Eric The Blue

The Children Act

Several years ago, probably when it was first published in 2014, I read a review of The Children Act, a novel by Ian McEwan, and I remember thinking that it sounded like a book my boss might enjoy.  Last Saturday I was at the library with the kids and I saw it on display, so I checked it out for myself, and I don't think the old boss could have enjoyed it any more than I did.  

The main character is what we on this side of the Atlantic would call a family court judge.  Fiona Maye, however, is English, childless, buttoned-up, humorless, 59, a longtime practitioner of earnest ambition that has landed her somewhere near the top of her profession, though with an unhappy husband who, as the novel opens, has asked leave to pursue a sexual relationship with a much younger woman who works with him.  He knows exactly how long it's been since he and Fiona were intimate: 50 days.  She calculates that this would put it back in a period during which she was considering a case of Siamese twins, whether a surgery that would for sure kill one should be permitted in order that the other might live.  The medical testimony, including forensic photography of the conjoined and disfigured twins, had not promoted ardor.  It's evident that her sexual temperature runs low anyway.  Her husband says she's "no fun" and has "lost the art of play," which, however one may feel about his application for a variance, appears accurate.

Fiona's attitude toward family court litigants has included a measure of aloof disdain. They aren't as smart as she, their lives are a mess, and they're making things worse by adopting imprudent legal strategies meant to compensate them for their bitterness.  Now, with her husband out of the flat, her own anger is at war with a desire to preserve the marriage.  When the former is ascendant, she is subject to the same frailties she condemns in others; and when the latter is ascendant, her calculations and guile are not very attractive, either.  At the same time, there isn't anything the reader dislikes about her that she hasn't noted and disliked herself.  The two strands of the narrative, very skillfully interwoven, concern her marital drama and a new case she has to decide, one involving a boy, a Jehovah's Witness, who is with his parents declining a blood transfusion needed to treat his leukemia.  Though the novel isn't long, part of the pleasure is the incidentals, including some courthouse banter.  Here's a lawyer joke, from page 56:

"A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy.  The pathologist says he's absolutely certain.  Oh, but how can you be so sure?  Because, the pathologist says, his brain was in a jar sitting on my desk.  But, says the cross-examiner, could the patient still have been alive nevertheless?  Well, comes the answer, it's possible he could have been alive and practicing law. . . ."

In the Review

I subscribe to The New York Review of Books, and when a new issue arrives, I turn first to the classified ads.  A typical personal ad might say something like:

Youthful septuagenarian academic, now retired, slender and fit, financially secure, seeks lissome partner for activities requiring discretion.  NYC.  Reply with bio and pic.

The need for discretion explains the absence of the descriptor, "widower."  The financially secure advertiser could pay for more characters but I think the message is clear.  Pic more important than bio, which is a half-assed virtue signaler--it's not only about that. Without quite approving, one likes seeing evidence that the elderly population hasn't given up on life.  Meanwhile, the real estate section always has ads for short-term rentals in London, Paris, Rome, and Tuscany.  I'm not up to speed on converting euros and pounds to dollars, but then, I don't need arithmetic to know that it's beyond me.  The Review's classifieds are a glimpse into a world in which I do not move.

Yesterday I was straightening up around the house and I came upon an issue from last summer. Before putting it in the recycling, I turned to the classifieds, where I found an ad harder than most to characterize.  It was in the Books section and said:

Retired PhD in French literature.  Seeking to sell entire collection of French and French-related books.  Over 500 volumes, hardbound and paperback, medieval through mid-20th Century.  Pleiade, Larousse, NRF, Garnier, Livre de poche, etc.  Complete works of Rabelais, Montaigne, Corneille, Moliere, Camus, Cendrars.  Buy all or none.  Best offer, starting price $1000.  Offer withdrawn September 1, 2017.  You pick up in Southern Vermont.

Is he disgusted, or maybe just bored, with his life's work?  He'd accept less than two dollars per book.  Or maybe his "loved ones" have indicated that they have no interest in the artifacts of his egg-headedness and could he please convert them to cash before croaking?  I hope there are other possibilities because those two seem to me, in their different ways, about equally discouraging.  

In re Polanco

Rooting around on the Internet about Twins' shortstop Jorge Polanco, who was suspended today by major league baseball for using a performance enhancing drug (Stanolozol), I came across passages like this one more than once:

Polanco, 24, settled in as Minnesota's full-time shortstop last season, hitting .256/.313/.410 with 30 doubles and 13 home runs in 133 games.  He was especially good in the second half, hitting .293/.359/.511 with 10 home runs in 63 games after the All-Star break.

Though I'm enough of a fan to know what is signified by the abc/lmn/xyz notation, I was a little surprised to see it used repeatedly without any explanation--as if it can be safely assumed that anyone reading a baseball article will for sure know that these numbers refer, respectively, to batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage.  A useful explanation of the meaning of these three batting statistics is here.  I think the back-story is that for a long time batting average was regarded as the preeminent measure of a batter's proficiency, which explains why figures like .367 and .406 will be immediately recognized by many fans as Ty Cobb's lifetime batting average and Ted Williams's batting average for the 1941 season, the last time any player hit for an average of more than .400.  In our hip new century, however, it's generally acknowledged that batting average reveals less about a batter's value to his team than the other two measures.  Indeed there is a fourth statistic, OPS, for "on-base plus slugging," that's pretty widely regarded as the best indicator of all.  As the name suggests, OPS is simply the sum of on-base percentage and slugging percentage, so batting average is no part of it.  Baseball geeks would probably vote to retire batting average from public discourse but for its outsized place in the history and lore of the game.  If someone this season has a batting average of .397 on September 1, we are all going to be paying a lot of attention to his at-bats. Hardly anyone has any idea of what's a good, or great, or record-setting OPS.

Polanco's .293/.359/.511 over the second half of last season is pretty good for a 24-year-old shortstop and suggest that he could have been poised to establish himself as a real star player this season.  The Twins have several guys like that, I think--besides Polanco, we have Miguel Sano, Eddie Rosario, Byron Buxton, and pitcher Jose Berrios.  Now we're going to have to wait on Polanco. 

When the topic is baseball and banned performance-enhancers, lots of fans think exclusively of superstar "cheaters" like Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire.  But here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a list of players suspended for using banned performance-enhancers.  I'm a pretty big fan and perhaps close to half the names are to me either barely familiar or outright unknown.  Polanco, 24, from the Dominican Republic, earned $540,000 last year.  If you can imagine how eager he is to stay in the big leagues, imagine another player, a little older and a link or two down the chain.  In the movie Bull Durham, the Kevin Costner character (Crash Davis) has a memorable riff on the line between being stuck at the upper levels of the minor leagues and getting called up to "the show."  You get 25 at-bats per week, Crash calculates.  Seven hits, you stay put.  Eight, and you're promoted to the show.  One extra hit per week.  The minimum major league salary is currently $507,500, whereas the minor league minimum is $2150 per month.  It's easy to condemn "cheaters" but it should be just as easy to comprehend why these guys are desperate for anything that might give them an edge. 

Sunday morning musings: Trump and basketball

 

The utility of lying depends upon a threshold plausibility, since generally the whole purpose is to deceive.  What then is the point of Trump insisting that he didn't "carry on" (my mom's phrase for the type of activity in question) with porn star Stormy Daniels when it's obvious he did?  No one is deceived, everyone knows he's lying, so there is no point to it. 

The best answer to this riddle is probably that Trump doesn't lie to deceive.  It's just that he cares so little for the truth that his speech acts are true or false in a way that is essentially random.  With regard to marital infidelity, it's customary to deny one's guilt, so like everyone else Trump does, too: there's no strategy, just a reflexive impulse to lie. 

The second best answer is probably that he does have a rational strategy and, while it doesn't require that anyone be deceived, he does benefit from standing by an obviously false story.  For example, he cares a lot about money, and it may be that by the terms of his pre-nup the pot sweetens for Melania if he is unfaithful.  It's okay if she "knows" he's cheated but it would be costly for him to stipulate to it himself.

On the basketball front, it seems to me that of all the stunning conclusions to NCAA tournament games--the ones that get played on tape over and over again to promote the tournament--a very high percentage begin with an offensive player standing alone and unguarded behind his own basket and then delivering a long, accurate pass up the court to someone who sinks a game-winner at the buzzer, or passes to someone who makes the winning shot.  If I'm the coach, I guard the inbounds passer with the guy on my team with the longest wingspan.  If he tips the pass, game over.  Even if he just makes the passer throw the ball higher, the extra hang time gives the other defenders time to react, and the chance of a clean catch and shot drops precipitously.  

Anyway, that's what it seems like to me.  I'm more confident about Trump being a liar and a crook.

Go Gophers!

I've been watching a lot of basketball, naturally, and I think the most fun I've had is yesterday's game between the Gopher women and Wisconsin-Green Bay.  I didn't turn it on till half time, when the Gophers were behind by ten points.  Did they switch jerseys with some new players in the locker room?  After losing the first half, 42-32, Minnesota won the second by 57-35.  Fifty-seven points is an almost impossible tally for just a half of a college basketball game, and, as improbable as it seems, Wisconsin-Green Bay had the best defense in the country as measured by average points allowed per game: 46.1. 

No typos, reader.  The other team on average allowed fewer than 50 points per game and the Gophers scored 57 in the second half.  Minnesota has the third highest scoring offense in the country at 85.2 points per game.

I haven't followed the team at all, but it looked to me as if they have an unambiguous super star: Kenisha Bell, pictured above.  I see that she's averaged around 21 points a game this season.  She's a 5-9 guard, kind of slight, and maybe she was getting knocked around or something in the first half because she scored just two points.  In the second half, she scored 24 points.  Wisconsin-Green Bay had no one quick enough to stay with her.  She'd beat her defender off the dribble and either pull up for mid-range jumpers or go all the way to the basket, where she'd usually get fouled.  She made 14 free throws in the game, and the Gophers, as a team, made 22 of 23 free throws in the second half.  

I guess that's the way to score more than fifty in a half--make 22 free throws, when the clock isn't moving.  The Gophers also made 10 of 18 three-point attempts, which, though she didn't even try one, should probably be attributed to Bell as well: it looked to me like Wisconsin-Green Bay's players were so worried about helping to contain her drives that they sagged off their assignment, and Gopher players were able again and again to catch and shoot from just behind the arc.

Bell also had five rebounds, four assists, and two steals.  

The outcome was if anything a bit of an upset, since the Gophers were a ten seed and Wisconsin-Green Bay a 7.  Next game is against 2-seed Oregon, 9:30 tomorrow evening, on Oregon's home court in Eugene.  I'm going to guess that a team good enough to earn a 2 seed has someone who can keep her body between Bell and the basket. But maybe the Gophers can make it interesting.

Pennsylvania's special election: last note

I expressed skepticism yesterday about the suggestion that the Democrat's victory in the southwestern Pennsylvania congressional district that had gone for Trump by 20 points means they have a real chance of picking up more than 100 seats in the coming midterm election. My skepticism doesn't mean, however, that I think the Republican talking points, or spin, from their place below the electoral rubble are plausible or anything other than laughable.

For example, we are told, by the Speaker of the House and others, that Lamb "ran on Trump's agenda."  This claim is open to a basic objection: it's false.  The NRA would probably give Lamb a C- at best, his leading sin being support for expanded background checks that, according to gun rights fundamentalists, amount to a stealthy repeal of the Second Amendment.  His position on abortion is that he's "personally opposed" but doesn't want the Roe decision overturned--a viewpoint that generally goes by the name "pro-choice."  Trump's only legislative achievement is the tax reform bill, which Lamb, like Nancy Pelosi, opposed on the ground that it's a big giveaway to the rich.

Mentioning the name of she-devil Nancy Pelosi reminds me that Republicans are also making a lot of Lamb's assertion that he would not vote for her for party leader.  If Lamb's against her they can claim him for their own!  Well, sure, but it's risible.  It's true that Republicans have demonized Pelosi, but this says more about them than it does about Lamb or the Democrats.  Presumably Republicans understand that there will be an opposition party, which will have a leader, with whom they will disagree.  Pelosi, an Italian Catholic who with her husband of more than 50 years has raised a passel of high-achieving kids, is in some ways an odd object for contempt tending toward hysteria--but, on the other hand, she's a powerful woman, from California, specifically San Francisco, all of which associates her in the Republican hive mind with America not being great.  I think they need a new answer for "San Francisco" in a free association test--instead of Gay People Living Happily, how about White Guys Making Really A Lot Of Money?  And if these rich white guys want to be represented by Nancy Pelosi, then Democrats running for office in Appalachia could express support for her, too.

My favorite bit of nonsense relating to the special election result in Pennsylvania comes from the White House: Trump's endorsement helped the Republican in the race, but just wasn't quite enough to haul his sorry ass across the finish line first.  Though look how close he came!  The power of Trump!  

There is an actual reason that it's possible to make too much of Pennsylvania's special election result.  Yes, the district went for Trump by 20 points, and has in recent history been about 11 points more Republican than the country as a whole.  But this doesn't take account of how many persuadable voters there are in the district.  Here is an article, from the 538 blog, that describes the concept pretty clearly, with special attention to the difference between Alabama and Mississippi.  Trump got 63% of the vote in Alabama, compared to only 58% in Mississippi.  You might therefore be tempted to argue that, since a Democrat just won a Senate seat from Alabama in admittedly unusual circumstances, the same thing could happen in Mississippi if the conditions were almost as surreal.  But that's probably not right.  In both Alabama and Mississippi, whites vote for Republicans and African-Americans vote for Democrats.  Trump won Alabama by more because there are fewer African-Americans in Alabama.  But then you have to ask another question: when the tide turns against Republicans, how likely are usual Republican voters to abandon ship and vote for the other team?  In Alabama, there are quite a few, and they have a similar demographic profile:  they've been to college, they have professional jobs, or their spouses do, and they live in places like Huntsville or the suburbs of Birmingham.  There are far fewer such people in Mississippi.  Jackson and Biloxi do not resemble Birmingham and Huntsville.   My dad, who had a science job at Honeywell, was always traveling for work to Huntsville, Alabama, which is an aerospace center.  Probably never been to Mississippi in his life, certainly not for work.  The Republicans of Mississippi vote for the Republican, no matter what.  In a "normal" election, Alabama is more Republican, but there is no elasticity whatever in the Mississippi electorate.

Pennsylvania's current 18th congressional district is, on this "elasticity" scale, more like Alabama than Mississippi, mainly because it includes a considerable swatch of suburban Pittsburgh--the only part of the district where Lamb won a majority of the votes.  Losing in southwestern Pennsylvania doesn't mean the Republicans are going to lose in rural districts across the Midwest, where the partisan index might have less tilt toward the GOP but  persuadable voters are scarce.    

 

Pennsylvania's 18th and the underbelly of a startling statistic

Democrat Conor Lamb's victory in the special election for Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district earlier this week is causing some people to wonder whether any Republican will be safe in this fall's midterm election.  It's being reported, for example, that somewhere between 110 and 120 districts that are less Republican than Pennsylvania's 18th have a Republican representative.  Does that mean they are all "in play"?  Maybe, depending partly on the definition of "in play," but this kind of analysis seems to me suspiciously like the comparative scores game played by some sports fans.  The Vikings beat the Lions by 10, and the Lions lost to the Packers by 7, so next Sunday, when the Vikings play the Packers, they should win by 3, right?  One understands the logic while at the same time comprehending that the world is more complicated than that.  

But let's accept the logic and return to the question of whether any Republican is safe.  There are currently 241 Republicans in the House of Representatives, so more than half of them represent districts that are even more safely Republican than Pennsylvania's 18th, which Trump won by 20 percentage points before Lamb on Tuesday won by a few hundred votes.  By the logic we're adopting, then, more than a quarter of the congressional districts in the country are represented by Republicans who are beyond the electoral reach of even a Democratic landslide at the polls.  There are a like number of districts, mainly within the country's urban centers,  represented by similarly invulnerable Democrats.  I don't know what such an arrangement is good for, unless you count breeding extremism, vanity, and corruption in the souls of invincible incumbents.  No wonder it's depressing to watch C-SPAN.  Some people recognize the problem  and recommend term limits, which seems to me roughly analogous to prescribing two Advil for a malignant tumor.  What's needed is surgery, but if we are stuck with the current system of congressional representation it would help somewhat if district boundaries were drawn with an eye toward fostering competition instead of with an eye toward creating fiefdoms for one or the other party.

"A Serious Man": the Coen brothers and me

Somehow, I had until yesterday avoided ever seeing A Serious Man, the movie usually described as "the Coen brothers' 2009 black comedy," as opposed to, say, Fargo, a movie I've watched several times and which is usually described as "the Coen brothers' 1996 black comedy."  I vaguely remember renting A Serious Man once and beginning to watch it in bed one night before falling asleep around the time the Korean kid tries to bribe the physics professor.  When I watched the whole thing on Netflix the other night, it seemed sort of familiar up to that point. 

Now that I think of it, the bribe theme is another link between these two black comedies set and filmed here in the Twin Cities.  In Fargo, the master criminal plot goes awry when the bad guys are pulled over by a state trooper who notices some flaw with their vehicle's registration tags. When the driver (Steve Buscemi) retrieves his license from his wallet, he also raises the corner of a $50-dollar bill above the wallet's edge and says to the trooper, "Can't we take care of this right here, in Fargo?"  Things go south from there.

Compared to Fargo, A Serious Man seems pitiless.  The bribe, for example, works--an F gets changed to a C-, the professor adding the minus, with the camera zoomed on his grade book, in a determined, comical, pathetic gesture toward integrity.  There is no Marge Gunderson, efficient, intelligent, humane and unassuming, on the case.  No one's on the case.  The story appears to have been modeled on the Book of Job, for the suffering professor is "consoled" by a series of three rabbis, corresponding to three comforters in Job, who are revealed to be absurd and ridiculous.  Actually, the professor never gets an interview with the third rabbi, whose reputation for wisdom is other worldly, but his stoned son does immediately after achieving a sham success at his bar mitzvah.  The two talk briefly about the names of the Jefferson Airplane band members before the boy retrieves his transistor radio that holds, in its case, the $20-bill he owes the Hebrew school drug dealer.  The "voice from the whirlwind" with which the movie ends is that of the professor's doctor telephoning to request that he come to the office to discuss the x-ray results.  Can they talk about it on the phone?  No, they will be "more comfortable" in person, at the office.  Roll credits.

Here is an interesting page showing the Twin Cities locales where scenes from A Serious Man were shot.  I've gone swimming at Lake Nokomis Beach many times, but, reading the Wikipedia article on the movie, and clicking over to the articles on some of the actors, I see to my delight that I have an arguably more personal connection to the film.  The wife of the physics professor is played by Sari Lennick, who "currently resides in Los Angeles and is married to financial services executive Alan T Lennick."  I know Al!  I used to play pick-up basketball with  him, his dad, and several of his dad's work connections at some other sites around town--the health club at Highway 100 and Cedar Lake Road, Linden Hills Park in south Minneapolis, another park in Edina at the Crosstown and Tracy Avenue, and Benilde-St Margaret's High School.  I knew Al had gone off to USC--he went to a private high school, Breck, and I remember his dad joking that he could hardly wait for him to be in college instead--but didn't know he'd married a star in a Coen brothers' movie!

Pennsylvania's special election

Not much about tomorrow's special election in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district, in the southwest corner of the state, has been underreported, but a plausible candidate would be why there is a special election in the first place.  It's because the incumbent, Tim Murphy, a Republican who was first elected to the seat in 2002 and was then reelected seven consecutive times, twice without opposition and never with less than 58% of the vote, resigned last fall.  His resignation was triggered by the revelation of an extramarital affair that had a few extras in the eyebrow raising department.  First, the cliché about "twice her age" was not in this case an exaggeration: Murphy was 64, his girlfriend, 32.  Second, journalists, once on the scent of a scandal, had no problem finding ex-staffers willing to say unflattering things about the congressman, so the floodgates were opening.  Third, and probably most damaging, one of the empty cans floating on the dirty water of Murphy's reputation was news of a pregnancy scare that had caused the gallant congressman to urge his lover to have an abortion.  Of course he's  "pro-life."  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the congressman's hometown newspaper, got the text messages.

Girlfriend: [Y]ou have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options.

Congressman Murphy: I get what you say about my March for life messages.  I've never written them.  Staff does them.  I read them and winced.  I told staff don't write anymore.

Four, though by now it probably barely registered, he's the kind who puts off his own failings on the people who work for him.  Everyone's wincing, Congressman.

I mention this mainly because I saw on tv this morning one of those reports featuring on-the-street interviews with voters.  Two were middle-aged women who said they usually voted Republican.  When asked their impressions of the Democratic candidate, Conor Lamb, one used the phrase (if memory serves) "right off mom's menu" and the other said he was "the real deal," a "straight arrow."  Lamb, 33, is a former federal prosecutor and marine of moderate views whose opponent, Rick Saccone, has said of himself, "I was Trump before Trump was Trump"--which I actually love for the possibly unintended suggestion that Trump is playing himself.  

Anyway, it's true, as the journalists endlessly remind us, that the district's strong Republican slant is being tested by Trump's unpopularity and the fact that the Democrats have a good candidate.  But I wonder, too, whether the stain attaching to the district's longtime Republican representative isn't also giving Lamb a boost.  He's probably married, but if he isn't those Republican women interviewed on tv this morning might like to introduce him to the last congressman's girlfriend.  She could do better. 

Randy Shilts's "And the Band Played On"

Last night, after the kids were in bed, I dipped into my copy of Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On, hoping to use the index to find the answer to some question that had occurred to me, and, next I knew, it was 1:30 in the morning, which alas was just a half hour shy of 3:00 a.m.  What a wonderful and engrossing book! It's widely acknowledged to be a masterpiece of "gay literature"--a pale compliment, in my opinion.  Yes, the center of the book is the early days of the AIDS epidemic, a qualifying gay theme.  But the book succeeds on other levels--as a medical mystery, for example.  In 1981, in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, single young men begin presenting at health care centers with ailments that end up being diagnosed as strains of skin cancer (Kaposi's sarcoma) or pneumonia (pneumocystic carinii).  The former is bizarre because the disease is typically limited to elderly Mediterranean males, and the progression so slow that often the patient dies first of some other geriatric disease.  But now, suddenly: all these single young men, mostly in their 30s and until recently in perfect health, few of them Middle Eastern, afflicted with an apparently virulent form--the progression, accelerated by what appear to be opportunistic infections, to pitiable deaths is rapid.  The pneumonia is also idiosyncratic, the discouraging aspect here being its sudden high incidence together with resistance to the normal antibiotic cure.  Instead of getting quickly better, the patient has a general downward trend, is stricken with other infections, and soon dies from, essentially, suffocation.  What's going on?  Shilts's handling of this aspect of his narrative is masterly, but it also is effectively interwoven with many other strands--national politics, city politics, the history and culture of the city of San Francisco, the fraught question of whether or not to close the bathhouses, the calculations and maneuverings of Mayor Dianne Feinstein, the mix of motives among medical researchers, a hundred or more gem-like portraits of minor actors--activists, investigators, doctors, caregivers, obscure GS-7 federal government employees at the Centers for Disease Control, patients, their friends and partners, the sometimes humorous interactions between wildly incongruent specimens of humanity: the cumulative effect is of some kind of hybrid encyclopedia and compendium of grief and human suffering.  If I had to compare And the Band Played On to any other book I know, I'd choose Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, "a true-life novel" wherein the author, by examining, exhaustively and with sympathetic detachment, a Utah murder case in all its human elements, ends up writing a book more about what's sometimes called, quaintly, the human condition rather than anything so small as a mere murder case. 

As Gary Gilmore's crime is to Mailer's big book, so is the AIDS epidemic to Shilts's.  He was born in Davenport, Iowa, grew up with five brothers in Aurora, Illinois, and studied journalism at the University of Oregon, where he came out as gay and ran for student government with the slogan, "Come out for Shilts!"  He landed a job with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981, just when AIDS was beginning to ravage the city's large gay population.  It became his beat, and in the course of his daily journalism he conceived of the book that became And the Band Played On. While working on the book, he was tested for HIV, but declined to be informed of the result for fear it might impair his objectivity.  He thus read the first favorable reviews with the fresh knowledge that he was himself HIV-positive, a fact he kept to himself until shortly before he died, age 42, on February 17, 1994, seven years after the publication of And the Band Played On.

Trump: the beat goes on

Here's a presidential tweet from a few days ago that raised some eyebrows:

China has been asked to develop a plan for the year of a One Billion Dollar reduction in their massive Trade Deficit with the United States. Our relationship with China has been a very good one, and we look forward to seeing what ideas they come back with. We must act soon!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2018

Since our trade deficit with China is around $375 billion, this seemed like one of our brash leader's more modest requests, and indeed it turns out that, according to The Wall Street Journal, he left out an important word: "Hundred" between "One" and "Billion."  So, off by $99 billion.  In scientific notation, 

9.9 x 10¹⁰.

On the interpretation most favorable to our president, I suppose you might say that anyone can leave out a word.  The problem with this is that the White House has advised the world that his tweets are to be regarded as official presidential statements.  Maybe he needs a copy editor.  In that case, however, the editor should be somewhat more knowledgeable than the president, because I'm pretty sure the real problem here is that Trump is uninformed and probably also confused by big numbers.  After all, this is the guy who, a few days before he lobbed this tweet into the ether, had announced at the Gridiron dinner that he'd recently spoken on the phone with North Korea and told them he'd talk but they had to "de-nuke."  This, too, seemed implausible, and it turned out he'd actually been talking with South Korea.  So many Koreas!  Think how unfortunate it would be if North and South Dakota were at each others' throats and you really had to know which was which.

I remember that, in the run-up to the Reykjavik summit on arms control, there was concern on our side about allowing Reagan to be alone with Gorbachev.  What if the president started telling old stories and then gave away the store?  Well, the problem is back, with a vengeance.  The good news is that the whole story seems half baked.  The thing we most want from North Korea is for them to "de-nuke," which, according to Sarah Sanders yesterday, they must do for the talks to occur.  But giving away their biggest chip before the first card is dealt isn't something the North Koreans are apt to do.  It's beginning to look like the Administration's breathless announcement of the day before was a case of ready-fire-aim. 

It's alarming that Team Trump should be so ready to have him sit down with Kim Jong Un.  They are plainly trying to avoid allowing Mueller to interview him, as it seems his options are then either to tell the truth (which means confessing to crimes) or lying (which would be a new crime).  But at least the jeopardy accrues only to Team Trump.  When he speaks at a high stakes summit, we could all be in trouble, for he's plainly not up to the job.  

Scenes in my life

One thing about being an older, retired parent of young children: you don't have the normal excuse for ignoring "volunteer opportunities" at the kids' school.  And so today I found myself getting reacquainted with the sound it makes when a school bus, capacity 71, is loaded for a field trip with two teachers, two "chaperones," and 67 fourth graders.  On the ride I had a flashback to one I was on about fifty years ago, with my mom in my role for today.  We kids started singing a song of our invention that went:

Marijuana, marijuana!
LSD, LSD!
Scientists make it!
Teachers take it!
Why cant' we? Why can't we?

At the dinner table that night, my mom commented on our singing, and my dad, who worked as a physicist, having elicited the details of the song lyrics, emphatically denied that "scientists make it."  Am pretty sure the only reason I remember this small event so vividly is that I had in my approximately 10-year-old brain the distinct thought: Well, he's not denying that teachers take it.

With all the financial advice shows on television and radio, I'm surprised no one has recommended imitating yourself while afflicted with a viral infection of the digestive tract.  I went around five days without spending five cents.  Wasn't running low on groceries, liquor, or gasoline, either.   Then yesterday, feeling a little better, I ventured to Target to pick up a few things I needed, like food for the kids and bathroom disinfectant, and escaped with a bill under $50.  You don't need money if you feel shitty enough.  

As you can imagine, I've been putting in some time with the cable news personalities.  Yesterday, during Sarah Huckabee Sanders's daily press briefing, I had a Eureka moment, which I'll relate even though it's probably obvious and reflects poorly on my powers of observation.  I've always been annoyed by how so many of her answers, if not an outright lie, qualify as what a trial lawyer would call "nonresponsive."  That is, her response plausibly answers some question, though not the one she was asked. She also has this curious and I think off-putting habit of staring downward while the reporter is asking her a question.  Why not look at the person who's talking to you?   What I realized yesterday is that the two phenomena are related.  She undoubtedly has a cheat sheet of talking points on her lectern.  She can't anticipate the exact questions, but she can guess the general topics she's going to be asked about, so the content of her cheat sheet is essentially: if the subject is x, say y; if the subject is a, say b; and, if the subject is l, say n.  When she calls on a reporter, she looks at them for as long as is necessary to comprehend the general topic of their question.  While they finish the question, she looks down at her sheet and finds the talking point for that subject.  They finish, she looks up and recites the line from her sheet.  This happens over and over again.   I think I can pinpoint the moment of my low-grade insight.  A reporter asked about Team Trump's payment of $130k in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels.  Sanders, looking up from the lectern, answered that the matter had "already been won in arbitration."  The reporter followed up with who won what when and where.  Sanders said, "The arbitration was won in the president's favor."  

Next!

Doubling down

Laid low by stomach flu, I am splayed on the sofa in the presence of MSNBC, hoping that the worst is over and pondering another cliché of current politispeak:  doubling down.  It comes from blackjack, the casino card game in which, after the deal, you can double your wager after seeing your hand and the dealer's upcard.  You get one more card if you double down--you can't decline a card or draw more than one.  You double down only when you're in a strong position:  for example, your two cards are an 8 and a 3, so that a ten or any face card gives you 21.  A chart of basic blackjack strategy is here.  With 11, you should always double down; with ten points, you double down unless the dealer shows an ace, a ten, or a face card; with nine points, you should double down if the dealer shows a 3, 4, 5, or 6. I am not much of a gambler, but it's pretty easy to learn by heart the basic strategy, and, when playing according to its rule, the house's advantage is very small.   

Transferred to the political realm, however, it seems "double down" is just a kind of wild west thing, an act of defiance.  Instead of being a reasonable move dictated by one's strong position, it's a gob of spit in the face of one's reasonable foe.  You do it when your position is weak, to show your disdain for ordinary rules--the ones by which you're losing, such as that the truth matters.  One woman accuses you of having groped her, you deny it.  Ten more say you groped them, you double down on your original lie.  I think the gender aspect of my example is apt.  I can't remember anyone reporting that Hillary Clinton ever doubled down on anything, but Trump is said to do it several times a day.  

I see that Condoleezza Rice is making the rounds.  She actually sounds measured and reasonable, which I attribute to the degeneracy of the current Administration.  Sure, the last President Bush was a failure, but he did not indulge himself in racketeering, money laundering, nepotism, and ass-slapping in the girls' dressing room.  Trump's first hire for the position Rice held was Michael Flynn.

Listening to Radiolab

I was home baking cookies Saturday afternoon and so rediscovered that MPR chooses to air its best shows while productive members of society are grocery shopping or watching young children play ball.  This American Life was pretty good but I liked even more Radiolab, which took as its subject stochasticity, or randomness.  You can listen to the show here, if so inclined.  Here's a little teaser to help you decide whether you're interested.  A statistics professor asks one group of students to flip a coin a hundred times and record the results.  A second group is tasked with setting out a likely result of a hundred coin flips; that is, instead of actually flipping a coin, and recording either an H or a T, they simply set out a 100-string-long sequence of Hs and Ts that in their opinion mimics the random result that will be achieved by the actual coin flippers.  The professor leaves the room while the two groups do their work and then, returning to scan the two completed H-T strings, takes around five seconds to identify the one that is based on actual flips.  Always.  Without fail.    

I'm enough of a contrarian to be attracted to the way in which students of probability are less apt to be taken in by "miracles" and assorted other fond beliefs.  Take the notion that shooters in basketball games get a "hot hand."  Years ago, another statistics professor, this one also a fan of the Philadelphis 76ers, tracked the result of every shot taken by individual 76ers over the course of a season.  He then began looking for evidence of streaks when a shooter was "hot."  Turns out that, while fans have a powerful impression that players "get hot," the notion is refuted by data.  For example, Andrew Toney, who was at the time one of the team's leading scorers, made 46 percent of his field goal attempts over the course of the season.  But supposing you look only at shots taken immediately after three successive "makes."  He made only 32 percent of those attempts.  It seems that the players themselves are victims of the "hot hand" fallacy.  A little bit of success changes their conception of what's a good shot, and so their percentage slides until they recalibrate.

People love good stories and aren't inclined to look into them too closely.  Every lottery winner seems to have a unique story but really they aren't different from the losers, who of course don't get interviewed in the media.  If you determine before the numbers are drawn to do a story on the winner, it's a safe bet that word of a "miracle" is going to be promulgated.  The "hand of God" will be detected in an unbelievable outcome.  Indeed, the discovery of theological significance in necessary facts is pervasive.  Another instance: it's not really a sign of God's great beneficence that he placed human beings here on earth, where conditions are such that we can live and prosper, instead of on some eternally frozen and poisonous orb where no one will ever sit down at a word processor to compose a sermon.

Updike, again

However incongruous it seems, the Updikean extract I posted yesterday is from an essay, "On Not Being a Dove," about the author's halting, sheepish support for the Vietnam War at a time (late 1960s) when peers such as Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer, not to mention Updike's wife, were militantly opposed.  You might wonder what Vietnam has to do with neighborhood ski trips and back-seat shenanigans on the beery ride home, and the answer seems to be a principle well known to criminal attorneys: the prosecutor wants jurors who are "successful," because they think "the system" works, thereby accounting for their own success.  These people believe cops and, in a different context, congressmen, generals, and presidents.  By the time Updike, born in 1932, was in his mid-30s he had attained a lifestyle that he describes in the essay as "genteel Bohemian."  If anything, this is probably an understatement, for by 1968 he had published five novels, four collections of short stories, two books of poems, and an essay collection, all well received.  Success came early and fast and he seems to have had the syndrome that prosecutors look for.  He certainly could afford ski trips. "I had not voted," he writes, "for Abbie Hoffman or Father Daniel Berrigan or Reverend William Sloane Coffin or Jonathan Schell or Lillian Hellman or Joan Baez or Jane Fonda or Jerry Rubin or Dr Spock or Eugene McCarthy."  I detect in the catalogue at least a trace of authorial disdain.  The riff concludes, "I had voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson, and thus had earned my American right not to make a political decision for another four years."  

Many more than four years later, Rabbit Angstrom has Jewish golfing partners in Florida and keeps quiet while on tee boxes and greens they run down Reagan.  Rabbit, of course, had voted for him.  Updike himself never went so far--in one of his last interviews, in October of 2008 (he died of cancer three months later), he enthusiastically endorsed Obama over McCain--but there is in Rabbit's resentful, cantankerous character the shadowy imprint of his creator.

The mention of Jonathan Schell, who at the time would have been Updike's colleague at The New Yorker, will be of interest to longtime subscribers.  In those days, the Talk of the Town pieces, including political commentary, were unsigned and meant to speak with the magazine's institutional voice.  Updike was the principal author of many unsigned "notes and comments" until his reluctance to criticize the war caused him to withdraw in favor of "more leftish voices"--one of which was certainly Schell's, whose Village of Ben Suc was a devastating illustration of how the US "destroyed villages in order to save them."  Schell would go on to write The Fate of the Earth.

Reading in the service department's waiting room

Sitting in the waiting room of the Richfield-Bloomington Honda service department while my oil gets changed and my tires rotated, I read along in John Updike's Self-Consciousness and come to this passage--he's describing occasional neighborhood ski trips to New Hampshire from his home in Ipswich, Massachusetts:

Our trips to the tonic north country squeezed us all into one smoky automobile and felt like a holiday back into adolescence.  We would become a pack, welded together by the day's fatigue and bruises and beer.  I seem to remember, on one endless drive back home in the dark down Route 93, while my wife sat in the front seat and her hair was rhythmically irradiated with light from opposing headlights, patiently masturbating my back-seat neighbor through her ski pants, and taking a comradely pride in her shudder of orgasm just as we hit the Ipswich turn-off.

That feeling when you look up from the page and are a little surprised to note that your fellow customers retain their bored, impassive faces.