Eric The Blue

Not entirely a clown show

 

 

 

There's been a lot of commentary about Michael Cohen's big day with the House Oversight Committee yesterday, and it's unlikely I've had any reactions that have yet to be expressed on cable tv, but, since I haven't heard them expressed, here goes. . . .

You know the joke about, "Yes, Mrs. Lincoln, but other than that, how did you enjoy the play?"  Well, along that line, I'm not at all surprised that the legal beagles and other talking heads on tv are talking about Trump's alleged criminal conduct, whether it means he will be impeached or possibly indicted, etc., etc., all of which is roughly analogous to the assassination of Mrs. Lincoln's husband.  But the play was terrible, too--I mean, there are small bad things in addition to the big bad things.  For example, according to Cohen, Trump once donated a portrait of himself for a charity auction, then planted "bidders" at the auction who, supplied with Trump money, bid up the price of the portrait so that it would raise more money than any other donated item.  It's not a crime, or an impeachable offense, but what kind of sad sack does that?  Even his "charity" is a form of improvisational grifting and self-promotion.  Among the many threatening letters Cohen wrote on Trump's behalf were the ones to administrators of schools he (Trump) attended, warning of severe consequences if they were ever to release any of his academic records, including his SAT scores.  This is of a piece with Trump's steady bad habit of harping on the IQ of friends and foes, a topic evidently of great import (and sensitivity) to him.  Maxine Waters is "a low IQ person." His cabinet has "one of the highest IQs of any cabinet ever assembled."  Black people are "too stupid" to vote for him.  And so on & so forth.  

It seems safe to conclude, from the letters Cohen was assigned to write to school administrators, that Trump himself was not at the top of the class, or within hailing distance of the right-hand edge of the bell curve distribution for standardized measurements of intellectual ability.  I doubt Trump voters care but I wonder if they care that Trump cares because it's obvious that he does.

It wasn't a good day for Trump's party, either.  The GOP members of the committee exhibited no interest in anything except Cohen's history as a liar.  But it's like prosecuting the mob: everyone who knows the score is corrupt--nuns and school principles don't work there.  Moreover, Cohen's supposed depravity raises the question of why Trump hired him and, over the course of ten years, advanced him within the organization. ("I only hire the best people," Trump says.)  According to US intelligence agencies, Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election and is still at it today, but the Trump administration and congressional Republicans don't appear even mildly interested.  The varieties of their incompetence are beclouded by their thoroughgoing buffoonery.  The way that white Americans like to attribute their opinions on racial topics to "black friends" of theirs has deservedly achieved the status of a hackneyed joke, so ridiculous is it, but yesterday, Mark Meadows, R-Carolina, fed the old joke steroids and interjected it into a congressional debate.  Cohen's opening statement, which included the charge that Trump is a racist, had circulated the night before his testimony, so at the appropriate time Meadows was ready and produced from behind the curtain an obscure Trump Co. employee, an African American lady, who stepped out into the lit room and shifted her weight nervously as Meadows in effect identified her as another of the "black friends" who show I'm right and you're wrong.  An embarrassing, pathetic stunt.  What a dope.

Did anyone shine?  Yes, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the bogey-girl of right-wing fever dreams!  See the clip of her interrogation of the witness above. Unlike the bloviating old white men well known to seasoned CSPAN viewers, she was crisp, poised, prepared, concise, and effective--like the smart girl in school who's also not above doing her homework.  The answer to the question "why does x hate y" is often "because x knows y is better than him."  The congressional questioners get their turn in order of seniority, so Ocasio-Cortez was near the very end, when the headlining questions have been animatedly pursued by long-term incumbents.  The usual thing is for eager back-benchers to follow their elders' example and go over the same trodden ground again, maybe waving their arms more to prove they belong.  Instead, Ocasio-Cortez was ready with untried lines of questioning which she pursued briskly to their conclusions, staying within her allotted time and eliciting from Cohen new charges of criminality as well as the names of individuals who could corroborate his story.  Here she is conducting a similarly effective interview at a previous congressional hearing--she's 29 and a walking, talking, thinking, laughing, ebullient rebuttal to the familiar plaint about how the younger generation has gone all to hell.

 

 

 

[North] American stories: Alice Munro's "Boys and Girls"

 

The geographic home of Alice Munro's fiction is southwestern Ontario, Canada, the plug of land nearly surrounded by three of the Great Lakes--by Lake Huron on the north and west, by Lake Erie on the south, and, on the east, by the western end of Lake Ontario.  The metropolis of Toronto sits like a sentinel near the northwest corner of Lake Ontario, and a line drawn southwesterly from Toronto to Windsor, next to Detroit, Michigan, passes through or near several pretty substantial towns--Cambridge, Kitchener, London.  But north of that line--Munro territory--is thinly populated farm country.  She was born in 1931 at Wingham, sometimes, as in "Boys and Girls," called in her fiction Jubilee; it's about 55 miles northwest of Kitchener.  Her father was a fox farmer.  The first sentence of "Boys and Girls" is, "My father was a fox farmer."  Those collecting autobiographical tidbits might also notice that the name of the girl narrator's younger brother, Laird, seems a version of the author's birth name, Alice Laidlaw.  

"Boys and Girls" was one of the stories in her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968.  If you know one thing about Munro, it's probably that she recently won the Nobel Prize--in 2013, when she was getting too old and frail to spend the cash award.  Though I'm not a reliable guide on these things, my sense is that her Nobel-worthy reputation rests more on stories from the middle and latter part of her career.  There is a view that she just kept getting better and better.  Her stories tended to get longer, and began exhibiting what reviewers and scholars have called "complex architecture," including preeminently big jumps in time as a story of maybe 40 or more pages shows a character at different stages in life but not in the order of young-older-old.  The themes and settings changed, too.  Later stories are less apt to be set in and around Jubilee, and more apt to concern older women alone in the world.  The successful author may have become a bit more cosmopolitan.  The earlier stories are almost always set in rural and small-town southwestern Ontario.  They are not anything like "technically innovative."  A recurring theme, or maybe I should say "situation," is--feeling the inadequacy of labels but here goes--female coming-of-age tale.  "Boys and Girls" is one of these.

The title: sounds like something a kindergarten teacher would say several times a day, with a faint accent of myth--"male and female He created them."  The second sentence is an amplification of the first, the declaration that the narrator's father is a fox farmer:

That is, he raised silver foxes, in pens; and in the fall and early winter, when their furs were prime, he killed them and skinned them and sold their pelts to the Hudson's Bay Company or the Montreal Fur Traders.

Munro's prose can go on and on without ever really calling attention to itself, but it seems hard to ignore here the emphatic fall of monosyllabic verbs.  You want to know about fox farming?  Killed--skinned--sold.  The narrator doesn't let on that she is aware of any irony, but she proceeds to describe the calendars depicting "treacherous northern rivers" and "plumed adventurers" that these fur companies gave her father.  The calendars were hung by the kitchen door.  Meanwhile in the whitewashed cellar, on a work table illuminated by a bare hundred-watt bulb, her father skinned the foxes, removing the pelt so that it was inside-out, then tediously scraped away "little clotted webs of blood vessels, the bubbles of fat."  The slippery and rat-like fox carcasses were put in a sack and buried at the dump.  Once, Henry Bailey, the playful hired man, had taken a swing at the narrator with a full sack.  Her mother had not liked that.  She tells us that her mother disliked the pelting operation, not without reason, for the whole house smelled of fox--which smell, however, the narrator found "reassuringly seasonal, like the smell of oranges and pine needles."

The story at first may not seem to be about anything more than the details of the fox farm operation.  The narrator describes them with a kind of subdued Dickensian relish--where the foxes lived, how their cages were arranged, how they were fed, what they were fed, the chores she performed, her superiority as a farmhand to her younger brother Laird.  All the details convey her keen interest and love, but it wouldn't be right to say we learn of this only through indirection or inference.  Her desire to please her father, a somewhat mysterious man, is intense:

Whatever thoughts and stories my father had were private, and I was shy of him and would never ask him questions.  Nevertheless I worked willingly under his eyes, and with a feeling of pride.  One time a feed salesman came down into the pens to talk to him and my father said, "Like to have you meet my new hired man."  I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure.

"Could of fooled me," said the salesman.  "I thought it was only a girl."

And a page later this blunt, soaring assessment:

It seemed to me that work in the house was endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing; work done out of doors, and in my father's service, was ritualistically important.

Ritualistically.  In my father's service.  These phrases, evocative of religious sublimity and sacred rites, seem oddly elevated for the topic of fox farming.  I think maybe they're supposed to seem odd, like the lying calendar pictures that contrast with killed-skinned-sold, the table lit by the bare bulb, and the bag filled with slippery carcasses that gets buried at the dump.  The drama in the largely incident-free story relates to the resolution of these opposing things.

One of the things the foxes eat is horsemeat.  When neighbors have a horse no longer useful for farm work, they sell it cheaply to the narrator's father, who kills it, butchers it, feeds it to the foxes.  When a horse is available, it makes sense to buy it now, even if the need isn't immediate, since it doesn't cost much to keep the horse alive for a week or a month or half a season.  And so it happens that for awhile the narrator's family is keeping two horses.  Notwithstanding their short life expectancies, they name them: the male is called Mack and the mare they call Flora.  Mack is old and easy to handle whereas Flora is spirited--it seems she was available not on account of her age but because a farmer had gotten a tractor.  I said the story is largely incident-free, but toward the end these two horses get killed.  It's practically the only two things that happen in the story.  All the rest is description and incidental detail--atmospherics, you might say.  The narrator sees the first horse get killed and plays a part two weeks later when the second is killed.  

Mack is the first to go.  One day the narrator guesses what's going to happen and she hustles herself and Laird into the barn, so that they can watch.  Laird looks out through a crack between boards and the narrator finds a knothole "that gave me the view I wanted--a corner of the barnyard, the gate, part of the field," and then:

My father came in sight carrying the gun.  Henry was leading Mack by the halter.  He dropped it and took out his cigarette papers and tobacco; he rolled cigarettes for my father and himself.  While this was going on Mack nosed around in the old, dead grass along the fence.  Then my father opened the gate and they took Mack through.  Henry led Mack away from the path to a patch of ground and they talked together, not loud enough for us to hear.  Mack again began searching for a mouthful of fresh grass, which was not to be found.  My father walked away in a straight line, and stopped at a short distance which seemed to suit him.  Henry was walking away from Mack too, but sideways, still negligently holding on to the halter.  My father raised the gun and Mack looked up as if he had noticed something and my father shot him.

I set this down because I know for sure I can't adequately describe it.  The first sentence establishes the narrator's telescopic view through the knothole and suggests a peculiar intensity of vision.  What she'll see is lifted out of ordinary experience.  Things begin to happen--things that have a strong ritualistic aspect, like the men preparing to smoke.  Their movements and actions function to accomplish the task safely, but, through the knothole, they register in her consciousness like a liturgy.  Though she had before ascribed the phrase ritualistically important to her father's work, the ritual she now observes repels her.  You can tell from the way it naturally occurs to her to describe what she sees.  Laird would not apply "negligently" to Henry's grip on the halter. She thinks her father stops short "at a distance which seemed to suit him" because, to her, it seems like more negligence.  And the horse nosing around for a tuft of grass in the seconds before being shot.

Two weeks later it's Flora's turn.  This time the narrator has no intention of watching.  Once is enough.  In the days since Mack was shot, she has reflected, while combing her hair in a mirror and wondering whether she'd be pretty, on what she'd seen, "the easy, practiced way my father raised the gun."  She and her brother are playing up by the house when they hear wild whinnying down by the barn.  They run to see what's happening.  The spirited Flora has broken away from Henry, gotten out of the barn, and is running free in their large, L-shaped field.  The gate at the far end is open. Her father yells for her to race to the end of the field and shut the gate.  She runs very fast, ahead of Laird, and gets to the gate before Flora, and also before her father gets to the bend in the L to see.  Instead of shutting the gate, she opens it wide and the horse escapes.  She can't explain to herself why she does this.  It's a useless gesture, worse than useless since Flora won't really get away and it's a waste of her busy father's time to have to go after her in the truck.  Sure enough, that afternoon the truck rolls back into the yard with a big tarpaulin spread over the back.  At dinner, in the house, over bowls of steaming and overcooked vegetables, Laird tells what she'd done and she cries.  Her father makes "a curt sound of disgust" but excuses her with the same dismissive phrase that the feed salesman had used--"She's only a girl."  The last line of the story is: 

I didn't protest that, even in my heart.  Maybe it was true.

Probably "Boys and Girls" is not among Munro's very best stories, but it's been attractive to me ever since I first had to read it in a college class on the short story.  I wish now I could remember the form in which the teacher got the text for us.  I don't recall ever seeing "Boys and Girls" in an anthology.  Maybe he just made copies for us out of his own edition of Dance of the Happy Shades.  It seems that even way back in the late 70s there would have been other Munro stories to assign, and that he must therefore have really wanted us to read "Boys and Girls."  One possible reason, because I think it applies to me now and so it could have applied to him then, is that loving her stories makes you curious about her, and one senses that in "Boys and Girls" the fictive draperies might not be too heavily embroidered.  In a detail that seems extraneous, the narrator goes with a friend to a show in Jubilee in the interval between the two horse shootings.  She reports having a good time, and the name of the friend, Judy Canova, is dropped into the story, the only mention of this girl, and I kind of wonder if young Alice Laidlaw didn't have a friend with a similar name with whom she went to shows in Wingham, the closest town to the fox farm on which she grew up in southwestern Ontario.  

Finish the game, ladies!

 

Twice this winter I have while flipping through the channels stumbled on a Gopher women's basketball game, early second half, Gophers with what is sometimes called "a working lead," and both times I watched to the end. 

First time was about a month ago.  They were in Lincoln playing the Cornhuskers.  About half way through the fourth quarter, the "working lead" had been cut to six, and Nebraska then scored the last 12 points of the game to win by six.

Second time was day before yesterday.  They were playing Maryland, the first place team in the conference, on Maryland's court.  When I started watching, the game was in the third quarter, and the Gophers were ahead, 50-something to 30-something.  Even though the Gophers were on a 6-game winning streak, this was unexpected, and I settled in to watch.  With (I believe) 1:17 left to play, the Gophers' lead was down to seven, but they had the ball and a full shot clock.  Maryland then scored nine unanswered points to win the game.  

No missed free throws.  In the last 70 seconds or so, the Gophers turned the ball over three times and Maryland scored four baskets, one a 3-pointer.  The tying basket came with four seconds left.  The Gophers' inbounds pass was then intercepted and the winning basket scored at the buzzer.  

Looking at the box score, I see that the minutes played for the five Gopher starters were 36, 36, 37, 39, and 40.  (The game is 40 minutes.)  The first of the three late turnovers was an offensive foul called against one of the Gophers' best players, a guard who's a confident ballhandler.  Since it was her fifth foul, she had to leave the game, and both bench players who had been in the game--Coach Lindsay Whalen only played seven kids--are post players.  One of them checked back in and the collapse continued.  

On most days I'm not in charge of the main TV set around here, so I sometimes "watch" games on the ESPN game tracker, and have been intrigued by the "win probability" meter that goes up and down as the game progresses.  I see now that in this game the Gophers' win probability with about a minute to go stood at 99.8%.  That it was under 100 suggests to me that it's really quite sophisticated and not a gimmick.

Finally, a documented instance of election fraud!

When Republicans wail about election fraud (which is frequently), their complaint almost always concerns voter impersonation at the polling place--that's the only cheating, after all, that would be averted by voter ID laws, which is their solution for the nonexistent problem.  I say "nonexistent" because there are a lot of reasons to suppose voter impersonation is too exceedingly rare and inconsequential to merit a remedy.

1. Common sense.  Voter impersonation could add one vote at a time to the tally of the cheating candidate.  How does that actually sway the result?  You'd need organized teams of fraudsters descending on polling places, all of them knowing whom to impersonate, and some way of knowing that the voter being impersonated wasn't going to vote.  No one has ever explained the details of how the cheating Democrats, who according to legend routinely organize themselves into circular firing squads, manage to pull it off.

2. Republicans occasionally acknowledge the above difficulty by asserting, never with any evidence, that these squadrons of cheaters have in fact invaded polling places and, with their illegal ballots, put the Democratic candidate over the top.  For example, President Trump, who in 2016 lost New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes, has alleged that "bus loads" of illegal voters crossed into the Granite State from Massachusetts on Election Day to vote for Hillary Clinton.  The claim is so implausible as to be laughable and of course there's no evidence it happened--Trump's just bleating.  If there were 50 illegal voters per bus, there would have to have been about 60 buses--another caravan!  Where did the buses start from?  Who paid for them?  Where did they stop?  How many illegal ballots were cast at what polling places?  The whole tale is preposterous.

3. The testimony of election officials and other experts, who, with one voice, assert that voter impersonation isn't an issue.  Court records indicate that the number of cases is minuscule, and, of those few that do arise, the most prevalent underlying explanation is never organized and corrupt intent but, rather, the simple carelessness or confusion of a lone careless or confused person.  The Republican response to this objection is essentially the children's joke about pink elephants who hide in cherry trees.  That there is no evidence it happens proves how cunning they are!

4. Possibly my favorite: after Trump's election, when Republicans had their fingers on all the levers of power, they organized a commission to investigate this gigantic problem.  The commission soon disbanded without uncovering any evidence that the problem exists.  There have been no efforts to rev up a new investigation.  It's almost like this fraud is just a phantom to invoke whenever Republicans lose a close election--and voter ID laws, the solution for the invisible problem, a tool to suppress the vote!  

We do now know, however, of at least one documented case of election fraud from the just completed midterm election.  It didn't fit the Republican scheme in several significant respects.  First, it didn't involve voter impersonation, and was of a sufficient scale to change the outcome of a fairly close election.  Second, the fraud, evidence of which is clearly visible in the tabulated results, has now been confirmed by the testimony of principles.  And third, it was Republicans who were cheating.

The race in question was for the congressional seat from North Carolina's ninth district.  The Republican, Mark Harris, "won" by 905 votes out of more than 282,000 cast.  There was in the immediate aftermath of the election some murmuring about what are politely referred to as "irregularities," in this case "election workers" who showed up at people's houses to collect their absentee ballots that otherwise would have been mailed in.  (In North Carolina, the names of people who have requested an absentee ballot is a public record.)  There are nine counties within the district, and reports of these personal visits to collect ballots came from two of them--Robeson and Bladen.  Journalists investigating the "irregularity" easily discovered clear evidence of fraud.  For example, in the other seven counties the percentage range of requested absentee ballots that were not returned ran from a low of 12% to a high of 27%.  But in Bladen County the figure was 40% and in Robeson County it was 62%.  Of people in Robeson County who requested an absentee ballot to mail in, 38% were registered Democrats, 22% were registered Republicans, and the rest were independents.  Despite the Democrats' advantage in registration, Harris, the Republican, won 61% of the returned absentee ballots.  Robeson was the only county in the district in which Harris got a majority of the mailed-in absentee votes.

Testimony in an ongoing hearing about the election has made it quite evident what was going on.  The Harris campaign employed an operative--his name is McCrae Dowless--who ran an absentee ballot scam in two of the district's nine counties.  Campaign workers (not "election workers") would show up at houses where a voter had requested an absentee ballot. The worker would offer to collect the ballot.  Back at headquarters, ballots marked for Harris would be falsely witnessed and then, in small batches at post offices near the voter's home, mailed in to be counted.  Ballots marked for the Democrat didn't go anywhere.  That's why there was such a high rate of unreturned absentee ballots in those two counties.

Dowless has asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.  The lower-level workers who did the grunt work have corroborated the details of how the fraud worked.  No one testified that the candidate, Harris, was aware of the scam--until, yesterday, the candidate's own son testified that he had warned his father that Dowless was crooked.  Today, Harris himself testified, and called for a new election.  Apparently that's what will happen, but to me it seems like a pretty meager penalty--no penalty at all, actually.  Cheat and "win."  If you don't get caught, great.  If you do get caught, the "penalty" is that you then have to try and win a fair election--what you would have had to do in the first place had you never perpetrated a fraud against democracy. 

American stories: Richard Ford's "Rock Springs"

 

The title refers to the town in southwest Wyoming.  The narrator, his girlfriend, his young daughter (who is not the girlfriend's daughter), and a pet dog are on their way to Florida from Kalispell, Montana, when their stolen car breaks down just outside of Rock Springs.  The main incidents of the story occur at a trailer park on the edge of town and then later at the Ramada Inn of Rock Springs.  The trailer park adjoins a gold mine and was built by the mining company for the temporary workers who have come to Rock Springs for the high wages.   Besides the trailer park, the mine and its wandering workers are responsible for a bustling prostitution trade in town--on the cab ride from the trailer park to the Ramada Inn the cab driver complains about it and mentions that he almost had ignored the narrator's phone call, so sure was he that it was more prostitution-related business.  The story, only 26 pages of pretty big print long, is "about" a lot of things, one being the American West circa 1985.  

Here is the first paragraph:

Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn't turn me in to the police.  I had managed to scrape with the law in Kalispell over several bad checks--which is a prison crime in Montana.  And I knew Edna was already looking at her cards and thinking about a move, since it wasn't the first time I'd been in law scrapes in my life.  She herself had already had her own troubles, losing her kids and keeping her ex-husband, Danny, from breaking in her house and stealing her things while she was at work, which was really why I had moved in in the first place, that and needing to give my little daughter, Cheryl, a better shake in things.

The very smooth first-person narration is one of Ford's calling cards and is employed to great effect also in his most famous works, the series of novels about Frank Bascombe--The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank with You.  Here, notice how much information is passed, effortlessly, about certain kinds of people living a certain kind of life in a certain place. Later, on their way to Florida by way of Rock Springs, Edna will prepare cocktails in paper cups on the ledge made by the open door of the glovebox, eliciting from the narrator the casual observation that, while writing bad checks will land you in jail in Montana, consuming liquor on the front seat of your moving automobile is perfectly legal.  The West!

But does the narrator's easy flow of words reveal more than he intends?  (More than the narrator intends, not more than Richard Ford intends!)  For example, the "which" in the last sentence refers to the reason he moved in with Edna, but, regarding the specifics: is the idea that his presence is protection against the marauding ex while she's away at work? or is the attraction that she is away at work--that is, has a job--something he currently lacks (therefore, perhaps, the bad checks)? or might it be both, one explaining the advantage on her side and the other, his?  There's a lot going on, I think.  The ex, Danny, is no prize, that's clear, but it appears that a court might have determined that he is a more fit parent than Edna--a lot fitter, since she has "lost" the children.  Yet the narrator advances, as a reason for moving in with her, giving his daughter "a better shake in things."  It doesn't seem wise.  The narrator has at least a vague sense of this, for the story's second paragraph commences:

I don't know what was between Edna and me, just beached by the same tides when you got down to it.

The themes of the American West, constricted lives, life decisions that seem poor but almost necessary, indifferent or neglectful parenting, children made vulnerable by their stumbling parents--all adumbrated in the deceptively casual opening.  I think you could also say that the story is about what is often called The American Dream.  Does the phrase ever refer to anything beyond baubles, luxury possessions, financial ease?  In "Rock Springs," it seems a fraud.  The car the narrator steals, off an ophthalmologist's parking lot in Whitefish, Montana, is a cranberry-colored Mercedes, but his considerable troubles deepen when the luxury vehicle breaks down next to a literal gold mine that has spawned a huge trailer park and thriving local prostitution industry.  

It's dusk.  The narrator pushes the stolen Mercedes into the trees as Edna steers.  When he can't push the car farther, he leaves it to sink on its tires in the soft sand and heads into the trailer park to call for a cab to bring them into Rock Springs.  The interview he has with the trailer park resident amounts to an interlude, ambiguous and affecting.

He climbs the portable wooden steps leading up to the door of the first lighted trailer home.  His knock is answered by an attractive, 60ish African American woman--the narrator calls her a Negro.  Though her husband is at work at the mine, she invites him in to make his call.  She is very polite, and, not wanting to arouse suspicion, he lies politely about the details of his predicament.  Though he of course has no intention of calling a tow truck, he looks up towing companies in the phone book--it's the 1980s!--she gives him so that he can remember a name and tell the cab driver a plausible lie that might also allay suspicion.  It's more pleasant than he expected in the trailer home.  It looks comfortable, lived in, there is the smell of a nice dinner cooking on the stove, kid toys on the floor--the narrator compares it favorably in his mind to other trailer homes he's known, another detail: he has known trailer homes.  When he expresses admiration, she observes that the home is owned by the company.  Not everything is well here, either.  The toys are for a young boy who lurks behind the woman, not speaking, because, it develops, he can't: "special needs," we say.  His father, the lady's son, is deceased, and his mother abandoned him, so grandma and grandpa have stepped into the breach, at least temporarily.  They are from Rockford, Illinois, and are going to be in Rock Springs for three months, making good money at the mine before moving back to Illinois.  You piece this all together from the conversation they have, and the effect is like a variation on a theme in a musical work.  It's all there: struggle, trouble, vulnerable children, instability, rootlessness, everyone from somewhere else, a meeting in Rock Springs between the small-time crook from Kalispell and the dignified woman from Rockford, she looking forward to a return home and him on his way to Florida, trying to stay a step ahead of the law and the prospect of doing so dimming.  The stolen cranberry Mercedes sunk in sandy soil among trees off the roadway will be discovered in the morning.

When the narrator gets back to the road, the cab is already there and Edna and his daughter and their little dog are waiting.  The cab driver's complaint about local social conditions includes that motel rooms in the boom town are exorbitant and he offers to take them some place reasonable.  The narrator, however, opts for the Ramada Inn, on the theory that the police always check the dives first and, anyway, it's been a hard day and he wants to be comfortable.  Once in their room, the story moves quickly to its conclusion.  The exhausted little girl falls asleep even though she hasn't eaten all day.  Tired of motels and stolen broken cars,  Edna announces her intention to buy a Greyhound ticket back to Kalispell in the morning.  The narrator gently remonstrates with her--it seems he's crushed, or would be, if he weren't so accustomed to disappointment.  But he has to go on.  He'll need a car tomorrow, so a new crime has to be committed.  When it's very late, and Edna has fallen asleep on the last night of their life together, he leaves the room to scout out the cars parked in the lot, and the story ends with another--hard to describe, but evocative, modulated expression of yearning, similar to what happened at the trailer home, the details mirroring his own but suggesting circumstances less unhappy:

I walked over to a car, a Pontiac with Ohio tags, one of the ones with bundles and suitcases strapped to the top and a lot more in the trunk, by the way it was riding.  I looked inside the driver's window.  There were maps and paperback books and sunglasses and the little plastic holders for cans that hang on the window wells.  And in the back there were kids' toys and some pillows and a cat box with a cat sitting in it staring up at me like I was the face of the moon.  It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car.  Nothing seemed surprising, nothing different.  Though I had a funny sensation at that moment and turned and looked up at the windows along the back of the motel.  All were dark except two.  Mine and another one.  And I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn?  Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared?  Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him?  Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him?  Would you think he had a daughter?  Would you think he was anybody like you?

Not roofing but dying

The picture is of the novelist, short story writer, and memoirist Donald Antrim, a hale looking fellow with a good resume, which includes, for example, a MacArthur "genius fellowship," a no-strings attached grant of $625,000 paid over five years--$31,250 quarterly for twenty quarters--to . . . geniuses, so that they can stay hard at work, I guess, without having to worry over much about how to cover expenses. Despite evidence of being among the fit and fair, Antrim has in the current New Yorker a "personal history" piece, "Everywhere and Nowhere," that opens with him crawling on his belly on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, soiling the front of his clothes and scraping his hands and knees as he navigates to the roof's edge for the tentative purpose of hurtling himself over.  He made several approaches, also multiple trips up and down the fire escape, in full view of affluent neighbors enjoying, on an April Friday in 2006, after-work cocktails on the private decks of adjoining apartment buildings.  Antrim later imagines these neighbors explaining to themselves the curious sight.  Possibly the antic motions of an energetic but not very efficient work man engaged in maintenance or roof repair, something along that line?  The scene is like a real-life variation on a poem by Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning":

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Just want to point out (because it tends to refute popular notions) that the language of this poem is simple, simple: of 77 words, 67 have one syllable, and it feels instructive to list the other ten--waving (2), drowning (2), moaning (2), larking, further, always, nobody.  People think poetry should rhyme but they probably aren't expecting "he's dead . . ./They said."  

Happily, Antrim's piece ends with him checking himself into Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he must have gotten help--because he lived to tell the story, quite a harrowing read: again, "Everywhere and Nowhere," subtitled "A journey through suicide."

Picking a scab

Some keep asking what can beat Trump? He lost by over 4 million votes. He got in b/c of voter suppression swinging 80k votes in a few states. How do you beat him? Fight voter suppression, turn out votes, don’t write off any states & fight him in the South.

— Rev. Dr. Barber (@RevDrBarber) February 10, 2019

Though disinclined to nitpick a fellow traveler, I think the above tweet, by Rev. Wlliam J. Barber II, indicates that the result of the 2016 presidential election is making its way from history toward mythic tale, the purpose being to inculcate a lesson on the magnitude of the heist.  Trump didn't lose "by over 4 million votes"; the final popular vote tally was 65,853,514 for Clinton and 62,984,828 for Trump, a difference of just under 3 million.  In percentage terms, Clinton won 48.2 percent of all votes to 46.1 percent for Trump.  Close, but not that close--the precise facts are bad enough.  Everyone says, "The polls were off!"  Not by very much.  On Election Eve, the RealClearPolitics average of the various polling organizations' last measurement put Clinton at +3.3 and she "won" by 2.1.  

Let's elaborate just a bit on Rev. Barber's claim about Trump prevailing on account of "voter suppression swinging 80k votes in a few states."  I think the few states he's referring to must be Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won, by a total of about 78,000 ballots--45,000, 11,000, and 22,000 in those three states, respectively.  Not to be all schoolmarmish about it, but "suppressing" votes is one thing and "swinging" them another.  If in these three states 40,000 Trump votes had gone ("swung") instead to Clinton, in the ratio of 4:1:2, then she would have won all three by a little more than W won Florida in 2000.  That would have given her 278 electoral votes, leaving 260 for Trump.

The results in these states were so close--Clinton, in percentage terms, won the national vote by three times Trump's margin in Pennsylvania--that any successful effort to suppress voting in Democratic strongholds might have made Trump president.  But Rev. Barber's tweet doesn't supply any evidence.  For what it's worth, I just checked, and in 2016 Clinton received about 27,000 more votes in Philadelphia County than Obama had in 2012.  Trump got about 17,000 more than Romney had, so Clinton's raw vote margin in the big and overwhelmingly Democratic county was 10,000 more than Obama's four years earlier.

Rev. Barber is a North Carolinian and it's possible perhaps to sense a dollop of geographic patriotism in his tweet.  He thinks his friends, neighbors, and parishioners can make the difference so leaves out the names of the Great Lakes states that were Trump's three narrowest wins and the key to his victory in the Electoral College.  Meanwhile, he urges Democrats to fight for every state, especially in the South.  I'd be for all of that, except it's also true that the goal is to win, resources are finite, and the all-or-nothing allocation of electoral votes makes it foolish to fight for Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee unless Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are secure (along with Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas).

Of course it shouldn't be necessary to reason thus.  But thanks to the Electoral College we must.  I might have mentioned once before how much I hate it.  Have the College's defenders ever said one true thing about it?  The last thing I'll say here is that D.J. Tice, editor of the Star Tribune's opinion section, has asserted--behind a pay wall but I think that's it--that the College, by boosting the amplitude of the winner's margin, brings "closure" to a close election.  This is in the first place an odd notion--the country is like a  psychological patient who, if her desired state of somnolence is to be maintained, must by artifice be distracted from perceiving the true state of affairs.   It's obvious, however, that running the ballots through a Rube Goldberg machine does not yield anything like a predictably enhancing result.  In 1968, Nixon beat Humphrey by less than one percent of the popular vote and by 110 electoral votes.  In 2016, Clinton beat Trump by more than two percent of the popular vote, but, instead of winning by 110 or more electoral votes, she lost by 74.  That the evident randomness of the College's machinations does not advance the cause of "closure" isn't  the only, or preeminent, problem--on that, I bet Rev. Barber and I concur.

Moyn versus Pinker on the general drift of things

Are things getting better or worse?  Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist, linguist, and science popularizer, thinks they're getting better, so much so that in his new book, Enlightenment Now, he evinces impatience with the determinedly dower.  Meanwhile, Samuel Moyn, reviewing Enlightenment Now, evinces impatience with Pinker's good cheer, which he thinks is too simple, too complacent, and too unenlightened.  I think Moyn has the better of it, but maybe it's a case of me resembling my bête noire, Trump, who is famous for agreeing with whoever he heard from last. 

Speaking of Trump, perhaps a point in Moyn's favor concerns how he (Trump) is president (and Mike Pence vice president) of a continental nation of well over 300 million people, whereas, at the time of our Revolution, a population of under four million included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison &c. It seems we are not living through a golden age of political leadership.  On the other hand, Hamilton was killed in a pistol duel fought against the sitting vice president, Aaron Burr, who suffered no legal consequences.  On yet another hand, it's not as if gunfire in the streets is unheard of in America today.  Earlier this week, here in Minneapolis, a security guard with a permit to carry a handgun was cut off on his commute by a school bus, so he made use of the slow-and-go traffic to get out of his car and shoot five times through the windshield of the bus, striking the driver in the arm and grazing his head--the only passenger, an 8-year-old, was not hit.  Of course, Pinker might point out that the bus driver received medical care superior to what would have been available to any founding father.  John Adams's daughter, Nabby, died of metastatic breast cancer after having lived through a primeval mastectomy performed without anesthesia, which hadn't yet been invented.  According to Wikipedia:

The instruments used during the surgery consisted of a large fork with a pair of six-inch prongs sharpened to a needle point, a wooden-handled razor, a small oven filled with heated coals, and a thick iron spatula. . . .

Click on the link if you're actually curious about the use to which the surgeon put these instruments.  Poor Nabby Adams soon died anyway, but on her death bed she would have been surprised to learn that in less than 150 years the possibility that humans would so despoil the earth's environment that it might no longer be able to sustain her kind, so that everyone would die, had become a distinct possibility.  

My conclusion, with which I think Moyn might agree, is that we look for meaning in things and discover patterns and trends that explain something about how our minds work but nothing else.  We think we're the measure of everything and that our history must be headed toward something, either Heaven or Hell, but it's really just one thing after another, good after bad and bad followed by good, enough of both so that the ruddy and the discouraged can both make a case and the considerable gray is mostly forgotten.  

Also, people susceptible to road rage, which I think includes everyone with a driver's license, should not be allowed to carry around a loaded handgun.  Just use your middle finger, it's less satisfying than shooting the guy but we like to think we have a civilization going here.   

Yearbook trouble

 

Not that I am planning a run for high office, or suspect I am about to be appointed to a position of public trust, but I did put in some time last night reviewing my high school yearbook.  I didn't see anything disqualifying in connection to myself.  In the whole book there was only one picture of anyone in black face.  It was a teacher in front of a few bored looking kids, and, since he wasn't standing next to someone in a KKK hood, it's possible there is an innocent explanation.

Besides the predictable sensation of nostalgia, and the recurring question about "wonder what became of him/her," I got a lot of chuckles from the editorial content.  Lots of pictures of two or three or four kids, one or two or three of whom are identified by name in the caption.  It must have just depended upon whether the caption-writer happened to know you or not.  Pounding the pavement in order to find out someone's name?  Not going to do it.  There are over 1500 kids in the school and the yearbook has deadlines!

The yearbook headlines are not up to the standards of the New York tabloids.  Here are some examples:

"Art Department Has New Member" (nothing on page identifies the new member)
"Cooks And Janitors Work Hard"
"Rousted Spirit Alive At Homecoming" (suggesting that "spirt" had been slumbering)
"Many Students Join Ski Club" (you don't say!)
"Osterndorf is New Superintendent" (should have added, "but outworked by cooks, janitors")
"On-The-Job Is 'Hire' Education" (not like they didn't have it in them to try!)

I make two appearances.  One is my senior picture, for which I wore a plaid jacket and a huge bow tie.  I vaguely remember borrowing them from a stylish neighbor.  My last name is Jorgenson, so I should have appeared right after classmate Jill Jorgensen, with whom I worked at Ponderosa Steakhouse, but my picture is just before hers.  Oddly, two years behind us were both my sister and Jill's brother, and sure enough, their pictures are reversed, too.  I had a brief reverie about working at Ponderosa.  Soon as the last customer was out and the doors locked, the manager would go to his trunk and bring in a case of beer, which he was cool about sharing with the high-school help.  My parents were of the kind who knew when I was due home, so I'd quaff one off and then take one for the road.  Once, riding home on my bike in the dark, pedaling no-handed the better to drink my boss's beer, I was accosted by one of Columbia Heights's finest, who followed me in his squad to my house, where he went to the door with me and explained to my dad the regrettable circumstances necessitating the interview.  I was released into dad's custody, and I think he didn't feel comfortable dressing me down while in his pajamas.  To protect the top dog at the local Ponderosa, I was ready to lie coolly about where I got the beer, but I didn't even have to do that.

So I survived to have my picture taken with the basketball team, my other appearance in the yearbook.  "Basketball Team Goes To State" the headline above our picture incorrectly announces.  We got within two wins of qualifying for the state tournament, and for some reason the region semifinal, which we lost to Minneapolis North, was played at a professional sports venue--the Met Sports Center, in Bloomington, where the North Stars and the Twin Cities' ABA franchises played in the days before the facility was razed to make room for the Mall of America.  The yearbook staffer probably mistook the big arena for the state tournament.  Fake news!

In the picture, my teammates and I all peer out stonily from beneath our hair.  I think our coach had some rule about how long your hair could be, and it was cool--manly--to keep yours just a little longer than the rule, strictly speaking, permitted.  Maybe we're in the neighborhood of an explanation for the yearbook-related troubles of the Governor of Virginia and the newest member of the Supreme Court.  I'm sure, for example, that Justice Kavanaugh assaulted that woman at the high-school beer party, but he probably wouldn't have done it if his football teammate hadn't been there to witness him passing some kind of ass-stupid masculinity test.  As kids and young men, we weren't that bad alone, but in a group picture for an athletic team we all glared like criminals.  The fellows on the cross country team smiled for their picture, but it's not a very macho sport, and anyway, according to the headline above their picture, "Rebuilding Year For Hites In Cross Country."  

Books of the Bible: I Kings

 

Imagine some earnest young theological scholar who, out of a surplus of enthusiasm and devotion, sets himself the task of reading through all 66 books of the Christian Bible, front to back, Genesis to the Revelation to John.  Let's for the sake of a speculative question I mean to pose endow the youngster with more than the usual amount of determination without making him a hero--say, he's in the top quintile for perseverance, but not the top decile.  The betting question is how far will he have proceeded when he gives up on the project.  I think a reasonable estimate would be somewhere in First or Second Kings.  If the bet is of the over-under variety, and the mark set at Deuteronomy, I'd take the over for sure.  Genesis is often sublime, Exodus of intermittent interest, and, by the end of the Pentateuch, which is where Deuteronomy stands, the diminishing returns will not have yet knocked out someone who embarks with enthusiasm and top-quintile credentials.  But if the mark is set at the end of II Chronicles--I and II Chronicles follow I and II Kings--I want the under.  These historical books are oppressively dull, and the division of each into two books can be for no other reason than their oppressive lengths.  To persevere past the Chronicles toward the Old Testament's wisdom literature, the next relief in sight, would require unusual tolerance for boredom, or maybe a mystic's confidence in the favorable effects of forcing one's eyes to move over all the words--something, anyway, not possessed by most of us.

Yet we must acknowledge that, just as some people peruse with avidity the uniform commercial code, others are devoted to biblical literature.  I'm not counting those who profess interest out of religious duty, just those who on Crusoe's island could be employed, happily and for all time, with the part of the Old Testament occupying the bulk between Deuteronomy and Job.  What difficulties have they surmounted?  And, having surmounted them, what view, unobscured by the dreary weather, have they attained?

Many of the challenges are by now familiar, and we may begin with the matter of multiple sources that one could not say have been woven together into a spellbinding tapestry by a skilled editor.  The result is that what one supposes to be "the narrative" is actually several narratives that are constantly interrupting one another and giving a general reader the strong impression of incoherence.  A modest example might be the sequence of stories about the prophet Elijah in chapters 17, 18, 19, and 21 of I Kings.  These four chapters make a single unit that for some reason is presented, on account of the unrelated chapter 20, nonconsecutively.  What the hell, editor?

It is possible to detect in Kings the hand of an unambitious editor, often referred to as "the Deuteronomic editor" because of his evident allegiance to the general outlook of the Deuteronomic source for the Pentateuch.  Recall that, in the Pentateuch, the so-called Yahwist source is responsible for the sublimity--man created by God kneeling in the earth and dirtying his hands, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham and Sarah, the "handmaid" and Ishmael, and the story of Jacob's family, featuring preeminently the proto-picaresque adventures of Joseph and his brothers.  By contrast, the Deuteronomist's calling card is--well, when I say his hand may be "detected" in I Kings, I'm thinking of chapter 3 concerning the bureaucratic organization of King Solomon's government, and chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8 concerning his construction projects, including an extraordinary level of detail on the building specs.  This longueur draws to a blessed conclusion when, in chapter 9, God appears to Solomon in a vision and says:

[I]f you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my ordinances, then I will establish your royal throne over Israel for ever . . . .  But if you turn aside from following me . . . .

It's not necessary to continue since anyone may, using their own words, produce an apt paraphrase of the recitation of dire consequences following upon disobedience. 

And what a lot of disobedience ensued!  Not just Solomon, either.  If you can keep your eyes open, you might notice the formulaic phrases with which the deficiencies of successive kings are identically summarized.  They come to power in the nth year of So-and-So, rule for some number of years, fall well short of the example of David, may be read about further in a certain named (but now lost) work, and then "slept with their fathers," necessitating the ascension of a new So-and-So.  Their shortcomings  aren't vivid but appear to arise mainly from excessive libido and excessive tolerance of the religions of Israel's neighbors.  This would be a good time to mention that in about 920 B.C. the United Kingdom of Israel divided into a northern kingdom ("Israel," including the cities of Shechem and Samaria) and a southern kingdom ("Judah," with a principal city of Jerusalem).  More kingdoms, more kings, more unfamiliar geographic references, more insufficiently labeled and alternating histories of north and south--those in the top decile, though soldiering onward, have lost their enthusiasm.

Quite a lot is known of the actual history of this period, and, reading around in it a little, the Deuteronomist turns out to be an unreliable guide.  For example, one would conclude from I Kings that Omri, quite a consequential figure in secular history, was just another in the line of Israel's undistinguished libertine rulers.  Moreover, the effort to make events conform with the notion that God lavished his blessings on his people during the reigns of pious kings but sent hardship during the reigns of the impious required some--shall we say--manipulations.  A careful general reader may catch the scent of this in the bifurcated portrait of King Solomon.  In the early chapters, he's wise and devout--the famous story of his deciding which of the competing mothers should get the baby is in chapter 3--but chapter 11 begins, ominously, "Now King Solomon loved many foreign women."  Predictably, it develops that trouble is afoot in the kingdom, and the explanation appears to be that the king's declining moral status must account for it. 

Is it possible that Solomon, as he approached his dotage, became more randy and cosmopolitan?  If so, he reversed the common trend.  It seems more likely that the Deuteronomist is struggling to make history align with a religious doctrine requiring that God reward good kings and punish the bad.  Viewed in this light, the tedium recedes to some modest degree, and it's possible to sense a bit of life behind the wooden exposition.  More about all the excitement when we progress into II Kings!