Eric The Blue

Poem for Memorial Day

It's Robert Bly's "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings":

We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
To new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters, the boy
Tortured with the telephone generator,
"I felt sorry for him,
And blew his head off with a shotgun."
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and in your cup you will look down
And see
Black Starfighters.
We were the ones we intended to bomb!
Therefore we will have
To go far away
To atone
For the sufferings of the stringy-chested
And the small rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.

Power Line: a natural disaster

I recently made fun of the Power Line philosophers for calling Rand Paul "not ready for prime time,"  as if the problem was a lack of seasoning.  Today, I wondered what the boys might be saying about the oil spill in the Gulf.  Turns out, they aren't saying much.  Hinderaker has a post comparing Obama to Cheney in his emotional chilliness.  After all, Obama played basketball on the same day he visited the Gulf.  That's frigid!  At least Cheney "oozed competence."  In another post, he links to Peggy Noonan, never a good sign, and asks, rhetorically, why anyone would have expected competence from Obama.  My favorite part of this post is Mirengoff's addendum:

PAUL adds: I doubt that liberals thought, in Noonan's words, that "Katrina was the result only of George W. Bush's incompetence and conservatives' failure to believe in government." I think they saw an opportunity to beat Bush up and took it. Now Republicans are using the same stick to beat Obama up.

This is part of a depressingly familiar phenomenon -- the politicization by Democrats of everything, with the Republicans (reasonably enough) following suit. We saw it with judicial nominees, to cite one example, and now we're seeing it with natural disasters.

Those Democrats are so mean that the poor Republicans can hardly keep up!  And you have to love the parallelism between Katrina and the oil spill, both "natural disasters."  Does he think the oil in the Gulf is to be attributed to a particularly windy day?  It almost makes me pine for "Drill, baby, drill."

Netflix: "The Last Seduction"

Superman in reverse, it's the Bad Girl whose wiles and puissance are destined to prevail in the end. How bad is she?  Slow service in a saloon elicits her question, "Whose a girl gotta suck around here to get a drink?"  I'm glad I was watching with my wife, not my mom.

Linda Fiorentino is the femme fatale and she would have benefited from worthier competition.  The outcome is not in doubt.  Implausible as Superman, it's a confection for those who say they hate confections.  Halliwell's Film Guide gives it three stars, and I loved it, too.

Netflix: "Word Wars"

The subtitle of this documentary is "Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit."  Would you have guessed that the greatest Scrabble players in the world are a little off?  This movie will persuade you that it's so.  I remember, when young, being perhaps too impressed by televised feats of incredible athleticism and then feeling let down when the hero, interviewed after the game, revealed himself to be weird and dopey.  For some reason, I thought the grace and prowess would extend into other areas, but of course the opposite is true: those who are the best at something tend to have ignored everything else.  These scrabblers reminded me of Grigory Perelman, the famously prickly and antisocial mathematician who solved the Poincare Conjecture.  His biographer has conjectured that he suffers from Asperger's syndrome, sometimes called "autism lite," and that the condition is associated with unusual mathematical ability.  If you read this review, by John Allen Paulos, and then watch the movie, I think you too will detect a certain family resemblance. 

What's new in wing-nuttery?

Between the office in which I work and the nearest Caribou shop is a financial firm that plays, continuously during business hours on a giant TV for the de-edification of skyway strollers, Fox News.  Yesterday, while I was on the way to get fortified for the last hours of the work day, the text at the bottom of the screen below the talking heads said: "American people have cut back, wonder when government will end the spending spree." 

Maybe that's what Fox News viewers are wondering.  But they've been systematically dumbed down--by  Fox News.  If "people have cut back," and business has done the same, then government is all that's left to stimulate a shrivelling economy.  This notion that what's reasonable for an individual makes a good principle for government policy--it's just childish, churlish, and a crock of organic matter.

I prefer to get my right-wing talking points from Power Line.  I can't tell you how Fox News is playing the Rand Paul story but the philosophers agree that he's "not ready for prime time," which is a way of putting it.  Depend upon it, ladies and sirs, understatement is not an arrow in their rhetorical quiver.  Regarding Dr. Paul, the diagnosis is in: basically sound but needs seasoning.

Another Sunday Afternoon Miscellany

Another Sunday afternoon at home alone with a napping toddler and the Twins game on the radio.  The philosopher Schopenhauer wrote that we are all like children at a play disporting ourselves before the drawn curtain.  We do not know what will happen to us, which is fortunate, because it would wreck my enjoyment of the next two hours.

Corey Hart, of the Brewers, just deposited a Carl Pavano pitch in the third deck of the leftfield seats at Target Field.  He's the first to achieve that feat.  The previous batter had lined out to the Twins' second baseman, Orlando Hudson, who leaped to catch it and then, attempting to double Prince Fielder off first base, hit him in the back with his throw.  That is not hard to do as it is about a mile and a half from Fielder's left shoulder to his right.  Still, if Hudson could have somehow snaked a throw around the massive baserunner, Hart would not have batted with a man aboard and the Twins would not have fallen behind, 3 to 2. 

Yesterday's game was probably the most exciting to date at Target Field.  The Twins led 6 to 2 heading into the ninth, but the Brewers then scored five runs--the first five at-bats of the inning resulted in a walk, two singles, and two doubles--to take a one-run lead.  The Twins then tied the score in the bottom of the ninth and had the winning run on third base with just one out.  Punto, however, struck out before Span batted.  Span drove a fly to deep right and, thinking he'd hit a walk-off homer, raised his arm as he ran toward first.  But the ball died and was caught on the warning track for the third out.  All these ups and downs were alternately cheered and groaned by a bipartisan sell-out crowd, Wisconsin beginning only a half hour or so east of the new stadium.  The Twins finally won on a run in the bottom of the twelfth.

With the radio on I am trying with my eyes to repair my ignorance about the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen.  I've found out that, when writing about him recently, I should have referred not to A Doll's House but to A Doll House, the latter being a better translation of the Norwegian and, considering the situation depicted in the play, more apt as well.  Also, I should not have said that I have read so far only Ibsen's "early plays."  It would have been more accurate to say that almost no one reads Ibsen's early plays, ever.  He was born in 1828 (the same year as Tolstoy) and his first play, Catiline, appeared in 1850.  Since his last play, When We Dead Awaken, belongs to 1899, his entire career coincides neatly with the second half of the nineteenth century.  The plays that belong to the second half of the second half of the nineteenth century include all the ones you are most likely to have read, heard about, or seen performed: Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892).  What I called Ibsen's "early plays" are really the early plays of those anyone but scholars know about.

It's not quite so simple as that.  In college, I had to read Brand (1865) and Peer Gynt (1867), but I think that is because I went to St. Olaf College, where Kierkegaard is king, and these two plays are said to have been influenced by the philosophy of the God-obsessed Dane.  I remember reading them in "Philosophical Ideas in Literature," taught by the renowned Kierkegaard scholar Howard Hong, who died recently.  I am now rereading Peer Gynt and find I remember nothing of it.  Probably I'd forgotten it before I took the final test.  Brand I think is more obscure yet.  These are the plays of Ibsen read by people who are less interested in Ibsen than in Kierkegaard and religion.

The Brewers won today's game, 4 to 3, the last out having been recorded in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded.  Oh, well, the Brewers lost a tough one yesterday, and starting Tuesday we have three home games against the Yankees.

Encore

Seven days, says my dashboard, since I delivered myself of the definitive deconstruction of the political commentary of Michael Gerson.  What can I do for an encore?  That is the question reverberating in cyberspace.  Here on First Avenue South, in Minneapolis, however, the question has been: when the hell are you going to plant flowers in the boulevard?  And the answer has been: on some day when I am not at work for nine hours and the Twins aren't playing the Yankees on tv.  What a full life.  Reminds me of a cartoon in The New Yorker.  It's a graveyard, full of stones, and the only one you can read says, "Here lies So-and-So.  He watched a lot of sports on television."

The Twins, after disappointing Bronx losses on Friday and Saturday, salvaged game three yesterday by scoring five runs in the eighth inning, all batted in against Mariano Rivera, who walked Thome with the bases loaded and then yielded a grand slam to Kubel.  As for gardening, I can say that, while not an Olympic sport, you use muscles that apparently hibernate in the winter.  I lay in bed, weary and feeling hot on the tops of my ears, with the Modern Library's Eleven Plays of Henrik Ibsen.  We're going to see "Dollhouse," Rebecca Gilman's "droll and deliciously caustic" update of Ibsen's "A Doll's House," at the Guthrie on May 26, so naturally, like the A-student I wasn't, I'm reading up in preparation for the big night out. 

Being a hundred per cent Norwegian, I feel obliged to approve of every dropping from the pen of Norway's greatest gift to literature, though I have to admit that some of those earlier plays--the only ones I've read so far--may strike a Swede as melodramatic and cheap.  I'm thinking mainly now of Pillars of Society.  You think all is well at the house of the town's finest citizen?  Well, it's not, and some of the trouble concerns forbidden sex.  Oh, my!

Michael Gerson annoys me

When in the journalism profession someone rises to the level of being a syndicated columnist, those of us with a newspaper subscription and an interest in public affiars are sentenced to becoming familiar with his regard for himself.  Charles Krauthammer, for example, sees himself as a hardheaded crusader against the effeminate know-nothings who coddle terrorists when of course the thing is to kill all of them before they kill all of us, which they are perpetually on the cusp of achieving.  Woe is us!

At least Jesus doesn't seem to have much to do with it.  For that, we have Michael Gerson, of the Washington Post.  He is one of those who probably thinks there is a Christian angle to trigonometry. The Christian angle to this and that is almost his only topic.  He feels obliged to work it into every piece. When he strays too far in his choice of subject, we readers are witness to the strain.  In a recent column on Tim Pawlenty, the governor of our state and early campaigner in the 2012 presidential sweepstakes, Gerson manages to notice Pawlenty's "quiet evangelical Christianity"--the phrase is an oxymoron--and that, when trying to feign tea party anger on the stump, he can "come across like a Baptist trying to swear."  Religion, besides providing Gerson with a favorite subject, is his only allusive resource.

I should not criticize, because Gerson is such an outstanding Christian, but it is possible that his enthusiasm for religion has prevented him from becoming acquainted with things he purports to know about. Consider the following paragraph: 

Pawlenty is the successful conservative governor of one of the most liberal states in the union -- as if Ronald Reagan had been elected in Sweden. One explanation is his disarming, beer-sharing niceness, which is among Minnesota's main exports to the nation (exception: the seething Sen. Al Franken).  

Allow me to state my objections in no particular order.

The deployment of "beer-sharing" reminds one of what Gerson himself says about Pawlenty trying to sound angry.  Gerson is trying to sound regular, but it doesn't work for him, because he's not.  Regular people are interested in more than religion.  I shouldn't have said that religion is his only allusive resource.  It's the only one easily within reach.  Anything else and you notice the stretching.

The whole "Minnesota-nice" thing: what a load of rubbish!  If Gerson wants to adopt the views of Garrison Keillor, there are better candidates.  I've lived here my whole life and am not nice at all.  I don't even consider it a virtue.  Justice is a virtue.

Consider that last paragraph a defense against the gratuitous swipe at Al Franken.  About some things a morally alive person has to be angry--"seething," if you will.  Religion--if an outsider may broach the topic--permits it.  See, for example, the Book of Amos.

The timing of Gerson's column is--I don't know whether to say awful or delectable.  On the day it appeared in the local paper, the headlines concerned the decision, of the Minnesota Supreme Court, that Pawlenty had violated state law when, in the last legislative session, he stonewalled the Democratic majority's solution to the state's budget problems and then did an endrun around the Legislature by "unallotting" once the session had ended.  Pawlenty criticized the opinion, which was written by the Chief Justice, whom he appointed.  It seems he should take the blame for something.  I would have thought that being a "successful conservative governor" might include following the law--or, at least, not being busted for breaking it by your own appointee.

What evidence is there for the claim that Minnesota is "one of the most liberal states in the union"?  We've got Power Line and Michele Bachmann.  We have not had a Democratic governor in twenty years. Obama's share of the popular vote here was lower than in 18 other states.  It's possible that Gerson was so infatuated with the quip about Reagan and Sweden that he couldn't let facts stop him.  It's also possible that he just doesn't know what he's talking about.  There is a tendency among the faithful to regard their religious commitment as a substitute for the trouble associated with actually finding things out.  In this respect, Gerson's columns are representative cultural artifacts.

Netflix: The Atheism Tapes

"The Screwtape Letters"; "The Atheism Tapes": a sly dig, maybe.  The presence in the title of the A-word is also significant, as the film is made of "extra material" collected by Jonathan Miller, the British polymath, while making the BBC program "Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief," which in America was renamed "A Brief History of Disbelief" in order to be less offensive to potential corporate underwriters.

The title is almost the only playful thing about it.  Jesus, though truly human, is never in the Gospels reported to have laughed, and neither it seems do his contemporary critics.  Perhaps this God-business is only for the serious.  Once or twice I smiled, as when Colin McGinn, discussing the so-called ontological proof of God's existence, said something like: "It is easier to be unpersuaded than to say exactly what is wrong."  I think he was paraphrasing Bertrand Russell.

There are six parts, one each for Miller's interviewees, who for the record are, besides philosopher McGinn, the physicist Steven Weinberg, playwright Arthur Miller, biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and, presumably for "balance," the British theologian Denys Turner, who called Dawkins a fundamentalist.  I'd say what else he said but none of it made enough sense to remember.  Jonathan Miller has some very colorful socks and an odd way of stretching his arms and playing with his fingers.

Here's a joke. A small town in a very remote location is populated by fundamentalist Christians who are afraid that, at the Second Coming, Jesus will not find them and they'll be left behind in the rapture.  So they build towers on the edges of town and hire some of the local beggars to sit atop them in shifts looking for Jesus to come again in all his glory, in which case they are to signal him to the town.  One day a traveller is passing by and sees a man sitting in the tower.  "What are you doing up there?" he calls.  The former beggar explains the whole thing.  "Well," says the traveller, "that's a helluva job.  How's the pay?"

"The work doesn't pay much," the beggar answers.  "But it's steady."

Today on the Star Trib's editorial page

The Republicans went and did it--endorsed the crazy guy, Tom Emmer, for governor of Minnesota.  I hope that makes it more likely that the Democrat will win, because it certainly makes it more likely that Emmer will win.  Did I mention that he's crazy?  During the Democrats' convention, there  was a lot of talk about which candidate was most "electable."  The Republicans evidently are not oppressed with such calculations.  Even if Emmer loses, the high profile of him and a million other nuts has the effect of moving that holy grail, "the center," rightward.  

Lori Sturdevant, a consistent voice of reason on the editorial page of the Star Tribune, today compares Emmer's views with those of Marty Seifert, his opponent for the Republican endorsement:

[Emmer] was the one who wants to eliminate state aid to cities; Seifert wouldn't quite go so far.  Emmer said he wants to replace government subsidies for health care for the poor with tax incentives for charity care; Seifert wouldn't go that far either. . . . Emmer has signed on to a proposed state constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds vote by the Legislature and a gubernatorial signature before a new federal law could go into effect in Minnesota.  Seifert knows his U.S. constitutional law better than to do any such thing.

Meanwhile, Katherine Kersten inveighs against pornography, which "may even have influenced rogue American soldiers' abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib."  Yes, and President Bush was surfing the Net one-handed when he should have been getting briefed.  The wingnuts don't always want to let the market work its magic.  They're in favor of freedom, except for when they aren't; and against excuses for bad behavior, except for when it helps the cause.  Just make sure the government doesn't help the uninsured get health care!