The insurrection can readily be appreciated as a historical moment because it was an unprecedented one. The U. S. Capitol had never been invaded by Americans, even if Washington and New York were assaulted by Bin Laden and, much previously, by the British. Not even our current pandemic is unprecedented, though not in anyone’s memory. Other such events are historical because they are momentous. These include Pearl Harbor and D Day and Antietam, all wartime occasions which altered American history, just as had economic events such as the industrialism of the Andrew Carnegie generation and the Great Depression and suburbanization in the Fifties and Sixties. Certain other events which seem momentous when they happened did not alter the American landscape. That includes the destruction of the World Trade Center, which, however, did not seem to have significantly altered the New York landscape, it instead becoming just office buildings, now filled with family based coops and the rest of the paraphernalia that go along with urban life rather than a permanent mark of devastation, something even Germany could overcome even if what abides in it is its scar of history.
Values
The Classic comic books version of the short story “The Man Without a Country” presented Philip Nolan’s staterooms in one or another United States warship, him forever exiled from having said he hated the United States when he had been part of the insurrection by which Aaron Burr tried to wrest the trans-Appalachian mountains from the United States, these later of his staterooms festooned with banners and flags and portraits of Presidents that showed him as forever pining for his country, this a sentiment appropriate when Edward Everett Hale wrote the story in the midst of the Civil War. It struck me then and remains so that flags and banners were not the proper ways in which to display tribute to the idea of the United States. That was because these visual effects were present in all nations and no more than an icon of the team of the National Football League. Every nation has banners and so those are just lapel buttons rather than explanations of why someone would feel worthy of the nation for which it stands. What makes its images, ideas and expressions distinctive?
Read More"Dark Victory"
There is a group portrait of George V lying in his death bed in a gigantic bed and a beautiful quilt surrounded by clergy, doctors, politicians and family waiting for him to expire. Many of the people in the room are identifiable so as to document who were present at the event. All they did was to stand around and wait for the end, one of those in attendance to go up to the King and confirm him as having died. What was also worth noting at the time, which was 1936 and when Great Britain was one of the most advanced of medical science, was that there were no machines to intervene between the patient and the audience, when some fifteen or twenty years later there were oxygen masks and monitors that provided vital signs and beeping noises to accompany a patient who was in the process of dying. A clergyman was there at the earlier moment so as to give a benediction, while the clergyman in “M*A*S*H*” is perfunctory, given aside by the doctors laboring on the wounded and justified by his other services as someone who aid comfort to the stricken for as much time as can be spared from the more important duties. The painting of George V showed the state of the relation between his doctors and his death and how much things had changed by a generation later. I am interested in the nature of the patient at the time and whether the role of the patient has changed since that time to the present. My evidence is drawn from that time, the film “Dark Victory” appearing in 1938, a fiction able to convey what are the facts of social relations regarded as inevitable at the time, just as present day fiction attests to the fact that everyone can hook up on their i-phones while earlier generations had to rely on telephone calls, as in “Sorry, Wrong Number” as a fact that could become a gimmick in a melodrama. What, if anything, changed in being a patient since the Thirties, which are now eighty years away?
Read MoreThe Political Bubble
Political thinkers are deeply divided about whether people are inside the bubble in that their political thoughts and actions are anchored in their actual social life or else that politics take place as a result of what is outside the bubble, politics a circling cyclorama of people and ideas churned out by policies, doctrines, and people who live in the reality of the media. This division does not line up with Conservatives and Liberals. DeTocqueville was a Conservative who thought that politics was grounded in the town hall democracy whereby local citizens learned to compromise with one another so as to get a local road created so that they could bring their produce to market. Marxists, for their part, thought that people were grounded by the actual conditions of their labor. Lazarsfeld political polling was based on the idea that voters were grounded in the demographics of their situation. Republicans were grounded in small town bourgeois life and Democrats were grounded in their working class situations rather than the working class allegiances that were derived from their situations. Thinkers of those who opposed these views took the idea that politics took place on the outside of their lives. Machaevelli’s view was that people in power had to instill both fear and love so as to get people to accept power and so that meant that these feelings were engendered by the people in power, on their balconies and through their marches, rather than by intruding with very many people so as to create and sustain order. Most politics is the theatre of politics. Ortega Y Gasset thought that the mass of people were dissociated from their structural ties so that they could roam around and riot as they will, their political activities independent of their allegiances or interests. Lord Bryce, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, thought that public opinion had come to dominate Democratic societies in that whatever were the popular views of the moment, the fads and catchphrases of the people, would motivate people to use their vote to get their way and effectuate policies. Closer to home, people are understood as responding to Donald Trump because they find him somehow attractive and compelling, and so are responding to the outside of the bubble, even if their own conditions are not so bad, or else must be responding from grievances, whether economic or cultural, as the reasons for why they get up off the coach to become engaged with Trumpian politics.
Read MoreInsurrection
Today is Friday and it was just two days ago that Donald Trump encouraged people to invade the halls of Congress. Joe Biden said while the onslaught of Congress was taking place that a President’s words mattered for good or for ill and so he asked President Trump to tell the rioters in Congress to cease their activities. Some hours later, Trump said that they should go home even though he loved those people who were engaged in the violence, which was clearly a half-hearted condemnation of violence. The intruders did not achieve their objective to delay very long the certification of the Electoral College vote because the Congress reconvened and met through the night to finish the task. Joe Biden, who is not an eloquent man, did offer a word that had resonance during his remarks. He said that what happened in Congress was an “insurrection”. (Sen. Mitt Romney used the same term, as did Sen. Chuck Schumer, in very short order, and the term has now been used by many others.) The events at the Capital were not just a riot or a disturbance, but an insurrection, and we should think what that term means.
Read MoreNostalgia and History
Nostalgia is the modern form of pastoral in that it gives an emotional expression to much of contemporary historical consciousness. It is no more debased than pastoral itself in that it shares with all pastoral a fawning view of time past. It differs from other forms of pastoral in that the usual pastoral connection of violence, death, simplicity and virtue to a bucolic time is made instead to the sense of time past that cannot at all be remote because it is a time that is still can be remembered as having been real. Nostalgia cannot predate what happened before a person is born though I can be nostalgic about the Thirties in that I can be fanciful about the times that were close enough to be in my time to think them as similar to my times.
Read MoreOrdinary Painting
Here are three oil paintings in the European representational tradition that have found their ways to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. They are not particularly good paintings and they are worth thinking about so as to help understand why oil painting in its representational mode is such a satisfying experience, ones that give pleasure not because the artist is clever or insightful or with superb technique, but because painting itself in these of its genres has a power of its own. These paintings can be best appreciated for what it is to be paintings.
Read MoreObama's Victory Lap
Early reviewer’s of Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land”, his memoir of the first two years of his Presidency, found the book to be candid because Obama mused on his uncertainties about his personal and political decisions. Actually, Obama is not at all forthright in this book. He plays it very close to the vest, a kind of victory lap where he thanks all the people that helped him on his ascent to the Presidency and never clearly says what was his motivation to drive towards the Presidency. He acts as if it happened to him, arriving at the point that his speech at Kerry’s nomination in 2004 that gave him an opportunity to be in the spotlight and for people to see him as having a voice, and then coming to understand that the United States Senate was too narrow a place in which to enact public policy, and then finally deciding to run so that some little Black boy would see that he could emulate Obama. That rings false in that Obama seems to have had political ambitions from the start, he an up-and-comer in the Illinois Senate, just waiting to make his move. His greatest candor is his life long apology for how politics had made Michelle's life more difficult, as if becoming President were not a worthwhile achievement and as if she could not have known early on that he was ambitious. Harry Truman was not ambitious, but Obama certainly was. Why else had he insisted on being only a part time professor of the University of Chicago Law School? Obama, in his memoir, does not explain himself.
Read MoreFirst Contacts
“Gulliver’s Travels” is a first contact novel. Obviously inspired by the Age of Discovery, it creates four occasions during which a traveler comes to a culture that he had not known existed and which did not know that he and his kind existed. Never mind the political satire; Swift is telling four stories of how cultures collide. The small people, the Lilliputians, figure out how to tame him, because power is all that interests them, and he allows them to believe he will not hurt them, which is certainly the case, because he has no reason to. And so they treat him as an admiral, their own Othello. Then the very big people in the second island he visits figure out how they can use him, which is as an entertainment and a pet, which he finds disgusting, but where he has no choice because any one of them could easily crush him. He is too small, as Aristotle would say, to be part of the arrangement whereby people of relatively the same size have to form a polity lest they can choose sides against one another. Then, on the third island, Gulliver meets a passel of fantasists who think they can improve humanity but create, instead, disastrous results, such as old people who linger on into extended debility, and then, in the fourth island, he meets the horses, who try to treat him as a human being, as someone with moral dignity, and this is the most unsettling of all his encounters because he can’t live up to their expectations, and so returns home a broken man. As critics have long argued, the four alternative worlds are a sequence, the first three of them as inferior to the life in Great Britain, their home culture, because each of them are parodies of England, and the fourth culture is much superior to his own in that people have resigned themselves or else achieved a kind of serenity because they are not ambitious, the previous three cultures dominated, in turn, by power, pleasure and fantasy. What is clear is that other previously unknown other societies are either superior or inferior to our present society, and so that is just the way it is.
Read MoreEntitlements
Liberals, who believe in the intervention of government to right wrongs and to regulate the economy and the social structure, are identified with FDR’s New Deal, but FDR used a variety of mechanisms other than entitlements to achieve its ends of providing work and greater equality between peoples, the regime of entitlements meaning that legislation would consist of financial and other services and preferences to be awarded to categories of eligibility. The first acts in FDR’s First Hundred Days were not entitlements. The Glass Steagall Banking Act of 1933 provided for the separation of commercial from investment banking. It required commercial banks to have sufficient equity and provided the FDIC to guarantee that bank customers did not have to worry about runs on the banks. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, also early on in 1933, allowed for the government to buy up beef and pork so as to destroy them so as to keep up farm prices. It also allowed farmers to get money so that they would refrain from raising crops, and so also raise farm prices, even though this was sort of an entitlement because people who owned farms were paid for a purpose, the purpose more important than the mechanism. The Wagner Act of 1935 set up a mechanism whereby workers could engage in collective bargaining rather than pay or guarantee wages to union workers. The TVA put in a lot of money to build dams and create electrical grids rather than give grants to people in Tennessee. The CCC made work available to poor whites rather than give them food stamps or a dole. Yes, entitlements did come later. Social Security, passed in 1935, was a clear entitlement in that a category of people--the aged-- were entitled to get benefits when they had reached a certain age and had contributed to payroll taxes for by then just a very short time of payment. And the great last act of the New Deal, the Wages and Hours Act of 1938, did require people of occupational categories to meet pay and work standards, though not by direct payments. Nor were entitlements the only mechanisms for reform during the War on Poverty. Money was used by Lyndon Johnson to create incremental change in a variety of outcomes, such as better nutrition or availability to education, by paying programs rather than people, though some entitlements were included, as was the case with Medicare and Medicaid, so as to entitle people to the cost of health care because they qualified as old or poor.
Monuments
Some places that are destination points also do other things. A person can visit the Empire State Building to look at the little ants on the street that they view from near the top, or they can, while on street level, look up to the not quite sheer towers that are above, there being setbacks from the broader base of the lower floors. That is majesty and artistry occurring while floors and offices are rented and occupied within the floors. A tourist has the same experience when visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral so as to see the spaces of the church during which a major or minor service is also taking place. You can look at the architecture of the George Washington Bridge while also watching the automobiles travel over the most heavily traveled bridge in the world. On the other hand, there are destination points that are only to be looked at. There is nothing else to do with them other than allow people to observe and tramp through them, which is the case with the national parks that I visited in the past few weeks in southern Utah, when my son and grandson and I visited Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park and Canyonlands, the Park Service having very artistically arranged for visitor centers to look on imposing edifices and also to create roadways that allowed access for astonishing sites to see. But the cliffs and canyons and rock formations were not meant to do anything but look, to be turned only into aesthetic objects, because nothing else could be done with that harsh terrain. You couldn’t farm or easily build houses in such remote terrain and there are or were no ores. There were just places to see and so it is worth thinking about what are the aesthetics to be drawn from people who are forced to consider something aesthetic because there is nothing else to do with them, as well as to consider these objects by people who, like myself, claim to have a disciplined take on the aesthetic.
Read MoreDecades and Trends
Radio and TV d.j.’s like to talk about musical decades so as to evoke the nostalgia of there being a particular sound or style that dominated music for about a decade. I think that we can broaden it out so that each decade includes its politics and social structure so as to characterize decades as being cultural entities, distinct from the previous and the succeeding one, just as if we do when historians and literary critics speak of the periods of Classical and Romantic and Victorian, the Romantics, for example, not just meaning Jane Austen and John Keats and Charles Lamb, but also John Bright and the Luddites and Peterloo and the other early struggles of industrialism. Periodization is a different prospect from doing what a friend of mine does, which is separate before and after a critical event, which for him is 1968, That year separates two different experiences, people profoundly altered by that event so that I, for one, still expect to turn on the television and find out that there has been an assassination. Pearl Harbor was one of those events that made America different and not in just leading to the waging of the worst war in human history. It made the United States the economic, cultural and military center of the world, while the Vietnam War was just an interlude even if young people at the time, including me, found it all consuming, it instead just coming and going, which would also be the case in the War on Terror that commenced with the World Trade Center, but lasted only a decade or so, and us still not knowing whether Trumpism can outlast his separation from office.
Read MoreEmpiricism in "A Winter's Tale"
Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” starts out with a scene that the audience takes will be a leisurely exposition of who is who. It begins with fulsome praise by a resident king to a visiting one, and then shifts to an even more fulsome praise by the resident queen to the visiting king. And then the audience begins to notice something, or has been prepared to notice it by having prepared for this visit to the theatre by reading the text (something, it need hardly be said, that was not done in Shakespeare’s day, though that would have meant an appreciation of the scene rested solely on its stagecraft). The mutual statements of love become much too fulsome, crossing some kind of line into being inappropriate. The Queen’s husband no longer likes what he hears and you see him and hear him in a few lines deliberating about what is going on and coming to the conclusion that his wife has indulged in adultery with his best friend. He turns on her and denounces her and that is what sets the play in motion: a set of suspicions that are turned into a conviction and which he then proceeds to act upon, making plans to murder the erstwhile cuckold maker. A lot has been compressed into that scene and it sets an audience reeling, wanting to know how things will further escalate and unravel, and there are enough surprises ahead, enough plot twists, to satisfy anyone’s sense that good plays often are continually turning the tables.
Read MoreSara Rossberg
Sara Rossberg is a British portraitist who flourished during the 1990’s though she has done later work through the present, and now works primarily with color and texture to distort the faces of people. His most accomplished work is included in London’s National Gallery. Entitled “Dame Anita Roddick'' and painted in 1995, it is a striking and depth filled presentation of its subject. The woman’s face is framed by her frazzled red hair, her face also with a tint of red. Her lips are thin, as are her eyebrows. Her facial expression is intense and soulful, livened by her anxiety or mournfulness, particularly (and inevitably) projected in her pained eyes. A nice touch is that Dame Anita’s blouse peters off into being of no consequence while her hair had very much caught the face that would come below it. So Rossberg provides an internal soul made very visible, when Sargent, the master portraitist of a century ago, has the audience draw out of their regal and polished presentations each of their fully human and individual consciousnesses. The Rossberg painting shows people not disassembled but in their inner thoughts, looking composed in their everyday lives and yet still penetrating. A worthy addition to the collection.
Read MoreThe Nature of Evil
Trump is “unquestionably” evil, Marty has said for years now, because Trump separated immigrant children from their parents. Harold, Marty’s son, responded, “You still holding on to that?” Harold’s meaning, according to Roland, is that Trump’s action of separating parents from children has been forgotten by everyone, held onto only by extremists like Marty. Extremist reasoning is inherently dismissable.
Read MoreOrganizational Portals
There was a science fiction movie which showed people as having multiple portals on their bodies to which were attached hoses, perhaps half a dozen to a person, which swung free and were available to be connected to machines that took or received some fluids. It was very unnerving to see people so dependent on their mechanical devices that made them able to survive though, if you think about it, this was a biological metaphor in that people do have tubes that sustain life. Food goes down your gullet and wastes come out of tubes whose exit points are covered. It was just unsettling to see these processes as mechanical rather than biological. There are, however, another set of portals that, as the expression goes, connect every person to their lives. These are the organizational portals whereby you are connected to your identity and therefore have access to the services which sustain us, both biologically and otherwise. I have become particularly aware of my reconnecting to my new portals when I recently moved from New York to Salt Lake City. I did not have to change my phone number because of the miracle of a cell phone, but I did have to change addresses for my credit cards and my health insurance companies and I still keep my passport handy to identify who I am. All those verifications of my identity enable me to live an ordinary life. I don’t need one for a supermarket, but Utah requires an identification so as to access a liquor store, which was not the case in New York.
Read MoreTrump in Anguish
If I were a playwright rather than a critic, I would write a play, "The Anguish of Trump", that told a tragedy in the style of Camus' "Caligula". It would show his despair and anger at having lost the presidency, much worse than previous incumbents who have lost and can solace themselves for what were their accomplishments, such as Popi having waged the Persian Gulf War, which he believed was a good thing. Even Herbert Hoover was rehabilitated in that he produced a major set of recommendations about the future of government and policy after FDR eventually left office, and Nixon, unsuccessfully, tried to rehabilitate himself. But Trump can't rest on his laurels because he never cared for them and so is simply a loser, the ultimate loser, bereft of any honor and without any graciousness. He had said nothing for five days after Election Day and presumably just fumed, and then he lashed out with accusations of fraud, none of which supplied with evidence, even his lawyers admitting there had been no fraud, and then blaming anyone he could care to for his defeat, including the claim that the pharmaceutical companies developing the coronavirus vaccines had deliberately delayed the process so that the Democrats could win the election. Trump's measures were thwarted by the permanent civil service, who supervised their ballot counting, and by judges who Republican appointed judges decided that there were no merits to keeping the voting certified. It is worth adding that certification by the states had not been previously more than paperwork, the election decided by whatever unofficial result was offered by the AP or even back to the time when the trusted Walter Cronkite declared an election decided. So we go through the legal process with utmost punctiliousness and Trump comes short. Trump stews, as is the just result of his nature, perfectly appropriate in a tragedy that tells what it is to be a person without values and so left to drift or to be battered by events, him being without a compass whereby he might right himself, and so the subject of a very Camus like theme.
Read MoreShakespeare's Greatest Melodramas
The great works of Shakespeare from “Julius Caesar” to “Antony and Cleopatra” (with the obvious exception of “Twelfth Night”) have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal flaw which dooms those around them as well as themselves, or as tragedies of the Classic variety, in which case we understand the central characters as caught up in existential situations beyond their control, those including the warp and woof of nature, social relations, and the emotions of jealousy and ambition to which all people are subject, not just the tainted few. That construction of the plays is certainly true enough and, following Aristotle, in both cases people are shown as pushed beyond endurance so that they emerge scourged of pity and terror, justly having become aware of their own human, social and metaphysical limitations, the audience morally improved for having observed and grasped and engaged in these lives.
There is another way to look at this set of great works. Rather than looking at the plays as tragedies, these plays can be considered melodramas. That term need not be treated as a designation of something less than a tragedy, a tragedy manqué, in which the playwright has either not fully developed the tragic nature of his characters or where the playwright settled for placing characters in social situations where they go on too long about what are, after all, the relatively trivial travails of life, and generally exhibit their less than noble characters. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is not so easily drawn. Lear goes on rather long windedly and his problems are indeed the social problems that are created by an old man coming to live with his relatives. Why does he have to keep all those knights with him in his daughter’s castle? He just has the pathetic conceptions of past grandeur that may descend on any old person. That is no reason to go off to the heath and bemoan his fate. Get a grip on yourself and get thee off to a nursing home.
Read MoreGeography and Social Structure
Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts, in particular, thought that geography was destiny. Montesquieu had back in the Eighteenth Century said, quite correctly, that temperate climates allowed nations to prosper. Europe and China do better than sub-Saharan Africa and Amazonian Brazil. Nineteenth Century historians and social analysts fully thought that geography was destiny. De Tocqeville thought that the small steads in New England was the result of the hilly and rocky terrain, while large plantations flourished in the South because of the flat turrain. Motley thought that the Lowlands resulted from a swampy land whose water had ever to be contested through dikes. In the Nineteen Fifties, historians said that the United States prospered because it's fields and wheatlands were so fertile There is an alternative example. It is the culture and its social structure that make a nation prosperous. The United States did well because it had a genius for government. The Northwest Ordinance, which predated the Constitution, treated new territories as places to become new and equal states rather than subordinated territories. The Constitution set up a system of government that has endured for more than two hundred years despite the fact that it is rife with its division between Northern and Southern States. America has the internet and its television networks across time zones and its climates and so you are everywhere at once, so long as you have electronics. I wanted to test out the experiences of geography and the other things by looking at Utah, the place in which I have recently settled.
Read MoreEssential and Consequential Aspects of the Civil War
David M. Potter, in his well regarded and still quite valuable history, “The Impending Crisis”, published in 1976, says that at the time of the Mexican War the various aspects of American structure and culture were remarkably uniform in that they intersected and functionally supported their regional economies, shared the values that had supported the Revolution, and were homogeneous in that they were mostly of English speaking peoples, all with the exception of what had happened to the slaves. Potter makes this point so as to say the road to disunion was created after the Mexican War, and so could perhaps become unnecessary if other political and structural things had happened. That is very different from saying that the Civil War had been inevitable in the sense that what happened in the intervening years, or even back to the arrival of slavery in 1619, had been compromises to try to avoid the inevitable outcome of civil war, whether they were due to the arrangements in the Constitution that allowed slaves to be counted as three fifths the number for the calculation of state representation, or because of the three compromises composed by Henry Clay that allowed the Union to persist from 1831, the time of the Missouri Compromise, where north of that state the territories would be free states, to 1861, never finding a long term solution to the dilemma of slavery. The view today is very different from what it was in Potter’s time. Nowadays, people speak of slavery as having been the original sin from which we have not as yet staunched its wounds, there needing to be a great reckoning of what was unfolded in the past. No justice; no peace. I want to address this highly toxic issue through carefully addressing the words that people deploy in engaging this discussion.
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