprinted stamps - that, now that he can actually pay for them, might ruin him. As long as I'm on this issue, I have to point out Geoff Dyer's short and shocking "White Sands." The shock comes early and resonates right up until the end.
¶ The Atlantic, December 2005. James Fallows has the cover story, "Why Iraq Has No Army." Since I don't want to know any more about the mess over there than I do, or in any greater detail, I skipped what was probably a lucid analysis. Like most Americans right now, I wouldn't know what to do with a lucid analysis. (I'll have more to say about this a little further along the list.) What I did read was Paul Bloom's "Is God an Accident?" Studies of infant and juvenile behavior suggest that we come into the world hard-wired to believe in the supernatural and in a creator. Adults just tone this down and rationalize it - and of course they exploit it for purposes that would never occur to a child. Apparently, we learn about the material world - the one in which rocks fall and things stay where they are until someone moves them - much earlier than we learn about the "social" world's rules.
For those of us who are not autistic, the separateness of these two mechanisms, one for the understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires. The biggest consequence has to do with the way we think of ourselves and others. We are dualists; it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity - a mind or soul - are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them.
According to Mr Bloom, science and religion will always clash, because science makes no room for the duality that most of us (but not all) feel so intimately that we don't notice it. Science says, "that doesn't exist," and we feel robbed. The first lesson of science, of course, is that you don't go by your feelings; they're to be mistrusted at every turn. For lots of people, this is no way to live; it's not nice at all.
¶ In The Nation for December 26, 2005, Sasha Abramsky
recounts the charming life story of Charles Graner, the ex-Marine prison guard
who, recalled to Iraq, organized the Abu Ghraib follies. Nothing that he did
surprises anyone back home in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. Tara McKelvey writes
about the think-tankers and scholars who have developed the Bush
Administration's justifications of torture. Barry Schwabsky's
long and knowing review of Art Since 1900 will have to wait until I sink
my teeth into Barry Gewen's essay, "State of the Art," one of these days when
I'm not feeling poorly. In The Nation for December 19, Daniel Lazare
reviews two very different books, The Jewish Century, by Yuri Slezkine,
and A History of the Jews in the Modern World, by Howard M Sachar. Mr
Slezkine's looks to be the more interesting book by far, but it is contentious
about Israel and Palestine.
¶ Michael Massing concludes his two-part look at the American media in The New York Review of Books, Volume LII No 20 (December 15, 2005). The first piece concentrated on structural problems, such as corporate ownership; the second focuses on the rot within the profession of journalism itself. What it comes down to, in argument after argument, is a failure of courage. Reporters and, more significant, as gatekeepers, editors, don't want to rouse the wrath of wingnuts.
When NBC cameraman Kevin Sites filmed a US soldier fatally shooting a wounded Iraqi man in Fallujah, he was harassed, deounced as a an antiwar activist, and sent death threats. Such incidents feed the deep-seated fear that many US journalists have of being accused of being anti-American, of not supporting the troops in the field. These subjects remain off limits.
In other words, we're no better than Turkey, where discussing atrocities that occurred almost ninety years ago is still taboo. If you don't talk about it, it goes away. I wish that Paul Bloom would go back to those cognitive scientists who studied children and see if there's something in our early development that makes denial appear to be a successful strategy. Not that it ever, ever is.
Mr Massing correctly points out that, for one reason or another, the weekly New York Times Magazine is considerably bolder than the daily paper in its Iraqi reportage.
It is immensely sorrowing to read Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's assessment, first, of the charges that he is facing (as I write) in an Istanbul courtroom, but beyond that, of the pressures that have inspired a prosecutor to bring those charges against him. Mr Pamuk, having told a Swiss newspaper last February that millions of Armenians lost their lives in Turkey during World War I and that what bothers him most about this is that the subject is taboo in Turkey (and, apparently, for Turks everywhere), is on trial for having "publicly denigrated Turkish character." He traces the animus behind his indictment to the rise of a Westernizing middle class that attempts to hold on to the allegiance of a traditionalist population by "brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism." He sees the same phenomenon - the persecution of artists and writers by otherwise cosmopolitan elites - in India and China.
Mr Pamuk's thesis is sound, but not exhaustive. Checking The New York Times's site for late news of his trial (there wasn't any), I was reminded of events in Britain, where Islamic groups have shut down at least one play that criticizes traditional gender roles and where artists are upset about the new crime of "glorifying terrorism." As for us - US - "virulent nationalism" is Rush Limbaugh's stock in trade. The problem is bigger than Turkey, bigger than the developing world, bigger than all of us. We're in an awful muddle.
Looking back at the Enlightenment, we can see it for the elitist project that it was. Ordinary people simply didn't count, in the eighteenth century, except as mobs to be feared and controlled. In time, wealth and education would spread throughout the land, and mobs would simply evaporate, leaving a residue of thinking men and women. This is still a dream today, but implementation has grown increasingly ramshackle. Where once a program of teaching Enlightenment values was at the core of every American high school outside of the South, school boards now see to it that community values, whatever they might be, are taught instead. This is simply another form of not teaching anything.
The Enlightenment was a prestige project. Much of its initial funding came from self-interested aristocrats, and in time two of Europe's greatest despots became sponsors. Writers were not squeamish about accepting such support. I may be naive, but I believe that most of today's serious writers would feel dreadfully compromised about living on grants from the aristocrats of today - the managers of large corporations. But most of today's creative political thinking is conducted very much on that footing, in think tanks across the ideological spectrum. We can be happy that no one has pointed to their activities as constituting a new enlightenment, but I suspect that they are indeed engaged in the important job of refashioning such Enlightenment principles as now make up the American political tradition. Sadly, they're writing very much as the philosophes did - for the attention of a very small readership. The broad general public couldn't care less about what they're doing, and this gives each faction abundant wiggle room for misleading statistics and tendentious argument. In the marketplace of ideas, we are doing very little to improve the quality of the market itself. The goods on offer can hardly benefit from this neglect.
Orhan Pamuk is an Istanbullu, a man of Istanbul. He may be the greatest novelist of our time - he is at least a worthy heir of Dostoevsky, and I don't see many of them on the scene - but he is also a man who wrestles with his roots, with his rootedness itself. Is he a Turk? What would that mean? Insofar as it means denying that millions of Armenians perished during World War I, then, no, he is not a Turk. But that's precisely what he wants to change about "being Turkish."
I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believed that what stained a country's "honor" was not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was also because I believed that in today's Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably linked. Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world.
It is important, here, not to rail on about "Turkey!" as Mr Orhan's oppressor. His oppressors are opportunists with other agendas. Turkey itself is a nation like any other, under the control of more or less virtuous people. Whatever happens to Mr Pamuk, we should do what we can to strengthen the influence of the more rather than the less virtuous in Turkey and elsewhere. And we can start, Mr Pamuk advises us, right here:
As tomorrow's novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret CIA prisons have so damaged the West's credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world.
(Hats off to New Yorker editor David Remnick for giving Mr Orhan's apologia the magazine's pride of place.)
Planted deep in the heart of Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf, 2005) is the most important essay written by anyone, anywhere, in the year 2005. It is an indispensable item of nonfiction. Entitled "The Novel and History," it makes the case that our liberal, tolerant, and progressive society is inconceivable without the novel. The claim is audacious, but Ms Smiley is persuasive. She will at any rate persuade anyone who has loved a novel that reading novels, far from being a pastime, is the engine of our social development.
Let's be clear right away what this does not mean. It is not that novelists propose social change. Sometimes they do, but the best novelists accept the status quo well enough to study the parts that interest them thoroughly and to compose fictional reflections, stories that illuminate the problems that some people have in the world. It is really the readers who mulch the social bedding with their reactions to novels.
Sometimes, of course, the solution proposed by the novel is a passive one, such as acceptance of the idea that evil exists or fate exists and nothing can be done about it. We often react to such novels with special admiration and respect, as I react to The Good Soldier. The Good Soldier is told entirely in retrospect by a narrator who has no hope of changing the outcome and not much hope of understanding it - his premise is that certain events have taken place right in front of him, but out of obtuseness and complacency, he was never able to see what was going on until it was too late for anyone to be saved. I read this with enjoyment and appreciation for the author's perspicacity, but even as I am understanding what has happened for Ford's narrator, John Dowell, I am vowing to learn from his mistakes - I will never be so unobservant. The very process of accompanying him while he disentangles his experiences reassures me that they can be disentangled.
Ms Smiley focuses on two institutions that have been overhauled by fiction: marriage and the sense of self. "Sense of self" is no less an institution than marriage, for it, too, has been institutionalized by all the major religions in such a way that, ideally, everybody's sense of self is the same - just as all marriages are the same, governed by a handful of simple if severe rules. The novel has blasted such complacencies to bits, and it is no wonder that orthodoxies rail against the resulting "individualism." The very idea of orthodoxy...
Continue reading about Jane Smiley on the novel at Portico.
Front-page story, New York Times, today.
Some of the nation's most prominent megachurches have decided not to hold worship services on the Sunday that coincides with Christmas Day, a move that is generating controversy among evangelical Christians at a time when many conservative groups are battling to "put the Christ back in Christmas."
At first, Laurie Goodstein's story made sense. Why should people have to work on Christmas Day? Even if their employer is a megachurch? Why not make this wonderful family holiday a day of rest, and let everyone stay home, quietly, with loved ones. Why not?
Of course I was smirking sardonically. If these huge congregations, with membership reaching 25,000 and beyond, are the future of American religion, then the break with traditional Christianity will soon be complete, and there will have to be some sort of reckoning about just what it means to be a Christian. Until the Reformation, being a Christian required subscribing to the Nicene Creed, and even the earliest breakaway sects (Lutheran and Anglican) retained this requirement. But Calvin and other more radical reformers, intent upon returning to an earlier and allegedly "truer" church, were bothered by some of the metaphysics that the Creed implied - and that was the end of orthodox Christianity. Now we have orthodox Christian sects (Roman Catholicism among them), but "Christianity" itself is, shall we say, open to interpretation.
But if I was not surprised by the news when I read it, I found myself becoming surprised, the longer I lived with the story. Sunday is the Lord's Day. Christmas is the Christ's birthday. How do we combine these principles to yield the result (church closed)? Just how debased is this religion? One begins to suspect that megachurch services - which are rousing and long on the multimedia, I understand - are a sort of Sunday, "feel-good" equivalent to Friday night football. They're not supposed to interfere with traditional, family holidays.
Right?
Kathleen left for Arizona at 6:30 yesterday morning. For some reason, I didn't feel like getting back into bed - I was probably too tired - so I made myself a nice breakfast and tidied up the kitchen, all the while watching Henry Hathaway's 1953 classic, Niagara, which may be the best Hitchcock film not made by Alfred Hitchcock.
Then I went back to bed. It was 8:15, and the Times hadn't yet arrived. It's not supposed to until about 9:30. When I came to, there it was. I reached for the Book Review. "Holiday Books"! Goody! Expecting lots of group summaries - the year's best gardening books, and so on - with few full reviews, I was disconcerted by the issue's thickness. What's this? More reviews than ever? The very opposite of "Goody!" By the time I was finished reading the damned thing, I was sick of books. So I read the paper itself and finished Margaret Talbot's excellent article on the Dover Area School District case.
At issue in this case is the legitimacy of proposing Intelligent Design as a scientific theory. I've been so scattered that it has taken all week to read the piece, but that has also kept the problem fresh in mind. Dover presents a veritable Problem of Democracy. If a majority decides that Intelligent Design is science, then that's that, at least so far as public schools are concerned. Scientists and other leaders can insist that the majority is mistaken, but the majority has the right to be mistaken. Until the Enlightenment, it was generally assumed that, given a broad franchise - "mob rule" as it was contemptuously described - the majority would be mistaken as a matter of course.
Regular readers will know that I trace Dover, as I do so many outcroppings of inappropriate sectarianism, to the civic upset of the 1960s. Where federal legislation enacting broader civil rights stopped, "activist" courts were willing to pick up. Apparently, there are a lot of people my age who, as teenagers, witnessed their parents' anger at and humiliation by "elitists," and many of them have devoted their mature efforts to fighting back - whether against evolution, women's rights, gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell research, or the ban on prayer in public schools. Call it the "Revenge of the Patriarchs" if you're drawn to exciting catchphrases. Or you can call me simplistic. I don't say that tectonic shifts occurring forty years ago are the cause of today's reaction. But I do trace its energy back to them.
In the evening, there was Orpheus at Carnegie Hall. As Kathleen was in Arizona, Ms NOLA stepped in to take her place, and M le Neveu met us at the Brooklyn Diner USA afterward.
Dalton Conley's essay in yesterday's Times, "A Man's Right to Choose," makes me more impatient every minute. The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes that even to speak of "rights" in the abortion situation is unintelligent. I suppose that it was necessary to do so at the time of Roe v. Wade, but that case is over a generation old.
Let's talk about realities. Mr Conley writes,
Nobody is arguing that we should let my friend who impregnated his girlfriend off the hook. If you play, you must pay.
Ah, good old "personal responsibility," applied to an aspect of human life that more or less demands a surrender, or loss of control, that fairly rules out responsible thinking. To believe that people who have irresponsible sex must pay for the consequences by supporting a child that one of them doesn't want is patriarchal moralizing at its most intoxicated. Let's consider the reality of the life that such a child is likely to have. We are grown-ups, not idealists; we understand and accept that even the best-intentioned parents may not be up to the task. Unwanting parents are unlikely to be "best-intentioned."
Another reality: there are circumstances in which an unwanted pregnancy may lead to the mother's beating or murder by a husband who could not have been the father. "Pay and Play"? Is that really a decent standard of judgment? If your daughter were caught in such a bind, would you admonish her sternly that she brought the situation upon herself? Or are you sure that no one you're connected to could be caught in such a bind. Just less-advantaged folk.
These realities don't matter much to the patriarchs, because Christianity and its offshoots set themselves in the teeth of reality. Reality - the material world in all its failings - is precisely what religious figures such as Augustine command us to reject and contemn. Since life in this mortal world doesn't matter in itself, because earthly life is no more than a test of worthiness of divine love (I am choking as I write this), there is really nothing wrong with punishing people for their "sins." Even innocent children; because, after all, thanks to Augustine's utterly lunatic but strangely-appealing doctrine of original sin, there are no innocent children.
Forget "rights" - we're not talking about property here - and focus instead on probability, which is, indeed, all that we know about the reality to come. For my part, I would require obstetricians to abort fetuses in the absence of affidavits from each parent in support of the pregnancy. That's undoubtedly going too far for most of us, and doubtless it would lead to injustices of its own. Better, perhaps, to have no rules on the subject. Better to accept the reality that, even though some of us are passionately opposed, on the most deeply-felt religious grounds, to abortion, there is no consensus among the all-of-us in whose name any government must act.
There is a lot of talk these days about the possibly corrosive effect of teaching little boys that daddies aren't necessary. Won't they grow up thinking the same thing? As I understand human nature, children are never stunted by genuinely loving care; they don't learn eccentric behavior from eccentric parents. Mr Conley seeks to tap into this debate toward the close of his piece.
The bottom line is that if we want to make fathers relevant, they need rights, too. If a father is willing to legally commit to raising a child with no help from the mother he should be able to obtain an injunction against the abortion of the fetus he helped create.
Looked at from the vantage of "rights," this is arguable. From the standpoint of reality, it is obscene. It submits women to exactly the same pressure that existed prior to Roe: a forced pregnancy followed by adoption. As a child who was adopted in the good old postwar days when there was still thought to be a stigma about not being your parents' biological offspring - but no thought whatsoever was given to the possibility that you might never, ever think like one or both of your parents, something that, in my experience, does not occur in even the most dysfunctional biological families - I hardly know which I value less: the life that I wouldn't have had had Roe been decided a generation earlier, or the love that I lost because my mother was an unmarried woman who would have brought scandal upon herself and upon her family because she lived in an America still ruled by the patriarchs. Mr Conley does not, I assure him and you, know what he's talking about - he really doesn't.
Not that I expect him to care about that.
The featured Essay in the current issue of Harper's, Erik Reece's "Jesus Without The Miracles: Thomas Jefferson's Bible and the Gospel of Thomas," would be an arresting read at any time, but in coming at the time of national thanksgiving it packs an even mightier punch. Briefly, Mr Reece, the lapsed son and grandson of Baptist ministers, traces an unexpected connection between the version of the Gospels that Thomas Jefferson knocked off by removing everything miraculous and entitling the result, The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, on the one hand, and the Gospel of Thomas, an non-canonical writing, probably older than the canonical ones, that was unearthed in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. These documents are far too concerned with what Jesus said to be called "Christian." Christianity is a carapace built around the figure of Jesus that also obscures him; it stands in the same relation to Jesus as one of Tutankhamen's glorious coffins does to the young king's mummy. Χρίστος - "Christ" - is the Greek translation of "Messiah," something that Jesus did not claim to be. It represents the fabulous constructions of Paul and his followers. Most important doctrines, from the Trinity and the Immaculate Conception through Original Sin and the Resurrection, completely lack the authority of Jesus' word. They are the mainstays of a formidable institution that has served a majority of Westerners well enough while crushing and maiming those who question its authority, which it claims to derive directly from God, in the person of Jesus. I doubt that Jesus would have much good to say about its non-charitable operations.
It is not surprising that the Gospel of Thomas was declared to be heretical in the second century, and that copies of it were ordered to be burned. It is not surprising that the Apostle Thomas's best-known appearance in the canonical gospels, at John 20:24-29, discredits him as lacking faith in Jesus' resurrection; at the time that the Gospel of John was written, the Gospel of Thomas was probably still in circulation and increasingly disputed. These are not surprising because the Gospel of Thomas, like The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, is wanting in miracles.
Continue reading about stewardship at Portico.
Because of the Times Select paywall, I have not supplied links to the writings discussed in this entry.
As befits the eve of our annual fête de food, yesterday's Times Op-Ed page is given over to three essays on the state of the national cornucopia. Farmer Nina Planck urges us to look beyond claims that food products are "organic" for proof that say, beef is "grass-fed." This is because food giants such as General Mills have acquired "organic" brands and now, as members of industry associations, are lobbying to relax some of the restrictions.
Unfortunately, the organic rules are all but silent on the importance of grass to animal and human health.
Chef Dan Barber urges us to change our diets, not only for our own health but also to encourage mid-sized farms by consuming less of the mega-crops - corn, soy, and sugar.
We're going to have to support a diet that contains fewer processed, commodity-based foods. We're going to have to pay more for what we eat. We're going to have to contend with those who question whether its practical to reduce subsidies for large farmers and food producers. And we're going to have to reward farmers for growing the food we want for our children.
Finally, New Orleans professor John Biguenet writes with disgust of the national stinginess that has driven many in his city to wonder if it will ever be viable again.
So far, the president, Republican leaders in Congress and even the reconstruction czar, Donald Powell, have declined to provide any commitment beyond repairing the levees already breached. But if the United States refuses to protect New Orleans, what will the world - and what will history - make of a nation that let one of its most celebrated cities die?
There is also a silly column by Thomas L Friedman, urging the president to change course. What I can't understand is Mr Friedman's faith that this is possible. If there's one thing that I can't be thankful for, it's that the United States has been well-served by democracy in recent years. Because it hasn't been.
What all four pieces point to is the importance of responsible stewardship in human affairs. That's a topic that Eric Reece addresses with surprising force, and from a surprising direction, in an essay that I will write about later today. Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving to all my countrymen, at home or abroad.
Looking back a bit, I see that I haven't written much about politics lately. There hasn't been much occasion to do so, or so I've thought. But the echo of last week's "Mean Jean" Congressional outburst, which I heard by chance on the radio, has been hard to shake. It reminds me that, while I'm waiting for the Democratic Party to be replaced by something more constructive, the political scene becomes ever more malignant. How far off our rocker can Bush & Co push us? Given time, I am certain that it could and would destroy the United States of America and every man, woman, and child in it. No point in saying that every day, however. So I'll let Ellen Moody have the floor.
Politics? I don’t write politically regularly. Well, while the present US administation is so egregiously, shamelessly brutal, doing all it can to grind down the vast majority of people in the world for the benefit of a very few; torture is now open and institutionally encouraged; soon many more US women with no money or wherewithal to leave the states may have to endure compulsory pregnancy (admittedly many don’t seem to mind; this way they hope to nail some man to them?); but this is really more of what’s been developed by US institutions since WW2. Bush did get enough votes to steal the two elections. I am literally sickened and disgusted—amused too as they're clearly dangerous and absurd—by the gross SUVs which make driving harder, and parking a nightmare: you can’t see over or beyond them. Road pigs, no warts getting fatter and taller every year; yesterday at Kaiser’s parking lot two couldn’t get past one another in a lane.
The world we have is the world human beings as a group allow, seem to want.
Is it the world that you want?
A recent entry, "Free Market Fires," has elicited an illuminating comment from M François Peyrat, a Parisian who is involved in the redevlopment of the Ile-de-France, the region of which Paris is the heart but which also includes the banlieues that surround the city. M Peyrat sees the recent troubles as primarily economic, and I'm inclined to agree, although I would like to see a clearer connection between the isolation of so many maghrébins (North Africans) in what we would call housing projects, and the greater difficulty that their young men seem to have getting jobs, on the one hand, and the French economy on the other. I most heartily agree with M Peyrat that neither the US nor the UK is a "multicultural" society.
The eruption of violence in France underlines, for me, a real problem with free-market thinking.
The North Africans parents of the rioters emigrated to France because there were jobs. The jobs were not good jobs, but they were better than the jobs at home, and came with much better benefits. Just living in France was a benefit. This much is very clear. Nobody was brought to France as a slave. Well, not so far as I know.
It was piously hoped by the French establishment that these immigrants would assimilate themselves to French culture. It was hoped that they would take care of this on their own, notwithstanding their isolation in grim cités on the outskirts of whatever town you care to name, and the resentment of the lower middle class, which soon came to see Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans as a threat. A threat to something.
You can blame the French lower middle class for xenophobia. You can blame the North Africans for not suppressing their North African customs. These are both cheap wastes of time, but they seem to make people feel good about a bad situation.
Or you can blame the French élite. Here we find the people with the education to foresee problems, the power to take preventive action and - sorry, you libertarians! - the moral responsibility to commit their gifts to the common good. Here, in the land of noblesse oblige, we have the class that reaped the benefits of North African immigration while doing little or nothing to smooth inevitable conflicts between immigrants and locals. The resolution of such conflicts was left to the people least equipped to deal with them.
That, that is the free market way.
Women often complain that men don't notice things - meaning small but momentarily important things. Although I notice more than most women, even, I think that they're right about the run of men. For a long time, I thought that masculine inattentiveness was conditioned by taboo: boys who notice things are likely to regarded as sissies. But it can't just be that, I thought the other day. Most boys are hugely egocentric, and don't notice anything beyond their own immediate interest. Surely they're not conditioned by taboo; they never need to be.
So I asked myself, what are men paying attention to? (Bear in mind that what follows is more a bit of creative writing than a scientific hypothesis.) That question soon lost priority to another: what makes a man who doesn't pay attention to the small things pay attention to the outside world at all? Here's my highly imaginative and thoroughly unsupported non-thesis.
It's long been a hunch of mine that baseball cards and other collectibles tell us something about the masculine psyche. As adults, men replace these items with memories, but they arrange their memories with equal care. Arranging and rearranging memories is an endless pastime. "I came out well in that encounter." "Don't want to go there again." Many expectations are really nothing but projected memories. "It happened to him, it could happen to me." The rearrangement is important because it's from this activity that a man can infer his place in the pecking order - he certainly doesn't want to be told. So he's sizing himself up all the time. This gives him the appearance, if looked at from a certain angle, of insecurity, but it's not that really. Nothing, after all, is secure. Call this state of mind, rather, hedging. Keeping the bases covered. (Whatever that means; I have no business using sports metaphors. Now PPOQ will post one of his scathing comments in order to tell me what "covering the bases" entails, but, dearest, let me remind you: it will go in one ear and out the other.)
A man who routinely passes his free time hedging needs a mental appliance that will alert him to the need to pay attention to the outer world. It's actually the sign of a man's security if such alerts are rare. The man may be a fool, but he's secure. An insecure man is always switching between the two states, hedging and observing. The only reason that I'm not a nervous wreck is that I don't hedge at all, so I don't have to be alerted. I was too tall and too odd too young to worry about my place in the pack. I didn't have any place in the pack. I was something of a rogue elephant, "exiled," according to the dictionary, "from the herd."
That's just what makes this matter so interesting to me now. I always knew that I was different, but like most young creatures I was too preoccupied by my own problems to devote much attention to the inner lives of other people. (I worked my way back into the herd, but on a Green Card.) One of the fruits of late middle age is the tranquility to be openly curious. So it occurs to me to ask, what's going on in the head of the other guy in the elevator? Assuming that he's not overburdened by care and woe - and that he's not wondering the same thing about me - what sort of thing is going on? What does consciousness feel like, when it's not tied to observing the condition of the elevator cabin and the state of its occupants? Since I'll never know empirically, I have to come up my own answer, and this is what I've come up with.
Experience sets the inner alarm system. Some men will always sense what they need to sense without suffering any harm, while others will be on the alert all the time. The difference between being on the alert and noticing things is that noticing things is non-committal; nothing's at stake. That's why most men don't notice the little things: they don't need to, and not noticing leaves them free to pursue their favorite pastime in a sanguine state.
Eventually, the breathless phase of genetics publicity will peter out, as more and more people - victims of illness, certainly - learn how hugely complicated the interaction of genes is. What do genes do, actually? Well, they trigger the production of proteins, and the body either changes or maintains accordingly. Until recently, it was thought that only a small percentage of our genome was still functional, because most genes don't trigger protein production in a body-building way. For a while, these "non-coding" genes were dismissed as "Junk DNA," leftovers from evolution. Now they're understood to be switches that activate or deactivate the genes that do produce protein. Tracking down the secrets of this ballet will make finding "the gene for blue eyes" seem like a kindergarten game.
A few weeks ago, H Allen Orr published an article in The New Yorker, "Is evolution facing a revolution?" that is not, unfortunately, online. Such a revolution, spearheaded by evolutionary developmental theorists (hence "evo devo") would account for the staggering similarity of genes from across species lines by highlighting the role that the "non-coding" genes play as switches. It is an elegant solution to be sure.
Evo devo's emphasis on switch-throwing represents a profound departure from evolutionary biology's long obsession with genes. Animal evolution works not so much by changing genes, Carroll maintains, but by changing when and where a conserved set of genes is expressed. In the lingo, evolution is regulatory (involving patterns of gene expression), not structural (involving the precise proteins coded by genes). ... Evo devo tells us that animal species look different not because their structual bits and pieces have changed but because they switch on and off the same old bits and pieces in different combinations. Roughly speaking, then, penguins and people differ for the same reason you pancreas and eye differ: they're expressing different genes.
If evo-devo is right, then it's going to be a long, hard slog to identifying the "genetic" causes of just about everything. There's an infinite-regression headache, too: non-coding genes throw their switches, presumably, at the instruction of other thrown switches.
In any case, it was with a deep chuckle that I came across a review, in the current Wilson Quarterly, of a study (conducted by political scientists, no less) of the genetic consequences of political orientation. Thanks to the miracle of twins, you don't have to be a biologist to romp in the fields of genetic extrapolation. Because twins share the same DNA, any difference between them must be attributed to something other than inheritance. Comparing differentials between twins with those of the general public ought to tell you something about the role that genetics has to play. Right? Well, not hardly. Because it is possible that certain switches are thrown by environmental factors - disease, perhaps, or fetal trauma. Bingo: not the same DNA anymore! But even aside from this objection, there's the apples-and-oranges aspect of trying to link up ultra-precise biological blueprints with the fuzzballs of political discourse. How do you frame meaningful questions for such an experiment? The review doesn't give any examples, but I don't think that it's possible to shortcut arduous physical research with such quickie "studies." And, oh, the loose talk about "blue state genes" that this could give rise to! A little knowledge is truly a dangerous thing.
And, yes, I understand that all knowledge is little.
Back in August, I posted an entry about Colin Jones's Paris: The Biography of a City. Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from a gentleman who is participating in an urban-planning project for the Ile-de-France, the region of which Paris is the heart. My new correspondent concluded his most recent letter with a request.
I would be curious to know if, outside the town-planning community and specialised circles, there is any kind of public debate going on in the US on similar issues. What kind of look does the educated general public have on US cities today? I don’t know how interested you are in these issues of urban forms in relation to social and environmental issues, but I would love to know if by chance you have come across anything worth reading on these topics.
Today, I finally got round to responding.
Thanks for sharing your perspective on the Paris-banlieue divide.
Much of my admiration for Paris proper is a response to the complete lack of intelligent planning here in the United States. I believe that I understand certain special reasons for this (my hypothesis can be found here), and in any case there is a strong anti-dirigiste trend in the American psychology. How much longer we'll be abandoned to laissez-faire is anyone's guess. The educated American public does not seem to have thought beyond "the need to reduce energy consumption." It's a perfectly empty gesture, since turning out the lights and reducing the temperature a few degrees in winter barely a cosmetic "solution." I daresay very, very few Americans understand that rising oil prices will eventually make many plastics applications too expensive, a development that will have innumerable effects (packaging is the area I think about most). Our exurban sprawl is manifestly untenable in the mid-term, but nobody wants to hear that. We are, you might say, too busy being "productive." We have, if anything, taken too much to heart Voltaire's suggestion about the cultivation of gardens.
As you may know, American public education is financed largely by local property taxes. This not only explains why the quality of education in this country is so wildly uneven, but it also works against any regional spirit.
As for New York, I can only tell you that it is on the verge of falling apart. In fact it is falling apart, constantly, and being repaired on an ad hoc basis. But the plant itself is too old, and needs to replaced (I'm thinking of water mains and subways in particular). There is no political will for such projects. It doesn't help that our society has been so polarized by political manipulators.
In my haste to answer, I neglected to answer the gentleman's request for books on the subject. David Owen's fantastic article in The New Yorker last October, "Green Manhattan," certainly deserves mention (I didn't know that it was online!). And the work of James Howard Kunstler. Do any of you have further suggestions? I'd be grateful, as would my friend in Paris.
¶ The August entry on Colin Jones's Paris.
On Saturday afternoon, M le Neveu and his Dartmouth chum, E**, stopped by to join me for a pot of Earl Grey. E**, who just started his second year of law school at Michigan, had come to town for an interview. He was spending his Saturday hopping around Manhattan, and I was flattered to be squeezed in. The visit lasted not quite an hour.
The conversation stuck pretty much to law school. I asked E** what his favorite course was, and he named Property Law, I got him to state the Rule Against Perpetuities to my nephew, whereupon we both piqued the latter's interest by assuring him that the Rule would make no sense to him and that he shouldn't even try to understand it. So much waving of red capes in front of bulls.
I asked E** if he had read "the Reading pipe case." He remembered it instantly, and together we related it to M le Neveu. This case, which is formally styled Jacob & Youngs v Kent (230 NY 239; 129 NE 889; 23 ALR 1429), appears early on in Contracts, another first-year course, in connection with the equitable remedy of specific performance. In 1914, an evidently wealthy man paid $77,000 for the construction of a country place. The contract required the contractor to use pipe manufactured by the Reading Manufacturinig Company. When the house was completed - with most of the pipe buried in the walls - it was discovered that all sorts of pipe had been used. The pipe was of uniform quality, "as good as" Reading pipe. But the buyer refused to pay the final few thousand dollars when the architect refused to issue a certificate of completion. The contractor sued. At trial, evidence of the uniformity of the nonconforming pipe was suppressed. The buyer-defendant won his counterclaim, which sought specific performance of the contract. Somehow, the contractor would have to rip out a lot of work and replace all the piping in the house. Not being an idiot, he appealed the judgment first.
Eventually, the case came to the New York Court of Appeals, New York State's highest court (just as our Supreme Court is the lowest, or trial-level court.), which was then graced by the genius of Benjamin Cardozo. By the time that I read his opinion in Jacob & Youngs, I was a connoisseur of Cardozo's prose style, even though we weren't very far into the semester. It was a style at once clear and literary. It illuminated the ideas upon which it rested as much as it argued them. Jacob & Youngs was decided in January of 1921. The issue, as issues on appeal usually are, was very narrow: should there be a new trial, at which evidence of the uniformity of the pipe might be admitted? Cardozo thought that there ought to be a new trial. If the pipe was all of the same quality, then let a jury of reasonable people decide whether or not the contractor must rebuild the house. In other words, submit the facts to the doctrine of substantial performance.
Those who think more of symmetry and logic in the development of legal rules than of practical adaptation to the attainment of a just result will be troubled by a classification where the lines of division are so wavering and blurred. Something, doubtless, may be said on the score of consistency and certainty in favor of a stricter standard. The courts have balanced such considerations against those of equity and fairness, and found the latter to be the weightier. The decisions in this state commit us to the liberal view, which is making its way, nowadays, in jurisdictions slow to welcome it (Dakin & Co. v. Lee, 1916, 1 K. B. 566, 579). Where the line is to be drawn between the important and the trivial cannot be settled by a formula. "In the nature of the case precise boundaries are impossible" (2 Williston on Contracts, sec. 841). The same omission may take on one aspect or another according to its setting. Substitution of equivalents may not have the same significance in fields of art on the one side and in those of mere utility on the other.
A dissenting judge by the name of McLaughlin wrote an impassioned dissent, based upon the "illiberal" view that Cardozo's opinion would replace. M le Neveu, when it was explained to him. agreed with the dissent. Many law students do the same. Tear the house down! If the contract stipulated Reading pipe, give the man Reading pipe! As the three of us talked about Jacobs & Young, I saw that its importance lies beyond the fact that it provides an instance of specific performance sought but withheld. The case matters - and figures early in the education of most attorneys - because it embodies a core principle of modern American jurisprudence. Obsessions, fanaticisms, and whims are not to be encouraged by the courts. If the owner of the new palazzo couldn't sleep at night because some of the pipes in his house were stamped "Cohoes" instead of "Reading," then, in the absence of any more substantial disappointment, that was his problem. Our system of justice will not going to require senseless destruction just to gratify an insignificant quibble. Everything about Cardozo's judgment steers away from the hard-and-fast implementation of rules and the unthinking imposition of rules, and toward the willingness, liberal indeed, to consider each case in context. In the facts at hand, Cardozo found a perfect opportunity for breaking with ironbound tradition, and he evidently persuaded a majority of his colleagues on the bench to make the break with him.
When I was in law school, I certainly never thought that the Supreme Court of the future would house the reactionary mentalities of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
The other night, we were talking about luck. Kathleen reports that nobody believes in it on Wall Street, at least as regards personal prosperity. She knows this because most people are uncomfortable with the way she attributes her success. In the general view of her peers, Kathleen became a leader in the practice of ETF law because she worked very hard. She did work very hard. but in Kathleen's view, she became a leader because she was drafted to take the place of an associate who left the practice of law to have a baby. Kathleen continued to work very hard, and eventually she became a leader. But her hard work, while it made her available for promotion, did not ensure that promotion. Far from it. People don't want to hear this, however. Maybe it's wrong to say that they don't believe in luck. Maybe they're afraid of it. Because good luck is usually withheld.
I know that, if and when this blog ever takes off - and it very well may never take off, but just inch its way onward, capturing one permanent new reader for every hundred visitors (I'm being optimistic) - that I'll have luck to thank. That the right person will have visited on the right day and been in a position to tell all the right people. My job is to prepare for that visit every day without expecting it. This is the other side of what I wrote about last Friday. All too often in the past year I have wilted in disappointment because the day has not brought fortune's nod. But somewhere during the winter, I gave up the idea of giving up. It just wasn't realistic. And so life became simpler. Later, I learned not to wilt. Much later.
There's a difference between believing in luck and depending on it. It's the latter that leads to tears and resentment. It also tempts one to do nothing, to fail, in short, to be prepared for luck when it comes - and goes, without one's having known that the right visitor visited on the wrong day and left with nothing to say to all the right people. The greater the right visitor's acquaintance with all the right people, the more difficult it will be to convince that visitor that one is doing something worth talking about. It may indeed take many visits.
This is not whistling in the dark. I'm past that. But this does surprise me, this trim, athletic talk of being prepared. (Well, trim for me.) And the consciousness behind it. How can it have taken so long to learn? Or is the marvel rather that one can still grow up so close to sixty?
On Saturday morning at ten, Malcolm Gladwell began his New Yorker Festival appearance by talking about his early career as a champion runner. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, Mr Gladwell won all the top prizes in the Ontarian field. Then he took a break. When he came back to running in his late teens, he was only a little better than ordinary. Why? Mr Gladwell did not go into this, because what interests him now is the complete failure of his early success to predict his later mediocrity. This personal anecdote - which seemed at first to be no more than that, a gratuitous self-exposure for which his fans might be expected to be grateful - opened out quite beautifully into a brief lecture on the topic of precocity, or precociousness, whichever you prefer.
The talk had such a profound impact on me that I'm not sure that I can report it. For three days, I swam in the trembling exaltation that follows "religious experience." I'm almost glad that that's passing, because I want to get on with the somewhat altered course of my life. Now, Malcolm Gladwell's talk didn't change me. Things have been changing within me for some time, although perhaps only those who know me personally and very well can tell. Certainly this Web log is produced, for the most part, by the "new" me. The me who has already responded to Rilke's line,
Du musst dein Leben ändern.
"You must change your life." Well, I don't know that I changed my life, but my life has certainly changed, and I'm holding on tight. Malcolm Gladwell's lecture was an announcement of the change, of its nature and extent, and also an explanation of the change. So my version of the lecture is all bound up with me. Sorry.
I will note that both Ms NOLA and I expected a different personality. We didn't expect Mr Gladwell to be sharp. He does not open his mouth without knowing pretty well exactly what he is going to say. (This may be, and in fact I hope that it is, unconscious.) He speaks very clearly and, for the most party, with a tiny but witty smile. Watching him at the podium for nearly two hours also helped to clarify his features, which never seem to come through in photographs. I would love to know the history of the non-haircut.
When asked, during a Q&A session that lasted rather longer than the lecture, if precocity was going to be the subject of his next book, Mr Gladwell said "no." What he's really interested in right now is late blooming. It was at this point that the bulb popped, illuminating everything for me and opening my brain to a strong, destabilizing current. For as it happens, I was a precocious child, I am also a late-blooming adult. According to Mr Gladwell, the one may have led to the other; the experience of precocity may have doomed me to a late bloom.
Malcolm Gladwell argued, quite persuasively, that the qualities that produce precocious children are not in synch with the qualities that distinguish productive adults. Children learn things to the extent that they mimic doing them, and precocious children are just faster mimics. Mimicry, however, is obviously not an important, or even desirable, trait in adults. Somewhere along the line, the outer-directed (or -focused) precocious child must grow into the inner-directed adult, and quite often this doesn't happen. One of Mr Gladwell's examples was the Hunter College Elementary School, an extremely selective institution that was designed to nurture future Nobelists and the like. It hasn't produced them. What it has produced is a crop of happy and successful people, but few superstars. Mr Gladwell's hunch is that these kids were so smart that they grasped the great sacrifices that aiming for the top requires - and decided to go for happiness instead. It seems clear that precociousness is not the fruit of ambition; it's simply an inborn characteristic. So it may well be that the gifted children at Hunter lack the deep competitiveness that drives some people toward the attainment of honorable fame.
The downside of privileging the precocious is that it demotes the importance of work. Of practicing an instrument. Of editing a text toward perfection. Of doing all the research that a project requires, unstintingly. Of leaving no stone unturned. Now, you can regard such work as drudgery, the necessary evil associated with achievement. Or you can look at it as the whole point. Achievement? There is no such thing as achievement, not for the achiever. Achievement notifies other people that something remarkable has been done, but it's the doing, not the having done, that matters. The only thing that we ever achieve is, as the French have it, death itself. We are achieved. At the risk of appearing to reinvent an "Eastern" philosophy, I am opening myself up to the idea that mindful work is the thing that counts most, perhaps even more than love. Perhaps the two go together.
Mr Gladwell's larger point, which underlies his interest in late bloomers, is the price that we pay for rewarding - and demanding - early success. His example here was the celebrated band, Fleetwood Mac. A music executive recently highlighted the importance of patience to Mr Gladwell by pointing out that the album that is generally regarded as the band's best, most critically acclaimed, and so forth - Rumours - was its seventh LP. Nobody gets to make seven albums today unless the preceding six are all big sellers. In one sense, this is just another example of the pernicious effect that bottom-line mentalities have on the arts. But in another, it's a story that many of don't want to hear: that it took Fleetwood Mac seven tries to strike it rich. We'd almost prefer the lesson that if at first you don't succeed, you never will. There's something easy about that, something that assures almost everybody plenty of company.
I was not an ordinarily precocious child, I don't think. I didn't learn things quickly in order to please adults. I didn't give a damn about pleasing the adults. It was great if it happened, but when it happened less and less because I really was doing my own thing, I gave up thinking about pleasing anybody but myself. That was an awful condition to land in, especially as I had also learned that precocious children don't have to work hard. Perhaps if I'd grown up in the city, and gone to more challenging schools, that wouldn't have been true, but in leafy Westchester, I was simply one child less to struggle with. My parents certainly had no regard for the critical and unsentimental intelligence that I had developed by the age of nine or ten. They may have hoped that keeping me in "good" schools would restrain my eccentricity. In any case, I coasted, on the understanding that application and perseverance were for the less-gifted. I don't think that I arrived at this judgment on my own. I believe that it is a central precept of what I'm going to call the American Scream.
The American Scream is the nightmare version of the American Dream. If I may be permitted a moment of craziness, let me call it the spawn of television. It is a siren call to alluring leisure that, if followed, can only end in tears. I don't see much television advertising, but an enormous bloc of it seems to involve cars snaking dreamily along empty roads in remote places. Like any New Yorker reader, I see a lot of print ads for fashion and vacationing. In both, there is a tremendous accent upon idleness and unoccupation - except where sports enters the picture. We seem to be looking forward to a sort of peacefully pleasant death-state in which we will no longer have to lift a finger. What sort of dream is this for healthy people to have?
I have recently observed that the happy people whom I know do not dream this Scream. The happy people whom I know are too busy doing what they're doing. They love what they're doing, and, what is not quite the same thing, they love doing it.†
Malcolm Gladwell's talk showed me that I what I'm doing here is important - to me. Sure, I'd like it to be important to "innombrables lecteurs" (Journal d'un Vrai Parisien). Vastly anterior to that, however, keeping my sites fresh and full of "content" has to matter, vitally, to me. I see that I've been holding back from that kind of commitment, or perhaps had just made it. I would discuss it a bit with Kathleen (my biggest supporter in every way), but I'd keep quiet about it, even with myself. It wasn't something that I felt comfortable acknowledging; it was too final. But I walked out of the Director's Foundation on Saturday morning silently trumpeting the fact that I have responded to Rilke's admonition. I have changed my life. Here I am, and here I will stay.
Long before Mr Gladwell was done, Jane Smiley's ambitious horses were galloping through my corral. I will refrain from repeating myself on that subject, except to point out the relation between repetition and intelligence. Doing something worthwhile over and over, and with satisfaction, does make you smarter. Getting away without having to do anything is not smart at all. It's not only imprudent, it's life-denying. Just getting things done without minding much how they're done isn't much better. What I learned from Malcolm Gladwell is not that I want to be a better blogger in the sense of writing more and better entries. I do want that, but I want to do it well. I want the doing of it, which you can't see, to be as good as what you can see. We're not talking about my blog. We're talking about my life.
† I will save the interesting connection between the degradation of the workplace and the collapse of the American work ethic for another time. There is also another facet to this nugget that, while it catches my eye, I'm ill-equipped to address, and that is the problem of untalented and moderately-talented people for whom the opportunities of interesting work are not numerous. (Nor will I take on the interesting theory that everyone is talented in some way or another, but that societies depend a lot more upon some talents than upon others, leaving the talents of many to go to waste.) What I want to focus on is the importance of determination and persistence, not as a prerequisite of success but as a quality of life. Good work is good because it is the mind's way of breathing, just as it is the body's route to health. (There are bad sorts of work, involving excess, stress, and danger, but that's another matter that I'm foreclosing.)
In all the rush of the week - well, I took off most of yesterday to finish reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty - it took me until today to get to this week's New Yorker, and I want to lose no time in urging you to read David Remnick's report, "High Water," which is one of the very best things that I have read about the Katrina disaster.
Five years of George W Bush have disciplined my sense of outrage into a sixpack state. I don't blow up about every little thing, and I spend as little energy as possible in despising the despicable. I use my savings to look at the situation in unusual ways. I usually keep them to myself until something with better credentials airs them, as Mr Remnick has now done. While I don't believe that any local groups or individuals sabotaged New Orleans as a way of ensuring ethnic cleansing, I do believe that reckless disregard for the city's defenses was motivated by a dream of letting nature do the dirty work.
Putting this entry next to the preceding one, I feel a tension between the literate class that I belong to - a class whose business it is to look at and report upon human experience - and a commerical class that is not interested in "people" or "humanity," but only in "I" and "we." This thought disciplines my outrage even more strictly than the Bush Administration! When we write about its horrors, who, besides us, is listening?
New Orleans developer and banker Joseph C Canizaro emerges today in two New York Times stories as an important behind-the-scenes adviser and campaign contributor, and also as a man who will have a major say in how New Orleans will be rebuilt. Interestingly, Mr Canizaro is not a native New Orleanian. He came to town from Biloxi in his late twenties. In spite of that, he has worked his way into the centers of local power. He does not appear to have ever served as an elected official, however, and as a private citizen now, Mr Canizaro is under no obligation to speak to newspaper reporters. So I was tickled by Times reporter Gary Rivlin's delicate handling of Mr Canizaro's assumption of practical power.
Mr. Canizaro, who earlier this year hosted a fund-raiser in his home for the mayor, tiptoed around the topic of his behind-the-scenes role. Only when pressed did he acknowledge that he is fully engaged in the creation of the advisory council: "The mayor and I have spoken numerous times about getting the commission together," he said, but he stressed that ultimately the mayor, and no single private individual, would fill out its roster.
"This is the mayor's thing," he said, over a breakfast of ham and eggs in Baton Rouge last week. "I'm just doing what I can to help."
This contrasts quite starkly with an earlier bit of reporting in the same article.
Since Katrina, Mr. Canizaro has spent much of his time in Utah, where he owns a second home. In mid-September, when the mayor invited a group of business leaders to Dallas to discuss the city's future, the mayor took the time for a phone conversation with Mr. Canizaro.
"It was an incredible thing to witness," said one participant in the Dallas meeting, who did not want his name used because he was talking about a private gathering. "The mayor stood there on the phone, nodding and jotting down notes, as if Joe were passing on bullet points directly from the president."
Mr Canizaro may be the nicest, noblest man ever to go into real estate; I don't mean to say anything about him personally. He seems exemplary of an entire class of wealthy but insulated American businessmen whose principal skill - aside from their grasp of the balance sheet, if they've got that - is a synthetic candor, by turns oleaginous or tart, that will call a spade almost anything but a spade. In our democracy, it's the guys with the money who call the shots. Elected officials merely implement them. It is no wonder that voter turnouts keep dropping.
What can one say about this? Well, one can say that newly rich Americans are going through another period of really bad taste. Having money to spare, they can build castles that, if they were really castles, would be as unaffordable as they are improbable. Look at that cut stone in the turrets. Here in New York, we call this sort of thing "Garden State Shitface," after a prominent company, Garden State Brickface, that provides remodeled walkups with an unconvincing patina of venerability.
What's especially lovely here is the scale of the turrets versus the scale of the entry. In real castles, entry is, well, difficult. Castles are not easy to get into. Their gates are not the warm welcoming Arts & Crafts portico that we see here. As for medieval towers, they rarely sport generous, lower-storey windows, such as the one on the left, beyond the entry. What I'm dying to know is whether the three graduated windows on the tower at the right really do signify a staircase to some marvelous attic chamber. I'm inclined to think that, if they do, the space is also accessible by elevator.
But what's really clear, after a long view, is that the entire façade, insofar as it is not dedicated to a Plasticville idea of the middle ages, is really a sort of amplified sweet English cottage, to be populated by vicars and maiden aunts. A century ago, the great architect Edwin Lutyens found the secret of providing very rich people with houses that didn't, somehow, look very rich, and his work has been much imitated in the past twenty years. But this is a house that makes its inhabitants look ridiculous. Even Enid Lambert would sniff at this fantasy - to her credit.
The idea that I am going to state here for the first time is really nothing but the convergence of many observations, most of them not new, that by means of some internal attraction have gravitated toward one another, bumping through the racket in my head. I can't put a date on the moment of crystallization, but I can say that it was the opposite of a "Eureka" moment. Archimedes was working toward the solution of a problem. I was just minding my own business whistling "Dixie" - "Is It True, What They Say About Dixie?" to be exact - when the idea sloshed over me like a barrelful of cold water. It was a new way - new to me, anyway - of understanding how this country got to the situation that it's in.
I discussed the idea with Kathleen, who made lots of refining objections even while she agreed more or less from the start. I may have ventured it in casual conversations with M le Neveu and Ms NOLA. It popped up parenthetically in some Front Pages, as the home page of Portico was called before I started blogging. For the most part, though, I kept it to myself for months. Although I thought it explained a great deal with a satisfying elegance, I thought that broaching it here would simply upset people. But when I read Paul Krugman's column this morning, I knew that it was time to get my idea into presentable shape, because Mr Krugman had said much the same thing, with just enough difference for me to claim a little attention for mine.
In "Tragedy in Black and White," Mr Krugman traces the origins of the Katrina disaster - the human part of the disaster, not the storm itself - to the Civil Rights Act. (See below for the full text.)
But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.
Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
You may think that this is far-fetched. To me, it has been God's own truth for quite a while. The aspect that has captured my attention is the connection between the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1960, 1964, and 1968 (see Wikipedia entry) and the erosion of American public spirit. The first unpleasant thing to say is that solid groups almost always reaffirm their identity by demonizing an excluded group - so there was nothing uniquely wicked about White America's disgusting treatment of American Blacks. If I were to write "Black America" there, I'd be committing an anachronism, because prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act there was no "Black America." America was a country for Whites only; Blacks were suffered.
The Civil Rights Acts proclaimed that Blacks were equally American. At first, this was just a law, something to be got round or accommodated. After all, nobody could require Whites to like the new arrangement. The initial response was "White Flight," private schooling, and recourse to clubs. This was the first step in the abrasion of our social fabric, because it spelled the end of White commitment to public projects. Now that the res publica was as accessible, at least in theory, to Blacks as it was to Whites, White America would take care of itself without relying on the government. Or by co-opting the government through pork. Civic projects intended for the good of one and all, however, dried up, and the United States became two countries living side-by-side. The only crossing over was done by Black bureaucrats and, of course, Black servants.
The second unpleasant thing that I have to say is that the initial Black response to the Civil Rights Acts was equally regrettable, and possibly even tragic. Tragic in flowing inexorably from centuries of injustice; tragic precisely to the extent of its foreseeably. If Whites wanted their own America, well, so did Blacks. Many young Black men went out of their way to make White America's worst fears seem to come true.
As the decades passed, and increasing numbers of Blacks achieved eminence in America, racism came to be replaced, at least in most people's minds, by poorism. My bet is that Dick Cheney does not harbor a well-concealed contempt for Condoleezza Rice. He accepts her - her. Many powerful and privileged White Americans have opened their arms to the Blacks who have scrambled to their altitudes, and I don't think that the sincerity of the welcome should be questioned. But in the vast middle of the body politic, where people are neither rich nor poor, such openness does not appear to have taken root. Middle-class Whites probably do bite their tongues and pretend to be gracious. Blacks certainly attest that they can see through the pretence. It is not clear to me that either American wants to unite. Coexistence, yes, with minimal services in common.
And nothing for the poor. "Why should I be taxed to support those people?" It would not surprise me to learn that this is a biracial attitude. After all, the Civil Rights Acts opened the door; anyone not persevering enough to escape the pen deserves to stay there. This is poorism, and it is as bigoted as racism. Whereas racism belabors skin color with imaginary negative attributes, poorism just as blithely assumes that comfortable people deserve their comfort because they have worked for it without outside help. Almost nobody in this country gets anywhere without outside help. Sure, there are isolated cranks who make the occasional fortune, but it is nonsense to downplay the role of connections in achieving social and financial success. That is why little Manhattanites are routinely confronted with batteries of admissions tests to pre-schools. It is true that connections, in America, signify open doors, not magic carpets; they confer the opportunity to demonstrate skills, not a guarantee against the lack of skill. But they're vital, and luck has a lot to do with them. This cannot be acknowledged. The power of luck is perhaps this country's deepest taboo.
One could sigh and echo Mark 14:7 or Matthew 26:11. But even setting the awful plight of the poor to one side, we're left with the fact that there are two Americas that show little interest in maintaining their common fabric. That may be why no one will attend to our soaring debt, our unraveling health-care system, our impending fuel crises, and, perhaps most signally, the environmental concerns that Katrina dragged right to center stage, and dumped there as an awful truth.
Note: As of today, The New York Times no longer makes every daily feature available at no cost. Home subscribers have access (as we damn sure ought to!), but others must subscribe to the on-line edition in order to see such things as Paul Krugman's column today. For that reason, I have copied the text and pasted it here, below the jump. I am not going to make a habit of doing this, and do so today only because the appearance of the column was of such great importance to me.
Note: As of today, The New York Times no longer makes every daily feature available at no cost. Home subscribers have access (as we damn sure ought to!), but others must subscribe to the on-line edition in order to see such things as Paul Krugman's column today. For that reason, I have copied the text and pasted it here, below the jump. I am not going to make a habit of doing this, and do so today only because the appearance of the column was of such great importance to me.
Zounds! It has taken me a while to resume my regular blog-reviewing, checking out the provisional lists of blogs that I keep in my "Favorites" folders. Among the first in "Foreign Blogs" is Hollandaise, written by Jasper Emmering, a research physician in Amsterdam. I discovered the site just in time for Mr Emmering to take a vacation, from posting blog entries, anyway, and I got into the habit of skipping the link from "Favorites." Until today, and, oh, my, am I blushing. Why didn't it occur to me to check out Nederlander blogs after Katrina? I have copied the permalink to an entry in which Mr Emmering quotes an account of the 1995 Rhine flood. The flood destroyed a lot of property, but the evacuation of half a million people (and many more livestock) was effected without casualty. The event needs more study by all intelligent Americans. If Nederland can do it, so can we.
Be sure to look over all of Mr Emmering's flood-related entries.
A very good friend sent me a link to this photograph, on Astropix, of the Boomerang Nebula. It seems just the right thing to be looking at on this momentous day. Actually, yesterday was the momentous day, but I didn't know that. I had to wait for the Times to announce this morning that President Bush publicly took responsibility yesterday for the federal government's failure to do what it ought to have done for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Why I'm coming across the following allegations for the first time in a Times Op-Ed column by Maureen Dowd is a very disturbing question. But I do want to know more. (Follow the links.)
Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.
Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.
The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.
The media appear to have taken off their gloves.
For anyone who has to buy a present for a thoughtful man this season, Madison Smartt Bell has written the one you're looking for: Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution (Atlas/Norton, 2005). This is an almost perfect book, really. It addresses the complete overhaul of chemistry, by a team of French scientists working under Antoine Lavoisier in the 1770s and 1780s, in terms that, while not difficult to follow, require some thought on the reader's part. The writer is a novelist who has undoubtedly had to teach himself everything that he writes about here. Lavoisier in the Year One is part of a series, commissioned by James Atlas, of "Great Discoveries," with David Foster Wallace on Infinity and Rebecca Goldstein on Gödel, and, yet to appear, David Leavitt on Alan Turing. This is what the world needs now: cogent science books for the serious lay reader.
Lavoisier in the Year One will appeal to readers male and female because of its star character. "Man of parts" is an understatement as applied to Antoine Lavoisier. He will always be celebrated as a major chemist, but in his day he held a portfolio of government and NGO roles, one of which - his membership in the General Farm, or hired-out tax-collection service - cost him his life at the height of the Terror, in 1794. He was gifted, but he was also ...
Continue reading about Lavoisier at Portico.
Anybody who's wondering how Michael D Brown can be relieved of his "Gulf Coast duties" while remaining head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency hasn't been paying attention. The White House has been so profoundly reconceived that the President, while remaining the Chatterbox-In-Chief, was relieved of his duties from the start. This arrangement allows Mr Bush to serve as a warm, lovable, and unthreatening guy whom the less attentive among us can look up to, while dragons like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld hand the country over to corporations. It also allows Mr Bush to concentrate his energies on running the George W Bush Campaign, a Scout troop for untalented cronies, such as Mr Brown, whose only real "skill" is lockstep loyalty.
I hope I'm exaggerating. Nothing of this is new, but the Brown maneuver is an elegantly simple display of Bushism at work.
Allow me to recommend a concise essay on "the media-political axis," and how Katrina may (pray! cross your fingers!) have snapped it, by Tina Brown in the Washington Post.
And here's novelist Donna Tartt, in the Telegraph.
What you have here is the remains of a piece that upset a regular reader (Ms NOLA) so badly that I took it down. Self-censorship? You bet. But I've resolved to add a certain national conflict that happened a while back to my short list of proscribed subjects. That's to say that I won't bring it up. I may comment on it if somebody else does.
The entry began as an email to a friend, and probably ought to have stopped there. It was written in fury, caused by the WaPo's reporting that 74% of registered Republicans think that the administration has done a fine job of relieving New Orleans. Look at all those evacuees in the Astrodome, of whom Barbara Bush jested, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway," she said, "so this is working very well for them."
I'm beginning to see how the Katrina fallout is, inevitably, no less a political disaster than a natural one. It appears to be taking us a step further away from any kind of national consensus. Liberals, progressives, Democrats - whatever you call them, they see an outrage. Republicans just don't see a problem. They really don't. "Life's not fair, and it's crazy to expect government to guarantee against that. Take personal responsibility!" That sums up their civic philosophy, their totally anti-Christian religion.
When are we going to hear from Barack Obama? His official Web site is faintly embarrassing.
Yesterday was the last day of summer. The Labor Day weekend is behind us, and it's back to work and business as usual. The weather here was extraordinary, and I spent most of it reading on the balcony. At once point in the early evening, I lifted my eyes and saw that the somewhat distinctive shadow of a building at the corner of 87th Street and York Avenue was falling on the rear of building on East End Avenue between 88th and 89th. Amazingly, my hands were steady enough to capture good pictures.
When I wasn't reading, I was thinking of the remark that I'd made in an earlier entry, about not understanding how this country holds together. I knew that I'd have to explain it, and I knew that I'd never be able to explain it all at once. I'm going to begin now - but only begin. First of all, the statement was does not reflect any sentiment other than common sense. My feelings about the South (say) have nothing to do with my remark. When I say that the South seems more foreign to me than the Netherlands, that is not a like/dislike statement. It's nothing but my observation that the everyday values of my part of the United States are more closely aligned with those of a people whose first language isn't even English than they are with a region that is still scarred by the legacy of slavery.
The slavery thing is still hard to discuss, or rather, still very easy to get wrong. I believe that no group came out of the War of Secession in good odor. It was waged by a Union even more extensively plagued by fundamentalist radicalism than we are by the End Times folks. I certainly don't believe that the War accomplished very much beyond the persistence of the Union, a result that for me has no value at all, because I long ago lost faith in the myths that inflate it. What I do believe is that we are all - all - still engaged in resolving post-slavery issues. These issues have mutated so extensively that there is a widespread argument today about whether it was racism that doomed the poor of New Orleans. I'm inclined to agree with the "poorist" argument, which holds that today's discrimination runs along economic lines that just happen to jag along racial ones. But there can be no denying that "poorism" in this country is a child of racism. Just as slaves were thought to lack the wherewithal to govern themselves even in the smallest, most intimate matters, so now the poor are thought to lack "personal responsibility." The flip, from assuming dominion over slaves, and "taking care of them," to abandoning the poor to a fate of fending for themselves is not really a flip at all.
To say that I don't know how or why this country coheres is not to hope that it stops trying. But it is to ask that we stop pretending. Look what pretending, at every level, did to the good people of New Orleans.
A little while later, I looked toward the north, where the windows of the obliquely-sited Stanley Isaacs Houses, our view of which is almost completely obstructed, were flashing like the cities on an alien planet.
So, here is the problem, in miniature, right here in New York. Take a break from trying to get your mind round the catastrophe in New Orleans. If you're wondering how, how, how - well, here's how. Right here in the Big Apple.
About a hundred passengers were held up in a Roosevelt Island tramway glitch for two hours. I'll get to what the tramway is in a minute. Let's just see, first, why the ordeal lasted so long.
The delay in getting the tram running again was made more difficult because the only engineer familiar with the system was in Westchester County. He was brought in on a police helicopter.
Once the engineer arrived, he was able to start the power generator quickly and get the tram moving.
Link to the whole story, at least according to the Times. The tram is a no-longer-necessary link between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, the twenty-five block long sliver in the East River where you will find that even New York City boasts a Main Street. (It's just about the only street on Roosevelt Island.) Subway connections were built years ago, and the city - or whoever it is in the city that's responsible for Roosevelt Island - would like to dismantle the tram. But that would be like telling the descendants of pioneers that they could no longer drive their Conestoga wagons to the shopping mall, and, hey, it's a scenic ride. So the save-the-tram constituency is pretty rabid.
New York is the American capital of low-budget engineering. There are a jillion elevators, and the density of outfits requiring mechanical know-how, from the backstages of Broadway theatres to the trains and subways and on to the three major airports, may make our town a hub of Mr Fixits. Tell me, please, why there we are talking about "the only engineer familiar with the system." It's a tram - an amusement park ride with a slightly higher safety record - not a nuclear facility. It's true that the tram was imported from Europe. It may even be Swiss. But why was there only one guy in the vicinity - and not all that much in the vicinity - who knew how to flip a couple of switches? One guy fixed the tram quickly. With all due respect, I'm sure that this guy could have explained the necessary information over the phone to any intelligent handyman.
My legal training suggests that the tramway people are overly picky about who gets to look at their junk. Only tramway-authorized personnel can operate the light switch in the control room! I propose this explanation because I am certain that no better argument could possibly be advanced in defense of current operational procedures. That's how stupid they are. Sadly, they are not unusual. Our America is a procedurally fragmented place in which a million little Napoleons make up their own rules and don't care if anyone outside their jurisdiction knows them. If you think about it for a minute, you'll have no trouble seeing why New Orleans's levees weren't beefed up despite widespread consensus on their inadequacy.
My favorite detail: the passengers conveyed their cell-phone numbers via "hand signals" to circling helicopters, which allowed the rescuers to keep the passengers informed and calm. I'm certain that there's nothing in the handbook about hand gestures, but I'm glad to see that they weren't ignored.
This is not going to be the best of Labor Day weekends. Not that we didn't know that on Monday.
In Paris, JR, at L'homme qui marche, reported having been down with "blogblues." I'm not sure that I know what that means, but I can sing it. Jason Kottke left for the weekend in what one would have thought was a very uncharacteristic frame of mind. I was feeling a little rancid myself. Reading Marilynne Robinsons's Gilead during this particular week was probably ill-advised, and following it with Madison Smart Bell's fantastic but ultimately you-know-what book about Antoine Lavoisier may have been the dumbest thing I've ever done. I don't know what would have become of me if a shipment from Amazon hadn't delivered Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of The Beach Boys. I put it on in the kitchen while I was making dinner and was presently right as rain.
This morning brings dueling Op-Eds from Maureen Dowd and John Tierney. Mr Tierney does the unspeakable, by lodging the "moral hazard" argument against Katrina's victims. According to this pet meme of the right, disasters wouldn't happen if we didn't permit government handouts to dazzle and disable our self-reliance. If you had to bear the loss, in other words, of your seaside home without federally subsidized insurance, and if you couldn't count on the government to rush in with food, water, and first aid, then you'd think twice about living on the Gulf of Mexico. There is an iota of truth in this argument, but only an iota, and it is deformed by a vain, masculine stoicism. Poor people, such as the thousands stranded in New Orleans, don't choose to be poor because the government will help them out. Why should they? It usually doesn't. We practice socialism for the rich in this country. Only.
It's hard to feel purposeful just now. The sudden disaster in New Orleans has knocked the wind out of me, strewing awful repercussions from right in front of me to the horizon. When I think about what the people of New Orleans will face when they return - but I can't think about that. The floodwaters appear to be in no hurry to go anywhere, except atop the city itself. I'm very worried about getting clean water to the folks who are safe but stuck in their refuges. What no one seems to have thought about is how long the aftermath would be. There's no end in sight right now.
This is the kinder, gentler part of this morning's entry. I've saved my sharper words for la version française (not a translation). Ranting is so much more satisfying in French! It actually feels virtuous, somehow. The grander emotions are all so much more accessible. Of course, one has to give a little more thought to what one says. But soon it's over and one feels pretty much all better. Ranting in English just makes me feel sore.
But even if it weren't for Katrina, I wonder if my spirits would be much higher. In a disturbing article in today's Times, Dr Jon Miller, of Northwestern University Medical School, tells reporter Cornelia Dean about his highly respected assessments of the state of scientific savvy prevailing in American society.
Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.
You'd think I'd be used to this kind of disturbance by now. It used to be funny. I used to feel so superior. Now I feel locked in a zoo. Dr Miller quite soundly attributes the situation to the American folly of financing public schools with locally-assessed property taxes. Freedom, rah!
In a not-unrelated article appearing in the current Foreign Affairs, Daniel Yankelovich proposes to identify the tipping point at which public opinion begins to have an effect upon policymaking.
The combination of three factors, all measurable through surveys such as [his], can help determined whether matters are likely to come to a head: the size of the public majority in favor of or opposed to a particular policy, the intensity and urgency of its opinions, and whether it believes that the government is responsible for addressing them. Public opinion reaches the tipping point when a significant majority of the population feels strongly that the government can and should do something about a given issue.
...
Consider issues that greatly concern experts and elites but still leave the public unfazed. Americans do not seem to worry much, for example, about the United States' extravagant foreign debt (32 percent of those surveyed said they do), even though it may prove hazardous to the nation's future.
("Poll Positions: What Americans Really Think About U.S. Foreign Policy.") Boy, does this ever make me feel like a kid in a car on an endless journey. Are we there yet? No, the public still isn't paying enough attention. And why am I bothering to write this? If you're reading it, you're probably already of the same opinion. You probably know what Foreign Affairs is. I'm in another Blogospherical echo chamber.
We'll see what the already mounting, now set-for-rocketing, price in gasoline does to the national inattentiveness. But first,
Exercice de style
Je m’excuse ; mon “cerveau français” ne fonctionne pas très bien aujourd’hui. Je suis affligé par le sort de la ville de La Nouvelle Orléans. Fouettée par les vents de l’ouragan Katrina et inondée par ses pluies, la ville est presque engloutie, une quasi Atlantide. Personne ne sait quand sera restauré ou l’électricité ou l’eau potable ; on doute que cela soit une question de mois.
On a tort de parler d’une catastrophe tout court. Oui, le cyclone est une manifestation de la nature. Mais on pouvait prendre des précautions. Les levées auraient dû être renforcées, et les pompes, qui datent des années Trente, remplacées par des autres plus robustes et indépendantes du réseau de pouvoir – dont les câbles auraient dû être enterrés. On aurait dû se souvenir de l’utilité des volets.
C’est un désastre de la volonté publique, cette immersion d’une ville de quatre cent mille et demi habitants. C’est une honte nationale pire que les attentats de 9/11.
Have you come across the following in your in-box?
Subject: gas tooo high
IT HAS BEEN CALCULATED THAT IF EVERYONE IN THE UNITED STATES DID NOT PURCHASE A DROP OF GASOLINE FOR ONE DAY AND ALL AT THE SAME TIME, THE OIL COMPANIES WOULD CHOKE ON THEIR STOCKPILES.
AT THE SAME TIME IT WOULD HIT THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY WITH A NET LOSS OF OVER 4.6 BILLION DOLLARS WHICH AFFECTS THE BOTTOM LINES OF THE OIL COMPANIES.
THEREFORE SEPTEMBER 1ST HAS BEEN FORMALLY DECLARED "STICK IT UP THEIR @$$ " DAY AND THE PEOPLE OF THIS NATION SHOULD NOT BUY A SINGLE DROP OF GASOLINE THAT DAY.
THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN BE DONE IS IF YOU FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN AND AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN TO GET THE WORD OUT.
WAITING ON THIS ADMINISTRATION TO STEP IN AND CONTROL THE PRICES IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE REDUCTION AND CONTROL IN PRICES THAT THE ARAB NATIONS PROMISED WEEKS AGO?
REMEMBER ONE THING, NOT ONLY IS THE PRICE OF GASOLINE GOING UP BUT AT THE SAME TIME AIRLINES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES, TRUCKING COMPANIES ARE FORCED TO RAISE THEIR PRICES WHICH EFFECTS PRICES ON EVERYTHING THAT IS SHIPPED. THINGS LIKE FOOD, CLOTHING, BUILDING MATERIALS, MEDICAL SUPPLIES ETC. WHO PAYS IN THE END? WE DO!
WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. IF THEY DON'T GET THE MESSAGE AFTER ONE DAY, WE WILL DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN.
SO DO YOUR PART AND SPREAD THE WORD. FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND MAKE SEPTEMBER 1ST A DAY THAT THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES SAY "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH"
PLEASE FORWARD THIS ON TO EVERYONE YOU CAN!!!!
(Pardon the caps, but I couldn't bring myself to retype this thing.)
This document interests me more every time I look at it. I suspect that the increased interest may be a sublimation of the fear that I ought to be feeling instead.
What we have here is a testament to American free-market democracy, where, because everyone can speak up, all opinions are equal. Where authority of any kind is resented and, if possible, ignored, often because of the underqualified people who are poorly paid to exercise it. Where leaders have long since ceased to lead - to identify the problems of the future and to propose plans for meeting them. Where politics is a beauty contest that masks the wholesale appropriation of the res publica by private interests. This is home of the free-market; this is where free markets are widely misunderstood.
So it's "the oil companies" that are raising prices? Pity the fools who believe that! And watch out for them, too, because when they decide to "take action" - because it feels better than doing nothing - there's no knowing what foolishness they may get up to. A half-century of prosperity has lulled many people, including most of my own generation, into regarding comfort and convenience as a birthright. For millions dependent upon oil heating, the coming winter is going to be neither comfortable nor convenient.
And as the tone of the manifesto makes clear, far more time is likely to be spent assigning blame and pointing fingers than in accepting situation and dealing with it.
(An outfit called Gasoline Boycott Day has called for a boycott on Labor Day, 5 September. It appears to have a more sophisticated objective and to be capable of more lucid thinking. Keep Googling, and you'll come across Alabama Gas Prices, from I was led to this pretty tune. The president is not popular with this contingent!)
A quick look at the Times Web site suggests that Laurie Goodstein's print report has not been updated to state that the White House has or has not commented on Pat Robertson's outrageous call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The Reuters story that appeared on the newspaper's site last night pointed out that the White House had not yet commented. I'm sure that that's how folks at the White House want to keep it. To criticize Pat Robertson is to irritate the base. In time, people will forget, move on, whatever, and the Prince Esquivaliant team will have scored yet another esquivalience. (Note to spell check: these are real words now. I say so.)
Or do you believe that the President's official duties do not include vigorously denouncing demagoguery? When an extremely influential and widely broadcast figure takes to the cablewaves to solicit murder, is it not incumbent upon the President to make it clear, as Donald Rumseld sort of did, that - as Reuters cheerfully put it - "Political assassination as U.S. policy has been prohibited since 1976"?
Media Matters for America has collected two recent outbursts of pundit bloodlust, adding as a lagniappe a 1998 Ann Coulter call for President Clinton's assassination. I am no stranger to such impulses, but that is all that you are ever going to read about them here. If I thought I actually wielded influence over a substantial number of people, as Mr Robertson, Bill O'Reilly, and others do, I would go out of my way to purge my orations of all such suggestions. That is what good leaders do. They argue for better behavior than they or anyone else is capable of maintaining, and in the process inspire others to lead decent, productive, and hopeful lives. They do not appeal to the broken or bitter reflexes of their listeners. That is what demagogues do.
We know from numerous twentieth-century examples that demagoguery sometimes succeeds - for a short while, before everything blows up. It is the official duty of every democratically-elected leader - particularly those who claim to be democratically elected - to denounce demagoguery, insidious root and bruising branch.
The word "esquivalience" was invented in 2000 by Christine Lindberg, an editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. I've long known that cartographers include made-up streets and other features in their maps, and apparently dictionaries and other reference works do the same. The appearance of such inventions in anybody else's material would be slam-dunk proof of piracy.
The definition of "esquivalience" was said to be "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities." If you think I'm letting go of this word, you're wrong.
Ms Lindberg took a French verb, esquiver, meaning "to dodge or evade something," and tacked on an ending that, according to the dictionary's editor-in-chief, "could not arise in nature." Maybe so. But I believe that Ms Lindberg's etymological brain was chugging away nicely when she settled on "alience," because it put "val" into play, and "val" spells "value," which neatly ties the French root to the phoney definition. The esquivalier - rhymes with "cavalier" - isn't just shirking any old thing. He's shirking his official responsibilities.
Now, kiddoes, can you think of anybody who might be deep into esquivalience? Somebody in Crawford, Texas, maybe?
Prince Esquivaliant, we salute thee!
(Read more about "esquivalience" at The New Yorker.)
John Tierney had an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's Times that I found unusually irritating. I am almost always irritated by John Tierney. Our ways of looking at the world are, frankly, hostile. His way strkes me as short-term, bottom line, sauve qui peut. A cold draft of social Darwinism courses through his opinions. I see him as an intelligent man who's determined to be nobody's chump. Light on his feet, an agile debater, Mr Tierney is too competitive by half. He may, in fact, be none of these things; I have never met him. But that is the vision of him that I have built up over the years, and now it inclines me to skip his columns.
I read yesterday's offering because I'm curious to see just how the "Peak Oil" issue makes its way onto center stage - as it appears, finally, to be doing. I don't expect the transfer to be handled very intelligently. The other day, I quoted David Owen on the upsetting books about the "end of oil" that he is not going to read while he still has hopes of being alive for the next six months. If you have been pushing energy worries toward the edges of your thought, indulging in magically thinking that "they'll think of something; they always do," then the sudden loss of faith in this approach can induce a rush of sheer despair - and an attendant loss of judgment. Hands thrown up in the air are not particularly useful hands.
Mr Tierney actually believes that they'll think of something, because they always do. This is not magical thinking for him but demonstrable fact. And it is fact - if your time frame stretches from the end of World War II to fifteen years from now. To be more specific, the time frame that Mr Tierney sets in "The 10,000 Question" runs from 1980 to January 1, 2011, when a $5000 bet will be decided. If the price of a barrel of oil is "in the triple digits" as of that date, then Matthew Simmons, a Houston investment banker and the author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, will collect the $10,000 that he, Mr Tierney, and Mr Tierney's partner, Rita Simon have deposited in an escrow account. (Mr Tierney and Ms Simon, partners, put in $2500 each; Rita Simon is the widow of Julian Simon, an economist who won a bet, made in 1980, with ecologist Paul Ehrlich, concerning the price of metals.)
In some ways, I hope that Mr Tierney and Ms Simon win their bet. It's not even unlikely that they'll win it; the flow of fuels is full of surprises. But I'm inclined to agree with petroleum engineers who believe that we may have already burnt up half of the earth's oil supply. I like that figure, because it gives us some time - time to find other energy sources, time to realize that a free market approach, while successful in the short term, will doom humanity in the long. That's why I also hope that Mr Simmons will win - not because oil has become scarce but because leaders may have persuaded voters to reverse course and resume the program of delayed gratification that built the powerful middle class in the first place. Don't worry; I'm not making any bets that this will happen. But against the long view that I'm taking - and it's not really a long view to think a century or two ahead - Mr Tierney's thinking looks just plain infantile. He's betting on what's worst about us. He's nobody's chump. It must feel great to be so cool.
What a glorious day yesterday was! Clear and bright and comfortable, it was perfect weather for a long walk. Unfortunately, I had the vapors. I simply couldn't wake up. In the morning, I sat at the computer for a while in a stupor. There were a few letters to answer, but I wasn't quite up to them, and since there was nothing easy to do I went back to bed, intending to finish Jean Dutourd's Au Bon Beurre. I did finish it, too, in the late afternoon and after much dozing. I have no idea why I was sleepy in the middle of the day. 'Twas even worse than Monday.
There's a 1969 translation, apparently, of M Dutourd's 1952 novel, The Best Butter. That's not a very good handle, if I may say so. At the Poissonards' Shop would be better. During the Occupation, Julie and Charles-Hubert Poissonard run a food shop in the Ternes district of Paris (XVIIe). They specialize in dairy products, preserved meats, and canned goods. M Dutourd tells the story of their frauds, adulterations, gougings and betrayals in a voice that recalls Evelyn Waugh: the narration is quite deadpan, even (faux) ingenuous, and only the innocent suffer. When I wasn't laughing, I was gasping. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who can read it. Prepare to consult the dictionary frequently. M Dutourd writes in a clear, almost classical style, but his vocabulary is immense - and that's part of the fun.
I was only slightly troubled by the sober reflection that, no matter how assiduously I work to improve my French, I am never, ever going to have a vocabulary to match my English. They say that French doesn't have nearly as many different words as English does, and this makes perfect sense, given English's double past, with words of both Germanic and Latinate derivation for almost everything. But each time I open Larousse, the words that I don't know seem to have multiplied like toadstools.
By seven o'clock, I had gotten out of bed, showered, dressed, and made the bed. I settled down for a couple of hours of paperasse - dealing with paper-stuffed desk drawers. I want you to know that I've kept David Owen's almost-famous article from last fall, "Green Manhattan" (The New Yorker, 18 October 2004), among my working papers, and, to be honest, it's only now becoming really current. If you read the comments posted to yesterday's entry, you will have caught Amy's remark about her husband's "peak oil prognostications"; if I'd been in finer fettle today, I'd have written a long letter attempting to console Max about the shock of looking at the peak oil problem too closely. Here's what David Owen has to say about it:
On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the environment which I plan to read obsessively if I'm found to have a terminal illness, because they're so unsettling that they may make me less upset about being snatched from life in my prime. At the top of the pile is "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil," by David Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology...
I will spare you Professor Goodstein's prognostications. The other day, I got into trouble with a reader for appearing to condescend, by saying that I'd known something or other for years. Let's see if I can avoid doing that again. I took geology in college - rocks for jocks. (It was slightly more demanding than the nickname suggests, and I, of course, was no jock.) And my father was in the pipeline business. It didn't take a slide rule to see that the time required to create the earth's oil deposits was on a very different scale from the rate at which whizbang humanity was burning it up - and this at a time when China was communist and carless. I was arguing with Dad about reserves in the late Sixties. "I'll be dead by then," he finally conceded - before going on to win a "Gloomy Gus" reputation among his colleagues. I don't expect that the people who died in time to avoid the coming shock are going to be remembered fondly. That would be us, maybe.
Today, unless the vapors strike with redoubled force, I am going to visit the Cloisters, for the first time in an age. Ms NOLA's enjoyment of free Friday afternoons is about to come to an end, so we're going to beat our way to the northern tip of Manhattan if it kills me.
There are many beautiful things at the Cloisters, and I don't think that anybody can complain about their overall arrangement. But I'm feeling naughty. Let me say in advance that I love the synthetic nature of this branch of the Metropolitan Museum. For all the pillars and posts that are authentically antediluvian, the museum's fabric belongs magnificently to the Thirties, to an era of very sound institutional construction. Someday, mark my words, the Rockefeller bits (almost everything) will be as noted as the medieval fragments. I'm exaggerating, of course; there is, after all, the Fuentidueña Apse, a genuine structure (think bandshell) with a glorious painted Christ, that's - I can never get over this one - on "permanent loan" from Spain. (It's impossible to read this information without hearing "We want it back! It's a loan.") I've been to a few genuinely medieval sites, and they're cold and black and almost menacing. And they never have all the painted and sculptural goodies that are on view in Fort Tryon Park. I know I'm being crassly American, and I know that we have no right to have the Merode Altarpiece. But there it is, a manifestly improved version of the originals. Five cloisters, too. Now, who had that in Europe? And nobody French can complain about what I'm writing here, after all the defacements of the Revolution. No having cake and eating it too on this score.
The very best "you must know this" detail about the Cloisters is the protestant monastery (what can that mean?), quite similar to the Cloisters in silhouette, that the Rockefellers built right across the river, on what was then their personal property, now Palisades Park, to "harmonize" with the Cloisters. Now, that's opulence!
My attention was caught by a pair of Op-Ed pieces in yesterday' Times. The first, "Conservative Compassion," by Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, is a fundamentally fatuous bit of self-promotion, in which the writer uses his own experience to justify the actions, or inactions, of President Bush. Having spent two days alongside Ronald Reagan at the White House, Mr Morris was overwhelmed by crush of new faces - faces that were new to the President as well. Mr Morris, accordingly, can well understand why Mr Bush is unwilling to meet again with Cindy Sheehan, whom he has already consoled, however unconsolingly, for the loss of her son in Iraq. The man needs his vacation.
As a comment on Mrs Sheehan's protest, Mr Morris's essay ought to be deleted. It completely fails to address the essence of Mrs Sheehan's challenge, which is almost transparently designed to show how deeply cocooned Dubya is. I suspect she knows that the meeting she demands will almost certainly never take place, and that, if it did, it would be meaningless. Our current president is like the Japanese emperors during the shogunate: a puppet maintained for ceremonial purposes only. He is the attractor of millions of voters to officials and policies that they would never choose directly. Information is systematically withheld from him - presumably at his own instruction - so that he can present himself with confidence and self-assurance. It is a mystery to me that the man appeals to anybody outside of his immediate family, but I have accepted the fact that he does appeal, and widely. He represents a further step in the structural shift undertaken by Reagan, and now the core Republican Party approach to politics: Nominate a charmer, and while he's in office get away with murder. Just don't tell him what you're doing.
Below the Morris piece appears Thomas Lynch's "Left Behind." Mr Lynch, the literary funeral director from Michigan, writes from his own vacation in Ireland, at the house his great-grandfather left "for a better life in America." Mr Lynch exhorts to the President to show at least a modicum of remorse for the harm that he has inflicted upon the nation, by firing up fanatical feelings and ugly hatreds,
for all of the intemperate speech, for the weapons of mass destruction that were not there, the "Mission Accomplished" that really wasn't, for the funerals he will not attend, the mothers of the dead he will not speak to, the bodies of the dead we are not allowed to see and all of the soldiers and civilians whose lives have been changed by his (and our) "Bring it On" bravado in a world made more perilous by such pronouncements.
While I agree with Mr Lynch's sentiments, I must say that I would regard any show of remorse by Mr Bush as a shocking obscenity. It would be impossible to convince me that the display was anything other than an opportune gesture, adopted for purposes of political salvage. Whatever the man is like in private life, Mr Bush has, as a public figure responsible for all that Mr Lynch charges him with and more, put himself beyond the pale of any possible public forgiveness. His callous disregard of Cindy Sheehan, his honest determination that it is "important for me to go on with my life," may be the only decent thing about the man.
It is very difficult for me to write about something that hasn't taught me something. To learn something new is to reconfigure the brain, if only slightly, and for me there is something about the process that creates a compulsion to write. No such compulsion was born of reading Bill McKibben's piece, in Harper's, "The Christian Paradox." Sure, there were a few little things that I learned from it, such as the dandy finding that
Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. [!!!!!]
That's how the essay begins. What immediately follows was not new.
This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage doesn't matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans - most American Christians - are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
What has happened in this country of ours, with its resistance to authority of any kind, is that most Americans have infected true Christianity with a metastasizing agent that produces a religion of accommodation. It is a Wicked Queen's mirror of a religion, assuring its followers that they're doing fine, and that Jesus loves them, no matter what.
Well, not quite "no matter what."
Continue reading about "The Christian Paradox" at Portico.
Here in New York we are waiting for the weather to break. With a little luck, it will do so in a few hours. My shoulders are terribly sore, and I attribute this to the ongoing humidity; we shall see. I'm really fit for nothing but reading, which is okay, because I've been doing almost everything but in the past two weeks. I'm here, actually, because of a thought that this afternoon's reading has planted.
The source book is Jane Smiley's A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck. It's great, and I recommend it, but I'm not going to talk about the book itself now, not least because I haven't read all of it. I simply want to try out an idea. Ms Smiley has convinced me that horses - which, as she points out, have actually worked with human beings since prehistoric times - are capable of ambition. She has observed horses who perform above and beyond what they're asked to do, and I'm persuaded by her findings. It's a colossally interesting idea, because we're so mired in the association of ambition and payoff. There is no payoff for ambitious horses. There's simply the opportunity to do something that they're good at and that they like to do.
This amounts to a redefinition of "ambition."
There are plenty of people who think that they're ambitious for payoff, but by Ms Smiley's definition, this is not possible. You can plod and save, and you can finagle and gamble. Ambition has nothing to do with these approaches. Ambition means loving something that you do well and, as the book title has it, waiting for the money to follow. Or the fame.
This kind of ambition is not something that you can pursue or develop. It requires natural gifts. It requires a kind of undistracted energy that achieves results with grace. Once the gift is recognized, then it can be honed and disciplined, but the mere will to do something is not enough. This is why so many people who would like to be writers will never be read; writing begins with inborn abilities. Such abilities may have little or nothing to do with intelligence; I'm not sure, for example, that I attribute good writing exclusively to intelligence. And think of all those actors downtown who, for all their classes and try-outs, can't be ambitious because they haven't got the goods.
What is the special skill that mediocre but successful performers and politicans have? It's the ability to be at ease in public, among strangers. It's the desire to be onstage. Yes, you've probably got to be good looking, but being good looking isn't something that you do. Therein lies one of the mysteries of great beauty, and the emptiness that so often attends it.
There are undoubtedly people who are ambitious about sex. They may, but are unlikely to, be monogamous.
Something creative people hear all the time: "But you're doing something that you love. That makes up for the lousy pay." Well, it makes up for not being filthy rich. But poverty is not productive after a certain age. Nevertheless, there is a paradox of sorts here. In What's New, Pussycat?, Woody Allen's character tells Peter O'Toole's that he's got a job as a chorine dresser and, when he's asked what the job's worth, he names a low figure - adding, "It's all I could afford." He likes the job so much that he pays for the chance to do it. In our exchange-driven world, where money does not grow on trees, however, this is not a sustainable approach to life. People who do something really well will always be better-paid than people who don't, even though they do enjoy what they're doing and the others would rather be doing something else. Where ambition is lucrative (and it often isn't; consider mothering and the other domestic arts), the reward is double.
And ambition is thus doubly unfair. Anyhow, I hope I've just blown the possibility of excellence out of the "personal responsibility" rot.
Patricia Storms has raised a very interesting question at Booklust. Can readers be divided into "men" and "women" simply by what they read?
Behind the obvious thrust of the question - are there subjects that interest men but not women, and vice versa, and how important are these subjects to readers overall - lies the issue of authority. Do people read what they're supposed to read? I have only to frame the question to generate the answer, but it should be borne in mind that, until some strange moment in the past seventy to a hundred years, nobody read anything unless it was authorized or - small difference - forbidden. And authority is still with us. Only now it flows from cool people who have excited our envy, not from greybeards in ivory towers.
Patricia happened upon an egregious lapse at her local Chapters. The books for men were serious, and the books for women weren't. That's wrong not only because women read serious books but because nobody would think of piling the sort of literature that men read for escapist pleasure in a family bookstore - if literature is the word. I myself, however, haven't figured out how guilty to feel about dismissing books because they're escapist literature for women. And there is some truth - as my sister just reminded me - to Voltaire's acid comment, made in a very different society and can somebody please supply me with a cite, that women love wit but hate analysis. The "some truth" is that women hate to be bored too much to put up with the boring (in their free time, that is), while men are usually too shamelessly ambitious to admit that they're bored. We must remember that analysis, in the eighteenth century, could be grueling.
Books used to be good for you. Now they're supposed to be "great!" which is certainly something different. You're supposed to feel enthusiastic about what you're reading, or at least therapeutic. Reading a book that you find tedious and unsympathetic - well, who does that? No matter what hard lesson you might learn.
I proposed to Patricia an inversed signage: "Books no Man will Touch!" "Books Women will Throw Away!" But I did this just to be silly. I was reminded of the great dust jacket for Golfing for Cats, a collection of British humorist Alan Coren's writing. Between the title and the author's name, the cover was dominated by a huge swastika. Mr Coren explained with entertaining disingenuousness that he had researched popular book titles and discovered that golf, cats, and Nazis were sure winners - so why not collect 'em all? I have it here somewhere, but it's really so visually shocking that I refuse to scan it onto the site without months of trumpeted warnings.
Come to think of it, no woman whom I have ever serenaded with Golfing For Cats has ever found it remotely as funny as I do.
Just tell me this. How does "intelligent design" theory explain the White House residency of a burnt-out bully screw-up? How does it account for the existence of all the middle-income voters who put him there? Just tell me. Go ahead, make an idiot of yourself.
The nub of the President's error is his belief that there is a diversity of scientific methods. Talk about "moral relativism"!
In 1919, Scribner's published a collection of articles by Edith Wharton that had appeared in various publications, and called it French Ways and Their Meaning. The pieces had been written primarily to introduce American soldiers to the French alongside whom they would soon be serving; our War Department, as it then was, placed the collection in the libraries of all troop ships. It is hard to guess what a young, unsophisticated soldier would have made of Mrs Wharton's knowledgeable idolatry. If I found it an easy read, that's probably because I already share most of its prejudices. I am thinking of writing to Diane Johnson - now that I have her address - and suggesting that she give us an update on the French ways that Mrs Wharton discusses. I'd love to hear Ms Johnson's take on this extract from the Preface:
The French are the most human of the human race, the most completely detached from the lingering spell of the ancient shadowy world in which trees and animals talked to each other, and began the education of the fumbling beast that was to deviate into Man. They have used their longer experience and their keener senses for the joy and enlightenment of the races still agrope for self-expression. The faults of France are the faults inherent in an old and excessively self-contained civilization; her qualities are its qualities; and the most profitable way of trying to interpret French ways and their meaning is to see how this long inheritance may benefit a people which is still, intellectually and artistically, in search of itself.
Well, now that we've settled that!
Continue reading about French Ways and Their Meaning at Portico.
The other day, I came across yet another great link at Towleroad. (Thanks, Andy.) It took me to a powerfully stark video that raised a serious question. Unlike so many questions bouncing about the body politic, this one doesn't involve natural or impersonal forces that are beyond my control, and I find that to be a refreshing change. While I worry about that we may have wrecked the environment in some catastrophic way - the Gulf Stream does appear to be in real danger of breaking down - there's not much that I can do about it, and as I'm already one of the relatively few Americans (if one of the many New Yorkers) who doesn't have anything to do with cars that aren't taxis, I give myself a pass on the matter, and wait for the rest of the world to catch up. And as for worrying about what's going on in Washington - ! The video to which I am about to refer you, however, is different. It is all up to you.
Watch the video. Then come back.
¶ In 2014, will The New York Times go offline in protest?
Let's assume that, as a reader of the Daily Blague, you're going to be an elderly or elite consumer of newsprint in 2014, with all that that entails about your critical judgment and deep perspective you're cool. But are you safe? Will you be functionally elite, in a "democracy" that swarms with ill-informed bigots who know very little about what lies beyond their everyday experience? No, you won't. You'll be marginalized at best, persecuted at worst. I myself doubt that a carefully-calibrated government of checks and balances can operate in a world where most people believe that, because democracy means that nobody can make you do what you don't want to do, it's perfectly all right to do anything that you do want to do.
It has always been understood that democracy requires an educated citizenry. But the idea of education, like every other idea, changes over time. I don't think that we know what general education means nowadays. EPIC 2014 suggests that we'd better find out, and fast.
From David Carr's lighthanded denunciation of Time Inc.'s editor in chief, Norman Pearlstine"
Those looking for the heavy hand of a corporate overseer in Time's decision are making a mistake. Mr. Pearlstine is independent, and while he may have sought input from elsewhere in Time Warner, he made the decision alone.
Real businessmen need no process, endless e-mail messages or even so much as a make-it-so nod. No one had to lean on Mr. Pearlstine. He leaned on himself.
It has been a very long time since I glanced at once-proud Time. I'm not sure that I would read it now even if were as good as it used to be; I've gotten hooked on The Economist, which, for all its faults - not least of which is a desultory design scheme that seems intended to repel interest - has always been a great deal more serious. But Time was once an important source of centrist judgment that was capable of enlightening readers too busy to keep up in depth. Now it appears to be nothing more than a highbrow People, if such a monstrosity can really be conceived.
Perhaps one blessing to come from the jailing of reporter Judith Miller will be a cleaving of genuine news outlets from their entertainment-oriented simulacra. But I do ask myself what catastrophes will be required to awaken American citizens to their formidable duties as (however temporary) high stewards of the earth.
This is not going to be about the book that I've been re-reading, Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. I'm still in the middle of it, or just past. The Devils of Loudun is a book that all clever undergraduates read when I was in college. Huxley takes a shocking but minor historical event - the burning of a priest convicted of witchcraft in seventeenth-century France - and uses it as a point of departure for expatiations about ESP, transcendence, "the Spirit," and whatnot. A lot of what he has to say is pure twaddle, but his retelling of the ordeal of Urbain Grandier makes for great reading, and his analysis of the political background is chillingly apt. We will get to all of this when I finish re-reading the book. What I want to write about now is "the subconscious."
In 1953, when The Devils of Loudun was published, all educated anglophones knew what the subconscious was. Just as all Gaul was divided into three parts by Caesar, so Freud divided the mind of man. The ego was the self, embattled by a superego that told it what to do and made it feel awful about its shortcomings - what we usually call a "conscience" - and a subconscious that swarmed with illicit impulses, a sort of muddy mirror image of the superego. Actually, the terminology is not Freud's at all, but that of his English translator, James Strachey. If Strachey had been more faithful to his texts, which spoke of Ich, Über-ich, and Es, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
That's because when I came upon the word "subconscious" in Huxley's book the other night, it struck me that this familiar term has become very rusty. It's still in general use, of course, but it's impossible to take seriously. I don't mean to suggest that there isn't some neural system in the brain that codes "forbidden" thoughts and keeps them well out of conscious awareness. But with the invention of "subconscious," Strachey institutionalized a very rickety idea about the mind, to wit, that its higher functions are conscious. Our reason and our speech - these are conscious faculties, surely?
If you want to know what it is like to be conscious of producing speech, try learning a foreign language. That's consciousness, believe me, and it gets maddeningly in the way. If you have to think about what words you're going to use - something quite different from thinking about what you want to say, what idea you want to express - the bogged-down effort of it all may easily defeat you. If you have to evaluate every sentence on a page for truth values, you will never finish the book. The fact is, our minds are wired to burden our consciousness with as little as possible. (I've been given to understand that the problem of autism is in large part a matter of too much information; instead of seeing a field of daisies, an autistic person counts them.) The more fluent and practiced at anything that you become, the deeper the elements of your expertise sink into unconsciousness. The weasel term that "saves" these processes for dignified human rationality is "second nature," but they would be much better denoted by "subconscious," a term that is, thanks to James Strachey, no longer available for the purpose.
When you speak, you are aware that you are speaking, but not of choosing your words. If you pause to find the right word, you know that you're looking for the right word, but you don't know what the right word is until it presents itself, as if by a miracle. Anything that you do well, you do without thinking. You're a (partly) rational animal, but you don't have to know it, and lots of perfectly rational people don't.
The other day, I wrote an entry that contained the following sentence:
Even now that I am confident and relatively easy-going, I doubt that any soldier and I would have much to talk about, in the way of common interests.
I ought to have given more care to expressing myself, and made it clear that I was not insinuating that the interests of American soldiers in Iraq are inferior to mine. I didn't say that they were, but the inference was drawn by several friends. All I meant was that, on every indication, few young soldiers - I wasn't talking about officers, and ought to have made that clear - would regard passing time at any of my sites as anything but a penance, while I would not want to participate in talk of bands, cars and sports, which appears to make up a trio of recreational topics. Most soldiers, I'm sure, would find me hopelessly stuck up, no matter how affable I was. I'd do better, in fact, by being stern and remote. They would understand that in an older man.
Even now, I'm not doing a very good job of getting my thought across. It's one of those cases where the more you try to extricate the more stuck you get. So I am very grateful to my old friend George Henderson, who continued to discuss the entry even after commenting on it, eventually presenting me with the following.
What I would want from you in a piece like your "Independence Day" post is to convey that genuine interest and sense of value through prose that though likely it would never be read by soldiers in Iraq, and if it were, they would know immediately that you were not like them, but the prose would show them instantly that you indeed care deeply about their sacrifices and deaths which you regard as needless. And, even though you view their sacrifices and deaths as needless that in no way diminishes the respect you have for their honorable service.
That is exactly what I would like to write. As you can see for yourself, the other day's entry followed the sentence that I've quoted with a negative litany, denouncing the fools who have put our troops in the sandbox. Well, that's not how to express any kind of solidarity. So let me say that I respect the willingness of American soldiers in Iraq to discharge their orders and to put their futures at risk in defense of their homeland. I admire their courage, even when it fails, and I try hard to imagine their sacrifices. I hope that every one of them comes home safe and sound, but I am proud of the sense of honor that makes their doing so so uncertain. And I urge them and all of us to bear in mind that, history books to the contrary notwithstanding, the meaning of a military engagement is not bound up with victory or defeat. Ultimate victory, ultimate defeat - these are the sum totals of countless individual victories and defeats, and it is in those small but brave acts that the true meaning of warfare lies. Soldiers are not at liberty to judge whether wars make sense, but they must be assured that the meaning of their sacrifices does not drop to zero if and when their leaders determine that the bravest course of action is to withdraw from fighting.
The other day in The New Yorker, George Packer had something to say about Web logs. Distinguishing our Iraqi misadventure from other military engagements, he wrote,
It was the first blogged war, and the characteristic features of the form - instant response, ad-hominem attack, remoteness from life, the echo chamber of friends and enemies - helped define the tone of the debate about Iraq.
If Mr Packer is right, then I am wasting my time here, no? But I'm probably not. While I know perfectly well how poisonous some blogs can be, and how readily blogging technology brings aid and comfort to the wounded narcissist, Web logs are no more condemned to exhibit the "characteristic features" than old-fashioned letters in envelopes are bound by the cut-and-paste conventions of blackmail. As always, vice is easy and virtue is hard. This will become clearer as bloggers and their readers inevitably mature.
When I was young, my greatest fear was that I would have to serve in the Army - or in any branch of the military. It was an instinctive dread of masculinity that I couldn't articulate at the time but understand very well now that I am getting positively old. Suffice it to say that I find the first half of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket more compelling than any Greek tragedy. Even now that I am confident and relatively easy-going, I doubt that any soldier and I would have much to talk about, in the way of common interests. But my aversion to military values - how much happier the human race would be without them! - has not stood in the way of admiration for our beleaguered troops in Iraq. Condemned by an ignorant president and his vicious enablers to risk their lives in a campaign of empty calories, these men and women are learning the hard way what it means to be an American, and some of them are not surviving the lesson. I would offer this Independence Day as a second Memorial, to the memory of those who have died to make this country free no more than to those who are helplessly dying to make this country hated.
Do read read Mr Packer's essay, in which the grief of a father for his dead son, felled by shrapnel in Iraq, encapsulates a capital denunciation of the Bush Administration's ways of doing things. I hope to come back to it later in the week. But not on a holiday.
William Pfaff has published a characteristically wise post-mortem of the European Constitution. Mr Pfaff, neither idealistic nor pessimist, has a nose for the unrealistic, which is a great help in trying to distinguish the workable aspects of a remarkable treaty organization from the wishful ones. He can also spot a rush to premature conclusions.
I will be very interested to know what my French visitors make of Mr Pfaff's analysis of their compatriots' rejection of the constitution.
In 1991 the French public, urged to do so by President François Mitterrand, approved the Maastricht Treaty confirming the expansion of the EU to twelve nations and proposing steps toward a common currency. Comparison of the May 29 exit polls in France with those of the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty shows no strengthening of extremist parties. Nor do the polls show new class, ideological, or regional divisions, or a rural–urban divide, or even one between the employed and unemployed. Retired people mostly voted yes both times, as did the professional and upper middle classes.
The decisive difference was a big shift in the vote of the "intermediate" trades and professions that make up the lower middle class. These include schoolteachers, nurses and hospital technicians, accountants, department heads in shops, and salesmen, among many others. The "no" vote of this group increased by seventeen points between the Maastricht referendum and 2005, producing a 53 percent majority.
In 1992 this group was the great beneficiary of the prosperity of France's so-called glorious thirty postwar years. Its members were making more money than ever before, buying new houses in better suburbs, and had high expectations about their own future and particularly that of their children. That optimism now has disappeared, and people fear falling back. They have lost buying power and are afraid for their children. They are working harder (the thirty-five-hour work-week notwithstanding) but losing ground. These above all are the people who see "France in decline," while their own situation seems ignored by management and unions alike; they are overlooked by the press, and treated with indifference by governing elites in Paris and Brussels.
It sounds plausible to me, but what do I know?
Spain legalised same-sex marriages on Thursday, becoming only the fourth country to do so after Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands and dealing a blow to the Catholic Church in a traditional stronghold.
That's from a Reuters story in the New York Times. Online, that is. The news is too fresh for the presses. There will be something in the paper tomorrow, I suppose. Bummer, waking up in Europe's afternoon. In any case, there are two things about the sentence that I've quoted that catch my attention. The first: "only the fourth." As Ms NOLA would say, "What is that?" The other thing, more profound, not in the text, is the reminiscence of the last time Spain tried to leap into the present. Not everybody was ready for the move, and the ensuing civil war is fondly regarded by many casual historians as a dress rehearsal for World War II's atrocities. (Funny thought that just went off with a boy-am-I-stupid pop: the heart of the European war wasn't against Russia or the Allies, but against the Jews. Just because the Jews had no military and were more or less defenseless doesn't mean that they weren't fighting. And Hitler was insane enough to put the war against the Jews ahead of the other wars when it came to, say, dispatching trains.) Perhaps we can draw hope from the fact that, this time, Spain isn't trying to catch up with the present. It's jumping into the future.
With every White House press conference transcript that I read, Scott McClellan sounds more like a Stalinist goon. Yesterday, the Times ran a story about three liberal activists (let's call them) who claim to have been thrown out of a "taxpayer-financed Bush Social Security event" in Denver by a man who presented himself as Secret Security. Why? One them drove a van with a "No Blood for Oil" sticker on its tail. The Secret Service denies having had any dealings with the Denver Three, who in turn are persisting in their search for the "mystery man" who manhandled them, and they're getting some support, even from Republicans. The president is so notorious for preaching to the choir and only to the choir that even Republicans are getting a little nervous.
Not Scott McClellan, of course. He doesn't want to talk about the incident, pointing out that occurred on 21 March - old hat! Thank you, Scott, for the new statute of limitations on political news! But notice Mr McClellan's fascist phrasing:
It's clear that these three protesters are trying to advance their own political agenda.
Wow! How low can you go! What could be more despicable than attracting the attention of journalists in order to advance your own political agenda! Such, at least, is the response that Mr McClellan is clearly hoping to arouse. The first rule of fascism is that politics are bad. And observe that Mr McClellan says "trying," not "lying."
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Malcolm Gladwell's latest book has been in the house for so long that it was in danger of no longer being his latest book. I exaggerate, perhaps, but I had a real reluctance to open Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown; 2005), and the subtitle may tell you why. A book celebrating the power of snap judgments had almost no appeal to me, partly because I think that I'm very bad at making snap decisions. In any case, it was only after reading a book that has traveled in its wake - Freakanomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side of Everything (William Morrow, 2005), by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner - that I felt inclined to pick it up. The two books make for an interesting contrast.
Both are brainy but not obscure, and both are great reads. Both are studded with interesting, unexpected, and sometimes quite surprising information. Both clarify great swathes of our world (although I suspect that for their readers these areas were fairly clear already; the people who might benefit most from Freakanomics are unlikely to read books at all). But for Freakanomics to be as useful a book as Blink is, it would have to come in several volumes, and be very comprehensive indeed. Maybe it will.
Continue reading about these crazy books at Portico.
Thanks to Édouard at Sale Bête, I glanced at Eschaton. Édouard's link was to a cogent entry in which Atrios asked how on earth we're going to get out of Iraq if we don't know why we went in?
I haven't looked at a political blog in ages, and now I see why. I'm impatient with questions to which the answers are clear. It was apparent to me as the march to war was heating up in the first two years of the first Bush Administration that the ongoing regime of Saddam Hussein was simply intolerable to the president (for his own reasons) and to the administration's neoconservative policy wonks (for their own reasons). It's ludicrous to say that the administration led us into war under false pretences, when in fact we allowed ourselves to be led into war on patently flimsy pretexts. No good reason for offing Saddam Hussein was ever put forward. We went to war because we could - something well-known wherever the severely crippled American mainstream media don't control the news.
Don't expect me to be intelligible about it, but I've just got wind of The Blue Brain Project. And I've learned about an important brain structure of which I hadn't the least notion before opening the current Economist and reading about it. It's called the Neocortical Column (or NCC), and at the very least you have to check out the images at the Project's site. Shown here are "pyramidal neurons," about which the only intelligent thing that I have to say is that the top of the image is the outer edge of the brain. The structures are about 0.5 mm wide and 2 mm long. There are about a million of them in the brain, and each connects to about ten thousand nerve cells. The discovery of the NCC earned two scientists the Nobel Prize in 1981.
The Blue Brain Project is going to put the type of IBM supercomputer that is currently studying brain chemistry to work juggling digital simulations of an NCC. That's step one. It is believed that the rules governing NCC operation have been successfully captured in digital expressions; now these will be organized to simulate an actual NCC. According to The Economist's sources, the entire brain might be modeled in ten to fifteen years. Kathleen is not going to be happy when she reads about this, but, for the moment, I'm simply amazed. I had no idea that research had gotten this far.
At Biscuit Report, Amy has posted an eloquent entry that explodes a lot of the nonsense inherent in gabble about "the balance between liberty and safety."
But why should we even have to debate if we are willing to lose our souls for the not-at-all-certain possibility of adding another drop of illusory security into the infinite bucket of impermanence and death? All we have is this moment, our way of life right now. Right now, we are torturers. We have traded our liberty and our honor, in this moment, for the wish that someday, some distant time in the future, we will be safe. It's one thing to sell your soul for some immediate benefit -- we've sold our souls for a hypothetical and utopian future, for the day the War On Terror ends, and Democracy and Freedom are everywhere.
The frontier of torture may be difficult to discern, but there is no doubt that American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently acting under orders or pursuant to guidelines, have sailed across it numerous times and plunged deep into torture's territory. Hoods, electric shocks, sexual humiliations, and peroneal strikes are all unmistakably acts of torture. Living conditions at Guantánamo Bay are inhumane. Even assuming that the mass of detainees have done something to merit incarceration, acts and conditions that impinge upon their physical dignity - "cruel and unusual punishments," in the words of the Eighth Amendment to our Constitution - are completely unjustifiable. To wink at them is to risk, as Amy puts it, one's soul.
But what are you waiting for? Go read Amy!
The third installment of Bernard-Henri Lévy's journey through America, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville," has appeared in The Atlantic. One passage is particularly arresting. Having been flown over the Grand Canyon by a smart young helicopter pilot who professes to believe that Darwinism is "just a theory," M Lévy writes of the "Intelligent Design" malignancy:
On the contrary, it accepts Darwinism, or in any case pretends to accept it - but only while asserting the right, the mere right, to oppose its "hypotheses" with the contrary hypotheses, placed on the same level and equal in worth, of "scientific creationism." The invention of scientific creationism - the elevation to the rank of "science of what is patently superstition and imposture - can only be called inspired.
There are two theories, and you have a choice: that's the formula of an enlightened obscurantism; that's the principle of revisionism with a liberal and tolerant face; that's the act of faith of a dogmatism reconciled with freedom of speech and thought; that's the subtlest, most underhanded, most cunning, and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver of the American Right in years.
How about ever.
Merci, M Lévy: you've caused me to see in a flash that the fundamental proposition of creationism and/or intelligent design theory is that science as we know it - as it has developed as a discipline since the middle of the seventeenth century; the science that put Americans on the moon - is "just a theory." This is also the right's judgment of critical thinking itself - "just a theory." Operatives such as Karl Rove (not that he has any peers) understand that many Americans are too harried by circumstances to bother with abstract truths and falsehoods. They don't want to grapple with documentary evidence of immaterial things like "responsibility" or "history." We all like to hear good news; the suckers on the right have been assured that what they don't want to hear is "just a theory."
New: a write-up of the 1956 Judy Holliday/Paul Douglas comedy, The Solid Gold Cadillac. I post entries about DVDs at Good For You, and ordinarily I wouldn't mention the entry here, but, hey, a plug never hurts. Seriously: The Solid Gold Cadillac, while quite funny (George S Kaufman wrote the play on which it is based), offers an instructive look at corporate structure and abuse. The full post appears at Portico.
Having written about gaydar yesterday, I'm somewhat embarrassed
about having to bring up sex again today - but then, it's not sex, it's no sex.
It's
asexuality! Mary Duenwald has
a story in the silly Styles section of today's Times.
But could indifference to sex extend to humans, too? An increasing number of people say yes and offer themselves as proof. They describe themselves as asexual, and they call their condition normal, not the result of confused sexual orientation, a fear of intimacy or a temporary lapse of desire. They would like the world to understand that they can live their entire lives happily without ever having sex.
You can read more at the Web site run by AVEN, an online advocacy group for asexuals. Needless to say, there are doubters.
"It's a bit like people saying they never have an appetite for food," said Dr. Leonard R. Derogatis, a psychologist and the director of the Center for Sexual Health and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Sex is a natural drive, as natural as the drive for sustenance and water to survive. It's a little difficult to judge these folks as normal."
Aside from the error of comparing food, which is essential to life, to sex, which is not - although I have always enjoyed those stories about African alpha males who sicken and die if deprived of sex for just a few days - Dr Derogatis wades right into the deep doo-doo with the "N" word. Since when is anyone's sexuality "normal"? More to the point, why does it matter? Why is anybody interested the sexuality of people who are not prospective partners?
Happily, I did not have to search for an answer in books of
wisdom. The silly Styles section was right there to help me
out, with a story on page G8: "For
Men at the Gym, It's Step, Step, Step, Panic!", by Taylor Antrim.
This is the affecting tale of guys who are afraid to join group classes at New
York's gyms, because, you know. "I felt like a weenie," says Martin Vahtra, who
melted into a fog of evaporated self-esteem under the glare of weight-lifting Blutos
on the other side of the glass wall.
In what may prove to be my favorite sentence of 2005, gym spokeswoman Lisa Hufcut observes, "Men feel more comfortable around equipment." As I savor this gem like a sip of great Bordeaux, it gets richer and riper. I don't think that I have ever read anything more pathetic but at the same time more accurate about guydom.
To speak, if not more seriously, then more earnestly, for a moment, I will venture that we all find sexuality frightening, because it is never something that we can will, and is sometimes something that we can't control. But maturity means learning to live with the various fears attendant upon life, most particularly the fear of dying. It means not running away from them by seeking shelter in nonexistent norms. It means accepting ourselves as we grow up and develop - very difficult, but doable - and not worrying what the weightlifters think. And not worrying that step aerobics, if that's what works for you, is going to make you a weenie. You're not that malleable!
Where I Was From, Joan Didion's meditation on the myths of California (Knopf, 2003), has been in the pile for quite a while, and I don't know why I put off reading it. I do know why I picked it up; Ms Didion's recent piece in the NYRB on Terry Schiavo (which I wrote about last week) left me hungry for more of the writer's peculiarly addictive blend of dry humor, muffled oracle, and utter sérieux (she must translate very well into French - although it appears that anybody là-bas who wants to read her can do so in English). And because I've been reading Them to Kathleen, I needed an alternative memoir to satisfy the craving that Francine du Plessix Gray has excited. Voilà, the perfect moment.
Where I Was From is a book of awakening, a work of grasping her earliest interior furniture, holding it up to the light, and finding it somehow fake or insubstantial. The writer springs from generations of Californians; many of her ancestors crossed the plains and the mountains before 1868, the year of the railroad. We can forget, nowadays, what a desert almost a third of our heartland is, but from the Rockies just beyond Denver to the Sierra Nevada on the California-Nevada border, the terrain is not hospitable to human beings. And it is not easily traversed, either, in wagon trains pulled by oxen. Many people died en route, most notoriously the Donner Party, in which some forty-odd people perished out of a company of ninety when the Party could not clear the snows of the Sierrra Nevada in the fall of 1846. Making the passage was an ordeal that, like warfare, produced legends but also silence. The people who got to California were heroically taciturn. This tough calmness was the ideal breeding ground for mythology, and by Joan Didion's day the mythology was so ingrained that she could give, in eighth grade, a concise account of it.
They who came to California were not the self-satisfied, happy and content people, but the adventurous, the restless, and the daring. They were different even from those who settled in other western states. They didn't come west for homes and security, but for adventure and money. They pushed in over the mountains and founded the biggest cities in the west. Up in the Mother Lode they mined gold by day and danced by night. San Francisco's population multiplied almost twenty times, until 1906, when it burned to the ground, and was built up again nearly as quickly as it had burned. We had an irrigation problem, so we built the greatest dams the world has known. Now both desert and valley are producing food in enormous quantities. California has accomplished much in the past years. It would be easy for us to sit back and enjoy the results of the past. But we can't do this. We can't stop and become satisfied and content. We must live up to the our heritage, go on to better and greater things for California.
Seen along one plane, squinting slightly, this is all fairly true. California attracted adventurers and gamblers. And so on. What happened to Ms Didion in her forties, it seems, is that she suddenly saw California along another plane entirely, and understood that she had never bothered to press the meaning of what now struck her not as history but as mythology. Although the word does not appear in the excerpt from her valediction, the passage is heavy with the implication that what all those heroic pioneers did, from building the biggest cities in the west to building the greatest dams the world has known, was constructive. The world, and California in particular, was a better place for all that building, and the building must continue, so that the California and the world might become even better. It's an admirable call, if indeed surprisingly more boosterish than one can imagine Ms Didion ever being.
Continue reading about Where I Was From at Portico.
By now, everybody knows what gaydar is, even if not everybody can use it. My question is, why does it work so well in the United States and so poorly elsewhere? Ms NOLA told me that during her term in Paris her gay colleagues were distraught by their inability to distinguish gay from straight French men. Yesterday, Andy Towle reported on a new Gillette campaign fronted by a soccer star who likes to shave his legs before matches. Meanwhile the San Francisco 49ers are in the soup because of a really stupid (as well as offensive) training video.
Gaydar works because so many straight American men have shut down displays of interest and mimicked homogenized behaviors. They don't inspect other men. They walk a walk and talk a talk. Why is American masculinity so hypertrophic? Who's trying to prove exactly what to exactly whom?
Like many people, I've been mulling over Matt Miller's Saturday Op-Ed piece in the Times, "Is Persuasion Dead?" Well, it can't be, I thought; it must not be. And yet it's pretty clear that nobody wants to be persuaded just about now. We are all bursting with opinions about everything, including exactly what's important enough to warrant having an opinion about. Some time ago, I ran through the blog roster of an collaborative "intellectual" site, and every third blog seemed to have gone dead since the election. I know that I have stopped following such sites.
And yet this blog right in front of you is never, not for one second, not trying to persuade you of something. For starters, obviously, it's trying to interest you, trying to get you to keep reading. And I am usually attempting to persuade you that a book is worth reading, or that an orchestra's concerts are worth showing up for. It hasn't happened lately, but I am known to argue that watching television is bad for you, period. That's a toughie, not because anybody disagrees but because they don't do twelve-step for television yet. (Do they?) Finally, as one friend put it one night, I'm trying to get my philosophy across. This still confounds me, because I don't know what my philosophy is. But prenez garde: these entries of mine are designed to transmute your curiosity into susceptibility.
So I had to keep asking myself Mr Miller's question. If persuasion is dead, we're wasting our time here. Then, while I was out running errands yesterday, it occurred to me that beneath the swarm of recommendations that makes up the surface of these pages there lie one or two behemoths that might eventually swim into your mind. The first - if indeed there are two - is the vital importance of thinking with as much breadth and tranquility as you can command, and of doing this thinking (taking notes!) as often as possible. Someday, someone will decide that thinking in this way is a kind of meditation, but it seems far too busy and capricious for that. Reading, of course, counts. So does good talking to a good listener (someone who combines patience with an insistence upon making sense).
The second thing is probably just what's missing from the first: think about what? I have an agenda: I should like you to think about fixing a few of our largest institutions. The corporation for one. Our educational system, for another. These systems are so embedded in our lives from such an early stage - we are schooled as very small children, at a time when our quality of life is determined by our guardians' adaptability to corporate structures - that we really don't think about them. That they're both pimply with problems nobody doubts, but the pimples are symptoms, not causes. Both institutions need to be re-imagined from the ground up, retro-engineered to suit us. We need to question our belief in growth, or at least to think more about development instead. There is ample evidence that school systems and corporations become more toxic and less efficient as they get bigger, while at the same time concentrating more power in fewer hands. I am confident that we are heading into a long-tail economy in which small enterprises will flourish, relying on a few massive service providers who will handle paperwork and so on the way 1&1 hosts Web sites. Most of us will not come into direct contact with mass marketers. More of us will be CEOs. Wealth will naturally fall into more equitable distribution. Our only problem will be finding occupation for the sociopaths who occupy so many of today's corner offices.
(As for education, I've already sketched my scheme of breathtaking reform elsewhere, but I might as well plug it.)
Until you begin to think about these things, and to persuade your friends to do the same, things will only get worse. We'll go on racking up huge debts and running out of oil. There will be no reason for potential leaders to lead. Is persuasion dead? That's up to you.
If you believe that there is any aspect of the Supreme Court's assertion of federal authority in the regulation of medical marijuana - a story reported on the front page of todays Times - I'll start again. If you think that there is anything about this story more important than the names of the six justices who supported the majority opinion, which asserted that the Federal Government has the power to overrule state legislation authorizing medical marijuana, then hie yourself to 43rd Street and get a job: you're just as in-the-know and out-of-touch as the folks who run the paper.
There are nine paragraphs about this decision on today's front page. Justices Scalia and Kennedy are named, as is Justice Stevens, but in order to find out who the other three were, you have to open the paper to page A21. No need to wade through all those paragraphs, though, because there's a handy sidebar with everybody's picture. The three dissenters were Justices O'Connor, Thomas, and Rehnquist. That's why Justices Scalia and Kennedy were identified on the front page: you were supposed to be clever enough to see that in this humanitarianism-vs-federalism fight, these two jurists were more appalled by the tolerance of weed than they were worried about their pet peeve, the encroachment of states' rights. You felt really stupid when you opened the paper to page A21 and figured that out, didn't you.
Shame on the justices for whom I usually root: Ginsburg, Stevens, and Breyer. Shame on Linda Greenhouse, too. The Times is supposed to be a fount of information, not East Lynne.
Having glared at it in my "to read" pile for several months, I finally shamed myself into opening Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; Schocken, 2004). The shame continues: it is twofold. Intellectually, I am ashamed of how much I am learning from the book. Not that I have read very much of it yet; I'm still on Book I, Chapter 3, "The Jews and Society." But what I have read has been bouleversant. Ordinarily, the history books that I read cover familiar territory, and fill in more details. I am not, as a rule, surprised by anything that I read. That I should be surprised by Hannah Arendt's analysis of the European emancipation of Jews, finding out how it led to their destruction by the Nazis, in a book written a couple of years after I was born (id est, many years ago), is embarrassing. I ought to have known this. I ought to have read this book a long time ago.
So much for the intellect. I'll get used to that part. A year from now, I may not even remember how ignorant I used to be. That's how we are. But the other part of my shame is not likely to disappear so quickly, or, for that matter, ever. It's the shame of having grown up in an insistently antisemitic household.
My spell checker just informed me that I ought to have written "anti-Semitic," but I'm going to stick with Arendt's usage. Actually, given the complications of Arendt's definition of the vice (and it is a vice), I wonder if it's not too fancy for my mother's outlook, which was quite simple: she hated Jews. And so, it seems, did a lot of the neighbors. The Bronxville, New York, that I grew up in was proudly, if quietly, judenrein. (It isn't any more, but I've been told by reliable sources that the prejudice continues.) God knows we all knew about it, as kids, in the half-uncomprehending way that the kids in Never Let Me Go know that they're doomed.
It's a shame that I can never quite move beyond. I am far too conscious of who is and who isn't Jewish. I can interpret names, read physiognomies, see through assimilations. I was taught this by a zealous parent and couldn't help absorbing the information even thought I knew that the animus was wrong. (Not, I rather chickenshittily want to confess, that this parent was my "birth mother.") I was brought up on ideas about blacks that were so ridiculous that they don't trouble me. The antisemitism, however, was plausible. That's to say that it represented Jews as people who desperately wanted to enter mainstream society but were subtly, bacterially unqualified to do so. I feel like a broken thing just thinking about what was poured in my ear.
I don't think that I've ever been guilty of an act that could remotely be described as antisemitic. If anything, I've condescended overboard in the other direction. I remember a conversation with one of Kathleen's paralegals and her husband, a long time ago (firms and personnel have changed), in which I was almost hectored by the question: why would anyone want to exclude Jews from a nice suburb? I was powerless to explain. It seemed as wrong to me as it did to them. But that wasn't good enough for them. They demanded a justification that I couldn't produce. It was harrowing. And enlightening.
I hasten to add that my adoptive father was most certainly not antisemitic. He may have had a couple of prejudices as a young man from Iowa, but all his business experience taught him something that he was willing to learn. His dealings with the eminent energy lawyer, Ray Shibley, were off-limits to my mother's virulence. But he was home rather rarely.
It was a form of abuse to have been told such nonsense, and, like every victim of abuse, apparently, I will always, always feel guilty, and to no real purpose.
While I was washing up after breakfast yesterday, I noticed that the kitchen sink wasn't draining. Then I saw that it was draining - into my bathroom sink, which filled up with gross black sludge. I couldn't do anything about it with a plunger, the handyman couldn't do anything with a plunger and a short snake, and by the time the plumber arrived, shortly before eight (on a Sunday night!), I was set for really bad news, or in any case for no quick fixes. And in fact the plumber had to snake both sinks. But, pretty soon, he was done, and all I had was a lot of mess. Kathleen heroically sponged and toweled the pool of Tartarean dreck from the warped floor of the cabinet under the kitchen sink (for there was a little leak, too!). We let it dry, and went out for dinner. I was a wreck while all this was hanging overhead, but Kathleen quite blithely strung her beads, creating one summer necklace and restringing another, made of Venetian glass. Then, and for about five hours, she embarked on a pair of matching earrings. She quoted the Glen Baxter cartoon, "There was still much to learn about Szechuan cuisine."
The top stories in the current issue of The New York Review of Books are by Mark Danner, on the Downing Street Memorandum, and Joan Didion, on the Schiavo case. I recommend both - in fact, I recommend the issue itself with unusual enthusiasm, having gone from one piece to the next with unflagging interest. But "The Case of Theresa Schiavo" is a must, and, as you can see, it's online. As one would expect from Ms Didion, her essay is about the way the case was handled, or mishandled, in public discourse, and the compression of extremely fragmentary facts and hearsay into red hot factoids. Just to give an example, it is not known what caused Schiavo to suffer cardiac arrest on 25 February 1990. It was not a heart attack. It may have been a potassium deficiency - we know that the woman was severely short of potassium. But potassium deficiencies have several causes, and there was no good reason to fix one of them, bulimia, as the culprit. Bulimia corrupts the teeth in visible ways, no such confirmation was ever made. (I hereby acknowledge that I rely entirely on Ms Didion's account.)
Nor was there any reason to believe that Schiavo had in any meaningful way attested to a wish not to be kept alive with feeding tubes, should the need ever arise. Various members of the widower's family remembered her having made offhand remarks to that effect, but Ms Didion deals with these quite coolly.
(Imagine it. You are in your early twenties. You are watching a movie, say on Lifetime, in which somebody has a feeding tube. You pick up the empty chip bowl. "No tubes for me," you say as you get up to fill it. What are the chances you have given this even a passing thought?)
Indeed, the burden of Ms Didion's report is that so many of us went straight for passing thought to vehement conviction in no time at all. We were forced, by the sheer force of the current, to take positions. I recall being outraged about the political exploitation of the case, but there was nothing in the immediate family tragedy to make me comfortable enough to have an opinion. Michael Schiavo did not strike me as behaving appropriately; he seemed pretty clearly to want to "move on" from his wife's state of mind, and to marry the mother of his two children. I thought that, other things being equal, he ought to have ceded guardianship to his in-laws. But other things weren't equal. Other things were screamingly antagonistic. I didn't have the energy to insulate what I thought about Mr Schiavo as a guardian from suggesting an alliance with the in-laws' legionary supporters. And I wasn't interested enough in the Terri Schiavo's health to bone up on what few facts there were. Where would I have been sure of finding them? If I trust Joan Didion now, it's because it no longer matters whether anyone has accounted for everything; it is clear that the "issues" over which so many strangers fought were unsupported by medical reality.
And why did no one point out, when the feeding tubes were removed shortly before Easter, that the actual removal of feeding tubes until a patient completely recovers or dies is unusual? There is no need to remove tubes. You just stop filling them. In retrospect, pulling the tubes out seems barbarically pointless. It had to be painful on some level for the victim. But it seems that Terri Schiavo died a living symbol and nothing more, at least to her husband and his entourage.
There is more to Joan Didion's piece than a critique of what she refers to only in brackets as the "circus" that set up shop at Schiavo's bedside. Ms Didion also identifies the issue that nobody talked about, that, to some extent, the political frenzy was a means of avoiding.
The question began with the different ways in which we define a life worth living, but it did not stop there. The question had ultimately to do with whether or not there could be occasions when the broad economic and ethical interests of the society at large should outweigh any individual claim to either the most advanced medical attention (which Theresa Schiavo, outside the one procedure at UCSF in 1990, did not have) or indefinite care. This was the question no one on any side of the debate wanted to hear. This was the question conveniently muffled by talk about "right-to-die" and "murderers" and "mullahs," about the "freak show," the "circus."
On the day Theresa Schiavo finally died it seemed clear that the unthinkable question could for the time being remain unthought. Freed of the need to avoid confronting the presence of an actual moral dilemma, all sides could reassume their usual fencing positions. All sides could imagine that by exposing the errors of the opposition, they had advanced the public dialogue. "This is going to be an all-out culture war," someone said enthusiastically on MSNBC that evening.
"Enthusiastically" - in the days of the Enlightenment, "enthusiasm" was a failing, a surrender to irrationality. Enthusiastic talk of war - of any kind of war - is certainly that.
If I was a wreck about yesterday's plumbing problem, that was because I was wracked with guilt. I've been very cavalier, lately, about what goes down the drain - and let's leave the confession there. I will try to mend my ways.
Since when do daisies grow on trees? These aren't actually daisies, of course - but what are they? I took the photograph for its composition, not really looking at its elements. The wall, with its brick, its terracotta medallion, and its almost voluptuous rusticated stone, is typical of what's left of Henderson Place.
I've been mulling over an entry at Joe.My.God about blogging as therapy. Although I've been following Joe Jervis's site for only a short while, I'm not surprised to learn that Joe has never consulted a psychotherapist. He seems to be a very centered gentleman, and perhaps there's a biologically-based inverse proportion between neurosis and a taste for Budweiser beer. But Mr Jervis has also been lucky. It may well be that lots of New Yorkers go to therapists for handholding, but there are also many who go because of disorder in their lives. Some are unwell - clinically depressed (or trying not to be). Some are enduring the aftermath of catastrophe - the sudden loss of health, wealth, or loved ones. Some are damaged - crippled by bad parents. Because of simplistic ideas about "character," people who aren't in any of these groups are tempted to imagine that, if they were, they could tough it out on their own. Perhaps they could. But I don't think that they'd find blogging very helpful.
Americans like to think that good health is the result of virtue. The New York Times's weekly Science section is so drunk on the idea that a proper diet and regular exercise will keep you out of the hospital that it has become about as creditable as Pravda. Good habits will almost certainly keep healthy people healthier longer. But they will not prevent cancer or arthritis. They won't help the victims of hit-and-run drivers. And they will be powerless to protect anyone who has inherited a predisposition to depression. Healthy people ought to consider themselves very, very lucky - and leave it at that.
It's undoubtedly for the best that we find it difficult to imagine someone else's illness. For the matter of that, try to remember one of your own: it's not easy. But we have arrived at a level of civilization that honors the illnesses of others. We do not expect sick people to jump out of bed to check their Filofaxes. It's time for us to strive for the next peak in our social advance, and to extend this honor to the victims of mental illness. A little understanding is all that's required to distinguish malingerers and whiners from the truly ill, so there's no need to fear being taken in.
The atmosphere in Carl Schurz Park yesterday, when I came across some irises, was strongly reminiscent of Blow-Up. Momentary gusts tugged the foliage, and the foliage protested with roiling susurration. It was not warm. In the playground, the little kids were shrieking with glee while doing the only thing (I swear) that I miss about childhood: swinging.
You won't have read much about Iraq in these pages lately, and I am not going to write at length about it now. This is only a link to The Light of Reason, where Arthur Silber responds to today's news about the warcast. I am in complete agreement with Mr Silber's opinion that no progress toward peace will be made in Iraq until American troops are vacated.
What to do? Somewhat counterintuitively, I think that the only useful tactic now is to press legislators to restore the draft, in the name of national security. Progressive voters ought to do what can be done to expose the Administration's incompetence in national security affairs. Our armed services increasingly overstretched, we may, it has been predicted, have to reinstate the draft if we are still in Iraq next year. There's a message there. Press it.
In form, if not substance, Harry G Frankfurt's On Bullshit (Princeton, 2005), is a tract. There used to be many such small books of essay length, on subjects religious, political, and satirical. On Bullshit is philosophical, but even for a tract it is short. It is, however, serious and useful.
The title makes the best of a bad mess. On Bullshit is tractlike in its plain descriptiveness, and similarly old-fashioned. (Candid titles used to be the rule in the West, as they still are in China.) But the tonic is not strong enough to calm my discomfort at typing out a vulgar word. I am not squeamish, but because I associate four-letter words with anger and frustration (the conditions that provoke me to shout them), Dr Frankfurt's title triggers cognitive dissonance. Attentive readers will have noticed my home-grown euphemism, torosplat, which "means" the same thing but doesn't sound anything like bullshit. I shall not avail myself of it here. Dr Frankfurt has his reasons.
As Dr Frankfurt points out, bullshit can be true. But it is never precise, and therefore the task of fixing the concept with precision is also a matter of cognitive dissonance. What exactly are we doing here? Thankfully, Dr Frankfurt is a lucid, sensible writer, and he explains his purpose succinctly:
Continue reading "On Humbug" at Portico.
Two articles in the current issue of the The New York Review of Books underscore my sense that the Democratic Party is a dangerous obstacle to the progress of liberalism. There was really not even one solid, likeable candidate in last year's roundup of primary contenders, except perhaps Howard Dean, and he turned out to be terribly unprepared for a national campaign.
First, Thomas Frank asks "What's the Matter with Liberals?" I agree with everything about this article except its title, which stands for an equation of "Liberal" and "Democratic Party." Liberals were not responsible for this:
The illusion that George W. Bush "understands" the struggles of working-class people was only made possible by the unintentional assistance of the Democratic campaign. Once again, the "party of the people" chose to sacrifice the liberal economic policies that used to connect them to such voters on the altar of centrism. Advised by a legion of tired consultants, many of whom work as corporate lobbyists in off years, Kerry chose not to make much noise about corruption on Wall Street, or to expose the business practices of Wal-Mart, or to spend a lot of time talking about raising the minimum wage.
This strategy had a definite upside: Kerry's fund-raising almost matched that of the Republican candidate...
There you have the picture of a party that might as well call itself "The Also-Rans." And there, too, one finds the hint of a suggestion about what the Democratic Party's successor must be very clear and firm about: business. It is not enough to be "anti-business" anymore, or, rather, it is too much, counterproductive. We are all of us in business these days, buying if not selling in the national marketplace. But business today is extremely noisy: it causes too much damage, material and personal, and it hijacks too much attention. Someone out there, I hope, serious reformers are taking a good long look at the anatomy of the limited liability corporation, and finding that it is no longer a suitable template for today's highly interconnected life. Amazingly, the modern corporation isn't anywhere near two centuries old, but it has acquired an almost Mosaic venerability. I say, throw the baggage out. And so would everyone else if it were more widely understood that so many of today's executive suites are colorless but vicious replicas of the princely courts of old, with intrigue leading responsibility every time. (Here's a thought: let's let the workers elect the bosses.) Laissez-faire capitalism may have been what it took to jolt the West from an agrarian to an industrial age, but, hey, we're no longer living in a "industrial" age.
Second, Ian Buruma writes about "The Indiscreet Charm of Tyranny." (This piece is not online.) He notes that there are few big-time dictators these days, and all of them have wrecked their countries. Tongue in cheek, Mr Buruma asks what it is that makes tyrants so appealing - for to be sure they cannot rule without massive popular consent. He finds the answer in human nature:
What has not changed is human nature, the human desires that have allowed dictators to emerge in the past. The wish to worship, to be sheltered by a great father, to bask in the reflected glory of war, to be mesmerized by the spectacle of power, or swept up in collective emotion, these are still with us. And then there is the dictator's most potent weapon, our fears: of unseen enemies, threatening us abroad and at home; of individual meaninglessness and impotence; and indeed of freedom itself.
In a well-functioning democracy these emotions are defused....
If the United States is truly a functioning democracy these days, it is no thanks to the Democratic Party, which for forty-odd years has been exhorting Americans to set the unpleasant aspects of human nature aside. Leadership has been in scant supply since the departure of Lyndon B Johnson, who himself was a leader only in retrospect. Only Bill Clinton has made a plausible claim for the mantle of "great father" - and then he dropped the thing. Nor has the Democratic Party a coherent idea of religion. Beyond mumbling words of pabulum about "separation of church and state," it has nothing to offer as a vision of the church in public life. This is part of its pretense that we have outgrown religion, and the principal justification for conservative attacks against liberals. The leadership of a liberal party ought to be encouraging its supports to seize - literally! - their houses of worship as temples of respect for the integrity of diverse individuals.
How do we get rid of this wrinkled old carcass?
Here's a passage from Judith Warner's Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety:
Our baby boomer elders often call us selfish, but in doing so they miss a larger point: that what our obsessive looking-inward hides is at base a kind of despair. A lack of faith that change can come to the outside world... The desperate, grasping, and controlling way so many women go about the job of motherhood, turning energy that used to demand social change inward into control freakishness is our hallmark as a generation. We have taken it upon ourselves as super mothers to be everything to our children that society refuses to be: not just loving nurturers but educators, entertainers, guardians of environmental purity, protectors of a stable and prosperous future.
On one hand, this explains a lot. It explains the depressing lineup of stories about the nation's troubled state that Amy has gathered up at The Bisuit Report. (The quote comes from an article in the current Atlantic by Sandra Tsing Loh, "Kiddie Class Struggle.") For example: why nobody cares if George W Bush lied or is still lying about Iraq. Or if Pat Robertson compares judges adversely to terrorists. If the public sphere can't be fixed, why complain about what goes on it in? Better to stay home and optimize the kids.
But on the other hand, Ms Warner's passage makes no sense at all, at least from my perspective. Looking back on five decades of reasonably attentive life, I'm astonished by all the changes that this country has witnessed. It will suffice to name but two: the radically altered positions of blacks and women in the United States. No matter how far short of improvement these changes fall, they remain unmistakably epochal. And it is no surprise that they have not been fully or evenly digested. Nor have many of the other changes - the absence of a military draft, for one; the Internet, for another. Perhaps the most pernicious, because the most wrongheadedly pursued, has been the privileging of "self-realization."
Our society is one that's plainly in shock from too much change, which is why those who aren't standing around with their tongues lolling are combining beneath the aegis of reaction. The Democratic Party, our leading agent for change, has exhausted its energies in the good fight but is too punch-drunk to realize that it itself stands in the way, not of progress - that would entail yet more change - but consolidation, in sedulously rooting the new arrangement against all weathers. This rooting work, moreover is difficult, dull, and solitary. It is much easier to drift off to the local megachurch and chant in herds.
The only thing a super mother can produce, so far as I can see, is a cynical and anxious child. Hey Moms: Demand less of the kids and more of the world.
Somewhere in his book, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, 2004), Richard Wolin observes that criticism is intended to strengthen and improve its object; it is the opposite of hostility. Setting aside the many hatchet jobs that have passed for "criticism" over the years, I quite eagerly agreed with this distinction, and then watched the implications build up. The real object of criticism, dear reader, is you. It is to suggest good ideas and helpful ways of looking at the world that I write. It is to bolster important distinctions that are often overlooked in the everyday rush. My opinion of a given work, as such, is of little importance to me. Sometimes it is the frank attempt to persuade others that motivates me. At others, I want to call attention to recalcitrant uncertainties, bounding them with cordons if necessary but not pretending to clear them up. In the intellectual life, nothing is quite as important as the ability to suspend the rush to judgment, to hold contrarieties in the mind.
Another implication is that it's going to take me a while to build a readership. Although I haven't been blogging for a year yet, even in simulation mode, I've discovered that the Blogosphere is a contentious place. I'm not speaking of flame wars or insults. The contention is milder than that. But it is contention: argument that's more competitive than persuasive. There is also a great deal of outrage, or at least the verbal expression of it. We are perhaps living in an age of outrage, but that only makes it more vital to avoid gratuitous manifestations. The real object of my outrage, if I were to indulge it, would not be the Bush Administration or the Congress or the Media, all of whom, in my view, are derelict at their very best and usually much worse, but the voters and television viewers without whose support these institutions would be very, very different. I don't believe in blocs; I believe in individuals. We must change the fabric of the nation one person at a time. Such a project is bound to be hindered by tones of outrage.
And perhaps few readers will be comfortable with the idea that I'm talking about them. Not personally or individually, to be sure. But when I remark that, for example, Americans are going to have to reduce their consumption of petroleum in all its forms, what I'm not doing is suggesting that you wait anxiously for the government to take charge of the problem. Without a catastrophe, no "leader" is going to touch this matter unless and until voters begin to pull their heads out of the sand and demand policies - with luck, on the most local of levels possible.
And if I suggest that you read Bob Herbert's column in last Monday's Times, it's because I'd like you consider his last sentence as carefully as you can.
In one of the most interesting cross-cultural projects of recent times, The Atlantic has commissioned French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, to take a trip through the United States, following Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 footsteps. The first instalment of M Lévy's findings appear in the current (May) issue, which I encourage you to pick up even though the text is, astonishingly, available online. Where Tocqueville drew a series of broad generalizations about America and about democracy in action from his encounters, M Lévy piles up the anecdotes and lets inferences and conclusions precipitate. The installment ends with the declaration that we have become a nation of ideologues, a proposition that I'm very unhappy about having to agree with. And we have refashioned religion into something that no pious person of a century ago (much less a millennium or two) would recognize as religion. Our deity appears, in practice, to be part animist presence, part Clark Kent - a regular guy with super powers. He demands no sacrifices and will forgive all members of the club.
I don't know quite how I got this, but it's the English translation of M Lévy's interview with France-Amérique, and quite interesting in its own right. Edward Rothstein, in the Times yesterday, gave the project high marks. Be sure not to miss the anticipation, in each of these linked articles, of the installment in which, flying the author over the Grand Canyon, a helicopter pilot notes that it may have been carved by Noah's Flood.
And in Cooperstown, M Lévy finds a curious mixture of willful self-deception - nobody really believes the Genesis of baseball promulgated by the Hall of Fame - and secular religion - an awed man refers in hushed tones to imagined on-site sepulchres of great ball players.
As readers of this site will understand from my constant hectoring, religious and moral values in Cooperstown America have little to do with the either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament beyond the wallpaper effects of Tim LaHay's exciting Tribulation novels. Christianity has been boiled down to an accessible Costco of the soul. You need only sign up and affirm your membership. You can go on with your regularly scheduled activities with a clear conscience, and, as for the unscheduled activities that you wouldn't want anybody to know about, they'll be forgiven upon request.
There has always been much about institutional Christianity that was wrongheaded and oppressive. But even in the throes of its lowest-common-denominator excesses, it was usually right for most people, and liberals today are paying through the wazoo for having overlooked that FACT. Nevertheless, Christianity was, until recently, a serious, demanding faith. It was inconvenient (a point that Orthodox Jews have turned into a plus). It was hard. The religions that Bernard-Henri Lévy encounters in his travels across America - even among the Amish of Iowa - are not only easy; they're mindless.
This is the once-fabled Cocoanut Grove, a huge nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel somewhere out on Wilshire Boulevard - currently, I believe, an administration building of the Los Angeles public schools. I was never in the Grove, but I did stay at the hotel for few days in 1962. It is the black hole of my memories of a trip from Kansas City to Liberal, Kansas, thence to Santa Fe, Los Angeles, San Franciso, and, finally, to Davenport, Iowa and Chicago. The only thing that comes back about Los Angeles is that the daughter of my mother's oldest uncle, named "Tiger Lilly," drove us along Sunset Strip. I did not believe then and I don't believe now that nice people live in Los Angeles. There is something terribly wrong with the place.
Everybody knows by now that when Hattie McDaniel showed up here to accept her Gone With The Wind Oscar, she was ushered in through the kitchen. Let's hope that some parallel dishonor does not doom attempts to save the Plaza Hotel here in New York. The exterior, thankfully, can't be touched, and there's some hope that the new owners will be shamed into living up to their new acquisition. We'll let you know more after Kathleen's birthday party in ten days - we're booked for the Palm Court.
Karol Wojtyła was a holy man, but John Paul II was, while still a holy man, a terrible pope. If your idea of the pope is an ambassador to the world at large, you've got a strange idea about the papacy. If you look at the properly papal things that the pope did, you'll see a record that's quite remarkably Stalinist. Wonder where he got his ideas about running things?
The trouble with the Roman Catholic Church as an institution is that it has no place for a Karol Wojtyła except the papacy. The popes have been arrogating the Church's authority unto themselves ever since Pio Nono, and now they suck up all the oxygen in the organization. The pope is no longer primo inter pares. He's solus.
An authoritarian papacy will work in the growing Asian and African dioceses only if its positions are as conservative as the local bishops themselves. Rome ought to look to Canterbury if it seeks to hold onto Western European and North American believers. It has done itself great harm in South America by suppressing liberation theology.
Memo to cardinals: "one size fits all" won't work in a truly global church. It's time for popes to stick to the small core of Catholic dogma and leave interpretation to others.
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What sorrow. For me, not for him. Saul Bellow is dead at 89. Time to read Herzog again. Has anybody ever pointed out that herzog means duke? If so, I missed it; sorry. How did Bellow pronounce the title? I've no idea. "Her-zog"? Air-tz-ohg?" I sit here fiddling with transliterations, wishing really that I were on the verge of an English garden.
The climate of political comment has become so rank, so hormonally malodorous lately that I hesitate to applaud the Times for publishing a remarkable pair of Op-Ed pieces today. One is by former Republican Senator John C. Danforth, and the other is by former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley. Each piece advises the author's own party, not the opposition. That's a relief right there. And I could not more enthusiastically endorse what each statesman has to say.
Mr Danforth is unhappy with the conjunction of the Republican Party with conservative Christianity, and he explains quickly and lucidly why the mixing of politics with religion is inadvisable:
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.
Mr Bradley believes, as I have done for most of George W Bush's presidency, that the Democratic Party has got to take a good look at the massive but disciplined rganizational effort that made the Republican Party the political powerhouse that it is today, and he astutely traces his party's haphazard fortunes to the charisma of John F Kennedy. But no party can run on charisma alone, as the sequel to Bill Clinton's administrations shows.
If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.
Actually, I believe that progressive Democrats who happen also to be influential ought to form a new party, and call it either "Liberal" or "Progressive." Political advisers would be sure to laugh this idea down, but then few of them would have predicted the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater's campaign.
As the previous entry indicates, not much is going on at this end. I've been vacationing at the spa in our bedroom. Ordinarily, I can't wait to get out of bed, but for two days now I've had a very hard time not staying in. Don't think I'm staring at the ceiling though. I've been reading. Reading and reading and reading. I intend to do the rest of today's reading sitting up, but I think I'll actually plan next Monday's Day of Rest. I caught up on a lot of stuff yesterday, and I listened to Volume Two of Jean-Yves Thibaudet's recording of Debussy's piano music, which combines very well-known things such as the Children's Corner and the Suite Bergamasque with the highly abstract Études, not to mention the jolly "Danse (Tarantelle styrienne)." And I started reading Ceux qui prennent la large, the translation of Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away, which I've not read in the original, and, as I thought, Highsmith's kinkiness is more graceful in French. Today, I read David Owen, in The New Yorker, on the city's golf courses, of which there are many.
Something about a recent public outcry (from which I have decided to remove the feeding tube by leaving it nameless) has so heavily clouded my outlook that I can't summon my usual enthusiasm for social observation. It is not the particulars of the case itself, but the eagerness with which it was embraced, first and gratuitously by the right, then, necessarily but still too gleefully, by the left. The insistent focus on what is happening right now this very minute gives me the phobic feeling of being trapped face-up beneath a bed. A good deal of the richness of life - my life, anyway - comes from a sense of the past and an idea of the future. And a reasonably calm environment.
The question on my mind is whether Web logs can be interesting without being exciting or immodest. This is a question about readers, really. It's a question about citizens. Has the body politic developed an addiction to extremes? That's what Paul Krugman writes about in today's column. The right may be the source of much contemporary intemperance, but I can't help seeing it as a response to the anarchic left of my youth.
Although I wouldn't want to touch the point of contention among pro- and allegedly anti-Israel factions at Columbia with yard-long tongs, I'm glad that university president Lee Bollinger has spoken up.
"We should not elevate our autonomy as individual faculty members above every other value," the president, Lee C. Bollinger, said in a speech to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.
What this means, I hope, is that the freedom that professors have to explore the consequences of all conceivable ideas does not entail a license to vent personal hostility while on the job. This would include publication of the kind of intemperate remarks that have landed Ward Churchill on the hot seat. University professors ought to spend more time guiding society and less time antagonizing it.
At the same time, the American public's refusal to take an interest in the Middle East means that the debate is confined to campuses and special interests. I don't mean that we ought to have opinions about every global problem. That would be nice, but perhaps overexcited. A region to which we have committed considerable amounts of money and military force, however, would seem to merit broad public attention.
Yesterday afternoon, I was on the Lexington Avenue No. 6 train during it’s brief hour of proper functioning. I thought that it was strangely crowded, but I forgot about it as soon as I boarded the R at 59th Street. It wasn't until this morning that I found out how lucky I'd been. On the front page of the Times this morning, I read that power failures and signal breakdowns halted the East Side trains for most of yesterday’s work day. I almost threw up from sheer bitterness, but I wasn't surprised. I have decided that the following fragment from Overheard in New York captures the guiding ethos of today’s business and political leaders:
Man in fur: You know, we should get rid of the subways.
Woman in fur: Why? People ride them to get to work.
Man in fur: Exactly. The subway is the weapon of the masses.
--82nd St. and 3rd Ave.
And it isn’t just “the masses” to whom the leadership is indifferent. It’s everyone, other insiders included. The control of this country has been taken over by manic sharks who don’t give a damn about the dollar’s fall or the price of oil. They’re gleefully engaged in a destructive game of musical chairs, each convinced that he or she (but mostly he) has a good shot at the final survivorship - and, hey, when you're the one who can't find a chair, you've at least racked up a fortune mismanaging things. What kind of world the survivor will have to make do with doesn’t enter into the calculation, however, because, like sharks, these people can’t see further than the struggle for survival. They have forgotten, in their collective mania, that nobody survives indefinitely even in the best of all possible worlds, much less the one that’s taking shape on their watch. Frenzied dementia on high, narcotism (by television) below.
My head feels like a Flemish village in World War I: barraged by futility.
Well, it was probably inevitable. Dennis Brain's recording of Mozart's Horn Concerti was one of the first LPs that I owned; it was one of the four "free" discs that I got by subscribing to the Angel Record Club. (At least two of the others also featured Herbert von Karajan). By the time I'd played the Mozart into the ground, I'd "grown up," and learned to look down my nose a little at this music. Besides, the recording was monaural. Reasoning that was persuasive to a seventeen year-old took a long time to lose its grip. The other day, I ordered the recording from MHS, somewhat incredulous at EMI's having let this cornerstone recording go. (Perhaps they haven't; perhaps MHS simply picks up the marketing and distribution without buying any rights. It would be nice to know more.)
Listening to the horn concerti this morning, I dusted off some vintage mental lumber. I promise to check it out later, and don't you believe a word of the rest of this paragraph until I do. But here's what I recall: the concerti were written for Michael Puchberg, a wealthy fellow-Mason who played the instrument as an amateur. I forget how he made his money, but Mozart wrote not only the concerti for Puchberg but a lot of letters to him, begging for cash, and we know that Puchberg came through because Mozart wrote to say thanks, too - although the thank-you notes often asked for more. On top of that, the manuscript scores of the concerti are littered with insulting challenges to the soloist that are not fit for republication in this family blog. At least not until later when I've looked them up.
These Puchberg letters have contributed to the very incorrect idea that Mozart had money troubles because nobody appreciated his genius. It seems rather that Mozart was a manic-depressive who lived far beyond his means. At one point, he rented an apartment in the center of Vienna that had its own ballroom. (Mozart loved parties.) He dressed like a Kurfürst and a weakness for gems. His popularity, it is true, ebbed after the premiere of Don Giovanni in 1787, but that had almost as much to do with an expensive war against Turkey as anything else. If anything Mozart was too appreciated, in that he was seen as complicated and demanding. He asked too much of everybody.
That's why I think there ought to be a Puchberg Prize. Decency requires this award to be posthumous, but then that's when the winners will need it most. After all, who would remember Michael Puchberg if he hadn't lent money to Mozart?
As a rule, I hate long blockquotes, but Terry Eagleton's almost insanely dystopian assessment of Enlightenment civilization does not appear on Harper's Web site; nor can it be cut.
There's something awful, I've decided, in the mechanics of Movable Type's habit of underlining each date in the current calendar on which a blogger has added a new post. I don't know quite what Ben and Mena Trott were thinking; the only time I've ever found this feature useful was when Édouard revived Sale Bête. Otherwise, underlined calendar dates look like an achievement test. Did you miss one? Whatever its use to a visitor, this feature reminds me rather more graphically than I'd like of the cruel passage of time. I can remember - it was only days ago - when March was a largely un-underlined month. Now we're more than halfway through. April will be marvelous, but our arrival there will mean that the days I'm living through now are over.
The other day, I quipped that the format in which David Foster Wallace's "Host," appears in the current Atlantic might upstage its contents. I hope that that doesn't turn out to be the case. Mr Wallace, always a fan of footnotes, and even, I seem to recall, of footnotes to footnotes, has taken the aside to a new plateau of articulation. The footnotes to "Host" are signaled by lightly colored boxes that frame words in the text. These correspond to larger - well, generally larger boxes of the same color in the sidebar. This is not just a gimmick; it gives to each of Mr Wallaces notes a slightly different voice, and as most of his footnotes introduce some ironic qualification of the story, the different colors suggest, what is the case, that the note of irony shifts from note to note, ranging from faux disbelief to outright disagreement; one note consists of nothing more than "?!". Because the notes slow down the story, it might be said that the reader will have evolved a more deliberative response to "Host"; certainly the varying sizes and colors suggest a complexity of vision that would be quite beyond the power of monotonal footnotes situated in their customary place.
But "Host" is not just a delivery system for gimmicky layout.
We've been hearing from soldiers and their families that that our forces in Iraq don't have the armor that they need. Last December, Secretary Rumsfeld blithely dismissed - well, blithely for him - these complaints as so much wrongheaded sense of entitlement. You fight the war with the army you've got, he quipped, in words to that effect. But "the army you've got" is not a fact of nature. On the contrary. It is the result of decisions large and small, some of them quite mistaken.
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.
The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.
That's from Michael Moss's front-page story in today's Times, "Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq." Wishful thinking in Washington projected a traditional war of front lines and battles, and this, indeed, was what the march to Baghdad mostly was. But having reached the capital - "Mission Accomplished" - the military faced an altogether different enemy, an enemy that it has been all but powerless to check. The only thing that surprises me is that the replacement of Saddam Hussein's army by terrorist insurgents surprised the Pentagon. In any case, fighting insurgents means, first and foremost, throwing "battles" and "front lines" out the window: every soldier in a terror-inflected war is serving on the front, and the battle is non-stop. But "the army you've got" was now in the hands of comfortable uniformed executives far from the blood and dust.
But an examination of the issues involving the protective shielding and other critical equipment shows how a supply problem seen as an emergency on the ground in Iraq was treated as a routine procurement matter back in Washington.
The Secretary of Defense is mentioned only twice in Mr Moss's story, first in connection with his atrocious response to soldiers in December, the second in a reference to the resignation of Thomas E White, the Secretary of the Army who resigned, according to Mr Moss, "after a falling out with Mr Rumsfeld" in April, 2003. Funny, I thought that Mr White's Enron background had something to do with that resignation, but no matter, no matter. Mr Rumsfeld was on my mind in every paragraph of the story; I was stuck, as it were, on the "supply chiefs" who had told General Cody that soldiers who weren't in the "front lines of battle" could "do without." Could these be officers who survived the Army purge that Seymour M Hersh exposed two years ago, in an article that I hope The New Yorker will maintain on-line until our Iraqi misadventure is over, "Offense and Defense"?
Gradually, Rumsfeld succeeded in replacing those officers in senior Joint Staff positions who challenged his view. “All the Joint Staff people now are handpicked, and churn out products to make the Secretary of Defense happy,” the planner said. “They don’t make military judgments—they just respond to his snowflakes.”
As always with the mess in Iraq, we come back to the TPFDL - the "time-phased, forces-deployment list," and Mr Rumsfeld's contempt for this painstaking distillation of military experience. Sticking to the "tip-fiddle" would certainly not have saved every soldier's life. But General Cody might have been able to rely on more trustworthy supply chiefs.
Memo to Robert H Scales: Prepare to be branded for aiding and abetting the enemy!
"This is a new age in war with an enemy that adapts faster than we do," said Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., retired, a former head of the Army War College. "Al Qaeda doesn't have to go to the Board of Accountability in order to develop a new roadside bomb or triggering device."
Why do I bother to write this out? Because one can't do enough to demonstrate that the Administration's radical wishful thinking is the real menace facing our troops in Iraq.
The other day, I spent most of the afternoon writing an analysis of Book Second, Chapter 1 of The Ambassadors, the first of Henry James's trio of late, great novels. I wanted to show that the conversation that takes up most of the chapter is a paraphrase of the serpent-in-the-garden story with which the Bible really begins (it is at any rate the first instance of conflict or difficulty), but, true to my author's spirit, I neglected to mention this; I had made the point in an earlier post and apparently didn't think that it needed repeating. As I worked, a vague incredulity perfumed the room: why on earth was I spending so much time on one chapter of a novel? Other demands scratched at my conscience, but I steadfastly put them aside, sure that what I was doing - writing an explication de texte - was what I ought, supremely, to be doing. Even if it was also great fun.
How warped! And how eye-opening, later, so feel from inside what must have been James's disappointment at the muted reception of his work, which most readers then, like most readers now, found rather hard to read. (They at least had, those contemporary readers, the advantage of readily understanding James's tony slang.) The novels that we call "difficult" are usually hard to follow because they don't observe the rules of causality, or because they're written largely in metaphor; in short, because the author writes from a secret cave to which you will have to find your way if you want to understand what he's writing about. But the difficulty of Henry James's late fiction is altogether different: the narrative is straightforward, even banal, but there is in an intense resistance to the idea of calling a spade a spade. A spade might be called almost anything else. This indirection is not gratuitous; the whole point of it is to make the reader sit up and pay attention.
In my commentary, I remarked that there is probably no passage in all of The Ambassadors in which the author clearly and distinctly tells the reader just what it is that Lambert Strether is supposed to accomplish in Paris. The information is dribbled out in fragments and implications. Anybody who has got through the novel can tell you what Strether's mission is, but any reader who has got through the novel has worked hard, for a reader. The veteran reader - the reader who is coming back for a second look - will have an easier time of it. I have read the novel three times (I think), and I'm finding it almost as plain as day. I still stumble; there are sentences that I have to reread, and perhaps even parse. But the vista is astonishing - when it isn't terrifying. I still don't know how to summarize it without crushing the excitement out of it. You have to be there.
And yet why, in an age of notoriously easy entertainments, should you bother? The question is entirely rhetorical; I don't believe that anyone ever really asks it of oneself. Either it never comes up, because the answer is obvious and inescapable, or it is lodged argumentatively, as an excuse or explanation for not bothering. You bother because the effort and the experience alike are good for you, in that they make you more alert and alive, but you bother also because there is no question of "bother" when so much pleasure is involved. It is an acquired pleasure, certainly, but it is nonetheless real for that.
A remark of Susan Sontag's has been haunting me. It appeared after her death, in one of the many published memories of her vitality. These all had the effect of making Sontag more approachable and less hieratic, but none was more "mortal" than the one that's been on my mind. She was telling someone she knew about how filled with ambition she was when she came to New York as a young woman. She was going to read all the books - the books she hadn't already read - and understand all the arguments and make her mark in the bazaar of ideas. Well, she made it. But she never got over her surprise that the number of people fired by the same ambition was small.
This site is dedicated to everyone for whom the prospect of being the smartest person in the room is a glimpse of living hell.
Sure, the Gannon/Guckert story is amusing in itself. In its sick little way. But beneath this tale of the hustler-fluffer (that was Gannon's role at the White House, wasn't it?) there is a very serious story, and it has nothing to do with national security. Well, not directly. The New Yorker kicked off this week's Talk section with a pithy summary of the affair and the opinion that it be dubbed "Nothinggate," because, with both houses of Congress controlled by legislators still loyal to the White House, official hearings are unlikely, and we may never learn just how Mr Guckert got those credentials. Meanwhile, however, the more serious story concerns the reluctance of the mainstream media to cover the cascade of embarrassing revelations about Mr Guckert's various Web sites. We all know that the Rove White House has perfected the art of cowing the contemporary press corp, but how in tarnation did the press corps ever become so cowable?
The other day, I wrote about improving my manners when advancing the liberal agenda. To a great extent, this would be the same thing as bothering to advance the liberal agenda. It certainly wouldn't involve making significant alterations to the liberal agenda for the sake of appealing to illiberal people.
The first lesson in manners is to understand where other people are coming from. That's what distinguishes true politeness from an act. Sometimes, however, one simply doesn't understand where other people are coming from, and in such cases one can only fall back on understanding one's own very imperfect understanding in a way that's not condescending, that doesn't announce the opinion that some people come from places that aren't worth knowing about. (As in: "South Bend! It sounds like dancing.")
So what I'm trying to understand right now - what I've been trying to understand since whenever it was that I grasped that the Kerry campaign was not going to be an easy winner - is the appeal of George W Bush and the appeal of his Administration's policies. These are two very different things. The man inspires the respect of voters who don't understand his policies, while his policies command the loyalty of voters who, privately, can't stand the man. His very unfitness for office gives him an advantage over other contenders, because it widens his constituency to include a mass of resentful conspiracy theorists who are prone to blame others for everything that's wrong in their lives.
Wait a minute. What happened to manners?
I have nothing to say to people who genuinely admire President Bush as man. I don't address myself to them. It's for the voters who like what his Administration is doing - or, to put it better, who dislike what his Administration isn't doing - that I frame what I have to say about the body politic on this site. And this is where I have to leave off, because I'm on the steepest part of the learning curve.
Thinking further along the lines of yesterday's post, "Conventions of Disrespect" (see below), I thought that I'd say a few things about the regrettable side-effects of our bottom-up, decentralized school governance system, which gives local civilians with (very possibly) no academic or intellectual qualifications a leading role in determining how and what kids are taught. For many reasons, decentralization has never struck me as a good idea. Never mind what the reasons are; it's enough to confess that I'm an arrogant liberal. That's to say that I prefer the European model, which concentrates power in the hands of the manifestly, demonstrably intelligent, and which coordinates curricula throughout the land. Keeping experts at bay has been so deeply built into the American way of doing things that it would take a crisis of religious hysteria to put this country on the European course.
My arrogance betrayed itself in my Google search. "Lowest common denominator," "school district," "textbook" - I was fishing for a particular kind of page, one that would argue my already-held ideas and, with luck, join an authoritative chorus of support. What I got was rather different. I stumbled on a few well-written sites that I want to spend a little more time on before summarizing them here. Had I found what I was looking for, what you're reading now would have written itself. Instead, I'm groping. (Does it show?) I've been tossed back on one of two lessons that I've learned during these years of conservative hegemony: liberals are eating the bitter fruit of decades of swaggering presumption. (The other lesson concerns "moral values" and resistance to the shift away from what I call the Augustinian Settlement - you'll find that among the Categories, below right.) The sooner we learn why we've been served this bitter fruit, the sooner we'll begin to move on.
The casual reader, eyeing the phrase "arrogant liberal," might make the snap judgment that this is a conservative blog, and there would be some truth to that, although not the kind of truth that's popular in Washington these days. In fact, though, I do identify myself as an arrogant liberal for the simple reason that I've never been allowed to forget that I am one. For most of my life, I've stirred up a running low boil of resentment. I'm big, I'm smart, and, at least when I'm holding forth, I'm not the best listener. I can control a conversation the way a good cowboy herds cattle, and it shows. And I certainly like to hold forth. I have learned that I can whip up a load of resentment in no time. It's the sort of resentment to which a younger me used to respond with scorn, dismissing it as a failing that only proved the resenter's unworthiness. Middle age has made me rather more reflective.
Now I see that it's the sort of resentment that put George W Bush in the White House.
After World War II, liberals became passionate about civil rights. From a standpoint of pure self-interest, they learned from the McCarthy travesty that bright, inquiring minds could be marginalized in the same way that Afro-Americans were. But completing the work begun in 1861 and so malignantly forestalled was obviously a fight for the good. As blacks were enfranchised, the public began to pay a new attention to the circumstances of black society in America, and a very liberal connection between education and prosperity led to a vast increase in the funding of social and educational programs that, inevitably, sported plenty of instances of waste and folly. (Liberals believe that improved school systems will produce an improved society. Conservatives see the importance of education, too, but they believe that a bright person will make the most of whatever educational opportunities are available. That is conservative arrogance.) But liberals were so convinced that what they were doing was right, so very - although they would have choked on the term - self-righteous and optimistic about social engineering that they deflected criticism. Only nasty old bigots ("John Birchers") could be opposed to the liberal project.
So you can see who taught whom this bad habit, so loudly decried by today's liberals, of refusing to hear what you don't want to hear.
That the liberal project did have right on its side remains, for me, a core belief. But I have been taught this bitter lesson: for the project to advance, I and every other liberal will have to work on my conversational manners.
Over the weekend, I took a look at Daily Howler, the often intemperate scourge of journalism. One thing that drives the author, Bob Somerby, bonkers is the self-censorship that has induced mainstream journalists to take the Bush Administration at its own word. Last Friday, Mr Somerby scolded E J Dionne, of the Washington Post, for making the following remark:
More than any of his predecessors, President Bush understands the conventions of journalism and the traditions of political debate. These require that respectful attention be paid to whatever claims the president makes. Journalists who have the temerity to question whether the claims ring true (or whether the numbers add up) can count on being pummeled as liberal ideologues, even when they are only seeking the facts.
The last part of this passage certainly appears to state the truth. It's as simple as the chanting at a football game. The Administration's My Way/Highway philosophy is rigorously enforced. Criticize any of the President's men, and you will promptly and unthinkingly be plastered with "liberal bias" labels, or some other equally unlovely marker accusing the bearer of self-interest. Once applied, these labels are impossible to remove quickly, and the awkward business of peeling them off makes dignified rebuttal impossible. This has made reporters cautious and, yes, a mite obsequious. Or, in Mr Somerby's view, cowardly.
Sorry—there simply is no “convention of journalism” which requires respectful treatment of bald-faced misstatements. As civics textbooks tell your eighth-graders, traditions of journalism require skeptical, aggressive “attention” to such misstatements by presidents.
Mr Somerby is probably correct, from a journalism-school point of view, to deny the existence of Mr Dionne's "conventions." But I can't see that scolding journalists is going to get anyone anywhere. What if we rewrite Mr Dionne's observations thus:
More than any of his predecessors, President Bush understands the a sizable bloc of American voters is tired of the conventions of journalism and the traditions of political debate.
Everything that Mr Bush does in public is meant to be seen by his supporters. This is so obvious that we forget earlier times in which statesmen did not calibrate every gesture to the fine-grained prejudices of their constituents, who could be presumed to be paying less than constant attention. Cable TV and the Blogosphere have eliminated such unguarded moments. The President, accordingly, does not answer questions from the Press. He retrofits questions into launch pads for the statements that he knows his supporters want to hear. The conventions of journalism are utterly irrelevant to these people - where they are not actually objectionable. These people have had it with political debate, which they understand to be loaded with terms of art that don't quite mean what the man in the street thinks they mean. These people are sick and tired of seeing their leaders harassed by eggheady East Coasters. They demand that he be shown the "respectful attention" to which their support entitles him.
The President's success does not stem from the success of his policies. What success? It does not stem from widespread support for his Administration's often radical ideas about changing government in particular and the United States in general. It has nothing to do with actions, but is a response to George W Bush's image. I used to wonder why the Republican Party chose this man as its candidate for the highest job in the land, but now I see the genius of Karl Rove's Machiavellian shrewdness. In Mr Bush, the Republicans presented a man who would strongly appeal to a hitherto overlooked bloc of voters while so infuriating the liberal enemy that it would be reduced to spluttering squawks of outrage.
(For a concise description of the hitherto overlooked bloc of voters, see the exchange of letters among Andrew Hacker, Paul Cohen, and Mark Danner at the back of the current issue of the New York Review [Vol 52, No. 4 - not online as of this writing].)
In Monday's Times, there was an Op-Ed piece by Judith Warner that I would have linked to, but I'd already posted the day's Loose Links and couldn't be bothered. This morning, though, I found that it had provoked The Biscuit Report to do something that it normally doesn't: talk about Baby Biscuit. I hope to come back to this matter after lunch, but I'll post now in hope of comments.
Ms Warner writes about a tendency among parents (one she does nothing to document) to put their children where their spouses ought to be in their love-lives.
If you flip through the magazines aimed at moms this month, you'd be hard pressed to find much talk of romance, unless you count all the articles on modern marriage's lack of romance, which are legion: Working Mother pleads, "Make Time for Your Valentine." Good Housekeeping insists, "Men can be romantic." Child magazine offers tips on "Staying Lovers While Raising Kids." And Parents, acknowledging that marriage with children often feels "about as romantic as changing a dirty diaper," offers advice for getting "back in the groove," like establishing "no-sex nights." (Absence makes the heart grow fonder?)
In many marriages, erotic love has been supplanted by what The New Yorker once called "the eros of parenthood." Up to 20 percent of couples now report having sex no more than 10 times a year, qualifying them for what the experts call "sexless marriages." Many mothers freely admit to preferring their children's touch to their husband's, without regret or shame.
Where did our love go? Look no further than the adorable little girl on the cover of this month's Parents, clutching a huge, red-sequined heart in her chubby little hands. According to a recent report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, children are a "growing impediment" to a happy marriage.
What this tells me is that there are a lot of parents who haven't grown up themselves, and that, basically is the point that Amy makes at TBR when she writes about "attachment parenting":
The Wikipedia entry on attachment parenting is a bit of a caricature of it -- describing a parenting style in its maximal forms and with all the other cultural choices that are more-or-less associated with it. I would lean more toward the minimal description: raising your children secure in the knowledge that too much love won't hurt them. Lots of parents who "do attachment parenting" are anxious, rigid, and obsessive about the rules they follow, about what they must do for their kids, about, generally, doing everything right. So, for that matter, are lots of other parents. There are all kinds of 'systems' out there, and they do make parents crazy. Lots of families involved in "attachment parenting" end up with a rigid division of labor in which the mother is basically completely responsible for the kids and must be incredibly available to them, and the father is busy at work all the time. So, too, do lots of families who don't "attachment parent". Parental anxiety and preoccupation with their kids is real, and no doubt it does put a real strain on some marriages, but my own observations (anecdotal of course, but I didn't see any hard citations in Ms. Warner's essay, either) lead me to believe that parents become preoccupied with their kids because their marriages aren't so great to begin with, not vice-versa. If a husband works 80-hour weeks and the wife is busy with kiddie activities all the time, or if both work all the time and spend their little spare time in a "quality" way with the kids, then yeah, I'll bet the marriage is going to suffer. And it'll suffer whether the toddlers are still nursing and sleeping in the parents' bed.
It has always seemed to me that many children are conceived faute de mieux. What do we do now, honey? How do we sustain this relationship beyond what's looking more and more like its natural expiration date? Divorce is no longer frowned upon, but I suspect that it remains wrenching and humiliating for most people. I am not saying that many babies are born in order to save marriages; that would be wildly overdramatic. But I sense that many couples turn to parenthood as a way of turning away from the deep friendship that distinguishes marriage from a legitimized love affair. This kind of friendship is never as easy as it looks, and it requires change on both sides, as the spouses literally grow closer together. The time to begin working on this friendship is the moment when it begins to require it; that is, at the very moment when one begins to wonder if one has chosen the right mate. It is an awkward, even sickening moment, and children simplify everything. Instead of growing together, spouses become "mommy" and "daddy." Mind you, I am speaking only of couples that drift into parenthood or yield to family pressure. There are lots of loving couples who know exactly what they're doing when they decide to have children, and who know themselves well enough to live up to their commitments. But I don't think that such people constitute a majority of parents. The self-consciousness of the magazine articles that Ms Warner cites alone suggest that they're not.
What happens next, faute d'amitié, is the withering of the attachment between husband and wife, and the intensification of parental feelings that Amy mentions.
Here, it seems to me, the fundamental question is one of narcissism - of whether the child is seen as an extension of the parent or as an autonomous person. As someone for whom neither childhood nor parenting was ever straightforward, I've concluded that children never match their parents' love, and that they don't understand this until they have children of their own. It is the role of a parent to help a highly dependent baby become a highly independent adult, and the leading edge of independence sets the child apart from its parents. I have always been surprised by the weedlike persistence of my unwillingness to recognize my daughter's independence. Oh, she might do whatever she likes - so long as she remains, in ways that I like, a reflection of me. I've had to learn to be proud of her. Disconnecting the longing to see her grow in my direction from my behavior has proved to be difficult and painful.
Everything was so much simpler when paternal authority went unquestioned, and when marriage marked a woman's move from one kind of servitude to another. Yes, sir, it sure was simpler.
The heading refers to a great limerick by Felicia Lamport Kaplan. Anybody ever hear of her?
Two things have conspired to focus my attention on academic freedom of speech. First, being called "a radical and a fool" at the dinner table because I disparaged the tenure system, and, second, reading Amy's clever take on Lawrence Summers's latest impersonation of a loose cannon.
On the one hand, there is the First Amendment. On the other hand, there is professional responsibility.
Andrew Sullivan has published bits of email in which two of his readers attempt to calm him down about torture. (To his credit, Mr Sullivan can't be calmed.) It is very hard to read the snips without wishing that the people who wrote them had never been taught to read and write. What is the point of an education if it produces a mind capable of the following silliness - which would be silliness tout court if it were not attached to a voter's hand:
Since you want to continue to wallow in the Abu Ghraib "torture" allow me to point out a number of observations. Firstly, I pride myself on a skill that involves the dissection of pictures that would appear to portray certain things. I've looked carefully at the Abu Ghraib human "pyramid" and my assessment is that the prisoners in that particular picture are complicit in this so-called "torture". I see a scenario wherein the guards say; "Hey, lets have some fun, you guys get naked and get into a pile and we'll get some pictures". Some say absolutely not and do not participate. Others say "Okay but we need to hide our faces". Hence the pictures depict hooded prisoners
I'd love to know where this creep went to school. That he - almost certainly a "he" - hasn't been snapped up by the MSM for his "skill" at analyzing photographs must tax his little brain. "Firstly," "wherein," "Hence" - fancy, bogus usage that's as off as spoiled milk. The best part, of course, is the speculation about prisoners who refused to "participate": because there aren't any photographs of them, the entire romp was purely optional. Whee! Nothing short of encephalectomy will fix these circuits.
Because I was on the subway at the time, I didn't take good notes of the Eureka moment, but I saw, as the IRT rumbled northward yesterday, that the key to George W Bush's appeal (to those who find him appealing) may be that he is known to have experienced rebirth. At the age of forty (this would have been in 1986), the future president stopped drinking alcohol, an act of will that heralded his overall spiritual regeneration. The mean-spirited frat boy, best-known as an enforcer of loyalty to his father, became the very nice man we see today, with the help of Jesus and a loving wife.
What I grasped on the subway was not the truth of this fairy tale, but its urgency for millions of Americans - American men especially. The sacrament of rebirth, which would have been scoffed at by our grandfathers, has become a crucial part of the American way ever since Jimmy Carter confessed to lust in his heart. Nobody cared if he was saved, it's true, but his successor in the White House, Ronald Reagan, transmuted good old American reinvention into something more transcendental, at least in the eyes of his admirers. The traditional understanding of character, as a trait just as God-given and inalterable as one's height or one's gender, was junked for a more flexible model. Nowadays, character is little more than an opportunistic aptitude for recognizing and seizing second chances. And nobody has more of that than Mr Bush, who, after all, must have spent a good part of his youth trying to convince his elders that he would really behave this time.
From the rehabilitation of fraudulent, philandering televangelists to the other day's "accountability moment," America has been demonstrating for twenty-odd years now that it is besotted by faith in fresh starts. What Bush may have had over Kerry last fall was a reputation for whipping inner demons. Mr Kerry's inner demons, if he had any, were too polite, too prone to speak French during exorcisms. What Americans want just now is a former screw-up who can convince us that he will never screw up again.
Never screw up exactly how?
"Fascism" hasn't been much in currency since the late Sixties, when "fascist" was a sloppy epithet aimed at anyone who supported the Vietnamese misadventure or who opposed long-haired demonstrators. It was pretty clear that actual fascism was not in the offing. Now, however, I'm often afraid that it is, and I think that a good working definition is in order. I'd like to collect ideas, so please comment. We need to know what we're up against, and a liberal consensus on the subject would be very useful.
As I see it, fascism is a parapolitical reaction to secular socialism - and I think that it must be seen as a reaction; fear is a prime motivator. To its advocates, fascism is a mighty fortress where traditional values are safe and outsiders know their place. I call it "parapolitical" because it exploits the machinery of politics to achieve transpolitical aims; fascism envisions the end of politics. The president's remark about "an accountability moment" was perhaps the most purely fascist statement ever to issue from the White House. In Bush's view, an election becomes a ratification, annulling the need for further debate, or really for any kind of discussion.
Fascism harbors the dream of an apolitical democracy, where everything works harmoniously because everyone has the same outlook. "Diversity" is tolerated only to the extent that it is merely decorative. Disagreement and protest are forms of treason.
Never mind why (I didn't rent it), but we watched De-Lovely last night, the Cole Porter biopic starring Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd. I still don't know what Kathleen expected, but I was prepared to dislike it as much as Amadeus. Hollywood hasn't done very well by famous composers; the only interesting films with a serious-music edge are melodramas from the Forties like Humoresque and The Great Lie. Cole Porter probably had the most filmable biography of any composer. (Gershwin, as we were reminded in last week's New Yorker, was shunned by everybody for bad behavior until the doctors finally discovered a massive brain tumor a day or so before he died - who wants to sit through that?) His story would be interesting even if he'd never written a single hit. Given this second account of one of the truly fabulous American lives of the Twentieth Century, I've come to believe that it was the greatness of Porter's work that got in the way.
I don't intend to write a little review of the movie, which is, in the end, worth seeing, and which has many good points, not the least of which is Ms Judd's ailing Linda Lee toward the end. What angers me about De-Lovely is its falsification of the Porter marriage. In the movie, Cole Porter is an introspective fun-seeker who likes to go to bed with men, but whose heart belongs to a wonderful woman whose love, in return, allows him a very long leash. Perhaps the real Cole Porter would have been happy with this emotional arrangement, had it been available. But it wasn't. Porter was a gay man living in the beau monde who was lucky enough to find a woman of the world who also wanted to be married in the beau monde. Linda Lee was a friend, perhaps even a very close friend - I don't know - but she did not have any claims on Porter's heart, nor could she solace it. Porter didn't look anything like Kevin Kline (he was far shorter, far plainer, and his voice was totally tenor), and his love-life was the usual upper-crust cliché of brief, impossible romances. These inspired many of his songs, so it would have been edifying to see more of them, but in De-Lovely they're nothing but inconsequential flings, menacing nothing worse than the occasional logistic embarrassment. We're asked to applaud the film's bravery in so much as it acknowledges Porter's carnal circuitry, but we're denied the opportunity to see it in operation.
For a thousand, or perhaps only one or two, good reasons, Hollywood still has trouble with homosexuality, and, yes, it ought to be applauded for trying to cope. There are still millions and millions of Americans who, this year anyway, are ready to believe that the normalization of "deviancy" is all Kinsey's fault, and to follow "experts" who deploy pseudo-scientific balderdash in the attempt to return to a world that even Norman Rockwell would have found falsely saccharine. That's why I think that the better course would have been simply not to make De-Lovely, to let the story wait for a better future. The high-concept aspects of the movie - great songs sung by hot, current artists, such as Mr and Mrs Elvis Costello and Sheryl Crow; the glamorous Gatsby-era sets and costumes - can't save this false-hearted version of an intriguing story; they only make it more meretricious, like brandy on top of bad fish. The screenplay is deeply untrue to Porter and to the sorrows of gay life at a particular moment in the past, but the movie itself is even worse, because it transforms Ashley Judd into a matron who could easily be Margaret Dumont's younger sister, without any redeeming camp effect. The capable cast and crew of De-Lovely have been grossly disserved by a marketable lie. Cole Porter, his music and his reputation will survive. But most gay people will have been moved back a couple of spaces on the board game of life. Perhaps I'm asking too much. Perhaps we ought to welcome the measure of social progress that will tolerate homosexual sex as long as loving wives are willing to do so.
The contents of this page can be found at "A Week in Istanbul" at Portico.
By this time today, I thought there would be more chat about the Times article about the Christmas Tsunami and the Blogosphere. Headlined "Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate," John Schwartz's article proceeds to make a much more balanced assessment of how the Blogosphere handled its first whopping natural disaster. I don't know what to make of the oft-cited "tension" between bloggers and mainstream journalists, because while it would be naive or wrongheaded to deny that the 'Sphere is a source of news (witness, for example, Gothamist, which had much better photographs of the anti-Bush banner-at-the-Plaza stunt than did the Times - and more of them, too), I don't regard professional journalism as a model for what's going on at most of the blogs that interest me. I'm certainly not in the news business. (That's why I haven't done the newsreader thing yet. The very terminology put me off. Consider this a solicitation for recommendations: d'you know of a good service?) And at the "political" blogs there is often an air - a pong, really - of a high school corridor at lunch time, with everyone excited about something that nobody's going to remember next week. It's early days yet, so comparing and contrasting blogs and newspapers is bound to fall somewhere between the tentative and the premature.
The headline, though, looks like pretty clear proof of the mild hostility that many bloggers have attributed to newspaper editors. Further evidence is provided by the callout (subtitle), which might well have been used instead: "While chaotic, Web log discussion can be self-correcting." That, it turns out, is the actual gist of Mr Schwartz's story.
Then on the Op-Ed page, there is a pair of French-accented essays. The one on top is a silly argument by a writer for National Review, John J. Miller. He urges President Bush to deal with the French (and their opposition to the "war in Iraq") by - ignoring them.
Thinking otherwise [i.e., that the French are "important"] only buys into the Gaullist claim that France should occupy a place of reverence in the community of nations. But why should its views matter any more than, say, Italy, those population and economy are nearly the same size?
This is ahistorical claptrap. France and Italy may be similarly-sized nations today, but that's a very recent development, and, as for foreign affairs, no two countries could trace more antithetical histories. Italian politics - the politics of Italy's myriad historic autonomies - tends always toward the solipsistic; Italians are relatively uninterested in the other peoples of the world. The French, to be sure, are only slightly behind them when it comes to the conviction that it's regrettably unlucky to be born anywhere else, but the French are missionaries, proselytizing their grand culture and way of life to whomever will listen. That's why, as I remarked here yesterday, there are more people who speak French as a foreign language than there are native speakers. There's a real distinction between what I'll call la France profonde, that aspect of France that is accessible only to natives, and la mode française, which, beyond being available to anybody who sets foot on French soil, can even be exported with some success. The same distinction could be made between the American heartland and this country's "popular culture," but the French export is incontestably superior. My response to Mr Miller is that we ought to imitate Italy and stop trying to guide the peoples of the earth toward democracy or anything else. Like the Italians, we're insufficiently interested in foreigners to learn how to help them.
The other piece is by Antoine Audouard, a French writer who has recently moved to New York. He writes very sensibly about French-bashing in the media, about the association that Muddle-Minded people make between arrogance and the ability to speak French, and about the French delusion that alleges the equal value of each nation's contribution to the other's welfare. He rightly deplores the idea of disliking any given nationality.
Americans themselves are sometimes confronted with this kind of absurd hostility abroad. Of all nationalities, they should be the first to stay away from it. After all, diversity and respect for other cultures are among the core values on which America was founded - and by which Americans thrive.
Or so I thought, too, M Audouard, until I learned that the vast majority (apparently) of Americans don't have passports, and don't have much use for diversity, either.
Despite being down with a virus, and taking care of a similarly afflicted child, Amy at The Biscuit Report has composed an ardent manifesto for dealing with the creeping pestilence of fascism in the United States. She was inspired by Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free of 1955. I have taken her five points and appended my own responses, but I urge you to read Amy first and then return here. Post any responses at both sites.
1. First, and most importantly, we cannot wait to be
certain before acting, and acting in a way that does put our own selves at risk.
While I agree with Biscuit's remarks dismissal of "waiting for
certainty," I think it's easier to remark that we are already quite certain that
the Administration is reckless and incompetent. There is no need here to argue
that case. But we ought to be prepared to argue it, concisely as
possible, to others. Which is why, upon consideration, I not only didn't remove
the Blog Roster's link to Winning Arguments but wrote to its author, who
has stopped adding posts, asking him not to remove the blog from the 'Sphere.
Another thing that we can be certain of is that the drift toward fascism will involve billions of small decisions - and hesitations - by millions of Americans. This is the tide that we must redirect wherever possible, with whomever possible.
According to the latest Census, Anglos are no longer the majority ethnic group in Texas. Make that "Tejas" (TAY-hoss). Today's Times reports the latest round of skirmishing on the "We Say/Nosotros Digamos" front in the Lone Star State, where "surging" Hispanic populations see no reason not to restore the local nomenclature to its original pronunciation. "Juh-SIN-ta" or "Ha-SEEN-toe"? What caught my eye was the following pearl of provinciality, which appeared in a letter to the editors of the Houston Chronicle.
"I have no beef with whatever language people want to speak at home," wrote A. W. Mohle Jr. of Houston, "but if you're going to live here, then by speaking 'American' in public, you will have a much better opportunity of being accepted as American."
In the Sixties, red-state patriots of Mr Mohle's persuasion urged this country's native critics to "Love It or Leave It." Let's not have any more of that. To such lazy-minded patriots I reply: "Learn It or Drop It." You know perfectly well what the other guy is saying. This is a big country, remember? How do you pronounce "Houston"? Depends upon which eponym you're thinking of. Texan Sam, or New Yorker William?
The Anglophone habit of going out of one's way to murder the pronunciation of foreign languages (under the impression that the ostentatious display of ignorance is the mark of true superiority) has to be one of the greatest black marks against the culture of the Atlantic Isles.
In a conversely-related note, I learned from a table in The Economist yesterday that of the eleven major languages spoken on the planet, the number of people who speak French as a second language is greater than the number of those who are born to it. (Just in case you thought English was going global.) Far more people speak English, of course, but that's as a native language; the French work very hard to keep their language alive in former colonies and areas of influence, not, apparently, without success. For reasons that I will explain as the week goes on, I am wondering which language I might find more useful in Istanbul.
The Biscuit Report has an important, and very balanced, post on the subject of antidepressant medication. Biscuit has submitted several letters to the New York Times, and it's a shame that they haven't at least published the following paragraph:
There are no antidepressants on the market today (and perhaps none are possible) that take less than several weeks to have an antidepressant effect Anyone who has ever been through it could tell you that those weeks of waiting and wondering if the drug will work, if any drug will work, or if you are just to be left to rot inside you own personal mental hell, are excruciating. It doesn't matter how much doctors explain that it takes a few weeks, a depressed person responds by feeling immediately hopeful (wow, there is something actually wrong with me; there are drugs that can help) and then, when everything isn't instantly okay, more hopeless than before. When each minute is torture to live through, several weeks is too long, and the thought that the drugs might not work at all makes suicide a tempting option.
Antidepressants might not seem to be a very seasonal topic, but unfortunately they are. For anyone beyond the mildest stages of clinical depression, the cheerful, colorful clatter of the holidays can be unbearable. Healthy people will have trouble understanding why; let me suggest this: to feel absolutely nothing (besides fatigue) when surrounded by festivity is something like being buried alive. The shortness of daylight enhances the claustrophobia.
My horizons have been broadened this weekend, and now they include The Biscuit Report. (Finally, someone who agrees with me about William Safire!) I'm going to throw away this site's Mission Statement and replace it with the following:
Private intellectuals are people who think about public policy, politics, 'issues', philosophy, the meaning of life, and all that stuff on, amazingly, their very own time. Living the examined life and all that. They are likely to be paid to think in their day jobs, but to think about things like UML diagrams, brand visibility, bond markets, databases, or other things that are important only in so much as they fuel the economy and provide a paycheck (and, if you're very lucky, health insurance...). But while some company is leasing their brain, theoretically at 100% CPU time, they actually have a lot of other processes going on in the background, thinking about the stuff that really matters. And they come home and blog about it, or blog about it at work when they are supposed to be working on a slide presentation, and maybe their blogs don't get much traffic, but in having to write down their thoughts they get to organize them, they make sense of the information overload caused by too many newsfeeds, and maybe some readers read about things they wouldn't otherwise read about, and think about things they wouldn't otherwise think about, and so the blogging of private intellectuals, we amateurs, is a kind of grassroots movement to make serious thinking into a national pasttime, so that we can become again, perhaps, a nation of informed citizens
I hope that Biscuit has just outlined your reasons for paying attention to this site.
Beyond an everyday attentiveness to providing for food, clothing, shelter, and recreation, economic self-interest has never seemed a very compelling force to me. Most people seem to pursue their ideas of success without much regard for the personal bottom line, and most people also strike me as not wanting to think very much about that line in the first place. I've known men who enjoyed turning profits well enough, but they always had, for me, the air of happy gardeners, delighted to see what seeds and soil turned up. The person who would abandon a job paying $150,000 for another paying $151,000 (other things being equal) must, I think, be extremely rare, and quite probably troubled.
So I don't expect dollars and cents to play much of a role in political calculations. When they appear to do so, it's a front for something else. When voters appear to get mad about taxes, for example, they're really angry about how they think their tax dollars are being spent - or upon whom - or about the arguable incompetence that would explain persistent tax hikes. In the right circumstances, people will happily pay high taxes. Westchester County, north of the City, contains more than few villages where high property taxes support excellent public schools. These school districts are cooperatives, effectually, for the parents of school-aged children. When your children have gone through the system, you can stay, if you like, but you can leave, too, and make room for a family like the one yours used to be.
A parent in one of these towns might very well argue that he is sending his children to good schools so that they will eventually win lucrative employment. But that is daydreaming, wishful thinking at best, and certainly not economic self-interest, narrowly conceived.
Free market economics are popular with Americans not because they benefit from them, but because free market economics militate against schemes for the redistribution of income, or welfare. When most people feel that their prosperity is in retreat, they are understandably unwilling to allow the government to appropriate any of their dwindling resources for the benefit of those less fortunate.
In today's Times, Scott Elliott writes about politics fatigue in Washington State, where partisans are still trying to decide who one November's gubernatorial election. People still feel strongly about the outcome, but they don't want to talk about it. That's because the big lesson of the presidential campaign was that "the two sides have trouble listening to each other."
For most of my adult life, political conversation was conducted within the framework of the New Deal. People unhappy with the New Deal were completely marginalized until the Reagan Administrations, and even then they were unable to transpose the discussion into a key that did not take the Deal for granted. Who knows if they would ever have found a way to do so if Bill Clinton's private life hadn't been presented as some kind of proof that liberals are morally corrupt. As it happened, the really terrible legacy of the Lewinsky Affair was that it desensitized the public to outrage. And outrage quite perfectly fit the mood of those who felt that they hadn't been heard. Exploiting both the excitement and the repellence of angry insult, they finally seized the floor. But they are still very sore winners.
And we liberals are sore losers as well. We still can't believe that the dimensions of the arena have been enlarged to include people whom we were accustomed to regarding as unfit to participate in political discussion. Religious fundamentalists, libertarians, tax-starvers - what these people have in common, in our view, is selfishness: they put their pocketbook or their personal salvation (or both) ahead of the common weal. They argue that, if you can't be sure that taking action will actually fix something, it's better not to take any action at all. The inevitability of unintended consequences serves as proof that activist government is incompetent, if not evil.
We don't hear this argument, any more than they hear ours about social welfare. We can't stand by and watch obvious injustices and inequities without trying to fix them, and we're not going to wait for perfect solutions. As I've said before, we and they don't even share a common idea of freedom. For conservatives, freedom is negative, a freedom from; for liberals, it is a freedom to. Liberal freedom makes it possible for very different people to live closely together, as New Yorkers do. Conservative freedom is a portcullis that, ideally, locks the cities and their problems up behind their moats and frees the rest of the country to do what it pleases - which, in most cases, seems to be the quiet enjoyment of traditional life.
If the country really were split between all-red and all-blue states, we might learn to get along by simply ignoring each other. But if there are a few all- or nearly-all-red states, there are certainly none that are all-blue. So ignoring each other is not an option. Clearing the air of outrage is the only way to revive our civil discourse, and that is going to be very hard, because there is so much genuine, and understandable, contempt on each side. (For my part, I am outraged every time I hear the phrase "Christian nation" spoken with approval. Outraged!) Denying our mutual disapproval isn't going to do any good. Moderating it will help. But there's no getting around the bad-tasting medicine: we're going to have to learn to listen to each other. I'm not sure that we've ever done this before in the United States.
There may be one unintended, beneficial, consequence of our listening to each other. We may be forced to give up our childish determination to be unremittingly cheerful and nice.
Reading about the Nicene Creed, in Charles Freeman's excellent The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (Knopf, 2002), I'm struck by how impossible it would be to interest religious Americans today in the dogmatic struggle that it has long been thought to have resolved. The Creed was hammered out, under the presumably impatient eye of the Emperor Constantine, in order to establish a) an orthodox Christian position on the relation between Jesus and "God the Father" and b) a community of the orthodox who would thereupon be eligible for preferential tax treatment. One of Constantine's first acts of toleration was to relieve Christian priests of the need to serve the state (as pagan priests had to do); little did he suspect, apparently, that this would trigger a huge identity crisis among Christians. But how understandable, in retrospect: a swarm of sects, united by a handful of practices and observances but distinguished by all manner of interpretive divisions, proliferating under the rock of imperial ban, suddenly exposed to the light of Official Status. Proponents of the Nicene Creed, which held that Jesus is "consubstantial" with the Father and begotten by him out of time, would eventually prevail, but not without a century of vicious squabbles taken up against those who failed to find any support for consubstantiality in Scripture. Augustine would eventually sum up, with his own incomparable arrogance, the correct relation between the Church and Scripture: "I would not believe the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me." This neatly elides the fact that Augustine was speaking for and as the authority of the Catholic Church.
According to Charles Freeman, the victory of the "Nicean" contingent reflected the Church leadership's surreptitious but wholehearted adoption of Platonic propositions, not the least of which was the idea that, because only a very few gifted men are capable of grasping the nature of things, the rest of us ought to exercise our privilege of letting them tell us what to do. Mr Freeman does not have to work very hard to convince me that Plato was an intellectual tyrant; his success in the past 2500 years must be attributed to the vanity of those who, studying him, would put themselves forward as "authorities." As one Greek philosopher among many, Plato could enjoy only limited influence. there were real limits to Plato's influence, but a church that had absorbed his rationalistic megalomania would prove far more pernicious. Reason shut down in the West because critical debate was suspended, not because critical books were forgotten.
But Platonism (like authority generally) has very little hold on today's religious thinking, and I am sure that it is enough to acknowledge Jesus "as a personal savior," whatever that might mean, without being very specific about just how it is that the human and the divine are combined in the person of Jesus. As a personal savior, Jesus might well "be" certain things to you that he "isn't" to anybody else, or not to many others. You are under no obligation to share. No televangelist is going to waste his time or yours parsing the metaphysics of Christ's godhead. Doctrinally, these are freewheeling times.
Except, of course, with respect to Topic A. Self-styled authorities draw on the full fund of Augustinian severity when claiming that matters relating to human sexuality are not open to discussion but have been settled for all time in the eyes of God. Isn't it funny? The only practice that Jesus emphatically denounced was - divorce (Matthew, 5:32). But Augustine sets the precedent. What comes first, Jesus or "Christianity"? The authoritarian institution, of course.
The best reality show in America is going on right now in Enterprise, Florida, where Cat and Harlan Barnard have, shall we say, had it with the incapacity of their children to accept the most minimal domestic responsibilities. Unfortunately for TV addicts, you have to be in Enterprise, Florida, driving by the Barnard home, to watch. Having tried everything else they could think of, the parents of seventeen year-old Benjamin and twelve year-old Kit have abandoned home temporarily and set up camp in the driveway, where, apparently, they're receiving the warm support of numerous postadolescents.
The Barnards's strike has been going on long enough for local authorities to investigate the scene and to determine that the dear little ones are not in any danger. Already, pages and pages of Google are prepared to list sites that refer to "Harlan Barnard." Who needs TV? (Thanks to ObWi.)
BARNARD UPDATE (Keep reading)
What will be the fallout, do you suppose, of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's Q&A in Kuwait the other day? When the very courageous Specialist Thomas Wilson asked the Secretary why his unit was so chronically short of armor and supplies, Mr Rumsfeld replied rather testily to the effect that things can't be perfect. But as anyone familiar with the planning for the Iraq war knows, the shortages referred to by Specialist Wilson are the inevitable result of Mr Rumsfeld's disregard for standard Army planning, which he thought too costly. Save dollars, lose lives. It's a grim calculus, and the sooner military families wake up to it, the sooner we'll see the end of Secretary Rumsfeld.
Or so you'd think. Although there have been isolated acts of protest - some reservists are resisting orders to return to Iraq; one or two have even sought asylum in Canada - there is as yet no general movement openly or forcefully critical of the Administration. Although the Iraq misadventure is being fought by a volunteer army, the volunteers come from the same relatively underprivileged sectors of American life that staffed our forces in Vietnam. But I sense that they do not regard the the current morass with simple patriotism. While most soldiers probably do believe that taking some kind of pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein was necessary - they're soldiers, after all, not middle-aged eggheads living in Yorkville who are busy making blanquette de veau for a family dinner party - it's just possible that many of them see that there are good ways of prosecuting a war, and bad ways, and that the Administration has been doing almost everything wrong, from taking Ahmen Chalabi's nonsense on faith to - scrimping on armor and supplies. I hope that they're wondering why the world's most powerful military has bogged down in a war of attrition. A few of them, having spent some time on the ground in Iraq, may even have good ideas about blocking terrorism.
I haven't spent any time whatsoever among military people, and I've reason to believe that my observations might sound condescending. Let me very bluntly state that they are not meant to be. My admiration for our soldiers is quite deep, not least because they're volunteers. Being the liberal that I am, I have no objection to exploiting the military as a machine of upward mobility; after all, that's how we've staffed our airlines from the start. But although a stint in the Army exposes one to an elevated risk of death and injury, that assumption of risk doesn't justify throwing inadequately armed young people into harm's way. Forcing defenseless soldiers to choose between death from the enemy and death from the officers was Stalin's response to Hitler, and it still sounds gruesome. But Stalin could claim reasons of state that are altogether missing from the Administration's portfolio.
As Andrew Sullivan says, "This is not knee-jerk anti-war sentiment. This is knee-jerk pro-war sentiment." I disagree with Mr Sullivan about the warrant for this war, but, now that it is wearing through its second year, I can see no warrant, either, for fighting it ineptly, and at unnecessary cost to our soldiers.
It sounds so easy now, like something that should have happend a long time ago. But it didn't happen until just the other day, when I was in a plane coming home from Puerto Rico. Something that Kathleen and I had talked about while watching a movie in the hotel room after dinner sank in. Deeply.
You want to know how deeply? When the plane to New York ran into some turbulence, I talked myself into believing, for the very first time, that neither the crew members nor my fellow passengers were, as I had hitherto believed (ah, paranoia), concealing their certain knowledge of impending disaster just to protect me. They were not being enorously brave. They were simply sitting on a bumpy flight reading magazines and eating dinner. Their investment in protecting me from the inevitablility of disaster was nil.
My fear of flying - what an embarrassment!
If there are more charts where the three that the Times published yesterday came from, I want to see them. Take "Recreational Activities." These run the gamut from volunteering and gardening to the full range of leisure sports. Democrats are less likely to engage in all of them than the average television viewer, while Republicans are for the most part even more more likely to pursue them. The only exceptional figure, weirdly enough, is the one for dancing. Democrats are about 36% more likely dance than the average television viewer; Republicans are somewhat less less likely to cut a rug. How do Democrats pass the time, one wonders, when they're not dancing? I see that "reading" is not an option. Nor is "engaging in political discussion." The graph's Mr & Mrs Sprat effect is quite stark. But who is 'the average television viewer, and why is this person a benchmark? Because the enquiry was conducted by media researchers, of course; but is the information of interest to anybody but advertisers?
Because I don't watch television, I didn't see a single political ad during the entire campaign. When I think of all the money that was spent on the dumb things ($1.6 billion), I'm shattered. What a complete waste of money! Experience in the former Yugoslavia ought to have taught us to ban political advertising from television and radio altogether.
The very thought of conservative academics reminded me of Anne Norton's deadly description of the Straussians who taught her at the University of Chicago. Alan Wolfe suggests that she's a little unfair, but the shoe fits.
Now that they have gained absolute dominion in Washington, conservatives have turned their attention to their primeval enemy, the liberal academics who expelled them - or, rather, who proscribed their worldview - forty years ago. Their current tactic is to decry an anomaly in academia: while universities insist upon diversity for and among students, their faculties are homogenously liberal. Tut, tut. Hypocrisy on the left? George Will whines about it, Lexington deplores it.
I'd like to argue that it would only be natural for liberal educations to be provided by liberal thinkers, but this would be playing the conservative game of glib, factitious argumentation. Universities haven't been very liberal in the past forty years; conservatives are right to suspect that something like China's Cultural Revolution has roiled through the nation's humanities departments. But the mess will have to be cleaned up by the heirs and assigns of the people who made it: the liberal professoriate. Mark Edmundson, of the University of Virginia, has a great many intelligent suggestions for healing the wounds of radical campus politics (see below). Input from conservatives would be worse than useless.
Until conservatives demonstrate - and I do mean demonstrate - that they can put open-mindedness ahead of party ideology, and that they can follow their curiosity regardless of the claims of loyalty, they will not belong on American campuses. I am perfectly well aware that they could charge liberal academics with an equally strangling ideological program, and with running humanities faculties with more attention to party loyalty than to intellectual merit. But the ideology of the left had a worthy objective: breaking the back of the nuclear patriarchy. Women and minorities would no longer be subservient to white men as a matter of course. Got it? Now that the educated half of the country gets it, liberal professors can go back to being genuinely liberal. They can allow the expression of conservative ideas. But they should not welcome the presence of conservative operatives.
The American university's most vital mission is to make this country uncomfortable for social and economic conservatism. It has a commitment to something far older, to the humanism of the Renaissance. It must assure that the loyal soldiers of ideology do not close the Western mind a second time.
Don't miss Rob Walker's piece, "The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders," in this week's Times Magazine. It's about volunteer word-of-mouth marketing campaigners who, for the most part, don't see what they're doing as "marketing." They're just recommending things that they like - books, movies, chicken sausage, you name it - to their friends. At the moment, I can't decide whether the promotions engineered by BzzAgent (a freestanding outfit that will let anybody sign up) and Tremor (a division of Procter & Gamble that seeks out "natural" persauders) are benign or insidious, but I couldn't help connecting what Mr Walker's eager beavers were doing to what I'm doing. If nobody's sending me products to push or concert tickets to write up, one of the reasons just might be that nobody has to.
Ever since the election, I have been teasing out aspects of a prevailing social persuasion that is very different from my own. I call it a persuasion because I suspect that its religious claims are spurious, and its hostility to reflection and self-awareness make it utterly unphilosophical. I've decided that it is a mistake to label this persuasion "the patriarchy," but I haven't come up with anything better. Is there a myth about a man who would fall apart if he ever looked at himself in the mirror? In a conflation of the Narcissus and Medusa stories, our unlucky hero, upon seeing his own face, would turn to stone. If there were such a myth, this character's name would make the ideal label for what I've been thinking about.
In an article about John Travolta in today's Times, Caryn James writes of Mr Travolta's "religion," Scientology, that it considers "psychiatry and psychology to be evil." Some would say that this explains that flatness of many of Mr Travolta's performances - and those of his "coreligionist," Tom Cruise, as well. But forget about acting. Psychiatry and psychology have done more to undermine the myth of male supremacy than any other intellectual developments. They have exposed macho behavior as a bluff. I don't mean that tough guys don't really want to fight. The bluff is their pretense that fighting is so meaningful that it overcomes the pain of mayhem and death. But psychiatry and psychology have revealed that it is fear that motivates aggression. Tough guys fight because they're afraid not to.
When I started seeing a psychiatrist, in sixth grade, it was a family secret, a potential disgrace. (My adoptive parents didn't know what to do with me, and I didn't know what to do with life, and my sessions with Dr K-, aside from giving me a chance to talk about myself without being interrupted, accomplished nothing.) To an extent, of course, seeking psychiatric help sounded the alarm of significant emotional instability (the word was "mental" - itself a clue to this country's anti-intellectual posture). This was permissible in women, but in a man, even in a boy, it signaled the worst possible character defect that didn't involve outright criminality: lack of self-confidence. To be unsure of oneself was the cardinal failing. (I was actually all too sure of myself as a child. I was sure that I would never, ever fit in, and I was sure that I didn't want to, either. Only when it became necessary to make a place for myself in the world did I question this, and healthy self-doubt didn't take root until I was well into my thirties.) And then there was sex. Weren't psychiatrists thought to grill their patients endlessly about sex?
Surely one of the most interesting differences between men and women today is that women seem to have no trouble at all discussing their sex lives with other women. I've even overheard such conversations myself, in circumstances suggesting that my eavesdropping was neither unnoticed nor objectionable. Men, on the other hand... Sadly, it is very much the case that the fool who divulges his sex life to another man can be sure of winning that man's instant contempt. In order to talk about your sex life, you have to know something about it; you have to think about sex when you are not actually having sex. You have to look into the mirror.
Thinking back on my Working Definitions (26 November, below), I read Burkhard Bilger's article about Ole Anthony, in the current New Yorker (Dec. 6 2004; unhappily, not online), with popping eyes. Mr Bilger writes of a religious service, so-called, at the Copeland complex (I don't know what else to call it), outside Dallas, at which the man on the stage puts his congregation in a trance with a rudimentary but rousing anthem set to the words, "No more thinking, I'm just drinking, drinking of the spirit." Where is the faith or religion here, I asked myself. Silly me, I answered: the ritual described by Mr Bilger is as old as religion. But it is missing some of the more important pieces. There is, for one thing, no sacrifice, no gesture of purification through offering. During the Reformation, the new protestant sects considered such gestures superstitious; they were too cerebral for hocus pocus. But evangelicals do without sacrifice because it's unpleasant and - sad. (Please don't confuse yourself with the idea that dollar-denominated contributions are "sacrifices"!) Another thing that's missing is covenant, no commitment either to Jesus (whose new wine is served up as grace - that is, gratuitously) or to the others in the congregation. Covenant would require thinking. Drinking the spirit, drinking the new wine. How on earth can an intelligent person respond to this without contempt?
For a stronger dose of dyspepsia, here's James Wolcott.
26 November 2003: Before the public conversation about religion in America boils over, I'd like to suggest some clarifications. It has been clear to me, since the election, that some important words are being bandied about without much sense of precision. I suggest that the following clarifications articulate the wellsprings of American political virtue.
Red State, Blue State? I think I've hit on the perfect litmus test for determining which kind of state you belong in. Do you prefer Donald Duck to Daffy Duck? Pluto to Sylvester? Fantasia to "Hollywood Steps Out"? Then you're - not Blue. If you think you have no preference, it's been too long since you've watched our pop culture's seminal cartoons. I think you'll find that they're hugely different. Disney's cartoons are, well, just what you'd expect: sweet. They're 'family fare.' Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes, in stark contrast, are sarcastic, risqué, and culturally sophisticated. Mel Blanc's vocal characterizations and Carl W. Stalling's music are as sharp and rude as Hell's Kitchen used to be - well, they've got the same tang. Kathleen noticed something else: while the Disney characters are normally gendered (Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse), the creatures at Looney Tunes fall into a rather different pair of bins: male and dim or doomed (Sylvester, Elmer Fudd, Wile E Coyote) or 'other,' neither masculine nor feminine. Bugs Bunny acts like a wise guy most of the time, but he's awfully prone to cross-dressing. Daffy Duck - well, now that we're more frank about these things, we can see that Daffy Duck is a drama queen.