Hildegarde

Well, here I am–yesterday, the computer worked perfectly, without a hitch, all day.

Today, it’s been a constant struggle.

I’ve begun to wonder if the issue might be heat and humidy, since we still don’t have an air conditioner down here yet.  And the night before last it was REALLY cold, but last night it was hot and muggy.  And it’s hot and muggy now.

Greg was wondering if it could be that the monitor is freezing up and not the CPU, that the monitor failing to turn on may be the monitor’s fault and not the CPUs, if that makes sense.

I don’t understand any of this, so I’m not the right person to ask.

I’m still reading Witness, of course, and I do have a couple of notes on my progress.

1) Upper middle class twits may be drawn to Communism because they expect to end up in charge of things when the revolution comes, but that does not seem to have been Chambers’s motivation, and it doesn’t seem to have been the motivation of many of the people Chambers describes working with in the Party.

2) Chambers explains his own attraction and commitment to Communism as coming from the need to find “something to live for and something to die for,” with the second half of that sentence being as important as the first.  And since he was not a religious believer, what he found instead was Communism.

3) A good part of his attraction to Communism and the Communist Party came from a direct experience of actual working conditions on the ground.  He ran away from home around the time he should have gone to college and spent about a year working rough on construction sites and at other hard manual labor.  And he met a fair number of men who, having done that work all their lives and been broken down in health because of it, were left pretty much destitute.

4) Robert says he thinks people attracted to socialism are never attracted to it because they’re upset about the conditons people have to live and work under, but it seems to me that a fair number of them were so concerned, at least in the Thirties.  We’re talking now about people like Chambers rather than people like Hiss.

5) The extent to which actual espionage was going on in the Thirties is truly staggering, but what’s more staggering is how much infiltration and manipulation was going on on everything from newspapers and magazines to elementary schools.

6) Chambers pinpoints the period when American intellectuals became largely and almost monolithically left as the Twenties–that may be the result of the ebbing of religious belief.  See number one above.

7) No matter what Chambers says, it seems obvious to me that the choice isn’t between religion and Communism, because I’m neither. 

Well, more tomorrow, maybe.

I am starting today’s post in a spirit of cautious optimism.  A day and a half ago, this computer started doing the oddest things, including suddenly freezing solid for no reason any can tell.

Of course, computers do that, but this time it would do it over and over again and have to be rebooted to fix.  Then, when we rebooted it, it would sometimes simply not connect to the keyboard and the monitor.  The CPU would hum, and the screen would not light up, the little green lights on the keyboard would not light up.

At one point, I had to reboot eleven times in a row to get that to stop. 

My friends Carol and Richard came over yesterday and worked on the computer while I fed them, and things are a little better–though not entirely peachy keen–now.  Anyway, they’re better enough for me to attempt this post here and now instead of waiting to get into school.

And the post is not very well organized, so you’ll have to bear with me a little.  I’m still reading Whitaker Chambers’s Witness, and I’ve gotten to the point that could be called actual autobiography.  And it’s interesting on a purely human level, and well written, so I’d probably go on reading it even if there weren’t all these other issues involved.

What’s been brought home to me, though, in this description of his rather bizarre family life and early working career (so to speak–he hired himself out as a laborer just to get away from home) is this:  when Chambers uses the word “bourgeois,” he doesn’t use it in the way it’s most commonly used now, or in the way that it was commonly used in the Sixties.

These days, when people use the word “bourgeois,” they mean simply middle class–specifically middle middle or lower middle class–and with it values like working hard, doing mundane and not-sexy jobs, getting married and staying married, liking popular entertainment.

People often call behaving in this way “being conventional,” which I suppose it is.  But the use of “conventional” here is like the use of “bourgeois.”  It seems to be the same word as the one Chambers is using, but it isn’t.

When Chambers says “bourgeois,” the kind of people he’s actually talking about are the upper middle class that would now call somebody like Chambers bourgeois.

Ack.

Am I making any sense at all?

What Chambers is upset about, what he seems to be about to join the Communist Party to fight, is…Alger Hiss.

I’m fairly sure he didn’t know this when he started out.  I think he believed that by doing what he was doing he would in fact be working to end the reign of the upper middle class Ivy League educated look down your nose at the yokels class his mother wanted so desperately to belong to.

When he says “bourgeois” and “conventional,” he means that hectoring Nurse Ratchett, I’m smarter than you so I know better than you approach to anybody with less money, and the drive to behave exactly the way one is expected to behave, to have no tastes that everybody around you doesn’t have, to have no opinions everybody around you doesn’t have.

Chambers didn’t like Ayn Rand, but on this level they are in perfect agreement.  There is something wrong with people who take their likes and dislikes from the people around them instead of from inside themselves, who take their ideas from the people around them rather than from somewhere inside themselves.

And, you know, I sympathize.  This actually is “inauthentic.”  And it occurs to me that the reason so many people in the present day upper middle class condemn so much of what they see as “inauthentic” may have less to do with what they see and more with the fact that they are, themselves, inauthentic.

The interesting thing is the way in which this has been turned around in the years since Chambers was a young man. 

The accusation of inauthenticity was real enough.  It would be real enough today applied to many of the same people.  It has certainly been true of a solid plurality of the people I’ve met in private schools and high-end colleges.   It’s what my sons rebelled against so strongly in almost all their schools.

But the epithet has been adopted by the very people it was meant to accuse, and its meaning has been slid slowly off into another realm, and it now seems to mean “anybody who likes stuff that’s popular” or “anybody who does shift work.”

Okay, I got that last euphemism from Kenny Chesney.

But you see what I mean.

And this means that there is now no reliable word to describe what is wrong with the Alger Hisses of the world–not what is wrong with them as spies, or anything else so dramatic.

There’s no word for what is wrong with that kind of “conventionality” the high end private schools (and their parent/teacher organizations) are full of.

So instead of using such a word and making that particular argument–which would be valid–we have people who simply attack any taste for classical music, any interest in books, as snobby by definition.

Which puts those people–the ones making the snobby distinction–at a disadvantage.  No movement gets far without people who read and write books, who understand abstractions, who can function in the world of ideas.

If you define the world of ideas as the thing you hate, you’ll simply lose, in the long run, no matter how right you are about what you want to save in the world.

What’s needed here is a new way to describe the inauthenticity itself, instead of using code words for it that are not, in fact, what you’re talking about.

Okay.  The title is only there because I love the word–and I can’t stop myself from thinking of it as an adjective, although the one place I know where it’s used (in McBeth’s speech after he’s killed Duncan), it’s used as a verb.

Incarnadine.  When you incarnadine something, you make it read.

But it’s Sunday of a long week-end, and I have nothing in particular to do, and nowhwere to go, and I’ve got Hildegarde herself playing in the background, in the guise of Anonymous 4’s album Origin of Fire.

I’ve also got a book, and it’s the book I want to make some notes about.  I’ve only started reading it, so the final verdict will have to wait.  But it’s an interesting exercise.

The book is Witness, by Whitaker Chambers. 

For those of you who are too young to remember this sort of thing, Chambers was the chief witness against a US State Department man named Alger Hiss, first in a government investigation of Hiss’s possible membership in the Communist Party and later in a criminal case against Hiss for perjury for lying under oath during that investigation.

For most of the time I was growing up–I think the Hiss case was 1954–it was a matter of settled wisdom that Hiss was never a spy even if he had been a Communist, that Chambers was mentally ill, that the perjury conviction was the best the government could do during a red scare brought on by Sen Joseph McCarthy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, release of KGB and other documents from Russia and release of the decryption of the Verona memoes by the US made it abundantly clear that Hiss had indeed been a spy, and a rather active and destructive one. 

And memoirs of other members of the Communist Party USA and of members of the KGB and GPU that the stories ex-Comminists were telling in the Fifties about the operations of the Communist Party USA and of Russian agents in the US were–no matter how fantastic they sounded at the time–also true.

So I went into the reading of this book knowing that the things people said about it when they were published–that it was the obvious fabrication of a feverish brain with distinct tendencies to histrionics and paranoia, for instance–were not true.

The one thing I did not question, however, is that the book was an “autobiography” of Chambers.

It isn’t.  Not exactly.

What it most is is a conversion narrative, because Chambers is very probably the originator of the idea that Communism is a form of religion, and that commitments to it are religious commitments. 

And because it is that, it is a far more interesting book than I ever expected it to be.

It’s one of the ones, too, that has been sitting around on my TBR pile for years, gathering dust and being ignored for any number of other books that were not nearly so well written.

And it’s also not a small thing that the book is ferociously well written. 

And, in an odd way, it is a kind of companion to the article I posted a couple of days ago.

But I want to read more, and then I’ll report.

I will say that I find it astonishing that this book is not on more of those conservative reading lists I see up everywhere.

Why promote lightweights like Dinesh what’s his name when this is here?

Or, for that matter, when the writer of that article is here?

Never mind.

Tea and Hildegarde.

More later.

I figured it was better to say that than to say “interlude” for the fortieth time.  So there’s your title.

I found this on Arts and Letters Daily this morning:

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/print

It’s from a magazine I generally dislike, and with reason.  All the partisan magazines and web sites and news outlets and books misrepresent and twist the truth, but unlike The American Spectator, most of them have not also been credibly accused of paying sources to lie.

On the other hand, it was just accused.  So let’s leave that up in the air for the moment.

This is an excellent article, and a very interesting one on several levels.

For one thing, it implicitly endorses my analysis of the how and why of Sarah Palin–the idea that elite Republicans “play stupid” because they think stupid is what the electorate wants.

Which says something about the way the upper reaches of the Republican Party view their fellow citizens.

But it’s hardly just about Republicans.  Which is the point.

It does stumble a bit here and there.  For one thing, to say that the “social sciences and humanities” “rule” the universities is ludicrous, at least as it pertains to the humanities.  If the humanities ruled the universities, half their departments wouldn’t be shriveling away into nothingness or being tossed out altogether. 

Besides, the authors could have made their same analysis of the universities without that particular nonsense, since the real “rulers” of academe are the administrators, and the administrators fit this article’s definition of “ruling class” far better than any professor ever will.

And it’s by no means true that the best US colleges require the least work.  In fact, quite the opposite.  I’ve seen a few kids transition from the community college system to the Ivies (and other top twenty schools…), and their first reaction is, invariably, shock at the workload.

But the idea that the “ruling class” “recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in” is, at least for universities, right on the money.

And it’s what has always bothered me about the competition for highly selective schools.  There is a sense in which the top layer of US colleges and universities are all looking for the same student–ambitious, driven, willing to do whatever it takes to play the game and win it, “well rounded.”

In the real world, though, achievement is not to those who are “well rounded.”  Every once in a while you run into a Bill Gates, who can jump through all the hoops and still be lopsidedly passionate about one thing.  Most of the time, those people–the Spielbergs, the Wozniaks–couldn’t get into a top tier school to save their lives, and tend to flunk out of whatever school they do get into.

That’s because they’re focussed on one thing to the extent that they just don’t bother with much of anything else.

I’m making this sound as if it were an article about education, or universities, and it isn’t–those things come in only as examples and side issues of a different point.

At any rate, I could quibble with more of it, but the fact is that this is a very interesting article.

And I think it may be right.

So, here we are, at the start of another term. 

And I’m happy about that, mostly.  I get bored at home.  I get bored without sufficient to do.  I can only write so much before I start doing it badly.

But there is something else on the table, and four months of trying to think about it has not helped.

Some people teach what I teach because they need the money, or because they can’t get hired to teach anywhere else. 

I got into this in an attempt to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.  I’d spent a long time telling myself and anybody else who would listen that we all had a real obligation to do something to alleviate the situation of people who are blocked from any ability to participate in the wider culture through circumstances that they did not create.

That was put badly. 

I deal, by and large, with people who have grown up in rural poverty or the poverty of our small cities in Northern Connecticut.  In a way, they’re even worse off than the residents of big city inner cities.  If you grow up on Harlem or the Bronx, you can always take the subway down to the Metropolitan Museum, and even your neighborhood will probably have a very decent branch library.

My kids come from places where the nearest library can be twenty miles away, and then often have nothing in it but the latest best sellers and a few stray ancient “facts” books that were added for local school projects decades ago.  Of course, Connecticut has universal interlibrary loan.  Books can be ordered from any library in the system to be taken out from your home library.  I love interlibrary loan.  But before you can use it, you’ve got to know what books you want, and before that you have to know that you want books.

 Most of my kids came from homes that didn’t contain a single book–not even Mike Fisher’s encyclopedias–or, if they did, it was the Bible.  Neither their parents nor their neighbors read the newspapers.  Their houses and apartments do not have computers. 

If they come from out in the country, they usually have something to drive, although it will be old and very unreliable.    If they come from town, they will not have anything to drive, and getting to class will be a matter of getting public transport (where available), or walking (often a long way), or finding a ride. 

Our campus, of course, is out in the country, close to absolutely nothing.  The one local college or university that is downtown–and therefore easily accessible to kids living on East Main or any of the neighborhoods branching off it–is the local UConn branch, the most difficult of the bunch to get into.  My kids would love to go there if they could, but most of them couldn’t qualify if their lives depended on it.

A significant number of my kids are not in fact able to read.  They can sound out words if they work at it.  They have brothers and sisters at home who cannot do even that.  That is, in fact, a good deal of the reason why they’re my kids.  Most of them can’t meet the basic requirements for any school.  Even the local community college will only allow them to take non-credit remedial classes.

We require a high school diploma.  That’s it.  All my kids have high school diplomas, and most of them have actually made their way through highs schools.  For one thing, the requirements to pass the Connecticut GED are much higher than the requirements to get through our inner city and poor rural schools. 

If you go to the right Connecticut schools–in Wilton, maybe, or Westport–you can get an education in a public school that will outdo what most high-end prep schools offer. 

If you go to the wrong Connecticut schools–in Waterbury, say, or Bridgeport–you can graduate from high school without being able to read and understand a paragraph in an article from People Magazine, without being able to add and subtract well enough to figure out the change you’ll get back from your dollar if you take the bus, and without knowing anything at all.

And I do mean anything.

My black kids know who Martin Luther King is, but not what the Jim Crow laws were.  They know there was slavery in the South, but not that there was ever slavery anywhere else.   They are fascinated by Obama, but have no idea what the requirements are to run for President, or even if there are any.

Black or white, they don’t know the name of the mayor or the governor, they don’t know how many senators and representatives the state has, they don’t know that there is a difference between state and federal law.  Most of them get all their news from MTV, VH-1, and Fuse.    They know a lot of things I don’t know.  Most of them aren’t useful.

The big thing, though, and I’ve said this before, is the passivity.  Most of them aren’t openly defiant.   This is good, because some of them are very large male people.  Although not many.   Women outnumber men by a good three to one.

And a good segment of the men are on probation or parole, but that’s something else. 

The passivity is very pleasant, but it is what it is.  “You need to get this paper in,” I say.  “Oh, I will,” the student says.  And that’s it.  The paper never arrives.  You can have one on one conferences that go on for hours, and nothing ever arrives. You have them write things in class and hand them in at the end–and they don’t hand them in.  They don’t do them.

Mike Fisher pointed out that the pasivity might be due to depression, and it might be, but it doesn’t matter.  I’m not equipped to fix it, and I don’t know if anybody is.

I do know that the usual approach to trying to fix it–dumbing down the high schools to the point where anybody can pass, then to where anybody can get an A, on the assumption that to do otherwise will only discourage students more–not only doesn’t work, but may very well be counterproductive. 

A lot of my kids think school is a waste of time, a set of arbitrary hoops they have to jump through in order to get stuff–and they’re not wrong, except that the hoops they’ve been made to jump through are so low the jumping won’t even get them stuff.

Like everybody else, I go on doing this because every couple of years I have somebody who uses the system and makes it work for them, and the people who do that can get very far indeed.

But the question, the one I keep running through my head, is:  does it make any sense for me to do this?  Am I helping anybody at all besides those one or two every second year?  Does helping those one or two make up for months upon months of slog trying to work with people who don’t want to be there, don’t want to hear from me, and resent the whole thing?

And what can be done, after all, about the things that create this situation in the first place? 

It’s not the poverty that’s the real issue.  Poverty sucks, but lots of people have overcome childhood poverty.  Right now, as we speak, there are dozens of Korean and Chinese families within screaming distance of this office who are just as poor (and sometimes poorer) than my kids’ families, but none of their kids ever ends up in my program.

What do we do about kids whose mothers drink all the time or stay high on heroin (in the city) or crystal meth (in the country) and who drop them off on streets or porches to fend for themselves at four or seven or twelve?   Theoretically, this is what Child Protective Services are for, but there’s an awful lot of it going around that isn’t being taken care of.  Or even noticed.

And even if DCF does come in and try to do something–what exactly gets done?  The majority of foster families in my state are in it for the money.  When the local newspapers or television stations decide to notice, they find that child rape and battering in endemic in foster homes, that children are left without adequate clothing or food, that the places are often filthy.

 I suppose it’s better than living on the street, or being left alone in a trailer for a week with nothing to eat but crackers, but it’s hardly a solution to the problem.

And it doesn’t solve the contextual deficit, either–the difference in what kids bring to school when their families talk about politics and books at the dinner table and go to see plays as well as movies and listen to classical as well as the local rock station, next to what kids bring to school when the television would be on 24/7  if the cable company hadn’t cut off the feed for lack of payment.

The worst about all of this, though, is my increasingly strong feeling that if the kids don’t want to help themselves, then nothing I can do will matter.

And it doesn’t matter if the kids don’t want to help themselves because they’ve been through hell and back, or because they’re just lazy, or whatever–the reason doesn’t matter.  The fact reigns supreme.  

Life isn’t fair, President Kennedy said–and that’s true.

But there’s a part of me that says it ought to be fixable.

I’d have used the other part of the lyric, but I already did that, as a post title, some time ago there.

Anyway, it’s about three in the morning and I’m not getting anywhere.  Our downstairs air conditioner, the great big one, died the day before yesterday, and I’ve learned a couple of things.

First is that the air conditioner always dies at the beginning of a heat wave, and we’ve got one.  It hasn’t been this bad since the beginning of the summer.  Temperatures are in the mid to high nineties.  Humitidy readings sound like the grades for somebody who’s going to make the honor roll.  It really is a mess.

The second thing is that, this late in the season, it’s virtually impossible to get an air conditioner. 

Matt’s gone back to school, which means I’m here largely on my own, and I need not only to have an air conditioner, but to have somebody deliver and install it. 

And you can forget it.  I know, I tried. 

So what I’m doing is staying upstairs as much as possible (very nice air conditioners up there, and relatively new, too), or staying out, or riding around in the car–in other words, being mostly uncomfortable and not getting a lot of work done.

But here I am, and at the moment I’m mostly disheartened.

I really do try to read both sides of just about everything–or at least both sides as sides, if that makes any sense.  I’ve read A People’s History of the United States and A Patriot’s History of the United States.  I watch both Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly.  I see Michael Moore movies and read Ann Coulter books.

I try.  I really do.

But lately I’ve been finding that I’ve got litmus tests.

For the left, my litmus tests are varied. 

First and foremost is whether or not they get religion right when they criticize it.  They can criticize it.  They can scoff at it.  They can make fun of it.  What I won’t put up with any more are completely misunderstandings and misreprentations of what religions say or what their actual history does.

If that makes sense.

Some of that is the Medieval thing. 

My next big thing with left leaning writers is whether or not they know the difference between a conservative and a libertarian and whether or not they know what libertarianism actually says.

If you think the nonsense people spout about religion is bad, the nonsense they spout about libertarianism is not only worse but often just idiotic. 

There are other things, of course, but those two tend to be my biggies, because they’re things that I know something about.  So I know when people are cheating.

With the right–and I’m talking about conservatives here, not libertarians–there are also two main issues.

One is the separation of church and state.

If I have to hear, one more time, that “separation of church and state isn’t in the Constitution,” I’ll scream.  The statement is deliberately tendentious, besides being untrue at least as its base.

And it almost always goes along with either misunderstanding or misrepresenting Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists–or with not reading it, which I suspect is usually the case.

For the record:  the Baptist church in Danbury, Connecticut, wrote a letter to then-President Thomas Jefferson complaining about Connecticut’s “multiple establishment” law.

Connecticut was then one of a number of state that gave tax money to churches.  Its law stated that all churches would receive this money.  In practice, the Baptists–whom many other Christians did not consider to be Christian, since they denied the validity of infant baptism–were getting stiffed.

The Baptists wrote and asked Jefferson if this was not contrary to what the Bill of Rights had intended.

Jefferson wrote back to say that yes, the intent of the First Amendment’s religion clauses was to erect “a wall of separation between Church and State,” and that the men who had written those clauses had hoped that by giving the example of such separation on the federal level, the individual states would follow suit.

He then gave the letter to his attorney general to vet.

In other words, this was not a casual, private reply to a personal level. Jefferson knew the Baptists would publish his letter.  He was writing for the public as much as–or even more than–to them.

Conservatives trying to get around the clear meaning of Jefferson’s letter tie themselves into all kinds of knots, and do at least two predictable things.

The first is that they refer to seventeenth century America when they talk about the place of God in politics.  But nobody has ever denied that the original colonies were mostly religious enterprises.

The issue is the sentiment in eighteenth century America.  And that is not anywhere near as useful to these people as relying on the early stuff is.

The second thing is that they ignore that there are other indications that what was wanted was a separation of  Church and State.  I often get conservative writers who tell me that Ben Franklin wanted the meetings of the Constitutional Convention to open with a prayer.  They rarely include the fact that the idea was put to a vote and rejected. 

And I hear nothing about the Treaty of Tripoli at all.  In case I haven’t beaten you over the head with this already: the Treaty of Tripoli was negotiated during the administration of George Washington, passed unanimously by the US Senate in the administration of John Adams and then signed by him.

Why does this matter?  Because article eleven of that treaty begins, in no uncertain terms, “As the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion…”

I honestly do not understand how much clearer that can be–or how thoroughly that discredits the idea that the Founders of this country based its political system on the Bible or intended to found “a Christian nation.”

The other litmus test I have for conservative books is, of course, evolution.  If I hear one more time about how “scientists” think it’s “controversial” or “flawed” or any of the rest of it, I may go crazy. 

If I have to put up with one more whinging whine about how it’s a “theory,” or one more deliberate confusion between methodilogical naturalism and philosophical naturalism–well, whatever. 

Evolution is a fact–we’ve observed it happen, and we’ve got scores of transitional sequences between species as well as within species. 

The theory of evolution is the scientific explanation of that fact–it’s the set of explanations we’ve come up with as to why the fact of evolution exists and how it works.

And a theory is not a guess, and it is not an opinion. 

And methodological naturalism is not atheism–it is the decision to look for natural explanations for natural phenomena, and it is what makes science science.  Science is the enterprise of seeking natural explanations for natural phenomena. 

In case you’re wondering why I’m frothing at the mouth about all this this morning–well, I do try to read everything.

Right now, I’m reading something called 48 Liberal Lies About American History, by Larry Schweikart.

Schweikart is one of the two authors of A Patriot’s History of the United States.

This morning, I hit the chapter on Scopes and evolution.  I hit the chapter on separation of church and state yesterday.

Well, what can I say?

Schweikart hit all the high (or maybe low) spots–no mention of the Treaty of Tripoli, mention of Franklin’s call to prayer but no mention of its rejection, even a paragraph that implies that there’s something called “creation science” that actual scientists do.

It’s this kind of thing that makes me want to drink huge quantities of tea and go to sleep early.

But, of course, I’ve got a lot of running around to do today.