Eric The Blue

Talking politics

Dorothy Wickenden discusses presidential politics with her New Yorker colleagues Ryan Lizza and Hendrik Hertzberg, who are joined by Neera Tanden, of the Center for American Progress, and Steve Schmidt, who is perhaps best known for becoming publicly annoyed, while running McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, with the performance of Sarah Palin.  So as Republicans go he is under-benighted.  Is it true, as he says, around nine minutes in, that the conservative movement is "intellectually serious" and has been undercut by know-nothings like Palin?  I wish Wickendon had asked him who, among  the Republican candidates for president, or among the 289 Republican members of Congress, represents the "intellectually serious" wing of the party. 

The "conservative movement" has been Palinized. 

Fine man

I reviewed James Gleick's biography of the physicist Richard Feynman here.  He (Feynman) is the subject of a television biography, "No Ordinary Genius," which is available online--I found it at 3 Quarks Daily.  Takes about ninety minutes.  There is a lot to like, even if you are not in the cult, but I was struck by Feynman's self-criticism for having participated in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos.  He had thought it was vital to get it before the Germans did, but then Germany was defeated, and he was too busy to notice that his reason for participating was gone.   In his imagination, he juxtaposed the drunk, celebrating scientists with the suffering Japanese.  Everyone talks about Truman and "the decision to drop" but I think it was more like bureaucratic momentum arising from the same force that worked on Feynman.  It was a train you couldn't get off.

 

Newt rising!

Ah, Newt Gingrich, the latest not-Romney and someone new to have some fun with!  Andrew Sullivan, for example, has invented a drinking game: while watching the Republican presidential candidates debate, everyone has a shot each time Newt says "frank/frankly, profound/profoundly, total/totally, utter/utterly, or complete/completely."  That'll land you somewhere you might not want to be on the morning after. Newt's verbal tics are as indefatigable as his self-regard.  In "The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich," published sixteen years ago in The New York Review of Books, Joan Didion quotes the following representative specimen of a Gingrichean speech act: "I teach a course which is an outline of my thoughts at 51 years of age, based on everything I've experienced, which is, frankly, rather more than most tenured faculty."

Didion's essay begins with a list--Newt himself loves lists as well as outlines--of some of the "personalities and books and events that have 'influenced' or 'changed' or 'left an indelible impression on' [Newt's] thoughts."  She sets them down in the manner of a Homeric catalog:

Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Isaac Asimov, Alexis de Tocqueville, Tom Clancy, Allen Drury's Advise and Consent, Robert Walpole, William Gladstone, Gordon Wood, Peter Drucker, Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, the "Two Cultures" lectures of C.P. Snow, Adam Smith, Zen and the Art of Archery, "the great leader of Coca-Cola for many years, Woodruff," an Omaha entrepreneur named Herman Cain ("who's the head of Godfather Pizza, he's an African American who was born in Atlanta and his father was Woodruff's chauffeur"), Ray Kroc's Grinding It Out, and Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages.

There are also. . . .

You get the idea.  Gee!  Whiz!  He's a genius!  You also have to love Herman Cain's cameo, and how way back then he required parenthetic identification.  Republicans don't like affirmative action, but you can always count on them to mention that there's this black guy they admire.  His dad used to drive around rich white guys in a limo!  And now look at him!  He doesn't know where Libya is!

When discussing Newt, you find yourself using a lot of exclamation points.  It's the punctuation mark that goes with his puffy style.  Totally!

A professorial oracle: I demur

In yesterday's Star Tribune, Stephen J Heaney, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of St Thomas, argues that a rule mandating "that nearly every insurance plan cover sterilization procedures and contraceptives" amounts to "an indefensible assault on freedom of conscience, of association and of religion" for Roman Catholics.  He purports to "explain the situation." 

Perhaps the first thing to notice is the words Professor Heaney chooses to deploy.  He speaks, for example, of "sterilization procedures," which in ordinary speech refers to a surgery imposed upon an unwilling subject by court order or the fiat of a tyrannical power.  But what the professor means by "sterilization" presumably includes one of  the most common, elected surgeries performed in the United States--the one most of us refer to as a "vasectomy."

No one is saying that Catholic hospitals must perform vasectomies, or abortions.  Insurance policies, however, should cover them.  And medical professionals should tell patients about their options, including those that are not available at Catholic hospitals.  People can get the services they conclude are best for them at some less benighted institution. 

When Professor Heaney isn't indulging himself in fanciful metaphors concerning "pork stores," he manages to make some straightforward pronouncements that are pretty bizarre.  Here he is "refuting" the claims of a previous writer, State Sen. Scott Dibble (DFL-Minneapolis):

Medicine is about restoring people to health.  Abortion destroys a living human being.  Contraception, when it works, prevents pregnancy. . . .  Deliberately frustrating healthy functions and destroying human beings is the opposite of health care.

This conception of the practice of medicine appears to ignore the entire realm of preventative care.  Is the professor against doctors telling patients they should quit smoking, or lose weight, or be screened for colon cancer?  Does he deny that for many women another pregnancy is medically undesirable, even dangerous?  The professor seems to think it is never a bad idea for a woman to become pregnant.  How many women concur?  And who should decide whether or not it is a good idea for her to have a baby?

The main thing the professor's article explains is why so many people, including most American Catholics, think the Church's teachings on matters touching upon sexuality are completely bonkers.  "Contraception, when it works, prevents pregnancy."  Yes, professor.  Now I understand why the Church is okay with the rhythm method.  It isn't on the insurance menu--and, better yet, it doesn't work.

Netflix: The Special Relationship

Dennis Quaid's bluff, voluble Bill Clinton schools Michael Sheen's Tony Blair, who could barely be heard above the shoosh of our dishwasher in the next room, on winning elections and governing from "the center left."  Sheen's undertones signal Blair's moral seriousness: he knows you have to invade Kosovo, and not permit interns to suck you off. If only he could figure out that W. is a chump.

Quaid shows that he has studied his subject by the way he sets his chin in the crotch between thumb and pointing finger, so lost in thought that he momentarily forgets to feed himself.  The thin overlay of historicity, including news footage, suggests that the prime minister and his aides really did bat back and forth the question of whether "it has to be in to be a sin."

Not a significant contribution to the made-for-TV genre.

Reading my Blog Roll

Been reading my own Blog Roll.  Amy Davidson, author of the Close Read blog at The New Yorker, has four questions ("for starters") about the scandal at Penn State.  Why, indeed, did Sandusky retire from coaching in 1999?  He was 55, which is not the usual retirement age for highly successful assistant coaches in big-time Division One football programs.  One would expect the defensive coordinator under Joe Paterno at Penn State--"Linebacker U"--to want something more from football.  Of course, we now know that the year before he had been the subject of a police investigation after a mother began asking questions when he brought her son home from an outing and she noticed that both had wet hair.  Despite the coach's near confession to the mom, the investigation went nowhere.  Sandusky, however, quietly retired.  Deal?  How far does the corruption  go?  It calls to mind one of the last, chilling lines from Chinatown.  Someone has suggested that someone call the police, and Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray cries, "He owns the police!" 

Penn State versus the local Dogberry in State College might have been a greater mismatch than some of their home football games against outmanned foes. 

And what about Mike McQueary?  He was the graduate assistant who, in 2002, came across Sandusky raping a 10-year-old in the football shower.  He was 28, a former Penn State footballer himself, able-bodied, but  he did not physically intervene.  Nor did he call the police.  Instead, he told Paterno, who told the athletic director, who told someone higher up in administration, and time passed.  What did McQueary think when nothing happened?  He must have kept seeing Sandusky around the football facilities.  Soon he got a better job on the Penn State coaching staff.  His career path would have been different had he pulled Sandusky off the 10-year-old and called the police. 

And what was Paterno thinking when nothing happened? 

Davidson has more questions, too.  Read the whole thing.  One topic she doesn't take up is the charitable foundation--the "Second Mile"--Sandusky started to help at-risk kids.  Was it ever anything more than a way for him to meet victims?  Yet the foundation had a high profile in a town as small as State College.  What view of it was held over the years by Coach McQueary and JoePa?

Meanwhile, Davidson's colleague John Cassidy has a post about those entertaining Republicans.  If you've been thinking about Penn State, Cassidy's take on Mitt, Rick, Herman et al has an effect like that of the graveyard scene in Hamlet.

The party of Lincoln

What's going on with the Republican party?  Are its presidential contenders a fair sample of the whole?  I'm afraid they are.  If you're in quality control at the widget factory, and the first six you inspect are defective, you'd begin to suspect the entire consignment was effed, right? 

It can't be that the able ones are sitting this one out on account of Obama's manifest invincibility.  What you see is what the Republican party has become.

Let's go down the list.  Huntsman appears connected to reality, which is probably why his candidacy has no pulse.  The others are successively displacing one another as the punch line to jokes.  Perry's recent moment--I mean 53 seconds--of brain-turdiness is emblematic of the modern Republican party.  There are layers of absurdity.  The president cannot abolish cabinet-level departments, as Perry seems to suppose.  Maybe he can't remember the three he means to eliminate because it's just empty talk anyway.  Details, details.

Bachmann would be better off if she also would forget everything she was about to say.  Paul is like the crazy old uncle who blights your anticipation of Thanksgiving.  (I hope he doesn't talk about politics again!)  Santorum: where did he get the self-regard to run for president?  the dutifully incessant praise of all his Sunday-school teachers?  If you're curious about how Newt Gingrich got his reputation for great intellect, it's because of the company he keeps. 

Who am I missing?  Oh, yes, the front-runners! Herman Cain's standing in the polls suggests that Republicans are not thoroughgoing in their opposition to affirmative action.  Interviewer: Do you have any fiscal recommendations for Europe?  Cain: "No, I do not, honestly."  Has he been more inept at rebutting criticism of his 9-9-9 tax plan or at remembering the details of some of his nights out?  To be fair, his tax plan is indefensible. 

Romney is just a shameless trimmer.  If it weren't for ambition, there'd be nothing to hold his suits up.  He's the one!

Netflix: Love Actually

Of King Lear, Lionel Trilling said it is not enough that there is one broken man wandering the earth in despondency and madness; there must be two.  For Richard Curtis, director of Love Actually, it is not enough that there is one absurd love story tugging at the heart strings of good-hearted holiday moviegoers; there must be seventeen. 

It's like splenda on frosted flakes. 

With Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Keira Knightley, Laura Linney, Colin Firth. . . . many others: 17 x 2 = 34, and some of the stories involve, you know, triangles.  Terrible, just terrible. 

Two Aprils

Chaucer is my new coffee-break companion--I've now finished the 850 or so lines of the "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, wherein the pilgrims are expertly limned.  My tentative plan is to read the tales of the miller, the reeve, the nun's priest, the wife of Bath, the merchant, the franklin, and the pardoner.  I don't think you want to read the whole thing:  according to Robert K. Root, author of The Poetry of Chaucer (1922), the parson's tale--actually a sermon--is "interminably long" and "interminably dull."  I can see that it's long and am going to trust him about the dullness.

It's not on account of being an advanced Chaucerian that I claim familiarity with the criticism of Dr Root.  Years ago, as a student at the University of Minnesota, I took "the Chaucer course" taught by Andrew Macleish, who had us buy Allan H. Maclaine's The Students Comprehensive Guide to the Canterbury Tales.  In less than 300 pages, this helpmate collects a significant portion of the scholarly commentary on The Canterbury Tales, including Root's stricture regarding the parson's sermon.  My copy is alternately pristine and marked with underlinings and marginalia, so I can tell which tales were and weren't assigned.  The ones I mean to read are the ones I read years ago. 

Here are just a few lines from the portrait of the miller in the Prologue:

Upon the cop right of his nose he hade
A werte, and thereon stood a tuft of herys,
Reed as the bristles of a sowes erys;
His nosethirles blake were and wyde.

You would not say of The Canterbury Tales what Dr Johnson said of Paradise Lost--that it lacks in human interest on account of the lack of human characters.  Chaucer is the first English poet whose name we know and, with the exception of Shakespeare, it's not clear that his achievement has been matched.  For those of us for whom the Middle English is opaque, it can be exhilirating how again and again initial perplexity gives way to bursts of enjoyment of the type often associated with a "modern" literary sensibility.  Chaucer's urbane realism.  His many-minded mastery of the whole human scene.  In Joyce's Ulysses, one of the characters sniffs his own toe jam, but that kind of thing was not invented by Joyce.  Chaucer casts a long shadow.  The Tales open:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendered is the flour. . . .

More than 600 years later, what is probably the most famous long poem in English of the 20th century, Eliot's Waste Land, begins:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. . . .

 

Fun with Herman

Is the Republican presidential race a conspiracy to boost the ratings of Stewart and Colbert?  I admit, they're both clever, but, really, all you have to do is play the tape.  And it's not as if Cain was a credible candidate, by the standards that apply outside the Republican part of the electorate, before he started talking out of every side of his mouth about some of his minor adventures with the National Restaurant Association.  Back when he was just this month's alternative to Romney, and people started scrutinizing his "9-9-9" tax plan, he was unresponsive and defenseless.  When asked recently whether he had any fiscal recommendations for Europe, he said, "No, I do not, honestly."  It's practically the only believable thing he's said.

The most ludicrous aspect of the story may be the defense offered up by some of the usual suspects--there's been another high-tech lynching, Herman Cain is the victim of a liberal smear, etc., etc.  Cain as the nominee would be a bigger gift to Obama than Cain as a candidate is to late-night comedians.  The only way this could get crazier is if the nuts rally around Cain and he begins to lengthen his lead over the suit named Romney as the sun sets on the Perry candidacy.  When that happens, we'll revisit the notion that Cain's current troubles are part of a grand liberal plot.