Eric The Blue

American stories: Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge"

Flannery O'Connor, whose stories have long filled me with morbid fascination, has fallen victim to "cancel culture." In her case, a dormitory named for her on the campus of Loyola University Maryland was, at the direction of its president, Jesuit Fr. Brian Linnane, rechristened after he received complaints about the "racist perspective" of some of her writings. O'Connor has many defenders, especially among Catholic intellectuals, and not all of them are as frank as Jennifer Frey, a philosopher at the University of South Carolina whose brief for the defense acknowledges the casual racial slurs that adorn O'Connor's personal correspondence. Frey refers also to O'Connor's "disappointing" and "cringeworthy" dismissal of black intellectuals, most notably James Baldwin. I'm pretty sure she must have in mind the following passage from a letter O'Connor wrote on May 21, 1964, about three months before she died, to her friend Maryat Lee:

About the Negroes, the kind I don't like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. [Martin Luther] King I don't think is the age's great saint but he's at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don't know anything about Ossie Davis except you like him but you probably like them all.

The backdrop for these benighted opinions, and of the evident sneer directed at her liberal friend, is of course the civil rights movement in Dixie. O'Connor was born at Savannah in 1925. Her father died of lupus while she was a teenager. After being afflicted with lupus herself as a young woman, she spent the rest of her days—she died at 39—living with her mother on the family farm near Milledgeville, Georgia, a town of about 11,000 a hundred miles southeast of Atlanta. There, from 1953 to 1964, she wrote most of the stories collected in A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955) and all the stories collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge, which was published posthumously in 1965. Change wrought by the civil rights movement was the principal social fact of her time and place. It seems to have had no part in her early fiction, but in the later stories, such as the title story for Everything That Rises, race is close to the thematic center and her treatment of it cannot fairly be characterized as "racist," though I think "unsentimental" and the overused "ironic" might be apt. Without too much imagination one might even regard the story as a prophetic counterpunch to the jaw of some of her current critics.

It's about a ride on a recently integrated city bus—the half hour before, the ride itself, and a few minutes after it ends. The main character is the mother of an adult son, Julian. She isn't herself named, except the family name very fleetingly, which may suggest that she's intended not as an individual but as a representative specimen of humanity. Once a week she attends a "reducing class" at the Y. But since the buses have been integrated she refuses to ride them alone and has therefore recruited Julian to accompany her to the Y. He resents the imposition, which is the occasion for some comedy as they prepare to depart from her house for the walk to the bus stop.

It's the conversation that's funny—"cringeworthy," you might say. The subject of race is on the mind of the 50-something white lady and she's pleased with her own opinions. She tells Julian—it's a boast—that his great grandfather owned slaves. Irritable and eager to contradict, he points out that there are no longer slaves. She counters that "they were better off when they were" and, as if she thought this might be harsh, elaborates: 

"It's ridiculous. It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence."

The referent of the recurring "it's" is of course racial integration. The idea that the descendants of slaves should rise on their own side of the fence, regarded by Julian's mom as proof of her “realistic” views, is explicitly denied by the story's vivid title, "Everything That Rises Must Converge." We'll see what comes of that. Meanwhile, as they prepare to depart for the bus stop, there is quite a lot made about a new hat that Julian's mother has bought. Did she pay too much? Should she return it? Wear it to the Y? The hat is clearly unusual and hideous. She decides to wear it, naturally. 

Talk, talk, talk, more ridiculous talk—all, one feels sure, perfectly rendered. It doesn't stop when they get on the bus. They take their seats at the front, the side bench that faces the aisle. Julian's mother makes meteorological observations to no one in particular, just to see who she can chat up. She finds a taker, a "thin woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair." Surveying the other passengers, Julian's mother observes: "I see we have the bus to ourselves." (Meaning, of course: no blacks.) She and the woman with protruding teeth agree that things used to be better as now there is so much crime. The code hasn't changed, or acquired a better disguise. The two women boast of their children. We learn that Julian is a recent college graduate trying to get on his feet. He wants to be a writer but is currently selling typewriters. The lady with the protruding teeth remarks that these occupations are related and that he'll move from the one right into the other. Forced to listen, Julian is beside himself.

This is funny enough so that one might not notice that the story is turning. The neighborhood is shabby. The mother is unmarried, doesn't drive, relies on public transportation. Yet Julian has been to college. Sacrifices have been made. It seems all that is true, too. A black man boards and takes a seat on the opposite bench beside a white woman, who immediately rises and moves to a seat farther back. Julian then rises to take the seat she vacated beside the black man. When his mother looks straight ahead, she now sees her son sitting next to a black man on the integrated bus. She hates it, which is why Julian loves it. He knows it will be worse if he strikes up a conversation with the black man, so he asks for a light. But in his eagerness he has failed to think things through. When the man produces a light, Julian remembers he has no cigarettes—he had recently quit smoking because he can't afford it. The man repockets his matches with an annoyed look. We are told that he's nicely dressed and carries a briefcase but not whether he is aware of being a prop in the white man's drama. 

Something like this happens again and again in O'Connor's stories. You laugh and laugh and think you know who the joke is on—and then the joke widens. Frustrated by his failure to commune with a black person, Julian falls into a reverie. They are almost to the Y. What if, when his mother rose to disembark, he remained seated, and when she told him they were at their stop he stared blankly at her as if they were strangers? Morally, they are strangers, since his superiority is to himself so evident. What if he knew a black professor or lawyer and brought him back to the house for dinner? Better yet, a beautiful black woman? "There's nothing you can do about it," he'd say to his mother. He's jolted back to reality when the bus stops and an actual black woman boards. 

The new rider has a young kid with her and is enormous. To Julian's annoyance, she wedges in beside him. Her clothes are ridiculous, perhaps because she's limited by what she can fit into. The narration of events is interrupted to describe her fully. Is there an element of racial caricature? No, I think the point to make is that the gigantic black woman is the second person in the story meriting a physical description. The first had been the white woman with protruding teeth and long yellow hair. The two are united in their grotesquery. Something about the black woman seems familiar to Julian. She is an imposing, threatening, scowling presence, a real eyeful, and it takes a minute for him to realize that she's wearing the same hideous hat as his mother. 

Her little boy sits across the aisle, next to Julian's mother. You won't be surprised to hear that she thinks children are all cute, especially black children. But before she can force her generosity on the boy the bus arrives at the stop for the Y. She's pleased when the enormous black woman is going to get off with her kid at the same stop and determines to give the youngster a coin. Julian sees her digging in her purse as the boy and his mom walk away on the sidewalk and the bus pulls away. Maybe he comprehends the racial condescension inherent in the act, maybe he doesn't want to hear from his mother for the next weeks and months about her kindliness toward a black child. Anyway, he tries to stop her, but too late. The black woman is insulted. She shouts that her son doesn't take anyone's pennies and, swinging her big arm, strikes Julian's mother in the face with her pocketbook. She falls to the ground, injured and dazed, her customary self-satisfaction erased. Everything that rises must converge! Thwack! That's the end of the story but for a modulated denouement in which, in the last sentence, Julian, stunned by his mother's disorientation, becomes disoriented himself and is jerked from complacency:

The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.

What to make of this? I mentioned that from a sufficient altitude O'Connor told this story again and again. A critic might say she's a bit of a one-trick pony. In another story, maybe her most famous one, the idle chatter of self-satisfied talkers yammering about the golden days of yesteryear includes the parties' agreement that, nowadays, "A good man is hard to find." The old lady who says this soon comes face to face with appalling evil and I think the reader is meant to perceive that her platitude is actually an expression of the Christian doctrine of original sin. To say that the characters in "Everything That Rises," black and white, are "united in grotesquery" tends in the same direction. Reading the story over again, one notices small flourishes, sort of like angels hovering in the corner of an otherwise realistic painting, such as when in the opening Julian impatiently waiting for his mother is compared to Saint Sebastian waiting for the arrows to begin piercing his flesh: a signal, however humorous, that more than ordinary verisimilitude might be at stake.

For O'Connor, the only significance is religious significance. Social issues are just emblems of theological ones. "Everything That Rises" will probably seem to most readers more congenial, less disturbing, than most of her others. For example, it can be enjoyed by anyone who might appreciate quite a devastating cartoon of a "woke" young person, too hip to be decent to his mother. Estelle Parsons reads the story, here.

Judges, gasbags, lawyers and liars

Though I'm sure I disagree with Judge Amy Coney Barrett about vasectomies, IUDs, rubbers, tubal ligations, and the divinity virginity of Mary, my opposition to her sitting on the Supreme Court is that Trump has made it clear that he needs nine justices now so that, when the election result is challenged, any 4-4 decision will be nudged to 5-4. He might as well broadcast that he has selected her to be the fifth vote for the election lawsuit that he's planning in the likely event that he loses but not in a landslide visible on Election Night. Under these circumstances, an honorable person would not accept his nomination. The same logic applies to the nomination of a non-Catholic. The nominator has poured poison down the well and now no one should drink. 

To divert attention from nightmare scenarios concerning the disintegration of our democracy, I've been reading the decisions of federal court judges. Remember Karen McDougal? She's Playboy's runner-up for "Playmate of the '90s" who, back in the aughts, was boinking our current president. In a deal arranged by Trump's fixer Michael Cohen, she sold for $150,000 the rights to her story about the affair to National Enquirer, which never published it—a "catch-and-kill" scheme that amounted to a hush payment to McDougal. After this all came to light, Carlson claimed on his primetime Fox News show that McDougal had extorted from Trump the money she received. She then sued Fox News for defamation. The judge this week ruled in favor of Fox and, in her decision, cited an argument that had been advanced at trial by the defense:

I'll translate from the legalese: it's impossible for Tucker Carlson to defame anyone, because all reasonable people understand that he's a gasbag and a liar whose statements can't be trusted. This was the argument of lawyers for Fox! And it worked!

Highlights of a wasted day

 

 

    I enjoyed this interview, between New York Times staffer Sopan Deb and Zach Zarba, a veteran NBA referee. Here's a teaser, the most interesting exchange of the interview to me (aside from an amusing story about the young Kobe Bryant):

Deb: Do superstars get more leeway?

Zarba: I would disagree and go the other way and I would say that the majority of superstar players in our league don't get all the calls and don't get as many whistles as they deserve.

I guess I would have expected an official either to acknowledge that conventional wisdom about a star system is true, thereby winning points for "candor," or else to defend the honor of his profession by insisting that refs treat star players the same as everyone else. The view that star players get the shaft from officials therefore struck me as actually candid. From my long-ago experience umpiring ball games, I have an idea how this could be true without impugning anyone's good faith. I felt like my judgment could be affected by what I expected to happen, and that it was practically impossible not to have these expectations. For example, a batter hits a sinking line drive into the outfield. I think it's a hit for one second, two seconds—I can't suppress the thought—then the racing outfielder dives and gloves the ball at turf level: Was it a trap or a good catch? Well, from the instant the ball was hit, I'd been thinking: "can't be caught." It seems to me entirely possible that your perception of what actually happened can be colored by what you thought was going to happen—or, to put it another way, by what you thought was possible. It's not hard to see how such a psychological process operating in a good-faith referee might work against an athlete capable of defying expectations.

On the other hand, in the NBA the same officials are working games with the same players over and over again. Zach Zarba knows who is a star, right? Maybe if I had known that the diving player was the Kobe Bryant of outfielders, my expectation about what was going to happen would have shifted and the result of the headlong dive would look more like a good catch. Only thing I'm sure of is that referees are human, a point that comes to the fore when you talk to them, if Deb's conversation with Zarba is representative. 

****

Ten seconds of every hour devoted to social media is worth the callous on the tip of my scrolling finger. I know I won't get 59 minutes and 50 seconds back but here's the harvest from the other ten ticks, my candidate for Tweet of the Day:

 

don’t even bother clicking - I checked, they don’t show you the sandwich. https://t.co/X0fxToheAg

— hend amry (@LibyaLiberty) September 23, 2020

Dave and the two Nates

My title refers to Dave Wasserman, Nate Cohn, and Nate Silver, three liberal arts graduates with specialties, it seems, in probability & statistics, political science, and sociology. In the autumns of even-numbered years, I find myself compulsively checking the Twitter feeds of all three for election commentary, forecasts, links to the cross tabs of the latest polls, etc., etc. This morning, I believe with his tongue only partly in his cheek, Wasserman methodically lays out trends in Texas voting patterns associated with proximity to a Whole Foods Market. I'll summarize but here is the link to his Twitter.

Of the 254 counties in Texas, 11 have a Whole Foods Market. In the 1992 presidential election (Bill Clinton-Bush I-Ross Perot), 55% of the statewide vote came out of what I'll call Whole Foods Counties (WFCs). Clinton in 1992 won 48% of the two-party vote in WFCs. Since then, the percentage of the statewide vote coming out of the WFCs has ratcheted slowly upward. So has the percentage of the WFC vote won by the Democratic candidate. By 2016, 59% of presidential ballots cast in Texas came from the 11 WFCs, and Hillary did somewhat better than her husband had: she got 54% of them. Just two years later, in a US Senate race, 61% of the statewide vote came out of WFCs, and the Democratic candidate, Beto O'Rourke, won 58% of them. 

Wasserman comments, jokingly, that the "Whole Foods-ification" of Texas is going to doom Republicans in the state. I guess that's the tongue-in-cheek part, inasmuch as the formulation suggests that building some more upscale groceries would turn Texas navy blue. Of course the presence of a Whole Foods Market is a proxy for something else, which, were we to try and name it, would be something like: a diverse metropolitan population wherein an unusually high percentage of the Caucasians are college-educated. The 11 WFCs, as you have probably guessed, are the home counties to Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso. The other five WFCs are suburban counties adjoining either Houston, Austin, or Dallas-Fort Worth.

Maybe "doom" is partly for humorous effect but it isn't hard to see where Texas is headed. In the 2018 midterms, the Democrats picked up two US House seats in the state, one in the suburbs of Houston, the other in the suburbs of Dallas. Both districts are entirely within WFCs. In a statewide race, such as for the state's 38 electoral votes in a presidential election, the task is to get to "50 percent plus 1." Thirty years ago, according to my rough-and-ready calculations, Democrats were getting only about half of what they needed out of the WFCs—just under half the vote in counties accounting for just over half of the total vote puts you to 25% and you need 50%. But 30 years later half of a half has become three-fifths of three-fifths, which is 36% of what's needed to win. 

It's not as if 243 counties without a Whole Foods Market have no say, and Wasserman sets out the voting data for them as well. The problem seems to be that their share of the statewide vote is shrinking, and there isn't much upside for Republicans across much of rural and small-town Texas: everyone in town, except maybe the school nurse, already votes Republican. No room for growth unless you can get the nurse, a single Latina who on her occasional treks to El Paso loves to visit the Whole Foods Market. 

What do the two Nates have to say today? Silver, of the FiveThirtyEight blog, currently pegs Biden's chances in Texas at 32 percent. That's a 1-in-3 that would spell D-O-O-M for Trump—it's like praying the league batting champ comes through with a hit! Cohn points out that the bad news for Biden is that, while polling evenly with Trump in Texas (and also in Georgia, Ohio, and Iowa), he's struggling to establish a clear advantage in Pennsylvania and Florida. The upshot, in his view, is that the Electoral College sits on a knife's edge: a small movement toward Biden between now and November would result in a route, but a small movement toward Trump would give him a chance to eke out another one in the Electoral College even while losing the popular vote by more than last time. Although it would have seemed farfetched half a year ago, Biden's most likely minimal victory right now might very well be the Clinton states plus Michigan plus Wisconsin plus Arizona plus the second congressional district in Nebraska. That would make exactly 270.

Nebraska, like Maine, awards two electoral votes to the statewide winner and one to the winner of each congressional district within the state. In 2016, Trump carried the second district, which centers on the city of Omaha, by 47 to 45 percent. I just checked and there is a Whole Foods Market in Omaha.

 

RBG and the Supreme Court

Herewith some unconnected lukewarm takes (since I trust they have been expressed elsewhere) on RBG's death and the politics of filling her seat.

I. The place of these confirmation struggles in American political life is so big as to blot out all else. Possibly this could work to Trump's advantage. We have just passed coronavirus death number 200,000. We have about 4% of the world's population but more than a fifth of the cases and deaths. Naturally, Team Trump wants to change the subject, and now the mortality of Supreme Court justices has performed the awkward transition.

RBG herself, her life and legacy, is another regrettable casualty of the total eclipse of the sun. She is one of the great Americans of our time, but on the news the tributes have barely begun taxiing on the runway when suddenly you are staring at the mug of Mitch McConnell. Hurry, the barf bag! Maybe time will supply the remedy. Linda Greenhouse's New York Times obituary is a start.

II. The obituary recalls that, during Obama's second term, RBG "shrugged off a chorus of calls for her to retire in order to give a Democratic president the chance to name her replacement." One conclusion that ought to be drawn from this episode is that, to the degree such actuarial and political projections have merit, it shows that the system as it currently operates should be overhauled. I wonder if genetic testing of potential nominees isn't the next escalation in the vetting process. Maybe I shouldn't assume that my dystopia hasn't already been realized.

III. Supposing RBG had heeded "the chorus." By what date in Obama's second term would she have had to announce her retirement in order for him to be able to name her successor? We know, from the debacle relating to Justice Scalia's death and the Republican Senate's refusal even to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland as his successor, that at some point President Obama lost the power to fill Supreme Court vacancies. It's reasonable that RBG would have wanted to serve as long as possible, consistent with the actuarial and political considerations recommending retirement. To execute the strategy prescribed by "the chorus," she therefore would have had to know the date on which President Obama's constitutional prerogatives expired. But there is no such date. She would have been trying to play a game, the rules of which are both vague and fluid. The ambient absurdity of the situation is more proof that the system needs overhauling.

IV. Regarding the fluidity of the "rules": before, the president could not fill a vacancy occurring nine months before an election; now, the president can fill a vacancy occurring less than two months before an election. The jesuitical distinctions advanced to defend against hypocrisy only highlight the hypocrisy. As everyone knows, the lone "principle" is naked power. Where does this end? Then, Republicans had the power to eighty-six an Obama appointee. Now, they likely have the power to confirm a Trump appointee. Tomorrow, the Democrats may have the power to expand the number of justices to thirteen by appointing and confirming four woke 38-year-olds whose only hobby is a fanatical devotion to physical fitness. Legislators, when not maneuvering for power, deliver encomiums on The Rule of Law. Please, spare me the lectures and instead reform a plainly broken system.

V. If you want to talk about root causes of disease, one is that the Supreme Court isn't really a law court so much as it is a legislature on steroids. When the president and 535 members of Congress can't agree, the Supreme "Court" decides, often by a 5-4 vote. When a vacancy in the 9-member super legislature occurs, the stakes are so high, and the system so broken, that the absurdity of the whole enterprise comes into view. Chief Justice Roberts is said to fret that the public is losing confidence in the Supreme Court as an institution. He is therefore inclined to subordinate his conservative legal principles to his judgment about what damage will occur if the public concludes, correctly, that the justices are thinly disguised partisans in the same war that wasn't settled in the Capitol building. Assuming he's a smart man, it seems impossible that he should not comprehend that his solution of moving his own vote to the center tends to confirm the truth of the proposition he seeks to deny. 

VI. The looming struggle, with the likely consequence that passions will be inflamed and the losing side set upon a course of retribution, was precipitated by the death of a distinguished woman 87.6 years old. Had she lived 87.9 years, there would be almost no issue: either Trump would have been reelected (in which case it's clear that he gets to appoint the next justice) or Biden would have been elected (in which case it's clear that he makes the appointment). One need not disavow a healthy respect for the role of chance in human affairs to assert that this is crazy. The Constitution has been amended to specify a process in the event of the death or disability of the president. Yet for some reason, regarding events much more likely to occur, and which have now occurred twice in less than five years, we are satisfied instead to see who can shoot their piss higher in the air. 

VII. The brokenness I'm describing is erected upon a crumbly foundation. In theory, people go to the polls and indicate by ballot which presidential candidate they'd like to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court for the next four years. In 2016, 66 million indicated Clinton, 63 million indicated Trump. Yet Trump is on the verge of making his third life-term appointment to that 9-member super legislature. Well, "states matter" we are told—as if the verdicts of the Supreme Court did not apply across state lines. The president is constrained by the "advice and consent" of the Senate, and in the days since Justice Ginsburg’s death some Republican senators have been running their mouths about how "the American people" have put them in the majority for the express purpose of confirming conservative judges. This elides the fact that the 53 Republican senators represent fewer Americans than the 47 who caucus with the Democrats. A minority of the citizens' votes is the source of Republican power—in the legislative branch, in the executive branch, and in the judiciary.

But do go on, President Trump, complaining about how the game is rigged against you. LOL!

Current events: a hot take

I know it's died down, but for awhile there were earnest discussions about whether it would be legal for Trump to pardon himself. So maybe we should consider whether he might appoint himself to the Supreme Court. He could thereby avoid the embarrassment of losing to Biden, a distinct possibility according to current polls. Assuming his successor in the presidential race lost, he could from his perch on the High Court critique the substitute's foreshortened campaign. I'm pretty sure there's no requirement that a Supreme Court justice be a lawyer. Since there are currently 53 Republicans in the Senate, his confirmation is assured: Mitt Romney's vote might be shaky, and Susan Collins would have concerns—I count no fewer than 52 yes votes. It's a lifetime appointment, something that is plainly appealing to Trump, though this advantage would be offset by eight coequal colleagues taking up office space.

On the other hand, the annual task of interviewing and hiring law clerks could be made into a lucrative reality TV show. 

More on Elmore Leonard's "The Switch"

My favorite Elmore Leonard novel is whichever one I'm reading, or finished most recently—right now it's The Switch. There's around ten that I read over and over again. I think he might have written more than forty, so it's a bit like an endless Chinese menu from which I keep ordering a few dishes I know are good. His first novels are westerns and I haven't read any of them. Then, in the mid-1970s, when he was in his late 40s, he switched to the crime genre. Those are the ones I know something about and love.

First time I read The Switch, I wrote about it here. The Frank Dawson character had plainly made the biggest impression upon me. But, on re-readings, one's eye tends to stray and this time mine settled on Richard Edgar Monk.  The last name is perhaps something of a sly jest since Monk lives alone in a small house in Detroit on West State Fair Avenue across from the Michigan state fairgrounds. He had lived there with his mother, his wife, and his young son. Then his wife left him, taking the kid with her. Then his mom died. That's why Monk is now alone. Here is Leonard performing what I believe is called by English teachers "character development":

Richard wanted to go to California to look for his wife and boy and believed he could do it himself because of his interest in police work and procedures. He read books on it, watched police shows on TV and, until recently, had had a job with Alert Security Services—patrolling shopping centers, rich neighborhoods and construction projects—which Richard felt was good training. The trouble with the job, he'd only made three-sixty-five an hour, one-ten a week take-home, had to buy his own uniform and wasn't able to save anything. So he had begun drawing fifty bucks on the side to disappear or look the other way whenever the coon came at night in the truck to pick up building materials. That was fine until he got questioned, readout and fired without notice.

Now he had a two-tone police uniform and no job. He was patiently waiting for the big one the coon, Ordell Robbie, told him was going to come anytime now.

The wannabe cop, an American loser who also—surprise!—is a racial bigot: though they aren't usually the subject of literature, our country is full of these guys, and to me it seems natural to think, for example, of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who assigned himself to the armed neighborhood patrol and then killed Trayvon Martin. To round out the portrait of Monk, one of the rooms in his house is devoted to the guns and Nazi paraphernalia that he collects.

[Spoiler alert.]

I can't resist relating one incident that will divulge a bit of the plot. The "big one" in the passage quoted above refers to the criminal plot that, in its execution, supplies the main action of the novel. These are not sophisticated criminals—hell, Monk is one of them. The building supplies that Ordell steals, paying Monk to look the other way, are sold at a low price to Dawson, who puts them to use improving the rental properties he owns. That's how "coon" Ordell happens to know Dawson, the country-club golf champion and grown-up college Republican. Ordell concocts a scheme to deliver a payday out of all proportion to funds generated by the building supply scam. He and his main accomplice will kidnap Dawson's wife, Mickey, and extort a big ransom. He brings Monk in because they'll hold Mickey in the nondescript house on West State Fair while negotiating the ransom delivery. This begins well enough, though it soon develops that the criminals have failed to consider the possibility that Dawson might have a young hottie on the side and could care less about Mickey, his aging trophy who ends up a prisoner on West State Fair longer than had originally been intended. The celibate Monk has drilled a hole in the bedroom door where she's held (and another in the door of the bathroom she uses), through which he hopes to view her undressed. It's frustrating though because she only has the clothes she was kidnapped in and so rarely undresses. She does, however, discover the hole in the bedroom door. When she knows she's being observed, she moves to a corner where she can't be seen and lights a cigarette. Then, having crept along the wall that the door is on, she slowly slides the cigarette toward the hole and, when almost to the bored edge, suddenly jabs the lit end into it. Downstairs, the brains of the operation are trying to cope with the incipient unravelling of their criminal scheme and so are not too distressed by Monk's howls. 

F.O. Matthiessen

 

F.O. Matthiessen taught American literature for two decades, 1930-50, at Harvard, which by itself would probably not warrant a Wikipedia article. He was also, however, the author of a book, American Renaissance, about the "standard" American authors of the mid-19th century—Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson—that is the source of his fame in literary circles. I've never read it, but my impression of the general consensus about the book is that Matthiessen, by discussing these authors in their historical and cultural context—that of America a decade or so before the start of the Civil War—practically invented the field known as "American Studies," now often its own department within a university. 

I wonder whether Matthiessen has any answers for a question that has sometimes occurred to me. If you sign up for a course in American literature, any period before 1850, the assigned readings are not likely to be the poems, novels, and plays that we usually think of as literature. Instead you'd read diaries and journals of colonial Americans, slave narratives, Puritan sermons, political documents relating to the founding (preeminently The Federalist Papers), some dull poetry (like by Edward Taylor and William Cullen Bryant), maybe Ben Franklin's Autobiography and "Rip Van Winkle." A hundred years and more of that and then suddenly, without warning: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby Dick (1851), Walden (1854), the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). 

Matthiessen's title indicates there was a reawakening, but to me it seems more like a first flowering, and from thin soil.

Anyhow, the Wikipedia article: I hit upon it the other day for no specific reason, and oh my! A suicide at 48, Matthiessen wrote, besides American Renaissance, about a half dozen books I wasn't aware of and was also an active left-wing socialist and a homosexual who lived with his partner, Russell Cheney, for 20 years ending with Cheney's death in 1945. Reading between the lines just a little, there comes into view a strange world in which Matthiessen seems to have been necessarily closeted though in an open-secret sort of way. It's affecting to think that his status as a scholar and Harvard professor is probably what made it possible for him to live half above ground (but half below). His progressive politics had nothing to do with this fundamental fact of his own life—gay rights had not yet been invented, or imagined. He was pro-labor, a union man, and but for his early death would likely have come to the attention of Joe McCarthy. There has evidently been speculation that the developing Red Scare contributed to his mental distress. The Life magazine of April 4, 1949, included an article, "Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Fronts," accompanied by a rogues' gallery of Albert Einstein, Arthur Miller, Langston Hughes, Norman Mailer, Matthiessen, and 45 others. Of course, Matthiessen had lost Cheney at around this same time. On April 1, 1950, he jumped to his death from the twelfth floor of a Boston hotel. 

Dyspeptic in dystopia

The picture is of the Oakland Coliseum before a recent A's home game. The sky is orange because the state's on fire. The "fans" are cardboard cutouts because . . . you know. It looks like Mars, or hell, or a scene from a dystopian sci-fi flick. Just Oakland, 2020, however.

It seems like this would be a poor environment for an incumbent seeking re-election, but California and Oregon are just two states, neither red nor swing. In the kind of election where the winner gets the most votes, it would matter to the current occupant whether he was the choice of 30 percent or just 25 percent of people living within 50 miles of the Pacific Ocean. That's not how we do it, however. If you can't persuade half of them, tell the people who live somewhere else about the pathetic a-holes who don't agree with you. 

Thought experiment: imagine that Pennsylvania was burning. I don't think we'd hear so much about the forest management skills of its governor or the crazed environmentalists who reside in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The ongoing effort to split the country apart is almost comical on account of the obvious falsehoods that are pressed into service and then repeated by guys named Travis. "Mitch McConnell Says 'No' to Blue-State Bailouts"—as if Kentucky had not since time immemorial been scooping up tax money collected in places like New York State. When Republicans complain bitterly about "socialism," they don't have in mind the steady flow of federal tax dollars from blue states to red ones. 

Roger Angell turns 100

Apparently the fellow who empties my recycling bin has tipped off NPR and the result is "Hangover From Alcohol Boom Could Last Long After Pandemic Ends."

It won't be a problem if the pandemic never ends. The Covid body count over just the four days of the Republican convention surpassed that of 9/11. Happily, no one will ever ask where you were when a thousand people died, day after day after day, every day for six months, now going on seven.

Well, many of them are old with "co-morbidities," a medical term easier to pronounce than, say, "expendable." Culture of Life seems to have lost some cachet when the refrigerated trucks were double parked outside the ICU and our president was telling Bob Woodward one thing while telling us another. 

Roger Angell, about whom I wrote here and here, is one oldster who has not succumbed. He just turned 100 and, since my dad is only 87, there is now an opening in the category of My Favorite Nonagenarian. Angell's longtime employer, The New Yorker magazine, marks his birthday here. Though the article refers to "his matchless oeuvre of baseball writing," it supplies no specimens, so I will. Describing the effect upon witnesses of a dominating pitching performance, with particular reference to the Giants' Madison Bumgarner in the 2014 World Series, Angell wrote of the quiet associated with the slow accrual of strikeouts, ground balls, and pop-ups before concluding that "the click of another passing inning is like someone closing a door in the next room." 

And here he is, unabridged, on the topic of old age. Better than the alternative, as is often said, even if I suspect that those who are actually bearing up under the strain of all the years may often register silent disagreement. 

Since the hyperlinks are recommended readings, I should have the decency to save you eye strain by summarizing ten jillion current contributions to journalism: Biden is ahead and favored to win, but it's relatively close, especially in "the battleground states," so Trump still has a chance. Except for the hyperventilators, that's what they all say. There, you can skip it for a few weeks.

Distance learning

First day of school, a hundred percent "distance learning" into the foreseeable future, and I have a pass as the kids are with their alternate custodian.  But I did receive a FaceTime call that displayed the following 4th-grade puzzler:

I'll admit that I dicked around with this for awhile, to no avail, until it occurred to me that since the "average" value of the numbers is 5, and 4 x 5 = 20 > 17, it's probably the case that the boxes at the vertices, which are overused compared to the others, should be filled with low numbers. It then took but a minute to come up with:

After a decent interval, I took a picture of my solution and texted it to said 4th-grader. Here's what that ended up looking like:

At least she acknowledged the difficulty. Maybe someone helped her. Didn't dare ask. 

 

Wisconsin

The accompanying images depict the result, by county, of the last two presidential elections in Wisconsin—Obama versus Romney in 2012 (above) and then Clinton versus Trump in 2016 (below). Obama carried Wisconsin rather easily in 2012, but then, in 2016, Trump won the state by about 22,000 votes, a fraction of one percent of the ballots cast. The sources for the images are here and here. The sites themselves are interactive; you can click on a county and see how its residents voted.

I find this kind of data almost endlessly interesting. Also, it seems to me that the actual result refutes common "narratives" that one hears about why Trump won. If you just look at the pictures, you get a pretty good idea why Trump carried Wisconsin: in the small towns and rural parts of the state, he did better than Romney had, and not just by a little. Yet one continually hears that depressed turnout in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison doomed Clinton. This story doesn't stand up to scrutiny, however. Against Romney, Obama carried Milwaukee County—the city and its inner ring of suburbs—by 170,000 votes. Clinton carried the county by 163,000. I attended public schools, but, by my calculations, had Clinton matched Obama's margin in Milwaukee County she still would have lost the state—by 15,000 votes instead of by 22,000. In Dane County, home to Madison, Clinton actually outperformed Obama, winning by 146,000 compared to Obama's margin of 132,000. In the state's two biggest counties, Clinton's margin was slightly wider than Obama's had been. 

But look at how much of the rest of the state switched from blue to red! Granted, the visual effect can mislead. Most of these counties have small populations, and if they switched from "narrowly for Obama" to "narrowly for Trump," the difference, in raw vote totals, would be small. But if you click around a little on the two maps I think you will quickly conclude that this is not what happened. Depressed turnout in the population centers did not cost Clinton Wisconsin. She suffered a meltdown across the rest of the state. 

Dave Wasserman, of Cook Political Report, has devised a rather dramatic way of demonstrating the tectonic shift in Wisconsin's vote. The state has 72 counties. He eliminates five and looks at the aggregate result in the other 67. The five he sets aside are Dane (Madison and environs), Milwaukee, and three others that are unambiguously "suburban Milwaukee"—Ozuakee, Washington, and Waukesha. Obama outpolled Romney in the 67 counties of "non-metro" Wisconsin by 36,000 votes. Then, four years later, Trump carried the same 67 counties by 228,000. A shift of 264,000 votes! Obama had carried the state by 205,000. 

What's happened in Wisconsin has happened across the Great Lakes region, from Pennsylvania to Minnesota. Meanwhile, as Sun Belt metros grow, their states are turning purple or blue—think Denver, Colorado; Las Vegas, Nevada; Phoenix, Arizona; Austin, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. Broadly speaking, the rural parts of the North are voting more like the rural parts of the South (overwhelmingly Republican), and southern metros are voting more like the northern ones (overwhelmingly Democratic). I said it's "interesting" to track how people vote. It's alarming, too. The country is splitting apart, not by geographic region, as in the middle of the nineteenth century, but by geographic region within states. 

 

 

 

President Chucklehead

He said we were a laughingstock and now he's made it come to pass. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States:

 

There will be something no less absurd tomorrow. The thing about an abyss: no bottom. 

Books of the bible: Micah

The book of Micah is sometimes thought of as Amos redux, since he followed the herdsman from Tekoa by a generation or two while, to a significant extent, repeating the message, often in the same tones of caustic bitterness. Amos:    

Come to Bethel, and transgress;
to Gilgal, and multiply transgression;
bring your sacrifices every morning,
your tithes every three days;
offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened,
and proclaim free will offerings, publish them;
for so you love to do, O people of Israel!

Micah:

Hear, you heads of Jacob
and rulers of the house of Israel!
Is it not for you to know justice?—
you who hate the good and love the evil,
who tear the skin from off my people,
and their flesh from off their bones;
who eat the flesh of my people,
and flay their skin from off them,
and break their bones in pieces,
and chop them up like meat in a kettle,
like flesh in a cauldron.

I don't think that sarcasm is usually thought of as a tool of the biblical authors, or of God if you prefer to think of him as the author, but in the works of Old Testament prophecy the lip is often curled and the speaker filled with disgust. What disgusts him? Frequently the contrast between a preening adherence to the forms of worship and what the speaker regards as immoral behavior—the idea, in other words, that what pleases God is offerings and the sound of hymns and liturgies rather than . . . what? How to define upright behavior that's pleasing to God? Micah's formulation is one of the most resonant passages in the Hebrew Bible:

With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

I picked the first quotation from Micah to show that he was capable of matching Amos's rage. There is nothing like that in the above passage, however. The form may make one think of a Shakespearean sonnet, with the twist at the end, but it's all quite dignified, stately. That the questions presuppose that the answer certainly has to do with the most pleasing outward signs of devotion is what makes the turn work. Without any knowledge of Hebrew, I'd say that, in the above translation (Revised Standard Version), the first heavy emphasis falls on "showed," so that there is at least a suggestion of exasperation: He has showed you . . . (but still you are obsessed with these trivial matters that don't interest me). 

If you read the passage in its context within the sixth chapter of the book of Micah, you'll see that it's part of an extended metaphor: a trial in which the prophet, representing God, is the prosecutor, the people of Israel are the guilty defendant, and the witnesses are the "hills" and "mountains" of the land that, since they endure, know the whole history of God's dealings with his people. While the law court metaphor might indicate that Israel has violated a written statute, the charge is that it has forgotten, or ignored, the history to which the topographical features of the land could attest. (Yes, the metaphor is arguably strained at its weakest point.) As is always and ever the case, the defining events in that history are the exodus and the establishment, between God and his people, of a covenant relationship that imposes reciprocal obligations on the parties. The prosecutor's case is that God has fulfilled his promises and that his people have defaulted. 

Historical amnesia is the underlying offense. The specific terms of default are more amenable to the lawsuit metaphor. What have the people been shown, to no effect? That they are to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly. One might object that they've been shown some other things, too. The story of the conquest of Canaan—see the book of Joshua—does not exemplify the traits that  now are put forward as "what the Lord requires." There are plenty of instructions about how to worship and make sacrifices, though these requirements are now denigrated, sometimes with fury. Perhaps one might with profit regard Micah's formulation of what's required as a kind of triage, akin to the question to Jesus, in the New Testament gospels, about what is required above all else. And Micah says, above all else, do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God. The part of the tradition elevated by Micah is the one found, for example, in portions of the holiness code in the book of Leviticus:

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Or: 

You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason with your neighbor, lest you bear sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:17-18)

This is the part of the tradition, elevated by Micah to a position of preeminence, that the people have ignored while worrying about outward ceremonies of worship. The prophet's reaction includes elements of scorn and exasperation. The claim that Micah is Amos redux might be both true and modest, for the more comprehensive application of his prophecy is exhibited, both tone and content, in for example the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus inveighs against "hypocrites" who "heap up empty phrases," "practicing [their] piety before men in order to be seen." He places in opposition those who thirst for righteousness ("do justice"), the merciful ("love kindness"), and the meek and pure of heart ("walk humbly"). 

Going, going . . . gone

QANON is going to disavow him soon. “We may be crazy conspiracy theorists, but we still have standards” pic.twitter.com/hCiZUJFsF1

— Scott Shapiro (@scottjshapiro) September 1, 2020

What is he talking about? The President of the United States is farther gone than his Facebook supporters—who, judging by my feed, are on indefinite leave from reality.

Ingraham: Where is this?

Trump: I'll tell you sometime.