Hildegarde

This:

http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?AID=1192#.UDT_mjyypY1.facebook

is in honor of the fact that the term will be starting soon. 

Have fun.

Real post for the day is the one before this.

One of the things I have been trying to do this summer is to find out how to get my younger son–turned 18 this winter–registered to vote.

This is not as simple as it sounds, because Greg was born in London, and because he doesn’t have a driver’s license.  The driver’s license thing I thought was just the problem of being blind for half a year, but now it turns out that he doesn’t want one.  My older son doesn’t have one either, and Bill never did.

Now, what is not a problem, right here, is Greg’s status as a United States citizen.  A child born abroad of a US citizen is himself automatically a US citizen.

That was how the Embassy explained it to us when I was pregnant with Greg, and about a week after he was born I brought his British birth certificate and some other paperwork to Grosvenor Square and Greg got a concilar birth certificate attesting to his status as a US citizen and a US passport to boot.

Think about that for a minute.

The child of a US citizen born abroad is automatically a US citizen.

And Obama’s mother was…what, exactly?

Actually, I know the answer to that riddle.  For a while, US policy was that a child born to a US father abroad was a citizen, but not a child born to a mother. 

The other thing the US Embassy told me was that the SCOTUS had taken care of that.  Which would mean that even if Obama WAS born in Kenya, or the Philipines, or wherever, his mother’s status as a US citizen should legally have made him one.

But I really didn’t intend to write this post about the birthers. 

I’ve got all Greg’s documents together, and his social security card, and we should be able to get him registered well in time for the election. 

But because I’ve been trying to get him registered, I’ve been paying more attention to this stage of the Presidential election than I usually do.

And maybe that’s the only necessary answer.  Maybe I just don’t usually pay attention this early in the cycle.

But I’m paying attention now, and the whole thing seems to me to be…completely unreal.

I don’t mean unreal as in crazy, or surreal, or psychodelic.

I mean unreal as if it weren’t actually happening.

The whole thing just seems–superfluous.  As if nothing was going on, in spite of all the yelling and screaming. 

And I’m not sure why that is. 

Part of it may be that I’ve never taken Romney seriously as a candidate.  He is, it seems to me, the apotheosis of establishment Republicanism, but an apotheosis as abstraction.  There’s no there there, as Gertrude Stein said about something else.

If Romney has convictions–about anything–I haven’t seen it.  It was why I always thought the Republicans should have gone with Santorum.  You may like what he has to say or hate it, but the man has convictions and he sticks to them, even if it means losing primaries and elections.

He is also, I think, what the core of the contemporary Republican Party actually wants.  Because what the Tea Party is, first and foremost, is a protest against exactly what Romney is, no matter on which side of the aisle–the slick, the “sophisticatedly educated,” the guys who give bailouts to their friends who run the banks.

So, for better or worse, I never thought Romney could win the election.  I still don’t.  So the contest seems less than compelling even without the eerie feeling that it just isn’t there.

But part of it is just that everything feels like white noise.  And that’s true even when there’s a real story, rather than another round of they’re lying! no, they’re lying! no, they’re lying! in the plitical ads.

The Todd Akin thing is a case in point.  God only knows, the man is a complete and irredeemable idiot.  And it’s kind of fun to watch Ann Coulter trying to get him chucked out of his race by the sheer power of her own will.  She’s got one hell of a will, too.  She just might manage it.

But unforgivably vile as the thing he said were, the whole episode just feels scripted. Everybody is saying what you’d expect them to say.  The outrage sounds–as most outrage does these days–fake.

Too much of what happens here these days, politically, seems like an attempt to evade reality.

Rather than actually compete, on ideas or even on personalities, what we have is a series of Outrage Moments.  Obama said that if you have a business, you didn’t build it  yourself!  The Republicans are trying to deny women access to birth control!

Neither of these things is, or ever was, true.  Obama’s “you didn’t build that” obviously was meant to refer to things like roads and bridges, not your company.  And refusing to pay for your choices is not the same thing as denying you the right or the ability to make them. 

But that’s what we were yelling about before Todd Akin came along.  And although Akin really did say something that was substantively objectionable, the outrage sounds the same as it did when the bases for it were far less solid.

Greg, in the meantime, is taking this, his first Presidential election, every personally.

Don’t ask him what he thinks, or you’ll be nailed to your seat for hours.

I usually get up just about an hour from now.  Today,  however, I have been up since 1:30, having gone to bed at ten, because–well, whatever.  I have cats.  Two cats, to be exact.  Tonight, one of them decided I needed to be awake.

Of course, once I was awake, he paid no more attention to me at all, but that’s how that works.

So right now, being completely whacked out, I want to ask a very simple question:  what brings companies to decide to put old movie onto DVD, or not?

There are, out there, two  movies I desperately, desperately want to own:

Take Care of My Little Girl, a postwar Jeanne Crain thing about college sororities and returning veterans.

The Girl He Left Behind a  movie with Natalie Wood in it (in a feather cut, of all things) but before the days of her stardom, about a guy who is completely irresponsible, ends up drafted, and gets turned around.

Now, these are not secretly wonderful, unacknowledged screen gems.  They’re essentially A- to B+ features that I just happen to like a lot.

And I don’t own them–it’s been nearly 30 years since I last saw Take Care of My Little Girl.  I saw The Girl He Left Behind about a month ago because it showed up on TCM or Antenna TV or one of those channels.

But the simple fact is that I want them, and I don’t own them, because they are not available to own in any legitimate way.  You can get pirated copies of Take Care of My Little Girl, but–

Well, let’s face it.  I own hundreds of copyrights.  I don’t buy bootleg DVDs, not only because it’s a form of theft, but because I want other people respecting my right to my own intellectual property.

So all I want to know is this:  why aren’t these movies available for sale on DVD?

I know all the usual answers, but they don’t really hold up.  Yes, of course, more popular movies are more likely to be offered on DVD than less popular ones, but lots and lots of small movies have made the transition and are on offer.

Both Natalie Wood and Jeanne Crain are actresses with followings.  Both of them were released as A films.  Neither of them is smaller or less important than, say, Magnificent Obsession or half a dozen other forgetable movies you can pick up any time you want.

And, quite frankly, either one of them would be wonderful to have right this minute, when I know I’m not getting back to sleep again  until nearly dawn, and I’m far too messed up to read John Locke or watch anything serious.

Even Bach’s Concerto in D Minor is too difficult for me to listen to when I’m this tired, and that’s my favorite piece of music in the world.

This is not, obviously, a Really Serious Problem.  It will not cure unemployment or cancer or the epidemic of cheating by teachers and administrators on standardized tests.

It’s just that–I mean, sheesh.

This is what capitalism is supposed to be–and usually is–good at.

And here I sit, at four o’clock in the morning, totally bereft.

Maybe I’ll go watch Too Big To Fail, a movie that was nominated for 11 Emmys for simplifying the hell out of the nonfiction book of the same name, and making Hank Paulson a hero.

The mind may boggle, but it does not require a lot of linear thought.

One of those books that have been lying around my house for a while without my being able to get to them is a volume from the Yale University Press of the major works of John Locke.  The first of these is the First Treatise of Government, which is one of those odd things.

I don’t mean the book is itself odd, although it would probably sound odd to most modern readers.  I mean that it exists in the Canon in a kind of limbo.

The Two Treatises of Government were published more or less together and were considered, in their time, to be a whole. 

The Second Treatise of Government is the work that outlines Locke’s political theory, and that is the first expression of the idea of the social contract–a social contract with as many distinct differences with Rousseau’s later one as the American Revolution had with the French.

The First Treatise of Government is something else.  It is Locke’s attempt to systematically disprove the idea that Scripture supports that theory of government we call the “divine right of kings.”

And that’s where the book lands in limbo.  Virtually anybody who makes his way through a halfway decent education in the West will have been asked to read the Second Treatise of Government, but almost nobody will have been asked to read the First.

And you can see why that would be so.  For the past century or so, and into the foreseeable future, the issue of the divine right of kings has been definitively settled.  No developed country on earth considers monarchy to be an acceptable and legitimate form of government, except in extremely attentuated forms.  We can describe the reign of Queen Elizabeth II of England a lot of ways, but “divinely instituted absolute power over her realm” is not one of them.

Still, the work is interesting to read, and for reasons that can sometimes be tangential to Locke’s main point.  For instance–if Queen Victoria wanted some back up for her position that the use of anesthetics in childbirth was not contrary to Scripture, she could have found it here.  The early feminists could have found here an argument against the idea that the Bible granted men power over their wives in perpetuity, too.

What interests me here, however, is that the book progresses in the way that all works of literary criticism and textual interpretation progress, and it therefore has some bearing on the post yesterday, and the replies to it.

So I’ll try to use Locke’s method, and start here.

The first thing concerns the contention that the phrase “Products must be safe and effective” constitutes a law in clear and simple language.

It doesn’t.

As the writers themselves said, the possibilities for interpretation are endless.

No statement for which the possibilities of interpretation are substantial is “clear” in any sense whatsoever.

And what should have been clear was the statement in my post the aim of the kind of legislation I’m asking for is to limit possible interpretations to the smallest number possible. 

“Products must be safe and effective” is not a law written in clear and simple language.  “Mayonaisse must be kept refrigerator at a temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit” is.

There is only one reason to write a law like “Products must be safe and effective,” and only one reason why the US Courts would allow it to stand–to give the regulatory agencies scope to write regulations.

But in what I suggested, regulatory agencies would not have the power to issue regulations.  All regulations would have to be passed by Congress.

In such a situation, the Courts would most likely do what they do with other vague legislation–strike it down as impossibly obscure and broad.

And, of course, no method is perfect–I’m not suggesting that this one is.  What I do think it is, is far less liable to being corrupted, and to facilitating corruption.

Corruption begins in interpretation. 

For society to function well, citizens must be able to read their laws, and understand them, and know what they have to do and how they have to behave to avoid committing a crime or a violation.

If they can’t do that, then the law is whatever the latest functionary says it is, and every one of us is liable for arrest and punishment at any time.

That’s a government of men and not of laws.

At the moment, huge whacking hunks of the US system operate in this way.  Did you abuse your child when you denied him television for a week because he  brought home an F in sixth grade math?  It’s up to the social worker’s “best professional judgment.”  Did you discriminate on the basis of race by insisting on an employment test that requires higher level mathematics to pass, which then rejects a larger percentage of black applicants than white ones?  It’s up to the EEOC to decide.  You can’t anticipate what their ruling will be, because it will be based not on facts but on the “best professional judgment” of individuals.

Such a system will, I guarantee you, be corrupt.  It is  not a disaster waiting to happen, but a disaster in progress.  It is the reason why nobody will prosecute the Wall Street bankers and the kid on your block who was carrying a little baggie of marijuana will go to jail for five years.

It is what causes inequality in the only way in which inequality really matters in a political sense.

Interpretation is what causes us to be unequal before the law. 

And yes, of course, I know that some interpretation will always be necessary, and that we will never get rid of it altogether.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to get rid of it altogether, and to get rid of it as far as possible, starting now.

I can’t usually say that.  I’m actually a very slow and deliberate reader most of the time.  I wasn’t when I was younger, but the older I got and the more interested I got in understanding what I was reading–well, there you are.

But before I get to the book of the day, let me backtrack to clean up two things from yesterday.

First,  I seem to have given the misimpression that Betty Friedan was interested in women being academics or intellectuals–and those were certainly on the list, but what she actually wanted was a rigorous liberal education followed by graduate and professional training that would make women lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers, and that sort of thing.

She just assumed–as almost everybody did in that day and age, and as I still do–that rigorous liberal education is both the best way to train the intelligence, and the best introduction to the achievements of Western Civilization.

Second, Robert says, well, we’ve expanded the franchise to all sorts of people, and that must mean that our politics is better now than it was before.

But there are two things going on here.

In the first place, there’s the obvious.  We don’t expand the franchise to make our politics better or more honorable, but because it would be dishonorable not to do so.  The first thing we owe our fellow human beings is our recognition of their full humanity, and that includes the recognition of their full citizenship.

But on top of that, the construction is backwards.  We don’t extend the franchise and then see our politics get worse.  We see our politics get worse and then we extend the franchise. 

In other words, we first perceive that the group charged with the right to rule and decide is corrupt, or stupid, or misusing their power, and then we dilute their power by giving the people they have power over the right to participate in self government.

Slavery is morally wrong, but if slaveholders had in fact been benevolent, it would have been nearly impossible to get rid of it.

And we can see a movement of this type in the decreasing prevalence of an increasing opposition to laws that forbid felons from voting. 

What was once a widespread and unexceptionable practice has become a badge of infamy–not because we feel any more loving towards felons, but because felonies have multiplied so rapidly and populations have become so widely subject to the penalty that we no longer trust that the designation fairly singles out only those people who have done something serious enough to lose their right to vote.

If Andy the Axe Murderer gets to help decide the next election, it won’t be because we think that will make our politics better or our society more honorable.  It will be because that will be the only way we insure that Bobby the Marijuana Smoker won’t have that mandatory minimum five year sentence end all his rights as a citizen.

And here we come to our Book of the Day, which took so little time to read that I’m still a bit astonished by it.

The book is Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Christopher Hayes. 

For those of you who don’t know:  Hayes worked for a while as an editor at The Nation, and may still work there for all I know.  He also has a regular show on MSNBC called Up With Chris Hayes, which aired after he’d spent about a year being the Official Substitute Host for Rachel Maddow. 

I first got interested in this book when I read a long article more or less excerpted from it in The Nation. I passed that article around to a couple of people and got the criticisms I was expecting, but the central premise still interests me.

We’ve reached a point where the people who run our central institutions–government, military, corporate, educational, whatever–seem to be capable of nothing but failing at the jobs they were chosen (by a highly competitive process) to do.

Now, in the first place, I find this idea interesting because I agree with it, and I agree with Hayes’s corollary–that this has something to do with the fact that this group of people is now pretty much all the same.

And starting with that, I have, not a book review, but a few notes:

1) I have long complained that the right has a better record of pointing  out that the right has a better record of putting out books accessible to a broad spectrum of readers, so I should probably shut up–but.

This thing is written for an audience with reading skills levels of about sixth grade in a good middle school.  I found it sometimes distractingly “easy,” and always annoyingly so.

But this, I think, is a complaint for myself, and may actually be a plus for some readers.

2) I have to congratulate the man for having actually listened to Tea Party people.  Hayes is–obviously, from his credentials–a man of the Left, more or less, but instead of resorting to the usual hysterical nonsense about how all members of the Tea Party are gun toting half-educated lunatics who are only protesting because they’re so racist they can’t stand a black president in the White House, he actually went and found out who the Tea Party is and what they actually have to say.

And, having done that, he came to the same conclusion I did–which is that in terms of the fundamental analysis of the problem, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have a lot in common. 

And what they both have in common, and what Hayes and I have in common, is this–that the perfect symbol of what’s wrong here is TARP. Otherwise known as the bank bail out.

And that brings me to the last note, which is this:

3) You’re humming along being happy that the man has pretty much the same analysis of the situation as you do, and then you hit the last chapter.

That last chapter is enough to make you wonder if Hayes has any imagination at all, never mind a grip on linear thought.

Because what happens in the last chapter is that he reverts entirely to the same tired, failed and completely idiotic “we need redistribution!” ideas that got us into this mess to begin with.

Or, as I responded–and others responded–to Michael a couple of posts ago, it makes no sense to answer the use and abuse of government power by special interests by expanding government power.

If you’re going to make TARP the end of that kind of politics, then what you need is not expanded government, but restricted government.

You need to end the ability of the government to institute a TARP–to forbid it to bail out bankers, and to forbid it to bail out banks that are not part of FICA.  Ever.  Period. 

You need to end government discretion in how bankers and traders and other white collar types are treated when they’ve committed a crime.  We require that low-level drug dealers be prosecuted and we have a whole set of mandatory minimums that say judges don’t get to give such people slaps on the wrist.

We should have something similar for white collar crime.  If Martha Stewart could go to jail not for “insider trading” (she actually got acquitted of that), but for telling her board of directors that she would be acquitted for that (which was against the law, even if it turned out that her prediction was true)–then Dick Fuld, Lloyd Blankstein and the rest of the crew should be spending their time in Danbury as we speak.

If you don’t want corporations using the power of government regulations to stifle their competition, then the answer is not to give government a broader power to regulate, but to restrict that power.

And you do that in ways that should be no brainers–

a) you require that regulations, which are laws, be passed by Congress.

b) you require that laws be short, to the point, and written in a way that can be read by somebody with a high school education. 

The purpose of this is to stop the custom of hiding little  gimme provisions in laws that are so long and complicated that nobody ever notices the giveaway to Archer Daniels Midland on page 456 subclause 394.

The other purpose is to leave as little as possible up to interpretation.

Interpretation is where special interests can use their clout, financial or otherwise, to expand their power.  Say “no deductions for second homes” and you get no deductions for second homes.  Say “no deductions for second homes except under these circumstances,” and bureaucrats and regulators will be open for business to the highest bidders, “interpreting” whose circumstances qualify.

c) you limit what may be regulated.  The fewer areas over which government is allowed to exert power over its citizens, the fewer areas special interests can use to force their will on their fellow citizens. 

And that definitely includes business regulations of all sorts, environmental regulations of all sorts, and the present regime of anti-discrimination law.

The problem with that last one, by the way, isn’t that it should be okay to reject people on the basis of their race or color or sex, but because it represents, at the moment, the ultimate in subjective government of men and not laws. 

If the standard of whether or not something is a violation of a law or regulation is “when the investigator thinks so in her best professional judgment,” then that law or regulation must go.

And finally, let’s institute a tax system that is, in fact, fair.

We could keep the rates we have now, IF–

Deductions were limited to a very few:  the home mortgage deduction on your house, your state and local taxes, the dependent exemptions.

And that’s it.

NOTHING ELSE.

No special treatment for capital gains.  No special deductions for oil and gas leases, or the myriad little bips and bops that let some small group of people deduct their private jets or their aesthetically pleasing cattle raising hobby.

(Note the hobby–real cattle ranchers actually raising cattle for profit would still have legitimate business deductions–although I’d want to reduce the deductions for businesses and to make them less subjective, too.  But right now, I’m only talking about the personal income tax.)

Then, after you’ve done that, raise the exemption level to where it would have been in real dollars if it was still paying out at 1950 rates, which I think doubles those.

And what you would have is the single largest tax rise on wealthy people EVER, and it would be entirely fair, because it would be cleared, and it would be applied to everyone in the same way and without exception. 

And you’d have a lot less influence peddling, because there would be no influence to peddle.  And you’d have a lot fewer special interest power grabs, because there would be a lot less power to grab.

You’re never going to get more equality by trying to reduce the demand for inequality.

You’re only going to get it by reducing the supply.

Okay–the program that runs this blog  just had an update, and now it looks different and kind of odd.

I’ll get used to it, but in the short run, I’m going to be referring to it every once in a while, when it does things I’m not expecting.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here, as the title to this post suggests, so let me get on with it.

I’ve just reread The Feminine Mystique for the first time in what is probably more than a decade.  I do that every once in a while just to see how I feel about the books over time, and sometimes to see if I’ve remembered the books correctly.

And on that second point, this has been one of the odder of my experiences.

First, you must remember that when this book first came out, and I first read it, I loved it down to the ground. 

I loved it in a way I rarely love books that are not fiction.

And it was, for me, one of the first moves I made to shake off all those things my childhood and early adolescence was that I needed so desperately to escape.

So, a few notes:

1) If you haven’t read this lately, you’d be surprised at how old fashioned it is.  This is not the feminism of the Seventies.  It’s a book about women and the Life of the Mind, with the capitals definitely implied.

Its few of a college education is what my view of it was at the time–the liberal arts, with training in the hard sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, not for a specific vocation (which was left to graduate and professional schools), but for the dual purpose of rigorously training the intelligence and introducing students to the great questions of live and the traditions of Western Civilization.

And because of that

2) This is a book aimed not at Everywoman, but specifically at the brightest women out there, the ones who could do a rigorous college course as it used to be defined. 

It was not a book for women whose level of talent fitted them for being cashiers or even typists.

And Friedan’s assumption was that we should direct our resources at our most talented young people, female as well as male. 

It is, in fact, the exact opposite of the assumption now, which is that we can cut “gifted” programs all we want, because those kids will make out fine on their own, but we must aim resources at the marginally intelligent and the academically untalented to see if we can’t bring them up to something like speed.

I admit to being on the side of Friedan’s original thought–pouring our resources into our best performing students got us the Apollo space program, pouring our resources into our worst tends to get us things like the Atlanta test cheating scandal.

It’s important to note,  however, that Friedan neither suggests nor approves anything like the Seventies idea of “affirmative action.”  She doesn’t want women to get breaks, she wants to make the hoops they have to jump through even higher, the standards they have to meet even more stringent.

3) Because this book is what it is, it is aimed specifically at middle and upper middle class women who have had some college education, or whose abilities would have allowed them to get a college education if they hadn’t gotten married at nineteen.

And one of the reasons this book had such a powerful effect on me was that these were the women I knew, the women of my mother’s generation, the schoolgirls of my own, who not only had restricted themselves to the tiny little space of home-and-family, but who were hell bent on restricting every other woman to it.

And who were, by the way, gut wrenchingly, bitterly, angrily miserable.

I do not have a single example of a woman in my mother’s generation who was actually happy as a wife and mother. 

I had two ambitions growing up:  to be an honest to God published writer, and to be nothing at all like my mother.

On that level, I was at something of  a disadvantage–I look like my mother, but I think like my father, and always did.  You’ve never seen two such thoroughly mismatched people (in intellect and temperament), as my mother and myself. 

The first time I noticed that the woman seemed to hate me, I was about seven.  And it only got worse with time.

Personal circumstances notwithstanding,  however, when Friedan talked about the anger, the provinciality, the narrowness, the resentment–there it was, in my own house, and among my mother’s friends, and among those relatives and schoolmates of my own generation who were buying into the whole thing.

And what Betty Friedan told me was that I was right to value the things I valued, and that what I valued was better than what they valued.

And that brings me to

4) One of the constant refrains in the years since the publication of this book, from the left as well as from the right, is that it is wrong for women like me to believe that our choice (education, that life of the mind thing, a career instead of a primary identification as wife-and-mother)–

That it is wrong for women like me to believe that our choice is objectively better than the choice of women who decide to define themselves principally as wives and mothers.

Of course, the women who decide to be primarily wives and mothers are not exhorted not to declare their own choice as superior. 

It is only women like me who must apologize for our lives, and assure all those women who didn’t use their educations that they’ve really made the best and noblest choice, the superior choice, we’re just not good enough to make it ourselves.

And to this I say

5) Why?

If I thought the choice of defining myself first as a wife and mother was the best one, I’d have made that choice.

In fact, I don’t think that choice is the best one–and for women with high levels of education, I think that choice is damned near criminal.

Places at top ranked educational institutions are limited, and the competition for them is tough.  If your intention is to tread water through four years Harvard and then bury yourself in domesticity, never again to read anything serious even in your spare time and never to contribute anything serious to the wider world around you–you should opt for the local community college and let somebody who’s really serious take your place.

And if you’ve got a really good mind and decide to do nothing about it at all, to do the least work possible–no, sorry, there’s cancer to be cured and a thousand other things that need doing, and your choice is not only objectively less good than that of someone who at least tries, but it objectively immoral.

You’ve only got one chance to live this life on earth.  If you’re religious, think of the parable of the three servants whose master gave them each three talents and watched what they did with them.

Your job, in other words, is to use your God or nature given talents to their fullest possible expression.  And if you don’t do that, you’ve wasted what life you’ve had.

6) Before you start ranting and raving about how elitist I am, remember this–

The wives and mothers are NOT being told they must apologize to women like me and assure us that our choice is really the better one.

They can declare their superiority all they want, deride the choices we’ve made, and rail at us for being pretentious, elitist snobs when we try to defend ourselves.

If it’s alright for them to do that, then it’s certainly all right for me to insist that my way is best, without compromise, and without equivocation.

Of course, I do know that real life is not that simple.  Some people choose not to develop their talents.  Others get stuck through circumstances beyond their control.  Others are not capable of developing very far or very much.

But of those of us who have the choice, those who make the choice to fully develop themselves have made the better and more defensible choice.

And in a world of limited resources where we can either put in the time and effort on our best and most talented students or put that same time and effort on our least–

Well, if it has to be one or the other, the better choice is to put those resources into the most talented.

In the long run, that will end up helping everybody.

A short note on vocabulary.

Because I’ve just hit one of those walls I never anticipate, even though, given everything, I should have anticipated.

So–

No novel can be a good novel if it is not true.  The opposite of true is false. 

In other words, a novel that is not true is a lie about human life and human nature.

But true DOES NOT mean the same thing as real.

A novel is real if the events and locales within it correspond to what is existing and possible in the real world.

And this is not the same thing as “realism,” which is a movement in Western literary history in which the world is portrayed as one of those reality programs about lowlifes who live in a post apocalyptic dystopia.

Okay, I’m exaggerating there.  But not a lot.  I give you Thomas Hardy.

The important thing to remember is this:  a book can be true even if it is in no way real.

Terry Pratchett’s  novel Small Gods is one of the truest books I’ve ever read, but it is in no way real.

It occurs to me that when I talk about how I do not like books that are not real, what most of you answer with are examples of how books with unreal settings or possibilities can be true.

And you’re quite right, of course.

Books set in outer space or Middle Earth or three hundred years in the future can be very true indeed.

But they are still not real.

With all due respect to Lymaree–no, that isn’t what I’m doing.

It’s got nothing to do with keeping things in separate compartments.

It has everything to do with the music.

To  me, prose plays in my head the same way music does.  There is a music to written prose, different for every writer and for every piece, like Beethoven is different from Mozart and Mozart’s flute concertos are different from the Jupiter Symphony.

I don’t listen to music in the mornings when I’m going to write, either–if the rhythm of the Eroica gets into my head, it will override the rhythm that is inherent in my own writing, at least for fiction.

Try to think of yourself with a song stuck firmly in your head, so that you can’t get it out.  Try Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.”  Then think of yourself walking into an evening at the New York Philharmonic. 

You try to hear the Mozart, but it just doesn’t work, because no matter what you do,  no matter how hard you try to concentrate, all you can hear is “I Walk the Line.”

Reading prose is, to me, essentially a musical experience.  My prose has a rhythm and a music, too, and what I have to guard against when I write is getting somebody else’s music stuck in my head so that I can’t shake it and produce my own.

And I don’t have to decompress from work and then pick up again to go back to work.

I have to decompress from work in terms of my emotional state, because I’ve just spend a long time living somebody else’s life in somebody else’s head. 

But that is not about what I read, and I could go on reading the stuff that suits me for writing without that being a problem.

I do sometimes need to sort of decompress from what I read, but that’s usually because the book in question has been unusually long. 

Long books–especially long nonfiction books–tended to be complicated and, yes, sometimes a bit difficult in terms of arguments and references,

So I always follow something really long with something really short, as a form of mental relaxation.

And sometimes when I get to the end of a very long book, I don’t really know what kind of thing I want to read next. 

I don’t need to keep things separate.  I just need to be able to focus on what I’m reading, and not be thinking of other things.

And I understand that if you’re tone deaf to the music of prose–and most people seem to be–then this must not make much sense.

And I also think that this thing–the ability to hear the music of prose–is what REALLY sets apart the people who like all that literary stuff nobody else wants. 

I don’t care about the plot.  I don’t really care about the story.  Strong characters are definitely a good idea, but they’re not primary.

I care about the music.

On any of the usual criteria proposed by people here, J.D. Salinger is a boring author who writes about “angst.”

But he makes some of the most beautiful music with his prose ever written, and for me, that makes him a greater writer than a hundred who produced exciting plots but whose prose is flat and discordant.

The Jupiter is for Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, which is what I was listening to while reading this morning–and on a Saturday and not a Sunday, too.

Mostly I only take Sunday off, and not even Sunday when I’m in the middle of a book, either writing the first draft or cutting it. 

But this year, I’ve completed not one but two major projects–a Gregor Demarkian due out for 2013, and the first Georgia Xenakis.  I am feeling deserving of a little self indulgence. 

To put it mildly.

But writing for me is what writing always is, and I do always come up against the problem that I cannot write at all when I’m reading certain books. 

Towards the end of any project, I start to get nervous about reading books I haven’t read before, because I just don’t know if I can work when I’m reading them or not.   I therefore tend to go back to things I’ve read before and know will let me work.

These things do not make a whole lot of sense as a group.  I am not entire sure why these books hang together, or what they have in common beyond the fact that they are books I can read while I’m writing.

All of P.D. James is on that list, and so is all of Anne Perry.  Stephen King is not.  The Loeb translation of Plato is.  Burning Questions works.  So does any Perry Mason or Agatha Christie. Only Gaudy Night, out of the Dorothy L. Sayers, makes the list.

It’s like I said.  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.  I’m sure there’s an organizing principle in there somewhere.  I just can’t find it.

This time, when I finished Burning Questions and still had a week of writing and cutting to do, what I wanted to read was The Feminine Mystique.  For one thing, I know I can work through it.  For another, the theme fit with Burning Questions.  For a third, it had been nearly ten years since I had read it the last time, and that’s always an interesting comparison.

As it turned out, this was not something I was going to be able to do.  It was one of those things.  I had two copies of it in the house, and I could find neither one of them.  I searched for five days, and then I recognized I would have to give up and find something else.  A friend sent me two copies, and my younger son went to the library and ordered me one on interlibrary loan, but I had to read something right away.

What I finally chose to read was something else I hadn’t reread in a few years, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. 

This is not, by the way, what I want to talk about today.  I had the same problem with the Bloom that I always do.  For one thing, I can never quite figure out what he wants.

But the bigger deal was this–I finished reading that just yesterday afternoon, and when I did, I went looking for some decompression literature, something to be reading when I’m not sure what I want to read next, or when I need something short to balance something long, or whatever.

My usual choice for that kind of thing is Sherlock Holmes–and I want to stress as strongly as possible that if you’re looking for a good complete collection of those stories to actually carry around and read, they’re available in a Barnes and Noble classics edition in two volumes that’s inexpensive, well put together, and arranged chronologically as originally published.

This time, however, Holmes was not what I was looking for.  All I really need for these periods are collections or short stories or articles, so that I can read to the end of one or two and then put the book away to go back to later. 

This time, what I picked up was that enormous collections of essays on education starting with the ancients that I’d first tried a bit of about three years ago.  I’m pretty sure I reported on some of that here–essays and excerpts from longer works by everyone from Plato to the day before yesterday.

When I got to the book this time, the first section I was faced with was by Erasmus, and the second was by Martin Luther.

Erasmus is one of my favorite people in history, and Martin Luther is a man whose work I do not generally like at all.

I say that last with reservation, because not much of Luther’s writing is available in English, and my German wasn’t ever up to it. 

But what I have read of Luther, I have not been happy with, and far too much of it has been concerned with polemics against “learning” that sound a lot like modern-day anti-intellectualism. 

It’s one of the commonplaces in the modern day secular movement that the Catholic Church repressed learning and Luther freed it.  I even met a number of people–and one in particular–who were convinced that the Reformation must have come before the Renaissance, because the Catholic Church would never have allowed the latter.

The section on Luther in this book, however, contained an instruction to the civil authorities in Germany, most of which was concerned with two themes:

1) That learning and study should be encouraged, and pagan learning should not be entirely proscribed–only Aristotle, who was full of error and evilness and other nonChristian and not good things.

and

2) That municipal schools should be set up in every town and city to ensure that every boy and girl should have at least the rudiments of an education.

Now, that the Protestants (unlike the Catholics) insisting on universal literacy for all classes of society and for girls as well as boys was not news to me.  If you’re going to insist on sola scriptura, and on the principle that men did not need the mediation of priests to understand it, then you’re going to have to make sure that all your people can read at least well enough to read a Bible.

What I found much more interesting about this selection, though, was the reason Luther thought it necessary and advisable  for municipalities and churches to set up such schools.

Yes, it would insure that all children would learn to read, even children of poor parents who could not afford to provide tutors or to send their children to private schools with tuition fees.

But the real reason was this:  Luther did not believe we could trust parents to make their children literate, or to properly instruct them in faith and morals.

Parents, apparently, were, to Luther, mostly neglectful, self-concerned, and heedless of their children’s well being.  They were also woefully ignorant, and so mired in sin that they couldn’t provide their children with decent examples of how to live a Christian life.

All this was especially interesting in comparison with the Erasmus I’d just read, which assumed that parents wanted the best for their children, but weren’t sure how to provide it–and a little advice from someone who knew would be all that was necessary for parents to choose the best path, no coercion by the state required.

Which bring me to my question of the day.

The idea that parents are incapable of caring decently for their children and must be forced to by the state has been around a long time, starting at least with Plato, if not before.

And it’s with us still, in the entire “best interests of the child” standard in family courts.

Such ideas have not, however, been universal. 

The question becomes, then, what it is that makes this particular idea so attractive to so many people.

And no, “power” is not the answer.

Seductive as power is, not everybody who craves it craves it in this particular form.  In fact, most people who are after power want it in other ways and in other guises.

I’m tempted to say that this sort of thing crops up  most commonly among people who do not themselves have children, or who have at most one or two–and that seems to hold down to our present day.

Luther, however, went on to have children of his own, and for all I know might have an entire pack of them.

And out of this idea, we have the New England common schools and the directives of most Calvinist societies that all children spend some time in them, which was not altogether a negative thing.

I think it’s the impetus that puzzles me the most–if you’re not interested enough in children to have your own, why are you so passionately interested in what happens to other people’s?

And yes, I know, there’s the power thing.

But as I said, there are lots of other ways to get power, and most people aren’t interested in this one.

So I’d like to figure out what’s going on with the people who are.