Eric The Blue

Walter Mondale, 1928-2021

 

I like this video of Walter Mondale, presiding over the Senate in his capacity as vice president, announcing in January of 1981, before a joint session of Congress, the defeat of the Carter-Mondale ticket by Reagan-Bush. He laughs when reporting his own paltry electoral vote tally and the assembled members of Congress rise in a standing ovation as he jokes with the Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill.

"A landslide," says Mondale, "I did it!"

"Very impressive!" replies O'Neill. 

On every viewing I notice something new. Mondale, a college football player, is dwarfed by Tip O'Neill, who must have been quite a big man. Closest I can come to confirming this is that the Wikipedia article says he possessed "expansive appetites" before relating how, at a White House breakfast soon after Carter took office, O'Neill was appalled by the dainty fare served up by the abstemious new president. "You know," he said, addressing Carter, "we won the election." 

Probably the two most striking aspects of the clip—Mondale's self-deprecating humor and the evident affection with which colleagues of both parties regarded him—are related. The New York Times obit, published Monday, notes that talking himself up was for Mondale the hardest part of the job. To Washingtonians he must have seemed like proof The Prairie Home Companion was realistic. It's a little discouraging, but cosmically apt, that tributes have been sparse on account of his death coinciding with final arguments and then a verdict in the Chauvin trial.

Around fifteen years ago I was strap hanging one day on a crowded light rail car when through the fog of my public transportation consciousness it occurred to me that the older fellow sitting a few feet away directly in line with my blank gaze looked vaguely familiar. Yes, it was the former ambassador, senator, and vice president of the United States. He must have been on his way home from the airport—had a small suitcase sitting on one of those wheeled trolleys with him. You'd think—anyway, I'd think—someone like him might have had a driver pick him up from a VIP area of the airport. At least a cab. No, Mondale takes the train. Not really incognito either, unless you count a maroon U of M baseball cap pulled down pretty low over the eyes. He was sitting on one of those benches that face the aisle so there was no reason for me not to study him as he chatted amiably with the person next to him—a "staffer" of some kind, I guessed, but then the guy disembarked at the same station as I and Mondale travelled on. Probably started chatting with someone new. Not all Scandinavians are sullen. 

Flannery O'Connor on TV

Turned on the TV last night, thinking I'd watch some of the Twins game, probably all of it if the score was close, and saw that it had been "postponed." Since they're playing the Angels, and it doesn't rain a lot in Los Angeles, I was sufficiently suspicious to go to espn.com and, what do you know, we're sidelined for COVID: at least four cases among the team's traveling entourage, so not necessarily all ballplayers. No game today, either, and the next series, against the A's in Oakland, is also in doubt. I had recorded some episodes of Jeopardy, which is now airing at 1 in the morning on account of the Chauvin trial, but when trying to delete one I'd already seen I accidentally deleted all of them. Stone sober, I swear, just clumsy and inept. My next choice was a PBS "American Masters" show about Flannery O'Connor that I had also recorded—evidently during a weather event, considering the quality of the recording. Obviously I was determined to watch television.

I've been long interested in O'Connor and have written about her here, here, and here. She only lived to be 39, so it's not hard to read everything she wrote—my edition of The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor is 550 pages, in addition to which she wrote two short novels and some essays, collected in Mystery and Manners, that are mostly talks she gave on literary topics in order to get money. (Her fiction didn't sell much till after she was dead.) There is also a collection of her personal letters, published as The Habit of Being, that conveys a vivid personality, smart and funny, confident and opinionated, the confidence like the intelligence making the opinions you disagree with seem especially disagreeable. But frequently laugh-out-loud-while-reading-in-bed-in-an-empty-house funny. 

I've read it all, much of it more than once, and am almost embarrassed to say that I found the PBS show not just enjoyable but enlightening. It's impossible not to notice how many of O'Connor's stories feature a foolish, talkative, self-satisfied, older, white, southern woman. Though generally familiar with the details of her biography, I never made what now seems to me an obvious connection. O'Connor's dad died of lupus while she was a teenager. She was then stricken with the same disease at age 25. In her case, the disease was checked with drug treatments that had severe side effects, preeminently anemia and the softening of her bones, which restricted her mobility. In the years between college and the onset of lupus, she had attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, been a resident at the writer's colony Yaddo, lived in an  apartment in Manhattan and, later, with literary friends at their house in Connecticut. But at 25 she became suddenly and permanently too ill to live on her own. She moved back to Georgia and lived with her mother on a small farm just outside the town of Milledgeville. Quite a narrowing of her life! She'd been running with the smart set at the Iowa writer's workshop and then at Yaddo and New York City, where her friends included for instance Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick, and now here she is in rural Georgia, immobilized by illness, her mother her constant companion and caregiver. It's these circumstances that account for The Habit of Being, all the smart and entertaining letters that possess (it now occurs to me) a bit of a sad or plaintive undertone when one considers the recurring themes of "Write to me!" and "Come visit me!" as well as the detailed descriptions she sent to mutual friends of the letters she had received and the visits that did occur.

But here's the thing that I thought of, inexplicably for the first time. That foolish, talkative, self-satisfied, older, white southern woman who appears in story after story, filling it up with her prattle in the build-up to some ambiguous and often violent but also possibly revelatory event of theological import—it's Flannery O'Connor's mom. I mean the general tenor of the conversation, the topics that are discussed and the level of the discourse:

"People are certainly not nice like they used to be," said the grandmother. 

"A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said. "Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."

He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now. She said the way Europe acted you would think we were made of money and Red Sam said it was no use talking about it, she was exactly right.

Her mother is all over her letters; here is one of the earliest, but by no means unrepresentative, mentions:

My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took place over some Modern Library books that I had just ordered.

SHE: Mobby Dick. I've always heard about that.

ME: Mow-by Dick.

SHE: Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What's it about?

ME: An idiot.

Flannery was too ill to leave the house and listen to people talk in the cafes and beauty parlors of Milledgeville. It's the voice of her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, yakking on and on, and on and on and on and on, in those stories she was well enough to write. The daughter was a superb ventriloquist. Did the mother read what the daughter wrote? It seems impossible that she would have been too slow to recognize herself. I think the word the show used to describe their relationship was "difficult," or maybe "complicated." The leading elements of the complicatedness would have been love, dependence, and the grinding of teeth. Here's another passage; I enjoy them and they're not hard to find; just open The Collected Stores almost at random; if it's real close to the end of one, just page back a few and you'll find something like:

Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them for four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people.

Regina O'Connor ran the farm, which entailed hiring the help.

Now pitching. . . .

 

I went to bed last night after the grand slam in the bottom of the seventh made the Twins' deficit 3-9 and so missed Willians Astudillo's pitching performance in the bottom of the eighth. You can watch it above. Changing "speeds" and painting the corners, he retired the Angels 1-2-3 on seven pitches. Worked quickly, too. Two of the outs were liners to the third baseman and the third was a 3-hopper to shortstop. As honest pitchers have confessed, just throw it over the plate and batters will get themselves out. Plus, it's not as if there aren't seven guys with gloves standing behind you within the right angle where batters must hit the ball. 

The great ones always make it look easy.

In another strong pitching performance last night, Max Scherzer, of the Nationals, allowed four base runners—two hits and two walks—over seven innings, no runs, 10 strikeouts. He remains winless this season. The only run in last night's game scored on a solo homer in the ninth. 

I wish I had seen Bob Gibson pitch more, and I wonder whether the youth of today will wish they'd paid more attention to Scherzer. Probably not: youth and baseball are wasted on the young. Scherzer is a machine, however. Someone recently set out on social media his road-home splits over the course of his career so far.

	Home	Away
Games Started	184	185
Innings Pitched	1182.0	1181.1
Win/Lose Record	87-45	88-48
Strikeouts	1395	1398
Hits Allowed	979	979
Opponent BA	.223	.224
Opponent OPS	.656	.656
Hits as a Batter	39	39

Coincidence accounts for some of this, and perhaps an artful selection of statistical categories, but still. 

The news, alas

It's convenient for the police that the people with whom they come in contact self-select for having criminal law problems: a built-in excuse for any breach of professionalism, as well as instances of shocking incompetence and brutality. He was high and had passed a fake 20 (so I strangled him till he was dead). He had expired tags and an outstanding warrant (so I meant to tase him, only by mistake I shot him instead). A 13-year-old with a gun was running from me, so I chased and yelled for him to drop it and show his hands, which he did (and then I shot him anyway). 

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Odd how people who insist they need guns for self-defense, including against a tyrannical government, reflexively defend government agents who kill people.

The same author, John Hinderaker, has an even more recent article that runs beneath the headline "Voters say: election fraud is a problem." Better headline would be: "Wingnuts cite their own delusions in support of voter suppression laws." 

Another thing that seems odd is the way in which Republicans insist Democrats favor immigration as a means of recruiting new voters and "consolidating power." For some reason, they seem to think that brown-skinned immigrants who are disproportionately Catholic with conservative social views would never vote for them, the "conservative" party. It's almost as if Republican views, on this topic and that one, don't hang together very well—unless one is so bold as to introduce the topic of race into the equation. But they assure us race has nothing to do with it. In that case, instead of suppressing votes, they should be sensing opportunity and trying to persuade these new voters to choose them. It's the American way, ffs. 

The Stephen Hawking industry

I've sometimes wondered—had to wonder, being in no position to judge—whether Stephen Hawking's status as a best-selling author, and the difficult circumstances of his life, have caused the public to overrate his contributions to science. Now I see there is a book that takes up this question, Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, by Charles Seife, reviewed here by the estimable James Gleick. Short answer to my question is, as the title suggests, Yes, Hawking has been successfully hawked to the public as a scientific genius. It wasn't perhaps a real hard sell. There's more romance to some scientific topics than others, and Hawking's interests, cosmology and black holes, are among the sexiest. It also helps to have some kind of "hook," a personal tic or oddity that captures attention. With Einstein, the hair, suggesting he was too lost in ruminations and calculations to go to the barber. And it's true, so far as my understanding extends, that relativity "came out of his head" rather than being derived from the process one learns about in school concerning hypotheses that are then tested by experimentation, &c. Einstein just figured out in his head what must be true, and it seemed super weird, but the experimenters confirmed he was right: a triumph of pure thought.

Hawking's analogous trait would have been the disease—motor neuron disease to Brits but what we Americans call Lou Gehrig's Disease—that disabled him to such a degree that any image of him might conjure the phrase "pure thought." His body couldn't do much besides keep his brain alive. That such a man should then be the successor to Newton and Einstein is a pretty good story—so good as to be readily believed even though the truth is in quite another direction. It's not that Hawking wasn't a good scientist. The work he is known for, however, was achieved in the 1960s, before disease had crippled his body, and it's probably the case that disability hindered his scientific work: by 1966 he could no longer write or type, and even the math that I can do is abetted considerably by writing, drawing, diagramming, doodling. Hawking could not hold a pencil. The notion that his genius was a kind of compensation for having been stricken with a dreadful disease is mostly a heap of rubbish. What might be thought of as the Stephen Hawking Industry arose at the intersection of science, which he was good at, and his need to support a "life style" that required, for example, round-the-clock nursing attention, personal aides, medical devices and gadgetry, a voice box synthesizer—the comparatively healthy cannot begin to fathom what was required to sustain him. Perhaps the most memorable sentence of Gleick's review states that, while Hawking "considered suicide," he "had no way to accomplish it." He wasn't well enough to start a car in a garage, jump from a roof, shoot himself, cut his wrists, swallow pills or poison. Instead, he participated, to a degree, in the monetizing of celebrity. He might have told interviewers that he was no Newton or Einstein, but he cultivated these kinds of comparisons, and his "modesty" could be viewed as part of the campaign. 

A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, is chiefly responsible for having created a science superstar. More than 25 million copies have sold, and it has generated the predictable commercial offspring—a movie, an opera, a tenth anniversary edition, an expanded and illustrated edition, an abridged sequel called A Briefer History of Time. Hawking's original 100-page manuscript was, in Gleick's summary of Seife's assessment, dull and "uneven," alternately assuming the reader to be a physicist and a middle school student. It was then improved considerably, less by Hawking than by his graduate students and editors at Bantam. The editing was done with an eye on putting Hawking, not science, at the center. Ka-ching!

Some biographies are in the mode of Life-of-the-Saintly-Genius, and another variety takes an equal pleasure in knocking down the scaffolding on which some supposed giant is perched. This one, assuming Gleick's review of it to be apt, corrects an established version resembling the former tendency without descending into the latter pit. Hawking, in the revision, is famous for the wrong reasons, which is not to say that he was a fraud or that his life's story isn't full of human interest. 

Good boy!

Whew boy, kitty hospice care rather draining work. Thought I was holding up pretty well but then the kids lost it, followed by me. Here they are, happier days: not long ago, actually. 

David Foster Wallace had some memorable speech acts on the topic of John Updike: nothing but "a penis with a thesaurus," for example, and I think he was also responsible for the rhetorical question, "Has the s.o.b. ever had an unpublished thought?" I'm sure he must have, but, to the point DFW was making, Updike wrote the only poem in The Norton Anthology of American Literature about the death of a pet:

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded with love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

The only one I know on this topic but what more is there to say about it? I knew the time had come when I found Diddles prostrate in his litter box. Getting in had used up all his strength. 

 

As the world turns

My dad's bank has alerted my sister and me of odd activity, and this morning, by text message, she informed me that it's about as bad as can be imagined:

My impulse was to get in my car and drive forty miles in order to perform acts that never occurred to Goneril or Regan, but then I thought of ten million times I'd asked him to play catch and ten million times that, instead of saying "Later" or "Not now" or "In a minute," he dropped whatever he was doing and got his glove. That was his real self. After 88 years the wires have gotten scrambled and the thieves and charlatans are descending upon him. Some people would say, "Sad!" No doubt he failed to uncheck the box and has unwittingly agreed to recurring payments. 

Yet the earth, spinning on its axis, continues its trip 'round the sun and, yes, Aaron Rodgers is hosting Jeopardy even as Trump raids my inheritance. Today's final question (or answer) involved identifying two of the three South American national capitals with a metro population of more than 10 million. None of the contestants could do any better than I, meaning: they named Buenos Aires and somewhere else that was wrong. The two that no one knew or guessed were Lima and Bogota. The whole continent is something of a mystery. Anyone who can, on a blank map showing only national borders, correctly distinguish Paraguay from Uruguay should work for the State Department—and supplement their income by going on Jeopardy. 

62, woke and with-it

To prove that White men in their 60s can be woke and with-it, I've started fasting each day from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. This is not just a Lenten thing. No nothing during those hours, a full quarter of my life. Nutella, Oreos, vegetables, animal products (including ice cream and beef tongue tacos from Taco Taxi), nonalcoholic beverages—all strictly forbidden, I need to "cleanse." 

Also, thinking of becoming a Buddhist even though I have ugly feet and don't like sandals.