Eric The Blue

The Series

I was half-heartedly pulling for the Royals, I guess, but mainly just enjoying the games, the ones I was able to watch anyway.  The dominating performances by the Giants' Madison Bumgarner reminded me of something I think receives too little attention, which is that, in baseball, the post-season is a whole different ballgame.  During the grip-and-slog of the long summer, when you're playing at least six games a week every week for more than twenty weeks, your final record depends a lot upon how good your fourth and fifth best starting pitchers are.  But, if they are pretty good, and you win enough games to make it into the playoffs, these same guys hardly throw a pitch.  It's all about your ace and the guy behind him.  In this year's Series, Bumgarner got the Royals side out 21 times in the seven, 9-inning games, allowing just one run to score.  That didn't leave the Royals much room for error in the forty or so innings that Bumgarner wasn't pitching.  It's worked out in the past for my Twins, who, first time they won the World Series, had Viola, Blyleven, a good closer (Reardon), and hardly another pitcher deserving of an adjective pale as "serviceable." They weren't built for 100 regular-season wins.  But they were hard to beat in a short series.

I woke my wife when, in the bottom of the ninth of this year's Game 7, I jerked up in bed the second a Giants' outfielder misplayed Alex Gordon's two-out hit, permitting it to skip past him to the fence, then let out a little shriek when another outfielder fumbled the ball on the warning track. 

"Jeezus, don't shit yourself," she wearily advised. 

"I thought he might be able to run around all the bases," I explained.  And, considering it in the cold light of the next morning, he should have tried.  Maybe the relay home would have been ten feet over the catcher's head.  There was a better chance of that than of getting another hit off Bumgarner.  The best description of the experience of watching the games that guy pitched has been supplied by Roger Angell, the redoubtable nonagenarian and poet laureate of baseball:

Watching Bumgarner, whose amazingly extended lefty delivery begins with the held ball detouring toward short center field, I decided that his great stuff is equalled by the calm and the air of mournful apology with which it’s delivered: Sorry, guys, but you’ve got no chance. It’s quiet when he’s pitching, with little to note beyond the flow of strikeouts or pop-ups or ground balls, delivered without gesture or a change of expression, and the click of another passing inning is like someone closing a door in the next room.

Maybe he lost his way a little in the syntax of that last sentence, but hell, it was late, and it's great anyway.  I hope Roger hasn't watched his last game.  Soon it will be Christmas, and how long past that till pitchers and catchers report?

 

Reading Thoreau during "Million Dollar Listing"

 

I've been reading, during my lunch hour at work, and at home in the evenings after the kids are in bed and while Amanda is watching the sublime programming of the Bravo network, Great Short Works of Henry David Thoreau.  It's a pocket-sized paperback and includes at the back "A Thoreau Chronology" that lists, year by year, the principal events of his life.  Here is the entry for 1840, the year Thoreau turned 23:

Proposal of marriage to Ellen Sewall rejected.  Wrote The Service, rejected by Margaret Fuller for The Dial.

By some measures, it was more than a slump.  The year before he had gone on a trip that provided the material for his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  It was this book that he wrote, in 1845 and 1846, while living alone in the cabin he built on Walden Pond.  When A Week was published in 1849, the reviews were poor and the sales worse.  How bad were the sales?  Well, in 1853, Thoreau took back from the publisher 706 of the original run of 1000 copies, remarking in his Journal, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."  The next year he published his masterpiece, Walden.  One rag of the day reviewed it along with P. T. Barnum's autobiography beneath the heading "Town and Rural Humbugs."  Emerson, his friend and champion, criticized Thoreau's lack of ambition: "Instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party."  Another contemporary genius, Hawthorne, described the effect of Thoreau's physical presence:

He is as ugly as sin, long nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior.

In college I had a course with a professor, John Dolan, who obviously revered Thoreau.  Being a teen-aged contrarion, I adopted the view that it was convenient for such a man as Thoreau to ask, "Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?"  We learned about how Thoreau, to oppose the unjust Mexican War, went to jail rather than pay a poll tax.  But I preferred to emphasize how he was bailed out when some unknown person, probably his aunt, paid the tax, and then paid it again year after year in order to avoid a recurrence.  Dolan thought Thoreau was the great original for Ghandi and Martin Luther King, but to me his purity was too closely associated with the useless depletion of his aunt's savings.

I think, however, that I am coming toward Dolan's view.  Maybe it's just the Bravo going in the background but Thoreau seems to have gotten so much right.  "Keep a chaste mind," is good advice.  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" is like a mountain of truth built with just a few stones.  The Mexican War was unjust.  Slavery, too, and the Fugitive Slave Act--abominations.  And Thoreau didn't just condemn them in his essays and at the lyceum; his house, at some danger to himself, was a stop on the Underground Railroad.  His short life was in many ways heroic and not the least of it was his perfect indifference to what others thought about him.  The distinction between what's respected and what's truly respectable is one of the icebergs moving beneath the water of his prose, but he illustrated it with his life, too. 

 

Ad watch

The thing I hate most about political ads is what they reveal about how stupid the campaigns must think we all are.  Take the most recent Mike McFadden ad, which criticizes his opponent, incumbent Democrat Al Franken, for voting with President Obama 97% of the time.  Ninety-seven percent sunny is a great weather forecast, we are told, and a great test score, too, but in Washington it's only "great for gridlock." 

And then the portentous conclusion: Al Franken--the MOST PARTISAN member of the US Senate.  Mike McFadden will quit before he votes with anyone 97% of the time!

Let's just note in passing that only one senator can be the most partisan, and that Franken isn't the only one that Republicans say votes with Obama 97% of the time.  So does Mark Warner of Virginia, according to the GOP.  And then there is Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat from New Hampshire, who supposedly votes with Obama 99% of the time.  By the logic of the ad, doesn't that make her more partisan than Franken?    And what about the GOP senators who would vote against Obama if he wanted to change the White House's vendor for office supplies?  Or can only Dems be "partisan"?  The ad is childish. To the degee it means anything specific, it's also false.

The more brazen lie, it seems to me, concerns the claim that a Democratic senator voting with a Democratic president 97% of the time is "great for gridlock."  Franken is part of a fairly substantial (55-45) Democratic majority in the Senate.  If he and his Democratic colleagues always vote with Obama, that should be a prescription for passing the president's agenda--the opposite of gridlock.  The reason we have gridlock is: (a) the Republicans in the House; and (b) the Republicans in the Senate, who, though a minority, have made promiscuous use of the filibuster to block up-or-dowwn votes on Democratic legislation.  I suppose Exhibit A would be the failure to get a vote, even in the wake of a massacre of 6-year-olds carried out by a disturbed individual in a Connecticut elementary school, on modest resrictions on gun ownerhip that are favored by almost everyone who isn't a member of the NRA.

You couldn't make this ad if you thought there was a chance the target audience has been paying attention.

Obamacare on the news feed

This picture was in my FB news feed.  I'm not sure what the lie might have been.  Did someone in the Administration say that, within a year of the roll out of Obamacare, the number of uninsured Americans would go from more than 50 million to zero?

Actually, the number of people who have signed up exceeds the CBO's expectations, and the percentage of Americans without health insurance is declining.  You can look it up.  The number would be shrinking faster if several Republican governors had not opted out of the Medicaid expansion provision, thereby preventing qualifying citizens of those states from gaining access.

I continue to be puzzled by all the Americans who seem genuinely angered by the prospect of their fellow citizens at last being able to get affordable health insurance. 

Power always out

The Supreme Court's announcement, earlier this week, that it would not review lower-court decisons, from three different circuits, holding that same-sex couples have a right to marry has been widely viewed as another in a string of significant victories for gay marriage.  But the far-seeing John Hinderaker, of the determinedly ridiculous Power Line blog, understands what no one else can grasp--namely, that the conservative justices who voted to let the lower-court decisions stand are playing the proverbial "long game."  The idea is that gay marriage foes would suffer a definitive defeat if the current Court ruled on a dispositve case.  Too many liberals!  Thus an ingenious strategy is born--put off the day of reckoning until a Republican is president and Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been replaced by someone crazy as Hinderaker.

As Alvie Singer says to his girlfriend's brother in Annie Hall, "Uh, excuse me, but I have an appointment back on Planet Earth."

It's true that Justice Ginsburg is elderly and has had serious health problems.  When you've said that, you're pretty much done with the plausible part of Hinderaker's argument.  I doubt a Republican will be elected president in 2016.  But let's suppose one is.  Heck, let's suppose that it's Ted Cruz, who lambasted the High Court's "judicial activism" after it declined to reconsider any of the lower-court decisions.  (Refusing to act = activism.)  Abetted by the Supremes' inaction, well over half of gay Americans now live in states allowing gay marriage.  More and more are marrying, and we're still waiting on the dire consequences predicted by opponents.  The percentage of Americans who support same-sex marriage continues to rise.  Nevertheless, in the world according to Hinderaker, President Cruz in about 2018 is going to appoint to the Supreme Court a couple of ideologues who will then--what?  In an unprecedented act of judicial restraint, unmarry all the legally married gay couples?  Yes, that's the plan!

To me, it appears that gay Americans want to act like Republicans--get married, join the military--and, for unknown reasons, Republicans do not declare victory but instead persist in their Crazyhood.  (It's  the quality or state of being crazy.)

 

Books of the Bible: Joshua

Back in Genesis, God had promised Abraham that He would give his descendants a land and a nation and that they would be a blessing to all people.  But the promised land, modern-day Palestine, was inhabited by other people who worshipped other gods.  Naturally, they had to be slaughtered so that the first part of the promise, concerning a land, could be kept.  The book of Joshua tells the story of a bloody, one-sided territorial conquest.  The third part of the promise, about being a blessing to all people, was no concern of the author. 

And who was the author?  The preponderance of scholarly opinion holds that Joshua is continuous with the five books of the Pentateuch, which is why one sometimes hears the term "Hexateuch" applied to the first six books of the Old Testament (Pentateuch plus Joshua equals Hexateuch).  In that case, we have in Joshua a composite of the four sources of the so-called documentary hypothesis.  This would explain the familiar problem of contradictory details (caused by the coexistence of unedited material from different sources within the same narrative) and long, boring stretches (our old friend, P).  An example of the former occurs when the Israeli fighting force is crossing the Jordan.  In one detail, the presence of the Ark in the river acts like a dam, the water is stopped up, and the Israelites cross on dry land, whereupon  the Ark follows them out of the river bed and the water flows again.  In another detail, we are told that the Ark and the priests led the procession across the river.  These details appear contradictory.

Most of the second half of Joshua, about the partition of the conquered territory, with its numbing geographical lists and confusing tribal names, is an instance of another longueur courtesy of the Priestly source.

Unless you are determined to give it a pass since it's been canonized as Holy Writ, it's hard to find anything to like in Joshua.  The title character is plainly meant to be Moses's successor, but he is not a vivid figure.  There is nothing analogous to the attractive scene in which Moses protests his lack of eloquence to God.  The battle of Jericho, which the Negro spiritual may have persuaded us to anticipate, disappoints.  The city's fortifications fell flat when the Israelites, having encircled it, let out a shout?  Sure.  I've alluded to an obvious moral problem.  The only excuse I can think of for the bloodthirstiness of the Israelites is that it's actually the bloodthirstiness of their God.  And it is the reader who has to supply the excuses, because the text seems unaware of any problem at all.  The headnote to Joshua in The Oxford Annotated Bible allows that "many have felt--no doubt rightly--that the God of Joshua is infinitely remote from the God of Jesus."  A smart aleck might call this an instance of damning with faint praise the God of Jesus.  The editor's conclusion is that "[i]n this book Israel's God appears as a purely nationalistic deity, a God of Battles whose power is chiefly manifested in the prosecution of Holy War."  And all this pertains to the part of the book that is relatively lively.  Having survived the killing fields, the reader comes to the attention deadening second half of the book.

But suppose you had to find merit in something.  I'd choose the story line about the Israelite spies who put up in the house of Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute.  Her shielding of the Israelites is the source of a popular tradition in which she is exalted as a faithful hero.  Christians, for example, see in her a forerunner of the Good Samaritan, an outsider who apprehends the true God and His teaching.  But I wonder whether it's not possible to detect in her actions some enlightened self interest.  She might have understood better than the spies whether the loose confederation of peoples inhabiting the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean stood a chance to turn back Israel's incursion.  In any event, it seems she chose wisely, for her life is spared by invaders who killed practically everyone else they came upon.  I am pleased by the prospect of a prostitue making judicious geopolitical calculations that succeed in the very personal matter of saving her life. Rahab signed up to be on the winning team.  A world in which "true God" means nothing more than "most powerful national deity" invites such an arguably cynical interpretation.

The question of the book's historical accuracy has been the subject of much inquiry.  Modern archaeology has uncovered evidence of ruined Palestinian cities from the latter part of the thirteenth century B.C., which coincides with Joshua's time.  But the details of time and place don't always line up,  and one is, moreover,  suspicious of a Jewish document that reports a series of overwhelming Jewish victories that decisively established the chosen people in the promised land.  It all seems too neat, and indeed other biblical texts at least suggest that Israel's hegemony in the promised land was achieved much more gradually.  The book of Joshua is followed by the book of Judges, which begins with the question of who, after the death of Joshua, "shall go up first for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?"  This suggests that Joshua's victories were not as decisive as depicted in the book of Joshua.  Later, but still in the first chapter of Judges, we're told:

And Yahweh was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron.

Note the impossibility of avoiding the conclusion that, according to this text, Israel attempted but failed to "drive out" a technologically more advanced foe.  That Israel might by stymied by chariots of iron is completely foreign to the account of the conquest found in the first half of the book of Joshua, where God, who presumably could overcome the military hardware of the thirteenth century B.C., fought on the side of His people. 

The tentative conclusion of much mainline scholarship holds that the military campaigns as described in Joshua didn't actually occur.  Instead, the "conquest" of the promised land occurred over a few generations, and the military part of it mattered less than the gradual infiltration of the Jewish people into Palestine.  But to the Deuteronomic writer responsible for much of the book of Joshua, such a story lacked drama and glory.  The source material at hand was therefore embellished to create a work more flattering to national and religious enthusiasms.

In the current New Yorker

I enjoyed this review despite knowing nothing about the subject, Marilynne Robinson.  I take that back.  I do know that Robinson is a great favorite of other writers.  She is also devout and has, in one of Joan Acocella's many arresting phrases, "been accustomed to interrupting her career as a novelist to produce essays on such matters as the truth of John Calvin's writings."  Well, maybe, but I hope she doesn't care if I read all her books before starting in on his.

The same issue of The New Yorker includes a review of the current movie Gone Girl, about a troubled marriage.  Is it his fault or hers?  I have no idea, but in real life, suggests the reviewer, Anthony Lane, the best answer is usually "neither" or "both."  He has an anecdote covering the case. Concerning the marriage of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Samuel Butler is said to have remarked, "It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable instead of four."