Eric The Blue

Michel de Montaigne

I finished a "selection" of Montaigne's essays today. Would never have made it but for "shelter in place." The "selection" was 436 pages, small print, and the style is not what you'd call "breezy": Montaigne's father had ideas about education, which resulted in a nothing-but-Latin rule at home, and it shows not only in the quotations and allusions from classical literature but also in the brocaded style. At the end, I was rewarding myself with one chapter of an Elmore Leonard novel (Maximum Bob) for every 5 pages of Montaigne.

In case you're wondering (and still reading), Montaigne was a 16th-century Frenchman. He is widely regarded as the progenitor of the modern "essay." He was born rich and as a young man, having suffered something like a mental crisis when both his father and best friend suddenly died, he retired to the family chateaux to think things over. Eventually he began writing down his thoughts in "assays" on various subjects. He kept revising his assays and composing new ones till dying, age 59, in 1592.

Some people place Montaigne on a level with Socrates for wisdom and overall human excellence. His essays are like self-help for people who think they're too smart for, I don't know, Suzy Ormond and Dr. Oz. He has a lot of opinions and advice, including about money and the practice of medicine. His idea seems to have been that the proper object of human reflection is human beings, and, since he knew himself best, he'd as we say "put himself out there"—he could be wrong about someone else, but not about himself. One thus learns arguably too much about his gallstones; also, that his favorite time to evacuate his bowels is immediately upon rising in the morning and his favorite time to have sex is just before falling asleep at night. Fairly representative, from what I can tell. 

He tackles every subject. One of his early essays is titled, "To philosophize is to learn how to die"—probably a source for the frequent comparison to Socrates. A practicing Roman Catholic, he did not live to see his essays placed on the index of books the Church until 1966 forbade Catholics to read. There are signs (scholars say) that he self-edited with an eye toward pleasing (or at least not provoking) the Vatican, but if so the stratagem failed. He would not have been angry about that or, it seems, anything.  He might have been amused, however, to behold the high esteem in which he's held, since he counsels against having too high or low a view of our fellows. I think one of his essays is the likely source for the saying about no man being a hero to his valet. As his last essay draws to a close, he writes:

It is an accomplishment, absolute and as it were God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. We seek other attributes because we do not understand the use of our own; and, having no knowledge of what is within, we sally forth outside ourselves. A fine thing to get up on stilts: for even on stilts we must ever walk with our legs! And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses. 

Now, back to Maximum Bob, uninterruptedly. 

Joe Diffie, 1958-2020

Brutal day for music fans. First, the news that Joe Diffie has died of Covid-19 in Nashville. Now I just saw that John Prine has been hospitalized since Thursday and was intubated yesterday, condition critical. Hoping he can pull through, but he's older with (as we all now know to say) co-morbidities.

I think the most affecting thing I've heard about this scourge came from a doctor describing the scene in the ICU. Since visitors, including family members, aren't allowed, there are no human voices, the gravely ill dying alone in the presence only of other patients and the furiously toiling health care workers, the only sound the softly whooshing ventilators. 

Here they are, better days:

 

 

 

Science v. politics

Richard Feynman, who in 1965 won the Nobel Prize in physics, is known to the general public, if he is known, as the member of the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle accident who figured out what had happened. You can read a brief summary here. When Feynman was asked to be on the commission, his impulse was to run the other direction. He'd have to spend a lot of time in Washington, D.C., which was a long way from his home in California—he was on the physics faculty at Cal Tech, in Pasadena. Moreover, he had always suspected that the space shuttle program was less about science (which he loved) and more about government and public relations (which he despised). He was also 67 years old and ailing with the cancer that would take his life within about a year and a half. In his memoir What Do You Care What Other People Think?, he relates how he decided to join the commission only after his wife told him:

"If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission there will be eleven people—all in a group, going from place to place together—while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it." 

I think it's likely that Feynman was attributing to his wife his own thoughts about himself, but in any event, she (or he) was right: he might not have played well with others, but he figured out why the Challenger had crashed.

His whole account of his time on this commission, as related in What Do You Care, makes for pretty enjoyable reading. He was predisposed to despise all the Washington dipshittery, and to some degree his suspicions were confirmed, but he also had some pleasant surprises: for example, he found a friend in fellow commissioner General Donald Kutyna, to whom he was immediately attracted upon observing that after the first commission meeting the general took the subway back to his job at the Pentagon:

I thought, "This guy, I'm gonna get along with him fine: he's dressed so fancy, but inside, he's straight. He's not the kind of general who's looking for his driver and his special car; he goes back to the Pentagon by the Metro." Right away I liked him, and over the course of the commission I found my judgment in this case was excellent. 

I was thinking recently of this episode from Feynman's life because it relates to tensions at the intersection of science and politics, a current topic. Feynman was a pain in the arse of William Rogers, the former Nixon cabinet secretary who led the commission. Rogers, a lawyer charged with heading what was essentially an inquiry into a technology failure, had a thankless job, and perhaps no part of it was worse than having to deal with a free-wheeling iconoclast like Feynman who understood much more about the subject matter. Their last mild squabble related to the commission's final report. There was a question about whether Feynman, who had solved the problem, would sign on: the facts of the case reflected poorly on NASA management, and Rogers, but not Feynman, was inclined to accept a conclusion obscuring this fact with bureaucratic language. In the end, Feynman agreed to sign on only if he could write his own report, which was included as an appendix to the main one. The last sentence of Feynman's report, and thus the last sentence of the final report (including appendix) of our federal government's inquiry into the Challenger shuttle disaster, is:

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Doesn't that explain our federal government's failure in this coronavirus crisis? People like Trump can say anything. He can say there are 15 cases and in a few days those will go to zero. He can say it's contained and that there's no reason to worry. He can say we're going to "open everything up" at Easter, "a beautiful timeline." But that's all public relations taking precedence over reality. The virus ("Nature") isn't affected by Trump's speech acts. Public policy in this case has to take account of the subject matter of microbiology and epidemiology, two of ten million subjects about which Trump's ignorance is comprehensive and his interest in learning, negligible. So, while he blathers and dithers, thinking of it as a political problem for him, the virus, according to laws well understood by scientists, spreads in the population, and the necessary measures are not taken—a monumental failure. 

It's not as if conservative political views make it impossible to comprehend the truth of the situation. Here is Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and daughter of Dick, tweeting something sensible the other day, when Trump was still talking about crowding the churches on Easter and the cure being worse than the disease:

There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus. https://t.co/AchwfXtuLi

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) March 24, 2020

We'd all have a better chance of getting through this if people who think Ivy League epidemiologists are all effeminate alarmists would at least listen to her. The president, alas, is an irresponsible menace.  

UPDATE: Just adding a video clip of probably the most dramatic moment of the Challenger investigation. Pretty sure that the reporter mispronounces Feynman's last name: should be like Fine-man (not Fayn-man).

 

 

On the bright side . . .

On the bright side . . .

1. All the laundry is done.

2. House cleaner than usual.

3. Older daughter so bored she wants to shoot baskets with me, and I can beat her at H-O-R-S-E.

4. Air quality high. To elaborate, a map showing elevations throughout the city of Minneapolis is here. The hotter the color, the higher the elevation. If you choose the "open street" option and follow the 35W corridor south out of the downtown area, you see the numbers along the route—15A, 13, 12—getting smaller. Those are the exit numbers from the freeway. The top tail of the "1" for the second, more southerly "13" is pretty much pointing at my house. Just to the south is a splash of red, one of the highest points in south Minneapolis. If you're traveling westerly on 50th Street, you climb a hill as you approach the freeway. You keep climbing as you cross the bridge over the freeway. Then, to go to my house, you turn right at the end of the bridge. You are now toward the northerly end of the red splotch, very high, I see from the map about 910 feet, and you can look north right along the sunken freeway corridor to the downtown buildings 5 miles away. It can be a stunning sight, especially around sunset when the fading light makes the glass skyscrapers all glimmering and shimmery, but even on a cloudless day this is rare—too much haze in the air, it might as well be dully overcast. The last few times I've passed through, however, the view has been spectacular. Though it's sort of creepy how few cars are on the freeway.

Home school schedule

I've gotten together with some of the other neighborhood parents and worked up an academic schedule for our kids while school is out. None of us is a professional educator, but we are doing our best in these strange times. Feel free to use it yourself, if you have kids who need to keep learning!

It's ambitious, but so far I've found that, once past Tuesday, I'm able to execute the plan. 

More quarantine notes

1. Now with the interviewees on cable news shows providing their insights from home, I find my interest in what they have to say slaughtered by what can be seen of their residential interiors. It seems that in front of the book shelf is a favorite spot from which to opine, and I am always squinting over their shoulders trying to make out a title. No luck so far, but I feel I'd have a better idea of whether I should listen to them if only I could tell what books they own. A volume on astrology: who set the channel to Fox? The Bible, I'm sorry to say, is sort of a crap shot: could be a sign of either earnestness or crackpottery. A textbook on a basic science subject, like Introduction to Organic Chemistry: you have my ear, sir or madam!

2. When I used to tell my mom something she'd made to eat was delicious, a pretty common response was: It's so easy! You could make it yourself! Well, it's probably not that easy, but I thought of her confidence in me today when for lunch I opened a small can of salmon and, after draining off the water, mixed in Miracle Whip and some chopped red onion. Then I smeared it on top of Ritz crackers. I think the lives of people who haven't had young kids for awhile are impoverished by an insufficient appreciation of the Ritz cracker. I added carrot sticks, some cherry tomatoes, and, since it was already afternoon in the eastern time zone, a glass of Carlos Rossi burgundy ($15.99 for the 4 liter jug). Times might be bad, but food still tastes good, and I don't want to be stone cold sober for the daily coronavirus briefing.

3. Why would it be a good idea to adopt a law that would give the man pictured above $500 billion to distribute as he saw fit to America's captains of industry, with no requirement that he divulge what he did with the money for at least six months? A reporter asked Trump that question at this afternoon's briefing and he answered:

Jabberclackdockerywingbizniskabangfrildinkeldoperyetcetera.

But what about oversight, the reporter persisted, and Trump, looking like that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, assured her that he'd supply the oversight—which brings me back to the question of why anyone would think it's a good idea. 

4. It's odd the way that Trump is often completely incoherent when he appears to be reading prepared remarks. Is Jared's handwriting that bad? Is the President of the United States just a weak reader? If he's speaking the words that are written on the paper . . . oh boy. Did you notice that Dr Fauci was not at the briefing today? Over the weekend, he was quoted in the press to the effect, What do you want me to do? Just shove him off the dais when he starts saying stupid stuff?

Speaking for myself, yes, that's what I'd like you to do.

Notes while social distancing

 

Looking over my recent outlays—nothing else to do—and extrapolating, I conclude that providers of cable tv, internet, and cell phone services are still gouging, I mean prospering, while bars and restaurants suffer. Depressing, because I love bars and restaurants! I've googled my favorite, The Lowbrow, 43rd & Nicollet in south Minneapolis, and see that, while their dining room is closed (of course), they are now offering curbside pickup and pushing their gift cards. If you have a favorite joint, you can help them through a hard time by patronizing them to the degree possible. I say "them." Probably "it" is correct, a singular and impersonal "joint," but if you're a regular you associate the "joint" with the people you know who work there. Sometimes, if on a Wednesday I don't feel like cooking I'll suggest Lowbrow for supper, and the girls invariably say, "No, let's go tomorrow, because Dominic works on Thursdays." Kids' menu items are practically free, which I think must be part of the business plan, because, looking around on Thursday evenings, it's crowded with young families, kids eating for barely anything as mom and dad have apps, a meal, and a couple of adult beverages. You cannot recapture that trade with curbside pickup.

Speaking of adult beverages, I get a little bit of a kick out of the occasional news item about how liquor stores have been deemed "essential services" and are still open. Living in the middle of the city, I'm used to walking everywhere, including to Boulevard Liquors on South Lyndale, but yesterday I drove there in order to lay in a decent store. On other hoarding fronts, however, I plead Not Guilty. Only six rolls of toilet paper, for example, and two of those currently half unfurled.

I've also been looking at the results of presidential elections—nothing else to do. At Wikipedia, the article on a presidential election has arrows that allow you to jump to the article on the next one, or the previous one, so it's super easy to surf around and be amazed. When Clinton was first elected, in 1992, he won Arkansas and Tennessee. Maybe that's not too surprising, since those are the home states of him and his running mate, Al Gore. But he also won Georgia while losing Florida, and he carried Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia despite losing Virginia. When he was reelected four years later, Georgia and Florida switched columns, but the result was the same in the other aforementioned states: Virginia, red; Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia all blue.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton won Virginia. But she lost Kentucky by 30 points, and she lost West Virginia by more than 40 points. Of course she got slaughtered in Missouri and Louisiana, too. Household income was formerly a somewhat reliable indicator of political preference. No more! Democrats have lost working class whites while making big gains among people who know that bruschetta is an Italian menu item.

The FDR elections are interesting. I think of him as being an electoral powerhouse, and he was, but the details are a little more complicated than I'd imagined. He was first elected in 1932, defeating Hoover in a landslide, 57 to 40 percent. Hoover managed to win six states—Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—all in the northeast, now pretty much a Republican graveyard. Four years later, having passed into law landmark New Deal legislation, including preeminently the Social Security Act, his popular vote margin increased to 61-37, and he carried every state save Maine and Vermont. But that was his biggest landslide. In 1940, he lost Maine, Vermont, and a bunch of what back then might have been called "western states"—Indiana, Michigan, both Dakotas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. His popular vote victory was, in percent terms, shy of double-digits: 54.7-44.8.  His last reelection occurred on November 7, 1944, five months and a day after allied forces, led by America, had launched the assault that wrested the European mainland from the Nazis. His winning margin slipped to 53-46, and the list of states he lost included every one from the 1940 election plus Ohio, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. 

I got sucked into these researches when trying to determine the name of the politician responsible for one of my favorite quips of all time. For the period running from roughly the Civil War to the Great Depression, Maine had a reputation for being "the bellwether state." For some unknown reason, it conducted its gubernatorial elections in September, and over the course of almost 100 years the party of Maine's gubernatorial winner consistently predicted the party of the presidential winner two months later. Somehow, its small population, housed at a geographic extremity, seemed to reflect perfectly the national political mood and thus the saying, "As Maine goes, so goes the land." Then Roosevelt, in his 1936 reelection, carried 46 of the 48 states, the only exceptions being Maine and Vermont, thereby inspiring some wit to comment, "As Maine goes ... so goes Vermont." 

It was James Farley, FDR's campaign manager.

Senators sell stock as Americans get sick

 

If you have coronavirus symptoms, you can still only be tested if you've been exposed to someone who's tested positive, which is unlikely, because then the person to whom you were exposed would have to have qualified for testing, and probably they didn't, for the same reason you don't now. It's an infinite regress that reminds me of the first-cause argument for the existence of God, only in this case you are reasoning backwards in the chain not to the first cause, God, but rather to someone like an NBA player, a class of humanity to whom the Catch-22 logic doesn't apply. A solution, however, does come into view. You could cough in the face of an NBA player, then wait to see whether he tests positive. 

Kelly Loeffler would also work, but it'd probably be easier to get within coughing range of a basketball star. Loeffler is the junior US senator from Georgia, a right-wing Republican who, in the days following a closed briefing of senators on the coronavirus threat, sold stock worth well into 7 figures in 27 different companies. The first sale was on January 24, the same day as the briefing. Most of the stocks she dumped have subsequently lost more than a third of their value. She did make at least one new purchase. She bought more than $100,000 worth of stock in Citrix, a company that develops applications for telecommuting. Pro move by Sen. Loeffler, since suddenly everyone is working from home! I'm not a federal prosecutor, but maybe her cell phone records for the first fifteen minutes after the conclusion of the briefing would tell an incriminating tale? She doesn't appear to have taken pains to cover her trail. Her colleague, Richard Burr, Republican from North Carolina, made some similarly savvy moves in the days after the briefing. A spokesperson for Burr explained that his stock sales were all above board because they occurred before the onset of "market volatility." I guess the senator thinks it would be more suspicious if he had sold the stocks after the "volatility" had sunk their value?

Sweet Jesus, in addition to being corrupt, these pols are dumb as firewood.

They have to fill out these disclosure forms divulging stock transactions each month. Did they think no one would notice? It was the first time Loeffler had sold stock since she was in the Senate. Suddenly had an itch to sell off her shares in 27 companies! Must have been an informative briefing, but the people she represents in Georgia could only hear the president declaring that he had the pandemic completely under control, while their newest senator tweeted:

Concerned about #coronavirus? Remember this:

The consumer is strong, the economy is strong, & jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle #COVID19 & keep Americans safe.

Update following meeting with @realdonaldtrump, @VP, & @StevenMnuchin1: pic.twitter.com/H9t2D6x19k

— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) March 10, 2020

That was March 10. The alarming briefing had been more than a month ago, and she'd already unloaded her stock. She knew the economic outlook was dim.

Loeffler is the richest senator. Her husband, Jeff Sprecher, is chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. Their net worth is reported to be around a half billion dollars (that is, $500 million). It seems that, for her, a few million to avoid some bad press would have been a bargain. She could have done the right thing for the wrong reason and no one would have known. Hell, she's planning on spending $20 million of her own money this summer and fall to defend her seat. Now maybe it'll require $25 million. Taking a low 7-figure hit to her stock portfolio would have been a good investment. But probably grifting is such a long habit that by now it's reflexive. Too venal to think straight. 

#LaughterTheBestMedicine

The caption for this pic, posted on social media, was something like, "While working from home it's important to preserve as much of the daily routine as possible."

In the same spirit, someone said he had built a gym in his basement, then joined, then never went.

Day 1 of distance learning

Around a half day into "distance learning," the dropout rate is high—fifty percent, if you must know the exact statistic. In the admittedly unlikely event that you are looking to while away some quarantine time by contemplating a few 6th-grade math problems, the student who has not dropped out is working on the above four. Notice—what I do not necessarily like, but it's how it is—that there's no effort even to pretend that we are not here just coaching kids to perform satisfactorily on a standardized test. The problems aren't dumb problems, but they are exactly the kind that get asked on the standardized test to determine whether a 6th-grader "meets the standard," "exceeds the standard," etc. "You have to know this stuff because our school will look bad if you don't!" If it's math, but not on the "big test" all 6th graders take . . . some other day. It seems there's something to be said for having an agile mind—bringing to bear what you know on a new or unfamiliar kind of problem. But the idea here is to make sure there won't be any unfamiliar problems on Test Day.

Whatevs, I'm a "school nerd," as the little wenches around here keep reminding me.

Actually, the first question, demonstrating mere "emerging understanding," is an example of what I'm talking about. I guess it's considered the easiest and most basic because you are supplied with the formula for the area of a trapezoid. All you have to do is put the right numbers from the figure into the formula and then do the arithmetic correctly. But supposing, I asked my marginally interested daughter, you were not given the formula and had forgotten what it was? No need to panic. Think of the figure as a 10.2 x 12 rectangle with a 5 x 12 x 13 right triangle sitting atop it. So it's (area of rectangle) + (area of right triangle) = (10.2)(12) + (6)(5) = 122.4 + 30 = 152.4 sq cm. I thought it might make an impression on her when you arrive at the same answer my way as she had when plugging numbers into the formula, but it didn't. Whatevs.

Whatevs is the word for day 1 of distance learning.

To me, the question to prove you're "proficient" doesn't seem any harder than the ones for "emerging proficiency" and "partial proficiency." But the last one, to exceed the standard, is definitely the hardest, no? The idea is that a triangular prism has been cut and laid out flat, which makes it arguably easier to work out the surface area: the sum of the areas of three rectangles and two triangles. We're also supposed to figure out the volume, however. My 6th-grader tries to remember all the formulas she thinks she needs to know. Seems better just to remember that, in all these solids, the volume is given by the product of the area of a face and the length of the lines connecting it to it to its "partner" on the other side. So, for example, the volume of a Campbell's soup can (aka a "right circular cylinder") is the product of its height and the area of either circular end. In this case, the identical triangles, with areas of 6 sq cm, would be connected in the reconstituted prism by the 3 cm edges of the center square in the flat net. The volume of the prism must therefore be 18 cubic centimeters? Unless Homeschool Dad cannot himself exceed the 6th-grade standard.

 

 

 

Shakespeare in a time of coronavirus

Social distancing? Self-quarantine? I've been practicing for this for years. All the fun, convivial people are freaking out as my eye scans, lasciviously, the bookcase. Finally, alone with you guys. School's not out till almost 4. 

But then, before the fun can begin, school cancelled indefinitely and I'm called back to the world: for example, IT support for online learning assignments, just the kind of work English majors can expect to get. The coronavirus giveth, and the coronavirus taketh away. 

Rosanne Cash, also standing at the intersection of books and pestilence, tweeted:

Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.

— rosanne cash (@rosannecash) March 14, 2020

Well over a quarter million likes and more than 50,000 retweets. I got tired of scrolling through 3,000 comments to see whether anyone questioned her source. Here is Frank Kermode in The Riverside Shakespeare:

King Lear was entered in the Stationers' Register on November 26, 1607, and the entry mentions that it was performed "uppon S. Stephens night at Christmas last,"  that is, December 26, 1606. The lower limit is March 1603, when Samuel Harsnett published his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, a work from which Shakespeare took the names of Edgar's devils, and which he also remembered at some other points [in the play].

And there follows more learned discussion, narrowing the date of composition to 1604, possibly leaking into 1605. We don't know much about Shakespeare's daily habits, but there would have been no reason for him to be quarantined in 1604. The previous year, 1603, had been a bad one, 30,000 dead of plague in London, but it was not enough for the theatres to close, as they had for the seasons of 1592 and 1593, to which years belong Shakespeare's long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. But who wants to say we owe those almost unknown poems to Shakespeare having been under quarantine? No one reads them except scholars, and scholars only read them because Shakespeare wrote them. Shakespeare's grocery lists would probably be the subject of PhD dissertations if they were extant, but they aren't. 

I love Rosanne Cash, and it's sort of a romantic notion to think of Shakespeare writing a play about the end of the world during a pestilence—maybe that's why she thinks it happened that way, but it didn't. He didn't need to be under quarantine to get things done. Besides writing plays, he acted in them, was a shareholder in the acting company that performed his works (as well as the works of others), and owned a 10% interest in the theatre in which these works were performed. Actor, playwright,  businessman, litigant—for, on at least two occasions, he sued people who (he claimed) owed him relatively small sums of money. A real multitasker but, I'm afraid, a disappointment to people with gushing feelings about how artistic geniuses likely live. Of all the penetrating commentary included in The Riverside Shakespeare, the one sentence that sticks in my mind, from Harry Levin's General Introduction, is: "The figure of Shakespeare as a practical man of affairs, though well attested by the evidence, seemed rather too modest to occupy the lofty pedestal reared by the Bardolaters." 

But, followers of Rosanne Cash, by all means, write more great songs while you're social distancing. I hope your kids don't distract you. Shakespeare's, by the way, were almost certainly a hundred miles away with their mother in Stratford-on-Avon when, toward the end of Lear, with chaos and dissolution encroaching, their dad made the old king say to his loving daughter:

              . . . Come, let's away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out—
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th' moon.

Laugh or cry?

Once, toward the end of his life, brain scrambled by dementia and probably some small strokes, my grandpa at breakfast poured orange juice on his Cheerios as the rest of us looked on, a little stunned. He studied the bowl puzzledly for a moment and then with a shrug of his shoulders took a big spoonful as my uncle, laughing, reached across the table and scooped the bowl away. Then in front of dazed grandpa my uncle said to the rest of us, sort of apologetically, "You have to laugh, it's better than the other options." 

That's how I feel now watching Trump try to cope with coronavirus. It's serious business, so maybe laughing is in poor taste, but my god, what are the better options when for example—

(1)Trump, in a White House presser on Feb 26, his first very formal response to the pandemic, bragged about how only 15 Americans had been infected and predicted that "the 15, within a couple of days, is going to be down close to zero." He concluded, "That's a pretty good job we've done." At the very same press conference, public health officials, such as the CDC's principal deputy director, provided a  less rosy account, correctly forecasting that the number of cases would not fall but spike. Within a few minutes, from the same podium, on national tv, the president said "x" while his government's public health experts said "opposite of x." 

(2) An even more formal response, in the form of an Oval Office address to the nation, occurred last Wednesday evening. This was a prepared speech that Trump read from a teleprompter. It included significant errors that the White House (as is said) "later had to walk back." It's not clear whether the prepared speech was deficient or the president just read it wrong; perhaps different instances had different causes. Here is one problematic sentence from the speech, as read by Trump (the context is the travel ban from Europe he had just announced):

There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval.

To the degree these words are at all coherent, you'd have to conclude that (1) re-entry of American citizens currently in Europe is contingent on "appropriate screenings" (whatever that means); and (2) the prohibitions apply to trade and cargo. Neither (1) nor (2) is true. On account of (1), there was on Thursday, before the ban went into effect at Friday midnight, a mad scramble for the last seats on planes headed to American airports from European ones—and, since there was panic, price gouging. With regard to (2), the way the sentence trails off into empty fog—"various other things as we get approval"—suggests that Trump wholly butchered the reading and that the word "only" was not in the teleprompter: ". . . these prohibitions will not [only] apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo . . . ."

In favor of the butchered reading theory, "various other things as we get approval" does sound like the kind of word rot Trump slides into when he's messed up and has to ad-lib his way to a period. Also, his reading, even when it was coherent, seemed tortured and halting, like a second grader trying to read aloud a third grade text. There has been speculation that he needs glasses but is too vain—a friendly surmise, since the most likely alternative is that he’s barely able to read.

On the other hand, maybe all that is wrong. Maybe the speech as written was that bad. 

At another place in the speech, Trump indicated he had prevailed upon leaders of the health insurance industry "to waive all co-payments for coronavirus treatments, extend insurance coverage to these treatments and to prevent surprise medical billing." It turns out, however, that these provisions relate to coronavirus testing, not coronavirus treatments. Details, details! But it's great that there is no out-of-pocket expense for a test that hardly anyone can currently receive!

(3)Yesterday's press conference in the Rose Garden may be regarded as a tacit admission that the Oval Office address was a disaster. After Trump was done speaking Wednesday evening, or maybe including while he was speaking, stock futures plummeted, and the next day, Thursday, the Dow was down 10%, its worst day in more than 30 years. The Rose Garden strategy may have been to limit Trump's speaking opportunities, for he was backed by a bunch of corporate CEOs whom he called to the mic, one at a time, to thank and praise him. Trump, who has been exposed to coronavirus, shook their hands and adjusted the microphone according to the next groveler's height. It seems that there was some kind of "public-private partnership" being announced, but the details were hazy until Mike Pence spoke and said that the CEOs had promised to give over a portion of their store parking lots for drive-up testing that would begin . . . no one said when it would begin. The sacrifice is huge, to be sure, but who knows if the public-spirited CEOs will ever have to share their parking lots.

The Google CEO was not in the Rose Garden. This seemed weird, inasmuch as all those others were but the most concrete forward step announced in the presentation related to a website Google is supposedly developing. When ready for release, presumably soon, the site would guide users across the country through some questions intended to determine whether they should be tested for coronavirus and, if they should, the nearest location. After the presentation was over, journalists started making inquiries, and the minor mystery about the Google CEO's absence lifted: practically none of the advertised details about this purported website were true. 

Unbelievable. 

Reporters were allowed to ask questions—probably a mistake. When asked whether he took responsibility for the failure to ramp up coronavirus testing, Trump said bluntly that he did not. Another reporter said, in effect, ok, you won't take responsibility for things that haven't happened, what about things that have happened, in your administration, like the 2018 firing of the federal government's entire pandemic response chain of command? Trump said it was "a nasty question," that he personally had done no such thing, and hadn't heard of this—did Tony know about it? He looked over his shoulder at Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as if he expected Fauci to come forward and say something unnasty, maybe fall on a sword, but the doctor stood in place. No one doubts the pandemic experts were fired—well, John Bolton, who performed the execution, prefers to say that "structures" were "streamlined." 

(4) The Rose Garden event began around a half hour before Wall Street's closing bell. The wild stock market ride continued, with the Dow gaining back most of the previous day's steep loss, a good chunk of it at the end of the trading day. Trump was obviously quite proud of this and sent to supporters, such as Lou Dobbs, autographed printouts exhibiting graphically the day's market surge—the presidential equivalent of grandma bragging that she won $400 at the casino when actually she lost $100 (but had once been down $500).

(5) I almost forgot this bizarre-o performance at the CDC headquarters.

(6) So that is a recap of some of Trump's more official responses to the pandemic. In between these, he's said warm April weather will make coronavirus go away. Sure it will! He has also shared his "hunch" about what the death rate from coronavirus will prove to be. On another occasion, he spoke of the possibility that the plague will lift, "like a miracle," maybe because then there would be no need to wait till April. Ivanka has probably told him he can't play golf while people are dying.

Is it possible to think this is all funny—in the way, perhaps, that the audience may frequently laugh during performances of Samuel Beckett's dark, absurdist dramas? For certain it's not encouraging. For that, we have regular people, like neighbors of mine knocking on doors of the elderly to say, "I'd be happy to shop for you if you'd prefer staying home." (I know about this by chance, not because any of my wonderful neighbors consider me to be among the vulnerable elderly—yet.) What about this tweet?

Dark times for all. Trying to find some bright spots. If you were meant to perform in your High School musical and it was cancelled please post yourself singing and tag me. I want to be your audience!! Sending all my love and black market toilet paper. 💛 pic.twitter.com/BVYR4t3dJE

— Laura Benanti (@LauraBenanti) March 13, 2020

 

The replies go on and on and on and on and on and on. Here is one; I just happened to click on it as I was scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. 

I attend Union High School and we are doing Once On This Island. As of now our show is postponed but we don’t know how long. This is a little snipbit of Waiting For Life pic.twitter.com/isdwSj17ho

— Dij (@khadija_sankoh) March 13, 2020

Coronavirus ----> no games on tv ----> philosophy

I had to retrieve my older daughter from school early, because she was leaving on a ski trip with a friend's family, and they don't just let kids wander off before the last bell rings. In the main office, there's a sign-out sheet: my name, her name, time, and reason for leaving. A new sheet had just been started, so there was only one used line above the one I filled in, and I noticed that someone's mom had written in the reason box: "sick/anxiety." As we drove off I mentioned this to Lydia, who commented: "Probably has Ms. K for math. Her tests really suck." Then we performed a familiar ritual. Only the fine details vary.

Me: You mean they stink. The tests are hard.

Her: No, they actually suck.

Me: You could just say they're hard, challenging.

Her: No one gets anxiety cuz they're "hard." They suck. 

She made air quotes with her fingers around "hard." We were about two minutes away from parting for a few days, so I Iet it drop, but I'm putting my foot down if she starts saying stuff "fucking sucks." That's bullshit. 

I doubt it's the math tests and feel bad for the kid with anxiety. Maybe his mom is the real nut. I've noticed, for example on "curriculum night," that when time comes for parents to ask questions two out of every three concern "accelerated programs" for their "gifted children," which accounts for why I no longer go to "curriculum night." More bullshit! The school is about a half mile from Lake Harriet, which is surrounded by some of the most affluent neighborhoods in Minneapolis. Living about a half mile in the other direction, I always suspect they're the ones obsessed with accelerated programs, and, if I'm right, perhaps there's a connection to the disorders of their 12- and 13-year-olds? Just a theory. I'll be punished for it when my younger one gets to middle school and I start taking calls from the school psychologist. 

I can imagine myself encouraging—lecturing—my anxious kid. "Get a little perspective! It's not a big deal, you only think it's a big deal!" It amounts to, "You feel miserable but you're wrong." Can a person in misery ever persuade himself that he's wrong and he ought not to feel miserable? You just have to get older. When you're 20, you'll realize that the stuff you worried about at 15 was trivial, but you'll have new reasons to be miserable, also trivial. I used to be miserable at work. The problem, I now realize, is that since I was busy I assumed what I was doing must be important. Yet more bullshit! One of these years, a doctor will probably tell me that the cancer has spread to my underwear, and I'll think it's the end of the world, but when I get older I'll realize I was wrong about that, too.

Joseph Cornell's "dime-store alchemy"

Probably his biography is not the most curious in 20th-century American art, but Joseph Cornell's is the one I've been reading about, and it's plenty curious. He was born in 1903, at Nyack, New York, which is on the west bank of the Hudson River about 20 miles north of Manhattan's northern tip—despite a population of only about 7,000, Nyack is the birthplace of Edward Hopper, too. Cornell's father earned a good living in the textile industry, first as a salesman and then as a designer, but in 1917 he died of leukemia, leaving behind his wife, Joseph, and Joseph's three younger siblings, one of whom, Robert, was afflicted with cerebral palsy. The mother went to work but for years the family lived in poverty's inner-ring suburbs. Joseph nevertheless was sent to Phillips Academy, a prep school in Andover, Massachusetts, through the largesse of his deceased father's former employer. He was a terrible student and left school without graduating. Upon returning home, which on account of strained finances was now a modest house in Queens, he got a textile sales job through one of his father's connections and went to work supporting the family. We are now up to 1921, the year he turned 18. Cornell spent the rest of his life in the house in Queens, with his mother and Robert, who was disabled by his disease. Robert died 44 years later, in 1965, followed by the mother in 1966, and then Cornell himself, age 69, in 1972.

My introduction to Cornell was an essay, "Stargazing in the Cinema: On Joseph Cornell," by Charles Simic, the author also of an unusual book called Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. The essay includes the following paragraph:

"A gourmet art by a man who ate junk food" is how Robert Motherwell described [Cornell's] work. Even to people who saw him fairly often he was a complete enigma. They remember him as drab looking, always preoccupied, speaking in monologues, oblivious to other people, an eccentric and a loner. Unmarried and with no sexual experience till the very last years of his life, he lived with his mother and an invalid brother who suffered from cerebral palsy in a small house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, whose basement he had turned into his studio. He ate little, never touched alcohol or set foot in the famous bars the painters and writers then frequented. He made appearances at art shows and gallery openings, greeting acquaintances and making a speedy departure. Cornell, who roamed the streets of Manhattan for almost fifty years, was usually to be found at home in Queens by eight o'clock in the evening. Except for time spent at boarding school in Massachusetts, this strange man never traveled beyond the five boroughs and their environs.

One of the somewhat comical aspects of the story is that this man should have fallen into work in the sales field. Despite his manifest unfitness, he pounded the Manhattan pavement, presenting samples to manufacturers and between appointments killing time in thrift shops and junk stores, for another of his quiddities  was that he collected what "normal" people would call "trinkets" or "cheap souveniers"—Simic catalogues these objects as "old books, movie magazines, silent-film postcards, nineteenth-century toys, engravings, theatrical memorabilia, dolls, maps, and much else that anyone else would regard as nothing but trash." Another word that recurs in critical commentary is "ephemera." All this stuff, whatever you call it, came home to Queens. Sounds like mental illness, right? Maybe, but Cornell was also interested in New York's contemporary art scene and was much taken with, for example, the surrealistic collages of Max Ernst. In the basement of the house in Queens, he began tinkering endlessly with all his "junk," arranging and substituting and rearranging the found pieces until he had an "image" that pleased him. He would then mount them in a box—at first, in pill boxes purchased at drug stores and then emptied of their contents, though sometimes with the advertising (like Sure cure for that tired feeling) intact, and then later in the larger shadow boxes that made him famous. 

It wouldn't be exactly right to say that Cornell labored on anonymously and became a hero of modern art when his boxes were discovered in the basement of the little house in Queens after he died. He showed some of his first assemblages to Julien Levy, the owner of the gallery where he'd seen Ernst's collages. Simic reports that Levy, in his memoirs, says his first reaction was that Cornell was showing him some lost works of Ernst. When persuaded that it was Cornell's own work, he offered to include some of the boxes in an exhibit of surrealist art his gallery was putting on that winter—this was the winter of 1931-32—and the young textile salesman thus became a member of the New York art world just when the Great Depression was making it impossible to peddle his wares. Cornell occasionally had to return to regular work in order to keep his odd little family going, but he was able to exhibit his boxes, and to sell many of them (for a fraction of what they'd command today). He also made avant-garde movies, like one called Rose Hobart, which was constructed by cutting and splicing together, out of sequence, the found footage of an early talkie called East of Borneo. As you can imagine, the entire plot was gone: instead, Cornell's radically abridged version highlights the movements, expressions, and tics of the female lead, Rose Hobart. 

Simic doesn't think much of Cornell's experimental films, and I trust his judgment, but I think he might have mentioned that Rose Hobart is connected to the boxes in the respect that it was made from a lost print that fell into Cornell's hands, just as the boxes are made of objects he found at flea-markets, second-hand stores, junk shops, etc. It's like he meant always to rescue lost things and turn them into art. I haven't mentioned that he was a convert to Christian Science, a consequence probably of having rested up in their reading rooms during his peregrinations around Manhattan. In a way that may seem at once creepy and moving, his weird religion ties in with the rescue theme and his repressed sexuality. As a middle-aged man, he formed platonic friendships with young New York ballerinas, and some of his best known boxes depict famous and unattainable women, such as Lauren Bacall, in a way calculated to lift them out of sexualized publicity stills and fix them forever in a box as something more like religious icons. You get the feeling, or I do, that he could have been a dangerous person if he hadn't been able to transmute his stunted personality into art made of these discordant and discarded pieces of "junk" he collected and painstakingly arranged inside a glassed box into which the viewer gazes, a little like at the movies, though with no storytelling, only the 3-dimensional image of discarded things brought together. His first inspiration was drawn from the surrealists, and he is still sometimes regarded as one, but his purpose or intention—the effect, anyway, of his art—lies in the exact opposite direction: whereas the discordant objects and absurdist subjects of surrealism evoke anger and nihilism, Cornell's boxes are more apt to elicit nostalgia, or something like stifled yearning. "Somewhere on the island of Manhattan," writes Simic, "there were, [Cornell] believed, a few objects, dispersed in unknown locations, that rightly belonged together despite being seemingly incompatible in appearance"—harmony, in other words, out of garbage and dissonance.  I think  Christian Science is ridiculous, but (if an outsider dare speak) one senses behind Cornell's art a religious sensibility. I'm thinking mainly of the way in which ordinary objects, in his hand, become charged with mystery and significance, like a sacrament. 

Cornell is a fairly popular YouTube subject. The below is a short introductory video, but there are a lot more, some quite lengthy and detailed. I just discovered that if you google "images of Joseph Cornell" you get the above picture of him, taken the year before he died, and lots of pictures of his boxes. 

 

 

 

 

Making light of coronavirus

Here is a joke that's apparently enjoying a cachet among third graders at my daughter's school:

Q: Why was the clock worried about coronavirus?

A: Because its hands are always touching its face.

I like my third grader, but, in general, the people making light of coronavirus are looking more ridiculous with each passing hour. At the recently concluded CPAC conference, in Maryland, the standard line regarding the virus was that the Democrat Lamestream Media was exaggerating the threat in order to smear Trump, who of course has the situation under control. But now an attendee has tested positive for Covid-19 and the American Conservative Union is tweeting out its concern, noting that neither Trump nor Pence had interacted with the infected person—whew! Meanwhile, Trump fanboy Matt Gaetz, R-FL, ridiculed the alarm over Covid-19 by wearing a gas mask to work. I think that was Wednesday. Today, one of his constituents in northwest Florida died of the disease. Hilarious!

Then there is Trump himself. He said nothing about the pandemic until, on February 26, with the stock market sinking, he went before the cameras to predict that 15 current US cases would soon go to zero. Ten days later, there are more than 330 confirmed cases, and 19 Americans have died. Yesterday, at the CDC, in Atlanta, Trump gave one of the most bizarre-o performances of his tenure in office. Of the things he said that can be fact-checked, only his uncle having taught at MIT is probably true. It seems this bit of Trump family history was offered up to account for what he called his "natural ability" in science. "I like this stuff, I really get it," he explained. He worked in an advertisement for Fox News, called the governor of Washington "a snake"—because no time is the wrong time to slime people—and claimed that anyone who needed to be tested was being tested, which isn't in reality's zip code (unless you live in another country). Regarding the cruise ship anchored off the California coast with at least 21 sick people onboard, he said he'd prefer if it stayed at sea.

"I like the numbers being where they are," he said. "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault."

It seems he's too dumb to understand that, in a public health emergency, it makes him look bad to admit that he's focused on not looking bad. 

Trump and Pence take on coronavirus

Reading around hither and thither, I've formed the impression that I'm not the only one worried that the administration has a pretty loose grip on this coronavirus thing. The above picture is of Mike Pence's team kicking off another public health meeting. It's almost as if "thoughts and prayers" is being repurposed for a new epidemic (since it's been so successful at reducing gun violence). I like the way the guy resting his arm on the fireplace appears to be sneezing, or worse, into his hand. I don't think that's recommended. Fold your hands, sir! The photographer has arrived and the vice president is now praying!

I have a suggestion for the president. I think that, in the interests of bipartisanship, former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson should be appointed to the coronavirus team. She shares President Trump's skepticism about the utility of vaccinations, she shares the vice president's confidence in the efficacy of prayer, and the suits in the picture look to me as if they'd benefit from some yoga and herbal tea. Marianne was last seen stumping for Bernie Sanders in Texas. Not sure she can be reached by cell phone as they are said to cause cancer. Contact her telepathically. 

Assuming only human intelligence can save us, we're probably screwed. I understand it's hard to find toilet paper on the shelves at CostCo, a circumstance that lines up with the following trenchant observation on Twitter:

 

Scientists: you should wash your hands because of Coronavirus.

People: I'm gonna stop flying, hoard masks, work from home & totally rearrange my life.

Also Scientists: the #ClimateCrisis will kill millions - we must use clean power & change how we get to work.

People: No way.

— Nathaniel Stinnett (@NCStinn) March 4, 2020

I wonder whether there's a scientific reason we're so bad at this—like, maybe our ability to assess risk is connected to our calculating faculties, the handiwork of the evolutionary process, which has selected genes that cause us to exaggerate immediate risks to ourselves and to ignore future ones to unknown others. You don't have to persuade people to look after their own short-term pleasures, but it's very difficult for us to take collective action in order to ward off a future plague. 

When possible, we should find arguments that appeal not to our decency but to our self-interest. Regarding coronavirus, it's risky for me if you cannot get tested and treated. I'm protected if everyone can afford to go to the doctor.

The polls

 

For the fun of it, I'm going to post below final polling data relating to the Super Tuesday primaries today. If you want, you can look back later, when actual results are known, and see how accurate they were. My idea is that people underestimate the accuracy of polls. For example, everyone says that in 2016 "the polls got it wrong," which is not exactly right. The Real Clear Politics final average of all national polling data showed Clinton ahead by 3.3%. In the event, she won the national vote by 2.1%. Pretty close. No one claims polls are more than a "snapshot in time," so, if as seems likely there was movement toward Trump in the last days of the campaign, the RCP average of polls was really very accurate.

Of course, some state polls were off, like in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Most of these were older, so it's hard to say exactly how inaccurate they were: maybe lots of people changed their minds. Not to say there aren't bad polls. The science behind polling acknowledges that. If the poll has a margin of error of 3%, that might mean there is a 96% chance that the measurement is true within 3%. What of the other 4%? All bets cancelled. It's not an exact science, but a pretty good one. 

Two more things. There might be a psychological aspect to the notion that polling is "just a guess" and "often wrong." There's a legend in Minnesota concerning how there's always a blizzard during the high-school basketball tournament in March. People can think this because the times there is a blizzard prove the theory is right and the times there isn't a blizzard don't mean anything—everyone forgets "those times." Similarly with polls. No one remembers when they're proven to be pretty good, which is usually.

Second thing is that this particular Super Tuesday might not be the best one to test my theory. Events of the past couple days have roiled the race. Everyone agrees that "the situation is fluid," and polls, remember, are only the latest snapshot. But, as I say, for the fun of it.

The data for California, Texas, and North Carolina are from the Real Clear Politics average of different polls. For the other states, I'm using the "final super Tuesday polling" from Data for Progress.

CALIFORNIA
Sanders 35
Biden 23
Warren 16
Bloomberg 14

TEXAS
Sanders 29.5
Biden 28
Bloomberg 18
Warren 14.5

NORTH CAROLINA
Biden 36.7
Sanders 23.3
Bloomberg 14.3
Warren 10.7

VIRGINIA
Biden 39
Sanders 24
Bloomberg 18
Warren 17

MASSACHUSETTS
Warren 28
Biden 26
Sanders 26
Bloomberg 15

COLORADO
Sanders 32
Warren 21
Biden 18
Bloomberg 16

TENNESSEE
Biden 34
Sanders 27
Bloomberg 20
Warren 15

MINNESOTA
Sanders 32
Biden 27
Warren 21
Bloomberg 16

ALABAMA
Biden 47
Sanders 22
Bloomberg 18
Warren 12

ARKANSAS
Biden 36
Sanders 23
Bloomberg 22
Warren 15

OKLAHOMA
Biden 35
Sanders 28
Bloomberg 19
Warren 16

MAINE
Sanders 34
Biden 25
Warren 20
Bloomberg 18

UTAH
Sanders 29
Biden 23
Warren 19
Bloomberg 17

VERMONT
Sanders 57
Biden 16
Warren 16
Bloomberg 8

Fun factoid: Just saw an MSNBC reporter talking from a polling place in Harris County, Texas, where Houston is. He said there will be more ballots cast today in Harris County than there were in Iowa and New Hampshire combined. I just checked, and this seems plausible: the population of Harris County (4.7 million) exceeds the combined population of Iowa (3.15 million) and New Hampshire (1.34 million) by about 210,000.

Scott Shapiro tweets; Donald Trump writes Yelp reviews

Yalie Scott Shapiro—"bad for Yale, bad for America" according to a colleague (incorporated into his Twitter bio)—is a convivial and learned tweeter. One of his recent stunts involved a caption-writing contest for the above picture of Trump's coronavirus team setting to work at maybe their first meeting. Shapiro himself suggested:

"Ok, our first priority is to put out a press release agreeing that the food is great at Sammy's Mexican Grill in Phoenix. Make sure you capitalize 'GREAT'"

This was puzzling to me, and therefore intriguing. Being moderately proficient (for my age) at performing Internet searches, I now know about another of those minor debacles of Trump Time that partakes, in roughly equal measures, of the funny,  the absurd, and the pathetic.  Here's the story:

A couple weeks ago (Feb 19), Trump had a rally in Phoenix. Flew in, flew out: airport, motorcade, arena, motorcade, airport. This couple who own Sammy's Mexican Grill in the Tucson area are in the MAGA cult so they traveled to Phoenix for the rally. Then, a couple days ago, they complained that pics of them at the rally were circulating on social media and that the libz were hating on them and boycotting their restaurant. Predictably, this landed them on Fox News, which aired a segment about their troubles yesterday at around 7:30 in the morning, eastern time. At 10:11 a.m., the President of the United States tweeted:

The food is GREAT at Sammy’s Mexican Grill in Phoenix, Arizona. Congratulations to Betty & Jorge Rivas on doing such a wonderful job. I will try hard to stop by the next time I am in Phoenix. Support Sammy’s! @foxandfriends

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 1, 2020

Mildly amusing because, for one thing, the restaurant isn't in Phoenix—it's around 100 miles away, in a Tucson suburb. That Trump's confused about the location suggests that, notwithstanding his testimonial about the GREAT food, he's never been to Sammy's Mexican Grill. (On his most recent trip, he wasn't within a hundred miles of it.) But, on the day that his coronavirus team, headed by public health whiz Mike Pence, was rolling up its collective sleeves to start work, the president was himself watching Fox and tweeting about what he saw. Thus Scott Shapiro's hot take on what was being discussed at the meeting—the administration's top priority, as demonstrated by what the president was devoting his time to. Well, it's cheaper for us than when he plays golf!

The kicker is that the same couple got embroiled in an identical controversy during the 2016 campaign. It seems to have worked out well for them, as their restaurant filled with customers eager to own the libz by dining at Sammy's Mexican Grill. Pretty sure it's not too cynical to suspect that they attended Trump's most recent Arizona pep rally for the purpose of igniting another controversy and thereby refilling their restaurant with a new generation of MAGA devotees willing to eat food prepared by the people Mexico sent us ("not their best"). If only the President of the United States, their in-house Yelp reviewer, could place the restaurant in the right city!

Shapiro's Twitter feed can be enlightening as well as fun: for example, he recently recommended this article, by Jacob Hacker, "the most informed person in America on healthcare," he (Shapiro) says. It's long and I've only scanned it, but I'm going to read the whole thing more carefully when Family Feud is over. I already learned that FDR wanted to make national health insurance part of the Social Security Act of 1935, but he concluded that the opposition of doctors might then kill the whole program. In the realm of alternate history, one can speculate about what might have happened had Roosevelt dared to roll the dice and fight the American Medical Association. Is it possible that we'd be stuck with national health insurance and that it'd be as wildly unpopular as the other provisions of the Act have proven to be?  It seems outrageous, but the federal government confiscates part of every paycheck, feeds the stolen proceeds into this ginormous government fund administered by deep state operatives, and then redistributes the wealth to recipients who need it more on account of being members of a favored demographic group. I'm pretty sure that's how it works. No wonder everyone has hated it for 80 years!

American stories: Hemingway's "The Killers"

Hemingway's "The Killers" is another of the Nick Adams stories. I wrote about "Indian Camp" here and noted that in Hemingway's first book of stories, In Our Time, the boy keeps getting older in the successive fictions in which he figures as the main character. In "Indian Camp," the first Nick Adams story, he appears to be around 10. In "Big Two-Hearted River," which concludes the book, Nick is a young man and Great War veteran. After In Our Time, Hemingway only occasionally returned to Nick, and does not preserve the chronological element: "The Killers" appeared in Hemingway's next collection of stories, Men Without Women, and one surmises that Nick is in late adolescence, younger than he was at the end of In Our Time. 

The story is set mainly in Henry's lunch-room, a diner in a town called Summit, which I suspect is not an invented place but a reference to what is now known as Summit Township, in Mason County, Michigan. I took up the question of the geography of the Nick Adams stories in "Up in Michigan with Philip Roth," here. The short version is that Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, but the family had a summer home on Walloon Lake, near where the eastern shore of Lake Michigan meets the northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula. If "Summit" in the story is connected to Summit Township, it would be on or near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan around 165 miles south of Walloon Lake. That is, it's a place Hemingway would have known on account of passing through, possibly sometimes stopping to eat, on boyhood trips from Chicago to the lake home.

As the story opens, two menacing customers enter the lunch-room. Nick, the only customer, had been talking with George, who is taking orders, when the men enter, and so he watches and listens as rudeness deepens into something else. First, there is trouble ordering food as the customers, strangers in the small town, try to order from the dinner menu:

"I'll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes," the first man said.

"It isn't ready yet."

"What the hell do you put it on the card for?"

"That's the dinner," George explained. "You can get that at six o'clock." 

George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter. 

"It's five o'clock."

"The clock says twenty minutes past five," the second man said.

"It's twenty minutes fast." 

"Oh, to hell with the clock," the first man said. "What have you got to eat?"

"I can give you any kind of sandwiches," George said. "You can have ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver and bacon, or a steak."

"Give me chicken croquettes with green peas and cream sauce and mashed potatoes."

"That's the dinner."

"Everything we want's the dinner, eh? That's the way you work it."

"I can give you ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver—"

"I'll take ham and eggs," the man called Al said.

Film noir dialog owes a lot to Hemingway. The detail about the clock becomes important. For now, let's just observe that it seems odd that it would be twenty minutes fast. If George knew that, why wouldn't he fix it? Is he trying to put off the time that dinner could be ordered? A clock set to the wrong time suggests something—disorder?—that is reinforced perhaps by Henry's lunch-room being run by George. Toward the end of the story, Nick goes to Mrs Hirsch's boarding house, and, assuming that the woman running that place is Mrs Hirsch, calls her by name:

"Well, good-night, Mrs Hirsch," Nick said. 

"I'm not Mrs Hirsch," the woman said. "She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I'm Mrs Bell."

"Well, good-night, Mrs Bell," Nick said.

There isn't any reason for this odd detail but to connect it to Henry's lunch-room run by George, where the clock is set to the wrong time (maybe). You might say that nothing is as it ought to be, or as you'd expect, or would like to be able to count upon. 

The two men soon order Nick back into the kitchen with the black cook.  Max stays in the customer area with George and Al is in the kitchen with Nick and the cook, who are gagged with towels. Max and Al call to each other from different rooms, and Max talks to George. It develops that the two diners are gangsters in Summit to kill an ex-prizefighter named Ole Andreson. They have sawed-off shotguns beneath their coats. The one called Max asks George if it's true that Ole Andreson takes his dinners in Henry's lunch-room every evening at six o'clock. George allows that he "sometimes" does, and when he does, it's around six. 

And so the waiting begins. The question is whether Ole Andreson, who one guesses in his boxing career must have crossed the head of a gambling ring, is going to show up to eat at the diner. Remember, the clock had said 5:20 when the hitmen were ordering food, though it may only have been 5. Max tells George to tell anyone who enters to eat that the cook has had to step out and that they should come back later; if they persist, or it's a take-away order, he is to make it himself. Al props open with a ketchup bottle the slit through which dishes are passed from the kitchen to the eating area and directs Max and George where to sit as they all wait—presumably so they won't obstruct his line of sight to the door, and his shooting angle. A few people do come to eat, and the mundane conversations as they complain to George or order food tend to heighten the tension: the intrusion of the ordinary upon the horrific highlights the horror. We are told at intervals what time the clock says. Eventually the gangsters decide Andreson isn't coming and they leave.

Of course this leaves George, the cook, and Nick alone in the diner with knowledge of Andreson's peril. George asks Nick if he will warn Andreson. Against the cook's advice, young Nick Adams says he will. Up to this point, you might almost have forgotten about Nick's presence. He has spoken three times. The first, he answers one of the gangster's question about his name by saying simply, "Adams." When ordered to go back into the kitchen, he says, "What's the idea?" And after the gangsters leave, upon having the towel removed from his mouth:

Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before. 

"Say," he said. "What the hell?" He was trying to swagger it off.

This adolescent bravado is what in my mind establishes Nick's age as on the boundary of young manhood. In "Indian Camp," the point had been the effect on him of the "inner story" about the birth and suicide at the camp. He does not now appear to have been similarly overwhelmed by the unpleasantness at the diner, or at least in front of the two other men he is eager to act that way. But then he goes to the boarding house to warn Andreson.

When Mrs Bell—he thinks it's Mrs Hirsch—shows him to the room of the former prizefighter, Nick on being told to enter opens the door and sees Andreson lying on his bed in his clothes. Nick begins telling his story. Andreson does not seemed alarmed. The narration of events at the diner, as described by Nick, is repeatedly interrupted to state that Andreson "did not say anything" and, instead of looking at Nick, stared into the wall at the side of his bed: "Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything." Nick ends his story by saying, "'George thought I better come and tell you about it.'" Andreson then speaks for the first time: "'There isn't anything I can do about it.'" The conversation continues:

"I'll tell you what they were like."

"I don't want to know what they were like," Ole Andreson said. He looked at the wall. "Thanks for coming to tell me about it." 

"That's all right."

Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed. 

"Don't you want me to go and see the police?"

"No," Ole Andreson said. "That wouldn't do any good."

"Isn't there something I could do?"

"No. There isn't anything to do."

"Maybe it was just a bluff."

"No. It ain't just a bluff." 

Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall. 

"The only thing is," he said, talking toward the wall, "I just can't make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day."

"Couldn't you get out of town?"

"No," Ole Andreson said. "I'm through with all that running around."

He looked at the wall.

"There ain't anything to do now." 

"Couldn't you fix it up some way?"

"No. I got in wrong." He talked in the same flat voice. "There ain't anything to do. After a while I'll make up my mind to go out."

"I better go back and see George," Nick said.

"So long," said Ole Andreson. He did not look toward Nick. "Thanks for coming around." 

On the way out, the aforementioned mix-up with Mrs Bell occurs. Back at the diner, Nick tells George about his encounter with Andreson—the cook, having heard the start of it, retires into the kitchen, saying he doesn't even want to listen. All Nick's swagger is gone. It seems Andreson has been on the run and would now rather just face his end. Only he hasn't yet fortified himself sufficiently. He hadn't shown up at the diner because all day he'd been afraid to go out. Eventually he would. Maybe "the killers" will find him in his bed in his room before he goes out. Nothing I think is more affecting than the repeated, "There's nothing to do." Nick can't shrug it off as he had the ordeal in the diner over the dinner hour. Here's how "The Killers" ends:

"What's he going to do?"

"Nothing."

"They'll kill him."

"I guess they will."

"He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago." 

"I guess so," said Nick.

"It's a hell of a thing."

"It's an awful thing," Nick said.

They did not say anything. George reached down for a towel and wiped the counter.

"I wonder what he did?" Nick said. 

"Double-crossed somebody. That's what they kill them for." 

"I'm going to get out of this town," Nick said.

"Yes," said George. "That's a good thing to do." 

"I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful."

"Well," said George, "you better not think about it." 

"You better not think about it" recalls the ending of "Indian Camp," wherein the young Nick Adams "felt quite sure," in the last sentence of that story, "that he would never die." Of course he will, as will Andreson, even though it may be too awful to think about. 

I sometimes think that "The Killers" has not aged as well as some of Hemingway's stories. If that's true, it could be that the originality now may seem hackneyed on account of a thousand noir movies that have copied its manner. The picture at the top is Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks." I remember that in college I had to buy for a course an American literature anthology that had this picture on its cover. One of the included works was "The Killers," and I've always suspected that the cover is meant to refer to that story in particular. The correspondence isn't perfect. For one thing, there's a woman in the Hopper picture, which moreover appears to be set in a city instead of a small town. But there is the same aura of menace, and the story, considering it's mainly dialog, has a distinctly pictorial effect: Hemingway is intensely interested in the way things look, and the play of light. We aren't told much, mostly we just overhear (as it were) what's said, but we are told that the lunch-room is a converted saloon, and that this explains why there is a long mirror on one wall in which Max gazes at George—maybe so that he can see him while looking directly at the door? (Hopper's nighthawks' diner has no visible door.) I didn't mention the story's abrupt opening:

The door of Henry's lunch-room opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.

Yes, they sat down at the counter and began talking. The next paragraph without quotation marks begins:

Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window.

The Wikipedia article on "Nighthawks" mentions that Hopper may have been influenced in this work either by "The Killers," which he is known to have admired, or by another Hemingway story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."