The Truth of Conversation

When I was a child and went to visit relatives with my parents, I thought how fortunate I was to be a child because I could go off to play in my room of my relative’s child and use his toys as well as the ones I had brought with me while the adults spent their time in the living room just talking. That had to wait until I was slightly older when I would sit on the stoop outside my apartment building and go over with friends what we had seen on television or what we knew about girls. It is worth pondering conversation as being an essential human activity, something we very much recognize during the pandemic in that people crave to be with people to flirt and drink and talk with one another, even if doing so can incur fatal risks. We have to be free to talk. There are many explanations for this. Talking allows people to convey information and to also hector and intimidate one another and also to display relative social prestige. Putting these and other functional advantages of talk aside, one of the most miraculous and existential qualities of talk is that it is unalienated, which means that people are likely to tell the truth of what they are when they converse with one another. It isn’t just that people will unload when in stress and so unload the truth. Rather, it is that in the ordinary course of events that we say what is the truth and that we have only with great difficulty do we manage to confide the truth or avoid blaring out what is in our mind. Yes, there are turns of phrases that distract and there are exaggerations and circumlocutions. But people are, in general, like dogs in that they are also not inclined to lie. A dog gives over that he is trying to lie. He will act submissively when the bad thing he has done, such as poop on the rug, will soon be revealed. No dog is an accomplished liar, and the same is with people.

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How Black Lives Can Matter

The past three weeks have moved quickly because there have been rapid and very different shifts of public attention. First, there was Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” which showed that Trump had lied by denying just how bad the coronavirus would be, he said, not so as to create panic, as if the only alternative to avoid panic is to lie. But as is the case with many of Trump’s outrages, people just move on, as when he said he would not accept the election if he lost, other Republican politicians pooh-poohing the matter, the succession to be intact as it has been since 1792. Republicans treat Trump much less seriously than Democrats do. Then there was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone whom I much admired though I thought the accolades were a bit much, praise heaping over praise, perhaps because she is a model of probity as that is every moment implicitly contrasted to the current President. And then returned the public to an incident that awakens the issue of Blacks being unfairly killed by the police. There were no charges for the killing of Breonna Taylor, which led to public outrage and to the MSNBC regulars, who are sure that there should have been high criminal charges for the Louisville police officers. I am going to say something controversial about this last particular matter, even though it may give many people offense, that being the coin of the common realm. People are more concerned about whether they are rankled is more important than whether people are accurate or analytic, so deeply are deeply incurred to the solipsistic cliches of our times. Look carefully at the ways the choices of words spin the issues.

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Trump and Other Verbal Confusions

I am continually astonished that Donald Trump supporters do not diminish their enthusiasm for him no matter how outrageous he says things. You might think that treating military deaths as “suckers” and “losers” would give people pause. Even if reports of this are regarded as lies, Trump did say on the record that McCain that he was not a hero because he had been captured would seem to patriotic citizens to regard as an affront. But I heard one Trump supporter say that the antagonism between Trump and McCain was just politics and so just dismissed the matter, as if politicians say and do just anything and so are to be discounted, though for some reason what is said or attributed about Clinton or Biden will not be discounted. So there is an attempt to make sense of whatever is the point of view of the Trump supporters, even though they are not, as a matter of fact, socially or economically disadvantaged, nor because they are poorly educated, in that since the uneducated clearly enough supported FDR because they clearly enough saw what was in their interests. The Trump supporters remain a puzzlement. Are they angry for no reason? Are they disturbed at the way society is changing? Part of the explanation, I suggest, for Trump supporters are partly the verbal confusions that occur in political discourse so as to evade or obfuscate issues. Verbal ju-jitsu allows people to support them for whatever other are the real reasons of a preference, whether that is racism or Covid denial or whatever other are the Trump concerns.The verbal gymnastics are longstanding and are currently on parade. But they also have to do with the particular kind of rhetoric in which Trump is involved, ways in which he cannot help himself, and that help along his obfuscations and so have made quite an appeal for him for five years now. I will try to parse out some of his peculiar verbal constructions.

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Biden's First Hundred Days Or So

The Biden and Harris campaign is excoriating Trump as a sleaszy, racist, mean spirited person who has also been derelict in his duty in that the President has neither a plan to deal with the coronavirus pandemic or to deal with the continuing economic crisis. It is more than understandable that there would be a focus on this singular figure. Just about everything that might go bad has gone bad. We should be thankful that there is no major war. The focus groups may also conclude that the demeaning of Trump is likely to earn a few points in Biden learners and with those who are disenchanted with the President. That campaign decision is not to spend much time or attention on the plans Biden will roll out when he might become elected, even though the general wisdom is that elections are about hope and promises for the future rather than failures of the past. We will see. But interviews with Biden and Harris have made clear that there is a clear program of action should Biden become President, and so we are sometimes not emphasizing enough what Biden will do on Day 0ne. I want to cobble together what is said or implied about what his plan is, even if Biden does not want to make his plan front and center.

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The Routine Republican Convention

David Brooks said on Friday that the talking points of the Republican Convention were incoherent. That is just incorrect, perhaps because Brooks preferred to believe Republicans had a sweeter tone in years past. But even on the first night, the talking points were neither new nor particularly biting than the accusations leveled against the Democrats ever since I started watching both Republican and Democratic Conventions ever since 1952. It has always been the penchant of Republicans to attack Democrats as Socialists or worse. They were also the exponents of Main Street and then of the suburbs. Republicans and Trump are against the labor unions and in favor of the corporate job creators. Republicans and Trump emphasize the danger of public rioting and urban unrest lest it reach to social anarchy. Republicans and Trump are bellicose about foreign nations, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union then, or, now, Venezuela and China and Iran. The great dirty secret is not that Trump took over the Republican Party, but that the Republican Party, however much its misgivings about his verbal excesses, is comfortable with most of his policy positions, to the extent that Trump can say he has a set of positions rather than a reflexive instinct for the most Conserrvative caricatures of American society. Henry Kissinger once said that the Republican Party was a first rate party with a second class constituency. He was probably thinking of the able cabinets Republican Presidents assembled once they got elected. That is no longer the case. The party is just its constituency.

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The Dull Democratic Convention

The Democratic Convention that ended on Thursday with Joe Biden’s acceptance speech, was a dull affair. That wasn’t just because there was no live hoopla on a convention floor. It was also that the convention organizers had failed to find a visual equivalent to that by creating fanciful settings in which to set the speeches. They did have a moment when you saw the states nominate Joe Biden with their landscapes in the background, so New Mexico looked like itself, as did American Samoa. But they needed the sort of people who design the opening night spectacles at the Olympics to choreograph some pageantry for an event that looked, instead, like something out of the early days of television. You might have thought that would be unnecessary given the gravity of the issues facing the nation, and these were indeed alluded to. Barack Obama took on Trump’s character, as well he could and might, but he did not spell out why the man is unfit for office. Why was he pulling his punches? Do the polls tell the Democrats not to go after Trump personally? Various speechifiers did lambast Trump on the issues that I, for one, think important. Trump had separated toddlers from their parents and made it hard for them to be reunited. He had not criticized Putin for putting a bounty on the lives of American troops. Unmentioned, however, was Trump’s on again and off again negotiations with the Chinese that had left farmers in the lurch. The speeches tended to be flat, more like a telethon, as one wag had it, which means for me that the speeches all said the same thing, which is that we would be spiritually better off if we give money to and, in this case, vote for a good cause, one that will bring us all together. Jerry Lewis did it better.

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Incumbent and Post-Incumbency Presidential Prosecutions

Time moves quickly in an election season. There I was writing a response to Michelle Goldberg’s column in the NY Times in which she suggested that there should be prosecutions of Trump and his deputies for their illegal shenanigans in office after they had left office, however difficult that might be, she agrees, without it seeming to be just a political vendetta against the deposed party, when information came out about the President trying to interfere in the administration of an election by having his appointee as Postmaster General downsize the Post Office so that it could not handle what are likely to be the huge number of absentee ballots that are mailed in this November. So the question shifts from what to do with him after he is defeated to what to do with him now, he having confessed that he wanted to withhold money from the USPS just so that it would not be able to process the ballots. That is a real life case of election tampering, which is barred by most state laws, and certainly an impeachable offense in that Nixon was hounded out of office for illegal acts to cover up his trying to influence the election of 1972, while here we have an attempt to intrude on the administration of an election, all out there in the open. But before going on to that, let us consider the Michelle Goldberg case for going after past crimes of a President.

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Politics and Time

Politics is one of only a few social institutions that are complex in that they embody an existential paradox. On the one hand, politics is dramatic. The 1968 Democratic nominating process and the campaign that followed afterwards where Nixon went from a close to thirty percentage point lead over Humphrey to pulling out a victory by only about a half of one percent is testament to that. The same is so in any number of elections when people come from behind or, even more surprisingly, simply solidify their leads, as happened for George W. Bush in his bid for reelection, despite having led the nation into war under false pretenses, the Iraq War at its peak when the election was held. Politics provides the public with a bevy of interesting characters whose repeated exposure to the public makes the public think that it knows what these people are really like; campaign spectacles like rallies and even, up to forty years ago, the intrusion of assassinations and assassination attempts to provide dramatic reversals that keep the plots intriguing. Yet at the same time, politics is dramatic without doing what drama does, which is elide time so that the boring parts are cut out or shortened or compressed. Far from exemplifying Aristotle’s principle that there are unities of time and space in drama, politics works itself out in real time, events moving no faster than it takes them to unfold, however extended may be the longueurs between pivotal events. This fact about politics, that it is dramatic without eliding time, goes far to explain the texture of the public’s exposure to political life as well as the dynamics within politics itself.

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The Veep Sweepstakes

The current debate over who should be Vice President Biden’s running mate this fall is likely to be settled in a week or so when Biden announces his choice. It is a remarkable feature of our ever evolving and largely unwritten constitutional system that this choice is left to him entirely alone, each of the contenders proclaiming that they will be satisfied to be spear carriers in his campaign if that is the role assigned to the. And yet the choice is likely to be very significant, given his age. His Vice President may well ascend to office either by death or because Biden does not run for a second term and his Vice President would therefore have an inside lane for the nomination in 2024. But the Vice Presidency has become something at the disposal of the nominee for over a very long time reaching back into the early Nineteenth Century and has, if anything, become even more so now that the Vice President, since Jimmy Carter was President, has significant responsibilities and so the President is likely to want someone with whom he feels comfortable and who shares his basic policy viewpoints.

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Working for Trump

Let us commit a bit of sociology by proposing a typology, which means a systematic set of ways in which something can be accomplished. Here are the ways in which a subordinate can support their superior: the subordinate can agree or disagree or disregard or amplify the views expressed by his or her superior. All four of these options apply to one or another of the people who work for Trump, and so we can explore the dynamics of subordination as well as why Trump seems so difficult a person to work for.

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The Future of the Presidency

Gerald Ford, in his first speech in office, said that we were over our “national nightmare”. What followed from it were a series of measures to bring some control over the federal bureaucracy so that a future President could not manipulate it in the ways Nixon had. These included the Inspectors General offices in the various cabinet departments, those same offices which President Trump has vacated so that he can replace the career officials with his own supporters. What will happen when the present national nightmare is ended and Joe Biden becomes President, which assumes that state election officials will conduct honest elections and that the Russians will not very significantly influence the campaign or its results? The larger question is a very hard one to answer.

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Heroism

Heroism or courage is usually thought of as a personality attribute. People are either brave or they are not when they are called on to be so, which means a hero is the opposite of the normal person who could not or would not rise to the circumstances. Achilles was brave; Audie Murphy and Sergeant York were brave; Freud was brave, in an extended sense of the term, because he was willing to challenge the conventional thoughts of his time in a major way that earned him derision at best and a suspicion that this man was preoccupied with things better left alone. Part of his success was to legitimize the connection between sex and ordinary feeling as a fit subject for communication. Most of us just keep our secrets.

There is another way to look at heroism or courage. It is to emphasize the situation rather than the person. Certain situations require a person to take an action that will be thought brave or courageous; to act otherwise is cowardly rather than ordinary. The soldier who is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade to spare his comrades is brave, though, depending on the details of the circumstances, if he had acted otherwise so as to save himself when that would only have meant that all the people in his foxhole would have died, would have made him a coward, and we do not know whether there was a way he might have hunkered down and saved only himself and still have been considered honorable.

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Nuclear Amnesia

The coronavirus pandemic is pretty bad as catastrophes go. It has killed more people in the United States than the number of U. S. soldiers killed in World War I. It has had a heavy economic impact and we do not know how quickly the country will recover from the economic downturn. It has had a psychological impact in that people are asked to stay home and they are rebelling against that because it disrupts their lives too much, whatever may be the dangers of contagion. It leaves everybody with the feeling of how vulnerable we are to the almost invisible world of microbes. And the situation is getting worse rather than better. What if this turns into a general panic, with people roving the streets to attack who knows what? I have been told that Periclean Athens survived a plague and life went back to normal. I am not so sure that will happen this time around. The Black Plague changed the European economy and may have been responsible for the end of feudalism.

But this pandemic, I would insist, has not been the scariest time in the past hundred years, dating back to the last pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which was, in fact, of American origins. That “honor” is to be reserved for the Cold War which was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from, let us say, the time of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, which all but declared it, the President of the United States sitting behind Churchill at the time, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan had arrived a few years before at what amounted to a Soviet surrender arrangement with Gorbachev, the details of which have not yet been made public. During that 43 year long war, the United States also lost as many soldiers as it had in World War I, if you add together Vietnam and Korea, two wars in which the United States and its allies engaged with Soviet or Communist proxies, and also add in the dead among our allies that resulted from other proxy wars in Africa and South America (remember Chile? Remember the Bay of Pigs?). Worse than that, during the Cold War. we were under the threat of most of us dying as a result of a nuclear exchange in which both sides would destroy one another within thirty minutes of launching. “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” was posting how close we were to midnight on its monthly cover and, according to its editors, we came within one minute of midnight. The talk was of “Better Red than Dead” and children were taught to hide under their desks to avoid bomb blast and many of us who were children at the beginning of the Cold War dreamed about atomic attacks and their aftermath.

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Monuments and Politics

This is going to be a long hot summer. The coronavirus is not going away and there is no plan to deal with it until Joe Biden, should he be elected, puts one in place, the current President having no plan other than denial. The public protests that started with the death of George Floyd seem not to be abating, though they eventually and inevitably will, with nothing to show for it, because the Republicans think that they can wait the protesters out, which is the way they handled protests against mass shootings, and so no legislation will get passed to decrease police brutality until Joe Biden gets elected with a Congress that will support him. The economy may rebound a bit, as is indicated by all the traffic on the roads in New York City, people commuting to their jobs and probably avoiding mass transit as a way to do that. But those who are running out of money, which means workers and restaurants and those who own the office buildings where the businesses have switched over to telecommuting, suggests that the road to economic recovery is very rocky and likely to be long, at least until Joe Biden comes up with a plan on how to develop a new economy for post epidemic times, including how to revamp research and forecasting so that we are not caught so badly when the next pandemic rolls around. Meanwhile, what do we do until the election rolls around and we get to see if that is conducted fairly so that the winner can seem legitimate? That is a problem we have never had before, given that elections were conducted fairly in the midst of a Civil War and during the Second World War.

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Old and New Protests

Rather than think of the current protests in isolation, compare them to the protest that went on during the Sixties. There was, then, much more damage to property, and a far greater impact on social structure. This time the protests are aimed at revising police policies so that they are less brutal without requiring any large scale change in the way society is ordered. Back in the Sixties, demonstrations that led to the burning down of large parts of downtowns, usually those inhabited by African Americans, and that required significant presence of the National Guard in a number of states for a number of weeks, was part of the movement to change American society as a whole so that its Black citizens would no longer be members of an inferior caste but understood as an ethnic group like any other ethnic group in American society. The stakes were bigger and the outcomes more significant. It is a shame that sixty years later, it is that same ethnic group that is at the forefront of national concern, portrayed by some as victims or heroes and by others as troublemakers. That we have not moved further on in black-white relations shows just how much slavery was our original sin. America has not yet found a way to put race behind it.

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Defunding the Police

Defunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.

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The Current Riots

When the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.

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Politics Before and After the Pandemic

What happened to the Squad of Four? You remember them, don’t you? They were the set of leftish congresswomen that came into office after the 2018 election: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and, most notably, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes, the firebrand from the Bronx, quickly in the spotlight because she was so young and had a mouth on her. Trump and his acolytes were quick to pounce on the Squad of Four and proclaim that the Democratic Party had been taken over by Socialists (and AOC was indeed a member of Social Democrats of America). That was what Trump was going to run against in 2020. Right wing rhetoric quickly turned racist, asking these women to go back to where they came from though that meant, in the case of AOC, going back to the Bronx, three of the four women born here though one was black and two were Muslim and AOC was Puerto Rican. It doesn’t take much to see the racism there. Nancy Pelosi had to pass a resolution rejecting racism however much she held these four at arms length, at one point remarking that they were only four of her members and so hardly spoke for her caucus. AOC disappointed people like me who had hoped she would bring new life and fresh ideas to the Democratic Party by opposing the deal whereby Amazon would bring 50,000 jobs to New York City, even though the plan, including tax favors that wouldn’t occur until the project was done, was supported by labor unions, the local Congresswoman, and political leaders throughout the city. Enough with this jejune radicalism.

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The Politics of The Pandemic

One of the lasting aspects of the coronavirus pandemic will be watching President Donald Trump standing in the White House Briefing Room holding two hour press conferences in which he delivers a mixture of buffoonery, wrong information, platitudes, and self serving rhetoric while yielding to health experts who then contradict what he has just said and can get away with it however polite they are being, keeping up the fiction and the reality of demural to the commander in chief. Fauci says weeks ago that what the President said about opening up the country by Easter was “aspirational”, while what Fauci said himself had to be based on science, and the President apparently liked that formulation, saying he was indeed aspirational and more that he was a “cheerleader” for the nation and so not a person who emphasized bad news, and so admitting out of his own mouth what he really thinks, which he is prone to do, which is that he lies to the American people. Hardly Churchillian. This practice of the experts diverting from what the President standing behind them had just said may be why the Wall Street Journal asks him to leave the press conferences in the hands of the experts because the press conferences are not winning him any votes, but the President is a showman and so unlikely to voluntarily leave the stage.

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The Poor Suffer More

When I taught sociology of disasters, which covered everything from the Black Plague to Chernobyl, my students insisted that disasters were times that brought people together in a cooperative spirit. That is what the media would like you to believe, showing anecdotes to that effect so as to calm down the population, but it is the opposite of what usually happens, which is that disasters intensify whatever are already the lines of conflict in a society. The rich become richer; the poor suffer more. And political conflicts grow worse.

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