The Post-War Years

That was also a towering generation.

For some reason or other, I was particularly struck at a young age by political and otherwise public matters. I remember the day FDR died, which is when I was four. We were visiting relatives and heard it on the radio and my parents were very distressed even though they were not particularly political. My mother thought about the fate of Jews but did not remember when I asked her years later of walking with me down the  Grand Concourse in the Bronx to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. For his part, my father just insisted that all rich people were crooks, getting their ill gotten gains, even George Washington. I have other early memories during and after the War ended. (I still think of the Second World War as “the War” whatever were the wars that came afterwards.) I remember blackouts. My parents put in a night light near my bed because it was so dark when the drapes and curtains were drawn. Men complained about how little gas was allocated through their ration categories but my father always seemed to get enough gas to travel between the Bronx and his father’s house in the Catskills. The three of us were able to take a trip to Akron, Ohio so the family could work in a bakery owned by the rich uncle who had brought my mother and her sister to America. The women in the extended family worked at the front selling baked goods while the men in the back made the baked goods, the kids just getting out of the way because the multiple families were so busy. Maybe Uncle Benjamin had gotten a lot of flour on the Black Market. The store was always filled with customers. Back in the Bronx, there was plenty of meat available in the local kosher meat market, and women would bring their ration stamps to be given to the butcher along with the cash. People were not hungry and rationing quickly ended after the War ended even though rationing in Great Britain didn’t end until the Fifties.

Read More

The Election Results

Making political predictions is easy; noticing how society operates is hard.

I am disconsolate. I am an optimist, but I see no silver lining in the election results.  Trump made clear what he was and the American people supported him  and none of them deserve what will happen to them if Trump carries out even some of his promises: deporting eleven million people, adding tariffs that will lead to a big recession , jailing his enemies, replacing civil service with political appointees, using the military against civilians, and caving into Putin and other dictators. The New Yorker blames Biden for not having left the race earlier, and I can blame the judiciary for not moving its indictments into trials, but the real blame or responsibility is that the people voted for a clearly monstrous candidate. People excused or endorsed Trump's blemishes. The only upswing was that the election was decisive even if not overwhelming, the electoral college favoring Trump; so that there is no question which candidate was elected. Getting rid of the electoral college would open up endless recounts everywhere to add a few thousand votes to one side or the other. An election has to be definitive if it is to be considered legitimate.The rest of us have to regroup and hunker down for the onslaught. Maybe he is so incompetent to do much but his henchmen will do these things and J. D. Vance would be worse because he is smarter.. But I can't spend four years watching "The West Wing" reruns. A forum on silent movies? A Revolutionary Era set of Committees of Correspondence? Take your pick.

Read More

Simple and Deep Art

When does simplifying art make it simplistic?

Popular art simplifies art as when, in musical comedy, a look and a sneer in “Kiss Me Kate” shows that the lady lead is jealous of her ex husband’s  new love. Irving Thalberg, an executive at  MGM in the Thirties, said you didn’t  need twenty pages of dialogue to explain that a husband and wife were on the outs. Just have her give her husband a dirty look when he notices a pretty girl getting off an elevator. High art, on the other hand, explains just how complicated are relationships as we slowly unpack the motives of the great Gatsby. Great art can do both. Shakespeare allows the playgoer to see that Beatrice and Benedict are so preoccupied with one another engaging in their banterring that they are candidates for love. Jane Austen presents Mr. Knightley was so attentive to Emma, the daughter of his friend, though it takes a while for the reader and Emma to realize that he cared for her for a long time. Picasso also uses simple lines to make objects fresh and reimagined, as in strokes that make a bull come to life or van Ruisdael, in “Dunes”, freshly see what a rise from a seashore looks like even if seeing only a very small amount of the view.

Read More

Childhood Experience

Even small children have identities and the ability to rationally manipulate social life.

There are deep structures in existence, like consciousness or the reality of the external world, that are thought to be philosophical or metaphysical or even just conceptual that in fact can be reduced to generalizations or inferences that people draw from experience rather than as inevitable or inherent. The evidence comes from consulting the experience of early age children as to establish what they themselves are able to find and what can be found about them even without the advantages supposedly offered about psychoanalysis about how the early child’s mind can be accessed. I am thinking of my commonplace observations of what I remember before I was four about things I now know as having already been discovered in the world. I remember, for one thing, learning to drink from a glass rather than from a bottle. I had been a late learner and my mothers ruse, as I realized it to be many years later, was to say that she could not get down to the village to buy bottles and so I would have to cope by using a glass to drink milk. An accommodating sort, I said I would do that if I drank from a glass in private and she acquiesced and we went into a private space and I drank from a glass and never went back to bottles. Think about that. I already had the ability to feel embarrassed about making what seemed a major transition and I was able to negotiate  the terms of my acquiescence. 

Read More

The State of the Election

I am very distressed at the present condition of the election. I thought that Kamala would by this time be far ahead, the character of Trump having revealed himself, just the other day by admiring Arnold Palmer's penis. He is a clown but Kamala rightly says that Trump is an unserious person who could bring about very serious consequences. My late wife reminded me that my predictions were largely based on hope rather than data or analysis and so what I say should be discounted. My daughter-in-law says that one party or the other will be very angry at the outcome, but that is not my feeling. If Kamala wins, I will be relieved, I think, rather than elated. If Trump wins, I will despair over whether the constitutional measures are available to control his worst instincts, which is to cede a lot of Ukraine to Putin, put eleven million people in detention camps and then deport them, and get revenge against his enemies, which include Pelosi and Schiff as bad people who are part of the enemy within. Sixty-one percent of veterans will vote for Trump even though Trump admires Hitler. What is going on?

Let’s put aside the issues. Kamala wants capital gains taxes lower than Biden did. She wants substantial tax breaks for home ownership, children and new businesses. Conservatives can support those proposals because they reduce taxes and Liberals can support them as a way to provide more entitlements to people. Yes, Kamala could have campaigned against the “Do Nothing” Republican Congress, as Harry Truman had done in 1948, but never mind. The only point of difference in the election is the character of Trump versus the constitutionalism of Harris and that is by now well established even  though some people think Trump is a flawed vessel who will further their own agenda, much of which seems to me indefensible. These differences are clear. So, less than two weeks before the election, what has to be said has been said. Everyone should go out to vote and let us be done with it. 

My daughter said to me many years ago that politics was character, and that applied to the electorate and not just the candidates. My point was that the qualities of a person’s politics, whether they are mean or niggardly to the poor, or care only for their own financial benefits, or are statesmanlike, was an expression of their innermost natures. But I don’t want to believe that because it would mean half of the  present electorate are tainted in their souls. Better to think they have been caught up in a frenzy induced by culture, which rapidly changes, and so will just pass, as Trump said would happen in the spring of 2020, at Easter time. But it takes work rather than wishes to lift the malaise. 

Ezra Klein in the New York Times says that Trump’s disinhibition makes him attractive. To some extent, people like him mean when some voters are too timid to be so outrageous. But I disagree. Think of what is the content of what he says. Do people disregard that? They just agree with the anger. These people may think you need a mean person during mean times and so a strong man will make the nation free. But crime is down and the economy is up and the nation needs the immigrants to keep the economy going. So anger is an end in itself, not for a purpose. It seems that there has been a sea change in that a lot of people do not want the President to be Henry Fonda or Jed Bartlett: cool under pressure, very well informed, humane. They want the opposite. That may mean Trumpism will outlast Trump, some other potential dictator arising, and that is very disheartening, that meanness, not disinhibition, the real thing. 

What might it be that could control Trump if he were elected? The 25th Amendment or a conviction by the Senate of an impeachment? Congressional Republicans have not been a bulwark of democracy, cowering instead because of their contributors and local party officials and their base, the Cheneys notable exceptions, but note that neither of the two have elective office, nor do some Republican ex-congresspeople and loads of ex Trump officials who have defected from Trump.  And as for the Supreme Court? All the male justices are corrupt. Alito and Thomas get millions of dollars worth of perks from interested donors who have business at the Court and sometimes report these and sometimes don’t and are both into far right points of view and so in Trump’s pocket. Roberts refuses to impose any ethical standards with any bite. Gorsuch and Kavenaugh told Senators during the time of their confirmations that Roe v. Wade was “settled law” and did not add that they would overrule it anyway. That is hardly the honorable behavior expected of a Supreme Court Justice. 

So the anti-democratic forces have been mobilizing for quite some time and can be attributed as far back as Gingrich who tried to make the Republicans something other than the me too party which for many years acquiesced to Democratic initiatives but just slowly. And at this juncture, one might expect there to be rioting of the streets by either side while in the moment of what used to be called a revolutionary moment as preceded the French Revolution or even the easily pacified Vietnam War protests. But people like me are amazed that what we anti insurrectionists do is follow out the formalities of democratic institutionalism for as long as that lasts, hoping that Kamala will win and that Trump would be restrained, nothing premature to be done. This may be the most important election since 1860, but let the other side fire on Fort Sumter.

My son says that I shouldn't worry because the election won't affect my life. I will have my Social Security and my streaming services and Amazon and my friends and family. But I have followed politics for three quarters of a century and care about it and can't give it up, the way I did with baseball when Derek Jeter retired and management knew that A Rod was on steroids. My daughter tries to just cultivate her garden but has become obsessed as well with the  election. My granddaughter is spoiling for an argument about how disgraceful Trump is. I guess I should be an Olympian and notice how foolish mere mortals might be and so let the election be noted as a possible upheaval that in history can occasionally come to nations, but I cannot disengage because this is in my time and in my place. I cannot just note that I am fortunate to live in interesting times. But my options are few. I vote and exercise my voice by writing and I can allow myself to feel dispirited.

Re-release: Class and Gender in Thirties Movies

Men, like the poor, are stolid and reliable, while women, like the rich, are diverse and uncertain.

In four years we will mark the centenary of “The Jazz Singer”, the first talkie movie. That is as long a time as the century between the time of “Great Expectations” and when I graduated from college. That seems to me to be a very big difference. There should be a major celebration of the invention of the talkies, as important as great battles or other events so dedicated, because so much was ushered into our consciousnesses. Maybe the publication dates of great novels, those who always seemed to have been here once they were created, should also provide a new version of a saints calendar, also now forever once canonized. Oh, and how the talkies talked! The dialogue of Thirties films, often based on plays and novels, were crisp and witty and eloquent, characters saying what they had to say about themselves and other people and their situations, even including “The Grapes of Wrath”, where Henry Fonda makes clear enough what an Okie immigrant family off to California had to say for himself in his understated way. But that decade was so long ago, however vibrant they may still be, that the topics covered in them, across the genres of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, are very different from the ones seen today and so it takes some excavation so as to mine them.

The topics for the decade were the condition of women and the condition of the rich. In both cases, the conditions were problematic in that it wasn’t clear what women or the rich were like or what they should be like. Both of those kinds of people were murky and so difficult to understand. Ernst Lubitch, known for his scintillating touch, starts “Bluebeard’s Ninth Wife” with  whether Claudette Colbert is married or unmarried or a loose woman or not because she is buying the trousers of men’s pajamas. It turns out that she is buying it for her father and so that is respectable and so the romance can begin, Gary Cooper, not known for comedy, the usual and unproblematic man who is daring, decisive and stoic, just what a stereotypical man should be, just as he is in all his stereotypical roles all the way through “High Noon” and beyond, while Grace Kelly is surprising in that she appears ats the decisive decision maker at the end of that movie. Women are amazingly different from one another even if also attractive while male heroes like Fonda and Heston and the aforementioned Cooper are true to form even if also deficient rather than fulfilled, as happens in “The Wizard of Oz”, where the Tin Man is lacking a heart and the Scarecrow lacks a brain, and the cowardly Lion lacks courage. A true man has to gain all three attributes, while Dorothy and the other women and girls all have their own peculiar motives, Dorothy wanting just to go home, and all those witches, some good and some bad.

The same is true of the women in the melodramas of the Thirties that were regarded as “women movies” because they explored the varieties of what were women, ever fascinating and to men alluring even if subject to conversation as “only” about women’s concern. The queen of the sub-genre was Bette Davis who could be everything: an ugly duckling who becomes a therapist and a lover to a limited Paul Henried in “Now, Voyager”, a flibbertigibbet who becomes a heroine as she faces death in “Dark Victory'', men in these movies dutiful, like George Brett, never fully aware of what is going on in women’s secrets, as when he is killed in a duel in “Jezebel” because Bette Davis eggs him on about supposed slights and then she turns into a hero by taking Henry Fonda into a pest house during an epidemic, she more likely to manage through it if anybody could. Women could be anything, but men were the same old.

The same division between women as problematic as to what they are while men have problems, whether of enemies or existential issues while remaining true to their identity or just failing to accomplish it by being too soft or insufficiently suspicious or overtaken by lust, as happens in “Double Indemnity”, something Catholics understand as an overabundance of a natural thing, also applies to the rich, who are problematic in that they are opaque, not quite revealing what they are up to.  The young George Cukor’s movie “Holiday” enters a rich home to find out what those people are like. The girl to whom he is engaged but he knew little about her turns out to want him to become a banker, which he, Cary Grant, finds boring, himself a self made man through Harvard and a fancy law firm, and wants to try out new things, which is admirable for men, and so she tires of him, while her sister, Katherine Hepburn, perhaps at her most glamorous rather than overly angular, wants Grant to follow his whims, which is what a respectable and loving girl wants her man to happen, a lapse into conventionality unbecoming of Hepburn as the independent woman, but there being other fish to fry, and so the two at the end come to one another, as would be expected from the first moment the two stars meet with one another because, after all, they are the stars. The financial magnate of the family, on the other hand, is difficult to understand other than that he has connections but does not know why capitalist fetishism is a concept much less a fault, just trying to meet his potential son in law by offering his own connections and wealth, having disregarded his own son who drinks too much because he is so tied to the loathsome bank when he had wanted to be a musician. Woe is me to the children of the rich. They are all psychologically scarred and most of them would be better off without money, which is a fantasy that other than rich people in the audience might find as a compensation for not being rich.

Unlike most Thirties movies, which are long on talk and short on visuals, Cukor is alive with set decoration, leading to his visualization thirty years later of “My Fair Lady”, what with all those flowers. Here, in “Holiday”, Cukor contrasts the mansion with staircases and internal elevators and regal paintings and adornments, with the room Hepburn has set aside for herself as having a fire, comfortable sofas, bookcases and the piano and barbells her brother used before he gave up his childish ways. (Someone else, I suppose, stokes that fire. As Mel Brooks might say, “It's not bad being rich.”) Hepburn is comfortable rather than stuffy, and that seems all to be said of the difference between the rich and those not inclined to be rich, the father saying he does not understand what is happening to the world other than that it makes him uncomfortable. The rich are not greedy, just confused, a set on the way out if they could bother to notice. Maybe the title is called “Holiday” because viewers are on holiday visiting the rich but knowing the rich are dodos, those people making themselves rather than their employees miserable.Feel sorry for them. That is a kind of vacation.

On the other hand, the poor are not problematic, even if they are also tragic or flawed. To use the terms used by Civil Rights activists in the Sixties, when whites asked what Blacks wanted, the answer was that Blacks wanted to have what white people already had. Similarly, the poor in the Thirties, wanted the comforts of the rich, by hook or by crook. Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” wanted to become a powerful boss and his nerve, intelligence and diligence, all male traits, led that to him, even though he is machine gunned in the end, a classic tragedy about the wheel of life, ending with his remark “Is this the end of Rico?”, which sadly it is. The hero of “Scarface” also rises to the top and also is upended, even more unsettled by his unaware lust for his own sister. But that is aside from the rise and fall, all the way through to the Godfather trilogy, where he cannot free himself from crime and become, let us say, a Senator. His greatest betrayal is that of his wife, who aborts his child, because she does not want to live with this gangster family, and that is the only time that Michael Corleone rages rather than calculates, while his older brother Sonny is always raging, and so weaker as a man. The type of men runs through the movie decades.  

One of those so-called “screwball comedies” of the Thirties combines the two binaries of male and female and rich and poor. It is Gregory De Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carol Lombard. The magnate father is annoyed at the  spendthrift ways of his wife, who is a ninny, as well as his two daughters, one mean and vindictive and snooty while the other is ditzy, and supposed to have had a nervous breakdown in the past when in fact she was trying to escape from her madcap lives. The two daughters compete in a scavenger hunt, which means they are so mean spirited and callous and humiliating so as to recruit some poor person as well as a live goat to show himself to a society party to win points for having accumulated worthy objects that are useless. The mother has what is called a “protege”, which is an exiled Russian who amuses the family by walking around the living room like a gorilla to amuse the family, in return for which he gets canapes and the chance to play the piano. The idle rich are women who don’t know what to be or to do with themselves. 

Into their lot comes a bum who, it turns out (spoiler alert!) to be down on his luck because he was a Harvard graduate who had been spurned by a woman and thought of suicide but was impressed by the stoical men who endured their poverty and so he lived in a shanty near a refuse dump and is picked up for the scavenger hunt and then asks to serve as a butler for what shows itself to be a ditzy family. He too is the compassionate, articulate, well mannered and stoical and resourceful person who can lead the labile young girl out of her distress and she falls for him even though he is thought to be a bum, hardly likely given his bearing, while another bum just wants his reward for having been entered into the scavenger hunt. Poor men have dignity while rich girls are mean or atwitter.

I take note, again, of the set decoration and the costumes. The, at the time, well appointed kitchen has a refrigerator with a cylindrical portion on top of it which I take was the refrigeration unit, and is, of course, now antiquated. Technology marches on.. The women wear Thirties gowns that seem to me colorless and dowdy though no doubt glamorous at the time. Fashion also moves on. The dump where Godfrey is found is just off Sutton Place, which means, I infer, before the FDR Drive built in that area and doing away with the dumps and the bums. Infrastructure changes. The value of a movie made in a time will last as physical culture is available to be appreciated from another time for its atmosphere whatever the time’s only much more slowly changing social structure.

How different it is in the movies twenty years later. In the musical remake of “The Philadelphia Story”, with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, called “High Society”, only the just teen daughter acts haughty and weird, everyone else normal people. Another movie at the time, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” has Frederic March as the haggard advertising mogul who blames himself for having neglected his troubled daughter, je in despair about her rather than, in the Thirties, indulging her. Gregory Peck is the up and coming advertising executive, also forthright and stoic, who arranges to provide regular money to the child he had made when in Italy during the war when he finds out about their condition, and the wife supports him in his plan, something regarded as heroic. 

Skip another generation. The rich are like Michael Douglas in  “Wall Street”, from 2010, just greedy rather than people who can justify themselves, as investment bankers do, of making it possible for the economic market to work, and young women are physically exploited by rapacious men, as is clear in “The Handmaid's Saga”. Reese Witherspoon in the recent miniseries “The Morning Show” offers up many victims of rape because of men using their powerful positions, a version of the idea of a previous generation where  Andrea Dworkin saif that all sex is rape, just modified enough to be plausible, when what I think is that Jane Austen got the relation of the sexes and the rich and the poor just about right, however are the changes since then of costume and mores. Mr. Wickham, in “Pride and Prejudice”, is a cad, but he is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

A word should be said about the relation of fiction to reality. Should we trust to Thirties movies and those films that follow them about the reality of what is depicted there? After all, fiction, whether a novel or a movie, is made up. Its characters and plots are concocted even if films claim to be “based on a true story” because scriptwriters put in events and characters so as to make the films clearer to follow and so as to fill out a generic type.Its hard to make up settings, it is true, especially in science fiction, where even Kubrick’s “2001” is an extrapolation of how women and men would dress and how no one would smoke. So a reader is unlikely to trust fiction. People are distorted from what people really are and situations are abbreviated or just insufficiently imagined rather than an accurate depiction of reality.

But what is the alternative? Voting behavior measured through polling data may have said somewhat accurately from 1940 to about 1980 or so who would vote for whom, that moment past in that people came to hide their preferences by lying. And even the most innocuous question, such as whether you approve of the President, is ambiguous, in that it doesn’t make clear whether you approve his way as a person or approve of his policies. And much of history is to condense contemporary newspaper reporting with some documents added on. So what else is there to do but find the truth through fiction, especially when it comes to the temper of the times or the fads of the moment, like Hula Hoops and the war between the Communists and the ex-Communists that Whittiker Chambers regarded as the central debate and war of his time? 

I would suggest we follow Georg Simmel who thought that what was embedded inevitably in fiction was not the mores or the fashions or the technologies of a time, however much those artifacts are accurately recorded in film s of the past, but what Simmel regarded as the inevitable consequences of sociation, which means the qualities that emerge from people dealing with one another. Things like cooperation and conflict and hierarchy are everywhere the same down to the higher apes and I would suggest the same for friendship (as old as “Gilgamesh”), and courtship and political negotiation. Simmel modified only to mean that social structures may change, but only very gradually, even as those other things feel quite different from one generation to the next. Men and women haven’t changed since Samson and Delilah, even if Feminists say otherwise. So trust the Thirties movies as telling the truth.

What Academic Studies are Worth

Learning is one way of being human.

The various academic departments in a college or university can be ranked on their relative prestige rather than as a menu whereby students have to try a variety of courses so as to get an ample meal. One way to track the various departments is by how hard they are. Mathematics seems the most demanding and abler students stand out quickly but some still decide that they cannot compete with the real stars and so fall back into other fields, like languages, their intellects superior enough to  master those fields, though there seems to be a cleavage between mathematical and language ability, some very good at one but not the other. Classics are said to always attract people even if there are few jobs in it because it is so hard and so it is not surprising that classicists go deeply into related areas like foreign policy or not so related areas such as psychoanalysis to use their acquired skills. Most of the humanities are not regarded as being as hard as the natural sciences or economics, the sole difficult discipline in the social sciences that is regarded as hard, though I note that historians or sociologists can view as naive the speculations on these other matters by people who do hard fields of study because they can form coherent arguments about them while a humanist cannot say anything intelligible about scientific matters. While the natural sciences are ranked hard to relatively easy, humanists are generally ranked from deep to superficial. Low end on the ranking of prestige by difficulty are area studies such as feminist studies because they engage in advocacy more than rigorous methods or include newer fields like mass communication where film production is more important than film criticism. 

Read More

Romance and Romanticism

Romance, I think, is bursting out all over, but people disagree.

Here is a three net tennis match about a well discussed topic in literary history which I think unfolds an even deeper three part argument or presumption about social structure. The topic is the status of romantic love as it has altered or not altered across the ages. The contributors are my daughter in law Maria, who is a trained classicist and seems to have read everything; my close friend Roland, who has esoteric views about sociology, in which he was also well trained, but has standard view on literature, one of his major interests; and myself, also a trained sociologist with a literary flair, who is politically adventurous only in thinking that Joe Biden was the second coming of FDR, while having views on romantic love which seem rather radical even though I thought my own view was the usual one.

Read More

Cultural Capital

Education is a social movement rather than a social class characteristic that inevitably replicates the prior generation.

There was a theory bandied about for many a year to explain why the social classes replicate themselves rather than are like a lottery whereby children all who went to school chose their situations and developed their abilities each on their own. In fact, the children of a social class emerged as the social class of their parents, the exception being ethnic groups where when introduced to the American mix rose to the level they might and then afterwards replicated themselves. Immigration push gets you just so far. The theory was that of “material culture”, which meant that the social classes had differential opportunities to get the material resources and opportunities to hone their minds. That included buying mobiles to hang over cribs so that the ever changing shapes intrigued the babies, or buying books and magazines and going to cultural activities or getting the experiences of having gone to summer camp. The more your family bought stimulation, the more you grew intellectually. I was dubious about this theory because even if  I noticed that Teddy Kennedy showed up at the Met to hear “La Boheme”, as I once saw him do, I didn’t think he was particularly intellectual, just a politician, however good and celebrated he was.  He was just doing the culture his social class did, and the dances done by the rich to the music of Lester Lanin were the same popular ones that existed throughout a teenage cohort, but never mind.

Read More

The Presidential Campaign Now

Are voters reliable judges of character?

This is the dirtiest and meanest Presidential campaign in my lifetime. Worse than the Willie Horton ad leveled by George W. H. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988 where antiblack feeling was drummed up because Dukakis as governor of Massachusetts had left on parole a convict who reoffended. Just one and tube first Bush must have held his nose about what he was convinced to do. Not Lyndon Johnson unleashing the daisy petals ad and invoking nuclear war if Goldwater was elected in 1964, and a declaration by psychiatrists that Goldwatger was mentally unstable. Just  a few attacks, the petals had withdrawn after it was aired after only one time. Nor even Richard Nixon, who had associated his California campaigns with slanders on opponents being Communist tainted, presenting the checkers speech in 1952 to counter his having a slush fund, by clothing his wife in a Republican cloth coat and a refusal to give back the dog checkers that his daughters loved, himself clothed in Republican conventional respectability. This time is much worse. J. D. Vance says that it is alright to make up and repeat stories about migrants who happen to be legal but black as eating pets so as to show just how awful illegal immigration is. And a trump close supporter saying the white house would smell like curry if Kamala was elected and that Jews would be responsible if Israel was destroyed if Harris was elected, greatly exaggerating the two to three percent of Jewish American voters and American Jews in high places scrupulously and easily holding their allegiance to the United States even if having sentimental associations with Israel. When John McCain jousted with Barack Obama neither suggested the other was a threat to democracy and both current candidates charge that, one of them unfortunately true, the election an existential threat to America for the first time since 1860.

Even less combustible issues are discouraging. The Democratic Primary candidates in 2020, Harris, Sanders and Warren, were to the left of Joe Biden. Now, Harris is to the right of Biden, though not by very much, the best example of that in Harrfis wanting to raise capital income taxes by a little, less than what Biden has proposed. Trump was in favor of reversing Roe v. Wade and said so proudly but is now backpedaling because the issue is inflaming women. Not even the appearance of principle, just as his preferring a border issue rather than a border solution, as he said so overtly to Republican Senators who scuttled a border bill at his behest.This year found, this year as a whole, anti-Israel cohorts tinged with antisemitism has become prevalent and not only on campuses. The White House press corps displays some of that. A correspondent at a meeting asks whether their own beepers (which they probably don’t have as they are antiquated) asks if their cell phones will blow up. Jean Pierre, perhaps because of her discretion as press secretary does not quip as I would, “Not unless you got your instrument from Hezbellah which was a weapon of war sent  to underlings so as to communicate about planned battle action, and therefore liable to enemy intervention so as to disrupt military communications. Why were parents giving weapons of war to their children?

There is an asymmetry between the parties. Democrats don't castigate one another while Republicans say just awful things about one another. The worst Democratic candidates say is minor. Harris criticized Biden on bussing however much she misrepresented his position which was that local districts were free to allow bussing, and that is what happened when Harris was bussed as a child in Berkeley. Obama used his irony and wit to say of Hillary that she was “appealing  enough”. So Biden made up with Harris and made her Vice President and Hillary supported Obama with good conscience. Republican candidates go  for the jugular, as when George H. W. Bush as a candidate called Reagan’s economic policy “voodoo economics” and Vance said Trump was like Hitler. Those shouldn’t be passed off as words that become meaningless when the campaign is over for they lead to a cynical view that nothing politicians say can be taken seriously. Bush just allowed himself to be angry and say his words were only then once he became the Vice Presidential nominee and Vance says he learned to favor trump because of his administration as president though, obviously, being hitler is a  character trait that doesn’t go away even  if good administration follows unless he is a very bad judge of character, which is also a weighty  matter for someone running for very high office.

The columnists are all wondering under the guise of what they think the candidates should do is what they think the voters will do. What will motivate Harris or Trump to clinch the deal? What will Harris say to show is her purpose as president rather than just an alternative to Trump? Voters want more than that. But I disagree.The real question I ask is why that choice is not obvious. Whatever Harfris’s shortcomings, whether she flip flops or is not specific on policy, she is not a mean spirited insurrectionist who would sell America to the highest bidder and is afraid to confront any of America’s adversaries, he someone less likely to drop the bomb than to cave in at any treaty.

Consider the current events which make Harris a clear choice. The Biden Administration has been dealing with two major developments in the past few days and has been handling them professionally: they are providing hurricane assistance to the southeast United States and using the American military to assist Iranian missiles against Israel. American leaders are well informed and coordinating with one another and with their allies, saying very little about planks forward, which should be their posture, but as accurate as possible as the facts as they know them. That is  how a responsible government operates and by and large has operated in most Democratic and Republican administrations, sober rather than bellicose, measured rather than precipitous. And what does Trump do? He lied that Biden had not spoken to the Republican Governor of Georgia who himself said that Biden had given Georgia whatever he wanted. Trump lied about covid and recently about pets eaten in Springfield, Ohio, though that a President telling the truth to the American people is a sacred trust even if some information can be withheld. Will you trust Trump should he be elected to tell the people the truth about anything, significant, like a war, or trivial, like his crowd sizes? How can anyone take the position otherwise than that of the NY Times editorial board which is that in this case a patriot can only vote for Harris? And yet the polls remain surprisingly close, as if people disregard Trump as an insurrectionist or all the indictments against him . Why? Do people have no respect for the constitution or simple individual morality whereby we deplore liars and those who disdain the military?

And then, that night, there was the Vice Presidential debate. Vance “won” because he presented himself as more articulate than Walz, who opened with hems and haws rather than getting to the point directly, and also as a reasonable and compassionate person rather than the ogre and extremist preoccupied with punishing cat ladies by reducing the power of their votes. He did so by being mild mannered, family oriented, and engaging in the technicalities of legislation, as if people cared about such things, knowing that arguments could be made on all sides for an audience unfamiliar with the issues. So much for everybody wanting a policy debate when  clearly people prefer the personality debate that was present in the Harris Trump debate where everyone could assess the characters of the people running for President. Also, to achieve his ends, Vance just lied or obscured a number of issues as that was quickly ;pointed out by the commentators on CNN  who clearly prefer Harris. Vance said that he wanted to provide child benefits rather than defend his opposition to abortion. He also said that Trump saved Obamacare when he had in fact tried to overturn it. Vance also said that Trump had turned over power on Jan. 20th neglecting that he tried to overthrow the government on Jan 6th while also himself asking Georgia votes to give him the statue and in  cahoots with those engaged in drafting fake electors to gum  up the electoral process. Some of those actions are under indictment but trials are delayed at the behest of the president who, if he thought himself innocent, would move them quickly to clear his name. But the greatest failure of the debate was that the CBS moderator  put in  the question of Jan. 6th late in the debate rather than making it front and center because that is the central issue about whether Trump is suitable for high office rather than just one of a long set of issues worth debating. Insurrection is not just another item.

And this is happening while the United States is heavily engaged, though without ground troops, in two wars and abortion and the peaceful succession of power are mighty issues for the American people to deal with and debates just skirt around them. In the old days, when people were ideological or interest based, that is what candidates talked about: getting out of Korea or civil rights or welfare for the poor. Sometimes I prefer the old days so the media discussed the issues rather than personalities. But personality is what it is and the media do dig deeply into that rather than just the puff their supporters present. But I am unsure whether the American people are even up to judging character rather than policy. If they were, Harris would win in a landslide.

The Girls at Bronx Science

Elite high school in the Fifties might have been over-competitive, but they helped young women and also young men to liberate themselves.

The Bronx High School of Science, where I was a student from 1954-57, was an intellectually elite school whose admittance was based on a competitive test offered to any applicants and the highest scores got the seats regardless of any other criteria such as race or attendance or prior grades. That strategy has weathered various attacks on pure merit because, as I understand it, a number of the members of the state legislature were graduates, along with those from Stuyvesant High School, another test based school, to which my son attended, and those from Brooklyn Tech, another test school at the time, and those legislators protected the process. There are now six of these test schools in New York City and the student body in Science and Styuvesant is overwhelmingly Asian, though at the time the students of all three were overwhelmingly Jewish and had just a few Blacks, one of those a girl who had been raised in North Carolina by her preacher father and a capable student and no one was distressed that she was admitted to Radcliffe.

Read More

"Genesis" and Abortion

Politics settles metaphysical issues such as abortion.

Neither the Old or the New Testament refer to abortion, which you would think would be considered there given how many religious people today regard abortion as a cardinal sin. Some Jews think otherwise. They cite “The Book of the Covenant”, included in “Exodus”, but regarded as the oldest of the Biblical texts, and which is a pact about the rules of warfare between raiding parties, as repeatedly invoking the idea that miscarriages are subject to less penalties than a death and therefore, interpreters say, that means a fetus is less valued than  a person. But that is a stretch in that “less” does not mean “not at all” and that the text  does mean “miscarriages” rather than “abortions”. Robert Alter’s translation just says fetuses “coming out”. Let’s look elsewhere.

Read More

The Trump-Harris Debate

It is still a horserace.

The bottom line on the debate is that it is contentless even if consequential. Famously, in the first televised presidential debate, radio listeners thought Nixon “won”, whatever that means other than making some memorable pointed remarks lacking in  the opponent, while Kennedy was thought by the public to win maybe because of his teeth and smile while Nixon had five o'clock shadow. The debates contest appearances and so people decide they disdain Kamala’s laugh because that has become a Republican talking point. Moreover, we know alot about the candidates. Trump is mean and gruff and garbled and accept or like that for him, a strong man who voters may not have the gumption to express themselves while Kamala is a centrist left Democrat who moved more centrist this time than she was four years ago when the general rhetoric was more leftist even though Biden’s definitely New Deal leanings, pure FDR, was successful economically and overcame Covid. Saying the economy is the real issue is just a way of offering a respectable reason  for liking the Trump style. So why bother having the debate at all?

Well, the debate could provide dramatic surprises and that is what it delivered. And so the debate should satisfy as the real deal the broadcast and cablecast news organizations were hawking for a week now.Trump had to meet a low bar. All he had to do was sound coherent and a bit less mean while Harris, the old prosecutor, had to nail him on the wall to seem victorious. When I saw the debate, I decided that Harris began nervous but settled down and was fine at delivering her impassioned speech on abortion, but she failed to deny Trump’s charge that immigrants were being loosed from prisons and insane asylums, perhaps because so she would not seem to be protecting or defending undocumented aliens. In my view, the debate came down to being parallel stump speeches, each one offering their own slogans and myself amazed that Trump just goes on lying, like immigrants eating house pets. It was a largely useless exercise, I thought, that wouldn’t switch voters. People like the patter of the one they support.

But CNN  commentators thought differently, that Harris clobbered Trump, baiting him into saying stupid and racist remarks or having no answer to why he hasn’t offered a plan to replace Obamacare for the many years since Obama proposed it. The Times thought Trump was made small while Kamala went high. But if you discount his lies, Kamala doesn’t win by exposing them and, following J. D. Vance, it doesn’t matter if Haitians are eating cats, only that immigrants are disrupting American life. What still matters is comparing cheerfulness to meanness, and that is up to the voters. PBS,  the NY Times and the New Yorker mostly said the same thing. 

My take was different. Trying to expand the MAGAS would probably lose but  in a close thing. Trump was baited into saying what Harris wanted him to say, but Trump said what he wanted to say anyway: to be mean and vague and full of lies. His supporters want him to say these things even if MAGA commentators want him to dwell on issues. Why should he? He wins for his followers even if it loses the undecided, that very small figure who actually have not made up their minds about the differences. Trump has to gain more MAGAS to show up to vote, not win the undecided. In that case, he would probably lose but in a close vote. For Harris to really have a resounding victory, to win substantial numbers of MAGAS to her side, she would have required shaming him or getting him to stumble, which he did not do. He told his lies and exaggerations and did not linger on his self praise and grievances and so did not hurt himself unless people were ready to give up on him. The article yesterday in the NY Times by Peters, Healy and Robertson got it right, I think,  were close to the mark by pointing out that undecideds remained undecided which meant, to me, that uninformed people, and especially MAGAS, would vote for Trump whatever the debate results.

A debate is like a stage play and not just because it has revealing dialogue that is constrained in time and space, and in this case, as I claim, where the two sides were talking past one another. It is also dramatic because the audience makes sense of the drama, what is to be taken from the dialogue or excuse for one, out of the content and the exchanges. Playwrights improve a project by trying out audiences as to what makes an impact and will change a play so that it will resonate with real playgoers so that what happens on the strange is not elusive or obscure. They have to get it. Voters are even  less discerning playgoers. They are not schooled in political science or even standard historical references or particularly verbally astute. They just dip in late in the election year into politics and are expected to make a judgment on the candidates even though focus group members just after the debate the other night had difficulty articulating why they liked or didn‘t like one or the other candidate. The voters are amateurs with only passing interest in the subject matter and their specialized languages but they are supposed to be the wisdom of the Republic. Well, not really. People get to vote not because of their education or investment in the nation or even just because voting is an alternative to civil unrest. It is a procedure for transferring power and the Founding Fathers thought that a republic required only that a populace was virtuous, which meant that it could make obvious distinctions between right and wrong. The present election is obvious and we hope the Founding Fathers were right and the American people remain virtuous.

"Showboat" Melancholy

Life, like show business, puts you in the spotlight before making you miserable.

It is easy enough to think why the Mozart-Da Ponte triptych should be included in the Western literary canon because the three operas expand the consciousness so as to include women. “Don Giovani” shows that women are not to be trifled with; “The Marriage of Figaro” shows that other than aristocrats can create an independent family; “Cosi Fan Tutte” shows that women are onto men even if they do not admit it. It is harder, however, to include any American musical comedies into the canon because the plots are so mannered, so artificial, and so without depth or resonance despite the attractive tunes. “Pal Joey” and “Cabaret” are too pointedly cynical while “Fiddler on the Roof” and Rodgers and Hammerstein are too sentimental to meet literary muster even if  Billy Wilder does turn the trick even if he is cynical because he adds suspense to “Double Indemnity”, poignancy to “Ace in the Hole” and vaudeville slapstick to “Some Like It Hot”.

A candidate for entering the literary-cultural canon is “Showboat”, the Kern, Hammerstein and Ferber collaboration, which was introduced in the Twenties and was radical at the time because the play was sympathetic to miscegenation and treating blacks as fully formed figures while Jim Crow was at its height. There are artistic shortcomings in the musical comedy. That include lyrics that don’t fit the metrical line and a telegraphed plot line in that riverboat gamblers are not likely to be trusty breadwinners whatever their charm and personal rectitude. But the themes  of the show, which go beyond the political to the existential, are strong enough to give the world it creates plausible, ingratiating and even deep. The only comparison worth considering is Lerner and Lowe’s “My Fair Lady” which owes so much to the today underappreciated George Bernard Shaw who also offered a way of life, the Edwardian aristocracy and its low class counterparts, flower girls and shiftless cockneys, as well as distinguishable characters and a political agenda for female emancipation that goes to the heart of male-female relationships, still not fully plumbed a century after Shaw and a half century after Lerner and Lowe.

Read More

How People Vote

Politics is character.

Kamala Harris continues to unroll her campaign, so far, without a hitch. She does so by providing a warm, and welcoming presence rather than a set of issues to run on. She extends Biden’s efficient and humane program of greater entitlements and a new  Democratic Congress would restore both voting rights and abortion rights, both of which Biden supports. But what she mainly sells is her presence and so she takes credit for taking charge and propelling her campaign to a growing lead over Trump, all due credit to be mentioned for the experienced people she put in charge of the campaign. I am amazed at her political touch and so it is understandable that policies aren’t central. They aren’t necessary, however much it may be that pro abortion voters might be the difference in the November election. 

Read More

Three Kinds of Miracle

Three Kinds of Miracle


There is the miracle of change, the miracle of possibility, and the miracle of serenity.


Bert Erdman says that theologians can say whatever they want regardless of facts while a historian of biblical history lille himself are disciplined in that they can only point out to what texts say and compare them to one another so as to arrive at an accurate historical narrative and so can  conclude that Jesus never said He was God. THat point of view is too harsh on theologians. What they offer are explanations that make sense, which means can be expressed in words and internally consistent about supernal things, like the Trinity or the Resurrection. But these exercises in theology can do even more.Theological terms and distinctions addressed to explaining God and religion can be turned into philosophy in that tey apply to distinctions in the nature of existence, which is the realm of metaphysics. 


A good example of the transition from theology to metaphysics are the proofs of the existence of God that are exhibited by St. Thomas. They may fail as proofs but the devices each do catch a feature of what it is to be. Aquinas says that existence is better than non-existence and that means God exists because that is the preferred state and God is whatever is best. Revealing the fallacy of that argument allows considerations of the nature of existence. Not all attributes are scalar and so being existent is not better than being non-existent, just a different stage. Moreover, even things that are scaler need not mean there is a best or most. Yes, there is an absolute zero for temperature but there is no such thing as the hottest or that there is a most perfect and therefore best beauty. There are different kinds of beauty. The idea that grecian urn is the most perfect form is conventional rather than necessary. So Aquinas’s failures advance metaphysics.


Another valuable example of a theological controversy that can be generalized into a description of metaphysics, which is the study of being for itself, is available in the three interpretations that are offered for miracles, which is clearly a feature of religion, the experience of it made meaningful by finding words to describe it. The first and most ordinary description of miracles is that these are events which violate nature. These include the parting of the Red Sea and the Resurrection. (The communion in the  Catholic Mass is not strictly a miracle even though the claim is that bread and wine are transformed into flesh and blood because there is no claim that the transformation is at all visible, as the claim of the named miracles are, but shrouded in words so that the altered states are different in name or in essence rather than in reality.) It is no use to say the Israelites crossed over the Sea of Reeds and so was a natural event because if that were the case it was no longer a miracle in this meaning of “miracle”. 


Such an explanation away from a miracle that violates nature would put it into the second category of miracle which is a term used, which is that a miracle is any event so earth shatteringly significant that it is not divinely inspired or created and so the change just had to be because a person could not imagine a world where that event did not come to be. So people quite appropriately speak of the birth of a baby or finding your true love as a miracle because you can no longer imagine having had a life without them, life before that chaos or a limbo without enlightenment, accidents rather than necessities. Here, in this second case, there is no violation of nature, just the sense that the past was coincidental while the miraculous event was necessary. You are fated to meet your spouse because it is so important that you cannot treat it as coincidental. A miracle is whatever is singularly or collectively important, whether or not the Red Sea was divided and that created flounders. It was just absolutely necessary that it happened.


A third and viable meaning for miracle that is even further removed from a violation of nature is a subjective evaluation about how the processes of nature as well as of the supernatural are so awesome as to make oneself in the presence of a God-like power. Looking at the sunset creates a feeling of beauty even if you learn it is the result of a lot of soot in the sky. It is overwhelming as well in scope.Scientists can be awed at the immensity of the universe or the intricacies of biological evolution, people insignificant next to those immensities, just as people are  awed by the overly large structures of skyscrapers or the plans Hitler had for a newly built Berlin after the war was successfully completed. That is so even if the awesome things are also cringeworthy, as is  the case with a world of pterodactyls many ages ago without the presence of people or even most mammals. Babies and puppies are also awesome, perhaps because they are fragile rather than enormous and so it is very lucky to have them and so think they could not be  lucky, which makes this third kind of miracle into examples of the second type, all three types sharing a familiarity of necessary specialness. 


The third kind of miracle can create an ambivalent response. Spinoza was considered God intoxicated because he had what he considered his identification  with the all of everything because that is just the intensification of an experience of all that is, including both the natural and the conceptual realms. But Spinoza can also be considered as an atheist in that he redefined terms so that God is the name for everything and can’t make choices and that ethics is reduced into psychology. So modern day scientists can be in awe of the immensity of space or the intricacies of biology and call that religious and treat science as the how rather than the why or else say, following others, there is no need for the God hypothesis. There is no why, only how.


A theological definition of three kinds of miracles can be generalized so as to describe three kinds of a property of existence, which is the concept of cause, which is about how and what happens when things change. A first definition of cause is parallel to the idea that a miracle intervenes or violates nature. In this case, a cause is whatever it is that can disrupt or give resistance to what already exists. You push a boulder up the mountain; you finagle an  internal combustion engine so you can speed at eighty miles an hour; you insist your colleagues are all wrong in the way the committee should proceed. In that sense, cause is told in the form of a story because stories involve people doing something to change an initial condition, such as the placement of Claudius on the throne when,. Perhaps, Hamlet would be thought the rightful heir since he was son of the king and been superseded because he was away at Wittenberg and has now returned to Denmark. What is to be done with him  or by him? Some plays are said to have n o action that changes things but Ibsenism shows that from Chekov and Shaw, activities in plays can change a mood. Eliza not only has become able to act like an aristocrat; she is able to verbally battle with Higgins as an equal person. If there is nothing to overcome, there is no cause.


That  causation is regarded as a miracle in the ordinary sense that comes about in that it is problematic, events occurring within time to change from one state to another. How is it that one moment is connected to the next, the first transformed into the latter? That is the mystery of time. Malebranche, the underappreciated Seventeenth Century Catholic theologian and philosopher, solved the problem by asserting that every moment was a miracle in that God intervened agt every moment to make the next thing happen. Rather than desacralizing nature, miracles are available if you understand them right. That allows all people to feel serene, because every moment is guided even if free just as any scientist will say that people are free because they are in accord with the laws that in this special sense that they need not be enforced to be real. 


A particular kind of cause of this first type, as change, is the phenomenon of a trial, where people are found responsible for the consequences of their actions in the past and so as to include anticipated actions, such as planning a crime, because that is also an action if a person has planned with confederates to do a bank robbery. This kind of cause is, however, very specialized, in that only people can be ascribed to having been the cause of a crime because criminal justice is out to blame people for not having acted properly rather than the crime being the result of a defective brain or what is called acts of God. So a trial eliminates all  the forces or conditions not relevant for a person's intention . You may have had a weak septum but only the punch in the nose is considered as an impact that caused  the crime. Only people can be blameworthy while biology is a natural process and not a person. That people die is natural, while a mistake in surgery is subject to a suit.


The second kind of miracle, which is a consequence that is momentous, can be generalized into a meaning for cause, which is that some events will be more likely than  others to play a significant role in the future. So a butterfly can cause a catastrophe, but a hurricane is more likely. The idea of probability does not depend on contemporary elaborations of inferential statistics, but has always been with people. They knew the sun  would set but, unlike Bertrand  Russell’s chicken, who did not know it would be sacrificed in  the morning when the sun came up, people do wonder at how regular were natural and celestial cycles and so built Stonehenge and calendars to chart the miraculous ways they repeated rather than were unreliable.and  that they would face the cold of winter without knowing how harsh it might be and appealed to the gods to intervene to make the winter more mild, and that one species was likely to be more dangerous than another if approached by a human. People, one can presume, the likelihood of whether an approaching stranger is a danger and lessens or intensifies distrust on the basis of telling signs, such as one's tattoos or the person’s gestures, it always, nonetheless, that you can’t be certain even if you and he smoke the peace pipe. 


People are still amazed at possible momentous things and so speculate about whether storms are the sign of the Second Coming or that weather variations will lead to climatic catastrophes, and need to heed the warning that view events are really apocalyptic however much there is a chance of being killed on the highway during the drive home, or that you might find your wife has left home when you get home. There is no reason to think that we have all become less superstitious because we calculate better. To the contrary, the danger of momentous but statistical outcomes becomes more present and horrifying as we consider whether your medical testing  means you have a larger chance of getting prostate surgery or whether genetic testing shows your unborn child may  have abnormalities. The era of statistics increases uncertainty and so makes religious solace even more attractive than when intrusions might be made in life by witches and demons.


When possibility is the object of attention, it shows that the universe is not ordained and allows for choice. That is introduced into the inventory of reality and so free will is not a property of persons  but of existence, some mammals better or worse at engaging in it, thinking ahead. A dog knows when called to dinner that the bowl will become full and people  wonder whether they can  anticipate they will succeed at a task and reflect on the task as well as the separation between the anticipation of a task and its accomplishment.


The third definition of cause corresponds to the third definition of miracle, which is to stand back at the amazement of nature rather than resist it to notice its own probabilistic nature. That, in effect, is to negate the ordinary sense that cause means impact by reducing nature to formulas or other descriptions where nature is rule-like but does not intervene in nature but only describes it, magical formulas which provoke interventions now understood as descriptions alone. Invoking “F=MA” doesn’t accomplish anything, however profound the formula may be as the way the universe works. You can use physical or biological  forces but the words are only words, except in comic books, where “Shazam” turned a mere mortal into a superhero, however many superhero movies wish it were so. How a formula seems to guide nature and is said to be akin to the dictates of a lawgiver, a divine legislator, remains a mystery.


The three definitions of miracle can be applied to politics as well as to the idea of cause. The first view is that  not much changes in political life throughout the ages because it is always an uphill fight, overcoming resistance, so that a politician can grasp the brass ring of power. Politics hasn’t changed since David went from being the king’s courtier to becoming a rebel leader and then an overbearing king himself. What seems in retrospect seems inevitable, had to be accomplished through political and, in modern times, electoral mobilization. So people take the Federal Drug Administration to supervise the safety of their pharmaceuticals, but that had to be legislated into existence, and faced a contentious fight, as happened with the Affordable Care Act which was unpopular until it was in place for a few years and is regarded as necessary now by most vogters. What seems like it is stable, like Roe v. Wade, is not when people act against it just as what seems uncertain becomes certain, when people have the National Labor Relations Act in place as has been the case for ninety or so years. Indeed, Max Weber insisted on imaging charismatic or otherwise called singular figures as essential so as to overcome the entropy of custom and beau racracy. There had to be some first cause whereby politics could change and so the necessary job, the logical need for a compensating force to bring about change that would otherwise never happen, was the charismatic, a religious like invocation of a miraculous figure that every once in a while emerges to overcome the applecart, which is what politics, because there never was a time before politics that was not resistance, whether to overcome a Platonic city state imbued with loyalty replaced by a cosmopolitanism described by aristotle in  a generation or two, or an American Republic  so successful that we forget that the idea was at the time revolutionary.


The second type of miracle that applies to politics presents a very different view than is available as the ever ending struggle of politicians to change things. It is the idea that there are new political structures that come into place that are so formidable that all aspects of social life are overshadowed by them, however murky may be the origins of these structures, however much their designs become part of their national histories and are taught in schools at all levels of education. It seems remarkable and astonishing that the collection of people who made up the Founding Fathers were so perspicacious as to create their perpetual motion machine called the Constitution. It seems like a miracle no matter how much these people can be placed in their lives and circumstances and engaged in proposals and compromises before coming up with the document.  Democracy is another one of these large scale movements which came to dominate Western societies in the early Nineteenth Century and has sustained itself, encompassing Europe and North America and large parts of Asia, despite what might seem the cumbersome apparatus of arranging for reasonably legitimate elections and short terms of office, whereby royal regimes had long tenure and succession was most of the time assured, rueing the day when that secession was not clear. 


The possibility of a successful new alternative political formation that would have great consequence for governments and even the psyches of people was totalitarianism, which arose about a hundred years ago, but was vanquished by 1989, with the fall of the Soviet Union and where Russian government was replaced soon enough by authoritarianism, a very o;ld form of government,,where leaders only kill off their political rivals.Other social structures such as bureaucracy are very old, as old as the pyramids, as are also such social structures like professionalism, but there are also innovations, like cultic religions becoming congregation al at the time of Jesus and the rise of Protestantism, which insisted that miracles were accomplished in spiritual personal transformations rather than miracles, like confession or the Mass, however much the officiant was legitimately designated. So major political upheavals into new forms of social and political structures are uncertain of origin however profound their impact and people who bother can wonder how that could have come about. Just like being amazed at finding a spouse or a child especially in that people cling to the idea that whatever is has to be and so these developments are a rejection of politics as just the usual resistances.


The third way of understanding politics is applying the idea of standing back and experiencing political and social life as in accord with general principles, that is a substitute for it being individually or collectively motivated. There might be cycles which dominate, such as a circulation of elites, or more familiar to American politics, the idea that periods of innovation are replaced by periods of consolidation as when, again, Eisenhower accepted the New Deal, or when Jim Crow replaced Radical Republicanism. Or else there might be a secular trend whereby incrementally there grows up a greater suffrage or the extension of medical insurance so that it began  for the elderly and now is all but universal. Necessary social mechanisms are discovered, like regulated collective bargaining, though the guarantee of reliable and comprehensive voting frights has had a setback in recent years, while the ability to control; the business cycle has not found to be a satisfactory solution  in  that the Federal Reserve has only the crude device of changing interest rates up and down but has added quantitative easing into its repertoire. 


Some sociologists like Parsons rely less on season-like changes to see the patterns of social and political life. Instead, they try to abstract to the level of what are the inevitably necessary aspects of social life so that societies have to meet their perquisites one way or the other or else society will turn into chaos. This is very different from single factor theories which say that avoiding inflation is the main thing so that an economy will collapse and so will  the entire society, forgetting that there are many ways for a society to collapse: if it doesn’t maintain an  educational system or if it allows great ethnic unrest. And, anyway, stability is not the only way to describe a society, in that there is always its march towards inclusiveness and greater personal liberty.


Here is a reverse miracle in politics. While low information voters do not have to be conspiracy theorists, people of the working class and poverty areas mobilized by class and ethnic loyalties, low information voters can find conspiracy theories, whereby some diabolical people secretly plan to control politics, quite attractive. Conspiracy theorists as identifying an easily mastered mechanism with magical properties rather than attending to what os a[p[parently real, which is that people vote their interests and preferences and legislators are concerned to get reelected and that you have to put up with your boss even if he is nasty because you want to keep your job. Getting rid of  miracles means appealing to ordinary situations and motives. Just the opposite of miraculous thinking which is beneficial and instead spreads gloom and doom.

Read More

What a Political Convention is Not

I wish national political conventions were more analytic.

The first national political conventions largely covered by television was in 1952 and both the Republican and Democratic eventual nominees for their parties were contested. For the Republicans, Robert Taft, often called “Mr. Republican”, was isolationist and anti-labor but was defeated by Dwight David Eisenhower, the famous general of World War II, who was an internationalist who would go on, as President, to in effect ratify the New Deal. I remember Everet Dirksen, the Senator from Illinois, standing on the rostrum and pointing his finger at Tom Dewey, who was the leader of the New York delegation, saying with contempt, Dewey, a strong supporter of Eisenhower, that Dewey “had led us down to defeat”. For their part, there were a number of contestants for the Democratic nomination in that year. There was support by Eleanor Roosevelt for Averil Harriman, the Governor of New York, who had been a major player in diplomatic negotiations for her late husband, and she was interviewed on television on Harriman’s behalf. But Harriman was somewhat stiff and probably nobody could have beaten Eisenhower.

Read More

Taste

 Taste is constrained by circumstance and character.

Taste, as in food or music, is regarded as a personal preference that is inconsequential, but that judgment should not be extended to politics or literature, where people are said to be arbitrary or idiosyncratic but where these judgments are not merely consequential but also matters of character.

Begin with the superficial aren of taste. People like the food they grow up with and therefore often seen as comfort foods or throwbacks to their roots. So I like tongue and Reuben sandwiches because my mother was more or less kosher and some people identify the Italian culture with red sauce pasta rather than Michaelangelo or Dante. My children all knew how to use chopsticks because their family and the families around them frequented Chinese restaurants So food tastes are deeply set, people appalled at being exposed to unfamiliar foods, even though, Levi Strauss’s claim otherwise. In my view, taste is a matter of circumstance and history, however deeply set, and does not they do not convey meaning from or for a food taste. It doesn’t explain a person’s character because they prefer rare to well done steak even if someone can speculate that those who prefer the well done are repressed or that those who eat raw shellfish are more open minded. 

Read More

Freedom and Liberty

These two sentiments divide America. 

“Freedom” and “liberty” are two terms that are used interchangeably since the founding of the Republic, as in “Give me liberty or give me death!”, which might have been said as “Give me freedom or give me death!”, but these two terms should be distinguished so as to be clearer about the architecture of government. Freedom refers to ways in which people are not externally constrained by governments and so point to the process of unleashing people of their shackles. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” refer to becoming  unconstrained by fear and want though it treats the other two as attributes of positive government,  which is the freedom of speech and to engage in religion, but those two had been under attack by contemporary repressive governments and so to be thought of as something to be achieved rather than as the founding fathers thought inherent in human nature. Liberty, on the other hand, refers to what the unconstrained person can do and so are the expressions of individuality rather than a coercive act to be lifted. So people can mean liberty to mean, as many frontiersmen did, to be  far away from their neighbors, or wear holstered pistols so as to create a great equalization, or try unpopular or uncouth thoughts, or to engage in dangerous sports, or to otherwise explore the possibilities of the individuality coming into favor in the late Eighteenth Century.

Read More