Eric The Blue

Woman in size 6 red dress disapproves of police tactics in Atlanta

No doubt it is morally depraved to find entertainment value in the current social turmoil, but you might as well know the worst about me: I think this is funny.

 

 

Too close to the news

I live at 47th Street and 1st Avenue South in Minneapolis. This is about 2 miles southwest of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, where Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on Memorial Day. For more than 20 years I lived at 14th Avenue and 40th Street, maybe a half mile from an intersection that's now going to be notorious into the foreseeable future. It's sort of crazy, and terribly sad, to see on the world news pictures of streetscapes I've known intimately for forty years. It'd be different if it was in, say, a Prince music video! This, however, is embarrassing. Tonight, driving north along Nicollet Avenue to get some curbside pickup food, I was stunned to see many of the storefronts boarded up, including the restaurant/bar at 43rd Street that was my destination. There hasn't been any vandalism around here but I guess people are taking precautions. Tonight, a beautiful Friday evening at the start of summer, there is an 8:00 curfew across the city. Last night, you could hear sirens continuously. When I took out some garbage, I could hear but not see helicopters low in the sky to the northeast, where the trouble was.

I've forced myself to watch the video. It feels pornographic, like a snuff film. Some people say, well, it's "taken out of context." But the context is a police call about someone trying to pass a bad $20-bill at a corner grocery. He wasn't armed. His crime, assuming he knew it was a bad bill, wasn't remotely violent. His hands were cuffed behind his back while one of Minneapolis's finest slowly strangled him for about 9 minutes. Of course the cop had to hear the decent people complaining, raising their voices in alarm and filming him with their phones. Impassive, he persisted.  One way to account for this might be that he'd been doing more or less the same thing for years. Three other cops standing around, doing a lot of nothing. They don't appear surprised. As his colleague killed a guy, one of them told the worried onlookers not to do drugs. Wtf? "Just a few bad apples," we're told. Right, but 4 out of 4 responding to this police call about a guy with a fake $20-bill: how unlucky. In retrospect, maybe the onlookers should have tried to pull the cop off the guy. Would the other three then have come to the assistance of their colleague? In that case, there would have been a street fight between decent people and the thugs with badges and guns.

Around 20 years ago, I was called to serve on a grand jury in Hennepin County. You are basically "on call" for several months, and have to report for duty when the County Attorney has a case to present to a grand jury. Most of the cases you hear are for first degree murder, because a grand jury indictment is required to proceed against a defendant who, if convicted, would be subject to the maximum penalty of life in prison.

You get used to the drill. First witness is usually someone from the medical examiner's office with gruesome morgue pictures. So, a corpse, and cause of death is a gunshot wound. Then come the homicide detectives with what they've discovered. The prosecutors are zealous and solemn. There's been a serious crime and they think they know who did it. They want an indictment, and that's what we gave them. Fine, because the murder cases were all strong.

One case was different from the others. After all these years, I might be violating an oath to get into the details, but the case was not first degree murder. It related to a police shooting. It wouldn't have had to be presented to a grand jury, but possibly the county attorney, at the time Amy Klobuchar, did not want to make a tough call. Let a grand jury decide! Everything was suddenly different. Prosecutorial zeal had gone missing. It was the only case where the suspect appeared before us. Instead of leading the medical examiner and homicide detectives through the incriminating evidence, the "prosecutor" led the cop, who appeared in the grand jury room in full dress uniform, through his side of the story.  The "prosecutor" was now like Kenny Jay, the professional wrestler whose job was to turn a few somersaults before getting pinned. I did not think the situation called for "deadly force," but it was obvious I was 1-out-of-23 holding that opinion, 24 if you count Kenny Jay, and an indictment required 12 votes. Amy got to say the grand jury heard all the evidence and cleared the cop.

I don't often think about it, but the last few days the memory of this has irritated me. Should have been more pugnacious. Instead, I feel I was recruited for a bit part in a long, rigged game from which this Chauvin fellow reasonably concluded that he could jack people around with impunity. That could be what attracted him to police work in the first place—the prospect of jacking people around. If you're interested in grand juries, here is an informative article outlining criticisms that match pretty nearly my own experience of what's wrong with them. 

The pic at the top is of something happier: a middle school basketball team I played against. Bryant Junior High was on 38th Street a few blocks west of Chicago Avenue. Number 3 in the front row quit playing basketball and ended up doing, for example, this:

 

 

 

 

 

American stories: Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

 

There is a local angle for Minnesotans as the author, Tim O'Brien, was born in Austin, Minnesota, in 1946—lots of Americans born in 1946—before the family moved, when he was 10, to Worthington, in the southwest corner of the state, where he graduated from high school in 1964. He then attended Macalester College in St. Paul: honor student, an editor of the college newspaper, president of his class. He graduated from Macalester in the spring of 1968 and planned on continuing his education at Harvard, but the Vietnam War was escalating—it was the year of the Tet Offensive—and that summer his draft notice appeared in the mailbox in Worthington. Though he was opposed to the war, as evidenced by signed editorials in the Macalester student newspaper, he reported as directed in the notice and served two years as a US Army grunt in Vietnam. This was plainly the defining experience of his life. His war memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone (Box Me Up and Ship Me Home), was published in 1973 and was followed, in 1978, by the Vietnam War novel Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award. His third book, The Things They Carried, published in 1990, is a collection of linked stories, some of which seem more like memoir: all are narrated by a Vietnam veteran who is now a writer. The story called "The Things They Carried" opens the book and gives the collection its title. 

There is a technique of literature called the catalogue, in which names or objects are compiled in a long list. To my knowledge, the great original is from the Iliad, the section in Book II where Homer gives the names of all the ships, together with the names of the leaders and their soldiers and the districts from whence they came, that sailed against Troy. "The Things They Carried," a war story some three millenia hence, employs the same technique, but the catalogue is made of—"the things they carried," that is, the items that the grunts "humped" across Vietnam on their expeditionary missions. It begins:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

And we learn, as the paragraph proceeds, that Martha is an English major, that she loved the poetic works of Geoffrey Chaucer, that her letters were "chatty" but "elusive on the subject of love," and that they weighed ten ounces. One expects events in a war story but this one is made mostly of this elaborate catalogue of the things the men carried. The narrator moves on from Lieutenant Cross to other members of the platoon and we are filled in, one by one, on the things that this man and that one carried. Of course, many items were carried by all, or most, of the soldiers:

P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia. 

And on and on it goes. What can be said about it? The lieutenant's name, Jimmy Cross, calls attention to itself: Christ figure? suffering servant? One may take him to be the leader of a band of pilgrims on a journey, like in The Canterbury Tales, whose author is name-called in the first paragraph. Cross's girlfriend Martha, the English major, might point out that in the General Prologue Chaucer methodically moves through the various pilgrims, describing each one briefly, thereby achieving a kind of miniature portrait that is then deepened in the tales that are told along the way to Canterbury. "The Things They Carried," the first story in The Things They Carried, may function in a similar way.

Considered apart from the other stories, however, the accumulation of items carried has an incantatory force. One receives an overwhelming sense of burdens. The men are burdened, materially but also immaterially. The flat naming of items permits the narrator to bury his strong emotion about his experience beneath the mass of all the carefully observed and collated stuff. He pretends to be completely objective. He's just giving a list. But it's possible to detect a certain attitude toward the stuff and, by association, toward the war. Never a mention of anything a dignitary might say on Memorial Day. Not a laminated copy of the Gettysburg Address. Instead, can openers, cigarettes, Kool-Aid &c. Once, the narrator allows something like an editorial opinion to intrude on the catalogue:

If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily mined AOs [areas of operation], where the land was dense with Toe Toppers and Bouncing Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine detector. With its headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety, partly for the illusion of safety.

By describing this technique of the catalogue, I think I've accounted for most of the words in the story. But there is one incident, one event. All this business with the catalogue is like the backdrop for the thing that happens. One of the soldiers in the platoon, Ted Lavender, is killed. We've seen that the story doesn't begin with him—it begins with Lieutenant Cross. Lavender isn't the last soldier mentioned, either. He's just in the mix, as it were. He receives his first mention in the sentence following the one about Jensen's R&R in Sydney, Australia:

Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. 

This is hardly what literature teachers call "foreshadowing," right? Just told, flat out, that he got shot in the head. Wasn't for nothing that he was scared. The next sentence concerns how they all carried 5-pound steel helmets. So moving on. Next mention of Lavender:

Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity.

One more item in the catalogue: premium dope. Lavender next comes up in connection with yet another item:

Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost two pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that carried him away.

This is just a couple of pages into the story, which continues in the same manner, but with details of Lavender's death occasionally distilled in the catalogue. The killing occurs when the platoon is on a mission to blow up enemy tunnels, an operation that affords the narrator the opportunity to describe the explosives and detonators—more things that have to be carried. For some reason, the tunnels can't just be blown: someone has to descend into them and investigate. Lots are drawn for this task. A soldier named Strunk loses. He disappears into the tunnel and is gone for what seems too long. Lavender moves away from the group to pee. Strunk emerges, and the relieved joking is interrupted by the sound of the sniper shot that kills Lavender as he heads back to the group. His wound is described with the same clinical detachment that the narrator devotes to the specs of the carried things. Waiting for the helicopter that will take Lavender's body away, the soldiers smoke the dead man's dope. One jokes that the moral of the event relates to the dangers of drug use (as they smoke up Lavender's unused stock). Kiowa, the devout Baptist who carried an illustrated New Testament, is obsessed with the way Lavender crumbled unceremoniously, no somersaults or picturesque effects like in the movies. Something about the everyday haphazardness of it strikes him as "unchristian." Lieutenant Cross blames himself for allowing reveries about Martha to interfere with the strict imposition of safety protocols and so burns her pictures and letters. The platoon burns to the ground the nearest Vietnamese village and an animal is cruelly tortured. I'm relating all this together but in the story it's conveyed in separate snapshots, the killing of Lavender and its effect on the rest of the platoon acting as a leitmotiv that at intervals interrupts the unfurling of the list of things that had to be carried. The list is unending, the weight of obscene experience infinite:

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds.

Reading recommendations

People who know I like to read sometimes ask whether I have any book recommendations. Just two:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read them aloud to my kids on the night before the big standardized tests, which I'm pretty sure is why they're both among the top 93%. 

Get serious about the paranormal? Are you serious?

 

A blog post at Scientific American asks: "Should Scientists Take UFOs and Ghosts More Seriously?" If the question were instead whether anyone should take UFOs and ghosts more seriously, I think my answer would be that lots of people are already way too serious about them. The journalist interviewed in the post seems to be of the view that scientists unscientifically reject all sorts of paranormal phenomena that really ought to be investigated—the evidence for them is so strong! But wouldn't it be more accurate to say that all sorts of claims about UFOs and ghosts and communication with the dead and telepathy and psychokinesis and astrology, et cetera, et cetera, have indeed been investigated, and found deficient?

Most of it is manifest quackery. When magicians move inanimate objects with "mental energy," they are entertaining us. The contract between performer and audience is that the former will, by misdirection and trickery, create an illusion that will amuse and astound the latter. But if the performer claims for himself "gifts" and "powers" from a spirit world, that's something else. In the clip above, Uri Geller was unable to exhibit his supposed psychic powers on an episode of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. "I don't feel strong," he explains to Johnny, who had worked as a magician early in his career and perhaps for that reason was skeptical enough to have sought advice before the show from the paranormal investigator James Randi on what steps could be taken to ensure that Geller would have to demonstrate actual paranormal abilities rather than mere magic tricks. The result was Geller pleading for more time, I guess to gather his powers, and much fussing and fidgeting on his part while Johnny coolly smoked. Yes, kids, there was a time when you could smoke on TV. That's how long it's been since Geller was exposed as a fraud on The Tonight Show. But now it's 2020 and Scientific American is interviewing a New York Times journalist who thinks this kind of nonsense isn't getting a fair shake from scientists! 

At one point, the interviewer, alluding to the journalist's book Surviving Death, asks: "What is the best evidence you've seen for life after death?" Her answer begins:

That is a huge question. The evidence that I have pulled together in Surviving Death comes from so many places, historical and contemporary, experiential and scientific. It's the full gestalt that provides the best evidence. I think the cases of very young children who report accurate details of a past life, complete with nightmares about the previous death and knowledge from the previous career, are compelling when the memories can be verified and the previous person is identified. If one does not accept rebirth as an explanation, then something else very "paranormal" is going on. . . .

So: it's either reincarnation or something else very paranormal-ly—heads she wins, tails she wins. The rest of the answer trails off into the truly bizarre—"actual-death experiences" (as opposed to less impressive near-death experiences), "mediumships" between the dead and surviving family members, name-dropping of the intellectual elite (William James, with no mention of his conclusions), and so on. But notice how, before really getting on a roll, she appears reluctant to site any specific evidence and instead invokes "the full gestalt." The interviewer doesn't press her for details but does provide hyperlinks to supposed studies about "the cases of very young children who report accurate details of a past life." 

Scanning the list of these studies, I'm struck by how the field is apparently dominated by a single lead author, Jim B. Tucker of the University of Virginia. In this NPR interview from 2014, Tucker describes how a 2-year-old boy in Louisiana had nightmares and explained to his parents that he had been shot down in a plane at Iwo Jima in World War II. Turns out that several of the details of the boy's story "checked out"—an American pilot had been killed over Iwo Jima, he had taken off from a ship with the same name as the one provided by the young boy, he had been killed in a manner similar to the one described by the boy, and the pilot in the plane next to him had a name (Jack Larsen) that matched the name of a "friend" given by the boy.

I wish the interviewer had pursued Tucker on some of the details, beginning perhaps with the language abilities of 2-year-olds, who usually have a vocabulary of about 250 words and would therefore be incapable of telling a detailed story about how in a previous life they'd been killed in an air fight at Iwo Jima after taking off from an aircraft carrier named the Natoma. The interview continues:

Reporter: And how old was James when he was making these claims?

Tucker: Well, it started when he was 2—and a very young 2.

Reporter: That's amazing.

Tucker: Like with most of these cases, it faded away by the time he was 5 or 6 or 7, which is typical. But it was certainly there, quite strong, for some time. 

How amazing? The church lady would probably say "How convenient!"—that it's typically very young children who have these memories, which then fade. Fortunately, Tucker has access to them before that happens. But you could still talk to the parents. I'm more interested in them, anyway. Are they, as my mom used to say, "a little different"? The NPR interviewer exhibits no curiosity on this point.

If you root around on the Internet for stuff about Jim B. Tucker and the paranormal, you are soon referred to another case, concerning a 10-year-old boy who reported having a previous life as a movie extra and, later, a Hollywood agent. The NBC Nightly News, with Lester Holt, did a credulous report about him. Being I guess a rare instance of an older kid with memories of his former life, he appeared on camera with his mother, and the two of them described to the reporter how in a movie book he had pointed to a picture of this obscure actor, Marty Martyn, and said, "That's me!" This made it possible to try and match details of Martyn's life with the boy's memories of his supposed former life, when he was Martyn. Tucker touts 50-some inexplicable matches, but to me they seem explicable in terms of their consistent generality—he was rich, he had nice cars, he had a swimming pool, he liked to sun bathe, his address had either a "Rock" or a "Mount" in it. This seems like an impressive list, but many are related: if one is true, others follow.  ("In a previous life, I played basketball in the NBA; also, I was tall, athletic, affluent, and owned nice cars.") Notwithstanding the two proffered possibilities, the address is more specific, and Tucker discovered that Martyn once lived on a street named "Roxbury." Of course he regards this as a match, but, strictly speaking, it's merely similar to one of the two possibilities. (I'd be more impressed if the boy had said he'd lived on Rockymount Road and Martyn had lived on—Rockymount Road.) It seems the decisive piece of evidence establishing reincarnation, or "something paranormal," pertains to the usually unambiguous question of the date of someone's death. The boy indicated his previous life had ended at age 61, but Tucker knew that Martyn's death certificate said he died at age 59. Then, somewhat mysteriously, "new information" came to light suggesting Martyn had actually died two years after the date given on his death certificate. More amazingness! How exactly did that work? And if the boy is a better source than the death certificate for when Martyn died, because it was his former life, then why was he a little off on the name of the street he lived on? Jim B. Tucker doesn't seem interested. NBC News doesn't seem interested. It's more fun to be amazed.

As a philosopher once noted, people have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard on themselves to slake it. Fine, let them have their fun. I'll only complain when they complain about not being taken seriously. 

James Addison Baker III turns 90

James Addison Baker III was President Reagan's first Chief of Staff, despite having run the campaign of Reagan's primary opponent, George H.W. Bush. It may well have been Baker who supplied the term "voodoo economics" to describe Reagan's fiscal policies. But the affable former actor, unlike our current reality tv star, was not one to hold grudges: he selected Bush as his running mate and named Baker his Chief of Staff and, later, Secretary of the Treasury. When Bush the Elder became president in 1989, Baker reversed the order of his high-level appointments, serving first as a cabinet secretary (Secretary of State) and then as White House Chief of Staff. By 2000, he was past retirement age, but was called into service to manage George W. Bush's legal team during the Florida recount after that year's presidential election. Baker turned 90 last month. 

Someone has said that the poem title "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is reductive, since the name would seem to belong to someone too well dressed to sing love songs. In a similar vein, doesn't the name James Addison Baker III just sound like a Republican? It's the opposite of reductive. A Republican named James Addison Baker III should be taken seriously. Trump would say the name is out of central casting. I have no idea why Addison Mitchell McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, goes by Mitch. He looks like an Addison to me—the horn rimmed glasses, the rich second wife, the Vietnam deferments: Addison. 

It's fun to go through the Wikipedia article on Baker and extract the parts that tend to confirm one's prejudices:

Baker's first wife, the former Mary Stuart McHenry, was active in the Republican Party, working on the Congressional campaigns of George H. W. Bush. Originally, Baker had been a Democrat but too busy trying to succeed in a competitive law firm to worry about politics, and considered himself apolitical. His wife's influence led Baker to politics and the Republican Party. He was a regular tennis partner of George H. W. Bush at the Houston County Club in the late 1950s . . . .

Baker met his first wife, the former Mary Stuart McHenry, of Dayton, Ohio, while on spring break in Bermuda with the Princeton University rugby team. They married in 1953 . . . .

On June 15, 2002, Virginia Graeme Baker, the seven-year-old granddaughter of Baker, daughter of Nancy and James Baker IV, was victim of lethal suction-pump entrapment in an in-ground spa. To promote greater safety in pools and spas, Nancy Baker gave testimony to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and James Baker helped form an advocacy group, which led to the Virginia Graeme Baker Pool and Safety Act. Another granddaughter is Rosebud Baker, a stand-up comedian.

On this last, it's probably too cynical to complain about niche activism after a family tragedy, but I'm up to the job. Don't spread the benefits too liberally!  Preserved from the threat posed by pools and spas, the children of Flint will next want to drink water right from the tap. Here's Rosebud, proof that the effects of a so-so family environment may be overcome:

 

 

 

 

Political notes

I. Christopher Hale, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Tennessee's 4th congressional district, recently observed:

My opponent pulled a gun on his first wife and shot it, forced her and mistresses into three abortions, and illegally prescribed painkillers for a patient he was sleeping with while married. 

Me? Not so much. I will vote to give you health care though.

Chip in.

His opponent is the Republican incumbent, Scott DesJarlais (pictured). Something about the whimsy of the second paragraph made me think, or hope, that the charges in the first paragraph might be at least arguably exaggerated, but I guess they're not. It's all in the family court file from his divorce. There is also a tape, made by DesJarlais himself, of a phone conversation in which he pressures a woman to have an abortion. He was at the time boffing her, as we say, "on the side." DesJarlais was originally elected to Congress in 2010 (the tea party year). His colorful lifestyle came to light in October, 2012, before his first reelection effort, which he won, like all the subsequent ones. His district is rated R+20, the technical definition of which is, I believe, that it is 20 points more Republican than the country as a whole. Possibly that understates it. When in 2016 DesJarlais was reelected to a fourth term by 30 points, Trump carried the district by more than 40 points. In 2018 DesJarlais's margin was up to 40 points, too. You'd think maybe another Republican could beat him in a primary, but no. Here is an article in which a Tennessee political reporter tries to explain to himself and the world how DesJarlais does it. The headline is "The Biggest Hypocrite in Congress?" 

I wonder whether the headline first said "The Biggest Hypocrite in Congress" and then an editor changed it to "The Biggest Hypocrite in Congress?"—because, you know, competition: it's not clear that in the body of 535 he's really the biggest. But if the Wikipedia article on DesJarlais is two-thirds true, his claim is stronger than I've made it sound.

II. Those interested in Electoral College Strategy, 2020 edition, might want to peruse this paper by Doug Sosnik, a political advisor to President Clinton.  He says Biden's likeliest path to victory is the twenty states Hillary won plus Pennsylvania plus Michigan plus Arizona. (The Clinton states plus only Pennsylvania and Michigan would leave Biden on the short side of a 268-270 tally.) More provocative, perhaps, is his prediction that by the end of the decade there will be a big U-shaped wall of Democratic states around the periphery of the continental 48, from Washington State to California across to Florida then up the other coast to New England and including, most notably, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.

I don't know. Better win this year as things may change slower, or faster, than anyone currently imagines. In 1956, Republican Dwight Eisenhower carried 41 of 48 states. The seven states he lost were all in Dixie. Eight years later, the Republican, Barry Goldwater, lost 44 of 50 states, and, excepting his native Arizona, his only victories were in Dixie. And eight years after that, in 1972, the Republican, Richard Nixon, won every state but Massachusetts. In sixteen years, the map went from all red to all blue and back to all red again.

III. Did you see the online commencement address delivered by Ben Saase, Republican of Nebraska? Good grief. I think he thought he was being funny? Note to self: this must be what happens when someone is taught from infancy that everything out of his mouth is clever and laded with wit and insight. Be mean to your kids because, when the disease is narcissism, self-diagnosis is out of the question. 

 

 

 

Philippa Foot; George Clooney

This is too obscure to help in the event you one day go on Jeopardy, but I put it forward as an example of the (arguably) fun facts you can learn whiling away your life on social media.  Today someone posed on Twitter a question about a philosopher who deserves more renown. I suppose they know that a lot of their followers are philosophy professors or something. I'd at least heard of all the candidates mentioned in the replies, except for one: Philippa Foot. Now I've looked her up and it turns out she's the English philosopher who invented the Trolley Problem. You may have heard about it recently, in the context of discussions about the ethical distribution of scarce medical resources. In the Trolley Problem, Foot described a trolley heading down a track to which five people are tied. By throwing a switch, you can send the trolley down a different track where it will kill only one person. Foot was interested in why it seems you ought to throw the switch, thereby saving four lives, though at the same time almost all of us (I think) agree that you cannot kill someone in order to harvest organs that would save the lives of four desperately ill people. 

But that's not the fun fact. Philippa Foot was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. Her mother, Esther, was Cleveland's daughter, and was actually born in the White House on September 9, 1893, early in her dad's second term. Esther married some British military hotshot and their philosopher daughter was born in 1920. 

But maybe you are more interested in George Clooney. This is highly entertaining.

 

 

 

 

Handicapping [Updated]

I have no idea who is going to win the presidential election in the fall, but it seems there is a consensus that Trump's chances have taken a hit over the past month or two. If that's true, I can understand why: the Biden campaign keeps releasing new ads made mostly of Trump saying stupid stuff, and the main criticism is that they are "too long." 

Well, Trump talks a lot, all of it stupid! He alone can fix it, but he's bravely deferred to the governors, whom he then criticizes harshly, and yesterday he told a reporter that she'd have to ask China ("Chiiiinuh") if she wanted to know why 80,000 Americans have died.

Nevertheless, I'm not as sanguine about Biden's prospects as, say, James Carville, whom I recently saw on tv chortling about how the tide has turned. Not a poll showing Trump ahead, he says. Yes, but who cares? Everyone says the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day, which is true, sort of. More to the point is that everything hinges on the Election Day poll in around six states. Thanks Electoral College! I just checked and right now the average of the national polls, according to Real Clear Politics, is Biden +4.4%. Unfortunately, it would mean more, for purposes of predicting the winner, if Biden were ahead by 4.4% in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. 

Supposing on Election Day Biden wins the national vote by 4.4%. There's a pretty good chance that Trump would then be "reelected." If you're skeptical, here's how the arithmetic on that looks.

In 2016, Clinton won the national vote by just under 3 million ballots, which was 2.1% of all votes cast. So Biden, winning by 4.4%, would basically be doubling Clinton's margin and adding on for good measure about another quarter million. To keep the numbers round, let's say he'd win by 6 million, adding just over 3 million to Clinton's margin. Sounds like a lot, but where would the additional 3 million come from?  An even distribution of the additional votes would put Biden comfortably over the top in the Electoral College. But the distribution wouldn't be even. In 2012, Obama won California by 2.3 million votes. Then in 2016 Hillary Clinton, running a little behind Obama in the country, carried California by 4.3 million votes. She picked up 2 million in one state. Obama had lost Texas by 1.2 million in 2012. Clinton then lost it by 800,000 for a net gain of 400,000. So in the two biggest states she ran ahead of Obama by 2.4 million votes. Net gain in the Electoral College: zero. 

If Biden were to duplicate Clinton's gains in our two biggest states, he also would not net a single additional electoral vote. But he would have used up 80% of his additional 3 million votes. It's not at all clear that there'd be enough in the remaining 20% to switch the outcome in enough states so that his 6 million vote advantage translated into victory after being run through the Rube Goldberg machine that determines the winner. After all, when Clinton gained 2.4 million votes in the two biggest states, she went backwards in the only ones that  mattered—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida. 

I'm not saying it makes no sense to be bullish on Biden's chances. If my life depended on choosing the winner today, I'd bet on him myself—but not on account of current national polling data, and I'd be a lot less nervous if between now and November around a million Californians were to start telecommuting from the suburbs of Milwaukee, Madison, Detroit, and Philadelphia. It would be illegal to pay people to vote for the Democrat but how about paying people who already are Democrats to move to "swing states"?

It's surely crazy that our method of choosing the president makes a voter migration plan a viable electoral strategy. Colonize the red states! Start with those of the lightest hue!

UPDATE: I should have included links to the sources for the election results I describe. For 2012, here. And for 2016, here. You can check my math and, if you want, contemplate the result in any particular county, which for me has dissipated several hours of life's tedium. Check out the 2016 result in the suburban counties of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro compared to the result in the counties surrounding Milwaukee.

Casey Cep on Johnny Cash, &c

No doubt it is a sign of encroaching fuddyduddyism, but I regret that the way people get their music nowadays is putting cultural artifacts like album covers and liner notes in a category with phone booths and white Democrats from Dixie. Who would want to be without the liner notes to Johnny Cash's 1996 album "Unchained," in which he wrote:

I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God.

I confess I know this not because I own "Unchained." Last night, I saw a woman, Casey Cep, interviewed on TV about the post office, because it was Mother's Day and she'd written an article about her mom, a mail carrier, that was published in The New Yorker, where Cep is a reporter. I was so favorably impressed by her in the interview that I found the article online, read it—it's great—and then surfed around finding other stuff she's written, including a review of a book about Johnny Cash wherein she quotes the above extract from the liner notes to "Unchained." In the same review she relates the following detail from Cash's life:

Here and elsewhere, Beck [the author of the book under review, Richard Beck's Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash] wrestles with questions about solidarity and patriotism, and with the complexities of Cash's simultaneously conservative and countercultural appeal. That's a familiar bind for country-music artists, as the recent Taylor Swift documentary "Miss Americana," the career of the Dixie Chicks, and a long litany of actions and notable inactions before them testify. In Cash's case, it came to a head when he was invited to perform for President Richard Nixon at the White House, in 1970. The Administration announced that Cash would perform "Okie from Muskogee," the famous anti-antiwar anthem by Merle Haggard, and "Welfare Cadillac," a racist dog whistle by Guy Drake—but he refused and instead performed his prison set, including "What Is Truth," a protest song of sorts that he likened to Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

I'd heard of this kerfuffle before, which leads me to believe Ken Burns covered it in his film on country music? I was 11 when Cash played for Nixon so don't think I remember about it from contemporary accounts! Though Cep doesn't explicitly mention it, the craziest aspect of the whole thing must be that Nixon specifically requested Cash to play two songs that were not Johnny Cash songs. He probably didn't even know. 

Casey Cep, on the other hand: doesn't seem to be much she doesn't know about. The daughter of the mail carrier went to Harvard and then, on a Rhodes Scholarship, to Oxford, where she studied theology. The New Yorker sent her to Alabama to report on Harper Lee, and the upshot was Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, which made all the lists of best books of 2019. She is the same-sex spouse of another New Yorker writer, Kathryn Schulz. Cep's abiding interest in religion must be upsetting to votaries of stereotypes relating to Ivy League lesbians. An interview she did in connection with the publication of Furious Hours concluded:

Q: In addition to your English degree from Harvard, you have a master of philosophy in theology from Oxford. Issues of religion and religious leadership come up in this book. I wonder if you think of theological concerns as central to your overall project.

A: Thank you for noticing this. I grew up in the Lutheran Church, and I often say that Sunday services were my first book club, because week after week very thoughtful, very loving people gathered around the same book and tried to figure out what it meant. I was steeped in scripture as a kid, and I've devoted quite a lot of my adult life to studying religion and theology, so I find that it is one of the great themes that interests me—not only as a writer, but as a person in the world, trying to figure out how to be a good partner and community member and citizen of the cosmos. I end up writing about it so much because I think about it so much.  

Flipping coins: an academic paper

I found this academic paper, on a topic at the intersection of philosophy and math, a hundred times more interesting than one expects an "academic paper" to be. If a tossed coin lands heads 92 times in a row, would you be surprised? The author of the paper, Martin Smith, argues that you should not be surprised, and makes a stronger case than I for one would have thought possible. 

The article, very clearly written, is only about 7 pages long, but I understand if you don't want to click and read so will try to give the main points myself in a lot less than 7 pages. We should make a distinction between what you'd predict and what would surprise you. Suppose you determined to flip a coin just five times. Would you predict that it would land heads every time? No, because most likely it wouldn't. To be precise, the chance of this is only 1/2⁵, or 1/32, a titch above 3%. Pretty unlikely. But suppose you then flipped the coin five times and got five heads. Should you be surprised? No, because there had to be some specific result, and HHHHH is just as likely as, say, THHTH. If you're not surprised by THHTH, then you shouldn't be surprised by HHHHH, either. You wouldn't have predicted five heads in a row. Most likely, something else happens. But "something else" encompasses all the other possibilities. If you actually flip the coin five times, there has to be some specific result, and HHHHH is as likely as any other. Five heads in a row doesn't require an explanation.

Neither does 92 heads in a row, for the same reason. That is, the argument doesn't change on account of the number of trials. (Smith chose 92 because, in a Tom Stoppard play, one of the characters flips a coin in a gambling game—heads he loses—and as the curtain rises is trying to make sense out of having lost 92 games in a row.)

My reasoning faculties find the argument to be sound. All the rest of me says to keep looking for the flaw. This isn't an unusual sensation in human affairs and reminds me of a story about the paradox of Zeno, who postulated that you could never traverse the distance between two points, since you'd first have to cover half the distance, and then half the balance, and on and on, with the result that, at the end of time, you'd still be some distance away from the destination. To demonstrate, a teacher had a boy and a girl face each other from opposite ends of a classroom. The boy then advanced toward the girl, the teacher measuring off half the distance each time. After a few advances, the boy was getting pretty close, and grinned at the girl. Trusting Zeno, she said, "You'll never get here." He answered, "Right, but I'll get close enough for all practical purposes." Maybe he was being a jokester, maybe he sensed that there was something unfair about chopping up distance but not time. 

One's strong impression of reality, or whatever you want to call it, might make you doubt Zeno, but it isn't always a good guide to the truth. Apparently it's true that all matter is made of just over a hundred different kinds of atoms—these tiny particles we can't see that jiggle about constantly, because they attract one another until, having been drawn together, they instead repel. I anyway think the atomic hypothesis is true, though it's not on account of my "strong impression of reality" that I've reached this conclusion. Crediting only my own impressions, I'd say there are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of different substances just in my house alone. 

I'm inclined to give my assent to Smith, partly because it seems people's probabilistic impressions are unusually susceptible to error, so that what seems true might very well not be. There is, for example, an entire literature about "the Monty Hall problem"—so called, I think, because it's hard to make people believe that the best strategy in a certain game is indeed the best strategy. If you're of a certain age, like mine, you'll know that there used to be a game show hosted by the TV personality Monty Hall. In the big game at the end of the show, there would be three prizes concealed behind three doors. Behind two of the doors would be something like a live, impassive goat. But behind the third door there'd be something like a sports car. The contestant gets the prize behind the door she chooses. The wrinkle is that, after she's made her choice, Monty reveals the prize behind one of the unselected doors. This is always a goat, so it's evident that Monty knows where the big prize is and wants to heighten the suspense. He then offers the contestant a deal (the name of the show was "Let's Make a Deal"): if he wants, he can take the prize behind the remaining closed door instead of the one behind the door he originally chose. 

Should the contestant switch? Does it make a difference? In experiments, more than 80 percent of people stick with their original choice (according to the Wikipedia article on the Monty Hall Problem). It's not that hard to show, however, that by switching a contestant doubles the chance of winning the valuable prize. After making your original choice you have a one-third chance of winning—that's not controversial. It seems people must reason that the chance they've chosen correctly rises after Monty reveals a goat. This reasoning would be sound if Monty revealed at random what was behind one of the unselected doors. Remember, though, it never happens that he reveals a sports car and the contestant immediately loses. It's always a goat, followed by the offer to switch. The likelihood that the contestant has chosen correctly therefore remains one-third. Monty is in effect divulging that the two-thirds chance the contestant was wrong is not evenly distributed between two unselected doors. Rather, all two-thirds attaches to the unselected door Monty hasn't yet opened. By switching, the chance of winning the car goes from one-third to two-thirds.

I can't think of an experimental test for Smith's argument, but, if you doubt the one I've sketched out above for the Monty Hall Problem, you might accurately simulate the game by taking a couple of deuces (goats) and an ace (sports car) from a deck of cards.  After "shuffling," deal face down one card to yourself and two to someone you are co-quarantining with. Now, to make it more interesting, you each ante a dollar and the person with the ace wins the pot. This is obviously a bad game for you, right? Suppose you make a rule that, before seeing who has the ace, your co-quarantiner has to look at his two cards and turn a deuce face up. It's an illusion to suppose this changes anything, right? It's still a bad game for you. But if there were yet another rule, one requiring you and the co-quarantiner to now swap the remaining downturned cards before looking to see who has the ace, the game would become a money-maker for you. If you're still not persuaded, just play a bunch of games and see who wins how often under what rules. 

What I find intriguing about Smith's argument concerns what, if true, it suggests about our minds—namely, that they seem to be repulsed by randomness, prefer order, and therefore are constantly exercising themselves to discover patterns. It doesn't mean there aren't patterns. It means that detecting a pattern when there is none is a common mistake compared to failing to detect a pattern. I think this would explain a lot, like the hold of elaborate conspiracy theories on the human mind. Oswald was not enough of a marksman to have shot Kennedy! There must have been additional gunmen in Dealey Plaza and a conspiracy involving Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Soviet Union! But what if Oswald just got lucky? (It happens, I once hit two doubles in the same baseball game.) A basketball player misses a foul shot that would have won the game. She choked! But wait, she doesn't make them all when practicing in her driveway. What if the fateful, errant shot was just one of those that she happens to miss? We're told that everything happens for a reason. I'll subscribe, if "random chance that might not have been realized but was" is allowed as a reason.

Presho, South Dakota

Probably because I spoke with my dad on the phone today, I fell into kind of a reverie about a family car trip from 50-some years ago. We stopped some place for lunch. For some reason, I remember it was in the town of Presho, South Dakota. No, actually I think I do know the reason I remember: when my dad was paying the bill, the teenaged girl ringing it up boasted, in reply to some comment of his, "Yup, Presho, the best little town in South Dakota!" She'd be around 70 now. 

Anyway, I'd gone to the men's room by myself a few minutes earlier. When I returned, my dad told me that for about the first two-thirds of the way from the bathroom door back to the table I'd been tugging at my zipper, trying to get it to the top of the tracks as I walked along. He said, very levelly, that protocol required I take care of that while still in the bathroom. A lesson I've generally remembered through all these years.

I'm sure that within about three days I'd seen Mount Rushmore, the Calamity Jane Passion Show in Deadwood, and Devils Tower in Wyoming, but the only thing I distinctly remember of the trip is that little restaurant in Presho. 

May 7, 1951, at Nicollet Park in Minneapolis

I've meant for awhile to follow up on this post, in which I mention my dad having seen Willie Mays play for the Minneapolis Millers in a May, 1951, game at Nicollet Park. Yesterday, Mays's 89th birthday, would have been a good day to catch up, but better even later than never.

I think it was on the day of that post, January 28, that I met some people I used to work with for lunch. Nicollet Park was on my mind and at lunch I said something about it, including that my dad had seen a game there in which Willie Mays had made the greatest catch he'd ever seen. Next day one of the baseball fans from the old office shot me an email in which he attached the box score and newspaper accounts (one by the legendary Halsey Hall) of the Miller game played at Nicollet Park on May 7, 1951—69 years ago today, the day after Mays turned 20—against the Louisville Colonels. He wanted to know whether the details matched up with my dad's account. Here's the lede to Halsey's May 8 gamer for the Minneapolis Tribune:

Minneapolis won one of the most thrill-splashed, impotently pitched games in the lurid history of Nicollet park Monday night, defeating the Louisville Colonels 10-9. The 1,351 fans went home drooling, for instance, about—

Willie Mays turned scoreboard boy. Off Taft Wright, in the third inning, the young genius looked like he was hanging up numbers as he leaped almost to the level of the big league board for a fly ball, banged into the wall and doubled a runner at second base. It will rank as one of the greatest catches you ever will see. 

Yes, that has to be the game my dad saw! Good sleuthing, honed by the necessity of tracking down people for service in law suits. Here is the account from the May 8 Minneapolis Star:

The phenoms were on parade at Nicollet Park Monday night as Minneapolis nosed out Louisville 10-9 in a carnival of run, hit and walk that opened a four-game series.

Almost too many things happened to keep track of in the two hours and 49 minutes of action, but when all totalled up a couple of kid outfielders had stolen the show—Willie Mays of Minneapolis and Karl Olson of Louisville.

[Snip]

Mays in the third inning made the greatest catch anyone present could recall at Nicollet park. He literally climbed the right center field wall to pick off Taft Wright's jet drive.

It was so nearly an impossible catch that Jim Piersall, Colonel runner on second base, took off and raced for the plate. He headed for the dugout instead of trying to get back to second and the double play was easy.

What happened to Karl Olson? How long between occurrences of "lurid" and "impotently" in the lede to a Halsey Hall game account? How could a 9-inning, 10-9 game be played in under 2 hours, 50 minutes? Why did the style sheets of Minneapolis newspapers evidently require a lower-case p for "Nicollet park"? What else did my dad do in Minneapolis on a Monday night in May, 1951, when he was ostensibly a college student 40 miles away, in Northfield? I said in my post that Mays had a double and a homer, but actually he had a single and a triple: did I misremember my dad's account, or did he embellish? It seems he did not embellish the details of the catch. 

There are a million delicious details. Or maybe they seem delicious because I miss baseball. Piersall, the runner Mays doubled off second, went on to a distinguished big league career that was however marred by mental illness, which is the subject of his autobiography Fear Strikes Out and the movie made from the book. I had thought he was little more than a journeyman but I see now that he was a good, or nearly great, player—two-time all star, two-time Gold Glove winner, and member of the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame. In 1956, he led the American League with 40 doubles. Tidbit: as a high school basketball player, he led his Waterbury, Connecticut team to the 1947 New England championship, scoring 29 points in the final game. Another tidbit: one of the early signs of his illness, diagnosed as manic-depression, occurred about a year after Mays doubled him off second base, when he got in a fist fight with Yankee second baseman Billy Martin. (Could have happened to almost anyone, of course.)

The box score shows that Mays was not the only future Hall of Famer playing at Nicollet Park that night. Hoyt Wilhelm was one of three pitchers used by the Millers, and, despite walking four (to go along with five strike outs), got credit for the win. He helped his own cause, collecting a hit and a walk in two plate appearances and scoring a run. You can't tell from the box score, but I'm guessing Wilhelm entered the game in the sixth inning, when the Colonels scored five times to take an 8-6 lead, and got at least the last ten outs, allowing only a solo homer in the ninth inning. He pitched in the majors from 1952 to 1972 and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1985.

Regarding Mays, the Star article notes that his two hits that night pushed his average to .405. By the time the New York Giants called him up two weeks later, he was batting .477. I wonder whether he had to break a lease at the boarding house where he lived at 3616 Fourth Avenue South, less than a mile from the Nicollet Park site. The house is still there, behind the Hosmer Library. In those days, the area around 38th Street and Fourth Avenue was a black residential and business center. Housing in south Minneapolis was segregated and enforced mainly by "racial restrictions" in real estate deeds. If the boarding house had been south of 42nd Street, the owner most likely would not have been able to rent to Mays, who was at the back end of his prime when I first became a baseball fan. When I think of him, I see him running between first and second base, cap off, looking over his right shoulder at the ball he just hit over the right fielder's head and deciding to try for a triple. Only bad thing about being a Twins fan was not seeing more of him, Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente. 

The above picture was taken on May 24, 1951, in Omaha, where the Millers were playing when Mays got the call from the Giants. He's getting a plane ticket to Philadelphia, where the next day he made his major league debut against the Phillies. The stuff my colleague, Dave Gates, sent me is copied below.

 

"A Jew Walks Into a Bar"

I think this short film—less than a half hour—is funny and oddly affecting. Watch it if you have 25 minutes of shelter-in-place time to spare.

The main character's opening joke, about maybe being in the wrong place, reminds me of a small incident from my life as an occasional fan of standup comedy. The VFW in Minneapolis's LynLake neighborhood used to have one standup night per month before all the craziness started. Once, arriving alone and early for the show, I took a seat at the back of the room—in case audience participation was a part of someone's act. After the room had begun to fill, this strikingly obese fellow took a seat by himself at the table adjoining mine. Our chairs were next to each other, and I was about to make small talk with him when he pulled out a notebook and began studying it: one of the performers? Sure enough, the show starts, and he's about the third comedian to take the stage. There's no "green room"; the comedians just walk up the aisle and mount the stage after being introduced. Most of them charge right up there, jump onto the stage, and shout something like "Good evening Minneapolis!" All energetic and fun. This guy is way too big for that. He lumbers down the aisle from his seat in the back, next to me. It seems to take him forever. Of course every eye is on him and it's easy to imagine what everyone is thinking: "My God! This guy is huge!" He finally gets to the stage and ascends with difficulty. Now he's finally at the microphone. The room has gone silent. Everyone is waiting for him to speak. He pauses, maybe for effect, like David Finklestein in "A Jew Walks Into a Bar," but it's also possible he's winded and has to catch his breath. And then he speaks.

He says, "No one ever asks me if they need a jacket."

Miscellany

In case like me you are wondering when there will be a vaccine for the coronavirus, it seems the answer is "in 12 to 18 months." The date you ask has no bearing on the answer, which is ever and always "in 12 to 18 months."

I see, however, that the final American death toll is variable. A while ago Trump said it would be 55, maybe 60k. A couple days after we roared past 60k, he told Fox News that was too low. You don't get rich without being good with numbers! Now he says it's going to be 75, 80, maybe 100k. No wait, that was yesterday. Today, his Administration's favorite model says 134,000. The number goes up on account of relaxed restrictions, which his Administration favors, except when it doesn't. And Trump's authority is "total," except that he's deferring to the governors, whom he then criticizes for following his Administration's guidelines (in the case of the governors of Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia) and for violating those guidelines (in the case of the governor of Georgia). Meanwhile, the governors of Florida and Texas, who are also relaxing restrictions before Trump Administration guidelines say they should, are "doing a great job." Needless to say, so is he.

I'm still collecting Faulkner anecdotes. Flannery O'Connor's letters are collected in a book called The Habit of Being. I looked up "Faulkner, William" in the index yesterday and came across this gem, from a letter she wrote to Elizabeth Bishop on 2 August 1959:

Yesterday I sold a pair of [peacocks], the first time I have sold any. These people showed up in a long white car, the woman in short shorts. They obviously had plenty of money that they weren't used to. She flew a Piper Cub, kept two coons, and what she called a "Weimeraw" dog. He was going to start in on pheasants, peafowl and bullfrogs. They came in and admired the house and she said, "We was in Macon looking for some French Provincial furniture. I want me a love seat." The man was a structural engineer. He said he had a friend in Mississippi who was a writer and I said who was that. He said, "His name is Bill Faulkner. I don't know if he's any good or not but he's a mighty nice fellow." I told him he was right good. 

In another letter, she tells John Hawkes that, regarding Faulkner, "Probably the real reason I don't read him is because he makes me feel that with my one-cylinder syntax I should quit writing and raise chickens altogether." In yet another, she tells someone else, "I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won't get swamped." 

Someone took to social media to suggest that the coronavirus quarantine might be a good time to learn a poem by heart, "to get a different rhythm and new voice in your head." So I've been looking around for one I think I can memorize and finally found:

A mob of the MAGA persuasion
Conducted a statehouse invasion.
Though heavily armed,
Not one was harmed:
Whaddya know? They were all Caucasion!

American stories: Faulkner's "That Evening Sun"

A wee bit of background with anecdotes: Faulkner's novels and stories are a chronicle of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County and the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha's county seat. These correspond with Lafayette County (pronounced with emphasis on FAY) and Oxford, Faulkner's home town, in the north central part of the state, about 85 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. Oxford is home to the University of Mississippi, where the young Faulkner was enrolled long enough to make a D in the only English class he ever took. For his novel Absalom, Absalom! he drew a map of Yoknapatawpha County on which he marked where various events described in his fiction occurred. Main characters in some of the books appear in others as minor characters, as the author turned his attention first here and then somewhere else. Faulkner enthusiasts have constructed biographies of his characters from all the information that may be gleaned from the different fictions in which they appear. The Compson family is at the center of two of his best novels, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and "That Evening Sun" is narrated by one of the Compson children, Quentin, who says he was 9 years old when the events of the story occurred, 15 years ago. In Absalom, Absalom!, however, Quentin commits suicide at the end of his freshman year at Harvard. When Faulkner was asked about the problematic timeline, he replied that "these are my people" and "I can move them around if I want." 

Another curiosity related to timeline comes into view once we get into the text of the story. We are told right away that the events we're going to hear about occurred 15 years ago, and we learn later that Quentin was then 9 years old (and his sister Caddy 7, and brother Jason 5). This means it would be possible for Quentin to comment upon the events from his adult perspective, but he does not. The narration seems limited to the point of view of someone 9 years old. Probably the best example of this relates to the most shocking incident of the story, when the Compson's black maid, Nancy, is arrested and then viciously assaulted by a white man:

. . . they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say:

"When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It's been three times now since—" until Mr Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, "It's been three times now since you paid me a cent."

That was how she lost her teeth. . . .

The adult reader comprehends, as the 24-year-old narrator must, that the Compson family maid had a prostitution sidelight and one of her customers, a banker and deacon in the Baptist church, did not feel obliged to pay. Moreover, he felt free to assault her in the presence of the marshal. Only she went to jail. Mr Stovall obviously knew it was impossible for him to commit a crime against a black woman. This as I say is shocking, but the narration is flat, because it is limited to the perspective of a 9-year-old (even though the actual narrator is 24), who doesn't understand what it all means. 

Let's ask two questions about this. (I.) Why, from the viewpoint of the narrator, Quentin Compson, who is either 9 or 24, depending on how you measure, is this incident in the story? (II.) Why, from the viewpoint of the actual storyteller, William Faulkner, is this incident in the story? The answer to the first question is that a 9-year-old white boy has noticed that the family's black maid is missing teeth and this incident explains why. It reveals something about Nancy. The answer to the second question is that the answer to the first question reveals something about Quentin Compson. Nine is old enough to be horrified, to say nothing of 24. But it seems he wasn't. And isn't.

Perhaps a good deal about the story may be comprehended if we keep always in mind this gap between "the story Quentin tells" and "Faulkner's story." Quentin directs our attention to Nancy. It develops that she's pregnant, and that her common law husband, Jesus [sic], is angry since the child is not of "his vine"—it's possible it's of the vine of a banker and Baptist church deacon. Jesus has left Nancy, but she's terrified that he's going to return and kill her. The Compson family is inconvenienced by her paralyzing fear: for example, she's afraid to leave their house to walk home at night, sleeps in their kitchen and, on one occasion, moves her pallet to the floor of the children's upstairs bedroom after being frightened by sounds in the kitchen below. Some of this is beyond the ken of 9-year-old Quentin, but the journalistic character of his account—what he saw, what he heard people say—permits the reader to understand more than he did.

And one thing a reader, but not Quentin, might perceive is that different members of the Compson family have different reactions to Nancy's troubles. The father (Jason Sr.) is somewhat sympathetic but mainly irritated. He tries to persuade Nancy that her fears are unwarranted. Twice he urges her to seek the counsel and assistance of "Aunt Rachel," her neighbor in the black part of town who sometimes said she was Jesus's mother and at other times denied it. You can almost make out Mr Compson's internal monologue: my life would be easier but for these ignorant Negroes and their inscrutable lives! Some of his irritability arises from the necessity of appeasing his wife, who in all the fictions about the Compsons is an almost disembodied voice, always complaining from another room. In "That Evening Sun" it's: I cannot have a Negro sleeping in my house. We pay taxes, why is it our job to protect this Negro? I can't believe you're proposing to leave me alone in this house in order to walk home a Negro.

Mrs Compson is a miserable specimen of humanity. Quentin doesn't say so, but Faulkner does, indirectly through Quentin.

The children's reaction is at first ambiguous and then at the end heartbreaking. In the last scene Nancy, who can't abide the thought of being alone, persuades them to accompany her home without permission of their parents, who have forbidden the kids to cross the ditch—symbolism!—that separates the homes of the whites from those of the blacks. But, once there, she is too distracted to be able to deliver on the fun she'd promised them. They feel uneasy. Eventually Mr Compson comes for them. As they prepare to leave, so that Nancy will be alone, her fear gives way to something more like resignation, and Quentin in his familiar flat manner reports the following detail:

"When yawl go home, I gone," Nancy said. She talked quieter now, and her face looked quiet, like her hands. "Anyway, I got my coffin money saved up with Mr Lovelady." Mr Lovelady was a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents. He and his wife lived at the hotel. One morning his wife committed suicide. They had a child, a little girl. He and the child went away. After a week or two he came back alone. We would see him going along the lanes and the back streets on Saturday mornings.

The Compsons leave. Mr Compson, from outside, tells Nancy to come and bolt the door, but she just sits in her chair by the fire. As they walk away, she's visible through the open door till they get to the ditch. Caddy and Jason start arguing. The 5-year-old says he's "not a nigger." The 7-year-old says, no, but he's "scairder than a nigger." Mr Compson admonishes, "Candace!"

Quentin had just reported himself asking the crushing question toward which the whole story was moving. "Who will do our washing now, Father?" he says. 

The story's achievement is to evoke, in just a few pages, an entire culture, that of the American south around a half century after the Civil War, exhausted, decrepit, shot through with rot. The detail about the man collecting “insurance” money from people like Nancy! Characters like that in Dickens are bearable on account of a certain cartoonish aspect they tend to possess. There's something almost entertaining about their depravity. This one, though he has the Dickensian name of Mr Lovelady, is "short, dirty." Quentin Compson is just reporting, but the author's disgust is palpable. 

What will future generations condemn us for?

Everyone must occasionally wonder whether, if they'd been alive in New England in the 1690s, or the Commonwealth of Virginia circa 1840, what opinion they would have held regarding, respectively, women accused of "witchcraft" or the "peculiar institution" of chattel slavery. Once we've given ourselves the benefit of the doubt on those and similar questions, the next uncomfortable line of inquiry might relate to current practices we accept that our children, or their children, will find intolerable and shocking. It seems doubtful they'll have a lot of patience for excuses we'd offer from beyond, if we could. Ten years ago, the Washington Post, recognizing that we probably aren't made of better stuff than judges in Salem, Masssachusetts or the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, asked a group of scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals to nominate candidates for things for which we should perform preemptive penance, before our descendants condemn us for them.  Kwame Anthony Appiah submitted:

 

 

If you're willing to entertain the notion that the world is ruled by a stern justice, and are okay with ascribing the adjective "prescient" to Appiah, then it's safe to note that ten years hence life in America has taken a hard gut punch from a virus that has spread widely after incubating most easily in

1. jails and prisons;
2. meatpacking plants; and
3. nursing homes.

Our president frequently anthropomorphizes the virus by speaking of "the invisible enemy." It seems maybe the next step in that analysis would be to allow that our weaknesses, though largely invisible to us, were spied out beforehand by this "enemy" who then targeted them for attack.