Hildegarde

So, you know, here I am, dispirited already before the term has even gotten started. 

I gave a quiz today.  It was a ten-answer definitional thing, you took the term, you define it.  All the terms and all their proper definitions were posted on Blackboard last week.

And I still got six people with zeros (out of a hundred) and another eight with tens.

And As The World Turns is ending, as the Guiding Light ended a while back.  I’ve never watched a daytime soap opera in my life–in fact, I can barely stand to be in the same room with them–but my grandmother did, and I have distinct memories of staying over at her house and watching her do it.

That said, I’m not sure that I’d sign on to Lymaree’s claim that the sexual control of women was always one of the prime reasons for formal marriage.  In Christian Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it was at least as often aimed at the sexual control of men, which the Church was always having a lot of trouble with.

Of course, in that period, there was no such thing as “homosexuality.”  There were men who liked sleeping with other men and men who liked sleeping with boys, but all that was classified under ordinary lust, under the apparent assumption that your normal male would sleep with a tree trunk if that was all he had available, and that the job was to get him to sleep with his wife and produce children.

But I’d like to say that a lot of the problems we’ve got–and certainly a lot of what drives things like the Tea Party–is the fact that we’ve federalized everything.

Not only are too many rules being made and enforced by unelected bureaucrats, but they tend to be national rules. 

I understand that in two very distinct areas–first slavery, and then Jim Crow–“states rights” were code words for doing the wrong thing and a thing of a kind that could not be allowed at all.

That doesn’t diminish the wisdom of federalism.  We’ve got those 300 million people, 4000 religions and religious denominations, every racial and ethnic group on the planet, and literally millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal.

No matter how much sense it makes to insist that states not deny citizens the right to vote or go to school on the basis of race, it makes none to insist that we should enforce a national policy on childhood obesity, educational focus (NCLB), or smoking regulations.

And the people who insist we should enforce such policies nationally are always ending up in places they don’t want to be.  It was liberal justices, not conservatives, who found against the small homeowners in Kelo and who found in favor of corporations and other employers who wanted to enforce no-smoking and other behavioral regulations on their employees even when those employees were off the job and at home in their free time.

The Tea Party, I think, comes out of the feeling that the nationalization of regulations about everything is inevitable, and therefore the only possible response is to get your own regulators into power.

But maybe that’s because I’m still reading the Chambers book. It’s a very long book.  And the theme music is curiously unchanged between then and now on a lot of points.

But it is really late in the afternoon, and I really don’t want to cook chicken.

Or anything, for that matter.

Is whether or not the backspace and delete are going to work on t his keyboard the first I wake up this morning, and they did.  Of course, I haven’t had any caffeine yet, so I can’t actually see, but that’s another issue.

And, I’ll admit, today is the parking problem–I have a schedule that is hell on earth, but only because there’s no way to park anywhere near my building after about eight o’clock.  If I could go in at ten thirty, I’d have a perfectly sane day, and be somewhat relaxed in the process.  When I taught in the other building, it was no problem.  Nobody wants to go to the other building.

Okay.  You know the term has started.  I’m complaining about the parking.

But I have been reading all the comments.  And I think–

I agree with Cathy about the fact that both sides want to restrict liberty.  I don’t think I’d use gay marriage as an example of the right wanting to restrict liberty, though, because marriage is not what is at issue in the “gay marriage” debate, and what is is not a liberty issue that I can see.

The issue in gay marriage is not marriage, per se–churches in New England were performing marriage ceremonies for gay people ten years ago, and carrying those couples on their books as married.

The issue in gay marriage is the government recognition of marriages between two people of the same sex.

And that is not a small thing.  Even without the various benefits–from Social Security, for instance–there is the legal right to act as next of kin when one partner becomes ill and other things that amount to having married couples recognized as if they were related by blood.

But, aside from the fact that all rights are properly negative, the mere history of government recognition of marriage argues against such recognition as a right.

All states have always put restrictions on the marriages they would recognize, and not merely restrictions on “miscegnation” as existed in the South under Jim Crow.  States put age restrictions on marriage, for instance.  And states have refused to honor marriages from other states when the age of the one of the partners is significantly below that at which the marriage would be recognized for people in-state.

That was a terrible sentence.  I meant that even in the Fortie and Fifties, states like California and New York were refusing to recognize a thirteen year old girl as “married” even though she and her husband had gone through the ceremony in a state (like Kentucky or Alabama) that allowed her to be married at that age.

The big liberty issues on the right are a) abortion; b) private sexual acts between consenting adults; and c) publicly coerced prayer.

The abortion one doesn’t need elaboration in the present discussion.  The private sexual acts between consenting adults, however, may.  I give you Lawrence vs. Texas, where the SCOTUS struck down a Texas law forbidding sodomy, pretty much saying that if two men wanted to have sex together in their own bedrooms, it was there business and none of the State’s. 

And conservatives were, fairly solidly, behind the “right” of a state to forbid such sexual acts.  What’s more, they were alarmed at the possibility that the decision in Lawrence would mean, in the long run, that it would be impossible to pass any kind of morals legislation at all.

On that one, I agreed with them, and said–yay.  I don’t want the government to pass morals legislation.

Of course, it will anyway, it will just call it something else.  Public health measures, for instance.  On things like smoking.  Or maybe, later, eating Big Macs.

Publicly coerced prayer is, of course, the endless call to bring prayer back into the public schools. 

I tend to be someone who thinks school boards should be local and that local communities should be allowed to teach their children what they want to teach them, even if that makes the teachers’ unions froth at the mouth.

But I actually have a bigger problem with school sponsored prayer than I do with the teaching of Creationism.  And I’m not the only one, and the other people who have, or have had, a problem with it are not necessarily atheists.

We have an enormous system of Catholic schools in this country because Catholic parents would not allow their children to say the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer or read from the King James Version of the Bible–and how that wasn’t a government establishment of religion is beyond me.  It was paid for by my tax money.  It was imposed on the general population by agents of the government as the Official Version of religion.  There were penalties for dissent, if not formal ones than informal ones.  Ask any kid who got to “sit out” the prayer in the Fifties what his classmates said to him later, in the cafeteria and on the playground.

But in spite of all that, I still think it’s sane to be more worried about having left moral prejudices imposed on you in this country than the right’s. 

It’s not that the right isn’t trying to get theirs established as law–they are–it’s that the left tends to work not through the electoral and legislative process, but through bureaucracies and courts.

And the bureaucracies are worse than the courts.

If you were going to ask me what the worst idea we ever had was, I’d have to say it was the one that allowed federal bureaucracies to issue regulations that did not–each one individually–have to be enacted by legislatures.

And yes, I know the rationale for allowing it.  It was still a really bad idea.  And clunky as the resulting system would be, I think we should abolish that particular power of bureaucracies. 

If spanking is ever abolished in this country, it won’t be because somebody passed a law against it.  It will be because various state Departments of Child Protection decided to treat spanking as the same thing as “beating,” call it child abuse, and have children removed from homes where it is practiced.

And this is an enormous power to have, especially in family court, where the due process rights of parents are treated as nonexistent.  (In fact, when parents in one case a few months ago claimed their right to refuse to answer questions under the Fifth Amendment, the relevant state Department went to court on the grounds that, if people could refuse to speak, the Department wouldn’t be able to do its work.  My internal response was:  if your work is impossible when you follow the Constitution, then maybe it shouldn’t be done.)

And the attempts to use CPS to enforce one segment of the population’s ideas on what is good and proper isn’t restricted to physical acts like spanking.  It’s behind all the calls for religious upbringing to be treated as “child abuse,” and for homeschooling to be treated as a “risk factor” for such abuse. 

But it isn’t just CPS that issues and carries out regulations under its own steam and without public imput, support or ratification.  Virtually every government department issues regulations and none of them have been discussed by legislatures, or passed by them.  They’re entirely outside the scope of the Democratic process.

And that, I think, is much more threatenting to people than anything that has to be passed in an actual law.

And it should be.   The point, after all, is self government, and a country increasingly ruled by arbitrary regulations issued by unelected (and job protected) bureaucrats is not self governing.

We have in fact installed a new aristocratic class.  It’s virtually impossible to have them fired.  They can issue rules for the rest of us on their own power, without having to have our consent or our imput.  They can enforce them with everything from fines and jail time to removing children from families. 

If you happen to be on the receiving line of a lot of that, then thinking the Democrats–who tend to support that kind of thing more than Republicans do–are Communists is maybe not as crazy as it sounds.

I’m going to go drink this tea before I fall over.

I’m dead tired, and it’s late, but I wanted to ask a question:  what is it about me that makes machines lose their minds?

And it’s all machines, not just the computer.  I managed to break not one but four copy machines in the space of about two hours one day, and neither I nor anybody else knows what I did.

Over the last week or so I’ve been breaking my computer, so that eventually the damned thing just would not turn on the monitor no matter what I did.

But I had good friends over who do computer, and when they were here, it behaved perfectly.

Then they took it away to look at it and gave me this loaner thing, which is actually a laptop hooked up to my monitor and keyboard, so it feels like the usual thing and I don’t have to swear at the laptop keyboard, which I don’t like much.

Except when I started working on it, everything was fine except–it wouldn’t backspace or delete.  ANYTHING.  On AOL, on Open Office, on the blog.

I sent an e-mail to Richard to ask about it, and he asked if the laptop keyboard would backspace and delete, and it would.

And then, by accident, I found that now that I’d done that, the regular keyboard backspace and delete would work, too.

Honestly, the machines just hate me.

Or something.

And you don’t want me to get near your car.

Well, I made it to Saturday. This feels like some kind of miracle that I should celebrate, but instead I’m worried about my mother–yesterday, she was in the hospital all day for a blood transfusion; last night she was back in her nursing home–and I’m intent on drinking this enormous cup of tea.

I want to throw out a proposition, however, that ties in with the posts of the last few days.

Here it is:  the only people who are threatened by competition are people who are afraid to lose.

I want to make that as clear as I can.  I’m not talking about people who think they might lose.  I’m not even talking about people who know theyr’e going to lose.

You can be both of those things and yet not be threatened by competition, as long as you can accept losing.

I am, in fact, one of those people who is often convinced I am going to lose.  And I have, in my life, often lost.  It feels awful, and I hate it, but I get up and give it another shot.

And I don’t hate losing–failing, may be the better word–so much that I’m willing to do anything to avoid it.

I’d rather compete and lose, try and fail, than not compete or try at all.

There are a certain subset of people, however, for whom losing/failing is the worst possible thing.  Some of those people are in situations where their fear makes at least practical sense.

If you’re the sexagenarian owner of the local pharmacy and Rite-Aid moves in next door,  you may very well be afraid of the competition (and seek to find a way to avoid it) because it might mean that your store goes out of business and you no longer have a source of livelihood at a time in your life when you don’t really have the personal resources to rebuild.

But some people just can’t face failure, period.  It doesn’t matter if they think they’re going to win or to lose, because the mere possibility of losing is insupportable to them psychologically.

And I’ll tell you from experience that a fair number of these people end up in highly competitive environments.  It’s not that they don’t compete.  It’s that they hate the competition and are constantly trying to find some way to game it.

I bring these people up because I think they’re the second solid segment of what I remember of the New Left, and the New Left keeps coming up in connection with Whittaker Chambers and the Old Left.

Let me say this first.

I think most people underestimate how large a percentage of the leadership of the campus left in the Sixties was made up of the children of the Old Left of the Thirties and Forties.

Without the Red Diaper Babies, the New Left would never have happened.

And the Red Diaper Babies were not the ones I’m thinking of who were afraid of competition.  They came to Left politics the way a lot of people come to religion.  It was what they were brought up with, and they never questioned the dogma (moral or political) of their faith any more than a Southern Baptist at Liberty University questions his.

In fact, they may have questioned it less.

But the New Left would never have gotten where it got to if it had had to rely on the Red Diaper Babies alone.  There weren’t enough of them.

What it had was the most competitive generation in the history of the country, a phalanx of adolescents who had grown up being told:  a) they could be anything they want to be if they just worked at it and b) the road to riches and power and fame was through the universities that were open to everybody.

The implication, of course, was that if they did not do much with their lives, then it was their own fault and no other.

This was what I was trying to explain the other day about the problems of meritocracy.  Meritocracy leaves nobody an out.  If you fail, then your failure is your own personal sin, and it says something about your worth as a human being.

The New Left was headed largely by students from top-tier universities.  These were the students who had, up to that point, been winning the competition to “be somebody.” 

They were also the ones most likely to be afraid to lose, because losing would mean (given where they had gotten to) being separated from the entire life they had build so far.

Ack.  Every time I try to say this, I feel like I mess it up.

There’s a saying that it’s harder to be poor if you’ve ever been rich.

That’s the sense in which I mean it.  These were kids used to being at Harvard and Columbia.  East Podunk U would be hard to take.  Moving into anonymous, not very glamourous careers would also be hard to take, because they’d look up every morning and see the kids who sat beside them in History and Calculus running the country.

I think that fear of losing resulted in a big minority of “movement” students deciding that the safest thing to do in their position was to try to bring down the system that would judge them.  If the system was destroyed, they couldn’t lose.

I have no idea if any of that makes any sense.

But I think you can apply it to certain kinds of Left-ish pundit, too, and to a lot of the really silly Left faculty on college campuses.

I think that the reason that Humanities professors skew left isn’t that there is something inherent in the Humanities, but that in a world that values science and technology, they will in fact lose, even on their own campuses.

If you’re part of a system that judges what you are to be worthless, then it makes sense to try to bring down the system.

George Steiner pretty well said this in “Archives of Eden,” which is osmething I should talk about on this blog at some point, because it’s a truly astonishing piece of work.

But I think the Communists of the Thirties were different from the Leftists of the second half of the 20th century because they could not have had the motives those second-half Leftists had.  In the world of the Thirties, places like Harvard and Yale were largely restricted to people who had not only money, but the right kind of money.  If you failed to get into them, it had nothing to do with you.

But the fellow travelers are something else.

I think the fellow travelers may very well have been influenced–some of them–by that fear of failure. 

But at the moment, I’m trying to figure out a man named Henry Ware.

And I need my tea.

It’s a weird day on a lot of levels.  Trust me.

But there are points.

The first is that I don’t think people like Chambers were interested in workers’ pensions or unemployment insurance.

When I said this was a book about a religious conversion, I meant it.  What Chambers was looking for was salvation, a permanent end to a certain kind of evil–for equality of condition (not just “of outcomes”), period, across the board, and to control of work and working conditions in the hands of the people who did the work.  Or at least the manual and skilled trades work.

And he was looking for that because he honestly thought that things could not get better by simple evolution.  Instead, he was convinced that not only were things bad–and they were very bad, even in the Twenties, for certains classes of people–but that they could only get worse, because the internal logic of the economic system as it was then constituted would force them to get worse.

Second, Chambers not only knew all about the show trials, he knew they were show trials.  It was the fellow travelers and sympathizers who were deluded or self-deluded on that point.  Actual working members of the Party knew what was going on and why. 

They just thought it was justified.  They did not hold free elections, for instance, to be of any value.  They were not looking for democracy, and they did not accept rights, individual or otherwise, as we understand them. 

What seems to us to be scandalous and an obvious sign that we would have to abandon this particular cause meant nothing to them on a moral level.  Chambers was exasperated by what he felt were heavy handed tactics and unnecessary factionalism, but he also thought that the Party was the only possible organ for society’s redemption (as defined above) and that leaving it would not do any good and might do a lot of harm to his own long term goals.

But even complaining about how, in the Sixties, they “should have known” has a few problems.

Part of it is that it’s really amazing how little people do know, even know. 

Part of it is in the assumption that, had they known, they would have disapproved, or found those conditions unacceptable. 

Party members were not, and are not, liberals.  They’re not even socialists if we understand the term as what’s going on in Sweden. 

The book is interesting precisely for this reason–that Chambers does not try to pretend to be a liberal, he doesn’t pretend to have valued (at the time) elections or free speech or any of that, he instead gives a portrait of himself as he actually was, and a portrait of the Party in the US as it actually was.

And still is, for all I know.

For active Party members, complaining that they “should have known” there was no free speech, and no free elections, the the Soviet Union was pointless.  They did know.  They just didn’t think it was important.

In a way, they are the least interesting people in this movement–they are committed believers, their belief is both about the nature of reality now and the possible nature of reality in the future, and they don’t compromise.

The fellow travelers and sympathizers a more of a puzzle, because they did value things like elections and free speech, and went ahead anyway.

And no, after the show trials, I don’t think they could have avoided knowing what was going on if they’d wanted to know.

When we get down to today, of course, things are a lot more complicated, or a lot more murky.  Nobody believes in the coming Communist paradise any more. 

But a lot of people do still believe that the economic system that now exists is inherently corrupt, evil and unjust.

On the other hand, there is politics as fashion, and that’s something else again.

I’ve got to go teach.

It’s Thursday, and it’s obvious to me that Tuesdays and Thursdays are going to be the days I hate the most this term.  It’s not the classes or the students, it’s the elongated schedule.  And I actually asked for the schedule, so go figure.

But…

In terms of the Chambers book, we’re talking about Communists in the Twenties and Thirties, not now.  And although I’d agree that, by now, most people who can read past a third grade level ought to know that there is something inherent in the Communist idea that creates dictatorships and totalitarianisms.

I’m not so sure with socialism, because socialism has only a fuzzy definition.  A lot of people mean by it only an expanded welfare state.  Sweden, they’d say, is socialism.  And Sweden is a lot of things–and not a place I’d like to live–but it isn’t a totalitarianism in the ordinary definition of that term.

It comes down, I think, to the way in which one defines “justice.” 

I get a little nuts over the term “social justice,” because what seems to be meant by it is “justice defined in a way contradictory to the usual,” but I do know a number of people for whom “income inequality” is, on its face, simply wrong. 

I don’t think any of them mean that there should be no income inequality at all.  The fact that some people drink and drug and party instead of doing any work is by now obvious to everybody.  But I do know people for whom large differences in wealth and resources among people going around getting there work done are inexcusable.

This is not something that bothers me at all.  I don’t care that Bill Gates has more money than I do, even vastly more money than I do.  I think he’s earned it, but I wouldn’t care that much even if he hadn’t.  Inherited wealth does not seem like an injustice to me.

What I do care about is that people who do go about doing there work be capable of acquiring the basics of a decent life.  If you live right, work hard and play by the rules–God, I hate that phrase–you ought to be able to have a decent place to live, food for your family, clothing, recreation, health care when you need it and education for your children.

What Chambers is talking about is a world in which that was not possible not only for people on the lowest level of employment, but even for many skilled workers. 

Charity would not have answered to the problem–the issue was not giving your money away but the structure of a society that reduced skilled machinists working ninety hours a week to penury and want in an early old age, with no end in sight for themselves or their children.  

This was, after all, in the days before widespread financial aid for colleges, never mind in the days before state universities with tuitions low enough to make attendance possible for virtually anybody.

I think part of what Chambers joined the Communist Party to effect was a world in which that would not be the case. 

I think part of it was to find some kind of organizing principle for his life. 

And that second thing explains why he didn’t “notice” the purge trails, for instance, or the famines.

There’s a real sense that the change that would be needed to make sure that machinist had a decent retirement and a good future for his children would be resisted at all costs by the powers that were, resisted right down to violence.

And that that meant that building Communism would also have to be taken right down to violence.  What’s the old saying?  You can’t make an omelet without breaking legs.

In the 1890s, the 1920s, and for a while after that, it really wasn’t clear that Communism as an idea necessitated the things it eventually did, and there was quite a lot of argument even within the Communist Party USA about it.

But I think the most important thing is that business–something to live for and something to die for.

Because I think that there are some people who are not able to function without a sort of referential frame for their lives.  In the Middle Ages, these people would have been priests and nuns, or–if prevented from that by circumstances–possibly saints of the Doctor of the Church kind, people who worked with the ideas of Christian doctrine.

In a world where God is assumed not to exist, they became Communists.

I’m absolutely convinced that that is what is at the basis of Chambers becoming a Communist.

And it would explain the fascination for Communism among scholars. 

If you are the kind of person who must have such a narrative frame–and I think that people who are attracted to things like Literary Criticism and Philosophy are very often just such people, just as many people who are psychologically troubled are attracted to Psychology–

Well, if you are that kind of person, and you can’t make yourself believe in God, maybe that is going to be the only option available.

I can’t think of any other option available right now, at any rate.

And then there is my favorite explanation, which has not come up in Chambers at all.

In a world in which every man is free to make of himself what he will, the fact that you’re not Bill Gates is something of a condemnation.  Competition becomes threatening when competition determines not just your net work financially but your worth as a human being.

And I do think the meritocratic state ends up presenting something like that.

And it’s late, and I’d better do the rest of this tomorrow.

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

Today, it’s been a constant struggle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, more tomorrow, maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ack.

Am I making any sense at all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, I got that last euphemism from Kenny Chesney.

But you see what I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The book is Witness, by Whitaker Chambers. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

It isn’t.  Not exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind.

Tea and Hildegarde.

More later.

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

I found this on Arts and Letters Daily this morning:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I think it may be right.