Eric The Blue

The sporting press

I understand the Winter Olympics have ended.  I saw nary a quintuple axle, not because I have no interest but because they were on NBC, or ABC--something other than Nick Jr., anyway.  What I know about the outcomes, like that the U.S. hockey teams were not a disappointment to the Canadians, comes mainly  from chance encounters with the sports page in the break room at work. 

What is it about the Olympics that makes sportswriters daft?  I think I'd rather watch back-to-back episodes of Dora the Explorer than be subjected to another article like, say, this one.  There's a million hockey games, and usually the better team wins, but it seems that it's only in the Olympics that the outcome requires moral explanations of geopolitical import.  Americans are a resilient people, and our Olympic hockey team, by losing the bronze medal to the Finns, failed to display our true national character.  What an outrageous embarrassment!  These players are not patriots and no one on the team should ever be allowed to represent our country in international competition again.

God, what a dope. 

The electoral college: Judge Posner lays an egg

Googling myself to see what might turn up, I ended up reading some editorial commentary with which I strongly agree, mainly about the electoral college, as well as a dissenting opinion, in Slate, by the jurist Richard Posner.

The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Posner describes him as a legal theorist and an economist, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh District, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and a leading figure in the field of law and economics.  Further on, we learn that he graduated first in his class at Harvard Law School. I assume, therefore, that he's capable of making a case, and that the almost laughable ineptness of his defense of the electoral college indicates that this Rube Goldberg machine really must be an indefensible bad joke.

Here's a representative specimen of Posner's case--It's the third of his five reasons for keeping the electoral college:

The winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes induces the candidates—as we saw in last week’s election—to focus their campaign efforts on the toss-up states; that follows directly from the candidates’ lack of inducement to campaign in states they are sure to win. Voters in toss-up states are more likely to pay close attention to the campaign—to really listen to the competing candidates—knowing that they are going to decide the election. They are likely to be the most thoughtful voters, on average (and for the further reason that they will have received the most information and attention from the candidates), and the most thoughtful voters should be the ones to decide the election.

I have to admit, it's true that the electoral college makes the four-fifths of us who do not live in a Battleground State passive spectators without a voice.  I had thought this was one of the items in its interminable debit column.  Happily,  however, the electoral college converts the people of The Battlegound States into  the Platonic forms of earnest citizens determined to deliver the best candidate to the rest of us low-information types who understand only that our vote doesn't count.  Maybe we should follow the argument to its logical conclusion and select by lottery one person to choose the president.  With all that responsibility, and the advantage of all the campaign white papers written to his reading level, there's no question but that he'd choose wisely. 

Posner's other reasons aren't any good, either.

The power of neutral-tinted haps and such

In a post called "The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking," Adam Alter describes social science research indicating that your mom and your second grade teacher and all the self-help authors are wrong about the favorable effects of a sunny disposition.  "Ceaseless optimism about the future," it turns out, "only makes for greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can't persuade himself to believe are good."

Aha!  We melancholics are the Einsteins of the happiness project, blandly advancing crazy theories and then waiting patiently for the experimentalists to explain to everyone that, actually, we're right. 

Here is a poem that Thomas Hardy wrote when he was 86:

Well, World, you have kept faith with me,
                Kept faith with me;
Upon the whole you have proved to be
                Much as you said you were.
Since as a child I used to lie
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
            That life would all be fair.

"Twas then you said, and since have said,
            Times since have said,
In that mysterious voice you shed
            From clouds and hills around:
"Many have loved me desperately,
Many with smooth serenity,
While some have shown contempt of me
            Till they dropped underground.

"I do not promise overmuch,
            Child, overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,"
            You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit's sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
            As each year might assign.

He gave it the title, "He Never Expected Much."

Sue Grant, Michel de Montaigne, Roger Angell

I can always remember when our neighbor Dr. Sue Grant died, because when Amanda was pregnant with our youngest, she (Dr Grant) told us that one thing she regretted was that she probably wouldn't last long enough to "meet" the new baby.  And she was right: our Claire was born three days after her memorial service. I remember that Lydia was just starting to have some bathroom successes and we took along her portable potty to the church.  It was a snowy Saturday morning in Minneapolis, and during the service I had to take her out to use it.  In all the hurry and excitement, I left the back door of the minivan wide open after she'd done her business.  So when the funeral was over we had to sweep snow off the floor and seats before strapping her in again.  Claire was born the following Tuesday.

Anyway, I've been thinking of Dr Grant, because at her estate sale I bought for about a dollar a hardback selection of Montaigne's essays that I've been reading in bed at night and on my morning coffeebreaks.  There's no marginalia or markings of any kind.  I doubt she ever read it--the "science and nature" section of the bookstore would have been by far her favorite.  My own drowsy enjoyment of the book is punctuated by moments of stabbing pleasure, as when it comes to light that Montaigne evidently shared one of my secret pastimes--namely, imagining great and powerful personages on the toilet, raising themselves up on one haunch to clean, just the same way as everyone does it.  Montaigne:

If I had been able to see Erasmus in other days, it would have been hard for me not to take for adages and maxims everything he said to his valet and his hostess.  We imagine much more appropriately an artisan on the toilet seat or on his wife than a great president, venerable by his demeanor and his ability.  It seems to us that they do not stoop from their lofty thrones even to live.

That was written about 450 years ago.  I'd forgotten, till I looked it up again now, that "or on his wife."  How could I forget that?  One of the theologians responsible for getting these essays placed on the Index argued that Montaigne was insufficiently ashamed of his vices. 

Nevertheless, his work is widely regarded as the fountainhead of the modern "personal essay."  One of the more enjoyable rivulets I've lately come across is here, behind a subscriber wall: the reflections of the 93-year-old Roger Angell,  longtime New Yorker editor and baseball aficionado, on old age.  He's pictured above lounging somewhat jauntily in Central Park earlier this year.  Maybe Angell would say that it's easier to appear "jaunty" when your cane looks momentarily more like a fashion accessory than a third leg used to aid walking.  Without sugar-coating the geriatric complaints, which include besides physical symptoms a lot of funeral-going, almost predictably for a nonagenarian those of a wife and of a daughter, Angell is not without hope and considerable humor.  I laughed out loud at the Starbucks I was in when I read:

I count on jokes, even jokes about death.

TEACHER: Good morning, class.  This is the first day of school and we're going to introduce ourselves.  I'll call on you, one by one, and you can tell us your name and maybe what your dad or your mom does for a living.  You please, over at this end.

SMALL BOY: My name is Irving and my dad is a mechanic.

TEACHER: A mechanic!  Thank you, Irving,  Next?

SMALL GIRL: My name is Emma and my mom is a lawyer. 

TEACHER:  How nice for you, Emma!  Next?

SECOND SMALL BOY: My name is Luke and my dad is dead.

TEACHER: Oh, Luke, how sad for you.  We're all very sorry about that, aren't we class?  Luke, do you think you could tell us what Dad did before he died?

LUKE (seizes his throat):  He went "Ngungghhh!"

In another passage, Angell reads the thought balloon above the heads of acquaintances who, happening upon him, inquire about his "secret" and rave, "You're looking great!":  "Holy shit--he's still vertical."

Abortion on TV

Since I don't watch a lot of TV, and when I do it's often ball games, I'm not an expert on the abortion theme in television dramas.  I would have guessed that it's not a theme at all.  But I know it came up in Sunday's episode of Downton Abbey, when Lady Edith, having been abandoned by her lover, who she thinks is quite possibly dead, pays a visit to a London practitioner and has a waiting-room change of heart.  This reminded me that in Mad Men, another show to which I am thanks to my wife addicted, the same thing happens to Joan--Joan!--in New York City about 35 years later when she thought she had determined to end the pregnancy resulting from her relapse with Roger Sterling.  I think that maybe President Clinton's formulation about how abortion should be safe, legal, and rare has been adopted in the television arts.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the abortion rate in America is as low as it's been since the Supreme Court decided the Roe case in 1973. You'd think the foes of legal abortion would be happy about this but they are a hard group to please.  And possibly they are right not to be happy, for on the evidence it doesn't appear that the decline is wholly on account of their occasionally successful efforts to impose restrictions that make access to abortion services difficult.  It's true that fewer women are having abortions in places like Kansas and Oklahoma, where state legislatures have adopted such restrictions.  But it's also true that states like California and New Jersey, which have no such restrictions, have seen some of the steepest declines.  Margaret Talbot is therefore tempted to advance the unremarkable hypothesis that, as unwanted pregnancies are the leading cause of abortion, the decline may be attributable to widely available information about contraception, including in schools, and access to reliable and long-acting contraceptive methods--IUDs, implants--that do not require attention to detail  when the mind is distracted and not receiving its usual supply of blood.

But for those in the pro-life movement this is not a pleasing interpretation.  It is almost as if unwanted pregnancies excite them, because then the prospect of punishing bad girls comes into view.  Maybe it is sex more than abortion that appalls them.  There has to be some way to make sense of the opposition to both abortion and reliable means of preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Home thoughts

What might euphemistically be called a "stomach bug" is touring our household.  I am the most recent victim and so am home from work today gingerly partaking of the BRAT diet.  I had a cold when the more disabling illness struck, and find today as I recover that it did not go away while I was on hands and knees in the bathroom.  Being an English major, this reminds me of one of Dr Johnson's finest moments.  Some pious churchman had composed a treatise arguing that the sufferings of the poor innoculate them against other grievances and are therefore to be deemed an aid to human happiness, another of the Lord's tender mercies.  In his review, Johnson wrote (it is almost my favorite thing in English literature):

The poor indeed are insensible of many little vexations which sometimes embitter the possessions and pollute the enjoyment of the rich.  They are not pained by casual incivility, or mortified by the mutilation of a compliment; but this happiness is like that of the malefactor who ceases to feel the cords that bind him when the pincers are tearing his flesh.

In other news, today's Roman churchmen are exhibiting a certain testiness over a U.N. report that says little more than what everyone already knows about how the Catholic Church has coddled and enabled its criminally abusive priests.  From a report in the LA Times:

The Vatican, which signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, has “consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the protection of the perpetrators above children’s best interests,” said the report, accusing the Vatican of transferring abusive priests to new parishes where many have continued to abuse children, and of “humiliating” the families of victims into silence.

In a sharply worded response, the Holy See’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, attacked the report, calling it “surprising” and full of “incorrect” statements, and alleging that the U.N. had ignored steps taken by the Vatican in recent years to root out abuse.

In an interview with Vatican Radio, Tomasi also suggested that nongovernmental organizations that oppose the Vatican’s positions on homosexuality and gay marriage had influenced the U.N. report, giving it an “ideological” slant.

Addressing the U.N. committee last month, Tomasi said the Vatican had no responsibility for abusers because "priests are citizens of their own states, and they fall under the jurisdiction of their own country."

Everyone knows the famous illustration of chutzpah--you murder your parents, then, on the ground that you are an orphan, beg the court's mercy.  Is the archbishop's defense any less ridiculous?  When made aware of abusive priests, the Church does not call the cops; no, it quietly moves the offender to a new parish, where he persists in his criminality.  Later, when this comes to light, times twenty thousand, the Church's spokesmen say, "Well, you know, priests are citizens of their own states and it's not our place to prosecute them."  You do everything possible to shield criminals and then blame all the local Dogberries for not penetrating the shield.  Plus, you suggest your critics are just a bunch of gay-loving haters of religious freedom.

One of the Church's biggerst problems may be that the only men--and they are all men--who have risen high enough in the hierarchy to speak for it have, naturally, been the ones so devoted to its rituals and claims of authority that they can't see what things look like to normal, healthy people. 

Increasing your word power: Susan Sontag and Eric the Blue

Who would have guessed that the hyper-smart Susan Sontag, whom John Updike once described as our camp follower of the French avant garde, kept journals in which she set down unfamiliar words she came across in her reading?--"persiflage," for one, and "integument." The author of an in-progress biography of her reveals this detail here.  I'd love to know what other words she was unsure of.  It would be a tremendous resource for teens preparing for the SAT.

I just walked over to the book shelf and took down a battered Modern Library paperback of William Faulkner's Light in August.  Sure enough, the inside of the back cover and the blank page facing it are filled with the definitions of words I came across while reading the novel for a college class in the 1970s.  I couldn't make much of the book, but I was too dutiful a student not to turn the pages, so had decided, what the hell, I will at least make my vocabulary more Faulknerian.  Here are the words, together with their definitions--only thing I know about the source for them is that it was not an online dictionary.

avatar: one regarded as the incarnation or embodiment of some known model

irascible: prone to outbursts of temper

immanent: existing within; inherent

augur: a seer or prophet; soothsayer

mendacity: the quality or state of being a liar

meretricious: pertaining to or resembling a prostitute

importunate: stubbornly or unreasonably persistent

veracity: habitual adherence to truth

redolent: having or emitting fragrance

ratiocination: to reason logically and methodically

soporific: tending to induce sleep

purlieu: an outlying or neighboring area

incipient: just beginning to exist or appear

spurious: lacking validity; false; counterfeit

visceral: intensely emotional

perspicuous: easy to understand; lucid

putrefaction: the decomposition of organic matter

inscrutable: not able to be fathomed or understood

apotheosis: deification

catafalque: what a coffin sits on

abrogate: to abolish; annul by authority

lassitude: a state of exhaustion; torpor; lethargy

paramour: a lover, esp adulterous lover

If you know nothing of Light in August, I bet you wouldn't guess from the above that it's about poor whites in Mississippi.