Rahm Emanuel, when he was Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, said “No crisis should be wasted”. What he meant was that when there is a legislative moment where there is an urgency and general willingness to act, measures should be added to the package of other measures that are a long time part of the leadership’s agenda. That is what happened with the passage yesterday of the American Recovery Act. No Republicans joined to aid the Democrats, truthfully saying that many of the measures had nothing to do with coronavirus relief but were part of long time Democratic wish lists, but some of the Democrats did not waver too much from the bill, except for eliminating the fifteen dollar minimum wage and forgiving student loans, and did approve of provisions that could be considered radical in a liberal way in that they moved forward major programs to expand entitlements so as to provide a more substantial way of life for all citizens and particularly those who were all but the rich, the rich not needing the assistance. Biden’s law is incremental but substantial, a firm way whereby economic situations do not interfere in people achieving their life, liberty and quest for happiness. From a Liberal point of view, this is the greatest advance since the New Deal, and Democrats from Bernie Sanders to John Manchin are impressed by the audacity, even if Larry Summers says that the package of money is so large that it will lead to inflation. The U. S. has had no inflation since the late Seventies, which is two generations ago, and the Federal Reserve has the ability and the power to squeeze out any inflation should it arise. Look at the solid policy accomplishments rather than speculation.
Read MoreShakespearean Excess
Among those authors that have contributed to “the great works of the Western imagination”, the position of Shakespeare is well known and assured, however much his plays require allowances that need not be granted to other authors, whether they work in drama or in poetry or in novels. Other great works are complete in themselves, benefiting from an exquisite unification of their parts though a generic device of the author’s own choosing. The device of a journey through hell and then purgatory and heaven supplies a unity for the stories Dante, the character, has told to him and the various awful settings in which those often first person narratives take place. Indeed, the device, the architecture of the afterlife, is the most memorable conceit the author Dante leaves us with, far more telling than the stories of major and minor miscreants and the poetry of the description of those people and places. For his part, Chaucer crafts tales that are gems of multilayered meanings and intersections of plot motifs and narrative devices, those arranged in a format, the journey of travelers, which need not strain for unity or overall dramatic structure, even if one can claim that, indeed, there is an arc in “The Canterbury Tales”, moving them, one might say, from concerns of everyday life to matters of the soul. Certainly, Milton is always full of his own Miltonic seriousness, clearly a presence that combines the author’s personality with a form for his artistic presentation. Mark Van Doren found this a weakness. Milton never gave you a breather, was always high minded. Van Doren liked Cervantes for taking time to provide bathroom breaks for his characters. I like the redactors of the Old Testament who never let on to whether their characters (Ruth, David, Joseph) ever themselves caught on to the complexity of their own motivations and their own situations. That is the unity of tone, more important than is the intermittent presence of God, that holds the narrative books of the Old Testament together.
Read MoreWhy Jane Austen Loves Romance
Love stories about the adventure of courtship and love are so popular, such a standard sub-genre of the genre of domestic histories, that people think it has always been the case. Yes, there are sexual and lustful couplings as well as fits of passion in the Bible and in Greek and Roman romance but there was something new that happened in the early Nineteenth Century, rightly beginning with what is called the Romantic Period, that does engage people with love and courtship as being a pivotal matter, as is elaborated by Goethe’s Werther, by Mozart’s trilogy of “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Così Fan Tutti” and “Don Giovanni'', all dedicated to the idea that love was revolutionary in that it unsettled social relationships and also made love independent of ordinary social relationships, nevertheless until that time everyone understanding that people were still attracted to but opposed to the lovers in Dante because the two are entwined but wafted about by the currents of the wind, and so therefore not the right way to be. Jane Austen, for her part, is preoccupied in every one of her books with how people will create a marriage out of elective affinities, as Goethe put it, rather than for some other reason or to deal with some other subject so as to fill out a novel. Jane Austen could have written about the improvement of agriculture, as was indeed a social development in the area of which he lived as well as a theme of the time, or the state of politics, about which her mentor William Shakespeare had more than dabbled and whose contemporary perturbations, as with the Warren Hastings Impeachment, Austen had followed. But instead she did focus on this new found topic of romance, which just a few generations ago Samuel Johnson had only gingerly advanced the idea that people should consider how well they can get along with the people they marry rather than just the fact that they might carry with them property or wealth or social position. And here Jane Austen is presenting the aim of her stories as treating marriage as people so deeply emotionally involved with their spouses so as to be the be all and end all of their purposes in life, however much the pursuit of romantic happiness has to overcome many hurdles of disparate wealth or personality. The pursuit of happiness, that Eighteenth Century idea, had been limited, in the early Nineteenth Century, to the pursuit of romance. How did this happen to a person remarkably circumspect about the traditions of society and who embodied a Conservative political philosophy which led her to believe that people, like as not, were better off to marry to people of their own class rather than try to cross over as spouses with people of different social backgrounds?
Read MoreModern Taboos
Taboos are usually associated with ancient ways, sometimes religious, whereby people are separated with one another because they are so horrified by their physical or social conditions. Women were separated into their huts during their periods because the women were regarded as unclean, possibly because, as has been said, that women have a wound that never heals. Jews and Muslims did not eat pork perhaps because it was diseased but more likely because it separated these groups of people from other groups of people. Taboos are therefore irrational in that they are responses to fear and without the need to explain why these taboos are. Durkheim updated that idea when he said that people ostracized or did worse to people who behaved differently rather than violated rituals when people violated norms as to sexual practices, beliefs and, as Goffman added, personal disfigurement.
I want to suggest a different way to understand the way peoples are separated from other groups of people in the modern way but this time for reasons that are very rational. People are separated by keeping secret to the deviants that they are not pretty or handsome, that they are not very able at their work, or that even if they are just not very nice people. These verbal separations are accomplished so as to provide people with respect, so as not to hurt them, and so become or remain part of the community at large, and so is a progressive rather than a deeply unnecessary set of practices.
Read MoreThe Department of Justice
Merrick Garland will need all the intelligence and judicial discernment his supporters say he has, as well as a theoretical perspective his prior roles have not required, so that Garland will be successful as Attorney General because the policies to be implemented by him will be the most important of the issues of the Biden Administration after that of the coronavirus Recovery Act and what comes right after that, which will probably be some deal on immigration. Biden is correct in picking Garland to deal with some of the most controversial issues Biden will have to deal with. Here are three of them: what to do with prosecutions of Trump and his henchmen; the legislation concerning police violence and voter disenfranchisement; and the legislation concerning social media. All three of them fall into the hands of the Justice Department because criminal justice, voting rights and anti-trust are part of their responsibilities.
Read MoreMy First Vaccine Shot
I got my first vaccine shot yesterday, as you oldsters probably already had before me. It was done in what is called "The Salt Palace'', which is in downtown Salt Lake City. It is a convention center of gigantic proportions that was built in 1995 and seems to have taken its inspiration from an airport terminal. It had very long hallways with properly spaced chairs between so that all the people waiting for their appointments to start at ten a.m. business could sit while they were waiting, quite considerate of the fact that many elderly people can’t wait standing for a long time. Everything was well organized. I was ushered into the Grand Ballroom where one person promptly went over the paperwork and then shifted to a table where I got my shot and then went to another place to wait for fifteen minutes to see if I had a reaction. All of the people at work, from those at the start to guide you where to go, or at the end to tell you to go home, were all perky and friendly, something I much appreciated, anxious that something in the process might go wrong because of the paperwork or the injection. Nothing did.
Read MoreThe Crisis in Education
All institutions are always in a state of crisis. The economy has to adjust every generation or so to new products, a changing work force, and new ways of raising capital. The airline industry has to find today ways to work out of the problems created by high union contracts, unregulated competition, terrorism, and high oil prices just as it had to find a way out of the cluster of problems that arose after World War II: how to increase the passenger base; how to absorb Army Air Corps bases as civilian airports; how to stake out routes. Medicine switches from being office based to hospital based, from treating infections to treating organ diseases and cancers. Institutions are never just on the cusp between one era and another. The ground shifts so quickly that an era of medicine or industry is only a metaphor for the fact that some features of an institution may coexist for a while together even if one or another of those features will change for any number of reasons.
Education is an institution that is also always changing. Education, however, is described as in a state of crisis rather than merely in the process of responding to the next challenge. That is because education always falls short of the goals it and other institutions of social life set for it. Doctors may be required to treat but they are not required to cure diseases regarded as incurable; generals are expected to win wars, not to put an end to war. Teachers, on the other hand, are expected to provide, as the New York State Court of Appeals has held, “a sound basic education” for every young person, without defining what that would mean, though the phrase would seem to mean, if it has any meaning at all, that every young person will have learned enough to hold down a middle class occupation, regardless of the abilities of the child. Education is, in general, so grand a thing in conception that its goals always outstrip the ability of the institution to meet those goals. The goals of education are no less than to make every member of society economically productive, intellectually inquisitive, morally responsible, socially conscious, and psychologically mature.
Read MoreThe Insurrection as a Great Event
How do we know when great events have occurred, when something happens which is of great consequence, the road of history having taken one fork rather than another? Sometimes there are announcements and celebrations and ceremonies. Neville Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was at a state of war with Germany on Sept. 1, 1939. FDR announced there was a state of war with Japan at a joint session of Congress on Dec. 8, 1941. There were crowds of people in Times Square on V-E Day. Bells rang when the Declaration of Independence was announced and read at numerous crowds. Great events are also proclaimed at technological events. There were fireworks when the Brooklyn Bridge opened, and crowds of people crossed it in celebration at the new marvel. People cheered and were itself a celebration when Edison opened up the Pearl St. station in lower Manhattan and so began the Electric Age. There was a ceremonial golden spike hammered in by the last link between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific to commemorate the opening of the railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
Read MoreSchool Integration and School Effectiveness
This is a sad story. It is the story of the failure of the promise to equalize the outcomes between black and white students in the years after segregation ended. The irony was that the desegregation of schools was supposedly to be for that end, and was the clarion call for the Civil Rights Movement in the Fifties and Sixties, that emblemized by the Norman Rockwell painting of the little Ruby Bridges being escorted into a New Orleans elementary school by burly protectors. So many other changes in race relations did change. A Black middle class and a Black professional class has entered the ranks of doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs. There are numerous bBlack politicians in that the percentage of Black congresspeople is about the same as that of the population at large even though there are, at the moment, only three Black Senators, but then there has been a Black President and, currently, a Black Vice President. The Secretary of Defense is a Black man. Perhaps most important as a measure of normalizing Black people in the United States, is that Black women are featured in fashion magazines and that there are a large number of Black people as reporters and news talk hosts and commentators. But not so with education.
Read MoreMarjorie Taylor Greene
I know those whom I respect and with whom I can discuss political matters who nonetheless disagree with my Biden Liberal-centrist perspective. It takes a little more to understand or try to discuss matters with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who most of us dismiss as a kook or a laughing stock, what with her Jewish lasers from space attacking California so as to start forest fires and so make available lands for high speed train travel. Let us compare the differences in the kinds of people who are anti-Biden and we will find that even Greene can be placed within an ideology, which can be defined as a highly articulated set of propositions about politics and society, or else placed, like Greene, as just a not very articulate view even if some intellectuals can fashion thoughts and feelings into an ideology or turn an ideology into sentiments that do not have much thought about them, Biden as well as anyone else subject to the back and forth of feelings and ideas. None of us can escape some broad view of what constitutes the political and social landscape. Even my uneducated father believed that the gentiles were, in general, out to get the Jews, but that the United States was pretty safe for the Jews, and my students, who thought themselves too uninformed to go out and vote, had a sense, living in the Northeast, that there should be racial justice and protections for gays and lesbians as just a matter of common decency.
Read More"The Third Man"
Nineteen Forty-Nine was a great year for movies, one that earned the ad of a decade later that “movies were better than ever”. Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” won the Best Oscar, the awards trying to believe that the most quality movies were also the most popular, but the year also included the musical “On the Town”, a blockbuster musical by the young people of Comden and Green and Leonard Bernstein, “Pinkie”, a movie about a mulatto girl trying to live in the South that showed some of the sorrows of segregation, “The Treasure of Sierra Madre”, which was a story as tightly drawn as a Chaucer story, and even the awful “My Friend Irma” remarkable only because it introduced Martin and Lewis, who stole the show with Martin’s suave deliveries, including his signature ability to caress the microphone, and Jerry Lewis, who was not so much imitating a cripple as much as imitating a nerd before there was such a term. It seems that the movies had moved on beyond World War II to pick up the new issues of the post-war world, such as suburbanization in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” which was produced in 1948, and even in the 1949 and wonderfully comic “I Was a Male War Bride”, where the women were seen as independent minded and responsible and sensible. Cary Grant was the comic foil to Ann Southern’s straight man, the opposite of Burns and Allen, a duo from the era of the Thirties, where Allen played the ditzie foil. Movies were into social issues, such as the overdrawn “Gentleman’s Agreement”. The weekly movie goer didn’t need to read the papers. Those who tuned into the dream factory had plenty of real issues to chew on. The major studios were at work with socially significent stuff, not just with film noir detective and crime stories that portrayed dark emotions shot mostly at night, such as “The Postman Rings Twice” or “Sorry, Wrong Number”, the genre seeming profound because the protagonists were quirky as well as bad. (But, then again, “Richard III” would qualify as a film noir piece.)
Read MoreThe Insurrection Moment
The insurrection can readily be appreciated as a historical moment because it was an unprecedented one. The U. S. Capitol had never been invaded by Americans, even if Washington and New York were assaulted by Bin Laden and, much previously, by the British. Not even our current pandemic is unprecedented, though not in anyone’s memory. Other such events are historical because they are momentous. These include Pearl Harbor and D Day and Antietam, all wartime occasions which altered American history, just as had economic events such as the industrialism of the Andrew Carnegie generation and the Great Depression and suburbanization in the Fifties and Sixties. Certain other events which seem momentous when they happened did not alter the American landscape. That includes the destruction of the World Trade Center, which, however, did not seem to have significantly altered the New York landscape, it instead becoming just office buildings, now filled with family based coops and the rest of the paraphernalia that go along with urban life rather than a permanent mark of devastation, something even Germany could overcome even if what abides in it is its scar of history.
Values
The Classic comic books version of the short story “The Man Without a Country” presented Philip Nolan’s staterooms in one or another United States warship, him forever exiled from having said he hated the United States when he had been part of the insurrection by which Aaron Burr tried to wrest the trans-Appalachian mountains from the United States, these later of his staterooms festooned with banners and flags and portraits of Presidents that showed him as forever pining for his country, this a sentiment appropriate when Edward Everett Hale wrote the story in the midst of the Civil War. It struck me then and remains so that flags and banners were not the proper ways in which to display tribute to the idea of the United States. That was because these visual effects were present in all nations and no more than an icon of the team of the National Football League. Every nation has banners and so those are just lapel buttons rather than explanations of why someone would feel worthy of the nation for which it stands. What makes its images, ideas and expressions distinctive?
Read More"Dark Victory"
There is a group portrait of George V lying in his death bed in a gigantic bed and a beautiful quilt surrounded by clergy, doctors, politicians and family waiting for him to expire. Many of the people in the room are identifiable so as to document who were present at the event. All they did was to stand around and wait for the end, one of those in attendance to go up to the King and confirm him as having died. What was also worth noting at the time, which was 1936 and when Great Britain was one of the most advanced of medical science, was that there were no machines to intervene between the patient and the audience, when some fifteen or twenty years later there were oxygen masks and monitors that provided vital signs and beeping noises to accompany a patient who was in the process of dying. A clergyman was there at the earlier moment so as to give a benediction, while the clergyman in “M*A*S*H*” is perfunctory, given aside by the doctors laboring on the wounded and justified by his other services as someone who aid comfort to the stricken for as much time as can be spared from the more important duties. The painting of George V showed the state of the relation between his doctors and his death and how much things had changed by a generation later. I am interested in the nature of the patient at the time and whether the role of the patient has changed since that time to the present. My evidence is drawn from that time, the film “Dark Victory” appearing in 1938, a fiction able to convey what are the facts of social relations regarded as inevitable at the time, just as present day fiction attests to the fact that everyone can hook up on their i-phones while earlier generations had to rely on telephone calls, as in “Sorry, Wrong Number” as a fact that could become a gimmick in a melodrama. What, if anything, changed in being a patient since the Thirties, which are now eighty years away?
Read MoreThe Political Bubble
Political thinkers are deeply divided about whether people are inside the bubble in that their political thoughts and actions are anchored in their actual social life or else that politics take place as a result of what is outside the bubble, politics a circling cyclorama of people and ideas churned out by policies, doctrines, and people who live in the reality of the media. This division does not line up with Conservatives and Liberals. DeTocqueville was a Conservative who thought that politics was grounded in the town hall democracy whereby local citizens learned to compromise with one another so as to get a local road created so that they could bring their produce to market. Marxists, for their part, thought that people were grounded by the actual conditions of their labor. Lazarsfeld political polling was based on the idea that voters were grounded in the demographics of their situation. Republicans were grounded in small town bourgeois life and Democrats were grounded in their working class situations rather than the working class allegiances that were derived from their situations. Thinkers of those who opposed these views took the idea that politics took place on the outside of their lives. Machaevelli’s view was that people in power had to instill both fear and love so as to get people to accept power and so that meant that these feelings were engendered by the people in power, on their balconies and through their marches, rather than by intruding with very many people so as to create and sustain order. Most politics is the theatre of politics. Ortega Y Gasset thought that the mass of people were dissociated from their structural ties so that they could roam around and riot as they will, their political activities independent of their allegiances or interests. Lord Bryce, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, thought that public opinion had come to dominate Democratic societies in that whatever were the popular views of the moment, the fads and catchphrases of the people, would motivate people to use their vote to get their way and effectuate policies. Closer to home, people are understood as responding to Donald Trump because they find him somehow attractive and compelling, and so are responding to the outside of the bubble, even if their own conditions are not so bad, or else must be responding from grievances, whether economic or cultural, as the reasons for why they get up off the coach to become engaged with Trumpian politics.
Read MoreInsurrection
Today is Friday and it was just two days ago that Donald Trump encouraged people to invade the halls of Congress. Joe Biden said while the onslaught of Congress was taking place that a President’s words mattered for good or for ill and so he asked President Trump to tell the rioters in Congress to cease their activities. Some hours later, Trump said that they should go home even though he loved those people who were engaged in the violence, which was clearly a half-hearted condemnation of violence. The intruders did not achieve their objective to delay very long the certification of the Electoral College vote because the Congress reconvened and met through the night to finish the task. Joe Biden, who is not an eloquent man, did offer a word that had resonance during his remarks. He said that what happened in Congress was an “insurrection”. (Sen. Mitt Romney used the same term, as did Sen. Chuck Schumer, in very short order, and the term has now been used by many others.) The events at the Capital were not just a riot or a disturbance, but an insurrection, and we should think what that term means.
Read MoreNostalgia and History
Nostalgia is the modern form of pastoral in that it gives an emotional expression to much of contemporary historical consciousness. It is no more debased than pastoral itself in that it shares with all pastoral a fawning view of time past. It differs from other forms of pastoral in that the usual pastoral connection of violence, death, simplicity and virtue to a bucolic time is made instead to the sense of time past that cannot at all be remote because it is a time that is still can be remembered as having been real. Nostalgia cannot predate what happened before a person is born though I can be nostalgic about the Thirties in that I can be fanciful about the times that were close enough to be in my time to think them as similar to my times.
Read MoreOrdinary Painting
Here are three oil paintings in the European representational tradition that have found their ways to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. They are not particularly good paintings and they are worth thinking about so as to help understand why oil painting in its representational mode is such a satisfying experience, ones that give pleasure not because the artist is clever or insightful or with superb technique, but because painting itself in these of its genres has a power of its own. These paintings can be best appreciated for what it is to be paintings.
Read MoreObama's Victory Lap
Early reviewer’s of Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land”, his memoir of the first two years of his Presidency, found the book to be candid because Obama mused on his uncertainties about his personal and political decisions. Actually, Obama is not at all forthright in this book. He plays it very close to the vest, a kind of victory lap where he thanks all the people that helped him on his ascent to the Presidency and never clearly says what was his motivation to drive towards the Presidency. He acts as if it happened to him, arriving at the point that his speech at Kerry’s nomination in 2004 that gave him an opportunity to be in the spotlight and for people to see him as having a voice, and then coming to understand that the United States Senate was too narrow a place in which to enact public policy, and then finally deciding to run so that some little Black boy would see that he could emulate Obama. That rings false in that Obama seems to have had political ambitions from the start, he an up-and-comer in the Illinois Senate, just waiting to make his move. His greatest candor is his life long apology for how politics had made Michelle's life more difficult, as if becoming President were not a worthwhile achievement and as if she could not have known early on that he was ambitious. Harry Truman was not ambitious, but Obama certainly was. Why else had he insisted on being only a part time professor of the University of Chicago Law School? Obama, in his memoir, does not explain himself.
Read MoreFirst Contacts
“Gulliver’s Travels” is a first contact novel. Obviously inspired by the Age of Discovery, it creates four occasions during which a traveler comes to a culture that he had not known existed and which did not know that he and his kind existed. Never mind the political satire; Swift is telling four stories of how cultures collide. The small people, the Lilliputians, figure out how to tame him, because power is all that interests them, and he allows them to believe he will not hurt them, which is certainly the case, because he has no reason to. And so they treat him as an admiral, their own Othello. Then the very big people in the second island he visits figure out how they can use him, which is as an entertainment and a pet, which he finds disgusting, but where he has no choice because any one of them could easily crush him. He is too small, as Aristotle would say, to be part of the arrangement whereby people of relatively the same size have to form a polity lest they can choose sides against one another. Then, on the third island, Gulliver meets a passel of fantasists who think they can improve humanity but create, instead, disastrous results, such as old people who linger on into extended debility, and then, in the fourth island, he meets the horses, who try to treat him as a human being, as someone with moral dignity, and this is the most unsettling of all his encounters because he can’t live up to their expectations, and so returns home a broken man. As critics have long argued, the four alternative worlds are a sequence, the first three of them as inferior to the life in Great Britain, their home culture, because each of them are parodies of England, and the fourth culture is much superior to his own in that people have resigned themselves or else achieved a kind of serenity because they are not ambitious, the previous three cultures dominated, in turn, by power, pleasure and fantasy. What is clear is that other previously unknown other societies are either superior or inferior to our present society, and so that is just the way it is.
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