Eric The Blue

The Republicans debate

Watched the Republican You Tube debate on CNN last night.  What a lot of nuts--and I'm not talking only, or mainly, about the candidates.  I think my favorite questioner, by which I mean the most grotesque, was the fellow who, glowering in front of the stars and bars of the Confederacy, challenged anyone on the stage to declare that that banner is something other than a hallowed symbol of "southern pride."  Was it the previous citizen-questioner who had wanted to know why the Republicans can't get any black people to vote for them?  That question had elicited political elevator music and it was as if the guy with the flag had arrived on cue to lend some clarity.

The event made Republicans look so bad that even some of them are embarrassed.  Of course they are quick to detect a sinister plot.  "They chose the questions so once again we get the liberal's [sic] perspective of conservatism," whines one of Power Line's fawning correspondents.  But you can't really win elections by courting the votes of these idiots and then pretend that you aren't in league with them.  Reagan began his first successful campaign for the White House by going to Philadelphia--not the one in Pennsylvania, to ask a million African-Americans for their vote, but the one in Mississippi, a small town in a small state significant only on account of the murders there, sixteen years earlier, of three civil rights workers.  In his speech that day Reagan never mentioned the murders, or that the killers had escaped punishment for their crimes, but he did repeatedly declare his support for "states' rights."  Despicable.

In the talking-head commentary after the debate, Blustering Bill Bennett continued the show, criticizing Rudy Giuliani for criticizing Mitt Romney for employing illegal immigrants at his home.  The last thing Rudy should do, intoned Bennett darkly, is bring the argument to the hearth and home.  I can't now remember whether it was just before, or just after, this subtle insinuation of Giuliani's speckled marital history that Bennett, a values conservative known to have squandered millions at casinos across the land, had deployed the vernacular of Texas Hold-em to extoll the thoroughgoing conservative agenda of the debaters.  "They're all in," he said.

Sopranos poetry

In the last season of The Sopranos suicidal A.J. is enrolled in a literature class.  One episode shows the teacher in front of the class reading this poem by Wordsworth, which I recently thought of while viewing reports about traffic jams at shopping malls in the wee hours of the morning after Thanksgiving. 

But Wordsworth does not make on A.J. the same impression as does this poem by Yeats.  His mother later attributes his suicide attempt to the school curriculum.  "What kind of poem is that to be teaching college students?" she says, to no one in particular.

A.J., I think, makes his own poetry when his parents are pressing him about his depression.  He says this and that, his troubled boyhood and so on, eliciting his father's scorn until he quotes what his late grandmother told him when, prodded by his mother, he went to visit her in the nursing home before she died.  "It's all a big nothing," Grandma Livia had told him.  A.J. remembers her words exactly.  "She said in the end your friends and family let you down.  That you die in your own arms."  When he finishes relating that memory, no one says anything.

Poetry, said Auden, is nothing more than "memorable speech."

Defending Darwin

Years ago, in "Survey of British Literature," I was assigned to read a selection from The Origin of Species.  It wasn't long, as reading assignments went, and I can't remember now what topic Darwin was discussing.  I remember feeling bored, so it probably wasn't sexual selection.

Or maybe it was, for in the intervening years I've become more familiar with Darwin's memorably colorless way of putting things--for example, "We should remember the fact given on excellent authority in a former chapter, namely that several peahens, when debarred from an admired male, remained widows during a whole season rather than pair with another bird."

Darwin's plodding prose style does not measure up to that of the King James Version of the Bible (a work with which his are frequently compared), and I formed the view that the pedagogical intent must have been to shed light upon the morose musings of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  I found Darwin less annoying--he didn't make his points in chiming quatrains of iambic tetrameter--but he aroused no strong sensation in me.

I realize now that my reaction was unusual.  For a more representative response, consider the views of Power Line wingnut John Hinderaker, who once summarized Darwin's place on the scrap heap of intellectual history in the following manner:

Modern leftism has always been anti-religious at its core.  The three great intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, founded by Marx, Darwin and Freud, were all rebellions against the European religious tradition.  Marx sought to secularize history, Darwin to secularize biology, and Freud to secularize human nature.  All three movements pretended to be scientific, but in reality were pseudo-science.  Hostility to religion was their essence and their motivation.

Many concur with Hinderaker, whose hasty sketch blends well with other pictures they are fond of staring at with blank incomprehension.  Apparently it is necessary to take sides, and despite initial coolness I'm recommending Darwin's.  The flip side of "colorless" and "plodding" is "meticulous" and "systematic."  Lurking behind that one unintentionally humorous sentence about spurned, bitter peahens is a tremendous evidentiary edifice founded upon acute observation and built up with the power of human thought.

I get a kick out of people who say evolution is "just a theory."  You never hear them saying the same thing about the notion that everything is made of atoms.  That is because they do not detect in the atomic theory a challenge to their religion or their politics.  Their numbers are legion, and they have worked up a controversy over evolution by pleasing each other with a prolific assortment of bad arguments.

Hinderaker, for example, eschews science altogether in an effort to reduce evolution to a personality cult.  Let us put to one side his evident assumption that an unbeliever is necessarily incapable of uncovering the laws of nature.  No one who combines regard for truth with the slightest knowledge of Darwin's character could assert that he was motivated by hostility to religion.

The young man who signed on as naturalist for the Beagle had been a candidate for Holy Orders in the Church of England.  With age, he grew skeptical on religious questions, finally declaring himself "agnostic."  It's unclear to what degree his scientific views influenced his religious ones.  His writings--letters and private journals as well as the famous treatises--often betray profound horror at the suffering in the world.  He was deeply affected by the early death of a daughter, Anne.

Darwin also worried about a rift between him and his wife Emma, a devout Anglican, brought on by divergent religious opinions.  One biographer has suggested that on her deathbed the widowed Emma agonized over the prospect of not being reunited with her husband in heaven.  Other scholars have speculated that the anxiety Darwin felt over troubling Emma with his skepticism contributed to the mysterious ailments that afflicted him through his life. 

Perhaps.  What is clear is that Darwin unfailingly regarded religious faith with reserved respect.  He was a most tolerant skeptic who, in a letter to the botanist
Asa Gray, summed up his position on The Religious Question by writing: "I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect.  A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.  Let each man hope and believe what he can."

This was in 1860, the year after the publication of The Origin of Species.  Darwin, one of the great men of science, was never a crusading atheist.  Hinderaker pretends to know what he is talking about, but in reality he doesn't.  The disease has a high incidence among enlistees in the anti-evolution corps.

And another thing

Yet another problem with the electoral college comes into view once you start toying with various plausible winning combinations for the Democratic candidate in 2008.  Kerry won nineteen states, 18 of which were also carried by Gore.  The two states in which Kerry's deficit was smallest, both in terms of raw votes and percentage, were New Mexico and Iowa: he received more than 49% of the popular vote in each.  If you put both of them in the enlightened column, along with the nineteen states (and the District of Columbia) won by Kerry, you edge up to 264 electoral votes, which is six less than the 270 needed to win and five less than the 269 needed to keep the Republican from getting 270.  Kerry's third narrowest defeat, measured by difference in total votes received, was in Nevada.  (Ohio was closer in terms of percentage.)  Since Nevada has five electoral votes, the question about what happens in the event of a 269-269 tie is of more than just theoretical interest.

The standard answer to the question is that "the House of Representatives decides," which is true so far as it goes.  The details, set out in the Twelfth Amendment, do not however provide for each representative to have one vote.  Instead, "in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorom for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice."  So you see that the details of the electoral college tie-breaker magnify the undemocratic nature of the electoral college itself: when, for example, the votes of the representatives from California (which currently sends 34 Democrats and 19 Republicans to the House) and Wyoming (which has one at-large representative, a Republican) are tallied, there would be around 34 for the Democrat and around 20 for the Republican, but the real score would be 1 to 1, and both candidates would need a majority from 25 of the remaining 48 state delegations to be "elected."

Since "a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice," it is easy to see that the tie-breaker too might easily fail to deliver a verdict.  A straight party line vote in the House, for example, means that any state with a delegation split evenly between Republicans and Democrats (currently there are two, Arizona and Mississippi) would advance neither candidate toward the required majority in 26 state delegations.  What then?  The Twelfth Amendment takes up the issue:

And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President. . . .

But who is the Vice-President?  When the electoral college has rendered no verdict, the Twelfth Amendment provides for the Senate to select the Vice-President, and a simple majority of Senators suffices for the purpose.  It therefore appears that the running mate of one presidential candidate could be the Vice-President, and the acting President, while the stalemate over the election of the President dragged on in the House. 

The final component of this Rube Goldberg machine is contributed by the Twentieth Amendment, which states, in the relevant part:

If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall  be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

The details of this scheme are horrible, partly because they are vague.  The potential for mischief and chaos, and a consequent crisis of legitimacy, is considerable.  I will say it again: the president should be elected by the same means employed to elect everyone else who runs for public office, from governor to senator to state legislator to county commissioner and city council--that is, he (or she) should be chosen by the direct popular vote of all the citizens. 

Check this out and do what you can to support the effort.

Perfidy

As Hendrik Hertzberg reports on his blog, the plan to award California's 55 electoral votes not in winner-take-all fashion, as nearly every other state does, but one-at-a-time, according to the individual outcomes in the state's 53 congressional districts, has been revived by deep-pocketed Republicans aided by ballot initiative laws.  Thus the perfidy of the party with the presidency compels me to amend my post of November 7, wherein I wrote that the proposed "reform" appeared dead.

Nineteen of California's 53 congressional districts are currently represented by Republicans, so the effect, were the initiative to pass, would be to hand to the 2008 GOP presidential candidate an electoral gift at least the size of Michigan. If the Republicans can collect enough signatures to get the proposal on the primary election ballot next June, when turnout is usually low, anything could happen.  Those of us who want a Democrat in the White House again would have to trust Californians to defeat at the polls this egegious attempt to steal the election before the candidates are nominated.

Don't conclude that I'm in favor of the current electoral college system.  Remember, in that November 7 post I called the electoral college a supremely undemocratic instrument, since it lends ballast to ballots cast in states with small populations--which, by the way, tend to be Republican states (think: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, all of which are among the 20 smallest states, all deep red, and, by the way, possessing in aggregate 20 percent of the seats in the US senate despite having just 5 percent of the country's population).  In the 2000 election, after which Bush took office despite having lost the national vote by more than half a million ballots, 10,966,000 California voters determined the outcome of 54 electoral votes--203,000 ballots for each electoral vote.  Meanwhile, in Wyoming, 243,000 voters determined the outcome of three electoral votes, or 81,000 per electoral vote.  A single voter in Wyoming therefore exercised somewhat more than twice the influence on the awarding of an electoral vote--what actually elects the president--than did an individual Californian.

The remedy for this terrible system is simply to elect the president the same way we elect governors, senators, representatives, state legislators, mayors, city council members, county commissioners, school board members, and everyone else I can think of who runs for public office: that is, by direct popular vote.  Besides being a nakedly partisan power-grab, the "reform" that may end up on the ballot in California would be roughly as undemocratic as the electoral college.  In 2000, for example, Bush carried 226 congressional districts, compared to 209 carried by Gore, for whom more voters voted.

Congressional districts have roughly equal populations.  If presidential candidate A carries one district by 100,000 votes and loses a second by 1000 votes, should this subset of the overall election be effectively a tie?  Of course not.  And the case, as the 2000 result illustrated, is not hypothetical.  In Minnesota, where I live, the Democratic presidential candidate has won the statewide race for eight elections in a row.  Yet the Republican candidate regularly carries at least four, and usually five, of the state's eight congressional districts.  That is because the state's Democrats are crowded together in the fourth (which includes St. Paul), fifth (which includes Minneapolis), and eighth (which includes Duluth and the iron range towns) districts.  In 2004 Kerry won these three districts overwhelmingly, lost the other five more narrowly, and won the statewide vote by about 100,000 ballots.  Why should Bush have "won" the state, 5 to 3?

The rural versus urban divide in Minnesota voting patterns is reflected across the country, which helps explain how, in 2000, Gore could have lost the majority of congressional districts, as well as the electoral college tally, despite having won more votes than Bush.  Ballots should weigh the same no matter where they are cast.  The National Popular Vote plan, whereby states agree to award their electoral votes to the nationwide winner, but only after other states possessing a majority of all electoral votes have agreed to do the same thing, ingeniously guarantees that the winner of the popular vote becomes president without (this is the ingenious part) amending the Constitution to abolish the electoral college.  The plan deserves your support. 

More Sopranos

My wife and I, advancing systematically through the 86 episodes of the HBO series The Sopranos, have made it into the seventh and final season.  One of the last episodes we saw has what may be my favorite scene so far.  Johnny Sack, having received a terminal diagnosis for his metastatic lung cancer, is visited in the prison medical center by his wife and daughter.  With no hope of recovery, Johnny has begun smoking again, and his wife scolds him.  Johnny is dismissive of her concern and of her optimism.  She suggests that his bad attitude is probably in some measure to blame for his illness.  As I remember it, Johnny exhales contemptuously, almost in a snort, so that the cigarette smoke pours out of his nose, and he says:  "You gonna start with that again?  What about all these 6-year-olds with leukemia?  What's that from?  All their negative thinking?"

Another memorable scene occurs in "Unidentified Black Males," from the penultimate season. Meadow and her boyfriend, Finn, finally get engaged.  Excited, she calls her mother with the good news.  Carmela, who is at the time separated from her own husband, picks up in an upstairs bedroom at the same moment that she catches sight of Meadow's father through the window.  He has turned up unannounced to enjoy his backyard swimming pool.  She listens to her overjoyed daughter while contemplating, as it were from on high, the oversized Tony lounging on a flotation device in the pool.  Meadow carries on happily, and Carmela listens and says the right things while watching her husband splash water on his big belly.

Toward the end of The Tempest, Miranda enthuses, in some famous lines, over the revelation of a world hitherto unknown to her:

                                      O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!  O brave new world
That has such people in't!

Her father's terse reply is comparatively unknown: "'Tis new to thee."

In memoriam

My tribute to Norman Mailer shall not be as tardy as the one to Mark Harris.  I think The Executioner's Song is one of the great American books written during my lifetime, but you cannot really link to a massive tome.  Try this, published in The New York Review, on the subjects of George Bush, the Iraq war, and the psychology of the white American male, as evidence that at age 80 Mailer's characteristic pugnacity, acumen, and dash had suffered no fadings.  The whole thing is exhilirating and gathers force as it moves toward the memorable, concluding paragraph, which I will enjoy typing in below.

Democracy, more than any other political system, depends on a modicum of honesty.  Ultimately, it is much at the mercy of a leader who has never been embarrassed by himself.  What is to be said of a man who spent two years in the Air Force of the National Guard (as a way of not having to go to Vietnam) and proceeded--like many another spoiled and wealthy father's son--not to bother to show up for duty in his second year of service?  Most of us have episodes in our youth that can cause us shame on reflection.  It is a mark of maturation that we do not try to profit from our early lacks and vices but do our best to learn from them.  Bush proceeded, however, to turn his declaration of the Iraqi campaign's end into a mighty fashion show.  He chose--this overnight clone of Honest Abe--to arrive on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on an S-3B Viking jet that came in with a dramatic tail-hook landing.  The helicopter was easily within helicopter range of San Diego but G.W. would not have been able to show himself in flight regalia, and so would not have been able to demonstrate how well he wore the uniform he had not honored.  Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always in civvies while he was commanader in chief.  So was General Eisenhower.  George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit.  There he was for the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys.  Let us hope that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest. 

In another world

In its Saturday editorial pages the Minneapolis paper runs, with connecting commentary by staffer Tim O'Brien, a compilation of text bytes from the week in the political blogosphere.  Today the Blog House, as it is called, noted that Political Animal named Power Line's John Hinderaker the winner of its Golden Wingnut Award for having written, in a 2005 post:

It must be very strange to be President Bush.  A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice.  He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Meanwhile, over at Power Line today the Golden Wingnut winner has a post up called "In Another World." That other world, visible to the oracular Hinderaker from his perch at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, is "a sort of bubble inhabited only by leftists."  He proceeds to his view of polls, cited by liberal co-panelists at the Expo, indicating strong public disapproval of our course in Iraq:

I'm pretty sure the number of people who think the facts don't matter in Iraq is quite a bit less than 70%, and I'm also pretty sure that a political movement that explicitly declares its indifference to reality is in trouble. 

Concerning these co-panelists, who are indifferent to the encouraging state of affairs in Iraq, he announces that their "disconnect from reality was complete" --a tiding of great joy, in his estimation, for future Wingnut Award competitors:

The effect of all this unreality was cheering.  Disconnects this total can survive only inside an echo chamber, which appears to be what the left has going on.  That's good, if you're a Republican.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

2008

In The New York Review of November 8, 2007, Michael Tomasky responds to reader questions relating to--I was going to say the upcoming presidential election campaign, but it is plainly well underway.  Some observations on Tomasky's observations.

When challenged to name which states lost by Kerry will be in the Democratic column this time, Tomasky admits to some pessimism.  The electoral map, it seems, favors Republicans.  Tomasky thinks the Dems have a chance in Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio, especially if the second slot on the ticket is occupied by Senator Webb of Virginia, or Governor Strickland of Ohio.  He names Iowa (won by Gore but lost by Kerry), New Mexico (also won by Gore but lost by Kerry), and Colorado (lost by both Gore and Kerry) as states moving the Dems' way.  But he doesn't predict victory in any of them, and I thought it sobering that he barely mentions Florida and does not mention Missouri.  Moreover, he acknowledges that four Kerry states, with a total of 45 electoral votes, cannot be counted on; these are Wisconsin, my own Minnesota (gasp), the indispensable Pennsylvania (bigger gasp), and New Hampshire (which Tomasky incorrectly says was won by both Gore and Kerry--only Kerry, from neighboring Massachusetts, got it).

I wonder whether my rooting interest makes me overestimate the electoral vulnerability of the side I prefer, the way a fan of a particular baseball team may not notice that the fourth and fifth best starting pitchers for nearly every other team are suspect, too.  Sure, Pennsylvania is not in the bag, and the Dems cannot get to 270 without it.  But perhaps Tomasky does not say much about Florida for the simple reason that, if it goes blue, a more likely event than Pennsylvania turning red, the electoral addition ceases to be very interesting.

Tomasky's relatively ungiddy take on the Dems' chances includes the interesting concern that a lot of white men, not just limited to the ones who vote Republican in any event, have a female supervisor at work and therefore may not be inclined to vote for Candidate Clinton (if it's her, and, for a related reason, not for Obama, if it's him).  I'm a white guy with a female, African-American supervisor who has no intention of voting for any Republican, but of course that doesn't mean Tomasky is wrong to worry.  Nevertheless I trust the psycho-sexual drag on the Democratic ticket will be less than that exerted, again, by the electoral college, which Tomasky discusses mainly in the context of the effort by California wingnuts to award that state's 55 electoral votes, not to the statewide winner, but according to the separate outcomes in 53 different congressional districts --a scheme that, under the guise of "reform," would deliver a Pennsylvania-sized gift to the Republican candidate.  That effort now appears dead, but the electoral college, a supremely undemocratic instrument, is a considerable advantage to the Republicans, since it weighs more heavily ballots cast in sparsely populated states, which almost by definition are inhabited mainly by their rural and small-town white supporters.

The question posed to Tomasky by Jim Ledbetter, the Deputy Managing Editor of CNN Money, concerned the prosepects for abolishing the electoral college, and asked what he saw as the main obstacles to achieving this worthy end.  Tomasky somehow fails to mention the obvious answer, which is that small (and mostly red) states have something close to veto power over a reform that would deprive them of exercising an influence on presidential elections that is out of all proportion to their population.