Hildegarde

I don’t usually write a blog post on Friday.  I’ve got an early class, and it’s my absolutely worst day on a number of levels.

But I heard this last night, and I can’t help myself.

Mayor Bloomberg and the same health department that tried to limit “sugary drinks” to no more than 16 ounces–unless they were from Starbucks or other places yuppies like to get their stuff–has now issued an order banning gifts of food to homeless shelters, because the city can’t monitor their salt and fat content beforehand.

So here are these people, living on the streets, eating out of garbage cans, mentally ill or addicted or whatever–and Mayor Bloomberg thinks their biggest problem is that they might get too much salt in a donated batch of bagels.

Or maybe Bloomberg and his people think that homeless people wouldn’t be homeless if they hadn’t done anything wrong, so they should be punished by only being allowed to eat tasteless, unappetizing food.

It would be interesting to find out whether some of them think they get better food dumpster diving.

This, by the way, is the real class warfare.

I’m going to go do something so that I can at least appear to be competent at eight o’clock.

I learned something very important this election.

I’m an old person.  I can no longer stay up all night to listen to the returns and then do a normal day following. 

I did indeed do my entire normal day yesterday, but I spent the whole time feeling as if I was about to fall over.

And then there’s been the weather.  We had a nor’easter move in over night.  First they said it was going to dump one and a half inches of snow.  Then four to seven inches of snow.  Then ten inches of snow. 

Then I went to bed.

This morning, the entire state seems to be closed except my place, which is apparently carrying on as usual. 

I think if I’m going to have to shovel, or make offspring shovel, I should at least get a snow day.  But nobody listens to me.

At any rate–the election.

1) I told you so. 

I have been saying for months that Romney had  no chance of winning this election and that the outcome wouldn’t even be close.

I was right on both counts.

2) But I don’t think the reason was what Democrats want it to be.  I don’t think Tea Party candidates dragged Romney down.

I think Romney dragged the Tea Party candidates down.

The Tea Party hated Romney and didn’t come out to vote for anybody, meaning to send a clear signal to the party brass that they were no long willing to put up with rich guys  whose only interests were to funnel taxpayer money to corporate welfare clients and to protect those clients from their mistakes.

I think the Democrats got their analysis extact 180 degrees wrong. 

The Tea Party was not astroturf being manipulated by rich people.

The Tea Party was trying to turn the Republican Party into the agency of what they want, which is actually much worse for the rich guys than anything the Democrats have on offer.

The Democrats were just as much behind saving the bankers as the Republicans were.  The Tea Party wanted to see these guys crash and burn.

For a while, TP rallies featured people with signs saying “Let the failures fail.”

There were hysterical blog posts across the left wing declaring  that the TP protestors might SEEM to be calling down retribution on bankers, but that wasn’t what they REALLY meant.  What they REALLY meant was that poor people should be left to starve.

No, what they really meant is that people like Dick Fuld and Jamie Dimon should go down with their firms and lose all their money in a combination of the collapse of the enterprises they ran into the ground and the lawsuits from investors that would surely follow.

TP candidates would have done much better with Santorum on the ticket, because their base would have been willing to come out and vote.

3) What we are actually seeing here is the death of Establishment Republicanism. 

The Establishment types yelled and screamed that the world was going to end if the TP didn’t rush out and vote “against Obama,”  never mind who Mitt really was or what he represented–run, run, the world is on fire!

The TP wasn’t having any of it.

If the Republicans are ever going to win an election again, they’re going to have to ditch the rich guys and find people who are going to be willing to throw those same rich guys under the bus the next time there’s a financial scandal.

4) That said, I also think that the more extreme religious right candidate isn’t going to do very well either.

Of the two poster boys for ton deafness in this race, I’ve go some sympathy for Mourdock and none at all for Akin.

Akin was an idiot, and he should have dropped out of the race. 

Mourdock, on the other hand, had a point that he seemed constitutionally incapable of articulating.

If you honestly believe that abortion is the act of murdering a child, then making exceptions for rape makes no sense.

Making exceptions indicates that you are, in fact, viewing pregnancy as punishment for sexual behavior.  If she gets pregnant she has to live with it–unless it turns out it wasn’t her fault, then it’s okay.

Such a position is not just incoherent, but morally reprehensible.

But it is also the case that adhering to such a position will lose you elections, because people instinctively recoil from it.

They recoil from it because being forced to carry a pregnancy to term under those conditions is a punishment, no matter what else it is.  It is suffering inflicted on a person who is already the innocent victim of other suffering.

And people are just not going to have it.

5) Anyone who thinks that nobody votes because they want to stay on welfare needs to meet some of my students, a good knot of whom declared that they’d voted Democratic because the Republicans wanted to take their food stamps and welfare away.

I still think my answer to this one is the right one.

Let’s move away from a system where we have a patchwork of “programs” offering a little bit of this here and a little bit of that there accompanied by gargantuan bureaucracies with tentacles reaching further and further into private life in an attempt to “fix” the poor–and anybody else they can get their hands on.

Let’s replace all this with an expanded earned income tax credit–maybe four or five or six time larger than it is now, paid for by all those social work and administrative salaries and benefits we will no longer have to pay after we’re no longer trying to build the New Englightenment Man.

Let’s give the poor money and treat them like grown ups.  Let them make their own decisions for themselves.

Some of them will, undoubtedly, make very bad decisions–but that’s their business and not yours. 

And life is going to be a lot better for everybody, when we’re  no longer trying to  micromanage  everybody’s private life in an attempt to coercive them all to behave just like all your friends in Scarsdale.

While we’re at it, of course, I’d get rid of all the other programs and regulations meant to “fix” people and “help” them by coercively changing their private behavior.

The people of the United States are not children, and they’re not patients.  They’re citizens, and they should be treated as such, even if they’re dumb as rocks or too poor to buy potato chips.

6) Those of you from outside the US might be interested to know that there was virtually no discussion of foreign policy at all in this race.

The old truism is that Republicans win when foreign policy is the focus of the Presidential election and Democrats win when the economy is, and that held up here.

I’m getting most of my news about the Lybian thing from the BBC.  Fox runs some stories, and the other stations say “Fox is lying” and then don’t elaborate. 

The liberal to left wing here continues to declare all kinds of thing “lies” that are nothing of the kind.

For some people, any difference of opinion or interpretation is automatically “lying” if they don’t agree with it, and so is telling jokes.

There aren’t very many times I sympathize with Ann Coulter, but, I mean, really.  You ought to be able to expect that your audience is literate enough to get it when you’re making a funny.

7) As to my local races, I’m completely flabbergasted.  I did not expect the Republican candidates to win, but I didn’t the races to be such complete blowouts, either, considering the way the Democrats were running their campaigns.

Elizabeth Esty’s entire campaigan against Andrew Rohraback came down to “OTHER Republicans take these stands on issues, so you should vote against him, even though he doesn’t agree with any of this.”

Is that what we vote on these days, really?

But Chris Murphy’s campaign was far worse, because it spent a lot of time telling outright lies.

And the lies weren’t subtle, and they weren’t matters of interpretation, and they weren’t hard to uncover.

McMahon would run an add proclaiming herself a pro-choice woman, and the next ad on your television would be Murphy declaring that you should vote for him because “I’m pro-choice and she’s not.”

We’re a blue state–damned near navy blue–and the two of them were going to win under any circumstances. 

I did think there would be more people here who, like me, didn’t think it was a good idea to vote for people who behaved like t his.

I’m going to go off now and correct papers.

It’s been suggested to me that I should get back to the education thing, and start with the Enlightenment and finish the argument.

I’m still in the middle of rewrites, though, and I’m going to have to get those done before I can write something as complex as that.

But I’m thinking about it.

I’d better go correct papers.

So, what can I say?

I voted.

I didn’t vote for Romney.  And I didn’t vote for Obama.

But I voted, and so did the two of them, Greg for the first time. 

Greg managed to keep his mouth shut, so that he didn’t get thrown out of the polls for electioneering.

I found out that the voting machines scan the paper ballots from both sides, which means I didn’t have to spend five minutes trying to figure out which way I was supposed to put mine in.

And now I’m going off to make an enormous tuna casserole and spend the evening drinking serious Scotch and watching the returns.

It says something that the only time I ever want to drink anything stronger Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey Tea is during the returns for federal elections.

Well, looking over the commments, I think I’m with Cheryl–I think the issue isn’t self interest, but disgust and disillusionment at the free riding.

And not just the freeriding of intellectuals who want to spend all their time talking theory instead of doing anything specific.  At New Harmony, especially, there was a distinct–and distinctly large–free riding population on the other end, people who signed up for the “cooperative community” because they believed Owen’s promise that in such a community they would have to do no more than two or three hours of work a day, and none on Sunday.

This seems to be a common fantasy of people who found such communities. 

My guess is that one of the things religion did for these groups was to cut down on the free riding by redefining work as a form of prayer. 

The religious communities were also much less likely than the nonreligious ones to hold out the promise of endless leisure as a goal of their societies.

But it’s important to remember, as well, that New Harmony was not Fruitlands.  It was not founded by people who did not understand what work had to be done to make a society function, or who constructed their plans out of theory untainted with practice.

Owen had built and run very successful companies.  His fault was not in a failure to understand what practicality required, but in seriously misjudging human nature, both in its foundations and in its malleability.

It ought by now to be understood that no amount of social engineering–no matter how sweepingly total or uncompromisingly brutal or tyrannically therapeutic–will change human nature in any significant way.

Owen simply refused to believe it, and a lot of people have come down the pike since who continute to refuse to believe it. 

At the moment, I’m up to Julius Nyerere refusing to believe it, and I think in a page or two I’m going to arrive at yet another great big mess.

 As for unions, a couple of things.

First is that the one union I have any personal knowledge of  is one that not only refuses me the right to refuse to belong to it, but then actively works AGAINST my interests and the interests of the majority of the people it gets its dues from.

What the union actually does is to protect the rights of full time faculty–a very small minority of our teaching staff–against the rights of part timers.  It limits the number of courses a part timer can teach, making it impossible to make a living as an adjunct unless you sign up at three or four different area colleges and spend truly enormous amounts of time and money commuting between them.

It also enforces a policy where any full timer who wants to make a little extra money can bump a part timer from a course section at will.  That means that even if a part timer gets assigned the two courses the union will allow her to teach, she can find herself deprived of either or both of them as late as the date classes begin for the term, with no notice and no compensation.

The union brass tells me, earnestly, that doing these things protects me from being “exploited” by the university. 

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

Maybe–just maybe–the reason people resist unionization sometimes is because they’re aware of situations like this, and not because they’re “sheep.”

As for “income inequality,” I don’t see anything wrong with it, per se.  It doesn’t bother me at all that Bill Gates makes exponentially more money than I do.  I don’t think that’s “immoral.”  I don’t think it should be eradicated.  I don’t think it’s anything but the way the world works.

It DOES bother me that the people at the head of Lehmann Brothers, etc, still have THEIR money, but that’s because my government took my tax dollars to cushion them from the consequences of their failures.

And it DOES bother me that businesses are allowed to do things that should be clearly unConstitutional–like requiring me not to smoke or drink at home, and not just on the job. 

The answer to that is to no longer allow the government to do EITHER or those things–but good luck with the second one, because the government wants to regulate your home life, too.

Other than that, the real question about income differentials is this–what kind of living would the workers make if the company did not exist? 

If they’re living better than they would have, then I think their decision to go with what they’re offered isn’t evidence of sheepdom, but evidence of a fair amount of calculation.

So, with the outage repaired in what I have to consider record time, and other things more or less out of control on the usual bases, I actually got to settle down with a book I need to pay attention to, and that book is Joshua Muravchik’s Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.

When I told a friend of mine I was reading this, he remarked that he wasn’t sure socialism  had fallen.

That may be true, but the book is still interesting, intelligent and very informative, so let me make a few notes here for anybody who might want to think about reading it.

The first is the author, who was what we called in my day a “red diaper baby”–someone born and brought up in a Communist/Socialist family and who who brought up on Marxism the way other children were brought up on Catholicism.

There is an interesting opening chapter/prologue about that upbringing and about his parents and their friends, all of it leading up to the fact that Muravchik is now a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

It’s not a unique trajectory.  A number of prominent writers on the Right these days share it, including, most prominently, David Horowitz, who has become more or less a Rightist the way Lenin was a Leftist.

I know nothing at all about Muravchik, but that in itself is probably indicative.  If he was pursuing a career as an intellectual bomb thrower, I probably would have heard about it.

After that initial autobiographical note, Muravchik proceeds by giving the personal stories of various people  important in the history of socialism, beginning at the French Revolution and ending with Tony Blair and New Labour. 

One of the reasons I was interested in this book is that he includes Mussolini and the Fascists (including the National Socialists), which is something most people who write about the Left rarely allow themselves to admit.

So far–I’m not finished yet–I’ve been impressed by the amount of information I didn’t already know, such as the nearly lifelong personal connection between Lenin and Alexander Kerensky.  For someone, like me, who reads a lot in this area, this is not an easy thing to do.

But so far, the most interesting material in this book concerns a man named Robert Owen and his attempts to build the New Cooperative Society, right here on earth, right now, and not through coercive politics.

Owen was a Welsh industrialist in the years before the American Civil War, and  it is important to note what he was not.

He was not born to a wealthy family, and he was  not sent to university to become an intellectual.

Instead, at fourteen years old, he left home to make his way in the world.  His parents were prosperous members of the working class, but they were members of the working class.  They gave him  10 pounds to help him on his way, and he went to London.

What happened after that is the kind of rags-to-riches story that we now think Horatio Alger made up.   He worked in draper’s shop, then went to Manchester and got a job in another draper’s shop.  He moved from there to a mill, and by the time he was twenty-one he was a manager at the same mill.

At that point,  he started making serious money, and very serious money it was, too.  Before he reached middle age, he was one of the richest men in Europe.

He was also something else by then, and that is one of the most prominent advocates of Enlightenment ideas about human nature and social organization.

In spite of the fact that his formal education stopped when he was ten, he’d not only  managed to keep up with all the new ideas floating around, he’d become an honor champion of them.  He was elected to several learned societies that would ordinarily have requited their members to have much higher levels of formal education, and he began to write on his pet project of creating a heaven on earth.

He called this heaven on earth the “new cooperative communities,” and he was convinced that once they were founded, men and women would be completely different from the way they were in his own society.

This was because he believed absolutely that there was  no such thing as free will, and that therefore all the behavior we saw that we didn’t like–theft, idleness, alcoholism–would disappear once men and women came to live in cooperative communities wi thout personal property and saw how much better such societies were to their own.

This was not a particularly unusual set of ideas at the time.  It was the thinking that came out of the French Revolution, and writers and lecturers who embraced such thinking were very popular.

There is a wonderful story in this book of then-President John Quincy Adams leaving the White House after lunch one day to walk across the street to hear Owns lecture–no Secret Service detail or anything!–and these were, of course, the ideas adopted by many of the New England Transcendentalists.

What’s more, there was something of a vogue in founding communitarian settlements, especially in the United States.  Some of those settlements were notably successful.  These included the Shakers, whose last two surviving members were still living in their northern New England settlement houses in the 1970s, and a group known as the Rappites.

The Rappites were the followers of a man named George Rapp.  They’re important to t his story because they founded a large and flourishing cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana just about the time Owen was looking around the United States for a place to found a cooperative community of his own.

It was just at the time when Rapp was having one of his periodic fits of restlessness.  New Harmony was actually the third site on which his community had settled.  Every once in a while, Rapp would get the idea that his community was actually in the wrong place and would demand they all pick up and move.  From what we can tell, they mostly did.  And they mostly flourished.

And, like the Quakers, they died out in the end only because their rules of celebacy made producing a new generation difficult.

It’s remarkable how many of the people who found and occupy these kinds of settlements cannot wrap their minds around the fact that not producing children will be a crimp in the continued survival of their project, but there it is.  Not having sex was as popular in early nineteenth century American communist settlements as having it with everything except the cat was in Sixties and Seventies communes.

On that front, Owen had an advantage.  He didn’t intend for the citizens of his New Cooperative Communities (or New Communal Societies) to refrain from sex.  He had an entire, elaborate system all written down and ready to be put into place about how mates would be chosen and when and on what basis and…well, you get the idea.

So Owen bought New Harmony, the Rappites moves (I think) to upstate New York, and then–the entire New Harmony experiment fell apart.

In fact, it took  less than a year before Owen’s New Harmony community completely destroyed the flourishing agricultural system that the Rappites had left them.  Crops went unplanted or were eaten by wondering livestock, livestock went untended (which is why the were eating the crops), and in no time at all, the single most important group to the survival of the settlement–the skilled workers and artisans–picked up and left.

Actually, that’s the group of people  most necessary to the survival of any society of any kind, and when Atlas shrugs, it isn’t Rand’s industrialists who go, it’s the ironmongers, the blacksmiths, the shoemakers, the builders and the rest of the people who have specialized knowledge of how to make things work. 

If Atlas shrugs this time, my guess is that the plumbers, the electricians, the mechanics and the engineers are the ones who are going to go this time.

Along with these people, of course, went the experienced farmers, the ones who understood that you have limited windows of opportunity to plant and to reap, among  other things.

The ones who stayed were in one of two categories:  people looking for a free ride, and intellectuals trying to live out their own passionately held theories.

Neither group seemed to know how to actually do anything.

This may seem inevitable, and just what you’d expect, so that there’s no point in belaboring the obvious. 

But two things interest me here.

First, Owen should have known better.  He was not a professional intellectual, although he became one in practice.  He was not only a businessman, but a phemonenally successful businessman. He knew what it meant to meet a payroll, as they say in politics these days.

And he knew that some of the ideas he had about human nature and how human beings behaved were wrong, because he’d seen the wrongness of them in his own factories.  At o ne point he tried to introduce a system whereby workers would police their productivity themselves.  The free riding was terrific, and the system had to be abandoned within a year.

Even if we adopt the explanation Owen himself did in later years–that people conditioned by a selfish society couldn’t  just become communal and cooperative overnight–it’s something that should have been evident from his own initial theories.

But here’s the big thing.

Remember how I said that several of these Communist communities in antebellus America were successful?

They were.  They were very successful, and many lasted not just years, but decades.

Of course, there were many such communities that fell apart in no time flat, and disintegrated into squalor and penury almost as soon as they were founded.

These unsuccessful communities, like Owen’s unsuccessful community, differed from the successful communities in one specific way.

Openness to the market?

Nope.

Observant of individual rights?

Nope.

Some form of draconian punishment of free riding?

Nope.

What was it?

Religion.

All the successful voluntary Communist communities in antebellum America were declaratively and distinctively religious communities before they were anything else.

All the unsuccessful ones, in contrast, were declaratively opposed to religion in  all its various forms.

Owen was so adamantly opposed to religion that he went on at length even in lectures about other things to declare it the worst evil on earth and in need of being eradicated as soon as possible.

Some of the Transcendentalist communities were a little squishier than this, in that they only outrightly rejected Christianity. 

They then went in for the sort of vague “spirituality” which consists of thinking warm fuzzy  pseudoprofound thoughts while not actually committing oneself to any set of substantive beliefs in particular.

It’s discouraging, sometimes, to realize that all this stuff has been going on for centuries, with not so much as a significant detail ever changing from one decade to the next.

It’s even more discouraging to realize that I’ve got friends and students who would sign on to all this right this minute without a second thought.

But I’m still very interested in Robert Owen, who doesn’t fit the mold for the kind of politics he adopted.

Oh, and then there were his children, who remained in America after the New Harmony experiment failed, repudiated their father’s ideas almost in their entirety, and went to work in their New Country.  They go elected to the state legislature, build businesses and–in the case of his most cherished son–became a banker.

Well, what can I say?

We lost power.  And we not only lost power, but the new VP for Emergency Management at Connecticut Light and Power, or whatever he’s called, got up at press conferences and said all the same things the old president or CEO or whatever he was said last time, which did not make Governor Malloy happy and didn’t make any of the rest of us happy, either.

We can’t do anything about widespread power outages.  As soon as things are safe, we will assess the situation and get right to work.  It will take two or three days before the assessments are done.

A friend of mine said that this only sounded as if CL & P wasn’t doing anything but assessing for three days, and in fact he was right–we got our power back after about 12 hours. We didn’t even lose any food.

But I went back and looked at the stuff I had for last year, and I’d be willing to be that “didn’t do anything until the assessments were all finished three days later” was what we had then.  At least I can’t find any  indication that anything was getting fixed.

On the other hand, a lot of what went wrong last October went right this time–we had out of state crews in Connecticut as of Sunday night, ready and able to get started.  At least part of the reason for that was that no out of state crews had been left unpaid since the last disaster.

Yes, that’s what I said.  When the big winter storm hit here this time last year, some out of state crews were refusing to come because they still hadn’t been paid for the work they did during Hurricane Irene a few months earlier.

So there was that.  There was also a massive tree clearing effort that had been going on all year and went into gear to finish up by the time the storm was predicted to hit.

And all this helped.  Our power went out at around eleven Monday night and came back between ten and eleven the next morning.  We didn’t even lose any food, and Matt found that his decision to stay instead of trying to get back to Philadelphia actually made sense.

All that said, things are nasty enough.  The towns on the shore will in all likelihood be without power for at least a week, which will be the third time in fourteen months they have been stuck with that particular problem. 

And New York, of course, is a mess.  As is New Jersey.  I’ve got friends in Virginia and family in Maryland and they all seem to be all right, and not in the middle of a castrophic mess.

Of the people I know in New York, most thankfully live in Brooklyn, where the least damage seems to have been done. 

But my agent is without power or water, and the businesses I deal with all seem to be well before the 31st Street cut-off for “you really don’t want to be here.”

As to what else is going on–the predictable “this is all about global warming and climate change” stories have all started, and they continue to miss the point.  The issue–at least for me–has never been if climate change is happening but what we should do about it, coupled with my skepticism that a “global goverance” regime of top down controls is the way to go.

(Why is it that the people who constantly lecture me about how we’re all resistant to “change” don’t seem to be able to cope with actual change?)

But the big news on the political front is that this thing may have won Obama the election.

It matters how government officials respond to this sort of thing.  It is one of the very few times we can see them actually doing their jobs.  It’s what turned my–and a lot of other people’s–opinions about Rudy Giuliani from “jerk” to ‘class act.”

Obama has done well with this, so far.  He’s certainly got a better ear for  how to behave in public and what to say than W did after Katrina.

And he’s being helped immeasurably by a Romney campaign that–I don’t know what it is they think they’re doing.  The Romney campaign’s behavior in the middle of all this has been patently bizarre.

I’m also pleased with Chris Christie in New Jersey, who had the grace to thank the President for help instead of doing that thing where you try to say it’s all the other guy’s fault no matter what he does.

At any rate, it’s over.

Before Hurricane Irene in the summer of last year–what happened in the fall was a winter storm with snow–anyway, before that, the last time a hurricane  had hit Connecticut with any force was in 1938.

I have to go correct these papers.

Hurricanes may come and go, but English composition marches on.

Well, no.

What it is is a very soggy morning even before the rain comes, with a little wind. 

But Sandy hasn’t made landfall yet, so although I’ve got my fingers crossed, I’m also charging everything chargable in the house. 

All the schools are closed, and most of them  have declared themselves closed both today and tomorrow.  Up where I am, this is a little difficult to understand. 

The storm is not supposed to hit Connecticut until late this afternoon or early this evening.

It makes sense to me that most of the towns on the shore issued mandatory evacuations for about midnight last night.  If we get the worst case scenario, there’s going to be coastal flooding across four high tide cycles, and having an entire twenty four hours to make sure the town is cleared out is probably the prudent thing.

Up here, though, the major damage is supposed to be from wind–which can be really bad, admittedly–and the wind hasn’t started yet.

If I was the one in charge of cancelling things up here, I would have gone for Tuesday and Wednesday rather than Monday and Tuesday. 

But Governor Malloy has declared a state of emergency in advance of the storm, and he keeps holding press conferences along with the new President of Connecticut Light and Power, the people who didn’t respond all that well to the last mess we were in.

The guy who was President then was forced out after last year’s storm.  They had to put armed guards on his house just in case somebody got it into his head to kill him.  In the end, the armed guards weren’t necessary, and the man slunk out of town under his own steam.

The new guy looks absolutely petrified, and I don’t blame him.  Every time he said exactly the same kind of thing the last guy said last year–“we can’t prevent widespread outages,” “when it’s safe we’ll start assessing the damage”–Malloy looked daggers at  him.

In the end, I suppose the only real answer is to put all the wires underground.  I think the reason that we haven’t done that is that it’s too expensive both to install and to maintain. 

That argument assumes, of course, that storms like this, with power outages like last year, will be few and far between.  But this is the third one we’ve had in eighteen months, so I’m not sure if that rationale remains convincing.

My feeling about that kind of thing is that I rather like storms as long as we don’t lose power. 

Being without power for eight days last year was miserable beyond belief, but some of the happiest times I’ve had in this house have involved full power without outages, fully stocked larder and freezers, and a two foot fall.

When I was  younger, I used to prefer fall afternoons, with that weird half-light you get as you’re going to dark, to any other kind of weather or season. 

When I imagined myself grown up and out in the world, it was always walking through weather like that. 

That’s where the fantasy of the purple cashmere sweater and the tweed skirt came in.

These days I tend to prefer spring. 

The question now, of course, becomes what to read. 

I finished a book last night–What Matters in Jane Austen, by John Mullan–and haven’t really gotten started on another one.

That can always be a difficult problem, but at the moment there are considerations other than the usual.

For one thing, I’ve had to reject a Perry Miller intellectual history because the type is so small, I won’t be able to see it without artificial light.

A friend of mine recently gave me my first e-reader, which is now filled with absolutely wonderful stuff you can get for free–I don’t know who thought that up, but bless him.  Or her.  Or it, if it was a bot–but e-readers have batteries that need to be charged.

Granted, those batteries seem to have really long lives, but still. 

I’m looking for something I can read in the daytime if the electricity goes out, and that won’t run out of batteries when I can’t get the batteries recharged.

I am definitely one of those people who wants better safe when I’ve got a situation.

Whatever.

The wind is picking up, so I think I’m going to publish this and go back to watching the weather news obsessively.

The current projections have this thing hitting the coast at just around Atlantic City, which ought to provide fodder for a few sermons in New Jersey come Sunday morning.

So here it is, late October.

Tomorrow evening will mark one year to the day since the freak snow storm since the freak snow storm that knocked out the power to most of Connecticut for the following seven to nine days.

This was, to put it simply, Not Fun. 

It was, in fact, barely bearable.  The people next to us one down on this road had a generator.  It burned out and became inoperable on Day 5.

A friend e mailed to tell me that people in his area are stripping the local Target bare, and that when this is all over and turns out to be nothing, they’ll bring everything back.  Most of it will be tossed and wasted.

The bring it all back thing isn’t usual where I am, at least not that I’ve ever seen, but of course everybody is indeed buying out all the grocery stores. 

Most of the people who live around me are rural New England working class, and the people who live around my friend are mostly educated upper middle class, but I don’t think it has anything to do with class.

The strip the grocery stores bare thing is traditional in New England with just about everybody.  All we need is the news that a nor’easter is coming, and there we are, hitting the grocery stores and buying them out of…

Potato chips.

I am not making this up.

What New Englanders buy when a storm is coming is potato chips.  Some people buy standard Lays and Wise and Utz.  Some people buy fancy organic wholly natural artisan whatever. 

One way or the other, we all buy potato chips.

I have no idea why this is so.  New England is the region of the US that buys the most potato chips overall, even without a storm.  It’s also the region of the US that buys the most chocolate. 

It’s an interesting menu choice, if you think about it.

I’ve got bottled water, but of the kind I usually like to take to class, so if this is a bust–and, please, let this be a bust–I’ll just use it over time. 

But this post is about the possibility that there will indeed be a storm, and a storm whose effects are just as bad as last time.

 That was the storm that derailed my long series on education when it was only about half done, and it isn’t done yet.

For all I know, this one will derail something else.

I hope not–but  I can’t tell.

In the meantime, I’m trying to get as much done on this computer as I can.

If I suddenly disappear for a while, you’ll know why.

So–I got my midterm grades in, and all my correcting done, and even a few things done around the house, in the middle of a crisis where a pipe that goes from my house to the water main exploded and it was apparently all my fault.

It was one of those things where, if I didn’t have very good friends, I would have been sunk completely. 

It also gave rise to the speculation that there are some people for whom “cut off  your nose to spite your face” is a philosophy of life.

But to explain that, I’d have to go into local government out here, and I’m not ready to do that at this hour of the morning.

Let me get back, instead, to Jane Austen.  To recap something I probably said last time:  a friend sent me a book, from an English publisher, called What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Mullan.

And the book opened by referencing Mansfield Park, which was a novel I’d never read.

It turned out that Persuasion was also a novel I’d never read, because I’d confused it with Sandition, which is the novel Austen left unfinished at her death, and that other people keep trying to complete.

I’d been avoiding that one for years, except I’d gotten the titles mixed up.  So now I will, when I’m finished with the What Matters book, read that one.

But in the meantime, I have finished Mansfield Park, and I have a few notes.

SPOILER ALERT–there are LOTS of spoilers here. 

1) First is the simple fact that this is the only novel I’ve ever read by Jane Austen that is bad as a novel.

It’s not bad in the way, say, The Da Vinci Code is bad.  This is Jane Austen.  She writes well.

But structurally, this novel is a mess. 

Not only is there far too much tell rather than show, but there are long stretches when she just narrates what’s supposed to have happened without dramatizing it at all.

And in the last chapter, she just lays out everything else that’s supposed to happen over the course of years in one long expository sweep.

There’s nothing wrong with that if the writer is just giving you the postscript to the action of the novel.  In fact, that kind of thing can be fun.

What happens here, however, is a sort of rapid-fire tell-and-get-it-over-with of what should be main actions in the novel as it has been set up to that point. 

It’s almost as if she just lost interest in what she was writing. 

Except not, exactly, because–

2) This is a book by a woman who has absolutely lost all patience.

Austen never did have a rosy view of human nature, but in Mansfield Park, she seems to have consigned the vast majority of the human race to a writhing mass of selfishness and malevolence. 

And I do mean malevolence.

This book contains a character who is by far the single most evil human being in any Jane Austen  novel I’ve read so far, and one of the top five evil characters in all of fiction in English.

The extent of Mrs. Norris’s envy, spite and corruption is truly breathtaking, and it’s all the more effective because what’s actually going on creeps up on you only gradually.

I’ve always said that real evil is always expressed in the small things–that what we have to watch out for is not Hitler, but the Nurse Ratcheds and Delores Umbrages on the domestic front, and here you’ve got her in spades. 

Before this, I would have said that Austen wasn’t capable of writing a character this spiritually ugly, but here she is.

3) And, to go along with that, there are the sharpest of all of Austen’s commentary on social class. 

And she’s not a sentimentalist.  Harriet, Emma’s protege and improvement project in Emma, is a decent and wholesome person on her own terms.  The Prices are not that at all, and the life they lead and the feelings they express are pretty much just dumped on the table and declared unacceptable for any human being.

This is not the usual thing in Austen.  She critiques the well-off and objectionable, but she usually accepts the impoverished on their own terms.

This is something else, and it’s difficult to see where it’s coming from if you know anything about Austen’s usually take on this kind of thing.

4) But Austen’s usual take isn’t much visible anywhere.

Take our erstwhile heroine, Fanny Price.

Austen’s heroines tend to be young and spirited–wrongheaded, a lot of the time, and foolish, but with good strong backbones. 

Fanny Price is a doormat.

She is, in fact, a Patient Griselda–when she’s abused, ignored, neglected and oppressed, she doesn’t rail back, even internally.

She just tells herself that this is what she deserves.

The only sign we have that there may be more to her than a whimpering little ball of nerves, depression, and pathologically low self esteem comes when she refuses to marry a man her relations try to push on her and whom she does not love.

This would be a larger consideration if it wasn’t for the fact that, by the end, she is almost persuaded anyway, and only escapes because the man is just as much of a moral cesspool as she thinks he is, and in the middle of wooing Fanny runs off with her married cousin.

It is very difficult to sympathize with a character who cannot stand up for herself, and who spends her time telling herself that she is not only m iserable, but that she deserves to be miserable.

It is even more annoying to get the impression from the narrative that it is this very dishrag quality that we are supposed to admire her for, that constitutes her greatest virtue.

Austen usually knew better than that. 

The contrast between this character and Austen’s usual heroines is made all the stronger by the appearance at the end of the book of Fanny’s younger sister Susan, who looks as if she could hold her own with Eleanor Dashwood or Elizabeth Bennet or Emma.

Fanny most certainly cannot.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I didn’t “like” this book, because I did.

It may not be what I’d call an actual novel is structure or form, but it was interesting as hell, precisely because in it Austen seemed to have lost all patience (see above).

It’s possible to see, in that, something of Austen’s wider moral understanding that is present in all the other novels, but not nearly so clear.

It also leaves me wondering what was going on in Austen’s life, and mind, that could bring her to this.

So here’s the thing.

Right now, I’m supposed to be in the other room, correcting papers.

It’s midterms, and that means I have literally hordes of panicked students convinced that their midterm grade is going to be an F because they haven’t handed in–well, a lot of stuff, actually.

Because they’re always late with stuff.

But just as I was about to get up from the computer after getting some work done and answering the more important of my e-mail, I found that I just couldn’t do it. 

I couldn’t face going out there and wading through yet more examples of –well, I’d say you’d really have to see this stuff, except I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

So, just a couple of notes here, until I can write something coherent.

One of the things I have read over the last week has been the newest P.D. James, Death Comes To Pemberley.

It is supposed to be a sequel of sorts to Pride and Prejudice, in which Lydia Bennet’s husband is accused of the murder of his friend.

I won’t put in a lot of spoilers here, because other people also like P.D. James, and I don’t think the paperback is even out yet.

But I will say this:

1) It’s a good book, as a book.  It’s P.D. James.  Of course it’s a good book as a book.  I wish I could write this well.  I hope I’ll be able to write at all when I get to her age. I hope I get to  her age with my mind that thoroughly intact.

2) It is not a particularly good mystery.  The ending is too abrupt and too mechanistic, and the solution is not arrived at by detection.  Which is odd, because if there is anything beside great prose that James is good at, it’s the detection.

3) It is not Jane Austen. 

I’m not saying, by that, that the book is bad.  And James is very good at not inserting anachromisms into the story, like liberated women or characters with twenty first century ideas about things like gay rights or the oppression of subject peoples.

But although I’m thoroughly convinced that James is as much a lover of Austen as I am, the sensibility is just wrong.

Part of the problem–which isn’t a problem, if you’re not trying to read this as Austen reborn–is that the book is written with the emphasis overwhelmingly on the  male characters. 

I don’t think I’d ever noticed it before, but Austen herself puts the weight of action, point of view and ideas on her female characters almost always. 

And that is especially true of Pride and Prejudice, where the focus is on the Bennet girls and especially on Elizabeth.

Perhaps that was deliberate, but for me it felt as if the book wasn’t a sequel at all, but something entirely separate–and, I don’t know, not quite nineteenth century.

Whatever. 

I enjoyed reading it, and you will probably enjoy reading it too, but it’s not really the sequel it was designed to be.

And now, if I don’t go and do those papers, I’m going to still be doing them when we get to dinnertime.

And I’m going to be a very unhappy person.