Eric The Blue

To laugh, or not to laugh

Sticking with the theme of our president, and not knowing whether to laugh at or be scared by his antics:

Yesterday, he tweeted:

Dow just broke 25,000. Tremendous news!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2019

And a year ago, in January, 2018, he tweeted:

Dow just crashes through 25,000. Congrats! Big cuts in unnecessary regulations continuing.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2018

So over the last twelve months the DJI was outperformed by my checking account--which did not, however, prevent the president of the United States from celebrating its surge. If he cuts even more regulations, maybe the market will crash through the 25,000 barrier sometime in 2020, too!

I think this is in the category of something everyone should be free to laugh about.  The president got confused, forgot, stumbled.  It could happen to anyone overdetermined to boast, and, as the topic isn't a grave one, we can enjoy the humor of the president participating in the same ignominy suffered by less elevated narcissists.  Possibly funny, but maybe scary, too, is today's contretemps relating to yesterday's congressional testimony in which, on topics ranging from election security to North Korea's nuclear weapons program, the heads of our intelligence agencies--FBI, CIA, DNI--kept contradicting the cheerful and widely reported proclamations of the president.  When Trump was asked today whether he had expressed his displeasure with the intelligence chiefs, he said he had, and that they had explained to him that they had been "misquoted" and that any alleged disagreement was "fake news."

Of course that's impossible.  The intelligence chiefs gave public testimony to Congress while under oath.  The session was broadcast live by news outlets, and extended excerpts were played on evening news shows.  The congressional website has a video of the hearing in addition to a link to a 42-page written summary of their testimony.  Under these circumstances, it's clearly impossible for the intelligence officials to have been "misquoted."  They wouldn't have claimed that something that can't be true was true.  The president did, however.  Is this funny?  More in the sense of "odd" than "haha," but more than either it's kind of disconcerting that someone with so much power is so untethered from reality as to be clueless about what lies might deceive and what lies just make him look immediately ridiculous.

It's been so cold here in Minneapolis that my kids' school has been cancelled every day this week.  I guess the "polar vortex," as it's called, has a grip on the entire Midwest, and the other evening, in Chicago, a performance of Hamilton was cancelled on account of the cold, causing some wit to remark, "Brrrr kills Hamilton again!" 

Ok, maybe not as good as the stock market bit, but Trump had the advantage of being accidentally funny.  It's always harder when you're actually trying.

The best medicine (laughter)

Our president is a fraud, for sure, and dangerous, so that being a citizen is like being in the audience for some absurdist play or movie, and feeling unsure about whether laughter or horror is the more appropriate response.  I lean toward laughter.  Not for any deep reason, it's just more pleasant.  Yesterday, maybe the day before, he tweeted:

Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019

Which raised the profile of this interview he gave during the campaign:

"When I talk about the Bible, it's very personal [so I'm not going to talk about it]."  LOL!  He wouldn't be able to tell you whether "the gospels" are part of the Old Testament or New.  He probably didn't know about the two parts till John Heilemann asked his question.  But it's great that biblical literacy is making a "turn back"!

It's also sort of amusing that the other interviewer, Mark Halperin, lost his job for behavior towards women that approximated the interviewee's self-described unknightly habits in this regard.  Interviewer fired by private employer, interviewee elected president of the United States.  Hahahahaha!

Not going to stop hating on the Electoral College

 

 

The above map shows the number of general election campaign events held in each state during the 2016 presidential race.  To qualify as an "event," at least one of the four top-of-the-ticket candidates--Trump, Pence, Clinton, Kaine--had to speak.  The count started on the day following the conclusion of the nominating conventions of the respective parties.  Here are some high-level observations:

• Twenty-four states were not visited by either campaign.
• Seven more were visited once.  (Almost all of these one-time events were in some sense artificial, like a rally in an airplane hangar during a refueling stop.  The Illinois event was held in a large park on the east bank of the Mississippi River, directly across from Davenport, Iowa, the third largest city in Iowa--it could more meaningfully be counted as the 22nd Iowa stop than the only one in Illinois.)
• The 31 states that were visited never or once include four of the five largest--California, Texas, New York, and Illinois--and are home to well over half the country's population.
• More than half the events were in just four states--Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
• Six states--adding Virginia and Michigan to the above four--received more than two-thirds of all visits.

I hope it's obvious that these observations tend to rebut things we hear from supporters of the Electoral College.  We are told, for example, that but for the College a few big states would get all the attention.  I doubt that's true, since it seems the same logic would require gubernatorial candidates in, say, Minnesota, never to leave the Twin Cities metro area, though in fact they crisscross the entire state.  If a vote is a vote is a vote is a vote, it makes sense to seek them everywhere, including in geographic areas where you know your opponent is preferred by most residents.

But suppose it were true.  Why should Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida get all the attention instead of California, Texas, New York, and Illinois?  Please explain why it's better that these states should be ignored and not those ones.  [Cue Jeopardy! theme song.]

In my experience, devotees of the College also have some fanciful notions about small states and "the real Americans" who live in them--as opposed, I guess, to the imposters residing in Boston, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area.  I'm not sure why a discussion of the Electoral College should so quickly elicit opinions about the virtues of small-town and rural Americans.  Maybe it's because the Electoral College, like the US Senate, overweighs their ballots and the idea is that that's okay, because they're better Americans than Californians and New Yorkers.  I don't know.  Take a look at the map again.  It's pretty clear that it isn't wildly divergent state populations that cause campaigns to target certain states and ignore others.  For the list of ignored states includes plenty of small ones--Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, both Dakotas, Arkansas, others.  They are all ignored equally along with California, New York, and Texas.  Meanwhile, New Hampshire and Iowa get all the attention they want and probably more.  

So this is obviously the "swing-state" phenomenon, a notable byproduct of the Electoral College.  We don't have national elections to choose the president.  The all-or-nothing allocation of electoral votes gives all the power to people who live in a few evenly divided states.  By "all the power" I mean all the power.  I have sometimes pointed out that in Wyoming about 230,000 voters determined the outcome of 3 electoral votes, while in California more than 13 million voters determined the outcome of 55 electoral votes.  If you do the arithmetic, it works out that in California there are around 240,000 ballots cast per electoral vote awarded, compared to fewer than 80,000 in Wyoming, and, according to some of us, that's a gob of spit on the principle of one-person, one-vote.  Actually, though, it's a lot worse than that.  Actually, the voters in both states are almost completely powerless.  If you are a Republican in California or a Democrat in Wyoming, it is impossible for your ballot to help your preferred candidate win a single electoral vote, and of course it's electoral votes that determine who becomes president.  If you are a California Democrat or a Wyoming Republican, the situation is hardly better, since your ballot is just one among a superfluity.  I'm sure this point is understood pretty well in California, where it happens that election law permits you to mail in your ballot as late as Election Day.  On the morning after the 2016 election, many people therefore were in the position of knowing that "the national election for president" had been close, that their ballot had not yet been counted--and that it wouldn't matter in the least if it never got counted, because it was just a useless extra vote for Clinton.

The effort to measure the distance between one-person, one-vote and the distortions wrought by the Electoral College resides at the intersection of political science and probability & statistics.  The calculation is very math-y, lots of variables, some of which are independent but many related to each other in varying degrees.  A quite technical discussion of the topic may be perused here.  The opening sentences of the article's abstract give the flavor:

In an election, voting power--the probability that a single vote is decisive--is affected by the rule for aggregating votes into a single outcome.  Voting power is important for studying political representation, fairness and strategy, and has been much discussed in political science.  Although power indexes are often considered as mathematical definitions, they ultimately depend on statistical models of voting.

As readers of FiveThirtyEight Blog will know, the result of the calculation is usually referred to as "the voter power index," which for presidential elections is "the relative likelihood that an individual voter in a state will determine the Electoral College winner."  The techie-ness of the lingo may tend to obscure the fact that what we're talking about is the relative weight of an individual ballot, depending upon the state in which it's cast.  In the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight gauged the voter power range to run from 4.8 down to under 0.1.  So, top to bottom, the relative power is different by a factor of more than 50--and about half the states are below 0.1.  

The above map is just a visual representation of the result of some complicated  calculations.  The campaigns and their strategists know what they're doing.  The votes of people living in around half the states don't matter at all.  Ignore them.  Concentrate all your efforts on the voters living in a handful of states who have all the power.  It's surprising to me that so many people are okay with this, and even rise to defend it, especially considering that a straightforward remedy is at hand.  I suspect my cynicism is inadequate for the times and that purely partisan considerations account for the controversy.  In any event, the National Popular Vote movement is a needed electoral reform.

Intense guilty pleasure

 

Unless caffeine and domestic macro-brews count, I lack experience with the famously addictive drugs, but I can't imagine they are a match for the sensation caused by waves of Schadenfreude coursing through your nervous system, every nerve ending eventually drowsing in the flood, such as might occur when, on the same day, Trump folds like a scared card player and his associate of forty years is indicted on seven counts.  A better man might resist, but I'm flesh and blood, and, besides, sympathy for Roger Stone is a waste of a finite resource.  Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute and an editor at The Atlantic, recalls foolishly accepting a FB friend request from Stone.  Later, when Joe Biden's son died of cancer, Ornstein wrote a sympathetic FB post in which he recounted how Biden, who had suffered a previous tragedy when his wife and young daughter were killed in a car accident, had been especially kind when the Ornsteins lost a child.  Stone responded to the post to opine that Biden's son deserved to suffer more.  God made him, says someone in Shakespeare, and therefore let him pass for a man.

Also, it would appear that Stone is too busy being a dick to read the care instructions for his golf shirts.

BuzzFeed story, if true, not as bad as what's known

One curiosity of the Trump age, to me anyway, relates to the public's reaction to news of Trump treachery.  It seems "off"--sometimes overdone, and then sometimes oddly muted. For example, last week, after BuzzFeed reported that Trump had directed Michael Cohen to lie to congressional investigators, the I-word was on the lips and in the tweets of every committed and nominal member of "the resistance"--and it wasn't confined to that demographic, either.  Then the Special Counsel's Office denied the accuracy of the report, and Trump was back to being snagged in the gills instead of flagellating with a barbed hook in his belly.

But while it's not established that Trump directed Cohen to lie, it is known that Cohen did indeed lie.  What did he lie about?  Lots of things, but including the Trump Organization's effort to close this big real estate deal in Moscow.  It's not the case, as Cohen previously testified, that the project died in its embryonic stages long ago.  According to both Cohen's new testimony and Rudy Giuliani, the project was alive and the licensing deal being negotiated during the 2016 presidential campaign (Cohen) and continuing up to Election Day in November (Giuliani).  If Trump had lost, Putin might by now be boxing away some stuff in preparation for his move to the penthouse suite.  But Trump won, which made it pretty hard to proceed.  

So during the presidential campaign Team Trump was negotiating a business deal with an adversarial power that would have enriched the candidate by tens of millions.  Meanwhile, the candidate was lying to the American people about it.  If there's one thing he said more often than that Mexico would pay for the wall, it's that he had no business interests in Russia.  It was a lie every time he said it.  Now put that together with his uniquely solicitous regard for Vladimir Putin.  President Obama is a feckless foreigner, NATO is superannuated, our allies "weak" and on the dole, the media depraved (but not Fox), the FBI and CIA compromised by their hatred of him, Carly Fiorina a horse face, "little Marco," "low energy Jeb," "lying Ted Cruz," "crooked Hillary," John McCain incompetent or he wouldn't have been captured, and on and on and on, everyone and everything an object of his contemptuous derision . . . except Putin, who is "a strong leader," "someone I respect and get along with," &c.  

People were flipping out about the uncorroborated BuzzFeed story but seem relatively sanguine about the history of Trump Tower Moscow, the damning outline of which is no longer much in dispute and which aligns, perhaps not legally and technically but broadly and colloquially, with what people mean when they pronounce the word "treason."  

Lunching with mom on King Day

Always think of my mom on the King holiday.  I worked downtown Minneapolis, in county government, so had the day off, and as she liked the city bustle we'd go for lunch and, later, I'd drink my seventh cup of coffee somewhere while she knocked around her favorite stores, like Talbot's.  She'd never buy anything unless it was at least 60% off--or had a sticker claiming it was 60% off.  She would brag about her bargains and my dad would observe that 60% off a million is 400,000, a lot for a sweater.  Frequently she had a coupon for lunch, one free with one paid, and she'd get irritated when of course her $4 lunch was the free one and we had to pay $10 for mine.  It was always cold.  One year I overstayed my welcome at a parking meter, or maybe failed to notice a sign restricting parking during a snow emergency.  Anyway, I discovered after we parted that my car was gone, and I spent the rest of the day at the Minneapolis impound lot with a hundred African American guys.  Apparently I was the only Norwegian in the city to have my car towed on the King holiday. 

In time my mom and dad began wintering in Arizona and the golden era of Martin Luther King holidays came to an end.  Now I can't even call her--got nothing to do but watch TV, the vice president on "one of those shows" comparing King to his boss and enlisting the civil rights leader in the fight for a wall: after all, both are seeking change "through the legislative process."

"Uff da," mom used to say.

 

In the Twitterverse

 

I had what for me qualify as a couple of brushes with fame yesterday, thanks to social media--Twitter, specifically. 

A few days ago, I was scrolling through my feed and I saw that someone named Fred Beukema had commented on something someone I follow had tweeted.  I know a Fred Beukema, just a guy like me here in south Minneapolis, with a job and kids about the age of mine, which is the main reason I know him at all: we used the same day care for awhile.  And here was someone with the unusual name of Fred Beukema commenting in an authoritative manner on the tweet of some prominent journalist I follow.  So I clicked on his photo and, sure enough, it was the Fred I know, right city, right job, and also, according to his Twitter bio, a 3-time Jeopardy champion.  Good enough!  Fred, you have a new follower.

That was around a week ago.  Yesterday, Fred tweets:  "Sincere Q: Does the Senate Maj Ldr have any choice on holding an impeachment trial? Or is it necessarily mandated if the House approves articles?"  My first thought was that obviously the Senate has to conduct a trial.  My second thought was that if a 3-time Jeopardy champion doesn't know, maybe it's not obvious.  So I looked into it--first, in the Constitution, where I was expecting to find, in the section describing impeachments, a sentence along the line of "The Senate shall try the impeached scoundrel in a New York minute . . . ."  But there isn't anything like that.  Closest thing is in Article 1, Section 3--

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.  When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation.  When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present . . .

--which, since having the sole power to do something doesn't mean it has to be done, would  not appear to force the hand of Mitch McConnell.  You understand what lies behind Fred's question.  If a trial is "required" only by traditions and norms, then it isn't actually required, because--Merrick Garland, for instance.

In digging around just a little more, however, I found that the Senate has rules describing what happens in impeachments, and these Senate rules governing impeachments are filled with "whensoever" and "shall," meaning I think that the answer to Fred's question is that McConnell can't prevent a trial.  By the time I'd found a link to these rules, no one had answered Fred very confidently, so I tweeted the link to him.  He liked it, especially the "shall"s.

That was in the forenoon.  Late in the afternoon, Chuck Todd, host of MTP Daily on MSNBC, interviewed Bob Bauer, who served as White House Counsel under President Obama.  In the interview, Bauer expressed the opinion that, if the Democratic House were to adopt Articles of Impeachment against President Trump, the Republican-controlled Senate could simply refuse to try the case.  I didn't see the interview, but I know roughly what Bauer said, because I follow Laurence Tribe on Twitter.  Tribe is one of the country's leading constitutional scholars.  It's not too much to say that he wrote the book on the subject--American Constitutional Law, which since 1950 has been cited more frequently than any other legal text.  Tribe is now 77, but twenty years ago he was frequently named as a likely pick for Supreme Court justice in the event there should be a vacancy during a Democratic administration.   He's taught at Harvard Law School for the last fifty years.  In a series of tweets, he expressed his opinion that the Constitution requires the Senate to try impeachment cases when an official such as the President is impeached in the House.

Well, I am unencumbered by a legal education, save what I had acquired earlier in the day by rooting around on the Internet for about a half hour trying to answer Fred's question, which was the very question at issue between Bauer and Tribe, and my findings, if that is what you want to call them, suggested that neither man was entirely correct.  I made bold to comment on this tweet of Tribe's:

You mean Article 1, Section 3: "The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments"? But does "shall have the power to try" = "shall try"?

— Eric Jorgenson (@EricMJorgenson) January 18, 2019

And I then added another tweet with the same link to the Senate rules I'd sent to Fred:

And there is this:https://t.co/DDhVBdkcGX

— Eric Jorgenson (@EricMJorgenson) January 19, 2019

About a half hour later, I received a notice from Twitter that Laurence Tribe had quoted my tweet in a new tweet of his!  Here it is:

See the Senate rules: https://t.co/VIiDeEZNoL

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) January 19, 2019

And that is how, within a few hours' time, I hobnobbed in the ether with

i. a 3-time Jeopardy champion; and

ii. arguably our country's preeminent constitutional lawyer and scholar. 

Now if I could beat my 8-year-old at Scattegories.  She's learned the art of filling up her card with adjectival and verbal phrases--like, if the letter is "G" and the category "reasons to be late," she'll write "got on wrong bus."  Things with wheels starting with R?  Red cars!  Competitive little twit had the nerve to complain about my answer: "Roadster."

T.S. Eliot reads Huck Finn

My fondness for the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does not exceed my hatred for the electoral college, but it's a competition, so I think the number of Mark Twain blog posts should rise to reflect the tussle in my mind.

Loving Huck Finn for one's own reasons, it's natural to wonder what really smart people think of the book.  I alluded here to Lionel Trilling's essay, a long except from which can be read online here.  But the "Finn crit" that I know of and like the most is an essay by T. S. Eliot, who is of course most famous as the modernist poet who wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," &c.  Eliot's essay may be read here.  I note, since it relates to my gripe with the obtuse crimes perpetrated against Huck Finn by mincing school boards, that Eliot, almost as an aside, observes at one point:

And the style of the book, which is the style of Huck, is what makes it a far more convincing indictment of slavery than the sensationalist propaganda of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

But what I like most about Eliot's essay is just that he seems an unlikely member of the fan club, and so distinguished as to ratify one's own enthusiasm.  He and Mark Twain were both raised in Missouri and there the resemblance ends.  Twain's father died when he was 11--an event that brought his childhood to an early, abrupt conclusion, for he almost immediately started working for money in order to help the family survive financially.  It's frequently been remarked--frequently and probably justly--that in this respect Twain's biography explains the evident preoccupation with childhood joys and traumas that characterizes his two most famous (and best) books.  The literature he invented is the first to use the American language in prose, for his predecessors--Melville, Hawthorne, Poe--wrote in a self-consciously literary style, as if they were Englishmen influenced by intellectuals on the European continent.  And then Twain:

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter.  That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.  That is nothing.  I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.  Aunt Polly--Tom's Aunt Polly, she is--and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book--which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.

The book is all-American: the language, the vernacular speech, the setting, the subject matter, the humor, the Mississippi, the fraudsters who prefigure televangelists and, alas, our current president.  Eliot, who grew up in St Louis, about a hundred miles downriver from Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, is an opposite type.  Maybe you catch a whiff of this in his explanation of why he came to Mark Twain only as an adult: his parents would not have set these "boys' books" before him out of fear that he'd acquire a premature taste for some of Huck's pleasures, like tobacco.  We can be sure that Twain's childhood reading was unsupervised, and he certainly did not go to Harvard, which is where Eliot's parents sent him.  He majored in philosophy and soon moved to Europe, studying on the continent and at Oxford before settling in London, where he became a director at the publishing firm of Faber & Faber.  During the same years of his life, Mark Twain was prospecting for precious metals in the west, piloting a Mississippi River steamboat (after serving an apprenticeship), and working as an itinerant journalist specializing in humor and satire, sometimes a coarse strain.  The poetry Eliot wrote, influenced by European symbolists and alluding copiously to everything in the humanities curriculum (as well as much that is too obscure to make it onto the syllabi), might but for chronology have provided some targets for Twain's satiric arrows. 

And yet here is this accessible, admiring, learned essay, full of insight, from the hand of T. S. Eliot on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one Missourian on another but so different: must be a big state (and country).

Clemson dines at the White House

Maybe it's because a stomach flu has been circulating in my household, but news accounts and pictures of the spread President Trump ordered up for the Clemson football team nearly set me off on another mad dash to the toilet.  The thought of those fast food hamburgers cooling within their cardboard containers, the grease soaking the buns and congealing on the way to the White House as the bright cheese performed its secret ministry on the filets-o-fish--well, it must have seemed to those guys like a very long time ago that they beat the crap out of the Crimson Tide.  I think the whispered message is that real men, of the kind who love Trump, aren't going to forgo their favorite all-American foods on account of what educated people say about what's good for you.  It's their version of "virtue signaling."  They're hard-line conservatives so no fruits, vegetables, or homilies from nutrition scholars!  In reading up on this subject on the Internet, I see that, according to Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager and co-author of Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency, the president's standard order at the Golden Arches is two Big Macs, two Filets-o-Fish, and a chocolate milk shake.  Since this is an approximately 2700 calorie package, it raised a few eyebrows, and Lewandowski, back pedaling a little, explained that Trump does not eat the buns. Is there anything these guys don't lie about?  Here is an amusing article by some "investigative journalists" reporting on what happened when they tried to consume our president's favorite order.  

One day Trump will die and go to Hell, where Satan, if he is moderately competent, will compel him to eat healthful food while some guy with horn-rimmed glasses and a PhD explains, with infinite patience, the virtues of the NATO alliance.  

Potpourri

 

I think the Cowboys' head coach and the Rams' head coach have exactly the same color hair.  Usually when that happens, the color is gray.  

Cruising around the Internet during lulls in the action, I came across an unusual sentence in the Wikipedia article on the art critic, Robert Hughes (pictured):

Hughes was married to his second wife, Victoria Whistler, a housewife from California, from 1981 until a divorce in 1996.

Apparently she was doing the housewifing thing when she met Robert?  His whole name is very manly--Robert Studley Forrest Hughes.  According to Wikipedia, the full name of his brother, Tom, a lawyer and "Liberal member of the Australian House of Representatives from 1963 to 1972," was Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes.  So it seems "Forrest" was good for two middle names but never the top choice, kind of like being the running mate for different presidential candidates.  If you are interested in art, search Robert Hughes at YouTube.  Even if you aren't, do it: you might find that you're more interested than you thought.

Trump, oh my god.  Working for the Russians out of the Oval Office would be worse than shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.  To be fair, the New York Times's article takes pains to point out that, in the view of the FBI, he could be an unwitting asset of the Kremlin, which seems

1) not as bad as being a witting one; and

2) consistent with his generalized cluelessness.

If you are one of these people who thinks being rich is a sign of competence, get over it.  More likely it's a sign that your dad was rich.  Trump is obviously sensitive about what his tax returns would reveal.  The benign explanation is  that they'd show his financial position today would be stronger if he had simply invested the millions his dad gave him in a conservative index fund and then partied away the last fifty years.  The dark end of the spectrum was being checked out by the FBI before the hand off to Mueller.

Our system places the fate of a corrupt president in the hands of his own party.  Trump's survival plan therefore is to maintain his support among Republicans.  So far, he's done that, and he's now done it for so long that it probably makes it easier to maintain that support into the  future.  It's one thing to admit you made a mistake yesterday.  It's quite another to admit you made a mistake  years ago and have  enthusiastically repeated it every day since, including yesterday.  Soon, though, this principle might be tested by really grave revelations.  Every new thing the public learns nudges the very worst possibilities farther along the way toward probable.  Trump himself presumably knows how bad the facts are, and for a long time now he's been acting as if they must be very bad indeed.  Democrats should resist the temptation to be gleeful.  They have to perform the oversight function of Congress--Republicans were supine for two years--but they should proceed methodically with their investigations, letting the facts speak for themselves.  Make it as easy as possible for Republicans to do the right thing.  It's too grave a matter for a pissing contest like is going on now over Trump's "wall," or whatever  he's currently calling it.  Maybe I'm pollyannish, but I think the Democrats have good people in key places who are up to the task--committee chairs like Nadler and Schiff in the House of Representatives and senators like Feinstein and Klobuchar.   Trump's vocabulary is so small that of necessity he says the same things over and over again, and one of them is, "We'll see what happens."  If  he survives until 2020, the quadrennial proclamation concerning how this is the most important election ever will finally be credible.

Huck Finn and the culture wars

Being interested in Mark Twain, I've been reading up on the Huck Finn wars.  In the American Library Association's list of the hundred books most often challenged or banned from school libraries or curricula in the 2000-2009 decade, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comes in at #14.  I think it's the best book in the top 20--sorry Harry Potter fans--and for sure it's the oldest. On the local front, about a year ago the school board in Duluth, Minnesota, made national and world news when it booted Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird from district classrooms, which should help Twain's masterpiece maintain it's ranking for 2010-2019, maybe even boost it into the top ten.  Here is the Washington Post article on the Duluth school board's decision, Minneapolis Star Tribune here, Duluth News Tribune here, and the UK's Telegraph here.

As far as I can tell, the dispute is pretty much between those who are offended by the book's language, especially the frequent use of the n-word, and, on the other side, those who think the language might be hurtful to some though the novel has compensating merits and anyway that's just the way people talked back then.  The head of the local branch of the NAACP in Duluth said the ban was "long overdue," since the book contains so much "oppressive language."  Conservatives generally regard the ban as an instance of liberal snowflakery.  Man up and read the book!--they're pro-Huck Finn to own the libs.

No one seems interested in the book as a work of literature.  It seems clear, too, that the people who decide what books may be read for school must be unfamiliar with everything about Huck Finn except that it frequently deploys the n-word.  If you read the book, only extreme obtuseness could prevent you from noticing that the author must be an ardent foe of slavery and the prevailing racist ethos of his day.  It's as if the n-word has achieved totemic status so that when pronounced, including by characters in novels, it blots out all context as well as the last traces of human intelligence.  School board members have to have an opinion about the book but can't spare the time to read it.

Here's something that happens toward the end of Huck Finn.  I guess the passage is "objectionable" and "hurtful"--anyway the n-word appears.  Jim has been sold back into slavery.  Huck learns that he's being held at a certain "one-horse plantation" that turns out to belong to some relatives of Tom Sawyer.  Tom is on his way to visit, but hasn't shown up on the steamboat yet, and the relatives have begun to worry.  Now Huck turns up on the property for the purpose of stealing Jim back out of slavery.  When Tom's Aunt Sally sees Huck, she thinks he's Tom Sawyer--she hasn't seen her nephew in years, maybe ever, so perceives only a white boy of about the right age.  Huck, conscious of his guilty purpose--stealing a slave and freeing him!--is not expecting such kindness.  He knows he's been mistaken for someone else and also that, considering his intentions, it's not in his interest to enlighten her.  They talk.

"Now I can have a good look at you: and laws-a-me, I've been hungry for it a many and many a time, all these long years, and it's come at last!  We been expecting you a couple of days and more.  What's kep' you?--boat get aground?"

"Yes'm--she--"

"Don't say yes'm--say Aunt Sally.  Where'd she get aground?"

I didn't rightly know what to say, because I didn't know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down.  But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up--from down towards Orleans.  That didn't help me much, though; for I didn't know the names of bars down that way.  I see I'd got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on--or-- Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out.

"It warn't the grounding--that didn't keep us back but a little.  We blowed out a cylinder-head."

"Good gracious! anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. . . ."

And she goes on a long jag that's apparently intended to persuade the boy that he shouldn't think a person can't get hurt in accidents of this kind, for she was once acquainted with someone who was injured in a similar mishap, and, now that she thinks about it, he had died when mortification set in.  She uses the word mortification more than once to indicate a medical condition.  If you were in eleventh grade, and the question was what does the author here reveal about the character of Aunt Sally, and how would you characterize said author's attitude toward her, wouldn't the answer be that he's shown her to be a fool and a bigot, and that he's more bitter about the second count than the first, although he likely thinks that the two are steady companions?  Regarding Huck's answer to the question about injuries, is there another instance in the world's literature of an author having loaded into fewer words a similar volume of satiric indignation?  And Aunt Sally just hurdles on by.  

It helps if you've read up to this point with intermittent attention.  For example, a few pages earlier Huck had debated with himself whether he should try to steal Jim off the plantation. His instinct is to do it, but he "knows" that would be "wrong"--stealing! against the law!--and he attributes his wicked inclinations to his poor upbringing and shoddy attendance record at Sunday school.  He almost decides against it, on moral and religious grounds, but finally determines to rescue Jim anyway and risk hell fire in the event he actually pulls it off.  Sunday School administrators, not the NAACP, should complain.

In the category of fake news . . .

 

I wonder whether Team Trump considers it a bad sign that Sarah Sanders goes on Fox News--Fox!--and, after being politely called a liar by the interviewer, starts raving about how the bad guys are coming, the bad guys are coming, by air, by land, by water, an invasion, coming at us from every direction, and she repeated: by air, by land, by water!  Paul Revere was comparatively reposed regarding the British.  It's so bad the president will address the nation tonight in a prime time televised speech from the Oval Office.  Kennedy did that to reveal that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba, Nixon did it to resign, and now the wicked brown people are coming by every conceivable means of conveyance.

There is no crisis at the southern border, unless you count kids being taken from their parents, and that isn't really a crisis, either, because, as the president's former chief of staff explained, "The children will be taken care of, put into foster care, whatever."  So no crisis.  Here are some facts regarding illegal immigration from Pew Research.  I'd highlight the one about the percentage--66%--of unauthorized immigrants who have been here for more than ten years.  That's mainly because they did not enter our country illegally--rather, they entered legally and have now overstayed.  It's frequently pointed out that illegal immigrants are less apt than the general population to commit crimes.  This seems a sensitive topic with the MAGA crowd, probably because it suggests that the supposedly depraved immigrants are better than us natives, though of course the real reason must be that they are more scared and therefore prudent.  The dispute between Sarah Sanders and Fox interviewer Chris Wallace related to the number of "known or suspected terrorists" detained at the southern border by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) last year.  She said it was nearly 4,000.  Wallace said, no, according to CBP they were all detained at airports.  This is when she started ranting like Paul Revere on Ritalin.  As is so often the case, the truth turns out to be between the extremes: apparently, CBP detained, in the first half of 2018, six (6) migrants at the southern border whose names appeared on a terrorist watch list. (Forty-one were detained at the Canadian border.) The other 3,900-some were at airports.  This reminds me of the time the basketball player Hot Rod Hundley, asked to name his biggest thrill in the game, replied it would have to be the night he and Elgin Baylor combined to score 81 points in a Lakers win.  The difference between Hundley and Sanders is that, on further questioning, Hundley freely admitted that Baylor scored 79 of them.  

A few years ago, after immigration reform had fallen apart in the Congress, President Obama issued some executive orders relating to immigration that also caused Republicans  to lose their shit (as hip younger people say).  A constitutional crisis!  An overreach of executive authority!  Obama asked the major networks for TV time for an address in which he'd talk like calm dad, and was declined on the ground that his purpose was "overtly political."  But I guess they're cool with Trump tonight?  Maybe they make a distinction between being "overtly political" (not allowed) and "lying your ass off" (which is okay).  As John Kelly would say, whatever.  

Speaking regionally

So one good thing about the government shut down, at least for those of us who find regional speech variations "interesting" and even charming, and have worried that they'd be wiped out by a usurping dialect of National Media Monochrome, so that in time we'll all sound like cable news anchors:

Where I live (Minnesota) we "call in sick" to work, but I've noticed that the national media talkers, who live in the northeast, have been reporting on how TSA workers and other feds are now "calling off" or "calling out," and I see  by the above map compiled by Grammar Girl that the phrase you deploy indeed depends on where you live.  The shades of meaning, or emphasis, suggested by the different prepositions are for some of us language dweebs a fun source for speculation.  I think I like "call in" the least, possibly because to my Minnesota ear it's familiar and so the least arresting, but isn't the "in" for the place you call kind of general and dull?  Where else would you call?  The broad formulation must be responsible for "call in sick," since there are conceivably other reasons you'd place the call.  But if you "call out" or "call off," the preposition alone carries the meaning, or at least suggests it:  I'm off, out for the day, (sick).  To me it seems sort of stodgy to "call in sick," like you're embarrassed about it, feeling guilty, and therefore have to supply the reason, which is one that no one can argue with: sickness.  Whereas "calling out" and "calling off" elide the reason and simply announce that you won't be there.  It's comparatively casual, almost aggressive: I won't be there, none of your business why.  If we think of pretty widely held notions about regional differences in character types, it's fitting that it's here in the Midwest, Lake Wobegone Land, where people should feel the need to "call in sick."  

These little prepositions, many of them only a letter different from each other, and denoting all sorts of esoteric meanings, have got to be the despair of adult English-language learners.  Like "in" and "on"--a letter different, to indicate different locations, which is bad enough but you could deal with it.  However, I have been writing here "on" the subject of regional speech differences.  What is the logic requiring "on"?  I mean, why is it "on" instead of "in"?  I haven't a clue.  I suspect there is no logic to it and you just have to memorize the idiomatic expressions.  How the idioms attained their status is beyond me.

As a parent of kids who not long ago were making rapid advances in language acquisition, I've noticed that they obviously first learn rules and then eventually master the  exceptions.  For example, every little kid spends some time referring to their two foots before eventually figuring out that they have a right and left foot but two feet.  First the regular forms, then the irregular exceptions.  This business with the prepositions is like an infinite field of irregularity and it seems odd to me that I haven't noticed kids making errors with them before they start getting them right.  A local business, owned by recent immigrants, boasts on their truck of having "the best tacos on the Twin Cities."  I don't blame them!  Yet it's not a mistake I remember hearing one of my native-speaking 3-year-olds make.  Another mystery.

My cat throws up

 

That's our cat, Didzy.  He is such a good boy!  There is, however, another side to the domestic tranquility--

Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy cuz of you. . . .

that Graham Nash and I associate with content felines.  Didzy's sitting on a piece of handiwork meant to cover the radiator that supplies the heat in the renovated "master suite" of my nearly hundred-year-old house.  So warm air emanates from those vents he's sitting on, which is why he spends about ten hours a day there.  Alas, he also throws up a lot, and, while he knows where to piss and shit, he will not be bothered to remove himself somewhere to vomit.  If he'd just hop down, there's nothing for yards and yards but hardwood floors and easy clean up, but, no, he stays right where he is and barfs down those vents.  Sometimes in the night, through the mist of light sleep or a dream, I hear him kacking, and in the morning when I wake up and start walking dully around I'll suddenly remember.  My first thought then is that I should have been more careful, I might have stepped in it already, which has happened, and for a conceptual moment in time I'll be relieved to find that my feet are unsullied.  Then I remember the vents.  Sure enough, that's where the puddle is, silky strings of coagulating vomit, little stalactites of cat fur coated with the slime of his digestive tract, tapering downward from the source into the inaccessible nether region of some contractor's notion of faux modernity.  

While cleaning I almost always think of one of my favorite "Car Talk" calls.  "Car Talk" was the NPR show in which brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi ("Click" and "Clack," as they called themselves), auto mechanics with a shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took calls from people who had car troubles.  Of course many callers thought they were being jacked around by their mechanic (almost always the brothers confirmed their suspicions).  Others were women who doubted the wisdom of their husbands and boyfriends on matters related to automobiles (almost always the brothers agreed that the man was nuts and attributed his wacky ideas to state laws requiring men to have opinions about cars).  I think the idea for the show came from their customers, many of them graduate students at nearby Harvard: predictably, budding scholars of "comparative literature" or "art history" are at a complete loss about what to do about their failing cars.  The brothers were witty and had a lot of fun with the callers before, in the end, according to my dad, who knows a lot about cars, dispensing solid diagnoses and sound advice.  When stumped, they'd say so before advancing a theory of the case "unencumbered by rationality."

One day I'm listening and a guy calls in because his big dog, riding up front in the passenger seat, had been overcome with car sickness and vomited all over the dash, quite a quantity, some of it seeping down into the heat vents.  Back at home he'd cleaned as best he could, but he noticed that whenever he ran the heat, the car became redolent of warmed over dog vomit. This is just the kind of call the brothers loved, and they had a lot of fun with the caller--much laughter and hilarity, also one possible solution after another advanced and then dismissed until, in the end, they advised the guy to endure the remaining weeks of winter and then sell the car in early summer.  There's no help for some things.

Watching Fox

 

When Aretha Franklin died, Fox News ran the following graphic on one of their high-powered news shows:

The problem with this is that the pictured woman is not Aretha Franklin.  It's Patti LaBelle.  I flipped over to Fox the other day because I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sort of hot, and they hardly ever stop airing pictures of her, but wouldn't you know they were taking a break to drum up opposition to legalized marijuana!  Here's a graphic from the segment:

My conclusion is that no one who works at Fox News knows anything about getting high, and I think we can all agree that, in a journalist or anyone, that's a species of ignorance we must honor.  Also, to people who work at Fox, African-American ladies all look alike, especially if they're "singers."  Maybe you're less enthusiastic about that kind of ignorance, but let's just grow up and realize that devoted Fox viewers appreciate it, and there's no reason a news show shouldn't give them what they want.

Here's a picture of Alexandria.  She's a Democratic-Socialist so I bet she only uses a spoon for eating Captain Crunch when she's already gotten where she wants to be without the aid of cutlery.

Notes on Twain

 

Perhaps on account of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded annually to such figures as Steve Martin, Ellen DeGeneres, and David Letterman--most recent honoree is Julia Louis-Dreyfus--Twain is frequently regarded as "a humorist," which, while not plain wrong, is off course by a mile or more.  Dickens isn't generally thought of as "an English humorist."  A truer estimate of Twain's just place in American culture was set out by his friend, the novelist William Dean Howells, who in My Mark Twain wrote: "Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all--sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."

I just found out that if you google "Mark Twain Prize," the graphic right below the first return, for the Wikipedia article, is "People also ask" and includes the question: "Is Mark Twain related to Shania Twain?"  That would be a No.  The author's "Twain" is the pen name of Samuel Clemens and the singer's is for the man her mother married after divorcing her father.  So neither one is a Twain!  Mariel Hemingway, however, is the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, who, backing up Howells, said that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."  Keep all this in mind if you ever go on Jeopardy!

An accepted opinion regarding Twain's career holds that he started out as a sunny humorist, became progressively more cynical and pessimistic, and that his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was composed in midlife, when the scale was briefly in uneasy equilibrium.  An alternate view might be that the darkness and savagery were always present, but, as he got older, more famous and successful, he was less inclined to bury it, or disguise it, and in his greatest work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the strands oscillate, Huck and Jim's raft trip down the mystic Mississippi being interrupted by the perversions of "the damned human race" every time they have to tie up and go ashore.

Twain's savagery isn't usually highlighted, perhaps because it was often directed against Christianity, at least as practiced in America, post-Civil War.  Though he himself was a participant in the money-making frenzy, his disdain for it--he was responsible for the term "Gilded Age"--was bottomless when piety got mixed in with the rapacious acquisitiveness, as witnessed by his 1901 "updated" version of The Battle Hymn of the Republic:

In a sordid slime harmonious, Greed was born in yonder ditch;
With a longing in his bosom--for other's goods an itch;
Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich;
Our God is marching on.

The reader of Huck Finn will detect similar notes--in Huck's assessment of the religious training he receives while living with the Widow Douglas, in Judge Thatcher's theft of Huck's money (abetted by Huck's indifference).  But it's true that in the work of the mature but not old Mark Twain, the one who created Huckleberry Finn, the ugliness, filtered through the sensibility of the boy narrator, seems bearable.  What to say about that sensibility?  The critic Lionel Trilling loved the following passage, from the beginning of the book, when Huck is still hanging with Tom Sawyer and the boys, before he teams up with the Widow's slave.  They've snuck out at night to pursue their adventures, a recurring event in the "boys' books":

Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hill-top, we looked away down into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling, where there was sick folks, may be; and the stars over us was sparkling ever so fine; and down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad, and awful still and grand.  We went down the hill and found Jo Harper, Ben Rogers, and two or three more of the boys, hid in the old tanyard.  So we unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two mile and a half, to the big scar on the hillside, and went ashore.

I think this is the first hint in the book of Mark Twain's conception of the mystic Mississippi, and it's felt by Huck--doesn't seem likely that Tom or Ben or one of the unnamed others, had any of them been narrating, would ever have thought to include the "ever so fine" or "awful still and grand."  The detail attracting Trilling's attention, however, was the way that Huck connects the few twinkling lights to townspeople up in the middle of the night keeping a sick watch.  When Huck and Jim later meet up with human folly along the shore of the river, the details come to us through Huck's consciousness, humane, sympathetic, decent, pure, accepting, calm despite often reporting himself to be "all in a sweat"--invariably over the  troubles of others and including those of murderers, grifters, runaway slaves.  The chronology isn't right, but Huck Finn might have grown up to be Walt Whitman, the other most plausible candidate for "the Lincoln of our literature."