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.
Read MoreWorking 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.
Read MoreBrueghel's Novelistic Landscapes
Brueghel changed secular landscapes into historical ones by changing the moment chosen for portrayal from after the event to just the moment before the event portrayed. A further limitation imposed by the artist on himself changes his landscapes into what can be called, with hindsight, novelistic landscapes. The landscape is composed in such a way that any one of the figures in it could be the framing figure. The hunters descending the hill in “Hunters in the Snow” are not yet returned to the village and they are the focal figures of the picture but the picture can be imagined from the viewpoint of any of those who see them descend, many of the same details caught in the frame, just from a different angle.
Read MoreUtopias
A utopia is a society that has abolished the difference between public and private life. That definition of a utopia is superior to the usual one which regards a utopia as a perfected society, whether that means everyone is equal or everyone is in their properly subordinated social positions, because the new definition reveals the mechanism by which some perfect ordering is accomplished and also because it does away with the need to distinguish between utopias and dystopias, all of whom have this same characteristic, the observer to decide whether one or another utopia is to be admired. In Plato, everyone’s character as either a soldier, an artisan or a philosopher is in keeping with their role in society. In Orwell’s “1984”, everyone is being retrained so that the only emotions that are felt internally are the ones approved of by the state, and so sex, which is personal, is a revolutionary concept. In his far more probing “Brave New World'', Aldous Huxley suggests that a person’s chemicals have been balanced and re-balanced since before birth so that the person will be an appropriate social being, only the savages who live on the fringes of society going their own way. This new definition explains the paradox of Bertrand Russell’s witty observation about Plato’s Republic, which is that it is a place where everyone is equally unhappy. It is why both North Korea and an Amish community are utopian in prospect if not in reality. The definition applies to the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, where people get what they deserve which is what each of their nature’s require, whether that is some degree of pain for those assigned to the levels of Hell, or the equality of the ecstasy that will be achieved in Heaven. Nobody in Hell deserves to be anyplace else and there are no slackers in Heaven. So, in utopias and dystopias, there is supposedly no struggle between the internality of the individual and the person’s public function.
Read More
Vermeer's "The Milkmaid"
A good place to start an interpretation of Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” is to ask why he left the wall blank. That is not his usual procedure. Vermeer is inclined to fill walls with maps and other decorations that bring the outside world into the confines of the room that makes up his canvas so as to show how the two, the private and the public worlds, reflect and refract on one another, the house as a realm of the private while the public life of the Netherlanders stretched around the world. It is widely noted that Vermeer had originally painted a map on the wall in “the Milkmaid” only to paint it over. Why?
Read MoreWoody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors"
Woody Allen was a prolific filmmaker who shared with two other prolific filmmakers, Billy Wilder and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a preference for character and plot over spectacle, which is what most American directors do instead, even though through his career he was particularly good at filming places such as New York City, Paris and Barcelona. What stands out about all three of these directors is that they were adept at tussling with moral dilemmas, Wilder was the most cynical of the three, as when he dealt with the fine points of the moral ambiguities to be found in “The Apartment”. Sure, Fred MacMurray was a louse, but was the Shirley Maclaine character any better even if Jack Lemon fell for her? Or was that just another side of his weakness as a human being? Fassbinder gives away that his movie “World on a Wire” is about the nature of identity in that most of the people at a party at the beginning of the movie seem like mannikins. So the question is what is a mannikin and what is a human being. “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, which is one of Woody Allen’s most memorable films, has a message, as do many of them. In this case, it is not the claim that there is no justice, which is what some critics at the time of the release of the film in 1989 said was the case. The thesis of the movie is that people can be forgiven for their crimes but are never forgiven for their misdemeanors. That is a morality far harsher than any other I know of, and is very carefully arrived at and so, I would suggest, Allen makes a contribution to thought far greater than film directors are usually credited with, however much Allen himself has many times said he only retails what he has read in one book or another during his career of self-education.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreWedding Announcements
A good way to see that social class is alive and well in the United States is to consult the wedding announcements in the Weekend Style Section of the New York Times. This is not what most sociologists would do. That is because those announcements are not a random sample of anything and, with the exception of the piece about the featured couple, largely contain only the information selected for presentation by the people making the announcements. Sociologists (and, nowadays, economists have entered this discussion) prefer to look at the various determinants of social class such as prior family wealth, education, and income to predict whether people are more likely over the generations or within a career to improve their chances of having power, prestige or position or additional wealth and income. But a consideration of what the Times chooses to notice about the lives of people tells more about how people make choices which have to do with social class or, more to the point, what beds they chose to sleep in for the long run.
Read MoreHeroism
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.
Read MoreWalter Benjamin
Literary criticism in the Thirties had a number of branches. Edmund Wilson published “Axel’s Castle” in 1931. It was a book that compared Imagist poetry to the poetry that came before. It was followed in 1941 by “The Wound and the Bow”, which was a Freudian interpretation of the Modernist literature of his time, and in 1943 he published “To the Finland Station”, which was an assessment of Marxist writers. Wilson was less driven by ideology than by the critical project itself, which was to get the hang of what an author was saying, whatever was the subject matter or the relevant theory. William Empson, on the other hand, had a consistent point of view. He published “Seven Types of Ambiguity” in 1930 and “Some Versions of Pastoral” in 1935. In the first book, he carefully took apart the idea of simile and metaphor so as to establish the resources language provided to a writer. In the second book, he reduced literature to its conventionalized genres, so that the Gothic romance was a form of the pastoral, a form that stretched back to Vergil and beyond. Literary language and literary form were what made literature work. Walter Benjamin, for his part, had a Marxist interpretation of literature that was perhaps best realized in his “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1936. This last has remained remarkably influential. Both Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss took it seriously as the way to understand art. I want to look at what Benjamin proposes in this very short book of his, why I think it is so imperfect, and compare it to other works of aesthetics which seem to me to get the relation between art and modernity more correctly.
Read MoreNuclear 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.
Read MoreReligious Schools
The gimmick behind most Supreme Court decisions is to find a set of circumstances that allows the Court to kick a can down the road rather than to settle a large outstanding issue even if the Court does shift slightly the balance between obdurate public interests. I would call this doctrine of constitutional interpretation “consequentialism” because the Court becomes legitimately, in its own lights, concerned with the consequences of its decisions more than it is with the particular legal reasoning it engages in. So much for “textualism” or “originalism” or even “moral principle” as serving as the basis of Supreme Court decisions. The exceptions to consequentialism are very rare and they are often cited. Brown v. Board of Education was understood as a departure from consequentialism but understood as necessary because to uphold Jim Crow in schools was simply beyond the pale after the Second World War, and even Roe v. Wade, a notable non-consequentialist decision, hedged its bets by insisting that women had to consult their doctors before having an abortion, which is something that has now been superceded so that it is purely the woman’s decision whether she should have an abortion. The doctor doesn’t get to say whether it is a wise decision.
Read MoreNational Styles of Moviemaking
National styles in movie making predominated during the Silent Era. You could tell the nation in which a movie was made without referring to the opening titles or the street signs. Themes important to the culture of each nation accompanied the distinctive craftsmanship. The important point is that those styles and themes have not changed in the decades since. That is worth remarking on, given that so much is made of how film has become different from what it was because of technological innovation and the importance of the Hollywood-raised dollar. Well, just as there are still national styles in novels, even though novels are translated into at least the major world languages, there are still national styles in films.
Read MoreMonuments 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.
Read MoreSargent's Late Style
John Singer Sargent earned for himself fame and fortune as a painter of realistic portraits of society ladies adorned in fashionable and elaborate dress and carefully posed so that the viewer of the painting knew that they were posed. After that period, which covered about the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century, and after which time Sargent was known as a painter of the previous generation, he tried to reinvent his style, however much, when he went back to doing an occasional portrait, he returned to his original realistic style. The new style was to be a take on Impressionism, and it did not catch on, however much he worked at it. Now, there are other great painters who are able to develop alternative styles that are impressive, Picasso and Matisse among them, Picasso, in fact, inventing a new style every decade of his career, but that was not to be for Sargent, and so his efforts in that direction draw attention to how difficult it is to think up a new way of seeing especially after having so thoroughly mastered a previous one.
Read MoreGold Diggers
There were musicals both in movies and on Broadway that told tales of social significance before the song “Sing Me a Song of Social Significance” appeared in 1937 in the Broadway musical “Pins and Needles”. They go back, of course, to Kern and Hammerstein’s “Showboat” and even King Vidor’s silent movie, “Hallalujah!”, a film that takes the form of a musical of the sort that will be discussed here as much as it also embellished the form of the documentary. There are images of stooping field hands interspersed with images of rousing Church choirs that leave you asking which one of these is the true life of Negroes in the South. Forget about Gershwin’s “Of Thee I Sing” whose relation to politics is to the clichés told about politicians, and so is somewhat like Kaufman and Hart’s “Merton of the Movies”, which is a satire on the conventions of Hollywood as they are known from what were then the already well established conventionalized portrayals of Hollywood. First rate political satire such as is found in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or in “Primary Colors” does not readily yield itself to the musical form because its métier is the rapture caused by political rhetoric, which has rhythms all its own.
Read MoreTrue Lies
Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.
Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.
Read MorePop Art Jokes
Andy Warhol wasn’t the only artist of the mid Twentieth Century who broke out of the era of Abstract Expressionism, which had lasted, after all, for only about twenty years, by painting objects that were found all around us in the consumerist culture recognized by the thinkers of the time and in ways that led to ready duplication by all the technology of the mechanical revolution. It was just that Warhol was expert at merchandising himself, which was perfectly appropriate a way to unify production with the meaning of his product, though one can claim that all artists, back to those recorded in Vasari, were up to the same task of projecting their names and reputations and in competition with one another for fame and money. Here are three other pop artists worth notice and from whose works we can assess the purely artistic strengths and shortcomings of their movement.
Read MoreOld 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.
Read MoreThe Importance of Lady Windermere's Fan
What might seem a failure of plot structure in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is, in fact, a key to understanding the play. There are numerous occasions on which the characters in the know are about to break the truth of Lady Windermere’s birth to her so that she will put a stop to some very self-destructive behavior. She is about to go off with a man not her husband because she thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her with a woman who is in fact her mother and who has been supported by Lord Windermere so that she can find herself a suitable match and so put an end to her years of wandering about the Continent as a fallen woman who had apparently turned to her wiles as the way to support herself.
Read More