Eric The Blue

A most formidable man

Another article in the current New York Review concerns Dr. Johnson, 2009 being the tercentenary of his birth, at Lichfield, England, on September 18, 1709.  Wolcott, taking notice, calls Johnson "one of the greatest men to grace mankind"--a sentiment with which I am in full agreement, though Andrew O'Hagan, author of the piece in The New York Review, and another Johnson admirer, calls attention to his faults, which included a penchant for intellectual bullying.  Sometimes his victims deserved it.  When Soame Jenyns, a contemporary, attempted to justify God's ways by arguing that, in his kindly providence, he had made the poor, in comparison to the rich, more hopeful, more ready to enjoy simple pleasures, and slower to take offense, Johnson, in his review of the work, wrote:

The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment of the rich.  They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh."

Johnson's early struggles, which get short shrift from Boswell, who did not meet him until 1763, are part of what endear him to many of us.  As his review of Jenyns suggests, he was not the kind of conservative who took a dim view of those less able to boost their own prospects by the exercise of will and a superior intellect.  While in college, I wrote down in a notebook, without noting the source, things that struck me as profound or in some way memorable.  I stumbled across it recently and found it to be reminiscent of the "ID section" of a literature exam--that's Shakespeare, that's Milton, that's Frost, that's from The Sun Also Rises, and so on.  With it all is this, obviously from the hand of a contemporary, which one I have no idea:

JOHNSON, SAMUEL.  Englishman.  Fifty-four years old.  A large, ugly, slovenly, near-sighted man, his face scarred by scrofula, his body distorted by compulsive tics, his speech interspersed with absent-minded clucks and mutterings. . . .  Author of two fine gloomy poems and a tragedy which he now candidly admits he once thought too highly of.  Compiler of the best English dictionary.  Author of Rasselas, a short Oriental novel written to expound his favorite text that human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed, and two series of essays, The Rambler and The Idler: forthright lay-sermons, mournful, eloquent, ironically humorous, in a ponderous but precise style which no one else has ever handled without making it ridiculous.  Though he is frequently given to huge hilarity, his temperament is naturally gloomy to the point of despair.  He has won his way to orthodox Christian faith but not to serenity of mind. . . .  A most formidable man.

National Security State

After its annual summertime publishing lull, The New York Review of Books is again arriving in my mailbox with sufficient regularity to make it hard to keep up.  The current number, dated October 8, includes an article, "The Torture Memos: The Case Against the Lawyers," by David Cole, that in my opinion could never have been written but for the phenomenon described in another, by Garry Wills, called "Entangled Giant."

The entangled giant is President Obama.  He is entangled, for lack of a less awkward phrase, in "the national security state."  Having typed that phrase with some dissatisfaction, I see now that Wills himself deploys it, only with capital letters, "National Security State."  I'll let him explain:

After most of the wars in U.S. history there was a return to the constitutional condition of the pre-war world.  But after those wars there was no lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously assembled in the 1940s and 1950s.  After World War I, for instance, there was no CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea. . . . 

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets.  He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command.  Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments.  He becomes the prisoner of his own power.  As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal.  It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. . . .

Perhaps, in the nuclear era, the Constitution has become quaint and obsolete.  Few people even consider anymore Madison's lapidary pronouncement, "In republican government the legislative authority necessarily predominates."  Instead, we are all, as citizens, asked to salute our commander in chief.  Any president, wanting leverage to accomplish his goals, must find it hard to give up the aura of war chief, the mystery and majesty that have accrued to him with control of the Bomb, the awful proximity to the Football, to the Button.

The Cult of the Bomb has created The Cult of the Commander in Chief, "The Decider" in the phrase of Obama's predecessor, who also referred to himself as a "war president" and "war leader."  This figure is not so much a politician or even a statesman as he is an existential hero before whom we all must make obeisance, not being privy, as is he, to state secrets and other forbidden knowledge, the successful manipulation of which is evidently our only hope for survival.  Yet there is also this quaint tale we enjoy telling schoolchildren about a nation of laws, et cetera.  David Cole does not say, but he might have, that the torture memos represent the effort of government lawyers to accommodate The Cult of the Commander in Chief without gobbing spit on the quaint tale--a difficult task, as their memos prove.  Turns out nothing the Commander in Chief wants to do is ever against the law.  It is possible, as the ladder is climbed, wall banging and stress positions having won approval and waterboarding now under consideration, to hear something like uneasiness in the spaces of their lawyerly prose.  But they never say, No.

Netflix: "Slumdog Millionaire"

A boy from the slums of Mumbai, India goes on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and wins the big prize.  Between successive correct answers, the movie shows, in a series of flashbacks that tell the story of his life, how exactly he came to know the answer to that particular question.  Clever, but the reason it won an Oscar for Best Picture is that all the suffering and brutality cannot defeat an indomitable spirit, et cetera. 

There is one sense in which the plot seems realistic.  He gets the girl only after he gets the big money.

Sunday afternoon brooding

Sunday afternoon.  I am home alone, except for a napping toddler, in the hours before the Sunday evening blues set in.  The Twins trail the Tigers 4 to 2 in the fifth inning.  In the game yesterday, the Tigers were ahead 2 to 1 for about two hours.  Then, when we were eating supper, the Twins batted in the bottom of the eighth and the result of five consecutive at-bats was: single, fly-ball double, intentional walk, soft single, home run.  Twins win, 6 to 2, and are now just two games behind the Tigers with thirteen to play.  Life can seem like that, too.  For the longest time, nothing; then suddenly important events, you are caught up in it, but, always, the sun rises and sets, the water returns to the sea, and there is another game tomorrow.

I think maybe Linda Pastan was in a similar mood, having similar thoughts, when she wrote the following poem, which I came across once when reading Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, selected and edited by Elinor Nauen:

Baseball

When you tried to tell me baseball was a metaphor

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season--
I didn't believe you.

It's just a way of passing
the time, I said.

And you said: that's it.
Yes.

They aren't racists, they're the loyal opposition

The local daily here in Minneapolis chooses one letter to the editor to feature each day, the "Letter of the Day," which is printed above the others and in larger type.  In today's specimen, one Ray Snell, of Plymouth, loudly proclaims that, notwithstanding President Carter's opinion, he (Snell) is not a racist.  Mr Snell is in a state of high dudgeon on this point and manages to work into his letter several of the most predictable defenses to the unleveled charge of racism.  Why, he's going to the Gopher football game today with his black friend!

General principle: people who say "I'm not a racist" before anyone says they are a racist have already convicted themselves of being racist. 

In Mr. Snell's defense, at least he's protesting.  The really appalling ones are proud to be bigots.  Here, courtesy of AMERICAblog, are a few works of art displayed by the loyal opposition at their tea parties.

Matthew Yglesias photographed this nicely adorned American midriff at the tea party closest to him:

This fellow, whom I found at Majikthise's site, sums it up.

The loyal opposition

Majikthise has been documenting the wit and wisdom of the loyal opposition.  My favorite, by which I mean the most despicable:

But the competition is fierce.  You can check out the honorable mentions by linking to her blog from my blog roll to the right.  The above, winning photograph was taken by Matt Yglesias at the September 12 tea party in Washington, D.C.  He reinforces with words here.

The Republican base is so far gone that one or two of the literate ones are beginning to feel uncomfortable.

What education should do

Amanda and I were listening to public radio recently when a fellow being interviewed rather mincingly suggested that perhaps education should be valued apart from its beneficial financial effects.  She says to me, "Hey!  You listening?  They found someone who thinks like you." Yes, me and one other guy!

When people ask of students what they're taking up at school, they want to know what profession they mean to enter.  If the answer is something like "literature" or "history," the next question is: So you want to teach?  And the answer to that is: No, law school.  All education is now vocational training.  Politicians who "support education" are really just in favor of high-paying jobs.  Education is a means, the end is affluence.

Everyone just assumes the role of education is to fit you for remunerative employment.  But an education worth having should fit you for unemployment, too.

Divorce & affluence

My job is in the Hennepin County Recorder's Office--land records.  We are developing new software to be used by our customers--mainly real estate lawyers and title insurance abstracters--when conducting their searches.  Testing successive versions of this system is one of my tasks, a bleak one that I try to make interesting by conducting name searches on people I know who may own real estate in the county.  I've learned that old college acquaintances with whom I have lost contact work best.  You never learn anything interesting by examining the trail laid down in the County Recorder's Office by people you know well.  You have to know the subjects well enough to be interested in the details, but not so well that you cannot be surprised by those details. 

So what surprising details do you turn up?  I have been startled by the number of divorces.  Maybe it is not out of the ordinary, given the divorce rate in the general population.  But when you know the people, however superficially, they don't seem like good candidates for divorce.  The college is affiliated with the Lutheran Church and makes much of its effort to instill in students "Christian values." My memory is of serious classmates who studied late into the night, attended the college's daily chapel service, and spoke earnestly of "vocation" in dormitory bull sessions. Oh, sure, some of us were revellers and miscreants, but, proportionately, there was a superfluity of these models of college-aged intelligence and maturity.

I can say that they do not appear to have failed in marriage on account of a lack of funds. Expensive homes. High incomes. Alimony obligations that exceed my annual income. Despite their intelligence they sometimes do not appear to have learned any practical lessons. One high-achiever, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate and alum of one Ivy League graduate program and another Ivy League professional school, was divorced from three different wives inside of five years. 

Needless to say, I have a cheap-and-easy theory to explain why their college successes were apparently more predictive of financial success than of domestic stability. Near synonyms of "earnest" and "serious" are "humorless" and "pain-in-the-ass." Twenty years of that is more than enough. But let's leave the disenchanted former spouses out of it and imagine, at age 40, someone who acted 40 while still a teen-ager. They listened to their parents and teachers and the school counselors and the minister of their church and they took it all to heart. Two roads diverged in the wood, and they knew which one they were to take. They did everything they were supposed to do, so they got everything they were supposed to get, and perhaps became very disagreeable upon beginning to suspect that they should have done something else.  The stuff advertised on TV during golf tournaments does seem a meager prize for all the hard work.  The spouse reminds them of how they spent their youth preparing for a success that now seems like too much dessert. 

On the other hand, those who are more appropriately casual about their "career path" may end up working in the County Recorder's Office, and that is not the greatest, either. 

Recommended reading

David Grann's article, in The New Yorker, on a capital case from Texas.  The evidence is strong that a man was executed for setting a deadly fire that, in fact, started accidentally.

If capital punishment is not abolished, and the justice system continues to be administered by fallible human beings, then it is inevitable that innocent people will be put to death. 

I write to the editor

7 September 2009
 
To the editor:
 
Katherine Kersten's attempt at character assassination (Commentary, September 6) seems no more fresh on account of the subject being freshly buried.  Did someone say, "Ted Kennedy is dead"?  Then she'll devote her next foot-long editorial to shouting, "Chappaquiddick! Chappaquiddick! Chappaquiddick!" 
 
What else has she got?  She writes that Kennedy "was unique in our time in the depth of his failure of character."  Evidence? Well, in addition to Chappaquiddick he was "dogged for decades by rumors of  boozing and womanizing."  Either she hasn't been paying attention or else she doesn't know what "unique" means. 
 
Her "analysis" of Kennedy's legislative record and its fruit is, shall we say, deficient.  But these letters are to be no more than 250 words.  So let's just say that she is a junkyard dog.

Eric Jorgenson

Netflix: "Five Easy Pieces"

The title character, played by Jack Nicholson, is named Robert Eroica Dupea.  The five easy pieces of the title refer to piano compositions he played as a boy.  Music lessons together with a middle name that refers to Beethoven's Third Symphony might make you wonder about the household of origin.  But Dupea has left it behind.  He has a dirty job in an oil field and lives with his girlfriend.  He drinks, bowls, cheats on the girlfriend, and watches television in the trailer home of his friend.  The camera does not deprive you of views of freeways, landscapes of parking lots and roadside motels, and the insides of cheap diners.  That is pretty much the first half.

The second half starts when Dupea learns that his father is very ill.  He travels back to the household of origin and finds that his mute dying father is attended to by a laconic weightlifter who is bedding his rather homely sister.  Meanwhile a brother, a violinist, has "sprained his neck" and wears a goofy-looking brace that nevertheless has not prevented him from becoming the lover of an attractive hippie who has settled into the household, appropriately located on an island.  They all work on their music and occasionally an intellectual drops by to hold forth on some topic.  Dupea tries to persuade the hippie girl to switch brothers, succeeds a little, then fails.  He tries to talk with his mute father but the old man is too far gone.  Dupea had picked up some hitchhiking gargoyles along the way but were they any crazier than these characters?

The organization of the movie invites you to compare the world Dupea rejected to the one he found with the motels and parking lots and freeways and oil fields.  His own vote seems to be thumbs down on both.  On the way back home, he stops for gas, and the girlfriend walks off to the diner next to the station for a coffee.  Dupea studies himself in the mirror of the station's men's room.  When he comes out, a truck hauling timber has pulled in.  The camera only shows, and from a distance, the conversation in which the necessary agreements are made, then, as Dupea takes his seat beside the  driver, pulls away even farther as the truck moves out into the highway and turns the opposite direction from which Dupea had been going in the car with his girlfriend.  The camera continues to dwell on the crumby little gas station after the truck has disappeared and you can only hear the sound of its changing gears.  The end.

With Karen Black, as Dupea's girlfriend, and everyone will recognize Sally Struthers.  Bob Rafelson directs.  The scene in the diner is so famous that it seems to have stopped people from realizing that "Five Easy Pieces" is one of the very best American pictures.

DiMaggio and some baseball math

Publicity for this photograph, currently on display in a San Francisco museum, set me to noodling around with numbers connected with hitting safely in 56 consecutive games, a feat performed by DiMaggio during the 1941 baseball season.  Many say it is the most amazing and improbable record in sports.  So I wondered what the probability might actually be.

Of course you have to make assumptions.  They don't have to be perfect in order to give a good idea of what magnitude of improbability we are looking at.  Let us assume a batting average of .400 and four at-bats each game (over the 56-game streak, DiMaggio went 91-for-223, essentially four at-bats per game and an average of .409).  It's obviously very difficult to bat for an average higher than that.  In the same year that DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games, Ted Williams batted .406 for the season--and it hasn't been done since then.  I remember reading somewhere that over the time that DiMaggio was compiling his legendary streak--it began on May 15 and ended on July 17--Williams hit for a higher average.  That's not too surprising.  His average for the whole season was only three points lower than DiMaggio's during the streak.

Anyway, if you have a 0.4 chance of getting a hit in each at-bat, the likelihood of getting no hits in a game in which you have four official at-bats is given by 0.6⁴, which is 0.1296.  The likelihood of getting at least one hit is therefore 1 - 0.1296 = 0.8704.  If there is a 0.8704 chance of something happening in each independent trial, what is the chance of it happening 56 times in a row?  That is given by (0.8704)⁵⁶, which is quite a small number: 0.00042--or about 1-in-2500.

Now, that is not a rough answer to the question: what is the probability of a .400 hitter ever duplicating DiMaggio's streak?  DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games played from May 15 to July 16, but we'd be no less impressed if he had done it in 56 consecutive games played from late July to sometime in September.  The season is now 162 games long, so a player who plays in almost every game has right around 100 different groupings of 56 consecutive games (games 1 to 56, 2 to 57, 3 to 58, and so on).  Consequently it seems reasonable to expect that the chance of our .400 hitter getting at least one hit in 56 straight games played within the same season is something like 1 - (2499/2500)¹⁰⁰, which is about 0.039--a little less than a 4% chance.

I think the above calculations are sufficient to demystify DiMaggio's streak.  Yes, it was improbable, but not freakishly so.  A batter who could stay healthy and consistently hit .400 over the course of ten seasons would have a roughly 1-in-20 chance of equalling DiMaggio's record sometime over the course of the ten years.  As averages fall away from .400, however, probabilities become vanishingly small.  The highest lifetime batting average among active players is Ichiro Suzuki's .333.  His chance of getting a hit in a game is about 0.8.  His chance of getting a hit in 56 consecutive games somewhere over the course of 1500 games is about one-half of one per cent, or 1-in-200, which is just one-tenth the chance a .400 hitter has.  Ichiro's longest career consecutive game batting streak is 27.

Feynman speaks

More Feynman.

 

He objects that the story they tell doesn't seem "in proportion."  The argument from design turned upon its inventors.  Hard to believe this is the world God would have chosen to create.  Too big.  He came to our little earth, because it's us he cares about, but arranged for all the rest of it, too?  The stars so far away that we see their light tonight even though they burnt out before he fashioned the first man out of dirt and spittle?  Go on! 

The human eye is evidence on one side but light years of nothing don't count on the other?  Besides, we can account by other means for the human eye.