Celebrity Images of Old Age

Celebrities are a good way to consider the differences between being young and old and also considering the significance of being old.

It is not true that “The medium is the message”, a remark and approach to modern media stated by Marshall McLuhan, and widely circulated in the Sixties. But the medium can make it easier to develop or appreciate a message if you use a new medium, as happens when an x-ray, which is the medium, can reveal the message of an abnormality. Such is the case with old age as that is revealed by the comparison photographs provided in YouTube shorts that juxtapose young celebrities, both male and female, when they are young actors and actresses juxtaposed to photographs of them just before they died. What is the same and different between these juxtaposed positions? The shift in the cultural interest in aging is itself worth noticing. Dante placed the various people in Hell and Purgatory at the prime of their lives perhaps to make these villains heroic rather than villainous or victimized given the pains they endure forever or just millennia. But in our times we look at the contrasts, the before and after being the long arcs from youthfulness to being all but dead, ravaged by age and infirmity. Look at these people in these photographs closely. 

Audrey Hepburn (candids)

Here are some obvious but significant aspects of aging. People age to different degrees. Elderly women get lined and puffy, but Audrey Hepburn retained her pixie-like and endearing face for her entire lifetime. Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren became crones but it wasn’t just because they had always been pulchritudinous. Jane Seymour, Shirley Jones and Julie Andrews added a bit of weight but kept their shape and faces till they died. We never got to see if Marilyn Monroe would age gracefully but we know that until her very late years Elizabeth Taylor remained well crafted, as did her bete noire Debbie Reynolds. Men, as is often observed, age better than women. They become more lined and craggy as they age but retain their shapes though sometimes, like Martin Landau, adding a beard to make them full faced. (Remember that sometimes, as in tbhe differential aging of the sexes, biology may be more imprtant than culture or circumstances.)

Sophia Loren (studio, candid)

What remains of the older movie stars has their penetrating eyes, their pleasing and enigmatic smiles, their posture and poses that show that however much their bodies deteriorate, their selves remain: they are alert and observant, looking out at the world with the sadness or bemusement they probably retained through most of their lives, how it was that they engaged life. Each person has his or her particular presence despite the fact that old people look like one another. That means that the self usually outlasts the body unless dementia takes its toll. We are alive inside while the body fails us which is a blessing in that people are alive inside their decaying surroundings even if sometimes as in ALS, the body becomes a coffin. That was very different from the way William Hazlitt, writing in the early nineteenth century, thought about the old, which was that they were ready to die when they died because they had by that time deteriorated in spirit as well as body, perhaps because the various infirmities had diminished mental capacity because of pain and general condition and so the actual death coincided with the spiritual death and so seemed fitting or just while in the present day death seems unjust because it is wrenched by one or another failing organ or particular disease while the mind was still lively. 

How do we assess beautiful people? Sometimes, as in a Thirties Busby Berkeley musical, a bevy of beauties flash through the screen, each face for only a few seconds, and all you, the viewer, can do is just feel the aesthetic of the objects being beautiful, each in their own way. It is the experience of abundance and awesomeness. Sometimes, in the Belle Epoch, and at other times, you can linger with a particular portrait and study the woman’s mystery and try to figure out why she is attractive. The pert nose? The tilt of her head? The prominence of her cheekbones? The point is that there is a mystery to be solved as if there were a way to show appearances to be tied to an inner reality. The beautiful know they are burdened with being looked at as if they could be read. But when women age, the question shifts to what it was that made her old, that damaged her beauty. Too puffy? Neck muscles like cords because the neck has lost its fat? And what is now to be retained in the pose and presence of the elderly ex-beauty, some resemblance to the time at her highest beauty? My surmise is that the women who arrive at old age are not ashamed of having deteriorated or are for the most part desperately trying to cover up their deterioration. They are simply trying to look presentable, their self staying within themselves and appearing to be what they always have been. If that is true, then old age is not a stigma as is the case with a deformity but another state of being continuous with prior states and so neither shameful nor admired, just the fact of life. That is very different from what Cicero said about old age which people met with character if they had it rather than reproaches of oneself for being more frail or ugly, a Stoic acceptance of what had to be, but rather a continuation of a life in this sense in disrepair, and therefore also a kind of mystery in that the critic of a portrait of an older beauty also has to also be challenged to think how the appearance is related to the inner self, whether Sigourney Weaver or Tuesday Weld, each preserving a kind of graciousness as well as aware of how much better they looked, not so much, I think, to mourn it, as to keep in cherished memory what they looked like best. So being old is not about death or deterioration but being a stage in yourself aside from the fact that it is the last one, long may it last.

Gary Cooper (studio)

People who age may get significant advancements in their careers in the course of their lives. Junior accountants can become senior accountants or firm managers and interns can become attending doctors, these based on skill and experience, while people may only move up from filling in on an assembly line to shift managers and small entrepreneurs from running a small grocery store to a small supermarket or even a chain of supermarkets. Those are the careers they create in their lifetimes, the pinnacle being the corner office or a paid off mortgage, Celebrity movie stars are more closely tied to aging rather than just the years whereby to work forward, they are tied to their bodies because, as the expression goes, their faces and their posture as well as their voices are their instruments and so it is remarkable to notice how actors can provide long careers, having to change over time to adapt to their aging. Bette Davis was the attractive sultry and lowdown temptress in “Of Human Bondage” in 1934, then the young women and the matrons in the Forties and then an old hag in “What Happened to Baby Jane?” in 1962. Myrna Loy was the femme fatale in “The Black Watch” in 1930 and then the young wife in the Thin Man movies and then the wife with an adult daughter in “The Best Years of Our Lives” in 1946 and the grandmother in the 1950 “Cheaper By the Dozen”. Gary Cooper was the young aviator in silent movie “Wings” in 1927 and ended up as the elderly man who had a fling with a young woman in “Ten North Frederick” in 1958.  Some notable stars have brief careers, Grace Kelly decided to give up her film career to marry a prince and Clara Bow was felled by mental illness.  So a film career shows aging taking place, its various accommodations and its continuing strands, John Wayne the slender laconic man in 1939’s “Stagecoach” becoming the laconic and corpulent person as Rooster Cogburn in 1975. We measure our own ages by seeing into which celebrity lives our own lives have intruded by watching some party or all of their careers. The young Katherine Hepburn, who I know from early on, was much the same person in her late movies such as “The Lion In Winter” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” before she left my scene. 

John Wayne (studio)

Dante is rather harsh in thinking that people could be sent to Hell or Purgatory for some single events of moral failure on the grounds that such events show the persistent flaws of their characters. But he is very much to the point in that a single life is a span to decide what a person is like, for a person to make their mark on life, and so think of life as a career to test the mettle of people. Everybody does that and celebrities visibly show their talents as being attractive and amiable, whether as character actors or major stars or themselves flickering out after a few films. The age and station of the person shows a celebrity career as having a timeclock that can be altered by facelifts and different roles. Andy Devine and Gabby Hayes were always character actors but John Wayne since 1939, was always a star. We watch him be himself and change and that is what all of us do, moving from prodigy to child bride to patron or matron and wise elder, catching up with ourselves, knowing that as soon as you have learned how to be a child you have to learn how to be a teenager, never quite mastering an age before it is past. Reinventing is maddening and celebrity reinventing is a visualization of a truth of human nature in the lives of people who present themselves to the public view. Some movies are profound, and movies as a form of story are also profound because the celebrities, the nature of celebrities, is to see these things happening before our eyes. We see them in youth in their time settings, in the clothes and customs and preoccupations of a time and then can time travel to a nearer time with its own customs, settings and preoccupations and see how they can do there. William Powell could last from “My Man Godfrey” in 1936 on because a manner of sophistication works everywhere but Marlon Brando had to abandon the kitchen drama of Stanley Kowalski, and he did, many times. He was a man in all seasons, while most of us are not, gravitating to a particular time which is our time, the one in which we feel comfortable, often the one from which one’s character is formed.

There is another way to use comparisons between celebrities in their young adulthood and their old age. Because celebrities are revealed in their personal lives as well as their professional ones, their life span across their age shows what people can make of themselves in the one life to which, the photos show, their lives were allotted. Did they flash on the screen early in life and then go dry and spend the rest of their lives with regret or pride at the time before? Shirley Temple was a charming pre-adolescent, became less charming as a teenager, and superfluous as well as doughy as an adult U. S. Representative to the United Nations while Natalie Wood remained charming and attractive until her death in her forties. Rob Reiner changed from becoming a very able actor in “All in the Family” into a very accomplished film director during his adult years. 

There are three ways in which people can measure the success in their trajectories. There is the accomplishment of producing a work, such as a poem or painting, what Marx thought transformed labor into work. There is the creation of an activity, such as starting a business or being a good person, which is what religions favor as the best ends of life. There are the creations of memories or records of one’s own life for their own sake, which has recently become popular with selfies for recording having gone to a Starbucks, such events neither artful nor significant. The thing is that celebrities do all three of these things. They have filmographies. They experience being in the limelight. They are photographed for the trivial things they do and remarked on in print for doing casual things to the point that some of them cherish ordinary life, which means being anonymous, as happened when Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward removed themselves to Connecticut, flying to LA only for work.

What is to be made of such trajectories from the point of view of their elderly visages? The sardonic view that the person with the most toys when they die is the one who wins is partly true in that people leave after themselves foundations and art collections and apportion their wealth to their descendants, controlling people after their grave. But dead people do not look at the future that will happen after they die unless they are superstitious, just as they cannot trade in their accumulated good deeds for how things will be treated about you in your afterlife. Dead means all dead. So all you can say is that whoever wins is the person who lives longest while remaining mentally intact and without much discomfort. Maybe that is why the celebrities in old age are smiling.

Moral Absolutes

There are no moral absolutes. There are just consequences and preferences and rules that apply for only a short or long time.

Most people think, to the extent that they think about the matter, that almost all people think they have basic principles of conduct and that people more or less try to abide by their principles, while acknowledging that people in other cultures may have different basic principles and so follow those different ones. Everyone has their principles, whatTalcott Parsons called “values”, and that is what differentiates people. Values are the axioms from which behaviors are implied or descend. So people believe that you should not kill or steal, and some emphasize that they are loyal to religion, family, or church, and there is no logical way to dissuade them from their values even if you might disapprove of those allegiances although you might try to argue an opposing point of view was cruel or revengeful but your antagonist might simply embrace that point of view however contrary it is to your own values, or try to move an advocate of reproductive rights that a fetus looks like a human being but the reproductive rights person could steel themselves to this appeal by asserting that nonetheless a woman controls her own body.  

I want to suggest that this point of view is not true. There are no such things as values, just short or long chains of  causes and consequences which justify a behavior and the eventual end of the chain is a matter of fact which is true or false and so that the value has been reduced to being true or false rather than good or bad. This apparently outlandish view of morality is consistent with Spinoza, the Pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey and, I would say, of G. E. Moore, who claimed that a sense of right or wrong was independent of theories of ethics but a particular sense of the rectitude of a behavior as when a person might sense it was acceptable to kill enemy soldiers even if killing is generally wrong.The reconstruction of philosophy Dewey contemplated meant that a number of traditional terms in philosophy just disappear as meaningless. Among them, I would say, is “nature”, which simply means everything, so that angels living on clouds and having wings would be natural rather than supernatural if that in fact was the way they existed even if you know that fact only on faith. Another term to be abolished is “cause” which is a force and that can be substituted with the word “context” and so people don’t get pneumonia because of germs because pneumonia germs are always present and a necessary condition for the disease but also require people who are run down in one way or other, all the conditions together and being arbitrary as which condition is to be regarded as the cause. 

There is also no need for the word “justice”, however much the term is bandied about. “Justice” is a term that cannot be defined because there is no balance of interests, as there are with weights, and so perhaps applicable to some damages, such as restitution for a wrecked car, but when applied in the criminal court system simply means punishment as if incarceration or execution somehow balances the original offense. All it does is repeat the action of killing. The victim of murder does not come back to life. All that can be meant by “justice” is palliative or remedial programs for those who live under dire conditions. Similarly, there is no need for the word “should”: even though Kant insisted the word was so essential in conversation that it must necessarily have meaning, when the word “should” is a shorthand for all the consequences one prefers that, as I say, resolve into being matters of fact, as when I say I should be nice to my wife because to do otherwise leads to wear and tear on a relationship and wanting to have that relationship is satisfying, which is a fact not a value. Now consider the status of a number of well known values that are absolute in the sense that they are axiomatic and so beyond appeal when that is clearly not the case.

A simple derivation that reasons to an absolute are the morals in the Ten Commandments. “Though shalt not steal” can be found in its consequence that this is functional for the maintenance of society. As Hobbes might say, allowing people to steal leads to anarchy and so has to be raised to the status of a moral outrage. That practical usefulness is reason enough. But some religionists might say that the implication need not be practical, that it is akin to dietary laws which some people say are sanitary or otherwise useful, but have to be obeyed because God mandated it for whatever reason He had. Your’s is not to argue. But if God commands something, the question resolves itself to the factual question of whether God exists and I have said elsewhere (See my “Contra-God” in Wenglinsky Review) that the term God is essentially meaningless, just a set of metaphors drawn from lords and masters. The commandment doesn’t hold if there is no God to command it.

Try another commandment: “Thou shalt not kill”. Leave aside the functional argument that allowing killing also leads to eternal fear amidst anarchy. Or that there are qualifications whereby enemy soldiers at the least are allowed to be killed. Consider the legal death penalty. People offer the reason for allowing it is that it may serve as a deterrent and that under present guidelines it is more expensive to do that rather than put a murderer into life imprisonment but underlying the practical considerations is the view that killing a person is worthy because it shows the sanctity of a society to protect itself, and so execution symbolizes the authority of the state. Opponents of the death penalty go beyond the practical claims that there are people who are wrongly convicted or rehabilitatable to the bedrock, axiomatic symbolic idea that refusing to execute people shows the respect of a society for all human life, even of those who are just awful. But in both cases of symbolism, the object is empirical: whether to enhance the glory or value of either the state or the individual. 

Avoid the shorthand of referring to God or symbolism and so provide the practical chains of reasoning for policy decisions. A particularly complex chain of causation to ultimate ends or values means a longer one. These are political ones such as price supports and making castes into ethnic groups. These chains, however, do not follow the model of Euclid and Spinoza to assemble axioms, already proven theorems and lacunna so as to arrive at a very different and perhaps surprising result ending with “ergo something”. Instead, a moral absolute is challenged by a logical or empirical objection followed by an alternative moral absolute that is also answered with a logical or empirical response until all the moral absolutes are used up for that particular question. 

J. F. K. said that price supports for farmers were necessary because they had been promised to them and we should honor that promise. That seems pretty weak, begging the question of whether price supports were a good thing in the first place. A more candid answer to why to continue to honor price supports is because farm states have a disproportionate number of Senators and get the support to trade favors with other things that are important to industrial states. A more generalized and moral value for farm price supports can instead be offered. It is that farm families need it and the government should provide help to whatever constituency needs it, whether struggling farmers or inner city youth, even if some politicians support one or the other because of their own interests. That moral principle is too general because it would include financial and moral support for Nazis or criminals, and indeed there is political support for either one in that Trump thought Nazis in Charlottesville were among the good people there and that Liberals want criminals to get good conditions and rehabilitation. The more economic and practical issue underlying farm price supports is that agriculture is a different kind of business than manufacturing where you can cut back on production and so cut costs when there is less demand but that farms don’t save much money by decreasing production and so the question is if there is the demand for the ample opportunities farms produce. Farm subsidies and government bought food like butter ate up some of the farm crops and other products. But things changed in that the family farmer was replaced by the industrial or corporate farm and large amounts of farm products like soybeans were sent to overseas markets at least until Trump upset the applecart with his tariffs. So farm subsidies largely become obsolete, which is not a value but an empirical question, a matter of fact about the rural economic and institutional structure. 

The same practical issue of obsolescence holds with regard to slavery which was regarded by Southerners as a necessity and Northerners as an abomination even though, not for them, the reason to go to war. The absolute moral claim of whether all people are by their nature free and that to enslave others is to diminish oneself, is countered by William Graham Sumner, the turn into the twentieth century sociologist, who said that slavery was obsolete as a method for procuring workers because wage workers were more productive and less costly. The same goes for Jim Crow. Integrating the work force and other amenities to the South helped in the decades after the Second World War, along with air-conditioning and Northern investment, to make the South prosperous. So the moral sentiment for treating people as equal is not a moral absolute but the question of obsolescence, which is an empirical matter as well as an operative rather than idealized condition.

Here are two other social policy issues that seem to rely on the same absolute value: the taking of risk. The overt and initial reason for providing Social Security is that it provides income to the elderly and old people are no longer the worst income groups in America and so easing the elderly is a good thing because people should be nice to old people. The objection to that is that the provision of pensions to the elderly allows people not to provide for their own old age by saving money and investing in private insurance or investment instruments. Those who are self indulgent, like the grasshopper, aren’t able to last the terminal winter. But that again can appeal to the cruelty being inflicted on the old. Another objection to Social Security is that people of even moderate means will never make up in their benefits from the contributions they have made in withholding payroll income taxes, and so that is unfair to the better off workers, and the answer to that is that Social Security is not an annuity but a tax scheme whereby money is transferred from the people working to the people no longer working and can easily enough be funded despite the lower number of workers to people retired with minor tax adjustments such as lifting the cap on incomes to be taxed. 

Underlying these other reasons for and against Social Security is a very different issue. Social Security is a system where people do not have to take risks and risks are a good thing, part of a person being alive and an active member in life. So Social Security would be alright if people were allowed to invest their Social Security contributions into stock portfolios and so risk making either a profit or maybe a loss and so a participant based on their own judgment even though the conversion to such a system would require massive amounts of money and also require the government to list which stocks were eligible for investment lest citizens invest in very long term odds and lose their money and have to be supported by a supplementary Social Security fund for bad investors. But that would mean engaging in the unprecedented event of the government intruding in the stock market to decide which companies were winners and losers, either worthy or unworthy objects of investment. Those who support the insistence on everyone engaging in risk as a natural and praiseworthy enterprise for all people, a kind of right, are willing to accept the costs and the transformation of the American economy in a radical way in order to accomplish this end. Risk is the absolute value.

There is another kind of risk, a social rather than an economic risk, which seems to have come to prevail in American and Western society as the essential way to manage a practice. That is courtship. People in the old days and in the Old Countries had arranged marriages. That meant that potential spouses would be culled and even marriages enforced by parents or professional matchmakers who might have better judgment than young people about what couples might get along as well as fit their lifestyles. Never mind romance. People of good will will find it easier to become companionable with a chosen mate rather than one found otherwise. But people decided differently. The young men and women who came to America decided that Western liberty meant finding a spouse on your own though usually from their own neighborhoods or mixers where the people they met were likely to be compatible. They had romantic love  interests as the basis for settling down and even had serial love affairs, as it now turns out, before settling down. Yes, that creates considerable emotional wear and tear on people and leads to computer dating and other sketchy devices for identifying who is the One, but it is worth it because romance is the greatest risk people will have in their lives, remembering how the two hit it off at a bar or a mixer, and so everyone becoming a kind of hero and heroine in their own lives however pedestrian their occupation or other activities in life might be. You did it yourself. You risk-take for better or worse. And that is an end in itself to have that adventure, something no longer available only to knights on a pilgrimage or an explorer going into the wilderness, and so part of the pursuit of happiness available to all rather than just some elites. 

Given that both Social Security and courtship, very different things, are both rooted in risk, it might be thought that risk was a moral absolute but that would be incorrect because it leads to a deeper idea than absolute value. People can either decide to accept risk or reject it as a moral principle and there is no way to insist on taking risk or not taking risk though a different value, such as the obligation to answer a military draft can entail risk and is maybe morally mandatory without it being an absolute value but one of the many obligations that people take on by being a citizen or an employee or a spouse. Rather, risk is a preference, which means a voluntary choice akin to liking Chinese or Italian food or one of the range of breakfast cereals in the supermarket, these considered in a trivial sense to be matters of taste, which means of no significance. Only your spouse cares about whether you like asparagus.

But there are also matters of taste that are significant that they are deep expressions of character. A preference for Verdi melodramas paraded as tragedies rather than a Mozart rom-com is a test of what you sound as simpatico about life, just as is the case in preferring middle brow John Steinbeck to high brow Modernists like Mann or Joyce. It tells you who you are and adopting one or the other is also a matter of taste in the sense that Hume meant that taste was a sense of something deeper not deeply explored or what C. E. Moore meant when he said that morality was taste in that it was a sense of what is right or wrong in a particular matter without reference to some moral rule which necessarily does not spell out what might be or might become regarded as exceptions. So the heart of morality is  preferences and not rules, much less absolute values, which can exist singularly as a sense of justice rather than a code of justice. And there you have it: you have a taste for or a preference for a potential spouse or a politician and that tells a lot about you but that does not exhaust you and you can change your preferences and these still have the weightiness of moral decision making but are not moral absolutes, just possibly very bad judgments that other people or even yourself find disreputable or invoke mean thoughts rather than whatever other thoughts and feelings that a politician can evoke.

There is another meaning to “moral absolutism” other than the one discussed, that it is axiomatic, and it too can be dispensed with. This second and related meaning is that moral principles are not only true but are always applicable, the view that if that timelessness is abandoned for cultural relativism, it means that it is not truly a moral principle and is subject to the whims of cultural fashion, so that principles of “Thou shalt not kill” are acceptable in some cultures or times rather than in others. When in Rome do as the Romans do applies to togas or good manners (which I would argue are in fact long lasting rather than transitory, only the expression of good manners varying from time to time but the function of good manners is more or less permanent). The status of whether a moral is absolute is just a question of whether you look at the short run, such as that of a few millenia, or the very long run, in which case a moral principle changes only when the social structure changes so fundamentally as to be difficult to imagine when the absolute moral principle disappears. 

Consider “Thou shalt not steal” again. That makes sense for all societies that have existed so far (though some Marxists believe that caveman societies might have had a primitive communism where everyone worked together and distributed goods on a need to have basis.) It makes sense that people should not take grab of the holdings of another person, whether a meal or an item or a piece of land appropriated except by law, or even a woman, though the Ten Commandments speak of two other ways not to take women, neither to engage in adultery or even just to covet them. The ancient Hebrews must have been a lascivious people, just like everyone else. Think of stealing as becoming no longer meaningful if there is so much abundance created by technology that everyone can get free of charge everything they want, available online to your heart’s content, money an unnecessary transaction, even though there still might be records of transfers so as to keep the production and distribution line going. There would be no scarcity, which ends economics and theft as a meaningful idea. That is a very long way away and so we might think not stealing a universal and permanent rule for the game of organizing social life but still nevertheless theoretically terminal.

A less fanciful notion of a permanent moral principle that could in fact become suspended because it is no longer meaningful is “Thou shalt not kill” which would occur when there arrived what Kant called “perpetual peace” when a world organization made it no longer necessary to have wars and killing people for greed was unnecessary and killing women or men for lust or jealousy gave away to the pacific world of Diderot who thought that women in Polynesia might think they were kind to even ugly men. Even closer to the horizon are the abolition of penitentiaries as punishment just as penitentiaries replaced a very general death penalty when rehabilitation of criminal minds could be successful rather than serious crime to be the result of bad social conditions or a bad seed. A shorter time frame would be to eliminate the forbearance of those who suffer from illness if most illness was eliminated through vaccines and quick surgery of the sort imagined in “StarTrek” which is just half a millennium from now, which is not very far away. Then, people would not have to be patient with the pathetic because no one would be pathetic however much that aspect of human compassion may seem a bedrock of moral existence.and universally admired as a virtue. Absolute morality, therefore, is always for a relatively short time.

Another Short Post on Race

People say the United States is on the edge of a constitutional crisis when in fact the nation has gone over the edge and it is about race. Masked government agents detain and make disappear long established as well as “criminal” people on the basis of them looking Hispanic or speaking Spanish or around places where illegal aliens might be found. The Supreme Court has decided in early September that such apprehensions are justified because the detainees can be released if they are found not to be illegals. That violates both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments which has for hundreds of years meant that people can be detained for probable cause of a particular crime rather than general suspicion or suggestive features. I don’t know why the American people are not up in arms about this authoritarian move but life seems pretty ordinary despite this insult to the Constitution but after all the Harris campaign did not make much headway with the American people in that democracy was on the line in this election and Democrats today are going back to inflation and economic issues as the basis of their challenge to the Trump administration rather than getting to the core issue of constitutionalism. What the Supreme Court now allows can be used to stop anyone of color or race or political affiliation to be stopped and detained for any suspicion, which means most people and that is an attack on the heart ofAmerica.

Trump’s racist impulses are overt and of longstanding, back to the days when his father discriminated against Blacks in his housing developments and the federal government went after that for that. He came down the escalator to announce his candidacy for the Presidency in 2015 by excoriating Hispanics for having calves like cantaloupes because they were carrying drugs with them over the border. Trump has said that Norwegians can come to America but not Arabs or people from “Shithole” nations. He said Haitian legal immigrants were literally eating cats and dogs inSpringfield, Ohio. He treats inner cities as pestholes rather than struggling populations of the sort of areas from which white ethnics emerged. He doesn’t hate all minorities. He is more supportive of Israel than any prior President and gave the Jews the backhanded compliment when Trump was running casinos that he wanted his accountants to be wearing yamulkas, but all things considered he is the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson, who expelled Black workers from the federal civil service and does worse than Wilson in trying, as abetted by Governor Abbott of Texas and others to eliminate voting rights protections or gerrymander out minority districts. 

People are blase about the present situation and it traces back to the unwillingness of Democrats to ask Republicans again and again whether they supported Trump fomenting the insurrection on Jan. 6th, 2021. Unmasking his racism would be a worthy companion piece. Don’t be civil so as to bring down the heat when the other side undermines American principles. As the Senate hearing yesterday with Pam Bondi showed, the two sides have only contempt for one another. I don’t know how it will end.

A Short Post on the Shutdown

The shutdown is a constitutional way to  confront Trump’s unconstitutional and just very bad policies and statements.

I think I am insufficiently knowledgeable about the inside baseball of politics to know what is going on behind the shutdown, however much the significance of the shutdown is clear and everyone decides whether or not to support it. Four months ago, Chuck Schumer and some of his Democratic Senators went  over to vote with the Republicans to support a continuing resolution so as not to shut down the government on the grounds that Trump would use a shutdown to fire a lot more federal workers more easily than otherwise and his Progressive allies thought that a bad idea but this time Schumer is standing up to Trump and Trump is threatening publicly to do in a few days just what Schumer said would happen. What changed? Maybe Schumer decided that the Medicare and the Affordable Care Act cuts were so serious that he had to take a stand regardless of the consequences. Or maybe the Progressives pressed Schumer on the issue and he gave in. The Progressives think there has to be more confrontation with Trump and not wait it out until the midterm election which Schmer prefers because the Constitution might be in a shambles to wait that long and I tend to agree that Democrats should resist Trump in every way possible that is legal. Moreover, the polls, according to a thousand member focus group by the Washington Post, support the Democrats, with twice as many blaming the Republicans as the cause of the shutdown, which is what happened as well in past shutdowns.  So Schumer is reading public opinion rather than the Progressives on how to play this rather than to accommodate to keep Trump from being even worse. So the Democrats are getting a shutdown on their own issue rather than a Republican issue but the Democrats will gain politically. 

Within a few days of the shutdown, the tone of Democratic support of the shutdown has shifted. Though minority leader Jeffries still insists itis about sustaining medicare and obamacare , others, including Sen. Adam Schiff, have enlarged the confrontation. The President has refused to pay for programs already authorized. He has fired people illegally. He is punishing only democratic cities and states from getting funds for infrastructure. He says Portland is in flames, which it is not, just like saying Springfield, Ohio legal Haitians were eating cats and dogs. He tells the military to wage wat on Democratic cities and regards Democrats as full of hatred, evil and Satanic, when I think only the first two applies to Republicans for cutting off nutrition to malnourished African children even though ngos would take the supplies and distribute the aid before they expired but the State Department refused and no Republican protested. There is nothing to compromise. Jeffries should take up a sombrero and a moustache along with all the other House Democrats as a badge of honor and so to make fun of the President. I don’t want the shutdown to end before the President and the Vice President, who abets the President with his lies and misrepresentations, to resign. It is going to be a long shutdown.

The virtues of politics as an object of contemplation of what it is as a thing and as a participant is that it is clear and easy rather than secretive. It is not a Manichean world where opposing elites battle above the fray of the common man as Whittaker Chambers thought was the case because he thought the final war would be between the Communists and the ex=-Communists. To the contrary, the confrontation took place in full view during tbhe Cold War and everyone was aware of it and took sides on whether the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Vietnam was a good thing and it ended with the Reagan=-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland, though I suspect that not all of the Reykjavik Accords have all been disclosed these thirty five years later. Nor is domestic confrontation like it is in the recent very well done but fanciful movie “One Battle After the Other” where an oligarchic cabal represents white people in a war against Mexicans who are armed with secret codes and secret confederates everywhere. The oligarchs are in fact just out there buying Supreme Court Justices and giving gigantic campaign donations as are their opponents and legislation results unless taxes for the rich when the oligarchs win and gigantic campaign donations are offered to the opposition, not that the contributions don’t cancel one another off because what matters is whether the nominee is personable or not. So politics is clear in that what you need to know about it is apparent. Politics is also easy in that you need no expertise to participate not needing to know the expertise required to run a supermarket or a hardware store but relying on whatever information or rumors a voter comes across and apply whatever common sense, as it is called, or ideological framework it has to inform itself. Politics is not in the stars but in peoples selves. So an educated person can decide to rid their hands of the matter, deciding that religion or cultivating one’s garden is the way to live, but I prefer this sport and form of co;;ective interaction as a way to understand something always engaging, a never ending soap opera with new faces and struggles and carrying great moment for how a collectivity will proceed and worthy because it is not opaque but transparent. Politics in our time can muddy or cleanse and see it happen, and that will occur with the shutdown.