Eric The Blue

Flying home

Back to Minneapolis yesterday evening.  A week earlier, when we had just taken off and our plane was climbing to its cruising altitude, Rianna, our 9-year-old, who had a window seat, exclaimed, "Wow, is this ever cool!"  The gentleman in the seat in front of her was amused.  Turning around and addressing her through the space between the seats, he asked, or observed, "You haven't flown before, have you?" 

I guess I haven't flown so much that I've stopped looking out the window and thinking it's cool.  Yesterday, when the sun had set, and we were flying over I presume Iowa, or maybe eastern Nebraska, I was able to look out past the stranger snoozing in the window seat next to me and notice the way that small towns look from the air at night: two lines of crossing light that bulge near their intersection. 

Earth, I think, looks better from a few miles up than it does on the surface.

By the Pacific

We drove to La Jolla today, where I stepped into the Pacific Ocean for the first time in my life. Spent most of the time trailing behind our two older girls and lifting them up out of the water when a wave threatened to knock one or the other off her feet. The other thing I noticed is that the surfers looked like regular people, not Platonic forms of southern California perfection.

Keats seems to have thought that Cortez, not Balboa, was the first European to make it to the Pacific Ocean--see his "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." The best poem about the view from the shore was written by a New Englander, Robert Frost. "Too far out, girls!"

Family vacation

We are on a family vacation in the American southwest. Phoenix, where my parents live in the winter months, is the hub for our activities, but yesterday we drove to San Diego. There is a kitchenette in our room, so we walked to a nearby Trader Joe's, where I felt like Ben Franklin entering Philadelphia and discovering that he could get three loaves for what in Boston would purchase only one: the wine known to me as "3-buck-Chuck" costs just $1.99 per bottle here. It's available in the grocery store, too. As is right and proper. When Amanda made a Facebook post concerning my satisfaction, someone pointed out that a 1000-square-foot house here costs at least a half million, thereby setting her up to reply that, factoring in the wine savings, we might be able to swing the house. Smart aleck!

Today we took the kids to the zoo. It would get a chapter in the Eric the Blue version of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The most exotic fauna on display are the ones that paid $42 to get in, and you don't have to go to the zoo to see them. I have to say, however, that I like the monkeys, especially the big apes. The fundamentalists, including I guess Rick Santorum, say it's crazy to think they're our next of kin, but I don't doubt it in the least. Maybe he's never seen one peel a banana.

 

Poor, White, Republican, and overwrought

This--"Poor, White, and Republican," a New Yorker "Daily Comment" by George Packer--had elicited precisely 100 comments last time I visited.  One of them was by yours truly, who detected a geographical lapse: Chisago is the name of a Minnesota county, not a "small Minnesota town." But that is not my only reaction.  For example, the line about the "bad teeth" of the demographic group he's describing is not, as some may suppose, a gratuitous sneer by a New Yorker staff writer, aka, Platonic form of The Cultural Elite.  One of Amanda's best friends lives somewhere in northern Anoka County, which abuts Chisago County.  She drove up there one day a couple years ago to go garage-saling, and, arriving back home here in Starbucks land, announced that she had never seen so many people who could benefit from some dental work.  This reminded me of my own observations during time spent in small-town bars in central Minnesota during weekend softball tournaments.  Packer is probably familiar with the article by his colleague, Malcolm Gladwell, wherein one reads, at the outset:

Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, "Uninsured in America." They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers—and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth.

My other reaction concerns the movies Packer references.  He's a reader, too, so he might have referenced novels, but for some reason it's the movies, not fiction, in which the decline of the American working class has been chronicled.  Is Rabbit Angstrom an exception?  Golfing with fellow retirees, Jews, in Florida, Rabbit doesn't let on when they run down Reagan that he'd voted for him.  But, then, Rabbit had graduated from the print shop to the Toyota dealership, inherited from his wife's side of the family.  He doesn't really qualify. 

What a lot of vitriol in the other 99 comments!  I wouldn't have guessed that the group Packer is discussing includes so many inclined to surf to the New Yorker site and take a crap in the Comments.  I think both he and they could benefit from a little sense of humor.  Whenever the local news reports about some knucklehead who has, say, fallen through the ice on his snowmobile and drowned, Amanda can be counted upon to ask whether he was my year or the one just ahead of me at Columbia Heights Senior High.

I King Henry IV

I'm coming to the conclusion of I King Henry IV and my reaction, which I think is in line with that of millions of others over the past 400+ years, is: less royal court, more Falstaff, please.  Indeed, scholars have speculated that II King Henry IV is an (initially) unplanned sequel intended to take advantage of the public's fondness for the boozy wheezing fatso who, in the first scene of Act V, provides this memorable summary of his personal "catechism" (in the context of preparation for battle, he has just been informed by the Prince of Wales that "he owes God a death"):

'Tis  not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me?  Well, 'tis  no matter; honor pricks me on.  Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air--a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon--and so ends my catechism.

The officially-approved, Cliffs-notes interpretation is that the play depicts different character types and that Falstaff is a foil to the impulsive Hotspur, who is so hot for glory.  The one is too much this way, the other too much the other way, and what is recommended is for the humors to be mixed as, at the end, they are in the reformed Prince Hal. Very tidy.  If that was the intention, it seems to me that Shakespeare confounded himself, somewhat in the manner of Dostoevski making Ivan Karamazov's brief against God so convincing that it's the main thing readers remember about his last novel.  Who remembers Hotspur?  The official history concerning the king and the rebels, their conventional reckonings and assumptions--all obliterated by Falstaff's subversive intelligence.  Where will honor get you?  Into a casket.  Who has it?  "He that died a Wednesday" (while Falstaff was drinking and whoring, which pastimes he pursued again on Thursday).

Charged with raising a force through conscription, Falstaff accepts cash payoffs from anyone of means, so that his "soldiers" are a rag-a-tag collection of ne'er-do-wells.  Prince Hal, well along the road to reformation now, enters with Westmoreland to review the troops, which is the occasion for this exchange:

PRINCE  . . . . But tell me, Jack, whose fellows are these that come after?

FALSTAFF  Mine, Hal, mine.

PRINCE  I did never see such pitiful rascals.

FALSTAFF  Tut, tut! good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder.  They'll fill a pit as well as better.  Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

My paperback Pelican Shakespeare helpfully glosses, "toss i.e. on a pike."   

Dickens at 200

Charles Dickens was born 200 years ago today.  I wrote about him most recently here; I am not one of those who loves Dickens unreservedly.  Adam Gopnik, writing recently about the scandal of America's prison system, had the occasion to quote Dickens on the subject of the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, which he (Dickens) visited in 1842:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

When Dickens was a kid, his father had been thrown into debtor's prison, the notorious Marshalsea.  The boy never got over it.  Wherever he went, he wanted to see the prison.  In his novels, they loom large, simultaneously metaphors and grotesque in their materiality.  You have to love the wounded, reforming Dickens. 

In 170 years we in America still have not "roused up to stay" the awful toll of our prisons.  We could begin by not incarcerating people for possession of marijuana.  I can't think of anything good that comes from that. 

The electoral college: Jason Lewis swings, misses

Jason Lewis's latest contribution to the Star Tribune's editorial page--"Here's what happens if the popular vote is made prime"--is a grab-bag of overused, soiled tissue.  Let's take a look at the various points he makes against the National Popular Vote Movement (NPV).

(1) He begins with a cheap shot at Al Gore.  Whatever.  Does he have an argument to make?

(2) Yes, sort of.  It begins, "Proponents say the NPV reform plan would lessen the importance of swing states and steer candidates to less-travelled places--say, California, New York or North Dakota, where contests are all but settled in a winner-take-all system."  This would not be far from wrong if you were to replace North Dakota, where no one is going to go under any circumstances, with, say, Texas.  Supporters of the electoral college fondly argue that, without it, New Hampshire and Iowa and New Mexico would be ignored.  They never explain why that would be worse than a system that results in New York, Texas, and California--which, together, have more than a quarter of the country's population--being ignored.

(3)  It's not even true that voters living in small states would be ignored in a popular vote presidential election.  Only presidents are elected under the electoral college system, so we can see what the other way looks like.  By Lewis's logic, the candidates in a Minnesota gubernatorial election should never leave the Twin Cities.  He does not explain why, in fact, they barnstorm the entire state looking for votes.  This pattern repeats itself across the country.  When Hillary Clinton was running for US Senate from New York, she did not camp out on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.  She headed upstate.  If she camped out anywhere, it was Buffalo. 

Why?  It's easy to appeal to your base and will always be important to turn them out.  But if a vote is a vote is a vote is a vote, it makes sense to try and elevate your share of it from 40 to 45 per cent in places where you aren't so well liked.  But, under the electoral college, it makes no sense for a Democrat to try and do that in Texas, or for a Republican to try it in California. 

(4) Lewis is hardest to refute when he's incoherent.  For example:

States have disparate local interests they wish to protect, yet imagine if Minnesota decides to go predictably blue in this year's presidential contest but the country has had enough of Obamanomics and votes Republican. Under the NPV plan -- should Minnesota join the compact -- our state's electoral votes would be awarded to the GOP nominee regardless of a direct popular election within our borders. This is important, because we ought to be, at least to a degree, masters of our own universe.

Makes no sense.  How is it that, by voting for Gore and getting Bush, Minnesota was "master of our own universe"?  A presidential election is a national election.  The question is: who will be president for the next four years?  If I vote for candidate A, and she carries my state, but candidate B wins the election and takes office. . . . I confess to being confused about why I should be consoled by having voted for the winner of my state.

(5)  Back to being coherent, but wrong:

[T]he NPV juggernaut is rolling on, already halfway to its goal. Once enough states sign on -- enough, that is, to deliver a 270-electoral-vote majority -- the game is up. And that means a free-for-all every four years, in which the more candidates who enter the presidential sweepstakes, the easier it would be for one to get a simple plurality and become a truly minority president with little governing power.

There is no argument here, just a dubious assertion about what the effects would be.  What I said in (3) above applies again: if a popular vote election would result in third party candidates denying anyone a majority, why doesn't this happen in our gubernatorial elections?  Because the country is so big?  But it happens in neither California nor Wyoming. He's just making stuff up.

(6) Sometimes, Lewis appears to argue against himself without being aware of it:

As it stands now, and thanks to the "undemocratic" awarding of two senators (originally chosen by state legislatures) to every state, regardless of size, our Electoral College system is weighted ever so slightly in favor of smaller states. So swing states such as Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire -- representing 16 electoral votes up for grabs -- are more likely to see President Obama and the GOP nominee duking it out.

First, why the quotes around "undemocratic"?  Two senators for California and two for Wyoming is undemocratic.  Alexander Hamilton was eloquent on this subject in Federalist No. 22:

Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.

The small states nevertheless prevailed and essentially extorted a compromise.  It doesn't follow that we should have to live with it forever, or that its undemocratic nature should have to be reproduced in presidential elections. 

Ballots in a presidential election should be given equal weight, no matter where they are cast.

(7) Needless to say, Lewis does not mention some of the worst characteristics of the current electoral college system--which, for example, has the practical effect of disenfranchising a considerable part of the electorate.  If you are a Republican who lives in New York or Illinois or California, or a Democrat in South Carolina or Texas or Idaho, you have no voice in a presidential election.  On Election Day, you can stay home or for exercise walk to your polling place and cast a ballot--it makes no difference as to who will become president. 

(8) Lewis concludes by returning to the election of 2000:

The only way that contested race could have been more divisive is if every vote in every state, not just Florida, had to be recounted. Which is what may happen under a national popular vote.

For mathematical reasons, Lewis's worry is far-fetched.  His history isn't any good, either.  The ballots were not recounted in Florida in 2000.  If we are just going to stipulate that the Supreme Court decides the really close ones, then there is no reason to be concerned about the trouble connected with recounting ballots.

Maybe it's not about the economy; maybe it's about contraception and conscience

Do Republicans really want to make the 2012 election about birth control?  If the economy keeps adding jobs at the rate it has for the past few months, is the Obama Administration's "repeal of religious liberty" and the scandal of "sterilization"--sometimes, in an Orwellian master stroke, referred to as "vasectomies"--the back-up plan?  Is that all they got?

I had not realized that birth control was so controversial.  Insurers, if they are interested in turning a profit, love covering it, as it's considerably cheaper than pre-natal care, c-sections, vaccinations, and 20 gazillion strep tests.  That it enhances the quality of life for its practitioners is generally denied only by crackpots, like the robed and virginal septuagenarians at the top of the Catholic Church hierarchy.  Surveying the Catholic families of my acquaintance, I detect a suspiciously reasonable number of nicely spaced children.  In fact, American Catholic women have on average the same number of kids as other American women.  The teachings of the Catholic Church on this matter are ignored by American Catholics. 

Apparently the exceptions are running for President.  According to Rick Santorum, contraception is "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."  Perhaps this statement wan't meant to be examined too closely, but it occurs to me that people indulging themselves in the "things" he probably has in mind don't have to worry about unwanted pregnancies, sperm swimming up fallopian tubes not being an offshoot of their pursuits.  And what of the nice heterosexual couples interested in official, Santorum-approved sex acts?  Is the trouble with them that they tend to get a hankering on all different days of the month?  His general approach to the topic reminds me of what someone said about why Puritans opposed bear-baiting--they were okay with cruelty to animals but hated the way that people were enjoying themselves. 

Santorum appears to have an ally in Mitt Romney, who in one of the debates said of the Supreme Court's decision in the Griswold case, which struck down a law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to married couples, "I don't think they decided that correctly."  Of course, at some point in his career Romney has been your ally, too, no matter where you stand, even though he may not be now.  Now he's trying to appeal to Republican primary voters and caucus attendees, and for that you need to be as "out there" as the old Catholic guys in funny hats.