Author Archive
OFGS
That’s a new acronym, invented by me. It means, “Oh, for God’s Sake.”
I invented this acronym specifically for an article posted on FB yesterday by several of the people on my FB friends list. You can find it here
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/09/bringing-back-feudalism-is.html
And I’ll get to it in a moment.
First, however, I’d like to formulate a Useful Rule for Everyday Life.
This useful rule is like the other one I’ve come up with–“never defend a government that has to pass laws to prevent its own citizens from leaving.”
This new rule will also save you a lot of trouble, and it goes like this:
If somebody starts telling you that the period of this country’s greatest prosperity was also the period in which taxes were highest and regulation was expanding–
And he tells you that as “proof” that high taxation and regulation is good for us.
Then stop reading.
The writer either has no idea what he’s talking about, or he’s willing to engage in any kind of fraud to manipulating you into agreeing with him.
Why?
Because the period of America’s greatest prosperity was also the period of America’s greatest autonomy on the world stage.
It was World War II and it’s immediate aftermath.
It was the period when all our traditional competition–all of it–was busy blowing itself up and laying waste to its industrial plant.
After that, it was the period in which these same countries were trying desperately to rebuild.
Marshall Plan or no Marshall Plan, you don’t rebuild overnight.
So, yes, during that period when we had no real competition anywhere in the world and everyone who couldn’t compete with us needed to buy our products to survive, we had the most prosperity we’d ever have.
Unfortunately for the people who want to make this “proof” of the goodness of high taxation and higher regulation, all it actually proves is that, in conditions like that, we could have been governed by Bozo the Clown and we’d still have had a great time.
As you’ve probably guessed, the article makes that particular argument, among others that are equally assinine and silly, and that doesn’t even begin to be the worst of it.
The worst of it–aside from the fact that the writer doesn’t seem to know what “feudalism” means–is the nonsense of the bait and switch with “libertarianism.”
That is, the writer assumes that whatever caricature of idiocy his side has so far defined as “libertarian” is what “libertarians” believe, and then processes to have discovered a scandal because he’s actually read a couple of libertarian writers now and…THEY DON’T SAY THAT!
Instead of doing the obvious and honest thing and wondering if he might, just might, have been misunderstanding what libertarians are saying, he decides that libertarians don’t know what libertarianism actually said.
This is an incredibly neat maneuver, because it means he doesn’t have to listen to any of the contemporary advocates of libertarianism, or respond to anything they’re saying.
After all, you can’t respond to what you don’t know is there.
This leads him to declare that rule by bureaucrats is actually more “libertarian” than rule by “oligarchs” (he means corporate CEOs) because there are more bureaucrats than oligarchs, and “libertarianism says” that rule by bureaucrats is bad because there are so few of them and they therefore can’t know what people actually want.
But libertarianism does not say anything of the kind.
Libertarianism says each individual man and woman is a better judge of his own interests that ANYBODY else is, no matter how numerous (or not).
Bureaucrats do a bad job because they are not the individuals themselves.
Libertarianism would certainly also agree that “rule by oligarchs” (if we had it) would be just as bad, if now worse, except for one thing.
Except for those cases (very common in the present US) where corporations have managed to grow the regulatory state to their advantage (to use to protect themselves from competition), those “oligarchs” are always held accountable by consumers.
You don’t have to buy their products. If you don’t like what they’re selling, they lose, and if they lose often enough they cease to exist.
At least half the great, invincible corporations of my childhood have ceased to exist, somehow finding their oligarchic power not enough to keep them alive. You give the people what they want, or you die.
Bureaucrats, on the other hand, are accountable to nobody. When they do wrong, or make mistakes, it’s still almost impossible to fire them, and no matter how bad they are, they metastasize.
Libertarianism does not know, and has not ever, recommended an end to all regulation or to all public provision.
It says instead that the preservation and protection of individual liberty is the first business of government, and that regulation should therefore be:
a) limited in extent
b) limited in area (that is, pr0hibited absolutely in most areas of private life)
c) democratically and publicly imposed.
That is, that we shouldn’t erect an oligarch of regulators empowered to enact laws without the consent of Congress and to micromanage anything and everything it can get its hands on.
Nor do libertarians say that there should be no public schools or dam projects or libraries or public universities.
We’re happy to have public institutions as long as:
a) we really NEED them and
b) they are not used to enforce a virtual Official State Church on the public at large.
The issue in libertarianism is how to make it possible to allow every single human being to make his own decisions about his own life and, outside REAL crime, to protect him from people who would force him to toe the conformist line.
That means libertarians won’t care very much if your school decides to serve quinoa and passion fruit that none of the children will touch, but they WILL care if lunchroom officials confiscate the lunch you sent with your child because it doesn’t meet their idea of standards.
Yes, that’s right.
I want parents to have the right to send whatever lunch they want even if that lunch is Twinkies and potato chips. I want local school boards to decide on their curricula even when that means teaching creationism and climate “denial.” I want individuals owning stores and businesses and running hospitals and practicing medicine and law to be able to do all that without directly violating their religions, even if that means not paying for abortion coverage or not making wedding cakes for gay couples.
In case you’re wondering, the other article, this one
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/12/11_questions_to_see_if_libertarians_are_hypocrites/
the article the first article calls a straw man argument, is just as silly as the first link I posted.
This one actually starts with a paragraph that misrepresents every single thing libertarianism is about.
Nobody ever said that “selfishness” makes everything better for everybody (assuming you’re defining “selfishness” as it’s commonly used), but that millions of people each making decisions about their own private interests results in better overall outcomes for everybody than “experts” and rulers trying to impose their own ideas of the good on everybody else.
This has been proved so conclusively true that I can’t believe anybody can deny it any more with a straight face.
Ah, but you deny it by pretending it says what it doesn’t say–you pretend it says “millions of people making private decisions will end up making the BEST decisions.”
But it doesn’t say that. It says that the outcome from millions of people deciding to eat Twinkies and chips instead of fruits and vegetables will be better overall than the outcome from experts and rulers trying to make everybody eat right.
It’s not that the first set of positions will lead to The Good, but that the second will lead to the Inevitably Worse.
Then there’s the thing about how libertarianism was resurrected by big corporations for their own advantage.
By and large, big corporations hate libertarianism, because it affords them no protection against competition.
Think of it–no bailouts, no being able to use regulatory agencies to keep upstarts from muscling in on your business, no big juicy government contracts for just about anything, never mind privatized prisons or the war in Iraq.
The other thing I’d really like is for people to stop telling me what’s wrong with Ayn Rand while making it completely obvious that they either haven’t read her or they don’t understand what she says.
I know that I’m in the presence of somebody who hasn’t read her or doesn’t know what she says when they use the common definition of “selfishness” and claim that’s the way she’s using it too.
One more time: when Ayn Rand uses “selfishness,” she means “being absolutely and inflexibly true to yourself.” That means holding onto your ideals and values even if you lose every material thing by doing so, even if you’re put in jail or tortured or killed.
In other words, she’s not talking about what we call “selfishness” in everyday usage, but about what we call “integrity.”
And, yes, the world would be a better place if everybody practiced that.
Next, I’ll start taking your seriously when you claim that libertarianism only exists now because Evil Billionaires and their Evil Corporations give it money when you start saying the same thing about Evil Billionaires and Evil Corporations who give money to the left.
Which they do.
There is money on both sides of these issues, and neither side is capable of making the populace believe what it wants them to believe no matter how much money it throws into the mix.
As for the “libertarian hypocrisy test,” it’s so ludicrous it makes my head ache.
It defines “hypocrisy” as “any disagreement with its own definitions and ideas,” so that it claims that libertarians who aren’t “willing to admit” that “production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded” is being a hypocrite, when
a) in fact, libertarians do recognize that and
b) the real point of contention is not THAT each of the players should be rewarded, but what percentage of the rewards it is “fair” for each player to have.
If you start with the assumption that rich guys couldn’t get rich without the work of their employees, you get one answer.
If you start with the assumptions that employees couldn’t be employed if the guy didn’t start the business, you get another.
But the worst, and the most hypocrital, of the question in the test is:
>>>Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with governments that regulate.
This is the worst because I’ll guarantee you that the person who wrote this article has a whole list of things it would deny the right of any government, no matter how democratic, to regulate–abortion, for instance.
The issue isn’t “democracy,” but natural rights–there are some things no government should be allowed to regulate no matter how many people want it to.
There’s more that’s even worse–Ayn Rand never in her life suggested that government should “not regulate anything,” although, being a mostly sane person, she preferred laws passed by democratic bodies to “regulations” issued by bureaucratic fiat.
Well, whatever. The man, as I said, has no idea what Rand actually said, and if he’s every read anything but a quote here and there, he didn’t understand what it meant.
The final howler is the statement that Rand was “adamantly opposed to good works,” which the right “proves” by quoting a statement
The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves.”
that does not say anything at all about doing good works.
It is, instead, about living an inauthentic life with no ideas of your own, no tastes of your own, no values of your own, but pursuing conformity at all costs.
A King and a Gandhi do the opposite of that. They were, in living the way they lived, “selfish” by Rand’s definition–they were true to themselves.
But, you know, what the hell.
It’s much easier to declare you opponents stupid and hypocrites if you haven’t a clue what they’re actually saying.
Ruined
I know I make a lot of fun here about the silly trivialities of our local news, and I have every right to do that, because mostly our local news is about silly trivialities.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is something very comforting about living in a place where the stuff people get worked up about is the amount of traffic being generated by the Oktoberfest festival and the lack of parking near the second run m ovie house on Main Street.
Unfortunately, this does not mean that we don’t have real crime, if not on our doorstep, but very near it. Chesire is about an hour’s drive away, and the Cheshire home invasion made national news. Newtown is much, much closer–and, well, there’s that.
When we get crime up here, though, it’s seldom of the Cheshire or Newtown magnitude. It’s seldom even interesting, like the case of the New London lawyer who paid a hit man to kill her brother in law.
What we get are the kinds of things you’re all probably used to: domestic violence cases, gang shootings in inner cities, the occasional amateur bank robbery or convenience store stick-up.
Out in the very rural districts, we get the occasional meth lab exploding and taking the double wide with it. I don’t know what makes the rural white poor so fatally attracted to playing with chemistry, but there it is.
All these things are serious enough, but they also happen seldom enough so that every one of them is reported.
The relative rarity of them all does not make any of them any better, and it especially does not make the case we have this week end any better.
I’d say stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but you’ve definitely heard this one before. So I’ll just ask you to bear with me.
The story is common enough. She had a boyfriend and a 13 month old baby. She had something she had to do, and she left the boyfriend to babysit with the baby. The baby was whiny and fussy. The boyfriend got fed up. He picked up his fist, hit the baby in the stomach, and a few hours later, the baby was dead.
You can go here, if you like
for a fairly comprehensive report on this particular case.
Oddly enough, it was exactly this kind of crime that was the first I ever heard of when we moved into this house.
In that case, the boyfriend punched the baby so hard, he split its spleen. He was also older than this kid–who is, in fact, a kid.
A kid whose life is, effectively, over.
I think I’d feel a lot better about what is inevitably about to happen in this case if I thought this kid was malicious, that he was violent and meanspirited and close to psychopathic.
There is, however, nothing to indicate anything of the kind. He seems to be just a kid, the kind of kid who could show up in one of my classes. What happened was not an act of deliberate malice, but a momentary loss of self control. It was probably one of a history of momentary losses of self control.
What’s going to happen now is that the apocalypse is going to rain down on this kid’s head. He’s already admitted the act. We’re all waiting for the courts to decide for sure and finally what the charge will be that he will have to plead to.
In the meantime, of course, a baby is dead, her mother is hysterical and the authorities are not wrong that there have to be consequences for that kind of thing. We don’t excuse people, especially people who are technically adults, when their momentary losses of self control result in real damage.
What’s more, we can talk all we want to about homes without fathers and young men without role models leading to responsibile manhood, but people with a history of momentary losses of self control have existed throughout the millennia.
I don’t really have a “take” on this. It just bothers me, and it will probably go on bothering me.
And it’s Sunday.
What Jane Is Claiming
But before I get specific about that–you guys do realize that Mique is talking about Australia, which may have different water issues than the US?
The short answer to Mike F is that I did not say I did not want any advice at all, I said I didn’t want any advice from Michelle Obama.
I’ll expand that to say that I don’t want any of this kind of advice from the government.
In fact, I’ll go farther than that. I think the government should be legally prohibited from even collecting information on citizens’ weights, their eating habits, or any other private choices.
These things should not be the business of government. Ever. For any reason.
And I object to Michelle Obama’s advice because, unlike the “advice” given by commercials, she’s de facto in a position to coerce me into doing it her way.
Corporations can run commercials on television and ads in magazines and I can be “gullible” enough to take the bait–but only the government can forcibly require me to buy their product.
The SCOTUS tells me that may demand that I buy the products of a private corporation and penalize me if I don’t. It says that when the government gives money to schools to provide school lunches it can tell the schools what kind of lunches to provide.
Thousands of school children who get no other hot meal for the day except for their subsidized school lunches didn’t get much of even that one all last year as they were fed food they didn’t want and threw out, leaving them to be hungry and distracted during their afternoon classes while their richer classmates (whose parents could afford to pack lunches for them) got yet another advantage in school.
Corporations can’t force me. They can’t even restrict my choices unless they can get the government to do things like, oh, erect a regulatory regime that’s a rule of men and not law, with lots of vague regulations arbitrarily enacted and applied and therefore making it nearly impossible for upstarts to challenge established large firms.
And no, “manipulation’ by advertising is not just as bad, or even nearly as bad.
I’m sorry. I just don’t see my fellow Americans as mindless automatons helplessly unable to resist advertising. We resist it all the time. We’re citizens, not victims. And we’re the reason why 90% of all product launches fail.
But this particular case, the case of bottled water, is even less of a good example than most examples of this kind.
Because this thing with bottled water didn’t start because corporations manipulated Americans into thinking their water wasn’t safe.
It started as snobbery.
It started, in the 70s, among the kind of people who went to the kinds of schools I went to as a badge of sophistication. You drank Perrier instead of regular water because regular water was, well, you know, American.
All those poor rubes out there, drinking tap water–well, they just didn’t know any better. Every time you saw them scarfing up their awful tasting stuff, well, you could just smile to yourself a little, because you were just so much more in the know.
I remember this. It drove me absolutely crazy.
Did corporations take advantage of this and market the stuff to people who thought like this?
You betcha.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. I see nothing unethical in that.
I DO see something wrong and unethical in the symbiotic relationship between business and government that has created a vast regulatory state who primary function is not to protect consumers from corporations but corporations from competition.
So–cut back the regulatory state. Take away the ability of agencies and departments to issue “regulations” which are really laws that have skirted the democratic process. Let any ambiguities in the laws be decided by the courts, where decisions set precedents that apply to everybody. End the need for businesses to hire dozens of functionaries just to deal with the government paperwork. Forbid business bailouts. Ever.
Do all that, and you may reduce the power of corporations.
You may even make them smaller.
In the meantime, I want to forbid my government from meddling in the state of my health, or my nutritiion, or any of those other things that are supposed to be part of PRIVATE life.
Pointless
So, in case you’re wondering, I’m here at office h0urs. It’s Friday, and almost nobody is even in the building, never mind in this room looking to talk to me. I’ve done my Blackboard update. I’ve corrected all the papers I can correct. I’ve played a PopCap game because, you know, eventually this gets boring I’ve got a book on me, but I can’t read very well in this office.
So I decided to do something constructive instead. A friend of mine sent me this article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/09/why-drink-more-water/279591/
which is a report on yet another Healthy Initiative coming out of the First Lady’s office.
In this case, the HI is concentrated on getting people to drink more water, and the article says everything that needs to be said about it better than I could.
But although the writer is completely confused about why the HI is not doing things like saying you should substitute water for “sugary drinks” and being so relentlessly “positive” that you begin to think everybody involved has been lobotomized–
I think I know what’s going on here.
I think that the White House has heard enough criticism, and outright anger, at all the other HIs, the new school menus, the constant hectoring about “being healthier” and “fighting obesity,” and they think the problem is that the advice has been too “negative.”
So they’re trying to give advice that’s entirely “positive.”
Somebody needs to tell them that nobody cares if the advice is positive or negative.
They don’t want any advice at all.
This keyboard sticks, and it’s driving me crazy. I’m going to go back to looking hopeful that somebody will walk through the door.
Dipsydoodle
I’ve been sitting here over the last week basically tearing my hair out and having a cold. I’ll admit, if this is my traditional start of term catch something from students, it’s very mild, and I’ll take it.
My book still isn’t finished, although it’s preceding better than it was, and I’ve got a stack of papers to correct–the first real ones this semester–waiting for me when I give in and go to get lunch.
On the whole, I find this a not very cheerful day, but there are some things of note, some of them even positive.
First, it seems like Anthony Wiener will not be the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, and therefore will not be the actual mayor of New York, which is something of a win for the dignity of the American political process.
Assuming it has any.
I’ll admit that after years and years of Michael Bloomberg’s prissy soft totalitarianism, the idea of a mayor with a looser style had its advantages.
But the bottom line is that whoever told Wiener he could pull this off, or even that he should try, was an idiot.
Second, we’re not going into Syria as far as I can tell.
My hesitation derives from the fact that I’m not really sure what is going on, and I’m not sure anybody else is either.
A friend of mine described all this to me as Obama practicing the multilateralism everybody wanted out of Bush on Iraq, but if it is, I don’t think we should do it any more.
I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but it just looks bad, less like measured reason and more like bumbling around without a clue.
And I’m not sure what it is all supposed to be in aid of.
The explanations I heard Obama give–okay, I didn’t listen to yesterday’s speech–didn’t make much sense, and to the extent they would have made any sense at all would have served as a justification for the Iraq war at least as much as it would have served as a justification of this one.
A lot of the people who post here don’t much like Obama, but I don’t care who it was who had made this particular pitch, it just didn’t–cohere, somehow.
And if you’re going to justify a war, you do have to put together a narrative that coheres. Somewhere.
Third, it’s the anniversary of 9/11, and as with all the other anniversaries of 9/11 so far, that doesn’t cohere all that well, either.
I sometimes think we haven’t really figured out what we think about all that yet.
This anniversary is eerily like the day itself, at least as far as weather goes out here.
But I think 9/11 is hard for most Americans to read.
And it gets harder for me to read the more I know about the world at large.
On that note, I’d like to suggest a book. It’s called Reading Lolita in Teheran, by Azan Nafisi, and Irani woman trained as a professor of literature in the US (Oklahoma/Norman) who went back to Iran to participate in the revolution against the Shah and ended up–
Well, eventually she ended up back here as a professor at Johns Hopkins, but what got to me was her realization that even if her Leftist allies had won that revolution, they would still have imposed not only a repressive state, but the same kind of repressive state.
She is, as far as I can tell, a more enthusiastic American than a lot of born Americans these days.
As for the successful revolutionaries, all I can say is that these people are obsessed with sex.
They’re more obsessed with sex than any Western porn addict could be if he worked on it for decades.
And, along with the bizarre mania for “purity” in men as well as women, the age of marriage for a girl in Iran is now 9, and the routine sexual abuse practiced by the authorized “morality police” is just stunning.
Dr. Nafisi is much more concerned with the fact that such ideological rigidness, of the left as well as of the right, renders the ideologue incapable of understanding fiction.
I think she may actually have a point.
I, however, have a stack of papers to correct.
Cycles of Confusion
After considering the whole situation from every angle I could think of, I decided it was about time to take a couple of days off.
This does not make me very happy. There is a deadline involved here, and it’s getting very, very close.
But writing huge swaths of stuff and tossing it at the end of the day, or the week, isn’t getting me very much farther along, either.
So, this morning, instead of charging in to do my customary Good Day’s Work (or even a bad one), I put on Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and futzed around a little.
For those of you who don’t know, there are two things in the world called “The Kreutzer Sonata.”
One of them is the Beethoven piece I listened to this morning. The other is the short story Tolstoy named after the Beethoven piece.
The Tolstoy is one of the most cynical, slimiest, mysoginist things I’ve ever read.
Or I think it is.
I’ve only read it once. I picked it up because I liked the Beethoven, and I was so repelled by it, I never picked it up again.
I feel more than a little guilty about this. I will admit that Tolstoy really, really, really isn’t my kind of writer, and I’ve never been able to force myself through War and Peace.
With Russian writers, I invariably prefer Dostoyevski. And when I tell people this–especially people whose first language is Russian–they invariably tell me I’m wrong.
There may be something that is not coming across in the translations. I keep telling myself that I’m going to go back and give it another try, just to see if I can see what the fuss about Tolstoy is about, but I can never quite manage to make myself do it.
At any rate, I figure a day or two off won’t kill my schedule, and I like the Beethoven.
To answer a question from yesterday, though, yes, this book has to be a Gregor.
It has to be because it was contracted for nearly two years ago, and if I turned in something else my publisher wouldn’t just be miffed, he’d be well within his rights to sue me.
In this case, however, it would have to be a Gregor no matter what, because it takes place on Cavanaugh Street and in Philadelphia and it concerns the people on Cavanaugh Street as much as it does anybody else.
It’s been over a decade since I did a Gregor that actually concentrated on Gregor, and I think it’s just about due.
Still–day off.
And one of the nice things about days off is that I have a chance to pay attention to the news, and I have been paying attention today.
The big news is about Syria, and what we will or will not do about Syria.
JD sent me a delightful link to an op ed piece by Maureen Dowd in the NYTimes pretty much blaming the entire Syria mess (or the mess of our possible involvement in it) on Bush.
But that’s Maureen Dowd and the NY Times and it’s hard to know what else you could expect.
What I found a lot more interesting was the story of a lawsuit that’s been going on over the last few weeks in New York City, in which a woman named Brandi Anderson sued an employment agency called STRIVE and one of its managers, Ron Carmona, after Carmona delivered a 4-minute-long rant about her alledged inappropriate behavior that used the n-word several times.
This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy. Somebody screaming at a black client using the n-word is something we could see a lawsuit resulting from without needing to go into a discussion of whether somebody is being oversensitive.
What makes this case interesting is that virtually everybody involved in it–including Brandi Anderson’s lawyer, Carmona, and the staff of STRIVE–is black, and the defense essentially amounted to “it’s okay when black people use the n-word, that’s our culture.”
Anyway, you can go here
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/09/03/5702255/brandi-johnson-manhattan.html
and see a fairly good summary of what happened.
Because what happened was that the jury rejected the idea that using the n-word is okay when black people use it, or that it’s ever nondiscriminatory, or that it ever means anything but an insult.
And that’s interesting on a number of levels because:
1) Carmona’s explanation of the way in which the n-word is used in African American communities is, in fact, true.
It is a continual problem in mixed race classrooms during the first semester or so of college, especially if the mixed race classrooms are very mixed.
And it’s especially, especially true of the African American students are the products of inner city schools where “racial diversity” is practically nonexistent.
It can require quite a bit of work to get across the idea that no, you really can’t use that word in college even if you’re talking about yourself.
I’ve often toyed with the idea of bringing in Richard Pryor’s bit about why he gave up using the n word and why he thinks other black people should give up using it, too.
But the fact remains that it is a word commonly used in black communities, where it is not always–or even usually–an insult. And the fact remains that it has been so used in those communities for a couple of centuries.
This in no way excuses Mr. Carmona’s behavior, which from reports seems to have been abusive in more ways than just by use of the n-word,
But it does highlight an issue that isn’t usually examined, and the verdict highlights it even more.
2) Because, in rejecting Carmona’s contention that the n word can be used as other than an insult, ever, the jury was essentially saying: we don’t care what you’re culture is, the norm is otherwise, and you have to follow it.
I think the term for this, in circles more progressive than the ones I inhabit, is “cultural imperialism.”
Let’s face it. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a cultural or moral relativist.
I do think that there are norms of behavior that should be culture-wide, even world-wide.
I think, for instance–just to side reference the book I’m reading–that a culture in which schoolgirls burn to death because they are “improperly” dressed to appear in public and therefore must not be allowed to evacuate a burning building is both morally and culturally inferior to the one I inhabit.
Inferior to. Not just different from.
I also think that the n-word has a history in this country, and it is not a nice history. And I think that history has to be acknowledged when we make decisions about using that word in public.
My problem is that that word actually has two histories, and not one, and what seems to be going on here is the unstated but unmistakable decision to acknowledge only one of those histories as legitimate.
The article gave no indication that I could see of the racial composition of the jury, but I’d really like to know.
Because I know something else from my students. My middle class and upper middle class African Americans–and especially the women–hate that word just as much as this jury hated it.
I’d like to know what’s actually going on.
The Muses Hate Me
It’s quarter after six on a Tuesday morning, and as the day and time will attest, I’ve just had a REALLY bad day at work.
I don’t know what it is about this book, but writing it has been one of the greatest struggles of my life.
Some of that can be put down to the fact that I have changed the format more than slightly for this one, and it’s been decades since I did something like that with a Gregor.
So what feels to me to be so alien and wrong may just be my head going “but this isn’t a Gregor!” when it is.
Whatever the reason, this is now the fifth day in a row that I’ve thrown out everything I’ve done, and I’m feeling a little testy. On top of that, I’ve got class, and the IRS, and I don’t know what else, and that’s making me testy, too.
It is just, on the whole, shaping up to not being a great day.
What is making it all worse is that, bad day or not, I’m sitting here really wanting to write. Writing feels to me like the thing I ought to be doing.
I really wish I was one of those people who could write books out of sequence, stitch all the scenes together at the end, and end up with a coherent narrative.
Unfortunately, I’m not even a little bit like that.
Oddly enough, I can remember being young and trying to work like that.
I was ten or twelve years old and I had no idea how to write a novel, but I had a typewriter my grandmother had given me for Christmas and a big room at the top of the house with a wall of built in bookshelves and the first walk in megacloset I’d ever seen or heard of.
When I could escape from the obligation to be sociable, I would go up there and work on whatever I was thinking about.
This tended to be a frustrating exercise, because I really had no idea what I was doing, not even with the number of books I’d read.
This was, remember, a time before the Internet or DVDs or even VHS, and we did not live close to a town or a library. If I wanted to go somewhere, I had to get my mother to take me, and mostly she wasn’t interested in hauling me in to town unless she had a reason to go there herself.
This was actually a bigger problem in relation to movies than it was to books. My father’s attitude to books was that any child of his could have all she wanted, and any of them she wanted, and my mother wasn’t to get in my way or try to take them away from me for any reason.
My father owned a barn that sat on the back of a small office building he also owned, and he rented to barn to the biggest local distributor of paperback books to places like grocery stores and pharmacies.
In those days–and maybe even now–you did not return whole paperbacks that didn’t sell. Instead, you ripped off the covers and sent just those back.
The man who rented by father’s barn would do just that and then give the coverless paperbacks to my father, who would then pass them on to me.
One of the books that was passed on was a thing called Understanding Human Sexual Response–not the actual Masters and Johnson book, but a book about that book, and when my mother saw me reading it, she had three kinds of fits.
When my father came home, she marched him into their bedroom and presented him with the book.
He then marched back out of the bedroom and gave it back to me.
“Never tell her there’s anything she isn’t allowed to read.”
My father was a real old-fashioned liberal. He was such an old-fashioned liberal, he ended his life calling himself a conservative.
Which was odd, because he had less than no use for religious conservatives, and he lived in Florida.
Anyway, I didn’t have much trouble getting books, because my mother would take me to bookstores if I had the money, because she didn’t want an argument with my father.
Movies, however, were another story. The best I usually got, except when my mother herself had something she wanted to see, was matinees at a couple of second-run houses, and that meant that I often didn’t get to see the movies I wanted to see.
If it was running at the second run houses, I saw it. If not, not.
(My mother did take me to movies she herself wanted to see. She once let me take a day off from school so that we could both go to Cleopatra. It was decades before I realized what that meant, that she had no girlfriends in the area she could go with, that marrying my father meant moving away from everything she knew and living in isolation with only us for company. It was very lordly isolation, but it was isolation,)
One of the movies I did get to see was the Mutiny on the Bounty remake with Marlon Brando.
This intrigued me beyond all reason, and for months afterwards I worked and worked and worked on a book I called Alicia Wellington.
As ideas for books go, this was–let’s call it less than fully formed.
What it really was was the first sexual fantasies I ever had, even though it had no sex in it. It was a different time and a different world, and I had no idea what sex was, although I thought it did.
I thought it had something to do with kissing.
The idea for Alicia Wellington was that Wellington’s father was wrongly accused, tried and convicted of treason by the British government during the Napoleonic wars, and in revenge she took off to sea to become a spy for the French. At some point she was captured by a British vessel and thrown in the brig, therefore starting her big romance with our hero, the captain of the British ship.
If you’re sitting there holding your head in your hands and going “no! no! this history! the Duke of Wellington!”–
Yes, I do know I had the history all wrong, but I didn’t know it then, and I didn’t have access to the Internet or even a reliable ride to the library to find out.
And, of course, being the age I was, and not knowing how to write a novel, and really not knowing what it took to write an historical novel, I didn’t really care.
At any rate, after trying for what felt like ever to make a novel of this thing, I finally gave up and just started writing random scenes.
I had a lot of random scenes fixed very firmly in my head, some of the most vivid scenes I’ve ever been able to imagine.
They were not connected to anything that could properly be called a plot. I had that beginning, and I had the vague sense that something would happen between Wellington and the hero that would result, at the very end, in her being reconciled to England.
This reconciliation would not result in her execution, of course, and her father would be vindicated and…
Yeah, okay. It was a mess.
I still have a box somewhere with all those old manuscripts in it. I don’t know if you can call what there is of Alicia Wellington a manuscript, but it’s floating around there somewhere with the script of a play I wrote in which a character staggers onto the stage at intervals and announces “I”m SICK of life!”
I don’t know why. I don’t think I knew at the time. I was reading plays by people like Jean Paul Sartre.
But the bottom line here, actually, is this–the scenes I wrote for Alicia Wellington never coalesced into a novel, and no scenes I’ve ever written out of sequence for anything have ever coalesced into a novel.
It’s just not a way I’m able to work.
When I was first starting out professionally and I had to come up “partials and a synopsis”–fifty pages and then a summary of what I was going to do–I had to write a first draft to find out what should be in the summary.
I still have to write a first draft to figure out what the plot is.
I have enough of this book I’m working on today so that I know what the plot is, so I really shouldn’t be having this much trouble.
But here I am.
It’s time to pack up for school.
The Link
Okay. The real post for today is the one just below this one, where the August reading list is.
But I just couldn’t pass up linking to this
The August List
It’s the first of September, so I owe the blog this, and the comments on this.
This was August–and yes, I know, I haven’t gotten around to the Aquinas commentary yet.
The list:
48) Gertrude Himmelfarb. The Demoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. (rr)
49) Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Inferno.
50) Paul Hoffman. The Man Who Only Loved Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth.
51) Joseph Epstein. Snobbery: The American Version. (rr)
52) Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. (rr)
53) Erle Stanley Gardner. The Case of the Runaway Corpse.
54) Bruce Catton. Terrible Swift Sword.
55) Erle Stanley Gardner. The Case of the Blonde Bonanza.
p) George Steiner. “Archives of Eden.”
Anyway, some notes on this I haven’t already commented on:
The Paul Hoffman book claims to be a biography of Paul Erdos, but it isn’t, really–it’s more like a free form exposition of how mathematicians do math.
One of the things in Steiner’s essay (“Archives of Eden,” end of the list, look at yesterday’s blog post) I thought he got right was the part about how the Doing Good Bureaucrats–including especially teachers and psychologists and social workers–tend to “diagnose” high levels of creativity as “autism,” and if you look at the way most of the people in this book behave, you can see that that is exactly what would happen if they were coming up through American schools now.
They are all, also, incredibly interesting people I’d really like to know, and they would make terrific role models in the sense of presenting the fact (and it is fact) that not being like everybody else can be a very good thing.
You’d never get the book by the CPS people and the school board, though, because these very successful people don’t behave the way the Powers That Be have decreed that one must in order to be able to do anything.
Erdos himself, for instance, one of the greatest mathematicians in the history of the world and one of the ones with the most influence on modern mathematics, kept himself productive and creative well past the age when most mathematicians run out of ideas by consuming a steady diet of various forms of speed.
Once, having been charged by one of his friends with being a drug addict, he left off the speed cold turkey for three months.
At the end of that time, he announced that he hadn’t had a single mathematical idea in the entire period and that therefore not using the drugs was counterproductive, and went back to taking them.
I think this is fascinating on a number of levels–although I already knew that some people find drugs to be performance enhancing rather than otherwise. Witness Coleridge, among others.
But speed is, if I’m remembering this correctly, one of the drugs that can cause an actual addiction–that old fashioned definition where your body has to give up a vital function and let the drug do it instead.
Meaning that if you try to ditch the drug cold turkey, you kill yourself.
With speed–I’m dredging this up from a LONG time ago–it’s the adrenal gland that shuts off.
Although apparently not in Erdos.
Or maybe all that stuff they taught me in college was wrong.
At any rate, it’s an interesting book, with interesting people, and I understood maybe a third of the math.
The Joseph Epstein book on snobbery is, well, peculiar.
It’s not the first time I’ve read it, and I found I had the same response to it this time that I had the last.
I think everybody everywhere is guilty of some form of snobbery in some area. Some people care about birth and breeding. Some people care about obscure science fiction stories or unappreciated Nascar drivers.
But snobbery on the scale and with the intensity described in this book is only what I can call…a lot of work.
A LOT of work.
I mean, for God’s sake.
The man wrote the book using himself as an example a lot of the time, so I have to assume people like this actually exist in the real world, but if they do, I want to know how they get anything else done.
It is apparently possible to subject every area of your life to micomanaging rules and regulations that are never written down anywhere but that “everybody knows.”
Except, apparently, me.
Epstein and I don’t move in the same circles, of course, so it’s possible I know another set of rules and am just not aware of it–but the stuff as presented here is so complicated, I’m not sure I could know a comparable set of rules without knowing I knew them.
If that makes sense.
The first time I read this book–more than a decade ago–it did have one effect on me.
Epstein goes on at length about the absolute no-no of having one of those school or college stickers on your car.
I have never forgotten it. And although I never have put stickers on my cars–weird bumperstickers sometimes, but not the school and college ones–I always think of Epstein when I see the cars of people who do.
I have no idea why that would have stuck when nothing else about the book did.
In the end, I think if you asked me for a recommendation about a book about snobbery, I wouldn’t pick this one, but David Brooks’s Bobos In Paradise.
That one’s a lot of fun.
Bruce Catton’s Terrible Swift Sword is volume 2 in his three volume centennial history of the American Civil War. Volume 1 is back there on the list a few months ago.
About this volume, I can only say this: I can barely figure out how we managed to have an American Civil War, considering the amount of time the soldiers and their leaders spent wandering around lost in unfamiliar landscapes.
And not just wandering around lost.
My favorite figure in the case of characters in this volume is a Confederate general named Zollicoffer, who went charging up to what he was convinced was a unit of his own men in the middle of a battle. Unfortunately, due to the fact that he was incredibly nearsighted, he made a mistake and the unit he went charging into was actually made up of soldiers on the Union side. They shot him dead.
As marvelously amusing as this was, it was by no means the worst thing anyone did in these early battles. At one point, the two top Confederate generals in charge of a defense–both of them civilians who were appointed to the brass as soon as the war started, but who had no real military experience–just got up and went home as soon as the battle got thick, leaving their third in command to fix the mess.
In the meantime, on the Union side, Generals Halleck and McClennon weren’t running away from battles so much as they weren’t bothering to engage in them at all.
If everybody had done everything right, the war would have been over in 1862 and slavery would still be with us.
Instead, the Confederates had a competent general, Robert E. Lee, who was in charge.
The Union also had a competent general, Ulysses S. Grant, but nobody was giving him anything really serious to do.
Sigh.
Anyway, that’s the list, and the month, and I’m going to go put on Thelonious Monk and Coltrane in the one CD I have of them playing together.
Edenic
I spent a great deal of time and trouble this summer trying to make sure I would have my book done before classes started up for fall term.
That worked out in the way in which that kind of thing always worked out. Not only was I not finished by the end of the term, I’m farther behind than I usually am in this stage of the run up to my deadline.
I sometimes think there is a part of my brain that is doing this subconsciously but on purpose.
Actually, there is a lot my brain is doing subconsciously but on purpose these days, but that’s the topic for another post.
My schedule being what it is this term, with the writing and the classes and other commitments elsewhere, I am once again faced with the Fridays From Hell.
They start with an early morning writing Gregor and are then followed by a three hour long 8 o’clock in the morning class in which everybody in the room (possibly including me) looks game to give it a try but mired in something like shell shock.
We will, I think, make it all work, but it’s going to be a very interesting ride.
Needless to say, when I finally got home after class and office hours and everything else, I was in that state of mental fuzzy wool that makes your forehead feel numb.
I was also at the very end of a book, meaning
55) Erle Stanley Gardner. The Case of the Blonde Bonanza.
I truly love all things Perry Mason, and I was recently delighted to discover that there’s actually an annual Perry Mason convention, but this particular book is a late entry in the series and a little thin.
That said, you should all be aware that my friend Jeffrey Marks is coming up with a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner fairly soon.
Anyway, here I was at the very end of a book which, in spite of its complete lack of material for mental exercise, was feeling very hard to get through.
Me being me, however, the possibility of just getting through the rest of the evening without reading anything was not an option.
Unfortunately, since I’m doing Real Writing, neither were several other options I sometimes use in similar situations. I cannot manage to write through anything I read.
For some reason, reading some things just makes writing harder for me.
One of those things, some of the time, are the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Sherlock Holmes stories are my default setting for “can’t think of what I want to read next.”
So there I was. Sitting on the love seat. Listening to West Wing Season 4 blasting behind my head on DVD. Sending up little pleas to the cosmos that the single best writer of fiction I’d had in any class in years wouldn’t be one of the ones who just disappeared by midterm.
At that point, I decided to annoy my younger son by announcing that I needed some help looking through my TBR file. “I want to look through my TBR pile and I don’t know what I want” has the same status in this house as the nuclear attack sirens going off elsewhere.
Nevertheless, we got down to it, and what I finally settled on–something short that would allow me to pick up something longer in the morning–was George Steiner’s “Archives of Eden.”
Yes, all right, I know. Steiner is not something light. Ever.
But as anybody who has been reading this blog for a while already knows, I have read this particular essay of Steiner’s several times already. I have a fascination with it, and with its central idea, and even with several of its subsidiary ideas.
And every time I read it, I find something I haven’t noticed before.
For those of you who have not read this thing, or the other blog posts about it, Steiner’s central point is that great art and great culture are impossible in a democratic country, because great art and great culture are fundamentally and uncompromisingly elitist.
Very few people are born with the capable of truly understanding either, and even fewer people are born with the capacity to do either.
Under the term “high culture,” Steiner includes things like physics and theoretical mathematics.
That gets us into interesting territory in some ways.
The idea that theoretical mathematics belongs to an elite, and that very few people are born capable of understanding it or doing it, is uncontroversial. The stanchest democratic leveler seems to be capable of recognizing that most people are never going to understand Fermat’s Theorem.
The controversy over the elitism of high culture comes in other areas, like those of the arts, where the judgments of what is “high” and what is otherwise can be contested.
And are.
But the controversial parts of Steiner’s essay are not this. They come with his corollaries, once this–high culture being always and everywhere the province of a small elite–is stipulated.
(And I think it can be stipulated. You may or may not think that Picasso or Dvorak is great art, but you can recognize that the existence of such people and the audience for their work is a minority group in every society everywhere.)
Once you agree that high culture belongs to a minority in every society, though, Steiner asks you to contemplate three things:
1) It is possible that high culture not only does not make people better people, but that it may actually make them worse. There is an odd and persistant correlation between high culture and the worst forms of political savagery.
Unlike a lot of writers on high culture, Steiner does not try to gloss over the fact that many of his examples of high culture excellence and transcendance were also very bad people–that Heidigger was a member of the Nazi Party and personally involved in the persecution of Jews; that Sartre was an apologist for Stalin and something of a Nazi collaborator during the War.
And he asks the question. Maybe an involvement with high culture does not only not make you better. Maybe it makes you worse.
2) Even if it doesn’t make people worse, societies in which the high culture elite is in charge and can impose the standard on everybody else lives stunted lives relative not only to the elites but to those of citizens in a democratic country like that United States.
If our object is to make life decent and livable for most of our citizens, then a democratic culture–a democratic ethos–is what we need to get us there.
But we should recognize, when we do that, that we are condemning high culture to, at best, a thing of the past, dead as a doornail, imprisoned in museums and treated as an historical curiosity.
3) And then the kicker–in spite of the betterness of democratic culture for nearly everybody, in spite of the possibility that the encouragement of high culture is in some way related to the worst (Nazi, Soviet) political outcomes every invented–
In spite of all that, we should side with high culture anyway, because what we lose by not doing so is the only thing that makes life worth living, and the only think that makes human beings actually human.
High art, the abstract realms of metaphysics, the pure science of mathematics and physics–these are the things that make human beings human, what distinguish them from beasts.
To give Steiner his due–and he deserves all the due we give him–he isn’t really comfortable with this last thing.
He did, after all, come to the US as a child as part of a family that was trying to outrun the Nazis. Every last member of his extended family who did not make it here died in the camps.
He is such a beautiful writer that it took me several run through to realize how incoherent so much of this essay is.
At one point, he goes off on a riff about immigrants and what they really were. We’re told all about heroic immigrants, but the poem says tired and poor and huddled masses–and maybe that’s just what they were.
Ordinary people. Not heroes. Just the lumpen mass. Not very bright. Not very anything.
To somebody who was brought up with the American idea, this just seems silly.
Yes, of course they were just ordinary people, just like the waves of Latinos coming up from South America now are just ordinary people.
But I always thought the history of immigration in the United States was a testament to just how much ordinary people could do.
The real lumpen mass of Europe didn’t consist of the people who came here. It consisted of the people who stayed, who responded to misery and oppression with passivity and patience.
It’s not a small thing to rip up your life, leave everything and most of everybody you know, and start all over again in an alien place.
I kept trying to figure out if Steiner was distressed to think he was classes with all these ordinary people who could not understand philosophy, or if his own passage to American, having been under more comfortable circumstances, didn’t let him see what most people who make the journey put themselves through to make it.
(My Greek relatives, and the Greeks I meet in Greece, are entirely distainful of “Greek Americans.” Obviously, only lower class people went to America. And that is, of course, quite true. I do think it’s not lost on any of us, though, who is providing what to whom at the moment, or how likely this situation is ever to reverse itself.)
But the really big thing I noticed this time that I hadn’t noticed before is the fact that the world he thinks he’s nostalgic about, the world of artists doing art not for the money but for the passion of it, of standards of value not based on cash or professionalism or conspicuous consumption but oriented to the practice and experience of the art itself–
Such places and communities exist right now in the United States–several of them do.
They just exist in places and among people and with kinds of art Steiner doesn’t know exists, and, if he did, would probably declare didn’t count.
I’m not saying that the vast variegated content of science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, romance and the rest of the genres is the artistic equivalent of Dostoyevsky or Stravinksy.
I’m saying that to the extent that what he wants is a certain kind of communal approach to the art, it can be found these days in those genres.
The last thing is a little more speculative.
Steiner in this essays bemoans the fact that America “archives” all the past artistic achievements of Europe, but does not expand on it, does not produce new high art of its own.
But I wonder if that has anything to do with America.
It seems to me that many of the specific forms of high art are dead or dying everywhere.
There are few great painters these days–maybe none–because the social function of painting is no longer what it was. That social function has been taken over by photography, and there are some truly astonishing (and, yes, high art) advances in photographic art.
Maybe the old forms have simply run their course, which happens.
Maybe some of the old forms have found new and different kinds of outlets and audiences (think John Williams in music).
I don’t really have any answers to those last questions. I haven’t thought about them enough.
But there’s my Saturday.