Eric The Blue

David Copperfield: the social and legislative background, very condensed

Reading David Copperfield, it seems natural to wonder about child labor laws in 19th-century England. David is 10 when he goes to work at the counting-house. I have a 10-year-old, or will in a few weeks. She's in the fourth grade and learning her "math facts" (I call them "multiplication tables"). That someone her age should go off by himself to work for wages seems incredible. But it wouldn't have to the people who first read David Copperfield, which was published serially over the period May 1849 to November 1850. When you type into Google "child labor laws England" and click on the first thing that looks promising, you soon read:

The campaign against child labour culminated in two important pieces of legislation—the Factory Act (1833) and the Mines Act (1842). The Factory Act prohibited the employment of children younger than nine years of age and limited the hours that children between nine and 13 could work. The Mines Act raised the starting age of colliery workers to 10.

A colliery is a coal mine. Just want to call attention to the verb in that first sentence, culminated, as if outlawing the employment of 9-year-olds in factories was the crown jewel of progressive legislation. Imagine the "moderates" during the debate in the House of Commons: "Well, I can live with the prohibition against 9-year-olds, but, once you're 10, big government should not be telling you or your employer how many hours you can work." 

The hateful Mr Murdstone wasn't breaking any laws by sending David away to the counting-house.

Between the passage of the Mines Act and the first installment of David Copperfield, Marx's literary partner Friedrich Engels had published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Of course we all know his criticisms went too far. Quite an unfavorable portrait of the capitalists! Not really sure why Marx and Engels are blackguards and Dickens is loved. 

Maps and elections

 

For those interested in data and electoral politics, the above map is a bright, shiny object capable of holding the attention for hours. It shows, at the county level, the result of the 2016 presidential election, but rather than reddish hues meaning Trump won and bluish ones meaning Clinton did, the colors are linked to which candidate did better compared to the previous (2012) presidential election result. That is why, for example, Utah is almost entirely blue: Trump won Utah, but in 2012 the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, outperformed him in all but one of the state's counties.

The map tends to confirm the conventional wisdom about how Trump was able to win. Maybe I've been helping with too much seventh grade math, but it seems easy to make out a "Trump parabola" extending northwesterly to the Dakotas and northeasterly to Maine from an inflection point in western Tennessee. That curve encloses a huge area, almost all of it red—and a significant portion dark red, indicating Trump did far better than Romney had. The so called "blue wall" states flipped by Trump—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin—are, except for a sliver of the most easterly portion of Pennsylvania, embraced entirely within the parabola. 

Polling suggests Biden is on the cusp of making the updated version of this map look very different. We tend to focus on the polls of "battleground states," but maybe one of Trump's worst recent results came from South Dakota, where the Argus Leader/KELO TV poll found him leading Biden by 51 to 40 percent. That's a safe lead, but in 2016 Trump carried South Dakota by 62 to 32 percent. Even if the final result is somewhat more favorable to Trump, much of South Dakota will likely be shades of blue, like Utah above, in the updated map. The state's most populous county, Minnehaha, which is home to Sioux Falls, might well be pretty dark blue: Trump carried it last time by 14 points, but, in the Argus/KELO poll, Biden is actually ahead, though narrowly, in the Sioux Falls metro. 

The above map is a dismal sight for Democrats, but at least across the Sun Belt, North Carolina to southern California by way of Texas, there isn't much dark red. Moreover, if you have a sharp geographical eye, the prevailing light pink of the Sun Belt is interrupted by splotches of blue at the locations of big cities. Arizona doesn't have a lot of counties, but several are blue, including Maricopa, which is the one shaped like an L rotated 90 degrees clockwise. It's home to the Phoenix metro, where well over half of the votes in a statewide election are cast. Romney won Maricopa County by 12 points and the state by 10; Trump won Maricopa by 3 points and the state by 3.5; Biden is currently leading in polls of Arizona, mainly because he's ahead in Maricopa. Look at Georgia: almost entirely pink and red except for a substantial cluster of blue around Atlanta. I'm surprised by the blue in the Texas panhandle, but go southeast from there through some red and you get to a group of five contiguous counties, two light blue, three pretty dark blue—that's the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, a comparative treasure trove of voters. The blue blob of counties on the Gulf of Mexico is Houston and Galveston. From there, go west across the pink till you hit the middle of a kind of walkway of blue counties, northeast to southwest: you're on the interstate connecting Austin to San Antonio. 

That the Sun Belt looks so different from the Trump parabola suggests two basic strategies for the 2020 Democratic nominee. One would be to recapture Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by turning the interior of the parabola blue. The second would be to accelerate the existing trend in the Sun Belt by exciting the region's younger and browner voters, and by juicing turnout in the growing metros. There's no rule against both, but different candidates were better suited for one task or the other, and the Dems chose the guy best fit to win in the parabola. Biden's campaign has focused on that task, to the point of frustrating the likes of Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro, who think the Democrats might be leaving 54 electoral votes on the table in Georgia and Texas, not to mention three Senate seats on the ballot in those two states. On the other side of the argument, Biden's northern tier strategy has put even Ohio and Iowa in play.

Now we're a week from the last day of voting, when everyone tries to gauge where the two campaigns think they are based on where they go in the last days. The Biden campaign announced over the weekend that this week he'll be traveling to Georgia, and that Kamala Harris will be in Texas for the last day of early voting. The public polls indicate that the likely explanation for their travel itinerary is that they're safely ahead in Pennsylvania-Michigan-Wisconsin and that Georgia and Texas are within reach. Three other big Sun Belt states seem to be occupying a space between these two groupings: in North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, Biden leads, narrowly but consistently. 

The one thing that's virtually certain is that more Americans will vote for Biden. That assures us of exactly nothing, of course. In another week, after the Senate has confirmed Barrett and Biden has won the national vote by several million, Republican presidents will have made five of the last seven appointments to the Supreme Court even though the Democratic candidate for president won more votes in five of the six presidential elections conducted over the same period. 

Receiving medical care

I've had a couple skin cancers—the most common, least serious variety, but still, the whitecoats  are interested in me, so Friday I found myself sitting alone in one of those rooms, wearing only one of those "robes" and enjoying the sensation of the examination table's crinkly paper runner against my exposed backside. How long did I sit there before the dermatologist, a woman perhaps half my age, rapped unshyly at the door and entered? Impossible to say, on account of psychological aspects relating to judgment about the passage of time, but I can say with certainty that it was long enough so that before I got company the room's energy-saving motion detector had shut off the lights. In the dark, I maneuvered gingerly on the table in order to wave my hand in front of the switch, thereby reilluminating the room in antiseptic brightness. If they measured your blood pressure on these visits, pretty sure I'd have been hustled over to the ER. 

The doctor was covered up like you see in news spots aired from the hospital's coronavirus ward—a mask and a plastic shield and goggles. I could be off about her age, for the same reason you might misjudge an astronaut's weight. She had short sleeves, however, and her skin was very white and smooth. It seems that if dermatology is your specialty, you stay in the shade. Her first question related to my own habits in this regard, and my answer, shall we say, massaged the truth.  It seems like a game: she expects to be lied to, and asks only to make her point, so, since she'd made her point, I lied to her. It was somewhat of a relief when she began to look me over. At least I had something to do, following instructions: stand here, face that way, lay back, take your arm out of the sleeve, etc., etc. To stay out of the barbershop, I've given myself a military haircut, which she said made her job easier. One's groin does not typically suffer damage from the sun but I believe she copped a look anyway. Rather too frequently, it seemed, she would pause to study, under magnification, a square centimeter of blemished skin. Her thoroughness suggested she was determined to find cancer and I hated her for that. When finally admitting she'd failed, she spoke clinically, but I heard relievedly, and my hatred dissolved. Suddenly her thoroughness was a virtue. "Come back and see us in a year," she said, exiting.

I dressed with efficiency and, pitying the people looking serious behind their masks in the waiting room, got the hell out of there.

Minnesota races

The above depicts Cook Political Report's most recent "rating changes" in this year's roster of US House races. Of the twelve, eleven move in the Democrats' direction, and there is some local interest since two of the twelve are here in Minnesota.

Our first congressional district runs along the Iowa border from Wisconsin to South Dakota. It was represented for years by Tim Walz, who retired in 2018 in order to run for governor. No doubt there were some career calculations involved in Walz's decision: his reelection margins in the first district kept shrinking, and indeed a Republican, Jim Hagedorn, won the open seat in 2018 even as Democrats were gaining 40 seats from coast to coast. The district is older, white, and rural—just the kind of place that has been getting more and more Republican. In 2016, Trump carried the district by fifteen points and Walz by 50.4 to 49.6 over Hagedorn, who then won the race for the open seat two years later. Cook moves Hagedorn's reelection race from "lean Republican" to "tossup." 

The second congressional district is suburban and exurban territory to the south of Minneapolis/St. Paul: Burnsville, Eagan, Apple Valley, Lakeville, Farmington, and, at its southern extremity, Northfield. When the rural first district went for Hagedorn in 2018, the suburban second district gave the boot to radio talker Jason Lewis (who's now the Republicans' challenger to Tina Smith in our US Senate race) and elected Democrat Angie Craig. Cook moves Craig's reelection race from "lean Democrat" to "likely Democrat." 

Trump was supposedly targeting Minnesota—he lost here by less than two percent of the vote in 2016—but neither he nor Pence has visited for awhile and I haven't seen a Trump TV ad in weeks. Maybe I watch the wrong channels, or they can't transmit their ads into the People's Republic of South Minneapolis.  But Cook's analysis of these congressional races suggests another possibility: Trump has no chance in Minnesota and his campaign knows it. I'm a little suspicious of this conclusion, because I want it to be true, but, seriously, if Trump was going to have a chance here then Craig's race, not Hagedorn's, would be the tight one. The incumbent Republican congressman is struggling to be reelected in a district Trump carried by 15 points—unless he's been having an affair with a farm animal, that's a bad sign for your side, MAGA bros. And it seems broadly consistent with other measurements of public opinion. Minnesota's first congressional district is culturally and demographically indistinguishable from much of Iowa, where in 2016 Trump won by 9.4 percent. Of the eight most recent polls of Iowa listed at FiveThirtyEight's 2020 Election Forecast, Biden leads in four, Trump in one, and the other three show a dead heat. I don't know when Trump was last in Minnesota but he had a rally in Des Moines last week. 

October: nonsurprises, surprise

One October nonsurprise would be the recent news that lawyers say they can't find the parents of 545 migrant children separated from their families at our southern border. The kids are still here, but the whereabouts of their parents is unknown. In most of the cases, the parents were likely deported while the kids, having been taken from them, remained in US custody.

Is it incompetence or indifference? The lawyers who can't find the parents are in no way responsible. They were appointed by a federal judge to help clean up the mess. But it seems the mess is too great. 

That the lawyers can't perform the task assigned them by the judge should be attributed to the indifference of the Trump administration. The administration is also incompetent, but when cruelty is the point, as with the family separation policy at the border, there was no reason to keep track of who belonged to whom and who went where. Of course the court-appointed lawyers can't find the parents. The administration never intended for the families to be reunited. That only became the goal after courts to some degree wrested the problem from Trump and his people. 

Another nonsurprise is that the coronavirus did not disappear by Easter, or by Memorial Day, or when the weather got hot, and, now that it's October and cold again, still has not "lifted like a miracle" as we were promised. For the past month, it's been killing on average about 750 Americans per day—see the 7-day moving average of daily deaths at Worldometer, here. That's seven 9/11 body counts in the last month as the president, campaigning Monday in Arizona, castigated CNN for covering it as if it were a problem or something. He speaks openly of his boredom with the subject. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose he has no ideas.

"It is what it is." "Don't let it dominate you." "Fauci is a disaster!" 

The pope is in favor of civil unions for same-sex couples? I didn't think that would happen till gay people were marrying in Saudi Arabia. An actual October surprise!

Distance learning in snow

Yesterday, I ran the lawn mower over my yard just to pick up leaves. Today, I shoveled maybe two tons of wet snow off my driveway and walk. To every neighbor who approached for small talk, I'd say, "Apparently raking season is over." They'd laugh, which gave me courage to repeat the line to the next one. One fellow observed that if you don't like the weather in Minnesota, wait an hour. I happen to know that he was a pretty big fan of A Prairie Home Companion. 

Just for shits and giggles, here is a math problem I helped the seventh grader with today. I don't think I had to work on problems like this till I was in at least eighth grade, maybe ninth or even tenth—too long ago to remember for sure. 

Easy mistake: forgetting to change the direction of the inequality when multiplying both sides by a negative number. Gave her the tip of checking her work with an easy point, like (0, 0), to make sure she had identified the correct side of her graph. She said the teacher had already suggested that. I asked why in that case she hadn't done it. She said, "There's twelve more problems!"

Sunday evening coming down

Sitting here watching the seventh game of the NLCS on TV. Wasn't expecting to care who wins but find myself now rooting for the Dodgers. Is that the Senior Circuit equivalent of being a Yankees fan? Well, I remember in my youth trying, but failing, to dislike the Yankee teams featuring Bernie Williams, Paul O'Neill, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, the leftfielder from Japan . . . who am I missing? All the starting pitchers, but you get the idea: workaday professionals doing their job, every game, every season for years, excellence. 

I don't know the Dodgers but I've always liked Justin Turner, their third baseman. Part of it is that he's a dumpy looking stump of a guy. In a track & field meet, what would be his event? Nothing. But he can play ball. In that crazy play, fourth inning, runners at second and third, nobody out, batter hits him a sharp grounder, he throws home starting a rundown that ends with him diving to tag the runner out, then he immediately twists around and, from his butt, throws out the guy from second trying to advance to third. Double play. Thinking about it now, I have no idea why the Atlanta guy waited so long before breaking for third base. If the runner on third is going right away, the guy on second has to go too: not soon, now. Turner can't run fast but I'm pretty sure that's the kind of baserunning sin he'd never commit. 

Maybe the World Series, which begins Tuesday, will keep me from obsessing over the election. Here's the kind of thing that is for me like a heaping plate of french fries while high:

There is a suburban GOP-held House seat that Romney won by 15%+ and Trump won by 10%+. Today, at least two private surveys I've seen have Trump *down* 10%+ there.

In the past few weeks, I've heard the word "bloodbath" uttered in multiple convos w/ GOP pollsters/ad makers.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 18, 2020

I’ve also started reading David Copperfield: 826 pages, which should distract me till the votes are all counted. I'm about 80 in. David's mother has remarried, he's bitten his stepfather, been sent away to school. Details of David's first-person narration make it evident that his mother abandons him to pursue her own love life and that he, idealizing her, can't admit this to himself. The situation has a parallel in Dickens's own life. When he was 12, his father was incarcerated in a debtor's prison, and he was removed from school to work in a factory. A few months later, his paternal grandmother died and the family inherited £450. This got his father out of prison but his mother did not want to recall young Charles from the factory. He never forgave her. 

Dodgers win, 4-3. Braves probably ran themselves out of the World Series in the top of the fourth inning. 

Tall Black guy checks into a hotel

When I was a kid, I devoured biographies of sports stars, and as-told-to autobiographies, one of which was Bill Russell's Go Up for Glory. You can see from the book's cover photograph why he blocked so many shots, as back in those days there were a lot of Caucasians in the NBA and by rule they were not permitted to leave their feet. Today, almost the only thing I remember of the contents was a conversation the young Russell had with a hotelier in, I believe, South Carolina. This would have been in the mid 1950s. Russell had been invited to play in some kind of collegiate all-star game and was going to arrive before most of the other players. He called the hotel to make sure this wasn't going to be a problem—South Carolina, mid 50s, he's Black (but a rising athletic star), he wasn't sure of the drill. "Oh, no, no problem at all, Mr. Russell," he's assured. 

He decides to push the envelope. "Can I use the swimming pool?" he says. A pause and then, "Well, yes, but we'd appreciate it if you could be inconspicuous." In the next sentence, Russell considers how he, a 6-foot 10-inch Black guy, is going to be "inconspicuous" at the hotel swimming pool in Carolina. 

The other thing I remember is that Russell's high school basketball teammates in Oakland, California, included future baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson. Kids used to play all the sports. Russell was a champion high jumper in track and field. 

The history of segregated swimming pools enjoyed a renaissance on social media this week after top Trump staffer Mercedes Schlapp compared, contemptuously, Joe Biden to PBS kids' show icon Mr. Rogers (Schlapp, in her tweet, misspelled his name "Rodgers"). Biden supporters embraced the resemblance and the implied contrast with Trump. Soon #MrRogers was trending on Twitter. Kind and calm: what's wrong with that? One contributor to the hashtag appended the below clip from a 1969 episode of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." At the time, many public swimming pools, and especially kiddie wading pools, were still segregated, no longer by law but by longstanding practice—de facto as opposed to de jure, as the scholars say.