Eric The Blue

Happy holidays!

I've had it up to about the fourth of July with our president and Fox News &c for all their phony outrage over "the war on Christmas" and all the rest of their whining about "political correctness." Trump may have bragged more about making it okay to say "Merry Christmas" than he has about his supposed triumph in a cage match against all of ISIS.  On Christmas Eve he tweeted:

People are proud to be saying Merry Christmas again.  I'm proud to have led the charge against the assault of [sic] our cherished and beautiful phrase.

Actually, everyone who has maintained a grip understands that the despised "Happy holidays" is just a kind of shorthand for a good-will greeting of too many syllables, something like: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and, in the event that you are committed to Yahweh or Mohammed or Christopher Hitchens and the New Atheists, best of wishes to you in the new year, too!  Who could be against that?  Trump and "his base," that's who.  They are captains of industry in the manufacture of artificial grievances and no one can leave their post on the assembly line unless it is to complain about the "snowflakes" on the other side.  

Also, it's not true that the Obama Administration waterboarded people who wished one another "Merry Christmas."  Didn't even mildly rebuke them.  Obama himself said "Merry Christmas" all through the season, as did Americans from Seattle to Key West without consequence.  It's false that in America Christians are an oppressed minority.

This constant din about the horrors of "Happy holidays" and other bogeymen of "political correctness"--it's 97% stagnant ditch water.  When Trump & Co. complain about something or other being "politically correct," it's almost always "just plain correct."  The only problem is that their picture preference has been violated.  They wish something wasn't true but it is.  It's useful to consider roughly parallel cases from a common realm--science, for example, since part of the game is to make everything political.  The atomic theory, concerning how all matter is made of atoms, is correct.  The theory of anthropogenic climate change, however, is politically correct.  Same for Darwin's great theory.  The truth is okay so long as it does not cause trouble for the party line.  For things that are true and offensive to the party line they have invented this pejorative, politically correct.  

And anyway, is this why we have a president--to reverse the (imagined) assault on the cherished phrase "Merry Christmas"?  In the unanimous verdict of our intelligence agencies, the Russians interfered in our last national election, and now we're going to have another one in less than a year.  Have we made any progress in protecting the integrity of this basic democratic process?  No, the Administration barely acknowledges the problem, but Trump has made it safe again to say  "Merry Christmas!"  You can draw a line between Trump's Christmas triumph and his inauguration, which he and his lackeys have persistently insisted broke all the attendance records.  In both, he's wrong on the merits, but why is he even talking about them in the first place?

Vacant Ivanka &c

I think Ivanka Trump's job title is Senior Adviser to the President, something like that, but what she actually does is a mystery, unless you count the occasional interview with a friendly news outlet in which she nevertheless manages to exhibit her vacantness.  The most recent example is her interview a few days ago with "Fox and Friends," in which she breathlessly looked forward to traveling the country this April, when people are completing their tax forms and realizing how great the new law is for them.  I guess she doesn't realize that this April people are settling up with the feds for the 2017 tax year, which is governed by the old law.  You'd think that someone in the Trump Administration could explain to her that, while  some people may be able to detect a different withholding rate in their paychecks early next year, the tax filing due in April isn't affected by the new law at all.  The benighted mainstream media, speaking through one of its principal propaganda organs, the Washington Post, explains:

[The new] law has no real bearing on the 2017 tax returns Americans will be filling out in April. It will apparently take effect when it comes to their personal tax withholding as early as February 2018, but the tax returns in April involve only taxes paid through December 2017.

Ivanka elaborated by indicating that people will in April be particularly grateful because the "vast majority" of them will be able to do their filing on a postcard-sized form.  Uh, no.  That's wrong for April 2018 for the aforementioned reason, and it's wrong for April 2019 because the new law does not deliver on the promise to simplify the tax code (which is not the only promise it doesn't deliver on).  Again, the Post explains:

[T]he postcard thing was a Republican goal for this process that never came to fruition. In fact, as FiveThirtyEight notes, this bill doesn't really even simplify the tax code. There may be an increase in the number of people who take the standard deduction, which has doubled, and taxes for businesses will in some cases get simpler. But other aspects, such as the expanded child tax credit and new rules for pass-through income, will create more complexities. In addition, people will still want to calculate their itemized deductions before deciding whether the standard deduction is the better option for them.

Oh, Ivanka!  You're confirming my suspicions about pretty girls who post to social media selfies of themselves lounging by the pool at a Mar-a-Lago Christmas.

Meanwhile, her dad's administration is having trouble filling a lot of positions in the federal bureaucracy, including secretary of defense for health affairs.  In his confirmation hearing, conducted on the morning after the mass shooting at the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Dr Dean Winslow, professor of medicine at Stanford University, let drop that he thought it was "insane" that a civilian can buy a semiautomatic weapon like the AR-15.  His nomination was subsequently tabled and he has now withdrawn from consideration.  He appears to be a smart and qualified guy, which distinguishes him from many Trump nominees, but, alas, his generally conservative outlook does not extend to Second Amendment absolutism.  We are told that the Constitution is not a suicide pact but it does stop anyone seeking to curb gun violence in America, a serious public health issue.  Dr Winslow wrote about his experience on the editorial page of the same propaganda organ that corrected Ivanka.

American stories: John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio"

"The Enormous Radio" was first published in the May 17, 1947 issue of The New Yorker.  It begins:

Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins.  They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester.

Sutton Place, for those who have not watched "Million Dollar Listing" on the Bravo Network, and so are uninformed about the New York City real estate market, is a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side (East 50s), where nowadays a one-bedroom condo offered at a low seven-figure price would cause the cognoscenti to wonder what was wrong with it: definitely no view across the East River.  But note that Cheever says that the Westcotts lived near Sutton Place.  Westchester County, to which they aspire, lies in the Hudson River valley just north of the city and is home to some of the most affluent suburbs in the country.  Something about the way this opening is handled, the snide or nearly snide statistical precision, or over precision, indicates the author's reservations.  That the Westcotts hoped someday to live in Westchester suggests they had no loftier goal than moving up the real estate chain and that John Cheever perhaps would recommend another way of life.

So is the story going to be a satiric take-down of the Westcotts?  The sentence following upon the statistical abstract of their lives is a physical description of Irene, "a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written."  Regarding her husband, Jim:

He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naïve.

Yes, it's going to be, already is, a satiric take-down.  The next detail, however, concerns the Westcotts' love  of "serious music": they attend a lot of concerts, and at home spend time listening to music on the radio.  When their radio breaks, Jim buys Irene a new one, enormous, contained within an ugly gumwood cabinet, and the documentary realism of the opening is jettisoned.  For this enormous radio, when turned on, picks up, in interludes between Mozart quintets and the "Ode to Joy" and Chopin preludes, conversations and goings-on in the other units of their apartment house, which include:

"For Christ's sake, Kathy," he said, "do you always have to play the piano when I get home?"  The music stopped abruptly.  "It's the only chance I have," a woman said.  "I'm at the office all day."  "So am I," the man said.  He added something obscene about an upright piano, and slammed a door.  

Instructions to a maid before the cocktail guests arrive: "Don't give the best scotch to anyone who hasn't white hair," the hostess said.  "See if you can get rid of that liver paste before you pass those hot things, and could you lend me five dollars?  I want to tip the elevator man."

"I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning," a woman said.  "It must have fallen out of that bracelet Mrs Dunston was wearing last night."  "We'll sell it," a man said.  "Take it down to the jeweler on Madison Avenue and sell it.  Mrs Dunston won't know the difference, and we could use a couple of hundred bucks."

Now and again the radio picks up the cooing, English-accented voice of a neighbor's nanny calming a baby with nonsense verse, the candle flame of goodness in a naughty world--and supplying also an ironic commentary on some of the other overheard bits, such as the plan to sell Mrs Dunston's diamond to the jeweler: "'Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's,'" the Sweeney's nurse sang.  "'Halfpence and farthings, say the bells of St Martin's.  When will you pay me? say the bells at old Bailey . . .'"

Sex and money, the Sweeney's nurse, money and sex and debauchery, the Sweeney's nurse: a fugue, with the defining contrapuntal themes, played on the enormous radio.  At first, the Westcotts are amused and go to bed laughing, but the new knowledge begins to weigh on Irene.  Something is finally being written on her wide, fine forehead.  Home during the days with this radio, she hears more and more, and begins to feel discouraged and obsessed.  One night, in the wee hours, her son calls for a glass of water:

All the lights in the neighborhood were extinguished, and from the boy's window she could see the empty street.  She went into the living room and tried the radio.  There was some faint coughing, a moan, and then a man spoke.  "Are you all right, darling?" he asked.  "Yes," a woman said wearily.  "Yes, I'm all right, I guess," and then she added with great feeling, "But, you know, Charlie, I don't feel like myself any more.  Sometimes there are about fifteen or twenty minutes in the week when I feel like myself.  I don't like to go to another doctor, because the doctor bills are so awful already, but I just don't feel like myself, Charlie.  I just never feel like myself."  They were not young, Irene thought.  She guessed from the timbre of their voices that they were middle-aged.  The restrained melancholy of the dialogue and the draft from the bedroom window made her shiver, and she went back to bed.

In the concluding scene, the Westcotts are themselves unmasked, more profoundly than we probably expected.  Jim comes home from work more tired than usual and, already feeling irritable, is shoved across a line by Irene's new sensitivity.  He complains about her spending--"fur coats and radios and slipcovers." He confesses, probably for the first time, his disappointment with his career and his worries about money, the kinds of things he thinks about.  She pleads with him to stop, the neighbors will hear, but he hurdles on over this objection and demands to know why she has suddenly become "so Christly," a real "convent girl," and he proceeds to throw into Irene's face some incidents from her past that only an intimate would know--chicanery and theft connected with the probating of her mother's will, indifference to a friend in need, an abortion.  Then the coda:

Irene stood for a minute before the hideous cabinet, disgraced and sickened, but she held her hand on the switch before she extinguished the music and the voices, hoping  that the instrument might speak to her kindly, that she might hear the Sweeney's nurse. Jim continued to shout at her from the door.  The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal.  "An early morning railroad disaster in Tokyo," the loudspeaker said, "killed twenty-nine people.  A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns.  The temperature is forty-seven.  The humidity is eighty-nine."

We might have been expecting to be pleased to witness the humiliation of some Upper East Side deplorables and instead we get world-sorrow washing over the whole earth and a muffled call, in the action of some nuns and the songs of the Sweeney's nurse, for forbearance and love.   Merry Christmas from John Cheever!

He rides again

 

In "Alabama Votes; I Remount My Hobby Horse," I noted how on the congressional generic ballot question Democrats currently enjoy an 11-point advantage over Republicans.  I suggested, further, that an 11-point victory by Democratic candidates for US House in the 2018 midterms might--but might not--be enough to deliver control of the House to Democrats.  This is because gerrymandering, such as may be seen in the map of Alabama's congressional districts, requires Democrats to win the national vote in a near landslide in order to win a slim majority of the 435 House elections.

Now a new CNN poll, released yesterday, places the Democratic advantage in the generic ballot at 18 points.  It's still almost a year until people will vote, but a result such as this brings into view a possibility I haven't before mentioned.

To oversimplify just a little, the essential strategy behind Republican gerrymandering is to create, wherever possible, congressional districts that are either about 55% Republican or 60% or more Democratic.  If voters from sea to shining sea are about evenly divided, the roughly even national vote will then result in Republican control of the US House--because there will be more districts that are 55% Republican than are 60-plus% Democratic.  Simple math.  You want to keep the Republican districts at 55% so that you can withstand an election in which there is a pretty strong shift toward the Democrats.  The recent US Senate election in Alabama is illustrative, especially when compared to the presidential result of 2016, in which Hillary Clinton received 35% of the statewide vote and carried one of the state's seven congressional districts.  Then, last week, Doug Jones, the Democratic US Senate candidate, won the special election with 50% of the statewide vote--but still, like Clinton, carried only one congressional district. 

Regarding representation in the US House, Alabama is for Democrats an impregnable fortress erected on the foundation of a gerrymandered map.  The question of what it would take for Democrats to win four congressional seats, a majority within the state, would seem to be of only theoretical interest, since it's very hard to imagine any Democrat in Alabama doing better than Jones did.  Still, along this line, it's worth noting that the 15-point swing toward Jones, compared to Clinton's share of the Alabama vote, had the effect of making the result quite close in several of the districts that Jones lost (which is why so much of the above map is light pink).  Indeed, his Republican opponent got no more than 51% of the vote in four of those districts that Jones lost.  If Jones could have done even better--say, 2.5% better evenly distributed across the state--he would have carried not one but five of Alabama's seven congressional districts.

Here's the thing: the strategy on which Republicans have relied to give themselves a seemingly shockproof advantage has the admittedly remote downside of creating a tipping point at one outlying end of imaginable election outcomes.  If that tipping point is crossed, they are wiped out.  You can think about it like this (again, from an altitude in order to illustrate the general truth about the lay of the land, electorally):  If Democrats win 50% of the national vote for US House, they will not win anywhere near half the seats; and if they win 52% of the national vote, they will hardly win any additional seats over what 50% gives them; and if they win 53% of the national vote, they will win a negligible number of more seats; and, at 54%, they again win a few more seats though they likely remain in the minority; but, at some point, as their share of the national vote inches upward, one extra percent will suddenly give them fifty or more additional seats.  I'm not Nate Silver, and so don't know where this tipping point is, but we now have a reputable poll showing a 56-38 Democratic advantage in the congressional generic ballot, and the tipping point probably isn't north of that.  Republicans need to hope for at least a modest reversion toward the mean, in which case the advantage they've given themselves will yield a result better than they deserve. 

The conclusion of the matter is that Republicans have a decent chance of holding their majority.  But if they don't, they have a good chance of being buried beneath a few tons of electoral rubble.  Because of how they've organized things, the space between these divergent outcomes is narrow. 

Books of the Bible: Colossians

Colossae, in Asia Minor, present day Turkey, was some few centuries before the Christian era a busy commercial center, but by the first century AD it had been eclipsed by nearby towns.  Paul never visited it, and the Colossian church, the recipient of this letter, was founded by his mentee, Epaphrus, a fact alluded to in the introductory greeting at 1:7.  The town seems to have been wiped from the map shortly thereafter, probably by an earthquake that is known to have struck the area during the reign of Nero, whose death in 68 followed Paul's by three or four years.

That the town disappeared seems emblematic of the letter's many obscurities, beginning with its authorship.  Its authenticity as a Pauline epistle has been questioned by scholarship despite the fact that the author refers to himself as "Paul."  The aspect of the debate that seems of most interest to me relates to the letter's style or "tone."  The undoubted compositions of Paul are characterized by strong polemical attacks, the vigor of which tends to illuminate the object of the author's derision.  Sometimes, as in Galatians and the later chapters of 2 Corinthians, he cannot constrain himself at all, and he falls, somewhat to the delight of a dutiful but drowsy reader, into heavy sarcasm.  Speaking for myself, the interest of the Pauline letters may be attributed mainly to the author's vitriol and hate, which naturally arouse human interest.  Why is he so angry?  One begins to pay attention.  With Colossians, the general situation is the same as always--there is some problem in the church there and the purpose of the letter is to set the congregation back on track--but the polemical vigor is missing.  Instead, the author seems more like a stern, wooden lecturer who, were he on the seminary faculty, would have to rely on late registrants to fill his classroom.  The adjective "polemical" is replaced by "admonitory" in commentaries.  It doesn't necessarily mean Paul isn't the author.  It's been suggested, for example, that his never having visited Colossae may have had a subduing effect on his exposition to the church there.  But the letter does not sound like the Paul we know from Corinthians, Galations, and Romans.

Upshot: if you are engaged in a trek through the Bible, just to say you read every word of it, you will likely be thankful that Colossians is brief, only four chapters and probably the same number of pages.

The second chapter is the one in which the trouble in the Colossian church is addressed--"through a glass, darkly," we might say.  For example, 2:16-19:

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath.  These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.  Let no one disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.

Presumably this meant something definite to the original recipients?  The intervening centuries have rendered it quite obscure, and nowhere is it any more clear than above, where it is possible at least to detect the suggestion of recognizably Pauline themes: distaste for unusual rites and impatience with what might be called spiritual pride.  The rites in question appear to be consistent with those of Gnosticism, a religious movement arising in the first century about which there is an extensive literature, in part because it was first mixed and then purged from developing Christianity.  I mention it only because the prevailing scholarly interpretation of the letter to the Colossians is that it's essentially a rejection of dualistic Gnostic beliefs and a reassertion of the superiority of what, thanks to Paul's success, became orthodox Christianity--though, as we've noted, without Paul's characteristic vehemence.  This conclusion about the author's intention is not one that will be reached by any "general reader" relying only on the biblical text, which is opaque and resistant to comprehension.  

There's another side to the authorship question that is to me anyway intriguing.  I keep noting how in many New Testament writings there is quite plainly an expectation that Christ's Second Coming is imminent, while in other texts it's possible to detect a kind of uneasiness over the evident postponement of this event.  As time proceeds, and it doesn't happen and doesn't happen, uneasiness gives way to an interest in the organization and activity of the early Christian church--a concern that could not have arisen when each day might be the last of human history.  If one were to place the undoubted letters of Paul into one of these categories, the question would be whether they belong in the first or the second.  The letter to the Colossians, however, might plausibly be placed in the third. For the first time, one may detect the concept of ecclesiastical organization--for example, in the titles that are assigned to the named figures: Epaphrus is "a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf" and Paul himself "a minister according to the divine office which was given to me for you."  When the author occasionally is echoing  Paul's language from other letters, one might notice what is however new.  For example, Colossians 1:24--

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.

--resembles 2 Corinthians 1:5-6:

For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.  If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation.

What's new in Colossians is the reference to "the church" and its identification with the body of Christ.  I'm not smart or alert enough myself to pick up on these things and so am following the analysis of Norman Perrin in The New Testament: An Introduction.  His conclusion is that the letter to the Colossians was written somewhat later than the authentic letters of Paul and that the author is not Paul but an unknown "Paulinist."  If nothing else, this acquits Paul of having written "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord" (3:18), the inerrant and infallible nature of which has been doubted even by devout, Republican-leaning women.

Resistance tweets back

The GOP will ignore the obvious voter fraud in AL because they wanted Moore to lose. Hell, they may have even paid for the buses!

— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) December 14, 2017

 

Bill Mitchell is a right-wing radio talker and Trump sycophant in West Palm Beach, Florida.  Usually on Twitter people follow only like-minded tweeters, but Mitchell has so insistently tweeted out his skepticism about the fairness of Alabama's recent Senate election, won by Democrat Doug Jones, that he attracted the attention of some card-carrying members of the reality-based community.  Their replies to Miller--who had speculated about dark colored high-occupancy vehicles carrying into Alabama dark colored Mississippians on Election Day--are pretty funny, and the fun radiates as others join in and riff on wit higher up in the thread.  Here are some specimens; link here.

• Mississippi resident here, can confirm I was one of those who crossed over.  But an IMPORTANT correction: the vans were dark grayish and not black.
• Scotland calling: yes I flew across the Atlantic then bused it down to Alabama just so I could vote.  That's legal right?
• British resident here.  I swam for three months to vote for Doug Jones twice.
• California resident here: we rode all night in our Burning Man art cars and bikes, hoop skirts flashing with blinkies and desert sand spraying errywhere. I’m surprised no one saw us! Report THIS rumor!
• Time traveler from 2734 out of the Yvittfon Alliance here. I came back to vote for Jones & to see Moore ride off on that horse in person
• I caught a ride over from Louisiana on the underground Soros monorail. I even got to vote twice, once with my birth name & again under my Islamic one. Waiting for my Soros checks now.
• Soros pays EVERYONE will he ever run out of money?

Alabama votes; I remount my hobby horse

The above picture, a screenshot from last night's Rachel Maddow Show, captures a good deal of what's wrong with democracy, American style--that is, "democracy."  The ubiquitous state map divided into counties shaded red and blue is of considerable interest but does not expose the chicanery of Republican mapmakers.  So instead of considering the result by county, let's contemplate how Alabamians voted in their state's US senate election Tuesday within the seven congressional districts created by the Republican controlled Alabama state legislature.

Democrat Doug Jones won the statewide vote by about 21,000 ballots, or 1.5 percent of all ballots cast.  Yet he was outpolled by the Republican, Roy Moore, in six of the seven congressional districts.  This means that had the election been for the House of Representatives, and all Jones supporters had voted for the Democratic candidate in their district, and all Moore supporters for the Republican candidate, the outcome would have been six Republican representatives and one Democrat--an overwhelmingly Republican state delegation headed to Washington despite the fact that more Alabamians voted for a Democrat.

The Democrats couldn't do any worse, right?  If you divide the state into sevenths, and Democrats win the aggregate vote by 1 or 2 percent, it's impossible to lose within all seven subdivisions.  You have to win somewhere.  If the lines were drawn at random, you'd expect to win four seats, only three if you were quite unlucky and maybe five if the sun shone on you.  But, in Alabama, an evenly divided electorate--or, to be precise, an electorate narrowly favoring the Dems--yields a 6 to 1 Republican advantage in actual representation in "the people's House."  

Of course, Alabama district boundaries were not drawn at random.  They were drawn by Republican legislators determined to achieve a certain result, one favorable to Republicans.  It's very obvious that they've succeeded in this endeavor.  There's an apt way of describing what's going on that shows how ass-backwards things are.  In theory, voters on Election Day choose who will represent them.  But what actually happens is that, long before Election Day, politicians choose the voters who will select members of their own party to go to Washington.  

The only congressional district Jones carried was the 7th, which he won by 57 percent (78-21). In the gerrymandering trade, this is what's called "packing"--you pack the other party's voters into as few districts as possible so that you can win everywhere else.  In the case of Alabama, "everywhere else" is literally everywhere. The below map, unlike Rachel's above, shows the relationship between district boundaries and population centers.  Notice the 7th district's narrow arm that extends northeasterly and artificially in order to include Birmingham, the largest city in the state and home to reliably Democratic voters.  This isthmus cuts Tuscaloosa County in two before widening dramatically to take in a huge chunk of the majority African-American counties of west central Alabama.  The remaining challenge for Republican cartography is Montgomery, second biggest city in the state and even more Democratic than Birmingham.  The solution is the distorted hourglass that is the state's 2nd congressional district, with Montgomery located at the narrowest point.  To the north and especially to the south, the 2nd district flares out and takes in a bulbous swatch of rural southeastern Alabama.  It takes a lot of redneck acres to make sure that residents of Montgomery will never get the Democratic representative they always vote for!

With the current map, there is obviously no chance of anything changing in Alabama at the congressional level.  Roy Moore, a laughably ridiculous dumpster fire of a candidate, won six of the seven congressional districts against a decent, smart, accomplished Democrat who, by the way, got more votes statewide.  And Alabama's gerrymandering is within a standard deviation of the national mean.  According to polling, Democrats currently enjoy an 11-point advantage on the congressional generic ballot question.  If that result came to pass in next year's midterm election, it still might not be enough for the Dems to win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives.  Running even in Alabama translates into a national landslide.  But it doesn't matter how well Democrats do in Alabama: they will represent one of the state's seven congressional districts until there is either electoral reform or the Republicans lose control of the state legislature in a census year.  Many other states are arranged similarly.

 

Basketball players and peanut farmers weigh in

 

Seeing Charles Barkley on stage making the case for Doug Jones in Alabama's Senate race reminded me of one of my favorite Sir Charles stories, a political one.  Back when W was president, Charles was home in Alabama with his extended family for Thanksgiving.  Everyone was grousing about the president when Charles announced that he supported him.  There was a chorus of groans and indignant questions.  How could he be for a president who was only for the rich?  Charles is reported to have replied, "You all keep forgetting: I'm rich."

He made a course correction in 2006, stating, "I was a Republican until they lost their minds."  He's now all-in for Jones but he doesn't make as compelling a case as the above peanut farmer from the rural southeastern corner of the state.  What a prince!

Notes on Alabama

Those who are bullish--or who pretend to be--on Doug Jones's chance of defeating Judge Roy Moore in Alabama's special US Senate election on Tuesday often point out that the only time Moore was on the statewide ballot he defeated his Democratic opponent by only 52-48 percent.  That was in 2012, so the same voters who narrowly chose Moore had a choice also between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for president.  They chose Romney, by 61-38 percent.  In 2016, Trump carried Alabama by an even wider margin (63-35) than Romney had.  The above map shows the 2016 result in the state, by county. 

The striking pattern to the map turns out, on inspection, to be a pretty simple matter of black-white demographics.  There are in Alabama 11 counties in which African-Americans are a majority of the population.  See the band of 12 contiguous counties across the state's waistline that were carried by Hillary Clinton?  The 11 majority African-American counties are all within that 12-state band.  The way in which Clinton's share of the vote tracks the African-American part of the population is arresting.  Here are the 12 counties followed first by the percentage of the vote won by Clinton and then the percentage of the county population that's African-American, moving east to west from the Georgia to the Mississippi line:

Russell 50/42
Bullock 75/71
Macon 83/81
Montgomery 62/56
Lowndes 73/74
Dallas 68/70
Wilcox 71/72
Perry 73/68
Hale 60/58
Marengo 51/51
Greene 82/81
Sumter 74/72

The numbers track closely because Alabama voters are so starkly divided along racial lines.  So, yes, Moore ran well behind Romney in 2012, but African-Americans provide so much of the support for Democratic candidates in Alabama that one could argue it's actually a good sign for him that he won, however narrowly, in a presidential election year in which there was an incumbent African-American president on the ballot.  Will Jones be able to turn out these voters in a special election in December?  He has a strong record on civil rights, and Moore is helping by saying stupid (and revealing) stuff, such as that America was great back in the slave days "when our families were united."  (Since slavery broke up a lot of American families, it appears that Moore's  conception of "our" does not extend to the descendants of slaves--they aren't among "us.")  Still, it seems like a tall order, and it's only half of Jones's job.  African-Americans are about a quarter of all Alabamians.  He needs more.

On this second front, the glimmer of hope for Jones is the only other spot of blue on the above 2016 map.  It's in Jefferson County, home to Birmingham, the biggest city in the state and a thriving business center.  The county voted for Clinton, and if we were to add it to the above list of Clinton counties in Alabama the last item would look like this:

Jefferson 52/42

In the long list of Clinton counties in the "black belt," the gap between Clinton's share of the vote (left-hand number) and the percentage of African-Americans in the county population (right-hand number) averages between 2 and 3.  The 10-point gap in Jefferson County reflects a different type of white Alabamian--conservative, to be sure, but more the chamber-of-commerce type than the Moore type.  There are a lot of their demographic cousins in Madison County, to the north, home of Huntsville, fourth largest city in the state.  It was a Trump county but were we to append it to our list it would look like this:

Madison 39/24

So in Madison County the gap between the Clinton share of the vote and the African-American part of the population is half again as wide as in Jefferson County, where it was 3 or 4 times greater than almost everywhere else in the state.  I assume there is a kind of continuum and that more white Clinton voters means that the Trump voters were on average less enthusiastic, more apt to be afflicted now with buyer's remorse and open to supporting a Democrat when the Republican is as obviously unfit as Moore. Maybe there are among them even a fair number of "strategic voters" who will reason that the long-term interests of the Republican party are better served if the Democrat wins on Tuesday.  I think they'd be right about that.  If Moore wins, the two most famous Republicans in the land when America votes in the 2018 midterms will be himself and Donald Trump--and, barring impeachment, ditto for 2020.

At the movies: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Trying to keep up with Judge Roy Moore in the category of corrupting minors, I saw with my favorite 14-year-old another movie for mature audiences, this time Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.  If you own a tv that you turn on, you probably know the basic plot elements and that the film has a large advertising budget.  It's stylish to be cynical about hyped Hollywood rollouts, and I would not be above trying to land a few sucker punches if there was an opening, but Three Billboards is such a good movie that I slipped in that last sentence and called it a film.

In order not to give away more than the advertisements do, I'm going to focus on the atmospherics instead of what happens.  In almost the first scene, the Frances McDormand character walks into the rental office of a billboard company and interrupts the agent, who is reading a book.  As an English major, I'm always interested in what people are reading, and usually it's disappointing.  In this case, however, the agent is reading A Good Man is Hard to Find, the first collection of stories by Flannery O'Connor, about whom I've written here and here.  So . . .  American south, violence, dark humor, misshapen characters, and a religious theme.  Check, check, check, check, and check.

That title--A Good Man is Hard to Find--is somewhat more colorful than, say, The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor.  It's also the title of one of the stories in that first collection, maybe one that O'Connor or her publisher particularly esteemed since it "got the cover."  The story features a nice but daft and over comfortable southern grandma who is full of wisdom that doesn't quite come up to the level of conventional.  At a roadside restaurant, she and the proprietor agree that, these days, a good man is hard to find.  The platitude, and she is full of them, signals their limitations, but by the time the story ends meanings have deepened and the platitude signals the limitations of all humanity.  A good man is hard to find, O'Connor would say, because all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  She is a kind of fanatic who puts opposite Christian faith a large gaping void of nothing--nihilism in Latin, and the story ends, chillingly, with a mass murderer admonishing a laughing accomplice who is rolling a dead body in a ditch:

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," the Misfit said.  "It's no real pleasure in life."

The story has for me the fascination of what's appalling and, being fascinated, I may be naturally inclined to think that writer and director Martin McDonagh had in mind not just O'Connor but this particular fiction of hers.  It's the McDormand character who is sunk in the yawning hole and surrounded by no-good men.  In one of the more memorable scenes, she gobs spit on the Catholic church when the priest, in the role of the voice of the fallen community, comes calling.  He is culpable.  She uses the word, which seems a little unnatural for her, around six times in her brutal assessment of him and his church.  There is also a midget and an alcoholic ex who has taken up with a teen-ager.  In an overheard detail, we learn that the teen-ager's new job involves a horse riding enterprise for cripples. It's Flannery O'Connor's world, including the way there is operating in the brokenness something else, a possibility of grace, with the result that in the last scene the two most hopeless characters are driving to Idaho to kill someone--unless, being changed people, they decide not to. 

 

Making it

 

A friend made me laugh recently by arguing, or pretending to argue, that old age is not really that bad.  Decreased sexual desire, for example, had simplified life considerably, and he was grateful for that.  On the other hand, he wished that he could sleep through the night without having to get up and pee.

Actually, I think he said that a few years ago, which shows how decrepit we must be.  I only thought of it again recently because of all the news about men, middle-aged and beyond, acting like thoroughgoing whore-dogs.  On my friend's principle, you might have thought they'd be preserved from these sins just by age and biology.  They're old and rich and venal, so shouldn't they be devoting their energies to devising tax dodges instead of getting their rocks off? 

But, on review, probably it's not all about sex.  Though we're often told that poor people have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, they aren't in the same class as many of the fair and favored few who have risen to the top notches of entertainment, media, law, politics.   So accustomed are the highest achievers to mountain air that they fail to acknowledge the humanity of their assistants and all the young strivers who toil below in the domain that they have conquered.  It's as if the philosopher's moral imperative, concerning how people must never be treated as the mere means to another's end, applied only near ground level.  At altitude, you exercise your prerogatives.  This must be why the details of the individual cases lack the mutuality of even the most forlornly casual sexual relationships, and we read instead about disturbing, ritualistic humiliations of passive victims being made to watch while [unmentionable]. 

If the perpetrators were asked why they did it, their only answer would be that they could.  It appears that boredom is a hazard of having "made it."  We may hope that restaurant managers and the supervisor of the hotel housekeepers have actual work to do, but I imagine there is down time in those industries as well.