Eric The Blue

It would be great if weekends were made for Michelob

Over the weekend—Saturday—I proposed to out-of-town guests that I drive them around, showing them the sites. Was there any place they were particularly interested in seeing? Yes, the Mall of America! I talked them out of that and instead we went to Minnehaha Falls and the Sculpture Garden, both of which were also on their list. After they'd left, I did something by myself for the first time ever: held an umbrella over a dog while he took a crap in the rain. I would have memorialized the event with an Instagram photo, but I had the leash in one hand and the umbrella in the other. 

Then, yesterday, I helped my sister empty out our dad's old house in preparation for an estate sale—he's moved to an assisted living facility. It's sort of sad to come upon mementos of me that my parents thought to preserve, like report cards now close to 50 years old. They weren't even that great but I guess mom and dad were proud? An upside to what the whitecoats call "mild to moderate cognitive decline" might be that you are not up to the task of noticing that high hopes for your offspring appear to have been affected by gravity. What's the last line of that Melville story?—

Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

Court TV

My dad once owned a small apartment building, and after a mentally disturbed tenant tried to burn it down someone from court administration contacted him to solicit a "victim impact statement" for the judge to consider in sentencing. My dad declined, saying he was happy to leave it up to the judge, a presumed expert, before adding he thought it odd that the supposed crime victim should have a say in determining the sentence: not a disinterested, dispassionate party, it would seem. In relating the story, he mentioned that the court employee seemed to think his view on the topic was unusual, even kind of bizarre. The feeling was mutual. 

I'm willing to disagree with my dad, believe me, but nothing in the Chauvin sentencing hearing  on Friday persuaded me he's wrong. What is the point of the statements given by members of the Floyd family and Chauvin's mother? The former ask for the maximum sentence allowed and the latter declares that, contrary to reports, her son "is a good man." Not very enlightening, and the caption for the case is State of Minnesota v Derek Chauvin, not Floyds v Chauvins. When Judge Peter Cahill walked into the courtroom to listen to the dueling family statements, he had already composed a 22-page sentencing memorandum explaining his reasoning for the 22.5 year sentence he knew he was going to impose—and then did impose, soon as the speakers had finished. 

Unless the goal is for court proceedings to resemble trashy day-time TV shows of yesteryear, in this case with cable-TV commentators in the role of the gasping studio audience, I don't see why these statements are allowed. 

Alexander Hamilton weighs in on current debates

I'm not among those who regard America's founding fathers as secular saints, geniuses  whose writings apply to our transcontinental nation of fifty states and 330 million people with the same aptness as they did to the thirteen original and largely rural ones tucked between the Atlantic Ocean and a ridge of mountains a few hundred miles inland. But if called upon to defend the view that they are always speaking truth to us today, I think I'd highlight views advanced by Alexander Hamilton in the 22nd Federalist Paper:

To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision) is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser number. . . . The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, the caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength, of its government is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must in some way or other go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority in order that something may be done must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good. 

Hmmm, I think one might safely infer from this Hamilton's opinion on the Senate filibuster rule and the need, in around another two-and-a-half centuries, for three-fifths of the Senate to agree that a voting rights bill passed by the House can even be debated and voted on in "the world's most august legislative body." Of course, since each state has two senators, no matter how large or small its population, the number of senators needed to sustain a filibuster might represent a tiny minority of Americans. In the same essay, Hamilton foresaw too the mischief attaching to the equal representation of states:

Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts that fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America . . . . In addition to this it is to be observed that there is a probability of an increase in the number of States, and no provision for a proportional augmentation of the ratio of votes.

At the time Hamilton was giving voice to these quaint concerns, the population of the biggest state (Virginia) exceeded that of the smallest (Delaware) by a factor of about 13. Today, California's population is about 68 times more than Wyoming's, 63 times more than Vermont's, 54 times more than Alaska's, and about 24 times that of North and South Dakota combined. If forced to contemplate Mitch McConnell's US Senate, Alexander Hamilton would not be able to stop throwing up. 

Puzzlers

The fact that I've cut down on alcohol has me wondering which neighbor is colonizing my recycling bin with the same cheap brands I prefer. 

On a less serious note, I'm also puzzled by the place opposition to abortion seems to occupy in Catholic moral teaching. I haven't heard any American bishops complaining about Catholic politicians who dare present themselves for the Eucharist even though they support capital punishment. Nevertheless the bishops want to eighty-six Biden for supporting abortion rights. Do the ancillary functions of the American church now include being an arm of the Republican party?  And where does it end? If after ten years of marriage a Catholic politician has just two kids, born eighteen months apart in the second and third years after the wedding, should she (or he) have to produce any medical certifications concerning unperformed procedures or prescriptions not written before receiving a sacrament? 

Just an outsider's opinion, but I think the bishops should be less concerned about Biden receiving communion and more concerned about making their church a laughingstock. 

Bloomsday, 2021

Yesterday, to mark the anniversary of Bloomsday—Thursday, June 16, 1904, the day the action of James Joyce's Ulysses, starring Dubliner Leopold Bloom, is set—I read the introductory note to the section on Joyce in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. It was written by David Daiches and gets off to a fast start:

James Joyce was born in Dublin, son of a talented but feckless father who is accurately described by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a man who had in his time been "a medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, and at present a praiser of his own past." The elder Joyce drifted steadily down the financial and social scale, his family moving from house to house, each one less genteel and more shabby than the previous.

A paragraph later, concerning the son as a young artist, a couple ways in which the apple fell near the tree come into view:

Proud, obstinate, absolutely convinced of his genius, given to fits of sudden gaiety and of sudden silence, Joyce was not always an easy person to get on with, yet he never lacked friends and throughout his 36 years on the Continent was always the center of a literary circle. Life was hard at first. At Trieste he had very little money, and he did not improve matters by drinking heavily, a habit checked somewhat by his brother Stanislaus who came out from Dublin to act (as Stanislaus put it much later) as his "brother's keeper." His financial position was much improved by the patronage of . . . .

And there follows a roll call of the benefactors who kept Joyce afloat in an age before fellowships, arts grants, writing colonies, and so on. But what's really great about Daiches's note is the way in which he describes why many of us adore Joyce, notwithstanding some of his unattractive personal traits:

Joyce's almost life-long exile from his native Ireland has something paradoxical about it. No writer has ever been more soaked in Dublin, its atmosphere, its history, its topography; in spite of doing most of his writing in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he wrote only and always about Dublin. He devised ways of expanding his accounts of Dublin, however, so that they became microcosms, small-scale models, of all human life, of all history and all geography. Indeed that was his life's work: to write about Dublin in such a way that he was writing about all human experience. .  .  .

Ulysses is an account of one day in the lives of citizens of Dublin in the year 1904: it is thus the description of a limited number of events involving a limited number of people in a limited environment. Yet Joyce's ambition—which took him seven years to realize—is to make his action into a microcosm of all human experience. The events are therefore not told on a single level; the story is presented in such a manner that depth and implication are given to them and they become symbolic of the activity of Man in the World. . . .

The climax of the book comes when Stephen, far gone in drink, and Bloom, worn out with fatigue, succumb to a series of hallucinations where their subconscious and unconscious come to the surface in dramatic form and their whole personalities are revealed with a completeness and a frankness unique in literature. Then Bloom takes the unresponsive Stephen home and gives him a meal. . . .

The more one reads Ulysses the more one finds in it, but at the same time one does not need to probe into the symbolic meaning in order to relish both its literary artistry and its human feeling. At the forefront stands Leopold Bloom, from one point of view a frustrated and confused outsider in the society in which he moves, from another a champion of kindness and justice whose humane curiosity about his fellows redeems him from mere vulgarity and gives the book its positive human foundation. 

Perhaps one senses a few ounces of special pleading, a bit of a soft sell of the challenge connected with making sense of Ulysses: what Daiches calls "literary artistry," for example, sometimes seems to me like a pianist playing a discordant but difficult piece mainly just to exhibit his skill. But my own experience as a reader would cause me to write that, the more you read Ulysses, the more you love Leopold Bloom, and the better you feel about being a member of his species. Happy Bloomsday, a day late!

Darwin award?

According to this analysis by David Leonhardt of The New York Times, the bad news about COVID right now in the US is that the number of new infections has leveled off after having fallen dramatically week after week for many weeks going back to mid-April—see above graph. The main cause is evidently the so-called Delta variant, the one originating in India that's now responsible for around ten percent of new cases in our country. The Delta variant is an unusually contagious form of the disease and makes people sicker faster than any strain we've faced so far.

The good news about COVID in our country right now is that the vaccines are effective against all variants, including Delta. If you've been vaccinated, you have little to worry about: you're unlikely to be infected, and, if you are, you're unlikely to get sick enough to notice it. The chance of dying, or even of having to be admitted to a hospital for treatment, is essentially zero. 

The bad news about the good news is that the number of people being vaccinated has dropped considerably in the last few weeks. It's pretty clear that the remaining part of the unvaccinated population is reluctant to be vaccinated or, worse, determined not to be. The Times has also looked at the state-by-state vaccination trends and compiled a table, published June 3, of how long it will take a state, given current vaccination rates, to get 70 percent of adults in that state protected. Here are the 15 states with the farthest to go, from at least a year (Alabama and Mississippi) to three months (Indiana).

Alabama	Tennessee	South Carolina
Mississippi	North Dakota	Idaho
Wyoming	Missouri	West Virginia
Louisiana	North Carolina	Montana
Oklahoma	Arkansas	Indiana

The red-blue divide is evident not just in the fact that Trump won all of these states. A list of Trump's best 15 states (in terms of percentage of the statewide vote) has eleven in common with the above list of 15 states with the farthest to go on vaccinations. The vaccines were developed while Trump was in office and provide his fanboys with their chief talking point when the topic at hand is his administration's bungled response to the crisis. That his supporters are the most vaccine-averse segment of the population is therefore a bit of a mystery, at least to me. It would help a lot if Trump urged people to get vaccinated, in fact it would undoubtedly save lives, but of course then he'd be aligning himself with Biden, who has set the goal of 70 percent of adults being fully vaccinated by the Fourth of July. Perhaps MAGA people don't want Biden to reach his goal. In that case, they are risking illness and death in order to own the libz. A 70-percent national vaccination rate means pockets in Trumplandia where it's low enough for the Delta variant to gain a foothold and spread. What's exasperating is that such a result could so easily be averted. The vaccines are available but instead we might be writing a new chapter in The Darwin Awards. 

Ultimate

I spent the afternoon at the Middle School State Tournament for Ultimate Frisbee in St. Paul. Possibly a better entertainment than watching the Twins get drilled on TV, but just sitting outside in the sun and the wind is kind of draining. Some teams ran sprints, knee to chin, during "warmups," and my old-man thought was: Jesus, coach, it's hot, and there's only so much tread on the tire. Ultimate Frisbee coaches look a little like retired hippies so I don't think the high-stepping sprints are connected in any way to their Nazi ideology. Maybe the extra running somehow helps. My daughter's team warms up by tossing frisbees around and their record in the state tournament was 0-5. 

When my kid's in the game, I tend to watch only her, and I notice myself giving her throws body English from my lawn chair. At some point this afternoon, I realized that I wanted her team to win more than she did. She seems to understand this too. After the last game, another loss, she expressed disappointment, but cheered up immediately when I asked whether it had been fun anyway. She wasn't disappointed if I wasn't. Mainly, she likes being on a team with her friends. It's a pretty universal thing. When Magic Johnson retired, he was asked what he thought he'd miss the most, and he answered: "Being with the fellas." In this year's ACC basketball tournament, a senior who had just played in his last game was asked the same question. He paused, and you could see the emotion welling up in him before he managed to say, "Going out to eat with my teammates after road games."

One of the moms took the above pic almost immediately after loss #5. You can see that they're crushed. Eventually I might ask my daughter whether she thinks it would be rude to occupy space in the same zip code as the girl she is said to be “guarding.”

Weather! Waugh!

Whew, it's hot, every day in Minneapolis at least 90 for more than a week now, and the local nuts who are sure that a cold snap disproves the theory of anthropogenic climate change are not talking about the weather. They've moved on to crime. I wonder whether there might be a connection. Some days in these parts it's just too cold to go outside and shoot people, which anyway is hindered by the wearing of mittens. Hot weather, on the other hand, provokes surliness, short tempers, and trigger fingers. Everyone has a gun, or may have a gun, so when carrying to advance the cause of personal safety there is a reason to be the first to escalate a disagreement. It seems that, contrary to theory, "responsible gun owners" are rarely on the scene to prevent crimes from happening. They might even be the ones shooting each other. 

To stay out of the line of fire, I lounge in the air conditioning, reading in bed—most recently Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, about whom I've written before, here and here. Of the Waugh novels I've read, A Handful of Dust is still my favorite, but there is no down side to trying to discover one I like even better. The action of Scoop is set off when a ridiculous media magnate is determined to send a correspondent to a war brewing in East Africa. He receives a tip from a socialite concerning a popular, dissolute novelist who, she contends, is just the man for the job. Actually, he isn't, but it doesn't matter because he is a distant cousin of an obscure rural columnist for the magnate's London daily and, as the two men share a last name, the unknowing columnist is sent to Africa by the unknowing big shot: a case of confused identities. The comedy of errors then proliferates madly. It's less easy than in A Handful of Dust to discern a serious purpose lurking in the comedy, but in both novels there is just no relief from stupidity, vanity, error, and folly. It's interesting to me that, in my paperback Penguin edition, the admiring Introduction to Scoop is by Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the most notorious of the "new atheists" and thus it might seem an odd enthusiast for the fiction of a deeply conservative, Catholic novelist. If you're serious about Original Sin, you might share with atheistic absurdists a generally dim view of human activity here on Earth. 

T-ball bloopers

 

As a teenager, I had a summer job coaching youth baseball in my hometown. I remember once, in a t-ball game, a kid hit a weak grounder to the first baseman, who fielded the ball in front of the base. Instead of touching first base, the first baseman decided he'd tag the batter as he ran past him. So the the kid who hit the ball just stopped in the baseline. For a second or more, the two boys contemplated one another from a distance of a few feet before the first baseman, evidently having forgotten that he only had to touch first, advanced toward the stalled runner to tag him. The kid who hit the ball then retreated toward home. This baseball play ended with the first baseman throwing the ball to the catcher, who tagged the runner as he slid into home from the first baseline.

The parents were hootin' and hollerin' and I guessed they might be wondering what the coach was teaching their kids about baseball. But check out the above video of a play earlier this year in an mlb game, Cubs versus Pirates. No reason for me to have felt bad about what my t-ballers did. Fyi, there were two out (in the Pirates-Cubs game). I like how the broadcaster, when the craziness apparently had come to an end, shouts, "Run! Keep running!" That's what parents, understanding that no one in the field can throw or catch, yell at their kids when they stop at a base before the other team has corralled the ball.

On this date in 1944

The historian Michael Beschloss regularly posts to Twitter primary documents from American history. Today it is the above statement drafted by General Dwight Eisenhower on June 5, 1944. (Eisenhower misdated it, writing "July" for "June.") The statement was for release in the event the D-Day invasion, set for the next day, June 6, should be repelled. His handwriting isn't the greatest but this is what it says:

Our landings in the Cherbourg–Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The edits Eisenhower made are notable. It appears that the first sentence originally said:

Our landings in the Cherbourg–Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and the troops have been withdrawn.

He then continued:

This particular operation . . . .

At this point, he crossed out "have been withdrawn" and inserted "I have withdrawn" before "the troops" so that the first sentence then read as I have set it out above. He also crossed out "This particular operation" and started the second sentence, instead, "My decision." One surmises that the rest of the second sentence would have read something like:

This particular operation was based upon the best information available.

He changed it to:

My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available.

He squeezed out every drop of mistakes-were-made in order to stress that the decision had been his. This was on the day before the invasion. Of course the statement was never released, since the invasion achieved "a satisfactory foothold."  

Shambolic

I just looked up the meaning of "shambolic." It's not the first time. My excuse for always forgetting is that I love the way it sounds, and my sense of what it ought to mean, based on the sound it makes, isn't quite right. And that's all I ever remember: that it doesn't mean what I think it ought to mean. According to Merriam Webster's online dictionary, the official meaning is:

obviously disorganized or confused.

It's "chiefly British," and a relatively new word, the first known use having occurred in 1970. As for etymology, the dictionary only speculates that it's "probably from shambles." Therein lies my confusion, for I felt, or guessed, or would prefer that it's probably from sham, and that the meaning therefore pertains to trickery, dishonesty, a confidence game. A "shambolic bureaucracy" means only that it's confused, in disarray, whereas I always want to ascribe to it at least an undersense of corruption.

I was thinking of "shambolic" in connection with the recent vote in the Senate about forming a commission to investigate the January 6 riot at the Capitol. The vote was 54-35 in favor of forming the commission. The shambolic aspect of the vote makes its entrance when one learns that the side with 54 lost. There will be no commission. I imagine the third-world countries we lecture on the glories of democracy might be confused, which, if true, would be evidence of the shambolic essence of the filibuster rule.

The shambole only deepens when details are discussed. What could justify the side with 54 votes losing out to the side with only 35? It has to do, we are told, with the need for bipartisan support in order to move forward. The word "bipartisan" is often pronounced with quiet gravity, as if speaking the name of God in church. It's such a crock. The 54 votes for included the votes of all the Democrats who voted and some of the Republicans who voted. The 35 votes against came only from Republicans. Actual bipartisanship was thus defeated (by a Senate rule, the alleged purpose of which is to require "bipartisanship"). The side with only 35 votes imposed its narrow partisan agenda on the bipartisan majority. In the interests of bluntness, we might as well just say it: the Republican side is guilty of political crimes and, like criminals everywhere, would prefer their crimes not be investigated. The poor rubes who believe the Big Lie rioted at the Capitol and are now being investigated and prosecuted by the Justice Department. But the Republican politicians who lied to them will not be investigated. Something called "bipartisanship" requires that they get a pass. I like the adjective "shambolic" but it's too pale to describe such a farcical sham.