Eric The Blue

Night thoughts

The kids are in bed and Amanda and I have assumed our positions in different corners of the living room.  She is reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.  Though she is only on the Preface to the paperback edition, she breaks into frequent giggles.  My game is not to ask what has amused her.  So far, I always find out anyway.  Dawkins is addressing, one at a time, the various objections of the pious.  "You can't criticize religion without a detailed analysis of learned books of theology."  "You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best."  His response to one or the other involves P.Z. Myers's "The Courtier's Reply."  The theological enterprise--explaining why, appearances notwithstanding, the emperor is clothed.

I don't know about all that but have my own complaint.  Let us put to the side the fundamentalists and related crackpots.  What of the rest, the so-called "best"?  To me they seem to present a moving target.  When they preach to Joe Pewsitter, it's hard to know that there is much space between them and the fighting fundamentalists.   God cares for us, hears our prayers, sent his son to die for our sins that we might have eternal life, and so on.  For someone like Dawkins, however, they have a different speech.  Doctrines are given a metaphoric interpretation and the crude drawings of the fundamentalists are now works of abstract expressionism.  Those inclined to be sympathetic say it is sublime but outsiders may sense a fraud. 

Picked up election pieces

My interest in politics and elections cannot be contained by the porous boundaries of our campaign seasons.  Herewith a few picked-up pieces relating to the 2008 election.

After Bush won in 2004, there was a lot of talk about how Democrats had a southern problem.  Kerry was shut out in the states of the old Confederacy.  So was Gore.  You put all the electoral votes of that region in the R column and the Ds only chance is to draw to an inside straight--so said wise men on CNN.  Then Obama won and the new story line concerns the R's problems, which you might call  triregional.  There are now 18 states, with 245 electoral votes, that have gone Democratic in five straight presidential elections.  These states seem to divide naturally into three geographical groupings.  There is the northern Atlantic seaboard, from Maine to Maryland, less New Hampshire but plus Vermont--ten states with 110 electoral votes.  Then there are four states of the upper midwest with 58 electoral votes--Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  And then there are four states of the Pacific rim that, mainly on account of California, total 77 more electoral votes.  You might say that Bush drew to an inside straight twice in a row, but it's probably best to dispense with the card-playing metaphors and just say that the country is divided along regional lines and that for awhile now the outcome of presidential elections has been determined around the edges of these regions--Florida, Ohio, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.

Speaking of a southern problem, and division, here's something I was startled by while examining who voted for whom: Obama got just 11 percent of the white vote in Mississippi, which is slightly better than he did among whites in Alabama, where he got 10 percent.  Yet Obama broke through in the south by winning Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.  What gives?  Obama did well among a younger, wandering set of new southerners who have landed in the Washington suburbs of northern Virginia or around Research Triangle in North Carolina.  Mississippi and Alabama don't have such places.  Race is part of it, yes, but age, educational level, and the distance from your house to the nearest Starbucks are now reliable indicators of party preference.  Some will say I am only revealing my own preferences, but still it is true, that the attractive, thriving parts of the south are trending Democratic.

The modern Republican party is on the wrong side of a demographic curve.  The opposition of nearly all Republicans to any reform of the health care system isn't going to help their cause.

Clear your mind of cant

Dr. Johnson famously called patriotism "the last resort of a scoundrel."  My immediate reaction is to agree, and my more considered reaction is that, no, he was wrong, patriotism is the first resort of a scoundrel.

And here is a discouragingly common, cant expression: "My country, right or wrong."  As if stupidity were a virtue.

Cooking the recent past

One of the Power LIne philosophers, Paul Mirengoff, knows that the "intelligence" regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was not cooked.  It was wrong, you see, but it wasn't any more wrong than the assessments of all our allies.  An honest mistake that does not seem to bother Mr. Mirengoff over much. 

One might wonder why, since all our allies concurred in the view that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, hardly any followed us to war.  But it is not really such a great mystery.  There was no reason to rely on intelligence.  In November, 2002, Iraq had allowed the return of UN weapons inspectors onto its territory.  They were conducting their searches in unfettered fashion and had turned nothing up when their work was ended by our invasion.  If they had been allowed to continue their inspections, we would have found out, without a war, that Iraq did not have any weapons. 

There was a decision to go to war in Iraq and to make Saddam's weapons the casus belli.  The intelligence and facts were fixed to fit that policy.  The weapons were just a plausible pretext.  It's not that, had the "intelligence" been different, there would have been no war.  There would have been a different pretext.   It's not enough to say the intelligence was cooked.  The entire process was cooked.  First there was a decision for war, then an effort to find "intelligence" to justify it.  The "intelligence" was never for decsion makers.  It was for the rest of us.  The decision had been made. 

Political science and arithmetic

It now appears that a health reform bill will soon be debated on the floor of the U.S. Senate.  What will be in it?  Will any Republicans support it?  Can it pass with only Democrats voting in favor?  Would that be a bad thing if it happened? 

Any close consideration of these kinds of questions shows what an undemocratic body is the U.S. Senate.  There are of course 100 members, and 60 votes are required to shut down debate and force a final vote.  Since the Republicans hold 40 seats, they cannot themselves sustain a filibuster, but if united in opposition they would need just one Democrat to join them.  It would be regarded as a  landslide, an unambiguous mandate, if a candidate for president got 59% of the vote--but it will take more than that to get health care reform through the Senate.

Join a bit of arithmetic to political science and things look even worse.  By my rough-and-ready calculations, the 40 Republicans in the Senate represent only 35% of the population.  This is because each state, no matter how small, gets two seats in the Senate, and Republicans, whose constituency lives in rural and small-town America, tend to win seats from sparsely populated states.  Or work it the other way around.  The Democrats tend to come from the under represented big states.  Of the ten seats from the five largest states, seven are held by Democrats.  Of the ten seats from the next five biggest, seven are held by Democrats.  Of the ten seats from the next five biggest, eight are held by Democrats.  These "top fifteen" do not of course include Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Mississippi, or Alabama--all of which are represented by two Republican senators.

Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, number 40 in population, has been much in the news lately: she is the Republican most apt to vote for some kind of reform.  I worry about the role of Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, number 44 in population, and of Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, number 38 in population.  And then there is Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, 49th in population.  He doesn't know what he's talking about.

The rules of the Senate, together with the more or less random relationship between state boundary lines and population centers, will make it very difficult to pass health care reform that includes a public option.  It seems that the support of 55-60 percent of the population doesn't matter.

Incident

I take the bus.  On weekdays, during the morning and evening rush hours, there is an express that carries manifestly affluent workers between their homes in Edina and southwest Minneapolis to their jobs in downtown office buildings.  On weekends, however, there is no choice but to take the local, which runs up and down Nicollet Avenue, through poor neighborhoods that the express speeds past on the freeway.  The local stops at every corner that anyone is waiting at, and "incidents" occur with regularity.  A passenger who cannot, or will not, pay the fare is a mild example.  I see the same faces every day on the express but I've never seen a single one of them on the local.  If they go downtown on the weekend, they drive.  The people on the local--not their demographic.

All that is a sort of preface to what happened to my six-year-old and me yesterday, Sunday, on the local.  She boarded first and headed straight to the back of the bus.  After paying the fare, I joined her on the back bench next to an African-American teen who looked like a reason for driving your car: baggy jeans half way down his ass, the elaborately decorated hero jacket, the cap worn in the manner of C.C. Sabathia--I would have chosen a seat closer to the senior citizens crowding the driver.  This black kid was sitting next to the window, which was open, and, soon as we were settled, he spoke: "Is it too cold for the little girl? I can shut the window."  I said she was fine.  He smiled.  "How about you?" he said.

Wha! wha! wha!

I think the conservative politics of a lot of American men is connected to insecurity about their masculinity.  In other words, their political views are a substitute for the lack of something.  The theory explains diverse phenomena--for example, this.  According to themselves, conservatives are manly and realistic.  Liberals, meanwhile, whimper and whine portentously, in the manner of chicks and queers, most of whom are liberals, etc.

But what, then, to make of all their portentous whining?  Rush Limbaugh wanting to own a football team--that, I can understand.  It's all the crybaby sour grapes when his gambit fails that I do not get.  Check this out.  They sound like their own parody of a puffed-up, whiney liberal.  Wha! wha! wha!  They like the free market, except for when they don't.  Wha! wha! wha!

Everyone's against them!  Wha! wha! wha! Etc.

Netflix: Taxi to the Dark Side

Filmmaker Alex Gibney seems to have taken something from Errol Morris--the montage of historical footage and interviews of people who aren't used to being on camera, the opium-den music--and used it to convict the Bush administration of lawlessness.  The most stunning effect of cinematic art occurs when, the "dark side" of the title having been exposed, two of our finest, dressed all in crisp whites, are shown raising the flag with all requisite precision and ritual.  It might put you in mind of "whitewash," a necessary concept to explain how MPs could go to jail while Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo, et al, give speeches, write memoirs, teach law students, etc.

It might also put you in mind of the chapter on the whiteness of the whale.  Probably deserves its Oscar for best documentary.

Hemingway

I am so much enjoying my perusal of selections from Johnson's Lives of the Poets that I thought I might write up, in blog posts, very brief biographies of some writers I like.  At the least, I will enjoy the exercise.  Hemingway is first.

He was born on July 21, 1899, and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb abutting Chicago on the west.  His father was a medical doctor and his mother an enthusiastic member of the local Congregational church.  The family kept a house on Walloon Lake, between Boyne City and Petoskey, and the short fiction he would publish in the 1920s makes clear that his time spent in this area was the part of his childhood that mattered to him.  One of his first published stories is called "Up in Michigan."  The title alone suggests two worlds, the unmentioned artificial one and then the one that will be the object of his intense and enduring interest. 

The United States entered the war in the year he was graduated from high school.  He tried to enlist but was rejected for poor vision and then, lying about his age, which accounts for some books giving 1898 as the year of his birth, landed a newspaper job in Kansas City.  But he soon found that he could get in the war by volunteering for the Red Cross.  Serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, he saw heavy fighting and was himself seriously wounded in his legs by mortar fire on July 8, 1918.  He recuperated in Milan and, later, back in Oak Park.  In September of 1921 he married Hadley Richardson and soon moved with her to Paris, where he began writing the sketches and stories that would be published in 1925 as In Our Time.

His status as a major American author rests almost entirely on the fiction he wrote and published over the next ten or twelve years.  Besides In Our Time, there were two novels, The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929), and two collections of stories, Winner Take Nothing (1927) and Men Without Women (1933).  After this period, his work became less regular, and much of it would not be read if he hadn't written it.  He won the Nobel Prize for The Old Man and the Sea (1952), but by this time he was imitating himself.  During the last political season both Obama and McCain named For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel, as a book that had influenced them.  I don't think much of it.  For one thing Hemingway, in order to achieve a desired effect of elevated solemnity, had this kind of trick of pretending to provide a literal English translation of dialog spoken in a different language.  Sometimes it could work, as in the conclusion to one of his best stories, "In Another Country," where the major, who has lost his wife, declares, "I cannot resign myself. . . . I am utterly unable to resign myself."  But in For Whom the Bell Tolls it is frequently, though not intentionally, funny, especially all the thees and thous passing between the protagonist, Robert Jordan, and his pliant young lover. 

The dichotomy suggested by "Up in Michigan" carries through his work.  In another early story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," the wife asks her husband what has upset him and he explains that an Indian has tried picking a fight with him to avoid having to pay with labor for medical services rendered.  She says, "Dear, I don't think, I really don't think that anyone would really do a thing like that."  Oh, yes, they really would: the first part of the story shows it happening with understated precision.  This disgust with conventional attitudes and pieties receives its fullest expression in a celebrated passage from A Farewell to Arms.  An Italian soldier has just expressed the view that the war will not be lost because what has so far been gained in battle cannot have been "in vain."  Then the narrator:

I did not say anything.  I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.  We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.  There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.  Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything.  Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

He moved rather quickly through middle age, divorcing three wives and cultivating a celebrity status.  On July 2, 1961, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.  Some of his warmest admirers seem to think he founded a masculine cult but the heroes of his best fiction, wounded sufferers of night terrors and noontide nightmares, struggle to hold things together.  In The Sun Also Rises Jake Barnes, speaking of the bullfighter Romero's technique, observes that he "had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure."  This was meant to stand for something else, a versatile ideal to be sought in prose and life. 

 

How coarse can you get?

Haven't perused Power Line for a while but I see now that on September 24 John Hinderaker wrote that, while the number of American politicians more contemptible than Walter Mondale is dwindling, Jimmy Carter's death would nudge his v.p. closer to the head of the class.  This was in the second paragraph of a post.  The first paragraph was about the regrettable coarseness of American politics.  Hinderaker is too self effacing to put forward his own example as a needed corrective but here he is replying to someone who once disagreed with him:

You dumb shit, he didn't get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties' concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don't bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don't qualify, you stupid shit. 

Yet I have some regard for Carter and Mondale, who cannot draw on such resources of vocabulary and personal charm.  Perhaps they only seem contemptible in comparison.

The day you won your town the race

The Twins hit five home runs today and beat the Royals, 13 to 4.  Since the Tigers also won, the two teams are tied after 162 games, and the division championship will be settled on Tuesday when the two teams meet for a one game playoff in the Metrodome.

There was after the game a long, televised ceremony celebrating 28 seasons of baseball in the Dome.  Fans had voted earlier in the season for an All-Metrodome Team, and the winners, except for Chuck Knoblauch, who was arrested last week for domestic assault, and Kirby Puckett, who is dead, took to the field again as their names were announced.  More than one was too heavy to jog.  Had he survived, Puckett would have been one of those.  Some years after his retirement, he was charged with an attempted sexual assault in a restroom stall at a local restaurant, and part of his defense was that it seemed unlikely he could occupy a stall simultaneously with another person.

In it Looked Like Forever, the final installment in Mark Harris's baseball tetralogy, former pitching star and current hanger-on Henry Wiggen participates in a similar ceremony honoring the World Series championship team he had played on twenty seasons ago.  But the outfielding Carucci brothers have had a falling out and don't speak to one another.  Sid Goldman, the slugging first baseman, sought political office but lost every campaign.  The middle infielders receive necessarily brief reviews:  "Ugly Jones, shortstop, dropped from sight.  Gene Park, second base, also dropped from sight."  Excepting Wiggen and catcher Red Traphagen, it seems that a gradually fading gray is the best that can be hoped for:  "Lucky Judkins, center field, was soon traded away, played awhile else where [sic], left baseball in 1957 and to the best of my knowledge lives in Oklahoma to the present day."  In the middle of the novel, more or less unconnected to anything happening at the time, Wiggen recalls how Coker Roguski, with whom he'd come up through the minor leagues, had several years after retiring been traveling near Wiggen's home.  He placed a phone call and accepted an invitation for a meal and some reminiscing, but never showed up, never telephoned back, never sent an explanatory note, and never returned Wiggen's messages.  We are led to conclude that, off the sports page, quirkiness had progressed into full-blown mental illness.  The epigraph for the novel is Frost's "Provide, Provide":

The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all.  Provide, provide!

Compensations of flu

I've been laid low with flu, garden-variety.  It's almost pleasant to be sick enough to stay home from work, conscience free, but not so sick as to be unable to enjoy sedentary pursuits--the divisional race in the American League Central, for example, and Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets.  Last night the Twins beat the Royals while the Pale Hose topped the Tigers, thereby lifting the Twins to within a game of first place and freeing me, once the telecasts were concluded, to forge ahead in Johnson's account of the life and work of John Milton. 

Though it may not have seemed so to Milton, his life was divided in three parts: (1) youthful apprenticeship; (2) pamphleteer; and (3) epic poet.  Johnson, a self-made man dogged for years by the need to make a living, probably regarded the details of (1) with a mixture of asperity and longing.  There is no need to speculate about what he, a strong Tory, thought of the details of (2).  Almost against his will he could not deny Milton's achievement in (3).  One can often sense the opposing forces contending in his inimitable prose style.  Having reached the point, on the cusp between (1) and (2), at which Milton returns home to contentious England from his tour of the continent, Johnson writes:

Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school.  This is the period of his life from which all his biographers seem inclined to shrink.

His contempt for Milton's politics is joined to a coldly ferocious attack on his character:

It has been observed that they who most clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it.  What we know of Milton's character in domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary.  His family consisted of women, and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females as subordinate and inferior beings.  That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education.  He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.

The temperature here seems sufficiently high to make one wonder what his veneration of Milton would preclude.  His offhanded dismissal of "Lycidas" is famous (and wrong), and he works into his generally admiring review of Paradise Lost the remark that "none ever wished it longer."  (I think he was right about that.)  One does nevertheless often detect a kind of grudging veneration, in small things as well as great:

Of his zeal for learning in all its parts, he gave a proof by publishing the next year (1661) Accidence commenced Grammar, a little book which has nothing remarkable but that its author, who had been lately defending the supreme powers of his country and was then writing Paradise Lost, could descend from his elevation to rescue children from the perplexity of grammatical confusion, and the trouble of lessons unnecessarily repeated.

Delmon Young, batting with two out and the bases loaded in the sixth inning of a pitchers' duel, has just delivered a bases-clearing double.  It appears the Twins have a good chance of playing a meaningful game on the very last day of the regular season.  As a compensation for the flu, all this is first-rate.