Eric The Blue

Trump court

Presidents, by their Supreme Court picks, have a profound effect on national affairs long after they've left office, and even sometimes long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil--Anthony Kennedy, who just announced his retirement from the high court, was appointed by President Reagan in 1987, and has for years supplied the swing vote for an array of 5-4 decisions.  Since Trump is poised to appoint a conservative jurist who will, if the actuaries aren't surprised, make the Court an instrument for advancing conservative causes for a generation or more into the future, one would expect, looking backwards, to see a string of Republican victories at the presidential level.  Yet Democrats have won four of the last seven presidential elections, and in two of the other three, the Democratic candidate received more votes than the Republican.  So Republican hegemony at the Supreme Court is being achieved despite Republicans having lost the popular vote in six of the last seven elections.  Americans haven't voted for a very conservative Supreme Court, but it's what they're getting.

How did it happen?  Well, there is a roulette effect connected to the randomness with which openings occur.  A president might get to appoint three justices within a year or two, and there might then not be another opening for ten years.  Of course it isn't entirely random.  The Trump administration appears to have encouraged Kennedy to retire now, and, on the other side of the divide, Ruth Bader Ginsburg would probably have to croak before Trump could name her successor.  I just saw the movie RBG, about Ginsburg's life, and it takes up briefly the question of whether she should have retired while Obama was still president.  Were she to die while Trump was still in office--ugh, I don't want to think about it.

There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, and a hundred senators, but only nine justices of the Supreme Court and their appointments are for life.  Anything anomalous or "chancy" that happens with respect to the appointment of a new justice is therefore of supersized import.  Obama was president for eight years and made two appointments.  Trump is about to make his second appointment within eighteen months of taking office.  This wasn't just a matter of good luck for Republicans.   Trump's first appointee, Neil Gorsuch, replaced Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly on February 13, 2016, about eleven months before the end of Obama's second term.  As the Constitution provides, Obama nominated a new justice, Merrick Garland, for the open seat, but Republicans in the Senate then refused to hold hearings or a vote until after Trump was elected and named Gorsuch instead.  It wasn't a matter of the time being too short for Garland: Republican senators are talking now about confirming Trump's choice by Labor Day, two months down the road, after having refused to hold hearings on the Garland nomination for close to a year.  Their "argument," such as it was, relating to the Garland nomination is almost too half-cocked for words.  It had to do with it being an election year, and Obama being a "lame duck."  In politics, a "lame duck" refers to someone holding office during the interim period after his successor has been elected but before the successor is sworn in.  By the private and ad hoc definition of Senate Republicans, it evidently refers to a president in his second term who cannot run for a third term, but by this logic it seems a president should be barred from appointing anyone to the Supreme Court for all four years of a second term.  That's ridiculous, and thus, perhaps, the other made-up argument about no appointments in an election year.  Too many lame reasons, like when a guy calls into the office to say he won't be in because he has the flu and his car won't start.  

It will forever be unclear on what date, according to Republicans, Obama lost the constitutional authority to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court, and it's probably useless to query law and logic on this question.  For there was no principle, just a naked exercise of power on the part of Senate Republicans.  They did it because they thought they could get away with it, and events proved them to be right.  If, however, Garland had been appointed, he would have been a moderately liberal justice replacing a very conservative one, Scalia, and the center of the Supreme Court would then have not stood at such a grotesque remove from what Americans, judging by the ballots they have cast, want.

I don't know if it follows that we should spit in their food when they patronize Mexican restaurants, but it's pretty rich of Republicans to expect Democrats to play nice and knuckle under while their Supreme Court decides that the rules are going to be exactly what the majority of us voted against.

 

Supreme Court speaks on gerrymandering in Texas

 

Above are maps showing the 35th congressional district in Texas.  Smell something fishy?  Or maybe the word is "serpenty," like a dinosaur with a little spike at the end of its long tail?  Upon inspection, the spiky tail encompasses a big chunk of metro San Antonio.  The head and body, meanwhile, are made out of a wide swatch of the Austin metropolitan area.  In between, the district is about as wide as Interstate Highway 35.  Since Austin and San Antonio are two heavily Democratic areas within red Texas, a half wit can tell that this is a glaringly obvious attempt to pack Democratic voters into a single, overwhelmingly Democratic district.  If the fat northeasterly part and slightly bulbous southwesterly part were within two adjoining districts that looked something like a figure in a geometry book, there would be two Democratic representatives going to Washington.  Instead, there is only one.

The district map was challenged in court, and last year a panel of federal court judges held that three Texas districts, including the 35th, violated both the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act.  Texas appealed, and earlier this week the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, reversed the decision of the federal court panel.  So there is nothing illegal about a blatant political gerrymander, and the 35th district of Texas is "good to go" until at least the next census.  The remedy, it seems, is for the Democrats to win more elections so they can start drawing their own sleazy maps--and holding open vacant Supreme Court seats until one of theirs is in place to appoint the next justice.

What a country!  It's perfect that the president should be a buffoon.

 

Be prepared

This is a link to a Tweet by Philippe Reines, a Hillary Clinton aide who was a stand-in for Trump during Clinton's preparation for their first debate.  I think the video is hilarious.  Some of the comments--not so much.

 

How great is "The Great Gatsby"?

 

Here is a list of the hundred best novels, according to the Modern Library board.  Scanning it, I think it must actually be the hundred best English-language novels published since about 1900--no Tolstoy, no Russian, no Dickens, no Jane Austen, no Middlemarch, no Melville or Hawthorne or Mark Twain.

I was at the site because I googled "100 best novels" in order to see where The Great Gatsby would come in.  It's always near the top of these lists, and yep, there it is, at number 2, sandwiched at the pinnacle between two works by James Joyce.  Is it overrated?  Not as much as A Portrait of the Artist!  My theory is that these books are read and talked about mainly at colleges and universities, where there are often constraints of time and a desire to expose students to an array of "standard authors," so the brevity of The Great Gatsby gives it a boost. In Survey of American Literature, it's always assigned, along with a couple of stories by Hemingway, a story of Faulkner's (or maybe As I Lay Dying, which is also brief), some poems by Frost, and "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock."  I'm not being flip, these are all great works, but I'm not sure they're greater than other works of the period that make their entrance farther down this list of novels.  You're not going to assign such immense works as An American Tragedy, USA, or Studs Lonigan.  Any of them would consume the whole term, just to get the pages turned.  So, of American novels of the period between the two world wars--The Great Gatsby just has the most exposure.

But paging through my copy now I feel more inclined to defend its high reputation.  It's not long but not wispy, either.  I see that the passages I marked as a college student still have for me a strong appeal.  Of seasonal interest, because it just happened to me, is Daisy's question, in almost the first scene:

She looked at us all radiantly.  "Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it?  I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it."

Seems like an odd thing to "watch for" or be radiant about.  Her husband soon interrupts her languor:

"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently.  "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.  Have you read 'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard?"

"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

"Well, it's a fine book and everybody ought to read it.  The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged.  It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."

Vacancy--intellectual, moral--in society's upper crust: the theme of the book.  Gatsby shouldn't have wanted in.  I put an exclamation mark next to

[Gatsby] took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray.  While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue.  Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.  "It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.

and another next to narrator Nick Carraway's final judgment:

I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.  It was all very careless and confused.  They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .

One of the qualities of the book is the way in which this sharp verdict is rendered within a dusky glow of disappointment and wistful longing for something genuine and better.  Of one of the anonymous and forgotten attendees of one of Gatsby's summer parties, Fitzgerald writes: "Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration  of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face."  

Politico goes to "northeastern Minnesota"

In the long-ago of my carefree bachelorhood, I spent a fair amount of time in Minneapolis's Warehouse District, where I was impressed with the evident wide learning of a bartender I knew.  He talked fluently on almost any topic, including arcane ones, but then one day he started in on something I knew about and, though he talked just as easily and authoritatively, he was all wrong, and I began to consider the possibility that he was full of shit about everything.  I had a similar sensation when reading this Politico story on Trump's recent visit to Duluth.  It's all about Trump's prospects in Minnesota, especially in the 8th congressional district, which is anchored by Duluth.  The authors, Christopher Cadelago and David Siders, write:

If Trump can flip Minnesota in 2020, he will need to sustain large majorities on northeastern Minnesota's Iron Range, including in the 8th Congressional District, which presents a rare pickup opportunity for the GOP this year . . . .

I'm a pretty avid consumer of political journalism, and I look at Politico almost every day.  If nothing else, it seems as if it's a decent source for "conventional wisdom," but the above snippet displays  innocence of Minnesota geography and politics.  For one thing, it assumes that the 8th Congressional District is all within the Iron Range when of course the opposite is true.  Further, Duluth and the Iron Range towns are the population centers of St. Louis County, which Hillary Clinton carried by a double-digit margin.  So it makes little sense to speak of Trump sustainirng large majorities in northeastern Minnesota: he lost northeastern Minnesota, and not just by a little.  He did, however, carry the 8th Congressional District, which includes St. Louis County, by about 15 points.  He was able to do that because the district stretches southerly to the northern exurbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as westward to encompass a bulbous swatch of central Minnesota--the state's geographic center is in the southwesterly part of the district, near Brainerd--and it's these areas that are home to the Republican voters who went overwhelmingly for Trump.  

A map of the district (from the Wikipedia article) is shown above.  If you divide its area into equal thirds with two east-west lines, the most southerly sector--hardly "northeastern Minnesota"--is overwhelmingly Republican.   It abuts the 6th Congressional District, which was for years represented by the execrable Michele Bachmann, and is continuous with the 6th  in culture and politics.  Lots of snowmobiles, 4-wheelers, and guns per capita.  Not very many dental offices, Caribou shops, or institutions of higher education.  It's this area that makes the district a candidate for a Republican pickup, and where Trump, to flip Minnesota, would "need to sustain large majorities."  

Remounting the hobby horse: the electoral college is bad every day of the year

Have I ever mentioned that I hate the electoral college?  Yes, I have, like here, here, here, here . . . . 

And I have skirmished in the public press with the college's benighted defenders, such as D.J. Tice, of the Star Tribune newspaper's editorial page.  Him.  Me.

Today I want to call attention to a hardy perennial of Tice's argument, one he highlighted in "The Electoral College Still Gets My Vote":

The Electoral College, by giving states, as distinct polities, a role in choosing presidents, forces politicians to concern themselves with appealing to a broad coalition of concerns across America.  

Under a pure popular vote system, running up one's vote totals in small but loyal regions and narrow demographic groups would be a smart politician's single-minded objective.  There would be little strategic sense in broadening one's message to pursue a wider appeal. 

But when a candidate has to win separate contests inside the borders of numerous states to prevail, he or she is forced to break out of the partisan stronghold and seek support in the opposition's backyard.

At the time, I wrote, in response:

I wonder whether Tice thinks that what he describes here is what Donald Trump did.  If not, his analysis is divorced from reality, right?

It seems obvious to me that Trump did not seek broad support and that his campaign was targeted narrowly at white working class voters who, happily for him, are pretty heavily concentrated across a swatch of "swing states" running along the Great Lakes, from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin.  These "distinct polities," as Tice calls them, are not really distinct.  Trump was able to eke out narrow victories in several of them with a single demographic strategy, because the boundaries between them are artificial.

Suppose California were divided in two by an east-west line drawn somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay.  Clinton would then have won an additional two electoral votes, and, in the word according to Tice, she would have earned them, because she would have appealed to another "distinct polity."  Is it necessary to explain patiently why this is stupid?

Thinking about it now, the described division of California would create "distinct polities" that actually are distinct, since the state is the country's leading agricultural producer as well as home to two great but quite different urban centers--the interests of the people who live in Compton are quite distinct from those of the residents of Nob Hill.  The notion that the state line between Ohio and Michigan more meaningfully delineates "distinct polities" is implausible--as Trump showed by winning both those states while making no attempt to "seek support" outside of his base.  

But the point I want to make today is that, while the debate about the electoral college is generally reserved for election time, its distorting effects may be seen clearly in day-to-day governance.  Trump's approval rating, in the low 40s according to polls, may seem incompatible with his supporters' confidence that he will be re-elected.  But he very well could be.  He won election with only 46 percent of the vote (to his opponent's 48), so he hasn't fallen off much.  Among the substantially more than half who disapprove, how many live in New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, or California?  It's a vital question, because, on Election Day, thousands and thousands of them don't have a vote--they are meaningless "extras," ciphers, third-string touchdown scorers in the fourth quarter of a game that was over before half time.  The only game that counts is being played on another field, which also explains, in case you are wondering, why in a "democracy" the Trump administration feels free to "double down" on wildly unpopular policies, such as separating migrant children from their parents and holding them in cages. 

Trump is not responsive to the views of "the American people."  He is responsive to his base, which is the heart of both his electoral strategy and his governing strategy.  So D.J. Tice  is off by 180 degrees.  The electoral college did not force Trump to "seek support in the opposition's backyard."  It permitted him to say Fuck You to everyone hanging out in that yard--during the election campaign and every day that he's president.

 

Bloomsday, 2018

June 16, Bloomsday, so-called because the action of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904.  One of the leading characters, Leopold Bloom, spends the day wandering the streets of his hometown in order to stay away from his house, where he knows his wife, Molly, has scheduled an assignation with Blazes Boylan, a concert manager.  The novel seems better each time one reads it, which is fortunate, since on first perusal most mortals are lost, lost.  Three Monkeys Online has collected the thoughts of fifty writers on Joyce, here.  I will highlight the following, from Salman Rushdie on Ulysses:

You never hear people say that there is so much humor in the book, that the characters are so lively or that the theme--Stephen Daedalus in search of his lost father and Bloom looking for his lost child--is so moving.  To me it was moving, in the first place.

It's possible to overlook, or to forget, though Rushdie seems not to have, that the Blooms lost a young son over ten years ago, and, while Leopold has never gotten over it, his sadness has elevated his character and in some substantial way made him more humane and tolerant.  No cuckold in literature is more resigned or beloved.  When he and Stephen finally meet up late in the evening at Bella Cohen's brothel, after which Bloom takes him to his house and makes him cocoa . . . Rushdie's right, it's very moving.  It's also the first novel I ever read in which the protagonist sniffs his toe jam and takes a dump, which reminds me of the following notable passage in the novel I'm reading now (Roth's Sabbath's Theater):

In the morning, after a leisurely bath in Debby's tub, he took a wonderful crap in her toilet--satisfying stools easily urged forth, density, real dimension, so unlike the sickbed stuff that, on an ordinary day, streamed intermittently out of him because of the agitating action of Voltaren.  He bequeathed onto the bathroom a big, trenchant barnyard bouquet that filled him with enthusiasm.  The robust road again!  I have a mistress!  He felt as overcome and nonsensical as Emma Bovary out riding with Rodolphe.  In the masterpieces they're always killing themselves when they commit adultery.  He wanted to kill himself when he couldn't.

Joyce might have meant more to Roth than, say, Anna Karenina.  Happy Bloomsday.

Jeff Sessions: the hat, the hermeneutics

 

In "200 journalism clichés--and counting" the Washington Post takes up a topic of interest to me.  I'm glad it's not just a list, for the explanations and side snark are more than half the fun.

Needless to say (then don't say it)

Suffice it to say (if it suffices, then just say it) 

Opens/offers a rare window (unless it is a real window that is in fact unusual)

Outside the box (describes creative thinking--with a cliché)

Many (196) more.  I see that "thoughtful people"--which is, or used to be, a favorite of someone responsible for editorial writing at the Minneapolis Star Tribune--doesn't make the list.  I think it's what you say when you don't have an argument with which to support your policy preference.  Just attribute the preference to an imagined deep thinker who probably dresses in tweeds and smokes a pipe.  

But maybe it's time to devote some attention to the clichés, not of journalists, but of journalism consumers.  I'd like to nominate, "This is not who we are," often spoken as: "This is NOT who WE are."  It's got some miles on it but has been used a lot, really a lot, in the past couple of weeks, in connection with the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents at our southern border.  Since it is what we are in fact doing, I guess it is who we are.  Why does that not count as an unanswerable rebuttal?  I suppose the cliché is an emotional version of, "The policy goes against our principles"--but, in that case, aren't we just extending to ourselves a benefit that we deny to everyone else?  The English and the French and the governments of "shithole countries" we judge by their actions, but when we're judged by ours--well, "it's not who we are."  It seems that the answer to the question of who we are is: people who ignore the principles we love to lecture on.  

Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, isn't shy about owning the appalling policy.  He saw fit today to remind some of his kindhearted evangelical friends of Romans, chapter 13.  I'm guessing the part he likes best goes:

For rulers are not a terror to good contact, but to bad.  Would you have no fear of him who is in authority?  Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good.  But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.  

But from St. Paul esteeming the Roman authorities it does not necessarily follow that we must all similarly esteem all things Trump.  By such logic, the American colonists should have knuckled under to British rule, slavery should not have been abolished, and Martin Luther King should have obeyed Jim Crow laws.

Also, I've never said it before, so in case I have the big one in my sleep tonight I want to put it out there now:  though the competition is formidable, no one has ever looked dumber in one of those MAGA baseball caps than Jeff Sessions.  Even though he fills every hole in that band at the back, only his ears stop the cap from from falling to his shoulders, and his ears are far enough down the side so that the brim teeters over his eyes.  Compared to Sessions in a MAGA cap, Michael Dukakis wearing the helmet while peering out of the tank turret looked as good as George Bush in full flight gear pontificating beneath the Mission Accomplished sign, and even white Republican men got a sexual thrill from that.

The former Walmart, now decorated with murals praising President Trump and used to warehouse kids taken from their parents, is an apt monument to our time. 

Trump considers Muhammad Ali for a pardon

There's plenty about our president that's alarming, but I prefer to focus on those aspects of his incompetence that are merely, or mostly, just humorous--for example, his floating the name Muhammad Ali as someone he's considering for a presidential pardon.  After winning the heavyweight championship in 1964, when the Vietnam War was starting to heat up, Ali in 1966 claimed conscientious objector status, and also rather famously declared, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.  They never called me nigger."  His CO application was rejected by the Louisville, Kentucky, draft board, and Ali was eventually convicted of violating Selective Service laws, whereupon he was stripped of his title and had his license to box revoked.  In 1971, however, the Supreme Court, in Clay v United States, unanimously overturned the conviction.  An interesting history of the case may be read here.  Its four year route to the Supremes cost Ali four years of what would have been the prime of his boxing career, when he was in his late 20s.  

There are layers to the absurdity of Trump blathering about pardoning Ali.  The first layer is that he doesn't need a pardon, since the Supreme Court's verdict reversed his conviction more than 45 years ago.  A statement put out by a lawyer for Ali's estate said:

We appreciate President Trump's sentiment, but a pardon is unnecessary.  The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction of Muhammad Ali in a unanimous decision in 1971.  There is no conviction from which a pardon is needed.  

The second layer of absurdity is that, judging by his vilification of Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who silently kneel during the playing of the anthem, Trump should revile Ali for his comparatively militant protest.  But here is Trump, in his own words, explaining why he was considering Ali for an (unneeded) pardon:  "He was not very popular then, his memory is very popular now.  I'm thinking of [pardoning him] very seriously."  

Say, what?  The reason Ali "was not very popular then" is the same reason Colin Kaepernick is not very popular now.  To say nothing of the fact that the exercise of the pardon power should not depend on the president's estimation of a subject's current popularity.  Good grief!  We live in a democracy of more than 300 million people and the man who was most recently elected president cannot open his mouth without beclowning himself.  

 

Anthony Bourdain, 1956-2018

 

Though a longtime subscriber to The New Yorker, I never saw "Don't Eat Before Reading This," Anthony Bourdain's article on working in Manhattan restaurants that was published under "Annals of Gastronomy" in the issue of April 19, 1999.  He died by his own hand this morning, age 61, so he was already into his 40s back then and no one had ever heard of him.  The New Yorker article formed the scaffolding for Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which came out the next year, and he was off.  From what I can tell, his young adulthood, except for the restaurant work, is mainly a tale of heroin addiction, a solid excuse for having some "missing years" on your resume. 

I became a fan of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on the Travel Channel.  It ran from 2005 to 2012.  People who know him as a "celebrity chef" might be surprised to learn that the show was on the Travel Channel, not the Food Network, but for a lot of fans the attraction was the show's travelogue aspect.  Yes, he ate the food, but vicariously going places and experiencing new things--not just the food, which you can't taste through the TV--kept me tuning in.  Oh, also the host's telegenic charm and caustic intelligence.  A recurring word in the tributes that are flooding the Internet is curiosity.  Where one is trained to expect condemnation or condescension, you got from him simple questions:  what makes you happy? what do you like to eat?  And the door would open instead of get kicked shut.

The above YouTube clip is from an episode of No Reservations wherein he is visiting the Inuit.  From a boat, they shoot a seal out on the ice, drag it across the ice back to the boat, haul it home across the water, spread a tarp on the kitchen floor and get after it with good knives and their hands--that simple, and of course blood everywhere, bowls of it, spattered chins.  The only "side" is dessert, blackberries rolled in blubber.  As the honored guest, Anthony is offered the delicacy of an eyeball, and if you listen carefully you'll hear the instructions he receives from the woman who has just cut a slit for him in the membrane: "Suck it like a nipple."  He does and, though it's not a part of the clip, I believe I remember him concluding that it was nowhere near as odious as a Chicken McNugget. 

People like me at home, watching TV while young children sleep and imagining that at least someone like Anthony Bourdain is living life all the way up, and then he does himself in.  No one guesses what others are enduring, or trying to.

Words for limericks

My thoughts returned to the diction of the "Full Frontal" hostess when actress Minnie Driver tweeted: "That was the wrong word for Samantha Bee to have used.  But mostly because (to paraphrase the French) Ivanka has neither the warmth nor the depth."

My own meager appendix to yesterday's news concerns the way in which the word in question has something like a poetic effect that is, I think, a cousin to what English teachers call onomatopoeia.  You know about this if you somehow managed to stay awake while the teacher was boring the crap out of everyone by woodenly, slavishly making check points next to bulleted items in the printout of the day's "learning objectives."  There are words for sounds, and of course words make sounds too, and when the sound the word makes imitates the sound the word is for, that's onomatopoeia.  I was bored myself, but I believe that's right, and, if it is, examples include: sizzle, whisper, and plop.  It's a favorite device of kiddie literature, as seen, for example, in the opening to The Little Engine that Could:

Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff.  Ding-dong, ding-dong.  The little train rumbled over the tracks....

Little kids love that. I wonder whether it plays a role in language acquisition.  Once you know how to read, the shine is gone, but before that there is magic in the way the words make the same sound as the train.

Then there are other words, not for sounds, where there is a correspondence between the thing the word stands for and the sound it makes.  I think an example might be "prim."  Doesn't this seem right in an almost inexplicable way?  Something about the single syllable, the short-i sound, and the way in which you close your mouth--purse your lips--to make the opening and closing sounds.  All that speaks of constriction, and constriction is close to what is signified by the word and its associations--stiffly proper, over-proper, an arguable excess of propriety, narrow, cold, uptight, emotionless but efficient.  Prim.

Ivanka Trump is prim.  Samantha Bee is not, which is why she had it in her to apply to Ivanka that bad word whose very sound suggests blunt, ugly force and contempt.  You barely open your mouth to say "prim" and you never shut it to say what Samantha said.  Your tongue gets involved, and the closing t is like spitting, the opposite of constriction.  Reading over what I just wrote, it seems apt that I settled unconsciously on the rhyming adjective "blunt."  Maybe I should get to work on a limerick.  

Summer of '72

 

I remember once reading somewhere an article by someone in which the proposition was advanced that modern people of a certain age are less connected to their youthful selves than was formerly the case, because not only have they been changed by age but the pace of change has resulted in the disappearance of the world in which they were young.  Their youth is gone, as is the world in which they were youthful, and these facts work together to leave them gray and heavyset and stranded on one side of a wide river that can't be forded, even in the mind.  And this wasn't the case for an American reaching the age of, say, 60, in, say, 1840--the world in which this person was young was pretty much the same world 40 or more years later.

Maybe there's something to this, but my own experience causes me to be skeptical.  We don't usually have what Minnesotans call "pop" in the house, but the other day at the grocery store I picked up some root beer, because I thought the kids might enjoy taking their nightly ice cream in the form of root beer floats on some of these summery nights.  Then yesterday, to reward myself for having pedaled the stationary bike for 45 minutes, I made myself a root beer float and sat down to watch the NBA playoff game.  When I tasted the root beer, I had a sudden and quite vivid memory of something that happened to me 46 years ago.  I had just gotten done playing in a baseball game.  My position was second base--this was the summer after eighth grade, I weighed perhaps 125 pounds, and that was the only position that I had the arm for.  After home games, several of us rode our bikes to the A&W root beer stand that was a couple blocks from the ballpark, and, drinking root beer out of quart-sized milk cartons, we'd talk over what had happened.  In this particular game, a key play had occurred in a late inning when the other team had runners on first and third base, and the runner on first broke with the pitch for second base.  Of course this is a routine strategy in games being contested by kids who are just old enough to be playing on regulation-sized ball diamonds under the actual rules of baseball. The idea is that, with guys on base, especially one on third, good things are apt to happen for the batting team if the team in the field starts throwing the ball around.  We were coached by older teens who played baseball for the high-school team and so had plays ourselves to defend against this common ploy.  On this night, the play we had on called for me to run toward second base as if I was going to take the throw from the catcher, whose name was--is--Terry Kubalak, and try to tag out the runner attempting to steal; but then, when almost to the base, I would cut in a couple of steps toward the pitcher's mound and take Terry's throw in front of the bag.  If the runner on third stayed put, fine, we'd concede second base to the stealing runner.  If, however, the runner on third broke for home, I could relay the ball back to Terry without being at all impeded by the kid sliding into second. Well, on this night the kid on third broke for home, I caught Terry's throw in front of the base and threw it back to him, the kid was out at home, and we won the game by a run or two.

I probably would have forgotten about all of this but for Terry, at the A&W, telling me about the play from his perspective while I swilled root beer.  "Geez, Eric," I remember him saying, "I didn't think your throw would ever get to me!"  Yes, that would be because it was probably the farthest I had to throw the ball all season--a little farther than the distance from second base to first, when trying to complete a double play, and I had to "put a little air" under those throws.  So you can imagine poor Terry, straddling home plate, listening to the footsteps of the runner coming home get louder and louder as my loopy throw arced lazily toward him.  But it got there in time, he tagged the kid out, pretty much snuffing out their threat, and we won the game.  All it took to bring it all happily back was the taste of root beer.

The above video is of Pete Rose crashing into Ray Fosse in a play that ended the 1970 All Star game.  It's a famous play in baseball history, and the game I described would have been played in the summer of 1972, so it could have been something for Terry to contemplate as my throw hovered in the air.

 

Index

The Harper's Index is a popular feature of the magazine.  It could as well be called "By the Numbers," since usually it is a surprising data point, or collection of data points, presented as a line or lines in a statistical abstract.  For example (actual entries in the Index):

Percentage of registered U.S. voters who say that Donald Trump is a good role model for young people: 29

Of Americans who said the same of Bill Clinton in 1998: 18

Average number of additional assaults in a city when it hosted a Trump campaign rally: 2.3

When it hosted a Hillary Clinton campaign rally: 0

Here's my offering for a new installment:

Number of Americans killed by Hurricane Katrina: 1,836

Number of people, including terrorists, killed in the 9/11 attacks: 2,996

Number of Americans killed in Iraq war (including killed in action and non-hostile): 4,424

Number of Americans killed in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria: 4,645

 

 

Samantha Bee and the c-word kerfuffle

 

I love Samantha Bee, but am willing to confess that she should have called Ivanka Trump a "feckless vacant airhead," which would have

1) been just as true; 

2) spared the above-pictured gentleman from spraining his wrists while clutching too tightly his pearls; and

3) not made it easy for Trumpists to deflect attention away from Bee's topic--the administration's godawful policy of separating kids from their parents at our southern border.