Eric The Blue

Watching MSNBC

 

I find that in retirement I am developing a pretty serious MSNBC addiction.  It's not the evening lineup, which I resent for making me a little embarrassed sometimes of my own opinions, the way they land back in my lap wrapped in yards of ribbon and loopy bows.  Plus just tonight, or maybe it was yesterday, I heard Chris Matthews, describing a play in the Alabama-Auburn game, speak of a quarterback lofting the ball across "two lines of scrimmage."  What the hell?  I think he was referring to Auburn's "jump pass" touchdown, which wasn't even thrown by the quarterback.  Does he think the goal line is a "line of scrimmage" too?  Maybe he's more knowledgeable on Robert Kennedy, about whom he has penned a recently published book.  Speaking of which: enough of the on-air book advertisements by the on-air personalities who are making use of their on-air fame to sell a lot of probably mediocre books.  Lawrence O'Donnell, you're another offender.

But during the day, once Morning Joe is over, the network is a great companion while one prosecutes the household chores.  More than once I've had to shut off the dust buster in the expectation that Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle might be about to interrupt someone about one-fifth of the way through their palpably memorized pastiche of bullshit.  "You can't just come on tv and lie!" I remember Ali complaining to one of Trump's shoe-shiners.  Alas, you could say that Sarah Sanders proves daily that you can do just that--or at least you could if the "daily press briefing" was aptly named.  I was watching the day before Thanksgiving, unless it was the Tuesday before, when Sanders started out by saying she was thankful for her faith and her family and then made all the reporters preface their question with a similar disquisition.  To my alarm and their own humiliation, the hardened White House press corps played along, and even though I was a thousand miles away the air became so humid with pieties that I could hardly think to hope someone might say she was thankful for Robert Mueller.  (No dice.)

It is, however, MSNBC's house Republicans who intrigue me most, and none more than Nicolle Wallace, who has worked for W, Jeb, John McCain, and perhaps other objects of my contempt.  Actually, McCain I could respect if he hadn't plucked Sarah Palin from obscurity, which may have been the triggering event for where we are today since it got Republicans used to the concept that no one isn't qualified.  Anyway, Wallace now has her own show at three o'clock, and I can tell you that, even though I have to get the kids from the bus at 3:45, I see enough to know that she is indignant.  At first I thought it might be an act--I'm sure the pay is good, MSNBC is obviously getting millions from Peloton--but no one could act like that.  She may be more revulsed by Trump than I am and her horror appears to be flipping other switches.  Yesterday she had on John Podhoretz, who was singing the praises of Mitch McConnell.  Cutting him off in order to get to a commercial, Wallace quipped that viewers had now heard from McConnell's "one-man fan club."  Zing!  Was it she or someone else who pointed out that the Christians of Alabama are apparently appalled by same-sex lovers but ambivalent about a 30-something assistant DA who trolls the mall for teen-aged girls?  Not to mention that he was twice kicked off the state supreme court for defying court orders.  A real conservative hero!  It makes sense that Wallace, an actual conservative, should revile him, and it's a relief nowadays when anything relating to our politics makes sense. 

Authors: Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick, who died in 2007, was born July 27, 1916, in Lexington, Kentucky, the eighth of eleven children of Eugene Hardwick, a heating and plumbing contractor, and his wife, Mary, who stayed at home with the kids.  Her New York Times obituary notes that in the autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights the narrator observes that the kids' "mortification" over their parents' fecundity was expressed "in their passionate love for their kind, happy mother and in a singularly low birth rate for themselves."

She attended the University of Kentucky in her hometown--B.A. in 1938, M.A. in 1939.  Though her resume to this point was all Lexington, Kentucky, she seems to have had her eye on a New York literary life, and her next move was to enroll in a PhD program at Columbia University.  Her focus was 17th-century English literature, but she withdrew without a degree in 1941.  She would become renowned as a "literary essayist" who wrote with authority on art, music, theatre, politics, American places, American crime (the Menendez brothers), American literature, especially her contemporaries  Updike, Roth, Didion, Mailer, and Richard Ford, though Melville was another favorite, as well as women writers from all over (Plath, Jane Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, Dorothy Wordsworth, Nadine Gordimer, Simone Weil), but she did not, as far as I can tell, devote any attention after 1941 to 17th-century English literature.  Maybe she mainly wanted to get to New York, where she spent most of the war years writing fiction, including a novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945), and touring jazz clubs, often in the company of gay men, one of whom she shared an apartment with. The question of how she financed herself during this time is addressed briefly in the aforementioned obituary, which states that she eked it out on fellowships and family help before allowing her own words to summarize her days (and nights):  it was a life signified by "love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor."

For obscure reasons, The Ghostly Lover attracted the attention of Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, who solicited her contributions.  This was how she got her start as an essayist, and her output over the next fifty years was collected in four volumes: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998).  I've tried to indicate above her wide range of subjects; it's harder to describe the flavor of the individual essays.  The openings tend to be vivid and perhaps just setting down a few of them is the way to proceed.  Her most frequently reprinted essay might be "The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King," which begins with a description of the city in which King was assassinated on the weekend between the murder and the funeral:

The decaying, downtown shopping section of Memphis--still another Main Street--lay, the weekend before Martin Luther King's funeral, under a siege.  The deranging curfew and that state of civic existence called "tension" made the town seem to be sinister, again very much like a film set, perhaps for a television drama, of breakdown, catastrophe.

"Citizen Updike" commences:

John Updike, the dazzling author, appeared, and still appears, to be one of Augustine's "fair and fit"--and never more so than when viewed among his male literary colleagues who often tend to show the lump and bump of gene, bad habits, the spread and paste of a lifetime spent taking one's own dictation.

And here she is setting out on someone who in certain respects reminds me of her:

Edmund Wilson, one of our country's supreme men of letters, is sometimes remembered as being autocratic and intimidating.  My own memory, not the most intimate, is of a cheerful, corpulent, chuckling gentleman, well-dressed in brown suits and double martinis.

In the next sentence she refers to Wilson's "astonishing range of subjects"--astonishing to us, for sure, though it's not clear why she should have been surprised.

The association with Partisan Review was not forever.  In the winter of 1962-63, there was a newspaper strike in New York, and Hardwick and some of her set, preeminently Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, decided that the absence of the Sunday book sections was an invitation to show that they could do better in any event.  Thus was born The New York Review of Books, "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language," according to Esquire, and, according to Tom Wolfe, "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic."  It was the organ in which for the rest of her long life most of Hardwick's essays were first published.  There was for her an aspect of put-up-or-shut-up in this venture since she had a few years earlier published in Harper's, which was at the time edited by Silvers, an essay on the decline of book reviewing and the unrelieved dullness of those now absent Sunday book sections.  It's an excuse to set down another sample of her prose, always alive on the page and an antidote for the very thing she was criticizing:

A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised.  Sweet bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.  A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory.

[Snip]

It is not merely the praise of everything in sight--a special problem in itself--that vexes and confounds those who look closely at the literary scene, but there is also the unaccountable sluggishness of the New York Times and Herald Tribune Sunday book-review sections.  The value and importance of individual books are dizzily inflated, in keeping with the American mood of the moment, but the book-review sections as a cultural enterprise are, like a pocket of unemployment, in a state of baneful depression insofar as liveliness and interest are concerned.  One had not thought they could go downward, since they have always been modest, rather conventional journals.  Still, there had been room for a decline in the last few years and the opportunity has been taken.

She had heard that Wilson was autocratic and intimidating!  Yet one is not aware of lambastings in her assessments, just judicious intelligence and memorable expressions.  Possibly her place among those in the Review's inner upper circle allowed her to write about what interested her and the writers who interested her were not those whose reputations she thought needed puncturing.  Her tours of many oeuvres take note of strengths and weaknesses, the former predominating, in prose that one might almost term breezy--so conversational and free of jargon is it--but for the intellectual heft: the achievement of an alchemist.

Regarding her private life, the inevitable main event is her 23-year marriage to Robert Lowell, who is regarded by many to be the best American poet of the second half of the last century.  Lowell seems almost to have compensated for being a genius by also being a terrible husband.  A manic depressive, he was in and out of hospital beds, and in and out of bedroom beds, too.  In one excruciating anecdote, related by Hardwick herself, a bitter extracurricular lover sent to their residence some unpaid bills, which Lowell, after opening, tossed on the floor: she says she picked them up and paid them.  It got worse.  He left her for an English woman, Lady Caroline Blackwood, and then, without her permission, used lines from her anguished letters sent across the ocean in his new book of poems, The Dolphin, a work in the "confessional" mode.  He was upbraided by friends--Elizabeth Bishop told him in a letter that "[a]rt just isn't worth that much"--but Hardwick seems never to have uttered a word against him in public.  He and Blackwood were an awful match, she being approximately as stable as he was, and after their break-up Lowell and Hardwick were apparently reuniting--he had gone back to England in the fall of 1977 to collect some things and was on his way from Kennedy Airport to her Manhattan duplex when he died of a heart attack in the cab.  They had one child, a daughter, Harriet, born in 1957, when Hardwick was 40--her tardy contribution to her generation's "singularly low birth rate."  

The image of Hardwick kneeling to pick up the bills sent by her husband's lover, and then paying them, seems in line with what an outsider can glean of her character.  Without histrionics or fanfare, she did what needed to be done, and kept doing it.  Her last essay for The New York Review, on the American novelist Nathanael West, was published in 2003, when she was 87.  It may not have been that hard for her to stay steadily at it, for she once told an interviewer:

As I have grown older I see myself as fortunate in many ways. It is fortunate to have had all my life this passion for studying and enjoying literature and for trying to add a bit to it as interestingly as I can. This passion has given me much joy, it has given me friends who care for the same things, it has given me employment, escape from boredom, everything. The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Just a little about Judge Roy Moore

If my own behavior is representative, the wild ride of Alabama's special election for U.S. Senate has been good for cable news ratings, but I find a few of my reactions are far enough off the worn path as not to have received an airing.  So, here goes!

I love listening to southern drawls.  Actually, anything that's different from my own inflections sounds great to me--Brooklyn, Jersey, Canuck, the drawl.  I used to work with a woman who grew up in southeastern Ohio, where the natives have what sounds to me like a definite twang, and when I remarked upon it to her she laughed and said, "When ah first moved here, ah thought y'all sounded like Bob Dylan.  Ah mean, everyone!"  I once thought that certain social forces, such as the flourishing national mass media, would extinguish regional speech differences, but so far that hasn't happened, thankfully.

Anyhow, I usually abhor man-in-the-street interviews, because the subjects tend to be embarrassingly daft, and God knows the men-in-the-street in Alabama are not exceptions to that rule, but I could listen to native Alabamians talk until they elect a Democrat to the U.S. Senate--in other words, forever, though if the polls are to be believed Roy Moore may actually lose.  For the Republican party, it would be better if he did, but I'm pulling for Jones anyway. 

Of course it's abhorrent that kids have to be harassed and even molested by ambitious and powerful men in order that I can enjoy listening to southerners talk to tv reporters.  Still, I can't go all in on Roy Moore being a villain.  To me, he's just a sick-o.  I guess I don't buy into this tendency--which is Roy Moore's own--to think of everything as moral or immoral, good or evil, Christian or the devil.  The either/or that applies to Moore is rather sick/healthy, and he's sick--not sick like a metaphor but sick like people who study these things could diagnose, give a name to, supply a clinical overview. 

When the story first broke, I read something on a right-wing blog that I half agreed with.  The author wasn't ready to believe the allegations against Moore because, he said, people who do these kinds of things are compulsive, so there would never be only four victims.  Since he was right about compulsive, he was naturally wrong about there being only four.  In retrospect, the affecting account of the then-14-year-old should have put everyone on notice--I mean, the detail about how, in the courthouse, Moore so deftly separated his victim from her mother.  He was practiced.

What makes it so easy to pile on him is, of course, how quick he has always been to condemn others for what he considers to be their sins.  Hypocrite!  But I think his desperate-seeming religion is just another aspect of his psychological disease.  He's aware of what compulsions are operating on him and has to take steps to hide them--from others but, more to the point, from himself.  His practice of "extreme religion" is a compensation for being deviant.  He has to have some concept of self and "Christian" beats hell out of "pervert."  

In the context of the criminal law, concepts like "illness" and "compulsion" diminish culpability, so I guess the above amounts to a kind of defense of Roy Moore.  I don't want to go too far with it.  The U.S. Senate is a better place for moral hypocrites than for psychological wrecks.  Fortunately!

 

At the movies: The Florida Project

On Sunday, my stepdaughter and I saw a wonderful movie: The Florida Project.  I had noticed an advertising blurb to the effect that it's a shimmering exploration of childhood, something like that, and thought it might appeal, despite the R rating, to a mature 14-year-old.  Perhaps a bit more research would have been in order.  The director is Sean Baker, whose previous movie, Tangerine (2015), is known for having been made for a song (it was shot with an iPhone) and for its subject matter (a day in the life of some trans hookers in West Hollywood).

I think "the Florida project" is what Disneyland was called in business memos when it was being planned and then constructed.  My guess would be that something about the contrast between that colorless phrase and the goal of creating a childhood dreamscape is what attracted Baker and his colleagues.  But Disneyland is until the last scene an off screen presence in The Florida Project, which is set a couple miles away, on the outskirts of Orlando, along a string of gaudily painted crap businesses, including soft-serve ice cream shacks and flophouses, one in particular called The Magic Castle, bright purple, or maybe mauve is the right word, three-leveled, with those concrete walkways and iron railings running outside the doors of floors two and three.  Two of the main characters, a 6-year-old girl, Mooney, and her single mother, Halley, an elaborately tattooed and studded former exotic dancer (I think), live in room 323. The third leading character is the motel's manager, played by Willem Dafoe, who, though great in this role, is arguably outdone by the child actress (Brooklynn Prince) who plays Mooney and by Bria Vinaite's Halley.  Baker recruited Vinaite after seeing her Instagram account.  It's her first role.

That The Magic Castle was originally meant to house Magic Kingdom visitors seems a reasonable surmise, but if so that didn't work out, and the current business plan is to rent to central Florida's poor.  Halley pays $38 a day for room 323, which, doing the math, is not super cheap housing, especially considering that it's a damn motel room, no kitchen, no appliances.  It's not Exhibit A of the movie, but The Florida Project is good, in an understated way, on some social science relating to poverty.  You have to have money to trim costs.  Halley has nothing.  Reminds me of the way, before moving to my current neighborhood and changing where I shop, I'd always see people getting into taxi cabs with their groceries.  

If not for the presence of Dafoe, a recognizable movie star, you might form the impression that The Florida Project is a documentary.  The camera follows the characters around and the movie is made of episodes that do not advance a plot.  In some, Mooney and her young friends have adventures; in others, Halley and Mooney cavort happily, sometimes working together to rip off tourists when the rent period is approaching its end; and in yet others the Dafoe character does what needs to be done to entertain and protect the at-risk children who reside in the motel he manages.  Slowly the details of a world set off from Disneyland by wide avenues of multilane traffic fill in, and it can seem almost bucolic.  The movie causes you to realize something that's obviously true but which you may never have thought of: "at-risk children" do not think of themselves as being at-risk.  It's summer vacation, school's out, and Mooney and her friends are having fun in the only neighborhood they know.  

But Mooney is an at-risk child and the movie doesn't ignore that aspect of her life.  I said that the episodes do not advance a plot but the accumulating details do impress upon the audience how precarious these lives are.  The money problems persist, the manager's gruff efforts to assist are insufficient, and Halley eventually turns to sex work, sometimes turning tricks in the motel while Mooney sits in the tub behind a closed door bathing the manes of her toy horses.  The illegal activity gets reported and representatives from the Department of Children Services are alerted of a case of child endangerment.  In the climactic scene (spoiler alert), they come to The Magic Castle to remove Mooney from her home.  To this point, the camera has been coolly observing, documentary-style, everything that happens, but now it appears to be ditched in favor of another iPhone as Mooney escapes from the social workers and, with a little friend from the adjoining flophouse, sets out on a grainy jerky phantasmagoric sprint through her seedy neighborhood, across the busy avenues, and through the gates into the Magic Kingdom.  I read another review in which this ending was described as a "punt," which it may be in a certain sense, but it is also exhilarating and, anyway, it would be too painful to have to watch what "really" happened.

CORRECTION: Every place I say "Disneyland" I mean "Disney World."  It's not a mistake my 7-year-old would make.  H/t Bob Edholm.

Last round of the year

Checking my records, I see that I played golf on October 25.  The temperature was in the mid-50s, the sun was shining, no wind, and it's looking like it will be my last round of the year, which is okay, because in that case I have a pleasant memory of 2017's last hole.   It's a par 5 at Sundance, a reputed dog track in the town of Dayton.  By this point I may have been half snapped up on account of my partner's view that signs about "absolutely no carry-ons" are "only a suggestion."  Nevertheless I hit a long drive, though way right, and had no route straight toward the green for my second shot.  I played out to the fairway between some trees at around a 45 degree angle to the hole, and, as often happens when taking a short swing to hit a low shot with an unlofted iron,  I made a clean connection and the ball jumped, landing at least half way through the fairway and rolling into the left rough, where it came to rest about three yards behind the trunk of a small tree.  I was maybe 130 yards from the hole, and the flag was directly behind the tree trunk, but I was so close to the trunk that I could aim just to the side of it and toward the left side of the green.  To stay below the branches, I took another short swing with a 3-iron, and did pretty much what I wanted to do, but it's evidently hard to control the distance on such a shot: the ball again flew farther than I intended and rolled across the green, leaving around a 35-foot putt through maybe 3 yards of fringe.  I got it within 4 or 5 feet of the hole and then made the next putt for a par.

Sometimes even a mediocre player can have a string of holes like that and golf seems easy.  Never make a good shot, get a par anyway, because you never make a really bad one, either.  I mean to contemplate this lesson all winter long.  The Zen of golf.  I will have watched a lot of basketball games on tv before this delusion comes crashing down upon me.

Notes on Virginia

The Washington Post collects exit polling results from the Virginia governor's race here.  It's all interesting to a junkie but for me one item stands above the rest.  Among white Virginians with a college education, the Democrat, Northam, defeated the Republican, Gillespie, by 51-48.  But get this: among white Virginians without a college degree, Gillespie won by 72-26, which is about the same as Trump's margin with this group (71-24) in last year's presidential result. A 25-point difference based on whether or not you're a college graduate!

John Edwards had enough blood circulating north of his waistline to be on to something about "two Americas."  If you grow up in rural Virginia, and have a chance to go to college, where you do well enough to graduate and then don't leave the state, you're apt to end up in the D.C. suburbs, or Richmond, with a Netflix account, a Starbucks habit, and a preference for the Democrats.  If you don't go to college, you probably remain within easy driving distance of mom and dad, and vote as they do.

Democrats had a good night in Virginia, but, being a glass-half-empty sort of liberal, I think they've got to find a way to do better with noncollege whites--either that, or make sure that more and more kids are the first in their family to go to college.  The Republicans would really be sunk if more than a few hillbillies were to conclude that their kids' interest is pretty much in line with those of the striving immigrants and brown-skinned ones.

Also, on the glass-half-empty theme, I have to report from the back of my hobby horse that Democrats' sweeping victories at the polls probably won't put Virginia's House of Delegates into their hands: for that to happen, recounts in a couple close races would have to flip the result.  This despite the fact that across Virginia voters favored Democratic candidates for the state house by a margin that mirrored very closely the gubernatorial result--nine points.  In other words Republicans, when the recounts are done, likely will find that they are still the majority party in the House of Delegates even though their candidates won about nine percent fewer votes across the state.  This is a familiar pattern.  In last year's congressional elections in Virginia, the statewide vote was very evenly divided between the two parties--Democratic candidates got around 15,000 more votes than Republicans.  Yet Republicans won seven out of Virginia's eleven seats in the U.S. House.  Do you know who draws the boundaries that so clearly favor Republicans?  The Virginia General Assembly, one body of which is of course the House of Delegates, where, despite having received fewer votes, it appears Republicans will continue in the majority!  There have been in the very recent past (shall we say) shenanigans:

The redistricting of congressional districts prepared by the Virginia legislature, the Virginia General Assembly, in 2012 was used in the 2014 elections. The redistricting was found unconstitutional and replaced with a court-ordered redistricting on January 16, 2016, before the 2016 elections. Gloria Personhuballah and James Farkas claimed that Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District violated the Voting Rights Act by packing black voters into the district for the political purpose of making surrounding areas better for Republican candidates. Following Supreme Court precedent, the Eastern Virginia Circuit Court found that U.S. Congressional Districts cannot be gerrymandered by race for partisan gain. In this case, the twisting non-contiguous 3rd District hopped the James River in several places and divided multiple locality boundaries, resulting in 89% majorities for Representative Bobby Scott (D) while surrounding Republican incumbents enjoyed majorities of 16-24%.

Happily for Virginia Republicans, gerrymandering is legal so long as it is not done by race--and, as anyone can see from the exit polling, black/white is not the only demographic category that can function as a pretty reliable stand-in for Democrat/Republican.

American stories: Flannery O'Connor's "Parker's Back"

I wrote here about Flannery O'Connor and the notebook of prayers she kept while a student in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa.  She was a Catholic from the deep South, a close observer of the fundamentalist Protestants who surrounded her, and the kick-ass effect of some of her stories comes, I think, from the way in which, either gradually or suddenly, you comprehend that the joke isn't on who you thought the joke was going to be on.  John Updike, having quoted a few passages from the work of another author (Anne Tyler), remarked, "This is O'Connor cartooning without the cruelty, without the pinpoint tunnel to Jesus at the end of all perspectives."  Cruelty, cartoons, fanaticism--Updike captured, in one sentence meant to describe Anne Tyler, an awful lot of Flannery O'Connor.  

In a letter to a friend dated January 21, 1961, she expressed dissatisfaction with a story she was working on called "Parker's Back": 

It is too funny to be as serious as it ought.  I have a lot of trouble with getting the right tone.

She seems to have discarded it and then taken it back up in 1964--the year of her death, in August, at age 39, from lupus, with which she had been stricken in her mid-20s.  She was a semi-invalid for most of her adult life, and was dying when she returned to "Parker's Back," but the humor that she was seeking to blend with her serious purpose remains in the finished story.  It begins with an absurd courtship of a homely fundamentalist by the title character, O.E. Parker, a type of southern drifter and ne'er-do-well.  Without understanding his own motives for courting her, he seeks to arouse her jealousy by describing his employer:

He had told her that the woman was a hefty young blonde; in fact she was nearly seventy years old and too dried up to have an interest in anything except getting as much work out of him as she could.  Not that an old woman didn't sometimes get an interest in a young man, particularly if he was as attractive as Parker felt he was, but this old woman looked at him the same way she looked at her old tractor--as if she had to put up with it because it was all she had.

Another of his methods is to show her his body, all festooned with tattoos.  He suggests slyly that the best ones are where she can't see but she isn't impressed.  Actually, he isn't either.  In a virtuoso sequence, the back story of his life is related by way of the history of his attraction to tattoos.  He quit school at sixteen, went to a trade school, quit that in favor of a job at a garage that allowed him to pay for more tattoos, and then joined the navy after his mother failed to get him interested in religion.  Of course he got a lot more tattoos in the navy:

He had stopped having lifeless ones like anchors and crossed rifles.  He had a tiger and a panther on each shoulder, a cobra coiled about a torch on his chest, hawks on his thighs, Elizabeth II and Philip over where his stomach and liver were respectively.  He did not care much what the subject was so long as it was colorful; on his abdomen he had a few obscenities but only because that seemed the proper place for them.  Parker would be satisfied with each tattoo about a month, then something about it that had attracted him would wear off.  Whenever a decent-sized mirror was available, he would get in front of it and study his overall look.  The effect was not of one intricate arabesque of colors but of something haphazard and botched.  A huge dissatisfaction would come over him . . . .

It's around about in here that the quite funny "cartooning" merges into something else suggested by "haphazard," "botched," and "huge dissatisfaction."  It seems the hardscrabble loser O.E. Parker has in him something of the spiritual quester and that this accounts in some mysterious way for the attraction to tattoos and the plain fundamentalist woman whom he first courted and then married without knowing why.  By this time in his life, the only blank canvas on his body is his back. He hadn't wanted any tattoos where he couldn't himself very easily see them, but now he becomes obsessed with filling up his last open body space with a work of tattoo art that Sarah Ruth--that's her name--won't be able to resist.  It turns out that the title is a bit of a double entendre, since the obvious meaning refers to the back of Parker, the last empty space, whereas the more significant reading of "Parker is back" suggests that this story may be meant as a kind of religious parable of returning.  Toward the end, Parker enters his favorite tattoo parlor and demands to see the book "with all the pictures of God in it."  Then:

"Father, Son, or Spirit?"

"Just God," Parker said impatiently.  "Christ.  I don't care.  Just so it's God."

The artist returned with a book.  He moved some papers off another table and put the book down on it and told Parker to sit down and see what he liked.  "The up-t-date ones are in the back," he said.

On this recommendation, Parker begins at the end, where he finds reassuring pictures of a friendly Jesus--the good shepherd, "forbid them not," the physician's friend, and so on.  He thumbs backward toward the front of the book, back in time, to the less "up-t-date" specimens.  As he progresses, the artistic renderings of Jesus become more and more austere, less reassuring.  He passes one toward the front, hears a voice telling him to GO BACK--a bit more playfulness with the title, perhaps--and finds himself contemplating "the haloed head of a flat, stern, Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."  This is the one he chooses.  If there is the under tone of a sneer in that reference to the up-t-date ones being at the back, it's the author's contempt for what has become of Christianity.

Notwithstanding his dim comprehension, the tattoo artist, over the course of two days, diligently reproduces the Byzantine Christ on Parker's back, and he must have done a good job judging by the effect it has on its first viewers:  on his way back to Sarah Ruth, Parker stops by a pool hall, and when his friends, after some glad-handing, lift his shirt to have a look, "Parker felt all the hands drop away instantly and his shirt fell again like a veil over the face."  When the pool-hall gang recovers, they try to make a joke of it, and a fight breaks out.  They throw Parker out into the alley and 

Then a calm descended on the pool hall as nerve shattering as if the long barnlike room were the ship from which Jonah had been cast into the sea.

This fleeting allusion to the book of Jonah, the closest thing in the Bible to a short story, may reveal quite a lot about what to make of "Parker's Back," which ends with Parker leaning against the pecan tree in his yard and crying after Sarah Ruth kicks him out of the house for having defiled himself with a graven image of God.  This seems a deliberate echoing of the conclusion to the Book of Jonah, and in retrospect the silence of the pool-hall gang when they see what's beneath Parker's shirt is the analog for the heathen sailors who, when the sea ceases raging once they throw Jonah overboard, "feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows."  Thus Jonah, against his will and without even knowing it, was a successful missionary for the God from whom he was trying to flee.  Is there a suggestion that the pool-hall gang may also have been turned in a new direction? 

The biblical book and O'Connor's story share the method of joining hilarity to religious purpose, as well as the theme of God hunting down stubborn sinners and using them to achieve his ends.  Though Jonah's unending recalcitrance, which keeps his unintentional successes on the ship and at Nineveh from being over tidy, reminds us that in "Parker's Back" the Christian fundamentalist fails to recognize her own God in the flat stern gaze of the Byzantine Christ.  Her sinning husband knew the face of God when he saw it near the front of the artist's book. 

You can look it up: gun laws reduce gun violence

The above chart shows, in ascending order, the number of gun deaths per 100,000 population in the fifty states, together with an assessment of the strictness of the gun laws in the states.  Seems like a reasonable exercise to help gauge the effectiveness of gun laws, especially for proponents of federalism--fifty laboratories of democracy and all that.  The two shades of green bars are for strict and somewhat strict gun laws, the two shades of red are for lenient and most lenient, and the pale bars are for the middle ground.  Standard is the 2011 state scorecard issued by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Some observations:

• Of the five states with the lowest rates of gun fatalities (Massachusetts, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut), all have green bars (strict gun laws).
• Six states get a green bar.  Their individual ranks are 38, 46, 47, 48, 49, and 50.
• Of the states in the "high half"--Texas and those to the right of it--one (Michigan) has a pale bar.  The other 24 are red.  Of those 24, 20 are dark red (most lax).
• "But what about Chicago?"  That's the refrain, right?  Chicago is about 40 miles from Wisconsin and about 20 miles from Indiana.  Both Wisconsin and Indiana get the dark red bar.
• Doubt the standard for the color of the bars?  Just want to point out that there is a strong correlation between "liberal" political culture and low rates of gun fatalities.  There is also a strong correlation between "conservative" political culture and high rates of gun fatalities.  For example, Clinton carried 8 of the 10 states with the lowest rates (exceptions: Iowa and Nebraska).  Of the 10 states with the highest rates, 8 were carried by Trump (exceptions: Nevada and New Mexico).
• The above are part of the reason that, among social scientists who have studied the question, there is a consensus that strict gun laws lower the incidence of gun violence.  

Kelly does the Civil War

John Kelly, President Trump's chief of staff, is one of the White House characters who, in the view of Sen. Bob Corker, R-TN, keeps our country from falling into chaos.  The source of Kelly's reputation for seriousness and competence must be his military background, his crewcut, and the way he often hangs his head in apparent dismay while listening to his boss speak.  There was also his silence, which  allowed us all to hope for the best, but which he has now broken, thereby providing more evidence that the malaise within Trumpland is general.  

Was the Civil War caused, as Kelly insists, not by slavery but by the failure of men of honor on the opposing sides to compromise?  No, because the only issue there was to compromise on was slavery, and by 1860 there had already been too much of that.  The story of the country's first eighty years is a tale of trying to reach some kind of accommodation regarding slavery.  It began with the Constitution, which, when ratified by the separate states, brought the US into existence.  Here is Article I, Section 9:

The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.

So the founding document, adopted in 1787, allowed for the continuation of the slave trade for twenty years, until 1808.  This may appear to be a gift to what has been modestly described as "the peculiar institution," but it is possible to detect in the somewhat stilted prose--which here as everywhere else in the document studiously avoids the words "slave" and "slavery"--the outline of a compromise: you can import your slaves, but you may have to pay a tax to do so.  

Then, from Article IV, Section 2:

No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.

This is the notorious fugitive slave clause, which allowed for the return of escaped slaves to their masters.  The squabbling at the constitutional convention again brings into sight a kind of compromise.  The phrase "under the laws thereof" was added at the eleventh hour, so that it would not be possible, strictly speaking, to assert that the Constitution regarded slavery as legal.  It's only that the laws of some states permitted it.  The anti-slavery contingent at the convention was in the role of Pontius Pilate, washing its hands of evil while taking actions that would result in its advance.  

And then from Article I, Section 2:

Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

This is the three-fifths compromise, probably the Constitution's most notorious sop to slave owners.  The question was about whether slaves should be counted as persons for purposes of determining representation in the Congress.  Since they were treated as property, and had no political rights whatever, certainly no right to vote, they obviously should not have counted at all.  But the slave-holding states were already worried about being outvoted by the more populous North, so wanted desperately to boost their clout in Washington, and, again, the anti-slavery contingent caved or, if you prefer, compromised.  Every five slaves would count as three souls--the ratios of one-half and three-fourths were discussed but rejected in favor of the middling three-fifths, another compromise.  Thus more slave owners would be elected to Congress, where they could be counted on to vote against the interests of fake constituents who they were "representing" in a sixty per cent sort of way.  (The compromise also boosted the electoral vote tally of the slave states.)

So those are three ways in which the Constitution "compromised" on slavery (though I think "caved" is the more accurate verb).  By any decent standard, the problem was not that there wasn't enough compromising but that there was too much--and we're talking about only the Constitution, not the next eighty years and the Fugitive Slave Act, the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case, the disputes over the expansion of slavery into the territories, the Kansas and Missouri compromises, etc., etc. 

Kelly isn't going to say anything more on the subject, of course.  His best defense would be that he doesn't believe it himself but is just kissing up to Trump's base, the only people in the world who seem eager to wallow in this load of manure.  I sometimes almost feel sorry for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.  The administration is full of white guys saying stupid stuff and she's the one who has to go out and answer questions about it.  She's probably as nostalgic as Kelly for the days when women were "sacred" and so didn't have impossible jobs like hers.