Eric The Blue

Watching cable news, II

This should have been yesterday's #2:

2. While tuned yesterday afternoon to CNN, my ears perked up when Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin began an answer to a question put to him by the host with the words, "I'm going to say three words that you're never supposed to say on cable tv. . . ."

I wish I knew what the question was, but again, I wasn't paying much attention until Toobin promised to smash a taboo.  The three words you're not supposed to say, and his answer to the question:  I don't know.

Regarding the subject matter of Mueller's investigation, no one not on the Trump Team knows, but there's 24 hours of programming that need to be filled each day, so by all means, let the speculators speculate.  But doesn't it seem obvious in what general direction the truth lies?  The Trump Team knows what happened, so it makes sense to ask whether they appear to be waiting calmly for complete vindication.  

No, they don't.  The head coach in particular appears irritable.

Watching cable news

 

I watched today's cable news through the fog of a World Series hangover, so may not have picked up on the most important points, but a couple of things:

1. Apparently there was a two or three year period earlier this decade during which Manafort spent like $1.5 million on clothes.  He'd go into a Manhattan haberdashery and say, for example, "Give me fifty thousand dollars worth of neckties" in the same way I heard my dad tell filling station attendants, "Two dollars of regular, please."  Then he (Manafort) would pay with a wire transfer from a bank in Cyprus.  While they ran the old tapes of him lying I would study his suits and they looked like everyone else's, which is why I buy wine at Trader Joe's. 

2. Thought I had a couple of things but I guess not.

Lessig's if . . . then

We don't know what the truth is about the Trump campaign's dealing with the Russian government, but the range of possibilities has always extended from "Trump's right" (fake news!) to "Trump's critics with the fastest resting heart rate are right" (treason!).  The former has it seems to me always been only a theoretical possibility: Team Trump was up to no good, else its behavior makes no sense--I'm talking about the failure to acknowledge the conclusions of our intelligence community regarding Russian interference, the firing of Comey, lying about the reason for firing Comey, later accidentally telling the truth about why Comey was fired, lying about (not) meeting with Russians, then lying about the substance of meetings once it was known that they'd lied about there having been no meetings, etc., etc., etc.  I suppose you could take the view that they lied purely for recreational purposes, but that would be dumb as everything else they've done, and anyway we know now that indictments are forthcoming.  Something's rotten and it's not in the state of Denmark.

The worst case scenario is still in play and it seems worth asking:  What then?  Lawrence Lessig, of Harvard Law School, has gotten in trouble with Trumpeters for taking up that question.  I think his conclusion about what ought to happen in the unlikely event that there arises indisputable proof that the Trump campaign worked directly with a hostile foreign power to rig our election is more than they can stomach.  As Lessig points out, however, events would in this scenario almost certainly move very quickly and the possibility of a decent outcome could be carried away on storm waves.  It makes sense to think now about what ought to happen.

The Trump presidency should end.  If he doesn't resign, he should be impeached by the House and convicted by a two-thirds majority of the Senate, as the Constitution requires.  I'm confident our institutions are healthy enough so that this would happen.  I disagree with Republicans about this,  that, the other thing, and almost all else, but I also don't doubt that many of them are sane and decent.  In the House, a simple majority suffices, and it's become evident how, say, Bob Corker would vote in the Senate.  For reasons great and small, including just the enlightened self-interest of Republican senators, Trump would be done.

The line of presidential succession then falls first on the vice president, Mike Pence.  But Pence holds that office by virtue of the same  election that elevated Trump to the presidency.  Since the treasonous and impeachable act pertained to the subversion of that election's integrity, Pence should not benefit from it.  Though we are now in unmapped territory, the articles of impeachment that function to remove Trump should disqualify Pence from succeeding him.  Or, if Pence does become president, he should resign or be impeached himself.  Lessig saves his skepticism about the likelihood of his remedy being adopted for the next step of the succession, but I feel that we have now already left the realm of what would happen and are talking only about what ought to occur.  Most likely, Pence would become president, notwithstanding the corrupt acts of the Trump-Pence campaign.  But, were he barred from settling into the Oval Office--

Next up in the line of succession is the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin.  He should become president.  Almost his first duty would be to nominate someone for the vacant office of vice president.  Whom should he nominate?  Lessig says he should nominate Hillary Clinton.  Then, when she's approved by both Houses in accordance with the Twenty-fifth Amendment, Ryan should resign and Clinton should be sworn in as the next president.  You see now why Lessig's in-box was full even though the whole argument is premised on the condition that a treasonous conspiracy is proven.  Lessig:

Of course, this is the sort of thing that’s unimaginable in Washington today. But that’s why we need to start imagining it, now. The nation won’t have months to deliberate the matter in the urgency of a treason-driven impeachment. It’s the sort of truth we should have resolved to long before it is needed.

And it is the sort of truth we all should embrace: If you steal an election, neither you or your party should benefit from that theft. Even more so if you steal it in conspiracy with a foreign government. Everyone should be able to agree with this fundamental principle. The only question then is whether that principle would guide in this particular case.

Without doubt, if Ryan did the right thing, that would be the most extraordinary event in the history of America since the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter. But unlike that, this event would build the union, not divide it. And if he did it, then Clinton should embrace the spirit of cross partisan decency and nominate Ryan, or a Republican, as her Vice President. At least for the balance of her first term, the frame of adults-behaving-like-adults could live.

 

Books of the Bible: Psalms

 

The Book of Psalms, also known as the Psalter, is sometimes called the hymnbook of ancient Israel.  This isn't meant as a metaphor.  Untranslated terms such as selah--untranslated because the meaning is lost--recur and seem intended to signal a musical interlude or some other liturgical direction.  So the individual psalms were aids to public worship, elements of a liturgy.  They are used for that purpose to this day, and a churchgoer who reads through them might as a result find much that is familiar, even known by heart on account of a thousand recitations, and will be surprised to learn that the words come directly from the Psalter.  For example, here is a portion of Psalm 51:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from thy presence,
and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Perhaps even an outsider may sense here an incantatory power that is achieved again and again within the 150 psalms that comprise the Psalter.  The most common source for the effect is, I think, a combination of solemnity, simplicity, and human feeling.  Colleges offer courses with titles such as "The Bible as Literature," which, were it not for the Psalter, would be more susceptible to charges of special pleading.  

The tone of lofty dignity is not, however, maintained from front to back of this hymnbook.  The base specimens contribute to deplorable Old Testament themes--for example, the violent hatred of enemies, which is usually joined to the notion that God should and will assist in their slaughter.  From Psalm 137:

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, "Rase it, rase it! Down to its foundations!"
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

It is a fond claim of fundamentalists that the Bible inculcates a single message, or at least that it doesn't contradict itself, but really there is no way to reconcile the petition for the skulls of the foe's infants to be crushed against rocks with the commandment to love one's enemies.  At least contemporary politicians have options when mining for biblical texts friendly to their preexisting inclinations.  

Scholarship on the Psalms has performed a mighty taxonomic labor, with the result that all 150 may be filed within a half dozen or so phyla.  There are hymns (calls to worship, such as #100); royal psalms (for celebrations related to coronations, a king's wedding, a military victory, etc.: #2, 45 and 110 are examples); psalms of thanksgiving (a worshiper exhorts fellows to heed a personal narrative of deliverance, as in #30, 32, and 34); psalms of trust (among others, the justly famous 23rd, which has not been altogether ruined by the profusion of calligraphic renderings in service of kitschy Christian art); and liturgies (a grab-bag for the most boring ones, so far as I can tell).

I've left out of the above classification system the psalm of lament, which is the single most prevalent type: a full 50 of the 150 psalms qualify as either a communal lament (worshipers petition for relief from a national affliction) or a personal lament (an individual calls to God from "out of the depths" of his suffering).  These psalms seem to me to be of particular interest, mainly on account of the way in which they peculiarly mix very aggressive complaints against divine justice with faith in God's saving action.  Of the personal laments, Psalm 22 is probably the best known, since according to the crucifixion accounts in two gospels (Mark and Matthew) Jesus, on the cross, cried out its famous first words:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

The 22nd, though long and meandering, includes the essential elements of the personal lament, which may however be seen most clearly in the stripped down thirteenth:

How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me for ever?
How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
lighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him";
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

But I have trusted in thy steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me.

That is the whole psalm, a template for the individual lament, a skeleton on which to hang elaborations, the absence of which here direct attention to the essential form.  The four-fold "How long" is a variation on "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?": both are complaints, brash and deficiently reverent but born of desperation, lodged against God's injustice.  The petitioner insists upon his pain and also upon an answer, a justification.  But then everything slides away quite unsatisfactorily.  The petitioner's desperation is not made more impressive by the disclosure that its evident source is a version of, "What will other people think?"  And what of the apparently invisible transition between the second and third stanzas?  The petitioner had demanded that God answer him but in the end folds his hand even though there's been no answer.  If the sudden memory of God's past bountiful dealings with him resolves the whole issue, then how is it that he put this history out of his mind for long enough to suffer the agony described in the first two stanzas?  

But these are perhaps the complaints of a rationalist.  Psalms follows Job in the Bible and I didn't find the final resolution to that righteous man's questions very satisfactory, either.  To close on a conciliatory note, however, it is at least satisfying that in the religious practice of ancient Israel the  darkness and disorder in human life is recognized--it's the subject matter of a third of the Psalter.  Whereas in contemporary America the practice of religion often seems roughly analogous to another healthy lifestyle choice, like doing yoga, one more tool to get ahead and not fall into the hole out of which God's people cry to him in fifty of the psalms.  

 

 

Baseball's home team

I followed the American League Championship Series, between the Astros and Yankees, closely enough to be aware that the home team won every game, which almost necessarily follows from the fact that the Yankees scored 19 runs in the three games played in New York and 3 runs--yes, sic, three, 3--in the four games played in Houston.  And it's not as if the ballpark in Houston is a graveyard for hitters.  Being a Twins fan, I know that in the team's two championship seasons they never won a road game or lost a home game in the World Series.  I therefore got curious about what the data indicate for home field advantage in major league baseball.  

Turns out that over the last decade or so the home team has consistently won, year by year, from about 52 to 55 percent of regular season games.  The small range contained within the lower half of the 50s suggests that the home field advantage is real but small.  Six out of eleven pretty nearly pegs it, and a team that wins six out of eleven games over the course of a season will end up 88-74--probably not good enough to win the division, though a wild-card playoff berth is possible.  

Does the home team's small regular season advantage get a boost in post-season games, when there is suddenly more on the line?  I doubt it.  Last year, for instance, there were 35 post-season games, from the two wild-card contests through seven World Series games.  The home team won 17 and lost 18.  So far as I can tell, this year's ALCS and the Twins' two World Series wins represent predictable statistical wanderings from the general rule holding that the home team wins just over half the time.

It's possible, I think, to give a plausible account of why, in baseball, the home team should have a small but real advantage.  

The real advantage occurs in close games, when in the last innings the home team can know with less ambiguity what it has to do to win.  Suppose, for example, that the score is tied after eight innings.  In the top of the ninth, the visitors get their first batter to base.  Should they bunt and play for one run or hit away and hope for a "big inning"?  It isn't clear.  But if the visitors don't score, the home team knows, when they come to bat, that scoring one run wins the game, and that moving a runner along with a bunt might therefore be a good strategy.  On the other hand, if the visitors score twice, and the home team gets their first batter to base in the bottom of the ninth, they know not to give away an out in order to advance the runner, since they need two runs to avoid losing.  The home team, in other words, can adopt the maximal strategy.  There isn't anything like this in any other sport that I know about.

That the home team's advantage is small may be explained by another feature unique to baseball--the place of the starting pitcher, which changes from game to game.  Sometimes you hear people say things like "pitching is 60% of baseball," which sounds like a lot, but every fan has been to games in which 100% is more like it: one team's pitcher can't be hit, and the other team's can, so guess who wins?  Over the long haul, the pitching advantage belongs to the visitors as frequently as it does to the home team, and this holds down the home team's winning percentage--to no higher than about 0.53, it seems. 

American stories: Hemingway's "Indian Camp"

Back in 2013-14, I did a series of posts on the stories in James Joyce's Dubliners, one of my favorite books.  Here is a link to the one on "Araby," about a young boy who has an unpleasant epiphany when he goes to buy a gift for a girl he likes at a bazaar.  I enjoyed that exercise and think I will start a series like it, except that the subjects will be a continuous miscellany of stories I like by American authors.  First is going to be Hemingway's "Indian Camp."  It can be read online here, if you are interested.  It's only about 1500 words long.

"Indian Camp" was the first story in Hemingway's first collection, In Our Time, published in 1925, the year he turned 26.  Possibly it is misleading to say "collection," for the stories in the book are preceded by brief vignettes and the successive headings "Chapter I," "Chapter II," "Chapter III," etc.  So Hemingway did not think of the book as a collection of unrelated stories.  In this respect, In Our Time resembles Dubliners, which had been published in 1914--Hemingway admired it and seems to have studied it carefully.  The stories in Joyce's book are about ordinary Dubliners who keep getting a little older as the book progresses.  "Araby," for example, is the third story, and the main character is on the brink of adolescence.  In the last story, "The Dead," the main character, Gabriel Conroy, is middle-aged.  In In Our Time, we have not a succession of characters but a single character, Nick Adams, who is a little older in each story in which he appears.  (He doesn't appear in all of them.)  "Indian Camp," then, is the story for Chapter I in the first edition of In Our Time.  It's the first Nick Adams story, both with respect to the boy's age (one guesses around 10) and date of composition (1923 or 1924--the above picture is contemporaneous, as it's Hemingway's passport photo for 1923).

Here's what happens in the story: 

Nick is on a fishing trip with his father, who is a physician, and his father's brother, George.  They camp on the shore of the lake they fish.  On the other side of the lake is an Indian camp.  As the story opens, two Indians have come in row boats in the night to summon Dr Adams.  A woman at the camp has been in labor for two days, unable to deliver her baby, which is in the breech position.  Nick, his father, and uncle cross the lake in row boats with the Indians.  Here is the paragraph in which Hemingway describes their entry to the camp:

Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman.  She had been trying to have her baby for two days.  All the old women in the camp had been helping her.  The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made.  She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty.  She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt.  Her head was turned to one side.  In the upper bunk was her husband.  He had cut his foot very badly with an axe three days before.  He was smoking a pipe.  The room smelled very bad.

Unless I've miscounted, eleven sentences, 121 words, 142 syllables, and one comma.  Every word is one or two syllables but for "Indian," which occurs twice.  George and Nick are pressed into service as assistants and Dr Adams addresses successfully the medical crisis.  In the immediate aftermath, he is giddy and tells his brother that to have performed a C-section with a jack-knife and then sewed up the incision with fishing line is "one for the medical journals."  The improvised operation has been accomplished without the aid of an anaesthetic.  Before leaving, Dr Adams checks on the husband in the upper bunk.  The man lies on the edge of the bed away from the open part of the room, face to the wall.  When the doctor lifts his lamp, Nick happens to be standing right where he can see that the sagging part of the bed is full of pooling blood and that the man has with a razor slit his throat from ear to ear, nearly decapitating himself.  He evidently could not endure his wife's suffering.

Hemingway's spare narration somehow amplifies the horror of the scene.  In the muted conclusion, Nick and his father are in the row boat again, headed back across the lake.  Nick asks questions, like whether suicide is very common and whether some women do it, too, and his father answers.  The sun is just coming up, and there is a chill in the air that contrasts with the warmth of the water when Nick trails his hand in it.  In another detail, a fish jumps, forming a circle in the water.  It is as if the nightmare is receding as father and son row away from the fallen world back into Eden.  This sense seems consistent, perhaps, with the description of the original night crossing to the Indian camp, when Nick had leaned back in the boat, his father's arm around him, as the Indian rowed them through the mist on the lake.  We might say that the structure of the story is a framed narrative--the frames being the two trips across the lake by boat--and that its "point" is the effect of the inner story on the approximately 10-year-old Nick Adams.  The last sentence is:

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, [Nick] felt quite sure that he would never die.

The Indian camp experience is too awful to be assimilated and accepted.

Twitter, God, and Trump

 

Someone has said that Twitter is where you find out that your FB friends aren't all that and a bag of chips.  Maybe this is just a way of indicating that your world is your world, subject to every fault and taint, whereas Twitter, if you make judicious decisions about whom to follow, allows you to drop in on a better one?  Anyway, I am glad that yesterday Kwame Anthony Appiah retweeted Matthew Yglesias's comment on a headline.  The headline was, "President Donald J Trump Proclaims October 15 through 21, 2017, as National Character Counts Week."  Yglesias's comment: "Satire is dead."

In a similar vein, David Frum, after citing Trump's statement to "Values Voters" about how he's busy "stopping the assault on Judeo-Christian values," notes a few exceptions:

1. Thou shalt not steal
2. Thou shalt not commit adultery
3. Thou shalt not bear false witness &
4. Thou shalt not covet.

There are six more commandments but Twitter has a character limitation.  

These tweets raise a question for which I have no answer satisfactory to me: Why is Trump such a darling of conservative Christians?  It seems, to this outsider, that his past is spattered with too many women, too many bankruptcies, too many shady dealings, too many stiffed creditors, too many lawsuits, too many positions on abortion, too much boasting, too much glitz, too much Manhattan, too many tone deaf references to (for example) "Two Corinthians."  Yet, according to Pew Research, he won the white evangelical vote by a whopping 65 points (81 to 16 percent), which is unprecedented--beyond even George W Bush's margin over Kerry with this group.  All my theories go bust upon further review.  For example, white evangelicals obviously self-select for whiteness, but, considering that Trump won white Catholics by only 60-37, and lost lopsidedly among Jews and religiously unaffiliated whites, that seems over simple.  Trump is rich, thereby proving he's favored by God?  But they wouldn't vote for an even richer Democrat. 

I need to be on the receiving end of some evangelsplaining.  

Scary family photo

Here is a family photo of the Huckabees, including Trump's current press secretary, Sarah, in her student days, when she was presumably preparing herself to lie her ass off in service to America.  The other gargoyles are her father, Mike, who was at the time the governor of Arkansas; her mother, Janet; and her brothers, John Mark and David.  I love that John Mark goes by John Mark, as if determined to announce that his identity is connected to two of the evangelists, not just one.  Am a little surprised that David is David instead of Matthew Luke.  I don't know which boy is which but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?  Yikes.

Since the Huckabees were the first family of Arkansas, the picture may have been taken by an official photographer who was unaware that in years unborn people would wonder whether he had been influenced by Diane Arbus.

Morongate &c

 

Though it's not up to the level of a bigly, or big-time, scandal, I've been following, sort of, the kerfuffle that goes by Morongate.  This refers to the news that at a Pentagon meeting last summer Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to President Trump as "a moron."  I suppose the teed-up response would be: "What was your first clue?"  A state department spokesperson denied the report and advanced the notion that "the secretary does not use that kind of language."  Tillerson, however, when asked directly whether he'd called Trump a moron, said only, "I'm not going to deal with that kind of petty nonsense."  In the coded talk of Washington, that doesn't even qualify as a nondenial denial.  The translation is: I'm not going to pronounce the word "yes," but the answer is, Yes, I called him a moron.

An amusing detail in the above narrative relates to the spokesperson's evident supposition that "moron" is truly despicable language and not allowed in the best homes.  I was around my mother a lot for the last 55 of her 79 years and only heard her say "shit" once.  The whole sentence was, "Grandma's cupboards are full of mouse shit." But, while "shit" was reserved for extreme circumstances, we had no problem calling a moron a "moron" at the supper table.  Who does?

Of course, the entire fabrication hilariously disintegrates if, as Stephen Colbert (above) has speculated, Tillerson actually called Trump "a fucking moron."  

In other Trump family news, it appears that the Manhattan DA may have accepted a bribe from a Trump family lawyer to overrule worker-bee prosecutors who in 2012 wanted to indict Don Jr. and Ivanka for lying like rugs in an effort to attract buyers to a failing Trump real estate venture in SoHo.  Or maybe it wasn't a bribe, just a "campaign contribution" representing the lawyer's honest evaluation of who should be district attorney after the investigation was dropped.  In any event, the corruption of the young Trumps is on display in the emails collected by investigators before they were instructed to find something else to work on.  This might remind some people of the debate last fall wherein near the end the candidates were challenged to think of something nice to say about their opponent.  Hillary praised Trump's family, especially his beautiful children.

Give it up, Hil.  The cupboard is bare but for the mouse shit.

Puerto Rican calculations

I noticed this morning that when typing "population" into the Google search bar, the Wizards in the ether correctly guessed that I was interested in the population of Puerto Rico, which I now know to be a titch over 3.4 million. So it seems I may be among the legions whose geographical knowledge is on the rise, thanks to a catastrophic event. It would be cool if we were joined by our president, who keeps saying that Puerto Rico is "in the middle of the ocean."

If you're looking for context, Puerto Rico falls between Connecticut (3.6 million) and Iowa (3.1 million) in an ordered list of states and territories by population.  It's also true that there are more Americans in Puerto Rico than in the four smallest states (North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming) combined.  If Puerto Rico were a state, its population would entitle it to 7 electoral votes.  Some might be tempted to say that Trump would not be tweeting insults at Puerto Rico if it had 7 electoral votes.  But that's probably wrong, because Puerto Rico would be strongly Democratic, and the Electoral College causes candidates to ignore states they can't win.  (It also causes them to ignore states they can't lose.) Indeed, one thing Republicans fear is that the catastrophe will result in lots more Puerto Ricans living in Florida, which has 29 electoral votes that can go either way.  Those Puerto Ricans would suddenly have a voice. The ones who move to New York, however--not so much. You don't get extra electoral votes for winning by a lot.  So, move to Florida and maybe swing the whole election to the Democrats, or to New York and be a wasted, forgotten "extra vote."

Here's another thing that's  true: Puerto Rico, despite its larger population, would if it were itself a state have five fewer electoral votes (7) than those four smallest states have together (12). More people, fewer electoral votes--because the "more people" would be within a single state. It's hard to argue that the Electoral College is unconstitutional, since it's established in the Constitution.  But the Constitution also guarantees everyone, for example, "the equal protection of the laws."  How can you enjoy that constitutional right if you don't have an equal voice in the selection of officials, including the president, who decide what the laws will be and how they will be administered? 

One person, one vote! Support the National Popular Vote movement. It brings the Electoral College into line with more basic constitutional principles.