Eric The Blue

Lying in bed

 

 

Found myself last night thinking about car alarms while lying in bed. Take a guess why, you'll be right. I just typed "car ala" on my keyboard and Google, taking instant note of where other typists of these characters in that order have ultimately landed, suggested, of all things, "car alarm keeps going off."

Out of every thousand times a car alarm goes off in America, how many can be attributed to an auto theft in progress? I choose to speculate about a thousand occurrences in order that the probable answer might climb as high as the first counting number, which I'm pretty sure it would not if we were talking about only a hundred occurrences. This being the case, car alarm seems to me a misnomer. Nobody was calling 9-1-1 or running out in the street in their pajamas to defend their motor vehicle. The neighborhood was not alarmed, only annoyed. 

I am not a scholar of the works of Karl Marx, but he was lying down on the job if his critique of capitalism makes no mention of its tendency to produce for sale and profit devices that make life unambiguously worse. On another day I'll tell you what I think about leaf blowers.

The Buckley Rule

Though no expert on Republican intramural politics, I do know about The Buckley Rule, named for the founding editor of National Review, and according to which conservatives contemplating the field in a Republican primary race are to choose the rightward most viable candidate, or the rightward most electable candidate, or the rightward most candidate with a snowball's chance in hell of winning the general election, or something—there are various formulations, it seems. I used to think the weakness with all the formulations was that they placed too great a burden on anyone who would be guided by the Rule. On the one hand, you have to be crazy enough to vote for a complete lunatic. On the other, you have to be lucid enough to comprehend when there aren't enough voters crazy as you to make the lunatic "viable" or "electable." 

I wonder now whether The Buckley Rule doesn't tend to resolve the supposed dilemma in favor of the rightward most candidate, period. If the Rule were in universal operation, then everyone would be contemplating a vote for the biggest loon, a fact that would seem to go a long way toward making her (or more frequently him) "viable." Remember that, on account of gerrymandering, the Venn circle of districts that are a lock for the Republican candidate lies almost directly atop the one for districts in which the Republican has any chance at all. A Republican who can win the primary is therefore "viable" (or "electable") in the general, almost by definition. 

I'm only being around one-third facetious about this as I believe the theory, if that's the word for it, has considerable explanatory power. For example, it offers a way of understanding how ambitious but obviously flawed—deeply, almost laughably flawed—people can end up in the Congress. By moving to the rightward fringe, their deficiencies are washed away—because if you're the most rightward, you're probably the most rightward viable, too. I'm thinking of you Matt, Marj, Lauren, Louie, others. The only thing bad about being an ignorant vulgarian is that, theoretically (but probably not actually), it makes you "unviable."

Peter Meijer is a Republican House member from Michigan. He voted to impeach Trump, so of course he has a MAGA challenger in the GOP primary. This challenger, whose name is John Gibbs, recently told the Detroit News, "There are many great Americans all around the country who were actually conceived from rape." He's just another whacko with a strong claim to being the most rightward, viable candidate. This is one of those races in which the local Democratic party in Michigan is spending money to boost Gibbs's candidacy. Viewed through the lens of The Buckley Rule, their calculation is evidently that "viable" means something closer to "could win" than "most likely to win." The Cook Political Report seems to agree and, on the supposition that Gibbs will defeat Meijer in the primary, has for now placed the general election race in the "toss up" category.

The Buckley Rule may have confounded itself, unless the goal was always just to strike a pose. When Buckley first enunciated his Rule, it meant Goldwater for president, not Rockefeller, and Goldwater lost 44 states. The thing about The Buckley Rule is that to the degree it's honored, either consciously or not, it probably has the effect of making Republicans lose more elections than they otherwise would. But it also makes it more important that they lose, since the consequence of them winning is . . . take a look around. The J6 Committee is trying to show them that Trump isn't viable, but they're too crazy to be persuaded. Meanwhile, perplexed journalists wonder aloud why more Republicans don’t renounce Trump. It’s because there hardly are any sane Republicans left on the scene—they’ve all been defeated, many by an insane Republican in a primary, and the remnant is doomed. Liz Cheney, for example, is sure to lose her seat. 

Good bye dog, hello horse

The younger girl left today for horse camp after saying quite an elaborate good-bye to our dog. Just a flip "See ya" for dad.

Does anyone understand very well the connection between kids and animals? I feel like my kids aren't the only ones who, when there were around a hundred words in their vocabulary, knew the names of all the common pets, farm animals, and several more for good measure too: dog, cat, horse, pig, cow, bird, frog, snake, fox, donkey, bug, zebra, monkey, butterfly, wildebeest—the last is the only one I'm kidding about. It's like they're all born zoologists.

Animals have a featured role in ten million kids' books, and if it's going to be a chicken-or-egg question, my answer is that the authors are catering to, not creating, the interests of kids.  Regarding dogs, in particular: why is it practically impossible to catch even very young children making a category mistake? Dobermans, St. Bernards, German Shepherds, boxers, collies, French poodles, cocker spaniels, bulldogs, labs, pit bulls, Irish setters, beagles, Rottweilers, huskies, Golden Retrievers, Jack Russells, Dachshunds—without instruction, kids effortlessly identify all these as dogs, and never call a non-dog a dog. (Maybe they'd be tricked by coyotes or wolves, but still.) In other areas, they make mistakes, and you can detect a learning process. They talk about the toes on their foots, because with language they first learn rules and, later, the exceptions. But soon as they know the word "dog," they apply it correctly to all the different breeds and varieties of friendly mutts, though to an adult eye many of these look no more alike than a tabby and a red fox (which is another mistake they'd never make). 

It seems they should be confused, but they aren't. Maybe I'm way off course about this. If not, I have no idea what accounts for it. If you google, say, "kids and animals," you end up reading about how it's good for kids to have pets, but nothing that explains the natural affinity between them and the animals that hog all the space in their earliest working vocabulary.  

Family watches tv

With no Twins game till tomorrow, I watched with the older girl, Lydia, who is 14, a couple Jeopardy shows that we'd recorded. Toward the end of one of them, Ken Jennings announced that the subject for the final Jeopardy round was going to be "Opera." Lydia moaned. "I'd only bet a dollar," she announced, "cuz unless they mean Opera Winfrey, I'm screwed." 

Told her I was screwed no matter what Opera they had in mind. 

Schopenhauer: essays and aphorisms

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) published his most famous work, The World as Will and Representation, in 1819, when he was 31. It was not well enough received to land him a permanent academic position, so it's fortunate for him that he was what we'd call a trust fund beneficiary—his father, a successful businessman, had drowned in a canal, quite likely a suicide, when Arthur was 17, and his share of the inheritance, invested conservatively, yielded an annual income of approximately twice that of a university professor. He settled into a modest but comfortable life of study and leisure at Frankfurt. He did not lack confidence in his own merit; here is a passage, from a later book, in which he is no doubt backhandedly explaining why his "masterpiece" had been largely forgotten:

If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.

I can imagine him trying not to betray his gratification upon reading the Wikipedia article on himself, especially:

Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, Schopenhauer had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science.

The article about him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a trove. His name has become associated with "pessimism," which is a little simple without being unfair. Here is a characteristically straightforward expression of a dim view that also possesses, I think, at least a bit of uplift:

The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation is we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de misères. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.

It was perhaps hard to live up to this creed, for the same volume includes:

What the pathetic commonplace heads with which the world is crammed really lack are two closely related faculties: that of forming judgments and that of producing ideas of their own. But these are lacking to a degree which he who is not one of them cannot easily conceive, so that he cannot easily conceive the dolefulness of their existence.

It also includes a section titled "On Women" that I think we might all agree is bereft of ideas that were ahead of their time. An American reader, meanwhile, might be startled by the following, which follows the chauvinism by only a few pages:

Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is. For enlightenment on this matter, though, you have no need to wait until that happens: there exist hundreds of reports, recent and less recent, which will suffice to convince you that man is in no way inferior to the tiger or the hyena in pitilessness and cruelty. A weighty contemporary example is provided by the reply received by the British Anti-Slavery Society from the American Anti-Slavery Society in answer to its inquiries about the treatment of slaves in the slave-owning states of the North American Union: Slavery and the Internal Slave-Trade in the United States of North America. This book constitutes one of the heaviest of all indictments against mankind. No one can read it without horror, and few will not be reduced to tears: for whatever the reader of it may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the unhappy condition of the slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when he reads how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, Sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into their devilish clutches. This book, which consists of dry but authentic and documented reports, rouses one's human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade for the subjugation and punishment of the slave-owning states of North America. They are a blot on mankind.

This book, Essays and Aphorisms, is a roller coaster ride. I find myself reading passages over and over again—but not, as with other philosophers who have a place in the humanities curriculum, because I'm conscious of having failed to apprehend the meaning. 

Matt Birk speaks

 

Republican state legislators impose abortion bans with no exception for rape—in Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, South Dakota, Texas, maybe others by now too, unless this summary is up to date.

Opponents observe that these laws mean forced birth for sexual assault victims.

Matt Birk, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Minnesota: I can't believe the other side keeps playing the rape card! Did you know I was a football player? The culture is stealthily encouraging abortion by telling women they should have a career and look a certain way . . . "all these things!"

But what a sense of humor. You have to admit, he's funnier than Herschel Walker. 

The Uvalde report

The gang that loves wisecracking about the conclusions of climate scientists every time there's one cool day has been quiet for a while. In order to feel something besides the oppressive heat, I skimmed the Texas House Committee's report on the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The effect was not cooling. Apparently 376 cops responded and were on the scene. That seems like a lot—the population of the county is 25,000, but there were the city cops, state police, border patrol, officers from the county sheriff's office, etc., etc. Unless I missed it, the report (which is 77 pages long) does not explicitly state that this might have been part of the problem, but the way in which responsibility can, in a large group, get spread so thin as to dissolve entirely is a pretty well-known phenomenon of psychology. There was only one shooter, and it took 376 cops about 70 minutes to confront and kill him. I wonder if just four might have done better. 

It's not exactly true that all 376 stood around for an hour or more, doing nothing, waiting for instructions, or for rifle-rated shields, or something. From the report (page 74): 

The initial responders to the west building heard gunfire and encountered a hallway with a fog of drywall debris, bullet holes, and empty rifle casings. They converged on Rooms 111 and 112, which they identified as the location of the attacker. They acted appropriately by attempting to breach the classrooms and stop the attacker. The attacker immediately repelled them with a burst of rifle fire from inside the classrooms. 

He was finally killed around 70 minutes later. According to the report, some of the kids died on the way to the hospital, and they might have survived but for the elapsed time. On the previous page (73), the report had noted, without comment:

There was no legal impediment to the attacker buying two AR-15 style rifles, 60 magazines, and over 2,000 rounds of ammunition when he turned 18. 

Duh! Have they not heard of the Second Amendment? John Cornyn, one of Texas's two senators, was the Republican leader of a bipartisan committee that, in the aftermath of the tragedy, hashed together a bill that could pass the Senate. On June 22, he tweeted out a list of ideas that had been dropped from consideration since, as he put it, if any were included "the bill would not command the votes needed for passage." In other words, of 50 Republican senators, there were not 10 votes for any of the bullet points listed below.

 

These are ideas we rejected in the bipartisan agreement on principles for gun-related legislation announced yesterday. Why? Because we knew that if they were included, the bill would not command the votes needed for passage. pic.twitter.com/dfrAWmYJM2

— Senator John Cornyn (@JohnCornyn) June 13, 2022

Domestic

"Well, it's better than it used to be"—what I tell myself each day after devoting 5 minutes to house cleaning. I haven't thought it all the way through, but am beginning to suspect a fallacy connected to the question of whether it might nevertheless be worse than it was 23 hours and 55 minutes ago. 

Postscripts

 

One of the pleasures of a New Yorker subscription is reading the brilliant if alarmingly regular obituaries, composed by a staff writer, of a recently deceased colleague at the magazine. It's not for nothing that these people have found their way into a certain line of work. The most recent specimen, here, concerns John Bennet, an editor unknown to the public, who is eulogized by quite a well-known writer, Nick Paumgarten. The piece enumerates some "Bennetisms," including:

A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that's open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.

If you don't like something I write, remember: there's no one walking behind me! Paumgarten says he has on the wall of his office a draft of a long "Profile" he'd written for the magazine. It had been edited by Bennet, and somewhere around the middle several consecutive paragraphs, spreading across a few pages, were X'd out. In the margin, Bennet had chicken-scratched the justification for this long excision: "Blah, blah, blah." If you are at all inclined, I recommend the whole thing—it's not long (no blah, blah, blah). 

Here is another recent contribution to the genre, Ian Frazier's obituary of Martin Baron, a fact checker at the magazine for 35 years. Quoted snippets cannot convey its excellence, which has something to do with a modulated and understated tone that creates an overall effect well beyond the sum of things explicitly stated. Apparently not the easiest fellow to know too well, though esteemed by Frazier, Baron had become a superannuated figure, awaiting his end in an apartment in the Bronx where he smoked Marlboros out of the presence of home healthcare workers and, with politeness almost awkward in its formality, conversed with an old colleague who had come for a last visit. 

The video above is of comedian Dina Hashem. I think she's hilarious, often in a similarly understated way. The bit in this routine concerning the former boyfriend with an unusual sexual proclivity seems to relate subterraneanly to the recent handiwork of some state legislatures.

Boyfriend: I like sex with pregnant women.

Hashem: I'll gain a few pounds for you, but that's as far as it goes.

Boyfriend: But it would turn me on to feel a life within you.

Hashem [deadpan but exasperated, indicating her body with hand gestures]: I'm alive. 

Hinderaker hustle on Ohio 10-year-old

I recently mocked Sen. Ron Johnson, MAGA-WI, for what I considered to be double-think regarding abortion law in the US. The senator has been a strong opponent of Roe and has even expressed support for a national abortion ban. Then, after the draft opinion overturning Roe was leaked, he said that abortion "isn't going away" and that a Wisconsin woman could procure one simply by driving to Illinois. So why all the fuss? "Life begins at conception, and abortion is murder, but, instead of getting upset with people like me, just travel to a state where they aren't as uptight about homicide as we are here in America's Dairyland." That seems to be his most recent position.

But he's not the only flexible thinker, as the terrible saga of the Ohio 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to Indiana for an abortion shows. The first impulse of many was to suggest that the story could only be a fabrication intended to embarrass opponents of abortion rights. As to the question of what abortion laws ought to be, this struck me as a diversionary tactic, since the scenario very well could be real: that is, the claim is that very young girls are sometimes impregnated in sexual assaults, and that in Ohio they cannot receive a legal abortion. Is that what the law ought to be? Now it turns out, of course, that the story was not fabricated. This isn't a hypothetical in a political debate: the 10-year-old exists, she was pregnant after being sexually assaulted, and she went to Indiana for an abortion. Those who were sure they had detected a scam needed a new story. For example, John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, had on July 12 posted an article beneath the headline "Story of 10-year-old rape victim crumbles." By my count, this was his fourth contribution to the genre—he had made the same assertion in articles posted on July 7 ("About that 10-year-old rape victim"), July 8 ("Biden hops on the rape bandwagon"), and July 10 ("Journalism then and now"). When the "tale" that had "crumbled" was indisputably confirmed, he added an "Update" to the July 12 post that reads:

It turns out, apparently, that the rape was real, and the rapist has been arrested. He is a 27-year-old illegal alien. According to local news in Columbus, the rape was reported on June 22, but as of July 11, Ohio Attorney General David Yost said he could find no evidence of a rape investigation. The alleged rapist was arrested the next day. Perhaps the national outcry over the case had something to do with the arrest.

Left unexplained is why the girl did not get an abortion in Columbus, where there are two abortion centers, one operated by Planned Parenthood. Ohio's Attorney General says the abortion would have been legal in Ohio, and that is consistent with my reading of the Ohio statute. For some reason, the Indiana abortionist who fed this story to the press, evidently for political purposes, has gone quiet and stopped responding to inquiries. I think there is more to be learned about this story. In the meantime, I hope they throw the book at the rapist.

Quite an oily rhetorical exercise, in my opinion, beginning with "apparently." He suggests in the first paragraph that he was led astray by the Ohio Attorney General, then quotes the Ohio Attorney General as an authority in the second paragraph, where the new villain is the "abortionist" whom he had called a liar even though, as he now apparently admits, she was telling the truth. The place for the penultimate sentence, it turns out, was in the four original articles, not the "update," which is also notable for the way in which the author can barely contain his contempt for legal abortion while at the same time indicating, sort of, that in this case the girl should have made use of "abortionists" employed by "abortion centers" in Columbus, Ohio. 

Could the girl have gotten a legal abortion in Ohio? Hinderaker says that she could have, just as Ohio's Attorney General did, but neither man cites any language to justify this conclusion. The statute is here; anyone can read it. I don't see where it says that, in a case like that of this raped 10-year-old, abortion is permissible in Ohio. There is no exception for rape. There's no provision relating to the age of the person seeking an abortion. The abortion ban is comprehensive, after about six weeks' gestational age (before many women realize they are pregnant), except that it "does not apply to a physician who performs a medical procedure that, in the physician's reasonable medical judgment, is designed or intended to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or to prevent a serious risk of the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman."

It isn't at all clear that this condition pertained to the 10-year-old. What is clear, I think, is that the purpose of the statute is to make abortion practically impossible in Ohio.  One of the ways it does that is by intimidating doctors who might contemplate performing them. When does a problematic pregnancy cross a border so that it threatens to cause either the woman's death or "the substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function?" (Note substantial and irreversible: both have to apply.) The impossibility of answering this question means there will be no abortions, but the ambiguity, apparently, also allows Hinderaker and the Republican Attorney General of Ohio to assert that the law does not do what it in fact does. At least, no doctor following the advice of a competent lawyer would ever perform one. 

They want to make abortion impossible in every case. At the same time, they want to be able to deny that they are making abortion impossible in every case. Though, to be fair, not all of the cranks and fanatics are so slippery. Today, Jim Bopp, the Indiana lawyer who, in anticipation of Roe being overturned, wrote model legislation for states seeking to severely limit abortion rights, told Politico that under his proposed law the 10-year-old would be required to carry her pregnancy to term.

"She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child," Bopp told Politico in an interview earlier today.

Books of the Bible: Zephania

I haven't given up on this eccentric project I set myself. It's just that many of the remaining books are dauntingly long (the Chronicles, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah) or, like Zephania, obscure (and likely for good reason). I think I have around a dozen to go, which means, if the psalmist is right about the years of man being three score and ten, that I need to tackle two per year if I am to brag about having read and commented on every biblical book in my interview with St. Peter six or seven years hence.

Today, Zephania; in six months, Haggai! Maybe "eccentric" isn't the word. 

For me, the Pauline phrase "through a glass, darkly" describes the experience of wading through the three chapters of Zephania. I can make out that God is mad:

"I will utterly sweep away everything
from the face of the earth," says the Lord.
"I will sweep away man and beast;
I will sweep away the birds of the air
and the fish of the sea.
I will overthrow the wicked;
I will cut off mankind
from the face of the earth," says the Lord.

But what is it this time? The commentators concur: it's "religious syncretism" that, according to Zephania, has set him off. The worship of God's chosen, in other words, has been sullied by the incorporation of elements from the religious practices of non-chosen peoples. This explains the references, in the passage following the above, to Canaanite ("Baal"), Ammonite ("Milcom"), and Assyrian ("host of the heavens") religions. To the non-specialist, general reader . . . almost perfectly impenetrable.

Since I haven't much to say about Zephania, let me just point out that the God of the Bible must sometimes confound the theologians. For example, it seems that God's anger does not fit well with his supposed omniscience. Was he surprised that his people would incorporate aspects of Canaanite religion into their worship—or, for that matter, that his directive concerning the tree of knowledge would be ignored? Also, he's hard to please on the details of the worship of him. Amos, Zephania's fellow among the twelve "minor prophets," had inveighed:

I hate, I despise your feasts
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

There is no suggestion here that the worship practices have been adulterated by foreign influence. The various offerings presumably meet specifications. The problem now is that "good worship" results in complacent piety, the enemy of justice and righteousness, which he chiefly desires. This idea is not altogether absent from Zephania:

Come together and hold assembly, O shameless nation,
before you are driven away like the drifting chaff,
before there comes upon you
the fierce anger of the Lord,
before there comes upon you
the day of the wrath of the Lord.
Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land,
who do his commands;
seek righteousness, seek humility;
perhaps you can be hidden on the day of the wrath of the Lord.

As to the conclusion to the above passage, a commentator directs us to a different parallel passage in Amos:

Hate evil, and love good,
and establish justice in the gate;
it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts,
will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

The strong overall impression one receives is of consuming anger. I hate! I despise! I will sweep you from the face of the earth! The animals, too! And he's not easily appeased. You can be hidden on the day of wrath, perhaps. It may be that the Lord will be gracious. This anger is so obtrusive as almost to obliterate the consistent teaching of Israel's prophets, not ever memorably expressed in Zephania, where it nevertheless is generally still in line with the distillation of, for example, Micah:

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?

To give the anger its due, place the emphasis on "showed." God's human, non-omniscient emotion is of exasperation. 

Squirming while watching Twins

Sitting here watching the Twins blow another lead in Texas. In the first game of this series they scored 5 runs and lost by 1. Yesterday they scored 7 and lost by 2. Today they were ahead 3-0 before allowing a 2-out, 3-run double in the bottom of the second inning—this, after the number 9 batter walked on 4 pitches to fill the bases. Hard to watch if for some reason the atoms in your brain are arranged in a way that makes you care. Aaron Gleeman, the Twins beat writer for The Athletic, recently set out the following statistical tidbit under the heading Minnesota pitching ERA by month:

April         3.16
May          3.64
June         4.18
July          4.31

Reminds me of when I took "the calculus sequence" in college:

Calculus I       A
Calculus II      B
Calculus III     C

I could quit registering for math classes; the Twins have to play out the schedule. That 4.31 was before this game started. It's higher now. Gleeman just put out the numbers without comment but I think they explain why the Twins were 9 games over .500 at the end of May and 7 games over now.

If you like the Twins, but have enough of a life not to spend it scouring the Internet for news droplets about them, I can keep you filled in. Here's another courtesy of Gleeman:

Last 35 games for Jose Miranda

.312 BA
.348 OBP
.560 SLG
.908 OPS 
6 homers
9 doubles

Again, no comment from Aaron, just the facts, but I'm thinking Miguel Sano, who is currently on a rehab assignment in the minor leagues, may have taken his last at-bat for the Twins. If so, I will no longer have to avert my eyes when he's hitting with a 1-2 count.

Byron Buxton gets a lot of sneers for missing so many games, but, in his defense, he's played enough so that currently only four guys in the majors have hit more homers than he has (23). And he hits them when it matters: 14 of the 23 have lifted the Twins into the lead from either a tie or small deficit. According to the reporting of Do-Hyoung Park, who covers the Twins for mlb.com, he's also one of the principals in the following charming story. Around a month ago the Twins were playing Detroit, Griffin Jax on the mound, when the batter hit a rocket into the right-center gap. Buxton raced back, leaped on the warning track, extended his arm, and had the ball tick off the end of his glove just as he collided with the wall: a double, and the batter eventually scored, though the Twins won the game. That night, about 1 in the morning, Jax's phone dings. It’s Buxton, who has been stewing about not catching that ball, and he apologizes to Jax for the nick on his ERA. Park quotes the text, so I assume he saw it. Jax replies along the line of: that was a missile, if you didn't catch it the ball wasn't catchable, no one I'd rather have playing behind me in center field. Fast forward to the Twins' recent series in Chicago. Jax is pitching, two on, no outs, batter drives one into the right-center gap. The metric used to rate fielders' "outs above expected" says batting average on balls like this one is .820. The base runners seem to believe it—they both take off, but Buxton runs the ball down on the warning track, catches it, and, wheeling, throws back to the infield, where a triple play is easily completed. In the dugout Jax approaches Buxton and says he hopes he can now forget about the ball in the Tiger game.

Unscholarly notes on Madame Bovary

1. The title character is a "fallen woman," which is the one thing a lot of people (including me) know about Madame Bovary. When I began making my way through it, I kept waiting for the adultery to get started. But it takes awhile. Here's the first time:

The broadcloth of her habit clung to the velvet of his coat. She leaned back her head, her white throat swelled in a sigh, and, her resistance gone, weeping, hiding her face, with a long shudder she gave herself to him.

In my edition, this occurs on page 152 of 330. I could be wrong, but I feel like if you opened at random a paperback romance novel, the kind with a Fabio-looking guy on the cover with a swooning lady, and let your eye fall somewhere on the page, you might read a sentence a lot like this one. 

2. So what's going on for the first 150 pages? Well, the book begins, not with Emma Bovary, the title character, but with the man she ultimately marries, Charles Bovary, whose youth is described, and a fair amount too about his parents. Eventually we learn a fair amount about Emma as a girl and young adult. The author (Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1880, pictured) is at pains to describe, for example, her reading habits. She consumes novels, some good, others not, and I wonder whether the point isn't to supply an explanation of sorts for what's coming. Her reading tempts her to expect a lot from life, like in the plots of books in which Big Things happen to the heroines. They have to in order to keep the reader's interest up. But Big Things will not happen in the life of a woman married to Charles Bovary. She's unhappy, bored, "unfulfilled." Thus the wandering eye.

This isn't stated. The novel, however, feels highly wrought: everything for a reason, details are connected in subterranean ways, and the reader has to do some of the work.

3. The reason you have to wait till page 152 for what you knew was coming: the first object of Emma's extracurricular affection, Leon, though highly interested, is too tame and conventional to force the moment to a crisis, and something similar could be said of Emma. After many longing and reciprocated looks, he limps out of town, which by the way is a small one far from Paris: when the locals go to a city, it's Rouen. The novel's subtitle is "Patterns of Provincial Life." The next candidate, Rodolphe, a local landowner, is slick, confident, unrestrained, and therefore it is the velvet of his coat to which Emma's habit clung as her white throat swelled and "she gave herself to him."

To fill in some details of the plot, Rodolphe in time cruelly jilts her on the eve of their planned escape, and, in a twist, she soon meets up again with Leon, who this time proves a satisfactory replacement. 

4. The title may have the effect of leading you astray from the main theme of the book, having to do with provincial life, the principal feature of which one might get at by asking: Who in the novel is admirable or likable? You can look high and low among the main characters. It's not like there are many villains, either. Emma's two lovers are different types of louts beneath their respectable surfaces. She herself, a shallow self-seeker, chooses them, though that's not precisely right: they are merely available. The small-town druggist, Homais, is a self-satisfied and self-described "man of science," a progressive skeptic and author of absurd articles of which he is way too proud. The village priest, another mediocrity, is a kind of foil to the druggist. After Emma has killed herself, and Charles is away with his grief, these two in mutual and charitable decency keep a vigil with the corpse, and there occurs maybe my favorite passage in the book:

Homais attacked confession. Bournisien defended it: he dilated on the acts of restitution it was constantly responsible for, told stories about thieves suddenly turning honest. Soldiers, approaching the tribunal of repentance, had felt the scales drop from their eyes. There was a minister at Fribourg . . .

His fellow watcher had fallen asleep. Bournisien found it somewhat hard to breathe, the air of the room was so heavy, and he opened a window. This woke the pharmacist.

"Here," the priest said. "Take a pinch of snuff. Do—it clears the head."

There was a continual barking somewhere in the distance.

"Do you hear a dog howling?" said the pharmacist.

"People say that they scent the dead," answered the priest. "It's like bees: they leave the hive when someone dies."

Homais didn't challenge those superstitions, for once again he had fallen asleep. 

Monsieur Bournisien, more resistant, continued for some time to move his lips in a murmur, then his chin sank gradually lower, his thick black book slipped from his hand, and he began to snore.

5. Christian moralists might be disappointed to learn that Emma's sexual sins aren't the proximate cause of her descent into despair. In her grasping desire, she lived well beyond the family's means—a path made possible by successive promissory notes she signed, without Charles's knowledge, in favor of the village loan shark, who in time of course demands payment. Now she's up against it, and seeks new sources of capital. One candidate indicates that he might be willing if only she will sleep with him, and she angrily rebuffs him. Later, more desperate, she arranges an interview with Rodolphe, and lets it be known that she'd like to recapture past magic. He's interested till she reveals her financial plight. When the transactional aspect of the proposal comes into view, he coolly dismisses her, and the narrator with equal equanimity observes that "of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling."

The book is sometimes funny; also, thoroughly grim and pitiless.

6. When she has failed to get money, and the Bovarys' household goods are about to be sold pursuant to a legal writ in order to raise funds for the creditor, Emma gets into the druggist's storeroom and eats arsenic. Flaubert writes:

Soon she was vomiting blood. Her lips pressed together more tightly.  Her limbs were contorted, her body was covered with brown blotches, her pulse quivered under the doctor's fingers like a taut thread, like a harpstring about to snap.

Then she began to scream, horribly . . . .

Not long thereafter, some villagers are gathered around her corpse, a few of them because they are preparing her for the funeral:

"Look at her," said the hotel-keeper, with a sigh. "How pretty she still is! You'd swear she'd be getting up any minute."

Then they bent over to put on her wreath.

They had to lift her head a little, and as they did so a black liquid poured out of her mouth like vomit. 

Just trying to reinforce the point about "grim and pitiless." Hard not to connect the brown splotches and black liquid with Emma's swollen white neck in the first love scene with Rodolphe. That sentence seems in retrospect an intended parody of the novels Emma liked to read. The real Flaubert describes the physical symptoms of poisoning and the scene in the room with the corpse, where a stupid, romantic sentiment is immediately exposed—not by an authorial comment but just as a necessary conclusion of the detached narration. 

7. The time has come to speak of Charles. His desperation while Emma is dying, and genuine heartbreak after her death, tend to elicit sympathy. But what an obtuse dolt! I'd almost go so far as to say Flaubert nodded, for in this supposed masterpiece of realism it seems unbelievable that Charles should never have suspected a thing. It's not as if Emma took elaborate pains to deceive him, or hesitated to answer a few questions with outlandish lies: such gestures would have indicated a measure of respect, and she had none for him. She didn't care what he felt or thought. After she's dead, he discovers among her things the saved letters of her lovers. Even then he is at first in denial. Also, he's impoverished, because his stuff has been sold to pay off the loan shark. Yet he grieves copiously? He respects himself about as much as she did, and takes his place among the novel's gallery of rather poor, though not villainous, human  specimens. 

8. Charles and Emma had a child together, a daughter. She makes no appearance for long stretches. When she is seen, she's often being carted away to a nurse so that her mother can pursue her interests. I cannot now remember what plan was made for her when Emma thought she was about to run off with Rodolphe. Maybe I'm a poor reader but it is no point of emphasis in the narration. The girl exists to be neglected. Had the Bovarys been childless, the novel would barely be different, but it would lack this little accent mark of sadness. Charles does not survive his wife by long: on the last page the little girl discovers him sitting oddly in a chair and, thinking he's playing, gives him a little push, and he falls over. Now she's officially an orphan, and the novel at its end. 

What a waste

Embarrassing but true: I look like Nixon when someone is explaining to me about fishing. Did you know that you have to set your beer down if you catch one? And then hold its scaly body while trying to yank the hook out of its throat. Just the worst. Only makes sense as a subsistence activity in a primitive economy.

Spent some time chatting on the couch with my girls tonight. The younger one is starting middle school in the fall. The older one, a middle school grad, was therefore providing an overview of the teachers, their strengths and weaknesses, which ones are to be avoided at all costs, etc. Regarding a certain Spanish teacher, her entire summation was, "I love how real she is, she even swears at us."

I felt a twinge. All the effort of suppressing my impulses—wasted. 

Patriotic reading refutes patriotic opinion

For a Fourth of July activity, pre-Twins game, I've been skimming some of the Federalist Papers. These are the series of 85 essays, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, that were published in New York newspapers beginning in October of 1787. The purpose was to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution that had been drafted that summer at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. I might have mentioned before that the twenty-second, in which Hamilton inveighs against the equal representation of states, is one of my favorites:

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 must prevail. Sophistry may reply that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of all 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

After the word "America" Hamilton inserted a footnote that reads:

New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and Maryland are a majority of the whole number of States, but they do not contain one third of the people.

Hamilton's animus is here directed against the Articles of Confederation, which had been adopted in 1777 and now were about to be replaced, he hoped, by a new Constitution. Yet Article 1, Section 3, of the new Constitution he was recommending begins

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State. . . .

and the logic of his argument against the Articles therefore applies to the Constitution's Senate as well. Moreover, the goal was to get New York to ratify the new Constitution, and New York was one of the big states that would be underrepresented in the Senate—dwarfs such as Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Carolina would have "equal weight in the scale of power," thereby violating "every rule of fair representation." The original readers of Federalist No. 22, New Yorkers weighing whether their state should ratify the new Constitution, might have noticed that "two senators for every state" was just another instance of what Hamilton purported to be condemning. Why should they ratify a Constitution that, in the upper chamber of the Congress, would place their interests and sense of the public good on a level with South Carolinians'?

James Madison somewhat sheepishly answered this question in Federalist No. 62:

The equality of representation in the Senate is another point which, being evidently the result of compromise between the opposite pretensions of the large and the small States, does not call for much discussion. . . . A government founded on principles more consonant to the wishes of the larger States is not likely to be obtained from the smaller States. The only option, then, for the former lies between the proposed government and a government still more objectionable. Under this alternative, the advice of prudence must be to embrace the lesser evil; and instead of indulging a fruitless anticipation of the possible mischiefs which may ensue, to contemplate rather the advantageous consequences which may qualify the sacrifice.

When contemporary liberals complain about senators from Wyoming (population: 600,000) cancelling the votes of the senators from California (population: 40 million), or point out that the senators voting to confirm the justices who overturned Roe represent considerably less than half the country's population, they elicit stern lectures on what the Founders, out of their endless store of wisdom, wrought. But what these contemporary apologists call "wisdom" was hated by Hamilton and regarded as "the lesser evil" by Madison, who recommended it only because it was necessary to get the small states on board. 

In No. 22 Hamilton had continued, after the passage quoted above, to argue:

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, caprice, or artifice 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.

I have been used to thinking of this as a prescient critique of a "tone" that would finally prevail well over 200 years in the future. But I now think the force described by Hamilton was operating on him at the time he wrote these words. It was necessary that something be done, the new Constitution had to be ratified, and a "pertinacious minority" was thus able to impose its will on the "respectable majority," with the result that "the sense of the smaller number prevailed," the public good was compromised, and every state, regardless of its population, got two senators—not because it was wise, just, and good but only so that the new Constitution could get ratified. 

Twins in June

The Twins in June, meh: 13 wins, 15 losses, their first losing month of the season. Could have been worse considering that the month began and ended on seasonal low points. On June 1 and 2, they lost games in Detroit, capping off a series in which they fell in four of five to the lowly Tigers. Their pitching staff was in tatters—just getting to the 9-inning finish line each day was a challenge, without regard to the question of winning or losing, and their next nine games were against the Jays, Yankees, and Rays, all playoff teams. Somehow they went 5-4 in those three series. They were bumping along like that till the end of the month, when they had another 5-game road series, this one in Cleveland against the Guardians, who are proving to be their main competition in the AL Central. They won two one-sided games and lost the other three, all after late-inning leads had been bollixed by the bullpen, the last two, on the 29th and 30th, by the walk-off homer method. 

The problem of just finding a pitcher to get you to the end of the game has again arisen. On June 30, locked in a tight contest against the team with the best chance to finish ahead of them in the division, the Twins were reduced to sending Tyler Thornburg to the mound for the eighth and ninth innings. Who, you might ask, is Tyler Thornburg, thereby making my point for me. He pitched to eleven batters, retiring five of them. Of the other six, three walked, one was hit by a pitch, and two got hits. Four scored, two in the eighth and two in the ninth, including of course the guy who hit the walk-off dinger. Thornburg threw 48 pitches in the game, and, of the 47 that didn't hit the batter, 26 were called balls. His place on the roster has now been taken by Juan Minaya, who was called up from the Twins' Triple-A affiliate in St. Paul, where he had compiled a 5.73 ERA over 22 innings pitched.

The Twins reportedly are in talks with other teams about possibly acquiring bullpen help. You might say that their desperation is partly their own doing. At the start of the season, they traded Taylor Rogers, a bullpen stalwart over the past few seasons, as well as prospect Brent Rooker, to the San Diego Padres for pitchers Emilio Pagan, Chris Paddack, and Brayan Medina. Pagan has been a leading figure in the bullpen collapse—he has an ERA north of 5 and a WHIP north of 1.4. Paddack hasn't pitched since early May and recently underwent Tommy John surgery. Medina is struggling in the low minors. Rogers has a 2.84 ERA and 22 saves for the Padres.

The Twins record against the Guardians this year has been crazy. In eleven games played so far, Minnesota has outscored Cleveland 61-45—and won just five times. The six losses have been by a total of seven runs. The Twins are one game ahead of Cleveland in the AL Central standings.

Though it's not as if there haven't been bright spots for a team that's still in first place. Luis Arraez continues to lead the American League in batting average (.343) and on base percentage (.421). Byron Buxton has played in just 60 of the team's 80 games but still has slugged 21 home runs—Aaron Judge is the only hitter in the majors with more than 23. The beleaguered pitching staff has received a respite from some unlikely sources, such as Devin Smeltzer, who in his last couple of starts has allowed just one run in 12 innings pitched. Jhoan Duran and Griffin Jax have both pitched well in relief all year. Alas and alack, there's a game every day, and they can't pitch in all of them. What did fans of the Boston Braves used to say? 

First we'll use Spahn
and then we'll use Sain.
Then an off day
followed by rain.
Back will come Spahn
followed by Sain,
and followed
we hope
by two days of rain.

But if you're calling in guys from the bullpen, it already hasn't rained.