Hildegarde

So, here’s the thing–I sort of agree with Robert that source of income is more important than amount in determining political commitment, but I don’t agree with his source.

First, let’s be clear–there are definitely classes in America, and  I’m not talking about economic classes, although they exist, too.

It’s the cultural classes that matter in the long run, and in more ways than we realize.

There’s the American upper class, to begin with, which consists of people who have money, but don’t make it.   Or, if they make it, they hide the fact as well as they can.  The culturally upper class have no use for work, and they tend to have nothing but amused contempt for people who “slog away” at things.  Up until the last fifteen or twenty years, most of these people were guaranteed a place in the proper Ivy, Seven Sisters or  Little Three schools on the basis of family legacies alone, so they didn’t bother to study a lot to get the grades to get in.  And once they got there, they didn’t bother to study a lot then.  George W. Bush is culturally upper class–a gentleman’s C was good enough, and the real things to concentrate on are certain specific kinds of sports (tennis, downhill skiing, horses) and, very often, a lot of serious drinking.

The American upper middle class consists of “educated professionals”–but only certain kinds of educations and certain kinds of professions “count.”   These are the people who, if they went to one of the national prep schools, got their on stellar grades and  SSAT scores, and who ran into the upper class with a kind of shock.  “There are two kinds of people here,” a tour guide at Taft told my older son when he was looking at high schools, “Rich people and smart people.”

To the  American upper middle class, intelligence and education are everything.  They’re doctors, lawyers, accountants with the big national firms, psychologists,  professors at certain universities (Yale, yes, Mattatuck Community College, no), research scientists, journalists in the national media, and a few other things.

At sixty, they’ll still remember their  SAT scores, and their rank in their high school class.   Most of them have postgraduate degrees–again, from only a certain set of schools and only in a certain set of professional areas.  An MBA is fine if it’s from Wharton or Harvard, but a  PhD in education is  ALWAYS unacceptable even if it does come from Harvard.  

Most of the educated upper middle class works in the private ssctor–the public sector doesn’t pay enough money–but in specific parts of the private sector.  They don’t run widgets factories in New Jersey.

Almost all these people vote Democratic, and they do it for two reasons–because social issues are far more important to them than economic ones, and because the Republican Party has done a bang-up job of marketing itself as the Party of the local yokels, all those people these people happily left behind when their grades bought them a ticket into what they consider to be a far better world.  

The American middle class consists of white collar workers, people who work in middle and low level management jobs in offices and are paid by the year instead of by the hour.  These tend to be the swing voters, because in fact what they want from politics is practical approaches to immediate problems.

Also included in this group are the owners of mid-sized businesses.   You can tell the difference between them and the upper middle class in the emphasis they place on education–the middle class wants its children to go to college “so they can get a good job.”   There is little understanding of or even acceptance of the idea that knowledge is important for its own sake or that the purpose of education should be something other than practical training.

They use the local public or parochial schoolsand send the kids to the state unversity, but usually to the flagship campus to spend four years “living away,” which is an experience they think everybody should have.

The American lower middle class and working class are largely the same, but they’re divided by source of income–the lower middle class owns small businesses, the working class works for an hourly wage.

Both public school teachers and nurses tend to belong to this category, even though public school teachers get paid salaries and, in some places, those salaries can be quite large.  

Education degrees, however, are notorious for being intellectually vacant and academically useless.  Education majors typically have the lowest entering credentials of any students on any university campus.   These are the people who tormented the hell out of the people who are not part of the upper middle class, especially since they were almost always stupider than their students and not good at handling it.

The lower middle class, including those public school teachers, tends to be sociall conservative.  In fact, every working public school teacher I know–and I know a couple of dozen of them–is a Republican. 

On the local level, of course, they vote for whoever will vote for more money for schools, but on the local level that doesn’t shake out by party as much as it might on the national level.  On the national level, they hate the No Child Left Behind Act, but they’d hate anything that required them to meet a prescribed standard.  These are people who generally did not do that well in school, and who think intellectual demands are largely “unfair.”

The lower class, of course, consists of people on welfare, or the street, and that’s a complicated issue on its own.

But the American upper middle class gets shafted big time by Democrats, if what you’re looking at is economics.   When Clinton raised taxes, he didn’t raise them on “rich” people.  He raised them on those doctors and lawyers making 250,.000 and then dropped the rate again after half a million–he targeted educated professionals precisely. 

What’s more, an incredible number of these people are philosophically libertarian.

They’re just not going to vote for a Party that makes Sarah Palin–dropped g’s, just-folks demeanor, sketchy knowledge of just about anything she’s asked–a national figure.

It’s interesting what gets people worked up.

First, a note–Mab,  I think, said we were talking about why there was so much resistance in some places to “a decent life for all.”   That wasn’t what I thought I was talking about.  I  thought I was talking about whether the outcomes in your life depend on work or luck, and taking the position that they always depend on both.

Second, yes,  Robert, of course, what  I’m saying about lack of knowledge and going to the Ivies would, even if the knowledge were thoroughly distributed, mean change for only a very few people.  That doesn’t negate my point, however, which is that whether or not you go the the Ivies does not depend entirely on your ability or willingness to work for it.  You can work your butt off, and in the end you still have to get lucky–at the very least, you have to have somebody in your environment who understands the finances and knows why it makes sense to go for it. 

Third, grade inflation is system-wide.  There’s grade inflation at Harvard, but there’s also grade inflation at  Oklahoma State and Herkimer County Community College.  So yes, the Ivies still glitter, because their inflation starts from a much higher substantive base.  Of course, along with the Ivies there are other first -tier universities that get close to the same kind of name advantage (Georgetown, for instance, and Duke).

Fourth, the move to “need blind admissions” and the promise that if they admit you, money won’t be the reason you don’t come started in the late  Sixties or early Seventies at the top end of the Ivy League (Yale,  Harvard, Princeton) and spread from there over time.  But this is not the system at every private college and university.  Harvard has an endowment larger than the entire economies of several small countries, and it only spends 4%–no, that’s not a typo, I said 4%–of the income from that endowmen every year.   A number of these schools could eliminate all student fees inclusive–tuition, room, board, lab fees, you name it–and not even notice the financial bite.

In general, however, indepedent small colleges with regional reputations tend to be the worst financial deals in the system.  Their endowments are often small, which means they don’t have much money to give away.  I don’t know about  St. John’s, since Matt’s thing about not going anywhere that didn’t accept  ROTC pretty much made that a moot point in this house.  

Fifth, I’m with Lymaree–the reason there’s so much resistance to government financed health care in this country is the deep seated perception that with it will come h ealth care managed by “experts” who will get to tell you how to live, and how to die.  The biggest issue now in the discussion is the fact that Oregon’s state-based plan, although it won’t cover certain emerging cancer treatments (still “experimental”), will cover assisted suicide.

Robert suggested something that I’ve actualy thought a lng time–we don’t really have a health care financing crisis in this country, we have two.  We should uncouple catastrophic and long term chronic care from routine care, for one thing, because those are not the same problems and in many ways solving them requires contradictory answers.

Sixth, I know what happened to good old fashioned working class liberals–social liberalism.  FDR and company were very careful not to associate themselves with things like ending segregation or the emancipation of women, never mind gay rights or abortion.  That was the old Democratic Party  compromise–in order to get support for large scale government social programs, states and municipalities were left to do what they wanted to about things like what went on in their school systems and whether or not they had laws on the books criminalizing promiscuous fornication. 

Social issues are more important to people than economic ones–they’re more important no matter where you are on the economic scale.  The upper middle class votes for the Democrats in droves, even though Democratic tax policy hurts them even mor than it hurts the upper class, because the Democratic Party delivers pro-choice, gay rights, and (increasingly) anti-religious policies.  The lower middle class votes for Republicans in droves, even though Republican tax and services policies hurt them more than anybody else, because the Republicans support religion, oppose abortion, and (and this is a BIGGIE), are the only ones that look like they might try to get rid of affirmative action.

On the subject of illegal immigration, the working class is  screwed from both sides, because the upper echelons of both parties have more to gain than to lose from continued waves of illegal immigrants. 

But FDR was a smart man, and he knew that there was only one way to get his economic policies through–and that was to make sure that the people who benefited from them did not have their way of live significantly disturbed.  Whether he should have done that or not is debatable, but that we won’t see working class support for social programs as long as they have to swallow abortion and gay marriage with them is not.

Seventh, I, like Lymaree, know a lot of plumbers and carpenters and other small contractors who are not longing to be working for banks, but my concern is with people who literally do not have the capacity, mental or otherwise, to do anything but what they are already doing.  I’m not talking about plumbing contractors so much as I’m talking about convenience store clerks, and the people the n on-numeric cash registers were designed to help:  just bunch a picture of the Whopper, no need to know the math.

I still say that luck plays an enormous part in all of our lives.  No, it’s not the whole story, not by a long shot, but it’s there, all the time, and it cannot be ignored. 

And to think, I was going to talk about this odd and wonderful Polish writer today, because–yes, yes–I’ve finally dug out a book that I can use to ditch Little Women.

I found the comments to yesterday’s post interesting.  There are some subjects out there that people are so convinced they know the details of, it’s as if they don’t hear what doesn’t comply with what they think they know.

Let’s start with  Cheryl’s comment that it wouldn’t make sense for a middle class or working class family to “stake all” on the hope that an Ivy education would mean great success for their child.

But such a family WON’T “stake all” on an Ivy education–in fact, if the family makes $60,000 or less a year, and the kid is good enough to get in anyway, the chances are that his total outlay for tuition, room and board for four years will run at most between $6000 and $8000–less, if he can get into Harvard. 

That same kid will pay $68,000 to spend four years at the University of Connecticut at Storrs–close to ten times as much.

So why would this family be “staking all’ to take the Ivy deal and being sensible to send the kid to UConn?

Like Mab, I also have one of those fancy degrees from a fancy college.  And the advantage doesn’t lie in the “old boy network.” 

Statistically, the bottom half of a Ivy class does better, financially, that the top half of a second tier–but the real issue isn’t the money.

Let’s say you’re an editor at Big New York Publishing House and you need an ediorial assistant.  An editorial assistant is a glorified secretary, but nobody gets to be an editor without being an EA first, so what you’re trying to do is hire somebody who can b promoted in two years.

You advertise–the pay is God awful, and the hours are worse, but lots of people want to get into publishing, and you find yourself with 7,000 applications on your desk.

How do you sort through them?

Picking out the ones with Ivy or other top-20 credentials makes sense on two levels:  first, the standards  for academic work at such places are much higher than at the competition and second, if you ever have a discrimination complaint that first part will cover your ass–yes, we turned down Ms. Murecki, but not because she’s a Polynesian woman. The guy we gave the job to has a degree from  Harvard and Ms. Murecki went to Oklahoma State.

In all my years in this business, I’ve known exactly one person without such credentials who managed to make it into the system, and the same thing is true of the national magazines.

And this is not a minor issue if you want to end up making your living as a writer, because the usual path to that is NOT to write things in your room at home and send them out to editors in hopes somebody will buy one.

The usual method is to take a job at a national magazine or an important publishing house, work for a few years, get to know all the editors and agents you can, and then, after a promotion or two, pitch a project. 

Most of the books and articles you see for major publishers and publications are contracted for before a single word of the project has been put on paper.  When I was still doing a lot of writing for women’s magazines, my usual process was to work up fifty or so one-sentence article ideas, e-mail or FAX them, and wait for the editor in question to pick what she wanted.   She’d take anywhere for six to fifteen, send me out a contract that covered the lot, and then, and only then, would I go to work.

Do people do it the hard way, from that room at home?   Sure.  Some very successful writers have gone about it that way, especially writers of fiction.  But if you want to make sure you can write for a living, you go the editorial assitant route.

The issue isn’t privelege or the old boys’ network, it’s access.  And it works for people who come from nothing to attend these schools even better than it works for the legacies, because the people who come from nothing have to be very, very, very good to get admitted.  Harvard has an affirmative action program, but it won’t do you any good unless your grades are already good enough to get you into Georgetown.

There are plenty of people who might make good lawyers in international firms, good bankers in international banks, who never get invited to an interview, because the sifting process dumps their applications out long before.  This is, as I said, not a matter of snobbery or privilege but merely one of logistics.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of people want these jobs.  There’s got to be a way to make an initial cut in your applicant pool to get it down to a size you find it possible to handle.

I’m with Cheryl, too, by the way, on the fact that being born into a family with money and privelege is a form of luck.  But I’m aware that it’s not just that that’s luck–there are a lot of accidents of birth going on here.   Most of my kids could work their butts of for decades and not achieve much in the way of material prosperity, not because they’re lazy or spendthrift but because they’re not very bright.   And I am more and more convinced that there is a significant proportion of intellectual ability the potential for which is set at birth. 

I don’t think it’s entirely determined at birth, by the way–I think that, given the raw material, what becomes of it is a result of environment.  But you can only work with the raw material you’ve got.   And no matter how perfect you make the environmental conditions, some raw material will limit the outcome.

I could read before I was three, I got stellar college boards in math even though I hated the subject and refused to study for it, I’ve got a phenomenal memory–and I did nothing to earn any of this.  It’s just me.  I’m very grateful for it, too, but I don’t see why the fact that I’m the fourth or fifth in the family line to be able to read a book and then remember it–actually, project the page on the back of my eyelids and read it off again–should mean that what success I have is entirely earned while my student who cannot do simple addition no matter how many times you explain it to him is being lazy and feckless because all he can get is a job at Wal-Mart.

Okay, the thing with the memory starts to go away when you’re about forty.  But my memory for what I’ve read is still far and away superior to almost anybody around me.  Want to guess what kind of an advantage that was in college classes?

Yes, of course, it’s not enough to be born with advantages if you want to achieve something significant, but that doesn’t change the fact that some people, maybe most of them, aren’t born able to achieve something significant.

And yet these are people we need.  I live out in the country, and in order to do that–in order not to have to live in New York City while doing what I do–I need a lot of help.   I’ve got to have somebody to do my lawn, my plumbing, my electricity–I’m not physically capable of the lawn, and don’t know enough about the other two to be safe.  I need people who deliver things, because packages have to go to publishers.  I need service personnel at telecommunications companies, people to collect my garbage, police and firefighters, the guys who do the sewers.

There seems to me to be something fundamentally wrong with looking at all those people and going, “well, it’s their own damned fault they’re in dead end jobs.  Let them go hang.”  It seems even more fundamentally wrong that the level of at least some of the services they need should be held down to their ability to pay.

It’s to my advantage for the public schools to be first rate.   It’s even more to their advantage.  I don’t get the bit where, with jobs that offer no benefits, it’s okay to strip him of everything he’s managed to save as soon as anybody in his family gets seriously ill.

A guy who works hard, who takes on three jobs, who does his best and goes on doing it, but who simpl doesn’t have the mental capacity to do much better than a job as a clerk somewhere (or three), should not be left out to hang.

I’m not looking to give “handouts.”  I’m looking to make sure that anybody who works hard and follows the rules actually gets to have a decent life, even if he’s never going to be able to wrap h is mind around how to make change, or what a sentence with a subordinate clause might mean.

Okay, let’s start here:  the night before last, my older son was hit by a car.

You can calm down now.  It wasn’t a bad hit.   He wasn’t seriously injured.  He was stepping off the curb as the walk light went on and this guy in a parking space pulled out without looking, and Matt got clipped in the knee.  This was not fun, and he had to take a bunch of prescription ibuprofen, and I called him  at weid hours for the next 24, just to check up on him, but he’s fine.

None of you out thre would deny that what happened  to my son in this instance was luck–he wasn’t jaywalking, so he didn’t bring it on himself, it could have been a lot worse, and all that kind of thing.

But Robert and I have discussions every  once in a while about whther we should call the people who make more money people who are “more fortunate” or people who work harder than other people do, with Robert seeming to insist that the rule would be the people who work harder, and me saying that it isn’t that simple.

It also occurs to me that richer parts of the country tend also to be the most “liberal” parts of the country, with “liberal” here defined as people who think it’s a good idea to have higher taxes for higher brackets of income and to be in favor of the government giving money to the “less fortunate.”

I want to make a suggestion–those of us on the coasts tend to be more “liberal” not because we despise conservatives or the middle class values of hard work and thrift, but because we live every day with the very people who do in fact have the money.  We are forced to confront the impact of luck head on, and we see a lot of it.

Inheritance and marriage are the two most common ways in which any individual will enter the Fortune 400 list of richest people in the country.   Yes, of course, there are plenty of top earners on that list, but just go down and check off  how many people have “inheritance” as their source of money.

But the impact of luck goes much farther than this.  Cheryl said she was surprised that upper middle class parents wouldn’t want their children to study something ‘practical” in college–and a mountain of luck is implied in whether or not your parents understand that she’s misunderstanding the situation.

Culturally upper middle class parents want their children to major in philosophy at Yale rather than accounting at Ball State not because they oppose being practical, but because they know that a philosophy major with a C average from Yale will get a better job (in finance, even) after graduation than an accounting major with an A average from Ball State.

In fact, most large compaines have tiers of job recruiting drives–they go to Ball State to hire middle management, they go to Yale to hire the guys they think may one day end up as CEOs. 

And it gets even worse.  Want to go to law school, med school, grad school?  All the first rate ones weight grades from different institutions, so that 4.0 from Western Connecticut State  College is probably viewed as a C next to Bs from Harvard and Cornell, which, with the weight, will b treated as As. 

And it gets even worse than that.  The chances are good that the kid at  Ball State will in fact pay more for his education than the kid at Yale, and have more loans when he leaves.  Why?  Because the top tier or uninversities have huge endowments and hand out lots of money to students they want to recruit.  Ball State, not nearly so much.

Hell, Harvard made an announcement a while back that it will no longer charge any tutition at all–none–to students from families making less than $60,000 a year.

Information like this is incredibly valuable, and not having it can cost you a career.  My husband turned down Harvard because–God help me–they didn’t have a major in broadcasting.  He had nobody to explain to him that he’d find an easier time getting an actual job in broadcasting if he went to Harvard, majored in English, and then went looking. 

Guidance counselors should fill the information gap here, but they don’t.  I don’t know what qualifies somebody to get a job as a high school guidance counselor, but I can tell you, from having dealt with the money problems of lots of kids, that most of them don’t have the faintest idea how the financial aid system actually works. 

How many kids do you think have given up the dream of going to Vassar to go to the local community college instead, because the  CC is “affordable”?  How many have given up the hope of becoming a lawyer, or a doctor, and signed on for nursing or paralegal studies instead, because—well, they just “couldn’t afford” the right school?

The offices of international law firms, the staffs of famous hospitals, the buildings of famous banks are stuffed full of people who, if their parents had been other than they were, would have ended up at that community college.  The nursing rosters of local facilities, the middle management cubicles of small local companies, the paralegal bullpens of mid-sized state law firms have a sprinkling of people who do in fact have far more in the way of raw talent, dedication and drive than the low end of the big deal.  Except that the low end of the big deal is making nearly ten times more money.

I could go into other ways in which luck counts, but I think I’ve hit it right when  I say that the difference between red states and blue states isn’t any of the values/lifestyles/whatever that we’re always talking about.  It’s that states are blue when lots of first-tier people live in them, and the population can get a good, day to day look at what that first tier does and does not consist of.

Yes, the best of the best are as good as it gets.  They work hard.  They learn more and do more than any of the rest of us. 

What’s right below that, though, is mostly luck–at $250,000 a year, a full benefits package, and the kind of Christmas bonus that makes your teeth hurt.

Okay, here’s the thing.

I’m a compulsive reader.

I mean, I’m a really compulsive reader.  I read all the time.  I’d read in traffic if I could figure out how to hold the book.   I’ve got to have something to read, no matter where I am, orwhat I’m doing. 

So yesterday, after complaining, for good reason, about Little Women, I came across an interesting fact.  The book we know as the “novel” Little Women is actually two separate books, published six months apart.  What is now labeled “part one” of a single work was originally the entire novel, and what is now labeled “part two” was the sequel.

So, I thought, I had an out–I could finish part one and say I was actually done, since that was an entire book, even if it didn’t seem like it given the formatting of my edition.  I mean, I read a single story in a collection sometimes, why not one of two novels in a compendium.  Or whatever you want to call it.

This was a great idea, but it ran into a serious problem.  I finished part one while I was waiting to get into my classroom, and suddenly there I was, in an empty hall, on a nice cushioned bench, and the only thing I had to read was…part two.

And I knew, if I started on part two, I’d have to finish it.

So I tried.  I really did.  I roamed up and down the hall looking for reading material.  One of the problems with having the kind of student who “hates the news” is that they don’t read newspapers, and they don’t discard them, so I couldn’t find one.  I found a bunch of promotional materials for students looking to apply to Western Connecticut State University, the name of which always gives me a fit of the giggles.  I’m old enough to remember when this was Danbury Normal School, meaning a teacher-training school in the days before elementary and high school teachers had to have “degrees.”  It was nice promotional material, as far as that kind of thing goes, but there were more pictures than words, and in no time at all I was staring at…

part two.

So, you know.  I had a half hour wait.  I started part two, and now I’m sitting in the middle of it, trying very hard not to engage in the kind of avoidance behavior tha tmakes bad books last so long with me.

That said, however, I have a few observations.

One is that, from the evidence of the chapter detailing Jo’s first success in publishing novels and short stories, not a whole lot has changed in a hundred years.  Reviewers, especially, seem to run the same gamut, as if they’re places are being filled generation after generation by clones.  There are lots of good reviewers out there, and there are some I take very seriously, but I know that guy who wants to lecture me about how I’m promoting Communism/capitalism/degeneracy/whatever and  yet can’t remember the names of any of the characters, and the guy who cribbed his review from one of the ones in the industry press–except the industry press got bound galleys with mistakes in them and this guy is complaining about a mistake tha tno longer exists in the finished copy he was actually sent. 

But the bigger issue is the question of poverty, which I alluded to a little yesterday, and also to what it means to say that somebody is “culturally middle class” as opposed to “middle class.”  That second one came up in the lottery one.  So let me try this.

It’s possible to have a middle class income and yet not be culturally middle class (or upper middle class), and to be culturally middle or upper middle class and yet have little or no money. 

I have a suspicion that I’m going to make a complete hash out of trying to explain this, but let me give it a shot.

Sarah Palin is culturally middle class, or maybe even culturally lower middle class–I’m sure she has an upper middle class income as governor of Alaska, but the culturally upper middle class do not send their sons into the armed services directly after high school graduation.  And if they go into the services at all, the go to the academies.

The culturally upper middle class work out, support NPR, read real newspapers, read other things, and tend to be obsessively and competitively career oriented–if you have a choice between your work suffering and your family suffering, your family is what goes.  The associates in my father’s old law firm work ninety to a hundred hours a week until they make partner.  Then they go on working that much as long as they remain partners.  When I was growing up, my father was almost never home before I went to bed, and home on the week-ends only sometimes. 

Then there are schools and colleges–to the culturally upper middle class, it makes sense to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt to make sure that your children attend academically rigorous private schools.  The price tag on a place like Andover or Taft taps $40,000 a year, and will actually cost close to $6,000 even with financial aid.  But such places make it much easier for a student to get into a first-tier university, and the first tier is the goal.  And even if the kid can’t manage the first tier, living away from home on a campus is simply expected.  At least part of “the college experience” is that living away from home thing.  What’s m ore, “majors” must be traditional majors–English literature, art history, philosophy, biology, political science.  Undergraduates in the Ivies can’t major in business or teaching–those options aren’t even offered.

The culturally middle class work to live, rather than the other way around.  If a crunch comes between work and family, it tends to be work that suffers.  They’re careful about moving to towns with good public schools, and they use them.  And they’ve got nothing against the kid going to Harvard if he gets in.  On the other hand, they’re not wedded to the idea that the kid has to live at school.  Something closer to home will do just as well, and “majors” are expected to be something “practical,” that will get the kid a job after graduation. 

A lot of the reaction to Sarah Palin, I think, was the perception that she was not culturally upper middle class, which nearly anybody who makes it as far as a career in the national media would have to be.  Even the self-proclaimed conservatives who say they champion the middle class are themselves culturally upper middle class, and it matters to them.  Think about Ann Coulter, who had a hissy fit over the Harriet Myers appointment because Myers had gone to Southern Methodist University, instead of a “good” (read Ivy) school. 

I am really making a hash of this, but what I’m trying to get around to is this:  on different class standards, different things are considered so essential that they cannot be denied.

In Little Women, that thing is a maid.  No matter how poor the Marches are, and they’re often poor enough to have to mend holes in clothes because they can’t afford new ones, they’re always Hannah, helping to cook and clean.

For the culturally upper middle class, there are those tuitions–if you suddenly fall out of work and find yourself reduced to penury, the administration at any first-rate private school will turn itself into a pretzel making sure your kid can stay, because, of course, going to public school is out of the question.

But what stopped me, thinking about Hannah the maid in this thoroughly idiotic book, was the Bernie Madoff problem–which is also the Citigroup CEO problem and the Lehmann Brothers problem.  There are those huge bonuses, and they’re nonnegotiable–the idea that one would have to do without that particular thing is unthinkable.

And courts buy into this.  As Enron was inking, Lay and Skilling were being granted all kinds of financial concessions to make it possible for them to go on doing things like maintaining club memberships and going on vacations because–well, because, those things are nonnegotiable, everybody has those, you can’t deprive people of them.

Okay, I really am making a hash of this.  I think what I’m trying to say here is that the courts should not assume that it is necessary to keep someone materially in the class in which he culturally belongs–“everybody” does not really have club membership money, at least as long as you’re defining “everybody” in some sensible way.

Okay.  Blah.  Bleh.

I really am doing this badly.

Sometimes, reading this blog makes me feel like an old fogey–just using the term “old fogey” makes me feel like an old fogey.  But I  can’t believe how many of you just assumed that the lottery winners who went wild and to held were young.  In fact, every single one of them was over forty but one, and he was definitely over 35.  The couple portrayed at the end as “good” winners who handled it well were in their twenties.  

But, whatever, what I really want to get into here is the fact that I think I’m about to do something very unusual, and I was wondering if I’m a little off in this sense. 

When I was very small, my father told me that it was a disaster ever to leave anything unfinished.   Too many people, he said, go through life with good ideas, and start good projects, only to lose interest and wander away, and therefore losing any benefit that might have been had from finishing.   A college education only “counts” if you get that degree.  It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how much knowledge you have, if you drift off at the end of sophomore year.

I was about seven or eight at the time of this conversation, so  I’m not sure why college was the object of the lesson–although in my house, I not only knew that I was going to college by the time I was three, but I’d picked out the place, and it turned out to be the place when the time came–but I know what made it memorable.

That was the fact that, at the time, I was in the habit of starting stories, or even whole novels (The  Susan Derringer Mystery Books!), and then just sort of never getting around to doing anything about them.  And I could see my father’s point.   It wasn’t enough to have a long list of titles for the books that were to come in the series.   You had to have the actual books.  Which meant you had to write them.

Now, this was very good advice, and in general it’s done me well over the years, but it does have one drawback–for most of my life, I’ve been damned near incapble of  NOT finishing anything.   And I do mean anything.   But at the moment, what I want to talk about is books.

In the whole of my life, I’ve probably put down and refused to continue with a total of maybe five books, and there have been many more than that that haven’t been worth finishing.  I’m rather proud of myself for having given up on The Da Vinci Code, but I was almost driven into that one.  I kept making notes in the margins and on the flaps about historical inaccuracies, the author’s complete and appalling ignorance of both the Middle Ages and the general rules of logical inference–anyway, it got to the point where I couldn’t follow the plot any more because all this other stuff kept getting in the way.

In the years since, I have managed to force myself through some books that I’ve positively hated, and some of them have been long.  Over the past week, however,  I’ve been reading a book that has managed to bore me more than most technothrillers do, and that’s saying something, because I am a woman who goes to sleep during sword fights and car chases.

The book is Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott.  Alcott was the daughter of Bronson Alcott, who established one of the first American communies (before the Civil War!), called  Fruitlands, where everybody was supposed to share the manual labor and not eat meat.  She grew up in Concord and had her first girlish crush on a relatively superannuated Ralph  Waldo Emerson.  She was a child of the Transcendalists in a literal sense, and one of their sharpest-eyed chroniclers throughout her life. 

If Little Women was about the Transcendentalists, I might have liked it better.  Instead, it’s a book deliberately aimed at children–girl children–in Alcott’s desperate attempt to make enough money to keep her family afloat.  This wasn’t easy, because her father was just the kind of irresponsible hippie he would have been if he’d lived in 1960 instead of 1860.  There was never enough food in the house and the Alcotts were continually being evicted from one house or the other for nonpayment of rent.   If it hadn’t been for good old Waldo, they probably would have starved.  As it was, old Bronson Alcott was fond of giving Louisa long lectures about why she was a “dark” child and largely both untalented and evil.   When he wasn’t doing that, he was calling family meetings to explain why marriage was an unacceptable restraint on the liberty of the individual and he was going to book it right this second and try his luck on his own in the West.

He never actually went, which might have been the bad news.

At any rate, I had this book on by TBR stack in my office, and I don’t remember buying it.   I do know why I didn’t read it as a child.  I had a positive horror of “children’s books” when I was growing up.   I thought their very existence was an insult to my intelligence.  I mean, what were these books trying to say?  That I couldn’t read real books?  I don’t know why I didn’t equate  Nancy Drew with “children’s books,” but it was a good thing I didn’t, because if  I had, I’d never have read them.

The odd thing about Little Women, however, is the fact that I don’t remember buying it.  It was up there on the stack, so I must have, and it isn’t too old–the papers aren’t yellowing yet–and I don’t think I would have been given it as a gift, since it’s a Barnes and Noble  Classics edition.

If you don’t know about these, you should.  Barnes and Noble, the American bookstore company, has put out a whole slew of classic texts in cheap but solid trade paperback editions.  Their two-volume set of the complete Sherlock Holmes is the best you can get anywhere if you aren’t interested in the kind of footnoted edition that can provide blood types for Holmes and  Moriarity both.

So the book was there, and I’m still making notes for an essay on Hawthorne and company, and I thought I’d give it a shot.   I knew a few things that I hadn’t back when I’d been avoiding it as a child, and that included the fact that it was, for many yeras, right up through th ebeginning of the Great Depression, the best selling novel in  America.  In the twenties, a survey asking what book the respondents felt had had the most influence on their lives got Little Women as an answer more often than the  Bible.  And did that for three years of surveys in a row.

Obviously, something was going on here, and to an extent it still is.  Little Women is being read by generation after generation of  American girls.  It’s still being taken out of libraries and its editions still make money, if not so much as they used to.  What’s more, it’s not a matter of this having become a course adoption text (CAT–I like the acronym), because usually it isn’t.   It wasn’t assigned in school when  I went, and I know it isn’t assigned now.  It won’t show up on a college curriculum unless you take a special course in children’s literature or are working on the gradduate level in American Studies, at which point it’s treated like Uncle Tom’s Cabin–interesting as an artefact, not as a novel.

So here is all this stuff going on, and it’s evident that lots and lots of people over lots and lots of years, even generations, have really loved this book.

I just have no idea why.

I mean, for God’s sake.  I know the thing was written for children at a time when all literature for children was supposed to be composed of moral homilies, but this thing is so sickly sweet I want to kick it.  And I want to wring the necks of virtually all the girls except Jo, and with Jo I keep wishing she’d suddenly decide to come out, and I don’t mean as a debutante. 

What’s more, the whole moral patina of the thing hides some very odd stuff.  The family is symbiotic to the point of weirdness, with the girls–even the older girls–hating the idea of marriage because it will break up their little circle.  Then there’s the long sequence that results in Beth’s getting scarlet fever because she does an errand that was supposed to be Jo’s responsibility. It’s not the sequence itself I object to as much as the way the characters respond to it–Jo herself, and all the people around her, take her responsibility for  Beth’s illness and near death with about the same amount of moral outrage they’d use to scold her if she’d been expelled from school for cutting classes.

I have absolutely no idea why anybody reads this book.   One of the posters in the comments said a few weeks ago, I think, that she liked to read books where people had goals and didn’t drift.  Well, this is not the book for her, really.  There doesn’t seem to be any kind of actual point.  The girls and their mother just go through life, with little treats and moral homilies and a few asides about the troubles caused by their “poverty,” which is the poverty of the nineteenth century middle classes–they hav very little in the way of clothes, and they all have to work, but they still employ one servant.   The woman who wrote the introduction to the edition I have is very perplexed by the servant, but I get it.

I don’t need a strong plot in a novel if the characters are interesting to me.  These characters are too unrealistic to be interesting to me.   I can understand the desire to set down an account of the way we live now, and I understand that in  America that project has often been done through children’s books–Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Little House on the Prairie, Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn.  But this isn’t that, either.

I also understand Alcott’s desperate desire to create on paper the sane and loving family she never had, to take a childhood of misery, chaos and grinding penury and transform it into one she could actually live with, but it’s not one I can live with.   I can’t remember being this bored with a book in a long time. 

But I also can’t seem to force myself to put it down.  If the thing was actively bad, I might have a chance.  Anger moves me to action more than boredom does. 

What I do is read page after page, often very slowly.  Then I put it down, do something else, pick it up–a book that should have taken me three or four days to read has already eaten up two weeks, and I have a feeling it’s going to take me a lot longer.

I have no idea what it would take me to give up on this.  I  just wish  I could find the formula.

So, yesterday, after writing the blog, I went in to school.  I stopped in at the division office to check up on some paperwork, and the secretaries took one look at me, turned me around, and sent me back to my car. 

Which was how I managed to be lying on my couch at three o’clock yesterday afternoon with the remote all the way across the room and the television somehow stuck on E!  You know  I’m sick when the TV is on E! and I’m too tired to do anything about it.

At any rate, what E! was showing was something the channel info bar called a ‘documentary,” which I suppose it actually was, technically.  The name of this thing was Curse of the Lottery, and its supposed premise was that people who win the lottery are worse off because of it, terrible things happen to them that wouldn’t have happened if they’d never won the money.  I say this was the “supposed” premise because, like a student paper, the damned thing changed its subject about three quarters of the way through.

About the first three quarters, though, a couple of notes.  First,  I’ve got nothing against people playing the lottery if that’s what they want to do.  I tend not to bother unless we get into one of those things where it’s the biggest news at six and the jackpot is in the ridiculous range, but I don’t see what’s wrong with it if you’re not getting stupid about it.  This means, however, that I also don’t know anybody who plays regularly, and the only time I did was in the first stages of my mother’s dementia, when she became for a while a Powerball fanatic.   Then she forgot about it, the way she forgot about most things.

I make these points to provide a caution–I have no way of knowing, or judging, whether the stories presented in this program are typical of people who play the lottery.  In fact, there was an interesting difference in the people profiled in the last quarter of this thing that makes me think that the people in the first three quarters were not necessarily typical at all.   That said, a number of observations:

1) It was remarkable how many of the people who won big and then got into enormous amounts of trouble seem to have spent most of their lives before the win being close cousins to my most passive students.  Some of them were drifters literally, living on disability checks or not much at all.   Some of them were convenience store clerks and factory workers and janitors.  It didn’t matter.  All of them, from the testimony of their friends, had been floating for years.

2) I found it really surprising how many of these people seem to have had “substance abuse” problems long before they won money.  Is it just me, or does everybody have trouble figuring out where people like this get the money to indulge their tastes in chemicals?  So-and-so has “a five hundred dollar a day habit”? If you’re working behind the counter at the local  Dairy Queen and can come up with five hundred dollars a day to buy God knows what, you should be able to put aside money for a house.  Where do people like this get all their cash?

3) It’s really, really remarkable how many of these people don’t seem to be able to add and subtract.  To be fair, I notice this same thing when MTV or somebody highlights the lifestyles of various pop and movie stars.  If you’re Paris Hilton, you probably have a trust fund and lawyers who restrict what kind of cash you can lay out, and they’re probably very careful to make sure you only spend income, not capital.  But a lot of the lottery winners were like a lot of the pop stars–as soon as they got a few million, they went out and spent five times that and then, of course, in no time at all, most of the money was gone. 

4) The craziest thing about the money spent as above, was the amount of it that was spent on complete silliness–collectable plates, six cars (why does anybody want six cars?  why?),  whatever.  And, of course, lots of it was spent on houses, which would be all right except that the houses were then tricked up in ways that I found it hard to take in–plasma TVs as big as movie theater screens hung on bedroom walls, for instance.  The houses were all absolutely huge, and they all looked incredibly uncomfortable to live in.  They also got foreclosedon at a really impressive rate.

5) A fair amount of the trouble these people got into involved violence.   Not spectacular violence, mind you, mostly the same penny-ante stuff that shows up every week in the Police Blotter section of my town’s (weekly) newspaper, but violence even so.   There were the usual round of domestic violence calls, but one woman was involved in a DUI that killed her passenger, walked away from it and ended up in jail for hit and run.   Another man’s granddaughter died of a drug overdose just before he himself was mugged for half a million dollars he was for some reason carrying around in his pockets.

6) The press attention never seemed to go away.  There were clips from press conferences several years after the lottery win, as if once these guys won money the local newspapers and television stations were watching their every move.  I have no idea if this is typical.  I admit to never having seen a story about a local lottery winner on the local news, or to have heard of any of these people except one, who was rather a flamboyant sort to start with.   Maybe I’m just not paying attention, but I don’t know the name of a single lottery winner, not even the flamboyant one.  There did seem to be lots of attention, though, with plenty of headlines reading things like “Lottery  Winner Jailed for  DUI” and “Lottery Winner In Divorce Shocker.” 

I said at the start that the last quarter of this thing changed subject, and it did–to highlighting people who had done well with the money they won and giving advice on how, if you won, you could be lucky with it instead of unlucky.  And there were a few things the doing-well people had in common.  One was that they were all culturally middle class–they had decent jobs, they already owned houses, they had functional educations, they had no histories of run-ins with the law or substance abuse.  The other thing was that they could add and substract.   Instead of buying million dollar houses and stuffing them full of the products of the Franklin Mint, they paid off their own mortgages and those of their children, put grandchildren through college, and did all the things most people would do if they go a bit ahead.   In one case or two cases, the win having been very big indeed, they bought “nice” houses that were nowhere near the kind of MTV cribs things the “tragic” lottery winners couldn’t stay away from.

The last thing they had in common was this:  there didn’t seem to be anything in the way of headlines about them.  Obviously, people knew who they were–otherwise, they couldn’t have been profiled for this program–but they didn’t seem to generate the kind of interest the disasters did.

I don’t actually know if I’m going anywhere with all of this.  Part of me wishes I understood the dynamic of the publicity.  Why would people be interested not just in hearing that so and so won the lottery, but in what such a person was doing afterwards, often for years afterwards?  Why would such a person be a continuing object of interest  for total strangers?  And why is what people want to hear about most the disasters and the failures and the general bad news?

There was something else that was only alluded to once or twice that I found fascinating, but that I see no way to research:  apparently, once your name has been in the paper as winning a lot of money, people not only approach you looking for handouts, they go on approaching you, for years.   The begging requests never stop.

All of this makes me wonder about the entire phenomenon–the people who play, the people who win, and the problems a certain segment of the population seems to have with good news. 

And it’s just possible that I may have had to have a decent fever to be interested in this at all.

So I’ve been thinking about it.  Robert said that the result of more people being more engaged in the political process seems to be that more people head for the extremes, but I don’t know that that’s what’s happening here.

In the first place, Idon’t think more people are involved in the political process than there used to be.   In fact, I think there are less, at least as a proportion of the adult population.  It’s hard for me to come up with even an anecdotal defense of this, since the only political incident I can remember from my childhood was an all-school poll on the 1960 election, in which, given the overwhelmingly Irish Catholic make-up of our student body, went to  Kennedy in a landslide.

I just don’t know, however, if there was much in the way of the equivalent of the vast majority of my students, who often don’t know who’s running (asked who  Joe Biden was, they guessed Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby daddy), or, if they do, get the basics wrong (MSNBC favored Obama, one student wrote, which meant they were Republicans, who were the liberals). 

It seems to me that a number of factors, however, contribute to less involvement in politics by more people, one of which is certainly the fact that we can now avoid politics if we want.  The last time I remember a situation where almost every channel suspended regular programming to deal with the news, it was 9/11, and even then it was only almost every channel.  

It was entirely possible to go through this last election, the most historically significant since FDR, at least, and possibly since Lincoln, and never hear a word about it.   Radio music stations, the Soap network, you name it, there was a way to avoid it.  I think a lot of people used to be “informed” mostly because they had no choice.  There were three broadcast television stations and all of them had the news on at the same time.  For an hour or so each day, if you were watching at all, you were stuck getting to know things.

But I also think that fewer people participate because the process has become so distasteful in so many ways.  It’s easy to poke fun at the Bush is a fascist war crimine!  Obama is a Communist selling the soul of America into totalitarianism! people–and they deserve to be made fun of–but the fact is that when the discourse becomes dominated by people like these, something profouindly destructive is being done to democracy.

I think that a lot of people have just been turned off by the hyperbole, and by the endless name calling, and by the tactics–and on both sides.   I also don’t think most people are in need of a new narrative, or insecure with the one they have.  They’ve mostly come to some compromise they can live with.  They’re not feeling threatened.

But the people who are doing the yelling and screaming are feeling threatened, and in a way they have a right to be.  I think that both the religious narrative as it is promulgated by the evangelicals in politics and the secular narrative as it is presented by the main secular/atheist organizations are deeply flawed,  and neither of them has the actual support of the majority of the American people. 

I think that the polls are right when they say that most Americans believe in God, for instance, but I don’t think the God they believe in has much in common with the one being presented by American folk Protestantism.  That is, most Americans seem to think that being homosexual or not is a person’s own business, and that God won’t be sending anybody to hell just for that.   God is a vaguely comforting, important person out there somewhere, who really just wants us all to be good and decent and happy and to behave well towards each other.

I think that the fact that the polls also show that most Americans wouldn’t touch an atheist with a ten foot pole has less to do with their understanding of atheism–most of them don’t understand it, and a fair number think atheists worship Satan–than with the fact that the public face of atheism in this country has become strident, angry and pinched.

Whether or not the local high school gets to have a Christmas pageant is important to exactly two groups of people:  the committed Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who want to promote their religion, and the committed secularists, who want to stop them.  The rest of the student body, and their parents, think that Christmas is this neat time where there’s Santa Claus and presents and that sweet story about the three kings–and what the hell is everybody getting so worked up about? 

I think there’s a fair amount of a pox on both your houses in this mess–to the vast general public, the “Christians” are the people trying to ban the Halloween party and the “atheists” are the people trying to ban the Christmas party, but in both cases, what we’ve got is some group or the other trying to stop the rest of us from doing what we want to do

I think that it would be difficult for anybody to get involved in the process if this was what they saw it as, first hand.  If you’re happy about where you are, if you’re not feeling as if you’re very identity is threatened, then you want to enter the process to get things done, like the town sewer system being extended out to the Fire District or a new middle school being built to replace the one that’s started falling down.  When you can’t do that, when getting involved means getting in the middle of a shooting war between two groups of people who seem to be ready to taste blood over issues you find trivial, you retreat to your living room and watch another episode of Friends.

I have no idea what it is we’re supposed to do about this.  I know that the clash between these two ways of looking at the world, of constructing an American identity, are real enough, and that they’re not compatible.

But they’re also not new.  You can find most of the same themes in the New England of the years that ran up to the Civil War.  The two strains, liberal and conservative, have been with us always.  When Thomas Jefferson ran for  President, the churches denounced him as an atheist–and although he wasn’t, quite, he came damned close.   When Franklin Delano  Roosevelt ran for President, he was disinvited from the reunion of his Groton School class, because his fellow preppies had no intention of shaking the hand of the man who had “betrayed” them.

But even though there was always turmoil, up until very recently it was also always possible for Americans to be Americans first and all this other stuff sort of as a hobby.  We managed to assimilate Catholicism and dozens of ethnic groups, so that pizza and tacos and General Tso’s Chicken and bagels with a shmear are all now “American” foods, and there are now myriad styles of “being  American.”  Tony Soprano is as American as David Rockefeller. 

I’d be a lot more coherent here if I had an answer for all this, but I don’t.  I think that the clash of narratives, and the rise of political classes who feel threatened by the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t validate their story, was inevitable.  The sheer amount of information available to larger and larger numbers of people means that any narrative we choose must necessarily bump up against others and against evidence that at least some of its claims are false.  

I don’t know, though, that I am royally sick of it.   I don’t think Bush is a fascist war criminal and I don’t think Obama is a Communist plant bent on destroying democracy and the free market.   I’m tired beyond belief of policy issues become ideological ones.   I’m even sicker of the ideological issues becoming so paramount that we’re unable to actually figure out what the consequences of our policies are going to be and act on those. 

Maybe it’s just that I’m still more than a little sick–and Cheryl is right, this is always worse when you have students, who seem to carry some kind of superbug around with them just to give the teacher a fever–and so my ordinary annoyance with all this is getting out of hand. 

Or maybe it’s just that Glenn Beck and Keith Olberman are driving me crazy.

Not that I have the flu, mind you.   I’m told on good authority that I  have something called a “sub flu,” which gives flu-like symptoms but is not actually the flu, and therefore my flu shot has been no good to me whatsoever.  It’s at times like these that I begin to think that no matter how much I dislike Florida, I ought to move there.  At least I wouldn’t be cold on top of having one.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking, sor of, when I haven’t just been falling over like a tree and sleeping for hours at a time, and what I’ve been thinking about is that modernity has presented a distinct problem for human beings and their narratives.

In a world with the communications systems of ancient  Rome, for instance, a people could have their narrative and have it virtually unchallenged.   They would be aware of other cultures and other narratives, but they wouldn’t have to confront them on any regular basis.

In modern societies, though, we are all hit with contradictory narratives every day, and we don’t so much pick and choose between them–although we do a little of that–as assimilate what we see sort of willy-nilly.  But no matter how much we know or see of those other narratives, we know them only partially, and we’re no better at really understanding the differences between people, cultures and habits of mind than the Romans were.

I don’t think fiction provides us with narratives.  I think it rather embodies narratives already in the culture around us.   And most people need more than one narrative at a time–a personal one, surely, and one for their country, and one for the world at large. 

The problems come, I think, when one of these narratives will not fit with the others, when we find it impossible to embed ourselves in an explanatory framework that actually explains anything.

Narratives are not wholly self-delusional.  They do and will come in contact with reality, and that means they will sometimes run into it like a car hitting a brick wall.  This is what has happened to a large segment of the Islamic “community.”   Their metanarrative says that Islam is the only true religion and Muslims are destined by God to rule over the earth.  Their reality says that the people who rule the earth are not only not Muslims, but opposed to Islam on so many points they’re almost anti-Muslim.

People do very odd things when their narratives hit that brick wall, and not only things on the scale of suicide bombings. 

Consider the rash of hoax “hate crimes” that occured across the country a couple of years ago, including one where a professor in the Midwest who claimed to have been set upon by a raging Christian fundamentalist because he’d (the professor) said negative things about Christianity on the  Internet. 

After all, if your metanarrative says that you are surrounded by people who are violent and malicious and want to kill you because you uphold Truth and  Right and Reason, and then these people don’t do anything to you  at all, and don’t do anything to anybody that you can see–what does it take for you to go on believing in your metanarrative?

Narratives provide our lives with meaning, and we cannot live without meaning.   What’s more, narratives provide us with self-respect, with the ideas that make it possible for us to look in the mirror and affirm that we are good people.  If our narratives so flagrantly contradict reality that those contradictions cannot be ignored, we’re in big trouble.

One of the ways in which people protect their narratives from reality is to restrict their contact with other people, as far as possible, to  th ose people who accept their narrative.  Conservatives watch Fox News but not MSNBC, read The Weekly Standard but not The Nation.  Atheists read Free  Inquiry and books by Paul Kurtz, but nothing by Augustine or Alvin Plantinga.

But the problem remains–there is no way to restrict our contact with other narraties, not in this technological society, not now.  And that means that we are constantly being threatened by people and events that could easily destroy our narratives entirely.

It’s this–this threat to narratives–that I think is the real explanation for the total insanity of so much in US politics recently. 

We used to be able to disagree with each other and leave it at that, but that is no longer possible for many people on either side of the political divide.

Republicans started out screaming that the Clintons had had Vince Foster murdered and then responded to Obama by calling him a Socialist, a Communist, and–in the case of one  Glenn Beck–comparing him to Hitler. 

And that’s okay, in a way, because liberals spent the Bush administration comparing W. to Hitler, calling him a fascist, and demanding he be tried for “war crimes” becuase he’d sanctioned “torture.’

And those people are back, by the way, now that  Obama is in office.  Fortunatly, the Obama people actually seem to have more sense.

But these are not political disagreements we’re witnssing, they’re the class of narraitives.   The two sides do not see the world and what is important in it in the same way, and one of those ways will, eventually, fall by the wayside and be overtaken by the other. 

The danger of the Bush administration was not that it was evil and totalitarian–it was neither, although I didn’t like it much–but that it portended a world in which that paradigm becomes predominant and the other kind is marginalized.

The danger of the Obama administration is not that it’s evil and totalitarian, but that the man’s sweeping victory seemed to indicate a sea change in the attitudes of the  American public, suddenly marginalizing conservative ideas and beliefs and making them irrelevant to the wider society.

The good news is that the majority of the American public seems to be on neither side.  I think Obama’s biggest selling point was his repeated assertion that there are not liberal Americans or conservative Americans, but just Americans.  The United States actually has a pretty good metanarrative that is servicable for people of many different faiths and philosophies, and it’s one of the better omens of the future that a majority of people want that one and not one of the two more partisan ones that have taken over so much of our discourse in the past few years.

It’s of course never been the case that every single American has been able to adopt the American metanarrative as her own–that would be impossible with so many other options on offer-but the emergene of two large and vocal minorities both of whom reject it in favor of narratives that are considerably less congruent with reality is an interesting circumstance, and one  I don’t know I’m able to solve. 

If I’d have to make my best guess, I’d say that the majority of the militantly “evangelical” wing of the Republican party only says it believs in God.  It is apparently unable to maintain that belief in a society that does not support it both officially and unofficially. 

I’d say the view from the other side is similar.  There are some atheists who, like me, essentially just grew up with atheism.  We never believed in God to begin with, and so we don’t now, and it’s no big deal.

A large part of the atheist movement, however, is made up of converts, and like all converts they tend to be far more fanatical than the average. People like me have n o problem with calling the December concert the “Christmas Concert.”  People who have left what were once strong attachments to faith often do, and  I do think that that is, in part at least, a result of the fact that they’re not really 100% sure they’re right.  I knew a man on the Internet for a while who would get absolutely hysterical if you even suggested that you thought Jesus Christ might have been an historical person–if it was even possible for  Jesus to exist, this man seemed to be coninced he was going to hell.

I have no idea what we’re supposed to do with all this.  The Founding Fathers thought that some things–religions and personal philosophies, certainly–would be best handled by keeping them private and out of the public areas of contention.   There is no way for us to keep any of these things private any longer, because just turning on the televisoin set means that we will be assaulted by ideas that oppose ours.

On one level this is the good news–an awful lot of creativity is born of this kind of friction–but on a personal level, for many people, it can be profoundly psychologically destabilizing.  Even small challenges to our personal narratives can be that.

I have no idea what we’re supposed to do about any of this.   At the moment, my chief desire is to make some chicken broth and go watch Matilda, which is what I do when  I’m too out of it to function. 

With any luck, I’ll be feeling more human tomorrow.

And the cats will stop fighting me for the ice cream.

Okay.  I’m on round two of winter health crud here–this time it seems to be just your standard cold, sore throat, feel like yuck, you know what I mean.  But with the schedule I  keep, I’m bone tired and can’t sleep in until  Sunday–my younger son has classes on Saturday, which means getting up at three thirty even on the week-ends–so I’m feeling a little disorganized.   So let me try to cover a few things without worrying about the structure of the whole, so to speak.

First, I never said that fiction didn’t “change lives.”  I said the humanities–literature, music, art (and history, but I’ll get to this in a minute)–didn’t make us good people, and it doesn’t.  On the individual level, the jury is still out on what people like Arnold claimed that an understanding of the humanities would do–that is, make the individual better than he would have been without them–and I’ll leave determination of the truth or falsity of that to whoever figures out how to test it.

But on the society-wide and culture-wide level, there’s no doubt at all–it is narrative that shapes out societies and changes them.  And those changs are often enormous.   Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more to turn public sentiment against slavery, and make it impatient of resolution, than the thousands of abolitionists tracts and lectures that had been issued across the county in the decades that preceded it.  When Virgil wanted to give  Rome a sense of identity, he didn’t write a philosophical tract on the glories of the Empire, he wrote The Aeneid, convinced that it was the Iliad and the Odyssey, not Aristotle and Plato, that had made the Greeks the great civilization they were.

Human beings live and die by narrative, and this narrative is almost always at least partially finctional.  It is always consciously shaped.  Remember how I said I’d get back to history?   History has always been considered one of the humanities–not the “social sciences”–because from the beginning, history has been about producing narratives and claiming them to be ‘true stories!”

I don”t mean that there”s no such thing as fact in history. Of course there is.  The problem is that, if all you had was a list of facts, without framework or interpretation, you wouldn’t have anything particularly useful, or particularly of interest to just about anybody.  Herodotus and Thucydides both knew this, and they felt no compunction at all about making up speeches to put in the mouths of historical figures, or turning entire events into platforms for moral instruction.

These days we’re more careful.  We don’t do anything so blatant as simply to make up what somebody is supposed to say.  But we don’t just stick to the facts, either, because we can’t.   A list of all the facts that make up the Civil War would tell us very little about the Civil  War–that’s why Bruce Catton writes narratives called histories, not fact sheets.  And even if every single fact he gives is verifiable, the further fact is that he only gives us some of them and leaves others out.  In that choice itself the “facts” are fictionalized, and history becomes an art and not a science.

If you don’t believe me, think about a scientist conducting an experiment about a new drug, who decides to keep in the data on one set of side effects but to leave out the data on another set.

Like it or not, narrative is the most important fact about us individually and as a society, and narrative is what both makes us what we are and pushes us into change.

What’s more, the Great  Conversation has, in the West as in everyplace else, always been carried on primarily through the arts (and therefore fiction), not through philosophy or other nonfiction work.

Robert was wrong to say I care very little about the nonfiction end of the Canon.   Any look at The Western Canon According to Me will show that at least half of it is taken up with nonfiction.

But the simple truth is that philosophers speak mostly to each other.   If their ideas remain in philosophy texts without being translated in any way into fiction, those ideas will be of no ultimate important to civilization at large.   Sartre and Camus both understood this, which is why, aside from writing philosophy, they always made it a point to write novels that embodied that philosophy as well.  And to this day, you can learn a lot more about existentialism as philosophy and as way of life from The Stranger than you can from Being and Nothingness.

Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom and its ideas had no currency in everyday life whatsoever until a generation which had been reared on Atas Shrugged discovered it.  Suddenly it was popular enough for multiple reprintings and references on Internet web sites by people who know no more of Leibniz or Macchiavelli than I do of carburetors.

Human beings think in narratives, and the narratives they think in determine their personal identities and the nature of the societies they live in.   Change a society’s narrative, and you change everytbing about it.

And that will, I guarantee you, change lives.

What’s more, once a narrative becomes strongly entrenched, it maintains itself even if it’s drastically, destructively wrong.

Consider both Karl  Marx and Sigmund Freud, two thinkers whose chief claim to fame is to have come up with some of the worst ideas every written down on paper, almost all of which have been decisively refuted on almost every level.  

I say almost every level, because Ayn Rand notwithstanding, there’s been very little in the way of counternarrative out there to deconstsruct the worst of the idiocies their narratives left behind.   In the case of Marxism, the effect has been even stronger than it might have been because its narrative is in fact an offshoot of an older one, with enough of that older one’s elements to feel “naturual” to the people taking it up–Marxist narratives are always variations on the Gospel,  with History made to stand in for  God and Oppressed Humanity made to stand in for Christ on His Cross.

A  philoosphy that is never expressed in narrative dies, or becomes a simple academic enterprise of interest to nobody but scholars in universities.   It you want to chane the world, you must tell a story, and get other people to adopt your story as ‘true.” 

All of the great questions of our time will be decided not by logical discussion,  not by philosophical or political debate, but by which naratives come to be adopted by the most people.  Abortion, gay rights, the welfare state, pre-emptive war, the Islamic resurgence–you name it, and the best and most compelling story will win. 

What strikes you as more immediate and true–the stoy of the rape victim who finds herself pregnant by her rapist and is trapped, screaming and desperate, with no way out of undergoing even more pain and suffering?  or the story of the small child in the womb, trusting to its mother and the rest of the the world to feed and comfort and protect it, suddenly attacked by knives and suction cups and ripped to pieces?

Or how about this–the story of an old and suffering woman, condemned to die a slow death from a debilitating disease, without hope, without relief from pain, unless someone will help her put herself out of her misery?  or the story of the old woman who is suffering but still wants desperately to live, constantly in fear of the “medical professionals” around her who think her clinging to life makes her a “greedy geezer’ and is completely irrational, determined to “put her out of her misery” even if she thinks that isn’t what she wants?

Our narratives are who we are, and the Great Conversation is first and foremost a history of and competition between narratives. 

And, if that’s a hobby, it’s the most important one ever invented, far more important than most of the rest of what we do.