Eric The Blue

Joyce Carol Oates tweets

Joyce Carol Oates's Twitter autobiography is a word long: "Author."  True statement, dat.  Wikipedia notes that she has "published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction."  Her Twitter activity, likewise prolific, features a lot of pretty standard social media fare, including pictures of beautiful gardens, herself on vacation or dining with friends, her husband, cute animals, mostly her own cats with funny captions appended, the recommended allowance of aggressive Trump-bashing, &c.  There are also, predictably, many literary tweets, and pretty regularly something truly arresting, such as:

Only the newly bereaved see life clearly--what is profound, what is petty; what is permanent in our lives, & what is fleeting.  But they/we must heal--that's to say, lose this tragic clarity & return to the normal state of trivia-besotted contentment.

Whoa!  I hope she isn't meaning to criticize someone who watches the Twins every night, including into and through a highly disappointing fourteenth inning in which they abruptly suffered yet another walk-off loss after two were out and no one on base.  I think I shall persist with my arguably trivial pastimes until such time as my demise stuns my loving daughters into tragic clarity about what matters.  That will be my contribution.

Also, it may have been from Oates's Twitter feed--though I can't locate it now, maybe because her feed is so crowded, maybe because it was someone else's contribution--that I was recently made aware of my new favorite concluding line (there wasn't an incumbent) to a commencement address:  Never forget, it's not who you know, but whom you know.

Looking back at Philip Roth

Philip Roth's death, while I was chopping at the big water of his collected works, some thirty or more books, means that suddenly the opinions of others on this hurricane-force man of letters are plastered all over the place.  I especially like this New York Times piece wherein a bunch of novelists, critics, and assorted scholarly types are asked to say a few words about their favorite Roth book.  Judging by the number of mentions, it seems there might be a consensus for Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral being his two best books.  I'd have guessed that Portnoy's Complaint would earn more votes, just for notoriety and universal "name recognition," but perhaps among this learned group Sabbath's Theater, next on my list to read, has replaced it as the greatest achievement of "the transgressive Roth."  Of course there are many Roths.  I just finished Nemesis, the last novel he wrote.  I remember one scene in which the protagonist and his love interest have canoed out to an island from the lakeside summer camp where they work and, away from the kids, disrobe in a previously prepared bower before the curtain is demurely drawn--next we know, they're paddling back to camp, very happy with one another.  This isn't always how it works in Roth.  For example, the teen-aged Alexander Portnoy uses a hunk of liver from the icebox for an idiosyncratic purpose and then has to see it again later that day when it's served for supper.

Nemesis is named by one of the Times's experts.  Its main character, an earnest square of a playground director, may remind us of all the other squares whom Roth, creator of Alexander Portnoy and Mickey Sabbath, plainly esteems.  These fellows work hard for modest wages, often in a struggling family business, often in the role of the transgressive protagonist's father, and almost always in Newark, New Jersey, specifically the Weequahic section southwest of the main business district, where the Jews lived.  The autobiographical aspect is here apparent, which reminds me that Roth also wrote a memoir, Patrimony, about his father, and that it is at least twice-mentioned in the article.  Even Alexander Portnoy worked as a public-interest lawyer, and remember, too, the definition that is set out on the very first page:

Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. . .

Grading Trump's letter

Above is an image of the letter President Trump sent Kim Jong Un earlier this week.  One of the Power Line bloggers has praised it, on the ground that Trump "strikes just the right tone and sends the correct message."  The late night comedians have a different view, one a lot closer to my own.  I thought I'd annotate the letter, sentence-by-sentence, in the manner of a conscientious freshman composition instructor, and then assign a grade.

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore.

Sounds a little like a stupid person's idea of how smart people talk, but whatever, fine, bureaucratic language for a diplomatic purpose.  And the "was scheduled" is a kind of foreshadowing!

We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant.

A lot goes wrong in this short sentence.  The truncated passive voice leaves out the agent, South Korea.  Since Kim Jong Un knows this anyway, what is the point of being awkwardly obscure?  The adjective "irrelevant" means "totally irrelevant"--the concept does not admit of degrees--so there is no need for the president to do his impression of a Valley Girl.  Like, totally, Kim.  And if this bit of information is "to us totally irrelevant," why is he mentioning it at all?  Did John Kelly tell him he had to fill a page?  The comedians all regard the letter as belonging to the "Dear John genre"--a breakup letter--and, in that respect, maybe there is a wee bit of psychological maneuvering beneath the surface.  You wanted to date me more than I wanted to date you!

I was very much looking forward to being there with you.

In that case, I can hardly wait to hear why you won't be there!

Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.

You mean the most recent statement in which Kim called our vice president "ignorant" and "stupid"?  I thought truth was a defense.  Anyway, this hardly comes up to the level of "fire and fury such as the world has never seen" and therefore raises the question of what the real reason is.  On this point, I think the comedians have a good theory of the case:  "I really wanted to date you, but now I see it's not going to work like I told my friends it would, so, to save face, I'm going to break up with you before you can break up with me."   The White House says the entire letter was dictated by Trump, which I assumed was a lie, since almost all their pronouncements are lies, but one recognizes in this sentence Trump's distinctive vocabulary.  Sadly!  Tremendous!

Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place.

It's good for us and good for you but bad for everyone else?  I get the part about the summit being off but the rest is a species of grandiloquent incoherence.

You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

Yep, this is definitely Trump speaking.  Logical connection weak, and one recognizes his theme of "my button is bigger than yours."

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters.

Don't know what this can possibly mean so will only point out that Trump often sounds a lot like what his supporters would call a snowflake.  Oh, the dialogue!

Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you.

Stilted but representative.  See the letter's third sentence, too.

In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families.

You mean the hostages he seized in order to have something to "give up" in the brutal negotiations to which you subjected him?  This is called "being played"--and liking it.

That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

Seems to have no inkling that the recipient oversees a system of gulags in which thousands of North Koreans are imprisoned without anything remotely resembling a legal process, and that the rest of the population is on a starvation diet.  How the Power Line blogger detected in the letter the "right tone" is a mystery to me.  It is characterized by a grab-bag of incompatible tones, none more repugnant than the ass-kissing one.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write.

More incoherence, since it's Trump, not Kim, who's calling it off.

The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth.

Similar to what he says to women who won't sleep with him.

This missed opportunity is truly a sad moment in history.

Yes, and recall that, from all we can tell from this letter, the "sad moment" was caused by Kim calling Mike Pence "stupid."  More snowflakery.

If Trump was 19 and enrolled in a community college composition course, I'd give him a C.  But he's the president, so: F.

 

Philip Roth in his fecund dotage

 

In the second half of the 1990s, when he was in the second half of his seventh decade of life, Philip Roth published three novels, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, that are sometimes referred to as "the American trilogy."  Each was widely acclaimed.  American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize, I Married a Communist was shortlisted for the IMPAC Award, and The Human Stain received the PEN/Faulkner Award.  All three are on a big canvas, of hefty length, and address themselves to large issues in American life, such as domestic terrorism and identity politics.  Since they were composed by a man who presumably had commenced receiving social security payments, the novels were often attributed to a late-life cataract of creativity.  Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, had won the National Book Award in 1960, so there is a 40-year span between it and The Human Stain.

I have for the past few weeks been sunk in the quartet of novels that Roth wrote after he finished the American trilogy.  They are Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis--a tetralogy handsomely collected in a Library of America volume under the title Nemeses.  I've read American Pastoral and The Human Stain, and for whatever reason they do not affect me like these four even later novels, written when Roth was well into his 70s.  In the Library of America volume, the four works come in at 446 pages.  I can't say much about Nemesis, which I'm only around twenty pages into, but in two of the other three (Everyman and The Humbling) the survey of American society is replaced by the crabbed ruminations of a near septuagenarian who faces declining health and a gray tedium of days that are leading, he knows, toward extinction.  The other two are death-infused as well, Indignation being set against the backdrop of the Korean War while Nemesis concerns a polio epidemic in Newark, New Jersey.  The protagonists are in a state of quiet desperation.  The consolations of religion are tartly dismissed, and, in the books with the older protagonists, the subject of suicide arises.  I said I was "sunk" in the books, not "happily sunk."  In The Humbling, the central character is an aging actor who suddenly can't act anymore, and, being very familiar with the world's dramatic literature, he calls to mind all the characters he knows who commit suicide: "Hedda in Hedda Gabler, Julie in Miss Julie, Phaedra in Hippolytus, Jocasta in Oedipus the King, almost everyone in Antigone, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Joe Keller in All My Sons, Don Parritt in The Iceman Cometh, Simon Stimson in Our Town, Ophelia in Hamlet, Othello in Othello, Cassius and Brutus in Julius Caesar, Goneril in King Lear, Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, and Charmian in Antony and Cleopatra, the grandfather in Awake and Sing!, Ivanov in Ivanov, Konstantin in The Seagull."  And these are only the plays in which Roth's protagonist has acted.  He adds a few more that he knows about--"Deirdre in Deirdre of the Sorrows, Hedvig in The Wild Duck, Rebecca West in Rosmersholm, Christine and Orin in Mourning Becomes Electra, both Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles' Ajax."  The conclusion of it is:

He should set himself the task of rereading these plays.  Yes, everything gruesome must be squarely faced.  Nobody should be able to say that he didn't think it through.

I guess I'm more of a novel reader and so was impressed by the body count of suicides in these plays.  I'm surveying the novels I know and Anna Karenina is the only suicide I can think of.  No, Hurstwood kills himself in Sister Carrie.  Oh, and Simon Axler in Philip Roth's The Humbling, and a widow who takes a painting class from the protagonist of Philip Roth's Everyman.  It's like he's trying to catch his genre up.

UPDATE: Yikes.  When I clicked over to Facebook to post this, I saw the following "trending headline": "Philip Roth, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and literary icon, dies at 85." 

"You thieving pile of albino warts."

One of the commonest and tiredest expressions of political speech is variations of the introductory clause, "Words cannot express," followed by a generalized expression of grief, dislike, favor, or some other purported emotion.  Words cannot express my sorrow, my affection, my contempt, &c.

Well, yes, actually they can, but you're a witless phony, which may account for your election to the US Congress.

The recent death of Tom Wolfe, practitioner of the "new journalism," has temporarily raised the profile of his fellow practitioner, friend, and occasional antagonist, Hunter Thompson, who, especially in the contempt category, was generally capable of finding words to convey his strong feeling.  The accompanying communication  was to his biographer, William McKeen.  A letter to Wolfe included the expression, "You thieving pile of albino warts," which provided the headline for a New York Times book review, by Christopher Buckley, that included a compendium of Thompson's lexical repertoire.  First, the adjectives of abuse:

vicious, rancid, savage, fiendish, filthy, rotten, demented, treacherous, heinous, scurvy, devious, grisly, hamwit, filthy, foetid, cheapjack, and hellish.  

Then "favorite gerunds and verb forms":

Festering, stinking, crazed, deranged, soul-ripping, drooling, rabbit-punching and knee-crawling, to say nothing of even more piquant expressions.

Why is it that for me the expression about the albino warts calls to mind the prim mug of Mitch McConnell?  Anyway, it's not that this is some new skill that humanity has acquired.  Here, in King Lear, is Kent meeting up again with the contemptible Oswald in Act II:

Oswald: Why dost thou use me thus?  I know thee not.

Kent: Fellow, I know thee.

Oswald: What dost thou know me for?

Kent: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deny'st the least syllable of thy addition.

Oswald: Why, what a monstrous fellow art thou, thus to rail on one that is neither known of thee nor knows thee. 

Kent: What a brazen-faced varlet art thou to deny thou knowest me!  Is it two days ago since I tripped up thy heels and beat thee before the King? [Draws his sword.]  Draw, you rogue, for though it be night, yet the moon shines. I'll make a sop o' th' moonshine of you. You whoreson cullionly barbermonger, draw!

Though an editor's gloss would sometimes help, you get the idea.  I personally like how Oswald's foppishness is a recurring theme in the indictment:  "glass-gazing" means always before a mirror, and "cullionly barbermonger" means he's the despicable sort who's continually off to the barbershop to get fixed up.  I can imagine Oswald serving in the House of Representatives, but not Kent, though it would boost the ratings of C-SPAN. 

New slaughter, same bullsh*t

The gun lobby and its bought-and-paid-for hookers in Congress have two general responses to every proposal to limit gun violence.  Either the proposal violates the Second Amendment, or else it would have done nothing to prevent the latest atrocity currently being discussed.  In the case of the former, the proposal "goes too far"; in the case of the latter, the proposal fails a kind of "magic bullet test"--only a comprehensive solution for every shooting scenario is permitted.  So the remedies all either "go too far" or don't go far enough.  They send their thoughts and prayers, however.

This rhetorical strategy is augmented by a lot of gaslighting, the most favored tactic here being a surfeit of furrowed-brow pontificating about anything but guns--for example, mental illness, God's expulsion from school, angry young men who can't get laid, school buildings with too many exits and entrances, etc., etc., etc.  None of these can account for why our country, compared to others in the developed world, is off the charts with respect to gun violence.  Mental illness does not respect national boundaries.  The culture of western Europe, where gun violence is a small fraction of what we endure in our country, is considerably more secular than America's.  I'm reasonably confident that some Scandinavian boys can't get a girl to bed, and the Texas lieutenant governor's concern for the uniquely dangerous architecture of American schools takes the gold. 

Because what can stop a bad guy with a gun? Making it harder to get out of the building in case there is a bad guy with a gun!

 

Books of the Bible: I Timothy

The two letters addressed to Timothy, together with the one addressed to Titus, are usually called "the Pastorals," not on account of the subject matter being fields and streams, meadows and brooks, shepherds and their sheep, but because of a common thread relating to the church, its congregations, and congregants--the concerns of pastors.  All three begin with a form of the salutation familiar to New Testament readers.  Here it is in I Timothy:

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope,

To Timothy, my true child in the faith:

Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

This greeting notwithstanding, scholarship has concluded that these letters could not have been written by Paul.  It is almost certain that all three were written by the same pseudonymous author, who, for reasons sufficient to him, wrote in Paul's name long after Paul was dead.  A comprehensive summary of the scholar's brief would be as soporific as the letters themselves, but perhaps a condensed version will have the effect of highlighting the main points of interest, such as they are, in I Timothy.

For one thing, the subject matter of I Timothy did not yet exist when Paul was alive and composing his letters. Broadly speaking, New Testament literature exhibits an interest in either eschatology ("a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind") or ecclesiology ("theological doctrine relating to the church").  Those exhibiting eschatological concerns were written before those exhibiting ecclesiastical ones, because an interest in the church and its function in the world was a response to the sun rising and setting, rising and setting, and no trumpet blare to announce the Second Coming.  Eschatology is a frequent theme in the genuine letters of Paul but is absent in I Timothy, which is devoted largely to ecclesiology, an inconceivable topic to someone under the impression that human history is about to end.  Paul's response to what he takes to be aberrant beliefs and practices is to argue for what ought to be orthodox.  In I Timothy, orthodoxy has been defined, and the remedy for the temptation to stray is to submit to the authority of an organized and universal church that did not exist in the time of Paul.  

Linguistic analysis tends to confirm the above conclusion.  Even in translation, one can tell that the meditative style of I Timothy is very different from the vigorous, personal, combative exposition one confronts in, say, Romans or Galations.  Norman Perrin notes that, excluding proper names, the three Pastoral letters use 848 different Greek words, and, of these, 306 do not occur anywhere in the known letters of Paul (which, to review, are: I Thessalonians, Galations, the two letters to the Corinthians, Phillipians, Romans, and Philemon).  Some part of this should be attributed to the invention of ecclesiology after the period of Paul's activity, for in I Timothy there is much talk of church administration, including the place of "bishops" and "deacons"--offices that had not been invented in Paul's time, so of course he didn't use the words.  The different vocabularies reflect the different times and also the different habits of mind of different authors.  It's been pointed out that there are no points of contact between the career of Paul, as described in his known letters and the Book of Acts, with anything that turns up in any of the Pastoral letters. A weightier consideration, however, is just that Paul, to have written I Timothy and the two other Pastoral letters, would have had to suffer some sort of cataclysm that left him functioning but with a completely different personality and cast of mind.

To illustrate this last point, consider how the unknown author of I Timothy, almost immediately after representing himself as Paul in the salutation, proceeds to bungle Paul's teaching on a fundamental point.  Here is I Timothy 1:8-10:

Now we know that the law is good, if anyone uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnapers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

Wayne Meeks, editor of The Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St. Paul, observes in a footnote that the first eight words are likely "[a] verbal parallel of Romans 7:16, but the following clause is hardly Pauline." It is perhaps useful therefore to set out Romans 7:16, along with the clause that immediately follows it:

Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good.¹⁶  So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.¹⁷

For Paul, the law doesn't distinguish the lawful good from the disobedient.  Instead, it is "good" only inasmuch as it shows that no one can live up to it and that all stand in need of grace and the justification that comes from faith.  

St. Paul died in the seventh decade of the first century, perhaps in 65.  A good guess for the date of I Timothy is 120.  In any event, I Timothy was composed long after the death of Paul.  While pseudonymous authorship was common, it's obvious that fundamentalists cannot allow that a letter in which the author falsely represents himself as Paul was admitted into the inerrant and infallible canon of Scripture.  Even worse, the unknown author appears to have endeavored to burnish his credentials with an allusion to a passage in Paul's greatest letter--and then immediately supplied evidence that he has wholly misunderstood the import of the passage.  

A final note: the whole church administration business is a terrible bore, but the reader of I Timothy who determinedly slogs ahead to the end is eventually rewarded with a passage that sounds more like a bit of wisdom literature from the Old Testament:

There is great gain with godliness in contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world; but if we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content.  But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is the root of all evils. . . .

Just want to point out that the famous conclusion to this passage is routinely misquoted.  It's not money itself that's the root of all evil; rather, the love of it.  

 

And now for something totally new . . . .

 

A headline at "The National Review," which describes itself as "a leading conservative magazine and website covering news, politics, current events and culture with detailed analysis and commentary": "The Electoral College Favors Republicans."

This was yesterday.  Considering that in two of the last five presidential elections the electoral college has delivered the White House to a Republican candidate who was outpolled in the land by the Democrat, we should all anticipate tomorrow's headline concerning the possibility that Pythagoras might have been onto something regarding triangles.   

On a cheerier note, Connecticut just joined the National Popular Vote Compact, bringing the electoral vote tally of member states to 172--less than a hundred shy of the 270 needed to ensure that the winner of a presidential election is the candidate who receives the most votes.  The last 98 will be a hard pull, because "the electoral college favors Republicans," so the states outside the compact are lopsidedly red in hue.  But it is not impossible to imagine that partisan interests could give way to a needed, good government reform.  In the recent vote in the Connecticut general assembly, for example, four Republicans joined 17 Democrats to form the 21-14 majority in favor of joining the compact.  

If the electoral college had not been enshrined in the Constitution, in part as a sop to slave states that feared voters in the more populous north might put an end to their "peculiar institution," I'm pretty sure it would be found to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.  How can you enjoy the equal protection of the laws if your vote doesn't count as much as someone else's?  And the electoral college indisputably weighs ballots differently depending upon the state in which they are cast--else, it wouldn't be possible for a candidate to "win" with fewer votes.  In a presidential election, an individual voter in Wyoming has more than three times the "pull" of an individual voter in California, but that is only the half of it.  The above map shows the number of general election campaign events held in each state in 2012.  Four states--Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa--received more than two-thirds of the candidates' attention as measured by campaign stops.  Iowa and New Hampshire, which together have less than two percent of the country's population, were visited 40 times.  California, Texas, New York, and Illinois, which together have about 30 percent of the country's population, were ignored--along with 34 other states.  

I get a kick out of it when defenders of the electoral college complain about "flyover country."  Thanks to the electoral college, almost all of us live there.

 

At the bank

In Buddhism, the awakening of the young prince Siddhartha is said to have been triggered by "the four sights" he took in on his sojourn outside the palace, where he had for his first 29 years led a sheltered life of ease and luxury.  The four sights were an old man, a diseased man, a corpse, and an ascetic.  He was puzzled by all these, but his charioteer patiently answered his questions, setting him straight about much that is unpleasant, and Siddhartha was thus set on his way to establishing The Four Noble Truths and The Eightfold Path.

While doing a little banking today, I think I saw a 21st-century, western version of the first of the four sights.  The bank has one of those coin-counting machines, and as I stood in the teller line I observed an elderly, stooped man work out a transaction with it.  There was some pacing to and fro as he tried to determine what went where, but before I got to a teller, he had figured out where to pour in his coins--he carried them in a big plastic cup such as you might get a beer in at the ball game--and I could see on the machine's display that he had likely converted his cup of coins into a ten, a five, two ones, two quarters, a nickel, and three pennies.

Give me about five years.

Public service announcement for Minnesotans: if your property taxes aren't rolled into your mortgage payment, the first half is due tomorrow.  Writing out that check reminds me that the new young energetic mayor of Minneapolis has not personally repaired all the potholes in East Forty-Second Street.  

 

While working the clicker

En route on my clicker from the NBA playoff game to the finale of the Twins' series in Anaheim, I stumble on "one of those shows" and pause long enough to hear some puzzled commentators puzzling over why the White House doesn't just apologize for the rube, Kelly Sadler by name, who said something crass about John McCain not being long for this world.

"It would be so easy to get this embarrassing story behind them," the perplexed talkers agreed.

Sounds reasonable, I guess, but, once they start apologizing, where would it end?  Trump himself has said ridiculous, insulting things about McCain that are less plausibly just "jokes" that fell flat when the world heard--because, unlike Sadler, he wanted the world to hear him.  What's so hard about being a POW in North Vietnam for the better part of six years, suffering torture and turning down offers of repatriation in exchange for information?  The real heroes don't get shot down and captured!  From a man who received deferments for his bone spurs!  It says something about Trump that it's debatable whether this is the most outrageous thing he's said. 

McCain's daughter, Meghan, wants Sadler fired.  "I don't understand what kind of environment you're working in where that would be acceptable and the next day you could come to work and still have a job," she said.  

I think I understand what kind of environment she's working in.  Hell, by Meghan McCain's standard Kelly Sadler's boss would have been fired a hundred times.

According to news reports, McCain is planning his own funeral, which is to be at the National Cathedral in Washington.  He has asked President Obama to be one of the eulogists, and has requested that the current president not attend.

Travel notes

A friend and I travelled this past weekend to watch the Twins play the Cardinals in St. Louis.  Back at home, I'm reading the Wikipedia article on the city to see whether it tends to confirm my general impression of decline.  And it does.  For example, the population of St. Louis has fallen from a high of 856,796, in 1950, to just under 320,000 in the 2010 census, and an estimated 308,626 in 2018.  Of cities with at least 100,000 residents in 1950, only two others have lost as high a percentage of their population as St. Louis: Detroit, Michigan, and Youngstown, Ohio.  Wikipedia:

After years of immigration, migration, and expansion, the city reached its peak population in 1950.  That year, the Census Bureau reported St. Louis's population as 82% White and 17.9% African-American.  After World War II, St. Louis began losing population to the suburbs, first because of increased demand for new housing, unhappiness with city services, ease of commuting by subsidized highways, and later, white flight.  St. Louis's population decline has resulted in a significant increase in abandoned residential housing units and vacant lots throughout the city proper; this blight has attracted much wild life (such as deer and coyotes) to the many abandoned and overgrown lots.

We stayed downtown, within five blocks of both the Gateway Arch and the ballpark, at the Hotel Majestic, which probably was majestic in 1950.  Today, "Omni" has been crudely excised from the inscription above the entrance, the four letters made legible by the lighter shade of grime behind where they formerly were attached to the facade.  So it seems Omni Hotels & Resorts gave up on the hotel and St. Louis.  The complimentary breakfast is served in what one can see was formerly a grand barroom, with a long, wooden bar and empty shelves where the bottles once stood.  There is on one wall a very nice mural of famous African-American jazz musicians who, one can easily imagine, might have played there in the 40s and 50s.  The breakfast was of the kind you get at the exurban franchises along the interstate, the quality of the choices declining in relation to the care required for preparation: cereal just what you'd expect; eggs okay; the potato, sausage, and vegetable sidedish for the eggs not recommended.  The room was fine and reasonably priced.

We walked around a fair amount and took two short rides on the subway.  One thing you can't miss in Minneapolis, all the young white hipsters hanging out at cool places, was nowhere in evidence.  Maybe we missed them but maybe there aren't any.  I'm guessing that newly minted graduates of Ivy League law schools and techie sharpsters are not flocking to St. Louis.  You can get a Budweiser wherever you go, and someone told us there was "a happening craft beer scene," but, if there is, we missed that, too.

People seem to have money to go to the ball yard.  There were around 40,000 in attendance for the two games we saw--Monday night and Tuesday afternoon against the Twins, not big draws.  The Cubs had been in over the weekend and there had been three sell outs, which means about 46,000 per game.  The Cardinals swept that series, winning twice on walk-off hits, one of those in the fourteenth inning, thereby gaining a chunk of turf over their main divisional rival.  The home team looked to be suffering from a hangover in the games with the Twins, whose recent descent in the standings has been caused by weak pitching that nevertheless held the Cardinals to one run in two games.   On Tuesday, the Cardinals' line went 1-2-3: one run, two hits, three errors.  The scores of the games were 6-0 and 7-1. 

If you have the kind of car that needs gas, and the kind of bladder that fills, it takes close to ten hours to drive from St. Louis to Minneapolis.  For a Minnesotan, it's a little startling to see liquor for sale in gas stations.  A good way to get to the game is to leave your car in the parking lot of the Casino Queen, in East St. Louis, which is across the Mississippi in Illinois, then take the subway over the river into St. Louis to the ballpark station.  We did that, and gassing up in East St. Louis after the game, my travelling companion was waiting to pay for a coke behind a fellow who was also buying a coke--and two shot-sized bottles of Jack Daniels.  

"You having a bad day, hon?" asked the kindly woman at the checkout.

"No," he said. "I'm having a great day."

 

 

Everyman

Just finished Philip Roth's Everyman, which has the effect of confirming a recent speech act of my 85-year-old dad: "Old age is not for the faint of heart."  Roth:

But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was--the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing.

I have a little arthritis in my knee--a foretaste, evidently, of the feast to come.  Well, I'm off to St Louis, by way of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to watch some future and current Twins.  Aimless, pleasant days.

Details, details

Since President Trump insists that the press is too hard on him, I thought to look into some of the things he says the Fake News Media are ignoring, like the performance of the domestic economy.  He seems especially proud of gains in stock prices and jobs while he's been in office.

Stocks are indeed up.  Table.  Since New Year's Day 2017, eight weeks after Trump's election and three weeks before his inauguration, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen from around 19,800 to (as I write this) 23,600, a gain of 19% in sixteen months.  In contrast, over the eight years of the Obama presidency, the DJIA went from about 8,000 to just under 20,000.  The year-by-year returns for Obama's eight years (rounded to the nearest whole percent) were: 19%, 11%, 6%, 7%, 27%, 8%, (-2%), 13%.  Have Trump's policies been a great success or has the bull market simply continued apace?  He crows most loudly about his deregulation regimen, so it seems fair to note that in this regard he is following the Republican line and rejecting the  supposedly business-unfriendly Democratic one.  But during W's eight years the DJIA actually retreated, whereas it was up dramatically under President Clinton.  Stock market indices aren't a good way to judge the health of the economy, but, since Trump wants to play that way, it seems worth noting that the market's performance under Republican and Democratic administrations tends to undercut his boasting.

Similarly with job creation.  In the first fourteen months of the Trump administration (February 2017 through March 2018), the economy added, on average, 183,000 new jobs per month.  In the fourteen months before that (the last year and change of the Obama administration), it added an average of 203,000 jobs per month.  Source is the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Of course, these numbers are open to criticism--lag time for policies to take effect, economic factors beyond the control of a president, et cetera, et cetera--but, again, I'm just accepting the premise of Trump's boasting.  He says his policies have led to an explosion in job growth, a claim contradicted by data.  Nor is it the case that "the big picture" supports the view that Republican administrations have spurred job growth by "getting government off the back of job creators," while "the regulatory state" favored by Democrats is a proven job killer.  Of the last five presidents, job growth was strongest under Clinton, followed in order by Reagan, Obama, George H W Bush, and, bringing up the rear, George W Bush.

Do your best, you probably can't do otherwise

 

 

A hearty perennial of philosophy class concerns the question of free will.  Part of what's interesting is the conflict between the evidence supplied by our sensations and the conclusions yielded by reflection.  On the one hand, I could right now, if I wanted, stand up, walk to the fridge, and, even though it's not yet noon, crack open a Miller High Life before settling into the recliner to enjoy some daytime television.  At least, it sure feels like I could do that.  On the other hand, you don't have to persuade me that things happen for a reason, that the "choices" that are made by me and other people have causes, which are themselves the effects of prior causes, and that you don't have to go back very far in this causation tree before you get to places I've never been and had no power to affect.  Think, for example, about what science says about the reason we are the way we are--partly our genes, supplied by our parents, and partly our environment, especially the environment we grew up in, which is also supplied by our parents.  And no one picked their parents.

I was stewing about this the other day because I felt so bad for one of my daughters, the 10-year-old, who confided to me that she was very nervous about having to take a standardized math test in school the next morning.  "What does dad always say?" I asked, and we answered simultaneously, "Do your best!"  But instead of laughing, she only smiled at me, sort of weakly, and my advice does seem pretty thin.  She hadn't been planning on trying to do less than her best and was nervous anyway, so it's not like I had transported her to a new and better place.

I suppose the "deep meaning" behind my lame "Do your best!" is just that doing her best is all she can do.  The truth is that her score on a standardized math test given to fourth graders had settled into a fairly narrow range around eleven years ago, when that sperm fertilized that egg, and, of the settling that's occurred since then, her industry as a student (her choice) is likely a pale influence compared to conditions in the uterus (not her choice), the attention she got as an infant (not her choice), and the quality of the instruction she receives in the school she attends (not her choice). Such a model seems like it might be a plausible resolution of the higher-level free will question.  We feel like we are free either to work the problems in the Chapter Review or watch tv.  The sensation of having this choice tends to obscure the fundamental facts of the case.  You have to admit that other things are apparently like that.  Based on the sensations we receive from living in the world, who would ever imagine that everything in the universe is made of just over 100 different kinds of atoms, and that these atoms are perpetually buzzing around, attracting each other when apart but then repelling upon being drawn together?  No way!

I understand that the above view of things is an insult to the ethos of striving American achiever-types and will seem to some pretty dismal.  There's a happier way to view it, however.  I wouldn't say this to my daughter, because she should do her homework, but there isn't a good reason to be nervous about the math test: show up, take it, "do your best," attain the score that's been aimed at you since before you made choices; also, have fun at recess and be modest and kind to everyone, because the very best have only been the luckiest, and the very worst have had no good luck at all.