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.
Read MoreThe Nature of American Painting
National traditions of art in the West have the same subject matters. There are landscapes and seascapes, portraits, battle scenes, disasters. apocalyptic and utopian imaginings. This differs from Chinese art, for example, which emphasizes landscapes and seascapes, and also from Arab art, which neglects the human figure. The Western national traditions are distinct, however, in that each has its own themes and its own artistic resources, and so a Dutch Golden Age portrait looks different from, let us say, a Nineteenth Century American portrait. A Vermeer would not be confused with an Eakins, and not just because of the way people are dressed or the settings in which they are placed. Vermeer gives his models a quiet grace that is emphasized by his subtle colors while Eakins makes his people impressive because of their carriage and the solemn colors in which they are painted.
Read MoreThe Origins of Romance- III
Scholars have found other times and places to set the origin of romance than at the dawn of civilization. Each of these theories has a certain attraction because each does capture certain aspects of the experience. But none of the alternative theories explain why full blown romance appears by the time I have suggested, which is with Samson and Delilah. The theories for a later time of origin, rather, are add ons in that new features are included in the basic formula for romance, which is dedication, even beyond self-interest, to the emotional needs of the partner, as that is associated with the exchange of sexual favors. Moreover, all the theories have to deal with the problem of how to relate cultural changes to structural changes, which means what actually happens in social life.
Read MoreThe Coronavirus Pandemic
A disaster occurs when the public resources set aside to deal with any upending of social life prove insufficient to deal with the extent of the insult to the social structure. That makes a real disaster different from what might be called a local disaster, such as the forest fire that consumed Paradise, California, because that was very restricted, there not being enough fire engines to save the houses in the area, but also because local forest fires are already baked into the social structure of California in that people buy a lot of insurance and are not surprised if they have to move from one abode to another in the wake of a fire that burns up parts of the Oakland Hills. Also to be distinguished from a true disaster is what might be considered the collective tragedies regarded as just part of ordinary life, as the fact that tens of thousands of people die every year from influenza, hospitals and morgues and funeral parlors prepared to deal with the influx and processing of victims. And then there were the people who died during summer heat waves in cities because of the lack of air conditioning, that absence not considered a failure of public services to intervene in what was a public health emergency.
Read MoreRoth's "The Plot Against America"
I have seen the first episode of HBO’s film version of Phillip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America”. It is presented as a shocking tale of what might happen to Jews if Charles Lindbergh had been elected President of the United States in 1940. It is a dystopian vision that concentrates on dread and foreboding and does a lot of plot exposition while Roth tells a crisper tale that hinges on what is the difference between illusion and reality. Philip Roth must be laughing in his grave. He fooled the clucks one more time. They didn’t see the irony in his telling of his story, however adept he was at constructing a plausible story of the details of what would happen under and to a Lindbergh Administration. He was pointing out that America would come to the aid of its Jews rather than victimize them if a Nazi sympathizer came to power. So I am posting most of the review I did of the novel back in 2005, soon after the novel came out, for those who want an accurate account of what Roth was up to. (Beware. There are spoilers therein.)
Read MoreThe March Democratic Debate
The idea of “The Loyal Opposition” emerged in early parliamentary government. It meant that whatever the issues that divided the major parties, whether that was based on their different class interests or ideologies, both of those holding for Tories and Whigs and Labor in Great Britain, the parties would come together in some national emergency in the interests of the nation, to which all parties felt themselves loyal. That certainly played itself out in World War II when Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labor Party, took up his role as the Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill’s Government of National Unity, even though it was clear that Churchill was calling the shots. The same thing happened in the United States during World War II. Frank Knox, a former Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, took over as Secretary of the Navy in the FDR administration, and Henry Stimson, a long time Republican Party stalwart, who had been Secretary of State under Hoover, became Secretary of War, which meant the civilian in charge of the army and air force. The two managed production and procurement and manpower for the armed services, although it was clear that FDR reserved grand strategy to himself. Other issues than warfare are regarded as ones about which men of good will can disagree and that they do so should not prevent any of them from being considered people with the best interests of the nation at heart.
Read MoreDrawing
Drawing, as an art form, is somewhat like silent movies or black and white movies in that they call attention to their artiface until they have established themselves well enough in your mind so that a drawing can be appreciated in its own terms, as a full blown kind of art. In the case of silent and black and white movies, these limitations are imposed by the limitations of the technology of that time, it taking a while for sound and then color, a mere ten or fifteen years later than color, to come to the movies. But even during the silent era, where films were interrupted by dialogue cards that had to keep talk clear and crisp, film had already developed most of its techniques: close, medium and long shots; novelistic story lines that combined public events with private life; deep investigation of character; angle shots so that railroad trains moved from upper right to disappear lower left; and so on. The audience adjusting its expectations of verisimilitude so that it could engage with very delightful stories, just as happened when audiences accepted the richly textured black and white of film noir so as to enhance its eerie and emotionally dark qualities, forgetting that it needed to be black and white after all, regardless of the mood conveyed, even though black and white musicals had been aglow with the lights and elaborate costumes designed for how they would look in black and white. The limitations of the technology did not seem so harmful that some directors, including Woody Allen, preferred to make their early films in black and white, to work under its limitations, rather than risk getting color wrong before they were ready to do it that way.
Read MoreThe Second Super Tuesday
The results of Tuesday’ selection, what with clear victories for Joe Biden in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, led James Carville to say that the Democratic Party had decided to move on from contesting who would be the nominee to opening the general election campaign against Trump. The Democrats had settled on their candidate. The end, to all intents and purposes, of the primary season, gives time to pause to consider the shock that was delivered to the political system by the fortunes of some of its contenders. Elizabeth Warren did not get many votes, She had about eight percent of the male vote in North Carolina, and even if you doubled that so that her female vote was 16%, that means she just wasn’t a popular candidate, regardless of gender. That may be because her policies were not all that attractive, or it may be because the electorate will not abide a woman candidate. Warren herself said that if you say that sexism played a part in her political race, you will be considered a whiner, but the truth of the matter is that the American people, male and female, just don’t accept the idea of a woman President. A woman in that role just does not sit well with them.
Read MoreThe Origins of Romance- II
So as to show that romance is a historical concept that was born at the dawn of recorded history, refer to the documents in the Hebraic tradition. It might seem, in fact, that the earliest stories in “Genesis” were already devoted to this notion of romance. Remember that in the creation story, God creates Adam to be on his own even though he would soon create the other animals with their mates and only then does He decide that Adam is alone and so needs a companion. Why had that not occurred to God in the first place? Perhaps because Adam was supposed to be a figure who got to rule over the animal kingdom without being a member of it in other respects. But God changes his mind because Adam seems lonely, which is a spiritual state. Adam needs someone to cling to, or as the Bible puts it, to “cleave” to, and that is as full a definition of romance as one needs, even if “Genesis” is, as usual, notorious for its brevity. So move on in the Bible.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday
The past week in national political events has been satisfying to me because it put my candidate, Joe Biden, back in the race, and I saw the week before last that something like this was necessary-- either a Biden resurgence or a Bloomberg surge-- so that Sanders would not run off with the nomination because and I thought, as apparently did so many other people, that Sanders was the candidate most likely to be defeated by Trump. Most voters, I think, are not like me, who will support anyone but Trump, but will instead settle for the known evil rather than what they suspect to be the worse evil of a Democratic Socialist. Now we will see what happens with Biden. The week has also been satisfying because it provided a splendid example of political drama, something that happens more often than we might expect because the forces that make it a drama are arranged fortuitously rather than by the hand of a playwright. This political drama brought together engaging and distinctive personalities, noble rhetoric, a clash over issues and constituencies as well as personalities, all occurring, mostly in public view, in the course of a brief period of time that allowed for plot complications as well as for the reversal of expectations. Playwrights should do as well, and certainly Shakespeare did in “Julius Caesar'' and Oscar Wilde did in “An Ideal Husband”.
Read MoreTheatricality in Jane Austen's "Emma"
Being “theatrical” means summing up plot or character with a single gesture so that the audience can take it in and move on. That happens throughout Broadway musicals and is epitomized by Bert Lahr saying that a doctor’s office sketch should not begin with a long exposition of the motivations for being there but with the simple line “Here we are in the doctor's office”. The price of such brevity is that there is no development through dialogue and action of the mood and the circumstances that justify the situation that is to be unfolded through subsequent dialogue and activity. Irving Thalberg is supposed to have told a screenwriter that you don’t need ten pages of dialogue to establish that a man and his wife are not getting along; just show her giving him a glare when he gives a look at a pretty young woman getting out of an elevator the three of them have shared. Thalberg was praising theatricality but that doesn’t do justice to the drama of a situation, where there is an explanation of how people became embedded in their situations, that regarded as something of significant interest, that ten pages of dialogue about a couple on the rocks telling something about this particular relationship and about such relationships in general. Drama has to do with an appreciation of the nature of a conflict while theatricality simply reveals and maybe not very well that the conflict exists. I am thinking of the original production of John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” on Broadway in the Fifties. The first act opens with a woman in a slip ironing her boyfriend's shirt. The second act opens with a new girlfriend also standing in her slip at the ironing board. The audience laughed. They got the joke and the revelation that the girlfriend got treated the same way whomever she was. That was the heart of the drama and it was offered up with great theatricality.
Read MoreLiving in the Past
A number of old fogies, including me, were lined up in front of the steam tables at a Chicago cafeteria (“Mannie’s”, for those of you in the know) a few days ago when the first guy on the line, an old, thin, stooped, Black dude with very few teeth, started inquiring about what was in stuffed derma and what was the difference between corned beef and pastrami, apologizing to the rest of us for making us wait, we returning the good humor by remarking that we were all old and retired and so had nothing else to do but kill time. I, on the other hand, was listening with my inner ear to the counterman, wondering whether he would say something condescending or dismissive to the old black man. Would he act as if the customer should have known what the different products were? Would he be annoyed that the oldster was holding up the line? No, he just described the cuisine in a chatty and goodhumored manner. I, however, was looking to hear something from fifty years ago, which would then have been seen as an expression of prejudice and would today be called an example of “microaggression”. That places me. I am still conscious of the feelings I had at the time of the Civil Rights Movement and so the lack of hostility by the counterman was a sign of how far we had all come even if I could not get over noticing how far we had come.
Read MoreThe Origins of Romance-I
Romance is when a person regards a sexual partner or a prospective sexual partner with a fascination that renders any number of aspects of the person—the way a woman poses her head, the way a man strides across a room—as so engaging that the lover wants to remain in the company of the beloved for a very long time— or as it is put in the exaggerated rhetoric of romance, “forever”. This engagement with another person licenses the lover to attribute to the beloved any number of positive qualities such as loyalty, attraction, compassion, intelligence and so on, though it also licenses the lover to recognize the failings of a lover— his or her meanness or anger or duplicity-- without necessarily breaking the bond that ties them together emotionally and may simply mean that a lover understands that his or her beloved is a termagant or a bully or a nag or distracted. Love does not mean the forgiveness of all, only the acceptance of all, love being a way to think that the intensity of sexual passion is a window into the soul of the beloved.
Read MoreThe Nevada Debate
Yes, the Democratic debate last night was certainly a food fight and the candidates had nothing new to say for themselves. The candidates are also getting a little testy out there. But the debate was illuminating nonetheless and pointed a way forwards. Joe Biden gave a very solid performance. He clearly laid out a tax package that made sense, more so than any of the others, and even though no one bothers to mention that Warren's wealth tax is unconstitutional. Biden has to do well in South Carolina and then the media, who are very fickle, and are at the moment conceding the race to Bernie, who they found to have a lot of integrity until it seemed possible he might actually triumph as the nominee and surely to be beaten by Trump, may will come to recoil from Bernie and reconsider the Veep. Mayor Mike had a worse night than was even expected and did not come up with answers to questions he knew he would face. When Elizabeth asked him to release women from their NDA's, he should have said NDAs are not a bad thing and that the #metoo movement had in fact thought women should get training in negotiating them. So where did Elizabeth stand on that? Bloomberg should also have said that Stop and Frisk was a policy supported by many Black politicians because it was a way of protecting little Black girls from being killed by random or drive-by shooters. For some reason or other, New York City Mayors, like Lindsay and Guiliani, never make it in national politics. Mayor LaGuardia became Mayor after serving as an influential Congressman in Washington.
Read MoreCanadian Art
All nations are artificial constructions in that it was a series of deliberate events that went into each of their creations. Great Britain was created after many a battle, including those to unify Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, these battles not ceasing until the Battle of Culloden, in 1745, and the question of Scottish independence still looms for a post-Brexit Great Britain. The United States assumed its now “natural” shape after a period of self declared Manifest Destiny which enabled it to create a continental sized nation, its parts, whether the dividing line is drawn between North and South or coastal and interior, still not having found ways to overcome their differences. Nations may claim to be united by a language or an ethnicity or a point of view, but their nationhood never ceases to be a hard sell. Ask the Yugoslavians.
So it is no surprise to think that Canada is an artificial nation, pieced together from French and British colonies, ninety percent of its population living within a hundred miles of the American border, very culturally and economically dependant on the United States, and bound to have become part of the American Union if Benedict Arnold had had some better luck. There are many explanations for why Canada was able to forge a distinctive identity for itself, one that was not a part of the American identity. Some say it was because of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which tied the country together east to west and so avoided the pull across the border, though that is hard to say because Alberta cowboys have more in common with the Wild West than with their Toronto co-citizens. Some would say it is because of the distinctive institutions Canadians set up, such as a cabinet system responsible to Parliament, or a national health insurance plan, even though these institutions are shared by all or most Western societies. It is also difficult to explain a Canadian identity because the settlement pattern of immigrant ethnic groups from Western and then Eastern Europe (Scots and Irish and Brits and then Italians and Slavs and Jews) was the same in Canada and in the United States; it was just that more Europeans went to the United States, and Canadians still just can’t believe that they did so because the weather was better further south.
Read MoreBeneath Self Interest
People from most classes, when they are young, are out to find a vocation and try to do well at it. The people I knew when I was young were all out to be doctors or lawyers or professors (noone I knew wanted to go into business, because the working class and the petit bourgeois were the classes we were all rising out of) and most of the young men did just that, becoming what they wanted to be. That applied to women as well, who also became doctors and lawyers and professors although one young woman I knew didn’t think she could become what she wanted, which was a Rabbi, not possible at the time, and so she became a law professor instead. The same was true of people who did not expect to do better than the working or middle class. They too wanted to take up a place where they could have an occupation that filled up their time with purpose even as it supplied the living that enabled them to support their families and so made of them successful people, coming home after work to the house or apartment that they paid for and to a dinner with their children and a few hours of television before retiring to bed and arising the next day for another long session of work. That is the round of life for most people of most classes.
Read MoreStorytelling at Oscar Time
Hollywood has always been the preserve of middle brow sensitivities. Charlie Chaplin was sentimental; the very talky dramas of the Thirties and Forties testified to the sanctity of middle class life (think of “The Best Years of Our Lives”); the Seventies, given their taste for epics, translated the gangster film into a family tragedy (think of “The Godfather” trio of movies). And so it goes on, people without much education treating Hollywood as their canon of great literature, quoting “Casablanca” or”The Wizard of Oz” as part of the collective wisdom they have absorbed into their own heads, using those stories and phrases to capture events in their own fantasy and actual lives, just as Shakespeare or Dickens serve that function for a more educated audience. And so it is fair to ask a deep aesthetic question after this year’s Oscars, which made Koreans the latest group to move into the spotlight, just as in the past Hollywood acceptance marked the passage of Jews, Italians and African Americans into the assimilated parts of the nation, even if women, one such group vieing for inclusion, still consider themselves as having a way to go, however much the women’s point of view has driven story lines from at least the Thirties Warner Brothers’ musicals to the Nora Ephron romantic comedies of the Nineties.
Read MoreThree Kinds of Knowledge
I used to tell my students that I would carefully label the three kinds of knowledge I would offer them so that they could make up their own minds about how much they could trust to what I said. The first kind of knowledge I would offer would be consensus knowledge, which is what all experts in a field would attest to. An example of that in sociology is the general belief among sociologists that immigrant groups assimilate into American society within two to five generations of arriving on these shores. That is different from what happens in Indonesia, for example, where three separate groups-- the original Polynesians, the Muslims and the Chinese-- have coexisted in a three tiered caste system for hundreds and hundreds of years. The second kind of knowledge I would offer is where there is a strong difference of opinion, contending sides, in an intellectual debate. That kind of knowledge is represented by the debate over what are the causes of continued poverty in the Black community. There is one school of thought that poverty is the result of cultural forces. Poor people got that way because of historical conditions but by this time have internalized dysfunctional relationships and so poor people are overcome by anger, poor child raising habits, inadequate family life, and other cultural forces that make it difficult for people to compete in a market economy or simply to hold down jobs. The alternative hypothesis is that the continuing social structures which engulf people are the forces that keep people from prospering. There are not enough men in Black urban areas to go around so as to provide young women with partners to set up stable families. That is because young men who might otherwise settle down are either dead or in prison. The two theories converge in that one can be a precursor of the other but they are still distinct in that the causal factors are independent of one another. The third kind of knowledge, I offered, was my own educated judgment, something not shared by other sociologists, but a point for which I thought I could make a good case. An example of that was when I argued that the reason Black poverty from the Sixties on was not better dealt with was that LBJ’s War on Poverty did not deal with male unemployment but rather with providing benefits for women who had to raise children without the benefit of a spouse. During the New Deal, there had been work programs for Appalachian white youth. There were no such programs for Black male youth a generation later. Some sociologists have caught up with this view in recent years.
Read MoreThe Iowa Caucuses
One week before the Iowa Caucuses, one poll showed Biden ahead, another showed Sanders ahead, and a third showed the race to be a dead heat. At that point, forty percent of Iowans said they were still undecided about their final choice. What do these Iowan prima donnas want? A third or fourth or fifth encounter with a candidate at a coffee shop so they can make up their minds? They have had since last summer to look these candidates over: to evaluate their programs and savor their characters. The main influence of a Bloomberg candidacy, which is already, by one poll, at double digits, may be to rid us of the influence of the “ethanol” state on national politics. Other candidates have already caught that message in that they were scheduled to spend less time in Iowa than in past presidential years because they are aware that Nevada and South Carolina and then Super Tuesday will quickly diminish whatever victory Iowa seems to provide.
Read MoreThe National Gallery of Ireland
The National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin, has holdings from many places, some of them quite good, like the collection of paintings from the Lowlands, and also the very good “The Dublin Volunteers on College Green, 4th November 1779” wherein Francis Wheatley, a recently arrived Britisher, painted a public and historic scene. The painting flatteringly captures Irish sunshine bathing a busy urban square, people gawking out of Georgian windows at the moment that an honorary gun salute has sent clouds of smoke into the air around a statue of King William III, the smoke billowing like Rubens’ clouds. So the picture may be taken as signifying the connection of Ireland to Britain as a long time thing. Wheatley’s painting also has the slightly higher than eye-level, straight on point of view that since Poussin has given seriousness to paintings by portraying the mythic as historical. The painting was not well appreciated at the time because of what I will consider an Irish aversion to overt political paintings.
All museums answer queries that are asked and some that go unasked. The question I have is this: what is the relationship of the Irish as a people to Ireland as a nation? Ireland is a geographical entity that became an ethnic group long before that term became fashionable as well as long before Ireland struggled for national independence, which was 300 years, or more, depending on when you start the count, before it succeeded in wrestling itself from Great Britain. Ireland had been the off-shore thinking house for all of Christendom when Christendom was relatively young. The struggles with the British conquest that make up what is known as Modern Irish history created that other struggle about whether to be Irish is to be a resident of Ireland or a resident of Catholic Ireland or just connected to Irish nationalism. It is to be remembered that De Valera was an American citizen. Or else Irish ethnicity can be defined as a comic garrulousness founded in a deep sorrow which an anthropologist might trace the distinctiveness of the Irish to the lack of primogeniture or to infant swaddling practices or child rearing practices which tend towards tough love, all of these post hoc explanations in that any difference in an antecedent can be treated as the cause of a cultural difference. Whatever the explanation, the fact of the matter is that the Irish, as Kennelly has said, have moved around the world and not only made an impact on it but retained their identity, whatever became of their nation, which is now independent but had its rebellion too late to save its language or, later, its family structure and distinctive class and family structure, from Westernization.
Read More