Nothing Happening

Have you noticed that nothing much has been happening in Washington since the attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare went down to defeat? Yes, there was the two day interest in the raid on the Syrian airfield, but that was a mild response not readily criticized because of the atrocity that had led to it and leaving everything in the middle east still unresolved. And there was the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, which was never much in doubt, the Senate left in no greater disarray than it had been beforehand. But do you notice that Trump is not as much in the headlines as he used to be, when he dominated every news cycle with his tweets and outlandish claims? He may actually be trying to govern, but is finding that it is not that easy, “more complicated than anyone thought”-- which is to say, more complicated, it turns out, then only he thought. The legislative agenda is frozen. Trump people do not know how they can put together the Republican votes for a tax bill or for an infrastructure bill anymore than they could find a way to a health care bill. And so the tabloid papers no longer put Trump on the front cover but on the inside pages, leaving the usual crimes and accidents to attract the eyes of readers. The prison on Riker’s Island is scheduled to close and starlets show off their legs. It isn’t easy being President if you are not doing very much and if you have cut down on outrageous tweets in the hope of appearing more Presidential.


Another way to say this is that what has changed in the past few  weeks is that foreign policy has returned to normal, to the central tendency it had taken from Bush 41 through Obama, the exception being Bush 43, who went off the rails in Iraq and had, earlier, been too unwilling to commit American troops in Afghanistan. The rest stays the same. Relations with Russia are testy, just as they have been ever since Putin took power. We cultivate Arab dictators, though Trump is more fulsome than Obama would have been in his support of Sisi, probably because Trump does not know how to modulate his tone. Trump nowhere acknowledges his campaign contempt for the Iran Nuclear Deal, perhaps because he has been told that no better deal could be forged. Syria remains the same dreadful civil war into which the United States will not intervene, even if Trump, like Obama, drew a line against chemical weapons. And the North Koreans continue to develop their atomic weapons, Trump no better able to stop that than any of his predecessors, and we shall see what happens when North Korea presents a clear danger to the United States, and whether the Congress or the American people are prepared for decisive action of one sort or another. And so talking heads give sighs of relief that nothing really bad has happened so far in foreign policy and are amazed at his surrender to the foreign policy establishment. Today, Trump said NATO was ok and that China would not be cited for currency manipulation. Hurrah! The standards are dumbed down since Bush 43. Just don’t be foolish, and from Trump something foolhardy was and remains a fear.

Being Comfortable & Self-sufficiency

Dogs show themselves to be comfortable. My dog lies on his back under the air conditioner, the breeze going through his whiskers and onto the hairless part of his undercarriage. He has just been walked and so has relieved himself and he has been fed. His social nature is also satisfied in that I am present in the room with him while he stares out into space doing nothing but being comfortable. He exudes his comfort even though he doesn’t know he is comfortable, is not self-aware of his comfort. Maybe the dog is close to Nirvana, though I am not big on thinking it is better to be unconscious rather than conscious of one’s state. People, for their part, know when they are comfortable and knowing so is itself a pleasure and a satisfaction. I am ever more conscious of this self sufficiency as I get older even though I don’t think there ever was a time for me or for anyone else when we did not both sense and know when we were comfortable. I wake up in the middle of the night, aware of the silence, of the fact that I am breathing comfortably, that my bowels are untroubled, that the temperature is just about right, and that my thoughts can wander whichever way they care to. It is like when my wife slept next to me before she died though not as good as that, my listening to her unlabored breathing and touching her warm skin though not with so much pressure as to wake her.

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Syrian Decision Time

In one sense, the government is operating as it is supposed to in its response to the Syrian atrocity. The National Security Council will offer up to the President a number of practical ways to respond to the Syrian use of chemical weapons. These will be well considered by the foreign policy professionals. President Trump, for his part, has fulfilled his role by announcing a change of policy based on his gut response that chemical weapons require a response even if just a few days before he had said that Assad’s regime is not his concern. That changed sense may or may not reflect what the American people think and they will form their own judgment, partly on the basis of how successful are the military efforts that are likely to be made. Will the loss of American pilots lead the American people to think a military option was bound to be a failure? Will the Russians dumping Assad lead the American people to think a military policy was a success? These are the moments when a President wins or loses, his own judgment and reputation and style of governing in the dock.

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How God Behaves

The Book of Genesis tells stories that concern a time before the existential events that make up the Book of Exodus where, among other things, the idea of law as providing guidance for how people are to conduct themselves makes its entrance. The Book of the Covenant had indeed provided a kind of international compact whereby families that resembled those of the patriarchs were supposed to regulate their relations with one another through establishing rules of compensation for damages, but the editors of the Five Books of Moses chose to include this passage in Exodus, as if to indicate that the Book of Genesis was to be truly prior to the concept of law. But if that were the case, how were the people of the Book of Genesis “supposed” to behave, that term itself rushing us to impose the imperative of law--”should”-- on the pre-legal condition. Was it supposed to be that mere custom and godly edict would be enough to explain how people behaved and behaved themselves? Not so, because the pre-legal people of Genesis used their minds to consider their interests, however difficult it may be not to assume that they were making legal type judgments. When Jacob learns that his sons had killed the people who had offered to circumcise themselves as well as intermarry with Jacob’s tribe because one of them had taken one of their sisters for a wife, Jacob does not excoriate his sons for having been vengeful or otherwise done evil, but simply concludes that the tribe will have to move on now rather than settle there. That can be taken as an ironic understatement, meant to foretell that those descended from the Old Testament  families would always, sooner or later, have to move on, or that Jacob was making a silent judgment about their actions-- though I have done so myself in an earlier reading of this story of the rape of Dinah-- but, rather, that Jacob was simply not given to the moral reasoning that would come with the arrival of law.

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A Nazi Dedication: How hHistory Can Be Normalized

Here is a dystopia that came awfully close to coming true and which shows how history can be normalized by rhetoric and so come to be just the substance of the familiar and the everyday.

Remarks at the Dedication of the Berlin Center for Judaic Studies (1994):        

In the Spring of l950, when the Fuhrer was taken from us, worn down by his years of service to the European peoples, it would have surprised the world that the international system he put in place would still be in place, stronger than ever, half a century later. His dramatic and memorable declaration of l945, "The Channel is deeper than the Atlantic", had allowed the British to accept the bitterness of their inevitable defeat: their armies decimated in Africa; their cities devastated by the Luftwaffe; their population demoralized; and a grand army about to be lifted by the then newly invented jet transports in an invasion by airbridge over the now militarily meaningless Channel. Let the British and their American and Commonwealth allies control the intercontinental oceans, the Fuhrer was saying. They shared a similar bourgeois way of life-- and a similar set of economic problems. The Continent, however, would achieve its rightful unity as the Federal Republic of Europe, a destiny which had eluded it since the collapse of Christendom as a unifying ideal some five hundred years before. Fratricide in Europe was finally over.

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Two Congressional Hearings

The two hearings that have dominated the news at the beginning of this week, the appearance of the head of the FBI to announce to the House Intelligence Committee that there was an ongoing investigation of the connections between the Russians and the Trump campaign, and the appearance of Judge Gorsuch at the Senate Judiciary Committee before a vote takes place on his nomination to be a member of the United States Supreme Court, is that neither of these hearings was necessary. Both were occasions that simply demonstrate that Congress thinks it is doing business when it holds hearings. These people love any occasion when they are able to sound off, although it is also possible that most of them couldn’t absorb information if it was presented to them only in the form of documents.

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Culture and Taxation

It is certainly possible for Liberals and Conservatives to engage in a public policy debate about what items should be collectively purchased, like armies, through government taxation, and what items, like luxury cars, should be a matter of individual purchase, money for the item directly out of the consumer’s pocket rather than out of the tax dollars paid into the general fund for the government to spend as it wishes. There are difficult cases. Should the upkeep of a car be included in the welfare budget for a rural person who needs a car to get around, much less to get a job? Should everyone pay for parks even if only some people use them? The issue of what is the proper kind of purchase arises at the moment with regard to building infrastructure. Should it be by the government through what would at the moment be very low interest bonds? Or should it be by private investors who use tax incentives to go into the business of building toll roads? I would prefer direct government purchase of roads, and that is the Liberal preference, though until recently it was also the Conservative preference, Eisenhower having financed the interstate highway system in the Fifties with government money, even if the building of the railroads some seventy-five years before that was only indirectly financed by the government because the government provided free or very cheap and very broad rights of way to the railroad barons of the time.

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Social "Wars"

Wars in the modern age are fought to preserve and protect the ability of a nation’s population to pursue its own purposes rather than the purposes of its enemies. The Nazis thought their way of life was endangered by the Jews and the governments they controlled and the Soviets thought their country was threatened by the capitalist world that engulfed it. That is different from previous times when wars were fought to expand territory or capture natural resources. In fact, international law now holds a war of aggression to be illegitimate, while wars of self defense are legitimate. What counts is whether decisions people make as to their vocations or how they are subject to criminal law are matters which their own nation controls. We fought World War II to allow fans to call the umpire blind, though I don’t know that German soccer referees were not subject to similar abuse.

We also fight social wars, which means campaigns to allow people to continue with their ordinary way of life, getting up to go to work and take a vacation in the summer, without the intrusion of disease or crime, much less foreign invasion. That is the case with homeless shelters, which are referred to as programs rather than as wars, though they share with other social wars, such as the War on Poverty or the War on Cancer, the idea that resources will be mobilized so as to confront a problem or a threat to ordinary life that will eventually be overcome. Smallpox was eradicated, as was polio. Homeless shelters allow people to negotiate what is for them the very burdensome task of making it through the day, no other purpose able to supplant that one, while most people can take their households to be the site from which they can negotiate their purposes rather than their sole purpose becoming the maintenance of a household.

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Ryancare

The reason Republicans don’t care how the Congressional Budget Office scores the Republican healthcare plan to replace Obamacare is that they are under the illusion that the free market, if left to its own devices, will come up with ways to lower the cost of insurance and so allow more and more people to keep coverage. Let insurers sell policies across state lines, which means that they will offer policies that are so bare bones as to be useless, but people will have become “free” to choose the plan they prefer. The truth of the matter, to the contrary, is that the idea of the free market failed to explain or prevent other economic problems, like the Great Recession and what to do about the ten percent of the population that probably can’t hold down places in the work force, and the market model is just as wildly inapplicable to medical care. Even back in the days of horse and buggy medicine, when the town doctor could do little but set bones, see you through a bout of an infectious disease, or tell your family that you were dead, doctors engaged in a sliding scale of fees, charging their poorer patients less than they did their wealthier ones, accepting a few chickens as remuneration for attending a farm family. The poor depended on charity wards and free clinics or went without. All this at the same time that late nineteenth century capitalism was developing a system of standard prices openly advertised as such so as to rationalize merchandising. You didn’t haggle over the price in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue. It was different at the other end of the ladder. George Bernard Shaw, in “The Doctor’s Dilemma” shows Harley Street physicians out to make a buck by selling useless nostrums and surgeries for made up diseases to their patients because they could get away with it. Going to a doctor was like going to a spa is today for the self-pampered rich. The best that could be said of it was that it did no harm.

 

 

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Trump's Rebellion

Samuel Freeman, in the latest number of “The New York Review of Books”, gives an adequate but hardly inspired presentation of the Frankfurt School, that group of German intellectuals which advocated a cultural Marxism that became very popular in this country during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, but which seems less and less relevant to contemporary concerns. Why could we have believed that Madison Avenue was the arch-enemy of all that was holy, when all it was out to do was sell deodorant? “Madmen” was very good at parodying the supposed insights of advertising men into the American psyche, which was more interested in moving to the suburbs and putting their kids into college than in whether Doris Day played a virgin just once too often. Freeman, however, insists on making what has become almost an obligatory reference these days in “The New York Review of Books” to the Trump election. He says that the Frankfurt School got the hang of the kind of authoritarian leader Trump is: an enemy of reason tied up with demagoguery and capitalism both at once. But that is to take just the wrong reading of Trump, who is neither an ideologue nor the prisoner of capitalism but is out there on his own, hardly even aware of the radical right forces he has empowered to do their own bidding rather than his.

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What the Future Holds

Let us construct a plausible narrative for the future of the Trump Administration, that being possible because narratives can be predictive. They are not just the conventions through which stories are told but also discoveries about chains of causation as those apply in human endeavor, sometimes a story coming back upon itself and sometimes just enlarging upon itself. Werther just can’t let go of Charlotte and devote his life to translating Ossian, and neither can Raskolnikov let go of his guilt, while Dickens is filled with new beginnings, and Jane Austen’s new beginnings are always with the same people rediscovering their ties to one another.

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Encapsulated Lives: The Aims of Racial Segregation

People are universally required to rationalize the relationship between the foreground and background of life so that they can go about dealing with their activities as a set of purposes not too often interrupted by items in the background of life, as happens when, let us say, people step into dog do-do when they are emerging, elegantly dressed, from a limo. One way to do that to create a stable equilibrium whereby the arena of background matters is put on hold by segregating them from the foreground events, though this may be at the cost of a heightened anxiety about the ability to maintain the truce. The lives of one group is encapsulated so that the members of that group can keep in the foreground what matters to them. An easy example of this is a retirement community. It provides physical security and other amenities that will appeal to old people who are becoming fragile so that they can go on with what seems to them a more or less normal set of activities even if these are somewhat more restricted than the lives that were led when people were living in “normal” communities. There are vans to take you from one place to another, to concerts and to downtown; there are walking trails so one can follow one’s doctor’s orders to exercise; there are small supermarkets so that one does not have to deal with the hustle and bustle of the outside world to get one’s shopping done. Political lectures and folk singers are brought “on campus”. All this is done so as to make life as stable for as long as possible before a resident is moved into the even more secure area of a nursing home.  

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The Almost State of the Union Address

President Trump’s address to Congress last night was a dull affair. That is because he was trying to sound Presidential and so gave his standard stump speech without the insults and so came across as a dullard, the speech without any rousing rhetoric or programmatic weight. The talking heads that afterwards opined on the speech caught its gist quickly. Trump had drawn back from the offer of legalization to undocumented immigrants that he had hinted at earlier in the day and had pinched some of Paul Ryan’s talking points about what the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare would look like, but was hardly committed to that. Nor had Trump specified how to pay for an infrastructure program when the key issue there is whether to fund it through what would be very low interest bonds, which the Democrats would support, or through tax breaks to financiers, which the Democrats would not support. Trump could not bring himself to avoid telling lies, as when he said that the money from the European countries to pay for their own defense is just rolling in, because such money would not be payments to the United States but increases in their own defense budgets. Maybe Trump, as is his wont, was just speaking loosely, and so was not so much lying as misunderstanding the issue. Commentators mistake him by thinking there is much more there than there is. Chuck Schumer says Trump says one thing, his Populist message, and delivers another, which is a right wing program, but that is to mistake him as having a message at all rather than just a set of slogans that he endlessly repeats, those tied together only by Trump’s own meanness, not any ideological cogency. That’s all there is, folks. Stop expecting more.

Pretty People

Here is a controversial issue that can be illuminated through the use of sociological role theory. There are a number of  asymmetries between the sexes that feminists regard as unfair or unjust or to be remedied by social action. Women have weaker upper body strength, but that should not bar them from going into combat because some women can meet rigorous physical standards. Other asymmetries are regarded by feminists as just the way it is. Women are supposed to believe in compromise while men are stuck with a rigid sense of justice. Men live, on average, seven years less than women, but that is outside the interest group to which feminists find themselves responsible.

Let us turn to what may be a more essential asymmetry in that it has to do with the everyday conduct of the sexes. Attractiveness is something with which only women have to struggle. Men may clean up for a date but hardly primp the way women do even if they are also anxious about how the date will go. Women, for their part, are the sex that dresses up in tight fitting clothes, high heels and makeup so as to appear at their most attractive to a date or even at a meeting in a workplace. So women work hard at being attractive, even if there are bounds to which men must restrict themselves in looking at well turned out women, not “checking them out” for too long, or making remarks that are too appreciative of how nice they look in their presentation of themselves, for then it might be understood that the women were being judged on their looks rather than on their other qualities, though to be judged at least passingly on looks is the reason for gussying up in the first place.

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The Mass Deportation

Well, we had to wait a month into his term for President Trump to do something really outlandish, and he finally has. He has issued deportation orders that could affect a majority of the eleven million or so illegal aliens in our midst because it seems that he is willing to deport even those who have engaged in such minor infractions as lying to an employer about their immigration status, and so the President is going far beyond the deportation of serious felons that was government policy when Obama was President. Trump also wants to scale up the number of agents available to do the job so that it can indeed be done. So much for those who said it would be impossible to deport all those people. It can be done. If you want to do something terrible, you can find a way, and also believe them when they say they are going to do it. Millions and millions of people are going to have their lives disrupted, perhaps irreparably, by being dumped into Mexico, even if they originally come from nations in Central America, Mexico not wanting them and perhaps not providing them with resettlement services unless the United States pays for those. Fat chance. So we are facing a major catastrophe. Rescinding the Obama doctrine on people using the bathroom of the sex with which they identify is a bad and inhumane policy, but it affects very few people while the deportation orders affect, as I say, up to ten million people.

 

The only ones spared by the Trump deportation orders are the DACA children, though they might lose their parents to deportation. In retrospect, which means a few years time, this entire episode will be seen as inhumane as Andrew Jackson moving the Cherokees west, but in the meantime, arguments are made that Trump is, after all, just keeping a campaign promise, and that nations, after all, have to defend their borders. Well, he also promised to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem but better judgment prevailed. Why create problems where there are none? And the idea of carefully protecting our borders against immigrants is less than a century old. Immigrants entering through Castle Garden, which was the entry point to New York before Ellis Island was established, just signed in and went on their way to local hotels and rooming houses. And at Ellis Island the main concern was communicable disease. Vetting of immigrants did not start until after the First World War. Americans should be proud of their tradition of open borders even if we do need to vet against Islamic terrorists, but we already do that, so what is the problem?

 

So far, the President has been bluster without consequence and I had hoped but not really thought that he would content himself with that. Even the order halting immigration from seven mostly Moslem countries made a certain amount of sense. A President has a great deal of leeway in determining what is and what is not a threat to the country. He can include in his calculations a hunch about where or from where an attack might take place. So it was not unreasonable to think that the seven unstable countries might be the source of attacks even if they had not been so until now, and it was reasonable to exclude Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the ban because those are erstwhile allies, whatever their histories. Consistency in principle is not the most important thing in foreign policy. We enlisted Vichy generals and admirals and made supposed common cause with Stalin all in order to win the Second World War. So why pick an additional fight with Pakistan when we don’t have to. Yes, the ban on immigrants may have made life inconvenient for some people, delaying them in their travels, but not for all that many, and virtually any act of foreign policy is going to inconvenience some people, and that is not enough reason to not go ahead with it. Yes, it was bad policy because some people were indeed inconvenienced and, more than that, frightened that they would never get to this country, but the new version of that travel ban should get rid of the obvious clinkers, like keeping out people who were already holders of green cards. So, all in all, the real problem with the ban was that there was no real point to it, no real danger that it avoided, all of it just the product of Trump’s simplistic imagination to do something no matter how irrelevant it is to the problem at hand so long as it suits his sense of what is right, which means find a way to punish people for what he takes to be the bad behavior of the world.


But this deportation edict is worse than that. It not only addresses a problem that doesn’t exist, which is that illegal immigrants bring crime with them, when in fact they commit crimes less frequently than American citizens, but instead provide workers necessary to the country because they fill jobs American citizens are unwilling to fill, but because the orders bring with them a great deal of real suffering to a great number of real people, all to salve Trump’s conscience that it is just not right for illegals to be here at all. The infliction of gratuitous suffering would seem to be the opposite of justice but it is in fact the substance of justice. Think of the Salem Witch Trials and the Holocaust, both launched in the name of solemn principles and undertaken with the sense of more in sorrow than in anger (look at the Nazi propaganda of the time), but really undertaken to alleviate in draconian manner a problem that did not exist.

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Smarts

People have higher or lesser amounts of that quality that is known as intelligence or more generally and perhaps more accurately as “smarts” because the former term connotes being good at standardized tests while the latter term means being good at having insight and turning that to the solution of problems of one sort or another. People think it is important to have smarts or at least be smart enough to manage their lives.  They can claim to have emotional intelligence rather than book intelligence and to intuit situations rather than verbalize a description of situations. Fredo told his brother, Michael Corleone, that he was also smart, by which he meant that he could do things: strike up deals, carry out instructions-- even though those were just the things he was bad at. People can also define their smarts by relative comparisons. The higher functioning residents of a home for the retarded will regard the lower functioning residents as "dummies". Most people infer the intelligence or smarts of people by consulting whether or not they are articulate, can memorize or master procedures, whether they have a fund of general knowledge, and whether they are savvy about managing one or another situation, whether within a family or at business. An uneducated person can be regarded as smart if he or she can get relatives to do what is wanted of them.

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"I Inherited a Mess"

The most startling quote from President Trump’s notably vituperous press conference last week was not his jousting with the press the way Nixon, in his last days, had jousted with the likes of Dan Rather. Instead, it was the remark that provided the New York Times with its headline the next day: “I inherited a mess”. This was not one of Trump’s many lies. Rather, it showed just how bad his judgment is on foreign policy, even if there are many voters who agreed with him about a point he had been making since the Eighties, which is that the government makes disastrous foreign policy choices all the time. For Trump, gloom and doom is a reflex reaction; for the population as a whole, I take it, it is because they have such a short term memory that they forget how bad things have been and also have a very poor imagination for conceiving just how very bad they could become again.

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One or Two States

The self inflicted crises in the still less than one month old Trump Administration keep coming so fast and furious. There was the immigration ban, now pushed out of the news, though there still remains on the table whether the scale of deportations has increased since Trump took over. There was the Flynn resignation, the furor over which suggests that that there is much more to be said about the connection of the Trump campaign and the Trump Cabinet with the Russians than has yet been made public, but that insiders already know there is something to it, for otherwise why care so much that one official proved unsuitable for his job. Then there is Netanyahu coming into town to announce with the President that the time of the two state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over, to be replaced, possibly, by a one state solution. This, actually, may be a good idea, even though the New York Times dismisses it simply because it is not what has been United States policy for twenty years now. Let us sort out the meaning of the proposal, Netanyahu, we may assume, fully comprehending what this initiative is while the President, as usual, falls for a phrase and can’t look beyond that.

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A Democratic Resurgence

Democrats are down in the dumps that they lost the Presidency to such an unworthy contender. It is one thing for Hillary to have lost the Presidency the first time to Barack Obama, who is so charming that he could have won a third term if he had been allowed to run. After all, the economy is chugging along and foreign affairs are under control, Obama having declared the Middle East a place to stay out of. But it was quite another thing for her to have lost to Donald Trump, the most unqualified candidate in history, who is boorish and inarticulate even if also outspoken. The Donald, all the prognosticators said, would have to pull an inside straight to win, and that is just what he did.

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Movies Then & Now

My friend Dorothy Glass, the art historian, is not as big of a movie buff as I am and so asked me a few years ago when movies became mature, by which she meant when they became of interest to adults and not just simplified dramas used to show off the visual power of film. I gave what I thought was a glib answer, that it occurred about the time of “On the Waterfront”, in the mid-Fifties. My answer was glib because I wasn’t sure her’s was a real question. Film, from the beginning, had been worth serious consideration and been filled with real themes and real emotions, “mature” in that sense to be awarded to D. W. Griffith and “The Big Parade”, however much they were melodramas, with too readily recognized villains and heros (or heroines).

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