A Paranoid Reverie

Does everyone important need to be surveilled?

Consider the following mental experiment. Suppose that one of the intelligence agencies comes across new plans for Russian espionage in the United States. Do they present the evidence to the President at his daily intelligence briefing? Probably not because by all accounts these are short and supplied through graphics. But let us say suspicious Russian behavior is persistent. The President, after all, is the great decider about national defense policy and it is or always has been the obligation of his intelligence agencies to supply him with the best of their products so he can decide what course of action is in the national interest. But what happens when the President is himself distrusted, on the basis of prior experience, not to be discrete with national security information, that in itself an unprecedented event, and even more so, is suspected of and being investigated for collusion with the Russians? What are the intelligence agencies to do? Giving him the information might be dangerous because he might pass it on to the Russians and not giving it to him borders on treason in that the intelligence agencies would then be subverting their duty to serve all presidents.

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Washington Hugger Mugger

The press is so anxious to nail down the basis for a Trump impeachment that they run around trying to make matters that are inconclusive or even irrelevant seem definitive of treason. So one top national security official says that Jared Kushner did nothing wrong while another, who served in the Obama Administration, said a warning light went on for him when Kushner was said to be seeking to establish a back channel to the Kremlin that used Russian communications links. Maybe yes; maybe no. Maybe establishing a back channel is OK because other administrations in waiting have done so and maybe not if it is the case that Kushner kept that plan out of the reach of American intelligence officials, which we don’t know happened. On another matter, was Russian Ambassador Kislyak telling this story of Kushner’s offer to his people back home so as to disinform the Americans who he knew were listening in? All of this is out of “Homeland” But most of us, including me, don’t well enough know the customs that guide high level diplomacy and intelligence operations to pass judgment on these matters and neither do most of the press that feels called upon to opine on these matters.

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Immigration

When I hauled myself into his cab, the driver was speaking Arabic into a phone mike. The only phrase I could make out was “long term mortgage”. I surmised he was talking to a relative because, whatever the language, only close friends and relations talk in the clipped tones and interrupted sentences that other people would take as rude. Halfway through the ride, he hung up (or whatever you do to slam down the receiver when using this kind of phone equipment). He glanced over his shoulder at me and unburdened himself. “I brought my son over from Egypt, and now he doesn’t even want to go into business with me. All he cares about is his own family.” I felt like saying “Welcome to America”  because, of course, that has been the story of any number of immigrant groups. The first generation comes over knowing it may or may not be as successful as it was over there, that they may sacrifice themselves to allow some success to the next generation, as was the case for the Chinese laundryman and his wife on my old block who spoke fluent English and whose daughter became a doctor, and not so much for the Korean grocer on the corner of my old block who never learned English and so could not use his Korean degree in social work, and yet put his kids through Ivy League colleges, never allowing any of them to work in the store, one of his sons, nevertheless, eventually taking over the store.

There is, indeed, something magical about America. Its streets are paved with gold; it is indeed the gold mountain. The chances of doing well over the generations are big, though children may go through a time when they are embarrassed by the fact that their parents seem so quaint and unknowing, but that happens with all American children, no matter how many generations their families have been here. What explains the ambitions of the immigrants and the relative success of their children?

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Shakespeare's Characters

Students of Shakespeare from William Hazlitt through Harold Bloom think of Shakespeare as someone who embraced the new philosophy of individualism by making each of his characters a unique personality, responsible to noone but his or her self. But a late medieval mind or an early Elizabethan one might have appreciated Shakespeare differently, his characters embodiments of abstract virtues and vices, Polonius of self-importance and pomposity, Macbeth of ruthless ambition, Romeo and Juliet of love heedless of its surroundings, very much like Dante’s Paolo and Francesca  who swirl around as the winds of Hell will carry them because they have no anchors. If that is the case, then Shakespeare stocked his plays with characters who acted according to the types of characters available to a playwright of the time. A way of bringing those two ideas together and which enhances not only our sense of Shakespeare but of modern psychology, is to realize that Shakespeare presented each of his characters as true to their own essence and, moreover, that they were each, deep down, what they each appeared to be. 

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The Trump Scandal

The appointment of a special prosecutor may prove not to impede or divert the investigation into Trump’s Russian connection, which is what I feared, because it seems largely designed to protect the ongoing FBI probe. And the case for such a connection is mounting, having already reached Trump’s inner circle, the latest news being that Jared Kushner was trying to set up a secret communications link with Moscow. There are just too many dots out there for them not to connect. Does anyone think that this is still all coincidence?

But whether Trump is removed from office by impeachment or by the Twenty Fifth Amendment, or simply serves out his term, hobbled by his tendency to kick himself in the head and with no idea of how to organize and accomplish a legislative agenda, the effects of the Trump Presidency are historical in the sense that they will be with us for a very long time. That is because Trump was elected as a fluke rather than because he was the symbol or activator of a social movement, and so his Presidency is something of a scandal, and scandals, in the course of history, usually have unfortunate rather than liberating sequela, while social movements, at least among the English speaking peoples, result in real social progress. That is because real change and progress occur slowly, over generations, albeit with the assistance of social movements to promote change by taking advantage of changing social circumstances. Scandals, however, do not refresh the social system, freeing it to engage in progress, but rather result in retrograde developments that just routinize what had previously been seen as just a scandal.

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What World War II Wrought

Post-Apocalyptic life is a standard literary genre. The Terminator series, as well as the Mad Max series, show what life is like when some great catastrophe has engulfed and destroyed the civilized world. According to these tales, life has once again become short and brutal, peopled by grotesquely dressed and malformed people (and by machines), some saving remnant of humanity trying to preserve what is left of and trying to re-establish what had existed before the cataclysm. My favorite of these is the Alexander Korda version of H. G. Wells’ “Things to Come”, the movie made just before the impending Second World War, when it was expected that strategic bombing might reduce cities to rubble-- which it did, without, however, destroying the governance of those cities or nations. In Wells’ vision, civilization is reduced to barbarism until it is rescued by a cadre of airmen, known as “Wings Over the World”, who then build cities that are modernistic while its inhabitants wander around in togas and are given to bombastic speeches delivered by gigantic holograms of themselves, the young people driven to go on to the exploration of the Moon.

To the sociological mind, however, whatever is imagined can be exemplified by what actually comes to pass. There are many times in world history when a nation or a new civilization is reborn or created after the coming of a dark age, or when, even more generally, the old days have rather abruptly been put to rest and a new time is emerging, a new time beginning, as happened when the French started the clock over again as part of their understanding that their Revolution had put an end to the Old Regime that would be replaced by an age of citizenry and enlightenment. The new calendar lasted fourteen years. Similar new beginnings emerge after the execution of Charles I and the Russian Revolution and Hitler’s seizure of power, while the new beginnings that started with the eight years of violence and mayhem that was the American Revolution are still going on, so much so that there are those who will claim that the American Revolution was not really a cataclysmic upheaval but just a struggle among the colonial elites for power, even though the people of the time certainly thought, as the popular song of the time went, that “The World [was] Turned Upside Down”.

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Nixon One Paragraph at a Time

Reading is a very complex process as the following examples try to show.

Every book is a genre all its own. It is a combination or play on some combination of other types of books, and so lives up to what is taken to be Polonius’s over the top statement in Act II, Scene ii of Hamlet about the players:

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,

comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,

historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-

comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or

poem unlimited:

As usual, Polonius knows what he is talking about. Nobody composes afresh; everyone adapts the genres that are there. The writers of the Gospels were fresh in that they reworked the tale of a man going to meet his fate, as that might happen in a Greek tragedy, to Oedipus for example, into an exemplary and unique story, endlessly to be repeated, of a god-inspired personage working out the inevitabilities of his nature and his destiny in the course of his short and doomed ministry. And, at the more comic end of the spectrum, It is reported that Lucille Ball got wind of meetings where producers would ask for a Lucille Ball like comedy with someone else. Ball got the message and moved to television and became “Lucy”.

But that is not the whole of it. Every paragraph of a book is also a distinct entity. It has a structure and a tone different from that of the paragraphs which preceded it and which follow it. Part of the pleasure of reading is the interaction between the reader’s imagination, memory and analysis and what is there to be discovered in every paragraph. So while most literary remarks about a recent book, John A. Farrell’s “Richard Nixon: The Life”, might tell a reader that they can garner pleasure from a set piece such as Farrell’s clear retelling of the Alger Hiss investigation, or from Farrell’s not that well done overall presentation of Nixon as America’s very own Richard III, though I would let him off easy on that because he is competing with Shakespeare, let us attend, instead, to how just a few of Farrell’s paragraphs provide their pleasures.

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Grief and Isolation

When I walked my dog in my old neighborhood, I would continually come across a young couple standing in front of a brownstone, good weather and bad, smoking up a storm, one of them doing so even if the other were absent. When together, they were in animated conversation, or looking into one another’s eyes, or just intruding into one another’s space, and so, as anyone else would, I thought them to be lovers who could not for one reason or another go inside, and it is always heartwarming to see young lovers. But I was also tempted to go up to them and say to them that they should stop smoking for one another’s sake so that they did not have to face my fate which was to be made a widower after forty-eight years of marriage because my wife had been a heavy smoker for fifty years even though she and I and all her friends had made the effort to get her to stop smoking. In the early years of our marriage I had even gotten her to try a woman’s pipe, which was a small and pastel colored thing to make it seem feminine, and was something of a fad at the time, but that hadn’t worked, and so by the time she died of lung cancer her only hope had become, as she said, that she would beat the odds. Nobody’s fault that she was dying; only a hope of rescue unfulfilled. But I never did intrude on the couple’s time or space. It was not that I am timid about expressing my opinions. It is rather that you respect the choices people make, however foolish they are, and also so as not to too much blame the addiction prone for their cravings.

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A Special Prosecutor is a Bad Idea

The idea of appointing a special prosecutor to look into the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia is a bad idea because special prosecutors are either ineffective or led astray, as the history of them attests. It was not Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox that brought Nixon down. It was the Senate Select Committee that had Alexander Butterfield admit before it that Nixon had taped his Oval Office conversations and it was Judge Sirica who got the Watergate burglars to break their silence about what had been going on if they were not to face what might be considered overly harsh sentences were it not for Sirica’s motive to get to the bottom of Watergate. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Special Prosecutor Jaworski’s subpoena of the tapes, but the House Judiciary Committee was about to rule favorably on impeachment anyway, even without the tapes, which were just the final straw, adding some more Republican votes to the decision.

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Economists & Sociologists

There are other closely related disciplines that really go into very different matters. These include such pairs as history and sociology; comparative literature and English literature; American studies and American history. But let us consider only the profound difference between an economic and sociological approach to social problems.

There was a time when the major advisors to political leaders on various social problems were social workers and sociologists. The tradition reaches back to when Jane Addams advised the Governor of Illinois at the turn into the Twentieth Century about how to deal with problems of urban poverty. FDR was served by Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins, although Hopkins eventually was given much broader responsibilities. That tradition perhaps reached its apex during Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty where the major influence was Frances Piven, and the team of Richard Cloward and LLoyd Ohlin, as well asa other students of the sociologist Robert Merton, many of whom were social workers, and who offered up one program after another that was designed to make a difference to people in poverty by offering them one service piled up upon another. These programs were largely unsuccessful because they were to be measured by their outcomes but the input, like school lunch programs, while laudable in themselves, were never enough to make a difference in the overall condition of poverty, while the civil rights legislation Johnson also passed did make a difference because they changed the status of black citizens, making them into an ethnic group rather than a caste.

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Educational Means & Ends

So difficult and profound is the nature of education, and so uncertain its results, since education has to do with the nature of the way people think more than what they know or what they can do, that it is not surprising that the goal of education is replaced by something else. Using history to ponder the complexities of social causation is replaced by learning the chronicles and traditions of a nation so as to implant patriotism; using math to learn how to think abstractly and logically is replaced by the mastery of times tables and algorithms. More dramatically, learning is itself replaced as a goal of education, its time taken up with the variety of services that are useful to the population that attends school, such as how to drive an automobile or protect against pregnancy. Schools can therefore become schools in name only, even though they are regulated by state education departments rather than by some other agency. That is what happens when schools serve non-educational functions for reasons of convenience, such as providing vaccinations for all students, free lunches for poor children, or day care for seriously disabled children, or warnings about not to talk to strangers. These are health and safety programs, not educational programs, even if it is also the case that children who get glasses may see the blackboard better and so learn more. Many social services make it easier to educate students, and there is no reason why these services should not be provided in schools, given that children of school age can be found there en masse, but social services are not the same thing as education itself.

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Particularities & Generalities about Ryancare

Trump is settling into the background noise (as we can only hope), while the real players are in the Congress and the Cabinet. Trump may hold a triumphal self-promotion event in the Rose Garden to celebrate getting an Obamacare repeal bill through the House of Representatives, but that is only a stunt because a new bill will be crafted in the Senate that may look very different from the bill Speaker Ryan got through the House. Remember that Trump’s election was itself a fluke, not a trend, much less “a movement”, as he likes to put it. Journalists like to tie his election to Brexit, which had its distinct sources in the failures of the European Union, and to tie it to Marine Le Pen, but look what happened to her.

So we have to look elsewhere than to Trump to find out what is happening in government, and an insight into, at least, how politicians argue about health care policy was available yesterday at, among other places, George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday talk show on ABC. Politicians and journalists, first of all, when they talk about policy issues, by and large do not these days begin with axiomatic statements that they then apply to the particulars of Ryancare. They do not argue about whether people do or do not have a right to health care, even though, by the way, Ryan made it clear that if people don’t want insurance, they shouldn’t be forced to get it, and so people have no right of coverage, even if they do have a right of care, which means that they can always go to emergency rooms where the costs will be picked up by insurance companies and state governments. But Ryan does not too much refer to first principles because outright saying that healthcare is a luxury purchase rather than a right might make him seem hard hearted. So he prefers to appear as someone who is just making health insurance better.

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A Minimalist Definition of Education

The distinctive goal of an institution is whatever is the primary goal of the institution, whatever other functions it may carry out, and even if its budget and talk seem more devoted to other activities than those that enhance that distinctive goal.  The distinctive goal of the military is to strip or counter the ability of the enemy to perpetrate organized violence through the use of its own abilities in perpetrating organized violence, never mind that the military also dallies in winning over hearts and minds and is an icon of patriotism. Other institutions, like Hollywood, also win over hearts and minds, and patriotism can be tied to vigorous, loyal dissent as well as to risking life and limb on a battlefield.

It is the same with education. Local suburban school boards may be preoccupied with making a campus shine even though their students will do well whether the campus looks good or not; local urban Parents Associations may talk a great deal about a learning environment when what they mean is that the school is safe enough for their children to attend. But a school without instruction in subject matter is a recreation program by another name, and so schools have to offer some version of the usual courses as well as the other things that motivate students to attend school so that they can be known and qualified as schools and thought to be doing the things schools are supposed to do. A college curriculum without liberal arts requirements is a training academy, and you couldn’t sell it to parents as a real college education unless you included those requirements, even if students don’t like to take those courses and even if the parents and students say that what they really want are the vocational preparation courses.

By that light, the distinctive task of education can be defined, in general, as structured instruction for the purpose of the development of disciplined thought about any subject matter. Plato thought that there was a single discipline of thought which pervades all thinking, and for which we retain the title of “logic”. Aristotle thought that there were many disciplines of thought, the rigor or “logic” of which depends on the subject matter and the audience which was to be convinced of the rightness of one or another view. This distinction between logic and logics still obtains. Some people develop large habits of thought, such as how to read texts or do statistical analysis, and some people learn particular disciplines, like economics and psychology and religious studies, and some people learn subject matters, like Southeast Asia, or mass communications, or African-American studies, and pick up smatterings of whatever disciplines seem to apply as well as a healthy dose of some particular discipline so as to provide tools for the study of the particular subject matter.

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Citizenship & Voting

Voting is an ineluctable part of citizenship in a modern representative democracy. But Jefferson thought that it was very difficult to be a good citizen who casts a responsible vote even if he also thought that every yeoman farmer (who was white) should have the vote. Jefferson proposed universal elementary education so that citizens would be literate enough so that they could evaluate whether the candidates would represent their interests. That would enable a lot of people to vote and at the same time vote sensibly. The history of voting behavior in the United States, however, suggests that there are a great many things that interfere with the voter offering up in his or her vote his or her best judgment about what is good for his or her faction and for the nation as a whole, and so the promise of democracy as a system of government which justifies itself as having been empowered by the people is called into question.

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Teaching as an Occupation

There is something peculiar about the notion that teaching is an occupation. Everybody does it: every parent and every employer tries to be calm while explaining to a child or a worker what it is they aren’t doing quite properly or how to do a task better. If explanation is provided with patience, then children and workers are likely to have a more positive attitude towards their tasks—though, on the other hand, if a lesson is reinforced with a spanking or a dressing down, then children and employees are likely to learn how important it is they learn their lesson well. Teachers are similarly divided between those who think that sticks or carrots, whether in the forms of grades, or informal praise and criticism, are the ways to advance student learning. Presumably, and contrary to the teacher unions, anyone of good will and patience and an education a little bit superior to that of their students, could be a teacher.

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Democratic Presidential Timber

For those of us who participate in the Hot Stove League of presidential politics or, to switch the metaphor, who await the arrival of our spring planting seed catalogues in mid-winter, it is never too early to estimate the horseflesh that will compete in the Derby (to add a third metaphor to a single opening sentence). My early judgment is that there are many capable Democrats, seasoned by executive or legislative experience, but that none of them have the added oomph of an outsized personality that Trump seems to have made the only qualification for a Presidential nomination or victory, and that may be Trump’s only contribution (if we are so lucky) to American political history. Let us review the tout sheet.

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Moral and Immoral Child-Rearing

I want to propose a philosophical question and then answer it with a bit of counter-intuitive sociology, and then address why people persist in availing themselves of the usual philosophical conclusion. The philosophical question is the age at which children take on moral responsibility, the so called age of consent. The usual moral answer is that children reach the age of consent when they are capable of managing their own lives, at least in the sphere in which their ability to give consent is at issue. They are supposed to be able to evaluate information and their own emotions and so give informed consent to their own action and the action of others. The law in most states sets sixteen as the age at which people can agree to sexual relations and twenty one as the age at which people can purchase alcohol. But it proves impossible to give an accurate definition to this leaping off point for adulthood. Why a particular age for one thing and a different age for another? What changes in a person that they become morally responsible or is it just that age is just a rule of thumb for developmental processes recognized to happen but not very well understood?

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Misplaced Hopes for the Midterms?

Democrats read special congressional elections, such as the soon to take place runoff in Georgia’s Sixth between Ossoff and Handler, as tea leaves by which to forecast the 2018 Midterm elections. They have set high hopes on taking back the Congress because the Congress will do nothing or because Trump will do something awful in the meantime. How could anyone who voted for him (aside from his true believers) not be disappointed by the actuality of his Presidency and so overcome whatever were the motives that led them to vote for him in 2016? Moreover, there is the ever looming prediction that sooner or later the demographics of the South will catch up with it and return it to the Democratic column because the South is so far better educated than it was in the past, has put its regional issues, especially those of race, aside, and Hispanics and Blacks and retirees from the North will all contribute to swinging the South to being part of what will become a permanent Democratic majority. So Democrats look forward to the deliverance of the country to them. But I am not sure it will happen and I want to explain why.

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A Material Family

There is a family I have never met that I came to know quite well over my years as a college teacher. They are the Greenwalts, once of Birmingham, Michigan, a wealthy bedroom community outside Detroit, who were the subject of a documentary entitled "But What If The Dream Comes True?" that appeared on CBS in l970. Unlike other family portraits of the time, such as that of the Louds, where a hand-held camera picked up the wife telling her husband to move out, the portrait of the Greenwalts was not given to titillation or uncovering family ghosts. Nor was this a video blog pretending to be the real life of a celebrity with all but selected warts edited out. Its method was that of a standard documentary: interviews with the protagonists and film on the settings in which they lived their lives. Its purpose was an exploration of the American character, and its narrator, Charles Kuralt, brought his usual mixture of amusement and appreciation to an hour-long human interest story that was and is more than a sidebar.

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Charles Van Doren

Gabe Pressman, then as for a very long time after that a reporter for WNBC-TV, came up to Columbia University in 1959 to interview undergraduates, of which I was one, about Charles Van Doren and the quiz show scandals. Pressman was surprised to see how protective the students were of Van Doren. Pressman said that it was his job to cover the story. It was the opinion of many undergraduates that looking through the window slats at someone's national humiliation was not a moral way to earn a living, much less to further one's career. That episode, I think, suggests why Robert Redford was overly glib in his handling of the Van Dorens in his movie Quiz Show, whose appearance, some twenty years ago, reminded me of events that, until the movie, I had remembered with sadness rather than anger.

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