Eric The Blue

Browsing Power LIne

I haven't visited the Power LIne site for awhile.  What's new with those deep thinkers?

Yesterday, John HInderaker, taking note of Rush LImbaugh's health problems, wrote: "Let's all say a prayer for the well-being of a good man who has contributed more than almost anyone else to public discourse in our time."  Today he notes approvingly that, according to a Rasmussen poll, 58% of respondents are in favor of waterboarding the Nigerian man who tried to blow up an airliner as it approached the Detroit airport on Christmas Day.  The debate, says John, is over, "and Dick Cheney won."

Meanwhile, also today, Scott Johnson complains of "stretchers" in a Ben Nelson ad. 

On Christmas Eve, in a post entitled "Arrogance, Corruption, Stupidity," he (Scott) summarized his views on the health care reform bill then poised to pass the Senate.  Struggling to express in words his distress, Scott resorted to quoting "Oklahoma's magnificent Senator (and Dr.) Tom Coburn."  In an addendum, John, speaking of the Dems, adds: "These are not people who can be compromised with or deflected from their drive toward socialism."

It should be said that in the long-ago days of March Scott was able himself to give poetic expression to his "despair" (his word).  "I feel utterly powerless," he wrote, "to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can't keep up and I can't stand to pay attention."

You understand.  It is Obama who is "infantile" and "grandiose."

Back to John, who, on October 14, called "our friend" Rep. Michele Bachmann "smart, articulate, and telegenic."  Unless describing her as "a tax litigator by trade" counts, he doesn't provide evidence of her brains or verbal graces, but probably had in mind, for examples:

• Her grave warning that America is "running out of rich people."
• Her shout-out to the black chairman of the Republican National Committee: "Michael Steele!  You be da man!  You be da man!"
• Her statement, "I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter.  And I'm not blaming this on President Obama; I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

It's an interesting coincidence, though of course not anyone's fault, that the friends of the Power Line philosophers are as crazy as they are.  No matter what planet you live on, Happy New Year from Eric the Blue!

At home

Fortified with Christmas cookies, I've been shoveling snow for lo these many days.  Since it has now stopped accumulating, the plowing of side streets has begun, and this morning I chopped up and cleared away the heavy crusty mass deposited in the night at the end of our driveway by a public employee getting time-and-a-half.  Before he did his work, our driveway was passable but the street was not.  After he plowed, the street was passable but we couldn't get our car to it. With the holiday now past, and our reliance on the automobile no longer mocked by circumstances, the world seems to have returned to normal.

If it hadn't been for all that snow I might have had more of a chance to do what I do every Christmas:  tenderly peruse the tables of contents and indexes, and selected random pages, of the books I get as gifts, which this year were Brad Gooch's biography of Flannery O'Connor, from my sister, and the Library of America edition of Henry Adams's History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, from Amanda.  The latter now sits next to its previously purchased mate, concerning the history of our country during the administrations of Madison, on a shelf filling up with these handsome editions--I have L of A volumes given over to the works of Thoreau, Clemons, Nabokov, Henry James, Howells, and Wilson, besides the Adams pair.

Speaking of books, over at the New Yorker site diverse writers and editors of that estimable magazine tell what they read in 2009.  Lauren Collins provides a list, because she'd written them down in a notebook.  As best I can in a listless moment remember, my own would look like this:

1. The Triple Thinkers, by Edmund Wilson
2. The Wound and the Bow (Wilson)
3. Classics and Commercials (Wilson)
4. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
5. Six Easy Pieces, by Richard Feynman; and
6. assorted writings of Samuel Johnson, culled from one source and another, mainly Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Brady and William Wimsatt.

Looking it over there is a kind of personal logic to the succession.  Dickens is the subject of the long opening essay in The Wound and the Bow, and, having only ever read Hard Times, I determined to take a longer drink from that deep river.  When I came up, a couple of months later, I was in the mood for something very different--a slim science paperback with the word "easy" in the title.  Well, it's not that easy.  Meanwhile, this being the tercentenary of Dr. Johnson's birth, I had stumbled across some notices pertaining to him, especially this from Wolcott, and next thing I knew was plundering the PR3522 area of the public library.  Predictably, I am now submerged in Boswell's Life, though I have the good sense to limit myself to an abridged version--the one in The Portable Johnson Boswell, which includes a value-added introduction by Louis Kronenberger.  I sometimes find myself laughing aloud:

One night, when Beauclerk and Langton had supped at a tavern in London, and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their heads to go and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on him to join them in a ramble.  They rapped violently at the door of his chambers in the Temple, till at last he appeared in his shirt, with his little black wig on the top of his head, instead of a night-cap, and a poker in his hand, imagining, probably, that some ruffians were coming to attack him.  When he discovdered who they were, and was told their errand, he smiled, and with great good humour agreed to their proposal: "What, is it you, you dogs!  I'll have a frisk with you."  He was soon drest, and they sallied forth together into Covent-Garden, where the greengrocers and fruiterers were beginning to arrange their hampers, just come in from the country.  Johnson made some attempts to help them; but the honest gardeners stared so at his figure and manner, and odd interference, that he soon saw his services were not relished.  They then repaired to one of the neighbouring taverns, and made a bowl of that liquor called Bishop, which Johnson had always liked; while in joyous contempt of sleep, from which he had been roused, he repeated the festive lines,

Short, O short then be thy reign,
And give us to the world again!

They did not stay long, but walked down to the Thames, took a boat, and rowed to Billingsgate.  Beauclerk and Johnson were so well pleased with their amusement, that they resoved to persevere in dissipation for the rest of the day: but Langton deserted them, being engaged to breakfast with some young Ladies.  Johnson scolded him for "leaving his social friends to go and sit with a set of wretched un-idea'd girls."  Garrick being told of this ramble, said to him smartly, "I heard of your frolick t'other night.  You'll be in the Chronicle."  Upon which Johnson afterwards observed, "He durst not do such a thing.  His wife would not let him!" 

There is much to enjoy in this little episode, and it is only one of very many in the whole, but the figure of Dr. Johnson in the role of macho taunter of the hen-pecked married man, who can't go out carousing with his friends, lodges in the mind.  Kronenberger, in an astute remark in the Introduction, suggests that Johnson, conscious of his oddness, took inordinate delight in things he thought "normal." 

The New Yorker, Dec. 21 & 28, 2009

The current New Yorker is one that the circulation deparment should wish into your mailbox right before your subscription runs out--George Packer on Obama's Oslo speech, a story by Helen Simpson, Louis Menand on Arthur Koestler, and Joan Acocella on Chaucer.  Something quick about each.

I have not read the speech Obama delivered that day.  I expect Packer quotes the parts he found particularly strong but here is one sentence that makes it into his column that I wish had not made it into the speech: "For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world."  Does the president imagine that some of his auditors disagree?  Is it his view that critics of his Afghanistan policy think evil does not exist in the world?  His conception of ambiguity may be over-simple.

The story by Helen Simpson, called "Diary of an Interesting Year," is hard to read.  There has been a global disaster and the diary entries mercilessly describe a descent into a hell where life is nasty, brutish, solitary, and, the female diarist must think, not short enough.  It isn't the worst, so long as the she can say, "This is the worst."

Koestler was the reason Cyril Connolly told Edmund Wilson, "Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long, one could not trust him half an hour with one's wife."  Also, he (Koestler) believed in paranormal phenomena and bequeathed 400,000 pounds to the University of Edinburgh that it might establish in its psychology department the Koestler Parapsychological Unit, which, Menand reports, is currently studying "alleged poltergeist experiences."  I'm with Menand about the title--Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic--of the new biography, by Michael Scammell, that is the subject of his article: the word "skeptic" does not belong.  The peculiar enthusiasms and blind spots of geniuses must be an interesting topic.

I studied Chaucer at the University of Minnesota with Andrew MacLeish.  We had to learn by heart passages from The Canterbury Tales and then, at an interview, recite for him in Middle English one of the assigned passages, we knew not which till he told us at the interview.  It happened that my interview was in the afternoon of the morning on which we had all had to turn in a final paper that was to be a big part of our course grade.  MacLeish gave it back to me at the interview.  It looked just as it had when I turned it in a few hours earlier except now, at the end, was written: "Your paper is sensible though not particularly profound. B."  I always wondered how many profound papers he read that day.  Anyway, Acocella will make you want to read The Canterbury Tales.  She suggests the interlinear translation of Vincent Hopper but the Middle English is really not that incomprehensible, honest.  MacLeish required us to buy Robert Pratt's edition, which glosses in the right-hand margin the least familiar looking words.  The tale of the Pardoner is really one of the best things in English literature.

Senate rules allow Lieberman, Nelson to rule

Turns out that, in the show I was grateful I wouldn't watch, Lieberman made news by moving his goal posts behind the back of the end zone.  It now appears that the health care bill meets his personal requirements and we are on to appeasing Nelson.  It is easy to regard these guys with aversion, but don't forget the Republicans and the Senate rules that make it all possible.  I wrote the following letter to the editor, which was printed in Thursday's Star Tribune (the link will soon die):

If a candidate for president were to receive 59% of the national vote, it would be regarded by all as a landslide, an unambiguous mandate.  But for some reason that is not enough of a super majority to pass needed reforms in the US Senate.

It's bad enough that we might not get meaningful health care reform.  We also have to watch Joe Lieberman, I-Conn, and Ben Nelson, D-Neb, the prospective 59th and 60th votes for reform in the Senate, primp and preen while playing hard to get.  If you add together the entire populations of the states they represent, then multiply by 12, you're getting pretty close to the number of people who voted for Obama.  Yet it is now clear that, on this issue, they have all the power and he is irrelevant.

Meanwhile, the Republicans act as if they meant only to tighten their grip on Alabama and Idaho.  Well, why not?  The fate of health care reform rests with one guy from Connecticut and another from Nebraska.  Insane.

--Eric Jorgenson

I think I was trying to cheer myself up in that last paragraph.  The Republicans will probably do more than tighten their grip on Alabama and Idaho in 2010.  The country is full of crazy people.

Sunday morning politicking

In my bachelor days, I always watched the Sunday morning news talk shows.  This morning, scanning the newspaper over the blare of Sponge Bob Square Pants, I saw a short item, "TV News Shows," detailing which guests would be on what shows, and thought: Boy, am I glad those days are gone.  What was I thinking?  I can hear them without hearing them, their lines so palpably memorized.  Holy Joe Lieberman was on "Face the Nation," no doubt pronouncing platitudes inflected with piety and self-importance.  Not that he's that much worse than most of the rest of them.  The day's other guests on "Face the Nation" were Sens. Rockefeller, Nelson, and McConnell.  McConnell, in particular, is nauseating--though the formerly unknown Nelson, who seems to be enjoying all the attention lavished on him as a "swing vote" on health care, isn't far behind. 

He's not big but he's slow

That's what my high school coaches said about me.  In other sports notes:

The University of Minnesota men's basketball team, which will play its tenth game of the season later today, is beset by legal problems--two of its better players are defendants in pending criminal cases.  One of these, ahem, student athletes, a freshman, is charged with shoplifting at the Mall of America and then assaulting a security guard who confronted him.  A couple days after these charges were written up in the newspaper it came to light that he is also a suspect in a dormitory theft complaint.  The other fellow had, if I recall correctly, a set-to outside a club in Miami.

At least none of the Vikings has been arrested recently for drunk driving.  Their star running back, however, was clocked doing 109 mph a couple of weeks ago.

It's been worse for the Gopher basketball program.  Their previous coach was ousted in the wake of an academic cheating scandal.  And the career of the coach before that coach ended when three players were charged with sexual assault after a road game in Madison, Wisconsin.  The players were eventually acquitted but the evidence presented at trial was, or should have been, embarrassing to them.  Yet one of these student athletes returned to the (basketball) court after his acquittal sporting a champagne glass design carved into his haircut by a clever barber.

The star d-back of one of the recent Gopher football teams was convicted of a sexual assault that occurred at a campus party.  The victim was too drunk to giver her consent.  This student athlete might have escaped punishment if a teammate had not taken pictures with a cell phone. 

Did I hear somewhere that Tiger Woods has been behaving badly?

Okay, maybe some part of this has to do with fame and visibility.  As a former Timberwolf basketball player complained after his forty-fifth brush with the law, "I'm a marked man!"  Moreover, the demographic group to which star athletes belong--males under 35--accounts for such a high proportion of all crimes that waxings and wanings in the crime rate are sometimes attributed, plausibly, to bulges or tapers in this part of the population. 

When a 30-year-old sales rep gets a dwi you don't read about it in the paper.

Still, I laugh to recall the sentiments expressed at all the post-season banquets I attended in my youth.  You know the ones.  Participation in athletics builds character, instills discipline, teaches teamwork and other important life lessons, like: "You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it."  All, strictly speaking, crapola.  The only lesson I learned is something like the opposite of that.  No matter how much you like to play, and no matter how hard you try or how much you practice, others are going to be better than you.  They are bigger, stronger, faster.  The discouraging facts of the case recommend a kind of rear-guard action.

Maybe that is a good lesson to learn, but no one ever talks about it, and it's axiomatic that the biggest, strongest, fastest, and best learn something else. 

   

Write like Palin

There's a show on NPR over the weekend--"Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me"?--in which contestants are read three "news" stories and have to identify the one that's real.  Since Sarah Palin has published Going Rogue, and Slate has challenged its readers to submit a single sentence in a "Write Like Palin" contest, I thought I might challenge my hordes of readers to distinguish entries in the contest from sentences in the book.  So here goes!  Of the following four sentences, two are quoted from Going Rogue, and the other two are entrants in the "Write Like Palin" contest.

1. As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.

2. The minute I was on that stage in Florida with all those lights in my eyes and the smell of Alaska still on my fingertips and my family, too, all around out there, I was where I dreamed of all those years on the basketball court and in Alaskas's God given beauty which we must cherish and use as God gave it us to use and in honor of the troops, also.

3. Reaching the peak of Igikpak, that majestic mount, feeling the smooth Alaskan wind rustle against my cheeks, watching over this vast yet tender land that epitomized so much of America's resplendent pulchritude, and slowly squeezing the trigger on the wolf cub I'd been tracking through my crosshairs, I suddenly felt in my heart something I had always known to be true: the capital-gains tax must be eliminated.

4. I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.

Spoiler alert: the solution is in the last paragraph. 

This is all a lot of fun but we should remember that Sarah Palin, a manifest dope, is a leading figure in the Republican party and could become president if Obama fails, which he might.  It's hard to overstate the irresponsibility exhibited by John McCain in selecting her.  On the other hand, given the composition of the modern Republican party, the odds were against the selection of a serious person.  Had McCain picked at random a Republican member of Congress there would have been a high likelihood of a real crackpot--though, I have to admit, a relative few are in Palin's class.

Sentences (2) and (3) are entrants in the contest.  The first and fourth are from Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin.  Via Andrew Sullivan.  Here is the winner in the contest: "One night after a long day of campaigning, when the haters had made my spirits reach a nadir, I looked into Todd’s eyes, which were as blue as the stripes on Old Glory, and too representing truth and loyalty, and he looked back at me with a twinkle of determination which I hadn’t seen since I told him my goal of having another baby in my fifties and naming it Tron, then did I know for sure that I could carry on, like he, and we, have done together all of these years on this long, Iron Dog race of a marriage that is at once grueling and celestial, onerous and majestic."  (You have to love "blue as the stripes on Old Glory.")

Netflix: Chinatown

Last night's home entertainment was not actually a Netflix rental.  That would have have been the third episode in the first season of Mad Men, but we couldn't play the disc, so we substituted my personally owned videocassette of Chinatown: Los Angeles in the 1930s, not Madison Avenue in the 1960s.  I'd forgotten Gittes's putdown of the crooked cop Mulvihill, who has had his water service cut off.

How did you know?  You don't drink it.  You don't bathe in it.  Did they send you a letter?  Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.

You have to supply the Nicholsonian inflection, the way he hangs on to the vowel sound in "read," drawing it out.

The ending is not focus-group tested.  "He owns the police!"  Then some shots and the long blare of the horn.  So it's not "just Chinatown"; the corruption is pervasive.  Roman Polanski has a cameo and directs.  You don't have to be a nice man to make a great movie.

In one post: Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson & a Tiger joke

Of this speech in the third act of King Lear--

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

--A.C. Bradley, one of the best Shakespearean critics, suggests that criticism must stand mute, and declares only, "This is one of those passages which make one worship Shakespeare."  Indent, new paragraph, nothing more to say about that.

The accumulation of such passages, in diverse situations across approximately 36 dramas, all compelling the conclusion that nothing remains to be said, is responsible for Shakespeare's status as the author of "humanistic scriptures, the tested residue of pragmatic wisdom, a general collection of quotable texts and usable examples" (as Harry Levin, in his General Introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare, puts it).  This raises the question: who's in second place? 

Since I have recently quoted Dr. Johnson to shed light upon the troubles of Tiger Woods, it should not surprise my hordes of loyal readers to learn that, today, I vote for him (Johnson, not Woods).  I've been reading Johnson's LIfe of Savage and, on a coffee break from work trouble on Friday, came upon this passage:

Examples need not be sought at any great distance to prove that superiority of fortune has a natural tendency to kindle pride, and that pride seldom fails to exert itself in contempt and insult; and if this is often the effect of hereditary wealth and of honors enjoyed only to the merit of others, it is some extenuation of any indecent triumphs to which this unhappy man [Savage] may have been betrayed that his prosperity was heightened by the force of novelty and made more intoxicating by a sense of the misery in which he had so long languished and perhaps of the insults which he had formerly borne, and which he might now think himself entitled to revenge.  It is too common for those who have unjustly suffered pain to inflict it likewise in their turn with the same injustice, and to imagine that they have a right to treat others as they have themselves been treated. . . .

[Savage] was then able to discern that if misery be the effect of virtue it ought to be reverenced; if of ill fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.  And the humanity of that man can deserve no panegyric who is capable of reproaching a criminal in the hands of the executioner.

Maybe this does not deserve the epithet "quotable," but it's overflowing of wisdom and humanity, and is one of those passages that make me worship Dr. Johnson. On a lower note:

Q: What is the difference between a Cadillac Escalade and a golf ball?

A: Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball 300 yards.

Obama at West Point

Being married with children, I was not in front of the tv last night watching the president.  But I agree with Amy Davidson:  if the purpose of the policy is to have fewer of our soldiers in Afghanistan by 2011,  wouldn't it be simpler to reduce troop levels rather than first sending 30,000 more so that you can then throw the ball over the garage, bounce it off the roof and through the basket in the back yard?  Q: What are we doing there?  A: Beating a cat because we don't know what to do about the tiger in the next room.

(The cat is the Taliban in Afghanistan; the tiger, al-Qaeda in Pakistan.)

Let's pile on by calling attention to one of the president's goofiest supporters.  I don't mean Senator Imhofe, a convert as of last night, but Cornel West, the subject of this exercise in expert vituperation.  Satire: the pleasure is in watching a ripe target taking a hit.  Via Michael Tomasky.