Eric The Blue

Remnick on The Boss

In the current New Yorker, David Remnick profiles Bruce Springsteen, the closest thing to a pop-star hero of mine.  Naturally, I devoured every word.  The affecting thing is the way the article brings into view, sort of, the daily life of a zillionaire celebrity who, no matter how many houses he has, is obliged to go home and try to sleep in the oversized master bedroom of one of them.  The stuff that's for sale is just not that great.  And there is this:

As Springsteen sees it, the creative talent has always been nurtured by the darker currents of his psyche, and wealth is no guarantee of bliss.  "I'm thirty years in analysis!" he said. 

Turns out his analyst explained to him why he kept driving by the house he grew up in. One wonders what else he got from the 30 years of fee-for-service.  The people in his songs just have another beer.  Anyway, Remnick has been posting links to Springsteen in concert, many of them from the early days.  Here.  Here.  And here. 

Two droppings

1. Last night, skimming channels between innings of the Twins game, I stumbled upon a debate between the two Republicans vying to face Rep Tim Walz, D-MN, in this fall's congressional election.  It's either humorous or alarming to listen as two Republicans try to top one another in appealing to The Base.  Both agreed that the Affordable Care Act should be repealed.  When asked what should replace it, one, Allen Quist, said we have to "get back to free-market principles."  In his next breath, he said that scrapping mandates on insurance companies should be a top priority, and in the one after that he said we had to "listen to what consumers want."  So: Let insurance companies cover whatever they want and listen to what consumers say they need.  His opponent, whose name is Parry, did not dare point up the  absurdity, and they were soon on to other topics, such as how oppressively horrible it would be if ordinary citizens were barred from owning military-style assault rifles.  If only the good moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado, had armed themselves before heading out to the show.  Honest!

From now on I'm staying on Fox Sports North.  It's entertaining, in its way, to stay abreast of wing-nut orthodoxy, but better to know about the deals to be had at Menard's.

2. Here's an amusing anecdote to cure you of your notion that famous philosophers are a bunch of bloodless intellectuals unwilling to engage with "the real world."  The logical positivist A.J. Ayer was something of a dandy and, at age 77, was attending a party hosted by a famous fashion designer when he observed boxer Mike Tyson making clearly unwanted advances upon Naomi Campbell.  Ayer approached and told Tyson to stop.  I'll let Wikipedia take it from there:

[T]he boxer said: "Do you know who the fuck I am?  I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I'm the former Wykeham Professor of Logic.  We are both pre-eminent in our field.  I suggest that we talk about this like rational men."  Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.

The only thing that would be better is if Ayer had hooked up with Campbell later that night, but life is not like that.  (I know.)

Assertions and falsification

The essay "Theology and Falsification" by the British philosopher Antony Flew is, as the author is modest enough to admit, "probably the most widely read philosophical publication of the second half of the twentieth century."  It is around a thousand words long and raises the objection that God-talk is meaningless.  When someone says, for example, "God is love," it appears that something is being asserted.  But what, exactly?  If something is asserted, then something must be denied ("if p, then not the opposite of p"), which suggests that the assertion could theoretically be proven false.  Regarding "God is love," what is being denied?  What event, or proposition, if shown to be true, would disprove the "assertion"?  We are told that "God is love" is not disproven by cancer in young children, "because His love isn't a human love," etc., etc.  Okay, what would disprove it?  If there is nothing that, if true, would cause the assertion to be withdrawn, then nothing is actually being asserted.  It's just empty happy talk, a fake assertion, the expression at most of a mere "picture preference."  That's the argument of the very brief essay.

To me it seems cogent and generally applicable.  The success of Clinton's economic program, despite the Republicans' dire predictions of what would be wrought, did not shake their confidence in their economic views.  What would?  The medical literature does not dissuade devotees of certain "alternative treatments."  Is there anything that could?  What would it take to turn practitioners of occult practices into materialists on the ground that the former had been proven to be bunk?  If the answer to all these questions is "nothing," then we don't have to take them very seriously.  Whether or not they're right isn't an interesting question compared to why they believe as they do.  The psychology of belief is a large field.  Flew's phrase "picture preference" (which he borrows from another philosopher, John Wisdom) usually has a larger role than the merits of the particular case.

There she goes again!

I checked in at the Power Line site to see what the Philosophers might be saying about the latest episode of Michele Bachmann's moving lips.  While still hyperventilating about the hoax of climate change during the middle of a scorching drought, they are silent about Bachmann.  I conclude she is indefensible.

But she is really not so much more far gone than the rest of her party.  Rick Santorum, silver medalist in their recently concluded Presidential Sweepstakes, is an ardent foe of contraception.  Last April Alan West, who represents a Florida district in the Congress, charged that "78 to 81" Democratic representatives belong to the Communist Party.  (Apparently there are 78 open-and-shut cases and three others who are suspected only by sages like him.)  Four years ago, the party's vice-presidential candidate was the half-term, half-wit governor of Alaska.  Let's return to this year's Republican presidential aspirants, who were asked in a debate whether they'd support a budget deal in which there were ten dollars of cuts for every one dollar of new revenue:  eight candidates, all opposed.  Newt Gingrich is sometimes said to qualify as a big-thinking Republican intellectual.  Alack, it's true.  Those with a stronger claim to the title are falling away.  The conservative jurist Richard Posner recently said, "I've become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy."

Thus the conclusion of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, two sober observers of the American political scene, in their Washington Post editorial, "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans are the problem":

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional.  In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted.  Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.  It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Many people think we have two major political parties, one liberal, the other conservative.  It would be nice if this were true.  Actually, we have two parties, one moderately conservative, the other bat-shit crazy--or, more politely, "unmoved by conventional understanding of facts."  

Mitt Romney's retroactive retirement

It seems like a million years ago that Mitt Romney, being pursued in one of those awful Republican presidential debates on his view of illegal immigrants, and attempting to face up to the fact that there are too damn many of them even to begin a comprehensive round-up, indicated that they should all "self deport."  Maybe you could attribute that laughable moment to a failure to think on his feet, but now he is being pursued on the question of when, exactly, he ceased being Large-and-in-Charge at Bain Capital, and the deliberate, considered response of his campaign introduces Americans to the concept of "retroactive retirement." 

Were I personally to retire sometime in the future, retroactive to 2011, would that mean that the 8-to-5s I am currently pulling would just be an unpleasant dream?

Oh, but I am being unfair.  The rules are different at Bain Capital than in the gray zones of the economy wherein people separate from their employers with a kind of unambiguous immediacy.  Maybe that would be why Romney isn't releasing more of his tax returns.  They'd show the laws he obeys aren't the ones that apply to algebra teachers and mid-level managers.  It's possible to overplay that I-play-by-different-rules schtick. 

Have you seen Obama's Bain ads? If not, don't fool yourself: you have no vote

I'm a compulsive consumer of political journalism, and, while my memory is imperfect, I don't think horse-race reporting during the summer of presidential election years ever before was so blunt about how the contest is really occurring in just a relatively few "battleground states."  The other day, for example, I read somewhere that Obama's ads featuring Bain Capital "are taking a toll on Romney in several battleground states."

Well, yes, those are the only states the ads are airing in.  Because those are the only states that matter.  It's the voters who live in them--Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, a handful (at most) of others--that get to choose the president.  The rest of us are just spectators.  To see the ads they talk about in news shows, we have to watch those shows.  No one cares what we would make of them if they aired where we live.  We've been deprived of a vote by the Electoral College. 

Support National Popular Vote.

Roberts-ology

Chief Justice John Roberts has certainly set off a lot of speculation concerning his views of the Affordable Care Act.  In his opinion, he indicated that judges should find a reason, if they can, to uphold laws passed by elected legislatures, and he found that the Act's individual mandate was permissible under the federal government's taxing authority.  This isn't very persuasive.  For one thing, he needn't have ranged so far, for the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce affords a perfectly good reason to uphold the mandate.  For another thing, he is contradicted by his own record.  No one seriously believes that in, for example, the Citizens United case, Roberts really, really wanted to uphold McCain-Feingold, but, after exercising his intellect to its full extent, was unable to locate any constitutional ground on which the law could stand.

Since it's hard to believe him on the subject of his own thinking, let us consider the thoughts of others about his thinking.  There is a consensus that the chief justice, who is only 57 and could be the chief justice for another quarter century or more, is playing a "long game."  The most charitable version is that he cares about the institution of the Supreme Court--he's a "Burke, not a  burka," in the phrase-making of Hendrik Hertzberg.  The Court put Bush in the White House, then in Citizens United handed Republicans a gift too big to wrap.  In both cases, the legal reasoning was . . . --dubious.  If it had on similarly flimsy grounds proceeded to throw out the signature achievement of Obama's first term, the umpire (to use a metaphor Roberts deployed during his confirmation hearings) might have called, "Strike 3!"  The Court is in danger of being viewed as another instrument in the national food-fight, a functional arm of the Republican party, like Fox News, and Roberts knows it.  In the end, he cares more for the Court than for his party. 

Ronald Dworkin is a spokesman for a related but less cheery take on Roberts's decision.  In this view, the chief justice, instead of looking backward and worrying about strike 3 of 3, was looking forward and worrying about strike 6 of 6.  In the next year, the Court will take up cases regarding voting rights, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action in school admissions.  If, in the afterglow of having thrown out the chief legislative achievement of Obama's first term, the conservative bloc were to prevail in all three of next year's high-profile cases, and you add in for good measure Bush v Gore and Citizens United, the case for the Court being viewed as a kind of Republican muscle, the bouncer at the door, becomes disturbingly clear. 

These interpretations are plainly not mutually exclusive.  In both, Roberts is concerned for the institutional health of the Supreme Court.  The first casts him in a favorable light (especially if you approve of Edmund Burke).  The second is disconcerting for what it suggests he thinks the Court is poised to do next year. 

But, this year, regarding the Affordable Care Act, the Court, for whatever reason, did the right thing, and  the lives of millions of Americans will be improved.  Which is why even Dworkin's piece begins, "Above all, we should celebrate."

The Malkin Award and a local hero

One of the awards distributed by the indefatigable Andrew Sullivan at his Daily Dish Blog is for "shrill, hyperbolic, divisive, and intemperate right-wing rhetoric."  It is aptly named for Michelle Malkin, and today's nominee is John Hinderaker, subject of many of my "Power Out" posts.  Sullivan cites this award-worthy passage from a July 9 post, "Soak the Rich!":

[T]he percentage of families who earn over $250,000 happens to be almost exactly the same as the percentage of homosexuals in the population.  How would our ever-courageous journalists react if an American president tried to increase his odds of reelection by demonizing homosexuals and calling for draconian legislation against them?

Sullivan does not divulge that John is only getting warmed up.  The graf including this passage concludes

Do you think that a president who called for discriminatory legislation against homosexuals would be criticized as divisive?

and the post ends by calling Obama "the worst president since James Buchanan."  Since this would elevate Jimmy Carter, one of John's 932 jillion betes noires, over Buchanan, the only "bachelor president," I can actually detect some logic: it's meant as a sly dig at Sullivan, who's gay.

But all this is just a two-putt par for John and his Powerline colleagues.  You can't be too crazy for them.  Malkin is on their Blog Roll.  The Daily Dish has another award named for Hugh Hewitt, whom Sullivan has called an "absurd partisan fanatic."  Hewitt is on their Blog Roll, too. 

Mavis Gallant makes me hungry

Last night, while Amanda was at work on our evening meal, I sat on the couch with our girls in front of Blue's Clues and read, in The New Yorker, excerpts of the diary that the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant kept while living in Spain in the early 1950s.  She sold things--her clothes, her grandmother's jewelry--to get money for food.  The ratio of potatoes to literature is high.  Food, food, food.  By the time we were called to dinner, I was famished, and scarfed down, oh, around 3000 calories if you count the two bottles of "the champagne of beers."  Notwithstanding all that, the entry I remember now is:

Today from the balcony I see a blind man tapping his way along the buildings across the street.  He reaches a street crossing; everyone watches, silent, and lets him walk full on into the side of a building.  When he has recovered (for a moment he was like a butterfly beating its wings in a box) the spectators just walk away.  Pure detached curiosity: "What happens when a blind man collides with a wall?"  Then, "Only that?"

Here is a (rare) interview she gave. 

Regoogling the clergy

I googled the clergy again, an exercise that unfailingly raises my hackles.  The article I came upon, having entered the name of a classmate (Steve Paulson) whom I know to be a professor of systematic theology at a Lutheran seminary, is entitled "Against the Holy Blasphemers."  For those disinclined to click on the link, trust me: the pugnacious title is characteristic of the whole.  Who are "the holy blasphemers"?  Lutherans whose view of homosexuals is more, shall we say, moderate than those of the author, Dr Steven Paulson.  Of course his view is the Lutheran, biblical one sporting the imprimatur of St Paul, that fount of wisdom on all matters sexual.  

Dr Paulson gives the impression of a man who, standing at the lectern before thirty mild and admiring theological students, is not accustomed to being contradicted, and has as a result lost any inclination to self-edit.  "Blasphemers!"  "Fanatics!"  To me, it seems over the top, but then you can imagine how annoying it is to be outvoted by a bunch of know-nothing laypeople.

It's a wonder that the article is so long, since the author has nothing more than the familiar bible-says argument, but on a second reading the mystery lifts.  It's not that the reasoning is subtle, it's that the wind is strong.  Who really is the fanatic?  "They know," writes Dr Paulson (his emphasis), "even though they have no word from God to stand on."  As opposed to: "I know, and I have the word from God to stand on."  Here is the last sentence of "the word from God" that he chooses to cite:

Though they know God's decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them (Romans 1:32).

You can see why he's against ordaining homosexuals.  They don't even deserve to live.  Disagree?  Fanatic!  Blasphemer!

The Affordable Care Act: the Supremes speak

Count me among the ungiddy.  What's amazing, in a chilly sort of way, is that there were four votes for throwing out the law in its entirety.  The health care system is in an alarming state of disarray--costs spiking upward, access shrinking, poor outcomes compared to the rest of the "advanced" world--the Rs, as ever, in denial--and the Ds deliver what once would have qualified as a conservative, business-friendly reform that has the efffect of delivering millions of the uninsured into the loving embrace of the private insurance industry.  And the Supreme Court was on the edge of canning it, the whole thing beyond the pale of the Constitution. 

Compel people to pay beforehand for health care that they will receive?  Saying "no" to free loading?  Outrageous!  Government intrusion!  Unconstitutional!

Very nearly so, it seems.  It's more proof, if any was needed, of how far the conservative center has shifted.  Not a single Republican in either the House or the Senate voted for what twenty years ago would have been regarded as a right-wing, Heritage Foundation bill.  And when it passes Supreme Court muster, 5 to 4, we're supposed to wave our palm branches at Voter #5! 

Still, a relief.  Atul Gawande collects stories of patients whose health has been adversely affected by a lack of insurance, then appends some sensible analysis.