Liberals, who believe in the intervention of government to right wrongs and to regulate the economy and the social structure, are identified with FDR’s New Deal, but FDR used a variety of mechanisms other than entitlements to achieve its ends of providing work and greater equality between peoples, the regime of entitlements meaning that legislation would consist of financial and other services and preferences to be awarded to categories of eligibility. The first acts in FDR’s First Hundred Days were not entitlements. The Glass Steagall Banking Act of 1933 provided for the separation of commercial from investment banking. It required commercial banks to have sufficient equity and provided the FDIC to guarantee that bank customers did not have to worry about runs on the banks. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, also early on in 1933, allowed for the government to buy up beef and pork so as to destroy them so as to keep up farm prices. It also allowed farmers to get money so that they would refrain from raising crops, and so also raise farm prices, even though this was sort of an entitlement because people who owned farms were paid for a purpose, the purpose more important than the mechanism. The Wagner Act of 1935 set up a mechanism whereby workers could engage in collective bargaining rather than pay or guarantee wages to union workers. The TVA put in a lot of money to build dams and create electrical grids rather than give grants to people in Tennessee. The CCC made work available to poor whites rather than give them food stamps or a dole. Yes, entitlements did come later. Social Security, passed in 1935, was a clear entitlement in that a category of people--the aged-- were entitled to get benefits when they had reached a certain age and had contributed to payroll taxes for by then just a very short time of payment. And the great last act of the New Deal, the Wages and Hours Act of 1938, did require people of occupational categories to meet pay and work standards, though not by direct payments. Nor were entitlements the only mechanisms for reform during the War on Poverty. Money was used by Lyndon Johnson to create incremental change in a variety of outcomes, such as better nutrition or availability to education, by paying programs rather than people, though some entitlements were included, as was the case with Medicare and Medicaid, so as to entitle people to the cost of health care because they qualified as old or poor.
Monuments
Some places that are destination points also do other things. A person can visit the Empire State Building to look at the little ants on the street that they view from near the top, or they can, while on street level, look up to the not quite sheer towers that are above, there being setbacks from the broader base of the lower floors. That is majesty and artistry occurring while floors and offices are rented and occupied within the floors. A tourist has the same experience when visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral so as to see the spaces of the church during which a major or minor service is also taking place. You can look at the architecture of the George Washington Bridge while also watching the automobiles travel over the most heavily traveled bridge in the world. On the other hand, there are destination points that are only to be looked at. There is nothing else to do with them other than allow people to observe and tramp through them, which is the case with the national parks that I visited in the past few weeks in southern Utah, when my son and grandson and I visited Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park and Canyonlands, the Park Service having very artistically arranged for visitor centers to look on imposing edifices and also to create roadways that allowed access for astonishing sites to see. But the cliffs and canyons and rock formations were not meant to do anything but look, to be turned only into aesthetic objects, because nothing else could be done with that harsh terrain. You couldn’t farm or easily build houses in such remote terrain and there are or were no ores. There were just places to see and so it is worth thinking about what are the aesthetics to be drawn from people who are forced to consider something aesthetic because there is nothing else to do with them, as well as to consider these objects by people who, like myself, claim to have a disciplined take on the aesthetic.
Read MoreDecades and Trends
Radio and TV d.j.’s like to talk about musical decades so as to evoke the nostalgia of there being a particular sound or style that dominated music for about a decade. I think that we can broaden it out so that each decade includes its politics and social structure so as to characterize decades as being cultural entities, distinct from the previous and the succeeding one, just as if we do when historians and literary critics speak of the periods of Classical and Romantic and Victorian, the Romantics, for example, not just meaning Jane Austen and John Keats and Charles Lamb, but also John Bright and the Luddites and Peterloo and the other early struggles of industrialism. Periodization is a different prospect from doing what a friend of mine does, which is separate before and after a critical event, which for him is 1968, That year separates two different experiences, people profoundly altered by that event so that I, for one, still expect to turn on the television and find out that there has been an assassination. Pearl Harbor was one of those events that made America different and not in just leading to the waging of the worst war in human history. It made the United States the economic, cultural and military center of the world, while the Vietnam War was just an interlude even if young people at the time, including me, found it all consuming, it instead just coming and going, which would also be the case in the War on Terror that commenced with the World Trade Center, but lasted only a decade or so, and us still not knowing whether Trumpism can outlast his separation from office.
Read MoreEmpiricism in "A Winter's Tale"
Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” starts out with a scene that the audience takes will be a leisurely exposition of who is who. It begins with fulsome praise by a resident king to a visiting one, and then shifts to an even more fulsome praise by the resident queen to the visiting king. And then the audience begins to notice something, or has been prepared to notice it by having prepared for this visit to the theatre by reading the text (something, it need hardly be said, that was not done in Shakespeare’s day, though that would have meant an appreciation of the scene rested solely on its stagecraft). The mutual statements of love become much too fulsome, crossing some kind of line into being inappropriate. The Queen’s husband no longer likes what he hears and you see him and hear him in a few lines deliberating about what is going on and coming to the conclusion that his wife has indulged in adultery with his best friend. He turns on her and denounces her and that is what sets the play in motion: a set of suspicions that are turned into a conviction and which he then proceeds to act upon, making plans to murder the erstwhile cuckold maker. A lot has been compressed into that scene and it sets an audience reeling, wanting to know how things will further escalate and unravel, and there are enough surprises ahead, enough plot twists, to satisfy anyone’s sense that good plays often are continually turning the tables.
Read MoreSara Rossberg
Sara Rossberg is a British portraitist who flourished during the 1990’s though she has done later work through the present, and now works primarily with color and texture to distort the faces of people. His most accomplished work is included in London’s National Gallery. Entitled “Dame Anita Roddick'' and painted in 1995, it is a striking and depth filled presentation of its subject. The woman’s face is framed by her frazzled red hair, her face also with a tint of red. Her lips are thin, as are her eyebrows. Her facial expression is intense and soulful, livened by her anxiety or mournfulness, particularly (and inevitably) projected in her pained eyes. A nice touch is that Dame Anita’s blouse peters off into being of no consequence while her hair had very much caught the face that would come below it. So Rossberg provides an internal soul made very visible, when Sargent, the master portraitist of a century ago, has the audience draw out of their regal and polished presentations each of their fully human and individual consciousnesses. The Rossberg painting shows people not disassembled but in their inner thoughts, looking composed in their everyday lives and yet still penetrating. A worthy addition to the collection.
Read MoreThe Nature of Evil
Trump is “unquestionably” evil, Marty has said for years now, because Trump separated immigrant children from their parents. Harold, Marty’s son, responded, “You still holding on to that?” Harold’s meaning, according to Roland, is that Trump’s action of separating parents from children has been forgotten by everyone, held onto only by extremists like Marty. Extremist reasoning is inherently dismissable.
Read MoreOrganizational Portals
There was a science fiction movie which showed people as having multiple portals on their bodies to which were attached hoses, perhaps half a dozen to a person, which swung free and were available to be connected to machines that took or received some fluids. It was very unnerving to see people so dependent on their mechanical devices that made them able to survive though, if you think about it, this was a biological metaphor in that people do have tubes that sustain life. Food goes down your gullet and wastes come out of tubes whose exit points are covered. It was just unsettling to see these processes as mechanical rather than biological. There are, however, another set of portals that, as the expression goes, connect every person to their lives. These are the organizational portals whereby you are connected to your identity and therefore have access to the services which sustain us, both biologically and otherwise. I have become particularly aware of my reconnecting to my new portals when I recently moved from New York to Salt Lake City. I did not have to change my phone number because of the miracle of a cell phone, but I did have to change addresses for my credit cards and my health insurance companies and I still keep my passport handy to identify who I am. All those verifications of my identity enable me to live an ordinary life. I don’t need one for a supermarket, but Utah requires an identification so as to access a liquor store, which was not the case in New York.
Read MoreTrump in Anguish
If I were a playwright rather than a critic, I would write a play, "The Anguish of Trump", that told a tragedy in the style of Camus' "Caligula". It would show his despair and anger at having lost the presidency, much worse than previous incumbents who have lost and can solace themselves for what were their accomplishments, such as Popi having waged the Persian Gulf War, which he believed was a good thing. Even Herbert Hoover was rehabilitated in that he produced a major set of recommendations about the future of government and policy after FDR eventually left office, and Nixon, unsuccessfully, tried to rehabilitate himself. But Trump can't rest on his laurels because he never cared for them and so is simply a loser, the ultimate loser, bereft of any honor and without any graciousness. He had said nothing for five days after Election Day and presumably just fumed, and then he lashed out with accusations of fraud, none of which supplied with evidence, even his lawyers admitting there had been no fraud, and then blaming anyone he could care to for his defeat, including the claim that the pharmaceutical companies developing the coronavirus vaccines had deliberately delayed the process so that the Democrats could win the election. Trump's measures were thwarted by the permanent civil service, who supervised their ballot counting, and by judges who Republican appointed judges decided that there were no merits to keeping the voting certified. It is worth adding that certification by the states had not been previously more than paperwork, the election decided by whatever unofficial result was offered by the AP or even back to the time when the trusted Walter Cronkite declared an election decided. So we go through the legal process with utmost punctiliousness and Trump comes short. Trump stews, as is the just result of his nature, perfectly appropriate in a tragedy that tells what it is to be a person without values and so left to drift or to be battered by events, him being without a compass whereby he might right himself, and so the subject of a very Camus like theme.
Read MoreShakespeare's Greatest Melodramas
The great works of Shakespeare from “Julius Caesar” to “Antony and Cleopatra” (with the obvious exception of “Twelfth Night”) have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal flaw which dooms those around them as well as themselves, or as tragedies of the Classic variety, in which case we understand the central characters as caught up in existential situations beyond their control, those including the warp and woof of nature, social relations, and the emotions of jealousy and ambition to which all people are subject, not just the tainted few. That construction of the plays is certainly true enough and, following Aristotle, in both cases people are shown as pushed beyond endurance so that they emerge scourged of pity and terror, justly having become aware of their own human, social and metaphysical limitations, the audience morally improved for having observed and grasped and engaged in these lives.
There is another way to look at this set of great works. Rather than looking at the plays as tragedies, these plays can be considered melodramas. That term need not be treated as a designation of something less than a tragedy, a tragedy manqué, in which the playwright has either not fully developed the tragic nature of his characters or where the playwright settled for placing characters in social situations where they go on too long about what are, after all, the relatively trivial travails of life, and generally exhibit their less than noble characters. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is not so easily drawn. Lear goes on rather long windedly and his problems are indeed the social problems that are created by an old man coming to live with his relatives. Why does he have to keep all those knights with him in his daughter’s castle? He just has the pathetic conceptions of past grandeur that may descend on any old person. That is no reason to go off to the heath and bemoan his fate. Get a grip on yourself and get thee off to a nursing home.
Read MoreGeography and Social Structure
Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts, in particular, thought that geography was destiny. Montesquieu had back in the Eighteenth Century said, quite correctly, that temperate climates allowed nations to prosper. Europe and China do better than sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonian Brazil. Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts fully thought that geography was destiny. De Tocqeville thought that the small steads in New England was the result of the hilly and rocky terrain, while large plantations flourished in the South because of the flat turrain. Motley thought that the Lowlands resulted from a swampy land whose water had ever to be contested through dikes. In the Nineteen Fifties, historians said that the United States prospered because it's fields and wheatlands were so fertile There is an alternative example. It is the culture and its social structure that make a nation prosperous. The United States did well because it had a genius for government. The Northwest Ordinance, which predated the Constitution, treated new territories as places to become new and equal states rather than subordinated territories. The Constitution set up a system of government that has endured for more than two hundred years despite the fact that it is rife with its division between Northern and Southern States. America has the internet and its television networks across time zones and its climates and so you are everywhere at once, so long as you have electronics. I wanted to test out the experiences of geography and the other things by looking at Utah, the place in which I have recently settled.
Read MoreEssential and Consequential Aspects of the Civil War
David M. Potter, in his well regarded and still quite valuable history, “The Impending Crisis”, published in 1976, says that at the time of the Mexican War the various aspects of American structure and culture were remarkably uniform in that they intersected and functionally supported their regional economies, shared the values that had supported the Revolution, and were homogeneous in that they were mostly of English speaking peoples, all with the exception of what had happened to the slaves. Potter makes this point so as to say the road to disunion was created after the Mexican War, and so could perhaps become unnecessary if other political and structural things had happened. That is very different from saying that the Civil War had been inevitable in the sense that what happened in the intervening years, or even back to the arrival of slavery in 1619, had been compromises to try to avoid the inevitable outcome of civil war, whether they were due to the arrangements in the Constitution that allowed slaves to be counted as three fifths the number for the calculation of state representation, or because of the three compromises composed by Henry Clay that allowed the Union to persist from 1831, the time of the Missouri Compromise, where north of that state the territories would be free states, to 1861, never finding a long term solution to the dilemma of slavery. The view today is very different from what it was in Potter’s time. Nowadays, people speak of slavery as having been the original sin from which we have not as yet staunched its wounds, there needing to be a great reckoning of what was unfolded in the past. No justice; no peace. I want to address this highly toxic issue through carefully addressing the words that people deploy in engaging this discussion.
Read MoreUpdike's Take
Critics tend to diminish the efforts of John Updike because they think of the late writer as having been fluent rather than deep, Updike creating concoctions that are entertaining and all too tied together rather than a set of ideas that are riveting. Updike is all about sex and religion and so it might seem weighty but what critics say about these matters are unsurprising and that the forays into politics are embarrassing, especially in his later novels. John Updike’s novel “Terrorist”, one of those later ones, supposedly written after he had run out of things to say, and he just having the need to keep putting out a novel a year, received a lukewarm reception when it came out in 2006 and not because of a lack of timeliness. There were any number of reports in the newspapers of the time about aborted terrorist plots. Instead, “The New York Times Book Review” commentator Rachel Donadio wondered what novelists knew about terrorism. That is the crux of the matter. Reviewers did not see how a novelist could have plausible control of his materials, especially about such an urgent social concern as terrorism. The reviewers thereby showed their distrust of their own literary callings and, more than that, their unwillingness to come to terms with the claim that novels are an account of reality more terse and insightful than those offered by, let us say, journalists, at least when the novel is done by a major writer. Updike creates a trust in the reader (the attentive and/or swept away reader) that what he is describing is real and not just imaginary.
Read MoreA New Adventure
People are engaged in new adventures at least in part because of the coronavirus pandemic. My family resettled West in part of the fear of declining property values in New York City and because where we settled seemed so open and clean and so much more safe, which is what I think, even if the mountain and plains states are reaching new highs of illness. A friend of mine in New York City is thinking of trading to a larger condo in her apartment building because, I think, she wants to do something busy rather than sit in her chair waiting for the pandemic to pass. Another New York City friend goes to restaurants that are open and also to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which has opened but with conditions including limited entrants spaced far apart and only one bookstore. Going to visit is a kind of adventure because there may be some risk but that is a very marginal one. They are casting their vote for the city by making their presence felt. Most people don’t have adventures in that waitresses wear masks to serve patrons, those put in significantly separated tables and store clerks moving about their wares and their customers. These people are not in adventures because they are just continuing their jobs because they have to make a living.
Read MoreJubilation
Jubilation for Biden is never what I expected weeks ago much less in the past few days as Biden expects to slowly and confidently move towards a Biden very close victory. Actually, my response to the election before hand and now is relief rather than elation. There were so many things that might have gone very wrong: massive irregularities, mischievous lawsuits, violence sufficiently anticipated so that Washington and New York City have boarded up buildings. But local elections did their jobs by methodically and calmly keeping to the election system, showing that the American people, despite these four years, are a people with a genius for government, just as the British had done in the Nineteenth Century and before and after. There is something to be said for the Electoral College making the legitimate choice certain and soon and for letting local districts control their precincts by administering calm and peaceful and even handed voting. I saw Ohio being orderly even though the voting is split just about the middle.
Read MoreThe Chicago 7
I just caught up with the Andrew Sorkin movie about the Chicago 7 showing the anti-Vietnam activists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 being prosecuted in federal court during the following year for having incited rioting. Sorkin did a good job making the plot coherent and showing the different points of view and Sorkin, as usual, punched up some telling lines, but I felt that the whole enterprise was wrongly focussed. The trial was just an anticlimax after the events that had happened in the previous year, the images of the actual riots much more profound than a trial that was so clearly a show trial that not even the prosecution didn’t want to pursue it and a judge so biased that there was no doubt about who was the bad guy. No contest on the issue of free speech versus authoritarianism. Sorkin tried to create some controversy by comparing Tom Haydn as the one who said that all the programs depend on what happens to the vote in opposition to Abbie Hoffman saying that the demonstrations were creating a cultural revolution. So the movie had a dramatic clash between the two ideologies: Haydn as a traditional political organizer and Hoffman as crafting a new way to do politics. But that wasn’t the larger issue. Sorkin showed Haydn, at the end of the movie, reading off the numbers of people who had been killed in Vietnam during the time of the Chicago 7 trial. That was what the war was about: its carnage and the attempt to stop that. That was the view all the characters in the film portrayed as the gravamen of the war. David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7, had indeed been a conscientious objector on the grounds of being a Pacifist. Joan Baez, a fellow traveller of that time, said she was a Pacifist because she was against violence, though she demurred that non-violent resistance against Hitler would have had many casualties before the German people had blanched at the number of deaths.
Read MoreNabakov and Post-Modernism
Back at the turn into the Twentieth Century, Modernism was a movement to liberate myth and abstraction from the encrustations of history. Freud's Viennese living room, filled as it was with draperies, overstuffed furniture, pictures, knick knacks and anthropological icons, would become in twenty years, all across the "modern" or economically developed world, a set of austere white walls surrounding single and dramatically placed objects (a family portrait, a piece of distinctively wrought furniture, Prometheus in Rockefeller Plaza). Modernism would attest to the essentially primitive and primal themes that prevailed, just as was the case in art which, for the next fifty years, would allow shapes and materials to prevail over content, swatches of color and form to be seen ever since the vanguard Impressionists as representations of the real structures that informed appearances. Subject matters were superficial. The real thing, the real art, was the form rather than the matter.
Read MoreBertram Married A Witch
In “All’s Well That Ends Well”, a virtuous woman, acclaimed by all, is rejected by the suitor she has chosen because he regards her as insufficiently well born. Callow youth that he is, he runs off to war and is won back only by a stratagem whereby his true bride deceives him into going to bed with her and making her pregnant and giving her a ring his mother gave to him. The denouement consists of the revelation of this scheme and his surrender to her love. That interpretation, however, has to elide many of the problems the text provides for it. Bertram, the runaway bridegroom, must be made into a total cad if he is to give up a ring his mother gave him so that he can bed someone who is no more to him than a whore. He is so obstinate and cold to Helena, the doctor’s daughter who chooses him as a husband, that one wonders what she saw in him in the first place. Stage business has to be worked in if the two “lovers” are to reconcile. In one production, Helena puts a toy hobby horse between them after the last line of dialogue has been spoken to suggest that the child she will have will bind the two together. The interpretation also posits the notion that Shakespeare thought upward mobility was a reward for merit and that warfare was a silly calling, something not apparent in his great plays, and only a grand irony in “Troilus and Cressida”.
Read MoreThe Last Presidential Debate of 2020
What could possibly happen in the last 2020 Presidential Debate, I wondered? Everything seemed to be set and done. That first debate was informative rather than chaotic because each of the performers did what each of them did: Trump a blowhard who says the venomous things he has extolled ever since he went down the Trump Tower escalator and Joe Bidden righteous in his principles and agenda even if he sometime has garbled his words, a viewer difficult to say that his childhood stuttering is worse than it has been for many years even though his voice does seem weaker. Each of the two characters are very familiar. There are few secrets of character to a presidential candidate. They are what they are at least as I have known them back to Harry Truman. Moreover, the voters have pretty much made up their minds, weeks ago ninety percent of them saying they wouldn’t change their minds. The polls have been stable in that the battleground states are mostly pro-Biden and Joni Ernst is a little bit behind in the Iowa Senatorial race by just a few points and Susan Collins is consistently behind in Maine by five points. Biden has for months had a constant nine or ten percent lead. Might as well vote and finish it, unless there is a late October Surprise, the canard against Hunter Biden having fizzled-- unless something comes up tonight. Also, voter irregularity is not likely to make a difference. Georgia and Texas are not likely to turn Democratic even though Gov. Abbott has run scared enough to insist on the scandalous behavior of restricting the number of places to deposit ballots so that there is only one of them in Harris County, which covers four million people in that it includes Houston. I thought that the vote meant that the access to the vote was supposed to be made available as part of the right to vote, but not so for some Republicans. So there is nothing left but the nail biting because the voters are mercurial rather than firmly implanted in their demographics. We will see what we can see.
Read Morethe Heartland
My family and I visited Promentary Point where my fourth grade history told me that it was the place that the last spike was placed in1869 to connect the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and so create a continental railroad. It was quite an accomplishment, indicated, as we drove past, by how long were the graded stone bedways so that the train would not have to rise or fall too quickly as well as all those ties and rails. A marker at the exhibit showed that the information of the event was sent by telegraph to Omaha and points East, including President Grant in Washington, D.C. I was also impressed by the arid land. It was desolate and windy and with vast vistas. Not a task without hardy people and careful planning. I also remembered in the fourth grade, where I seem to have learned a lot of things, the quick development of communications. The Pony Express had lasted for eighteen months so people could travel in 1860 and 1861 from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. The continental telegraph system, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., was completed in 1861 in Salt Lake City and the pinnacle of these three amazing developments in the Eighteen Sixties was the continental railway itself, which I have heard was not significantly interfered with by the Indians because by that time the Indians in the area were largely pacified.
Read MoreThe Trip West
Alister Cooke, the Englishman who had become an American citizen, was well known as the host of “Omnibus”, a fine book on the Alger Hiss case, and a long time letter on America to the BBC. Once he explained that to understand America, you had to see that America was not a nation but a continent. That quip came to my mind this week because my daughter in law drove me from Brooklyn, New York, to Salt Lake City, my daughter in law’s ancestral home and the new permanent residence for their family including me. It is the start, for me, of a great adventure, the short take of my travel showing how much its topography and agriculture certainly make America a continent. We moved from the granite rocked hills of the East, it's very filled treescapes changing with its fall colors, to a spectacular view of Iowa, flat and filled with quite clearly prosperous corn farms, their main house and farm buildings shiny and up to date, and at one point, a spectacularly sunny day having low slung clouds for a hundred miles that made the sky take up seven eights of the landscape, as if this were a Modernist painting, and then to the endless plains in Nebraska, ever more desolate and most of Wyoming unpeopled, but giving rise to spectacular and for me unfamiliar sedimentary rocks and striated hills that continued on to the Salt Lake City Basin.
Read More